July 16, 2026 • 57 mins
In this series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the dog days of summer, their connection to a luminous star in the night’s sky and various ideas linking the summer’s hottest days to human and animal behavior.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to use Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick,
and we're back the second part in our series on
the Dog Days of Summer and the dog Star Serious,
from which the dog Days get their name. So in
part one of the series, we started off talking about
childhood recollections of hearing this phrase the dog Days of
(00:35):
Summer without knowing what it meant or where it came from.
And it turns out that the dog Days do not
get their name from the image of dogs panting in
the heat, but instead from the astrology of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks,
and Romans, who linked the hottest part of summer to
the haliacal rising of the star Serious, the brightest star
(00:58):
in the night sky and the brightest star in the
constellation Canus Major, which the Greeks and Romans linked to
the mythic huntsman Orion. Canus Major and Canus Minor were
Orion's hunting dogs. So many ancient peoples thought that when
Sirius rose in conjunction with the sun, when this haliacal
(01:19):
rising happened in the middle or late part of summer.
The star added its heat to the heat of the sun,
so it's like turning on a second burner under the pan,
and this is what made the weeks of Midsummer dangerously
hot last time. We also talked a lot about the
meaning of the Dog Star in ancient literature, such as
(01:41):
the Iliad, where Homer repeatedly invokes it as a symbol
of both brilliance and radiance, but also as a death star,
an omen of doom and destruction. And we got into
the use of the dog days of Summer in other
poems and songs as well, including some digressions about Don
Henley and Dylan Thomas. I guess the Don Henley reference
(02:02):
is indirect. It's not a direct quote, but you know,
Boys of Summer and that's got a lot of dog
gets into some of the same vibes. Yeah, yeah, Dog
Days in it. And then we also discussed the Dog
Star as a star Serious A, which is actually part
of a binary star system with the smaller white dwarf
Serious B. We got into a number of fascinating things
(02:24):
about the star itself and the astronomy history around it,
like how long will it remain the brightest star in
Earth's night sky? Why ancient authors might have described it
as a different color than it appears today, and so forth.
So if you haven't heard part one, please go back
listen to that first. But today we're here to keep
the dog days rolling.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah, And I thought i'd throw in a quick short
poem by Robert Frost here. The poem Canus Major. This
is one I'd kind of forgotten about, but I distinctly
remember now reading it as a kid in like ENGL class,
and I remember, I think I had to memorize this one,
or I had to like write it out and do
a little drawling for it or something. It is. I'm
(03:07):
gonna say it is not particularly deep as far as
serious related poetry or Robert Frost's poems go, but it's
still kind of delightful, and it also is kind of
a counter note to some of like the deeper, kind
of darker contemplations we've touched on already. It goes as follows,
the great overdog, that heavenly beast with a star in
(03:30):
one eye, gives a leap in the east. He dances
upright all the way to the west, and never once
drops on his four feet to rest. I'm a poor underdog,
but tonight I will bark with the great overdog that
romps through the dark.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Very nice.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Yeah, I'm assuming he's talking about turning into a were
wolf for a wear dog of some sort back.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
Yeah, it could could well be. I mean, what is
he doing in those woods? Dark and deep?
Speaker 2 (03:57):
And you know he's just running about chasing squirrels all
fours That's what I'm man.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Goes into the woods, drinks the water from a wolf's pawprint,
and there you go.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
There you go. That's how it works. But I also
have some more things I want to add regarding Don
Henley and some of the other songs that in poems
that we mentioned in the last episode. So, first of all,
in the last episode, in addition to two discussions of
Don Henley's The Boys of Summer and the Dylan Thomas
(04:28):
poem I see the Boys of Summer, I also mentioned
in passing landa del Ray's excellent twenty twelve song Summertime
Sadness off of the album Born to Die, generally considered
I think to be one of her more electronic leaning albums,
though it would probably be way too strong to say, oh,
this is an electronic album, but you know, there's a
lot of electronic notes there.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
I'm not super familiar with Lana del Rey, but is
this the album that the single Video Games is from.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
I think it is, I have to admit to I'm
more of a like a drop been on particular tracks
listening a listener of Delray's material. But this album had
both Summertime Sadness and Blue Jeans, which is another favorite
of mine. Off this album particularly, there's a remix of
it from Sims and Bell that features Azalia Banks, so
(05:17):
it has this like very heavy driving synth added to it,
and also a rap bridge from Banks, and I occasionally
will pull this track up and listen to it. It's
got a great vibe, but at any rate, Summertime Sadness
great track. It's one of these that my mind often
turns to during the dog days of summer. There's also
(05:40):
this side tangent that's just just confined to me and
my family where we will sing the song and say
I've got those summertime summertime pumpkins. Discussing the volunteer pumpkins
that will pop up in our garden emerging from the
remains of the composts from previous years. But that is
summertime sadness. Great song, and it is worth noting that
(06:04):
summertime sadness does exist in the form of summer onset
seasonal effective disorder. Not exactly what the song is about,
but there is a connection here. So I was reading
a little bit about that, you know, because this does
kind of relate to this idea of there being certain
moods that settle in during this time, during the hottest months,
(06:27):
or maybe like in the period immediately after, and I
found that. Stephanie Rhoades wrote an article about it in
twenty sixteen for Michigan Medicine at the University of Michigan,
pointing out that, yeah, the summer onset seasonal effective disorder
is less common than fall and winter onset seasonal effective disorder,
but it does exist. And she writes that some of
(06:49):
the frequent triggers that are associated with summer include schedule changes.
This is a you know, suddenly you have the sort
of routine you're going through. Maybe it has to do
with your work or your school or the school schedule
for you know, a child in your life, but whatever
the case, suddenly things are different. That's going to shake
things up a little bit. Likewise, you may be going
(07:12):
on vacation. Vacation, of course, is a way to get
away from a lot of your troubles, but vacation treats
everyone differently. In different sorts of vacation treat everyone differently.
So setting on the beach reading a good book, that
might be your pure escape, but it might also give
you maybe a little bit too much time to contemplate
things at the you know, the edge of the world
where the ocean meets the beach.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
At the other end of the spectrum, if you're in
a different type of vacationing family culture, you might be
trying to pack too much into a vacation. Yeah, I
don't know if you've experienced that.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Yeah, I mean I've experienced both sides, vacations where way
too much is packed in and maybe not enough is
packed in. So I mean it's I think it's It
is important to note you can be very much the
kind of person that you know that enjoys a vacation.
It doesn't mean you're anti vacation, but you shake things up,
and yeah, it can it can serve as a trigger
(08:06):
for certain you know, depressive states or anxious states and
so forth. On top of this, Roades also points out
that you're going to have obviously changes in daylight patterns,
so the days are going to get longer. This can
impact sleep schedules, like you might be joy overjoyed that
the days are so long, but also it you know,
(08:28):
it might influence you that like, wow, it's it should
be just fully nighttime right now, right, but the sun
is still out. How am I supposed to react to that?
Speaker 3 (08:36):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (08:37):
And then on top of that, there's just various psychosocial
issues that can come into place, such as recent life changes,
which of course may or may not have anything to
do with summer. And I also want to note this
is mostly from my personal observation, not from this article,
but I think summer is also highly susceptible to that
same level of heightened expectations for happiness enjoy that you
(09:00):
encounter with Christmas. You know, you're hit with all of
this media advertisements trying to sell you things that are
aligned with summer. And you know, what if I'm not
having a hot girl summer, What if I don't feel
like beach boys lyrics coursing through my veins?
Speaker 3 (09:17):
Yeah, extremely true that it can really get you down
when you are not feeling great and you feel like
there are forces telling you that you should be feeling good,
like you're having a great time right now. Isn't this
great and you're not feeling it, It kind of makes
it even worse.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, maybe you go on social media and now you're
hit with well, summertime themed advertisements as well as other
people's summer pictures, which, again, as we've touched on, how
many times are the curated extremes extreme expressions of whatever
is going on? So yeah, all that can come into play,
let's see. I also looked around a little bit for
other poetic examples of summer sadness summertime sadness, and there's
(09:57):
actually a poem from us to fun marrow May who
lived eighteen forty two through eighteen ninety eight, titled Summer
Sadness and I want to read just a part of
this from this is translated from the French, of course,
but it is a poem that really does seem to
capture this idea of like being on the beach, being
in like what is otherwise a happy setting, surrounded you
(10:20):
know there was someone you love even and still feeling
this sadness creep in where it should not be allowed
to be surely, but I'm just going to read the
first two stanzas this is, this is a nice taste.
The sun on the sand, Oh, sleeping wrestler warms, a
languid bath in the gold of your hair, melting the
(10:42):
incense on your hostile features, mixing an amorous liquid with
the tears. The immutable calm of this white burning Oh
my fearful kisses makes you say, sadly, will we ever
be one mummified winding under the ancient sands and palm?
I'm so happy? Mm So I like it. I wasn't
(11:04):
super familiar with this poet either, but clearly, you know
this is something that people have been running into for
quite a while.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Yeah, romantic awkwardness on a beach. That's it shows up
in other poems as well. I'm thinking of the kind
of it's not explicit, but the subtext in Matthew Arnold's
Dover Beach.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Various paintings, for sure, also seem to
have this kind of vibe. You know, you see like
a you know, a landscape of a beach and it
you know it looks. It can at once be inviting,
like I want to be there, but also are these
people happy? What are they feeling? How do they feel?
How would I truly feel if I was.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
There feeling like they're supposed to be happy.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Yeah, and then also I did end up digging back
around a little bit regarding The Boys of Summer from
Don Henley, and yeah, and it's I'm gonna have to
go back on some of the things I said about it.
But first of all, I did find some interview segments
(12:04):
where he does specifically cite Dylan Thomas's I see the
Boys of Summer as a core inspiration here.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Wow, that's kind of surprising to me.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Yeah. Yeah, I have to point out that in some cases,
you'll look online and you'll see people state that the
best selling nineteen seventy two baseball book The Boys of
Summer by Roger Kahn was the inspiration, but Henley, in
an interview stated that, yeah, despite being a baseball fan,
he'd never read that book, and the inspiration is Thomas. Here.
(12:37):
I should also point out Henley wrote the lyrics the
music is by Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Petty actually passed on the demo, you know, the lyricless
demo for this song, and then he ended up shopping
it to Don Henley and he's the Campbell's talked about
it in interviews as well, where he's like, yeah, I
(12:57):
wasn't sure that Henley even liked it. He's like, well,
let me see what I can make it. And then
he came back and he's like, I think I've written
the best song in my career to your music. So yeah,
and it's you know, a strong case could be made
that that is what exactly what happened.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
Trying to imagine it as a Tom Petty song, it's
not really working for me.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure it would have been great,
you know, Tom Petty was great, but yeah, Henley brings
a specific energy to it, you know, in Henley's vocals,
I think, And and also you know, who knows what
the lyrics would have been. It would have been different
lyrical composition there for sure if it was a Tom
Petty song. So I'm sure it would have been great,
(13:36):
but it wouldn't have maybe it wouldn't have been as great,
who knows.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
I guess I feel like I can't think of a
Tom Petty song that feels that earnestly melancholy. I feel
like the Tom Petty sad songs always have some irony
to them.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. So this was meant
to be. Now that if you want to look up
the quote where he's talking about the inspiration. I was
reading the twenty twenty six Louder article The Boys of
Summer by Don Henley, the Story behind the Song by
Bill Demain. Certainly look that up if you're interested to
(14:12):
dig in more. And yeah, I have to say that.
As I was reading this, I was like, Okay, I
need to listen to these summertime songs again. So I
was pulling up Summertime Sadness, listened to it a few
times through, and I pulled up The Boys of Summer,
and yeah, I have to go back on some of
the things I said, go back on some of the
things I said in the last episode, you know where
(14:33):
I said like, oh, I love the music, but you know,
the lyrics a little creepy at times. I think I
think I was wrong. I think I have to say
that great music and the lyrics are great too. It's
got some wonderful lines and like out on the road today,
I saw a deadhead stick around a Cadillac. That's just
an all timer right there.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
That one's scan's really good. It's good metrical qualities.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
I also feel very differently this song now, knowing that
it has that Dylan Thomas the force that drives the
green views through the flower principle in it. I wouldn't
have suspected that, even though it kind of fits the
mood of the music. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
So anyway, don Henley fans right in, let us know
what you think. Do you agree, do you disagree? I
would not be surprised if there are some folks who
write in to correct me on how I feel about
this song after part one, and if you did so,
we'll rest assured that I changed my mind a little
bit between part one and part two.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Okay, well, Rob, would you like to talk about a
historical link that a lot of people made between the
Dog Days of Summer and rabies.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
I think that is the next logical place to go
after more discussion of the Boys of Summer.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Yeah, deadheadsticker on a Cadillac, rabid Dogs. So I was
reading about this actually in a paper published in the
Journal of Urban History in twenty twenty five by a
scholar named Chris Pearson who is a professor of environmental
history at the University of Liverpool. This paper is called
The Sinister Side of Summer, Revisiting the Dog Days of
(16:23):
nineteenth century New York. So in this paper, it's interesting
because the author places a sort of specific narrative about
dogs and rabies and the heat of the summer and
the dog star Serius within a broader context of literature
in the nineteenth century where people are just expressing anxieties
(16:48):
and grievances about the dog days of summer, especially in
the city of New York. At the time, the dog
days were typically placed in late July and early August.
That was the time people really I was like, that's
when we think the dog days are now, because, as
we discussed in the last episode, while the Hallikal rising
of Sirius is an objective date that you can that
(17:10):
you can find, you know, you can pinpoint exactly when
that happens for your location on the globe each year,
that's not necessarily how people usually invoke the dog days
of summer, especially in subsequent decade. That might have been
more what it was in the ancient world, where people
were pegging it to astrology into the star. But in
(17:30):
more recent centuries it's just like the hottest part of summer.
People call that so late July early August. In New
York in the nineteenth century, those were the dog days,
and people had a lot of negative opinions about the
dog days. So Pearson quotes a poem from the year
eighteen fifty written by a New York newspaper editor named
George P. Morris, called Rhyme of the ancient editor, Yuck Yuck,
(17:55):
New York in the dog Days, and it includes the
lines my brain is parched and airing, the pavement hot
and dry, and not a breath is stirring beneath the
burning sky. And so a common sentiment that you will
see expressed in writing of the time is that this
time of year is sort of cursed. It was just
(18:17):
a regular belief that the height of summer was a
terrible time when people are at their worst, and was
a time when mad or rabid dogs would come out
and prowl the streets. Now today we know that rabies
is caused by a virus, and it is most often
transmitted through a bite, when the saliva of an infected
(18:41):
animal gets into the open wound of another animal, or
into the mucous membranes like the eyes or the mouth.
But we didn't always know that. And Pearson writes that
before the widespread acceptance of germ theory in the second
half of the nineteenth century, many people apparently believed quote
that the heat of the dog Days and the strange
influence of serious the dog star caused rabies.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Another way he puts it is that rabies was quote
an emotional disease triggered by high temperatures. Now, this was
by no means a universal view. There were plenty of
doctors and veterinarians in the eighteen hundreds who thought that
this was complete hogwash, that neither the stars nor heat
(19:27):
had anything to do with rabies, and they argued their
case in public. But they were not able, apparently, to
put this popular belief to rest. And what Pearson calls
the myth of the dog Days actually influenced public health policy,
including policy about like when dog pounds were opened, when
(19:48):
these dog kind of brutal and disturbing dog calling campaigns
took place. Now, one thing that I do want to
come back to later is that there are actually reasons
to be especially concerned about rabies in the summertime. But
that is not because raybis is only a disease that happen.
(20:10):
You know that happens in the summertime. Rabies is present
all year round, and it is not because the heat
triggers rabies in any particular way. There are other reasons
that I'll come back to you at the end of
the section. It is not that the summer stars or
the hot weather give animals rabies, but there are summertime concerns.
(20:31):
So summarizing the press treatment of dogs and rabies in
nineteenth century New York, Pearson writes, quote, the high temperatures
sparked concerns about dogs overheating and falling under the influence
of the dog star, with the press reporting frequently on
instances of seemingly mad dogs roaming the streets and causing chaos.
(20:54):
Pet dogs were just as likely to become rabid, but
the close associations of street dogs with dirt disorder and
disease framed them as the canine counterpart to the so
called human dangerous classes, making them the particular target of
anxieties as well as violence from passers by and policeman. However,
(21:15):
in mocking the very same ideas, Pearson quotes an eighteen
fifty seven edition of the New York Daily Times, which wrote,
quote popular belief and what is often synonymous popular error,
give to the dog Star the honor of influencing the
ebb and flow of canine madness, as its lunar sister
does the tide in affair of men. So you get
(21:39):
these voices. It's not like a universal chorus of people
saying like, oh yeah, the heat of the summer, the
dog Days and the dog Star they are causing rabies.
You're going to get in the literature a lot of
sources arguing against this idea, seemingly because it was just
so popular among regular people, and it was showing up
a lot in like newspaper articles, not written by experts.
(22:03):
So you'll get a lot of skeptical debunkings of this
idea over and over during the time. Pearson also lists
evidence of dog Day's Panic in places other than New York,
mentioning that there was some dog Day's danger reasoning to
some degree driving the summer call of street dogs in
British colonial Bombay in eighteen thirty two, and he talks
(22:26):
about the police in Paris focusing the rabies control efforts
specifically on the summertime. As an example of the people
who argued against the belief that rabies and dogs was
caused by heat, Pearson cites a British veterinarian named William
Ywat who lived seventeen seventy six to eighteen forty seven.
(22:47):
This guy argued in his writings against the idea that
Raybi's quote is caused by a particular state of the atmosphere,
and Pearson notes this guy's exasperated tone and the tone
of other printed arguments against rabies. It seems like it's
one of those things that just like won't die, and
so the people who are skeptical of it are getting
continually annoyed by it. There's another doctor, he brings up
(23:10):
in a minute, who's like, I can't believe it's the
nineteenth century and people are still saying that rabies is
caused by the stars or by heat. But Pearson summarizes
the general corners of the nineteenth century debate among doctors
and veterinarians about the cause of rabies, and he mentioned
several competing ideas. So one of the theories was not
(23:33):
quite there yet to the full like germ theory viral
explanation that we would eventually land on, but it was
basically on the right track, and that idea was that
there was some kind of harmful substance transmitted between animals
and humans through the mouth which could spread through biting
or licking. That turned out to be basically correct. The
(23:55):
rabies virus is mostly spread through saliva getting into open
wounds or into mucous membranes. But other ideas were that
it arose somehow spontaneously in dogs due to sexual activity
too much or too little we'll get your arabies, or
too emotional disturbances come back to this one in a minute,
(24:18):
or finally to heat or heat maybe contributing to one
of the other explanations like the emotions, maybe like heat
triggers emotional irritability in dogs which makes them rabid. Now,
apart from actual seasonal trends and infection, which we can
talk about later, you might be able to imagine how
(24:41):
people could form a mental link between heat and rabies
just through visual cues, like when it's hot, dogs pant
a lot and this can result in drooling and the
showing of teeth, both symptoms that people would associate with
mad or rabid dogs, and Pierson quotes a couple of
(25:02):
other authors named Michael Warboys and Neil Pemberton, who described
this as a leading strain of thinking that quote, rabies
might be perverted pathologized panting. You know, it's somehow like
the panting response goes wrong and it goes haywire, and
it takes over the dog's brain and the dog becomes rabid.
(25:25):
Another way of characterizing this thinking is that heat could
cause some kind of internal chemical change in dogs, that
the hottest part of summer could cause canine blood to
quote putrefy and become poisonous. So, despite the protestations of
skeptical experts, it was apparently widely believed that a hot
(25:46):
dog could somehow transform into a rabid dog.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
It's such an interesting and you can see where it
would be such an infectious idea if you really get
in like some of these deeper connotations, like what a
domesticated dog is, like this sort of like deep seated
knowledge that this is an animal, This is a wolf
that has been brought into the fold and has entered
into the fold and entered into this ancient pact with
(26:11):
us and become this companion animal that is valuable and
useful and even beloved. And the idea that something could
just sort of snap in them and revert all of
that back to wildness. You know, that's that's a scary concept.
I mean, that's the stuff of horror movies. That's like
a blue Sunshine but for dogs.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Or Kujo, which is literally about rabies exactly.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
There, Yeah, more directly.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
Yeah, but it's funny what you bring up, like the
link with wolves and this knowledge about their their domestic
their domestic state now, but their wild heritage. This actually
does connect to something that a lot of people wrote
at the time about vilifying certain breeds of dogs, which is,
you know, a thing that still happens today, but at
the time it's not a particular breed, but at the
(26:58):
time piercing it's into this long section about how there
was a type of dog widely known as a spitz
dog spi t Z, and these dogs were singled out
for concern as being especially prone to dog day rabidity
to you know, summertime dog madness. Now, the spits is
(27:19):
not a breed, it's this broad, vaguely defined class of
pointy snouted dogs. I looked this up. The Encyclopedia Britannica
has an article about the spitz dog concept, and Britannica
calls them quote northern breeds with defining characteristics such as
a fox like head, pointed ears, and a tail that
(27:40):
curves over their backs. So you can think about a
lot of dogs that have roughly those characters.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
The scary dogs from movies. These are the kinds of
dogs that are going to chase James Bond through the woods.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Well, not necessarily, like a lot of the dogs that
fit the spits characteristics are actually quite funny, like cute,
little yappy dog, you know, like a Pomeranian or something
that's you know, that fits the characteristics. But these characteristics,
the thinking wind made the Spits dogs more closely related
(28:13):
to wolves and thus more prone to give way to
their brutal nature and become rabid.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
And of course there are a lot of like incorrect
notions about the wolf title and all of this as well,
because there's a big difference between a rabid dog and
a wild wolf. I mean, you can get a rabid
wolf obviously, and that's a bad situation as well. But yeah,
the wild wolf and the rabbit dog are two very
different cases. The wild wolf has long been vilified, in
(28:42):
large part because of its relationship to domesticated farm animals.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
Yeah yeah, so tons of misconceptions are all wrapped up here.
Pierson quotes an author named George B. Taylor, writing in
a book called Man's Best Friend in the year nineteen
oh one. Taylor wrote that talking about spits dogs, wrote quote,
they are Arctic creatures to whom life is only worth
(29:08):
living with the thermometer at from sixty five degrees to
where alcohol freezes. Creatures of snow and ice flow, who
are miserable in warm weather, and of course, like other
what are called arctic dogs. Authors of the time argued
that these dogs were especially prone to rabies. There's some
(29:29):
kind of mental link going on there, Like they're especially
uncomfortable in hot weather, they're especially tied to their wild ancestors,
they're especially wolf like, and thus these are like the
pinnacle of like rabies concern dogs, like they're the most
likely to become mad and dangerous.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Again, flawed logic, but you can see how these thoughts
are connected in people's minds when they're considering this idea.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
Now, I want to come back to the idea that
there was this other explanation of rabies and dogs, which
is that dogs are especially prone to emotional disturbances and
that their emotions can make them rabid. Pearson presents the
example of a British veterinarian named Edward Mayhew who wrote
about dogs as quote, irritable creatures with highly sensitive brains
(30:31):
and nervous systems. It's like, wow, it seems like I
could describe a lot.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Of animals, can describe people.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Yeah, yeah, wonder Yeah strange, But this guy characterized rabies
as a disease caused by nervous excitability. And then Pearson
also mentions a New York doctor named Thomas Blatchford who
argued in eighteen fifty six that dogs were just super emotional.
They're very sensitive, highly prone to anger, and that emotional
(30:58):
sensitivity could in some way drive rabies and so as
a result, Pearson says, it's kind of interesting to think
that canine emotions quote were a public health risk that
needed to be managed. Yeah. Now it's interesting on this
topic because we have some like wrong versus wrong in
the literature. This is something something we encounter sometimes where
(31:21):
like a really wrong idea is being attacked by a
still wrong but maybe slightly less wrong idea. So this
guy Blatchford, this veterinarian or not veterinarian. I think he
was a doctor. But Blatchford thought that rabies was an
emotional condition. But he argued forcefully against the idea that
(31:43):
it was caused by heat. He called the dog day's
myth and utter fallacy. And he ran a special committee
of the American Medical Association in eighteen fifty six which
presented this report denouncing the heat rabies connection, arguing that
quote law is based on such a hypothesis or a
reproach to the nineteenth century. And he also made the
(32:05):
point that this very actually quite good point that this
false belief that the dog days of summer trigger rabies
could lead people to avoid taking precautions against rabies in
the other season. And he was absolutely correct that rabies
is a year round issue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, this
paper also goes into a lot of dark places that
(32:28):
I'm not going to follow in detail. There are many
I mean, this is historically useful information, but I don't
want to dwell on this. But there's summaries of lots
of documented violence against street dogs and against dogs that
were suspected of being rabid during hot weather. There was
a lot of cruelty in the official campaigns instituted in
cities like New York trying to deal with straight dogs
(32:51):
or rabid dogs in the summer, supposedly rabid dogs in
the summer, culling campaigns, and dog pounds with appalling conditions
time Eventually, more humane measures were brought online, but for
a while in the nineteenth century it sounds like these
measures were pretty nasty. However, eventually germ theory and the
(33:12):
new medical science that emerged, especially after the work of
Louis Pasteur, would help clear away a lot of these
misconceptions and offer a real framework for both understanding and
dealing with the reality of raybis so. Louis Pasteur studied
rabies in the early eighteen eighties, and in eighteen eighty
(33:32):
five Pasteur developed the first successful vaccine for the disease.
So before the rabies vaccine, raby's infection was almost one
hundred percent fatal and also not to dwell on grim realities,
but death by rabies is a horrifying death. Like one
of the most terrible and excruciating diseases you can imagine,
(33:55):
so it's like, you know, an absolute death sentence and
a horrible death. If it's not always that a bite
would result in rabies, like there are cases where people
were bitten by rabbit animals and maybe like it just
didn't result in a full infection, symptoms never manifested. But
basically if infection actually takes hold, if symptoms manifest, it
(34:16):
is one hundred percent fatal. So Pasteur first he created
this vaccine first by developing an attenuated form of the
rabies virus by passing it through a series of animal
hosts and then drying out the infected tissue to weaken it.
So what Pasteur did is he took samples of nerve tissue,
(34:40):
which was basically dried ground up spinal cords from rabbits
that had been infected with the brain tissue from rabbit dogs,
and then injected a hydrated form of that dried nerve
tissue into the patient in a series of increasing doses.
And I think as the method went on, he came
up with with the idea that you could like progressively
(35:02):
weaken the virus by drying it out for different periods
of time. And so this treatment based on the dried
nerve tissue from infected animals. This treatment was first tried
in humans in eighteen eighty five on a nine year
old boy named it Joseph Meister from Alsace, who had
been bitten fourteen times by a rabid dog. He was
(35:25):
brought to Pasteur after the bites to try out the
first post exposure prophylaxis that's what it's called today, when
you get the rabies vaccine after you've already gotten the exposure.
And for Meister it worked. He survived, and again worth
emphasizing that basically nobody survived actually contracting rabies before this.
(35:46):
Now it's worth stating that it wasn't that Meister had
actually fully developed symptoms and contracted rabies and then got
the vaccine, because once you developed symptoms sort of your
window has closed. But the important thing is being able
to get the post exposure prophylaxis between the time of
exposure and when the first symptoms develop. And that's what
(36:07):
happened here.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
And this is why as most of you know that
you know if you're bitten by an animal of unknown origin,
like there's a very high probability that the doctors are
going to give you that shot, you know, just to
make sure.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
Yeah, And one of the most important things is that
speed is of the essence here. So today, if you
have access to immediate medical care before symptoms begin, rabies,
getting a bite from a rabbit animal is almost one
hundred percent survivable. Like the treatment works, but the emphasis
we really should emphasize speed, Like if you ever think
(36:43):
you might have been exposed to rabies, you should not
wait and see it's not. Yeah, that could mean death.
You seek medical attention immediately, and if you do, it
is survivable. But basically so this early paste or vaccination,
it did come with some dangers. It hadn't been perfected yet,
so there were like some bad complications and side effects
(37:05):
for some people. But also it saved tons of lives,
and it laid the groundwork for the safer and even
more effective post exposure profile access protocols that we have today.
So rabies is really an amazing case of medical science
in that regard, like a bite from a rabbit animal
used to mean almost certain death, assuming that infection actually
(37:27):
took cold and not all bites resulted in an infection.
But it used to be if you got infected, certain death.
And now if you have access to fast medical care.
If you can get the post exposure vaccines, then you
will you will almost certainly survive.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
And then is it safe to look at the dog
star once you've see the vaccine?
Speaker 3 (37:48):
Okay, yes it is. Yeah, the dog star, from what
we can tell, has no role there. Yeah, But you know,
that does kind of bring it back to the Pearson
talks about this. So now we've got a vaccine, we've
got journey theory established, you know, so germ theory becomes
the dominant explanation in the late nineteenth century, certainly by
the beginning of the twentieth century. And we have a
(38:09):
vaccine that is effective, but that did not totally stop
the summer mad dog scares. It just continues in the
popular consciousness for a while, and you still see these
newspaper articles about its summertimes here. That means dogs are
going to be, you know, getting rabies from the summer heat,
and you got to watch out for them. But I
do want to come back and mention that there are
(38:30):
actual reasons to be concerned about rabies in the summertime.
It's not that the summer stars give animals rabies. It
is not that the hot weather gives animals rabies, but
there often are summer seasonal spikes in rabies, especially in
detection of rabies, and the main variable here seems to
(38:53):
be increased opportunities for infectious encounters. So during warm weather,
people and dogs spend more time outdoors, and wild animals
in the summertime are also going to be more active,
moving around into new territory, doing more active foraging. So
(39:14):
there are just going to be in the warm months
more chances for infection to spread between wild animals through
increased encounters, and more chances for humans and domestic animals
to come into contact with infected wildlife. There might be
some light inherent seasonality to the virus itself, but primarily
(39:41):
the issue does seem to be that it's like, because
of the changes in behavior patterns of animals and humans
during the warm months, there's just more ways and chances
for infectious encounters to happen.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
Yeah, we don't have time to get into this. We
may come back to this in a later episode, but
it reminds me a little bit about some of the
factors surrounding the heat aggression hypothesis with human populations, where yeah,
there's this idea that there seems to be a correlation
between violent and aggressive behavior and humans and the hot
(40:17):
places and the you know, the hottest part of the summer.
But one of the factors there is like, well, okay,
are more people outside, are more people interacting with each other?
Among a host of other factors that are involved. Because
you know, anything that's already complex with with dogs, it's
going to be in many ways more complex with human beings.
(40:45):
All Right. For the remainder of this episode, I want
to I want to come back to Sirius. I want
to come back to the Dog Star and pick up
on some of what we were discussing last time. So
in the last episode we discussed the various dog and
wolf based interpretations of the stars Serius and its place
in the constellation Canus Major. If you connect the cosmic
(41:06):
dots the right way, sure it sort of looks like
an animal, and that animal might as well be a dog,
because again, dogs have long been the nearest and dearest
creatures to our hearts. We have lived alongside them for
a very long time. So if you're going to interpret
this connect the dots shape in the sky to an
animal might as well be a dog.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
What about my beloved crocodile Crocodilius major.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
Yeah, I mean it could be the case. I mean,
I think we've all had this situation with constellations, right
where you have the nice overlay with the stenciled image
of Orion or his dog, and you're like, oh, yeah, yeah,
there he is with his club, and then you remove
that and you just look at the stars dot it
together and you're like, okay, I see it a little less.
And then you just look at the stars and you're like, Okay,
(41:53):
maybe I'm not seeing it at all. But yeah, I mean,
obviously this is all human interpretation and our way of
understanding the arrangement and movements of the stars and then
you know, aspiring different levels of meaning and memory to them.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
So I want to return once more to Jay Holberg's
serious Brightest Diamond in the Night Sky from two thousand
and seven book we cited in the last episode. He
gets into it a bit here, and you know, again
he covers the Greek and Roman emphasis on the canine
aspects of the dog Star, as well as it's purported
influence over dogs, which we've been discussing. But again, the
(42:32):
dog Star is also sometimes the wolf Star. And you know,
that's a major shift, maybe not in species, but certainly
in its implications, because, as we've been referencing here, the
dog is the domesticated relative of the wolf. And while
the dog is our companion, our guardian, and our helper,
the wolf is often an emblem of wildness, maybe in
(42:54):
a positive way, but also in a potentially dangerous way.
And this has all long been an area humans have
kind of wrestled with this duality. I've discussed this before
regarding where wolf myths and proto were wolf myths, and
you know, even the Romans who recognized the founders of Rome, Romulus,
and Remus as having been suckled by the great she wolf.
(43:14):
And you know, obviously they have a great affinity for
the wolf. In this sense, there's also still room for fear.
So you have both of these energies going on at once. Yeah,
in addition to the dog influence, the idea that again
that there's some sort of influence from the dog star
on the behavior of dogs. Holberg notes that the denizens
(43:34):
of the Greek island of CEOs viewed the twinkling or
shaking or any faintness of the dog star as a
potential indicator of crop blight, and that the dog Star
itself like basically kept the golden wolf of the Eastern
Taurus Mountains at bay, forcing this wolf to retreat underground
(43:58):
then and in doing so like protected the crops. The
Romans also thought that the haliacal setting of the dog star,
not the rising, but the setting, could bring about a
rust colored grain fungus, and that the sacrifice of a
red dog to the deity Rhebigus was required. But certainly
(44:19):
a dash of domesticated dog versus wild wolf is It
can be seen in this you know, this long standing
contemplation point and human thought.
Speaker 3 (44:30):
It's interesting that you would have this tradition of the
dog star keeping the wolves at bay in this one telling,
whereas later you get this idea that it is setting
the dogs like it is turning the doll the dogs
into mad wolves. It's like making them revert like altered
states or something.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess we see that a
lot in various traditions, even in like modern traditions coming
back to the werewolf, like does wolf's bane stop a
werewolf or does it cause a werewolf?
Speaker 3 (44:58):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (44:59):
They just like closely a associated in so it's upgoing
different different ways in different tellings. Again, in China, I
think we referenced this already, but the star was known
as the heavenly Wolf, where I believe ten Lang. It's unknown, however,
if there is actually any link between the Eastern wolf
interpretation and the Western dog interpretation, but Holberg notes that
(45:22):
depictions of the star as a dog do seem to
date back to ancient Mesopotamian cuniform writings, where it was
at least sometimes referred to as the dog that leads. Again,
while the Egyptians had no deep rooted concept of Sirius
as a dog, rather as soft debt an aspect of
(45:42):
the goddess Isis, still you had the influence of Greek
and Roman dog star concepts, and those eventually did have
their influence over Egyptian thought, resulting in a believe second
century CE Alexandria minted drachma that showed Isis riding on
the back of a dog. So like two different ideas
(46:04):
kind of brought together there and then meanwhile, this was
really fascinating. Holberg devotes several pages to the various North
American indigenous tribes that characterize the star Sirius as a dog,
and there are numerous examples, just to name a few.
He mentions the moon dog of the Inuit, the dog
(46:28):
that follows the mountain sheep of the thane Atham, who
we've talked about on the show a couple of times
already this year, the blackfoot of the Great Plains, who
called it dogface. And he also mentions that the Cherokee
see the stars Sirius and Anteries the brightest star of
the constellation Scorpius, as a pair of celestial dogs guarding
(46:50):
either end of the path of souls, the Milky Way,
and so to pass beyond the path of souls, the
spirit of the dead has to bring a little tree.
You got to bring a bribe, You got to bring
something for both dogs. And if you don't, you're going
to wander the path of souls forever and never cross
on beyond it.
Speaker 3 (47:08):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Yeah, so yeah, some beautiful traditions they are also the
Pawnee called it the white Star or wolf star, and
sometimes in some traditions it was not a wolf or
a dog, but a coyote and would take on a
trickster aspect, you know, very much. Getting into that recurring
theme of the coyote as some sort of a cosmic
trickster in various indigenous traditions. Now, it's also important to
(47:35):
stress here, and Holberg points this out as well, that
there's still plenty of indigenous North American traditions about the
star Sirius that do not have any canine references. But
he stresses that there's no real consistency among those non
canine interpretations. And so, you know, you have numerous canine
(47:57):
traditions then that could possibly be linked together and even
share a common ancestor with traditions that were carried over
by the first people to cross into North America, you know,
across the Bearing Sea land bridge, and then but still
plenty of room for other traditions that have nothing to
do with dogs.
Speaker 3 (48:15):
Interesting, Yeah, because we don't know how far back some
of the traditions about serious go, because it seems like
people have been noticing and paying attention to the star
long before you know, recorded history.
Speaker 2 (48:29):
Yeah, and so, and then it's also one of these
things like if there is a human inclination to identify
this these stars and the way you might connect them
to an animal, and then possibly to an animal that is,
you know, close to us. In one way or another.
If we do it at one point in time, it's
not impossible that we do it another point in time
(48:51):
later on, you know, separated by maybe thousands of years,
and you know, on the other side of the globe,
so it could just spontaneously pop up as well.
Speaker 3 (49:00):
Totally. Yeah, dogs are close at hand, so it's not
proof of like a common cultural ancestral tradition.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
Yeah. Yeah. And if not dogs, then wolves or coyotes
or whatever the case may be.
Speaker 3 (49:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
Now, there's also a long standing tradition of seeing the
star Sirius is not part of a dog or a
wolf for a coyote, but is part of a bow
and arrow. This is interesting. The ancient Chinese viewed part
of the constellations of Pupis and Canus major as forming
a bow and arrow pointed at Sirius, and then in
(49:35):
ancient Mesopotamian traditions, the star Sirius is sometimes the point
of the arrow primed in its bow. Thus the ancient
Babylonian tradition of the star as and I did not
look up the pronunciation for this getting into the ancient
Babylonian probable pronunciations, but Caxi saw spelled capital kak dot
(49:59):
s I dot s say, which also sounds like it
could be some sort of web address that you shouldn't
click on. But this would mean the arrow star, and
in ancient India as well, it was associated with arrows
and was sometimes described as the deer slayer or the hunter.
Speaker 3 (50:15):
Oh well, interesting also that it could be coincidence once again,
But Orion is the hunter, of course, and so Orion's
dogs are the hunting dogs.
Speaker 2 (50:23):
Yeah, and the hunting dogs dogs in human hunting. There
a lot has been. There's a lot of fascinating hypotheses
out there about the role that dogs played in really
like upping our hunting game and allowing us to become
these mighty hunters. You know, would we have mighty hunters
among the humans if we did not have the dogs
(50:44):
there alongside us. Let's see elsewhere. You mentioned that the
Zoroastrians identified Sirius as Trishtira, the angel of the Star
of Sirius, and a lot of emphasis here was on
its connection to rain and water, which of course reminds
us of the way that the Egyptians thought of the star.
Speaker 3 (51:04):
Right, because in ancient Egypt, the Hallikal rising of Sirius
was thought as the signal of the beginning of the
Nile inundation season.
Speaker 2 (51:12):
Yeah. Meanwhile, in Arabic it was al Shira and then
later al kaalb al Akbar, the greater Dog in Islamic
astronomical texts. Obviously here it's picking up on some ideas
from the Greek, but Holberg also points out that Sirius
is the only star other than the Sun obviously to
be quote explicitly identified in the Qoran. So he singles
(51:37):
out chapter fifty three of the Qoran. This is Sura
on Nadjim the Star, and in it Allah is described,
among other titles and honorifics, as quote he who is
the Lord of Sirius. And this is a really interesting line.
And I'm on one hand reading this for my own
(51:59):
part for the first time. Again. It's one of many
titles and honorifics given to Allah in this chapter. And
it seems fitting yet that an almighty god is also
god of the most prominent star in the night sky, right, yeah, yeah, So,
I mean, at face value, it just seems like perfectly
reasonable thing that you would list out there. But apparently
(52:19):
as far back as the fourteenth century it was said
as well that this was a direct rebuke of a
tradition among some pre Islamic Arabs to revere or possibly
worship the star in some fashion or at least hold
it within some religious tradition that was maybe seen in
opposition to the rise of Islam. And so this would
(52:43):
seem to be potentially a case then where the text
is saying those of you who worshiped a god associated
with Sirius, well, Allah is the one true God and
the god of that star along with everything.
Speaker 3 (52:56):
Else I see. So it's allegedly making a point about
about all those dominance over the gods of previously held faiths.
Speaker 2 (53:04):
Yeah, yeah, that's my understanding of it. And in this,
you know, we can easily compare this with various other
uh the rise of other religions, where there is an
emphasis on pointing out things that were held sacred in
prior faiths, be they you know, monotheistic, monotheistic, or polytheistic,
and saying well, actually, no, that is the domain of
(53:26):
this god. This god is is the highest god of all.
Speaker 3 (53:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (53:32):
And of course I think all this, of course is
always fascinating because you know, from our vantage point, we
know the Golden Age of Islamic astronomy to come from,
you know, the certainly the eighth through fifteenth centuries, So
it's it's interesting to see these little astronomical touches already
in the Qur'an. And then finally, I'll note that Holberg
(53:53):
does devote several pages to to discussing the importance of
Sirius among other stars in Polynesian and Micronesian now vigation,
as well as a seasonal marker. And of course this
calls back to a whole series that we did a
few years back about such navigation and the importance of
the stars and charting these just amazing voyages or really
(54:13):
the last voyages into the unknown on the planet Earth
by human explorers.
Speaker 3 (54:19):
Yeah. Yeah, that series I remember being one of the
most amazing things to me, like, of all the things
we've ever covered, was about the Pacific Island navigation techniques
before modern instruments. Yeah, like really really amazing.
Speaker 2 (54:33):
Yeah, the last cases of human beings venturing out and
discovering new places where humans had never ventured to before.
It's pretty amazing, and doing so with these these finely
honed traditions and observations that yeah, the contemporary historians and
scientists and so forth had to struggle to understand.
Speaker 3 (54:55):
Yeah, but being able to read things that a lot
of people just wouldn't even notice about the sea, about
the currents, about the stars, of course, but even about
the behavior of animals like birds, and all kinds of
things that could give you clues about how to navigate
in open ocean where you have no reference markers and
no compass instruments or anything either.
Speaker 2 (55:18):
Yeah, yea, your compass becomes the heavens, it becomes these
the movements of these stars, and Serious plays a role
in all of that. Yeah, all right, Well, I think
that's going to do it for part two here, but
we have enough, at the very least for a part three.
There's still some areas concerning the dog days of Summer
and Serious that we want to get into. So join
(55:40):
us next week as we come back and at least
do Dog Days and Death Stars part three.
Speaker 3 (55:46):
All right, I'll see you then.
Speaker 2 (55:49):
In the meantime, we'll just remind you that Stuff to
Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast,
with core episodes in the podcast feed on Tuesdays and Thursday,
short form on days and on Fridays, we set us
one most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
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for a long time, so if you want to look
(56:10):
up any of these older episodes that we keep referring to,
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More recent episodes also have a video component over at Netflix,
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(56:32):
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Speaker 3 (56:44):
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Speaker 1 (57:06):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to use Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick,
and we're back the second part in our series on
the Dog Days of Summer and the dog Star Serious,
from which the dog Days get their name. So in
part one of the series, we started off talking about
childhood recollections of hearing this phrase the dog Days of
(00:35):
Summer without knowing what it meant or where it came from.
And it turns out that the dog Days do not
get their name from the image of dogs panting in
the heat, but instead from the astrology of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks,
and Romans, who linked the hottest part of summer to
the haliacal rising of the star Serious, the brightest star
(00:58):
in the night sky and the brightest star in the
constellation Canus Major, which the Greeks and Romans linked to
the mythic huntsman Orion. Canus Major and Canus Minor were
Orion's hunting dogs. So many ancient peoples thought that when
Sirius rose in conjunction with the sun, when this haliacal
(01:19):
rising happened in the middle or late part of summer.
The star added its heat to the heat of the sun,
so it's like turning on a second burner under the pan,
and this is what made the weeks of Midsummer dangerously
hot last time. We also talked a lot about the
meaning of the Dog Star in ancient literature, such as
(01:41):
the Iliad, where Homer repeatedly invokes it as a symbol
of both brilliance and radiance, but also as a death star,
an omen of doom and destruction. And we got into
the use of the dog days of Summer in other
poems and songs as well, including some digressions about Don
Henley and Dylan Thomas. I guess the Don Henley reference
(02:02):
is indirect. It's not a direct quote, but you know,
Boys of Summer and that's got a lot of dog
gets into some of the same vibes. Yeah, yeah, Dog
Days in it. And then we also discussed the Dog
Star as a star Serious A, which is actually part
of a binary star system with the smaller white dwarf
Serious B. We got into a number of fascinating things
(02:24):
about the star itself and the astronomy history around it,
like how long will it remain the brightest star in
Earth's night sky? Why ancient authors might have described it
as a different color than it appears today, and so forth.
So if you haven't heard part one, please go back
listen to that first. But today we're here to keep
the dog days rolling.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah, And I thought i'd throw in a quick short
poem by Robert Frost here. The poem Canus Major. This
is one I'd kind of forgotten about, but I distinctly
remember now reading it as a kid in like ENGL class,
and I remember, I think I had to memorize this one,
or I had to like write it out and do
a little drawling for it or something. It is. I'm
(03:07):
gonna say it is not particularly deep as far as
serious related poetry or Robert Frost's poems go, but it's
still kind of delightful, and it also is kind of
a counter note to some of like the deeper, kind
of darker contemplations we've touched on already. It goes as follows,
the great overdog, that heavenly beast with a star in
(03:30):
one eye, gives a leap in the east. He dances
upright all the way to the west, and never once
drops on his four feet to rest. I'm a poor underdog,
but tonight I will bark with the great overdog that
romps through the dark.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Very nice.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Yeah, I'm assuming he's talking about turning into a were
wolf for a wear dog of some sort back.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
Yeah, it could could well be. I mean, what is
he doing in those woods? Dark and deep?
Speaker 2 (03:57):
And you know he's just running about chasing squirrels all
fours That's what I'm man.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Goes into the woods, drinks the water from a wolf's pawprint,
and there you go.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
There you go. That's how it works. But I also
have some more things I want to add regarding Don
Henley and some of the other songs that in poems
that we mentioned in the last episode. So, first of all,
in the last episode, in addition to two discussions of
Don Henley's The Boys of Summer and the Dylan Thomas
(04:28):
poem I see the Boys of Summer, I also mentioned
in passing landa del Ray's excellent twenty twelve song Summertime
Sadness off of the album Born to Die, generally considered
I think to be one of her more electronic leaning albums,
though it would probably be way too strong to say, oh,
this is an electronic album, but you know, there's a
lot of electronic notes there.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
I'm not super familiar with Lana del Rey, but is
this the album that the single Video Games is from.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
I think it is, I have to admit to I'm
more of a like a drop been on particular tracks
listening a listener of Delray's material. But this album had
both Summertime Sadness and Blue Jeans, which is another favorite
of mine. Off this album particularly, there's a remix of
it from Sims and Bell that features Azalia Banks, so
(05:17):
it has this like very heavy driving synth added to it,
and also a rap bridge from Banks, and I occasionally
will pull this track up and listen to it. It's
got a great vibe, but at any rate, Summertime Sadness
great track. It's one of these that my mind often
turns to during the dog days of summer. There's also
(05:40):
this side tangent that's just just confined to me and
my family where we will sing the song and say
I've got those summertime summertime pumpkins. Discussing the volunteer pumpkins
that will pop up in our garden emerging from the
remains of the composts from previous years. But that is
summertime sadness. Great song, and it is worth noting that
(06:04):
summertime sadness does exist in the form of summer onset
seasonal effective disorder. Not exactly what the song is about,
but there is a connection here. So I was reading
a little bit about that, you know, because this does
kind of relate to this idea of there being certain
moods that settle in during this time, during the hottest months,
(06:27):
or maybe like in the period immediately after, and I
found that. Stephanie Rhoades wrote an article about it in
twenty sixteen for Michigan Medicine at the University of Michigan,
pointing out that, yeah, the summer onset seasonal effective disorder
is less common than fall and winter onset seasonal effective disorder,
but it does exist. And she writes that some of
(06:49):
the frequent triggers that are associated with summer include schedule changes.
This is a you know, suddenly you have the sort
of routine you're going through. Maybe it has to do
with your work or your school or the school schedule
for you know, a child in your life, but whatever
the case, suddenly things are different. That's going to shake
things up a little bit. Likewise, you may be going
(07:12):
on vacation. Vacation, of course, is a way to get
away from a lot of your troubles, but vacation treats
everyone differently. In different sorts of vacation treat everyone differently.
So setting on the beach reading a good book, that
might be your pure escape, but it might also give
you maybe a little bit too much time to contemplate
things at the you know, the edge of the world
where the ocean meets the beach.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
At the other end of the spectrum, if you're in
a different type of vacationing family culture, you might be
trying to pack too much into a vacation. Yeah, I
don't know if you've experienced that.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Yeah, I mean I've experienced both sides, vacations where way
too much is packed in and maybe not enough is
packed in. So I mean it's I think it's It
is important to note you can be very much the
kind of person that you know that enjoys a vacation.
It doesn't mean you're anti vacation, but you shake things up,
and yeah, it can it can serve as a trigger
(08:06):
for certain you know, depressive states or anxious states and
so forth. On top of this, Roades also points out
that you're going to have obviously changes in daylight patterns,
so the days are going to get longer. This can
impact sleep schedules, like you might be joy overjoyed that
the days are so long, but also it you know,
(08:28):
it might influence you that like, wow, it's it should
be just fully nighttime right now, right, but the sun
is still out. How am I supposed to react to that?
Speaker 3 (08:36):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (08:37):
And then on top of that, there's just various psychosocial
issues that can come into place, such as recent life changes,
which of course may or may not have anything to
do with summer. And I also want to note this
is mostly from my personal observation, not from this article,
but I think summer is also highly susceptible to that
same level of heightened expectations for happiness enjoy that you
(09:00):
encounter with Christmas. You know, you're hit with all of
this media advertisements trying to sell you things that are
aligned with summer. And you know, what if I'm not
having a hot girl summer, What if I don't feel
like beach boys lyrics coursing through my veins?
Speaker 3 (09:17):
Yeah, extremely true that it can really get you down
when you are not feeling great and you feel like
there are forces telling you that you should be feeling good,
like you're having a great time right now. Isn't this
great and you're not feeling it, It kind of makes
it even worse.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, maybe you go on social media and now you're
hit with well, summertime themed advertisements as well as other
people's summer pictures, which, again, as we've touched on, how
many times are the curated extremes extreme expressions of whatever
is going on? So yeah, all that can come into play,
let's see. I also looked around a little bit for
other poetic examples of summer sadness summertime sadness, and there's
(09:57):
actually a poem from us to fun marrow May who
lived eighteen forty two through eighteen ninety eight, titled Summer
Sadness and I want to read just a part of
this from this is translated from the French, of course,
but it is a poem that really does seem to
capture this idea of like being on the beach, being
in like what is otherwise a happy setting, surrounded you
(10:20):
know there was someone you love even and still feeling
this sadness creep in where it should not be allowed
to be surely, but I'm just going to read the
first two stanzas this is, this is a nice taste.
The sun on the sand, Oh, sleeping wrestler warms, a
languid bath in the gold of your hair, melting the
(10:42):
incense on your hostile features, mixing an amorous liquid with
the tears. The immutable calm of this white burning Oh
my fearful kisses makes you say, sadly, will we ever
be one mummified winding under the ancient sands and palm?
I'm so happy? Mm So I like it. I wasn't
(11:04):
super familiar with this poet either, but clearly, you know
this is something that people have been running into for
quite a while.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Yeah, romantic awkwardness on a beach. That's it shows up
in other poems as well. I'm thinking of the kind
of it's not explicit, but the subtext in Matthew Arnold's
Dover Beach.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Various paintings, for sure, also seem to
have this kind of vibe. You know, you see like
a you know, a landscape of a beach and it
you know it looks. It can at once be inviting,
like I want to be there, but also are these
people happy? What are they feeling? How do they feel?
How would I truly feel if I was.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
There feeling like they're supposed to be happy.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Yeah, and then also I did end up digging back
around a little bit regarding The Boys of Summer from
Don Henley, and yeah, and it's I'm gonna have to
go back on some of the things I said about it.
But first of all, I did find some interview segments
(12:04):
where he does specifically cite Dylan Thomas's I see the
Boys of Summer as a core inspiration here.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Wow, that's kind of surprising to me.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Yeah. Yeah, I have to point out that in some cases,
you'll look online and you'll see people state that the
best selling nineteen seventy two baseball book The Boys of
Summer by Roger Kahn was the inspiration, but Henley, in
an interview stated that, yeah, despite being a baseball fan,
he'd never read that book, and the inspiration is Thomas. Here.
(12:37):
I should also point out Henley wrote the lyrics the
music is by Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Petty actually passed on the demo, you know, the lyricless
demo for this song, and then he ended up shopping
it to Don Henley and he's the Campbell's talked about
it in interviews as well, where he's like, yeah, I
(12:57):
wasn't sure that Henley even liked it. He's like, well,
let me see what I can make it. And then
he came back and he's like, I think I've written
the best song in my career to your music. So yeah,
and it's you know, a strong case could be made
that that is what exactly what happened.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
Trying to imagine it as a Tom Petty song, it's
not really working for me.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure it would have been great,
you know, Tom Petty was great, but yeah, Henley brings
a specific energy to it, you know, in Henley's vocals,
I think, And and also you know, who knows what
the lyrics would have been. It would have been different
lyrical composition there for sure if it was a Tom
Petty song. So I'm sure it would have been great,
(13:36):
but it wouldn't have maybe it wouldn't have been as great,
who knows.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
I guess I feel like I can't think of a
Tom Petty song that feels that earnestly melancholy. I feel
like the Tom Petty sad songs always have some irony
to them.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. So this was meant
to be. Now that if you want to look up
the quote where he's talking about the inspiration. I was
reading the twenty twenty six Louder article The Boys of
Summer by Don Henley, the Story behind the Song by
Bill Demain. Certainly look that up if you're interested to
(14:12):
dig in more. And yeah, I have to say that.
As I was reading this, I was like, Okay, I
need to listen to these summertime songs again. So I
was pulling up Summertime Sadness, listened to it a few
times through, and I pulled up The Boys of Summer,
and yeah, I have to go back on some of
the things I said, go back on some of the
things I said in the last episode, you know where
(14:33):
I said like, oh, I love the music, but you know,
the lyrics a little creepy at times. I think I
think I was wrong. I think I have to say
that great music and the lyrics are great too. It's
got some wonderful lines and like out on the road today,
I saw a deadhead stick around a Cadillac. That's just
an all timer right there.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
That one's scan's really good. It's good metrical qualities.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
I also feel very differently this song now, knowing that
it has that Dylan Thomas the force that drives the
green views through the flower principle in it. I wouldn't
have suspected that, even though it kind of fits the
mood of the music. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
So anyway, don Henley fans right in, let us know
what you think. Do you agree, do you disagree? I
would not be surprised if there are some folks who
write in to correct me on how I feel about
this song after part one, and if you did so,
we'll rest assured that I changed my mind a little
bit between part one and part two.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Okay, well, Rob, would you like to talk about a
historical link that a lot of people made between the
Dog Days of Summer and rabies.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
I think that is the next logical place to go
after more discussion of the Boys of Summer.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Yeah, deadheadsticker on a Cadillac, rabid Dogs. So I was
reading about this actually in a paper published in the
Journal of Urban History in twenty twenty five by a
scholar named Chris Pearson who is a professor of environmental
history at the University of Liverpool. This paper is called
The Sinister Side of Summer, Revisiting the Dog Days of
(16:23):
nineteenth century New York. So in this paper, it's interesting
because the author places a sort of specific narrative about
dogs and rabies and the heat of the summer and
the dog star Serius within a broader context of literature
in the nineteenth century where people are just expressing anxieties
(16:48):
and grievances about the dog days of summer, especially in
the city of New York. At the time, the dog
days were typically placed in late July and early August.
That was the time people really I was like, that's
when we think the dog days are now, because, as
we discussed in the last episode, while the Hallikal rising
of Sirius is an objective date that you can that
(17:10):
you can find, you know, you can pinpoint exactly when
that happens for your location on the globe each year,
that's not necessarily how people usually invoke the dog days
of summer, especially in subsequent decade. That might have been
more what it was in the ancient world, where people
were pegging it to astrology into the star. But in
(17:30):
more recent centuries it's just like the hottest part of summer.
People call that so late July early August. In New
York in the nineteenth century, those were the dog days,
and people had a lot of negative opinions about the
dog days. So Pearson quotes a poem from the year
eighteen fifty written by a New York newspaper editor named
George P. Morris, called Rhyme of the ancient editor, Yuck Yuck,
(17:55):
New York in the dog Days, and it includes the
lines my brain is parched and airing, the pavement hot
and dry, and not a breath is stirring beneath the
burning sky. And so a common sentiment that you will
see expressed in writing of the time is that this
time of year is sort of cursed. It was just
(18:17):
a regular belief that the height of summer was a
terrible time when people are at their worst, and was
a time when mad or rabid dogs would come out
and prowl the streets. Now today we know that rabies
is caused by a virus, and it is most often
transmitted through a bite, when the saliva of an infected
(18:41):
animal gets into the open wound of another animal, or
into the mucous membranes like the eyes or the mouth.
But we didn't always know that. And Pearson writes that
before the widespread acceptance of germ theory in the second
half of the nineteenth century, many people apparently believed quote
that the heat of the dog Days and the strange
influence of serious the dog star caused rabies.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Another way he puts it is that rabies was quote
an emotional disease triggered by high temperatures. Now, this was
by no means a universal view. There were plenty of
doctors and veterinarians in the eighteen hundreds who thought that
this was complete hogwash, that neither the stars nor heat
(19:27):
had anything to do with rabies, and they argued their
case in public. But they were not able, apparently, to
put this popular belief to rest. And what Pearson calls
the myth of the dog Days actually influenced public health policy,
including policy about like when dog pounds were opened, when
(19:48):
these dog kind of brutal and disturbing dog calling campaigns
took place. Now, one thing that I do want to
come back to later is that there are actually reasons
to be especially concerned about rabies in the summertime. But
that is not because raybis is only a disease that happen.
(20:10):
You know that happens in the summertime. Rabies is present
all year round, and it is not because the heat
triggers rabies in any particular way. There are other reasons
that I'll come back to you at the end of
the section. It is not that the summer stars or
the hot weather give animals rabies, but there are summertime concerns.
(20:31):
So summarizing the press treatment of dogs and rabies in
nineteenth century New York, Pearson writes, quote, the high temperatures
sparked concerns about dogs overheating and falling under the influence
of the dog star, with the press reporting frequently on
instances of seemingly mad dogs roaming the streets and causing chaos.
(20:54):
Pet dogs were just as likely to become rabid, but
the close associations of street dogs with dirt disorder and
disease framed them as the canine counterpart to the so
called human dangerous classes, making them the particular target of
anxieties as well as violence from passers by and policeman. However,
(21:15):
in mocking the very same ideas, Pearson quotes an eighteen
fifty seven edition of the New York Daily Times, which wrote,
quote popular belief and what is often synonymous popular error,
give to the dog Star the honor of influencing the
ebb and flow of canine madness, as its lunar sister
does the tide in affair of men. So you get
(21:39):
these voices. It's not like a universal chorus of people
saying like, oh yeah, the heat of the summer, the
dog Days and the dog Star they are causing rabies.
You're going to get in the literature a lot of
sources arguing against this idea, seemingly because it was just
so popular among regular people, and it was showing up
a lot in like newspaper articles, not written by experts.
(22:03):
So you'll get a lot of skeptical debunkings of this
idea over and over during the time. Pearson also lists
evidence of dog Day's Panic in places other than New York,
mentioning that there was some dog Day's danger reasoning to
some degree driving the summer call of street dogs in
British colonial Bombay in eighteen thirty two, and he talks
(22:26):
about the police in Paris focusing the rabies control efforts
specifically on the summertime. As an example of the people
who argued against the belief that rabies and dogs was
caused by heat, Pearson cites a British veterinarian named William
Ywat who lived seventeen seventy six to eighteen forty seven.
(22:47):
This guy argued in his writings against the idea that
Raybi's quote is caused by a particular state of the atmosphere,
and Pearson notes this guy's exasperated tone and the tone
of other printed arguments against rabies. It seems like it's
one of those things that just like won't die, and
so the people who are skeptical of it are getting
continually annoyed by it. There's another doctor, he brings up
(23:10):
in a minute, who's like, I can't believe it's the
nineteenth century and people are still saying that rabies is
caused by the stars or by heat. But Pearson summarizes
the general corners of the nineteenth century debate among doctors
and veterinarians about the cause of rabies, and he mentioned
several competing ideas. So one of the theories was not
(23:33):
quite there yet to the full like germ theory viral
explanation that we would eventually land on, but it was
basically on the right track, and that idea was that
there was some kind of harmful substance transmitted between animals
and humans through the mouth which could spread through biting
or licking. That turned out to be basically correct. The
(23:55):
rabies virus is mostly spread through saliva getting into open
wounds or into mucous membranes. But other ideas were that
it arose somehow spontaneously in dogs due to sexual activity
too much or too little we'll get your arabies, or
too emotional disturbances come back to this one in a minute,
(24:18):
or finally to heat or heat maybe contributing to one
of the other explanations like the emotions, maybe like heat
triggers emotional irritability in dogs which makes them rabid. Now,
apart from actual seasonal trends and infection, which we can
talk about later, you might be able to imagine how
(24:41):
people could form a mental link between heat and rabies
just through visual cues, like when it's hot, dogs pant
a lot and this can result in drooling and the
showing of teeth, both symptoms that people would associate with
mad or rabid dogs, and Pierson quotes a couple of
(25:02):
other authors named Michael Warboys and Neil Pemberton, who described
this as a leading strain of thinking that quote, rabies
might be perverted pathologized panting. You know, it's somehow like
the panting response goes wrong and it goes haywire, and
it takes over the dog's brain and the dog becomes rabid.
(25:25):
Another way of characterizing this thinking is that heat could
cause some kind of internal chemical change in dogs, that
the hottest part of summer could cause canine blood to
quote putrefy and become poisonous. So, despite the protestations of
skeptical experts, it was apparently widely believed that a hot
(25:46):
dog could somehow transform into a rabid dog.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
It's such an interesting and you can see where it
would be such an infectious idea if you really get
in like some of these deeper connotations, like what a
domesticated dog is, like this sort of like deep seated
knowledge that this is an animal, This is a wolf
that has been brought into the fold and has entered
into the fold and entered into this ancient pact with
(26:11):
us and become this companion animal that is valuable and
useful and even beloved. And the idea that something could
just sort of snap in them and revert all of
that back to wildness. You know, that's that's a scary concept.
I mean, that's the stuff of horror movies. That's like
a blue Sunshine but for dogs.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Or Kujo, which is literally about rabies exactly.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
There, Yeah, more directly.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
Yeah, but it's funny what you bring up, like the
link with wolves and this knowledge about their their domestic
their domestic state now, but their wild heritage. This actually
does connect to something that a lot of people wrote
at the time about vilifying certain breeds of dogs, which is,
you know, a thing that still happens today, but at
the time it's not a particular breed, but at the
(26:58):
time piercing it's into this long section about how there
was a type of dog widely known as a spitz
dog spi t Z, and these dogs were singled out
for concern as being especially prone to dog day rabidity
to you know, summertime dog madness. Now, the spits is
(27:19):
not a breed, it's this broad, vaguely defined class of
pointy snouted dogs. I looked this up. The Encyclopedia Britannica
has an article about the spitz dog concept, and Britannica
calls them quote northern breeds with defining characteristics such as
a fox like head, pointed ears, and a tail that
(27:40):
curves over their backs. So you can think about a
lot of dogs that have roughly those characters.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
The scary dogs from movies. These are the kinds of
dogs that are going to chase James Bond through the woods.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Well, not necessarily, like a lot of the dogs that
fit the spits characteristics are actually quite funny, like cute,
little yappy dog, you know, like a Pomeranian or something
that's you know, that fits the characteristics. But these characteristics,
the thinking wind made the Spits dogs more closely related
(28:13):
to wolves and thus more prone to give way to
their brutal nature and become rabid.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
And of course there are a lot of like incorrect
notions about the wolf title and all of this as well,
because there's a big difference between a rabid dog and
a wild wolf. I mean, you can get a rabid
wolf obviously, and that's a bad situation as well. But yeah,
the wild wolf and the rabbit dog are two very
different cases. The wild wolf has long been vilified, in
(28:42):
large part because of its relationship to domesticated farm animals.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
Yeah yeah, so tons of misconceptions are all wrapped up here.
Pierson quotes an author named George B. Taylor, writing in
a book called Man's Best Friend in the year nineteen
oh one. Taylor wrote that talking about spits dogs, wrote quote,
they are Arctic creatures to whom life is only worth
(29:08):
living with the thermometer at from sixty five degrees to
where alcohol freezes. Creatures of snow and ice flow, who
are miserable in warm weather, and of course, like other
what are called arctic dogs. Authors of the time argued
that these dogs were especially prone to rabies. There's some
(29:29):
kind of mental link going on there, Like they're especially
uncomfortable in hot weather, they're especially tied to their wild ancestors,
they're especially wolf like, and thus these are like the
pinnacle of like rabies concern dogs, like they're the most
likely to become mad and dangerous.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Again, flawed logic, but you can see how these thoughts
are connected in people's minds when they're considering this idea.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
Now, I want to come back to the idea that
there was this other explanation of rabies and dogs, which
is that dogs are especially prone to emotional disturbances and
that their emotions can make them rabid. Pearson presents the
example of a British veterinarian named Edward Mayhew who wrote
about dogs as quote, irritable creatures with highly sensitive brains
(30:31):
and nervous systems. It's like, wow, it seems like I
could describe a lot.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Of animals, can describe people.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Yeah, yeah, wonder Yeah strange, But this guy characterized rabies
as a disease caused by nervous excitability. And then Pearson
also mentions a New York doctor named Thomas Blatchford who
argued in eighteen fifty six that dogs were just super emotional.
They're very sensitive, highly prone to anger, and that emotional
(30:58):
sensitivity could in some way drive rabies and so as
a result, Pearson says, it's kind of interesting to think
that canine emotions quote were a public health risk that
needed to be managed. Yeah. Now it's interesting on this
topic because we have some like wrong versus wrong in
the literature. This is something something we encounter sometimes where
(31:21):
like a really wrong idea is being attacked by a
still wrong but maybe slightly less wrong idea. So this
guy Blatchford, this veterinarian or not veterinarian. I think he
was a doctor. But Blatchford thought that rabies was an
emotional condition. But he argued forcefully against the idea that
(31:43):
it was caused by heat. He called the dog day's
myth and utter fallacy. And he ran a special committee
of the American Medical Association in eighteen fifty six which
presented this report denouncing the heat rabies connection, arguing that
quote law is based on such a hypothesis or a
reproach to the nineteenth century. And he also made the
(32:05):
point that this very actually quite good point that this
false belief that the dog days of summer trigger rabies
could lead people to avoid taking precautions against rabies in
the other season. And he was absolutely correct that rabies
is a year round issue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, this
paper also goes into a lot of dark places that
(32:28):
I'm not going to follow in detail. There are many
I mean, this is historically useful information, but I don't
want to dwell on this. But there's summaries of lots
of documented violence against street dogs and against dogs that
were suspected of being rabid during hot weather. There was
a lot of cruelty in the official campaigns instituted in
cities like New York trying to deal with straight dogs
(32:51):
or rabid dogs in the summer, supposedly rabid dogs in
the summer, culling campaigns, and dog pounds with appalling conditions
time Eventually, more humane measures were brought online, but for
a while in the nineteenth century it sounds like these
measures were pretty nasty. However, eventually germ theory and the
(33:12):
new medical science that emerged, especially after the work of
Louis Pasteur, would help clear away a lot of these
misconceptions and offer a real framework for both understanding and
dealing with the reality of raybis so. Louis Pasteur studied
rabies in the early eighteen eighties, and in eighteen eighty
(33:32):
five Pasteur developed the first successful vaccine for the disease.
So before the rabies vaccine, raby's infection was almost one
hundred percent fatal and also not to dwell on grim realities,
but death by rabies is a horrifying death. Like one
of the most terrible and excruciating diseases you can imagine,
(33:55):
so it's like, you know, an absolute death sentence and
a horrible death. If it's not always that a bite
would result in rabies, like there are cases where people
were bitten by rabbit animals and maybe like it just
didn't result in a full infection, symptoms never manifested. But
basically if infection actually takes hold, if symptoms manifest, it
(34:16):
is one hundred percent fatal. So Pasteur first he created
this vaccine first by developing an attenuated form of the
rabies virus by passing it through a series of animal
hosts and then drying out the infected tissue to weaken it.
So what Pasteur did is he took samples of nerve tissue,
(34:40):
which was basically dried ground up spinal cords from rabbits
that had been infected with the brain tissue from rabbit dogs,
and then injected a hydrated form of that dried nerve
tissue into the patient in a series of increasing doses.
And I think as the method went on, he came
up with with the idea that you could like progressively
(35:02):
weaken the virus by drying it out for different periods
of time. And so this treatment based on the dried
nerve tissue from infected animals. This treatment was first tried
in humans in eighteen eighty five on a nine year
old boy named it Joseph Meister from Alsace, who had
been bitten fourteen times by a rabid dog. He was
(35:25):
brought to Pasteur after the bites to try out the
first post exposure prophylaxis that's what it's called today, when
you get the rabies vaccine after you've already gotten the exposure.
And for Meister it worked. He survived, and again worth
emphasizing that basically nobody survived actually contracting rabies before this.
(35:46):
Now it's worth stating that it wasn't that Meister had
actually fully developed symptoms and contracted rabies and then got
the vaccine, because once you developed symptoms sort of your
window has closed. But the important thing is being able
to get the post exposure prophylaxis between the time of
exposure and when the first symptoms develop. And that's what
(36:07):
happened here.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
And this is why as most of you know that
you know if you're bitten by an animal of unknown origin,
like there's a very high probability that the doctors are
going to give you that shot, you know, just to
make sure.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
Yeah, And one of the most important things is that
speed is of the essence here. So today, if you
have access to immediate medical care before symptoms begin, rabies,
getting a bite from a rabbit animal is almost one
hundred percent survivable. Like the treatment works, but the emphasis
we really should emphasize speed, Like if you ever think
(36:43):
you might have been exposed to rabies, you should not
wait and see it's not. Yeah, that could mean death.
You seek medical attention immediately, and if you do, it
is survivable. But basically so this early paste or vaccination,
it did come with some dangers. It hadn't been perfected yet,
so there were like some bad complications and side effects
(37:05):
for some people. But also it saved tons of lives,
and it laid the groundwork for the safer and even
more effective post exposure profile access protocols that we have today.
So rabies is really an amazing case of medical science
in that regard, like a bite from a rabbit animal
used to mean almost certain death, assuming that infection actually
(37:27):
took cold and not all bites resulted in an infection.
But it used to be if you got infected, certain death.
And now if you have access to fast medical care.
If you can get the post exposure vaccines, then you
will you will almost certainly survive.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
And then is it safe to look at the dog
star once you've see the vaccine?
Speaker 3 (37:48):
Okay, yes it is. Yeah, the dog star, from what
we can tell, has no role there. Yeah, But you know,
that does kind of bring it back to the Pearson
talks about this. So now we've got a vaccine, we've
got journey theory established, you know, so germ theory becomes
the dominant explanation in the late nineteenth century, certainly by
the beginning of the twentieth century. And we have a
(38:09):
vaccine that is effective, but that did not totally stop
the summer mad dog scares. It just continues in the
popular consciousness for a while, and you still see these
newspaper articles about its summertimes here. That means dogs are
going to be, you know, getting rabies from the summer heat,
and you got to watch out for them. But I
do want to come back and mention that there are
(38:30):
actual reasons to be concerned about rabies in the summertime.
It's not that the summer stars give animals rabies. It
is not that the hot weather gives animals rabies, but
there often are summer seasonal spikes in rabies, especially in
detection of rabies, and the main variable here seems to
(38:53):
be increased opportunities for infectious encounters. So during warm weather,
people and dogs spend more time outdoors, and wild animals
in the summertime are also going to be more active,
moving around into new territory, doing more active foraging. So
(39:14):
there are just going to be in the warm months
more chances for infection to spread between wild animals through
increased encounters, and more chances for humans and domestic animals
to come into contact with infected wildlife. There might be
some light inherent seasonality to the virus itself, but primarily
(39:41):
the issue does seem to be that it's like, because
of the changes in behavior patterns of animals and humans
during the warm months, there's just more ways and chances
for infectious encounters to happen.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
Yeah, we don't have time to get into this. We
may come back to this in a later episode, but
it reminds me a little bit about some of the
factors surrounding the heat aggression hypothesis with human populations, where yeah,
there's this idea that there seems to be a correlation
between violent and aggressive behavior and humans and the hot
(40:17):
places and the you know, the hottest part of the summer.
But one of the factors there is like, well, okay,
are more people outside, are more people interacting with each other?
Among a host of other factors that are involved. Because
you know, anything that's already complex with with dogs, it's
going to be in many ways more complex with human beings.
(40:45):
All Right. For the remainder of this episode, I want
to I want to come back to Sirius. I want
to come back to the Dog Star and pick up
on some of what we were discussing last time. So
in the last episode we discussed the various dog and
wolf based interpretations of the stars Serius and its place
in the constellation Canus Major. If you connect the cosmic
(41:06):
dots the right way, sure it sort of looks like
an animal, and that animal might as well be a dog,
because again, dogs have long been the nearest and dearest
creatures to our hearts. We have lived alongside them for
a very long time. So if you're going to interpret
this connect the dots shape in the sky to an
animal might as well be a dog.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
What about my beloved crocodile Crocodilius major.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
Yeah, I mean it could be the case. I mean,
I think we've all had this situation with constellations, right
where you have the nice overlay with the stenciled image
of Orion or his dog, and you're like, oh, yeah, yeah,
there he is with his club, and then you remove
that and you just look at the stars dot it
together and you're like, okay, I see it a little less.
And then you just look at the stars and you're like, Okay,
(41:53):
maybe I'm not seeing it at all. But yeah, I mean,
obviously this is all human interpretation and our way of
understanding the arrangement and movements of the stars and then
you know, aspiring different levels of meaning and memory to them.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
So I want to return once more to Jay Holberg's
serious Brightest Diamond in the Night Sky from two thousand
and seven book we cited in the last episode. He
gets into it a bit here, and you know, again
he covers the Greek and Roman emphasis on the canine
aspects of the dog Star, as well as it's purported
influence over dogs, which we've been discussing. But again, the
(42:32):
dog Star is also sometimes the wolf Star. And you know,
that's a major shift, maybe not in species, but certainly
in its implications, because, as we've been referencing here, the
dog is the domesticated relative of the wolf. And while
the dog is our companion, our guardian, and our helper,
the wolf is often an emblem of wildness, maybe in
(42:54):
a positive way, but also in a potentially dangerous way.
And this has all long been an area humans have
kind of wrestled with this duality. I've discussed this before
regarding where wolf myths and proto were wolf myths, and
you know, even the Romans who recognized the founders of Rome, Romulus,
and Remus as having been suckled by the great she wolf.
(43:14):
And you know, obviously they have a great affinity for
the wolf. In this sense, there's also still room for fear.
So you have both of these energies going on at once. Yeah,
in addition to the dog influence, the idea that again
that there's some sort of influence from the dog star
on the behavior of dogs. Holberg notes that the denizens
(43:34):
of the Greek island of CEOs viewed the twinkling or
shaking or any faintness of the dog star as a
potential indicator of crop blight, and that the dog Star
itself like basically kept the golden wolf of the Eastern
Taurus Mountains at bay, forcing this wolf to retreat underground
(43:58):
then and in doing so like protected the crops. The
Romans also thought that the haliacal setting of the dog star,
not the rising, but the setting, could bring about a
rust colored grain fungus, and that the sacrifice of a
red dog to the deity Rhebigus was required. But certainly
(44:19):
a dash of domesticated dog versus wild wolf is It
can be seen in this you know, this long standing
contemplation point and human thought.
Speaker 3 (44:30):
It's interesting that you would have this tradition of the
dog star keeping the wolves at bay in this one telling,
whereas later you get this idea that it is setting
the dogs like it is turning the doll the dogs
into mad wolves. It's like making them revert like altered
states or something.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess we see that a
lot in various traditions, even in like modern traditions coming
back to the werewolf, like does wolf's bane stop a
werewolf or does it cause a werewolf?
Speaker 3 (44:58):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (44:59):
They just like closely a associated in so it's upgoing
different different ways in different tellings. Again, in China, I
think we referenced this already, but the star was known
as the heavenly Wolf, where I believe ten Lang. It's unknown, however,
if there is actually any link between the Eastern wolf
interpretation and the Western dog interpretation, but Holberg notes that
(45:22):
depictions of the star as a dog do seem to
date back to ancient Mesopotamian cuniform writings, where it was
at least sometimes referred to as the dog that leads. Again,
while the Egyptians had no deep rooted concept of Sirius
as a dog, rather as soft debt an aspect of
(45:42):
the goddess Isis, still you had the influence of Greek
and Roman dog star concepts, and those eventually did have
their influence over Egyptian thought, resulting in a believe second
century CE Alexandria minted drachma that showed Isis riding on
the back of a dog. So like two different ideas
(46:04):
kind of brought together there and then meanwhile, this was
really fascinating. Holberg devotes several pages to the various North
American indigenous tribes that characterize the star Sirius as a dog,
and there are numerous examples, just to name a few.
He mentions the moon dog of the Inuit, the dog
(46:28):
that follows the mountain sheep of the thane Atham, who
we've talked about on the show a couple of times
already this year, the blackfoot of the Great Plains, who
called it dogface. And he also mentions that the Cherokee
see the stars Sirius and Anteries the brightest star of
the constellation Scorpius, as a pair of celestial dogs guarding
(46:50):
either end of the path of souls, the Milky Way,
and so to pass beyond the path of souls, the
spirit of the dead has to bring a little tree.
You got to bring a bribe, You got to bring
something for both dogs. And if you don't, you're going
to wander the path of souls forever and never cross
on beyond it.
Speaker 3 (47:08):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Yeah, so yeah, some beautiful traditions they are also the
Pawnee called it the white Star or wolf star, and
sometimes in some traditions it was not a wolf or
a dog, but a coyote and would take on a
trickster aspect, you know, very much. Getting into that recurring
theme of the coyote as some sort of a cosmic
trickster in various indigenous traditions. Now, it's also important to
(47:35):
stress here, and Holberg points this out as well, that
there's still plenty of indigenous North American traditions about the
star Sirius that do not have any canine references. But
he stresses that there's no real consistency among those non
canine interpretations. And so, you know, you have numerous canine
(47:57):
traditions then that could possibly be linked together and even
share a common ancestor with traditions that were carried over
by the first people to cross into North America, you know,
across the Bearing Sea land bridge, and then but still
plenty of room for other traditions that have nothing to
do with dogs.
Speaker 3 (48:15):
Interesting, Yeah, because we don't know how far back some
of the traditions about serious go, because it seems like
people have been noticing and paying attention to the star
long before you know, recorded history.
Speaker 2 (48:29):
Yeah, and so, and then it's also one of these
things like if there is a human inclination to identify
this these stars and the way you might connect them
to an animal, and then possibly to an animal that is,
you know, close to us. In one way or another.
If we do it at one point in time, it's
not impossible that we do it another point in time
(48:51):
later on, you know, separated by maybe thousands of years,
and you know, on the other side of the globe,
so it could just spontaneously pop up as well.
Speaker 3 (49:00):
Totally. Yeah, dogs are close at hand, so it's not
proof of like a common cultural ancestral tradition.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
Yeah. Yeah. And if not dogs, then wolves or coyotes
or whatever the case may be.
Speaker 3 (49:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
Now, there's also a long standing tradition of seeing the
star Sirius is not part of a dog or a
wolf for a coyote, but is part of a bow
and arrow. This is interesting. The ancient Chinese viewed part
of the constellations of Pupis and Canus major as forming
a bow and arrow pointed at Sirius, and then in
(49:35):
ancient Mesopotamian traditions, the star Sirius is sometimes the point
of the arrow primed in its bow. Thus the ancient
Babylonian tradition of the star as and I did not
look up the pronunciation for this getting into the ancient
Babylonian probable pronunciations, but Caxi saw spelled capital kak dot
(49:59):
s I dot s say, which also sounds like it
could be some sort of web address that you shouldn't
click on. But this would mean the arrow star, and
in ancient India as well, it was associated with arrows
and was sometimes described as the deer slayer or the hunter.
Speaker 3 (50:15):
Oh well, interesting also that it could be coincidence once again,
But Orion is the hunter, of course, and so Orion's
dogs are the hunting dogs.
Speaker 2 (50:23):
Yeah, and the hunting dogs dogs in human hunting. There
a lot has been. There's a lot of fascinating hypotheses
out there about the role that dogs played in really
like upping our hunting game and allowing us to become
these mighty hunters. You know, would we have mighty hunters
among the humans if we did not have the dogs
(50:44):
there alongside us. Let's see elsewhere. You mentioned that the
Zoroastrians identified Sirius as Trishtira, the angel of the Star
of Sirius, and a lot of emphasis here was on
its connection to rain and water, which of course reminds
us of the way that the Egyptians thought of the star.
Speaker 3 (51:04):
Right, because in ancient Egypt, the Hallikal rising of Sirius
was thought as the signal of the beginning of the
Nile inundation season.
Speaker 2 (51:12):
Yeah. Meanwhile, in Arabic it was al Shira and then
later al kaalb al Akbar, the greater Dog in Islamic
astronomical texts. Obviously here it's picking up on some ideas
from the Greek, but Holberg also points out that Sirius
is the only star other than the Sun obviously to
be quote explicitly identified in the Qoran. So he singles
(51:37):
out chapter fifty three of the Qoran. This is Sura
on Nadjim the Star, and in it Allah is described,
among other titles and honorifics, as quote he who is
the Lord of Sirius. And this is a really interesting line.
And I'm on one hand reading this for my own
(51:59):
part for the first time. Again. It's one of many
titles and honorifics given to Allah in this chapter. And
it seems fitting yet that an almighty god is also
god of the most prominent star in the night sky, right, yeah, yeah, So,
I mean, at face value, it just seems like perfectly
reasonable thing that you would list out there. But apparently
(52:19):
as far back as the fourteenth century it was said
as well that this was a direct rebuke of a
tradition among some pre Islamic Arabs to revere or possibly
worship the star in some fashion or at least hold
it within some religious tradition that was maybe seen in
opposition to the rise of Islam. And so this would
(52:43):
seem to be potentially a case then where the text
is saying those of you who worshiped a god associated
with Sirius, well, Allah is the one true God and
the god of that star along with everything.
Speaker 3 (52:56):
Else I see. So it's allegedly making a point about
about all those dominance over the gods of previously held faiths.
Speaker 2 (53:04):
Yeah, yeah, that's my understanding of it. And in this,
you know, we can easily compare this with various other
uh the rise of other religions, where there is an
emphasis on pointing out things that were held sacred in
prior faiths, be they you know, monotheistic, monotheistic, or polytheistic,
and saying well, actually, no, that is the domain of
(53:26):
this god. This god is is the highest god of all.
Speaker 3 (53:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (53:32):
And of course I think all this, of course is
always fascinating because you know, from our vantage point, we
know the Golden Age of Islamic astronomy to come from,
you know, the certainly the eighth through fifteenth centuries, So
it's it's interesting to see these little astronomical touches already
in the Qur'an. And then finally, I'll note that Holberg
(53:53):
does devote several pages to to discussing the importance of
Sirius among other stars in Polynesian and Micronesian now vigation,
as well as a seasonal marker. And of course this
calls back to a whole series that we did a
few years back about such navigation and the importance of
the stars and charting these just amazing voyages or really
(54:13):
the last voyages into the unknown on the planet Earth
by human explorers.
Speaker 3 (54:19):
Yeah. Yeah, that series I remember being one of the
most amazing things to me, like, of all the things
we've ever covered, was about the Pacific Island navigation techniques
before modern instruments. Yeah, like really really amazing.
Speaker 2 (54:33):
Yeah, the last cases of human beings venturing out and
discovering new places where humans had never ventured to before.
It's pretty amazing, and doing so with these these finely
honed traditions and observations that yeah, the contemporary historians and
scientists and so forth had to struggle to understand.
Speaker 3 (54:55):
Yeah, but being able to read things that a lot
of people just wouldn't even notice about the sea, about
the currents, about the stars, of course, but even about
the behavior of animals like birds, and all kinds of
things that could give you clues about how to navigate
in open ocean where you have no reference markers and
no compass instruments or anything either.
Speaker 2 (55:18):
Yeah, yea, your compass becomes the heavens, it becomes these
the movements of these stars, and Serious plays a role
in all of that. Yeah, all right, Well, I think
that's going to do it for part two here, but
we have enough, at the very least for a part three.
There's still some areas concerning the dog days of Summer
and Serious that we want to get into. So join
(55:40):
us next week as we come back and at least
do Dog Days and Death Stars part three.
Speaker 3 (55:46):
All right, I'll see you then.
Speaker 2 (55:49):
In the meantime, we'll just remind you that Stuff to
Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast,
with core episodes in the podcast feed on Tuesdays and Thursday,
short form on days and on Fridays, we set us
one most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
film on Weird House Cinema. We've been a audio podcast
for a long time, so if you want to look
(56:10):
up any of these older episodes that we keep referring to,
wherever you get your audio podcast, seek us out, dig
around in there see if there's something that interests you.
More recent episodes also have a video component over at Netflix,
and if you're watching us on Netflix, we thank you,
and we would just encourage you to give us a
couple of thumbs up as to be reminded about new
(56:32):
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ratings and reviews you can give us that bumps us.
Speaker 3 (56:44):
Up huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer
JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say hello, you can email us at contact stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (57:06):
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