From the Vault: Fingernails, Part 2

How fast do human fingernails and toenails grow? Are they claws and, if not, what are they? In this classic Stuff to Blow Your Mind exploration, Robert and Joe dive into the anatomy, evolution culture and mythology of the “nail as old as time.” (originally published 9/3/2020)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Land and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time for a vault episode today. It's part two of
our series on fingernails. This episode originally aired on September three.
I think it'll be a scream. Let's dig right in.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of my

(00:28):
Heart Radio album. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and we're back with part two of our talk about nails,
Fingernails Toenails. In the last episode, we talked about how
fast nails grow, what influences how fast they grow, some

(00:50):
strange decades long self experimentation projects on the measurement of nails,
And this time we're going to get out of some
of that scientific minutia and jump in to the weirder
world of nails and the role that nails and hair
play in a lot of very very surprising and interesting,
magical and religious beliefs. Yeah, and it it makes sense

(01:13):
that we would since the nails that we look down
at every day, that we you know, find ourselves absent
mindedly feeling uh that that in fact enhance our ability
to engage physically with the world. They are strange to behold.
Like we said before, they're both alive and dead at
the same time, at least as you know, in the

(01:34):
way that we we think of them. You know, they
they're obviously a part of our body, uh, and yet
they feel slightly external. You know that there are these
things that are like clause but not clause. So it
makes sense that we would have some kind of complicated
magical ideas at times about what they are and what
they do. Yeah, and I think some of the magical

(01:54):
and religious ideas are going to connect with something that
we talked about in the last episode, which was this
the strange thing I was observing about how our hard
body parts, the hard external parts like teeth and nails,
though you would expect them to be sort of like
the most uh I don't know what you would call
like the most brutally disposable parts of our bodies because

(02:18):
they're hard. You know, they're like what you put out
front in defense or attack. But in fact we've got
these kind of vulnerability trauma obsessions with these parts of
our bodies. Like if you just start worrying about what
could go wrong with your body, how you could be injured,
how it could be damaged. A lot of the natural
places that people go to go to worry about these

(02:39):
things our teeth and nails, absolutely, and that's that's why
towards the end of the at the last episode, we
started talking a little bit about Glenn Danzi's fingernails and
about how, at least in some music videos or posters
that I kind of half remember um from my my
teenage years, I recall that he had sharpened fingernails, and

(03:00):
I would wonder to myself, well, what purpose did those have?
And indeed, you know, would sharpened fingernails age you in
in fights or something? Because I also remember, like Stephen
King novels and short stories that I also was reading
at the time, you'd occasionally have a character show up
that's sharpened their teeth down to the to file points
um or or perhaps even has some sort of like

(03:22):
sharpened fingernails, I guess, and uh, and it brings them
to wonder like would there be any kind of actual
combat or defensive advantage to that sort of thing, And
we we mostly decided that there would not really be yes,
you can scratch your way out of a out of
a scrape here and there, But there's also a big
possibility to damage your your fingernails if you're trying to

(03:44):
use like sharpened fingernails to attack somebody. More than likely,
if you encounter somebody with really gnarly looking fingernails that
have been sharpened to a point, or or indeed, um uh,
you know, just look seemingly intentionally creepy, they probably are
trying to look at the still a little bit like
nos Feratu, right, And so this vampire association with long nails.

(04:06):
In fact, we were just talking about this with Seth
the other day, uh and and uh Seth. Seth was
sharing with us the idea that, you know, it's possible
that the association between long fingernails and vampires could come
from the idea that often in the old days, you
might open up if you've you've exhumed a body from
the graveyard and you notice that their nails look a

(04:27):
little bit long, and so you think, wait a minute,
are they still alive in some way or they're getting
up and roaming around and still growing body tissues. Yeah,
I feel like this has coming up on the show
in the past before and it's certainly it goes beyond
the world of mere vampires. We talked about it a
bit in the episode where we talked about the Kappa,
the Japanese water demon um where you have varying monstrous

(04:51):
conceptions in the human imagination that are based upon an
analysis of a physical death to see what happens to
the body after it dies and the seeming changes that
take place in the body. And in the case of
the vampire, yeah, it's like the bloated form. Uh, the
impression at least that the hair is still growing, the
impression that the nails are still growing. So if you

(05:14):
ask the question is that true, the answer is no,
It is not true that hair and fingernails continue to
grow after death, at least not to any significant degree. Now,
if the nails and the hair don't keep growing after death,
that that does leave the question of why so many
people thought that that was the case. Why Why would
you look at a corpse and think that its nails

(05:34):
appear long? And the most common explanation for this tends
to be based on the dehydration of the corps, that
as the body begins to decompose, it loses a lot
of moisture, which causes the retraction of the skin tissues
around the finger nails and around the nail plate, which
makes the nail plates look longer because there's there's just
less skin around them. Now, this helps inform more than

(05:55):
just our idea of vampires for starters. It also has
factored into the bare aid a live panics that have
existed at different times. I believe we we discussed this
a bit in an episode of Invention on various casket innovations.
So the idea is, oh, you know, you end up
digging up this corpse later. Maybe you don't assume that
they were some sort of undead fiend, but you might think, oh,

(06:17):
my goodness, they were still alive for some time after
we buried them. They must have been buried alive. And
this led to a fashionable demand in the nineteenth century
for caskets with escape hatches and ways of getting out.
If you happen to have been buried alive. Yes, so
if you want to catch up on that, do check
out that episode of Invention. It may still be in
the stuff to boil your mind feed from when we

(06:39):
put a bunch of those out earlier. In the year.
But if not, you can find the dedicated fee to invention.
Even though we're not putting out new episodes of that
show in that feed, you'll still find all of those
episodes there for your listening. I think it was a
three part last October. Yeah, that's what it was. Now.
In addition to this, you'll also find various myths and
legends just concerned just general monstrosity in the world. And

(07:02):
oftentimes you'll have a monster that has long finger nails.
And this is roughly, you know, associated with the idea that, okay,
long finger nails imply a wildness, to kind of beastial
nature of the the entity or the being in question, right,
what has claws wild animals? Yeah, and though the longer
finger nails become, the more like the claws of an

(07:25):
animal they become. Now, there are exceptions to this. Long
finger nails are sometimes considered fashionable for females. We see
we see a lot of that in um in modern culture,
and then also you sometimes see it as a fashion
for males as well. Long nails, for example, were important
symbols of social status at various points in Chinese history,

(07:47):
and they were sometimes painted for visual effect. But also
sometimes the painting or sometimes the lacquering of the nail
was as much about strengthening the nail as it was
about making it fancy, which is an interesting point. And
apparently this we see echoes of this and other cultures
as well. I think the ancient Egyptians um are Are

(08:07):
are thought to have engaged in this sort of thing
as well, strengthening the nail in order to maintain it's
elongated uh uh structure. Now, later on in Chinese history,
ornate finger nail guards were used to protect outer nails.
So this might be like on the pinky finger, for example,
and the ring finger uh and uh. And we're we're

(08:28):
talking some pretty ornate finger coverings here. For instance, the
six inch long golden nail protectors that were worn by
the emperorus Dowager Sushi, who ruled China for forty three
years from eighteen sixty one until her death in nineteen
o eight. If you look her up, you can find
actual photographs of her decked out with these things. Now, Robert,

(08:51):
can you describe Is this more of like a thimble
type covering that would go over the end of the
finger and extend out from there, or is it more
like that finger armor stuff that has joints and goes
over the whole finger. Um, not really joints per se.
It is one gets the impression of like long tapering

(09:11):
golden fingertip covers Um. I think this this sort of
thing has also been utilized in dance in various Asian cultures. Um. Yeah,
so they're really neat looking now in terms of just
longer finger nails in general, the style has also been
popular with males at different times in Chinese history, with

(09:31):
longer manicured nails still having a residual cultural association with
higher classes in society. Uh. One also sees the retention
of a long, pinky finger nail as a signifier of
social status. Uh. But then there are also varying levels
of when you get into the actual reasons uh that
the individuals um, you know, self identify uh and uh

(09:53):
and certainly uh uh explain that their their pinky nail.
They might be it's for good luck or you know,
it might be there might be some idea of divinational
aspects uh a finger morphology. They're various sort of cultural
ideas that seemed to be floating around. Um explaining you
know why one would have a longer nail. If there's

(10:16):
a class association that nails are, you know, for higher
social status. I wonder if it has anything to do
with demonstrating the lack of need to engage in physical
or manual labor. Yes, sort of along the same lines
as you know. There are some cultures. I think it
was once common in uh in European culture, for and
it was fashionable from me to where like long pointy shoes.

(10:38):
And one explanation given for this is, well, a long
pointy shoe makes you look rich because it's a kind
of shoe that you can't do any physical work in. Yeah. Yeah,
The best explanations seemed to tie it to this like
a long standing idea that it informs social status. However,
I should note that I've I've looked into this a
couple of times over the years, and I've never found

(10:59):
like a I have not found not to say it
doesn't exist, but I have never found like a really
good paper on this that really dives in with a
lot of the information out there about this is more
informal in nature. But um traditional Chinese cultural hierarchies do
seem to retain their power though according to one paper
I was looking at Saving Face in China, Modernization, parental

(11:22):
pressure and plastic Surgery by Andrew Lyndridge and Choufeng Wang,
published in the Journal of Consumer Affairs in two thousand
and eight. UM, so you know, basically underlying the idea
that you can you can have these ideas that are
still floating around in society, and perhaps you know, perhaps
the rationale for them isn't you know one uh in

(11:44):
an individual's forethought. But it's just something that survives and
is still done and perhaps on some level still does
inform UH that notion that I have this longer nail,
which means I am of a higher social status and
maybe don't have to engage in as much physical labor.
For in his storical example of this getting outside of
modern culture. UM, there's a book that I've I've been

(12:06):
fond of for for for many years titled Tales from
a Chinese Studio, and it's a collection from seventeen forty
of these various weird tales that were compiled by the
author Uh Pooh song Ling and Uh and it's these
are wonderful stories. I recommend anyone who's even halfway interested
in in strange Chinese ghost stories. You should pick up

(12:29):
a copy of this because some of them are funny,
some of them are just really weird. Um. There's also
a certain poetry to them, and I understand that if
if one is actually reading these stories uh in Mandarin uh,
they're also there are also a lot of various illusions
that are going to be lost on the English language

(12:50):
translation reader. But they're still they're still tremendous as translated pieces.
I think you've quoted from it before. I have positive
associations with this title. Yeah, it's a it's a great book,
and I think Penguin has an edition of it. Um.
So I was looking back through that because I'm thinking, Okay,
if there's a good example of a monster with long fingernails,
perhaps i'll find it entails from a Chinese studio. I

(13:12):
did not find it, but I did find this little
note um about a particular line in one of his
writings that I had skipped over before I didn't remember
from before. Basically, uh uh poohsong Ling mentions the bard
of the long nails, which the translators and editors of
this Penguin edition identify as Lee He who lived seven

(13:36):
sixty through eight sixteen. So he was a late Tongue scholar,
often characterized as a sort of quote doomed poet with
a vision so intense the world will destroy him if
he does not destroy himself. Whoa, and and so the
the editors here they could they compared him to John Keats.

(13:58):
That's interesting because Keiths definitely he died young. But I
don't really think of him as doom driven in that way. Uh.
When I think of doom driven English poets, I guess
I would think more like Byron or Percy Shelley. Yeah,
Lord Byron definitely comes to mind, right, especially with when
it comes to like a dark bad boy status walking
around a skull goblet and a pet bear on a

(14:18):
chain exactly. Uh. And and interestingly enough, uh, if you
look up some of uh Lee He's translated work, he's
sometimes described as this is from the Amazon description to
a nice collection of his work. Uh, the bad boy
poet of the late Tang dynasty. Well that I got
to hear more from this bad so it was it

(14:39):
was he a bet. Was the fact that he was
a bad boy at all related to the perception of
him having long nails? Um? Well, yes, and no, I
think when I think this will maybe become a little
more clear, Like, for instance, I don't think the fact
that that he had long nails was like the signifying
bad boy aspect about him. I take that to be
probably we're in common with with professional scholars of the day,

(15:03):
Like you know, you're you're you're a you're a scholar,
you're a man of of words. Uh, you certainly don't
need short nails in order to engage in a bunch
of physical labor, like you're a man of letters. I
see that being said, he has a very gothic quality
to him. The New Tang History of ten sixty described
him as quote frail and thin, with eyebrows that met

(15:26):
together and long fingernails. He was also known as the
Demon Talent due to his love of weird and exotic
subjects in his writings, and the New Tang History also
said that he quote felt himself already halfway across the
boundary between the living and the dead. Now that being said,
apparently he also wrote about mundane topics as well, like

(15:47):
you know, earth like food and so forth. So it
wasn't just all ghoulish content. Um, maybe a spooky food.
Oh No, I think he generally, you know, wrote about
food and acceptable non what we would think of in
Western terms is of you know, a non Gothic sense.
But anyway, if you if you look at his work,

(16:09):
it is really quite beautiful. Um. He is probably apparently
most famous for this poem song of Magic Strings that
the editors and translators of the pous song Ling text include. Uh.
The poem itself was translated by john Fordsham in ninety
three's Goddesses, Ghosts and Demons that Collected Poems of lee
he He He, which you can you can buy in like

(16:31):
e book or physical form. I'm thinking of picking up
a copy. But but here's here's just a little bit
from that poem. Quote. Blue raccoons are weeping blood as
shivering foxes die on the ancient wall. A painted dragon
tail inlaid with gold. The rain god is writing it
away to an autumn tarn. Owls that have lived a

(16:53):
hundred years turned forest demons laugh wildly as an emerald
fire leaps from their net. Wow. That that is electrifying. Man,
I've got goose bumps. Yeah. Like I say, I think
I'm gonna pick up a copy for this Halloween season. Um,
but there was there was another line when I was
looking at the preview of that actual text, Fordsham wrote, quotely,

(17:17):
he was temperamentally unable to write a conventional social poem,
and consequently he is very rarely dull. Uh So, apparently
to to be like a professional man of words, to
be like, you know, a writer of the day, you
had to engage in a lot of sort of boring,
sort of courtly writing. Uh. The example that he gave
was it was apparently common to sort of to to

(17:40):
write to patrons and compliment them on, say, the birth
of a child. And there's an example of this short
poetic poetic piece that he wrote to such a patron,
and he makes it sound like Fortshune compares it to
uh the child from the omen um about just how
he describes this child as like being able to like
see through people to their to their soul, or something

(18:02):
to that effect. It's pretty interesting. So I like the
idea of this, uh, this Bard of the Long Nails,
who when he tries to fit in and be like
just a boring poet, he can't quite do it. He's
just a little too weird. But I should drive home
that I don't think the Long nails were the were
the weird thing about him. No, it was that he

(18:23):
would write you a note saying, congratulations on the birth
of your child who will one day flay my soul
in the underworld. Yeah, that sort of thing. Um. So, anyway,
I encourage everyone to check out both of those authors.
But but anyway, back back to nails in general. Long
nails have have apparently sometimes been seen as a luxury
for those of upper classes in various cultures who don't

(18:43):
have to truly labor with their hands. And I've had
a couple of studies at least that backed this up,
such as excessively long fingernails as a risk factor for
upper extremity soft tissue injury published in two thousand eight
in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, and another
pay or Effects of fingernail linked on finger and hand performance,
published in the Journal hand Therapy back in two thousand

(19:06):
and This the second paper here recommends keeping fingernails shortened
to at least point five centimeters to quote achieve optimal
functional outcomes. Well, I guess, to be fair, I laughed
because I was imagining optimal functional outcomes of hands just
in regular life. But I guess this is talking about therapy,
so that phrasing makes sense. Yes, yes, this this paper

(19:28):
does seem to be narrowing its focus somewhat. Uh. And
I think it's also worth noting that, you know, I
have for my own part, I've encountered people with with
very long, you know, well maintained nails, uh, you know,
sometimes very fancy looking nails. This seemed quite capable of
manipulating their environment and say, an office setting. Uh. Though
perhaps that's not that different from the sort of physical

(19:49):
demands of of of of a scholar in um, you know,
in in in in China, of old Uh. You know,
you're you're still not having to like actually physically in
the earth or something to that effect. So so I'm
not sure i'd be interesting to hear from anyone out
there who does, who has had long nails in the
past or keeps them maintains long nails today, Like are

(20:11):
there things that you find that they get in the
way of or are they just generally not in the way?
Do you sort of adapt I mean, obviously, you know,
we we we can adapt our body schema to a
accommodate for any number of of extra things. It seems
like just longer nails. I mean, that's even more a
part of our body than any tool or costume that

(20:32):
we might acquire. All Right, it's time to take a
quick break. But when we come back, we can talk
about a demon warship made out of nails than all right,
we're back, and I'm excited for this, Joe, because you
were you were about to embark on a journey and
you're you're going to uh tell us about what maybe

(20:52):
the the magical fingernail story par excellence. I mean, there
are a lot of great magical figure nail stories that
that I'm to get into, but this might be the
most most thoroughly mythological one, the one that's like the
most the most like a device in a story where
the nails are sort of the mcguffin. Though there's also
a very good Persian one that we'll get into. But anyway,

(21:13):
so I want to go to the prose Edda. This
is a work that tells us a lot of what
we know about ancient Norse mythology that was written or
edited by the medieval Icelandic author Snorri Sturlason. In the
prose Edda, there are these collected literary works that tell
many of the stories of Norse mythology, including the story
of Ragnarok, the final confrontation, the destruction of the gods

(21:38):
at the end of that era and there but early on,
there's a passage in the prose edit that's just talking
about ships, just mentioning what kinds of mythological ships there are,
And it mentions one ship in passing, calling it the
Nagle Far. And it only says a couple of things
about the Nagle Far. It says that it is in
mu spell. Mu Spell is a realm of fire, home

(22:00):
of the fire giants who you don't want to mess with.
And the passage also mentions that Nagle Far is the largest,
meaning the largest of all ships. So what is this
Nagle Far the largest of all ships? Well, later the
author here tells us that the Nagle Far will appear
over the horizon during the calamity of Ragnarok, when the

(22:23):
gods will be destroyed. And the author also tells us
something about its construction. And here I'm going to quote
directly from the work quote the stars shall be hurled
from heaven. Then it shall come to pass that the
earth and the mountains will shake so violently that trees
will be torn up by the roots, and the mountains
will topple down, and all bonds and fetters will be

(22:46):
broken and snapped. The fin ris wolf gets loose, the
sea rushes over the earth for the mid guard serpent
writhes in giant rage and seeks to gain the land.
The ship that is called nagle Are also becomes loose.
It is made of the nails of dead men. Wherefore
it is worth warning that when a man dies with

(23:09):
unpaired nails, he supplies a large amount of materials for
the building of this ship, which both gods and men
wish maybe finished as late as possible. But in this
flood Naggle far gets afloat. The giant crime is its steersman,
or there might be him h r y M. But okay, yeah,
so it's got it's got giants on it. It's got

(23:31):
the giant crime or h rim as it's steersman, and
it's made out of the fingernails and toenails of dead
men who did not care appropriately for their nails at
the time of death. That is that is gnarly um.
I by the way, I I'm not surprised at all
to learn as well that there is a a longstanding

(23:53):
Swedish black metal band that has naggle far as It's
as its name. They've been active since then the early
nineties apparently. Oh wow, I've never heard of him, but
of course yeah, I mean, in anything, this gnarly is
going to end up as a metal band name. But
I should also mention that in telling the same story
the story of Ragnarok, you know, sort of the destruction

(24:14):
of the gods at the end of at the end
of time, or maybe not of time, at least at
the end of the era the age of the gods
um it is. The same scene is described in the Voluspa,
which is an old Norse poem describing a lot of
mythological events that we've mentioned on the show pretty recently. Actually,
I think, wait, which episode did it come up in?
I cannot recall the context at the moment, but there's

(24:36):
also a quatrain in the Voluspa that mentions it. It says,
from the east comes crime with shield held high in
giant wrath, does the serpent writhe or the waves he twists,
and the tawny eagle naws corpses screaming. Naggle Far is loose.
I love, I love the idea that it's you know,

(24:57):
this is just me reading into it, perhaps, but it
it feels like it's not. It's not just the bones
that are making it's not bones that are making up
the ship. It is the toenails and the fingernails that
seem more like the detritus of of the the dead body.
You know. It seems like this is like a ship
that has been collecting and assembling, like at the bottom

(25:17):
of the universe, throughout all of human conflict, you know,
And so that that's why it is only it is
only completely finished towards the very end of human existence.
So there's a paper I want to talk about, Robert,
if you're ready, called the Treatment of Hair and Fingernails
among the Indo Europeans. Oh, yes, I am ready for
this because I've I've read about certainly nothing on the

(25:38):
ship level, the ship building level, but I've I've read
about some of these of these folk beliefs before. Yeah.
So this is a paper by Bruce Lincoln, who is
a scholar of religious studies at the University of Chicago.
It was published in nineteen seventy seven, and that's worth noting.
This is an older paper. I'm citing it because it's
still really interesting, but I just want to flag that
it's older, because it's possible that in the intervening years

(26:02):
some of Lincoln's factual assumptions might have been superseded by
more recent anthropological or historical research. But I think the
general thrust of the question he poses remains and uh,
and some of the hypotheses he discusses in this article
remain extremely interesting. Okay, so he starts like this quote.
One of the important lessons that has learned from the

(26:22):
study of history of religions is that there is no
act so small or insignificant that it cannot take on
symbolic importance. In certain cultures, it is not always an
easy task to recognize such symbolically invested action, although the
existence of elaborate rules for behavior in a given situation
may serve as a valuable clue. And if the identification

(26:46):
of such action is sometimes difficult, the interpretation of a
given motion, gesture, or ritual is even more delicate. And
the example that he gives that he's going to talk
about in this paper is the extremely careful, meticulous rules
governing the treatment of clippings from the hair and nails
in many cultures and religions throughout the world, especially in

(27:07):
many cultures that are descended from in some way the
ancient speakers of Proto Indo European, which I'll get into
more later. So I'm going to start by just listing
a number of examples that Lincoln brings up, and then
we can go back and talk about possible explanations for
where these beliefs and religious practices come from. So the

(27:28):
first one mentioned by Lincoln concerns the hair specifically, and
is it's the right of the child's first haircut or
first tonture, practiced historically by some people of India, and
it's described in the Sankayana Gria Sutra, and the Gria
Sutras are a number of manuals describing the steps of

(27:49):
various domestic religious ceremonies. So I think specifically the kind
of religious ceremonies that you you might perform around the house.
So this is performed for different children at front ages,
I think also traditionally depending on cast. But the process
goes like this in Lincoln's summary quote, the child's hair
is untangled and anointed and a young cusa shoot is

(28:12):
placed in it, Kusa being the sacred grass of ceremonial.
His hair is then shaved with a copper razor and
placed on a mound of bull dung mixed with kusa
grass that has been prepared to receive the hair. Finally,
and here he quotes directly from translation of the Sankayana
Gria Sutra quote to the northeast, in a place covered

(28:34):
with herbs, or in the neighborhood of water, they bury
the hairs in the earth. So that's interesting to begin with.
You you have this ritual of at a certain age,
the child's hair is shaved or cut, and then it
is in a kind of symbolic ritual way planted within
dung or within the earth. And there's this association with
vegetation or herbs. Interesting. Now, this may have absolutely no

(28:58):
connection with it. But uh, a while back, I guess,
oh man, probably more than probably about a year ago. Uh,
my son and I had our hair cut at our
house on our our front porch. And afterwards, um uh,
the individual cut our hair encouraged us to take the
clippings and put at least some of them in our
garden um in order to help deter creatures from eating

(29:21):
our vegetables. I wonder if that actually works. I don't know,
but I've I mean, I've heard also similar advice concerning
a little like hair from your pet, like to to
keep the road inside of your garden, to put some
hair from your cat for for for instance, in there,
which which I mean it sounds like it could work.
I don't know that I've I've seen any thing to

(29:41):
actually back that up, except I haven't noticed any any
mice or rats out there. But then again, um, just
because you don't notice them doesn't mean they're not there.
That's interesting. We'll definitely keep that in mind as we
go through a few more of these examples. So the
next one that Lincoln sites comes from ancient Roman religion. Uh.
And this is the example of the flamand Alice, or

(30:03):
the high priest of Jupiter, the chief god of the
Roman pantheon, and the flamand Alice had numerous ceremonial requirements
and restrictions guiding his daily activities. There were rules about
where he had to sleep, there were rules about what
he was supposed to wear, about what kinds of things
he could touch or couldn't touch. And one of these restrictions,

(30:23):
as reported by the second century Roman author Aulus Gellius,
in a text called Attic Nights, goes like this, and
this is with some abridgments. Quote the ceremonies placed upon
the flamand allies are many, and the forbearances are numerous.
No one should cut the hair of the de Aalie
except a free man. The cuttings of the nails and

(30:45):
hair of the deals are buried in the earth under
a fruitful tree. There were almost the same ceremonies for
the Flamenica de Alice, and I think that's the wife
of the high priest of Jupiter. And they say that
other different ones are to be observed, for instance, that
she is covered with a dyed gown, and that in
her veil she has the shoot of a fruitful tree.

(31:09):
And there are other similar practices elsewhere in ancient Roman religion.
For example, in the Natural History, Plenty of the Elder
recounts how the vestal virgins are expected to observe special
ceremonies in the disposal of the trimmings from their hair.
Plenty rights quote, truly, there is a lotus tree in Rome,
in the area of Lucina. Now this tree is about

(31:30):
five hundred years old or older. Its age is uncertain,
and it is called the hairy one because the hair
of the vestal virgins is brought to it. So note
again the kind of rough similarities with the Indian practice here,
the association with vegetation, especially well, hair is a is
a thing that grows out of us, not unlike a plant,

(31:51):
right or some sort of vine. And then I guess
a lot of this tube just has to do with
the fact that hair and fingernails and toenails as well
are the things that are paradoxically a part of us
and yet not a part of us. And then when
we trim them away or cut them away, they are
no longer part of our bodies that they came from

(32:11):
our bodies. And therefore you could you could see where
you could easily lean into this idea that's something appropriate
must be done with these parts of ourselves. Yeah, and
we'll get into more about that in the in the
part where we talk about the possible explanations for these
but I want to talk about the next example Lincoln sites,
which is German folkloric practices. He writes that there are

(32:32):
a number of archaic rituals among German people speaking Germanic
languages for dealing with the disposal of clippings from the
hair and nails quote. Thus, in Oldenburg hair and nails
are wrapped in a cloth and fastened under a tree
three days before the new moon to cure infertility. Similarly,
in Brandenburg, Dooseldorf, Swabia and elsewhere, hair and nails are

(32:56):
placed in a hole board in a tree or our
place to on a branch. This is often done when
one suffers from some sort of pain, and the pain
is said to go with these moving to anyone who
comes close to them. Now, there are some differences here
from the other examples we already talked about, because, you know,
Lincoln points out it's important to note that these practices

(33:18):
he just mentioned are targeted towards specific magical outcomes like
the curing of infertility or the healing of pain, rather
than a sort of free floating ritual without a specific
outcome object. But he notes again the similarity in the
association between hair and nails with plant life. Again, hair
and nails, and then trees and grass and branches. And

(33:40):
then finally one more example, and this one is probably
my favorite one, He draws attention to what is described
in an ancient text in the Avestan language, which is
associated with the ancient Iranian culture and is a foundational
religious text of Zoroastrianism. So this text is known as
the Vindidad or the vidv Dot. And in this writing

(34:04):
the character of Zoroaster also known as Zarathustra, and I
think Zarathustra is probably the earlier pronunciation. Zarathustra is speaking
to the wise Lord Ahura Mazda. And Zarathustra asks the
wise Lord why it is that the demon named Ayosha,
whose name literally means burning or destruction, Why Aosha harms

(34:28):
and punishes humans? And Ahura Mazda explains as follows, quote truly,
that righteous Zarathustra, when one arranges and cuts his hair
and clips his nails and then lets them fall into
holes in the earth or into furrows, for by these improprieties,
demons come forth, and from these improprieties monsters come forth

(34:52):
from the earth, which mortals call lice, and which devour
the grain in the fields and the clothes and the closets. Now,
when you must arrange and cut your hair and clip
your nails in the world Zarathustra. Hereafter you should bear
it ten steps from righteous men, twenty steps from fire,

(35:13):
thirty steps from water, and fifty steps from the barisman,
which is a bundle of sacred twigs. When it is
laid out. Then you should dig a pit here, a
disty deep in hard soil, and a vitasti deep in
soft soil. To that pit. You should bear the cuttings.
Then you should pronounce these words victorious Zarathustra. Now for me,

(35:38):
may Mazda make the plants grow by means of asha,
and Asha means right. Uh. You should plow three or
six or nine furrows for Zassura vira, meaning good dominion,
and you should recite the Ajuna Vira prayer three or
six or nine times. So here you're in in this

(35:59):
ancient z or asterie and text. You're getting this elaborate
ritual described for what you should do with the trimmings
from your hair and nails, and that there are actual,
like real demonic consequences if you do not follow these rituals. Uh.
And Lincoln points out several things he finds really interesting
about the explanation from the Wise Lord to Zarathustra. So,

(36:21):
first of all, there's the need to carry these clippings
from hair and nails away from sources of purification. Remember
the mentions, if you've got to carry him this far
away from righteous men, this far away from fire, from water,
and from the sacred bundle of twigs, because these are
all potentially sources of religious purity, and it seems like
there's a desire to avoid cross contamination of all that

(36:44):
purifying matter with impure matter that you've just trimmed off
of your body. But then there's also Lincoln points out
the use of troughs to demarcate a sacred space, and
then also the spontaneous production of monsters from the air
and nail trimmings that are disposed of incorrectly. And if
that sounds familiar based on stuff we were just talking about,

(37:06):
isn't that kind of similar to the supposed origin of
the noggle far the nail ship. So in the Ragnarok myth,
again from Norse religion, this ship is built out of
the nails of dead men as a result of their
nails not being trimmed and disposed of properly according to
the correct rituals. So if you do the wrong thing
with your nails, you make an accidental donation to the

(37:29):
construction of the demons galleon. Oh wow, So this is
this is fascinating cause that on one hand, you can
compare a lot of this with just kind of a
basic understanding that this is bio waste, and there's there
there's an appropriate and an inappropriate way to dispose of
bio waste. But then of course we have this this
whole magical domain as well of monsters and monstrous ships

(37:51):
rising up from sort of the accretion of these materials. Yeah,
and it's it's interesting. Lincoln doesn't really get into this
at all, but it's interesting to wonder about what role
um I don't know, like practical biological facts could play
into the origins of these practices. I don't know if
there is, for example, any kind of real disease risk

(38:12):
that you would get from from encountering the trimmings of
hair and nails from other people. Perhaps there's some, but
it seems like there would be less of that than
there would be from say, contact with blood or feces,
though I'm not sure. I mean, it's interesting that there's
a mention of lice and and one of the things
talking about being disposed of. Here is hair. Yeah, I mean,
you know, we might think, well, the hair is the

(38:34):
place where the lice live. Therefore, you know, less inclined
to pick up odd pieces of hair that we find
just out on the road. I mean, certainly, I think
we can all attest to, you know, being on a
walk or something, or and encountering a piece of someone's
hair or you know, hair clippings, or perhaps even a
fingernail or a toenail, and um, your first instinct is

(38:57):
not to pick that material up and look closer up
put it in your mouth. Yeah, yeah, that doesn't seem
like a natural thing to do. All right, On that note,
we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back. Alright, we're back. But we've been talking about
all these examples from all of you know, different parts
of the world of religious or magical significance that is

(39:20):
granted to trimmings from the hair and nails. And this
list is far from exhaustive. There are tons of examples
in practices all all over the place. But I think
just the examples we've talked about do help paint a
picture of the wide range of myths, beliefs, and practices
about hair and nails and the many similarities between them.
But the question is why why do so many different

(39:42):
cultures place this important ritual or religious significance on the
correct procedures for trimming and disposing of hair and nails. Now,
Lincoln in his paper goes over several possible answers to
this question that had been advanced by the time he
was writing in the seventies. And I would say the
list of possible explanations is also not going to be exhaustive,

(40:03):
but just to discuss a few possibilities. One is a
very influential theory that's best known for its articulation by
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Scottish anthropologist J. G.
Fraser in the Golden Bow. The Golden Bow has come
up on the show before. Uh. Fraser, of course is
very uh, you know, enormously influential, but also heavily criticized.

(40:25):
We can talk about that in a minute, um. But
Fraser argues that many of these practices have their roots
in a widespread ancient belief in what he would have
called the contagious branch of sympathetic magic. So the basic
idea here is that if something was once touching your body,
or especially if it was part of your body, that matter,

(40:48):
that object maintains a magical connection to your body even
after being physically separated from it, and thus it could
be used by a witch or a sorcerer to work
curses on you or magically control you in some way.
So if Jimmy the sorcerer gets hold of your hair
or nail trimmings, you are in for a very bad time.

(41:11):
And so in order to protect yourself from this kind
of sympathetic magic, you either had to destroy your hair
and nail trimmings or hide them very well, or maybe
also perform some kind of purging ritual to rid this
matter of its contagious magical power. And I think it's
interesting we still see evidence of this kind of magical
thinking even today. I mean, there there is magical thinking

(41:33):
that persists into the modern modern era whereby you can
have some kind of power over a person by by
possessing a personal artifact of there's or an object that
touched their body. You know, think about like doing magic
on someone by by possessing their hair brush. Right, There's
also interesting stuff about just how we think about the

(41:55):
contamination of of objects. Uh, there's a there's a there's
this study back in the nineteen nineties by social psychologist
Paul Rosen and um. This was actually recently mentioned on
an episode of the excellent radio show Hidden Brain. Uh.
They pointed out that they asked in this particular study,

(42:15):
they asked people if they would consider wearing hitler sweater
and uh, and they almost always said no. Uh. And
they said no even if they've been assured that it
had been washed, then it had that it had been torn,
you know, that it had been punished for being Hitler's sweater,
or that it had been symbolically cleansed by being worn
by say, mother Teresa before being passed on. And it

(42:39):
was the you know, this, this idea that that this,
this object, this sweater is is contaminated in a way
that cannot be uh punished away, cannot be cleansed away.
It just remains the impure in a completely irrational manner.
That is really funny. I mean, I can just say
for myself, like I I rationally do not believe in

(43:01):
any kind of sympathetic, contagious magic. So I don't think
like Hitler's evil would be contained in the physical sweater
in any way but still I wouldn't want to put
it on. Well, I have a lot of nitpicky questions
about that that scenario, like is it a good sweater?
Like is there anything notable notable about the sweater other
than it was Hitler's sweater? Because obviously I'm not going

(43:23):
to just wear a sweater because Hitler wore it? But
what ither I like? Was it a store and there
was like vintage stuff and there was like this really
nice sweater and I'm like, oh, this is nice. And
then I asked why is it so cheap? And they
tell me, oh, because this was Hitler's sweater. Then okay,
that might be different because I have some pre existing
interest in it. There's something about that sweater that's really neat.

(43:45):
I don't necessarily get that from this this limited scenario.
Uh you know, it's it's kind of implied that the
notable thing about the sweater is that it was Hitler's. Well,
you know, I actually can think of a reason I
wouldn't want to wear that sweater or own it, even
if even though I don't believe in any magical associations,
which is that I mean, I guess if you were
to wear a sweater that you knew had been warned

(44:06):
by Hitler, you'd probably end up thinking about Hitler all
the time. And you know, it's like, every time you
put it on, you have to be like, oh, yeah, Hitler,
and you just don't want Hitler in your brain that much. Yeah.
I mean, to a certain extent, one encounters this with
the you know, the struggle to separate say an artist
from the art. Uh. That can sort of be the

(44:26):
Hitler's sweater scenario in some cases, where you're like, Okay,
there's nothing wrong with the sweater, but I can't wear
it without thinking about Hitler. So I just don't think
I'm gonna wear this anymore. So it's worth noting that
Fraser's work on the origins of religions, again as I
said earlier, was both enormously influential and has come under
a lot of criticism. I you know, I'm not deep

(44:47):
on this, but I think one common criticism is that
Fraser would sometimes I think, kind of fudge or cherry
pick the ethnographic evidence he cited in order to make
things fit more cleanly into his broader theories. And you know,
this is something I think that a lot of writers
who have grand theories about human culture and society end
up being guilty of uh So, while the Golden Bow

(45:10):
remains a fascinating read, I would advocate that you shouldn't
rely on Fraser alone is your soul source for anything.
And in Lincoln's analysis of Fraser's thoughts on on the
origins of these uh these rituals for dealing with hair
and nails in in sympathetic contagious magic, Lincoln thinks that, well,
probably a lot of practices do have some kind of

(45:32):
roots like that, but he's not convinced that contagious sympathetic
magic lies at the root of all of these practices,
and certainly not the practices in the cultures that that
have some origins in the speakers of Proto Indo European,
because he has a different theory about that that we
can get into in just a minute. Lincoln also mentions
the work of an anthropologist named Mary Douglas, who is

(45:53):
a very influential twentieth century anthropologist. She proposed that uh
that within human religious thinking quote that the body is
a powerful model or image which can which can represent
any bounded system, and which most often represents society itself.
The limits of the body then represent the limits of society,

(46:16):
the points at which it encounters opposition and danger, and
must thus be treated with appropriate care. So she's arguing
basically that we symbolically make an an equivalence between our
bodies and the society at large, and that margins in
general are dangerous and ambiguous places, and thus the things
that come off of our body represent ambiguity at the

(46:38):
margins in the larger context of symbolic thinking about the society.
So you have to carefully regulate this marginal body matter.
And uh Lincoln in this paper, he he similarly thinks
this idea is interesting, that it might explain some things,
but he's got a different theory that is based in
the Proto Indo European creation myth. So, the Proto Indo

(47:01):
Europeans are a hypothesized prehistoric culture that we know about
primarily through reconstruction of their language, which is a direct
ancestor to a huge number of historical and existing languages
throughout Asia and Europe. Just for example, English has a
number of roots in different languages, including but not limited

(47:23):
to Germanic languages and Romance languages, but both Germanic and
Romance languages themselves have roots in Proto Indo European language,
so you know, there was a root language that influenced
these derivative languages that developed in you know, different ways,
and then those derivative languages came back and in a
way combined to influence other languages like English. The Proto

(47:46):
Indo European people left no written records, but linguists have
been able to reconstruct a lot of their language by
tracing back similar word roots in a widespread catalog of languages. Uh. Similarly,
scholars have tried to reconstruct other things about them. We
don't know a lot of things for sure, but they
probably lived somewhere around southern Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, sort

(48:11):
of between and to the north of the Black Sea
and the Caspian Sea, probably a few thousand years b c.
We don't have any direct records of their religious beliefs,
their myths, and their practices, but scholars, including Bruce Lincoln,
have used clues from other descendent religions to try as
best as possible to reconstruct elements such as their creation myth,

(48:36):
and Lincoln explains his hypothetical reconstruction of this creation myth
as follows, quote, this myth, as I have established elsewhere,
told how the world and all the creatures in it
were established by the first act of sacrifice, in the
primordial offering, the first priest Manu meaning man, dismembered the

(49:00):
first king Yemo meaning twin, and from his body built
up the material world. Now, certain steps in the process
of creation were described in this myth, steps whereby the
body of the primordial victim became the world. Thus his
skull became the heavens, his eyes the sun and moon,

(49:23):
his blood the seas, and what is most important for
the issue at hand, his hair became the plants and trees,
and so Lincoln quotes. He goes on to quote a
bunch of related ancient religious texts that serve as evidence
for his reconstruction of the myth in this way. Um,
And of course we don't know that this is actually

(49:45):
what their creation myth was like, but it seems like
a reasonable approximation of what their creation myth might have
been like, given what we know from a lot of
other religions that seem related to it. And this is,
of course, I mean, you can immediately think of other
samples of creation myths in which the parts of the
world are made out of the body of a slain

(50:07):
primordial foe. Think about the ways that in say the
Enema a leash, that the body of tiamat the dragon,
you know, the sea monster gets turned into the you know,
the mountains and the sky and the seas and all
that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, this is something you
do see in a number of different mythologies like that,
if nothing else you could even summarize just to say
that the body, the primordial body of being such as

(50:31):
this are important in the way that they are then
taken apart and then redistributed in those parts become important
aspects of the world that follows right. And so Lincoln
says that, you know, if his reconstruction of the Proto
Indo European creation myth is is basically correct or is
on the right track, that a lot of religious practices

(50:52):
of round disposal of hair and nails in cultures that
are in part descended from the Proto Indo Europeans could
be rooted in a recapitulation of this creation myth. And
this draws on a strain of thinking that I think
in some way is associated with the Eliade. For example,
that a lot of religious rituals are in a way

(51:13):
supposed to be a re enactment of a foundational myth.
Yeah yeah, the idea that that that that everything we
do is only important in the archaic sense if we
are recreating something from our founding myths. Right, So that's
ultimately Lincoln's theory here what what he thinks best explains

(51:34):
the widespread nature of these these practices about the disposal
of hair and nails. That he thinks, when you dispose
of hair and nail clippings in the correct way, you
are furthering the life of the world's vegetation in keeping
with the creation story. The sacrifice here is your own body,
and the sacrifice of hair. Originally, he thinks hair and

(51:57):
the nails were sort of added onto the hair. Sacrifice
feeds the trees and the grasses the same way that
this primordially slain foe originally created all that vegetation. And uh.
And then Lincoln says, the other half of the coin
is quote. When such care is not taken, when disposal
is not a ritual and does not repeat the acts

(52:19):
of a mythic model, the reverse can be the effect.
For if proper disposal serves to create the cosmos, then
improper disposal can de create it, or to put it negatively,
conserved to create chaos out of cosmos. And think of
the examples again we discussed here the destruction of crops
by vice demons from the Avestan text, you know, the

(52:41):
ancient Zoroastrian text, or the creation of the noggle far
the ship that brings monsters to deliver the violent into
the world, and the destruction of the gods that's made
out of the nails of dead men improperly cared for.
So obviously, I mean, I would say in my final thoughts, obviously,
Lincoln idea here about the origins of these practices could

(53:03):
be wrong, but at the very least it provides some
really interesting scaffolding for understanding ways in which complex symbolic
religious thinking might enter into what we would consider an
extremely mundane grooming practice. How uh, it's it's possible that
just clipping your nails and cutting your hair too many

(53:23):
people might have cosmic significance because of the myths that
informed their worldview. Yeah, this is this is all very fascinating.
You know. It gets to the sort of the ambiguity
of what our nails and our as well as our hair, Like, well,
what what they really are? And and then yeah, what
are we supposed to do with them once we once
they leave our body? And then what sort of ideas

(53:44):
do we end up building up about uh those things
and our identity and our place in the cosmos? Yeah,
totally so maybe uh maybe if if you're somebody who
has a say a partner or roommate or family member
who gets mad when you just like clip your toe
nails in a willy lily fashion, they shoot all over
the room and you do not collect them in a

(54:05):
clean and tidy way for proper disposal, think about this
interpretation of the proto Indo European creation myth. What if
what if you are somehow creating chaos out of order
by doing so, and you are summoning demons up from
the earth. Yeah, yeah, indeed, I think they're there. There's
probably like a wide variety of different takes on this

(54:27):
as well. Like I think I've run across the examples
of a Chinese superstition um that at least exists in
some places where you are not supposed to trim your
toe nails at night while it's dark outside um or
not to trim them outside at night for my own part,
I mean, I prefer to to trim my my nails
outside if I can. I feel like they just simplifies

(54:49):
the whole scenario, you know, Um, you don't have to
worry about finding them if they go flying or anything
like that. Now, one thing that comes to my mind is,
you know, in terms of the the parts of our
bodies that we leave behind on regular basis, I mean,
humans have it fairly simple, you know. Well it's just
the most mostly just the nails and the hair, and

(55:10):
but and yet we still managed to build up all
these fabulous ideas to construct demonships of the mind. Um,
Imagine what it would be like if we if we
like molted um and left behind an exoskeleton that resembled ourselves,
you know, sort of like the cicada shell that is
left behind. Or imagine that we make something along the

(55:31):
lines of squid that leave behind us a pseudomorph, you know,
a cloud of of ink that is in the shape
of their body to fool predators, that sort of thing.
Imagine what sort of like strange ideas about self and
former self. Uh, such beings, intelligent beings might have. Yeah.
Can you imagine the religion and the religious practices of

(55:53):
intelligent arthropods that had to molten have a whole body
shell that was left behind? Oh? Man, that that would
be good. That's that's that's something good for your sci
fi novel there, Yeah, I mean what shape would it take?
Would it be? Would there be like a would you
have like special burial grounds where all of your your
various um uh, you know exoskeletons go once you've morphed

(56:15):
out of them. Um do do famous uh crab people
did do their exoskeleton moldings wind up in a museum somewhere?
I don't know. There's so many questions to ask. As always, Uh,
if you've run across any examples in science fiction or
fantasy to deal with these sort of issues, we'd love
to hear from you. We we always love your to

(56:36):
hear advice from listeners on old works of science fiction
and fantasy or new works as well. Um. Likewise, we
touched on a lot of different traditions and cultures in
this episode especially, so I would love to hear from
absolutely anybody who has insight on this. Uh, particularly with
with with long nails for example. Uh, do you keep

(56:57):
your nails long? Have you ever kept your nails long? Um?
You know, right in. I'd like to to know how
that has impacted your life or not impacted your life. Likewise,
if there's a particular tradition in your culture or your
culture of origin, I would like to hear about that
as well. And certainly, as Joe mentioned, if there are
any particular practices that you engage in, either culturally or

(57:19):
just sort of as a as a as a quirk
of your own individual nature regarding your your your nail
and hair trimmings. Uh, we would love to hear what
they are totally. In the meantime, if you would like
to listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
you can find us wherever you find your podcasts and
wherever that happens to be. We just asked that you rate, review,

(57:39):
and subscribe. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio
producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get
in touch with us to answer any of the questions
Robert just listed, or if you'd like to suggest a
topic for the future. You've got any other feedback on
this episode, you can email us at contact that's Stuff
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(58:06):
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