The Hearth, Part 1

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe dig into the powerful resonance of the fireplace and hearthstone in human culture, psychology and myth.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
As I drew in my head and was turning around
on the chimney, Saint Nicholas came with a bound. He
was dressed all in fur from his head to his foot,
and his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.
He was dressed all in fur from his head to
his foot, and his clothes were all tarnished with ashes
and soot. He was dressed all in fur from his
head to his foot, and his clothes were all tarnished
with ashes and soot.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
And today we're going to be kicking off a series
of episodes on the fireplace and the hearth, the infrastructure
through which humans brought their campfires indoors, inside their homes
and other dwelling structures. We're gonna look at how fire
places work, where they come from, and what they mean.

(01:03):
And just got to apologize again this week like I
did last week. I've still got a cold. It's either
round two of this cold or a whole new cold
has come into my life. So so apologies for the
sinus noises today, but I'm doing what I can.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
Twelve days of Christmas over there, Yeah they're gathering around
the fire, but anyway, Yeah, so I wanted to do
a series of episodes looking into fireplaces.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
And sometimes when you're trying to understand what an experience
means to people, you can really get some good insights
by looking at attempts to simulate that experience in its
literal absence, like which elements do people consider worth copying,
which elements can be ignored, which elements are accentuated or

(01:51):
exaggerated in simulation. And this got me thinking about the
Netflix mega hit Fireplace for Your Home, which, for those
of you somehow not familiar, is an hour long, unbroken
shot of logs burning in a fireplace, and it is
the hottest movie of the year for I don't know,

(02:12):
seven or eight years running whenever this thing started playing
on Netflix. I just checked on Netflix and there are
three episodes. This is not a sponsored episode, by the way.
Netflix had nothing to do with this. I just think
this is an interesting subject on its own, and we'll
explain more as we go on. But I checked on
Netflix and there were three episodes of season one of

(02:35):
fireplace for your home. There's crackling yule log fireplace. That
one's the one that plays music like Joy to the
World and we wish you a Merry Christmas kind of
Muzaki versions of them. Yeah, And then there's the second
one that's just crackling fireplace, so no music. You just
get the pop, the hiss and all that good stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
There you go.

Speaker 3 (02:54):
And then there's a third one with music, again I
guess in different music than the first one. I don't.
I think we mainly just listen. The one we put
on is the one without music.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
That's the way to go. You can add your own
music that way.

Speaker 3 (03:07):
So I don't remember what year it was we first
discovered this thing, but it has played a number of
times in our household, and so I was wondering, Rob,
do you do you have experience with this thing?

Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yes, I do. You know, I've never owned or rented
a home that had a hearth or a fireplace in it,
not even like some of the scaleback versions where it's
like gas generated and you know, or has some sort
of other effect. So I have to depend on what
a lot of people have to depend on for the
spiritual center of their home and that's the television, and

(03:37):
so of course I fire up a fake fireplace, and
the one that's been our favorite for several years running
now is on Netflix. So again, credit, where's credit? Where
credits do? They'll cancel your favorite shows after two seasons,
but they will give you an amazing virtual fireplace, and
our favorite is Netflix The Witcher Fireplace. It is a

(03:57):
Witcher tie in and it's not much to it. It's simple,
it's awesome. It's just kind of a medieval fantasy world
fire pit, like you know, wrought iron or something. It's blazing,
it's crackling. There's no Henry cavill or Unifer back there
and a hot tub or anything like that. It's just
the fire pit and it's great. My only criticism is

(04:18):
that it's only an hour long, and I either can't
or I don't know how to put it on repeat,
because I would just prefer to have it on all
the time during the holidays.

Speaker 3 (04:26):
What's this emblazoned on the side of it? Is it
like a kraken or something?

Speaker 1 (04:31):
Ah, since I've seen this show, that's probably like some
sort of a monster. You know, Henry Cavell is a
monster hunter. And that the Witch is a monster hunter
and that's I don't know, a chimera or something.

Speaker 3 (04:41):
Oh, I know the Witcher from the game, the third
game specifically. But yeah, so this thing does look really cool.
I'll have to look this one up this year. But
it's like sexy wrought iron brazier for your home.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah, yeah, it's cool. Yeah, I legitimately love it.

Speaker 3 (04:56):
So I think Fireplace for Your Home and it's many
derivatives are interesting cultural artifacts because on one hand, they're
just like a genuine holiday fixture in millions of homes.
I couldn't find any reliable sources on viewcount because Netflix
doesn't release that kind of stuff as far as I know.
But in an interview with The Independent in twenty eighteen,

(05:19):
the director of Fireplace for Your Home, George Ford, I'll
come back to this in a minute, estimated that it
had been it had been watched more than seventy million
times in twenty eighteen. No idea if he's right about that,
But how am I going to argue with him? But
at the same time, I think it's funny that people
are putting this on to be cozy and feel good

(05:40):
at Christmas time, and yet this movie is also a
source of ironic amusement, Like when you bring it up,
people kind of there's something funny, Like they find something
kind of goofy about the idea of a cozy fire
happening inside their television. And if you look at reviews,
most of the reviews for this thing are jokes. They're

(06:01):
things like, you know, zero stars, nearly burned down my house.
It's like the joke is with the incongruity of the
fact that this is not a real fire.

Speaker 1 (06:11):
It's not it won't it won't put out heat. And
if it is putting out heat, there's probably something wrong
with your television set. I mean, it'll put out a
little heat, right, Like, you shouldn't be putting out a
lot of heat. You shouldn't actually be able to warm
your buns by it.

Speaker 3 (06:23):
You hope it's not putting out a lot. This is
actually this is kind of a tangent. But I got
interested thinking about what makes the difference between lovable holiday
kitch like fireplace for your home and a divisive experimental
art film like Andy Warhol's Empire, which if you're not
familiar with Empire, this is worth looking up. It's an

(06:44):
eight hour static shot of the illuminated upper floors of
the Empire State Building. I think it was actually filmed
over the course of roughly like six hours, and then
it's supposed to be played back at slow motion, so
the film takes like eight hours to watch. It was
filmed over the course of one night in July nineteen
sixty four, and you're just watching the buildings, like the

(07:05):
sun sets and the floodlights come on, and you just
watch the building through the night, and occasionally there'll be
you know, a plane going by or flashes of light
or something like that, but otherwise it's just a static shot. Obviously,
the movie Empire is more likely to be regarded as
either an important work of art with something interesting to
illustrate about passage of time or the aesthetics of film, or,

(07:29):
on the other hand, to be seen as a pretentious,
self infatuated, artistic boondoggle. Fireplace for your home does not
really invite either of these types of appraisal. It's just
you know, cozy holiday kitsch. However, I would say that
an hour long shot of a burning fireplace and an
eight hour shot of the floodlights on top of a

(07:50):
skyscraper have a lot of similarities. Both are what you
might call slow or atmospheric films without plot, characters, or dialogue,
primarily interested in just a purely aesthetic experience, maybe causing
maybe something about causing the viewer to have time to
relax and reflect without something directly taking up their attention

(08:10):
to too aggressively. And both of them, in terms of
visual display, are based on the interplay of light and shadow.
I read somebody described the glowing crown of the building
featured in Empire as a chandelier in the sky, and
based on an interview I was looking at it's clear
that fireplace for your home. It took a lot of

(08:31):
care to try to get the right interplay of lights
and colors in the fire and how they would be
picked up by the camera and the contrast of that
with the shadows in the room around. And so I
was thinking about if I had to single out a
major difference, like what would make the difference between the
kinds of feelings people have about them? Apart from the
length difference, I think a big thing is that there

(08:54):
is an understanding of a different expectation put on the viewer,
Like if you were asked to watch Andy Warhol's Empire.
People probably think that they're supposed to like sit silently
in an art house theater and look at the screen
the whole run time and think deep thoughts, whereas fireplace
for your home makes no such demands. You probably just

(09:15):
put it on in the background while you're having coffee
or while you're wrapping presents or something.

Speaker 1 (09:20):
Yeah, it's interesting to think about the different ways we're
supposed to or do, interact with various media. Like I
was thinking about this recently. I went to a performance
that was maybe a little dry for my taste, and
in the same way, you know, you sometimes say, well,
this meeting could have been an email, I kind of
felt like this performance could have been an art installation,

(09:42):
you know, something where I walk through it, I spend
as much time with it as I want and sort
of like gain what I want from looking at it
walking through it and so forth. You know, I think
we've all been to This also sometimes breaks down into
actual video pieces, right where you'll see like short short
films or even longer pieces, and yeah, you could watch

(10:03):
them all in their entirety, or you could sort of
pass through and get a general sense of it, and
then on the other end, of the spectrum. Like you
look at the way people often treat their favorite television shows,
be it to you know, something's often something they have
a lot of nostalgia for. You hear people talking about,
say The Office or a Siginfeld or something like that,
and they talk about, well, you know, I just like

(10:24):
to put it on in the background while I'm working.
It just put it on while I'm working or you know,
doing things around the house. And you know it's you're
kind of treating the office like one of these virtual fireplaces,
something that is just generating a feeling in the background
of some stimuli in the background that you're not one

(10:45):
hundred percent focused on. In fact, I would say if
you are one hundred percent focused on one of these
fireplace videos, that may be a warning sign. You know,
it's like that's why not. I mean, however, you engage
with your art, that's fine.

Speaker 3 (11:01):
Or it could be you're just trying to find the
warholiness of it. I mean, on the I have read
strange kinds of interpretations of fireplace for your home. Was
reading something that referred to an almost Lynchian meditation on
the synthetic and alienated faces of holiday cheer. That you
could see in fireplace for your home if you're looking

(11:23):
for it. But I was thinking about it in the
opposite direction, with the contrast with the Andy Warhol movie.
You could be like wrapping Christmas presents and you could
put Empire on in the background. It might not feel
any less appropriate. The other day, I just watched part
of Empires, like you can find it online, and however
orthogonal this is to Warhol's intensions, it actually does feel

(11:44):
quite seasonally festive. There's something about like the art deco
design of the Empire state building and the floodlights against
the dark knight skies, extremely cozy and felt like Christmas time.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah, there have been a number of interesting related I
guess ambient audio visual experiences. Netflix hosted multiple moving art
works by Lewis Schwarzberg. This is the guy who also
directed the twenty nineteen film Fantastic Fun Guy, which is
more traditional in its structure, But the moving art show,

(12:18):
I guess, you know, they were like one hour long each,
maybe less. You know, It's just pleasing music, a lot
of cool ambient nature footage, and it's like great stuff.
It was great stuff to take a nap to, you know.
But still have something visual going on in the room
as well. Disney has also got in on this with
some great long ambient Star Wars themed av presentations like

(12:41):
it'll be a landscape of Hath or something like that.
So it seems like, you know, enough people were doing
this kind of thing they realized, well, let's put that
out there. I mean, we also have sort of screen
savory type things that pop up on Apple televisions right
and various apps and so forth, where instead of just
looking at an ad, they're going to show you a

(13:01):
city scape or something like that.

Speaker 3 (13:05):
I didn't know about the Star Wars thing.

Speaker 1 (13:06):
I don't look that up. They're pretty good Wampa attacks
to study, relax to yeah, well yeah, nothing really happens.
Maybe a spaceship flies over, you know. Yeah. They keep
it chill, they keep it ambient. And it's an interesting
I mean, because the idea of the TV being on
NonStop as being this flood of ideas into your home

(13:27):
and into your life, like this is nothing new. We've
been doing this, We've been using our televisions like this
since we've had televisions, and it's it's really almost kind
of a refined idea to think, well, you know, let's
let them have an hour two hour blocks of just
you know, very ambient, chill audio visual stimuli instead of

(13:47):
just NonStop ads and so forth.

Speaker 3 (13:49):
I don't know, well, yeah, yeah, and I mean and
part of the reason I brought this up is to
think about the the similarities and differences in the way
people are now seeming to use a TV like would
once or in many cases still do use a fireplace
as a primarily you know, not primarily to heat the house,
but because they probably have another heating system as well,

(14:10):
but as an esthetic experience. It's something that supplies a
kind of mood or ambience to the room that makes
you feel a way you want to feel, or helps
you focus your attention in a way that you want
to Anyway, I just wanted to mention a couple of
funny things that I found out about because I read
a couple of interviews with the creator of Fireplace for
Your Home, an American director named George Ford, who lives

(14:32):
in Washington State, whose primary job is, or at least
was at the time of these interviews, running a pet
supply company, but he also directed a number of these
like static shot genre films. One is like a mountain
stream flowing. There's another thing of like fish bopping around
in a saltwater aquarium. But apparently this started with him
making these cat entertainment DVDs, the goal of which is

(14:55):
to like drive your cat insane with images of mice
running all over the place.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
Oh yeah, yeah. There are various YouTube accounts that specialized
in this sort of thing as well, and some of
those can be quite cheerful, you know, until the YouTube
ads cut in.

Speaker 3 (15:09):
Yeah, I guess YouTube must have really cut into the
DVD market for these things. He used to like twenty
years ago you'd pick up in Pet Smart or something.
But anyway, these interviews, one of them was with The
Independent in twenty eighteen and others with CBC in twenty
twenty two. A few takeaways that seemed interesting to me.
This guy was inspired in part by pre existing hearth

(15:31):
and fireplace films, So Fireplace for your Home not the
first thing of its type. One example is a film
that used to run on Christmas even Christmas on the
New York TV market. It was on a station called WPIX,
Channel eleven. This started in the nineteen sixties and it
was this thing that was like two to four hours
long depending on the instance, that would play a video

(15:52):
loop showing a log burning in a fireplace with Christmas
music playing over the top. And I read in turn
that this was the idea of somebody who worked at
this TV station who was inspired by like a Coca
Cola commercial that he saw. But another thing from these
interviews is that Ford talked about how his kids would
keep begging him to build a fire around the holidays

(16:14):
because you know, yeah, I remember when I was a kid,
I wanted a fire in the fireplace. That was fun.
And it occurred to him that it would be easier too,
in his words, quote, just place a television inside our fireplace,
hearth easier than to keep making a real fire. So
he like pitched this to Netflix multiple times. They initially
ignored him or laughed him off, but eventually he got

(16:36):
some traction. And he claims again it can't verify this,
but according to the director, the First Fireplace for Your
Home film took him two years to make and cost
almost thirty five thousand dollars to produce. This would not
be Netflix money, by the way. It was actually that
he made these films independently, and then I think sold
the Distro rights to Netflix later on, like, how on

(16:58):
earth could it actually be that difficult? Well, again, can't
verify the figures are true, but the explanation kind of
makes sense to me. Speaking to The Independent, he said, quote,
we battled timing issues, color audio and general high resolution
problems along the way. Special cameras have to be used
around flames, and only certain color temperatures work. That's why

(17:18):
you just don't see an open flame much in movies.
And I was like, oh, that is interesting. You know,
I think for a cozy fire on a TV screen,
we kind of have some criteria that we might not
even be aware of. But we'd like to see the
warmer colors of the fire, don't We want some red,
orange and yellow. But a roaring fire on camera, especially

(17:39):
not the right kind of camera and not the right
kind of shot, just doesn't always look like that. I
can think of a lot of old movies and video
where camera where a camera catching a fireplace looks either
just like a white glare or it's like invisible somehow.

Speaker 1 (17:55):
M that's a good point. Now I'm going to have
to be extra judging when I watch films with fireplaces
in them.

Speaker 3 (18:00):
Apart from the technical concerns. This gets back to the
things about like what elements of the simulation are important
to capture. They also went through a lot of tries
actually getting the logs to burn right in like an
aesthetically pleasing way. They wanted the right sounds of like
a crackle and snap and a visually symmetrical flame. And
also to make the fire in such a way that

(18:21):
it requires no intervention so you don't have to keep
like poking it reaching in front of the camera. And
another hilarious thing that I did not know so you
filled me in about the Witcher themed fireplace, But according
to this guy, Netflix did a fireplace tie in with
some dystopian movie they made called Bright and they summarized this,

(18:44):
I haven't seen this movie, but it's like it's got
like elves and orcs in what is otherwise just a
buddy cop movie. And they called this burn barrel for
your home.

Speaker 1 (18:54):
I have not seen this one, but I mean, in general,
I'm all for this. Let's have let's have more of these.
I'm just looking around. It's possible that they just unleashed
one for squid Game. If so, excellent, keep it keep
it going. I need all Netflix series. I'm really kind
of pissed we didn't get one for Gama Do Toro's

(19:17):
Cabinet of Curiosities. We knew we really needed, like a
linel lasseter themed a fireplace that would have been ideal.

Speaker 3 (19:26):
Oh yeah, like a fireplace that that talks extensively about
what kind of drink it's making you.

Speaker 1 (19:31):
Yeah, I don't know, I mean, but seriously, can you
imagine if Panels Coos Motos did a fireplace hour long
video for Netflix? That would be amazing. Imagine how glorious
that fireplace would.

Speaker 3 (19:42):
Look some kind of creature slowly melting. Oh but one
last thing about the fireplace director. Speaking to the CBC,
they ask him why do we love to stare at
a fireplace even if it's not putting out heat like

(20:03):
a real woman would. He mentioned a number of things,
but one that he mentions this might seem kind of obvious,
but he says, you know, a fireplace looks like safety,
and I think that's true. Something feels very like safe,
enclosed and contained about it, which is funny because actually,
like putting a fire inside your house is one of
the more dangerous things you might do.

Speaker 1 (20:24):
Yeah, yeah, but like this is the place to do it,
and it's it's the thing that we have, and it's
the thing we have a very long history with, you know,
our you know, going back through times, will be discussing
like this is what the house was built around. It
is the heart of the house. It is the center
of the house, and it is therefore the center of
your lives.

Speaker 3 (20:42):
That's right. So I don't know if I meant to
end up talking that long about fireplace for your home.
Apologies it was a bit much, But I don't know.
I think it does raise some issues that I might
want to keep returning to as we think more about
the fireplace and what it means to us over the
course of the next couple episodes. But one thing I
did want to cover briefly is the prehistory of human

(21:04):
control of fire. Now, we've gone into this in depth
in other episodes, so we're not going to rehash all
that material in the same level of depth here. I
just wanted to do a sort of quick overview of
some things we've talked about. A paper we've referenced on
the show before that is highly cited on this subject
is from twenty sixteen published in Philosophical Transactions of the

(21:24):
Royal Society. B by JAJ. Gawlett called the discovery of
fire by humans a long and convoluted process. Now, this
paper posits that human control of fire in prehistory probably
constituted three general phases, and the first stage would be
humans engaging in something we actually see in other animals,

(21:46):
which is fire. Following this would be opportunistically taking advantage
of natural fires caused most often by lightning strikes, lightning
striking brush, but less often by like weird ignition sourcesvolcanic eruptions,
but whatever the cause of the fire. This phase would
be humans notice a natural fire is occurring and then

(22:07):
swoop in to take advantage of it in various ways,
like to capture prey that is flushed out of hiding,
or to scavenge and eat a prey that has been
killed and maybe even cooked by the fire in some
way like oh, it's nicely roasted now, or to in
various other ways take advantage of natural resources revealed or

(22:28):
transformed by a burn. And then after the wildfire foraging stage,
you've got the second and third phases, which postulate control
of the fire within the living space. So the second
phase is domestic fire primarily used for cooking and safety.
And then the third phase is what you might call
industrial fire, the transformation of used for the transformation of

(22:51):
resources and technology, like the production of baked pottery, and
so going into the second and third phases, you see
this sporadic an opportunistic relationship to rare natural fires transform
into the capture and maintenance of fire first, like feeding
a fire continuous fuel to keep it burning after you've
caught it from a natural source. And then eventually humans

(23:14):
would learn to strike fire from nothing with implements like
flintstone's and tender Now what's the general timeline for these
early stages of fire control. Well, it's messy and it's
still debated. The oldest evidence that anybody seriously proposes for
human control of fire goes back to our hominin relatives
roughly one to two million years ago, So at the

(23:37):
farthest it might go back like two million years but
this evidence is ambiguous. So you can have things like
charred or baked remains buried at a site that was
occupied by hominins around the same time between one and
two million years ago. But with these cases it's not
always clear if this is the result of deliberate fire

(23:57):
control or of natural burning and like scavenging of burned materials.
Gallot in the paper mentions a couple of sites of
this kind in Kenya containing like burned sediments, stone tools
that appear to have been altered by heat, and a
couple of large hunks of baked clay, but again it's
not clear if these are from natural fires or controlled burning.

(24:21):
A lot of the archaeological investigation for the emergence of
fire control has focused on looking for what are called hearths.
In the literature, that's going to be a little bit
different than the way we're using hearth primarily in these episodes,
because this would not necessarily refer to indoor fireplaces, but
could refer to any dedicated place for burning. So, in

(24:42):
like the archaeological papers, a hearth just means the remains
of a place that was used for a purposeful fire,
and there is pretty unambiguous evidence for hearths starting several
hundred thousand years ago. There are more traces of human
associated burning beginning around one million years ago, and then
the hearths really start popping up in Africa, Asia, Europe,

(25:04):
in the Middle East around four hundred thousand years ago
when you start seeing a lot of them.

Speaker 1 (25:09):
Yeah, just based on materials I've been looking at. The
exact usage of the term hearth is going to depend
on a large part on exactly what the researchers and
or the paper or the book is dealing with, Like
are we dealing with with an age in which people
are living in homes or some other situation, and then

(25:30):
the exact nature of the homes varies as well. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:33):
Yeah, hearth in the main way we're using it in
this series is going to refer to a piece of
infrastructure in a home, like a constructed enclosure made of
fireproof materials that contains the fireplace.

Speaker 1 (25:44):
Right. But there may be a time or two where
we use the term hearth and you might think are
they talking about a home? Well, in a few cases
we might be referring to some material that's dealing with
some other situation. But yeah, for the most part, we're
dealing with hear, hearthstones and gotten something along the lines
of a fireplace.

Speaker 3 (26:01):
Now, there are tons of ways that gaining control over
fire transformed humankind. Of course, one thing is it would
have expanded our geographic range, making it easier to migrate
into colder climates and higher altitudes. It allowed us to
expand our technological regime through the transformation of natural resources. Again,

(26:23):
a very good example is pottery fired pottery, but also
things you might not think of as readily, like adhesives
for hafting, the famous birch bark tar that we talked
about in some episodes in the past, and other things
you know you can make like various glues out of
natural substances that involves some element of heating. Also the
heating of stones for improved napping. Some silicon based stones

(26:48):
they nap better, you know, they flake off into the
kinds of sharp edges that you're looking for with a
napping exercise if you heat them the right way. But
a big thing, of course, is the importance of cooking.
The importance of fire for cooking really hard to overstate.
Now there is a real scholarly debate about the extent
to which cooking actually could have transformed the human body.

(27:10):
This is known as the cooking hypothesis. The base idea
is that the ability to cook otherwise hard to digest
foods actually steered hominine evolution, changing not just our culture
but our bodies. Allowing us to grow more powerful brains
by devoting less energy to a hardy gut. Though I
should stress that the cooking hypothesis is not proven. There

(27:32):
are arguments against it, mainly having to do with the
timing that would be required and lack of evidence for
control of fire at the required times. So we don't
know about the cooking hypothesis hypothesis in terms of human evolution.
But what cannot be doubted is that the invention of
cooking massively expanded the base nutrition yield of food we acquired.

(27:54):
So it just made it possible to get a lot
more nutrition out of your food. And it also made
food safer by calling food borne pathogens and neutralizing some
plant toxins. So it just unlocked a gigantic level up
in nutrition.

Speaker 1 (28:08):
Yeah, there's like a real sort It's often described as
kind of an externalization of digestion, like a lot of
the chemistry of digestion and potential chemistry of digestion handled
outside the body, taking the strain off of the body,
making things that we could need otherwise edible or more

(28:28):
nutritious and so forth. Yeah, and then there's you know,
additional areas you can get into, like food preservation and
so forth.

Speaker 3 (28:36):
Yeah. Also with control of fire, you have protection against
wild predators which tend to be afraid of fire and
are easier to drive away with it. And then finally
you've got provision of light in the darkness. And the
way in which fire provides light in the darkness I
think is interesting because of how it is different from

(28:59):
the light provided by the sun, and to say nothing
of the way that it's different from the kind of
light provided by electrical light sources that we have today.
That's something I want to come back to in part two,
to think about the particular light regime of fire based societies.

Speaker 2 (29:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
Yeah, this is something I was thinking a lot about recently.
When I visited Wales with my family. We went to
Saint Fagan's National Museum of History, which has a lot
of these historic Welsh buildings that have been moved to
this area where you can check them out, you can
walk inside them, and in many of these buildings they
had a fireplace going and that was often like the

(29:40):
main form of illumination and there may or may not
even be any windows, and it's such an insight into
times when you would be inhabiting an indoor environment like that.
You know, we were totally spoiled for indoor illumination. These days,
you can have your house generally as bright as you
want it, like astoundingly bright. But it's an interesting experience

(30:04):
to sort of step back in time and appreciate like
the challenges and not to say that they were restricted
only to the hearth fire. There are other you know,
tricks you could could you could utilize to up your elimination,
but you were limited. Uh and yeah, it's it was
a different world.

Speaker 3 (30:21):
And specifically, one of the things I want to come
back to in part two is ways that that limitation
could actually be create a kind of freedom or open
opportunities for other things that that are not as a
parent if you're just in a daylight type of light
or in a very bright electrical lighting scenario.

Speaker 1 (30:40):
Yeah. Yeah, in addition to like the obvious, like it's dark,
maybe we should go to sleep. Yeah, it's sometimes a
kind of a revelation to modern humans. It's like it
is nighttime, I could sleep, I could turn all of
this off, and we often don't do that. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:59):
I was about to be like, stop staring at your
phone right before bed, which I do.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
Yeah, it's really hard to shake. It's our little heart
we bring to bed with us, our little fireplace.

Speaker 3 (31:09):
Yeah, all right, well, so from here for the rest
of today's episode, I wanted to talk briefly about how
fireplaces are normally constructed, how they normally work in the
modern sense, and then Rob, I know you had some
stuff you wanted to get into about fireplaces as kind
of magical portals. But okay. So one of the things

(31:29):
is that obviously, once humans started to build houses, to
build enclosures to live inside, it can be easy to
see why you would want to have the heat and
light benefits of a fire inside the protection of the
dwelling and not just outside. But this actually is not
as easy as it sounds. You're presented with several concerns.
One is, how do you keep the fire from burning

(31:50):
down the house. To do so, you would need to
build the fireplace kind of away from any flammable walls
or furniture, or if it is touching walls, you would
need a fireplace system built into non flammable infrastructure made
out of something like stone, brick, clay, or metal. Other
big thing this is huge, how do you keep the

(32:11):
fire from filling your house? Up with smoke. You need
to have some kind of channel through which smoke and
hot gases can escape the building. Modern fireplaces are equipped
with dedicated flues and chimneys, as we'll talk about in
a second. But as we see, many early indoor fireplaces
had more had cruder ventilation systems, often consisting of simply

(32:33):
a hole in the roof directly above the fire. And
this would work to a degree, but it also meant that, yeah,
for like thousands of years, a lot of buildings that
housed indoor fires were just going to be pretty smoky inside.

Speaker 1 (32:46):
I definitely got a taste of some of that at St. Fagan's. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:50):
Now, basic modern fireplace and chimney design goes roughly like this.
Usually you've got the fire box. This is where the
fire goes, built on top of what's called a hearth.
This is the more specialized use of the word hearth.
This is the base of the fireplace that is made
out of some kind of fireproof material, often bricks or stones.

(33:13):
And this material, of course is meant to absorb heat
from the fire and then heat the room that it's
in by radiating that heat back out into the air. Now,
above the firebox You often have like a decorative shelf
called a mantle, but that's not really part of the
mechanics of the fireplace. That's just a common decorative feature.
The channel above the firebox leading to the outside is

(33:36):
what's called the flu, and then the flu is surrounded
by the structure that we call the chimney. A lot
of times the flu is slightly offset from the firebox,
so it's not just a pipe straight up. Instead, it'll
be kind of set off to the side or behind,
and it will be the FLU will be positioned directly
above something that is called the smoke shelf, where soot

(33:57):
or anything that happens to penetrate the flu opening on
top of the roof, anything comes in from outdoors can
fall without landing directly on the fire. Instead, it falls
onto this shelf. Often also there is a damper which
allows you to close off the flu when there's no
fire burning to stop cold air from coming down in
the chimney. Very important to remember to open the damper

(34:20):
before lighting a new fire.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
This is especially true. Yeah, if you're staying in a
cabin or something it's not your home, maybe back at
your own house, you're not used to using a fireplace.
It is an absolutely necessary step.

Speaker 3 (34:32):
Now, we all know that a fire needs fuel and
heat to burn, but it's also important to remember that
it needs oxygen. So airflow is important in determining how
a fire burns and also in determining what effect a
fire has on the house and its occupants. The majority
of the interior heat provided by a fireplace is radiant heat.

(34:53):
It's the infrared radiation coming off of the fire itself
and then also coming off of the heated parts of
the hearth or whatever is enclosing the fire, so coming
off of the heated bricks or stones, or the metal.
If it's more of a stove design, I'll talk about
that in a second. But there is an irony to
this beloved fixture of the fireplace. Way back in the

(35:18):
eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin wrote about how inefficient fireplaces were
actually were at heating indoor spaces, just huge amounts of
wasted energy. He noted that the majority of the convective
heat that they produce just rushes straight up the flu
and is lost to the outside air. And this is
often true, though it can vary depending on particulars of

(35:40):
the fireplace design. In fact, here's a weird thing. A
lot of people might not know. A fire in the
fireplace can actually make your house colder overall. So this
again depends on particulars, depends on the design of the
fireplace and the chimney, particularly how the vinylation system is configured.

(36:01):
But in a lot of cases, you build a fire
in the fireplace and it will increase the temperature in
the area directly around the fire, you know, mostly again
by way of radiant heat coming off the fire and
the heated stone or brick or metal of the hearth.
But meanwhile that fire is sucking in air from the
inside of your house, relatively warm air, probably if it's

(36:23):
winter time and you have the heat going, or just
you know, there's warm stuff happening inside the house and
so it's warmer than the air outside. So this air
from the rest of the house is being sucked into
the fireplace to feed the fire, and then the convection
of the hot gas plume rising up through the flu
is driving it outside as it gets superheated. As hot

(36:46):
gas and smoke rushes up the chimney, a vacuum is
created and more air continues to flow in from the
inside of your house to the fireplace system, and thus
a vacuum is created in the rest of the house,
and then cold air is in from outside through whatever
cracks your house has, cracks in the doors and windows
and so forth. So plenty of tests have shown that

(37:08):
an inefficient fireplace may feel warm to the room right
there in front of the blaze, but actually freezes out
the rest of the house. They even did an episode
of MythBusters where they featured this one time. I haven't
seen this, but I read about it, and I read
that in their particular test rooms farther away in the
house got a couple of degrees celsius colder.

Speaker 1 (37:29):
This is fascinating, and it makes me think back on
times I've been in houses where there is a fireplace,
and I'll, I mean, I will often find myself in
this situation where it's like I'm somewhere else in the house,
start feeling kind of chilly. Then I have to go
like right next to the fireplace to warm up, and
this pattern kind of continues. Yeah, and now I'm realizing
it could be in part due to the presence of

(37:49):
the fireplace to begin with, this inequality of temperature.

Speaker 3 (37:54):
Now, there are ways to improve the heating efficiency of
a wood fire a one is to replace it with
a wood is to replace your open fireplace with a
wood stove. So this would be a fireplace completely enclosed
in a metal box, which uses air more efficiently. It
sucks less cold air into your house, and also it
radiates heat into the house more efficiently, like the metal

(38:17):
can radiate in all directions. You might notice a traditional
stone or brick fireplace is usually built into a wall,
whereas a wood stove is more often closer to the
middle of the room and can radiate in all directions.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
Yeah, my late father in law was really into like
passive solar and design and houses and you know, not
quite like living off the grid kind of stuff, but
like all the things you could do with a house
to sort of like limit the need for electricity and
so forth, and like that was a Keith aspect of
his home design was having that wood stove. And yeah,

(38:51):
it's not stuck in the wall, it's like out there
basically in the center of the house.

Speaker 3 (38:55):
And we might talk more about this in part too.
But there are also designs that improve the heating efficiency
because they don't draw air from the interior of the house. Instead,
they've got like an external intake vent of some kind
feeding a fire that heats a structure made of again
a fireproof material like brickstone or metal or tile, and
then that radiates heat into the building, but the airflow

(39:19):
system just doesn't really connect to the inside of the house.
That also is a way of improving the heating efficiency.
Though there's an interesting sort of a converse implication here
which I discovered. Shout out one of my sources on
fireplaces and how they generally work here was how stuff
Works article our old employer. This one was by John Kelly,
so a nice job, John, But basically the idea here

(39:43):
is that if you notice you're building a fire and
it's like having a hard time burning and the damper
is open, and yet there's still a lot of smoke
coming into the house, a problem could be that the
house is too well sealed, like the doors and the
windows are too well sealed, and the fire is not
able to create this efficient river of air from the
outside into the house into the fireplace, up the flu

(40:06):
and then back outside. So instead it's pulling some air
down the flu which is causing a counter draft and
sending smoke into the room. So if you are having
this problem, one thing to try is like opening a window,
though of course that's going to let a bunch of
cold air in, so that may just be the price.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
Wow, I had never thought about that, huh.

Speaker 3 (40:26):
But anyway, I'm just thinking about the implications of a
fireplace often making the rest of the house colder, even
while it makes one or two rooms much warmer. And
this made me think about an unintended secondary effect of
wood fire heating being the tendency to cause people to gather.

Speaker 1 (40:47):
Yeah, this is a great point. Yeah, drawing people to
the hearth, to the fire, drawing them together, and thus
and thus becoming like a center of the family of
social interaction, storytelling and so forth.

Speaker 3 (41:03):
Yeah, there's like a sort of unstated little punishment for
being off by yourself. It's just gonna make your room colder.

Speaker 1 (41:10):
Yeah, now you know it is. It is Christmas time,
and so a lot of folks are engaging in different
fireplace related traditions, the hanging of stockings and so forth.

(41:35):
And what do you traditionally hang your stockings? Why you
hang them by the hearth. You hang them above the fireplace.
And of course we have tales of Santa Claus, or
perhaps they masquerading grinch entering your home by crawling down
your chimney and climbing in through the fireplace. This is
this is one of those I think examples of the

(41:55):
fireplace as a portal, fireplace as a as a gate
through which something may travel that it's almost too close
to us. You know, we grow up with this tradition,
we're told it from an early age. We're familiar with
this story before. We're familiar with many of the foundation
stories of our own religions, you know, and important cultural

(42:18):
other important cultural tales, arguably more important cultural tales. We
have this story of a strange old man who climbs
through the fireplace, again, almost too close for us to
even think about it. We'll come back to that in
a second. But another way, of course, that and this
is one that may resonate more with fireplace owners, people
who actually have hearts in their home, is the reality that, okay,

(42:41):
as a literal aperture to the outside of your home,
it is possible for animals to climb down that chimney
and potentially enter your home. They may be prevented full
access to the home by bats, raccoons, mice various squirrels
are some of the examples of potential chimney splunkers. I

(43:03):
know I've encountered bats in this manner before at a
friend's house, where like a bat or two would come
into the chimney, get trapped in the house, and then
you would find them, often in the sink trying to
get water. WHOA, yeah, I came to this house like
some it was, you know, it's like a vacation home
or something, so nobody had been in it for a
little bit, and I saw something in the sink and

(43:23):
I'm like, oh, someone left a tea bag and I
almost grabbed it throw it away, and then I, oh,
that's a bat. And then I had to call my
friend and be like, what's your bat protocol? The bat
was fine, thiss.

Speaker 3 (43:39):
Never even occurred to me. I cannot relate. That's but
that's incredible.

Speaker 1 (43:43):
Now. This idea, though, of a chimney is a portal
through which other worldly powers may traverse, such as Santa Claus.
This is a pretty deeply seated concept, certainly in European traditions,
but you can also see examples of similar ideas from
pretty far flung traditions. Seemingly to connect with the various

(44:04):
supernatural concepts you might encounter about the home, about fire, technology,
about cooking, and just the nature of the flame itself.
For instance, Carol Rose, in her Encyclopedia of Giants, Monsters,
and Dragons that I frequently cite, mentions a tradition of
the clean Get peoples of Northwestern United States the tell

(44:26):
of Heya Kannako, the old woman underneath us, an enormous
protective deity of the earth who concentrates on supporting the world,
almost in a similar sense to Atlas, you know, holding
up the earth. But when her hunger gets the better
off her, her concentration falters and earthquakes ensue. And so

(44:50):
humans occasionally throw bits of fat into their hearths, and
the Carol Rose describes it in order to help or
overcome her hunger and to concentrate on keeping the earth imbalance.
So you know, it's not something crawling through the fire
through the hearth, but it's this idea of the hearth

(45:12):
is kind of this connection in almost a physical connection
to some sort of supernatural force.

Speaker 3 (45:20):
Yeah. I think the general use of fire for burnt
offering or sacrifice indicates a way of thinking of the
fire as a kind of interface point between our world
and the other world, that you can burn something to
kind of send it through a portal to the gods.

Speaker 1 (45:37):
Yeah, and what I like about this one, though, is
the idea that it's not a special fire created for
a special ritual purpose. It's more like the everyday fire.
But even the everyday fire has the potential to be
this gateway. And you know, again, it makes sense when
you think about all the convergence of activities and energies
at the hearth, the warmth, the illumination, food preparation, social gathering.

(46:02):
You know, perhaps due to the fact that it's in
a home situation that the rest of the home is cold,
and drawing people together to tell stories, tell jokes, share
their experiences. And on top of that, it is an
obvious aperture to the outside world, which certainly brings about
the possibility of various natural world creatures gaining access to

(46:24):
your abode. But let us also remember that we're also
talking about a gateway through which air can pass and
does pass. And as most of human history is pre
germ theory, I think you can see where this is going.
The idea that this is also an aperture through which
bad air could travel, or something in the air, something
that is not as constricted as physical as physical beings

(46:50):
are constricted. That they could pass through that small hole.
They could essentially, you know, pass through the keyhole and
that's all the space they need. Interesting, it reminds me
actually of a tradition we talked about an idea of
the Dine or Navajo people. This came up in a
couple of episodes, I think in Our Dust episodes, actually,

(47:10):
the idea that you might have an adante, a practitioner
of secret evil magic, who might introduce a magical poison
or illness into a home through its smoke hole. So
that definitely came to mind here, the smoke hole in
a traditional home, this could be an aperture that could

(47:30):
be exploited by an evil doer, and in European traditions,
spilling over into early American colonial traditions, this concept carried
a great deal of weight, something that previous guest on
Stuff to Blow your Mind Brian Hoggard discusses in his
excellent twenty nineteen book Magical House Protection The Archaeology of

(47:51):
counter Witchcraft. I know some of you probably listened to
that episode. It's a great one if you want to
go back and listen to an interview with the author.
But I'm going to discuss some of the ideas that
he brought up in that book here as it relates
to this topic. So in the book, Hoggard discusses the
various counter witchcraft rights and rituals that Europeans use, dating

(48:12):
back at least to the Middle Ages, functioning alongside and generally,
I guess in spite of protections offered by the Christian
faith and Christian tradition. This is coming from the show before.
You know, you have the various church approved methods that
you might take against supernatural evil, but are you going

(48:35):
to limit yourself to just those or are you going
to also set other traps and wards in place? But
in this case, we're talking about supernatural superstitious folk protections
that were clearly deemed absolutely necessary by many to combat
evil in a demon haunted world. Hoggard stresses that the

(48:57):
archaeological evidence suggests that unseen supernaw natural threats, which just
a standard part of everyday existence, supernatural evil was everywhere
and you had to bust out all the tricks in
order to if not completely protect yourself, then at least
been the odds even slightly in your favor, and is
explored in the book. These efforts often took the form

(49:17):
of a ritual object or objects hidden in the home.
He writes the most popular locations to conceal objects within
buildings are usually at portals such as the hearth, the threshold,
and also voids or dead spaces. This suggests that people
believed it was possible for dark forces to travel through

(49:38):
the landscape and attack them in their homes. Whether these
forces were emanations from a witch in the form of
a spell, a witch is familiar pestering their property, an
actual witch flying in spirit, or a combination of all
of those is difficult to tell. Additional sources of danger
could be ghosts, fairies, and demons. People went to great
lengths to ensure their homes and property were protected, highlighting

(50:00):
the fact that these beliefs and fears were visceral and
as far as they were concerned, literally terrifying.

Speaker 3 (50:07):
Interesting yet again, the way that some physical intuitions apply
to these apparently magical substances, like the spell of a
witch or a which is familiar, which you might well
assume could just you know, pass magically through any wall
or whatever. It seems people were especially concerned about voids
and portals, like the physical gaps that a physical being

(50:29):
would need to travel through.

Speaker 1 (50:31):
I mean, I imagine a lot of you have had
this experience. I mean, to be clear, some of you
may have the experience of finding some of these secreted
and hidden items, and if so, do write in. We
would love to hear from you. But I find it
like a little strange when I encounter a void in
my house, when you realize, like, here is a space
within my home where there is nothing, you know, and

(50:53):
that's that I don't know. It shouldn't feel creepy, but
it does.

Speaker 3 (50:57):
What's under the stairs nothing, there's nothing there.

Speaker 1 (51:12):
Now, if you're not familiar with the details that HACKERD
gets into and the details that came up in that
interview I conducted a while back, you might be wondering, well,
what sort of ritual objects are we talking about hidden
away in homes and voids and so forth, potentially near
the hearth to afford protection against these many evils. Well,
there are various examples, but some of the main ones

(51:35):
are as follows. First of all, there's just protective marks.
And I feel like this is fairly self explanatory. You know,
some sort of a symbol or a sigil that has
protective properties and that may be hidden away somewhere in
a home. This next one, though, this one was the
one that I found surprising at the time I was
not familiar with prior to reading this book, and that

(51:58):
is shoes. And I think this is especially interesting because
from our modern perspective, we often forget just what a
shoe is. We can take it for granted, we can have,
you know, hundreds of them, and we may love shoes
to death without like, without really thinking about this vital
aspect of what they are. Yeah. Yes, we put them
on our feet to walk about in and you know,
not step on nails and rocks and so forth, keep

(52:20):
our feet warm, make our feet look you know, snazzy
and cool. But they are also flesh like sheaths, sometimes
made from animal products, that are sized, perhaps individually sized
for the shape of our feet or if nothing else.
Over time, they take on the shape of our feet.
They take on the odor of our feet. These are

(52:41):
two details, especially the odor that is often lost on us,
perhaps not lost on our dogs and cats. They know
these shoes smell like us and are like potent familiar
items of us. You know, our cat will lay on
shoes a lot, and I've had some commentary on this

(53:01):
kind of behavior in cats and dogs, where they will
be drawn to the shoes because they remind them of
the owners of said shoes. And all. This would seem
to be part of the superstitious calculus for these traditions.
So a shoe may wear out beyond repair in the
case of a child's shoes and shoes that they may
outgrow them, but they are still then objects that have

(53:23):
to a large extent become a part of us. You know,
they are shaped after us, they smell of us, and
they're therefore dangerous items to discard. In much the same
way that nail clippings and hair were often seen as such,
like they were a part of you. They still are
a part of you, and that is dangerous material to
just leave out in the world where you know an

(53:46):
evil doer or an evil spirit may come across it
and by doing so gain power over you.

Speaker 3 (53:52):
This type of folk belief is sometimes referred to as
the law of contagion, that like things that were once
united or in contact with one another. If they become separated,
you may need to do some kind of cleansing or exorcism,
or some kind of ritual acknowledgment of the severing there
or destruction of the thing as it is separated from you,

(54:13):
or else it can be used to have power over
you by way of the associative magical connection.

Speaker 1 (54:19):
Yeah yeah, or in this case, you find another use
for them. And so according to Hoggard, shoes and other
objects we're often deposited on ledges, within the chimney breast
or behind the fireback, and he stresses that quote. Shoes
are perhaps the most commonly encountered apotropaic objects and often
had an association with the hearth.

Speaker 3 (54:38):
Oh interesting, so the same object that could become your
vulnerability if discarded and found by a witch, could be
your protective amulet if you keep it, if you keep
it in the home, right.

Speaker 1 (54:49):
And I'll come back to why this may be in
just a second, but before we do, I want to
talk briefly about witch bottles, which are I think the
more exciting and exotic sounding version of abotropic objects hidden
in a home, often in the area of the hearth. Now,
there's some variety to what these will consist of but

(55:10):
you know, they have been found, they've been analyzed, they're
still being found. That's one of the great things that
Hagard discusses is that you have so many different waves
of renovation that take place with some of these old
homes in Europe, in Britain, in the UK, and also
in parts of the United States and Canada as well,
where people will suddenly discover a pair of ancient shoes

(55:34):
or a strange bottle. And he also discusses how there
are cases where people have suddenly sort of given into
some of the superstition of it and they've had to
put sad item back. You know, it's like it's kind
of like the reverse of finding a void. You find
a purposeful item that you don't fully understand. You're not

(55:54):
on the same mental wavelength with it, but you've come
to believe, well, I should put it back. I don't
know my way around all of this enough to say
it doesn't belong there.

Speaker 3 (56:03):
I can sympathize with that, and this may just say
something about my you know, personality or kind of tendencies,
the character tendencies. But while I would never take active
steps to do it to like you know, put shoes
in a wall thinking it would protect my house or something.
I would feel weird about taking something out. Yeah, yeah,

(56:25):
it seems like, well, feels like I shouldn't do that.

Speaker 1 (56:28):
Yeah, that may be a load bearing shoe.

Speaker 3 (56:31):
Just leave it alone.

Speaker 1 (56:33):
So with witch bottles, again there's some variation as to
what they may hold, but there are various written instructions
from historical records that talk about what goes into a
witch bottle, and one that Hoggard shares This is from
seventeen oh one and he includes it in his book,
and basically the directions are to take a pint of

(56:54):
your own urine, heat it to near scalding temperatures, pour
it into a jug, and then add white salt and
three new nails with the points down. Then you bind
the jug with clay and leather and you heat it
over embers for nine to ten days.

Speaker 3 (57:10):
It's gotta work because look at all the steps.

Speaker 1 (57:13):
Yeah, and I think sometimes there are more steps than
may be a simplified version, but it's the basics are
in play here. The urine, the pointy object. Sometimes they're
pins or needles. Sometimes it's like a lot of like
rusty nails, pins or needles and so forth. So in
the case of the shoes and the witch bottle, here
the basic idea would seem to be this. You have

(57:33):
an unseen evil force, be it a demon, a fairy,
a ghost, or some curse of a witch, and it
is seeking you. It has entered your home, perhaps through
a door, perhaps through a window, perhaps down the chimney
and through the fireplace. It's seeking you out. But what
does an encounter. Instead, it encounters your smell, and encounters

(57:58):
the shoe that was so much a part of your
body and now can be mistaken for your body, and
it goes after that. Instead, it serves as a decoy.
And in the case of the witch bottle, it's even
more exciting. So it smells that deep uriny stench that
is associated with you. But it's found the bottle first.
And so what does this evil thing do, this spirit,

(58:20):
this dark seeker in the night. It climbs inside that bottle.
But uh oh, Now it is either trapped in the
bottle or it is impaled upon all of those sharp
pointy bits inside the bottle and therefore injured or perhaps
killed by this witch bottle, this trap that has been
set for it.

Speaker 3 (58:41):
That's ingenious. I didn't know it was going there with
the nails, but that makes sense. I was wondering if
the nails had some kind of you know, they might
be iron nails unless the iron significance as like a
protective magic against the fairy folk and so forth.

Speaker 1 (58:54):
Yeah, and there may be part of that to it
as well, you know, and certainly protective magic like this,
you know, they may sort of like drag various ideas
with them across time. So I would not discount the
importance of the iron at all. But this is all
very interesting to think about in comparison to various Christmas traditions,

(59:16):
like I instantly think about wooden clogs left out for
Saint Nicholas or Santa though I've also read that prior
to the sixteenth century, at least in some European countries,
the clogs were left in the church rather than in
the home. I'm not as well versed in the history
of those traditions, but at any rate, you do have
examples where shoes are left out so that some entity

(59:40):
may deposit gifts inside them, and those shoes may be placed,
I think often near doors or windows, so there still
is that sense of put them near the aperture, put
them near the portals. And where do we hang our
stockings with care? We of course hang them again by
the fireplace, by the hearth. Yeah, almost as if we're

(01:00:01):
trying to throw Santa Claus off the scent. You know,
there is no need, strange one, to bring the gifts
directly to the children. Here is their sense, smell their feet.
Here is the essence you seek. Leave the gifts here,
leave the children alone in their room.

Speaker 3 (01:00:17):
Or the coal, I guess if applicable.

Speaker 1 (01:00:20):
Yes, there is no need to put the coal inside
the children, leave it in the socks. And thus he
is outsmarted, and he leaves the children alone for another year?

Speaker 3 (01:00:29):
What resonance this idea is now bounding about inside me?

Speaker 1 (01:00:35):
One more note from Brian Haggard. I was looking through
the book to see I couldn't remember if he had
mentioned anything Christmasy in particular, And he does mention a
rhyme that was associated with ritual burn marks from tapers
in homes. So, like I say, there were various There
are various marks and signs inside some of these old

(01:00:56):
homes that are interpreted as being associated with various protective
magical activities. And rituals, and one of them I think
could be easy to miss. It's just like burn marks
in a house. I included a picture from his book
here for you to look at, Joe, Like, if you
didn't know what you're looking at, you might just think
these were caused by some other you know, I don't know,

(01:01:17):
something that occurred during construction or something like that. But
an interpretation here is that these were ritual burn marks.
And he includes this is a translation, but it is
a translation of a German rhyme that apparently went along
with some holiday traditions of protecting the home. So I'm

(01:01:38):
going to read it here again. This is from Brian
Huggrid's book and it goes as follows, and round about
the house they go with torch or taper, clear that
neither bread nor meat do want know which with dreadful
charm have power to hurt their children or do the
cattle harm. So I'm not saying burn beams in your

(01:01:58):
house with fire as part of your holiday traditions. But yeah,
it's interesting to think about all of this. And again,
this is another one that involves the power of fire,
the power of the flame to protect us against unseen things.
In the night. By the way, I know Brian would
want me to pass this along to you. If you

(01:02:21):
do encounter something like this in your house strange shoes,
a strange item, a witch bottle and so forth, it
is very helpful to like reach out to people who
will document it all. And a lot of people do
reach out to Brian Hoggard themselves. He's on Instagram as
folk Magic Man. He also has a website, so just

(01:02:43):
look him up. It's Brian Hoggart h O G A
r D. And he can point you in the right
direction if if you encounter something like this in your home,
or email us and I'll forward it to him. Happy
to do that.

Speaker 3 (01:02:57):
All right, Well, I think we're out of time for today.
We've got more to say and to explore about the
fireplace and the hearth, so join us again on Thursday.

Speaker 1 (01:03:05):
That's right. In the meantime, we'll remind you that this
stuff to blow your mind is primarily as signed some
culture podcasts with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On
Wednesdays we do a short form episode and on Fridays
we set aside most series concerns to just talk about
a weird film on Weird House Cinema. If you're on Instagram,
follow us at stbym podcast, and if you are on
Letterboxed follow us at Weird House. That's where you can

(01:03:27):
keep up with movies that we're covering on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (01:03:30):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:03:52):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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