May 16, 2019 • 51 mins
It’s time for another movie-themed Stuff to Blow Your Mind episode. In fact, it's TWO episodes. This time Robert and Joe discuss the 1982 sword and sorcery picture “Conan the Barbarian.” Join them as they gush over the film’s charismatic villain Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones) and explore the real world of giant snakes, Set, snake arrows and more.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back to talk snakes. It's
snake talk. That's right. We're continuing this month's movie episode
(00:23):
and now it's episodes because we you you got to
pick the movie this time. You pick Conan the Barbarian.
Hadn't seen it in a while. I was wondering how
it held up, and you know, it kind of did,
it kind of didn't. But it's it's definitely worth talking about.
But one of the key centerpieces in this film is
the cult of set thulsa dooms religion. I mean, he
(00:44):
seems into the branding, even in the earlier portions of
the film when he's just a warrior. Yeah, that's a
little confusing, because the whole thing is that, like James
Earl Jones, he was like once I was a young
man and I was just a war lord running around
raiding villages. You know, the sorry I killed your parents
and not that's a yeah. I don't think he ever
said he was no. He didn't say no. In fact,
he says, Dakona, and he's like, got Arnold Schwartzendinger on
(01:05):
the floor. He's like, when when I destroyed your village,
I made you You're welcome. Yeah, pretty much. Uh. But
but then later in the film he's he's like, oh,
I don't do that anymore. Now I'm just a regular
cult leader. But in both cases he's carrying the symbol
of his cult even though he's not a cult leader yet.
In in the earlier part, and the symbol of his cult,
(01:28):
which is referred to in the movie as the Cult
of set or the Temple of set Uh. And in
the last episode we discussed the real ancient Egyptian not
well maybe not real, but the real mythology of the
ancient Egyptian god Set or Seth, and how he is
very different than the set represented in the film. But
the Cult of set in the film has the symbol
of the two headed snake with with the two heads
(01:51):
facing off against each other. Right, I mean, maybe part
of it is that just even though his approach to
life changed a little bit, he just always had great branding,
always loves snakes, or certainly he just maybe just took
up the the the emblem at some point there was
a pre existing cult of Set. I mean certainly that
would if you're creating a cult leader. I mean, some
cult leaders create their faith wholesale, uh, from from new parts.
(02:16):
But for the most part, for the most part, they're
depending on something that came before and just inserting themselves
into it. That's exactly right. I mean, in fact, I
can scarcely think of a cult that doesn't draw on
some existing mythology. I mean, uh, you think about the
Heaven's Gate cult. I mean that was in a large
part based on like UFO mythology and existing Christianity. Even
(02:38):
if you look at like the Raylians and Rileyans, one
of the the UFO religions, they're the guy who found it,
has this whole book going through like the books of
the Bible and all this talking about how it's actually
all about alien encounters and alien technology. It's basically an
ancient aliens religion. So the emblem for the Temple of
Set in this film has this this really cool logo
(03:00):
actually that it's like there are two different versions of it.
You kind of see one is like on the like
the staffs and the armor that they carry, and then
there's this like simple simplified logo, but it's a snake
with two heads as a head on each end, like
a like the head of the snake is a snakehead
and the tail of the snake is a snakehead, and
they're they're rising against each other, and in the background
(03:23):
there is a son And in fact it's a plot
point in the film because Conan and his friends go
around looking for Falsa Doom played by James Earl Jones
by asking about this symbol. It's like, have you seen
this symbol anywhere? That's how they they initially connect with him.
So I should kind of surprise, as a surprise to
nobody that the idea of a snake with a head
on each end pre dates this film, that you know
(03:45):
that this this is something that we can go back
in time and we can find examples of in uh
in the human use of symbols. Right now, you might
be thinking about other existing snake symbols that are a
little bit different. You might be thinking about the orb
corros where a snake is swallowing its own tail, But
that's different than two snake heads facing each other, right though,
(04:07):
I mean in Theora Boruss defense we usually don't see
the tail because it's in his mouth. Who's to say
that wasn't a hat on there? But yeah, the the
or a Borus, the world serpent, the mid guard storm, Um,
it's uh. It is yet depicted as the snake consuming itself.
On the other hand, one that is very similar but
isn't quite the same thing does have snakeheads facing each
other would be the Caducius. This is this is like
(04:29):
the staff with the snakes staff of hers. Yeah. Yeah,
So what we're talking about here is the the amphis
beina and it's a it's a name that's derived from
the Greek to go both ways because of the idea
is that it's a snake that can move forwards or
backwards with ease. The one thing I've read is that
snakes that just have one normal head and a normal
(04:50):
tail can sometimes slither backwards. Like I was reading a
book about how the author observed that coral snakes seem
to be able to slither backwards just fine. Right, And
so I mean, of course, in all of this you're talking,
we're dealing with something on one level, there's the symbolism
level of it, right, Like what does the idea of
a snake with two heads mean, how does it? What
(05:11):
does it? How does it function in the human mind?
But then also there is a certain degree of just
like weird tales about what snakes look like. So, according
to Carol Rose, the folklorist, his books always come back
to She she has a nice write up about it
in one of her monster books, and she points out
that the Greek writer Lucan described it as a desert
(05:32):
creature of North Africa. Um and um, and of course
as well, we'll we'll see plenty of the Elder of
course also wrote about it. But I also was reading
from a article Stalking the Emphis Beena by Sydney J.
Levy from the Journal of Consumer Research. That but yeah,
(05:53):
but that mentions that the this particular symbol quote was
probably intended to express the horror and anguish associated with
ambivalent situations. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean that. Um,
it certainly goes with a kind of classic archetype of
of psychodynamics, right, the idea that like this might not
(06:14):
be the most correct way of thinking about the mind. Now,
but if you go back to Freudian thought, you know,
he often seemed to emphasize that major problems in the mind.
The psychoses and things were caused by states of ambivalence
where you had, you know, conflicting desires or conflicting tendencies
that couldn't be resolved. Should I stay or should I go?
I don't know. I'm of two snakes on the man. H.
(06:37):
So this particular beast also shows up in a lot
of medieval beast theories with as a winged creature with
two legs at it as well. Uh, sometimes it's said
that it can roll like a hoop snake, a hoop
snake being kind of a form of an aura borous
that's less, less concerned with what happens if a snake
consumes itself. How does this house this play out in
my mind? Versus what if a snake just at its
(07:00):
own tail and then rolled like a wheel down a
down a hill. Now this is a mythical creature, no
real creature, though there is a real wheel spider. Yeah, yeah,
there are some real rolling creatures, but but not quite
like a snake. Um Plenty of Here's what Plenty had
to say about the the amphisbina in the Natural History
Glad Plenty was on it. The amphisbina has a twin
(07:22):
head that is one at the tail end as well
as though it were not enough for poison to be
poured out of one mount, because that's another aspect of
it is is that the creature is supposed to be
like any mythic serpent. It's highly venomous, and so maybe
the ideas it's just so venomous that one head is
not enough. It needs two heads for all that venom. Uh.
Then likewise, there their accounts of how you can use
(07:45):
its dried skin to say, treat rheumatism. Uh. So there's
you know, there are all these different stories about it,
and it reminds me a lot of the of some
of the things we're discussing about the bassilisk. Now Rose
writes that while exaggerated, she thinks it was likely based
on some real venomous reptile in the Libyan desert, perhaps
(08:05):
one that was capable of slithering in either direction, which,
as you said, that's some real snakes. Not that impressive.
But if you didn't know that, it's kind of like
if you don't know that horses can lay down, and
then you see one laying down, sleeping and you're like, whoa.
Then you start reporting you're gonna call it plenty immediately.
I didn't tell him or the other possibilities that is
that it's a snake that seemed to raise its tail
(08:27):
a tail like a head when it was threatened. And
we'll come back to to that because there are some
potential examples of that for sure. Then there. You know,
if we look outside of Western traditions, we also see
double headed serpents in the Aztec tradition. Yeah, with a
with a you know, there's a particularly interesting fifteenth or
(08:47):
sixteenth century turquoise example that I'm sure everyone's seeing photos of.
There's a particularly a nice example of this in the
British Museum. Uh. This this turquoise uh serpent creature uh
with this like almost bear like head on on either end.
And it's uncertain exactly what it's depicting. So, you know,
(09:09):
the the idea maybe that this is just representing that
serpentine rebirth that we've talked about, So this is not
so much a snake with two heads, but that it's
a snake emerging from itself from its skin. It also
may be well be related to quetzal codal, which we
we did an episode on talking about the importance of
the plumed serpent in in meso American religion. And uh,
(09:35):
and we should also point out that that particular god
like there there's a snake god that is certainly far
removed from anything Falsa Doom represents no thoroughly nondo me
And then uh, I also read that it's it's possible
that this is not like clearly maybe an Aztec creation,
but maybe it's a creation of the mix the mixed
tech people. UM, so you're you're ultimately going with with
(09:58):
perhaps several different degrees of separate between the people who
originally um dreamed up and created this work of art
versus those certainly who now possess it. So obviously the
next question is are there two headed snakes in real life? Oh? Yes, yeah,
the answer is clearly yes. Two headed snakes of a
certain kind I will say, absolutely do exist and are
(10:20):
pretty regularly captured or breading captivity. It seems like maybe
once every couple of years, herpetologists come across one new
and interesting case of this that blows up in the media.
I think they probably get discovered more oftense, just only
sometimes do they really catch fire on the internet. But yes,
there are pretty frequently cases of two headed snakes known
(10:41):
as diecephalic or polycephalic, meaning you know, two heads or
many heads from species like ladder snakes, copper heads, king
snakes I've read about in all those species and others,
and these snakes generally have two heads, both growing from
the neck end of the body. There is no species
of snake that is regularly like this. Rather, this is
(11:04):
like this is not an adaptation or evolutionary change. It's
a developmental anomaly. It occurs the same way that most
other conjoined twins do when an embryo in in utero
splits into twins, but it doesn't split all the way,
leading to embryos that continue to develop while remaining attached
in some way. That's right, And if if you want
some more information on conjoined twins, uh, we we actually
(11:27):
discussed this in our Halloween episode whatever Halloween episodes last year,
the Tales from the Crypt episode, because of course there's
a Tales from the Crypt episode. There's more than one
actually that involves that in an insensitive manner, but so
we we we use that episode as an excuse to like,
all right, let's let's put aside the trash because let's
face the tales in the crypt is ultimately a trashy show.
(11:50):
But let's set all that aside and discuss, like, you know,
what the actual science is. And so we went through
all the various forms that occur, and so, yeah, this
this occurs in all kinds of animals and in cases
I've read about. What happens with snakes is you've got
two heads that are side by side, both extending from
the neck at different um. Sometimes there will be different
amounts of like length of the body that that are separated.
(12:14):
Sometimes the heads are very close to each other. Sometimes
they've got significant amounts of of separate neck, but they
share connections, usually to the top of the elementary canal. Um.
But the question would be here, what about a snake
with a head on both ends of the length of
the body, like in Thulsa Dooms standard for the cult
of set Could there be a snake that's got a
(12:36):
head for a tail? Well, we already mentioned that plenty
of the elder Um discussed one, and uh, you know,
we don't have plenty with us any any longer, but
we do have the Daily mail, and uh, and so
I was I was looking around, you know, for doing
various searches for two headed snakes, and I found an
article from September twenty third, two thousand twelve by Daily
(12:58):
Mail reporter titled they Both Seemed to Control It. Family
finds snake with two heads, one on each end of
its body. And so this all seemed to have happened
in South Carolina, and it was originally reported by Fox
Carolina presumably It's Fantastic Beasts news Beat newsdesk, and it
was it was identified by the local high school's biology
(13:21):
department as a rough earth snake. Uh. And you look
at these pictures, they're not, you know, super clear. Um,
but there was video. There was video at some point,
but the video I couldn't find actually alright good because
the video footage I found had been removed, as as
had the like I was getting a four or four
on the original Fox reporting. But uh, the article was
(13:45):
was pretty fun. My favorite line from it was quote,
but while the snake pulls itself in opposite directions, young
Savannah and Preston are also pulled in different directions on
what to name the snake. That's right. One of them
wanted to name it Billy Bob and the other said
Oreo right, um, uh yeah. I was looking for more
(14:06):
on this story to see to try to dig underneath
like the the Daily Mail article, and I couldn't. I
couldn't get under it. I don't understand why there wasn't
more follow up. I mean, I suspect it's because the
snake died and everyone was like, oh no, I'm sad
and let's move on with it. But or because the
original reporting might have been mistaken. That's the other. Yeah,
we just don't We don't know ultimately. Yeah. So even
(14:28):
though there's video, I mean I did watch video, and
it's a small snake, but they've got it in like
a little igloo cooler and it's slithering around and it
has some kind of it wasn't super high definition, but
it's got something on its tail. It looks sort of
head shaped. Even though I saw some video, I'm still
a little bit skeptical. I wonder if what's being interpreted
(14:49):
as a head on the tail end of the snake
is not really ahead. Yeah, I mean that's that's a
huge possibility. Uh yeah. So just to as as back
up for that as that being a possibility, I was
looking at a book from J h U Press two
thousand eighteen called American Snakes by Sean P. Graham. Uh.
And just as a side note before we get to
(15:10):
the thing that I went to this book for. As
a side note, there's a part I found where the
author is describing strange defense strategies that snakes employ. Uh.
And this unrelated one is called cloacle popping. Oh okay,
So sometimes have you read about this? No, I mean,
if you tell, if you'd asked me what cloacle popping was,
I would assume it's like the hottest new dance number
(15:32):
that I'm not familiar with. So sometimes when threatened, Uh,
some types of snakes will rapidly turn their cloaca inside out.
The cloaca is the common hole at the rear of
the body that's used for urinary tract, digestive tract, and
reproductive tract. So it's it's a common sort of hole
back there that takes care of all the cummings and
(15:55):
goings at the back side of the body. So when
these snakes get captured or handled or encounter some kind
of menace, they will sort of suddenly vigorously poop out
part of their own rectum. Basically, it's not a rectum.
It's cloaca, which produces these popping or squishing sounds which
are vaguely audible to us. Uh. It's not known what
(16:17):
adaptive purpose, if any of this has. But there's your
fact of the day, chloecal pot there, Okay. But also
the reason I was reading about this is that I
was looking for examples, and this is absolutely true that
some snake species have a defensive strategy that's known as automimicry,
which involves having a tail that looks like a second head.
(16:39):
And examples of this include the rubber boa, which can
use its tail as a decoy head if it's attacked.
Like if this snake is attacked, if you've seen pictures
of the rubber boa, you might have seen it not
just coiled, but sort of tied up in itself like
a not it'll you know, be a jumble, and while
it's in this tangle, it will raise its tail all
(17:00):
up as if it were raising its head up, and
allow whatever is attacking it to attack its tail, while
you know, the real head is defended under the coiled
body and perhaps searching for an escape route. Right. And
so in this it has a lot in common with
various other animals where the ideas of a predator is
going to attack, you draw their attack away from them.
(17:22):
The more sensitive parts of your anatomy draw them away
from them from like your brain or your Torso get
them towards the tail. There are some creatures that even
practice something that's known as autotomy, where they will like
release their tail sort of as a distraction or a
gift to the predator while the rest of them can escape. Yeah.
I encountered this on a nature path over the weekend.
(17:43):
I was walking with my son and lo and behold,
there in the path is we see a little lizard
tail still moving, still flopping back and forth, no sign
of the of its former owner. And so we were
trying to decide, well, what happened here? Did did the
lizard you know, an attempt to prevent predation and it
didn't work? Or did it work? And it's ever all
(18:06):
the parties have gone their separate ways. Uh. Yeah, it's
a fascinating survival adaptation. And there I believe there is
an episode of stuff to blow your mind in the
vault about it. Yeah. I think we did a two
parter about tails. Long We talked about the scorpion scorpion autonomy, Yeah,
where its tail will come off, But then it can't
live much longer after that because it can't poop. That's right,
(18:28):
the tail or, one of the lost segments of the
tail contained the scorpion anus, and therefore it can never
poop again. Which I mean, as far as scorpion timelines get,
it's probably not that bad. But that's the world of scorpions.
Let's get back to the world. How do you know
how bad it is I speak for the scorpions, Well,
(18:49):
I mean never having to poop again. I can just imagine, Yeah,
there's gonna be there's gonna be some huge downsides to that,
but then there are certain upsides, namely not having to
poop again. Okay, so I want to be clear. I
want to try to be humble about what's going on
with the with the supposed two headed, you know, head
on the tail snake here. I don't know that what's
(19:11):
going on here is like a mistaken case of automimicry.
I I just will say that I'm not yet convinced
that this is really a snake with a head on
both ends. It seems a little hard for me to
imagine exactly how that happens, Like, where is the cloaca
for one thing, Is it in the middle of the snake? Well,
the two heads go out from each side. All the snakes,
(19:32):
all the snakes where we have confirmed accounts that, like
a really well documented that I could find are where
the heads appear at the same end. And so I'm yeah,
I'm I'm skeptical about this. I am not yet convinced
that this is for real. Yeah, I definitely would love
to see more evidence. Um, be it just visual evidence
(19:53):
of this particular snake or just more people saying oh yeah,
Like I would love to hear from the the actual
uh science teacher who resumably weigh in on this. Oh yeah,
if you've seen this thing up close and you're listening
now get in touch. Yeah. And likewise, I feel like
the town that this occurred in, like this should be
if this was real, this snake should be like the
mascot for the city at this point. Um, so yeah,
(20:16):
talking pulling itself into uh. But but anyway, just to
get back to the broader subject of polycephaly or having
two heads in the serpent world, Um, it's rare, but
it does seem to occur. It seems to occur more
in the snake world, but it's really hard to say
for sure because such specimens they tend to die fast
(20:39):
in the wild. Yeah, I've seen it speculated, but not
known for sure that it happens more often in snakes
in captivity than it does in wild snakes. But we
that's not something that's know and it's just kind of
a possibility. I found a two thousand twelve paper in
the Bulletin of the Chicago or Herpetological Society titled two
headed Snakes Make high Mate It's Pets by Van Walock,
(21:02):
and the author points out that there was a nineteen
thirty seven book by an individual by the name of
Cunningham on the subject of two headed snakes, and that
book catalog nine and fifty cases in one d and
sixty nine species from ninety four genera and um. The
author here writes that currently, and this is two thousand twelve, currently, uh,
(21:23):
there were one thousand fifty known cases one species in
a hundred and three genera, and Van Wallack drove home
that most of them end up just drowning in the egg,
or they're still born, or they die shortly after birth.
But if they if they do survive, one of the
things is, and this is the key to the title
of the paper, they're difficult to care for. They require
(21:44):
extra assistance in in uh, you know, in eating, they
need extra systence even when they shed their skin. But
they can survive in captivity in some cases. Yeah, but
they do encounter all kinds of problems to survival. I mean,
they're good reasons you don't usually come across them alive
in the wild. For one thing, with two heads, movement
is a lot more difficult. You know, you've got two
(22:04):
brains that can struggle for control of the body. Feeding
can be more difficult as the two heads sometimes fight
each other over access to the food. Also, in some
cases after, of course, predation can be more difficult. And
then in some cases after feeding, I was reading that
if one of the snake's heads smells like prey because
(22:25):
it just eight, the other head may sometimes mistake that
head for prey and try to attack it, and then
we're potentially back in oral Boras country at that point. Yeah.
And another thing that I thought was kind of morbidly
interesting in the in the van Wallaka piece that that
you just mentioned, there is a risk. For example, if
you've got a snake in a two headed snake in
(22:45):
a tank, a risk of the snake crawling into apertures
or past obstacles, because of course, snakes very often like
to hide inside holes and enclosures. But if they have
two heads bifurcated at the neck, you can run into
a situation where one head is trying to pass by
an obstacle or go into a hole. That's essentially like
(23:06):
like smashing the other head against that aperture or that
obstacle trying to get past it, and could end up
sort of peeling the other head off as it struggles
to go forward. That's not good. That's not good for anybody.
And uh, and the snakes are not I mean, they
don't have a lot of complex cognition. They can't usually think, oh,
I should back up, you know, it just doesn't seem
(23:29):
to occur to them. Now, outside of the world of snakes,
we should also know that real life worm lizards are
also known as Emphis pina um, but they of course
only have one head, but their tail does trunkate in
a way that kind of resembles a head. So is
it a form of automimicry. They think, I'm not entirely
sure on that if it actually functions as a as
(23:51):
as a mimic a mimic head, or it's just one
of these things where where we look at and we say, oh, well,
the end kind of looks like a head, and then
they decided to bestow this name upon them. Okay, I
think we got to take a break, but we will
be right back with more. Alright, we're back. Okay, So
we're thinking about Fulsa doom in the Conan the Barbarian movie.
(24:14):
One thing that the great Fulsa doom Uh does. One
trick he's got up his sleeve is the snake arrow. Yes,
so this is one of my my favorite snake tricks
from the film. And there are there's at least there
are a couple of scenes where he employs this one
extremely dramatically, where he'll he'll draw a venomous snake and
(24:35):
then he'll he'll stretch it out and he'll make it
rigid like an arrow. And then he will take the
rigid snake and he will put it in a bow
and then he will fire it as an arrow at
one of his enemies. And so he like he takes
a venomous snake and uses it as a venomous arrow. Yeah,
this is how he kills Conan's beloved the thief area. Yes,
(24:57):
so if you're watching this, maybe you're not asking questions,
but I can't help it. But wonder where does this
come from? Like they had to have been inspired by this,
And even if they weren't inspired by a particular detail
from from history and mythology, uh, then clearly they weren't
the ones to think of it first. Somebody else came
up with this cool idea earlier. Uh. And indeed we
(25:18):
do see some form of this in the Hindu epic
the Ramayana. So there are mentions in uh in the
Ramayana of serpent arrows or sharpa vanna. And then there's
also the Naga Pasha powerful snake turned arrow created created
by Brahma. So one particular character, we have the Prince
(25:41):
of Lanka, and this is the son of the tin
headed Ravana Ravana being. Yeah, he's like the demon king
principal antagonist in in in this particular Hindu epic. Um.
And anyway, the Prince of Lanka is named Indrajit and
he employs a host of wondrous weapons, including serpent arrows.
(26:05):
And I could have this wrong, but it seems like
the descriptions vary as to whether these are snakes transformed
into arrows or snakes fired as arrows. Again, I don't know,
you know at what point you draw a line between
these two things. Also, I'm left wondering if they're venomous
like those of the Fulsa doom uses, or do they
coil around the victim? Now this is the later would
(26:27):
seem to be the case, based on some of the
depictions I've seen of Hanuman, the monkey bound up by
such an arrow, and so it would almost be something
more like a bolus or something like it, Like it
binds the enemy, you shoot it at them, and it
wraps them up. Yeah, that definitely seems to be what's
taking place in some of these illustrations. I was looking
at like you've been shot by a snake and now
(26:49):
you're wrapped up in the snake. Now, of course that's
again we've gone from um Hollywood film to Hindu mythology.
But let's bring it back to history. Okay, So what
about just snake venom arrows, not a snake, Like we're
not even explore we're not gonna even attempt to mythbust
the idea that you could that you could string a
(27:09):
snake in a bow and arrow and fire it at somebody.
That's not gonna work. I don't think that would work.
I don't think you could get the snake to stay
rigid for that. But I do think there have been
cases where snakes have been used, uh, you know, in
intact as bioweapons, you know, just sort of like seeding
enemy territory with poisonous snakes. And certainly the idea of
(27:30):
using snake venom on an arrow, Uh, this does seem
to be a thing. I was looking uh at a
paper titled Chemical and Biological Warfare and Antiquity from by
Stanford's Adrian Mayor of the Geomethology episode, and this was
in History of Toxicology and Environmental health. So, um, some
(27:50):
of the points that Mayor makes. First of all, snake
venom is digestible, so it's actually suitable for killing game.
Oh that's interesting. So like you can eat it without
it necessarily harming you, right, yeah, or you don't have
to worry about Yeah, I've I've I've felled a deer
and now I could potentially eat this deer. I haven't liked,
you know, ruined the deer. Another point they make is
(28:13):
that in warfare UH, the venom can produce agonizing pain
and or a never healing wound. And then there are
numerous venomous snakes in the Mediterranean and UH and in
Africa and Asia that one could turn to. And the
Greeks and Romans recorded numerous groups that were known to
utilize their venom on arrows. Greek geographer Strabo, she writes,
(28:39):
wrote of Ethiopian arrows dipped in quote the gall of serpents,
and that the so ends of the Caucusus used arrow
poison so noxious that the smell alone was supposed to
injure you. And then poisonous arrows, though perhaps not snake based,
pop up in ancient China and South America as well.
We'll come back to China in a second. Um, oh,
(29:00):
this is a big one. Snake venom crystallizes so it
can cling and remain viable on a wooden bone and
metal points. Okay, so it wouldn't just be like dipping
it in water that would run off right, yeah, and
fly off as you send the arrow sailing like it
would have some sticking potential there um. Also, the Greeks
wrote of the deadly arrows of the Scythians coated in scythocon,
(29:22):
which was said to be a combination of venom in
various other infectious agents like dung and human blood. Yeah,
this comes back to something we'll see in the Chinese
example of like people potentially just taking a bunch of
things that were known or suspected to be nasty and
infectious and combining them together and then using that as
a coding for a weapon. Yeah. So the the it
(29:45):
might be that there were some vague concepts about biowarfare
in the ancient world or you know, before we had
a germ theory of disease, say, or modern modern theories
of toxicology and biology and chemistry. But still they would
have some vague ideas that there's a bunch of stuff
you just group under poison and those things that will
will poison you in the direct chemical sense or cause
(30:08):
infections exactly. Uh. Mayor also points out that several venomous
snakes would have been at the disposal of the Scythians,
so the Caucus viper, the European adder, and the sand viper,
Alexander the Great, according to his campaign historians encountered snake
venom weapons in the conquest of India. Uh, specifically in
(30:31):
Harmatilia in modern day Pakistan. Quote, any man who suffered
even a slight wound felt immediately numb and experienced stabbing,
pains and convulsions. The victim's skin became pale and cold,
and he vomited bile. Soon a black froth exuded from
the wound. Purplish green gang green spread rapidly, followed by death.
(30:53):
So the idea was what perhaps this was cobra venom,
but uh and that was long the theory, she points out,
but that the counter to that is the cobra venom
brings on a largely painless death due to respiratory paralysis,
so it's likely that it was another species of venomous
snake that was utilized there. Now. On the subject of
(31:13):
snake venom and Chinese weapons, Christian and I did an
episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind years ago titled
Six Deadly Venoms, where we discussed various venoms from history
and what their biological component was, and we discussed the
Chinese poison goo and what it might have actually been
with all of the folklore and superstition removed the idea
(31:35):
of being that this was goog was supposed to be
a poison that was used by by um um Uh
sort of rival ethnic groups on the border, and so
it doesn't it doesn't. The the idea of goo also
has connotations of like decay or something. You know, well,
they're they're kind of two different there's it's kind of
(31:58):
becomes a complex topic because it's you can sort of
view it as being a poison that was utilized by
a foreign adversary, or it's kind of like an aspect
of their foreignness. It gets kind of complicated, and we
certainly give it more of a robust treatment in that episode.
But one of the main sources we turned to it
on that was the Meal and Poison Interactions on China's
(32:21):
Southwest Frontier by Norma Diamond publishing a edition of Ethnology
and um this was yeah, this was said to be
a poison used by the male people, one of Chinese
China's fifty five ethnic groups, mostly in the mountains of
southern China, and um the Google folklore of the Tang
dynasty from around six eighteen CE onward took a couple
(32:44):
of different forms. Uh. One was that it was just
a quasi magical poison created by sealing five different poisonous
creatures together in a jar and keeping it in a
dark place for a year. So you're throwing a snake,
a sinipede, the toad, the scorpion, and the lizard and
you just let them duke get out in there until
there's only one survivor, and then that survivor dies and
(33:04):
then when you open up the jar, bam, you've got
some poison. It's like the Doomsday of poison. Yeah. Um,
But in terms of figuring out what the actual poison
might be like, if if there's a real poison that
was utilized by by this group of people, you have
to ask, well, what what was it really? What were
they getting it where they weren't really creating a magical poison.
(33:27):
But if we set aside all these supernatural ideas, um,
you know, there are various theories that arise, but one
of them is that there were poisons. Uh, they were
used in hunting by the male. There is the you know,
the sap of a particular tree, but also sometimes they
would mix this sap with the snake venom and it
was widely traded in the area around n Nie. So
(33:50):
this is a case where it doesn't sound like they
definitely depended on snake venom, but snake venom might have
been part of the cocktail, and then we of course
have to or like to to what extent it was
an active part of the cocktail. If it was really
more about the the the herbal ingredients and the you know,
like that the tree sap that was utilized as opposed
to the strength of the the snake venom, this would
(34:12):
be an interesting topic to come back to because of
course one's reminded of to branch over into the amphibian
world the various poisoned dart frogs uh and and they
are high toxicity. But of course, the fact of the
matter with with with these species is that if you
go and see them like your local um, you know,
botanical garden or zoo, they're not actually gonna be poisonous
(34:36):
there because they don't have access to, uh, the the
vegetation that they consume to give them, uh that that
high degree of toxicity. Oh yeah, I mean a lot
of extremely poisonous or extremely venomous animals get their potency
from something in their natural ecology, often from like a
bacterium or something it's from from their their microbiome or
(34:57):
something else that they consume. But anyway to bring it
all act told thulsa doom venomous arrows. Uh, definitely a thing.
Shooting actual snakes at people. Uh, not a thing unless
you are a mythological figure. You know, there are many
animals mentioned in the Bible that actually we don't know
exactly how to translate them, Like modern scholars aren't sure
(35:20):
what this name of an animal refers to. And one
of them that's often been kind of confusing is this
animal that's mentioned called the arrow snake. Uh, so that's
how the name of it is translated, but I never
made the connection. I don't know if that means that
there's some suggestion that it's a snake that would have
had venom used in arrows. I kind of doubt it,
(35:41):
but that's possibility. I mean, you're also left with just
the the undeniable comparison between an arrow, which is a
very old bit of human technology, and then naturally occurring snake.
Like the snake can be stretched out and it looks
kind of like an arrow. The comparison is unavoidable, both
in understanding what it arrow is and understanding what a
(36:02):
snake is. They're both considered deadly, yes, even though most
snakes not deadly. We don't want to contribute to snake
panic on here. Snakes are great. You want snakes living
around your house, You want them, And in fact, I
would love to come back to that. I've already sort
of planted the seeds. We'll see, but I'm I'm thinking
about having a guest come back on the show and
discuss the importance of snakes in our our local habitats.
(36:26):
I am so on board for that. I want to
do whatever we can to fight reptile hate. Al Right, Well,
on that note, we're gonna take one more break, and
when we come back, we will discuss one more aspect
of Falsa Doom's cult and how it compares to the
natural world. Thank alright, we're back. So clearly, the best
(36:48):
thing about the Cone of the Barbarian movie, as we've
discussed before, is James Earl Jones and the role of
Fulsa Doom. But but he does one thing in the
movie that we haven't gotten to yet. I don't think
we've mentioned, which is that he turn himself into a
giant snake. Oh, yes, he does this. He changes into
a giant snake in order to escape the vengeance of Conan. Yeah,
(37:08):
there's also a part where Conan just goes into a
tower and kills a giant snake for no good reason
except I guess he wanted to steal and the snake
woke up while he was stealing. Well, the snake was
a pet, that was it was it Rex or had right?
Which one? Was it by spinel a Thora secundus from
(37:28):
a practis guardian of the universe. Yes, so he had
raised this snake from a child he lived in the temple.
It was the pet of Thusa Doom. So, but it's
also like the security device and Conan and his compatriots
had broken into the temple to steal things. It's just
one of the many examples in the movie where you
see Conan, like uh enacting brutal violence on something where
(37:50):
you kind of take the other things side. It's like,
I'd kind of like to see the snake win here. Yeah,
Conan is just chopping its head off. I'm trying to
steal a gym. Wou't you leave me alone? Yeah? And
certainly Conan does succeed in mass occurring this giant, beautiful
reptile um, but also James Earl Jones can turn himself
(38:11):
into a massive giant snake, which appears is not the
same as the earlier snake. There's just multiple giant snakes
in the movie. Yeah, I mean that's one of the
authentically this is one of the aspects of like old
pulpe wizards is you don't know what they're capable of.
They can pull off any any number of of dark sorceries. Uh,
they have a pet snake, they can turn into a
pet snake. There they can make snakes and arrows. There's
(38:32):
no limit. But it leads to the the unavoidable question
like how big due terrestrial snakes get? How big have
they gotten in the past? Is there anything in the
world today as big as the snake we see in
the Temple of set And if not, was there ever
anything that big? So let's start with the present and
(38:54):
work our way back. So this is a topic I've
I've looked into previously, actually ended up writing an article
about this for How Stuff Works a few years back.
And when we look when we discuss the biggest snakes,
there are a couple of species that we turned to,
and in both cases we turned to the females because
(39:14):
they run larger. So we have the Asian reticulated python
or python reticulattice. And these tend to be the longest
snakes that you find in the natural world. The most
uh reputable record lengths are around twenty five ft or
seven point six meters. Field measurements in a survey averaged
(39:37):
a little under twelve feet or three point two meters
in the jungles of southern Sumatra, maxing out at just
shy of twenty ft or six point one ms um
and uh. Then in South America we have the green anaconda. Okay,
this would be of the movie Anaconda. To bring in
another another giant snake movie, another great cheesy, cheesy action movie,
(40:01):
the one that it ends up eating John Voyd for
a while for a while. Speaking of films I loved
when I was younger and recently went back and revisited,
Anaconda is another one. Yeah, I I love that when
I was a kid. I went back and watched it
within the past couple of years, and that is a
great cheesy creature flick. It is worth a watch now
(40:21):
is the creature in question the giant snake or John
Voyd because he's the villain. But John Voyd in it
is also speaking of like like actors who go whole
hog just like go over the horizon with their villain performances. Uh,
John Void's doing it in this movie. He's got this
accent that who knows what it's supposed to sound like.
(40:43):
He's like a he's playing like a South American Dracula
who hunts snakes. It's just amazing. I need to see
that one again. So yes, if you go to South America,
you'll get the green anaconda. And these tend to be
the more massive of the two species here. Larger females
typical rate typically reach lengths of nine ft two point
seven meters, and they way upward of two hundred pounds
(41:04):
or nine point seven krams. Up to twenty nine and
thirty thirty two ft lengths have been considered possible by experts.
So this tends to be when you get into arguments
about what's the largest living snake. Uh, you know you're
gonna have people that are on team articulated python. You're
gonna have people that are on team green anaconda. If
you go to a zoo or a reptile house and
(41:26):
you happen to see um specimens of both species, you
could probably make a case for either depending on how
large the individual is. And also in either case, they're
also wilder stories and even some photo evidence of skins
UH that suggest larger creatures. So it might be just
(41:46):
a reported sighting or someone said, look, here's a picture
of the skin we got from the snake. The problem
in these situations is that snake skins, once they've been
removed from the snake, may be stretched out a bit.
So not only you can stretch your story, and you
can stretch your physical evidence and it becomes harder to
lean on it um. But to just give an idea
(42:09):
about the about some of the crazier sightings UH. In
ninety three, Fritz w Uptograph reported seeing a fifty to
sixty ft or fifteen to eighteen meter green anaconda. And
that's one that I've seen the experts do. They really
kind of rolled their eyes at that one. But that's
so that both of these are cases where those giant snakes,
(42:31):
those are impressive creatures if you get to see them
at any kind of a reptile house or certainly if
you ever get to see one in the wild, like
that's that's impressive. But they're not as big as the
as the giant snake we see in Cone in the
Barbarian To find something that big, we have to go
back in time, uh, you know, not to the Hyborian age,
you know, we have we have to go well past
the time of my adventure. We have to go back
(42:54):
sixty million years. Uh. Specifically have to go to what
is now known as because the country of Colombia, and
we have to go to the Sera John rainforest, and
that is where we will find the Titana Boa. Titana Boa, yes, uh,
and this is uh, this is a creature that's received
a lot of press. Uh. There's been a lot of
(43:16):
there's some cool artwork that was created with to go
along with the studies about the Titana Boa and the
fossil evidence that that informs us about its size. But
this was an impressive serpent. This was this is kind
of a very like a hot box jungle environment. And
that's one of the reasons that, uh, this serpent could
(43:36):
reach such a size sixty million years ago. Uh. The
temperatures there uh probably an average yearly temperature of eighty
six to ninety three degrees fahrenheit or thirty to thirty
four degrees celsius, far hotter than modern tropical rainforest temperatures.
And and the size of this creature was impressive. University
of Florida paleontologists estimate its tip to tail link that
(43:58):
a whopping forty two eight or thirteen meters, and it
would have had a crushing it would have had a
crushing weight of more than a ton. Wow. So this
particular species, titanaboa, would definitely be able to stand in
for that giant snake we see in ConA, the Barbarian.
And don't you lay a finger on it? Conan, don't
(44:19):
you hurt the snake. It is a holy, blameless creature.
It is uh. You know, whatever your feelings are about
Fulsa Doom and his awful death cult um which grant
it is an awful death cult. You know, we can't
blame that on the snake. Why don't they look I
have a question about snake size and uh and are
supposed instincts. Now. We talked a little bit in the
(44:41):
last episode about the idea that there's there's an ongoing
debate about the extent to which are the common fear
of certain types of animal forms, particularly things like snakes
and spiders. Is is hardwired into human brains, it's the
thing that you're born being afraid of with out even
having having been told it exists. Or is it a
(45:04):
culturally conditioned fear and something we learn about from fiction
and from people around us that we're supposed to be
afraid of. And there's obviously going to be some cultural conditioning.
The question is is there something that's there before that is?
Is it there in the brain before the culture gets
to you. And there's some evidence I think that, you know,
even like babies looking at pictures of snakes get people
(45:26):
dilation when when they see an image of a snake.
But my question would be does that scale like does
the I mean like, once you get to a snake
of this size, it's so big it's not even really
recognizable as a snake in the way you would normally
perceive snake threats. It becomes a dragon, it becomes some
kind of completely other thing. I mean, the kind of
(45:48):
snakes that would be any sort of normal threat that
you might have biological conditioning to avoid would be relatively
small snakes. Their threat would be in their venom, not
in their size. But you're you're saying, like, if we
were to encounter a titana boa in the wild, would
it even register as a snake to us? Well, I
think on on one level, you know, yeah, it wouldn't
(46:10):
have to. Like, I think there is something, there's that
kind of magical moment, like a darkly magical moment, whenever
you perceive a predator in the wild, like like, not
not not just any predator, but a creature that that
could conceivably prey upon a human um at least, you know,
(46:30):
a weakened human. Uh, it seems to it feels like
it sets off different alarms in your brain, you know,
like when you lock eyes with that lion when you're
I've certainly been in this situation when you're the first
person to the zoo and and the lion sees you,
and you lock eyes with a lion, or perhaps the
lion looks at the small child that's traveling with you, um,
(46:53):
and you realize, oh, I would you know if if
if not for this glass wall, if not for for
the artificial as acts of this encounter, Um, I would
be the one fleeing. Now, I would be the one,
you know, at least backing away, if not running in tearror.
Uh So I feel like that would certainly kick in
if you were to encounter the Titana bo. Yeah. I
(47:14):
guess I'm not saying people wouldn't be afraid of it
with good reason. I would. I think they wouldn't say
eke is the is the difference. They wouldn't say, eke
a snake. They would say, oh my god, a snake.
But I guess humans in the Titana bow never existed
at the same time, so there'll be no reason to
have this kind of conditioned fear. Yeah. I mean the
(47:34):
closest would be, you know, any degree of conditioning that
might come from being around um. You know green anicon
is in reticulated pythons. But that's a different that's a
different level of It's totally not the same thing as
the danger of a venomous snake, where I could conceivably accidentally,
um wind up bitten by the snake. But I think
(47:55):
also a lot of the danger there with the venomous
snakes that it has been hypothesized if we have some
kind of hardwired instinctual reaction to snakes. It was mainly
about children, right, that there would be small children would
be vulnerable to them, right, And of course that's going
to be the case with a lot of predators in general.
You know, the the wild cat that is not a
(48:16):
danger to an adult human could be a danger to
a small child. I mean, definitely that's the case, even
with modern day crocodilians. Oh but they're also they're definitely
crocodilians that are a danger to adults. Yes, yes, but
but but even you know, more so so to a
diminutive human. Yeah. Well, I'd just like to wrap up
today by saying I'm on thulsa doom side. I would
(48:37):
join his cult. I would take his side against Conan
and his evil friends. And uh yeah, there's where my
loyalty is. Okay, even even though, just to be clear,
they do practice cannibalism. It's firmly established, you know, big
cannib annibalism here and there. To hang out with spin
only thorson, you know, yeah, they don't seem to be
(48:58):
a certain amount of just hanging out and chill. Uh.
In the temple set flesh is stronger than steel. That's right,
that's what he tells us. All right, So there you
have it. Um Again, we set out to do one episode.
We had to break this one into two. But I
think it was worthwhile because we got to explore a
few things that I don't think we would have necessarily
have recovered on the show had we not been prompted
(49:19):
by Fulsa Doom's teachings. Likewise, we get to highlight some
areas we might come back to in the future. Uh,
were related to the study of of serpents. Yeah, totally.
I'm not done. This is not this is not just
another snake cult. We will be the snake religion by
the time we're finished. All right. Well, Uh. In the meantime,
(49:40):
if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff
to Blow your Mind, you want to check out those
past movie episodes that we've done Highlander two, two thousand
and one, of Space Odyssey, The Dark Crystal. You can
find them all. It's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
And if you want to support the show, the best
thing you can do is rate and review us wherever
you have the power to do so. Um, you know,
wherever you get this podcast asked give us some stars
(50:01):
leave a nice comment that helps us out. Also, if
you haven't checked out Invention, check out Invention. It's the
other podcast that we do. It is an invention by
invention exploration of human techno history. We've been looking at
a lot of photography and motion picture. So you know,
if you perhaps you check this episode out because you're
into films and you're like, what kind of science are
(50:21):
they going to squeeze out of this? Uh, this puppy well, uh,
then go check out Invention and learn about where the
technology of films came from. Huge thanks as always to
our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and Tory Harrison. 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, just to say oh, you can
(50:41):
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wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back to talk snakes. It's
snake talk. That's right. We're continuing this month's movie episode
(00:23):
and now it's episodes because we you you got to
pick the movie this time. You pick Conan the Barbarian.
Hadn't seen it in a while. I was wondering how
it held up, and you know, it kind of did,
it kind of didn't. But it's it's definitely worth talking about.
But one of the key centerpieces in this film is
the cult of set thulsa dooms religion. I mean, he
(00:44):
seems into the branding, even in the earlier portions of
the film when he's just a warrior. Yeah, that's a
little confusing, because the whole thing is that, like James
Earl Jones, he was like once I was a young
man and I was just a war lord running around
raiding villages. You know, the sorry I killed your parents
and not that's a yeah. I don't think he ever
said he was no. He didn't say no. In fact,
he says, Dakona, and he's like, got Arnold Schwartzendinger on
(01:05):
the floor. He's like, when when I destroyed your village,
I made you You're welcome. Yeah, pretty much. Uh. But
but then later in the film he's he's like, oh,
I don't do that anymore. Now I'm just a regular
cult leader. But in both cases he's carrying the symbol
of his cult even though he's not a cult leader yet.
In in the earlier part, and the symbol of his cult,
(01:28):
which is referred to in the movie as the Cult
of set or the Temple of set Uh. And in
the last episode we discussed the real ancient Egyptian not
well maybe not real, but the real mythology of the
ancient Egyptian god Set or Seth, and how he is
very different than the set represented in the film. But
the Cult of set in the film has the symbol
of the two headed snake with with the two heads
(01:51):
facing off against each other. Right, I mean, maybe part
of it is that just even though his approach to
life changed a little bit, he just always had great branding,
always loves snakes, or certainly he just maybe just took
up the the the emblem at some point there was
a pre existing cult of Set. I mean certainly that
would if you're creating a cult leader. I mean, some
cult leaders create their faith wholesale, uh, from from new parts.
(02:16):
But for the most part, for the most part, they're
depending on something that came before and just inserting themselves
into it. That's exactly right. I mean, in fact, I
can scarcely think of a cult that doesn't draw on
some existing mythology. I mean, uh, you think about the
Heaven's Gate cult. I mean that was in a large
part based on like UFO mythology and existing Christianity. Even
(02:38):
if you look at like the Raylians and Rileyans, one
of the the UFO religions, they're the guy who found it,
has this whole book going through like the books of
the Bible and all this talking about how it's actually
all about alien encounters and alien technology. It's basically an
ancient aliens religion. So the emblem for the Temple of
Set in this film has this this really cool logo
(03:00):
actually that it's like there are two different versions of it.
You kind of see one is like on the like
the staffs and the armor that they carry, and then
there's this like simple simplified logo, but it's a snake
with two heads as a head on each end, like
a like the head of the snake is a snakehead
and the tail of the snake is a snakehead, and
they're they're rising against each other, and in the background
(03:23):
there is a son And in fact it's a plot
point in the film because Conan and his friends go
around looking for Falsa Doom played by James Earl Jones
by asking about this symbol. It's like, have you seen
this symbol anywhere? That's how they they initially connect with him.
So I should kind of surprise, as a surprise to
nobody that the idea of a snake with a head
on each end pre dates this film, that you know
(03:45):
that this this is something that we can go back
in time and we can find examples of in uh
in the human use of symbols. Right now, you might
be thinking about other existing snake symbols that are a
little bit different. You might be thinking about the orb
corros where a snake is swallowing its own tail, But
that's different than two snake heads facing each other, right though,
(04:07):
I mean in Theora Boruss defense we usually don't see
the tail because it's in his mouth. Who's to say
that wasn't a hat on there? But yeah, the the
or a Borus, the world serpent, the mid guard storm, Um,
it's uh. It is yet depicted as the snake consuming itself.
On the other hand, one that is very similar but
isn't quite the same thing does have snakeheads facing each
other would be the Caducius. This is this is like
(04:29):
the staff with the snakes staff of hers. Yeah. Yeah,
So what we're talking about here is the the amphis
beina and it's a it's a name that's derived from
the Greek to go both ways because of the idea
is that it's a snake that can move forwards or
backwards with ease. The one thing I've read is that
snakes that just have one normal head and a normal
(04:50):
tail can sometimes slither backwards. Like I was reading a
book about how the author observed that coral snakes seem
to be able to slither backwards just fine. Right, And
so I mean, of course, in all of this you're talking,
we're dealing with something on one level, there's the symbolism
level of it, right, Like what does the idea of
a snake with two heads mean, how does it? What
(05:11):
does it? How does it function in the human mind?
But then also there is a certain degree of just
like weird tales about what snakes look like. So, according
to Carol Rose, the folklorist, his books always come back
to She she has a nice write up about it
in one of her monster books, and she points out
that the Greek writer Lucan described it as a desert
(05:32):
creature of North Africa. Um and um, and of course
as well, we'll we'll see plenty of the Elder of
course also wrote about it. But I also was reading
from a article Stalking the Emphis Beena by Sydney J.
Levy from the Journal of Consumer Research. That but yeah,
(05:53):
but that mentions that the this particular symbol quote was
probably intended to express the horror and anguish associated with
ambivalent situations. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean that. Um,
it certainly goes with a kind of classic archetype of
of psychodynamics, right, the idea that like this might not
(06:14):
be the most correct way of thinking about the mind. Now,
but if you go back to Freudian thought, you know,
he often seemed to emphasize that major problems in the mind.
The psychoses and things were caused by states of ambivalence
where you had, you know, conflicting desires or conflicting tendencies
that couldn't be resolved. Should I stay or should I go?
I don't know. I'm of two snakes on the man. H.
(06:37):
So this particular beast also shows up in a lot
of medieval beast theories with as a winged creature with
two legs at it as well. Uh, sometimes it's said
that it can roll like a hoop snake, a hoop
snake being kind of a form of an aura borous
that's less, less concerned with what happens if a snake
consumes itself. How does this house this play out in
my mind? Versus what if a snake just at its
(07:00):
own tail and then rolled like a wheel down a
down a hill. Now this is a mythical creature, no
real creature, though there is a real wheel spider. Yeah, yeah,
there are some real rolling creatures, but but not quite
like a snake. Um Plenty of Here's what Plenty had
to say about the the amphisbina in the Natural History
Glad Plenty was on it. The amphisbina has a twin
(07:22):
head that is one at the tail end as well
as though it were not enough for poison to be
poured out of one mount, because that's another aspect of
it is is that the creature is supposed to be
like any mythic serpent. It's highly venomous, and so maybe
the ideas it's just so venomous that one head is
not enough. It needs two heads for all that venom. Uh.
Then likewise, there their accounts of how you can use
(07:45):
its dried skin to say, treat rheumatism. Uh. So there's
you know, there are all these different stories about it,
and it reminds me a lot of the of some
of the things we're discussing about the bassilisk. Now Rose
writes that while exaggerated, she thinks it was likely based
on some real venomous reptile in the Libyan desert, perhaps
(08:05):
one that was capable of slithering in either direction, which,
as you said, that's some real snakes. Not that impressive.
But if you didn't know that, it's kind of like
if you don't know that horses can lay down, and
then you see one laying down, sleeping and you're like, whoa.
Then you start reporting you're gonna call it plenty immediately.
I didn't tell him or the other possibilities that is
that it's a snake that seemed to raise its tail
(08:27):
a tail like a head when it was threatened. And
we'll come back to to that because there are some
potential examples of that for sure. Then there. You know,
if we look outside of Western traditions, we also see
double headed serpents in the Aztec tradition. Yeah, with a
with a you know, there's a particularly interesting fifteenth or
(08:47):
sixteenth century turquoise example that I'm sure everyone's seeing photos of.
There's a particularly a nice example of this in the
British Museum. Uh. This this turquoise uh serpent creature uh
with this like almost bear like head on on either end.
And it's uncertain exactly what it's depicting. So, you know,
(09:09):
the the idea maybe that this is just representing that
serpentine rebirth that we've talked about, So this is not
so much a snake with two heads, but that it's
a snake emerging from itself from its skin. It also
may be well be related to quetzal codal, which we
we did an episode on talking about the importance of
the plumed serpent in in meso American religion. And uh,
(09:35):
and we should also point out that that particular god
like there there's a snake god that is certainly far
removed from anything Falsa Doom represents no thoroughly nondo me
And then uh, I also read that it's it's possible
that this is not like clearly maybe an Aztec creation,
but maybe it's a creation of the mix the mixed
tech people. UM, so you're you're ultimately going with with
(09:58):
perhaps several different degrees of separate between the people who
originally um dreamed up and created this work of art
versus those certainly who now possess it. So obviously the
next question is are there two headed snakes in real life? Oh? Yes, yeah,
the answer is clearly yes. Two headed snakes of a
certain kind I will say, absolutely do exist and are
(10:20):
pretty regularly captured or breading captivity. It seems like maybe
once every couple of years, herpetologists come across one new
and interesting case of this that blows up in the media.
I think they probably get discovered more oftense, just only
sometimes do they really catch fire on the internet. But yes,
there are pretty frequently cases of two headed snakes known
(10:41):
as diecephalic or polycephalic, meaning you know, two heads or
many heads from species like ladder snakes, copper heads, king
snakes I've read about in all those species and others,
and these snakes generally have two heads, both growing from
the neck end of the body. There is no species
of snake that is regularly like this. Rather, this is
(11:04):
like this is not an adaptation or evolutionary change. It's
a developmental anomaly. It occurs the same way that most
other conjoined twins do when an embryo in in utero
splits into twins, but it doesn't split all the way,
leading to embryos that continue to develop while remaining attached
in some way. That's right, And if if you want
some more information on conjoined twins, uh, we we actually
(11:27):
discussed this in our Halloween episode whatever Halloween episodes last year,
the Tales from the Crypt episode, because of course there's
a Tales from the Crypt episode. There's more than one
actually that involves that in an insensitive manner, but so
we we we use that episode as an excuse to like,
all right, let's let's put aside the trash because let's
face the tales in the crypt is ultimately a trashy show.
(11:50):
But let's set all that aside and discuss, like, you know,
what the actual science is. And so we went through
all the various forms that occur, and so, yeah, this
this occurs in all kinds of animals and in cases
I've read about. What happens with snakes is you've got
two heads that are side by side, both extending from
the neck at different um. Sometimes there will be different
amounts of like length of the body that that are separated.
(12:14):
Sometimes the heads are very close to each other. Sometimes
they've got significant amounts of of separate neck, but they
share connections, usually to the top of the elementary canal. Um.
But the question would be here, what about a snake
with a head on both ends of the length of
the body, like in Thulsa Dooms standard for the cult
of set Could there be a snake that's got a
(12:36):
head for a tail? Well, we already mentioned that plenty
of the elder Um discussed one, and uh, you know,
we don't have plenty with us any any longer, but
we do have the Daily mail, and uh, and so
I was I was looking around, you know, for doing
various searches for two headed snakes, and I found an
article from September twenty third, two thousand twelve by Daily
(12:58):
Mail reporter titled they Both Seemed to Control It. Family
finds snake with two heads, one on each end of
its body. And so this all seemed to have happened
in South Carolina, and it was originally reported by Fox
Carolina presumably It's Fantastic Beasts news Beat newsdesk, and it
was it was identified by the local high school's biology
(13:21):
department as a rough earth snake. Uh. And you look
at these pictures, they're not, you know, super clear. Um,
but there was video. There was video at some point,
but the video I couldn't find actually alright good because
the video footage I found had been removed, as as
had the like I was getting a four or four
on the original Fox reporting. But uh, the article was
(13:45):
was pretty fun. My favorite line from it was quote,
but while the snake pulls itself in opposite directions, young
Savannah and Preston are also pulled in different directions on
what to name the snake. That's right. One of them
wanted to name it Billy Bob and the other said
Oreo right, um, uh yeah. I was looking for more
(14:06):
on this story to see to try to dig underneath
like the the Daily Mail article, and I couldn't. I
couldn't get under it. I don't understand why there wasn't
more follow up. I mean, I suspect it's because the
snake died and everyone was like, oh no, I'm sad
and let's move on with it. But or because the
original reporting might have been mistaken. That's the other. Yeah,
we just don't We don't know ultimately. Yeah. So even
(14:28):
though there's video, I mean I did watch video, and
it's a small snake, but they've got it in like
a little igloo cooler and it's slithering around and it
has some kind of it wasn't super high definition, but
it's got something on its tail. It looks sort of
head shaped. Even though I saw some video, I'm still
a little bit skeptical. I wonder if what's being interpreted
(14:49):
as a head on the tail end of the snake
is not really ahead. Yeah, I mean that's that's a
huge possibility. Uh yeah. So just to as as back
up for that as that being a possibility, I was
looking at a book from J h U Press two
thousand eighteen called American Snakes by Sean P. Graham. Uh.
And just as a side note before we get to
(15:10):
the thing that I went to this book for. As
a side note, there's a part I found where the
author is describing strange defense strategies that snakes employ. Uh.
And this unrelated one is called cloacle popping. Oh okay,
So sometimes have you read about this? No, I mean,
if you tell, if you'd asked me what cloacle popping was,
I would assume it's like the hottest new dance number
(15:32):
that I'm not familiar with. So sometimes when threatened, Uh,
some types of snakes will rapidly turn their cloaca inside out.
The cloaca is the common hole at the rear of
the body that's used for urinary tract, digestive tract, and
reproductive tract. So it's it's a common sort of hole
back there that takes care of all the cummings and
(15:55):
goings at the back side of the body. So when
these snakes get captured or handled or encounter some kind
of menace, they will sort of suddenly vigorously poop out
part of their own rectum. Basically, it's not a rectum.
It's cloaca, which produces these popping or squishing sounds which
are vaguely audible to us. Uh. It's not known what
(16:17):
adaptive purpose, if any of this has. But there's your
fact of the day, chloecal pot there, Okay. But also
the reason I was reading about this is that I
was looking for examples, and this is absolutely true that
some snake species have a defensive strategy that's known as automimicry,
which involves having a tail that looks like a second head.
(16:39):
And examples of this include the rubber boa, which can
use its tail as a decoy head if it's attacked.
Like if this snake is attacked, if you've seen pictures
of the rubber boa, you might have seen it not
just coiled, but sort of tied up in itself like
a not it'll you know, be a jumble, and while
it's in this tangle, it will raise its tail all
(17:00):
up as if it were raising its head up, and
allow whatever is attacking it to attack its tail, while
you know, the real head is defended under the coiled
body and perhaps searching for an escape route. Right. And
so in this it has a lot in common with
various other animals where the ideas of a predator is
going to attack, you draw their attack away from them.
(17:22):
The more sensitive parts of your anatomy draw them away
from them from like your brain or your Torso get
them towards the tail. There are some creatures that even
practice something that's known as autotomy, where they will like
release their tail sort of as a distraction or a
gift to the predator while the rest of them can escape. Yeah.
I encountered this on a nature path over the weekend.
(17:43):
I was walking with my son and lo and behold,
there in the path is we see a little lizard
tail still moving, still flopping back and forth, no sign
of the of its former owner. And so we were
trying to decide, well, what happened here? Did did the
lizard you know, an attempt to prevent predation and it
didn't work? Or did it work? And it's ever all
(18:06):
the parties have gone their separate ways. Uh. Yeah, it's
a fascinating survival adaptation. And there I believe there is
an episode of stuff to blow your mind in the
vault about it. Yeah. I think we did a two
parter about tails. Long We talked about the scorpion scorpion autonomy, Yeah,
where its tail will come off, But then it can't
live much longer after that because it can't poop. That's right,
(18:28):
the tail or, one of the lost segments of the
tail contained the scorpion anus, and therefore it can never
poop again. Which I mean, as far as scorpion timelines get,
it's probably not that bad. But that's the world of scorpions.
Let's get back to the world. How do you know
how bad it is I speak for the scorpions, Well,
(18:49):
I mean never having to poop again. I can just imagine, Yeah,
there's gonna be there's gonna be some huge downsides to that,
but then there are certain upsides, namely not having to
poop again. Okay, so I want to be clear. I
want to try to be humble about what's going on
with the with the supposed two headed, you know, head
on the tail snake here. I don't know that what's
(19:11):
going on here is like a mistaken case of automimicry.
I I just will say that I'm not yet convinced
that this is really a snake with a head on
both ends. It seems a little hard for me to
imagine exactly how that happens, Like, where is the cloaca
for one thing, Is it in the middle of the snake? Well,
the two heads go out from each side. All the snakes,
(19:32):
all the snakes where we have confirmed accounts that, like
a really well documented that I could find are where
the heads appear at the same end. And so I'm yeah,
I'm I'm skeptical about this. I am not yet convinced
that this is for real. Yeah, I definitely would love
to see more evidence. Um, be it just visual evidence
(19:53):
of this particular snake or just more people saying oh yeah,
Like I would love to hear from the the actual
uh science teacher who resumably weigh in on this. Oh yeah,
if you've seen this thing up close and you're listening
now get in touch. Yeah. And likewise, I feel like
the town that this occurred in, like this should be
if this was real, this snake should be like the
mascot for the city at this point. Um, so yeah,
(20:16):
talking pulling itself into uh. But but anyway, just to
get back to the broader subject of polycephaly or having
two heads in the serpent world, Um, it's rare, but
it does seem to occur. It seems to occur more
in the snake world, but it's really hard to say
for sure because such specimens they tend to die fast
(20:39):
in the wild. Yeah, I've seen it speculated, but not
known for sure that it happens more often in snakes
in captivity than it does in wild snakes. But we
that's not something that's know and it's just kind of
a possibility. I found a two thousand twelve paper in
the Bulletin of the Chicago or Herpetological Society titled two
headed Snakes Make high Mate It's Pets by Van Walock,
(21:02):
and the author points out that there was a nineteen
thirty seven book by an individual by the name of
Cunningham on the subject of two headed snakes, and that
book catalog nine and fifty cases in one d and
sixty nine species from ninety four genera and um. The
author here writes that currently, and this is two thousand twelve, currently, uh,
(21:23):
there were one thousand fifty known cases one species in
a hundred and three genera, and Van Wallack drove home
that most of them end up just drowning in the egg,
or they're still born, or they die shortly after birth.
But if they if they do survive, one of the
things is, and this is the key to the title
of the paper, they're difficult to care for. They require
(21:44):
extra assistance in in uh, you know, in eating, they
need extra systence even when they shed their skin. But
they can survive in captivity in some cases. Yeah, but
they do encounter all kinds of problems to survival. I mean,
they're good reasons you don't usually come across them alive
in the wild. For one thing, with two heads, movement
is a lot more difficult. You know, you've got two
(22:04):
brains that can struggle for control of the body. Feeding
can be more difficult as the two heads sometimes fight
each other over access to the food. Also, in some
cases after, of course, predation can be more difficult. And
then in some cases after feeding, I was reading that
if one of the snake's heads smells like prey because
(22:25):
it just eight, the other head may sometimes mistake that
head for prey and try to attack it, and then
we're potentially back in oral Boras country at that point. Yeah.
And another thing that I thought was kind of morbidly
interesting in the in the van Wallaka piece that that
you just mentioned, there is a risk. For example, if
you've got a snake in a two headed snake in
(22:45):
a tank, a risk of the snake crawling into apertures
or past obstacles, because of course, snakes very often like
to hide inside holes and enclosures. But if they have
two heads bifurcated at the neck, you can run into
a situation where one head is trying to pass by
an obstacle or go into a hole. That's essentially like
(23:06):
like smashing the other head against that aperture or that
obstacle trying to get past it, and could end up
sort of peeling the other head off as it struggles
to go forward. That's not good. That's not good for anybody.
And uh, and the snakes are not I mean, they
don't have a lot of complex cognition. They can't usually think, oh,
I should back up, you know, it just doesn't seem
(23:29):
to occur to them. Now, outside of the world of snakes,
we should also know that real life worm lizards are
also known as Emphis pina um, but they of course
only have one head, but their tail does trunkate in
a way that kind of resembles a head. So is
it a form of automimicry. They think, I'm not entirely
sure on that if it actually functions as a as
(23:51):
as a mimic a mimic head, or it's just one
of these things where where we look at and we say, oh, well,
the end kind of looks like a head, and then
they decided to bestow this name upon them. Okay, I
think we got to take a break, but we will
be right back with more. Alright, we're back. Okay, So
we're thinking about Fulsa doom in the Conan the Barbarian movie.
(24:14):
One thing that the great Fulsa doom Uh does. One
trick he's got up his sleeve is the snake arrow. Yes,
so this is one of my my favorite snake tricks
from the film. And there are there's at least there
are a couple of scenes where he employs this one
extremely dramatically, where he'll he'll draw a venomous snake and
(24:35):
then he'll he'll stretch it out and he'll make it
rigid like an arrow. And then he will take the
rigid snake and he will put it in a bow
and then he will fire it as an arrow at
one of his enemies. And so he like he takes
a venomous snake and uses it as a venomous arrow. Yeah,
this is how he kills Conan's beloved the thief area. Yes,
(24:57):
so if you're watching this, maybe you're not asking questions,
but I can't help it. But wonder where does this
come from? Like they had to have been inspired by this,
And even if they weren't inspired by a particular detail
from from history and mythology, uh, then clearly they weren't
the ones to think of it first. Somebody else came
up with this cool idea earlier. Uh. And indeed we
(25:18):
do see some form of this in the Hindu epic
the Ramayana. So there are mentions in uh in the
Ramayana of serpent arrows or sharpa vanna. And then there's
also the Naga Pasha powerful snake turned arrow created created
by Brahma. So one particular character, we have the Prince
(25:41):
of Lanka, and this is the son of the tin
headed Ravana Ravana being. Yeah, he's like the demon king
principal antagonist in in in this particular Hindu epic. Um.
And anyway, the Prince of Lanka is named Indrajit and
he employs a host of wondrous weapons, including serpent arrows.
(26:05):
And I could have this wrong, but it seems like
the descriptions vary as to whether these are snakes transformed
into arrows or snakes fired as arrows. Again, I don't know,
you know at what point you draw a line between
these two things. Also, I'm left wondering if they're venomous
like those of the Fulsa doom uses, or do they
coil around the victim? Now this is the later would
(26:27):
seem to be the case, based on some of the
depictions I've seen of Hanuman, the monkey bound up by
such an arrow, and so it would almost be something
more like a bolus or something like it, Like it
binds the enemy, you shoot it at them, and it
wraps them up. Yeah, that definitely seems to be what's
taking place in some of these illustrations. I was looking
at like you've been shot by a snake and now
(26:49):
you're wrapped up in the snake. Now, of course that's
again we've gone from um Hollywood film to Hindu mythology.
But let's bring it back to history. Okay, So what
about just snake venom arrows, not a snake, Like we're
not even explore we're not gonna even attempt to mythbust
the idea that you could that you could string a
(27:09):
snake in a bow and arrow and fire it at somebody.
That's not gonna work. I don't think that would work.
I don't think you could get the snake to stay
rigid for that. But I do think there have been
cases where snakes have been used, uh, you know, in
intact as bioweapons, you know, just sort of like seeding
enemy territory with poisonous snakes. And certainly the idea of
(27:30):
using snake venom on an arrow, Uh, this does seem
to be a thing. I was looking uh at a
paper titled Chemical and Biological Warfare and Antiquity from by
Stanford's Adrian Mayor of the Geomethology episode, and this was
in History of Toxicology and Environmental health. So, um, some
(27:50):
of the points that Mayor makes. First of all, snake
venom is digestible, so it's actually suitable for killing game.
Oh that's interesting. So like you can eat it without
it necessarily harming you, right, yeah, or you don't have
to worry about Yeah, I've I've I've felled a deer
and now I could potentially eat this deer. I haven't liked,
you know, ruined the deer. Another point they make is
(28:13):
that in warfare UH, the venom can produce agonizing pain
and or a never healing wound. And then there are
numerous venomous snakes in the Mediterranean and UH and in
Africa and Asia that one could turn to. And the
Greeks and Romans recorded numerous groups that were known to
utilize their venom on arrows. Greek geographer Strabo, she writes,
(28:39):
wrote of Ethiopian arrows dipped in quote the gall of serpents,
and that the so ends of the Caucusus used arrow
poison so noxious that the smell alone was supposed to
injure you. And then poisonous arrows, though perhaps not snake based,
pop up in ancient China and South America as well.
We'll come back to China in a second. Um, oh,
(29:00):
this is a big one. Snake venom crystallizes so it
can cling and remain viable on a wooden bone and
metal points. Okay, so it wouldn't just be like dipping
it in water that would run off right, yeah, and
fly off as you send the arrow sailing like it
would have some sticking potential there um. Also, the Greeks
wrote of the deadly arrows of the Scythians coated in scythocon,
(29:22):
which was said to be a combination of venom in
various other infectious agents like dung and human blood. Yeah,
this comes back to something we'll see in the Chinese
example of like people potentially just taking a bunch of
things that were known or suspected to be nasty and
infectious and combining them together and then using that as
a coding for a weapon. Yeah. So the the it
(29:45):
might be that there were some vague concepts about biowarfare
in the ancient world or you know, before we had
a germ theory of disease, say, or modern modern theories
of toxicology and biology and chemistry. But still they would
have some vague ideas that there's a bunch of stuff
you just group under poison and those things that will
will poison you in the direct chemical sense or cause
(30:08):
infections exactly. Uh. Mayor also points out that several venomous
snakes would have been at the disposal of the Scythians,
so the Caucus viper, the European adder, and the sand viper,
Alexander the Great, according to his campaign historians encountered snake
venom weapons in the conquest of India. Uh, specifically in
(30:31):
Harmatilia in modern day Pakistan. Quote, any man who suffered
even a slight wound felt immediately numb and experienced stabbing,
pains and convulsions. The victim's skin became pale and cold,
and he vomited bile. Soon a black froth exuded from
the wound. Purplish green gang green spread rapidly, followed by death.
(30:53):
So the idea was what perhaps this was cobra venom,
but uh and that was long the theory, she points out,
but that the counter to that is the cobra venom
brings on a largely painless death due to respiratory paralysis,
so it's likely that it was another species of venomous
snake that was utilized there. Now. On the subject of
(31:13):
snake venom and Chinese weapons, Christian and I did an
episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind years ago titled
Six Deadly Venoms, where we discussed various venoms from history
and what their biological component was, and we discussed the
Chinese poison goo and what it might have actually been
with all of the folklore and superstition removed the idea
(31:35):
of being that this was goog was supposed to be
a poison that was used by by um um Uh
sort of rival ethnic groups on the border, and so
it doesn't it doesn't. The the idea of goo also
has connotations of like decay or something. You know, well,
they're they're kind of two different there's it's kind of
(31:58):
becomes a complex topic because it's you can sort of
view it as being a poison that was utilized by
a foreign adversary, or it's kind of like an aspect
of their foreignness. It gets kind of complicated, and we
certainly give it more of a robust treatment in that episode.
But one of the main sources we turned to it
on that was the Meal and Poison Interactions on China's
(32:21):
Southwest Frontier by Norma Diamond publishing a edition of Ethnology
and um this was yeah, this was said to be
a poison used by the male people, one of Chinese
China's fifty five ethnic groups, mostly in the mountains of
southern China, and um the Google folklore of the Tang
dynasty from around six eighteen CE onward took a couple
(32:44):
of different forms. Uh. One was that it was just
a quasi magical poison created by sealing five different poisonous
creatures together in a jar and keeping it in a
dark place for a year. So you're throwing a snake,
a sinipede, the toad, the scorpion, and the lizard and
you just let them duke get out in there until
there's only one survivor, and then that survivor dies and
(33:04):
then when you open up the jar, bam, you've got
some poison. It's like the Doomsday of poison. Yeah. Um,
But in terms of figuring out what the actual poison
might be like, if if there's a real poison that
was utilized by by this group of people, you have
to ask, well, what what was it really? What were
they getting it where they weren't really creating a magical poison.
(33:27):
But if we set aside all these supernatural ideas, um,
you know, there are various theories that arise, but one
of them is that there were poisons. Uh, they were
used in hunting by the male. There is the you know,
the sap of a particular tree, but also sometimes they
would mix this sap with the snake venom and it
was widely traded in the area around n Nie. So
(33:50):
this is a case where it doesn't sound like they
definitely depended on snake venom, but snake venom might have
been part of the cocktail, and then we of course
have to or like to to what extent it was
an active part of the cocktail. If it was really
more about the the the herbal ingredients and the you know,
like that the tree sap that was utilized as opposed
to the strength of the the snake venom, this would
(34:12):
be an interesting topic to come back to because of
course one's reminded of to branch over into the amphibian
world the various poisoned dart frogs uh and and they
are high toxicity. But of course, the fact of the
matter with with with these species is that if you
go and see them like your local um, you know,
botanical garden or zoo, they're not actually gonna be poisonous
(34:36):
there because they don't have access to, uh, the the
vegetation that they consume to give them, uh that that
high degree of toxicity. Oh yeah, I mean a lot
of extremely poisonous or extremely venomous animals get their potency
from something in their natural ecology, often from like a
bacterium or something it's from from their their microbiome or
(34:57):
something else that they consume. But anyway to bring it
all act told thulsa doom venomous arrows. Uh, definitely a thing.
Shooting actual snakes at people. Uh, not a thing unless
you are a mythological figure. You know, there are many
animals mentioned in the Bible that actually we don't know
exactly how to translate them, Like modern scholars aren't sure
(35:20):
what this name of an animal refers to. And one
of them that's often been kind of confusing is this
animal that's mentioned called the arrow snake. Uh, so that's
how the name of it is translated, but I never
made the connection. I don't know if that means that
there's some suggestion that it's a snake that would have
had venom used in arrows. I kind of doubt it,
(35:41):
but that's possibility. I mean, you're also left with just
the the undeniable comparison between an arrow, which is a
very old bit of human technology, and then naturally occurring snake.
Like the snake can be stretched out and it looks
kind of like an arrow. The comparison is unavoidable, both
in understanding what it arrow is and understanding what a
(36:02):
snake is. They're both considered deadly, yes, even though most
snakes not deadly. We don't want to contribute to snake
panic on here. Snakes are great. You want snakes living
around your house, You want them, And in fact, I
would love to come back to that. I've already sort
of planted the seeds. We'll see, but I'm I'm thinking
about having a guest come back on the show and
discuss the importance of snakes in our our local habitats.
(36:26):
I am so on board for that. I want to
do whatever we can to fight reptile hate. Al Right, Well,
on that note, we're gonna take one more break, and
when we come back, we will discuss one more aspect
of Falsa Doom's cult and how it compares to the
natural world. Thank alright, we're back. So clearly, the best
(36:48):
thing about the Cone of the Barbarian movie, as we've
discussed before, is James Earl Jones and the role of
Fulsa Doom. But but he does one thing in the
movie that we haven't gotten to yet. I don't think
we've mentioned, which is that he turn himself into a
giant snake. Oh, yes, he does this. He changes into
a giant snake in order to escape the vengeance of Conan. Yeah,
(37:08):
there's also a part where Conan just goes into a
tower and kills a giant snake for no good reason
except I guess he wanted to steal and the snake
woke up while he was stealing. Well, the snake was
a pet, that was it was it Rex or had right?
Which one? Was it by spinel a Thora secundus from
(37:28):
a practis guardian of the universe. Yes, so he had
raised this snake from a child he lived in the temple.
It was the pet of Thusa Doom. So, but it's
also like the security device and Conan and his compatriots
had broken into the temple to steal things. It's just
one of the many examples in the movie where you
see Conan, like uh enacting brutal violence on something where
(37:50):
you kind of take the other things side. It's like,
I'd kind of like to see the snake win here. Yeah,
Conan is just chopping its head off. I'm trying to
steal a gym. Wou't you leave me alone? Yeah? And
certainly Conan does succeed in mass occurring this giant, beautiful
reptile um, but also James Earl Jones can turn himself
(38:11):
into a massive giant snake, which appears is not the
same as the earlier snake. There's just multiple giant snakes
in the movie. Yeah, I mean that's one of the
authentically this is one of the aspects of like old
pulpe wizards is you don't know what they're capable of.
They can pull off any any number of of dark sorceries. Uh,
they have a pet snake, they can turn into a
pet snake. There they can make snakes and arrows. There's
(38:32):
no limit. But it leads to the the unavoidable question
like how big due terrestrial snakes get? How big have
they gotten in the past? Is there anything in the
world today as big as the snake we see in
the Temple of set And if not, was there ever
anything that big? So let's start with the present and
(38:54):
work our way back. So this is a topic I've
I've looked into previously, actually ended up writing an article
about this for How Stuff Works a few years back.
And when we look when we discuss the biggest snakes,
there are a couple of species that we turned to,
and in both cases we turned to the females because
(39:14):
they run larger. So we have the Asian reticulated python
or python reticulattice. And these tend to be the longest
snakes that you find in the natural world. The most
uh reputable record lengths are around twenty five ft or
seven point six meters. Field measurements in a survey averaged
(39:37):
a little under twelve feet or three point two meters
in the jungles of southern Sumatra, maxing out at just
shy of twenty ft or six point one ms um
and uh. Then in South America we have the green anaconda. Okay,
this would be of the movie Anaconda. To bring in
another another giant snake movie, another great cheesy, cheesy action movie,
(40:01):
the one that it ends up eating John Voyd for
a while for a while. Speaking of films I loved
when I was younger and recently went back and revisited,
Anaconda is another one. Yeah, I I love that when
I was a kid. I went back and watched it
within the past couple of years, and that is a
great cheesy creature flick. It is worth a watch now
(40:21):
is the creature in question the giant snake or John
Voyd because he's the villain. But John Voyd in it
is also speaking of like like actors who go whole
hog just like go over the horizon with their villain performances. Uh,
John Void's doing it in this movie. He's got this
accent that who knows what it's supposed to sound like.
(40:43):
He's like a he's playing like a South American Dracula
who hunts snakes. It's just amazing. I need to see
that one again. So yes, if you go to South America,
you'll get the green anaconda. And these tend to be
the more massive of the two species here. Larger females
typical rate typically reach lengths of nine ft two point
seven meters, and they way upward of two hundred pounds
(41:04):
or nine point seven krams. Up to twenty nine and
thirty thirty two ft lengths have been considered possible by experts.
So this tends to be when you get into arguments
about what's the largest living snake. Uh, you know you're
gonna have people that are on team articulated python. You're
gonna have people that are on team green anaconda. If
you go to a zoo or a reptile house and
(41:26):
you happen to see um specimens of both species, you
could probably make a case for either depending on how
large the individual is. And also in either case, they're
also wilder stories and even some photo evidence of skins
UH that suggest larger creatures. So it might be just
(41:46):
a reported sighting or someone said, look, here's a picture
of the skin we got from the snake. The problem
in these situations is that snake skins, once they've been
removed from the snake, may be stretched out a bit.
So not only you can stretch your story, and you
can stretch your physical evidence and it becomes harder to
lean on it um. But to just give an idea
(42:09):
about the about some of the crazier sightings UH. In
ninety three, Fritz w Uptograph reported seeing a fifty to
sixty ft or fifteen to eighteen meter green anaconda. And
that's one that I've seen the experts do. They really
kind of rolled their eyes at that one. But that's
so that both of these are cases where those giant snakes,
(42:31):
those are impressive creatures if you get to see them
at any kind of a reptile house or certainly if
you ever get to see one in the wild, like
that's that's impressive. But they're not as big as the
as the giant snake we see in Cone in the
Barbarian To find something that big, we have to go
back in time, uh, you know, not to the Hyborian age,
you know, we have we have to go well past
the time of my adventure. We have to go back
(42:54):
sixty million years. Uh. Specifically have to go to what
is now known as because the country of Colombia, and
we have to go to the Sera John rainforest, and
that is where we will find the Titana Boa. Titana Boa, yes, uh,
and this is uh, this is a creature that's received
a lot of press. Uh. There's been a lot of
(43:16):
there's some cool artwork that was created with to go
along with the studies about the Titana Boa and the
fossil evidence that that informs us about its size. But
this was an impressive serpent. This was this is kind
of a very like a hot box jungle environment. And
that's one of the reasons that, uh, this serpent could
(43:36):
reach such a size sixty million years ago. Uh. The
temperatures there uh probably an average yearly temperature of eighty
six to ninety three degrees fahrenheit or thirty to thirty
four degrees celsius, far hotter than modern tropical rainforest temperatures.
And and the size of this creature was impressive. University
of Florida paleontologists estimate its tip to tail link that
(43:58):
a whopping forty two eight or thirteen meters, and it
would have had a crushing it would have had a
crushing weight of more than a ton. Wow. So this
particular species, titanaboa, would definitely be able to stand in
for that giant snake we see in ConA, the Barbarian.
And don't you lay a finger on it? Conan, don't
(44:19):
you hurt the snake. It is a holy, blameless creature.
It is uh. You know, whatever your feelings are about
Fulsa Doom and his awful death cult um which grant
it is an awful death cult. You know, we can't
blame that on the snake. Why don't they look I
have a question about snake size and uh and are
supposed instincts. Now. We talked a little bit in the
(44:41):
last episode about the idea that there's there's an ongoing
debate about the extent to which are the common fear
of certain types of animal forms, particularly things like snakes
and spiders. Is is hardwired into human brains, it's the
thing that you're born being afraid of with out even
having having been told it exists. Or is it a
(45:04):
culturally conditioned fear and something we learn about from fiction
and from people around us that we're supposed to be
afraid of. And there's obviously going to be some cultural conditioning.
The question is is there something that's there before that is?
Is it there in the brain before the culture gets
to you. And there's some evidence I think that, you know,
even like babies looking at pictures of snakes get people
(45:26):
dilation when when they see an image of a snake.
But my question would be does that scale like does
the I mean like, once you get to a snake
of this size, it's so big it's not even really
recognizable as a snake in the way you would normally
perceive snake threats. It becomes a dragon, it becomes some
kind of completely other thing. I mean, the kind of
(45:48):
snakes that would be any sort of normal threat that
you might have biological conditioning to avoid would be relatively
small snakes. Their threat would be in their venom, not
in their size. But you're you're saying, like, if we
were to encounter a titana boa in the wild, would
it even register as a snake to us? Well, I
think on on one level, you know, yeah, it wouldn't
(46:10):
have to. Like, I think there is something, there's that
kind of magical moment, like a darkly magical moment, whenever
you perceive a predator in the wild, like like, not
not not just any predator, but a creature that that
could conceivably prey upon a human um at least, you know,
(46:30):
a weakened human. Uh, it seems to it feels like
it sets off different alarms in your brain, you know,
like when you lock eyes with that lion when you're
I've certainly been in this situation when you're the first
person to the zoo and and the lion sees you,
and you lock eyes with a lion, or perhaps the
lion looks at the small child that's traveling with you, um,
(46:53):
and you realize, oh, I would you know if if
if not for this glass wall, if not for for
the artificial as acts of this encounter, Um, I would
be the one fleeing. Now, I would be the one,
you know, at least backing away, if not running in tearror.
Uh So I feel like that would certainly kick in
if you were to encounter the Titana bo. Yeah. I
(47:14):
guess I'm not saying people wouldn't be afraid of it
with good reason. I would. I think they wouldn't say
eke is the is the difference. They wouldn't say, eke
a snake. They would say, oh my god, a snake.
But I guess humans in the Titana bow never existed
at the same time, so there'll be no reason to
have this kind of conditioned fear. Yeah. I mean the
(47:34):
closest would be, you know, any degree of conditioning that
might come from being around um. You know green anicon
is in reticulated pythons. But that's a different that's a
different level of It's totally not the same thing as
the danger of a venomous snake, where I could conceivably accidentally,
um wind up bitten by the snake. But I think
(47:55):
also a lot of the danger there with the venomous
snakes that it has been hypothesized if we have some
kind of hardwired instinctual reaction to snakes. It was mainly
about children, right, that there would be small children would
be vulnerable to them, right, And of course that's going
to be the case with a lot of predators in general.
You know, the the wild cat that is not a
(48:16):
danger to an adult human could be a danger to
a small child. I mean, definitely that's the case, even
with modern day crocodilians. Oh but they're also they're definitely
crocodilians that are a danger to adults. Yes, yes, but
but but even you know, more so so to a
diminutive human. Yeah. Well, I'd just like to wrap up
today by saying I'm on thulsa doom side. I would
(48:37):
join his cult. I would take his side against Conan
and his evil friends. And uh yeah, there's where my
loyalty is. Okay, even even though, just to be clear,
they do practice cannibalism. It's firmly established, you know, big
cannib annibalism here and there. To hang out with spin
only thorson, you know, yeah, they don't seem to be
(48:58):
a certain amount of just hanging out and chill. Uh.
In the temple set flesh is stronger than steel. That's right,
that's what he tells us. All right, So there you
have it. Um Again, we set out to do one episode.
We had to break this one into two. But I
think it was worthwhile because we got to explore a
few things that I don't think we would have necessarily
have recovered on the show had we not been prompted
(49:19):
by Fulsa Doom's teachings. Likewise, we get to highlight some
areas we might come back to in the future. Uh,
were related to the study of of serpents. Yeah, totally.
I'm not done. This is not this is not just
another snake cult. We will be the snake religion by
the time we're finished. All right. Well, Uh. In the meantime,
(49:40):
if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff
to Blow your Mind, you want to check out those
past movie episodes that we've done Highlander two, two thousand
and one, of Space Odyssey, The Dark Crystal. You can
find them all. It's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
And if you want to support the show, the best
thing you can do is rate and review us wherever
you have the power to do so. Um, you know,
wherever you get this podcast asked give us some stars
(50:01):
leave a nice comment that helps us out. Also, if
you haven't checked out Invention, check out Invention. It's the
other podcast that we do. It is an invention by
invention exploration of human techno history. We've been looking at
a lot of photography and motion picture. So you know,
if you perhaps you check this episode out because you're
into films and you're like, what kind of science are
(50:21):
they going to squeeze out of this? Uh, this puppy well, uh,
then go check out Invention and learn about where the
technology of films came from. Huge thanks as always to
our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and Tory Harrison. 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, just to say oh, you can
(50:41):
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production
of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from
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