Living with the Dead - Tana Toraja's Ma'nene Festival with Author & Photographer, Dr. Paul Koudounaris - Elvis Duran and the Morning Show ON DEMAND

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Mother Knows Death, starring Nicole and Jemmy and Maria QK.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey, guys, welcome to Mother Knows Death. The news has
been so heavy this week and we thought we would
lighten it up a little bit and talk to one
of our friends, Paul Kunaris. Paul has a PhD in
art history from the University of California and has written
widely on European oustuaries and charnel houses for both academic

(00:41):
and popular journals. He is the author of Empire of Death,
a cultural history of ousuaries and Charnowhouses, Memento Mori, the
Dead among Us, Heavenly Bodies, Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints
from the Catacombs, a book about domestic felines called a
ca Tal that was a Barnes and Noble Book of

(01:02):
the Year, and his latest book was called Faithful unto Death,
pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves and Eternal Devotion. Hi, Paul, welcome
the Mother Knows Death.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
Hi Nicole, him, Marie, and nice to see you again.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
All right, So, so we decided that the news has
been so crazy this week and we just need a break,
and you're the perfect person to bring everyone this break
and laughs that we need learning.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
Over mommies in Indonesia. That's fair.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
No, listen, our conversations really make me happy. So I
just wanted to spread the happiness with everyone. So all right,
so let's start. So a couple of weeks ago, you're
on a trip. You're always on a trip, and I
and I say where are you? And the conversation just

(01:53):
goes down all of these crazy lanes and I just
I'm like, all right, we need to talk about this
with everyone. So let's start off by telling everyone where
you were.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
Well, I had actually when I talked to you. When
I spoke to you, I was in Indonesia. I was
in Tana Taraja, which is part of the island of Sulawesi,
and I was at a mummy festival it's called Manine
where they dressed the mummies. But before that, I had
actually been in Thailand doing something really fascinating, documenting animal funerals,
because there's a temple in Bangkok where they do funerals

(02:25):
for pets and they do these Buddhist pet cremations and
then they take them down to the river and release them.
So in terms of the end of this deathy stuff,
it was it was a fantastic here.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
All right, So you've been to Indonesia before for this,
so just I guess go over exactly what happens there.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
Well, first of all, if you've never been to Indonesia,
the thing you have to understand is that you know,
it's it's a country of islands, which is obviously if
you look at a map, but you have to understand
that each island is almost like it's own separate country.
You know, they have their own customs, they have their
own beliefs, they have you know, they have their own culture.
And so even within certain islands, because they're large, you

(03:10):
can find pockets that are culturally completely different than others.
And the Tarajan tradition has always been Tana Taraja being
part of the island of Sula Wasi. The Tarajan tradition
has always been this fixation on death. The biggest event
in your life is actually your death, your funeral. It's
not your it's not your birth, it's not your wedding.

(03:31):
That's that's you know, in American culture, we all know
the thing that costs the most is the wedding, right.
You know, people pay out massive amounts of money for
wedding in taraja. It's the funeral. People will keep mummies
in their home. They'll keep their mummified relatives in their
home for sometimes years until they have enough money for
the funeral because it involves, you know, accumulating a certain

(03:51):
amount of buffaloes and pigs that have to be sacrificed
and building these enormous structures. So there's real fixation on death.
The death are really the dead are not considered to
be gone. The dead are still members of the community.
They've just kind of transitioned into another faith. They've transitioned
into a silent phase. So they're still members of the community.
So even after the funeral, they're not buried in the

(04:14):
ground and put away, you know, they're not stigmatizer dewised
in a funeral in a cemetery the way they are
in the United States. The dead will be placed in
above ground family crypts, you know, all one family together
in a crypt. And then once a year when the
rice crop comes in. So this usually happens in August.

(04:35):
Because the rice crop comes in sometimes around August, they
have spare time, and it's August kind of becomes a
month that they will dedicate to the dead, and so
a lot of these families then will open the crypts
and they'll take the mummies out, they will clean them,
they will lovingly redress them, they'll walk them around the village.
You know, they'll talk to them about family life, and
they'll re establish this bond with the people who have

(04:57):
passed on. Because the dead there aren't dead the way
they we are in the United States. The dead there
are still parts of the community and they still have
a role to play. And so if you show up
in August and you tour some of these outlying villages,
you can see exactly this the Mononee, this mummy ritual.
You can see them opening the tombs, opening the coffins,
taking out the mamafa ancestors, cleaning them, redressing them, and

(05:20):
walking around them.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
And they don't mind just Americans going and just observing.

Speaker 1 (05:27):
No, no, they don't. That becomes an interesting question too,
because this has never been too touristy. It's not like
Diadello's Weirtos, which is an entire industry and you know,
it has lit of thees based around it, like Cocoa,
the Monaa has always been very small in terms of outsiders.

(05:48):
That is beginning to change, and it will be interesting
to see how that culture adapts and how they react
to more visitors coming. But I've been four times to
this now, and you know, at the most you go
to a village and at the most, you know they'll
tell you, oh my god, there were so many tourists
here today, and at the most it might be about twenty.

(06:10):
So it's really still a very small number. It's really
just a trickle of people who are coming through Tana
Turraja to watch this thing with the mummies. But that
is beginning to change, and I don't know if that
will have an effect on how they view outsiders. But
they've always been very open. They've always been very willing
to share this, and they enjoy sharing this. The thing

(06:30):
that doesn't come across in the photos, and I know
you have some photos and some videos to show that
I took. The thing that doesn't come across in the
photos is that we think of this. You know, if
if we in the United States were to have the
ceremony like this where we exhumed our relatives and we
redress them, we would think of this as being very something,

(06:52):
very somber, and very mournful. It's not there. It's celebratory.
It's fun because they don't view the dead the way
we view the dead. They don't view them as being gone.
They just view them as kind of silent partners in
the community. And so this is a fun festival. You know,
you'll have people joking around, they'll be they'll light cigarettes

(07:13):
and put them in their mouth and the mummy's mouths,
and take pictures of the mummies smoking cigarettes. They put
funny hats on them, they'll put they themselves, will pose
for funny selfies with their own dead relatives. I was
in one of these villages. I don't know if I
sent this photo, and I don't know if you have it,
but in those you've selected for this episode, but uh,

(07:35):
dog running around. There was a husband, there was a
mummy of a husband and a wife, and their caskets
had just been open, and there was this dog running around.
And I said, Hey, was that dog owned by this family?
And so I told me, yeah, I was. I was like,
I would be great to get the dog in the photo.
And there was someone else there who was an American.
He's like, Oh, that would be really disrespectful. Don't do that.

(07:56):
That's really rude. Suggest that it's like, no, I don't
think they're gonna mind, And so I had my guide
go over and ask him. It's like, hey, what do
you think about getting the dog in the photo with
the mummies? And they're just like, oh, that's a great idea.
That's wonderful. And you know, they brought food over to
kind of encourage the dog to stand in front of
the mummies. So it's not this somber thing like we
tend to think as outsiders. They're very welcome people coming

(08:19):
because for them it's a celebration. It's a big party.
They love these ancestors and they love sharing this bos.

Speaker 2 (08:26):
All right, so then we so for those of you
that are listening, we do have these videos. This is
the first time that we're doing this on mother nos death,
so bear with us if it doesn't go according to plan.
But I guess we should start with this first video,
video number one, of what appears to be a husband

(08:48):
and wife. I don't know if this is the same
couple you were talking about, are a different one.

Speaker 1 (08:53):
Yeah, that's them. The dog won't be in the video,
but there is a still photo that shows the dog
just standing there right in front of them. But yeah,
so that's not that's a husband and wife. Their families
from the village had opened up the caskets and they
cleaned them. I have a bunch of photos of them
cleaning them off. Forward. They'll usually clean them off with
is a soft brush like a paint brush. So they'll

(09:14):
dust them off and clean them and they'll cut away
those old clothes and then they'll redress. They'll and and
they're very careful. You know. It's like one of the
things that's really touching to me is watching them checking
the necklace, like the woman's necklace. That particular woman, they
were tearfully checking her necklace to make sure all the
beads were still on it and to make sure the
class was still good.

Speaker 2 (09:33):
You know.

Speaker 1 (09:33):
They'll take the glasses off and they'll clean the glasses
and put the glasses back on. They'll make sure they have,
you know, that their watches are still attached properly. And
that woman, by the way, this was my favorite detail
of that couple. So they were they were cleaning out
the woman's coffin because they also cleaned the coffin. You know,
if they take the mummies out, they cleaned the coffin.

(09:55):
Now they dust the coffin out and get all the
junk out of it, and and purse was sitting there.
They buried her with a pink purse that matched that
shirt she was wearing. And then I saw the guy
opening the purse to inspect it as I, oh, what's
in her purse? And he pulls out one item. There
was one item in this woman's person. It was a dagger.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
That's so interesting.

Speaker 3 (10:15):
So when they put this clothing on them, is it
new clothing that's bought for the celebration or is it
the person's existing clothing or family heirlooms or mix.

Speaker 1 (10:25):
That's a great question because they oftentimes bury them with
a huge variety of their own clothing. As if who knows,
maybe the spirit wants to change clothing, you know, mid
death or something, they will. Usually they'll have to buy
new clothing to put on them when they redress them.

(10:49):
And the reason is this, when you think just functionally
about robing a corpse, you know, rigor mortis has set in,
and so you can watch them. Sometimes they'll show up
with with say shirts or dresses in multiple sizes because
you can't bend those arms in right, and so sometimes
they're gonna have to buy something that's bigger than the

(11:11):
person actually wore, to be able to have enough stretch
on the garment to get it over their arms and
their shoulders. It's interesting. The number one question I get
asked about this is does it stink. It's like, no,
it doesn't stink any worse than an old shoe, right
their old leather by now it's just a little musty.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
Did they get into the process with you at all?

Speaker 1 (11:34):
Yeah, but I was gonna say the number two question
I get asked is how do they get a shirt
onto a guy whose arms don't move? That's why usually
you should say it to me. Yeah. So they used
to use natural tens, you know, but nowadays they just
use formaldehyde. From aldehyde, They've been doing this for a

(11:55):
long time. Obviously they've been doing this, you know. Exactly
how long they've doing this is debatable. I've heard people
claiming that they've been doing this for Llennia. I have
not seen evidence of that, but I've definitely seen mummies
that are have got to be about one hundred years old,
about the oldest I've seen before they completely fall apart.
Nowadays they do it with formaldehyde, and you can tell

(12:18):
I did send some stuff over where it wasn't in
the tombs but in people's homes. And I've visitored a
lot of homes where they do still have the mummies.
They are waiting for the funeral and they look amazing,
and it's all from this formaldai. They really really shoot
them up with a lot of formaldehyde to preserve them.
So that's been introduced in it. And so they do
use the formal dayde now rather than the natural methods,

(12:40):
just because it works much better.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
This is this is really interesting to me because all right,
Ray show first show, pick six, because he was talking
about that a little bit earlier about how they clean
them up.

Speaker 1 (12:52):
That's fair.

Speaker 2 (12:54):
Wait, we have another sit. It's just going to take
us back for it to pop up. I think you
were saying with the brush that how they clean them all. Yes,
so I guess from from a decomposition standpoint. My my
question is because they obviously they when a person dies,

(13:18):
they're going to have rigor mortis for after death, but
that goes away after that goes away after a couple
of days for sure.

Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yeah, that's that's the same guy. That's the husband, and
you can see he's he's cleaning off the guy's nose.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
Yes, So they do this that every year when.

Speaker 1 (13:39):
Well, not necessarily every year the mon in ay goes.
This is what gets very confusing because I've had people
tell me, you know, I want to go see this,
you know, you know, what's the schedule, as if there's
as if it's you know, some like published schedule somewhere,
like like a public holiday in the United States, And
it doesn't work that way. There's about a from two

(14:01):
there's about a period of about two weeks to a
month where villages might potentially be doing this anywhere from
when they bring the rice c up in until when
they have to start working on whatever the next thing is.
And so there's a period of about a month where
they might be doing it, and each village can do
it at different times. Not every village chooses to do
it every year, and even in the village that does

(14:23):
choose to do it, they don't do everybody. So we
might be i'd say, all the average, a corpse comes
out and is re robed about every three years, I
would say, on the average. So you know, this year
it was this guy's urn. The guy we're looking at
the picture of mom and dad. This year, someone said
let's get mom and dad out, and you know, instead

(14:44):
of Uncle Pete, let's do mom and dad this year.
So they don't do everybody every year. And as I study,
it's not every village is doing it at a different time.
By the way, you know, watching the guy watching the
picture of the guy with the the paintbrush cleaning him up.
My favorite guy was someone at one of the villages.
I guess he just didn't have enough time. So they

(15:06):
opened the coffins and he just walked up with a
giant push started sweeping everybody off, two of them at
a time.

Speaker 2 (15:13):
Oh my, all right, so put up picture to ray.
So this is my question after so I think that
we talked about this in our text, that some of
these bodies have a very interesting appearance, because this isn't so.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
You of course had to use the one where the
guy's wearing the fake beer.

Speaker 2 (15:33):
Mask because this sorry anything about it, as if this
is normal. Now, this this is amazing. When you sent this,
I'm like, dude, like, I'm so fortunate to be friends
with someone that has the opportunity to take a photo
like this. I just don't even know where to start.

Speaker 1 (15:54):
This is his grandmother I so regarding the mask, a
lot of them do wear masks. I actually I try
when I take the photos to take more photos of
people out them without masks than with masks, just because
it creates it's not some kind of like you know,

(16:17):
COVID thing. And that's why I try to get away
from that symbolism because when Americans see that, you know,
when they see masks now they think of COVID. It's
not because they think they're gonna get COVID. It's not
because they think they're going to get some infection from
the dead people. It's simply from dust because there's so
much dust. Like I've watched some of these mummies getting

(16:41):
blown off, you know, brushed off for the dust, and
it's like a fog machine that's gone off because it's
not just dusty and the tom you know, the skin
is deteriorating. So you got these skin particles accumulating, they're
brushing them off and it creates a kind of cloud.
And so a lot of times they do wear the
masks for the dust. That's why this is guy, this
guy's wearing this mask. I don't know why he chose

(17:03):
this particular mask, but he, Uh, you know it's it's
for us, and and you know, this is a great
picture actually because he it makes that point that I
was trying to make that this is fun, this is celebratory.

(17:24):
This guy is not mocking it. He's just having fun
with it. He's like, you know, I'm gonna go take
Grandma out and I'm gonna wear the funny mask.

Speaker 2 (17:35):
Do you since you've been all over the world looking
at different cultures and and have had experience with multiple
different kinds of mummies, do you think that these ones
look a little bit different than other ones that you've
seen as far as this, I'm I'm just curious about
the decomposition process, just because of the this particular just

(17:59):
because of the way are treating the bodies, and then
the particular environment they're in versus somewhere like Sicily that
has a completely different environment, right that.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
That's a tough question to answer, because when they've been
desiccated to this extent, they all kind of start to
look the same. Dried skin inevitably starts to look like
dried skin. There are differences here. The coloration of these
is significantly significantly different than the coloration of the mummies
I've seen in places like Sicily. But then again, these

(18:34):
people have a different tonal pigment to their skin, so
maybe that's it. Maybe it's simply the tonal pigment to
their skin. You would know this better than I. I
think maybe the you know, you'd know the answer to
this better than I. But maybe the tonal coloration of
their skin is still preserved for a while versus some

(18:55):
I don't know environmental environmental issue.

Speaker 2 (18:59):
Well, it's interesting because I did say that I knewed
you put that picture back up, that there's something called
so you on top of the mummification, there's also something
called adipus here which I could see, which is something
that is a more rare thing that happens during the
decomposition process, which is specific to being inside of an

(19:20):
environment that doesn't have any air, particularly like if someone's
buried in soil, for example, not in a box in soil,
but like just no and no air. Environment that's also moist,
which is which is why I'm getting there with the
environment there, because it's a little bit more like tropical
like there.

Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yeah, it's well, it's certainly yes, and no tarage is
at elevation and it's one of the least tropical, one
of the least tropical is one of the least human
areas I've been in.

Speaker 3 (19:54):
Cha.

Speaker 1 (19:55):
But that being said, yes, it's still it's still probably
more humid.

Speaker 2 (20:01):
Yeah, that's just like I mean, it's humid less humid there,
but compared just because typically the mummification process is to
remove water. That's how you get like a true mummified body.
But because you really can't just because it's in the air,
that's what might be creating this specific like the more

(20:22):
yellow white look with these patches here. It's just something
that I was curious about. That's all, all right? Reput
up photo three three, Okay, so I'll describe the photo
for those who are just listening. It appears to be
a husband and wife who are wearing baseball hats, and

(20:45):
there's a daughter and a son who seemed to be
ten to twelve to thirteen years old range. And they're
holding a child, a mummy child that's wearing a dress,
and it looks like a the most awkward family photo ever,

(21:06):
write them. But the guy's wearing a Yankees hat, and
you're your.

Speaker 1 (21:11):
Well, there were the whole family wearing Yankee hats, and.

Speaker 2 (21:15):
What happened when you asked them?

Speaker 1 (21:16):
You well, I asked them about the Yankees, and you know,
I asked it because the whole family of wearing the
Yankee hats. I asked them, It's like, hey, so you
guys like the Yankees. They're like, you know, they're just hats,
and uh. Some of them were like yeah Yankees. Nice
and who's your who's your favorite player? And some girls
in Big Ruth.

Speaker 2 (21:37):
So so so then this, all of these conversations get
really good when I'm having a text with Paul. So
of course when I look at this photo, my first
question is like, well, what happened to this kid? And
he's like, she died.

Speaker 1 (21:57):
It's not untrue, no, I I know not. Keep in
mind that compared to the United States, infant mortality is
very high in Indonesia in general, and especially in Tan
of Turaja, so it's not surprising to find a high

(22:19):
percentage of infant mummies. One of the more touching things
on this trip was a family that was cleaning off
the remains of a baby that had died at the
age of four hours, so it had barely lived at all.
It hadn't even lived for a day, and I don't

(22:40):
know if you recall I did send you some pictures
of that and you had mentioned, you know, I was like, wow,
this kid was really young that because the sutures on
the skull hadn't even closed, they were still open. The
skull was still fragmented. It was, you know, still in
multiple pieces. And this kid had died something like twenty
years ago. But when you think about it, it really
is a very touching esther to allow this child who

(23:01):
never had a chance to life had life to continue
to live on in a way as a beloved member
of the family and as a member of the community.
And so they were very very careful and very verry
gentle with this infant's remains, you know, like checking like
because you also, the normal mollification process apparently that they're
that they're using apparently can't really be done with infants

(23:24):
in the same way it can be done with grown ups,
and so this one was more skeleton. So they were
very careful, you know, going through and checking all the
clothing for every tiny little towbone and every tiny little
finger bone and making sure that every part of this
kid was still in there. And it was really, like
I said, it was probably the most touching moment of
this trip to see this, this infant that had died
it just a few hours, still still receiving still well,

(23:50):
I was gonna say, still receiving love, but receiving the
love that had never had an opportunity to receive in live.

Speaker 3 (23:56):
So some of these people keep the mummies in their homes.

Speaker 4 (24:00):
Correct, Yeah, as I said, it's because the funeral process
is so lengthy and it can take years and years
to get enough money for the funeral.

Speaker 1 (24:12):
I've visited people who've had mummies in their homes for
you know, to ten years, like really a very long time.
The first time I went to Taraja, things really got
put in perspective for me when I had a guide
by the name of a Goost, and I asked him
whether he knew anybody who kept mummies in the hole,

(24:32):
because I would like to visit some mummies at home.
And he started telling me a story and he said, well,
you know, when I was a kid, we had the
mummy of my grandfather at the home. It just lived
with us and every morning, you know, we'd stand it
up in the corner and you know, we'd put its
day clothes on, and then in the evening, we put
its pajamas on and we would just put it in

(24:55):
the bed and my brother and I would sleep with
his mummy.

Speaker 2 (24:59):
This when you say this, which is not well, normally.

Speaker 1 (25:02):
They don't sleep with the mummy. They're usually in home
with the coffin. But Goose was an older guy and
maybe that's how they did it back in the day.

Speaker 2 (25:09):
It's just.

Speaker 1 (25:12):
With his grandfather's mummy.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
Like to hear that as an American, it just sounds
so so weird. But but like when you hear, when
you really think about it, how you're telling the story
and stuff, it's it's like we're the weird ones because
they're they're able to get on with their life and
not be devastated by the death of someone, which is
I mean, we need to bring more of that here.

(25:36):
So it's just not so terrible because people die all
the time accidentally, uh just naturally die younger than they should,
and sometimes it completely ruins their family's life because of it.

Speaker 1 (25:49):
And this is we are the weird ones historically and culturally,
because when you look at death culture across the world,
and you look at it historically, the dead had never
really been ghetto wised the way they are in American
and European culture until around the last century, until really

(26:11):
the beginning of the twentieth century is when we really
started going at it in this way. It used to
be very common for people to die at home and
to keep the body at home, sometimes for a lengthy
period for the funeral. Even within Europe. You know those
those great collections of mummies in Italy sometimes you know
in Palermo, for instance, thousands and thousands of them. That

(26:32):
was still going until the early twentieth century. And you know,
we're the one who changed it and then projected this
idea that we now have a lot of. It had
to do with hygiene laws, and it's understandable as metropolitan
areas became extremely large. You know, in the medieval world,
they didn't have cities of millions and millions of people.

(26:54):
They didn't have millions of people they needed to inhue
and so you know, when you have millions of dead people,
you do have to start making an accommodation. Part of
the reason they made all those giant cemeteries in Paris
when they did is there were certain neighborhoods where the
groundwater in that neighborhood was being contaminated by corpse juice,

(27:14):
you know, because they were bearing them in the local churchyards,
and the and the churchyards themselves had become so exhaust
the soil had become the nutrients in the soil that
would process the bodies had become so exhausted that they
could no longer process human flesh, and so the bodies
were basically just oozing out into the groundwater. And it is,

(27:34):
you know, it is a sincere public health concern if
you've got that going on. So in some ways we
had to change things. We had no choice when when
our population exploded and these metropolitan areas became very huge.
But historically and cross culturally, we are the weird ones
for doing things the way we're doing now and then
projecting that idea across the rest of the world. And

(27:57):
it's like, hey, look what you're doing. You people over
there are a bunch of savages. You're playing with the dead.
This isn't the this isn't the way. It's you know,
this isn't the objectively true way we're supposed to have
a relationship with the dead. And it's just nonsense. It's
you know, it's this false humorous that the way we
do things, and that the method that we've invented for

(28:18):
our culture is somehow right, and it should be right
for everybody. And like as I said, and you said,
we're the weird one. We came up with something that
is historically very different than humanity had been doing it
for millennia. It's very sterile here.

Speaker 2 (28:34):
Yeah, we've had a couple of stories in the news
over the past couple of years that have been like
a husband's wife died and he was living with the
dead body in his house for months, sometimes even longer.
And it kind of sucks because these people get in
trouble for this, and you yea, And in other cultures

(28:58):
it would just be considered, of course, like you don't
want you to leave your wife's body sometimes, and even
though the decomposition process can be a very gross thing,
when you're in love and you have a connection with someone,
you kind of can overlook that.

Speaker 1 (29:14):
Right. He was something that that I realized when I
was working on those mummies in Sicily, that if you
had gone back in time into the nineteenth century in Palermo,
you know Norman Bates, Well, we'll leave out the murder part,
but Norman Bates would have been considered a loving son,
you know, for preserving his mother and um mummifying her

(29:38):
and dressing her up and continuing this relationship with her.
This one he would have that would have been considered
an act well, and you know, by the nineteen fifties
it was considered the act of a criminal lunt.

Speaker 2 (29:51):
Yeah, and a good a good piece for a horror film.
It's kind of amazing.

Speaker 3 (30:05):
This episode is brought to you by the Grossroom.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
Guys, the Grossroom is on sale for only one more day.
Right on Friday, we are done with the sale and
it doesn't go on sale that much, so you really
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(30:28):
with photos, videos. It's a lot. And it's only twenty
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or celebrity death dissection is on Charlie Kirk and there's
a lot of activity on that. It's really awesome because
we're all having a conversation that is civil about it.

(30:49):
Just talking about the forensics and the investigations. So check
that out.

Speaker 3 (30:53):
Head over to the grossroom dot com now to sign up.

Speaker 2 (30:58):
Ray show video too, because this one's got a good
story if you're willing to tell it. All right, sound on, yeah,
keep the sound on.

Speaker 1 (31:06):
Okay, this is the kid, isn't it.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yes? Okay, So this guy is shaking this maybe like
it's a Morocco.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
Yeah. The thing you're hearing rattling is his brain. There
is a great story with this, a couple of great stories,
weird stories, and the viewer will have to decide what
they think is credible. But with that preface, the first
time I had been to to Raja and I had
mentioned that I I've already mentioned that, I asked my

(31:43):
guide whether he knew anybody with mummies in the house,
and he said to me, yeah, you know, I know
a place where they have this mommified's little girl. She
lives in the house. It's their daughter. She was found
in a crypt somewhere. No one knew who she No
one knew who she was. They felt she was lonely
or they felt they heard her crying. So to the home,
this is that girl. This was about ten years ago

(32:04):
when I first met her, I wrote a book called
Momento Mori and I included that story and it included
tootos of her. Since that time, every time I've gone
back to Taraja, I've asked about this little girl, and
no one knows what has happened to this mummy this
little girl. People said, no, we've never seen this mommy.
We don't know anything about her, don't We don't know
what you're talking about. So I had never known what

(32:25):
had happened to this little girl. And then on this
last trip this year in August, I asked my guide,
you know, I'd like to set up some tours homes
or they have mommies living there. And we had visited
a couple and then he came to me and he said, yeah,
there's apparently a woman named Susan who's mummified in a
home very far from me, by a couple hours drive.

(32:48):
But they said we could go and meet her, and
so we drove out there, and we got there and
the guy comes out. He's the head of the village.
The guy shaking her is that guy. He's the head
of the village. He comes out, he brings out some
coffee and some sticky rice. And he said, well, I'd
like to talk to you about her and and drink
some coffee with you first before we meet her, because

(33:09):
she she's a very special mummy. And I said, you know,
so we sat down and we talked to the guy
and he said, well, first of all, her name is Susan,
and she's very small. It's like, how small, He's like,
she weighs about a pound. She is very small. By boy,
It's like, that's odd. And I started to get the
impression when when he was describing this mummy that this

(33:30):
might be a chavoo. And then he said something about
and she told me that an old friend was coming
to visit her today. It's like she won. And sure
enough he brought her out and it was her. It
was that little girl that I had met ten years
ago and had lost track of. He believes that she
has she has kind of quasi magical powers. He says

(33:51):
he talks to her in dreams, that in the dreams
she jumps up and down on his bed and he
touches her foot. She touches his foot and tickles it.
And the track of her is because someone came to
the village and tried to buy her, and they had

(34:11):
decided to hide her away in the house of the
guy who's in charge of the village. Head of the village. Though,
no one would be tempted to steal her and sell
her because then, first of all, she's considered a member
of the community. Now, so that would be a heinous act,
you know, it would be like selling someone into slavery.
But so they believe they could be cursed, you know,

(34:33):
she's sold ethically cursed as well as maybe by her
she has magical power. The thing that gets really weird
about this story is I asked who tried to buy her,
and he said a guy had come to the village
saying that he was a representative of the Saudi Arabian
army and that he heard they that he had heard
they had some magical mummy, and he offered an amount

(34:55):
of money that that I'm just telling you guys what
he told. Okay, offer, I said, how much did he offer?
And he gave me an amount of money that when
I did the conversion would have been around almost four
million dollars US dollars. And I said, that can't be wrong.
Are you sure? You're you know the Saudis can afford this,

(35:17):
but why does the Saudi army need a magical baby mummy?
But I asked him, I was like, are you sure
we're talking about the right number, like because in current
if you've been to Indonesia, you know that currency exchange
is tricky because the rapia is so low. It's like
sixteen thousand to a dollar. And I saysthing, are you

(35:39):
streaman billions and not millions? Because if he knocked three
zeros off of it, it would be something right around
four thousand dollars, which might make a little bit more
than nod well, more than I've got to spend on
a mummy, let's say that way. Why anyway, that's why not?

(35:59):
He taught me, no, no, this was the amount that
he offered, but it doesn't which it would be enough
to rebuild the village, you know, a dozen times. But
he told me no, that he the guy had offered
that account. But it didn't matter. She wasn't for sale
for any price. But if you're wondering about shaking her around,
he wanted to show that her brain is still there.

(36:21):
That was the point, he said, you know, her brain
is still in there, and so he started shaking her
like a rocket show that her brain. He also and
I found this funny. He started complaining, oh is the
sound on? I think the sounds off. Yeah, yess yeah.

(36:42):
So he also started bringing that the brain doesn't rattle,
which I think it's probably ys. So the brain is
probably breaking into smaller pieces.

Speaker 2 (36:59):
Yeah, as he exactly, it's kind of fragile.

Speaker 1 (37:02):
Yeah, set by it that her brain was not rattling
the way it should. Wow.

Speaker 2 (37:08):
That it's just so. I mean, the amount of money
is insane, but it's so. I had asked you because
you're like, what's the connection between Saudi Arabia and Indonesia,
But you were, which I didn't realize that about the
religions there, and that got us into another conversation of
you saying that Indonesia was primarily.

Speaker 1 (37:31):
Indonesia's primarily Moslim. But all these people with the mummy,
and we haven't mentioned this yet and we should discuss it.
Taraja is the Catholic part of it. All these people
with the mummies are Catholics, which you know, to a
Catholic in the United States, this is a very weird

(37:52):
and perverse practice if it's considered Catholic. But you have
to remember that. You know, Catholicism always takes on two forms.
Any religion really takes on two forms, but especially Catholicism.
You travel around the world, there's something about Catholicism where
it tends to vary more from place to place than

(38:12):
other religions. You'll have the doctrinal version of Catholicism as
they practice it in the Vatican, and then you'll have
the localized version. And so this happens to be Tarajian.
Catholicism has this intense focus on the dead, and I'll
get asked questions about these photos a lot. It's like, well,

(38:33):
you know, what's what do they believe about the afterlife?
What's the spiritual connection? It's like, well, they're Catholics, you know.
And then people want some you know, people want some
really lengthy anthropological answer about you know, some trip down
a magical river and such and such, you know with
the mummies, and it's it's like they're actually just Catholics.

(38:53):
All these tombs they have a cross, right, you know,
all these they keep the money, they've got to cross
right outside the door, and they've got a picture of
Jesus and Mary. They're just Catholic.

Speaker 2 (39:02):
Well, assuming in Palermo. They're also Catholics, correct.

Speaker 1 (39:07):
That's right. So it's interesting that.

Speaker 2 (39:10):
That they were doing the mummies too, I wonder.

Speaker 1 (39:14):
But again it's not It wasn't mormal, all right.

Speaker 2 (39:19):
So one of the things that I wanted to bring
up to was that this is just cool from a
medical perspective. Some of the some of the mummies, and
also these skulls we'll talk about too, that they actually
have signs of some kind of medical intervention, which is
cool to show Show pick five first. This this one

(39:40):
has dentures, which is kind of cool that they just
left there. So we'll see things like that too.

Speaker 1 (39:53):
I suppose, yeah, well, she's gonna want her dentures, right,
She's It would be an affront to her to bury
her without the dentures, wouldn't it, especially if they don't
consider the dead to be dead the way we do.
You know, they leave, Okay, so we've already seen people

(40:13):
where they leave the glasses on them, they leave the
watches on them, they leave their jewelry on them. Why
wouldn't they leave the dentures.

Speaker 2 (40:21):
It's it's it's just really cool because you get this
unusual opportunity to view a lot of people in this
this interesting preservation and it's cool to see certain things.
Like the next one we're gonna show is, let's look
at number seven. So this so you have other photos

(40:42):
from this trip of all of these skulls that are
where are they exactly located?

Speaker 1 (40:47):
Okay, So this is also in Indonesia. This guy obviously
had brain operation of some kind and it looks it
looks like he might have died of it. Right, there's
not much healing going on around those cuts. But this
is not from Taraja, This is from Bali. This is
from Indonesia too. Bali is the Hindu part of Indonesia.

(41:11):
This obviously with the skull is not a Hindu practice.
There's one part of Bali called Trunion that never converted
to Hindu it so they are the original Balanese and
so they still practice the original what we consider the
more pagan practices in Bali. They have three different cemeteries
for three different classes of people. There's a cemetery for babies,

(41:33):
there's a cemetery for single people, and there's cemetery for
married people. And what they'll do, especially at that second cemetery,
they the dead are allowed. It's a natural green burial. Effectively,
the dead are laid out on the ground. They put
the they build what amount to kind of like bambootipies

(41:54):
over them to keep monkeys out. To keep the monkeys
from chewing them, they build these kind of bamboot teepees
over them to protect them. There's room for only a
certain number of graves out there because it's a small
piece of land. There's a giant tree. It's a banion
tree that naturally deodorizes the area and sought to protect
the spirits of the dead. And every time someone new dies,

(42:17):
since there are very few barrier space, there's very few
spaces for these bamboo tipee things. Every time someone new dies,
they take someone who has been decomposed and they take
their their bones and they put them over in a
big pile. And this is the Trunnion Cemetery. So if
it's on an island, you can only get there by boat.
It's on an island in Lake Patoure. And so if
you go to Trunnion and you go to the dock,

(42:39):
you can take a boat ride out to the cemetery
and they'll just let you wander around and take pictures
and be all this stuff and you can look in
the deepees and see the people who are decomposed. There's
one guy who on this trip, there was one guy
who had only been there for a couple of days.
He was very new. Like, you'll find some interesting things
in that bone pile because you will see, as you said,

(42:59):
a lot of signs of some of the medical interventions
or operations that people might have had.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
Yeah, this one's cool. So this guy definitely had a craniotomy.
For those of you who are listening, it's a surgery
as Paul's had a brain surgery. It's a perfect square
on the side of the temporal bone over here, and
there's four burholes on each corner, and there's hardware that

(43:25):
are taking it, that are adhering it to the skull.
So this person had some kind of a brain injury
where they had to allow for swelling of the brain.
And this is a surgery they could do on people
that survive it, too, but they have to because the
brain is so tight within the cranial cavity. They have
to open a hole basically to let it swell out,

(43:47):
to give it room, and the thought that it would
swell back down and then they could just put it
back basically, and they use this hardware to do it,
and it's it's really cool that you get to see
this kind of stuff on people. Do they do they
ever have problems with people going and robbing these remains

(44:10):
to sell them on the market because people want skulls.

Speaker 1 (44:14):
Yeah, I was actually going to say something about that
to my eye. And I've been to Trunnion several times
because every time I passed through Indonesia, if I stop
in Bali, I do go to Trunnion and you know,
just see who's new in the little teepee, see who's died,
and see what's been added to the unpop. I think
there are a lot less skulls now than there used

(44:36):
to be, So yes, I think they do have a
problem with theft, but I don't I don't necessarily think
it's Westerners who are sealing them. It would be very
hard to get out to Trunnion, to that island as
Western because you need to depart from their dock on
a boat, and if you are departing from their dock

(44:57):
on your boat, they know they'd see you. And there's
really no way to get to that cemetery except on
a boat. I think it might be some shady locals
who are maybe stealing them and selling them to outsiders,
which yeah, it's just as bad. I mean, you know,
the skull traffic. It's our fault. We're the ones, you know,

(45:18):
we're the ones who are buying. If we weren't buying
these things and they wouldn't be selling, there would be
no interest in stealing them. But I definitely think that
there are less skulls there than when I first went.

Speaker 2 (45:31):
Yeah, and I can't imagine that a Westerner would be
I mean, if you're just traveling on an airplane, that
just would not be possible to I mean, how are
you going to get it home? I guess unless you
could ship it somehow. But I see what you're saying though,
it's just less likely that they're going to do that.
But who knows, because we you know, we all have them.

(45:53):
So like where are they coming from? Originally? You know,
sometimes you get an antique store or whatever, but you
have to think, like, well, where did it come from
before that? You know?

Speaker 1 (46:04):
When I So there's a somewhat analogous practiced to some
of this in Bolivia, in La Pause, there's a festival
called Yesterday Lost in Gatitas, and it's on every November eighth,
and I went there something like twelve years in a row.
And so the world's largest skull festival. And every year

(46:25):
on November eight, these people who live with skulls in
their homes as you know, spiritual protectors and helpers and guardians,
they take the skulls back to the cemetery and they have
this giant party for them, and you can go down
to the cemetery. At one time you could buy three
human skulls at that cemetery for ten dollars that it
was kind of like a special deal. This was at

(46:46):
one point in time, meaning like a long long time ago,
like the first time I had ever gone down. But
because in La Pause, in that cemetery, you're renting grave site.
You don't purchase it in two you have to keep
paying rent on it. And at some point in time,
you know, however, many generations down the line, you know,

(47:08):
someone's gonna stop paying the rent on your grave. And
if you walk around the cemetery, you'll see your fiction
notices on some of the graves. You know, it's like
a quit notice, and so those people get removed and
they're supposed to be taken into this. Basically, you're supposed
to be putting a mass pit in a mass grave,
but a lot of those skulls were getting sold by
the grave diggers. And so yeah, you can buy skulls

(47:31):
and other parts of the world significantly cheaper than in
the United States. As you said, there's an issue with
getting them back into the United States, but there's no
problem buying them in other parts of the world. When
I used to travel in Peru, it was very easy
to buy skulls at at the black market in Lima.
They were all over the place. I even had a

(47:52):
woman show up at my hotel doors. Woman knocks on
my hotel door and I opened it up and she
had a bag and she opened up with the bag
and there was this MoMA fight head and bag to
somebody that's hand the toe room. Because she had seen
me looking at the skulls at the black market. And
you know, I chase I chased her out. That head
had come from that that head had come from, uh,

(48:13):
you know, anhink and bury all. It was plunder hell
out of here. I don't want that thing in my room.
That's a bust. And you can buy the skulls olive
or someplace like that. You can't buy the moment fighted
heads that are stolen too.

Speaker 2 (48:26):
Yeah, that that just seems like it would be cursed too.
But I think it's funny that she was just like,
you look like the type that would like what I
have in this.

Speaker 1 (48:34):
Bag here, and I'm not gonna buy it.

Speaker 2 (48:39):
Yeah, no, I I get that, all right. There was
one other photo that you talked about earlier. I just
wanted to put up when you were saying that how
they dressed up the mummies and stuff. Wait, which one
is it a picture for? Is just shows that they're
putting a cigarette in the mummy's hand.

Speaker 1 (48:59):
Yeah, I love the photo.

Speaker 2 (49:01):
Yeah, it's just so cool. You just the way that
you capture these photos is just like unlike anything, It
almost seems not real.

Speaker 1 (49:10):
Right. First well, first of all, it can hurt them now.
And second of all, like I said, it's the mistake
that we make when we confine ourselves to just looking
at the photos or the videos. The mistake we make
is thinking that this is some very somber ceremony, like
people are weeping, and you know, like everybody is marching

(49:31):
in silence up to the dead person, and like you know,
you know, deflecting their gaze. True, it's supposed to be fun.
It's supposed to be celebratory. We saw the guy in
the funny mask before, you know, we see the people
with the cigarettes, you know, like I said, the people
let me pose the dog with the mummy. It's supposed
to be fun, you know. And look at it this way.

(49:55):
If you were a corpse that hadn't been out of
the box for three years, wouldn't you want to come
out and have fun instead of having everybody shut up
and silent around you.

Speaker 2 (50:05):
Yeah, I mean I would totally be into this. I
don't know if my town would be into it.

Speaker 3 (50:10):
Well, Paul, I think the way you explained death in
other cultures is so beautiful because I think a lot
of our listeners are not a lot I think some
of our listeners might look at this and think it's strange,
especially with the sterile nature of funerals and death in
Western society.

Speaker 1 (50:25):
But when you are.

Speaker 3 (50:26):
Showing these pictures and documenting them and taking the time
to learn these people's stories and the process, it's so
cool to see. And it opened my eyes as somebody
that wasn't really open to you know, seeing something like
this to how really respectful and honorable it could be.

Speaker 1 (50:42):
Well, and I love the fact that they happen to
be Catholic. I think that's a wonderful part of it. Yeah,
because if you wannt to write it off as you know,
it's like, well, it's just some you know, perverse, exotic thing.
Come back to the fact that they're Catholic. I mean,
I yes, there are people who want to write off
all of Catholicism, reverse thing, I suppose, but it's no,

(51:02):
you know, it's it's a religion that people practice in
the United States too. It's a religion that is that
is headquartered in Italy, and this just happens to be
the local manifestation of it. So it's another tie that
lets us know that just as different as this is,

(51:23):
there's a commonality these people and with us.

Speaker 2 (51:27):
This is actually less weird to me than what we
would do in our family as a traditional Catholic viewing,
which is, you know, embalming a person and then putting
makeup on them to try to make them look like
they're alive. It's just the weird. It's so weird imposing them.
It's just it's weird.

Speaker 1 (51:47):
Well, and it's funny because they think that our practice is,
you know, if you talk to them about it, like, well,
you know, we put a bunch of makeup on the
you know, they kind of swell up like a balloon.
We put a bunch of makeup on them and will
bury them in the ground. Like, oh, that sounds kind
of savage.

Speaker 2 (52:04):
It is, like it really is when you sit there obviously,
you know, like all the stuff that's been happening in
the news, and Charlie Kirk's wife had posted a video
of herself kind of crying over his body at his viewing,
and people really freaked out about this video just because
his hands. They thought his hands looked terrible. And I

(52:25):
keep bringing up the point like he's dead and she's
alive holding his hands, but her hand is alive, and
his hand has actually been so Number one, he bled out,
so he was pal as hell, he's been embalmbed, and
he has makeup on top of it to make him
look alive. So yes, it looks like hell, that's what
it looks like.

Speaker 1 (52:46):
One of the things that I love that really touches me.
And I don't know what photos you still have. Maybe
we should just run through some of them, and I'll
try to narrate what's going on. But one of the
things I love about this thing in Indonesia, in ton
of Trondia is when they will take out the mummies
of people who are severely deteriorated, severely and they will

(53:07):
continue and they will treat them as loving as if
they were the living person. And I think that is
really like, that is real love. To me, that is
real beauty, because to us when we look at them
this revulsion, you know, it's like, oh my god, she
really looks bad. It's like, hey, you know what, the

(53:28):
way you look is superficial. What they're celebrating is the
bond underneath. And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if
they're not wearing makeup, and it doesn't matter that they
look desiccated. They love these people and they will continue
to love them, and they are not revolted by them.

Speaker 2 (53:48):
Yeah, it really is. And I mean all the the
thing is is that humans are so are just so
in tune to things that aren't that aren't real. And
when you when you have a person that's dead and
you put all that makeup and stuff, it's not tricking
anybody to think they look like they're sleeping. Like everyone's like,
that looks really bad.

Speaker 1 (54:11):
I had a guy. Usually I try really hard to
keep the online dialogue around these photos clean, you know,
because I don't want people insulting someone else's cultural practice.
But some guy said it and I had to admit
it's true. Some guy commented on this photo when I
put on line, it's like she looks like c THEYPO.

(54:33):
Well yeah, and it was chill. I was like, you
know what that one. I'll let that one stay. It's
really it's there's a beauty. It's like, good for her,
you know what she kind of does, and I think
it's beautiful.

Speaker 2 (54:45):
Yes, it's very cool what's going on with with the
orbit there, and it's just like it it really is
this unique kind of form of mummification and atipacer that
it just has a very pacific look compared to other time,
Like if a person died and naturally mummified in in

(55:07):
you know, Oklahoma or something, it just would have a
different look. And it's just really cool.

Speaker 1 (55:13):
Well, one thing about these that would really shock people.
I don't know again, if you have more photos or
more of the videos to show one thing that would
really shock people, and it took me a while to
get over. Is when they open the caskets, they're not
just when they clean them. They're not just brushing away
the dust. They're brushing away insect carcass. Yea, they're brushing

(55:35):
away bug carcasses because the bugs are eating these too,
and you'll see them constantly, like some of them are
just loaded over. Their caskets are just full of insect cases.
And that would really be a hard thing, I think
for Americans to take to not just see their dead
relative all desiccated, but to see the evidence that their

(55:55):
dead relative had been had been eaten by bugs, was
being eaten by these insects. But it doesn't bother them
at all, again, because you know, that's all vanity, it's irrelevant.
They understand what the natural process of death is and
that's part of the process, and they love these people nonetheless.

Speaker 2 (56:13):
Well, thanks so all right, thank you so much for
sharing this, because this is just this is just so cool,
and I think the first time I ever saw you
lecture about this, I was just mind blown. And I
really hope that lots of people got to learn something
today because it's so cool. But before we go, let's
just talk about really quick, because we had a story

(56:35):
in the news a couple of weeks ago where you
want to get into that. I did text him about it, but.

Speaker 3 (56:42):
Yeah, so we had this story a few weeks ago
that all these piles of ashes were found what was
it right outside of Las Vegas, Like yeah, so of course, yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:53):
I know the story. People were in shocked because there
was something like nineteen out in the desert. There was
this piece of land with nineteen piles of cremation ashes
found just sitting there, and it was like, oh my god,
you know, the ashes of the dead are out in
the desert, which in so you had texted that to
me and asked me about it. I was like, it's

(57:14):
really not.

Speaker 2 (57:15):
That and then you said right away, you're like, this
is every day for me.

Speaker 1 (57:22):
First of all, let's get over it. It's only ash.

Speaker 2 (57:25):
You know.

Speaker 1 (57:26):
It's not like they're dumping murder victims out there. It's
not like they're dumping corpses out there there rotting. It's
just ash. And and I told you, well, actually, I
just found pile of cremation ashes somewhere else. Because this
is actually really common. A lot of poor people who
don't know what to do with their dead relatives, and
for some reason they might not want them or be
able to have them, and that's they'll just take them

(57:46):
out to the desert and spread them in the desert,
or they'll put them somewhere in the desert. And I
think I think that pile that they had found, I
think people were kind of using that as a makeshift cemetery.
If I drive out in the desert, I find all
over the place, I'll find little makeshift pet cemeteries and
so forth. People have picked some patch of land just
turned it into pet cemetery ten or twenty burials. And

(58:10):
so I mentioned to you, it's like, well, yeah, I
just found another pile of ashes just the other day.
It was over by one of the pet cemeteries. But
it was definitely not a pet it was too big
for that. And so someone had poured out someone's cremation
ashes and put there's a beer bottle in there, and
it looks like they took a piece of wood and
a little little block and they were using it as

(58:30):
kind of a makeshift altar. So I think they poured
out the cremation ashes, had a drink with their buddy
or their brother, or their dad or whoever it was,
and made a little offering on that altar and left them.

Speaker 2 (58:43):
That's so cool. You got you really get to see.
Just for being out there in the desert for the
first time, really driving around like that last year, you
just don't really realize that there's just it. It could
be a potential dumping ground for so many things which
you stumble across all the time while you're going out there.

Speaker 1 (59:04):
Well for the good and the bad, because a lot
of people do have animals out there, and in fact,
this is a story that I think is far more
interesting than the ashes. There was a story about a
veterinarian in Las Vegas who got caught on camera beating
up a horse, and then the veterinarian disappeared and they

(59:28):
found his body lying on the shore of like Meat.

Speaker 2 (59:33):
We covered that story, do you remember, Ray, Yeah?

Speaker 1 (59:35):
Oh we did, Yeah, we did. Actually, yeah, they found yeah,
that was not far from here. They found his body
by like me. The guy the veterinarian beat up the
horse was found dead by like me, so they so
they dumped him out there too.

Speaker 2 (59:49):
Yeah, that's it's just it's just something that when you
live in like the East Coast we just don't really
have a lot of that because there's not space to
do stuff like that. I just was really shocked driving
through Texas and stuff of all of the abound abandoned
houses and just cars and just it's just there and
it just sits there. And that and of course all

(01:00:09):
the photos that you take when you go out on
your adventures all the time.

Speaker 1 (01:00:14):
Well, that's why I live in That's why I live
in the desert, because it's this treasure trove of ghost
towns and abandoned stuff. I was gonna mention too that
in my book about pet cemeteries they fallen to death,
which we talked about last year. There is a large
desert pet cemetery outside of Las Vegas in Boulder City.
And the pet cemetery in Boulder City was founded in

(01:00:36):
fifties in the densert, just a different place for berry on,
a free spot for people to bury pets. And that
has always in the early days, was always reputed to
actually be a mafia dump site for bodies, that pet cemetery,
that the mafia was taking it because the mob, you know,
they ran Las Vegas, they probably sidh but uh, it

(01:00:57):
was that had long been the rumor that some of
those graves for dogs and so forth out in Boulder
City were actually mafia hits, so they would just have
someone take them out to the pet cemetery and carry
them and put a dog.

Speaker 2 (01:01:12):
Wow, that's that's yeah. It's very interesting though, because that's
that's probably true. I would love to see them like
dig them up. I guess I don't know. Maybe they
should just leave it. So are you Are you working
on any other projects? Like? What do you what? What
is Paul doing now?

Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
I'm doing something totally related. I spent all my time
studying the history of nineteenth century railroad dogs.

Speaker 2 (01:01:45):
I know, no comment, Okay, just tell us I want
to know, Yeah, we want to know.

Speaker 1 (01:01:50):
Yeah, oh yeah, well okay, oh, everything's a lot. I
just became obsessed with the story of these dogs because
they've been largely forgotten. In the nineteen century, there were
these dogs that would just honerless, dogs that would just
jump on and off trains and travel all around the country,
and a lot of it became a lot of them.
Some of them became really big celebrities. They basically became heroes.

(01:02:14):
They became like, you know, the Jack Kerouac on the road,
for that generation, because a good person was you know,
a good person didn't just run away from society. It
was not an age where individualism was considered a virtue,
and so, you know, a good person was an industrious person.
And these dogs kind of lived out the fantasy of
freedom for the newspaper crowd, you know, reading where these

(01:02:36):
dogs were going and what they were doing, and of
course then they were totally freeot. But the thing that
really strikes me out the stories of these dogs. First
of all, how we create heroes, how we abandon heroes,
and then how we you know, because these dogs represented
freedom for the newspaper reading crowd that would follow their adventures,
and how every time we think we're advancing to freedom,

(01:02:59):
you know, every time we think we're becoming more and
more free, it actually turns out we're going in the
opposite direction, you know. And maybe those dogs, maybe those
dogs in the nineteenth century, maybe they had something for
us that we can still learn from about what freedom
really is.

Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
You're a genius, you really are. I love the way
that you're I love the way that you're You're like
weird stories, but it's just it's just very it's very
relevant right now and.

Speaker 1 (01:03:27):
But I think that is very relevant right now. That's
why so addicted to the stories of these dogs. Yeah,
because it's awesome. So the way I see it in
terms of freedom, we keep going backwards, and maybe it
was actually really simple all along. Maybe these dogs new
you just turn around. If you want to be free,

(01:03:47):
you don't like where you are, you turn around.

Speaker 2 (01:03:50):
And yeah, you're so right. It's it's it's just like
the most relevant topic, especially this week. And we talk
about that in our private talks that just like everything
doesn't have to be improved, some things are just good.
Just leave it alone, all right, awesome, Well, thanks so

(01:04:11):
much for being here. I think that our listeners are
just gonna freak out over this episode. They're gonna love it.
Where can everyone let's just tell I mean we always talk.
You don't even know this, but we talk about you
on the show all the time, and we give out
your Instagram, but just give out like where do you
want people to find you?

Speaker 1 (01:04:30):
Some kind of docs myself? Yes, tough. I'm on Instagram
under a Hexton called h e x e n kult h.
I don't do TikTok, I don't do x.

Speaker 2 (01:04:45):
Keeping it simple, but Paul has lectures all over and
sometimes you do virtual ones too, So if you guys
are interested in hearing more about this, because obviously we
could listen to you all day, like you just have
such a great life and great life stories to tell.

Speaker 1 (01:05:04):
Well, I only have achu coming up. It's in northern California.
I've cut back on a lot of that because I
really need to get some work done.

Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
I guess that. Yeah, exactly, all right, Well, thanks so much.

Speaker 1 (01:05:20):
We love you, thank you, love.

Speaker 3 (01:05:22):
You to.

Speaker 2 (01:05:26):
Thank you for listening to Mother nos Death. As a reminder,
my training is as a pathologist assistant. I have a
master's level education and specialize in anatomy and pathology education.
I am not a doctor and I have not diagnosed
or treated anyone dead or alive without the assistance of
a licensed medical doctor. This show, my website, and social

(01:05:51):
media accounts are designed to educate and inform people based
on my experience working in pathology, so they can make
healthier decisions regarding their life and well being. Always remember
that science is changing every day, and the opinions expressed
in this episode are based on my knowledge of those
subjects at the time of publication. If you are having

(01:06:13):
a medical problem, have a medical question, or having a
medical emergency. Please contact your physician or visit an urgent
care center, emergency room, or hospital. Please rate, review, and
subscribe to Mother Knows Death on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or
anywhere you get podcasts. Thanks

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Living with the Dead - Tana Toraja's Ma'nene Festival with Author & Photographer, Dr. Paul Koudounaris

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Living with the Dead - Tana Toraja's Ma'nene Festival with Author & Photographer, Dr. Paul Koudounaris