Speaker 1: Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert.
Speaker 2: Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday. Time
Speaker 2: for an episode from the Vault. This is part two
Speaker 2: of the series that aired last Saturday. This is Because
Speaker 2: It Is My Heart, Part two, originally from February sixteenth,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three. Let's jump right in.
Speaker 1: A heart ate Loki. In the embers it lay and
Speaker 1: half cooked, found he the woman's heart, with child from
Speaker 1: the woman Loki soon was, And thence among men came
Speaker 1: the monsters. All the sea, storm driven seeks heaven itself.
Speaker 1: Over the earth it flows, the air grows sterile. Then
Speaker 1: follow the snows and the furious winds. For the gods
Speaker 1: are doomed, and the end is death. Then comes another,
Speaker 1: a greater than all, Though never I dare his name
Speaker 1: to speak. Few are they now that farther can see
Speaker 1: than the moment when Othen shall meet the Wolf.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 2: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Oh
Speaker 2: where did that poem come from?
Speaker 1: Rob?
Speaker 2: Is that one of those Icelandic texts.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is from the lay of Hindler, a Norse
Speaker 1: poem from the twelfth century or perhaps a little later.
Speaker 1: But in this I know that the wording and in
Speaker 1: this translation can maybe be a little confusing. A heart
Speaker 1: is not eating Loki. Loki, the Norse trickster god is
Speaker 1: consuming a heart, and after consuming that heart, he becomes
Speaker 1: with child, and those children are the monsters that plague
Speaker 1: you man.
Speaker 2: I think this poem is easier to follow if you
Speaker 2: read it in Yoda voice because it follows Yoda syntax.
Speaker 1: It does a heart Loki. Yeah, you know. So. In
Speaker 1: this poem we see just one example of heart consumption
Speaker 1: in Norse mythology. There are other tales. There are tales
Speaker 1: of men eating the bloody hearts of slain dragons to
Speaker 1: gain their strength and courage, and this is a motif
Speaker 1: we see continued in other European myths as well, such
Speaker 1: as that of the Germanic hero a Cigarette who consumes
Speaker 1: the heart of the dragon Faffnir after slaying the monster.
Speaker 1: In one telling of that, this kind of goes back
Speaker 1: to episodes from last year that will be rerunning shortly.
Speaker 1: In one telling of this, avac he has the dragon's heart.
Speaker 1: He cooks it over the fire too, and so he
Speaker 1: can eat it, and in doing so he burns his
Speaker 1: hand on those delicious blood juices of the heart, and
Speaker 1: he instinctively licks his hand because he's been burned. And
Speaker 1: the taste of the dragon's blood is said to give
Speaker 1: him the ability to understand all languages.
Speaker 2: Oh, this reminds me of the Salmon of knowledge. Is
Speaker 2: that the comparison there?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's I think exactly the comparison. I don't
Speaker 1: remember this coming up, but there's a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of those tales are interconnected, and some of their
Speaker 1: themes and sometimes the details.
Speaker 2: Well, obviously we are back with part two of our
Speaker 2: series on the removal of hearts, a topic that Rob
Speaker 2: you have brilliantly chosen for the week of Valentine's Day,
Speaker 2: because as much as we associate with love, with the
Speaker 2: giving around and the trading of symbolic heart imagery, we
Speaker 2: also do you know, love is a lot about like
Speaker 2: getting your heart ripped out?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, and of course that we love those metaphors,
Speaker 1: especially the week of Valentine's Day.
Speaker 2: Well, so, in the previous episode we ended up focusing
Speaker 2: on some various traditions of heart removal in ancient Egyptian
Speaker 2: religion and in a Mesoamerican context. And today we're going
Speaker 2: to be starting off in accordance with the poem you read,
Speaker 2: looking at some Norse traditions.
Speaker 1: That's right. And I found a really great book that
Speaker 1: I used in putting this section together. It's called A
Speaker 1: History of the Heart by O. M. Hoystad of Telmark
Speaker 1: University College in Norway. The author here is of Norse
Speaker 1: descent and frequently mentions that in the book. In the
Speaker 1: book itself doesn't just deal with Norse traditions of the heart.
Speaker 1: He also touches on some of the examples we discussed
Speaker 1: in the last episode. But he spends a lot of
Speaker 1: time discussing the Norse idea of the heart and what
Speaker 1: they thought the heart did, and kind of like the
Speaker 1: way that these ideas affected expectations of physiology. So as
Speaker 1: Hoystod discusses, the Norse saw the heart as the seat
Speaker 1: of courage, which you know, that squares with a lot
Speaker 1: of other traditions as well, and a lot of the
Speaker 1: ways we talk about the heart metaphorically today, but it
Speaker 1: was also seen as the seed of the mind. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously we get into Norse culture, and there's there's a
Speaker 1: lot in Norse culture beyond the warrior ethos and warrior culture.
Speaker 1: But Hoystot is pretty quick in this book to say
Speaker 1: like there was there was a certain ruthless edge to
Speaker 1: Norse culture as well, and we see that in the
Speaker 1: way they treated the heart and what Once more, in
Speaker 1: reading this, I was reminded again of that C. S.
Speaker 1: Lewis quote that we discussed in a previous episode of
Speaker 1: about the unloving heart, how it becomes this dark thing
Speaker 1: and an encased thing that is that is cold and
Speaker 1: and and unflappable, but also you know, it's it cuts
Speaker 1: you off from from any like legitimate feeling and connection.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, his point in that quote being that love
Speaker 2: is by nature becoming vulnerable, and you can defend yourself
Speaker 2: against becoming vulnerable, but that has its own consequences, right
Speaker 2: the Norse.
Speaker 1: I don't know how the Norse of old would have
Speaker 1: have taken that that quote. They would have been like, yeah,
Speaker 1: perhaps seal that hard off, let it grow nice and cold,
Speaker 1: because that basically is one of the attributes of the
Speaker 1: ideal Norse warrior heart. His voice Dood discusses in the book.
Speaker 1: In some accounts, it even seems to you to go
Speaker 1: beyond the merely metaphorical, and it seems to be seen
Speaker 1: as a biological reality, either the physiological result of bravery
Speaker 1: or its cause. So we're talking about a heart that
Speaker 1: is shriveled, that is cold, that doesn't have a lot
Speaker 1: of blood in it, and it doesn't quiver. So in
Speaker 1: the fust Broad saga, this is the saga of the
Speaker 1: foster Brothers, or the saga of the Sworn Brothers. This
Speaker 1: is a tale of the eleventh century surviving in a
Speaker 1: trio of I think each one is incomplete thirteenth century manuscripts,
Speaker 1: and it's in this particular tale it's said that following
Speaker 1: the death of a brave warrior named tor Gear, they
Speaker 1: take the warrior, they lay him out. He's like laid
Speaker 1: out on a stone or a table or something, and
Speaker 1: they open up his guest so that it could be
Speaker 1: seen what a brave man's heart truly looks like, because
Speaker 1: they were curious, is it, like they say, is a
Speaker 1: brave courageous man's heart? Is it small? Is it cold?
Speaker 1: Is it shriveled? Is it like the heart of the grinch?
Speaker 1: Before it grows three sizes. M Is it in fact
Speaker 1: free of the blood that would cause it to quiver
Speaker 1: and make one a coward? Or is it? Indeed you
Speaker 1: have the small, firm, cold heart of a warrior. And
Speaker 1: in this account, supposedly this is exactly what they find.
Speaker 1: They cut him open and they say, yes, it's all true,
Speaker 1: like look at this heart. Behold this shrivelled cold heart
Speaker 1: of a warrior. And so hoist I discusses this a bit.
Speaker 1: He he references some other accounts. There's a one of
Speaker 1: a Norse warrior heart from the hell Gees saga. This
Speaker 1: is a quick quote from that quote. Fearless was he
Speaker 1: bold for battle? Bone hard, his heart within his breast. Now,
Speaker 1: he stresses, in this case this is more of a
Speaker 1: metaphor than anatomical commentary. But he cites the work of
Speaker 1: a Norse his story in a named Claus von See
Speaker 1: on the idea that courage and cowardice can still be
Speaker 1: thought of in Norse thought to stem from quote purely
Speaker 1: anatomical relations. So to quote of this quote. The important
Speaker 1: thing for the present argument is that the metaphors mentioned
Speaker 1: refer to the anatomical composition of the heart, and that
Speaker 1: they see in its smallness, hardness, and absence of blood
Speaker 1: a cause of courage, and not only a symptom of it.
Speaker 2: Okay, So it is because your interior organs have certain
Speaker 2: properties that certain behaviors emerge in you. And so for
Speaker 2: a warrior who's very courageous and very strong in battle,
Speaker 2: it just happens to be because their heart is this
Speaker 2: icy little nugget.
Speaker 1: Yeah O. When speaking of the icy nuggets, he also
Speaker 1: points to the giant Rubny in Norse mythology, who is
Speaker 1: said to be the strongest of all the giants because
Speaker 1: he has a heart of literal stone.
Speaker 2: That, yeah, that'll do it.
Speaker 1: And he also gets into this account of Rudney going
Speaker 1: up against Thor and and so Rudney's really strong, but
Speaker 1: you know that Thor also has a really tough heart
Speaker 1: and has these you know, magical you know, god given
Speaker 1: hammer and so forth and some other magical items. They
Speaker 1: don't want to go up into a direct battle against them,
Speaker 1: so they're like, build a giant, and then they have
Speaker 1: to give it a heart, but no, no hearts are available,
Speaker 1: so they put a mayor's heart in there, and it
Speaker 1: doesn't work, like it just throws off the whole construct
Speaker 1: but there and then.
Speaker 2: Sorry, it's like you get the wrong voltage battery.
Speaker 1: Yeah, basically, you know, And I think that's in that
Speaker 1: we get back. You know, we're talking about some of
Speaker 1: the interpretations of the heart and it's role in the
Speaker 1: body and the person that are more magical and then
Speaker 1: maybe to modern eyes and scientific understanding a little backwards,
Speaker 1: but at the same time, they do realize that there
Speaker 1: is something about the heart that that powers everything. It
Speaker 1: is the center of the being, even if contrary to
Speaker 1: this one leg of Norse thought, it has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with one's mind exactly.
Speaker 2: And as we talked about in the last episode, it
Speaker 2: is scientifically true that feedback from organs other than the
Speaker 2: brain contributes to the way the brain works. So I
Speaker 2: think the way we put it last time is that,
Speaker 2: you know, the brain is the necessary organ for cognition.
Speaker 2: You couldn't think without it. But also it doesn't think
Speaker 2: in a vacuum. It's influenced by organs throughout the body.
Speaker 2: So the digestive system has influence on how the brain works,
Speaker 2: how you feel, how you think, and the cardiovascular system
Speaker 2: does as well, your heart and your lungs and all that.
Speaker 2: So I think there is for example, I mean, I
Speaker 2: think courage and cowardice would be a great example, because
Speaker 2: that would involve the fight or flight response, which of
Speaker 2: course is based in the nervous system, but then involves
Speaker 2: feedback loops from organs throughout the body, and it does
Speaker 2: indeed include regulation of the circulatory and respiration systems, so
Speaker 2: in a way, you are sort of getting feedback from
Speaker 2: the heart when you're feeling fear.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And I think we've discussed this before, but
Speaker 1: I think it would be a mistake to think that
Speaker 1: the Norse had like a simplistic understanding of, say that
Speaker 1: the human inner experience, because you also look at things
Speaker 1: like the idea that of Odin's crows. What were their names,
Speaker 1: Hogan and Moonan. I think I'm probably mispronouncing them, But
Speaker 1: we discussed this in the past, how each one has
Speaker 1: a different connotation dealing with like the mind and memory,
Speaker 1: as of Oden. So we're going to move on from
Speaker 1: most of the Norse examples here, but we are going
Speaker 1: to get into another European example of heart removal, one
Speaker 1: that I wasn't familiar with until basically researching these episodes.
Speaker 2: Right, So we're going to talk about heart burial or
Speaker 2: the treatment of the heart in medieval and post medieval
Speaker 2: Christian Europe. Now a major source I was consulting on
Speaker 2: this was a chapter in a collection of archaeology essays.
Speaker 2: The book that it's from is called Body Parts and
Speaker 2: Bodies Whole. That was from Oxbow Books, that's an Oxford
Speaker 2: press in twenty ten and the editors were Katerina Rebe Salisbury,
Speaker 2: Marie Luis Stigsrensen and Jessica Hughes. And the specific chapter
Speaker 2: in question is called heart Burial in Medieval and early
Speaker 2: post Medieval Central Europe by Estella Weiss Crachie, and I
Speaker 2: looked her up. She's a scholar affiliated with the Austrian
Speaker 2: Academy of Sciences and the Austrian Archaeological Institute. So between
Speaker 2: the introduction of Christianity in Europe and roughly the nineteenth century,
Speaker 2: the usually near universal ideal for burial practices in Europe
Speaker 2: in Christian Europe was straightforward burial of the body whole
Speaker 2: with flesh intact. And there are exceptions to this we're
Speaker 2: going to talk about, but that was basically the norm.
Speaker 2: And this could be connected in part to Christian beliefs
Speaker 2: about the afterlife, because strangely, today, I think if you
Speaker 2: ask most Christians what they believe happens after death, they
Speaker 2: will say that their immaterial soul separates from the body
Speaker 2: and goes off to live in Heaven with God for eternity.
Speaker 2: And under this way of thinking, the body is not important.
Speaker 2: It's just sort of the matter that the soul uses
Speaker 2: to live through, and the afterlife will not have a
Speaker 2: material basis. But this is not what the earliest Christians
Speaker 2: buy and large believed, and this is not what's described
Speaker 2: in the earliest Christian texts. They instead speak of what
Speaker 2: theologians often call a general resurrection, that at the end
Speaker 2: of the age, all of the dead, the righteous and
Speaker 2: the unrighteous will be resurrected in bodily form to face judgment,
Speaker 2: though canfusingly, the apostle Paul writes that it will be
Speaker 2: a kind of changed bodily form, because the present earthly
Speaker 2: flesh and bones that we have now are perishable, and
Speaker 2: so they can't inherit the kingdom. And yet we will
Speaker 2: be raised in bodily forms. So when our bodies are
Speaker 2: raised from the dead, we will be given new spiritual flesh,
Speaker 2: which is imperishable.
Speaker 1: Synthetic flesh.
Speaker 2: You could look at it that way, okay, But anyway, So,
Speaker 2: it was commonly understood by the dominant schools of early
Speaker 2: Christian theologians that the afterlife for believers would consist of
Speaker 2: some form of bodily resurrection, even if the body is
Speaker 2: changed somehow, thus giving rise to a desire for funeral
Speaker 2: practices that would keep the body relatively intact.
Speaker 1: And I think, knowing that I would never have conceived
Speaker 1: that heart removal would be in the cards at all.
Speaker 2: Well, I think various procedures that in some way violate
Speaker 2: the wholeness or integrity of the body were controversial with
Speaker 2: certain people at certain times. And by the way, I
Speaker 2: want to say this whole thing about like the body.
Speaker 2: This leads to a great digression on the implications for
Speaker 2: cannibalism in early Christian thought, because like, okay, what if
Speaker 2: you are saved, but then you are killed and eaten
Speaker 2: by a cannibal and your body becomes part of the
Speaker 2: body of the cannibal, what will happen at the resurrection?
Speaker 2: Or what if two cannibals eat a Christian and then
Speaker 2: together the two cannibals have a baby. The baby will
Speaker 2: be made of parts of the Christian that the parents ate,
Speaker 2: So how will God retrieve the bits of the Christian
Speaker 2: from the baby's body and so forth? Like Thomas Aquinas
Speaker 2: participated in discussions about topics of this sort, and it's
Speaker 2: a hoot. But anyway, one interesting area we see the
Speaker 2: theological implications of Europe shifting from mostly Pagan to mostly
Speaker 2: Christian is in attitudes toward funeral practices, specifically toward cremation,
Speaker 2: because apart from the literal implications for the possibility of
Speaker 2: future resurrection, and there were different ideas about this, you know,
Speaker 2: some Christian theologians did not place as much importance on
Speaker 2: the integrity of the body, you know, some just didn't
Speaker 2: think it was a big deal. I think Augustine didn't
Speaker 2: think it was a big deal. But anyway, cremation was
Speaker 2: not only a way of destroying the body, including in
Speaker 2: a way destroying the bones, but also just sort of
Speaker 2: it was it was culturally associated with paganism. It was
Speaker 2: something that the Pagans did, and thus it was viewed
Speaker 2: as alien and unholy by Christian rulers. So, for example,
Speaker 2: in the seven eighties, and I've seen two different years
Speaker 2: given for this, seven eighty five and seven eighty nine.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure why the difference or which one is correct,
Speaker 2: but sometime in the seven eighties, the Christian king Charlemagne,
Speaker 2: who eventually style himself as the Emperor of the Holy
Speaker 2: Roman Empire, banned the practice of cremation of the dead
Speaker 2: as practiced by the Saxons. And I was looking for
Speaker 2: a quote of this edict. I found it quoted in
Speaker 2: something called European Paganism The Realities of Cult from Antiquity
Speaker 2: to the Middle Ages by Ken Dowden, published in twenty thirteen,
Speaker 2: and this quotes it in translation as follows. If anyone
Speaker 2: causes the body of a dead man to be consumed
Speaker 2: by flame according to the right of the Pagans, and
Speaker 2: shall reduce its bones to ashes, he shall suffer capital punishment.
Speaker 2: So that's harsh. Cremating a friend or family member's body
Speaker 2: is punishable by death. So you get the idea of
Speaker 2: how strongly intact burial was was linked to cultural and
Speaker 2: religious orthodoxy in much of Christian Europe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the point that it needs to be enforced, apparently
Speaker 1: with the death penalty, you know, I guess drawing just
Speaker 1: this firm line that needs to be enforced in the
Speaker 1: view of the time between us and them.
Speaker 2: But to come back to Why's Cracheese article. Despite intact
Speaker 2: burial being the norm, there were countercurrents of thinking and practice,
Speaker 2: both for cultural and theological reasons. Like again, there were
Speaker 2: some people who didn't think the intactness of the body
Speaker 2: was as important as others did, and for purely practical reasons.
Speaker 2: For example, practical reasons would include space real estate. There
Speaker 2: was the common practice of removal of bones from a
Speaker 2: burial place to be taken away to a charnel house
Speaker 2: because you know, there's just not enough space for all
Speaker 2: the bodies in the cemetery.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, And this is I mean, this is something
Speaker 1: you see in cultures around the world where there might
Speaker 1: be some sort of predominant idea about how the dead
Speaker 1: should be buried. But you're going to then come up
Speaker 1: against basic environmental constraints on that practice, as well as
Speaker 1: size constraints based on various factors.
Speaker 2: Exactly. And I've got another practical time and place, time,
Speaker 2: place and manner constraint on what can be done with
Speaker 2: the body, and that would be processing the body in
Speaker 2: some way to delay putrefaction. This was to preserve the
Speaker 2: corpse for some reason, often either for public display or
Speaker 2: for transport across a long distance. And some of these
Speaker 2: forms of processing, okay, you can imagine some types of
Speaker 2: just like embalming to make the corpse last as long
Speaker 2: as possible. But sometimes this was a little more involved
Speaker 2: than that and could be thought to violate the integrity
Speaker 2: of the body as a whole. Sometimes it involved removing
Speaker 2: things or even more extreme forms of processing, and these
Speaker 2: practices get weirder than you might imagine. So some of
Speaker 2: what we're talking about here is just disembowelment, removal of
Speaker 2: the internal organs from the abdominal cavity. Weiscrazi says that
Speaker 2: this became common in the Frankish Empire in the eighth
Speaker 2: and ninth centuries. So you take the guts out, or
Speaker 2: take all the internal organs out. That might have some
Speaker 2: kind of implication for preserving the rest of the body
Speaker 2: for a certain period of time to do something with.
Speaker 2: But in the twelfth century we see the rise of
Speaker 2: a practice called most teutonicus, which translates to the German custom.
Speaker 2: What is this custom of the Germans? It was boiling
Speaker 2: the honored dead.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: Sometimes here's an example of how it would be used.
Speaker 2: Sometimes a high ranking warrior or commander would die on
Speaker 2: a campaign in southern Europe or in the Holy Land,
Speaker 2: far away from home. How are his retainers going to
Speaker 2: get the cadaver back to the crypt at the family estate.
Speaker 2: The German speaking crusaders often did not want to be
Speaker 2: buried away from home, you know, in the place where
Speaker 2: they were crusading. They wanted to be buried back at home.
Speaker 2: The body would obviously rot if it were transported intact,
Speaker 2: or you know, by cart or even by ship, trying
Speaker 2: to take it all the way back to Germany or
Speaker 2: Australia where where the warrior came from. So people came
Speaker 2: up with the solution of making that warrior into a
Speaker 2: bone broth. You would have crusader stock. So imagine Conrad
Speaker 2: here dies in battle trying to sack a Muslim city
Speaker 2: in Syria, and his servants or his kinsmen get his
Speaker 2: body and they boil it until you can be boiled
Speaker 2: in water or in like vinegar or wine, or I
Speaker 2: think sometimes in milk, but in some kind of liquid.
Speaker 2: You boil it until the flesh starts to separate from
Speaker 2: the bones, and then somehow you get the bones clean
Speaker 2: I guess if you boil it long enough, just basically
Speaker 2: everything will float off. Or you could boil it for
Speaker 2: a period and then it might require some additional scraping
Speaker 2: with sharp instruments, but you would boil first to get
Speaker 2: the meat off, and then you'd have clean, hygienic bones
Speaker 2: that could be taken back to the estate in Europe
Speaker 2: for deposition.
Speaker 1: Yeah, to your point about the stock, we're really close
Speaker 1: to just to butchering here this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and sometimes I've read so this was not in
Speaker 2: this book chapter I'm talking about it. I read somewhere
Speaker 2: that sometimes the organs from this were discarded, and other
Speaker 2: times the organs in the flesh were preserved, like you
Speaker 2: might preserve a meat, like by salting them so that
Speaker 2: they could be transported somewhere, maybe to be buried separately.
Speaker 1: Wow, this seems like a whole area that is overdue
Speaker 1: for exploration in some sort of undead you know, templar
Speaker 1: fiction or something. You know, you could have the skeletal,
Speaker 1: reanimated remains of this crusader. And what does he want
Speaker 1: while he wants his salted organs.
Speaker 2: Back, Give me my body back in sausage form. It
Speaker 2: is sausage now, and how fitting for a German speaking
Speaker 2: medieval noble to become a sausage in death. But anyway,
Speaker 2: so most Teutonicas, by I guess its advocates, was thought
Speaker 2: to avoid violating the prohibition against cremation, specifically Charlemagne's probe,
Speaker 2: because of course it did not involve destruction.
Speaker 1: Of the bones.
Speaker 2: You would not be reducing the bones to ashes. The
Speaker 2: bones would be intact. So I think that's good enough.
Speaker 2: You know, the body is intact enough to be considered
Speaker 2: okay and not pagan. But some church officials still didn't
Speaker 2: like it, and it was ultimately forbidden as disgusting and
Speaker 2: unfitting of a proper disposal of the dead by the
Speaker 2: pope in twelve ninety nine and thirteen hundred. So this
Speaker 2: would have been Pope. Uh, I just wondering, I had
Speaker 2: to say this, Boniface Bonifaci, I guess Bonifaci the eighth.
Speaker 2: I was looking for a translation of the original text
Speaker 2: of this edict as well, and so what I came
Speaker 2: across was part of a papal bull from thirteen hundred
Speaker 2: called bold A Sepulturus, which was quoted in a paper
Speaker 2: called The Popes and the History of anatomy by James J. Walsh,
Speaker 2: published in nineteen oh four in the Medical Library and
Speaker 2: Historical Journal, and the translation of the Papal Bull says,
Speaker 2: person's cutting up the bodies of the dead barbarously cooking
Speaker 2: them in order that the bones being separated from the flesh,
Speaker 2: maybe carried for burial into their own countries, are by
Speaker 2: the very fact excommunicated. So I think that means no
Speaker 2: further discussion necessary if you do it automatic excommunication.
Speaker 1: And you know this does this sounds like a very
Speaker 1: top down edict right here, and obviously it is coming
Speaker 1: from the pope. But you can imagine the scenario where
Speaker 1: out in the field, out in the where you're actually
Speaker 1: having to deal with the challenge of bringing bodies back
Speaker 1: across vast distances. You might this might be a lot
Speaker 1: clearer a situation like this body is going to rot,
Speaker 1: it is going to be foul. By the time you
Speaker 1: get it back, it is going to be a mess.
Speaker 1: Why don't we just do the messy part here and
Speaker 1: speed it up a bit and then bring the bones
Speaker 1: back clean.
Speaker 2: Yes, you can see the obvious practical advantages to this method,
Speaker 2: even though I mean we are highlighting how it does
Speaker 2: seem extremely weird, and I'm not gonna lie it does,
Speaker 2: but like the advantages are clear in terms of like
Speaker 2: hygiene and so forth.
Speaker 1: The boiling and milk especially gives me pause. That's the
Speaker 1: one that really sticks with me for some reason, because
Speaker 1: I'm like, boiling and wine, well, yeah, that just makes sense,
Speaker 1: But milk, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Walsh writes of more examples of famous rulers who underwent
Speaker 2: most Teutonicus. He says, quote the body of Frederic Barbarossa.
Speaker 2: I think that's Frederick the First, the Holy Roman emperor,
Speaker 2: who was drowned in the river Clef near Jerusalem, was
Speaker 2: one of the first to be treated thus. Afterwards, the
Speaker 2: remains of Louis the ninth of France and a number
Speaker 2: of his relatives who perished on the ill fated crusade
Speaker 2: in Egypt were brought back to France in this fashion.
Speaker 2: And though this is a side issue, I did just
Speaker 2: want to quickly make note of it, because the main
Speaker 2: point of this paper by Walsh is to refute an
Speaker 2: apparently long propagated claim that this papal bull from thirteen
Speaker 2: hundred from Boniface the eighth forbade dissection for the purpose
Speaker 2: of anatomical research. So a lot of early histories of
Speaker 2: science said, oh, we could have learned so much through
Speaker 2: anatomical dissection if not for this Papal bull. Walsh argues
Speaker 2: that it was actually neither intended to have this purpose
Speaker 2: nor understood as such, and it was explicitly about boiling
Speaker 2: crusaders to bring their bones home from foreign lands.
Speaker 1: And you know what.
Speaker 2: Coming back to that chapter by Weisscracie, she says that
Speaker 2: despite the prohibition in the Bull, evisceration and excarnation by
Speaker 2: boiling continued some people. I guess, I don't know. I
Speaker 2: don't know if they didn't know about it, or maybe
Speaker 2: they just ignored the pope. I'm not sure, though, she says,
Speaker 2: defleshing by boiling eventually faded away, mostly by the middle
Speaker 2: of the fifteenth century. However, a related but different practice
Speaker 2: is the focus of this chapter, and that is heart burial,
Speaker 2: or the separation of the heart from the body after
Speaker 2: death for burial, usually in a different place. Now in
Speaker 2: some cases, various types of evisceration, including removal and separate
Speaker 2: treatment of the heart as well as other internal organs,
Speaker 2: may have been practical in the same sense as the
Speaker 2: boiling of a crusader's bones. It was in some cases
Speaker 2: a practical solution to deal with the tricky situation of
Speaker 2: a death far away from home and the inevitable onset
Speaker 2: of decay in an era without freezers or modern embalming techniques.
Speaker 2: So I was looking for one big example of this,
Speaker 2: and I came across what I thought was a great one,
Speaker 2: the story of King Henry the First of England, which
Speaker 2: is interesting in a number of ways. My main source
Speaker 2: on this is some materials from the Reading Museum in
Speaker 2: the UK, and the reason for the location of the
Speaker 2: Ready Museum will become apparent. Minute but tiny bit of background.
Speaker 2: Henry the First, also known as Henry bow Clerk, which
Speaker 2: means good scholar, was He was a very ambitious guy.
Speaker 2: He was a kind of a Game of Thrones character.
Speaker 2: He was the fourth son of William the Conqueror, originally
Speaker 2: without a domain rulership of his own because he's the
Speaker 2: fourth son. But Henry became king of England after his
Speaker 2: eldest brother, William the Second, died in eleven hundred, and
Speaker 2: then Henry made some moves. He leapfrogged over his older
Speaker 2: his other older brother Robert, to claim the English throne,
Speaker 2: and then he went out and seized control of the
Speaker 2: Duchy of Normandy in northern France from that same brother,
Speaker 2: Robert in eleven o six.
Speaker 1: Wow, he's making moves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, making moves. I think he kept Robert in
Speaker 2: prison for the rest of his life or something. It
Speaker 2: was not that nice on that issue. But one thing
Speaker 2: you may have read about Henry, the first notable for
Speaker 2: its like brutal pithiness, is the note about the cause
Speaker 2: of his death. And the note is that he died
Speaker 2: in eleven thirty five at a hunting lodge in Leone
Speaker 2: la Foret in Normandy as a result of eating quote,
Speaker 2: a surfeit of lampreys.
Speaker 1: It's just like that.
Speaker 2: It's like four perfect words.
Speaker 1: I could be wrong, but I think there is an
Speaker 1: episode of horrible Histories that the touches on this.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, I should look that up. Well, this that
Speaker 2: may cover some of the same stuff I'm about to mention.
Speaker 2: By the way, lamprey's, if you're not familiar, they are
Speaker 2: a type of I know, kind of wormy looking, jawless fish,
Speaker 2: superficially resembling eels. I think biologically they are not eels,
Speaker 2: but they're sometimes called eels. I think this death has
Speaker 2: been interpreted as maybe food poisoning, but it's not known
Speaker 2: for sure, as somehow it is insistently a hilarious idea
Speaker 2: to me, This conqueror king dies from just like eating
Speaker 2: eating lampreys until he died. But from the Anglo Saxon Chronicles.
Speaker 2: This is quoted on the website of the Museum of Reading.
Speaker 2: Quote that very year the king died in Normandy the
Speaker 2: next day after the feast of Saint Andrew. Then this
Speaker 2: land immediately grew dark because every man who could immediately
Speaker 2: robbed another. Then his son and his friends took and
Speaker 2: brought his body to England and buried it at Reading.
Speaker 2: I like that note everybody immediately committing crimes. I don't
Speaker 2: buy it, but who knows. Okay, so, but they want
Speaker 2: to bring his body back to Redding. That makes sense,
Speaker 2: But it's not quite as simple as that. Henry had
Speaker 2: given instructions to take his body to Redding. He did
Speaker 2: want his body to be laid to rest within the
Speaker 2: abbey at Reading, where he had personally found it a
Speaker 2: sizeable monastery, but that was all the way over across
Speaker 2: the English Channel. Reading is a town a bit to
Speaker 2: the west of London, so it's inland as well. It's
Speaker 2: not like right on the coast, And apparently at the
Speaker 2: time of his death was bad. There was a winter
Speaker 2: gale blowing, making travel across the channel a treacherous proposition,
Speaker 2: and according to our chronicles, Henry started rotting and smelling
Speaker 2: bad very quickly. So instead of trying to take him
Speaker 2: to Redding as is, a different plan was followed. Henry's
Speaker 2: body was taken to the cathedral at Ruan, which was
Speaker 2: nearby Normandy, where it was embalmed in the following manner.
Speaker 2: He was vivisected and his heart and intestines were removed
Speaker 2: and buried separately at a priory in France. So here's
Speaker 2: a case of heart removal and burial along with the
Speaker 2: intestines at a different place than the rest of the body.
Speaker 2: His brain and his eyes were also removed. Not sure
Speaker 2: what happened to them, somebody might be I'm not sure.
Speaker 2: The rest of his flesh was I think slashed open
Speaker 2: and rubbed with salt inside out as a preservative, and
Speaker 2: he was smeared with a kind of perfume. Finally, the
Speaker 2: body was wrapped in an ox hide that was sown shut,
Speaker 2: and that part the rest of that body, the salted
Speaker 2: body inside the oxide, was taken back to the abbey
Speaker 2: at Reading for burial. But despite these precautions, Henry's retainers
Speaker 2: noticed during the journey back to England that the ox
Speaker 2: hides were leaking quote black fluid all over the place.
Speaker 2: It is gross.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 2: Also, despite the obvious caveats to be skeptical of accounts
Speaker 2: like this, the chroniclers at least tell us that the
Speaker 2: embalmer whose job it was to remove Henry's brain was
Speaker 2: so overpowered by the stench that he died.
Speaker 1: Well, that makes sense because that lines up with stuff
Speaker 1: we discuss in the past regarding Egyptian lummification, where one
Speaker 1: of the factors we have to take into account regarding
Speaker 1: the removal and disposal of the brain is that that
Speaker 1: would have gone rants it really quickly and would not
Speaker 1: have been a pleasant material to have to deal with.
Speaker 2: Well, it makes me wonder, what can you actually die
Speaker 2: from a stench? Obviously you can die from inhaling things
Speaker 2: that are harmful to your body, But like, could something
Speaker 2: actually smell so bad that in some way the smell
Speaker 2: is what kills you? That doesn't really seem to make sense.
Speaker 2: But I don't know.
Speaker 1: H well, I don't know. There would be an interesting
Speaker 1: topic to discuss in the future. I mean, there are
Speaker 1: certain things you can smell that will kill you, but
Speaker 1: it's not the merely the stinch of the thing that
Speaker 1: makes it lethal, right, So it's an open question.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, maybe we'll come back to that one day anyway.
Speaker 2: So here we have a case in Henry the First
Speaker 2: where there may have also been symbolic considerations involved, but
Speaker 2: there were clearly practical reasons for burying the heart and
Speaker 2: other organs separately from the rest of the body. And
Speaker 2: to come back to this this article or this book
Speaker 2: chapter I was talking about, whatever the reasons involved. The
Speaker 2: author here writes that this type of practice was fairly
Speaker 2: common for the upper classes in Western Europe, starting it
Speaker 2: around the time of Henry's reign.
Speaker 1: Quote.
Speaker 2: The extraction of the inner organs and the separate burial
Speaker 2: of the heart and intestines was a hallmark of English
Speaker 2: and French aristocratic mortuary behavior from the twelfth century onwards.
Speaker 2: It is worth noting that the English often quickly discarded
Speaker 2: the viscera close to the site of corpse treatment, whereas
Speaker 2: the French treated them with great respect. The English aristocracy
Speaker 2: generally favored a double interment, one for the body, the
Speaker 2: other for the heart, while French aristocracy often requested that
Speaker 2: the corpses be buried in three separate places body, heart,
Speaker 2: and entrails. Now to end that quote, but summarize some
Speaker 2: other comments. A big focus of this chapter is about
Speaker 2: the practice of heart burial in Central Europe, so in
Speaker 2: mostly German speaking areas of Europe, where it was much
Speaker 2: less common than it was in France and England, though
Speaker 2: there were some examples. There's one specific exception, which is
Speaker 2: that it was a standing tradition of the prince bishops
Speaker 2: of Wurtzburg. Wurtzburg is a city in the German state
Speaker 2: of Bavaria, and these prince bishops established a tradition with
Speaker 2: a three part burial. The corpse would go off to
Speaker 2: Wurtzburg Cathedral, the intestines go to the castle church of Marienburg,
Speaker 2: and the heart goes off to the monastery of Ebrach.
Speaker 2: And in these cases it would have been probably for
Speaker 2: or not probably almost certainly for mainly symbolic reasons rather
Speaker 2: than practical ones. And what were these symbolic reasons, while
Speaker 2: she writes in her conclusion that the primary symbolic purpose
Speaker 2: of the division of the corpse in both Central and
Speaker 2: Western Europe in the Middle Ages was a desire to
Speaker 2: quote duplicate the body quote by physically fragmenting corpses, high
Speaker 2: ranking individuals could express loyalty to more than one site
Speaker 2: and comply with a range of political, religious, and social demands.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this makes sense. This is kind of like around.
Speaker 1: It's like it's almost like a royal, say, a royal
Speaker 1: official that has three parties on the same night, they're
Speaker 1: going to try to attend each of them for a
Speaker 1: little bit, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, make an appearance at all three.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And so this is a similar thing, except
Speaker 1: when one's remains right.
Speaker 2: So, at this time, the choice of where to be
Speaker 2: buried was often interpreted as an important sign of what
Speaker 2: was important to you. So, if you're a duke and
Speaker 2: you want to show your loyalty to your duchy, but
Speaker 2: maybe you're also a member of a consecrated religious order
Speaker 2: and you want to show your loyalty to that order's
Speaker 2: founding abbey, what can you do? Or maybe you're a
Speaker 2: duke and you want to be in part at your duchy,
Speaker 2: but also you are on some brutal military campaign and
Speaker 2: you want to be buried in part, you know, in
Speaker 2: the Holy Land where you're conquering cities. Is so what
Speaker 2: do you do? You duplicate your body, allowing it to
Speaker 2: be buried in both places. And one common way of
Speaker 2: doing that, especially in Western Europe, mainly England and France,
Speaker 2: was burying the body in one and the heart in
Speaker 2: the other. A very common example here is English nobles
Speaker 2: having their hearts transported separately to or from the Holy Land.
Speaker 2: But the author also writes that in the post medieval period,
Speaker 2: such as seventeenth century Catholic Europe, the symbolic significance of
Speaker 2: separate heart burial becomes more complicated. Quote, the heart turns
Speaker 2: into something more than just a representative of a person.
Speaker 2: It becomes a political artifact which was used to renew
Speaker 2: spirituality and promote new types of religious beliefs. So a
Speaker 2: heart in this case, the way I'm understanding this is
Speaker 2: that it could be used more kind of like the
Speaker 2: relics of saints, or like a religious icon that was
Speaker 2: dedicated to maybe some kind of Catholic counter reformation movement
Speaker 2: that would you know, people could look on it and
Speaker 2: meditate on it, and it would or not the heart
Speaker 2: itself maybe, but you know, like a marker of its
Speaker 2: deposition somewhere, and that would inspire them to feel certain
Speaker 2: religious feelings.
Speaker 1: Fascinating.
Speaker 2: Another interesting trend observed in this paper that she mentions
Speaker 2: in the conclusion, especially in England, it seems like heart
Speaker 2: burial takes on a kind of fashionableness, like it's kind
Speaker 2: of cool, and like so many things that are perceived
Speaker 2: as cool over the years, this had to do in
Speaker 2: part with being a practice of the rich. And it
Speaker 2: goes like this, transportation of a corpse is a marker
Speaker 2: of what she calls social distinction. So you know, whose
Speaker 2: corpse gets transported around after death, usually a powerful and
Speaker 2: wealthy person.
Speaker 1: Quote.
Speaker 2: Procedures associated with transportation and delayed burial, such as a
Speaker 2: visceration and separate burial of the inner organs, eventually developed
Speaker 2: into symbols of high status even when transport was not necessary.
Speaker 2: So maybe if earlier transportation of different parts of the
Speaker 2: body around was a sign of like, wow, you're rich
Speaker 2: enough to go like lead people to fight in the Crusades,
Speaker 2: and it was just a practical necessity there, maybe later on,
Speaker 2: and it doesn't have any of those practical implications, but
Speaker 2: it's just like, well, that's what rich, important, powerful people
Speaker 2: used to do, so maybe we should do that. Also,
Speaker 2: division of the corpse was more expensive than a regular burial.
Speaker 2: So if you are say, rising up through the classes,
Speaker 2: like if you were somebody who was formerly more of
Speaker 2: a commoner but you got appointed to a to like
Speaker 2: an administrative position somewhere within the government, you could try
Speaker 2: to signal your rising class status with some kind of
Speaker 2: different funeral practice, maybe division of your body and deposition
Speaker 2: at different places. So it becomes a form of conspicuous consumption,
Speaker 2: a way to show off the fact that you have
Speaker 2: money to create the appearance of higher social class or prestige.
Speaker 1: M Yeah, I can afford to not only at one funeral,
Speaker 1: but three funerals. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, here's an interesting question. Why did division of the corpse,
Speaker 2: including heart burial, spread more quickly in medieval England but
Speaker 2: remain peratively rare in Central Europe. She suggests here that
Speaker 2: it's because in England it was practiced by men, women,
Speaker 2: and children, whereas in medieval Central Europe basically meaning like
Speaker 2: the Holy Roman Empire area, it was mainly done to
Speaker 2: unmarried men without legitimate offspring, so obviously that would make
Speaker 2: a big difference. Another big difference here comes back to
Speaker 2: what we were talking about in the past episode about
Speaker 2: the symbolism of the heart. There appear to be differences
Speaker 2: in the understanding of the unique symbolism in the heart
Speaker 2: in western versus Central Europe. So example, here there was
Speaker 2: a twelfth century Austrian figure named Hadmar of kun Ring, who,
Speaker 2: according to the author, is the only known German speaker
Speaker 2: ever to ask for his heart to be transported back
Speaker 2: home from a crusade. Because remember, among German speakers, what's
Speaker 2: the solution there? The German speakers like the most Teutonicus,
Speaker 2: the German custom may in the bone broth out of
Speaker 2: the crusader.
Speaker 1: Yeah, bring back the bones. But this guy's saying the heart.
Speaker 2: Right, that's what's hot. But Hadmar he he wanted his
Speaker 2: heart brought back. However, he did not ask for the
Speaker 2: heart alone. He wanted his heart and his right hand
Speaker 2: returned for burial. Why the hand well. Another example cited
Speaker 2: earlier in the paper, she mentions Prince Bishop Gottfried of Spitzenberg,
Speaker 2: who died in the Third Crusade in the year eleven ninety,
Speaker 2: he asked not for his heart to be returned, but
Speaker 2: for his hand, and it got lost along the way. Whoops, Hemia,
Speaker 2: but she ends up writing quote. It seems that for
Speaker 2: the English the heart was important because it represented humanity's
Speaker 2: in her being. Among medieval German speaking people, especially the
Speaker 2: prince bishops, who represented both secular and religious powers, other
Speaker 2: body parts such as bones or arms could also fulfill
Speaker 2: that function. And I thought that was so interesting. It
Speaker 2: makes me wonder about the ore of this difference in
Speaker 2: metaphor and an idioms. So if in medieval England it's
Speaker 2: commonly understood that your heart, the organ that pumps blood,
Speaker 2: is the symbol of your soul, you know, it's the
Speaker 2: most important seat of your character and your integrity, but
Speaker 2: in German speaking lands it might just as well be
Speaker 2: your bones or your right hand that symbolize that core
Speaker 2: part of you. What linguistic or cultural or literary differences
Speaker 2: in those different language traditions might have caused this, you know?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I mean, on one level, all this is making
Speaker 1: me think of all the potential for various horror movies
Speaker 1: and so forth, But it also makes me think of
Speaker 1: some of those crawling hand movies of the beast with
Speaker 1: five fingers. You know, like there is something about the
Speaker 1: hand that in the treatment given by these various horror films,
Speaker 1: and all of them are kind of interconnected and ultimately
Speaker 1: stemming from some of the same source material, but there
Speaker 1: is this idea in them that the hand retains something
Speaker 1: of the original individual, and therefore you can it's really
Speaker 1: not that much of a stretch for even a very
Speaker 1: heart centric or cardiocentric I'm not sure what you would
Speaker 1: you would call this a very heart centric culture to
Speaker 1: realize that, Yeah, you can easily imagine how the hand
Speaker 1: could end up getting all of the attention instead, because
Speaker 1: we can see examples of that just in our various
Speaker 1: fictions and folk tellings.
Speaker 2: So anyway, if it comes down to it, most teutonicus
Speaker 2: versus heart burial, which team are you on?
Speaker 1: But it's a bones or heart in hand.
Speaker 2: Boiling to take the bones home or taking the heart
Speaker 2: and the body different places?
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I don't want to be an inconvenience,
Speaker 1: so I don't know. The heart seems like it might
Speaker 1: be a nice tidy way to go about things. Therefore,
Speaker 1: I don't know, if you know it's ultimately about what
Speaker 1: they feel comfortable. Is if they would rather do the boiling.
Speaker 1: Okay I would maybe it'd rather not be milk, but
Speaker 1: that's just me, And obviously I'm not going to really
Speaker 1: care all that mon After, after we've reached that.
Speaker 2: Point, I'm seeing visions of a gigantic instant pot.
Speaker 1: That is not product integration. They did not, they did
Speaker 1: not ask us to put that image in everyone.
Speaker 2: That would be the best bit of spawn ever.
Speaker 1: All right, well, obviously we'd love to hear from everyone
Speaker 1: else out there, which would you prefer bones or or heart?
Speaker 1: Hand or hand? And if you choose bones, what's the
Speaker 1: substance you want to hear your bones stripped of their
Speaker 1: flesh in? I guess you can choose anything. You can
Speaker 1: choose wine, you can choose milk, you can choose Yahoo.
Speaker 1: I don't know. You know what's your favorite beverage? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Pour it up? Yeah? You know the chocolate you who? Not? Yeah?
Speaker 1: You who? Yahoo is the website? You who is the
Speaker 1: chocolate beverage, though there are other brands of the of
Speaker 1: the chocolate beverage as well, But yeah, you who boiled?
Speaker 1: And you who?
Speaker 2: I think you're onto something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So Hey, we'd love to hear from everyone out
Speaker 1: there if you have thoughts on what we discussed in
Speaker 1: these two episodes, or if there are some other interesting
Speaker 1: ideas of how the heart is seen or treated either
Speaker 1: physically as a part of a funeral custom or sacrificial
Speaker 1: custom in different cultures and different times in history. Or
Speaker 1: if there's something from a mythological level or even a
Speaker 1: purely fictional level that you'd like to bring up share
Speaker 1: it with us. We'd love to hear from you. I know,
Speaker 1: just in putting this episode together, run across a few
Speaker 1: other monsters and creatures from various folklores and folk traditions,
Speaker 1: so I may have to come back to some of
Speaker 1: those maybe on future episodes of The Monster Fact. Reminder
Speaker 1: for everyone out there that this is stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind. We're primarily a science podcast with our core
Speaker 1: episodes like this one on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on
Speaker 1: Mondays we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do Monster
Speaker 1: Factor Artifact, and on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 1: That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and
Speaker 1: just talk about a weird film such as The Beast
Speaker 1: with five fingers. That's about a crawling hand or Returnity
Speaker 1: Evil Dead, which well it's also Return of the Blind Dead,
Speaker 1: depending on which title you want to go in. That
Speaker 1: has to do with undead templars coming back to live.
Speaker 1: So some of those have touched on some of the
Speaker 1: ideas that we discussed in this episode.
Speaker 2: Mad Love also about possessed hands, the souls in their
Speaker 2: hands in that movie.
Speaker 1: That's right, How could I forget Mad Love? All right?
Speaker 2: Well, big thanks to our audio producer jj Pauseway. If
Speaker 2: you would like to get in touch with us with
Speaker 2: feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
Speaker 2: topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
Speaker 2: can email us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow your
Speaker 2: Mind dot com out.
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