It Lurks in the Mine Shaft, Part 2

In this sinister episode from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss different folkloric and legendary monsters tied to mine shafts and mining...

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Land.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back to part two
of our Halloween season series called it Lurks in the
Mind Shaft, about creatures and spirits said to haunt the mines.
In part one, we talked about red caps, blue caps,
and the Cornish mining spirit known as the Knocker or
Tommy Knocker, which was originally the subject of labor lore

(00:38):
in Southwest England, but was later imported through immigrant oral
tradition to the minds of the Western United States. And
we're back today to talk about more so, rob In
the last episode we talked a bit about the creature
from German folklore known as the Cobald. Would you mind
if we do a little bit more on this one

(00:58):
because I found an interesting geological history connection.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Yeah, yeah, this will be fun to get into. The Cobald,
of course, is also well known to Dungeons and Dragons
players as the low level dragon kin creature that is
generally encountered at low levels and in beginner campaigns, but
has apparently become increasingly popular as a character choice for players.
Apparently there's a whole very popular meme among younger D

(01:26):
and D faults where you would have three Cobalts in
a trench coat pretending to be a person and like
people make you know, there's all sorts of fan art
of this. You can find three D printed miniatures and
so forth.

Speaker 3 (01:40):
Okay, so you said a low level dragon form. This
is a draconic reptilian type creature, but also humanoid, kind
of a long snout with scales and.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
A tail exactly. Yeah, basically goblinoid creatures with dragon features
ch iconic features. Yeah. So not a lot to do
with what we're going to get into here, except that they,
you know, typically live underground.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
Yeah, underground small stature would have been common with the
real folklore. But the creature from actual historical folklore doesn't
have any reptilian features that I read about. That seems
to be a pure D and D invention. So this
originally came up in the context of talking about the
Tommy Knockers, because there is a lot of overlap between
these two creatures. So I'm going to go more lightly

(02:23):
on the things that are essentially the same between them.
The cobalt seems to have been well known in German
sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and is usually
described as a type of goblin or fairy like creature,
looking like a little old man. I believe Georgia's Agricola,
who we mentioned last time, says that they are about

(02:43):
twenty seven inches tall. Other times they're said to be
two feet tall, somewhere in that range. They are sometimes
described as wearing a conical hat and pointy shoes, or
they can be dressed like a human miner in mining
clothes and mining gear. Sometimes friendly, but often delicious and deceitful.
The I don't know the moral alignment of the cobalt

(03:05):
from what I was reading, seems to have the same
range as the Tommy knocker, but it with a little
more emphasis on the meaner side of the scale. Okay,
the cobalt is most notably associated with mines, but it's
not limited only to minds. It can also inhabit households
on the surface, so it can be a household trickster,

(03:27):
like many of these other spirits we've talked about. In
either place, it would often play tricks, even nasty tricks,
on people. So in your house. It might throw sawdust
all over the floor, or kick ashes around up of
the fireplace, or drop sand in your milk. In the mine,
it could lead you astray, making you think you had

(03:47):
discovered a great vein of silver, only for you to
waste so many hours working on it and later realize
you had been fooled. The element cobalt actually gets its
name from the impish form of the cobalt, because early
modern miners believed the presence of cobalt or near a
vein of silver was problematic in some way. It made

(04:09):
the silver harder to get out, or damage the purity
of the silver in some way, So cobalt was a
demonic or mischievous mineral. One interesting thing about the cobalt
is that I found references to a passage where Martin Luther,
the father of the Protestant Reformation, talks about the cobalt

(04:30):
as a type of devil or minion of satan. I
came across this reference in a book called Early Modern
Supernatural The Dark Side of European Culture fourteen hundred to
seventeen hundred. This is a book from twenty twelve by
an author named Jane P. Davidson, who is a professor
of art history at University of Nevaderino. Davidson is in

(04:51):
the middle of writing about the blurring between categories of
supernatural beings and interesting that that's something that came up
in part one one of this series, that sometimes you
have these creatures where it's not quite clear are they
considered a fairy type creature, something other than human, or
a ghost of a dead human. Sometimes there is a

(05:14):
crossing of boundaries between these categories. A creature can be
considered one or the other, or maybe both at the
same time. In the case of the cobalt, some early
modern authors treated them as a type of fairy or gnome.
Others treated them as ghosts, having qualities similar to a
Poultergeist noisy ghost moving things around and making a rucus.

(05:37):
But also they were sometimes considered to have the qualities
of a demon or an imp, and some authors embraced
a fully Christian theological framing and simply said they were
devils of Satan. So Martin Luther is an example of
the latter. In a passage from his table talk, he says,
in translation of course quote, the devil vexes and harasses

(06:02):
the workmen and the mines. He makes them think they
have found new veins of silver, which when they have
labored and labored, turn out to be more illusions. Even
in open day on the surface of the earth, he
causes people to think they see a treasure before them,
which vanishes when they would pick it up. I have
never had any success in the minds, but such was

(06:23):
God's will, and I am content. And I thought this
was interesting because it recasts the mining imp as one
associated not so much with the mine as a place,
but with the mental space of searching for treasure. You know,

(06:43):
he says, even in open day on the surface of
the earth, if your mind is in prospector mode, if
you are looking for treasures and riches, searching for little
signs of ways to profit and get rich, this devil
will find you and take advantage of your greed or
your hope. So this made me think, is it worth

(07:04):
thinking about the difference between devils with a theological framing
and goblins or fairy folk with a more secular folklore framing.
The latter seems to me to be more part of
the geography or the environment, sort of a part of
the natural world, but a magical part of the natural world,

(07:25):
whereas the former the devil is part of a very
human focused cosmology. It's hard to think of a devil
as something leading a life of its own, living a
parallel existence in a hidden world where you might get
in trouble for spying on it going about its business.
You know, like these stories we have the Knockers, where

(07:46):
people are peeking in on the knockers working and they
get caught, and that's no good for them. That it's
not really going to happen with a devil because devils
have no business. They're not going about their own business.
Their business is exclined lusively the tempting and tormenting of
human souls.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
Yeah, to use a very late example, you can look
at C. S. Lewis's The screw Tape Letters, in which, Yeah,
the demons are expressly concerned with us. They have no
other business, like, this is their entire life, this is
their identity.

Speaker 3 (08:18):
I don't know if I've ever thought about it in
quite these terms before, but this strikes me as a
potent distinction between different types of creatures or imps a
person could believe they were crossing paths with You have
this more fairy folk tradition where these creatures are just
part of the world and you might by chance cross
paths with them, and you know, things, lots of things

(08:42):
could happen from that accidental meeting, But the meeting is
an accident. The meeting with a devil is never an accident.
The devil is looking for you, you know, and if you
meet it, it is because you have done something wrong
and you have allowed it the opportunity to get you,
which is something it's all trying to do.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
Hmmm. Yeah, this is fascinating to think about because obviously,
if you experience an hallucination or see something in the
natural world that you don't have context for, you could
go with either explanation. But then you can also think
about like the purpose these different supernatural motifs serve. And
in the unique environment of a mind like a deep

(09:24):
rock mind, you have both the interaction with the natural world,
and therefore you can see yourself leaning more towards these
embodiments of nature, nature spirits, nature guardians, nature deities. But
then you are also in a highly social environment, you know,
working with people, trusting people, having weird feelings about how

(09:48):
your foreman is treating you, and so forth. And all
of that seems like maybe a little richer area for
the devils to do their work.

Speaker 3 (09:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
And I guess the other thing to stress, you know,
talking about how different people have characterized these things. I
guess this is always the problem when you have you know,
at some later point an academic or a best eerie
rider wants to categorize everything something that existed in an
oral tradition and may you know, differ from mind to mine,
from storyteller to storyteller, and even you know, situation to situation.

Speaker 3 (10:21):
I think you can get a lot of things exactly
like that, where something is much more in the fairy
folk mold, in how it is discussed among the people,
that's its oral tradition mode of being. And then when
it's time for someone to come along and catalog that
belief in a book, it gets very much recategorized in
the theological framing.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
Yeah, and we want to know what is its challenge rating?

Speaker 3 (10:45):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (10:45):
Is it a fairy or is it a devil? You
have to tell me faye or you know, infernal fay
or fiend? Which is it?

Speaker 3 (10:51):
Well, I've got another little alley to go down if
you want to play some more fair fiend games. Would
you like to look at some creatures of Scandinavian mining folklore,
Let's do it, okay? So for this I turned to
a book called Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend by a
couple of scholars named Rymond Kevitaland and Henning K. Simsdorf.

(11:12):
This book is from the University of Minnesota Press, nineteen
eighty eight, and the authors note that while mining legends
are prolific throughout continental Europe, they're actually a little bit
less common, though still present in Scandinavia. So they were
able to collect five different varieties of mining legend here

(11:33):
based on accounts from different times in places from Sweden
and Norway. It seems mostly collected in the first half
of the twentieth century. So in contrast to the most
common subterranean mining spirit found elsewhere in Europe, which as
we discussed last time, was usually this elf like being
shaped like a tiny old man, the creature that haunts

(11:56):
a mine in Norway or Sweden is most often described
as a solitary female being, often a fine lady. There
are a few examples here that go by different names.
You have the Groovra, the ruler of the mine, the
groove Froken, the Lady of the Mine, or the Soulvmora,

(12:17):
the Silver Mother. Almost exactly like the Tommy Knocker and
other spirits we've discussed, the spectral Lady of the Mind
has a dual nature. In some tellings, she is benign
and even helpful, leading the miner to loads of ore
or protecting him from danger. But in other situations she

(12:37):
is a jealous guardian of the riches of the earth,
and she can cause disaster and strike the greedy miner dead.
In addition to the Lady of the Mine and the
Silver Mother, there are also stories in Scandinavian legend that
depict mythological beings as miners themselves. For example, mythical dwarves

(12:58):
are often depicted as in dustus miners and smiths, and
they could carry dangerous and powerful magic of their own.
So the authors include a few specific tales. First, I'll
mention a couple having to do with a lone female
mining spirit like the Silver Mother. One story from Middle
Sweden involves silver miners in a place called Holifores Forest.

(13:22):
The story goes when the mine first opened up, the
miners worked for a while without finding much, but then
one day they heard the voice of a lady calling
out to them. It was a woman's voice, and she said,
keep to the left, otherwise you disturb the foot of
my bed. These miners were, you know, they paid heed
to the voice. They followed her instructions, keeping to the

(13:42):
left of the pit, and what do you know, they
struck silver. So turned out well for them. Who knows
what would have happened if they had done otherwise, Maybe
they would have angered the silver mother. Another story collected
from near the same place in the Swedish province of
Vostmanland call. This one was called the Lady of the
mine warned them. It goes like this quote. In Clack Mountain,

(14:06):
there was a mining pit called Sunshine Mountain. My father
heard from my grandfather who worked there in his time,
that one day the miners had emerged from the mine
and were eating their noon meal in a shack. Suddenly
a fine lady appeared and said, go down into the shaft,
pick up your gear, and go home. The older men
did as she told them, but the younger fellows just

(14:28):
laughed and stayed. The mine collapsed and they were all
buried under the rocks. It was the lady of the mine,
who had warned them whenever she showed herself, a miner
would lose his life. Interesting detail here. The old men
listen and are saved, the young men ignore her and die.
Are the old men simply more cautious or is it

(14:52):
that the old men have respect for the legend and
thus are saved.

Speaker 2 (14:57):
Ah, you know, I think it's probably both. I mean,
the youth of today they just don't listen to to
the Silver Mother like like like the old codgers know
how to do.

Speaker 3 (15:05):
What did the young men think the Silver Mother was?
Was she just like, oh, that's just a crazy, random
lady coming out of the mine.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
I don't know. Maybe you know what it probably is,
you know, getting back to some of what we were
discussing in the last episode and discussing in this one.
It probably comes back to that gut understanding of the mine.
It sounds, it's in some cases it smells, you know,
being able to sort of feel the mine, and the
young people they just don't have the experience and or

(15:34):
they're more brash, whereas the old men like they've been
down there in the mine long enough. I mean, they
didn't they didn't become old miners by not listening to
the mine.

Speaker 3 (15:44):
As George Orwell reports, they can feel the weight upon them.
Yeah yeah, okay, So we have the Silver Mother leading
you to or and the Silver Mother warning you of danger.
And then finally they also include a short remembrance from
a place called the Nasa Mine, near the border between
Norway and Sweden, and that goes like this. Nils Olsen

(16:05):
from then from northern Rana tells how his father once
went over to look at the minds of Nasa. As
it turned out, he stayed away for quite a long time,
and when he finally returned, the people were just getting
ready to come after him. They had feared that the
Silver Mother in Nasa had taken him. So here the
Silver Mother herself seems to be the threat, a malicious

(16:29):
figure who in fact in the story does not harm anyone,
but the people assumed could seize you on a solitary
survey and make you disappear forever. But fortunately the father
and the story was spare. Okay. Now a couple more

(16:52):
Scandinavian tales in the other tradition, not the Lady of
the mines or the Silver Mother, but the spirits and
beings who are minor themselves, or at least make some
claim over the ore in the mine. One of them
is a story collected from Norway concerning a place called
Klett Mountain, a mountain with silver hidden inside it. The

(17:13):
main character of the story is a ferryman who works
a boat taking people across a nearby sound. One day,
two men come over and hire him to take them
across the sound, and one of them is carrying a
load of silver so big it almost sinks the boat.
The ferryman asks them where they got all the silver.
They tell him it's from Clett Mountain. He asks them

(17:34):
if there is more silver still in the mountain. They say, yes,
there's a bunch more there, and they tell him the
secret of where to find it. But when the boat
reaches the other shore, the two miners disembark, and as
soon as they leave the boat, they vanish into thin air.
I don't know if the implication is that they were
actually dwarves, but there was some kind of spectral miner here,

(17:56):
you know, they knew where to get the ore, and
they gave him the secret, and then they're gone.

Speaker 2 (18:00):
And here well outside of the mine too. Yeah, that's interesting.
That's like if you were to encounter spectral dwarves on
Wall Street. Yeah, yeah, trading in like silver stocks or something.
And then like where did they go? Oh they were dwarves.

Speaker 3 (18:15):
The taxi driver, yeah yeah, that drops them off and
they disappear.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (18:19):
And then finally, here's one last story, also collected from
vast Minland in Sweden in nineteen oh two. I'm just
going to read this one directly. This one is called
he lost his eyesight quote. According to legend, the copper
deposits at Leunsnarberg were discovered at the beginning of the
seventeenth century by a man named Martin Finn. One day

(18:41):
he went fishing and slept by his fire. He was
awakened by the sound of hammering and pounding in the mountain.
A rough voice shouted the first, who are treasure? A
spies will lose both eyes. When he pushed aside the
coals to quench the fire, the rock was laid bare
and there glistened the copper. But as soon as the

(19:03):
exploitation of the find began, Martin Finn went blind. So
that story is interesting because there's some ambiguity, at least
to me, in the way it's being told. I think, though,
I am not sure that this should be interpreted as
another example of supernatural miners, or at least supernatural claimants
to the discovery of the ore there. But it could

(19:26):
also be like supernatural guardians or protectors of the mind,
more like the Silver Mother. I guess it depends on
how you interpret the sound of the hammering and pounding
that woke Martin up. Was that the sound of the
beings that cursed him pounding the rock trying to reach
the ore first? In other words, is the speaker of
the curse a competing spectral miner, or was that hammering

(19:50):
the sound of human mind workers or explorers who were
there at the same time as Martin. If it's the latter,
I think you could interpret this more like the malevolent
version of the Silver Mother, like I am the spiritual
owner or guardian of this mine, and I will curse
and punish the first person who finds the ore I
have hidden there. But it reads to me more like

(20:11):
these are you know, the dwarfs or whatever other spectral beings.
They want the ore, They want to get there first.
You know that I saw it first, and if you
lay your eyes on it, I will punish.

Speaker 2 (20:22):
You supernatural competition.

Speaker 3 (20:24):
Yeah, so I was trying to think, are there any
consistent moral themes in this Scandinavian mining lore like we
saw in the early Cornish legends of the Tommy Knockers,
Because remember in the Cornish examples, there were moral punishments,
and what was punished was disrespect of the knockers themselves,

(20:45):
excessive curiosity like spying on the spirits, or excessive greed
and ambition trying to take more than your fair share
or trying to swindle the spirits. By contrast, I tried
to actually separate out what is being punished in the
three Scandinavian examples here that feature punishment or feature the
threat of punishment. In one, it seems to be simply

(21:08):
looking at the minds, like trespassing or possibly spying. That
could be a curiosity punishment, but it could also just
be a jealous guardianship of the mind. In another, it
seems to be not listening to the warning of the
Silver Mother. This might actually not be seen as a
punishment but merely a consequence. And in the third, it

(21:29):
is accidentally laying eyes on or that the spirits either
guard or seek to extract themselves, and this one to
me doesn't feel like a moral punishment. It seems just random.
So I think there's really no evidence here of punishment
for greed or excessive ambition. The magical violence feels more capricious,

(21:50):
random and purely dangerous.

Speaker 2 (21:52):
M yeah, as in keeping with a natural force.

Speaker 3 (21:56):
Yeah yeah. And I was also thinking about the silver
Does the fact that it is a regal, somber, solitary
woman change anything, comparing it to the idea of a
cadre of mischievous, diminutive, old gray bearded men. Does that
change how the legend is received and told by the

(22:18):
people who believe in it. And I would note also
that the curses here are more acute than we saw
in the Cornish legends, because if you remember the original
Cornish Tommy Knockers, they would curse you if you crossed them,
but that curse tended to be bad luck or bad
luck in mining. If the Silver Mother or any of
these Scandinavian beings curse you, it seems more likely to

(22:42):
mean violent death or being struck blind, something really acute.
And that's more like the later American evolution of the
Tommy Knockers, which tended to give omens about death and disaster.

Speaker 2 (22:55):
Yeah, this is interesting to think about. They're more likely
to be like little Gromlin type creatures or or little
men if they are just cursing your luck. But then
if we're looking at it as a like a death
dealer or or death itself, then you know, what does
it mean that it is gendered and given this kind

(23:15):
of you know, almost the stature of a goddess. Yeah,
I've I've been thinking about that recently. You know, we
see you know, feminine versions of death in various cultures,
in pop culture as well, and like what does that mean? Yeah,
valkyries are a great example. What does that mean? You know,
looking I guess considering like the the heteronormative male view

(23:39):
on sexuality, is it is it an eroticism of death
or is it something more maternal? I mean is it
all these things? You know? And then what what service
does it do? Does it kind of lessen the blow
uh or the fear of an approaching death? You know?
I want to change the subject. I want to come
back to something that I was thinking very early on

(24:01):
in this and that is that J. R. R. Tolkienah
for the student of European myth of course, nicely explored
and reused many of these concepts with his depictions of
the dwarves of Kaza Doom later known as Moria who digged,
who were digging too greedily and too deep in the
relentless mining for the precious metal mythrill, and of course,

(24:22):
you know, unlocked their own doom and released the ball
Rock upon them.

Speaker 3 (24:27):
Yeah, that's a great connection, and it seems to have
a lot in common with some of these tellings, though
I would note that Tolkien actually makes the legend much
more epic and grim. You know, the warning of awaking
this demon of the ancient world, something that is more
dangerous than anything you've ever seen, does seem it seems

(24:48):
like it goes much further beyond any of these actual
old bits of folklore where the worst thing that's going
to happen is like there's a being that causes a
cave in or seizes you in the mine, and it's
just sort of death. I mean, it's not it doesn't
have this epic monstrous form like.

Speaker 2 (25:04):
The ball Rog. Yeah, the Ballrog is like the destroyer
or ultimately a civilization like it did, you know, it's
that level of threat to the dwarves that unlock it.
All right, Well, it makes sense that next we're going
to be diving a bit into German legend here, and
like all these things that you know, all these concepts
have some degree of interconnectedness, and you know, Scandinavian and

(25:25):
Norse mythology has strong connections going into German mythology and folklore.
So I want to talk about one that was new
to me that I found very exciting, and that is
der berg Munch, which is translated as the mountain monk
or even the mine monk. More often than not, I
found this entity described as the mine monk amazing.

Speaker 3 (25:47):
Let's let's hear about this monk.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
So one of the main sources I turned to for
this was the work of the brothers grim In. There
were a couple of volumes that they put out titled
German Legend in eighteen sixteen, in eighteen eighteen, and I
was working from a nineteen eighty one translation by Donald Ward.
And yeah, so we have the mind monk here. Sometimes

(26:09):
he's given a proper name, meister Hammerling or something like
Master of Hammering, you know, other times mountain monk, mind monk,
and so forth. And concerning the translation here I found
I have to stress this is something that's not directly
about the mind Monk, but is talking about a German

(26:31):
poem that references the mind Monk, and how we might
translate that into English. This was from nineteen twenty two.
Leonard Dhalty commented on the translation of the name meister
Hammerling in the poetry of nineteenth century German poet Henrik Heine,
and this is from notes on Translating Heina from the

(26:51):
Texas Review. Basically, the author here notes that there are
a few different possible meanings tied up in the name.
So first of all, is it is on its own
like a hateful gnome or cobalt who hammers underground. We've
been talking about this throughout these episodes. And is therefore
like a trickster, a devil, or even a clown. You know,

(27:11):
there's a sins, there's a there's a wide spectrum by
which this entity might manifest. The hammer also in German,
takes on the connotation of bully. Apparently that's something to
consider as well when when a hammer or the Hammerling
is mentioned. And the poem in question that the author

(27:34):
is commenting on here in concerns a passage where the
poet is pleading for Master Hammerling to build a bridge
for the poet, like, you know, like hey, master of Hammering,
build me a bridge. And sometimes in English that gets
transmitted into Hangman, apparently because I guess English readers aren't

(27:54):
going to necessarily pick up on the mind monk thing,
and you need some sort of ominous press like that
you were calling to, like hey, hey Hangman, or even
like hey, Death, build me a bridge. So I found
that interesting and perhaps speaks to the intimidating nature of
the monk in question, because descriptions of this entity sound

(28:15):
rather intimidating. We're not talking about a little person here.
We're talking about a gigantic figure in a dark robe,
a giant. And the Grim's right that he frequently appears
in several different minds that he mentions. One is the
Gara Bunden Alps, but especially on Fridays, that's when you

(28:37):
will find him in the in the shafts. He's generally
seen there emptying a bucket of ore into another bucket
and then back again. So once more we have this
idea of the supernatural entity in the mind creating a racket,
messing with the tools and equipment, but not getting any
work done.

Speaker 3 (28:57):
Okay, we've seen this before.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
Yeah, so in this case, you know, basically, the Grims
tell a few different stories, and the Grimms explained that
the mine owner in this particular case was well aware
of this particular spirit and made sure everyone left him alone, Like,
don't object to what he's doing. It seems pointless, but
just leave him alone and he won't harness. And so
he kept to himself, didn't cause any trouble. But then,

(29:20):
of course, one day a reckless miner, probably a young miner,
scolded and cursed at the mine monk, and this did
not go well for him. They explained that the giant
hooded figure lunged at this reckless I assume youth. They
pick him up, It picks him up and then shakes
him so severely that his face turns inside out. Like

(29:42):
it doesn't kill him, but for the rest of his
life he walks around with an inside out face.

Speaker 3 (29:47):
Just one curse of that monk and your inside out.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
Yeah, now, how are we supposed to interpret this? I
couldn't find a lot of scholarly breakdown on this. This
is not a grim story that's translated a lot apparently,
but you know, we can easily imagine this as being
a description of a very real disfigurement from a mining accident.
It could very well just be a magical, you know,
inversion of the face, or it could be something related

(30:12):
to trauma, you know, some sort of like a look
of fear locked into the facial features or something. All Right,
So there are more mind monk stories, though they share
some accounts of the annamine. They say a dozen men
were working in the silver rich Rosenkrantz shaft when a
mine monk appeared, or the mine monk appeared and breathed

(30:34):
on them, causing them all to drop dead, and the
shaft was abandoned thereafter.

Speaker 3 (30:39):
Oh and bad breath.

Speaker 2 (30:42):
Yeah. And this is very interesting too because it speaks
to the very real dangers of mind gases, which are
in mind terminology called damps. This comes from the German
a damph, which means vapor. So we have I was
not familiar with this, but we have various types of
damps that can occur in a mine environment. Again, in

(31:04):
the language and terminology of miners, you have fire damp.
This is a gas that occurs naturally in coal seams.
It's apparently nearly always methane, highly flammable and explosive at
higher concentrations. Then we have white damp or carbon monoxide,
particularly toxic and perhaps a reasonable fit for the breath
of the mine bunk because the correct or the wrong concentrations,

(31:28):
it can cause death within a few minutes, and this
is a risk, particularly in coal mines. We have black damp.
This is a situation where the atmosphere won't allow you
to light a lamp, usually because of an excess of
carbon dioxide and nitrogen in the air. Then there's stink
damp hydrogen sulfide, so you have the smell, the rotten

(31:49):
egg smell. And then there's after damp, and this is
a mixture of gases found in a mine after an
explosion or a fire.

Speaker 3 (31:57):
So a lot of different gas hazards occurring in a mine.

Speaker 2 (32:00):
Yeah, yeah, but I like this idea of presenting one
of these damps, again, probably white damp, as like the
killing breath weapon of the mind monk. Yeah, though in
this case, I don't, you know, it doesn't sound like
they did anything to particularly offend the mind monk except
maybe went into a shaft, went into a part of
the mountain they were not supposed to venture into.

Speaker 3 (32:21):
Yeah, so it could be that this story in particular
has less of a moralistic bent and is instead an
attempt to magically explain a natural phenomenon exactly.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
Yeah. And in most of these stories, I'll get to
one where the mind Monk talks, But most of the
time it seems like the mind Monk doesn't speak. You
just encounter it. It's fearsome to look at, and you know,
hope that he just continues to pour oar from one
bucket to another and doesn't breathe on you. Now, let's
see a few other tails of the mind Monk. They
mentioned that in the Ana Mine, the mine Monk appeared

(32:57):
as well, in the shape of a steed with a
long neck and terrifying eye, so an alternate form here.
And in the Saint George Mine it said that he
appeared in his standard form, you know, the tall, black
robed giant grabbed a young miner, lifted him up into
a silver rich shaft, and then sat him back down

(33:19):
so violently that he injured all of the youth's limbs.
And in the Harz Mountains, the mind Monk was said
to punish a foreman who was cruel to his workers
by positioning himself above the entrance to a particular shaft,
and when the foreman emerged beneath him, he caught the
man's head between his legs and crushed his skull. Whoa, Okay, yeah,

(33:40):
so now we have a little bit of the like
the moral even you could maybe say devil work of
the entity here because he's punishing a cruel foreman. Yeah
all right. But the best story, and this is one
where the mine monk speaks, is the tale they tell
of the mind monk of the Harz Mountains, which I
found some nice similarities between this and the Japanese ghost

(34:03):
story concerning the Yuki. Oh no, the Lady of the Snow.

Speaker 3 (34:06):
Is this the story of the woman whose secret is
kept for many years but then when the secret is revealed.

Speaker 2 (34:12):
Okay, yeah, and she's at once like a natural force,
but also she takes pity on mortals, but you know
it does ask for that secrecy in return.

Speaker 3 (34:21):
Okay, let's hear it.

Speaker 2 (34:22):
Okay. So in this story, we have a pair of miners.
They work as a team, and they descended into their
shaft one day and then uh oh, they realized that
they didn't have enough lamp oil to complete their shift.
They'd have to go all the way back home to
get more lamp oil, and of course that was just
going to tick off the mine foreman in the process.
So it seemed like a real losing situation. Yeah, but

(34:43):
then what occurs, Well, they see a light appearing down
the shaft, deeper in the shaft, you know, coming from
a you know, deeper into the mountain, and blow and behold,
approaching them is a towering figure in a black robe
carrying a miner's lamp. It is the mine monk, and
the two miners are of course terrified here, but the
mine monk actually speaks to them and tells them not

(35:05):
to be afraid. Quote, do not fear. I shall do
you no harm. But rather good, All right, what's he
gonna do? Well, he pours some of his lamp oil
into their lamps, and then he grabs their tools and
begins to work, doing a week's worth of work in
a single hour. It seems like a good deal. Yeah, yeah,

(35:25):
I'm gonna read another passage here. Tell no one that
you have seen me here, he says, and then he
slammed his fist against the shaft wall, which shattered, revealing
a long vein sparkling with pure gold and silver. So
once more, you know, a spirit of the mountain revealing
a rich vein of treasure inside the wall.

Speaker 3 (35:46):
It's like boone, boone, boone. He gives them the oil,
but in fact they didn't even necessarily need the oil,
because he did all the work for them for a
whole week's worth, and then is like, here as a bonus,
here's another vein.

Speaker 2 (35:57):
Yeah, they really hit the jackpot with this sky. Yeah.
Sometimes the mind Monk breathes toxic death on you. Other
times he just gives you gift after unearned gift.

Speaker 1 (36:07):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (36:07):
But this one. It gets a little weird here because
at this point the gold and silver is so blinding,
so dazzling, that the two mortal miners have to look away,
and when they look back, the mind Monk and the
vein of riches are gone. The grims here add that
if these miners had been quicker, they might have heaved
a pick into the shaft that had been opened or

(36:28):
the vein that had been opened, but it was too late,
so they didn't get the full riches and the mine
that the mine monk had revealed to them. But the
oil in their lanterns proved inexhaustible and it gave them.
This of course, gave them a huge advantage over other miners.
Other miners their lamps can run dry and then they
have to go out and get more lamp oil. But
these two, their lamps have been blessed by the mine

(36:49):
Monk's lamp oil, and they'll just burn, you know, without end.

Speaker 3 (36:53):
That seems even better than the vein, right, I mean,
you can use that the rest of your life.

Speaker 2 (36:57):
Yeah, But the mine Monk did say, hell, no one
that you have seen me here. And one Saturday night,
what do they do. They're out drinking with their friends
and the tavern and they tell the whole story. They
end up breaking their word to the mine Monk, and
the magical oil in their lanterns promptly gives out. So,
I mean it's terms in terms of bad things that
could happen after encountering the mine Monk, this isn't too bad.

(37:20):
They just basically lost the boon that the entity had
given them. And it's similar to what occurs in the
Lady of the Snow. You know she in most tellings anyway,
she does not kill the man who has finally revealed
what happened on that fateful night during the snowstorm. But

(37:40):
she does leave him, and I believe takes the children
that she has had with him as well.

Speaker 3 (37:46):
But it's not in this story like the mine monk
breathes on them.

Speaker 2 (37:49):
Now they're told, yeah, they told, so they lost the
magical lamp oil that he had given. So I like
how we see in this tale of the mind monk.
Several were these various tales in the mind monks, several

(38:10):
recurring themes of mind shaft entities. We got that pointless
labor that is sometimes beneficial, a power not to be offended,
revelation of riches, deadly gas lights in the dark, and
also sudden violent action not unlike a cave in or
various other related events. There are various sorts of rapid

(38:31):
high release energy phenomena inside of a mine that could
stand in for, you know, one of these encounters where
again like the mind monk is picking you up and
shaking you, or even like picking you up and putting
you in, sticking you into a shaft and then dropping
you back down again. You have things like mind trimmers
and rock burds, seismic events, methane, cold dust explosions, and
ground falls. As for the lights, you know, you have

(38:53):
sensory deprivation that might result in visual hallucinations in a
mining environment, but then also methane or cold dust explosions,
open flame ignitions, and even electrical arcing and lightning strikes
in mines. This is apparently a significant risk for some
mining operations, which you know, might seem counterintuitive to a

(39:13):
lot of folks that you know, don't know anything about mining.
You would think, oh, you're underground, you're safe. Not necessarily
the case. And then mythologically, I can only assume there
is at least some connection here between again the towering
mine monks and tales of stone giants such as you
know the ootin of Norse myth which included yes, like

(39:33):
storm giants and so forth, but also and ice giants,
but also mountain giants divided between mountain dwellers and cliff giants.
A number of Norse mythological concepts find their way into
German traditions, and this includes the figure of Rubsol or
the Lord of the Mountains, and there are various versions
of him and other European traditions as well. Joe I

(39:56):
included a painting of this character rubes All, the Lord
of the Mountains here. This is from eighteen fifty nine
by Morse von Schvend. I believe I'd seen this before
in a book from my childhood. Maybe it was one
of those fantastic legends from time life books, a series

(40:16):
on giants. But you know, we see like a monk
type figure with a jutting beard just walking through the
forest here.

Speaker 3 (40:23):
Looks like he's wearing flip flops.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
Yeah, yeah, some sort of old timey crocs.

Speaker 3 (40:28):
Yeah yeah, I like it.

Speaker 2 (40:31):
So I have two more entities I want to discuss here,
and there were international entities which I think roalms things
out rather nicely. The first I want to bring up
is Lteo of Bolivia. The author Luke Fodder explored this
one in a twenty nineteen Atlas Obscure article that has
some great photographs with it as well. So basically, the

(40:52):
practices associated with this entity occur in the silver mines
Osirio Rico in the Bolivian Andes and here otherwise Catholic
Christian local miners leave cigarettes at the base of some
apparently six hundred shrines to alto, which I believe translates
to the uncle, and this is a goatish, devil looking

(41:12):
figure with horns like red skin, a goateee, and generally
a jutting erection. They'll soak his impish likeness in alcohol
lah blah. Blood is apparently offered once a year as well.
There are some different accounts of that. And then you
also will make offerings of cigarettes or even light a
cigarette in his lips, and the degree to which the

(41:32):
cigarette burns down might be a sign of good luck.

Speaker 3 (41:35):
From what I understand, lt O. Much like many of
these other figures we've been talking about, is is a
being of both blessings and curses that you know you
can you can do well by appeasing him, or you
could incur wrath and danger by not appeasing him.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
Yeah, definitely, definitely getting into this idea of its standing
as a kind of nature entity. So, as Fodder explains
in the art, there seem to be several forces at
work with the genesis of this practice. So under Spanish
rule colonial rule, the mountain was mined under just really
brutal conditions, he writes, quote between four and eight million

(42:13):
Kachuan Indians and enslaved Africans died mining the mountain, and
among other names, the mountain was known as the Mountain
that Eats men. So brutal conditions here, and you had
this influx too of Christianity and its devil likeicnography, melding
of course with local folk beliefs and those of enslaved
people from Africa, again in a dangerous environment. I think

(42:36):
that's one of the things that's so captivating about any
of these mining tales is that we have folkloric elements
being developed and nurtured, like right at the edge of
life and death. I mean, that's often the case, I
guess in life anyway, actual life and death scenarios, perceived
life and death scenarios. But in the mind everything feels

(42:56):
perhaps heightened, right, It's like it's a pressure for folkloric belief.

Speaker 3 (43:02):
Well, yeah, I guess there is a temptation sometimes to
think of the creativity that drives the emergence of new
pieces of folklore, creatures and stories as coming from an
environment of ease and idleness. When do you make up stories?
Maybe when when you're chilling, when you've got nothing else
to do, not much to worry about, but no in fact,

(43:22):
in reality, people are often making up the most interesting
in creative stories. Folklore is developing under really harsh conditions,
under times when people are facing threats of death or
when they've got, you know, a lot to worry about.

Speaker 2 (43:36):
Yeah, I mean sometimes it's the case. Yeah, you may,
you may make up the story or elements the story
when in your leisure time when things are nice. But
when things are bad, when maybe when the Silver Mother
is not too far off in the distance, that's when
you find out what the story means.

Speaker 1 (43:52):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (43:52):
So, I don't know, it's interesting to think about here.
But coming back to lt O here, Yeah, there apparently
seems to be a strong sense that in order to
take from the mountain, to take silver from the mountain,
you have to give back to the spirit of the mountain.
And that's what these offerings to lt O or about.
That it's ultimately a force that might bring good luck
or terrible doom, depending on how you've honored and respected him.

(44:15):
And so, you know, clearly influenced by some visual ideas
concerning the Christian devil, but he seems very rooted in
indigenous ideas of earth deities and the entities Phallus would
seem to speak to this as well. You know that
he's an entity that is associated with sometimes doom, but
also life, But where does that life spring from? It

(44:37):
would seem to be more elemental in nature.

Speaker 3 (44:39):
Yeah, there's another mining related entity from the and Dan
region known as Muki that has some characteristics in common
with lto here. But the Muki in the Indian minds
is a being that sometimes, like many of the other
stories we've talked about, sometimes can lead people to riches
or sometimes can lead them to danger and curses.

Speaker 2 (45:02):
All right, I have one more I want to mention here,
and this is one that I was initially reading about
in Carol Rose's book of Fairies and Leprechauns. She brings
up an example of a spirit that is also tied
to both virility, again coming back to the phallus of Altio,
but is also associated with mines, and that is the

(45:24):
trickster spirit essue of the Yoruba people of Nigeria. So
apparently he according to de Rose, I'm going to caveat
this in a minute. This entity is portrayed as both
a trickster and a protector, is the patron of both
mothers and childbirth. And miners in Nigerian coal fields, and
he's depicted as having a large lock of plaited hair

(45:46):
sculpted like a penis. Now elsewhere I've seen this described
as more of a huge backward curving horn or like
a horned head dress, and the god, while usually regarded
as male, also sometimes either takes a fine form or
features feminine features such as breasts. I've also read Assue
described as the anger of the gods, and as one

(46:08):
might expect, religions from Afar, such as Christianity, have often
attempted to recast Essue as more of a devil figure,
though clearly he seems to have a more nuanced presence,
sometimes described as a god of trickery but also a
god of surprise, and I found that really interesting. But
again a god that, according to these sources, was both

(46:29):
associated with mining but also childbirth and surprise.

Speaker 3 (46:35):
Yeah, so interesting that figures associated from mining with from
all these different parts of the world and different cultures,
have a few things seemingly in common. One is the
bivalent nature that they can represent either dangers or boons
and blessings, that they might be helpful or they might

(46:55):
be harmful, and also that they are so often associated
with tricks and miss pranks. Yeah, that seems like that
doesn't seem like I mean, obviously I don't have I'm
not a miner, so I have no experience in the mind.
But you I think the lay person who has no
experience would not assume a natural connection between the environment

(47:15):
of a mine and the concept of tricks, trickster behavior
or mischief or pranks. But that does seem to be
very common.

Speaker 2 (47:24):
Yeah. Yeah, And as I mentioned in the last episode,
I'm sure we have some listeners out there who are
miners or have been in the mining business before. If
that's the case, I would love to hear from anyone
out there if you have particular insight on the just
the headspace of of miners. If not some of these
traditions or remnants of these traditions that may may or

(47:45):
may not still exist today. I mean some of them
definitely do. But I again, I would just like to
hear from from actual folks out there who have real
life experience in the.

Speaker 3 (47:56):
Minds contact at Stuff to blow your mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
All right, where we're gonna go ahead and close off
this shaft for today, But we'd love to hear from
everyone out there, if you have some favorite mind spirits
that we didn't cover in this episode, also right in
with that, or anything from like the wide world of
you know, pop culture, magic things inspired. You know, we
mentioned dungeons and dragons a bit, but you know, any

(48:22):
other fantasy spin on any of these concepts that we
would love to hear from you on that as well.
Just to remind it that Stuff to Blow Your Mind
is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes
on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do a short form episode
on Wednesdays, and on Fridays we set aside most serious
concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird
House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (48:41):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us as always at contact at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (49:04):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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