November 7, 2023 • 48 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss headless beings in myth, legend and the bestiaries of antiquity. What is it about a headless being that captivates us so and why were such beings once thought to exist?
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
And Hey, it is no longer October. But is this
still a topic that we planned on doing in October
and never got to Possibly. We'll let you guess if
that is the case or not.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yeah, And you might be like, I don't know, Joe
and Robert, I don't know if I wont Halloween content
and the early part of November, shouldn't we be doing
Christmas content now? No, absolutely not. There will be Christmas
content in due time, but it will not be this month.
It'll barely be next month. So you're getting more Halloween
content whether you want it or not.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Are your Halloween decorations still up or do you get
them down yet?
Speaker 2 (00:54):
We took them down over the weekend, but the jack
O Landin's are still out there. They haven't turn to
jelly yet, but I'm having to give them the tap
test every day. If they jiggle, then it's dangerously close
and I have to get them to the backyard and
spill them there.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
I know exactly what you're saying. We have squirrels very
slowly eating our pumpkins. It's like they take one bite
out of them every day.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
It's weird. We have plenty of squirrels around here, but
I don't think they ever messed with the pumpkins. But
it has been I feel like more people are chronicling
the decay and or consumption of their jack lanterns and
pumpkins this year, and it's been nice to watch.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
I'm curious why just the like one bite and run away,
Like it can't be that delicious if they don't stay
to take a few more bites.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Unless it's you know, just gnawing. It's gnawing action. I'm
not sure.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
But Okay, what was this Halloween related topic that we
didn't get to in October and they're covering now.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
It's headlessness, Yeah, which ties in nicely with the idea
of jackal lanterns. I mean, these two concepts are are
connected in many ways. Yeah, we're going to discuss the
idea of headless entities, mostly in the human imagination, but
it probably makes sense to think about what's lacking in
these fantastic creatures and what we tend to take for granted.
(02:14):
It's we're going to get into just the concept of
why do creatures have heads? What is a head? Even
it's easy to just take that whole idea for granted,
because I mean, the basics I think are pretty obvious,
and you know, we have to stop and look them
in the mirror and realize. A head is the top
or front part of an organism, the upper or anterior
(02:35):
division of the animal body that contains the brain, most
of the sense organs, and the mouth. It is the
communication array as we've described it many times before. It's
the matter consumer, and it's also the nerve center of
the organism.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Now, most of the animals you can probably think of
off the top of your head do have heads, but
actually a head is not a necessary part of what
it means to be an animal. There are animals without heads,
So that raises the question of why do certain animals
have heads and not others? What causes this difference?
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yeah, we have to realize that heads emerge in organisms
over the course of evolutionary time and a process referred
to as cephalization, during which the mouth, sense organs and
nerve ganglia moved toward the front or what would we
would come to think of at the front of the creatures,
resulting in head morphology and the emergence of complex brains
and arthropods, cephalopod mollus and invertebrates. So these organisms tend
(03:36):
to be cephalized or semi cephalized. And would that mean
that a creature in fantasy that has lost its head
and continues to move around and act and behave is decephalized.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
Well, I think that would be the term. The head
is removed, a thing is decephalized. But whether or not
a thing can continue to act without its head, it
probably depends on the degree to which it was originally
cephalized as a matter of its innate anatomy. I'll get
back to that in a few minutes. Actually, So I
(04:12):
was thinking about this, and it probably helps to put
cephalization within the broader evolutionary history of bilateral animals or bilatarians.
These are animals that have a left side and a
right side of the body that are roughly symmetrical, that
are mirror images of each other. So we are bilatarians,
(04:32):
and again, most of the animals you can think of off
the top of your head are bilatarians. The symmetry does
not have to be exact. It refers to the overall
body plan and how the animal develops in its earliest
phases of growth. So even in the case of animals
that happen to have evolved wildly asymmetrical features. One example
(04:53):
we've talked about on the show before is male fiddler crabs,
which have one claw that's much bigger than the other,
in some cases half of the crab's body weight, So
you know, roughly on the scale of a human with
one regular sized hand and then another hand that's four
feet in diameter and weighs eighty pounds, even that animal
is a bilatarian because the animal's body plan has bilateral
(05:15):
symmetry overall, with the exception of the claw, And it's
also a question of its evolutionary clade. It is descended
from the evolutionary clade of bilateral animals. So bilateral symmetry
is not just a feature of an animal body, but
a particular branch on the evolutionary tree, going back to
a common ancestor. As I was saying a minute ago,
(05:38):
though most of the animals you can think of are bilateral,
not all animals are. There are lots of sea creatures
like sponges, jellyfish, hydri and corals, that are animals but
are not Bilatarians. We don't know for sure when exactly
this split took place, when the last common ancestor of
(05:58):
all bilatarians split off from the ancestors of other animals,
but based on what I've been reading, I think it's
probably sometime between roughly five hundred and fifty and six
hundred million years ago. Is clearly it pre dates the
Cambrian Explosion, because in the Cambrian era, starting around five
hundred and fifty million years ago, you see a great
(06:20):
diffusion or profusion of different animal body plans that exhibit
bilateral symmetry. So clearly their last common ancestor was before that.
There's still debate about exactly what that animal was like,
but whatever its exact features were, it is mind boggling
to imagine the common ancestor of all of the world's fish, crabs, cats, squid, slugs,
(06:47):
barnacles and worms all in one body.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Yeah, you can't just combine all those things in your
head and say, like, all right, a little bit of
the cat, a little bit of the squid. It's a
different sort of arithmetic in play.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
But one of the things, apart from bilateral symmetry that
makes Bilatarians unique is their degree of cephalization. That they
these animals really started to develop heads in ways that
non biletarian animals did not. And the authors of a
paper I was looking at, they they define cephalization as
(07:20):
quote anterior concentration, and remember anterior means front, so front
facing concentration of nervous tissue, sensory organs, and the appearance
of dedicated feeding structures surrounding the mouth. Now, one question
I was wondering about was how to even decide which
is the anterior part of an animal that doesn't already
(07:42):
have a head. I think the answer is it's where
the mouth is. Makes sense. Yeah, Now to get some
more perspective on why and how a head developed in Bilatarians,
I was reading a few chapters from a book. It
was a book called Creatures of acxis The Rise of
the Animal Kingdom, published by Hill and Wang two thousand
(08:03):
and seven by an author named Wallace Arthur.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
So.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
The author of this book, Wallace Arthur is an evolutionary
biologist who was a professor at the University of Galway
in Ireland. I looked him up and it seems like
his work focused a lot on the interplay between evolution
and development and the emergence of animal body plans, which
is what we're talking about here, And in a couple
of chapters of this book he has a very nice,
(08:29):
plain language summary of the likely pressures leading early by
leetarians to acquire ahead. So one interesting thing to think
about here is that the early evolution of the animal
lineage found different types of symmetries. So the first animals
were not symmetrical, and there are animals today that are
(08:50):
not symmetrical in their bodies, like sponges. You know, you
can't cut them down the middle and get a mirror
image in any direction. Then there came animals with radial symmetry,
where the body is symmetrically reproduced around an axis in
the middle. And a great example here would be a jellyfish. Jellyfish,
they're not bilaterally symmetrical, but they're radially symmetrical. Finally, there
(09:14):
came animals with bilateral symmetry, tracing back to a common
ancestor that is known in the literature as the ur bileatarian,
so biletarian with the letters you are in front of it,
you are meaning like original or first. And again we
don't know exactly what this animal was like, but Arthur
thinks the best guess is that it was somewhat similar
(09:34):
to modern flatworms. This, he acknowledges this is debatable, and
I was reading a bit about the modern debate here
it seems like this is still one of the one
of the possible pictures of what this creature was like.
So Arthur asks a question, if you compare a bilaterally
symmetrical flatworm with a radially symmetrical animal like a jellyfish,
(09:57):
can we really say that one is more complex than
the other? He writes, quote, does a flatworm have more
different types of parts than a jellyfish? Well, not really. Yes,
it has left and right sides, which a jellyfish does not,
but that's about it. Although the flatworm has head and
tail ends while the jellyfish does not, The jellyfish has
(10:18):
a top side and an underside, the latter having the mouth,
which pretty much amount to the same thing. And the
jellyfish has tentacles while the flatworm does not. And yet
despite this basic parity, or maybe you might even say
that the jellyfish seems more complex, we do tend to
think of bilaterally symmetrical animals as more complex than animals
(10:40):
with radial symmetry. Why do we think of them that way. Well,
Arthur says that there could be a good reason for this,
and it's that bilateral symmetry led to subsequent steps of
increasing complexity. Bilateral symmetry was not itself necessarily more complex,
but it became a platform for future complexity to emerge,
(11:02):
making the point that some changes in evolution can seem
really important to us because they are necessary precursors to
other developments, maybe millions of years down the line, and
you couldn't always necessarily predict what those future developments would
be at the time. Like if we were standing there
in the pre Cambrian era looking at the orbilatarian, you
(11:22):
wouldn't necessarily be able to look at this little flatworm
like creature or whatever it was that it looked like
some kind of little little organism that has left and
right sides that roughly mirror each other and think, well, yes,
this is going to be big, This will turn into
spiders and cats and octopuses.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
But that is.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Exactly what happened. It became this sort of platform for
future development. But to come back to the question, what
is it about these early Bilatarians that favors the evolution
of a head. Well, Arthur argues that it is the
peculiarities of pre cam animal movement. It had to do
(12:02):
with how animals move. So he says, you know, jellyfish,
this animal with radial symmetry swims around in the open sea.
You know, it floats in the water column. It kind
of pulses to swim where it wants. And then you
might have other animals that have radial symmetry, like the
sea anemone. This lives it's a sessile organism, so it
lives most of its life by sticking itself to a
(12:24):
surface and staying there, you know, grabbing things from the water. Flatworms, however,
creep across the two dimensional surfaces of solid objects like
rocks in the water. So you can imagine what he
thinks is likely the form of the orbiletarian traversing the
face of a flat boulder in an archaic lagoon. And
(12:47):
so he zeros in on the different ways that these
creatures move. For the jellyfish with radial symmetry floating in
the water, Arthur says, there is little reason to think
of any direction as forward or backward. All directions are
basically the same. The sessile sea an enemy doesn't generally
travel around, so travel isn't a big issue for it.
But for the flatworm like or biltarian, there is a
(13:12):
very definite forward and backward regime in the way that
this animal moves. You can think of the difference between
a car and an aerial drone. You know, the jellyfish
might be more like the aerial drone. It can kind
of go in whatever direction a car has to like
aim its movement. It crawls, it creeps along on a
(13:32):
forward path.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
That's a good way of putting it. Yeah, yeah, drones
versus cars.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
Yeah, now, no, there's absolutely nothing wrong with moving like
a drone, you know, the jellyfish, and there's nothing wrong
with these other lineages. Jellyfish can be highly successful without
a brain and with limited range of behaviors. They're doing
just find how they are, and this leads to what
Arthur calls an evolutionary cul de sac. You know, they're
(13:57):
just successful in the way they already are. But for
the orbiletarian, with a definite bias for forward movement, there
is a lot of reason to differentiate the front of
the body from the back. There are reasons this animal
needs to change based on the way it moves. Arthur writes, quote,
it is more important to be able to detect the
(14:18):
features of the area you are moving into than the
one you're leaving behind. So it is to be expected
that natural selection will favor variants that have more of
their nerve net upfront. As part of this concentration of
perceptive powers at the front of the animal, in the
region that will one day merit the term head, there
may be rudimentary forward pointing outgrowths densely populated with sensory
(14:43):
nerves primitive antennae. And I was thinking about this. Maybe
this is getting a little too philosophical about it, but
you could argue that the evolution of the head in
animals is related to the nature of time. For an
organism that specializes in moving in one direction, moving like
a car, or like a flatworm moving forward along varied terrain,
(15:06):
the gathering of nerve cells and sensory organs in the
front reflects the fact of reality that it is more
important to sense and react to the future where you
are headed than to the past where you've just been.
The past can't hurt you anymore, but the future can no.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
I think that's a good way of looking at it.
And it reminds me of some accounts. Off the top
of my head. I can't recall how accurate these are
held up to be, but there was at least an
idea that was put forward in Western writing that certain
members of Native Arctic groups kind of referred linguistically to
(15:44):
something in the distance as being tomorrow, like this relationship
between where you will be and how you think about
what is ahead of you. And yeah, I can sort
of see that reflected in what we're talking about here.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Oh, this came up when we were talking about the
cultural spatialization of time. Yeah, how people represent time in
as a type of physical space or the metaphor of
the space around them. And I don't remember if that
example in particular was thought to be valid, but that
there are cultural differences in the spatial metaphors people used
to describe, like the future in the past and so forth.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah, yeah, but even today, you know, we can easily
think about everything that's coming into us is like our future.
You know, it's the future of our body in that
in what we are consuming the you know, the future
of our thoughts based on the sense data that's entering
entering our body and our mind and so forth. So
(16:44):
uh yeah, I can see this this holding up. Whereas
what is it like? I mean, to the limited extent
you can even ask this question, what is it like then?
For the creature that is not farward loaded, that is,
you know, it's kind of like an a nowness. It's
kind of perhaps something at least distantly comparable to that
state of calmness and serenity that we aspire to, you know,
(17:08):
or so many of us aspire to to try and
get out of that forward headlong you know, sprint into
the future.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
Assume the mind of a jellyfish. Yeah yeah, okay. Next
ecological consideration pressure on the creation of a head in
the early piletarians. Arthur says that forward movement also favors
(17:39):
the evolution of a front facing mouth. If you think
about this, this will make sense. It's kind of obvious.
Like if you feed by taking things into an orifice
in your body, it's best to be able to aim
your body movement to engulf food matter with that orifice.
So like, in the same way that it wouldn't make
sense to build a combine harvester with its intake on
(18:02):
the side. Right, you'd want it in the front of
the vehicle so you can aim it at the thing
you're trying to harvest.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Essentially an eat the future approach. Basically we've covered so.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
Far right, So aiming the mouth orifice at food and
making sure food gets inside also requires extra motor control
around this region of the body. And this also favors
nerve cells being concentrated at the anterior or the front
of the bileatarian body. So nerve cells want to gather
(18:34):
there not just to sense what is ahead in your
movement schema, but also to control the mouth to eat
what is ahead in the movement schema. And you can
see this, this direct connection between nerve cell density and
eating behavior in an example that Arthur sites, which are
modern snails and slugs, some of the simpler bileateian animals
(18:56):
extant today. These creatures, he writes quote, have a arrangement
of mouth and nerve cells such that the nerves form
a ring around the mouth or the esophagus, and at
various points around this ring are expanded groupings of nerve
cells called ganglia or mini brains if you like. So
I love that. Of course, what begins as ganglia for
(19:19):
control of just like a mouth, you know, the eating
orifice could well evolve over millions of years into denser
and more complex structures of neurons, and eventually could even
become a brain. And so I thought this was fascinating.
According to Arthur's argument here, so much of the strange
and complicated and unpredictable evolutionary potential of the bileatarian body
(19:44):
plan arises out of the simple circumstance that these animals,
the Orbileatarians, had specific limitations on their range of movement,
that their world was a world of moving forward. One
more thing from this book I wanted to mention before
I move on is something that he talks about in
the next chapter, which is sort of the idea that
(20:04):
cephalization is not a binary It's not like you are
cephalized or not, but a question of degree. Some creatures
are strongly cephalized, others are more weakly cephalized. And to
illustrate this, Arthur begins by telling a story about a
time he was collecting centipedes from an area along the
coast of northeast England. He says he collected a number
(20:27):
of centipedes. He brought him back to the lab for examination,
where they seem to be functioning fine. Some of them
had injuries, like they might be missing legs or parts
of legs, but he explains that these centipedes have an
adaptation where they cover the stumps of their missing appendages
with a thick black substance that looks like tar, presumably
(20:47):
to seal off the wound and prevent anything that's on
the outside from getting in or anything on the inside
from getting out.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Seems like a solid approach, some sort of weird black
centipede sealant.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Okay, yep, yeap, seal it up. But then he came
across something weird, he writes, quote to my surprise, I
found that one specimen had lost its head and had
used that same black tar technique to seal the wound. Strangely,
it was moving around in a normal fashion, just like
all its friends who had retained their heads. It walked
(21:21):
in the way centipedes do, usually in a forward direction,
but it was also able to retreat backward from threatening stimulis,
such as my giving it a tap on its anterior
end with a pair of tweezers. Not only did it
do so for a considerable period in the lab hours,
but it had probably done so for an even longer
one days in the wild before I found it, because
(21:43):
the wound looked old. Inasmuch as you can tell these things. Wow,
So he says that this headless centipede eventually died because
it probably starved to death. No mouth means it can't eat.
But that's amazing. It's hard for us, being extremely highly
cephalized organisms, to imagine that, Like the first problem to
(22:04):
reach the crisis point with a headless animal would be
that it starves to death. And the difference here is
the level of cephalization in each organism. The centipede and
the human are both cephalized. They both have heads, but
the human is strongly cephalized and the centipede only weakly so.
In humans, control of the body functions is strongly localized
(22:25):
in the brain, which is in the head, and the
body really can't do anything without the brain. Centipedes, on
the other hand, they do have a brain of sorts
in the head. There is a cluster of nervous tissue
up there, but they also have clusters of nerve cells
in each body segment that work as a distributed system
of many secondary brains throughout the body. Even without the
(22:46):
brain in the head, the body segments can keep on
living and acting individually. They can make the centipede walk around,
react to stimuli, and so forth, but not forever. But
to come back to headlessness in nature, I want to
emphasize again that not every animal naturally has a head. Jellyfish,
for example, there's some disagreement to the extent to which
(23:10):
you should say they are cephalized, but they really don't
have anything you would normally call ahead. In fact, jellyfish,
you don't even have brains or hearts, or even blood
for that matter. They do have a nervous system, but
it is distributed throughout the body tissues without a central
like a major command center like a biletarian brain.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah, it's fascinating and maybe a little treacherous right to
look at some of these organisms and ask questions like,
all right, where's the head? Where's the head at? Because
sometimes an animal that seems to be headless may just
be all head It's another way of sort of spinning it.
This was an argument I was reading about from some
(23:51):
researchers at Stanford University and UC Berkeley. This came out
I believed this earlier this month. In a paper published
in Nature, they found that ceased to once thought of
as headless, actually exhibit gene expressions associated with head development
all over their bodies. Meanwhile, genes related to torsos and
tails were largely absent, so you could, I guess, think
(24:13):
of them more as disembodied or never bodied heads than
you would think of them as a body without a head.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
Another interesting fact about sea stars is that so they're
thought of as animals with radial symmetry, not bilateral symmetry,
but they are actually descended from Bileatrians, So these are
animals whose ancestors are part of that group. They did
have bilateral symmetry and they evolved to lose it.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
The idea of something having a head in a body
and then becoming mostly head I was instantly reminded of
a character from Marvel comics named Modoc. Included a picture
for you here, Joe. You're not familiar with this guy,
but essentially I believe he was supposed to have been
a human at one point in the comics, and I
think definitely in the movies, and he has, through you know,
(25:07):
comic book events, become just this enormous head with much
smaller arms and legs hanging off of him. You know,
there's a sense that like even these may go eventually
because he doesn't need them. It's all you know, cerebral
power in there.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
I notice a strange body feature here, which is that
Modoc's legs are not on the underside of his head body,
but the front of his head body, almost like little
tentacles or fe feeder jaws around the mouth.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
Yeah. Yeah, and this being, I guess, the first imagined
being that we've referenced here. It's something to keep in
mind with all of these is the question of like, okay, well,
what was literally intended with this character, but also like
how did the imaginations behind them? How did the creators
(25:56):
behind them sort of channel some of these ideas we've
already been discussed, either overtly or just sort of subconsciously,
Like what do we think of when we have a head,
what do we think of them when we imagine beings
that have lost their head, that have a much larger
head than a body, and so forth. Like there's a
lot of you know, overt and then sort of hidden
(26:16):
language in there.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
I think, yes, in some ways, it's kind of hard
not to approach everything with a sort of vertebrate anatomical bias,
where you, you know, you are looking for the analogies
to the way your body is put together in everything
in the world, even in even in you know, non
living inanimate objects. I mean you often, Rob, I'm sure
you have this experience. You look at some kind of
(26:39):
inanimate object and look for the head or the legs
or whatever.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Yeah. Yeah, And and on top of that, like the
other wrinkle for a human's especially is that in the
head we see a centralization of the nervous system on
the front and upper part of the creature amid its
sense organs in its mouth. It's the defining feature of
both humans and when humans are looking at animals, and
certainly animals, it's you know, it's become it's come to
(27:06):
be thought of as a center of personhood and self.
It is the face, you know, at the front part
of the head, if you will. And of course that
that factors into a lot of our conceptions of not
only people, animals, but also just inanimate things. We're always
looking for the face. We're looking for that that front
facing communication array of micro and macro expressions, you know,
(27:32):
and we can also couple that with this idea of
the head the face looking into the future, and what
happens when these two future gazing facial arrays see each other. Then, Oh,
you have to have all the computation. What does it
mean that this person is in my immediate future? Am
I going to eat them? Are we going to communicate
(27:55):
on seven level? Or are we going to turn our
eyes away and continue on our own forward core? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (28:01):
I mean, for a second there, I was thinking about
the salients of faces. Why we notice faces everywhere? I mean,
we see faces in electrical outlets, and we see the
you know, the boxing octopus and the kadhook on the wall.
Everything is a face. Part of me wanted to interpret
that as a result of our highly social brains. You know,
we're always looking at other people's faces to try to
(28:22):
understand what they're thinking, how they're feeling towards us, and
all that. That is very important. But then it could
actually be even deeper than that in an ecological origin,
because of course, understanding like looking for the face of
a predatory animal could help you understand like, am I
in the attentional zone of this this big looking animal
(28:43):
over there? So it could go even deeper than social factors.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Yeah, no, that's a good point, and it goes back
to numerous things we've discussed, but most recently talking about
what happens when you meet eyes with just a household cat.
Yeah know, and how that is maybe an anxious experience
for the cat because again, it doesn't have all these
layers of human cognition. It gets down to the basic
interactions that a creature like a house cat that is
(29:08):
both predator and prey would have when it's locking eyes
with another organism. And so on top of all that,
as we begin to venture into the world of fantastic beings,
imagined beings, creatures of mythology, folklore, and much more. Yeah,
it's like to imagine something without a head is of
(29:28):
course also to imagine something without a face, And you
could just you can easily just you could focus on
the facial aspect of this, and there's plenty of ways
to cut that apart. But then on top of that
this idea of here is a thing that has no
head or separated from its head, and knowing like what
that would mean for a human being, Like you said,
survival is not possible even for a very short period
(29:52):
of time. I mean there, of course, studies and there've
long been some fascination about to what degree a human
head can survive without its body. The answer still remains
not very long at all. So to take all of that,
these observations and knowledge about the importance of a human head,
the role that a head plays in a human's life
(30:14):
and personhood, what happens when that is cut away? What
happens when you have an imagine being that can live
without a head? And what does it mean? You know?
Speaker 3 (30:22):
When I go back in my history of taking in
stories of headless beings, the main one that comes to mind,
of course, is probably not a big surprise, is the
headless Horseman story and Ichabod Crane and all that, which
has been realized in many you know, Halloween specials on
TV and stuff like that through all the years. And
one thing I always remember thinking about the headless horsemen
(30:44):
that made them different than other kind of ghosts and
monsters is that the headless horseman seemed less like a
personal entity and more like a machine or a robot
than most other types of monsters and ghosts. Do you
have this experience?
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Yeah, yeah, And I think it's one of the reasons
that at times, I mean, there's also the effects level
of this, but it's one of one of the reasons
that at times filmmakers have struggled with portraying it. I
think of the Tim Burton film where you had Christopher
Walken playing the headless being, and sometimes you see his head,
you see his face, because that helps convey like the
intent and the horror of the thing. You take that away,
(31:23):
it's like, yeah, it's like a robot. It's like all action,
but without cognition, all like physical It's certainly still a
physical threat, but there is no mind communication. Will like,
you take this entire aspect of what it is to
be an entity in the physical world, and you remove
this huge slice of it. How do you reason with that?
(31:46):
How do you even comprehend it?
Speaker 3 (31:48):
I guess part of it is that even with a
regular ghost, you know, this imagined entity that doesn't behave
by normal biological rules, we still make biological inferences about it.
So like with a ghost, a monster, you can tell
you're in danger if it looks at you. You know,
like you are still tracking its gaze to understand what
its state of mind and attention is doing. And with
(32:10):
a headless beast. You can't do that.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Yeah, So we're going to begin to go through some
various ideas that, you know, especially with with what we've
talked about so far, I think this will make for
a nice discussion. The various examples of beings and entities
(32:34):
that have lost their heads are separated from their heads
and so forth, and in doing so they often have
lost a face, though, as we'll discuss, sometimes the face
finds a way. But let's start with roughly with the
realm of the divine headless. And I suppose the notion
of the divine headless is interesting to think of in
(32:55):
light of some of the popular modern religious views that
position a mon theistic God as being essentially bodyless. And
in this respect you might well argue that, well God
is headless, then if God has no body, then God
has no head, at least in the literal sense. But
of course it's hard to escape the head in virtually
any sort of anthropomorphism or any number of linguistic uses
(33:19):
of the word head. We even have the term godhead
used to sum up different theological concepts, particularly in the
Abrahamic and religions, and also in Hinduism, though.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
That is a false cognate. You know. The head in
godhead actually has nothing to do with the biological head.
I think it is derived from the term that essentially
means like godhood. It is like the essence of godness.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Yeah, but then you throw that into a language system
where head means head. You can't help but think of
it as such. Right now. Another thing to look at is, Okay,
if your god or goddess of choice goes through different
avatars or incarnations, then well, no matter what their pure
form is, they're going to wind up having a head
of some sort at some point, at least for a while.
(34:09):
I think a fantasy example we might turn to if
you think of a Sauron from The Lord of the Rings, right,
he takes on a number of bipedal and headed being
of forms, but ultimately assumes the physical form of a
great disembodied eye, devoid of body and head in the
literal sense.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
Though it is interesting that it's still the eyes at
the top of a tower, making it kind of like
a head.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Yeah. Yeah, And I guess the idea is that during
that incarnation, like it has, he has become all seeking
all because there is only one thing that it wants.
It is not consumption. It is just to find the
one ring.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
It's kind of the opposite of the headless horseman issue,
where like you can't tell where it's looking, all Sauron
is is looking at something.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Yeah. Now, in actual religions, though, gods do sometimes lose
their head heads, but unlike with human beings, this doesn't
spell the end of it, because here you're dealing with
again divine beings and magical powers and so forth. We've
discussed in the past. The Hindu god Rahu, this is
(35:15):
the entity that is associated with eclipses. He was once
a proud oserer, a demi god of immense power and
hunger seeking immortality. For demi gods are just another realm
in the wheel of Samsara. Rahu drinks the divine nectar
known as Amrita, but before he can swallow it all
(35:35):
the way, as it's passing down his throat, all powerful
Vishnu decapitates him for the transgression.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
He wasn't supposed to drink the nectar.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
He was not supposed to drink it and was stopped
in the act of drinking it. So the power of
the nectar. In at least some tellings and understandings of
the story makes his disembodied head immortal, and so this
cleaved and fallen god continually seeks his revenge on the
two planets jerry deities who ratted him out to Vishnu. However,
(36:04):
in a lot of these tellings, his headless body is
still in the mix under the new name of Ketu,
so both Rahu and Katu take on the classification of
shadow planets in Indian astronomy. Katu is indeed sometimes depicted
in Hindu iconography as a body without a head. Interesting now,
Hinduism also boasts a headless goddess of sorts by the
(36:26):
name of Chinnamasta. She is depicted as a nude, red fleshed,
self decapitating tantric goddess. She's generally depicted standing atop the
bodies of a divine couple with a scimitar in one
hand and her own head in the other, with three
jets of blood spurting out of her neck, which her
(36:47):
own severed head plus two attendants like gaze upward and
open their mouths and drink like a fountain.
Speaker 3 (36:54):
So she's understood to have cut her own head off
with the scimitar.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Right right, now I suppose she is still head in
body as one, even in separation, or at least that's
my understanding. This might differ, you know, if one were
to dive more into the theology of this particular god
and what these depictions mean. But it's my limited understanding
(37:21):
that you still think of them as as the same goddess,
and she's associated with destruction and creation, but also apparently paradoxes,
which I think is worth highlighting. Now, another headless divine
figure can be found in Chinese mythology, and this is
Sing Ten. As Anne Beryl describes in Chinese Mythology and introduction,
(37:44):
Sing Ten is a failed hero in minor deity. His
plight is described in the Shanghaijing, the Classic of Mountains
and Seas, which we've talked about on the show before.
This is a work from between five hundred and two
hundred BCE. Taking into account of variations of his name,
Beryl writes that we might very roughly translate his name
(38:05):
as punished by heavens or formed by heavens or And
I love this one because this one sounds like he
could straight up be a death metal band. Is form
prematurely dying? Who you can just imagine that in that
nearly illegible script on a festival poster.
Speaker 3 (38:24):
Right right, yes, in the Batlord fond.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
Yeah. So Beryl points out that the story of Sing
Ten kind of stands out for its gruesomeness in the
in the classic, and this is partially thought to be
because many instances of sex and violence were like edited
a bit and cleaned up a bit over time in
that work, and for one reason or another, this one
was not. She describes Sington as an odentic warrior, and
(38:51):
we might well think of him as kind of a
Satanic figure as well, if you know, comparing him to
modern Christian and certainly Western literature depictions of Satan, because
we know, for what little we know about him is
that he winds up in this position of having no
head due to his hubris, due to his violent opposition
(39:11):
to the supreme god Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
So what's the story, all right?
Speaker 2 (39:17):
So the story goes that sing Ten, who sometimes described
as a giant as well, challenges the Yellow Emperor on
a particular battleground for a divine rule. You know, He's like,
you shouldn't be ruined everything, I should. Let's battle it. Out. Now,
the Yellow Emperor is victorious in the end, and he
beheads his challenger and buries the head on cheng Yang Mountain.
(39:41):
But Sing Ten is too proud to die. According to
one translation, quote Ten made his nipples serve as eyes
and his navel as his mouth, and brandishing his shield
and battle axe, he danced. And we might well imagine
this dance is a proud kind of war dance, a
a vein dance, a spiteful dance. Again, he has been defeated,
(40:04):
his head has been removed from his giant body, and
yet he refuses to truly give up, to cease his
opposition to the Yellow Wimperor, and continues to fight, though
in time the body dies as well and the body
is buried as well. Now I included some illustrations of
this entity for you to look at here Joe, the
(40:25):
first of which is an older illustration from the Shanghaijiing
which folks can can look up. Is found in a
lot of places, very very simple and kind of comical.
But by doing image searches, especially using the Chinese characters
for the entity, you can find a number of really
cool like modern illustrations. I don't know to what extent,
(40:46):
Like he's been utilized in Chinese comic books and video
games and whatnot. But it looks like a lot of
folks have done some very unique sketches of him that
look very horrifying, very demonic, with like the belly erupting
into a big fanged mouth and indeed the nipples becoming eyes,
and you know, this is the ferocious form, you know,
(41:08):
still carrying and brandishing its battle axe.
Speaker 3 (41:12):
At least one of these illustrations has a little bit
of Critter's energy.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Yeah, yeah, they have. Maybe there there's one thing to
keep in mind, like ideas of like what happens when
like the head is fused with the body, or thought
to have fused with the body. We'll get back to
that in a bit. But yeah, it's like there's also
this kind of spirit of, well, you can't be head
me again, Like my head is literally my torso. Now
what are you going to do? Cut my torso off?
Speaker 3 (41:36):
I can't believe I didn't connect it to this earlier,
but I mean when you were talking about Modoc, I
mean the critters, the crits really sort of are all head.
They're like a head, an eating head with legs and arms.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
Yeah, and what does it mean sort of conceptionally if
we are imagining a creature that doesn't have a head
with a mouth, but its body is the mouth, where
like head and body are fused into one. You know,
on some level, does that kind of mess with our
concepts of head and body? Like one of the concepts
we've discussed in the past is how arguably modern humans
(42:09):
tend to think of body and head as horse and rider.
You know, we're the head and there's the body. It's
doing its thing. But of course there's really more of
a centaur concept where horse and rider are one, and
that breaks down in a number of different ways. But
then what if we imagine, like the horse, human is
just one entity, you know, Like, how are we supposed
(42:32):
to take take account of that? Like, here is this creature,
like the critter like sington, who now has its belly
more or less in its body, its eyes or in
its body. What does that mean about its volition and
its intent?
Speaker 3 (42:47):
I don't have a good answer on this, but I
was just trying to think, how would your vision be
different if your eyes were in your nipples'd be farther
apart than human eyes usually are. And I don't know
exactly how that would change things.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Well, yeah, they would be wider apart, and certainly these
depictions of like Singing ten. You know, he seems to
be have a very broad giant's body, so the nipples
are pretty far apart. Yeah, I'm not sure exactly how
to cut that. But in a way, it's like by
having the belly be the mouth, it's like it does
(43:20):
tend to give us this idea that like the hunger
is even more all consuming, like the belly itself is
opening up and wishes to eat.
Speaker 3 (43:29):
There will not be like an esophagus in between the
food and the stomach. You're just like chomping. It's like
the stomach itself has teeth.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
Yeah, yeah, I don't imagine there's a lot of tasting.
This critter is not going for the tasting menu, is
going for the buffet. That's right by the way. If
we dip back into Hindu epics for just a second,
there is a demon with these basic features that pops
up there, known as Kabanda, and the story goes that
Indra stove this individual's head and thighs in stove them
(44:00):
into his body with the celestial thunderbolt weapon known as
the Vadra. But then Indra shows mercy and says, well,
he's still alive, he should be allowed to eat. So
Indra gives him long arms and a belly mouth. And
I included one depiction of this creature here for you, Joe.
Speaker 3 (44:19):
On this drawing. He's kind of cute. He's like a
blue Teddy bear.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
Yeah. Yeah. But this one's interesting too because it's like
the head is not removed. The head is just kind
of like apparently it's like driven down into the body
with something like it's easy to imagine like some gruesome
Mortal Kombat esque battle field fatality here, and then that
is rectified by divine magic to some extent. Now, if
(44:46):
we look to the world of Japanese jokai, there is
also a creature there that is described as headless but
with nipple eyes and a belly mouth. This is a
donatsura or torso face, according to I couldn't find out
a lot about this one. I was looking at yokai
dot com where Matthew Meyer describes this entity and says
(45:08):
that the main connotation here is to shame and some
sort of saying in Japanese about lowering the lowering of
one's face. I think the effectiveness of this is likely.
You know, something that's lost in translation. M okay. There's
another yokai that Meyer describes called Kuba kajiri, and this
(45:29):
one is also apparently sometimes described as headless. It's a
kind of ghoul that consumes the heads of the dead,
though plenty of illustrations depict it as having a head,
as being a being with a head that is gnawing
on disembodied heads, and this may seem this seems to
be maybe connected to the idea of bodies buried without
(45:50):
heads coming back as vengeful spirits that seek out corpse
heads to eat. It could also be linked to starvation,
according to Meyer. But at this point, obviously we're our
beginning to talk about things that are maybe less divine
and maybe a little more diabolical, a little lower down
the ladder of power when it comes to supernatural entities.
(46:10):
And so this is where we're going to leave off.
But in the next episode we're going to come back
in and we're going to discuss other examples of more
outright diabolical headless entities, and we'll also get into the
works of antiquity and various descriptions of peoples in distant
parts of the world or distant from the writers and
(46:31):
observers here, that were said to have no heads, but
of course to have faces on their bodies. And so
we'll get into that and discuss like where these ideas
came from and what they seem to mean. So we'll
get into that on Thursday. In the meantime, we'll remind
everyone out there that, Yeah, Stuff to Blow Your Mind
is a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
(46:53):
Mondays we do listener mail. Wednesdays we do a short
form artifact or monster fact episode, and on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
weird film on Weird House Cinema. We remind you that
if you are using social media currently, well, our accounts
are active again and you can follow us there. I
especially encourage you to check out stbympodcast dot com. That's
(47:16):
our current Instagram account. Our old Instagram account got locked up,
and who's the meta guy? What's his name? Zuckerberg? Zuck Yeah,
Mark Zuckerberg. You won't let us back in. You can't
get a hold of the guys. So we have this
new account stbympodcast dot com. Do us a solid and
if you use Instagram, follow us there. There are social
(47:37):
media folks that are actually putting out some really cool
content there, including a little bit of a video here
and there related to our Wednesday episodes and to our
Weird House Cinema episodes.
Speaker 3 (47:47):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway.
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 (48:09):
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 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
And Hey, it is no longer October. But is this
still a topic that we planned on doing in October
and never got to Possibly. We'll let you guess if
that is the case or not.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yeah, And you might be like, I don't know, Joe
and Robert, I don't know if I wont Halloween content
and the early part of November, shouldn't we be doing
Christmas content now? No, absolutely not. There will be Christmas
content in due time, but it will not be this month.
It'll barely be next month. So you're getting more Halloween
content whether you want it or not.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Are your Halloween decorations still up or do you get
them down yet?
Speaker 2 (00:54):
We took them down over the weekend, but the jack
O Landin's are still out there. They haven't turn to
jelly yet, but I'm having to give them the tap
test every day. If they jiggle, then it's dangerously close
and I have to get them to the backyard and
spill them there.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
I know exactly what you're saying. We have squirrels very
slowly eating our pumpkins. It's like they take one bite
out of them every day.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
It's weird. We have plenty of squirrels around here, but
I don't think they ever messed with the pumpkins. But
it has been I feel like more people are chronicling
the decay and or consumption of their jack lanterns and
pumpkins this year, and it's been nice to watch.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
I'm curious why just the like one bite and run away,
Like it can't be that delicious if they don't stay
to take a few more bites.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Unless it's you know, just gnawing. It's gnawing action. I'm
not sure.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
But Okay, what was this Halloween related topic that we
didn't get to in October and they're covering now.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
It's headlessness, Yeah, which ties in nicely with the idea
of jackal lanterns. I mean, these two concepts are are
connected in many ways. Yeah, we're going to discuss the
idea of headless entities, mostly in the human imagination, but
it probably makes sense to think about what's lacking in
these fantastic creatures and what we tend to take for granted.
(02:14):
It's we're going to get into just the concept of
why do creatures have heads? What is a head? Even
it's easy to just take that whole idea for granted,
because I mean, the basics I think are pretty obvious,
and you know, we have to stop and look them
in the mirror and realize. A head is the top
or front part of an organism, the upper or anterior
(02:35):
division of the animal body that contains the brain, most
of the sense organs, and the mouth. It is the
communication array as we've described it many times before. It's
the matter consumer, and it's also the nerve center of
the organism.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Now, most of the animals you can probably think of
off the top of your head do have heads, but
actually a head is not a necessary part of what
it means to be an animal. There are animals without heads,
So that raises the question of why do certain animals
have heads and not others? What causes this difference?
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yeah, we have to realize that heads emerge in organisms
over the course of evolutionary time and a process referred
to as cephalization, during which the mouth, sense organs and
nerve ganglia moved toward the front or what would we
would come to think of at the front of the creatures,
resulting in head morphology and the emergence of complex brains
and arthropods, cephalopod mollus and invertebrates. So these organisms tend
(03:36):
to be cephalized or semi cephalized. And would that mean
that a creature in fantasy that has lost its head
and continues to move around and act and behave is decephalized.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
Well, I think that would be the term. The head
is removed, a thing is decephalized. But whether or not
a thing can continue to act without its head, it
probably depends on the degree to which it was originally
cephalized as a matter of its innate anatomy. I'll get
back to that in a few minutes. Actually, So I
(04:12):
was thinking about this, and it probably helps to put
cephalization within the broader evolutionary history of bilateral animals or bilatarians.
These are animals that have a left side and a
right side of the body that are roughly symmetrical, that
are mirror images of each other. So we are bilatarians,
(04:32):
and again, most of the animals you can think of off
the top of your head are bilatarians. The symmetry does
not have to be exact. It refers to the overall
body plan and how the animal develops in its earliest
phases of growth. So even in the case of animals
that happen to have evolved wildly asymmetrical features. One example
(04:53):
we've talked about on the show before is male fiddler crabs,
which have one claw that's much bigger than the other,
in some cases half of the crab's body weight, So
you know, roughly on the scale of a human with
one regular sized hand and then another hand that's four
feet in diameter and weighs eighty pounds, even that animal
is a bilatarian because the animal's body plan has bilateral
(05:15):
symmetry overall, with the exception of the claw, And it's
also a question of its evolutionary clade. It is descended
from the evolutionary clade of bilateral animals. So bilateral symmetry
is not just a feature of an animal body, but
a particular branch on the evolutionary tree, going back to
a common ancestor. As I was saying a minute ago,
(05:38):
though most of the animals you can think of are bilateral,
not all animals are. There are lots of sea creatures
like sponges, jellyfish, hydri and corals, that are animals but
are not Bilatarians. We don't know for sure when exactly
this split took place, when the last common ancestor of
(05:58):
all bilatarians split off from the ancestors of other animals,
but based on what I've been reading, I think it's
probably sometime between roughly five hundred and fifty and six
hundred million years ago. Is clearly it pre dates the
Cambrian Explosion, because in the Cambrian era, starting around five
hundred and fifty million years ago, you see a great
(06:20):
diffusion or profusion of different animal body plans that exhibit
bilateral symmetry. So clearly their last common ancestor was before that.
There's still debate about exactly what that animal was like,
but whatever its exact features were, it is mind boggling
to imagine the common ancestor of all of the world's fish, crabs, cats, squid, slugs,
(06:47):
barnacles and worms all in one body.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Yeah, you can't just combine all those things in your
head and say, like, all right, a little bit of
the cat, a little bit of the squid. It's a
different sort of arithmetic in play.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
But one of the things, apart from bilateral symmetry that
makes Bilatarians unique is their degree of cephalization. That they
these animals really started to develop heads in ways that
non biletarian animals did not. And the authors of a
paper I was looking at, they they define cephalization as
(07:20):
quote anterior concentration, and remember anterior means front, so front
facing concentration of nervous tissue, sensory organs, and the appearance
of dedicated feeding structures surrounding the mouth. Now, one question
I was wondering about was how to even decide which
is the anterior part of an animal that doesn't already
(07:42):
have a head. I think the answer is it's where
the mouth is. Makes sense. Yeah, Now to get some
more perspective on why and how a head developed in Bilatarians,
I was reading a few chapters from a book. It
was a book called Creatures of acxis The Rise of
the Animal Kingdom, published by Hill and Wang two thousand
(08:03):
and seven by an author named Wallace Arthur.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
So.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
The author of this book, Wallace Arthur is an evolutionary
biologist who was a professor at the University of Galway
in Ireland. I looked him up and it seems like
his work focused a lot on the interplay between evolution
and development and the emergence of animal body plans, which
is what we're talking about here, And in a couple
of chapters of this book he has a very nice,
(08:29):
plain language summary of the likely pressures leading early by
leetarians to acquire ahead. So one interesting thing to think
about here is that the early evolution of the animal
lineage found different types of symmetries. So the first animals
were not symmetrical, and there are animals today that are
(08:50):
not symmetrical in their bodies, like sponges. You know, you
can't cut them down the middle and get a mirror
image in any direction. Then there came animals with radial symmetry,
where the body is symmetrically reproduced around an axis in
the middle. And a great example here would be a jellyfish. Jellyfish,
they're not bilaterally symmetrical, but they're radially symmetrical. Finally, there
(09:14):
came animals with bilateral symmetry, tracing back to a common
ancestor that is known in the literature as the ur bileatarian,
so biletarian with the letters you are in front of it,
you are meaning like original or first. And again we
don't know exactly what this animal was like, but Arthur
thinks the best guess is that it was somewhat similar
(09:34):
to modern flatworms. This, he acknowledges this is debatable, and
I was reading a bit about the modern debate here
it seems like this is still one of the one
of the possible pictures of what this creature was like.
So Arthur asks a question, if you compare a bilaterally
symmetrical flatworm with a radially symmetrical animal like a jellyfish,
(09:57):
can we really say that one is more complex than
the other? He writes, quote, does a flatworm have more
different types of parts than a jellyfish? Well, not really. Yes,
it has left and right sides, which a jellyfish does not,
but that's about it. Although the flatworm has head and
tail ends while the jellyfish does not, The jellyfish has
(10:18):
a top side and an underside, the latter having the mouth,
which pretty much amount to the same thing. And the
jellyfish has tentacles while the flatworm does not. And yet
despite this basic parity, or maybe you might even say
that the jellyfish seems more complex, we do tend to
think of bilaterally symmetrical animals as more complex than animals
(10:40):
with radial symmetry. Why do we think of them that way. Well,
Arthur says that there could be a good reason for this,
and it's that bilateral symmetry led to subsequent steps of
increasing complexity. Bilateral symmetry was not itself necessarily more complex,
but it became a platform for future complexity to emerge,
(11:02):
making the point that some changes in evolution can seem
really important to us because they are necessary precursors to
other developments, maybe millions of years down the line, and
you couldn't always necessarily predict what those future developments would
be at the time. Like if we were standing there
in the pre Cambrian era looking at the orbilatarian, you
(11:22):
wouldn't necessarily be able to look at this little flatworm
like creature or whatever it was that it looked like
some kind of little little organism that has left and
right sides that roughly mirror each other and think, well, yes,
this is going to be big, This will turn into
spiders and cats and octopuses.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
But that is.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Exactly what happened. It became this sort of platform for
future development. But to come back to the question, what
is it about these early Bilatarians that favors the evolution
of a head. Well, Arthur argues that it is the
peculiarities of pre cam animal movement. It had to do
(12:02):
with how animals move. So he says, you know, jellyfish,
this animal with radial symmetry swims around in the open sea.
You know, it floats in the water column. It kind
of pulses to swim where it wants. And then you
might have other animals that have radial symmetry, like the
sea anemone. This lives it's a sessile organism, so it
lives most of its life by sticking itself to a
(12:24):
surface and staying there, you know, grabbing things from the water. Flatworms, however,
creep across the two dimensional surfaces of solid objects like
rocks in the water. So you can imagine what he
thinks is likely the form of the orbiletarian traversing the
face of a flat boulder in an archaic lagoon. And
(12:47):
so he zeros in on the different ways that these
creatures move. For the jellyfish with radial symmetry floating in
the water, Arthur says, there is little reason to think
of any direction as forward or backward. All directions are
basically the same. The sessile sea an enemy doesn't generally
travel around, so travel isn't a big issue for it.
But for the flatworm like or biltarian, there is a
(13:12):
very definite forward and backward regime in the way that
this animal moves. You can think of the difference between
a car and an aerial drone. You know, the jellyfish
might be more like the aerial drone. It can kind
of go in whatever direction a car has to like
aim its movement. It crawls, it creeps along on a
(13:32):
forward path.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
That's a good way of putting it. Yeah, yeah, drones
versus cars.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
Yeah, now, no, there's absolutely nothing wrong with moving like
a drone, you know, the jellyfish, and there's nothing wrong
with these other lineages. Jellyfish can be highly successful without
a brain and with limited range of behaviors. They're doing
just find how they are, and this leads to what
Arthur calls an evolutionary cul de sac. You know, they're
(13:57):
just successful in the way they already are. But for
the orbiletarian, with a definite bias for forward movement, there
is a lot of reason to differentiate the front of
the body from the back. There are reasons this animal
needs to change based on the way it moves. Arthur writes, quote,
it is more important to be able to detect the
(14:18):
features of the area you are moving into than the
one you're leaving behind. So it is to be expected
that natural selection will favor variants that have more of
their nerve net upfront. As part of this concentration of
perceptive powers at the front of the animal, in the
region that will one day merit the term head, there
may be rudimentary forward pointing outgrowths densely populated with sensory
(14:43):
nerves primitive antennae. And I was thinking about this. Maybe
this is getting a little too philosophical about it, but
you could argue that the evolution of the head in
animals is related to the nature of time. For an
organism that specializes in moving in one direction, moving like
a car, or like a flatworm moving forward along varied terrain,
(15:06):
the gathering of nerve cells and sensory organs in the
front reflects the fact of reality that it is more
important to sense and react to the future where you
are headed than to the past where you've just been.
The past can't hurt you anymore, but the future can no.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
I think that's a good way of looking at it.
And it reminds me of some accounts. Off the top
of my head. I can't recall how accurate these are
held up to be, but there was at least an
idea that was put forward in Western writing that certain
members of Native Arctic groups kind of referred linguistically to
(15:44):
something in the distance as being tomorrow, like this relationship
between where you will be and how you think about
what is ahead of you. And yeah, I can sort
of see that reflected in what we're talking about here.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Oh, this came up when we were talking about the
cultural spatialization of time. Yeah, how people represent time in
as a type of physical space or the metaphor of
the space around them. And I don't remember if that
example in particular was thought to be valid, but that
there are cultural differences in the spatial metaphors people used
to describe, like the future in the past and so forth.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah, yeah, but even today, you know, we can easily
think about everything that's coming into us is like our future.
You know, it's the future of our body in that
in what we are consuming the you know, the future
of our thoughts based on the sense data that's entering
entering our body and our mind and so forth. So
(16:44):
uh yeah, I can see this this holding up. Whereas
what is it like? I mean, to the limited extent
you can even ask this question, what is it like then?
For the creature that is not farward loaded, that is,
you know, it's kind of like an a nowness. It's
kind of perhaps something at least distantly comparable to that
state of calmness and serenity that we aspire to, you know,
(17:08):
or so many of us aspire to to try and
get out of that forward headlong you know, sprint into
the future.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
Assume the mind of a jellyfish. Yeah yeah, okay. Next
ecological consideration pressure on the creation of a head in
the early piletarians. Arthur says that forward movement also favors
(17:39):
the evolution of a front facing mouth. If you think
about this, this will make sense. It's kind of obvious.
Like if you feed by taking things into an orifice
in your body, it's best to be able to aim
your body movement to engulf food matter with that orifice.
So like, in the same way that it wouldn't make
sense to build a combine harvester with its intake on
(18:02):
the side. Right, you'd want it in the front of
the vehicle so you can aim it at the thing
you're trying to harvest.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Essentially an eat the future approach. Basically we've covered so.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
Far right, So aiming the mouth orifice at food and
making sure food gets inside also requires extra motor control
around this region of the body. And this also favors
nerve cells being concentrated at the anterior or the front
of the bileatarian body. So nerve cells want to gather
(18:34):
there not just to sense what is ahead in your
movement schema, but also to control the mouth to eat
what is ahead in the movement schema. And you can
see this, this direct connection between nerve cell density and
eating behavior in an example that Arthur sites, which are
modern snails and slugs, some of the simpler bileateian animals
(18:56):
extant today. These creatures, he writes quote, have a arrangement
of mouth and nerve cells such that the nerves form
a ring around the mouth or the esophagus, and at
various points around this ring are expanded groupings of nerve
cells called ganglia or mini brains if you like. So
I love that. Of course, what begins as ganglia for
(19:19):
control of just like a mouth, you know, the eating
orifice could well evolve over millions of years into denser
and more complex structures of neurons, and eventually could even
become a brain. And so I thought this was fascinating.
According to Arthur's argument here, so much of the strange
and complicated and unpredictable evolutionary potential of the bileatarian body
(19:44):
plan arises out of the simple circumstance that these animals,
the Orbileatarians, had specific limitations on their range of movement,
that their world was a world of moving forward. One
more thing from this book I wanted to mention before
I move on is something that he talks about in
the next chapter, which is sort of the idea that
(20:04):
cephalization is not a binary It's not like you are
cephalized or not, but a question of degree. Some creatures
are strongly cephalized, others are more weakly cephalized. And to
illustrate this, Arthur begins by telling a story about a
time he was collecting centipedes from an area along the
coast of northeast England. He says he collected a number
(20:27):
of centipedes. He brought him back to the lab for examination,
where they seem to be functioning fine. Some of them
had injuries, like they might be missing legs or parts
of legs, but he explains that these centipedes have an
adaptation where they cover the stumps of their missing appendages
with a thick black substance that looks like tar, presumably
(20:47):
to seal off the wound and prevent anything that's on
the outside from getting in or anything on the inside
from getting out.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Seems like a solid approach, some sort of weird black
centipede sealant.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Okay, yep, yeap, seal it up. But then he came
across something weird, he writes, quote to my surprise, I
found that one specimen had lost its head and had
used that same black tar technique to seal the wound. Strangely,
it was moving around in a normal fashion, just like
all its friends who had retained their heads. It walked
(21:21):
in the way centipedes do, usually in a forward direction,
but it was also able to retreat backward from threatening stimulis,
such as my giving it a tap on its anterior
end with a pair of tweezers. Not only did it
do so for a considerable period in the lab hours,
but it had probably done so for an even longer
one days in the wild before I found it, because
(21:43):
the wound looked old. Inasmuch as you can tell these things. Wow,
So he says that this headless centipede eventually died because
it probably starved to death. No mouth means it can't eat.
But that's amazing. It's hard for us, being extremely highly
cephalized organisms, to imagine that, Like the first problem to
(22:04):
reach the crisis point with a headless animal would be
that it starves to death. And the difference here is
the level of cephalization in each organism. The centipede and
the human are both cephalized. They both have heads, but
the human is strongly cephalized and the centipede only weakly so.
In humans, control of the body functions is strongly localized
(22:25):
in the brain, which is in the head, and the
body really can't do anything without the brain. Centipedes, on
the other hand, they do have a brain of sorts
in the head. There is a cluster of nervous tissue
up there, but they also have clusters of nerve cells
in each body segment that work as a distributed system
of many secondary brains throughout the body. Even without the
(22:46):
brain in the head, the body segments can keep on
living and acting individually. They can make the centipede walk around,
react to stimuli, and so forth, but not forever. But
to come back to headlessness in nature, I want to
emphasize again that not every animal naturally has a head. Jellyfish,
for example, there's some disagreement to the extent to which
(23:10):
you should say they are cephalized, but they really don't
have anything you would normally call ahead. In fact, jellyfish,
you don't even have brains or hearts, or even blood
for that matter. They do have a nervous system, but
it is distributed throughout the body tissues without a central
like a major command center like a biletarian brain.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah, it's fascinating and maybe a little treacherous right to
look at some of these organisms and ask questions like,
all right, where's the head? Where's the head at? Because
sometimes an animal that seems to be headless may just
be all head It's another way of sort of spinning it.
This was an argument I was reading about from some
(23:51):
researchers at Stanford University and UC Berkeley. This came out
I believed this earlier this month. In a paper published
in Nature, they found that ceased to once thought of
as headless, actually exhibit gene expressions associated with head development
all over their bodies. Meanwhile, genes related to torsos and
tails were largely absent, so you could, I guess, think
(24:13):
of them more as disembodied or never bodied heads than
you would think of them as a body without a head.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
Another interesting fact about sea stars is that so they're
thought of as animals with radial symmetry, not bilateral symmetry,
but they are actually descended from Bileatrians, So these are
animals whose ancestors are part of that group. They did
have bilateral symmetry and they evolved to lose it.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
The idea of something having a head in a body
and then becoming mostly head I was instantly reminded of
a character from Marvel comics named Modoc. Included a picture
for you here, Joe. You're not familiar with this guy,
but essentially I believe he was supposed to have been
a human at one point in the comics, and I
think definitely in the movies, and he has, through you know,
(25:07):
comic book events, become just this enormous head with much
smaller arms and legs hanging off of him. You know,
there's a sense that like even these may go eventually
because he doesn't need them. It's all you know, cerebral
power in there.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
I notice a strange body feature here, which is that
Modoc's legs are not on the underside of his head body,
but the front of his head body, almost like little
tentacles or fe feeder jaws around the mouth.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
Yeah. Yeah, and this being, I guess, the first imagined
being that we've referenced here. It's something to keep in
mind with all of these is the question of like, okay, well,
what was literally intended with this character, but also like
how did the imaginations behind them? How did the creators
(25:56):
behind them sort of channel some of these ideas we've
already been discussed, either overtly or just sort of subconsciously,
Like what do we think of when we have a head,
what do we think of them when we imagine beings
that have lost their head, that have a much larger
head than a body, and so forth. Like there's a
lot of you know, overt and then sort of hidden
(26:16):
language in there.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
I think, yes, in some ways, it's kind of hard
not to approach everything with a sort of vertebrate anatomical bias,
where you, you know, you are looking for the analogies
to the way your body is put together in everything
in the world, even in even in you know, non
living inanimate objects. I mean you often, Rob, I'm sure
you have this experience. You look at some kind of
(26:39):
inanimate object and look for the head or the legs
or whatever.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Yeah. Yeah, And and on top of that, like the
other wrinkle for a human's especially is that in the
head we see a centralization of the nervous system on
the front and upper part of the creature amid its
sense organs in its mouth. It's the defining feature of
both humans and when humans are looking at animals, and
certainly animals, it's you know, it's become it's come to
(27:06):
be thought of as a center of personhood and self.
It is the face, you know, at the front part
of the head, if you will. And of course that
that factors into a lot of our conceptions of not
only people, animals, but also just inanimate things. We're always
looking for the face. We're looking for that that front
facing communication array of micro and macro expressions, you know,
(27:32):
and we can also couple that with this idea of
the head the face looking into the future, and what
happens when these two future gazing facial arrays see each other. Then, Oh,
you have to have all the computation. What does it
mean that this person is in my immediate future? Am
I going to eat them? Are we going to communicate
(27:55):
on seven level? Or are we going to turn our
eyes away and continue on our own forward core? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (28:01):
I mean, for a second there, I was thinking about
the salients of faces. Why we notice faces everywhere? I mean,
we see faces in electrical outlets, and we see the
you know, the boxing octopus and the kadhook on the wall.
Everything is a face. Part of me wanted to interpret
that as a result of our highly social brains. You know,
we're always looking at other people's faces to try to
(28:22):
understand what they're thinking, how they're feeling towards us, and
all that. That is very important. But then it could
actually be even deeper than that in an ecological origin,
because of course, understanding like looking for the face of
a predatory animal could help you understand like, am I
in the attentional zone of this this big looking animal
(28:43):
over there? So it could go even deeper than social factors.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Yeah, no, that's a good point, and it goes back
to numerous things we've discussed, but most recently talking about
what happens when you meet eyes with just a household cat.
Yeah know, and how that is maybe an anxious experience
for the cat because again, it doesn't have all these
layers of human cognition. It gets down to the basic
interactions that a creature like a house cat that is
(29:08):
both predator and prey would have when it's locking eyes
with another organism. And so on top of all that,
as we begin to venture into the world of fantastic beings,
imagined beings, creatures of mythology, folklore, and much more. Yeah,
it's like to imagine something without a head is of
(29:28):
course also to imagine something without a face, And you
could just you can easily just you could focus on
the facial aspect of this, and there's plenty of ways
to cut that apart. But then on top of that
this idea of here is a thing that has no
head or separated from its head, and knowing like what
that would mean for a human being, Like you said,
survival is not possible even for a very short period
(29:52):
of time. I mean there, of course, studies and there've
long been some fascination about to what degree a human
head can survive without its body. The answer still remains
not very long at all. So to take all of that,
these observations and knowledge about the importance of a human head,
the role that a head plays in a human's life
(30:14):
and personhood, what happens when that is cut away? What
happens when you have an imagine being that can live
without a head? And what does it mean? You know?
Speaker 3 (30:22):
When I go back in my history of taking in
stories of headless beings, the main one that comes to mind,
of course, is probably not a big surprise, is the
headless Horseman story and Ichabod Crane and all that, which
has been realized in many you know, Halloween specials on
TV and stuff like that through all the years. And
one thing I always remember thinking about the headless horsemen
(30:44):
that made them different than other kind of ghosts and
monsters is that the headless horseman seemed less like a
personal entity and more like a machine or a robot
than most other types of monsters and ghosts. Do you
have this experience?
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Yeah, yeah, And I think it's one of the reasons
that at times, I mean, there's also the effects level
of this, but it's one of one of the reasons
that at times filmmakers have struggled with portraying it. I
think of the Tim Burton film where you had Christopher
Walken playing the headless being, and sometimes you see his head,
you see his face, because that helps convey like the
intent and the horror of the thing. You take that away,
(31:23):
it's like, yeah, it's like a robot. It's like all action,
but without cognition, all like physical It's certainly still a
physical threat, but there is no mind communication. Will like,
you take this entire aspect of what it is to
be an entity in the physical world, and you remove
this huge slice of it. How do you reason with that?
(31:46):
How do you even comprehend it?
Speaker 3 (31:48):
I guess part of it is that even with a
regular ghost, you know, this imagined entity that doesn't behave
by normal biological rules, we still make biological inferences about it.
So like with a ghost, a monster, you can tell
you're in danger if it looks at you. You know,
like you are still tracking its gaze to understand what
its state of mind and attention is doing. And with
(32:10):
a headless beast. You can't do that.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Yeah, So we're going to begin to go through some
various ideas that, you know, especially with with what we've
talked about so far, I think this will make for
a nice discussion. The various examples of beings and entities
(32:34):
that have lost their heads are separated from their heads
and so forth, and in doing so they often have
lost a face, though, as we'll discuss, sometimes the face
finds a way. But let's start with roughly with the
realm of the divine headless. And I suppose the notion
of the divine headless is interesting to think of in
(32:55):
light of some of the popular modern religious views that
position a mon theistic God as being essentially bodyless. And
in this respect you might well argue that, well God
is headless, then if God has no body, then God
has no head, at least in the literal sense. But
of course it's hard to escape the head in virtually
any sort of anthropomorphism or any number of linguistic uses
(33:19):
of the word head. We even have the term godhead
used to sum up different theological concepts, particularly in the
Abrahamic and religions, and also in Hinduism, though.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
That is a false cognate. You know. The head in
godhead actually has nothing to do with the biological head.
I think it is derived from the term that essentially
means like godhood. It is like the essence of godness.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Yeah, but then you throw that into a language system
where head means head. You can't help but think of
it as such. Right now. Another thing to look at is, Okay,
if your god or goddess of choice goes through different
avatars or incarnations, then well, no matter what their pure
form is, they're going to wind up having a head
of some sort at some point, at least for a while.
(34:09):
I think a fantasy example we might turn to if
you think of a Sauron from The Lord of the Rings, right,
he takes on a number of bipedal and headed being
of forms, but ultimately assumes the physical form of a
great disembodied eye, devoid of body and head in the
literal sense.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
Though it is interesting that it's still the eyes at
the top of a tower, making it kind of like
a head.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Yeah. Yeah, And I guess the idea is that during
that incarnation, like it has, he has become all seeking
all because there is only one thing that it wants.
It is not consumption. It is just to find the
one ring.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
It's kind of the opposite of the headless horseman issue,
where like you can't tell where it's looking, all Sauron
is is looking at something.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Yeah. Now, in actual religions, though, gods do sometimes lose
their head heads, but unlike with human beings, this doesn't
spell the end of it, because here you're dealing with
again divine beings and magical powers and so forth. We've
discussed in the past. The Hindu god Rahu, this is
(35:15):
the entity that is associated with eclipses. He was once
a proud oserer, a demi god of immense power and
hunger seeking immortality. For demi gods are just another realm
in the wheel of Samsara. Rahu drinks the divine nectar
known as Amrita, but before he can swallow it all
(35:35):
the way, as it's passing down his throat, all powerful
Vishnu decapitates him for the transgression.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
He wasn't supposed to drink the nectar.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
He was not supposed to drink it and was stopped
in the act of drinking it. So the power of
the nectar. In at least some tellings and understandings of
the story makes his disembodied head immortal, and so this
cleaved and fallen god continually seeks his revenge on the
two planets jerry deities who ratted him out to Vishnu. However,
(36:04):
in a lot of these tellings, his headless body is
still in the mix under the new name of Ketu,
so both Rahu and Katu take on the classification of
shadow planets in Indian astronomy. Katu is indeed sometimes depicted
in Hindu iconography as a body without a head. Interesting now,
Hinduism also boasts a headless goddess of sorts by the
(36:26):
name of Chinnamasta. She is depicted as a nude, red fleshed,
self decapitating tantric goddess. She's generally depicted standing atop the
bodies of a divine couple with a scimitar in one
hand and her own head in the other, with three
jets of blood spurting out of her neck, which her
(36:47):
own severed head plus two attendants like gaze upward and
open their mouths and drink like a fountain.
Speaker 3 (36:54):
So she's understood to have cut her own head off
with the scimitar.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Right right, now I suppose she is still head in
body as one, even in separation, or at least that's
my understanding. This might differ, you know, if one were
to dive more into the theology of this particular god
and what these depictions mean. But it's my limited understanding
(37:21):
that you still think of them as as the same goddess,
and she's associated with destruction and creation, but also apparently paradoxes,
which I think is worth highlighting. Now, another headless divine
figure can be found in Chinese mythology, and this is
Sing Ten. As Anne Beryl describes in Chinese Mythology and introduction,
(37:44):
Sing Ten is a failed hero in minor deity. His
plight is described in the Shanghaijing, the Classic of Mountains
and Seas, which we've talked about on the show before.
This is a work from between five hundred and two
hundred BCE. Taking into account of variations of his name,
Beryl writes that we might very roughly translate his name
(38:05):
as punished by heavens or formed by heavens or And
I love this one because this one sounds like he
could straight up be a death metal band. Is form
prematurely dying? Who you can just imagine that in that
nearly illegible script on a festival poster.
Speaker 3 (38:24):
Right right, yes, in the Batlord fond.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
Yeah. So Beryl points out that the story of Sing
Ten kind of stands out for its gruesomeness in the
in the classic, and this is partially thought to be
because many instances of sex and violence were like edited
a bit and cleaned up a bit over time in
that work, and for one reason or another, this one
was not. She describes Sington as an odentic warrior, and
(38:51):
we might well think of him as kind of a
Satanic figure as well, if you know, comparing him to
modern Christian and certainly Western literature depictions of Satan, because
we know, for what little we know about him is
that he winds up in this position of having no
head due to his hubris, due to his violent opposition
(39:11):
to the supreme god Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
So what's the story, all right?
Speaker 2 (39:17):
So the story goes that sing Ten, who sometimes described
as a giant as well, challenges the Yellow Emperor on
a particular battleground for a divine rule. You know, He's like,
you shouldn't be ruined everything, I should. Let's battle it. Out. Now,
the Yellow Emperor is victorious in the end, and he
beheads his challenger and buries the head on cheng Yang Mountain.
(39:41):
But Sing Ten is too proud to die. According to
one translation, quote Ten made his nipples serve as eyes
and his navel as his mouth, and brandishing his shield
and battle axe, he danced. And we might well imagine
this dance is a proud kind of war dance, a
a vein dance, a spiteful dance. Again, he has been defeated,
(40:04):
his head has been removed from his giant body, and
yet he refuses to truly give up, to cease his
opposition to the Yellow Wimperor, and continues to fight, though
in time the body dies as well and the body
is buried as well. Now I included some illustrations of
this entity for you to look at here Joe, the
(40:25):
first of which is an older illustration from the Shanghaijiing
which folks can can look up. Is found in a
lot of places, very very simple and kind of comical.
But by doing image searches, especially using the Chinese characters
for the entity, you can find a number of really
cool like modern illustrations. I don't know to what extent,
(40:46):
Like he's been utilized in Chinese comic books and video
games and whatnot. But it looks like a lot of
folks have done some very unique sketches of him that
look very horrifying, very demonic, with like the belly erupting
into a big fanged mouth and indeed the nipples becoming eyes,
and you know, this is the ferocious form, you know,
(41:08):
still carrying and brandishing its battle axe.
Speaker 3 (41:12):
At least one of these illustrations has a little bit
of Critter's energy.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Yeah, yeah, they have. Maybe there there's one thing to
keep in mind, like ideas of like what happens when
like the head is fused with the body, or thought
to have fused with the body. We'll get back to
that in a bit. But yeah, it's like there's also
this kind of spirit of, well, you can't be head
me again, Like my head is literally my torso. Now
what are you going to do? Cut my torso off?
Speaker 3 (41:36):
I can't believe I didn't connect it to this earlier,
but I mean when you were talking about Modoc, I
mean the critters, the crits really sort of are all head.
They're like a head, an eating head with legs and arms.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
Yeah, and what does it mean sort of conceptionally if
we are imagining a creature that doesn't have a head
with a mouth, but its body is the mouth, where
like head and body are fused into one. You know,
on some level, does that kind of mess with our
concepts of head and body? Like one of the concepts
we've discussed in the past is how arguably modern humans
(42:09):
tend to think of body and head as horse and rider.
You know, we're the head and there's the body. It's
doing its thing. But of course there's really more of
a centaur concept where horse and rider are one, and
that breaks down in a number of different ways. But
then what if we imagine, like the horse, human is
just one entity, you know, Like, how are we supposed
(42:32):
to take take account of that? Like, here is this creature,
like the critter like sington, who now has its belly
more or less in its body, its eyes or in
its body. What does that mean about its volition and
its intent?
Speaker 3 (42:47):
I don't have a good answer on this, but I
was just trying to think, how would your vision be
different if your eyes were in your nipples'd be farther
apart than human eyes usually are. And I don't know
exactly how that would change things.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Well, yeah, they would be wider apart, and certainly these
depictions of like Singing ten. You know, he seems to
be have a very broad giant's body, so the nipples
are pretty far apart. Yeah, I'm not sure exactly how
to cut that. But in a way, it's like by
having the belly be the mouth, it's like it does
(43:20):
tend to give us this idea that like the hunger
is even more all consuming, like the belly itself is
opening up and wishes to eat.
Speaker 3 (43:29):
There will not be like an esophagus in between the
food and the stomach. You're just like chomping. It's like
the stomach itself has teeth.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
Yeah, yeah, I don't imagine there's a lot of tasting.
This critter is not going for the tasting menu, is
going for the buffet. That's right by the way. If
we dip back into Hindu epics for just a second,
there is a demon with these basic features that pops
up there, known as Kabanda, and the story goes that
Indra stove this individual's head and thighs in stove them
(44:00):
into his body with the celestial thunderbolt weapon known as
the Vadra. But then Indra shows mercy and says, well,
he's still alive, he should be allowed to eat. So
Indra gives him long arms and a belly mouth. And
I included one depiction of this creature here for you, Joe.
Speaker 3 (44:19):
On this drawing. He's kind of cute. He's like a
blue Teddy bear.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
Yeah. Yeah. But this one's interesting too because it's like
the head is not removed. The head is just kind
of like apparently it's like driven down into the body
with something like it's easy to imagine like some gruesome
Mortal Kombat esque battle field fatality here, and then that
is rectified by divine magic to some extent. Now, if
(44:46):
we look to the world of Japanese jokai, there is
also a creature there that is described as headless but
with nipple eyes and a belly mouth. This is a
donatsura or torso face, according to I couldn't find out
a lot about this one. I was looking at yokai
dot com where Matthew Meyer describes this entity and says
(45:08):
that the main connotation here is to shame and some
sort of saying in Japanese about lowering the lowering of
one's face. I think the effectiveness of this is likely.
You know, something that's lost in translation. M okay. There's
another yokai that Meyer describes called Kuba kajiri, and this
(45:29):
one is also apparently sometimes described as headless. It's a
kind of ghoul that consumes the heads of the dead,
though plenty of illustrations depict it as having a head,
as being a being with a head that is gnawing
on disembodied heads, and this may seem this seems to
be maybe connected to the idea of bodies buried without
(45:50):
heads coming back as vengeful spirits that seek out corpse
heads to eat. It could also be linked to starvation,
according to Meyer. But at this point, obviously we're our
beginning to talk about things that are maybe less divine
and maybe a little more diabolical, a little lower down
the ladder of power when it comes to supernatural entities.
(46:10):
And so this is where we're going to leave off.
But in the next episode we're going to come back
in and we're going to discuss other examples of more
outright diabolical headless entities, and we'll also get into the
works of antiquity and various descriptions of peoples in distant
parts of the world or distant from the writers and
(46:31):
observers here, that were said to have no heads, but
of course to have faces on their bodies. And so
we'll get into that and discuss like where these ideas
came from and what they seem to mean. So we'll
get into that on Thursday. In the meantime, we'll remind
everyone out there that, Yeah, Stuff to Blow Your Mind
is a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
(46:53):
Mondays we do listener mail. Wednesdays we do a short
form artifact or monster fact episode, and on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
weird film on Weird House Cinema. We remind you that
if you are using social media currently, well, our accounts
are active again and you can follow us there. I
especially encourage you to check out stbympodcast dot com. That's
(47:16):
our current Instagram account. Our old Instagram account got locked up,
and who's the meta guy? What's his name? Zuckerberg? Zuck Yeah,
Mark Zuckerberg. You won't let us back in. You can't
get a hold of the guys. So we have this
new account stbympodcast dot com. Do us a solid and
if you use Instagram, follow us there. There are social
(47:37):
media folks that are actually putting out some really cool
content there, including a little bit of a video here
and there related to our Wednesday episodes and to our
Weird House Cinema episodes.
Speaker 3 (47:47):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway.
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 (48:09):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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