March 4, 2023 • 42 mins
The Irish mythological hero Finn MacCool is known for many exploits, from the slaying of a great fire monster to the creation of Giant's Causeway. However, he’s also known for his magical thumb, which he could suck on to gain knowledge. In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert and Joe consider the thumb of knowledge and its relations to other myths and even a little bit of science. (originaly published 03/17/2022)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time for a vault episode. This is an older episode
of our show. This one originally published March seventeenth, twenty
twenty two, and it's part two of our series on
Finn McCool, the legendary Irish hero. Welcome to Stuff to
(00:28):
Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, 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 series about the legendary Irish hero Finn McCool.
If you haven't heard part one, you should go back
(00:50):
and listen to that one first. This one will make
a lot more sense if you do. But at the
end of the last episode, we promised you that this
episode would be the one that's all thumb, because, of course,
one of the great legends about Finn McCool is the
so called Thumb of knowledge. We teased it a few
times in the previous episode, but now we're finally here.
We're finally to the thumb factory. That's right, Finn is
(01:13):
not merely a warrior and a hunter and a defender
of his people. He also has the gift of divination.
His prescience puts him in keeping with the likes of
Paula Treads, But he doesn't take spice or enter a
Prana Bindu trance in order to see the future, or
is it sometimes described to gain wisdom. Instead, he puts
(01:34):
his thumb in his mouth. Is the most heroic thing
I can picture. I mean, imagine the movie poster. It's
like your action movie hero. They've got the sword, their
hair is blowing in the wind, maybe their armor is
splattered with blood and mud. And also he's just got
his thumb in his mouth. Now. In the last part
of the series, we referenced a few works by a
(01:56):
scholar named James McKillop, who has written extendly on Finn
McCool and on Irish smith and legend. For example, I
cited him when I was talking about the version of
the Giant's Causeway story that involves that involves the the
Ben and Donner Giant, the rival giant being replaced with
one named Kucullen, which is totally confusing because that's the
(02:19):
name of a different Irish folk hero. But this was
also the version of the story where Finn McCool bites
off the rival giant's finger when the giant is tricked
into putting the finger into his mouth. But I think
you were also reading something by James McKillop on on
the origins of this thumb story, right, yeah, yeah. According
(02:41):
to McKillop, the details on how the thumb is utilized
vary according to the you know, the different tellings. Sometimes
it's described as a sucking of the thumb, much like
an infant would would suck on a thumb or fingers.
Other Times it's described as a chewing of the thumb,
And sometimes it's specifically that the thumb is placed behind
(03:02):
the upper teeth, which I guess is something that is
as more or less happening with any kind of infantile
sucking of the thumb anyway, but they seem to make it.
Sometimes the point is made that it's like the thumb
is coming into contact with the palette and pressing. All right, So,
as amusing as the image of an action hero sucking
his thumb might be the idea of an action hero
(03:24):
biting his thumb, that's pretty close, But that seems a
little more maybe on the money, especially when you take
into account some historical considerations, because the idea of biting
his thumb immediately made me think of the classically confusing
scene from Shakespeare the infamous do you bite your thumb
(03:45):
at us, sir? The scene from Romeo and Juliet, rob
Do you remember coming across this in school and having
no idea what to make of it? Yes, I distinctly
remember this, probably when we were watching an adaptation of it,
and yeah, there's the whole scene with I bite my
thumb at you, and I remember everyone getting a real
kick out of that. Yeah, it's like it's one of
(04:07):
those where you know what it means, but you don't
know what it means, Like you get the gist, but
you don't understand what they're talking about. Because so the scene,
for anybody who hasn't read it, it's in Romeo and Juliet,
Act one, Scene one. We get servants of the two
rival houses, the Montagues and the Capulets. They run into
each other in the street and they're they're trying to
(04:28):
stir things up there. They're trying to provoke a fight
because they hate each other. And so a character from
one house says, do you bite your thumb at us, sir?
And the guy from the other house says, I do
bite my thumb, sir? Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?
And then the guy who's biting his thumb lead leans
aside to his friend and he says, is the law
on our side if I say I? And his friend
(04:49):
says no, it is not. So he says, no, sir,
I do not bite my thumb at you, sir. But
I bite my thumb, sir. So it's it's sort of
like I'm just punching the air, and if you happen
to walk into the air that I'm punching, you know,
so be it. I think the implication is that if
he says outright that he is biting his thumb at
(05:10):
the other guy, then if a fight breaks out, it'll
be considered his fault because he provoked it. So he's
just saying, no, I'm just biting my thumb. In general,
all right, makes sense, makes sense. It's kind of like
if here is, if there's a difference between flashing the
middle finger and making a middle finger and scratching your face,
you have plausible deniability and saying I know, I wasn't
floping you off, I was. I just the side of
(05:32):
my face itches and I needed to relieve it. And see,
my middle finger is my longest finger, and therefore it
is the ideal finger to use for scratching. Said notes. Right, Oh,
oh it's itching again. Oh here I go again. Oh
now both sides are itching. Yeah. So yeah, that is
clearly what's going on in the scene. But it is
interesting to ponder, like, what is what is the origin
(05:54):
of this thumb biting thing, because of course this was
localized to specific cultures, but it's clear what it means
in context. It seems to bite one's thumb at someone
was a gesture of disrespect or contempt. It was kind
of like giving the finger. It was a way of
saying you stink. And in trying to find something about
(06:15):
the origins of this gesture, I found an excerpt from
a book called How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan, England
by a British historian named Ruth Goodman, and she writes
as follows quote in modern sicily, you can still see
a form of this gesture and use an upright thumb
held so that the pad points outwards. Is tucked behind
(06:38):
the top front teeth and then flicked forwards out of
the mouth towards the intended insultee. Okay, so are you
picturing that It's not the thumb going straight into the
mouth as you might think with like when a child
is sucking their thumb. Instead, it's like the thumb kind
of goes upward into the mouth behind the top teeth,
and then you kind of flick the thumb out pad out. Yeah.
(06:59):
But then DMan also writes, I've also seen a version
in action on the outskirts of Venice, although I don't
know if it was a native Venetian performing it, where
the pad of the thumb was placed horizontally between the
top and bottom teeth in a bite, and then flicked out,
rotating as it went so that the bitten pad was
thrust forwards. And so because of the Finn McCool biting
(07:22):
the thumbthing, I started to wonder if there were any
interesting connections between this gesture we see in Shakespeare that
appears to have mostly gone out of style today, though
maybe you might still see it in isolated cases here
or there, such as in Sicily or somewhere in Italy.
But I'm going to have to say that for me,
this investigation was a failure. I couldn't find any evidence
(07:42):
of a connection between these two story elements, though it
did raise interesting questions on its own, like where would
this type of thumb biting gesture come from? And from
what I turned up. Like many obscene gestures, its origins
are unknown. But I did find a book that had
some interesting informed guesses, and this was in an academic
(08:04):
book called Historical Social Psychology by Kenneth Gurgen and Mary Gurgan,
published by Taylor and Francis, twenty fourteen. And so, first
of all, they dispense with a few alternatives. They say, well,
you know, maybe the thumb biting insult gesture has something
to do with thumb sucking, but that doesn't really fit
what's described in the Shakespearean usage. And they say the
(08:26):
same goes for the act of biting the knuckle of
your thumb, which is a gesture that sometimes people still
use today, but it seems demean something different. Biting the
knuckle of your thumb seems to denote someone desperately trying
to contain rage, and that also it also just doesn't
fit what's described in these sources. So instead, they argue
(08:48):
that the thumb biting described by Shakespeare is something that
has generally fallen out of fashion today, it's mostly not
used anymore, and that in order to understand it we
would need to look to the historical context. So what's
the context? Well, I thought their answer was pretty interesting.
They write, quote. The clue, it seems, is to be
found in the fact that during the latter half of
the sixteenth century, men were in the habit of wearing gloves,
(09:11):
and these were usually removed prior to any confrontation, not
unlike the present day Irish habit of taking off one's
jacket to show that one means business. In fact, the
practice of removing and throwing down one's glove had become
ritualized as a challenge long before Shakespeare's time, and it
is common knowledge that medieval knights use this device to
(09:32):
invite each other into the lists. It seems likely that
the medieval convention, or some version of it, was still
around in a stylized form during Shakespeare's time, but it
had become abbreviated to the point where an intention movement
of removing one's gloves would suffice. So how does an
early modern hater remove a glove, well, one way would
(09:55):
be to remove it with the opposite hand, but another
way would be to bite at one of the fingers
of the glove with your teeth and then pull the
hand away from inside. You've probably seen people take gloves
off this way. The latter method they claim is well attested,
and it was not unusual to remove a glove this
way by by biting the thumb and pulling the hand out.
Though when I was trying to imagine doing this myself,
(10:16):
to just sort of give it a quick thought experiment check,
I think you probably can do it, though it seems
to me be easier to get to get your hand
out of the glove by biting one of the long
fingers than by biting the thumb. But I'm no glove expert.
Well this makes sense, Yeah, the gloves are off. This
is the classic challenge, and I had to We had
to check this with Seth whose Simpsons knowledge knows no bounds.
(10:41):
But on the Simpsons we had the episode where we
had the glove slap, where our Homer is challenging everyone
to a duel in town by slapping them with his glove,
which he has removed right so in this case, the
authors suggest their hypothesis is that over time, this familiar,
highly salient activity of taking off a glove to demand
a duel could be abbreviated to a simple gesture of
(11:06):
just biting your thumb to show scorn or disrespect, whether
or not you're actually wearing a glove. They do say
they could find no direct evidence supporting this hypothesis, though
it does fit well with the observation that the gesture
mostly fell into disuse when dueling disappeared as a legitimate
way of settling beef. So anyway, I think interesting question
(11:27):
on its own, but I couldn't really find that this
much informs Finn McCool right, right. I think that's one
of the things that makes the thumb of knowledge here
so fascinating, is that it does, to a certain extent,
feel like kind of an island in mythology, Like it's
something that it's not like there's something universal about heroes
biting or sucking their thumb or placing their thumb in
(11:49):
their mouth. But but we'll get into some of the
connections that are in place in a bit here. The
next question is, of course, well, why what's the story
There's got to be a story. There's always a story
behind why something is the way it is in mythology,
(12:09):
and the main origin story for the miraculous thumb of
Finn McCool is the salmon of knowledge. Salmon is in
the fish, the delicious fish, where we're familiar with, and
McKillop points out that, Okay, in addition to this, the
salmon has plenty of mystical connotations, in part due to
(12:31):
it's observed leaping out of the water. So it wasn't
a stretch to think there might be something magical about
a salmon. It's not like an inherently secular animal or
mundane animal. It is one that already has all these
various mystical connotations, and so it makes sense that it
might play into such a story. Rob Can I reveal though,
(12:52):
when I was trying to see, okay, are there other
magical salmon out there? So I google the phrase magical
salmon and the first result is, of course, Chef Paul
Prudom's salmon Magic seasoning blend. There you go. I'm sure
it was a magical recipe that that he earned by
catching a magical fish, because that's that's that's basically what
(13:16):
we have going on here. So the stories goes that
you have a druid by the name of Phinegus who
lives on the banks of a river, and he has
long waited for and intends to catch the salmon of Knowledge.
There are other versions of the story that say that
he's he's camping out at a waterfall, or that there's
some sort of a you know, some sort of an
(13:37):
underground reservoir sort of situation going on. But the idea
is that at some point this uh, this marvelous salmon
is going to present itself, and if the druid can
catch it, he can eat it and he can gain
all of that wonderful wisdom for himself. Now, is it
ever explained how he knows that the salmon, the salmon
(13:57):
of knowledge, will give him all this wisdom? Or is
that just he is just something he knows? Well, there
are a few different There's at least one really good
uh story behind this, and this is account. This is
an account mentioned by Patricia Monigan in Celtic Mythology and Folklore.
According to this author, the fish is sometimes identified is
(14:19):
Finton a bard who lived many lifetimes in many incarnations.
Thus he has all of this accumulated knowledge, and in
this incarnation he just happens to be a salmon. And
so I guess, you know, through the druidic arts, this
particular druid knows, hey, I can catch him this time,
and if I eat him, and I'll gain all of
that knowledge. So it's it's literally that I'm going to
(14:42):
eat your brains and gain your knowledge logic, right, well,
you know, but not maybe not. The brains may just
all that delicious. Uh maybe, I don't know. I don't
I'm not sure if you have to eat like absolutely
all of the fish, or you have to eat the brain,
but you're already cooking a salmon, so you might as
well make a meal out of it. I don't know. Well,
I actually I guess, as Wills, we're about to learn
(15:04):
it's not just the brains, and in fact that it
may be a little more subtle than that, because what
apparently happens is the druid finally succeeds in catching it
after waiting for it for seven years, which incidentally, it's
been seven years since Finn McCool was born, and seven
year old Finn McCool is hanging out there at the
druid camp with him, and you know he's shadowing him,
(15:26):
you know, as you do. And so Finnegus he's caught
the salmon. He's overjoyed. So he starts cooking the salmon,
puts it on a spit. It's roasting there, and Finn's
trying to help out, and he accidentally burns his thumb
on the cooking fish. And what does he do? What
do you do in your thumb is burnt, while you
immediately seek to soothe that pain by thrusting your thumb
(15:47):
into your mouth. And Finn does just this, and when
he does, he inherits the power of the salmon before
the old druid even gets a shot at it. So
it's the oil from the salmon that contains the knowledge.
It's not eat your brains and gain your knowledge. It's
eat your omega threes and gain your knowledge right right now.
In some variations, however, he gains he said to gain
(16:10):
the power of divination by eating magical hazel nuts, or
he gains it from the salmon because the salmon ate
magical hazel nuts. There's also one version in which he
enters a fairy mound. Fairy mounds are these circular ancient dwellings, uh,
you know, from from ancient Ireland that were later associated
(16:30):
with supernatural tales, and you know, stuff like the two
author to done and so anyway, he enters a fairy ground,
he gains the magical ability from three fairy women he
encounters there, but then as he's leaving, he accidentally smashes
his thumb in the door of the fairy mound. But
it seems like the fish version of the story, the
(16:50):
Salmon of Knowledge is the primary tale. It's the most
popular now. It's it's often stated that it's not just
putting the thumb in his mouth that sets off the
divination trance, but that Finn also has to recite a
kind of poetic chanting incantation called the I think probably
(17:11):
pronouncing this wrong, but the teinem latia lata. And this
also may have some connection to hazel nuts, according to
mccellop in the Dictionary of Celtic Mythology. McKellop adds that
the thumb allowed him to enter quote and I love
this an altered visionary state in which he could see past,
present and future in which he could see present. Wow,
(17:35):
I mean that that is a real well maybe maybe
it means he could see all of the present, like
things that are not present with him at the present,
or to see the present clearly. I don't know. There's
another interesting wrinkle here. The Celtic languages and literature professional
Patrick k Ford suggests that one connection here may be
that the Old Irish word for thumb was ordu, which
(17:59):
may also signify a morsel, particularly a morsel of meat,
that you would you consume. And McKellop points out that
that the consumption of a morsel of magical flesh is
a common folkloric motif. So if I'm to understand this correctly,
the interpretation would mean that Finns morsel slash thumb becomes
(18:21):
the sacred flesh by coming into burning contact with the
cooking sacred fish of the Salmon of wisdom. But is
it also suggesting that there may possibly have been the
kind of semantic contagion in the evolution of this story,
where originally the story was about eating a magical morsel
of meat, but because you can use the same word
(18:42):
for morsel of meat and thumb, that it came to
represent a thumb in later tellings. Yeah, that's absolutely the
sense I'm getting from this. Yeah, So we have, you know,
a semantics and linguistic shift going on here in addition
to just a you know, a cool story of magic
fish consumption. Oh this is great because I'm imagining other
variations of that kind of evolution of a story. Like
(19:05):
the thumb slash morsel makes sense because like a little
morsel of meat that might be about the size of
your thumb. But there are other ways that we use
body parts to measure quantities in reality. Like I'm thinking
of people who would say, hey, I want two fingers
of whiskey in the glass. So you could have a
story about somebody who drinks a magical draft of something.
(19:27):
They get two fingers of it, but then in later
tellings it gets confused and it's like, well, yeah, they
drank their own fingers and then they gained this power. Yeah,
you could have like a sort of a Popeye Asque
character if he has if he's sticks two fingers in
his mouth, then he gets all riled up and is
ready to fight, puts him into a drunken brawling spade.
(19:48):
So as we'll discuss. The thumb pops up in a
few other places, but it's largely thought to be quite
emblematic of Finn McCool his only real defining feature in iconography.
I think sometimes they're our hounds or dogs that are
associated with Finn McCool. But but the thumb especially is
something where you know, historians and art historians are looking
(20:11):
at various images. If they see the thumb being, you know,
poked towards the mouth, they can they can generally say
with some certainty that this must be Finn McCool. And
I haven't found an example of this online or in
the books I was looking at, but apparently many Celtic
crosses have various figures in the design, and sometimes you'll
(20:33):
see this thumb brandishing Finn McCool. Characters pop up, or
it's assumed that it's Finn McCool because who else would
it be. So if you've if you've never, if you
can't imagine what a Celtic cross tense will look like,
they tend to be be a cruciform shape. But then
with all these kind of compartments for further illustrations and symbols, Now,
(20:53):
how is it the thumb is usually emphasized in the psychonography.
Is it like glowing or something? Or is he sucking it?
Is it in his mouth. Um. Well, like I said,
I couldn't find a direct example of this that stood
out to me, but I I just they're they're they're
going to be smaller figures and they're I don't think
they're gonna's going to be necessarily obvious that like the
thumb is glowing or anything, but just by by virtue
(21:15):
of having some sort of emphasis on the thumb and
a visible thumb or even a thumb in the mouth,
it's going to be pretty obvious that it's Finn McCool.
Now this is not related to the thumb, but just
as a quick side note on you mentioned that some
stories of Finn McCool emphasizes dogs. I was reading a
few of those. There are actually some really great dog
buddy uh legends of of Finn, and one of them
(21:38):
is about how he how he gains a wife who
is a person who I think she's like a fairy,
but in any case, she's transformed into a fawn by
an evil wizard and uh, and he finds her by
by virtue of the fact that he's out with his
hunting dogs and when he comes across this fawn, his
(22:00):
dogs don't go after the fawn and like attack it,
but instead settle down and cuddle with it. And so
then he brings the fawn back with him to his castle.
And once they arrive there, the fawn turns into this
woman who becomes his wife. But then unfortunately she is
she is tricked and stolen away by the evil wizard.
Again interesting. Interesting. Now, in terms of other accounts of
(22:26):
thumbs in Celtic mythology, I did run across another interesting example,
and this was this is from the ninety two or
ninety three Nordic Celtic Legends Imposium, an article by Rannock
Ogan titled music Learn from the Fairies, And according to
the author here there are many tales of mortals learning
(22:47):
the music of fairy folk music from beyond our world,
and usually they learn it by hearing it in just
the right place at just the right time, you know,
something like an ancient ruin strange rocks in the world woods,
you know, the sort of place that fairies might appear
or hang out, and such was also around the time
(23:09):
of Solin, like this is the time of the year
when the veil is thin between our world and the next.
And there's at least one account in in Celtic tradition
of a man hearing fairy music. He's you know, he
hears it in the woods or wherever, and what does
he do. He sticks his thumb in his mouth whilst
hearing the music, and as a result he remembered the music.
(23:31):
And of course this this caused to mind Finn McCool interesting.
I mean, what does that suggest about our intuitions about
the power of sucking a thumb that it like, I
don't know what that means, That it has some kind
of grounding power that it can like cause you to uh,
sort of like hold fast against maybe currents of magic
(23:53):
or forgetfulness that would otherwise wash away the memory. Well, yeah,
this is a great question because I guess on one hand,
let's let's start by let's go ahead and assume that
that sticking your thumb in your mouth actually doesn't have
any effect on you know, your your your memory, or
your your your your stress level or anything like that.
(24:14):
It does make you wonder if there is, if there's
something culturally in place where where just the idea of
sticking your thumb in your mouth is like a novel
thing that is done that is associated with insight. Um
I wonder if it is the kind of thing where
you could stick your thumb in your mouth thinking about
this tradition and it would actually help you remember something better,
(24:38):
because it's also like that thing I heard while I
was sticking my thumb in my mouth. Oh that's interesting.
In fact, that even connects to a mnemonic device I've
I've heard of before, which is basically like, if if
suddenly something happens and you want to remember it very well,
you should do something really weird immediately so that you
like form a link in your mind between that weird
(24:59):
memory bol thing you did, and whatever thing it is
you're trying to remember. Interesting now, of course, the thing
is when it comes with thumb sucking, it doesn't seem
to be just a completely neutral gesture, if you will.
And we actually have quite a lot of research out
(25:19):
there on thumb sucking, particularly as it relates to children. Right,
So I was actually reading a brief article in a
pediatric medicine journal reviewing the existing literature on thumbs sucking
as of two thousand and eight. So this article was
called Thumb and Finger Sucking by Lynn Davidson in the
journal Pediatrics in Review. Again, this was the year two
(25:40):
thousand and eight, and a few major takeaways from this
brief ride up. Number one is that different studies across
time have found some different rates of the prevalence of
thumb sucking or finger sucking. A lot of times these
studies just lump thumb and finger sucking in together, so
you're not necessarily getting a breakdown by which finger it is.
(26:01):
But I think it is clear that thumbs are the
most most common finger for infants to suck. But older
studies found rates in the range of seventy to ninety
percent of children showing a thumb or finger sucking behaviors,
and more recent studies have found rates more like thirty
percent by the end of the first year after birth,
along with forty percent using a pacifier. Though with that
(26:23):
thirty to forty percent, I don't know if that's an
either or situation or an and situation to some children
suck thumb and a pacifier, I'm not sure. I don't
I don't have a lot of direct experience with that,
but I mean, I guess in some cases you're going
to have a situation where the child is gravitating towards
sucking on on digits and you want to get a
pacifier in there instead, and you're like, here, here, you
(26:45):
use this instead. Anyway. There's some variations on these rates
with the within the first few years of life, but
Davidson writes that by the time most children reach the
age of four, these rates have gone way down. On average,
only twelve percent of children in one study sucked a finger,
including a thumb, by the age of four, and pacifier
(27:07):
use had gone down to four percent by that time.
Now here's something I thought was interesting. Apparently, during the
first few months of life, infants are most likely to
suck their thumbs during sleep, but by the end of
the first year more infants do it while awake. There
were no differences in rates of thumb sucking prevalence by sex.
(27:28):
And oh, and I thought this was interesting. Up to
fifty percent of children who suck their thumbs or fingers
also tend to hold a special object while doing so.
This is, yeah, sort of the classic I suck my
thumb or my fingers and I have to hold on
to a special blanket or a special stuffy that sort
(27:48):
of thing. Yeah. Now, there have been a number of
historical explanations for thumb sucking. One that must be cited
unfortunately as Freud. Freud being Freud believed it to be
an expression of what he called quote infantile sexuality, and
that when it persisted beyond infancy, it was a symptom
of emotional disturbance. Obviously, Freudianism held a lot of sway
(28:10):
for a while, despite it being profoundly weird and not
actually being subject to empirical testing. But there are some
more recent theories that seem better grounded and experimental research,
and they generally suggest that thumbsucking grows out of instinctual
behaviors in infants, that sucking behaviors are a universal instinctual
(28:32):
behavior in newborns that they use for breastfeeding or bottle feeding,
and that after that, for some reason, in some children,
this instinctual behavior continues beyond the point of nutritional relevance,
and the instinctual behavior might be reinforced through conditioning, and
in some cases it just continues with a substitute, such
(28:52):
as a thumb or a finger. I don't know if
there is a good agreed upon answer as to why
this reinforced behavior would be continued in some children but
not others, Like what makes the difference? I'm not sure. However,
it might be informative to note that some studies have
found that thumb sucking appears to be especially common when
children are bored, tired, or anxious, and this suggests that
(29:16):
it plays some kind of self soothing role. Yeah, and
I was finding some evidence to back this up as well.
There's a twenty fifteen article published in Minerva Pediatrica that
concluded that quote, a thumbsucking subject puts the thumb in
the mouth to stimulate the nasal pilatal receptors of trigeminists
(29:38):
and obtain muscular balance and a release of physical and
psychological tension. Now that's also interesting when you think about
the Okay, we have Finn McCool doing this as an adult.
You can certainly find adult thumbsuckers who speak to the
calming effects of the practice. So I wonder if it
(29:59):
is too much of a stretch to imagine an Irish
warrior of old who you know, you know, he's his
wonderful hunter and warrior in all this, but he needs
to calm down every now and then, and this stressful
role in society, And if you're going to ponder an
important decision, you need to reach a place of relative peace,
and perhaps placing his thumb inside of his mouth allows
(30:21):
him to do so, and maybe you end up seeing
the creation of magical explanations for what's going on here,
as opposed to just saying, well, he never quite stopped
sucking his thumb when he's nervous or stressed. Oh man,
that would be an amazing origin story. Yes, so it
begins with this beast of a warrior, great hunter, you know,
(30:43):
blow the hunting horn. I will defend the shores of Ireland.
But I also suck my thumb and people are like,
why is he sucking his thumb? And somebody else is like, well,
it's what he does when he needs to, you know,
see into the future. Yeah, now another possible connection. I
(31:05):
was thinking about a related connection. Anyway, Sometimes there's more
stress placed on the idea that Finn is placing his
thumb behind his upper teeth, and of course thumb sucking
itself impacts the palette. I was reminded of traditions in
meditation that you encounter in which one is asked to
hold the tip of one's tongue to the roof of
(31:25):
the mouth. Sometimes this is described in terms of you know,
of course, bodily energy flow, other times as just being
a way of altering the flow of saliva in the mouth,
though it is sometimes described as a way of eliminating
negative thoughts or even a way of sort of weeding
out speech based thoughts. Well, and I'd wonder if you
(31:46):
know any kind of meditative practice that involves unusual activities
with the body is essentially just trying to trying to
direct your concentration away from the sort of default mode
flow of thoughts that arise normally. If if you're thinking
about doing a sort of strange repetitive action with your body,
(32:07):
you're probably less inclined to start thinking about, oh, man,
next Thursday. I really yeah, yeah exactly. So I feel
like that is I couldn't find any like real research
on this, and perhaps I'm missing something, but this seems
plausible to me, like if there was some sort of
like ritual we see in meditation. This is a ritual
(32:27):
touching of something to the roof of your mouth that
is then associated with some degree of anxiety relief and
some degree of relaxation. We see some evidence to support
the idea that that thumb sucking itself can reduce anxiety,
and then We have this idea too that just sort
of novel behaviors and rituals of relaxation, rituals of grounding
(32:52):
can can very much be be helpful. I'm not advising
anybody to take up sucking of the thumb as a
as a way to try and uh, you know, find
balance or to see into the future, but I feel
like there's some there's some interesting leads here to potentially
pull on to sort of try and make sense of
of where this may come from, and uh and and
(33:13):
how such a either at the very least such a
myth comes together, but but also the possibility that this
is something that had could have been practiced to some
limited degree in uh, you know, in Ireland of Old. Yeah.
Also another note, Yes, so we were not encouraging thumb
sucking for adults, especially because that can cause dental problems
(33:34):
if if you're doing chronic thumb sucking after the baby
teeth have been replaced. Yeah, that's the that's of course,
the the prime reason that that adults discourage the act
and want to to wean kids away from the sucking
of fingers and thumbs, because yeah, once the baby teeth
are going, you've got the adult teeth going in. You
can you can jack up those adult teeth by continually
(33:57):
pressing the thumb up there into the palette. It's seems
like the methods used to discourage thumbsucking and train children
not to do it have become more humane over time,
because I was reading about some of the older methods
people used to try to, you know, get their kid
to get the thumb out of the mouth, and it
was brutal, like one was about these ideas of having
(34:17):
the sharp implements put on the backs of the teeth
that would like cause pain in the thumb. Have you
read about this, Yeah, yeah, I think I've heard about
that before. Yeah, obviously that does not sound good. Or
of course putting putting noxious chemicals or something on the thumb. Yeah,
I think I think people have better methods now. Yeah. Now,
(34:37):
one of the interesting thing we talked about, this idea
of the thumbsucking being, you know, the thumb in the
mouth being kind of an island for this mythology of
Finn McCool and certainly again it is a defining one
of the defining factors of this particular hero. But you
do see thumb sucking, thumb in the mouth motifs popping
(34:58):
up with some other heroes, particularly. A few examples that
have come to mind include um Sigurd, the hero there.
Actually I saw an image of him that it's like
a carving, and you see him with thumb in the mouth,
So that seems to be very much related to what
we're looking at here. Another hero that we see lined
(35:21):
up with the thumb is Taliesin, So there seems to
be some connection between Finn McCool and these heroes as well. Yeah,
McKillop notes in his book that there was a controversial
suggestion by Robert Graves that Heracles or Hercules, the Greek hero,
was associated with the thumb in the same way that
Achilles is associated with the heel, kind of these body
(35:43):
parts that are emblematic of the person. But McKillop brings
that association up specifically in the context of it being
kind of kind of doubtful. Now, outside of these these
three heroes, I wasn't really really finding much that that
even resembled Finn McCool. But there is an interesting thumb
sucking bit of myth making that pops up in Hindu traditions.
(36:06):
In the Hindu Epic, the Mahabarata. There's the story of
King yuvan Ashva, who apparently has trouble conceiving a child
with any of his concubines, and so he winds up
drinking a magic potion that makes him pregnant. So when
this occurs, his he realizes, well, there's some additional problems
(36:27):
now that I have to deal with. So he turns
to the divine physicians and they cut open his thigh
so that he can actually give birth to the baby.
But then how is he to nourish the child? Well,
then we have Indra, the King of Davis, to cut
open his thumb and this allows milk to leak forth
from the thumb so that he can nurse his infant
(36:50):
son in this manner. And this is why the story
goes that babies sometimes suck their thumbs. Wow. Interesting, Yeah,
no direct connection between this and Finn McCool, but just
another kind of cool thumbsucking mythology to reference here. The
more I think about the idea of a of a
thumbsucking warrior action hero, the more I love it, Like
(37:12):
I want to see a movie like this. Or it
doesn't have to be thumbsucking, it could also be um,
you know, your your great warrior, great swinger of the sword,
like has a blankie. Yeah yeah, I mean we had
let's see, who's the tell us of all his character?
That does it? Kolchak uh Kojack that that had the
sucker like that was his whole thing, right, Oh, lollipops
(37:33):
the lollipop. Yeah, uh, that's not too far removed from it.
I cannot do detective until I get my lolly. Yes, well, Rob,
I have greatly enjoyed this journey into Finn McCool. Yeah,
this one has been a lot of fun. Like I say,
I wasn't super familiar with Finn McCool prior to this,
and I certainly had had somehow skipped over or forgotten
(37:55):
anything about the Thumb of Knowledge. So this was this
was a fun journey into Irish mythology. Always fun to
do that around this time of year. You know. On
previous episodes of the show, we have talked about our
love for the time Life Enchanted World books that were
fabulously advertised on TV commercials with Vincent Price where you
(38:16):
know he's I love to carl up with a good book.
Did his eyes glow green in those commercials? I think so?
They may have, well, a couple of the volumes of
the Time Life Enchanted World have stories of Finn McCool,
and they're you know what I got to say, By
and large, those books are really good. They're good syntheses
(38:36):
of their sources and pretty well written, much better than
you would expect for something that was advertised on TV
that way. Oh absolutely, yeah. I'm actually reading through the
Dragon volume from that collection right now with my son,
and there's some sections of it that I feel like
we're a little a little wordier than they need to be,
(38:56):
but we're having a lot of fun with it. You
have the longer sections, the short order sections, you have
this wonderful mix of original artwork as well as traditional
artwork to illustrate these tales. So yeah, there there are
a lot of fun do you do? You have them all? Joe?
It was a wonderful gift from my wife, Rachel got
me the complete Time Life Enchanted World collection. Oh nice.
(39:20):
It's something like twenty something volumes all told. Right, Uh,
that might be about right. I haven't read them all yet.
So the stories about Finn McCool are in the ones
called Acts of Valor or maybe Tales of Valor. This
the one with Valor and the title, and then the
one called Fabled Lands. Yeah, okay, I have one of those,
but not the other. For the longest I just I
(39:40):
kind of assumed that I had the full collection that
had been gifted to me from an aunt when I
was a child. But I've come to realize, oh, I
don't have them all. So, like, just the other day,
as we were recording this, I was looking at oh,
which I was looking at, like, Okay, which ones do
I not have that I really should have? And I
noticed that I had two of the Black books, not
the third. So I immediately had to order that one up.
(40:03):
One of the great things about these books is that
I guess they were just so mass produced. You can
pick these volumes up for you know, for reasonable sums. Uh.
You know, sometimes you'll find one's even like dirt cheap. Uh.
So there there are plenty. There's plenty of Enchanted World
to go around if anyone's interested. I'm incredibly proud of
my Enchanted World collection. It's a it's a treasure all right,
(40:25):
where we're going to go ahead and close it out here.
And and I guess I wish everybody to Saint Patrick's
day while we're at it. But we'd love to hear
from everyone out there. We'd love to hear from uh
Irish folk and non Irish folk alike regarding these uh,
these myths, these these tales, uh you know, thumbs in
the mouth, thumbsucking in general, or even just an enchanted
(40:47):
world book chat. What's your favorite volume? Did you have
these growing up or did you just want them? Have
you have you rectified this in your adult life, etc.
Just let us know we'd love to hear from you.
In the meantime, you can find core episodes of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the
Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed On Mondays, we
(41:07):
do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do an artifact or
a monster fact. The one we did this week is
also Irish themed. And then on Fridays we set most
serious matters aside and we just talk about a strange film.
Huge thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
(41:29):
to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow
Your Mind dot com Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening
(41:51):
to your favorite shows.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time for a vault episode. This is an older episode
of our show. This one originally published March seventeenth, twenty
twenty two, and it's part two of our series on
Finn McCool, the legendary Irish hero. Welcome to Stuff to
(00:28):
Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, 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 series about the legendary Irish hero Finn McCool.
If you haven't heard part one, you should go back
(00:50):
and listen to that one first. This one will make
a lot more sense if you do. But at the
end of the last episode, we promised you that this
episode would be the one that's all thumb, because, of course,
one of the great legends about Finn McCool is the
so called Thumb of knowledge. We teased it a few
times in the previous episode, but now we're finally here.
We're finally to the thumb factory. That's right, Finn is
(01:13):
not merely a warrior and a hunter and a defender
of his people. He also has the gift of divination.
His prescience puts him in keeping with the likes of
Paula Treads, But he doesn't take spice or enter a
Prana Bindu trance in order to see the future, or
is it sometimes described to gain wisdom. Instead, he puts
(01:34):
his thumb in his mouth. Is the most heroic thing
I can picture. I mean, imagine the movie poster. It's
like your action movie hero. They've got the sword, their
hair is blowing in the wind, maybe their armor is
splattered with blood and mud. And also he's just got
his thumb in his mouth. Now. In the last part
of the series, we referenced a few works by a
(01:56):
scholar named James McKillop, who has written extendly on Finn
McCool and on Irish smith and legend. For example, I
cited him when I was talking about the version of
the Giant's Causeway story that involves that involves the the
Ben and Donner Giant, the rival giant being replaced with
one named Kucullen, which is totally confusing because that's the
(02:19):
name of a different Irish folk hero. But this was
also the version of the story where Finn McCool bites
off the rival giant's finger when the giant is tricked
into putting the finger into his mouth. But I think
you were also reading something by James McKillop on on
the origins of this thumb story, right, yeah, yeah. According
(02:41):
to McKillop, the details on how the thumb is utilized
vary according to the you know, the different tellings. Sometimes
it's described as a sucking of the thumb, much like
an infant would would suck on a thumb or fingers.
Other Times it's described as a chewing of the thumb,
And sometimes it's specifically that the thumb is placed behind
(03:02):
the upper teeth, which I guess is something that is
as more or less happening with any kind of infantile
sucking of the thumb anyway, but they seem to make it.
Sometimes the point is made that it's like the thumb
is coming into contact with the palette and pressing. All right, So,
as amusing as the image of an action hero sucking
his thumb might be the idea of an action hero
(03:24):
biting his thumb, that's pretty close, But that seems a
little more maybe on the money, especially when you take
into account some historical considerations, because the idea of biting
his thumb immediately made me think of the classically confusing
scene from Shakespeare the infamous do you bite your thumb
(03:45):
at us, sir? The scene from Romeo and Juliet, rob
Do you remember coming across this in school and having
no idea what to make of it? Yes, I distinctly
remember this, probably when we were watching an adaptation of it,
and yeah, there's the whole scene with I bite my
thumb at you, and I remember everyone getting a real
kick out of that. Yeah, it's like it's one of
(04:07):
those where you know what it means, but you don't
know what it means, Like you get the gist, but
you don't understand what they're talking about. Because so the scene,
for anybody who hasn't read it, it's in Romeo and Juliet,
Act one, Scene one. We get servants of the two
rival houses, the Montagues and the Capulets. They run into
each other in the street and they're they're trying to
(04:28):
stir things up there. They're trying to provoke a fight
because they hate each other. And so a character from
one house says, do you bite your thumb at us, sir?
And the guy from the other house says, I do
bite my thumb, sir? Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?
And then the guy who's biting his thumb lead leans
aside to his friend and he says, is the law
on our side if I say I? And his friend
(04:49):
says no, it is not. So he says, no, sir,
I do not bite my thumb at you, sir. But
I bite my thumb, sir. So it's it's sort of
like I'm just punching the air, and if you happen
to walk into the air that I'm punching, you know,
so be it. I think the implication is that if
he says outright that he is biting his thumb at
(05:10):
the other guy, then if a fight breaks out, it'll
be considered his fault because he provoked it. So he's
just saying, no, I'm just biting my thumb. In general,
all right, makes sense, makes sense. It's kind of like
if here is, if there's a difference between flashing the
middle finger and making a middle finger and scratching your face,
you have plausible deniability and saying I know, I wasn't
floping you off, I was. I just the side of
(05:32):
my face itches and I needed to relieve it. And see,
my middle finger is my longest finger, and therefore it
is the ideal finger to use for scratching. Said notes. Right, Oh,
oh it's itching again. Oh here I go again. Oh
now both sides are itching. Yeah. So yeah, that is
clearly what's going on in the scene. But it is
interesting to ponder, like, what is what is the origin
(05:54):
of this thumb biting thing, because of course this was
localized to specific cultures, but it's clear what it means
in context. It seems to bite one's thumb at someone
was a gesture of disrespect or contempt. It was kind
of like giving the finger. It was a way of
saying you stink. And in trying to find something about
(06:15):
the origins of this gesture, I found an excerpt from
a book called How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan, England
by a British historian named Ruth Goodman, and she writes
as follows quote in modern sicily, you can still see
a form of this gesture and use an upright thumb
held so that the pad points outwards. Is tucked behind
(06:38):
the top front teeth and then flicked forwards out of
the mouth towards the intended insultee. Okay, so are you
picturing that It's not the thumb going straight into the
mouth as you might think with like when a child
is sucking their thumb. Instead, it's like the thumb kind
of goes upward into the mouth behind the top teeth,
and then you kind of flick the thumb out pad out. Yeah.
(06:59):
But then DMan also writes, I've also seen a version
in action on the outskirts of Venice, although I don't
know if it was a native Venetian performing it, where
the pad of the thumb was placed horizontally between the
top and bottom teeth in a bite, and then flicked out,
rotating as it went so that the bitten pad was
thrust forwards. And so because of the Finn McCool biting
(07:22):
the thumbthing, I started to wonder if there were any
interesting connections between this gesture we see in Shakespeare that
appears to have mostly gone out of style today, though
maybe you might still see it in isolated cases here
or there, such as in Sicily or somewhere in Italy.
But I'm going to have to say that for me,
this investigation was a failure. I couldn't find any evidence
(07:42):
of a connection between these two story elements, though it
did raise interesting questions on its own, like where would
this type of thumb biting gesture come from? And from
what I turned up. Like many obscene gestures, its origins
are unknown. But I did find a book that had
some interesting informed guesses, and this was in an academic
(08:04):
book called Historical Social Psychology by Kenneth Gurgen and Mary Gurgan,
published by Taylor and Francis, twenty fourteen. And so, first
of all, they dispense with a few alternatives. They say, well,
you know, maybe the thumb biting insult gesture has something
to do with thumb sucking, but that doesn't really fit
what's described in the Shakespearean usage. And they say the
(08:26):
same goes for the act of biting the knuckle of
your thumb, which is a gesture that sometimes people still
use today, but it seems demean something different. Biting the
knuckle of your thumb seems to denote someone desperately trying
to contain rage, and that also it also just doesn't
fit what's described in these sources. So instead, they argue
(08:48):
that the thumb biting described by Shakespeare is something that
has generally fallen out of fashion today, it's mostly not
used anymore, and that in order to understand it we
would need to look to the historical context. So what's
the context? Well, I thought their answer was pretty interesting.
They write, quote. The clue, it seems, is to be
found in the fact that during the latter half of
the sixteenth century, men were in the habit of wearing gloves,
(09:11):
and these were usually removed prior to any confrontation, not
unlike the present day Irish habit of taking off one's
jacket to show that one means business. In fact, the
practice of removing and throwing down one's glove had become
ritualized as a challenge long before Shakespeare's time, and it
is common knowledge that medieval knights use this device to
(09:32):
invite each other into the lists. It seems likely that
the medieval convention, or some version of it, was still
around in a stylized form during Shakespeare's time, but it
had become abbreviated to the point where an intention movement
of removing one's gloves would suffice. So how does an
early modern hater remove a glove, well, one way would
(09:55):
be to remove it with the opposite hand, but another
way would be to bite at one of the fingers
of the glove with your teeth and then pull the
hand away from inside. You've probably seen people take gloves
off this way. The latter method they claim is well attested,
and it was not unusual to remove a glove this
way by by biting the thumb and pulling the hand out.
Though when I was trying to imagine doing this myself,
(10:16):
to just sort of give it a quick thought experiment check,
I think you probably can do it, though it seems
to me be easier to get to get your hand
out of the glove by biting one of the long
fingers than by biting the thumb. But I'm no glove expert.
Well this makes sense, Yeah, the gloves are off. This
is the classic challenge, and I had to We had
to check this with Seth whose Simpsons knowledge knows no bounds.
(10:41):
But on the Simpsons we had the episode where we
had the glove slap, where our Homer is challenging everyone
to a duel in town by slapping them with his glove,
which he has removed right so in this case, the
authors suggest their hypothesis is that over time, this familiar,
highly salient activity of taking off a glove to demand
a duel could be abbreviated to a simple gesture of
(11:06):
just biting your thumb to show scorn or disrespect, whether
or not you're actually wearing a glove. They do say
they could find no direct evidence supporting this hypothesis, though
it does fit well with the observation that the gesture
mostly fell into disuse when dueling disappeared as a legitimate
way of settling beef. So anyway, I think interesting question
(11:27):
on its own, but I couldn't really find that this
much informs Finn McCool right, right. I think that's one
of the things that makes the thumb of knowledge here
so fascinating, is that it does, to a certain extent,
feel like kind of an island in mythology, Like it's
something that it's not like there's something universal about heroes
biting or sucking their thumb or placing their thumb in
(11:49):
their mouth. But but we'll get into some of the
connections that are in place in a bit here. The
next question is, of course, well, why what's the story
There's got to be a story. There's always a story
behind why something is the way it is in mythology,
(12:09):
and the main origin story for the miraculous thumb of
Finn McCool is the salmon of knowledge. Salmon is in
the fish, the delicious fish, where we're familiar with, and
McKillop points out that, Okay, in addition to this, the
salmon has plenty of mystical connotations, in part due to
(12:31):
it's observed leaping out of the water. So it wasn't
a stretch to think there might be something magical about
a salmon. It's not like an inherently secular animal or
mundane animal. It is one that already has all these
various mystical connotations, and so it makes sense that it
might play into such a story. Rob Can I reveal though,
(12:52):
when I was trying to see, okay, are there other
magical salmon out there? So I google the phrase magical
salmon and the first result is, of course, Chef Paul
Prudom's salmon Magic seasoning blend. There you go. I'm sure
it was a magical recipe that that he earned by
catching a magical fish, because that's that's that's basically what
(13:16):
we have going on here. So the stories goes that
you have a druid by the name of Phinegus who
lives on the banks of a river, and he has
long waited for and intends to catch the salmon of Knowledge.
There are other versions of the story that say that
he's he's camping out at a waterfall, or that there's
some sort of a you know, some sort of an
(13:37):
underground reservoir sort of situation going on. But the idea
is that at some point this uh, this marvelous salmon
is going to present itself, and if the druid can
catch it, he can eat it and he can gain
all of that wonderful wisdom for himself. Now, is it
ever explained how he knows that the salmon, the salmon
(13:57):
of knowledge, will give him all this wisdom? Or is
that just he is just something he knows? Well, there
are a few different There's at least one really good
uh story behind this, and this is account. This is
an account mentioned by Patricia Monigan in Celtic Mythology and Folklore.
According to this author, the fish is sometimes identified is
(14:19):
Finton a bard who lived many lifetimes in many incarnations.
Thus he has all of this accumulated knowledge, and in
this incarnation he just happens to be a salmon. And
so I guess, you know, through the druidic arts, this
particular druid knows, hey, I can catch him this time,
and if I eat him, and I'll gain all of
that knowledge. So it's it's literally that I'm going to
(14:42):
eat your brains and gain your knowledge logic, right, well,
you know, but not maybe not. The brains may just
all that delicious. Uh maybe, I don't know. I don't
I'm not sure if you have to eat like absolutely
all of the fish, or you have to eat the brain,
but you're already cooking a salmon, so you might as
well make a meal out of it. I don't know. Well,
I actually I guess, as Wills, we're about to learn
(15:04):
it's not just the brains, and in fact that it
may be a little more subtle than that, because what
apparently happens is the druid finally succeeds in catching it
after waiting for it for seven years, which incidentally, it's
been seven years since Finn McCool was born, and seven
year old Finn McCool is hanging out there at the
druid camp with him, and you know he's shadowing him,
(15:26):
you know, as you do. And so Finnegus he's caught
the salmon. He's overjoyed. So he starts cooking the salmon,
puts it on a spit. It's roasting there, and Finn's
trying to help out, and he accidentally burns his thumb
on the cooking fish. And what does he do? What
do you do in your thumb is burnt, while you
immediately seek to soothe that pain by thrusting your thumb
(15:47):
into your mouth. And Finn does just this, and when
he does, he inherits the power of the salmon before
the old druid even gets a shot at it. So
it's the oil from the salmon that contains the knowledge.
It's not eat your brains and gain your knowledge. It's
eat your omega threes and gain your knowledge right right now.
In some variations, however, he gains he said to gain
(16:10):
the power of divination by eating magical hazel nuts, or
he gains it from the salmon because the salmon ate
magical hazel nuts. There's also one version in which he
enters a fairy mound. Fairy mounds are these circular ancient dwellings, uh,
you know, from from ancient Ireland that were later associated
(16:30):
with supernatural tales, and you know, stuff like the two
author to done and so anyway, he enters a fairy ground,
he gains the magical ability from three fairy women he
encounters there, but then as he's leaving, he accidentally smashes
his thumb in the door of the fairy mound. But
it seems like the fish version of the story, the
(16:50):
Salmon of Knowledge is the primary tale. It's the most
popular now. It's it's often stated that it's not just
putting the thumb in his mouth that sets off the
divination trance, but that Finn also has to recite a
kind of poetic chanting incantation called the I think probably
(17:11):
pronouncing this wrong, but the teinem latia lata. And this
also may have some connection to hazel nuts, according to
mccellop in the Dictionary of Celtic Mythology. McKellop adds that
the thumb allowed him to enter quote and I love
this an altered visionary state in which he could see past,
present and future in which he could see present. Wow,
(17:35):
I mean that that is a real well maybe maybe
it means he could see all of the present, like
things that are not present with him at the present,
or to see the present clearly. I don't know. There's
another interesting wrinkle here. The Celtic languages and literature professional
Patrick k Ford suggests that one connection here may be
that the Old Irish word for thumb was ordu, which
(17:59):
may also signify a morsel, particularly a morsel of meat,
that you would you consume. And McKellop points out that
that the consumption of a morsel of magical flesh is
a common folkloric motif. So if I'm to understand this correctly,
the interpretation would mean that Finns morsel slash thumb becomes
(18:21):
the sacred flesh by coming into burning contact with the
cooking sacred fish of the Salmon of wisdom. But is
it also suggesting that there may possibly have been the
kind of semantic contagion in the evolution of this story,
where originally the story was about eating a magical morsel
of meat, but because you can use the same word
(18:42):
for morsel of meat and thumb, that it came to
represent a thumb in later tellings. Yeah, that's absolutely the
sense I'm getting from this. Yeah, So we have, you know,
a semantics and linguistic shift going on here in addition
to just a you know, a cool story of magic
fish consumption. Oh this is great because I'm imagining other
variations of that kind of evolution of a story. Like
(19:05):
the thumb slash morsel makes sense because like a little
morsel of meat that might be about the size of
your thumb. But there are other ways that we use
body parts to measure quantities in reality. Like I'm thinking
of people who would say, hey, I want two fingers
of whiskey in the glass. So you could have a
story about somebody who drinks a magical draft of something.
(19:27):
They get two fingers of it, but then in later
tellings it gets confused and it's like, well, yeah, they
drank their own fingers and then they gained this power. Yeah,
you could have like a sort of a Popeye Asque
character if he has if he's sticks two fingers in
his mouth, then he gets all riled up and is
ready to fight, puts him into a drunken brawling spade.
(19:48):
So as we'll discuss. The thumb pops up in a
few other places, but it's largely thought to be quite
emblematic of Finn McCool his only real defining feature in iconography.
I think sometimes they're our hounds or dogs that are
associated with Finn McCool. But but the thumb especially is
something where you know, historians and art historians are looking
(20:11):
at various images. If they see the thumb being, you know,
poked towards the mouth, they can they can generally say
with some certainty that this must be Finn McCool. And
I haven't found an example of this online or in
the books I was looking at, but apparently many Celtic
crosses have various figures in the design, and sometimes you'll
(20:33):
see this thumb brandishing Finn McCool. Characters pop up, or
it's assumed that it's Finn McCool because who else would
it be. So if you've if you've never, if you
can't imagine what a Celtic cross tense will look like,
they tend to be be a cruciform shape. But then
with all these kind of compartments for further illustrations and symbols, Now,
(20:53):
how is it the thumb is usually emphasized in the psychonography.
Is it like glowing or something? Or is he sucking it?
Is it in his mouth. Um. Well, like I said,
I couldn't find a direct example of this that stood
out to me, but I I just they're they're they're
going to be smaller figures and they're I don't think
they're gonna's going to be necessarily obvious that like the
thumb is glowing or anything, but just by by virtue
(21:15):
of having some sort of emphasis on the thumb and
a visible thumb or even a thumb in the mouth,
it's going to be pretty obvious that it's Finn McCool.
Now this is not related to the thumb, but just
as a quick side note on you mentioned that some
stories of Finn McCool emphasizes dogs. I was reading a
few of those. There are actually some really great dog
buddy uh legends of of Finn, and one of them
(21:38):
is about how he how he gains a wife who
is a person who I think she's like a fairy,
but in any case, she's transformed into a fawn by
an evil wizard and uh, and he finds her by
by virtue of the fact that he's out with his
hunting dogs and when he comes across this fawn, his
(22:00):
dogs don't go after the fawn and like attack it,
but instead settle down and cuddle with it. And so
then he brings the fawn back with him to his castle.
And once they arrive there, the fawn turns into this
woman who becomes his wife. But then unfortunately she is
she is tricked and stolen away by the evil wizard.
Again interesting. Interesting. Now, in terms of other accounts of
(22:26):
thumbs in Celtic mythology, I did run across another interesting example,
and this was this is from the ninety two or
ninety three Nordic Celtic Legends Imposium, an article by Rannock
Ogan titled music Learn from the Fairies, And according to
the author here there are many tales of mortals learning
(22:47):
the music of fairy folk music from beyond our world,
and usually they learn it by hearing it in just
the right place at just the right time, you know,
something like an ancient ruin strange rocks in the world woods,
you know, the sort of place that fairies might appear
or hang out, and such was also around the time
(23:09):
of Solin, like this is the time of the year
when the veil is thin between our world and the next.
And there's at least one account in in Celtic tradition
of a man hearing fairy music. He's you know, he
hears it in the woods or wherever, and what does
he do. He sticks his thumb in his mouth whilst
hearing the music, and as a result he remembered the music.
(23:31):
And of course this this caused to mind Finn McCool interesting.
I mean, what does that suggest about our intuitions about
the power of sucking a thumb that it like, I
don't know what that means, That it has some kind
of grounding power that it can like cause you to uh,
sort of like hold fast against maybe currents of magic
(23:53):
or forgetfulness that would otherwise wash away the memory. Well, yeah,
this is a great question because I guess on one hand,
let's let's start by let's go ahead and assume that
that sticking your thumb in your mouth actually doesn't have
any effect on you know, your your your memory, or
your your your your stress level or anything like that.
(24:14):
It does make you wonder if there is, if there's
something culturally in place where where just the idea of
sticking your thumb in your mouth is like a novel
thing that is done that is associated with insight. Um
I wonder if it is the kind of thing where
you could stick your thumb in your mouth thinking about
this tradition and it would actually help you remember something better,
(24:38):
because it's also like that thing I heard while I
was sticking my thumb in my mouth. Oh that's interesting.
In fact, that even connects to a mnemonic device I've
I've heard of before, which is basically like, if if
suddenly something happens and you want to remember it very well,
you should do something really weird immediately so that you
like form a link in your mind between that weird
(24:59):
memory bol thing you did, and whatever thing it is
you're trying to remember. Interesting now, of course, the thing
is when it comes with thumb sucking, it doesn't seem
to be just a completely neutral gesture, if you will.
And we actually have quite a lot of research out
(25:19):
there on thumb sucking, particularly as it relates to children. Right,
So I was actually reading a brief article in a
pediatric medicine journal reviewing the existing literature on thumbs sucking
as of two thousand and eight. So this article was
called Thumb and Finger Sucking by Lynn Davidson in the
journal Pediatrics in Review. Again, this was the year two
(25:40):
thousand and eight, and a few major takeaways from this
brief ride up. Number one is that different studies across
time have found some different rates of the prevalence of
thumb sucking or finger sucking. A lot of times these
studies just lump thumb and finger sucking in together, so
you're not necessarily getting a breakdown by which finger it is.
(26:01):
But I think it is clear that thumbs are the
most most common finger for infants to suck. But older
studies found rates in the range of seventy to ninety
percent of children showing a thumb or finger sucking behaviors,
and more recent studies have found rates more like thirty
percent by the end of the first year after birth,
along with forty percent using a pacifier. Though with that
(26:23):
thirty to forty percent, I don't know if that's an
either or situation or an and situation to some children
suck thumb and a pacifier, I'm not sure. I don't
I don't have a lot of direct experience with that,
but I mean, I guess in some cases you're going
to have a situation where the child is gravitating towards
sucking on on digits and you want to get a
pacifier in there instead, and you're like, here, here, you
(26:45):
use this instead. Anyway. There's some variations on these rates
with the within the first few years of life, but
Davidson writes that by the time most children reach the
age of four, these rates have gone way down. On average,
only twelve percent of children in one study sucked a finger,
including a thumb, by the age of four, and pacifier
(27:07):
use had gone down to four percent by that time.
Now here's something I thought was interesting. Apparently, during the
first few months of life, infants are most likely to
suck their thumbs during sleep, but by the end of
the first year more infants do it while awake. There
were no differences in rates of thumb sucking prevalence by sex.
(27:28):
And oh, and I thought this was interesting. Up to
fifty percent of children who suck their thumbs or fingers
also tend to hold a special object while doing so.
This is, yeah, sort of the classic I suck my
thumb or my fingers and I have to hold on
to a special blanket or a special stuffy that sort
(27:48):
of thing. Yeah. Now, there have been a number of
historical explanations for thumb sucking. One that must be cited
unfortunately as Freud. Freud being Freud believed it to be
an expression of what he called quote infantile sexuality, and
that when it persisted beyond infancy, it was a symptom
of emotional disturbance. Obviously, Freudianism held a lot of sway
(28:10):
for a while, despite it being profoundly weird and not
actually being subject to empirical testing. But there are some
more recent theories that seem better grounded and experimental research,
and they generally suggest that thumbsucking grows out of instinctual
behaviors in infants, that sucking behaviors are a universal instinctual
(28:32):
behavior in newborns that they use for breastfeeding or bottle feeding,
and that after that, for some reason, in some children,
this instinctual behavior continues beyond the point of nutritional relevance,
and the instinctual behavior might be reinforced through conditioning, and
in some cases it just continues with a substitute, such
(28:52):
as a thumb or a finger. I don't know if
there is a good agreed upon answer as to why
this reinforced behavior would be continued in some children but
not others, Like what makes the difference? I'm not sure. However,
it might be informative to note that some studies have
found that thumb sucking appears to be especially common when
children are bored, tired, or anxious, and this suggests that
(29:16):
it plays some kind of self soothing role. Yeah, and
I was finding some evidence to back this up as well.
There's a twenty fifteen article published in Minerva Pediatrica that
concluded that quote, a thumbsucking subject puts the thumb in
the mouth to stimulate the nasal pilatal receptors of trigeminists
(29:38):
and obtain muscular balance and a release of physical and
psychological tension. Now that's also interesting when you think about
the Okay, we have Finn McCool doing this as an adult.
You can certainly find adult thumbsuckers who speak to the
calming effects of the practice. So I wonder if it
(29:59):
is too much of a stretch to imagine an Irish
warrior of old who you know, you know, he's his
wonderful hunter and warrior in all this, but he needs
to calm down every now and then, and this stressful
role in society, And if you're going to ponder an
important decision, you need to reach a place of relative peace,
and perhaps placing his thumb inside of his mouth allows
(30:21):
him to do so, and maybe you end up seeing
the creation of magical explanations for what's going on here,
as opposed to just saying, well, he never quite stopped
sucking his thumb when he's nervous or stressed. Oh man,
that would be an amazing origin story. Yes, so it
begins with this beast of a warrior, great hunter, you know,
(30:43):
blow the hunting horn. I will defend the shores of Ireland.
But I also suck my thumb and people are like,
why is he sucking his thumb? And somebody else is like, well,
it's what he does when he needs to, you know,
see into the future. Yeah, now another possible connection. I
(31:05):
was thinking about a related connection. Anyway, Sometimes there's more
stress placed on the idea that Finn is placing his
thumb behind his upper teeth, and of course thumb sucking
itself impacts the palette. I was reminded of traditions in
meditation that you encounter in which one is asked to
hold the tip of one's tongue to the roof of
(31:25):
the mouth. Sometimes this is described in terms of you know,
of course, bodily energy flow, other times as just being
a way of altering the flow of saliva in the mouth,
though it is sometimes described as a way of eliminating
negative thoughts or even a way of sort of weeding
out speech based thoughts. Well, and I'd wonder if you
(31:46):
know any kind of meditative practice that involves unusual activities
with the body is essentially just trying to trying to
direct your concentration away from the sort of default mode
flow of thoughts that arise normally. If if you're thinking
about doing a sort of strange repetitive action with your body,
(32:07):
you're probably less inclined to start thinking about, oh, man,
next Thursday. I really yeah, yeah exactly. So I feel
like that is I couldn't find any like real research
on this, and perhaps I'm missing something, but this seems
plausible to me, like if there was some sort of
like ritual we see in meditation. This is a ritual
(32:27):
touching of something to the roof of your mouth that
is then associated with some degree of anxiety relief and
some degree of relaxation. We see some evidence to support
the idea that that thumb sucking itself can reduce anxiety,
and then We have this idea too that just sort
of novel behaviors and rituals of relaxation, rituals of grounding
(32:52):
can can very much be be helpful. I'm not advising
anybody to take up sucking of the thumb as a
as a way to try and uh, you know, find
balance or to see into the future, but I feel
like there's some there's some interesting leads here to potentially
pull on to sort of try and make sense of
of where this may come from, and uh and and
(33:13):
how such a either at the very least such a
myth comes together, but but also the possibility that this
is something that had could have been practiced to some
limited degree in uh, you know, in Ireland of Old. Yeah.
Also another note, Yes, so we were not encouraging thumb
sucking for adults, especially because that can cause dental problems
(33:34):
if if you're doing chronic thumb sucking after the baby
teeth have been replaced. Yeah, that's the that's of course,
the the prime reason that that adults discourage the act
and want to to wean kids away from the sucking
of fingers and thumbs, because yeah, once the baby teeth
are going, you've got the adult teeth going in. You
can you can jack up those adult teeth by continually
(33:57):
pressing the thumb up there into the palette. It's seems
like the methods used to discourage thumbsucking and train children
not to do it have become more humane over time,
because I was reading about some of the older methods
people used to try to, you know, get their kid
to get the thumb out of the mouth, and it
was brutal, like one was about these ideas of having
(34:17):
the sharp implements put on the backs of the teeth
that would like cause pain in the thumb. Have you
read about this, Yeah, yeah, I think I've heard about
that before. Yeah, obviously that does not sound good. Or
of course putting putting noxious chemicals or something on the thumb. Yeah,
I think I think people have better methods now. Yeah. Now,
(34:37):
one of the interesting thing we talked about, this idea
of the thumbsucking being, you know, the thumb in the
mouth being kind of an island for this mythology of
Finn McCool and certainly again it is a defining one
of the defining factors of this particular hero. But you
do see thumb sucking, thumb in the mouth motifs popping
(34:58):
up with some other heroes, particularly. A few examples that
have come to mind include um Sigurd, the hero there.
Actually I saw an image of him that it's like
a carving, and you see him with thumb in the mouth,
So that seems to be very much related to what
we're looking at here. Another hero that we see lined
(35:21):
up with the thumb is Taliesin, So there seems to
be some connection between Finn McCool and these heroes as well. Yeah,
McKillop notes in his book that there was a controversial
suggestion by Robert Graves that Heracles or Hercules, the Greek hero,
was associated with the thumb in the same way that
Achilles is associated with the heel, kind of these body
(35:43):
parts that are emblematic of the person. But McKillop brings
that association up specifically in the context of it being
kind of kind of doubtful. Now, outside of these these
three heroes, I wasn't really really finding much that that
even resembled Finn McCool. But there is an interesting thumb
sucking bit of myth making that pops up in Hindu traditions.
(36:06):
In the Hindu Epic, the Mahabarata. There's the story of
King yuvan Ashva, who apparently has trouble conceiving a child
with any of his concubines, and so he winds up
drinking a magic potion that makes him pregnant. So when
this occurs, his he realizes, well, there's some additional problems
(36:27):
now that I have to deal with. So he turns
to the divine physicians and they cut open his thigh
so that he can actually give birth to the baby.
But then how is he to nourish the child? Well,
then we have Indra, the King of Davis, to cut
open his thumb and this allows milk to leak forth
from the thumb so that he can nurse his infant
(36:50):
son in this manner. And this is why the story
goes that babies sometimes suck their thumbs. Wow. Interesting, Yeah,
no direct connection between this and Finn McCool, but just
another kind of cool thumbsucking mythology to reference here. The
more I think about the idea of a of a
thumbsucking warrior action hero, the more I love it, Like
(37:12):
I want to see a movie like this. Or it
doesn't have to be thumbsucking, it could also be um,
you know, your your great warrior, great swinger of the sword,
like has a blankie. Yeah yeah, I mean we had
let's see, who's the tell us of all his character?
That does it? Kolchak uh Kojack that that had the
sucker like that was his whole thing, right, Oh, lollipops
(37:33):
the lollipop. Yeah, uh, that's not too far removed from it.
I cannot do detective until I get my lolly. Yes, well, Rob,
I have greatly enjoyed this journey into Finn McCool. Yeah,
this one has been a lot of fun. Like I say,
I wasn't super familiar with Finn McCool prior to this,
and I certainly had had somehow skipped over or forgotten
(37:55):
anything about the Thumb of Knowledge. So this was this
was a fun journey into Irish mythology. Always fun to
do that around this time of year. You know. On
previous episodes of the show, we have talked about our
love for the time Life Enchanted World books that were
fabulously advertised on TV commercials with Vincent Price where you
(38:16):
know he's I love to carl up with a good book.
Did his eyes glow green in those commercials? I think so?
They may have, well, a couple of the volumes of
the Time Life Enchanted World have stories of Finn McCool,
and they're you know what I got to say, By
and large, those books are really good. They're good syntheses
(38:36):
of their sources and pretty well written, much better than
you would expect for something that was advertised on TV
that way. Oh absolutely, yeah. I'm actually reading through the
Dragon volume from that collection right now with my son,
and there's some sections of it that I feel like
we're a little a little wordier than they need to be,
(38:56):
but we're having a lot of fun with it. You
have the longer sections, the short order sections, you have
this wonderful mix of original artwork as well as traditional
artwork to illustrate these tales. So yeah, there there are
a lot of fun do you do? You have them all? Joe?
It was a wonderful gift from my wife, Rachel got
me the complete Time Life Enchanted World collection. Oh nice.
(39:20):
It's something like twenty something volumes all told. Right, Uh,
that might be about right. I haven't read them all yet.
So the stories about Finn McCool are in the ones
called Acts of Valor or maybe Tales of Valor. This
the one with Valor and the title, and then the
one called Fabled Lands. Yeah, okay, I have one of those,
but not the other. For the longest I just I
(39:40):
kind of assumed that I had the full collection that
had been gifted to me from an aunt when I
was a child. But I've come to realize, oh, I
don't have them all. So, like, just the other day,
as we were recording this, I was looking at oh,
which I was looking at, like, Okay, which ones do
I not have that I really should have? And I
noticed that I had two of the Black books, not
the third. So I immediately had to order that one up.
(40:03):
One of the great things about these books is that
I guess they were just so mass produced. You can
pick these volumes up for you know, for reasonable sums. Uh.
You know, sometimes you'll find one's even like dirt cheap. Uh.
So there there are plenty. There's plenty of Enchanted World
to go around if anyone's interested. I'm incredibly proud of
my Enchanted World collection. It's a it's a treasure all right,
(40:25):
where we're going to go ahead and close it out here.
And and I guess I wish everybody to Saint Patrick's
day while we're at it. But we'd love to hear
from everyone out there. We'd love to hear from uh
Irish folk and non Irish folk alike regarding these uh,
these myths, these these tales, uh you know, thumbs in
the mouth, thumbsucking in general, or even just an enchanted
(40:47):
world book chat. What's your favorite volume? Did you have
these growing up or did you just want them? Have
you have you rectified this in your adult life, etc.
Just let us know we'd love to hear from you.
In the meantime, you can find core episodes of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the
Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed On Mondays, we
(41:07):
do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do an artifact or
a monster fact. The one we did this week is
also Irish themed. And then on Fridays we set most
serious matters aside and we just talk about a strange film.
Huge thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
(41:29):
to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow
Your Mind dot com Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening
(41:51):
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