December 13, 2025 • 54 mins
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 2 of 2, originally published 12/19/2024)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, you, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb. Today is Saturday, and we have
for you today of alt episode The hearth Part two
of two, originally published twelve nineteen, twenty twenty four. This
is the continuation of our look at the importance of
the fireplace in the hearthstone in human culture, psychology, and myth.
So let us gather around its gentle warm glow.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Here here is certitude you swore below this lightning blasted tree,
where once it strikes, it strikes no more fool. And
you sang, Here is a three, And in this three
love lies unshaken as now, so must it always be.
You sang, with harsh notes, to awaken that ancient toad
(00:52):
who sits and mirrored within your hearthstone light forsaken. He
knows that limits long endured must open out in vanity,
that gates by bolts of gold secured must open out
in vanity.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick, and we are back
with part two in our series on the Fireplace and
the hearth that reading at the opening was an excerpt
from not the whole poem, but an excerpt from a
poem called Essay on Knowledge by the poet Robert Graves,
the author of I Claudius, or as some might call it, Iclavdivs.
(01:46):
And so this poem, we were a little confused because Rob,
you dug this up, and I'd never read it before,
but I really liked it. But we were confused because
we were finding multiple versions of the same poem. And
it turns out that's not an error. There actually are
multiple versions of this poem. So it's kind of like
with some of these Walt Whitman poems, where like, you know,
he published multiple drafts of the same work. That's going
(02:10):
on here. Graves published an early version of the poem
called Essay on Knowledge, and then a later one called Vanity.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Yeah, but it's I mean, it's really getting into some
stuff to blow your mind territory, because not only do
we have a hearthstone with an ancient toad beneath it,
we also have a lightning blasted tree.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, that's an unintended resonance there. But as I said,
I'd never read this before. I really love it now.
It seems to describe the poet's internal struggle between reason
and passion. So he's characterizing half of his soul as
a kind of unflappable scholar aspiring to aloof rationality, that
(02:49):
part of himself attached to the day side kingdom of
Christendom and the Enlightenment. And then the other part of
him hidden underneath this thonyan pagan dragon of weird emotion, emotion, lust,
and magic, I think are the themes of the suppressed part.
In fact, we didn't quote this part of the poem,
but in an earlier stanza he refers to it as
(03:11):
a dragon, and the balance of the poem seems to
suggest that as much as the rationality of civilization tries
to rule over the self, the dragon of lust and
emotion and passion will inevitably at some point be unleashed
from his tomb and reign again.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Yeah, basically, he's saying, I really want to be a
good Christian scholar, dude, but somebody buried this pagan psychomania
frog underneath my hearth and there's nothing I can do
about it.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
But anyway, the focal lines for us are interesting because
when I first read the poem. You know, I thought
that it was supposed to be the speaker's suppressed emotion
and carnal desire that were embodied as that ancient toad
who sits and mirrored within your hearthstone light forsaken. In
other words, I took the toad as another form of
(04:03):
the pagan dragon. However, I was reading an essay about
Graves called Philosophical Speculations, mock Beggar Hall, Welchman's Hose and
Poetic Unreason by a critic named Patrick Quinn. Not otherwise
familiar with this critic, but Quinn writes about this part
of the poem that quote the cries awaken only an
(04:23):
ancient toad symbol of the philosophic awareness of the Apollonian
and Dionysian duality in man's nature, referring to that division
between the sort of Apollonian reason and Dionysian passion that
is discussed in Plato's dialogue The Feedrus. But anyway, so
you get that line after that in the poem, where
(04:45):
Graves says he knows the limits long endured must open
out in vanity, and the he in that line seems
to be the toad. So if Quinn is correct, the
toad is not the dragon of passion and emotion, not
that Dionysian half of the struggle, but in dead the
sage who observes and describes the struggle to us, the
toad immurred beneath the hearth is Socrates. But anyway, this
(05:09):
line kind of reminds me of that thing. So like,
the toad is buried beneath the hearthstone, and it reminds
me of the thing we talked about in the previous
episode of the void buried amulets, where you know, by
symbolic law of contagion that now means Socrates is a
witch bottle full of urine.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Yeah, and later on in the episode we'll get back
to some things buried under the hearthstone and there will
be toads.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Now. To recap a bit about the previous episode, if
you haven't heard it, I would recommend going back and
checking that out first. But in part one of the series,
we talked about what interior fireplaces mean to us culturally
by looking at the characteristics of hearthfire simulations such as
the Assorted Fireplace for your Home style media offerings that
(05:54):
have become very popular as ambient streaming video in recent years,
including with we talked about some kind of burn barrel
for your home linked to some dystopian movie, and also
your witcher fireplace beloved in your house, Rob.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Yeah, And I don't know if I mentioned this one,
but there's a squid Game one. Now. Did I mention
that in the last episode.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
You mentioned just finding out about it?
Speaker 1 (06:15):
I think, yeah, yeah, I haven't watched it yet, but
I'm excited. This is the most exciting thing I know
about on Netflix. Is this squid Game fireplace? Yeah? I
may fire it up tonight.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
Nice. But also in the last episode, we talked briefly
about research into the prehistory of humans and our close
hominin relatives, how our relationship too and then control of
fire probably developed over the last couple of million years,
and how fire fundamentally changed so much about human life,
from nutrition to technology to our relationship with the climate
(06:49):
and with wildlife. After this, we talked about how a
modern domestic fireplace is usually constructed and how it works, or,
depending on your emphasis, how it doesn't work given it's
massive inefficiency as a heat source for the home. Estimates vary,
but something like eighty or ninety percent of the heat
put out by a standard wood fire is lost just
(07:10):
straight up the chimney and goes right out the flu
And depending on the design, a wood fireplace can sometimes
even make a house colder overall, even though it heats
up one room, you know, makes one room nice and toasty,
but freezes out the rest of the house. We discussed
the mechanics of that in Part one, and of course
all of this material energy analysis is useful to know,
(07:34):
but it's not going to make hearthfire any less beautiful
or attractive or magical to us.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Yeah, as well as deeply nostalgic and comforting. Yeah, we're
connecting with something very primal when we view a fireplace. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
And on that note, finally, in the last episode, we
talked about the idea of the fireplace and its a
connected ventilation system as a portal for magical entrances and
exits in many full beliefs, as a sort of for
one thing, I sort of transporter platform to the gods,
but beyond that, as a weak spot in the homes
(08:09):
defense against spells and witchcraft. And this led to interesting
examples of apotropaic magic associated with the hearth So thinking
of the fireplace as a gap in the armor that
had to be protected, perhaps by witch traps or other
magically potent items, maybe shoes. Yeah. Now, in the last episode,
(08:29):
one idea that I mentioned briefly and said I would
come back to today was about the idea of domestic
hearth fire and the nature of the light it provides.
When you think about it, firelight is different both in
quantity of light produced and in quality from daylight, and
(08:49):
that fact should not be overlooked when understanding the role
of fire in culture, especially if it is the primary
or the only source of artificial light, but even in
cases where you're just sort of optionally choosing to have
a room lit by a fire. And this brings me
to an interesting paper I came across about a less material,
(09:11):
less economic, but probably no less important way that control
of fire may have altered human culture all over the
world in prehistory. So this paper was by a scholar
named Polly Weissner, who is an anthropology professor at the
University of Utah, and it is called Imbers of Society
(09:32):
Firelight Talk among the Jutuan ce Bushmen, published in Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences twenty fourteen, and so
the author here, Weisner, acknowledges that there has been a
lot of research on how the human control of fire
may have affected lots of things about us, may have
(09:53):
affected our physical evolution and anatomy. This again is a
reference to the interesting but not completely proven cooking hypothesis,
which we talked about a bit in the last episode.
And there's no doubt that it has affected our technology
and the design of our social and living spaces. But
then Licener writes, quote, However, little is known about what
(10:15):
transpired when firelight extended the day, creating effective time for
social activities that did not conflict with productive time for
subsistence activities. And I thought this was so interesting. So
this sort of acknowledges that while fire can extend the
amount of time in the day in which you can
(10:38):
stay awake and stay awake and conduct some activities, the
light of a campfire is not sufficient to illuminate the
majority of subsistence activities, like the main economic duties of survival,
such as gathering and processing food. So when there's firelight,
there is enough light that it gives you time to
(11:00):
be awake and to see each other and to interact,
But not really good enough light to do much useful work.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Yeah, and again this is something that we so easily
take for granted in our so easily illuminated world. I know,
just for my own part, my immediate neighbors usually don't
have their backyard floodlights on during the night. But if
they do come on in the night, or they're left
on during the night by accident, I'll sometimes notice that.
(11:27):
You know, I think I could read a book here
in my bedroom at three in the morning, Like it's
entirely possible based on the ampient illumination provided by their floodlights.
And you know, that's just acc at that level of
accidental illumination was just not something you had for the
majority of human history.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Yeah, and that highlights how, of course, firelight is different
from daylight, but electrical light is different once again from firelight.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
So, how does the availability of this different kind of
time in the day change a culture or in the
author's words, did firelight quote simply give more time or
did it create a qualitatively different time and space? So
Weisner offers several potential observations and ideas in the introductory section.
(12:28):
One is that the sort of different climate or weather
conditions during the night time, which is during which activities
can be extended by firelight kind of leads to some
different social dynamics. For example, during hot seasons, air cools
after sunset, but if you can have firelight, you can
still see each other after it gets dark, and people
can release pent up energy, you know, maybe dancing or
(12:50):
interacting socially in various ways. Meanwhile, during cold seasons, of
course the fire is useful for warmth, and people will
tend to huddle near the fire warmth. It kind of
has this gathering effect like we talked about with fires
even inside the home. She also says that fireside gatherings
are sometimes, though not always, characterized by social mixing, so
(13:13):
mixing of the sexes, mixing of people of different age
groups who might spend much of the economically productive part
of the day segregated. And then another thing she said,
I thought this was very interesting quote. The moon and
Starlit skies awaken imagination of the supernatural as well as
a sense of vulnerability too. Malevolent spirits, predators and antagonists
(13:37):
countered by security in numbers. So the argument here is
that nighttime is a time of the imagination for possibilities,
both good and bad. It kind of expands that the
possibilities that you envision. You might think about the gods
or of powers beyond the normal, but you can also
think about dangers lying beyond the firelight in the dark.
(13:58):
So the light that keeps you up at night keeps
you aware and active during this imagination rich time of
the day. Another thing she says, I thought was very
interesting quote body language is dimmed by firelight, and awareness
of self and others is reduced. Facial expressions flickering with
(14:19):
the flames are either softened or, in the cases of
fear and anguish, accentuated. And I'm not sure I've ever
considered this before, but I think that's absolutely right. Different
light environments change how we look and thus change what
kinds of emotional expression we are sensitive to or that
(14:40):
we're aware of other people being sensitive to in us,
and I think this could be a reason that we
associate like a romantic evening with candle light as opposed
to with like really bright lights. I don't you know,
there could be multiple reasons for that, but I don't
have proof of this, but I think it's quite plausible
that fire based light decreases our ability to register body
(15:03):
language and facial expressions that would normally cause us social anxiety,
both because of our constant tracking of these signals in
others and because of our awareness and regulation of it
in ourselves, our awareness of being observed. In other words,
firelight could be a naturally socially disinhibiting environment. Does that
make sense?
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Yeah, it does, because there is a huge difference between
you know, of course, stark daylight anywhere anything from stark
daylight all the way towards dusk and absolute darkness. We're
talking about a world in between where the illumination is
not harsh, but is atmospheric and can certainly have this
(15:47):
sort of emotional vibe to it. Yeah, this is interesting.
It's almost like did sexy times exist? Didn't romance exist
before firelight? I mean it did that, you know in
the way that we're thinking about it. You know, candle
at dinner and so forth, or any romantic scene you've
(16:08):
ever seen in a motion picture, you know it probably
takes place in some sort of a lighting environment like this. Well.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Yeah, and obviously the romantic example is just one type
of scenario where we want to be socially disinhibited where
we want like our social anxieties and our fear of
being perceived to be reduced. I think that's also the
case more in just general social interactions, where we want
to be like, you know, bonding with people and trying
(16:36):
to build up good relationships and so forth.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Yeah, Now, on the other hand, here the author says
that overt expressions of fear and anguish could in some
cases be accentuated by firelight, and you can imagine that
being powerful as well for sort of capturing the capturing
of attention with storytelling or ritual.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
I can't help but think about the fact that a
central fire, be it in a fireplace or a campfire,
or even just a lantern that people are gathered around,
it becomes the focal point. It becomes the thing you
look at. And on one hand, yeah, you're not looking
necessarily looking directly in people's faces while you're talking to them.
It's kind of getting into that whole zone where like
(17:17):
sometimes you know, a parent and their child can have
a more intense conversation whilst the parent is driving a car,
you know, because it's like eyes forward. We can kind
of have this slightly disconnected but deep personal conversation. And
then likewise, if everybody staring at the fire, it's kind
of like, yeah, attention is on the flames, but we
(17:38):
can still have this close conversation but without looking each
other dead in the eyes, and then the flames can
also kind of become the almost kind of like the
primordial television set where the telling of tales and the
invocation of wild concepts and imagined realities.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
I think that's a really good observation. I didn't think
about the comparison to the car or to the TV,
but yes, totally. Now there's another interesting general observation Weisner
makes in the introductory section, which is quote, whereas time
structures interactions by day because of economic exigencies, by night,
social interactions structure time and often continue until relationships are right.
(18:22):
And she summarizes this by saying that people in hunter
gatherer societies, they tend to focus interactions on efficiency during
the daytime and effectiveness during the night time. So during
the day we need to get this problem resolved quickly
so we can move on with what we're doing, whereas
at night we can address this until it's fixed. And
(18:44):
so the author here says that her goal is to
investigate how firelit time is used to achieve three things,
and this is, in the author's words, the first thing
is a more accurate understanding of the thoughts and emotions
of others, particularly those not immediately present. Second, bonding within
and between groups, and third the generation, regulation and transmission
(19:07):
of cultural institutions. So, in order to investigate the role
of firelight and creating productive space for these goals, the
author analyzed and quantified the differences in daytime and then
firelit nighttime conversation topics among the jutwan people of Southern Africa.
(19:27):
And so she is working mainly from a sample of
one hundred and seventy four memorialized conversations that took place
in among a group of people in northern Botswana in
nineteen seventy four, and then this was supplemented with subsequent
visits and re recordings of some stories. And then also
(19:48):
the analysis of this direct sampling of Jutwanzi conversations and
activities was supplemented by a survey of written translated texts
on day night differences in conversation topics in other cultures.
Now the author is clear about the limitations of this
kind of research, because it's very important to remember when
(20:09):
you're looking at anthropology studies of this kind. Studying the
habits of one culture does not necessarily tell you how
another culture in some overlapping circumstances will function. So if
you see a behavior among one group of hunter gatherers today,
that does not give you certainty that all prehistoric hunter
gatherers did the same thing. In fact, you don't even
(20:31):
know that other hunter gatherer groups in the modern world
do the same thing. In fact, it doesn't even show
you that the exact same group of people would keep
doing the same thing at a different time. And in
the case of the Jutwan people, the paper notes that
for many of them, the structure of life has changed
significantly since the mid nineteen seventies, around the time when
these conversations were initially recorded, with many people settling more
(20:56):
into more permanent villages with a more mixed economy, some
traditional subsistence foraging, but also wage labor and selling crafts
and things like that. But still, this kind of cultural
observation does tell you something. It doesn't show you how
it always is, but it does show you with certainty
one way it can be. So it's important to understand
(21:18):
the strengths and the weaknesses of this kind of anthropological research.
Studying one culture doesn't prove universal patterns, but it does
establish a precedent something you can see. Okay, here's one
way it could work. So coming back to the question
the author was trying to figure out here, does firelight
simply give us more time or does it create a
different type of time and space? And in the specific
(21:42):
case of the people observed here, the author found some
strong differences in what people talked about during the day
versus after sunset when the illumination was based on fire.
So the author said that daytime conversations strongly centered around
economic matters, meaning things having to do with work, so
(22:03):
the acquisition of food through hunting and foraging, plans for
the acquisition of food, resource availability, conversations about technology. All
of this economic talk about work represented about thirty one
percent of the daytime talk that was sampled. Another thirty
four percent of the daytime conversation sampled was what the
(22:26):
author calls quote, verbal criticism, complaint, and conflict, and this
basically covers all talk that is designed to regulate social
relationships and hash out personal disputes, and a lot of
this seems to be based on maintaining egalitarian social relationships
and preventing other people from acquiring social dominance or sort
(22:50):
of unfair social advantage.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
So bickering is that I think of this thirty four percent.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Well, I wouldn't want to put like afrmative negative spin
on it, but in a way, yes, this is social
regulatory talk where people are addressing social problems that they
perceive or some kind of conflict between people and addressing
those addressing those issues and trying to resolve them, which
(23:19):
in this broad understanding, this is also a huge part
of conversation I would say among basically any people anywhere, Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Now during the daytime, another sixteen percent was devoted to jokes,
joking around. Another nine percent was devoted to land rights
discussion of the use of land, four percent was about
(23:40):
interactions with other ethnic groups, and six percent was made
up of storytelling. But the author describes how as the
day went on and families would gather for the evening
meal around the fire, the mood would tend to mellow out,
losing a lot of the harshness of daytime talk. After
the sun went down and in the darkness around the
(24:01):
fire major activities shifted and they were music, dance, and conversation.
So what was that conversation about. Well, during the firelit time,
she found at least among these people in this sample
it was radically different. Quote, night activities steer away from
tensions of the day to singing, dancing, religious ceremonies, and
(24:24):
enthralling stories, often about known people. And the difference is huge.
I've got a pie chart for you to look at, Rob,
and I remember during the daytime, like thirty one percent
of the talk was about economic issues, things related to work,
thirty four percent was the resolving of these social disputes,
only six percent was stories. During the night eighty one
(24:47):
percent of conversation with stories, the radical shift was shifting
almost overwhelmingly to story mode.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Yeah, that is considerable, especially seeing it on the pigraph here.
Eighty one percent it just consumes everything. I mean, you
got some small percentage still allotted to you know, shop
talk and bickering ben in some of these other areas,
and then four percent for myth.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Yeah. And so I think the myth there connects to
the idea of storytelling as well, because one of the
broad observations that the author makes here is that is
of the idea of the night as a time of bigger,
broader thinking, and she gives an example where like, Okay,
during the daytime, you might have people devoting a significant
amount of conversation to a personal dispute about marriage. They're
(25:36):
discussing a marital dispute, whereas during the night instead, you
would have interesting and amusing stories about marriages of people
in the past, the marriage disputes of sort of characters
that are known or people who lived in generations ago.
Or during the day you might have a sort of
(25:58):
work related conversation about a certain kind of you know,
hunting pursuit, or about a kind of gift exchange scenario
that's a part of the culture. And then during the
night instead you would have conversations about stories about people
who engaged in those activities in the past, or in
the distant past, or in the recent past. So in
(26:20):
the daytime you talk about the issues and problems that
you're currently facing. At nighttime, you hear stories of others
who faced similar issues, and those issues are put in
the context of some kind of big picture. The author
emphasizes the use of nighttime talk and conversation as a
way of creating, generating, and regulating ideas about the bigger
(26:44):
picture beyond the little things you do here and there
to get through the day. The big picture of sort
of what are people are and what life is and
so forth that arises from these nighttime conversations that are
largely storytelling and about storytelling. So the author writes, quote,
night talk plays an important role in evoking higher orders
(27:07):
of theory of mind via the imagination, conveying attributes of
people in broad networks or virtual communities, and transmitting the
big picture of cultural institutions that generate regularity of behavior, cooperation,
and trust at the regional level. And so I thought
this was so interesting because again I want to stress
(27:28):
the caveats I mentioned earlier. You can't know what all
people long ago did based on what one group of
people have more recently done. But this kind of observation
does show one way people respond to a certain type
of environment, the regime of technology and environmental surroundings of
meeting by firelight after the sun sets. And I think
(27:51):
it's interesting. It's interesting as a sort of precedent that
possibly the introduction of fire may have opened up new
dimensions of creativity and abstract thinking about about ourselves and
about what our societies are, this idea of sort of
big picture ideas about what life is, specifically by creating
(28:12):
this kind of imaginative storytelling space of economically unproductive time.
You know, it's like time where you can't you can't
really effectively get work done, but you're you're here, and
so you can think in terms of stories, to think
about the past and explore models of the world out loud.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
I don't, I don't. I know you probably you've probably
thought along similar lines. But I'm instantly reminded of the
lyrics to Rocky Erickson's if you have Ghosts in the Night,
I am real?
Speaker 2 (28:39):
You know, yeah, I did not think about that, but yeah, because.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
I mean, depending on how you slice it here, I mean,
you're talking about a time when one can become more real,
like your existence becomes you know, this is the kind
of thing that Marsati Iliati I think would have gotten into. Perhaps,
you know, the idea that when you start you in
yourself within the context of like the mythic realms and
(29:07):
stories that have been told, like the self can become
more actualized, can become more real. You know.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Well, yeah, in many ways. In one way, by gaining
perspectives on our individual problems by placing them within this
like larger context of stories about the past, or stories
about mythical figures and characters and and so forth who
may have faced similar issues and overcome them in some
way or another. It allows you to just kind of
like to see another side of many things, and to
(29:36):
the extent that this might be a more general pattern
of how humans respond to you know, light, where nighttime
is illuminated primarily with fire, it makes me wonder, like,
do we still kind of activate some of these ways
of thinking when we when we seek out fire in
any context, when we seek out fire as a light source,
even optionally or and also makes me think about and
(29:59):
the author actually does into this into the paper the
contrast with electrical lighting. So like, say you move out
of this kind of environment and into an environment where
in the nighttime you can have super bright lights on,
and it's like, well, might as well get some more
work done.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Yeah, Yeah, that's one of the gifts of the electronic
age is oh, well there's enough illumination to work all
the time. It's true enough you know, work on you know,
passion projects, certainly, but also work on chores, work on
your day work, and so forth, your homework.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Yeah. So I wonder if having all this productive time
and electric lights is maybe robbing people of some time
that they might otherwise really benefit from getting kind of
a storytelling and imaginative, big picture perspective on life.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah, I mean, and likewise, I can't help but think
about that other fire, the holy fire of television, you know,
because you know, we think about oh, you know, you
sort of what netflix and chill. I guess this is
the saying, right or is that that means watching television, right?
Or is that something else?
Speaker 2 (30:59):
It means something else?
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Okay, well, okay, one could interpret it as me just
watching television. Though. So let's just like the idea of Okay,
I need to chill in the evening. I just want
to watch some shows. I want to watch a movie,
or I want to settle down with a good book,
or I want to play a nice narrative video game
or whatever. You know. It's like, based on what we've
been discussing here, like this is the time to do it.
This is the time to at once lose yourself in
(31:22):
the narrative but also kind of expand yourself within that
narrative and allow yourself to sort of like leach on
to these mythic ideas of self and struggle and so forth.
But in a weird way, that too is kind of
like put it odds with the electrically illuminated world, where
we're like, well, I could be working instead of watching Netflix,
(31:46):
instead of reading you know, a book that is you know,
maybe has nothing to do with with your day job,
or isn't like you know, it's just kind of a
guilty pleasure read or what have you, or certainly in
whatever video game you're into. You know, you could be working, Yes,
but maybe all of this is still vitally important to
who you are and your ability to continue on through
(32:06):
the day. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Yeah, anyway, that's what I have on the qualitative difference
of firelight. And I don't know, I'm still having lots
of ideas about this, but I think I got to
stop there for now. But I know you had some
(32:28):
more on the toad Buried beneath the Hearthstone.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
Yeah. Yeah, you know, now that we've discussed the illumination
by firelight and then all the ways that it changes
the human experience, it's time to really get down and
discuss human and animal sacrifice. That's the way we like
to land things with our holiday episodes. So yeah, I
want you to think back first, first of what we
(32:53):
talked about in the initial episode regarding artifacts and symbols
that have been secreted away in homes and voids in
the walls and under the hearthstone and behind the fireplace,
you know, as a form of apotropaic magic, protective magic
wards against witchcraft, demons, fairies and ghosts. Secondly, I'll bring
(33:15):
you back to that cold open that exert from the
poem by Robert Graves and it's invocation of not only
a lightning touch tree, but an animal buried beneath the hearthstone.
In the case of the poem, it was a frog.
So we've discussed animal and human sacrifice before on the show,
and today is going to be more of the same.
Why Christmas, you might ask, Well, I would say, well,
(33:37):
what better time than Christmas? To quote the late great
Terry Pratchett in his holiday book The Hogfather. There was
a great TV adaptation of this as well, quote the
very oldest stories are sooner or later about blood. So
you find, of course examples of blood sacrifice in every
human culture. We've discussed this plenty of times before, and
(34:01):
one pervasive form of alleged right of sacrifice concerns the
sanctification of ground upon which something is built, or is
being built or is about to be finished in its construction.
And in some cases it has been alleged that these
were carried out while the victims yet breathed, though obviously
there's plenty of room for such builders' rights and construction
(34:23):
sacrifices to be distorted through the telling of history. So
you know, you can very well imagine a scenario where
an animal is sacrificed but not entombed alive, but then
it becomes entombed alive in the telling of the tale.
We can't really get into all the nuances right now,
but suffice to say, burying something in or under the
foundation of a building has long been a symbolic, superstitious,
(34:44):
or outright religious right, and it's one that still echoes
through modern practices, you know, such as laying relics, you know,
in such a place, or or even a time capsule.
The bearing of a time capsule is ultimately kind of
connected to these ideas as well, and we've actually touched
on in recent episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind
(35:07):
on some examples of animals or humans allegedly entombed within
or alongside constructions. This came up in our Haunted Railways episodes,
and it also came up in our discussion of the
Horned Lizard. Mmm. Oh yeah, I forget what building in
Texas the horned lizard in question was was walled up
(35:27):
in but then was unearthed and said to be still alive.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
I remember there was something funny about it, so I
had to look it up. It was the name they
called him, Old Rip.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Oh yeah, Old Rip.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
I guess named after Rip van Winkle. But yes, I
think the story was that, you know, you know that
this thing was really alive after decades of being buried
without food or water, because there's like a judge in Eastland,
Texas who said.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
So yeah, yeah. As I go back and listen to
that episode if you want to hear more on it.
But for our purposes here today, we're trying to stay
more hearth and hearth adjacent. So I want to refer
back to Brian Hoggard's excellent twenty nineteen book Magical House
Protection The Archaeology of counter witchcraft. We talked about witch
bottles and shoes, but two other items are also frequently
(36:15):
found in the voids of homes, according to Hoggard, and
those are dried cats and horse skulls. So let's talk
about dried cats first, and I will I will add
that my own cat has decided to set in my
lap just for this part as a few since that
it was going to be feline related. So along those lines,
no shame if you want to skip this part. I'm
(36:35):
a cat person, and I don't love the idea of
anyone hurting a cat. Obviously is okay, if they hurt us,
that's the deal we made with them. But yeah, I
am going to discuss dead cats in walls and floors
and alleged cases of animal sacrifice with cats. I'm not
going to get into gory details, but you know, fair enough, okay,
I'm strapped in Okay. So yeah, this was, at least
(36:58):
to some extent a thing. As Hagard discusses, there's a
case to be made that practices involving shoes, which are
discussed in the last example, are simply replacements for older
rights involving the sacrifice of animals. And you know, there
are examples of this and other cultures as well, where
one you know, may move away from one form of sacrifice,
(37:19):
but then you end up with proxies and replacements and
so forth. But yeah, the reality is dried up cat
carcasses are frequently found in old homes in Europe, parts
of North America, and even in Australia, so you know,
basically coming out of European, you know, very much deeped
in European traditions, but then flowing over into some colonial
(37:41):
areas as well. They're found in roof spaces, under floors,
between walls, and sometimes in voids that seem quite inaccessible.
Sometimes the cat has actually been posed we're talking with
like wire work, so that it looks like they are
actively hunting. And sometimes there is a rodent or two
(38:02):
or three added as well, perhaps in the cat's clutches
or about to be killed by the cat, a haunting tableau,
again hidden away in the wall or under the floor.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Now, I would imagine in some of these cases it
might be disputable whether a dried up cat hidden under
a floor was I mean, in some cases it might
be clear, like if there's no way it could have
gotten in, it's a closed off space, but I guess
in some cases there would be dispute about whether a
cat actually just got stuck and died there, or whether
it is a dried cat that was intentionally deposited.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
That's correct. Yeah, the idea of accidental enclosure, because if
you know cats, you know that they are little explorers.
They'll go places they're not supposed to go, and it's
not impossible that they could get stuck. And that's something
Haggard discusses here. So a lot of people all that
many of these bodies, these cat carcasses, these dried cats,
(38:55):
are due to cats becoming trapped, perhaps during construction or
otherwise crawling into such spaces and dying from some pre
existing injury or illness. You know, cats loves often will
crave that kind of seclusion for their final moments. Haggard does.
He entertains this idea, but he suggests that there are
(39:16):
probably fewer cases of accidental trappings. He argues that, Okay,
a cat crawling into a wall or a floor of
your house and then dying and decaying, that's obviously going
to create an odor. It's going to be hard to ignore.
But on the other hand, he argues that it's you know,
it's often difficult or impossible to tell if many of
these animals wound up due to happenstance or intentional human activity.
(39:39):
It's certainly on the table. Some of these dried cats
inevitably got there on their own. It basically comes into
comes down to a discussion of what are the most
likely situations for some of these cats, like what why
are they there? And Hoggard sites they nineteen fifty one
paper by Margaret M. Howard published in the journal Man.
(40:00):
I had to look at it look it up to
get more of the details about it, but it's titled
Dried Cats. And in this Howard lays out three different
theories as to why cats pop up in these situations.
And so these are the three. I'm going to go
and give you number three. Number three that she entertains
is accidental enclosure, which we just talked about. She acknowledges
(40:21):
that accidental enclosure is always a possible explanation for cases
that don't strongly suggest either of the aforementioned theories. The
aforementioned theories that I'm about to explain, So sorry getting
into a little backwards, but I mean, obviously the case
is if the cat has been wired up to look
like it's hunting rats, you know, all but taxidermied within
(40:41):
a void in the wall. That cat had some help.
That is not accidental enclosure. Right. So a cat that
is put there in the wall, under the floor, where
have you? How does it get there? Well, the first
theory is indeed a foundation sacrifice, and Howard highlights the
use of foundations sacrifices in global cultural practices and points
(41:03):
to human sacrifice as the obvious forerunner, with examples from
European history and lore such as Irish abbot Saint Colomba
was calling for a human to venture into the foundations
of the Church at Iona to offer themselves as a sacrifice,
as just one example of a right that originated in
practices to appease earth spirits or deities and the construction
(41:24):
of a building, and then gets passed down ultimately in
non human sacrificial echoes of the original practices. She also
points to roof tree sacrifices to forest gods that were
also made in olden days, with the blood flowing down
the sides of the roof, and she also highlights just
(41:46):
the general bad time that cats had through the Middle
Ages and into the Renaissance, they were often seen as
ill omens, as agents of the devil, which is familiars,
and all of this despite their positive reputation as Mouser's
and she suspects, but she suspects that broadly speaking, cases
of foundation sacrifice, these are actually occurring later in the
(42:11):
record than the next example, the next theory and that
I'm going to discuss, and it ultimately foundation sacrifices are
perhaps less probable an explanation compared to this one. And
this is the idea that they were vermin scares. So again,
think to that idea of a lifelike positioning of a
mummified cat scaring away rodents, perhaps with two or three
(42:36):
rodents in its clutches. The idea here is that it
kind of functions like a scarecrow. It's intended to scare
rodents away from the insides of your walls and the
you know, the insides of your house, from the crawl
space and what have you. Like, Let's actually stuff a cat,
put it in there, have some rodents there, because it's
going to be more effective if the dead cat is
(42:59):
in this grizzly tableau of dispatching rodents.
Speaker 2 (43:02):
Okay, so this is the if I only had a
brain version of the cat.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Yeah, essentially, And of course, this idea of vermin scares,
I think it probably goes without saying, but this is
not a non supernatural, non superstitious idea, Like obviously there's
a certain amount of superstition to this as well. There's
like a there's a power to this tableau that clearly
(43:27):
goes beyond the idea of well, when a rat looks
at this, they're going to leave the house. They're not
going to hang around here, because look at this horror show,
you know it's it clearly goes beyond that as well.
So that is that is the theory that Howard seemed
to favor. But I think you tend to encounter a
certain amount of drift on which of these three primary
(43:50):
explanations are going to be employed. And obviously there are
going to be cases where it's very clear that the
cat was put in there for some sort of a
ritual or and or vermin scare purpose.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
By the way, I mentioned Terry Pratchett earlier, and I
had actually already put the Terry Pratchett quote in the
notes before I've found Haggard referencing Terry Pratchett. In this
section of the book. He brings up this idea suggested
by Terry Pratchett that sacrifices, those foundation sacrifices would have
been made not only to deities but to the buildings themselves.
(44:24):
The idea that you know later on, you know, various
tragedies can befall a person in a building, and in
a sense it's like, that's the house's doing, that's the
building's doing, and so you want to appease not necessarily God's,
but the house itself, which is an interesting concept.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
I'm going to go ahead and pre pay my tax here.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
Yeah. Now, coming back to hearthstones specifically, Haggard does cite
an example from England's Blackton Hall. You can look up
Blackden Hall. There's a Wikipedia page on it and you
can see a picture of it. This was a building
built in the sixteenth entree. But he points out that
beneath the hearthstone, during some construction they found a quote
(45:06):
constructed chamber into which the live cat was placed and
it contained a dried cat.
Speaker 3 (45:12):
Ye.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
Now, I'm not entirely certain if indeed this would have
been a live cat. That was placed there, but in
anyway we end up with a dead, dried cat. So
fill in the blanks for yourself. Now, since we mentioned
thunder and toads in the Cold Open, I also want
to point out that Hoggard lists thunderstones as being an
item that is sometimes hidden away in homes. These are stones,
(45:35):
often actually arrowheads of thought to have been created by
lightning strikes and thus they would protect it was thought
they would protect a building as lightning never strikes. Twice.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
Yeah, we mentioned thunderstones a little bit in the series we.
Speaker 1 (45:51):
Did a couple weeks ago.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
Well it was when we were talking about lightning strikes
of trees that would be enclosed, but as sacred trees.
But yeah, the idea of thunderstones. Often these were, as
you said, arrowheads or like hand axes. They were tools
made by stone Age peoples that were later found and
then like, yeah, this must be the gods doing or
lightning did that.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
And also reminds me of our episodes on elf shot
as well memory serves. Sometimes arrowheads were interpreted as being
like clear evidence of elf shot.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yep, stone age arrowheads found and then people were like
that must be the elves.
Speaker 1 (46:27):
Yeah, Now as for toads. Yes, toads and frogs also
pop up in Hoggard's book. Sometimes they are inside of
witch bottles, or at least pieces of them are in
witch bottles, but also just in general so that they
were associated with magic and sometimes secreted away in parts
of a house as a ward against illness. There's an
(46:48):
example of like pinned frogs, I think, behind a wall.
And there's also a story he shares about how it
was said that they're like a witch might keep live
toads under the floorboard, and they'd be like a hole
for easy access.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
So I wonder if Graves actually had this practice in
mind when talking about the toad underneath im mirrored underneath
the hearthstone, or is that just a coincidence.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
I don't know, it seems I mean, Graves seems like
the kind of chap who would have been well read
on these matters.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
He was very interested in like Celtic paganism, Yeah, and
wrote stuff about it that, from what I understand, is
completely wrong and not useful at all in terms of
informational value, but is a pretty great read nonetheless.
Speaker 1 (47:35):
Yeah, So yeah, I imagine he was very much all
this was on his right high. All right, one final
idea concerning bits of animals buried under the hearthstone, and
(47:55):
that is the idea of horse skulls buried under the hearthstone.
This is something in augur It also talks about, and
this is another thing that I chatted with him about
in a past interview episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
He goes into more detail, but basically, horse skulls have
been found in the floors of homes throughout Europe, the
British Isles, and the United States, and he specifically cites
(48:16):
cases where they are found under the hearthstone itself. According
to Haggard, there are three primary theories regarding such horse
skulls and their placement. One is that they are the
remains of a foundation sacrifice, as we've been discussing, you know,
appease the deities, make the ground holy, or appease the
house itself. Another is that it's simply they're simply there
(48:38):
as a token of luck or you know, perhaps getting
into some of these areas of apertubeic magic. You know,
it's a spell, it's protecting us, and in this case especially,
you get into sort of things we've talked about concerning
the horse before on the show that the horse is
like this very close animal to human existence, but it
is often the case you take all the meat off
(48:59):
of it. But the horse skull looks really weird and
seems to be grinning, a demonic grin. So you can
imagine that serving as like a sort of Gorgonian head
to ward away evil. But another theory, a very popular theory,
is that these skulls served partially or primarily as an
acoustic enhancer. What so the idea here is that horse
(49:23):
skulls were placed in the floor in order to enhance
the acoustics of dancing, like on the dance hall or
threshing floors, both activities with positive and protective supernatural associations,
and in this the practice is reminiscent of the ceiling
of acoustic vases in the walls of medieval churches. He writes,
(49:45):
which were These were apparently based on some of the
writings of Vitruvius on architecture, and it was thought to
enhance choral music. So have these like sealed vases inside
the walls of a church?
Speaker 2 (49:56):
Bizarre? I've never heard of this.
Speaker 1 (49:58):
Yeah. Hoggard ultimately argues that he thinks that the horse
gulls were primarily used to ward off evil, and that
a particular Norfolk account suggests a form of foundation sacrifice.
And he also argues that that really, when you start
looking around at the records about the use of horse
(50:19):
skulls and the foundations and under the hearthstone and so forth,
if it were merely for acoustics, you would probably see
more written about it, because people would be upfront. They'd
be like, yeah, I'm dumping a bunch of horse heads
under my floorboards. It's about acoustics, man, Do you want
the sound to sound like trash in here? No?
Speaker 2 (50:38):
Like church is fine with that.
Speaker 1 (50:40):
Yeah, Like people would be upfront about it. But if
it was for a magical purpose, you know, then you're
going to be maybe more secretive about it because the
church isn't telling you to bury horse skulls under your
floor You're doing it because you have a plan B
to keep the evil away, and they might not approve
of it, but you know that it's absolutely necessary.
Speaker 2 (51:03):
Well, I would never harm an animal for this purpose,
but assuming I can source some already available carcasses, I've
really got decisions to make if I ever build my
own hearthstone. So do I go horse, Do I go cat?
Do I go toad?
Speaker 1 (51:16):
Well, you can get some horseheads, yeah, I mean there
are there are sources for that, right you can. You
can get them used. You don't have to make the
head yourself.
Speaker 2 (51:25):
Oh I can get you a horse head. By three
o'clock this afternoon, well, I think we're out of time
for today's episode. But you know, it's funny, we still
had some other stuff we wanted to talk about. I
don't know how exactly this will mesh with our schedule
because next week we got some some days off for
the holiday, But we definitely had more fireplace stuff we
wanted to talk about. So I don't know. Maybe we'll
(51:46):
come back to it yet.
Speaker 1 (51:47):
Yeah. I didn't even get to even get into my
whole thing about how thinking about evil spirits crawling out
of the fireplace or out of the hearth, and then
comparing the hearth to the television, of course, just brings
us right to the ring and the idea of this
evil wraith like entity crawling out of your televisions that like,
it makes perfect sense if you think of the television
(52:08):
as a hearth.
Speaker 2 (52:09):
You know, well, actually that would be a good static
ambient TV. So you've got you know, logs burning. You
could have Andy Warhol's Empire where you're just watching the
skyscraper through the night, or you could just watch that
well see if anything happens.
Speaker 1 (52:22):
Yeah, it's like a seven hour video, but sometimes something happens,
but you don't know when it's going to happen, or
if you have the cut where it happens. Oh boy,
all right, we're going to go and close it out there.
Then happy Holidays if you celebrate. We'll be back with
new episodes after next week, and we have some fun
vault episodes and Weird House rewinds to keep you happy
(52:46):
while we're out.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
Oh but we still have a new Weird House coming
out tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (52:50):
Oh yeah, of course, and it's a holiday episode. Gosh,
darn't it.
Speaker 2 (52:54):
So yeah, there's one end ever.
Speaker 1 (52:58):
All right. So yeah, just a reminder of stuff to
blow your mind. Primarily Science and Culture podcast with core
episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set
aside most serious concerns to just talk about weird films
on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 2 (53:10):
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
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (53:32):
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.
Hey, you, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb. Today is Saturday, and we have
for you today of alt episode The hearth Part two
of two, originally published twelve nineteen, twenty twenty four. This
is the continuation of our look at the importance of
the fireplace in the hearthstone in human culture, psychology, and myth.
So let us gather around its gentle warm glow.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Here here is certitude you swore below this lightning blasted tree,
where once it strikes, it strikes no more fool. And
you sang, Here is a three, And in this three
love lies unshaken as now, so must it always be.
You sang, with harsh notes, to awaken that ancient toad
(00:52):
who sits and mirrored within your hearthstone light forsaken. He
knows that limits long endured must open out in vanity,
that gates by bolts of gold secured must open out
in vanity.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick, and we are back
with part two in our series on the Fireplace and
the hearth that reading at the opening was an excerpt
from not the whole poem, but an excerpt from a
poem called Essay on Knowledge by the poet Robert Graves,
the author of I Claudius, or as some might call it, Iclavdivs.
(01:46):
And so this poem, we were a little confused because Rob,
you dug this up, and I'd never read it before,
but I really liked it. But we were confused because
we were finding multiple versions of the same poem. And
it turns out that's not an error. There actually are
multiple versions of this poem. So it's kind of like
with some of these Walt Whitman poems, where like, you know,
he published multiple drafts of the same work. That's going
(02:10):
on here. Graves published an early version of the poem
called Essay on Knowledge, and then a later one called Vanity.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Yeah, but it's I mean, it's really getting into some
stuff to blow your mind territory, because not only do
we have a hearthstone with an ancient toad beneath it,
we also have a lightning blasted tree.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, that's an unintended resonance there. But as I said,
I'd never read this before. I really love it now.
It seems to describe the poet's internal struggle between reason
and passion. So he's characterizing half of his soul as
a kind of unflappable scholar aspiring to aloof rationality, that
(02:49):
part of himself attached to the day side kingdom of
Christendom and the Enlightenment. And then the other part of
him hidden underneath this thonyan pagan dragon of weird emotion, emotion, lust,
and magic, I think are the themes of the suppressed part.
In fact, we didn't quote this part of the poem,
but in an earlier stanza he refers to it as
(03:11):
a dragon, and the balance of the poem seems to
suggest that as much as the rationality of civilization tries
to rule over the self, the dragon of lust and
emotion and passion will inevitably at some point be unleashed
from his tomb and reign again.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Yeah, basically, he's saying, I really want to be a
good Christian scholar, dude, but somebody buried this pagan psychomania
frog underneath my hearth and there's nothing I can do
about it.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
But anyway, the focal lines for us are interesting because
when I first read the poem. You know, I thought
that it was supposed to be the speaker's suppressed emotion
and carnal desire that were embodied as that ancient toad
who sits and mirrored within your hearthstone light forsaken. In
other words, I took the toad as another form of
(04:03):
the pagan dragon. However, I was reading an essay about
Graves called Philosophical Speculations, mock Beggar Hall, Welchman's Hose and
Poetic Unreason by a critic named Patrick Quinn. Not otherwise
familiar with this critic, but Quinn writes about this part
of the poem that quote the cries awaken only an
(04:23):
ancient toad symbol of the philosophic awareness of the Apollonian
and Dionysian duality in man's nature, referring to that division
between the sort of Apollonian reason and Dionysian passion that
is discussed in Plato's dialogue The Feedrus. But anyway, so
you get that line after that in the poem, where
(04:45):
Graves says he knows the limits long endured must open
out in vanity, and the he in that line seems
to be the toad. So if Quinn is correct, the
toad is not the dragon of passion and emotion, not
that Dionysian half of the struggle, but in dead the
sage who observes and describes the struggle to us, the
toad immurred beneath the hearth is Socrates. But anyway, this
(05:09):
line kind of reminds me of that thing. So like,
the toad is buried beneath the hearthstone, and it reminds
me of the thing we talked about in the previous
episode of the void buried amulets, where you know, by
symbolic law of contagion that now means Socrates is a
witch bottle full of urine.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Yeah, and later on in the episode we'll get back
to some things buried under the hearthstone and there will
be toads.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Now. To recap a bit about the previous episode, if
you haven't heard it, I would recommend going back and
checking that out first. But in part one of the series,
we talked about what interior fireplaces mean to us culturally
by looking at the characteristics of hearthfire simulations such as
the Assorted Fireplace for your Home style media offerings that
(05:54):
have become very popular as ambient streaming video in recent years,
including with we talked about some kind of burn barrel
for your home linked to some dystopian movie, and also
your witcher fireplace beloved in your house, Rob.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Yeah, And I don't know if I mentioned this one,
but there's a squid Game one. Now. Did I mention
that in the last episode.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
You mentioned just finding out about it?
Speaker 1 (06:15):
I think, yeah, yeah, I haven't watched it yet, but
I'm excited. This is the most exciting thing I know
about on Netflix. Is this squid Game fireplace? Yeah? I
may fire it up tonight.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
Nice. But also in the last episode, we talked briefly
about research into the prehistory of humans and our close
hominin relatives, how our relationship too and then control of
fire probably developed over the last couple of million years,
and how fire fundamentally changed so much about human life,
from nutrition to technology to our relationship with the climate
(06:49):
and with wildlife. After this, we talked about how a
modern domestic fireplace is usually constructed and how it works, or,
depending on your emphasis, how it doesn't work given it's
massive inefficiency as a heat source for the home. Estimates vary,
but something like eighty or ninety percent of the heat
put out by a standard wood fire is lost just
(07:10):
straight up the chimney and goes right out the flu
And depending on the design, a wood fireplace can sometimes
even make a house colder overall, even though it heats
up one room, you know, makes one room nice and toasty,
but freezes out the rest of the house. We discussed
the mechanics of that in Part one, and of course
all of this material energy analysis is useful to know,
(07:34):
but it's not going to make hearthfire any less beautiful
or attractive or magical to us.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Yeah, as well as deeply nostalgic and comforting. Yeah, we're
connecting with something very primal when we view a fireplace. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
And on that note, finally, in the last episode, we
talked about the idea of the fireplace and its a
connected ventilation system as a portal for magical entrances and
exits in many full beliefs, as a sort of for
one thing, I sort of transporter platform to the gods,
but beyond that, as a weak spot in the homes
(08:09):
defense against spells and witchcraft. And this led to interesting
examples of apotropaic magic associated with the hearth So thinking
of the fireplace as a gap in the armor that
had to be protected, perhaps by witch traps or other
magically potent items, maybe shoes. Yeah. Now, in the last episode,
(08:29):
one idea that I mentioned briefly and said I would
come back to today was about the idea of domestic
hearth fire and the nature of the light it provides.
When you think about it, firelight is different both in
quantity of light produced and in quality from daylight, and
(08:49):
that fact should not be overlooked when understanding the role
of fire in culture, especially if it is the primary
or the only source of artificial light, but even in
cases where you're just sort of optionally choosing to have
a room lit by a fire. And this brings me
to an interesting paper I came across about a less material,
(09:11):
less economic, but probably no less important way that control
of fire may have altered human culture all over the
world in prehistory. So this paper was by a scholar
named Polly Weissner, who is an anthropology professor at the
University of Utah, and it is called Imbers of Society
(09:32):
Firelight Talk among the Jutuan ce Bushmen, published in Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences twenty fourteen, and so
the author here, Weisner, acknowledges that there has been a
lot of research on how the human control of fire
may have affected lots of things about us, may have
(09:53):
affected our physical evolution and anatomy. This again is a
reference to the interesting but not completely proven cooking hypothesis,
which we talked about a bit in the last episode.
And there's no doubt that it has affected our technology
and the design of our social and living spaces. But
then Licener writes, quote, However, little is known about what
(10:15):
transpired when firelight extended the day, creating effective time for
social activities that did not conflict with productive time for
subsistence activities. And I thought this was so interesting. So
this sort of acknowledges that while fire can extend the
amount of time in the day in which you can
(10:38):
stay awake and stay awake and conduct some activities, the
light of a campfire is not sufficient to illuminate the
majority of subsistence activities, like the main economic duties of survival,
such as gathering and processing food. So when there's firelight,
there is enough light that it gives you time to
(11:00):
be awake and to see each other and to interact,
But not really good enough light to do much useful work.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Yeah, and again this is something that we so easily
take for granted in our so easily illuminated world. I know,
just for my own part, my immediate neighbors usually don't
have their backyard floodlights on during the night. But if
they do come on in the night, or they're left
on during the night by accident, I'll sometimes notice that.
(11:27):
You know, I think I could read a book here
in my bedroom at three in the morning, Like it's
entirely possible based on the ampient illumination provided by their floodlights.
And you know, that's just acc at that level of
accidental illumination was just not something you had for the
majority of human history.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Yeah, and that highlights how, of course, firelight is different
from daylight, but electrical light is different once again from firelight.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
So, how does the availability of this different kind of
time in the day change a culture or in the
author's words, did firelight quote simply give more time or
did it create a qualitatively different time and space? So
Weisner offers several potential observations and ideas in the introductory section.
(12:28):
One is that the sort of different climate or weather
conditions during the night time, which is during which activities
can be extended by firelight kind of leads to some
different social dynamics. For example, during hot seasons, air cools
after sunset, but if you can have firelight, you can
still see each other after it gets dark, and people
can release pent up energy, you know, maybe dancing or
(12:50):
interacting socially in various ways. Meanwhile, during cold seasons, of
course the fire is useful for warmth, and people will
tend to huddle near the fire warmth. It kind of
has this gathering effect like we talked about with fires
even inside the home. She also says that fireside gatherings
are sometimes, though not always, characterized by social mixing, so
(13:13):
mixing of the sexes, mixing of people of different age
groups who might spend much of the economically productive part
of the day segregated. And then another thing she said,
I thought this was very interesting quote. The moon and
Starlit skies awaken imagination of the supernatural as well as
a sense of vulnerability too. Malevolent spirits, predators and antagonists
(13:37):
countered by security in numbers. So the argument here is
that nighttime is a time of the imagination for possibilities,
both good and bad. It kind of expands that the
possibilities that you envision. You might think about the gods
or of powers beyond the normal, but you can also
think about dangers lying beyond the firelight in the dark.
(13:58):
So the light that keeps you up at night keeps
you aware and active during this imagination rich time of
the day. Another thing she says, I thought was very
interesting quote body language is dimmed by firelight, and awareness
of self and others is reduced. Facial expressions flickering with
(14:19):
the flames are either softened or, in the cases of
fear and anguish, accentuated. And I'm not sure I've ever
considered this before, but I think that's absolutely right. Different
light environments change how we look and thus change what
kinds of emotional expression we are sensitive to or that
(14:40):
we're aware of other people being sensitive to in us,
and I think this could be a reason that we
associate like a romantic evening with candle light as opposed
to with like really bright lights. I don't you know,
there could be multiple reasons for that, but I don't
have proof of this, but I think it's quite plausible
that fire based light decreases our ability to register body
(15:03):
language and facial expressions that would normally cause us social anxiety,
both because of our constant tracking of these signals in
others and because of our awareness and regulation of it
in ourselves, our awareness of being observed. In other words,
firelight could be a naturally socially disinhibiting environment. Does that
make sense?
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Yeah, it does, because there is a huge difference between
you know, of course, stark daylight anywhere anything from stark
daylight all the way towards dusk and absolute darkness. We're
talking about a world in between where the illumination is
not harsh, but is atmospheric and can certainly have this
(15:47):
sort of emotional vibe to it. Yeah, this is interesting.
It's almost like did sexy times exist? Didn't romance exist
before firelight? I mean it did that, you know in
the way that we're thinking about it. You know, candle
at dinner and so forth, or any romantic scene you've
(16:08):
ever seen in a motion picture, you know it probably
takes place in some sort of a lighting environment like this. Well.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Yeah, and obviously the romantic example is just one type
of scenario where we want to be socially disinhibited where
we want like our social anxieties and our fear of
being perceived to be reduced. I think that's also the
case more in just general social interactions, where we want
to be like, you know, bonding with people and trying
(16:36):
to build up good relationships and so forth.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Yeah, Now, on the other hand, here the author says
that overt expressions of fear and anguish could in some
cases be accentuated by firelight, and you can imagine that
being powerful as well for sort of capturing the capturing
of attention with storytelling or ritual.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
I can't help but think about the fact that a
central fire, be it in a fireplace or a campfire,
or even just a lantern that people are gathered around,
it becomes the focal point. It becomes the thing you
look at. And on one hand, yeah, you're not looking
necessarily looking directly in people's faces while you're talking to them.
It's kind of getting into that whole zone where like
(17:17):
sometimes you know, a parent and their child can have
a more intense conversation whilst the parent is driving a car,
you know, because it's like eyes forward. We can kind
of have this slightly disconnected but deep personal conversation. And
then likewise, if everybody staring at the fire, it's kind
of like, yeah, attention is on the flames, but we
(17:38):
can still have this close conversation but without looking each
other dead in the eyes, and then the flames can
also kind of become the almost kind of like the
primordial television set where the telling of tales and the
invocation of wild concepts and imagined realities.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
I think that's a really good observation. I didn't think
about the comparison to the car or to the TV,
but yes, totally. Now there's another interesting general observation Weisner
makes in the introductory section, which is quote, whereas time
structures interactions by day because of economic exigencies, by night,
social interactions structure time and often continue until relationships are right.
(18:22):
And she summarizes this by saying that people in hunter
gatherer societies, they tend to focus interactions on efficiency during
the daytime and effectiveness during the night time. So during
the day we need to get this problem resolved quickly
so we can move on with what we're doing, whereas
at night we can address this until it's fixed. And
(18:44):
so the author here says that her goal is to
investigate how firelit time is used to achieve three things,
and this is, in the author's words, the first thing
is a more accurate understanding of the thoughts and emotions
of others, particularly those not immediately present. Second, bonding within
and between groups, and third the generation, regulation and transmission
(19:07):
of cultural institutions. So, in order to investigate the role
of firelight and creating productive space for these goals, the
author analyzed and quantified the differences in daytime and then
firelit nighttime conversation topics among the jutwan people of Southern Africa.
(19:27):
And so she is working mainly from a sample of
one hundred and seventy four memorialized conversations that took place
in among a group of people in northern Botswana in
nineteen seventy four, and then this was supplemented with subsequent
visits and re recordings of some stories. And then also
(19:48):
the analysis of this direct sampling of Jutwanzi conversations and
activities was supplemented by a survey of written translated texts
on day night differences in conversation topics in other cultures.
Now the author is clear about the limitations of this
kind of research, because it's very important to remember when
(20:09):
you're looking at anthropology studies of this kind. Studying the
habits of one culture does not necessarily tell you how
another culture in some overlapping circumstances will function. So if
you see a behavior among one group of hunter gatherers today,
that does not give you certainty that all prehistoric hunter
gatherers did the same thing. In fact, you don't even
(20:31):
know that other hunter gatherer groups in the modern world
do the same thing. In fact, it doesn't even show
you that the exact same group of people would keep
doing the same thing at a different time. And in
the case of the Jutwan people, the paper notes that
for many of them, the structure of life has changed
significantly since the mid nineteen seventies, around the time when
these conversations were initially recorded, with many people settling more
(20:56):
into more permanent villages with a more mixed economy, some
traditional subsistence foraging, but also wage labor and selling crafts
and things like that. But still, this kind of cultural
observation does tell you something. It doesn't show you how
it always is, but it does show you with certainty
one way it can be. So it's important to understand
(21:18):
the strengths and the weaknesses of this kind of anthropological research.
Studying one culture doesn't prove universal patterns, but it does
establish a precedent something you can see. Okay, here's one
way it could work. So coming back to the question
the author was trying to figure out here, does firelight
simply give us more time or does it create a
different type of time and space? And in the specific
(21:42):
case of the people observed here, the author found some
strong differences in what people talked about during the day
versus after sunset when the illumination was based on fire.
So the author said that daytime conversations strongly centered around
economic matters, meaning things having to do with work, so
(22:03):
the acquisition of food through hunting and foraging, plans for
the acquisition of food, resource availability, conversations about technology. All
of this economic talk about work represented about thirty one
percent of the daytime talk that was sampled. Another thirty
four percent of the daytime conversation sampled was what the
(22:26):
author calls quote, verbal criticism, complaint, and conflict, and this
basically covers all talk that is designed to regulate social
relationships and hash out personal disputes, and a lot of
this seems to be based on maintaining egalitarian social relationships
and preventing other people from acquiring social dominance or sort
(22:50):
of unfair social advantage.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
So bickering is that I think of this thirty four percent.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Well, I wouldn't want to put like afrmative negative spin
on it, but in a way, yes, this is social
regulatory talk where people are addressing social problems that they
perceive or some kind of conflict between people and addressing
those addressing those issues and trying to resolve them, which
(23:19):
in this broad understanding, this is also a huge part
of conversation I would say among basically any people anywhere, Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Now during the daytime, another sixteen percent was devoted to jokes,
joking around. Another nine percent was devoted to land rights
discussion of the use of land, four percent was about
(23:40):
interactions with other ethnic groups, and six percent was made
up of storytelling. But the author describes how as the
day went on and families would gather for the evening
meal around the fire, the mood would tend to mellow out,
losing a lot of the harshness of daytime talk. After
the sun went down and in the darkness around the
(24:01):
fire major activities shifted and they were music, dance, and conversation.
So what was that conversation about. Well, during the firelit time,
she found at least among these people in this sample
it was radically different. Quote, night activities steer away from
tensions of the day to singing, dancing, religious ceremonies, and
(24:24):
enthralling stories, often about known people. And the difference is huge.
I've got a pie chart for you to look at, Rob,
and I remember during the daytime, like thirty one percent
of the talk was about economic issues, things related to work,
thirty four percent was the resolving of these social disputes,
only six percent was stories. During the night eighty one
(24:47):
percent of conversation with stories, the radical shift was shifting
almost overwhelmingly to story mode.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Yeah, that is considerable, especially seeing it on the pigraph here.
Eighty one percent it just consumes everything. I mean, you
got some small percentage still allotted to you know, shop
talk and bickering ben in some of these other areas,
and then four percent for myth.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Yeah. And so I think the myth there connects to
the idea of storytelling as well, because one of the
broad observations that the author makes here is that is
of the idea of the night as a time of bigger,
broader thinking, and she gives an example where like, Okay,
during the daytime, you might have people devoting a significant
amount of conversation to a personal dispute about marriage. They're
(25:36):
discussing a marital dispute, whereas during the night instead, you
would have interesting and amusing stories about marriages of people
in the past, the marriage disputes of sort of characters
that are known or people who lived in generations ago.
Or during the day you might have a sort of
(25:58):
work related conversation about a certain kind of you know,
hunting pursuit, or about a kind of gift exchange scenario
that's a part of the culture. And then during the
night instead you would have conversations about stories about people
who engaged in those activities in the past, or in
the distant past, or in the recent past. So in
(26:20):
the daytime you talk about the issues and problems that
you're currently facing. At nighttime, you hear stories of others
who faced similar issues, and those issues are put in
the context of some kind of big picture. The author
emphasizes the use of nighttime talk and conversation as a
way of creating, generating, and regulating ideas about the bigger
(26:44):
picture beyond the little things you do here and there
to get through the day. The big picture of sort
of what are people are and what life is and
so forth that arises from these nighttime conversations that are
largely storytelling and about storytelling. So the author writes, quote,
night talk plays an important role in evoking higher orders
(27:07):
of theory of mind via the imagination, conveying attributes of
people in broad networks or virtual communities, and transmitting the
big picture of cultural institutions that generate regularity of behavior, cooperation,
and trust at the regional level. And so I thought
this was so interesting because again I want to stress
(27:28):
the caveats I mentioned earlier. You can't know what all
people long ago did based on what one group of
people have more recently done. But this kind of observation
does show one way people respond to a certain type
of environment, the regime of technology and environmental surroundings of
meeting by firelight after the sun sets. And I think
(27:51):
it's interesting. It's interesting as a sort of precedent that
possibly the introduction of fire may have opened up new
dimensions of creativity and abstract thinking about about ourselves and
about what our societies are, this idea of sort of
big picture ideas about what life is, specifically by creating
(28:12):
this kind of imaginative storytelling space of economically unproductive time.
You know, it's like time where you can't you can't
really effectively get work done, but you're you're here, and
so you can think in terms of stories, to think
about the past and explore models of the world out loud.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
I don't, I don't. I know you probably you've probably
thought along similar lines. But I'm instantly reminded of the
lyrics to Rocky Erickson's if you have Ghosts in the Night,
I am real?
Speaker 2 (28:39):
You know, yeah, I did not think about that, but yeah, because.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
I mean, depending on how you slice it here, I mean,
you're talking about a time when one can become more real,
like your existence becomes you know, this is the kind
of thing that Marsati Iliati I think would have gotten into. Perhaps,
you know, the idea that when you start you in
yourself within the context of like the mythic realms and
(29:07):
stories that have been told, like the self can become
more actualized, can become more real. You know.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Well, yeah, in many ways. In one way, by gaining
perspectives on our individual problems by placing them within this
like larger context of stories about the past, or stories
about mythical figures and characters and and so forth who
may have faced similar issues and overcome them in some
way or another. It allows you to just kind of
like to see another side of many things, and to
(29:36):
the extent that this might be a more general pattern
of how humans respond to you know, light, where nighttime
is illuminated primarily with fire, it makes me wonder, like,
do we still kind of activate some of these ways
of thinking when we when we seek out fire in
any context, when we seek out fire as a light source,
even optionally or and also makes me think about and
(29:59):
the author actually does into this into the paper the
contrast with electrical lighting. So like, say you move out
of this kind of environment and into an environment where
in the nighttime you can have super bright lights on,
and it's like, well, might as well get some more
work done.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Yeah, Yeah, that's one of the gifts of the electronic
age is oh, well there's enough illumination to work all
the time. It's true enough you know, work on you know,
passion projects, certainly, but also work on chores, work on
your day work, and so forth, your homework.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Yeah. So I wonder if having all this productive time
and electric lights is maybe robbing people of some time
that they might otherwise really benefit from getting kind of
a storytelling and imaginative, big picture perspective on life.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah, I mean, and likewise, I can't help but think
about that other fire, the holy fire of television, you know,
because you know, we think about oh, you know, you
sort of what netflix and chill. I guess this is
the saying, right or is that that means watching television, right?
Or is that something else?
Speaker 2 (30:59):
It means something else?
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Okay, well, okay, one could interpret it as me just
watching television. Though. So let's just like the idea of Okay,
I need to chill in the evening. I just want
to watch some shows. I want to watch a movie,
or I want to settle down with a good book,
or I want to play a nice narrative video game
or whatever. You know. It's like, based on what we've
been discussing here, like this is the time to do it.
This is the time to at once lose yourself in
(31:22):
the narrative but also kind of expand yourself within that
narrative and allow yourself to sort of like leach on
to these mythic ideas of self and struggle and so forth.
But in a weird way, that too is kind of
like put it odds with the electrically illuminated world, where
we're like, well, I could be working instead of watching Netflix,
(31:46):
instead of reading you know, a book that is you know,
maybe has nothing to do with with your day job,
or isn't like you know, it's just kind of a
guilty pleasure read or what have you, or certainly in
whatever video game you're into. You know, you could be working, Yes,
but maybe all of this is still vitally important to
who you are and your ability to continue on through
(32:06):
the day. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Yeah, anyway, that's what I have on the qualitative difference
of firelight. And I don't know, I'm still having lots
of ideas about this, but I think I got to
stop there for now. But I know you had some
(32:28):
more on the toad Buried beneath the Hearthstone.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
Yeah. Yeah, you know, now that we've discussed the illumination
by firelight and then all the ways that it changes
the human experience, it's time to really get down and
discuss human and animal sacrifice. That's the way we like
to land things with our holiday episodes. So yeah, I
want you to think back first, first of what we
(32:53):
talked about in the initial episode regarding artifacts and symbols
that have been secreted away in homes and voids in
the walls and under the hearthstone and behind the fireplace,
you know, as a form of apotropaic magic, protective magic
wards against witchcraft, demons, fairies and ghosts. Secondly, I'll bring
(33:15):
you back to that cold open that exert from the
poem by Robert Graves and it's invocation of not only
a lightning touch tree, but an animal buried beneath the hearthstone.
In the case of the poem, it was a frog.
So we've discussed animal and human sacrifice before on the show,
and today is going to be more of the same.
Why Christmas, you might ask, Well, I would say, well,
(33:37):
what better time than Christmas? To quote the late great
Terry Pratchett in his holiday book The Hogfather. There was
a great TV adaptation of this as well, quote the
very oldest stories are sooner or later about blood. So
you find, of course examples of blood sacrifice in every
human culture. We've discussed this plenty of times before, and
(34:01):
one pervasive form of alleged right of sacrifice concerns the
sanctification of ground upon which something is built, or is
being built or is about to be finished in its construction.
And in some cases it has been alleged that these
were carried out while the victims yet breathed, though obviously
there's plenty of room for such builders' rights and construction
(34:23):
sacrifices to be distorted through the telling of history. So
you know, you can very well imagine a scenario where
an animal is sacrificed but not entombed alive, but then
it becomes entombed alive in the telling of the tale.
We can't really get into all the nuances right now,
but suffice to say, burying something in or under the
foundation of a building has long been a symbolic, superstitious,
(34:44):
or outright religious right, and it's one that still echoes
through modern practices, you know, such as laying relics, you know,
in such a place, or or even a time capsule.
The bearing of a time capsule is ultimately kind of
connected to these ideas as well, and we've actually touched
on in recent episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind
(35:07):
on some examples of animals or humans allegedly entombed within
or alongside constructions. This came up in our Haunted Railways episodes,
and it also came up in our discussion of the
Horned Lizard. Mmm. Oh yeah, I forget what building in
Texas the horned lizard in question was was walled up
(35:27):
in but then was unearthed and said to be still alive.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
I remember there was something funny about it, so I
had to look it up. It was the name they
called him, Old Rip.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Oh yeah, Old Rip.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
I guess named after Rip van Winkle. But yes, I
think the story was that, you know, you know that
this thing was really alive after decades of being buried
without food or water, because there's like a judge in Eastland,
Texas who said.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
So yeah, yeah. As I go back and listen to
that episode if you want to hear more on it.
But for our purposes here today, we're trying to stay
more hearth and hearth adjacent. So I want to refer
back to Brian Hoggard's excellent twenty nineteen book Magical House
Protection The Archaeology of counter witchcraft. We talked about witch
bottles and shoes, but two other items are also frequently
(36:15):
found in the voids of homes, according to Hoggard, and
those are dried cats and horse skulls. So let's talk
about dried cats first, and I will I will add
that my own cat has decided to set in my
lap just for this part as a few since that
it was going to be feline related. So along those lines,
no shame if you want to skip this part. I'm
(36:35):
a cat person, and I don't love the idea of
anyone hurting a cat. Obviously is okay, if they hurt us,
that's the deal we made with them. But yeah, I
am going to discuss dead cats in walls and floors
and alleged cases of animal sacrifice with cats. I'm not
going to get into gory details, but you know, fair enough, okay,
I'm strapped in Okay. So yeah, this was, at least
(36:58):
to some extent a thing. As Hagard discusses, there's a
case to be made that practices involving shoes, which are
discussed in the last example, are simply replacements for older
rights involving the sacrifice of animals. And you know, there
are examples of this and other cultures as well, where
one you know, may move away from one form of sacrifice,
(37:19):
but then you end up with proxies and replacements and
so forth. But yeah, the reality is dried up cat
carcasses are frequently found in old homes in Europe, parts
of North America, and even in Australia, so you know,
basically coming out of European, you know, very much deeped
in European traditions, but then flowing over into some colonial
(37:41):
areas as well. They're found in roof spaces, under floors,
between walls, and sometimes in voids that seem quite inaccessible.
Sometimes the cat has actually been posed we're talking with
like wire work, so that it looks like they are
actively hunting. And sometimes there is a rodent or two
(38:02):
or three added as well, perhaps in the cat's clutches
or about to be killed by the cat, a haunting tableau,
again hidden away in the wall or under the floor.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Now, I would imagine in some of these cases it
might be disputable whether a dried up cat hidden under
a floor was I mean, in some cases it might
be clear, like if there's no way it could have
gotten in, it's a closed off space, but I guess
in some cases there would be dispute about whether a
cat actually just got stuck and died there, or whether
it is a dried cat that was intentionally deposited.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
That's correct. Yeah, the idea of accidental enclosure, because if
you know cats, you know that they are little explorers.
They'll go places they're not supposed to go, and it's
not impossible that they could get stuck. And that's something
Haggard discusses here. So a lot of people all that
many of these bodies, these cat carcasses, these dried cats,
(38:55):
are due to cats becoming trapped, perhaps during construction or
otherwise crawling into such spaces and dying from some pre
existing injury or illness. You know, cats loves often will
crave that kind of seclusion for their final moments. Haggard does.
He entertains this idea, but he suggests that there are
(39:16):
probably fewer cases of accidental trappings. He argues that, Okay,
a cat crawling into a wall or a floor of
your house and then dying and decaying, that's obviously going
to create an odor. It's going to be hard to ignore.
But on the other hand, he argues that it's you know,
it's often difficult or impossible to tell if many of
these animals wound up due to happenstance or intentional human activity.
(39:39):
It's certainly on the table. Some of these dried cats
inevitably got there on their own. It basically comes into
comes down to a discussion of what are the most
likely situations for some of these cats, like what why
are they there? And Hoggard sites they nineteen fifty one
paper by Margaret M. Howard published in the journal Man.
(40:00):
I had to look at it look it up to
get more of the details about it, but it's titled
Dried Cats. And in this Howard lays out three different
theories as to why cats pop up in these situations.
And so these are the three. I'm going to go
and give you number three. Number three that she entertains
is accidental enclosure, which we just talked about. She acknowledges
(40:21):
that accidental enclosure is always a possible explanation for cases
that don't strongly suggest either of the aforementioned theories. The
aforementioned theories that I'm about to explain, So sorry getting
into a little backwards, but I mean, obviously the case
is if the cat has been wired up to look
like it's hunting rats, you know, all but taxidermied within
(40:41):
a void in the wall. That cat had some help.
That is not accidental enclosure. Right. So a cat that
is put there in the wall, under the floor, where
have you? How does it get there? Well, the first
theory is indeed a foundation sacrifice, and Howard highlights the
use of foundations sacrifices in global cultural practices and points
(41:03):
to human sacrifice as the obvious forerunner, with examples from
European history and lore such as Irish abbot Saint Colomba
was calling for a human to venture into the foundations
of the Church at Iona to offer themselves as a sacrifice,
as just one example of a right that originated in
practices to appease earth spirits or deities and the construction
(41:24):
of a building, and then gets passed down ultimately in
non human sacrificial echoes of the original practices. She also
points to roof tree sacrifices to forest gods that were
also made in olden days, with the blood flowing down
the sides of the roof, and she also highlights just
(41:46):
the general bad time that cats had through the Middle
Ages and into the Renaissance, they were often seen as
ill omens, as agents of the devil, which is familiars,
and all of this despite their positive reputation as Mouser's
and she suspects, but she suspects that broadly speaking, cases
of foundation sacrifice, these are actually occurring later in the
(42:11):
record than the next example, the next theory and that
I'm going to discuss, and it ultimately foundation sacrifices are
perhaps less probable an explanation compared to this one. And
this is the idea that they were vermin scares. So again,
think to that idea of a lifelike positioning of a
mummified cat scaring away rodents, perhaps with two or three
(42:36):
rodents in its clutches. The idea here is that it
kind of functions like a scarecrow. It's intended to scare
rodents away from the insides of your walls and the
you know, the insides of your house, from the crawl
space and what have you. Like, Let's actually stuff a cat,
put it in there, have some rodents there, because it's
going to be more effective if the dead cat is
(42:59):
in this grizzly tableau of dispatching rodents.
Speaker 2 (43:02):
Okay, so this is the if I only had a
brain version of the cat.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Yeah, essentially, And of course, this idea of vermin scares,
I think it probably goes without saying, but this is
not a non supernatural, non superstitious idea, Like obviously there's
a certain amount of superstition to this as well. There's
like a there's a power to this tableau that clearly
(43:27):
goes beyond the idea of well, when a rat looks
at this, they're going to leave the house. They're not
going to hang around here, because look at this horror show,
you know it's it clearly goes beyond that as well.
So that is that is the theory that Howard seemed
to favor. But I think you tend to encounter a
certain amount of drift on which of these three primary
(43:50):
explanations are going to be employed. And obviously there are
going to be cases where it's very clear that the
cat was put in there for some sort of a
ritual or and or vermin scare purpose.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
By the way, I mentioned Terry Pratchett earlier, and I
had actually already put the Terry Pratchett quote in the
notes before I've found Haggard referencing Terry Pratchett. In this
section of the book. He brings up this idea suggested
by Terry Pratchett that sacrifices, those foundation sacrifices would have
been made not only to deities but to the buildings themselves.
(44:24):
The idea that you know later on, you know, various
tragedies can befall a person in a building, and in
a sense it's like, that's the house's doing, that's the
building's doing, and so you want to appease not necessarily God's,
but the house itself, which is an interesting concept.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
I'm going to go ahead and pre pay my tax here.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
Yeah. Now, coming back to hearthstones specifically, Haggard does cite
an example from England's Blackton Hall. You can look up
Blackden Hall. There's a Wikipedia page on it and you
can see a picture of it. This was a building
built in the sixteenth entree. But he points out that
beneath the hearthstone, during some construction they found a quote
(45:06):
constructed chamber into which the live cat was placed and
it contained a dried cat.
Speaker 3 (45:12):
Ye.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
Now, I'm not entirely certain if indeed this would have
been a live cat. That was placed there, but in
anyway we end up with a dead, dried cat. So
fill in the blanks for yourself. Now, since we mentioned
thunder and toads in the Cold Open, I also want
to point out that Hoggard lists thunderstones as being an
item that is sometimes hidden away in homes. These are stones,
(45:35):
often actually arrowheads of thought to have been created by
lightning strikes and thus they would protect it was thought
they would protect a building as lightning never strikes. Twice.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
Yeah, we mentioned thunderstones a little bit in the series we.
Speaker 1 (45:51):
Did a couple weeks ago.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
Well it was when we were talking about lightning strikes
of trees that would be enclosed, but as sacred trees.
But yeah, the idea of thunderstones. Often these were, as
you said, arrowheads or like hand axes. They were tools
made by stone Age peoples that were later found and
then like, yeah, this must be the gods doing or
lightning did that.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
And also reminds me of our episodes on elf shot
as well memory serves. Sometimes arrowheads were interpreted as being
like clear evidence of elf shot.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yep, stone age arrowheads found and then people were like
that must be the elves.
Speaker 1 (46:27):
Yeah, Now as for toads. Yes, toads and frogs also
pop up in Hoggard's book. Sometimes they are inside of
witch bottles, or at least pieces of them are in
witch bottles, but also just in general so that they
were associated with magic and sometimes secreted away in parts
of a house as a ward against illness. There's an
(46:48):
example of like pinned frogs, I think, behind a wall.
And there's also a story he shares about how it
was said that they're like a witch might keep live
toads under the floorboard, and they'd be like a hole
for easy access.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
So I wonder if Graves actually had this practice in
mind when talking about the toad underneath im mirrored underneath
the hearthstone, or is that just a coincidence.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
I don't know, it seems I mean, Graves seems like
the kind of chap who would have been well read
on these matters.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
He was very interested in like Celtic paganism, Yeah, and
wrote stuff about it that, from what I understand, is
completely wrong and not useful at all in terms of
informational value, but is a pretty great read nonetheless.
Speaker 1 (47:35):
Yeah, So yeah, I imagine he was very much all
this was on his right high. All right, one final
idea concerning bits of animals buried under the hearthstone, and
(47:55):
that is the idea of horse skulls buried under the hearthstone.
This is something in augur It also talks about, and
this is another thing that I chatted with him about
in a past interview episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
He goes into more detail, but basically, horse skulls have
been found in the floors of homes throughout Europe, the
British Isles, and the United States, and he specifically cites
(48:16):
cases where they are found under the hearthstone itself. According
to Haggard, there are three primary theories regarding such horse
skulls and their placement. One is that they are the
remains of a foundation sacrifice, as we've been discussing, you know,
appease the deities, make the ground holy, or appease the
house itself. Another is that it's simply they're simply there
(48:38):
as a token of luck or you know, perhaps getting
into some of these areas of apertubeic magic. You know,
it's a spell, it's protecting us, and in this case especially,
you get into sort of things we've talked about concerning
the horse before on the show that the horse is
like this very close animal to human existence, but it
is often the case you take all the meat off
(48:59):
of it. But the horse skull looks really weird and
seems to be grinning, a demonic grin. So you can
imagine that serving as like a sort of Gorgonian head
to ward away evil. But another theory, a very popular theory,
is that these skulls served partially or primarily as an
acoustic enhancer. What so the idea here is that horse
(49:23):
skulls were placed in the floor in order to enhance
the acoustics of dancing, like on the dance hall or
threshing floors, both activities with positive and protective supernatural associations,
and in this the practice is reminiscent of the ceiling
of acoustic vases in the walls of medieval churches. He writes,
(49:45):
which were These were apparently based on some of the
writings of Vitruvius on architecture, and it was thought to
enhance choral music. So have these like sealed vases inside
the walls of a church?
Speaker 2 (49:56):
Bizarre? I've never heard of this.
Speaker 1 (49:58):
Yeah. Hoggard ultimately argues that he thinks that the horse
gulls were primarily used to ward off evil, and that
a particular Norfolk account suggests a form of foundation sacrifice.
And he also argues that that really, when you start
looking around at the records about the use of horse
(50:19):
skulls and the foundations and under the hearthstone and so forth,
if it were merely for acoustics, you would probably see
more written about it, because people would be upfront. They'd
be like, yeah, I'm dumping a bunch of horse heads
under my floorboards. It's about acoustics, man, Do you want
the sound to sound like trash in here? No?
Speaker 2 (50:38):
Like church is fine with that.
Speaker 1 (50:40):
Yeah, Like people would be upfront about it. But if
it was for a magical purpose, you know, then you're
going to be maybe more secretive about it because the
church isn't telling you to bury horse skulls under your
floor You're doing it because you have a plan B
to keep the evil away, and they might not approve
of it, but you know that it's absolutely necessary.
Speaker 2 (51:03):
Well, I would never harm an animal for this purpose,
but assuming I can source some already available carcasses, I've
really got decisions to make if I ever build my
own hearthstone. So do I go horse, Do I go cat?
Do I go toad?
Speaker 1 (51:16):
Well, you can get some horseheads, yeah, I mean there
are there are sources for that, right you can. You
can get them used. You don't have to make the
head yourself.
Speaker 2 (51:25):
Oh I can get you a horse head. By three
o'clock this afternoon, well, I think we're out of time
for today's episode. But you know, it's funny, we still
had some other stuff we wanted to talk about. I
don't know how exactly this will mesh with our schedule
because next week we got some some days off for
the holiday, But we definitely had more fireplace stuff we
wanted to talk about. So I don't know. Maybe we'll
(51:46):
come back to it yet.
Speaker 1 (51:47):
Yeah. I didn't even get to even get into my
whole thing about how thinking about evil spirits crawling out
of the fireplace or out of the hearth, and then
comparing the hearth to the television, of course, just brings
us right to the ring and the idea of this
evil wraith like entity crawling out of your televisions that like,
it makes perfect sense if you think of the television
(52:08):
as a hearth.
Speaker 2 (52:09):
You know, well, actually that would be a good static
ambient TV. So you've got you know, logs burning. You
could have Andy Warhol's Empire where you're just watching the
skyscraper through the night, or you could just watch that
well see if anything happens.
Speaker 1 (52:22):
Yeah, it's like a seven hour video, but sometimes something happens,
but you don't know when it's going to happen, or
if you have the cut where it happens. Oh boy,
all right, we're going to go and close it out there.
Then happy Holidays if you celebrate. We'll be back with
new episodes after next week, and we have some fun
vault episodes and Weird House rewinds to keep you happy
(52:46):
while we're out.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
Oh but we still have a new Weird House coming
out tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (52:50):
Oh yeah, of course, and it's a holiday episode. Gosh,
darn't it.
Speaker 2 (52:54):
So yeah, there's one end ever.
Speaker 1 (52:58):
All right. So yeah, just a reminder of stuff to
blow your mind. Primarily Science and Culture podcast with core
episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set
aside most serious concerns to just talk about weird films
on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 2 (53:10):
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
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (53:32):
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.
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