Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2: And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday, so we're
Speaker 2: heading into the vault for an older episode of the show.
Speaker 2: This one originally published October twenty fourth, twenty twenty three,
Speaker 2: so keeping the Halloween vibes going, at least on the vault.
Speaker 2: This is part one of our series about shadows.
Speaker 1: All right, let's do it.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
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 today our October
Speaker 2: journey continues. If you're new to the show, we spend
Speaker 2: all of October covering spooky subjects, and we are plowing
Speaker 2: right on toward Halloween at a frightening pace, at such
Speaker 2: a pace that by the time we reach it, our
Speaker 2: skin may be seer by the wind. But today we
Speaker 2: wanted to embark on a new series of Halloween related
Speaker 2: episodes about shadows. Before we started, I was thinking about
Speaker 2: the series on necromancy that we published earlier this month,
Speaker 2: in which we explored a lot of ancient accounts of
Speaker 2: people summoning the dead, especially to get information about the
Speaker 2: future or some of the kind of hidden information from them,
Speaker 2: And we talked about stories that assumed the ancient Greek
Speaker 2: model of the afterlife a subterranean realm of darkness called hades,
Speaker 2: where the souls of the dead dwell in a weak, pitiable,
Speaker 2: and insubstantial form. So this would be unlike modern Christian
Speaker 2: notions of the dead dwelling either in heavenly bliss or
Speaker 2: infernal punishment. Haiti seems to be most often thought of
Speaker 2: as a gloomy, forlorn dungeon where your spirit is locked
Speaker 2: away forever, more like a slowly fading memory. It's not
Speaker 2: really a punishment, and basically everybody goes there, but it's
Speaker 2: not good. It's better to be alive. I guess. The
Speaker 2: only real exception seems to be like if you're turned
Speaker 2: into a god, which occasionally happens if you're really cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you got to have you gotta have an
Speaker 1: end for that. Yeah, not just they don't have that
Speaker 1: out there, just anybody.
Speaker 2: So anyway, relevant to our topic. In this next series
Speaker 2: of episodes, I was thinking about how in English translations,
Speaker 2: for example, of the Homeric myths. These dead souls that
Speaker 2: populate the underworld here are sometimes known as shades. I
Speaker 2: think this terminology comes up in the story, for example,
Speaker 2: in the Odyssey, where Odysseus goes to the edge of
Speaker 2: the underworld in order to summon up shades. I think
Speaker 2: he wants to speak to the shade of Tyresius.
Speaker 1: I believe that's right.
Speaker 2: Yes, But he sees his mom, he sees a bunch
Speaker 2: of people, he waves a sword at him, he slaughters
Speaker 2: a ram, and all that. And I was wondering when
Speaker 2: the English translations use the word shade here, does that
Speaker 2: mean shadows just in the regular sense of shadow, And
Speaker 2: does that usage, if so, go back to the original Greek,
Speaker 2: as best I can tell, it does. I'm not a
Speaker 2: Greek scholar here, but I was looking up some Greek
Speaker 2: English lexical sources, and from what I could find, it
Speaker 2: looks like the Greek word used here is skia, the
Speaker 2: Latin equivalent being umbra. And this word does indeed carry
Speaker 2: these multiple meanings. It could be used to refer to ghosts,
Speaker 2: to spirits of the dead, like the kind that are
Speaker 2: called forth to drink the blood of the ram and
Speaker 2: tell the future to Odysseus, or it could refer to
Speaker 2: the utterly mundane shade and shadow cast by a tree,
Speaker 2: or a mountain, or a person, just whatever blocks out
Speaker 2: the sun. And I thought this double meaning was very interesting.
Speaker 2: What is it about the mundane shadows we experience every
Speaker 2: single day that would cause people to give them this
Speaker 2: hair raising secondary meaning.
Speaker 1: This is a great question, Yeah, because shadows are every
Speaker 1: where there that you know, we encounter our own shadow
Speaker 1: every day. And yet the term shadow, the idea of
Speaker 1: a shadow carries a lot of weight, certainly supernaturally and
Speaker 1: fictionally and folklorically, as we'll get into in a bit here,
Speaker 1: but just linguistically, it does a lot of legwork, you know.
Speaker 1: I decided to turn to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and
Speaker 1: Fable on this one. It's often a fun way to
Speaker 1: sort of dive into not just the meaning of words,
Speaker 1: but also just like antiquated usages of those words. So
Speaker 1: the author here reminds us that shadow is a word
Speaker 1: with numerous figurative and applied meanings. A shadow maybe a ghost,
Speaker 1: as we see in Macbeth hence horrible shadow. It may
Speaker 1: also be a faint representation, as in a shadow of
Speaker 1: a doubt. It may also mean a constant attendant, and
Speaker 1: Brewers specifically references Milton's paradise lost here sin and her
Speaker 1: shadow death.
Speaker 2: It's hard for me to imagine that pairing of her
Speaker 2: shadow death does not in some sense derived from its
Speaker 2: usage in the Bible walk through the Valley of the
Speaker 2: Shadow of Death exactly.
Speaker 1: And of course we often use the term shadow as
Speaker 1: a verb to follow someone around and sort of learn
Speaker 1: from them, to shadow someone at work. Generally, when that
Speaker 1: is used, there are no haunting connotations, but shadow may
Speaker 1: also be a moral darkness or gloom now Brewers, Like
Speaker 1: I said, is also always great for some antiquated sayings.
Speaker 1: Here are a few examples gone to the bad for
Speaker 1: the shadow of an ass aka, choose your battles and
Speaker 1: don't battle for something as dumb as the shadow of
Speaker 1: a donkey?
Speaker 2: Does that go back to a story? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I have no additional context, but feel free to start
Speaker 1: incorporating it into your daily conversations, listeners. There's another one,
Speaker 1: May your shadow grow less? This one apparently has Eastern
Speaker 1: origins according to Brewers. And I'll get back to this
Speaker 1: one in a bit. And then the idea of being
Speaker 1: reduced to a shadow or emaciated, you know, so slender,
Speaker 1: so starved that even your shadow is reduced. But you know,
Speaker 1: obviously your shadow would be reduced if your body was reduced.
Speaker 1: But it's also not that simple, right, because shadows can
Speaker 1: be manipulated. We can cast a very long shadow depending
Speaker 1: on where we are in reference to the sun. Joe,
Speaker 1: I don't know about your experiences with this as a
Speaker 1: as a father, but I remember when my son was
Speaker 1: a mere toddler that we would have some fun with
Speaker 1: our own shadows in the park, especially in the way
Speaker 1: that a child can be shown to manipulate their own shadow,
Speaker 1: to cast a long shadow, to cast a big shadow,
Speaker 1: and also have it interact with other shadows, like have
Speaker 1: your shadow dinosaur hand, you know, bite another person's shadow,
Speaker 1: and that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know how much consciousness my daughter has
Speaker 2: of her own shadow yet, but I have done some
Speaker 2: shadow puppet shows for her in the light of the
Speaker 2: setting sun, and it's interesting to watch because I think
Speaker 2: the few times I've done this, my daughter has tried
Speaker 2: to reach out and touch the shadow is projected on
Speaker 2: the floor or on the wall, but of course there's
Speaker 2: nothing to touch. But she perceives that this moving display
Speaker 2: of shapes must be some kind of object that she
Speaker 2: could grasp.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's something about shadow. I think a child's fascination
Speaker 1: with them perhaps reveals much about what remains there, at
Speaker 1: least in some part of our mind. Even after we
Speaker 1: have grown accustomed to them, once they've become old hat,
Speaker 1: there are still going to be moments where we notice
Speaker 1: the peculiar when it comes to the shadow, that a
Speaker 1: shadow doesn't necessarily tell the truth. But also at the
Speaker 1: same time, a shadow can reveal things that are there
Speaker 1: that you know, perhaps you can't see an individual, but
Speaker 1: you can see their shadow, that sort of thing. So
Speaker 1: there's there's obviously a lot of rich room for interpretation.
Speaker 1: But then also just coming back to the linguistics of it,
Speaker 1: certainly when you get into translation. I know we were
Speaker 1: looking around for possible shadow poems to read at the
Speaker 1: top of this episode, and I was looking at some
Speaker 1: Borges poems in translation, of course, and for instance, there's
Speaker 1: one titled to the One who is Reading Me, which
Speaker 1: is a nice haunting poem with a number of different
Speaker 1: Borges sort of trademarks in it. But some translations will
Speaker 1: use shadow and others will not, So you know, it
Speaker 1: seems like a shadow. Maybe it is one of those
Speaker 1: words that, like we've been saying, it refers to so
Speaker 1: many things. It may be invoked in translation, even if
Speaker 1: that was perhaps not the author or the poet's original intent.
Speaker 2: Well, coming back to the representation of shadows in our minds,
Speaker 2: I dug up what I thought were a couple of
Speaker 2: pretty interesting cognitive science papers about shadow consciousness. So the
Speaker 2: first one I was looking at was a short paper
Speaker 2: published in Trendsing Cognitive Sciences in two thousand and six
Speaker 2: by Roberto Cassatti, an Italian professor. This paper is called
Speaker 2: the Cognitive Science of Holes and Cast Shadows, and this
Speaker 2: was published in two thousand and six. This paper asked
Speaker 2: an interesting question. It was what can quasi objects or
Speaker 2: negative objects such as shadows and holes tell us about
Speaker 2: how human brains perceive and understand physical objects. Of course,
Speaker 2: holes and cast shadows are interesting because they are not
Speaker 2: objects in themselves. They're actually just absences, in one case
Speaker 2: the absence of solid physical substance and in the other
Speaker 2: a relative absence of light. But despite the fact that
Speaker 2: things like holes and shadows are just absences, we intuitively
Speaker 2: often think of them as substances in themselves. Kasati writes, quote,
Speaker 2: both holes and cast shadows are dependent features. They cannot
Speaker 2: exist without objects hosting or casting them. Both shadows and
Speaker 2: holes are somewhere between being regions of space and fully
Speaker 2: fledged material objects. They are similar enough to bounded regions
Speaker 2: of space that they have a location, a shape, a size,
Speaker 2: and are as immaterial as space is, but are more
Speaker 2: object like as they can persist over time and move.
Speaker 2: And I think it's this ambiguity between being an object
Speaker 2: and not being an object that makes a shadow counterintuitive.
Speaker 2: One example I've seen is people talking about the interesting
Speaker 2: fact that a shadow could technically move faster than the
Speaker 2: speed of light. How would that be possible? The example
Speaker 2: would often be given that like, if you have a
Speaker 2: source of light that you can project across the entire
Speaker 2: surface of a planet, maybe the surface of the moon,
Speaker 2: and then you, standing right next to that source of light,
Speaker 2: move your finger quickly in front of it, you could
Speaker 2: actually make your shadow travel across the surface of that
Speaker 2: distant object fast than light would be able to travel
Speaker 2: if it were going from one side of that object
Speaker 2: to the other, though of course, nothing is actually traveling
Speaker 2: in the case of how you're altering the shadow there.
Speaker 2: So it's not actually a violation of the laws of physics.
Speaker 2: It's not any object going faster than the speed of light,
Speaker 2: but is it is a change propagating through space in
Speaker 2: some sense from our perspective, faster than the speed of light.
Speaker 1: Interesting, So absence in a sense travels faster than anything material.
Speaker 2: So I wanted to bring up a couple things mentioned
Speaker 2: in this paper that start me as interesting. One of
Speaker 2: them is a reference to another paper published a couple
Speaker 2: of years before this in the journal Perception called Impossible
Speaker 2: Shadows and the Shadow Correspondence Problem by Pascal Mammasian published
Speaker 2: in two thousand and four. And the background on this
Speaker 2: paper is the observation that we can and do use
Speaker 2: shadows to estimate information about a scene. So we can
Speaker 2: use shadows to infer properties of both the light source
Speaker 2: where light is coming from and a scene we're looking
Speaker 2: at and the object casting the shadow. But getting information
Speaker 2: this way is not a computationally trivial task. It's actually
Speaker 2: somewhat difficult Mamasian rights quote. In order to use that information,
Speaker 2: our visual system has first to segment regions in the image,
Speaker 2: decide that these regions are potential shadows rather than say
Speaker 2: ink blots, and then match these shadow candidates with objects
Speaker 2: in the scene. We call this last processing stage the
Speaker 2: shadow correspondence problem. It is reminiscent of the correspondence problem
Speaker 2: in stereopsis, and stereopsis is how the brain infers depth
Speaker 2: in our vision by comparing the images produced by our
Speaker 2: two different eyes and then going on they say quote
Speaker 2: or motion perception, where one has to match features between
Speaker 2: the left and right images, or between consecutive frames of
Speaker 2: a movie. So in inferring real accurate information about a
Speaker 2: scene you're looking at in a photograph or in front
Speaker 2: of you based on shadows is computationally intensive. We use
Speaker 2: shadows to get information, but it's a complex problem with
Speaker 2: multiple variables, and it's taxing on the brain. And so
Speaker 2: the author of this paper describes some experiments leading to
Speaker 2: the conclusion that we actually only infer information from shadows
Speaker 2: using a rough system. And one piece of evidence for
Speaker 2: that is that people usually seemed not to notice when
Speaker 2: projected shadows put in front of them were physically impossible.
Speaker 2: Rob I'd like, I've got an illustration for you to
Speaker 2: look at here that I pulled out of this paper.
Speaker 2: So there are a series of six objects shown that
Speaker 2: are there are ray white to sort of like pole
Speaker 2: with an arm at the top, and then a shadow
Speaker 2: being cast by that object, and so you could try
Speaker 2: to infer some information about where the source of light
Speaker 2: is is in relation to this object. But four of
Speaker 2: these are possible shadows that could be cast by an
Speaker 2: object of the shape, and two of them are impossible shadows.
Speaker 1: Wow. So just looking at these six images here is
Speaker 1: it is a little taxing. It can feel the mental
Speaker 1: strain because you know, I'm instantly trying to imagine light
Speaker 1: approaching the object from different directions at different angles. And
Speaker 1: when I start sort of doing that three dimensional computation
Speaker 1: in my head, I mean, it seems like all of
Speaker 1: them are probable, Like none of them are really standing
Speaker 1: out to me as necessarily impossible. I don't know, maybe gosh,
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe number two. Oh yeah, two is
Speaker 1: the only one that I'm that I'm thinking is even
Speaker 1: just a little bit suspect here. But yeah, this is
Speaker 1: this is this is this is rough to think about.
Speaker 2: You're in the same situation as most of the people
Speaker 2: who participated in this experiment, So most of the shadows
Speaker 2: given here are possible given the correct light source position,
Speaker 2: but the two on the right side of the image
Speaker 2: are impossible. If you look at them, you can see
Speaker 2: that the arm of the figure is pointed the wrong
Speaker 2: way in both of those cases.
Speaker 1: Fascinating. I guess this is why I've always been so
Speaker 1: forgiving too with video games, especially the ones where you
Speaker 1: could choose whether you wanted complex shadows or just sort
Speaker 1: of like the circle shadow. Like circle shadows good enough.
Speaker 1: If I'm having any kind of system issues, let's just
Speaker 1: go with this simple shadow.
Speaker 2: That might be a good instinct. We'll get to some
Speaker 2: reasoning about that in a second. So a couple of
Speaker 2: these images are not possible shadows. But I think I
Speaker 2: don't know. I already knew that I've read about it
Speaker 2: before I looked at the image, so I can't really
Speaker 2: know what my reaction would be. But you had the
Speaker 2: same reaction a lot of the people in the study did.
Speaker 2: They just didn't notice. People seemed not to notice that
Speaker 2: these shadows were not possible. It had to be explained
Speaker 2: to them afterwards by the experimenters, And so they used
Speaker 2: these bits of impossible geometry to infer mundane information about
Speaker 2: physical objects, space and light sources just like normal. So
Speaker 2: in the end here the author says that this is
Speaker 2: evidence that our brains use a quick mechanism or what
Speaker 2: is called a quote coarse representation course meaning rough, to
Speaker 2: solve the shadow correspondence problem. And another thing that gets
Speaker 2: pointed out in the discussion is surrealist art that makes
Speaker 2: use of impossible shadows. There is a painting called Indefinite
Speaker 2: Divisibility by a painter named Eve Tongi. Again that's called
Speaker 2: Indefinite Divisibility if you want to look it up yourself.
Speaker 2: It is a sort of dolliesque surreal painting with these
Speaker 2: strange objects standing up in a landscape with very stark,
Speaker 2: high contrast shadows that are falling long across the fading background.
Speaker 2: So there seems to be a strong directionally oriented source
Speaker 2: of light sort of where where the observer would be
Speaker 2: casting these long shadows. But in this paper there is
Speaker 2: a zoom in and some lines you can see if
Speaker 2: you scroll down in our outline here rob showing that
Speaker 2: the shadows cast in this painting are again impossible. They
Speaker 2: don't line up the way they would if there were
Speaker 2: actually a single consistent point of light.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is fascinating. Yeah, once you start looking at
Speaker 1: it and really comparing object to shadow, then yeah, you
Speaker 1: start seeing hit the problems here.
Speaker 2: And yet I wouldn't have noticed at all. So this
Speaker 2: raises a question like, were the impossible shadows in this
Speaker 2: painting included simply by accident because most people wouldn't notice,
Speaker 2: or is it an intended surreal effect to I don't know,
Speaker 2: reward careful study of the painting for you to realize like,
Speaker 2: oh wait a minute, this is not physically possible.
Speaker 1: Hm, it's got to be the latter, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: it seems like the amount of work that would go
Speaker 1: into a piece like this, and being a surrealist piece,
Speaker 1: that would that would make sense to intentionally distory the shadows,
Speaker 1: even if it was done in such a way that
Speaker 1: many viewers of the painting would not notice.
Speaker 2: Okay, so short story there. We do use shadows to
Speaker 2: get relevant information about a scene we're looking at, but
Speaker 2: we only look so close because we apparently do not
Speaker 2: detect when when shadows violate the laws of physics or geometry. However,
Speaker 2: coming back to that paper I mentioned by Kassati, shadows also,
Speaker 2: in addition to providing relevant information, they also represent noise.
Speaker 2: We might not think about this often, but in reality,
Speaker 2: it would be quite easy to mistake a shadow for
Speaker 2: a physical object or the outline of such to interpret,
Speaker 2: to misinterpret a shadow falling across an object as a
Speaker 2: contour on that object and the and Kassati points out
Speaker 2: this is one reason it is so difficult to represent
Speaker 2: shadows in line drawings. So Kassati says, our brains deal
Speaker 2: with this noise threat by mostly tuning out shadows as
Speaker 2: visual representations unless we suddenly decide to focus on them.
Speaker 2: And that seemed very true to me. You know, we
Speaker 2: see shadows all the time. We are constantly surrounded by shadows,
Speaker 2: but our brain sort of makes them cognitively invisible unless
Speaker 2: we decide for some reason to focus on them. And
Speaker 2: Cassatti calls this having quote limited conscious access to shadows.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is fascinating. So there is data there in
Speaker 1: the shadow, but there's just too much noise really to
Speaker 1: depend on it too heavily, and there's ultimately better visual
Speaker 1: and other sense data to go off of in any
Speaker 1: given situation that involves a shadow, I'm assuming.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I found that really interesting that as a
Speaker 2: form of visual information, shadows exist in this middle realm
Speaker 2: where we can get useful information from them. But we're
Speaker 2: never looking too close, or at least not naturally unless
Speaker 2: we're like really forced, because a lot of times we
Speaker 2: don't even notice if the shadow is eldritch in nature,
Speaker 2: it's doing something geometry can't do or wouldn't be justified
Speaker 2: by how light works. But secondarily, most of the time,
Speaker 2: even though we're looking right at shadows, we don't see them.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm literally looking right at shadows right now,
Speaker 2: and I don't see them as shadows unless I notice
Speaker 2: to look at the shadows there there. They don't. They
Speaker 2: don't I don't know strike my visual system as relevant,
Speaker 2: and so I'm just like I tune them out.
Speaker 1: That's interesting. Yeah, we kind of have shadow blindness to
Speaker 1: a large degree, which I guess makes it even more
Speaker 1: fascinating to think that there might be other beings out
Speaker 1: there who can see shadows in ways it can appreciate
Speaker 1: shadows in ways that human beings cannot. I would like
Speaker 1: to at this point turn our attention to various fictional, legendary, folkloric,
Speaker 1: and literary examples of shadowless wizards, demons, and vampires, and
Speaker 1: much more. In the shadows that may or may not
Speaker 1: be cast by these various individuals. So I've mentioned my
Speaker 1: fondness for the horror fantasy of Weird Tales era author
Speaker 1: Clark Ashton Smith before, and one of my all time
Speaker 1: favorites is a short story titled The Double Shadow about
Speaker 1: a pair of wizards who unearthed ancient dark magic that
Speaker 1: in turn dooms them both to a horrible death. Smith's
Speaker 1: own summary of the tale via eldrich Dark dot com,
Speaker 1: which is a great website that has just all of
Speaker 1: his writings available. This is how the author himself summarized it. Quote.
Speaker 1: A man sees a monstrous shadow following his own and
Speaker 1: merging with it gradually day by day, while coincidentally with
Speaker 1: this merging, he loses his own entity and becomes possessed
Speaker 1: by an evil thing from unknown worlds in his personality.
Speaker 1: The hideous invading spirit takes form and becomes manifest till
Speaker 1: his shadow is that which had followed him. And the
Speaker 1: story itself is very haunting and the ending is really awesome,
Speaker 1: with the doomed Wizard, the last of the doomed wizards,
Speaker 1: writing his last personal testimony in a locked study, while
Speaker 1: while this monstrous shadow crawls, ever closer closes as follows, So,
Speaker 1: knowing that the time is brief, I have shut myself
Speaker 1: in the room of volumes and books and have written
Speaker 1: this account. And I have taken the bright triangular tablet,
Speaker 1: whose solution was our undoing, and have cast it from
Speaker 1: the window into the sea, hoping that none will find
Speaker 1: it after us. And now I must make an end
Speaker 1: and enclose this writing in the sealed cylinder of our callum,
Speaker 1: and fling it forth to drift upon the wave. For
Speaker 1: the space between my shadow and the shadow of the
Speaker 1: horror is strained momently, and the space is no wider
Speaker 1: than the thickness of a wizard's pen. Now, I had
Speaker 1: long thought that this was mere fantastic invention on Smith's part,
Speaker 1: And then that and it doesn't just detract it all
Speaker 1: from the success of the story and the effect of
Speaker 1: the story. But based on what I was reading in Brewers,
Speaker 1: it would seem that he may have based this detail
Speaker 1: on the the that that example of so called Eastern
Speaker 1: origin this is. This is of course spectacularly vague and
Speaker 1: hartly limits the search too much. It just means that
Speaker 1: it must have originated outside of ancient Greece, Ancient Rome,
Speaker 1: and European traditions. But the idea is explained in Brewers
Speaker 1: is that wizards studying the Black Arts, after they reach
Speaker 1: a certain advanced stage in their studies, are chased through
Speaker 1: a subterranean hall by the devil. I don't know if
Speaker 1: this is supposed to be in real life or in
Speaker 1: a dream, et cetera. But then the idea is, if
Speaker 1: the devil catches you, while I guess, maybe you're done for.
Speaker 1: But if the devil catches only your shadow or part
Speaker 1: of it, then you lose all over part of your shadow.
Speaker 1: But in doing so, you become a first rate wizard,
Speaker 1: and so therefore you might identify a wizard because the
Speaker 1: wizard's shadow will be uncanny, It'll be incomplete to some extent,
Speaker 1: or perhaps it will be missing altogether.
Speaker 2: Oh but I wonder if most people would notice that,
Speaker 2: since we often don't notice impossible shadows.
Speaker 1: That's right, That's right. It's almost kind of a safe bet, right.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, okay, if I lose part of my shadow,
Speaker 1: or even the whole thing, I'm probably gonna be all right. Besides,
Speaker 1: I have all these dark magical spells to fall back on. Now,
Speaker 1: setting aside this vague claim of Eastern origins for a moment,
Speaker 1: we do see another variation of this idea in Icelandic traditions.
Speaker 1: And my source here is demonic magic in the Icelandic
Speaker 1: Wizard Legends by Mark Hanford. This was published in the
Speaker 1: Scottish Society for North and Studies twenty nine back in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety two. Now, Hanford's paper concerns a figure known
Speaker 1: as Semond Sigfisen or Semond the Learned. This individual what
Speaker 1: was it was well to explain here was an historic individual.
Speaker 1: This is someone who actually lived, but there are also
Speaker 1: various legends about them, legends in which they are described
Speaker 1: as a golderman, a type of wizard that was distinct
Speaker 1: from pagan slash evil magicians in early medieval Christian writings.
Speaker 2: Yes, because despite so many of the legends of him
Speaker 2: having to deal with interactions with the devil, Saman was
Speaker 2: a Christian priest.
Speaker 1: That's right, right, And apparently these goldermen were generally classified
Speaker 1: as priests in addition to wizards. They're generally strong Christian
Speaker 1: elements in their stories. And Hanford writes that Salmond is
Speaker 1: the earliest of the Icelandic wizards in this tradition. So
Speaker 1: first of all, the real Seaman according to the various annals,
Speaker 1: Semon was born in ten fifty six and educated in France.
Speaker 1: He returned to Iceland around ten seventy six, built a
Speaker 1: church in the south of Iceland, and then went on
Speaker 1: to be very influential in ecclesiastical law and politics of
Speaker 1: the day. So he was able to raise his own
Speaker 1: family's position in the country to a position of power
Speaker 1: for many generations to come. He wrote important histories such
Speaker 1: as the lost but off sited History of the Kings
Speaker 1: of Norway. He died in eleven thirty three at the
Speaker 1: age of seventy seven, and yeah, that's the short version
Speaker 1: of the historical Semand. But he also takes on different
Speaker 1: powers within the realm of icelandic legend.
Speaker 2: One of the many legends about Semund is that he
Speaker 2: was able to get control of his parish in southern
Speaker 2: Iceland because there were a group of I don't know,
Speaker 2: learned men or candidates who were brought before the King
Speaker 2: of Norway. King of Norway was like, okay, there's a
Speaker 2: parish in Iceland in whichever one of you gets there
Speaker 2: first can have it. So Samond goes to the beach.
Speaker 2: He goes to the shore and he calls up the
Speaker 2: devil and he says, okay, I need you to give
Speaker 2: me a ride to Iceland without getting my coat tails wet.
Speaker 2: And if you take me there without getting my coat
Speaker 2: tails wet, then you can have my soul. So the
Speaker 2: devil transforms into a seal and let's uh, Samon ride
Speaker 2: him all the way to Iceland. They're almost there, but
Speaker 2: then the devil is outsmarted because Samond beats the seal
Speaker 2: the devil's seal on the head with the salter I
Speaker 2: think either a Bible or as salter. The devil is
Speaker 2: knocked unconscious and sinks under the water, and then of
Speaker 2: course the coattails get wet because he falls into the water.
Speaker 2: Therefore the pact is invalidated. So he outsmarted him with
Speaker 2: a good whack to the head.
Speaker 1: In this outlandish story really does sum up a lot
Speaker 1: of the character of Samon in these legends, because he's
Speaker 1: nothing short of the ultimate demonic wizard in the classical
Speaker 1: Fostian sense. Yet, while FoST makes overall terrible deals with
Speaker 1: the devil, they come back to plague him. Samond is
Speaker 1: essentially He's like a wise trickster who knows how to
Speaker 1: outwit the devil himself when it comes to various contracts.
Speaker 1: You know, that sort of out lawyer the devil, I
Speaker 1: guess and even and as he goes on in legend,
Speaker 1: he's able to aid others in litigation of their own
Speaker 1: deals with the devil. So you got into a bad
Speaker 1: deal with the devil, well, maybe Salmon will be able
Speaker 1: to help you. The author here says quote Samon is
Speaker 1: presented as an ambiguous character, one who uses diabolical means
Speaker 1: to do good against the forces of evil.
Speaker 2: Oh, he's like Christopher Lee and the devil rides out.
Speaker 2: You know, he can know all the diabolical chants, he
Speaker 2: can know all the occult tons because he's using them
Speaker 2: for good. But simon, you can't know about them.
Speaker 1: That's right, Yes, the holy Warlock figure here. Now, the
Speaker 1: context for all of this actually brings us back to
Speaker 1: something we were talking about earlier this month regarding necromancy,
Speaker 1: and that's clerical access to texts and tones that contain
Speaker 1: forbidden knowledge regarding communication with demons and the sometimes acceptable
Speaker 1: realm of astral magic magic concerning the stars. Astral magic
Speaker 1: had been imported from the Arab world, so only learned
Speaker 1: physicians and clergy members had access to such texts, with
Speaker 1: the clergy especially having access to texts related to the
Speaker 1: command of demons for the purposes of exorcism, and as
Speaker 1: we touched on previously, it's members of the clergy who
Speaker 1: were frequently accused of demonology or necromancy, or at least
Speaker 1: accused of possessing texts related to these alleged practices. It
Speaker 1: was also Hanford stresses here an easy accusation to make
Speaker 1: against clergy and physicians by their enemies and or those
Speaker 1: jealous of their success. So you don't like a given
Speaker 1: guy who's way up in the clergy, especially one who's
Speaker 1: like Samond, foreign educated, Well you just say, well, of
Speaker 1: course he's successful. He's a wizard.
Speaker 2: He's doing deals with the devil, right.
Speaker 1: And then you know, maybe people are jumping to their
Speaker 1: defense and saying, well, Samon is doing a lot of
Speaker 1: great work if he if he made a deal with
Speaker 1: the devil, I guess he knows what he's doing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't mean you should make a deal with
Speaker 1: the devil. Leave it to to to individuals like saman
Speaker 1: to pull it off.
Speaker 2: But you know, one of the really interesting legendary motifs
Speaker 2: about Saman to the learned is the idea of him
Speaker 2: essentially going to devil school.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, again he was. He's foreign educated, educated in France,
Speaker 1: and realistically he would have learned about pagan history, he
Speaker 1: would have learned about mathematics, astrology, and theology. But Hanford
Speaker 1: writes that, you know, this gets all stretched in the
Speaker 1: popular imagination and it becomes the version that becomes kind
Speaker 1: of the folkloric canon. Is that? And then this was
Speaker 1: later recorded in i think seventeenth century by Arnie Magnuson
Speaker 1: in the States that Samon was educated at the Black School,
Speaker 1: which is of course a school of dark wizardry, and
Speaker 1: at the end of one studies there, the devil would
Speaker 1: claim the soul of the last student to leave.
Speaker 2: This setting is not unique to stories about this guy's life.
Speaker 2: By the way, there is a more common folk story
Speaker 2: motif about the Scholomance or the school of the Devil,
Speaker 2: which is in some sense a college where people go
Speaker 2: to learn mystical evil magic powers. They are instructed by
Speaker 2: the devil, or maybe not by the devil, maybe they
Speaker 2: just got to go to this place and there's lots
Speaker 2: of books of forbidden knowledge there. But yes, the devil
Speaker 2: will claim at least one of the students of each
Speaker 2: class there to be his personal servant.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I like it's kind of the last person
Speaker 1: to leave, which I kind of interpreted as being like
Speaker 1: the most studious of the children, or not children. I
Speaker 1: guess the students, the most studious, the biggest lizardry nerd
Speaker 1: on campus, that will be the one that the devil
Speaker 1: hand selects. So anyway, Salmon was very studious and he
Speaker 1: was often the last to leave, And I guess this
Speaker 1: was known about him because even back home in Iceland,
Speaker 1: they realized this kid is going to get the devil
Speaker 1: on him if someone doesn't help him out. And so
Speaker 1: that's where Iceland's Bishop John Augmundsen decides to jump in
Speaker 1: and help him out. He rushes there, he's there to
Speaker 1: help him out of the building, throws his coat over
Speaker 1: Salmon's back. As he leaves, the devil reaches out for
Speaker 1: him and snatches the coat instead of Salmon's soul. So
Speaker 1: this is how does this relate to Shadows. Well, we'll
Speaker 1: get there, but in this particular telling, the devil wasn't
Speaker 1: done though. He proclaimed that he had three days to
Speaker 1: claim Salmon's soul, so Salmon had to hide himself. He
Speaker 1: hit himself three times in a riverbank, in a boat
Speaker 1: at sea, and buried under a consecrated earth in a churchyard.
Speaker 1: And these tactics work, and the devil was thwarted. The
Speaker 1: idea being that like, where is he, Well, I'm getting
Speaker 1: a sense that he's he's he's out here at sea.
Speaker 1: He must have he must have drowned, or I get
Speaker 1: the sense that he's under the earth. He must be dead,
Speaker 1: And so he's able to thwart the devil and avoid
Speaker 1: having his soul claimed.
Speaker 2: The way I understood this. This was also connected to
Speaker 2: similar folk tales that weren't directly about the devil, but
Speaker 2: were about some kind of a master of astral magic,
Speaker 2: somebody who was like a wicked astrologer who wanted to
Speaker 2: capture his student, and the student would evade him by like, yeah,
Speaker 2: so he would get his feet wet on the first day,
Speaker 2: and so the astrologer would consult the stars and see
Speaker 2: that he was wet and be like, oh, okay, he
Speaker 2: is drowned. And then another day he does something else
Speaker 2: to his body, like he puts blood on his feet
Speaker 2: or something. And then the astrologer consults the stars that
Speaker 2: day and sees blood and thinks that he has been killed,
Speaker 2: and then yeah, I guess the consecrated earth. The astrologer
Speaker 2: consults the stars and finds Ah, he is buried, so
Speaker 2: I can no longer claim him.
Speaker 1: Right right now. In other versions of this story, though,
Speaker 1: it's not Salmond or the bishop's coat that is snatched
Speaker 1: by the devil, but Salmon's shadow, thus removing him of
Speaker 1: a shadow for the remainder of his life. So here
Speaker 1: we get back to this idea of wizards being chased
Speaker 1: around by the devil, having part of or their entire
Speaker 1: shadow snatched away, and thus being powerful and having all
Speaker 1: of this forbidden knowledge, being able to use it, but
Speaker 1: being deprived of something that may or may not be important,
Speaker 1: as we'll get into the shadow.
Speaker 2: One version of the story I came across was Samond
Speaker 2: using trickery. Actually, so he's the last student. He's trying
Speaker 2: to get out of the Devil's college, and the devil
Speaker 2: tries to reach out and claim him, but he says,
Speaker 2: wait a minute, no, I'm not the last. There is
Speaker 2: one more student still there, and he points to his
Speaker 2: shadow cast on the wall. So the devil reaches out
Speaker 2: to ground that and snatches his shadow away from him
Speaker 2: as he bodily makes his escape, but no longer with
Speaker 2: his shadow intact.
Speaker 1: That version is good too. I like that. So Hanford
Speaker 1: writes that this escape from the Black School trope is
Speaker 1: a migratory legend, one that is largely unchanged over the
Speaker 1: centuries and pops up in different contexts. And the same
Speaker 1: can be said for what is known on the the
Speaker 1: Arnie Thompson Index of Folktale Types as tail type three
Speaker 1: twenty nine. A man gives or sells his shadow to
Speaker 1: the devil.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, I think Hanford says, there's not a lot of
Speaker 2: detail on that index type, and I wish there was.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I had to look around. I found an Irish
Speaker 1: or Irish American tale that reflects this trope. This was
Speaker 1: recorded in nineteen seventy by Ruth and Music in Green
Speaker 1: Hills of Magic, West Virginia. Folk tales from Europe, and
Speaker 1: in this telling, you have a despondent man who's about
Speaker 1: to jump from a bridge when a stranger guess what it's.
Speaker 1: The devil arrives and says, hey, I'll buy that shadow off.
Speaker 1: Of you, and the man's like, what are you going
Speaker 1: to give me for it? And he'll said, he says, well,
Speaker 1: i'll give you. I'll give you all the gold you'll
Speaker 1: ever need. And he's like, well, that sounds like a
Speaker 1: good deal. I wasn't using my shadow. I was about
Speaker 1: to really not be using it for anything. And so
Speaker 1: the he agrees to this, and the Devil gives him
Speaker 1: a magic purse that always has coins in it. So
Speaker 1: this seems like a great deal. But then the townsfolk
Speaker 1: become suspicious of the fact that this guy always has money,
Speaker 1: and they also begin to notice, hey, he does not
Speaker 1: have a shadow, and so they throw him in prison
Speaker 1: I'm not sure on what charges exactly, and he dies there.
Speaker 2: I thought this was going to take a different turn
Speaker 2: where he was going to give him all the gold
Speaker 2: he'd ever need and then just push him from the bridge,
Speaker 2: because once he's dead, he doesn't need gold.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean that's the thing about deals with
Speaker 1: the Devil. Yeah, I guess. I guess they tend to
Speaker 1: take on the sort of lawful evil character right where
Speaker 1: there's some term, there's some detail in the contract. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I could have seen it going that darker direction as well.
Speaker 2: I guess what kind of moral failing on the part
Speaker 2: of the protagonist do you want to emphasize in those
Speaker 2: kind of stories. It's inattention to detail, it's failure to
Speaker 2: read the fine print on the contract. On this it
Speaker 2: seems more like an inability to understand that suddenly being
Speaker 2: rich but also having something missing of your person will
Speaker 2: be noticed by people around you.
Speaker 1: This trope is also reflected in the marvelous Tale of
Speaker 1: Peter Schimmel from eighteen forty three by Adalbert von Camisso,
Speaker 1: which concerns another despondent young man who also sells his
Speaker 1: shadow to the devil, and also sells it for a
Speaker 1: bottomless wallet. But in this story he ends up wandering
Speaker 1: the earth and depends, and it spends the rest of
Speaker 1: his doomed life. Is kind of a holy fool attempting
Speaker 1: to reconnect with nature. Interestingly enough, DeForest Kelly of Star
Speaker 1: Trek Fame played this character in a nineteen fifty three
Speaker 1: episode of the anthology series Your Favorite Story, an episode
Speaker 1: titled The Man Who Sold His Shadow. Now, this trope
Speaker 1: pops up places as well, probably the most noticeable and
Speaker 1: one that a number of you are already thinking of
Speaker 1: would be Peter Pan. You might remember this, especially from
Speaker 1: the Disney animated adaptation of Old Peter. Pan is nearly
Speaker 1: caught in Wendy's house and his shadow is ripped off
Speaker 1: in the escape, and later they have to stick it
Speaker 1: back down, or they try to stick it back down
Speaker 1: with like soap and stuff. It doesn't work, they have
Speaker 1: to sew it back on.
Speaker 2: It is a mischievous, fairy like shadow.
Speaker 1: Yes. Now, as for those supposed Eastern influences on the idea,
Speaker 1: I wasn't able to find out anything really solid here,
Speaker 1: though I was looking at a few different sources. I
Speaker 1: found a book titled Folk Traditions of the Arab World,
Speaker 1: A Guide to Motif Classification, Volume two by Hassan m
Speaker 1: el Shami, and the author does mention, at least in
Speaker 1: passing that one quality of demons is that they cast
Speaker 1: no shadows. And I also was reading in Commanding Demons
Speaker 1: in Gin the Sorcerer in Early Islamic Thought by Travis
Speaker 1: Zeta that eleventh century Islamic author Abu al Fado Mohammad
Speaker 1: al Tabasi wrote in a book on Devil's in Gin
Speaker 1: that Gin could be revealed by their shadows and by
Speaker 1: their shadows only as then, like you couldn't see the
Speaker 1: rest of them, but you could see the shadow of
Speaker 1: the gin.
Speaker 2: Interesting.
Speaker 1: So these two ideas are of course rather opposite from
Speaker 1: one another, and may well speak, you know, of different
Speaker 1: traditions and times. We're casting a large umbrella here over
Speaker 1: the concept. But they both do get at the idea
Speaker 1: of a shadow, or the lack thereof, is something key
Speaker 1: to an entity that doesn't completely fit into the human
Speaker 1: world or into human perception. And this brings us to
Speaker 1: the world of vampires. Ah okay, So I think a
Speaker 1: lot of you are probably up on the fact that
Speaker 1: in many tales, at least the vampires have no reflection
Speaker 1: in a mirror. That's a classic trope. It's one that's
Speaker 1: easy to visually represent in even a lower budget vampire film.
Speaker 2: Yes, Gary Oldman comes across Keanu shaving, he hisses like
Speaker 2: a snake at the mirror and it shatters.
Speaker 1: Yep. Yeah, But at least in some tellings the vampire
Speaker 1: also casts no shadow, and this is actually referenced in
Speaker 1: we've already referred to it here, the most influential vampire
Speaker 1: novel of all time, Bram Stoker's Dracula, I'll read a
Speaker 1: bit from it here where this is specifically discussed quote.
Speaker 1: I was not alone. The room was the same, unchanged
Speaker 1: in any way since I came into it. I could
Speaker 1: see along the floor in the brilliant moonlight, my own
Speaker 1: footsteps marked where I had disturbed the long accumulation of
Speaker 1: dust in the moonlight. Opposite me were three young women,
Speaker 1: ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the
Speaker 1: time that I must be dreaming when I saw them,
Speaker 1: for though the moonlight was behind them, they threw no
Speaker 1: shadow on the floor. They came close to me and
Speaker 1: looked at me for some time, and then whispered together.
Speaker 1: Two or dark and had high aquiland noses like the Count,
Speaker 1: and great dark piercing eyes that seem to be almost
Speaker 1: red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon. These are,
Speaker 1: of course the brides of Dracula, the three female vampires
Speaker 1: that serve him in the book and then various adaptations
Speaker 1: of the book. But then elsewhere in the Book of
Speaker 1: Dracula himself, it is written he throws no shadow, He
Speaker 1: makes in the mirror no reflect as again Jonathan observed.
Speaker 1: Though the Prince of Darkness himself also tells Jonathan I
Speaker 1: love the shade and the shadow.
Speaker 2: Well, maybe you love to be in the shade if
Speaker 2: you can make none with your own body.
Speaker 1: Maybe so all right, So we have this idea of
Speaker 1: the vampire, which, if you're not familiar, is a monstrous
Speaker 1: and cursed and corrupted, undead thing that was once human
Speaker 1: but has lost all humanity, and it is because nothing
Speaker 1: but supernatural hunger and cruelty and horror, at least in
Speaker 1: some tellings of it is the thing that no longer
Speaker 1: casts a shadow. And then we have other variations of this.
Speaker 1: We've talked about wizards losing their shadows, of sort of
Speaker 1: fairy folk losing their shadows, and literary traditions. But then
Speaker 1: there are also related concepts like the portrait of Dorian Gray,
Speaker 1: in which you don't have a shadow, you have a
Speaker 1: painting of an individual, and that representation also has some
Speaker 1: sort of connection to the state of their soul. And
Speaker 1: so these various literary treatments especially would seem to be linked.
Speaker 1: And I found a really cool source on this. This
Speaker 1: is titled Vampires, Demons, and the Disappearing Shadow in Folkloric
Speaker 1: Fictions of the Long nineteenth Century by Sam M. George,
Speaker 1: published in a twenty twenty edition of Gothic Studies. Now, Dracula,
Speaker 1: of course, was the work of an Irish author, and
Speaker 1: as I believe we've discussed in the show previously, invokes
Speaker 1: various Irish folklore ideas concerning the undead, perhaps in any
Speaker 1: ways more than anything that Bromstoker actually absorbed from European traditions.
Speaker 1: But George Wrights of Dracula there may be some links
Speaker 1: to actual Romani folkloric beliefs that a vampire was a
Speaker 1: person's shadow, for example, and that there was also a
Speaker 1: practice of shadow traders who quote traded shadows to architects
Speaker 1: who attempted to secure and wall up a person's shadow
Speaker 1: to ensure that their buildings were durable, with the result
Speaker 1: that after death that person would become a vampire.
Speaker 2: WHOA, I don't think I've ever heard of this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this was new to me, and I think there
Speaker 1: may be sprinklings of this tradition spread elsewhere in European
Speaker 1: traditions as well. We may come back to that, But
Speaker 1: what George ultimately argues is that this means that yes,
Speaker 1: Dracula and his spawn are all soulless. They have no souls. Again,
Speaker 1: they've lost every shred of their humanity, and in doing
Speaker 1: so they have also lost that shadow.
Speaker 2: Well, it may be a coincidence, but I mean, obviously
Speaker 2: this has the at least superficial connection to the idea
Speaker 2: of Greek conceptions of disembodied souls as shades or shadows.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, Now where it gets really interesting with George's
Speaker 1: article is that she references J. G. Fraser's The Golden Bough,
Speaker 1: the first volume of which I believe came out in
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety, and so it would have lined up with
Speaker 1: the writing of Dracula and some of the other writers
Speaker 1: and other works that invoke similar ideas of shadow or
Speaker 1: reflection or painting. Fraser writes of traditional belief systems in
Speaker 1: which the individual quote often regards his shadow or reflection
Speaker 1: as his soul, or at all events, as a vital
Speaker 1: part of himself, and as such it is a source
Speaker 1: of danger to him, for if it is trampled upon, struck,
Speaker 1: or stabbed, he will feel the injury as if it
Speaker 1: were done to his person. And if it is detached
Speaker 1: from him entirely, as he BELI leaves that it may be,
Speaker 1: he will die. And then elsewhere Fraser's writes, as with
Speaker 1: shadows and reflections. So with portraits, they are often believed
Speaker 1: to contain the soul of the person portrayed. People who
Speaker 1: hold this belief are naturally loath to have their likeness
Speaker 1: taken for if the portrait is the soul or at
Speaker 1: least a vital part of the person portrayed, whoever possesses
Speaker 1: the portrait will be able to exercise fatal influence over
Speaker 1: the original of it.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, So this connects to a big theme that
Speaker 2: Fraser propounds in The Golden Bough. The Golden Bough is
Speaker 2: an early attempt at sort of anthropologically categorizing the different
Speaker 2: religious practices all around the world, and Fraser characterizes a
Speaker 2: lot of it as sympathetic magic, the idea that you
Speaker 2: would have an object that is, by connection of some
Speaker 2: sort associated with a person, and that connection or association
Speaker 2: can be exploited for magical purposes to have influence over
Speaker 2: the person.
Speaker 1: Yes, Yes, and again George brings us up, though not
Speaker 1: not to argue at all that like, okay, Fraser is
Speaker 1: the authority on all of this. But again, this book
Speaker 1: would have come out at just the right time, and
Speaker 1: the book was a popular book. But also, she writes,
Speaker 1: would have had a certain amount of I wouldn't say
Speaker 1: maybe not a taboo quality to it, but there was
Speaker 1: kind of like a sense of like, oh, hey, this
Speaker 1: is hidden knowledge, this is this is the good stuff.
Speaker 1: And if you want insight into how perhaps monsters and
Speaker 1: supernatural relationships work, well, this is a book you might
Speaker 1: well pick up.
Speaker 2: Oh, I think it was controversial when it came out.
Speaker 2: What was it was a very hot book. A lot
Speaker 2: of people were very excited about it. But it also,
Speaker 2: for example, set Christian practices in comparison to a lot
Speaker 2: of other religious practices around the world, which scandalized many
Speaker 2: conservative Christians.
Speaker 1: M yeah, yeah, I can imagine that like that added
Speaker 1: context could be interpreted dangerous to one's own worldview and
Speaker 1: belief systems.
Speaker 2: Yeah, our religion is not like all the other religions now.
Speaker 1: George also connects this to Lavatar's theory of physiognomy, which
Speaker 1: is more directly a pseudoscientific face reading practice, something that
Speaker 1: traces back to the ancient world, but something that then
Speaker 1: would there would be a resurgence of in medieval and
Speaker 1: Renaissance thought. Renaissance thought and then utilized by Swiss pastor
Speaker 1: Johann Caspar Lavatar, who lives seventeen forty one through eighteen
Speaker 1: oh one, and Lavatar argued that the shadow or silhouette
Speaker 1: more specifically, I think could be used to understand a
Speaker 1: person's character. And I guess you could compare this easily
Speaker 1: to things like, you know, alleged aura readings and so forth.
Speaker 1: You get into a pseudo scientific idea that like, Okay,
Speaker 1: well here's here is the silhouette, here's the shadow. This
Speaker 1: is information about the physical person. But also we can
Speaker 1: then if we know what we're doing, we can read that,
Speaker 1: and we can we can make all sorts of judgment
Speaker 1: calls about, you know, their inner character.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think in the eighteenth and nineteenth century
Speaker 2: to some extent, physiognomy or physiognomy had some false scientific cachet,
Speaker 2: much like phrenology did. Like it's considered a pseudoscience now,
Speaker 2: but I think there were some people at the time
Speaker 2: who thought, oh, yeah, this is part of the new learning.
Speaker 2: You know, we can study actually the way you are shaped,
Speaker 2: or the way your face looks, or the bumps on
Speaker 2: your head, and these will tell us whether or not
Speaker 2: you're a criminal.
Speaker 1: So, citing David Glover's Vampires, Mummies and Liberals, bram Stoker
Speaker 1: and the Politics of Popular Fiction. George notes that quote,
Speaker 1: without his shadow or mirror image, Dracula becomes physiognomy's true
Speaker 1: vanishing point, a profoundly unsettling figure.
Speaker 2: No data. Yeah, that's funny. I like that.
Speaker 1: So Dracula is just pure physical existence in hunger, no soul,
Speaker 1: no spirit, no depth beyond the immediate and all consuming
Speaker 1: thirst for blood. And of course, as Dracula resonates through
Speaker 1: cinematic traditions, the shadow also becomes important, not so much
Speaker 1: in its absence but in its perversion, as seen especially
Speaker 1: in nineteen twenty two's nos Veratu and also coming back
Speaker 1: to Francis Ford Coppolo's nineteen ninety two adaptation of Dracula,
Speaker 1: we see the shadow of Dracula like reaching out and
Speaker 1: seeming to either act independently of the Prince of Darkness
Speaker 1: or to sort of telegraph his intense and hunger, like
Speaker 1: his hunger is so intense that the shadow is reaching
Speaker 1: out to grasp Jonathan's neck.
Speaker 2: By chance, I just happened to rewatch bram Stoker's Dracula,
Speaker 2: the Copola version from ninety two, and oh man, that
Speaker 2: movie is so much fun. I don't know exactly how
Speaker 2: it was reviewed at the time it came out, but
Speaker 2: it is a hoot. Gary Oldman is just wonderful and
Speaker 2: I love all of the shadow play scenes. You're exactly right.
Speaker 2: It's not that he doesn't have a shadow, it's that
Speaker 2: he has the wrong shadow. And I guess this comes
Speaker 2: back to what we were talking about with impossible shadows.
Speaker 2: There are multiple moments in the scene where like Keanu
Speaker 2: Reeves is in Dracula's castle and he looks where Dracula's
Speaker 2: shadow is, but Dracula's body is not there, and he
Speaker 2: turns around and he's on the other side of him,
Speaker 2: not where his shadow was. But he just kind of
Speaker 2: shrugs it off, and that seems funny, as in the
Speaker 2: same way that a lot of things in the movie
Speaker 2: seem funny with him just kind of I don't know,
Speaker 2: ignoring very strange things going on at this castle where
Speaker 2: I guess he really wants to close that real estate deal.
Speaker 2: Always be closing Jonathan Harker. But now that I've read
Speaker 2: this paper, it's like, well, I wonder if you would,
Speaker 2: you know, in real time, see a totally impossible shadow
Speaker 2: and not realize it would just kind of like you'd
Speaker 2: be blind to it. It would just kind of go
Speaker 2: into your mind and go out unrecognized.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it would be just super scie by the visual
Speaker 1: information of the Count's body. Like whatever was weird and
Speaker 1: uncanny about the shadow, It's like, oh, well, never mind
Speaker 1: that there's the body. This is what we go on
Speaker 1: as human beings.
Speaker 2: Of course, I don't know that's what would happen and
Speaker 2: if this were real life, but I don't know. It
Speaker 2: seems more plausible now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and again, Dracula is a being of shadows, so
Speaker 1: I like this. Whether he casts a shadow or not,
Speaker 1: he has some sort of strange relationship with shadows, either
Speaker 1: you know, casting distorted shadows, manipulating shadows, or having no
Speaker 1: shadow at all. It all kind of gets around to
Speaker 1: the same idea that this is a creature out of
Speaker 1: step or out of place in the natural world.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Coming back to Francis fort Copplo's Dracula for just a
Speaker 1: second though. I was thinking about it in writing the
Speaker 1: notes for this episode, but also in watching one of
Speaker 1: the Christopher Lee Dracula films, which we're going to be
Speaker 1: talking about in Weird House Cinema. This week, and I
Speaker 1: momentarily had the thought, it's a shame that Gary Oldman,
Speaker 1: such a great actor and such a great Dracula, only
Speaker 1: got to play Dracula once, whereas Christopher Lee got to
Speaker 1: play him so many times. But then I corrected myself
Speaker 1: and realized, no, Gary Oldman doesn't play one Dracula in
Speaker 1: this film. He plays multiple Draculas.
Speaker 2: That's true.
Speaker 1: Each Dracula has a different, slightly different feel and different
Speaker 1: visual presentation.
Speaker 2: He's got the earthly count VLab from the prologue where
Speaker 2: like he stabs the cross and renounces God, and I
Speaker 2: guess that's how he becomes a vampire in the story.
Speaker 2: He's old Grandma, Gary oldman with the butt hair. He's young,
Speaker 2: sexy Gary oldman with the purple sunglasses in London. He's
Speaker 2: a lot of vampires.
Speaker 1: He's Wolf, he's bat. We also get the later version
Speaker 1: of the old account where he has instead of the
Speaker 1: hair being up, it's all slipped back and long. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah there, and I maybe forgetting one or two
Speaker 1: in the mix. So he ultimately did a whole franchise
Speaker 1: is worth of Dracula's in just the one picture.
Speaker 2: The ninety two Dracula is far from perfect. I would
Speaker 2: say it is a weird in great ways and in
Speaker 2: not so great ways. It's it's flawed, some parts of
Speaker 2: it kind of dragged, But it is really really worth
Speaker 2: watching just for how amazing Gary Oldman is.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there are other great things too, great sets,
Speaker 2: and some other performances that are a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, a lot of great performances, great costumes,
Speaker 1: great blood, great monsters. And yeah, and Oldman's performance is perfect.
Speaker 1: I think I read somewhere that he mainly agreed to
Speaker 1: do it because he wanted to work with Francis Ford Coppola.
Speaker 1: But then also he said once he read the line
Speaker 1: I've crossed oceans of time to find you, he was like, well,
Speaker 1: I've got to do it. I can't. I can't go
Speaker 1: on with my career without saying that line.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I feel like Gary Oldman's performance is so good
Speaker 2: it can make you forget that there is no love
Speaker 2: story in the novel, or at least not worn with Dracula,
Speaker 2: like Dracula and Mina and the novel are not in love. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he's just bad in the novel. He's just a he's
Speaker 2: just a demon. He's not suave's that cool, he does
Speaker 2: not take her on the date to pet a wolf
Speaker 2: in the cinematograph.
Speaker 1: Yes, this is a good point. And you know, and
Speaker 1: I think if you're if you're out there and you
Speaker 1: want more about the nature of Dracula and various depictions
Speaker 1: of Dracula, tune in for a Weird House Cinema this Friday,
Speaker 1: because I'm sure we'll have a lot to discuss regarding
Speaker 1: this and the version of Dracula that will be experiencing
Speaker 1: in that film. And as for shadows, I believe we'll
Speaker 1: be back on Thursday with more.
Speaker 2: The shadows fall longer and longer, they will not be denied.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close it
Speaker 1: up there, but we will remind you that Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind is a science podcast with core episodes
Speaker 1: on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we do listener mail,
Speaker 1: on Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster
Speaker 1: fact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious
Speaker 1: concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird
Speaker 1: Houses Cinema. And oh, you may have noticed that we
Speaker 1: have new host photos for Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: Here if you haven't seen them. Run by our recently
Speaker 1: revived social media presences all linked off of stuffedbellermind dot
Speaker 1: com and more specifically where stbym podcast on Instagram. Now
Speaker 1: let me tell you where we have those photos taken.
Speaker 1: We visited the Museum of Illusions Atlanta, a delightful and
Speaker 1: educational attraction located in Atlantic Station. They feature a whole
Speaker 1: host of visual illusions, including illusion rooms that you can
Speaker 1: walk into and interact with. So in a way, you
Speaker 1: may feel like a vampire in some of these places,
Speaker 1: because your reflection especially will not be what you imagined
Speaker 1: it would be, or perhaps the way you look on
Speaker 1: your camera or on the cameras that are present in
Speaker 1: the room, the footage will not be right. Something is distorted,
Speaker 1: something is out of whack.
Speaker 2: It's a great place to get to know the stranger
Speaker 2: sides of your own reflection and your own shadow.
Speaker 1: Absolutely and it's fun for all ages. You can learn
Speaker 1: more about Museum of Illusions Atlanta ati Atlanta dot com.
Speaker 2: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 2: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 2: with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest
Speaker 2: a topic for the future, or just to say hello.
Speaker 2: You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 2: your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 3: more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 3: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.