The Hearth, Part 1
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And today we're going to be kicking off a series of episodes on the fireplace and the hearth. The infrastructure through which humans brought their campfires indoors, inside their homes and other dwelling structures. We're going to look at how fireplaces work, where they come from, and what they mean.

And just got to apologize again this week like I did last week. I've still got a cold. It's either round two of this cold or a whole new cold has come into my life. So apologies for the sinus noises today, but I'm doing what I can. 12 days of Christmas over there. Yeah. They're gathering around the fire.

But anyway, yeah, so I wanted to do a series of episodes looking into fireplaces. And sometimes when you're trying to understand what an experience means to people, you can really get some good insights by looking at attempts to simulate that experience in its literal absence. Like, which elements do people consider worth copying? What are some of the things that people are going to want to know about?

which elements can be ignored, which elements are accentuated or exaggerated in simulation.

And this got me thinking about the Netflix mega hit fireplace for your home, which for those of you somehow not familiar is an hour long unbroken shot of logs burning in a fireplace. And it is the hottest movie of the year for, I don't know, seven or eight years running whenever this thing started playing on Netflix. Um,

I just checked on Netflix and there are three episodes. This is not a sponsored episode, by the way. Netflix had nothing to do with this. I just think this is an interesting subject on its own and we'll explain more as we go on. But I checked on Netflix and there were three episodes of season one of Fireplace for Your Home.

There's Crackling Yule Log Fireplace. That one's the one that plays music like Joy to the World and We Wish You a Merry Christmas. Kind of Muzaki versions of them. Yeah, hard pass on that one. Yeah, and then there's the second one that's just Crackling Fireplace. So no music. You just get the pop, the hiss, and all that good stuff. There you go. And then there's a third one with music again. I guess different music than the first one. I think we mainly just listen. The one we put on is the one without music.

That's the way to go. You can add your own music that way. So I don't remember what year it was we first discovered this thing, but it has played a number of times in our household. And so I was wondering, Rob, do you have experience with this thing? Yes, I do. You know, I've never owned or rented a home that had a hearth or a fireplace in it. Not even like some of the scale back versions where it's like gas generated and whatever.

or has some sort of other effect. So I have to depend on what a lot of people have to depend on for the spiritual center of their home, and that's the television.

And so, of course, I fire up a fake fireplace. And the one that's been our favorite for several years running now is on Netflix. So, again, credit where credit's due. They'll cancel your favorite shows after two seasons, but they will give you an amazing virtual fireplace. And our favorite is Netflix The Witcher Fireplace. It is a Witcher tie-in.

And there's not much to it. It's simple. It's awesome. It's just kind of a medieval fantasy world fire pit, like, you know, wrought iron or something. It's blazing. It's crackling. There's no Henry Cavill or Yennefer back there in a hot tub or anything like that. It's just the fire pit. And it's great. My only criticism is that it's only an hour long and I either can't or I don't know how to put it on repeat because I would just prefer to have it on all the time during the holidays.

What's this emblazoned on the side of it? Is it like a Kraken or something? It's been a little while since I've seen this show. That's probably some sort of a monster, you know? Henry Cavill's a monster hunter in that. The Witcher's a monster hunter, and that's, I don't know, a chimera or something. Oh, I know the Witcher from the game, the third game specifically. So this thing does look really cool. I'll have to look this one up this year, but it's like sexy wrought iron brazier for your home.

Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. Yeah. I legitimately love it. So I think fireplace for your home and its many derivatives are interesting cultural artifacts because it's,

On one hand, they're just like a genuine holiday fixture in millions of homes. I couldn't find any reliable sources on view count because Netflix doesn't release that kind of stuff as far as I know. But in an interview with The Independent in 2018, the director of Fireplace for Your Home, George Ford, I'll come back to this in a minute, estimated that it had been watched more than 70 million times in 2018. No idea if he's right about that, but how am I going to argue with him?

Uh, but at the same time, I think it's funny that people are putting this on to be cozy and, and, and feel good at Christmas time. Um,

And yet this movie is also a source of ironic amusement. Like when you bring it up, people kind of, there's something funny, like they find something kind of goofy about the idea of a cozy fire happening inside their television. And if you look at reviews, most of the reviews for this thing are jokes. They're things like, you know, zero stars nearly burned down my house. It's like the joke is with the incongruity of,

of the fact that this is not a real fire. It's not. It won't put out heat. And if it is putting out heat, there's probably something wrong with your television set. I mean, it'll put out a little heat, right? It shouldn't be putting out a lot of heat. You shouldn't actually be able to warm your buns by it. You hope it's not putting out a lot of heat. This is kind of a tangent, but I got interested thinking about what makes the difference between lovable holiday kitsch like Fireplace for Your Home and

and a divisive experimental art film like Andy Warhol's Empire, which if you're not familiar with Empire, this is worth looking up. It's an eight-hour static shot of the illuminated upper floors of the Empire State Building. I think it was actually filmed over the course of roughly like six hours, and then it's supposed to be played back at slow motion, so the film takes like eight hours to watch. It was filmed over the course of one night in July 1964, and

And, and you're just watching the buildings like the sun sets and the floodlights come on and you just watch the building through the night and occasionally there'll be, you know, a plane going by or flashes of light or something like that. But otherwise, it's just a static shot.

Obviously, the movie Empire is more likely to be regarded as either an important work of art with something interesting to illustrate about passage of time or the aesthetics of film, or on the other hand, to be seen as a pretentious, self-infatuated artistic boondoggle. Fireplace for Your Home does not really invite either of these types of appraisal. It's just cozy holiday kitsch. However, I would say that

An hour-long shot of a burning fireplace and an eight-hour shot of the floodlights on top of a skyscraper have a lot of similarities. Both are what you might call slow or atmospheric films without plot, characters, or dialogue, primarily interested in just a purely aesthetic experience, maybe something about causing the viewer to have time to relax and reflect without something directly taking up their attention too aggressively.

And both of them, in terms of visual display, are based on the interplay of light and shadow. I read somebody described the glowing crown of the building featured in Empire as a chandelier in the sky. And based on an interview I was looking at, it's clear that Fireplace for Your Home, it took a lot of care to try to get the right interplay of lights and colors in the fire and how they would be picked up by the camera and the contrast of that with the shadows in the room around.

And so I was thinking about if I had to like single out a major difference, like what would make the difference between the kinds of feelings people have about them apart from like the length difference? I think a big thing is that there is an understanding of a different expectation put on the viewer like.

If you are asked to watch Andy Warhol's Empire, people probably think that they're supposed to like sit silently in an art house theater and look at the screen the whole runtime and think deep thoughts. Whereas Fireplace for Your Home makes no such demands. You probably just put it on in the background while you're having coffee or while you're wrapping presents or something. Yeah, it's interesting to think about the different ways we're

supposed to or do interact with various media. Like I was thinking about this recently, I went to a performance that was maybe a little dry for my tastes. And in the same way, you know, you sometimes say, well, this meeting could have been an email. I kind of felt like this performance could have been an art installation, you know, something where I walk through

through it. I spend as much time with it as I want and sort of like gain what I want from looking at it, walking through it, uh, and so forth. You know, I think we've all been to, and this also breaks down into actual video pieces, right? Uh, where you'll see like short, short films or even longer pieces. And yeah, you could watch them all in their entirety, or you could sort of pass through and get a general sense of it.

And then on the other end of the spectrum, like you look at the way people often treat their favorite television shows, be it, you know, something often something they have a lot of nostalgia for. You hear people talking about, say, The Office or Seinfeld or something like that. And they talk about, well, you know, I just like to put it on in the background while I'm working. I just put it on while I'm working.

or, you know, doing things around the house. And, you know, you're kind of treating the office like one of these virtual fireplaces, something that is just generating a feeling in the background, some stimuli in the background that you're not 100% focused on. In fact, I would say if you are 100% focused on one of these fireplace videos, you're

That may be a warning sign. You know, it's like, why not? I mean, however you engage with your art, that's fine. Or it could be you're just trying to find the Warholiness of it. I mean, I have read...

strange kinds of interpretations of fireplace for your home. I was reading something that referred to an almost lynchian meditation on the synthetic and alienated faces of holiday cheer that you could see in fireplace for your home if you're looking for it. But I was thinking about it in the opposite direction with the contrast with the Andy Warhol movie,

You could be like wrapping Christmas presents and you could put Empire on in the background. It might not feel any less appropriate. The other day, I just watched part of Empire. You can find it online. And however orthogonal this is to Warhol's intentions, it actually does feel quite seasonally festive. There's something about like the art deco design of the Empire State Building and the floodlights against the dark night skies. Extremely cozy and felt like Christmastime.

Yeah, there have been a number of interesting related, I guess, ambient audio visual experiences. Netflix hosted multiple moving art

works by Louis Schwartzberg. This is the guy who also directed the 2019 film Fantastic Fungi, which is more traditional in its structure. But the moving art show, I guess, you know, they were like one hour long each, maybe less. You know, it's just pleasing music, a lot of cool ambient nature footage. And

And it's like great stuff. It was great stuff to take a nap to, you know, but still have something visual going on in the room as well. Disney has also got in on this with some great long ambient Star Wars themed AV presentations. Like it'll be a landscape of Hoth or something like that. Hmm.

So, it seems like, you know, enough people were digging this kind of thing. They realized, well, let's put that out there. I mean, we also have sort of screen-savory type things that pop up on Apple televisions, right? And various apps and so forth, where instead of just looking at an ad, they're going to show you a cityscape or something like that. Mm-hmm.

I didn't know about the Star Wars thing. I don't look that up. Yeah, they're pretty good. Wampa attacks to study relax too. Yeah, nothing really happens. Maybe a spaceship flies over, you know, they keep it chill. They keep it ambient. And it's an interesting, I mean, because the idea of the TV being on nonstop is being this flood of ideas into your home and into your life. Like this is nothing new. We've been doing this. We've been using our televisions like this since we've had televisions.

Um, and it's, it's really almost kind of a refined idea to think, well, you know, let's let them have an hour or two hour blocks of just, you know, very ambient chill audio visual stimuli instead of just nonstop ads and so forth. I don't know. Well, yeah, yeah. And I mean, and part of the reason I brought this up is, is to think about the,

the similarities and differences in the way people are now seeming to use a TV like people would once, or in many cases still do use a fireplace as a primarily, you know, not primarily to heat the house, but because they probably have another heating system as well. But as an aesthetic experience, it's something that supplies a kind of mood or ambience to the room that makes you feel a way you want to feel or helps you focus your attention in a way that you want to. Yeah.

Anyway, I just wanted to mention a couple of funny things that I found out about because I read a couple of interviews with the creator of Fireplace for Your Home, an American director named George Ford, who lives in Washington state, whose primary job is or at least was at the time of these interviews running a pet supply company. But he also directed a number of these like static shot genre films, ones like a mountain stream flowing. There's another thing of like fish bopping around in a saltwater aquarium and

But apparently this started with him making these cat entertainment DVDs, the goal of which is to like drive your cat insane with images of mice running all over the place. Oh, yeah, yeah. There are various YouTube accounts that specialize in this sort of thing as well. And some of those can be quite cheerful, you know, until the YouTube ads cut in. Yeah, I guess YouTube must have really cut into the DVD market for these things. We used to like 20 years ago, you'd pick up in PetSmart or something.

But anyway, these interviews, one of them was with The Independent in 2018 and others with CBC in 2022. A few takeaways that seemed interesting to me. This guy was inspired in part by pre-existing hearth and fireplace films. So fireplace for your home, not the first thing of its type. One example is a film that used to run on Christmas Eve and Christmas on the New York TV market. It was on a station called WPIX Channel 11.

This started in the 1960s, and it was this thing that was like two to four hours long, depending on the instance, that would play a video loop showing a log burning in a fireplace with Christmas music playing over the top. And I read in turn that this thing was the idea of somebody who worked at this TV station who was inspired by like a Coca-Cola commercial that he saw. Yeah.

But another thing from these interviews is that Ford talked about how his kids would keep begging him to build a fire around the holidays because, you know, yeah, I remember when I was a kid, I wanted a fire in the fireplace. That was fun. And it occurred to him that it would be easier to, in his words, quote, just place a television inside our fireplace hearth easier than to keep making a real fire.

So he like pitched this to Netflix multiple times. They initially ignored him or laughed him off, but eventually he got some traction and he claims again, can't verify this, but according to the director, the first fireplace for your home film took him two years to make and cost almost $35,000 to produce. This would not be Netflix money, by the way, it would, it was actually that he made these films independently. And then I think sold the distro rights to Netflix later on. Like,

How on earth could it actually be that difficult? Well, again, can't verify the figures are true, but the explanation kind of makes sense to me. Speaking to The Independent, he said, quote,

And I was like, oh, that is interesting. You know, I think for a cozy fire on a TV screen, we kind of have some criteria that we might not even be aware of, but we'd like to see the warmer colors of the fire, don't we? We want some red, orange, and yellow. But a roaring fire on camera, especially not the right kind of camera, not the right kind of shot, just doesn't always look like that. I think a lot of old movies and video were

where a camera catching a fireplace looks either just like a white glare or it's like invisible somehow. Hmm, that's a good point. Now I'm going to have to be extra judgy when I watch films with fireplaces in them.

Apart from the technical concerns, this gets back to the things about like what elements of the simulation are important to capture. They also went through a lot of tries actually getting the logs to burn right in like an aesthetically pleasing way. They wanted the right sounds of like a crackle and snap and a visually symmetrical flame and also to make the fire in such a way that it requires no intervention. So you don't have to keep like poking it, reaching in front of the camera.

And another hilarious thing that I did not know. So you filled me in about the Witcher themed fireplace. But according to this guy, Netflix did a fireplace tie in with some dystopian movie they made called Bright. And they summarize this. I haven't seen this movie, but it's like it's got like elves and orcs in what is otherwise just a buddy cop movie.

And, uh, they, they called this burn barrel for your home. I have not seen this one, but I mean, in general, I'm all for this. Let's have, uh, let's have more of these. Um, I, I'm just looking around. It's possible that they just unleashed one for squid game. If so, uh,

Excellent. Keep it going. I need all Netflix series. I'm really kind of pissed we didn't get one for Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities. We really needed like a Lionel Lasseter themed fireplace. That would have been ideal. Oh, yeah. Like a fireplace that talks extensively about what kind of drink it's making you. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, but seriously, can you imagine if Panos Cosmatos did a fireplace thing?

hour-long video for Netflix. That would be amazing. Imagine how glorious that fireplace would look. Some kind of creature slowly melting. Small business owners, this one's for you. Chase for Business and iHeart bring you a podcast series called The Unshakeables. This one-of-a-kind series will shine the spotlight on small business owners like you who faced a do-or-die moment that ultimately made their business what it is today.

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Oh, but one last thing about the fireplace director. Speaking to the CBC, they ask him, why do we love to stare at a fireplace even if it's not putting out heat like a real one would? He mentions a number of things, but one that he mentions, this might seem kind of obvious, but he says, you know, a fireplace looks like safety. And I think that's true. Something feels very safe, enclosed, and contained about it, which is funny because actually putting a fire inside your house is one of the more dangerous things you might do.

Yeah. Yeah. But like, this is the place to do it. And it's, it's the thing that we have a, and it's the thing we have a very long history with, you know, our, uh, you know, going back through times, we'll be discussing like, this is what the house was built around. It is the heart of the house. It is the center of the house and it is therefore the center of your lives. That's,

That's right. So I don't know if I meant to end up talking that long about fireplace for your home. Apologies if it was a bit much, but I don't know. I think it does raise some issues that I might want to keep returning to as we think more about the fireplace and what it means to us over the course of the next couple episodes.

But one thing I did want to cover briefly is the prehistory of human control of fire. Now, we've gone into this in depth in other episodes, so we're not going to rehash all that material in the same level of depth here. I just wanted to do a sort of quick overview of some things we've talked about.

A paper we've referenced on the show before that is highly cited on this subject is from 2016, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B by J.A.J. Gowlett called The Discovery of Fire by Humans, A Long and Convoluted Process. Now, this paper posits that human control of fire in prehistory probably constituted three general phases, right?

And the first stage would be humans engaging in something we actually see in other animals, which is fire following. This would be opportunistically taking advantage of natural fires caused most often by lightning strikes, lightning striking brush, but less often by like weird ignition sources like volcanic eruptions.

But whatever the cause of the fire, this phase would be humans notice a natural fire is occurring and then swoop in to take advantage of it in various ways, like to capture prey that is flushed out of hiding or to scavenge and eat prey that has been killed and maybe even cooked by the fire in some way. Like, oh, it's nicely roasted now. Or to, in various other ways, take advantage of natural resources revealed or transformed by a burn.

And then after the wildfire foraging stage, you've got the second and third phases, which postulate control of the fire within the living space. So the second phase is domestic fire, primarily used for cooking and safety. And then the third phase is what you might call industrial fire, used for the transformation of resources and technology, like the production of baked pottery.

And so going into the second and third phases, you see this sporadic and opportunistic relationship to rare natural fires transform into the capture and maintenance of fire first, like feeding a fire continuous fuel to keep it burning after you've caught it from a natural source. And then eventually humans would learn to strike fire from nothing with implements like Flintstones and Tinder. Now, what's the general timeline for these early stages of fire control?

Well, it's messy and it's still debated. The oldest evidence that anybody seriously proposes for human control of fire goes back to our hominin relatives roughly one to two million years ago. So at the farthest, it might go back like two million years.

But this evidence is ambiguous. So you can have things like charred or baked remains buried at a site that was occupied by hominins around the same time between one and two million years ago. But with these cases, it's not always clear if this is the result of deliberate fire control or of natural burning and scavenging of burned materials.

Gallad in the paper mentions a couple of sites of this kind in Kenya containing like burned sediments, stone tools that appear to have been altered by heat, and a couple of large hunks of baked clay. But again, it's not clear if these are from natural fires or controlled burning. Yeah.

A lot of the archaeological investigation for the emergence of fire control has focused on looking for what are called hearths in the literature. That's going to be a little bit different than the way we're using hearth primarily in these episodes, because this would not necessarily refer to indoor fireplaces, but could refer to any dedicated place for burning. So in like the archaeological papers, a hearth just means the remains of a place that was used for a purposeful fire, and

And there is pretty unambiguous evidence for hearths starting several hundred thousand years ago. There are more traces of human-associated burning beginning around one million years ago, and then the hearths really start popping up in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East around 400,000 years ago when you start seeing a lot of them.

Yeah, just based on materials I've been looking at, the exact usage of the term hearth is going to depend on a large part on exactly what the researchers and or the paper or the book is dealing with. Like, are we dealing with...

with an age in which people are living in homes or some other situation. And then the exact nature of the homes varies as well. Yeah, yeah. Hearth, in the main way we're using it in this series, is going to refer to a piece of infrastructure in a home, like a constructed enclosure made of fireproof materials that contains the fireplace. Right. But there may be a time or two where we use the term hearth and you might think, are they talking about a home? Well, it

And in a few cases, we might be referring to some material that's dealing with some other situation. But yeah, for the most part, we're dealing with hearths, hearthstones, and something along the lines of a fireplace. Now, there are tons of ways that gaining control over fire transformed humankind. Of course, one thing is it would have expanded our geographic range, making it easier to migrate into colder climates and higher altitudes.

It allowed us to expand our technological regime through the transformation of natural resources. Again, a very good example is pottery, fired pottery, but also things you might not think of as readily like adhesives for hafting, the famous birch bark tar that we talked about in some episodes in the past. And other things, you know, you can make like various glues out of natural substances that involve some element of heating material.

Also, the heating of stones for improved napping, some silicon-based stones, they nap better. You know, they flake off into the kinds of sharp edges that you're looking for with a napping exercise if you heat them the right way. But a big thing, of course, is the importance of cooking. The importance of fire for cooking, really hard to overstate.

Now, there is a real scholarly debate about the extent to which cooking actually could have transformed the human body. This is known as the cooking hypothesis. The basic idea is that the ability to cook otherwise hard to digest foods actually steered hominin evolution, changing not just our culture, but our bodies, allowing us to grow more powerful brains by devoting less energy to a hardy gut.

Though I should stress that the cooking hypothesis is not proven. There are arguments against it, mainly having to do with like the timing that would be required and lack of evidence for control of fire at the required times. So we don't know about the cooking hypothesis in terms of human evolution. But what cannot be doubted is that the invention of cooking hypothesis.

massively expanded the base nutrition yield of food we acquired. So it just made it possible to get a lot more nutrition out of your food. And it also made food safer by killing foodborne pathogens and neutralizing some plant toxins. So it just unlocked a gigantic level up in nutrition. Yeah, there's like a real sort of, it's often described as kind of an externalization of digestion. Like a lot of the chemistry of digestion, uh,

And potential chemistry of digestion handled outside the body, taking the strain off of the body, making things that we could need otherwise edible or more nutritious and so forth. And then there's, you know, additional areas you can get into like food preservation and so forth. Yeah.

Also with control of fire, you have protection against wild predators, which tend to be afraid of fire and are easier to drive away with it. And then finally, you've got provision of light in the darkness. And the way in which fire provides light in the darkness, I think, is interesting.

interesting because of how it is different from the light provided by the sun and to say nothing of the way that it's different from the kind of light provided by electrical light sources that we have today. That's something I want to come back to in part two to think about the particular light regime of fire-based societies.

Yeah, yeah. This is something I was thinking a lot about recently when I visited Wales with my family. We went to St. Fagin's National Museum of History, which has a lot of these historic Welsh buildings that have been moved to this area where you can check them out, you can walk inside them. And in many of these buildings, they had a fireplace going. And that was often like the main form of illumination. And there may or may not even be any windows there.

And it's such an insight into times when you would be inhabiting an indoor environment like that. You know, we're totally spoiled for indoor illumination these days. You can have your house generally as bright as you want it, like astoundingly bright.

But it's an interesting experience to sort of step back in time and appreciate like the challenges and not to say that they were restricted only to the hearth fire. There are other, you know, tricks you could utilize to up your illumination, but you were limited. And yeah, it was a different world.

And specifically, one of the things I want to come back to in part two is ways that that limitation could actually be create a kind of freedom or open opportunities for other things that that are not as apparent if you're just in a daylight type of light or in a very bright electrical lighting scenario. Yeah, yeah.

In addition to like the obvious, like it's dark, maybe we should go to sleep. Yeah. It's sometimes a kind of a revelation to modern humans. It's like it is nighttime. I could sleep. I could turn all of this off. And we often don't do that.

Yeah, I was about to be like, stop staring at your phone right before bed, which I do. Yeah, it's really hard to shake. It's the tiny little hearth we bring to bed with us, our little fireplace. Yeah. All right. Well, so from here for the rest of today's episode, I wanted to talk briefly about how fireplaces are normally constructed, how they normally work in the modern sense. And then, Rob, I know you had some stuff you wanted to get into about fireplaces as kind of magical portals. Mm-hmm.

But, okay, so one of the things is that obviously once humans started to build houses, to build enclosures to live inside, it can be easy to see why you would want to have the heat and light benefits of a fire inside the protection of the dwelling and not just outside. But

This actually is not as easy as it sounds. You're presented with several concerns. One is how do you keep the fire from burning down the house? To do so, you would need to build the fireplace kind of away from any flammable walls or furniture. Or if it is touching walls, you would need a fireplace system built into non-flammable infrastructure made out of something like stone, brick, clay or metal.

other big thing, this is huge. How do you keep the fire from filling your house up with smoke? You need to have some kind of channel through which smoke and hot gases can escape the building. Uh,

Modern fireplaces are equipped with dedicated flues and chimneys, as we'll talk about in a second. But as we see, many early indoor fireplaces had more, had cruder ventilation systems, often consisting of simply a hole in the roof directly above the fire. And this would work to a degree, but it also meant that, yeah, for like thousands of years, a lot of buildings that housed indoor fires were just going to be pretty smoky inside. I definitely got a taste of some of that at St. Fagin's.

Yeah. Now, basic modern fireplace and chimney design goes roughly like this. Usually you've got the firebox. This is where the fire goes, built on top of what's called a hearth. This is the more specialized use of the word hearth. This is the base of the fireplace that is made out of some kind of fireproof material, often bricks or stones. Yeah.

And this material, of course, is meant to absorb heat from the fire and then heat the room that it's in by radiating that heat back out into the air. Now, above the firebox, you often have like a decorative shelf called a mantle, but that's not really part of the mechanics of the fireplace. That's just a common decorative feature. The channel above the firebox leading to the outside is what's called the flue. And then the flue is surrounded by the structure that we call the chimney.

A lot of times the flue is slightly offset from the firebox, so it's not just a pipe straight up. Instead, it'll be kind of set off to the side or behind, and the flue will be positioned directly above something that is called the smoke shelf, where soot or anything that happens to penetrate the flue opening on top of the roof, anything that comes in from outdoors can fall without landing directly on the fire. Instead, it falls onto this shelf.

Often also there is a damper which allows you to close off the flue when there's no fire burning to stop cold air from coming down in the chimney. Very important to remember to open the damper before lighting a new fire. This is especially true, yeah, if you're staying in a cabin or something. It's not your home. Maybe back at your own house, you're not used to using a fireplace. It is an absolutely necessary step.

Now, we all know that a fire needs fuel and heat to burn, but it's also important to remember that it needs oxygen. So airflow is important in determining how a fire burns and also in determining what effect a fire has on the house and its occupants.

The majority of the interior heat provided by a fireplace is radiant heat. It's the infrared radiation coming off of the fire itself and then also coming off of the heated parts of the hearth or whatever is enclosing the fire. So coming off of the heated bricks or stones or the metal if it's more of a stove design. I'll talk about that in a second. But there is an irony to this beloved fixture of the fireplace.

Way back in the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin wrote about how inefficient fireplaces actually were at heating indoor spaces. Just huge amounts of wasted energy. He noted that the majority of the convective heat that they produce just rushes straight up the flue and is lost to the outside air. And this is often true, though it can vary depending on particulars of the fireplace design.

In fact, here's a weird thing a lot of people might not know. A fire in the fireplace can actually make your house colder overall. Yeah.

So this, again, depends on particulars, depends on the design of the fireplace and the chimney, particularly how the ventilation system is configured. But in a lot of cases, you build a fire in the fireplace and it will increase the temperature in the area directly around the fire, you know, mostly, again, by way of radiant heat coming off the fire and the heated stone or brick or metal of the hearth.

But meanwhile, that fire is sucking in air from the inside of your house. Relatively warm air, probably, if it's wintertime and you have the heat going. Or just, you know, there's warm stuff happening inside the house, and so it's warmer than the air outside. So this air from the rest of the house is being sucked into the fireplace to feed the fire. And then the convection of the hot gas plume rising up through the flue is driving it outside as it gets superheated.

As hot gas and smoke rushes up the chimney, a vacuum is created and more air continues to flow in from the inside of your house to this to the fireplace system. And thus a vacuum is created in the rest of the house. And then cold air is pulled in from outside through whatever cracks your house has cracks in the doors and windows and so forth.

So plenty of tests have shown that an inefficient fireplace may feel warm to the room right there in front of the blaze, but actually freezes out the rest of the house. They even did an episode of Mythbusters where they featured this one time. I haven't seen this, but I read about it. And I read that in their particular test, rooms farther away in the house got a couple of degrees Celsius colder. This is fascinating. It makes me think back on times I've been in houses where there is a fireplace and

And I'll, I mean, I will often find myself in that situation where it's like I'm somewhere else in the house, start feeling kind of chilly, then I have to go like right next to the fireplace to warm up. And this pattern kind of continues. And now I'm realizing it could be in part due to the presence of the fireplace to begin with, this inequality of temperature.

Now, there are ways to improve the heating efficiency of a wood fire. One is to replace your open fireplace with a wood stove. So this would be a fireplace completely enclosed in a metal box, which uses air more efficiently. It sucks less cold air into your house. And also it radiates heat into the house more efficiently like the

the metal can radiate in all directions. You might notice a traditional stone or brick fireplace is usually built into a wall, whereas a wood stove is more often closer to the middle of the room and can radiate in all directions.

Yeah, my late father-in-law was really into like passive solar design and houses and, you know, not quite like living off the grid kind of stuff, but like all the things you could do with a house to sort of like limit the need for electricity and so forth. And like that was a key aspect of his home design was having that space.

that wood stove. And yeah, it's not stuck in the wall. It's like out there in basically in the center of the house. And we might talk more about this in part two, but there are also designs that improve the heating efficiency because they don't draw air from the interior of the house. Instead, they've got like an external intake vent of some kind feeding a fire that heats a structure made of again, a fireproof material like brick stone or metal or tile. And then that radiates heat into the building and,

But the airflow system just doesn't really connect to the inside of the house. That also is a way of improving the heating efficiency. Though there's an interesting sort of converse implication here, which I discovered. Shout out to one of my sources on fireplaces and how they generally work here was a How Stuff Works article, our old employer. This one was by John Kelly. So nice job, John. But it

Basically, the idea here is that if you notice you're building a fire and it's like having a hard time burning and the damper is open and yet there's still a lot of smoke coming into the house, a problem could be that the house is too well sealed.

Like the doors and the windows are too well sealed and the fire is not able to create this efficient river of air from the outside into the house, into the fireplace, up the flue and then back outside. So instead it's pulling some air down the flue, which is causing a counter draft and sending smoke into the room. So if the, if you are having this problem, one thing to try is like opening a window though, of course that's going to let a bunch of cold air in. So that may just be the price. Yeah.

Wow. I had never thought about that. Huh?

But anyway, I was thinking about the implications of a fireplace often making the rest of the house colder, even while it makes one or two rooms much warmer. And this made me think about an unintended secondary effect of wood fire heating being the tendency to cause people to gather. Yeah, this is a great point. Yeah. Drawing people to the hearth, to the fire, drawing them together and thus bringing

and thus becoming like a center of the family, of social interaction, storytelling, and so forth. Yeah, there's like a sort of unstated little punishment for being off by yourself. It's just going to make your room colder. Yeah. ♪

Small business owners, this one's for you. Chase for Business and iHeart bring you a podcast series called The Unshakeables. This one-of-a-kind series will shine the spotlight on small business owners like you who faced a do-or-die moment that ultimately made their business what it is today.

Learn more at chase.com slash business slash podcast. Chase, make more of what's yours. Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. member FDIC. Copyright 2024 JPMorgan Chase.

Congratulations to Easterseals Southern California on their first place win for innovation in customer service at this year's unconventional awards by T-Mobile for Business. Easterseals has used T-Mobile 5G to create immersive VR development tools that aid people with autism in addressing transportation barriers.

These tools are shaping the way safe and personalized skill building is delivered. And for that, T-Mobile congratulates Easterseals Southern California for their unconventional thinking.

Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, onobotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start. Botox is not approved for adults with migraine who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Botox prevents, on average, eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo.

Botox is a prescription medicine injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headaches.

Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Talk to your doctor and visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

This is Holly Frey from Stuff You Missed in History Class. The national sales event is on at your Toyota dealer, making now the perfect time to get a great deal on a dependable new SUV, like an adventure-ready RAV4. Available with all-wheel drive, your new RAV4 is built for performance on any terrain, from the road to the trails. And with plenty of passenger and cargo space, plus available tech like wireless charging, you and your entire crew can stay connected.

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in hybrid models. So no matter your style, you can drive efficiently and save on gas. So visit your local Toyota dealer and check out amazing national sales event deals on RAVs, Highlanders, and more when you visit buyatoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. ♪

Running low on time? Let a shopper with ship same-day delivery go the extra mile to help you get more out of the holidays. More time building a beautiful brunch spread? Not shopping for it, because you got groceries through same-day delivery. More time decorating the house? Not waiting in line. After all, you got lights from Lowe's delivered same day.

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Now, you know, it is Christmas time. And so a lot of folks are engaging in different fireplace related traditions, the hanging of stockings and so forth. And where do you traditionally hang your stockings while you hang them by the hearth? You hang them above the fireplace.

And of course, we have tales of Santa Claus or perhaps a masquerading Grinch entering your home by crawling down your chimney and climbing in through the fireplace.

This is one of those, I think, examples of the fireplace as a portal, a fireplace as a gate through which something may travel. It's almost too close to us. We grow up with this tradition. We're told it from an early age. We're familiar with this story before we're familiar with many of the foundation stories of our own religions.

you know, and important cultural, other important cultural tales, arguably more important cultural tales. We have this story of a strange old man who climbs through the fireplace. Again, almost too close for us to even think about it. We'll come back to that in a second. But another way, of course, that, and this is one that may resonate more with fireplace owners, people who actually have hearths in their home, is the reality that, okay, as fireplaces

a literal aperture to the outside of your home, it is possible for animals to climb down that chimney and potentially enter your home. They may be prevented full access to the home, but bats, raccoons, mice, various squirrels are just some of the examples of potential chimney spelunkers. I know I've encountered bats in this manner before at a friend's house where like a bat or two would come into the chimney, get trapped in the house and

Uh, and then you would find them often in the sink trying to get water. Whoa. Yeah. I came to this house, like some, it was, you know, it's like a vacation home or something. So nobody had been in it for a little bit and I saw something in the sink and I'm like, Oh, someone left a teabag and I almost grabbed it, throw it away. And then I was, Oh, that's a bat. Um, and then I had to call my friend and be like, what's your bat protocol? The bat was fine. It's never even occurred to me. I cannot relate. That's, but that's incredible.

Now, this idea, though, of a chimney as a portal through which otherworldly powers may traverse, such as Santa Claus. This is a pretty deeply seated concept, certainly in European traditions. But you can also see examples of similar ideas from pretty far flung traditions, seemingly to connect with the idea of a chimney.

with the various supernatural concepts you might encounter about the home, about fire technology, about cooking, and just the nature of the flame itself. For instance, Carol Rose, in her Encyclopedia of Giants, Monsters, and Dragons that I frequently cite, mentions a tradition of the Tlingit peoples of northwestern United States. They tell of Hea Kanako, the old woman underneath us,

an enormous protective deity of the earth who concentrates on supporting the world, almost in a similar sense to Atlas, holding up the earth. But when her hunger gets the better of her, her concentration falters and earthquakes ensue.

And so humans occasionally throw bits of fat into their hearths, as Carol Rose describes it, in order to help her overcome her hunger, to concentrate on keeping the Earth in balance. Mm-hmm.

So, you know, it's not something crawling through the fire, through the hearth, but it's this idea of the hearth is kind of this connection, you know, almost a physical connection to some sort of supernatural force. Yeah, I think the general use of fire for burnt offering or sacrifice indicates a way of thinking of the fire as kind of interdependent.

interface point between our world and the other world that you can burn something to kind of send it through a portal to the gods. Yeah. And what I like about this one, though, is the idea that it's not a special fire created for a special ritual purpose. It's more like the everyday fire. But even the everyday fire has the potential to be this gateway. Yeah.

And, you know, again, it makes sense when you think about all the convergence of activities and energies at the hearth.

The warmth, the illumination, food preparation, social gathering, you know, perhaps due to the fact that it's in a home situation that the rest of the home is cold, drawing people together to tell stories, tell jokes, share their experiences. And on top of that, it is an obvious aperture to the outside world, which certainly brings about the possibility of various natural world creatures gaining access to your abode.

But let us also remember that we're also talking about a gateway through which error can pass and does pass.

And as most of human history is pre-germ theory, I think you can see where this is going. The idea that this is also an aperture through which bad air could travel or something in the air, something that is not as constricted as physical beings are constricted, that they could pass through that small hole. They could essentially, you know, pass through the keyhole and that's all the space they need. Interesting. Yeah.

It reminds me actually of a tradition we talked about, an idea of the Dine or Navajo people. This came up in a couple of episodes, I think in our Dust episodes actually. The idea that you might have an Adante, a practitioner of secret evil magic, who might introduce a magical poison or illness into a home through its smoke hole.

So that definitely came to mind here. The smoke hole in a traditional home, this could be an aperture that could be exploited by an evildoer. And in European traditions, spelling over into early American colonial traditions, this concept carried a great deal of weight.

something that previous guest on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Brian Hoggard, discusses in his excellent 2019 book, Magical House Protection, The Archaeology of Counter Witchcraft. I know some of you probably listened to that episode. It's a great one if you want to go back and listen to an interview with the author. But I'm going to discuss some of the ideas that he brought up in that book here as it relates to this topic.

So in the book, Hoggard discusses the various counter witchcraft rites and rituals that Europeans use dating back at least to the Middle Ages.

functioning alongside and generally, I guess, in spite of protections offered by the Christian faith and Christian tradition. This has come up on the show before. You know, you have the various church-approved methods that you might take against supernatural evil, but are you going to limit yourself to just those, or are you going to also set other traps and wards in place?

But in this case, we're talking about supernatural, superstitious folk protections that were clearly deemed absolutely necessary by many to combat evil in a demon-haunted world.

Hoggard stresses that the archaeological evidence suggests that unseen supernatural threats were just a standard part of everyday existence. Supernatural evil was everywhere, and you had to bust out all the tricks in order to, if not completely protect yourself, then at least bend the odds even slightly in your favor. And as explored in the book, these efforts often took the form of a ritual object or objects hidden in the home.

He writes, quote,

Whether these forces were emanations from a witch in the form of a spell, a witch's familiar pestering their property, an actual witch flying in spirit, or a combination of all of those is difficult to tell. Additional sources of danger could be ghosts, fairies, and demons. People went to great lengths to ensure their homes and property were protected, highlighting the fact that these beliefs and fears were visceral and, as far as they were concerned, literally terrifying.

Interesting yet again, the way that some physical intuitions apply to these apparently magical substances, like the spell of a witch or a witch's familiar, which you might well assume could just pass magically through any wall or whatever. It seems people were especially concerned about voids and portals, like the physical gaps that a physical being would need to travel through.

I mean, I imagine a lot of you have had this experience. I mean, to be clear, some of you may have the experience of finding some of these secreted and hidden items. And if so, do write in. We would love to hear from you. But I find it like a little strange when I encounter a void in my house, when you realize like here is a space within my home where there is nothing, you know, and that's...

I don't know. It shouldn't feel creepy, but it does. What's under the stairs? Nothing. There's nothing there. Small business owners, this one's for you. Chase for Business and iHeart bring you a podcast series called The Unshakeables. This one-of-a-kind series will shine the spotlight on small business owners like you who faced a do-or-die moment that ultimately made their business what it is today.

Learn more at chase.com slash business slash podcast. Chase, make more of what's yours. Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. member FDIC. Copyright 2024 JPMorgan Chase.

Congratulations to the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine for the first ever Malcolm Gladwell Tipping Point designation at this year's unconventional awards by T-Mobile for Business. The university used integrated IoT devices and 5G solutions from T-Mobile to enable multiple synchronized health monitors, allowing for real-time remote data collection and analysis.

The initiative will shape patient care moving forward. And for that, T-Mobile congratulates the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

Botox is a prescription medicine injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headaches.

Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Talk to your doctor and visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

This is Holly Frey from Stuff You Missed in History Class. The national sales event is on at your Toyota dealer, making now the perfect time to get a great deal on a dependable new SUV, like an adventure-ready RAV4. Available with all-wheel drive, your new RAV4 is built for performance on any terrain, from the road to the trails. And with plenty of passenger and cargo space, plus available tech like wireless charging, you and your entire crew can stay connected.

Or check out a stylish and comfortable Highlander with three spacious rows of seating for up to eight passengers. And with available features like the panoramic moonroof, you can sit back, enjoy the wide open views with your whole family. Plus, both RAV4s and Highlanders are available individually.

in hybrid models. So no matter your style, you can drive efficiently and save on gas. So visit your local Toyota dealer and check out amazing national sales event deals on RAVs, Highlanders, and more when you visit buyatoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. Running low on time? Let a shopper with ship same-day delivery go the extra mile to help you get more out of the holidays.

More time building a beautiful brunch spread? Not shopping for it, because you got groceries through same-day delivery. More time decorating the house? Not waiting in line. After all, you got lights from Lowe's delivered same day.

More time prepping for the ugly sweater party, not battling traffic. Because you, you smart cookie, you got Sephora delivered to your door. You can even send a shopper to PetSmart for treats and toys, leaving you and Duke with more time for Frisbee in the park. Yes, dogs and cats love shipped same-day delivery too. So go ahead, do the things that matter most this holiday season. While you're living your life, a shopper with Shipt will update you as they shop to ensure you get exactly what you want.

Because less time shopping means more time for what truly matters. Get more this holiday season. Download the Shipt app and start shopping today. Now, if you're not familiar with the details that Hoggart gets into and the details that came up in that interview I conducted a while back, you might be wondering, well, what sort of ritual objects are we talking about? Hidden away in homes and voids and so forth. Potentially near the hearth to afford protection against these many evils.

Well, there are various examples, but some of the main ones are as follows. First of all, there's just protective marks. And I feel like this is fairly self-explanatory. You know, some sort of a symbol or a sigil that has protective properties and that may be hidden away somewhere in a home. This next one, though, this one was one that I found surprising at the time and I was not familiar with prior to reading this book, and that is shoes.

And I think this is especially interesting because from our modern perspective, we often forget just what a shoe is. We can take it for granted. We can have, you know, hundreds of them. And we may love shoes to death without like,

without really thinking about this vital aspect of what they are. Yes, we put them on our feet to walk about in and not step on nails and rocks and so forth, keep our feet warm, make our feet look snazzy and cool. But they are also flesh-like sheaths, sometimes made from animal products that are sized, perhaps individually sized, for the shape of our feet. Or if nothing else, over time, they take on the shape of our feet. They take on the odor of our feet.

These are two details, especially the odor, that is often lost on us, perhaps not lost on our dogs and cats. They know these shoes smell like us and are like potent familiar items of us. You know, our cat will lay on shoes a lot. And I've read some commentary on this kind of behavior in cats and dogs where they will be drawn to the shoes.

because they remind them of the owners of said shoes. And all of this would seem to be part of the superstitious calculus for these traditions. So a shoe may wear out beyond repair. In the case of a child's shoes, they may outgrow them, but they are still then objects that have to a large extent become a part of us. You know, they are shaped after us, they smell of us, and they're therefore dangerous items to discard, right?

Uh, in much the same way that nail clippings and hair were often seen as such, like they were a part of you. They still are a part of you. And that is dangerous material to just leave out in the world where, you know, an evil doer or an evil spirit may come across it. And by doing so gain power over you.

This type of folk belief is sometimes referred to as the law of contagion, that like things that were once united or in contact with one another, if they become separated, you may need to do some kind of cleansing or exorcism or some kind of ritual acknowledgement of the severing there or destruction of the thing as it is separated from you, or else it can be used to have power over you by way of the associative magical connection.

Yeah, yeah. Or in this case, you find another use for them. And so according to Hoggard, shoes and other objects were often deposited on ledges within the chimney breast or behind the fireback.

and he stresses that, quote, shoes are perhaps the most commonly encountered apotropaic objects and often had an association with the hearth. Oh, interesting. So the same object that could become your vulnerability if discarded and found by a witch could be your protective amulet if you keep it, if you keep it in the home. Right, and I'll come back to why this may be in just a second, but before we do, I want to talk briefly about witch bottles, which are, I think, the more exciting and interesting

sounding version of abotropaic objects hidden in a home, often in the area of the hearth.

Now, there's some variety to what these will consist of, but they have been found. They've been analyzed. They're still being found. That's one of the great things that is harder discusses is that you have so many different waves of renovation that take place with some of these old homes in Europe, in Britain, in the UK and also in parts of the United States and Canada as well.

where people will suddenly discover a pair of ancient shoes or a strange bottle. And he also discusses how there are cases where people have suddenly sort of given into some of the superstition of it, and they've had to put said item back. You know, it's kind of like the reverse of finding a void. You find a purposeful item that you don't fully understand, right?

Um, you're, you're not on the same like mental wavelength with it, but you, you come to believe, well, I should put it back.

I don't know my way around all of this enough to say it doesn't belong there. I can sympathize with that. And this may just say something about my, you know, personality or kind of tendencies, character tendencies. But while I would never take active steps to do it, to like, you know, put shoes in a wall, thinking it would protect my house or something, I would feel weird about taking something out. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like, well, it feels like I shouldn't do that. Yeah.

Yeah. That's maybe a load-bearing shoe. Just leave it alone. Yeah.

So with witch bottles, again, there's some variation as to what they may hold. But there are various written instructions from historical records that talk about what goes into a witch bottle. And one that Hoggard shares, this is from 1701, and he includes it in his book. And basically the directions are to take a pint of your own urine, heat it to near scalding temperatures, pour it into a jug, and then add white salt,

and three new nails with the points down. Then you bind the jug with clay and leather, and you heat it over embers for nine to ten days.

It's got to work because look at all the steps. Yeah. And I think that sometimes there are more steps than maybe a simplified version. But it's the basics are in play here. The urine, the pointy objects, sometimes they're pins or needles. Sometimes it's like a lot of like rusty nails, pins or needles and so forth. So in the case of the shoes and the witch bottle here, the basic idea would seem to be this.

You have an unseen evil force, be it a demon, a fairy, a ghost, or some curse of a witch, and it is seeking you. It has entered your home, perhaps through a door, perhaps through a window, perhaps down the chimney and through the fireplace. It's seeking you out. But what does it encounter instead? It encounters your smell. It encounters...

This shoe that was so much a part of your body and now can be mistaken for your body. And it goes after that instead. It serves as a decoy.

And in the case of the witch bottle, it's even more exciting. So it smells that deep urinary stench that is associated with you. But it's found the bottle first. And so what does this evil thing do, this spirit, this dark seeker in the night? It climbs inside that bottle. But uh-oh, now it is either trapped in the bottle,

Or it is impaled upon all of those sharp pointy bits inside the bottle and therefore injured or perhaps killed by this witch bottle, this trap that has been set for it.

That's ingenious. I didn't know it was going there with the nails, but that makes sense. I was wondering if the nails had some kind of, you know, they might be iron nails and thus the iron significance as like a protective magic against the fairy folk and so forth. Yeah, and there may be part of that to it as well, you know, and certainly protective magics like this, you know, they may sort of like drag various ideas with them across time. So I would not discount the importance of the iron at all.

But this is all very interesting to think about in comparison to various Christmas traditions. Like, I instantly think about wooden clogs left out for St. Nicholas or Santa. Though I've also read that prior to the 16th century, at least in some European countries, the clogs were left in the church rather than in the home. I'm not as...

well-versed in the history of those traditions. But at any rate, you do have examples where shoes are left out so that some entity may deposit gifts inside them. And those shoes may be placed, I think, often near doors or windows. So there still is that sense of put them near the aperture, put them near the portals.

And where do we hang our stockings with care? We, of course, hang them again by the fireplace. Oh. By the hearth. Yeah. Almost as if we're trying to throw Santa Claus off the scent. You know, there is no need, strange one, to bring the gifts directly to the children. Here is their scent. Smell their feet. Here is the essence you seek. Leave the gifts here. Leave the children alone in their room.

Or the coal, I guess, if applicable. Yes, there is no need to put the coal inside the children. Leave it in the socks. And thus he is outsmarted and he leaves the children alone for another year. What resonance. This idea is now bounding about inside me.

One more note from Brian Hoggard. I was looking through the book to see, I couldn't remember if he had mentioned anything Christmassy in particular. And he does mention a rhyme that was associated with ritual burn marks from tapers in homes. So like I say, there were various marks and signs inside some of these old homes that

are interpreted as being associated with various protective magical activities and rituals. And one of them, you know, I think could be easy to miss is just like burn marks in a house. I included a picture from his book here for you to look at, Joe. Like if you didn't know what you're looking at, you might just think these were caused by some other

you know i don't know something that occurred during construction or something like that yeah but uh an interpretation here is that these were ritual burn marks and he includes this is a translation but it is a translation of a german rhyme that apparently went along with some holiday traditions of protecting the home uh so i'm going to read it here again this is from brian hugger's book

And it goes as follows, and round about the house they go with torch or taper clear that neither bread nor meat do want, no witch with dreadful charm have power to hurt their children or do the cattle harm. So I'm not saying burn beams in your house with fire as part of your holiday traditions. But yeah, it's interesting to think about all of this. And again, this is another one that involves the power of fire.

The power of the flame to protect us against unseen things in the night. By the way, I know Brian would want me to pass this along to you. If you do encounter something like this in your house, strange shoes, a strange item, a witch bottle and so forth, it is very helpful to reach out to people who will document it all.

Uh, and, uh, and a lot of people do reach out to, uh, Brian Hoggard themselves. He's on Instagram as folk magic man. Uh, he also has a website. So just look him up. It's Brian Hoggard, H O G G A R D. And he can point you in the right direction. If, uh, if you encounter something like this in your home or email us and I'll forward it to him. Uh, happy to do that.

All right. Well, I think we're out of time for today. We've got more to say and to explore about the fireplace and the hearth. So join us again on Thursday. That's right. In the meantime, we'll remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays, we do a short form episode. And on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. If you're on Instagram, follow us at stbympodcast.com.

And if you are on Letterboxd, follow us at Weird House. That's where you can keep up with movies that we're covering on Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Thank you.

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