July 23, 2026 • 54 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 production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we are back with
the fourth and I think for now final part in
our series called Dog Days and Death Stars, where we've
been talking about the concept of the dog days of summer,
which in ancient times were linked to the halliacal rising
of the brightest star in the night sky serious known
(00:36):
to the Greeks as the dog Star. If you are
just now jumping in with this episode, I think you
should probably go back and listen to the other three
parts in the series. First, we've already covered a lot
of ground and we will keep referring back to that
in this episode, but for a brief recap. In part
one of this series, we talked about invocations of the
dog days and of serious in poetry, music, and ancient
(01:00):
literature like the Iliad, where in the Iliad the dog
star was a dual symbol of both brilliance and death.
And we discussed the star serious a itself. Why it's
the brightest star visible from the earth apart from the Sun,
of course, how long it has been and will be
the brightest in our sky, how the time of its
(01:21):
rising has shifted over the course of human history, and
why some ancient astronomers might have believed that the light
that issued from it was read. We also talked about
Don Henley a good bit in that episode and in
part two. Actually Don Henley has been a recurring theme,
So in part two we talked about the imagery and
narrative associated with Sirius and its constellation Canus major across
(01:45):
different cultures. Often it is a dog or a wolf,
sometimes it's not, sometimess, other things like a bow and arrow.
We also talked about the historical misconception that the dog
days of summer actually somehow caused rabies in and then
we got into the discovery of the actual cause of
rabies and the development of the rabies vaccine. In Part three,
(02:09):
I talked about the twinkling of serious what ancient writers
made of that, thinking it might be evidence of harmful
emanations from the star, and also we talked about what
we today know actually causes the twinkling of stars, also
known as scintillation. After that, we talked about aliens from
serious in science fiction, and also about a now pretty
(02:31):
thoroughly debunked but interesting claim by ancient astronaut proponents that
a group of people in West Africa had knowledge about
the binary Star serious be that could only have been
supplied by alien visitors. You know how those stories go.
We got into numerous reasons why this alien explanation is flawed,
(02:53):
and we are back today to round out the series.
A lot of times when we get to part four
of something, this is when we come back to earlier
things that we turned up in our research that seemed
too tangential before, but like now it's time to let
it all hang loose.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah, yeah, I mean by this point we've established the
core ideas and we can get into kind of the
sidebar information. Also reminds me about how I don't know
if it's still the case, but at least used to
on this American life by the time you got to
act for it may or may not really be tied
into the theme of the episode anymore, but it's still interesting.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Well, the tangent I want to take us on today
in my segment here is going to be very much
on topic, but it's going to be to a paper
that I'm going to go ahead and say right at
the top. I do not find its core thesis very convincing,
and it takes a kind of circuitous route to get there.
But I also found the paper very interesting and charming
(03:49):
and like the you know, it goes out on a limb,
but the crawl to get there is pretty fun. So
would you like to go on that journey with me?
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah? Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Okay. So this paper was published in the Journal Western
Folklore in nineteen eighty four by an American folklore scholar
named Eleanor R. Long, and it's called How the Dog
Got Its Days, a skeptical inquiry into traditional star and
weather lore. Eleanor Long passed away in two thousand and five.
(04:18):
She taught at several different universities across her career, including
UCLA and shout out that I came across this paper
because it was mentioned in a Jstore Daily article from
twenty sixteen by Matthew Wills. Hats off to the people
put together the Jaystore Daily articles. I often end up
getting to like a really weird, interesting academic paper through
those things.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Yeah, I love Jaystore Daily. Sometimes if I'm kind of
casting about for a podcast topic, I'll even just go
to my work email, and I'll just type in Jstore
Daily and then something pumpkins, I don't know, and just
see what comes up, and I might be reminded of like, oh,
look at this. This is a jastore Daily from two
years ago, and they referenced something kind of interesting about pumpkins.
(05:00):
I'm going to read a little more about it.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Yeah, So, yeah, they do a great job at just
unearthing treasures from the old academic journals. So anyway, in
this paper, Eleanor Long talks a lot about the same
lore we've already discussed in previous episodes. So I'm going
to try to avoid retreading too much familiar material, and
I'm going to focus mainly on the stuff she covers
(05:23):
that we haven't already gotten in too much, and the
stuff that is unique to the argument she's making. Long
starts off by cataloging popular cultural beliefs about the dog
days of summer, especially in the English speaking world, many
of them having to do with hot weather and generally
unwanted outcomes. So during the dog days, there are accounts
(05:46):
of people believing that dogs go mad. We've hit that
one plenty of times, that snakes go blind, haven't heard
this one before.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
That is interesting. Yeah, do you have more to say
about this one?
Speaker 3 (05:59):
No, he just says this is one of the beliefs
she's uncovered.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, I'm interested to see what, you know, her petologists
might might make of this. But the one thing that
comes to mind is like, if it's really hot, maybe
more snakes are out and you could potentially almost step
on one. And your argument could be that snake must
have been blind. It didn't see me coming. I almost
stepped on him, almost got bitten by that snake. I
(06:24):
don't know.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
Interesting.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Yeah, Otherwise, like what is the human interaction with the snake,
because clearly it has to be something about us encountering
the snake that makes us go I think the snakes
have gone blind. There must be some encounter there.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
I mean, I do think about don't at least some
snakes when they shed their skins they get a kind
of cataract appearance over the eye right before it happens.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Yeah, Yeah, that's another possibility. Yeah, that's a good one.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
I don't know if that would have anything to do
with the timing of the dog days.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Yeah, I mean, all you'd have to be doing, of course,
as is often the case in folklore and stuff is
just be looking for something that's different and then bam,
you make the connection you need to make.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Yeah, and then of course confirmation bias can pick up
from there. It's just like anytime somebody finds a snake
skin that's the right kind of thing, or has the
experience like ah that confirms it. Okay, yeah, so other things.
She mentions, chicken eggs go rotten or they hatch, but
the chickens are like crazy, abnormal chickens.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Like mutant chickens.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Okay, she just says, crazy chickens. I wonder what, like,
I don't know, Yeah, I would like to see what
those chickens are supposed to look like. Maybe they peck
too much. Apparently it is not It is thought to
not be a good time for tilling the soil, and
it is sometimes said that you shouldn't harvest vegetables or
cut down trees during this time. The last couple of
(07:46):
roughly agricultural or growing related pieces of wisdom. Those semen
line with some of the ancient Greek wisdom we've talked about, Like,
you know, summertime dog days, just hide in the shade
like he see it says there is also apparently a
belief that wounds will not heal properly during this time.
This also goes along with things that we've encountered in
(08:08):
these old, older medical manuals, like I think we talked
last time about Bald's Leech Book, which says, hey, during
the dog days of summer, let's just cool it on
the blood letting for a few days, you know, not
do that during the dog days, though Balds specifically says
that it is because that is the time when venomous
things fly.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Okay, so sort of a mixture of observation of insects
and also nasma theory probably.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Maybe, yeah, But this one I thought was really interesting,
and we have sort of encountered shades of this before
in the other sources. Long mentions old beliefs about the
dangers of water during the dog days of summer, that
during this time liquids become foul or poisonous, and that
(08:55):
people should avoid bathing, swimming, or drinking water. And I
have a pretty mixed reaction to that. On one hand,
it is absolutely true, especially in the modern world, that
lots of water born and diarrheal diseases are more common
in the summer, and that's not just my intuition. I
(09:15):
checked to make sure that is correct, and that is
true according to the CDC. In several papers, I looked
at a host of different waterborne diseases surge in hot weather,
not all of them. I think it's especially maybe some
bacterial and more eukaryotic parasite diseases that surge during the summertime.
(09:37):
Summertime surges in waterborne diseases include everything from vibrio to
garda to E Coli. A bunch of different diseases there,
and this can be for a number of reasons. Bacterial
growth is usually accelerated in warm weather. Also, summertime changes
in rainfall can lead to increased risk in multiple ways. Actually,
(09:59):
I thought this interesting. Both drought leading to low water
levels and heavy rainfall leading to flooding can both increase
the risk of different waterborne pathogens. It's kind of counterintuitive,
but basically I think drought means low water, so pathogens
are more concentrated, there's less water to dilute them and
(10:21):
flush them downstream, and water's just more likely to become stagnant.
Whereas with heavy rainfall, like you have more original disease
sources like sewage and agricultural waste that are just getting
washed into untreated waterways. Also worth mentioning that I think
some summer waterborne disease risks go up just from increased exposure,
(10:44):
like people are getting in the water for recreational reasons.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Yeah. Yeah, And that kind of ties into some of
the heat aggression and heat aggression adjacent ideas that we
discussed in previous episodes, like July fourth weekend being a
particularly deadly weekend, you know, in part and other holiday weekends,
you know, there might be a higher level of water
based incidents, and that could be that's one of the reasons,
(11:09):
just more people are out there.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Now.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
On the other hand, like all that's true, but it
also seems like absolute madness to say that during the
hottest part of the year you should avoid water. This
is like, during the heat, people need water. So I
think this is just something that should make us grateful
if we are lucky enough to have access to clean
drinking water, and also even somewhat less importantly but still important,
(11:34):
access to like clean bathing facilities like chemically treated swimming pools,
which are not sterile, but they're a lot safer than
you know, swimming with other people in untreated water sources.
The unfortunate reality is that the hottest time of year
when we are most at risk of overheating and dehydration
also usually happens to be the time when natural untreated
(11:56):
water sources are the most dangerous, at least from certain pathogen. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Indeed, I mean you make a great point that if
you if you do have access to readily available inexpensive
or cheap or and it's so expensive inexpensive that it
basically seems free water for drinking, bathing, et cetera, then
you're in a pretty lucky spot historically speaking. And I
don't know looking into the future too. I mean, this
is this is not this is not something to take
(12:22):
for granted. So enjoy every glass you can get.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Yeah, exactly, Cherish it, and remember that people have to
do things to make that happen. It is it is
a result of continue applied effort.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, take take the freemen approach to it, and also
never cry, never, never weak good water.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
So anyway, Long's major point in this paper is that
she's going to interrogate the traditional idea of where the
concept of the dog days of summer comes from. And now,
as I said earlier, I think I'm not convinced by
the argument she makes fully in the end, but I
think it's an interesting path to follow. Along the way,
(13:04):
so Long traces the regular and widely accepted story that
we've already talked about, that the hottest weeks of summer
are called the dog days because they began in the
ancient world in some ancient cultures, with the haliacal rising
of the dog star, which in turn got its name
because it was part of the constellation Canis Major and
was thought of as the hunting dog of the constellation
(13:27):
Orion and the mythic figure Orian. Therefore, traditional beliefs about
the Dog days trace back to this astrological origin and
to the coincidence that the stars rising happened to occur
at the hottest time of year in the northern hemisphere.
So what are Long's doubts about this narrative. I can't
explore every single thing she brings up, but I'll try
(13:48):
to do some of the major strands. One thing she
talks about is that the calendar doesn't line up exactly right.
This varies, of course by latitude and time period because
the rising of Sirius generally happens later in the year
the further north you go, and also because it is
very gradually across the centuries, getting later in the calendar
(14:12):
year for everyone in the northern hemisphere, so the ancients
had an earlier rising date than we do at the
same latitude. But Long argues that the astronomical event does
not reliably coincide with the hottest part of summer for
some cultures that have a concept of the dog days,
(14:32):
leading those cultures, particularly in Northern Europe, to sometimes seem
to disentangle the dog days of heat from anything having
to do with the stars. And we've already talked about this,
like sometimes what we think of as the dog days
in July is not actually related to when the star
rises where.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
You are right.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Also, she charts many examples of linguistically and historically related
cultures at least bordering in which the rising of Sirius
has no particular association with dogs, or in some cases
no association with heat, or in some cases with no
association with either one. Touching on some examples we've already
(15:14):
talked about, she mentions Persian and Hindu sources Sirius is
thought of as a positive water bringing star in these
culture is much like in ancient Egypt. And she talks
about how in some Hindu traditions, Sirius is associated with
a dog who provides help to the god Indra, with
epithets that translate to something like water producing dog or
(15:37):
in other possible references in one hymn, the heavenly hound.
And so, in Long's words, the Hindu serious is quote
associated not with midsummer heat but with the blessing of water,
which seems very contrary. That's like almost totally contrasted with
the idea that it's like where the meaning complex is
(15:58):
hot times, oppressive heat, drought, don't touch the water because
it's poisonous. You know, dog's bad, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Now, regarding Greek traditions specifically, Long argues that the association
triangle between serious O'rian and hot weather is less clear
than is sometimes supposed. For example, you know, in part
one we talked about in the references to Sirius or
the dog star in the Iliad by Homer, But she
(16:37):
points out correctly that Homer's passages about the balefulness of
the dog star actually do not mention hot weather. They
do say like summer or autumn. They identify a season,
but they don't say anything about heat. They only mention
fever and bad fortune like omens of bad fortune and
in passing. She also points out that there are multiple
(16:58):
Greek myths of about dogs being transformed into stars that
are totally you know, that are just different stories, you know,
different dogs from mythology and maybe different stars. One account
comes in a story that I don't think I was
really familiar with before. I've probably read some version of
it but forgotten about it. But I thought this story
was interesting. It's the story of Ecarius and his daughter Ariginy.
(17:23):
I thought this was interesting because it combined some elements
of like the classic hospitality lesson myth, and also combines
that with with some elements of Prometheus as well. So anyway,
the story goes that Ecarius was a man who welcomed
the god Dionysus, the god of wine, into Athens, and
(17:43):
showed him hospitality. In return, Dionysus taught Ecarius how to
grow grapes and make wines. This is a kind of
Promethean introducing of cultural knowledge to the humans from the
gods teaching him how to make wine. But there's a
danger that comes with this knowledge, because Acarius then makes
the first wine of humans, and when he gives it
(18:06):
to the shepherds who work for him, they drink the wine,
they become drunk, and this leads them to become confused.
They think that Acarius has poisoned them somehow, and they
murder him and bury bury his body in secret, which
also connects to the idea I think of sort of
Dionysian madness. But then the story goes that Acarius's daughter
Ariginy is looking for her father and her faithful dog Mira,
(18:31):
leads her to her father's grave, and then upon doing so,
when the grave is discovered, the dog is transformed into
a star, though I think not necessarily serious.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Okay, beautifully weird. I have made wine for you. The
wine works as intended, presumably, and has murdered for it.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
In another story there, I'm just going to read directly
from Long's telling here. In another story, quote the wonderful
hound lee Lapse, who never failed to run down its prey.
It's like a fool proof hunting dog. Leelaps, who never
failed to run down its prey. Was borrowed by infitrion
to hunt down the two messian fox, but the fox
(19:15):
was also magical and could never be caught. To resolve
the dilemma thus created, Zeus decreed that the fox should
be turned into a stone, the dog into a star.
That solves that.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Yep, yep, good good jobs cleared that one up.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
Yeah, So anyway, Long goes on to a section where
she summarizes basically her view of the problems with the
traditional etymology of this phrase the dog days of summer.
So again to run through these, like, actual climate conditions
can't really explain why the rising of a bright star
(19:52):
would be associated with the hottest weather of the year,
like they don't always line up, especially at the latitudes
of some cultures that invoke the dog day, and actual
climate conditions also can't explain why in one tradition the
star brings heat and in another it brings cooling rains
or winds. That to me doesn't seem like a really
(20:15):
insurmountable problem, because you can just imagine sort of cultural drift,
like this is an idea. It's being transmitted down the
ages into places and times where it's no longer it
no longer has the astrological relevance it once did.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
Right, right end. Seasons are complex and they have different
things going on in them, and you could have one
thing and yet the yearning for the other thing.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
Oh totally yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
Another reason she gives is that no existing Greek myth
explains the rationale for calling serious the dog star or
saying that Sirius is Orion's dog. Though, as we've discussed
on the show before, a lot of Greek mythology simply
never got written down in a form that survived to
modern times. It doesn't mean no such myth existed. It
(20:58):
might have been common knowledge or but didn't happen to
make it into a popular book. Might have been, it did,
but that book is just not something that survived into
modern times.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Right.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
Another interesting tension she mentions is that, you know, as
we've talked about, in Hindu traditions, the dog is a
producer of water, and in Western traditions, western European traditions
going back to the Greeks, the dog days are associated
with warnings to avoid water. So, as I said, I'm
not really convinced of Long's argument against the mainstream etomology here,
(21:31):
but she does introduce a very interesting contrasting idea, and
it is that quote, the primary and crucial relationship in
the complex of beliefs we know as dog days is
not between a particular star and the weather, or even
between dogs and the weather, but between dogs and disease.
(21:56):
So again, I can't detail her entire case here, but
I'll mention a few things. One thing she starts talking
about is how human attitudes toward dogs have long been
profoundly ambivalent. You know, dogs are both man's best friend
and in Long's words, quote emblems of filth and disrepute.
(22:17):
And that's absolutely true. And she makes a very convincing case,
noting a lot of different phrases and languages, and also
citing a couple of other scholars who have documented this extensively.
I mean, just think how many cultural expressions there are
about dogs in the extremes of both directions. Dogs as
the most loyable, the most loyable, the most loyal and
(22:39):
lovable companion a person can have, but also as untrustworthy, vicious, unclean,
as kind of an honorless scavenger, you dirty dog, that
sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah, yeah, that is interesting. Yeah, Like the dog has
such a privileged place for many people out there their
dog is like the most important relationship in their life.
And yet it is also to call someone a dog
can be a di or insult.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Yeah, I mean, in fact, I think it's even even
without any kind of modifier, doesn't even have to be
you dirty dog. Like a dog in conversational English means
a bad example of whatever kind of thing it is. Yeah,
like I think about in the scene in the Sopranos,
like the pump and dump scene, your stalk's a dog.
(23:27):
But yeah, so as such we have this this ambivalence,
this extreme in both directions, appearing in the astrological dog
weather lore. So you've got the dog as a bringer
of refreshing, replenishing rains and cooling wind, maybe as a
helper of Indra to bring the rains that you know
(23:49):
that help the world. But we've also got the dog
as a bringer of heat, drought, poison, sickness and death.
And of course the latter is true as an association
in the Middle Ages, in Europe and beyond, when the
dog days are said to be a time of infection,
poison and disease ruling the world. And she points to
(24:09):
an interesting sort of linguistic complex that I was not
previously familiar with. I think it's mentioned on the Wikipedia
page for dog days. Actually, she gets into the idea
of the Swedish and Finnish times in the middle of
the year known as the rotten days or the rot month.
The Swedish and Finnish languages have terms for these. It's
(24:33):
defined by it's the time defined by when things rot fast.
And you could come to see how that would be
the name for a time of year, because like rot
is highly it's a life and death issue, it's highly
relevant to our lives even economically. There's a close mental
analogy between disease and rot and like genuine links as well,
(24:54):
like both are caused by microbial life. Eating rotten things
can make you sick, and so.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And really you know when I when
I think about the sensations that I get, like walking
around out during the hottest days of the summer, I
mean one of them is the smell of things that
are rotting. Yeah, you know, it's like you you know,
be it like so some mix of you know, garbage cans,
uh you, dog feces, you know, squirrels that have died
(25:23):
and so forth. You know, just the ambient rot and
it's going to maybe be a little more fragrant on
those days.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
Interesting framing question. When you smell the smell of rot,
do you think of that as death or do you
think of that as life?
Speaker 2 (25:38):
Yeah, it is. It kind of has that place in between, right,
because it is it's kind of a fecundity that that
you're sensing, you know, like you know that, yes, something's rotten,
but something's living high on that rot like stuff is happening.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
It's like when you see a tree covered in ivy,
it's like, you know, it's kind of death for the tree,
but also looks so vibrant and a lot you know,
is so green all over.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Yeah, you see a bunch of mushrooms underneath an old
tree and you know that's not a good sign for
that tree, but pretty big day for the mushrooms.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
Now, we can all think of plenty of nasty associations
between dogs and disease. These go back, you know, thousands
of years in literature. You know, dogs dogs feasting on
corpses and as scavengers and bringers of disease and all
that sort of thing. But there are also plenty of
associations going the other way to read from Long here
(26:33):
quote it is a matter of record that Asclepias, this
is in the Greek context, Asclepias relied heavily upon dogs
in his treatment of various ailments. Indeed, his principles flourished
today in popular beliefs that dogs can heal sores by
licking them. Remember this actually came up when we did
(26:54):
a series on the licking of wounds, including the alleged
healing properties of dog licks. I think this was time
last year.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Yeah, I did a quick search, just put in licking
stuff to blow and nothing useful came up. But yeah,
it was sometime in the next last couple of.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Years for sure. But anyway, to continue with Long, so
she mentions a scleepyis having dog's lick sores, but also
the belief that quote the hair of a dog will
cure a wound inflicted by that dog, and that many
illnesses can be banished by quote giving them to the dog,
that is, by incorporating the hair or the or other
(27:31):
bodily fetish of the sufferer in the food of the
family hound. I don't think i'd heard of that last
one before.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
But this is where we would we get the hair
of the dog that bitched. The idea of like, if
you're hungover, you should have a little more alcohol, you
should have a little more of the thing that's making
you feel bad.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
Well, that's one of the two things she mentions. Yeah,
so like a wound, a bite from a dog can
be healed by hair from that dog. Yeah, so that's
also like alcohol will cure the hangover, which that that's
not a good idea, folks, it's not good.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
There's a rich association there in magical thinking, like getting
into the old ideas of like treating the weapon to
treat the wound and so forth.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
Exactly, Yes, the kind of sympathetic magic. But then that's
one of the things she says. The other thing she
says is that you had this belief, based on some
Greek medicine, going back to Aesclepias, that you can heal
people by taking some kind of peace or representation of
the person or of their illness, and you know the
(28:29):
person who is sick, and you give that to the
dog and the dog's food, and that somehow it transfers
the illness to the dog, which maybe the dog can
deal with it better or something. But anyway, so while
you've got Asclepias and his healing dogs, licking wounds and
absorbing illnesses and all that. Long says that even more
interesting in Greek thought is the goddess Hecate, who I
(28:53):
think has come up on the show before. But hekt
is a very interesting figure, sitting at a crossroads, you
might say, of lots of different beliefs. So she was
associated actually with crossroads, but also with the moon, with
night time, sometimes with ghosts and witchcraft.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Yeah. Yeah, three faces, three phases, looking in the different directions. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
So Long highlights other attributes of Hecate. Mentions that sometimes
she's thought of as like a crone figure, or as
the old Moon, though I've seen representations of her where
she looks youthful. Sometimes she's thought of as a primeval
earth mother, as the goddess who grants the power of witchcraft,
as the patron of souls who could not yet leave
(29:39):
the earth. I think this might be the partial association
with ghosts, though I'm not sure if she's the most
associated with ghosts of great goddesses. I think there's another
figure whose name I'm forgetting right now. But one thing
that's interesting that Long brings up is that Hekaty was
sometimes thought of, is the goddess who represents both disease
(30:00):
and the curing of disease, much like the dog, and
fitting with that ambivalent patronage, her avatar was the dog
often represented by the dog, and Long talks about how
she thinks that the tradition of stories in which dogs
are able to see ghosts or in which ghostly spirits
(30:21):
are represented by dogs, may trace back to this link
between dogs and Hecate, the goddess of ghosts.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Yeah, I mean, we've also done episodes where we talked
about the dog as psychopomp as a guide from this
world into the world beyond death. So yeah, the dog
is well acquainted with all human movements, be they in
this world or were into the next.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
But anyway, this finally brings us to the point the
alternate theory that Long is advancing about where this complex
of meaning comes from for the Dog Days, and she
explains it thusly quote, I submit that the same is
true of the season called dog Days, a time when
(31:08):
the healing function of Hecate is suspended and the agents
of infection are given free reiin. So that's her idea. Ultimately,
it's this association of the goddess Hecate with dogs that
Hekat would would have a time rising and a time
falling beneath the earth for a time. Humans on Earth
are just going to be left without the positive aspects
(31:31):
of Hecate's protection and the curative form of her sort
of dog healing magic, so that we will be vulnerable
to this season of disease and poison and rot in
the summertime quote until the healing aspect of Hekat is
restored by its disappearance beneath the horizon for another year. So,
(31:54):
I don't know, it feels like the connective tissue I
would say feels too loose for me to be convinced
by this. But I love all the bringing together things.
And it's hard to say, really when you go back
and try to trace the origins of ideas like this,
because a lot of it is just kind of murky.
It's coming out of You can find these stews of
(32:17):
complex interacting cultural imagery and associations, but you don't always
know exactly where an idea comes from or why.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, on one hand, I'm always a
little hesitant of a theory that really hones in on
one particular thing to explain something. But I know, we
could also see this is not merely saying this is
the origin, but more like this is the amplifier, you know,
in the same way you know, talking about you know,
emerging ideas in the last episode, and how you can
(32:47):
have like something that's brought up in the academic world,
but then it's picked up in the popular media. It's amplified,
and then it's kind of codified that way, and we
see that and of course recorded writings as well. So
I don't know, you know, I guess I'm with you.
I'm I'm I'm hesitant to put too much stock into it,
but it's an interesting concept, to be sure.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
Yeah, it is a swirling set of influences that make
an idea take hold. There might be one moment of
inspiration when a phrase is born from someone's pen and
somebody else reads that, but like what makes a phrase
catch on and become popular among people That might also
play on the phrase exciting like existing associations that people
(33:30):
are already prone to latch onto, if that makes any sense.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And certainly, like we've been saying, the
dog has long been there beside us ready to receive
various associations, be they good or bad, be they deep
or or fairly mundane, and shall Yeah, all right, Well,
(34:01):
for the remainder of this episode and this series, I
want to talk mostly about Cone and the Barbarian. I
can't remember if I actually mentioned this on Mike in
the last episode, but you were talking about the twinkling
of the dog star Sirius, and it connected with something
in my memory. I haven't actually seen nineteen eighty two's
(34:24):
Cone in the Barbarian in a while, but it made
me think about one of the scenes near the very end.
This is when Fulsa Doom, the warlord sorcerer cult leader,
the chief villain of the picture, played with overflowing villainous
charisma by James Earl Jones, is speaking atop this kind
(34:45):
of Ziggorot type temple to whole crowds of his followers,
people with torches and candles in the night. Really impressive scene,
great cinematography and great lighting, and he's a rowl them
towards some apocalyptic culmination of this death cult. Joe, I
(35:06):
know you remember this thing.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
I think I think Conan's doing some stealth roles in
this very moment.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Yeah, yes, Conan is moving in for the kill and
that's this is going to be the big conclusion of
the picture. But yeah, Fulca Doom is getting very worked up.
And I'm just going to read a bit from a
quote from the film. He says, purging is at last
at hand. Day of Doom is here. All that is evil,
all their allies, your parents, your leaders, those who would
(35:33):
call themselves your judges, those who have lied and corrupted
the earth. They shall all be cleansed. You, my children,
are the water that will wash away all that has
gone before. In your hand, you hold my light, the
gleam in the eye of set. This flame will burn
away the darkness, burn you the way to paradise. All right, Yeah,
(35:57):
pretty great stuff. Yeah. So you have like the twinkling
toward the candlelight playing out before doom like an inverse
night sky, you know, the invocation of something connected to
Egyptian mythology, which I'll get into a single eye. The
coming season of Doom. Everything lines up rather well, at
least thematically, with the dog Days as we've been discussing
(36:19):
them and obsessions over serious. But of course the big
question is there an actual connection here and I would
say in a roundabout way there is in a way
that is fitting for part four in a series. Okay,
So the simplest way to start breaking this down, I
think is to sort of formulate the question. Could Thulsa
(36:42):
Doom who is again fictional character and fictional stories, So
do't don't get too bit out of shape here. Could
he be referring at all to the star Sirius when
he's talking about the eye of set So let's let's
break it down. So, first of all, who is this
set and in general world in the real world, When
we talk about set or Seth or Sutec, we are
(37:05):
talking about the ancient Egyptian mythological figure, a god who
is the brother an enemy of Osiris and the rival
of Horace.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
Is set or Seth, the figure who I believe kills
and dismembers Osiris.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Yes, absolutely, among among the various things that's he's known
for these tales in which he kills and dismembers Osiris.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
I think he leaves his body parts along different parts
of the Nile.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Yes, yes, And everything has to be like reassembled and resurrected,
and in that resurrection Osiris becomes you know, the god
of the underworld, the god of the afterlife, and really
comes into his full power. We've talked about Set on
the show before, and I'm going to keep referring to
him as Set here just because that's that ties more
(37:51):
into the Cone in the barbarian association here. But his
iconography general generally represents a particular sort of mysterious and
likely imaginary animal. He's associated with different animals, but a
lot of his iconography features the Seth animal or the
set animal that is probably an imaginary creature, but there
(38:14):
has been some speculation that the iconography might refer to
a creature that is now extinct. We went into this
on an episode of years and years ago of stuff
to blow your mind.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
I barely remember this now, yeah, but I am familiar
with the phrase Seth animal.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Yeah yeah. Geraldine Pinch, in her book on her Encyclopedia
of Ancient Dyptient Mythology, describes it as sinister in nature,
and I guess it is sinister, though I don't know.
Sometimes it looks kind of sweet, you know. It's kind
of like a snouty, kind of like a dog with
a little bitty trunk sort of a thing. I don't know,
I don't always interpret it as evil so much.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
I just looked it up to refresh my memory. It
looks kind of like a cross between a greyhound, an anteater,
and a rabbit. Yeah, but with like a scepter for
a tape, a very straight tail with the club at the.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
End, right right. And it's been a while since I've
got into it. That's one of the reasons that some
have speculated like, well, this this could be a real animal.
Maybe it was an animal that simply you know, went
extinct and there was just you know, records of it
in ancient times. So yeah, I look that episode in
them up in the archives if you're interested. But as
with all the deities of ancient each of the stories
(39:24):
and meanings regarding this particular entity Set are complex and
they're subject to change over time. But Set is largely
associated with violence and disorder, with sandstorms and flash floods,
and he is portrayed as the great adversary in many
of these tellings, certainly you know, with the slaying and
the dismemberment of Osiris. In this he is the chaotic
(39:47):
force that brings down an incarnation of order. He is
a god of foreign deserts who brings down the god
of the Nile Valley. And of course again Osiris ends
up being reconstituted as the king of the underworld, and
this is a vital transformation in ancient Egyptian myth. Subsequently,
set battles Horace, a son of Osiris, and in the
(40:10):
process he blinds Horace or tears out one or both
of his eyes, and these two will eventually heal, bringing
about the eye of Horace as a protective symbol. And
then Set also suffers a grievous injury in this battle,
loses a testicle or both testicles. These two will regenerate,
(40:31):
and all of this becomes symbolically important in various rights
of Egyptian magic. And then by the Greek and Roman period,
Set is like outright vilified. The Greeks end up associating
him with the monster Typhon and this and then they
invoke Seth Typhon in curses that are designed to kill
enemies and to drive lovers apart from each other. You know,
(40:57):
you know all these various curse scrolls and so forth.
And I believe this is contained in the Coptic magical
papyri compiled from the fourth through the twelfth century. See
but this doesn't mean that Set or Set is universally
an evil entity either. So again he's chaos, he's violence,
(41:17):
but he's a necessary defender of the sun barge, which
is key to the sun being able to rise and
set each day. And his reckless actions pinch stresses do
in the end bring about positive outcomes, like the establishment
of Osiris as the god of the underworld. So you know,
in a way, it's like you have to have a villain,
you have to have some and you don't have to
(41:37):
have this opposing force.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
Oh kind of makes me think about how like in Christianity,
like Judas is vilified, but the actions of Judas are
necessary for the story of Christ to be completed.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yeah, exactly. So you know, ancient ancient peoples have the
same sort of contemplations about, you know, how the world
works and how awful things occur, but sometimes something good
comes out of it. And again, you know, I think
we also have to have to remember the importance of
the inundation of the Nile, and you know with that,
you know, flooding, it can be destructive, but it can
it also brings about life, and we can compare that
(42:11):
back to what we said earlier about a rock. But anyway,
while the eye of Horace and the eye of Ray
or Raw are both important symbols in ancient Egyptian mythology,
the same cannot be said for any eye of Set. Again,
(42:34):
the testicles of Set, maybe, but not the eyes. Furthermore,
we should note the cosmological connections here, so as previously noted,
sop Debt is associated with Sirius Set or Set, for
his part, is sometimes associated with the planet Mercury, and
sometimes associated with the constellation the fore leg of Ox,
(42:56):
which roughly corresponds to the Big Dipper. But not Serious, Okay,
but the Mercury connection is kind of interesting. I was
reading a little bit more about this. The planet Mercury
does gleam, if we're going to talk about the gleaming
of the eye have set, but it is an elusive
star at a spot. So it's actually the thirteenth brightest
(43:16):
object in the sky. The top five are the Sun,
of course, the moon, Venus, Jupiter, and then Serious. And
I was reading an article titled Mercury at its Best
in the Evening Sky from twenty twelve in Astronomy Magazine
by Richard Talcott, and he points out that despite its
ranking again thirteenth brightest object in the sky at night,
(43:40):
that's still pretty darn bright. That's still I mean, think
of all the stars in the sky, right be a
number thirteen. That ain't nothing. But Mercury can be rather
elusive because it never climbs that high it orbits closer
to the Sun than any other planet. So from our perspective,
it never ventures much beyond the glare of the Sun
(44:02):
and never appears fully against a totally a totally dark sky.
Speaker 3 (44:06):
Okay, so if we if we are to see Mercury
in the night sky, it's probably going to be near
dawn or dusk.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
Yeah, yeah, and it's again it's going to be a
little harder to pinpoint. I've heard that like for for
a lot of stargazers, it's like the trick is to
find Venus first and then use that to find Mercury.
And uh, I don't remember all the details that may
also be dependent, as a lot of these things are
dependent on depending on when and where you're doing your
your stargazing. But within the context of Conan the Barbarian,
(44:37):
and sure, I'm willing to accept that the eye of
Set could be the planet Mercury. But I guess it
could also just as well be serious, because we're not
really dealing with a mythologically accurate idea of Set anyway.
On top of the of the you know, and in
the context of the film, this god is being invoked
by a warlord, sorcerer and cult leader. He may be
(44:59):
bending things to his needs anyway.
Speaker 3 (45:01):
Yeah, and what what do we see him transform into. Well,
it's not the set animal. It's a It's a snake.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
It's a snake. There's a clear association here with a snake.
And uh, I haven't I'm not super well read with
Robert E. Howard, the creator and originator of the Conan stories. Uh,
but but I've read a few here and there, and
it was digging a little bit more into his lore
and the way his lore sort of like bleeds into
(45:29):
some of the other mythos weird fiction stuff of the
of the day, but within the context of his stories
and related fiction, Set is an ancient Lovecraftian serpent god
taking and taking on this overtly sinister vibe that is
associated with like the Leviathan and Satan. Uh and in
(45:51):
the Kolkuthulu RPGs Malice Monstorum set is associated with the
Egyptomania flavored mythos Alter God niro lethotepe so a highly
fictionalized take on set slash seth here clearly inspired by
Egyptian mythology, but set within this fictional Hyborian age, you know,
(46:12):
the time before the oceans drank Atlantis and also presumably
before the rise of ancient Egyptian civilization as we know.
Speaker 3 (46:20):
It a fictional kind of fantasy prehistory.
Speaker 2 (46:24):
Yeah. Yeah, but as we previously discussed, fascination with ancient
Egyptian concepts and adoption of its symbols and ideas has
taken place as long as other nations have come into
contact with it, and we definitely see its influence on
new religious movements and of course related strains of ufology
from the last one hundred years or so. You know,
(46:47):
we talked about the Syrian ancient astronaut thing in the
last episode, and that was certainly extrapolated by Temple and
other authors into something that influenced Egyptian culture as well.
Speaker 3 (47:00):
Oh, of course they always make it there. It's like
ancient astronauts they had something to do with.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
Yeah, how could the pyramids be it has to be
a right. So yeah, so obviously you're going to find
various Egyptian ancient Egyptian ideas weaving their way through the
world of new religious movements and also occultism, and so
in the so called left hand path strain of occultism
(47:28):
and ceremonial magic, various connections are made between Set and Satan,
fusing of Western and Eastern esoteric ideas in the early
twentieth century, and amid the tangle of contributions from the
likes of Aleister Crowley and Anton Levy, there are at
least a couple of offshoots from these two individuals, you know,
(47:51):
religious and occultist movements that do end up invoking Set
or Set in an interesting manner. So, first of all,
you have the Limic occultist Kenneth Grant, who founded the
Typhonian Order, drawing on the Limic and even Lovecraftian concepts
with a definite serious slash set focus. So it does
(48:15):
seem to come together in his writings and his religious thought.
And then we also have Michael Okino, an American political
scientist and military officer and also a member of Anton
LaVey's Church of Satan who ended up leaving the Church
of Satan, or at least after the Church of Satan
(48:36):
founded the Temple of Set. And I don't know that
his idea is concerned serious at all, but the eye
of Set does factor into his writings and into his work.
Is a kind of opposite of the eye of Horace.
And Akino claimed to have communicated with Set and claimed
that the eye of Set, or it's the way he
(48:58):
discussed the eye of Set was that was kind of
a representation of awakening to the left hand path. Like
I'm you know, drawing in these various ideas of individual
growth and expansion of consciousness and so forth. But ideas
like this really do in a way echo these older
traditions involving serious or some of them that we've been discussing,
(49:21):
the idea that there are particular astronomical bodies that influence
our minds, our souls or personalities in some way. And
I guess within the so in this sort of these
sorts of movements that are highly focused on the individual,
it's kind of like make yourself a satellite dish and
a tune yourself to this star or to this you know,
(49:41):
astronomical influence. So getting into the weeds a little bit there,
but my main point is that, Okay, at least in
these two cases we do see some some serious set synergy.
We also see the invocation of the eye of set.
And then that brings us back to the Conan the
Barbarian Script, which was of course famously first a really
(50:05):
crazy script written by Oliver Stone that I think was
like set in a post apocalyptic future with armies of
mutants and all sorts of crazy elements. And then you
get the John Milius script, which takes everything back into
instead of into a future and imagine future, takes it
back into an imagined fantasy past. So I would assume,
(50:28):
and I don't know for sure on this, but I'm
wondering if John Millius is not the one who then
directly brings in some of the flavor, some of the language,
some of these ideas from twentieth century occultism, as he's
bringing this Hyborian set cult, this death cult to life
(50:49):
for nineteen eighties audiences.
Speaker 3 (50:51):
Interesting. Yeah, in the writings of Roberty Howard, does it
have this cult element because the movie Cult feels more
like a post sixties experience.
Speaker 2 (51:02):
It really does. And I think that this is from
what I know of Milius in his like his own
religious views. I think he had always identified as a
is some sort of pagan like he identified with certain
pagan belief systems. And and yeah, it does feel like
a very much like a post sixties kind of commentary
on charismatic leaders and the idea of what a cult
(51:25):
might be. Fusing those ideas with this idea of more
of a Roberty Howard like sorcerer or warlord.
Speaker 3 (51:33):
It almost feels like, you know, what if there'd been
somebody there to behead Charles Manson exactly.
Speaker 2 (51:40):
Yeah, yeah, or you know, you keep folks from drinking
the kool aid or any number of tragic and murderous
ends to some sort of you know, you know, cult scenario. Yeah, Yeah,
that's that's that's I think that's that's the energy that
he's that he was feeding on for this scene. So yeah,
(52:00):
that's where that's how I end up connecting things back
around to each other here. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (52:05):
Interesting, Well, yeah, I admire the effort here.
Speaker 2 (52:09):
Cool.
Speaker 3 (52:10):
Now does any of this connect to the riddle of Steel?
Speaker 2 (52:13):
Ah, the riddle of Steel. That's we did a whole
episode talking about the riddle of Steel Ones. I think, yeah, yeah,
years back, it was before Weird How Cinema started. We
were we were experimenting with doing episodes. Well, we had
done episodes that discussed movies. We did one where we
talked about two thousand and one of Space Odyssey, and
we talked a little bit about the movie, and then
(52:34):
we talked about some of the concepts wrapped up in it.
And we did a similar thing with Conan the Barbarian,
and I think we talked a little bit about Steel.
We focused mostly on Fulstom.
Speaker 3 (52:43):
In that one.
Speaker 2 (52:45):
Yeah, hard not to Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (52:48):
Okay, Well do we think we're done with Dog Stars
and wait, Dogstars, Dog Days, Death Stars were ready to
contemplate this on the Tree of Woe.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
I think I think we should time to stretch out
on the true woe and think about it. But hey,
we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Anything we've
talked about in this series is fair game. And that
includes Thulsa Doom and Don Henley, who somehow seems like
they should go together. I don't know how, but they
do fit. But yeah, if you have anything you would
(53:18):
like to contribute, Questions, corrections, Field Reports stuff about blind
snakes right in We'd love to hear from you. A
reminder to everyone out there. The Stuff to Blow Your
Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core
episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays
and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns just
talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Follow
(53:38):
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reminded about new episodes. All of this helps us out.
Speaker 3 (53:53):
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 episod SO or any other, to
suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (54:14):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we are back with
the fourth and I think for now final part in
our series called Dog Days and Death Stars, where we've
been talking about the concept of the dog days of summer,
which in ancient times were linked to the halliacal rising
of the brightest star in the night sky serious known
(00:36):
to the Greeks as the dog Star. If you are
just now jumping in with this episode, I think you
should probably go back and listen to the other three
parts in the series. First, we've already covered a lot
of ground and we will keep referring back to that
in this episode, but for a brief recap. In part
one of this series, we talked about invocations of the
dog days and of serious in poetry, music, and ancient
(01:00):
literature like the Iliad, where in the Iliad the dog
star was a dual symbol of both brilliance and death.
And we discussed the star serious a itself. Why it's
the brightest star visible from the earth apart from the Sun,
of course, how long it has been and will be
the brightest in our sky, how the time of its
(01:21):
rising has shifted over the course of human history, and
why some ancient astronomers might have believed that the light
that issued from it was read. We also talked about
Don Henley a good bit in that episode and in
part two. Actually Don Henley has been a recurring theme,
So in part two we talked about the imagery and
narrative associated with Sirius and its constellation Canus major across
(01:45):
different cultures. Often it is a dog or a wolf,
sometimes it's not, sometimess, other things like a bow and arrow.
We also talked about the historical misconception that the dog
days of summer actually somehow caused rabies in and then
we got into the discovery of the actual cause of
rabies and the development of the rabies vaccine. In Part three,
(02:09):
I talked about the twinkling of serious what ancient writers
made of that, thinking it might be evidence of harmful
emanations from the star, and also we talked about what
we today know actually causes the twinkling of stars, also
known as scintillation. After that, we talked about aliens from
serious in science fiction, and also about a now pretty
(02:31):
thoroughly debunked but interesting claim by ancient astronaut proponents that
a group of people in West Africa had knowledge about
the binary Star serious be that could only have been
supplied by alien visitors. You know how those stories go.
We got into numerous reasons why this alien explanation is flawed,
(02:53):
and we are back today to round out the series.
A lot of times when we get to part four
of something, this is when we come back to earlier
things that we turned up in our research that seemed
too tangential before, but like now it's time to let
it all hang loose.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah, yeah, I mean by this point we've established the
core ideas and we can get into kind of the
sidebar information. Also reminds me about how I don't know
if it's still the case, but at least used to
on this American life by the time you got to
act for it may or may not really be tied
into the theme of the episode anymore, but it's still interesting.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Well, the tangent I want to take us on today
in my segment here is going to be very much
on topic, but it's going to be to a paper
that I'm going to go ahead and say right at
the top. I do not find its core thesis very convincing,
and it takes a kind of circuitous route to get there.
But I also found the paper very interesting and charming
(03:49):
and like the you know, it goes out on a limb,
but the crawl to get there is pretty fun. So
would you like to go on that journey with me?
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah? Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Okay. So this paper was published in the Journal Western
Folklore in nineteen eighty four by an American folklore scholar
named Eleanor R. Long, and it's called How the Dog
Got Its Days, a skeptical inquiry into traditional star and
weather lore. Eleanor Long passed away in two thousand and five.
(04:18):
She taught at several different universities across her career, including
UCLA and shout out that I came across this paper
because it was mentioned in a Jstore Daily article from
twenty sixteen by Matthew Wills. Hats off to the people
put together the Jaystore Daily articles. I often end up
getting to like a really weird, interesting academic paper through
those things.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Yeah, I love Jaystore Daily. Sometimes if I'm kind of
casting about for a podcast topic, I'll even just go
to my work email, and I'll just type in Jstore
Daily and then something pumpkins, I don't know, and just
see what comes up, and I might be reminded of like, oh,
look at this. This is a jastore Daily from two
years ago, and they referenced something kind of interesting about pumpkins.
(05:00):
I'm going to read a little more about it.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Yeah, So, yeah, they do a great job at just
unearthing treasures from the old academic journals. So anyway, in
this paper, Eleanor Long talks a lot about the same
lore we've already discussed in previous episodes. So I'm going
to try to avoid retreading too much familiar material, and
I'm going to focus mainly on the stuff she covers
(05:23):
that we haven't already gotten in too much, and the
stuff that is unique to the argument she's making. Long
starts off by cataloging popular cultural beliefs about the dog
days of summer, especially in the English speaking world, many
of them having to do with hot weather and generally
unwanted outcomes. So during the dog days, there are accounts
(05:46):
of people believing that dogs go mad. We've hit that
one plenty of times, that snakes go blind, haven't heard
this one before.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
That is interesting. Yeah, do you have more to say
about this one?
Speaker 3 (05:59):
No, he just says this is one of the beliefs
she's uncovered.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, I'm interested to see what, you know, her petologists
might might make of this. But the one thing that
comes to mind is like, if it's really hot, maybe
more snakes are out and you could potentially almost step
on one. And your argument could be that snake must
have been blind. It didn't see me coming. I almost
stepped on him, almost got bitten by that snake. I
(06:24):
don't know.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
Interesting.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Yeah, Otherwise, like what is the human interaction with the snake,
because clearly it has to be something about us encountering
the snake that makes us go I think the snakes
have gone blind. There must be some encounter there.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
I mean, I do think about don't at least some
snakes when they shed their skins they get a kind
of cataract appearance over the eye right before it happens.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Yeah, Yeah, that's another possibility. Yeah, that's a good one.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
I don't know if that would have anything to do
with the timing of the dog days.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Yeah, I mean, all you'd have to be doing, of course,
as is often the case in folklore and stuff is
just be looking for something that's different and then bam,
you make the connection you need to make.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Yeah, and then of course confirmation bias can pick up
from there. It's just like anytime somebody finds a snake
skin that's the right kind of thing, or has the
experience like ah that confirms it. Okay, yeah, so other things.
She mentions, chicken eggs go rotten or they hatch, but
the chickens are like crazy, abnormal chickens.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Like mutant chickens.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Okay, she just says, crazy chickens. I wonder what, like,
I don't know, Yeah, I would like to see what
those chickens are supposed to look like. Maybe they peck
too much. Apparently it is not It is thought to
not be a good time for tilling the soil, and
it is sometimes said that you shouldn't harvest vegetables or
cut down trees during this time. The last couple of
(07:46):
roughly agricultural or growing related pieces of wisdom. Those semen
line with some of the ancient Greek wisdom we've talked about, Like,
you know, summertime dog days, just hide in the shade
like he see it says there is also apparently a
belief that wounds will not heal properly during this time.
This also goes along with things that we've encountered in
(08:08):
these old, older medical manuals, like I think we talked
last time about Bald's Leech Book, which says, hey, during
the dog days of summer, let's just cool it on
the blood letting for a few days, you know, not
do that during the dog days, though Balds specifically says
that it is because that is the time when venomous
things fly.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Okay, so sort of a mixture of observation of insects
and also nasma theory probably.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Maybe, yeah, But this one I thought was really interesting,
and we have sort of encountered shades of this before
in the other sources. Long mentions old beliefs about the
dangers of water during the dog days of summer, that
during this time liquids become foul or poisonous, and that
(08:55):
people should avoid bathing, swimming, or drinking water. And I
have a pretty mixed reaction to that. On one hand,
it is absolutely true, especially in the modern world, that
lots of water born and diarrheal diseases are more common
in the summer, and that's not just my intuition. I
(09:15):
checked to make sure that is correct, and that is
true according to the CDC. In several papers, I looked
at a host of different waterborne diseases surge in hot weather,
not all of them. I think it's especially maybe some
bacterial and more eukaryotic parasite diseases that surge during the summertime.
(09:37):
Summertime surges in waterborne diseases include everything from vibrio to
garda to E Coli. A bunch of different diseases there,
and this can be for a number of reasons. Bacterial
growth is usually accelerated in warm weather. Also, summertime changes
in rainfall can lead to increased risk in multiple ways. Actually,
(09:59):
I thought this interesting. Both drought leading to low water
levels and heavy rainfall leading to flooding can both increase
the risk of different waterborne pathogens. It's kind of counterintuitive,
but basically I think drought means low water, so pathogens
are more concentrated, there's less water to dilute them and
(10:21):
flush them downstream, and water's just more likely to become stagnant.
Whereas with heavy rainfall, like you have more original disease
sources like sewage and agricultural waste that are just getting
washed into untreated waterways. Also worth mentioning that I think
some summer waterborne disease risks go up just from increased exposure,
(10:44):
like people are getting in the water for recreational reasons.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Yeah. Yeah, And that kind of ties into some of
the heat aggression and heat aggression adjacent ideas that we
discussed in previous episodes, like July fourth weekend being a
particularly deadly weekend, you know, in part and other holiday weekends,
you know, there might be a higher level of water
based incidents, and that could be that's one of the reasons,
(11:09):
just more people are out there.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Now.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
On the other hand, like all that's true, but it
also seems like absolute madness to say that during the
hottest part of the year you should avoid water. This
is like, during the heat, people need water. So I
think this is just something that should make us grateful
if we are lucky enough to have access to clean
drinking water, and also even somewhat less importantly but still important,
(11:34):
access to like clean bathing facilities like chemically treated swimming pools,
which are not sterile, but they're a lot safer than
you know, swimming with other people in untreated water sources.
The unfortunate reality is that the hottest time of year
when we are most at risk of overheating and dehydration
also usually happens to be the time when natural untreated
(11:56):
water sources are the most dangerous, at least from certain pathogen. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Indeed, I mean you make a great point that if
you if you do have access to readily available inexpensive
or cheap or and it's so expensive inexpensive that it
basically seems free water for drinking, bathing, et cetera, then
you're in a pretty lucky spot historically speaking. And I
don't know looking into the future too. I mean, this
is this is not this is not something to take
(12:22):
for granted. So enjoy every glass you can get.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Yeah, exactly, Cherish it, and remember that people have to
do things to make that happen. It is it is
a result of continue applied effort.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, take take the freemen approach to it, and also
never cry, never, never weak good water.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
So anyway, Long's major point in this paper is that
she's going to interrogate the traditional idea of where the
concept of the dog days of summer comes from. And now,
as I said earlier, I think I'm not convinced by
the argument she makes fully in the end, but I
think it's an interesting path to follow. Along the way,
(13:04):
so Long traces the regular and widely accepted story that
we've already talked about, that the hottest weeks of summer
are called the dog days because they began in the
ancient world in some ancient cultures, with the haliacal rising
of the dog star, which in turn got its name
because it was part of the constellation Canis Major and
was thought of as the hunting dog of the constellation
(13:27):
Orion and the mythic figure Orian. Therefore, traditional beliefs about
the Dog days trace back to this astrological origin and
to the coincidence that the stars rising happened to occur
at the hottest time of year in the northern hemisphere.
So what are Long's doubts about this narrative. I can't
explore every single thing she brings up, but I'll try
(13:48):
to do some of the major strands. One thing she
talks about is that the calendar doesn't line up exactly right.
This varies, of course by latitude and time period because
the rising of Sirius generally happens later in the year
the further north you go, and also because it is
very gradually across the centuries, getting later in the calendar
(14:12):
year for everyone in the northern hemisphere, so the ancients
had an earlier rising date than we do at the
same latitude. But Long argues that the astronomical event does
not reliably coincide with the hottest part of summer for
some cultures that have a concept of the dog days,
(14:32):
leading those cultures, particularly in Northern Europe, to sometimes seem
to disentangle the dog days of heat from anything having
to do with the stars. And we've already talked about this,
like sometimes what we think of as the dog days
in July is not actually related to when the star
rises where.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
You are right.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Also, she charts many examples of linguistically and historically related
cultures at least bordering in which the rising of Sirius
has no particular association with dogs, or in some cases
no association with heat, or in some cases with no
association with either one. Touching on some examples we've already
(15:14):
talked about, she mentions Persian and Hindu sources Sirius is
thought of as a positive water bringing star in these
culture is much like in ancient Egypt. And she talks
about how in some Hindu traditions, Sirius is associated with
a dog who provides help to the god Indra, with
epithets that translate to something like water producing dog or
(15:37):
in other possible references in one hymn, the heavenly hound.
And so, in Long's words, the Hindu serious is quote
associated not with midsummer heat but with the blessing of water,
which seems very contrary. That's like almost totally contrasted with
the idea that it's like where the meaning complex is
(15:58):
hot times, oppressive heat, drought, don't touch the water because
it's poisonous. You know, dog's bad, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Now, regarding Greek traditions specifically, Long argues that the association
triangle between serious O'rian and hot weather is less clear
than is sometimes supposed. For example, you know, in part
one we talked about in the references to Sirius or
the dog star in the Iliad by Homer, But she
(16:37):
points out correctly that Homer's passages about the balefulness of
the dog star actually do not mention hot weather. They
do say like summer or autumn. They identify a season,
but they don't say anything about heat. They only mention
fever and bad fortune like omens of bad fortune and
in passing. She also points out that there are multiple
(16:58):
Greek myths of about dogs being transformed into stars that
are totally you know, that are just different stories, you know,
different dogs from mythology and maybe different stars. One account
comes in a story that I don't think I was
really familiar with before. I've probably read some version of
it but forgotten about it. But I thought this story
was interesting. It's the story of Ecarius and his daughter Ariginy.
(17:23):
I thought this was interesting because it combined some elements
of like the classic hospitality lesson myth, and also combines
that with with some elements of Prometheus as well. So anyway,
the story goes that Ecarius was a man who welcomed
the god Dionysus, the god of wine, into Athens, and
(17:43):
showed him hospitality. In return, Dionysus taught Ecarius how to
grow grapes and make wines. This is a kind of
Promethean introducing of cultural knowledge to the humans from the
gods teaching him how to make wine. But there's a
danger that comes with this knowledge, because Acarius then makes
the first wine of humans, and when he gives it
(18:06):
to the shepherds who work for him, they drink the wine,
they become drunk, and this leads them to become confused.
They think that Acarius has poisoned them somehow, and they
murder him and bury bury his body in secret, which
also connects to the idea I think of sort of
Dionysian madness. But then the story goes that Acarius's daughter
Ariginy is looking for her father and her faithful dog Mira,
(18:31):
leads her to her father's grave, and then upon doing so,
when the grave is discovered, the dog is transformed into
a star, though I think not necessarily serious.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Okay, beautifully weird. I have made wine for you. The
wine works as intended, presumably, and has murdered for it.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
In another story there, I'm just going to read directly
from Long's telling here. In another story, quote the wonderful
hound lee Lapse, who never failed to run down its prey.
It's like a fool proof hunting dog. Leelaps, who never
failed to run down its prey. Was borrowed by infitrion
to hunt down the two messian fox, but the fox
(19:15):
was also magical and could never be caught. To resolve
the dilemma thus created, Zeus decreed that the fox should
be turned into a stone, the dog into a star.
That solves that.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Yep, yep, good good jobs cleared that one up.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
Yeah, So anyway, Long goes on to a section where
she summarizes basically her view of the problems with the
traditional etymology of this phrase the dog days of summer.
So again to run through these, like, actual climate conditions
can't really explain why the rising of a bright star
(19:52):
would be associated with the hottest weather of the year,
like they don't always line up, especially at the latitudes
of some cultures that invoke the dog day, and actual
climate conditions also can't explain why in one tradition the
star brings heat and in another it brings cooling rains
or winds. That to me doesn't seem like a really
(20:15):
insurmountable problem, because you can just imagine sort of cultural drift,
like this is an idea. It's being transmitted down the
ages into places and times where it's no longer it
no longer has the astrological relevance it once did.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
Right, right end. Seasons are complex and they have different
things going on in them, and you could have one
thing and yet the yearning for the other thing.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
Oh totally yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
Another reason she gives is that no existing Greek myth
explains the rationale for calling serious the dog star or
saying that Sirius is Orion's dog. Though, as we've discussed
on the show before, a lot of Greek mythology simply
never got written down in a form that survived to
modern times. It doesn't mean no such myth existed. It
(20:58):
might have been common knowledge or but didn't happen to
make it into a popular book. Might have been, it did,
but that book is just not something that survived into
modern times.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Right.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
Another interesting tension she mentions is that, you know, as
we've talked about, in Hindu traditions, the dog is a
producer of water, and in Western traditions, western European traditions
going back to the Greeks, the dog days are associated
with warnings to avoid water. So, as I said, I'm
not really convinced of Long's argument against the mainstream etomology here,
(21:31):
but she does introduce a very interesting contrasting idea, and
it is that quote, the primary and crucial relationship in
the complex of beliefs we know as dog days is
not between a particular star and the weather, or even
between dogs and the weather, but between dogs and disease.
(21:56):
So again, I can't detail her entire case here, but
I'll mention a few things. One thing she starts talking
about is how human attitudes toward dogs have long been
profoundly ambivalent. You know, dogs are both man's best friend
and in Long's words, quote emblems of filth and disrepute.
(22:17):
And that's absolutely true. And she makes a very convincing case,
noting a lot of different phrases and languages, and also
citing a couple of other scholars who have documented this extensively.
I mean, just think how many cultural expressions there are
about dogs in the extremes of both directions. Dogs as
the most loyable, the most loyable, the most loyal and
(22:39):
lovable companion a person can have, but also as untrustworthy, vicious, unclean,
as kind of an honorless scavenger, you dirty dog, that
sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah, yeah, that is interesting. Yeah, Like the dog has
such a privileged place for many people out there their
dog is like the most important relationship in their life.
And yet it is also to call someone a dog
can be a di or insult.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Yeah, I mean, in fact, I think it's even even
without any kind of modifier, doesn't even have to be
you dirty dog. Like a dog in conversational English means
a bad example of whatever kind of thing it is. Yeah,
like I think about in the scene in the Sopranos,
like the pump and dump scene, your stalk's a dog.
(23:27):
But yeah, so as such we have this this ambivalence,
this extreme in both directions, appearing in the astrological dog
weather lore. So you've got the dog as a bringer
of refreshing, replenishing rains and cooling wind, maybe as a
helper of Indra to bring the rains that you know
(23:49):
that help the world. But we've also got the dog
as a bringer of heat, drought, poison, sickness and death.
And of course the latter is true as an association
in the Middle Ages, in Europe and beyond, when the
dog days are said to be a time of infection,
poison and disease ruling the world. And she points to
(24:09):
an interesting sort of linguistic complex that I was not
previously familiar with. I think it's mentioned on the Wikipedia
page for dog days. Actually, she gets into the idea
of the Swedish and Finnish times in the middle of
the year known as the rotten days or the rot month.
The Swedish and Finnish languages have terms for these. It's
(24:33):
defined by it's the time defined by when things rot fast.
And you could come to see how that would be
the name for a time of year, because like rot
is highly it's a life and death issue, it's highly
relevant to our lives even economically. There's a close mental
analogy between disease and rot and like genuine links as well,
(24:54):
like both are caused by microbial life. Eating rotten things
can make you sick, and so.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And really you know when I when
I think about the sensations that I get, like walking
around out during the hottest days of the summer, I
mean one of them is the smell of things that
are rotting. Yeah, you know, it's like you you know,
be it like so some mix of you know, garbage cans,
uh you, dog feces, you know, squirrels that have died
(25:23):
and so forth. You know, just the ambient rot and
it's going to maybe be a little more fragrant on
those days.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
Interesting framing question. When you smell the smell of rot,
do you think of that as death or do you
think of that as life?
Speaker 2 (25:38):
Yeah, it is. It kind of has that place in between, right,
because it is it's kind of a fecundity that that
you're sensing, you know, like you know that, yes, something's rotten,
but something's living high on that rot like stuff is happening.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
It's like when you see a tree covered in ivy,
it's like, you know, it's kind of death for the tree,
but also looks so vibrant and a lot you know,
is so green all over.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Yeah, you see a bunch of mushrooms underneath an old
tree and you know that's not a good sign for
that tree, but pretty big day for the mushrooms.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
Now, we can all think of plenty of nasty associations
between dogs and disease. These go back, you know, thousands
of years in literature. You know, dogs dogs feasting on
corpses and as scavengers and bringers of disease and all
that sort of thing. But there are also plenty of
associations going the other way to read from Long here
(26:33):
quote it is a matter of record that Asclepias, this
is in the Greek context, Asclepias relied heavily upon dogs
in his treatment of various ailments. Indeed, his principles flourished
today in popular beliefs that dogs can heal sores by
licking them. Remember this actually came up when we did
(26:54):
a series on the licking of wounds, including the alleged
healing properties of dog licks. I think this was time
last year.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Yeah, I did a quick search, just put in licking
stuff to blow and nothing useful came up. But yeah,
it was sometime in the next last couple of.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Years for sure. But anyway, to continue with Long, so
she mentions a scleepyis having dog's lick sores, but also
the belief that quote the hair of a dog will
cure a wound inflicted by that dog, and that many
illnesses can be banished by quote giving them to the dog,
that is, by incorporating the hair or the or other
(27:31):
bodily fetish of the sufferer in the food of the
family hound. I don't think i'd heard of that last
one before.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
But this is where we would we get the hair
of the dog that bitched. The idea of like, if
you're hungover, you should have a little more alcohol, you
should have a little more of the thing that's making
you feel bad.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
Well, that's one of the two things she mentions. Yeah,
so like a wound, a bite from a dog can
be healed by hair from that dog. Yeah, so that's
also like alcohol will cure the hangover, which that that's
not a good idea, folks, it's not good.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
There's a rich association there in magical thinking, like getting
into the old ideas of like treating the weapon to
treat the wound and so forth.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
Exactly, Yes, the kind of sympathetic magic. But then that's
one of the things she says. The other thing she
says is that you had this belief, based on some
Greek medicine, going back to Aesclepias, that you can heal
people by taking some kind of peace or representation of
the person or of their illness, and you know the
(28:29):
person who is sick, and you give that to the
dog and the dog's food, and that somehow it transfers
the illness to the dog, which maybe the dog can
deal with it better or something. But anyway, so while
you've got Asclepias and his healing dogs, licking wounds and
absorbing illnesses and all that. Long says that even more
interesting in Greek thought is the goddess Hecate, who I
(28:53):
think has come up on the show before. But hekt
is a very interesting figure, sitting at a crossroads, you
might say, of lots of different beliefs. So she was
associated actually with crossroads, but also with the moon, with
night time, sometimes with ghosts and witchcraft.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Yeah. Yeah, three faces, three phases, looking in the different directions. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
So Long highlights other attributes of Hecate. Mentions that sometimes
she's thought of as like a crone figure, or as
the old Moon, though I've seen representations of her where
she looks youthful. Sometimes she's thought of as a primeval
earth mother, as the goddess who grants the power of witchcraft,
as the patron of souls who could not yet leave
(29:39):
the earth. I think this might be the partial association
with ghosts, though I'm not sure if she's the most
associated with ghosts of great goddesses. I think there's another
figure whose name I'm forgetting right now. But one thing
that's interesting that Long brings up is that Hekaty was
sometimes thought of, is the goddess who represents both disease
(30:00):
and the curing of disease, much like the dog, and
fitting with that ambivalent patronage, her avatar was the dog
often represented by the dog, and Long talks about how
she thinks that the tradition of stories in which dogs
are able to see ghosts or in which ghostly spirits
(30:21):
are represented by dogs, may trace back to this link
between dogs and Hecate, the goddess of ghosts.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Yeah, I mean, we've also done episodes where we talked
about the dog as psychopomp as a guide from this
world into the world beyond death. So yeah, the dog
is well acquainted with all human movements, be they in
this world or were into the next.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
But anyway, this finally brings us to the point the
alternate theory that Long is advancing about where this complex
of meaning comes from for the Dog Days, and she
explains it thusly quote, I submit that the same is
true of the season called dog Days, a time when
(31:08):
the healing function of Hecate is suspended and the agents
of infection are given free reiin. So that's her idea. Ultimately,
it's this association of the goddess Hecate with dogs that
Hekat would would have a time rising and a time
falling beneath the earth for a time. Humans on Earth
are just going to be left without the positive aspects
(31:31):
of Hecate's protection and the curative form of her sort
of dog healing magic, so that we will be vulnerable
to this season of disease and poison and rot in
the summertime quote until the healing aspect of Hekat is
restored by its disappearance beneath the horizon for another year. So,
(31:54):
I don't know, it feels like the connective tissue I
would say feels too loose for me to be convinced
by this. But I love all the bringing together things.
And it's hard to say, really when you go back
and try to trace the origins of ideas like this,
because a lot of it is just kind of murky.
It's coming out of You can find these stews of
(32:17):
complex interacting cultural imagery and associations, but you don't always
know exactly where an idea comes from or why.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, on one hand, I'm always a
little hesitant of a theory that really hones in on
one particular thing to explain something. But I know, we
could also see this is not merely saying this is
the origin, but more like this is the amplifier, you know,
in the same way you know, talking about you know,
emerging ideas in the last episode, and how you can
(32:47):
have like something that's brought up in the academic world,
but then it's picked up in the popular media. It's amplified,
and then it's kind of codified that way, and we
see that and of course recorded writings as well. So
I don't know, you know, I guess I'm with you.
I'm I'm I'm hesitant to put too much stock into it,
but it's an interesting concept, to be sure.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
Yeah, it is a swirling set of influences that make
an idea take hold. There might be one moment of
inspiration when a phrase is born from someone's pen and
somebody else reads that, but like what makes a phrase
catch on and become popular among people That might also
play on the phrase exciting like existing associations that people
(33:30):
are already prone to latch onto, if that makes any sense.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And certainly, like we've been saying, the
dog has long been there beside us ready to receive
various associations, be they good or bad, be they deep
or or fairly mundane, and shall Yeah, all right, Well,
(34:01):
for the remainder of this episode and this series, I
want to talk mostly about Cone and the Barbarian. I
can't remember if I actually mentioned this on Mike in
the last episode, but you were talking about the twinkling
of the dog star Sirius, and it connected with something
in my memory. I haven't actually seen nineteen eighty two's
(34:24):
Cone in the Barbarian in a while, but it made
me think about one of the scenes near the very end.
This is when Fulsa Doom, the warlord sorcerer cult leader,
the chief villain of the picture, played with overflowing villainous
charisma by James Earl Jones, is speaking atop this kind
(34:45):
of Ziggorot type temple to whole crowds of his followers,
people with torches and candles in the night. Really impressive scene,
great cinematography and great lighting, and he's a rowl them
towards some apocalyptic culmination of this death cult. Joe, I
(35:06):
know you remember this thing.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
I think I think Conan's doing some stealth roles in
this very moment.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Yeah, yes, Conan is moving in for the kill and
that's this is going to be the big conclusion of
the picture. But yeah, Fulca Doom is getting very worked up.
And I'm just going to read a bit from a
quote from the film. He says, purging is at last
at hand. Day of Doom is here. All that is evil,
all their allies, your parents, your leaders, those who would
(35:33):
call themselves your judges, those who have lied and corrupted
the earth. They shall all be cleansed. You, my children,
are the water that will wash away all that has
gone before. In your hand, you hold my light, the
gleam in the eye of set. This flame will burn
away the darkness, burn you the way to paradise. All right, Yeah,
(35:57):
pretty great stuff. Yeah. So you have like the twinkling
toward the candlelight playing out before doom like an inverse
night sky, you know, the invocation of something connected to
Egyptian mythology, which I'll get into a single eye. The
coming season of Doom. Everything lines up rather well, at
least thematically, with the dog Days as we've been discussing
(36:19):
them and obsessions over serious. But of course the big
question is there an actual connection here and I would
say in a roundabout way there is in a way
that is fitting for part four in a series. Okay,
So the simplest way to start breaking this down, I
think is to sort of formulate the question. Could Thulsa
(36:42):
Doom who is again fictional character and fictional stories, So
do't don't get too bit out of shape here. Could
he be referring at all to the star Sirius when
he's talking about the eye of set So let's let's
break it down. So, first of all, who is this
set and in general world in the real world, When
we talk about set or Seth or Sutec, we are
(37:05):
talking about the ancient Egyptian mythological figure, a god who
is the brother an enemy of Osiris and the rival
of Horace.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
Is set or Seth, the figure who I believe kills
and dismembers Osiris.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Yes, absolutely, among among the various things that's he's known
for these tales in which he kills and dismembers Osiris.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
I think he leaves his body parts along different parts
of the Nile.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Yes, yes, And everything has to be like reassembled and resurrected,
and in that resurrection Osiris becomes you know, the god
of the underworld, the god of the afterlife, and really
comes into his full power. We've talked about Set on
the show before, and I'm going to keep referring to
him as Set here just because that's that ties more
(37:51):
into the Cone in the barbarian association here. But his
iconography general generally represents a particular sort of mysterious and
likely imaginary animal. He's associated with different animals, but a
lot of his iconography features the Seth animal or the
set animal that is probably an imaginary creature, but there
(38:14):
has been some speculation that the iconography might refer to
a creature that is now extinct. We went into this
on an episode of years and years ago of stuff
to blow your mind.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
I barely remember this now, yeah, but I am familiar
with the phrase Seth animal.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Yeah yeah. Geraldine Pinch, in her book on her Encyclopedia
of Ancient Dyptient Mythology, describes it as sinister in nature,
and I guess it is sinister, though I don't know.
Sometimes it looks kind of sweet, you know. It's kind
of like a snouty, kind of like a dog with
a little bitty trunk sort of a thing. I don't know,
I don't always interpret it as evil so much.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
I just looked it up to refresh my memory. It
looks kind of like a cross between a greyhound, an anteater,
and a rabbit. Yeah, but with like a scepter for
a tape, a very straight tail with the club at the.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
End, right right. And it's been a while since I've
got into it. That's one of the reasons that some
have speculated like, well, this this could be a real animal.
Maybe it was an animal that simply you know, went
extinct and there was just you know, records of it
in ancient times. So yeah, I look that episode in
them up in the archives if you're interested. But as
with all the deities of ancient each of the stories
(39:24):
and meanings regarding this particular entity Set are complex and
they're subject to change over time. But Set is largely
associated with violence and disorder, with sandstorms and flash floods,
and he is portrayed as the great adversary in many
of these tellings, certainly you know, with the slaying and
the dismemberment of Osiris. In this he is the chaotic
(39:47):
force that brings down an incarnation of order. He is
a god of foreign deserts who brings down the god
of the Nile Valley. And of course again Osiris ends
up being reconstituted as the king of the underworld, and
this is a vital transformation in ancient Egyptian myth. Subsequently,
set battles Horace, a son of Osiris, and in the
(40:10):
process he blinds Horace or tears out one or both
of his eyes, and these two will eventually heal, bringing
about the eye of Horace as a protective symbol. And
then Set also suffers a grievous injury in this battle,
loses a testicle or both testicles. These two will regenerate,
(40:31):
and all of this becomes symbolically important in various rights
of Egyptian magic. And then by the Greek and Roman period,
Set is like outright vilified. The Greeks end up associating
him with the monster Typhon and this and then they
invoke Seth Typhon in curses that are designed to kill
enemies and to drive lovers apart from each other. You know,
(40:57):
you know all these various curse scrolls and so forth.
And I believe this is contained in the Coptic magical
papyri compiled from the fourth through the twelfth century. See
but this doesn't mean that Set or Set is universally
an evil entity either. So again he's chaos, he's violence,
(41:17):
but he's a necessary defender of the sun barge, which
is key to the sun being able to rise and
set each day. And his reckless actions pinch stresses do
in the end bring about positive outcomes, like the establishment
of Osiris as the god of the underworld. So you know,
in a way, it's like you have to have a villain,
you have to have some and you don't have to
(41:37):
have this opposing force.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
Oh kind of makes me think about how like in Christianity,
like Judas is vilified, but the actions of Judas are
necessary for the story of Christ to be completed.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yeah, exactly. So you know, ancient ancient peoples have the
same sort of contemplations about, you know, how the world
works and how awful things occur, but sometimes something good
comes out of it. And again, you know, I think
we also have to have to remember the importance of
the inundation of the Nile, and you know with that,
you know, flooding, it can be destructive, but it can
it also brings about life, and we can compare that
(42:11):
back to what we said earlier about a rock. But anyway,
while the eye of Horace and the eye of Ray
or Raw are both important symbols in ancient Egyptian mythology,
the same cannot be said for any eye of Set. Again,
(42:34):
the testicles of Set, maybe, but not the eyes. Furthermore,
we should note the cosmological connections here, so as previously noted,
sop Debt is associated with Sirius Set or Set, for
his part, is sometimes associated with the planet Mercury, and
sometimes associated with the constellation the fore leg of Ox,
(42:56):
which roughly corresponds to the Big Dipper. But not Serious, Okay,
but the Mercury connection is kind of interesting. I was
reading a little bit more about this. The planet Mercury
does gleam, if we're going to talk about the gleaming
of the eye have set, but it is an elusive
star at a spot. So it's actually the thirteenth brightest
(43:16):
object in the sky. The top five are the Sun,
of course, the moon, Venus, Jupiter, and then Serious. And
I was reading an article titled Mercury at its Best
in the Evening Sky from twenty twelve in Astronomy Magazine
by Richard Talcott, and he points out that despite its
ranking again thirteenth brightest object in the sky at night,
(43:40):
that's still pretty darn bright. That's still I mean, think
of all the stars in the sky, right be a
number thirteen. That ain't nothing. But Mercury can be rather
elusive because it never climbs that high it orbits closer
to the Sun than any other planet. So from our perspective,
it never ventures much beyond the glare of the Sun
(44:02):
and never appears fully against a totally a totally dark sky.
Speaker 3 (44:06):
Okay, so if we if we are to see Mercury
in the night sky, it's probably going to be near
dawn or dusk.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
Yeah, yeah, and it's again it's going to be a
little harder to pinpoint. I've heard that like for for
a lot of stargazers, it's like the trick is to
find Venus first and then use that to find Mercury.
And uh, I don't remember all the details that may
also be dependent, as a lot of these things are
dependent on depending on when and where you're doing your
your stargazing. But within the context of Conan the Barbarian,
(44:37):
and sure, I'm willing to accept that the eye of
Set could be the planet Mercury. But I guess it
could also just as well be serious, because we're not
really dealing with a mythologically accurate idea of Set anyway.
On top of the of the you know, and in
the context of the film, this god is being invoked
by a warlord, sorcerer and cult leader. He may be
(44:59):
bending things to his needs anyway.
Speaker 3 (45:01):
Yeah, and what what do we see him transform into. Well,
it's not the set animal. It's a It's a snake.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
It's a snake. There's a clear association here with a snake.
And uh, I haven't I'm not super well read with
Robert E. Howard, the creator and originator of the Conan stories. Uh,
but but I've read a few here and there, and
it was digging a little bit more into his lore
and the way his lore sort of like bleeds into
(45:29):
some of the other mythos weird fiction stuff of the
of the day, but within the context of his stories
and related fiction, Set is an ancient Lovecraftian serpent god
taking and taking on this overtly sinister vibe that is
associated with like the Leviathan and Satan. Uh and in
(45:51):
the Kolkuthulu RPGs Malice Monstorum set is associated with the
Egyptomania flavored mythos Alter God niro lethotepe so a highly
fictionalized take on set slash seth here clearly inspired by
Egyptian mythology, but set within this fictional Hyborian age, you know,
(46:12):
the time before the oceans drank Atlantis and also presumably
before the rise of ancient Egyptian civilization as we know.
Speaker 3 (46:20):
It a fictional kind of fantasy prehistory.
Speaker 2 (46:24):
Yeah. Yeah, but as we previously discussed, fascination with ancient
Egyptian concepts and adoption of its symbols and ideas has
taken place as long as other nations have come into
contact with it, and we definitely see its influence on
new religious movements and of course related strains of ufology
from the last one hundred years or so. You know,
(46:47):
we talked about the Syrian ancient astronaut thing in the
last episode, and that was certainly extrapolated by Temple and
other authors into something that influenced Egyptian culture as well.
Speaker 3 (47:00):
Oh, of course they always make it there. It's like
ancient astronauts they had something to do with.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
Yeah, how could the pyramids be it has to be
a right. So yeah, so obviously you're going to find
various Egyptian ancient Egyptian ideas weaving their way through the
world of new religious movements and also occultism, and so
in the so called left hand path strain of occultism
(47:28):
and ceremonial magic, various connections are made between Set and Satan,
fusing of Western and Eastern esoteric ideas in the early
twentieth century, and amid the tangle of contributions from the
likes of Aleister Crowley and Anton Levy, there are at
least a couple of offshoots from these two individuals, you know,
(47:51):
religious and occultist movements that do end up invoking Set
or Set in an interesting manner. So, first of all,
you have the Limic occultist Kenneth Grant, who founded the
Typhonian Order, drawing on the Limic and even Lovecraftian concepts
with a definite serious slash set focus. So it does
(48:15):
seem to come together in his writings and his religious thought.
And then we also have Michael Okino, an American political
scientist and military officer and also a member of Anton
LaVey's Church of Satan who ended up leaving the Church
of Satan, or at least after the Church of Satan
(48:36):
founded the Temple of Set. And I don't know that
his idea is concerned serious at all, but the eye
of Set does factor into his writings and into his work.
Is a kind of opposite of the eye of Horace.
And Akino claimed to have communicated with Set and claimed
that the eye of Set, or it's the way he
(48:58):
discussed the eye of Set was that was kind of
a representation of awakening to the left hand path. Like
I'm you know, drawing in these various ideas of individual
growth and expansion of consciousness and so forth. But ideas
like this really do in a way echo these older
traditions involving serious or some of them that we've been discussing,
(49:21):
the idea that there are particular astronomical bodies that influence
our minds, our souls or personalities in some way. And
I guess within the so in this sort of these
sorts of movements that are highly focused on the individual,
it's kind of like make yourself a satellite dish and
a tune yourself to this star or to this you know,
(49:41):
astronomical influence. So getting into the weeds a little bit there,
but my main point is that, Okay, at least in
these two cases we do see some some serious set synergy.
We also see the invocation of the eye of set.
And then that brings us back to the Conan the
Barbarian Script, which was of course famously first a really
(50:05):
crazy script written by Oliver Stone that I think was
like set in a post apocalyptic future with armies of
mutants and all sorts of crazy elements. And then you
get the John Milius script, which takes everything back into
instead of into a future and imagine future, takes it
back into an imagined fantasy past. So I would assume,
(50:28):
and I don't know for sure on this, but I'm
wondering if John Millius is not the one who then
directly brings in some of the flavor, some of the language,
some of these ideas from twentieth century occultism, as he's
bringing this Hyborian set cult, this death cult to life
(50:49):
for nineteen eighties audiences.
Speaker 3 (50:51):
Interesting. Yeah, in the writings of Roberty Howard, does it
have this cult element because the movie Cult feels more
like a post sixties experience.
Speaker 2 (51:02):
It really does. And I think that this is from
what I know of Milius in his like his own
religious views. I think he had always identified as a
is some sort of pagan like he identified with certain
pagan belief systems. And and yeah, it does feel like
a very much like a post sixties kind of commentary
on charismatic leaders and the idea of what a cult
(51:25):
might be. Fusing those ideas with this idea of more
of a Roberty Howard like sorcerer or warlord.
Speaker 3 (51:33):
It almost feels like, you know, what if there'd been
somebody there to behead Charles Manson exactly.
Speaker 2 (51:40):
Yeah, yeah, or you know, you keep folks from drinking
the kool aid or any number of tragic and murderous
ends to some sort of you know, you know, cult scenario. Yeah, Yeah,
that's that's that's I think that's that's the energy that
he's that he was feeding on for this scene. So yeah,
(52:00):
that's where that's how I end up connecting things back
around to each other here. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (52:05):
Interesting, Well, yeah, I admire the effort here.
Speaker 2 (52:09):
Cool.
Speaker 3 (52:10):
Now does any of this connect to the riddle of Steel?
Speaker 2 (52:13):
Ah, the riddle of Steel. That's we did a whole
episode talking about the riddle of Steel Ones. I think, yeah, yeah,
years back, it was before Weird How Cinema started. We
were we were experimenting with doing episodes. Well, we had
done episodes that discussed movies. We did one where we
talked about two thousand and one of Space Odyssey, and
we talked a little bit about the movie, and then
(52:34):
we talked about some of the concepts wrapped up in it.
And we did a similar thing with Conan the Barbarian,
and I think we talked a little bit about Steel.
We focused mostly on Fulstom.
Speaker 3 (52:43):
In that one.
Speaker 2 (52:45):
Yeah, hard not to Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (52:48):
Okay, Well do we think we're done with Dog Stars
and wait, Dogstars, Dog Days, Death Stars were ready to
contemplate this on the Tree of Woe.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
I think I think we should time to stretch out
on the true woe and think about it. But hey,
we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Anything we've
talked about in this series is fair game. And that
includes Thulsa Doom and Don Henley, who somehow seems like
they should go together. I don't know how, but they
do fit. But yeah, if you have anything you would
(53:18):
like to contribute, Questions, corrections, Field Reports stuff about blind
snakes right in We'd love to hear from you. A
reminder to everyone out there. The Stuff to Blow Your
Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core
episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays
and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns just
talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Follow
(53:38):
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Speaker 3 (53:53):
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 episod SO or any other, to
suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (54:14):
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