October 29, 2015 • 50 mins
If your fictional diet contains significant quantities of horror or dark fantasy, then you've likely encountered the ghoul: a scavenging, grave-robbing race of unnatural beings with an insatiable hunger for the dead. As Robert and Joe explore in this episode, the roots of ghouldom sink back into pre-Islamic Arabic folklore -- as well into the distant evolutionary history of humanity itself.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind. From how stupor
com a man he had known in Boston, a painter
of strange pictures with a secret studio and an ancient
and unhallowed alley near a graveyard, had actually made friends
with the ghouls and had taught him to understand the
(00:25):
simpler part of their disgusting meeping and glibbering. For all
their laughter, ghouls or a doola hunger is the fire
in which they burn, and it burns hotter than the
hunger for powers over men or for knowledge of the
gods in a craze mortal. It vaporizes delicacy and leaves
(00:47):
behind only a slag of anger and lust. Hey, welcome
to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And those were two quick readings,
the first from HP Lovecrafts The dream Quest of Unknown
(01:09):
Cataf and the second from Brian McNaughton's The Throne of
bones Um, available via Wildside Press. And that, by the way,
is not only one of my favorite publications that deal
with Google's, it's probably one of my favorite books of
all time. Now do you love it more than the
D and D Monster Manual. Well, the two different types
(01:31):
of reads there. I mean, I do love the Monster
Manual for my sort of catalog oriented monster consideration. And indeed,
girls have have long had a cherished role in the
Dungeons and Dragons setting. So what is Throwing of Bones about.
Throwing of Bones is a It's a collection of short
stories in one central novella set in a dark fantasy
(01:53):
setting that's vaguely Roman, vaguely tolkien Esque, I guess, but
but has more common with the works of say Clark,
Ashton Smith and some of the weird dark fantasy writers
of an earlier time. Oh, I should get into that,
because I've recently discovered that I really dig Roman themes
in in dark literature, because on your and Christians recommendation,
(02:16):
I read The Great God Pan, which has that that
fantastic reference to the statues from ancient Rome of the
you know, the horrific visage of the goat, the old
goat skin. Yeah. Well, one of the things I love
about mcnonton's work is that he brings this dark seriousness
of weird fiction and horror into his writing. But there's
(02:37):
also this gallows humor. There's this Uh, especially prominent with
the ghouls, because the ghoul is this creature that in
It's in the versions that I like the most. They're
they're gross, they're evil, they're sly, but they're also a
little mischievous. They also have this weird, black sense of
(02:57):
humor about them. Uh, and I feel mcnaton it really
brings that to life. Well, if you haven't figured it
out by now, we're going to be talking about Google's today,
and sadly, I think this is going to have to
be our final October podcast. It has been a great
run this month of monsters and demons and madness. We're
gonna have to sober up in the next episode a
(03:17):
little bit and get get back on track for the holidays.
But yeah, it's been a fun right, Okay, So Google's.
I think these days, when the average person is presented
with the concept of a ghoule, what kind of descriptive
features are you're gonna get? I would say they'd be
very generic. I mean, what is a ghoul to us today?
(03:38):
It's just some kind of vaguely monstrous creature. In fact,
you could even think of Google as a broader term
into which other monsters fit, like the vampire is a
type of Google. Well, the word is used that way
a lot. I have to admit that I have to
bite my tongue to keep from correcting people when someone
refers to a non Google as a Google, I want
(04:00):
to say, no, that's that's technically not a Google. That
is just a ghost, that is somebody in a vampire costume.
A Google is a specific thing, and you have to
use the term appropriately. Yeah, well I brought that up
specifically to provoke you. So Robert, come on, tell me
what is a gooul really? All right, So it's gonna
it's gonna vary, and we're gonna get it before we
(04:21):
end up at discussing actual science behind the Google. So yes,
that is coming in the second half. We're going to
discuss the ancient roots and sort of the modern fictional roots.
But in most cases, you're looking at this creature that
might be unliving or maybe it's just living on the
margins of what we think of as as an actual
appropriate member of the natural world. It's very much the
(04:43):
monster as outsider, a motif very much so, yeah, making
its home graveyards and places of of of loss and death,
and it feasts upon human remains, so it is essentially
a cannibalistic scavenger and scavin you're in the true sense,
and that it's sort of dwells at the edges of
(05:03):
the camp. You know, you have civilization as the encampment
where our activity dwells. You don't find the Ghoul in
the middle of the city. You find the Google trailing
behind you, feasting on what you leave behind. Right, Yeah,
I think in some cases you have Googles that are
following armies. I always love that motif and would love
to see that that that used more, especially in the
(05:25):
fantasy settings. You have some some sort of army going
out to fight a battle as they always do. Well,
then surely they are camp followers and there are Googles
right behind them. Yeah, the other type of camp follower.
But based on what we've said so far, it should
be clear that the concept of the Google has not
remained static over time. I mean, it's not even fully unified. Today.
You've got this generic goal and then you've got Robert's
(05:47):
very specific goal. How has the goule changed over time?
And where did the idea originally come from? All right, well,
let's go back to the beginnings. Then if not the
beginning of the universe, because we have to look at
pre Islamic Arabic mythology. This mythology is so cool and
(06:07):
I was so delighted to read it. So our main
source on this is a paper by Ahmed al Rawi
called the Mythical Ghoul in Arabic Culture, and this was
a really fun read. Yes it was. This was one
of my key sources on the house stuff works article
how ghouls work. Um, yeah, and he gets into the
you know, just the original root of the word word
(06:28):
for starters, which is from the Arabic ghoule or g
h u l that may stem from Galu, which is
the name of an ancient demon correct and the galou
played a role in some of their their key literature
and mythology, one of them being the death and rebirth
mythology of the god Demuzi or the Demuzi is sort
(06:50):
of equal to Tamus, which is another god of the
ancient Middle East. But the death and rebirth mythology corresponds
to the growth and harvest cycle of food crops. So
there you can see another one of the ways that
that our mythology ties into our way of life, the
way we make a living in our and our basic
material concerns inform the stories we tell about, you know,
(07:11):
the creation of the world and the behavior of the gods.
And and there you've got just like the crops die
every year and then are reborn later in the next
season or regrow out of you know, the dead fields
of the previous harvest. You've got the god Demuzi or
Tammuz is a vegetation god who is abducted and taken
down into the realm of death. And who is the
(07:34):
abductor of Demuzi or Tammus. It's the Galu, the demon right.
And this is fascinating too, because we see the google
tied into some of our our earliest and most powerful
myths concerning the flow to seasons. Totally yeah, But following
its role in the official mythology of of ancient Babylon
and ancient Mesopotamia, you have this idea of the ghoule
(07:57):
emerging as more of a ground the level folklore creature.
You know that that it's mentioned all in all of
the standard mythology and folk tales and superstitions of the
average person living in the Arabian Peninsula and Arabic scholars
have actually documented the way in which this monster emerged
(08:17):
in the thinking of the people. Yeah, Arabic scholars of
the eighth, ninth, and ten centuries, they compiled various Bedouin
folk tales involving the Gooules, and many of these found
their way into the collection The Thousand and One Nights.
And this is key because translations of this book, of
course traveled to Europe in the eighteenth century, as did
(08:38):
the notion with the Ghoul. And this is where, as
we'll get into later, we see the google emerge in
Western culture and in the in eventually in fictional creations
of the late eighteenth century and a most importantly the
nineteenth twentieth century. Yeah, so I get the feeling it's
more the European grave ghoul that ends up becoming the
D and D monster. Yes, you do see at times,
(09:01):
say the modern motifs kind of reaching back into into
Arabic folklore for for some additional depth. Yeah, I figured
we should mention a couple of these pre Islamic ghoul
accounts because they are fascinating. So one of the stories
that al Rawi tells in his paper is that it's
recounted according to the scholar Al Masudi, and he writes
(09:25):
the following. Arabs before Islam believed that when God created
genies from the gusts of fire, he made from this
type of fire their female part, but one of their
eggs was split into hince the kutrube, which looked like
a cat, was created. As for the devils, they came
(09:45):
from another egg and settled in the seas. Other evil
creatures such as the mariad inhabited the islands, The ghoul
resided in the wilderness, and the siloi dwelt in the
lavatories and waste areas, and the Hamma lived in the
air in the form of a flying snake. So these
are some awesome monsters that are being described here. I
(10:06):
love the idea of a lavatory and waste area monster. Yeah,
because that's again it's a it's a wonderful place for
a haunting. That's a wonderful borderland. Right. Well, it's a
place where you're vulnerable and usually where you're isolated, right
where do you have to go off by yourself? Yeah,
and that's where you might encounter the supernatural. Um But then,
of course there is another source that says that quote
(10:29):
the devils wanted to eavesdrop on heaven, so God threw
meteors at them, where upon some were burnt, fell into
the sea and later turned into crocodiles, while others dropped
onto the ground and changed into ghouls. So there you've
got a ghoule origin and a crocodile origin at the
same time. They're essentially siblings. Um and plenty of the
(10:51):
other stories also depict the ghoul as a shape shifter
that's able to disguise its appearance. Uh. This appears to
be a common feature. Other common features are that the
traditional Arabic goal is often female in appearance. And I
thought this was interesting. It can be killed with a
good chop from a sword, and if I'm reading this right,
(11:13):
it sort of makes it different from the vampire, the werewolf,
and these other monsters which can often only be killed
through magically appropriate means, like you have to have the
you know, the one magic bullet that is known to
kill the monster, as a silver holy water stake through
the heart or or whatever it is for that monster. Individually,
(11:34):
the ghoul can be killed by violence, but it does
have to be a very mighty and strategic form of violence.
Because an interesting development on the myth is that, according
to some versions, the ghoul would only die if you
hit it with one mighty blow with a sword, because
if you hit it more than once, then you would
(11:55):
have to hit it a thousand times more before it
would die. Yeah, that's so you had to time your
one strike, you know, you had to get the one
really good one in. Well, that could I could see
that making sense in terms of the creature. You sort
of have to get that surprise hit in. You've got
to get that. To put in D n D terms,
you have to get that that that surprise attack bonus, right,
(12:16):
and if you don't, then you're gonna have to apply
a lot of smaller attacks to win. I've also read
and this would of course be post uh Islamic interpretations,
but in these interpretations you could also at least drive
a ghoul away with readings from the Koran. Yeah, that
definitely comes up later where you can use the holy
or spiritual power of of a of a good spiritual
(12:39):
force by like saying the name of Allah or by
quoting from the Koran, and that will tend to drive
it into remission. Essentially, it will say, no, why do
you do this to me? But you can also whack
it with the sword as long as you whack it
really good. Just once. Now, speaking of Islamic traditions, you're
probably wondering, what did Mohammed have to say about Google's. Well,
(13:02):
Mohammed's words on the existence of gules vary depending on
which text you read, So the Koran does not mention
them at all. That's important to stress here that the
Koran does mention gin but not not ghoules. Yes, but
contested references do pop up in the head Ether that's
a book of mohammed attributed acts and sayings. Yeah, so
they're they're definitely conflicting bits of scholarship about what Mohammed
(13:26):
had to say about ghouls if anything, But to quote,
I'll RAWI again on the people who do say that
the prophet had something to say about ghouls. What he
said was quote, Ghouls are the demons or enchantresses of
genies that hurt human beings by eating or spoiling their
food or by frightening travelers when they're in the wilderness,
(13:47):
and in order to avoid their harm, one can recite
a verse from the Holy Koran or call for prayer.
Since they hate any reference to God. And that first
part mentioned something about the wilderness. This is something that
pops up again in in in the literature about the
about the ghouls that you know, these ancient ghoul folk tales,
is you don't expect to encounter them in the middle
(14:08):
of civilization there. You encounter them on the road in
the wilderness between places there, in that intermediary world. I
like to how this mentions um eating and spoiling of food.
It's tied uh inherently to our survival via consumption of
food and the potential violation of that food, and and
(14:29):
and just into general um ideas of purity and cleanliness
in our food. Yeah. Well, I mean, you certainly don't
want something that eats corpse flesh getting into your pantry, right, Yeah,
they're just going to tear it out in there, obviously.
But you may have noticed that so far there hasn't
been a whole lot, if anything, about the eating of
corpse flesh. That's right, And that's something that we'll get
(14:50):
into in a bit now. In some accounts, Mohammed dismisses
ghoules as completely non existent, and others he gives advice
on banishing them. His companion, though abou Asad al Sadi
takes a more balanced approach, and he states that ghoules
lived in the pre Islamic past, but that Allah no
longer permits them to exist. Meanwhile, there's also a legend
(15:12):
that Umar been All caught him another of Mohammed's companions,
put a google to the sword on the road to Syria. Yeah,
this was great. So the story goes a female ghoul
stops him on the road and asks him where are
you going? And Umar says it is none of her business.
And then she does the move from the Exorcist where
she turns her head all the way around. That's really
(15:35):
part of the story. It said that. Uh, and then
he splits her down the middle with the sword. Alright,
so single I'm guessing single blow there, right, he does it, right,
He hits her with the one blow. But then later
he comes back and the body is gone. H So
either she survived or the other ghoules came and took
her body away, or more some sort of magical disappearance. Yeah. So,
(15:56):
so if we consider the google that eats human flesh
kind of perversion of the idea of corpse cannibalism, what
is the ghoul that eats ghoul flesh. It's like meta cannibalism. Yeah, yeah,
I mean, and it certainly ties in with with how
we see scavengers, the hate towards their own sometimes. And
that's that's key here, because although ghouls were sometimes associated
(16:19):
with scavenging hyenas in a in Arabic test, they really
don't have this grave ghoul association where they're going to
come and take your dead loved ones from the graveyard
after the funeral and eat their corpses. Yeah. This particular detail,
according to al Rawi, seems to emerge from Anton Glan's
French translation of The Thousand and One Nights in the
early eighteenth century. So not only did Ghalan take liberties
(16:41):
in his translation, he even introduced and allegedly created a
female character named Amina who prefers the company of graveyard
ghouls to that of her new husband. Yeah. So this
and you can see this definitely appealing to some of
the Gothics sensibilities of the time in Europe. Right, But
this inaccurate translation was hugely influential in the Western world
(17:04):
and and in you know, informing their the Western worlds
understanding of the Middle East, so inspiring the work of
William Beckford, the eighteenth century author of the Arabian theme
novel Vfic, and the folkloric studies of of another individual
named Sabine Baring Gould. So we see. So that's interesting,
(17:25):
and you have this rich tradition of ghouls within in
the Arabic traditions, just some wonderful details. They're already a
fabulous creature. But then it gets tweaked a little bit,
either in you know, mistranslation or creative embellishment of the
myth as it translates into European um fiction and folklore
(17:47):
and European understandings of the Middle East. Yeah, it's fascinating,
this evolution of the ghoul meme because if you trace
the ancient pre Islamic Arabic ghoul up through the way
the grave ghoul comes to be under stood in European culture.
What's the common thread there? I mean, you've seen the
evolution basically of a word, the word ghoul, But is
(18:09):
there a common thematic element that remains the same throughout
it despite just general monstrousness or malevolence. Yeah, I think
it works like I feel like that the google as
we have seen it and discussed it in in pre
European traditions. I feel like it's able to take on
the mantle of of corpse eating rather rather honestly like
(18:30):
it adds another dimension to it and certainly tweaks it
in a new direction, but not in a direction that
feels out of character with its origins. Okay, I can
accept that. Now, if we look elsewhere in the world,
do we find myths of creatures that are similar to
the ghoul we do? Uh? Yeah, It's definitely worth noting
(18:51):
that even if the original Arabic ghouls didn't eat corpses,
they have peers in Asian folk tales that do so.
In the Tamil mythology of India, they have the shaggy
haired creatures known as the pay, who sought out human
battle so as to lap blood from the open wounds
of the dying um. Still, other ghoules emerge in the
(19:14):
eighth century. In the eighth century Tibetan Book of the Dead,
which details the Buddhist journey through death and into the
realms beyond death via reincarnation. Um Here, in the dream
like state known as Bardo, the departed soul encounters that
the the Pisachi ghouls and These are fierce female beings
(19:36):
with be steel heads and an appetite for bones and viscera. Wow,
that's interesting. Now, another thing that we see commonly here
is that in these early visions, the ghouls are very
often female, like explicitly described as female and appearance, whereas
the ghouls that I think we think of today tend
to be either sort of um androgynous, tending toward masculine,
(19:59):
or or fully male. Yeah. Yeah, I think there is
a definite tendency to to generate a masculine idea of
the ghoule in Western culture, though though some of my
favorite books on the matter have definitely have female ghoules. Now,
in the conclusion of his article uh al Rawi, he
says that the ghouls may have been inspired just by,
(20:22):
you know, things that people actually did encounter in reality,
like people with various birth defects. Yeah, particularly things like
cleft palate, cleft lip, distortions of the mouth and in
facial features you know, which sadly do um can and
do interfere in our interpretation of of a of an
(20:42):
individual substance. Yeah, I think this is a common feature
you see in the origins of monster legends. This is
often hypothesized that we would just see someone that uh
that had you know, some kind of atypical way of looking,
and that we would interpret that as well, you know,
this person is cursed or evil or there there's something
(21:03):
wrong with them. They didn't have the light of modern
medical science to just say no, they're a person like
anybody else. Yeah, very much in keeping with the changeling
traditions that you find in Europe. Right that surely that
this year your actual child was taken away by fair
is and this is the goblin that's left in in
its place. Yeah. Now, on top of that, Victorian adventure
and Middle Eastern scholar and just all around fascinating individual,
(21:26):
Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, uh He explained the Arabic
ghoul as a mythical creature that embodies human fears and
tapoos concerning graveyards check, desert wastes check and cannibalism and
specifically survival cannibalism. If we were to tie it into
other myth cycles that such as the wind to Go,
(21:47):
that did definitely have such a strong resident place in
uh in the Native peoples of North America, because it's
tied with that fear of survival, cannibalism as an a
as a possible necessity during winters. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
can see a very strong sort of theme emerging, which
is that all of these disparate things are sort of
(22:08):
united by the sense that they're playing on fears of
the periphery, the edges, the outside, and the taboo as
as many monsters do. So. As previously mentioned, thousand and
one Night serves as this cultural bridge, and it's kind
of a slightly distorted cultural bridge by which Middle Eastern
(22:29):
ghoules migrate into Western fictional traditions. And in addition to
the above examples, in the original Arabic text, the ghouls
of thousand and one Nights are also vile tricksters and
depending on again those translations, they may be flesh eaters.
They kidnapped victims, They lure lust wulm into their doom
(22:50):
by taking on the guys of beautiful women. Again, that
shape shifting motif. Yeah, that's a common thing you see
in the Arabic stories, is that there's a like a
female ghoul hanging out by the road and calling men
to come over and see her. Yeah, and over, come
over and see me. Sometime in deserts, and of course
that's a wonderful uh, a classic monster trope that we
continue to play with today. Um. But then of course
(23:13):
also sometimes they break into your storerooms and they much
on your dates, right, I think that's what Mohammed was mentioning. Yeah.
But some of the key early adapters, if you will,
to Golden were po Lord Byron and hands Christian Anderson. Yeah,
they all made mention of ghouls um in the in
the nineteenth century and their writings. What what did Hans
(23:34):
Christian Anderson write about ghouls? Um? It's just in one
particular story, and I don't think they play a huge role,
but they pop up like clearly they were, you know,
one of the many magical creatures. He was too, and
they're just in the mix. They're in the cultural mi asthma. Yeah. Yeah,
so they end up picking him up, playing with him
to a certain degree, and then you have a new
generation come along in the twentieth century. Lovecraft of course,
(23:56):
HP Lovecraft, who we've mentioned other weird fiction authors of
the day, including Clark Ashton Smith who wrote some wonderful
ghoul stories. They continue to cultivate gold in a new
dark form tying it in with some of the the dark,
weird motifs that are a part of weird fiction. Uh,
particularly in Lovecraft case, you have Pickman's Model, Ah, yeah,
(24:20):
which you read correct. Yeah yeah. Robert told me before
this episode that I should read Pickman's Model, and I did.
It was very interesting and it's also one of the
interesting things about it to me is that it is
different from all these other stories that where we've been
saying that the ghoul is sort of on the periphery,
as a scavenger on the outside, trailing behind the camp
or whatever. In this story, the ghoul emerges as a
(24:41):
feature of a sort of shadowy meta city, a shadowy
city within a city that there's a part of the
city that the narrator is taken to by Pickman, who's
this creepy artist who draws creepy things or I guess
paints creepy things, and they go to his house in
this bizarre part of the city where suddenly there are
(25:02):
tunnels going back to seemingly maybe back in time to
Salem and Witchcraft and monstrous things may be emerging from them.
And it's right there in the heart of Boston in
that story, right Yeah, it is. There's very much this
feeling that the gould kind of resides in the city's
history as well as in its architectural history. So there's
(25:24):
a there's a sense that the bodies that the ghoules
feed on, or not even current graves, they're they're kind
of feasting on the past. So Pigman's model is a
key work in the Western ghoul and we see here
that it really gets its clause into our our horror literature. Yeah,
there are several key scenes describing well describing paintings of
(25:47):
ghouls eating the dead flesh of human beings and uh.
And from here this spreads that Lovecraft of Courses is
hugely influential, and so his idea of Gouldham spreads into
various works of fantasy and dark fantasy again Clark, Ashton Smith,
Brian McNaughton, Neil Gaiman more recently. And do you even
see ghouls show up in the Harry Potter series, though
(26:10):
not that convincingly. Now, if we're gonna go with the
D and D model, what would you what type of
creature would you say, Lord Voldemort is Is he more
of a lich or he's kind of got some ghoul
features right than the I feel like he's a he's
a variation on the lich, you know, like what with
the whole storing of the soul and the various hork cruxes. Yeah,
(26:32):
but he has a ghoulish appearance for sure. Yeah. Now
I was curious. I didn't have time to look this
up before we recorded, but I just had the thought, Um,
what about the nasgool in Tolkien? Do you think that
the ghoul in Nascool meaning the nascoul or the ring
raiths in the Lord of the Rings and these evil
spirits who are obsessed with finding the Ring of Power
(26:55):
and they want to grab it and bring it back
to their master. Uh. And and I believe word nasgoul
means ring wraith, and so the ghoul there being some
kind of evil spirit. I wonder if Tolkien was inspired
by the Arabic word ghoul there. Well, you know, I'm
not that much of a Tolkien scholar, so we have
to have to call out for our listeners to see
(27:16):
if anybody has any insight on that. But and I
don't know to what extent he was interested in Arabic
culture and Arabic languages. I know he was in the
language and the language, and it seems completely possible that
he would have been familiar with with these tales, So
I would if I had to bet on it, I
would say, yeah, he surely. The nas goal has two
(27:39):
has its origins in pre Islamic Arabic folklore, and of
course we continue to see great works of horror and
other fictions that involved the ghoul. Catlin R. Kiernan has
a great um has a great novel called Daughter of
Hounds that deals with ghouls. I'd recommend that he's a
wonderful old weird Tales short story called Far Below by
(28:00):
Robert Barbara Johnson, and this involves ghoules in the New
York subway system. That's a great read if you can
find a copy, Oh man, that does sound great. Yeah,
And in comics and TV we see plenty of examples there.
There's a wonderful episode of Tales from the Crypt called
Morning Mess that involves UH, a shadowy organization that seems
(28:21):
to be very interested in in supplying burial for vagrants
and transients to Guy. But of course there's a ghoulish
secret at the heart of it. Oh No, Now I
recall a particular Tales from the Crypt comic segment that
I read years ago that was about It was about
a tale of a tragic tale of young lovers and
(28:43):
the woman dies and she her body is entombed in
a crypt, and then her lover is locked in the
mausoleum with her like locked into the crypt, and he
cannot get out, and he's trying to escape and he can't.
And then much or the police find him and they
find that he actually survived in there for a long time,
(29:04):
and the ominous ending is that they find he died
of formalde hyde poisoning. Well, that's that's a pretty good one. Yeah,
I need to go back and read some of these
old tales from the crypt. I don't have a lot
of experience with actual comics, but oh I haven't read
many either. That's a one of That's one a friend
of mine recommended to me. Excellent to have to look
(29:24):
that up. So, yeah, we made and we mentioned Dungeon
and Dragons already that the Gohougles have have a long
played a role in in in Dungeons and Dragons. They've
always been in the monster manuals, both Googles and I believe,
and they also have a like an advanced version of
the Google called a gas, and then variations on Googles
that pop up in different add on. So tell me
(29:46):
just basically, what is your encounter with the ghoul? Look
like it's just basic sword fodder, Like it's not very
very tough. The standard Google isn't particularly tough or intelligent.
The Gas is a little more potent and uh in,
a little more yeah, and a little tougher to encounter.
But they're not They're not high end monster encounters, unless,
(30:07):
of course you're encountering them in significant numbers. But despite
all this, the Ghoul has never really, as you I
think eloquently put it in our notes, exploded into the
main stream, at least not in the way that the
vampire or the werewolf or or even Frankenstein's creature has.
You know, we never got the universal monster movie of
the Ghoul. Yeah, yeah, I mean there have been occasional
(30:28):
films that I think there was even a Boriscarla film
titled the Ghoul though, really yeah, but it's not particularly
and keeping obviously I've never seen it. Yeah, So yeah,
it's just I guess the Ghoul is not that sexy.
The Ghoul, the ideas that it represents are maybe maybe
not as comfortably uh contemplated as that of vampires and werewolves. Well,
(30:51):
certainly not as sexy. I mean, that's the thing about
if you go back and watch a bell legosies Dracula,
it's it's very slick, you know, It's Dracula is kind
of sexy. He's not gross and monstrous. The ghoul is disgusting, Yeah,
and I think that's the big reason, but it continues
to be. It's kind of like one of those bands
that never really you know, takes off into stupid superstardom,
(31:13):
but they always have their following, right, So I would
say that ghouls are kind of like the maybe they're
the fish of the monster world, right, Like, not everybody's
gonna have a lot of familiariority with them or be
able to tell you what their top ten hits are,
but they have a hardcore following. They're not going away
even if you know some of the details about them,
you know, are a little ambiguous. So we've discussed the folkloric, mythological,
(31:39):
fictional history of the ghoul from ancient pre pre Islamic
Arabic traditions on up into the latest edition of The
Dungeons and dragons, monster man. Yeah, but of course, the
eating of dead flesh is not merely the stuff of fantasy.
I mean, this is a This is not only something
you commonly see in the natural world. It is a
standard way of making a living for many organisms. Yeah.
(32:03):
I mean we've discussed on this show before. In the past,
we've discussed basic cannibalism as it occurs in nature is
a very When you strip away all the human complications,
it makes a certain economic sense. You're just talking about flash,
you're talking about energy. You're talking about absorbing the energy
back into a viable being. I think a question we
(32:24):
should keep in mind throughout the course of this part
about science is the question of why cannibalism is such
a taboo among humans. And it's and obviously, I mean,
it would be quite clear why violent cannibalism is so,
like you kill somebody and eat their flesh. But I'm
talking about the kind of cannibalism that, as you just
(32:46):
alluded to, makes a kind of basic energy economics sense,
Like your loved one dies and then we say no, no,
you will not eat their flesh. Right. Well, I feel
like the big theme here, and we'll discuss another possible
theme in a minute. But the big one, of course,
ties right into what we've previously talked about concerning natural
(33:07):
burial versus uh modern burial traditions, is that we just
get wrapped up in the idea of that corpse still
being the person than it was. Yeah. Yeah, So we
did definitely allude to this in our episode called Human
Remains Past President in the Future. But there there is
the idea that we can never fully accept that the
dead body of the person we loved is not in
(33:29):
some sense still that person, not in some sense still
in a way alive, and thus in that way they're
really among humans at least may not be such a
thing psychologically as non violent cannibalism. Like if you if
your cousin dies and you rationally know you're no longer
(33:49):
hurting him by eating his body, you just can't on
some level except that you're doing violence to his flesh,
and it seems like you're doing a harmful thing. Okay,
So let's go on a journey traveling back down the
highway of human evolution and human ascension, uh, a road
that as we travel, what you're gonna see some rather
(34:10):
ghoulish characters standing along the wayside. I think if we
look back into early human history, we can see both
of the major aspects of the goal, both the scavenger
aspect and the cannibalistic aspect. Okay, so we're gonna travel
back two point five million years to the dawn of
the Policetocene epoch and you'll find our austar looked at
(34:30):
the scene ancestors scrambling to deserve diversify their diets in
a changing world. Okay, so these are people who are
They're not living a comfortable existence like us, supported by
agriculture and supply to stores of food. They're living at
the edge r at the edge of hunger. They need
to find food constantly. Yeah and uh. According to the
(34:53):
two thousand fourteen paper Humans and Scavengers the Evolution of
Interactions and Ecosystem Services that's published in the journal Bioscience,
we're specifically talking about increasing seasonality in uh precipitation in
the African savannahs, and this is forcing our ostrolepisthosine ancestors
to diversify again to cope with the developing seasonal bottleneck
(35:16):
in fruits and other soft plant foods. So it's becoming
harder to make a living gathering plant matter exactly. So
you end up with two approaches to responses to this bottleneck. Okay,
you have some early hominides that turned to seeds and roots.
They start diversifying in that direction. Uh, the roots are
going to be available year round. Uh, seeds can be
(35:39):
uh can be acquired in different seasons as well. That
doesn't sound very good to me. Yeah, well that's what's
the what this other group decided. And they're the ones
who decided to try out some of the meat to
be found on large vertebrate carcasses. But they're not hunting
because we're not like hunting. Hunting is a is a
technological advancement, but all aheadn't come along yet. Well, I mean,
(36:01):
think about all of the deficiencies human human beings have
as natural hunters, and we don't have uh teeth and
claws and powerful jaws like a lion or a tiger
or something like that. We do have smarts and we
can make tools, but we can't just chase down a
gazelle and rip it apart the way that these other
(36:21):
large predators can. And that's what these early meat eaters
had to do. They had to they had to Wait,
they had to watch, they had to look for the
signs they have vultures in the sky, or or the
movements of known predators or larger known scavengers. Strategic meat acquisition. Yeah,
find find where they're going and try and either pick
up the pieces afterwards or try and steal it. Again.
(36:44):
These are scavengers. Are their whole past is scavenging, and
so if they're going to start in encompassing meat into
their diet as well, then they're gonna try to do
it through scavenging strategies. Yeah. And you can even see
this in what scientists say about the most ancient human
tools we've discovered, because what do you think the first
human tools are. Obviously what would come to your mind
(37:06):
is hunting tools, right that you think about, like, yeah, yeah, spears, axes,
stuff like that to kill animals with. Uh. And obviously
if we do go back to certain periods, we do
find ancient hunting weapons, but a lot of what you
find appears to be early tools used for the processing
of animal carcasses, so not necessarily for the killing, but
(37:27):
for for processing for like a butchery. Yeah, like very much.
The idea of finding the body and needing to get
that narrow out right, trying to get some meat out
of this uh, this dead large vertebrate. Uh that can
that you can can sustain you, but you're gonna have
to use your tools to do it. Yeah, it's a
smart strategy, and hominids are not the only animal species
(37:49):
that has ever tried it. But yeah, you you look
to what the predator has already done, and then you
engage in kolepto parasitism, the stealing parasitism. You you take
advantage of their work and claim it for your own. Yeah.
And if you take you to the next level, you
engage in confrontational scavenging. So this is uh, and this
(38:10):
is something we still see to this day, uh in
rare instances and and there are these are the kind
of traditions that you know may not survive too much
longer in our modern world, But there are Cameroonian villagers
who continue to steal meat from lion kills to this day.
I mean, it's a smart strategy that totally makes sense.
(38:31):
The lion has done the work, and if you can
bluff your way in just long enough to just to
scare him a way enough to where you can cut
off a little bit of a kill and run off
with it. And then instead of hopefully, instead of coming
after you, they'll just return to their own kill to
harvest the rest of the meat for themselves. Yeah, you
can bribe the lion with the work it's already done. Yeah,
bribe it with the work it's already done. Steal just
(38:52):
enough to where they're not going to miss it, and
and come after you. Now, over time, this eventually developed
into more powerful hunting skills. Right, we develop the technology
and the strategies and the brain power to not only
drive away the hunters, but to usurp their role as hunters.
(39:13):
And according to that paper published in the journal Bioscience, quote,
the close association between human hunters and vertebrate scavengers probably
played a role in the diversification of cultural services. So
this is interesting because we're all used to these motifs
of the the early hunter and gatherer, right, and we
(39:34):
tend not to think about scavenging too much in that scenario.
We don't think about the ghoulish history of human ascension
and the idea that there was a time where we're
essentially hyenas were essentially vultures. And maybe that's one of
the reasons that the the the the idea of the
google still is so repellent because it does mirror our
(39:55):
own history. Well, there is something that we find inherently
is tasteful about scavenging as a way of life, right, Like,
I think that is very common among humans to sort
of see it as essentially ignoble or unchivalrous, almost like
it is honorable to hunt and kill your food, you know,
that's a sort of an admirable struggle. But there's something
(40:18):
just kind of like gross and unpleasant about scavenging and
looking through you know, trash piles and dead bodies and
stories and right it's probably one of the modern ideas
that it's just you tend to just to treat back like, oh,
that's a screwed up hillbilly thing to do to eat
the deer that you hit with your car. But really,
why Like if you ran over a deer with your
(40:39):
car and you're into eating deer meat and the problem
and you have the means to process it, that's still
a fresh kill. It's just as fresh as the one
that the dude shot from a deer stand. So why not. Now,
if we think of these ancient hominids as in a
way very economically conscious, essentially that they are making maximum
use of what's les and tools they have to get
(41:01):
energy resources from their environment, and the main way they
find to do that is scavenging, even maybe kind of
dangerous and scary forms of scavenging. Did they ever turn
that scavenging impulse in word? Yeah, that's the big, big question, right,
because it leads into into concerns about well, how does
this scavenging creature, this creature that has that has learned
(41:23):
the value of meat, has adapted to survive via meat,
and then suddenly suddenly it puts new it applies new
meaning to their own debt. Suddenly, Hey, I could go
out and I could try and steal this body from
a lion, but here's a dead member of our own community.
It's made out of meat. I can eat that meat.
And it's also worth noting too that eventually, as we
(41:45):
developed technologies to to better process and cook meat, we're
better able to deal with some of the disease issues
that are inherent with scavenging. Right, we reduced some of
the natural risk. Yeah, but why not why not turned
to that meat? Especially if I haven't really built up
as much? Uh? You know, human cultural whole taboos regarding
(42:07):
the consumption of that food. Yeah, and I think some
scientists think that we did make that leap. Yes. According
to paleontologist Isabelle Cassaries, our ancestors likely turned to cannibalism
due to lack of resources and competition for territory at
critical points and their ascensions. So you basically we're talking
again about survival cannibalism. You find ways to supplement your
(42:27):
diet when it gets tough, you can, you can deal
with you can scavenge for meat. But then what happens
when that runs low? Bats, when you turn to your
own dead and you give it a try. Yeah. What
did ancient hominids and the Donner Party have in common? Yeah,
they knew what made economic sense. Yeah, and it makes sense.
We've talked about the economy of cannibalism. It's widespread death
throughout the animal kingdom, including among human and non human primates.
(42:51):
Because sure, killing and eating your own kind tends to
interfere with the long term genetic mission of just reproducing
and making more of yourself, but it works like a
charm in terms of short term survival. Nevertheless, as I
mentioned before, there is this intensely strong taboo against it.
We we just do not feel generally like this is
(43:11):
an okay thing to do, or at least I can.
I can speak for myself and say that, no, that
does not seem like an okay idea. And I think
to most people seems that way. Yeah, Like, even if
the sandwich is really good and you're like, oh man,
this is such a good sandwich, in the back of
your mind you're thinking, but this this us to be ron.
Now I'm eating and ron as a sandwich and really
(43:34):
messing it up. Oh, he's so savory. But there may
be reasons for this taboo beyond what we mentioned before.
So earlier we were talking about the idea that it's
just hard to shake the feeling that the flesh of
a dead person is not still in some way able
to be harmed or in somebody still that person. But
there could possibly be selection pressures that favor a taboo
(43:56):
against cannibalism, right, yes, And this is this is where
we end up talking about Kuru disease and all and
and discussing prions. So what are prions? Well, prions are
abnormal proteins that induce irregular protein folding in brain cells,
and this construction leads to flawed brain tissue, resulting in
(44:18):
progressive and incurable brain damage. One of the most notable
examples here, certainly for our purposes in this podcast, is
Curu disease, which is found in New Guinea among the
four A people. It's a rare breed of of disorder
caused by the by this type of prion. Also, it's
(44:38):
known as the shaking disease what's what kuru means, right,
and sometimes referred to as the laughing disease because scientists
observed bits of hysterical laughing among those afflicted. Yeah, and
so obviously it is a it is a fatal, very
terrible disease that you do not want to get at all.
But what scientists observed is that it only really tends
(44:59):
to have and though it's comparable to some other priorn
diseases like like c j D, but it only really
seems to happen in the for A tribe of New Guinea.
And this is related to the some of the rituals
practiced by this tribe of Indo cannibalism, which sort of
flips the script on cannibalism. Like we've been talking about
(45:20):
I mean, from our cultural perspective, we've got this taboo
on cannibalism because we think of it as a kind
of disrespectful or harmful thing to do to the remains
of a person. But it's not necessarily thought of by
everyone in that way. I mean, this is a sort
of respectful cannibalism. The the the loving incorporation of a
(45:40):
dead loved one's flesh back into your society in the
form of food. Yeah, taking your dead loved one back
into yourself as food into your body, taking their body
and spirit into yourself. So it in their beliefs and
their traditions that the cannibal endo, cannibalism takes on a
form of of beauty. Really. Yeah, So this, in a
(46:01):
way that might seem strange to a lot of people,
could be a beautiful way of looking at the consumption
of human flesh, excepted that it did have this very
very unfortunate medical consequence of leading to kuru disease. Right
and doctors first first really focused in on this in
the nineteen fifties when curu is popping up among the
(46:22):
four A tribespeople decimating whole villages, and the scientist quickly
discovered that the only way to acquire the disease was
through the consumption of contaminated brain tissue, So they just
had to shut down the funeral rights, and that is
how they were actually able to to stop the spread
of Kuru disease among these tribes people. But the obvious
(46:45):
idea here is if it is possible to get an
extremely dangerous fatal disease by consuming in this case, I
believe the brain tissue of your dead loved ones, but
possibly there could be other cases where consuming the dead
tissue of human being is a disease threat. Would there
eventually be an evolutionary selection pressure against cannibalism, Well, would
(47:08):
there be enough of a pressure that that is an
argument is often made. However, I did find us some
work by a medical researcher, Michael Alper's, and he points
out that the widespread presence of genes protecting against Prian
disease suggests that human endo cannibalism was fairly common for
thousands of years. So we see the genetic legacy of
(47:30):
continuous indo cannibalism, the continuous consumption of human debt enough
to where we build up a certain amount of resistance
to these prior on, So, why do we need a
gene for indo cannibalism taboo? If we can just have
a gene for indo cannibalism, I don't know, shield that
makes it safe. It's basically like finding a cannibalism cookbook
(47:51):
in your on your friends bookshelf. Yeah, and then confining
when you have this if you didn't right right, like
clearly clearly that we know what the secret ingredient is
in the meat loaf. Now, so it seems like there
are some lines of evidence indicating that in the past
humans were eating some some some grave flesh. Yeah, that
(48:12):
I believe so based on the research material we were
looking at. Scavenging, just scavenging for debt meat is a
part of our evolutionary history, and so is the consumption
of our own debt. And therefore the the idea of
the graveyard ghougle is very much a dark reflection of
if not who we are today, then at least of
(48:33):
who we have been as a species in the past.
The scavenger. Yes, so I think about that. The next
time you you see an episode of I don't know, Supernatural,
I think sometimes as ghouls, or you watch an Old
Tales from the Crypts episode, or read some delightful fiction
that involves the Google death. Well, Unfortunately, as I said
(48:54):
at the beginning, I think this episode is going to
have to conclude our October lineup of creepy and mons
stress content. But please keep listening because even after October,
we will continue to serve up to all of you
intellectual scavengers some tasty and sometimes forbidden morsels. Indeed, and
in the meantime, be sure to check out Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's where
(49:15):
you'll find all the podcast episodes. You'll find videos, including
a new monster Science episodes that have been going up.
You'll find blog posts as well as links out to
our social media accounts uh such as Facebook and Twitter.
We'll blow the Mind on both of those, and we
are Stuff to Blow your Mind on tumbler. And if
you want to write to us and let us know
your favorite appearance of ghouls in literature or your favorite
(49:36):
scientific fact about scavenging or cannibalism or any other eating
of corpse flesh, you can email us at blow the
Mind at how Stuff Works at dot com for more
on miss and baths of other topics visit how stuff
works dot com,
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind. From how stupor
com a man he had known in Boston, a painter
of strange pictures with a secret studio and an ancient
and unhallowed alley near a graveyard, had actually made friends
with the ghouls and had taught him to understand the
(00:25):
simpler part of their disgusting meeping and glibbering. For all
their laughter, ghouls or a doola hunger is the fire
in which they burn, and it burns hotter than the
hunger for powers over men or for knowledge of the
gods in a craze mortal. It vaporizes delicacy and leaves
(00:47):
behind only a slag of anger and lust. Hey, welcome
to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And those were two quick readings,
the first from HP Lovecrafts The dream Quest of Unknown
(01:09):
Cataf and the second from Brian McNaughton's The Throne of
bones Um, available via Wildside Press. And that, by the way,
is not only one of my favorite publications that deal
with Google's, it's probably one of my favorite books of
all time. Now do you love it more than the
D and D Monster Manual. Well, the two different types
(01:31):
of reads there. I mean, I do love the Monster
Manual for my sort of catalog oriented monster consideration. And indeed,
girls have have long had a cherished role in the
Dungeons and Dragons setting. So what is Throwing of Bones about.
Throwing of Bones is a It's a collection of short
stories in one central novella set in a dark fantasy
(01:53):
setting that's vaguely Roman, vaguely tolkien Esque, I guess, but
but has more common with the works of say Clark,
Ashton Smith and some of the weird dark fantasy writers
of an earlier time. Oh, I should get into that,
because I've recently discovered that I really dig Roman themes
in in dark literature, because on your and Christians recommendation,
(02:16):
I read The Great God Pan, which has that that
fantastic reference to the statues from ancient Rome of the
you know, the horrific visage of the goat, the old
goat skin. Yeah. Well, one of the things I love
about mcnonton's work is that he brings this dark seriousness
of weird fiction and horror into his writing. But there's
(02:37):
also this gallows humor. There's this Uh, especially prominent with
the ghouls, because the ghoul is this creature that in
It's in the versions that I like the most. They're
they're gross, they're evil, they're sly, but they're also a
little mischievous. They also have this weird, black sense of
(02:57):
humor about them. Uh, and I feel mcnaton it really
brings that to life. Well, if you haven't figured it
out by now, we're going to be talking about Google's today,
and sadly, I think this is going to have to
be our final October podcast. It has been a great
run this month of monsters and demons and madness. We're
gonna have to sober up in the next episode a
(03:17):
little bit and get get back on track for the holidays.
But yeah, it's been a fun right, Okay, So Google's.
I think these days, when the average person is presented
with the concept of a ghoule, what kind of descriptive
features are you're gonna get? I would say they'd be
very generic. I mean, what is a ghoul to us today?
(03:38):
It's just some kind of vaguely monstrous creature. In fact,
you could even think of Google as a broader term
into which other monsters fit, like the vampire is a
type of Google. Well, the word is used that way
a lot. I have to admit that I have to
bite my tongue to keep from correcting people when someone
refers to a non Google as a Google, I want
(04:00):
to say, no, that's that's technically not a Google. That
is just a ghost, that is somebody in a vampire costume.
A Google is a specific thing, and you have to
use the term appropriately. Yeah, well I brought that up
specifically to provoke you. So Robert, come on, tell me
what is a gooul really? All right, So it's gonna
it's gonna vary, and we're gonna get it before we
(04:21):
end up at discussing actual science behind the Google. So yes,
that is coming in the second half. We're going to
discuss the ancient roots and sort of the modern fictional roots.
But in most cases, you're looking at this creature that
might be unliving or maybe it's just living on the
margins of what we think of as as an actual
appropriate member of the natural world. It's very much the
(04:43):
monster as outsider, a motif very much so, yeah, making
its home graveyards and places of of of loss and death,
and it feasts upon human remains, so it is essentially
a cannibalistic scavenger and scavin you're in the true sense,
and that it's sort of dwells at the edges of
(05:03):
the camp. You know, you have civilization as the encampment
where our activity dwells. You don't find the Ghoul in
the middle of the city. You find the Google trailing
behind you, feasting on what you leave behind. Right, Yeah,
I think in some cases you have Googles that are
following armies. I always love that motif and would love
to see that that that used more, especially in the
(05:25):
fantasy settings. You have some some sort of army going
out to fight a battle as they always do. Well,
then surely they are camp followers and there are Googles
right behind them. Yeah, the other type of camp follower.
But based on what we've said so far, it should
be clear that the concept of the Google has not
remained static over time. I mean, it's not even fully unified. Today.
You've got this generic goal and then you've got Robert's
(05:47):
very specific goal. How has the goule changed over time?
And where did the idea originally come from? All right, well,
let's go back to the beginnings. Then if not the
beginning of the universe, because we have to look at
pre Islamic Arabic mythology. This mythology is so cool and
(06:07):
I was so delighted to read it. So our main
source on this is a paper by Ahmed al Rawi
called the Mythical Ghoul in Arabic Culture, and this was
a really fun read. Yes it was. This was one
of my key sources on the house stuff works article
how ghouls work. Um, yeah, and he gets into the
you know, just the original root of the word word
(06:28):
for starters, which is from the Arabic ghoule or g
h u l that may stem from Galu, which is
the name of an ancient demon correct and the galou
played a role in some of their their key literature
and mythology, one of them being the death and rebirth
mythology of the god Demuzi or the Demuzi is sort
(06:50):
of equal to Tamus, which is another god of the
ancient Middle East. But the death and rebirth mythology corresponds
to the growth and harvest cycle of food crops. So
there you can see another one of the ways that
that our mythology ties into our way of life, the
way we make a living in our and our basic
material concerns inform the stories we tell about, you know,
(07:11):
the creation of the world and the behavior of the gods.
And and there you've got just like the crops die
every year and then are reborn later in the next
season or regrow out of you know, the dead fields
of the previous harvest. You've got the god Demuzi or
Tammuz is a vegetation god who is abducted and taken
down into the realm of death. And who is the
(07:34):
abductor of Demuzi or Tammus. It's the Galu, the demon right.
And this is fascinating too, because we see the google
tied into some of our our earliest and most powerful
myths concerning the flow to seasons. Totally yeah, But following
its role in the official mythology of of ancient Babylon
and ancient Mesopotamia, you have this idea of the ghoule
(07:57):
emerging as more of a ground the level folklore creature.
You know that that it's mentioned all in all of
the standard mythology and folk tales and superstitions of the
average person living in the Arabian Peninsula and Arabic scholars
have actually documented the way in which this monster emerged
(08:17):
in the thinking of the people. Yeah, Arabic scholars of
the eighth, ninth, and ten centuries, they compiled various Bedouin
folk tales involving the Gooules, and many of these found
their way into the collection The Thousand and One Nights.
And this is key because translations of this book, of
course traveled to Europe in the eighteenth century, as did
(08:38):
the notion with the Ghoul. And this is where, as
we'll get into later, we see the google emerge in
Western culture and in the in eventually in fictional creations
of the late eighteenth century and a most importantly the
nineteenth twentieth century. Yeah, so I get the feeling it's
more the European grave ghoul that ends up becoming the
D and D monster. Yes, you do see at times,
(09:01):
say the modern motifs kind of reaching back into into
Arabic folklore for for some additional depth. Yeah, I figured
we should mention a couple of these pre Islamic ghoul
accounts because they are fascinating. So one of the stories
that al Rawi tells in his paper is that it's
recounted according to the scholar Al Masudi, and he writes
(09:25):
the following. Arabs before Islam believed that when God created
genies from the gusts of fire, he made from this
type of fire their female part, but one of their
eggs was split into hince the kutrube, which looked like
a cat, was created. As for the devils, they came
(09:45):
from another egg and settled in the seas. Other evil
creatures such as the mariad inhabited the islands, The ghoul
resided in the wilderness, and the siloi dwelt in the
lavatories and waste areas, and the Hamma lived in the
air in the form of a flying snake. So these
are some awesome monsters that are being described here. I
(10:06):
love the idea of a lavatory and waste area monster. Yeah,
because that's again it's a it's a wonderful place for
a haunting. That's a wonderful borderland. Right. Well, it's a
place where you're vulnerable and usually where you're isolated, right
where do you have to go off by yourself? Yeah,
and that's where you might encounter the supernatural. Um But then,
of course there is another source that says that quote
(10:29):
the devils wanted to eavesdrop on heaven, so God threw
meteors at them, where upon some were burnt, fell into
the sea and later turned into crocodiles, while others dropped
onto the ground and changed into ghouls. So there you've
got a ghoule origin and a crocodile origin at the
same time. They're essentially siblings. Um and plenty of the
(10:51):
other stories also depict the ghoul as a shape shifter
that's able to disguise its appearance. Uh. This appears to
be a common feature. Other common features are that the
traditional Arabic goal is often female in appearance. And I
thought this was interesting. It can be killed with a
good chop from a sword, and if I'm reading this right,
(11:13):
it sort of makes it different from the vampire, the werewolf,
and these other monsters which can often only be killed
through magically appropriate means, like you have to have the
you know, the one magic bullet that is known to
kill the monster, as a silver holy water stake through
the heart or or whatever it is for that monster. Individually,
(11:34):
the ghoul can be killed by violence, but it does
have to be a very mighty and strategic form of violence.
Because an interesting development on the myth is that, according
to some versions, the ghoul would only die if you
hit it with one mighty blow with a sword, because
if you hit it more than once, then you would
(11:55):
have to hit it a thousand times more before it
would die. Yeah, that's so you had to time your
one strike, you know, you had to get the one
really good one in. Well, that could I could see
that making sense in terms of the creature. You sort
of have to get that surprise hit in. You've got
to get that. To put in D n D terms,
you have to get that that that surprise attack bonus, right,
(12:16):
and if you don't, then you're gonna have to apply
a lot of smaller attacks to win. I've also read
and this would of course be post uh Islamic interpretations,
but in these interpretations you could also at least drive
a ghoul away with readings from the Koran. Yeah, that
definitely comes up later where you can use the holy
or spiritual power of of a of a good spiritual
(12:39):
force by like saying the name of Allah or by
quoting from the Koran, and that will tend to drive
it into remission. Essentially, it will say, no, why do
you do this to me? But you can also whack
it with the sword as long as you whack it
really good. Just once. Now, speaking of Islamic traditions, you're
probably wondering, what did Mohammed have to say about Google's. Well,
(13:02):
Mohammed's words on the existence of gules vary depending on
which text you read, So the Koran does not mention
them at all. That's important to stress here that the
Koran does mention gin but not not ghoules. Yes, but
contested references do pop up in the head Ether that's
a book of mohammed attributed acts and sayings. Yeah, so
they're they're definitely conflicting bits of scholarship about what Mohammed
(13:26):
had to say about ghouls if anything, But to quote,
I'll RAWI again on the people who do say that
the prophet had something to say about ghouls. What he
said was quote, Ghouls are the demons or enchantresses of
genies that hurt human beings by eating or spoiling their
food or by frightening travelers when they're in the wilderness,
(13:47):
and in order to avoid their harm, one can recite
a verse from the Holy Koran or call for prayer.
Since they hate any reference to God. And that first
part mentioned something about the wilderness. This is something that
pops up again in in in the literature about the
about the ghouls that you know, these ancient ghoul folk tales,
is you don't expect to encounter them in the middle
(14:08):
of civilization there. You encounter them on the road in
the wilderness between places there, in that intermediary world. I
like to how this mentions um eating and spoiling of food.
It's tied uh inherently to our survival via consumption of
food and the potential violation of that food, and and
(14:29):
and just into general um ideas of purity and cleanliness
in our food. Yeah. Well, I mean, you certainly don't
want something that eats corpse flesh getting into your pantry, right, Yeah,
they're just going to tear it out in there, obviously.
But you may have noticed that so far there hasn't
been a whole lot, if anything, about the eating of
corpse flesh. That's right, And that's something that we'll get
(14:50):
into in a bit now. In some accounts, Mohammed dismisses
ghoules as completely non existent, and others he gives advice
on banishing them. His companion, though abou Asad al Sadi
takes a more balanced approach, and he states that ghoules
lived in the pre Islamic past, but that Allah no
longer permits them to exist. Meanwhile, there's also a legend
(15:12):
that Umar been All caught him another of Mohammed's companions,
put a google to the sword on the road to Syria. Yeah,
this was great. So the story goes a female ghoul
stops him on the road and asks him where are
you going? And Umar says it is none of her business.
And then she does the move from the Exorcist where
she turns her head all the way around. That's really
(15:35):
part of the story. It said that. Uh, and then
he splits her down the middle with the sword. Alright,
so single I'm guessing single blow there, right, he does it, right,
He hits her with the one blow. But then later
he comes back and the body is gone. H So
either she survived or the other ghoules came and took
her body away, or more some sort of magical disappearance. Yeah. So,
(15:56):
so if we consider the google that eats human flesh
kind of perversion of the idea of corpse cannibalism, what
is the ghoul that eats ghoul flesh. It's like meta cannibalism. Yeah, yeah,
I mean, and it certainly ties in with with how
we see scavengers, the hate towards their own sometimes. And
that's that's key here, because although ghouls were sometimes associated
(16:19):
with scavenging hyenas in a in Arabic test, they really
don't have this grave ghoul association where they're going to
come and take your dead loved ones from the graveyard
after the funeral and eat their corpses. Yeah. This particular detail,
according to al Rawi, seems to emerge from Anton Glan's
French translation of The Thousand and One Nights in the
early eighteenth century. So not only did Ghalan take liberties
(16:41):
in his translation, he even introduced and allegedly created a
female character named Amina who prefers the company of graveyard
ghouls to that of her new husband. Yeah. So this
and you can see this definitely appealing to some of
the Gothics sensibilities of the time in Europe. Right, But
this inaccurate translation was hugely influential in the Western world
(17:04):
and and in you know, informing their the Western worlds
understanding of the Middle East, so inspiring the work of
William Beckford, the eighteenth century author of the Arabian theme
novel Vfic, and the folkloric studies of of another individual
named Sabine Baring Gould. So we see. So that's interesting,
(17:25):
and you have this rich tradition of ghouls within in
the Arabic traditions, just some wonderful details. They're already a
fabulous creature. But then it gets tweaked a little bit,
either in you know, mistranslation or creative embellishment of the
myth as it translates into European um fiction and folklore
(17:47):
and European understandings of the Middle East. Yeah, it's fascinating,
this evolution of the ghoul meme because if you trace
the ancient pre Islamic Arabic ghoul up through the way
the grave ghoul comes to be under stood in European culture.
What's the common thread there? I mean, you've seen the
evolution basically of a word, the word ghoul, But is
(18:09):
there a common thematic element that remains the same throughout
it despite just general monstrousness or malevolence. Yeah, I think
it works like I feel like that the google as
we have seen it and discussed it in in pre
European traditions. I feel like it's able to take on
the mantle of of corpse eating rather rather honestly like
(18:30):
it adds another dimension to it and certainly tweaks it
in a new direction, but not in a direction that
feels out of character with its origins. Okay, I can
accept that. Now, if we look elsewhere in the world,
do we find myths of creatures that are similar to
the ghoul we do? Uh? Yeah, It's definitely worth noting
(18:51):
that even if the original Arabic ghouls didn't eat corpses,
they have peers in Asian folk tales that do so.
In the Tamil mythology of India, they have the shaggy
haired creatures known as the pay, who sought out human
battle so as to lap blood from the open wounds
of the dying um. Still, other ghoules emerge in the
(19:14):
eighth century. In the eighth century Tibetan Book of the Dead,
which details the Buddhist journey through death and into the
realms beyond death via reincarnation. Um Here, in the dream
like state known as Bardo, the departed soul encounters that
the the Pisachi ghouls and These are fierce female beings
(19:36):
with be steel heads and an appetite for bones and viscera. Wow,
that's interesting. Now, another thing that we see commonly here
is that in these early visions, the ghouls are very
often female, like explicitly described as female and appearance, whereas
the ghouls that I think we think of today tend
to be either sort of um androgynous, tending toward masculine,
(19:59):
or or fully male. Yeah. Yeah, I think there is
a definite tendency to to generate a masculine idea of
the ghoule in Western culture, though though some of my
favorite books on the matter have definitely have female ghoules. Now,
in the conclusion of his article uh al Rawi, he
says that the ghouls may have been inspired just by,
(20:22):
you know, things that people actually did encounter in reality,
like people with various birth defects. Yeah, particularly things like
cleft palate, cleft lip, distortions of the mouth and in
facial features you know, which sadly do um can and
do interfere in our interpretation of of a of an
(20:42):
individual substance. Yeah, I think this is a common feature
you see in the origins of monster legends. This is
often hypothesized that we would just see someone that uh
that had you know, some kind of atypical way of looking,
and that we would interpret that as well, you know,
this person is cursed or evil or there there's something
(21:03):
wrong with them. They didn't have the light of modern
medical science to just say no, they're a person like
anybody else. Yeah, very much in keeping with the changeling
traditions that you find in Europe. Right that surely that
this year your actual child was taken away by fair
is and this is the goblin that's left in in
its place. Yeah. Now, on top of that, Victorian adventure
and Middle Eastern scholar and just all around fascinating individual,
(21:26):
Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, uh He explained the Arabic
ghoul as a mythical creature that embodies human fears and
tapoos concerning graveyards check, desert wastes check and cannibalism and
specifically survival cannibalism. If we were to tie it into
other myth cycles that such as the wind to Go,
(21:47):
that did definitely have such a strong resident place in
uh in the Native peoples of North America, because it's
tied with that fear of survival, cannibalism as an a
as a possible necessity during winters. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
can see a very strong sort of theme emerging, which
is that all of these disparate things are sort of
(22:08):
united by the sense that they're playing on fears of
the periphery, the edges, the outside, and the taboo as
as many monsters do. So. As previously mentioned, thousand and
one Night serves as this cultural bridge, and it's kind
of a slightly distorted cultural bridge by which Middle Eastern
(22:29):
ghoules migrate into Western fictional traditions. And in addition to
the above examples, in the original Arabic text, the ghouls
of thousand and one Nights are also vile tricksters and
depending on again those translations, they may be flesh eaters.
They kidnapped victims, They lure lust wulm into their doom
(22:50):
by taking on the guys of beautiful women. Again, that
shape shifting motif. Yeah, that's a common thing you see
in the Arabic stories, is that there's a like a
female ghoul hanging out by the road and calling men
to come over and see her. Yeah, and over, come
over and see me. Sometime in deserts, and of course
that's a wonderful uh, a classic monster trope that we
continue to play with today. Um. But then of course
(23:13):
also sometimes they break into your storerooms and they much
on your dates, right, I think that's what Mohammed was mentioning. Yeah.
But some of the key early adapters, if you will,
to Golden were po Lord Byron and hands Christian Anderson. Yeah,
they all made mention of ghouls um in the in
the nineteenth century and their writings. What what did Hans
(23:34):
Christian Anderson write about ghouls? Um? It's just in one
particular story, and I don't think they play a huge role,
but they pop up like clearly they were, you know,
one of the many magical creatures. He was too, and
they're just in the mix. They're in the cultural mi asthma. Yeah. Yeah,
so they end up picking him up, playing with him
to a certain degree, and then you have a new
generation come along in the twentieth century. Lovecraft of course,
(23:56):
HP Lovecraft, who we've mentioned other weird fiction authors of
the day, including Clark Ashton Smith who wrote some wonderful
ghoul stories. They continue to cultivate gold in a new
dark form tying it in with some of the the dark,
weird motifs that are a part of weird fiction. Uh,
particularly in Lovecraft case, you have Pickman's Model, Ah, yeah,
(24:20):
which you read correct. Yeah yeah. Robert told me before
this episode that I should read Pickman's Model, and I did.
It was very interesting and it's also one of the
interesting things about it to me is that it is
different from all these other stories that where we've been
saying that the ghoul is sort of on the periphery,
as a scavenger on the outside, trailing behind the camp
or whatever. In this story, the ghoul emerges as a
(24:41):
feature of a sort of shadowy meta city, a shadowy
city within a city that there's a part of the
city that the narrator is taken to by Pickman, who's
this creepy artist who draws creepy things or I guess
paints creepy things, and they go to his house in
this bizarre part of the city where suddenly there are
(25:02):
tunnels going back to seemingly maybe back in time to
Salem and Witchcraft and monstrous things may be emerging from them.
And it's right there in the heart of Boston in
that story, right Yeah, it is. There's very much this
feeling that the gould kind of resides in the city's
history as well as in its architectural history. So there's
(25:24):
a there's a sense that the bodies that the ghoules
feed on, or not even current graves, they're they're kind
of feasting on the past. So Pigman's model is a
key work in the Western ghoul and we see here
that it really gets its clause into our our horror literature. Yeah,
there are several key scenes describing well describing paintings of
(25:47):
ghouls eating the dead flesh of human beings and uh.
And from here this spreads that Lovecraft of Courses is
hugely influential, and so his idea of Gouldham spreads into
various works of fantasy and dark fantasy again Clark, Ashton Smith,
Brian McNaughton, Neil Gaiman more recently. And do you even
see ghouls show up in the Harry Potter series, though
(26:10):
not that convincingly. Now, if we're gonna go with the
D and D model, what would you what type of
creature would you say, Lord Voldemort is Is he more
of a lich or he's kind of got some ghoul
features right than the I feel like he's a he's
a variation on the lich, you know, like what with
the whole storing of the soul and the various hork cruxes. Yeah,
(26:32):
but he has a ghoulish appearance for sure. Yeah. Now
I was curious. I didn't have time to look this
up before we recorded, but I just had the thought, Um,
what about the nasgool in Tolkien? Do you think that
the ghoul in Nascool meaning the nascoul or the ring
raiths in the Lord of the Rings and these evil
spirits who are obsessed with finding the Ring of Power
(26:55):
and they want to grab it and bring it back
to their master. Uh. And and I believe word nasgoul
means ring wraith, and so the ghoul there being some
kind of evil spirit. I wonder if Tolkien was inspired
by the Arabic word ghoul there. Well, you know, I'm
not that much of a Tolkien scholar, so we have
to have to call out for our listeners to see
(27:16):
if anybody has any insight on that. But and I
don't know to what extent he was interested in Arabic
culture and Arabic languages. I know he was in the
language and the language, and it seems completely possible that
he would have been familiar with with these tales, So
I would if I had to bet on it, I
would say, yeah, he surely. The nas goal has two
(27:39):
has its origins in pre Islamic Arabic folklore, and of
course we continue to see great works of horror and
other fictions that involved the ghoul. Catlin R. Kiernan has
a great um has a great novel called Daughter of
Hounds that deals with ghouls. I'd recommend that he's a
wonderful old weird Tales short story called Far Below by
(28:00):
Robert Barbara Johnson, and this involves ghoules in the New
York subway system. That's a great read if you can
find a copy, Oh man, that does sound great. Yeah,
And in comics and TV we see plenty of examples there.
There's a wonderful episode of Tales from the Crypt called
Morning Mess that involves UH, a shadowy organization that seems
(28:21):
to be very interested in in supplying burial for vagrants
and transients to Guy. But of course there's a ghoulish
secret at the heart of it. Oh No, Now I
recall a particular Tales from the Crypt comic segment that
I read years ago that was about It was about
a tale of a tragic tale of young lovers and
(28:43):
the woman dies and she her body is entombed in
a crypt, and then her lover is locked in the
mausoleum with her like locked into the crypt, and he
cannot get out, and he's trying to escape and he can't.
And then much or the police find him and they
find that he actually survived in there for a long time,
(29:04):
and the ominous ending is that they find he died
of formalde hyde poisoning. Well, that's that's a pretty good one. Yeah,
I need to go back and read some of these
old tales from the crypt. I don't have a lot
of experience with actual comics, but oh I haven't read
many either. That's a one of That's one a friend
of mine recommended to me. Excellent to have to look
(29:24):
that up. So, yeah, we made and we mentioned Dungeon
and Dragons already that the Gohougles have have a long
played a role in in in Dungeons and Dragons. They've
always been in the monster manuals, both Googles and I believe,
and they also have a like an advanced version of
the Google called a gas, and then variations on Googles
that pop up in different add on. So tell me
(29:46):
just basically, what is your encounter with the ghoul? Look
like it's just basic sword fodder, Like it's not very
very tough. The standard Google isn't particularly tough or intelligent.
The Gas is a little more potent and uh in,
a little more yeah, and a little tougher to encounter.
But they're not They're not high end monster encounters, unless,
(30:07):
of course you're encountering them in significant numbers. But despite
all this, the Ghoul has never really, as you I
think eloquently put it in our notes, exploded into the
main stream, at least not in the way that the
vampire or the werewolf or or even Frankenstein's creature has.
You know, we never got the universal monster movie of
the Ghoul. Yeah, yeah, I mean there have been occasional
(30:28):
films that I think there was even a Boriscarla film
titled the Ghoul though, really yeah, but it's not particularly
and keeping obviously I've never seen it. Yeah, So yeah,
it's just I guess the Ghoul is not that sexy.
The Ghoul, the ideas that it represents are maybe maybe
not as comfortably uh contemplated as that of vampires and werewolves. Well,
(30:51):
certainly not as sexy. I mean, that's the thing about
if you go back and watch a bell legosies Dracula,
it's it's very slick, you know, It's Dracula is kind
of sexy. He's not gross and monstrous. The ghoul is disgusting, Yeah,
and I think that's the big reason, but it continues
to be. It's kind of like one of those bands
that never really you know, takes off into stupid superstardom,
(31:13):
but they always have their following, right, So I would
say that ghouls are kind of like the maybe they're
the fish of the monster world, right, Like, not everybody's
gonna have a lot of familiariority with them or be
able to tell you what their top ten hits are,
but they have a hardcore following. They're not going away
even if you know some of the details about them,
you know, are a little ambiguous. So we've discussed the folkloric, mythological,
(31:39):
fictional history of the ghoul from ancient pre pre Islamic
Arabic traditions on up into the latest edition of The
Dungeons and dragons, monster man. Yeah, but of course, the
eating of dead flesh is not merely the stuff of fantasy.
I mean, this is a This is not only something
you commonly see in the natural world. It is a
standard way of making a living for many organisms. Yeah.
(32:03):
I mean we've discussed on this show before. In the past,
we've discussed basic cannibalism as it occurs in nature is
a very When you strip away all the human complications,
it makes a certain economic sense. You're just talking about flash,
you're talking about energy. You're talking about absorbing the energy
back into a viable being. I think a question we
(32:24):
should keep in mind throughout the course of this part
about science is the question of why cannibalism is such
a taboo among humans. And it's and obviously, I mean,
it would be quite clear why violent cannibalism is so,
like you kill somebody and eat their flesh. But I'm
talking about the kind of cannibalism that, as you just
(32:46):
alluded to, makes a kind of basic energy economics sense,
Like your loved one dies and then we say no, no,
you will not eat their flesh. Right. Well, I feel
like the big theme here, and we'll discuss another possible
theme in a minute. But the big one, of course,
ties right into what we've previously talked about concerning natural
(33:07):
burial versus uh modern burial traditions, is that we just
get wrapped up in the idea of that corpse still
being the person than it was. Yeah. Yeah, So we
did definitely allude to this in our episode called Human
Remains Past President in the Future. But there there is
the idea that we can never fully accept that the
dead body of the person we loved is not in
(33:29):
some sense still that person, not in some sense still
in a way alive, and thus in that way they're
really among humans at least may not be such a
thing psychologically as non violent cannibalism. Like if you if
your cousin dies and you rationally know you're no longer
(33:49):
hurting him by eating his body, you just can't on
some level except that you're doing violence to his flesh,
and it seems like you're doing a harmful thing. Okay,
So let's go on a journey traveling back down the
highway of human evolution and human ascension, uh, a road
that as we travel, what you're gonna see some rather
(34:10):
ghoulish characters standing along the wayside. I think if we
look back into early human history, we can see both
of the major aspects of the goal, both the scavenger
aspect and the cannibalistic aspect. Okay, so we're gonna travel
back two point five million years to the dawn of
the Policetocene epoch and you'll find our austar looked at
(34:30):
the scene ancestors scrambling to deserve diversify their diets in
a changing world. Okay, so these are people who are
They're not living a comfortable existence like us, supported by
agriculture and supply to stores of food. They're living at
the edge r at the edge of hunger. They need
to find food constantly. Yeah and uh. According to the
(34:53):
two thousand fourteen paper Humans and Scavengers the Evolution of
Interactions and Ecosystem Services that's published in the journal Bioscience,
we're specifically talking about increasing seasonality in uh precipitation in
the African savannahs, and this is forcing our ostrolepisthosine ancestors
to diversify again to cope with the developing seasonal bottleneck
(35:16):
in fruits and other soft plant foods. So it's becoming
harder to make a living gathering plant matter exactly. So
you end up with two approaches to responses to this bottleneck. Okay,
you have some early hominides that turned to seeds and roots.
They start diversifying in that direction. Uh, the roots are
going to be available year round. Uh, seeds can be
(35:39):
uh can be acquired in different seasons as well. That
doesn't sound very good to me. Yeah, well that's what's
the what this other group decided. And they're the ones
who decided to try out some of the meat to
be found on large vertebrate carcasses. But they're not hunting
because we're not like hunting. Hunting is a is a
technological advancement, but all aheadn't come along yet. Well, I mean,
(36:01):
think about all of the deficiencies human human beings have
as natural hunters, and we don't have uh teeth and
claws and powerful jaws like a lion or a tiger
or something like that. We do have smarts and we
can make tools, but we can't just chase down a
gazelle and rip it apart the way that these other
(36:21):
large predators can. And that's what these early meat eaters
had to do. They had to they had to Wait,
they had to watch, they had to look for the
signs they have vultures in the sky, or or the
movements of known predators or larger known scavengers. Strategic meat acquisition. Yeah,
find find where they're going and try and either pick
up the pieces afterwards or try and steal it. Again.
(36:44):
These are scavengers. Are their whole past is scavenging, and
so if they're going to start in encompassing meat into
their diet as well, then they're gonna try to do
it through scavenging strategies. Yeah. And you can even see
this in what scientists say about the most ancient human
tools we've discovered, because what do you think the first
human tools are. Obviously what would come to your mind
(37:06):
is hunting tools, right that you think about, like, yeah, yeah, spears, axes,
stuff like that to kill animals with. Uh. And obviously
if we do go back to certain periods, we do
find ancient hunting weapons, but a lot of what you
find appears to be early tools used for the processing
of animal carcasses, so not necessarily for the killing, but
(37:27):
for for processing for like a butchery. Yeah, like very much.
The idea of finding the body and needing to get
that narrow out right, trying to get some meat out
of this uh, this dead large vertebrate. Uh that can
that you can can sustain you, but you're gonna have
to use your tools to do it. Yeah, it's a
smart strategy, and hominids are not the only animal species
(37:49):
that has ever tried it. But yeah, you you look
to what the predator has already done, and then you
engage in kolepto parasitism, the stealing parasitism. You you take
advantage of their work and claim it for your own. Yeah.
And if you take you to the next level, you
engage in confrontational scavenging. So this is uh, and this
(38:10):
is something we still see to this day, uh in
rare instances and and there are these are the kind
of traditions that you know may not survive too much
longer in our modern world, But there are Cameroonian villagers
who continue to steal meat from lion kills to this day.
I mean, it's a smart strategy that totally makes sense.
(38:31):
The lion has done the work, and if you can
bluff your way in just long enough to just to
scare him a way enough to where you can cut
off a little bit of a kill and run off
with it. And then instead of hopefully, instead of coming
after you, they'll just return to their own kill to
harvest the rest of the meat for themselves. Yeah, you
can bribe the lion with the work it's already done. Yeah,
bribe it with the work it's already done. Steal just
(38:52):
enough to where they're not going to miss it, and
and come after you. Now, over time, this eventually developed
into more powerful hunting skills. Right, we develop the technology
and the strategies and the brain power to not only
drive away the hunters, but to usurp their role as hunters.
(39:13):
And according to that paper published in the journal Bioscience, quote,
the close association between human hunters and vertebrate scavengers probably
played a role in the diversification of cultural services. So
this is interesting because we're all used to these motifs
of the the early hunter and gatherer, right, and we
(39:34):
tend not to think about scavenging too much in that scenario.
We don't think about the ghoulish history of human ascension
and the idea that there was a time where we're
essentially hyenas were essentially vultures. And maybe that's one of
the reasons that the the the the idea of the
google still is so repellent because it does mirror our
(39:55):
own history. Well, there is something that we find inherently
is tasteful about scavenging as a way of life, right, Like,
I think that is very common among humans to sort
of see it as essentially ignoble or unchivalrous, almost like
it is honorable to hunt and kill your food, you know,
that's a sort of an admirable struggle. But there's something
(40:18):
just kind of like gross and unpleasant about scavenging and
looking through you know, trash piles and dead bodies and
stories and right it's probably one of the modern ideas
that it's just you tend to just to treat back like, oh,
that's a screwed up hillbilly thing to do to eat
the deer that you hit with your car. But really,
why Like if you ran over a deer with your
(40:39):
car and you're into eating deer meat and the problem
and you have the means to process it, that's still
a fresh kill. It's just as fresh as the one
that the dude shot from a deer stand. So why not. Now,
if we think of these ancient hominids as in a
way very economically conscious, essentially that they are making maximum
use of what's les and tools they have to get
(41:01):
energy resources from their environment, and the main way they
find to do that is scavenging, even maybe kind of
dangerous and scary forms of scavenging. Did they ever turn
that scavenging impulse in word? Yeah, that's the big, big question, right,
because it leads into into concerns about well, how does
this scavenging creature, this creature that has that has learned
(41:23):
the value of meat, has adapted to survive via meat,
and then suddenly suddenly it puts new it applies new
meaning to their own debt. Suddenly, Hey, I could go
out and I could try and steal this body from
a lion, but here's a dead member of our own community.
It's made out of meat. I can eat that meat.
And it's also worth noting too that eventually, as we
(41:45):
developed technologies to to better process and cook meat, we're
better able to deal with some of the disease issues
that are inherent with scavenging. Right, we reduced some of
the natural risk. Yeah, but why not why not turned
to that meat? Especially if I haven't really built up
as much? Uh? You know, human cultural whole taboos regarding
(42:07):
the consumption of that food. Yeah, and I think some
scientists think that we did make that leap. Yes. According
to paleontologist Isabelle Cassaries, our ancestors likely turned to cannibalism
due to lack of resources and competition for territory at
critical points and their ascensions. So you basically we're talking
again about survival cannibalism. You find ways to supplement your
(42:27):
diet when it gets tough, you can, you can deal
with you can scavenge for meat. But then what happens
when that runs low? Bats, when you turn to your
own dead and you give it a try. Yeah. What
did ancient hominids and the Donner Party have in common? Yeah,
they knew what made economic sense. Yeah, and it makes sense.
We've talked about the economy of cannibalism. It's widespread death
throughout the animal kingdom, including among human and non human primates.
(42:51):
Because sure, killing and eating your own kind tends to
interfere with the long term genetic mission of just reproducing
and making more of yourself, but it works like a
charm in terms of short term survival. Nevertheless, as I
mentioned before, there is this intensely strong taboo against it.
We we just do not feel generally like this is
(43:11):
an okay thing to do, or at least I can.
I can speak for myself and say that, no, that
does not seem like an okay idea. And I think
to most people seems that way. Yeah, Like, even if
the sandwich is really good and you're like, oh man,
this is such a good sandwich, in the back of
your mind you're thinking, but this this us to be ron.
Now I'm eating and ron as a sandwich and really
(43:34):
messing it up. Oh, he's so savory. But there may
be reasons for this taboo beyond what we mentioned before.
So earlier we were talking about the idea that it's
just hard to shake the feeling that the flesh of
a dead person is not still in some way able
to be harmed or in somebody still that person. But
there could possibly be selection pressures that favor a taboo
(43:56):
against cannibalism, right, yes, And this is this is where
we end up talking about Kuru disease and all and
and discussing prions. So what are prions? Well, prions are
abnormal proteins that induce irregular protein folding in brain cells,
and this construction leads to flawed brain tissue, resulting in
(44:18):
progressive and incurable brain damage. One of the most notable
examples here, certainly for our purposes in this podcast, is
Curu disease, which is found in New Guinea among the
four A people. It's a rare breed of of disorder
caused by the by this type of prion. Also, it's
(44:38):
known as the shaking disease what's what kuru means, right,
and sometimes referred to as the laughing disease because scientists
observed bits of hysterical laughing among those afflicted. Yeah, and
so obviously it is a it is a fatal, very
terrible disease that you do not want to get at all.
But what scientists observed is that it only really tends
(44:59):
to have and though it's comparable to some other priorn
diseases like like c j D, but it only really
seems to happen in the for A tribe of New Guinea.
And this is related to the some of the rituals
practiced by this tribe of Indo cannibalism, which sort of
flips the script on cannibalism. Like we've been talking about
(45:20):
I mean, from our cultural perspective, we've got this taboo
on cannibalism because we think of it as a kind
of disrespectful or harmful thing to do to the remains
of a person. But it's not necessarily thought of by
everyone in that way. I mean, this is a sort
of respectful cannibalism. The the the loving incorporation of a
(45:40):
dead loved one's flesh back into your society in the
form of food. Yeah, taking your dead loved one back
into yourself as food into your body, taking their body
and spirit into yourself. So it in their beliefs and
their traditions that the cannibal endo, cannibalism takes on a
form of of beauty. Really. Yeah, So this, in a
(46:01):
way that might seem strange to a lot of people,
could be a beautiful way of looking at the consumption
of human flesh, excepted that it did have this very
very unfortunate medical consequence of leading to kuru disease. Right
and doctors first first really focused in on this in
the nineteen fifties when curu is popping up among the
(46:22):
four A tribespeople decimating whole villages, and the scientist quickly
discovered that the only way to acquire the disease was
through the consumption of contaminated brain tissue, So they just
had to shut down the funeral rights, and that is
how they were actually able to to stop the spread
of Kuru disease among these tribes people. But the obvious
(46:45):
idea here is if it is possible to get an
extremely dangerous fatal disease by consuming in this case, I
believe the brain tissue of your dead loved ones, but
possibly there could be other cases where consuming the dead
tissue of human being is a disease threat. Would there
eventually be an evolutionary selection pressure against cannibalism, Well, would
(47:08):
there be enough of a pressure that that is an
argument is often made. However, I did find us some
work by a medical researcher, Michael Alper's, and he points
out that the widespread presence of genes protecting against Prian
disease suggests that human endo cannibalism was fairly common for
thousands of years. So we see the genetic legacy of
(47:30):
continuous indo cannibalism, the continuous consumption of human debt enough
to where we build up a certain amount of resistance
to these prior on, So, why do we need a
gene for indo cannibalism taboo? If we can just have
a gene for indo cannibalism, I don't know, shield that
makes it safe. It's basically like finding a cannibalism cookbook
(47:51):
in your on your friends bookshelf. Yeah, and then confining
when you have this if you didn't right right, like
clearly clearly that we know what the secret ingredient is
in the meat loaf. Now, so it seems like there
are some lines of evidence indicating that in the past
humans were eating some some some grave flesh. Yeah, that
(48:12):
I believe so based on the research material we were
looking at. Scavenging, just scavenging for debt meat is a
part of our evolutionary history, and so is the consumption
of our own debt. And therefore the the idea of
the graveyard ghougle is very much a dark reflection of
if not who we are today, then at least of
(48:33):
who we have been as a species in the past.
The scavenger. Yes, so I think about that. The next
time you you see an episode of I don't know, Supernatural,
I think sometimes as ghouls, or you watch an Old
Tales from the Crypts episode, or read some delightful fiction
that involves the Google death. Well, Unfortunately, as I said
(48:54):
at the beginning, I think this episode is going to
have to conclude our October lineup of creepy and mons
stress content. But please keep listening because even after October,
we will continue to serve up to all of you
intellectual scavengers some tasty and sometimes forbidden morsels. Indeed, and
in the meantime, be sure to check out Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's where
(49:15):
you'll find all the podcast episodes. You'll find videos, including
a new monster Science episodes that have been going up.
You'll find blog posts as well as links out to
our social media accounts uh such as Facebook and Twitter.
We'll blow the Mind on both of those, and we
are Stuff to Blow your Mind on tumbler. And if
you want to write to us and let us know
your favorite appearance of ghouls in literature or your favorite
(49:36):
scientific fact about scavenging or cannibalism or any other eating
of corpse flesh, you can email us at blow the
Mind at how Stuff Works at dot com for more
on miss and baths of other topics visit how stuff
works dot com,
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