Dog Days and Death Stars, Part 3

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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back today with the
third part in our series called Dog Days and Death Stars.
In these episodes, we have been looking into the history
of the so called dog Days of summer and the
astronomical body from which the dog Days get their name,
that is the dog star serious in the constellation Canus Major.

(00:38):
In the first episode of the series, we talked about
misconceptions about where the phrase dog Days of Summer comes from.
We talked about the origins of the dog days tradition
and the astrology of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans,
who believed that what's called the halliacal rising of Sirius
at the time when the star is a first visible

(00:59):
in the sky on the east and horizon just before dawn,
that the timing of that in the mid to late
summer triggered important effects on Earth, both positive and negative.
It seems like the associations were mainly positive for the Egyptians,
thinking of it as the beginning of the Nile inundation season.
Which is very important for the ancient Egyptian agricultural cycle

(01:22):
and in ancient Egyptian religion, whereas the associations tended to
be more mixed or even more negative for the Greeks,
who believed that the rising star brought these deadly rays
of heat and also brought fevers and plague and omens
of doom. So we talked pretty extensively about the invocation
of the Dog Star in the Iliad of Homer, who

(01:43):
repeatedly uses it as this dual image of both brilliance
and destruction, as a kind of death star in the
words of Jay Holberg, an author whose book we've been
referring to in this series, And that's kind of fitting
given that it is actually both the brightest star in
the Earth's night sky and that the Greeks thought that

(02:04):
it literally had the power to inflict harm on mortals
through its rays. More about that in this episode. In
Part one, we also talked a good bit about the
star itself. The star is serious A, the larger star
in a binary system, along with a white dwarf called
Serious B. Serious A is very bright in our night sky,

(02:25):
both because of its high inherent luminosity and also because
it is relatively close. It is something like the fifth
closest star to our solar system. I think maybe that
depends on what types of objects you count as stars,
like to sub brown dwarfs and stuff. But also rob
you got into the long term evolution of our relationship

(02:47):
with Sirius, including like how long it's going to be
the brightest star in our night sky, and how the
rising of Sirius has changed over time for different historical
cultures on Earth. And also we got into explanation for
the differing accounts of the color of Sirius across the
course of history. In Part two, I talked about a

(03:07):
paper covering the historically influential but totally incorrect view that
the dog days of summer somehow give dogs rabies. This
led into a discussion of the work done in the
eighteen eighties by Louis Pasteur in developing a rabies vaccine.
Rob You talked about the different cultural understandings of the
dog star and its constellation around the world, like how

(03:29):
it's often associated with dogs or wolves in different cultures,
but other times with imagery like a bow and arrow,
And we talked about the significance of Sirius in Islam.
And I should also flag that a running theme across
both of the past two episodes has been to what
extent the classical themes of the Dog Days of Summer

(03:50):
emerge in the work of Don Henley. Rob, do you
have any more dog Don Henley to report on?

Speaker 1 (03:55):
It?

Speaker 3 (03:55):
Said?

Speaker 2 (03:55):
I do not have any more Don Henley information for
this episode, so I don't know. I neglected to see
if there was anything else, like a draw from there
maybe next episode.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
Okay, Well, anyway, we're back today to talk some more
about the Dog Days and the Dog Star, Rob, if
you're okay with it, I wanted to kick things off
with the idea of being twinkled to death by a star.
This is sort of picking up on a It's a
little bit of a tangent based on a paragraph in

(04:26):
a book we've been reading for these episodes, a book
called Serious Brightest Diamond in the Night Sky by Jay Holberg.
Jay Holberg is an astrophysicist and a sort of historian
of science. This book was published in the year two
thousand and seven by Springer, New York, and so this

(04:46):
book has come up a lot in the past couple
of episodes, but I was going back over the chapter
where Holberg looks especially at the ancient Greek significance of
the dog star, and so he's talking about it's use
in poems, famous poems by Hesied, like in this poem
called Works and Days by he Sid which is a

(05:07):
sort of an ancient farmer's almanac that takes the form
of a poem. It's funny how a lot of ancient
texts are, like even sort of practical or even scientific
texts are written as poems.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
And if I remember correctly, that poem in particular is
the oldest known reference to Sirius by name. Yeah, that's
what I was reading.

Speaker 3 (05:26):
I think that's correct. Yeah, And so in this poem
you get just a lot of different claims, you know.
He Seid as talking about how the dog days of
summer are a time when like goats are fat, wine
is sweet. He says men are at their weakest and
women are at their most wanton. Okay, but he's just like, okay,

(05:47):
it's you know, nothing much good is happening this time
of year. It's time to just like wait it out,
like chill out, get in the shade, drink wine, eat
good food, and just just wait and give libations to
the gods. Yes, And then Holberg also talks about its
significance in a more astronomy focused poem by the Greek

(06:08):
poet Aratus or Eretus, writing in the third century BC.
But anyway, finally he gets on to talking about ancient
beliefs about the direct dangers posed by Sirius. So he
mentions that the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates warned that Sirius
could inflict harm on people, that it could bring fevers

(06:30):
in danger, and he mentions that ancient Greek and Roman authors,
at least some of them, believed that Sirius could produce
what Holberg calls this is his word, emanations, which could
threaten humans and animals alike, especially dogs. And this brings
us back in line with that sort of false folk

(06:52):
etymology of the dog days, in which they are the
days of dogs panting. We know actually that it comes
from the astrology association, but ancient Greek authors wrote about
how the panting of dogs in the summer heat was
an effect of the star Sirius, which internally desiccated the

(07:14):
dog's guts, like it, you know, dried them out on
the insides. And this would lead to panting, and during
this state of internal dessication and excessive panting, dogs were
liable to have their saliva turn poisonous, so the dogs
could become rabid. It's almost like the heat of the
dog star transforms dogs into a kind of venomous animal

(07:37):
with you know, this venomous saliva that can kill humans
with the bite by way of rabies infection. That they
didn't have the concept obviously viral infection at the time,
So that kind of ties into what we talked about
in the last episode with the paper about rabies and
the dog days. But regarding these emanations of Sirius, I
got really interested in this because Holberg taught about how

(08:00):
ancient stargazers thought they could see visual evidence of these
emanations in optical phenomena that people observed when looking at
the star. Serious Mainly this seems to be a reference
to twinkling. Serious was prone to twinkling and producing flashes
of differently colored light. So that brought me to the

(08:24):
question of why is it exactly that stars twinkle. Twinkling
is what we call it when stars appear to fluctuate
in brightness, position, or color, so it can look like
a star is wobbling or increasing or decreasing in intensity,
or even kind of turning rainbow colors, maybe going from

(08:46):
white to red to blue. But when you ask the
question what causes stars to twinkle, there's a really interesting
fact that I think provides a good clue to the answer.
And that fact is if you look at the starrs
from outer space, which the ancient Greeks couldn't do. You know,
that's an advantage we have over them. If you look

(09:06):
at them from outer space, they stop twinkling. So astronauts
in the space station and space telescopes can look at
the stars and just see steady, crisp, unvarying points of light.
You know, a culture raised entirely in space would never
come up with the song Twinkle, Twinkle little star.

Speaker 2 (09:26):
That's right, I mean, because they wouldn't twinkle, and they'd
know what they are. This is completely redundant, very good.

Speaker 3 (09:33):
So yeah, twinkling is only a feature of stars wind
viewed from down here on Earth. And this points to
the fact that actually twinkling is not something stars do,
but something that our atmosphere does to the light emitted
by stars. Before that light reaches our eyes. The scientific

(09:55):
name for the twinkling of stars is atmospheric scintillation. So dially,
what happens here is that the turbulence of our atmosphere
causes variation in how rays of light are refracted or
bent as they travel through the air. So differences in

(10:15):
temperature and density across different blobs of air in our
atmosphere can speed up or slow down the light as
it passes through those blobs, which causes the light to
bend as it passes from one region of air to another,
like a much more subtle version of what happens when
sunlight passes through a prism. And the effect of this

(10:39):
is at the seeing end, is that starlight passing through
a turbulent atmosphere can appear to change in brightness and
in color, or to move slightly in position. And for
an analogy that's easy to understand from experience, think about
how objects in the background look strain or distorted when

(11:01):
you view them through masses of hot air, like the
heat mirage effect. So if you think of looking at
something you know across from you behind a bonfire, or
you think about being in the desert and looking at
a you know, a heat mirage.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
Yet concrete and a summertime thriller, that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (11:20):
Yeah, it makes the stuff behind it, you know, from
your perspective look weird, though nothing is changed with that stuff. Actually,
something is changing with the light reflected off of that
stuff before it gets to your eyes. A similar thing
is happening to starlight when it twinkles. Stars appear to
us as point like sources of light, meaning that they

(11:42):
do not have an apparent diameter, and this, by the way,
distinguishes them from the planets, which many ancient people thought
of as movable stars. While to the naked eye, both
stars and other planets in the Solar System look like
points of light, the planets are close to enough that
they actually do have an apparent diameter. You often can't

(12:03):
quite tell looking without a telescope, but they do have
an apparent diameter, and as a result, they are far
less prone to twinkling when viewed through our atmosphere, essentially
because the beam of light projected from them is wider. Now,
all stars, as point like sources of light, can twinkle,
but there are some reasons that serious is especially prone

(12:26):
to a strong twinkling effect, and so if you are
primed to think of the twinkling of a star as
visual evidence that it is emitting something that is maybe
an attack or some kind of power it's exerting upon you.
It's like acting up, and you see that in the twinkling.
You can imagine how Serious would be especially prone to

(12:48):
these interpretations. Now, why is Serious a really twinkly star?
I was actually reading about this in a post on
Universe Today from twenty twelve by Adrian West called why
does Serious Twinkle? And West again says that all stars
can twinkle, of course, but points out a couple of
reasons that Sirius is among the twinkliest of stars. First

(13:11):
of all, it is the brightest, so the effect of
the twinkling is magnified. And I was trying to think
about how to understand this, and I actually thought back
to heat mirage effects again, So think about how a
bright object would be more noticeably distorted when viewed through
a heat mirage than an object that was already faint

(13:33):
and hard to see anyway. Also, another reason why Serious
is very twinkly stargazers are often looking at Sirious when
it is very low on the horizon. This is especially
true in the northern hemisphere where the cultures we've been
talking about are located Egyptians and Greeks and so forth,

(13:53):
northern hemisphere, looking at it when it's low on the horizon.
And that's especially true given the context of a astrology,
when many of these ancient stargazers would have been looking
for serious When it is just above the horizon at
its pre dawn rising at the beginning of the dog days,
that's when you know, it's like maybe signaling that the
nile is about to flood, or you know, when the

(14:17):
astronomers are saying, oh, okay, here come the hottest days
of summer. When a star is low on the horizon,
the light from the star is passing through more atmosphere
before it hits your eyes, because it's not just passing
down through the height of the atmosphere like it would
when it's directly overhead. It is cutting across many multiples

(14:39):
of that distance, sideways through the atmosphere.

Speaker 2 (14:42):
Yeah, that's why you know, obviously you should not stare
at the sunrise or the sunset, but it's one of
the one of the the reason why the sunrise or
the sunset, one of the reasons why the sun sunrise
of the sunset is more perceptible to the human eye,
like you can you can do something more more like
looking at it as opposed as the sun straight up

(15:03):
in the noonday sky.

Speaker 3 (15:04):
There's more atmosphere filtering it before it gets to you.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
It is not sufficient to protect your eyes entirely, but
it's easier on your eyes.

Speaker 3 (15:13):
Yeah. So anyway, the fact that people are looking at
the star, maybe right before dawn, when it's very low
on the horizon, it's cutting through lots of atmosphere horizontally
to get to the eyes. This causes increased twinkling because
over that distance in the air, there's more opportunity for
the light to cross barriers between different pockets of air

(15:36):
and encounter atmospheric turbulence. So it gets all these opportunities
for refraction that causes the twinkling. And so Holberg writes, quote,
there was also a widespread association in the Greek mind
of the twinkling and flashing of Sirius with such physiological
conditions and states as seething, shaking, emptying, and oppression, as

(15:58):
if the star was in distress and spewing its light
about the sky. Indeed, serious acquired such and I think
there's a typo here. It actually says epitaphs. I think
it means epithets. I caught a typo acquired such epithets
as the shaker. But then I thought that was funny
because it also brings it back to the effect of

(16:20):
the emanations on dogs and how this connects to rabies,
where Holberg talks about the belief that the rapid panting
of dogs that got very hot in the summer during
the dog days, with their tongue hanging out, this was
viewed as a behavior that was characterized by the gaping
of the mouth, a gaping behavior, and so because of this,

(16:44):
Hlberg also says that quote serious was sometimes referred to
as the gaper. So, man, it just seems like people
can't get this, like dogs with mouths hanging open out
of their mind when they're thinking about the star.

Speaker 2 (16:56):
Yeah, I mean again, I think a big part of
it comes back to you have dogs or best friend.
Dogs have always been there with us. They are the
closest organism to us that we see responding to environmental
changes and then we can't help but also factor in
potential astrological changes as well. So yeah, it's such a

(17:19):
fascinating history here. And while you know this, the the
twinkling light of Sirius is not actually doing anything to us,
you know, it's still fascinating to remind ourselves that it
is still light from a vast power source light years

(17:41):
away that has traveled all the way to us, and
we are we are receiving. I mean, there's not there's
not really any information there. There are no marching orders
or anything. But still it's pretty phenomenal in the same
way that you know, you're out under a star filled
sky and it's like all these uh, these streams of

(18:01):
light from you know, throughout the galaxy have converged on
you, you know, and it's it's kind of a kind of
a magical moment.

Speaker 3 (18:08):
Oh yeah, it's always interesting to remember how alien the
most common features of nature are that, like sunshine is
radiation from a natural fusion reactor, and so forth, radiation
from a star.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
All right, well, let's uh, let's veer a little bit
into the world of science fiction before we come back
around into the real world. Because, of course, is the
brightest star in humanity's terrestrial night sky. Sirius has also
factored into our science fiction from a pretty early point.
Uh So I was I was digging into this a

(18:52):
little bit, and most commentators seem to agree that the
earliest example of fictional consideration of aliens from Sirius Syrians,
if you will, as they are often referred to in
the literature, that it all stems back to the seventeen
fifty two novella Li Micromegas by French author Voltaire, best

(19:17):
known for Candide Candid's the one that I had to
read in school and remember richly enjoying. I haven't read
this particular book in which there is a character by
the name of Micromegas, a titan like humanoid from the
star Sirius, and he visits Earth with a companion like
a little short person like another humanoid but very small,

(19:41):
from Saturn, and they visit Earth and have adventures.

Speaker 3 (19:45):
Wait, so, in my understanding this right Voltaire, is he
thinking of this as a heavenly domain and these are
heavenly beings or is he positing them as other biological
entities that live on the surface of another planet.

Speaker 2 (20:01):
Well, I haven't read the text in full, so I
can't comment too much on that, but I will read
a quick quote from it. Okay, on one of the
planets that orbits the star, named Sirius. There lived a
spirited young man who I had the honor of meeting
on the last voyage he made to our little ant hill.
He was called Micromagus, a fitting name for anyone so great.

(20:24):
He was eight leagues tall, or twenty four thousand geometric
paces of five feet each. So that sounds like an
organic being from a planet orbiting serious. Of course, you know,
we have no reasona believe there are any planets orbiting serious.
But Voltaire wouldn't have known that. And obviously this was

(20:45):
not Voltaire's primary objective with this literary work. He had,
you know, other things he was exploring here, and not
just I wonder if there are giant people up there.

Speaker 3 (20:57):
Wait, so I'm trying to do the math on how
tall he is? Twenty four thousand paces of five feet each?
What does that mean? How many he's really tall? Ye?

Speaker 2 (21:06):
Really staggeringly tall, A true titan.

Speaker 3 (21:10):
He's like one hundred and twenty thousand feet tall. All right.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
So obviously this was not the last time we would
envision aliens from Sirius or somehow aligned with Sirius. One
pretty famous example is the nineteen eighty three mini series
V The Visitors, in which a race of reptilians are
invading Earth and they are said to hail from a
planet near Sirius. I did a little digging around and

(21:35):
found some other examples. Some of these I'm familiar with. Honestly,
most of them I'm not that familiar with. But let's
say there's a Frederick poll story from sixty five called
the Age of pussy Foot that entails the capture of
an alien in the Serious System, though it's not supposed
to be this alien's system of origin. The Sirious Sam

(21:56):
video games have some Syrians, The Star Control V game
series has some Syrians, and it was it was I
was curious to check, well, what does Star Trek say
about Sirius? Is a factory in there at all? And yes,
if you get into the Star Trek animated series, which
is apparently canon, there is mention of Serious nine as

(22:17):
an inhabited world where a human named Harold Mud introduced
a love potion that made everyone there ill and presumably
mad at him.

Speaker 3 (22:27):
Is Mud the guy? He's like a recurring character from
the original series who's a space con man. Yes, okay, nice, So.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
That character and this is one of his further adventures. Yeah, Now,
the Syrian sector does factor into the Dune universe and
some of the lore, though there are no there are
to my knowledge, no fictional world set there. But we
mentioned Cannabis in I believe the first episode, and I
didn't I gladly to mention this then, But Aracus, the

(22:59):
desert planet Dune itself, is supposed to orbit Cannapis in
the Dune universe. Now, obviously the Marvel Comics universe has
different treatments of Serious over the decades, because again with
all these things, it's like, if you're thinking about the cosmos,
you're thinking about stars. We have a history with Sirius.
We have familiarity with Sirius. It is the brightest star

(23:22):
in our heavens. So various alien species have been associated
with Sirius in the pages of Marvel Comics. I believe
the fifth Syrian planet that again, we have no reason
to believe there are planets there, but in the comic
books it's fair game.

Speaker 3 (23:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:39):
Serious five was settled by the High Evolutionary and his
new Men. And then digging around a little bit more,
it looks like in the nineteen sixties the X Men
battled some sort of an octopus with hands that was
supposed to be from Sirius, and they also had contact
with the Syrians, who are humanoids that were enslaved by

(24:01):
the quisites a different species of alien humanoids, again from
the nineteen sixties and the pages of X Men.

Speaker 3 (24:10):
I don't know why, but I'm offended by the idea
of an octopus with hands.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
I don't know if all of the octopus arms end
in hands, but I did look up one of the
illustrations of this creature and it's like, at least one
pair of arms have hands at the end, kind of
like Hamburger helper hands.

Speaker 3 (24:27):
Do only the hands have bones? Like, do the arms
have bones and it's still an octopus? Or do the
hands not have bones?

Speaker 2 (24:35):
I think the fingers are maybe like sub arms.

Speaker 3 (24:38):
You know, if you got octopus arms, why do you
need hands? They're perfectly dexterous?

Speaker 2 (24:43):
Is the rule of cool, I guess, But then again
not too cool, because I don't know that this was
at all a recurring character, kind of a one shot,
and there was actually another interesting one shot from Sirius
that I found. This is from two thousand and seven,
two thousand and eight in the pages of Black Panther
or well, I'm not actually sure it was the Black
Panther comic book. It might have been one of these

(25:04):
these other sort of bigger, you know, ongoing Marvel stories.
And I think this is somehow involving like gladiatorial combat
somewhere in space. But Black Panther battles the Werewolf of
Sirius and it almost kills him almost immediately. Not a
very huge scene. They have to get a cool little

(25:24):
fight scene, and then the Werewolf of Sirius dies. We don't.
We end up not finding out is he from Sirius
or being of serious is he merely like under the
influence of the Dog Star. So many questions and as
far as I know, they are unanswered.

Speaker 3 (25:39):
Oh interesting, like he's given rabies by the Dog Star.
Maybe yeah, I assume.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
I included a screenshot here for you, Joe and other
other folks. You can you can look up images of this.
But he basically looks like a big, light blue were wolf,
like humanoid wolf, very muscular and has you know, some
some armour on, you know, ready to do battle, lots
of scars.

Speaker 3 (26:03):
This is the werewolf form we've talked about many times,
the V shaped muscleman, where Wolf it's just bipedal Arnold
Schwarzenegger build with the doghead.

Speaker 2 (26:12):
Yeah, no match for black panther. Right, So those are
the main ones I'm gonna mention. But certainly, listeners out there,
I know a number of you have some some very
deep knowledge of different strains of science fiction. So if
there are utter other notable Syrians out there, you know,
either from like serious science fiction or just like Saturday

(26:32):
Morning cartoons, please share them with us and we'll talk
talk about them in a future episode of Stuff to
Blow your mind.

Speaker 3 (26:38):
Listener mail from serious science fiction. Serious serious, yes, very
science serious science fiction, not silly serious science fiction.

Speaker 2 (26:48):
Serious Syrian science fiction. Yes. It should of course come
to absolutely no surprise for anyone out there that Syrian
aliens also factor into ufology and UFO religions. Again, it
is the brightest star in the night sky. It's deeply
rooted in human contemplations of the cosmos. So why not

(27:08):
Syrian UFO is visiting the Earth. You know, let's take
a look at at at least one of them, and
the main one that you find if you look up
some images of this guy. Syrians often are depicted is
looking a little bit like ET, but kind of like
ET meets King.

Speaker 3 (27:24):
Of the Hill. Yeah, yeah, I gotta be honest, I
don't like this. I don't like looking at it. It's
something it's not pleasant. It looks like a fire based
ET with yeah, with Peggy Hill hair, like big beehive hair.

Speaker 2 (27:37):
But at least drawn by a human being, and that
I love. Like the older like Older, like a little
more sort of traditional ufology considerations of different supposed alien beings.
You know, they're they're often very amateur looking drawings. I mean,
some of them, I guess are quite nice, but they're
clearly the product of a human mind and human artistry.

(27:59):
Now nowadays, more and more of your imagery that is
dished up alongside ufology is of course AI generated, and
it makes it even more monstrous. In my opinion. It
just feels just it feels faker, and it already was
lacking an air of authenticity, but now it looks even worse.

Speaker 3 (28:20):
Well, yeah, I mean, we've made some of our views
on this show clear before, you know, as far as
UFOs go, Like, I'm in theory, open to it, but
not convinced by any you know, any kind of lore
or stuff I've ever come across. So it's already not
stuff I believe in, but at least it used to
be kind of interesting and the AI stuff just makes

(28:41):
it feel more expam it's just clutter. Yeah, and we know,
but we have talked about this off Mike. We sometimes
in our show Inbox we get reach outs from people
I don't know who want to be on the show,
who are like, hey, I'm a you know, I'm a
UFO influencer. These are the nine different types of aliens
I've talked to, And if you go to their website,

(29:02):
it's all AI generated stuff. Now it's like, how how
can those be pictures of the aliens you've talked to?
It's like a I generated Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:10):
Yeah. But anyway, we do get into a really thought
provoking area with consideration of supposed Syrians and ultimately their
consideration within ufology and different UFO based New Age lines
of thought. And Holberg discusses this a bit in his
book as well, and you know, he points out that,

(29:32):
you know, for all the reasons we've discussed already again,
brightest Star in the Sky one with a deep history,
deep cultural history, but also a very strong presence in
ancient Egyptian thought, and of course Egyptomania has long been
a major component of various strains of new religious movements,
new age philosophies, and just general cultural excitement. So the

(29:53):
Space Age just ends up creating new connection points for
us to get excited about.

Speaker 3 (29:59):
Sirius.

Speaker 2 (30:01):
And there was a key publication in nineteen seventy six
that really helped push a particular idea about serious and
really sort of inject it, you know, more steadily into
the UFO conspiracy theory ufology world. And that is a

(30:21):
book titled The Serious Mystery. And this was an ancient
astronaut's book by Robert KG Temple, who I believe is
still alive and still maintains a website. And before I
move on with this, I do want to point out
that if you're interested in our more complete takes on
ancient astronaut hypothesis, well we did a series of episodes

(30:47):
years back, and you can find those in the archives
wherever you get stuff to blow your mind as an
audio podcast. But at any rate, this book deals mostly
with the Dogan people in in West Africa, and the
idea that is presented in that book is that these

(31:07):
peoples still preserve traditions that stem from ancient contact with
amphibious extraterrestrial visitors, who, among other things, informed them about
the existence of Serious B. Again, we know now that
the star that we see, that we can see with
the naked eye is Serious A. And then there is

(31:29):
a much smaller white dwarf that is there with it
that we now know is Serious B that you cannot
see with the naked eye. It's far dimmer, far smaller,
and would not have would not have been visible and
would not have been known to human beings before the
advent of the telescope. Yeah, so the idea is well

(31:51):
before the advent of the telescope, the Dogan people knew
about Serious B somehow, and the somehow is aliens to
them about it. So Temple did not originate this idea. Rather,
he popularized concepts that were originally explored by a pair
of French anthropologists in the nineteen fifty publication A Pseudony

(32:11):
System of Serious and The anthropologists here were Marcel Griol
and Germaine Dieterlin. Now the Dogan people are just for
a little bit more information here. They are an indigenous
ethnic minority, and they currently have a pop population between
something like four hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand, and

(32:33):
they have a vibrant culture that features elaborate wooden masks,
dance rituals, sculpture, architecture, and so much more. We're not
going to have time to really get into everything that
they legitimately have to offer. And it's ultimately one of
the sort of tragedies of the whole situation is that
they often when they're talked about, they are often talked

(32:55):
about in reference to this particular idea, So you know,
it's we have to admit that it is ultimately kind
of an injustice to them. And as we'll explore, I
think they're The more pervasive argument is that there of
course was no ancient contact with some sort of extraterrestrial entity.

(33:17):
There are other reasons to explain why this interpretation has
been given the attention that it has.

Speaker 3 (33:24):
But worth looking up their masks and art, by the.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
Way, absolutely yes, if even if you just go to
the Dogan people's the Wikipedia profile about them, you'll find
some excellent visual examples of the mass that they create
of their their architecture, their sculpture art. So an incredibly
rich culture and that is going to be key when
we get into some of the reasons here as well. Now,

(33:58):
one thing to keep in mind about all of this
something that we really drove home in our series on
Ancient Astronauts, and it's also something that Carl Sagan was
very adamant about, and that is that there's no verifiable
physical evidence of historic or prehistoric contact with extraterrestrials. We
just don't have good, good evidence. And that includes that

(34:20):
you know, recent history or certainly getting into into ancient history.
The best we can really do the best if you're
really looking for evidence of it, and you're looking for
good evidence, your best hope would really be, you know,
short of actually discovering a you know, a buried alien
spaceship that we just haven't found thus far, we'd be
finding cultural evidence of it. So some sort of description

(34:43):
of an encounter in ancient literature that just seems to
line up in the right way and again wouldn't actually
prove anything, would but would it at the very least
provide sort of a huh I wonder if evidence?

Speaker 3 (34:57):
Yeah. And you know, one thing that I would say
we've talked about in the past as well, is that
I think typically even with the most interesting stuff like that,
the stuff that sounds most like an ancient text describing
something from a science fiction movie, it does tend to
rely on a lot of cultural bias, Like we're looking

(35:18):
for descriptions of the kinds of beings or events that
we're familiar with through science fiction of the modern world,
not necessarily like objective accounts. I don't know how you'd
even know what these should be, but objective accounts of
how ancient people would process and describe, you know, encounters

(35:39):
with beings from space. And also when when you're taking
an ancient text that describes an encounter with a god
or something like that and saying, oh, these must have
been aliens, you're inherently also just dismissing how the people
who created the text, what they thought the text meant,
and you know, how they were thinking about it. So
I don't know, I strongly skeptical of interpretive attempts of

(36:03):
this kind.

Speaker 2 (36:04):
Yeah, you know, I guess the main thing, and this
is I think Sagan's point is that, at least on
the surface, the Dogan idea here would be the most
attractive because if true, and that's a big if, that
we're going to come back to. If true, what you
would have is an ancient account in which something is

(36:26):
known before humans should know it, Like in this case,
if the dough if there was actually a tradition among
the Dogan people that said that you can contain knowledge
of a star that humans wouldn't be able to see
for thousands of years, well then that could potentially be compelling. However,
there are a number of factors we're going to have
to discuss here.

Speaker 3 (36:46):
Yeah, you could imagine, I mean, even if that were
the case, and again the caveats on that you could
imagine lists of much more highly specified information than like
the brightest star in the sky has a companion.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
Yeah, yeah, well, you know this case, as originally presented
by the French anthropologists does it does get into a
little of that. So the idea discussed by these authors
in that original paper from the fifties is they presented
this idea that the Dogan elders held a secret cosmology
that highly regarded Sirius and that they knew that Sirius

(37:24):
had an invisible companion with a fifty year elliptical orbit
around serious So you know, okay, you know, if true,
you know that's pretty compelling. That's some specific information. Temple
especially noted the connection on top of this between these
ideas and our modern knowledge of serious b suspected is

(37:47):
suspected as far back as the nineteenth century, but not
photographed till nineteen seventy. And then Temple further connected this
Dogan myth to their treatment of something called the Nomo,
an amphibious fish like ancestor who came from the sky
in a kind of woven arc. So, you know, the
rest stitches itself together rather easily.

Speaker 3 (38:09):
Here.

Speaker 2 (38:09):
You know this idea that okay, some sort of amphibious
beings came down in something that is a spaceship, and
they told us about where they came from, or in
some way pointed to the star in the sky that
the Dogan, you know, either already considered sacred or would
certainly from now on consider sacred. And they said, oh,
by the way, there's another star there. It's two of them,
you just can't see the other one. And here's some

(38:31):
figures related to that. Okay, So there are obviously, again
on the surface, that sounds very compelling, and if you
were inclined to want to believe this, well, you can
just stop right there, right because you've arrived. Sadly, that's
how these things often work. But yeah, there are some
key problems here, So in addition to anything we've already cited,

(38:56):
it is highly important and this is key. This becomes
pretty much the key factor is that the Dogan were
not totally isolated when these anthropologists initially spoke with them.
They had already had contact with French colonial authorities, with soldiers,
with missionaries and explorers, and bottom line, they could have

(39:17):
very easily been contaminated by modern views and modern understanding
and the hypothesis that siries B existed via contact with
these various individuals, and Holberg in his book explores some
of the possible candidates, like specific candidates for this transmission,
this cultural transmission, in a fair amount of depth. Another

(39:40):
factor worth keeping in mind is that in the nineteen
eighties and the nineteen nineties this would be and this
was after Sagan's publication as well, anthropologist Walter van Beek
conducted interviews with Dogan elders and found no evidence of
a tradition. And this would have been, by the way,
an oral tradition this would have been. This had been true,

(40:00):
would be something that was passed down via storytelling and
so forth, not written down. But this guy Van Beek
found no tradition of a companion star to Sirius, and
in this suggests that basically what could have been occurring
with Griol especially is that he could have been asking
some very leading questions and could have been the source

(40:21):
of the cultural contamination himself. Okay, yeah, I've read that
some think he might have been very aggressive in his
questioning and kind of was almost like it was almost
like cross examination, and so he could have effectively co
created the myth in his interviews.

Speaker 3 (40:38):
Well that's annoying if true.

Speaker 2 (40:41):
Yeah, yeah, And well Sagan gets into this as well.
I'm going to come out of what Sagan has to
have to say about have to say about this as well.
But another interesting point that Holberg brings up is that
the French anthropologists also reported that the Dogan held serious
to be read. We talked about the red serious issue

(41:02):
a bit in the previous episode, and basically this could
have been due to the revival of red serious theories
in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds introduced
to the Dogan by any of these various contamination points.
So essentially, you know, they could, upon questioning, could basically

(41:23):
be incorporating late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds of views
about serious and red serious excitement into their mythology.

Speaker 3 (41:34):
Yeah. Could this also be related to the hypothesis we
talked about in I think part one of the series
that some ideas about the redness of serious could come
from times when it legitimately does look red due to
atmospheric Oh yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (41:48):
Mean, yeah, absolutely, I mean, you know, obviously they did
hold they do hold serious in high regards, so they
could have some tradition of having If the observation of
Sirius is read with something that was actually occurring for
ancient people, then yeah, they could have actually had that
experience as well. But they could It could also just
be more evidence that they are that they had that

(42:09):
their understanding of serious has been contaminated by contact with
the with Westerners.

Speaker 3 (42:15):
Yeah, but am I remembering right? The idea is that
generally serious would not look red when it's like higher
up in the sky, but maybe sometimes when it's very late.

Speaker 2 (42:23):
Maybe the atmospheric reddening was seemed to be the best
possible case for some sort of legitimate reddening happening there,
and let's see on top of that. Yeah, it's also
worth noting that outside of their work, there is virtually
no serious academic consideration of the idea, while the influence
of Temple's book on the subject, you know, has has

(42:44):
had a big influence on ufology and UFO related New
Age thought. So yeah, it's just there. There are not
really scientific experts that are that have agreed with them,
or anthropological experts that have agreed with them, you know, outside.

Speaker 3 (43:00):
Of the fringe.

Speaker 2 (43:01):
Okay, but I want to get back into what Sagan
had to say about it in Broke his Brain back
in seventy nine. And of note, it's worth stressing that
this came out just a few years after Temple's book,
and certainly before some of the additional refuting research that
we've already mentioned. But Sagan at the time wrote that, Yeah,
at first glance, the Dogan claim seems compelling, and indeed,

(43:25):
as we've discussed on the show before, Sagan did an
outright dismiss the possibility of ancient alien extraterrestrial contact. I mean,
he seemed to find it quite exciting. But the big question,
of course, is it is it possible. Is there evidence
for it? What does the evidence seem to say? And
that's where we get into the nitty gritty here.

Speaker 3 (43:44):
Yeah, well, I mean i'd go farther. Actually, I'd say
it is possible. Yeah, perfectly open to it. Is just
where's the evidence?

Speaker 2 (43:52):
Yeah? Absolutely, you know, where is the evidence? And I'm
going to read a few quotes from Broke's brain here
from Sagan where he discusses this. So he says, quote,
at first glanced, the serious legend of the Dogans seems
to be the best candidate evidence available today for past
contact with an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. As we begin a

(44:12):
closer look at this story, however, let us remember that
the Dogan astronomical tradition is purely oral, that it dates
with certainty only from the nineteen thirties, and that the
diagrams are written with sticks in sand. So again we're
not dealing with you know, like you know, cuneiform evidence
that has been preserved across time. It is oral tradition,

(44:35):
and we know that oral tradition can reveal a lot,
but it is you know, it is very susceptible to
change and certainly to contamination via contact with other cultures.

Speaker 3 (44:46):
Sure, he makes.

Speaker 2 (44:48):
Another excellent point here and that and that concerns Dogan mythology,
which he says is is very rich in detail, perhaps
by some estimates some anthropologists say, richer than some of
their neighbors. And so Segan says, quote, where there is
a rich array of legends, there is of course a
greater chance of an accidental correspondence of one of the

(45:11):
myths with a finding of modern science. A very spare
mythology is much less likely to make such an accidental concordance.
But when we examine the rest of Dogan mythology, do
we find other cases hauntingly reminiscent of something of some
unexpected finding in modern science. So his point is, Yeah,
if you have a some sort of a rich pantheon

(45:33):
of gods, a rich mythological tradition, you're going to find
something in there that you can cherry pick and compare
to whatever you're looking for, whether you're looking for like
ancient super weapons, UFOs, lost cities, whatever you like, something
is going to line up. Because I mean, at the
end of the day, you're dealing with different things that

(45:56):
emerge from the human imagination and human perception of the
natural world and consideration of the cosmos, and so of
course you're going to find those things lining up.

Speaker 3 (46:06):
You are rolling the dice more times if you have
more stories, more richly filled with detailed imagery in them.
Each time you increase the complexity, you're adding more chances
that one of those things could resemble something from science
fiction or from future science. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yeah, And another point that he also makes in this
particular chapter, but I believe also references in other books
where he had chapters that touched on ancient alien hypothesis. Okay,
the Dogan case about the arc coming down from the sky.
I mean, within the context of this argument, you have
to say, well, that sounds like a spaceship. But so

(46:47):
many different religions and mythologies have something like this. This
is not unique to the Dogan. It's I mean, it's
basically universal. And yeah, you could also you could turn
that around and say, well, yeah, it's because all religions
are talking about space aliens. I mean, okay, go with that.
But but yet, there's nothing specifically in this story, in

(47:07):
this account of like people coming down on some sort
of vehicle that is different from any other mythology in
that regard.

Speaker 3 (47:13):
And it's just not hard to imagine how the mind
goes there. Like, it's not an idea that nobody ever
would have thought of with you know it, Like we
have ships, the boats that go on the water, what
if one could go in the sky. We see birds
that can fly, but we can't fly, so we imagine
what it would be like to be up there and
have that perspective. I mean, yeah, like it comes to mind.

Speaker 2 (47:37):
Human dreams are remarkable, but it is not remarkable that
someone in the ancient world had the same dream that
I'm having. Yeah, and I think that's that's the yeah,
the key. Now. Sagan briefly discusses the flawed idea of
wrapping Red Serious up in this example, and one of

(47:57):
the ideas that he mentions here this is something we
didn't get into the last episode. But apparently some made
the argument that, okay, what if Serious Bee was in
its red Giant phase in the past and that's what
people were seeing, and so there are some that have
made the case that this could be the reason for
Red Serious and so let's say, like ancient Greek writings,

(48:18):
and maybe it's the reason that there's talk of a
Red Serious here among the dogan and maybe this is
how they could see serious with the naked eye because
at some point, you know, because now it's a white dwarf.
But what about when it was a red giant?

Speaker 3 (48:34):
You mean, see serious B, the serious B.

Speaker 2 (48:36):
Sorry, yes, serious as has been visible you know, the
whole time in different degrees of luminosity for humans. But yeah,
what if this invisible to the naked eye white dwarf
was visible to us when it was a red giant
An idea that sounds compelling at first, but the stellar
timeline does not work at all for this. I believe

(48:58):
it's estimated, estimated that Series B would have been in
its red giant phase on the order of one hundred
and twenty million years ago. So I'm you know, the
Cretaceous period, there were no there were no humans to
see it and generate myths about it.

Speaker 3 (49:12):
Missed our species by a bit, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:14):
And so Sagan therefore thinks that European cultural transmission of
astronomical ideas is the most likely explanation here. For instance,
other aspects of their astronomical knowledge does seem rooted in
late eighteenth or early nineteenth century European knowledge of the Cosmos.
For instance, he points out that the Dogan do not

(49:36):
talk of another planet beyond Saturn with rings, and he
thinks that this lines up with the sort of that
that level of European understanding that would have been transmitted
to them. And I'm going to read one more bit
from Sagan here, he says, where he's kind of like
summing up how he sees this having occurred. He says,

(49:57):
in my mind's eye, I see a picture of a
Gothic visitor to the Dogan people in what was then
French West Africa in the early part of this century.
He may have been a diplomat, an explorer, an adventure
or an early anthropologist. Such people, for example, Richard Francis Burton,
were in West Africa many decades earlier. The conversation turns

(50:19):
to astronomical lore. Serious is the brightest star in the sky.
The Dogan regaled the visitor with their serious mythology. Then,
smiling politely expectantly, they inquire of their visitor what is
his what his serious myths might be? Perhaps, he refers,
before answering to a well worn book in his baggage,
the white dwarf companion of Sirius being a current astronomical sensation.

(50:42):
The traveler exchanges when spectacular myth for a routine one.
After he leaves, his account is remembered, retold, and eventually
incorporated into the corpus of Dogan mythology, or at least
into a collateral branch.

Speaker 3 (50:57):
Interesting. Okay, well, I mean that makes sense to me
as a perfectly plausible and normal account of where something
like this could come from. But we should be reminded
again that Sagan was writing this trying to come up
with an explanation of the facts before we had this
subsequent research that cast doubt on the original anthropological reporting, right,

(51:19):
that attributed the companion Stars story to the Dogun elders.

Speaker 2 (51:23):
Right, right, So yeah, we have even more reason to
not believe this connection in general. But yeah, at the time,
Sagan I think made a number of very strong points
and like further pointed out that, Okay, yeah, this is
what happened. If this is about like cultural contamination of
an indigenous mythology with you know, contemporary at the time,

(51:45):
European you know, astronomical ideas, you know, this sort of thing.
Maybe not with with astronomical ideas, but this sort of
cultural contamination has occurred before, and Sagan points to examples
North America and in New Guinea where where yeah, you
end up actually like feeding the idea to the people

(52:10):
you're talking to and then receiving it back again within
the trappings of their own mythology. So you know, yeah,
it becomes It highlights just how complex these cultural exchanges
are and the sorts of miscommunications and contaminations that can occur.

Speaker 3 (52:29):
By the way, I would just flag that the only
reason the word contamination is being used there is because
it may be, you know, bringing a negative connotation is
because it may be potentially confusing you about what beliefs
and stories were present in a culture before contact with
a person talking to them. Right, So it's not like

(52:50):
that the idea of mixing and sharing ideas between cultures
has any inherently negative thing about.

Speaker 2 (52:55):
It, right right, Yeah, I guess the main comparison I
would be making here would be to say, we send
a probe to Mars to look for signs of microbial life.
That probe has microbial life on it, and then we
discover that same life, or seem to discover that same
life in the soil of Mars. We we have contaminated
the thing that we're examining looking for, you know, things

(53:18):
that are that originate on Mars. We're already there and
we've just found the thing that we brought with us.
And that's kind of what's happening here culturally examining these
myths and what we just found something that we actually
introduced into it. Yeah, and and to also be clear,
I don't I don't think anyone's making the argument that

(53:40):
the anthropologists in question like we're planting evidence, you know,
it's this is the I think it highlights the complexity
of the task at hand, you know, trying to understand
traditional beliefs and again within an oral tradition and trying
to figure out like, you know what, what did they know?
What had what sort of observational information did they have

(54:03):
and did they you know what is how how does
their knowledge of serious matchup with their modern understanding what
connections could be made there? I mean, it's it's a
complex task and in doing if you're not super careful
and you don't have all the guard rails, you know,
many of which would not be developed until later, you know,
you're going to potentially get miscommunications like this.

Speaker 3 (54:23):
This is totally tangential, but I would say it also
highlights the absurdity of attempting to try to prevent the
mixing of cultures.

Speaker 2 (54:31):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I mean, because this is this is
the way, you know, this is the way it's always been,
you know. Uh, some new ideas introduced and it's folded in,
it's incorporated.

Speaker 3 (54:42):
Uh, and the sharing goes both ways.

Speaker 2 (54:44):
Yeah. Yeah, and we you know, we see so many
examples of that. It even occurs, and is it you
We've touched on other examples of this occurring, where religion
will change based on astronomical information. You know, we talked
about this when we were discussing you know, more recent
new religious movements that start reflecting ideas that are present
in sort of the scientific understanding of the world. So yeah,

(55:09):
you can't prevent it from happening.

Speaker 3 (55:20):
Okay, Rob, Before we wrap up for today, do you
mind if I read you one pretty cool thing I
came across about the dog days of summer in medieval
European medicine.

Speaker 2 (55:30):
Sure, sure, what do you got?

Speaker 3 (55:31):
Okay? So this was in a blog post called the
dog Days of Medieval Summer. This was on the website
History Today, but it's written by an author named Eleanor
Parker who is a lecturer in Medieval English literature at
Brazenose College, Oxford. And so this author is in the
post generally talking about the tradition of the dog days,

(55:54):
you know them being thought of since ancient times as
maybe a time of danger when there are special risks
to health. As she mentions that the dog days are
noted in the fifteen fifty two English Book of Common
Prayer and talks about some of the things we've already
gotten into how you know, the beginning and ending dates

(56:14):
of the dog days are not consistent across time and place,
but they're most often thought to be, you know, in July, August, September.
But anyway, she talks about how in the Middle Ages
in English texts, the dog days were considered key like
the timing of the dog days were considered key medical information,

(56:38):
and she cites the tenth century English medical manual known
as Bald's Leech Book, which I feel like I want
to get a print copy of that if I can.
But it's interesting because Bald's Leech Book mentions both some
good and bad medical implications of the dog days. So

(57:00):
mind if I read from the leech book here, Yes,
let's do it. So then this is the translation that
Parker presents in her post quote. Fifteen nights before Lamas,
which is the first of August, and thirty five nights afterwards.
Blood letting is to be avoided because at that time
all venomous things fly and greatly injure human beings. The

(57:23):
wisest physicians have taught that in this month no one
should drink medicine or in any way weak in his
body unless it is absolutely necessary, and in that case
he should stay inside around the middle of the day,
because at that time the air is most impure. For
this reason, the Romans and all southern peoples made earth
houses for themselves because of the heat and poison of

(57:46):
the air. Physicians also say that growing herbs are best
to prepare at this time, whether for potions, salves, or powder.
So dog day's bad time for health, generally good time
for venomous in SCX, good time for preparing herbal medicines,
so you have them in stock. But I do appreciate
the detail that you're going to get a respite from

(58:07):
the blood letter. The local leechman is not going to
be draining you of blood for what the thirty five
nights afterwards of lamas.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
Yeah, yeah, maybe that's for the best. Everyone get a
little break from the bleedings.

Speaker 3 (58:22):
Yeah, blood letting. Do we have to say this generally
not effective medicine?

Speaker 2 (58:27):
Actually yeah, yeah, I feel like we've covered this in
the past. But yeah, generally not.

Speaker 3 (58:33):
Though maybe one thing we can come back to in
the future is I did go on a tangent on
Bald's leech book after reading this. There was an interesting
study that tried a recipe from Bald's leech Book for
an I salve that from what I was reading, based
on a couple of experiments that looked into it, did
seem to actually be somewhat effective or better than placebo,

(58:55):
and then even better than the main active ingredient alone,
which was garlic. Like so, you know, little garlic in
your eye. But but yeah, maybe we'll come back talk
about the ice al of sometime.

Speaker 2 (59:06):
Yeah yeah, or even talk in depth about garlic. Yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (59:11):
I love garlic. I actually love garlic a little bit
too much. I'm one of those people, you know, I
put many multiples of whatever the recommended amount of garlic
in any recipe is.

Speaker 2 (59:22):
Yeah, I've never found a recipe where I could overdo
the garlic. Like, it's just, however many bulbs you care
to actually cut up, like that's that's the limit once
once you get sick of it, Well, that's probably enough garlic.

Speaker 3 (59:34):
Isn't it funny all these recipes that say two clothes
of garlic.

Speaker 2 (59:38):
Yeah, and yeah, the clothes they vary so much. It's
like like sometimes there are those there's those little ones
that you know, it's like a tiny tooth and it's like, okay,
one of these, or it's one that's about the size
of my thumb. You know, it varies so greatly. It's
not an accurate measurement. It's just basically they should just
say as much garlic as you care to throw.

Speaker 3 (59:58):
It, especially in the summer. Yeah, that's a good feeling
just having garlic sweatnut your pores.

Speaker 2 (01:00:05):
There you go, Yeah, garlic in the dog days. All right,
we're gonna go ahead and close this episode out, but
we'd love to hear from anyone out there if you
have thoughts on anything we've discussed here. If you want
to argue with us about ancient aliens, please do. If
you have examples of other Syrians from science fiction, definitely
share that with us. Thoughts on garlic, thoughts on anything

(01:00:26):
else we've discussed here, or anything else related to serious
in the Dog Days in general right in we would
love to hear from you. Just a reminder that Stuff
to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast,
with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episode
on Wednesdays, Weird House Cinema on Fridays, and we'll just
remind you that we have been an audio podcast for

(01:00:47):
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huge archive of our material wherever you get your audio podcasts,
but if you go over to Netflix, you'll also find
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just a little while now, but multiple episodes are available
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(01:01:08):
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Speaker 3 (01:01:21):
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,
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Speaker 1 (01:01:42):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Speaker 3 (01:02:00):
Influence is went with Retort