From the Vault: The Ancient and Occult History of the “A Christmas Story” Leg Lamp
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It is Saturday, so we have another Vault episode for you. This one's a bit older than some of the Vault episodes that we roll out. This is an episode that originally published 12-23-2021.

Seems like a very long time ago, but I guess it wasn't really that long ago. This is our episode, The Ancient and Occult History of the A Christmas Story Leg Lamp. Yes, the leg lamp from the 1983 holiday film, A Christmas Story. We get into it. We talk about the deep ancient and occult history of lamps and other objects shaped in the likeness of a human leg or foot. So it's a holiday celebration. So let's slip it on.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I'm Joe McCormick. And this is going to be our last core, our last new core episode of the year, and

And what do we have for you here? Another holiday episode. And we really didn't know until just a few days ago exactly what the holiday episode would be. We were talking about doing an episode on reindeer-related stuff, and maybe we'll do that next year. And then we were talking about, well, we've done a previous episode where we talked about holiday inventions, Christmas inventions, and so forth. Maybe we could do another one of those. And, you know, we started looking into some topics, and

And we wound up focusing entirely upon the 1983 holiday film, A Christmas Story. Well, not just on the movie, on the movie's most sacred prop. That's right. I mean, for a little bit there, we were thinking, well, look at all the things there are to talk about in A Christmas Story. We could talk about soap poisoning, freezing your tongue to a flagpole, the dangers posed by BB guns, how furnaces work, etc.

I gotta say, having looked into the medical literature on soap poisoning, first of all, it is a real thing. Second, that's some pretty dark territory. Not the most fun way to head into the holidays. Well, I mean, it's pretty dark in the Christmas story. You know, there he is. He's a child and he's blind and his parents feel such remorse for having him put that bar of soap in his mouth. Now, from what I could tell in my brief investigation, I don't think it's dangerous to put a bar of soap in your mouth for a few minutes, but you definitely don't want to, like, eat a significant amount of

Right. So soap poisoning is a thing. Yes. Yeah. Don't swallow soap. But like you said, we're not focusing on the soap here. We're going to be talking about the old man's major award. We're going to be talking about that leg lamp. Now, Rob, I don't know if you've had this experience, but I can say most of my exposure to A Christmas Story, the movie,

comes in the form of a sort of running, droning background noise that's going on at some kind of family house around Christmas while it's just playing on an infinite loop on some cable TV station that is turned on in a room I might not even be in very much. But...

when this happens, I noticed that this must have something to do with like the patterns with which I come and go into certain rooms in the house. So that would be an interesting thing to study on its own, but I will pretty frequently have the experience of seeing one scene in the movie, like five times in the same day. And it's always the same scene. And for me, it has definitely been the scene where the old man is in the house and a

big crate arrives and it was, we get the lines about it being fragile and, uh, he digs through the straw and then pulls out this glorious leg lamp. Yeah. I have, I have a similar experience with a Christmas story. Um, it would, it,

there were, there are, there have been some dedicated viewings of it, uh, you know, throughout the years. Um, but most of it, it's just, it's on TV during Christmas and therefore you watch it or you watch part of it. And so when you actually sit down and watch it in its entirety, there'll be these scenes that you remember really vividly. And then there are scenes that you didn't realize were part of the movie at all. That sort of thing. I should probably inform everyone what this movie is. A number of you are probably familiar with it. Some of you are not. Uh,

This was a 1983 holiday film that was based on the writings of Gene Shepard, particularly on the book In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash. It's one boy's account of childhood holiday dreams, desires, and fears. It's a fun movie with some solid laughs in it, some good heart, but not to a sappy degree, especially for a holiday film. And in some ways, you could almost think of it as kind of like a proto-Simpsons, you know? Like it's...

some of the gags that they get up to in a Christmas story are the sorts of things that would happen on The Simpsons later on, but of course, The Simpsons leans more into, more into the satire and more into like pop cultural references. You know what I'm talking about. Can't you imagine an episode where Homer gets some sort of obnoxious award that he wants to display at the front of the house? Oh,

Oh, yeah. And Marge doesn't like it. And maybe something terrible ends up happening to the award and he blames her. Yeah. Now that you say that, I can't imagine that being a plot line. Okay. Yeah. I mean, Ralphie is essentially a good boy, whereas Bart is a bad boy. So, you know, we have to take that into account as well.

Yeah, Bart would not dream of getting a BB gun for Christmas. He would just go and, I don't know, shoplift a BB gun or something. Yeah, oh, well, I mean, I hope he learned his lesson from that Christmas episode of The Simpsons where he did shoplift, remember? Oh, that's right. Oh, I remember that one's actually very sad because his mother is very disappointed in him. Yeah, yeah, we just touched that one the other day. Yeah, it's a solid episode. Like, that sort of Simpsons episode reminds me a lot of this. Though, in a weird way, that Simpsons episode is more serious

than A Christmas Story is. Yeah. What is it he steals? It's like a video game. It's like the Bonestorm 4 or whatever. Yeah, it's essentially like a Mortal Kombat type game that just seems like the greatest thing ever. And they have like the muscled Santa Claus in the commercial. Yeah.

Yeah. So we're not going to give A Christmas Story the full Weird House Cinema treatment or anything here today. But I do want to just point out real quickly a few of the people involved in it because it's kind of fun. First of all, it was directed by Bob Clark, who also directed the notorious holiday proto-slasher Black Christmas in 1974. Yeah.

which I have never seen, but it had a great cast, including Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder, Keira Dullea from 2001 A Space Odyssey, and of course, Weird House Cinema favorite, John Saxon. Everybody at home, do a push-up for John Saxon right now. He also directed Death Dream, Murder by Decree, which is a Sherlock Holmes versus Jack the Ripper story, two Porky's movies, two Baby Geniuses movies. Oh, boy.

Porky's and baby geniuses. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But still, there's some good stuff in there. He passed away in 2007, but I think a Christmas story is likely to remain his legacy. Like, this is the one that's going to really stick. Though I guess Black Christmas also has its place in film history as well. Sure. Yeah.

And as far as the cast, it has a wonderful cast, A Christmas Story. But the two main characters worth pointing out for our purposes, the old man is played by the always terrific Darren McGavin. This is the guy who played Colchak the Night Stalker. I think he was also in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Raw Deal. Okay. Yeah.

And the mom is played by Melinda Dillon, who was in Harry and the Hendersons, as well as Spontaneous Combustion, which is one of the films that we covered on Weird House Cinema this year. Did she play like the creepy scientist? Am I right about that? It's really hard to remember. Everybody else just kind of grows dim against the burning fire that is Dora's performance in that.

Brad Dourif is just so good. Yeah, I just double-checked. She's the German scientist. I think at some point, Brad Dourif goes to her house, and maybe she catches on fire. I don't know. Probably. That's generally how it goes. But I don't want to sell her short, because Melinda Dillon is a great actor as well. She was in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Absence of Malice in 1981. She was nominated for two Academy Awards and one Tony Award.

Okay, but we don't want to leave anybody out for the like eight people in the audience who have never seen this movie or even just seen this sequence in the movie on five times in the same day on Christmas.

But what's the deal with the major award? Well, it is, as we've been saying, a major award. It is something he has won for his achievements in a game. And what is the game, Joe? Well, I think it's like a trivia contest, maybe done through the mail from a newspaper. Though I think it's worth saying that...

He actually does not supply most of the answers on the contest. He has to ask Melinda Dillon, and she actually knows the answers. Then he fills them in and sends it off or something and apparently wins this trivia contest by answering questions like, what is the name of the Lone Ranger's nephew's horse? But later in the film, after he receives his major award, when people ask him what it was for, he says it's for mind power. Ha ha ha!

Yeah. So it's this wonderful design. It is a lamp that is shaped like a woman's leg wearing a fishnet stocking with the shade resembling a kind of mini skirt or short hoop dress or something.

And as we learn in the show, it's an item of much controversy in the household. And it's clear that mom does not like this lamp and certainly does not think it belongs at the front of the house where neighbors can see it. You know, it's already, it's becoming a topic of discussion in the neighborhood. And then what happens? There is an accident.

Somebody is cleaning too close to the lamp and it is accidentally destroyed. Now, I think one of the great points of humor in the movie is that it is never made clear why a lamp shaped like a sexy leg is the prize for winning this newspaper contest. Like there's no connection there. Like why would this be what you get? And it's just not explained. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't even say anything about

you know, on the lamp. It's not like the award is shaped like a lamp. No, this is just a lamp that's shaped like a leg.

But he is fond of it. He thinks it is wonderful. She does not. It becomes a controversial issue between the two of them. It is destroyed. An attempt to rebuild the leg lamp seems possible, but we'll never know if it was successful. We suspect that it was not, that this is something that once broken can never be repaired. Well, I think also there's a little bit of subtlety there because when the old man is trying to repair it with glue and failing, you sense in him a kind of

A kind of waning enthusiasm where it may be, in fact, that he is realizing that his wife was correct and thinking that this lamp is rather tacky. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But he didn't want to admit it earlier. Right. Yeah.

So this lamp, this is a hilarious part of the film. This is based on the chapter, My Old Man and the Silsivius Special Award that heralded the birth of pop art from the 1966 novel In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash.

But it's really taken on a life of its own since then. You can now buy replicas of the lamp, reproductions of the lamp in various sizes. You can get Christmas tree ornaments where the Christmas, I mean, you can basically get Christmas tree ornaments of it or even Christmas lights of

of the lamp. Like the lamp has become like this weird symbol all its own. I was reading about it on Reed Crager's blog, Inventors Digest, and apparently Shepard was inspired to create this fictional lamp based on knee-high soda ads

that he remembered seeing in magazines showing two shapely legs up to the knee. He remembered these from when he was a boy. And then for the film, production designer Ruben Fried, he did the rest. And the lamp is apparently protected by two different trademarks. They've been mass produced over the years. And yes, you can buy them today as functional lamps.

When this movie came out, you could only dream of such a thing. I think they made just a handful of these for the film, but now it is achievable by anyone. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe I read somewhere that the original lamp prop made for the film no longer exists. That is what I was reading as well. Yeah. Lost to history, like so many great works. Like many of the artworks of the Parthenon or just the great antiquities that just fade to time.

Well, speaking of antiquities, obviously, this can't be where the story begins and ends, right? There has to be more of it. There has to be more to the lamp that is a leg and the leg that is a lamp. By God, if there's not more to it, we'll make more to it. Absolutely.

Well, let's go to the obvious place to discuss all of this is to go way back and just talk about lamps in general. The lamp in the movie is, of course, an electric lamp with origins in the early 19th century. But the history of illumination technology goes way back, obviously. You can think to our invention episodes on fire technology. And indeed, the most basic form of illumination technology is, of course, a mere torch or a burning brand of some sort or even a very primitive, you know, burning stick.

These will all get it done. But according to Brian M. Fagan and Garrett G. Fagan in the 70 Great Inventions of the Ancient World, wick-burning lamps go back at least as far as the late Paleolithic period. It's 30,000 through 10,000 years ago. All you need is a reservoir of fuel and a wick made from plant fiber or even something like human hair—

And the fuel itself can be any number of things. It can be oil, it can be fat, and sometimes salt was added to oil to keep it from overheating.

Tons of lamps survived from the ancient world as these were, of course, widespread and extremely useful pieces of technology. They illuminate your environment. They turn nighttime – well, it doesn't turn nighttime into day, but it provides some of the illumination that you would have in the daytime in a nice concentrated form. Yeah, and I think one of the things that's useful about a lamp or like a candle – we've talked about this on core episodes of the show before –

is that they provide moderate light for a long period of time. They're constructed so as to gradually, slowly feed the fuel into the flame rather than have the fire just burn through the fuel source as fast as it possibly can like it would with many other things like a lit stick or something. Yeah, so the technology here, the device itself allows you to make the most out of your limited fuel.

Now, real quick, I want to just mention the Fagans quickly. Brian Fagan, of course, Brian M. Fagan is someone I cite a lot on the show. For starters, that Great Inventions book is super useful, but he's written a number of volumes and still has books coming out, including a new book with Nadia Durrani titled Climate Chaos, Lessons on Survival from Our Ancestors. Now,

Now, the other Fagan, though, Garrett G. Fagan, was an Irish-American ancient historian best known for his social histories of Roman bathing and the spectacles of the Roman arena. And I could be wrong on this, but I do not believe these two Fagans are related at all. They just happen to work together in this one chapter in the 70 Great Inventions of the Ancient World that deals with illumination technology.

Okay, so lamps go very far back, far into the Paleolithic period. Right, and lamp technology of this basic sort can be found from throughout Mesopotamia. And the shape of the reservoir varies. So you can use basically found objects as your reservoir. So seashells were often used because these were naturally occurring shallow bowls with ridges to accommodate a wick at one end.

But then once you start making artificial reservoirs for your oil or your fat, whatever you're burning, your fuel, then you're making them out of pottery or even metal. And this allows for all manner of simple and ornate lamp designs. And you know where we're going with that, right? Oh, of course. Yeah, the obvious question is how many of these lamps were shaped like legs? Well, are you going to tell me?

Well, this is a difficult question to answer, Joe. Humans have, of course, always loved to craft things in the likeness of animals and or themselves. And animal legs and feet have always been a favorite motif. In fact, Fagan includes an image of one in the book. It's a first century CE brazier from Pompeii with beautiful animal feet supporting it.

And of course, we still see this today with, you know, tubs, anything. It's like the human artisan can't help it. It's like, well, I have put feet upon this device

or this prop or this piece of furniture, could I not make those feet like actual feet? And I guess you could even say there's a bit of biomimicry there as well. Like if you're going to support an object with these like stumpy pods, well, maybe make them look like a foot. That's true. In fact, you've got me thinking about how often the legs of fancier pieces of furniture are

are kind of shaped to be organic or flesh-like in a way. They might have kind of curves on them similar to a human leg or to an animal leg. Even if they're not explicitly trying to depict a human or animal leg, like with toes and stuff. Right. Though, of course, there are plenty of explicit depictions out there where it's just like, it just straight up looks like the foot of a lion or a goat or what have you. Yeah.

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So looking around in the history of lamp designs, you know, I'm sure I missed something interesting. But I've come across two different examples from Greek and Roman traditions that are pretty interesting, particularly when dealing with the Greek ascos and the Greek alabastron.

So an ascos is an ancient Greek pottery vessel used to pour liquids such as oils. So it is not quite a lamp, though it could have been used to store lamp oil and could have been used to refill lamps. And many of these were decorated and decorational, sometimes in the form of animals.

And then an alabastron is similar. It's a pottery vessel often used for holding oils or perfumes named for the carved alabaster containers from Egypt that started the design key. And the key thing here is that these are generally elongated. So they are, despite their very nature and their sort of generic form, kind of leg-shaped.

So you'll find both of these in various shapes and forms, and they're littered throughout museums and collections around the world. But I was able to find some images of, for starters, there's a leg-shaped ascos or alabastron that is or was in the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Though I've had trouble finding out any additional information about it, I might have to ask anyone out there who has visited the

the Royal Ontario Museum or can visit it now to go in and try and get me more answers on this. But the image I found is indeed an alabasteron, or it appears to be an alabasteron. It's hard to figure out what the scale is here. It is shaped like a, essentially like a naked human leg.

And it's freestanding. It looks like it maybe has sandals drawn on it. And it was, yeah, used to hold oil or something. This gives new meaning to the expression that someone who can hold their liquor has a, quote, hollow leg. Yes, this is indeed a hollow leg. I wonder if that, yeah, I didn't even think about that phrase.

Now, I was able to find more information on another one. There is a Greek pottery alabasteron in the shape of a grieved or armored leg from Corinth or Rhodes circa 6th century BCE, and it's part or was part, I'm not sure, of the Kalos collection in London. I included an image of this for you to look at as well, Joe. So this is less decorative material.

But also is not a naked leg. It has armor on it. Yeah, this is more like an ancient Robocop leg. Yeah.

And the Kalos Collection website shares the following, quote, The Kalos example above is a very rare and fine alabasteron that takes the shape of a leg protected by a greave. Dating to the 6th century BCE, it is an interesting example of a plastic vase from this period. And note the use of the term plastic here. It's not modern plastic, obviously. This just means that it's molded, and this is derived from the Greek verb plasine, meaning to mold. Mm-hmm.

Quote,

There is a very similar example of this rare type in the Museum of Farmacia in Portugal, and they include an inventory number. And I was able to look it up. It's number 10892. And you get kind of a delightful rear view of this freestanding hollow leg. Okay. So it seems like a bunch of ancient Greeks really pouring stuff out of legs. Yeah. Now, again, these are not lamps.

They're merely containers that may have contained lamp oil and may have been used to refill lamps. But we're not done yet. So as the Fagans point out, the Roman period was a time of pottery lamp mass production. And lamps of every design were used for not only practical reasons, you know, providing illumination when you need it, but also purely aesthetic reasons and even religious and occult reasons. And that brings us to the next example, the Roman foot lamp. Ooh.

I initially found these on the Farabee Keeper blog by Wayne Farabee, a Brooklyn-based writer. And I have to say, this is quite a good-looking blog. Looks like a lot of interesting content on here if anyone wants to check it out. It's farabeekeeper.wordpress.com. And the great thing here is that we're not just talking about one lamp. We're not talking about, oh, well, here's the Roman foot lamp, and we have no idea why they made this. Instead, we have several different surviving lamps. And

And I've included images for you to look at, Joe. I invite anyone out there to either visit that Farabee website or to do Google image searches so you can pull this up for yourself. Because these are wondrous and really strange to look at. They are lamps in the shape of a human foot, as the name implies, with –

With essentially a stopper or a lid at the aperture where the stump of the disembodied foot would be. And then there is another aperture at the big toe. And it is from this that the wick and therefore the flame would emerge. Right. So I guess you would hold this by the handle at the back of the foot. So you're holding it like behind the heel and then you would have the flame sticking out of the big toe at the front. Right.

Yes, if you were holding it. But then, as we'll discuss, there are some questions regarding exactly what one does with a foot lamp. But in looking at it, too, it also reminds me a bit of depictions of the hand of glory, the occult item that is supposed to be like the disembodied hand of a criminal's corpse that is then transformed into this magical item that burns candlelight from the fingertips and has strange energies and effects. Mm-hmm.

Except this is not a hand. This is a foot. It's not a real foot. It's a ceramic foot. And, you know, it's a foot of pottery. And yeah, there is this flame that is emitting from either in front of the toe or from the toe itself. It depends on exactly how the sculptor has arranged it, you know.

Now, what I would wonder is, is this just like because somebody wanted an interesting lamp and they made lamps that look like looked like all kinds of things? Or would a foot lamp have a particular significance in, say, a religious or political context or something like that?

Yeah, and that is the riddle that the rest of us are left having to solve. So, Farabee points out that the symbols and motifs of the ancient Romans don't always make sense to us today, which I think is a very fair point.

And he says that the best explanation that he could find were that these were sort of literal footlights placed on the floor or ground, especially at the base of murals, which is interesting. It's still hard to figure out exactly like what that means. Is it just, you know, pure novelty? It's like, well, it's...

it's a foot lamp or it's a lamp that goes on the ground where our feet are. Let's make it in the shape of a foot as well. Well, to call back to the Simpsons, that kind of reminds me of why is there corn on the curtains in the kitchen? I don't know, kitchen, food, corn. Yeah, or imagine a time traveler visiting our current age and finding solar-powered outdoor lights that look like mushrooms.

Why do they look like mushrooms? Well, I mean, it basically comes down to they're on the ground where mushrooms are. So why not make them look like mushrooms? It amuses us. It just makes sense. Yes.

But I decided to look into this a little bit deeper, and I looked in a book titled Light and Darkness in Ancient Greek Myth and Religion from 2010. This has numerous authors on it, but is edited by Christophilus and Levaniuk. And they mentioned that Roman footlamps were used in incubation rituals, citing a couple of sources as well that I tried to follow, but I don't think they actually have English translations.

So incubation rituals or dream incubation rituals involve sleeping in sacred places in order to receive dreams or visions.

And it seems that copious amounts of lamps were often associated with many of the sites where you would engage in incubation rituals, as described in a book by Sandra Blakely titled God's Objects in Ritual Practice. I don't remember what episode it was in the past, but somehow this came up. I think we were talking about ancient rituals for dream incubation, specifically with regard to the Greek god of healing and medicine, Asclepius, where...

People who were sick and wanted healing would come to the temple of Asclepius and actually sleep in the temple in order to – like they'd make an offering or do a ritual and they'd sleep in the temple in order to receive a dream from the god as a form of cure for their illness. Yeah, there you go. That would be dream incubation. That's what we're talking about here. But –

How do these lamps come into play? I found another source that had some wonderful insight here. And this was a 1946 paper titled Material on the Cult of Serapis by Dorothy Kent Hill. And I'm going to read a quote from it here. But first, I want to run through a couple of things here so that everyone will know what's being referred to.

So first of all, a ureus is a curling snake motif, probably best recognized as a symbol of divine authority on the heads of Egyptian sarcophaguses. So I think everyone's probably seen one of these before, you know, like a hooded cobra or a snake that is emerging from a headdress or from the head of one of these artistic depictions. Also known as a boss snake. Okay, yeah.

And then Serapis was a Greco-Egyptian deity. He was introduced, but not necessarily created, by Greek pharaoh Ptolemy I Soter as an attempt to unify Greek and Egyptian culture. Specifically, as Geraldine Pinch points out in Egyptian mythology A to Z, he was meant to be a combination of Apis and Osiris and Zeus and Dionysus.

Now, Serapis is often depicted with something on his head that might be confused by the casual viewer as maybe something that is also involved in illumination. Like, it looks like you look at images of him, and it kind of looks like you're supposed to put a candle on top of his head. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

it doesn't really look like a hat or anything. It just looks like there's some kind of like container or bucket or something attached to his head in the form that he's in now as a piece of statuary or something. Yeah. So at first I was thinking, well, maybe it's illumination is involved in more ways than one here. But as it turns out, Serapis is often depicted with this thing on his head called a modius, which is a basket grain measure, a Greek symbol for the land of the dead. Yeah.

Now, in this text by Dorothy Kent Hill, she includes two images of bronze lamps in the form of human feet.

And they're very much like we've described thus far, except there's an extra interesting thing about them. So yes, you have the big toe or something just beyond the big toe that is clearly designed for the wick to go in and for flame to come out of. There is the larger aperture at the stump of the disembodied foot. But in both of these, you also have a rod that's basically going up from the base of the heel, right?

And this is something that she ends up reflecting on. I should also add at the top of this rod that's emerging from the base of the heel, we see...

Once more, this ureus symbol. We see the curled snake. Oh yeah, there it is with the hood flared. So this is what she had to say. Quote, lamps modeled after parts of the body, especially the foot, were very common in antiquity. Such a lamp might reflect no more than a whimsical mood of a craftsman. But the ureus immediately suggests a connection with the giant detached serapis feed recently studied by Dow and Upson.

On these monuments, the urias is usually curled somewhere in the neighborhood of the ankle. Here it coils on a rod which rises at the back of the foot.

What

Wait a minute. So I feel like I must be understanding this wrong, but does this mean this would be a foot with a head on the leg of the foot and then a snake over the head? Yeah, yeah. That's what I am to understand here. It's kind of like, here's a foot. Let's put a—or maybe we should think in reverse. I have a bust of a god I want to display. I want to display it. I don't want to just lay it on the floor, though. I need something to hold it up. And also, I need to illuminate it.

Well, I need a foot and I need a foot that emits fire. And then, you know, they're able to work the uraeus into it as the rod that is holding the bust above the foot. And there's more because she writes, quote,

Although Serapis was by no means the only deity honored on lamps, his frequent presence there is evidence for the probability of his guardianship over this bronze foot, referring to the example that she's talking about in the article. Certainly, however, there are not good grounds for connecting all foot-shaped lamps with the Serapis cult.

Interestingly enough, she also speculates, she brings up Psalms 119, thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path, suggesting that there are various ways we could interpret a foot-shaped lamp. And again, it comes back to the basic question, like how much of this is novelty? How much of it is based in some reference that just has not survived the ages? Or indeed, I mean, I have to say this idea of

of the lamp being used to illuminate and create like a smoky effect before the image of a god. There's something attractive about that. And perhaps this idea too, yeah, that it's like, well, if I'm going to hold up the face of a god on some sort of a stand, then I need it to be in a foot as well. Like, there's something about the compulsion there that is fascinating. Like, would it be wrong to

To hold up that bust of Serapis without a foot, without a human foot at the bottom? Would there be something kind of blasphemous about that? I wonder. Well, it's funny how the idea of a pedestal is derived from ped, like foot, but in this case, it's literally a foot. Yeah.

And this is interesting, too, to think of in comparison to A Christmas Story, because obviously with A Christmas Story, part of the whole deal with the lamp is that it is objectification of the female form. It's the idea of like here is just the leg of a woman that is sexy, you know, without taking into account the rest of her as a physical whole being and, of course, as a person.

In this, it almost seems like we have the reverse, where it's like, well, if we're going to have something else attached to this piece of a god, we need it to also be a physical piece of said god, perhaps. Okay, I'm going with you. Now, realistically, I think that's about all that connects these ancient foot lamps with a Christmas story. You know, probably no more than to say making objects, including lamps that look like feet or legs, is just the sort of thing that human artisans might do. Mm-hmm.

But I think if we were to be unrealistic about the connection, we could wonder that perhaps what has happened here is the old man has entered into the worship of an ancient Greco-Egyptian god and wishes to bring the city of Cleveland under his domain. Yeah.

His wife, however, clearly she serves the god Osiris, who Serapis partially replaces or is introduced to replace. And so she brings about the lamp's destruction in a campaign to keep Cleveland under the sway of the green-skinned god. Yeah, I think there's also some underworld stuff you can do with him going into the basement to fight the furnace. That seems to connect maybe somehow. Yeah.

Ooh, but you know, we also have to think about the fact that, okay, if the god Serapis is also still Osiris to some extent, I mean, part of the whole myth of Osiris is that his body is dismembered.

You know, that's part of the whole, you know, Osiris myth cycle. It's about his death and resurrection. And of course, we see the lamp broken into pieces as well, and an attempt, a failed attempt to resurrect it. That's very good. Kudos to you, Rob. Oh, I'm just interpreting the work of the gods here. I'm just a messenger. Yes. Yes.

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Now on the subject of tenuous connections to ancient art, I wanted to talk about leg sculpture a little bit more broadly and at the risk of getting sappy. I also just have to say that the idea of sculpture of the human form as a lamp is

It got me thinking about a line in one of my favorite poems. I'm sure this is one I've brought up on the show before. I don't remember when, but it's the poem The Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke. I'm sure I've read this one at you before, Rob. Haven't I? Well, let's see. Read a little bit and I'll see if it rings a bell. Okay. Well, so this is the English translation by Stephen Mitchell. I can't read the whole poem, but it's worth looking up. The Archaic Torso of Apollo. It's an excellent poem. Okay.

But the Stephen Mitchell translation begins, "...we cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit, and yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp in which his gaze, now turned low, gleams in all its power."

All right, all right. From here, he goes on to describe the kind of strange life flowing through this dismembered sculpture from ancient Greece. And it ends with a line that's pretty famous in this translation. It says, "...for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life."

So it's about Rilke's experience of looking at this fragment of an ancient sculpture of the human form that he sees, I think he sees it in the Louvre one day, and having this profound kind of stirring and even frightening human connection with it. Now, the word that appears as lamp in this English version, I think I've seen translated as candelabrum in others, but

In any case, I like this because the line in the poem seems to be confessing the power of great sculpture to suggest that there's something more than just mimicry of the shape of a human in great sculpture. It's not just that great sculpture gets the outline and the form and the contours of a human right. It's that in great sculpture, something actually seems to be alive inside it, almost perceptibly moving or lighting up.

And I think this is the case for Rilke, even though the sculpture he's looking at has arrived in the modern world in a totally degraded form. He mentions that it has no head. He calls it a torso. So I looked it up and I think the actual artwork that he's talking about here is usually understood to be an artifact in the collection of the Louvre called the Kouros of Miletus or the torso of Miletus. Yeah.

It is the torso of this nude male figure that's a very common form of sculpture in archaic Greek art known as the Kouros. And this one was excavated from the remains of Miletus. It is missing its head. It's missing both arms.

It's missing one leg up to the upper thigh and the other leg from above the knee. Rob, I've got an image from a couple of angles for you to look at just down below here. Yeah, it's quite striking. Yeah, the lifelike muscle definition on this torso. I agree. Even though it's like missing most of the parts of the body, there's still something a little bit haunting about it.

I know what Rilke is talking about because I see a kind of hint of that light or animating life force in it, though in a muted or half-formed way, which I think is the ambiguity that makes this sculpture an interesting subject for poetry. It's

It's what we can't fully see or know about it that makes it unsettling and something kind of rings within our chest when we look at it. And I think that's the thing also that leads Rilke to say, you must change your life. But this leads me to the fuller observation I wanted to make connecting the leg lamp to art history, which is that I think you could make a pretty good case that when it comes to sculpture of the human form, the legs are the life, right?

Hmm. Okay. Now, why would I say that? Here's the case I want to make. One thing that's interesting about this sculpture, the Kouros of Miletus, is that it seems to come from a period of transition in ancient Greek art, when Greek art was moving from what modern art historians call the archaic period into what we now call the classical period. And this transition was sometime in the 5th century BCE. That seemed to be roughly the turning point. Yeah.

And so Rob, to illustrate, I want to let you look at a couple of statues of the human form, both from ancient Greece. And so there's going to be one here you can look at on the left that's typical of the archaic style and one on the right that's typical of the classical style. These are both images I found on the website of the Met Museum, so both things in the collection there. But to describe them from you out there listening at home...

The older statue, I would say, is very rigid with very straight, upright posture. It is looking straight forward at you with very square shoulders and the head is pointed straight towards you. So it's very just an aligned body. In fact, I would say that in a lot of ways, it looks similar to sculpture from ancient Egypt.

Yeah, it has a very two-dimensional kind of appearance to it. It's forward-facing. It does not, even though it is itself a three-dimensional object, it is not really like owning that three-dimensional space. Right, and I want to be clear as I go ahead that I would say for my part, I think both of these styles are beautiful, both striking in their own way. I certainly would not say that I think one is somehow better than the other, but there is a difference between

So when you look at the second kind, the sculptures that are typical of the classical style beginning in the 5th century BCE. A good example of this, if you want to look it up at home, one is called the Doriforos or the Spear Bearer by the ancient Greek sculptor Polykleitos. P-O-L-Y-K-L-E-I-T-O-S.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I think if you've ever visited a sculpture garden and or gotten to see some of these classical works or reproductions of these classical works, you know exactly what we're talking about. You know, it's that feeling that this is life that was captured there.

and frozen, you know, that you look at one of these statues and it looks as if it had just moved and it wasn't even necessarily posing for the artist, you know? Yeah, that's a great comparison. They often, the classical sculptures look as if

you know you're a fly on the wall and you have just frozen time in the middle of a scene and this is what was happening while say you know the discus thrower was winding up to throw or somebody was leaning back to regard someone who had just entered the room does that make sense yeah yeah like the spear bear here he's kind of has the pose like oh are you sculpting me I'm sorry I was just standing here naked yeah

So the question is, what makes the difference? How do you go? Again, I think both styles are wonderful, but what makes the difference from this style that is striking as artwork, but doesn't look lifelike to this kind of the classical period that almost feels like it has a pulse. You know, it looks like there's something just about to move. I think there are a number of changes in artistic technique, and I fully admit there's a lot about classical art that I don't know or understand, but there's

I am to understand that one of the most significant developments here is a change in the approach to the depictions of legs, hips, and posture, which would come to be known by later artists and scholars as contrapposto. Okay.

So I was trying to find a succinct definition of this. I found one on a website for the National Galleries of Scotland. So this museum describes Contra Posto as, quote, "...a standing human figure carrying its weight on one leg so that the opposite hip rises to produce a relaxed curve in the body."

Now, I hope when I say that you can kind of picture, realize like, oh, yes, I have seen statues like this where the figure being shown has all of their weight shifted to their back leg.

And their other leg is kind of lifted and bent. And this sort of causes a shift, a corresponding shift in the position of the hips. And then also causes a kind of twist in the spine where it looks like the character has been caught in the middle of turning or leaning or relaxing or something. And the result is this powerful striking quality of life caught in the middle of motion. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. And again, this is in contrast to the posture that would have been common for standing sculptures of the human form in Greek art of the period just before this, the Archaic period, where again, the kouros, the nude male figure would usually have a rigid, straight posture with weight equally distributed on both legs.

And again, for some reason, while I think that is artistically beautiful, it doesn't look alive. Something happens when you twist the form like that. The adjustment of the legs so that the weight is on one leg and not the other is...

It almost seems to peel back this opening in the shroud that separates animate from inanimate. You shift the weight across the legs and the twist the hips and the spine accordingly and something just happens. Stone can become flesh and sculpture can sort of it can start to have that glow that unsettling quality of movement or soul.

I don't think I'd really thought about this much before, but yeah, absolutely. You look at, uh, you look at these, uh, these statues, the ones that are the most lifelike and you do see this kind of, uh, you know, it's, it's in the legs often. It's, it's how the weight is distributed. I mean, really one of the most iconic examples of this would probably be Michelangelo's David. Um,

Oh, yeah. Where you look at the legs, and it's exactly what we're talking about here. Well, yes. I think actually, again, I admit I don't know a ton about art history, but I think that this is something that was consciously sort of noticed and then recreated on purpose by Renaissance artists looking back to classical art. Like, they sort of noticed this about the legs and the posture and said, like, oh, hey, you know, let's do like that. And even kick it up a notch from there. Because...

I think the Renaissance artists took it a step further where there would be sort of like a double twist in the body. Like you see on the David where the legs have the lower body's weight shifted one way and then the upper body's kind of shifting back even in the other direction. Yeah, yeah. I'm looking at a photo of it right now and yeah, absolutely.

So there's my case. The legs are the life. It makes me want to go and visit a museum with a number of sculptures. I go to the Met and start looking at the legs more because often there's – the legs are not the obvious focal point of the statue. Instead, you're drawn to – well, you're drawn to like the chest or certainly with the nude statues you might –

notice what is there or isn't there concerning the groin. Oftentimes they have a weapon or they're holding like the head of a Medusa or they're fighting a centaur. There's generally a lot going on. It's easy to miss the legs and not think about these things. But now that it's been pointed out to me, like I want to go, I want to look at the legs of some statues and see to what extent their life is brought about by this effect. Yeah.

Yeah, totally. Once you notice it, you kind of can't unsee it. Yeah. So to conclude, I guess you must change your life. And how would you connect all of this to A Christmas Story and the major award? Well, I told you it was going to be tenuous, but okay, you know, leg sculpture, right? That's what I got.

All right. Now, obviously, we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Do you have additional insights on the history of lamps that look like legs or feet or the history of sculpture and artifice depicting legs and feet? Certainly write in because we would love to hear from you. Also, just additional thoughts.

on the deep occult secrets that are hidden within the film, A Christmas Story. Are you going to fall asleep with it playing to incubate a dream that will bring you a gift from the gods? It is a film with multiple dream and vision sequences in it, so it would be kind of perfect for that.

All right. Like we said, this will probably be the last new episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind for the year, but we'll be back in January with all new episodes. We're going to be excited to see what kind of topics we end up discussing. We have a whole list of potential topics, stuff we've thought up, stuff that you have submitted to us. So we have plenty of material to draw from, and we're looking forward to it.

In the meantime, you can find all of our episodes in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed, wherever you get your podcasts. Core episodes of the show on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Listener mail on Mondays. Short form artifact on Wednesdays. And on Fridays, we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most practical and serious concerns and just talk about a strange film.

Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, 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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