The Scarecrow, Part 1

The scarecrow watches over the field, but does it watch us back? Does it keep the birds away, or does it deter darker fiends from these haunted lands? Join Robert and Joe for a Halloween-season look at the science, culture and folklore of scarecrows.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:17):
And I am Joe McCormick. And today is not the
first day of October, but October does begin later the
week this episode airs. So we're kicking things off today.
Long-time listeners know our tradition. Every year, for the whole
month of October, we throw the podcast into uncanny overdrive.
So our core episodes all this next month are going

(00:40):
to be focused on eerie, haunted, or enchanted subjects. And
our Weird House Cinema selections are going to be all
horror films. We do horror sometimes anyway through the rest
of the year, but we're going full horror all month.
And today... Even though we are still in the last
days of September, we're going to be getting an early
start on the spirit of the season because today we're

(01:04):
going to begin a series of episodes about the scarecrow.
I've been really excited to do this one this year.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Yeah, yeah. This has been on the list for a
few years, I believe. And it's a great topic because
obviously there's it's just a ubiquitous part of Halloween and
just general autumn decoration. you know, celebrating fall harvest, even
as it hints at darker matters, you know, inanimate beings
brought to life through dark magic, or maybe just the

(01:34):
inner workings of the human mind. You know, you see
a scarecrow, and just by virtue of its design, the
way that it's made to mimic a human body, it
kind of works on us, too. And so our imagination
tends to run away with it. And you'll find no
shortage of creepy scarecrows, obviously, from Just go to your
local haunted attraction, and I'm sure one will chase you around.

(01:57):
There are a plethora of horror films that have come
out over the decades as well. I don't think we're
covering any of these for Weird House Cinema, but we'll
probably do a short breakdown of some of these and
some of their themes as we go. And then there
are lots of things that are sort of at least
Scarecrow adjacent, like the residents of Pottsfield in the animated
series Over the Garden Wall. Maybe not quite Scarecrows, but

(02:19):
there's a lot of Scarecrow in their DNA. And as
a topic for our show, Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Scarecrows allow us to explore a host of ideas and
all of our favorite buckets of content. You know, we
get to get into biology. We're going to get into
a little of that in this episode, more in later episodes,
and all manner of cultural, historic, folkloric treatments. I mean,

(02:42):
just think of the scarecrow as a sort of meta symbol,
you know, life and death, crucifixion and other modes of
public execution or display. uncanny watchers, apotropaic magic, and much more. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:57):
Have you ever had this Halloween experience where you go
up to somebody's house on Halloween for trick-or-treating, and they
have a display, maybe hay bales set out, and there's
a scarecrow laying across the hay bales, and as you
walk up, suddenly it moves, and it was actually a
human in disguise?

Speaker 2 (03:15):
This is a favorite tactic at your better professional haunted attractions.
The one I go to in the Atlanta area every
year is Netherworld. And a big fan of that place.
And you see a lot of this. It's like, be
really still. And ideally, trick the curious person into coming closer,

(03:36):
checking out the details. And then there's a sudden movement.
And they don't even have to make contact with you.
That movement enough is enough to just completely throw you off.

Speaker 3 (03:46):
I've never been to Netherworld, but I one time went
to a big haunted attraction in North Carolina where they
had some horror scarecrows that would attack your group as
it was going through a cornfield part of the attraction.
And the really cool thing I remember they did was

(04:06):
in that section, they planted some people among the group
that was walking through that were actually performers but were
pretending to be part of the group, and they would
get dragged out of the group and into the corn
by the scarecrows.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
I thought that was cool. Yeah, I don't think I've
seen that before. But yeah, create that sense of unease
by using plants, if you will.

Speaker 3 (04:28):
Anyway, to set the mood both for the Scarecrow series
and for the whole month, I thought it might be
good to start off retelling a classic tale of scarecrows
and witchcraft. This story is called Feathertop by the author
Nathaniel Hawthorne, American author, who wrote The Scarlet Letter, among

(04:49):
other things, Young Goodman Brown, those sorts of things. This
story was published in the year 1852. It's not strictly
a horror story. I think most of the things Hawthorne
wrote wouldn't quite make that cut. He wasn't Edgar Allan Poe.
But it's close enough, and it's got a lot of
great witchy magic and stuff like that. So are you game, Rob?

Speaker 2 (05:09):
I'm game, yeah. And I would say if you have
witches in it, you're at least horror adjacent. I mean,
that's close enough.

Speaker 3 (05:16):
Well, parts of the story are pretty spooky, but it's
also got a strong sense of the ironic. It's like
a humorous story about the foibles of human character. But anyway, okay,
so here we'll tell it. So it goes, somewhere in
New England, there is an old witch of the woods
named Mother Rigby, and she lives alone on her farm.

(05:39):
And one morning, she wakes up early and she calls
on her invisible demonic servant, a familiar named Dickon, to
come light her pipe for her. And then she sets
to the task of making a scarecrow to hang in
her garden, because it says it is May, and the
blackbirds have already showed up to peck at her corn.

(06:00):
Once funny uh note i'll make here in several of
the things i've been reading about scarecrows uh to prepare
for this series they they talk about you know we
think of scarecrows associated with the harvest season because of
halloween and october uh but a lot of these stories
mention using scarecrows in the spring and i wonder if
that's because like you're scattering seed then maybe and like

(06:22):
you don't want the birds to come peck the seed
before you.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
Uh yeah i don't know and And then, of course,
you have different harvests throughout the year, whether it's the big,
you know, there's the autumn harvest. But it's like if
you're growing tomatoes, you know, then if you're going to
try and engage in any kind of like bird or
rodent scaring, then you're going to have to do that
during the height of summer.

Speaker 3 (06:44):
I guess so. To be fair, I don't know that
much about farming. So maybe, are you scattering seeds in May?
Maybe not. Do you scatter them earlier than that? I guess,
like you said, there are stages.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
Throughout the year. All I know from my own limited
experience with backdoor gardening, which sometimes has catastrophic results, I
just know that there are different times to plant different
things and there are different times to harvest different things.
And if you're really hardcore about it, there's, I think,
pretty much, at least in our neck of the woods,
there's something you could be planting and or growing most

(07:16):
of the year. But we're not that hardcore. Throughout this series,
actual gardeners and farmers, please feel free to chime in
with your own field notes. Totally.

Speaker 3 (07:28):
The narrator tells how Mother Rigby, the witch, considers making
a truly hideous and terrifying scarecrow and being one of
the most cunning witches in the country. She could have
made something straight out of hell if she set her
mind to it. It makes that clear. Like she has
it in her power to make the most frightening scarecrow

(07:50):
on earth, but she's in a good mood this morning
and she's feeling dulcified by her pipe tobacco. So she
decides instead to make a scarecrow in the form of
a splendid, charming gentleman. That's what the narrator says, but
then I love how some of the details will kind
of contradict that. So here I'm just going to read
directly from Hawthorne's description. perhaps it may be as well

(08:14):
to enumerate the chief of the articles that went to
the composition of this figure. The most important item of all, probably,
although it made so little show, was a certain broomstick
on which Mother Rigby had taken many an airy gallop
at midnight, and which now served the scarecrow by way
of a spinal column, or, as the unlearned phrase it,

(08:34):
a backbone. One of its arms was a disabled flail,
which used to be wielded by Goodman Rigby before his
spouse worried him out of this troublesome world. The other,
if I mistake not, was composed of the pudding stick
and a broken rung of a chair tied loosely together

(08:55):
at the elbow. As for its legs, the right was
a hoe handle and the left an undistinguished and miscellaneous
stick from the woodpile. Its lungs, stomach, and other affairs
of that kind were nothing better than a meal bag
stuffed with straw. Thus we have made out the skeleton
and entire corporosity of the scarecrow, with the exception of

(09:16):
its head, and this was admirably supplied by a somewhat
withered and shriveled pumpkin, in which Mother Rigby cut two
holes for the eyes and a slit for the mouth,
leaving a bluish-colored knob in the middle to pass for
a nose. It was really quite a respectable face. I've
seen worse ones on human shoulders at any rate, said

(09:38):
Mother Rigby, and many a fine gentleman has a pumpkin
head as well as my scarecrow. So then she goes,
I thought that was great. And then she goes on
to dress the scarecrow. She gives it a plum-colored coat
made long ago in London, now tattered and threadbare, which
the narrator says the neighbors, Rigby's neighbors, believe are belongs

(10:01):
to the devil himself so they say the devil comes
stops by mother Rigby's house to slip on this coat
from her wardrobe when he goes to dine with the
local high society and And that's just kind of given
as an aside. But yeah, the idea is the devil
sometimes shows up to go visit the governor here. And
when he does, he's got to get some nice clothes
from Mother Rigby's closet.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
All right. And just leaves it on site.

Speaker 1 (10:23):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (10:25):
And then continuing the description of dressing the scarecrow, quote,
On the left breast was a round hole whence either
a star of nobility had been rent away or else
the hot heart of some former wearer had scorched it
through and through. And then later, to match the coat,
there was a velvet waistcoat of very ample size and

(10:47):
formerly embroidered with foliage that had been as brightly golden
as the maple leaves in October, but which had now
quite vanished out of the substance of the velvet. And
then she adds to this some scarlet breeches, which it
says once belonged to a French aristocrat, and then also
a pair of silk stockings, which she stretches over the

(11:08):
scarecrow's legs, quote, where they showed as unsubstantial as a dream,
with the wooden reality of the two sticks making itself
miserably apparent through the holes. Lastly, she put her dead
husband's wig on the bare scalp of the pumpkin and
surmounted the hole with a dusty three-cornered hat in which
was stuck the longest tail feather of a rooster. So

(11:31):
there you go, feather top. He's got the feather on top.
Once she has finished making this creature, she dies. just
gets to admiring it, and she judges it so handsome
and so fine that she really can't stand to just
leave it hanging in the garden. Quote, To say the truth,
whether it were chance or skill or downright witchcraft, there

(11:53):
was something wonderfully human in this ridiculous shape, bedizened with
its tattered finery, and, as for the countenance, it appeared
to shrivel its yellow surface into a grin, a funny
kind of expression betwixt scorn and merriment. as if it
understood itself to be a jest at mankind. So Mother Rigby,

(12:16):
she's like, I can't leave this thing out in the garden.
I'm going to come up with a different plan. She
decides to bring the scarecrow to life, to actually make
it a man. So she calls on her, which is familiar, Dickon,
to put another coal in her pipe. And then she
stuffs the pipe into the scarecrow's mouth and commands the
scarecrow to puff. Just as a side note in this story,

(12:40):
it keeps mentioning that Mother Rigby likes to have not
just tobacco in her pipe, but actually a coal from
the fireplace in her pipe for flavor. Love to get
some sulfur in.

Speaker 2 (12:52):
There, you know.

Speaker 3 (12:55):
Anyway, so it says that, quote, as soon as the
old dame bade him puff, there came a whiff of
smoke from the scarecrow's mouth. It was the very feeblest
of whiffs, to be sure, but it was followed by
another and another, each more decided than the preceding one.
Puff away, my pet. Puff away, my pretty one, Mother
Rigby kept repeating with her pleasantest smile. It is the

(13:18):
breath of life to ye, and that you may take
my word for. And so we're told that the smoke
of the witch's pipe begins to work its enchantment. The
narrator says that the shriveled yellow face becomes shrouded in
this tenuous haze of vitality. And it's shifting to and fro,
but growing stronger with each whiff of the pipe tobacco

(13:41):
and seeming more and more human. And then she says,
the witch says, why lurkest thou in the corner, lazy one?
Step forth, thou hast the world before thee. And then
the scarecrow tries to walk, but stumbles. Quote, the strong-willed
old Beldam scowled and beckoned. and flung the energy of

(14:01):
her purpose so forcibly at this poor combination of rotten
wood and musty straw and ragged garments that it was
compelled to show itself a man, in spite of the
reality of things. So it stepped into the bar of sunshine.
There it stood, poor devil of a contrivance that it was,
with only the thinnest vesture of human similitude about it,

(14:24):
through which was evident the stiff, rickety, incongruous, faded, tattered,
good-for-nothing patchwork of its substance, ready to sink in a
heap upon the floor, as conscious of its own unworthiness
to be erect. Shall I confess the truth? At its
present point of vivification, the scarecrow reminds me of some
of the lukewarm and abortive characters composed of heterogeneous material's

(14:49):
used for the thousandth time and never worth using with
which romance writers and myself, no, no doubt among the
rest have so over people to the world of fiction.
So he's like a one dimensional character there. Uh, so
mother Rigby then, uh, begins to bully and abuse the
scarecrow kind of yelling at it, commanding it to speak.

(15:12):
And finally, um, out of fear, it does, it speaks though. It, uh, fright, uh,
In a fright explains that it does not know what
to say. And Mother Rigby shouts at it. And what
shalt thou say, Quotha? Say indeed, art thou of the
brotherhood of the empty skull and demandest of me what
thou shalt say? Thou shalt say a thousand things and

(15:35):
saying them a thousand times over, thou shalt still have
said nothing. Be not afraid, I tell thee, when thou
comest into the world, whether I purpose sending thee forthwith,
thou shalt not lack the wherewithal to talk. Talk, Why,
thou shalt babble like a mill stream, if thou wilt.
Thou hast brains enough for that, I trow. So I

(15:55):
think the point here is that, like, look, you don't
have to have anything to say to talk. You can
talk without having any thoughts. Everybody does that.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
Yeah, this is already pretty rich because, you know, if
you're thinking about a physical scarecrow or a two-dimensional character
in a book, It doesn't take that much for us
to get invested in the idea, to think of the
scarecrow as real, to think of the two-dimensional character as real.
And then, of course, there's some nice commentary about noblemen

(16:25):
of the day, that sort of thing. Totally.

Speaker 3 (16:28):
So what is Mother Rigby going to do with this now-walking,
now-talking scarecrow that looks like a living man? Well, she
is going to send it to woo the magistrate's daughter,
of course, as you do. So to be impressive among
the high society, he's going to have to be a
rich man. So she gives him a fortune consisting of,

(16:50):
this is what it says, quote, a gold mine in
El Dorado and of 10,000 shares in a broken bubble
and of half a million acres of vineyard at the
North Pole and of a castle in the air and
a chateau in Spain, together with all the rents and
income therefrom accruing. She further made over to him the

(17:10):
cargo of a certain ship laden with salt of Cadiz,
which she herself, by her necromantic arts, had caused to
founder ten years before in the deepest part of mid-ocean.
If the salt were not dissolved and could be brought
to market, it would fetch a pretty penny among the fishermen.
That he might not lack ready money, she gave him

(17:30):
a copper farthing of Birmingham manufacture, being all the coins
she had about her. And likewise, a great deal of brass,
which he applied to his forehead, thus making it yellower
than ever. So the story mentioned several other things that
might make the scarecrow more convincingly human. So what does
it take to be a convincing human? One thing is

(17:53):
that the scarecrow learns how to respond in conversation with
meaningless cliches like, upon my word and indeed. So it's
saying like, oh, he can talk as vapidly as a
real human.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (18:05):
And then the other thing is that it really begins
to enjoy the tobacco smoke. So it sucks on the
pipe with great pleasure. And we're told that when the
tobacco in the bowl burns out, the scarecrow begins to
fade back into a lifeless form of rotten wood. So
the witch has her familiar replenish the tobacco constantly with

(18:27):
great haste so that the scarecrow's life breath is always there,
ready in the pipe, in the smoke of the pipe.
So Mother Rigby gives the gentleman scarecrow the name Feathertop

(18:49):
and sends him out to the house of the local
magistrate to court the magistrate's daughter, a girl named Polly. Now,
on the way, the story dwells on how the townsfolk
perceive Feathertop when he walks down the main street. They
think he's a great nobleman, a man of substance, a
wealthy and sophisticated traveler, someone who knows the protocol of
all the courts of Europe. And he's got a face

(19:11):
so beautiful it flames in the sunlight. Only two members
of the town dissent. There is a dog and a
young child, both of whom react as if the stranger
were frightening and unholy. But, you know, who listens to
a dog and a young child? So meanwhile, the daughter
of the gouty old judge sees this handsome, impressive stranger

(19:33):
coming up the walk to her house. She looks out
the window and sees him. And she is so excited,
she rushes to put on her finest clothes. And then
it says she practices laughing and smiling in a large mirror.
And when Feathertop is admitted inside, he whispers. a secret
word of introduction that Mother Rigby had instructed him to

(19:54):
tell the magistrate. And when the magistrate hears this word
of introduction, I think we're not told what it is.
When the magistrate hears it, he starts to tremble with terror.
But Polly is so smitten that she does not notice
her father's apparent distress. Quote, The old man was nervous, fidgety,
and very pale. Purposing a smile of courtesy, he had

(20:16):
deformed his face with a sort of galvanic grin, which,
when Feathertop's back was turned, he exchanged for a scowl,
at the same time shaking his fist and stamping his
gouty foot, an incivility which brought its retribution along with it.
The truth appears to have been. that Mother Rigby's word
of introduction, whatever it might be, had operated far more

(20:37):
on the rich merchant's fears than on his goodwill. Moreover,
being a man of wonderfully acute observation, he had noticed
that these painted figures on the bowl of Feathertop's pipe
were in motion. Looking more closely, he became convinced that
these figures were a party of little demons, each duly
provided with horns and a tail, and dancing hand in

(21:00):
hand with gestures of diabolical merriment, round the circumference of
the pipe bowl. So if the father can tell that
there is wicked magic afoot, why does he let the
scarecrow in to see his daughter? The implication is that
sometime earlier in his life, this rich man who is

(21:20):
a magistrate, a judge, and a wealthy merchant, and I
think also it says a member of the clergy, so
he's like all the branches, you know, all the power
branches concentrated in this one guy. It says that the father, quote,
had given some pledge or other to the evil principal
and perhaps was now to redeem it by the sacrifice
of his daughter. So the devil has come calling for,

(21:43):
you know, advantages that this guy received earlier on.

Speaker 2 (21:46):
Almost as if, yeah, the devil had said, all right,
I'll give you this bounty, these treasures, these benefits. But
one day a scarecrow will come and court your daughter
and you have to agree to it. That's what I ask.
That's the price.

Speaker 3 (22:02):
So the magistrate leaves the room. He leaves his daughter
in the company of this wooden man disguised by a
witch's glamour. But from the next room, he spies through
a gap in the door. And it says, quote, the
worthy magistrate who had been conversant with all degrees and
qualities of mankind could not but perceive every motion and
gesture of the distinguished feather top came in its proper place.

(22:25):
Nothing had been left rude or native in him. A
well-digested conventionalism had incorporated itself thoroughly with his substance and
transformed him into a work of art. Perhaps it was
this peculiarity that invested him with a species of ghastliness
and awe. It is the effect of anything completely and
consummately artificial in human shape that the person impresses us

(22:50):
as an unreality and as having hardly pith enough to
cast a shadow upon the floor. As regarded Feathertop, all
this resulted in a wild extravagant and fantastical impression as
if his life and being were akin to the smoke
that curled upward from his pipe. Now I loved this
part because I think obviously the point Hawthorne is making

(23:12):
is that there are some people who are so well
mannered and so practiced in their conversation and so well
cultured that they come off as not really human. It
kind of, however, made me think about artificial intelligence, about
this quality you can see where there is a kind
of smoothness and a kind of hollow perfection in writing

(23:37):
generated by artificial intelligence. It's the kind of lack of
human contours in it, of imperfections that might get a
piece of red pen from a writing instructor, but actually...
let you know that this was made by a person,
if that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (23:55):
Yeah, no, that's a good read. On top of just
the sort of the general threshold for us to, at
least on some level, think of, you know, say a
chatbot as being an entity that we're actually conversing with,
that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (24:10):
Yeah, totally. But again, the idea here being that there
are certain types of perfection in humans or human-like objects
that ring as hollow and unpleasant to us. They seem like, actually,
there's something inhuman about this in the way that it's
too perfect. Like uncanny symmetry, that sort of thing. Exactly, yeah. Anyway,

(24:32):
so Polly, the daughter, is easily charmed by Feathertop and
his enchantments. And so as they walk around the house
and talk, and within 15 minutes, Polly has fallen completely
in love with Feathertop. Quote, no matter what Feathertop said,
his words found depth and reverberation in her ear. No
matter what he did, his action was heroic to her eye.

(24:54):
But then comes the turn, the twist of the story.
Polly is admiring all of Feathertop's finery, his gleaming medals
and his fancy clothes. And then, quote, the maiden raised
her eyes and suffered them to linger upon her companion
with a bashful and admiring gaze. Then, as if desirous
of judging what value her own simple comeliness might have

(25:17):
side by side with so much brilliancy, she cast a
glance toward the full-length looking-glass in front of which they
happened to be standing. It was one of the truest
plates in the world, and incapable of flattery. No sooner
did the images therein reflected meet Polly's eye than she shrieked,
shrank from the stranger's side, gazed at him for a

(25:38):
moment in the wildest dismay, and sank insensible upon the floor.
Feathertop likewise had looked towards the mirror, and there beheld
not the glittering mockery of his outside show, but a
picture of the sordid patchwork of his real composition, stripped
of all witchcraft. So the mirror reveals the truth, and

(26:01):
Feathertop sees it as well, and he does not like
what he sees. Quote, The wretched simulacrum, we almost pity
him he threw up his arms with an expression of
despair that went further than any of his previous manifestations
towards vindicating his claims to be reckoned human. For perchance
the only time since this so often empty and deceptive

(26:24):
life of mortals began its course, an illusion had seen
and fully recognized itself. Later that evening, we're told that
Mother Rigby, the witch, is sitting alone in her home,
and then Feathertop bursts in through the front door, returning
home in failure. At first, the witch is furious. She's like,
did they throw you out? I'm going to send 20

(26:45):
demons to torture them. I'm going to make all the girls'
teeth fall out. And Feathertop says, no, it was not them.
I have seen what I am. I am an empty
and unreal thing, and I will exist no more. Quote,
snatching the pipe from his mouth, he flung it with
all his might against the chimney. And at the same

(27:07):
instant sank upon the floor a medley of straw and
tattered garments, with some sticks protruding from the heap, and
a shriveled pumpkin in the midst. The eyeholes were now lusterless,
but the rudely carved gap that just before had been
a mouth still seemed to twist itself into a despairing grin,
and was so far human. Mother Rigby says, My poor, dear,

(27:31):
pretty feather-top, There are thousands upon thousands of coxcombs and
charlatans in the world made up of just such a
jumble of worn out, forgotten and good for nothing trash
as he was. Yet they live in fair repute and
never see themselves for what they are. And why should
my poor puppet be the only one to know himself
and perish for it? So she considers bringing him to

(27:54):
life once again. I'll reanimate this pile of trash. But
then she decides against it. She says she's going to
hang him up in the field and use him to
scare the blackbirds from eating her corn. Basically, unlike being
a real man of society, that is an honest living.
And that's the end of the story.

Speaker 2 (28:13):
Oh, I love it.

Speaker 3 (28:15):
So, yeah, I love that story, too. Again, despite the
witchy themes, it's not really what would usually get called
a horror story. Like some other tales by Hawthorne, it's
probably best thought of as like a moral tale.

Speaker 1 (28:27):
Hmm.

Speaker 3 (28:29):
It's a story that's used to give a lesson or
illustrate something about human character. And in this case, I
think it seems mostly aimed at making two pessimistic points
about human nature. One is that most people are all hat,
no cattle. Like whatever seems impressive about them is an illusion.

(28:51):
People lack substance and character. and they are oblivious to
their own shortcomings. For if they could see themselves reflected
true in the mirror like Feathertop does, they would similarly
break the spell and collapse into a pile of rotten wood.
Probably not literally, but they couldn't bear to see themselves

(29:11):
for how hollow they really are. And then the second point,
I think, is that most people fall for this illusory
appeal in others. It's a little bit like the Emperor's
New Clothes story. You know, in this story, it says
only a child and a dog see through the Scarecrow's
phantom flesh and detect the uncanny within. All the adults

(29:35):
are like, oh, wow, he's so impressive, so cool. This
is the best guy ever. Well, I guess the other
exception is that the magistrate sees through the enchantment, but
the implication in the story is that he doesn't see
through it because like, oh, he's got real detective equipment,
you know, that he's the real deal. It's more like
he's familiar with the work of the devil because he

(29:56):
has dealt with the devil before. So he's like, oh,
I know what this is.

Speaker 2 (29:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:01):
So we can revisit the meaning of scarecrows in storytelling
as we go along. But this is one major idea
that they do connect to in literature and in folklore.
It's something about the difference between appearances and reality, like
the genuine versus the counterfeit. and the ability to discern

(30:24):
that difference. Because in its common form, in its most
common form at least, a scarecrow is a counterfeit human.
A scarecrow is an inanimate figure, usually made in the
shape of a human being, often dressed in human clothes,
placed among fields to keep birds or other animals away

(30:44):
from crops. And so in the rest of the series,
we're going to be talking about what scarecrows are, how
they work or don't work, their history, and how they
end up figuring into folklore and unsettling literature. But there
is one thing, Rob, of your game that I potentially
wanted to discuss here at the top before we move
on to that other stuff. And that's a bit of

(31:06):
a taxonomy of horror scarecrows. Because I think there are
actually a lot of different ways that a scarecrow can
be a monster in a horror story, or if not,
if not being a monster itself can be a frightening
symbol or a frightening image in the story of the uncanny.

Speaker 2 (31:23):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Let's get into it. Okay.

Speaker 3 (31:27):
So one, I think is the type of scarecrow being
we already saw in Feathertop and that is the illusion
or the false man. In this sense, it can be
a scarecrow that is literally brought to life by magic
or made to seem alive as some kind of trick.
But the emphasis in this kind of story is on

(31:48):
the scarecrow's unreality, like the discrepancy between it and the
real human being that it mimics. Another type of creature
I was thinking of is sort of the straw zombie.
It's not always clear how these things work, but they
pop up in some horror movies. Definitely. They work a
lot like standard zombies or undead, except they're often tool

(32:11):
wielding undead. Uh, you know, and we've talked about that difference.
I think this came up in our, um, weird house
cinema episode on burial ground, the difference between zombies that
use tools and those that don't, uh, these are often
like sickle wielding or, you know, gardening, farming equipment, wielding zombies.
And instead of being made out of flesh, they are
feed bags and flannel and straw.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
Okay. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that does remind me of
some of our discussions of burial ground zombies and other
sort of Italian takes on zombies that are very earthy
in their tone. And so we might think of these
animate scarecrows as being less, maybe less a situation of
like an artifice given life through magic by human magic workers.

(32:58):
Instead has at least some partial like environmental earth magic
aspect to it, maybe even tied directly to some sort
of magic in the earth. Totally.

Speaker 3 (33:10):
Yeah. Another way you could think of a horror scarecrow
is as a costume worn by a human killer to
blend in and appear harmless like that scarecrow gag on
Halloween night. And if you think about it, this is
kind of a reverse scarecrow, whereas a real scarecrow outside
of the horror context is a collection of inanimate objects

(33:33):
disguised as life to scare birds. The reverse scarecrow would
be a living person disguised as inanimate objects as disguised
as an effigy to calm humans and put them at ease.
And then a variation on this, I think, sometimes appearing
in these movies or stories would be a human corpse
used or disguised as a scarecrow.

Speaker 2 (33:56):
Right, right. And yeah, and these are two concepts that
I think factor into a number of the horror movies, right?
Where either it's just a costume for a slasher killer,
or you have a situation where, oh, it's just a scarecrow. No,
it's one of the characters that was killed off earlier
in the picture.

Speaker 3 (34:12):
Another thing you could have would be a kind of
idol or cult object. So this would be an effigy
on which frightening forms of religious attention are focused. Uh,
you could imagine something like this in a story like
the wicker man, though. I don't recall a scarecrow appearing
in that movie. Uh, but in this sense, it could

(34:33):
be a kind of embodiment of an agriculture, God, a
Lord of the fields, or it could just be a,
an object used in full core rituals.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
Yeah. he who walks behind the rose sort of a thing.
And it's some of those vibes, if not a direct
incarnation of this, that Over the Garden Wall gets into
it with its pumpkin-based entities. Though I'm not going to
spoil anything about the reveal there, but it's a pretty
great episode.

Speaker 3 (35:00):
I've got to watch that at some point.

Speaker 2 (35:01):
Oh, yeah. Now's the time. It's a great autumn show.
Check it out before you show it to the whole family,
just to be on the safe side. But it's pretty cute.

Speaker 3 (35:12):
And then one last category I'd mentioned would just be
pure uncanny Valley. It it's exploited as a thing that
looks a little too human and makes you wonder, is
that what it, what you think it is or is
it something else?

Speaker 2 (35:25):
Yeah. Yeah. Um, the, the shoddiness of scarecrows is often
very key, you know, I, and I love this in
Hawthorne's descriptions talking about the legs looking particularly bad as
they often do almost as if, um, sometimes, uh, the
creative or scarecrow runs out, partially runs out or completely
runs out of creative or engineering inspiration once they get

(35:50):
to the legs and they're like, ah, just some sticks
will do. Or do we need legs? Will half a
person do? And you see that all the time. There's
an annual festival at the Atlanta Botanical Garden where different
area artists and businesses will create scarecrows. And, you know,
they're not serving a purpose. They're just there as art,

(36:13):
as decoration. And you see, it's always amusing. And my
wife has actually participated in this a number of years.
Not this year, but in previous years. And it is
great to see different approaches to what a scarecrow is.
And also that sort of inherent shoddiness of the scarecrow
works so well with all levels of artistic ability and

(36:35):
different ideas. Because If a scarecrow looks a little bad,
like that's part of what a scarecrow is. If a
scarecrow looks too much like a human, it's no longer
a scarecrow. And that's an interesting way to think, too,
about at least our pop cultural idea of the scarecrow.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
Yeah. You know, it almost makes me think that the.
how pleasant a scarecrow is is inversely proportional to how
realistic as a human it is. Like that, you know,
a very shoddy scarecrow is cute and a really well
put together scarecrow can be a little creepy.

Speaker 2 (37:10):
Yeah. Yeah. Like you want to see the sticks. You
want to see that sort of protruding gut of obvious struts,
straw or hay. You know, it's those sort of things,
you know, corn cob bits in there. You know, it
needs to be, made out of the season and made
out of the world from which it arises. And if
that's missing, uh, yeah, it can be a little bit

(37:31):
too polished. And that's something I've seen with the, the
scarecrows in the garden, the Atlanta botanical, um, gardens before
as well, because yeah, sometimes it'll be a great concept,
perfectly executed, but maybe it's not scarecrowy enough. And it
almost feels out of place in that case.

Speaker 3 (37:46):
Hmm. You know, my brain just made a totally random
connection to a thing that we see in movies on
weird house cinema. Sometimes, um, especially lower budget movies. This
is not explicitly a scarecrow, but similar principle of human
clothes stuffed with padding or straw. That can be a scarecrow,
but that can also be the dummy you throw over

(38:06):
a waterfall or over a cliff for your human falling shot.

Speaker 2 (38:10):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We'll touch on some other examples
of this where the thing that we're talking about is
not really a scarecrow. Sometimes it may be referred to
as a scarecrow, or in some cases it might be

(38:32):
a description in another language that is loosely translated to scarecrow.
But sometimes we're just talking about a straw man, a
straw human, a human clothes stuffed with straw or some
other similar stuffing in order to create a human duplicate,
a human decoy for a variety of purposes. many of
which are going to come down to the root exercise

(38:55):
in any scarecrow exercise, and that is, of course, deception.
Whether that's deception for fun, to fool you into at
least momentarily thinking that this is a real human character
in your horror movie, or in the agricultural sense, try
to scare birds or other pests away by making them

(39:15):
think that a live human agent is present. So where
does this idea come from? So needless to say, this
concept is very deeply seated in us. It's not only
deep seated in the human experience, but really, if you
expand sort of the limits of it, it's also deep
seated in biology itself, because what is a scarecrow but

(39:38):
a form of anthropomorphic mimicry? You know, we are using
our technology and our tool use to mimic ourselves, to
create this false human for some sort of a purpose.
And various organisms have evolved with features or behaviors that

(39:59):
allow them to mimic the forms of other organisms, to attract,
to distract, or otherwise disrupt the activities of other life forms.
So scarecrows are, you could think of scarecrows as something
of a human technological take on all of this. To
protect an altered crop, We create a likeness of ourselves

(40:19):
to stand in for us and to scare away threats
to said crop. And it's pretty much the simplest form
of a robot in that regard, right? Based on the
simplest possible task. Just be there as a physical deterrence.
You don't have to move. There's no programming other than
to not fall down. And maybe, just maybe, this will
fool other animals, non-human animals, into thinking it's the live

(40:43):
presence of a human being.

Speaker 3 (40:44):
Yeah, interesting.

Speaker 2 (40:47):
And, you know, sometimes the other animals are, of course,
human beings as well, in what we might think of
as the Ferris Bueller principle. Those of you who remember
Ferris Bueller's day off, you remember that he's having a
sick day, he's faking being ill, and he has a
number of elaborate procedures that he goes through to pull
this off, you know, faking it to his parents. And

(41:09):
this culminates in the use of a dummy. Now, in
this case, it's not just a physical dummy in the bed.
I seem to recall he also had a, a false
breathing apparatus set up, like somehow to sort of mimic
the rise and fall of breathing.

Speaker 3 (41:23):
So you have a tape of his voice or something?

Speaker 2 (41:27):
Yeah, yeah. There's some audio equipment that's used. So it's
fairly elaborate, but it is based on this very old
idea that involves just like, you know, just create the
basic outline of a human body in a bed and
someone will think that there is an immobile person there.
It doesn't have to move because... We don't move as
much when we are sleeping. And we see this throughout

(41:49):
human history in all sorts of media. I suppose another
key cinematic scene is when, particularly in Peter Jackson's The
Lord of the Rings movies, when the ringwraiths stab the
pillows in the beds at the Prancing Pony. Or at
least my memory is that those beds are stuffed with pillows.
I think the way that it's presented in other bits

(42:12):
of Tolkien media and even in the book itself play
out just a little bit differently. But, but am I
correct in this, that in the original they're stabbing those
pillows that are in hobbit shapes in the bed? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:22):
The hobbits and, uh, and, uh, Aragorn, I guess known
as Strider at this point, they, they put the pillows
in the bed and trick the ringwraiths into attacking there
and they're watching from across the street.

Speaker 2 (42:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:35):
Well, one interesting distinction that occurs to me here is
that a lot of the mimicry in nature that's in
organisms other than humans would be mimicry of trying to
make yourself look like something else. Like, you know, I'm
trying to make my body look not like a bug,
but like a leaf or something.

Speaker 2 (42:53):
Yeah, or I'm trying to make my tail look like
my head, that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (42:57):
Or trying to make yourself look like a different, more
dangerous type of organism. You know, I'm disguising myself as
a really poisonous other animal or something. So that's one thing.
I'm trying to look like something else, but I guess
the scarecrow is a slightly different decoy mimicry principle, which
is I'm going to make a second object that is
not my body look like me, or at least look

(43:19):
like some kind of living thing. And so I guess
that's the question. Is there that sort of thing in nature?

Speaker 2 (43:25):
Yeah, something which is, to be clear here, it is
an act that is carried out using other materials. So
it involves a certain amount of material usage and construction.
And it is also something to be clear, we're talking
about something that is a definite act, not something that
has emerged out of evolution, but as something that an animal, well,

(43:49):
has certainly evolved to do, but it is actively doing,
it is actively creating this thing in real time. And
there is at least one strong case to be made
for one type of organism doing this. These are the
so-called decoy spider orb weavers. There are, I think, a
few different varieties of these. One that I was reading

(44:09):
about is Cyclosa longicata in Peru, and they create a
sort of spider-shaped form at the center of their webbing.
This is something that is in the literature called a stablamenta,
which I think just means like, you know, it's a
shape in the web is what it is. And it's

(44:32):
made out of bits of webbing, bits of their prey,
bits of, you know, plant detritus, you know, essentially spider garbage.
that is reutilized at the center of the web. And
it is, according to some hypotheses here, it might serve
as a decoy. It might serve as a larger double

(44:53):
of the actual spider that has built the web and
has built the decoy.

Speaker 3 (44:59):
So it's like, if this interpretation is correct, it would
be like the spider creating a scarecrow of itself But
a bigger, scarier spider form.

Speaker 2 (45:10):
Yeah, like one that's 10 times larger, roughly 10 times
larger than its actual self. Imagine if humans did this.
I mean, on some levels, I guess we do. But
imagine if humans did exactly this.

Speaker 3 (45:23):
Like the scarecrow in the middle of the field is
a Godzilla.

Speaker 2 (45:25):
Yeah, yeah. Don't mess with this field. Look how big
the people are who live here. That sort of thing.
So I was reading about this in, this is a
2025 study by Ola et al, or Ola and the
other human beings that aided in this study. It is
titled Cyclosomengy 1866, Orb Weavers Build Stabilimenta That Resemble Large

(45:49):
Spiders for Ecology and Evolution. This was published in Ecology
and Evolution. And the authors proposed that this is one
of the possible reasons for the spiders building this kind
of false spider at the center of their web. There
are other possible explanations to be clear. And these include
just like a shape that is there to prevent bird collisions,

(46:10):
you know, not unlike, you know, the stickers or other
shapes that one might put on a glass window in
order to keep birds from just running smack into it.
Because you're this orb spider, you've spent time building this
nest in order to catch prey you can eat. If
a bird doesn't see it and just comes going right,
you know, flying right through it, well, then that's your
work wasted. You're not going to catch that bird. That's

(46:32):
just pure destruction.

Speaker 3 (46:33):
So that would still be a visual symbol evolved to
have an effect on the behavior of another animal, but
it wouldn't quite be the scarecrow principle because it wouldn't
be in that point important that it looks like a spider.

Speaker 2 (46:48):
Right, right. They point out that with other species of
orb spider, the stable lamenta is more clearly understood to
be there as camouflage. So a place on the web
where the spider can retreat to, can hang out at
and blend in. That also seems to be, or at
least sounds to me like a compelling reason, you know,

(47:10):
just create a zone in your web so that you
can hang out at the center and not merely at
the edges and still benefit from camouflage. Because Again, it's
important to note the spider in this case is both
predator and prey. It's trying to catch creatures, but it
also is trying to avoid being consumed. And so like

(47:31):
their hypothesis is that the spider has built this false
spider not to work as a pure scarecrow, not to
say to potential like avian predators like don't come here.
The spiders are huge, but rather to sort of draw
the attack of the spider. So, I mean, draw the
attack of the bird, rather. So the bird sees the
spider shape at the middle of the web. It's going

(47:52):
to attack it. But that is not ideally where the
spider is. And the authors cite experiments in which the
webs with these oversized stabilimenta suffered more attacks than under-decorated webs,
but fewer successful attacks, which would certainly make all the difference.
So you build this spider shape at the center of

(48:12):
your web. You might get more attention from birds, but
that attention is going to be targeted at the area
where the spider is not at. So I find that interesting.

Speaker 3 (48:21):
You use one of these, you're making more work for
yourself maybe and having to rebuild your web, but you're
less likely to actually get eaten by a bird.

Speaker 2 (48:28):
Yeah, that would seem to be the case. Again, this
is one possible explanation for this. And we can't 100%
be sure. And as we discussed in the show too,
nature has a way of, you know, it solves problems
in ways that humans do not. with an efficiency that
we often do not, but also they have a way
of like solving multiple problems at once, you know, steadily

(48:51):
over time. So I personally can imagine a situation where
it's several of these little boxes being checked off at once.

Speaker 3 (48:59):
You've got a picture of this stabilimenta, is the singular stabilimentum,
I would guess? I don't know.

Speaker 2 (49:06):
I'm going to go with that.

Speaker 3 (49:07):
Okay. The stabilimentum, I'm guessing, in the outline here, and
it looks very Blair Witch. It's like those little puppets
that are hanging from the trees in that movie.

Speaker 2 (49:16):
Yeah, in a way, it's a perfect scarecrow because it
is it is crude. It is made from organic materials
like local garbage and, uh, and it is in the
shape of a living being, or at least that is
the way that, you know, it's, it's been interpreted many
times by, uh, by these humans studying it. So, uh, and,
and it seems to be interpreted as such by the birds.

(49:37):
If these, uh, experiments are, are truly shedding light on
what's going on here. If the birds are drawn to
it and are attacking it more often, then it's serving
that purpose.

Speaker 3 (49:46):
Is there any nutrition in it for the bird, or
is it just trash?

Speaker 2 (49:51):
I think it's just trash. Yeah, I mean, any bits
that the spider's not eating, I would assume that it
doesn't contain a great deal of nourishment.

Speaker 3 (49:59):
Spiders get most of the meat off those bones, at least.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
Yeah, we've talked about ingenious spider usage of corpse garbage
before on the show.

Speaker 3 (50:09):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (50:11):
Still, it might be the closest thing to a scarecrow,
to a human-built scarecrow, that I can think of, if
you just consider it to be possibly some version of
animal builds a copy of itself out of garbage. Otherwise,
the closest thing we have to look at are, again,
anatomical decoys, false heads, pretending to be another organism. And

(50:34):
I'm also briefly reminded of, this has come up on
the show before, there's a 2011 documentary Mark McMiniman hypotheses
concerning the Kraken, uh, not, not the mythical Kraken, but
the idea that the way that different, uh, ichthyosaurus bones, uh,
were fossilized, the way they were arranged, he put out

(50:55):
this controversial, but interesting idea that I don't think has
been really been commented on since 2013, but he presented
the idea of what if a giant cephalopod of unknown origin, um,
basically arrange bits of animals that it killed into a
self portrait of itself for, I guess, unknown reasons. And, uh,

(51:17):
you know, I think this was like a serious proposition,
but also one where a lot of people, you know,
found some problems with it and thought maybe it was
a bit of a jump and there's, you know, maybe
no way to really prove that that would be the case.
And it raises maybe more questions that it answers. But I,
I keep coming back to that, uh, you know, every
now and then there'll be something like adjacent to that idea.
And I'll, I'll think back to that Kraken hypothesis, and

(51:39):
it makes me wonder, who doesn't love the idea of
some ancient, now extinct, octopus-like creature killing prehistoric swimming reptiles
and then making a self-portrait out of its body? And
if it were doing that, if that were the case,
and again, that's a big leap that people are not
jumping to make, then you could imagine it might have

(52:02):
some function that involves drawing the attention of a predator
or driving them away. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (52:09):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (52:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (52:09):
As you say, highly speculative, but I wonder, yeah, how
would you, so you just take that and you say,
I wanted to look for, for evidence for or against that.
What would you look for? I guess you'd look for,
you'd look for a pattern, right? You'd look for other
arrangements that you think of a similar cephalopod shape or.

Speaker 2 (52:28):
Yeah. Or I guess it would really be helpful if
you found something like this, in the modern cephalopod world.
I guess it's possible there's something out there that we
haven't seen, but again, we haven't seen it, so there's
no evidence. We see some, as we've discussed in the show,
before you see cephalopods engaging with various construction and even

(52:50):
tool use, be it grabbing onto coconut husks or shells
or moving the objects in their midden around, but we've
never seen anything like this. So it's definitely a leap,
but an interesting one. So at any rate, humans might

(53:15):
not be the first to engage in the creation of
a double to make a copy of themselves out of
garbage to fool other organisms. But it's clear that we've
been doing things like this for a very long time.
So the first modern humans emerged some 300,000 years ago.
And most of the details are going to be lost

(53:35):
to prehistory, but we proved ourselves quite capable with tools
and tactics, making up for any perceived deficiencies very early on.
We became very skilled at deception, at fooling other organisms
and also fooling fellow humans to our benefit. I mean,
just imagine, imagine if human beings couldn't lie.

Speaker 3 (53:59):
Well, I'm reminded of, uh, there's a moment, uh, spoilers
for the, uh, the, uh, three body problem, uh, trilogy. Uh,
but I remember the, the kind of thrilling moment in
the books there, where there are these very technologically advanced
aliens that are threatening earth. And so they have all
these advantages that we don't have in terms of their
technology being so far ahead of ours. Uh, but there

(54:20):
is a moment where the aliens first become aware that
humans are capable of lying, uh, I think the aliens
have a situation where their thoughts are immediately perceptible to
each other, so they really don't have much of a
way or skill for deceiving about their intentions, and yet

(54:41):
they discover their enemy has the ability to be deceptive,
and that frightens them.

Speaker 2 (54:45):
Man, this alone is such an interesting concept, because we often,
certainly in Western history, we often have this sort of
Bible-coded view of the fall of man and the introduction
of sin, right? And suddenly humans discover what lying is

(55:06):
and these various other sinful abilities at their disposal. But
it seems more likely that this kind of deception, again,
we see it in the natural world, we see it
in other organisms, granted without the complexity of human thought
and behavior, but it's still there. So to me, it
makes more sense that this is just a fabric of

(55:26):
how organisms behave and how they navigate their relationships with
potential predators and prey. And therefore, it just all it
does is just becomes more complicated in the human scenario
as we ascend, if you will.

Speaker 3 (55:42):
Totally, though, I want to be clear that I'm not
giving a moral endorsement of lying. I actually I think
lying is bad. I think the cultural conventions against it
are good.

Speaker 2 (55:54):
All right. Well, it also depends on how you define lying, right?
Because if we think of scarecrow building as being another
form of misdirection, you know, this remains a hallmark of
various human activities from warfare, certainly, to the arts. You know,
I mean, there's a lot of misdirection and deception in

(56:15):
everything from a magic show to a motion picture. You know,
we engage in that willful suspension of disbelief. You know,
it's such a rich part of who and what we are.
A scarecrow, again, is a decoy made to resemble a
human form, placed so as to deter other creatures from
acting by manipulating them into thinking a human being is

(56:37):
present when they are not. And this sort of thing
in general does seem to go way back. Again, especially
if we're considering not just this specific agricultural usage.

Speaker 3 (56:52):
Though, and I think we'll get more into this in
the later episodes, I think there is good evidence of
the actual agricultural use of scarecrows going into the ancient world.

Speaker 2 (57:01):
Oh, absolutely. And it undeniably goes further back than that,
because you think of what a scarecrow is. This is
something that, this is the very sort of artifact that
generally does not survive, because it is, what is it
made out of? It is made out of agricultural garbage.
It's made out of sticks and clothing and straw and
things that will naturally degrade very quickly. And then also

(57:24):
think about the fact that even though it may be novel,
it may spin our imagination in interesting ways, but it
is also, at the end of the day, an agricultural tool.
And you have to ask yourself, is it the sort
of thing that many commentators would even stop to write about?
And then if they did write about it, of course,
does that writing survive? It's a similar scenario to artifacts like,

(57:45):
did it exist? Did it not rot away? Did it survive?
And then is it found? Yeah. But then there are
other things we can also look to. For instance, the
use of animal decoys goes back at least as far
as ancient Egypt. We know that there were clay waterfowl
used back to an estimated 2500 BCE for hunting purposes,

(58:07):
you know, to convince waterfowl that, hey, this is an
area you should go to. And then using their presence
there to hunt them, something that is, of course, still
done today by human hunters of waterfowl.

Speaker 3 (58:20):
So that's kind of a reverse scarecrow principle. Instead of
deterring animal presence, it would be attracting.

Speaker 2 (58:25):
Yeah, yeah. And of course, this gets a little complicated, too,
when you consider the fact that humans also just make
models of things because they like to. Because just in
ancient Egypt, for example, we have other various models of birds,
for example, that were clearly not used for any kind

(58:46):
of hunting purposes, nor were they capable of flight. But
they just had some sort of religious purpose or were
just novel. You know, people just make things because they can.
They do it to test out techniques. And so you
end up with these various curios throughout history that are
just because that's how we artistically engage with the world

(59:07):
around us.

Speaker 3 (59:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:09):
Now, as for using a human decoy for purposes besides scarecrowing,
besides bird scaring, there are a lot of stories of
human ingenuity and cunning here. And there's actually a pretty
fun one of like straight up Ferris Bueller tactics that
that you find in the Old Testament in 1 Samuel 11.

(59:31):
I'm going to read from this here. This is from
the updated NRSV translation. Quote, Saul sent messengers to David's
house to keep watch over him, planning to kill him
in the morning. David's wife, Michal, told him, if you
do not save your life tonight, tomorrow you will be killed.
So Michal let David through the window. He fled away

(59:54):
and escaped. Michal took an idol and laid it on
the bed. She put a net of goat's hair on
its head and covered it with the clothes. When Saul
sent messengers to take David, she said, He is sick.
Then Saul sent the messengers to see David for themselves.
He said, Bring him up to me in the bed
that I may kill him. When the messengers came in,

(01:00:15):
the idol was in the bed and the covering of
goat's hair on its head. Saul said to Michal, Why
have you deceived me like this and let my enemy
go so that he has escaped? Michal answered Saul. He
said to me, let me go. Why should I kill you?
So there you go. Again, straight up Ferris Bueller. Just

(01:00:37):
like let's create something sort of like a human, put
it where a human should be sleeping and people will
at least be temporarily deceived.

Speaker 3 (01:00:44):
I like that Saul has the whole bed brought to him.

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
Yeah. I mean, that's how they do it. Bring, bring
me the bed. Like, did they think he wasn't going
to wake up? He's like such a sound sleeper. It's like,
be very careful, but I don't want you to wake him,
bring him to me slowly and then wake him up
and we kill him.

Speaker 3 (01:00:59):
Yeah. Uh, that one is really funny. There's actually another
passage in the Hebrew Bible worth mentioning when it comes
to scarecrows and decoys. Um, This one actually, at least
in some translations, makes explicit reference to a scarecrow. So
the text in question occurs in chapter 10 of the
book of Jeremiah. This is a section sometimes called the

(01:01:22):
polemic against idols. And the context here is that the
prophet is trying to discourage the Israelites from taking part
in the religions of their neighbors who use cult images
in their worship. And one way the prophet makes his
point here is by spinning out this extended mocking satire

(01:01:45):
on the idea of an idol as a physically constructed god.
So the satire reads as follows. This is also from
the NRSVUE. It says, Do not learn the way of
the nations, or be dismayed at the signs of the heavens,
for the nations are dismayed at them. For the customs
of the peoples are false. A tree from the forest

(01:02:08):
is cut down and worked with an axe by the
hands of an artisan. They deck it with silver and gold.
They fasten it with hammers and nails so that it
cannot move. Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field,
and they cannot speak. They have to be carried, for
they cannot walk. Do not be afraid of them, for

(01:02:29):
they cannot do evil, nor is it in them to
do good. Now, a few thoughts on this. One is
that while I do kind of love this, I think
the book of Jeremiah has great literary qualities here. I
think the author, you could say, is not actually being
fair in how he characterizes the polytheistic religious beliefs of

(01:02:51):
the other peoples of the ancient Near East. In the
examples that I'm aware of, like Egyptian and ancient Mesopotamian religions,
the way I understand them. is that the people who
practice these religions would not usually have said that when
you make an idol, the idol simply is the god. Rather,

(01:03:13):
I think they believed that an idol properly fashioned, properly
cared for, and then sanctified through ritual. So you might
have these rituals like the opening of the mouth or
the washing of the mouth ceremony, different things, but like
Egyptian and Mesopotamian. that this idol cared for in the
right ways and having gone through the right rituals could

(01:03:35):
be inhabited or indwelt by a god or could become
a sort of conduit of the god's presence on earth.
So I think the artisan who makes the idol would
not exactly say, look, I've carved a figure from a
tree and nailed it up and it is my god.
But instead, if all the right rituals are observed, A

(01:03:57):
god comes to dwell within this body I have made
for it. Or this can be a focal point for
rituals where I honor this god. And obviously, like Jeremiah
or a monotheistic Jewish prophet would not have believed in
either version of the polytheistic religion. But I think the
latter is a little bit less intuitively easy to make

(01:04:19):
fun of.

Speaker 2 (01:04:21):
Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. I think it matches
up with things we've discussed in the show before, that
even ancient people had rather complex ideas about what a
god was and how that god interacted with the human realm,
certainly in the domain of ritual.

Speaker 3 (01:04:34):
Yeah, but in the satire here, it works because Jeremiah
is saying, like, look how stupid this is. Like, you
cut down a tree and you nail it with silver
and gold, and now you think, look, it's a god,
but it can't even walk by itself. You have to
carry it around on processions.

Speaker 2 (01:04:49):
Though I do like that he says, like, it can't
do any evil, but it also can't do any good. Like,
that in itself, I don't know, it reminds me a
little bit more of sort of like sort of the modern,
modern atheistic and skeptical approach to religion and say, like,
you know, would look at a statue and be like, well,
you know, it's not bad. It's not good. It's just
a piece of wood. Well, I think.

Speaker 3 (01:05:09):
I think he probably would say it's bad. I think
he's saying that, like, it has no power, good or evil. Like,
there's nothing in it. You know, it can't help you
and it can't harm you.

Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
Yeah, it can't move. It can't enact powers and so forth.

Speaker 3 (01:05:23):
Yeah, but I think he would definitely say it's bad
to worship it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:26):
That is his opinion. That is a common theme, right? Yeah,
don't go worshiping these things, according to the Old Testament authors.

Speaker 3 (01:05:34):
Now, there's another really interesting thing about the scarecrow line.
The line about the scarecrow has not been translated that
way universally. So the version I read again was the
updated edition of the NRSV, which is informed by modern scholarship.
So a lot of biblical scholars are going to think
that's a good translation. But where that translation reads, their

(01:05:58):
idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field for they
cannot speak or sorry, and they cannot speak. The older
King James translation says they are upright as a palm tree,
but speak not. So what's the difference here? Well, I
went looking into this. Apparently the Hebrew term used in

(01:06:19):
the text here is a bit ambiguous. It is, and
forgive any mispronunciation here, it is Tomer Miksa or Miksha,
in which the first word means something like palm tree
or date palm. And the second word has something to
do with hammering or manufacturing. So it means something like

(01:06:39):
worked or fashioned. So it suggests something of a palm
tree or wooden structure crafted by hand. Apparently, this interpretation
of the line as a scarecrow and a cucumber patch
is influenced, at least in part, by a later non-canonical
Jewish text from the Hellenistic period called the Epistle of Jeremiah.

(01:07:02):
which expresses the same idea as this passage in Jeremiah.
And in this text, it explicitly makes clear it is
talking about a scarecrow in a cucumber field who says
guarding nothing. So that's apparently one reason for thinking it's
what the author meant in this older text as well.
I also found a more recent paper from 2017 by

(01:07:24):
a scholar named Eichler who is arguing something else entirely
about This scholar says maybe it should be translated as
palm sculpture. And in this case, it would be a
reference to a known existing religious motif or religious symbol
in Assyrian art known as the Assyrian sacred tree. Have

(01:07:45):
you ever read about this before, Rob?

Speaker 2 (01:07:47):
I have definitely seen this image before. Yes, yes. It
is a very erect tree with these elaborate fronds coming
off of it in every direction.

Speaker 1 (01:07:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:07:59):
Uh, and there are different interpretations of what that Assyrian
sacred tree means. It could have something to do with
like the tree of life tradition, uh, or.

Speaker 2 (01:08:07):
Maybe we see in cultures around the world.

Speaker 3 (01:08:09):
Yeah. Uh, so I can't make a judgment about which
translation is best here, but I think the comparison to
a scarecrow makes a lot of sense to me because
it really fits with Jeremiah's satirical themes in the passage.
You know, the author is saying that idols like scarecrows
in his opinion are They are fashioned by clever humans,

(01:08:32):
but they possess no interior power of their own. He
says their only power is in the fact that they
mislead the foolish into fearing them.

Speaker 2 (01:08:43):
Yeah. I mean, this is also very interesting when you
think about either the acceptance or rejection of icons in
any kind of religious form. Like there's there's this kind
of like recognition here that. that an idol, a form
like this that is made, that it looks like a
human or an animal, is on some level deceiving us
because of the way that we buy into it and

(01:09:05):
we give it life just via our own mental processes.
And so you can see that then the rejection of
that is to say, well, we're not going to do
idols at all, no forms. No representations of human or
animal forms or any combination because that is inherently deceptive.
And the thing that we believe in is real and

(01:09:25):
therefore doesn't need that kind of a motif. It doesn't
need that trickery.

Speaker 3 (01:09:29):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:29):
And we've talked about that before. We did a whole
series on the rejection of idols and imagery and stuff
to what you're buying in the past.

Speaker 3 (01:09:37):
I don't remember the name of the series, but yeah,
on aniconism as a tradition.

Speaker 2 (01:09:40):
Yeah, I forget exactly what clever title we came up
with for the series, but it was a fun one.
All right. Well, we're looking at the time right now,
and we've decided this is when we need to cut
it off. But we already have so much more to
discuss in the next episode. We're going to get into
some more historic examples of scarecrows, or at least straw-stuffed
human bodies, or they're not really human bodies stuffed with straw,

(01:10:03):
but human forms, clothing stuffed with straw. More examples of
this from throughout history. And we're also going to get more,
I think, into the biology of what's going on with
the scarecrow. And even into these questions of does it work?
Do scarecrows work? Or if they don't work, why don't
they work? And when do they work? That sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (01:10:22):
Farmers, please write in. Let us know your thoughts. We
would love to talk about this on our next Listener
Mail episode.

Speaker 2 (01:10:28):
Yeah, yeah. And artists. Many of you out there just
enjoy the scarecrow for purely aesthetic reasons. So, yeah, stick
with us in this multi-part look at the scarecrow. And, yeah,
keep chiming in. All right. We want to remind everyone
out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily
a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays
and Thursdays, short form on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We

(01:10:50):
just set aside time to discuss a weird film on
Weird House Cinema. And again, throughout the month of October,
as much as humanly possible, it's all going to be
Halloween themed one way or another. Spooky content, spooky topics,
spooky tie ins and so forth. So stick with us.
It's going to be a fun ride. Let's see. Just
a reminder that you can get Stuff to Blow Your Mind,

(01:11:11):
the podcast, in the podcast feed wherever you get your
audio podcast. Wherever that happens to be, we just ask
that you rate, review, subscribe, help us out with all that.
You know, chime in and say, I enjoy the Halloween
offerings and accept them wholeheartedly, that sort of thing. And
then if you dig the video, well, the video version
of our podcast is available on Netflix. We encourage you

(01:11:32):
to go check that out. Maybe you just do the
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Or maybe you really want that video component. Go to Netflix.
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Speaker 3 (01:11:47):
Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

Speaker 1 (01:12:09):
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