From the Vault: Funeral for a Bug

How do insects factor into our traditions of death -- and how do insects handle their own burials? Find out in this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind as Robert and Joe discuss ants, termites, Virgil, ancient civilizations, bees and more. (originally published 1/21/2021)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time for a classic from the vault. This one originally
aired on January one. It was called Funeral for a Bug.
I think this was all literally about funerals for bugs?
Or will we get into some stuff about the Roman
poet Virgil. Yeah, yeah, and even know Virgil's there, It's

(00:27):
going to be a party, So so here we go,
let's have a listen. Welcome just about to blow your mind,
the production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and

(00:48):
I'm Joe McCormick, and today I wanted to start off
by talking about a weird legend about the Roman poet
Virgil and an insect funeral. Uh, Robert, you ready for
some Virgil talk? Okay? So, So Virgil was a poet
who lived in the first century BC during the Augustine period,

(01:09):
so early Imperial Rome. And uh, you might know him
best from his most famous work, the epic poem The Aenead,
which is about sort of the founding lineage of Rome
and the adventures of the Trojan hero Aeneas, who after
the Trojan War, travels from Troy and eventually becomes the
ancestor of the Roman people. Virgil is often considered one

(01:31):
of the greatest Latin poets, and he was wildly popular
during his own lifetime. Uh you know, he he received
commendations from from kings and the wealthy, and and you know,
everybody thought like, wow, this this guy has just got
the juice. And I had Virgil on my mind a
lot last year because Rachel and I were rereading Dante's

(01:53):
Divine Comedy. And if you'll recall, of course, Virgil is
Dante the pilgrim's guy through hell and purgatory in the
Divine Comedy. So the spirit of Virgil he's been living
out the centuries in Limbo because though he was a
very virtuous man, he's one of the virtuous Pagans. He
was never baptized as a Christian, so he can't go

(02:13):
to heaven. He's got to hang out in this sort
of anti chamber of hell where everybody sits around sighing
because nothing interesting is ever happening to them. I have
to admit that I tend to when anybody mentions Virgil
that's the first place my mind goes is Dante's Inferno,
which is it's probably not fair. It's like if you
were to mention the name of Socrates and there was
someone were to go, oh, yeah, yeah, he's in Bill

(02:35):
and Ted's Excellent Adventure. That's exactly That's exactly where I
knew you were going with that. Villa and Ted. Yeah,
um yeah, that that is pretty good because well though
it's slightly different because it's not a it's he's not
at all parodied in the Divine Comedy. In fact, I
would say it's exactly the opposite. In the Divine Comedy.

(02:56):
He is. He's revered, Yes, he's he's reimagined as this
like superhuman wizard. For for Dante, he uh, Virgil is
the embodiment of wisdom and reason. So for the intended
readers of the Divine Comedy, we're supposed to understand that
Virgil is like a ten out of ten platinum level

(03:16):
cool beast. He is just like this ultimate wizard of
knowledge and about half of the state you do remember
how like like basically every other time Dante talks in
the first two books of The Divine Comedy, it's just
to say like Virgil, you are so right, I would
never doubt your wisdom. Tell me more, you know. And
and it kind of stinks in because I remember when

(03:37):
we got to the end of the Purgatory. Oh, and
Virgil does not get to move on to to Heaven
with Dante. He has to stay behind and Beatrice takes
him on from there. We're really mad that Virgil didn't
get to go to heaven. Yeah, yeah, no, I mean
so much, so much time is devoted to him, and
it also so much is stripped away at that point.
You know, it's like if it's hard to follow Dante

(03:58):
and into pared Ceo, just because you know that there
there aren't gonna be any demons uh playing trumpets with
their bombs or anything. There's not going to be yeah,
you know, and monsters so much, and Virgil is not
going to be there. So it's it's you know, it's
part three in a series is always tough. Yeah, I agree,
you know, the trilogy is a hard sell to to

(04:20):
complete with dignity. Uh. And but I think for modern
readers that sense of injustice about Virgil that is interpreted, uh,
you know by the characters in the Inferno, as you know,
perfect divine justice. It's the one person version of the
dynamic that plays out throughout the whole thing. Where as
they're going through hell, it just seems like, wow, this
is really unfair. Yeah. But anyway, long before Virgil was

(04:43):
guiding Dante up the Mountain of Purgatory and his postmortem
shade form, people were telling lots of legends about his life,
and one of those legends is that once at his
home in Rome, Virgil built a two womb and held
an extravagant funeral for a dead fly, like a fly

(05:05):
as in the insect with six legs and wings. Uh.
This story is very probably untrue, and we'll get to
why that is in a bit, but first I wanted
to explore some of the details, and for this I
was reading an article by George Pendall in Cabinet Magazine
in two thousand seven called Virgil's Fly, and he describes
the legend in the following way quote. Held in the

(05:28):
grounds of Virgil's home on Rome's Esqualine Hill, the funeral
attracted the great and good of the city. Dirges were
sung and tributes read. Virgil's patron Mycenas delivered a lengthy
and moving eulogy to the departed insect, and Virgil was
himself said to have uttered a few of his exquisite
verses over the tiny carcass A tomb had been erected

(05:50):
and the lifeless body of the fly was placed within it,
to the whales and moans of the professional mourners. So
lavish were the commemorations that the cost was stimated at
over eight hundred thousand sister ss. So that's the gist.
According to this story, Virgil and his close friends spend
huge amounts of money and effort to celebrate the life

(06:12):
and memory of an insect, concluding with the insects burial
in a marble tomb. Why on earth would this be? Well?
The legend itself also contains an answer to this, So
to read from Pendle again quote but the reason for
the funeral was not due to extravagance, eccentricity, or even emotion.
Having defeated Julius Caesar's assassins at the Battle of Philippi,

(06:35):
the second Triumvirate was at that very moment engaged in
confiscating the estates of the rich and dividing them among
the war veterans. Returning from the battlefield. Only one exception
was given. If the estate held a burial plot, it
was not to be touched by burying his housefly. Virgil
saved his house. So here it has transformed into a

(06:59):
classic one of our favorite genres, loophole fiction. Yes, remember
when we did the Anthology of Horror segment in October
on deals with the Devil, and about how many of
these stories, I think, especially later deal with the Devil's
stories less so in the earlier ones. They're about somebody
saving the day by figuring out a loophole that they

(07:19):
can exploit to get out of their end of a
pact with Satan. And I wonder, again, what's so appealing
about this kind of plot resolution. It seems like maybe
this would be the kind of thing that's especially interesting
to too people who live in a more litigious kind
of culture. Could be. I can also imagine that if you're,
if you're, if you've ever taken advantage of a loophole,

(07:40):
it probably helps out if you demonize the legal authority
to some degree, if you make them into a devil,
because in all these stories, it's the loophole that saves
your soul. Whereas um, I think there are plenty of
cases in in real in real life where the loophole
might have the opposite effect. You Right, the loophole is

(08:01):
the is the refuge of of less savory individuals at times, right,
cheaters and scammers with crafty lawyers to help help them
get out of trouble by exploiting some kind of you know,
loophole in the wording of something. Is it? Isn't that
always like, that's always a really frustrating thing when somebody
uh evades the obvious spirit of justice by exploiting the

(08:25):
exact wording of something, you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
um yeah, So I can't have a wonder if there's
there's some connection there. You know, you make your stories
about cheating the devil with your loopholes, and then you
you feel better about the sort of implied devil that
you're cheating through your own loophole usage. Well, it's actually funny,
there is uh. In this Pendle article, he also talks

(08:47):
about a medieval legend about Virgil. And we'll get into
more of these legends about Virgil's life as we go on,
but one of these medieval legends about Virgil is that
Virgil freeze a d men from there's like a devil
trapped in a bottle, and Virgil lets it out so
that it will empower him to do something great. I
think maybe he uses its powers to to get a

(09:10):
long road paved or something like that. But anyway, once
he has has used this demon power, now I think
the demon is supposed to get his into the bargain
is going to do something really bad. But first Virgil's like, wow,
you know you're so powerful. Could you show me again
how you fit your frame into that bottle? So the
devil does, and then he corks it back up, so
he gets to have his magic and keep the genie

(09:32):
in the bottle as well. Oh that's great. I don't
know how to climb into an oven. And I've never
sat on a shovel. That's some jack frost. Jack frost,
that's from some ivanushka right there. So in that spirit
that there's obviously this interesting process by which after Virgil's death,
remember he lived in the first century b C. In

(09:53):
the centuries after his death, his poetry was greatly admired
and revered, but not just his poetry, he himself was
greatly admired and revered and took on the aspects of
a saint in many ways, even though he had been
a pagan. Uh. There's an interesting note in in his
Cabinet article where Pendle shares this fact that kind of
helps make more sense of the almost absurd reverence shown

(10:15):
for Virgil in the Divine Comedy in these in centuries
after his death, many Romans and and later Italians in
the Middle Ages thought of Virgil as possessing a literally
supernatural or near supernatural genius, that there was something magical
about his poetry, the same way people would feel there
is magic in the holy text of their religion. And

(10:36):
one one clear illustration of this is that in the
second century CE, under the Antonines, Uh, there had arisen
this form of divination. And we've we've done episodes on
divination in the past. You know, there are various ways
of trying to sort of get turned some sort of
noise or random input into an interpreted type of information

(10:58):
about hidden knowledge you know, what's going to happen the future,
or some other thing you want to know but can't uh.
And and so the Virgil's poetry was itself used for divination,
and so people would randomly select passages from the inneed
and then read those passages as some kind of prediction
about their future or statement about some other kind of

(11:19):
hidden knowledge. Uh Pendle writes, quote, it is said that
these sortes Virgiliana or Virgilian lots were consulted by both
the emperor's Hadrian and Severus, and with each consultation, Virgil's
memory began to take on an increasingly mystical air. But
anyway to get back to the story about Virgil and
the fly, So again, this story is almost certainly not true.

(11:41):
There are elements of it that fit within known history.
Apparently Virgil did actually have a house on the esqual
Line Hill uh the Second Triumph for it was actually
engaged in seizing a states so they could be given
to returning veterans from military campaigns. But that's just the
the accurate stuff about the setting. The main reason in
the story is probably untrue is simply that there is

(12:02):
no contemporary evidence or record of it. Uh. Nobody anywhere
near Virgil's lifetime mentions anything about it. It only shows
up in much much later sources. Rather, it seems to
be one of those legends that accumulates on a you know,
sort of gloamse onto a revered historical figure due to
a chain of associative thinking. So what's the chain, Well,

(12:26):
that brings us to a an absurd and absurdly interesting
Latin poem called the q Lex, which means I think
you can interpret it as like the gnat or the fly.
Q Lex is also a genus name for certain types
of mosquitoes, so I think it means like a flying insect.
And so this is a poem that was published sometime

(12:48):
after Virgil's death, and it was attributed to him as
part of his juvenile Yad. It was widely said, okay,
so this is something that Virgil actually wrote, but he
wrote it when it was young, and that's that's why
it's maybe not as good as his other poetry. Modern scholars,
I think mostly really doubt that Virgil actually wrote this.
It would technically be a poem in the pastoral genre.

(13:10):
So that's poetry about the supposedly blissful, uncomplicated life of
people in the countryside. It's usually about shepherds or herdsmen,
often a lot of references to flowers and naps and
clouds and cool waters, the idols of pan And it
made me think about how you know, So for hundreds
of years, the pastoral poem from the Classical period, even

(13:32):
into into the Renaissance was and well, actually i'd say
even into the Romantic poetry era. There there is this
tendency to fall back on this classic genre of stuff
about the fields and the simple life of shepherds and
all that, uh and and how great it is. And
I wonder if this is sort of realized in modern culture,

(13:55):
in our desire for like, uh, simple, aesthetically gentle content
like the Great British bake Off. Is that the pastoral
poetry of the modern era? Yeah, yeah, perhaps you know,
um just sort of like soothing and non offensive. Perhaps, uh,
you know, just just you know, it's not even really escapism.

(14:16):
It's just I mean, I guess to a certain extent
it is escapism. But yeah, perhaps I can see that connection.
I don't know it connected in my brain. But so
there's a plot in this poem, the Coolex. It is
widely regarded as absolutely ridiculous, but here is how it goes.
A shepherd goes out in the morning to take his
flocks to pasture, and there's some standard pastoral poetry musing

(14:39):
on how the simple life of a shepherd living in
the fields is so much better than the fraud life
of a rich man, because it's better to throw your
body down in the tender grass and lay your head
among the flower buds than to be consumed with the
grief and the greed that curdles the hearts of the
rich and powerful. So the shepherd is living this nice,

(14:59):
ide dilick life. He takes his flock to a fountain
in the woods, and there he falls asleep, lying in
the shade. But while he's asleep, a giant, horrible snake
slithers up. It's coming to the fountain where it likes
to lie in the mud, and it decides it's going
to bite the shepherd in his sleep and kill him.
But just before the snake attacks, a gnat buzzes down

(15:22):
and stings the shepherd on the eye, and this wakes
him up, and the shepherd crushes the gnat, but it
also wakes him up just in time to see the
snake and to save himself, so he beats the snake
to death with a piece of wood, which I would say,
in reality, is almost never necessary. Even if a snake
is dangerous, you can run away from it right, But

(15:44):
this is a storybook snake, and you know how they do.
They do things like wrap around you and tie you
to a tree or swile you hole. So um, you know,
within the context of the story, maybe it's justified, right.
So yeah, he gets this. This piece of wood beats
the snake into a bloody pulp. And then later the
shepherd goes to sleep again and the ghost of the
nat appears. It comes to him in a dream, and

(16:06):
the gnat choose him out for not being grateful. He's like,
why do you crush me? I saved your life. And
the shepherd wakes up and he feels remorse for what
he's done, and he builds a tomb in honor of
the gnat, and then decorates the tomb with flowers and
fruit and so to read briefly from the tomb section
of the poem, it says for him at length, did

(16:28):
heedful care the toil begun completing, gathered up the piled material,
and with a plenteous mound of earth, a tomb arose
in circle shaped around it, placing stone of marble smooth,
he plants it, mindful of his constant care and growing
here throughout the brilliant ring a can't this is? And
bashful roses too, and every kind of violet. And then

(16:51):
there are a bunch of lines about flowers. I'm gonna
skip towards the end of that flower section. Um the
admiranthe is here, and great switch, large do cluster ever
flowering piccres to Narcissus isn't absent there in whom his
beauty's radiance from cupids fire for limbs, his own begot
a hot desire, and all the flowers that blooming seasons.

(17:14):
No with these the mound is planted, or then on
the front is placed the inscription, which asserts the letters,
saying it with silent speech, Oh, tiny gnat, the keeper
of the flocks, don't pay to the deserving such a
thing the duty of a ceremonial tomb in payment for
the gift of life to him. All right, Well, there

(17:36):
you have it, a poem about honoring the the gnat
that saved him from the snake when he was sleeping
on the job. This is something I'm actually confused about.
Our shepherds supposed to just sleep while they're watching their flocks,
or they're not supposed to be watching. I don't know,
but you do see it is part of that pastoral
sort of image, you know, like we've all encountered some

(17:59):
version of that four which I'm guessing most of that
is just, Yeah, it's pining for a this um, this
presumed idyllic lifestyle in the country where it's like, oh,
you're just looking after sheep. It's just like a nap
all day. That's not just all it is, glossing over
all the other stuff that comes harding a shepherd. Yeah.
But anyway, once again it seems that modern scholars do

(18:22):
not accept that Virgil actually wrote this poem. Virgil did
write pastoral poetry. For example, in his ecologues. There's this
great part of in the i think the tenth eclogue
where he concludes with a wonderful passage decided bedtime uh,
where he writes, come let us rise. The shade is
wont to be baneful to singers. Baneful is the shade

(18:43):
cast by the juniper crops, sickened two in the shade,
now homeward, having fed your phil eves, star is rising,
go my she goats go. Okay. I guess that's that's
pretty good. But but yeah, if you were just going
off of this passage. I don't know if you'd you'd
really buy Dante's hype for virgil Um. Well, I mean,

(19:06):
she part is nice, that is the good part, and
it is in translation. I think, you know, there's all
kinds of stuff. I mean, for every type of poetry
and translation, there's a lot of stuff that's lost. But anyway,
so the Coolex, there's a good chance it was written
by someone else and then published under Virgil's name, and
it may well have had some kind of other meaning,

(19:26):
like a veiled meaning as a political allegory, though I
didn't follow the threads on that. But despite the doubt
about the authorship, the poem seems to have given rise
to all kinds of bizarre fly legends associated with virgil Um.
So to read a segment from Pendel that I thought
this was amazing quote. One of the most popular Neapolitan

(19:49):
myths held that Virgil had created a bronze fly the
size of a frog and placed it on one of
the gates of Naples. The talisman remained there for eight years,
during which time no flies could enter the city. In
a similar vein, armies attacking Naples were said to have
been harassed by swarms of flies sent after them by

(20:09):
the poet. The fly would become Virgil's magical familiar over
the ensuing years, never far from any tale of his exploits,
and that was not all. Possibly due to this control
of pestilence, Virgil was said to have created baths that
cured all illnesses, and a butcher's block on which meat
stayed fresh for six weeks. No longer renowned as the

(20:30):
master of grammar and philosophy, Virgil's achievements were put down
to his mathematical knowledge. In only a few centuries, Virgil
had gone from being the preeminent poet of the Roman
Empire to a Neapolitan enchanter with the pensiont for magical insects.
And there's all kinds of fabulous stuff about medieval legends
about Virgil becoming more of a necromancer type figure, that

(20:53):
he's got all these strange magical powers, like that you
know that he commands the insects of the air and
cast them down upon his enemies or can save you
from them, and uh, and I love that that that
this was like, I don't know if there was anything
in his actual life to associate him with flies. It's
only this poem that he probably didn't even actually right

(21:15):
and isn't actually very good, that was attributed to him
later that gave rise to all these strange stories. Wow,
that's something. Yeah, I don't I don't recall it, you know,
picking up on the the idea of the wizard Virgil.
But but now I'm fascinated by it. Well. I think
one thing is by the Middle Ages he had these
broadly understood wizard associations, but I think Dante was sort

(21:38):
of moving back against that and and saying like, no,
let's fit him more into the Christian cosmology and say
that he's more this beacon of reason and wisdom in
the pagan world. But we do see this wizardization taking
more hold with other figures like Roger Bacon comes to mind,
and we've talked about this on the show before. Oh yeah,

(22:00):
I remember in one of our previous episodes we sort
of concluded that maybe one of the greatest contributions of
Roger Bacon as a as a you know, man of
great learning in the Middle Ages and the thirteenth century
was that he was very open to sources of knowledge
from all over the world. So a lot of what
he did was say, like apply things that he learned

(22:20):
from texts from the medieval Muslim world, like the texts
of Vanel Haytham and other things, or like uh, studying
objects brought to him from from countries afar. So he
was sort of a good collector of knowledge from many places.
But somehow gets this, I don't know, gets this label
affixed to him, like he's some kind of wonder worker,

(22:40):
which he wasn't really in life, right, I mean, he
was it seems like he was a very impressive individual,
but yeah, he's begome. He instantly becomes elevated to like
arch alchemist status in some of these tellings, you know,
he takes on all the guys of some sort of
a mad scientist in a in a like a serial adventure.

(23:06):
The main reason I think I was originally inspired to
look into this topic and do this episode about insects
and funerals was when I read an interesting article on
Atlas Obscura that was also by George Pendel. The same
writer is that Cabinet magazine article about Virgil and the Fly,
and this article is on the broader topic of insects
and funerary rights. Yeah, this was a good, good article

(23:26):
by by Pendell the fly Master here um. He touches
on numerous associations between insects and death. Particularly, the author
points out quote necklaces of stone carved flies to ward
off maggots worn by the ancient Egyptian dead. Uh. The
idea of being here that the maggots were seen as

(23:47):
a threat to one's car or bo you know, the
like the vital one of the vital essences and in
the body, in the individual. And um. I found this interesting.
So the first thing I did was I looked up
to see of if Jeane Kritzky had written on this.
Jane Kritzky, of course, is a former guest on the show.
He wrote a book called The Tears of Ray about uh,

(24:08):
the ancient Egyptian use of bees and honey and how
they treated bees and honey both um, in terms of
just creating products as well as uh, you know, magical uses, etcetera.
I was thinking about that episode and about Jeane Kritzky
when I was recording a recent episode of the Artifact
I did, which was about ancient Egyptian head cones. Uh.

(24:29):
These if you haven't listened to that artifact yet, I
thought it was a lot of fun, so maybe you
should check it out. But the short version is, there
are these white cones depicted on top of people's heads
and a lot of ancient Egyptian art, but nobody had
ever found any physical evidence that they existed in reality.
So there's been this debate about what were these cones?
Did they ever actually exist in the world, or are
they some kind of artistic convention and uh the uh

(24:53):
and and in recent years there has been an excavation
that uncovered physical examples of these head cones for the
first time at a couple of graves in a Marna
in Egypt. But unlike some of the theories in which
these cones were made of like perfumed animal fat, these
cones were made out of biological wax, which I knew
immediately when I read that, Oh, that's gotta be bees

(25:13):
wax because of the role of bees wax in ancient
Egyptian culture, and sure enough that that seems like what
they almost definitely were made of. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, Well,
we've covered already. We've covered a few different Egyptian topics
in the artifacts, so uh, so definitely checked with out.
I'm sure we'll do more, but but in this cause
I turned to Jeane Kritsky's work, and particularly I looked

(25:34):
at a book that he wrote with an author by
the name of Ron Cherry titled Insect Mythology. And so
they get into this event. They point out that in
ancient Egypt the fly, first of all, it was also
a symbol of valor, because what does a pesky fly do. Well,
it'll it'll move in, it'll bite you, try to bite you.
You you drive it away by swatting your hand around.

(25:55):
But then what does it do? It comes back. It's persistent,
and therefore it is a symbol of valor. Wow, I've
never thought of that before. But yeah, when the fly
comes in to sting at you, it's like a human
going up against a dragon or a giant. Yeah, And
so we have this this one example in particular, or
a queen Ahotep gave her sons, three of her sons

(26:16):
golden flies to honor their fights against an adversary. So
I thought that was interesting, and you can actually look
up examples of this because I believe uh the ideas.
These three flies were then buried with her, and then
we're part of the the treasures that were on earth
with her body. And yeah, they're these beautiful golden fly ornaments,

(26:37):
but they stand for valor. Now as for the funeral necklace, yes,
this seems accurate as well. So in the Egyptian climate,
um flies would take to the dead rather quickly, and
freshly hatched flies would be seen leaving the body before
embalming could be completely finished. Um. These flies were seen

(26:57):
as again the individual's call or bob leaving the body.
So the fly necklaces were away to essentially put flies
back on the body to return this leaked car to
the deceased. Oh wow yeah, yeah, so and and this
is really interesting as well. The car or ba is
sometimes represented as a bird with a human head, but

(27:20):
you also see versions of it they consist of a
fly with a human head. So the the authors here, um,
Chriskey and and Cherry, but they point out that uh,
you know, there was there is, at least at the
time this was written, which I want to say it
was uh a couple of decades ago, um at the time,
and I imagine still to this day, there's the surviving
folk belief that certain varieties of flies with a greenish

(27:45):
or bluish metallic body were not to be killed as
these contained or were likely to contain the spirit of
someone who had died. So and then they say this
would just be one of many modern beliefs that are
seemingly tied to the traditions and beliefs from the age
of the Pharaohs. But the idea of a fly with
a human head certainly also makes me think of some

(28:07):
some twentieth century cinematic literature. Yeah, yeah, and it brings
to mind the movie The Fly, which ends with that
that scene, well where you help me seeing with the
fly with the human head, which we we had to
stand corrected on. That is not Vincent Price whose heads
on that fly. It's a different actor. He plays like
his brother or something. Yeah. But but yeah, so it

(28:30):
brings to mind hum a modern monster movie. But it's
also interesting because on a physical level this is correct.
There is something of the departed body anyway in the
substance of the emergent fly. There is a connection to
be made. Yeah, the chemical energy from yes, exactly. So
again the idea is is not so much to keep
flies away, but it's like to return what is leaked

(28:53):
out to the body through symbolic flies. Now, as for
flies in general, Chrisky and Cherry point out that the
flies are often associated with death just throughout global myth cycles,
and they rolled through a number of examples in their book,
you know, like the Greek damon of decomposition uh urinomos
uh and this was depicted often as either a vulture

(29:14):
or a fly, you know, a consumer of carry on.
Other fly demons can be found as well, such as
of course be Elzebub, at least in his demonic interpretations
later he was originally a Syrian god. You have the
the Yazads and Nassau of Zoroastrianism, and Nassau they describe
as quote the demon us of dead matter, and flies

(29:35):
were also a symbol of torment for early European Christians.
The god Loki was said to have taken on the
form of a fly in order to pass through a
key hole, and this transformation the transformation of one in
one's body into that of a fly. This has also
been associated with which is they write, in Hungarian traditions. However,
in all this they point out to outstanding exceptions to

(29:57):
the negative roles of mythological fly eyes. And they're pretty
interesting because these kind of take me back to what
you've shared from that poem that has been attributed to Virgil. Uh.
So the first example is big Biter. Big Biter is
an overlord of fish in what I believe is currently
known as the Innu tribe of this is a Canadian

(30:20):
Um First Nations people. And this uh, this spirit would
have taken the form of a fly and chrisky and
uh and cherry right that he quote hovered over the
fisherman in order to see how his subjects were being treated. Occasionally,
an overlord would bite the fisherman to remind him that
the fish were in his custody and to warn against wastefulness.

(30:43):
So so I I like that the idea of I
also it just kind of feels like it's kind of
illustrates the the you know, the universal experience of fishing.
You know, you're perhaps gonna, you know, gaze off into space.
You're you're gonna be bit by insects uh and then
maybe have to confront the possibility of wastefulness. Um. But anyway,

(31:05):
another one is big Fly, and this one is in
the Navajo religion, and it is a mentor or helper
that mediates between humans and the gods. And so it'll
it'll frequently show up in stories and uh and appear
to a hero and tell them how to proceed. And
so that's the example that reminds me specifically of what
we see in that poem attributed to Virgil. Yes, not

(31:26):
just as a helper who who intervenes to save his life,
but one who later appears to teach him a lesson. Yeah. Now,
one thing, of course, that that they drive home in
this book is that it's worth remembering that other insects
had entirely different roles in ancient Egyptian traditions. The scare
a beetle, for instance, symbolizes perpetual life and renewal. Uh
Kepri is in fact the dawn manifestation of of raw

(31:49):
or ray, the sun god, and uh derived this is
derived from kept her, which meant to become or to
be transformed. And so the reason for this is twofold.
According to Geraldine Pinch in the book Egyptian Mythology, first
dung beetles rolling spheres of dung were compared to the
movement of the sun across the sky. Uh. You know,

(32:09):
something that would be carried by the gods in the
sky barge uh and Secondly, the sight of young beetles
emerging from buried dung balls. This raised ideas of self generation,
and so these acts of transformation could have applied, would
have applied rather to more than just birth and death,
but also to the various rights of passage in one's life,

(32:31):
so not just being born, not just dying, but also
you know, growing up, changing who you are, this sort
of perpetual act of emerging and becoming. Oh, I like
this because uh, I think it's something I've seen from
Egyptologists in recent years, who I think sometimes emphasized that
older schools of Egyptology would would sometimes over emphasize the

(32:55):
the prevalence of thinking about death and the afterlife in
a scient Egyptian culture, and that this might just be
a result of the bias in what types of artifacts
are preserved for us to look at to get a
sense of their culture. And so so yeah, I like
the idea of like seeing how it has a lot
to do with birth and life itself as well. Yeah, yeah,

(33:17):
this is this is a thing that I actually just
touched on and one of the Artifact episodes having to
deal with the kiro To. I'm not sure if this
has come out yet by the time this episode publishes.
But at any rate, it has to do with an
element um an artifact that could certainly be interpreted is
something that is just about the dead, but upon closer examination,
is far more about the living and the experience of

(33:39):
living people. Yeah. Um, so, I think that's an important
thing to keep in mind. Even though it is fascinating
to know all these things about ancient Egyptian funerary rituals
and their beliefs about death in the afterlife, you can
easily get this mistake and assumption that, like in ancient Egypt,
all anyone did was die and be entombed and think
about death. And obviously that can't be true. I mean,

(34:00):
they were human beings, and they were they were subject
to all the other whims and obsessions of human life
now and in terms of their other relationships with with
insects and arachnids uh scorpions, for instance, arachnids were considered
it just enemies of humanity, but they were also associated
with the goddess circuit who who protected the body of

(34:21):
the deceased, as well as the canopic jars that would
contain organs um. But to come back to that, Atlas
Obscure article by George Pindall. UH. They write that there's
a particular civilization of northern Peru uh, the the Mochi
or the Mochika. Uh. This would have been a civilization

(34:42):
pre Columbian, of course, but also pre Incin that ran
from around one hundred to seven fifty c. And they
seemingly practiced some manner of sky burial in which the
flies that that that lighted upon the dead and then
emerged from the dead were interpreted as an essential part
of the spirit's journey. Um, maybe much like carrying birds

(35:05):
would be in some other types of sky burial type traditions. Yeah,
that that was where my mind instantly went to, like
the Tibetan model of where a body is sort of
processed for carrying birds in a you know, an elevated
rocky area, where other modes of burial or not as
much of an option, And this would be a way
of like returning the body to the world, to the
element uh through scavengers, through carrying consumers. So I decided

(35:30):
to look into this a little bit more because this
was instantly fascinating as well. You know, I have this
example that turns things on its head a bit. Uh.
There's a two thousand ten study I was reading published
in the Journal of Archaeological Science by Hutchett and Greenberg,
and a lot of this theory depends on the post
mortem interval in remains how long the bodies of these

(35:50):
people's were exposed prior to burial and um and, And And
that's one of the keys there. This is that it's
not simply while I'll get into this here, but it's
not just like, okay, then they left the bodies out
now that this would have been part of a more protracted, uh,
funeral rite. I see. So the Mochi, they excelled in ceramics,

(36:12):
they practiced human sacrifice um and. And to be clear,
a lot of ancient cultures did um not to sweep
human sacrifice under the rug or anything, but I think,
as we've touched on before, I think we it pays
to be fair in looking at particular cultures and regions
that are often highlighted for this sort of thing, that
we have to sort of keep them, uh. Keep in
mind that that plenty of other ancient cultures also did this,

(36:34):
did human sacrifice as well, and they were no exception,
but they apparently had a complex religious system with complex
mortuary practices supported by evidence of delayed burials, grave reopenings,
and secondary offerings of human remains. Their ceramic illustrations reveal
a lot about the role of flies and their beliefs

(36:55):
with their For instance, there these motifs of flies following
prisoners to exit cution in anticipation of of their corpses,
as well as oval shaped motifs that may represent flies
emerging from the puparia. So, you know, it's it's it's
really interesting to to think about this. This would have
been a society where instead of sort of taking the

(37:18):
Egyptian route and saying, well, the flies are part of
the soul leaving the body, and will we have this
magical uh symbolism that will will will prevent that or
reverse the the the leakage. Uh. This is like a
celebration of it. It would seem that's the argument anyway,
that they seem to have incorporated it into their understanding

(37:41):
of what our bodies and and or perhaps our souls
do when we die. You know that it's that the
flies moving in and then out of our bodies is
just a part of what is supposed to happen it's
part of the sacrament. Though. It's very interesting to see
cultures in which that sort of biological knowledge about what

(38:02):
happens to a human body that's left exposed to the
surface elements. Uh, it gets incorporated into religious beliefs as
opposed to the idea that a body should be you know,
immediately buried, hidden away to a different place where you
cannot see nature acting upon it as it decomposes. Yeah. Yeah,

(38:22):
I mean, especially modern culture, we're so far removed from
from physical death, you know that. Um. And I think
some would argue that we're too far removed from it,
you know that it Uh, it makes it more problematic
in some cases when it does occur, and it of
course will occur, and it does impact our lives. Um.
So yeah, it's it's interesting to try and envision how

(38:46):
how a culture like this would have handled death, because
because again it would have been according to the way
they were discussing it in this article, it would have
been a situation where like, the body dies, if some
sort of ritual that is conducted, but the body is
left out and long enough the flies to begin to
work upon it, and then other funeral customs come into
play and then it is eventually buried, and then then

(39:06):
it maybe a phase later on where the tomb is reopened.
So it's um. You know, there's a lot more in
and out compared to what we're more accustomed to with
our modern funeral rights. Yeah, absolutely, thank thank Okay, So
we've been talking about um legends of of human funerals

(39:29):
for insects. We've been talking about associations between insects, especially
flies and uh and human funerary rituals and different cultures.
But one other thing that I thought would be good
to talk about would be how insects deal with their
own dead, the funerals within the insect world. And one

(39:50):
place I was looking was that there's a there's a
good short article on that GEO from seventeen by Ali
Wilkinson that collects some really interesting examples of scientific study
and observations about how different types of social insects in
particular treat their own dead within and around their nest.
And I think if you're looking for the really interesting practices,
I think it would be these are especially going to

(40:11):
be among social insects. So the article is called queen
Ants and other Insects bury their dead. Here's why uh,
And so just to look at a couple of examples
sited here and maybe we can we can come back
and talk more about the general theory on on why
some of these things happen UH. For example, among ants,
it is commonly observed that in mature ant colonies there's

(40:33):
a very orderly process for removing dead ants from the nest.
Worker ants will locate dead individuals from the colony and
then systematically carry their bodies away, either to a place
away from the nest, like a trash heap that's removed
from the main nest activity, or to a special chamber
within the nest. And Wilkinson also points out a cool

(40:55):
study from the journal b MC Evolutionary Biology from ten
By for Pull and Sylvia Kramer, reporting that under some
conditions in some ants, even queens will engage in undertaker duties.
We can come back to why that is a bit
more later on, but just just to explore what happens
in the example of the black Garden aunt. Sometimes in

(41:17):
a young quality colony where there aren't many workers yet,
if one of the early queens in the colony dies,
the surviving queen will go to the dead queen's body
bite it up into a bunch of pieces, and then
bury those pieces herself, which kind of goes against the
idea of you know, the the queen aunt or the

(41:38):
queen bee, you know, the the queen in a social
insects species just being like sitting around and and doing
nothing and letting the workers do all the work and
basically only existing to fulfill reproductive duties and never having
never having any toil to their of their own. Yeah, yeah,
that is it does. Yeah, you did not think about that.

(41:59):
So there, so you you either go overboard and associate
all sorts of like human qualities with the with the
ant ruler, or you do just think of them fulfilling
this one key job within the colony. Though to be clear,
I think biologically that is the most important job of theirs,
and most of the work of the colony is relegated
to these non reproducing workers. Yeah, but it's like, yeah,

(42:22):
it's just just because you're reproducing all the time, doesn't
mean you can't clean up a little bit, right, right.
So another example b colonies and bees, there appears to
be a very well organized behavior system for quickly ejecting
dead bodies from the nest. Looks like they usually just
get dropped on the ground outside the nest. And in
honey bees, this disposal process tends to happen very fast.

(42:44):
It's carried out by a special class of middle aged
worker bees representing about one to two of the population
of the nest. And Wilkinson points to a nineteen eighty
three study by P. Kirk Vischer in the journal Animal
Behavior that found really acute time sensitivity in how the
bees prioritize body disposal. So, for example, corpses that were

(43:07):
one hour old were removed faster than bees that had
died just moments before. And I think this probably relies
on some kind of chemical signal, you know, uh, it's
something you can smell coming off of the dead bee.
Because Fisher notes also the dead bees that were coded
in paraffin, which would probably interfere with the penetration of
smells and stuff, are removed much more slowly. And then

(43:31):
one last thing in termites, Wilkinson also writes about some
interesting behavior in termites. Whereas bees and ants tend to
remove the dead bodies from the nest or deposit them
in a special trash chamber, termites often bury they're dead
within the nest. But I guess that gets us to
the question of why, like, why would insects have these organized,

(43:51):
efficient funerary practices for the disposal of the dead within
their colonies. And I think there's a pretty clear answer
to it, at least of pretty clear primary answer, and
that is a disease control. Yes, yeah, absolutely. Um. I
was reading reading a very concise article about this by
uh the author's son and Zoo. This was a Corpse

(44:13):
Management and Social Insects from in the International Journal of
Biological Sciences, and they summed it up as follows. Undertaking
behavior is an essential adaptation to social life that is
critical for colony hygiene in enclosed nests. Social insects dispose
of dead individuals in various fashions to prevent further contact
between corpses and living members in a colony. And I

(44:37):
think that that kind of puts a nice little type
bow on it right there. That's kind of the concise answer, um.
But of course it gets a lot more complicated than
than that, and certainly when you get into the various
specific examples. Um. Again, i think it's important to note, uh,
to to note all this because one of one of
the major realities of modern funeral practices is that we

(44:57):
often have an almost extreme separation from physical death. Again,
someone argue it's even detrimental set separate separation from physical death,
but this is in fact one of the key factors
in having funeral rights and practices to limit the amount
of contact between the living and the dead, not just
because the dead can be unsightly and troubling for the
living to behold, not only to prop up some notion

(45:19):
of continuation of the individual after death, but also because
of the dead are unhygienic and can serve as disease vectors. Now,
with solitary animals, that's one thing, right, avoidance is usually
the best approach if you encounter one of your own dead,
But social animals are just going to regularly encounter their
own dead. They are. There are essentially three different ways

(45:41):
of dealing with your own dead when you encounter them.
There's necrophagi eating the dead, there's corpse removal, and there's
burial and and necrophagi. As we've discussed in the show before,
it's pretty widespread in various organisms, uh and is also
found in human traditions. It's it's one solution, though not
though it's fortunately without its own complications. But his son

(46:02):
Enzo will point out while sanitary issues related to corpses
are widespread, they are particularly sharp and dense populations for
social organisms, and of course that that category certainly includes
human beings, but it also includes use social insects like bees, ants,
and termites, and so we see complex responses at the
individual and colony level to deal with the dead and

(46:26):
to engage in what humans would call undertaking. So they
point out that for certain social spiders and social aphids,
corpse removal is just an indistinguishable part of clearing out
a nest site. It's quote indistinguishable from dealing with inanimate
nest waste. So so that's one way of approaching it.
It's just like if you would get like a twig

(46:47):
or something in your nest area and you'd you'd clean
that out eventually, the same thing happens to the dead afid. Right.
It would be kind of like if you were, um,
you know, if you you had a human house and
you were to remove a dead body from your house
with about as much precaution and and ceremony as you
would take out the trash, where you're like, oh well,

(47:08):
they're dead, so I'll take them out and put them
in the trash can. That's kind of what some of
these social spiders and social etheids are doing. But they
point out that ants, bees, wasps, termites, we see much
more complex modes of behavior in which the treatment of
the dead is distinct from the treatment of other waste products.
And these methods kind of they kind of pick from
the eat removed Barry toolbox of possibilities, and I think

(47:32):
we see that in some of these specific UH answers
that you already looked at, you know, the idea of say,
cutting up the body of the dead and then burying
those pieces of just simply removing the dead and just
throwing them out of the colony, versus removing them and
burying them or in the case of the term ies,
just burying them within the nest. The one of the
really interesting questions I guess here is um among these

(47:55):
used social insects, how do they know what to do?
You know, like, how how do how do they know
how to guide and control this behavior? What's the what's
the nervous system flow chart for an aunt or a
b to participate in an undertaking? Yeah, this is where
it gets interesting. You get into a lot of really
deep research over the years because, um, you know, what

(48:18):
what is the trigger that causes them to remove the dead.
And by the way, there's a term for this for
the removal of the dead, and it is um uh necrophoresis,
and this is from the Greek just basically to remove
the dead. But it was coined by none other than EO. Wilson, um,
you know, the the master ant researcher who who Yeah,

(48:41):
this is one of his research projects for a while
was like looking at how individual ants within a colony
pick up on death and then respond accordingly. So you know,
obviously this is the first step. You have to know
what's dead. Uh is this a live ant or is
this a dead aunt? Is it getting better? Uh? Just
a flesh woe whatever? Uh? You know you have to

(49:01):
be able to react accordingly. Uh. You know, it's vital
to colony health. And it's based on chemical signals apparently
um as as much of the activity within the ant world.
And you can you can broadly think of the behavior
as entailing death recognition and then behavioral responses and then
task allocation for dealing with the dead. So Wilson and

(49:23):
his fellow researchers identified what they called fatty acid death
cues as being important in here. Those subsequent research seems
to suggest that those are not the only signals involved,
because sometimes the response time seems too short, like they're
the uh the ants and question are reacting before the
fatty acid death cues would generate. Uh. Get it all

(49:44):
gets very you know, complicated in ant world chemical But
basically they seem to lean more into perhaps a chemical
vital sign detection by the ants. So it's it's not
just picking up maybe on one chemical that's saying I'm
but it's more of like a a chemical vital sign
array that an ant is able to pick up on

(50:06):
and read and the the In this uh, this particular
son and our article, they also write that the term
uh necromone is also used. This is like pheromone, except
related to death, and this has been used to describe
sort of the sort of the realm of death recognition chemicals. Uh.
I love that that the necromone. It sounds like something

(50:27):
that would be made up for a riddic film, you know, yes,
but also fits well within the the ant world. You
know that they would again the chemical language of them.
I love this idea of these you know, these these
creatures that we often you know, we think about them
as being very simple, and they are, you know, you know,
in a way like simple but but complex parts of

(50:48):
this greater whole. And there's this whole language that they're
engaged in, this chemical language that it's kind of a
stretch for us to truly imagine it, you know, they
do the imagine the being able to read the chemical
vital science of other members of our society. That is
really interesting and weirdly, like, it gets even deeper because

(51:08):
there are some of these behaviors for the use social
insects removing the dead from their nests that incorporate prioritization
of the task based on how much of a disease
risk the dead body would actually entail. So that that
that raises all these other questions, like how can they

(51:28):
tell what kind of disease risk? This is? Like that
There's a section in that Wilkinson article that talks about
study in the journal Scientific Reports about about termites that
found that the termites would react differently to a dead
body within their nest depending on whether it was a
member of their own species or from a very closely

(51:51):
related species. Just to read from Wilkinson quote, regardless of
whether a corpse of the same species came from their
own colony or another colony, it was pulled back into
the holding chamber for nutrient recycling and hygienic purposes. But
if the corpse was that of a dark southeastern subterranean
termite or reticular Termy's virginicus, it was entombed by workers

(52:15):
on site with a large group of soldiers standing guard.
Ten times as many termites were involved with the burial
of this closely related species then the same species, but
the extra time, energy, and labor were warranted. Researchers found
in the face of external pathogens. So that so there

(52:36):
there seems to be some kind of like evolutionary mechanism
controlling the behavior here that recognizes certain types of dead
termites within the nest as an elevated disease risk because
maybe they're bringing in a pathogen that is new to
the nest and and could decimate it if it's not
disposed of, you know, immediately and totally, even though that

(52:56):
might be a very energy intensive process for the colony. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's it's amazing how these you know, each each
colony is like this entire immune system, and that that
brings me back to, uh, that other study I was
talking about earlier, the one in BMC Evolutionary Biology about
the Black Garden aunt and how the queens will sometimes

(53:17):
participate in undertaking behaviors if the colony is young and
there are not enough workers to help out with it.
And this is a situation where there can be multiple
co founding queens and a colony. Actually, just to read
from from the abstract of the study, quote, social insects
formed densely crowded societies and environments with high pathogen loads,
but have evolved collective defenses that mitigate the impact of disease. However,

(53:41):
colony founding queens lack this protection and suffer high rates
of mortality. The impact of pathogens may be exacerbated in
species where queens found colonies together, as healthy individuals may
contract pathogens from infectious co founders. Therefore, we tested whether
aunt queens avoid founding colonies with pathogen exposed con specifics

(54:06):
and how they might limit disease transmission from infected individuals.
And what this found is when there were these co founders,
these co founding queens in a colony. If one of
the original queens died, the surviving queen again would would
do this biting process where they would sort of chomp
up the other queen into pieces and then uh bury

(54:27):
and remove the corpse. And the authors here right quote
these undertaking behaviors were performed prophylactically, i e. Targeted equally
towards non infected and infected corpses, as well as carried
out before infected corpses became infectious. Biting and burial reduced
the risk of queens contracting and dying from disease from
an infectious corpse of a dead co foundress. So they

(54:50):
did actually find this had a survival benefit to the
queen that's doing this work, because better to be safe
than sorry and get that corpse buried just in case
it could become infectious. Well, this has been interesting, I
think by looking at insects in their relationship to death,
we've kind of gotten to explore both ends of the spectrum,
like the stripped down version of what funeral rights are,

(55:13):
like what does it mean to bury the they departed
and why do we do it on a very basic level,
But then also seeing how some of these these insects
end up being brought into far more elaborate understandings of
human death as well. Now, obviously we we could and
probably should come back in the future and talk more

(55:34):
about funeral traditions. We talked about funeral traditions on the
show before. Um, but but yeah, we could come back
and discuss sort of like the the early days, like
how what are some of the earliest examples of of
burial among humans and pre humans and what does it mean?
Like what and what aspects of it do we still
see in our practices today. Yeah, those types of things

(55:54):
are often interpreted as the earliest signs we have of
the development of religion and human But you know, that's
a really interesting area with a lot of questions open. Yeah.
On the the ant front, obviously, we've we've done plenty
of other AUNT episodes that I refer folks back to,
including our our three parter on Ant Warfare that we

(56:14):
did earlier this year. But I also want to mention
a really great YouTube channel. Uh this was one called
ants Canada. Are you familiar with this one, Joe, I
don't think so. I was. I was not familiar with
until a friend recommended as something to to show UM
kids and it's I mean it's also really interesting for
adults as well. But uh, this uh individual UM has

(56:39):
this entire channel devoted to their various uh ant farms
and also habitats for other creatures. But ants are the
like the key focus, and it's it's really well done.
Lots of great photography and video work. Uh. Some of
the very topics we've discussed here pop up in the show,
as as the chronicle, uh, the INDs and ounce of

(57:00):
the various ant colonies and how they deal with their dad,
how they deal with invaders and stuff of that nature.
So my family has really been enjoying it. So if
you have any AUNT fans out there, I highly recommend it.
It's good stuff. Oh I just looked this channel up.
I see one title on a popular video here seems
to take a page from EO. Wilson says fire ants
versus my hand. Yeah, yeah, I think IO Wilson would approve.

(57:26):
Here's another one cockroach giving birth while being devoured by
fire ants. Well, yeah, I'll have to give this a shot. Yeah.
I think some of these popular ones maybe look there,
they make the channel look a little grizzlier. Than actually is.
But but I'm I mean, I'm sure I don't know
if I've watched any of these uh these top ones yet.
I kind of come in and out of the room

(57:46):
home it's on sometimes, but I inevitably end up pausing
to see what's going on. There'll be some big mystery
with the colony, and uh, you know, they explore and
they watch and they figure it out. Of course, whatever
is the grossest and most gruesome content on the channel
is going to be the most feud Well, yeah, that's
that's that's what will be rewarded. But you know, the
ants don't care. They don't care about clicks and subscribers.

(58:08):
All right, we're gonna go and close it out there.
If you would like to listen to other episodes of
Stuff to Blow your Mind, you should check out the
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(58:29):
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to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
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(58:55):
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