July 12, 2025 • 43 mins
In this classic two-parter from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the chemistry, space science and mythology of burning hair. So strap in for a discussion of everything from pirates and barbecue mishaps to Latin literature and science fiction. (originally published 7/23/2024)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick,
and it's Saturday, so we are heading into the vault
for an older episode of the show. This one originally
published July twenty third, twenty twenty four, and it's part
two of our series about burning hair. Hair on Fire Enjoy.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part two in our discussion of burning hair. This topic
was inspired by a personal experience for me. I actually
singed a bunch of hair off my arm while grilling
at a family get together for the Fourth of July,
and not the first time I've done that, well grilling
for a crowd, and it got me thinking about what
(00:59):
happened when hair burns. So in the last episode we
talked about the distinctive and sometimes overpowering smell of burning hair,
which seems to be mostly due to the presence of
sulfur compounds that are formed and released when hair burns,
a chief one being sulfur dioxide which is released when
the keratin of hair is decomposed by fire. Sulfur dioxide
(01:22):
is also a major part of the characteristic smell of
a burning match head. We also ended up talking about
a couple of studies of hair catching on fire in
space ships, specifically addressing the question of whether human hair
is a fire hazard in environments with higher levels of
oxygen than Earth's atmosphere, and the answer seems to be yes.
(01:45):
In oxygen rich environments, where things catch fire more easily
because there's more oxygen, human hair can be a potent
fuel source and fire can spread quickly over it. So
these papers ended up talking about strategies to mitigate that
risk in future spacecraft and space habitation environments that might
be using elevated levels of oxygen. And then finally we
(02:07):
talked about stories of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century
English pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, who famously
was said to put burning slow matches under his hat
and he's drawn with like these slow matches and it
kind of fuses, sticking out alongside his hair. In some
evolved versions of this legend, maybe he's said to have
(02:28):
the burning slow matches in his hair or in his beard,
and we discussed to where these stories come from, how
historically plausible they are, including considerations of the danger of
catching one's own hair or beard on fire in general.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
In case you don't listen to that episode, don't try
any of this at home. Don't set out to do
anything flammable with your beard or.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Hair now, kind of continuing on that theme, I ended
up pursuing a research trail where I didn't turn up
quite as much as I expected to, but I at
least want to report what I did come across. So
I had a vague idea from somewhere that the powdered
wigs that were popular in parts of Western Europe, especially
(03:12):
in the eighteenth century, were prone to catching on fire.
My impression here may have been formed by seeing older
illustrations of this, or like cartoons from the period that
show people with elaborate hair wigs and headdresses catching on
fire due to a candle placed underneath them or something. Ultimately,
I found less about this than I expected to, and
(03:34):
I can't tell if it was actually any more common
than regular instances of people catching their hair on fire,
which of course does happen occasionally. Here and there, but
just to get into what it did come across, I
found mentioned in a post on the British Library's Untold
Lives blog, and I may have mentioned this on the
show before, but generally I think the British Libraries have
(03:54):
some great blogs and archives about history and some interesting
documents in their collections. This post was by Julia Armfield
from August twenty thirteen, and it's a short post concerning
how the elaborate wigs that had been so popular among
the wealthy during the Georgian Era, which was about seventeen
(04:14):
fourteen to eighteen thirty seven, these elaborate wigs began to
fall out of fashion later on in that period and
going into the Victorian period, they sort of fill out
out of fashion after the French Revolution and then especially
after the eighteen thirties. According to the author, this was
in part because of changing social perceptions about wigs that
(04:37):
they came to be seen not just as fashion but
in some cases as a kind of undesirable show of
vanity or as a deception. Which is funny because I
realized that even today there are like changes in how
you know, people are always like trying to affect their
outward appearance. There's like, you know, there's haircare and cosmetics
(04:58):
and stuff like that in every era, and for some reason,
you can look at someone trying to shape their appearance
in a certain way and just say, well, that's just fashion,
but with just a different kind of emotional spin on it.
You start to think of it as they're trying to
look unreal, They're trying to look away they're not supposed to.
Now it's a deception.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
M Yeah, that's interesting to think about. I guess the
stigma against powdered wigs in particular has pretty much stuck.
I think, yea, you know, there's certainly there's nothing wrong
with wearing a wig or a hair piece. But if
it is a powdered wig or a hair piece like
out of the period piece broadly speaking, like there's a
certain air that comes with that, then I guess there
(05:41):
are probably some exceptions in the fashion world and so forth.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Well, like why would wearing a wig be a deception,
but like wearing clothes that cover your skin is not
a deception.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
I don't know, yeah, I mean, I guess on one level,
someone can make the argument, well, the hair supposedly grows
out of you. The hair is of course, by its
very nature, something you put on you. But I don't know, yeah,
I mean, when you get down to it, why does
it matter one way or the other.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Anyway, This blog post mentions, in apart from changing social
perceptions of wigs, that there were that there were practical
problems presented by the wigs of the Georgian era, including
the fact that some wigs were so huge and heavy
that they actually caused people wearing them to develop sores
on their scalps. Another thing is infestation by insects or
(06:30):
other unwanted critters and parasites. Lice and fleas sometimes would
get into wigs, and that's also sometimes held up as
one reason for the popularity of wigs. Is that, well,
maybe the lice will get into the wig instead of
getting into your actual hair, if you can cut your
hair short or shave it, and then you know, they
just get into the wig instead. But then you've got
(06:51):
lice in your wig. I've read in separate places about
mitigation strategies for this, including historical trends in wigs that
would include built in lice or flea traps that would
be some kind of container with like bait hidden inside
the hair. But also this British Library post mentions that
Georgian wigs would be flammable due to the presence of
(07:13):
palmades made in large part out of animal fats such
as hogs lard or mutton renderings. Of course, animal fat
can be quite combustible, and so if you're using that
as the base of a kind of hair styling material
or pomade that we would think of today, you know,
to hold the wig in its in its styling shape,
(07:33):
you can imagine there would be trouble. Like you know,
combined wigs gelled up with animal fat and the use
of candles as a primary light source, and it just
seems like it would be a recipe for wig fires.
But I wasn't able to turn up a lot about
this in like history books or academic articles about the
history of wigs. I did find another blog post. This
(07:55):
one was on a history blog called all Things Georgian
by an author named Syria Murden, that managed to dig
up a handful of eighteenth century newspaper reports from England
and Scotland of young women's wigs or headdresses catching on
fire from a candle or in one case I think
from a fireplace and in a couple of cases leading
(08:17):
to their deaths. But again I did not find convincing
evidence that this was actually a really common occurrence or anything. So,
you know, with candles everywhere and large smeared masses of
hair bobbing around all over the place, it does seem
plausible that this would happen a lot, But apart from
a few reports here and there, I'm not sure it
actually did. Historians of wigs and hair, if you're aware
(08:39):
of something I'm not right in.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Yeah, it is often weird to look back on times
when candles were your main form of elimination. There were
a lot more open fires and less in the way
of fire safety, And on one level, you just kind
of think, well, why wasn't everything on fire all the time?
And certainly fire was a huge threat. But yeah, I
(09:02):
don't know. Maybe part of it is we sometimes don't
give our ancestors enough credit for not catching everything on fire.
I don't know, we think of them as the way
we might think of our own children if they're in
the presence of an open flame.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Well, I guess sometimes when we think about a historical
activity or apparatus that came with certain hazards. We imagine
the prevalence, but without the accustomedness that would accompany prevalence.
I mean, a world with lots of candles also had
people who were used to handling candles.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yes, exactly. Now, at this point in the episode, we're
going to get a little bit into hair of fire
and flaming beards and so forth, and mythology and folklore
(09:54):
and literature. And I have to admit this is an
area where I thought we were going to have more
to draw from. And certainly, you know, we probably left
some things off, and certainly, as always right in and
let us know if you have some great examples to
bring to mind. But generally I was thinking, Okay, hair
can burn, and it's reasonable to assume that every fire
(10:16):
bearing culture would have some experience with this that they
might further craft into various myths and legends, jokes, you know,
turns of phrase and so forth. Right, I mean, you
have fire, Hair can catch on fire. Maybe it doesn't
happen that often, but if it happens once, it's memorable.
And therefore you might have some traditions, you might have
(10:37):
some magical creatures, you might have some gods and goddesses
that have flaming hair. And while this is true, we
do have some examples to discuss, we didn't. I wasn't
able to find as many examples as I was expecting.
I was expecting it to be just a long list
of creatures and entities, but there's there's actually a lot
(10:59):
of like bleed over into other categories that makes it difficult,
you know, like just characters with red hair or characters
who have some sort of a halo or an ara.
But then it's kind of left to exactly what languages
used as to whether you would call this flaming hair.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Yeah, I think there are a lot of examples that
are arguable or edge cases, but I also was expecting
there just to be a lot more defined with it.
Was just like, here's a figure with fire for hair.
Maybe because I'm used to Hades from the Disney movie.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Yeah, yeah, this is a great example to bring up
the Greek god Hades in the nineteen ninety seven Hercules
movie flaming blue hair, voiced by James Woods. He's not
actually a fire related deity in Greek mythology. This was
just a visual choice by Disney that actually, I guess
the exact alchemy of this is they're dragging in elements
(11:53):
often associated generally with the Christian devil, you know, fire
and so forth, and and creating this kind of like
Haiti Satan combo for their their main villain, and making
like a very distinct visual choice on how to just
to present him.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yeah, it's like a combination. So you associate the Christian
the Christian Satan with the lake of fire, I guess.
So there's your fire element. But then you you've got
to have it like cold, sort of more like you
would get in Dante's Lower levels of Hell, or like
you would get I think more often in Greek depictions
of the underworld. It's just kind of like a cold,
(12:30):
dark place. So they make the fire blue, which ironically
is actually the hottest color of flame.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Right, So yeah, that's that's a that's a fun example
to bring up. I mean, there's so many pop culture
examples of this, and I think that's one of the
confusing things, is you, I mean, I would assume anyway
that Okay, we have characters like Captain Marvel and and
and so forth from from Marvel comics, and and they
(12:57):
have like flaming hair at times. Then this is it's
just a more modern example of a longer health tradition,
and that we're gonna have all these other examples and
in all these different belief systems. But yeah, I found
that you have certainly have no shortage of things like
fire elementals in modern fiction and sci fi and fantasy,
(13:18):
all sorts of creatures and spirits with flaming hair and
flaming beards. But they're just they seem there's just seemed
to be less of them when you actually look into
folklore and mythology and legend.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
As far as the recent pop culture examples go. You
brought up one in the notes that I didn't think of,
which is the one from the Wall the movie.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Oh yeah, yeah, this is the animated Pink Floyd movie,
and I believe it's Pink's wife, and it is depicted
later on as this kind of like monstrous cannibal creature
with flaming hair, hair of literal fire.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
I've seen this movie, I mean a long time ago.
I think I was in high school, but I completely
forgot about this. The main thing I remember is warning
for a gross thing about the scene shaves his nipple off.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Yeah, I forgot about that. How could you. I mainly
just remember the hammers like marching around.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
I guess, yeah, yeah, the fascist imagery.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Yeah yeah, it's been a long time since I've seen
I think I saw it when I was a kid,
and you know, on TV parts of it. Anyway, Ultimately,
the examples of like fire elemental beings are too numerous
to mention, but I was reminded of that there's one
in The Dark Crystal. So I picked up my copy
of the Dark Crystal Bestiary, and there's a description of
these things called the fire Lings. And I believe these
(14:31):
pop up in some of the like Dark Crystal Expanded
Universe material, I guess, you know, in comic books and
so forth. And I think maybe they were going to
be a part of a possible film project that never
came to fruition. But these are supposed to be direct
descendants of Gelfling exiles who live in the superheated core
(14:52):
of the planet Thraw, and they're depicted as Gelfling like beings,
but they have hair of fire. And then I found
like a couple of different images that kind of portray
different ideas of this, Like in one of them you
can see the Gelfling or in this case, the fire
ling has hair that is literal fire, and the others
(15:12):
they just look like fiery, golden beings. And it's kind
of left up to your interpretation if their hair is
just actual physical hair, or if it is like the
chemical emergence, you know, this, this pyrotechnic experience of fire.
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
I'm tempted to speculate that a lot of this modern
hair as fire imagery and cartoons and stuff specifically comes
from physical and visual similarities between hair and fire that emerge,
especially when they're being depicted in human drawing. That you know,
the ways that you sort of represent say hair blowing
(15:53):
in the wind, or hair flowing in a like a
still painting or photo or still painting or drawing can
very much resemble the kind of wisps of a fire,
but oriented in the opposite direction. Often. Yeah, I don't know,
and that's not a fully formed thought, but something almost
makes me think that it's something about like modern drawing
(16:14):
and animation traditions that give rise to seeing these things
as visually similar and then inviting the mind to make
a connection where it's not just that hair looks like fire,
but you have a character with fire fore hair.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Yeah, yeah, I was definitely thinking a bit about like
how hair appears when it is say, caught by the wind,
or if one is underwater and you have like footage
of someone with long hair and the hair is floating
and so forth, and if that has anything to do
with I mean that you could sort of link it
to the history of underwater the underwater moving picture, which
(16:50):
of course isn't going to go back that far, and
you could perhaps, I guess arguably enhance comparisons that would
be made in general, because of course there are always
going to be comparisons made between you know, reddish hair
and fire. You can factor in things like you know,
length and texture as well. But you know, at the
(17:14):
end of the day, we do have at least a
few examples of creatures and entities that I feel like
are close enough that we can say, Okay, we can
quibble about the details, but these creatures kind of sound
like they have fire for hair.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Okay, what'd you come up with?
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Now? A couple of these are from South America. One
is called the Kuma Conga, and this is a disembodied
head spirit of Brazilian folklore that I was reading about
in the werewolf in between Indians and Whites. This is
by Mark Harris and this was published in t PTE,
Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America.
(17:53):
And in this article, Harris describes this entity as entailing
aspects of what we might think of as a werewolf,
you know, in Western folklore, especially as well as sightings
of balls or wheels of fire. So that's another thing
I saw several examples of. It's like you have sort
of like fire entities, kind of will of the wisp
sort of entities, and it depends on like how far
(18:17):
you push that from being like a mere strange light
to being a flaming entity or a flaming head or
something with you know, physiology to it. Now, another one
that I've ran across was the Kurapura. I've seen descriptions
of this spirit from Tupequar Knee traditions of Brazil, entailing
a beard of fire, though Carol Rose doesn't mention this
(18:40):
in her entry on the creature in the book Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns,
and Goblins and Encyclopedia, she describes it as a bright,
red faced gnome with cloven hoofs as well as a
shaggy creature with backward turned feet. It's kind of a
forest guardian of game. Then there's also an Afro Brazilian
tradition of the Kurupira that casts everything more as a
(19:03):
will of the wisp that leads people off track in
the forest, but maybe sort of bribe with offerings. But
I've seen some more recent articles that mention either red
hair or hair of fire, so I can't completely dispute
that idea. But again, it seems like we often run
into this territory of It's probably some linguistic drift in
(19:24):
some of these descriptions, especially when you're dealing with multiple translations,
so hard for me to tell anyway exactly like what
the tradition actually is. Are we dealing with creatures that
are thought to have hair of fire or does that
just sort of get added on somewhere in the chain.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Or I think, especially the further back you go in history,
just to kind of blending of the concepts of light
and fire, that in many cases any light source that
didn't come from the sky or whatever could be described
as a fire.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Right right, Yeah, if you see a strange light in
the forest, for example, or in the sky and it
is of sufficient luminosity, like it's very reasonable to say, oh,
there was some sort of fire out there, there was
some sort of Yeah, what else could it be? If
it's like above, if it's not the moon, if it's
not a you know, something that is obviously celestial, and
it's not something that is like a firefly, then you
(20:19):
might reasonably think in terms of candles and torches and
so forth. I'm also reminded of a fireball yo kai
from Japanese traditions. I think we may have talked about
this one before and name Ubagabi, and this is more
of a fireball, but with the face of an old man.
And I guess if it is an old man's face,
then you could say, well, there the hair is fire.
(20:41):
But maybe not. Maybe that's adding too much on, you know.
I've also seen some ideas about low Key from Norse
mythology having hair of fire or flame hair. This I
didn't get a real strong feeling off of this either.
Hair with these two can get kind of complicated, and
in general are sort of understanding of them are kind
(21:02):
of you know, influenced by Marvel comics now, but you know,
Thor sometimes had red hair and a red beard, and
Loki is sometimes depicted with red hair, sometimes arguably resembling
a flame. And this is where I've seen various commentators,
you know, pointing out this idea that Loki may be
connected to the word Logi, which means flame, but is
(21:25):
also the name of one of the otin who personified fire.
So again, I don't know, there's that you could make
a case. I guess that sometimes Loki was perhaps a
fire headed god, but maybe not. Now one of the
stronger cases I came across is there is an Armenian
warrior god by the name of Vaughan the Dragon Reaper,
(21:47):
who apparently is more traditionally described as having celestial fire
for hair, a beard of flames, and eyes like suns.
So this one would seem a stronger example. Uh though
it is interesting here too that we're getting into like
celestial fire here in this idea of like a holy
flame that doesn't necessarily behave like a real flame, and
(22:09):
is also kind of like a halo, kind of like
a holy aura. But I feel like this this guy,
you can make a stronger case and say, Okay, this
guy has has fire for hair.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
So I was not initially familiar with a hagan the
dragon reaper, but the dragon reaper apparently is like a
that's a translation of a traditional epithet. But that's it's
amazing how much that sounds like modern cool. It sounds
like something out of a video game.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
Yeah, this is this is old school cool right here.
It makes me think I really need to get into
Armenian mythology more. I really don't know much about about
Armenian myth and lore, but if this is any indication
that they have warriors with flaming hair that slay dragons,
then I want to know more about it now. There
are a lot of additional possible examples in Buddhist i
(22:59):
Canog and Hindu iconography where you have things like hair
of fire going on. But also again sometimes it's might
be more akin to a halo or an aura or
multiple auras. And of course there's often a lot of
information that is being relayed through these religious images. But
(23:21):
for instance, the tantric Buddhist Paul Deen Mamo is sometimes
depicted with hair of flame. The Hindu god Agny is
sometimes depicted with hair of fire two varying degrees, but
sometimes it's more of an aura of flame so again,
there's going to be a lot of drift here, and
a lot of it is going to be left to
personal interpretation. Now one of the more interesting things to discuss, though,
(23:52):
really gets us more I guess into the literature end
of the spectrum, getting into Latin literature here. But are
there's not one? But there are two instances in Virgil's
Eneid concerning omens of burning hair and or hair that
becomes or is surrounded by a holy fire.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
M okay.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
So Virgil's Eneid has come up on the show before,
but I thought we should maybe take a moment just
to ground it properly and talk about what it is. So.
Virgil was a Roman poet who lived seventy BCE through
nineteen BCE and served Emperor Augustus. He composed the epic
poem the Eneid between twenty nine and nineteen BCE as
(24:32):
an attempt to ground Rome, the Roman people, and the
rule of his boss Augustus within a deeper mythopoetic tradition,
because while Romans he certainly had epics such as Homer's
the Iliad and the Odyssey, they lacked for a true
national epic and a true founding work of mythic literature.
(24:54):
So that's what Virgil had set out to do, to
create one, spinning a saga out of Greek myth and
the of Homer into a Roman history. Now, Virgil died
at the young age of fifty, possibly due to complications
from heatstroke. I think maybe there's some back and forth
over this, but sometimes I see it rather matter of
factly said that it was probably heat stroke. But he dies,
(25:15):
and as he is dying, he requests this unpublished and
unfinished epic to be destroyed. He's like, it's not ready yet,
I just get rid of it. Underlings, please destroy it.
His orders are are not obeyed, though, and Augustus, having
been exposed to some very flattering passages of the epic
in which the hero, the hero of the tale, mirrors
(25:38):
and predicts the rise of Augustus, he says, now, this
work is great, Please make sure that it is published.
And then it is published, and as we'll get into
maybe not every passage of the Aenead is as flattering
as those that Augustus initially heard.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Yeah, So for more context on Virgil, by the way,
I just wanted to say we did talk about him
a good bit in our episode a few years back
on insect funerals, because there is an apocryphal legend in
which Virgil and his friends held an elaborate funeral for
a fly. I think we concluded that this probably did
not actually happen, but the story arose like within the
(26:18):
logic of the story, it's something like they're using it
as a legal loophole to protect some estate from being seized.
But also in that episode, we talked about how Dante,
the author of The Divine Comedy, thought Virgil was just
like the coolest guy ever and the best example of
poetic virtues, which is why he uses him as the
virtuous pagan character who guides his fictionalized tour of Hell.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, And ultimately that's where I've certainly more
read on the Divine Comedy than I am on the
actual works of Virgil. But you end up learning about
Virgil in his works through Dante, like you end up
learning about everything that Dante's into. Yeah, as you travel
with him across the three Realms.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Yeah, Virgil's really great.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
Did you know this?
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Beatrice is really great too.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Not only is Virgil really great, but we're basically best friends. Now.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
Yeah, he liked me.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Yeah. So the Aeneid is the story of Aneas, who
flees the destruction of Troy and ultimately conquers Italy to
become the ancestor of the Romans. The first six books
of this epic cover his journey to Italy, but it's
not like a direct journey, like there's a joint through
the underworld, for example, and that's key as an influence
(27:34):
on Dante. And then books seven through twelve if the
Aeneid concerned the wars in Italy, So the first book
is a road trip, very much in the spirit of
the Odyssey, and the second book is very much in
the spirit of the Iliad because it's concerned mostly with
this big war. Now, to be clear, this in this
treatment in others, the founding of Rome and the Roman
(27:55):
people is greatly embellished by myth and literature. I mean,
that's again, that's kind of that's basically what Virgil set
out to do. Right.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Virgil is not like Herodotus or Thucydides, people in the
ancient world who were to some extent concerned with trying
to create an accurate historical record of events. He's like,
he's he's got he's telling a good story, and it
has a political agenda.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Right, And but that political agenda does, in very strong
terms concern Augustus. But while Augustus had again heard very
apparently heard very flattering parts of the work prior to publication,
it's thought that he might not have heard all of it,
because there are parts of the work that also cast Augustus,
or at least his his analog Aneas, in a more
(28:38):
flawed light, you know. And idea is that his ascension
and long term legacy are not completely assured. And we'll
get into some examples of that as we go. But
any rate, it's a book that's very concerned with prophesizing
the future of Rome, mostly saying great things are ahead,
but sometimes with little caveats, like bringing up probably great
things are ahead, but watch watch out for this or that. Right.
(29:01):
And at the end of book two we have the
omen of Ascanius is burning hair, So Ascanius, who is
also believe called LULUs. At times he's he's like a
little boy. At this point point, he is the he
is the son of Aeneas. He's eventually going to become
the king of the Latin city state of Alba Longa,
and is uh and in disrespect. He's you know, he
(29:24):
can kind of loop him in as being one of
the founders of the Roman race. But again, his father
a Eneas is this position as an ancestor of Romulus
and Remus. He's the hero of Troy. He's fled the
burning city of Troy with his son after receiving uh
he after he receives this omen of the burning hair
from the god Jupiter. Uh. So his son's hair catches
(29:47):
a flame. And there's you know, some back and forth
over this, and and and and and it becomes like
it's like a divine flame, a sort of soft, harmless fire, uh,
that is around and his brow like a crown. So
even here we have some there's some room to interpret it.
You can think of it as a like a crown
of flame, hair of flame, halo aurra and so forth.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
So his son's head appears with flame on it, and
this seems to be delivering a message from the gods.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Right, But of course he's not completely sure. So he's like,
you know, mighty Jupiter, if this is a sign, give
me another one. And so there's like a shooting star
and and and Virgil, you know, has a lot of
a lot of fun with this, you know, poetically comparing
the two. But you know, so ultimately we also have
the connection here to the burning city that they are
(30:39):
now going to have to escape. But it's a great
omen a signifier of deliverance there, you know. And again
their direct comparisons to be made between the tail the
shooting star and a flaming arrow. And again there's this
idea that y'all got to get out of here and
go on to great things, in other words, the founding
of Rome and so forth. Anna Rogerson in twenty seventeen's
(31:03):
Virgils Zoskanias writes that this episode illuminates quote the path
that must be taken in order ultimately to achieve the
Roman dream. But she also stresses that the fire also
carries with it other associations quote, hinting at different potential
outcomes and reminding us again that his role as a
sign and guaranteur of a Roman future is not as
(31:26):
secure or as patent as it might seem.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Oh that's interesting, especially if I'm interpreting this right. I
don't know at all if this is what Rogerson is
getting at, but the idea of a fire appearing around
his son's brow could have it. On one hand, it
could resemble this imagery like halo imagery that we see
in other cases, where it's sort of like an anointing
by the gods or a showing of divine favor light
(31:50):
showing around the head. And I'll mention another example of
that in a minute. But also the idea of fire
appearing around the child's head has the connotation of danger, right,
and so it's like both at the same time. Do
you think that's at all what Rogerson is getting at here?
Speaker 1 (32:05):
That that I believe that I believe that's that's what
they're getting at here. And and it does match up
with with other arguments I've seen, you know that that
that Virgil is of course talking about the greatness of
Rome and the greatness of his boss, but also adding
in these warnings and hints, you know, these uh uh,
you know, speaking speaking truth to power at least a
little bit u through the poetry. Interesting, so Ascanius and
(32:30):
his father flee Troy with Aneas carrying his own elderly
father on his back. There are some great depictions of this,
you have, like a cross generational trio escaping the burning city.
And so there are all, you know, various images where
you'll have Aneas with this older man, huge older man
on his shoulders, kind of piggyback style, and then here's
(32:51):
the young and behind him kind of like tugging on
his his clothing a little bit like Dad, are we
there yet? Have we founded Rome yet? And so forth. Now,
later on in book seven, Aneas's last wife of Lavinia,
she has an episode with burning hair as well. I
told you there was going to be a second one.
Her hair catches fire during a sacrifice at the altar
(33:12):
of the gods. And I'm going to read a bit here.
This is in a translation, of course, from the Aeneid.
While the old king lit fires at the altars with
a pure tortch, the girl Lavinia with him. It seemed
her long hair caught, her head dress caught in crackling flame,
her queenly tresses blazed, her jeweled crown blazed, mantled, Then
(33:33):
in smoke and russet light, she scattered divine fire throughout
all the house. No one could hold that site anything
but hair raising marvelous. And it was read by Sears
to mean the girl would have renown in glorious days
to come. But that she brought a great war on
her people, And I was reading about interpretation of this
(33:54):
by John E. Rexen from nineteen sixty one in fire
Symbolism in the Eneid, and this author wrote, these flames
presented both destructive and constructive aspects. Laviniu's people would be
involved in the conflagration of war with the Trojans, but
a marriage torch would unite her with Aeneas, who had
found a new city in Italy named Lavinium after her Ah.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
So it's almost that same duality we interpreted with the
crown of fire around Buscanius's head.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
Yeah, yeah, And I think it's really it's really potent
when you think about it, Like the idea of any
divine being giving you messages and laying out your course
for you, you know, making sure that you're walking, you know,
a conditioned path like that's at both powerful but also
terrifying because in all these various traditions, you know, we
(34:46):
know what sorts of fates the gods sometimes lay in
front of our heroes and heroines. You know, it's not
all it's not all roses. Sometimes there is a burning
city and so forth.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
Yeah, this actually connected for me to something that is
in the Iliad itself. We talked about how Virgil he
bases his epic in part on the epics of Homer,
but this came up a few years back when we
did episodes on the religious imagery of the Halo. You
can look up those older episodes if you want. There's
(35:19):
a good bit of overlap with what we're talking about today. Actually,
but this specific connection with the Iliad comes in book eighteen.
So I was thinking about the passage where the great
warrior Achilles he finds out that his bosom companion, a Patroclus,
has been killed in battle by the Trojan prince Hector,
and Achilles reacts sort of by losing his mind. He's
(35:42):
filled with grief and rage and a thirst for vengeance.
And so the Greeks and the Trojans in this part
of the poem are fighting over the right to retrieve
Petroclus's body from the field of battle. And then the
goddess Athena puts this godlike power and aura into Achilles
so that he will be able to terrify the Trojans
(36:02):
and drive them into a route. And so this is
from the translation by Caroline Alexander. Achilles beloved of Zeus arose,
and Athena casts the tasseled aegis about his mighty shoulders.
She shining among goddesses. Encircled round his head a cloud
of gold, and from it blazed bright, shining fire. Okay,
(36:24):
so maybe a little bit different. Maybe not hair directly
on fire, but a cloud of gold around the head
from which blazes bright fire. It goes on to say,
and as when smoke rising from a city reaches the
clear high air from a distant island, which enemy men
fight round, and they, the whole day long, are pitted
in hateful warfare around the city walls. But with the
(36:46):
sun's setting, the beacon fires blaze torch upon torch, and
flaring upward, the glare becomes visible to those who live around,
in the hope that they might come with ships as
allies against destruction. So from a killer head the radiance
reached the clear high air, and going away from the wall,
he stood at the ditch. Nor did he mix with
(37:08):
the Achaeans, for he observed his mother's knowing command, and
standing there he shouted, and from the distance Pallas Athena
cried out. Too unspeakable was the uproar he incited in
the Trojans, as when a clarion voice is heard, when
cries the trumpet of life, destroying enemies who surround the city.
Such then was the clarion voice of Eacides. And when
(37:31):
they heard the brazen voice of Eacides, the spirit in
each man was thrown in turmoil. The horses, with their
fine manes, wheeled their chariots back, for in their hearts
they forebode distress to come. And the charioteers were struck
from their senses when they saw the weariless, terrible fire
above the head of Peleus's great hearted son blazing. And
(37:53):
this the gleaming eyed goddess Athena caused to blaze. So
again it's sort of an edge case because it doesn't
say directly the hair is on fire, in that it's
literally being consumed by flame. But it's this more common
imagery we get of a radiance that appears around or
over the top of the head and is described as
(38:15):
burning like fire or burning like his hair were on fire.
And in fact it comes back more towards Virgil's time period,
the context of the early Roman Empire. You can think
of cases of imagery like this that appear in say,
the Christian New Testament. So in the New Testament, in
the Book of Acts, chapter two, we get the story
of the Pentecost, which is the anointing by the Holy
(38:38):
Spirit of Jesus's apostles in Jerusalem, fifty days after the
Resurrection has taken place. And this part says that in
the NRSV translation quote, when the day of Pentecost had come,
they were all together in one place, and suddenly from
heaven there came a sound, like the rush of a
violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they
(38:59):
were divided. Tongues as of fire appeared among them, and
a tongue rested on each of them. All of them
were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak
in other languages, as the Spirit gave them the ability.
So in this case it does not seem intended to
terrify like it did in the Iliad. But what's sort
(39:20):
of common in all these stories across the Eneid by Virgil,
across the Iliad, and across the New Testament is the
appearance of fire or radiance above the crown of a
human head, to show in some way that God or
the gods have intervened on behalf of this person, either
to make them powerful in battle, to give them new
(39:41):
powers of speech or understanding, or to show a kind
of prophecy about them, to mark them as destined in
some way.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
And then, yeah, you can imagine there's some crossover here.
Certainly we can look to various examples from the Bible too,
where there's people are in flames but they're not hurt,
or God speaking through the fire, the burning bush, and
so forth. So yeah, well, once you have these images
out there, they kind of there, they do kind of
brush up against each other and infect each other with
(40:09):
their their there ares.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Yeah, but if you want to learn more about the
Halo and the Ara, like I said, we did a
whole series on that a few years back. You can
go into our archives and check out. Ultimately, I feel
like a lot of the examples we were able to
turn up today I think do bleed more into the
halo are territory than into the more literal hair burning
territory that we were thinking about. So I don't know,
(40:32):
I want I guess this episode is one where we
turned up more dead ends than usual. But uh, maybe
that's useful to you. To you the listener to to
hear what it's like when you expect to find certain
things out there and you come up cold.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
Well, at least with the second example from the Ania,
it seems to sort of at least start off like
hair catching on fire, where they're like, oh my god,
our hair's on fire. Wait, hold up, just an omen,
It's okay, put their water jugs down. So there is
there is at least a direct connection there.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
I think the aenead is the closest we got to
what I had in mind. But like we said, and
maybe there are a bunch of great examples we just
didn't come across.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Yeah, yeah, And I don't know, there could be examples
that are kind of that where we lose that emphasis
and translation. So I don't know. It's like the comparison
of hair to fire and all these various auras and
halo effects. You know, they do kind of bleed together
and they confuse the topic of it. And again, there
there's no shortage of modern examples that are far clearer. Again,
(41:31):
lots of fire, elemental beings and fantasy and probably in
science fiction as well. I didn't look there as much,
but you know, so many examples, certainly in the illustrated medium.
There I ran across like multiple superheroes that have like
hair of fire, So I do think you're onto something
with that possible connection to modern depictions of hair and
(41:54):
that kind of like propping up more and more examples
of fire, elemental beings with flaming hair, flaming beard.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
Speaking of elementals, this has actually been on my list
for a bit. I've been thinking we should come and
do an episode on the elementals, like going back to Paris,
Elsis and stuff.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Oh yeah, yeah, I'd be up for that. Yeah, all
the way from ancient traditions on up to dungeons and dragons.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
But okay, I think that does it for burning hair
for me.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
All Right, we'll go ahead and close it off then,
but we'd love to hear from everyone out there if
you have thoughts on anything we discussed here, or examples
that we didn't bring up that we should sin them in,
and we'll cover them perhaps on a future episode of
Listener Mail. We're still doing listener Mails, They're just not
happening every week. They're going to occur every month or so,
(42:40):
and we're gonna they're gonna be longer. They're gonna be
in the place of Core episodes. Our Core episodes, of course,
are key science and culture episodes. They published on Tuesdays
and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do a short form episode,
and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to
just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
We're running those Weird House Cinema rewind episodes on Mondays now,
(43:02):
and of course regular Vault episodes reruns of Core episodes
those occur on Saturdays.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (43:29):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick,
and it's Saturday, so we are heading into the vault
for an older episode of the show. This one originally
published July twenty third, twenty twenty four, and it's part
two of our series about burning hair. Hair on Fire Enjoy.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part two in our discussion of burning hair. This topic
was inspired by a personal experience for me. I actually
singed a bunch of hair off my arm while grilling
at a family get together for the Fourth of July,
and not the first time I've done that, well grilling
for a crowd, and it got me thinking about what
(00:59):
happened when hair burns. So in the last episode we
talked about the distinctive and sometimes overpowering smell of burning hair,
which seems to be mostly due to the presence of
sulfur compounds that are formed and released when hair burns,
a chief one being sulfur dioxide which is released when
the keratin of hair is decomposed by fire. Sulfur dioxide
(01:22):
is also a major part of the characteristic smell of
a burning match head. We also ended up talking about
a couple of studies of hair catching on fire in
space ships, specifically addressing the question of whether human hair
is a fire hazard in environments with higher levels of
oxygen than Earth's atmosphere, and the answer seems to be yes.
(01:45):
In oxygen rich environments, where things catch fire more easily
because there's more oxygen, human hair can be a potent
fuel source and fire can spread quickly over it. So
these papers ended up talking about strategies to mitigate that
risk in future spacecraft and space habitation environments that might
be using elevated levels of oxygen. And then finally we
(02:07):
talked about stories of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century
English pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, who famously
was said to put burning slow matches under his hat
and he's drawn with like these slow matches and it
kind of fuses, sticking out alongside his hair. In some
evolved versions of this legend, maybe he's said to have
(02:28):
the burning slow matches in his hair or in his beard,
and we discussed to where these stories come from, how
historically plausible they are, including considerations of the danger of
catching one's own hair or beard on fire in general.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
In case you don't listen to that episode, don't try
any of this at home. Don't set out to do
anything flammable with your beard or.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Hair now, kind of continuing on that theme, I ended
up pursuing a research trail where I didn't turn up
quite as much as I expected to, but I at
least want to report what I did come across. So
I had a vague idea from somewhere that the powdered
wigs that were popular in parts of Western Europe, especially
(03:12):
in the eighteenth century, were prone to catching on fire.
My impression here may have been formed by seeing older
illustrations of this, or like cartoons from the period that
show people with elaborate hair wigs and headdresses catching on
fire due to a candle placed underneath them or something. Ultimately,
I found less about this than I expected to, and
(03:34):
I can't tell if it was actually any more common
than regular instances of people catching their hair on fire,
which of course does happen occasionally. Here and there, but
just to get into what it did come across, I
found mentioned in a post on the British Library's Untold
Lives blog, and I may have mentioned this on the
show before, but generally I think the British Libraries have
(03:54):
some great blogs and archives about history and some interesting
documents in their collections. This post was by Julia Armfield
from August twenty thirteen, and it's a short post concerning
how the elaborate wigs that had been so popular among
the wealthy during the Georgian Era, which was about seventeen
(04:14):
fourteen to eighteen thirty seven, these elaborate wigs began to
fall out of fashion later on in that period and
going into the Victorian period, they sort of fill out
out of fashion after the French Revolution and then especially
after the eighteen thirties. According to the author, this was
in part because of changing social perceptions about wigs that
(04:37):
they came to be seen not just as fashion but
in some cases as a kind of undesirable show of
vanity or as a deception. Which is funny because I
realized that even today there are like changes in how
you know, people are always like trying to affect their
outward appearance. There's like, you know, there's haircare and cosmetics
(04:58):
and stuff like that in every era, and for some reason,
you can look at someone trying to shape their appearance
in a certain way and just say, well, that's just fashion,
but with just a different kind of emotional spin on it.
You start to think of it as they're trying to
look unreal, They're trying to look away they're not supposed to.
Now it's a deception.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
M Yeah, that's interesting to think about. I guess the
stigma against powdered wigs in particular has pretty much stuck.
I think, yea, you know, there's certainly there's nothing wrong
with wearing a wig or a hair piece. But if
it is a powdered wig or a hair piece like
out of the period piece broadly speaking, like there's a
certain air that comes with that, then I guess there
(05:41):
are probably some exceptions in the fashion world and so forth.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Well, like why would wearing a wig be a deception,
but like wearing clothes that cover your skin is not
a deception.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
I don't know, yeah, I mean, I guess on one level,
someone can make the argument, well, the hair supposedly grows
out of you. The hair is of course, by its
very nature, something you put on you. But I don't know, yeah,
I mean, when you get down to it, why does
it matter one way or the other.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Anyway, This blog post mentions, in apart from changing social
perceptions of wigs, that there were that there were practical
problems presented by the wigs of the Georgian era, including
the fact that some wigs were so huge and heavy
that they actually caused people wearing them to develop sores
on their scalps. Another thing is infestation by insects or
(06:30):
other unwanted critters and parasites. Lice and fleas sometimes would
get into wigs, and that's also sometimes held up as
one reason for the popularity of wigs. Is that, well,
maybe the lice will get into the wig instead of
getting into your actual hair, if you can cut your
hair short or shave it, and then you know, they
just get into the wig instead. But then you've got
(06:51):
lice in your wig. I've read in separate places about
mitigation strategies for this, including historical trends in wigs that
would include built in lice or flea traps that would
be some kind of container with like bait hidden inside
the hair. But also this British Library post mentions that
Georgian wigs would be flammable due to the presence of
(07:13):
palmades made in large part out of animal fats such
as hogs lard or mutton renderings. Of course, animal fat
can be quite combustible, and so if you're using that
as the base of a kind of hair styling material
or pomade that we would think of today, you know,
to hold the wig in its in its styling shape,
(07:33):
you can imagine there would be trouble. Like you know,
combined wigs gelled up with animal fat and the use
of candles as a primary light source, and it just
seems like it would be a recipe for wig fires.
But I wasn't able to turn up a lot about
this in like history books or academic articles about the
history of wigs. I did find another blog post. This
(07:55):
one was on a history blog called all Things Georgian
by an author named Syria Murden, that managed to dig
up a handful of eighteenth century newspaper reports from England
and Scotland of young women's wigs or headdresses catching on
fire from a candle or in one case I think
from a fireplace and in a couple of cases leading
(08:17):
to their deaths. But again I did not find convincing
evidence that this was actually a really common occurrence or anything. So,
you know, with candles everywhere and large smeared masses of
hair bobbing around all over the place, it does seem
plausible that this would happen a lot, But apart from
a few reports here and there, I'm not sure it
actually did. Historians of wigs and hair, if you're aware
(08:39):
of something I'm not right in.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Yeah, it is often weird to look back on times
when candles were your main form of elimination. There were
a lot more open fires and less in the way
of fire safety, And on one level, you just kind
of think, well, why wasn't everything on fire all the time?
And certainly fire was a huge threat. But yeah, I
(09:02):
don't know. Maybe part of it is we sometimes don't
give our ancestors enough credit for not catching everything on fire.
I don't know, we think of them as the way
we might think of our own children if they're in
the presence of an open flame.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Well, I guess sometimes when we think about a historical
activity or apparatus that came with certain hazards. We imagine
the prevalence, but without the accustomedness that would accompany prevalence.
I mean, a world with lots of candles also had
people who were used to handling candles.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yes, exactly. Now, at this point in the episode, we're
going to get a little bit into hair of fire
and flaming beards and so forth, and mythology and folklore
(09:54):
and literature. And I have to admit this is an
area where I thought we were going to have more
to draw from. And certainly, you know, we probably left
some things off, and certainly, as always right in and
let us know if you have some great examples to
bring to mind. But generally I was thinking, Okay, hair
can burn, and it's reasonable to assume that every fire
(10:16):
bearing culture would have some experience with this that they
might further craft into various myths and legends, jokes, you know,
turns of phrase and so forth. Right, I mean, you
have fire, Hair can catch on fire. Maybe it doesn't
happen that often, but if it happens once, it's memorable.
And therefore you might have some traditions, you might have
(10:37):
some magical creatures, you might have some gods and goddesses
that have flaming hair. And while this is true, we
do have some examples to discuss, we didn't. I wasn't
able to find as many examples as I was expecting.
I was expecting it to be just a long list
of creatures and entities, but there's there's actually a lot
(10:59):
of like bleed over into other categories that makes it difficult,
you know, like just characters with red hair or characters
who have some sort of a halo or an ara.
But then it's kind of left to exactly what languages
used as to whether you would call this flaming hair.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Yeah, I think there are a lot of examples that
are arguable or edge cases, but I also was expecting
there just to be a lot more defined with it.
Was just like, here's a figure with fire for hair.
Maybe because I'm used to Hades from the Disney movie.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Yeah, yeah, this is a great example to bring up
the Greek god Hades in the nineteen ninety seven Hercules
movie flaming blue hair, voiced by James Woods. He's not
actually a fire related deity in Greek mythology. This was
just a visual choice by Disney that actually, I guess
the exact alchemy of this is they're dragging in elements
(11:53):
often associated generally with the Christian devil, you know, fire
and so forth, and and creating this kind of like
Haiti Satan combo for their their main villain, and making
like a very distinct visual choice on how to just
to present him.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yeah, it's like a combination. So you associate the Christian
the Christian Satan with the lake of fire, I guess.
So there's your fire element. But then you you've got
to have it like cold, sort of more like you
would get in Dante's Lower levels of Hell, or like
you would get I think more often in Greek depictions
of the underworld. It's just kind of like a cold,
(12:30):
dark place. So they make the fire blue, which ironically
is actually the hottest color of flame.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Right, So yeah, that's that's a that's a fun example
to bring up. I mean, there's so many pop culture
examples of this, and I think that's one of the
confusing things, is you, I mean, I would assume anyway
that Okay, we have characters like Captain Marvel and and
and so forth from from Marvel comics, and and they
(12:57):
have like flaming hair at times. Then this is it's
just a more modern example of a longer health tradition,
and that we're gonna have all these other examples and
in all these different belief systems. But yeah, I found
that you have certainly have no shortage of things like
fire elementals in modern fiction and sci fi and fantasy,
(13:18):
all sorts of creatures and spirits with flaming hair and
flaming beards. But they're just they seem there's just seemed
to be less of them when you actually look into
folklore and mythology and legend.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
As far as the recent pop culture examples go. You
brought up one in the notes that I didn't think of,
which is the one from the Wall the movie.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Oh yeah, yeah, this is the animated Pink Floyd movie,
and I believe it's Pink's wife, and it is depicted
later on as this kind of like monstrous cannibal creature
with flaming hair, hair of literal fire.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
I've seen this movie, I mean a long time ago.
I think I was in high school, but I completely
forgot about this. The main thing I remember is warning
for a gross thing about the scene shaves his nipple off.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Yeah, I forgot about that. How could you. I mainly
just remember the hammers like marching around.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
I guess, yeah, yeah, the fascist imagery.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Yeah yeah, it's been a long time since I've seen
I think I saw it when I was a kid,
and you know, on TV parts of it. Anyway, Ultimately,
the examples of like fire elemental beings are too numerous
to mention, but I was reminded of that there's one
in The Dark Crystal. So I picked up my copy
of the Dark Crystal Bestiary, and there's a description of
these things called the fire Lings. And I believe these
(14:31):
pop up in some of the like Dark Crystal Expanded
Universe material, I guess, you know, in comic books and
so forth. And I think maybe they were going to
be a part of a possible film project that never
came to fruition. But these are supposed to be direct
descendants of Gelfling exiles who live in the superheated core
(14:52):
of the planet Thraw, and they're depicted as Gelfling like beings,
but they have hair of fire. And then I found
like a couple of different images that kind of portray
different ideas of this, Like in one of them you
can see the Gelfling or in this case, the fire
ling has hair that is literal fire, and the others
(15:12):
they just look like fiery, golden beings. And it's kind
of left up to your interpretation if their hair is
just actual physical hair, or if it is like the
chemical emergence, you know, this, this pyrotechnic experience of fire.
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
I'm tempted to speculate that a lot of this modern
hair as fire imagery and cartoons and stuff specifically comes
from physical and visual similarities between hair and fire that emerge,
especially when they're being depicted in human drawing. That you know,
the ways that you sort of represent say hair blowing
(15:53):
in the wind, or hair flowing in a like a
still painting or photo or still painting or drawing can
very much resemble the kind of wisps of a fire,
but oriented in the opposite direction. Often. Yeah, I don't know,
and that's not a fully formed thought, but something almost
makes me think that it's something about like modern drawing
(16:14):
and animation traditions that give rise to seeing these things
as visually similar and then inviting the mind to make
a connection where it's not just that hair looks like fire,
but you have a character with fire fore hair.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Yeah, yeah, I was definitely thinking a bit about like
how hair appears when it is say, caught by the wind,
or if one is underwater and you have like footage
of someone with long hair and the hair is floating
and so forth, and if that has anything to do
with I mean that you could sort of link it
to the history of underwater the underwater moving picture, which
(16:50):
of course isn't going to go back that far, and
you could perhaps, I guess arguably enhance comparisons that would
be made in general, because of course there are always
going to be comparisons made between you know, reddish hair
and fire. You can factor in things like you know,
length and texture as well. But you know, at the
(17:14):
end of the day, we do have at least a
few examples of creatures and entities that I feel like
are close enough that we can say, Okay, we can
quibble about the details, but these creatures kind of sound
like they have fire for hair.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Okay, what'd you come up with?
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Now? A couple of these are from South America. One
is called the Kuma Conga, and this is a disembodied
head spirit of Brazilian folklore that I was reading about
in the werewolf in between Indians and Whites. This is
by Mark Harris and this was published in t PTE,
Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America.
(17:53):
And in this article, Harris describes this entity as entailing
aspects of what we might think of as a werewolf,
you know, in Western folklore, especially as well as sightings
of balls or wheels of fire. So that's another thing
I saw several examples of. It's like you have sort
of like fire entities, kind of will of the wisp
sort of entities, and it depends on like how far
(18:17):
you push that from being like a mere strange light
to being a flaming entity or a flaming head or
something with you know, physiology to it. Now, another one
that I've ran across was the Kurapura. I've seen descriptions
of this spirit from Tupequar Knee traditions of Brazil, entailing
a beard of fire, though Carol Rose doesn't mention this
(18:40):
in her entry on the creature in the book Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns,
and Goblins and Encyclopedia, she describes it as a bright,
red faced gnome with cloven hoofs as well as a
shaggy creature with backward turned feet. It's kind of a
forest guardian of game. Then there's also an Afro Brazilian
tradition of the Kurupira that casts everything more as a
(19:03):
will of the wisp that leads people off track in
the forest, but maybe sort of bribe with offerings. But
I've seen some more recent articles that mention either red
hair or hair of fire, so I can't completely dispute
that idea. But again, it seems like we often run
into this territory of It's probably some linguistic drift in
(19:24):
some of these descriptions, especially when you're dealing with multiple translations,
so hard for me to tell anyway exactly like what
the tradition actually is. Are we dealing with creatures that
are thought to have hair of fire or does that
just sort of get added on somewhere in the chain.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Or I think, especially the further back you go in history,
just to kind of blending of the concepts of light
and fire, that in many cases any light source that
didn't come from the sky or whatever could be described
as a fire.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Right right, Yeah, if you see a strange light in
the forest, for example, or in the sky and it
is of sufficient luminosity, like it's very reasonable to say, oh,
there was some sort of fire out there, there was
some sort of Yeah, what else could it be? If
it's like above, if it's not the moon, if it's
not a you know, something that is obviously celestial, and
it's not something that is like a firefly, then you
(20:19):
might reasonably think in terms of candles and torches and
so forth. I'm also reminded of a fireball yo kai
from Japanese traditions. I think we may have talked about
this one before and name Ubagabi, and this is more
of a fireball, but with the face of an old man.
And I guess if it is an old man's face,
then you could say, well, there the hair is fire.
(20:41):
But maybe not. Maybe that's adding too much on, you know.
I've also seen some ideas about low Key from Norse
mythology having hair of fire or flame hair. This I
didn't get a real strong feeling off of this either.
Hair with these two can get kind of complicated, and
in general are sort of understanding of them are kind
(21:02):
of you know, influenced by Marvel comics now, but you know,
Thor sometimes had red hair and a red beard, and
Loki is sometimes depicted with red hair, sometimes arguably resembling
a flame. And this is where I've seen various commentators,
you know, pointing out this idea that Loki may be
connected to the word Logi, which means flame, but is
(21:25):
also the name of one of the otin who personified fire.
So again, I don't know, there's that you could make
a case. I guess that sometimes Loki was perhaps a
fire headed god, but maybe not. Now one of the
stronger cases I came across is there is an Armenian
warrior god by the name of Vaughan the Dragon Reaper,
(21:47):
who apparently is more traditionally described as having celestial fire
for hair, a beard of flames, and eyes like suns.
So this one would seem a stronger example. Uh though
it is interesting here too that we're getting into like
celestial fire here in this idea of like a holy
flame that doesn't necessarily behave like a real flame, and
(22:09):
is also kind of like a halo, kind of like
a holy aura. But I feel like this this guy,
you can make a stronger case and say, Okay, this
guy has has fire for hair.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
So I was not initially familiar with a hagan the
dragon reaper, but the dragon reaper apparently is like a
that's a translation of a traditional epithet. But that's it's
amazing how much that sounds like modern cool. It sounds
like something out of a video game.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
Yeah, this is this is old school cool right here.
It makes me think I really need to get into
Armenian mythology more. I really don't know much about about
Armenian myth and lore, but if this is any indication
that they have warriors with flaming hair that slay dragons,
then I want to know more about it now. There
are a lot of additional possible examples in Buddhist i
(22:59):
Canog and Hindu iconography where you have things like hair
of fire going on. But also again sometimes it's might
be more akin to a halo or an aura or
multiple auras. And of course there's often a lot of
information that is being relayed through these religious images. But
(23:21):
for instance, the tantric Buddhist Paul Deen Mamo is sometimes
depicted with hair of flame. The Hindu god Agny is
sometimes depicted with hair of fire two varying degrees, but
sometimes it's more of an aura of flame so again,
there's going to be a lot of drift here, and
a lot of it is going to be left to
personal interpretation. Now one of the more interesting things to discuss, though,
(23:52):
really gets us more I guess into the literature end
of the spectrum, getting into Latin literature here. But are
there's not one? But there are two instances in Virgil's
Eneid concerning omens of burning hair and or hair that
becomes or is surrounded by a holy fire.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
M okay.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
So Virgil's Eneid has come up on the show before,
but I thought we should maybe take a moment just
to ground it properly and talk about what it is. So.
Virgil was a Roman poet who lived seventy BCE through
nineteen BCE and served Emperor Augustus. He composed the epic
poem the Eneid between twenty nine and nineteen BCE as
(24:32):
an attempt to ground Rome, the Roman people, and the
rule of his boss Augustus within a deeper mythopoetic tradition,
because while Romans he certainly had epics such as Homer's
the Iliad and the Odyssey, they lacked for a true
national epic and a true founding work of mythic literature.
(24:54):
So that's what Virgil had set out to do, to
create one, spinning a saga out of Greek myth and
the of Homer into a Roman history. Now, Virgil died
at the young age of fifty, possibly due to complications
from heatstroke. I think maybe there's some back and forth
over this, but sometimes I see it rather matter of
factly said that it was probably heat stroke. But he dies,
(25:15):
and as he is dying, he requests this unpublished and
unfinished epic to be destroyed. He's like, it's not ready yet,
I just get rid of it. Underlings, please destroy it.
His orders are are not obeyed, though, and Augustus, having
been exposed to some very flattering passages of the epic
in which the hero, the hero of the tale, mirrors
(25:38):
and predicts the rise of Augustus, he says, now, this
work is great, Please make sure that it is published.
And then it is published, and as we'll get into
maybe not every passage of the Aenead is as flattering
as those that Augustus initially heard.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Yeah, So for more context on Virgil, by the way,
I just wanted to say we did talk about him
a good bit in our episode a few years back
on insect funerals, because there is an apocryphal legend in
which Virgil and his friends held an elaborate funeral for
a fly. I think we concluded that this probably did
not actually happen, but the story arose like within the
(26:18):
logic of the story, it's something like they're using it
as a legal loophole to protect some estate from being seized.
But also in that episode, we talked about how Dante,
the author of The Divine Comedy, thought Virgil was just
like the coolest guy ever and the best example of
poetic virtues, which is why he uses him as the
virtuous pagan character who guides his fictionalized tour of Hell.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, And ultimately that's where I've certainly more
read on the Divine Comedy than I am on the
actual works of Virgil. But you end up learning about
Virgil in his works through Dante, like you end up
learning about everything that Dante's into. Yeah, as you travel
with him across the three Realms.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Yeah, Virgil's really great.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
Did you know this?
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Beatrice is really great too.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Not only is Virgil really great, but we're basically best friends. Now.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
Yeah, he liked me.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Yeah. So the Aeneid is the story of Aneas, who
flees the destruction of Troy and ultimately conquers Italy to
become the ancestor of the Romans. The first six books
of this epic cover his journey to Italy, but it's
not like a direct journey, like there's a joint through
the underworld, for example, and that's key as an influence
(27:34):
on Dante. And then books seven through twelve if the
Aeneid concerned the wars in Italy, So the first book
is a road trip, very much in the spirit of
the Odyssey, and the second book is very much in
the spirit of the Iliad because it's concerned mostly with
this big war. Now, to be clear, this in this
treatment in others, the founding of Rome and the Roman
(27:55):
people is greatly embellished by myth and literature. I mean,
that's again, that's kind of that's basically what Virgil set
out to do. Right.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Virgil is not like Herodotus or Thucydides, people in the
ancient world who were to some extent concerned with trying
to create an accurate historical record of events. He's like,
he's he's got he's telling a good story, and it
has a political agenda.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Right, And but that political agenda does, in very strong
terms concern Augustus. But while Augustus had again heard very
apparently heard very flattering parts of the work prior to publication,
it's thought that he might not have heard all of it,
because there are parts of the work that also cast Augustus,
or at least his his analog Aneas, in a more
(28:38):
flawed light, you know. And idea is that his ascension
and long term legacy are not completely assured. And we'll
get into some examples of that as we go. But
any rate, it's a book that's very concerned with prophesizing
the future of Rome, mostly saying great things are ahead,
but sometimes with little caveats, like bringing up probably great
things are ahead, but watch watch out for this or that. Right.
(29:01):
And at the end of book two we have the
omen of Ascanius is burning hair, So Ascanius, who is
also believe called LULUs. At times he's he's like a
little boy. At this point point, he is the he
is the son of Aeneas. He's eventually going to become
the king of the Latin city state of Alba Longa,
and is uh and in disrespect. He's you know, he
(29:24):
can kind of loop him in as being one of
the founders of the Roman race. But again, his father
a Eneas is this position as an ancestor of Romulus
and Remus. He's the hero of Troy. He's fled the
burning city of Troy with his son after receiving uh
he after he receives this omen of the burning hair
from the god Jupiter. Uh. So his son's hair catches
(29:47):
a flame. And there's you know, some back and forth
over this, and and and and and it becomes like
it's like a divine flame, a sort of soft, harmless fire, uh,
that is around and his brow like a crown. So
even here we have some there's some room to interpret it.
You can think of it as a like a crown
of flame, hair of flame, halo aurra and so forth.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
So his son's head appears with flame on it, and
this seems to be delivering a message from the gods.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Right, But of course he's not completely sure. So he's like,
you know, mighty Jupiter, if this is a sign, give
me another one. And so there's like a shooting star
and and and Virgil, you know, has a lot of
a lot of fun with this, you know, poetically comparing
the two. But you know, so ultimately we also have
the connection here to the burning city that they are
(30:39):
now going to have to escape. But it's a great
omen a signifier of deliverance there, you know. And again
their direct comparisons to be made between the tail the
shooting star and a flaming arrow. And again there's this
idea that y'all got to get out of here and
go on to great things, in other words, the founding
of Rome and so forth. Anna Rogerson in twenty seventeen's
(31:03):
Virgils Zoskanias writes that this episode illuminates quote the path
that must be taken in order ultimately to achieve the
Roman dream. But she also stresses that the fire also
carries with it other associations quote, hinting at different potential
outcomes and reminding us again that his role as a
sign and guaranteur of a Roman future is not as
(31:26):
secure or as patent as it might seem.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Oh that's interesting, especially if I'm interpreting this right. I
don't know at all if this is what Rogerson is
getting at, but the idea of a fire appearing around
his son's brow could have it. On one hand, it
could resemble this imagery like halo imagery that we see
in other cases, where it's sort of like an anointing
by the gods or a showing of divine favor light
(31:50):
showing around the head. And I'll mention another example of
that in a minute. But also the idea of fire
appearing around the child's head has the connotation of danger, right,
and so it's like both at the same time. Do
you think that's at all what Rogerson is getting at here?
Speaker 1 (32:05):
That that I believe that I believe that's that's what
they're getting at here. And and it does match up
with with other arguments I've seen, you know that that
that Virgil is of course talking about the greatness of
Rome and the greatness of his boss, but also adding
in these warnings and hints, you know, these uh uh,
you know, speaking speaking truth to power at least a
little bit u through the poetry. Interesting, so Ascanius and
(32:30):
his father flee Troy with Aneas carrying his own elderly
father on his back. There are some great depictions of this,
you have, like a cross generational trio escaping the burning city.
And so there are all, you know, various images where
you'll have Aneas with this older man, huge older man
on his shoulders, kind of piggyback style, and then here's
(32:51):
the young and behind him kind of like tugging on
his his clothing a little bit like Dad, are we
there yet? Have we founded Rome yet? And so forth. Now,
later on in book seven, Aneas's last wife of Lavinia,
she has an episode with burning hair as well. I
told you there was going to be a second one.
Her hair catches fire during a sacrifice at the altar
(33:12):
of the gods. And I'm going to read a bit here.
This is in a translation, of course, from the Aeneid.
While the old king lit fires at the altars with
a pure tortch, the girl Lavinia with him. It seemed
her long hair caught, her head dress caught in crackling flame,
her queenly tresses blazed, her jeweled crown blazed, mantled, Then
(33:33):
in smoke and russet light, she scattered divine fire throughout
all the house. No one could hold that site anything
but hair raising marvelous. And it was read by Sears
to mean the girl would have renown in glorious days
to come. But that she brought a great war on
her people, And I was reading about interpretation of this
(33:54):
by John E. Rexen from nineteen sixty one in fire
Symbolism in the Eneid, and this author wrote, these flames
presented both destructive and constructive aspects. Laviniu's people would be
involved in the conflagration of war with the Trojans, but
a marriage torch would unite her with Aeneas, who had
found a new city in Italy named Lavinium after her Ah.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
So it's almost that same duality we interpreted with the
crown of fire around Buscanius's head.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
Yeah, yeah, And I think it's really it's really potent
when you think about it, Like the idea of any
divine being giving you messages and laying out your course
for you, you know, making sure that you're walking, you know,
a conditioned path like that's at both powerful but also
terrifying because in all these various traditions, you know, we
(34:46):
know what sorts of fates the gods sometimes lay in
front of our heroes and heroines. You know, it's not
all it's not all roses. Sometimes there is a burning
city and so forth.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
Yeah, this actually connected for me to something that is
in the Iliad itself. We talked about how Virgil he
bases his epic in part on the epics of Homer,
but this came up a few years back when we
did episodes on the religious imagery of the Halo. You
can look up those older episodes if you want. There's
(35:19):
a good bit of overlap with what we're talking about today. Actually,
but this specific connection with the Iliad comes in book eighteen.
So I was thinking about the passage where the great
warrior Achilles he finds out that his bosom companion, a Patroclus,
has been killed in battle by the Trojan prince Hector,
and Achilles reacts sort of by losing his mind. He's
(35:42):
filled with grief and rage and a thirst for vengeance.
And so the Greeks and the Trojans in this part
of the poem are fighting over the right to retrieve
Petroclus's body from the field of battle. And then the
goddess Athena puts this godlike power and aura into Achilles
so that he will be able to terrify the Trojans
(36:02):
and drive them into a route. And so this is
from the translation by Caroline Alexander. Achilles beloved of Zeus arose,
and Athena casts the tasseled aegis about his mighty shoulders.
She shining among goddesses. Encircled round his head a cloud
of gold, and from it blazed bright, shining fire. Okay,
(36:24):
so maybe a little bit different. Maybe not hair directly
on fire, but a cloud of gold around the head
from which blazes bright fire. It goes on to say,
and as when smoke rising from a city reaches the
clear high air from a distant island, which enemy men
fight round, and they, the whole day long, are pitted
in hateful warfare around the city walls. But with the
(36:46):
sun's setting, the beacon fires blaze torch upon torch, and
flaring upward, the glare becomes visible to those who live around,
in the hope that they might come with ships as
allies against destruction. So from a killer head the radiance
reached the clear high air, and going away from the wall,
he stood at the ditch. Nor did he mix with
(37:08):
the Achaeans, for he observed his mother's knowing command, and
standing there he shouted, and from the distance Pallas Athena
cried out. Too unspeakable was the uproar he incited in
the Trojans, as when a clarion voice is heard, when
cries the trumpet of life, destroying enemies who surround the city.
Such then was the clarion voice of Eacides. And when
(37:31):
they heard the brazen voice of Eacides, the spirit in
each man was thrown in turmoil. The horses, with their
fine manes, wheeled their chariots back, for in their hearts
they forebode distress to come. And the charioteers were struck
from their senses when they saw the weariless, terrible fire
above the head of Peleus's great hearted son blazing. And
(37:53):
this the gleaming eyed goddess Athena caused to blaze. So
again it's sort of an edge case because it doesn't
say directly the hair is on fire, in that it's
literally being consumed by flame. But it's this more common
imagery we get of a radiance that appears around or
over the top of the head and is described as
(38:15):
burning like fire or burning like his hair were on fire.
And in fact it comes back more towards Virgil's time period,
the context of the early Roman Empire. You can think
of cases of imagery like this that appear in say,
the Christian New Testament. So in the New Testament, in
the Book of Acts, chapter two, we get the story
of the Pentecost, which is the anointing by the Holy
(38:38):
Spirit of Jesus's apostles in Jerusalem, fifty days after the
Resurrection has taken place. And this part says that in
the NRSV translation quote, when the day of Pentecost had come,
they were all together in one place, and suddenly from
heaven there came a sound, like the rush of a
violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they
(38:59):
were divided. Tongues as of fire appeared among them, and
a tongue rested on each of them. All of them
were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak
in other languages, as the Spirit gave them the ability.
So in this case it does not seem intended to
terrify like it did in the Iliad. But what's sort
(39:20):
of common in all these stories across the Eneid by Virgil,
across the Iliad, and across the New Testament is the
appearance of fire or radiance above the crown of a
human head, to show in some way that God or
the gods have intervened on behalf of this person, either
to make them powerful in battle, to give them new
(39:41):
powers of speech or understanding, or to show a kind
of prophecy about them, to mark them as destined in
some way.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
And then, yeah, you can imagine there's some crossover here.
Certainly we can look to various examples from the Bible too,
where there's people are in flames but they're not hurt,
or God speaking through the fire, the burning bush, and
so forth. So yeah, well, once you have these images
out there, they kind of there, they do kind of
brush up against each other and infect each other with
(40:09):
their their there ares.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Yeah, but if you want to learn more about the
Halo and the Ara, like I said, we did a
whole series on that a few years back. You can
go into our archives and check out. Ultimately, I feel
like a lot of the examples we were able to
turn up today I think do bleed more into the
halo are territory than into the more literal hair burning
territory that we were thinking about. So I don't know,
(40:32):
I want I guess this episode is one where we
turned up more dead ends than usual. But uh, maybe
that's useful to you. To you the listener to to
hear what it's like when you expect to find certain
things out there and you come up cold.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
Well, at least with the second example from the Ania,
it seems to sort of at least start off like
hair catching on fire, where they're like, oh my god,
our hair's on fire. Wait, hold up, just an omen,
It's okay, put their water jugs down. So there is
there is at least a direct connection there.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
I think the aenead is the closest we got to
what I had in mind. But like we said, and
maybe there are a bunch of great examples we just
didn't come across.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Yeah, yeah, And I don't know, there could be examples
that are kind of that where we lose that emphasis
and translation. So I don't know. It's like the comparison
of hair to fire and all these various auras and
halo effects. You know, they do kind of bleed together
and they confuse the topic of it. And again, there
there's no shortage of modern examples that are far clearer. Again,
(41:31):
lots of fire, elemental beings and fantasy and probably in
science fiction as well. I didn't look there as much,
but you know, so many examples, certainly in the illustrated medium.
There I ran across like multiple superheroes that have like
hair of fire, So I do think you're onto something
with that possible connection to modern depictions of hair and
(41:54):
that kind of like propping up more and more examples
of fire, elemental beings with flaming hair, flaming beard.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
Speaking of elementals, this has actually been on my list
for a bit. I've been thinking we should come and
do an episode on the elementals, like going back to Paris,
Elsis and stuff.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Oh yeah, yeah, I'd be up for that. Yeah, all
the way from ancient traditions on up to dungeons and dragons.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
But okay, I think that does it for burning hair
for me.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
All Right, we'll go ahead and close it off then,
but we'd love to hear from everyone out there if
you have thoughts on anything we discussed here, or examples
that we didn't bring up that we should sin them in,
and we'll cover them perhaps on a future episode of
Listener Mail. We're still doing listener Mails, They're just not
happening every week. They're going to occur every month or so,
(42:40):
and we're gonna they're gonna be longer. They're gonna be
in the place of Core episodes. Our Core episodes, of course,
are key science and culture episodes. They published on Tuesdays
and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do a short form episode,
and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to
just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
We're running those Weird House Cinema rewind episodes on Mondays now,
(43:02):
and of course regular Vault episodes reruns of Core episodes
those occur on Saturdays.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
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