STBYM Halftober Monsterfest Playlist, Episode 3: The Curse

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks
dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
today I want to start off by telling a short story.
So in the second or third century CE in Roman Britain,

(00:25):
in the settlement that is now the English city of Leicester,
there was a Roman named Servandas, and Servanda's discovered that
his cloak was missing. Not just missing, he knew it
had to have been stolen, but who stole it? Well,
he'd have to draw up a list of suspects. He
didn't know for sure. Now, Servandas was not plenty of

(00:46):
the younger. He was not an elite. He was not
some rich big shot with diarrhea of the pen. Hey,
we love plenty of this show, we do. But he
he was originally who had diary of the pen Uh,
not one of these people, one of these power people
who had their memoirs preserved for us. So how do
we know about the stolen cloak of this common person, Servanda's.

(01:07):
Well we know about it because in the mid two thousand's,
researchers from the University of Lester working at a site
within Lester dug up a rectangular sheet of lead about
seven inches by three inches, carved with an inscription a curse.
It was an entreaty to a god to smite his
enemy for stealing from him, and it reads quote to

(01:31):
the god Maglus, I give the wrong doer who stole
the cloak of Servandas that he destroy him before the
ninth day, the person who stole the cloak of Servandas.
So you got a nine day timeline basically nine days
to get me back the cloak, or may you be
destroyed by Maglus. And then Servanda's helpfully supplies Maglus, which may,

(01:53):
I think it's been speculated be a Celtic word meaning prints,
often names of gods or things that are just a
word for prince or king, like bay All or moluk Um.
But there there's a list of eighteen or nineteen possible subjects,
including people like and we don't know who these people are,
but people like Sylvester and Germanis, and Riomandus and Regulus.

(02:15):
So who are these guys? No idea, but Servandas was
comfortable condemning them to the talents of Maglus with this curse.
Now I know some of you are probably wondering, well,
who stole the cloak? Who you know? Who is the thief? Here?
My question is was this a nice cloak? Was it
just was? Is that the thing? Was it just really nice?

(02:35):
Or is he just very spiteful over it's it's lost? Well,
it could be those things, or it could be that
Servandas was very poor and could only afford one cloak,
and you know that that a cloak was a significant
possession to him, and so stealing a cloak from Servandas
in second or third century Roman Britain might be like
stealing your car. Now he has time and energy to

(02:57):
put into this whole curse business, though I'm I'm assuming
there's a fee associated with that. Well that's a good point,
and we'll come back to that in a minute. Yes,
you raise good questions. So today, obviously we're going to
be talking about curses, and Robert, I don't know about you,
but I love curse movies. I think like which is,
curse movies are really fun. They're one of my favorite

(03:19):
genres of horror. Like a witch puts a curse on
somebody and you've got to figure out what to do.
So in this case, you're talking about films where where
the protagonist is cursed and has to work their way
out of the curse. Yeah. Now there's a variation on
this that I don't like at all, which is like
the Thinner model, which I don't even want to get
into the details of. But that is just like an

(03:39):
unusually reprehensible movie or story in general, putting that kind
of thing aside, where like the person cursed really deserved it. Well,
that's a film that that explores a very common trope,
right where the making and the spitting of curses is
the domain of an outsider people or a people of
like a lower cast within a given society. Yeah, that's

(04:03):
a very common trope. I I don't I don't really
like that kind as much. I like the Witch curses.
But we should specify for the purposes of the episode
what a curse is. So, a curse is an invocation
of magic power to cause injury or misfortune to someone
or something. It is essentially the inversion of a blessing.

(04:23):
A blessing is a benediction, it's a wish of good
will towards someone, and a curse is a malediction, a
wish invoking magic to cause ill will, to to convey
ill will and cause ill fortune on somebody else. Other
names would be like schaden zob or black magic, binding,
cutting off. It's using supernatural power to hurt someone. An

(04:47):
invocation aspect here is key because it's not a mere prophecy.
It's not someone uh, you know, casting bones and saying, oh,
this will transpire, even saying this will transpire because of
this transgression. No, it's a it's it's an appeal to uh,
to a god or some divine force to to punish,

(05:07):
or just simply a magical punishment that essentially emerges from
the lips or from writing and then works its its
will on its own. Yeah, curses are not just predictions.
They are spoken into existence. Now. Curses are often unleashed
by the gods in our our myth and our fiction,
cursed placed upon individuals or groups of individuals. One thinks of, say,

(05:31):
the curse of Eve, the mark of Cain uh, the
various individuals that have been cursed in other fictions, the
curse of Innocus uh, dire words becoming dire realities uh,
and is one would expect right when the words are
rolling off the lips of a god. All a god
needs to do is speak right and things start happening.

(05:52):
You also have various monsters that are born from curses,
ghosts that are born from curses, even animals too that
are the prod up of curses. I'm thinking about, Uh,
some of the Greek myths concerning spiders and the curse
placed on a rackney. Um, Pumpkinheads a curse. Pumpkin Heads.
The werewolf is often a curse as well. Uh, So

(06:14):
we have a number of different pots. But I kind
of forgotten about Pumpkinhead. Of exactly how Pumpkinhead worked in
the horror movie was a witches curse. Yeah, guy, He
he wants revenge on some teenage motor bikers, so he
goes to a witch to cast a curse on them.
Not a great film, but it does have some great
monster effects. And there are any number of cursed villains
in fiction, right, I mean, everybody loves a good good

(06:36):
villain was some sort of significant curse placed upon them.
For instance, in Big Trouble and Little China, we're told
that Lo Pon is cursed by China's first sovereign emperor,
uh quinn s Long, and he has the curse of
no flesh. Interestingly enough, will return to lo Pan in
a bit. Oh well, I look forward to that now.

(06:56):
We also would be remnist if we didn't mention our
old fend for uh Connor McCloud, Connie mack. The is
essentially of a version of the wandering immortal character, a
character that is, that is, to some extent cursed with immortality.
This is always a lovely a trope in fiction and
mythology folklore as well, the thing that might seem a

(07:17):
blessing but is actually a curse. Oh yeah, like the
idea that when Jesus prophesied that there was at least
someone standing there who was watching him preach, who would
not pass away before the Kingdom of God came with power.
Um that you know that that has led to the
idea of the wandering Jew, that someone standing there that
day is actually immortal and still walking around. Right. There's

(07:40):
a there's another variation on this theme. There is I
believe it's a Russian tale um or at least East
Eastern European tale called the Soldier in Death. Anyone is
a frank fan of Jim Hinson's The Storyteller series, there's
a wonderful rendition of that little number. But it in
this story that the soldier eventually is cursed with a
form of immortality because he's basically um frightened. Everyone death

(08:03):
is afraid of him, the devils are afraid of him.
Nobody will let him into heaven or hell. Oh that's
a good story. Uh. So I want to bring it
back to to the curse invoking Maglas against the person
who stole the cloak of servandas so, I mentioned that
this was inscribed on a lead tablet, right, And it
turns out that there are thousands of curse tablets like

(08:24):
this from the ancient world. Uh. This one, like most
of them, is a small lead or pewter sheet on
which a curse is inscribed with the stylus. And uh,
sometimes they'll be rolled up into kind of a scroll,
like the metal will be rolled up. And one thing
that you can discover by reading various curse tablets from

(08:45):
antiquity is that an extremely common genre of curses in
actual history appears to consist of curses against people who
stole things from you. And one quote I came across
that I thought was interesting. Richard Buckley, co director of
the University of Lesser Archaeological Services who is involved in

(09:05):
that discovery, uh said quote. It has been suggested, on
the basis of name forms and the value of items stolen,
that the curses relate to the lives of ordinary people
rather than the wealthy, and that they were perhaps commissioned
by the dedicator from a professional curse writer. So so
generally here we're not dealing with rich people coming to

(09:26):
do curses. We're dealing with common people dealing with common problems,
like the theft of an item from their from their
person or from their house. And when that gets stolen
and they don't know what to do, they can go
say to a scribe and pay that person, you know,
somebody who's literate, and pay that person to write out
a curse on a tablet for them. You know, I

(09:46):
think we can all understand and relate to this, uh,
this impulse. If you've ever been a victim of a
crime like this and in a theft for instance, and
the police are like, yeah, there's nothing we can do, sorry,
you're just out however much money you lost on that
iPhone charger or whatever it was stolen out of your car. Uh,
And then you uh, you know, what what what's left

(10:06):
to do? Maybe spend a few dollars and and curse
the individual, right, I mean what percentage of small thefts
are actually solved and you get your stuff returned? I
would have to guess almost none. Yeah. Absolutely. Now. Now
this does make me think though, that if I were
a professional um cursed tablet manufacturer in olden times, it

(10:27):
sounds like the best thing you could do to to
drum up business is to go around stealing random things
from people and just like burying them somewhere. Uh, because
then people are gonna get piste off and they're gonna say,
who stole my cloak? And then they're gonna go buy
another tablet from you. Well, I would guess that would
depend on you not believing that the curses are efficacious,

(10:50):
Otherwise you'd just be accumulating curses that would actually harm you.
Well I would I guess. Yeah. In this model, the
the individual making the curses is in on a game.
You know, they can't be a true believer. They have
to be uh, you know, the the con artist in
the scenario. Well, that is something that we could definitely
talk about, because there are obviously differences in belief in

(11:12):
the power of curses in witchcraft all throughout history. Uh,
you know, we we find these curse tablets all throughout
the ancient Mediterranean. They're these wonderful artifacts of evil magic
or you know, you could think of it as evil,
because we usually think of curses as evil. But really
the people who were who were commissioning these, in many
cases we're seeking justice. You know, that they were trying

(11:32):
to get back something that had been unfairly taken from them.
But there are other varieties of curse tablets that are
more just kind of a a desire to get power
over arrival or to you know, a desire to hurt
some kind of competitor or enemy. In Latin, the curse
tablets are known as deficitions. In Greek, they're known as

(11:52):
cata desmoi. I don't know if I pronounced those correctly,
but close enough. You know, you'll sometimes hear people from
the you know, people talking about the ancient Greco Roman
world as a place of unusual reason and skepticism for
its time. You know, that sort of characterization of like
ancient Greece in ancient Romans places of like philosophy or something.

(12:13):
Oh yeah, there's an there's an entire argument that that
science and reason is is birthed solely out of out
of Greco Roman tradition, and that and that it only
spreads to the far corners of the world, that anything
that the you know, the that there were there was
taking place in ancient India or ancient China or meso America,
that these these didn't really count because they hadn't been

(12:35):
touched by a by the Greco Roman vibe yet. Now
obviously that's a nonsense. In fact, I don't really know.
I don't come across people making that argument anymore. I
think I feel like most most thinkers have have moved
beyond that. But I know that in The Demon Hunted World,
Segan spends a little time discrediting this notion as well.

(12:56):
But the other side of that is just the belief
that the ancient Greco Roman and world was this unusually
reasonable and skeptical place, relatively free from superstition and paranoia
about witchcraft. But the evidence indicates that just really is
not the case. It might be the case among some
particular you know, members of the elite or the intelligencia

(13:16):
or something. You might read their own memoirs and find
that this person in history who left a lot of
writing happened to be skeptical about things. But among people
in general, the ancient Mediterranean appears to have been run
through with fear of witchcraft and with the use of curses,
even in the Roman period. Plenty of the Elder rights

(13:37):
in his Natural History in the first century CE. We
mentioned him a minute ago in the middle of a
section about the power of portents and spells. Quote, there
is no one who does not dread being spell bound
by means of evil imprecations, and hints the practice after
eating eggs or snails of immediately breaking the shells or

(13:57):
piercing them with a spoon. I was like, well, what
is that about? So this is from the translation the
eight translation by John Bostock. Bostock or Bostock however you
say that, And there's a footnote that says, quote, it
is a superstition still practice to pierce the shell of
an egg after eating it. Less to the witches should come.

(14:19):
I've been doing it wrong this whole time, I know.
So I went and read a little bit more about this. Basically,
the idea is that if you eat an egg and
you leave the shell just sitting around. A witch can
come along and prick that shell with a needle while
citing the name of a person who wants to cast
a curse against you, and that will allow them to
do a curse. And this is a common part of
like sympathetic magic, like you touch the thing. Yeah, but

(14:42):
am I peeling eggs wrong? That's what I'm wondering, because
whenever I peel an egg, I like I end up
just destroying the eggshell. Like it looks pretty pierced to
me because I've just ripped it to pieces. Well, maybe
it's if they find a big shard of it and
they can pierce it, or maybe there's this is like
a post egg sucking scenario. People are just you know,
putting one hole in it and sucking it out. I

(15:03):
don't know, you took that to a nasty place. There's
nothing wrong with the eating raw egg that way, I guess.
I mean of the things one could be doing in
in in ancient Greece, as egg sucking sounds reasonable. Yeah,
but it leaves you vulnerable to witchcraft, I guess so. Famously,
many curse tablets have been found in the city of Bath,

(15:25):
which was a settlement known for its hot springs used
as a spa in a bath during Roman times, and
the goddess of these hot springs was a Celtic deity
named Soulis, who in many of these curses that have
been found at Bath, seems to be merged through syncretism
with the Roman goddess Minerva as Sulis Minerva. I read

(15:46):
that one of these curses from Bath is a bronze
It's for a bronze container that had been stolen. It
seems like most of these also have to do with theft,
and the curse asked the goddess to make sure that
the stolen container ended up old with the thief's blood.
That's pretty good. That is really good. That's clever. Yeah,
I mean it basically comes back to that old adage,
I hope you choke on it. You know, so somebody

(16:08):
has has has has obtained something of yours or something
that you feel should be yours through underhanded actions. Then
you just you just say, well, I hope, I hope
you choke on that. I hope that this brings about
your death. And we just kind of we kind of
throw that one out. But that is essentially a curse.
Even if we we say it, you know, kind of

(16:29):
flippantly or comedically. It's the unspoken part of you can
have it, you know, and you can have it just
meaning like and something bad is going to happen to you. Yeah,
this thing is, this is curse now anyway, I don't
want it. But then again, a lot of these curses
demand the return of the item, and they say like,
if you don't return the items, say, you know, in
nine days, may he be destroyed by the ninth day

(16:50):
or something like that. Another one quote Docillianus, son of
Bruce Serra's to the Most Holy God, Sulus, I curse
him who has stolen my hooded cloak, whether and or woman,
whether slave or free, that Sulis inflict death upon him,
and not allow him sleep or children now and in
the future until he has brought my hooded cloak to

(17:10):
the temple of her divinity. Now, I like how this
particular curse is nice and uh and and and broad.
Here you know, it's it's the it's the buckshot of curses,
because it is it is promising for what problem sleeping
and potentially problem bearing children. Uh, there's a lot of
room here. So if one if the individual who is

(17:32):
cursed and like knows that the curses leveled at them, like, Oh,
I think he's talking about me because I totally stole
that cloak. Uh. Chances are they might encounter a situation where, oh, man,
I'm having a little trouble sleeping, or I'm or are
or I'm having trouble conceiving. Maybe it was that curse. Well, yeah,
in the secular interpretation, you're trying to get the victim's

(17:52):
mind working against them, and we can talk about that
more later when we discuss like the psychological and scientific
aspects of cursing. But but you're also probably believing in
real magic power and thinking, yeah, something bad is going
to happen to this person. That's true. We do have
to come back time and time again to the idea
that we're dealing with people, more often than the common

(18:12):
people here, who do not have anything approaching the scientific
understanding of the world. They have magical explanations for how
the world works, and therefore that worldview is open to
magical manipulation. Now, you mentioned that you liked the things
that have been picked out in this curse, denying you
sleep and denying your children general things that are invoked

(18:34):
in these curses would be to like make it so
the thief cannot defecate or urinate, to make the thief bleed,
to cause sexual problems, to prevent them from sleeping or eating.
There's all kinds of stuff. But I wonder who picks
out what goes in the curse. Is that up to
the scribe who you're commissioning the curse from, or is
that up to you? Do you go to a scribe

(18:55):
and say, Okay, here's what I want. I want the
bleeding and I want the sexual problems. Yeah. Do you
think it's it's package based or it's all a cart right,
I don't know. You know, I think this would have
been a great, a great curse if you just said,
all right, whoever stole this cloak from me, every time
from now on, for the rest of your life, every
time you stub your toe, that's me. That's this curse,

(19:16):
you know, that's that That would be a good one,
because nothing is worse than stubbing your toe in that
second that you have stubbed it, um and you always
feel like somebody's to blame, yes, and you need to blame.
So usually, if you're me, you just curse at the
coffee table or what have you put that there? Yeah,
but then you're like, oh, servandas it was you. So

(19:36):
these tablets are actually they're more than just sort of
a magical curiosity. Uh. The tablets of Bath and many
others have actually proven useful in helping experts understand the
common vernacular language of say Roman Britain in the second
to fourth century. Because again, when you think about it,
curse tablets are kind of like graffiti. It's a window
into how written language was used by people who we're

(20:00):
not writing the kinds of works that get copied and
stored in libraries and come down to us through history,
you know, like nowadays, I assume future historians will probably
get to know what it was like when the average
English speaker in the United States used written English because
they can see it all over the internet. But in
ancient Rome, unless you like, wrote books that people thought

(20:23):
were very valuable, most of the time, people weren't going
to see what it looked like when you were, you know,
using language. Side note, I wonder if in hip hop,
like a distract is considered a curse. That's interesting sort
of kind of maybe do you well, I mean, there's
a lot of insults but does it actually like, does
it invoke a power to wish harm upon you? Maybe?

(20:44):
I don't know. I mean sometimes you could say that, well,
they're threats, but their self actualized things. They're like I'm
going to do something to you. Yeah, I guess they are.
They tend to be more threats than though, though I
don't I don't know. There might be some distracts out there.
I would love to hear about any distracts that invoke
magical forces or sort of the the inner workings of fate. Oh,

(21:07):
that's good. I bet there are some. I bet there
have to be some religious ones. Surely there's some like
religious sort of distracts. Maybe they're not individual, but I
mean one of the big uh selling points of religion,
and we'll discuss this more as we go forward, is
the idea that God or God's are going to punish
those who wronged you or are wronging you or living
their life in a way that you don't agree with. Now,

(21:29):
there will be some sort of divine vengeance, and therefore
you know to invoke that divine vengeance is essentially a curse.
Like anybody has ever stood on a street corner and
yelled nasty things with a God sign at participants in
a parade or something like that, they're essentially spitting out curses. Now,
they probably wouldn't think of it that way because they
wouldn't think like, I'm asking the divine power to do

(21:53):
something to you. They would probably think of it as
saying like, I'm just telling you what the divine power
is going to do to you. Anyway, right, Well, they
had their view and it's probably the same. But from
this side of the curse, I feel like the two
are are basically indistinguishable, Like the guy with the sign
is still the jerk in the scenario. Agreed. Now, we
have been talking about how often curses are used sort

(22:14):
of after the fact to get back at somebody who
wronged you, usually somebody who stole something from you. But
there's another way you could use an anti theft curse,
which would be a curse employed preemptively against thieves. So
I want to talk about medieval anti theft curses in
monastic libraries. Uh. Last year, the British Library put up

(22:35):
this awesome blog post by a medieval studies scholar named
Clark Dreyschen, highlighting medieval books in their collection that contained curses. So,
for example, and early fourteenth century copy of a thirteenth
century Middle Dutch encyclopedia and beastiary called The Flower of
Nature by Jacob von Merland. It has its own little

(22:57):
checkout ledger within the book, you know, like you at
a library book, you put the card in. So what
you have to picture here is there's a cross under
which anyone borrowing the book had to sign their name
and then had to swear a dear oath that if
they did not return the book they would die. And
there's there's one name at least there. It's a midwife
named Abstricts hype Motor who signed the oath. So we

(23:20):
we hope Absterricts brought the book back. There's also a
fourteenth century commentary on the harmony of the Gospels, inscribed
with a printer's note saying, anyone who steals this book
will receive quote death from evil things. May the thief
of this book die. So instead of a sticker that
says this book belongs to blank, it's essentially the same thing.
It's that sticker, but it's like this book belongs to blank,

(23:43):
and if you were not blank, you will die, right
and it But you know, we're we're getting into an
area here. We're talking about books that were tremendously valuable
in some cases and uh and also probably had a
bit of the a bit of magic to them. You know,
this reminds me of episode that I did with Christian
while back about books that were attributed magical properties in

(24:05):
a large part base just because of the like the
power of writing, like the ideas that were contained within
it and made it special. Oh yeah. The author of
this blog post actually points out that while some of
the curses seem like overkill, I'm going to mention a
couple more in a minute that are really overkill, um
for what's deserving of a simple book thief. In context,
it makes more sense because of what you're talking about.

(24:26):
Like we would today consider stealing a book to be
a pretty minor petty crime like shoplifting or something. But
this was before the printing press, when books were extremely
labor intensive to produce and a copy and often if
you lost a copy of the book, you weren't just
out a lot of monetary value. It might have been
something that you can't get another copy of. And now

(24:48):
add to that exactly what you're saying, maybe this book
has important information about how to interpret the Bible that
you consider important to saving your eternal soul. This is
a book of extremely important ma jical significance in a way,
So for a medieval Christian monk, stealing or damaging someone
else's religious literature, was this extremely costly and perhaps even

(25:09):
dangerous thing to do to them? Yeah, you're you're stealing
from the pool of collected knowledge. Yeah. Now, a couple
of other great book curses. One was this book that
belonged to the Church of St. Al Dad. In the
Gloucester States quote, this book is of St. Al Date.
He that takes this book shall be hauled by the neck,
bye bye, by who, well, presumably by Christ himself. Also

(25:34):
later in the book, a curse is attributed directly to
the mouth of Jesus Christ and the curses this book
belongs to the Church of St. Al Dad. This book
is one and Christ's curses another. He that takes the
one takes the other. I'm in a couple more. There's
a twelfth century manuscript known as the Arnstein Bible. It's

(25:54):
owned by the Abbey of St. Mary and St. Nicholas
and what's now Germany. Uh here here is the inscript
and quote a book of Saints Mary and Nicholas of Arnstein.
If anyone steals it, may he die, May he be
roasted in a frying pan, May the falling sickness and
fever attack him, and may he be rotated and hanged. Amen.
I think the rotated is on the wheel, and the

(26:16):
falling sickness. I think they're saying that's supposed to be epilepsy.
These are odd prayers. I never really heard amen thrown
on anything this, uh, you know, overtly ghastly in a while. Well,
it makes me think about the version of amen. That's
like when someone in church yells that out after after
the preacher says something that they agree with. You know,
the preacher has had something you agree with, you yell amen.

(26:38):
This is like the person writing the curse being like
that was a good curse. I agree with it. I
don't know, maybe that's not the best reading. One more,
how about a mid fifteenth century book belonging to the
Benedictine monastery of St. Albans. It was loaned to monks
studying in Oxford. Quote this book is given and used
to the Brothers of Oxford by John Weatham Steed father

(26:59):
of the Flock of the proto Martyr of the English.
If anyone secretly tears this inscription or removes it, may
he feel Judas is noose or forks. And I think
that's referring to like being either pitchforks or maybe being
impaled on forked trees. But then there are other more
spiritual curses, like some of them say, you know, if
you steal this book, your name will be deleted from

(27:20):
the Book of Life. It's essentially excommunicating you or sending
you to Hell. I wonder if that was thought to
be binding or you know, of what extent too, were
some of these kind of jokes, if they were if
these books were going to be checked out and read
by other monks. I mean, is there a certain tongue
in cheek vibe going on here? Oh, I wonder that
could be the case. I mean, you can see something

(27:41):
like that today. It's like the sign that says, uh, so,
you know, employee parking only all offenders cars will be
crushed and melted. Yeah, or trespassers will be eaten that
sort of thing. Yeah. Like, generally one assumes that these
are these are are not meant to be taking at
face value. No, I mean I think the books were
value bill and they were legit trying to scare people. Yeah.

(28:02):
I mean, on on one hand, I can I can
see that, see it as a as a legit a
scare tactic. But on the other it's also just if
you have like a really ridiculous, outlandish, um a curse
in the book. I mean, it's kind of a great reminder.
It sticks in your head. It makes you realize, oh,
I need to return this. I don't need to just
let this sit on my corner of the study or

(28:23):
what have you. I don't need to let it gather
dust in the scriptorium. I need to return it. That's
a very good point. I mean, I think we can
return to that again when we discuss the psychological impact
of curses. But yeah, a curse sticks in the mind
in a way that a general sort of moral injunction
might not. You know, just selling somebody you need to

(28:44):
return books you've borrowed. That's easy to forget saying people
who don't return books they've borrowed will be roasted and
rotated and hanged. Uh. You know you might not believe that,
but you're more likely to remember that now we've been
talking about warning curses here with library books essentially says
a curse will happen to you if you do this thing.
One of the obvious examples I can think of this,

(29:06):
which may be a real curse or maybe sort of
a myth about a myth, um would be would be
the idea of tomb curses, like the curse of the Pharaohs.
You know, do not enter here or ye shall be cursed.
Maybe we can address that when we come back from
a break. Yes, and I need to add that if
you skip over the ad you will be cursed. Than alright,

(29:27):
we're back now, Robert, can you tell me about tomb curses?
Is the curse of the Pharaoh's real Well, if you
watch enough movies, it seems like it is, right, I mean,
it's it's it's become a tremendously fun trope and so
many different uh, pictures that we watch, fiction that we read. Um,
you can't really mention curses at all else without summoning

(29:49):
thoughts of the Curse of the Pharaohs, the curse of
the Mummy, etcetera. Um. So for starters, we should point
out that, yes, you will find curses and things like
curses in a ancient Egyptian magic in setting sail for
the afterlife, the dead had to be prepared with spells
to counter curses in the realms beyond death, and pyramids
and tombs also sometimes engage security features nothing like you'd

(30:13):
find in an Indiana Jones movie, really, but certainly sturdy
doors and sometimes false burial chambers as well. But really
you can encounter only a very few written warnings in tombs,
and from what I've read, you find them protecting the
graves of common people as well as as pharaohs, but
again very very few cases, and they tended to promise

(30:34):
punishment in the afterlife for things like stolen bricks, don't
steal bricks from this tomb, or you're you'll get it,
or in one case there was a threat of crocodile
attacks in the living world should you mess with the tomb.
That's a good one. But this idea of the of
the Mummy's curse, this is largely a product of Victorian
England and the popular writings of one individual, in particular

(30:56):
Marie Corelli, who was a novelist and a stick of
the time. Um again, we're getting back to the idea
of of just like spiritual ideas, uh, you know, un
scientific ideas that are popular with people at the time,
and certainly Victorian England we're dealing with. There's a lot
of spiritualism going on, right, and so that is the

(31:18):
that that is the the environment from which this emerges.
So Correlli, she quoted a quote unquote rare book which
she said stated that quote the most dire punishment follows
any rash intruder into a sealed tomb, diverse secret poisons
enclosed in boxes in such wise that they who touched

(31:39):
them should not know how they come to suffer secret poison.
Huh yeah, So and then it sounds good, right, you know,
the idea that there's gonna be secret poison something or
some sort of magical effect that's going to punish anyone
who who dares, you know, break open a tomb. Well,
Tomb desecration is is widely you know, one of the
most prohibited things in many ancient law codes and stuff like.

(32:04):
I know, it's clear, as you mentioned that the ancient
Egyptians were very invested in preventing tomb desecration. You're just
saying that like achieving that by writing a curse on
the tomb was not especially common I know of also
worth knowing they universally failed at it, at least in
the long term, but also sometimes in the short term.
We've we've discussed this before on the podcast that You'll

(32:26):
You'll Have, not not only in Egyptian traditions, but in
other traditions as well. It's pretty common to find evidence
of tombs having been broken into rated Pilford like we
within a lifetime of their construction. Right, it wasn't just
modern people going through ancient Egyptian tombs. That being said,

(32:47):
nobody robs an ancient tomb quite like like a Victorian
era Western explorer. So, as a science journalist Joe Marchant
explains in their Ian magazine article The Mummy's Curse Um
CORRELLI here was it was kind of ground zero for
all of this curse nonsense. So she at the time

(33:08):
she had monished George Herbert for the fifth Earl of Carnarvon,
for his involvement in an architect archaeological dig in Egypt,
in particular the Tomb of Tuton Common and Uh. And
then an interesting thing happened. Herbert died from a mosquito
born illness in a Cairo hotel. Okay, or one assumes
it was a mosquito born illness because he was bitten

(33:29):
by a mosquito and then grew ill and died. But
so he's a guy involved in in excavating the tomb
and he dies of some illness, right, and so the
stories began to spin out from there. From there, the
idea going around that that British archaeologist Howard Carter, who
was also a part of this particular endeavor, that he
discovered a tablet warning death to tomb raiders, and that

(33:52):
he quickly hit it away buried in the sand to
keep the workers from seeing. Now, as as marchant explorers,
you you had skeptics of the day saying that this
was clearly all bologny. But this was again in the
midst of a spiritualist boom. Uh So you had famous minds,
including the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was

(34:13):
definitely susceptible to uh to this line of thinking. He
he ends up, you know, jumping in when people say, well, look,
if there's a curse, why didn't Carter die from the curse?
To why did only one of the two principles on
this dig die from the curse, and uh, Sir Arthur
Conan Doel's response was apparently, quote one might as well

(34:35):
say that because bulldogs do not bite everybody, therefore bulldogs
do not exist, which is such a ludicrous counter argument
Like this is the kind of counter argument one expects
to find on you know, in talk radio nowadays, or
on you know, political commentating on certain channels. I disagree.
Incredibly tight logic, exactly parallel. You can guess what fall

(35:00):
allow it? Right, anybody with the slightest connection to Herbert
was looped into the curse. If they happen to die,
and if they didn't die, well you just ignored that,
right You only focus this is this is key to
any kind of supernatural thinking, right you only you only
focus on the bits of information that back up your
supernatural premise. Uh. Now, one of the things that we

(35:22):
have to acknowledge here is that everybody from this scenario
is dead now. So if you want to, you could say, yeah,
well the curse must have worked because now nobody is alive.
Who who was originally in on the cracking of this tune?
Time the ultimate enforcer of all curses? Right? I mean
in a way, it's it's perfectly safe to cast a

(35:43):
curse because everybody will die and or something bad is
liable to happen to everybody involved. Now, the cool thing
is is that scientists and uh and more skeptical minds
have applied our scientific understanding of contagions to this idea
of a mummy's curse. Egyptologist Herbert Winlock published a chart
in the New York Times back in nineteen thirty four

(36:06):
that attempted to dismiss a lot of this, uh, you know,
mummies curse nonsense by pointing out that of forty people
who entered the tomb in question, only six died in
the following twelve years. And some of those people who
entered may have happened to be Westerners who were in
Egypt in a place with mosquito born diseases that they

(36:26):
were not resistant too. Oh yeah, there's so many factors
that have nothing to do with any kind of supernatural model. Um.
But by the way, if anybody wants to to read this,
you can find it on the New York Times website
in their archive. But the full title is Curse of
Pharaoh Denied by Winlock. Metropolitan museum director ridicules tale of

(36:47):
malediction about Teuton Common tomb. Quote. The so called curse
of tutin Common is a superstition, so holy, devoid a
foundation foundation that only the most credulous and ill informed
person can of a moment's credence to it, according to
Herbert Ewinlock, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and
its curator of Egyptology. So this is false on multiple levels.

(37:10):
Like the the idea of the curse of the Pharaoh's
It's not only not true that everybody who went in
the tomb died, it's also not even true that there
was a curse involved as far as we know, never issued,
never enforced, Whereas if you listen to all of the bologna,
it sounds like, oh, it was issued and it was enforced.
Isn't it creepy right now? Another individual who sought to

(37:31):
apply some common sense to the scenario was Mark Nelson
from the University of Tasmania, and he had a study
published in a two edition of the British British Medical
Journal that compared the death rates for people who entered
the tomb at key times with people who are simply
in Egypt not only did the tomb not make you
more likely to die, everyone that was analyzed in this

(37:54):
particulars particular study generally lived twenty more years. Okay, so
actually going into the tomb seems to be like a
fountain of youth. Well, or I think I think more
along the line is like everybody involved, whether you went
into the tomb or not, you had at least twenty
more years. So if there was a curse in place,
it's working, Like what it takes that long to kick in? Uh,

(38:17):
that's not a curse, that's just that's just you living
two more decades. And you have to think about like
the what are the what are the probable ages of
the individuals that are going out on one of these expeditions. Um, yeah,
twenty years does not a curse make, but the appeal
of the curse, you know, it seems to play I think,
in part on the modern trope of you know, the

(38:38):
the modern expert has has gone too far. You know,
it's it's essentially the Frankenstein idea, Right, your curiosity led
you to to places that should not be tread by humans. Yeah,
and then also I can't help but suspect that there's
a certain sense of of you know, buried colonial grave
robin guilt here as well. You know, like there's maybe

(39:00):
there's this deep idea that what I'm doing is, yes,
it's archaeology, but I'm also kind of desecrating a grave here,
and uh and and and maybe it ends up playing
on some of these like these older, more primal ideas
about um, the inherent defilement of that act. Yeah. I
think this is always something strange to consider an archaeology,

(39:22):
because of course I love archaeology, and I love what
we can discover about the past from it, but it
very often involves exposing things that ancient people's did not
want exposed, that they wanted left alone. Uh. And that's
true not just in Egyptian archaeology, but everywhere. One of
one of the funny things I find about that, though,
is that the anxiety, like with the Curse of the
Pharaohs as an example, tends to only come up with

(39:44):
regard to unearthing the remains or or hidden things of
rich people of the past. And you know, when you
just dig up like a common mask grave from the
past or something, people don't seem to worry about the
same stuff. I feel like that just betrays an extra
sort of level of bio us in the way we
think about what sort of ancient people's wishes should be honored.
If your remains are old enough and you were poor enough,

(40:06):
than nobody cares. But if you were very rich, there
might be a curse. You never know. If they could
afford all this, then they could probably pay the curse
crafter Now, and in talking about curses and exploring curses,
there's so many different cultures we could look at, so
many different periods of history. I ended up looking around
a little bit in Chinese history, and I ended up
focusing on a sorcery scare that occurred rather late in

(40:30):
Chinese history during the the Ching Dynasty, the last dynasty
of China that that last at sixteen forty four through
nineteen twelve. Now, I read before that the Ching Dynasty's
penal code was rather harsh on sorcery and called for
the execution of not only all those who employed spells
and incantations quote to agitate and influence the minds of

(40:52):
the people, but also anyone who wrote or edited books
of sorcery. So all you had to do is just
be the editor you know, or or one would presume,
like just proof reading a copy of of a sorceress
text could get you end up getting you beheaded. That's harsh.
Now read about about this in the notations to Herbert A.

(41:14):
Giles's translation of Pooh Song Wings Strange Tales from a
Chinese studio. This is a fabulous book. It's it's widely
available in English translation, uh, and it's it's from seventeenth
century China, and it collects and retails various weird tales,
some of which are horrifying ghost stories about like awful
spirits jumping out and gnawing on your head, you know,

(41:36):
strange goblins living uh in the forest, that sort of thing.
Others are more whimsical, like a pen dragon that infiltrates
a scholars office, or there's there's also a few that
are kind of body and hilarious as well. But again,
this is a book from seventeenth century China, and it

(41:59):
was written in a time that it was sometimes referred
to as the troubles Uh. This was in the coastal
province of shang Dong. That's where Pusson ling U lived,
and there it was an area subject to a various
peasant rebellions. Manshu uprisings. They were unstable times and then

(42:20):
UH during the eighteenth century it was also a time
of mass panic. I was looking at a book by
Philip A. Kun titled Soul Steel Steelers The Chinese Sorcery
Scare of seventeen sixty eight. This came out in two
thousand six. Uh and um It points out that during
the reign of the Qing Long Emperor, a mass hysteria

(42:40):
swept through the people. Quote in the year seventeen sixty eight,
on the eve of China's tragic modern age, there ran
through her society a premonitory shiver, a vision of sorcerers
roaming the land, stealing souls. By enchanting either the written
name of the victim or a piece of his hair
or thing. The sorcerer would cause him to sicken and die.

(43:03):
He then would use the stolen soul force for his
own purposes. Now. Coon points out that a lot of Chinese,
a lot of Chinese sorcery, concerns the fragility of this
supposed link between the body and the soul, and he
also specifically mentions the power of the beggar's curse UH
leveled at one who you know refuses to give alms

(43:24):
to the poor. Quote, his polluted nature was entirely combatible
with magical terrorism. So in this way, we kind of
returned to that idea we talked about earlier, the idea
that like the curse is kind of like it's it's
the last bit of power that somebody in a in
a reduced cast or in a reduced level of society,
the last thing they have that they can turn to

(43:47):
if they're you know, they're on the street corner and
they're asking for a coin from the from the rich man,
and the rich man doesn't give them to them. You know,
what can you do? You can curse them. You can
you can spit that curse. Uh, And they can't quite
take that way from you. They like, even no matter
what your position in life, they're they're going to have
to deal with that curse that you that you unleashed. Well,
I feel like a version of this comes through so

(44:09):
often even um, not just in all the real history
we've been talking about how curses have been used by people,
but even in like say the Witch literature, I mean,
the witch we often forget is an outcast figure. Right
that the witch is oppressed, the witch tends to be
an ugly old woman at a time when an ugly
old woman generally did not hold much power in society,

(44:32):
and at times and places where government and society are
very misogynist that would look on a single old woman
with with disdain and say, you know, why should she
have any say over how anything goes? And so maybe
she needs some magic to have a say. Yeah, there's
I feel like there's so much potentially unpack with the
idea of of of of the beggar figure in their

(44:53):
power to curse. You know, it's kind of like you've
like you've reduced their stature and you've kind of associated
a certain amount of pollution with them, and in doing so,
you've kind of given them the power to curse you,
you know. Yeah. Now, I mentioned at the top of
the podcast that we would come back to Lo Pan
because Lo Pan in a sense, does pop up in

(45:16):
Kuhn's book. So Lo Pan, the character from Victor Little China,
does not really exist in um in Chinese myth or history,
but we do have the figure of Lupan um and
he and he does come up in this particular book book,
Lupan being the mystic figure uh and inventor Chinese god

(45:37):
of carpentry. You have a particular book called the Lupan Qing,
and this text includes instructions for the construction of a
house in such a way to deal with the quote
various kinds of carpenters, mason's and plasters who will plot
to poison, curse and harm the owner. Whoa why would
they do that? Well? Uh, I mean, on one hand,

(45:59):
maybe it's just that, you know, how he's dealing with contractors.
You never know when they're going to curse you behind
your back, right. Uh, seems to belie maybe a guilty
conscience on the owner's part, exactly maybe exactly um, or
just to sort of a general distrust of everybody that
you've you know, I'm assuming in this case, you're probably
dealing with a wealthy individual. Who's who's who's either building

(46:22):
the house for themselves or or for another wealthy member
of society. Uh So, yeah, they're they're they're a number
of different societal elements and economic factors to consider and
why they might be uh subject to being cursed or
just be paranoid about being cursed. Yeah, okay, I can
see that. I Mean, generally, wealth might tend to cause
a sense of isolation in your brain, where you start

(46:44):
to look around at everybody else and think, oh, they're
all jealous of me. Well, luckily, this particular book included
some instructions how to how to create a counter curse
against the curse spitting contractor Okay, what do you do?
All right? So, first of all, when the roof beam
is raised, quote, offer a sacrifice to three types of animal.
And then the next recite the following secret charm to

(47:08):
master lupon quote. Evil artisans, do you not know that
poisons and curses will rebound upon yourselves and bring no
harm to the owner. Let the artisan responsible for the
sorcery meet misfortune. I have received the proclamation of the
Supreme Ruler, the Jade Emperor, ordering that I shall suffer

(47:30):
no harm from others, and that all will redound to
my good fortune an urgent decree. Next, you burn a
copy of the charm in a private place where no
pregnant woman can see it. Then you mix ashes with
blood of both a black and a yellow dog. Uh
dog blood apparently often factored into magical spells of the time.

(47:52):
Then you dissolve all of this in wine. And then
when the main roof beam is raised. You serve this
potion to the builders, and the boss of the builders
uh that they have to drink three cups of it,
and then whoever is plotting sorcery against you will perish. Also,
you want to paste of a million inc copy of
this um this anti curse a top of the roof beam.

(48:16):
That's a lot of lengths to go to. But it
makes me think again how sometimes we've talked about sometimes
it seems like magic operates on like the sunk costs
kind of issue. Like the more work you put into
making a magic spell work, maybe the more effective it
feels to you, because it will become harder for you
to admit that it didn't work. Yeah, I wonder too

(48:37):
if this is Like I wonder how much of this
scenario though, is about legitimate concern that underlings will work
evil sorcery against you, or the fear that their their
their work will be shoddy, or that they might steal
from you, etcetera. Like how much of this is is
just making up for lack of oversight in the construction process. Essentially,

(48:58):
I do not steal this book, warning that's possible. But
then there's all there's just all kinds of weird psychology
about the way that owners tend to resent the people
who work for them. You know. Uh, this is almost
like a like a weird magical version of an employment contract. Yeah. Now,
I do have to say I I have never had
an experience with a contractor or repair person, etcetera where

(49:21):
I felt that they were cursing me. Now, just in
case anyone out there is listening and they're thinking, hey,
well I I worked on Robert's house or I fixed
one of Robert's appliances, let me assure you I have
never had any experience with with a with a a
pair person, or a contractor where I felt like they
were cursing me in any way, shape or form. On
the other hand, I do think you need to return

(49:41):
that bronze vase pretty soon, because I can see it's
filling up with your blood rather quickly. What if Yelp reviews,
like negative Route Yelp reviews were um were overtly curses.
What if they were they were worded in that way,
there's probably something in the in the by laws for
for Yelp that you from doing that. From doing evil magic, Yeah,

(50:02):
no evil magic, no linguistic sorcery. It privent permitted on
the beat on the website. You know, one of the
things that's interesting about curses is that it seems like
words are very important to them. Like it is definitely
not enough to simply think that you wish ill will
to come upon somebody. It is often the case that

(50:23):
you need to put it down in writing or have
a spell spoken allowed in in conjunction with some kind
of ritual. It's putting the ill will into words that
makes it real. Yeah. We see that in the Roman example,
and we certainly see it here in this Chinese example,
both in that it is plastered to the beam and
then also the physical writing is used in a potion

(50:46):
that will become a part of the contractor's bodies. So
I think maybe this is a good opportunity to transition
to talking about the psychology of curses. What's going on
when people cast curse spells against others? Are curse spells
maybe sometimes actually effective in a way even though magic
isn't real. I'm ready to do that, Are you ready, Robert, Yeah,

(51:07):
let's do it. I mean, I think one thing that's
important to note here is that a curse need not
be entirely psychological or or or or you know, even social.
But certainly if if like someone publicly curses you, there's
probably gonna be a certain societal pressure. Like if you're
the guy who walks by the beggar and doesn't give
them a coin, and the beggar curses you in front
of other people, that's I mean, that's essentially like a

(51:30):
public shaming to to a certain extent, So there may
well be a pipe a price to pay, uh of
on a social level. But then if you have other
examples where like a curse is but perhaps accompanied by
some sort of a monetary penalty or some other kind
of penalty, then um, yeah, again it's not mirror. It's

(51:51):
not just a psychological attack. It may have these other components,
but for the most part, when we're talking especially about
the beggar's curse or the curse of the end of
the role who's whose cloak is stolen with no hope
of ever getting it back, all you have are the
words of the curse, and and to to a certain extent,
they might not even be heard or processed by the

(52:12):
individual that is the target. Right, Well, I mean, it's
important to think about the curse existing at two levels.
It's working at two levels. On one level, or maybe
you can even say three levels. One is it works
on the person who cast the curse. The other is
that it works on the you know, the target of
the curse. And the third is that it works on

(52:32):
the society in general, the people who you know, the context,
people who observe the curse happening. UM. Now to focus
first on the idea of the target of the curse,
Like you have had a curse put on you, are
there ways that that might actually be effective, that you
might think that you are actually suffering from a curse
even though there's no magic. And I think quite clearly

(52:54):
the answer to that is yes, you know, there's a
lot of psychological power. UM. Like the I guess we
should talk about the no Seebo effect. Yeah, we've we've
talked about this on the show before in the past.
There was an episode from I think eleven about placebos,
and then we of course end up talking about no
sepos which is in the same way that a curse
is the kind of the opposite of a prayer or

(53:17):
a or a blessing, the no Seebo effect is the
dark reflection of the plus sebo effect exactly. So we're
all very aware of the placebo effect now, right. So
the human body responds favorably sometimes to treatments that don't
actually chemically do anything to you. So you've got pain
in your shoulder, and I give you a pill and
tell you it's a pain killer. Even though the pill

(53:39):
contains no medicine whatsoever, many people will report that their
symptoms are being healed, and sometimes the expectation of benefit
leads people to have a greater chance of improvement over
the baseline from all kinds of negative conditions. The effect
is powerful enough that it's a standard part of the
scientific method in medicine. We always have to control for

(54:00):
placebo effect if you want your study to be valid. Yeah,
place the placebo effect is is one of the reasons
that any number of like faith healing or alternative medicine, uh,
these various practices may be perceived as having a positive
benefit because they may well have a marginally measurable positive

(54:22):
benefit in the short term, but it's all due to
the placebo effect. Or well that I'd say, there are
actually two things. Placebo effect is a strong part. Another
strong part I want to mention just real quick is
the idea of regression to the mean. Um. So, sometimes
I think people overstate the power of the placebo effect,
attributing almost magical powers to it. I'm sure you've encountered

(54:43):
this to where people think it proves some kind of
radical mind over matter state of affairs. I don't think
it goes that far. Though. The placebo effect is very
real and very interesting and absolutely worth talking about. It's
not like, you know, a magic, almost psychic power kind
of right. Sometimes it can be presented it almost like
it's it's it's like a lucid dreaming, right, like I
have broken free from the boundaries of my physical body.

(55:05):
Thank you placebo effect. All hell the mighty sugar bill. Right,
I've I've changed the laws of chemistry with my brain
and no uh and And the idea of regression to
the mean is important to understand because in fact, many
placebo effects can probably be attributed to it. Whenever you
hear the words this is a science e term regression
to the mean, Basically, you can just think of regression
to the mean as going back to normal. So most

(55:27):
of the time you're in a position to be studied
for some kind of medical treatment, it's because something has
gone wrong with your body. And often after something goes
wrong with your body, eventually you just get better. Right
whether or not you've got any kind of treatment. Something
went wrong and then it went away. So to test
the real effectiveness of placebo's qua placebo effects, you need

(55:49):
to not only get a test group getting the real
treatment under study, and then a test group getting a
fake treatment the placebo group, but also a group that
gets no treatment whatsoever, and compare the three of those.
In many cases, a significant number of people will get
better even despite getting no treatment at all. But then
usually on top of that, you'll get more people getting

(56:09):
better in the placebo group, people who think that they're
getting treated even though they're not getting anything that does
anything chemically real to their body. But, like we said,
placebo is robustly observed, very real anyway, The no sebo
effect is the evil twin of the placebo effect. If
a placebo can make you feel like you're getting better
when there's no physical cause, the no sebo can make

(56:31):
you feel worse when there's no physical cause. Yeah, this
is the idea that the sugar pill is hurting me
as opposed to the sugar peel A pill is healing me. Yeah,
And so in randomized placebo controlled trials of drugs and
other medical treatments, people in the placebo group sometimes report
not only feeling better despite not receiving the real drug,
sometimes they report negative side effects despite not receiving the

(56:53):
real drug, and researchers have determined that this is likely
due to the process of informed consent. Right, so, before
you sign up to an experiment, subjects have to be
told of any known adverse side effects that they might
experience due to the drug, even if they end up
sorted into the control group. So having been informed of
those possible side effects, people sometimes experience and report them

(57:16):
even though they're not getting any active ingredients. In other words,
a placebo effect for bad things. And there are all
kinds of examples of this. One of them is that
the no sebo effect can absolutely make people feel pain.
Uh an example cited and I was just reading an
article about this in Science from seventeen by Luana Colloca,
and Colloca writes about there's a concurrent study in in

(57:39):
the journal that talks about how so you can take
two creams. I would put some creams on your skin.
Robert and these two creams are actually both placebos. Neither
of them do anything. But I've told you that one
of the or I've given you indications a visual indications,
that one of them is very expensive and one of
them is very cheap. And what I tell you they're

(58:00):
supposed to do is they will stop itching, but they
will increase your sensitivity to pain in the affected area.
So not only does this cause people to think that
they're experiencing heightened pain, they actually think that the more
expensive looking cream causes them to feel more pain. I
think there's another thing going on there that's interesting with
like the idea of you having to cast a spell

(58:22):
that involves like a cost, like you pay the scribe,
or you have to do a lot of steps like
building the house. You know, that's something that's costly to you.
It seems like the more you spend on a magical
spell or a curse, maybe the more effective it is
because of some version of this effect, like the more
expensive cream seems like it's giving you worse side effects. Yeah,

(58:43):
and plus just the sunk cost. Right, I put this
much time and energy into this magical vendetta. It has
to work, That's exactly. Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. Now, Coloca,
just note something very quickly that I thought was kind
of interesting. What are the evolutionary explanations for the placebo
and no cebo effects? Why would there be a pressure
on the creation of our brains through evolution to feel

(59:06):
better or worse depending on suggestion rather than actual physical stimuli.
Uh and she she mentions quote. In evolutionary terms, no
cebo and placebo effects coexist to favor perceptual mechanisms that
anticipate threat and dangerous events no cebo effects and promote
appetitive and safety behaviors in placebo effects. So it's almost

(59:29):
like giving you a taste of what's to come. I
think this also makes sense if you you unroot um
our experience with placebo and no cebo no cebo effects,
if you if you try and take it outside of
the context of of of the human mind and thinking
so intently about the future and worrying about what the
future is, and you think of it in terms of

(59:51):
like a longer biological history of essentially like a dog
eating grass when its stomach is bothering it. Yeah, exactly,
um So, so you can clearly see how something like
the no cebo effect could be at play and somebody
who knows they're the target of a curse. Right, if
you're the target of a curse, it might not do
everything to you, Like somebody who curses you and says,

(01:00:13):
may he grow horns or something like that, that's not
going to happen. But if it is something like, may
you're urine sting ever so slightly when you urinate, or
more and more intently, may your may your stomach hurt?
May you have stomach pains? And you might start thinking,
I think I might have stomach pains. I think there's
something going on, And then there to a certain extent,

(01:00:33):
is something going on via the no cebo effect. Yeah,
so we know we're vulnerable to stuff like this, and
I think in those kinds of cases, curses could actually
be highly effective, depending on if the person believes that
the curse could be effective, and especially if the curse
appears expensive like the more expensive cream, and if it
is creating stress in the body. And that's always something

(01:00:57):
to look at too there because when we feel heightened
levels of stress there there can be physical ramifications for that.
There are limits to that, as we'll discussing in in
a minute, but but still stress in the body. Uh,
can have ill effects on the body. Yes, And now

(01:01:17):
here's another way that we could think of curses as
maybe being effective, just in what you're talking about, the
idea of the the the threat of a curse causing
stress or anxiety. Um, what about the cases where the
person's cloak is stolen and the person doesn't know who
stole the cloak and the cast a curse anyway, how
could that be doing anything well? I would argue that

(01:01:40):
maybe that could and sort of like an economic standpoint,
So take the context of the curse tablets against an
unknown thieves. Let's say you remember of the you know,
the common classes in in the ancient Mediterranean. Somewhere, one
of your most valuable possessions gets stolen. Somebody takes your
bronze pot, or somebody takes your cloak, and you live

(01:02:00):
in a time and place when the authorities are not
very helpful to you. They might be Uh, they might
not be especially interested in solving the case or getting
your stuff back, especially if you're poor. And I checked
out what what it was like in the Roman Empire,
like if you got your stuff stolen. I was trying
to find evidence of what you would do, right, you know,
if you could go to the police or something, what

(01:02:21):
kind of access to justice he would have. And as
far as I could tell, the Romans did at different
periods have various internal forces which might be thought of
as something like police, like the vigil as or the
watchman or the urban cohorts. But I've not found any
evidence that these forces would actually help common people in
solving petty crimes. Maybe they did in some cases, but

(01:02:43):
I have not found anything about that. It seems more
like they were oriented toward heavy jobs like firefighting or
putting down riots or violent gangs or mobs. It's almost
more like an uh, you know, a domestic military force
or something. It is just so difficult for the modernist
to imagine this world you're describing. No, I mean there

(01:03:03):
are many yeah, exactly. I mean a lot of people
do not have access to any kind of police force
that could give them justice on a small scale. And
even if you were privileged enough to like have access
to a police force, who's going to take down a
report about you getting your cloak stolen or something like that,
They're probably not going to be able to get it
back for you. A lot of times that written report

(01:03:25):
is about as useful as a written curse. You might
pay for a good point, dollars are paying for that
written curse, I suppose. So the state can't help you.
You don't really have the power to take matters into
your own hands, especially if you're not sure who the
culprit is. So what can you do about your stolen cloak? Well,
you go to the temple and you pay ascribe to
write out a curse tablet for you. It's not actually magic,

(01:03:47):
but imagine if enough people do this and believe in
the power of the curses to find and inflict pain
on the culprits. I wonder if it might actually discourage
thieves from praying on the power of lists to begin with, Right,
if you're surrounded by these cursed tablets nailed up everywhere,
they're giving you all these reminders that if I steal
something from somebody, I might get a curse cast against me,

(01:04:10):
and that would be really bad. Then I wouldn't be
able to defecate, or you know, I'd bleed into a pot,
or have sexual problems or something that might prevent me
from stealing somebody's cloak to begin with, Yeah, this, This
almost makes me want to devote an episode to to
figuring out like what, you know, what sort of mindset
the career uh cloak thief, a career criminal might have

(01:04:33):
had then in ancient times? Were they perhaps okay with
being cursed? Were they to some degree or even a
large degree? Uh? Did they see through the bologna of
the curse and like realize this is just a bunch
of people who are angry because I'm really good at
stealing cloaks, but so far I can still urinate, so
I'm in the clear. Or were there perhaps other magical

(01:04:54):
protections like ultimately, does the does the does the the
curse spitting only work with an certain religious worldview? And
if you have a slightly different religion or perhaps different
religious values, perhaps you worship another god, then you're protected.
At any rate, it still make it probably, it's still
definitely makes that the individual feel good, like, well, I'm
not going to get that cloak back, but at least

(01:05:15):
I got this curse rolled out. Yeah, it's hard to tell.
I mean, it's hard to look into the two the
minds of ancient people and know whether they expected it
to work or maybe I don't know, maybe it's possible
that people who were putting these curves, you know, paying
to get these curses done, or writing them themselves or whatever,
we're not always expecting to actually get their thing back.

(01:05:36):
But they were trying to create a kind of curse
culture that might offer a deterrent from committing crimes. It
was almost like an altruistic you know, for the greater
good kind of thing that I'm doing to discourage cloak
stealing in general. Alright, well, on that note, we're gonna
do one more break and again. You'll be cursed if
you skip the advertisement, but then we'll be right back.

(01:05:56):
Thank thank Alright, we're back. So we've been talking about
the ways that curses, even though they're not magic, might
be effective in one way or another. They might be
effective against the target of the curse via the no
Seebo effect. They might be effective on the society in
general via some kind of magic belief system in a
deterrent or that would create a deterrent from committing crimes

(01:06:18):
or something. Um then I wonder how they work on
the self. But one quick idea I had. I don't
have a whole lot to say about this, but just
a thought, is I wonder if sometimes a curse could
be a psychological self manipulation technique, like a way to
persuade yourself to fully turn against someone you previously had

(01:06:39):
some kind of relationship. Probably not with the curses against
like unknown enemies, you know, whoever took my cloak. But
when you're cursing somebody, you know, it almost reminds me
of um. You know, sometimes you see people like in
movies and stuff, like they go through a breakup or something,
and while they're going through the breakup, they just suddenly
say lots of really mean, hurtful things to the person

(01:07:02):
they're breaking up with. And obviously, you know you see that,
so you know that happens sometimes in reality. That's that's
based off people's experiences, And I wonder if people do
stuff like that to help themselves enforce a clean break.
It's like, you know, like once I say something like this,
I've crossed the line, and now this person is quote

(01:07:24):
dead to me or you know that that you're not
going to go back and rekindle the relationship. Perhaps, But
then also these curses feel so formal that it feels
like it would be easier to take back a formal
curse than something that is uh, that is you know
that that you just say in a moment of anger,
you know those things that you can truly never unsay. Yeah,

(01:07:46):
I wonder, But I wonder also if putting it into words,
written down as a way of trying to make it
like untake back double from you know, like if somebody's
written it on a lead sheet and then nailed it
up somewhere, you can't say like, I take it back now,
it's external to you. You've made the curse and you're
you're that person is dead to me. Sentiment sort of

(01:08:08):
public and unalterable. I don't know if people take down
crazy Facebook and Twitter posts every day, though I guess
sometimes you have. You can say my account was hacked. Sorry.
That curse is not really intended for everybody. But I
mean there are a lot of ways that I think
modern behaviors like you're talking about could be considered equivalent
to curses. I mean, putting aside people who would still

(01:08:30):
practice some form of witchcraft and like literally think they're
enacting evil magic against somebody else. There are other like
modern equivalents of curses. I think. Yeah, I mean, just
to go back to social media, I think We've probably
all seen examples of someone pointing out some wrongdoing and saying,
in varying degrees of viciousness, saying like, I hope something

(01:08:50):
bad happens to you because of this. But then also
you see the the opposite of that sometimes where someone
is going out of their way to to either not
make a curse or even to a certain extent, kind
of bless the perpetrator. You know, where someone says like, hey,
whoever it was who mugged me, uh the other day? Uh,

(01:09:12):
I hope, I hope you find the help that you need.
You know that that sort of statement, which can be
a very positive statement to make. Can you see someone
make a statement like that and you you're like, yeah,
this is a person who had every right to curse
the individual who wronged them, but they did not. And
there's something noble in that. But it's kind of playing
upon the same energy of the curse. It is in
the it is in the tradition of the curse. Even

(01:09:32):
if it is if it is a significant improvement. Yeah,
I can see that. And of course, I mean we
should not ignore that modern religions that are widely practiced
to do have things that are I don't know, maybe
not exactly like the you know, curse tablets or something,
but are in some form like invoking of supernatural authority

(01:09:52):
against someone. Oh yeah, I mean you can still find
yourself excommunicated in any number of faith and did not
nations where you were essentially kicked out of the religion,
and any rewards that might await you in the afterlife
are therefore denied you. And the time was when you
could you could essentially perform this on an entire nation.

(01:10:15):
Uh what a writ of interdict? I believe? Yeah, I think.
Uh well, I just looked at a pope innocent. The
third issued an interdict against Norway. It's just like Norwegians.
You're out. Sorry, the outside curse on all of you
until presumably you know, work things out. Um. And there
are forms of excommunication and other religions as well, um

(01:10:37):
in um. In Islamic traditions, there is tach fear, which
is a contentious declaration that an individual is a nonbeliever
that is sometimes compared to excommunication. And there was a
practice of cast excommunication in medieval India, and in Judaism
there is hiram, which is supposedly similar as well. Now

(01:11:01):
if you turn on evangelical television programming in the United States,
or if you've had an opportunity to watch any of
it um in the last few decades, you've probably seen
a lot of prayer activity and m and as well
as sometimes something that could definitely be considered a curse. Right, So,
if you're praying to God to invoke religious texts, uh,

(01:11:21):
you know, to spit doom at someone in particular, then
you're I think you're essentially talking about a curse. Again,
it comes back to the idea of the protester with
the sign. They may see it as them just invoking
the rule or reminding everybody how God works. But when
push comes to shove, how is that different? Really? Well? Yeah,
I mean from the from the third party's perspective, it

(01:11:42):
looks a lot like a curse. The person might say, no, no,
no, no no, I'm not making this happen. I'm just telling
you how it is. But the victim or the target
of this threat is probably going to perceive it essentially
as being something like a curse, like I I cast
down ill fortune upon you. Yeah, like so many, so
many different religion. Let's say, any religion that has a
theology of hell. Essentially you have a built in revenge fantasy.

(01:12:06):
And and I think this plays into some of the
psychology of the curse, issuing the curse, right, Like I'm
I I can't actually get back at whoever stole this
cloak from me, But in my mind they're suffering. In
my mind, they're they're going to be tormented. And that's
essentially what any health theology really is, like, Oh, those
people who didn't believe like me, or the people who

(01:12:27):
actually did something nefarious in a life, they may get
away with it now, but in the afterlife they will,
they will burn, And in my mind they are burning
in the depraved notions that I have incorporated into my worldview. Well,
you could also say, in like the economic example we gave,
that perhaps a belief like that might create a deterrent
among people from doing something negative. Unfortunately, now I think

(01:12:49):
you could take strong issue with saying that that a
that it was worth it to do that deterrent, or
be that it actually worked or did anything. Yeah, and
this we kind of get into the whole theological idea
that if people were not threatened with hell, they will
just they won't. They won't obey any law right, right.
I don't put much stock in that, but for my money,
especially in today's world, everyone has any kind of access

(01:13:11):
to the to the marketplace of of religious ideas. Like you,
you ultimately choose which version of a particular faith you're
going to adhere to, and if you choose the one
with the more elaborate, uh, you know, all inclusive revenge fantasy,
then you were deciding, like what curses you want to
level against nonbelievers or people who have who have sinned, etcetera. Yeah,

(01:13:36):
it's sort of a cursed by interpretation. Yeah, and then
of course you have plenty of individuals in our modern
world who have if they're not actually cursing people, they're
at least pushing the narrative that there are those out
there who are cursing. There have been specific examples with
Pat Robertson's claim that Satanist were cursing babies, or Alec

(01:13:56):
Jones saying that, which is, we're using curses and witchcraft
against Donald Trump, that sort of thing. Wait, does Jones
believe that the curse or does he claim to believe
that the curses are working? I don't know. You'd have
to ask Alex Jones about that. But to pick up
on what you're saying, a curse can also serve as
a form sort of a public shaming, right. You know,

(01:14:17):
it's been hypothesized that the bath curse tablets I think
I mentioned this a little bit earlier, may have been
publicly displayed, meaning that people could see the allegations, they
could sympathize with the victim, they could shame or punish
the perpetrator, they could help the victim with details, maybe
to discover who the perpetrator was. Like, something about this

(01:14:38):
historical scenario is saying maybe maybe it wasn't just the
magical qualities. I mean, these people probably did believe in
curses and believe there was a magic kind of work
being done, but it also might have also been just
kind of like the curse is part of a public
bulletin board system that helps keep everybody informed about crimes
that are going on and and what your friend might

(01:14:59):
need help with. Now, I'm also reminded in all of
this of prosperity churches, you know, churches that in many
cases they interpret poverty or even illness as divine punishment,
as is essentially a curse from God, which which which
really really plays into this older idea, right, if things,
if bad things are happening to people and we don't

(01:15:20):
know why, we we we end up attributing all of
these magical causes to it. Uh. And we still see
this throughout the world. I mean, they're they're. There are
a number of different examples. I was looking at a
particular paper though, published in the journal Plos one from
researchers at the University of East Anglia, and they point
out that many people in rural African communities still believe

(01:15:42):
that disability occurs due to some sort of supernatural force,
such as curses such as, you know, a demon afflicting
a child, that sort of thing um, and these are
caused by wrongdoing. So, for instance, one of the common
versions of the US is there's a there's infidelity and
therefore the child of that infidelity is punished with some

(01:16:05):
sort of deformity. But the research has found that as
medical understanding grows, apparents are more likely to seek medical
aid first rather than a which doctor to you know,
interpret what is going on, like why this deformity has
taken place, etcetera. This particular research was condicted conducted in Kenya,
by the way, but I think it does illustrate you know,

(01:16:25):
why the idea of a curse work so well, you know, right,
because it can what play on anxieties you have about
guilt and inadequacy. Yeah, and then on top of just
not having access to information about how deformities work, how
how medical science works, you know that sort of thing.
And then also especially the curses vague enough. I mean,

(01:16:47):
we're all going to violate a moral value to some extent.
At some point, We're all going to do something we
are not proud of and we feel guilty about, and
then something that we can interpret as bad luck is
going to happen to all of us. I mean, if
nothing else, you may find yourself in a situation where
you accidentally say a square word in front of a child,
and then later you'll stub your toe. And if you

(01:17:09):
and if you wanted to, if there was, if there
was support for this interpretation in your worldview, you could say,
oh h, that the god of toe stubbing punished me
for having sworn in front of that child. So it's
quite easy for us to make ourselves the victims of
magical causality via magical thinking, even if you know nobody
else out there is telling you I'm cursing you. Yeah,

(01:17:30):
because we was. We've discussed plenty of times in the
show before. Our brains are just pattern recognition engines, and
we'll often make connections that are not really there. And
uh and this is where we see so many different
magical ideas about how the world works emerging, right. Um,
you know, even outside of traditional beliefs and the developing world.

(01:17:51):
Who I mean, who out there has encountered the the
the negative people get cancer model, you know, that kind
of Western New Age thinking. It's like, you know what,
it's like the secret kind of Yeah. And and I
can see why this is attractive too, because in the
same way that if one doesn't have access tom like
a modern scientific understanding of disease, they might be susceptible

(01:18:14):
to to to some sort of magical explanation. I can
see where even with access to uh uh to medical
understanding of the world, if the if modern medicine is
not able to you know, provide the level of of
treatment that you would require, I can see where you
might turn to some of these magical ideas, you know,

(01:18:36):
or you might sort of stumble back into them or
even sort of have them at the same time, I mean,
are are we're certainly capable of having to conflicting ideas
in our head at the same time. We're on one level.
You know what cancer is, and you know that it
has nothing to do with your personality or your life decisions.
But still somewhere in the back of your mind there's

(01:18:56):
that old bit of magical thinking, sort of clawing at
the door, you know, trying to to to tear you
down into believing some other bit of nonsense about it. Yeah,
you brought all this on yourself with, like you say,
all that negative thinking. Yeah. Now that being said, psychological
stress cannon does have an effect on the body in
many ways. Stress can cause a number of physical health problems.

(01:19:17):
But the experts say, if you look, you can find
this answer if you look at cancer dot gov. The
link between stress and cancer is weak at best. Yeah, though,
as we explained earlier, of course we know all about
no cebo effects and stuff, so I can certainly see
that ways you know that the ways you're thinking could
have especially effects on the subjective experience of the negative

(01:19:41):
parts of an illness. Right, pain might feel like it
hurts more if there if your brain is in certain
states of of bad feelings or bad expectations or expectations
that you will feel pain. So it's interesting anyway you
cut it, uh, the curse at one On one hand,
the curse has no power, the curse is just pure

(01:20:02):
magical thinking. But on the other hand, a curse carry
some weight. And that's probably why people have been have
been spitting curses at each other for so long, and
we'll continue to do so in one form or another. Yeah,
I think you're right. Really, I'm surprised there aren't more
curses today because I imagine a curse gives you a
certain amount of legal protection. Like if like, if you

(01:20:22):
threaten somebody, you can be arrested like that. That that
is a that is a crime. But is it a
crime to curse someone? Is it a crime to invoke
divine powers against them? So if you say I will
make you unable to defecate, that that's a crime. But
if if you say I will invoke maglus to make
it unable make you unable to defecate, man, you know, Yeah,

(01:20:46):
I feel like that's a harder sell to the local
police force. I guess one last thing I would end
on is I would say, when I think about curses
and stuff. I think it's the kind of thing that,
even though I don't believe in magic, I think it's
the kind of thing you shouldn't do really because, as
you know, because it does have these effects, especially I
would say effects on the self, Like even if you
don't tell the person about it, you know it, it

(01:21:08):
kind of dirties your mind. To cast a curse, wishing
ill on other people hurts you, It hurts your hurts
your mind, it hurts your character absolutely, So hopefully in
this episode we've been able to, you know, to make
you rethink the world of of the curse. And heck,
we didn't even get into the idea of cursed items
and allegedly cursed items so much. But that's a whole

(01:21:28):
other area that we could potentially explore in the future. Yeah.
In the meantime, you should check out our website, No
Curses at All, to be found at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. That's where we'll find all the
podcast episodes, links out to our various social media accounts
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(01:21:50):
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(01:22:11):
say hi, you can email us at blow the Mind
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