WEBVTT - The Artifact: The Tongue Stone 0:00:03.279 --> 0:00:05.640 Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of 0:00:05.640 --> 0:00:10.920 I Heart Radio. Hi, my name is Joe McCormick, and 0:00:11.039 --> 0:00:14.480 this is the Artifact, a short form series from Stuff 0:00:14.520 --> 0:00:18.560 to Blow Your Mind, focusing on particular objects, ideas, and 0:00:18.680 --> 0:00:24.000 moments in time. There's a stone that looks like a tongue, 0:00:24.560 --> 0:00:27.720 the tongue of a human, or a snake or a dragon, 0:00:27.880 --> 0:00:30.960 depending on who you ask. It's roughly in the shape 0:00:30.960 --> 0:00:34.800 of a triangle or even a heart, with rounded edges 0:00:34.840 --> 0:00:38.040 and a rough textured bulge on one of its three sides. 0:00:38.920 --> 0:00:43.040 In ancient Rome, these were known as glosso petrie, meaning 0:00:43.159 --> 0:00:46.879 tongue stones. Our first written record of them comes from 0:00:46.960 --> 0:00:50.520 the first century Roman author Pliny the Elder, who mentions 0:00:50.560 --> 0:00:53.840 them in the mineralogy section of his surviving master work 0:00:54.080 --> 0:00:57.480 The Natural History. He doesn't say a lot, but what 0:00:57.520 --> 0:01:01.080 he does tell us is tantalizing. He writes that glossy 0:01:01.160 --> 0:01:05.120 petrie are stones that resemble the human tongue. He records 0:01:05.160 --> 0:01:08.480 a common folk belief that they are not created within 0:01:08.560 --> 0:01:12.560 the earth like other stones. Instead, people say that they 0:01:12.640 --> 0:01:16.000 fall from the sky when the moon goes into eclipse. 0:01:16.959 --> 0:01:19.840 They're used for the purpose of selenimancy, which is a 0:01:19.880 --> 0:01:23.560 form of divination that draws hidden knowledge from the appearance 0:01:23.600 --> 0:01:26.920 of the phases of the moon. What roll the tongue 0:01:26.959 --> 0:01:29.920 stone plays in this magic art is unclear. But from 0:01:29.959 --> 0:01:32.800 here Plenty goes on to doubt the folk wisdom about 0:01:32.880 --> 0:01:35.600 these rocks, since it's also said that they have the 0:01:35.640 --> 0:01:38.560 power of quelling the winds of a storm, which in 0:01:38.680 --> 0:01:42.560 his mind is clearly ridiculous. So what were these stones 0:01:42.840 --> 0:01:46.440 and where did the belief in their powers come from? 0:01:46.520 --> 0:01:49.919 Christopher J. Duffin of the Natural History Museum in London 0:01:50.000 --> 0:01:53.360 writes a chapter on the tongue stones for a book 0:01:53.600 --> 0:01:58.320 called Toxicology in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. According 0:01:58.360 --> 0:02:02.080 to Duffin, apart from a you reproductions of Plenty's comments, 0:02:02.120 --> 0:02:05.240 written references to gloss of Petrie mostly vanish in the 0:02:05.320 --> 0:02:10.000 following centuries. However, the stones returned with a vengeance in 0:02:10.080 --> 0:02:13.760 late Middle Aged Europe as a regular entry in lapidaries 0:02:14.000 --> 0:02:17.720 or gimstone reference manuals of the time, where it seems 0:02:17.760 --> 0:02:21.400 they were believed to have power over the snakelike domains 0:02:21.480 --> 0:02:27.120 of magic, poison and venom. The fourteenth century lapidary of 0:02:27.240 --> 0:02:31.200 Jehan Mandeville claims that gloss of petrie are alexi far mix, 0:02:31.639 --> 0:02:34.960 meaning they work as antidotes to poison, in this case 0:02:35.080 --> 0:02:38.560 changing color in the presence of a deadly draft. During 0:02:38.560 --> 0:02:42.280 this period in history, many rich and powerful Europeans seemed 0:02:42.320 --> 0:02:46.040 to be terrified of poisoning, especially due to the widespread 0:02:46.080 --> 0:02:49.680 knowledge and use of arsenic based compounds, which could be 0:02:49.720 --> 0:02:52.440 dissolved into a glass of wine or a ladle of 0:02:52.480 --> 0:02:55.079 gravy without a hint of smell or taste to give 0:02:55.120 --> 0:02:59.399 them away. Remedies for this sphere included everything from goblets 0:02:59.480 --> 0:03:02.760 made of was believed to be unicorn horn, often in 0:03:02.840 --> 0:03:07.680 reality sourced from a narwhall or rhinoceros, to bees or stones, 0:03:07.760 --> 0:03:11.040 which are masses of undigested material from the guts of 0:03:11.080 --> 0:03:14.840 an animal. Gloss of petrie appear to be interpreted firmly 0:03:14.919 --> 0:03:20.040 within this tradition. The sixteenth century Sloan Lapidary, for instance, 0:03:20.320 --> 0:03:24.320 advises that the tongues of adders should be set in silver, 0:03:24.760 --> 0:03:28.240 both for kings and lords at their meat, so that 0:03:28.360 --> 0:03:31.679 yet they may be kept safer from poison. So how 0:03:31.720 --> 0:03:34.760 will they keep the kings and lords safe? If your 0:03:34.840 --> 0:03:38.320 rival mixes arsenic into your quail pie. The Sloane texts 0:03:38.360 --> 0:03:41.840 suggests that rather than changing color, the stones will begin 0:03:42.000 --> 0:03:47.080 to sweat. Sometimes these stones were worn as pendants and jewelry. 0:03:47.600 --> 0:03:51.600 In other cases they were incorporated directly into the tableware. 0:03:52.360 --> 0:03:55.160 One example of the latter approach is the elaborate dinner 0:03:55.160 --> 0:03:59.680 table ornament known as that naturn Zungenbalm, meaning the adder's 0:03:59.720 --> 0:04:03.720 tongue tree. This and other ornaments like it were commissioned 0:04:03.720 --> 0:04:06.640 from gold or silversmiths of the day, and they were 0:04:06.680 --> 0:04:10.480 a luxury available only to the upper echelons of society. 0:04:10.800 --> 0:04:15.400 One explanation for this legendary alexipharmic power of Glossopetrie is 0:04:15.480 --> 0:04:19.839 pure sympathetic magic, since they either looked like snakes tongues 0:04:20.080 --> 0:04:23.599 or sometimes were in fact believed to be snakes tongues 0:04:23.720 --> 0:04:27.920 turned into stone, and since snakes were associated with the venom, 0:04:27.960 --> 0:04:31.799 the stones were believed to have power against chemical toxins 0:04:31.839 --> 0:04:35.040 according to the broad like cures like logic of pre 0:04:35.160 --> 0:04:39.520 scientific medicine and magic. However, by the Renaissance some authors 0:04:39.520 --> 0:04:43.000 began to question the legendary and magical accounts of these stones. 0:04:43.600 --> 0:04:48.279 In a separate article entitled Cochleodonts and caimeroids, Arthur Smith 0:04:48.320 --> 0:04:53.159 Woodward and the hollow cephalians. Duffen traces the evolving scholarship 0:04:53.200 --> 0:04:55.680 on these objects during the late Middle Ages to the 0:04:55.680 --> 0:04:59.560 early Modern period, noting that Leonardo da Vinci argued in 0:04:59.640 --> 0:05:02.839 his no books that Glosso petrie were likely the remains 0:05:02.839 --> 0:05:08.320 of ordinary, once living organisms, in other words, fossils. In 0:05:08.360 --> 0:05:12.560 the seventeenth century, the Danish scientist Nils Stenson, also known 0:05:12.640 --> 0:05:16.680 as Nicholas Steno, mounted a persuasive argument that these stones 0:05:16.720 --> 0:05:21.480 were not tongues at all, but teeth, the fossilized teeth 0:05:21.720 --> 0:05:25.200 of ancient sharks. This was based in part on his 0:05:25.240 --> 0:05:28.320 studies of the cranial musculature of a living great white 0:05:28.360 --> 0:05:33.440 shark captured at Lavorno in sixteen sixty seven. Duffin notes 0:05:33.520 --> 0:05:36.920 that the Sicilian painter Augustino Scilla came to the same 0:05:36.960 --> 0:05:40.840 conclusion around the same time, and that the Swiss naturalist 0:05:40.920 --> 0:05:44.960 Conrad Gessner had suggested the possibility a hundred years earlier, 0:05:45.160 --> 0:05:47.680 though he had been unable to prove it. So think 0:05:47.680 --> 0:05:50.440 back to the naturn Zungenbaum. Now that we know what 0:05:50.520 --> 0:05:54.680 these stones were, Nobles and clergymen were decorating their fine 0:05:54.720 --> 0:05:59.480 dinner tables with what looked like leafless, withered elms dangling 0:05:59.600 --> 0:06:04.120 with the fossilized teeth of extinct sea monsters. To read 0:06:04.160 --> 0:06:08.080 from duffin quote, the mounted shark's teeth were suspended from 0:06:08.080 --> 0:06:12.040 a central tree like structure, ready for picking and dipping 0:06:12.080 --> 0:06:15.359 into the wine before it was drunk. If the tooth 0:06:15.400 --> 0:06:18.520 did not undergo a color change on being extracted from 0:06:18.520 --> 0:06:22.039 the wine, the beverage was deemed safe to drink. One 0:06:22.080 --> 0:06:24.440 description of a tree like this mentions as many as 0:06:24.480 --> 0:06:28.599 eleven sharks teeth suspended from eight branches made of red coral. 0:06:29.200 --> 0:06:32.040 Records indicate that a major consumer of these snake tong 0:06:32.200 --> 0:06:35.839 trees was the papacy, especially during the Avignon period of 0:06:35.880 --> 0:06:39.760 the fourteenth century. According to Duffen, there are at least 0:06:39.839 --> 0:06:43.960 four surviving examples of these trees. One he describes in 0:06:44.080 --> 0:06:47.440 some detail is truly difficult to imagine without seeing, so 0:06:47.480 --> 0:06:51.119 it's worth looking up. Quote. A specimen in the green 0:06:51.240 --> 0:06:55.280 room of the stat Lika Kunst sam Lungen in Dresden 0:06:55.760 --> 0:06:59.440 consists of a silver base with Jesse, the father of David, 0:07:00.040 --> 0:07:02.800 lanked by a snake and reclining at the base of 0:07:02.800 --> 0:07:07.560 a tree. Six long pedicels then emerge through a canopy 0:07:07.560 --> 0:07:12.080 of serrated silver leaves, each terminating in a drooping flower, 0:07:12.400 --> 0:07:15.360 from which a tooth of issyrus or a mako shark 0:07:15.720 --> 0:07:19.880 is suspended in the crown of the tree. Mary with 0:07:19.960 --> 0:07:23.240 the baby Jesus in her lap, leans against a large 0:07:23.280 --> 0:07:28.640 specimen of otodous megalodon. This was new to me, our 0:07:28.720 --> 0:07:32.600 Lady of the Megalodon. Another example cited by Duffin as 0:07:32.640 --> 0:07:35.680 a thirty two centimeter piece held by the Treasury of 0:07:35.720 --> 0:07:38.920 the German Order in Vienna, consisting of a coral tree 0:07:38.960 --> 0:07:43.440 on a silver gilt base with fourteen megalodon teeth dangling 0:07:43.480 --> 0:07:47.560 like peaches from its red limbs. The Megalodon, whose name 0:07:47.680 --> 0:07:51.520 just happens to mean giant tooth, is an extinct species 0:07:51.560 --> 0:07:55.360 of enormous shark that lived from roughly twenty three million 0:07:55.440 --> 0:07:58.360 years ago until about two and a half million years ago. 0:07:59.080 --> 0:08:01.720 This amazing shark ark is one of the largest predators 0:08:01.760 --> 0:08:04.040 that ever lived, though its body size has to be 0:08:04.200 --> 0:08:08.440 estimated from incomplete data due to the poor fossilization potential 0:08:08.680 --> 0:08:12.400 of its cartilaginous skeleton. It may have grown up to 0:08:12.440 --> 0:08:15.920 around twenty meters or over sixty feet in length. What 0:08:16.040 --> 0:08:18.880 we know for sure is how big its teeth got, 0:08:19.120 --> 0:08:23.720 with the largest examples measuring almost seven inches or eighteen centimeters, 0:08:24.000 --> 0:08:26.800 which is probably too big to fit into a wine glass. 0:08:27.800 --> 0:08:30.880 While Renaissance popes and nobles may not have known exactly 0:08:31.000 --> 0:08:35.240 what the serpent's tongues were, they knew what kind they wanted. 0:08:35.640 --> 0:08:38.520 While it seems any shark's teeth were at least sometimes 0:08:38.559 --> 0:08:42.680 believed to have alexipharmic effects, the most prized specimens were 0:08:42.720 --> 0:08:47.800 Miocene fossils of Otodus megalodon from Malta. It appears Malta 0:08:47.880 --> 0:08:51.280 was a significant exporter of fossil shark teeth during this period. 0:08:51.679 --> 0:08:55.280 Malta is an island composed of sedimentary rock formed from 0:08:55.280 --> 0:08:58.720 ancient sea floors, which is a perfect place for serpent's 0:08:58.800 --> 0:09:02.920 tongues to leak out of eroding cliffs and hillsides. Also 0:09:03.000 --> 0:09:06.400 tying into Malta are some legendary explanations for the origin 0:09:06.440 --> 0:09:09.080 of gloss of Petrie, which traced back to a story 0:09:09.120 --> 0:09:11.880 in the New Testament in the Book of Acts where St. 0:09:11.920 --> 0:09:15.600 Paul is bitten by a viper but miraculously left unharmed 0:09:16.120 --> 0:09:18.640 to read from Acts chapter twenty eight in the n R. 0:09:18.800 --> 0:09:22.199 S V. After we had reached safety, we then learned 0:09:22.240 --> 0:09:25.200 that the island was called Malta. The natives showed us 0:09:25.280 --> 0:09:28.920 unusual kindness, since it had begun to reign and was cold. 0:09:28.960 --> 0:09:31.720 They kindled a fire and welcomed all of us around it. 0:09:32.200 --> 0:09:34.959 Paul had gathered a bundle of brushwood and was putting 0:09:34.960 --> 0:09:37.200 it on the fire when a viper, driven out by 0:09:37.240 --> 0:09:40.720 the heat, fastened itself on his hand. When the natives 0:09:40.720 --> 0:09:43.280 saw the creature hanging from his hand, they said to 0:09:43.320 --> 0:09:46.000 one another, this man must be a murderer. Though he 0:09:46.040 --> 0:09:49.280 has escaped from the sea, justice has not allowed him 0:09:49.280 --> 0:09:52.760 to live. He, however, shook off the creature into the 0:09:52.840 --> 0:09:56.240 fire and suffered no harm. They were expecting him to 0:09:56.240 --> 0:09:59.080 swell up or drop debt. But after they had waited 0:09:59.080 --> 0:10:01.800 a long time and saw that nothing unusual had happened 0:10:01.840 --> 0:10:04.760 to him, they changed their minds and began to say 0:10:04.840 --> 0:10:07.880 that he was a god. Over time, this story was 0:10:07.920 --> 0:10:11.040 embellished to include details not mentioned in the Bible, such 0:10:11.080 --> 0:10:14.720 as Paul turning the poison tongues of all of Malta's 0:10:14.720 --> 0:10:18.880 snakes into stone, or the idea that Paul's sermons were 0:10:18.920 --> 0:10:22.720 so righteous and commanding that they left physical impressions of 0:10:22.800 --> 0:10:26.480 his tongue in the rock strata of the island itself, which, 0:10:26.480 --> 0:10:29.600 of course, hundreds of years later would be dug up, collected, 0:10:29.640 --> 0:10:32.600 and sold as serpents tongues so they could be used 0:10:32.600 --> 0:10:36.160 to detect poison in a drink, or for Mary and 0:10:36.240 --> 0:10:44.200 baby Jesus to recline against them in a centerpiece. That 0:10:44.240 --> 0:10:46.880 does it for this edition of The Artifact. Tune in 0:10:46.960 --> 0:10:49.960 each week for new episodes of The Artifact, hosted by 0:10:50.080 --> 0:10:53.840 Robert or myself. Huge thanks as always to our excellent 0:10:53.880 --> 0:10:56.880 audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson, and if you'd like to 0:10:56.880 --> 0:10:59.320 get into contact with us, you can always email us 0:10:59.360 --> 0:11:10.439 at cont act at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. 0:11:10.520 --> 0:11:13.040 Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. 0:11:13.360 --> 0:11:15.720 For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart 0:11:15.760 --> 0:11:18.480 Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your 0:11:18.520 --> 0:11:19.200 favorite shows.