From the Vault: The Hearth, Part 1

In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe dig into the powerful resonance of the fireplace and hearthstone in human culture, psychology and myth. (part 1 of 2, originally published 12/17/2024)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. Today is Saturday, so we have a
vault episode for you. This is going to be The
hearth Part one. This is part one of two, originally
published twelve seventeen, twenty twenty four. This is our look
at the powerful resonance of the Fireplace and Hearthstone in
human culture, psychology, and myth. Let's jump right in. As

(00:34):
I drew in my head and was turning around on
the chimney, Saint Nicholas came with a bound. He was
dressed all in fur from his head to his foot,
and his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.
He was dressed all in fur from his head to
his foot, and his clothes were all tarnished with ashes
and soot. He was dressed all in fur from his
head to his foot, and his clothes were all tarnished
with ashes and soot.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
And I am Joe McCormick, and today we're going to
be kicking off a series of episodes on the Fireplace
and the hearth, the infrastructure through which humans brought their
campfires indoors, inside their homes and other dwelling structures. We're
going to look at how fireplaces work, where they come from,
and what they mean. And just got to apologize again

(01:35):
this week like I did last week. I've still got
a cold. It's either round two of this cold or
a whole new cold has come into my life. So
so apologies for the sinus noises today, but I'm doing
what I can.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
Twelve days of Christmas over there, Yeah they're gathering around
the fire, but anyway, Yeah, So I wanted to do
a series of episodes looking into fireplaces, and sometimes when
you're trying to understand what an experience means to people,
you can really get some good insights by looking at

(02:08):
attempts to simulate that experience in its literal absence, like
which elements do people consider worth copying, which elements can
be ignored, which elements are accentuated or exaggerated in simulation.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
And this got me thinking about the Netflix Megahit Fireplace
for your Home, which, for those of you somehow not familiar,
is an hour long, unbroken shot of logs burning in
a Fireplace, and it is the hottest movie of the
year for I don't know, seven or eight years running
whenever this thing started playing on Netflix. I just checked

(02:47):
on Netflix and there are three episodes. This is not
a sponsored episode, by the way. Netflix had nothing to
do with this. I just think this is an interesting
subject on its own, and we'll explain more as we
go on. But I checked on Netflix and there were
three episodes of season one of Fireplace for your Home.
There's Crackling yule Log Fireplace. That one's the one that

(03:10):
plays music like Joy to the World and we Wish
you a Merry Christmas kind of Muzaki versions of thing
hard pass on that one, yeah, And then there's the
second one that's just crackling Fireplace, so no music. You
just get the pop, the hiss and all that good stuff.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
There you go.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
And then there's a third one with music, again I
guess in different music than the first one. I don't.
I think we mainly just listen. The one we put
on is the one without music.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
That's the way to go. You can add your own
music that way.

Speaker 2 (03:37):
So I don't remember what year it was we first
discovered this thing, but it has played a number of
times in our household, and so I was wondering, Rob,
do you do you have experience with this thing?

Speaker 1 (03:47):
Yes, I do. You know, I've never owned or rented
a home that had a hearth or a fireplace in it,
not even like some of the scaleback versions where it's
like gas generated and you know, or has some sort
of other effect. So I have to depend on what
a lot of people have to depend on for the
spiritual center of their home, and that's the television. And

(04:07):
so of course I fire up a fake fireplace. And
the one that's been our favorite for several years running
now is on Netflix. So again, credit where's credit where
credits due? They'll cancel your favorite shows after two seasons,
but they will give you an amazing virtual fireplace, and
our favorite is Netflix the Witcher Fireplace. It is a

(04:27):
Witcher tie in, and it's not much to it. It's simple,
it's awesome. It's just kind of a medieval fantasy world
fire pit, like you know, wrought iron or something. It's blazing,
it's crackling. There's no Henry cavill or Unifer back there
and a hot tub or anything like that. It's just
the fire pit and it's great. My only criticism is

(04:48):
that it's only an hour long, and I either can't
or I don't know how to put it on repeat,
because I would just prefer to have it on all
the time during the holidays.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
What's this emblazoned on the side of it? Is it
like a crack in or something?

Speaker 1 (05:01):
Since I've seen this show, that's probably like some sort
of a monster you know, Henry Cavill's a monster hunter
in that the Witch is a monster hunter and that's
I don't know, a Kaimer or something.

Speaker 2 (05:11):
Oh, I know the Witcher from the game, the third
game specifically. But yeah, so this thing does look really cool.
I'll have to look this one up this year. But
it's like sexy wrought iron brazier for your home.

Speaker 1 (05:23):
Yeah, yeah, it's cool. Yeah, I legitimately love it.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
So I think Fireplace for your Home and its many
derivatives are interesting cultural artifacts because on one hand, they're
just like a genuine holiday fixture in millions of homes.
I couldn't find any reliable sources on viewcount because Netflix
doesn't release that kind of stuff as far as I know.
But in an interview with The Independent in twenty eighteen,

(05:49):
the director of Fireplace for Your Home, George Ford, I'll
come back to the in a minute, estimated that it
had been it had been watched more than seventy million
times in twenty eighteen. Idea if he's right about that,
But how am I gonna argue with him? But at
the same time, I think it's funny that it's only
people are putting this on to be cozy and feel

(06:10):
good at Christmas time, and yet this movie is also
a source of ironic amusement, Like when you bring it up,
people kind of there's something funny, like they find something
kind of goofy about the idea of a cozy fire
happening inside their television. And if you look at reviews,
most of the reviews for this thing are jokes. They're

(06:31):
things like, you know, zero stars, nearly burned down my house.
It's like the joke is with the incongruity of the
fact that this is not a real fire.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
It's not it won't it won't put out heat. And
if it is putting out heat, there's probably something wrong
with your television set. I mean, it'll put out a
little heat, right, Like you shouldn't be put putting out
a lot of heat. You shouldn't actually be able to
warm your buns by it.

Speaker 2 (06:53):
You hope it's not putting out a lot. This is
actually this is kind of a tangent, but I got
interested thinking about what makes the difference between lovable holiday
kitch like fireplace for your home and a divisive experimental
art film like Andy Warhol's Empire, which if you're not
familiar with Empire, this is worth looking up. It's an

(07:14):
eight hour static shot of the illuminated upper floors of
the Empire State Building. I think it was actually filmed
over the course of roughly like six hours, and then
it's supposed to be played back at slow motion, so
the film takes like eight hours to watch. It was
filmed over the course of one night in July nineteen
sixty four, and you're just watching the buildings, like the

(07:35):
sun sets and the floodlights come on, and you just
watch the building through the night, and occasionally there'll be
you know, a plane going by or flashes of light
or something like that, but otherwise it's just a static shot. Obviously,
the movie Empire is more likely to be regarded as
either an important work of art with something interesting to
illustrate about passage of time or the aesthetics of film, or,

(07:59):
on the other hand, to be seen as a pretentious,
self infatuated, artistic boondoggle. Fireplace for your home does not
really invite either of these types of appraisal. It's just
you know, cozy holiday kitsch. However, I would say that
an hour long shot of a burning fireplace and an
eight hour shot of the floodlights on top of a

(08:20):
skyscraper have a lot of similarities. Both are what you
might call slow or atmospheric films without plot, characters, or dialogue,
primarily interested in just a purely esthetic experience, maybe causing
maybe something about causing the viewer to have time to
relax and reflect without something directly taking up their attention

(08:40):
to too aggressively. And both of them, in terms of
visual display, are based on the interplay of light and shadow.
I read somebody described the glowing crown of the building
featured in Empire as a chandelier in the sky, and
based on an interview I was looking at, it's clear
that fireplace for your home it took a lot of

(09:01):
care to try to get the right interplay of like
lights and colors in the fire and how they would
be picked up by the camera and the contrast of
that with the shadows in the room around. And so
I was thinking about if I had to like single
out a major difference, like what would make the difference
between the kinds of feelings people have about them? Apart
from like the length difference, I think a big thing

(09:24):
is that there is an understanding of a different expectation
put on the viewer. Like if you are asked to
watch Andy Warhol's Empire, people probably think that they're supposed
to like sit silently in an art house theater and
look at the screen the whole run time and think
deep thoughts, whereas fireplace for your home makes no such demands.

(09:44):
You probably just put it on in the background while
you're having coffee or while you're wrapping presents or something.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
Yeah, it's interesting to think about the different ways we're
supposed to or do, interact with various media. Like I
was thinking about this recently. I went to performance that
was maybe a little dry for my taste, and in
the same way you know, you sometimes say, well, this
meeting could have been an email, I kind of felt
like this performance could have been an art installation. You know,

(10:13):
something where I walk through it, I spend as much
time with it as I want and sort of like
gain what I want from looking at it walking through
it and so forth. You know, I think we've all
been to. This also sometimes breaks down into actual video
pieces right where you'll see like short short films or
even longer pieces, and yeah, you could watch them all

(10:34):
in their entirety, or you could sort of pass through
and get a general sense of it. And then on
the other end of the spectrum, like you look at
the way people often treat their favorite television shows, be
it to you know, something's often something they have a
lot of nostalgia for. You hear people talking about, say
The Office or a Seinfeld or something like that, and
they talk about, well, you know, I just like to

(10:54):
put it on in the background while I'm working. It
just put it on while I'm working or you know,
doing things around the house, and you know, it's you're
kind of treating the office like one of these virtual fireplaces,
something that is just generating a feeling in the background,
some stimuli in the background that you're not one hundred

(11:15):
percent focused on. In fact, I would say if you
are one hundred percent focused on one of these fireplace
videos that may be a warning sign, you know, it's like,
that's why not. I mean, however, you engage with your art,
that's fine.

Speaker 2 (11:31):
Or it could be you're just trying to find the
warholiness of it. I mean, on the I have read
strange kinds of interpretations of Fireplace for your Home. Was
reading something that referred to an almost Lynchian meditation on
the synthetic and alienated faces of holiday cheer that you
could see in Fireplace for your Home if you're looking

(11:53):
for it. But I was thinking about it in the
opposite direction. With the contrast with the Andy Warhol movie.
You could be like wrapping Christmas presents and you could
put Empire on in the background. It might not feel
any less appropriate. The other day, I just watched part
of Empire like you can find it online, and however
orthogonal this is to Warhol's intensions, it actually does feel

(12:14):
quite seasonally festive. There's something about like the Art Deco
design of the Empire state building and the floodlights against
the dark knight skies, extremely cozy and felt like Christmas time.

Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yeah, there have been a number of interesting related I
guess ambient audio visual experiences. Netflix hosted multiple moving art
works by Lewis Schwarzburg. This is the guy who also
directed the twenty nineteen film Fantastic Fun Guy, which is
more traditional in its structure, But the moving art show,

(12:48):
I guess, you know, there were like one hour long each,
maybe less. You know, it's just pleasing music, a lot
of cool ambient nature footage, and it's like great stuff.
It was great stuff to take a nap to, you know,
but still have something visual going on in the room
as well. Disney has also got in on this with
some great long ambient Star Wars themed av presentations, like

(13:11):
it'll be a landscape of Hath or something like that.
So it seems like, you know, enough people were doing
this kind of thing they realized, well, let's let's put
that out there. I mean, we also have sort of
screen savory type things that pop up on Apple televisions,
right and various apps and so forth, where instead of
just looking at an ad, they're going to show you

(13:31):
a city scape or something like that.

Speaker 2 (13:35):
I didn't know about the Star Wars thing. I don't
look that up.

Speaker 1 (13:37):
Ya. They're pretty good.

Speaker 2 (13:39):
Wampa attacks to study relax to.

Speaker 1 (13:42):
Yeah, well yeah, nothing really happens, maybe a spaceship flies over,
you know. Yeah, they keep it chill, they keep it ambient.
And it's an interesting I mean, because the idea of
the TV being on NonStop, as being this flood of
ideas into your home and into your life like this
is nothing new. We've been doing this, We've been using
our televisions like this since we've had televisions, and it's

(14:05):
it's really almost kind of a refined idea to think, well,
you know, let's let them have an hour two hour
blocks of just you know, very ambient, chill audio visual
stimuli instead of just NonStop ads and so forth.

Speaker 2 (14:19):
I don't know, well, yeah, yeah, and I mean, and
part of the reason I brought this up is to
think about the similarities and differences in the way people
are now seeming to use a TV like people would
once or in many cases still do use a fireplace
as a primarily you know, not primarily to heat the
house but because they probably have another heating system as well,

(14:40):
but as an esthetic experience. It's something that supplies a
kind of mood or ambience to the room that makes
you feel a way you want to feel, or helps
you focus your attention in a way that you want to. Yeah, anyway,
I just wanted to mention a couple of funny things
that I found out about because I read a couple
of interviews with the creator of Fireplace for Your Home
and American director named George Ford, who lives in Washington State,

(15:03):
whose primary job is, or at least was at the
time of these interviews, running a pet supply company. But
he also directed a number of these like static shot
genre films, ones like a mountain stream flowing. There's another
thing of like fish bopping around in a saltwater aquarium.
But apparently this started with him making these cat entertainment DVDs,

(15:24):
the goal of which is to like drive your cat
insane with images of mice running all over the place.

Speaker 1 (15:30):
Oh yeah, Yeah. There are various YouTube accounts that specialize
in this sort of thing as well, and some of
those can be quite cheerful, you know, until the YouTube
ads cut in.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
Yeah, I guess YouTube must have really cut into the
DVD market for these things. He used to like twenty
years ago, you'd pick up in Pet Smart or something.
But anyway, these interviews, one of them was with The
Independent in twenty eighteen and others with CBC in twenty
twenty two. A few takeaways that seemed interesting to me.
This guy was inspired in part by pre existing hearth

(16:01):
and fireplace films, So fireplace for your home not the
first thing of its type. One example is a film
that used to run on Christmas even Christmas on the
New York TV market. It was on a station called WPIX,
Channel eleven. This started in the nineteen sixties, and it
was this thing that was like two to four hours long,
depending on the instance, that would play a video loop

(16:22):
showing a log burning in a fireplace with Christmas music
playing over the top. And I read in turn that
this thing was the idea of somebody who worked at
this TV station who was inspired by like a Coca
Cola commercial that he saw. But another thing from these
interviews is that Ford talked about how his kids would
keep begging him to build a fire around the holidays

(16:44):
because you know, yeah, I remember when I was a kid,
I wanted a fire in the fireplace. That was fun.
And it occurred to him that it would be easier too,
in his words, quote, just place a television inside our
fireplace hearth easier than to keep making a real fire,
So he like pitched this to Netflix multiple times. They
initially ignored him or laughed him off, but eventually he

(17:06):
got some traction and he claims again can't verify this,
but according to the director, the First Fireplace for Your
Home film took him two years to make and cost
almost thirty five thousand dollars to produce. This would not
be Netflix money, by the way. It was actually that
he made these films independently and then I think sold
the distro rights to Netflix later on, Like, how on

(17:28):
earth could it actually be that difficult. Well, again, can't
verify the figures are true, but the explanation kind of
makes sense to me. Speaking to The Independent, he said, quote,
we battled timing issues, color audio and general high resolution
problems along the way. Special cameras have to be used
around flames and only certain color temperatures work. That's why

(17:48):
you just don't see an open flame much in movies.
And I was like, oh, that is interesting. You know,
I think for a cozy fire on a TV screen,
we kind of have some criteria that we might not
even be aware of. But we'd like to see the
warmer colors of the fire, don't We want some red, orange,
and yellow. But a roaring fire on camera, especially not

(18:09):
the right kind of camera and not the right kind
of shot just doesn't always look like that. I can
think of a lot of old movies and video where
camera where a camera catching a fireplace looks either just
like a white glare or it's like invisible somehow.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
Mm. That's a good point. Now, I'm gonna have to
be extra judging when I watch films with fireplaces in them.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
Apart from the technical concerns, this gets back to the
things about like what elements of the simulation are important
to capture. They also went through a lot of tries
actually getting the logs to burn right in like an
esthetically pleasing way. They wanted the right sounds of like
a crackle and snap and a visually symmetrical flame, and
also to make the fire in such a way that

(18:51):
it requires no intervention so you don't have to keep
like poking it reaching in front of the camera. And
another hilarious thing that I did not know, so you
you filled me in about the Witcher themed fireplace, but
according to this guy, Netflix did a fireplace tie in
with some dystopian movie they made called Bright and they

(19:13):
summarized this. I haven't seen this movie, but it's like
it's got like elves and orcs in what is otherwise
just a buddy cop movie. And they they called this
burn barrel for your Home.

Speaker 1 (19:24):
I have not seen this one, but I mean, in general,
I'm all for this. Let's have let's have more of these.
I'm just looking around. It's possible that they just unleashed
one for Squid Game. If so, excellent, keep it, keep
it going. I need all Netflix series. I'm really kind
of pissed we didn't get one for Gama Do Toro's

(19:47):
Cabinet of Curiosities. We really needed like a Linel Lasseter
themed a fireplace that would have been ideal.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
Oh yeah, like a fireplace that that talks extensively about
kind of drink it's making you.

Speaker 1 (20:01):
Yeah, I don't know, I mean, but seriously, can you
imagine if Panels Coos Motos did a fireplace hour long
video for Netflix that would be amazing. Imagine how glorious
that fireplace would.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
Look some kind of creature slowly melting. Oh but one
last thing about the fireplace director speaking to the CBC,
they ask him, why do we love to stare at
a fireplace, even if it's not putting out heat like

(20:34):
a real woman would. He mentioned a number of things,
but one that he mentions this might seem kind of obvious,
but he says, you know, a fireplace looks like safety,
and I think that's true. Something feels very like safe,
enclosed and contained about it, which is funny because actually,
like putting a fire inside your house is one of
the more dangerous things you might do.

Speaker 1 (20:54):
Yeah, yeah, but like this is the place to do it,
and it's it's the thing that we have, and it's
the thing we have a very long history with, you know,
our you know, going back through times, will be discussing
like this is what the house was built around. It
is the heart of the house. It is the center
of the house, and it is therefore the center of
your lives.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
That's right. So I don't know if I meant to
end up talking that long about fireplace for your home.
Apologies it was a bit much, But I don't know.
I think it does raise some issues that I might
want to keep returning to as we think more about
the fireplace and what it means to us over the
course of the next couple episodes. But one thing I
did want to cover briefly, is the prehistory of human

(21:34):
control of fire. Now, we've gone into this in depth
and other episodes, so we're not going to rehash all
that material in the same level of depth here. I
just wanted to do a sort of quick overview of
some things we've talked about. A paper we've referenced on
the show before that is highly cited on this subject
is from twenty sixteen published in Philosophical Transactions of the

(21:54):
Royal Society B by JAJ Gawlett called the Discovery of
Fire by Humans Long and Convoluted Process. Now, this paper
posits that human control of fire in prehistory probably constituted
three general phases, and the first stage would be humans
engaging in something we actually see in other animals, which

(22:16):
is fire. Following this would be opportunistically taking advantage of
natural fires caused most often by lightning strikes, lightning striking brush,
but less often by like weird ignition sources like volcanic eruptions,
but whatever the cause of the fire. This phase would
be humans notice a natural fire is occurring and then

(22:37):
swoop in to take advantage of it in various ways,
like to capture prey that is flushed out of hiding,
or to scavenge and eat a prey that has been
killed and maybe even cooked by the fire in some
way like oh, it's nicely roasted now, or to in
various other ways take advantage of natural resources revealed or

(22:58):
transformed by a burn. And then after the wildfire foraging stage,
you've got the second and third phases, which postulate control
of the fire within the living space. So the second
phase is domestic fire, primarily used for cooking and safety,
and then the third phase is what you might call
industrial fire, the transformation of used for the transformation of

(23:21):
resources and technology, like the production of baked pottery, and
so going into the second and third phases, you see
this sporadic and opportunistic relationship to rare natural fires transform
into the capture and maintenance of fire first like feeding
a fire continuous fuel to keep it burning after you've

(23:41):
caught it from a natural source. And then eventually humans
would learn to strike fire from nothing with implements like
flintstone's and tender Now, what's the general timeline for these
early stages of fire control. Well, it's messy and it's
still debated. The oldest evidence that anybody seriously proposes for
human control of fire goes back to our hominin relatives

(24:04):
roughly one to two million years ago, so at the
farthest it might go back like two million years but
this evidence is ambiguous. So you can have things like
charred or baked remains buried at a site that was
occupied by hominins around the same time between one and
two million years ago. But with these cases it's not

(24:24):
always clear if this is the result of deliberate fire
control or of natural burning and like scavenging of burned materials.
Gallon in the paper mentions a couple of sites of
this kind in Kenya containing like burned sediments, stone tools
that appear to have been altered by heat, and a
couple of large hunks of baked clay, but again it's

(24:45):
not clear if these are from natural fires or controlled burning.
A lot of the archaeological investigation for the emergence of
fire control has focused on looking for what are called
hearths in the literature. That's going to be a little
bit different than the way we're using hearth, primarily in
these episodes, because this would not necessarily refer to indoor fireplaces,

(25:08):
but could refer to any dedicated place for burning. So,
in like the archaeological papers, a hearth just means the
remains of a place that was used for a purposeful fire.
And there is pretty unambiguous evidence for hearths starting several
hundred thousand years ago. There are more traces of human
associated burning beginning around one million years ago, and then

(25:30):
the hearths really start popping up in Africa, Asia, Europe,
in the Middle East around four hundred thousand years ago
when you start seeing a lot of them.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
Yeah, just based on materials I've been looking at. The
exact usage of the term hearth is going to depend
on a large part on exactly what the researchers and
or the paper or the book is dealing with, Like
are we dealing with an age in which people are
living in homes or some other situation, and then the

(26:00):
exact nature of the homes varies as well.

Speaker 2 (26:02):
Yeah. Yeah, hearth in the main way we're using it
in this series is going to refer to a piece
of infrastructure in a home, like a constructed enclosure made
of fireproof materials that contains the fireplace.

Speaker 1 (26:14):
Right, But there may be a time or two where
we use the term hearth and you might think, are
they talking about a home. Well, in a few cases
we might be referring to some material that's dealing with
some other situation. But yeah, for the most part, we're
dealing with hearthstones and have gotten something along the lines
of a fireplace.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
Now, there are tons of ways that gaining control over
fire transformed humankind. Of course, one thing is it would
have expanded our geographic range, making it easier to migrate
into colder climates and higher altitudes. It allowed us to
expand our technological regime through the transformation of natural resources. Again,

(26:53):
a very good example is pottery fired pottery, but also
things you might not think of as readily, like adhesives
for hafting, the famous birch bark tar that we talked
about in some episodes in the past, and other things
you can make like various glues out of natural substances
that involves some element of heating. Also the heating of

(27:13):
stones for improved napping. Some silicon based stones they nap better.
You know, they flake off into the kinds of sharp
edges that you're looking for with a napping exercise if
you heat them the right way. But a big thing,
of course, is the importance of cooking. The importance of
fire for cooking really hard to overstate. Now, there is

(27:34):
a real scholarly debate about the extent to which cooking
actually could have transformed the human body. This is known
as the cooking hypothesis. The basic idea is that the
ability to cook otherwise hard to digest foods actually steered
hominine evolution, changing not just our culture but our bodies,
allowing us to grow more powerful brains by devoting less

(27:57):
energy to a hardy gut. Though I should that the
cooking hypothesis is not proven. There are arguments against it,
mainly having to do with like the timing that would
be required and a lack of evidence for control of
fire at the required times. So we don't know about
the cooking hypothesis hypothesis in terms of human evolution. But
what cannot be doubted is that the invention of cooking

(28:20):
massively expanded the base nutrition yield of food we acquired.
So it just made it possible to get a lot
more nutrition out of your food. And it also made
food safer by killing food born pathogens and neutralizing some
plant toxins. So it just unlocked a gigantic level up
in nutrition.

Speaker 1 (28:38):
Yeah, there's like a real sort. It's often described as
kind of an externalization of digestion, like a lot of
the chemistry of digestion and potential chemistry of digestion handled
outside the body, taking the strain off of the body,
making things that we could need otherwise edible or more

(28:58):
nutritious and so forth. Oh yeah, and then there's you know,
additional areas you can get into, like food preservation and
so forth.

Speaker 2 (29:06):
Yeah. Also, with control of fire, you have protection against
wild predators which tend to be afraid of fire and
are easier to drive away with it. And then finally
you've got provision of light in the darkness. And the
way in which fire provides light in the darkness I
think is interesting because of how it is different from

(29:29):
the light provided by the sun, and to say nothing
of the way that it's different from the kind of
light provided by electrical light sources that we have today.
That's something I want to come back to in part two,
to think about the particular light regime of fire based societies.

Speaker 1 (29:47):
Yeah. Yeah, this is something I was thinking a lot
about recently. When I visited Wales with my family. We
went to Saint Fagan's National Museum of History, which has
a lot of these historic Welsh buildings that have been
moved to this area where you can check them out,
you can walk inside them. And in many of these
buildings they had a fireplace going and that was often

(30:10):
like the main form of illumination and there may or
may not even be any windows. And it's such an
insight into it into times when you would be inhabiting
an indoor environment like that. You know, we were totally
spoiled for indoor illumination. These days, you can have your
house generally as bright as you want it, like astoundingly bright.

(30:32):
But it's an interesting experience to sort of step back
in time and appreciate like the challenges and not to
say that they were restricted only to the hearth fire.
There are other, you know, tricks you could you could
utilize to up your illumination, but you were limited. Uh,
and yeah, it's it was a different world.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
And specifically, one of the things I want to come
back to in part two is ways that that limitation
could actually be create a kind of freedom or open
opportunities for other things that are not as apparent. If
you're just in a daylight type of light or in
a very bright electrical lighting scenario.

Speaker 1 (31:10):
Yeah. Yeah, in addition to the obvious, like it's dark,
maybe we should go to sleep. Yeah, it's sometimes a
kind of a revelation to modern humans. It's like it
is nighttime. I could sleep, I could turn all of
this off, and we often don't do that.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
Yeah. I was about to be like, stop staring at
your phone right before bed, which I do.

Speaker 1 (31:33):
Yeah, it's really hard to shake. It's our little heart
we bring to bed with us, our little fireplace. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:39):
All right, Well, so from here, for the rest of
today's episode, I wanted to talk briefly about how fireplaces
are normally constructed, how they normally work in the modern sense,
and then Rob, I know you had some stuff you
wanted to get into about fireplaces as kind of magical portals.
But okay, So one of the things is, obviously, once

(32:01):
humans started to build houses, to build enclosures to live inside,
it can be easy to see why you would want
to have the heat and light benefits of a fire
inside the protection of the dwelling and not just outside.
But this actually is not as easy as it sounds.
You're presented with several concerns. One is how do you
keep the fire from burning down the house. To do so,

(32:22):
you would need to build the fireplace kind of away
from any flammable walls or furniture, or if it is
touching walls, you would need a fireplace system built into
non flammable infrastructure, made out of something like stone, brick, clay,
or metal. Other big thing this is huge how do
you keep the fire from filling your house up with smoke?

(32:44):
You need to have some kind of channel through which
smoke and hot gases can escape the building. Modern fireplaces
are equipped with dedicated flues and chimneys, as we'll talk
about in a second, but as we see, many early
indoor fireplaces had more had cruder ventilation systems, often consisting
of simply a hole in the roof directly above the fire.

(33:06):
And this would work to a degree, but it also
meant that, yeah, for like thousands of years, a lot
of buildings that housed indoor fires were just going to
be pretty smoky inside.

Speaker 1 (33:16):
I definitely got a taste of some of that at St. Fagan's.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
Yeah. Now, basic modern fireplace and chimney design goes roughly
like this. Usually you've got the firebox. This is where
the fire goes built on top of what's called a hearth.
This is the more specialized use of the word hearth.
This is the base of the fireplace that is made
out of some kind of fireproof material, often bricks or stones,

(33:43):
and this material, of course, is meant to absorb heat
from the fire and then heat the room that it's
in by radiating that heat back out into the air. Now,
above the firebox you often have like a decorative shelf
called a mantle, but that's not really part of the
mechanics of the fireplace. That's just a common decorative feature.
The channel above the firebox leading to the outside is

(34:06):
what's called the flu, and then the flu is surrounded
by the structure that we call the chimney. A lot
of times the flu is slightly offset from the firebox,
so it's not just a pipe straight up. Instead, it'll
be kind of set off to the side or behind,
and it will be the FLU will be positioned directly
above something that is called the smoke shelf, where soot

(34:27):
or anything that happens to penetrate the flu. Opening on
top of the roof, anything comes in from outdoors can
fall without landing directly on the fire. Instead, it falls
onto this shelf. Often. Also, there is a damper which
allows you to close off the flu when there's no
fire burning, to stop cold air from coming down in
the chimney. Very important to remember to open the damper

(34:50):
before lighting a new fire.

Speaker 1 (34:52):
This is especially true. Yeah, if you're staying in a
cabin or something it's not your home, maybe back at
your own house, you're not used to using a fireplace.
It is an absolutely necessary step.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
Now, we all know that a fire needs fuel and
heat to burn, but it's also important to remember that
it needs oxygen, so airflow is important in determining how
a fire burns and also in determining what effect a
fire has on the house and its occupants. The majority
of the interior heat provided by a fireplace is radiant heat.

(35:23):
It's the infrared radiation coming off of the fire itself
and then also coming off of the heated parts of
the hearth or whatever is enclosing the fire, so coming
off of the heated bricks or stones, or the metal.
If it's more of a stove design, I'll talk about
that in a second. But there is an irony to this,

(35:43):
beloved fixture of the fireplace. Way back in the eighteenth century,
Benjamin Franklin wrote about how inefficient fireplaces were actually were
at heating indoor spaces, just huge amounts of wasted energy.
He noted that the majority of the convective heat that
they produce just rushes straight up the flu and is

(36:05):
lost to the outside air. And this is often true,
though it can vary depending on particulars of the fireplace design.
In fact, here's a weird thing a lot of people
might not know. A fire in the fireplace can actually
make your house colder overall. So this again depends on particulars.

(36:25):
It depends on the design of the fireplace and the chimney,
particularly how the ventilation system is configured. But in a
lot of cases, you build a fire in the fireplace
and it will increase the temperature in the area directly
around the fire, you know, mostly again by way of
radiant heat coming off of the fire and the heated
stone or brick or metal of the hearth. But meanwhile

(36:47):
that fire is sucking in air from the inside of
your house, relatively warm air, probably if it's winter time
and you have the heat going, or just you know,
there's warm stuff happening inside the house, and so it's
warmer than the air outside. So this air from the
rest of the house is being sucked into the fireplace
to feed the fire, and then the convection of the

(37:09):
hot gas plume rising up through the flu is driving
it outside as it gets superheated. As hot gas and
smoke rushes up the chimney, a vacuum is created and
more air continues to flow in from the inside of
your house to the fireplay system, and thus a vacuum
is created in the rest of the house, and then
cold air is pulled in from outside through whatever cracks

(37:32):
your house has, cracks in the doors and windows and
so forth. So plenty of tests have shown that an
inefficient fireplace may feel warm to the room right there
in front of the blaze, but actually freezes out the
rest of the house. They even did an episode of
MythBusters where they featured this one time. I haven't seen this,
but I read about it, and I read that in

(37:52):
their particular test rooms farther away in the house got
a couple of degrees celsius colder.

Speaker 1 (37:59):
This is fascinating and it makes me think back on
times I've been in houses where there is a fireplace,
and I'll I mean, I will often find myself in
this situation where it's like I'm somewhere else in the house,
start feeling kind of chilly. Then I have to go
like right next to the fireplace to warm up. And
this pattern kind of continues. Yeah, and now I'm realizing
it could be in part due to the presence of

(38:19):
the fireplace to begin with inequality of temperature.

Speaker 2 (38:24):
Now, there are ways to improve the heating efficiency of
a wood fire. One is to replace it with a
wood is to replace your open fireplace with a wood stove.
So this would be a fireplace completely enclosed in a
metal box, which uses air more efficiently. It sucks less
cold air into your house, and also it radiates heat
into the house more efficiently, like the metal can radiate

(38:47):
in all directions. You might notice a traditional stone or
brick fireplace is usually built into a wall, whereas a
wood stove is more often closer to the middle of
the room and can radiate in all directions.

Speaker 1 (39:00):
Yeah, my late father in law was really into like
passive solar and design and houses and you know, not
quite like living off the grid kind of stuff. But
like all the things you could do with a house
to sort of like limit the need for electricity and
so forth, and like that was a Keith aspect of
his home design was having that wood stove and yeah,

(39:21):
it's not stuck in the wall. It's like out there
basically in the center of the house.

Speaker 2 (39:25):
And we might talk more about this in part too.
But there are also designs that improve the heating efficiency
because they don't draw air from the interior of the house. Instead,
they've got like an external intake vent of some kind
feeding a fire that heats a structure made of again
a fireproof material like brickstone or metal or tile, and
then that radiates heat into the building, but the airflow

(39:49):
system just doesn't really connect to the inside of the house.
That also is a way of improving the heating efficiency.
Though there's an interesting sort of a converse implication here
which I discovered. Shout out one of my sources on
fireplaces and how they generally work here was how stuff
Works article our old employer. This one was by John Kelly,
So a nice job, John, But basically the idea here

(40:13):
is that if you notice you're building a fire and
it's like having a hard time burning and the damper
is open, and yet there's still a lot of smoke
coming into the house. A problem could be that the
house is too well sealed, like the doors and the
windows are too well sealed, and the fire is not
able to create this efficient river of air from the
outside into the house into the fireplace, up the flu

(40:36):
and then back outside, so instead it's pulling some air
down the flu, which is causing a counter draft and
sending smoke into the room. So if you are having
this problem, one thing to try is like opening a window,
though of course that's going to let a bunch of
cold air in, so that may just be the price.

Speaker 1 (40:54):
Wow, I had never thought about that, huh.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
But anyway, I'm just thinking about the implications of a
fireplace often making the rest of the house colder, even
while it makes one or two rooms much warmer. And
this made me think about an unintended secondary effect of
wood fire heating being the tendency to cause people to gather.

Speaker 1 (41:17):
Yeah, this is a great point. Yeah, drawing people to
the hearth, to the fire, drawing them together and thus
and thus becoming like a center of the family of
social interaction, storytelling and so forth.

Speaker 2 (41:33):
Yeah, there's like a sort of unstated little punishment for
being off by yourself. It's just gonna make your room colder.

Speaker 1 (41:40):
Yeah, now, you know it is Christmas time, and so
a lot of folks are engaging in different fireplace related traditions,

(42:03):
the hanging of stockings and so forth. And what do
you use traditionally hang your stockings? Why you hang them
by the hearth? You hang them above the fireplace. And
of course we have tales of Santa Claus, or perhaps
they masquerading Grinch, entering your home by crawling down your
chimney and climbing in through the fireplace. This is one

(42:24):
of those, I think, examples of the fireplace as a portal,
a fireplace as a gate through which something may travel.
That it's almost too close to us, you know, we
grow up with this tradition, we're told it from an
early age. We're familiar with this story before. We're familiar
with many of the like foundation stories of our own religions,

(42:45):
you know, and important cultural other important cultural tales, arguably
more important cultural tales. We have this story of a
strange old man who climbs through the fireplace, again, almost
too close for us to even think about it. We'll
come back to that in a second. But another way,
of course that and this is one that may resonate
more with fireplace owners people who actually have hearts in

(43:09):
their home, is the reality that, okay, as a literal
aperture to the outside of your home, it is possible
for animals to climb down that chimney and potentially enter
your home. They may be prevented full access to the home,
but bats, raccoons, mice, various squirrels are just some of

(43:30):
the examples of potential chimney splunkers. I know I've encountered
bats in this manner before at a friend's house, where
like a bat or two would come into the chimney,
get trapped in the house, and then you would find them,
often in the sink trying to get water. WHOA, Yeah,
I came to this house like some it was, you know,
it's like a vacation home or something, so nobody had

(43:50):
been in it for a little bit, and I saw
something in the sink and I'm like, oh, someone left
a tea bag and I almost grabbed it throw it away,
and then iized, oh, that's a bat. And then I
had to call my friend and be like what's your
bat protocol? The bat was fine.

Speaker 2 (44:08):
Thiss never even occurred to me. I cannot relate, but
that's incredible now.

Speaker 1 (44:14):
This idea, though, of a chimney is a portal through
which other worldly powers may traverse, such as Santa Claus.
This is a pretty deeply seated concept, certainly in European traditions,
but you can also see examples of similar ideas from
pretty far flung traditions, seemingly to connect with the various

(44:34):
supernatural concepts you might encounter about the home, about fire technology,
about cooking, and just the nature of the flame itself.
For instance, Carol Rose, in her Encyclopedia of Giants, Monsters,
and Dragons that I frequently cite, mentions a tradition of
the clean Get peoples of Northwestern United States the tell

(44:56):
of Heya Kanako, the old woman underneath us, an enormous
protective deity of the earth who concentrates on supporting the
world almost in you know a similar sense to Atlas,
you know, holding up the earth. But when her hunger
gets the better off her, her concentration falters and earthquakes ensue,

(45:18):
and so humans occasionally throw bits of fat into their
hearths and, as Carol Rose describes it, in order to
help her overcome her hunger and to concentrate on keeping
the earth imbalance. So you know, it's not something crawling
through the fire through the hearth, but it's this idea

(45:42):
of the hearth is kind of this connection, in almost
a physical connection to some sort of supernatural force.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
Yeah. I think the general use of fire for burnt
offering or sacrifice indicates a way of thinking of the
fire as a kind of interface point between our world
in the other world, that you can burn something to
kind of send it through a portal to the gods.

Speaker 1 (46:07):
Yeah. And what I like about this one though, is
the idea that it's not a special fire created for
a special ritual purpose. It's more like the everyday fire.
But even the everyday fire has the potential to be
this gateway. And you know, again, it makes sense when
you think about all the convergence of activities and energies
at the hearth, the warmth, the illumination, food preparation, social gathering.

(46:32):
You know, perhaps due to the fact that it's in
a home situation that the rest of the home is cold,
and drawing people together to tell stories, tell jokes, share
their experiences, and on top of that, it is an
obvious aperture to the outside world, which certainly brings about
the possibility of various natural world creatures gaining access to

(46:54):
your abode. But let us also remember that we're also
talking about a gateway through which air can pass and
does pass, And as most of human history is pre
germ theory, I think you can see where this is going.
The idea that this is also an aperture through which
bad air could travel, or something in the air, something
that is not as constricted as physical as physical beings

(47:20):
are constricted, that they could pass through that small hole.
They could essentially pass through the keyhole, and that's all
the space they need.

Speaker 2 (47:27):
Interesting it reminds me.

Speaker 1 (47:29):
Actually of a tradition we talked about, an idea of
the Dine or Navajo people. This came up in a
couple of episodes, I think in our Dust episodes actually,
the idea that you might have an adante, a practitioner
of secret evil magic, who might introduce a magical poison
or illness into a home through its smoke hole. So

(47:54):
that definitely came to mind here, the smoke hole in
a traditional home. This could be an aperture that could
be exploited by an evil doer, and in European traditions,
spilling over into early American colonial traditions, this concept carried
a great deal of weight, something that previous guests on
Stuff to Blow your Mind Brian Hoggard discusses in his

(48:16):
excellent twenty nineteen book Magical House Protection, The Archaeology of
counter Witchcraft. I know some of you probably listened to
that episode. It's a great one if you want to
go back and listen to an interview with the author.
But I'm going to discuss some of the ideas that
he brought up in that book here as it relates
to this topic. So, in the book, Hoggard discusses the

(48:38):
various counter witchcraft rights and rituals that Europeans use, dating
back at least to the Middle Ages, functioning alongside and generally,
I guess in spite of protections offered by the Christian
faith and Christian tradition. This is coming up on the
show before you know. You have the various church approved

(49:00):
methods that you might take against supernatural evil, but are
you gonna limit yourself to just those or are you
gonna also set other traps and wards in place. But
in this case we're talking about supernatural, superstitious folk protections
that were clearly deemed absolutely necessary by many to combat

(49:23):
evil in a demon haunted world. Hoggard stresses that the
archaeological evidence suggests that unseen supernatural threats were just a
standard part of everyday existence. Supernatural evil was everywhere, and
you had to bust out all the tricks in order
to if not completely protect yourself, then at least been
the odds even slightly in your favor, and is explored

(49:45):
in the book. These efforts often took the form of
a ritual object or objects hidden in the home. He writes,
quote the most popular locations to conceal objects within buildings
are usually at portals such as the hearth, the threshold,
and also voids or dead spaces. This suggests that people

(50:05):
believed it was possible for dark forces to travel through
the landscape and attack them in their homes. Whether these
forces were emanations from a witch in the form of
a spell, a witch is familiar pestering their property, an
actual witch flying in spirit, or a combination of all
of those is difficult to tell. Additional sources of danger
could be ghosts, fairies, and demons. People went to great

(50:27):
lengths to ensure their homes and property were protected, highlighting
the fact that these beliefs and fears were visceral and,
as far as they were concerned, literally terrifying.

Speaker 2 (50:37):
Interesting yet again, the way that some physical intuitions apply
to these apparently magical substances, like the spell of a
witch or which is familiar, which you might well assume
could just you know, pass magically through any wall or whatever.
It seems people were especially concerned about voids and portals,
like the physical gaps that a physical being would need

(51:00):
to travel through.

Speaker 1 (51:01):
I mean, I imagine a lot of you have had
this experience. I mean, to be clear, some of you
may have the experience of finding some of these secreted
and hidden items, and if so, do write in. We
would love to hear from you. But I find it
like a little strange when I encounter a void in
my house. When you realize, like, here is a space
within my home where there is nothing you know, and

(51:23):
that's that I don't know. It shouldn't feel creepy, but
it does.

Speaker 2 (51:27):
What's under the stairs nothing?

Speaker 1 (51:30):
There's nothing there. Now, if you're not familiar with the
details that HAWKERD gets into and the details that came
up in that interview I conducted a while back. You
might be wondering, well, what sort of ritual objects are

(51:52):
we talking about hidden away in homes and voids and
so forth, potentially near the hearth to afford protection against
these many evils. Well, there are various examples, but some
of the main ones are as follows. First of all,
there's just protective marks. And I feel like this is
this is fairly self explanatory. You know, some sort of
a symbol or a sigil that has protective properties and

(52:16):
that may be hidden away somewhere in a home.

Speaker 2 (52:18):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (52:20):
This next one, though, this one was the one that
I found surprising at the time I was not familiar
with prior to reading this book, and that is shoes.
And I think this one's especially interesting because from our
modern perspective, we often forget just what a shoe is.
We can take it for granted, we can have, you know,
hundreds of them, and we may love shoes to death

(52:40):
without like, without really thinking about this vital aspect of
what they are. Yeah, yes, we put them on our
feet to walk about in, and you know, not step
on nails and rocks and so forth, keep our feet warm,
make our feet look you know, snazzy and cool. But
they are also flesh like sheaths, sometimes made from animal products,
that are so perhaps individually sized for the shape of

(53:03):
our feet, or if nothing else. Over time they take
on the shape of our feet. They take on the
odor of our feet. These are two details, especially the
odor that is often lost on us, perhaps not lost
on our dogs and cats. They know these shoes smell
like us, and are like potent familiar items of us.

(53:26):
You know, our cat will lay on shoes a lot,
and I've read some commentary on this kind of behavior
in cats and dogs, where they will be drawn to
the shoes because they remind them of the owners of
said shoes. And all this would seem to be part
of the superstitious calculus for these traditions. So a shoe
may wear out beyond repair in the case of a

(53:47):
child's shoes and shoes that they may outgrow them, but
they are still then objects that have to a large
extent become a part of us. You know, they are
shaped after us, they smell of us, and they're therefore
dangerous items to discard in much the same way that
nail clippings and hair were often seen as such like

(54:07):
they were a part of you. They still are a
part of you, and that is dangerous material to just
leave out in the world where an evil doer or
an evil spirit may come across it and by doing
so gain power over you.

Speaker 2 (54:22):
This type of folk belief is sometimes referred to as
the law of contagion. That like things that were once
united or in contact with one another, if they become separated,
you may need to do some kind of cleansing or exorcism,
or some kind of ritual acknowledgment of the severing there
or destruction of the thing as it is separated from you,

(54:43):
or else it can be used to have power over
you by way of the associative magical connection.

Speaker 1 (54:49):
Yeah yeah, or in this case, you find another use
for them, and so. According to Hoggard, shoes and other
objects were often deposited on ledges within the chimney, breast
or behind the fireback any stresses that quote. Shoes are
perhaps the most commonly encountered apotropaic objects and often had
an association with the hearth.

Speaker 2 (55:08):
Oh interesting, so the same object that could become your
vulnerability if discarded and found by a witch, could be
your protective amulet if you keep it, if you keep
it in the home right.

Speaker 1 (55:19):
And I'll come back to why this may be in
just a second, but before we do, I want to
talk briefly about witch bottles, which are I think the
more exciting and exotic sounding version of apotropaic objects hidden
in a home, often in the area of the hearth.
Now there's some variety to what these will consist of,

(55:39):
but you know, they have been found, they've been analyzed,
they're still being found. That's one of the great things
that as Hagard discusses, is that you have so many
different waves of renovation that take place with some of
these old homes in Europe, in Britain, in the UK,
and also in parts of the United States and Canada
as well, where people will suddenly discover a pair of

(56:02):
ancient shoes or a strange bottle. And he also discusses
how there are cases where people have suddenly sort of
given into some of the superstition of it and they've
had to put sad item back. You know, it's like
it's kind of like the reverse of finding a void.
You find a purposeful item but you don't fully understand.

(56:23):
You're not on the same like mental wavelength with it,
but you come to believe, well, I should put it back.
I don't know my way around all of this enough
to say it doesn't belong there.

Speaker 2 (56:33):
I can sympathize with that. And this may just say
something about my you know, personality or kind of tendencies,
the character tendencies. But while I would never take active
steps to do it to like, you know, put shoes
in a wall thinking it would protect my house or something,
I would feel weird about taking something out. Yeah, yeah,

(56:55):
it seems like, well, feels like I shouldn't do that.

Speaker 1 (56:58):
Yeah, that maybe a load bearing shoe.

Speaker 2 (57:01):
Just leave it alone.

Speaker 1 (57:03):
So with witch bottles, again there's some variation as to
what they may hold, but there are various written instructions
from historical records that talk about what goes into a
witch bottle, and one that Hoggard shares. This is from
seventeen oh one and he includes it in his book,
and basically the directions are to take a pint of

(57:24):
your own urine, heat it to near scalding temperatures, pour
it into a jug, and then add white salt and
three new nails with the points down. Then you bind
the jug with clay and leather and you heat it
over embers for nine to ten days.

Speaker 2 (57:40):
It's gotta work because look at all the steps.

Speaker 1 (57:43):
Yeah, and I think sometimes there are more steps that
may be a simplified version, but it's the basics are
in play here, the urine, the pointy objects. Sometimes they're
pins or needles. Sometimes it's like a lot of like
rusty nails, pins or needles, and so forth. So in
the case of the shoes and the witch bottle, here
basic idea would seem to be this. You have an

(58:04):
unseen evil force, be it a demon, a fairy, a ghost,
or some curse of a witch, and it is seeking you.
It has entered your home, perhaps through a door, perhaps
through a window, perhaps down the chimney and through the fireplace.
It's seeking you out. But what does an encounter. Instead,

(58:25):
it encounters your smell, and encounters the shoe that was
so much a part of your body and now can
be mistaken for your body, and it goes after that. Instead,
it serves as a decoy. And in the case of
the witch bottle, it's even more exciting. So it smells
that deep uriny stench that is associated with you. But

(58:46):
it's found the bottle first. And so what does this
evil thing do, this spirit, this dark seeker in the night,
It climbs inside that bottle. But uh oh, now it
is either trapped in the bottle or it is hailed
upon all of those sharp pointy bits inside the bottle
and therefore injured or perhaps killed by this witch bottle,

(59:08):
this trap that has been set for it.

Speaker 2 (59:11):
That's ingenious. I didn't know it was going there with
the nails, but that makes sense. I was wondering if
the nails had some kind of you know, they might
be iron nails unless the iron significance as like a
protective magic against the fairy folk and so forth.

Speaker 1 (59:24):
Yeah, and there may be part of that to it
as well, you know. And certainly protective magics like this,
you know, they may sort of like drag various ideas
with them across time. So I would not discount the
importance of the iron at all. But this is all
very interesting to think about in comparison to various Christmas traditions,

(59:46):
like I instantly think about wooden clogs left out for
Saint Nicholas or Santa though I've also read that prior
to the sixteenth century, at least in some European countries,
the clogs were left in the church rather than in
the home. I'm not as well versed in the history
of those traditions, but at any rate, you do have
examples where shoes are left out so that some entity

(01:00:10):
may deposit gifts inside them. And those shoes may be placed,
I think, often near doors or windows. So there still
is that sense of put them near the aperture, put
them near the portals. And where do we hang our
stockings with care? We of course hang them again by
the fireplace, oh, by the hearth. Yeah, almost as if

(01:00:31):
we're trying to throw Santa Claus off the scent. You know,
there is no need, strange one, to bring the gifts
directly to the children. Here is their sense, smell their feet,
Here is the essence you seek. Leave the gifts here,
leave the children alone in their room, or the coal
I guess if applicable, Yes, there is no need to

(01:00:51):
put the coal inside the children, leave it in the socks,
and thus he is outsmarted, and he leaves the children
alone for another year.

Speaker 2 (01:00:59):
What res this idea is now bounding about inside me?

Speaker 1 (01:01:05):
One more note from Brian Haggard. I was looking through
the book to see I couldn't remember if he had
mentioned anything Christmasy in particular, And he does mention a
rhyme that was associated with ritual burn marks from tapers
in homes. So, like I said, there were various there
were various marks and signs inside some of these old

(01:01:26):
homes that are interpreted as being associated with various protective,
magical activities and rituals. And one of them, you know,
I think could be easy to miss. It's just like
burn marks in a house. I included a picture from
his book here for you to look at, Joe, Like,
if you didn't know what you're looking at, you might
just think these were caused by some other you know,

(01:01:47):
I don't know, something that occurred during construction or something
like that. Yeah, But an interpretation here is that these
were ritual burn marks. And he includes this is a translation,
but it is a translation of a German rhyme that
apparently went along with some holiday traditions of protecting the home.

(01:02:07):
So I'm going to read it here again. This is
from Brian Huggard's book, and it goes as follows and
round about the house they go with torch or taper,
clear that neither bread nor meat do want no which
with dreadful charm have power to hurt their children or
do the cattle harm. So I'm not saying burn beams

(01:02:28):
in your house with fire as part of your holiday traditions.
But yeah, it's interesting to think about all of this.
And again, this is another one that involves the power
of fire. The power of the flame to protect us
against unseen things in the night. By the way, I
know Brian would want me to pass this along to you.

(01:02:50):
If you do encounter something like this in your house,
strange shoes, a strange item, a witch bottle, and so forth,
it is very helpful to reach out to people who
will document it all. And a lot of people do
reach out to Brian Hoggar themselves. He's on Instagram as

(01:03:10):
folk Magic Man. He also has a website, so just
look him up. It's Brian Hoggart Hoggard and he can
point you in the right direction if you encounter something
like this in your home, or email us and I'll
forward it to him. Happy to do that.

Speaker 2 (01:03:27):
All right, Well, I think we're out of time for today.
We've got more to say and to explore about the
fireplace and the hearth. So join us again on Thursday.

Speaker 1 (01:03:35):
That's right. In the meantime, we'll remind you that Stuff
to Blow Your Mind is primarily assigned some culture podcasts
with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we
do a short form episode, and on Fridays we set
aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
film on Weird House Cinema. If you're on Instagram, follow
us at stbym podcast, and if you were on Letterboxed,

(01:03:55):
follow us at Weird House. That's where you can keep
up with movies that we're covering on Weird House centem Huge.

Speaker 2 (01:04:01):
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. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is

(01:04:23):
production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (01:04:25):
For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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