Wicker Men, Mock Kings and Ritualized Regicide

When you think about human sacrifice, you probably envision blood-soaked altars where the weak and defeated are massacred to a divine force. But what about situations where the most powerful member of a society, even a divine king, is sacrificed for the good of the people? Join Robert and Joe as they discuss literal, figurative and symbolic ritual regicide in human civilization.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how stepwork docomog.
The nation of all the Gauls is extremely devoted to
superstitious rights, and on that account, they who are troubled
with unusually severe diseases, and they who are engaged in

(00:25):
battles and dangers, either sacrifice men as victims, or vowed
that they will sacrifice them, and employed the druids as
the performers of those sacrifices. Because they think that unless
the life of a man be offered for the life
of a man, the mind of the immortal gods cannot
be rendered propitious, and they have sacrifices of that kind

(00:47):
ordained for national purposes. Others have figures of vast size,
the limbs of which are woven out of twigs. They
fill with living men, which, being set on fire, the
men pair enveloped in the flames. They consider that the
oblation of such as have been taken in theft, or
in robbery or any other offense is more acceptable to

(01:10):
the immortal gods. But when a supply of that class
is wanting, they have recourse to the oblation of even
the innocent. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
that is from The Gallic Wars by Julius Caesar, Book six,
chapter sixteen, translated by W. A. Mcdevite and W. S. Bone,

(01:32):
though with a couple of substitutions of my own for clarity. Yeah,
and so what are we talking about there? That that
that is the ritual that has come to be known
as the wicker Man, though you might know it better
from the movie than from the works of Julius Caesar,
or perhaps from the new Radiohead music video for Burn

(01:52):
the Witch which just came out, which actually came out
after we had already decided on this episode. Some wonderful
synchronous going on there. Um. But but the music video
to basically depict some of the key moments in the
classic film The Wickerman, in which this little um pagan
community out in the middle of nowhere I think on

(02:15):
an island, correct. Yeah, it's an island off the western
coast of Scotland, and it's a little it's a pagan
community run by a jolly gentleman pagan played by Christopher Lee.
He's singing, he's dancing around. You don't see it, You
don't see enough of that from his themography. So yeah,
if you haven't seen The Wickerman nineteen seventy three, it's

(02:35):
a horror cult classic, you should check it out. It's
very weird and very good and and very uh should
we say, yeah, very good, but also kind of silly
in a wonderful way. Yeah. I mean there's also there's
a hand of glory in it. We don't have another
hand of glory. Is such a bizarre item of folklore mythology.
This this dead man, this dead criminals hand with like

(02:57):
candled fingers, that that causes every one to just become
in you know, immobile, and it's used by by thieves
and robbers in their in their mischief. Like that's such
a wonderfully absurd and hideous idea. I'm surprised we don't
see it more often. Yeah, and so it also of
course has animal masks and human sacrifice. So so we
are going to be talking about human sacrifice today and

(03:21):
actually a very specific kind of human sacrifice. But one
thing I was wondering when I was reading Julius Caesar's
account of the Wickerman, you know, putting all these people
and basically a human figure woven like a basket out
of out of willow twigs and then burning them alive.
Did the Gallic Celts really do this? This would be
he would be talking about the Celtic people's occupying the

(03:42):
regions sort of now known as France Um and they
of course were Caesar's enemies. It's kind of hard to
say whether or not we can trust Caesar's word on this. Obviously,
Julius Caesar is describing the culture of his enemies and
the victims of his conquest, so he's obviously not the
most simpaththetic or unbiased anthropologist in this sense. Right, He's

(04:03):
coming from the standpoint of a of of of an
aggressor from a different culture that sees itself as as superior,
and just about every form, yeah, he did. It was
definitely uh not not just that he saw a Roman
culture as superior, but a lot of this was written
specifically to show how superior Roman culture was. Like. The
Romans were interested in portraying their enemies as barbaric and uncivilized,

(04:27):
and one of the huge primary signifiers of barbarity for
them was the practice of human sacrifice. Also, in addition,
I couldn't find any independent evidence of of anything like
the Wickerman ritual taking place. So who knows if anything
like this actually happened. It could be just a bunch
of slander from the Romans point of view, spoken like

(04:47):
a man who is foreshadowing his own death, a giant,
flaming Wickerman. Right, I'm in denial, that's exactly what it is.
I just it can't be true. No, he made it
all up. But then again, it's not like it's out
of the question, because when you wade into the shadows
of ancient history, and especially prehistory, I think pretty much
no matter what corner of earth you're looking at, you're

(05:10):
likely to find traces of human sacrifice. Like you could
be like Julius Caesar the Romans and say, oh, that's
what those other people over there do. But if you
go back far enough, it looks like we find traces
of human sacrifice all over the place. It's not what
those other people over there do, it's what we did.
It's what everybody seemed to do. Yeah, And it's one

(05:33):
of the you look back and just about any culture
you do find some evidence of this. And on one hand,
we look back at these ancient people and you think, well,
they were different than us. They were, uh, they were
you know, they were a primitive people. They lived with
a more cyclical mindset, and like the individuality just wasn't

(05:53):
quite the same. But then on the other hand, like
we can't distance ourselves too much from them, Like the
human experience in many ways, it's still gonna be the same,
and death is still the same. Um, no matter how
you know, mythic it's wrappings. Yeah, I mean, you can't
just let your sort of urban ethnocentrism take over and

(06:13):
imagine how oh how different we are than those uncivilized
savages out there, especially for example, coming back to Julius Caesar,
the fact that the Romans probably practiced human sacrifice. In fact,
we know that they did not that long before Caesar,
maybe just a couple of centuries before, especially if you
count the gladiatorial games, which I mean, come on, you know,
fighting ledge themselves to a god and then fight to

(06:35):
the death. That sounds kind of like human sacrifice to me. Yeah,
and as well discussed in this episode several different top
points here. There there's there's human sacrifice, and then there's
human sacrifice, and then there are things that that that
fill the role of human sacrifice in lethal forms, non
lethal forms, symbolic forms, and uh, in surrogate forms. Yeah,

(06:57):
that's that's absolutely true. And and in a lot of
case says, I think in our culture we can find
relics and ritual traces and residue of human sacrifice even
when that sacrifice is no longer performed. One good example
I think would be looking too ancient Rome. You know
about this festival of the r Gay. I hope I'm
pronouncing that right. It's a r g e I. I

(07:19):
was not familiar with this. No, I wasn't either until
we were doing the reading before this episode. I thought
this was really interesting. So in this festival, you have
twice a year in the springtime in Rome, a bunch
of big procession to go through the city and they'd
stop at all these stations would be festivals almost like
you know, Stations of the Cross or something like a
like a processional where you go to different places and

(07:40):
you pick up things at these places. And what they
were picking up were these human shaped effigies bound together
out of rushes, you know, bull rushes, like cattails. They
were rush dummies, uh. And they'd carry the rush dummies
to a bridge in Rome over the Tiber River and
then they dump them into the river. And the Roman

(08:01):
historians and all the people at the time, they couldn't
remember why anybody did this. They couldn't They didn't know
where the ritual came from, They didn't know what it meant,
what it was supposed to be about. But many people
ancient and modern have kind of speculated, Wow, I wonder
if those Rush dummies weren't dummies originally, Like, what is this?

(08:21):
Is this a converted ritual of human sacrifice that has
been tamed and domesticated by substituting effigies for real people. Yeah,
this example did remind me of something from my childhood. Um,
I spent I spent a couple of years of my
childhood in Newfoundland, Canada, and there they had a tradition
known as as Bonfire Night, where you everyone would get

(08:42):
together and you just have a big bonfire. Sounds great, yeah,
but but it apparently my understanding is that this was
essentially Guy Fox Day, where you know, across the ocean,
you were burning effigies of Guy Fox. The of course,
the the Trader, the Gunpowder plot. What year was that
he tried to blow up Parliament? There's a rhyme, isn't
there I'm supposed to remember a rhyme. I don't remember.

(09:03):
Remember remember the fifth of November. Oh that doesn't tell
you the year, tell me the year. Well, anyway, so
guy Fox tried to blow up parliament, right right, So
he's burned in effigy for his crime, which will discuss.
I mean, there's certainly a symbolic human sacrifice him play there.
But as the tradition crosses the ocean, it like the
geographical distance, the as well as the as the temporal distance,

(09:28):
just completely changes the practice until it's just this, Hey,
let's get together and have this big bonfire. Yeah, you
can't even remember why you're supposed to do it. Yeah,
we're celebrating the burning of the would the festival of chemistry? Yeah,
but does make me wonder if that Roman tradition is
a similar situation. Yeah, dude, were these once live people

(09:50):
thrown over the bridge, and then after that were they
symbolic individuals that represented enemies? You know, it could just
be that it remained and after it no longer had significance. Right,
you know, people like just enjoy having a bonfire, They
just enjoy making some rush dummies and throwing them into
the water, and he excused to sit around in craft,
right exactly. Okay, so we are going to be focusing

(10:12):
on a specific kind of human sacrifice today, and we
that we wanted to get into the one of the
weirdest examples of it, which is ritual regicide, that the
symbolic or ritual slaughter of a king or divine leader.
But before we get to that, I think we should
just go go over some of the basics of what
the profile of human sacrifice is on planet Earth, Like

(10:36):
how common and how widespread was the practice of human
sacrifice in prehistory in the ancient world. Yeah, well, pretty widespread,
and you're basically you can you can pretty much expect
to find a supernatural element in any of these. Obviously
it's tied into into into old beliefs involving deities and
appeasing the deities. Yeah, or I think for the purpose

(10:56):
of this episode, let me know if you disagree, but
I think we should go with the the broad definition
offered sort of by the uh the Roman interpretation of
human sacrifice, which is any homicide for magical purposes. Yes,
and yeah, I think that's a very good definition to
move forward with. So there are different modes of human
sacrifice underneath that. The tent now one of the oldest

(11:18):
you're gonna find. And this is like more or less
literal sacrifice, is the mass sacrifice of the dead leader's
um uh cordiers followers to accompany them into the afterlife,
like the Pharaoh's right exactly. Yeah, this is the old
trope of like, oh, the king's dead, you were his
best friend, you were a slever as mistresses, queen, his
cat whatever. Don't want him to be lonely in the

(11:40):
next day. I wanted to be lonely. Do the right thing,
go with him, and so in that that's something that's
worth noting too, is that depending on the account or
the lack of an account, in many cases you have
to ask what extent is this a self sacrifice or
you know, a homicide. But you know it dates back
at least five thousand years in agricultural societies in Europe.

(12:03):
We see evidence of this with the Royal Tombs of
ancient Mesopotamia from you know, thirty five BC, the tombs
of the First Dynasty of Egyptian pharaohs from around UT
one hundred to nine b C. The royal tombs of
the Shang dynasty in China from sixteen hundred BC e
to ten, as well as the tomb of Quinshai Hung,

(12:26):
who died into twenty b C, the first Emperor of China,
and we also see elements of this inviking funeral customs
from around uh The ancient civilizations of the America's were
also quite well known for the human sacrifices. The Incas,
the Aztecs, I mean the Aztecs engaged in the mass
sacrifice of defeated enemy warriors, sometimes through the use of

(12:49):
flower wars, which were themselves ritualized warfare and engagements. And
of course the Aztecs, the Incas, and the Maya all
seem to engage in child sacer defice as well on occasion. Now,
one thing you'll notice from a lot of these examples
we mentioned is what types of people were usually sacrificed to.

(13:10):
So we have we see practices of human sacrifice going
on all around the ancient world, all over the place.
Who was usually the victim of this sacrifice? I would
argue that in most cases, like you just talked about
defeated enemies, children, it's the powerless, it's people who don't
have a lot of power and say so about what
happens in society. So you get, you know, the follower,

(13:31):
the followers of the king who has failed and who
has died, the person who the people who have come
out of favor and out of power, but then also
defeated enemies, children, teenagers, criminals, people convicted of crimes, and
enemies of the state, people people generally without power. Yes,
I think that's a fair assessment. And so even like

(13:53):
Caesar Julius, Caesar tells us in his story of the
wicker Man, whether truthfully or not, again, the goals preferred
to load up their wicker man with thieves and other criminals.
But hey, if you're out of thieves, you know, some
innocent people will just have to do. You gotta feel
that Wickerman. So generally, you're you're gonna want to assume
that the victims of human sacrifice most often are going

(14:14):
to be chosen from among the most disadvantaged stations of society.
So the poor, slaves, women, press, ethnic minorities, defeated enemies, criminals,
or perceived criminals. And and this is for fairly obvious reasons.
The people making the rules in a society don't usually
make rules that involve putting themselves at risk of being burned,

(14:36):
alive or beheaded. But today we want to look at
a fascinating historical principle that runs counter to that, the
concept of ritual regicide, the ritual sacrifice or or murder
for magical purposes of a king or a monarch, the
sacred slaughter of the most powerful person in a society. Yeah,

(15:00):
it definitely turns most of our preconceptions of human sacrifice
completely on their head. But as we discuss it, it
makes it makes a lot of sense, and you can
see it even in the even in the fabric of
our current systems of rule. Yeah, we'll definitely get into
that more later. But this idea is is not something
we've just recently discovered. This is actually an idea that

(15:21):
has a lot of precedent and uh in comparative religions
and anthropology. In one place you can find a historical
precedent for talking about ritual regicide is in the work
of James G. Fraser. Uh, Fraser and the Golden Bow.
So James Fraser, we should say right at the beginning,
he was a great writer, and he was somebody who

(15:41):
who did were. He was a Scottish anthropologist and The
Golden Bow was his magnum opus. It was this huge
work on religious anthropology and a comparative study and religions.
So it was various volumes of The Golden Bow that
we're published, starting in eighteen ninety and then continuing over
the next few decades. And what he was trying to
do is find the common roots of myths and religious

(16:04):
rituals around the world. And the killing of the Divine
King is a ritual that plays centrally in his theory
about where all these myths and rituals come from. So
Fraser's work is what it's just chock full of, I
don't know, nineteenth century isms and what people would today
would probably just recognize as speculation. Very interesting speculation, and

(16:28):
Fraser was a very smart and creative and thoughtful guy.
But it's full of him making connections in his mind
and uh, and things that would not be considered the
most rigorous or or neutral, unbiased science by our standards
of social science today. But it's still a fascinating and

(16:48):
highly influential work of let's say English literature. Yeah, yeah,
it's highly readable and uh, you know, it's just researching
um anthropolic anthropological views on myth for an episode that
has at this point already come out for stuff to
blow your mind, and that of course deals with all
the different ways you can try and interpret interpret myth
and folklore and legend and uh and and and of

(17:11):
course Fraser's work came up in a number of the
things I was reading most most of them. You know,
even that even if they had severe bones to pick
with him on certain issues that they would tend to say, well,
you can't just discount Frasier, like, oh, it's such an
important work of of of anthropology that you know, everybody's
kind of working in a shad out to a certain extent.
Oh yeah, I mean, it's it's so good to read too.

(17:32):
He was just such a great writer. It's one of
those great works of in the history of what you
might call social science or the or the predecessors to
modern social science. While it might not have a whole
lot of scientific merit today, it's still just a really
great book to read. As a book. It's great fun reading,
it's imaginative, it's fascinating, and it was hugely influential at

(17:54):
the time, so it's a great thing to read if
you want to understand the literature of the early twenty century,
because it influenced all kinds of people. The Waste Land
by T. S. Eliott is highly influenced modernist literature in general.
A lot of these writers were reading James Fraser and
his ideas about myths and rituals. But so Fraser gets
into the killing of the divine king in chapter twenty

(18:16):
four of The Golden Bow, and and this has a
few sections. So first of all, he he establishes this
principle that he calls the mortality of the gods, which
is where he says that in many traditional pagan religions,
the gods are understood to be mortal. They're not timeless, perfect, abstract,
eternal beings. They're they're not the ground of all being,

(18:36):
they're not the origin of all but they're there beings,
their flesh and blood, beings that can walk around, that
they experienced travails, passions, struggles, and eventually they die. And
of course, if you are linking the idea of kingship
with the idea of godship, if the gods at some
point die, then the king at some point must die. Yeah,

(18:57):
one is then as an extension of the other. Yeah,
And so Fraser goes on to talk about the concept
of kings killed when their strength fails. So many societies,
he says, have a belief in this divine king concept,
where the king is in some sense a species of God. Right,
the king is is somewhere between a mortal and a

(19:19):
full on divine God, or might in some sense be
a full on divine God, that is just you know,
living among your society as a king. And also in
some sense the king and the kingdom are one there
they are linked by sympathetic magic, and their fates are
inextricably linked. So the health of the king relates directly
to the health of the kingdom. His body is the

(19:42):
body of the people, of the body of the nation,
and and is in a sense that the manifestation of
the God as well. Exactly so, the failure of a
king is the failure of the kingdom, and the king
becomes this magical metaem for the society itself. And what
Fraser does here is he goes on to give all
the anthropological examples of societies that he claims societies and

(20:04):
religions and tribal groups that he claims have this idea
of divine kingship where the king is killed when his
when his failing strength or failing health, or failing virility,
or or something like that seems to indicate a a
by by link of sympathetic magic, a bad omen for

(20:25):
the kingdom. So if the king begins to become weak,
you've got to kill the king to save the kingdom
from becoming weak as well. Yeah, I don't go out
on a good note right exactly while he's still young
and healthy. And I want to read a quote from Fraser.
He says, quote, for they believe, as we have seen,
that the king's life or spirit is so sympathetically bound

(20:46):
up with the prosperity of the whole country that if
he fell ill or grew senile, the cattle would sicken
and cease to multiply, the crops would rot in the fields,
and men would perish of widespread disease. Hence, in their opinion,
the only way of averting these calamities is to put
the king to death while he is still hail and hearty,

(21:06):
in order that the divine spirit which he has inherited
from his predecessors may be transmitted in turn, by him
to his successor while it is still in full vigor
and has not yet been impaired by the weakness of
disease and old age. So there are all these stories
he he gives where you know, there's an account of
a tribe where the tribe has a king, and then

(21:28):
as soon as the try, as soon as the king
maybe begins to show gray hair or begin or has
a missing tooth, or has any other or cannot produce
children anymore, or has any kind of sign that their
strength and youth and vigor is failing, there's a ritualized
process by which the king is put to death so
that a new healthy king can be installed, saving the

(21:49):
country from being punished by this link with weakness through
sympathetic magic. And then sometimes he also recounts that there
are there are societies and groups that don't want to
wait until the king shows signs of illness or failing strength,
so they just have a fixed term. It's sort of
like a term limit on the king. But you don't
want to come to the end of that term because

(22:10):
you don't just leave office, you get put to death.
So this is Fraser's idea. And as I said, you know,
his work is really fascinating, it's fun to read, but
it's not necessarily the most rigorous work of modern anthropology.
So the question is this whole process Fraser is talking
about the the ritual sacrifice of the divine king. Do

(22:30):
we really see the ritual sacrifice of kings in the
real world? Is this something that really gets enacted in
one form or another, and what role does it play
in the society's that do the do practice things like this? Well,
to answer that question, Joe, I think we're gonna have
to go to the bog. Yeah, I think it's time
to consult some bog bodies. What do you think the

(22:53):
I'm gonna put you in a scenario, Okay, put me
in it. Imagine you are digging down into a peat ball. Now,
bogs are places where there's vertical accumulation of dead plant
matter over time, such as layers of dead moss or
something like that. That this is dead old plant matter,
and it's known as pete and it makes a very

(23:13):
useful fuel if you want to heat your house or
boil some porridge for dinner. Uh. So you go out
and you dig in the peat and you're shoveling through
the peat getting some nice fuel for the fire, and
your shovel strikes something that looks like a hunk of
old leather. But then you notice this hunk of old leather.
You know, it almost looks like in the shape of
a foot, like an old leathery fruit by the foot

(23:38):
or fruit roll up. That's us dark and withered. But
it's it's foot shaped, and it has toes, and the
toes have toenails, and it's attached to a leg, and
you keep going up the leg and the legs attached
to a body. Oh, it seems you have discovered a
bog body. So Pete bogs, these bogs we talked about,

(24:00):
have been known to naturally preserve bodies that are laid
to rest into them, essentially because of the soil chemistry,
the chemistry of the bog environment. When you sink under
the peat, you are in this cold, an aerobic environment
with a low pH that's a non oxygenated environment with
with acidity, which staves off rot and provides a sort

(24:22):
of natural mummification to a body that's that's preserved this way.
And these human remains can be very pristine in some way,
so they'll they'll often be sort of darkened and shriveled
and hardened, but they'll keep all the tissues intact, like
a lot of momification. You would notice if one of
these was walking down the street, and you would say,
that does not right, that should not be alive, right,

(24:42):
we should rise up with fire against it. But in
terms of finding a body from the from the past,
it's very well preserved. Yeah, there's far less decay than
there would be from a burial and normal soil. Uh.
And so we can often see signs from these bog
bodies because of how pristinely they're preserved that the person
interred in the bog died by homicide. That's interesting. So

(25:04):
we see these all over. Were mainly focusing here on
the ones that are in like a northern and western Europe.
So in northern Europe you have pete bog bodies that
often look like they didn't just fall into a bog
and die. These people were put to death. They might
be bound, have their hands or feet bound, they might
be partially or fully naked. In some of these cases,

(25:25):
it might be the simple execution of criminals, but there
have been many that have been interpreted as likely sacrificial
in nature. There's human sacrifice going on in northern Europe,
and these bodies are ending up in bogs. So there's
there's perhaps even a sacred idea about what the bog
is and why they are taken to the bog, like
perhaps it's a it's a no man's land, or a

(25:46):
crossroads or a or a a sacred or or damned place. Yeah,
some of them might have been sacred locations. In fact,
we're going to talk about one now that could have been.
So let's meet a couple of bog bodies. Both of
these were discovered in Troll, Ireland in two thousand three,
just about forty kilometers apart, and it was in the
one was in the town of clony Can, County Meath,

(26:08):
and the other was near krogan Hill, County Offaly. And
so the krogan Hill one is known as Old krogan Man.
That sounds like a great name for an Irish whiskey,
by the way, Yeah, Old Krogan Man. Yeah, what's your
what's your brand? Oh? I only drink Old krogan Man.
Give me four fingers an Old Krogan Man, four pruney
black fingers from Oh it's great, So Old Krogan Man

(26:30):
probably lived due to radio carbon dating, probably lived between
three sixty two b C E and one b C.
And he is missing his head and legs, but based
on what remains, his height can be calculated to be
six ft and six inches or a hundred and nine
centimeters tall. That is dang tall for the ancient world. Yeah,

(26:54):
that's tall today. Back then people were short. Yeah, but
this is like pro wrestler height right here. Yeah, this
is a specially tall for the time. Uh. And so
another interesting thing about him is finally manicured nails and
delicate hands preserved, indicating that he was an aristocratic person
who didn't have to do manual labor. His last meal

(27:16):
was determined to be buttermilk and cereals, but based on
his body we can determine that his diet was rich
in meat. This is interesting because when you think back
on ancient people's and especially if you're thinking about the
type of culture of where people are taken out to
the bog and hacked pieces, you might think I was
just a bunch of sort of primal barbarian types. But no,
here we see evidence that there's there's there's definitely a

(27:38):
social hierarchy and perhaps even kind of kind of a
subspecies of individual that is, uh, that that that doesn't
have to engage in physical labor, that gets to eat
a better diet, and in a way maybe they're kind
of they're pampered. They're like a pampered, uh, sacrificial subspecies
of the of the of of the people. Well, I mean, yeah,

(27:58):
what people do make of this, what whether or not
he was prepared for sacrifice in any way knowingly or not.
What people do make of that is that he was
definitely some kind of aristocrat. He was of some upper class,
leading you to think he maybe if there was anything
like a kingly class in this ancient Irish setting there,
this guy would have been among it. So he was
able to have plenty of access to meet which means

(28:21):
he was rich. You know, had good diet, he didn't
have to work with his hands. He had these nicely
manicured hands, and he had the good nutrition that would
allow you to achieve a height like six six has
nothing to complain about, right, But well, no, he might
have something to complain one thing to complain about at
the end. But don't we all, Yeah, so we'll get
to that in a moment. So then there's this other guy,

(28:43):
this Clony Cavanman, different bog body, likely lived around the
same time three N two b C E two two
hundred and one BC. This guy, how tall was he
five ft and two inches or a hundred and fifty
seven centimeters that's I wonder if that would have been
short even for the time. Yeah, maybe so, But then again,
he probably made up for it in personality. You know,

(29:05):
he made up for it by spiking his hair. And
this is Clony cavan Man wore ancient hair gel. He
spiked his hair up into how would you describe this?
It was like a cross between a fox hawk and
a pompadoor. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like yes, sort of a mohawk,
sort of a pompadoor, all sort of gel together with this, uh,
this ancient palm ay. Yeah. So he actually had ancient

(29:29):
hair gel that they did a chemical analysis and found
it was made from vegetable oil and pine resin. And
the pine resin was sourced from trees not local to
this region of Ireland. It was from Spain and France,
which was determined by the archaeologist Stephen Buckley, And so
that indicates that this person had resources to spare. You know,

(29:49):
money to spend on personal grooming products that were imported
from elsewhere. Oh mine, my hair jel is from southern Europe.
He's not using fop. He's a dapper dan man, but
that's for sure. He's a effort dan man indeed. But okay,
so what's the deal with these guys? Both of them,
both of them and had some troubles before they ended

(30:10):
up in the bog. Something happened to them. Yeah, you
don't just wind up in the boy running into trouble.
So let's go back to old crogan man. He had
some nice jewelry too, nicely at the time he around
one bicep. He had this leather arm band with like
a bronze amulet on it that had these uh, these
copper alloy elements. So that makes you think again he
had some money to spend on, just some some nice

(30:32):
looking stuff, and perhaps that there was something very official
and sacred in his death because he's still wearing that.
I mean, oh yeah, because it's we're about to discuss. Uh,
something was done to him and those that did it,
uh didn't make off with an arm band. Yeah. So
according to a National Geographic article I was reading about
this I want to read a quote Old crogan Man.

(30:54):
He was stabbed, his nipples were sliced, and he had
holes cut in his upper arms through which a rope
was threaded in order to restrain him. And he was
also cut in half across the torso. So I mean
somebody was this was going down. I mean, this was
not not good for Old krogan Man. He was getting

(31:16):
his arms threat I mean that's gross. Yeah, that's something
that I've seen come up occasionally in historical documents. Specifically
in one of the Viking sagas, there's a scene where
I believe it's one faction in one family. They they
get into trouble, they fall out of favor, and there's
a scene where they're all strung up on a rope
with the rope going through their behind their achilles tendon. Yeah,

(31:39):
so there is something symbolic, I guess, in the idea
that you're not only tying someone up, but you're you're
tying them like through their body, so there their body
becomes a part of the bind. It's it's weird. It's
one of those things that I'm not sure there's quite
an accurate description for it or name for it. At
least in any English, like what do you what do

(32:01):
you call that? It's it's more severe than just restraining someone. Yeah,
and then of course they also cut him in half. True,
they went for the complete fatality on this one. Yeah,
But then of course there were some serious wounds in
Clony cavan Man as well. So Clony cavan Man was
cut in half by the pete cutting machine that discovered
him when he was discovered. But that was not the

(32:23):
only injury to this bog body. Before he died, or
maybe not before he died, before he was deposited in
the bog, he had three axe wounds to the head,
one axe wound to the chest, and he was disemboweled.
So that's the guy with the with the faux hawk pompadour.
He had all those axe wounds and disemboweled. So yeah,

(32:44):
so what's going on with these two men, Well, both
of them were young. They showed a few signs of
physical labor during their lives, They were healthy at the
time of their deaths, they looked like they were rich.
And so there are a lot of different ways when
you find bodies like this that you could interpret what
happened to them. Because we don't know. You know, this
isn't the this isn't the cloudy mists of history. The

(33:04):
cloudy mists. What a wonderful, uh little tautology that is
in the the boggy mists of history. So we don't
know what happened, but there have been people who have
offered some interpretations, and there's one I'm going to get
to in a minute that was pretty interesting. But what
is the information we have to work with? Well, these
guys were rich, they were they were well cared for

(33:27):
in one way or another physically before their deaths, and
they met a violin in So what do you make
of that? And I was reading an article in Archaeology
magazine about these two bog bodies that had a really
interesting interpretive theory coming from Amon P. Kelly, who is
the keeper of Irish Antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland.
And his interpretation is that these two guys were in

(33:50):
some sense failed kings. Now whether this means they were
vying for kingship and they failed and were punished, or
whether they were kings who were the their you know,
their rule had faltered in the in the Fraser kind
of sense, like their their strength had failed or uh,
something bad had happened and they were held accountable for
it for sort of magical sympathetic reasons. We don't know,

(34:13):
but Kelly says this, I believe these men were failed
kings or failed candidates for kingship who were killed and
placed in bogs that formed important tribal boundaries. Both Clony
Cavan and Old Krogan men's nipples were pinched and cut
and and Kelly says that sucking a king's nipples was
a gesture of submission in ancient Ireland. Cutting them would

(34:36):
have made him incapable of kingship. Okay, wow, I was
not I was not familiar with this association of the
king's nipples at all. I'd never heard of this before.
But but according to this, uh to Kelly here. Yeah,
so you want to show that you you are sent
to the rule of the king in ancient Ireland, you
suck on his nipples and if you thus damage a

(34:58):
man's nipples very decisively, he is incapable of being a king. Huh.
It's it's interesting to think about this in terms of
ancient societies and the tug of war between between feminine
and masculine powers. But could here because here we see
the appropriation of feminine power qualities in the male kings,

(35:21):
that there is a nurturing aspect to their nipples. It's
really interesting that slices away to their point, and you
have taken away a part of their rule, like you've
bodily taken away part of the ruin, in the same
way that by cutting a six six ft six man
and half you were taking away his stature, in the
same way that by threading rope through his limbs you
are binding him not only you know, not only binding

(35:44):
his limbs, but you were Let's see, there's not really
an accurate word for this, right, It's like you're that
the limbs themselves are becoming part of the binding. Yeah,
it's clear that with all this violence, it's not just
for the purpose of killing and causing pain. All of
it seems to have a very symbolic kind of quality
to it. All of it gets some kind of magical significance.
Crammed through. One last thing from that archaeology magazine from

(36:08):
where the they interview Aim and Kelly, I'll just quote
from it. Quote the body served as offerings to the
Goddess of the land, to whom the king was wed
in his inauguration ceremony. That's interesting. According to Kelly, both
men's multiple injuries may reflect the belief that the goddess
was not only one of the land and fertility, but

(36:28):
also of sovereignty, war and death by uh and then
this is a quote directly from Kelly. By using a
range of methods to kill the victim, the ancient Irish
sacrifice to the goddess in all her forms. That also
makes the nipple things interesting to think of it as
a matriarchal pantheon. Yeah. And then but but then you

(36:48):
have you have male rulers exactly, who then have symbolic
power of their nurturing nipples. Yeah, and so if Kelly's
interpretation is correct, like we say that, you know, there's
no way to know actually what happened here. But Kelly's
interpretation is these guys are in some sense of the
kingly class. They may have been failed kings or attempted kings,
and this is a magical symbolic ritual putting them down

(37:11):
in some way, decisively rejecting their kingship at the same
time reinforcing their religious ideals, you know, saying this is
for the goddess. You will not wed the goddess. Yeah,
or you're already having wed the goddess is now dissolved.
But there's another way you can approach the idea of
ritual regicide, which is sort of something we talked about earlier,

(37:33):
which is simulating it right. Yeah, and there's a wonderful
example of this, uh from Timor. We have to travel
all the way to team Or. And the main article
here that we're drawing from is uh an worth of
anthropology from David Hicks, making the King Divine a case
study in in ritual regicide from team Or and this
is from published in the Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute. Yeah,

(37:58):
and he's gonna he's going to explain this, uh, this
very interesting and very complex and detailed ritual that takes
place between a couple of tribes on the island of
team Or. Yes, and I will I'll spare you some
of the details because it honestly gets a little tedious
at times, but but overall it's it's extremely fascinating. So
Teamore is an island of the Melee Archipelago, currently divided

(38:19):
between the sovereign states of East team Or in Indonesia.
All right, So here for for our purposes, as though,
we want to focus in on two ethnic groups in
central team or Uh, the Tatum and the Emma, each
with their own distinct languages but with a lot of
cultural crossover, and they share a belief in a dualistic
universe and a cyclical nature of human existence, etcetera. Along

(38:41):
the north coast of team Or so imagine, if you
don't have a map in front of you, you you can
just imagine this island right. The island kind of runs
east west. Yeah, it looks, you know, kind of a
rectangle looks you know, it's kind of it looks like
kind of like Tennessee, except as an island. And along
the north coast there's a there's a lagoon known as
Bemali and it's rich and fish and crabs, crocodiles or shrimp,

(39:02):
very important um for the people who live near it.
And there are two villages that border it. One is
a Teetam village and one is an Ema village. And
they share a myth myth rich history of bloody conflict
over the lagoons riches, and over time this violent history
has transformed into a regular shared ritual called abbey climaxing

(39:24):
in the symbolic killing and restoration of a surrogate who
is standing in for one of the villages kings. So
all this serves as a means to commemorate the myth
of the creation of the lagoon itself, to recreate that myth,
and to ensure that the fish supply remains abundant, you know,
via supernatural ritual. Yeah. Now, in in this article, Hicks

(39:46):
seems to be working with some sort of theoretical framework
based on Durkheim and some other anthropologists and social critics.
I think where where the idea is that rituals sort
of reinforced categories of understanding in the society. And so
he's looking at this he has an interpretive framework, and
he's looking at this ritual as something that helps people

(40:09):
understand the relationship between social groups and the relationship to
a geographical location and natural resources. Right. So Ve and
Auld nineteen fifties, they carried this out every year around August.
That's where the dry season transitions into the wet season
from masculine to feminine. Uh. And you know what would
happen is dead fish and shrimp in the water would

(40:30):
ritually tip locals off to the necessity of the right. Yeah,
they mentioned this. When you start seeing dead fish floating
in the lagoon, now it's time to have the ritual right.
And so at that point the king's of masculine surrogate
is selected. Uh. And then he's joined at the altar
by two female animals and a ritual bridge is built. Um.

(40:51):
Really a lot of tedious things go down at this point,
but eventually the surrogate king retires to a special hut
where he fasts. He doesn't talk, and the next warning
priests take the surrogate to the water and they pretend
to strike a lethal blow to his head, and then
he pretends to die. And there's a great quote from
from Hicks piece. He says, quote as a god, the

(41:11):
king is at this moment the spirit of a culture
hero who figures in a myth. So it's important to
keep in mind here. At this point a pig has
brought out, and this serves as kind of a surrogate
currocate king because they kill it for real, and then
the blood drains in the lagoon, and then it's time
to go fishing, and then there's another ritual sacrifice and
of the surrogate king, and after this, utilizing a buffalo sacrifice, uh,

(41:36):
he rejoins humanity after casting the sacrifice to buffalo's uh
entrails into the lagoon. So essentially, the defined the divine
king offers up his life to ensure economic future, while
also uh uniting these two groups as one, these two
groups that have different languages but shared cultural elements and
depend on the same lagoon. Yeah, and I want to

(41:57):
read one quote from Hicks. He says, quote, by sacrificing
their king, the people of Bimalai not only bring land,
control over fertility, life, divinity, and kingship into a synthetic unity,
but make it possible for them to sacrifice themselves as
a collectivity by transforming king and society into a god who,

(42:18):
revitalized by the sacrifice, reasserts his power to restore life.
So there's so much like associative magic going on. The
society is magically embodied by the king, the king is
magically embodied by the surrogate. The king magically embodies the myth.
And there's there's sort of this uh everything that touches

(42:39):
something becomes the symbolic equivalent of that thing. Yeah, and
Hicks continues in performing this the ultimate act of self abnegation,
because the society becomes the king. The king is surrogately
killed in simulation uh bye, by this ultimate active self abnegation,

(43:00):
and the collectivity impresses upon its members it's power to
recreate itself as a divinity and hence restore itself to life.
In this sense, the king is no more divine than
the society he represents, but no less divine than the
god he becomes. That's fascinating, and uh, if we were
just discussing prior to recording this, you look at this

(43:22):
ritual and they seemed to be so many layers of
sanitation going on here. You're pretending to kill a surrogate
for the king. You're spilling the blood of animals in
the place that even the surrogates blood. You can easily
imagine a scenario where, uh, where there's an older version
of this in which a king is actually sacrificed and
one day the king says, hey, how about we just
use a surrogate instead, and maybe he can die and

(43:43):
I can just kind of do my thing and continue
to live, and they go, oh, yeah, we'll do that,
and then later on the surrogate is saying like, I
don't know if I want to take this gig. Is
it possible that I just you just pretend to hit
me with the with that death hammer, and I pretend
to die, and maybe if you really need some blood
and entrails in there, you can just like maybe kill
a couple of sacred animals. I don't know, Yeah, I mean,

(44:03):
in cases like this, as we've said, we we don't
know what happened, but it's quite easy to see if
we're gonna allow ourselves to speculate how something like that
could progress, uh, you know, ritual sacrifice, if the person
being sacrificed has any power to say no, at some point,
somebody's probably gonna start trying to say no. Yeah. Or
it's possible that like an interpretation like this, I'm not

(44:23):
giving them enough credit, and that ultimately the the the
brutal murder of the king is based in a mythological form,
and for me to interpret it as having been a
literal re regicide at any point is not giving their
mythological rooting enough credit. That's highly possible too. I guess
we don't know. All right, We're gonna take a quick

(44:44):
break and when we come back we'll dive right back
into the topic speaking of surrogates. There's a topic I
think we should come back to that we've actually talked
about on the show before. In the very first episode
I ever did, of stuff toble your mind. You remember that, Robert,
I was that the first one. I definitely remember the episode.

(45:05):
The very first one we ever did was the one
on eclipses, and that one was fun. But and that
we talked very briefly, just touched on the idea of
the ancient Mesopotamian eclipse kings. And I think this is
a really interesting variation on the theme of ritual regicide
because it uh it involves this surrogate kind of quality
and also involves the king looking out for his own life.

(45:29):
So I think we should definitely look at the eclipse
kings of ancient Mesopotamia in more detail. Are you game, Robert, Yes,
let's do it, okay. So, in ancient Mesopotamian the first
millennium BC, royal culture was really concerned with fate and
the meaning of omens, including astrological omens, so all kinds

(45:50):
of events could serve as symbolic predictions of the fate
of the king or the fate of the nation. And
one example was lunar eclipses now Robert, which is the
near eclipse. The lunar eclipse is the one involving the moon. Yes, yes,
good call there. No, it's the one with where you
see the Earth's shadow falling across the surface of the Moon.
And you can tell if for for people who didn't

(46:12):
understand the astronomy involved lunar eclipses, actually any kind of
eclipse could be quite terrifying. Yeah, and when we explored
some other modes of this in that episode about eclipse,
is because you're you're seeing like the moon is eaten
by this demonic four so some other, some other mythological
outcome is in play exactly. And so when the lunar eclipse,
the Earth passes between the Sun and the moon, you

(46:34):
see the moon starts to turn red. The moon the
shadow can pass over sort of different quadrants of the moon,
but essentially the moon is going to glow red and
and it naturally invites sinister interpretations, and it's certainly less
apocalyptic compared to the solar eclipse with the Moon passing
in front of the sign. It's it's it's perhaps and
that's that's the thing. It's more something's not right here,

(46:57):
something is is off as opposed to whole we crap
the light of day is leaving us exactly. But it
still was enough to signal an ill omen. So the
astrologers of ancient Mesopotamian empires they could predict lunar eclipses
with some rough degree of accuracy. They weren't always uh
fully accurate yet, but they sort of had what what

(47:19):
some of the scholars I read called rules of thumb.
You can sort of make a good guess about when
a lunar eclipse is coming, and in many cases, possibly
depending on which part of the moon earth shadow falls over.
The experts concluded that a lunar eclipse brought a very
bad omen for the king, up to and including the
king's death. But if you're the king, what are you

(47:40):
going to do about it? Well, you've got all these
swords and archers and chariots, and there's absolutely nothing you
can do to stop the orbital path of the moon. Well,
I mean, in many cases, if you're a king or
even a modern tyrant, modern deathpot in some situation, you
could have some lookalikes right that just to wander around
out there. Maybe they'll catching us Dassen's bullet instead of you.

(48:01):
But this isn't a human assassin, this this is this
is an eclipse. Yeah, how do you dodge that bullet? Well,
maybe by exactly the same method. Uh so. Yeah. So
there's plenty of evidence that the ancient Mesopotamian leaders took
a sort of direct action plan of avoiding fate. And
I think this is really interesting because it seems to
say something about what they thought fate was. I'll get

(48:24):
to that in a minute. Here's one variation. So there's
an ancient Mesopotamian scholar and nergal A Tear, and he
predicts the coming of a lunar eclipse in January six
seventy three b c E. And he gives a suggestion
to the Assyrian king eser Hatton. He says, quote, in
the beginning of the year, a flood will come and

(48:45):
break the dikes. When the moon has made the eclipse,
the king, my lord should write to me as a
substitute for the king, I will cut through a dike
here in Babylonia in the middle of the night. No
one will hear about it. Oh nergal A Tier plans
to avert the faded flood by secretly causing a small

(49:06):
scale flood himself. So you have fate predicted, and then
you can step in. And if you sort of like
make the thing happen yourself and hurry it along, you
can avoid having it happen naturally, perhaps on a much
larger scale, sort of predisaster yourself, but a disaster that
you get to micromanage yourself. Yeah, and here's where the

(49:27):
dictator's body doubles come in. One solution to an eclipse
pretending the death of a king is to set up
a decoy. The crown could install a substitute king known
as a sarpui and substitute queen to take the royal
mantle during the period that the eclipse was predicted. So
I've got a couple of sources here that I used

(49:48):
for this. One is Ullah susann Coke Mesopotamian astro astrology
and introduction to Babylonian and to Syrian celestial divination, and
the other is Jack Newton laws in the concept of
fate in ancient Mesopotamia of the first millennium towards the
understanding of shem too. So you're the king, you want
to pick a substitute to absorb your bad omen for

(50:09):
you so you don't have to die. Who's the substitute?
Generally they say it's going to be somebody like we
talked about earlier without power, right, a prisoner of war,
criminal who has been condemned to death, or a an
enemy of the king's some kind of political rival. Or
they also say, or a gardener or a simpleton. Man

(50:31):
that is not fair. Well, it sucks to be that
gardener or that quote simpleton. Yeah, that sucks. Dressing the
simple enough as the king and then sacrifice me. I
think we can all a grade at that. That's and
and and in doing so, the king is essentially weaseling
out of his responsibility to die. Like if you if
you look back at some of these mythic models of

(50:53):
of divine rule, it's like, yeah, you get, you get
to rule, but your job is to die at the end.
But then inevitably, these powerful individuals figure ways to weasel
out of that responsibility, right exactly. Uh so, so what
does the process look like, Well, Lawson writes, quote, the
man was taken to the royal palace, treated with wine, washed,

(51:13):
and anointed. I think that would mean like anointed with oil,
dressed in the king's finery, furnished with the royal insignia,
and then in throne. So it sounds like he's got
all the you know, it's not just kind of like
a quick mock ceremony. They're doing the whole nine yards. Uh.
And then he writes quote, a young woman or virgin
was also seated with him as his queen. Oh no

(51:35):
again that's the yeah yeah uh. And so at this
point the real king and the substitute king sort of
formally exchanged roles. So the substitute king is referred to
as king, and then thereafter the real king he hangs
out in the palace, but he is therefore addressed by
his exorcists, scholars, and servants as peasant or farmer. Can

(52:00):
you imagine that the king's walking around, You have a
fake king. Everybody is calling king, and when you address
the real king, who has power of life and death
over you, you must call him peasant. Then, of course,
this is a motif that occurs throughout history. And you know,
the prince and the put in the paper, the the
man in the iron mask, any of these situations trading

(52:23):
trading places, right, Yeah, Any situation where the most royal
individual and the lowliest individual in the culture have to
swap places. Yeah, and then what happens next, Well, then
the new king gets the bad news. So the bad
omens that had previously applied to the real king all
get written down on a tablet and then read out
loud to the substitute king and queen, essentially like reading

(52:45):
the charges against them. You know, these are the magical
omens you've been condemned to. And the substitute king then
has to go in front of Shamash, the divine judge,
the god and recite all of the bad omens that
have now been transferred to him, and this sort of
officially magically transfers the omens over to the substitute king.

(53:07):
Just to make sure the transferral takes place, the document
listing the bad omens was literally attached to the substitute
King's clothes, so he's walking around with like a tablet
saying you're gonna die, You're gonna you know, all this
bad stuff is gonna happen to you. Am I alone
in wondering why this wasn't made into like a poly
shore time travel vehicle in the nineties. You know where

(53:29):
he travels back to Mesopotamia. Uh, and he becomes this Uh,
he becomes like the the the he becomes the surrogate
king for the eclipse and didn't realize it to the
last minute. I think maybe that was the original script
of A Night's Tales for youth Ledger and then they
changed a bunch of stuff around over time. Or are
you thinking of First Night with Martin Lawrence? I think

(53:52):
I think maybe I'm thinking of Forever Night. Okay, I'm
not thinking of any of that. I'm sorry people. Okay. So,
as we mentioned, they seemed to go out of their
way to create the illusion that this this king is
a real king, this fake king. No, no, no, this
is really the real king now. So they say he
had a royal entourage about ten percent the size of

(54:14):
the real king's court. Considering how big the real king's
entourage is, that's probably pretty big, including uh, laws and rites, musicians, concubines, cooks, confectioners.
He gets confectioners, yeah, but more to your point, he
gets the concubines. He's a royal concubines exactly, and and
and cupcakes presumably. Coke also mentions that he receives a

(54:35):
large bodyguard, which is intensely ironic. Well, have installed this
guy to absorb the king's death omen and they give
him a huge bodyguard, like he's got jaws from James
Bond standing beside him. Well, that does make me wonder
what if there was a death threat, What if there
was a plot against the life of the surrogate king, Like,
what does that mean? I the surrogate king, the Eclipse

(54:57):
King is assassinated before he can to fill his duty.
Maybe that puts the the the the real king in jeopardy.
I don't know. Yeah, I don't know that that's a
good question. But then then okay, so the Eclipse King
is also treated to banquets known as naptunu. Just think
how expensive all this must have been. How long did
the Eclipse King rain? Well? Coke says that he sat

(55:20):
on the throne for up to a hundred days, often shorter,
even though the period affected by a lunar eclipse theoretically
was determined by the watch in which it occurred, measuring
one hundred, two hundred and three hundred days. So Coke
saying that, you know, really the omen period is longer,
but I guess that they didn't usually go longer than
a hundred days. Maybe they were impatient. This is a

(55:41):
lengthy charade that they're carrying out here, and it's in
involving like not only the ritual ultimate ritual sacrifice of
the individual, but all the rituals of of kingship that
come along with just occupying that station. Exactly. Eventually, according
to the historical records, the the a of the eclipse,
king and the queen would come to an end, and

(56:02):
according to records, they would die. Uh. The term used
in the records, I found this really interesting. The term
used in the records in contemporary correspondence is anna simti
a la coup, which, according to Lawson, is a metaphor
otherwise used to denote a death by natural causes. Right, So,
according to the official documentation, they died naturally, so there's

(56:25):
not a like ritual beheading or anything of that nature. Right.
But that can't be the case, right, because the king
and queen needed to die on command just in time
for the peasant to come back and become the real
king again. So how could they have died of natural causes?
It's obvious they were put to death, but we don't
know how some scholars have speculated, based on context clues,

(56:48):
that they were poisoned at the end of their reign
with food or drink containing an overdose of soporific and
confections or maybe poison concubines. Yeah, who knows. But but
in any case they would die and then they would
take the bad omens with them all the way to
the grave. And Lawson actually explains how in in his
reading the the idea of the natural death made of

(57:09):
metaphor kind of makes sense in context. Since the substitute
king and queen were absorbing the omen of fate, their
death was in some sense fated or in some sense natural,
no matter by what means they died. So even if
you killed them, the fact that they had absorbed a
death omen that's supposed to be a you know, a
consequence of fate, means that, yeah, yeah, the the universe

(57:32):
killed them, right, The universe was going to launch a
bullet at the king. This guy gotten in front of it,
and so now everything's good. We can continue on with
the reign of the real king, right, And so after
the burial of the false king, the real king returns
has to undergo ritual cleansing. And then there's there's also
this elaborate funeral ritual for the substitute king and queen.

(57:52):
They killed the queen too, is but keeping up the
appearance of true kingship even after the evil prophecy has
been fulfilled. And so anyway, I mentioned that I was
going to say something about how what this says about
how they believe fate works. I can't imagine a person
of any major religion today thinking that you could so
easily trick God or the gods or magical forces at

(58:15):
work in nature and to avoid their will, you know
what I mean? Yeah, And I think and now we
have to go. We have to try and put ourselves
in that mindset in a in a in a culture
where like just the the mythic importance of the individual
is so essential, and the cyclical nature of everything in
our lives. So it's kind of like we're all we're

(58:36):
all cogs in this this in this machine of mythological cycle.
And so it's not so much that you're trying to
fool the gods or even fool the people, but you're trying.
You know that certain mechanisms have to take place, certain
movements have to take place in the mythological framework, and
they're just tweaking it so that that that gear still shifts,

(58:57):
but it doesn't doesn't it crush the king and self? Yeah? Yeah,
in a way, it's kind of like finding a legal
legal loophole today. Yeah. Yeah. I think some scholars have
actually looked at this and said that it indicates that, um,
for many of these these ancient Mesopotamian religious leaders and scholars,
they looked at the magical aspects of the universe, you know,

(59:18):
divine will and fates and the things having magical influence
over our lives as a kind of natural law in
a way, not so much as like the you know,
the the explicit will of an agent, but just sort
of like forces that could be understood and manipulated. All right. So,
having discussed these specific examples of early ritual regicide, both

(59:43):
both symbolic and you know, symbolic and figurative and also
very literal in some cases, UM, it's kind of interesting
to then bring it back to the president and think
about um, human sacrifice as a whole, and not only
like lit real human sacrifice, but all of the various
symbolic forms of it that have continued even past the

(01:00:06):
point where individual cultures would would never dream of saying
that they practiced human sacrifice, right. I mean, if you
look at it from the point of view that human
sacrifice is sort of scratching some kind of itch that
people in general tend to have. Even if we're no
longer doing it for explicitly religious or magical ritual reasons,
there's probably still a way people are finding to scratch

(01:00:27):
this itch, right, Like we already mentioned that, like the
violent downfall of rulers. You know, that's not an inherent
part of a system, and maybe it is something that
systems do because because the people end up taking the
reins of that. Yeah, Well, in the in the James
Fraser kind of sense, where when the strength of the
king fails, you see the the people step in to

(01:00:48):
kill the king to you know, sort of protect themselves
from the symbolic magic of the king's virility failing them
and their society. I think you can maybe see that
in the ends met by any strongman dictators in the
twentieth century, Like uh, you see the violent punishment and
and just sort of public mockery and treatment of the dictators.

(01:01:10):
You'd think of like Hitler and uh and Mussolini and stuff.
You know, whether they ended up you know, hung on
public display or as Eddie Iszard would say, I think
it's covered in petrol on fire. Uh. You could look
at that as well as just you know, their enemies
destroying them and getting revenge on them. And I think
that that is a major part of it. But I
wonder if there's also part of it where someone who

(01:01:31):
at some point may have been at you know, a
supporter of one of these strong men, has seen the
strongman fail, and now that they see his strength has
left him, they want nothing to do with it. They
want to ritually purge that failing bad magic. Yeah, indeed,
I mean and not only like the bodily desecration of
the individual, but also like the continued desecration of the

(01:01:54):
individual through even uh the fiction and media, like in
speaking about Hitler, like we don't have a Guy Fox
Day for Hitler, but maybe we should, because we seem
that we can't stop re killing Hitler in fictional form,
be it you know, Wolfenstein video game or the the
the assassination of Hitler in uh, Quentin Tarantinos and glorious bastards,

(01:02:19):
like we keep recreating it or creating it in a
in a new way. We the time travel scenario. Everyone's like, oh,
would you go back in time and kill Hitler? Like?
Why why does that keep coming up? We can't stop
fantasizing about about his death. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I mean,
is that just is there a simpler explanation. Isn't just
that we well, we recognize him as a bad person

(01:02:39):
and a very obvious enemy, and you want to destroy
an enemy? Or is there something more symbolic and magical
to it as well? Yeah? And then also various assassinations
of of not only the loved leaders, but also you know,
hated ones, reviled leaders. You see those as being subjects
that we just continue to fascinate about. I mean just

(01:03:00):
JFK for example. Oh yeah, I mean I feel like
this is a perfect example of if you wanted to
come up with a modern idea of the the the
king who's killed before his strength begins to fail. Like
what we never saw the post presidency JFK. We never
saw JFK have to fight for reelection. We never saw
JFK in in his post presidency years growing old. We

(01:03:23):
only have this image of the strong, young powerful, healthy JFK.
I mean, despite however, I think he was taking a
lot of painkillers and stuff like that, But despite how
how however unhealthy he actually was, he looked it seemed powerful, strong, healthy, young, virile,
and he died that way. So it kind of again
embodies that that Fraser kind of mentality about how keeping

(01:03:46):
the kingship infused with that magical strength. Yeah, and again
it's a story we can't stop retelling, both just historical
versions of it, fictionalized versions of it, and conspiracy theories
surrounding it exact. Now, I do feel like I need
to make a note here about public execution and mob violence,
because let's not forget that there's there, there's overt human sacrifice,

(01:04:08):
and then there are acts of public murder that certainly
fit all the requirements of human sacrifice. For instance, take
public execution as a practice. It continues to this day
in certain parts of the world, and at the heart
of public execution throughout history, you have a clear element
of ritual and symbolic power. So the executors are not
merely removing the offending individual or even punishing them. They're

(01:04:30):
making a statement, perhaps even a mythic statement, intended for
consumption by the attending community. The ritual itself might be
situated in a religious right, or elements of military or state,
but in the but the in the killing act maybe instantaneous,
it might be prolonged, but in more brutal measures, the
victim is unmade. He or she is reduced in the
eyes of the onlookers, perhaps his masculinity or beauty that

(01:04:53):
robbed of the strength voice. It goes right back to
those those pete that peep bog example of the bog
people who are the body of the king is dismantled.
The power of the king is bodily dismantled. Yeah, yeah, there.
I think it is very hard to look at most
of the regalia of public execution and not conclude that
there is for people, uh, if not an explicitly magical significance,

(01:05:18):
a very strongly symbolic significance. Right. Another area, you can
make a very strong case for Southern lynchings in the
United States as being acts of human sacrifice. These are,
of course, we're acts of racial violence perpetrated by by
individuals in the South against against black individuals. Uh. And
it's easy to in my experience growing up It's easy

(01:05:40):
to have a very sanitized version of what this consisted of,
but the actual incidents where anything. But we're talking about
very violent and tortuous deaths of individuals, removal of body parts, burning,
the keeping of body parts, the commemorating of the event
through a photography in some cases, and uh in various stories,
including Donald G. Matthews, He's written about this a lot

(01:06:03):
has pointed out that all the elements of ritual human
sacrifice are there, the religious even ritualized unmaking of an
individual because of their perceived threat perhaps to do racial purity. Totally,
I can see that. I mean, all the elements are there.
It's ritualized, it's symbologized, it's uh, it's motivated by strong

(01:06:24):
emotional impulses and feelings of uh social cohesion. Yeah, and
uh and beyond that, I think there you can see
strong indicators in certain modes of gang or organized crime
violence uh throughout history that they fall into the category
of human sacrifice. Oh yeah, I mean speaking of ritual regicide.
I mean think about um, I think if you just

(01:06:45):
I don't know how real gang mob violence goes down
in reality, but I can certainly say if you just
think about the Sopranos or something. They have a very
almost magical feeling about the role of leaders in the gang,
where they they almost accomplish a magical act by killing
a leader of a gang. You know, they say like, oh,

(01:07:06):
we gotta kill Tony Soprano, We gotta decapitate and deal
with what's left. Why, I mean, what why? Why is
what is the magical power and killing this one guy? Yeah?
And if the gang is the gang is made of hundreds, yeah, yeah,
we end up investing so much in the ruler of
this group because ultimately, a divine king, king of a nation,
the king of a small cultural group, a cult leader,

(01:07:28):
an organized crime leader, they're all kind of serving the
same mode, even though the head of a corporation is
kind of, you know, cast from that same mold. You know.
I was trying to think of examples of things that
go on today in our modern world that you can
think of as being not just like human sacrifice, but
like ritual regicide, you know, the killing of the king
for magical purposes. And I couldn't think of anything that

(01:07:49):
seemed like a perfect fit. But I'm sure there are
things out there, and there are things that seem like
a kind of sort of fit. One that came to
my mind as a celebrity roast which granted it's not
a king, but it is a celebrity which has a
kind of a divine power in our own civilization. And
how do those typically typically go. Generally, Um, a celebrity

(01:08:10):
kind of passed their prime or maybe you know, on
the on the you know, on the back end of
their fame, unless it's peper. Yeah, they're they're brought before
a crowd, they're attended to by by their friends and peers,
and then they systematically insult and just take them down,
uh you know, not violating their body, but but just

(01:08:30):
systematically tearing their character apart. They die on the stage,
uh symbolically. But then at the end, what do they
get to do? They generally get to uh then throw
out some zingers at the individuals who roasted them, and
in a way they get to uh to come back,
to rise back, just like our our king of the lagoons.

(01:08:53):
And then of course you have maka regicides that continue
in some cultures through the practice of carnival, uh, either
through the temporary elevation of a carnival king or a
fool king uh or even actual you know, acts of
mock regicide of this carnival king. So there's the the
Patras Carnival in Greece and it actually culminates in the

(01:09:14):
burning of the carnival king. Not the individual, but like
an effigy of the carnival carnival king is burned. I wonder,
you know, this sounds kind of dangerous, so I wouldn't
really recommend people do this, but I wonder if political
tensions could be eased if people just did uh, effigy
burnings and stuff. You know, people no matter which parties

(01:09:37):
in office, you know, people hate the president of the
opposing party. They're just, oh, he's everything. That's terrible, is it?
I don't know if if they were to burn effigies
of that president. Would that that sounds very inflammatory and offensive?
But would that make things worse with that stoke angers?
Would that encourage violence or would it alleviate it? Would
it sort of scratch this itch without people actually having

(01:10:00):
to hurt anybody. I think it could scratch the h
because the thing is like the idea of it of
burning an effigy of say a sitting US president in
the streets it's inflammatory, you know, literally, I mean it
certainly conjures to mind the fear that like, is this
a prelude to real violence? Which you would not want
it to be. But but the key here is we
do not have a cultural space for it to take place. Um,

(01:10:23):
you know, we don't have a safe spot. We don't
have a holiday where it is allowed. Yeah, that's exactly
what it is. You need. You need a ritual environment
in which it is sanctioned. And in that case, it
could be done without people having to wonder like, is
this a prelude to real violence? No, it's just part
of the ritual. We do it every year. Yeah, so
it's it would be kind of like the U. S.
President said, you know, ap peering on TV and saying, Hey, normally,

(01:10:45):
if you talk about this kind of thing, we're going
to come to your house and the Secret Service is
gonna have a chat with you. But this one day
of the year, you can burn me in effigy whatever.
I'm going to be on vacation, you know, heavily protected.
So I'm good. Yeah, I'll be playing golf or working
at the ranch. What have you hanging out with my
confectioners confectioners and concubines. All right, So there you have it. Um,

(01:11:09):
we we've covered a lot of territory here today, but
it really I think it serves to take a real
stuff to Blow your Mind approach to the topic of
human sacrifice. You know what it means at all levels
of society, what it meant in ancient societies, and how
the energy of those acts carry on today. Right. And
of course today we focus primarily on this ritual regicide example,
but there are lots of other aspects of human sacrifice

(01:11:30):
that could probably do with episodes of their own in
the future that we don't want to turn this into
the human sacrifice show, right, but but certainly if there's
an area here where you you think to yourself, I
would I would like to hear a podcast episode in
the future that dives more into this. Let us know
what that is and we'll see what we can do
in the meantime. If you want to check out more
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(01:11:52):
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(01:12:34):
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