The Hearth, Part 2
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"Here, here is certitude," you swore, "below this lightning-blasted tree, where once it strikes, it strikes no more. Fool!" And you sang, "Here is a three, and in this three love lies unshaken, as now, so must it always be." You sang with harsh notes to awaken that ancient toad who sits immured within your hearthstone, light forsaken.

He knows that limits long endured must open out in vanity, that gates by bolts of gold secured must open out in vanity. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Stuff to Blow Your Mind

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Hamm. And I am Joe McCormick. And we are back with part two in our series on The Fireplace and the Hearth. That reading at the opening was an excerpt from, not the whole poem, but an excerpt from a poem called Essay on Knowledge by the poet Robert Graves, the author of I, Claudius, or as some might call it, I, Clavdivs.

And so this poem, we were a little confused because Rob, you dug this up and I'd never read it before, but I really liked it. But we were confused because we were finding multiple versions of the same poem. And it turns out that's not an error. There actually are multiple versions of this poem. So it's kind of like with some of these Walt Whitman poems where like, you know, he published multiple drafts of the same work.

That's going on here. Graves published an early version of the poem called Essay on Knowledge and then a later one called Vanity. Yeah, but it's really getting into some stuff to blow your mind territory because not only do we have a hearthstone with an ancient toad beneath it, we also have a lightning-blasted tree. Yeah, it's an unintended resonance there. But as I said, I'd never read this before. I really love it now. It seems to describe the poet's

internal struggle between reason and passion. So he's characterizing half of his soul as a kind of unflappable scholar aspiring to aloof rationality.

that part of himself attached to the the day side kingdom of Christendom and the Enlightenment and then the other part of him hidden underneath this Thonian pagan dragon of weird emotion. Emotion, lust and magic I think are the themes of the suppressed part. In fact, we didn't quote this part of the poem but in an earlier stanza he refers to it as a dragon.

And the balance of the poem seems to suggest that as much as the rationality of civilization tries to rule over the self, the dragon of lust and emotion and passion will inevitably at some point be unleashed from his tomb and reign again. Yeah, basically he's saying, I really want to be a good Christian scholar dude, but somebody buried this pagan psychomania frog underneath my hearth.

And there's nothing I can do about it.

However, I was reading an essay about graves called Philosophical Speculations, Mock Beggar Hall, Welchman's Hose, and Poetic Unreason by a critic named Patrick Quinn. I'm not otherwise familiar with this critic, but Quinn writes about this part of the poem that, quote, the cries awaken only in ancient toes.

symbol of the philosophic awareness of the Apollonian and Dionysian duality in man's nature, referring to that division between the sort of Apollonian reason and Dionysian passion that is discussed in Plato's dialogue, The Phaedrus.

But anyway, so you get that line after that in the poem where Graves says, he knows the limits long endured must open out in vanity. And the he in that line seems to be the toad. So if Quinn is correct, the toad is not the dragon of passion and emotion, not that Dionysian half of the struggle, but instead the sage who observes and describes the struggle to us. The toad immured beneath the hearth is Socrates, a

But anyway, this line kind of reminds me of that thing. So like the toad is buried beneath the hearthstone. And it reminds me of the thing we talked about in the previous episode of the void buried amulets were, you know, by symbolic law of contagion that now means Socrates is a witch bottle full of urine. Yeah. And later on in the episode, we'll get back to some things buried under the hearthstone and there will be toads.

Now, to recap a bit about the previous episode, if you haven't heard it, I would recommend going back and checking that out first. But in part one of this series, we talked about what interior fireplaces mean to us culturally by looking at the characteristics of hearth fire simulations, such as the assorted fireplace for your home style media offerings that have become very popular as ambient streaming video in recent years.

years, including I think we talked about some kind of burn barrel for your home to some dystopian movie and also your Witcher fireplace beloved in your house, Rob. Yeah. And I don't know if I mentioned this one, but there's a squid game one now. Did I mention that in the last episode? You mentioned just finding out about it, I think. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't watched it yet, but I'm excited. This is the most exciting thing I know about on Netflix is the squid game fireplace. Yeah.

Yeah, I may fire it up tonight. Nice. But also in the last episode, we talked briefly about research into the prehistory of humans and our close hominin relatives, how our relationship to and then control of fire probably developed over the last couple of million years, and how fire fundamentally changed so much about human life from nutrition to technology to our relationship with the climate and with wildlife.

After this, we talked about how a modern domestic fireplace is usually constructed and how it works or depending on your emphasis, how it doesn't work given its massive inefficiency as a heat source for the home. Estimates vary, but something like 80 or 90% of the heat put out by a standard wood fire is lost just straight up the chimney and goes right out the flue.

And depending on the design, a wood fireplace can sometimes even make a house colder overall, even though it heats up one room, you know, makes one room nice and toasty, but freezes out the rest of the house. We discussed the mechanics of that in part one. And of course, all of this material energy analysis is useful to know, but it's not going to make hearth fire any less beautiful or attractive or magical to us. Yeah, as well as deeply nostalgic and comforting. Yeah.

We're connecting with something very primal when we view a fireplace. Yeah, and on that note, finally in the last episode, we talked about the idea of the fireplace and its connected ventilation system as a portal for magical entrances and exits in many folk beliefs as a sort of...

for one thing, a sort of transporter platform to the gods, but beyond that as a weak spot in the home's defense against spells and witchcraft. And this led to interesting examples of apotropaic magic associated with the hearth. So thinking of the fireplace as a gap in the armor that had to be protected perhaps by witch traps or other magically potent items, maybe shoes. Yeah.

Now, in the last episode, one idea that I mentioned briefly and said I would come back to today was about the idea of domestic hearth fire and the nature of the light it provides. When you think about it, firelight is different both in quantity of light produced and in quality from daylight.

And that fact should not be overlooked when understanding the role of fire in culture, especially if it is the primary or the only source of artificial light. But even in cases where, you know, you're just sort of optionally choosing to have a room lit by a fire.

And this brings me to an interesting paper I came across about a less material, less economic, but probably no less important way that control of fire may have altered human culture all over the world in prehistory. So this paper...

It was by a scholar named Polly Weissner, who is an anthropology professor at the University of Utah. And it is called Embers of Society, Firelight Talk Among the Jutwansi Bushmen, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014.

And so the author here, Weissner, acknowledges that there has been a lot of research on how the human control of fire may have affected lots of things about us. It may have affected our physical evolution and anatomy. This, again, is a reference to the interesting but not completely proven cooking hypothesis, which we talked about a bit in the last episode.

And there's no doubt that it has affected our technology and the design of our social and living spaces. But then Leisner writes, quote, however, little is known about what transpired when firelight extended the day, creating effective time for social activities that did not conflict with productive time for subsistence activities.

And I thought this was so interesting. So this sort of acknowledges that while fire can extend the amount of time in the day in which you can stay awake and conduct some activities, the light of a campfire is not sufficient to illuminate the majority of subsistence activities, like the main economic duties of survival, such as gathering and processing food. So when there's firelight,

there is enough light that it gives you time to be awake and to see each other and to interact, but not really good enough light to do much useful work.

Yeah. And again, this is something that we so easily take for granted in our so easily illuminated world. I know just for my own part, my immediate neighbors usually don't have their backyard floodlights on during the night. But if they do come on in the night or they're left on during the night by accident, I'll sometimes notice that, you know, I think I could read a book here in my bedroom at three in the morning. Like it's entirely possible based on the ambient illumination provided by

by their floodlights. And, you know, that's just... That level of accidental illumination was just not something you had for the majority of human history. Yeah, and that highlights how, of course, firelight is different from daylight, but electrical light is different, once again, from firelight. Yeah. ♪

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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.

So how does the availability of this different kind of time in the day change a culture? Or in the author's words, did Firelight, quote, simply give more time or did it create a qualitatively different time and space? So Weissner offers several potential observations and ideas in the introductory section, but

One is that the sort of different climate or weather conditions during the nighttime, which is during which activities can be extended by firelight, kind of leads to some different social dynamics. For example, during hot seasons, air cools after sunset. But if you can have firelight, you can still see each other after it gets dark.

And people can release pent-up energy, you know, maybe dancing or interacting socially in various ways. Meanwhile, during cold seasons, of course, the fire is useful for warmth and people will tend to huddle near the fire for warmth. It kind of has this gathering effect like we talked about with fires even inside the home.

She also says that fireside gatherings are sometimes, though not always, characterized by social mixing. So mixing of the sexes, mixing of people of different age groups who might spend much of the economically productive part of the day segregated.

And then another thing she said that I thought this was very interesting, quote, the moon and starlit skies awaken imagination of the supernatural, as well as a sense of vulnerability to malevolent spirits, predators, and antagonists countered by security in numbers. So,

The argument here is that nighttime is a time of the imagination for possibilities both good and bad. It kind of expands the possibilities that you envision. You might think about the gods or of, you know, powers beyond the normal, but you can also think about dangers lying beyond the firelight in the dark. So the light that keeps you up at night keeps you aware and active during this imagination-rich time of the day.

Another thing she says I thought was very interesting, quote, body language is dimmed by firelight and awareness of self and others is reduced. Facial expressions flickering with the flames are either softened or, in the cases of fear and anguish, accentuated.

And I'm not sure I've ever considered this before, but I think that's absolutely right. Different light environments change how we look and thus change what kinds of emotional expression we're sensitive to or that we're aware of other people being sensitive to in us.

And I think this could be a reason that we associate like a romantic evening with candlelight as opposed to with like really bright lights. I don't, you know, there could be multiple reasons for that, but I don't have proof of this, but I think it's quite plausible that fire based light is.

decreases our ability to register body language and facial expressions that would normally cause us social anxiety, both because of our constant tracking of these signals in others and because of our awareness and regulation of it in ourselves, our awareness of being observed.

In other words, firelight could be a naturally socially disinhibiting environment. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does, because there is a huge difference between, you know, of course, stark daylight anywhere, anything from stark daylight all the way towards dusk and absolute darkness. We're talking about a world in between where the illumination is not harsh, but

but is, uh, you know, atmospheric, uh, and can certainly have this sort of emotional vibe to it. Um, yeah, this is interesting. It's almost like, did, did sexy times exist? Did romance exist before firelight? Um, uh,

I mean, it did, but, you know, in the way that we're thinking about it, you know, a candlelit dinner and so forth, or any romantic scene you've ever seen in a motion picture, you know, it probably takes place in some sort of a lighting environment like this. Well, yeah, and obviously the romantic example is just one type of scenario where we want to be socially disinhibited, where we want, like, our social anxieties and our fear of being perceived to be reduced. Right.

I think that's also the case more in just general social interactions where we want to be like, you know, bonding with people and trying to build up good relationships and so forth. Yeah, yeah. Now, on the other hand here, the author says that overt expressions of fear and anguish could in some cases be accentuated by firelight. And you can imagine that being powerful as well for sort of capturing the capturing of attention with storytelling or ritual.

Yeah, I can't help but think about the fact that a central fire, be it in a fireplace or a campfire or even just a lantern that people are gathered around, it becomes the focal point. It becomes the thing you look at.

And, uh, on one hand, yeah, you're not looking necessarily looking directly in people's faces while you're talking to them. It's kind of getting into that whole zone where like sometimes, uh, um, you know, a parent and their child can have a more intense conversation whilst the parent is driving a car, you know, because it's like eyes forward. We can kind of have this slightly disconnected, but deep personal connection.

conversation. And then likewise, if everybody's staring at the fire, it's kind of like, yeah, attention is on the flames and we, but we can still have this close conversation, but without looking each other dead in the eyes. And then the flames can also kind of become the almost kind of like the primordial television set for the telling of tales and the invocation of wild concepts and imagined realities. Yeah.

I think that's a really good observation. I didn't think about the comparison to the car or to the TV, but yes, totally. Now, there's another interesting general observation Weissner makes in the introductory section, which is, quote, "...whereas time structures interactions by day because of economic exigencies, by night social interactions structure time and often continue until relationships are right."

And she summarizes this by saying that people in hunter-gatherer societies, they tend to focus interactions on efficiency during the daytime and effectiveness during the nighttime. So during the day, we need to get this problem resolved quickly so we can move on with what we're doing. Whereas at night, we can address this until it's fixed.

And so the author here says that her goal is to investigate how firelit time is used to achieve three things. And this is in the author's words. The first thing is a more accurate understanding of the thoughts and emotions of others, particularly those not immediately present. Second, bonding within and between groups. And third, the generation, regulation, and transmission of cultural institutions.

So in order to investigate the role of firelight in creating productive space for these goals, the author analyzed and quantified the differences in daytime and then firelit nighttime conversation topics among the Jutuan people of Southern Africa. And so she is working mainly from a sample of firelight

174 memorialized conversations that took place in among a group of people in northern Botswana in 1974 and then this was supplemented with subsequent visits and re-recordings of some stories and then also the analysis of this direct sampling of

of Jiuquanzi conversations and activities was supplemented by a survey of written translated texts on day-night differences in conversation topics in other cultures.

Now, the author is clear about the limitations of this kind of research because it's very important to remember when you're looking at anthropology studies of this kind, studying the habits of one culture does not necessarily tell you how another culture in some overlapping circumstances will function. So if you see a behavior among one group of hunter-gatherers today, that does not give you certainty that all prehistoric hunter-gatherers did the same thing. In fact, you

You don't even know that other hunter-gatherer groups in the modern world do the same thing. In fact, it doesn't even show you that the exact same group of people would keep doing the same thing at a different time. And in the case of the Jutuan people, the paper notes that for many of them, the structure of life has changed significantly since the mid-1970s, around the time when these conversations were initially recorded.

with many people settling more into more permanent villages with a more mixed economy. So some traditional subsistence foraging, but also wage labor and selling crafts and things like that.

But still, this kind of cultural observation does tell you something. It doesn't show you how it always is, but it does show you with certainty one way it can be. So it's important to understand the strengths and the weaknesses of this kind of anthropological research. Studying one culture doesn't prove universal patterns, but it does establish a precedent, something you can see, okay, here's one way it could work. Mm-hmm.

So coming back to the question the author was trying to figure out here, does firelight simply give us more time or does it create a different type of time and space? And in the specific case of the people observed here, the author found some strong differences in what people talked about during the day versus after sunset when the illumination was based on fire.

So the author said that daytime conversations strongly centered around economic matters, meaning things having to do with work. So the acquisition of food through hunting and foraging, plans for the acquisition of food, resource availability, conversations about technology, all of this economic talk about work represented about 31% of the daytime talk that was sampled.

Another 34% of the daytime conversation sampled was what the author calls, quote, verbal criticism, complaint, and conflict. And this basically covers all talk that is designed to regulate social relationships and hash out personal disputes.

And a lot of this seems to be based on maintaining egalitarian social relationships and preventing other people from acquiring social dominance or sort of unfair social advantage.

So bickering is that I think of this 34%. Well, I wouldn't want to put a like a normative negative spin on it. But in a way, yes, this is this is social social regulatory talk where people are addressing addressing social problems that they perceive or some kind of conflict between people and addressing those addressing those issues and trying to resolve them.

Which in this broad understanding, this is also a huge part of conversation, I would say, among basically any people anywhere. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now, during the daytime, another 16% was devoted to jokes, joking around. Another 9% was devoted to land rights, discussion of the use of land. 4% was about interactions with other ethnic groups. And 6% was made up of storytelling. Hmm.

But the author describes how as the day went on and families would gather for the evening meal around the fire, the mood would tend to mellow out, losing a lot of the harshness of daytime talk after the sun went down.

And in the darkness around the fire, major activities shifted, and they were music, dance, and conversation. So what was that conversation about? Well, during the firelit time, she found at least among these people in this sample, it was radically different. Quote, night activities steer away from tensions of the day to singing, dancing, religious ceremonies, and enthralling stories.

often about known people. And the difference is huge. I've got a pie chart for you to look at, Rob. Now, I remember during the daytime, like 31% of the talk was about economic issues, things related to work. 34% was the resolving of the social disputes. Only 6% was stories. During the night,

81% of conversation was stories. Radical shift. We're shifting almost overwhelmingly to story mode. Yeah, that is considerable, especially seeing it on the pie graph here. 81%. It just consumes everything. I mean, you got some small percentage still allotted to, you know, shop talk and bickering and some of these other areas.

And then, ooh, 4% for myth. Yeah, and so I think the myth there connects to the idea of storytelling as well, because one of the broad observations that the author makes here is that, is the idea of the night as a time of bigger, broader thinking. And she gives an example where like, okay, during the daytime, you might have people devoting a significant amount of conversation to a personal dispute about marriage. They're discussing a marital dispute. Right.

Whereas during the night, instead, you would have interesting and amusing stories about marriages of people in the past, the marriage disputes of sort of characters that are known or people who lived in generations ago.

Or during the day, you might have a sort of work-related conversation about a certain kind of hunting pursuit or about a kind of gift exchange scenario that's a part of the culture. And then during the night, instead, you would have conversations about stories about people who engaged in those activities in the past or in the distant past or in the recent past.

So in the daytime, you talk about the issues and problems that you're currently facing. At nighttime, you hear stories of others who faced similar issues, and those issues are put in the context of some kind of big picture. The author emphasizes the use of nighttime talk and conversation as a way of

create generating and regulating ideas about the bigger picture beyond the, the little things you do here, here and there to get through the day, the big picture of sort of what, uh, what, what our people are and what life is and so forth that arises from these nighttime conversations that are largely storytelling and conversation about storytelling and,

So the author writes, quote, night talk plays an important role in evoking higher orders of theory of mind via the imagination, conveying attributes of people in broad networks or virtual communities and transmitting the big picture of cultural institutions that generate regularity of behavior, cooperation and trust at the regional level.

And so I thought this was so interesting because, again, I want to stress the caveats I mentioned earlier. You can't know what all people long ago did based on what one group of people have more recently done. But this kind of observation does show one way people respond to a certain type of environment, the regime of technology and environmental surroundings of meeting by firelight after the sun sets.

And I think it's interesting. It's interesting as a sort of precedent that possibly the introduction of fire may have opened up new dimensions of creativity and abstract thinking about ourselves and about what our societies are, this idea of sort of big picture ideas about what life is.

Specifically by creating this kind of imaginative storytelling space of economically unproductive time. You know, it's like time where you can't really effectively get work done, but you're here and so you can think in terms of stories to think about the past and explore models of the world out loud. I know you probably thought along similar lines, but I'm instantly reminded of the lyrics to Rocky Erickson's If You Have Ghosts.

in the night I am real, you know? Ooh. Yeah. I did not think about that, but yeah, because I mean, depending on how you slice it here, I mean, you're talking about a time when one can become more real, like your existence becomes a, you know, this is the kind of thing that Mercedes Eliade, I think would have gotten into perhaps, you know, the idea that when you start viewing yourself within the context of like the, the mythic, um,

and stories that have been told, like the self can become more actualized, can become more real, you know? Well, yeah, in many ways. In one way, by gaining perspectives on our individual problems, by placing them within this, like, larger context of stories about the past or stories about mythical figures and characters and, you know,

and so forth, who may have faced similar issues and overcome them in some way or another. It allows you to just kind of like to see another side of many things.

And to the extent that this might be a more general pattern of how humans respond to light where nighttime is illuminated primarily with fire, it makes me wonder, do we still kind of activate some of these ways of thinking when we seek out fire in any context, when we seek out fire as a light source even optionally?

or, uh, and also makes me think about, and the author actually does get into this, into the paper, the contrast with electrical lighting. So like say you move out of this kind of environment and into an environment where in the nighttime you can have super bright lights on and it's like, well, might as well get some more work done. Yeah. Yeah. That's one of the gifts of the electronic age is, Oh, well there's enough illumination to work all the time. I know that's true enough. Um,

You know, work on passion projects, certainly, but also work on chores, work on your day work and so forth, your homework. Yeah. So I wonder if having all this productive time in electric lights is maybe robbing people of some time that they might otherwise really benefit from getting kind of a storytelling and imaginative big picture perspective on life. Yeah. I mean, and likewise, I can't help but think about that other fire, the holy fire of television. Yeah.

Because we think about Netflix and chill, I guess is the saying, right? That means watching television, right? Or is that something else? It means something else. Okay, well...

Well, OK, one could interpret it as me just watching television, though. So let's just like the idea of, OK, I need to chill in the evening. I just want to watch some shows. I want to watch a movie or I want to settle down with a good book or I want to play a nice narrative video game or whatever. You know, it's like based on what we've been discussing here, like this is the time to do it. This is the time to

at once lose yourself in the narrative, but also kind of expand yourself within that narrative and allow yourself to sort of like leech on to these, uh, mythic ideas of self and struggle and, and so forth. But in, in a weird way, that too is kind of like put at odds with the, uh, electrically illuminated world where we're like, well, I could be working instead of watching Netflix instead of reading, you know, a book that is, you know, maybe has nothing to do with, uh,

with your day job or isn't like, you know, it's just kind of a guilty pleasure read or what have you, or certainly whatever video game you're into. You know, you could be working, yes, but maybe all of this is still vitally important to who you are and your ability to continue on through the day. Yeah, yeah.

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.

With Shipt same-day delivery, you get more than just groceries delivered by hand from your favorite stores. You get to hunker down for holiday movie night, toast mimosas with friends, or check out the neighborhood light displays. So while a shopper with Shipt checks off your grocery list or makes that last-minute trip to the store, you get the greatest gift of all, more you. Get more from the holidays. Download the Shipt app and start shopping today.

What is chronic migraine? It's 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, onobotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not approved for adults with migraine who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Ask your doctor about Botox.

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.

Hi everyone, it's Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb from the Today Show. We love this time of year. There's so much to celebrate. That's right. Nobody does the holidays quite like today. All season long, join us for special performances with the brightest stars. Plus, festive recipes to whip up the perfect holiday feast and great deals on the hottest toys and gifts for everyone on your list. So join us every morning on NBC to make today your home for the

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. ♪

Anyway, that's what I had on the qualitative difference of firelight. And I don't know, I'm still having lots of ideas about this, but I think I got to stop there for now. But I know you had some more on the toad buried beneath the hearthstone. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. You know, now that we've discussed the illumination by firelight and all the ways that it changes the human experience, it's time to really get down and discuss human and animal sacrifice. That's the way we like to land things with our holiday episodes.

So, yeah, I want you to think back first, first to what we talked about in the initial episode regarding artifacts and symbols that have been secreted away in homes and voids in the walls and under the hearthstone and behind the fireplace. You know, as a form of apotropaic magic, protective magic, wards against witchcraft, demons, fairies and ghosts.

Secondly, I'll bring you back to that cold open, that excerpt from the poem by Robert Graves and its invocation of not only a lightning-touched tree, but an animal buried beneath a hearthstone. In the case of the poem, it was a frog.

So we've discussed animal and human sacrifice before on the show, and today is going to be more of the same. Why Christmas, you might ask? Well, I would say, well, what better time than Christmas? To quote the late, great Terry Pratchett in his holiday book, The Hogfather, there was a great TV adaptation of this as well, quote, the very oldest stories are sooner or later about blood.

So you find, of course, examples of blood sacrifice in every human culture. We've discussed this plenty of times before. And one pervasive form of alleged rite of sacrifice concerns the sanctification of ground upon which something is built or is being built or is about to be finished in its construction.

And in some cases, it has been alleged that these were carried out while the victims yet breathed, though obviously there's plenty of room for such builders' rights and construction sacrifices to be distorted through the telling of history. So, you know, you can very well imagine a scenario where an animal is sacrificed but not entombed alive, but then it becomes entombed alive in the telling of the tale.

We can't really get into all the nuances right now, but suffice to say, burying something in or under the foundation of a building has long been a symbolic, superstitious, or outright religious right. And it's one that still echoes through modern practices, you know, such as laying relics in, you know, in such a place or even a time capsule. The burying of a time capsule is ultimately kind of connected to these ideas as well.

And we've actually touched on, in recent episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, on some examples of animals or humans allegedly entombed within or alongside constructions. This came up in our Haunted Railways episodes, and it also came up in our discussion of the horned lizard. Oh, yeah. I forget what building in Texas the horned lizard in question was walled up in, but then was unearthed and said to be still alive.

I remember there was something funny about it, so I had to look it up. It was the name. They called him Ol' Rip. Oh, yeah, Ol' Rip. I guess named after Rip Van Winkle. But I think the story was that, you know, you know that this thing was really alive after decades of being buried without food or water because there's like a judge in Eastland, Texas, who said so. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So go back and listen to that episode if you want to hear more on it. But for our purposes here today, we're trying to stay more hearth and hearth adjacent. So I want to refer back to Brian Hoggard's excellent 2019 book, Magical House Protection, The Archaeology of Counter Witchcraft. We talked about witch bottles and shoes, but two other items are also frequently found in the voids of homes, according to Hoggard, and those are dried cats and horse skulls.

So let's talk about dried cats first. And I will add that my own cat has decided to sit in my lap just for this part, as if she sensed that it was going to be feline-related. So sweet. Along those lines, no shame if you want to skip this part. I'm a cat person, and I don't love the idea of anyone hurting a cat, obviously. It's okay if they hurt us. That's the deal we made with them. But yeah, I am going to discuss...

dead cats in walls and floors and alleged cases of animal sacrifice with cats. I'm not going to get into gory details, but, you know, fair enough. Okay. I'm strapped in. Okay.

So, yeah, this was at least to some extent a thing. As Hoggard discusses, there is a case to be made that practices involving shoes, which we discussed in the last example, are simply replacements for older rites involving the sacrifice of animals. And there are examples of this in other cultures as well, where one may move away from one form of sacrifice, but then you end up with proxies and replacements and so forth.

But yeah, the reality is dried up cat carcasses are frequently found in old homes in Europe, parts of North America, and even in Australia. So, you know, basically coming out of European, you know, very much steeped in European traditions, but then flowing over into some colonial areas as well.

They're found in roof spaces, under floors, between walls, and sometimes in voids that seem quite inaccessible. Sometimes the cat has actually been posed. We're talking with like wire work so that it looks like they are actively hunting. And sometimes there is a rodent or two or three added as well, perhaps in the cat's clutches or about to be killed by the cat.

A haunting tableau, again, hidden away in the wall or under the floor. Now, I would imagine in some of these cases, it might be disputable whether a dried-up cat hidden under a floor is

I mean, in some cases it might be clear, like if there's no way it could have gotten in, it's a closed off space. But I guess in some cases there would be dispute about whether a cat actually just got stuck and died there or whether it is a dried cat that was intentionally deposited. That's correct. Yeah. The idea of accidental enclosure. Because if you know cats, you know that they are little explorers. They'll go places they're not supposed to go. And it's not impossible that they could get stuck there.

And that's something Hoggard discusses here. So a lot of people hold that many of these bodies, these cat carcasses, these dried cats, are due to cats becoming trapped, perhaps during construction, or otherwise crawling into such spaces and dying from some pre-existing injury or illness. Cats often will crave that kind of seclusion for their final moments. Hoggard does, he entertains this idea, but

he suggests that there are probably fewer cases of accidental trappings. He argues that, okay, a cat crawling into a wall or a floor of your house and then dying and decaying, that's obviously going to create an odor. It's going to be hard to ignore. But on the other hand, he argues that it's often difficult or impossible to tell if many of these animals wound up due to happenstance or intentional human activity. It's certainly on the table.

Some of these dried cats inevitably got there on their own. It basically comes down to a discussion of, well, what are the most likely situations for some of these cats? Like, why are they there? And Hoggard cites a 1951 paper by Margaret M. Howard published in the journal Man. I had to look it up to get more of the details about it, but it's titled Dried Cats and

And in this, Howard lays out three different theories as to why cats pop up in these situations. And so these are the three. I'm going to go and give you number three. Number three that she entertains is accidental enclosure, which we just talked about.

She acknowledges that accidental enclosure is always a possible explanation for cases that don't strongly suggest either of the aforementioned theories, the aforementioned theories that I'm about to explain. So sorry, getting into a little backwards. But I mean, obviously, the case is if the cat has been wired up to look like it's hunting rats, you know,

all but taxidermied within a void in the wall, that cat had some help. That is not accidental enclosure. So a cat that is put there in the wall, under the floor, where have you, how does it get there? Well, the first theory is indeed a foundation sacrifice.

And Howard highlights the use of foundation sacrifices in global cultural practices and points to human sacrifice as the obvious forerunner, with examples from European history and lore, such as Irish abbot Saint Columba's calling for a human to venture into the foundations of the church at Iona to offer themselves as a sacrifice, as just one example of a rite that originated in practices to appease earth spirits or deities in the construction of a building, and then

gets passed down, ultimately in non-human sacrificial echoes of the original practices. She also points to roof tree sacrifices to forest gods that were also made in olden days, with the blood flowing down the sides of the roof. And she also highlights just the general bad time that cats had through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance,

They were often seen as ill omens, as agents of the devil, witches, familiars, and all of this despite their positive reputation as mousers. But she suspects that, broadly speaking, cases of foundation sacrifice, these are actually occurring later on.

in the record than the next example, the next theory that I'm going to discuss, and that ultimately foundation sacrifices are perhaps less probable an explanation compared to this one.

And this is the idea that they were vermin scares. So again, think to that idea of a lifelike positioning of a mummified cat scaring away rodents, perhaps with two or three rodents in its clutches. The idea here is that it kind of functions like a scarecrow. It's intended to scare rodents away from the insides of your walls and the insides of your house, right?

um, from the crawl space and what have you. Like, let's actually stuff a cat, put it in there, have some rodents there, because it's going to be more effective if the, the, the dead cat is in a, this grisly tableau of dispatching rodents. Okay. So this is the, if I only had a brain, uh, version of the cat. Yeah, essentially. Um,

And, of course, this idea of vermin scares, I think it probably goes without saying, but this is not a non-supernatural, non-superstitious idea. Like, obviously, there's a certain amount of superstition to this as well. There's, like, a, there's a power to this tableau that clearly goes beyond the idea of, well, when a rat looks at this, they're going to leave the house. They're not going to hang around here because look at this horror show. You know, it's, it clearly goes beyond that as well. Uh-huh.

So that is the theory that Howard seemed to favor. But I think you tend to encounter a certain amount of drift on which of these three primary explanations are going to be employed. And obviously, there are going to be cases where it's very clear that the cat was put in there for some sort of a ritual and or vermin scare purpose. Mm-hmm.

By the way, I mentioned Terry Pratchett earlier, and I had actually already put the Terry Pratchett quote in the notes before I found Hoggard referencing Terry Pratchett in this section of the book. He brings up this idea suggested by Terry Pratchett that sacrifices, those foundation sacrifices, would have been made not only to deities, but to the buildings themselves. The idea that, you know,

Later on, you know, various tragedies can befall a person in a building. And in a sense, it's like that's the house's doing. That's the building's doing. And so you want to appease not necessarily gods, but the house itself, which is an interesting concept. I'm going to go ahead and prepay my tax here. Yeah.

Now, coming back to hearthstones specifically, Hoggard does cite an example from England's Blackton Hall. You can look up Blackton Hall. There's a Wikipedia page on it, and you can see a picture of it. This was a building built in the 16th century. But he points out that beneath the hearthstone during some construction, they found a, quote, constructed chamber into which the live cat was placed, and it contained a dried cat. Yeah.

Now, I'm not entirely certain of indeed this would have been a live cat that was placed there. But at any rate, we end up with a dead, dried cat. So fill in the blanks for yourself.

Now, since we mentioned thunder and toads in the cold open, I also want to point out that Hoggard lists thunderstorms as being an item that is sometimes hidden away in homes. These are stones, often actually arrowheads, thought to have been created by lightning strikes. And thus, they would protect—it was thought—they would protect the building as lightning never strikes twice. Right.

Yeah, we mentioned thunderstorms a little bit in the series we did a couple weeks ago. It was when we were talking about lightning strikes of trees that would be enclosed as sacred trees. But yeah, the idea of thunderstorms, often these were, as you said, arrowheads or like hand axes. They were...

tools made by Stone Age peoples that were later found and then like, yeah, this must be the gods doing or lightning did that. And also reminds me of our episodes on elf shot as well. Memory serves sometimes arrowheads were interpreted as being like clear evidence of elf shot. Yep. Stone Age arrowheads found and then people were like, it must be the elves. Yeah.

Now, as for toads, yes, toads and frogs also pop up in Hoggard's book. Sometimes they are inside of witch bottles, or at least pieces of them are in witch bottles, but also just in general. So they were associated with magic.

And sometimes secreted away in parts of a house as a ward against illness. There's an example of like pinned frogs, I think, behind a wall. And there's also a story he shares about how it was said that a witch might keep live toads under the floorboard and there'd be like a hole for easy access. Yeah.

I wonder if Graves actually had this practice in mind when talking about the toad mirrored underneath the hearthstone, or is that just a coincidence? I don't know. It seems, I mean, Graves seems like the kind of chap who would have been well-read on these matters.

He was very interested in like Celtic paganism. Yeah. And wrote stuff about it that from what I understand is completely wrong and not useful at all in terms of informational value, but is a pretty great read nonetheless. Yeah. So yeah, I imagine he was very much, all this was on his radar.

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Hi everyone, it's Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb from the Today Show. We love this time of year. There's so much to celebrate. That's right, nobody does the holidays quite like today. All season long, join us for special performances with the brightest stars. Plus, festive recipes to whip up the perfect holiday feast and great deals on the hottest toys and gifts for everyone on your list. So join us every morning on NBC to make today your home for the

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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All right. One final idea concerning bits of animals buried under the hearthstone, and that is the idea of horse skulls buried under the hearthstone, which is something that Ogert also talks about. And this is another thing that I chatted with him about in a past interview episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. He goes into more detail. But basically, horse skulls have been found in the floors of homes throughout Europe, the British Isles, and the United States. And he specifically cites cases where they are found under the hearthstone itself.

According to Hoggard, there are three primary theories regarding such horse skulls and their placement. One is that they are the remains of a foundation sacrifice, as we've been discussing, you know, appease the deities, make the ground holy or appease the house itself. Yeah.

Another is that it's simply there as a token of luck or perhaps getting into some of these areas of apotropaic magic. It's a spell. It's protecting us. And in this case especially, you get into sort of things we've talked about concerning the horse before on the show, that the horse is like this very close animal to human existence.

but as often the case, you take all the meat off of it, the horse skull looks really weird and seems to be grinning a demonic grin. So you can imagine that serving as like a sort of Gorgonian head to ward away evil. Mm, yeah.

But another theory, a very popular theory, is that these skulls served partially or primarily as an acoustic enhancer. What? So the idea here is that horse skulls were placed in the floor in order to enhance the acoustics of dancing, like in the dance hall or threshing floors, both activities with positive and protective supernatural associations.

And in this, the practice is reminiscent of the sealing of acoustic vases in the walls of medieval churches, he writes, which were, these were apparently based on some of the writings of Vitruvius on architecture. And it was thought to enhance choral music. So have these like sealed vases inside the walls of a church. Bizarre. I've never heard of this. Yeah.

But Hoggard ultimately argues that he thinks that the horse skulls were primarily used to ward off evil and that a particular Norfolk account suggests a form of foundation sacrifice. And he also argues that really when you start looking around at the records about the use of horse skulls and the foundations and under the hearthstone and so forth—

If it were merely for acoustics, you would probably see more written about it because people would be up front to be like, yeah, I'm dumping a bunch of horse heads under my floorboards. It's about acoustics, man. Do you want the sound to sound like trash in here? No. Church is fine with that. Yeah. Like people would be up front about it. But if it was for a magical purpose, uh,

then you're going to be maybe more secretive about it because the church isn't telling you to bury horse skulls under your floor. You're doing it because you have a plan B to keep the evil away. And they might not approve of it, but you know that it's absolutely necessary.

Well, I would never harm an animal for this purpose, but assuming I can source some already available carcasses, I've really got decisions to make if I ever build my own hearthstone. So do I go horse? Do I go cat? Do I go toad? Well, you can get some horse heads. I mean, there are sources for that, right? You can get them used. You don't have to make the head yourself. Oh, I can get you a horse head by three o'clock this afternoon. Yeah.

Well, I think we're out of time for today's episode, but it's funny. We still had some other stuff we wanted to talk about. I don't know how exactly this will mesh with our schedule because next week we got some days off for the holiday, but we definitely had more fireplace stuff we wanted to talk about. So I don't know. Maybe we'll come back to it yet. Yeah, I didn't even get even get into my whole thing about how thinking about evil spirits crawling out of the fireplace or out of the hearth.

And then comparing the hearth to the television, of course, just brings us right to the ring and the idea of this evil wraith-like entity crawling out of your television set. Like, it makes perfect sense if you think of the television as a hearth, you know? Well, actually, that would be a good static ambient TV. So you've got, you know, logs burning. You could have Andy Warhol's Empire where you're just watching the skyscraper through the night. Or you could just watch that well and see if anything happens. Yeah. It's like a seven-hour video.

But sometimes something happens, but you don't know when it's going to happen or if you have the cut where it happens. Oh, boy.

All right. We're going to go and close it out there then. Happy holidays if you celebrate. We'll be back with new episodes after next week. And we have some fun vault episodes and Weird House rewinds to keep you happy while we're out. Oh, but we still have a new Weird House coming out tomorrow. Oh, yeah, of course. And it's a holiday episode, gosh darn it. So, yes, there's one more. Is it ever.

All right. So, yeah, just a reminder, Stuff to Blow Your Mind, primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about weird films 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.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. ♪♪♪

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