Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And because we're
Speaker 1: out for full break this week, we're pulling an episode
Speaker 1: from the vault. This is a good one. I think
Speaker 1: you're in for a real treat. This was called The
Speaker 1: Holy Undead Part one, originally published October nineteen. What what
Speaker 1: Happens when the Dead get real pious? Yeah, these are
Speaker 1: some fun episodes, and they're also it was interesting how
Speaker 1: these were our Halloween episodes. Are some of our Halloween
Speaker 1: episodes from last year, but they're also really kind of
Speaker 1: Christmas episodes as well, so uh so, so take them
Speaker 1: however way you wish to take them, either celebrate Halloween
Speaker 1: or celebrate Christmas a little bit early, or both. Welcome
Speaker 1: to Stuff to Blow your Mind, production of My Heart Radio. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And of course it's
Speaker 1: October here on the podcast, so we've got to be
Speaker 1: talking about the undead. But this is a real special
Speaker 1: episode because today is the day that the undead go
Speaker 1: to church. That's right. Uh And this topic ended up
Speaker 1: being a whole lot of fun to research and uh
Speaker 1: and and right on, because I I knew some of this,
Speaker 1: but I did not know all of it. Uh. And
Speaker 1: I think the key thing is when when you think
Speaker 1: of the undead, when you think of zombies in particular, like,
Speaker 1: what what do you think about? For me? One line
Speaker 1: that instantly comes into my mind that I remember hearing
Speaker 1: at a at a young age and is is from
Speaker 1: the trailer for George romero zombie classic Dawn of the Dead,
Speaker 1: When there is no more room in Hell that dead
Speaker 1: will walk the earth very much suggests that reanimated corpses
Speaker 1: shambling around are a distinctly satanic phenomena. Uh, though as
Speaker 1: in George Romero's universe, I think it is. I think
Speaker 1: that's actually more a naturalistic interpretation. Don't they say, what's
Speaker 1: the deal? Like a satellite comes to Earth or something
Speaker 1: like that? What do they say in the first one? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's some sort of satellite crashes, And but
Speaker 1: there's kind of it's kind of like hearsay, right, or
Speaker 1: it's what the media is saying. It's it's it's ultimately um,
Speaker 1: it's it's out of our hands. And I guess that
Speaker 1: that leads me to the next very broad distinction that
Speaker 1: I tend to make with zombie films is that you
Speaker 1: have you have environmental zombie films, and you have sort
Speaker 1: of necromantic or magical zombie films, and the environmental something
Speaker 1: has happened that causes an extreme reversal in how death works.
Speaker 1: The dead instead of staying dead, they rise, and so
Speaker 1: it might be some sort of supernatural event, which that
Speaker 1: that quote uh kind of implies. It's like, well, humans,
Speaker 1: you done send up Hell and now there's no more room,
Speaker 1: so the dead are going to walk the earth. It's
Speaker 1: it's kind of our fault, but it's ultimately a larger
Speaker 1: systematic error that's going on. Okay, So in your view,
Speaker 1: environmental causes could still be supernatural, but they would be
Speaker 1: supernatural mechanistic rather than like supernatural directed will yeah you
Speaker 1: know there or or if it's if it is directed,
Speaker 1: it's it's like on a divine level, it's like, well,
Speaker 1: God's had it. He's just letting the zombies rome now,
Speaker 1: you know, and it's God reasons for that taking place,
Speaker 1: um or you know, it could even be scientific, but
Speaker 1: it's like a scientific accident by human science. So you're
Speaker 1: trying to make zombie bio weapons. Well you shouldn't have
Speaker 1: done that. Now, look what's happening. The dead are walking. Yeah,
Speaker 1: here's the rage virus. Though I guess a complication with
Speaker 1: that is you know, resident Evil twenty eight days later,
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff. A lot of that is often, uh,
Speaker 1: there's a blurring of the lines between what is undead
Speaker 1: and what is just some infected form of human being
Speaker 1: right right now. That The other area that the necromantic
Speaker 1: or magical interpretation this is. This is more where you
Speaker 1: have someone or something intentionally raising the dead through the
Speaker 1: use of mad um generally to do something, to do
Speaker 1: the bidding of their master, you know, who might be
Speaker 1: a warlock or a demon or another powerful undead being,
Speaker 1: maybe a mad scientist, even an alien mastermind or a
Speaker 1: dark like minor deity. That's sort of thing. But it's like,
Speaker 1: I need something done, I need some I need I
Speaker 1: need an army of the dead. So I'm gonna raise
Speaker 1: up an army of the dead to do specific dead things,
Speaker 1: as opposed to like, well, now all the dead rise
Speaker 1: from the grave and they do dead things. Right, I
Speaker 1: am the witch queens and Obia I say a bunch
Speaker 1: of skeletons, you pop up out of the ground and
Speaker 1: get you some swords and shields and go kills in
Speaker 1: bad so. Either way, I guess, very broadly speaking, there's
Speaker 1: plenty of examples I know that kind of break this.
Speaker 1: Zombies are either a thing that just kind of happens
Speaker 1: and as part of the new natural order of things
Speaker 1: or the unnatural order of things, or it's something that
Speaker 1: is done by an agent of the evil. Um today
Speaker 1: we're gonna be We're gonna be getting into I guess
Speaker 1: both of these categories a little bit. But in a way,
Speaker 1: we're also discussing a third category, you know, the holy,
Speaker 1: undead pious zombies and church going perhaps god worshiping wraiths
Speaker 1: and revenants who might just pack the local cathedral. You know.
Speaker 1: I would say that this is mostly new to me,
Speaker 1: but it has been so wonderful getting into these stories
Speaker 1: because they are so full of weird ambiguities and contradictions.
Speaker 1: I think that often suggest very interesting and enlightening things
Speaker 1: about the cultural climate in which these tales arise, right,
Speaker 1: and also the sort of the cultural soil, sort of
Speaker 1: oftentimes the pre Christian soil from which these myths and
Speaker 1: folk tales have germinated and then changed forms a little
Speaker 1: bit in the Christian era, you know, just to go
Speaker 1: back to Donna the Dead briefly though, the idea of
Speaker 1: the dead going to church, Uh, it is a little
Speaker 1: bit like the dead going to the mall and Don
Speaker 1: of the Dead. You know, they just show up and
Speaker 1: they're gonna do They're gonna do what humans do at
Speaker 1: the mall. They're just gonna wander around, um and uh
Speaker 1: and in Yeah, I feel like it manages up a
Speaker 1: little bit with some of the stories we're talking about here, yeah,
Speaker 1: and Dawn of the Dead. It's interesting because, uh, there
Speaker 1: is an assumption in the Rameiro zombie universe that the
Speaker 1: zombies are operating at a very low, very reduced level
Speaker 1: of cognition. You know, they have very limited ability to reason.
Speaker 1: I mean, they can clearly like use their brains enough
Speaker 1: to sort of like move towards the thing they want
Speaker 1: to eat. But but it doesn't get much more complicated
Speaker 1: than that with them. But I think one of the
Speaker 1: characters in Dawn of the Dead says, why are they
Speaker 1: all coming here to the mall? This must be someplace
Speaker 1: that was important to them in life and without anything
Speaker 1: else to do without any brains to eat in the
Speaker 1: nearby area, they just sort of drift back to a
Speaker 1: place that was significant in their lives and almost as
Speaker 1: if by force of habit. And that's kind of interesting too,
Speaker 1: because it suggests that whatever it is you would really
Speaker 1: say you want to be doing when in your afterlife,
Speaker 1: maybe you would say, i'd I'd go, I don't know,
Speaker 1: visit my still living relatives and give them new is
Speaker 1: from beyond the grave or something. In fact, what you
Speaker 1: do is walk the steps you've walked a hundred times before.
Speaker 1: And where does that take you? You go to the mall. Baby. Now,
Speaker 1: some would say there's no ethical consumption of brains under capitalism,
Speaker 1: but I guess that I'd have to discuss that another episode.
Speaker 1: Let's let's get back to religion though. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so we should talk about maybe a specific example to
Speaker 1: get us going of of one of these stories about
Speaker 1: about the church going undead. So the story I wanted
Speaker 1: to start with here, I wanted to start with because
Speaker 1: it's ultimately the story I've had the longest um exposure to,
Speaker 1: I guess in my life. I started looking into this
Speaker 1: and then I realized, oh, I have I've read some
Speaker 1: version of this story before. Uh and uh, I want
Speaker 1: to take I want to take at least some of
Speaker 1: you back to the Enchanted World book series from Time
Speaker 1: Life Books. Um. Uh. Some of us had these, some
Speaker 1: of us didn't. I was lucky enough. I think my
Speaker 1: aunt had purchased these, and I kind of temporarily inherited them.
Speaker 1: But I also still have them decades later. Um and
Speaker 1: and ultimately it's gonna it will be hard to make
Speaker 1: me give them up because they, ultimately, uh put played
Speaker 1: I think an important role in my my childhood. But
Speaker 1: if you were watching TV in the early nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: you might remember a TV spot for these books, starring
Speaker 1: the legendary Vincent Price. I will buy anything Vincent Price
Speaker 1: tells me to. Yeah, I wonder what else was he? Uh?
Speaker 1: Was was he a pitching back then unsleeved? The delicious
Speaker 1: flaky crust of a hot pocket? Oh? Man? Oh? He
Speaker 1: would have been great for Tomstone Pizza, right, Vincent Price
Speaker 1: Tomstone because they were going for more of a Western thing. Though, Man,
Speaker 1: Vincent Price impression was bad. I gotta work on that. Well,
Speaker 1: why don't why don't we? I encourage everyone to look
Speaker 1: this up. This particular commercial up on YouTube. But let's
Speaker 1: go and have just a little audio sample of it,
Speaker 1: because it's Yeah, it's vincent price, it's fabulous. On evenings,
Speaker 1: to like this, I'd like to parrol up with a
Speaker 1: good books short of book that lets the imagination run
Speaker 1: away with you. If you're like me and enjoy the
Speaker 1: mysterious and the unexpected, you'll love the Enchanted World. Each
Speaker 1: volume brings to life so vividly those inhabitants of the
Speaker 1: other world, witches and wizards, goh Scoblands, and avenging Nights.
Speaker 1: Call now and enter the Enchanted World with the first book,
Speaker 1: Wizards and Witches my favorite subject. It's an intriguing account
Speaker 1: of sorcery, spells, and deception. Other books include ghosts, fairies,
Speaker 1: and elves and dragons. Painstakingly researched by the editors of
Speaker 1: Time Life Books, each volume is exquisitely illustrated and portrayed
Speaker 1: with master works of art. Each volume is superbly written
Speaker 1: and bound in luxurious fabric. So rob I I was
Speaker 1: never lucky enough to have these books as a kid,
Speaker 1: But but I guess if you had access to them,
Speaker 1: I would assume that these books made you the terrible
Speaker 1: adult you are today. Oh yeah, probably so they were
Speaker 1: pretty great because each one well, first of all, as
Speaker 1: as Vincent Price reminds us, each one is bound in
Speaker 1: luxurious fabric, curious, yes, And each one is a different color,
Speaker 1: which I distinctly remember, because each book deals with a
Speaker 1: different topic, and you know, c have fairies, you have
Speaker 1: camelo giants, uh, you know, mermaids and so forth. I
Speaker 1: didn't have them all, but I had a number of them,
Speaker 1: and I distinctly remember there were, of course two black books,
Speaker 1: black bound books. One of them was on ghosts and
Speaker 1: the other one was on night creatures, and these were
Speaker 1: in a you know, sort of a childhood way. These
Speaker 1: were both my favorites of the series, but also the
Speaker 1: most feared. I remember that they'd be on the shelf
Speaker 1: and I could barely bring myself to look at their
Speaker 1: spines on the bookshelf if the sun had gone down,
Speaker 1: because I knew how terrifying the illustrations were in there,
Speaker 1: and how terrifying the contents of the stories were. Um
Speaker 1: and I certainly wasn't going to pull one of these
Speaker 1: books off the shelf at night, because the cover art
Speaker 1: was absolutely horrible on each of them. Oh that's so wonderful.
Speaker 1: And when I say the mentioned the art, it was
Speaker 1: all the books featured a combination of say, woodcuts and
Speaker 1: uh and old paintings, you know, as well as new
Speaker 1: custom illustrations matching up with the with the stories from
Speaker 1: different artists. And we'll mention one in particular in a bit, uh,
Speaker 1: specific artists, all with different styles. So it was it's
Speaker 1: just a visual to light. I highly recommend if you
Speaker 1: have a chance to pick up any of these books
Speaker 1: and you're interested in these topics, do so. I think
Speaker 1: they must have printed billions of these things, because I
Speaker 1: just looked around the other day, and you can pick
Speaker 1: them up for like dollar a dollar or two dollars each.
Speaker 1: I think in some cases if you buy them used.
Speaker 1: I wonder how that looks urious fabric holds up. I
Speaker 1: think it holds up all right. I don't know how
Speaker 1: luxurious it it really looks these days, but uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the books are holding together, and that's that's enough. So
Speaker 1: the Ghost Book, like I said, was particularly scary, and
Speaker 1: it featured a tale of the pious undead. So it's
Speaker 1: it's a short section in the book titled the Hooded Congregation,
Speaker 1: and it is fantastically illustrated and perhaps written. I think
Speaker 1: the writers are all just it's listed as like by
Speaker 1: folks at the Time Life Books or something, so he
Speaker 1: might have written it as well, but he at least
Speaker 1: illustrated it. Talking about Caldicott Medal winning author Chris Van Allsburg,
Speaker 1: if the name didn't ring a bell, let me just
Speaker 1: say this is this is the artist who illustrated and
Speaker 1: wrote the books Jumanji in one and The Polar Express
Speaker 1: in uh, both known for very elegant illustrations. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: ultimately very you know, ghostly and you know, kind of
Speaker 1: a yeah, ultimately ghostly. And so it's like this. I
Speaker 1: never really liked the Polar Express because it did feel
Speaker 1: kind of cold and uh and like it's something of
Speaker 1: the spirit world. And I was like this, I don't
Speaker 1: know this, this isn't my Christmas. But the Hooded Congregation
Speaker 1: in the Time Life Books. Here the illustration style apps
Speaker 1: absolutely works and it's it's fabulous. It's um. So what
Speaker 1: we have here is a series of haunting black and
Speaker 1: white images. And I sent these two images of these
Speaker 1: two Joe, so you could look at these as well.
Speaker 1: And then you have text pages that feature tiny images
Speaker 1: of a woman in a casket, and as you proceed
Speaker 1: through the story, her face shrivels towards the skull. It's
Speaker 1: absolutely wonderful. These are indeed beautiful. Though I'm almost kind
Speaker 1: of glad I didn't look at these illustrations as a kid,
Speaker 1: because if I had, I am positive, I would have
Speaker 1: cemented an unbreakable association between the ghostly hooded figures in
Speaker 1: the congregation, and especially the second illustration here, and the
Speaker 1: bad guys in Charlton Heston and the Omega man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's this kind of a similar such way and going
Speaker 1: on with the hooded figures. All right, So I'm gonna
Speaker 1: briefly roll through the story here. Uh And I'm sorry
Speaker 1: for the Christmas creep everyone, but this is a holiday story.
Speaker 1: So it takes place Christmas morning. We're somewhere in the
Speaker 1: Swedish mountain centuries ago, and a young woman has awoken
Speaker 1: extremely early and she hears the sound of church bells.
Speaker 1: So what does she do? The church bells are ringing.
Speaker 1: You need to get your your butt to church. So
Speaker 1: she ventures out into the darkness. Uh And and you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's a dark time of year, it's a cold time,
Speaker 1: of year, the cold, the cold is biting. She makes
Speaker 1: her way to the village church and uh the door
Speaker 1: is open. Inside the pews are filled with black, hooded
Speaker 1: figures and a hooded priest and gray stands at the
Speaker 1: stands on at the front of the church is reciting
Speaker 1: in psalms, you know, leading folks and song, that sort
Speaker 1: of thing, normal church business, except everything's a little weird. Um.
Speaker 1: The woman is led in, she takes a seat, and
Speaker 1: then a figure sits beside her. And then that figure
Speaker 1: that is seated beside her pulls back her hood and
Speaker 1: reveals the death shriveled face of her dead sister. Whoa,
Speaker 1: you don't see that coming. Yeah, And she she cries out,
Speaker 1: you are the dead. And then all the hoods fall
Speaker 1: back from the other worshippers, and it's revealed that they
Speaker 1: are all indeed the dead in various states of decay. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's written in this telling of the story that the
Speaker 1: oldest are little more than shadows. But you see, you know,
Speaker 1: some still have flesh on them, and they're uh, they
Speaker 1: seem to be physical apparitions, though for the most part.
Speaker 1: Her sister, her undead sister here warns her to flee
Speaker 1: while she can, and she gets up to do so,
Speaker 1: but of course the congregation gets to their feet as well.
Speaker 1: They chase after, they claw after with these skeletal fingers,
Speaker 1: and she feels them jabbing at her back as she
Speaker 1: reaches the door to to leave the church, and they
Speaker 1: pull the scarf from her neck and the process. So
Speaker 1: she gets away. She runs to the village priest's house
Speaker 1: and he's being ready to go to church to open
Speaker 1: it up. He didn't know that the church has already open,
Speaker 1: at least for some folks. Uh So they go back
Speaker 1: together and they find that the church is completely empty.
Speaker 1: But then there is her scarf on the floor, shredded
Speaker 1: to pieces by those skeletal fingers. This is such an
Speaker 1: unusual type of story because of this strange blending of themes.
Speaker 1: So there is clear menace implied by the beings of
Speaker 1: the church. These are not just you know, righteous Christians
Speaker 1: who have passed on the kind of people that Dante
Speaker 1: might encounter in in the paradiso, where they'd be, you know,
Speaker 1: humbly praising God from the point of the afterlife. Uh. No,
Speaker 1: that they are in church and they are praising God.
Speaker 1: But they're also dangerous, Like they immediately they attack and
Speaker 1: they poke with the bony fingers, they shred the scarf.
Speaker 1: These things, on the surface level at least, seem incongruous. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like how can like, Okay, they hate the living, well
Speaker 1: we expect that of the death and right, but they
Speaker 1: love God. That seems kind of strange, right you think
Speaker 1: that the uh, this would match up more with our
Speaker 1: our idea of the satanic undead, the devilish undead, the
Speaker 1: unholy undead, as opposed to holy zombies at church. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a simple, weird little ghost story. And the illustrations
Speaker 1: especially always haunted me when I looked at the pictures.
Speaker 1: But but I don't think I ever really thought about
Speaker 1: about why. And uh, I think, you know, it had
Speaker 1: to do with the darkness of the undead having such
Speaker 1: a presence in both a church and a Christmas story.
Speaker 1: I know that that that you know, I did think
Speaker 1: about that when I was a kid. But you know,
Speaker 1: but but you know, here was the kicker. It was
Speaker 1: as if the ghosts were supposed to be there, you know,
Speaker 1: not vile invaders intent on desecrating the church and destroying
Speaker 1: those who love God or something, you know. But but
Speaker 1: they were, they were doing their thing. It was like
Speaker 1: it was their time to be in the church, and
Speaker 1: the village girl had simply wandered into the night church,
Speaker 1: where she did not belong and where the dead worship
Speaker 1: while we sleep. It almost makes you wonder. The fact
Speaker 1: that they're in church praying before they attack her makes
Speaker 1: you kind of like reframe the story. It makes you
Speaker 1: wonder did she do something wrong, like did she step
Speaker 1: on their turf or offend them in some way maybe
Speaker 1: by pointing out the fact that her sister was dead. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, is that unwelcome news to them in some
Speaker 1: way or something like that? Yeah, so what does it
Speaker 1: all mean? Well, we're gonna get into that. But uh,
Speaker 1: initially though, I was like, all right, I've i've I've
Speaker 1: read the timeline version, I've reread the timeline version. Now,
Speaker 1: well what's what are some of the original versions of it? Well? Um,
Speaker 1: I I found a wonderful blog post, well written nicely
Speaker 1: cited by Camilla Christiansen on and on the blog Legends
Speaker 1: of the North Legends of the North thought blog spot
Speaker 1: dot com. Um they are a native Norwegian blogger, and
Speaker 1: uh they write about it a bit here and point
Speaker 1: out that the tale is usually known as the Midnight
Speaker 1: Mass of the Dead, and Christiansen writes that the tale
Speaker 1: seems to originate from Germanic Romance and Slavic regions, and
Speaker 1: that while there were there are many variations of this
Speaker 1: tale to be found throughout Europe. The oldest date back
Speaker 1: to the sixth century by historian Gregory of Tours, while
Speaker 1: it pops up in Nordic writings during the seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 1: and and we'll get more into some other traditions that
Speaker 1: seemed to weave their way into this particular tale as
Speaker 1: we proceed, but the story generally follows a basic format.
Speaker 1: A man or a woman they wait too early, perhaps
Speaker 1: confused by church bells and or the darkness of winter
Speaker 1: months in northern climates. Thinking themselves late to church, they
Speaker 1: rushed to u to the church and soon realized that
Speaker 1: they have wandered into the midnight Mass of the dead.
Speaker 1: A deceased loved one urges them to flee, and in
Speaker 1: some tellings um such as the one in the Enchanted
Speaker 1: World Book, they make it out alive and they merely
Speaker 1: lose a garment that becomes proof of what occurred, you know.
Speaker 1: But in other tellings the dead just simply tear them
Speaker 1: to pieces or otherwise drag them into the realm of death.
Speaker 1: And while it's not always Christmas Eve, uh, we do
Speaker 1: see this idea that, you know, what is Christmas but
Speaker 1: the darkest evening of the year. It's this time when
Speaker 1: the veil between the worlds of the living and the
Speaker 1: dead are the thinnest. So it kind of while at
Speaker 1: first you might think, oh, Christmas is not a time
Speaker 1: for the dead to come back to life, Well, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe if if you're talking about you know, modern and
Speaker 1: Santa Claus traditions, but if you're getting into the older
Speaker 1: ideas of of winter religion and winter legends and winter traditions,
Speaker 1: then then yes, this is a time when death is
Speaker 1: very close. This reminds me of a line that comes
Speaker 1: from another story that I'm going to talk about in
Speaker 1: a bit from a from a medieval Christian bishop who
Speaker 1: wrote about similar types of tales of of the pious undead.
Speaker 1: This guy is like a tenth to eleventh century German
Speaker 1: bishop named teet marvon Merseburg, and after telling a story
Speaker 1: kind of similar to this, uh, teeth Mark concludes with
Speaker 1: the statement, as day is to the living, So night
Speaker 1: is conceded to the dead. Uh. And I love that
Speaker 1: phrase night is conceded to the dead, as if, like it,
Speaker 1: it is ground that has been lost. The dead have
Speaker 1: taken it and it belongs to them. And of course
Speaker 1: I guess that would seem especially true in the winter,
Speaker 1: when the night is the longest. Yeah. So it's easy
Speaker 1: to see like this, this idea of a dual world.
Speaker 1: There's the world of the night, in the world of
Speaker 1: of the day, there's the world of the living. There's
Speaker 1: a little world of the dead. Uh. It also makes
Speaker 1: me wonder too if tales like this might have something
Speaker 1: to do with the idea that if we have human
Speaker 1: spaces uh, in this case, artificial human spaces like church interiors,
Speaker 1: the places of stone and wood that exists for particular purposes.
Speaker 1: So if this space is for you know, X, then
Speaker 1: does X occur even when we are not there? Uh?
Speaker 1: You know, an empty church is not at a church
Speaker 1: in some respects, so perhaps it remains occupied even when
Speaker 1: we are not in the church. Um, I'm not sure
Speaker 1: that that makes sense. That I was kind of mulling
Speaker 1: over it, and uh, yeah, like a place that we
Speaker 1: have created, like absolutely, such as an enclosed place it,
Speaker 1: you know, it can't it can't just be a wild
Speaker 1: place again, you know, unless it decays and becomes one
Speaker 1: with nature. Like it's it's still a church, but it's
Speaker 1: it's not a church if the people are not gathered
Speaker 1: in it. That's a very good point about the conceptualization
Speaker 1: of sacred spaces. So like is a to a medieval
Speaker 1: Christian would they consider a building to be a genuine
Speaker 1: Christian church if it is at its at the time
Speaker 1: of its construction, say, consecrated to the Christian religion? Or
Speaker 1: does it depend on its day to day use. Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: just something worth worth worth keeping in mind as we proceed. Now,
Speaker 1: you know, if the undead here though, again they sound pious,
Speaker 1: but they also sound a bit violent and hostile. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, there seems to be wrong vibes of the
Speaker 1: dead hate the living here and Christiansen points out in
Speaker 1: their blog that pre Christian traditions and Norse folklore, you know,
Speaker 1: are are often about undead beings who have it in
Speaker 1: for the living, particularly when it comes to uh at
Speaker 1: least a couple of different types of undead creatures. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this led me to the work of in k
Speaker 1: Chadwick from six they wrote Norse Ghosts, an article that
Speaker 1: was published in the journal Folklore, and Chadwick points out
Speaker 1: that the ghosts of Scandinavian and Iceland, uh that they
Speaker 1: stand out for being physical animated corpses, not ethereal spirits,
Speaker 1: but but the actual reanimated bodies of the dead. So
Speaker 1: when we talk about the dead coming back and say
Speaker 1: walking through a wall in your house, uh, well, in
Speaker 1: the in the North and s Line tradition, they're coming
Speaker 1: through the wall. They're busting through like the kool aid man.
Speaker 1: You know, they're not going to just pass through it
Speaker 1: like a spirit. Yeah. And it's interesting because sometimes stories
Speaker 1: of encounters with the living dead don't specify one way
Speaker 1: or another whether you're talking about an insubstantial spectral kind
Speaker 1: of reanimation or a reanimation of the physical body. So
Speaker 1: I think there's a bias in modern ghost stories towards
Speaker 1: the spectral apparition without mass. But in a lot of
Speaker 1: these older stories, yeah, you're talking about a creature with
Speaker 1: a body that might be more aptly called something like
Speaker 1: a revenant rather than a rather than a ghost. Though
Speaker 1: people describing stories that are clearly referring to beings with
Speaker 1: physical bodies still use the term ghost stories a lot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you definitely see that in the in the literature. But
Speaker 1: but yeah, these are these are stories where the dead
Speaker 1: are are so physical that you can wrestle them. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's there's one that Chadwick mentions. Uh, this is the
Speaker 1: Swedish tale of the shepherd Glamor, who in the gretast Saka,
Speaker 1: goes to work on a farm in Iceland and is
Speaker 1: killed by a supernatural force. And so he then returns
Speaker 1: to haunt the farm, killing both livestock and human servants.
Speaker 1: And in the hero of the saga, Greta Are the
Speaker 1: strong shows up and waits for him, then wrestles him.
Speaker 1: And many scholars have made the connection here between this
Speaker 1: tale and that of Beowulf and Grenville. You know, it's like,
Speaker 1: is the monster problem. There's some sort of thing that
Speaker 1: comes at night, so the hero waits for it and
Speaker 1: then enters into a physical contest with it when it arrives. Now,
Speaker 1: Gretis eventually slays the undead horror in this tale um used.
Speaker 1: I think he uses a sword on it, but the site,
Speaker 1: the mere sight of moonlight and the creature's eyes it
Speaker 1: it causes a sort of curse, and Grets is never
Speaker 1: comfortable alone in the dark again, it like scars him
Speaker 1: for life and has this kind of deteriorating effect on
Speaker 1: his psyche. And the modern context wouldn't be tempted to
Speaker 1: say he's gotten PTSD from this conflict. Yeah, exactly. So
Speaker 1: there there are at least a couple of different beings
Speaker 1: that are that are generally any talked about in these traditions.
Speaker 1: There's the hugboy and the dragger, and these are both
Speaker 1: undead barrow dwellers. So in some cases the draw already
Speaker 1: said to build his own barrow in life. So he's like,
Speaker 1: you know, he's like a local lord or something, and
Speaker 1: so he builds this barrow, this vault of stone and earth,
Speaker 1: fills it with riches, and in some cases the individual
Speaker 1: uh is said to have themselves buried alive in the barrow. Um.
Speaker 1: This is interesting, like the the idea that Chadwick mentions
Speaker 1: that there are these accounts of of this important individual,
Speaker 1: and there reaches the time when I guess that this
Speaker 1: individual is thinking about death and the end of their life.
Speaker 1: And rather than quote die on straw, which you know,
Speaker 1: brings the vision the idea of of of dying of
Speaker 1: old age or dying of sickness in a bed. The
Speaker 1: idea is you get you get twelve of your men
Speaker 1: with you, and you just get apparently just super drunk
Speaker 1: um on spirits, and then you all go into the tomb,
Speaker 1: which again has filled with riches and I think even
Speaker 1: some food and stuff, and then they seal you in
Speaker 1: and that's that's it. That's your that's your ernie into
Speaker 1: the end of the afterlife. This actually reminds me of
Speaker 1: something that I was going to get into later that
Speaker 1: is featured in in a paper that we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about. This may actually end up being in in
Speaker 1: the next part of this series, but this is in
Speaker 1: a paper by a historian of the Middle Ages at
Speaker 1: you see San Diego named Nancy Mandeville Cacciola, and the
Speaker 1: paper is called Revenants, Resurrection and Burnt Sacrifice. It's the
Speaker 1: paper that gets strongly into these, uh, these stories of
Speaker 1: the pious dead told by by Tetmar, the medieval chronicler.
Speaker 1: I already mentioned, but there's a part that I found
Speaker 1: very interesting where she explains sort of the the frequently
Speaker 1: encountered common sense logic about what leads to the state
Speaker 1: of restless death versus peaceful death in the Middle Ages,
Speaker 1: and that this is a an idea that probably exists
Speaker 1: mostly outside of Christian teachings. It was something that was
Speaker 1: common among pagan thinking of of medieval Europe, but that
Speaker 1: had a sort of continent innued folk belief life, even
Speaker 1: after a region had often been supposedly Christianized, and so
Speaker 1: she writes as follows, this was the notion that those
Speaker 1: who were subject to a quote bad death that was
Speaker 1: violent or sudden were unlikely to lie quietly in their graves.
Speaker 1: In such cases, the life force exits the body too
Speaker 1: quickly before the individual can make peace with the prospect
Speaker 1: of dying, while the trauma of a painful or violent
Speaker 1: death added to the fear among survivors that such a
Speaker 1: dead person might feel resentful of the living. In the
Speaker 1: felicitous phrase of Lesser k Little So, quoting another scholar here,
Speaker 1: these bodies expired with quote energy still unexpended, and thus
Speaker 1: were considered to be at high risk of returning from
Speaker 1: their graves. The flesh itself retained an element of untrammeled vitality.
Speaker 1: Now I see some differences here, because that's emphasizing one
Speaker 1: of the main things about the so called bad death
Speaker 1: that leads to a body getting back up out of
Speaker 1: the grave being that they were not ready for death
Speaker 1: when it happened. And the drawer here that you're talking about,
Speaker 1: it seems like they are specifically and intentionally ready and
Speaker 1: yet there's still some kind of element of badness about this. Uh,
Speaker 1: this death scenario, isn't there? Like it seems like that
Speaker 1: there's something greedy about their approach to death. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: this I think it gets kind of complicated again. There
Speaker 1: is a very the idea that it is very premeditated
Speaker 1: and and in fact, one of the things that Chadwick
Speaker 1: brings up is that um is that some cases, in
Speaker 1: some cases future Draga individuals are said to have undertaken
Speaker 1: a preliminary journey to supernatural regions prior to their final
Speaker 1: disappearance into the barrow, which makes which for me at
Speaker 1: least made me think about the Necromongers and chronicles of Riddick.
Speaker 1: I don't have remember this that the Lord Marshall there
Speaker 1: is said to have visited the under verse and returned.
Speaker 1: You know this idea that that you've you've kind of made. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this this initial jaunt into death and you've come back
Speaker 1: and you've checked it out and you can say, all right,
Speaker 1: it's good, the lodgings are great, let's do this. I
Speaker 1: can guarantee this is a connection that has never before
Speaker 1: been made in the folklore literature. But I do wonder
Speaker 1: if the writers of that were inspired. But um, anyway,
Speaker 1: there this idea that that there's still something off. This
Speaker 1: seems to be the kids. So first of all, they're
Speaker 1: multiple tales of this going on. And in some of
Speaker 1: the tales, the men don't stay content in their barrows.
Speaker 1: They hunger for blood, they venture back out, you know,
Speaker 1: and and the messing with with livestock or they're they're
Speaker 1: coming after living humans. But there are also these cases
Speaker 1: where a descendant of the individual and the barrow returns
Speaker 1: to it and engages in a kind of ritual combat
Speaker 1: with them. So, um, you can kind of, you know,
Speaker 1: imagine it as being perhaps you know, about generational issues
Speaker 1: and family wealth and treasure. It's pretty interesting, or at
Speaker 1: least it it makes me think of this kind of scenario.
Speaker 1: Descendant might come back and be like, hey, grandfather, Uh,
Speaker 1: you've got a lot of a lot of gold in there. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, the living need that gold. Uh, So I
Speaker 1: can imagine the kind of conflict that would ensue. Now.
Speaker 1: Chadwick also shares two different accounts of note because they're
Speaker 1: both examples of a story in which the undead don't
Speaker 1: appear to hate the living, but they have issues with
Speaker 1: the living that are that are pretty important. So one
Speaker 1: is from thet or fourteenth century Abrigia saga. It's the
Speaker 1: story of Thorguna, who is this Christian woman who wishes
Speaker 1: that her body be buried when she dies in a
Speaker 1: Christian cemetery. But as as as it occurs, uh, she
Speaker 1: dies two days journey away from the place that she
Speaker 1: wants to be buried. So what is her family has
Speaker 1: to do well that to to you know, meet her wishes,
Speaker 1: they have to take her body on this two day
Speaker 1: journey to a place where she can be buried. But
Speaker 1: during the journey they have to find somewhere to sleep
Speaker 1: rather than just sleep out of you know, exposed to
Speaker 1: the elements. They stopped by a local farmhouse and they say, hey,
Speaker 1: can we spend the night here? And the farmer says
Speaker 1: absolutely not, not having people come in here with a
Speaker 1: dead body. So the farmer goes back into his house,
Speaker 1: you know, they go about it, goes about his business
Speaker 1: with the family. They go to bed, but then in
Speaker 1: the night they hear a sound in the larder, and
Speaker 1: they go and they discover their the reanimated corpse of
Speaker 1: the woman, and she is in their cooking supper for everybody.
Speaker 1: And so at this point that what can you do?
Speaker 1: They humbly accept the meal, enjoy the meal, and they
Speaker 1: let the family stay tonight. This is very interesting and
Speaker 1: how it compares to the the undead going to church,
Speaker 1: because again this is a kind of unusual, like it's
Speaker 1: the undead engaging in the sort of uh, the wholesome
Speaker 1: and nutritious activities of the living. Yeah. Chadwick also specific
Speaker 1: he mentions that the woe the dead woman is naked
Speaker 1: whilst um uh you know, messing around in the larger
Speaker 1: and cooking supper, which which is interesting too because it
Speaker 1: brings to mind this idea of like um of of
Speaker 1: like perfect honesty, you know, like like she is the
Speaker 1: one who is also the honesty, but also there's something
Speaker 1: improper about it as well, you know, like um, it
Speaker 1: seems to match up well with this idea of the
Speaker 1: of the the apparition that is sort of shaming the
Speaker 1: farmers for not doing the right thing. But then on
Speaker 1: the same level, I mean, it is like a zombie
Speaker 1: in your kitchen cooking dinner. It's a little bit weird, uh,
Speaker 1: But you brought it on yourself by not letting these
Speaker 1: people stay in your barn, right. This also kind of
Speaker 1: reminds me of one of the stories that we uh
Speaker 1: in inverted form, but it has some similarities to one
Speaker 1: of the stories we looked at from Tales from a
Speaker 1: Chinese studio that involves the travelers on the road who
Speaker 1: are forced to stay in the room with the dead
Speaker 1: woman's body. Oh yes, yeah, and and that yeah, that
Speaker 1: deals to with the proper bear with the dead and
Speaker 1: what happens when you stand between um the dead and
Speaker 1: the burial that they desire. Now there's a there's another
Speaker 1: um uh story from that same saga the Chadwick mentions,
Speaker 1: and this one's This one's more humorous. I really like
Speaker 1: this one. Basically, you have a boatload of drowned men,
Speaker 1: all from the same boat, but they show up at
Speaker 1: a feast they were going to anyway, and they first
Speaker 1: of all the insist on warming themselves by the fire,
Speaker 1: and I think this kind of causes a stir. But
Speaker 1: then on top of that, they insist on taking their
Speaker 1: seat at the feast table. So the living guests are
Speaker 1: are perturbed by this, and they say, no, you can't
Speaker 1: be here, You've got to leave, and then quote legal
Speaker 1: proceedings were instituted against them. Uh from here. The story
Speaker 1: apparently takes on this on the idea that takes on
Speaker 1: the guys of like Icelandic legal pleadings, with the dead
Speaker 1: men making their case, the living men making their case,
Speaker 1: and the dead men lose and and then agree. They're like, okay,
Speaker 1: I will leave, and they go I like that it all.
Speaker 1: It's a tale of the dead walking among the living,
Speaker 1: but ultimately engaging in a legal dispute. The dead countersue
Speaker 1: the living. Yeah, that would make for a hell of
Speaker 1: a courtroom drama. The dead sue living like an undead
Speaker 1: lawyer hero as sort of a zombie Tom Cruise and
Speaker 1: a few good men. Oh yeah, kind of a kind
Speaker 1: of kind of a lawyer Lich. This is a gold
Speaker 1: nobody steal our idea. UM. I also love this too
Speaker 1: because I think you know, if you if you if
Speaker 1: you don't have any familiarity with the various sagas, it's
Speaker 1: easy to think of it's easy to imagine that these
Speaker 1: are gonna be tales that are just about violence, and
Speaker 1: certainly there's violence in them, but there's also a lot
Speaker 1: of like, yeah, you know, family feuding and intrigue and
Speaker 1: also legal proceedings. So fitting that we have that matchup
Speaker 1: with a ghost story as well, Thank thank thank All Right, well,
Speaker 1: I guess the next thing I wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: was some scholarship that I've been getting into on this
Speaker 1: historical figure known as Bishop tet Mar of Mercyborg and
Speaker 1: UH and his stories about the pious undead. And I
Speaker 1: think we're not going to have time to fully discuss
Speaker 1: this one in this episode, but we can start getting
Speaker 1: into it and then we'll have to continue in the
Speaker 1: next part of the series. But just a hat tip
Speaker 1: on sources here. I know we first found out about
Speaker 1: this subject by that there was a good short summary
Speaker 1: in UH in j Store Daily by Olivia Gershon called
Speaker 1: the Pious Undead of Medieval Europe. But this actually pointed
Speaker 1: to a long scholarly paper that I UH that I
Speaker 1: went and read and it's just wonderful. So this paper
Speaker 1: is called Revenance, Resurrection and Burnt Sacrifice by Nancy Mandeville Cacciola,
Speaker 1: who again I mentioned her before, but she's a medieval
Speaker 1: historian University of California, San Diego, focusing on religious history.
Speaker 1: And this article was published in a in a journal
Speaker 1: called pred Nature Critical and Historical Studies on the Predator
Speaker 1: Natural inteen. Uh. This appears to be some kind of
Speaker 1: collection or journal that's put out by Penn State University Press.
Speaker 1: And so it gets into this figure of the the
Speaker 1: of Bishop Teetmr and the stories that he tells. Now,
Speaker 1: the historical context of Bishop Tetmr. And I have to say,
Speaker 1: by the way, I had to look up how his
Speaker 1: name is pronounced. It is spelled t h i e
Speaker 1: t m e er, but I think it would be
Speaker 1: teete Mar, sort of deep mar, kind of one of
Speaker 1: those you know, it's like that the difficult to pronounce,
Speaker 1: like d t h thing in the Germanic languages. But
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna say tete Mark because I think that's
Speaker 1: about as close as we can consistently get. Um. So
Speaker 1: his context is Autonian. He he is an Autonian figure.
Speaker 1: And uh, this is a historical designation that comes from
Speaker 1: the name Otto. It describes the reign of a series
Speaker 1: of kings. These were Saxon kings in medieval Germany, including
Speaker 1: three animed Otto and two named Henry. So you got
Speaker 1: Henry the First, also known as Henry the Fowler, and
Speaker 1: I think this is because he was allegedly tending to
Speaker 1: a bunch of bird nets when he received news that
Speaker 1: he had been made king. And then after Henry the First,
Speaker 1: you got Auto one, then you got your Auto too,
Speaker 1: then you got your Auto three, and then finally you're
Speaker 1: Henry two. So these would have all been uh German
Speaker 1: Saxon king's beginning in the ninth or tenth century and
Speaker 1: then going into the eleventh seen in some ways as
Speaker 1: an artistic and cultural revival period of the the older
Speaker 1: Holy Roman Empire. So this would have artistic traditions with
Speaker 1: the basis in Byzantine and carol Ingian art and architecture.
Speaker 1: But these were also Christianizing kings who had a who
Speaker 1: saw themselves as having an important role in the history
Speaker 1: of the world as Christianizers, as as spreading the faith
Speaker 1: of Jesus by conquest and so to go to Cacciola's article,
Speaker 1: the story begins with with a tale based in a
Speaker 1: place called vals Leban, which is a town along the
Speaker 1: Elba River. So this town could be seen as a
Speaker 1: kind of colonial outpost in a way. Uh the Ottonian
Speaker 1: king Henry the First again, that's Henry the Fowler, He's
Speaker 1: the first one. He had been fighting a war of
Speaker 1: conquest against the tribes of the surrounding lands to cement
Speaker 1: the rule of his German Christian dynasty over the religiously
Speaker 1: pagan and ethnically Slavic peoples in the area. And vals
Speaker 1: Laban was a fortified town, one of a number like
Speaker 1: it along the Elba which served to protect this northeastern
Speaker 1: region of Henry's Astonian kingdom. And in the year nine nine,
Speaker 1: the town of wals Laban was attacked in a revolt
Speaker 1: by the by the nearby people's and we're told that
Speaker 1: all of its inhabitants were slaughtered. Caciola writes, quote our
Speaker 1: chief source for this event, videkind of Corve reports in
Speaker 1: his Deeds of the Saxons that other quote barbarous nations
Speaker 1: of Slaw likewise began to rebel when they saw the
Speaker 1: successful devastation of this revolt led by a group known
Speaker 1: as the Red dari I. The spread of the rebellion
Speaker 1: was checked, however, when Henry the First seized the Slavic
Speaker 1: fortress of Lenzen, and so after this massacre allegedly took place,
Speaker 1: vals Laban was then rebuilt and the Ottonian dynasty again
Speaker 1: gained control over the area. And Caciola tells us that
Speaker 1: the great massacre at this town not only played a
Speaker 1: role in the military and political history of the Ottonian era,
Speaker 1: but it also gave rise to supernatural urban legends, including
Speaker 1: one reported by another chronicler of the Ottonians. This is
Speaker 1: the guy you know by now, This is Titmar of Merzeburg.
Speaker 1: So Titmar was a bishop. I've seen it claimed elsewhere
Speaker 1: somewhere that Titmar was the first bishop of Merzeburg, but
Speaker 1: but no, Cachiola says he was the second bishop of
Speaker 1: this town. He was born around nine to what Catchiola
Speaker 1: calls an exalted warrior bloodline. I think this means his family,
Speaker 1: including Tetmar himself, had served in a military capacity under
Speaker 1: the Ottonian kings. Tetemar himself had been a military adviser
Speaker 1: to Henry the Second, the the later Autonian king, and
Speaker 1: then from the years ten thirteen to ten eighteen Tetmar
Speaker 1: set out to record this massive eight volume history of
Speaker 1: the Autonian dynasty known as the chronic Con And note
Speaker 1: this is probably not a super objective history. It sounds
Speaker 1: like he was firmly in the business of making the
Speaker 1: Ottonian kings look awesome, though nevertheless, it's probably still also
Speaker 1: a pretty good source of of of life and tales
Speaker 1: and beliefs of the period that he though he definitely
Speaker 1: he's pro Autonian, he's going to tell you good things
Speaker 1: about them. So apparently tete Mark gets to this massacre
Speaker 1: at Valls Laban toward the beginning of his history, and
Speaker 1: Catchiola writes that here he starts sort of drif sting
Speaker 1: away from the public political history and getting into personal memory. First,
Speaker 1: talking a bunch of saying a bunch of things about
Speaker 1: his own famili's association with the history of the place.
Speaker 1: And then suddenly he just starts getting into ghost stories.
Speaker 1: He tells a haunted church story he once heard about
Speaker 1: this town. So here I'm going to read directly from
Speaker 1: Caciola's translation of the story in tit Mar's Chronicon quote.
Speaker 1: So that no one who is faithful to Christ may
Speaker 1: doubt the future resurrection of the dead, but may proceed
Speaker 1: to the joy of blessed immortality zealously and through holy desire.
Speaker 1: I shall confide certain things that I have verified as true,
Speaker 1: and which occurred in the town of valse Laban when
Speaker 1: it was rebuilt after its destruction. The priest of that
Speaker 1: church used to sing Matin's there at the first blush
Speaker 1: of dawn. But when he arrived at the cemetery for
Speaker 1: the dead, he saw in it a great multitude of
Speaker 1: them making offerings to a priest who was standing at
Speaker 1: the doors to the sanctuary. At first he stopped in
Speaker 1: his tracks, but then, strengthening himself with the sign of
Speaker 1: the Holy Cross, he tremblingly went through the whole crowd
Speaker 1: to reach the oratory without acknowledging any of them. One
Speaker 1: of them, a woman whom he knew well and who
Speaker 1: had died recently, asked him what he was doing there.
Speaker 1: After he told her why he had come. She returned
Speaker 1: that everything had already been taken care of by them,
Speaker 1: and also that he did not have long to live.
Speaker 1: He reported this to his neighbors, and it turned out
Speaker 1: to be true. I love a ghost story or a
Speaker 1: weird story that that Indians like. That was just sort
Speaker 1: of a basic sourcing of the material. Somebody told me
Speaker 1: this and or there was evidence of it and it
Speaker 1: was true. Yes, And Tite mar I love earlier on
Speaker 1: also says, I have verified this story is true. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure how, but that's what he says. And uh,
Speaker 1: and well, but the part that turned out to be
Speaker 1: true and the implication in the last sentences they told
Speaker 1: him he did not have long to live. He reported
Speaker 1: this to his neighbors and it turned out to be true,
Speaker 1: So that's that's also saying like, oh, yeah, he did
Speaker 1: die shortly after that. So Catchiola notes that, however weird
Speaker 1: this story is, its point of view does not seem
Speaker 1: to be totally unique for its time and place and
Speaker 1: for its place in history. In medieval Europe, there were
Speaker 1: lots of stories about what she calls the continuing vitality
Speaker 1: and power of the dead. But the really funny thing
Speaker 1: about this history is that it seems like as soon
Speaker 1: as Tete Martell's one story about zombies, he gets so
Speaker 1: excited that he essentially derails his history of the Ottonian
Speaker 1: kings for several pages, just telling a bunch of other
Speaker 1: random stories about reanimated corpses that he has heard and
Speaker 1: I love this. I like I wish more recent political
Speaker 1: hagiographies were like this. Today. You know, some somebody's writing
Speaker 1: about the great George Washington and how he never told
Speaker 1: a lie and all that, But then they get sidetracked
Speaker 1: for like a ten page digression about people they know
Speaker 1: who have seen werewolf wolves. Oh, that would be good.
Speaker 1: So to finish off part one here, I think maybe
Speaker 1: we can list and reflect on some general observations that
Speaker 1: Cacchiola makes about this story in particular, and then in
Speaker 1: the next part we can come back to more of
Speaker 1: of teite Mar's tales of ghosts and and and undead
Speaker 1: beings and and uh and branch out from there. But
Speaker 1: regarding this one particular story, a few things worth noting.
Speaker 1: First of all, Catchiola calls these undead beings revenants, and
Speaker 1: this is worth pointing out because although these are sometimes
Speaker 1: referred to as ghost stories, like we were saying earlier,
Speaker 1: the word ghost in modern parlance usually refers to a
Speaker 1: spectral in substantial being rather than a bodily reanimation. Uh.
Speaker 1: The ladder of which again may have been called revenants
Speaker 1: in the past, would probably often be called zombies today.
Speaker 1: So even though the phrase ghost story is often used
Speaker 1: to describe what teite Mar is doing here, you should
Speaker 1: not automatically assume spectral in substantial beings. In fact, these
Speaker 1: very clearly seemed to be reanimated corpses that have physical mass,
Speaker 1: and so Cacchiola goes on to argue that tit Mar's
Speaker 1: ghost stories haven't received a lot of scholarly attention. Uh
Speaker 1: and in general, she thinks that medieval historians have kind
Speaker 1: of underappreciated the importance of ideas about the dead in
Speaker 1: medieval culture, and so contra that that lack of attention
Speaker 1: to the subject. She argues, for example, that quote the
Speaker 1: majority of medieval people who believed that they had had
Speaker 1: direct experience of the supernatural realm did so in intimate
Speaker 1: confrontation with dead human beings, rather than through encounter with
Speaker 1: a transcendent deity. So if she's correct in that argument,
Speaker 1: this mean, according to Tacchiola, people at the time were
Speaker 1: more likely to believe they'd had an encounter with a
Speaker 1: ghost or revenant rather than with say, God himself, or
Speaker 1: with Christ or the Virgin Mary. And these might have,
Speaker 1: given the right context, be equally taken as evidence of
Speaker 1: the supernatural realm, but the these more mundane encounters with
Speaker 1: just dead people and dead souls were were actually the
Speaker 1: more common thing for regular people to experience, and she
Speaker 1: argues there are there are a lot of things that
Speaker 1: historians can potentially learn from these ghost stories. So first
Speaker 1: of all, they can suggest details about local pagan beliefs
Speaker 1: that existed before Christianity and then probably in some form
Speaker 1: continued to exist after the Christianization of a region. Uh.
Speaker 1: In the case of tet Mars ghost stories, these would
Speaker 1: be local Slavic pagan beliefs UH. And these beliefs, even
Speaker 1: though the Christian chroniclers might want to kind of suggest
Speaker 1: that these beliefs are wiped out by the Christianization of
Speaker 1: a population, in fact they may well be partially preserved
Speaker 1: in stories like this. And so one example here is
Speaker 1: that Catholic doctrine placed a pretty clear and strong emphasis
Speaker 1: on what what is called in this paper the inertness
Speaker 1: of the human body after death. And this would be
Speaker 1: of course apart from the general resurrection in Catholic beliefs.
Speaker 1: So the the Catholic belief about the afterlife is you know,
Speaker 1: you die and then your body goes to the grave,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't do anything after that until the second
Speaker 1: coming of Christ, when the dead are raised and then uh,
Speaker 1: and then God will judge the living and the dead.
Speaker 1: But these kind of stories reflect alternative beliefs about you know,
Speaker 1: they don't reflect that emphasis on the inertness of the
Speaker 1: human body before the general resurrection. They say. So, the
Speaker 1: fact that these stories involved dead bodies popping up from
Speaker 1: the grave to go to church and worship together at
Speaker 1: night suggests other sources of beliefs about the afterlife, not
Speaker 1: just Catholic doctrines. But secondly, it's really interesting that you
Speaker 1: remember that Titmar Before he actually tells the story, he
Speaker 1: sort of gives a disclaimer paragraph, like he He's like, now,
Speaker 1: I've got a rhetorical purpose in telling you this, and
Speaker 1: is that and it is that this story will affirm
Speaker 1: Catholic doctrine itself. He says that his story proves the
Speaker 1: Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection and can be used as
Speaker 1: evidence against anyone who is skeptical that the dead will
Speaker 1: be raised in Christ at the end of time. Uh So,
Speaker 1: he says that like the local Slavic people's do not
Speaker 1: have a correct understanding of the resurrection, and he hopes
Speaker 1: this story will help correct them and now and then.
Speaker 1: A third point that Caciola makes is that these stories
Speaker 1: provide some evidence not just of lingering pagan beliefs alongside
Speaker 1: Christian beliefs, but of direct syncretism, actually the blending of
Speaker 1: different religious inputs into new hybrid forms of religion. This,
Speaker 1: of course, happens constantly throughout the history of religions all
Speaker 1: over the world. In fact, I think you could argue
Speaker 1: that basically all existing religions today are a result of
Speaker 1: past syncretisms, that previous religious traditions have in a way
Speaker 1: been combined or mixed and matched to form new ones.
Speaker 1: And so the argument would be that it appears to
Speaker 1: also be happening here in a frontier context, where German
Speaker 1: Christianity and Slavic Paganism are mixing with one another, not
Speaker 1: just existing alongside one another, but actually combining into hybrid forms,
Speaker 1: producing what Cachiola calls quote paganized Christianities and baptized pagan
Speaker 1: traditions uh quote. They express a pagan logic about life
Speaker 1: after death, but somewhere along the line of transmission they
Speaker 1: were adapted to a Christian semantic field and I thought
Speaker 1: this was really interesting in the following way. So I'll
Speaker 1: read another quote from Kachiola and then, uh, let's say
Speaker 1: what I was thinking about it. She says that this
Speaker 1: is uh, this is common throughout different parts of partially
Speaker 1: Christianized medieval Europe. Quote. The Catholic Church, for all its
Speaker 1: careful policing of dogma, was unusually tolerant of a wide
Speaker 1: spectrum of ideas about death in the afterlife. It is
Speaker 1: striking that stories of ghosts and revenants, for example, while
Speaker 1: not quite orthodox, were never declared heretical either. They occupied
Speaker 1: a capacious middle round of toleration without endorsement, an unusually
Speaker 1: ambiguous emplacement for such a significant area of thought. Uh,
Speaker 1: and that really inspired me. I was wondering, like, what
Speaker 1: is the logic, what is the even maybe the subconscious
Speaker 1: logic lying behind this distinction of like which types of
Speaker 1: doctrines are rigorously policed by the Church and deviation from
Speaker 1: them is deemed heretical versus which kinds of doctrines are
Speaker 1: treated more loosely and with just kind of like a
Speaker 1: look the other way tolerance. It seems that beliefs in
Speaker 1: various forms of the undead, while they're not within the
Speaker 1: church's belief structure. They're also not forbidden. They're just sort
Speaker 1: of like allowed to go on, you know, like the
Speaker 1: like the clergy would just kind of say like okay,
Speaker 1: and they just look the other way and not bother
Speaker 1: with it. Yeah, and I guess a lot of that
Speaker 1: probably gets back into the reality of of some of
Speaker 1: these events that were talking about, you know, uh, the
Speaker 1: same sort of paranormal events that happened today where someone
Speaker 1: has an ex arians they see something they can't quite explain,
Speaker 1: and there are these pre existing ideas about what that
Speaker 1: might be, and yeah, how far are you going to
Speaker 1: get are rolling out and and maintaining this new religion
Speaker 1: in this area if you just tell people, oh, well
Speaker 1: that that thing you thought you saw it's not real. Um.
Speaker 1: But then and then you can also imagine the inner
Speaker 1: experience of that, Like you you can't deny the mystery
Speaker 1: of an experience that you you had better to to
Speaker 1: allow that to exist under the umbrella of the faith
Speaker 1: than to make it be a contest between the two,
Speaker 1: because one of them the the you know, the the
Speaker 1: ghostly encounter, Like it's going to be possible that that
Speaker 1: is going to be the experience that feels more real
Speaker 1: and more authentic. Yeah, I think you're you're dead on
Speaker 1: with that. And this is a sort of consideration that
Speaker 1: Catchilo raises in her paper. I think this seems highly
Speaker 1: plausible to me that you could imagine that, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe Catholic clergy of this time would be seeing a
Speaker 1: a sort of trade off where they'd say, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: we could be really strict about making sure people have
Speaker 1: no pagan beliefs or practices, but if we do that,
Speaker 1: they're not going to accept the Catholic Church at all.
Speaker 1: So you kind of get them in the door by
Speaker 1: letting them go halfway. That This isn't any any specific
Speaker 1: case I'm looking at, but you can imagine them saying, well, maybe, okay,
Speaker 1: so if they get baptized and they come to church
Speaker 1: on certain occasions and stuff, you don't you don't have
Speaker 1: to like fight them tooth and nail on believing in
Speaker 1: dragger or something, because if you did, maybe they'd stop
Speaker 1: coming to church or wouldn't get baptized in the first place. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, ultimately, with with you're gonna have to to
Speaker 1: establish this, uh, this new religion on the on the bedrock,
Speaker 1: on the soil of the pre existing culture. Now, I
Speaker 1: think we're hitting the time limit on part one of
Speaker 1: this series here, but there's so much more interesting stuff
Speaker 1: to talk about. Tet Mark gets into some much more
Speaker 1: grizzly stories later on, and so I can't wait to
Speaker 1: further plumb his digression from the autone Me and King's
Speaker 1: and and just telling you about every weird ghost story
Speaker 1: he ever heard. So I'm so excited to come back
Speaker 1: to that next time. That's right when there's no more room,
Speaker 1: and how the dead shall go to church. So join
Speaker 1: us in the next episode when we continue on in
Speaker 1: this fascinating journey. In the meantime, if you would like
Speaker 1: to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 1: you'll find them in the Stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 1: podcast feed. We have core episodes on Thursdays and Tuesdays.
Speaker 1: We have an artifact episode on Wednesday, listener mail on Monday,
Speaker 1: and on Fridays we do a little weird house cinema.
Speaker 1: That's our time to set most of the most of
Speaker 1: the serious consideration aside and just focus in on a
Speaker 1: weird film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio
Speaker 1: producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get
Speaker 1: in touch with us with feedback on this episode or
Speaker 1: any other, to suggest topic for the future, just to
Speaker 1: say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff
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