Fingernails, Part 2

How fast do human fingernails and toenails grow? Are they claws and, if not, what are they? In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind exploration, Robert and Joe dive into the anatomy, evolution culture and mythology of the “nail as old as time.”

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of by
heart Radiobu. Hey, are you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and we're back with part two of our talk about
nails Fingernails Toenails. In the last episode, we talked about

(00:23):
how fast nails grow, what influences how fast they grow,
some strange decades long self experimentation projects on the measurement
of nails. And this time we're going to get out
of some of that scientific minutia and jump into the
weirder world of nails and the role that nails and
hair play in a lot of very very surprising and

(00:46):
interesting magical and religious beliefs. Yeah, and it it makes
sense that we would since the nails that we look
down at every day, that we you know, find ourselves
absent mindedly feeling, uh that that in fact enhance our
ability to engage physically with the world. They are strange

(01:07):
to behold. Like we said before, they're both alive and
dead at the same time, at least as you know,
in the way that we we think of them. You know,
they they're obviously a part of our body, uh, and
yet they feel slightly external. You know that they are
these things that are like clause but not clause. So
it makes sense that we would have some kind of
complicated magical ideas at times about what they are and

(01:29):
what they do. Yeah, and I think some of the
magical and religious ideas are going to connect with something
that we talked about in the last episode, which was
this the strange thing I was observing about how our
hard body parts, the hard external parts like teeth and nails,
though you would expect them to be sort of like

(01:49):
the most uh, I don't know what you would call
like the most brutally disposable parts of our bodies, because
they're hard. You know, they're like what you put out
front in defense or attack. But in fact we've got
these kind of vulnerability trauma obsessions with these parts of
our bodies. Like if you just start worrying about what
could go wrong with your body, how you could be injured,

(02:11):
how it could be damaged, a lot of the natural
places that people go to go to worry about these
things our teeth and nails, absolutely, and that's that's why
towards the end of the at the last episode, we
started talking a little bit about Glenn Danzig's fingernails and
about how, at least in some music videos or posters
that I kind of have remember um from my my

(02:34):
teenage years, I recall that he had sharpened fingernails, and
I would wonder to myself, well, what purpose did those have?
And indeed, you know, would sharpen fingernails age you in
in fights or something? Because I also remember, like Stephen
King novels and short stories that I also was reading
at the time, you'd occasionally have a character show up
that is sharpened their teeth down to to file points

(02:56):
um or or perhaps even has some sort of like
sharpened ginger nails, I guess, and uh, and it brings
them to wonder like would there be any kind of
actual combat or defensive advantage to that sort of thing,
And we we mostly decided that there would not really be. Yes,
you can scratch your way out of a out of
a scrape here and there, but there's also a big

(03:18):
possibility to damage your your fingernails if you're trying to
use like sharpened fingernails to attack somebody. More than likely,
if you encounter somebody with really gnarly looking fingernails, that
have been sharpened to a point or or indeed, um uh,
you know, just look seemingly intentionally creepy. They probably are
trying to look at least a little bit like nos Ferato, right,

(03:39):
And so this vampire association with long nails. In fact,
we were just talking about this with Seth the other day,
Uh and and uh Seth. Seth was sharing with us
the idea that, you know, it's possible that the association
between long fingernails and vampires could come from the idea
that often in the old days, you might and up

(04:00):
if you've you've exhumed a body from the graveyard and
you notice that their nails look a little bit long,
and so you think, wait a minute, are they still
alive in some way or they're getting up and roaming
around and still growing body tissues. Yeah, I feel like
this has come up on the show in the past before,
and it's certainly it goes beyond the world of mere vampires.
We talked about it a bit in the episode where

(04:21):
we talked about the Kappa, the Japanese water demon um
where you have varying monstrous conceptions in the human imagination
that are based upon an analysis of a physical death
to see what happens to the body after it dies
and the seeming changes that take place in the body.

(04:41):
And in the case of the vampire, yeah, it's like
the bloated form. Uh. The impression at least that the
hair is still growing, the impression that the nails are
still growing. So if you ask the question is that true,
the answer is no, It is not true that hair
and fingernails continue to grow after death. Uh, at least
not to any significant degree. Now, if the nails in

(05:03):
the hair don't keep growing after death, that that does
leave the question of why so many people thought that
that was the case. Why Why would you look at
a corpse and think that its nails appear long? And
the most common explanation for this tends to be based
on the dehydration of the corps. That as the body
begins to decompose, it loses a lot of moisture, which
causes the retraction of the skin tissues around the finger

(05:25):
nails and around the nail plate, which makes the nail
plates look longer because there's there's just less skin around them. Now,
this helps inform more than just our idea of vampires
for starters, it also has factored into the buried alive
panics that have existed at different times. I believe we
we discussed this a bit in an episode of Invention
on various casket innovations. So the idea is, oh, you know,

(05:48):
end up digging up this corpse later, and maybe you
don't assume that they were some sort of undead fiend,
but you might think, oh, my goodness, they were still
alive for some time after we buried them. They must
have been buried alive. And this led to a fashionable
demand in the nineteenth century for caskets with escape hatches
and ways of getting out if you happen to have
been buried alive. Yes, So if you want to catch

(06:10):
up on that, do check out that episode of Invention.
It may still be in the Stuff to Blow your
Mind feed from when we put a bunch of those
out earlier in the year. But if not, you can
find the dedicated fee to Invention. Even though we're not
putting out new episodes of that show in that feed,
you'll still find all of those episodes there for your listening.
I think it was a three part last October. Yeah,
that's what it was. Now. In addition to this you'll

(06:33):
also find various myths and legends just concerned just general
monstrosity in the world. And oftentimes you'll have a monster
that has long fingernails. And this is roughly, you know,
associated with the idea that, okay, long fingernails imply a
wildness to kind of beastial nature of the the entity

(06:55):
or the being in question. Right, what has claws wild animals? Yeah,
And though the long or fingernails become, the more like
the claws of an animal they become. Now, there are
exceptions to this. Long finger nails are sometimes considered fashionable
for females we see we see a lot of that
in um in modern culture, but then also you sometimes

(07:15):
see it as a fashion for males as well. Long nails,
for example, were important symbols of social status at various
points in Chinese history, and they were sometimes painted for
visual effect, but also sometimes the painting or sometimes the
lacquering of the nail was as much about strengthening the
nail as it was about making it look fancy, which

(07:38):
is an interesting point. And apparently this we see echoes
of this and other cultures as well. I think the
ancient Egyptians um are are are thought to have engaged
in this sort of thing as well, strengthening the nail
in order to maintain its elongated uh uh structure. Now,
later on in Chinese history, ornate finger nail guards were
used to protect outer nails. So this might be like

(08:01):
on the pinky finger, for example, and the ring finger
uh and uh. And we're we're talking some pretty ornate
finger coverings here. For instance, the six inch long golden
mail protectors that were worn by the Imperious Dowager Sushi,
who ruled China for forty three years from eighteen sixty
one until her death in nineteen o eight. If you

(08:23):
look her up, you can find actual photographs of her
decked out with these things. Now, Robert, can you describe
Is this more of like a thimble type covering that
would go over the end of the finger and extend
out from there, or is it more like that finger
armor stuff that has joints and goes over the whole finger. Um,
not really joints per se, it is one gets the

(08:45):
impression of like long tapering golden fingertip covers um. I
think this this sort of thing has also been utilized
in dance in various Asian cultures. Um, yeah, so the
really neat look now in terms of just longer finger
nails in general, the style has also been popular with

(09:05):
males at different times in Chinese history, with longer manicured
nails still having a residual cultural association with higher classes
in society. Uh. One also sees the retention of a long,
pinky finger nail as a signifier of social status. But
then there are also varying levels of when you get
into the actual reasons uh that individuals um, you know,

(09:29):
self identify uh and uh and certainly uh uh explain
that their their pinky nail. They might be what it's
for good luck or you know, it might be there
might be some idea of divinational aspects uh of finger morphology.
They're various sort of cultural ideas that seemed to be
floating around, um explaining, you know, why one would have

(09:51):
a longer nail if there's a class association that nails are,
you know, for higher social status. I wonder if it
has anything to do with demonstrate the lack of need
to engage in physical or manual labor. Yes, sort of
along the same lines as you know, there are some
cultures I think it was once common in uh in
European culture, for and it was fashionable from men to

(10:13):
where like long pointy shoes. And one explanation given for
this is well, a long pointy shoe makes you look
rich because it's a kind of shoe that you can't
do any physical work in. Yeah. Yeah, The best explanations
seemed to tie it to this like a long standing
idea that it informs social status. However, I should note
that I've I've looked into this a couple of times

(10:35):
over the years, and I've never found like a I
have not found not to say it doesn't exist, but
I have never found like a really good paper on
this that really dives in with a lot of the
information out there about this is more informal in nature.
But um, traditional Chinese cultural hierarchies do seem to retain
their power though according to one paper I was looking

(10:57):
at Saving Face in China, Modernization, parental usher and plastic
Surgery by Andrew Lyndridge and Choufeng Wang, published in the
Journal of Consumer Affairs in two thousand and eight. Um,
So you know, basically underlying the idea that you can
you can have these ideas that are still floating around
in society, and perhaps you know, perhaps the rationale for

(11:18):
them isn't you know, uh in an individual's forethought, But
it's just something that survives and is still done and
perhaps on some level still does inform UH that notion
that I have this longer nail, which means I am
of a higher social status and maybe don't have to
engage in as much physical labor. For an historical example

(11:38):
of this getting outside of modern culture, UM, there's a
book that I've I've been fond of for for for
many years titled Tales from a Chinese Studio, and it's
a collection from seventeen forty of these various weird tales
that were compiled by the author uh Pooh song Ling
and uh and it's these are wonderful stories, I reckon

(12:00):
and anyone who's even halfway interested in in strange Chinese
ghost stories, you should pick up a copy of this
because some of them are funny, some of them are
just really weird. Um. There's also a certain poetry to them,
and I understand that if if one is actually reading
these stories uh in Mandarin, uh, they're also there are

(12:22):
also a lot of various illusions that are going to
be lost on the English language translation reader. But they're
still they're still tremendous as translated pieces. I think you've
quoted from it before. I have positive associations with this title. Yeah,
it's a it's a great book, and I think Penguin
has an edition of it. Um. So I was looking
back through that because I'm thinking, Okay, if there's a

(12:44):
good example of a monster with long fingernails, perhaps i'll
find it entails from a Chinese studio. I did not
find it, but I did find this little note um
about a particular line and one of his writings that
I had skipped over before I didn't remember from before. Basically,
uh uh poohsong Ling mentions the Bard of the Long Nails,

(13:07):
which the translators and editors of this Penguin edition identify
as Lee He who lives seven sixty through eight sixteen.
And so he was a late tongue scholar often characterized
as a sort of quote doomed poet with a vision
so intense the world will destroy him if he does
not destroy himself. Whoa. And so the the editors here

(13:32):
they could they compared him to John Keats. That's interesting
because Keats definitely died young, But I don't really think
of him as doom driven in that way. Uh. When
I think of doom driven English poets, I guess I
would think more like Byron or Percy Shelley. Yeah, Lord
Byron definitely comes to mind, right, especially with when it
comes to like a dark bad boy status walking around

(13:54):
a skull goblet and a pet bear on a chain exactly. Uh.
And and interestingly enough, if you look up some of
uh Lee He's translated work, he's sometimes described as this
is from the Amazon description to a nice collection of
his work. Uh, the bad boy poet of the late
Tang dynasty. Well that I got to hear more from

(14:15):
this bad so it was it was he a bet.
Was the fact that he was a bad boy at
all related to the perception of him having long nails? Um? Well, yes,
and no, I think, uh when I think this will
maybe become a little more clear, Like, for instance, I
don't think the fact that that he had long nails
was like the signifying bad boy aspect about him. I

(14:35):
take that to be probably more in common with with
professional scholars of the day, like you know, you're you're
you're a you're a scholar, you're a man of of words. Uh,
you certainly don't need short nails in order to engage
in a bunch of physical labor, like you're a man
of letters. I see that. Being said, he has a
very gothic quality to him. The New Tang History of

(14:57):
ten sixty described him as quote frail and thin, with
eyebrows that met together and long fingernails. He was also
known as the Demon Talent due to his love of
weird and exotic subjects in his writings, and the New
Tang History also said that he quote felt himself already
halfway across the boundary between the living and the dead.

(15:21):
Now that being said, apparently he also wrote about mundane
topics as well, like you know, earth like food and
so forth. So it wasn't just all ghoulish content. Um,
maybe a spooky food yeah, Oh no, I think he generally,
you know, wrote about food and acceptable you know, non
what we would think of in Western terms is of
you know, a non Gothic sense. But anyway, if you

(15:45):
if you look at his work, it is really quite beautiful. Um.
He is probably apparently most famous for this poem Song
of Magic Strings that the editors and translators of the
pous song ling text include uh. The poem itself was
in selated by John Fordsham in ninety three's Goddesses, Ghosts
and Demons that Collected Poems of lee he He He, which

(16:07):
you can you can buy in like an e book
or physical form. I'm thinking of picking up a copy.
But but here's here's just a little bit from that poem.
Quote blue raccoons are weeping blood as shivering foxes die
on the ancient wall. A painted dragon tail inlaid with gold.
The rain God is writing it away to an autumn tarn.

(16:29):
Owls that have lived a hundred years turned forest demons
laugh wildly as an emerald fire leaps from their nests. Wow.
That that is electrifying. Man, I've got goose bumps. Yeah. Ye,
Like I say, I think I'm gonna pick up a
copy for this Halloween season. Um, but there was there

(16:49):
was another line. When I was looking at the preview
of that actual text of Fordsham wrote quote, lee he
was temperamentally unable to write a conventional social poem. In consequently,
he is very rarely dull. Uh So apparently to to
be like a professional man of words, to be like,
you know, a writer of the day, you had to
engage in a lot of sort of boring, sort of

(17:11):
courtly writing. Uh. The example that he gave was it
was apparently common to sort of to to write to
patrons and compliment them on, say, the birth of a child.
And there's an example of this short poetic poetic piece
that he wrote to such a patron, and he makes
it sound like fortune compares it to the child from
the omen Um about just how he describes this child

(17:35):
as like being able to like see through people, to
their to their soul or something to that effect. It's
pretty interesting. So I like the idea of this, uh,
this Bard of the Long Nails, who when he tries
to fit in and be like just a boring poet,
he can't quite do it. He's just a little too weird.
But I should drive home that I don't think the

(17:55):
Long Nails were the um were the weird thing about him, know,
it was that he would write you a note saying,
congratulations on the birth of your child, who will one
day flay my soul in the underworld. Yeah, that sort
of thing. Um. So, anyway, I encourage everyone to check
out both of those authors. But but anyway, back back
to nails. In general, long nails have have apparently sometimes

(18:17):
been seen as a luxury for those of upper classes
in various cultures who don't have to truly labor with
their hands. And I've had a couple of studies at
least that backed this up, such as excessively long fingernails
as a risk factor for upper extremity soft tissue injury
published in two thousand and eight in the Journal of
Occupational and Environmental Medicine, and another paper, Effects of fingernail

(18:38):
linked on finger and hand performance, published in the Journal
hand Therapy back in two thousand and This the second
paper here, recommends keeping fingernails shortened to at least point
five centimeters to quote achieve optimal functional outcomes. Well, I guess,
to be fair, I laughed because I was imagining optimal
functional outcomes of ends just in regular life. But I

(19:01):
guess this is talking about therapy, so that phrasing makes sense. Yes, Yes,
this this paper does seem to be narrowing its focus somewhat. Uh.
And I think it's also worth noting that, you know,
I have, for my own part, I've encountered people with
with very long you know, well, maintained nails. Uh, you know,
sometimes very fancy looking nails. This seemed quite capable of
manipulating their environment and say an office setting. Uh, though

(19:24):
perhaps that's not that different from the sort of physical
demands of of of of a scholar in um, you know,
in in in in China of old. Uh. You know,
you're you're still not having to like actually physically dig
in the earth or something to that effect. So so
I'm not sure i'd be interesting to hear from anyone
out there who does, who has had long nails in

(19:45):
the past or keeps them, maintains long nails today, Like
are there things that you find that they get in
the way of or are they just generally not in
the way? Do you sort of adapt I mean obviously,
you know, we we we can adapt our body schema
to accommodate for any number of of extra things. It
seems like just longer nails. I mean, that's even more

(20:06):
a part of our body than any tool or costume
that we might acquire. All right, it's time to take
a quick break. But when we come back, we can
talk about a demon warship made out of nails. Thank you,
thank you. All right, We're back, and I'm excited for
this job because you were you were about to embark
on a journey and you're you're going to uh tell

(20:28):
us about what maybe the the magical fingernail story par excellence.
I mean, there are a lot of great magical figure
nail stories that I'm about to get into, but this
might be the most most thoroughly mythological one, the one
that's like the most the most like a device in
a story where the nails are sort of the mcguffin.
Though there's also a very good Persian one that we'll

(20:49):
get into. But anyway, so I want to go to
the pros at A. This is a work that tells
us a lot of what we know about ancient Norse
mythology that was written or edited the medieval Icelandic author
Snorri Sturlason. In the prose Edda, there are these collected
literary works that tell many of the stories of Norse mythology,
including the story of Ragnarok, the final Confrontation, the destruction

(21:14):
of the gods at the end of that era and there.
But early on, there's a passage in the prose edit
that's just talking about ships, just mentioning what kinds of
mythological ships there are, and it mentions one ship in passing,
calling it the Nagle Far. And it only says a
couple of things about the Nagle Far. It says that
it is in mu spell. Mu Spell is a realm

(21:36):
of fire, the home of the fire giants who you
don't want to mess with. And the passage also mentions
that Naglfar is the largest, meaning the largest of all ships.
So what is this nagle Far the largest of all ships? Well?
Later the author here tells us that the Nagle Far
will appear over the horizon during the calamity of ragnar Hawk,

(22:00):
when the gods will be destroyed. And the author also
tells us something about its construction. And here I'm going
to quote directly from the work quote the stars shall
be hurled from heaven. Then it shall come to pass
that the earth and the mountains will shake so violently
that trees will be torn up by the roots, and
the mountains will topple down, and all bonds and fetters

(22:23):
will be broken and snapped. The fin ris Wolf gets loose,
the sea rushes over the earth. For the midguard serpent
writhes in giant rage and seeks to gain the land.
The ship that is called nagle Far also becomes loose.
It is made of the nails of dead men. Wherefore

(22:43):
it is worth warning that when a man dies with
unpaired nails, he supplies a large amount of materials for
the building of this ship, which both gods and men
wish maybe finished as late as possible. But in this
flood nagle Far gets a float. The giant crime is
it's steersman, or there might be hrim h r y m.

(23:05):
But okay, yeah, so it's got it's got giants on it,
it's got the giant crime or hrim as it's steersman,
and it's made out of the fingernails and toe nails
of dead men who did not care appropriately for their
nails at the time of death. That is that is
gnarly um. I by the way, I I'm not surprised

(23:26):
at all to learn as well that there is a
a longstanding Swedish black metal band that has naggle far
as It's as its name. They've been active since then
the early nineties. Apparently. Oh wow, I've never heard of him,
But of course, yeah, I mean, in anything, this gnarly
is going to end up as a metal band name.

(23:47):
But I should also mention that in telling the same story,
the story of Ragnarok, you know, sort of the destruction
of the gods at the end of at the end
of time, or maybe not of time, at least at
the end of the era, the age of the gods.
Um it is the same. A scene is described in
the Voluspa, which is an old Norse poem describing a
lot of mythological events that we've mentioned on the show
pretty recently. Actually, I think, wait, which episode did it

(24:10):
come up in? I cannot recall the context at the moment,
but there's also a quatrain in the Valoospa that mentions it.
It says, from the east comes crime with shield held
high in giant wrath. Does the serpent writhe or the
waves he twists? And the tawny eagle naws corpses screaming
naggle far is loose. I love I love the idea

(24:33):
that it's I know this is just me reading into
it perhaps, but if it feels like it's not. It's
not just the bones that are making It's not bones
that are making up the ship. It is the toe
nails and the fingernails that seem more like the detritus
of of the the dead body, you know. It seems
like this is like a ship that has been collecting
and assembling, like at the bottom of the universe, throughout

(24:57):
all of human conflict, you know. And so that that's
why it is only it is only completely finished towards
the very end of human existence. So there's a paper
I want to talk about, Robert, if you're ready, called
the Treatment of Hair and Fingernails among the Indo Europeans. Oh, yes,
I am ready for this because I've I've read about
certainly nothing on the ship level, the ship building level,

(25:18):
but I've I've read about some of these of these
folk beliefs before. Yeah. So this is a paper by
Bruce Lincoln, who is a scholar of religious studies at
the University of Chicago. He was published in nineteen seventy seven,
and that's worth noting this is an older paper. I'm
citing it because it's still really interesting, but I just
want to flag that it's older because it's possible that

(25:38):
in the intervening years some of Lincoln's factual assumptions might
have been superseded by more recent anthropological or historical research.
But I think the general thrust of the question he
poses remains and uh, and some of the hypotheses he
discusses in this article remain extremely interesting. Okay, So he
starts like this quote. One of the important lessons that

(25:59):
has learned from the study of history of religions is
that there is no act so small or insignificant that
it cannot take on symbolic importance. In certain cultures, it
is not always an easy task to recognize such symbolically
invested action, although the existence of elaborate rules for behavior
in a given situation may serve as a valuable clue.

(26:21):
And if the identification of such action is sometimes difficult,
the interpretation of a given motion, gesture, or ritual is
even more delicate. And the example that he gives that
he's going to talk about in this paper is the
extremely careful, meticulous rules governing the treatment of clippings from
the hair and nails in many cultures and religions throughout

(26:43):
the world, especially in many cultures that are descended from
in some way the ancient speakers of Proto Indo European,
which I'll get into more later. So I'm going to
start by just listing a number of examples that Lincoln
brings up, and then we can go back talk about
possible explanations for where these beliefs and religious practices come from.

(27:05):
So the first one mentioned by Lincoln concerns the hair specifically,
and is it's the right of the child's first haircut
or first tonture, practiced historically by some people of India,
and it's described in the Sankayana Gria Sutra, and the
Gria Sutras are a number of manuals describing the steps

(27:26):
of various domestic religious ceremonies. So I think specifically the
kind of religious ceremonies that you might perform around the house.
So this is performed for different children at different ages,
I think also traditionally depending on cast. But the process
goes like this in Lincoln's summary quote, the child's hair
is untangled and anointed and a young cusa shoot is

(27:49):
placed in it, Kusa being the sacred grass of ceremonial.
His hair is then shaved with a copper razor and
placed on a mound of bull dung mixed with kusa
grass that has been prepared to receive the hair. Finally,
and here he quotes directly from translation of the Sankayana
Gria Sutra quote to the northeast in a place covered

(28:11):
with herbs, or in the neighborhood of water, they bury
the hairs in the earth. So that's interesting to begin with.
You you have this ritual of at a certain age,
the child's hair is shaved or cut, and then it is,
in a kind of symbolic ritual way planted within dung
or within the earth. And there's this association with vegetation

(28:32):
or herbs. Interesting. Now, this may have absolutely no connection
with it. But a while back, I guess, oh man,
probably more than probably about a year ago, uh, my
son and I had our hair cut at our house
on our our front porch, and afterwards, um uh, the
individual cut our hair encouraged us to take the clippings

(28:52):
and put at least some of them in our garden
um in order to help deter creatures from eating our vegetables.
I wonder if that actually works. I don't know, but
i've I mean, I've heard also similar advice concerning a
little like hair from your pet, like to keep rodent
side of your garden, to put some hair from your cat,
for for for instance, in there which which I mean,

(29:15):
it sounds like it could work. I don't know that
I've I've seen any thing to actually back that up,
except I haven't noticed any any mice or rats out there.
But then again, um, just because you don't notice them
doesn't mean they're not there. That's interesting. We'll definitely keep
that in mind as we go through a few more
of these examples. So the next one that Lincoln sites
comes from ancient Roman religion. Uh. And this is the

(29:37):
example of the flamand Alice, or the high priest of Jupiter,
the chief god of the Roman pantheon, and the flamand
Alice had numerous ceremonial requirements and restrictions guiding his daily activities.
There were rules about where he had to sleep, there
were rules about what he was supposed to wear, about
what kinds of things he could touch or couldn't touch.

(29:58):
And one of these restrict chins, as reported by the
second century Roman author Aulus Gellius in a text called
Attic Nights, goes like this, and this is with some abridgments. Quote.
The ceremonies placed upon the flamen dialis are many, and
the forbearances are numerous. No one should cut the hair

(30:19):
of the dealis except a free man. The cuttings of
the nails and hair of the dealis are buried in
the earth under a fruitful tree. There are almost the
same ceremonies for the Flamenica de Allie, and I think
that's the wife of the high priest of Jupiter. And
they say that other different ones are to be observed,
for instance, that she is covered with a dyed gown,

(30:41):
and that in her veil she has the shoot of
a fruitful tree. And there are other similar practices elsewhere
in ancient Roman religion. For example, in the Natural History
Plenty the elder recounts how the vestal virgins are expected
to observe special ceremonies in the disposal of the trimmings
from their hair uh plenty rights quote Truly, there is

(31:02):
a lotus tree in Rome, in the area of Lucina.
Now this tree is about five hundred years old or older.
Its age is uncertain, and it is called the hairy
one because the hair of the vestal virgins is brought
to it. So note again the kind of rough similarities
with the Indian practice here, the association with vegetation, especially well,

(31:24):
hair is a is a thing that grows out of us,
not unlike a plant, right, or some sort of vine.
And then I guess a lot of this tube just
has to do with the fact that hair and fingernails
and toenails as well, are these things that are paradoxically
a part of us and yet not a part of us.
And then when we trim them away or cut them away,

(31:46):
they are no longer part of our bodies that they
came from our bodies. And therefore you could you could
see where you could easily lean into this idea that
something appropriate must be done with these parts of ourselves. Yeah,
and we'll get into more about that in the in
the part where we talk about the possible explanations for
these but I want to talk about the next example
Lincoln sites, which is German folkloric practices. He writes that

(32:09):
there are a number of archaic rituals among German people
speaking Germanic languages for dealing with the disposal of clippings
from the hair and nails. Quote. Thus, in Oldenburg, hair
and nails are wrapped in a cloth and fastened under
a tree three days before the new moon to cure infertility. Similarly,
in Brandenburg, Dooseldorf, Swabia and elsewhere. Hair and nails are

(32:34):
placed in a hole board in a tree, or are
placed on a branch. This is often done when one
suffers from some sort of pain, and the pain is
said to go with these moving to anyone who comes
close to them. Now, there are some differences here from
the other examples we already talked about, because, you know,
Lincoln points out, it's important to note that these practices

(32:56):
he just mentioned are targeted towards specific magical outcomes, like
the curing of infertility or the healing of pain, rather
than a sort of free floating ritual without a specific
outcome object. But he notes again the similarity in the
association between hair and nails with plant life. Again, hair
and nails, and then trees and grass and branches. And

(33:18):
then finally one more example, and this one is probably
my favorite one. He draws attention to what is described
in an ancient text in the Avestan language, which is
associated with the ancient Iranian culture and is a foundational
religious text of Zoroastrianism. So this text is known as
the Vindidad or the vidv Dot, and in this writing,

(33:42):
the character of Zoroaster also known as Zarathustra, and I
think Zarathustra is probably the earlier pronunciation. Zarathustra is speaking
to the wise Lord Ahura Mazda, and Zarathustra asks the
wise lord why it is that the demon named Ayosha,
whose name literally means burning or destruction, Why Aosha harms

(34:05):
and punishes humans? And Ahura Mazda explains as follows, quote truly,
that righteous Zarathustra, when one arranges and cuts his hair
and clips his nails and then lets them fall into
holes in the earth or into furrows, for by these improprieties,
demons come forth, and from these improprieties monsters come forth

(34:30):
from the earth, which mortals call lice, and which devour
the grain in the fields and the clothes and the closets. Now,
when you must arrange and cut your hair and clip
your nails in the world, Zarathustra. Hereafter you should bear
it ten steps from righteous men, twenty steps from fire,

(34:50):
thirty steps from water, and fifty steps from the barisman,
which is a bundle of sacred twigs. When it is
laid out, then you should dig a pit here, a
disty deep in hard soil, and a vitasti deep in
soft soil to that pit. You should bear the cuttings.
Then you should pronounce these words victorious Zarathustra. Now for me,

(35:15):
may Mazda make the plants grow by means of asha,
and Asha means right. Uh. You should plow three or
six or nine furrows for Zassura vira, meaning good dominion,
and you should recite the Ajuna Vira prayer three or
six or nine times. So here you're in in this

(35:36):
ancient Zoroastrian text. You're getting this elaborate ritual described for
what you should do with the trimmings from your hair
and nails, and that there are actual, like real demonic
consequences if you do not follow these rituals uh. And
Lincoln points out several things he finds really interesting about
the explanation from the Wise Lord to Zarathustra. So, first

(35:58):
of all, there's the need carry these clippings from hair
and nails away from sources of purification. Remember the mentions
if you've got to carry them this far away from
righteous men, this far away from fire, from water, and
from the sacred bundle of twigs, because these are all
potentially sources of religious purity. And it seems like there's
a desire to avoid cross contamination of all that purifying

(36:23):
matter with impure matter that you've just trimmed off of
your body. But then there's also Lincoln points out the
use of troughs to demarcate a sacred space, and then
also the spontaneous production of monsters from the hair and
nail trimmings that are disposed of incorrectly. And if that
sounds familiar based on stuff we were just talking about,

(36:44):
isn't that kind of similar to the supposed origin of
the noggle far the nail ship. So in the Ragnarok myth,
again from Norse religion, this ship is built out of
the nails of dead men as a result of their
nails not being trimmed and disposed of proper really according
to the correct rituals. So if you do the wrong
thing with your nails, you make an accidental donation to

(37:06):
the construction of the demons galleon. Oh wow, So this
is this is fascinating cause on one hand, you can
compare a lot of this with just kind of a
basic understanding that this is bio waste, and there's there
there's an appropriate and an inappropriate way to dispose of
bio waste. But then of course we have this this
whole magical domain as well of monsters and monsters ships

(37:28):
rising up from sort of the accretion of these materials. Yeah,
and it's it's interesting. Lincoln doesn't really get into this
at all, but it's interesting to wonder about what role
um I don't know, like practical biological facts could play
into the origins of these practices. I don't know if
there is, for example, any kind of real disease risk

(37:50):
that you would get from from encountering the trimmings of
hair and nails from other people. Perhaps there's some, but
it seems like there would be less of that than
there would be from sake contact with blood or feces,
though I'm not sure. I mean, it's interesting that there's
a mention of lice, and and one of the things
talking about being disposed of here is hair. Yeah, I mean,
you know, we might think, well, the hair is the

(38:12):
place where the lice live. Therefore, you know, less inclined
to pick up odd pieces of hair that we find
just out on the road. I mean, certainly, I think
we can all attest to, you know, being on a
walk or something, or and encountering a piece of someone's
hair or you know, hair clippings, or perhaps even a
fingernail or a toenail, and your first instinct is not

(38:35):
to pick that material up and look closer. Yeah, put
it in your mouth. Yeah yeah, that doesn't seem like
a natural thing to do. Alright, on that note, we're
going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back.
All right, we're back. But we've been talking about all
these examples from all of you know, different parts of
the world of religious or magical significance that is granted

(38:58):
to trimmings from the hair and nails. And this list
is far from exhaustive. There are tons of examples in
practices all all over the place. But I think just
the examples we've talked about do help paint a picture
of the wide range of myths, beliefs, and practices about
hair and nails and the many similarities between them. But
the question is why why do so many different cultures

(39:20):
place this important ritual or religious significance on the correct
procedures for trimming and disposing of hair and nails? Now,
Lincoln in his paper goes over several possible answers to
this question that had been advanced by the time he
was writing in the seventies, and I would say this
list of possible explanations is also not going to be exhaustive,

(39:41):
but just to discuss a few possibilities. One is a
very influential theory that's best known for its articulation by
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Scottish anthropologist J. G. Fraser,
in the Golden Bow. The Golden Bow has come up
on the show before. Uh. Fraser, of course is a
very you know, enormously influential, but also heavily criticized. We

(40:03):
can talk about that in a minute, um. But Fraser
argues that many of these practices have their roots in
a widespread ancient belief in what he would have called
the contagious branch of sympathetic magic. So the basic idea
here is that if something was once touching your body,
or especially if it was part of your body, that matter,

(40:26):
that object maintains a magical connection to your body even
after being physically separated from it, and thus it could
be used by a witch or a sorcerer to work
curses on you or magically control you in some way.
So if Jimmy the sorcerer gets hold of your hair
or nail trimmings, you are in for a very bad time.

(40:48):
And so in order to protect yourself from this kind
of sympathetic magic, you either had to destroy your hair
and nail trimmings or hide them very well, or maybe
also perform some kind of purging ritual to rid this
matter of its contagious magical power. And I think it's
interesting we still see evidence of this kind of magical
thinking even today. I mean, there there is magical thinking

(41:10):
that persists into the modern modern era whereby you can
have some kind of power over a person by by
possessing a personal artifact of theirs or an object that
touched their body. You know, think about like doing magic
on someone by by possessing their hair brush. Right, There's
also some interesting stuff about just how we think about

(41:32):
the contamination of of objects. Uh, there's a there's a
there's this study back in the nineteen nineties by social
psychologist Paul Rosen and um. This was actually recently mentioned
on an episode of the excellent radio show Hidden Brain.
They pointed out that they asked in this particular study,

(41:52):
they asked people if they would consider wearing Hitler sweater
and uh, and they almost always said no. Uh. And
they said no even if they've been assured that it
had been washed, then it had that it had been torn,
you know, that it had been punished for being Hitler's sweater,
or that it had been symbolically cleansed by being worn
by say mother Teresa before being passed on. And it

(42:17):
was the you know, this this idea that that this
this object, this sweater is is contaminated in a way
that cannot be uh punished away, cannot be cleansed away.
It just remains impure in a completely irrational manner. That
is really funny. I mean, I can just say for myself,
like I I rationally do not believe in any kind

(42:39):
of sympathetic contagious magic, So I don't think like Hitler's
evil would be contained in the physical sweater in any way.
But still I wouldn't want to put it on. Well,
I I have a lot of nitpicky questions about that
that scenario, like is it a good sweater, Like is
there anything notable notable about the sweater other than it
was Hitler's sweater? Because obviously I'm not going to just

(43:01):
wear a sweater because Hitler wore it. But what if
I like, was it a store and there was like
vintage stuff and there was like this really nice sweater
and I'm like, oh, this is nice. And then I
asked why is it so cheap and they tell me, oh,
because this was Hitler's sweater. Then Okay, that might be
different because I have some pre existing interest in it.
There's something about that sweater that's really neat. I don't

(43:23):
necessarily get that from this this limited scenario. Uh, you know,
it's it's kind of implied that the notable thing about
the sweater is that it was Hitler's. Well, you know,
I actually can think of a reason I wouldn't want
to wear that sweater or own it, even if even
though I don't believe in any magical associations, which is
that I mean, I guess if you were to wear
a sweater that you knew had been warned by Hitler,

(43:45):
you'd probably end up thinking about Hitler all the time.
And you know, it's like every time you put it on,
you have to be like, oh, yeah, Hitler, and you
just don't want Hitler in your brain that much. Yeah,
I mean, to a certain extent, one encounters this with
the you know, the strug well to separate say, an
artist from the art. Uh That can sort of be
the Hitler's sweater scenario in some cases, where you're like, Okay,

(44:08):
there's nothing wrong with the sweater, but I can't wear
it without thinking about Hitler. So I just don't think
I'm gonna wear this anymore. So it's worth noting that
Fraser's work on the origins of religions, again, as I
said earlier, was both enormously influential and has come under
a lot of criticism. I you know, I'm not deep
on this, but I think one common criticism is that

(44:28):
Fraser would sometimes I think, kind of fudge or cherry
pick the ethnographic evidence he cited in order to make
things fit more cleanly into his broader theories. And you know,
this is something I think that a lot of writers
who have grand theories about human culture and society end
up being guilty of. Uh So, while The Golden Bow

(44:48):
remains a fascinating read, I would advocate that you shouldn't
rely on Fraser alone as your soul source for anything.
And in Lincoln's analysis of Fraser's thoughts on on the
origins of these uh, these rituals for dealing with hair
and nails in in sympathetic contagious magic. Lincoln thinks that, well,
probably a lot of practices do have some kind of

(45:09):
roots like that, but he's not convinced that contagious sympathetic
magic lies at the root of all of these practices,
and certainly not the practices in the cultures that that
have some origins in the speakers of Proto Indo European,
because he has a different theory about that that we
can get into in just a minute. Lincoln also mentions
the work of an anthropologist named Mary Douglas, who is

(45:31):
a very influential twentieth century anthropologist. She proposed that that
within human religious thinking, quote that the body is a
powerful model or image which can which can represent any
bounded system, and which most often represents society itself. The
limits of the body then represent the limits of society,

(45:53):
the points at which it encounters opposition and danger, and
must thus be treated with appropriate care. So she's arguing
basically that we symbolically make an an equivalence between our
bodies and the society at large, and that margins in
general are dangerous and ambiguous places and Thus the things
that come off of our body represent ambiguity at the

(46:16):
margins in the larger context of symbolic thinking about the society.
So you have to carefully regulate this marginal body matter.
And uh Lincoln in this paper, he he similarly thinks
this idea is interesting, that it might explain some things,
but he's got a different theory that is based in
the Proto Indo European creation myth. So, the Proto Indo

(46:39):
Europeans are a hypothesized prehistoric culture that we know about
primarily through reconstruction of their language, which is a direct
ancestor to a huge number of historical and existing languages
throughout Asia and Europe. Just for example, English has a
number of roots in different languages, in fluding but not

(47:00):
limited to Germanic languages and Romance languages. But both Germanic
and Romance languages themselves have roots in Proto Indo European language.
So you know, there was a root language that influenced
these derivative languages that developed in you know, different ways,
and then those derivative languages came back and in a
way combined to influence other languages like English. The Proto

(47:24):
Indo European people left no written records, but linguists have
been able to reconstruct a lot of their language by
tracing back similar word roots in a widespread catalog of
languages uh. Similarly, scholars have tried to reconstruct other things
about them. We don't know a lot of things for sure,
but they probably lived somewhere around southern Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan,

(47:49):
sort of between and to the north of the Black
Sea and the Caspian Sea, probably a few thousand years
b c. We don't have any direct records of their
religious beliefs, their myths, and the Proud Actices, but scholars,
including Bruce Lincoln, have used clues from other descendent religions
to try as best as possible to reconstruct elements such

(48:12):
as their creation myth. And Lincoln explains his hypothetical reconstruction
of this creation myth as follows. Quote. This myth, as
I have established elsewhere, told how the world and all
the creatures in it were established by the first act
of sacrifice. In the Primordial offering, the first priest Manu

(48:35):
meaning man, dismembered the first king Yemo meaning twin, and
from his body built up the material world. Now, certain
steps in the process of creation were described in this myth,
steps whereby the body of the primordial victim became the world.

(48:55):
Thus his skull became the heavens, his eyes the sun
and moon, his blood the seas, and what is most
important for the issue at hand, his hair became the
plants and trees, and so Lincoln quotes. He goes on
to quote a bunch of related ancient religious texts that

(49:15):
serve as evidence for his reconstruction of the myth in
this way. Um. And of course we don't know that
this is actually what their creation myth was like, but
it seems like a reasonable approximation of what their creation
myth might have been like, given what we know from
a lot of other religions that seem related to it.
And this is of course, I mean, you can immediately

(49:36):
think of other examples of creation myths in which the
parts of the world are made out of the body
of a slain primordial foe. Think about the ways that
in say the Enema a leash, that the body of Tiamat,
the dragon, you know, the sea monster gets turned into
the you know, the mountains and the sky and the

(49:56):
seas and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah, this
is something you do see in a number of different
mythologies like that, if nothing else you could even summarize
just to say that the body, the primordial body of
being such as this are are important in the way
that they are then taken apart and then redistributed in
those parts become important aspects of the world that follows. Right,

(50:18):
And so Lincoln says that, you know, if his reconstruction
of the Proto Indo European creation myth is is basically
correct or is on the right track, that a lot
of religious practices of round disposal of hair and nails
in cultures that are in part descended from the Proto
Indo Europeans could be rooted in a recapitulation of this

(50:40):
creation myth. And this draws on a strain of thinking
that I think in some way is associated with the Eliade.
For example, that a lot of religious rituals are in
a way supposed to be a re enactment of a
foundational myth. Yeah. Yeah, the idea that that that that
everything we do is only important in the archaic sense

(51:02):
if we are recreating something from our founding myths. Right,
So that's ultimately Lincoln's theory here what what he thinks
best explains the widespread nature of these these practices about
the disposal of hair and nails. That he thinks, when
you dispose of hair and nail clippings in the correct way,
you are furthering the life of the world's vegetation in

(51:25):
keeping with the creation story. The sacrifice here is your
own body, and the sacrifice of hair. Originally, he thinks,
hair and the nails were sort of added onto the hair.
Sacrifice feeds the trees and the grasses the same way
that this primordially slain foe originally created all that vegetation.

(51:46):
And uh. And then Lincoln says, the other half of
the coin is quote. When such care is not taken,
when disposal is not a ritual and does not repeat
the acts of a mythic model, the reverse can be
the effect. For if proper disposal serves to create the cosmos,
then improper disposal can de create it, or to put it,

(52:07):
negatively conserved to create chaos out of cosmos. And think
of the examples again we discussed here the destruction of
crops by vice demons from the Avestan text. You know,
the ancient Zoroastrian text, or the creation of the noggle far,
the ship that brings monsters to deliver the violent into
the world, and the destruction of the gods that's made

(52:30):
out of the nails of dead men improperly cared for.
So obviously, I mean, I would say in my final thoughts,
obviously Lincoln's idea here about the origins of these practices
could be wrong, but at the very least it provides
some really interesting scaffolding for understanding ways in which complex
symbolic religious thinking might enter into what we would consider

(52:52):
an extremely mundane grooming practice. How uh, it's it's possible
that just clipping your nails and cutting your hair too
many people might have cosmic significance because of the myths
that informed their worldview. Yeah, this is this is all
very fascinating. You know. It gets to the sort of
the ambiguity of what our nails and our as well

(53:14):
as our hair, like, well, what what they really are?
And and then yeah, what are we supposed to do
with them once we once they leave our body? And
then what sort of ideas do we end up building
up about uh, those things and our identity and our
place in the cosmos? Yeah, totally so. Maybe, uh, maybe
if if you're somebody who has a say a partner
or roommate or a family member who gets mad when

(53:36):
you just like clip your toe nails in a willy
nilly fashion, they shoot all over the room and you
do not collect them in a clean and tidy way
for proper disposal. Think about this interpretation of the proto
Indo European creation myth. What if what if you are
somehow creating chaos out of order by doing so, and
you are summoning demons up from the earth. Yeah, indeed,

(54:01):
I think they're there. There's probably like a wide variety
of different takes on this as well. Like I think
I've run across the examples of a Chinese superstition um
that at least exists in some places where you are
not supposed to trim your toe nails at night while
it's dark outside, um, or not to trim them outside
at night. For my own part, I mean, I prefer

(54:22):
to to trim my my nails outside if I can.
I feel like they just simplifies the whole scenario. You know, Um,
you don't have to worry about finding them if they
go flying or anything like that. Now. One thing that
comes to my mind is, you know, in terms of
the parts of our bodies that we leave behind on
regular basis, I mean, humans have it fairly simple, you know.

(54:43):
Well it's just the most mostly just the nails and
the hair, and but and yet we still managed to
build up all these fabulous ideas to construct demonships of
the mind. Um. Imagine what it would be like if
we if we like molted um and left behind an
ex a skeleton that resembled ourselves, you know, sort of
like the cicada shell that is left behind. Or imagine

(55:06):
that we make something along the lines of squid that
leave behind a pseudomorph, you know, a cloud of of
ink that is in the shape of their body to
fool predators, that sort of thing. Imagine what sort of
like strange ideas about self and former self, uh, such
beings intelligent beings might have. Yeah, can you imagine the

(55:28):
religion and the religious practices of intelligent arthropods that had
to molten have a whole body shell that was left behind.
Oh man, that that would be good. That's that's that's
something good for your sci fi novel there. Yeah, I
mean what shape would it take would it be, would
there be like a would you have like spiritual burial
grounds where all of your your various um uh, you know,

(55:51):
exoskeletons go once you've morphed out of them. Um. Do
do famous uh crab people did do their exoskeleton moldings
wind up in a museum somewhere? I don't know. There's
so many questions to ask, as always, Uh, if you've
run across any examples in science fiction or fantasy that
deal with these sort of issues, we'd love to hear

(56:11):
from you. We always love your to hear advice from
listeners on old works of science fiction and fantasy or
new works as well. UM. Likewise, we touched on a
lot of different traditions and cultures in this episode, especially,
so I would love to hear from absolutely anybody who
has insight on this. Uh, particularly with with with long nails,

(56:32):
for example, Uh, do you keep your nails long? Have
you ever kept your nails long? Um? You know? Right
in I'd like to to know how that has impacted
your life or not impacted your life. Likewise, if there's
a particular tradition in your culture or your culture of origin,
I would like to hear about that as well, and certainly,
as Joe mentioned, if there are any particular practices that

(56:54):
you engage in, either culturally or just sort of as
a as a as a quirk of your own individual
nature regarding your your your nail and hair trimmings. Uh,
we would love to hear what they are totally. In
the meantime, if you would like to listen to other
episodes so of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can
find us wherever you find your podcasts and wherever that
happens to be. We just asked that you rate, review,

(57:16):
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(57:44):
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