June 5, 2025 • 49 mins
Before the dawn of the iron age, ancient humans had but one source of workable iron for their artifacts and weapons: meteorites. In this classic and very-metal episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss various examples of meteoric metal artifacts, including several precious sky-weapons of antiquity. (originally published 5/9/2024)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb. We're out this week, so we're continuing some
episodes from the vault here. This is going to be
part two of our series on meteoric metal and alien iron.
This originally published five nine, twenty twenty four. Let's jump
right in.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two
in our series on human uses of metal from the Sky.
If you haven't heard the first episode yet, you should
go back and check that one out before you listen
to this. But in that episode brief recap, we focused
mostly on a specific artifact from the New Kingdom of Egypt,
(00:58):
which was a dagger found wrapped up with the mummy
of the pharaotutin Common, which had a blade made of iron.
Now that might not sound remarkable, but this was a
blade made of iron from an era before the large
scale smelting of iron in Egypt. And the really cool
thing about this knife and many other iron artifacts from
(01:19):
before the regional iron age in Egypt is that they
were probably created out of iron that came from a
meteorite space metal. So we also discussed the history of
knowledge that meteorites come from space, including the story of
how European scientists came to generally agree on the cosmic
origin of meteorite rocks only around the beginning of the
(01:41):
nineteenth century or so, and then also some interesting evidence
that the ancient Egyptians did actually know that iron meteorites
came from space, for example the way they referred to
iron as the iron of the sky or the metal
of the sky, and some other linguistic clues, clues in
the way the glyphs of the Hieroglyphic language are put together.
(02:04):
And then there are also some other languages like Sumerian,
which have long had similar associations between iron or certain
types of iron and the sky. And so today we're
back to talk about more examples of the use of
metal from space in human artifacts in human technological history.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
That's right, and where we're going to go next. We're
going to get back into the use of iron and
meteoric iron in meteorites in Chinese tradition, Chinese history, and
maybe just a little dash of Chinese mythology. I want
to refer back to a write up on iron that
(02:45):
appears in the seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World
by Brian and Fagan. With this particular bit by Paul Tikratic.
Cratic sums up Chinese iron usage by pointing out that
iron production in China began around ninth century BCE, perhaps
introduced from the West, but also just as likely an
independent invention, and that by the Han period to go
(03:09):
to BCE, the Chinese quote incontestably led the world in
iron technology and production. But of course, as with these
other examples we've been looking at, we do have evidence
of artifacts created with meteoric iron prior to this. Specifically
it takes us back to the Sheng dynasty. This would
have been around fourteen one hundred BCE. Now, as we
(03:32):
previously mentioned, there of course has been some back and
forth on the testing of various pre Iron Age iron artifacts,
and ultimately a lot of that is still going on,
and these blades are often mentioned in some of those documents.
Now in that paper that I credited in the last
episode from Albert Jambond, twenty seventeenth Bronze Age iron meteoretic
(03:54):
or not a chemical strategy. At least according to this source,
the nickel count is low in these examples, but not
low enough to assign terrestrial origin, and that this is
definitely a case it seems like where the lower nickel
content is likely due to weathering effects. The blades themselves
have long been discussed as probable examples of meteoric iron,
(04:19):
going back at least as far as the book two
Early Chinese bronz Weapons with Meteoritic Iron Blades by gettens
at All in nineteen seventy one, which details that these
blades were found in nineteen thirty one in Anyang, Hanan
within a single tomb, which is also cited in Metals
in Antiquity by Young at All nineteen ninety nine. Now
(04:43):
I have a picture here of these artifacts here for
you to look at, Joe and everyone else. You can
look these up as well online. Just look for meteoric
iron Chinese axes or Chinese broad axes and you can
likely find images of this. You can tell that these
were ornate, highly stylized weapons. Now, I want to note
(05:05):
that both of these sources here that are talking about it,
they seem to indicate less than certainty in some of
the details, saying that there seems to be a lot
of believe to have been in these references. Though to
be clear, these weapons have long been in the Freer
collection at the Smithsonian, and there's no indication that the
(05:25):
dating or a larger geographic origin is particularly endowed here.
I just couldn't help but pick up on the fact
that this is one of those accounts where there seem
to be a little bit of ambiguity but no real
sticking points I think in trying to understand where these
came from. These would have been Chinese broad axes, formally
inlaid and again likely largely ceremonial. These are not weapons
(05:50):
that would be out on the battlefield.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
Ah. Yeah, and I had been assuming the same was
true of Tuton Commons iron dagger, though in fact I
guess I don't have a way of knowing that for sure.
Don't have a reason to suspect to use this for
knife dueling or anything.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Yeah, it's interesting to think about these examples in terms
of how do you use it right, because you know,
we have cases where you're going to have some sort
of an iron weapon that is going to be of
exceptional quality, but you're going to have so few of them,
maybe even just one. You know, what, what are you
going to do during the Bronze period with your iron weapon.
(06:25):
It's kind of like if, as a thought experiment, you
were to say, okay, what if I were to take
a lightsaber back to the Hundred Years War between England
and France during the fourteenth and fifteenth century, and you
gave it to one side or the other? You know,
what good is it going to do? You know, you
could make a case maybe for some sort of special
forces style use of the weapon by either party. Okay,
(06:48):
single combat, sure, but more likely than not, a single
light saber is not going to decide anything during the
fourteenth or fifteenth century in any kind of like warfare scenario.
Would make far more sense as a ritual object, as
a tool of propaganda, as is essentially like a scepter
to show how special and or powerful you are.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
And as we talked about last time, with the specific
case of iron versus the dominant metal of bronze, there's
not even really a clear material superiority of early iron
weapons over say, well made bronze ones of the period
that the advantages of iron when moving into the iron age,
were primarily advantages in terms of economics and the sourcing
(07:33):
of materials, that it was easier to produce lots of
iron implements and tools and weapons at scale, rather than
it being that iron is just a much better metal
or something right right.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
And the other key point, as we discussed in the
last episode, is the knowledge of where the meteoric iron
came from, like knowing that this weapon is, you know,
of heavenly origin or of cosmic origin and so forth,
that seems to often be really important. And so I'm
going to get into that question here with Chinese examples.
(08:08):
Turning first back to gettens at All the work to
early Chinese bronze weapons with iron blades from seventy one.
They point out that meteorite falls were known to the
ancient Chinese and discussed in their literature, often in reference
to portents. So if the metal used was known to
have come from the sky, they contend, it would have
(08:30):
added to the auspiciousness of the weapons and the reason
that the iron was used in these cases instead of jade,
which typically occupied an elevated position of ceremonial importance for
weapons and so forth. Such usage may have also influenced
known Chinese meteorite fragments. Quote such a use of meteoritic
(08:52):
iron might also explain the fact that only one iron
meteorite find is known from China. This I is referring
to ancient examples of meteorite, the idea being that iron
meteorites would have been known as a source for this
sort of metal and would have been used as such.
(09:14):
And certainly these are not the only known examples of
Chinese meteoric weapons or weapons or artifacts that are believed
or it's argued, may be made of such iron. There
are several known artifacts of possible meteoric iron from the
late Sheng and early Western Zo. So for examples of
(09:36):
some of those observations, because they mentioned, okay, the ancient
Chinese knew about meteorites. They knew they came from the sky.
For some examples of this knowledge, I turned to the
nineteen ninety four paper Meteorite Falls in China and some
Related human Casualty Events by Yao at All, published in
(09:56):
the journal Meteoritics. They looked at accounts from roughly seven
hundred BCE through nineteen twenty CE, with the earliest account
cited found in the Spring and Autumn Annals, traditionally attributed
to Confucius, who would have historically lived around five fifty
(10:16):
one through four to seventy nine BCE. This work is
one of the five classics of ancient Chinese literature and
it covers an historical period stretching from seven twenty two
to for eighty one BCE, and the work includes coverage
of a six forty five BCE event in which quote
in translation of course, five stones fell in Sung And
(10:41):
there are various other accounts in this article that they
don't highlight all of them, but they highlight some of
historic Note there is a Sei dynasty account. This is
from the work History of the Suy Dynasty, and it
refers to a six sixteen b CE meteorite, with the
(11:03):
account depicting a meteorite hitting a siege tower during the
besiegement of a walled city. What yeah, So the idea
is that there's a you know, a siege situation going on,
a meteorite hits, takes out the siege tower, causes the sea,
and then either the strike of the meteorite or the
(11:23):
perhaps far more likely the subsequent collapse of said siege
tower results in I believe I read possibly ten fatalities.
That was their I think recorded number. If this is true,
it might stand as the earliest recorded human meteorite related fatality.
These are of course rare. You're talking about situations where
(11:44):
the you know, a meteorite hits somebody or hits the
vicinity of a human and in doing so, results in
a casualty. But it's also non entirely clear. I've read
some criticism of this account saying, Okay, this is certainly possible.
It would be a very rare occurrence. We also have
(12:07):
to just acknowledge that it's possible that this siege tower
was taken out by something far more mundane, like human
munitions fired from the wall of the sieged city, that
sort of thing. But it is kind of It is
cataloged in the historic records, so I've seen numerous texts
acknowledge it and say, well, perhaps this is true.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
So hundreds of accounts follow these early accounts of meteorites
and the Chinese records, and I'm not going to go
through all of them, or even the ones listed in
this source. But there's one more I wanted to mention
here because it does line up with what we're talking
about and the subject of meteors and iron, and that
is the non meteorite shower of thirteen forty one. It's
(12:51):
notable because it seems to have been a shower of
iron meteorites, and it was even referred to as quote
the iron rain, with descriptions of the resulting bore holes
in the earth matching up with what we know of
iron meteorite impacts today. Now. Thirteen forty one, of course,
is far outside the Bronze Age examples we're looking at,
(13:16):
but you know, you combine this with certainly these much
earlier examples, and it does seem clear that the ancient
Chinese knew that meteorites came from above, they came from
the sky, and that alone would be enough to sort
of factor into these myth making understandings of what a
weapon forged of such iron would mean. By the way,
(13:41):
speaking of Chinese mythology, it's worth noting that you the Great,
the character that we've talked about on the show before,
founder of the Shop of the dynasty, in myth and legend,
the bringer of flood controls is sometimes, at least at
least in early China, these mythology connected to meteorites. Oh so,
(14:04):
according to Mark Edward Lewis in the Mythology of Early China,
some texts say that you was born of a stone
or in a place named for a stone, while other
tellings state that quote his mother was inseminated by a
magical stone or meteor.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
Oh. Interesting, this is a different way of sort of
like a parenthood by the gods. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yeah, so I had not run across this before. I
cross checked it in a couple of my go to
Chinese mythology sources Yang and in Turner's Chinese Mythology and
Burrell's work on Chinese mythology. Both of these texts, I
refer to an origin story for you by which he's
born from the belly of his father's corpse following the
(14:48):
said father's execution. And this I'm guessing this entirely masculine
birth as a Buryl describes it. I guess this is
the predominant origin story that comes later, and that Lewis
here is focusing primarily on early tellings before those traditions emerged.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Oh okay, I see so.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Anyway, these uh, these axes among other artifacts, you know,
another example of an ancient Bronze Age culture having access
to meteoric iron, using it to craft weapons that then
have an exalted place within their culture. Uh and so,
and definitely look up images of this if you have
(15:30):
the ability to do so readily, because you can you know,
they're they're they're not in pristine form, they haven't been
restored or anything like that. They're not anywhere near the
the completeness of Tout and Commons dagger, but you can
still get a sense of the majesty they would have had.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
Yeah, even the stubs are beautiful. Okay. I want to
talk about a statue, specifically a metal sculpture allegedly from Tibet,
(16:08):
sometimes called the Iron Man, referred to in a lot
of media reports as the Iron Man or sometimes as
the Space Buddha.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Well, these both, these descriptions both take you somewhere, that's
for sure.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
So this statue weighs about ten point six kilograms or
about twenty three pounds, and is roughly twenty four centimeters
or about nine and a half inches tall. It is
made of iron, and it depicts a bearded male figure
that is sometimes referred to as a Buddha, sometimes referred
to as a God sometimes referred to as a man,
(16:45):
but he is depicted wearing trousers, a sort of cape
or cloak that's joined over his shoulders in a knot
on his chest. He's wearing kind of almost kind of
cloglike looking shoes with a split in the cuff at
the bottom of the pant legs, and what looks to
me kind of like scale armor over his mid section.
(17:09):
And then on that scale armor there is the symbol
of a swastika, which, remember, before it was appropriated by
the German Nazi Party, that was around nineteen twenty, it
was for centuries or even millennia, a traditional symbol with
positive associations in a lot of different cultures and religions
throughout the world, notably in Hinduism and Buddhism.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
That's right, and it still has that status in various
Hindu and Buddhist traditions, though of course permanently ruined in
the West by the appropriation of the Nazi Party.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Yeah, and so in the iron Man statue, the figure
has a halo like disc behind his head and he
is clutching a round egg shaped object in one hand.
His legs are folded underneath. His body looks like he
could be sitting cross legged or perhaps even dancing. But
(18:06):
this whole thing is carved out of a solid piece
of metal with a rough, unfinished base below the figure.
So what is the deal with this weird metal statue. Well,
there was a bunch of media about this statue way
back in twenty twelve that was associated with the publication
of a paper that was looking into its physical makeup
(18:28):
and its origins. The paper was by Buckner at All,
published in the journal Media Critics and Planetary Science again
in twenty twelve, and it was called Buddha from Space,
an ancient object of art made of a China iron
metia write fragment. So I'm going to start with what
was originally alleged by it, but keep in mind that
(18:48):
some of the information I'm going to say at first
is either not certain or almost certainly not true. The
lead author of this paper, Elmer Buckner, is a geologist
affiliated with the Planetology Institute at Stuttgart University, and so
the authors of this paper were looking into the question
of first of all, what this statue is made of,
(19:11):
but also what does it depict and where did it
come from? As to where it comes from, there again,
is plenty of debate about this, but the story as
received by the authors of the paper goes like this.
In the years nineteen thirty eight and nineteen thirty nine,
Adolf Hitler's SS sponsored a research and propaganda expedition to Tibet.
(19:34):
This is kind of a famous, famous expedition about which
there has been much sort of cultural legend. But this
expedition was led by the German zoologist and explorer Ernst Schaffer.
This expedition collected a lot of material for return to Germany.
So they took a bunch of plant and animal samples,
seeds and grains and plants, and they cataloged birds. There
(19:57):
was ornithology missions and stuff like that. And it also
took a lot of cultural artifacts, including, according to a
Triple As blog post about this paper by Stephen A.
Edwards quote, a robe believed to have been worn by
the Dali Lama, a gold coin, and the iron statue.
The latter apparently attracted the attention of the Nazis because
(20:20):
of a swastika carved into its center. So that's the
story about where it came from. What does appear to
be true is that the statue was in the possession
of a private collector from some time unknown until the
year two thousand and seven, which is the same year
these authors began investigating it. But before then. The allegation
(20:42):
is that it was taken from Tibet by Schaffer's men
in the late thirties and then disappeared during World War II,
only to reappear to the public in the two thousands.
All right, now, as to the question of what the
statue is made of, the authors conducted an elemental analysis
and found that the concentration of elements present in the
(21:02):
metal was consistent with an iron meteorite, so much like
the analysis we talked about in the previous episode looking
at King Tut's dagger. Here they found high concentrations of nickel.
This statue was approximately sixteen percent nickel by weight and
about zero point six percent cobalt, and these are not
ratios you would expect to find in earth based iron.
(21:26):
Earth based iron extracted from before the eighteen hundreds tends
to be not more than about four percent nickel. Also,
the authors analyzed the ratios of trace platinum group metals
and found that these were also consistent with meteorite iron.
Not only that they were able to match this metal
to the composition of meteorites from a specific known impact area.
(21:50):
They write, quote, the geochemical data of the meteorite generally
matched the element values known from fragments of the Chinga
atax site taxite meaning ungrouped iron meteorite strewn field, discovered
in nineteen thirteen. The provenance of the meteorite, as well
as the piece of art strongly points to the border
region of eastern Siberia and Mongolia. Accordingly, and I went
(22:15):
and did a little more looking, So it seems that
the Chinga meteorite is sort of it's an area rather
than one specific object. The Chinga meteorite field is something
that contains fragments of meteorite found by gold miners in Tuva,
which is a region of southern Siberia in Russia near
(22:36):
the border with Mongolia, and the hundreds of meteorite fragments
found there are thought to result from an object that
exploded in the atmosphere over Tuva between ten and twenty
thousand years ago. So the scientific evidence that the iron
Man statue was made out of meteorite iron seems quite strong.
But what about these other questions? What does this statue
(22:59):
depict and when was a when and where was it made?
Here's where we start getting into the much more disputed territory.
The authors of this twenty twelve paper claimed that it
was likely a depiction of the warrior king, god and
wealth Buddha known as Viceravanna, who is the guardian of
the North. There you can think of sort of heavenly
(23:20):
beings that are guardians of the cardinal directions, and Viceravanna
is the guardian of the North. This figure, Viceravanna, shares
characteristics with the Hindu deity known as Kubera and is
also known as Jambala, sometimes shown carrying a lemon or
a money bag in his hand, and in other depictions,
especially earlier ones, the authors say that Viceravana is shown
(23:43):
as quote, a corpulent figure that holds a mongoose which
spews jewels from its mouth. Sometimes also, especially beginning in
the second half of the eighth century, they say he
is shown with ghosts at his feet. So, due to
a number of visual motifs such as the crossed legs
(24:04):
and the scale armor and so forth, the authors believe
that this is Viceravana we're looking at. But they also
write their thoughts about the religious significance of the swastika
in the image. They say, quote, the swastika prominently displayed
on the cuirass of the sculpture was a symbol frequently
used by the nature based pre Buddhist Bun religion rooted
(24:26):
in the western parts of Tibet. The Bun religion had
its own literature and art that was, they say, continuously
absorbed into the Tibetan Buddhism that propagated into the entire
area of Buddhist influence. A paper I'm going to talk
about in a minute I think will somewhat dispute that claim.
But they say, accordingly, the iron man could represent a
(24:48):
Bun slash Buddhist hybrid, showing some recognition features of Kubera
the early Viceravana.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Good, all right, and not getting into the criticism I
was about to come, that would seemingly make sense. We
can point in various examples not only in Buddhist traditions,
but in other traditions where we see these emerging of
art styles and merging of cultures in a particular sculpture
or other work.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
Sure, and so going with this hybrid art hypothesis, they
write quote. According to this interpretation, the possible provenance of
the Iron Man is Western Tibet or anywhere in the
area of Buddhist influence, and the age can be tentatively
dated at the eighth to tenth century. Now, as far
(25:44):
as I can tell, the chemical analysis that they did
appears sound. I've not come across major criticism of the
analysis of the materials. So the statue is probably made
of meteorite iron, perhaps even from the known source, the
Chinga metiorite field, but the question of its cultural origin
(26:05):
I found to be strongly disputed. So there is a
professor of Buddhist studies named Akim Beher that could be
Beyer or Bayer. I'm not sure. I'm going to say Beyer.
Apologies if that's wrong. Beher, who was at one point
affiliated with Dunguk University in Seoul, South Korea. He may
(26:25):
be at a different institution. Now addressed these claims in
an article that I found called the Lama Wearing Trousers
Notes on an iron statue in a German private collection.
And here's where the story I think becomes even more interesting, because,
of course, any statue or sculpture made out of a meteorite.
That's inherently a pretty fascinating idea, but it goes beyond
(26:48):
that because it calls up questions of the authenticity of
art and our ability to recognize what we're looking at
when we're looking for cultural authentics and forgeries and fakes.
In this place, pa Bear does not dispute the meteorite
origin of the iron, but argues that the statue is
not authentically Tibetan or Mongolian, and Bear's clear and well
(27:12):
known hallmarks of European imitations of Tibetan art. In other words,
instead of being a eight to tenth century Tibetan religious
sculpture made out of iron from space, it is a
modern European forgery made out of iron from space. Or
perhaps not forgery, perhaps just imitation. I guess to decipher
(27:33):
the difference between forgery and imitation, maybe you would need
to know the intent of the artist.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Yeah, yeah, I would imagine so. But as we've been saying,
that that would appear to be lost to history. So
all we can do is offer conjecture.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
So Behar says that at the time of his writing,
in response to this paper and the media that followed it,
no authority on Tibetan or Mongolian art had ever publicly
authenticated the sculpture. So basically, from his point of view,
I think he's saying like, there's not even really anybody
within the relevant field to disagree with about this. It's
(28:08):
just clearly not authentic. And he goes on to list
thirteen stylistic elements of the sculpture that make it overwhelmingly
clear to him that it is a fake. I'm not
going to go through all thirteen, but I wanted to
mention a couple in detail, and then I can just
allude to the rest. So one example that even looked
weird to me. I am not claiming to be an
(28:29):
expert on the Tibetan or Buddhist art. I don't really
know anything about it. But I looked at the statue
and I was like, huh, the shoes look weird, and
what do you know? So he identifies as this very
first item on the list, the footwear. He writes, quote,
the lama is neither barefoot, nor does he wear traditional boots.
(28:50):
The shoes cover the feet like European shoes up to
the ankles, and no further, and Rob, I've got a
zoom in for us to look at here of the
shoes on the image. Again, they do look weird to me.
I'm not saying what looks weird to me should be
decisive on this issue. I just thought it was funny
that they did look weird to me. So after I
(29:10):
read this comment by Bear, I went around looking for
other images of Vice Ravanna in Buddhist art and other
images of just figures from Tibetan art. And yeah, I
don't really see shoes that look like this. I either
see like bear feed or boots that go up the calf.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Yeah. I had a similar experience after I read this
in your notes. I have a copy of Roberty Fisher's
Art of Tibet that I've used in research projects before,
so I got that out I started looking through it.
That book, by the way, does not cover this particular
statue or mention it as far as I could tell,
but it has a lot of illustrations. So I scanned
(29:48):
through it, and I don't know, I had an odd experience,
Like I love looking at Tibetan art. I love the
complexity and all the rich information that is contained within
some you know that becomes apparent to someone like me,
but a lot of it is just lost on me
as I am not its historic contended viewer, but it
(30:09):
is almost I found it almost physically painful to look
at each of these amazing images and focus not on
anything else going on in them, but to look at
the feet and the shoes. There are some images where
feet are seemingly very important, and so it's not like
feet or just a non commodity in these images, but
(30:31):
there's just so much going on that I had a
hard time looking at just the feet.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
Yeah, there was some series we did a while back
where we talked about, you know, and there's variation within
all art styles, but we talked about how a lot
of Tibetan art is just gloriously busy. There's like so
much going on in it and so much text here.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Yeah, and it is if memory serves from those past episodes.
Like part of it comes down to, of course, you
have a very complex theology that needs to be related
to some degree through these visual representations. And then also
there's a strong case to be made that the landscape
plays into it, that there is a kind of scale
(31:10):
to the Tibetan landscape that therefore makes these interior holy
spaces need to be busier, need to be just just
so full of additional details, and without any of these,
you know, artistic voids that become important in other traditions.
But anyway, I looked at a lot of feet in
(31:31):
these when I could see them, and because it seemed
like most of the examples just broadly feet on all art,
you know, it's either going to be a barefoot or
it is going to be a feet you cannot see
because they are obscured by clothing. And in fact, I
don't think I saw a single shoe in that particular book.
(31:52):
I also went to a rather prolific blog online of
Himalayan Buddhis art titled It's you can find It's Himalayan
Buddhist Art dot WordPress dot com. A lot of images
on there, with some some write ups. It seems to
be a very current blog. I looked around on there,
and in fact, and there I found I found lots
(32:14):
of bear feet, and I did find at least one
example of a couple of examples maybe a footwear, one
of which though is clearly, like you said, a boot
that goes you know, much much farther up the leg
as opposed to what we see in the alleged Ironman here.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
M hm.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
And so like you, now, when I look at the
iron Man's feet, I'm like, this is this feels off?
Like it feels even more off now that I have
all this additional information in my head about it. They
you know, they look like, I don't know, kind of
like little elfin shoes.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
I don't know exactly. Yeah, but again, it's not just
our opinion. Expert on on Buddhism and Tibetan art says,
this is not what this usually looks like. Bear's next
point points out the pants. This guy's wearing pants, and
he says, this is sort of a dead giveaway that
the trousers worn by the lama in this sculpture are
(33:08):
to be found nowhere else in Tibetan nor Mongolian sculpture
of the time, in which figures may wear robes or
might have armor covering their shins, but never pants like this.
And even there's kind of this interesting like what would
you call this a flare or I guess like a split.
There's like a split in the pant leg down at
the cuff. And yeah, Bear is like, I don't know
(33:30):
what to make of that. Maybe that's just to make
it look sort of different than normal pants, like pastoral
or something. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Yeah, most of these images you look at Yeah, you're
looking at it flowing robes and so forth, or armor. Yeah.
I was looking around too for examples of what we
might describe as pants, and I was not finding them.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
So then Bear goes on the list eleven other points
of difference from known Tibetan nor Mongolian art, having to
do with everything from the way the body is positioned,
like the position of the legs, to how body parts
such as the beard and the hands are rendered. There
are major differences there. How the halo is depicted. I
want to come right back to that, and then things
(34:10):
about the clothing and the jewelry. Just a lot of
stuff about this does not fit with the alleged context
it supposedly comes from. So the part about the halo
was also interesting to me, given that we did a
series of episodes on halo imagery a couple of years ago.
Bayer says that halo's attached to the body like I
(34:32):
actually attached to the body on the sculpture are not
very common in genuine metal statues here. If they have
a halo it tends to be like a separate piece
from the body in the sculpture, but then also notes
that the halo around the figure's head and then the
greater ariole behind the figure's body are totally blank and
(34:53):
featureless circles. Here, I did a little digging deeper on this,
and I found another paper zooming in and show maybe
there are a few little scratches in the halo if
you zoom in, but there's no major decoration or adornment.
And if you compare this to how halo's or arioles,
you know, the glow around the head or the glow
around the body, how they're usually depicted in Tibetan or
(35:15):
Buddhist art, it's a world of difference. They are usually
not a blank circle. They are usually highly textured, highly adorned,
like we were saying, very busy, with a lot going
in them, maybe depicted as flames or having a kind
of texture within them, or or showing even little like
scenes and figures inside them.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Yeah. I think this feels like a strong point. Yeah,
that this halo feels way too casual. Yeah, and probably
has more in common with Western depictions of a halo,
you know.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
Yeah, looks more like a halo you'd see around the
head of a saint in like a medieval Catholic depiction
or something. Yeah. Yeah, So there is a bunch of
stuff like this that just does not match the cultural
con text of its alleged production and on the art elements,
Behar says, quote, my own research has not yielded a
single even remotely similar object, which led me to conclude
(36:11):
that the statue is in fact a European counterfeit, and
I was encouraged to take this conclusion by several colleagues
I contacted. While no such artifacts exist in Inner Asia,
artifacts of the pseudo Tibetan style exist in abundance, produced
as home decoration for film sets and the like. Any
(36:31):
highly improbable claim to the opposite would have to carry
the burden of proof. So having made the case that
this is a European imitation rather than a genuine Tibetan
or Mongolian original, the paper also addresses some other questions,
including who is depicted in the sculpture and where it
comes from. As to who is depicted, Bear agrees actually
(36:55):
that it might possibly be Vice Shravana, which is what
the original authors proposed, but then also give some other possibilities.
Maybe it is pod Maasimbava was another figure. It could
be an amalgam of elements from different original figures. And
then there's the question of where did it come from.
(37:15):
Behar also here casts doubt on the story that this
was taken from Tibet by the Nazi Schaffer expedition in
the late thirties. He claims that after corresponding with the
authors of the twenty twelve study, he could find no
reliable evidence that this piece had any historical association with
(37:36):
Schaffer or with the SS. I could be wrong, but
as best I can tell, the evidence for the association
is the claim of the collector who produced it in
the two thousands, But that came with no like historical
evidence backing it up or no reliable documentation. So Behyar
doubts the Schaffer connection totally.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
So this might have just been a story that was
perhaps just to make it a little more marketable.
Speaker 3 (38:04):
To collectors possibly and that could in fact work in
two different ways. He identifies two different hypotheses for the
production of this. One is that it's a He calls
it something produced for the quote general antique and curio market,
in which case, the swastika depicted on the armor and
(38:24):
the association with the Chaffer expedition would just like sort
of give it more general mystery to be like, wow,
that's weird and be attractive to a general antique buying
audience or curio buying audience. But then he says, there's
another interpretation which is a little more sinister, which is
that it is made specifically to appeal to the market
(38:45):
for Nazi memorabilia, in which case these associations would would
have a specific direct appeal. So who did make it,
Beyer says, we don't know, but he thinks that most
likely it was made by a European artist sometime roughly
between nineteen ten and nineteen seventy. Why those dates, The
(39:07):
reasoning seems to be that this would be a period
when there was a market for this sort of thing,
for artifacts imitating Tibetan styles or things to be passed
off as Tibetan in origin. But there was also still
before nineteen seventy enough ignorance within the market for this
sort of art that something of this quality could be
passed off as authentic. He says, after around nineteen seventy
(39:30):
quote more details of original Tibetan art gained wide dissipation,
so probably the market would be more aware of like
that this would not pass muster. So from Bear's perspective,
we don't know what happened for sure, but it seems
possible that it was something like a piece of meteorite
iron from the Chinga meteorite field in Tuva again that
(39:53):
southern Siberia somehow gets transported to Germany, where sometime in
the twentieth century, maybe between like nineteen ten and nineteen
seventy roughly, it is partially forged and carved into a
statue made to crudely imitate Tibetan art, and then from
there it passes into a collector's market with this story
behind it, with this alleged link to the Shaffer expedition.
(40:17):
And then he wraps up the article by sort of
discussing the importance of consulting people in the relevant fields
before go before you know, going public with claims of authenticity.
So of course I'm you know, I'm not qualified to
adjudicate this matter either, but I would tend to take
the word of people who specialize in Tibetan art in
(40:37):
evaluating whether something is authentically Tibetan art or not. And
he says, basically, any specialist in Tibetan or Buddhist art
could have looked at this and said this is not authentic.
And it's still an interesting story with that additional context
as well, because so like a European forgery of Buddhist
art imbued with a mysterious Nazi backstory which is in
(41:00):
fact made out of iron from a Siberian meteorite. How
does that happen?
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Yeah, it's still this enigma, isn't it, even if it's
not the enigma that some tellings would make it out
to be.
Speaker 3 (41:12):
But that's not all. There is one more development in
this story that I came across. So in the year
twenty seventeen, a German historian of Tibet named Israun Engelhart
published an article called the Strange Case of the Buddha
from Space. And in this piece, Engelhart gives extensive reasons,
(41:34):
first of all, for thinking the sculpture was not brought
back to Germany from Tibet by the expedition in the
late nineteen thirties, which that expedition she had actually studied
in great depth. For one thing, the members of the
SS expedition actually made meticulous catalogs of the items, but
they brought back from Tibet, and the iron statue is
(41:55):
not listed among them. But Engelhart in this paper also
documents her attempts to track down the ownership history of
the Iron Man, and these efforts are somewhat successful, and
they end up pointing her back to a sort of
aggressively negotiating antiquities dealer from Russia. Going off that information,
(42:18):
Engelhart eventually reaches the conclusion that the sculpture was probably
somehow associated with a known historical figure. That it was
probably associated with and perhaps made for the strange Russian
artist Nikolai Rarick that spelled Roe rh Nikolai Rarik, who
(42:39):
lived from eighteen seventy four to nineteen forty seven. Rareck
in his career traveled extensively in Central Asia and was
obsessed with the Himalayas and with Tibet, and there are
many portraits of him posed in Tibetan garb and with
Tibetan surroundings. He's wearing Tibetan robes. In nineteen twenty six,
(43:00):
Eric produced a sketch that angle heart came across and
the sketch is entitled the Order of Riggdan Yeppo, and
the sketch really looks a lot like the iron Man statue.
There's a similar posture and pose, a similar double halo,
similar pointed hat, similar clothing, and a note about the
(43:21):
title there that Rarick understood rigged and Yeppo as the
name of a figure meant to be the future ruler
of a spiritual kingdom known as Shambala in Tibetan Buddhism.
And further writing about the comparisons between the iron Man
(43:42):
statue and the sketch and eventually the painting produced by
Rarick known as the Order of Riggdan Yeppo, Angle Heart writes, quote,
the left hand of both the sketch and the statue
seems to hold neither a mongoose nor a vase, but
rather the famous radiant Centimani Stone, the wish fulfilling jewel
(44:05):
coming from the Sky, which Rareck painted several times. In
nineteen twenty three, when the Rarecks were in Paris, they
received a mysterious package through dubious channels that allegedly contained
this very stone, said to be a fragment of a
meteorite and apparently Rareck and his wife Elena, who Elena
(44:27):
was very into the mystical religious movement then known as Theosophy.
They got really excited about the meteorite stone and believed
it have great significance for their lives. Apparently Rareck had
long had thoughts like imagined himself as carrying around a
magic stone that had some kind of like potency and
(44:48):
meaning for his fate. But anyway, motivated in part by
their theosophical beliefs, Nikolai and Elena attempted to lead an
expedition in the nineteen twenties to find Shambala in Tibet,
to find the entrance to Shambala, and not only that,
but Nikolai would eventually come to see himself and to
(45:11):
style himself as Rigg Danneppo, the King of Shambala, and
so he had like ceremonial robes and other trappings of
this station created befitting his kingly destiny. Apparently, his claim
to be the King of Shambala did not go over
amazingly well with the Tibetans, and ultimately the expedition was
(45:36):
considered a failure. Rareck got incredibly mad at Tibet and
at Buddhism after this and published a bunch of nasty
things about them. But coming back to the statue, where
did the statue come from? Engelhart argues, based on a
number of clues, that it's quite likely that Rarick had
this statue made out of meteorite iron around nineteen twenty
(45:59):
six to nineteen twenty seven in order to represent himself
as the king of Shambala, and that's why it bears
these similarities to the sketch and the painting that he
did of himself in this posture. And this would have
probably been done by a metal worker somewhere in Urga,
(46:20):
the capital of Mongolia today known as Ulaanbatar, and this
would have been while the Rareks were staying there in
preparation for their expedition Tibet. So I think we would
need more like physical evidence to make the link for sure,
But I think it's good detective work, and Englehart makes
a really strong case, circumstantial case based on the similarities
(46:43):
of the artworks and themes that we know that Rarik
and Rarek and his family were very interested in. So
it seems quite plausible to me. Anyway. I think that'll
do it for today's episode on the iron from space.
But I feel like we've got more to talk about
with this subject now, Rob, I think you've got an
interview scheduled to run on Tuesday of next week, right,
(47:05):
But can we come back with part three of this
discussion on Thursday?
Speaker 1 (47:08):
Absolutely? Yeah. We have more examples of potential meteoric iron
artifacts to discuss and more related topics. So we'll come
back for a part three on Thursday with an interview
episode airing on Tuesday that's not related.
Speaker 3 (47:25):
To this topic. Sounds great, can't wait.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
In the meantime, certainly? Right in? If you have thoughts
on the alleged iron Man, well, I mean, I guess
the iron part is not alleged. He's it's a man.
He's made out of iron. He is iron Man. No,
we can doubt that. We can't take that away from him.
But if you have thoughts on that, or if you
have thoughts on Chinese artifacts in Chinese mythology right in,
(47:49):
we'd love to hear from you. Also, if there are
other examples from other cultures that we haven't covered so far,
bring them up, because we do have a few things
lined up to discuss. But if you get us in time,
you might be we might be able to add it
to the list, or if it comes in after the fact,
perhaps it's something we can discuss on our listener Mail episodes.
(48:10):
Our listener Mail episodes publish on Mondays, and the Stuff
to Blow Your Mind podcast feed core episodes on Tuesdays
and Thursdays, short form episode on Wednesdays and on Fridays.
We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (48:26):
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 2 (48:48):
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. This is
Robert Lamb. We're out this week, so we're continuing some
episodes from the vault here. This is going to be
part two of our series on meteoric metal and alien iron.
This originally published five nine, twenty twenty four. Let's jump
right in.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two
in our series on human uses of metal from the Sky.
If you haven't heard the first episode yet, you should
go back and check that one out before you listen
to this. But in that episode brief recap, we focused
mostly on a specific artifact from the New Kingdom of Egypt,
(00:58):
which was a dagger found wrapped up with the mummy
of the pharaotutin Common, which had a blade made of iron.
Now that might not sound remarkable, but this was a
blade made of iron from an era before the large
scale smelting of iron in Egypt. And the really cool
thing about this knife and many other iron artifacts from
(01:19):
before the regional iron age in Egypt is that they
were probably created out of iron that came from a
meteorite space metal. So we also discussed the history of
knowledge that meteorites come from space, including the story of
how European scientists came to generally agree on the cosmic
origin of meteorite rocks only around the beginning of the
(01:41):
nineteenth century or so, and then also some interesting evidence
that the ancient Egyptians did actually know that iron meteorites
came from space, for example the way they referred to
iron as the iron of the sky or the metal
of the sky, and some other linguistic clues, clues in
the way the glyphs of the Hieroglyphic language are put together.
(02:04):
And then there are also some other languages like Sumerian,
which have long had similar associations between iron or certain
types of iron and the sky. And so today we're
back to talk about more examples of the use of
metal from space in human artifacts in human technological history.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
That's right, and where we're going to go next. We're
going to get back into the use of iron and
meteoric iron in meteorites in Chinese tradition, Chinese history, and
maybe just a little dash of Chinese mythology. I want
to refer back to a write up on iron that
(02:45):
appears in the seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World
by Brian and Fagan. With this particular bit by Paul Tikratic.
Cratic sums up Chinese iron usage by pointing out that
iron production in China began around ninth century BCE, perhaps
introduced from the West, but also just as likely an
independent invention, and that by the Han period to go
(03:09):
to BCE, the Chinese quote incontestably led the world in
iron technology and production. But of course, as with these
other examples we've been looking at, we do have evidence
of artifacts created with meteoric iron prior to this. Specifically
it takes us back to the Sheng dynasty. This would
have been around fourteen one hundred BCE. Now, as we
(03:32):
previously mentioned, there of course has been some back and
forth on the testing of various pre Iron Age iron artifacts,
and ultimately a lot of that is still going on,
and these blades are often mentioned in some of those documents.
Now in that paper that I credited in the last
episode from Albert Jambond, twenty seventeenth Bronze Age iron meteoretic
(03:54):
or not a chemical strategy. At least according to this source,
the nickel count is low in these examples, but not
low enough to assign terrestrial origin, and that this is
definitely a case it seems like where the lower nickel
content is likely due to weathering effects. The blades themselves
have long been discussed as probable examples of meteoric iron,
(04:19):
going back at least as far as the book two
Early Chinese bronz Weapons with Meteoritic Iron Blades by gettens
at All in nineteen seventy one, which details that these
blades were found in nineteen thirty one in Anyang, Hanan
within a single tomb, which is also cited in Metals
in Antiquity by Young at All nineteen ninety nine. Now
(04:43):
I have a picture here of these artifacts here for
you to look at, Joe and everyone else. You can
look these up as well online. Just look for meteoric
iron Chinese axes or Chinese broad axes and you can
likely find images of this. You can tell that these
were ornate, highly stylized weapons. Now, I want to note
(05:05):
that both of these sources here that are talking about it,
they seem to indicate less than certainty in some of
the details, saying that there seems to be a lot
of believe to have been in these references. Though to
be clear, these weapons have long been in the Freer
collection at the Smithsonian, and there's no indication that the
(05:25):
dating or a larger geographic origin is particularly endowed here.
I just couldn't help but pick up on the fact
that this is one of those accounts where there seem
to be a little bit of ambiguity but no real
sticking points I think in trying to understand where these
came from. These would have been Chinese broad axes, formally
inlaid and again likely largely ceremonial. These are not weapons
(05:50):
that would be out on the battlefield.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
Ah. Yeah, and I had been assuming the same was
true of Tuton Commons iron dagger, though in fact I
guess I don't have a way of knowing that for sure.
Don't have a reason to suspect to use this for
knife dueling or anything.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Yeah, it's interesting to think about these examples in terms
of how do you use it right, because you know,
we have cases where you're going to have some sort
of an iron weapon that is going to be of
exceptional quality, but you're going to have so few of them,
maybe even just one. You know, what, what are you
going to do during the Bronze period with your iron weapon.
(06:25):
It's kind of like if, as a thought experiment, you
were to say, okay, what if I were to take
a lightsaber back to the Hundred Years War between England
and France during the fourteenth and fifteenth century, and you
gave it to one side or the other? You know,
what good is it going to do? You know, you
could make a case maybe for some sort of special
forces style use of the weapon by either party. Okay,
(06:48):
single combat, sure, but more likely than not, a single
light saber is not going to decide anything during the
fourteenth or fifteenth century in any kind of like warfare scenario.
Would make far more sense as a ritual object, as
a tool of propaganda, as is essentially like a scepter
to show how special and or powerful you are.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
And as we talked about last time, with the specific
case of iron versus the dominant metal of bronze, there's
not even really a clear material superiority of early iron
weapons over say, well made bronze ones of the period
that the advantages of iron when moving into the iron age,
were primarily advantages in terms of economics and the sourcing
(07:33):
of materials, that it was easier to produce lots of
iron implements and tools and weapons at scale, rather than
it being that iron is just a much better metal
or something right right.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
And the other key point, as we discussed in the
last episode, is the knowledge of where the meteoric iron
came from, like knowing that this weapon is, you know,
of heavenly origin or of cosmic origin and so forth,
that seems to often be really important. And so I'm
going to get into that question here with Chinese examples.
(08:08):
Turning first back to gettens at All the work to
early Chinese bronze weapons with iron blades from seventy one.
They point out that meteorite falls were known to the
ancient Chinese and discussed in their literature, often in reference
to portents. So if the metal used was known to
have come from the sky, they contend, it would have
(08:30):
added to the auspiciousness of the weapons and the reason
that the iron was used in these cases instead of jade,
which typically occupied an elevated position of ceremonial importance for
weapons and so forth. Such usage may have also influenced
known Chinese meteorite fragments. Quote such a use of meteoritic
(08:52):
iron might also explain the fact that only one iron
meteorite find is known from China. This I is referring
to ancient examples of meteorite, the idea being that iron
meteorites would have been known as a source for this
sort of metal and would have been used as such.
(09:14):
And certainly these are not the only known examples of
Chinese meteoric weapons or weapons or artifacts that are believed
or it's argued, may be made of such iron. There
are several known artifacts of possible meteoric iron from the
late Sheng and early Western Zo. So for examples of
(09:36):
some of those observations, because they mentioned, okay, the ancient
Chinese knew about meteorites. They knew they came from the sky.
For some examples of this knowledge, I turned to the
nineteen ninety four paper Meteorite Falls in China and some
Related human Casualty Events by Yao at All, published in
(09:56):
the journal Meteoritics. They looked at accounts from roughly seven
hundred BCE through nineteen twenty CE, with the earliest account
cited found in the Spring and Autumn Annals, traditionally attributed
to Confucius, who would have historically lived around five fifty
(10:16):
one through four to seventy nine BCE. This work is
one of the five classics of ancient Chinese literature and
it covers an historical period stretching from seven twenty two
to for eighty one BCE, and the work includes coverage
of a six forty five BCE event in which quote
in translation of course, five stones fell in Sung And
(10:41):
there are various other accounts in this article that they
don't highlight all of them, but they highlight some of
historic Note there is a Sei dynasty account. This is
from the work History of the Suy Dynasty, and it
refers to a six sixteen b CE meteorite, with the
(11:03):
account depicting a meteorite hitting a siege tower during the
besiegement of a walled city. What yeah, So the idea
is that there's a you know, a siege situation going on,
a meteorite hits, takes out the siege tower, causes the sea,
and then either the strike of the meteorite or the
(11:23):
perhaps far more likely the subsequent collapse of said siege
tower results in I believe I read possibly ten fatalities.
That was their I think recorded number. If this is true,
it might stand as the earliest recorded human meteorite related fatality.
These are of course rare. You're talking about situations where
(11:44):
the you know, a meteorite hits somebody or hits the
vicinity of a human and in doing so, results in
a casualty. But it's also non entirely clear. I've read
some criticism of this account saying, Okay, this is certainly possible.
It would be a very rare occurrence. We also have
(12:07):
to just acknowledge that it's possible that this siege tower
was taken out by something far more mundane, like human
munitions fired from the wall of the sieged city, that
sort of thing. But it is kind of It is
cataloged in the historic records, so I've seen numerous texts
acknowledge it and say, well, perhaps this is true.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
So hundreds of accounts follow these early accounts of meteorites
and the Chinese records, and I'm not going to go
through all of them, or even the ones listed in
this source. But there's one more I wanted to mention
here because it does line up with what we're talking
about and the subject of meteors and iron, and that
is the non meteorite shower of thirteen forty one. It's
(12:51):
notable because it seems to have been a shower of
iron meteorites, and it was even referred to as quote
the iron rain, with descriptions of the resulting bore holes
in the earth matching up with what we know of
iron meteorite impacts today. Now. Thirteen forty one, of course,
is far outside the Bronze Age examples we're looking at,
(13:16):
but you know, you combine this with certainly these much
earlier examples, and it does seem clear that the ancient
Chinese knew that meteorites came from above, they came from
the sky, and that alone would be enough to sort
of factor into these myth making understandings of what a
weapon forged of such iron would mean. By the way,
(13:41):
speaking of Chinese mythology, it's worth noting that you the Great,
the character that we've talked about on the show before,
founder of the Shop of the dynasty, in myth and legend,
the bringer of flood controls is sometimes, at least at
least in early China, these mythology connected to meteorites. Oh so,
(14:04):
according to Mark Edward Lewis in the Mythology of Early China,
some texts say that you was born of a stone
or in a place named for a stone, while other
tellings state that quote his mother was inseminated by a
magical stone or meteor.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
Oh. Interesting, this is a different way of sort of
like a parenthood by the gods. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yeah, so I had not run across this before. I
cross checked it in a couple of my go to
Chinese mythology sources Yang and in Turner's Chinese Mythology and
Burrell's work on Chinese mythology. Both of these texts, I
refer to an origin story for you by which he's
born from the belly of his father's corpse following the
(14:48):
said father's execution. And this I'm guessing this entirely masculine
birth as a Buryl describes it. I guess this is
the predominant origin story that comes later, and that Lewis
here is focusing primarily on early tellings before those traditions emerged.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Oh okay, I see so.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Anyway, these uh, these axes among other artifacts, you know,
another example of an ancient Bronze Age culture having access
to meteoric iron, using it to craft weapons that then
have an exalted place within their culture. Uh and so,
and definitely look up images of this if you have
(15:30):
the ability to do so readily, because you can you know,
they're they're they're not in pristine form, they haven't been
restored or anything like that. They're not anywhere near the
the completeness of Tout and Commons dagger, but you can
still get a sense of the majesty they would have had.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
Yeah, even the stubs are beautiful. Okay. I want to
talk about a statue, specifically a metal sculpture allegedly from Tibet,
(16:08):
sometimes called the Iron Man, referred to in a lot
of media reports as the Iron Man or sometimes as
the Space Buddha.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Well, these both, these descriptions both take you somewhere, that's
for sure.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
So this statue weighs about ten point six kilograms or
about twenty three pounds, and is roughly twenty four centimeters
or about nine and a half inches tall. It is
made of iron, and it depicts a bearded male figure
that is sometimes referred to as a Buddha, sometimes referred
to as a God sometimes referred to as a man,
(16:45):
but he is depicted wearing trousers, a sort of cape
or cloak that's joined over his shoulders in a knot
on his chest. He's wearing kind of almost kind of
cloglike looking shoes with a split in the cuff at
the bottom of the pant legs, and what looks to
me kind of like scale armor over his mid section.
(17:09):
And then on that scale armor there is the symbol
of a swastika, which, remember, before it was appropriated by
the German Nazi Party, that was around nineteen twenty, it
was for centuries or even millennia, a traditional symbol with
positive associations in a lot of different cultures and religions
throughout the world, notably in Hinduism and Buddhism.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
That's right, and it still has that status in various
Hindu and Buddhist traditions, though of course permanently ruined in
the West by the appropriation of the Nazi Party.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Yeah, and so in the iron Man statue, the figure
has a halo like disc behind his head and he
is clutching a round egg shaped object in one hand.
His legs are folded underneath. His body looks like he
could be sitting cross legged or perhaps even dancing. But
(18:06):
this whole thing is carved out of a solid piece
of metal with a rough, unfinished base below the figure.
So what is the deal with this weird metal statue. Well,
there was a bunch of media about this statue way
back in twenty twelve that was associated with the publication
of a paper that was looking into its physical makeup
(18:28):
and its origins. The paper was by Buckner at All,
published in the journal Media Critics and Planetary Science again
in twenty twelve, and it was called Buddha from Space,
an ancient object of art made of a China iron
metia write fragment. So I'm going to start with what
was originally alleged by it, but keep in mind that
(18:48):
some of the information I'm going to say at first
is either not certain or almost certainly not true. The
lead author of this paper, Elmer Buckner, is a geologist
affiliated with the Planetology Institute at Stuttgart University, and so
the authors of this paper were looking into the question
of first of all, what this statue is made of,
(19:11):
but also what does it depict and where did it
come from? As to where it comes from, there again,
is plenty of debate about this, but the story as
received by the authors of the paper goes like this.
In the years nineteen thirty eight and nineteen thirty nine,
Adolf Hitler's SS sponsored a research and propaganda expedition to Tibet.
(19:34):
This is kind of a famous, famous expedition about which
there has been much sort of cultural legend. But this
expedition was led by the German zoologist and explorer Ernst Schaffer.
This expedition collected a lot of material for return to Germany.
So they took a bunch of plant and animal samples,
seeds and grains and plants, and they cataloged birds. There
(19:57):
was ornithology missions and stuff like that. And it also
took a lot of cultural artifacts, including, according to a
Triple As blog post about this paper by Stephen A.
Edwards quote, a robe believed to have been worn by
the Dali Lama, a gold coin, and the iron statue.
The latter apparently attracted the attention of the Nazis because
(20:20):
of a swastika carved into its center. So that's the
story about where it came from. What does appear to
be true is that the statue was in the possession
of a private collector from some time unknown until the
year two thousand and seven, which is the same year
these authors began investigating it. But before then. The allegation
(20:42):
is that it was taken from Tibet by Schaffer's men
in the late thirties and then disappeared during World War II,
only to reappear to the public in the two thousands.
All right, now, as to the question of what the
statue is made of, the authors conducted an elemental analysis
and found that the concentration of elements present in the
(21:02):
metal was consistent with an iron meteorite, so much like
the analysis we talked about in the previous episode looking
at King Tut's dagger. Here they found high concentrations of nickel.
This statue was approximately sixteen percent nickel by weight and
about zero point six percent cobalt, and these are not
ratios you would expect to find in earth based iron.
(21:26):
Earth based iron extracted from before the eighteen hundreds tends
to be not more than about four percent nickel. Also,
the authors analyzed the ratios of trace platinum group metals
and found that these were also consistent with meteorite iron.
Not only that they were able to match this metal
to the composition of meteorites from a specific known impact area.
(21:50):
They write, quote, the geochemical data of the meteorite generally
matched the element values known from fragments of the Chinga
atax site taxite meaning ungrouped iron meteorite strewn field, discovered
in nineteen thirteen. The provenance of the meteorite, as well
as the piece of art strongly points to the border
region of eastern Siberia and Mongolia. Accordingly, and I went
(22:15):
and did a little more looking, So it seems that
the Chinga meteorite is sort of it's an area rather
than one specific object. The Chinga meteorite field is something
that contains fragments of meteorite found by gold miners in Tuva,
which is a region of southern Siberia in Russia near
(22:36):
the border with Mongolia, and the hundreds of meteorite fragments
found there are thought to result from an object that
exploded in the atmosphere over Tuva between ten and twenty
thousand years ago. So the scientific evidence that the iron
Man statue was made out of meteorite iron seems quite strong.
But what about these other questions? What does this statue
(22:59):
depict and when was a when and where was it made?
Here's where we start getting into the much more disputed territory.
The authors of this twenty twelve paper claimed that it
was likely a depiction of the warrior king, god and
wealth Buddha known as Viceravanna, who is the guardian of
the North. There you can think of sort of heavenly
(23:20):
beings that are guardians of the cardinal directions, and Viceravanna
is the guardian of the North. This figure, Viceravanna, shares
characteristics with the Hindu deity known as Kubera and is
also known as Jambala, sometimes shown carrying a lemon or
a money bag in his hand, and in other depictions,
especially earlier ones, the authors say that Viceravana is shown
(23:43):
as quote, a corpulent figure that holds a mongoose which
spews jewels from its mouth. Sometimes also, especially beginning in
the second half of the eighth century, they say he
is shown with ghosts at his feet. So, due to
a number of visual motifs such as the crossed legs
(24:04):
and the scale armor and so forth, the authors believe
that this is Viceravana we're looking at. But they also
write their thoughts about the religious significance of the swastika
in the image. They say, quote, the swastika prominently displayed
on the cuirass of the sculpture was a symbol frequently
used by the nature based pre Buddhist Bun religion rooted
(24:26):
in the western parts of Tibet. The Bun religion had
its own literature and art that was, they say, continuously
absorbed into the Tibetan Buddhism that propagated into the entire
area of Buddhist influence. A paper I'm going to talk
about in a minute I think will somewhat dispute that claim.
But they say, accordingly, the iron man could represent a
(24:48):
Bun slash Buddhist hybrid, showing some recognition features of Kubera
the early Viceravana.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Good, all right, and not getting into the criticism I
was about to come, that would seemingly make sense. We
can point in various examples not only in Buddhist traditions,
but in other traditions where we see these emerging of
art styles and merging of cultures in a particular sculpture
or other work.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
Sure, and so going with this hybrid art hypothesis, they
write quote. According to this interpretation, the possible provenance of
the Iron Man is Western Tibet or anywhere in the
area of Buddhist influence, and the age can be tentatively
dated at the eighth to tenth century. Now, as far
(25:44):
as I can tell, the chemical analysis that they did
appears sound. I've not come across major criticism of the
analysis of the materials. So the statue is probably made
of meteorite iron, perhaps even from the known source, the
Chinga metiorite field, but the question of its cultural origin
(26:05):
I found to be strongly disputed. So there is a
professor of Buddhist studies named Akim Beher that could be
Beyer or Bayer. I'm not sure. I'm going to say Beyer.
Apologies if that's wrong. Beher, who was at one point
affiliated with Dunguk University in Seoul, South Korea. He may
(26:25):
be at a different institution. Now addressed these claims in
an article that I found called the Lama Wearing Trousers
Notes on an iron statue in a German private collection.
And here's where the story I think becomes even more interesting, because,
of course, any statue or sculpture made out of a meteorite.
That's inherently a pretty fascinating idea, but it goes beyond
(26:48):
that because it calls up questions of the authenticity of
art and our ability to recognize what we're looking at
when we're looking for cultural authentics and forgeries and fakes.
In this place, pa Bear does not dispute the meteorite
origin of the iron, but argues that the statue is
not authentically Tibetan or Mongolian, and Bear's clear and well
(27:12):
known hallmarks of European imitations of Tibetan art. In other words,
instead of being a eight to tenth century Tibetan religious
sculpture made out of iron from space, it is a
modern European forgery made out of iron from space. Or
perhaps not forgery, perhaps just imitation. I guess to decipher
(27:33):
the difference between forgery and imitation, maybe you would need
to know the intent of the artist.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Yeah, yeah, I would imagine so. But as we've been saying,
that that would appear to be lost to history. So
all we can do is offer conjecture.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
So Behar says that at the time of his writing,
in response to this paper and the media that followed it,
no authority on Tibetan or Mongolian art had ever publicly
authenticated the sculpture. So basically, from his point of view,
I think he's saying like, there's not even really anybody
within the relevant field to disagree with about this. It's
(28:08):
just clearly not authentic. And he goes on to list
thirteen stylistic elements of the sculpture that make it overwhelmingly
clear to him that it is a fake. I'm not
going to go through all thirteen, but I wanted to
mention a couple in detail, and then I can just
allude to the rest. So one example that even looked
weird to me. I am not claiming to be an
(28:29):
expert on the Tibetan or Buddhist art. I don't really
know anything about it. But I looked at the statue
and I was like, huh, the shoes look weird, and
what do you know? So he identifies as this very
first item on the list, the footwear. He writes, quote,
the lama is neither barefoot, nor does he wear traditional boots.
(28:50):
The shoes cover the feet like European shoes up to
the ankles, and no further, and Rob, I've got a
zoom in for us to look at here of the
shoes on the image. Again, they do look weird to me.
I'm not saying what looks weird to me should be
decisive on this issue. I just thought it was funny
that they did look weird to me. So after I
(29:10):
read this comment by Bear, I went around looking for
other images of Vice Ravanna in Buddhist art and other
images of just figures from Tibetan art. And yeah, I
don't really see shoes that look like this. I either
see like bear feed or boots that go up the calf.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Yeah. I had a similar experience after I read this
in your notes. I have a copy of Roberty Fisher's
Art of Tibet that I've used in research projects before,
so I got that out I started looking through it.
That book, by the way, does not cover this particular
statue or mention it as far as I could tell,
but it has a lot of illustrations. So I scanned
(29:48):
through it, and I don't know, I had an odd experience,
Like I love looking at Tibetan art. I love the
complexity and all the rich information that is contained within
some you know that becomes apparent to someone like me,
but a lot of it is just lost on me
as I am not its historic contended viewer, but it
(30:09):
is almost I found it almost physically painful to look
at each of these amazing images and focus not on
anything else going on in them, but to look at
the feet and the shoes. There are some images where
feet are seemingly very important, and so it's not like
feet or just a non commodity in these images, but
(30:31):
there's just so much going on that I had a
hard time looking at just the feet.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
Yeah, there was some series we did a while back
where we talked about, you know, and there's variation within
all art styles, but we talked about how a lot
of Tibetan art is just gloriously busy. There's like so
much going on in it and so much text here.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Yeah, and it is if memory serves from those past episodes.
Like part of it comes down to, of course, you
have a very complex theology that needs to be related
to some degree through these visual representations. And then also
there's a strong case to be made that the landscape
plays into it, that there is a kind of scale
(31:10):
to the Tibetan landscape that therefore makes these interior holy
spaces need to be busier, need to be just just
so full of additional details, and without any of these,
you know, artistic voids that become important in other traditions.
But anyway, I looked at a lot of feet in
(31:31):
these when I could see them, and because it seemed
like most of the examples just broadly feet on all art,
you know, it's either going to be a barefoot or
it is going to be a feet you cannot see
because they are obscured by clothing. And in fact, I
don't think I saw a single shoe in that particular book.
(31:52):
I also went to a rather prolific blog online of
Himalayan Buddhis art titled It's you can find It's Himalayan
Buddhist Art dot WordPress dot com. A lot of images
on there, with some some write ups. It seems to
be a very current blog. I looked around on there,
and in fact, and there I found I found lots
(32:14):
of bear feet, and I did find at least one
example of a couple of examples maybe a footwear, one
of which though is clearly, like you said, a boot
that goes you know, much much farther up the leg
as opposed to what we see in the alleged Ironman here.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
M hm.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
And so like you, now, when I look at the
iron Man's feet, I'm like, this is this feels off?
Like it feels even more off now that I have
all this additional information in my head about it. They
you know, they look like, I don't know, kind of
like little elfin shoes.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
I don't know exactly. Yeah, but again, it's not just
our opinion. Expert on on Buddhism and Tibetan art says,
this is not what this usually looks like. Bear's next
point points out the pants. This guy's wearing pants, and
he says, this is sort of a dead giveaway that
the trousers worn by the lama in this sculpture are
(33:08):
to be found nowhere else in Tibetan nor Mongolian sculpture
of the time, in which figures may wear robes or
might have armor covering their shins, but never pants like this.
And even there's kind of this interesting like what would
you call this a flare or I guess like a split.
There's like a split in the pant leg down at
the cuff. And yeah, Bear is like, I don't know
(33:30):
what to make of that. Maybe that's just to make
it look sort of different than normal pants, like pastoral
or something. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Yeah, most of these images you look at Yeah, you're
looking at it flowing robes and so forth, or armor. Yeah.
I was looking around too for examples of what we
might describe as pants, and I was not finding them.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
So then Bear goes on the list eleven other points
of difference from known Tibetan nor Mongolian art, having to
do with everything from the way the body is positioned,
like the position of the legs, to how body parts
such as the beard and the hands are rendered. There
are major differences there. How the halo is depicted. I
want to come right back to that, and then things
(34:10):
about the clothing and the jewelry. Just a lot of
stuff about this does not fit with the alleged context
it supposedly comes from. So the part about the halo
was also interesting to me, given that we did a
series of episodes on halo imagery a couple of years ago.
Bayer says that halo's attached to the body like I
(34:32):
actually attached to the body on the sculpture are not
very common in genuine metal statues here. If they have
a halo it tends to be like a separate piece
from the body in the sculpture, but then also notes
that the halo around the figure's head and then the
greater ariole behind the figure's body are totally blank and
(34:53):
featureless circles. Here, I did a little digging deeper on this,
and I found another paper zooming in and show maybe
there are a few little scratches in the halo if
you zoom in, but there's no major decoration or adornment.
And if you compare this to how halo's or arioles,
you know, the glow around the head or the glow
around the body, how they're usually depicted in Tibetan or
(35:15):
Buddhist art, it's a world of difference. They are usually
not a blank circle. They are usually highly textured, highly adorned,
like we were saying, very busy, with a lot going
in them, maybe depicted as flames or having a kind
of texture within them, or or showing even little like
scenes and figures inside them.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Yeah. I think this feels like a strong point. Yeah,
that this halo feels way too casual. Yeah, and probably
has more in common with Western depictions of a halo,
you know.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
Yeah, looks more like a halo you'd see around the
head of a saint in like a medieval Catholic depiction
or something. Yeah. Yeah, So there is a bunch of
stuff like this that just does not match the cultural
con text of its alleged production and on the art elements,
Behar says, quote, my own research has not yielded a
single even remotely similar object, which led me to conclude
(36:11):
that the statue is in fact a European counterfeit, and
I was encouraged to take this conclusion by several colleagues
I contacted. While no such artifacts exist in Inner Asia,
artifacts of the pseudo Tibetan style exist in abundance, produced
as home decoration for film sets and the like. Any
(36:31):
highly improbable claim to the opposite would have to carry
the burden of proof. So having made the case that
this is a European imitation rather than a genuine Tibetan
or Mongolian original, the paper also addresses some other questions,
including who is depicted in the sculpture and where it
comes from. As to who is depicted, Bear agrees actually
(36:55):
that it might possibly be Vice Shravana, which is what
the original authors proposed, but then also give some other possibilities.
Maybe it is pod Maasimbava was another figure. It could
be an amalgam of elements from different original figures. And
then there's the question of where did it come from.
(37:15):
Behar also here casts doubt on the story that this
was taken from Tibet by the Nazi Schaffer expedition in
the late thirties. He claims that after corresponding with the
authors of the twenty twelve study, he could find no
reliable evidence that this piece had any historical association with
(37:36):
Schaffer or with the SS. I could be wrong, but
as best I can tell, the evidence for the association
is the claim of the collector who produced it in
the two thousands, But that came with no like historical
evidence backing it up or no reliable documentation. So Behyar
doubts the Schaffer connection totally.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
So this might have just been a story that was
perhaps just to make it a little more marketable.
Speaker 3 (38:04):
To collectors possibly and that could in fact work in
two different ways. He identifies two different hypotheses for the
production of this. One is that it's a He calls
it something produced for the quote general antique and curio market,
in which case, the swastika depicted on the armor and
(38:24):
the association with the Chaffer expedition would just like sort
of give it more general mystery to be like, wow,
that's weird and be attractive to a general antique buying
audience or curio buying audience. But then he says, there's
another interpretation which is a little more sinister, which is
that it is made specifically to appeal to the market
(38:45):
for Nazi memorabilia, in which case these associations would would
have a specific direct appeal. So who did make it,
Beyer says, we don't know, but he thinks that most
likely it was made by a European artist sometime roughly
between nineteen ten and nineteen seventy. Why those dates, The
(39:07):
reasoning seems to be that this would be a period
when there was a market for this sort of thing,
for artifacts imitating Tibetan styles or things to be passed
off as Tibetan in origin. But there was also still
before nineteen seventy enough ignorance within the market for this
sort of art that something of this quality could be
passed off as authentic. He says, after around nineteen seventy
(39:30):
quote more details of original Tibetan art gained wide dissipation,
so probably the market would be more aware of like
that this would not pass muster. So from Bear's perspective,
we don't know what happened for sure, but it seems
possible that it was something like a piece of meteorite
iron from the Chinga meteorite field in Tuva again that
(39:53):
southern Siberia somehow gets transported to Germany, where sometime in
the twentieth century, maybe between like nineteen ten and nineteen
seventy roughly, it is partially forged and carved into a
statue made to crudely imitate Tibetan art, and then from
there it passes into a collector's market with this story
behind it, with this alleged link to the Shaffer expedition.
(40:17):
And then he wraps up the article by sort of
discussing the importance of consulting people in the relevant fields
before go before you know, going public with claims of authenticity.
So of course I'm you know, I'm not qualified to
adjudicate this matter either, but I would tend to take
the word of people who specialize in Tibetan art in
(40:37):
evaluating whether something is authentically Tibetan art or not. And
he says, basically, any specialist in Tibetan or Buddhist art
could have looked at this and said this is not authentic.
And it's still an interesting story with that additional context
as well, because so like a European forgery of Buddhist
art imbued with a mysterious Nazi backstory which is in
(41:00):
fact made out of iron from a Siberian meteorite. How
does that happen?
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Yeah, it's still this enigma, isn't it, even if it's
not the enigma that some tellings would make it out
to be.
Speaker 3 (41:12):
But that's not all. There is one more development in
this story that I came across. So in the year
twenty seventeen, a German historian of Tibet named Israun Engelhart
published an article called the Strange Case of the Buddha
from Space. And in this piece, Engelhart gives extensive reasons,
(41:34):
first of all, for thinking the sculpture was not brought
back to Germany from Tibet by the expedition in the
late nineteen thirties, which that expedition she had actually studied
in great depth. For one thing, the members of the
SS expedition actually made meticulous catalogs of the items, but
they brought back from Tibet, and the iron statue is
(41:55):
not listed among them. But Engelhart in this paper also
documents her attempts to track down the ownership history of
the Iron Man, and these efforts are somewhat successful, and
they end up pointing her back to a sort of
aggressively negotiating antiquities dealer from Russia. Going off that information,
(42:18):
Engelhart eventually reaches the conclusion that the sculpture was probably
somehow associated with a known historical figure. That it was
probably associated with and perhaps made for the strange Russian
artist Nikolai Rarick that spelled Roe rh Nikolai Rarik, who
(42:39):
lived from eighteen seventy four to nineteen forty seven. Rareck
in his career traveled extensively in Central Asia and was
obsessed with the Himalayas and with Tibet, and there are
many portraits of him posed in Tibetan garb and with
Tibetan surroundings. He's wearing Tibetan robes. In nineteen twenty six,
(43:00):
Eric produced a sketch that angle heart came across and
the sketch is entitled the Order of Riggdan Yeppo, and
the sketch really looks a lot like the iron Man statue.
There's a similar posture and pose, a similar double halo,
similar pointed hat, similar clothing, and a note about the
(43:21):
title there that Rarick understood rigged and Yeppo as the
name of a figure meant to be the future ruler
of a spiritual kingdom known as Shambala in Tibetan Buddhism.
And further writing about the comparisons between the iron Man
(43:42):
statue and the sketch and eventually the painting produced by
Rarick known as the Order of Riggdan Yeppo, Angle Heart writes, quote,
the left hand of both the sketch and the statue
seems to hold neither a mongoose nor a vase, but
rather the famous radiant Centimani Stone, the wish fulfilling jewel
(44:05):
coming from the Sky, which Rareck painted several times. In
nineteen twenty three, when the Rarecks were in Paris, they
received a mysterious package through dubious channels that allegedly contained
this very stone, said to be a fragment of a
meteorite and apparently Rareck and his wife Elena, who Elena
(44:27):
was very into the mystical religious movement then known as Theosophy.
They got really excited about the meteorite stone and believed
it have great significance for their lives. Apparently Rareck had
long had thoughts like imagined himself as carrying around a
magic stone that had some kind of like potency and
(44:48):
meaning for his fate. But anyway, motivated in part by
their theosophical beliefs, Nikolai and Elena attempted to lead an
expedition in the nineteen twenties to find Shambala in Tibet,
to find the entrance to Shambala, and not only that,
but Nikolai would eventually come to see himself and to
(45:11):
style himself as Rigg Danneppo, the King of Shambala, and
so he had like ceremonial robes and other trappings of
this station created befitting his kingly destiny. Apparently, his claim
to be the King of Shambala did not go over
amazingly well with the Tibetans, and ultimately the expedition was
(45:36):
considered a failure. Rareck got incredibly mad at Tibet and
at Buddhism after this and published a bunch of nasty
things about them. But coming back to the statue, where
did the statue come from? Engelhart argues, based on a
number of clues, that it's quite likely that Rarick had
this statue made out of meteorite iron around nineteen twenty
(45:59):
six to nineteen twenty seven in order to represent himself
as the king of Shambala, and that's why it bears
these similarities to the sketch and the painting that he
did of himself in this posture. And this would have
probably been done by a metal worker somewhere in Urga,
(46:20):
the capital of Mongolia today known as Ulaanbatar, and this
would have been while the Rareks were staying there in
preparation for their expedition Tibet. So I think we would
need more like physical evidence to make the link for sure,
But I think it's good detective work, and Englehart makes
a really strong case, circumstantial case based on the similarities
(46:43):
of the artworks and themes that we know that Rarik
and Rarek and his family were very interested in. So
it seems quite plausible to me. Anyway. I think that'll
do it for today's episode on the iron from space.
But I feel like we've got more to talk about
with this subject now, Rob, I think you've got an
interview scheduled to run on Tuesday of next week, right,
(47:05):
But can we come back with part three of this
discussion on Thursday?
Speaker 1 (47:08):
Absolutely? Yeah. We have more examples of potential meteoric iron
artifacts to discuss and more related topics. So we'll come
back for a part three on Thursday with an interview
episode airing on Tuesday that's not related.
Speaker 3 (47:25):
To this topic. Sounds great, can't wait.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
In the meantime, certainly? Right in? If you have thoughts
on the alleged iron Man, well, I mean, I guess
the iron part is not alleged. He's it's a man.
He's made out of iron. He is iron Man. No,
we can doubt that. We can't take that away from him.
But if you have thoughts on that, or if you
have thoughts on Chinese artifacts in Chinese mythology right in,
(47:49):
we'd love to hear from you. Also, if there are
other examples from other cultures that we haven't covered so far,
bring them up, because we do have a few things
lined up to discuss. But if you get us in time,
you might be we might be able to add it
to the list, or if it comes in after the fact,
perhaps it's something we can discuss on our listener Mail episodes.
(48:10):
Our listener Mail episodes publish on Mondays, and the Stuff
to Blow Your Mind podcast feed core episodes on Tuesdays
and Thursdays, short form episode on Wednesdays and on Fridays.
We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (48:26):
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 2 (48:48):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.