October 21, 2025 • 46 mins
In this classic series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss some of the more noteworthy, fascinating and potentially terrifying gods and demons from the religions and myths of the ancient Mesopotamian world. It’s a who’s who of Pazuzu-adjacent entities. (originally published 10/10/2024)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. We're just finishing up our fall break episodes,
so this is going to be part two of the
Demons of Ancient Mesopotamia that originally published ten ten, twenty
twenty four. But starting Thursday, we're going to have all
new Halloween episodes for you, So stick around. I guarantee
(00:26):
we will be back. All right, let's jump right into
the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick, and we have returned
with part two of our Halloween season series on the
monsters and demons of ancient Mesopotamian religion. Now, if you
haven't heard part one yet, this is really one of
those series where I think you should go back and
listen to part one first. I would recommend that because
in that episode we have a general discussion about the
(01:08):
connotations of the English word demon and the ways it
both does and does not describe these entities from ancient Mesopotamia,
and we also get into some general general trends and
observations about the spirits and supernatural forces of ancient Mesopotamian religions.
But in that episode we also talk about a number
(01:29):
of specific horrifying creatures depicted in the literature and artworks
of this region and time period, including Humbaba or Huuahwa,
whose breath is death and whose face is an omen
when seen in the spilled intestines of a sheep. We
talked about the terrifying oppressor Lamashtu, who threatens infants and
(01:50):
pregnant women. And we talked about Pazuzu, the demon or
perhaps god depending on your take of the Southwest Winds,
known best to modern audience is as the devil that
possesses Reagan McNeil in The Exorcist. And then finally, we
talked about some actually quite surprising qualities of Pazuzu in
his original cultural context, in which he was often seen
(02:14):
as not just a malevolent threat in himself, but as
an apotropaic protector warding off other evil beings the Riddick principle,
if you will.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
We also talked about how no one really knows for
sure how to pronounce any of these words or names.
We have some best practices recommended by scholars, and we
try to follow that, But ultimately no one can know
for sure, Like, for instance, inky do, what if it's
inky do? No one ever says it like that, But
it's not impossible that that was the original pronunciation, right,
(02:48):
I think people say it like that inky do. Yeah,
I've heard that inky do. I don't know. It just
feels wrong.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
It just thinks I've said it that way.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
It doesn't have the same gravitized you know, I don't know.
It sounds a little like preschooler educational program.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
It does sound like a word my daughter would say,
just one of those words she makes up.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Now. When I told my wife that we were going
to do a couple of episodes about ancient Mesopotamian demons,
she jokingly asked if we were going to talk about
Goser Ah. And you know, readers of Tobin Spirit Guide
know all too well that Gozer the Gazarian is said
to have been an ancient extra dimensional entity worshiped in
ancient Mesopotamia, attended to by two guardians, Vince Clortho the
(03:30):
key Master and Zeel the Gatekeeper. Ah.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Yes, who can forget the frantic search of Rick moranis
for the Gatekeeper? I am Vince Clortho key master of Gozer.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yes, we are, of course talking about Ghostbusters again. And
to be very clear, Goser and their attendants are fictional
creations of Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis, and their names
have no connection to the actual mythologies the actual religions
of ancient Mesopotamia. In fact, in interviews, Ackroyd has pointed
to two key inspirations for the name Gozer in the film.
(04:02):
He claims there was a Goser Chevrolet dealership in upstate
New York, and that the name Gozer is somehow I'm
connected to her involved in an alleged poltergeist haunting. So
I don't doubt Akroyd on either of these counts. But
I also couldn't find any solid evidence of either. But
you know, it seems very likely on both counts, because
I believe Gozer or something like it is a relatively
(04:25):
common Turkish last name. And as far as haunting stories go,
I mean, sure, anything as possible.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
In the realm of ghosts. You can make up whatever
words you want.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah, But that being said, Gozer is a pretty great
fictional demonic god played by slaves Jhovin and voiced by
Patty Edwards. And the original Ghostbusters and Act and then
in the recent Ghostbusters Afterlife played by Olivia Wilde and
voice by show ray Adashlu. I like both incarnations of
(04:59):
the both both awesome in my opinion.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
I haven't seen the new Ghostbuster stuff, but.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
It's worth it for Gozer. Worth it for Gozer. Okay.
So Goser works, especially in the original Ghostbusters in a
large part because Akroyd and Ramis really had a lot
of enthusiasm clearly for weird fiction, Acroid in particular for
the occult and spiritualism. I think he said, I have
like a family connection to some of that stuff, and
(05:29):
you know, to a limited degree, I would say the
idea of Gozer is a kind of guardian death god,
guard of the under god of the underworld, feels appropriate
for ancient Mesopotamia. That being said, I believe in the
film or supporting material they give a date of like
six thousand BCE for Goser's worship, and that would put
(05:50):
this figure well outside the historical framework that we've been
considering in these episodes. So Goser would in this case
be like a firmly neil Thic deity.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
It would be from before written sources.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Yeah, so again no actual grounding in ancient Mesopotamian myth,
though the name, as you and I were discussing off
Mike the other day, does sound similar to the ancient
Egyptian pharaoh that is therefore essentially a god an individual
by the name of Joser Jesser Zoser. Even often I
(06:25):
think the primary spelling you run across in English is
djo s e R, but I've also seen it as
z o z Er. Okay, his name apparently refers to
the ancient Egyptian symbol of stability, a kind of terrorist
pillar known as the Jed.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
I mainly associate the pharaoh Joser with his his pyramid,
which is is a step pyramid, and it's different from
the pyramids on the Giza plateau. But this one is
really early. It was apparently like the first of the
big stone monuments of ancient Egypt. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah, So anyway, that's just a brief aside about Gozer.
But and then when we may come back briefly to
the idea of Gozer, but let's turn now to some
more amazing actual demons and monsters from the world of
ancient Mesopotamian myth and religion.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
That's right, so to get to the real ones, but
not to leave the movie connections. I just had another
quick note on Pazuzu, which we talked about at length
in the last episode. I was looking at some artifacts
pictured photographed in a book that was published by the J.
Paul Getty Museum that had text by Arion Thomas and
Timothy Potts. This was published in twenty twenty. This book
(07:35):
features an image of a full bronze statuette of Pazuzu
from the Neo Assyrian period, and it is depicted in
the statuette much like the common Pazuzu description we talked
about in the last episode, and there were lots of
depictions of Pazuzu because of his common use in Protective
Household Magic. But I thought a really cool thing about
(07:59):
this is that the statuette has an inscription on the
back and it like says, here's who I am. It says,
I am Pazuzu, son of Hanbu, king of the Leelu demons.
I have scaled the powerful mountains. They trembled the contrary
winds I've sometimes seen translated as enemy winds or something
(08:19):
like that. The contrary winds were headed west one by
one I broke their wings.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Yeah. Pazuzu, the breaker of the wings of the wind.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
Once again reminds me of your Godzilla comparison from last time.
You know that you is like, this is the the
king of monsters in a sense, the breaker of other monsters.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
That's right, but still dangerous in its own right.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
Yeah. So this inscription mentions that Pazuzu ruled over the
other demons of the wind. He was strong enough to
repel and subjugate them, as in the description one by one,
I broke their wings, and he says he is king
of the Leelu demons. So who are these demons? Well?
I decided to look them up as well, because we
(09:02):
didn't end up talking about them by name in the
last episode. We may have sort of referred to a
class of wind associated demons that would include these demons.
But here I'm going to refer again to a text
that we brought up that we used in the last episode,
and we'll refer to again in this episode. This is
God's Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia and illustrated dictionary
(09:24):
from British Museum Press, written by these scholars, Jeremy Black
and Anthony Green and illustrated by Tessa Rickards. So, regarding
the Leelu demons, Black and Green refer to them as
a family group of demons. So you got one male
demon named Leelu and two female demons named Lee le
(09:45):
Tou and our dot Lee Lee. The Leelu and Lee
Leitu are associated with the wilderness. They are malicious demons
who haunt the open desert in empty places, and much
like the demon as Lamash too, they pray a specially
on pregnant women and young children. The r double Lee,
on the other hand, is interesting because she seems to
(10:07):
embody something we see in a lot of monstrous imagery
throughout the Ages that seems to embody, especially male anxieties
about womanhood.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Yeah, the are, doubtedly. Lee certainly betrays very strict ideals
about what a woman's role or roles are in society.
That she is mother and she is wife, and a
woman that cannot act in these roles is essentially a
monster worthy of treatment as such. In these myths, Black
and Green include the translated quote, she is not a
(10:41):
wife a mother. She has not known happiness, she has
not undressed in front of her husband, has no milk
in her breasts and then you know, the most monstrous
creature then spreads impudence and infertility to other mortals like
a curse. So real, really rough stuff. But you know,
certainly you can use it as a lens to sort
(11:02):
of see like what were like the accepted roles and
limitations for people during this age.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Yeah, and the idea of a feminine entity who does
not fit into any of the socially prescribed roles for
a woman so such as mother or wife, is in
itself a terrifying thought.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yeah. I also looked up the r dot Lee in
one of Carol Rose's books, or Encyclopaedia of Various and Leprechauns,
and she says that the name literally means made of
desolation and describes it as a wild haired, winged creature
that will entice mortals to lonely, desolate places and then
attack them.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Yeah. And also, you know, in this century, Black and
Green compare the ardot Lee to a figure from Hebrew
folklore known as Lilith, a sort of sort of alternate
accounts of creation that are parallel to what we see
in the Book of Genesis. There's this of Lilith that
is also created that. I think there's a lot been
(12:03):
written about Lilith as well, commenting on the ways that
it reflects anxiety about socially nonconforming womanhood. I think this
is not limited to the ancient world, of course. There's
still a lot of men who are going to see
women who are not fitting into the social roles that
they believe women should fit into and thus conclude that
(12:25):
that woman is some kind of a monster.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Yeah. I think this is always one of the interesting
things about monsters in particular, but also other trappings of
myth and religion. It's like, no matter how fantastic the creature,
the story is like, the ideas involved, you know, often
resonate across the ages, and they often do line up
with some of the same problems that we have today.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
Yeah. I mean monsters they may not exist in reality,
they are made up, but they reflect what people have
on their minds, so they are actually I think, informative
about reality. They show people. They show weird sort of
like cracks and fissures in our categories, in our minds,
because monsters often occur at the intersection of categories, or
(13:09):
when we encounter a kind of being or concept that
doesn't fit into our category matrix very well, then we
make a monster out of it, or we simply just
express what's worrying us in some kind of physical form,
in the form of a monster. And those worries can
of course be in some cases very understandable even universal.
In other cases they can be pretty nasty. They can
(13:31):
reflect nasty attitudes, they can reflect misogyny, they can reflect
whatever is preoccupying people, understandable or not.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Yeah, well, Joe, why don't we move on to something
for the men here, specifically the scorpion man.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Hey, well, I'll give a preview that these next creatures
that gear Tablulu are often referred to as scorpion men,
but there are scorpion women as well, so we will
get both. But in the previous episode we talked about
the various human animal hybrids depicted in Sumerian and Tikadian
literature and then depicted in artwork from throughout the region
(14:18):
in the Neosyrian, Neo Babylonian period and so forth. In
some cases, it could be debated whether it is better
to call these monsters demons or some other kind of entity,
even in some cases a god. But however, we classify
them they are awesome. There are mermaids and mermen with
the head of a human and the tail and lower
(14:39):
body of a fish. There are centaurs half human and
half horse. There are lion centaurs part lion, part human,
and finally there are the gear tablulu, the scorpion men
or scorpion people. According to Black and Green, a scorpion
man is usually depicted as follows, so it's got to
(15:00):
human head with a majestic and luxurious beard on top
of his head. He often wears a horned cap and
sidebar on the horned cap because I got interested in
this and it seems like an important symbol. The horned
cap appears throughout Mesopotamian art, beginning in the early third
millennium BCE, and seems to be associated with power and
(15:21):
godhood in different periods of history. It is associated with
like different primary gods from the pantheons. So it might
be that the you know, in one period horn the
horned cap is really the symbol of this god, and
another period it's this Southern god. But it remains fairly
consistent as a symbol of divine status. Now, why does
(15:43):
a horned cap mean divine status? Black and Green speculate
that the godlike associations might be derived from the horns
of the now extinct wild bovine bos primogeneous, commonly known
as the orux now the aura was a wild ancestor
of today's domestic cattle, and still existed in its wild
(16:06):
form during much of human history, probably up until the
seventeenth century CE in some places, so just a few
hundred years ago that it finally went globally extinct, and
they were still being hunted by kings during the Neo
Assyrian period in Mesopotamia. These beasts were massive and awe inspiring,
(16:26):
larger than most domestic cattle today, with some bull oryx
standing up nearly six feet tall at the shoulder and
having gigantic thick horns more than eighty centimeters or about
two point six feet long, with each horn having a
diameter of up to between ten and eighteen centimeters, so
(16:47):
huge horns. I sometimes mention on the show that, like,
if you're not a farmer or a rancher and you
only ever see domestic farm animals like cattle and horses
on TV, it can be kind of shocking, like their
size and power when you actually get up close to one.
An example I've used before is that cattle can seem
(17:07):
very docile and bulky and slow moving until you see
one suddenly leap over a fence or start running at
full speed, and then you're like, WHOA. I did not
imagine that animal was capable of this, But the wild
Orx was even larger, more powerful, less docile, with horns
like Tim Curry and legend, so just an awe inspiring beast.
(17:31):
And with that in mind, it's not that hard to
imagine that the horns of the Aorx could be a
perfect symbol of kingly power, power, strength and will, and
thus a cap with horns on it would be a
marker of divinity in art. But ultimately this is speculative.
We can't know for sure exactly why this imagery was used,
(17:52):
but seems to me like a good guess.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Okay, so not actual horns growing out of the scorpion
man's head, but something more I can do, a crown.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Right, the horned cap. So back to the scorpion man
usually depicted, as I said, with the human head, thick beard,
and the horned cap of divinity. The scorpion man typically
had a human's upper body, so it would be kind
of human shaped from the diaphragm up. This seems pretty
consistent throughout representations, but then going down from here there
(18:20):
is some variation. Sometimes you'd get what looks like a
human abdomen, human pelvis, human thighs, but then going down
in the lower legs into bird legs and bird feet
with the talons of a raptor.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
As we discussed in last episode, this is pretty common
in a lot of different demons and godlike beings in
ancient Mesopotamia, and as we've talked about on the show too,
like this idea of demons having the legs of a bird,
this doesn't quite go away. We see perhaps the reverberations
of this on through like medieval and post medieval times.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
That's right now. Another variation is that sometimes beneath the check,
sort of from the bottom of the ribs on down,
you would instead get a more horizontal body, kind of
egg shaped body that I'm not sure if this is
supposed to represent a scorpion's body enlarged or maybe a
bird's body. It looks almost in some depictions, kind of
(19:17):
like a duck with instead of a duck's neck, just
a human's upper body from the chest up and then
this also descends into feet with bird claws. I don't know,
rob you look at this, do you see scorpion body
or bird body?
Speaker 1 (19:32):
I mean it feels more bird body to me.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
So whether the midsection is human or avian or iraqnid,
in any case, you will get a scorpion tail. This
is the promise of the premise, right. It is raised
in a threatening pose and it is ready to strike
with its deadly sting.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
And to be clear, it does not look like the
scorpion king has portrayed by Dwayne Johnson in one of
the Scorpion Kings Sea.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Which is a real shame some of the best cgi
of all time.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
Also, sometimes you get wings in an X shape, like
we discussed with representations of Pazuzu and other wind demons,
these X shaped wings. And sometimes you get also, like
we discussed with Pazuzu, a penis that has a snakehead.
What is the meaning of the snakehead penis? It is
hard to say exactly, but I feel like I get
(20:25):
the gist. So scorpion men are mentioned in several of
the best known works of ancient Mesopotamian literature. First of all.
They appear among a catalog of demons and monsters in
the Inuma a Leish, the Babylonian Epic of Creation. So
in the text, there is a character Tiamot, who is
(20:47):
the personification of the primordial ocean the salt waters, and
Tiamot is seeking revenge for the slaughter of her consort Opsu,
who is the personification of fresh water. These two are
kind of the original primordial deities. And then kind of
like in the kind of like in the in the
Greek stories, we get different generations of gods descending from them.
(21:11):
In this story, Opsu gets really mad at the younger
generations of gods because they are creating a commotion. I
think they're being too loud and boisterous, and he wants
to destroy them, but the gods kill Opsu first. And
then in preparing for vengeance, Tiamat creates or gathers a
bunch of monsters to her side to serve under her
son and new consort, Kingu. And then I'm going to
(21:34):
read from the inuma Elish, this is the Leonard William
King translation, talking about these monsters serving Tiamot with poison
instead of blood. She hath filled their bodies, fierce monster vipers.
She hath clothed with terror, with splendor. She hath decked them.
She hath made them of lofty stature. Whoever beholdeth them
(21:56):
is overcome by terror. Their bodies rear up, and none
can withstand their attack. She Hath set up vipers and
dragons and the monster Leahamu, and hurricanes and raging hounds,
and scorpion men and mighty tempests and fish men and rams.
They bear cruel weapons without fear of the fight. Okay,
(22:18):
so from this Acadian source, from the second millennium BCE,
we can sort of see the company they keep. Right,
they're among all of these monstrous beings who might run
out to fight against Marduk, But otherwise we don't get
a lot of description here. However, the scorpion beings also
appear in the epic of Gilgamesh, where they play a
more active role in the plot, and they also, in
(22:41):
this case appear in both male and female forms. So
the scorpion beings show up in tablet nine of the
Gilgamesh epic, where a lot of the text of the
epic has been lost, leaving us with fragmentary and missing
lines throughout, but they still make quite an impression, even
if some of their part of the story is gone now.
(23:01):
So the context is that Gilgamesh's friend, the wild man
in key Dou, has been killed by a curse from
the gods in punishment for the fact that together Gilgamesh
and in key Dou killed the monster Humbaba, who we
talked about at the beginning of the last episode, you know,
the big scary monster that guards the Cedar forest. Gilgamesh
and in key Dou go in there and they fight
(23:23):
Humbaba and they kill him. And so in revenge for that,
the gods kill in key Dou with a curse. And
then Gilgamesh is distraught over the death of his friend,
and he embraces in Keydu's body, refusing to believe that
he has died, until finally maggots begin to fall from
in key Dou's face. So Gilgamesh is horrified not only
(23:44):
by the loss of his friend, but by the realization
that he is going to have to die one day himself.
It's in a lot of ways, it's a kind of
almost humorously self focused reaction to He starts thinking, I
can't this can't happen to me, because you know it
means he would be taken down to the gloomy, horrible
nether world, where dust is your food and clay is
(24:06):
your meat, and it's just horrible to think about how
this fate is unavoidable. Unavoidable that is for most mortals.
But there is one man within the story who knows
the secret to eternal life, and that is the aged Utnapishtim,
the son of Ubaratutu, who along with his family, was
(24:29):
granted eternal life by the gods. Now, Utnapishtim is the
protagonist of another story. He is the survivor of the
Mesopotamian flood myth, of which Noah's flood story in the
Book of Genesis seems to be a very close analog,
so you can think of Utnapishtim and Noah as similar characters. Anyway,
(24:51):
Utnapichtim and his family they have the gift of immortality,
and so Gilgamash is going to try to get to
Utnapishtim to figure out how to live forever himself. But
to reach the old man, Gilgamesh has to go on
along and perilous journey, and at one point in his
journey he comes to the peaks of Mount Mashu, the
(25:12):
mountain of the horizon, and there, nestled in the belly
of the mountain is a great, yawning tunnel which he
must pass through to meet the immortal One. But it's
not just any tunnel. This tunnel is the path of
the Sun. So every evening at sunset, the sun god
Shamash must descend into one end of this tunnel and
(25:35):
then emerge out the other side at dawn. Anyway, guarding
the entrance of the Path of the Sun tunnel are
two monstrous beings. You've got a scorpion man and a
scorpion woman. So here I'm going to read from the
Epic of Gilgamesh tablet. Nine. This is the Stephanie Dally translation.
And to be clear, there are some gaps in the
(25:56):
text here and speculative words filled in. I'll try to
make it smooth so it reads. The name of the
mountain is Mashu. When he reached the mountain Mashu, which
daily guards the coming out of Shamash, their upper parts
touched the sky's foundation. Below their breasts reach Aralu, meaning
the underworld. They guard its gait scorpion men whose aura
(26:20):
is frightful and whose glance is death. They're terrifying. Mantles
of radiance drape the mountains. They guard the sun at
dawn and dusk. Gilgamesh looked at them, and fear and
terror clouded his face. He took the initiative and gestured
to them in greeting. A scorpion man shouted to his woman,
someone has come to us. His body is the flesh
(26:42):
of gods. The scorpion man's woman answered him, two thirds
of him is divine and one third of him is mortal.
So I like that there. The scorpion woman is a
bit more discerning in detecting mortality. Now after this there
is a section where a lot is missing. But it
seems that what happens is the scorpion beings question Gilgamesh
(27:04):
and where he's going, and he tells them he is
traveling to meet his ancestor, Napishtim. They warn him not
to try it, because to reach utnipischt him. Gilgamesh has
to pass through the tunnel under the mountain, which is
filled with the thickest darkness. No man has ever made
the journey alive, and missing text prevents us from knowing
exactly what happens, but it seems that maybe the scorpion
(27:27):
beings take pity on Gilgamesh and then allow him to
pass into the deep and he has to travel a
full day in this hot, pitch blackness, but he does
survive the journey and he makes it out to the
other side, where he emerges into the garden of Shamash,
where the trees are made of stone and they bear
jewels as their fruits. So you can see different roles here.
(27:50):
In the ina Ali, the scorpion people seem to be
simply grouped among other poisonous monstrosities the fighters of the
Imordial see Mother of Chaos, and they're going to do
battle against Marduk and the younger generation of gods. But
in Gilgamesh, while they are still presented as deadly and terrifying,
(28:12):
they're more human and more humane. And though this part
is speculative, one interpretation of the fragmentary text is that
they allow Gilgamesh to pass the gate of the Sun
because they take pity on him, And according to Black
and Green, you can see this duality in the way
the image of the scorpion person is used for artistic
(28:32):
and magical purposes. Much like Pazuzu, this horrifying entity can
not only attack, he can also protect. So they chart
the history of this imagery, saying that the scorpion person
first appears in the Acadian period in the third dynasty
of Ur, and then the scorpion people images became more
(28:53):
widespread during the Neo Assyrian and Neo Babylonian times, and
in accordance with their role in Gilgemh, they're often depicted
as servants of the sun god Shamash, sometimes even bearing
the up the image of the solar disk up on
their bodies, and in the Neo Assyrian period, the image
of the scorpion person in the form of a little
wooden figurine serves for apotropaic magic, just like Pazuzu, warding
(29:19):
off the malice of predatory demons and protecting the bearers
home from harm. So it seems interesting that this theme
recurs with multiple horrible demons we've talked about. Humbaba, Pazuzu,
and the scorpion people are apparently all apotropaic shields. At
some point. While they're like some of the scariest monsters
(29:39):
and demons that people can think of, they're also serving
as protective magic.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Yeah. Yeah, it's so so fascinating to think about this
again within the trappings, and even just not in the trappings,
but in the shadow cultural shadow of monotheistic religions. This
is not something you tend to think about, you know.
It tends to be the kind of thing that on
atheistic religions have put a lot of effort into squashing
the idea that you can turn to any figure except for,
(30:08):
you know, the Supreme God, or maybe certain agents have
said Supreme God. But you certainly can't turn to any
of the villains and ask for their help in matters.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
I'm going to recruit Beelzebub to protect me against Belisle.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Yeah, and you get into a nuanced conversation about well,
I mean, one's far worse than the other. It makes
sense to use the lesser evil against the greater email,
all right. Now, moving on to a couple of other
(30:44):
demons from ancient Mesopotamia. These are the two we're going
to discuss here. Are both connected to some really striking imagery.
Imagery from beast relief slabs found in the ancient Assyrian
city of Nimrud in what is now Iraq. Now back
in the ninth century BCE, this city was known as Kalhu,
(31:05):
and the Assyrian king Ashur Nasirpal the second had them erected,
I think, to either side of the main entrance to
the Temple of Minurta. According to Black and Green, one
particular image from these slabs is so evocative that you'll
just find it all over the place, and if not,
(31:25):
you know the actual image like a recreation of it,
and you'll even find it on the Wikipedia page for
Ancient Mesopotamian religion. One. I've seen it on the cover
of textbooks. I've seen it as like a striking image
for museum displays that have to do with this time
and or region. And it basically depicts two figures. One
(31:49):
is a winged, bearded humanoid with thunderbolts or some sort
of like Vodra type weapons in both of his hands,
like double bladed, and he's battling or chasing after some
sort of fearsome monster or demon. At least in my eyes,
it's uncertain how many feet this creature walks on, like
(32:10):
is it rearing up or does it just walk on
those rear feet, which of course look like the feet
of a bird. This thing is sometimes described as a
kind of winged lion or a monstrous griffin of some sort.
Speaker 3 (32:22):
Yeah, it's like it's got bird talons on its feet,
it looks like, but then also a clawed four pause
like maybe a lion's pause, though I don't know. Actually
they look more like hands with fingers, and then scales
all over the body and what looks kind of like
a lion's head, but weirdly, the neck doesn't look very leonine.
(32:43):
It looks more like a snake rising up, like a
you know, venomous snake rising up and hissing with its
mouth open, and then feathery wings.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Yeah, without a doubt, it is fearsome looking. And apparently
this is another case we don't one hundred percent know
who these entities are. There seem to be some best
guesses and some solid hypotheses, but sometimes they're just presented
as chaos demon in sun god or something you know,
generic like that British Museum sources. It should be pointed
(33:14):
out the British Museum this is where you'll currently find
the slabs. They suggested that God would have been the
local thunder Deityurta Black and Green also present the god
Adad as a possibility, but seem to focus more on
this character of ne Nourta and what is he battling well,
British Museum sources suggest possibly the monster Anzu, also known
(33:39):
as the bird idigod. This is a great lion headed
bird that steals the Tablet of Destinies from Inky or
inlil and the pictured god then slays the monster in
order to retrieve this sacred artifact. Now you might be wondering, well, okay,
what to deal with the Tablet of Destinies? Like the
(34:02):
name like that, it's got to be important, and yes
it is important. It is essentially the most important binding
legal document in the universe. According to this mythology, as
Black and Green point out, the tablet was essentially a
tablet of uniform writing impressed also with cylinder seals, and
(34:23):
it would give the possessor power and authority to determine
the destinies of the world everyone in the world, and
linked heaven to the underworld. So I suppose you could
almost think of it as the world tree in legal
document form, no doubt, you know, driving home the importance
of writing in the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia. So normally
(34:43):
in leal or Inky holds the tablet close to his chest,
clutching it as the guarantee of his rule. You don't
want this to fall into the wrong hands after all,
or the wrong clause, because that's exactly what happens. And
then Nnuta has to reclaim them and and then return
them to their rightful owner. So in and of itself,
(35:04):
pretty tremendous story and pretty great role for a monster
or demon. But Black and Green also suggested the creature
in this image could be the great demon Asag or
a Saku. Carol Rose describes the Sag as a demon
of disease who spreads pestilence, poisons the earth, and causes
wells to dry up. Black and Green describe a demon
(35:26):
so hideous and powerful that the fish boil alive in
the rivers at his approach. Whoa, He is the offspring
of the sky god, and he himself has mate it
with the mountains to produce monstrous offspring, presumably the Stone
warriors who follow him into battle. And this kind of
ties back in with the Zagros Mountains because they write
(35:48):
on one level, the defeat of Nnuta in this myth
of the Asag and the Stones expresses the unease felt
by the inhabitants of the Mesopotamian plain about the inhabitants
of the zo Gross Mountains. As you'll remember in the
last episode, these mountains to the west were thought to
produce winds of pestilence that would roll down into the
(36:10):
region in question.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
Oh yeah, and you know, when we see like what
actually are the effects that demons, like malevolent demons tend
to produce on human beings, it is often described in
Mesopotamian texts as like winds sort of weather phenomena and disease,
and disease I think was often thought to ride on
the winds.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
Yeah, and I will have to add a note here
that is a common occurrence when we're researching mythologies that
you'll encounter some sort of like monstrous entities or a
monstrous race and you're like, oh, these are really fascinating.
I wonder what the origin is. And then you'll look
into it and it's like, oh, it's because one people
distrusted in other people and describe them as monster. One
(36:53):
people wiped out another people and described them as monsters.
So you know, again it's you know, we see this
in like certain aspects of Irish mythology if I recall correctly.
So again, you know that the shadows of humanity's failings
certainly color even some of our more fantastic and captivating myths.
(37:15):
But anyway, zag was also frequently mentioned in spells against illness,
especially head fevers. And you know this this is because
I guess you need to name the demon that you
are saying, don't come in. Don't come in here, head
fever demon. And in some traditions, the asaku are said
to be a group of seven demons, not so much
an individual but a group of seven.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
Now, rob One thing we ended up talking about in
the last episode was the sort of proposed timeline of
the changing role of demons in ancient Mesopotamian religions and cosmologies,
and also how that affected views of the afterlife, because
of course, you know, the modern Christian vision of Hell
(37:58):
is one that is populated demons often, but this is
not necessarily the case with all visions of an embodied afterlife.
You could imagine another world that doesn't really have any
demons running around in it, but at least some versions
of the ancient Mesopotamian underworld of the dead did have
a demonic population.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Yeah, and it's sometimes the case that they're they're not
so much just evil things that happen to live there,
but they have a job, they have a role. They're
kind of part of the overall cosmic order. And of
course we see shades of this when we consider sort
of the wider loose and you know, it's the amorphous
ideas about even you know, the Christian cosmology and heaven
(38:41):
and Hell, like, okay, are the devils imprisoned in Hell?
Or do they work there? Like if they torment human
souls there, in which some of these beliefs would would
have What have you believe? Then? Is it like who
signs their paycheck? Is that a Satan thing? Is that
a God thing?
Speaker 3 (38:59):
Like?
Speaker 1 (39:00):
How does it work? You know, I don't know, big, big,
tough problems of religion and theology. Certainly you get into
if you follow this thread enough.
Speaker 3 (39:09):
The idea of a hell with demons working in it,
by the way, is as we talked about it in
the last episode, that's not in the Hebrew Bible at all.
That does emerge in Christian theology, but it's actually that
specific idea with demons working in hell to torture the
damned is not even in the Christian New Testament.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Yeah, yeah, it looks good, It looks really cool in
a woodcut, but you know, for my money, you can
kind of leave that on the table. Anyway. This comes
to a particular type of demon though in the ancient
Mesopotamian world that did have a job. So the demons
in question here are the Gala or the Galu, underworld
demons charged with dragging people off to the underworld. They
(39:48):
were said to number seven, and there were numerous spells
that might be used to ward them away. So there's
another case where at least some spells are saying like no, no, no,
do not come here. We do not want you, do
not drag me into the underworld. When the goddess in
Anna returns from her descent into the underworld, she's accompanied
(40:09):
by the Gala. And while again they're generally perceived as
horrific beings with a horrific purpose from our standpoint, they're
also not necessarily evil, just more of a harsh part
of the cosmic order, and so they could also be
invoked in a positive sense. So there are references to
both good Goala and evil Gala. You know, like good Goala,
(40:31):
come on in, evil Golla stay away. And yeah, so
I did wonder, like, you know how much of this
is about individual natures and or just their intentions, like
just saying like Gala, if you're here for me, please
keep on moving. But if you're here for souls that
are not supposed to be here, for ghosts or whatever,
then come on, come on in, do your job now.
(40:53):
You might wonder, well, how often does this occur? Like
what are the stories? And there is one key story
where they have a major role, and it is the
story of an Honor and her descent into the underworld,
which if I am understanding correctly, we don't necessarily know
why she goes into the underworld. I think there have
been a number of hypotheses as to, you know, why
this would be, And certainly you can look at other
(41:15):
descent into the underworld stories from other traditions that come later,
and you know, get some idea about you know, why
this would work. But essentially, she finds herself in a
situation where she cannot leave without someone taking her place,
And so what did the Gala do? Will they venture
back to our world? And they drag her young husband,
(41:37):
Dumuzi the shepherd god away in the night, so she's
allowed to go free. But Dumuzi dies and becomes a
god of the underworld. And there are accounts of the
sheep skin that he slept in was found empty, you know,
because they dragged him out of it in the night
and took him off to the underworld. But you know,
he's a god, so it gets to be a god
(41:58):
in the underworld, and you know, he ends up. I
was reading some descriptions in Black and Green where they
talk about I believe it was Black and Green talking
about like his role in the underworld is kind of guardian,
kind of a shepherd, and then he's you know, and
then we have these these gala around him as well.
And this kind of reminded me a little bit of
(42:20):
what we're presented with with Gooser in Ghostbusters. You know,
some sort of entity that is supposed to you know,
that is attended by monsters, beings, and perhaps has some
role regarding the flow in and out of the underworld,
which you know, in Ghostbusters, the Ghostbusters have interrupted this,
they have messed with things with their ghostbusting and ghost
(42:43):
capturing technology.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
Ah, that's very good, but you know, I was actually
thinking of another comparison that tied into some older episodes
we did, and that would be while acknowledging many of
the differences, some similarities there with the story of Osiris,
who dies, goes into the underworld, and you know, is
sometimes I think dubiously called like a god who dies
and rises again. Oh, Cyrus actually stays in the underworld,
(43:08):
so sort of stays in this dead state, but is
transformed and in a way transforms the underworld himself becomes
an authority there.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
Yeah, yeah, and yeah, I'm sure there's a lot deeper
one could go into looking at like what what does
it mean to have a shepherd god become a major
figure in the afterlife? And what does it say Tatis's
line up too with like the emergence of this concept
of a shadowy afterlife and our expectations for it, and
(43:37):
the things we might want for ourselves in it, and
the things we can do here for ourselves or for
our loved ones. Certainly, this idea of of the divine
as a shepherd does not go away, and it's with
us still today in some traditions.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
All right, well, you know what I promised in the
last episode that we were going to come back and
talk about Himbaba some more, but it seems like we're
really out of time on this series. So maybe we'll
have to return to Humbaba in the future, and in
fact to the general category of ancient Mesopotamian demons. There's
some whole other tangents I got really interested in but
didn't have time to fully develop or research, maybe having
(44:15):
to do with some connections to the Asiatic Lion. So
maybe we'll come back and do more ancient Mesopotamian demons
in the future.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
Yeah, I'm totally found for that. There's a lot we
could discuss, and really there's even a lot more with
the epic of Gilgamesh that we eat into. Yeah, we've
covered aspects of it in the past, but it's certainly
something we could do a deep dive on. All right,
let's go ahead and close it out then, just to
remind your stuff. To Blow your mind is primarily a
science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
(44:47):
We don't always talk about demons and monsters and so forth,
but it is October, so you're gonna find mostly that,
if not only that, during the month of October and then,
like you know, thirty forty percent of the time the
rest of the year, on Fridays, we set aside most
serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on
Weird House Cinema. You'll again find those episodes on Fridays,
(45:08):
and during the month of October. They are all going
to be horror and Halloween related.
Speaker 3 (45:13):
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 stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
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're listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
Four
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. We're just finishing up our fall break episodes,
so this is going to be part two of the
Demons of Ancient Mesopotamia that originally published ten ten, twenty
twenty four. But starting Thursday, we're going to have all
new Halloween episodes for you, So stick around. I guarantee
(00:26):
we will be back. All right, let's jump right into
the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick, and we have returned
with part two of our Halloween season series on the
monsters and demons of ancient Mesopotamian religion. Now, if you
haven't heard part one yet, this is really one of
those series where I think you should go back and
listen to part one first. I would recommend that because
in that episode we have a general discussion about the
(01:08):
connotations of the English word demon and the ways it
both does and does not describe these entities from ancient Mesopotamia,
and we also get into some general general trends and
observations about the spirits and supernatural forces of ancient Mesopotamian religions.
But in that episode we also talk about a number
(01:29):
of specific horrifying creatures depicted in the literature and artworks
of this region and time period, including Humbaba or Huuahwa,
whose breath is death and whose face is an omen
when seen in the spilled intestines of a sheep. We
talked about the terrifying oppressor Lamashtu, who threatens infants and
(01:50):
pregnant women. And we talked about Pazuzu, the demon or
perhaps god depending on your take of the Southwest Winds,
known best to modern audience is as the devil that
possesses Reagan McNeil in The Exorcist. And then finally, we
talked about some actually quite surprising qualities of Pazuzu in
his original cultural context, in which he was often seen
(02:14):
as not just a malevolent threat in himself, but as
an apotropaic protector warding off other evil beings the Riddick principle,
if you will.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
We also talked about how no one really knows for
sure how to pronounce any of these words or names.
We have some best practices recommended by scholars, and we
try to follow that, But ultimately no one can know
for sure, Like, for instance, inky do, what if it's
inky do? No one ever says it like that, But
it's not impossible that that was the original pronunciation, right,
(02:48):
I think people say it like that inky do. Yeah,
I've heard that inky do. I don't know. It just
feels wrong.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
It just thinks I've said it that way.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
It doesn't have the same gravitized you know, I don't know.
It sounds a little like preschooler educational program.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
It does sound like a word my daughter would say,
just one of those words she makes up.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Now. When I told my wife that we were going
to do a couple of episodes about ancient Mesopotamian demons,
she jokingly asked if we were going to talk about
Goser Ah. And you know, readers of Tobin Spirit Guide
know all too well that Gozer the Gazarian is said
to have been an ancient extra dimensional entity worshiped in
ancient Mesopotamia, attended to by two guardians, Vince Clortho the
(03:30):
key Master and Zeel the Gatekeeper. Ah.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Yes, who can forget the frantic search of Rick moranis
for the Gatekeeper? I am Vince Clortho key master of Gozer.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yes, we are, of course talking about Ghostbusters again. And
to be very clear, Goser and their attendants are fictional
creations of Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis, and their names
have no connection to the actual mythologies the actual religions
of ancient Mesopotamia. In fact, in interviews, Ackroyd has pointed
to two key inspirations for the name Gozer in the film.
(04:02):
He claims there was a Goser Chevrolet dealership in upstate
New York, and that the name Gozer is somehow I'm
connected to her involved in an alleged poltergeist haunting. So
I don't doubt Akroyd on either of these counts. But
I also couldn't find any solid evidence of either. But
you know, it seems very likely on both counts, because
I believe Gozer or something like it is a relatively
(04:25):
common Turkish last name. And as far as haunting stories go,
I mean, sure, anything as possible.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
In the realm of ghosts. You can make up whatever
words you want.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah, But that being said, Gozer is a pretty great
fictional demonic god played by slaves Jhovin and voiced by
Patty Edwards. And the original Ghostbusters and Act and then
in the recent Ghostbusters Afterlife played by Olivia Wilde and
voice by show ray Adashlu. I like both incarnations of
(04:59):
the both both awesome in my opinion.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
I haven't seen the new Ghostbuster stuff, but.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
It's worth it for Gozer. Worth it for Gozer. Okay.
So Goser works, especially in the original Ghostbusters in a
large part because Akroyd and Ramis really had a lot
of enthusiasm clearly for weird fiction, Acroid in particular for
the occult and spiritualism. I think he said, I have
like a family connection to some of that stuff, and
(05:29):
you know, to a limited degree, I would say the
idea of Gozer is a kind of guardian death god,
guard of the under god of the underworld, feels appropriate
for ancient Mesopotamia. That being said, I believe in the
film or supporting material they give a date of like
six thousand BCE for Goser's worship, and that would put
(05:50):
this figure well outside the historical framework that we've been
considering in these episodes. So Goser would in this case
be like a firmly neil Thic deity.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
It would be from before written sources.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Yeah, so again no actual grounding in ancient Mesopotamian myth,
though the name, as you and I were discussing off
Mike the other day, does sound similar to the ancient
Egyptian pharaoh that is therefore essentially a god an individual
by the name of Joser Jesser Zoser. Even often I
(06:25):
think the primary spelling you run across in English is
djo s e R, but I've also seen it as
z o z Er. Okay, his name apparently refers to
the ancient Egyptian symbol of stability, a kind of terrorist
pillar known as the Jed.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
I mainly associate the pharaoh Joser with his his pyramid,
which is is a step pyramid, and it's different from
the pyramids on the Giza plateau. But this one is
really early. It was apparently like the first of the
big stone monuments of ancient Egypt. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah, So anyway, that's just a brief aside about Gozer.
But and then when we may come back briefly to
the idea of Gozer, but let's turn now to some
more amazing actual demons and monsters from the world of
ancient Mesopotamian myth and religion.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
That's right, so to get to the real ones, but
not to leave the movie connections. I just had another
quick note on Pazuzu, which we talked about at length
in the last episode. I was looking at some artifacts
pictured photographed in a book that was published by the J.
Paul Getty Museum that had text by Arion Thomas and
Timothy Potts. This was published in twenty twenty. This book
(07:35):
features an image of a full bronze statuette of Pazuzu
from the Neo Assyrian period, and it is depicted in
the statuette much like the common Pazuzu description we talked
about in the last episode, and there were lots of
depictions of Pazuzu because of his common use in Protective
Household Magic. But I thought a really cool thing about
(07:59):
this is that the statuette has an inscription on the
back and it like says, here's who I am. It says,
I am Pazuzu, son of Hanbu, king of the Leelu demons.
I have scaled the powerful mountains. They trembled the contrary
winds I've sometimes seen translated as enemy winds or something
(08:19):
like that. The contrary winds were headed west one by
one I broke their wings.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Yeah. Pazuzu, the breaker of the wings of the wind.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
Once again reminds me of your Godzilla comparison from last time.
You know that you is like, this is the the
king of monsters in a sense, the breaker of other monsters.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
That's right, but still dangerous in its own right.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
Yeah. So this inscription mentions that Pazuzu ruled over the
other demons of the wind. He was strong enough to
repel and subjugate them, as in the description one by one,
I broke their wings, and he says he is king
of the Leelu demons. So who are these demons? Well?
I decided to look them up as well, because we
(09:02):
didn't end up talking about them by name in the
last episode. We may have sort of referred to a
class of wind associated demons that would include these demons.
But here I'm going to refer again to a text
that we brought up that we used in the last episode,
and we'll refer to again in this episode. This is
God's Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia and illustrated dictionary
(09:24):
from British Museum Press, written by these scholars, Jeremy Black
and Anthony Green and illustrated by Tessa Rickards. So, regarding
the Leelu demons, Black and Green refer to them as
a family group of demons. So you got one male
demon named Leelu and two female demons named Lee le
(09:45):
Tou and our dot Lee Lee. The Leelu and Lee
Leitu are associated with the wilderness. They are malicious demons
who haunt the open desert in empty places, and much
like the demon as Lamash too, they pray a specially
on pregnant women and young children. The r double Lee,
on the other hand, is interesting because she seems to
(10:07):
embody something we see in a lot of monstrous imagery
throughout the Ages that seems to embody, especially male anxieties
about womanhood.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Yeah, the are, doubtedly. Lee certainly betrays very strict ideals
about what a woman's role or roles are in society.
That she is mother and she is wife, and a
woman that cannot act in these roles is essentially a
monster worthy of treatment as such. In these myths, Black
and Green include the translated quote, she is not a
(10:41):
wife a mother. She has not known happiness, she has
not undressed in front of her husband, has no milk
in her breasts and then you know, the most monstrous
creature then spreads impudence and infertility to other mortals like
a curse. So real, really rough stuff. But you know,
certainly you can use it as a lens to sort
(11:02):
of see like what were like the accepted roles and
limitations for people during this age.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Yeah, and the idea of a feminine entity who does
not fit into any of the socially prescribed roles for
a woman so such as mother or wife, is in
itself a terrifying thought.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yeah. I also looked up the r dot Lee in
one of Carol Rose's books, or Encyclopaedia of Various and Leprechauns,
and she says that the name literally means made of
desolation and describes it as a wild haired, winged creature
that will entice mortals to lonely, desolate places and then
attack them.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Yeah. And also, you know, in this century, Black and
Green compare the ardot Lee to a figure from Hebrew
folklore known as Lilith, a sort of sort of alternate
accounts of creation that are parallel to what we see
in the Book of Genesis. There's this of Lilith that
is also created that. I think there's a lot been
(12:03):
written about Lilith as well, commenting on the ways that
it reflects anxiety about socially nonconforming womanhood. I think this
is not limited to the ancient world, of course. There's
still a lot of men who are going to see
women who are not fitting into the social roles that
they believe women should fit into and thus conclude that
(12:25):
that woman is some kind of a monster.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Yeah. I think this is always one of the interesting
things about monsters in particular, but also other trappings of
myth and religion. It's like, no matter how fantastic the creature,
the story is like, the ideas involved, you know, often
resonate across the ages, and they often do line up
with some of the same problems that we have today.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
Yeah. I mean monsters they may not exist in reality,
they are made up, but they reflect what people have
on their minds, so they are actually I think, informative
about reality. They show people. They show weird sort of
like cracks and fissures in our categories, in our minds,
because monsters often occur at the intersection of categories, or
(13:09):
when we encounter a kind of being or concept that
doesn't fit into our category matrix very well, then we
make a monster out of it, or we simply just
express what's worrying us in some kind of physical form,
in the form of a monster. And those worries can
of course be in some cases very understandable even universal.
In other cases they can be pretty nasty. They can
(13:31):
reflect nasty attitudes, they can reflect misogyny, they can reflect
whatever is preoccupying people, understandable or not.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Yeah, well, Joe, why don't we move on to something
for the men here, specifically the scorpion man.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Hey, well, I'll give a preview that these next creatures
that gear Tablulu are often referred to as scorpion men,
but there are scorpion women as well, so we will
get both. But in the previous episode we talked about
the various human animal hybrids depicted in Sumerian and Tikadian
literature and then depicted in artwork from throughout the region
(14:18):
in the Neosyrian, Neo Babylonian period and so forth. In
some cases, it could be debated whether it is better
to call these monsters demons or some other kind of entity,
even in some cases a god. But however, we classify
them they are awesome. There are mermaids and mermen with
the head of a human and the tail and lower
(14:39):
body of a fish. There are centaurs half human and
half horse. There are lion centaurs part lion, part human,
and finally there are the gear tablulu, the scorpion men
or scorpion people. According to Black and Green, a scorpion
man is usually depicted as follows, so it's got to
(15:00):
human head with a majestic and luxurious beard on top
of his head. He often wears a horned cap and
sidebar on the horned cap because I got interested in
this and it seems like an important symbol. The horned
cap appears throughout Mesopotamian art, beginning in the early third
millennium BCE, and seems to be associated with power and
(15:21):
godhood in different periods of history. It is associated with
like different primary gods from the pantheons. So it might
be that the you know, in one period horn the
horned cap is really the symbol of this god, and
another period it's this Southern god. But it remains fairly
consistent as a symbol of divine status. Now, why does
(15:43):
a horned cap mean divine status? Black and Green speculate
that the godlike associations might be derived from the horns
of the now extinct wild bovine bos primogeneous, commonly known
as the orux now the aura was a wild ancestor
of today's domestic cattle, and still existed in its wild
(16:06):
form during much of human history, probably up until the
seventeenth century CE in some places, so just a few
hundred years ago that it finally went globally extinct, and
they were still being hunted by kings during the Neo
Assyrian period in Mesopotamia. These beasts were massive and awe inspiring,
(16:26):
larger than most domestic cattle today, with some bull oryx
standing up nearly six feet tall at the shoulder and
having gigantic thick horns more than eighty centimeters or about
two point six feet long, with each horn having a
diameter of up to between ten and eighteen centimeters, so
(16:47):
huge horns. I sometimes mention on the show that, like,
if you're not a farmer or a rancher and you
only ever see domestic farm animals like cattle and horses
on TV, it can be kind of shocking, like their
size and power when you actually get up close to one.
An example I've used before is that cattle can seem
(17:07):
very docile and bulky and slow moving until you see
one suddenly leap over a fence or start running at
full speed, and then you're like, WHOA. I did not
imagine that animal was capable of this, But the wild
Orx was even larger, more powerful, less docile, with horns
like Tim Curry and legend, so just an awe inspiring beast.
(17:31):
And with that in mind, it's not that hard to
imagine that the horns of the Aorx could be a
perfect symbol of kingly power, power, strength and will, and
thus a cap with horns on it would be a
marker of divinity in art. But ultimately this is speculative.
We can't know for sure exactly why this imagery was used,
(17:52):
but seems to me like a good guess.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Okay, so not actual horns growing out of the scorpion
man's head, but something more I can do, a crown.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Right, the horned cap. So back to the scorpion man
usually depicted, as I said, with the human head, thick beard,
and the horned cap of divinity. The scorpion man typically
had a human's upper body, so it would be kind
of human shaped from the diaphragm up. This seems pretty
consistent throughout representations, but then going down from here there
(18:20):
is some variation. Sometimes you'd get what looks like a
human abdomen, human pelvis, human thighs, but then going down
in the lower legs into bird legs and bird feet
with the talons of a raptor.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
As we discussed in last episode, this is pretty common
in a lot of different demons and godlike beings in
ancient Mesopotamia, and as we've talked about on the show too,
like this idea of demons having the legs of a bird,
this doesn't quite go away. We see perhaps the reverberations
of this on through like medieval and post medieval times.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
That's right now. Another variation is that sometimes beneath the check,
sort of from the bottom of the ribs on down,
you would instead get a more horizontal body, kind of
egg shaped body that I'm not sure if this is
supposed to represent a scorpion's body enlarged or maybe a
bird's body. It looks almost in some depictions, kind of
(19:17):
like a duck with instead of a duck's neck, just
a human's upper body from the chest up and then
this also descends into feet with bird claws. I don't know,
rob you look at this, do you see scorpion body
or bird body?
Speaker 1 (19:32):
I mean it feels more bird body to me.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
So whether the midsection is human or avian or iraqnid,
in any case, you will get a scorpion tail. This
is the promise of the premise, right. It is raised
in a threatening pose and it is ready to strike
with its deadly sting.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
And to be clear, it does not look like the
scorpion king has portrayed by Dwayne Johnson in one of
the Scorpion Kings Sea.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Which is a real shame some of the best cgi
of all time.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
Also, sometimes you get wings in an X shape, like
we discussed with representations of Pazuzu and other wind demons,
these X shaped wings. And sometimes you get also, like
we discussed with Pazuzu, a penis that has a snakehead.
What is the meaning of the snakehead penis? It is
hard to say exactly, but I feel like I get
(20:25):
the gist. So scorpion men are mentioned in several of
the best known works of ancient Mesopotamian literature. First of all.
They appear among a catalog of demons and monsters in
the Inuma a Leish, the Babylonian Epic of Creation. So
in the text, there is a character Tiamot, who is
(20:47):
the personification of the primordial ocean the salt waters, and
Tiamot is seeking revenge for the slaughter of her consort Opsu,
who is the personification of fresh water. These two are
kind of the original primordial deities. And then kind of
like in the kind of like in the in the
Greek stories, we get different generations of gods descending from them.
(21:11):
In this story, Opsu gets really mad at the younger
generations of gods because they are creating a commotion. I
think they're being too loud and boisterous, and he wants
to destroy them, but the gods kill Opsu first. And
then in preparing for vengeance, Tiamat creates or gathers a
bunch of monsters to her side to serve under her
son and new consort, Kingu. And then I'm going to
(21:34):
read from the inuma Elish, this is the Leonard William
King translation, talking about these monsters serving Tiamot with poison
instead of blood. She hath filled their bodies, fierce monster vipers.
She hath clothed with terror, with splendor. She hath decked them.
She hath made them of lofty stature. Whoever beholdeth them
(21:56):
is overcome by terror. Their bodies rear up, and none
can withstand their attack. She Hath set up vipers and
dragons and the monster Leahamu, and hurricanes and raging hounds,
and scorpion men and mighty tempests and fish men and rams.
They bear cruel weapons without fear of the fight. Okay,
(22:18):
so from this Acadian source, from the second millennium BCE,
we can sort of see the company they keep. Right,
they're among all of these monstrous beings who might run
out to fight against Marduk, But otherwise we don't get
a lot of description here. However, the scorpion beings also
appear in the epic of Gilgamesh, where they play a
more active role in the plot, and they also, in
(22:41):
this case appear in both male and female forms. So
the scorpion beings show up in tablet nine of the
Gilgamesh epic, where a lot of the text of the
epic has been lost, leaving us with fragmentary and missing
lines throughout, but they still make quite an impression, even
if some of their part of the story is gone now.
(23:01):
So the context is that Gilgamesh's friend, the wild man
in key Dou, has been killed by a curse from
the gods in punishment for the fact that together Gilgamesh
and in key Dou killed the monster Humbaba, who we
talked about at the beginning of the last episode, you know,
the big scary monster that guards the Cedar forest. Gilgamesh
and in key Dou go in there and they fight
(23:23):
Humbaba and they kill him. And so in revenge for that,
the gods kill in key Dou with a curse. And
then Gilgamesh is distraught over the death of his friend,
and he embraces in Keydu's body, refusing to believe that
he has died, until finally maggots begin to fall from
in key Dou's face. So Gilgamesh is horrified not only
(23:44):
by the loss of his friend, but by the realization
that he is going to have to die one day himself.
It's in a lot of ways, it's a kind of
almost humorously self focused reaction to He starts thinking, I
can't this can't happen to me, because you know it
means he would be taken down to the gloomy, horrible
nether world, where dust is your food and clay is
(24:06):
your meat, and it's just horrible to think about how
this fate is unavoidable. Unavoidable that is for most mortals.
But there is one man within the story who knows
the secret to eternal life, and that is the aged Utnapishtim,
the son of Ubaratutu, who along with his family, was
(24:29):
granted eternal life by the gods. Now, Utnapishtim is the
protagonist of another story. He is the survivor of the
Mesopotamian flood myth, of which Noah's flood story in the
Book of Genesis seems to be a very close analog,
so you can think of Utnapishtim and Noah as similar characters. Anyway,
(24:51):
Utnapichtim and his family they have the gift of immortality,
and so Gilgamash is going to try to get to
Utnapishtim to figure out how to live forever himself. But
to reach the old man, Gilgamesh has to go on
along and perilous journey, and at one point in his
journey he comes to the peaks of Mount Mashu, the
(25:12):
mountain of the horizon, and there, nestled in the belly
of the mountain is a great, yawning tunnel which he
must pass through to meet the immortal One. But it's
not just any tunnel. This tunnel is the path of
the Sun. So every evening at sunset, the sun god
Shamash must descend into one end of this tunnel and
(25:35):
then emerge out the other side at dawn. Anyway, guarding
the entrance of the Path of the Sun tunnel are
two monstrous beings. You've got a scorpion man and a
scorpion woman. So here I'm going to read from the
Epic of Gilgamesh tablet. Nine. This is the Stephanie Dally translation.
And to be clear, there are some gaps in the
(25:56):
text here and speculative words filled in. I'll try to
make it smooth so it reads. The name of the
mountain is Mashu. When he reached the mountain Mashu, which
daily guards the coming out of Shamash, their upper parts
touched the sky's foundation. Below their breasts reach Aralu, meaning
the underworld. They guard its gait scorpion men whose aura
(26:20):
is frightful and whose glance is death. They're terrifying. Mantles
of radiance drape the mountains. They guard the sun at
dawn and dusk. Gilgamesh looked at them, and fear and
terror clouded his face. He took the initiative and gestured
to them in greeting. A scorpion man shouted to his woman,
someone has come to us. His body is the flesh
(26:42):
of gods. The scorpion man's woman answered him, two thirds
of him is divine and one third of him is mortal.
So I like that there. The scorpion woman is a
bit more discerning in detecting mortality. Now after this there
is a section where a lot is missing. But it
seems that what happens is the scorpion beings question Gilgamesh
(27:04):
and where he's going, and he tells them he is
traveling to meet his ancestor, Napishtim. They warn him not
to try it, because to reach utnipischt him. Gilgamesh has
to pass through the tunnel under the mountain, which is
filled with the thickest darkness. No man has ever made
the journey alive, and missing text prevents us from knowing
exactly what happens, but it seems that maybe the scorpion
(27:27):
beings take pity on Gilgamesh and then allow him to
pass into the deep and he has to travel a
full day in this hot, pitch blackness, but he does
survive the journey and he makes it out to the
other side, where he emerges into the garden of Shamash,
where the trees are made of stone and they bear
jewels as their fruits. So you can see different roles here.
(27:50):
In the ina Ali, the scorpion people seem to be
simply grouped among other poisonous monstrosities the fighters of the
Imordial see Mother of Chaos, and they're going to do
battle against Marduk and the younger generation of gods. But
in Gilgamesh, while they are still presented as deadly and terrifying,
(28:12):
they're more human and more humane. And though this part
is speculative, one interpretation of the fragmentary text is that
they allow Gilgamesh to pass the gate of the Sun
because they take pity on him, And according to Black
and Green, you can see this duality in the way
the image of the scorpion person is used for artistic
(28:32):
and magical purposes. Much like Pazuzu, this horrifying entity can
not only attack, he can also protect. So they chart
the history of this imagery, saying that the scorpion person
first appears in the Acadian period in the third dynasty
of Ur, and then the scorpion people images became more
(28:53):
widespread during the Neo Assyrian and Neo Babylonian times, and
in accordance with their role in Gilgemh, they're often depicted
as servants of the sun god Shamash, sometimes even bearing
the up the image of the solar disk up on
their bodies, and in the Neo Assyrian period, the image
of the scorpion person in the form of a little
wooden figurine serves for apotropaic magic, just like Pazuzu, warding
(29:19):
off the malice of predatory demons and protecting the bearers
home from harm. So it seems interesting that this theme
recurs with multiple horrible demons we've talked about. Humbaba, Pazuzu,
and the scorpion people are apparently all apotropaic shields. At
some point. While they're like some of the scariest monsters
(29:39):
and demons that people can think of, they're also serving
as protective magic.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Yeah. Yeah, it's so so fascinating to think about this
again within the trappings, and even just not in the trappings,
but in the shadow cultural shadow of monotheistic religions. This
is not something you tend to think about, you know.
It tends to be the kind of thing that on
atheistic religions have put a lot of effort into squashing
the idea that you can turn to any figure except for,
(30:08):
you know, the Supreme God, or maybe certain agents have
said Supreme God. But you certainly can't turn to any
of the villains and ask for their help in matters.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
I'm going to recruit Beelzebub to protect me against Belisle.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Yeah, and you get into a nuanced conversation about well,
I mean, one's far worse than the other. It makes
sense to use the lesser evil against the greater email,
all right. Now, moving on to a couple of other
(30:44):
demons from ancient Mesopotamia. These are the two we're going
to discuss here. Are both connected to some really striking imagery.
Imagery from beast relief slabs found in the ancient Assyrian
city of Nimrud in what is now Iraq. Now back
in the ninth century BCE, this city was known as Kalhu,
(31:05):
and the Assyrian king Ashur Nasirpal the second had them erected,
I think, to either side of the main entrance to
the Temple of Minurta. According to Black and Green, one
particular image from these slabs is so evocative that you'll
just find it all over the place, and if not,
(31:25):
you know the actual image like a recreation of it,
and you'll even find it on the Wikipedia page for
Ancient Mesopotamian religion. One. I've seen it on the cover
of textbooks. I've seen it as like a striking image
for museum displays that have to do with this time
and or region. And it basically depicts two figures. One
(31:49):
is a winged, bearded humanoid with thunderbolts or some sort
of like Vodra type weapons in both of his hands,
like double bladed, and he's battling or chasing after some
sort of fearsome monster or demon. At least in my eyes,
it's uncertain how many feet this creature walks on, like
(32:10):
is it rearing up or does it just walk on
those rear feet, which of course look like the feet
of a bird. This thing is sometimes described as a
kind of winged lion or a monstrous griffin of some sort.
Speaker 3 (32:22):
Yeah, it's like it's got bird talons on its feet,
it looks like, but then also a clawed four pause
like maybe a lion's pause, though I don't know. Actually
they look more like hands with fingers, and then scales
all over the body and what looks kind of like
a lion's head, but weirdly, the neck doesn't look very leonine.
(32:43):
It looks more like a snake rising up, like a
you know, venomous snake rising up and hissing with its
mouth open, and then feathery wings.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Yeah, without a doubt, it is fearsome looking. And apparently
this is another case we don't one hundred percent know
who these entities are. There seem to be some best
guesses and some solid hypotheses, but sometimes they're just presented
as chaos demon in sun god or something you know,
generic like that British Museum sources. It should be pointed
(33:14):
out the British Museum this is where you'll currently find
the slabs. They suggested that God would have been the
local thunder Deityurta Black and Green also present the god
Adad as a possibility, but seem to focus more on
this character of ne Nourta and what is he battling well,
British Museum sources suggest possibly the monster Anzu, also known
(33:39):
as the bird idigod. This is a great lion headed
bird that steals the Tablet of Destinies from Inky or
inlil and the pictured god then slays the monster in
order to retrieve this sacred artifact. Now you might be wondering, well, okay,
what to deal with the Tablet of Destinies? Like the
(34:02):
name like that, it's got to be important, and yes
it is important. It is essentially the most important binding
legal document in the universe. According to this mythology, as
Black and Green point out, the tablet was essentially a
tablet of uniform writing impressed also with cylinder seals, and
(34:23):
it would give the possessor power and authority to determine
the destinies of the world everyone in the world, and
linked heaven to the underworld. So I suppose you could
almost think of it as the world tree in legal
document form, no doubt, you know, driving home the importance
of writing in the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia. So normally
(34:43):
in leal or Inky holds the tablet close to his chest,
clutching it as the guarantee of his rule. You don't
want this to fall into the wrong hands after all,
or the wrong clause, because that's exactly what happens. And
then Nnuta has to reclaim them and and then return
them to their rightful owner. So in and of itself,
(35:04):
pretty tremendous story and pretty great role for a monster
or demon. But Black and Green also suggested the creature
in this image could be the great demon Asag or
a Saku. Carol Rose describes the Sag as a demon
of disease who spreads pestilence, poisons the earth, and causes
wells to dry up. Black and Green describe a demon
(35:26):
so hideous and powerful that the fish boil alive in
the rivers at his approach. Whoa, He is the offspring
of the sky god, and he himself has mate it
with the mountains to produce monstrous offspring, presumably the Stone
warriors who follow him into battle. And this kind of
ties back in with the Zagros Mountains because they write
(35:48):
on one level, the defeat of Nnuta in this myth
of the Asag and the Stones expresses the unease felt
by the inhabitants of the Mesopotamian plain about the inhabitants
of the zo Gross Mountains. As you'll remember in the
last episode, these mountains to the west were thought to
produce winds of pestilence that would roll down into the
(36:10):
region in question.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
Oh yeah, and you know, when we see like what
actually are the effects that demons, like malevolent demons tend
to produce on human beings, it is often described in
Mesopotamian texts as like winds sort of weather phenomena and disease,
and disease I think was often thought to ride on
the winds.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
Yeah, and I will have to add a note here
that is a common occurrence when we're researching mythologies that
you'll encounter some sort of like monstrous entities or a
monstrous race and you're like, oh, these are really fascinating.
I wonder what the origin is. And then you'll look
into it and it's like, oh, it's because one people
distrusted in other people and describe them as monster. One
(36:53):
people wiped out another people and described them as monsters.
So you know, again it's you know, we see this
in like certain aspects of Irish mythology if I recall correctly.
So again, you know that the shadows of humanity's failings
certainly color even some of our more fantastic and captivating myths.
(37:15):
But anyway, zag was also frequently mentioned in spells against illness,
especially head fevers. And you know this this is because
I guess you need to name the demon that you
are saying, don't come in. Don't come in here, head
fever demon. And in some traditions, the asaku are said
to be a group of seven demons, not so much
an individual but a group of seven.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
Now, rob One thing we ended up talking about in
the last episode was the sort of proposed timeline of
the changing role of demons in ancient Mesopotamian religions and cosmologies,
and also how that affected views of the afterlife, because
of course, you know, the modern Christian vision of Hell
(37:58):
is one that is populated demons often, but this is
not necessarily the case with all visions of an embodied afterlife.
You could imagine another world that doesn't really have any
demons running around in it, but at least some versions
of the ancient Mesopotamian underworld of the dead did have
a demonic population.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Yeah, and it's sometimes the case that they're they're not
so much just evil things that happen to live there,
but they have a job, they have a role. They're
kind of part of the overall cosmic order. And of
course we see shades of this when we consider sort
of the wider loose and you know, it's the amorphous
ideas about even you know, the Christian cosmology and heaven
(38:41):
and Hell, like, okay, are the devils imprisoned in Hell?
Or do they work there? Like if they torment human
souls there, in which some of these beliefs would would
have What have you believe? Then? Is it like who
signs their paycheck? Is that a Satan thing? Is that
a God thing?
Speaker 3 (38:59):
Like?
Speaker 1 (39:00):
How does it work? You know, I don't know, big, big,
tough problems of religion and theology. Certainly you get into
if you follow this thread enough.
Speaker 3 (39:09):
The idea of a hell with demons working in it,
by the way, is as we talked about it in
the last episode, that's not in the Hebrew Bible at all.
That does emerge in Christian theology, but it's actually that
specific idea with demons working in hell to torture the
damned is not even in the Christian New Testament.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Yeah, yeah, it looks good, It looks really cool in
a woodcut, but you know, for my money, you can
kind of leave that on the table. Anyway. This comes
to a particular type of demon though in the ancient
Mesopotamian world that did have a job. So the demons
in question here are the Gala or the Galu, underworld
demons charged with dragging people off to the underworld. They
(39:48):
were said to number seven, and there were numerous spells
that might be used to ward them away. So there's
another case where at least some spells are saying like no, no, no,
do not come here. We do not want you, do
not drag me into the underworld. When the goddess in
Anna returns from her descent into the underworld, she's accompanied
(40:09):
by the Gala. And while again they're generally perceived as
horrific beings with a horrific purpose from our standpoint, they're
also not necessarily evil, just more of a harsh part
of the cosmic order, and so they could also be
invoked in a positive sense. So there are references to
both good Goala and evil Gala. You know, like good Goala,
(40:31):
come on in, evil Golla stay away. And yeah, so
I did wonder, like, you know how much of this
is about individual natures and or just their intentions, like
just saying like Gala, if you're here for me, please
keep on moving. But if you're here for souls that
are not supposed to be here, for ghosts or whatever,
then come on, come on in, do your job now.
(40:53):
You might wonder, well, how often does this occur? Like
what are the stories? And there is one key story
where they have a major role, and it is the
story of an Honor and her descent into the underworld,
which if I am understanding correctly, we don't necessarily know
why she goes into the underworld. I think there have
been a number of hypotheses as to, you know, why
this would be, And certainly you can look at other
(41:15):
descent into the underworld stories from other traditions that come later,
and you know, get some idea about you know, why
this would work. But essentially, she finds herself in a
situation where she cannot leave without someone taking her place,
And so what did the Gala do? Will they venture
back to our world? And they drag her young husband,
(41:37):
Dumuzi the shepherd god away in the night, so she's
allowed to go free. But Dumuzi dies and becomes a
god of the underworld. And there are accounts of the
sheep skin that he slept in was found empty, you know,
because they dragged him out of it in the night
and took him off to the underworld. But you know,
he's a god, so it gets to be a god
(41:58):
in the underworld, and you know, he ends up. I
was reading some descriptions in Black and Green where they
talk about I believe it was Black and Green talking
about like his role in the underworld is kind of guardian,
kind of a shepherd, and then he's you know, and
then we have these these gala around him as well.
And this kind of reminded me a little bit of
(42:20):
what we're presented with with Gooser in Ghostbusters. You know,
some sort of entity that is supposed to you know,
that is attended by monsters, beings, and perhaps has some
role regarding the flow in and out of the underworld,
which you know, in Ghostbusters, the Ghostbusters have interrupted this,
they have messed with things with their ghostbusting and ghost
(42:43):
capturing technology.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
Ah, that's very good, but you know, I was actually
thinking of another comparison that tied into some older episodes
we did, and that would be while acknowledging many of
the differences, some similarities there with the story of Osiris,
who dies, goes into the underworld, and you know, is
sometimes I think dubiously called like a god who dies
and rises again. Oh, Cyrus actually stays in the underworld,
(43:08):
so sort of stays in this dead state, but is
transformed and in a way transforms the underworld himself becomes
an authority there.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
Yeah, yeah, and yeah, I'm sure there's a lot deeper
one could go into looking at like what what does
it mean to have a shepherd god become a major
figure in the afterlife? And what does it say Tatis's
line up too with like the emergence of this concept
of a shadowy afterlife and our expectations for it, and
(43:37):
the things we might want for ourselves in it, and
the things we can do here for ourselves or for
our loved ones. Certainly, this idea of of the divine
as a shepherd does not go away, and it's with
us still today in some traditions.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
All right, well, you know what I promised in the
last episode that we were going to come back and
talk about Himbaba some more, but it seems like we're
really out of time on this series. So maybe we'll
have to return to Humbaba in the future, and in
fact to the general category of ancient Mesopotamian demons. There's
some whole other tangents I got really interested in but
didn't have time to fully develop or research, maybe having
(44:15):
to do with some connections to the Asiatic Lion. So
maybe we'll come back and do more ancient Mesopotamian demons
in the future.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
Yeah, I'm totally found for that. There's a lot we
could discuss, and really there's even a lot more with
the epic of Gilgamesh that we eat into. Yeah, we've
covered aspects of it in the past, but it's certainly
something we could do a deep dive on. All right,
let's go ahead and close it out then, just to
remind your stuff. To Blow your mind is primarily a
science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
(44:47):
We don't always talk about demons and monsters and so forth,
but it is October, so you're gonna find mostly that,
if not only that, during the month of October and then,
like you know, thirty forty percent of the time the
rest of the year, on Fridays, we set aside most
serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on
Weird House Cinema. You'll again find those episodes on Fridays,
(45:08):
and during the month of October. They are all going
to be horror and Halloween related.
Speaker 3 (45:13):
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 stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
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're listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
Four
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