Speaker 1: Welcome to stot to Blow Your Mind, the production of
Speaker 1: My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And today I wanted to start off by talking about
Speaker 1: a weird legend about the Roman poet Virgil and an
Speaker 1: insect funeral. Uh, Robert, you ready for some Virgil talk?
Speaker 1: Let's do it, okay. So. So, Virgil was a poet
Speaker 1: who lived in the first century BC, during the Augustine
Speaker 1: periods of early Imperial Rome. And uh, you might know
Speaker 1: him best from his most famous work, the epic poem
Speaker 1: The Aeneid, which is about sort of the founding lineage
Speaker 1: of Rome and the adventures of the Trojan hero Aeneas, who,
Speaker 1: after the Trojan War, travels from Troy and eventually becomes
Speaker 1: the ancestor of the Roman people. Virgil is often considered
Speaker 1: one of the greatest Latin poets, and he was wildly
Speaker 1: popular during his own lifetime. Uh. You know, he he
Speaker 1: received commendations from from kings and the wealthy, and and
Speaker 1: you know, everybody thought like, wow, this this guy has
Speaker 1: just got the juice. And I had Virgil on my
Speaker 1: mind a lot last year because Rachel and I were
Speaker 1: rereading Dante's Divine Comedy, and if you'll recall, of course,
Speaker 1: Virgil is Dante the Pilgrim's guide through Hell and Purgatory
Speaker 1: in the Divine Comedy. So the spirit of Virgil he's
Speaker 1: been living out the centuries in Limbo because though he
Speaker 1: was a very virtuous man, he's one of the virtuous Pagans.
Speaker 1: He was never baptized as a Christian, so he can't
Speaker 1: go to heaven. He's got to hang out in this
Speaker 1: sort of anti chamber of hell where everybody sits around
Speaker 1: sighing because nothing interesting is ever happening to them. I
Speaker 1: have to admit that I tend to when anybody mentions Virgil,
Speaker 1: that's the first place my mind goes is Dante's Inferno,
Speaker 1: which is it's probably not fair. It's like if you
Speaker 1: were too mentioned the name of Socrates and there was
Speaker 1: someone were to go, oh, yeah, yeah, he's in Bill
Speaker 1: and Ted's excellent Adventure. That's exactly That's exactly where I
Speaker 1: knew you were going with that. Vill and Ted. Yeah, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that is pretty good because well though it's slightly
Speaker 1: different because it's not a it's he's not at all
Speaker 1: parodied in the Divine Comedy. In fact, I would say
Speaker 1: it's exactly the opposite. In the Divine Comedy, he is
Speaker 1: he's revered, Yes, he's he's reimagined as this like superhuman wizard.
Speaker 1: For for Dante, he uh, Virgil is the embodiment of
Speaker 1: wisdom and reason. So for the intended readers of the
Speaker 1: Divine Comedy, we're supposed to understand that Virgil is like
Speaker 1: a ten out of ten platinum level cool beast. He
Speaker 1: is just like this ultimate wizard of knowledge and about
Speaker 1: half of the state you do remember how like like
Speaker 1: basically every other time Dante talks in the first two
Speaker 1: books of the Divine Comedy, it's just to say, like, Virgil,
Speaker 1: you are so right, I would never doubt your wisdom.
Speaker 1: Tell me more, you know. And and it kind of
Speaker 1: stinks in because I remember when we got to the
Speaker 1: end of the Purgatory. Oh, and Virgil does not get
Speaker 1: to move on to to Heaven with Dante. He has
Speaker 1: to stay behind and Beatrice takes him on from there.
Speaker 1: We're really mad that Virgil didn't get to go to heaven. Yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I mean so much, so much time is devoted to
Speaker 1: him and it also so much is stripped away at
Speaker 1: that point. You know, it's like it's it's hard to
Speaker 1: follow Dante and into Paradiso just because you know that
Speaker 1: there there aren't gonna be any demons uh playing trumpets
Speaker 1: with their bombs or anything. There's not going to be
Speaker 1: uh you know, and monsters so much, and Virgil is
Speaker 1: not going to be there. So it's it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's part three in a series is always tough. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I agree, you know, the trilogy is a hard sell
Speaker 1: to to complete with dignity. Uh. And but I think
Speaker 1: for modern readers that sense of injustice about Virgil that
Speaker 1: is interpreted, uh, you know by the characters in the
Speaker 1: Inferno as you know, perfect divine justice. It's the one
Speaker 1: person version of the dynamic that plays out throughout the
Speaker 1: whole thing. Whereas they're going through hell, it just seems like, wow,
Speaker 1: this is really unfair. But anyway, long before Virgil was
Speaker 1: guiding Dante up the Mountain of Purgatory and his postmortem
Speaker 1: shade form, people were telling lots of legends about his life,
Speaker 1: and one of those legends is that once at his
Speaker 1: home in Rome, Virgil built a tomb and held an
Speaker 1: extravagant funeral for a dead fly, like a fly, as
Speaker 1: in the insect with six legs and wings. Uh. This
Speaker 1: story is very probably untrue, and we'll get to why
Speaker 1: that is in a bit, but first I wanted to
Speaker 1: explore some of the details, and for this I was
Speaker 1: reading an article by George Pendall in Cabinet Magazine in
Speaker 1: two thousand seven called Virgil's Fly, and he describes the
Speaker 1: legend in the following way quote. Held in the grounds
Speaker 1: of Virgil's home on Rome's Esqualine Hill, the funeral attracted
Speaker 1: the great and good of the city. Dirges were sung
Speaker 1: and tributes read. Virgil's patron, Mycenas, delivered a lengthy and
Speaker 1: moving eulogy to the departed insect, and Virgil was himself
Speaker 1: said to have uttered a few of his exquisite verses
Speaker 1: over the tiny carcass. A tomb had been erected and
Speaker 1: the lifeless body of the fly was placed within it,
Speaker 1: to the whales and moans of the professional mourners. So
Speaker 1: lavish were the commemorations that the cost was estimated at
Speaker 1: over eight hundred thousand sisters. Is So that's the gist.
Speaker 1: According to this story, Virgil and his close friends spend
Speaker 1: huge amounts of money and effort to celebrate the life
Speaker 1: and memory of an insect, concluding with the insects burial
Speaker 1: in a marble tomb. Why on earth would this be? Well?
Speaker 1: The legend itself also contains an answer to this, so
Speaker 1: to read from Pendle again quote but the reason for
Speaker 1: the funeral was not due to extravagance, eccentricity, or even emotion.
Speaker 1: Having defeated Julius Caesar's assassins at the Battle of Philippi,
Speaker 1: the Second Triumvirate was at that very moment engaged in
Speaker 1: confiscating the estates of the rich and dividing them among
Speaker 1: the war veterans returning from the battlefield. Only one exception
Speaker 1: was given. If the estate held a burial plot, it
Speaker 1: was not to be touched by burying his housefly. Virgil
Speaker 1: saved his house. So here it has transformed into a
Speaker 1: classic one of our favorite genres, loophole fiction. Remember when
Speaker 1: we did the Anthology of Horror segment in October on
Speaker 1: deals with the Devil, and about how many of these stories,
Speaker 1: I think, especially later, deal with the Devil's stories less
Speaker 1: so in the earlier ones. They're about somebody saving the
Speaker 1: day by figuring out a loophole that they can exploit
Speaker 1: to get out of their end of a pact with Satan,
Speaker 1: and I wonder again, what's so appealing about this kind
Speaker 1: of plot resolution. It seems like maybe this would be
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that's especially interesting to two people
Speaker 1: who live in a more litigious kind of culture. Could
Speaker 1: be I can also imagine that if you're if you're,
Speaker 1: if you've ever taken advantage of a loophole, it probably
Speaker 1: helps out if you demonize the legal authority to some degree,
Speaker 1: if you make them into a devil, because in all
Speaker 1: these stories, it's the loophole that saves your soul, whereas um,
Speaker 1: I think there are plenty of cases in in real
Speaker 1: in real life where the loophole might have the opposite effect.
Speaker 1: You know, the loophole is the is the refuge of
Speaker 1: of less savory individuals at times, right cheaters and scammers
Speaker 1: with crafty lawyers to help help them get out of
Speaker 1: trouble by exploiting some kind of you know, loophole in
Speaker 1: the wording of something is it isn't that always like
Speaker 1: that's always a really frustrating thing when somebody uh evades
Speaker 1: the obvious spirit of justice by exploiting the exact wording
Speaker 1: of something you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: um yeah, So I can't have a wonder if there's
Speaker 1: there's some connection there. You know, you make your stories
Speaker 1: about cheating the devil with your loopholes, and then you
Speaker 1: know you feel better about the sort of implied devil
Speaker 1: that you're cheating through your own loophole usage. Well, it's
Speaker 1: actually funny, there is uh. In this Pendle article, he
Speaker 1: also talks about a medieval legend about Virgil. And we'll
Speaker 1: get into more of these legends about Virgil's life as
Speaker 1: we go on, But one of these medieval legends about
Speaker 1: Virgil is that Virgil freeze a demon from There's like
Speaker 1: a devil trapped in a bottle, and Virgil lets it
Speaker 1: out so that it will empower him to do something great.
Speaker 1: I think maybe he uses its powers to to get
Speaker 1: a long road paved or something like that. But anyway,
Speaker 1: once he has has used this demon power, now I
Speaker 1: think the demon is supposed to get his into the bargain,
Speaker 1: is going to do something really bad. But first Virgil's like, wow,
Speaker 1: you know you're so powerful. Could you show me again
Speaker 1: how you fit your frame into that bottle, so the
Speaker 1: devil does, and then he corks it back up so
Speaker 1: he gets to have his magic and keep the genie
Speaker 1: in the bottle as well. Oh that's great. I don't
Speaker 1: know how to climb into an oven, and I've never
Speaker 1: sat on a shovel. That's some jack frost, Jack frost,
Speaker 1: that's from some ivanushka right there. So in that spirit
Speaker 1: that there's obviously this interesting process by which after Virgil's death,
Speaker 1: remember he lived in the first century b c. In
Speaker 1: the centuries after his death, his poetry was greatly admired
Speaker 1: and revered, But not just his poetry, he himself was
Speaker 1: greatly admired and revered and took on the aspects of
Speaker 1: a saint in many ways, even though he had been
Speaker 1: a pagan. Uh. There's an interesting note in in his
Speaker 1: Cabinet article where Pendle shares this fact that kind of
Speaker 1: helps make more sense of the almost absurd reverence shown
Speaker 1: for Virgil in the Divine Comedy In these in centuries
Speaker 1: after his death, many Romans and and later Italians in
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages thought of Virgil as possessing a literally
Speaker 1: supernatural or near supernatural genius. That there was something magical
Speaker 1: about his poetry the same way people would feel there
Speaker 1: is magic in the holy text of their religion. And
Speaker 1: one one clear illustration of this is that in the
Speaker 1: second century CE, under the Antonines, Uh, there had arisen
Speaker 1: this form of divination. And we've done episodes on divination
Speaker 1: in the past. You know, there are various ways of
Speaker 1: trying to sort of get turned some sort of noise
Speaker 1: or random input into an interpreted type of information about
Speaker 1: hidden knowledge. You know, what's going to happen the future,
Speaker 1: or some other thing you want to know but can't uh.
Speaker 1: And and so the Virgil's poetry was itself used for divination,
Speaker 1: and so people would randomly select passages from the in
Speaker 1: need and then read those passages as some kind of
Speaker 1: prediction about their future or statement about some other kind
Speaker 1: of hidden knowledge. Uh Pendle writes. Quote. It is said
Speaker 1: that these sortes Virgiliana or Virgilian lots were consulted by
Speaker 1: both the emperor's Hadrian and Severus, and with each consultation,
Speaker 1: virgil memory began to take on an increasingly mystical air.
Speaker 1: But anyway to get back to the story about Virgil
Speaker 1: and the fly, So again, this story is almost certainly
Speaker 1: not true. There are elements of it that fit within
Speaker 1: known history. Apparently Virgil did actually have a house on
Speaker 1: the esqual Line Hill the Second Triumph for it was
Speaker 1: actually engaged in seizing a states so they could be
Speaker 1: given to returning veterans from military campaigns. But that's just
Speaker 1: the accurate stuff about the setting. The main reason the
Speaker 1: story is probably untrue is simply that there is no
Speaker 1: contemporary evidence or record of it. Uh. Nobody anywhere near
Speaker 1: Virgil's lifetime mentions anything about it. It only shows up
Speaker 1: in much much later sources. Rather, it seems to be
Speaker 1: one of those legends that accumulates on a you know,
Speaker 1: sort of gloamse onto a revered historical figure due to
Speaker 1: a chain of associative thinking. So what's the chain? Well,
Speaker 1: that brings us to a an absurd and absurdly interesting
Speaker 1: Latin poem called the q Lex, which means uh, I
Speaker 1: think you can interpret it as like the gnat or
Speaker 1: the fly. Q Lex is also a genus name for
Speaker 1: certain types of mosquitoes, so I think it means like
Speaker 1: a flying insect. And so this is a poem that
Speaker 1: was published sometime after Virgil's death, and it was attributed
Speaker 1: to him as part of his juvenile yad. It was
Speaker 1: widely said, Okay, so this is something that Virgil actually wrote,
Speaker 1: but he wrote it when it was young, and that's
Speaker 1: that's why it's maybe not as good as his other poetry.
Speaker 1: Modern scholars, I think, mostly really doubt that Virgil actually
Speaker 1: wrote this. It would technically be a poem in the
Speaker 1: pastoral genre. So that's poetry about the supposedly blissful, uncomplicated
Speaker 1: life of people in the countryside. It's usually about shepherds
Speaker 1: or herdsman, often a lot of references to flowers and
Speaker 1: naps and clouds and cool waters, the idols of pan
Speaker 1: And it made me think about, how, you know, so
Speaker 1: for hundreds of years the pastoral poem from the Classical period,
Speaker 1: even into into the Renaissance was and well, actually i'd
Speaker 1: say even into the Romantic poetry era. There there is
Speaker 1: this tendency to fall back on this classic genre of
Speaker 1: stuff about the fields and the simple life of shepherds
Speaker 1: and all that, uh and and how great it is.
Speaker 1: And I wonder if this is sort of realized in
Speaker 1: modern culture, in our desire for like uh, simple, aesthetically
Speaker 1: gentle content like the Great British bake offf Is that
Speaker 1: the pastoral poetry of the modern era? Yeah, yeah, perhaps,
Speaker 1: you know, um just sort of like soothing and non offensive. Perhaps, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, just just you know, it's not even really escapism.
Speaker 1: It's just I mean, I guess to a certain extent
Speaker 1: it is escapism. But yeah, perhaps I can see that connection.
Speaker 1: I don't know it connected in my brain. But so
Speaker 1: there's a plot in this poem, the Colex. It is
Speaker 1: widely regarded as absolutely ridiculous, but here is how it goes.
Speaker 1: A chep bird goes out in the morning to take
Speaker 1: his flocks to pasture, and there's some standard pastoral poetry
Speaker 1: musing on how the simple life of a shepherd living
Speaker 1: in the fields is so much better than the fraud
Speaker 1: life of a rich man, because it's better to throw
Speaker 1: your body down in the tender grass and lay your
Speaker 1: head among the flower buds than to be consumed with
Speaker 1: the grief and the greed that curdles the hearts of
Speaker 1: the rich and powerful. So the shepherd is living this nice,
Speaker 1: idyllic life. He takes his flock to a fountain in
Speaker 1: the woods, and there he falls asleep, lying in the shade.
Speaker 1: But while he's asleep, a giant, horrible snake slithers up.
Speaker 1: It's coming to the fountain where it likes to lie
Speaker 1: in the mud, and it decides it's going to bite
Speaker 1: the shepherd in his sleep and kill him. But just
Speaker 1: before the snake attacks, a gnat buzzes down and stings
Speaker 1: the shepherd on the eye, and this wakes him up,
Speaker 1: and the shepherd crushes the gnat, but it also wakes
Speaker 1: him up just in time to see the snake and
Speaker 1: to save himself. So he beats the snake to death
Speaker 1: with a piece of wood, which I would say, in
Speaker 1: reality is almost never necessary. Even if a snake is dangerous,
Speaker 1: you can run away from it, right, But this is
Speaker 1: a storybook snake, and you know how they do. They
Speaker 1: do things like wrap around you and tie you to
Speaker 1: a tree or swallow you hole. So um, you know,
Speaker 1: within the context of the story, maybe it's justified, right,
Speaker 1: So yeah, he gets this. This piece of wood beats
Speaker 1: the snake into a bloody pulp. And then later the
Speaker 1: shepherd goes to sleep again and the ghost of the
Speaker 1: nat appears. It comes to him in a dream, and
Speaker 1: the gnat choose him out for not being grateful. He's
Speaker 1: like why do you crush me? I saved your life?
Speaker 1: And the shepherd wakes up, and he feels remorse for
Speaker 1: what he's done, and he builds a tomb in honor
Speaker 1: of the gnat, and then decorates the tomb with flowers
Speaker 1: and fruit. And so, to read briefly from the tomb
Speaker 1: section of the poem, it says for him at length,
Speaker 1: did heedful care the toil begun completing, gathered up the
Speaker 1: piled material, and with a plenteous mound of earth, a
Speaker 1: tomb arose in circle shaped around it, placing stone of
Speaker 1: marble smooth, he plants it, mindful of his constant care,
Speaker 1: and growing here throughout the brilliant ring a cantus is
Speaker 1: and bashful roses too, and every kind of violet. And
Speaker 1: then there are a bunch of lines about flowers. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna skip towards the end of that flower section. Um
Speaker 1: the admiranthe is here, And grapes which large do cluster
Speaker 1: ever flowering Piccrus to Narcissus isn't absent there in whom
Speaker 1: his beauty's radiance from cupids fire for limbs his own
Speaker 1: begot a hot desire. And all the flowers that blooming seasons. No,
Speaker 1: with these the mound is planted, or then on the
Speaker 1: front is placed the inscription, which asserts the letters, saying
Speaker 1: it with silent speech, Oh, tiny gnat, the keeper of
Speaker 1: the flocks, doth pay to the deserving such a thing
Speaker 1: the duty of a ceremonial tomb, in payment for the
Speaker 1: gift of life to him. All right, well, well there
Speaker 1: you have it, a poem about honoring the the gnat
Speaker 1: that saved him from the snake when he was sleeping
Speaker 1: on the job. This is something I'm actually confused about.
Speaker 1: Our shepherds supposed to just sleep while they're watching their flocks,
Speaker 1: or they're not supposed to be watching I don't know,
Speaker 1: but you do see it is part of that pastoral
Speaker 1: sort of image, you know, like we've all encountered some
Speaker 1: version of that before, which I'm guessing most of that
Speaker 1: is just, yeah, it's pining for a this um, this
Speaker 1: presumed idyllic lifestyle in the country where it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're just looking after sheep. It's just like a nap
Speaker 1: all day, that's all. Just all it is, glossing over
Speaker 1: all the other stuff that comes being a shepherd. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But anyway, once again it seems that modern scholars do
Speaker 1: not accept that Virgil actually wrote this poem. Virgil did
Speaker 1: write pastoral poetry, for example, in his ecologues. There's this
Speaker 1: great part of in the I think the tenth eclogue
Speaker 1: where he concludes with a wonderful passage decided bedtime, where
Speaker 1: he writes, come let us rise. The shade is wont
Speaker 1: to be baneful to singers. Baneful is the shade cast
Speaker 1: by the juniper crops. Sickened too in the shade, now homeward,
Speaker 1: having fed your fill, eve star is rising. Go my,
Speaker 1: she goats go. Okay. I guess that's that's pretty good.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, if you're just going off of this passage,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you'd you'd really buy Dante's hype
Speaker 1: for Virgil. Um, well, I mean, she goes part is nice,
Speaker 1: that is the good part, and it is in translation.
Speaker 1: I think, you know, there's all kinds of stuff. I mean,
Speaker 1: for every type of poetry and translation, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff that's lost. But anyway, so the coolex, there's
Speaker 1: a good chance it was written by someone else and
Speaker 1: then published under Virgil's name, and it may well have
Speaker 1: had some kind of other meaning. Like a veiled meaning
Speaker 1: as a political allegory, though I didn't follow the threads
Speaker 1: on that. But despite the doubt about the authorship, the
Speaker 1: poem seems to have given rise to all kinds of
Speaker 1: bizarre fly legends associated with Virgil. Um so to read
Speaker 1: a segment from Pendel that I thought this was amazing quote.
Speaker 1: One of the most popular Neapolitan myths held that Virgil
Speaker 1: had created a bronze fly the size of a frog
Speaker 1: and placed it on one of the gates of Naples.
Speaker 1: The talisman remained there for eight years, during which time
Speaker 1: no flies could enter the city. In a similar vein,
Speaker 1: armies attacking Naples were said to have been harassed by
Speaker 1: swarms of flies sent after them by the poet. The
Speaker 1: fly would become Virgil's magical familiar over the ensuing years,
Speaker 1: never far from any tale of his exploits, and that
Speaker 1: was not all. Possibly due to this control of pestilence,
Speaker 1: Virgil was said to have created baths that cured all illnesses,
Speaker 1: and a butcher's block on which meat stayed fresh for
Speaker 1: six weeks. No longer renowned as the master of grammar
Speaker 1: and fil aosophy, Virgil's achievements were put down to his
Speaker 1: mathematical knowledge. In only a few centuries, Virgil had gone
Speaker 1: from being the preeminent poet of the Roman Empire to
Speaker 1: a Neapolitan enchanter with the pensiont for magical insects. And
Speaker 1: there's all kinds of fabulous stuff about medieval legends about
Speaker 1: Virgil becoming more of a necromancer type figure, that he's
Speaker 1: got all these strange magical powers like that, you know
Speaker 1: that he commands the insects of the air and cast
Speaker 1: them down upon his enemies or can save you from them.
Speaker 1: And uh, and I love that that that this was Like,
Speaker 1: I don't know if there was anything in his actual
Speaker 1: life to associate him with flies. It's only this poem
Speaker 1: that he probably didn't even actually right and isn't actually
Speaker 1: very good, that was attributed to him later that gave
Speaker 1: rise to all these strange stories. Wow, that's something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't recall it, you know, picking up
Speaker 1: on the the idea of the wizard Virgil. But but
Speaker 1: now I'm fascinated by it. Well. I think one thing
Speaker 1: is by the Middle Ages he had these broadly understood
Speaker 1: wizard associations. But I think Dante was sort of moving
Speaker 1: back against that and and saying like, no, let's fit
Speaker 1: him more into the Christian cosmology and say that he's
Speaker 1: more this beacon of reason and wisdom in the pagan world.
Speaker 1: But we do see this wizardization taking more hold with
Speaker 1: other figures, like Roger Bacon comes to mind. And we've
Speaker 1: talked about this on the show before. Oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: remember in one of our previous episodes we sort of
Speaker 1: concluded that maybe one of the greatest contributions of Roger
Speaker 1: Bacon as a as a you know, man of great
Speaker 1: learning in the Middle Ages and the thirteenth century was
Speaker 1: that he was very open to sources of knowledge from
Speaker 1: all over the world. So a lot of what he
Speaker 1: did was say, like apply things that he learned from
Speaker 1: texts from the medieval Muslim world, like the texts of
Speaker 1: mbanel Haytham and other things, or like, uh, studying objects
Speaker 1: brought to him from from countries afar. So he was
Speaker 1: sort of a good collector of knowledge from many places.
Speaker 1: But somehow gets this, I don't know, gets this label
Speaker 1: affixed to him like he's some kind of wonder worker,
Speaker 1: which he wasn't really in life, right, I mean, he
Speaker 1: was it seems like he was a very impressive individual.
Speaker 1: But yeah, he's begome. He instantly becomes elevated to like
Speaker 1: arch alchemist status in some of these tellings, you know,
Speaker 1: he takes on all the guys of some sort of
Speaker 1: a mad scientist in a in a like a serial adventure.
Speaker 1: The main reason I think I was originally inspired to
Speaker 1: look into this topic and do this episode about insects
Speaker 1: and funerals was when I read an interesting article on
Speaker 1: Atlas Obscura that was also by George Pendel. The same
Speaker 1: writer is that Cabinet magazine article about Virgil and the fly,
Speaker 1: And this article is on the broader topic of insects
Speaker 1: and funerary rights. Yeah, this was a good, good article
Speaker 1: by by Pendell the fly master here. Um, he touches
Speaker 1: on numerous associations between insects and death. Particularly the author
Speaker 1: points out quote necklaces of stone carved flies to ward
Speaker 1: off maggots worn by the ancient Egyptian dead. Uh. The
Speaker 1: idea of being here that the maggots were seen as
Speaker 1: a threat to one's car or bo you know, the
Speaker 1: like the vital one of the vital essences and in
Speaker 1: the body, in the individual. And um, I found this
Speaker 1: interesting so The first thing I did was I looked
Speaker 1: up to see if if Jeane Kritzky had written on this.
Speaker 1: Jeane Kritzky, of course, is a former guest on the show.
Speaker 1: He wrote a book called The Tears of Ray about, uh,
Speaker 1: the ancient Egyptian use of bees and honey and how
Speaker 1: they treated bees and honey both um in terms of
Speaker 1: just creating products as well as uh, you know, magical uses, etcetera.
Speaker 1: I was thinking about that episode and about Jeane Kritzky
Speaker 1: when I was recording a recent episode of The Artifact
Speaker 1: I did, which was about ancient Egyptian head cones. Uh.
Speaker 1: These If you haven't listened to that artifact yet, I
Speaker 1: thought it was a lot of fun, so maybe you
Speaker 1: should check it out. But the short version is, there
Speaker 1: are these white cones depicted on top of people's heads
Speaker 1: in a lot of ancient Egyptian art, but nobody had
Speaker 1: ever found any physical evidence that they existed in reality.
Speaker 1: So there's been this debate about what were these cones?
Speaker 1: Did they ever actually exist in the world, or are
Speaker 1: they some kind of artistic convention and uh the uh
Speaker 1: and and in recent years there has been an excavation
Speaker 1: that uncovered physical examples of these headcones for the first
Speaker 1: time at a couple of graves in Amarna in Egypt.
Speaker 1: But unlike some of the theories in which these cones
Speaker 1: were made of, like perfumed animal fat, these cones were
Speaker 1: made out of biological wax, which I knew immediately when
Speaker 1: I read that, Oh, that's got to be bees wax
Speaker 1: because of the role of bees wax in ancient Egyptian culture,
Speaker 1: and sure enough that that seems like what they almost
Speaker 1: definitely were made of. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, well, we've covered already,
Speaker 1: We've covered a few different Egyptian topics in the artifacts,
Speaker 1: so uh so, definitely check this out. I'm sure we'll
Speaker 1: do more. But but in this case, yeah, I turned
Speaker 1: to to Jeane Kritzky's work, and particularly I looked at
Speaker 1: a book that he wrote with an author by the
Speaker 1: name of Ron Cherry titled Insect Mythology, And so they
Speaker 1: get into this event. They point out that in ancient
Speaker 1: Egypt the fly, first of all, it was also a
Speaker 1: symbol of valor, because what does a pesky fly do. Well,
Speaker 1: it'll it'll move in, it'll bite you, try to bite you.
Speaker 1: You you drive it away by swatting your hand around.
Speaker 1: But then what does it do? It comes back, It's persistent,
Speaker 1: and therefore it is a symbol of valor. Wow, I've
Speaker 1: never thought of that before. But yeah, when the fly
Speaker 1: comes in to sting at you, it's like a human
Speaker 1: going up against a dragon or a giant. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so we have this this one example in particular, where
Speaker 1: a queen Ahotep gave her sons, three of her sons
Speaker 1: golden flies to honor their fights against an adversary. So
Speaker 1: I thought that was interesting, and you can actually look
Speaker 1: up examples of this because I believe, uh the ideas.
Speaker 1: These three flies were then buried with her and then
Speaker 1: we're part of the the treasures that want to unearthed
Speaker 1: with her body. And yeah, they're these beautiful golden fly ornaments,
Speaker 1: but they stand for valor. Now, as for the funeral necklace, yes,
Speaker 1: this seems accurate as well. So in the Egyptian climate,
Speaker 1: um flies would take to the dead rather quickly, and
Speaker 1: freshly hatched flies would be seen leaving the body before
Speaker 1: embalming could be completely finished. Um these flies were seen
Speaker 1: as again the individual's car or ba leaving the body.
Speaker 1: So the fly necklaces were away to essentially put flies
Speaker 1: back on the body to return this leaked car to
Speaker 1: the deceased. Oh wow, yeah, yeah, so and and this
Speaker 1: is really interesting as well. The car or ba is
Speaker 1: sometimes represented as a bird with a human head, but
Speaker 1: you also see versions of it that consist of a
Speaker 1: fly with a human head. So the the authors here
Speaker 1: Um Chrisky and and Cherry, but they point out that, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, there is there is, at least at the time,
Speaker 1: and this was written which I want to say it
Speaker 1: was a couple of decades ago, um at the time,
Speaker 1: and I imagine still to this day, there's this surviving
Speaker 1: folk belief that certain varieties of flies with a greenish
Speaker 1: or bluish metallic body were not to be killed as
Speaker 1: these contained or were likely to contain the spirit of
Speaker 1: someone who had died. So and then they said, this
Speaker 1: would just be one of many modern beliefs that are
Speaker 1: seemingly tied to the traditions and beliefs from the age
Speaker 1: of the Pharaohs. But the idea of a fly with
Speaker 1: the human head certainly also makes me think of some
Speaker 1: some twentieth century cinematic literature. Yeah. Yeah, it brings to
Speaker 1: mind the movie The Fly, which ends with that that scene,
Speaker 1: well where you help me seeing with the fly with
Speaker 1: the human head, which we we had to stand corrected on.
Speaker 1: That is not Vincent Price, whose heads on that fly?
Speaker 1: Different actor he plays like his brother or something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but yeah, so it brings to mind a modern monster movie.
Speaker 1: But it's also interesting because on a physical level this
Speaker 1: is correct. There is something of the departed body anyway
Speaker 1: in the substance of the emergent fly. There is a
Speaker 1: connection to be made. Yeah, the chemical energy from yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: So again the idea is is not so much to
Speaker 1: keep flies away, but it's like to return what is
Speaker 1: leaked out to the body through symbolic flies. Now, as
Speaker 1: for flies in general, Chrisky and Cherry point out that
Speaker 1: the flies are often associated with death just throughout global
Speaker 1: myth cycles, and they roll through a number of examples
Speaker 1: in their book, you know, like the Greek damon of
Speaker 1: decomposition uh urinomos uh and this was depicted often as
Speaker 1: either a vulture or a fly, you know, a consumer
Speaker 1: of carry on. Other fly demons can be found as well,
Speaker 1: such as of course be Elzebub, at least in his
Speaker 1: demonic interpretations later he was originally a Syrian god. You
Speaker 1: have the the Yazads and Nassau of Zoroastrianism and Nassau
Speaker 1: they describe best quote the demon us of dead matter,
Speaker 1: and flies were also a symbol of torment for early
Speaker 1: European Christians. The god Loki was said to have taken
Speaker 1: on the form of a fly in order to pass
Speaker 1: through a keyhole. And this transformation the transformation of one
Speaker 1: in one's body into that of a fly. This has
Speaker 1: also been associated with which is they write in Hungarian traditions. However,
Speaker 1: in all this they point out to outstanding exceptions to
Speaker 1: the negative roles of mythological flies. And they're pretty interesting
Speaker 1: because these kind of take me back to what you
Speaker 1: shared from that poem that has been attributed to Virgil.
Speaker 1: Uh So, the first example is big Biter. Big Biter
Speaker 1: is an overlord of fish in what I believe is
Speaker 1: currently known as the Innu tribe of this is a
Speaker 1: Canadian Um First Nations people. And this uh this spirit
Speaker 1: would have taken the form of a fly, and the
Speaker 1: chrisky and uh and cherry right that he quote hovered
Speaker 1: over the fisherman in order to see how his subjects
Speaker 1: were being treated. Occasionally, an overlord would bite the fisherman
Speaker 1: to remind him that the fish were in his custody
Speaker 1: and to warn against wastefulness. So so I I like
Speaker 1: that the idea of I also it just kind of
Speaker 1: feels like it's kind of illustrates the the you know,
Speaker 1: the universal experience of fishing. You know, you're perhaps gonna
Speaker 1: you know, gaze off into space. You're you're gonna be
Speaker 1: bit by insects, uh and then maybe have to confront
Speaker 1: the possibility of wastefulness. Um. But anyway, another one is
Speaker 1: big fly, and this one is in the Navajo religion,
Speaker 1: and it is a mentor or helper that mediates between
Speaker 1: humans and the gods. And so it'll it'll frequently show
Speaker 1: up in stories and uh and appear to a hero
Speaker 1: and tell them how to proceed. And so that's the
Speaker 1: example that reminds me specifically of what we see in
Speaker 1: that poem attributed to Virgil. Yes, not just as a
Speaker 1: helper who who intervenes to save his life, but one
Speaker 1: who later appears to teach him a lesson. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: one thing, of course, that they drive home in this
Speaker 1: book is that it's worth remembering that other insects had
Speaker 1: entirely different roles in ancient Egyptian traditions. The scare a beetle,
Speaker 1: for instance, symbolizes perpetual life and renewal. Uh Kepri is
Speaker 1: in fact the dawn manifestation of of raw or ray,
Speaker 1: the sun god and uh derived and this is derived
Speaker 1: from kept her, which meant to become or to be transformed.
Speaker 1: And so the reason for this is twofold. According to
Speaker 1: Geraldine Pinch in the book Egyptian Mythology, First dung beetles
Speaker 1: rolling spheres of dung were compared to the movement of
Speaker 1: the sun across the sky. Uh. You know, something that
Speaker 1: would be carried by the gods in the sky barge uh.
Speaker 1: And secondly, the sight of young beetles emerging from buried
Speaker 1: dung balls. This raised ideas of self generation, and so
Speaker 1: these acts of transformation could have applied, would have applied
Speaker 1: rather to more than just birth and death, but also
Speaker 1: to the various rights of passage in one's so not
Speaker 1: just being born, not just dying, but also you know,
Speaker 1: growing up, changing who you are, this sort of perpetual
Speaker 1: act of emerging and becoming. Oh. I like this because uh,
Speaker 1: I think it's something I've seen from Egyptologists in recent years,
Speaker 1: who I think sometimes emphasized that older schools of Egyptology
Speaker 1: would would sometimes over emphasize the the prevalence of thinking
Speaker 1: about death and the afterlife in ancient Egyptian culture, and
Speaker 1: that this might just be a result of the bias
Speaker 1: in what types of artifacts are preserved for us to
Speaker 1: look at to get a sense of their culture and
Speaker 1: so so. Yeah, I like the idea of like seeing
Speaker 1: how it has a lot to do with birth and
Speaker 1: life itself as well. Yeah, yeah, this is This is
Speaker 1: a thing that I actually just touched on in one
Speaker 1: of the Artifact episodes having to deal with the kiro toe.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if this has come out yet by
Speaker 1: the time this episode publishes, but at any rate, it
Speaker 1: has to do with an element um an artifact that
Speaker 1: could certainly be interpreted as something that is just about
Speaker 1: the dead, but upon closer examination, is far more about
Speaker 1: the living and the experience of living people. Yeah. Um, so,
Speaker 1: I think that's an important thing to keep in mind.
Speaker 1: Even though it is fascinating to know all these things
Speaker 1: about ancient Egyptian funerary rituals and their beliefs about death
Speaker 1: in the afterlife, you can easily get this mistake and
Speaker 1: assumption that like in ancient Egypt, all anyone did was
Speaker 1: die and be entombed and think about death, and obviously
Speaker 1: that can't be true, right, yeah, I mean they were
Speaker 1: human beings and they were they were subject to all
Speaker 1: the other whims and obsessions of human life now and
Speaker 1: in terms of their other relationships with with insects and
Speaker 1: arachnids uh scorpions, for instance, arachnids were considered it just
Speaker 1: enemies of humanity, but they were also associated with the
Speaker 1: goddess circuit who who protected the body of the deceased,
Speaker 1: as well as the canopic jars that would contain organs um.
Speaker 1: But to come back to that Atlas Obscure article by
Speaker 1: George Pendall Uh, they write that there's a particular civilization
Speaker 1: of northern Peru uh the the Mochi or the Mochika. Uh.
Speaker 1: This would have been a civilization pre Columbian, of course,
Speaker 1: but also pre Incan that ran from around one hundred
Speaker 1: to seven fifty c. And they seemingly practiced some manner
Speaker 1: of sky burial in which the flies that that that
Speaker 1: lighted upon the dead and then emerged from the dead
Speaker 1: were interpreted as an essential part of the spirit's journey um,
Speaker 1: maybe much like carrying birds would be in some other
Speaker 1: types of sky burial type traditions. Yeah, that that was
Speaker 1: where my mind instantly went to, like the Tibetan model
Speaker 1: of where a body is sort of processed for carrying
Speaker 1: birds in a you know, an elevated rocky area where
Speaker 1: other modes of burial or not as much of an option.
Speaker 1: And this would be a way of like returning the
Speaker 1: body to the world, to the element, uh, through scavengers,
Speaker 1: through carrying consumers. So I decided to look into this
Speaker 1: little bit more because this was in simply fascinating as well.
Speaker 1: You know, I have this example that turns things on
Speaker 1: its head a bit. Uh. There's a two thousand ten
Speaker 1: study I was reading published in the Journal of Archaeological
Speaker 1: Science by Hutchett and Greenberg, and a lot of this
Speaker 1: theory depends on the post mortem interval in remains how
Speaker 1: long the bodies of these people's were exposed prior to
Speaker 1: burial and um and that's one of the keys there
Speaker 1: is this is that it's not simply well I'll get
Speaker 1: into this here, but like it's not just like okay,
Speaker 1: then they left the bodies out. Now that this would
Speaker 1: have been part of a more protracted, uh funeral rite.
Speaker 1: I see. So the Mochi, they excelled in ceramics, they
Speaker 1: practiced human sacrifice um and and to be clear, a
Speaker 1: lot of ancient cultures did. UM. Not to sweep human
Speaker 1: sacrifice under the rug or anything, but I think, as
Speaker 1: we've touched on before, I think we it pays to
Speaker 1: be fair in looking at particular cultures and regions that
Speaker 1: are often highlighted for this sort of thing, that we
Speaker 1: have to sort of keep them uh. Keep in mind
Speaker 1: that that plenty of other ancient cultures also did this,
Speaker 1: did human sacrifice as well, and they were no exception,
Speaker 1: but they apparently had a complex religious system with complex
Speaker 1: mortuary practices, supported by evidence of delayed burials, grave reopenings,
Speaker 1: and secondary offerings of human remains. Their ceramic illustrations reveal
Speaker 1: a lot about the role of flies and their beliefs
Speaker 1: with their For instance, there these motifs of flies following
Speaker 1: prisoners to execution in anticipation of of their corpses, as
Speaker 1: well as oval shaped motifs that may represent flies emerging
Speaker 1: from the puparia. So you know, it's it's it's really
Speaker 1: interesting to to think about this this would have been
Speaker 1: a society where instead of sort of taking the Egyptian
Speaker 1: route and saying, well, the flies are part of the
Speaker 1: soul leaving the body, and will we have this magical
Speaker 1: uh symbolism that will will will prevent that or reverse
Speaker 1: the the the leakage. Uh. This is like a celebration
Speaker 1: of it. It would seem that's the argument anyway, that
Speaker 1: they seem to have incorporated it into their understanding of
Speaker 1: what our bodies and and or perhaps our souls do
Speaker 1: when we die. You know that it's that the flies
Speaker 1: moving in and then out of our bodies is just
Speaker 1: a part of what is supposed to happen. It's part
Speaker 1: of the sacrament. Though. It's very interesting to see cultures
Speaker 1: in which that that sort of biological knowledge about what
Speaker 1: happens to a human body that's left exposed to the
Speaker 1: surface elements. Uh, it gets incorporated into religious beliefs, as
Speaker 1: opposed to the idea that a body should be, you know,
Speaker 1: immediately buried, hidden away to a different place where you
Speaker 1: cannot see nature acting upon it as it decomposes. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, especially modern culture, we're so far removed from
Speaker 1: from physical death. You know that, um, and I think
Speaker 1: some would argue that we're too far removed from it,
Speaker 1: you know that it uh, it makes it more problematic
Speaker 1: in some cases when it does occur, and it of
Speaker 1: course will occur, and it does impact our lives. UM.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's it's interesting to try and envision how
Speaker 1: how a culture like this would have handled death, because
Speaker 1: because again it would have been according to the way
Speaker 1: they were discussing it in this article, it would have
Speaker 1: been a situation where like, the body dies, there's some
Speaker 1: sort of ritual that is conducted, but the body is
Speaker 1: left out and long enough for the flies to begin
Speaker 1: to work upon it, and then other funeral customs come
Speaker 1: into play, and then it is eventually buried, and then
Speaker 1: then it may be a phase later on where the
Speaker 1: tomb is reopened. So it's um, you know, there's a
Speaker 1: lot more in and out compared to what we're more
Speaker 1: accustomed to with our modern funeral rights. Yeah, absolutely, thank
Speaker 1: thank Okay, So we've been talking about um legends of
Speaker 1: of human funerals for insects. We've been talking about associations
Speaker 1: between insects, especially flies and UH and human funerary rituals
Speaker 1: and different cultures. But one other thing that I thought
Speaker 1: would be good to talk about would be how insects
Speaker 1: deal with their own dead, the funerals within the insect world.
Speaker 1: And one place I was looking was that there's a
Speaker 1: there's a good short article on that GEO from seventeen
Speaker 1: by Ali Wilkinson that collects some really interesting examples of
Speaker 1: scientific studies and observations about how different types of social
Speaker 1: insects in particular treat their own dead within and around
Speaker 1: their nest. And I think if you're looking for the
Speaker 1: really interesting practices, I think it would be these are
Speaker 1: especially going to be among social insects. So the article
Speaker 1: is called queen Ants and other insects bury they're dead.
Speaker 1: Here's why. Uh. And so just to look at a
Speaker 1: couple of examples cited here and maybe we can we
Speaker 1: can come back and talk more about the general theory
Speaker 1: on on why some of these things happen. Uh. For example,
Speaker 1: among ants, it is commonly observed that in mature ant colonies,
Speaker 1: there's a very orderly process for removing dead ants from
Speaker 1: the nest. Worker ants will locate dead individuals from the
Speaker 1: colony and then systematically carry their bodies away, either to
Speaker 1: a place away from the nest like a trash heap
Speaker 1: that's removed from the main nest activity or to a
Speaker 1: special chamber within the nest. And Wilkinson also points out
Speaker 1: a cool study from the journal b MC Evolutionary Biology
Speaker 1: from ten by Christopher Pull and Sylvia Kramer reporting that
Speaker 1: under some conditions, in some ants, even queens will engage
Speaker 1: in undertaker duties. We can come back to why that
Speaker 1: is a bit more later on, but just just to
Speaker 1: explore what happens in the example of the black garden ant.
Speaker 1: Sometimes in a young colony where there aren't many workers yet,
Speaker 1: if one of the early queens in the colony dies,
Speaker 1: the surviving queen will go to the dead queen's body,
Speaker 1: bite it up into a bunch of pieces, and then
Speaker 1: bury those pieces herself, which kind of goes against the
Speaker 1: idea of you know, the the queen aunt er, the
Speaker 1: queen bee, you know, the the queen and a social
Speaker 1: insects species just being like sitting around and and doing
Speaker 1: nothing and letting the workers do all the work and
Speaker 1: basically only existing to fulfill reproductive duties and never having
Speaker 1: never having any toil to their of their own. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that it does. Yeah, you did not think about this,
Speaker 1: so you either so you you either go overboard and
Speaker 1: associate all sorts of like human qualities with the with
Speaker 1: the aunt ruler, or you do just think of them
Speaker 1: fulfilling this one key job within the colony. So to
Speaker 1: be clear, I think biologically that is the most important
Speaker 1: job of theirs, and most of the work of the
Speaker 1: colony is relegated to these non reproducing workers. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, it's just just because you're reproducing all
Speaker 1: the time, doesn't mean you can't clean up a little bit, right, right.
Speaker 1: So another example be colonies and bees. There appears to
Speaker 1: be very well organized behavior system for quickly ejecting dead
Speaker 1: bodies from the nest. Looks like they usually just get
Speaker 1: dropped on the ground outside the nest, and in honey bees,
Speaker 1: this disposal process tends to happen very fast. It's carried
Speaker 1: out by a special class of middle aged worker bees
Speaker 1: representing about one to two of the population of the nest.
Speaker 1: And Wilkinson points to a nineteen eighty three study by P.
Speaker 1: Kirk Visher in the journal Animal Behavior that found really
Speaker 1: acute time sensitivity in how the bees prioritize body disposal. So,
Speaker 1: for example, corpses that were one hour old were removed
Speaker 1: faster than bees that had died just moments before. And
Speaker 1: I think this probably relies on some kind of chemical signal,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, something you can smell coming off of
Speaker 1: the dead bee, because Visier notes also that dead bees
Speaker 1: that were coated in paraffin, which would probably interfere with
Speaker 1: the penetration of smells and stuff, are removed much more slowly.
Speaker 1: And then one last thing in termites. Wilkinson also writes
Speaker 1: about some interesting behavior in termites. Whereas bees and ants
Speaker 1: tend to remove the dead bodies from the nest or
Speaker 1: deposit them in a special trash chamber, termites often bury
Speaker 1: they're dead within the nest. But I guess that gets
Speaker 1: this to the question of why, like, why would insects
Speaker 1: have these organized, efficient funerary practices for the disposal of
Speaker 1: the dead within their colonies. And I think there's a
Speaker 1: pretty clear answer to it, at least a pretty clear
Speaker 1: primary answer, and that is a disease control. Yes, yeah, absolutely, um.
Speaker 1: I was reading reading a very concise article about this
Speaker 1: by uh the author's son and Zoo. This was a
Speaker 1: Corpse Management in Social Insects from in the International Journal
Speaker 1: of Biological Sciences and they summed it up as follows.
Speaker 1: Undertaking behavior is an essential adaptation to social life that
Speaker 1: is critical for colony hygiene in enclosed nests. Social insects
Speaker 1: dispose of dead individuals in various fats to prevent further
Speaker 1: contact between corpses and living members in a colony. And
Speaker 1: I think that that kind of puts a nice little
Speaker 1: type bow on it right there. That's kind of the
Speaker 1: concise answer, um. But of course it gets a lot
Speaker 1: more complicated than than that, and certainly when you get
Speaker 1: into the various specific examples. Um. Again, I think it's
Speaker 1: important to note to note all this because one of
Speaker 1: one of the major realities of modern funeral practices is
Speaker 1: that we often have an almost extreme separation from physical death. Again,
Speaker 1: someone argue it's even detrimental set separate separation from physical death,
Speaker 1: but this is in fact one of the key factors
Speaker 1: in having funeral rights and practices to limit the amount
Speaker 1: of contact between the living and the dead, not just
Speaker 1: because the dead can be unsightly and troubling for the
Speaker 1: living to behold, not only to prop up some notion
Speaker 1: of continuation of the individual after death, but also because
Speaker 1: the dead are unhygienic and can serve as disease vectors. Now,
Speaker 1: with solitary animals, that's one thing, right, Avoidance is usually
Speaker 1: the best approach if you encounter one of your own dead,
Speaker 1: But social animals are just going to regularly encounter their
Speaker 1: own dead. They are. There are essentially three different ways
Speaker 1: of dealing with your own dead when you encounter them.
Speaker 1: There's necrophagi eating the dead, there's corpse removal, and there's
Speaker 1: burial and and necrophagy. As we've discussed in the show before,
Speaker 1: it's pretty widespread in various organisms uh and is also
Speaker 1: found in human traditions. It's it's one solution, though not
Speaker 1: though it's fortunate without its own complications. But his son
Speaker 1: Enzo will point out while sanitary issues related to corpses
Speaker 1: are widespread, they are particularly sharp and dense populations for
Speaker 1: social organisms, and of course that that category certainly includes
Speaker 1: human beings, but it also includes use social insects like bees,
Speaker 1: ants and termites, and so we see complex responses at
Speaker 1: the individual and colony level to deal with the dead
Speaker 1: and to engage in what humans would call undertaking. So
Speaker 1: they point out that for certain social spiders and social afids,
Speaker 1: corpse removal is just an indistinguishable part of clearing out
Speaker 1: a nest site. It's quote indistinguishable from dealing with inanimate
Speaker 1: nest waste. So so that's one way of approaching it.
Speaker 1: It's just like if you would get like a twig
Speaker 1: or something in your nest area and you'd you'd clean
Speaker 1: that out eventually, the same thing happens to the dead afid. Right.
Speaker 1: It would be kind of like if you were, um,
Speaker 1: you know, if you you had a human house, and
Speaker 1: you were to remove a dead body from your house
Speaker 1: with about as much precaution and and ceremony as you
Speaker 1: would take out the trash, where you're like, oh, well
Speaker 1: they're dead, so I'll take them out and put them
Speaker 1: in the trash can. That's kind of what some of
Speaker 1: these social spiders and social athids are doing. But they
Speaker 1: point out that ants, bees, wasps, termites, we see much
Speaker 1: more complex modes of behavior in which the treatment of
Speaker 1: the dead is distinct from the treatment of other waste products.
Speaker 1: And these methods kind of they kind of pick from
Speaker 1: the eat removed berry toolbox of possibility, and I think
Speaker 1: we see that in some of these specific UH answers
Speaker 1: that you already looked at, you know, the idea of say,
Speaker 1: cutting up the body of the dead and then burying
Speaker 1: those pieces, of just simply removing the dead and just
Speaker 1: throwing them out of the colony, versus removing them and
Speaker 1: burying them or in the case of the term ise,
Speaker 1: just burying them within the nest. The one of the
Speaker 1: really interesting questions I guess here is um, among these
Speaker 1: youth social insects, how do they know what to do?
Speaker 1: You know, like, how do how do they know how
Speaker 1: to guide and control this behavior? What's the what's the
Speaker 1: nervous system flow chart for an aunt or a bee
Speaker 1: to participate in undertaking? Yeah, this is where it gets interesting.
Speaker 1: You get into a lot of really deep research over
Speaker 1: the years because um, you know what, what is the
Speaker 1: trigger that causes them to remove the dead? And by
Speaker 1: the way, there's a term for this for the removal
Speaker 1: of the dead, and it is um uh necrophoresis And
Speaker 1: this is from the Greek just basically to move the dead.
Speaker 1: But it was coined by none other than E. O.
Speaker 1: Wilson Um, you know, the the master ant researcher who
Speaker 1: who you know, this is one of his research projects
Speaker 1: for a while, was like looking at how uh individual
Speaker 1: ants within a colony pick up on death and then
Speaker 1: respond accordingly. So, you know, obviously this is the first step.
Speaker 1: You have to know what's dead. Uh. Is this a
Speaker 1: live ant or is this a dead aunt? Is it
Speaker 1: getting better? Uh? Just a flesh wound whatever? Uh, you
Speaker 1: know you have to be able to react accordingly. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know it's vital to colony health. And it's based
Speaker 1: on chemical signals. Apparently um as is much of the
Speaker 1: activity within the ant world, and you can you can
Speaker 1: broadly think of the behavior as entailing death recognition and
Speaker 1: then behavioral responses and then task allocation for dealing with
Speaker 1: the dead. So Wilson and his fellow researchers identified what
Speaker 1: they called fatty acid death cues as being important in here,
Speaker 1: though subsequent research seems to sugge us that those are
Speaker 1: not the only signals involved, because sometimes the response time
Speaker 1: seems too short, like they're the uh the ants in
Speaker 1: question are reacting before the fatty acid death cues would generate.
Speaker 1: Get it all gets very you know, complicated in ant
Speaker 1: world chemical But basically they they seem to lean more
Speaker 1: into perhaps a chemical vital sign detection by the ants.
Speaker 1: So it's it's not just picking up maybe on one
Speaker 1: chemical that's saying I'm dead, but it's more of like
Speaker 1: a a chemical vital sign array that an ant is
Speaker 1: able to pick up on and read and the the
Speaker 1: In this uh, this particular Son and Out article, they
Speaker 1: also write that the term uh necromone is also used.
Speaker 1: This is like pheromone, except related to death, and this
Speaker 1: has been used to describe sort of the sort of
Speaker 1: the realm of death recognition chemicals. Uh. I love that
Speaker 1: that the necromone. It sounds like something that would be
Speaker 1: made up for a Riddic film, you know, yes, but
Speaker 1: also fits well within the the ant world, you know
Speaker 1: that they would again the chemical language of them. I
Speaker 1: love this idea of these, you know, these these creatures
Speaker 1: that we often you know, we think about them as
Speaker 1: being very simple, and they are, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: in a way like simple but but complex parts of
Speaker 1: this greater whole. And there's this whole language that they're
Speaker 1: engaged in, this chemical language that it's kind of a
Speaker 1: stretch for us to truly imagine it, you know, they
Speaker 1: do the imagine being able to read the chemical vital
Speaker 1: science of other members of our society. That is really interesting.
Speaker 1: And weirdly like it gets even deeper because there are
Speaker 1: some of these behaviors for the use social insects removing
Speaker 1: the dead from their nests that incorporate prioritization of the
Speaker 1: task based on how much of a disease risk the
Speaker 1: dead body would actually entail, So that that that raises
Speaker 1: all these other questions, like how can they tell what
Speaker 1: kind of disease risk this is? Like that there's a
Speaker 1: section in that Wilkinson article that talks about study in
Speaker 1: the journal Scientific Reports about about termites that found that
Speaker 1: the termites would react differently to a dead body within
Speaker 1: their nest depending on whether it was a member of
Speaker 1: their own species or from a very closely related species.
Speaker 1: Just to read from Wilkinson quote, regardless of whether a
Speaker 1: corpse of the same species came from their own colony
Speaker 1: or another colony, it was pulled back into the holding
Speaker 1: chamber for nutrient recycling and hygienic purposes. But if the
Speaker 1: corpse was that of a dark southeastern subterranean termite or
Speaker 1: reticular Termy's virginicus, it was entombed by workers on site
Speaker 1: with a large group of soldiers standing guard. Ten times
Speaker 1: as many termites were involved with the burial of this
Speaker 1: closely related species than the same species, but the extra time, energy,
Speaker 1: and labor were warranted. Researchers found in the face of
Speaker 1: external pathogens, so that so there there seems to be
Speaker 1: some kind of like evolutionary mechanism controlling the behavior here
Speaker 1: that recognizes certain types of dead termites within the nest
Speaker 1: as an elevated disease risk because maybe they're bringing in
Speaker 1: a pathogen that is new to the nest and and
Speaker 1: could decimate it if it's not disposed of, you know,
Speaker 1: immediately and totally, even though that might be a very
Speaker 1: energy intensive process for the colony. Yeah, yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's amazing how these you know, each each colony is
Speaker 1: like this entire immune system. And that that brings me
Speaker 1: back to, uh, that other study I was talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: the one in BMC Evolutionary Biology about the black Garden
Speaker 1: aunt and how the queens will sometimes participate in undertaking
Speaker 1: behaviors if the colony is young and there are not
Speaker 1: enough workers to help out with it. And this is
Speaker 1: a situation where there can be multiple co founding queens
Speaker 1: and a colony. Actually, just to read from from the
Speaker 1: abstract of the study quote. Social insects formed densely crowded
Speaker 1: societies and environments with high pathogen loads, but have evolved
Speaker 1: collective defenses that mitigate the impact of disease. However, colony
Speaker 1: founding queens lack this protection and suffer high rates of mortality.
Speaker 1: The impact of pathogens may be exacerbated in species where
Speaker 1: queens found colonies together, as healthy individuals may contract pathogens
Speaker 1: from infectious co founders. Therefore, we tested whether aunt queens
Speaker 1: avoid founding colonies with pathogen exposed con specifics and how
Speaker 1: they might limit disease transmission from infected individuals. And what
Speaker 1: this found is when there were these co founders, these
Speaker 1: co founding queens in a colony, if one of the
Speaker 1: original queens died, the surviving queen again would would do
Speaker 1: this biting process where they would sort of chomp up
Speaker 1: the other queen into pieces and then bury and remove
Speaker 1: the corpse. And the authors here right quote these undertaking
Speaker 1: behaviors were formed prophylactically, i e. Targeted equally towards non
Speaker 1: infected and infected corpses, as well as carried out before
Speaker 1: infected corpses became infectious. Biting and burial reduced the risk
Speaker 1: of queens contracting and dying from disease from an infectious
Speaker 1: corpse of a dead co foundress. So they did actually
Speaker 1: find this how to survival benefit to the queen that's
Speaker 1: doing this work, because better to be safe than sorry
Speaker 1: and get that corpse buried just in case it could
Speaker 1: become infectious. Well, this has been interesting, I think by
Speaker 1: looking at insects in their relationship to death, we've kind
Speaker 1: of gotten to explore both ends of the spectrum, like
Speaker 1: the stripped down version of what funeral rights are, like
Speaker 1: what does it mean to bury that they departed and
Speaker 1: why do we do it on a very basic level,
Speaker 1: but then also seeing how some of these these insects
Speaker 1: end up being brought into far more elaborate understandings of
Speaker 1: a human death as well. Now, obviously we we could
Speaker 1: we should come back in the future and talk more
Speaker 1: about funeral traditions. We've talked about funeral traditions on the
Speaker 1: show before, um, but but yeah, we could come back
Speaker 1: and discuss sort of like the the early days, like
Speaker 1: how what are some of the earliest examples of of
Speaker 1: burial among humans and pre humans and what does it
Speaker 1: mean like what and what aspects of it do we
Speaker 1: still see in our practices today. Yeah, those types of
Speaker 1: things are often interpreted as the earliest signs we have
Speaker 1: of the development of religion and humans. But you know,
Speaker 1: that's a really interesting area with a lot of questions open. Yeah.
Speaker 1: On the ant front, obviously, we've We've done plenty of
Speaker 1: other AUNT episodes that I'd refer folks back to, including
Speaker 1: our our three parter on ant Warfare that we did
Speaker 1: earlier this year. But I also want to mention a
Speaker 1: really great YouTube channel. Uh. This is one called Ants Canada.
Speaker 1: Are you familiar with this one, Joe, I don't think so.
Speaker 1: I was. I was not familiar with until a friend
Speaker 1: recommended as something to to show UM kids. And it's
Speaker 1: I mean, it's also really interesting for adults as well.
Speaker 1: But uh, this uh individual UM has this entire channel
Speaker 1: devoted to their various uh ant farms and also habitats
Speaker 1: for other creatures. But ants are the like the key focus,
Speaker 1: and it's it's really well done. Lots of great photography
Speaker 1: and video work. Uh. Some of the very topics we've
Speaker 1: discussed here pop up in the show as as they chronicle,
Speaker 1: uh the ins and outs of the various ant colonies
Speaker 1: and how they deal with their dad, how they deal
Speaker 1: with invaders and stuff of that nature. So, uh, my
Speaker 1: family has really been enjoying it. So if you have
Speaker 1: any Aunt fans out there, I highly recommend it as
Speaker 1: good stuff. Oh I just looked this channel up. I
Speaker 1: see one title on a popular video here seems to
Speaker 1: take a page from EO. Wilson says fire ants versus
Speaker 1: my hand. Yeah, yeah, I think IO Wilson would approve.
Speaker 1: Here's another one cockroach giving birth while being devoured by
Speaker 1: fire ants. Well, yeah, I'll have to give this a
Speaker 1: shot out. I think some of these popular ones maybe
Speaker 1: look there, they make the channel look a little grizzlier
Speaker 1: than it actually is. But but I'm I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: sure I don't know if I've watched any of these,
Speaker 1: uh these top ones yet. I kind of come in
Speaker 1: and out of the room home it's on sometimes, but
Speaker 1: I inevitably end up pausing to see what's going on.
Speaker 1: There'll be some big mystery with the colony, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, they explore and they watch and they figure
Speaker 1: it out. Of course, whatever is the grossest and most
Speaker 1: gruesome content on the channel is going to be the
Speaker 1: most viewed well, yeah, that's that's that's what will be rewarded.
Speaker 1: But you know the ants don't care. They don't care
Speaker 1: about clicks and subscribers. All right, we're gonna go and
Speaker 1: close it out there. If you would like to listen
Speaker 1: to other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you
Speaker 1: should check out the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast channel.
Speaker 1: You can find that wherever you get your podcasts. UH
Speaker 1: core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursday's Weird House Cinema on Fridays,
Speaker 1: and where we've got artifact and listener mail in the
Speaker 1: mix as well. Uh and wherever you listen to the show.
Speaker 1: We just asked the you rate, review, and subscribe huge
Speaker 1: thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
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Speaker 1: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 1: a topic for the future, or just to say hi,
Speaker 1: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
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