January 8, 2026 • 56 mins
In this series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss anthropomorphic personifications of death in human culture. What do they mean? Where do they come from? Why and how are they gendered? Find out…
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two
in our series on Personifications of Death.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
We were thinking about calling these episodes faces of Death,
but then we realized that it might be confusing title lies. Ah.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Yeah, was that like when you were in I think
it was when I was in high school. I remember
people watching those things.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yes, yeah, I remember seeing them in video stores. Never
watched them myself, but it always felt like like the
ultimate video, the ultimate forbidden video on the shelf.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Were those a mix of real footage of executions and
then fake footage pretending to be of real executions.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
That's my understanding. Yeah, that it's like and not just
actual death. Especially they got further into the series. I
think it also got into stuff like, you know, just
footage from around the world, maybe like footage of big
snakes things like that. But yeah, I never saw them
and I've never sought them out.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Yeah, like, oh, here's a snake that ada tortoise and
then ruptured or something. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, anyway, we're
back with part two of the series on Personifications of Death.
We should do a brief refresher on what we talked
about in the last episode. So last time we mostly
talked about common types of death figures. So one distinction
(01:35):
we talked about was between the moment of death figure
like the grim reaper, the kind we usually think of
as appearing to someone while they're still living, either to
cause death or to signal that death is near. And
we thought about that versus a different type of character
known as the psychopomp. This is from the Greek for
(01:57):
soul guide or soul conductor. This is the figure who
shepherd's the soul of the recently dead into the afterlife.
The analogy we use for the distinction between these two
was that the reaper is like the bouncer who tells
you you're cut off you have to leave the bar,
and the psychopomp is the cab driver who takes you home. Yeah.
(02:18):
We also explored an influential framework from the psychology of death,
tracing back to a book called the Psychology of Death
from nineteen seventy two by Robert Castenbaum and Ruth Eisenberg.
In this framework, the authors used surveys to study how
US participants were most likely to personify death, and these
(02:39):
authors ended up arguing that most of the personifications fell
into one of four general categories. You had a grim, terrifying,
and threatening figure that they called the macabre. There was
a soothing, welcoming character that they called the gentle comforter.
There was an attractive and exciting but dangerous trickster figure
(03:01):
they called the gay deceiver. And note that the use
of gay there was not intended as any reference to
sexual orientation. It's just the older usage, meaning like jolly
or carefree. And finally, there was a cold, impersonal entity
they called the automaton. And then after this we got
into some general findings about how these different personifications were
(03:22):
usually expressed, how that's changed over time, and we ended
up talking about some more recent experiments which found, among
other things, in one small study conducted on American university students,
subjects were relatively more likely to imagine death as a
comforter type figure when they thought about their own death
as opposed to other people's deaths. And hard to know
(03:46):
exactly what to make of that, but I kind of
interpret this as a suggestion that maybe we're more likely
to personify death as a coping strategy than as like
a raw expression of unresolved fears the way you might think,
you know, we would get to an image like the
grim macob figure. And then we also talked about a
(04:07):
study linking these different archetypes to particular circumstances of death.
So it's like some of these are more surprising than
others not very surprising, or the findings like you're more
likely to think about the macab grim reaper type figure
with the skeletal, you know, sadistic kind of visage if
you imagine a murder taking place outside the home, whereas
(04:29):
the deceiver figure the trickster was more likely to be
associated with a heart attack. That's kind of interesting. And
of course, one line running through the discussion last time
was that most of the psychology research we cited was
conducted on Americans, and the evidence is pretty clear that
the personification of death is highly culturally variable. It's not
(04:50):
like there's one type of death character that's hardwired into
the brain of the human animal. Though I think it
is interesting that despite the huge very in how death
is personified within and across cultures, in some way, almost
every culture does it.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Yeah, yeah, and I think that is indeed, one of
the fascinating things about this is that there's something going
on in every human mind and in every human culture.
You know, Crunching this idea of death and these personifications
of death are one way of dealing with it. And
you know, so this is where we dig into, like
(05:29):
what does it mean? Why are we building these things?
And what do all the pieces mean? So I want
to follow up on some of the concepts that we
discussed in the last episode. One of the books that
I dug into for these episodes is Psyche and Death
by Edgar Herzog. I believe this was a nineteen eighty
three publication originally published by the C. J. Young Institute
(05:52):
in Zurich, and I believe the book the text of
the book is based on some like older presentations that
Herzog gave, so naturally, all of this is steeped in
union concepts. But I thought it was all really fascinating
and it really puts an interesting spin on some of
what we discussed last time. Okay, So Herzog goes through
(06:12):
some of the common animal forms of death personified in
different cultures and certainly in ancient times. So he singles
out the wool for dog, the bird, the snake, and
the horse, and I believe this gets this gets especially
it makes me think of episodes we've recorded in the past.
We've talked about the horse skull and the potent symbol
(06:34):
of the horse skull and how it becomes this totem
that goes beyond like the remnant of an important domesticated animal.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
I don't really recall what we concluded, but didn't we
talk about the idea that for some reason, the horse
skull seems grimmer than other skulls.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does that. Yeah. But anyway, he
refers to all of these different personifications of death in
this case and beast form as death demons. That's this
sort of catch all phrase, so I'll use that as well,
and certainly when I read some quotes from him here.
But then he goes on to discuss the death demon
(07:11):
and the human form, and he argues, first of all
that the various animal forms of the death demon were
quote the externalization of inner images by means of which
the human psyche expresses its reaction to the experience of death. Okay,
that's basically that makes sense. That falls in mind what
we've been talking about, and he also stresses that they
(07:31):
were still at the same time the quote inner crystallization
of numinous experience into an image, and the human form,
which is only explicitly developed later, is secretly contained within them.
So this is understandable as well. While death might be
conceptualized as some sort of a great beast, say a
giant bird, we're still going to anthropomorphize that great beast.
(07:54):
But then Herzog argues that in time the shift occurs
where the death demon becomes implicitly human in form or
mostly human in form. And I'm going to read this
quote here that I thought was really telling, and there
might have been an I don't know if there was
an error in translation, but I'm going to throw an
iz in there that isn't there in the actual text
that to my understanding clarifies things. But if I messed
(08:18):
it up, my apologies to mister herzag quote. It is
not until the death demon becomes explicitly anthropomorphized that the
full richness of the incomprehensible event that death is begins
to emerge, even though it can never be wholly contained
in an image. When it is given human form, the
(08:40):
nature of the death demon is enriched and deepened and
related to the totality of the universe, the individual, and
life in a succession of new ways. So he points
out that by making death more human in form again
anthropomorphized death, death made to a being, we also firmly
(09:02):
allow death then to do things that humans do, such
as use tools and weapons, which you know, coming back
to the arguably and many you know, certainly in the
Western culture, the most sort of famous version is the
grim Reaper. We've referred to this already multiple times. This
is the version of death that will show up in
your like Far Side cartoons and so forth, or on
(09:25):
just you know, probably SpongeBob as well. You know, anywhere
you have death step in, we take it for granted,
oh he has a scythe there. But the human technology
used by a death figure a death demon allows us
to employ technological metaphors laid in with additional meanings.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Okay, so one that comes to mind for me immediately
would be the technological metaphor of harvesting with a scythe there.
That is something that we use a tool to do.
But you can think of it now that death is out,
collecting is out harve people.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Yeah, yeah, like the scythe really does a lot to
inform how we're supposed to feel about the reaper, right, Yeah,
there's there's certainly implied violence of cutting away. It is
the way it's sometimes brandished. It feels like a weapon,
like don't chase me with that thing.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
Also makes you feel not very special, like you are
one of many. Yeah, I am a grain among the
grains of the field.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Yeah, yeah, strong sense of cyclical harvest. Yeah, this is
something that happens all the time to everybody. But there
is also an implied violence of severing. So yeah, the
inclusion of something like that can can do a lot
of lifting.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
I'm trying to think though, that what's the next tool
where there's a good technological death metaphor?
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Oh well, we'll get to we'll get to one in
a bit.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
But okay.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
He also folds in the hybrid body plans of monsters
into this, so like claws, but he calls out knives, tridents,
the hook, the net by which the Nordic oceanic deity
run is said to collect the drown dead, and he
also calls up the dogs of various wild hunt traditions.
(11:05):
So ultimately wrapping up human domestication and not exactly a tool,
but a thing that humans do. And by making death
human or humanoid, death can do those things too and
take on those additional meanings.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
This is a really good point, and I don't know
if I've ever thought about before the idea of how
the tool you imagine in death's hand affects how you
think about death. I mean, yeah, so it's clear with
something like the scythe you could go in interesting places
with it. So if you give death a frying pan,
how do you think about that? I guess there it
(11:38):
makes it sound like a kind of torture, doesn't it.
What if it's a mandolin slicer.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Yeah, I don't know. I think if you gave death
a frying pan, it makes it feel like death was
doing other things. Death was making breakfast, and maybe this
isn't the primary thing that death does. On the other hand,
if you give death a long sword, and I think
sometimes you see depictions of death with some you know,
a grim reaper type figure with a long sword. Well,
(12:04):
now he's holding something that is a weapon. It is
it has no other purpose but to cut down and
murder people, or at least in nothing else to intimidate
them with the threat of murder. So it changes the
vibe to a very large degree.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Yeah, death as lethal enemy, not like I am not
metaphorically grain in a field here, I'm not a sheaf
of wheed. I am just a person being killed in battle. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
And so Herzog points out that like hooks and ropes
associated with different death figures, this conveys a sense of
snatching away sudden demise and maybe even a bit of
malice as well. A net. On the other hand, he
says that this is more passive collective. You know, you
can't feel too bad about this character that's out there
(12:53):
collecting the drowned dead with the net. And so in
all this we observe that the tools of death can
adjust their symbolic impression to convey any of the four
basic death types that we've talked about previously, the macop,
the gentle comforter, the gay deceiver, and the automaton. He
also points out that the humanoid form also enables the
(13:16):
adjustment of the image via clothing choices, and this is
something that we kind of take for granted with the
robes of death, right, the robes of the reaper you
know it just to be shrouded is to be to
take on that sense of darkness and obscurity, that same
darkness and obscurity that death will drag the human soul
(13:37):
into in many of these traditions. Other traditions involve magical
caps of invisibility, which would seem partial to the way
that death moves through our world, you know, unseen, certainly
striking out of nowhere and so forth, on top of
it being you know, if we're to take it literally,
(13:57):
some sort of supernatural entity moving through our world. Yeah,
and I want to come back to something else that
we mentioned in the last episode, the idea that death
should end up looking like the dead, as well as
one of those attributed death anxieties that came up in polling,
the fear of seeing a human corpse.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
Yeah, there was an interesting irony that came up when
we were talking about the four archetypes of death from
Castenbaum and the Eisenberg, which specifically came up with reference
to the macabre, because this is the scariest of the
four death personifications, and yet it's also the only one
that looks like it is a victim of the thing
(14:37):
it symbolizes. It is often represented as dead and decayed,
but none of the other three are.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Yeah, and again this is something that we're so used
to seeing in our representations of death, particularly with the
Grim Reaper, that we don't really stop to think how
interesting it is. Why does this bringer of death look
like death itself? It may seem like, well, yeah, well
how else would it be? Maybe you stop and look
at it, you know, you have to ask why, and
(15:05):
herz Our expresses that many characteristics found in the humanoid
death demon quote arise out of the experience of seeing
human corpses. To see a human corpse is to, you know,
to have to contemplate all of these realities of death.
It of course can be keep scary, anxiety or raising,
and certainly something one would fear seeing, particularly if you
(15:28):
get into specifics like I am afraid of seeing the
corpse of this particular person or this particular person that
I know, and you know, coming back to something we
mentioned as well, In our contemporary world, we make it
more and more possible to avoid seeing human corpses, at
least for much of our lives. But of course someone
has to see them, and historically most people would have
(15:50):
had a stronger connection to the physical reality of death.
Herzog also discusses the idea that masks of death play
into all of this as well, because when one dies,
the face becomes like a mask, and of course the
(16:11):
idea of a mask plays right into the trope of
the gay deceiver that we discussed, especially in the form
of quote one whose back is wholly different from his
appearance in front, which of course I want him like,
that's what a mask does, right, It's like, I hold
the mask in front of my face, and if you're
looking at me from the front, I have a different face.
(16:32):
And he points to a number of feminine death forms
and also some male death forms where it's not mere
monstrous hybridity like with sirens or harpies. But there's this
idea that the death demon is all beauty in the
front and decay in the back, so not a mix again,
not like a harpy. It's like, oh well, it looks
(16:53):
pretty in some ways, but it also has big claws
and vulture rings, but no one where if you're standing
direct in front of them looks like a fair form.
Standing directly behind them, you would see that they are gross.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
The woman in the bathtub in the Shining.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Oh yeah, it's rotten. Yeah, Oh, she's rotten in the back.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Yeah, she's a beautiful woman when yeah, and Jack Nicholson
starts to kiss her and then he sees in the
mirror that she is a rotten corpse from behind.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Been a while since I've seen that scene, and historically
I didn't get to see that scene because I would
watch television. It's kind of a hidden easter egg for.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
The Shining, censored for television. Amazing, amazing choices.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
But that that sounds like it may have been well
inspired by by some of these examples that I'm about
to roll out. First up, there's the Nordic Haldron, and
this is an entity where the front is said to
look like a beautiful fair form, like a beautiful woman,
but then the back of the individual is hollow, like
(17:54):
a kneading trough.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
So that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Yeah yeah, the back yeah yeah, just like hollow, like
a big cavity of decay. They are also apparently particular
Austrian devils that Herzog brings up, namely a Styrian and
Corinthian in which you'll have a captivating lover in the front,
(18:19):
but then the back is all hallowed out, like this,
hollowed out with decay. There's a fraul Hola and the
Woman of the Woods, again beautiful in the front, but
in this case like a hollowed out log in the back.
And I think this one may be connected more to
like earthy nature motifs.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
Interesting recurring theme the hollow.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Yeah, and a lot of his examples are you know,
certainly Germanic and European and origin, but we also have
He also brings up the example of the wahout of
the luis no An indigenous people of southern California, and
this is a pretty woman with long hair in the front,
but in the back there's no flesh on her.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
You know, this may be entirely off base, but I'm
thinking of this recurring theme of the form that appears
beautiful in the front but in the back is not
just ugly or you know, dead or something, but is
actually hollow. It almost makes me think of fruit of produce. Yeah,
you know, I don't know if that's actually what's leading
(19:21):
to this, but I'm sure we've all had the experience
of you know, you're at the market and you're picking
up a nice looking piece of fruit, or vegetable or
something that looks great on one side you pick it
up and the other side is not just not beautiful,
but is hollow, is eaten away.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Literal bad apples, these death demons. Yeah. One of the
more interesting examples he brings up, in part because I
found like actual visual visuals of these more forthcoming on
the internet is fraul Veldt or Lady World. She pops
up in medieval European iconography and in poetry, and again
(20:00):
we have a case where it's generally a beautiful woman
in the front, but her back is hollow and or
infested with snakes and toads. I had to look her
up in Carol Roses Encyclopedias of Mythical Creatures, and she
describes this figure as a female supernatural lover or a
fairy mistress, one that particularly preys on monks, members of
(20:23):
the clergy, and so forth, with vibes of a succubus
demon or an incarnation of the devil.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
It's the idea that monks are especially easy to get
or especially hard to get.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
Or right, maybe they're the only ones writing about them.
I go, oh, yeah, but yeah, this is you'll actually
find sculptures of this figure, and indeed it'll be like
a you know, some it almost looks like they're wearing
a hospital gown because in the front they are clothed
and fair, and in the back the gown is open
and we just see decay. And also you'll see examples
(21:00):
of it looks like there are toads and or snakes
like swimming in the pestilence of their back and their
legs and their buttocks.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
One of these statues you've included an image of for me.
Here it's shrunken down, so I can't quite tell, but
it kind of looks like it has crabs all over it.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Yeah, we find a similar image but flipped to the
mail in the sculpture Foolish versions Seduced by the Tempter
featured on the Strausburg Cathedral. Here the male tempter has
the back of decay, and I believe he's holding out
an apple, and he has animals swimming in his back
as well. And in this I'm also briefly reminded of
(21:39):
the accounts we have a vampires in which once you've
slain the creature, they just turn into a torrent of
snakes and bugs. Some spontaneous generation wrapped up in all
of this, to be sure.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
Yeah, notes of Halloween three, Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
And speaking of films, this of course made me think
of some possible exam They are possible examples of this
from horror cinema especially. There's a shot in particular from
John Carpenter's in the Mouth of Badness nineteen ninety four.
There's a scene where the character Linda Styles embraces the
enigmatic Sutter Caine, and so in the front he just
(22:17):
looks like Sutterkane. This you know, commanding and you know,
ruggedly handsome. Horror writer Jurgen prac now it is yes,
okay and a great role. And as she embraces him
and kisses him with her own eyes bleeding from the
revelations he's given her that the shot moves back and
(22:38):
we see that the back of him is just all monstrous,
like weird kind of decay, and there's a face back
there on the back of his head.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
It's really more like Lovecraft goo.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Yeah, Lovecraft goo, I think is a good description. I
was looking around. It looks like there are some other
examples of this as well. Some of them go they'll
get more into the direct trope of face back of
the head, and I'm not there's one in particular that
ended up spoiling a movie for me, so I'm not
gonna mention that one. But if folks have seen it,
(23:09):
you probably know what I'm talking about. And I'm not
talking about Harry Potter and the Sorcer of Stone. There's
a different one. But frau Veldt here is a terrific
example of the gay deceiver in that she is supposed
to represent the mortal world of sin and therefore death.
Something Herzog drives home really well is that within the
Christian tradition, death largely becomes not a natural aspect of creation,
(23:33):
but an unfortunate byproduct of human sin, and a byproduct
that may eventually be reversed or erased. So that a
very consequential way to spin a natural occurrence.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Right, So, because Adam and Eve are kicked out of
the Garden of Eden, death and sin come into the world.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Yeah, So frau Veldt reveals the wages of earthly sin.
Herzog cites a poem by twelfth and thirteenth century German
poet and barred Walter von der Vogelweida and in the
poem frau Veldt speaks. She says, I am the world
looked now upon my back and see the wage I bring.
(24:13):
He looked and saw her back hollow. It was San's flesh,
all full of toads, crawling with worms and stinking like
a putrefying dog. Uugh, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 4 (24:25):
But why a dog? I mean putrefying anything. It's specific.
You want to be specific, you know. And presumably he's
singing this as well, by the way, like this is
this was probably a song because he was again like
a traveling bard.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Now. Her Zog ultimately argues though, that images like this
one they end up betraying a deeper understanding, or at
least a deeper contemplation of the polarity of death in life,
and one that continues to sort of resonate hidden behind
the Christian reworking of things, something quote so deeply disturbing
that it can't be grasped and permanently held. And so
(25:01):
you know, you have this image of a fraul Velt
and you know, again beauty on the front and on
the back, all decay and death, life on one end,
death on the other. And it's presented as if like, oh,
you know, sin looks like this from one angle, but
it's really this but beyond this lesson of this morality
(25:22):
lesson that's that they're trying to teach with this image,
there's this kind of like deeper understanding that death isn't
only darkness and decline, but it's also light and the scent,
because one side of this thing is not and cannot
merely be the true essence of the thing, like both
are the true face. And so yeah, even as you're
if you're taking this image in as a teaching implement,
(25:45):
a religious teaching implement, like it ultimately betrays even deeper
contemplations of life and death.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
And possibly also brings a comforting side. Again back to
the idea of the personification as a coping strategy.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Yeah, even though it's rolled out just to say, hey,
don't sin, or death will happen and so forth, and
I think, yeah, that's one for me. The big takeaway
from Herzog's discussion of Yungi interpretations of this kind of
imagery is that all of these depictions have been generated
as a way of attempting to cope with and understand death,
(26:21):
which is in so many ways something that is just
too huge and varied to fully hold in our minds.
It's overwhelming, it's multifaceted, but that is one of the
powers of symbology, of poetry, of song, and of all
human art. We can capture like some sense of that
overpowering ambiguity, polarity and ineffability of the thing, and then
(26:45):
as you hold it up to the light, you can
kind of catch it in different ways. Now, in the
rest of this episode, we're going to expand on some
of those classifications we discussed in the previous episode some more,
(27:05):
while also getting into the role fate plays and some
of humanity's anthropomorphic personifications of death. Because of course, broadly
death is fate. It's the one true certainty in human
life and something we spend much of our lives coming
to terms with in different ways. So in that sense,
the idea of death personified or not, is innately tied
to the concept of fate.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Huge number of stories illustrating the concept of fate center
around predictions of death. This will come up in the
Greek context, which I'm going to talk about in a minute.
It's it is certainly not the only aspect of fate.
Fate is everything about our lives. But for some reason,
the most central event in stories about fate is death.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Yeah, it's the one thing that's guaranteed to happen, yea,
even though it doesn't always happen. It's kind of like
in our stories often we don't always get to see
our lead character eventually die. It's kind of like Barbie
doesn't have to have a bathroom in her dream house,
that sort of thing. We should also note that while
the terms fate and destiny are often used interchangeably, and
(28:11):
we may use them interchangeably here in this episode a
little bit, they are often considered different concepts historically. So
fate is passive, it's the course in life that was
predetermined for you. Destiny, however, is active and must be achieved.
So one becomes resigned to one's fate, while one sets
out after their destiny. So death in and of itself
(28:35):
not much of a destiny, but a key aspect of
any given fate. Now, we could do a whole series
of course on fate and destiny, as well as huge
tactics as well for human contemplation, but we are talking
about death, the anthropomorphic personification of death, and this ties
in nicely with some very old concepts, concepts that are
in fact again based on a metaphor of human technology,
(28:58):
thread spun from a spindle, and this metaphor can be
found in pretty much all Indo European cultures. The technology
involved here dates back to Neolithic times at least. The
spindle enables one to transform a seemingly chaotic mass of
fibers into a purposeful thread. So out of what seems
(29:19):
like chaos comes order. We get purpose and direction. Out
of the direction lists, we get a narrowing of focus.
We get a thread, a line with a beginning and
an end. So how could we not see ourselves and
our world in this process, in this technology.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
That is true. I was also thinking about, speaking of
technological metaphors, the way that thread as a metaphor kind
of flattens our existence. Like, you know, thread, like any
object really existing in space is a three dimensional object,
but in a metaphorical sense, it is a one dimensional object.
(29:57):
Like the metaphor of thread is something that only has lef,
that doesn't even have width, you know, not to speak
of depth. And yeah, I wonder how that also feeds
into the use of thread as a metaphor for human life.
It sort of reduces everything to one factor.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Yeah, yeah, it's almost it almost you can almost imagine
a situation where we see other lives as thread. I mean,
I feel like I do this all the time, you know,
I look back on an actor and an older film,
and what do I want to know? I want to
know like the basic thread of everything. I want to
know the timeline, you know, that's just part of our
linear existence. And then how do we experience ourselves? Well,
(30:38):
sometimes I feel like we do think of ourselves as threads,
and we think of ourselves as a linear story. But
we also, I think, experience ourselves as just that mass
of chaotic fiber. So yeah, interesting to think about this,
but yeah, it one can only you know, imagine how
these sorts of contemplations originally came together, you know, via
(30:59):
this crafting technology. And so let's go ahead and turn
into what it's probably, at least in the Western world,
the most famous example of this from Hellenistic tradition. You
want to talk about the fates, let's get in there. Yeah, okay, okay.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
These are the Greek fates, also known as the Moirai.
They are three divine sisters with individual names They are
named Clotho, Lacasis, and Atropos, usually depicted as three women
who respectively spin out the thread of life, measure it
to size, and then cut it off. They're depicted with
(31:39):
their implements, usually for their individual jobs, so you know,
like with this tool theme we've talked about, they also
have tools. Clotho usually has a spindle, Lacsis holds sometimes
a measuring rod, and Atropos most famously wields a pair
of scissors or shears to snip the thread of life.
(32:01):
And these tools are not always consistent in some tellings.
For example, Lacsis has casting lots instead of a rod,
and that's actually there in her name. I think I
forget exactly, but I believe Lacsis means something like the
one who casts lots or something signifies her agency in
basically rolling the dice on what kind of life you
(32:23):
will have. She is the determiner of the length and
type of life. And sometimes instead of shears, Atropos has
a knife or in some cases a document like a
scroll or some other kind of document, which I think
signifies something like reading out your death sentence.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
In any case, though, I can't help but think about
what we were talking about earlier, Like whatever you specifically
put in her hand, it does kind of change the
nature of what she's doing.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Yeah. Yeah, the scissors make her a little creepier. The
document makes her sinister in a different way, Like she's
the judge, you know, telling you, Okay, here's here's what
you got coming.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Yeah, but it's also like, hey, what can you do
this was I've got this decree, I've got to follow it,
you know.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
So the three sisters together are responsible for enforcing the
laws of fate and destiny to make certain that the
lives of mortals unfold as they are preordained. And often
this involves, or not often, I guess always this involves
a fated form of death. So the fates altogether represent
(33:33):
first of all, the guaranteed finitude of life. But I
would say that Atropos in particular has some grim reaper
like qualities, because as the one who cuts the thread
of life with her shears, she's the one who most
directly seals your doom. And also, you know, kind of
like the reaper, she has a sharp instrument. A big
(33:54):
thing that I want to discuss about the Greek fates
is the most common theme of stories about them, both
in stories about them as goddesses and in stories about
fate as a principle. Is this common theme is that
a mortal person might find a way to temporarily escape
(34:16):
their fate or destiny, but somehow the faded outcome will
find a way to happen. All apparent escape hatches are
actually just detours and delays, which in a way is
literally true about death. Like, we can find ways to
put it off in a sense, though there are questions,
(34:37):
I guess in strictly physical terms about what that means
to put it off. I mean, you're going to die.
When you're going to die, you can, compared to the
general population, hopefully do things that will increase your chances
of living longer. But you know, there's not like any
way you could have of knowing that, Oh I would
have died at this earlier time had I not done X.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
Yeah, they're obviously a number of facts involved, many of
which are completely out of our control.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Yeah, But so we can find ways to put it off,
but eventually death always comes, no matter your efforts, and
that is what fate is like in most Greek storytelling.
There are tons of stories in Greek mythology that are
used to illustrate this principle. One example I wanted to
talk about is the story of the hero Melieger. You
(35:24):
know this one.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
I don't know if that's meant with this one.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
Okay. So Melieger's parents are the king and Queen of
the Greek kingdom of Caledon. When Melieger is born, the
fates come to his mother, Althea, and they tell her
that her newborn son is doomed and he's going to
die as soon as the log currently burning in the
fireplace is consumed. But notice they gave her a clause
(35:51):
there there's an or a win. So Althea thinks she
has found a cheat code to escape the fate. She
extinguishes the fire, and she takes the wood out of
the hearth and hides it in a secret box.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
So kind of a don't eat daddy's soul donut sort
of situation here.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Yes, exactly, So, yeah, it seems like she's found a workaround.
Mellieger grows up strong and handsome, and he eventually falls
in love with the fleet footed huntress Atalanta, and then,
after the slaying of the monstrous Caledonian boar, Mellieger gives
the boar's hide to his new love, to Atalanta. This
(36:31):
gift makes Mellieger's maternal uncles his mom's brothers angry because
they want the boar's hide for themselves and they feel
insulted that Mellieger is giving it to a woman instead,
so they try to steal it from Atalanta by force,
and for this Mellieger kills them, kills his uncles, So
(36:53):
now Mellieger is a kin killer, and his mother, Althea,
becomes torn between family loyalties. She loves her son, but
her son has killed her brothers, and ultimately, in an
act that can be interpreted multiple ways, you could think
of this as retaliation or punishment, or maybe even contrition
(37:15):
for her earlier attempt to cheat the fates. For whatever reason,
she takes the hidden log out of the chest and
throws it back into the fireplace, and when the wood
is consumed by the fire, Mellyager drops dead. So you
thought you could avoid fate, but somehow it happened anyway.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Oh, this is a good one. Yeah, you know, I
had heard this one before, and I think there might
have been a ted ed video about it. Certainly. Once
you introduced the log I was like, oh, yeah, this
is the one.
Speaker 3 (37:46):
So you know, that's a common format of the fate
stories in Greek telling. But I was looking for more
stories on this theme. And there's actually a whole section
dedicated to fatalism in this book I've got. It's William
Hannahson's Book of Greek and Roman folk Tales, Legends and Myths,
from Princeton University Press, twenty seventeen. And I thought a
(38:07):
couple of these were really interesting. So one of these
stories is a later tale told by the Roman author Alien,
and it takes place in Athens after the Peloponnesian War.
This was the war in the fifth century BCE where
Athens and its allies fought Sparta and its allies. Sparta
(38:28):
won this war and afterwards installed a new government over
Athens made up of Spartan controlled oligarchs who were known
as the Thirty Tyrants or just the thirty. And so
I think there may be some different versions of this story,
but this is the version told in this telling by
Alien that is recounted in this book by Hansen. So
(38:50):
the story goes that the Athenian statesman Theramones has been
hanging out in a particular house in the city, and
one morning he gets up, he walks out of the
front door of the house, and immediately afterwards the whole
building collapses behind him, leaving him unharmed. So if he'd
been inside a moment longer, he would have been crushed.
(39:11):
So people come from all around. They are astonished at
his good luck. But while all the neighbors are really
happy for him, Theremines himself gives a more cautious response.
He says, zeus, for what occasion have you preserved me?
And then right after that alien narrates quote. Not long afterward,
(39:31):
he was put to death by the thirty condemned to
drink himlock some notes of final destination here. So the
idea is, after one incredibly lucky escape from death, you're
kind of in debt to the fates, and your account
will soon be settled by other means. In the Greek context,
(39:54):
I think it's also significant that the death from a
collapsing house, the death that Theram these escapes here, would
be a relatively quick and neutral death in terms of honor.
So he's spared that relatively quick and neutral death, only
too soon after be condemned to a much nastier and
(40:14):
more humiliating end where he's you know, so he misses
out on being instantly taken by an act of the
gods and instead gets wiped out in a reign of
terror by his victorious enemies.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
I mean, still could have been worse, but but yeah,
I got your meaning.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
And note that there's no personification of the fates in
these stories. They didn't always have to be personified. That
the principle of fatalism and the cosmic balance comes through.
Another awesome story that Hanson includes in this book is
from the Greek historian Herodotus, and this one is called
the Last Days of mike Karenos. Mike Arnos is the
(40:53):
Greek name of the Old Kingdom Egyptian pharaoh Mencora. So
this story is interesting because it is the closest anybody
seems to get to escaping their fate in the stories
I was reading, but only in a way that's questionable
as an actor. So here's how Herodotus tells it. So it's
(41:15):
like the pharaoh mike Karenos gets an oracle from a
city called Bhutto that he will only live for six
more years and will die in the seventh year. Hence,
he does not like hearing this, obviously, and he sends
a message back to the oracle saying, this is not fair.
You know, my father and my uncle who ruled before me,
(41:38):
they both lived to a ripe old age, and they
were constantly doing things to anger the gods. They shut
down temples, they forgot to make sacrifices, and they also
did tons of murder. They're terrible guys. I, on the
other hand, I am pious, I honor the gods. I'm
not a murderer. It does not make sense that the
(41:59):
gods would get give them longevity and cut my own
life short. And then a message comes back from the oracle,
this is great. Turns out, it is because you are
pious and righteous that your life is being snuffed out early,
because you are refusing to fulfill your evil destiny. Whoa see.
(42:19):
It turns out that before your father was king, before
your father and uncle were king, it was faded that
Egypt would suffer and be afflicted with horrors for one
hundred and fifty years. Your father and uncle understood that
they had to fulfill their destiny and be terrible rulers,
so they made sure that things were really bad around here,
(42:40):
but look, we're still on the clock. Egypt is still
faded to suffer, and you are doing too good of
a job. So Herodotus says. Quote. When Mike Karenos heard
that his lot had already been decided, he had a
large number of lamps made, lighting them at night, and
he drank and enjoyed himself without cease, day and night.
(43:03):
He roamed the marshlands, groves, and any other pleasant place
of enjoyment that he came to know. He devised this
strategy in order to prove that the oracle was mistaken.
By making his nights into days, he had twelve years
to live instead of six.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Oh man, what a life hack. I feel like I've
heard versions of this song from influencers in recent years.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Not the only person to have figured out this hack. Yeah,
you double your lifespan by never sleeping. It's true. So
several interesting themes here. One is this story depicts different
ways that you cannot escape fate. So as with the
other stories, like you cannot escape your own personal fate.
(43:48):
You know, the King's death prophesied by the oracle here,
except maybe through changing your mindset the external events won't change.
You will still die, you know, for six years, because
that's what you're fated to do, But you can change
the way you think about it.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Yeah, yeah, And I mean that's a message that still
resonates today.
Speaker 3 (44:13):
Also, there's the message that the gods will kill you
if you try to resist or alter a broader, more
collective form of fate. So Egypt, it's supposed to be
bad here. It is destined to be a terrible place
for one hundred and fifty years. It's only been like
one hundred and six years, and you're being too nice
and ruling too well. So we've got to kick you
(44:34):
out so we can get a solid, incompetent tyrant in
here to play ball.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Oh wow, that is a good one.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
One more interesting note about the role of fate in
Greek theology. I was reading this in a brief note
in the Oxford Encyclopedia of World Mythology edited by David Leming,
and they're Leaming notes that the fates seem to present
a paradox or a theological problem within Greek mythology because
(45:02):
they are depicted as being in some cases the ultimate
authority over life and death, though in other contexts Zeus
is said to be that authority, So who is really
the master of life and death? This really does present
a kind of could God create a boulder so big
he couldn't lift it problem within Greek religious thinking, And
(45:25):
this is never fully resolved anywhere. There are just some
texts that have one answer, some texts have a different answer.
Some texts don't seem to have an answer to this question.
But it is it is who is really the master
of life and death? Is it Fate or is it
the God Supreme?
Speaker 2 (45:43):
By having apoltheistic structure like this and all fully loaded pantheon,
it does seem like you allow these sorts of paradoxes
a little more room to breathe, right.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
I guess so? But yeah, well, I mean you can
resolve some Paradoix boxes and create others. So like within
a polytheistic pantheon, you don't have the Odyssey problems like
you do with the belief in like a single God
who is all good and all powerful. You know, why
do bad things happen to good people? Well, if you've
got polytheism, you've just got like lots of different thoughts
(46:19):
with different motives and different levels of power and there's
just like you know, that's just what happens. So that's
like a kind of problem you don't really have as
much with polytheism. I don't know, people probably still find
their way there sometimes sometimes, but seems easier to resolve
if there is a diversity of greater powers than humankind.
(46:39):
But yeah, you create new problems like this, like you,
you come up with competing domains and there will probably
be conflicting beliefs about who's really in charge of what.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
Yeah, we'll see some of this reflected in what we're
going to turn to next. Having talked about the fates,
I want to talk a little bit about what are
essentially the fates of Norse mythology, the Norn. They line
(47:14):
up in a number of ways with the fates, and
in some tellings, to be clear, stories about the Norns
may have been influenced by these traditions of the fates
and so forth. But we're also dealing with just some
very ancient ideas that a number of Indo European cultures
have in common. So yeah, we have the Norn again,
(47:35):
the fates of the Norse, if you will. They are
said to be the daughters of Dabblin, the dwarf, the
slumbering one, and they are also known by other names
such as the noor Ear and the words This is
apparently associated with a term that means to turn. So
there are three of them, much like the fates of
Hellenistic traditions, and we're told that they dwell at the
(47:58):
base of the Great World tree ill where they reside
over one of the three wells or well springs, and
this water is used to water the Great Tree. They're
sometimes described as being dressed all in gray with gray veils,
other times as appearing like they're covered in feathers, like
they're wearing feathers, as the Valkyries often are, as well
(48:20):
more on the Valkyries in a minute. They also are
given names. So of the Norn, we have Urdur, the
Norn of the past, also sometimes known as Weird like
w Yrd Weird. We also have Randi, the Norn of
the present, and then we have Skulled, the Norn of
the future, And there's a lot of overlap between the
(48:44):
Norn and like the Valkyries, Scold is also sometimes said
to be the name of a valkyrie. So they spin
not and weave the thread of fate for a new
born babe. But they also seem to serve as agents
of death in more of an atomon fashion, so like
the fates, they spin and eventually cut the thread. But again,
(49:05):
the actual technological metaphors sometimes varies with weaving accounts, perhaps
influenced by the Greek or some common source. Other sources
mentioned carving rooms on wooden slips, and then there are
other accounts that really focus more on the watering of
the roots of the world tree. But in general it
seems fair to sort of classify them as serving the
(49:27):
role of the fates. Here we also see the idea
that the norns are highly mysterious and they actually may
vary greatly in number. In the prose ed, for example,
we see the idea that in addition to the main
three norns, there are additional both good norns and evil norns,
(49:48):
and this is why there is such a lack of
uniformity in the way life unfolds for people. It's mentioned like, well,
why does why did this guy have such bad luck?
And why did he die so soon so horribly and
so forth, and they're like, oh, well, his life was
probably overseen by an evil norn, as opposed to a
good norn. And there's also discussion about how like norns
(50:09):
are drawn from different species as well, like that could
have been an elf norn or something to that effect.
Speaker 3 (50:16):
Okay, so it was a bad norn, and not that
he was too nice and he was supposed to be
a bad friend to all his friends because he was faded.
Call back there, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:29):
Basically you can end up blaming it on a bureaucracy
of norns, like oh, sorry, you got a real bummer norn.
There happens. But the norns are closely associated with some
other spirits and Norse traditions. There's the philja, which are
like hereditary protective guardians, though apparently rarely seen except in
dreams or at the time of death. There are hamongjas,
(50:52):
which are like household guardian spirits, but also spirits of
luck and happiness. So indeed, beginning to get a sense of,
perhaps all told, a rather large bureaucracy of supernatural beings
that are attending to the direction of your life. And then,
of course we have the valkyries. The choosers of the
slain generally describe more as psychopomps than anything, you know,
(51:16):
they escort the souls of the dead onto Odin's valhalla,
you know, the portion of the afterlife that is reserved
for the valiant dead, where they get to keep fighting
and killing each other, but then also setting down having
a you know, whole bunch of drinks and it's lit
by the light of their swords.
Speaker 3 (51:35):
Only special certain dead go there.
Speaker 2 (51:37):
Yeah yeah, and you get to eat that magical boar
that never dies, so you know, good stuff. And of course,
the Valkyries are also closely associated with Hell, the name
given to both the underworld and the female deity that
rules over it, but she only rules over a portion
of the overall dead. Multiple gods, including Odin, oversee the
(51:59):
dead of different sorts, and there are different gatherers of
the dead we already discussed Ran, the ocean goddess who
collects the drown dead via a net and then presides
over them again. They are often said to be three
valkyries as well, with varied attributed names. Beautiful virgin female
warriors sometimes closed in feathers, and their name literally means
(52:22):
she who chooses the dead. Borges in the book The
Book of Imaginary Beings points out that the Valkyries were
invoked in Anglo Saxon spells against muscle pain, and in
medieval Christian England the term was apparently closely associated with
the witch just sewing you know, you know, under you.
In Christian times, house and many of these older concepts
(52:45):
become simplified and vilified in their treatment. But yeah, the
norns here do seem to fulfill a similar purpose in
Norse mythology, Like they are there at the beginning, deciding
more or less, like how things are going to turn
out for you? Like is what is the course of
(53:08):
your lives? And really both of these models, you know,
get down to some of those deep contemplations that our
ancestors had throughout their lives, just as we have them
throughout our lives, like why is my life the way
it is? Why why are my days numbered like they are?
And asking these same questions for everyone around them, like
why does this seemingly awful person just live forever doing
(53:31):
bad things whereas like the best of us are cut
down in their prime. That sort of thing. It's always
been a conundrum.
Speaker 3 (53:38):
Yeah, I guess the gears are kind of turning in
my head about what difference it makes when when fade
is personified versus just a process or a principle of
the universe, because you know, obviously you can think about
it as an impersonal force or just a process, a
natural balancing that occurs. Yeah, how is it different when
(53:59):
it's in a body? Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (54:03):
And in these cases, is particularly with the norns and
the fates, there is a sense that no matter how
nasty those scissors are that ultimately cut the life string,
they're not the only individual involved in the process. Like
they're just responding to the way the thread was measured out,
and the person who measured the thread out didn't actually
(54:24):
make the thread. So it does point seemingly in large
part to a more automaton view of death, and more
of an automaton death figure with less cruelty. But then
also room for it is in the Norse example, room
for bad norns, you know, room for situations where oh,
(54:46):
well you really you really did you know, get kind
of a you know, a Boem sentence there with this
particular reading. So again we generate these different ideas out
of contemplation of these largely unanswerable questions of fate and death.
(55:06):
All right, well, with that, we must draw out our
scissors and cut the string on this episode of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, but we're going to be back.
We're going to continue this series because there's so much
we haven't gotten into, so it's always difficult to say
how many more episodes will do. I figure we'll at
least do one more episode on anthropomorphic personifications of death,
(55:27):
maybe one more. Ultimately, we don't know how much thread
has been measured out for us here with this series.
Speaker 3 (55:34):
I guess we'll just have to find out.
Speaker 2 (55:36):
Yeah, all right, before we close out. Just reminder to
everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have short form episode on Wednesdays
and on Fridays. That's when we set aside most serious
concerns to just talk about a weird movie on Weird
House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (55:55):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.
Speaker 1 (56:17):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two
in our series on Personifications of Death.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
We were thinking about calling these episodes faces of Death,
but then we realized that it might be confusing title lies. Ah.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Yeah, was that like when you were in I think
it was when I was in high school. I remember
people watching those things.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yes, yeah, I remember seeing them in video stores. Never
watched them myself, but it always felt like like the
ultimate video, the ultimate forbidden video on the shelf.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Were those a mix of real footage of executions and
then fake footage pretending to be of real executions.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
That's my understanding. Yeah, that it's like and not just
actual death. Especially they got further into the series. I
think it also got into stuff like, you know, just
footage from around the world, maybe like footage of big
snakes things like that. But yeah, I never saw them
and I've never sought them out.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Yeah, like, oh, here's a snake that ada tortoise and
then ruptured or something. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, anyway, we're
back with part two of the series on Personifications of Death.
We should do a brief refresher on what we talked
about in the last episode. So last time we mostly
talked about common types of death figures. So one distinction
(01:35):
we talked about was between the moment of death figure
like the grim reaper, the kind we usually think of
as appearing to someone while they're still living, either to
cause death or to signal that death is near. And
we thought about that versus a different type of character
known as the psychopomp. This is from the Greek for
(01:57):
soul guide or soul conductor. This is the figure who
shepherd's the soul of the recently dead into the afterlife.
The analogy we use for the distinction between these two
was that the reaper is like the bouncer who tells
you you're cut off you have to leave the bar,
and the psychopomp is the cab driver who takes you home. Yeah.
(02:18):
We also explored an influential framework from the psychology of death,
tracing back to a book called the Psychology of Death
from nineteen seventy two by Robert Castenbaum and Ruth Eisenberg.
In this framework, the authors used surveys to study how
US participants were most likely to personify death, and these
(02:39):
authors ended up arguing that most of the personifications fell
into one of four general categories. You had a grim, terrifying,
and threatening figure that they called the macabre. There was
a soothing, welcoming character that they called the gentle comforter.
There was an attractive and exciting but dangerous trickster figure
(03:01):
they called the gay deceiver. And note that the use
of gay there was not intended as any reference to
sexual orientation. It's just the older usage, meaning like jolly
or carefree. And finally, there was a cold, impersonal entity
they called the automaton. And then after this we got
into some general findings about how these different personifications were
(03:22):
usually expressed, how that's changed over time, and we ended
up talking about some more recent experiments which found, among
other things, in one small study conducted on American university students,
subjects were relatively more likely to imagine death as a
comforter type figure when they thought about their own death
as opposed to other people's deaths. And hard to know
(03:46):
exactly what to make of that, but I kind of
interpret this as a suggestion that maybe we're more likely
to personify death as a coping strategy than as like
a raw expression of unresolved fears the way you might think,
you know, we would get to an image like the
grim macob figure. And then we also talked about a
(04:07):
study linking these different archetypes to particular circumstances of death.
So it's like some of these are more surprising than
others not very surprising, or the findings like you're more
likely to think about the macab grim reaper type figure
with the skeletal, you know, sadistic kind of visage if
you imagine a murder taking place outside the home, whereas
(04:29):
the deceiver figure the trickster was more likely to be
associated with a heart attack. That's kind of interesting. And
of course, one line running through the discussion last time
was that most of the psychology research we cited was
conducted on Americans, and the evidence is pretty clear that
the personification of death is highly culturally variable. It's not
(04:50):
like there's one type of death character that's hardwired into
the brain of the human animal. Though I think it
is interesting that despite the huge very in how death
is personified within and across cultures, in some way, almost
every culture does it.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Yeah, yeah, and I think that is indeed, one of
the fascinating things about this is that there's something going
on in every human mind and in every human culture.
You know, Crunching this idea of death and these personifications
of death are one way of dealing with it. And
you know, so this is where we dig into, like
(05:29):
what does it mean? Why are we building these things?
And what do all the pieces mean? So I want
to follow up on some of the concepts that we
discussed in the last episode. One of the books that
I dug into for these episodes is Psyche and Death
by Edgar Herzog. I believe this was a nineteen eighty
three publication originally published by the C. J. Young Institute
(05:52):
in Zurich, and I believe the book the text of
the book is based on some like older presentations that
Herzog gave, so naturally, all of this is steeped in
union concepts. But I thought it was all really fascinating
and it really puts an interesting spin on some of
what we discussed last time. Okay, So Herzog goes through
(06:12):
some of the common animal forms of death personified in
different cultures and certainly in ancient times. So he singles
out the wool for dog, the bird, the snake, and
the horse, and I believe this gets this gets especially
it makes me think of episodes we've recorded in the past.
We've talked about the horse skull and the potent symbol
(06:34):
of the horse skull and how it becomes this totem
that goes beyond like the remnant of an important domesticated animal.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
I don't really recall what we concluded, but didn't we
talk about the idea that for some reason, the horse
skull seems grimmer than other skulls.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does that. Yeah. But anyway, he
refers to all of these different personifications of death in
this case and beast form as death demons. That's this
sort of catch all phrase, so I'll use that as well,
and certainly when I read some quotes from him here.
But then he goes on to discuss the death demon
(07:11):
and the human form, and he argues, first of all
that the various animal forms of the death demon were
quote the externalization of inner images by means of which
the human psyche expresses its reaction to the experience of death. Okay,
that's basically that makes sense. That falls in mind what
we've been talking about, and he also stresses that they
(07:31):
were still at the same time the quote inner crystallization
of numinous experience into an image, and the human form,
which is only explicitly developed later, is secretly contained within them.
So this is understandable as well. While death might be
conceptualized as some sort of a great beast, say a
giant bird, we're still going to anthropomorphize that great beast.
(07:54):
But then Herzog argues that in time the shift occurs
where the death demon becomes implicitly human in form or
mostly human in form. And I'm going to read this
quote here that I thought was really telling, and there
might have been an I don't know if there was
an error in translation, but I'm going to throw an
iz in there that isn't there in the actual text
that to my understanding clarifies things. But if I messed
(08:18):
it up, my apologies to mister herzag quote. It is
not until the death demon becomes explicitly anthropomorphized that the
full richness of the incomprehensible event that death is begins
to emerge, even though it can never be wholly contained
in an image. When it is given human form, the
(08:40):
nature of the death demon is enriched and deepened and
related to the totality of the universe, the individual, and
life in a succession of new ways. So he points
out that by making death more human in form again
anthropomorphized death, death made to a being, we also firmly
(09:02):
allow death then to do things that humans do, such
as use tools and weapons, which you know, coming back
to the arguably and many you know, certainly in the
Western culture, the most sort of famous version is the
grim Reaper. We've referred to this already multiple times. This
is the version of death that will show up in
your like Far Side cartoons and so forth, or on
(09:25):
just you know, probably SpongeBob as well. You know, anywhere
you have death step in, we take it for granted,
oh he has a scythe there. But the human technology
used by a death figure a death demon allows us
to employ technological metaphors laid in with additional meanings.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Okay, so one that comes to mind for me immediately
would be the technological metaphor of harvesting with a scythe there.
That is something that we use a tool to do.
But you can think of it now that death is out,
collecting is out harve people.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Yeah, yeah, like the scythe really does a lot to
inform how we're supposed to feel about the reaper, right, Yeah,
there's there's certainly implied violence of cutting away. It is
the way it's sometimes brandished. It feels like a weapon,
like don't chase me with that thing.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
Also makes you feel not very special, like you are
one of many. Yeah, I am a grain among the
grains of the field.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Yeah, yeah, strong sense of cyclical harvest. Yeah, this is
something that happens all the time to everybody. But there
is also an implied violence of severing. So yeah, the
inclusion of something like that can can do a lot
of lifting.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
I'm trying to think though, that what's the next tool
where there's a good technological death metaphor?
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Oh well, we'll get to we'll get to one in
a bit.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
But okay.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
He also folds in the hybrid body plans of monsters
into this, so like claws, but he calls out knives, tridents,
the hook, the net by which the Nordic oceanic deity
run is said to collect the drown dead, and he
also calls up the dogs of various wild hunt traditions.
(11:05):
So ultimately wrapping up human domestication and not exactly a tool,
but a thing that humans do. And by making death
human or humanoid, death can do those things too and
take on those additional meanings.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
This is a really good point, and I don't know
if I've ever thought about before the idea of how
the tool you imagine in death's hand affects how you
think about death. I mean, yeah, so it's clear with
something like the scythe you could go in interesting places
with it. So if you give death a frying pan,
how do you think about that? I guess there it
(11:38):
makes it sound like a kind of torture, doesn't it.
What if it's a mandolin slicer.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Yeah, I don't know. I think if you gave death
a frying pan, it makes it feel like death was
doing other things. Death was making breakfast, and maybe this
isn't the primary thing that death does. On the other hand,
if you give death a long sword, and I think
sometimes you see depictions of death with some you know,
a grim reaper type figure with a long sword. Well,
(12:04):
now he's holding something that is a weapon. It is
it has no other purpose but to cut down and
murder people, or at least in nothing else to intimidate
them with the threat of murder. So it changes the
vibe to a very large degree.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Yeah, death as lethal enemy, not like I am not
metaphorically grain in a field here, I'm not a sheaf
of wheed. I am just a person being killed in battle. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
And so Herzog points out that like hooks and ropes
associated with different death figures, this conveys a sense of
snatching away sudden demise and maybe even a bit of
malice as well. A net. On the other hand, he
says that this is more passive collective. You know, you
can't feel too bad about this character that's out there
(12:53):
collecting the drowned dead with the net. And so in
all this we observe that the tools of death can
adjust their symbolic impression to convey any of the four
basic death types that we've talked about previously, the macop,
the gentle comforter, the gay deceiver, and the automaton. He
also points out that the humanoid form also enables the
(13:16):
adjustment of the image via clothing choices, and this is
something that we kind of take for granted with the
robes of death, right, the robes of the reaper you
know it just to be shrouded is to be to
take on that sense of darkness and obscurity, that same
darkness and obscurity that death will drag the human soul
(13:37):
into in many of these traditions. Other traditions involve magical
caps of invisibility, which would seem partial to the way
that death moves through our world, you know, unseen, certainly
striking out of nowhere and so forth, on top of
it being you know, if we're to take it literally,
(13:57):
some sort of supernatural entity moving through our world. Yeah,
and I want to come back to something else that
we mentioned in the last episode, the idea that death
should end up looking like the dead, as well as
one of those attributed death anxieties that came up in polling,
the fear of seeing a human corpse.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
Yeah, there was an interesting irony that came up when
we were talking about the four archetypes of death from
Castenbaum and the Eisenberg, which specifically came up with reference
to the macabre, because this is the scariest of the
four death personifications, and yet it's also the only one
that looks like it is a victim of the thing
(14:37):
it symbolizes. It is often represented as dead and decayed,
but none of the other three are.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Yeah, and again this is something that we're so used
to seeing in our representations of death, particularly with the
Grim Reaper, that we don't really stop to think how
interesting it is. Why does this bringer of death look
like death itself? It may seem like, well, yeah, well
how else would it be? Maybe you stop and look
at it, you know, you have to ask why, and
(15:05):
herz Our expresses that many characteristics found in the humanoid
death demon quote arise out of the experience of seeing
human corpses. To see a human corpse is to, you know,
to have to contemplate all of these realities of death.
It of course can be keep scary, anxiety or raising,
and certainly something one would fear seeing, particularly if you
(15:28):
get into specifics like I am afraid of seeing the
corpse of this particular person or this particular person that
I know, and you know, coming back to something we
mentioned as well, In our contemporary world, we make it
more and more possible to avoid seeing human corpses, at
least for much of our lives. But of course someone
has to see them, and historically most people would have
(15:50):
had a stronger connection to the physical reality of death.
Herzog also discusses the idea that masks of death play
into all of this as well, because when one dies,
the face becomes like a mask, and of course the
(16:11):
idea of a mask plays right into the trope of
the gay deceiver that we discussed, especially in the form
of quote one whose back is wholly different from his
appearance in front, which of course I want him like,
that's what a mask does, right, It's like, I hold
the mask in front of my face, and if you're
looking at me from the front, I have a different face.
(16:32):
And he points to a number of feminine death forms
and also some male death forms where it's not mere
monstrous hybridity like with sirens or harpies. But there's this
idea that the death demon is all beauty in the
front and decay in the back, so not a mix again,
not like a harpy. It's like, oh well, it looks
(16:53):
pretty in some ways, but it also has big claws
and vulture rings, but no one where if you're standing
direct in front of them looks like a fair form.
Standing directly behind them, you would see that they are gross.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
The woman in the bathtub in the Shining.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Oh yeah, it's rotten. Yeah, Oh, she's rotten in the back.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Yeah, she's a beautiful woman when yeah, and Jack Nicholson
starts to kiss her and then he sees in the
mirror that she is a rotten corpse from behind.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Been a while since I've seen that scene, and historically
I didn't get to see that scene because I would
watch television. It's kind of a hidden easter egg for.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
The Shining, censored for television. Amazing, amazing choices.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
But that that sounds like it may have been well
inspired by by some of these examples that I'm about
to roll out. First up, there's the Nordic Haldron, and
this is an entity where the front is said to
look like a beautiful fair form, like a beautiful woman,
but then the back of the individual is hollow, like
(17:54):
a kneading trough.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
So that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Yeah yeah, the back yeah yeah, just like hollow, like
a big cavity of decay. They are also apparently particular
Austrian devils that Herzog brings up, namely a Styrian and
Corinthian in which you'll have a captivating lover in the front,
(18:19):
but then the back is all hallowed out, like this,
hollowed out with decay. There's a fraul Hola and the
Woman of the Woods, again beautiful in the front, but
in this case like a hollowed out log in the back.
And I think this one may be connected more to
like earthy nature motifs.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
Interesting recurring theme the hollow.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Yeah, and a lot of his examples are you know,
certainly Germanic and European and origin, but we also have
He also brings up the example of the wahout of
the luis no An indigenous people of southern California, and
this is a pretty woman with long hair in the front,
but in the back there's no flesh on her.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
You know, this may be entirely off base, but I'm
thinking of this recurring theme of the form that appears
beautiful in the front but in the back is not
just ugly or you know, dead or something, but is
actually hollow. It almost makes me think of fruit of produce. Yeah,
you know, I don't know if that's actually what's leading
(19:21):
to this, but I'm sure we've all had the experience
of you know, you're at the market and you're picking
up a nice looking piece of fruit, or vegetable or
something that looks great on one side you pick it
up and the other side is not just not beautiful,
but is hollow, is eaten away.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Literal bad apples, these death demons. Yeah. One of the
more interesting examples he brings up, in part because I
found like actual visual visuals of these more forthcoming on
the internet is fraul Veldt or Lady World. She pops
up in medieval European iconography and in poetry, and again
(20:00):
we have a case where it's generally a beautiful woman
in the front, but her back is hollow and or
infested with snakes and toads. I had to look her
up in Carol Roses Encyclopedias of Mythical Creatures, and she
describes this figure as a female supernatural lover or a
fairy mistress, one that particularly preys on monks, members of
(20:23):
the clergy, and so forth, with vibes of a succubus
demon or an incarnation of the devil.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
It's the idea that monks are especially easy to get
or especially hard to get.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
Or right, maybe they're the only ones writing about them.
I go, oh, yeah, but yeah, this is you'll actually
find sculptures of this figure, and indeed it'll be like
a you know, some it almost looks like they're wearing
a hospital gown because in the front they are clothed
and fair, and in the back the gown is open
and we just see decay. And also you'll see examples
(21:00):
of it looks like there are toads and or snakes
like swimming in the pestilence of their back and their
legs and their buttocks.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
One of these statues you've included an image of for me.
Here it's shrunken down, so I can't quite tell, but
it kind of looks like it has crabs all over it.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Yeah, we find a similar image but flipped to the
mail in the sculpture Foolish versions Seduced by the Tempter
featured on the Strausburg Cathedral. Here the male tempter has
the back of decay, and I believe he's holding out
an apple, and he has animals swimming in his back
as well. And in this I'm also briefly reminded of
(21:39):
the accounts we have a vampires in which once you've
slain the creature, they just turn into a torrent of
snakes and bugs. Some spontaneous generation wrapped up in all
of this, to be sure.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
Yeah, notes of Halloween three, Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
And speaking of films, this of course made me think
of some possible exam They are possible examples of this
from horror cinema especially. There's a shot in particular from
John Carpenter's in the Mouth of Badness nineteen ninety four.
There's a scene where the character Linda Styles embraces the
enigmatic Sutter Caine, and so in the front he just
(22:17):
looks like Sutterkane. This you know, commanding and you know,
ruggedly handsome. Horror writer Jurgen prac now it is yes,
okay and a great role. And as she embraces him
and kisses him with her own eyes bleeding from the
revelations he's given her that the shot moves back and
(22:38):
we see that the back of him is just all monstrous,
like weird kind of decay, and there's a face back
there on the back of his head.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
It's really more like Lovecraft goo.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Yeah, Lovecraft goo, I think is a good description. I
was looking around. It looks like there are some other
examples of this as well. Some of them go they'll
get more into the direct trope of face back of
the head, and I'm not there's one in particular that
ended up spoiling a movie for me, so I'm not
gonna mention that one. But if folks have seen it,
(23:09):
you probably know what I'm talking about. And I'm not
talking about Harry Potter and the Sorcer of Stone. There's
a different one. But frau Veldt here is a terrific
example of the gay deceiver in that she is supposed
to represent the mortal world of sin and therefore death.
Something Herzog drives home really well is that within the
Christian tradition, death largely becomes not a natural aspect of creation,
(23:33):
but an unfortunate byproduct of human sin, and a byproduct
that may eventually be reversed or erased. So that a
very consequential way to spin a natural occurrence.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Right, So, because Adam and Eve are kicked out of
the Garden of Eden, death and sin come into the world.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Yeah, So frau Veldt reveals the wages of earthly sin.
Herzog cites a poem by twelfth and thirteenth century German
poet and barred Walter von der Vogelweida and in the
poem frau Veldt speaks. She says, I am the world
looked now upon my back and see the wage I bring.
(24:13):
He looked and saw her back hollow. It was San's flesh,
all full of toads, crawling with worms and stinking like
a putrefying dog. Uugh, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 4 (24:25):
But why a dog? I mean putrefying anything. It's specific.
You want to be specific, you know. And presumably he's
singing this as well, by the way, like this is
this was probably a song because he was again like
a traveling bard.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Now. Her Zog ultimately argues though, that images like this
one they end up betraying a deeper understanding, or at
least a deeper contemplation of the polarity of death in life,
and one that continues to sort of resonate hidden behind
the Christian reworking of things, something quote so deeply disturbing
that it can't be grasped and permanently held. And so
(25:01):
you know, you have this image of a fraul Velt
and you know, again beauty on the front and on
the back, all decay and death, life on one end,
death on the other. And it's presented as if like, oh,
you know, sin looks like this from one angle, but
it's really this but beyond this lesson of this morality
(25:22):
lesson that's that they're trying to teach with this image,
there's this kind of like deeper understanding that death isn't
only darkness and decline, but it's also light and the scent,
because one side of this thing is not and cannot
merely be the true essence of the thing, like both
are the true face. And so yeah, even as you're
if you're taking this image in as a teaching implement,
(25:45):
a religious teaching implement, like it ultimately betrays even deeper
contemplations of life and death.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
And possibly also brings a comforting side. Again back to
the idea of the personification as a coping strategy.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Yeah, even though it's rolled out just to say, hey,
don't sin, or death will happen and so forth, and
I think, yeah, that's one for me. The big takeaway
from Herzog's discussion of Yungi interpretations of this kind of
imagery is that all of these depictions have been generated
as a way of attempting to cope with and understand death,
(26:21):
which is in so many ways something that is just
too huge and varied to fully hold in our minds.
It's overwhelming, it's multifaceted, but that is one of the
powers of symbology, of poetry, of song, and of all
human art. We can capture like some sense of that
overpowering ambiguity, polarity and ineffability of the thing, and then
(26:45):
as you hold it up to the light, you can
kind of catch it in different ways. Now, in the
rest of this episode, we're going to expand on some
of those classifications we discussed in the previous episode some more,
(27:05):
while also getting into the role fate plays and some
of humanity's anthropomorphic personifications of death. Because of course, broadly
death is fate. It's the one true certainty in human
life and something we spend much of our lives coming
to terms with in different ways. So in that sense,
the idea of death personified or not, is innately tied
to the concept of fate.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Huge number of stories illustrating the concept of fate center
around predictions of death. This will come up in the
Greek context, which I'm going to talk about in a minute.
It's it is certainly not the only aspect of fate.
Fate is everything about our lives. But for some reason,
the most central event in stories about fate is death.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Yeah, it's the one thing that's guaranteed to happen, yea,
even though it doesn't always happen. It's kind of like
in our stories often we don't always get to see
our lead character eventually die. It's kind of like Barbie
doesn't have to have a bathroom in her dream house,
that sort of thing. We should also note that while
the terms fate and destiny are often used interchangeably, and
(28:11):
we may use them interchangeably here in this episode a
little bit, they are often considered different concepts historically. So
fate is passive, it's the course in life that was
predetermined for you. Destiny, however, is active and must be achieved.
So one becomes resigned to one's fate, while one sets
out after their destiny. So death in and of itself
(28:35):
not much of a destiny, but a key aspect of
any given fate. Now, we could do a whole series
of course on fate and destiny, as well as huge
tactics as well for human contemplation, but we are talking
about death, the anthropomorphic personification of death, and this ties
in nicely with some very old concepts, concepts that are
in fact again based on a metaphor of human technology,
(28:58):
thread spun from a spindle, and this metaphor can be
found in pretty much all Indo European cultures. The technology
involved here dates back to Neolithic times at least. The
spindle enables one to transform a seemingly chaotic mass of
fibers into a purposeful thread. So out of what seems
(29:19):
like chaos comes order. We get purpose and direction. Out
of the direction lists, we get a narrowing of focus.
We get a thread, a line with a beginning and
an end. So how could we not see ourselves and
our world in this process, in this technology.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
That is true. I was also thinking about, speaking of
technological metaphors, the way that thread as a metaphor kind
of flattens our existence. Like, you know, thread, like any
object really existing in space is a three dimensional object,
but in a metaphorical sense, it is a one dimensional object.
(29:57):
Like the metaphor of thread is something that only has lef,
that doesn't even have width, you know, not to speak
of depth. And yeah, I wonder how that also feeds
into the use of thread as a metaphor for human life.
It sort of reduces everything to one factor.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Yeah, yeah, it's almost it almost you can almost imagine
a situation where we see other lives as thread. I mean,
I feel like I do this all the time, you know,
I look back on an actor and an older film,
and what do I want to know? I want to
know like the basic thread of everything. I want to
know the timeline, you know, that's just part of our
linear existence. And then how do we experience ourselves? Well,
(30:38):
sometimes I feel like we do think of ourselves as threads,
and we think of ourselves as a linear story. But
we also, I think, experience ourselves as just that mass
of chaotic fiber. So yeah, interesting to think about this,
but yeah, it one can only you know, imagine how
these sorts of contemplations originally came together, you know, via
(30:59):
this crafting technology. And so let's go ahead and turn
into what it's probably, at least in the Western world,
the most famous example of this from Hellenistic tradition. You
want to talk about the fates, let's get in there. Yeah, okay, okay.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
These are the Greek fates, also known as the Moirai.
They are three divine sisters with individual names They are
named Clotho, Lacasis, and Atropos, usually depicted as three women
who respectively spin out the thread of life, measure it
to size, and then cut it off. They're depicted with
(31:39):
their implements, usually for their individual jobs, so you know,
like with this tool theme we've talked about, they also
have tools. Clotho usually has a spindle, Lacsis holds sometimes
a measuring rod, and Atropos most famously wields a pair
of scissors or shears to snip the thread of life.
(32:01):
And these tools are not always consistent in some tellings.
For example, Lacsis has casting lots instead of a rod,
and that's actually there in her name. I think I
forget exactly, but I believe Lacsis means something like the
one who casts lots or something signifies her agency in
basically rolling the dice on what kind of life you
(32:23):
will have. She is the determiner of the length and
type of life. And sometimes instead of shears, Atropos has
a knife or in some cases a document like a
scroll or some other kind of document, which I think
signifies something like reading out your death sentence.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
In any case, though, I can't help but think about
what we were talking about earlier, Like whatever you specifically
put in her hand, it does kind of change the
nature of what she's doing.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Yeah. Yeah, the scissors make her a little creepier. The
document makes her sinister in a different way, Like she's
the judge, you know, telling you, Okay, here's here's what
you got coming.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Yeah, but it's also like, hey, what can you do
this was I've got this decree, I've got to follow it,
you know.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
So the three sisters together are responsible for enforcing the
laws of fate and destiny to make certain that the
lives of mortals unfold as they are preordained. And often
this involves, or not often, I guess always this involves
a fated form of death. So the fates altogether represent
(33:33):
first of all, the guaranteed finitude of life. But I
would say that Atropos in particular has some grim reaper
like qualities, because as the one who cuts the thread
of life with her shears, she's the one who most
directly seals your doom. And also, you know, kind of
like the reaper, she has a sharp instrument. A big
(33:54):
thing that I want to discuss about the Greek fates
is the most common theme of stories about them, both
in stories about them as goddesses and in stories about
fate as a principle. Is this common theme is that
a mortal person might find a way to temporarily escape
(34:16):
their fate or destiny, but somehow the faded outcome will
find a way to happen. All apparent escape hatches are
actually just detours and delays, which in a way is
literally true about death. Like, we can find ways to
put it off in a sense, though there are questions,
(34:37):
I guess in strictly physical terms about what that means
to put it off. I mean, you're going to die.
When you're going to die, you can, compared to the
general population, hopefully do things that will increase your chances
of living longer. But you know, there's not like any
way you could have of knowing that, Oh I would
have died at this earlier time had I not done X.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
Yeah, they're obviously a number of facts involved, many of
which are completely out of our control.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Yeah, But so we can find ways to put it off,
but eventually death always comes, no matter your efforts, and
that is what fate is like in most Greek storytelling.
There are tons of stories in Greek mythology that are
used to illustrate this principle. One example I wanted to
talk about is the story of the hero Melieger. You
(35:24):
know this one.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
I don't know if that's meant with this one.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
Okay. So Melieger's parents are the king and Queen of
the Greek kingdom of Caledon. When Melieger is born, the
fates come to his mother, Althea, and they tell her
that her newborn son is doomed and he's going to
die as soon as the log currently burning in the
fireplace is consumed. But notice they gave her a clause
(35:51):
there there's an or a win. So Althea thinks she
has found a cheat code to escape the fate. She
extinguishes the fire, and she takes the wood out of
the hearth and hides it in a secret box.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
So kind of a don't eat daddy's soul donut sort
of situation here.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Yes, exactly, So, yeah, it seems like she's found a workaround.
Mellieger grows up strong and handsome, and he eventually falls
in love with the fleet footed huntress Atalanta, and then,
after the slaying of the monstrous Caledonian boar, Mellieger gives
the boar's hide to his new love, to Atalanta. This
(36:31):
gift makes Mellieger's maternal uncles his mom's brothers angry because
they want the boar's hide for themselves and they feel
insulted that Mellieger is giving it to a woman instead,
so they try to steal it from Atalanta by force,
and for this Mellieger kills them, kills his uncles, So
(36:53):
now Mellieger is a kin killer, and his mother, Althea,
becomes torn between family loyalties. She loves her son, but
her son has killed her brothers, and ultimately, in an
act that can be interpreted multiple ways, you could think
of this as retaliation or punishment, or maybe even contrition
(37:15):
for her earlier attempt to cheat the fates. For whatever reason,
she takes the hidden log out of the chest and
throws it back into the fireplace, and when the wood
is consumed by the fire, Mellyager drops dead. So you
thought you could avoid fate, but somehow it happened anyway.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Oh, this is a good one. Yeah, you know, I
had heard this one before, and I think there might
have been a ted ed video about it. Certainly. Once
you introduced the log I was like, oh, yeah, this
is the one.
Speaker 3 (37:46):
So you know, that's a common format of the fate
stories in Greek telling. But I was looking for more
stories on this theme. And there's actually a whole section
dedicated to fatalism in this book I've got. It's William
Hannahson's Book of Greek and Roman folk Tales, Legends and Myths,
from Princeton University Press, twenty seventeen. And I thought a
(38:07):
couple of these were really interesting. So one of these
stories is a later tale told by the Roman author Alien,
and it takes place in Athens after the Peloponnesian War.
This was the war in the fifth century BCE where
Athens and its allies fought Sparta and its allies. Sparta
(38:28):
won this war and afterwards installed a new government over
Athens made up of Spartan controlled oligarchs who were known
as the Thirty Tyrants or just the thirty. And so
I think there may be some different versions of this story,
but this is the version told in this telling by
Alien that is recounted in this book by Hansen. So
(38:50):
the story goes that the Athenian statesman Theramones has been
hanging out in a particular house in the city, and
one morning he gets up, he walks out of the
front door of the house, and immediately afterwards the whole
building collapses behind him, leaving him unharmed. So if he'd
been inside a moment longer, he would have been crushed.
(39:11):
So people come from all around. They are astonished at
his good luck. But while all the neighbors are really
happy for him, Theremines himself gives a more cautious response.
He says, zeus, for what occasion have you preserved me?
And then right after that alien narrates quote. Not long afterward,
(39:31):
he was put to death by the thirty condemned to
drink himlock some notes of final destination here. So the
idea is, after one incredibly lucky escape from death, you're
kind of in debt to the fates, and your account
will soon be settled by other means. In the Greek context,
(39:54):
I think it's also significant that the death from a
collapsing house, the death that Theram these escapes here, would
be a relatively quick and neutral death in terms of honor.
So he's spared that relatively quick and neutral death, only
too soon after be condemned to a much nastier and
(40:14):
more humiliating end where he's you know, so he misses
out on being instantly taken by an act of the
gods and instead gets wiped out in a reign of
terror by his victorious enemies.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
I mean, still could have been worse, but but yeah,
I got your meaning.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
And note that there's no personification of the fates in
these stories. They didn't always have to be personified. That
the principle of fatalism and the cosmic balance comes through.
Another awesome story that Hanson includes in this book is
from the Greek historian Herodotus, and this one is called
the Last Days of mike Karenos. Mike Arnos is the
(40:53):
Greek name of the Old Kingdom Egyptian pharaoh Mencora. So
this story is interesting because it is the closest anybody
seems to get to escaping their fate in the stories
I was reading, but only in a way that's questionable
as an actor. So here's how Herodotus tells it. So it's
(41:15):
like the pharaoh mike Karenos gets an oracle from a
city called Bhutto that he will only live for six
more years and will die in the seventh year. Hence,
he does not like hearing this, obviously, and he sends
a message back to the oracle saying, this is not fair.
You know, my father and my uncle who ruled before me,
(41:38):
they both lived to a ripe old age, and they
were constantly doing things to anger the gods. They shut
down temples, they forgot to make sacrifices, and they also
did tons of murder. They're terrible guys. I, on the
other hand, I am pious, I honor the gods. I'm
not a murderer. It does not make sense that the
(41:59):
gods would get give them longevity and cut my own
life short. And then a message comes back from the oracle,
this is great. Turns out, it is because you are
pious and righteous that your life is being snuffed out early,
because you are refusing to fulfill your evil destiny. Whoa see.
(42:19):
It turns out that before your father was king, before
your father and uncle were king, it was faded that
Egypt would suffer and be afflicted with horrors for one
hundred and fifty years. Your father and uncle understood that
they had to fulfill their destiny and be terrible rulers,
so they made sure that things were really bad around here,
(42:40):
but look, we're still on the clock. Egypt is still
faded to suffer, and you are doing too good of
a job. So Herodotus says. Quote. When Mike Karenos heard
that his lot had already been decided, he had a
large number of lamps made, lighting them at night, and
he drank and enjoyed himself without cease, day and night.
(43:03):
He roamed the marshlands, groves, and any other pleasant place
of enjoyment that he came to know. He devised this
strategy in order to prove that the oracle was mistaken.
By making his nights into days, he had twelve years
to live instead of six.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Oh man, what a life hack. I feel like I've
heard versions of this song from influencers in recent years.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Not the only person to have figured out this hack. Yeah,
you double your lifespan by never sleeping. It's true. So
several interesting themes here. One is this story depicts different
ways that you cannot escape fate. So as with the
other stories, like you cannot escape your own personal fate.
(43:48):
You know, the King's death prophesied by the oracle here,
except maybe through changing your mindset the external events won't change.
You will still die, you know, for six years, because
that's what you're fated to do, But you can change
the way you think about it.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Yeah, yeah, And I mean that's a message that still
resonates today.
Speaker 3 (44:13):
Also, there's the message that the gods will kill you
if you try to resist or alter a broader, more
collective form of fate. So Egypt, it's supposed to be
bad here. It is destined to be a terrible place
for one hundred and fifty years. It's only been like
one hundred and six years, and you're being too nice
and ruling too well. So we've got to kick you
(44:34):
out so we can get a solid, incompetent tyrant in
here to play ball.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Oh wow, that is a good one.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
One more interesting note about the role of fate in
Greek theology. I was reading this in a brief note
in the Oxford Encyclopedia of World Mythology edited by David Leming,
and they're Leaming notes that the fates seem to present
a paradox or a theological problem within Greek mythology because
(45:02):
they are depicted as being in some cases the ultimate
authority over life and death, though in other contexts Zeus
is said to be that authority, So who is really
the master of life and death? This really does present
a kind of could God create a boulder so big
he couldn't lift it problem within Greek religious thinking, And
(45:25):
this is never fully resolved anywhere. There are just some
texts that have one answer, some texts have a different answer.
Some texts don't seem to have an answer to this question.
But it is it is who is really the master
of life and death? Is it Fate or is it
the God Supreme?
Speaker 2 (45:43):
By having apoltheistic structure like this and all fully loaded pantheon,
it does seem like you allow these sorts of paradoxes
a little more room to breathe, right.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
I guess so? But yeah, well, I mean you can
resolve some Paradoix boxes and create others. So like within
a polytheistic pantheon, you don't have the Odyssey problems like
you do with the belief in like a single God
who is all good and all powerful. You know, why
do bad things happen to good people? Well, if you've
got polytheism, you've just got like lots of different thoughts
(46:19):
with different motives and different levels of power and there's
just like you know, that's just what happens. So that's
like a kind of problem you don't really have as
much with polytheism. I don't know, people probably still find
their way there sometimes sometimes, but seems easier to resolve
if there is a diversity of greater powers than humankind.
(46:39):
But yeah, you create new problems like this, like you,
you come up with competing domains and there will probably
be conflicting beliefs about who's really in charge of what.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
Yeah, we'll see some of this reflected in what we're
going to turn to next. Having talked about the fates,
I want to talk a little bit about what are
essentially the fates of Norse mythology, the Norn. They line
(47:14):
up in a number of ways with the fates, and
in some tellings, to be clear, stories about the Norns
may have been influenced by these traditions of the fates
and so forth. But we're also dealing with just some
very ancient ideas that a number of Indo European cultures
have in common. So yeah, we have the Norn again,
(47:35):
the fates of the Norse, if you will. They are
said to be the daughters of Dabblin, the dwarf, the
slumbering one, and they are also known by other names
such as the noor Ear and the words This is
apparently associated with a term that means to turn. So
there are three of them, much like the fates of
Hellenistic traditions, and we're told that they dwell at the
(47:58):
base of the Great World tree ill where they reside
over one of the three wells or well springs, and
this water is used to water the Great Tree. They're
sometimes described as being dressed all in gray with gray veils,
other times as appearing like they're covered in feathers, like
they're wearing feathers, as the Valkyries often are, as well
(48:20):
more on the Valkyries in a minute. They also are
given names. So of the Norn, we have Urdur, the
Norn of the past, also sometimes known as Weird like
w Yrd Weird. We also have Randi, the Norn of
the present, and then we have Skulled, the Norn of
the future, And there's a lot of overlap between the
(48:44):
Norn and like the Valkyries, Scold is also sometimes said
to be the name of a valkyrie. So they spin
not and weave the thread of fate for a new
born babe. But they also seem to serve as agents
of death in more of an atomon fashion, so like
the fates, they spin and eventually cut the thread. But again,
(49:05):
the actual technological metaphors sometimes varies with weaving accounts, perhaps
influenced by the Greek or some common source. Other sources
mentioned carving rooms on wooden slips, and then there are
other accounts that really focus more on the watering of
the roots of the world tree. But in general it
seems fair to sort of classify them as serving the
(49:27):
role of the fates. Here we also see the idea
that the norns are highly mysterious and they actually may
vary greatly in number. In the prose ed, for example,
we see the idea that in addition to the main
three norns, there are additional both good norns and evil norns,
(49:48):
and this is why there is such a lack of
uniformity in the way life unfolds for people. It's mentioned like, well,
why does why did this guy have such bad luck?
And why did he die so soon so horribly and
so forth, and they're like, oh, well, his life was
probably overseen by an evil norn, as opposed to a
good norn. And there's also discussion about how like norns
(50:09):
are drawn from different species as well, like that could
have been an elf norn or something to that effect.
Speaker 3 (50:16):
Okay, so it was a bad norn, and not that
he was too nice and he was supposed to be
a bad friend to all his friends because he was faded.
Call back there, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:29):
Basically you can end up blaming it on a bureaucracy
of norns, like oh, sorry, you got a real bummer norn.
There happens. But the norns are closely associated with some
other spirits and Norse traditions. There's the philja, which are
like hereditary protective guardians, though apparently rarely seen except in
dreams or at the time of death. There are hamongjas,
(50:52):
which are like household guardian spirits, but also spirits of
luck and happiness. So indeed, beginning to get a sense of,
perhaps all told, a rather large bureaucracy of supernatural beings
that are attending to the direction of your life. And then,
of course we have the valkyries. The choosers of the
slain generally describe more as psychopomps than anything, you know,
(51:16):
they escort the souls of the dead onto Odin's valhalla,
you know, the portion of the afterlife that is reserved
for the valiant dead, where they get to keep fighting
and killing each other, but then also setting down having
a you know, whole bunch of drinks and it's lit
by the light of their swords.
Speaker 3 (51:35):
Only special certain dead go there.
Speaker 2 (51:37):
Yeah yeah, and you get to eat that magical boar
that never dies, so you know, good stuff. And of course,
the Valkyries are also closely associated with Hell, the name
given to both the underworld and the female deity that
rules over it, but she only rules over a portion
of the overall dead. Multiple gods, including Odin, oversee the
(51:59):
dead of different sorts, and there are different gatherers of
the dead we already discussed Ran, the ocean goddess who
collects the drown dead via a net and then presides
over them again. They are often said to be three
valkyries as well, with varied attributed names. Beautiful virgin female
warriors sometimes closed in feathers, and their name literally means
(52:22):
she who chooses the dead. Borges in the book The
Book of Imaginary Beings points out that the Valkyries were
invoked in Anglo Saxon spells against muscle pain, and in
medieval Christian England the term was apparently closely associated with
the witch just sewing you know, you know, under you.
In Christian times, house and many of these older concepts
(52:45):
become simplified and vilified in their treatment. But yeah, the
norns here do seem to fulfill a similar purpose in
Norse mythology, Like they are there at the beginning, deciding
more or less, like how things are going to turn
out for you? Like is what is the course of
(53:08):
your lives? And really both of these models, you know,
get down to some of those deep contemplations that our
ancestors had throughout their lives, just as we have them
throughout our lives, like why is my life the way
it is? Why why are my days numbered like they are?
And asking these same questions for everyone around them, like
why does this seemingly awful person just live forever doing
(53:31):
bad things whereas like the best of us are cut
down in their prime. That sort of thing. It's always
been a conundrum.
Speaker 3 (53:38):
Yeah, I guess the gears are kind of turning in
my head about what difference it makes when when fade
is personified versus just a process or a principle of
the universe, because you know, obviously you can think about
it as an impersonal force or just a process, a
natural balancing that occurs. Yeah, how is it different when
(53:59):
it's in a body? Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (54:03):
And in these cases, is particularly with the norns and
the fates, there is a sense that no matter how
nasty those scissors are that ultimately cut the life string,
they're not the only individual involved in the process. Like
they're just responding to the way the thread was measured out,
and the person who measured the thread out didn't actually
(54:24):
make the thread. So it does point seemingly in large
part to a more automaton view of death, and more
of an automaton death figure with less cruelty. But then
also room for it is in the Norse example, room
for bad norns, you know, room for situations where oh,
(54:46):
well you really you really did you know, get kind
of a you know, a Boem sentence there with this
particular reading. So again we generate these different ideas out
of contemplation of these largely unanswerable questions of fate and death.
(55:06):
All right, well, with that, we must draw out our
scissors and cut the string on this episode of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, but we're going to be back.
We're going to continue this series because there's so much
we haven't gotten into, so it's always difficult to say
how many more episodes will do. I figure we'll at
least do one more episode on anthropomorphic personifications of death,
(55:27):
maybe one more. Ultimately, we don't know how much thread
has been measured out for us here with this series.
Speaker 3 (55:34):
I guess we'll just have to find out.
Speaker 2 (55:36):
Yeah, all right, before we close out. Just reminder to
everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have short form episode on Wednesdays
and on Fridays. That's when we set aside most serious
concerns to just talk about a weird movie on Weird
House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (55:55):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.
Speaker 1 (56:17):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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