January 15, 2026 • 66 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, a 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 am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 4 (00:18):
And we're back with the fourth and final I think
is it the final for now?
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Par I mean, death is always final business. But I
don't know. We're gonna We're gonna see we have a
we have a fair amount of notes here, and it
kind of comes down to if we will get done
with them. In a way, it's kind of like the
the log. Once the log is burned to completion, then
it's over. But maybe we won't burn all of the log.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Ellieger there.
Speaker 4 (00:44):
Yeah, but I was gonna say this is the fourth
and potentially final part in our series on personifications of death,
when death becomes not not a process or an abstract concept,
but a person or an embodied character. Probably won't do
a full recap of what we covered in the last
episodes because it's been a lot of ground at this point.
(01:06):
If you are new to this series, you probably want
to go back and listen to the earlier episodes first.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeah, because we break down some basic categorizations and concepts
that we then returned back to again and again as
we break down other examples and so forth.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
So I flagged this when we left off at the
end of the last episode, but today I wanted to
come back and talk about a specific example of a
death personification that I found really interesting as I was
reading a paper about this character. Specifically, this is a
feminine death personification that is actually, according to some scholars,
(01:46):
the matron deity of one of the fastest growing new
religious movements in the Americas, and this figure is known
as Santemirte, which means Saint Death or Holy death in Spanish. Rob,
I've got some imagery for you to look at in
the outline. Here, would you say, in common appearance, a
(02:07):
fairly typical in some ways grim repress, a female grim reaper,
kind of a skeletal figure, clothed and enrobed in a way,
with a garment covering the head, kind of a veil
or a hood. In one representation we have here, she's
drawn with a halo around her head or at least
kind of an aura around the crown coming down.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
To the base of the head.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
And then in another representation she's actually quite colorful. You know,
she's decked out with a sort of rainbow back drop,
with a scythe and with some interesting objects in her hands.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Yeah. Yeah, that second image, you know, not surprising. I
think most of us familiar with the various colorful depictions
of death iconography in Mexican culture. But yeah, just a
quick glance at this character, you know what she's all about.
She's clearly some sort of an embodiment of death, and
there's a yeah, a sense of the weighing of the scales.
(03:04):
And you know, I don't know if we really mentioned
this or not, but the human skull in and of itself,
you know, is a very evocative image for a number
of reasons. You know, it's what's inside our head, that's
what we look like with no skin on our head.
But also it always appears to be grinning, you know,
(03:24):
it is. There is a it's easy to read the
skull as smiling, as if again there's a secret joke.
And we've already described what it means when death jokes.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Grinning or grimacing, I guess, but a certain gritted teeth expression, yeah,
either going through something difficult or trying to hold the
chuckle in. But yeah, so my main source on Santa
Morte Here is going to be a twenty twenty one
paper published in the journal Religions called syncredit Santamerte, Holy
(04:01):
Death and Religious Bricklage by a pair of scholars named
Kate Kingsbury and Our Andrew Chestnut. Kate Kingsbury is an
anthropologist affiliated with the University of British Columbia, and Our
Andrew Chestnut is a professor of Latin American history at
Virginia Commonwealth University, and at the time this paper was published,
(04:22):
the authors together explained they had fifteen years of cumulative
experience studying Santa Marte across different parts of the Americas.
So these are authors who have written a lot on
the Santa Marte figure and phenomenon. So, first of all,
who is Santa Marte. She is a Latin American folk
saint with devotees concentrated especially in Mexico, but in other
(04:47):
countries of North, Central and South America as well. So
a folk saint is a person or figure who many people,
especially within a Catholic influenced culture, consider holy, but who
has not been officially canonized.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
By the authorities of the Catholic Church.
Speaker 4 (05:07):
So Rob, you and I have actually talked about some
non official saints fairly recently. I think we talked about
Saint Swithin in English traditions.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
That's right. Yeah, and I believe they've been one or
two others. Yeah. I guess the thing about a folk
saint is it enough people make a case for it, bam,
folk saint. Like if enough people were saying Coffin Joe
is a saint, then we have to acknowledge the idea,
even if it is not approved by the Catholic Church.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
So, folk sainthood is recognized by the people, usually the
working classes, through a kind of emergent up from the
ground process. Folk saints can be either originally real people
who actually existed, or they can be legendary or mythical figures.
The people who believe in folk saints usually believe them
(05:57):
to be not only examples of holina, yes, but sources
of power, figures that possess supernatural powers and the ability
to provide blessings. And so despite not being formally recognized
by the Church and often being explicitly condemned by the Church,
(06:18):
the authors say that these folk saints are usually seen
as more relatable and with a greater ability to provide
healing and aid and comfort, especially to the people of
Latin American cultures, which the authors argue is in part
because the origins of these folk saints are typically closer
to the people in terms of time and space and
(06:41):
life experience than the origins of the canonized saints. Many
people in Latin American cultures, also, the authors say, prefer
folk saints to canonized saints, specifically because they exist outside
the sanction of the official church, and therefore their relationship,
(07:01):
you know, the people's relationship to the saint is kind
of freer. It is not mediated by the costs of
associating or going through the church, and it's not mediated
by the authority of a priest. So, for example, there's
no priest that can tell you what is and is
not an appropriate way to talk to or relate to
(07:21):
a folk saint like there would be in you know,
for official Catholic saints within the church.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
So in a way it's closer to the heart and
unperturbed by the intellects of others.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
So, for example, there's nobody telling you what it's appropriate
to ask for or how you need to ask that
you're doing it wrong. Yeah, I mean you could say
that the official church, and you know, I'm not trying
to make a judgment here, this is just this is
a common perception the official church is laiden with moral judgment.
Like what if I need a blessing, if I need
(07:56):
supernatural help with something, but from the church active what
if I am not asking for an appropriate goal, or
what if the church judges me to be in a
state of sin and you know, I show up saying
I need help with a problem, but from the church's
point of view, my problem is that I need to
repent and confess my sins before I come asking for help.
(08:19):
And so you know, there's just kind of you're at
an impasse there about like goals and priorities with the church,
but with a folk saint, you're not going to be
dealing with a hierarchy like that.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
The relation to the.
Speaker 4 (08:31):
Supernatural being is more on your own terms. So yeah,
So folk saints are often seen as in some ways better,
more miraculous, or more helpful than Catholic saints for these
multiple reasons, maybe cultural affinity. Their origins are closer in
cultural proximity and thus they're more relatable, and for reasons
of freedom. There's less restriction or instruction on how you're
(08:55):
supposed to relate to the saint. There's no implicit or
explicit judgment.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Folk saints, the.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
Authors say, often have a tragic death story, beginning as
real people who perished by violence or sometimes under the
oppression of authorities, or maybe in extreme poverty. They cite
the work of an anthropologist named Flores Matos, who calls
these figures the miraculous dead, and so they give one
example of another type of folk saint or miraculous dead
(09:24):
figure known of in Mexico, who is named Juan Saltados
and Wan Soldados is based on a soldier in Tijuana
who was said to have been framed for a horrible
crime and executed by firing squad in the nineteen thirties.
And then the story goes that after his death, his
ghost began to cry out from his grave to proclaim
(09:45):
his innocence, and the spirit of Juan Soldados started granting
people miracles, giving people miracles if they came to his
gravestone to ask for help, and a bunch of figures
like this exist with the understanding that it is so
thing about their tragic death and thus their relationship to
death that helps give them power to perform miracles. The
(10:09):
followers of Santa Morte often believe her to be the
most effective of these folk saints or miraculous dead, perhaps
because she's not just one of the miraculous dead, but
is the embodiment of death itself.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
So for listeners out there, go ahead, describe what does
she look like? How do we know her when we
see her?
Speaker 4 (10:31):
So we sort of alluded to this earlier, But she
takes the form of a female grim reaper or a
grim repress, said often to be based on a classic
Iberian grim repress figure called Laparca. So she's a grim
repress with a skeletal body and a skull face, usually
dressed in a long gown and a mantle meaning like
(10:53):
a cloak or a cape, often with a hood, and
the authors highlight that she has several characteristic items in
her hands in her left hand, usually a scythe. And
there's one note in the later in the paper where
the authors mention a common saying that wives whose husbands
had gone out roaming would would come back, would come
(11:16):
and ask Santa Marte to use her size to bring
errant husbands back. Home, so you can think of it
in that sense. It sounds almost not like a like
a blade or weapon, but like a shepherd's crook, you know,
pull them back. But I think it also has the
more common, you know, reaping imagery that we that we
just get from your classic Grim Reaper. And then so
(11:39):
that's her left hand. In her right hand she sometimes
has a globe like a representation of the planet Earth
or the scales of justice. She also has an animal companion,
which is an owl, and this could be for a
number of reasons. There are traditional associations between owls and
(11:59):
death in and some meso American religions. And then also
there is the association of the owl with wisdom in
a lot of traditions. And then to read here, I'm
going to read directly from Chestnut and Kingsbury about how
her name is put together. So they write quote in English,
she is called Saint Death or Holy Death. The name
(12:20):
Santa Muerte explicates her identity. In Spanish, Muerte means death.
Santa translates both as holy and as saint. But Santa,
it should be noted, is the female word for saint
in Spanish, and the saint is perceived by her followers
as of the female gender. She is a quote liminal, fierce,
(12:41):
feminine persona and is seen as an quote all powerful
and protecting mother who can solve all problems, who has
the power to.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
Give and take away.
Speaker 4 (12:53):
So this comes a bit back to when you were
talking about gender in the last episode, Rob. It seems
to me that Santa Morte is interesting because she is
one of these death figures that not only has a gender.
You know, you can imagine some death personifications that are
gender neutral or you can't really tell what gender they're
supposed to be, and then some some personifications have a
(13:17):
clearly intended gender, but maybe it's not necessarily supposed to
mean anything. But in this case, it seems like the
gendered embodiment is meaningful, Like she something about her being
death being a woman brings meaning to the relationship with her.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
So there may be some sort of stereotypical nurturing context
to her, comforting context to her. But then, as we've
been discussing, with room for other connotations as well.
Speaker 4 (13:45):
Yeah, I mean, as they say, I think the powerful
and protecting mother aspect of her is an important part
of what she is. So she's represented in all different
kinds of media. You can have pendance worn around the neck.
She might sometimes just be an image Jnan devotional candle,
or she can be in full sized statue form at
the head of a shrine. Believers will turn to her
(14:09):
for miracles and other aid, as you do with some
of these other folk. Saints are miraculous dead, and often
they believe she has the power to bring good health,
to bring success in love, to bring deliverance from money troubles,
and all other kinds of blessings. So it's not just
stuff that we think of as inherently connected to death.
(14:32):
She can bring boons of all sorts.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
That is interesting yet, because you might expect her powers
to be, you know, to borrow from dungeons and dragons,
spell classification. You might expect her to be a necromancy specialist,
you know, and all her abilities would be nechromatic in
one form or another. But yeah, once you're getting into
general blessings and financial boons, then you're in different territory.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
Now where does this interesting sort of wide ranging power
come from. We'll come back to that, because that's actually
a core part of what they argue in the paper.
I'm going to be focusing more on their general characterization
of Santa Marte, but they're also making an argument about
culturally where she comes from, so we'll come back to that.
Another thing that's important is that the authors note that
(15:17):
Santamerte has been grossly misrepresented by some sensationalist media reporting
that has treated her as some kind of Narco saint.
That's a term used to refer to her narco saint,
a sort of cult figure worshiped exclusively by criminals and
drug traffickers. The authors say this is not correct at all.
(15:40):
She's venerated by all kinds of people, especially by the
poor and by people without much individual access to power,
So it's not that she is never invoked by anybody
related to the drug trade or drug war. The authors
say that actually she is regularly supplicated by people on
both sides of the law within the drug war in Mexico.
(16:03):
But she also says that lots of people were turning
to Santa Marte for protection during the first year of
the COVID pandemic, and that she is widely seen as
a protector of women in places where there is a
special thread of gender based violence. The author is also
mentioned that there is you know, of course, no formal
authority or structure within the faith, so there's nothing like
(16:28):
the Catholic hierarchy. So you can have people kind of
striking out to honor her or relate to her in
whatever way they see best. So you get these chapels
and shrines that are sometimes opened and operated by independent
religious entrepreneurs, but a lot of the faith is actually
(16:48):
conducted in private, like in private homes and at family alters.
And because there are no formal rules, there are no structures,
there are no authorities. There's just great freedom in how
the faith of Santa Marte is practiced. And the authors
again I mentioned this a minute ago, but they identify
that freedom as a key part of the appeal. However,
(17:10):
so you know, that's sort of the heteropraxy aspect. There's
just a lot of diversity in how people honor and
relate to Santa Marte. But they also say there are
some common trends that they've identified in their study of
this phenomenon.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
So, first of.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
All, altars and chapels are important. Most devotees of Santa
Marte will visit the nearest chapel devoted to her, to
her at least like once a month, and so people
visit these chapels and they say prayers and leave offerings.
Lots of people have altars within their homes, often consisting
of like a small statue of the saint on a
(17:47):
table or a votive candle. And the offerings can take
a lot of forms. They might be foods, like chocolate
or other candy I've seen some. Sometimes fruits are given.
The offerings might be flowers. They could be alcoholic beverages
like beer or tequila. Sometimes it's cigarettes or other smokables.
(18:09):
There are bottles of water. Actually, the authors say quote
as the skeleton saint is said to be perpetually parched.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Everything she drinks it just goes right through.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:19):
No, I don't know exactly how to read the tone
on that phrase, but I think I take that as
there being a bit of playfulness in the relationship between
her devotees and her. But she's also she's commonly understood
as a folk saint of the powerless, of the marginalized
and oppressed, So the people with the least power, or
(18:40):
the people who live closest to meeting death are thought
to be especially within her domain. The author's cite previous
work by a scholar named Olaskyevitch Peralba, who argues that
she is appealing quote among liminal sectors of population that
deal with transitions and transgressions, such as people working on
(19:00):
the streets e g. Street vendors, criminals and prostitutes, migrants, inmates, policemen, troops,
prison guards, social workers, and lawyers. So it's interesting that
it's not just like a cohort of natural allies there.
You know, you have people in all different types of professions,
maybe on both sides of the law and so forth.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
But it's everybody on law and order, all the characters.
Speaker 4 (19:25):
But not just that. I mean also it's a lot
of connections to maybe danger or connections to what they
say again is transitions and transgressions, liminal spaces. And the
authors say also her appeal is fairly broad, so it's
not just that domain. They say that you will find
her devotees among people everyone from housewives to fishermen, they say,
(19:49):
but all kinds of people, especially the poor, who feel
less connection to the priesthood of the institutional church. And
the authors argue that her appeal in modern times extends
to so many people in part because of a pervasive
feeling of unsafety and a resulting metaphysics of disorder related
(20:12):
to the ongoing drug war. Of course, this effects not
just people involved in the drug trade or in fighting it,
but it involves a lot of innocent people caught in
the crossfire. And the authors argue that in this context,
for many people sort of within her domain, especially poor
people in certain parts of Mexico, for these people, living
(20:32):
entails a feeling of constantly standing up in the face
of death.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Quote.
Speaker 4 (20:39):
However, instead of standing up to death, many in Mexico
have instead entered into a religious relationship with death, wherein
she is imagined as possessing the supernatural puissance, meaning like
a power or strength to protect them from perishing. So
there's this belief, not necessarily that death is just a
(21:00):
bad thing to be protected from. There are elements of
that in the understanding, but it's also a power you
can appeal too to spare you and the people you love,
or to be redirected into a kind of general power
of blessing to bring you protection and boons in your life.
And so in this the authors invoke an idea of
(21:22):
a kind of interdependence between death and power. Just power
to act within reality.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Yeah, it comes back to, you know, a lot of
what we've been discussing here about how these dealing with death,
dealing with complex and semi chaotic or chaotic situations, violence
on a mass scale. You know, we can feel lost,
untethered and are you know, we have limited abilities to
(21:50):
make sense of it all, but we can reach out
to something. If we personify some of what's going on,
then we have something at least in our own minds
that we can deal with, that we can reach out to,
we can seek to appease, that we can seek the
guidance of, and so forth.
Speaker 4 (22:10):
Yeah, but especially interesting that it's not just in domains
related to death. That's like the thing that's most interesting
to me about this. So anyway, everything I've been talking
about so far is just sort of from the general
(22:32):
background sections of their paper. Actually, the main point that
they're arguing in this paper is they're making an interesting
argument about the origins and development of the Santamorte belief. Specifically,
the authors are making the claim that, in contrast to
some previous writing which they think over emphasized or exclusively
(22:55):
acknowledged the Catholic or European cultural roots of the deaths
ain't they say, In reality, Santa Morte is a syncretic figure.
A syncretic meaning a figure that emerges from the combination
or synthesis of elements from different cultures. In this case,
they're going to identify two main cultural inputs. One of
(23:16):
them is European Catholicism. It's the Catholic or Iberian grim Repress.
So this is a European and specifically Spanish Catholic moment
of death figure in female form, which was not a
god really as understood by the Christians, but it was
more of an image that served as a memento mori
or was a kind of teaching tool. So the image
(23:39):
reminds you that death is coming, and thus you need
to get right with Christ and confess right right.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
And as we're mentioning being not completely shackled the doctrine,
it does leave you open to interpret it and present
it in various ways throughout European literature.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
Yeah, so that's one input that they say. If you
just acknowledge that input, the Sentamorte belief doesn't make a
whole lot of sense. It's hard to make sense of
where a lot of its features come from. So they say, actually,
a huge input on it is pre Columbian indigenous thanatologies,
the death deities and other personifications of death from the
(24:21):
religions and cultures of pre Hispanic meso American peoples. And
then finally after this they also talk about this you
might have heard in the title there's the bricolage aspect.
They say that after this, the Senta morte belief continued to,
especially in recent years, accumulate elements from other sources, including
Afro Cuban, Santa Ria, Palomayumbe, and even.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
Wicca and New Age beliefs.
Speaker 4 (24:45):
But the main point I think they're making is that
you really can't understand how santamorte works today without understanding
the function of indigenous death deities in meso American religions,
which represent whole different ways of thinking about death compared
to European Catholic cultures. Specifically, these thanatologies in vision kind
(25:09):
of a more of a relationship between death and the
rest of life. I think a naive misinterpretation of this
reframing would be just that, oh, these meso American religions,
they didn't think death was bad, they thought death was good.
It's not exactly like that. I mean, in all cultures
you find religious expressions of aversion to death and people
(25:31):
wanting to find ways to put death off and other things.
But I think it is fair to say that as
opposed to the Catholic vision of life and death as
kind of binary opposite states of being, and the Catholic
vision of death is like a kid of a kind
of destruction that must be.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Avoided by salvation.
Speaker 4 (25:49):
In christ the meso American religious view of death, and
there's not just one, obviously, there's a diversity, but fairly
common among them in meso American religions is the idea
that death has some kind of more general power over
life and is related to birth and regenerative properties and
(26:12):
other kinds of good things in life, That in death
there is something cyclical and regenerative and life affirming.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Yeah, that life and death are linked, That the womb
and the tomb are linked. Yeah. We discussed some of
this already, about how even Mother Earth can come into
play in all of this, and it's not necessary. The
Catholic vision and the Christian tradition of it is a
little more set in stone, with some deviations as well.
Speaker 4 (26:42):
Okay, so I'm not going to have time to discuss
everything they get into in their paper here. It is
an interesting read if you want to go follow. Especially
they get into the whole history of how they think
the centimorte belief developed over time and more recent inputs
on it. But the main thing I wanted to talk
about from it here is their discussion of the different
views of the power of death, where the where death's
(27:05):
power comes from, and then also a little bit about
what the indigenous religious inputs on santamorte might be. So
first of all, again you've got this distinction between the
European Catholic understanding of death, which tends to be more
often about destruction, death as destruction and death as finality
(27:29):
in a sense of finality as a kind of finality
that can be averted through you know, faith in Christ.
But otherwise it's the hammer comes down and its finality.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
And then the.
Speaker 4 (27:39):
Destruction has associations of chaos, disorder, violence, negativity, pain, and sacrilege.
And again you find these negative elements of association with
death in other cultures too.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
But the authors argue.
Speaker 4 (27:53):
That in many of these different cultural contexts, death just
is believed to have more power over life, and not
just the power to end or destroy life, but to
influence and guide it.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
In many ways.
Speaker 4 (28:08):
And they have a kind of interesting theory about why
that would be. Why would death have any power over
like whether you could be healed from a sickness or
have success in love, or could you know, have material gains,
whether you know you get stuff from the hunt, or
you know you make money, or any of these things
people want. They say, you know, death is associated with
what they call liminal forces, forces having to do with
(28:32):
crossing a threshold from one thing to another or making
a transition from one thing to another. They say, actually
death is the ultimate and the most mysterious transition in life.
It's the one where we genuinely can't see what's on
the other side, at least for us, is there nothing?
Is there something? If there is something, what is it?
(28:53):
And so because liminal stages are so powerful, they're very
powerful and emotionally charged in our lives. Like if you
think about a lot of the most emotionally important and
you know, causally crucial things in our lives, they're these
things we think of as liminal stages or turning points. Birth, death,
(29:17):
rights of passage, and initiation, marriage, stuff like that. These
are the points where we transition into a new phase
of life, and because of that, they tend to be
the subject of a lot of prayer and ritual because
we correctly identify them as literal, causal turning points, like
they're the most important moments in our lives and they
(29:38):
determine the course of the future. And thus, in many cultures,
including these pre Hispanic meso American cultures, death was often
associated with the power to renew and restore life. Life
is guided by these very powerful liminal points, these transition points,
and death is the most powerful of them all. So
(29:58):
that's how I understand the argument they're making that it
has this association with liminality, the changes or the turning
points in life, and this association with liminality gives death
its perceived power over all important things in life, or
at least most important things in life. And then there's
another point they make that I think is interesting. They
(30:21):
say that death this is just a way that these
religious beliefs tend to manifest within culture. Death seems to
have more power over every aspect of life. If you
feel that you live your life in close proximity to death.
So if real danger is a big part of your
(30:42):
everyday experience, then a deity of death comes to feel
more like it has power over everything you do. Another
interesting note on the power of death, the authors cite
an interview with a devote of Santa Marte named Zenia,
who is asked why she worshiped Santamorte and she said,
(31:03):
and this is a translation from the Spanish. In translation,
she says, because the only thing that is certain is death. Interesting. So,
I don't know if I'm interpreting this right, but the
way I took that meaning, it's kind of that death
has undeniable power because unlike other spiritual entities, which you know,
(31:23):
you name another god or saint, you're kind of having
to put some faith in the idea that they have power.
With death, There's no question about it. You absolutely know
that it's real and it will be a factor in
your life. And that kind of certainty of real power
in the world can get mapped onto this embodiment of
(31:45):
the thing.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
Does that make sense?
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean there's so many other religious concepts,
personified or non personified, that are yeah, harder to grasp
and maybe more of a even more of an intellectual
pursuit to try and understand like some sort of you know,
deep theological concept. But yeah, death is inevitable, and not
(32:09):
only as the final destination if you will have our
own life, but as something that will occur multiple times
within proximity to our own life. We will experience it,
we will feel it. It has an absolute reality, and yeah,
as we experience the reality of death, it does kind
of take shape like we have Again, we have all
(32:32):
these personifications in our culture. And if you have a
dominant personification like this that is just sort of like
floating there, then yeah, the experience, the real experience of death,
I can imagine, might bring you closer to it and
realize like this, you know, if this entity has dominion
over this thing that I feel like it's power, then
is something I can feel as well.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (32:54):
Yeah, So anyway, I want to get on just briefly
to talk a bit about specifics of where they think
this comes from, examples of where they think senta morte
comes from, in the branch feeding into it that comes
from indigenous traditions. So they talk about some broad trends
in how death was most often spoken of in preconquest
(33:17):
Mexico as far as we know. They say that in
preconquest Mexican cultures, death was not as it was in
the European context, thought of merely as the extinction or
opposite of life. It was widely associated with, as we've said, regeneration.
The symbols of death in pre Hispanic indigenous cultures include
(33:39):
often themes of fecundity, sexuality, and rebirth, so you have healing,
life giving, procreative properties. And they also say that Mesoamerican
death deities were often not exactly gods and goddesses, but
in the author's words quote conceptualized as representing or embodying
(34:01):
the vital force of death, which vital force of death
that almost sounds like a oxymoron, right, is the life
force of death. But that is sort of what they
really were. It's hard, you know, to maybe identify with
that from the outside, but there is a life force
of death, and that is what they embody within their person.
(34:22):
So they sometimes symbolized the places where the dead dwell,
and they sometimes acted as psychopomps, which we've talked about
in other episodes of this, so they might guide the
souls or the dead in some form to their place
of dwelling after death. But they also had powers especially
related to death, not just to cause death, but to
(34:42):
do the opposite, so you could persuade them to delay
death or to heal you in sick or wounded. And
the authors bring up a pair of Aztec death deities.
I apologize if I get the pronunciation wrong here, but
they are mik Lantakoutli and mikta Kasiwatum. These are the
male and female male deities associated with death and the underworld.
(35:04):
And the authors say that in pre Hispanic times their
domain was not exclusively death, so you would possibly approach
them for blessings having to do with the with preservation
and enrichment of life. And in Aztec art they are
associated with the imagery of regeneration, birth, sex, and fecundity.
(35:25):
I believe the female deity here, miktakasi Wato, is often
represented as as pregnant. Actually, so these these images include
everything from sexual penetration to pregnancy and lactation.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
They quote a couple of other scholars.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
Who have an idea about the origins of this connection,
so they say quote it is assumed by McCafferty and
Carrasco that this is related to the and then they
begin to quote. These authors quote regenerative power of bones
as seeds, which which is evident in the journey of
Ketzlkowat to the world of the dead to steal the
(36:05):
bones from which human beings.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
Would be created.
Speaker 4 (36:09):
So there's a like if bones are seeds, that is
a quite literal connection between death and both both. I
meant to say birth and growth, but both it is both.
The authors discuss how before the Spanish Conquest, the female
death deity miktakasi Watt presided over a roughly month long
(36:30):
celebration of the beloved dead, which took place in the summer,
and this was a time when you would remember ancestors
and you would remember family members you had lost. And
then after the Spanish conquest, as part of the imposition
of Christianity by force, the authors say, quote, the Catholic
Church exercised Miktakasiwat and moved the date to coincide with
(36:55):
All Saints Day, the first of November, which is also
known in Mexico as Day of the Innocence for its
association with masses focusing on deceased infants and children, and
All Souls Day the second of November, where the focus
is on departed adults. So there's this attempt by the
Catholic Church to kind of hammer the original festival into
(37:16):
shape and make it a part of a Catholic celebration
instead of the traditional celebration. However, interestingly, for many followers
of Santa Morte, the Second Day of the Dead has
become the Skeleton Saints feast day, and the Church, they say,
has tried to suppress this because the Catholic Church says,
(37:36):
this is not an approved saint.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
You know, you should not be making.
Speaker 4 (37:39):
This folk saint part of your celebrations. They would just
want to keep the focus on the church sanctioned remembrance
of lost loved ones. But the presence of Saint Death
has not gone away. And the authors note that while
they are intentionally trying to highlight the influence of Miktakasi
Watt in those traditions on the evolution of to Morte,
(38:01):
that is not the only.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
Religion.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
It's not only in as Tech religion that you find
these regenerative or life giving powers related to death deities.
You'll apparently find this association in traditions of the Mishtech
and in the Maya. So one example they bring up
is a Mishtech death deity named the Lady nine Grass,
which is portrayed in a particular set of cotticies with
(38:27):
first of all, a naked, hinged jaw like you'd see
on a skeletal figure, so kind of a skeletal grim
reaper type face. But also so she's not dressed in
a dark hood with a scythe she is in a
blouse like garment that you'd normally see worn by the vibrant,
life giving female deities in post classic Mexican art. So
(38:49):
you've got skull like imagery and life giving or life
affirming imagery in the same figure. And so this seems
again to be in line with beliefs about death as
a transition to cyclical rebirth or a figure containing powers
of states of change. And finally, I just want to
mention they talk a bit about the contestation over the
(39:09):
origins of Santa Marte. So versions of Santa Marte go
back to the colonial period, but there's no consensus about
exactly where Santa Marte comes from. That's why you get
these different theories abounding. So some argue that she is
just a version of the grim reapress La Parca brought
from the Iberian traditions and made into a deity. But
(39:31):
the authors here again argue that this theory doesn't really
make sense because, for one thing, the grim Reaper was
not venerated and did not provide blessings in a Catholic context.
It was just an image to teach about death and
to remind you, momento moray, remind you that death is coming.
Christ is the only salvation.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
You know.
Speaker 4 (39:51):
It had different cultural values, but none of them were like,
it's here to help you out and give you blessings
if you make an offering.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Yeah, it wasn't implied that you should reach out to
this individual. Right.
Speaker 4 (40:02):
Yeah, so that doesn't make sense, they say, But it
does make sense as a sort of contribution of one
half of the origin is like a contribution of grim
Reaper imagery. They say, it makes sense if you also
incorporate the very important influence of indigenous death deities, which
were venerated and did provide blessings having to do with life.
(40:26):
And then, finally, to quote from the authors quote, since
many turned to death deities for their earthly needs, some
indigenous groups, as archives prove, took the Grim Reaper for
a saint. Since the Grim Reaper was often referred to
in connection to Una Santa Marte, a holy Death, the
figure of Death was understood to be miraculous, much like
(40:48):
the other saints that the Catholic Church had brought over
to New Spain, such as Santa Marta. Believing Death was
a saint in its own right, some began worshiping it.
This is the case for the Highland Maya in the
state of Chiapas and Guatemala, and the Guarini in Argentina
and Paraguay. So yeah, so there's this idea that that's
(41:09):
their argument about the origins. I guess we don't know
for sure exactly what the origins are, and they highlight
that that it's somewhat obscure, you know, this versions of
this figure popping up hundreds of years ago, and then
it kind of comes in and out of fashion for
a long time. It seems to be it is only
in secret or in hiding that Santa Marte is honored,
and in recent decades it has become much more open,
(41:32):
you know, an there's open honoring of Santa Marte. However
much the church tries to say like no don't do that.
That's not part of Catholicism.
Speaker 3 (41:40):
But yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 4 (41:41):
I feel like really interesting figure, really interesting history, and
I love thinking about where this comes from, the idea
that death is not just about death, that the embodiment
of death has domain over all of life.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Yeah, there's so many interesting angles to this, but I
love how there does seem to be a path of
desire here. You know, she exists slightly outside of of
of the actual, you know, dogmatic Catholic belief system, but
clearly there is a great need for her, and people
(42:20):
are drawn to the powers associated with her into and
into that limital space that she occupies. All right, Well,
I'm gonna turn over to a couple of other concepts here.
(42:42):
In both of these cases, I'm not introducing entirely new
concepts to our discussion, but kind of building on things
we've been discussing already. And first of all, I want
to just take a few moments to talk about this
idea of death entities is not merely an idea, you know,
but also an experience one might have. Because to be clear,
(43:07):
they don't have to be a death entity, a grim
reaper or an angel of death or any of these things.
They don't have to be perceived as anything approach approaching
literal incarnations or functional supernatural entities to have enormous cultural
value obviously, but we do have to acknowledge that they
certainly can be perceived and experienced as entities due to
(43:28):
a number of factors. And some of these are things
we've touched on over the years on the show, because
we often talk about things that may be described as
paranormal experiences and when you dig underneath them, like for
us anyway, the really fascinating part is figuring out like
how this actually emerges within the natural world, within the
(43:49):
inner workings of our mind and so forth. So I'm
going to just run through a few of these as
I related via my own experience in the last episode.
Dream states are a huge factor, sometimes enhanced by environment, anxiety,
and the effects of certain medications, including anesthesia meds, and
there have been many reports of people experiencing impactful visions
(44:11):
of departed loved ones under anesthesia. Others report angels, demons,
and death entities are certainly on the menu as well. Also,
we can have various entities come into play via tempo
varietal junction disruptions TPJ disruptions, So due to trauma, illness,
or even electrical stimulation, this can result in the brain
(44:35):
interpreting its own signals is that of some sort of
an other. As we've mentioned as well on the show,
we're hardwired not to contemplate the enormity of death, but
rather for more localized social interactions as social animals. So
we've also evolved something known as agent detection as a
survival strategy, and this is tied in with something we've
(44:58):
talked about in the show a lot before as well,
idea of false positives. You know, we presume tigers to
be where there are no tigers because if you think
of tigers everywhere, then you have a survival advantage over
people who don't think they are tigers anywhere. That sort
of thing, Right.
Speaker 4 (45:15):
At some point you hit the point of diminishing returns
for that payoff, Like you can be too paranoid, but
generally nature selects for having greater amounts of fear and caution.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
Yeah yeah, But alongside this, it can mean more than
just seeing a threat where there isn't one. It can
mean seeing a will where there isn't one. So the
argument is that we possess a hyperactive agent detection device
or had D or hat I guess coined I believe
by cognitive psychologists Justin L. Barrett around the year two thousand.
(45:47):
We tend to assume patterns have intent, and it might
just underlie just about every god, demi god, and magical
creature we've ever dreamed up. I feel like, for me,
like the simple version of this is and this is
in a way, this is like childishness on my part,
but I imagine many of you have done the same.
You stub your toe, You might very on the say
(46:08):
the coffee table. You might very well blame the coffee table,
curse the coffee table as an entity that has hurt you.
Speaker 3 (46:14):
Why did it do that to me?
Speaker 2 (46:15):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (46:17):
Yeah, this.
Speaker 4 (46:18):
For a while, the hyperactive agency detection device has been
one of the theories kicking around about the the you know,
the biological origins of religion and beliefs in magic and
things like that. It's possible that this is in part
where religious beliefs come from. We don't really know one
way or another, whether you know, it's hard to prove that,
but either way, I do think it's an interesting idea,
(46:40):
and I think it's hard to deny that there is
something like this at work, whether or not it's actually
the correct cognitive explanation for the origin of religion and
human history. It's clear something like this is at work
within us, Like we we believe that there are animals
or people or things that act with intentions like animals
(47:03):
or people in situations where there are not all the time.
Speaker 2 (47:06):
Yeah, and even if it's not the primary underlying mechanism here,
I feel like it's got to be in the mix, right, Yeah,
let's see. There's also the complex area of near death experience. Again,
we're often talking about entities that are said to or
believe to come into play during that liminal transitional phase
(47:32):
between death and whatever comes after. And so yeah, near
death experiences. This is a topic undo itself, but basically,
the neurochemical state of the dying brain makes us more
susceptible to these sorts of images, and there is nothing
paranormal about near death experiences twenty eleven by Dean Mobs
(47:52):
and Carolyn Watt. This is and Trends and Cognitive science
that they argue that the neurochemical state of the dying
brain mirror that of individuals on disassociative anesthetics, which frequently
produce anthropomorphic hallucinations and out of body experiences. And finally,
in a way that I think is equally profound as
(48:13):
any of these, if not more so, is another concept
we've touched on before, and that is that the brain
does not just produce random static during a crisis. It
uses top down processing to make sense of internal chaos.
So there will be all these gaps in our understanding
of what's happening, and our mind draws on relevant cultural
symbols and scripts to piece it all together. And that
(48:37):
script might be alien abduction, that script might be angel visitation,
it might be the fair folk who live unseen in
the woods. And the death entity is also a highly
accessible symbol that is never that far away from us.
Speaker 3 (48:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
So anyway, just food for thought here as we're thinking
about death. And again, I don't want to imply that
every manifestation of death, every personification of death is indeed
need to be a case where Okay, people believe they
see this thing when they're close, or they see this
thing near a dying person. That is sometimes the case,
(49:15):
but these concepts, these personifications are just as potent and
useful without that being in play.
Speaker 4 (49:21):
Oh No, it's a great distinction, because I think the
majority of what we've been talking about has been artistic representation.
You know, it's been artistic or deliberate imagination exercises things
like that, or just literature, you know, cases where people
are talking about how they imagine death. It's a quite
(49:42):
different thing to believe. You see someone you know that, like,
where does that come from? That seems to maybe arise
by somewhat different pathways, maybe have somewhat different triggers than
say a deliberate imaginative exercise where you're trying to come
up with imagery for a painting, or a psychologist is
sitting you down and asking you to think.
Speaker 3 (50:03):
What does death look like to you?
Speaker 4 (50:05):
Yeah, you might find out in an experience that death
looks different than you thought you would think.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
Yeah. Yeah, And it is interesting how like we may
summon this personification in our mind as part of like
the overarching human attempt to understand something as impactful and
traumatic and transitional as death in our own life or
in the lives of others, and then potentially have a
(50:32):
situation where then you see or experience that manifestation as well. Now,
for the rest of the episode. Here I wanted to
follow up on another specific example of an anthropomorphic personification
of death, and that is the Valkyries. We want to
come back to the Valkyries here, so on discord email
(50:59):
us if you want to link to join the stuff
to blow your mind. Discord Server. A listener by the
name of Gorpi wrote in and highly recommended that we
come back to the Valkyries and include mention of a
particular Skaldic poem. It's included in chapter one fifty seven
of the Nile Saga. I'm going to probably butcher this pronunciation,
(51:20):
but is It is titled dar Ratha the Song of
the Spear, and Gorpi says that it contains quote the
most metal description of fate being woven, and I agree,
boy does it. Ever let's hear it all right. So
I have to do some setup first, because it's not
(51:41):
going to necessarily make sense to anyone out there who
doesn't isn't already boned up on the loom or know
about weaving via allum. It's going to entail a number
of technology references to the loomb, specifically to the warp
weighted loom. This is an upright loom that was standard
for the day, you know, back back in the days
(52:03):
of the Viking sagas. So in order to get just
how metal this is, you're gonna have to learn a
little bit about textile crafting terminology. Okay, all right, so
I'm gonna bust out some terminology here. So first of all,
what is the warp? I know it sounds magical and
and already a little metal.
Speaker 4 (52:22):
But wait a minute, Rob, I'm sorry, is your reference
point for this warhammer?
Speaker 2 (52:27):
It is?
Speaker 4 (52:27):
Yes, okay, I thought I saw that in your eye.
Speaker 2 (52:30):
Yeah, I mean it could be you know, it could
also be warp records. You know, they're different, different uses
of the term. But within the world of the loom,
the warp is a set of lengthwise yarns stretched tightly
across the loom before the weaving begins. Then you also
have the weft or wolf. This is a set of
horizontal or crosswise threads that are woven over and under
(52:53):
the vertical warp threads to create a piece of fabric.
Up next, we have the headle. These are small or
strings with a hole or eye in the middle. Each
individual warp thread is threaded through one heddle, and when
the headles are lifted or lower, they pull the warp
threads with them to create a gap called a shed.
All right, we also have heddle weights. These are small,
(53:14):
heavy It's like a small heavy metal rod or weights
attached to the bottom of an individual heddle. We have
a headle rod. This is used to lift specific warp
threads to create an opening. And then we have shuttles.
These are the tools used to pass the weft or
the wolf through the warp. Okay, so I actually know
(53:34):
several loom enthusiasts in real life, but I've never discussed
the use of the loom with them, so I almost
pretty much all this terminology was new to me. I
know we have some loom users out there, just it
has to be the case. So maybe y'all can throw
in on this later on in a listener Mail episode.
(53:55):
But again, the idea here is that while many of
us have no clue how this technology works or or
what everything is called, this was an essential piece of
technology of the day, and as clearly illustrated when I'm
about to read it details, you know, its details were
culturally relevant, kind of like how so much computer and
internet terminology is found in our daily speech today, and
(54:17):
I included an image of this for you, Joe, to
look at. I think maybe this might clarify some of
the ideas here.
Speaker 4 (54:26):
I'm sorry, I'm not you might clarify, but it's just
like a thing that I have no familiarity with, and
it's like tons of parts.
Speaker 2 (54:33):
Yeah, yeah, all right, so I'm going to read here.
I'll also add that this poem is said to concern
the Battle of Klundtarf in ten fourteen CE. And yeah,
this is the translation from M. Magnusen and H. Paulson
from nineteen sixty seven. Blood rains from the cloudy web
(54:58):
on the broad loom of slaughter. The web of man
gray as armor is now being woven. The Valkyries will
cross it with a crimson weft. The warp is made
of human entrails. Human heads are used as the hadel weights.
The hatel rods are blood wet spears, the shafts are
(55:18):
iron bound, and arrows are the shuttles. With swords, we
will weave this web of battle. The Valkyries go weaving
with drawn, swords killed and hothriml sangrid and svapal spears
will shatter, shields will splinter swords will gnaw like wolves
through armor. Let us now wind the web of war
(55:41):
which the young King once waged. Let us advance and
weigh through the ranks where friends of ours are exchanging blows.
And I'm going to skip a bit at this point,
but we do indeed continue to wind the web of war. Here,
as our Scott Baker would put it, death comes spiraling down.
But then I'm going to pick back up at the end.
Here it is horrible now to look around as a
(56:02):
blood red cloud darkens the sky. The heavens are stained
with the blood of men. As the Valkyries sing their song,
we sang well victory songs for the young King. Hail
to our singing. Let him who listens to our valkyrie
song learn it well and tell it to others. Let
us ride our horses hard on bare backs with swords unsheathed,
(56:23):
away from here. So I think you'd agree, Joe, pretty metal.
Speaker 4 (56:28):
That is intense. I like how the intensity is applied
to the act of making textiles.
Speaker 2 (56:37):
Yeah, yeah, which you would normally think this is something
that could never harm us, would never be something that
would entail intrails and blood and splintered bodies. But it
goes back to what we were talking about earlier with
the muses, you know, and depending on the technological metaphor
in order to sort of make sense of how life
(56:58):
comes together, how long it lasts, and how it ends.
Speaker 4 (57:02):
Yeah, I mean this does. I don't know, maybe I'm
wrong about this, but this does at least suggest the
idea of, whereas the usual technological metaphor of death is
one of cutting, severing, reducing, destroying, that this is a
productive death enterprise.
Speaker 2 (57:22):
Yeah. Which I think that comes down to the idea
that it's attempting to help us understand the battle and
the battle field. So the valkyries here are obviously creating
no mere cloth. They are weaving the war winning wolf,
a supernatural tapestry that ensures the king's victory or defeat.
(57:44):
So once more, it's a textile product of destiny like
we've discussed before, while also standing as a powerful metaphor
for the battlefield itself, a place of chaos, of death,
of strategy and will as well as fate and destiny.
And when everything settles, the blood, the dust, the entrails,
(58:04):
like some sort of destiny will be achieved, like a
king will rise or a king will fall. Something will
have changed now in thinking about this, thinking about this
(58:25):
idea though, of the valkyries, the choosers of the slain,
wheeling over the battlefield like carrion birds, I'm reminded once
more of the idea of reference in Herzog's Psyche and
Death that the more archaic death demons in human traditions
are or more pure animal forms, such as wolves, snakes, horses,
and of course birds. And of these wolves and vultures
(58:47):
are exactly the sorts of creatures that would help themselves
to the dead and dying on a battlefield, that could
conceivably like physically visit you as you are on the
threshold of death, not to do anything supernatural, but to
you know, wait for you to expire, or maybe get
in a little early on the.
Speaker 4 (59:04):
Goods, to exhibit the virtuars of patients.
Speaker 2 (59:07):
Yes, and it's interesting too that arguably one of the
earliest known depictions of a personification of death is that
of a gigantic black vulture like birds that's swarming or
birds swarming over a headless human corpse. And these are
depicted on the seventh century BCE paintings at Chatilhuyuk in Anatolia,
(59:30):
and it's been proposed that headless remains discovered at this
location actual headless remains point to some sort of ritual
defleshing of the dead prior to their burial, which might
be another angle on the significance of birds in practices
like this, lining up with practices like exposure or sky burial,
(59:53):
which we see practice into the modern era, where generally
in places where bodies cannot be buried all that easily,
or maybe cannot be burd learned all that easily. One
way of returning them to the natural cycle of things
is to allow birds to feast on the soft tissues
and then you can do what you need to do
with the bones. So there's obviously plenty of symbolic weight
(01:00:15):
to throw around with all this. But you know, birds
sailing from above coming down to visit the dead and
the dying, You know what are they doing? Yes, they're
probably coming down to eat some eyeballs and so forth,
But more on the mystical realm of things? Are they
death dealers? Are they psychopomps? And so forth? And so
(01:00:35):
these various aspects are combined with the feminine form to
varying degrees to bring us the likes of the valkyries,
which again are sometimes said to be clothed in feathers,
as well as the cares or the cares of Greek tradition.
And you know, we might be tempted to describe them
as harpy like, and we've discussed harpies on the show before,
(01:00:56):
but I just want to throw in that harpies are
more closely associated as personification, are more closely understood as
personifications wind so a different personification going on there in
its origin. But the keras Uh were the daughters of
Nicks where to understand the goddess of night, and they were.
(01:01:16):
They're often described as death fates and that hover over
the battlefield, deciding who will fall and or looking to
exact a fate already decided by some higher deity, and
then swooping down upon the dying to await their death
so they can drag their soul into the afterlife. So
they are scavenger like fearsome creatures of doom.
Speaker 4 (01:01:38):
So but that's interesting because they combine, uh, you know,
the pre death selection and the psychopomp role.
Speaker 2 (01:01:47):
Yeah, but not in a good way. They're more in
the drag you to hell kind of a realm with psychopomp.
Not the come, gentle traveler, I see that you are lost,
let me help you. They're more like I'm going to
grab you by the tendon and rag you into eightes. Now,
there's a Greek epic poem attributed to Hesiod titled The
Shield of Heracles, and it includes an awesome description of
(01:02:12):
the keras here, and I should mention that not every
translation of this poem actually keeps the word keras. Some
use other words to describe them, and sometimes it's been
argue that, well, there's not really an appropriate English language
word for this sort of thing. But I'm going to
read from the nineteen fifty nine Richard Lattimore translation, and
(01:02:35):
it puts it like this. And men, the seniors on
whom old age had seized already, were sitting assembled outside
the gates and holding up their hands to the immortal gods,
being in fear for the sake of their children. And these,
for their part, were fighting their battle. And where they
were the spirits of death, dark colored and clattering, their
(01:02:57):
white teeth, deadly faced, grim glaring, bloody and unapproachable. We're
fighting over the fallen men, all of them rushing forward
to drink of the black blood, and each as soon
as she had snatched a man down already or just
dropping from a wound, would hook her great claws about
his body while his soul went down to the realm
(01:03:19):
of hades and cold tartarus. And then the spirits had
sated their senses on the blood of men's slaughter, they
would throw what was left behind them and go storming
back into the battle clamor and the struggle.
Speaker 4 (01:03:33):
Okay, so quite predatory vision there.
Speaker 2 (01:03:36):
Yeah, so there's still you know, death selectors in the
valkyrie s. But whereas the Valkyries are going to escort
you to a valhalla and are ultimately seen as in
a way deliverers like mission accomplished, You've done your part
and now you know, just reward. Yeah, this is the opposite.
But it's interesting how many things they have in common otherwise,
(01:04:00):
and you know, we might wonder, you know, to what,
to what extent they are partially based on observations of
raptors feasting on the dead following battles throughout human history,
I would say that they do not. They certainly don't
feel like you should worship them. I don't and I
haven't seen any any suggestions that one should.
Speaker 3 (01:04:25):
They're not going to do much good for you.
Speaker 2 (01:04:27):
Yeah, they're they're doing their job, they're enjoying it. Sounds
like a little bit too much, but I don't know
they're getting it done. All right. Well, I think we're
going to go ahead and close up this episode, perhaps
close up the series. I'm not sure we're going to
leave it slightly open ended. Maybe we should leave it
open ended in the long term, because I don't want
(01:04:50):
death to think that we're we're done discussing it, that
this is finished. So yeah, I'm going to say officially
open ended. We may come back next episode, We come
back years from now, so we should be permitted to
flourish in case that is the option we choose to pursue.
Speaker 3 (01:05:10):
But we will send our messengers ahead of us.
Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
Yes, yes, no doubt. All right. Just a 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, short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays.
We set aside most serious concerns just talk about a
weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 4 (01:05:30):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (01:05:52):
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, a 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 am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 4 (00:18):
And we're back with the fourth and final I think
is it the final for now?
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Par I mean, death is always final business. But I
don't know. We're gonna We're gonna see we have a
we have a fair amount of notes here, and it
kind of comes down to if we will get done
with them. In a way, it's kind of like the
the log. Once the log is burned to completion, then
it's over. But maybe we won't burn all of the log.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Ellieger there.
Speaker 4 (00:44):
Yeah, but I was gonna say this is the fourth
and potentially final part in our series on personifications of death,
when death becomes not not a process or an abstract concept,
but a person or an embodied character. Probably won't do
a full recap of what we covered in the last
episodes because it's been a lot of ground at this point.
(01:06):
If you are new to this series, you probably want
to go back and listen to the earlier episodes first.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeah, because we break down some basic categorizations and concepts
that we then returned back to again and again as
we break down other examples and so forth.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
So I flagged this when we left off at the
end of the last episode, but today I wanted to
come back and talk about a specific example of a
death personification that I found really interesting as I was
reading a paper about this character. Specifically, this is a
feminine death personification that is actually, according to some scholars,
(01:46):
the matron deity of one of the fastest growing new
religious movements in the Americas, and this figure is known
as Santemirte, which means Saint Death or Holy death in Spanish. Rob,
I've got some imagery for you to look at in
the outline. Here, would you say, in common appearance, a
(02:07):
fairly typical in some ways grim repress, a female grim reaper,
kind of a skeletal figure, clothed and enrobed in a way,
with a garment covering the head, kind of a veil
or a hood. In one representation we have here, she's
drawn with a halo around her head or at least
kind of an aura around the crown coming down.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
To the base of the head.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
And then in another representation she's actually quite colorful. You know,
she's decked out with a sort of rainbow back drop,
with a scythe and with some interesting objects in her hands.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Yeah. Yeah, that second image, you know, not surprising. I
think most of us familiar with the various colorful depictions
of death iconography in Mexican culture. But yeah, just a
quick glance at this character, you know what she's all about.
She's clearly some sort of an embodiment of death, and
there's a yeah, a sense of the weighing of the scales.
(03:04):
And you know, I don't know if we really mentioned
this or not, but the human skull in and of itself,
you know, is a very evocative image for a number
of reasons. You know, it's what's inside our head, that's
what we look like with no skin on our head.
But also it always appears to be grinning, you know,
(03:24):
it is. There is a it's easy to read the
skull as smiling, as if again there's a secret joke.
And we've already described what it means when death jokes.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Grinning or grimacing, I guess, but a certain gritted teeth expression, yeah,
either going through something difficult or trying to hold the
chuckle in. But yeah, so my main source on Santa
Morte Here is going to be a twenty twenty one
paper published in the journal Religions called syncredit Santamerte, Holy
(04:01):
Death and Religious Bricklage by a pair of scholars named
Kate Kingsbury and Our Andrew Chestnut. Kate Kingsbury is an
anthropologist affiliated with the University of British Columbia, and Our
Andrew Chestnut is a professor of Latin American history at
Virginia Commonwealth University, and at the time this paper was published,
(04:22):
the authors together explained they had fifteen years of cumulative
experience studying Santa Marte across different parts of the Americas.
So these are authors who have written a lot on
the Santa Marte figure and phenomenon. So, first of all,
who is Santa Marte. She is a Latin American folk
saint with devotees concentrated especially in Mexico, but in other
(04:47):
countries of North, Central and South America as well. So
a folk saint is a person or figure who many people,
especially within a Catholic influenced culture, consider holy, but who
has not been officially canonized.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
By the authorities of the Catholic Church.
Speaker 4 (05:07):
So Rob, you and I have actually talked about some
non official saints fairly recently. I think we talked about
Saint Swithin in English traditions.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
That's right. Yeah, and I believe they've been one or
two others. Yeah. I guess the thing about a folk
saint is it enough people make a case for it, bam,
folk saint. Like if enough people were saying Coffin Joe
is a saint, then we have to acknowledge the idea,
even if it is not approved by the Catholic Church.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
So, folk sainthood is recognized by the people, usually the
working classes, through a kind of emergent up from the
ground process. Folk saints can be either originally real people
who actually existed, or they can be legendary or mythical figures.
The people who believe in folk saints usually believe them
(05:57):
to be not only examples of holina, yes, but sources
of power, figures that possess supernatural powers and the ability
to provide blessings. And so despite not being formally recognized
by the Church and often being explicitly condemned by the Church,
(06:18):
the authors say that these folk saints are usually seen
as more relatable and with a greater ability to provide
healing and aid and comfort, especially to the people of
Latin American cultures, which the authors argue is in part
because the origins of these folk saints are typically closer
to the people in terms of time and space and
(06:41):
life experience than the origins of the canonized saints. Many
people in Latin American cultures, also, the authors say, prefer
folk saints to canonized saints, specifically because they exist outside
the sanction of the official church, and therefore their relationship,
(07:01):
you know, the people's relationship to the saint is kind
of freer. It is not mediated by the costs of
associating or going through the church, and it's not mediated
by the authority of a priest. So, for example, there's
no priest that can tell you what is and is
not an appropriate way to talk to or relate to
(07:21):
a folk saint like there would be in you know,
for official Catholic saints within the church.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
So in a way it's closer to the heart and
unperturbed by the intellects of others.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
So, for example, there's nobody telling you what it's appropriate
to ask for or how you need to ask that
you're doing it wrong. Yeah, I mean you could say
that the official church, and you know, I'm not trying
to make a judgment here, this is just this is
a common perception the official church is laiden with moral judgment.
Like what if I need a blessing, if I need
(07:56):
supernatural help with something, but from the church active what
if I am not asking for an appropriate goal, or
what if the church judges me to be in a
state of sin and you know, I show up saying
I need help with a problem, but from the church's
point of view, my problem is that I need to
repent and confess my sins before I come asking for help.
(08:19):
And so you know, there's just kind of you're at
an impasse there about like goals and priorities with the church,
but with a folk saint, you're not going to be
dealing with a hierarchy like that.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
The relation to the.
Speaker 4 (08:31):
Supernatural being is more on your own terms. So yeah,
So folk saints are often seen as in some ways better,
more miraculous, or more helpful than Catholic saints for these
multiple reasons, maybe cultural affinity. Their origins are closer in
cultural proximity and thus they're more relatable, and for reasons
of freedom. There's less restriction or instruction on how you're
(08:55):
supposed to relate to the saint. There's no implicit or
explicit judgment.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Folk saints, the.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
Authors say, often have a tragic death story, beginning as
real people who perished by violence or sometimes under the
oppression of authorities, or maybe in extreme poverty. They cite
the work of an anthropologist named Flores Matos, who calls
these figures the miraculous dead, and so they give one
example of another type of folk saint or miraculous dead
(09:24):
figure known of in Mexico, who is named Juan Saltados
and Wan Soldados is based on a soldier in Tijuana
who was said to have been framed for a horrible
crime and executed by firing squad in the nineteen thirties.
And then the story goes that after his death, his
ghost began to cry out from his grave to proclaim
(09:45):
his innocence, and the spirit of Juan Soldados started granting
people miracles, giving people miracles if they came to his
gravestone to ask for help, and a bunch of figures
like this exist with the understanding that it is so
thing about their tragic death and thus their relationship to
death that helps give them power to perform miracles. The
(10:09):
followers of Santa Morte often believe her to be the
most effective of these folk saints or miraculous dead, perhaps
because she's not just one of the miraculous dead, but
is the embodiment of death itself.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
So for listeners out there, go ahead, describe what does
she look like? How do we know her when we
see her?
Speaker 4 (10:31):
So we sort of alluded to this earlier, But she
takes the form of a female grim reaper or a
grim repress, said often to be based on a classic
Iberian grim repress figure called Laparca. So she's a grim
repress with a skeletal body and a skull face, usually
dressed in a long gown and a mantle meaning like
(10:53):
a cloak or a cape, often with a hood, and
the authors highlight that she has several characteristic items in
her hands in her left hand, usually a scythe. And
there's one note in the later in the paper where
the authors mention a common saying that wives whose husbands
had gone out roaming would would come back, would come
(11:16):
and ask Santa Marte to use her size to bring
errant husbands back. Home, so you can think of it
in that sense. It sounds almost not like a like
a blade or weapon, but like a shepherd's crook, you know,
pull them back. But I think it also has the
more common, you know, reaping imagery that we that we
just get from your classic Grim Reaper. And then so
(11:39):
that's her left hand. In her right hand she sometimes
has a globe like a representation of the planet Earth
or the scales of justice. She also has an animal companion,
which is an owl, and this could be for a
number of reasons. There are traditional associations between owls and
(11:59):
death in and some meso American religions. And then also
there is the association of the owl with wisdom in
a lot of traditions. And then to read here, I'm
going to read directly from Chestnut and Kingsbury about how
her name is put together. So they write quote in English,
she is called Saint Death or Holy Death. The name
(12:20):
Santa Muerte explicates her identity. In Spanish, Muerte means death.
Santa translates both as holy and as saint. But Santa,
it should be noted, is the female word for saint
in Spanish, and the saint is perceived by her followers
as of the female gender. She is a quote liminal, fierce,
(12:41):
feminine persona and is seen as an quote all powerful
and protecting mother who can solve all problems, who has
the power to.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
Give and take away.
Speaker 4 (12:53):
So this comes a bit back to when you were
talking about gender in the last episode, Rob. It seems
to me that Santa Morte is interesting because she is
one of these death figures that not only has a gender.
You know, you can imagine some death personifications that are
gender neutral or you can't really tell what gender they're
supposed to be, and then some some personifications have a
(13:17):
clearly intended gender, but maybe it's not necessarily supposed to
mean anything. But in this case, it seems like the
gendered embodiment is meaningful, Like she something about her being
death being a woman brings meaning to the relationship with her.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
So there may be some sort of stereotypical nurturing context
to her, comforting context to her. But then, as we've
been discussing, with room for other connotations as well.
Speaker 4 (13:45):
Yeah, I mean, as they say, I think the powerful
and protecting mother aspect of her is an important part
of what she is. So she's represented in all different
kinds of media. You can have pendance worn around the neck.
She might sometimes just be an image Jnan devotional candle,
or she can be in full sized statue form at
the head of a shrine. Believers will turn to her
(14:09):
for miracles and other aid, as you do with some
of these other folk. Saints are miraculous dead, and often
they believe she has the power to bring good health,
to bring success in love, to bring deliverance from money troubles,
and all other kinds of blessings. So it's not just
stuff that we think of as inherently connected to death.
(14:32):
She can bring boons of all sorts.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
That is interesting yet, because you might expect her powers
to be, you know, to borrow from dungeons and dragons,
spell classification. You might expect her to be a necromancy specialist,
you know, and all her abilities would be nechromatic in
one form or another. But yeah, once you're getting into
general blessings and financial boons, then you're in different territory.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
Now where does this interesting sort of wide ranging power
come from. We'll come back to that, because that's actually
a core part of what they argue in the paper.
I'm going to be focusing more on their general characterization
of Santa Marte, but they're also making an argument about
culturally where she comes from, so we'll come back to that.
Another thing that's important is that the authors note that
(15:17):
Santamerte has been grossly misrepresented by some sensationalist media reporting
that has treated her as some kind of Narco saint.
That's a term used to refer to her narco saint,
a sort of cult figure worshiped exclusively by criminals and
drug traffickers. The authors say this is not correct at all.
(15:40):
She's venerated by all kinds of people, especially by the
poor and by people without much individual access to power,
So it's not that she is never invoked by anybody
related to the drug trade or drug war. The authors
say that actually she is regularly supplicated by people on
both sides of the law within the drug war in Mexico.
(16:03):
But she also says that lots of people were turning
to Santa Marte for protection during the first year of
the COVID pandemic, and that she is widely seen as
a protector of women in places where there is a
special thread of gender based violence. The author is also
mentioned that there is you know, of course, no formal
authority or structure within the faith, so there's nothing like
(16:28):
the Catholic hierarchy. So you can have people kind of
striking out to honor her or relate to her in
whatever way they see best. So you get these chapels
and shrines that are sometimes opened and operated by independent
religious entrepreneurs, but a lot of the faith is actually
(16:48):
conducted in private, like in private homes and at family alters.
And because there are no formal rules, there are no structures,
there are no authorities. There's just great freedom in how
the faith of Santa Marte is practiced. And the authors
again I mentioned this a minute ago, but they identify
that freedom as a key part of the appeal. However,
(17:10):
so you know, that's sort of the heteropraxy aspect. There's
just a lot of diversity in how people honor and
relate to Santa Marte. But they also say there are
some common trends that they've identified in their study of
this phenomenon.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
So, first of.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
All, altars and chapels are important. Most devotees of Santa
Marte will visit the nearest chapel devoted to her, to
her at least like once a month, and so people
visit these chapels and they say prayers and leave offerings.
Lots of people have altars within their homes, often consisting
of like a small statue of the saint on a
(17:47):
table or a votive candle. And the offerings can take
a lot of forms. They might be foods, like chocolate
or other candy I've seen some. Sometimes fruits are given.
The offerings might be flowers. They could be alcoholic beverages
like beer or tequila. Sometimes it's cigarettes or other smokables.
(18:09):
There are bottles of water. Actually, the authors say quote
as the skeleton saint is said to be perpetually parched.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Everything she drinks it just goes right through.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:19):
No, I don't know exactly how to read the tone
on that phrase, but I think I take that as
there being a bit of playfulness in the relationship between
her devotees and her. But she's also she's commonly understood
as a folk saint of the powerless, of the marginalized
and oppressed, So the people with the least power, or
(18:40):
the people who live closest to meeting death are thought
to be especially within her domain. The author's cite previous
work by a scholar named Olaskyevitch Peralba, who argues that
she is appealing quote among liminal sectors of population that
deal with transitions and transgressions, such as people working on
(19:00):
the streets e g. Street vendors, criminals and prostitutes, migrants, inmates, policemen, troops,
prison guards, social workers, and lawyers. So it's interesting that
it's not just like a cohort of natural allies there.
You know, you have people in all different types of professions,
maybe on both sides of the law and so forth.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
But it's everybody on law and order, all the characters.
Speaker 4 (19:25):
But not just that. I mean also it's a lot
of connections to maybe danger or connections to what they
say again is transitions and transgressions, liminal spaces. And the
authors say also her appeal is fairly broad, so it's
not just that domain. They say that you will find
her devotees among people everyone from housewives to fishermen, they say,
(19:49):
but all kinds of people, especially the poor, who feel
less connection to the priesthood of the institutional church. And
the authors argue that her appeal in modern times extends
to so many people in part because of a pervasive
feeling of unsafety and a resulting metaphysics of disorder related
(20:12):
to the ongoing drug war. Of course, this effects not
just people involved in the drug trade or in fighting it,
but it involves a lot of innocent people caught in
the crossfire. And the authors argue that in this context,
for many people sort of within her domain, especially poor
people in certain parts of Mexico, for these people, living
(20:32):
entails a feeling of constantly standing up in the face
of death.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Quote.
Speaker 4 (20:39):
However, instead of standing up to death, many in Mexico
have instead entered into a religious relationship with death, wherein
she is imagined as possessing the supernatural puissance, meaning like
a power or strength to protect them from perishing. So
there's this belief, not necessarily that death is just a
(21:00):
bad thing to be protected from. There are elements of
that in the understanding, but it's also a power you
can appeal too to spare you and the people you love,
or to be redirected into a kind of general power
of blessing to bring you protection and boons in your life.
And so in this the authors invoke an idea of
(21:22):
a kind of interdependence between death and power. Just power
to act within reality.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Yeah, it comes back to, you know, a lot of
what we've been discussing here about how these dealing with death,
dealing with complex and semi chaotic or chaotic situations, violence
on a mass scale. You know, we can feel lost,
untethered and are you know, we have limited abilities to
(21:50):
make sense of it all, but we can reach out
to something. If we personify some of what's going on,
then we have something at least in our own minds
that we can deal with, that we can reach out to,
we can seek to appease, that we can seek the
guidance of, and so forth.
Speaker 4 (22:10):
Yeah, but especially interesting that it's not just in domains
related to death. That's like the thing that's most interesting
to me about this. So anyway, everything I've been talking
about so far is just sort of from the general
(22:32):
background sections of their paper. Actually, the main point that
they're arguing in this paper is they're making an interesting
argument about the origins and development of the Santamorte belief. Specifically,
the authors are making the claim that, in contrast to
some previous writing which they think over emphasized or exclusively
(22:55):
acknowledged the Catholic or European cultural roots of the deaths
ain't they say, In reality, Santa Morte is a syncretic figure.
A syncretic meaning a figure that emerges from the combination
or synthesis of elements from different cultures. In this case,
they're going to identify two main cultural inputs. One of
(23:16):
them is European Catholicism. It's the Catholic or Iberian grim Repress.
So this is a European and specifically Spanish Catholic moment
of death figure in female form, which was not a
god really as understood by the Christians, but it was
more of an image that served as a memento mori
or was a kind of teaching tool. So the image
(23:39):
reminds you that death is coming, and thus you need
to get right with Christ and confess right right.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
And as we're mentioning being not completely shackled the doctrine,
it does leave you open to interpret it and present
it in various ways throughout European literature.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
Yeah, so that's one input that they say. If you
just acknowledge that input, the Sentamorte belief doesn't make a
whole lot of sense. It's hard to make sense of
where a lot of its features come from. So they say, actually,
a huge input on it is pre Columbian indigenous thanatologies,
the death deities and other personifications of death from the
(24:21):
religions and cultures of pre Hispanic meso American peoples. And
then finally after this they also talk about this you
might have heard in the title there's the bricolage aspect.
They say that after this, the Senta morte belief continued to,
especially in recent years, accumulate elements from other sources, including
Afro Cuban, Santa Ria, Palomayumbe, and even.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
Wicca and New Age beliefs.
Speaker 4 (24:45):
But the main point I think they're making is that
you really can't understand how santamorte works today without understanding
the function of indigenous death deities in meso American religions,
which represent whole different ways of thinking about death compared
to European Catholic cultures. Specifically, these thanatologies in vision kind
(25:09):
of a more of a relationship between death and the
rest of life. I think a naive misinterpretation of this
reframing would be just that, oh, these meso American religions,
they didn't think death was bad, they thought death was good.
It's not exactly like that. I mean, in all cultures
you find religious expressions of aversion to death and people
(25:31):
wanting to find ways to put death off and other things.
But I think it is fair to say that as
opposed to the Catholic vision of life and death as
kind of binary opposite states of being, and the Catholic
vision of death is like a kid of a kind
of destruction that must be.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Avoided by salvation.
Speaker 4 (25:49):
In christ the meso American religious view of death, and
there's not just one, obviously, there's a diversity, but fairly
common among them in meso American religions is the idea
that death has some kind of more general power over
life and is related to birth and regenerative properties and
(26:12):
other kinds of good things in life, That in death
there is something cyclical and regenerative and life affirming.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Yeah, that life and death are linked, That the womb
and the tomb are linked. Yeah. We discussed some of
this already, about how even Mother Earth can come into
play in all of this, and it's not necessary. The
Catholic vision and the Christian tradition of it is a
little more set in stone, with some deviations as well.
Speaker 4 (26:42):
Okay, so I'm not going to have time to discuss
everything they get into in their paper here. It is
an interesting read if you want to go follow. Especially
they get into the whole history of how they think
the centimorte belief developed over time and more recent inputs
on it. But the main thing I wanted to talk
about from it here is their discussion of the different
views of the power of death, where the where death's
(27:05):
power comes from, and then also a little bit about
what the indigenous religious inputs on santamorte might be. So
first of all, again you've got this distinction between the
European Catholic understanding of death, which tends to be more
often about destruction, death as destruction and death as finality
(27:29):
in a sense of finality as a kind of finality
that can be averted through you know, faith in Christ.
But otherwise it's the hammer comes down and its finality.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
And then the.
Speaker 4 (27:39):
Destruction has associations of chaos, disorder, violence, negativity, pain, and sacrilege.
And again you find these negative elements of association with
death in other cultures too.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
But the authors argue.
Speaker 4 (27:53):
That in many of these different cultural contexts, death just
is believed to have more power over life, and not
just the power to end or destroy life, but to
influence and guide it.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
In many ways.
Speaker 4 (28:08):
And they have a kind of interesting theory about why
that would be. Why would death have any power over
like whether you could be healed from a sickness or
have success in love, or could you know, have material gains,
whether you know you get stuff from the hunt, or
you know you make money, or any of these things
people want. They say, you know, death is associated with
what they call liminal forces, forces having to do with
(28:32):
crossing a threshold from one thing to another or making
a transition from one thing to another. They say, actually
death is the ultimate and the most mysterious transition in life.
It's the one where we genuinely can't see what's on
the other side, at least for us, is there nothing?
Is there something? If there is something, what is it?
(28:53):
And so because liminal stages are so powerful, they're very
powerful and emotionally charged in our lives. Like if you
think about a lot of the most emotionally important and
you know, causally crucial things in our lives, they're these
things we think of as liminal stages or turning points. Birth, death,
(29:17):
rights of passage, and initiation, marriage, stuff like that. These
are the points where we transition into a new phase
of life, and because of that, they tend to be
the subject of a lot of prayer and ritual because
we correctly identify them as literal, causal turning points, like
they're the most important moments in our lives and they
(29:38):
determine the course of the future. And thus, in many cultures,
including these pre Hispanic meso American cultures, death was often
associated with the power to renew and restore life. Life
is guided by these very powerful liminal points, these transition points,
and death is the most powerful of them all. So
(29:58):
that's how I understand the argument they're making that it
has this association with liminality, the changes or the turning
points in life, and this association with liminality gives death
its perceived power over all important things in life, or
at least most important things in life. And then there's
another point they make that I think is interesting. They
(30:21):
say that death this is just a way that these
religious beliefs tend to manifest within culture. Death seems to
have more power over every aspect of life. If you
feel that you live your life in close proximity to death.
So if real danger is a big part of your
(30:42):
everyday experience, then a deity of death comes to feel
more like it has power over everything you do. Another
interesting note on the power of death, the authors cite
an interview with a devote of Santa Marte named Zenia,
who is asked why she worshiped Santamorte and she said,
(31:03):
and this is a translation from the Spanish. In translation,
she says, because the only thing that is certain is death. Interesting. So,
I don't know if I'm interpreting this right, but the
way I took that meaning, it's kind of that death
has undeniable power because unlike other spiritual entities, which you know,
(31:23):
you name another god or saint, you're kind of having
to put some faith in the idea that they have power.
With death, There's no question about it. You absolutely know
that it's real and it will be a factor in
your life. And that kind of certainty of real power
in the world can get mapped onto this embodiment of
(31:45):
the thing.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
Does that make sense?
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean there's so many other religious concepts,
personified or non personified, that are yeah, harder to grasp
and maybe more of a even more of an intellectual
pursuit to try and understand like some sort of you know,
deep theological concept. But yeah, death is inevitable, and not
(32:09):
only as the final destination if you will have our
own life, but as something that will occur multiple times
within proximity to our own life. We will experience it,
we will feel it. It has an absolute reality, and yeah,
as we experience the reality of death, it does kind
of take shape like we have Again, we have all
(32:32):
these personifications in our culture. And if you have a
dominant personification like this that is just sort of like
floating there, then yeah, the experience, the real experience of death,
I can imagine, might bring you closer to it and
realize like this, you know, if this entity has dominion
over this thing that I feel like it's power, then
is something I can feel as well.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (32:54):
Yeah, So anyway, I want to get on just briefly
to talk a bit about specifics of where they think
this comes from, examples of where they think senta morte
comes from, in the branch feeding into it that comes
from indigenous traditions. So they talk about some broad trends
in how death was most often spoken of in preconquest
(33:17):
Mexico as far as we know. They say that in
preconquest Mexican cultures, death was not as it was in
the European context, thought of merely as the extinction or
opposite of life. It was widely associated with, as we've said, regeneration.
The symbols of death in pre Hispanic indigenous cultures include
(33:39):
often themes of fecundity, sexuality, and rebirth, so you have healing,
life giving, procreative properties. And they also say that Mesoamerican
death deities were often not exactly gods and goddesses, but
in the author's words quote conceptualized as representing or embodying
(34:01):
the vital force of death, which vital force of death
that almost sounds like a oxymoron, right, is the life
force of death. But that is sort of what they
really were. It's hard, you know, to maybe identify with
that from the outside, but there is a life force
of death, and that is what they embody within their person.
(34:22):
So they sometimes symbolized the places where the dead dwell,
and they sometimes acted as psychopomps, which we've talked about
in other episodes of this, so they might guide the
souls or the dead in some form to their place
of dwelling after death. But they also had powers especially
related to death, not just to cause death, but to
(34:42):
do the opposite, so you could persuade them to delay
death or to heal you in sick or wounded. And
the authors bring up a pair of Aztec death deities.
I apologize if I get the pronunciation wrong here, but
they are mik Lantakoutli and mikta Kasiwatum. These are the
male and female male deities associated with death and the underworld.
(35:04):
And the authors say that in pre Hispanic times their
domain was not exclusively death, so you would possibly approach
them for blessings having to do with the with preservation
and enrichment of life. And in Aztec art they are
associated with the imagery of regeneration, birth, sex, and fecundity.
(35:25):
I believe the female deity here, miktakasi Wato, is often
represented as as pregnant. Actually, so these these images include
everything from sexual penetration to pregnancy and lactation.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
They quote a couple of other scholars.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
Who have an idea about the origins of this connection,
so they say quote it is assumed by McCafferty and
Carrasco that this is related to the and then they
begin to quote. These authors quote regenerative power of bones
as seeds, which which is evident in the journey of
Ketzlkowat to the world of the dead to steal the
(36:05):
bones from which human beings.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
Would be created.
Speaker 4 (36:09):
So there's a like if bones are seeds, that is
a quite literal connection between death and both both. I
meant to say birth and growth, but both it is both.
The authors discuss how before the Spanish Conquest, the female
death deity miktakasi Watt presided over a roughly month long
(36:30):
celebration of the beloved dead, which took place in the summer,
and this was a time when you would remember ancestors
and you would remember family members you had lost. And
then after the Spanish conquest, as part of the imposition
of Christianity by force, the authors say, quote, the Catholic
Church exercised Miktakasiwat and moved the date to coincide with
(36:55):
All Saints Day, the first of November, which is also
known in Mexico as Day of the Innocence for its
association with masses focusing on deceased infants and children, and
All Souls Day the second of November, where the focus
is on departed adults. So there's this attempt by the
Catholic Church to kind of hammer the original festival into
(37:16):
shape and make it a part of a Catholic celebration
instead of the traditional celebration. However, interestingly, for many followers
of Santa Morte, the Second Day of the Dead has
become the Skeleton Saints feast day, and the Church, they say,
has tried to suppress this because the Catholic Church says,
(37:36):
this is not an approved saint.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
You know, you should not be making.
Speaker 4 (37:39):
This folk saint part of your celebrations. They would just
want to keep the focus on the church sanctioned remembrance
of lost loved ones. But the presence of Saint Death
has not gone away. And the authors note that while
they are intentionally trying to highlight the influence of Miktakasi
Watt in those traditions on the evolution of to Morte,
(38:01):
that is not the only.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
Religion.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
It's not only in as Tech religion that you find
these regenerative or life giving powers related to death deities.
You'll apparently find this association in traditions of the Mishtech
and in the Maya. So one example they bring up
is a Mishtech death deity named the Lady nine Grass,
which is portrayed in a particular set of cotticies with
(38:27):
first of all, a naked, hinged jaw like you'd see
on a skeletal figure, so kind of a skeletal grim
reaper type face. But also so she's not dressed in
a dark hood with a scythe she is in a
blouse like garment that you'd normally see worn by the vibrant,
life giving female deities in post classic Mexican art. So
(38:49):
you've got skull like imagery and life giving or life
affirming imagery in the same figure. And so this seems
again to be in line with beliefs about death as
a transition to cyclical rebirth or a figure containing powers
of states of change. And finally, I just want to
mention they talk a bit about the contestation over the
(39:09):
origins of Santa Marte. So versions of Santa Marte go
back to the colonial period, but there's no consensus about
exactly where Santa Marte comes from. That's why you get
these different theories abounding. So some argue that she is
just a version of the grim reapress La Parca brought
from the Iberian traditions and made into a deity. But
(39:31):
the authors here again argue that this theory doesn't really
make sense because, for one thing, the grim Reaper was
not venerated and did not provide blessings in a Catholic context.
It was just an image to teach about death and
to remind you, momento moray, remind you that death is coming.
Christ is the only salvation.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
You know.
Speaker 4 (39:51):
It had different cultural values, but none of them were like,
it's here to help you out and give you blessings
if you make an offering.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Yeah, it wasn't implied that you should reach out to
this individual. Right.
Speaker 4 (40:02):
Yeah, so that doesn't make sense, they say, But it
does make sense as a sort of contribution of one
half of the origin is like a contribution of grim
Reaper imagery. They say, it makes sense if you also
incorporate the very important influence of indigenous death deities, which
were venerated and did provide blessings having to do with life.
(40:26):
And then, finally, to quote from the authors quote, since
many turned to death deities for their earthly needs, some
indigenous groups, as archives prove, took the Grim Reaper for
a saint. Since the Grim Reaper was often referred to
in connection to Una Santa Marte, a holy Death, the
figure of Death was understood to be miraculous, much like
(40:48):
the other saints that the Catholic Church had brought over
to New Spain, such as Santa Marta. Believing Death was
a saint in its own right, some began worshiping it.
This is the case for the Highland Maya in the
state of Chiapas and Guatemala, and the Guarini in Argentina
and Paraguay. So yeah, so there's this idea that that's
(41:09):
their argument about the origins. I guess we don't know
for sure exactly what the origins are, and they highlight
that that it's somewhat obscure, you know, this versions of
this figure popping up hundreds of years ago, and then
it kind of comes in and out of fashion for
a long time. It seems to be it is only
in secret or in hiding that Santa Marte is honored,
and in recent decades it has become much more open,
(41:32):
you know, an there's open honoring of Santa Marte. However
much the church tries to say like no don't do that.
That's not part of Catholicism.
Speaker 3 (41:40):
But yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 4 (41:41):
I feel like really interesting figure, really interesting history, and
I love thinking about where this comes from, the idea
that death is not just about death, that the embodiment
of death has domain over all of life.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Yeah, there's so many interesting angles to this, but I
love how there does seem to be a path of
desire here. You know, she exists slightly outside of of
of the actual, you know, dogmatic Catholic belief system, but
clearly there is a great need for her, and people
(42:20):
are drawn to the powers associated with her into and
into that limital space that she occupies. All right, Well,
I'm gonna turn over to a couple of other concepts here.
(42:42):
In both of these cases, I'm not introducing entirely new
concepts to our discussion, but kind of building on things
we've been discussing already. And first of all, I want
to just take a few moments to talk about this
idea of death entities is not merely an idea, you know,
but also an experience one might have. Because to be clear,
(43:07):
they don't have to be a death entity, a grim
reaper or an angel of death or any of these things.
They don't have to be perceived as anything approach approaching
literal incarnations or functional supernatural entities to have enormous cultural
value obviously, but we do have to acknowledge that they
certainly can be perceived and experienced as entities due to
(43:28):
a number of factors. And some of these are things
we've touched on over the years on the show, because
we often talk about things that may be described as
paranormal experiences and when you dig underneath them, like for
us anyway, the really fascinating part is figuring out like
how this actually emerges within the natural world, within the
(43:49):
inner workings of our mind and so forth. So I'm
going to just run through a few of these as
I related via my own experience in the last episode.
Dream states are a huge factor, sometimes enhanced by environment, anxiety,
and the effects of certain medications, including anesthesia meds, and
there have been many reports of people experiencing impactful visions
(44:11):
of departed loved ones under anesthesia. Others report angels, demons,
and death entities are certainly on the menu as well. Also,
we can have various entities come into play via tempo
varietal junction disruptions TPJ disruptions, So due to trauma, illness,
or even electrical stimulation, this can result in the brain
(44:35):
interpreting its own signals is that of some sort of
an other. As we've mentioned as well on the show,
we're hardwired not to contemplate the enormity of death, but
rather for more localized social interactions as social animals. So
we've also evolved something known as agent detection as a
survival strategy, and this is tied in with something we've
(44:58):
talked about in the show a lot before as well,
idea of false positives. You know, we presume tigers to
be where there are no tigers because if you think
of tigers everywhere, then you have a survival advantage over
people who don't think they are tigers anywhere. That sort
of thing, Right.
Speaker 4 (45:15):
At some point you hit the point of diminishing returns
for that payoff, Like you can be too paranoid, but
generally nature selects for having greater amounts of fear and caution.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
Yeah yeah, But alongside this, it can mean more than
just seeing a threat where there isn't one. It can
mean seeing a will where there isn't one. So the
argument is that we possess a hyperactive agent detection device
or had D or hat I guess coined I believe
by cognitive psychologists Justin L. Barrett around the year two thousand.
(45:47):
We tend to assume patterns have intent, and it might
just underlie just about every god, demi god, and magical
creature we've ever dreamed up. I feel like, for me,
like the simple version of this is and this is
in a way, this is like childishness on my part,
but I imagine many of you have done the same.
You stub your toe, You might very on the say
(46:08):
the coffee table. You might very well blame the coffee table,
curse the coffee table as an entity that has hurt you.
Speaker 3 (46:14):
Why did it do that to me?
Speaker 2 (46:15):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (46:17):
Yeah, this.
Speaker 4 (46:18):
For a while, the hyperactive agency detection device has been
one of the theories kicking around about the the you know,
the biological origins of religion and beliefs in magic and
things like that. It's possible that this is in part
where religious beliefs come from. We don't really know one
way or another, whether you know, it's hard to prove that,
but either way, I do think it's an interesting idea,
(46:40):
and I think it's hard to deny that there is
something like this at work, whether or not it's actually
the correct cognitive explanation for the origin of religion and
human history. It's clear something like this is at work
within us, Like we we believe that there are animals
or people or things that act with intentions like animals
(47:03):
or people in situations where there are not all the time.
Speaker 2 (47:06):
Yeah, and even if it's not the primary underlying mechanism here,
I feel like it's got to be in the mix, right, Yeah,
let's see. There's also the complex area of near death experience. Again,
we're often talking about entities that are said to or
believe to come into play during that liminal transitional phase
(47:32):
between death and whatever comes after. And so yeah, near
death experiences. This is a topic undo itself, but basically,
the neurochemical state of the dying brain makes us more
susceptible to these sorts of images, and there is nothing
paranormal about near death experiences twenty eleven by Dean Mobs
(47:52):
and Carolyn Watt. This is and Trends and Cognitive science
that they argue that the neurochemical state of the dying
brain mirror that of individuals on disassociative anesthetics, which frequently
produce anthropomorphic hallucinations and out of body experiences. And finally,
in a way that I think is equally profound as
(48:13):
any of these, if not more so, is another concept
we've touched on before, and that is that the brain
does not just produce random static during a crisis. It
uses top down processing to make sense of internal chaos.
So there will be all these gaps in our understanding
of what's happening, and our mind draws on relevant cultural
symbols and scripts to piece it all together. And that
(48:37):
script might be alien abduction, that script might be angel visitation,
it might be the fair folk who live unseen in
the woods. And the death entity is also a highly
accessible symbol that is never that far away from us.
Speaker 3 (48:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
So anyway, just food for thought here as we're thinking
about death. And again, I don't want to imply that
every manifestation of death, every personification of death is indeed
need to be a case where Okay, people believe they
see this thing when they're close, or they see this
thing near a dying person. That is sometimes the case,
(49:15):
but these concepts, these personifications are just as potent and
useful without that being in play.
Speaker 4 (49:21):
Oh No, it's a great distinction, because I think the
majority of what we've been talking about has been artistic representation.
You know, it's been artistic or deliberate imagination exercises things
like that, or just literature, you know, cases where people
are talking about how they imagine death. It's a quite
(49:42):
different thing to believe. You see someone you know that, like,
where does that come from? That seems to maybe arise
by somewhat different pathways, maybe have somewhat different triggers than
say a deliberate imaginative exercise where you're trying to come
up with imagery for a painting, or a psychologist is
sitting you down and asking you to think.
Speaker 3 (50:03):
What does death look like to you?
Speaker 4 (50:05):
Yeah, you might find out in an experience that death
looks different than you thought you would think.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
Yeah. Yeah, And it is interesting how like we may
summon this personification in our mind as part of like
the overarching human attempt to understand something as impactful and
traumatic and transitional as death in our own life or
in the lives of others, and then potentially have a
(50:32):
situation where then you see or experience that manifestation as well. Now,
for the rest of the episode. Here I wanted to
follow up on another specific example of an anthropomorphic personification
of death, and that is the Valkyries. We want to
come back to the Valkyries here, so on discord email
(50:59):
us if you want to link to join the stuff
to blow your mind. Discord Server. A listener by the
name of Gorpi wrote in and highly recommended that we
come back to the Valkyries and include mention of a
particular Skaldic poem. It's included in chapter one fifty seven
of the Nile Saga. I'm going to probably butcher this pronunciation,
(51:20):
but is It is titled dar Ratha the Song of
the Spear, and Gorpi says that it contains quote the
most metal description of fate being woven, and I agree,
boy does it. Ever let's hear it all right. So
I have to do some setup first, because it's not
(51:41):
going to necessarily make sense to anyone out there who
doesn't isn't already boned up on the loom or know
about weaving via allum. It's going to entail a number
of technology references to the loomb, specifically to the warp
weighted loom. This is an upright loom that was standard
for the day, you know, back back in the days
(52:03):
of the Viking sagas. So in order to get just
how metal this is, you're gonna have to learn a
little bit about textile crafting terminology. Okay, all right, so
I'm gonna bust out some terminology here. So first of all,
what is the warp? I know it sounds magical and
and already a little metal.
Speaker 4 (52:22):
But wait a minute, Rob, I'm sorry, is your reference
point for this warhammer?
Speaker 2 (52:27):
It is?
Speaker 4 (52:27):
Yes, okay, I thought I saw that in your eye.
Speaker 2 (52:30):
Yeah, I mean it could be you know, it could
also be warp records. You know, they're different, different uses
of the term. But within the world of the loom,
the warp is a set of lengthwise yarns stretched tightly
across the loom before the weaving begins. Then you also
have the weft or wolf. This is a set of
horizontal or crosswise threads that are woven over and under
(52:53):
the vertical warp threads to create a piece of fabric.
Up next, we have the headle. These are small or
strings with a hole or eye in the middle. Each
individual warp thread is threaded through one heddle, and when
the headles are lifted or lower, they pull the warp
threads with them to create a gap called a shed.
All right, we also have heddle weights. These are small,
(53:14):
heavy It's like a small heavy metal rod or weights
attached to the bottom of an individual heddle. We have
a headle rod. This is used to lift specific warp
threads to create an opening. And then we have shuttles.
These are the tools used to pass the weft or
the wolf through the warp. Okay, so I actually know
(53:34):
several loom enthusiasts in real life, but I've never discussed
the use of the loom with them, so I almost
pretty much all this terminology was new to me. I
know we have some loom users out there, just it
has to be the case. So maybe y'all can throw
in on this later on in a listener Mail episode.
(53:55):
But again, the idea here is that while many of
us have no clue how this technology works or or
what everything is called, this was an essential piece of
technology of the day, and as clearly illustrated when I'm
about to read it details, you know, its details were
culturally relevant, kind of like how so much computer and
internet terminology is found in our daily speech today, and
(54:17):
I included an image of this for you, Joe, to
look at. I think maybe this might clarify some of
the ideas here.
Speaker 4 (54:26):
I'm sorry, I'm not you might clarify, but it's just
like a thing that I have no familiarity with, and
it's like tons of parts.
Speaker 2 (54:33):
Yeah, yeah, all right, so I'm going to read here.
I'll also add that this poem is said to concern
the Battle of Klundtarf in ten fourteen CE. And yeah,
this is the translation from M. Magnusen and H. Paulson
from nineteen sixty seven. Blood rains from the cloudy web
(54:58):
on the broad loom of slaughter. The web of man
gray as armor is now being woven. The Valkyries will
cross it with a crimson weft. The warp is made
of human entrails. Human heads are used as the hadel weights.
The hatel rods are blood wet spears, the shafts are
(55:18):
iron bound, and arrows are the shuttles. With swords, we
will weave this web of battle. The Valkyries go weaving
with drawn, swords killed and hothriml sangrid and svapal spears
will shatter, shields will splinter swords will gnaw like wolves
through armor. Let us now wind the web of war
(55:41):
which the young King once waged. Let us advance and
weigh through the ranks where friends of ours are exchanging blows.
And I'm going to skip a bit at this point,
but we do indeed continue to wind the web of war. Here,
as our Scott Baker would put it, death comes spiraling down.
But then I'm going to pick back up at the end.
Here it is horrible now to look around as a
(56:02):
blood red cloud darkens the sky. The heavens are stained
with the blood of men. As the Valkyries sing their song,
we sang well victory songs for the young King. Hail
to our singing. Let him who listens to our valkyrie
song learn it well and tell it to others. Let
us ride our horses hard on bare backs with swords unsheathed,
(56:23):
away from here. So I think you'd agree, Joe, pretty metal.
Speaker 4 (56:28):
That is intense. I like how the intensity is applied
to the act of making textiles.
Speaker 2 (56:37):
Yeah, yeah, which you would normally think this is something
that could never harm us, would never be something that
would entail intrails and blood and splintered bodies. But it
goes back to what we were talking about earlier with
the muses, you know, and depending on the technological metaphor
in order to sort of make sense of how life
(56:58):
comes together, how long it lasts, and how it ends.
Speaker 4 (57:02):
Yeah, I mean this does. I don't know, maybe I'm
wrong about this, but this does at least suggest the
idea of, whereas the usual technological metaphor of death is
one of cutting, severing, reducing, destroying, that this is a
productive death enterprise.
Speaker 2 (57:22):
Yeah. Which I think that comes down to the idea
that it's attempting to help us understand the battle and
the battle field. So the valkyries here are obviously creating
no mere cloth. They are weaving the war winning wolf,
a supernatural tapestry that ensures the king's victory or defeat.
(57:44):
So once more, it's a textile product of destiny like
we've discussed before, while also standing as a powerful metaphor
for the battlefield itself, a place of chaos, of death,
of strategy and will as well as fate and destiny.
And when everything settles, the blood, the dust, the entrails,
(58:04):
like some sort of destiny will be achieved, like a
king will rise or a king will fall. Something will
have changed now in thinking about this, thinking about this
(58:25):
idea though, of the valkyries, the choosers of the slain,
wheeling over the battlefield like carrion birds, I'm reminded once
more of the idea of reference in Herzog's Psyche and
Death that the more archaic death demons in human traditions
are or more pure animal forms, such as wolves, snakes, horses,
and of course birds. And of these wolves and vultures
(58:47):
are exactly the sorts of creatures that would help themselves
to the dead and dying on a battlefield, that could
conceivably like physically visit you as you are on the
threshold of death, not to do anything supernatural, but to
you know, wait for you to expire, or maybe get
in a little early on the.
Speaker 4 (59:04):
Goods, to exhibit the virtuars of patients.
Speaker 2 (59:07):
Yes, and it's interesting too that arguably one of the
earliest known depictions of a personification of death is that
of a gigantic black vulture like birds that's swarming or
birds swarming over a headless human corpse. And these are
depicted on the seventh century BCE paintings at Chatilhuyuk in Anatolia,
(59:30):
and it's been proposed that headless remains discovered at this
location actual headless remains point to some sort of ritual
defleshing of the dead prior to their burial, which might
be another angle on the significance of birds in practices
like this, lining up with practices like exposure or sky burial,
(59:53):
which we see practice into the modern era, where generally
in places where bodies cannot be buried all that easily,
or maybe cannot be burd learned all that easily. One
way of returning them to the natural cycle of things
is to allow birds to feast on the soft tissues
and then you can do what you need to do
with the bones. So there's obviously plenty of symbolic weight
(01:00:15):
to throw around with all this. But you know, birds
sailing from above coming down to visit the dead and
the dying, You know what are they doing? Yes, they're
probably coming down to eat some eyeballs and so forth,
But more on the mystical realm of things? Are they
death dealers? Are they psychopomps? And so forth? And so
(01:00:35):
these various aspects are combined with the feminine form to
varying degrees to bring us the likes of the valkyries,
which again are sometimes said to be clothed in feathers,
as well as the cares or the cares of Greek tradition.
And you know, we might be tempted to describe them
as harpy like, and we've discussed harpies on the show before,
(01:00:56):
but I just want to throw in that harpies are
more closely associated as personification, are more closely understood as
personifications wind so a different personification going on there in
its origin. But the keras Uh were the daughters of
Nicks where to understand the goddess of night, and they were.
(01:01:16):
They're often described as death fates and that hover over
the battlefield, deciding who will fall and or looking to
exact a fate already decided by some higher deity, and
then swooping down upon the dying to await their death
so they can drag their soul into the afterlife. So
they are scavenger like fearsome creatures of doom.
Speaker 4 (01:01:38):
So but that's interesting because they combine, uh, you know,
the pre death selection and the psychopomp role.
Speaker 2 (01:01:47):
Yeah, but not in a good way. They're more in
the drag you to hell kind of a realm with psychopomp.
Not the come, gentle traveler, I see that you are lost,
let me help you. They're more like I'm going to
grab you by the tendon and rag you into eightes. Now,
there's a Greek epic poem attributed to Hesiod titled The
Shield of Heracles, and it includes an awesome description of
(01:02:12):
the keras here, and I should mention that not every
translation of this poem actually keeps the word keras. Some
use other words to describe them, and sometimes it's been
argue that, well, there's not really an appropriate English language
word for this sort of thing. But I'm going to
read from the nineteen fifty nine Richard Lattimore translation, and
(01:02:35):
it puts it like this. And men, the seniors on
whom old age had seized already, were sitting assembled outside
the gates and holding up their hands to the immortal gods,
being in fear for the sake of their children. And these,
for their part, were fighting their battle. And where they
were the spirits of death, dark colored and clattering, their
(01:02:57):
white teeth, deadly faced, grim glaring, bloody and unapproachable. We're
fighting over the fallen men, all of them rushing forward
to drink of the black blood, and each as soon
as she had snatched a man down already or just
dropping from a wound, would hook her great claws about
his body while his soul went down to the realm
(01:03:19):
of hades and cold tartarus. And then the spirits had
sated their senses on the blood of men's slaughter, they
would throw what was left behind them and go storming
back into the battle clamor and the struggle.
Speaker 4 (01:03:33):
Okay, so quite predatory vision there.
Speaker 2 (01:03:36):
Yeah, so there's still you know, death selectors in the
valkyrie s. But whereas the Valkyries are going to escort
you to a valhalla and are ultimately seen as in
a way deliverers like mission accomplished, You've done your part
and now you know, just reward. Yeah, this is the opposite.
But it's interesting how many things they have in common otherwise,
(01:04:00):
and you know, we might wonder, you know, to what,
to what extent they are partially based on observations of
raptors feasting on the dead following battles throughout human history,
I would say that they do not. They certainly don't
feel like you should worship them. I don't and I
haven't seen any any suggestions that one should.
Speaker 3 (01:04:25):
They're not going to do much good for you.
Speaker 2 (01:04:27):
Yeah, they're they're doing their job, they're enjoying it. Sounds
like a little bit too much, but I don't know
they're getting it done. All right. Well, I think we're
going to go ahead and close up this episode, perhaps
close up the series. I'm not sure we're going to
leave it slightly open ended. Maybe we should leave it
open ended in the long term, because I don't want
(01:04:50):
death to think that we're we're done discussing it, that
this is finished. So yeah, I'm going to say officially
open ended. We may come back next episode, We come
back years from now, so we should be permitted to
flourish in case that is the option we choose to pursue.
Speaker 3 (01:05:10):
But we will send our messengers ahead of us.
Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
Yes, yes, no doubt. All right. Just a 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, short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays.
We set aside most serious concerns just talk about a
weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 4 (01:05:30):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (01:05:52):
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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