Speaker 1: As I drew in my head and was turning around
Speaker 1: on the chimney, Saint Nicholas came with a bound. He
Speaker 1: was dressed all in fur from his head to his foot,
Speaker 1: and his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.
Speaker 1: He was dressed all in fur from his head to
Speaker 1: his foot, and his clothes were all tarnished with ashes
Speaker 1: and soot. He was dressed all in fur from his
Speaker 1: head to his foot, and his clothes were all tarnished
Speaker 1: with ashes and soot.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 3: My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 3: And today we're going to be kicking off a series
Speaker 3: of episodes on the fireplace and the hearth, the infrastructure
Speaker 3: through which humans brought their campfires indoors, inside their homes
Speaker 3: and other dwelling structures. We're gonna look at how fire
Speaker 3: places work, where they come from, and what they mean.
Speaker 3: And just got to apologize again this week like I
Speaker 3: did last week. I've still got a cold. It's either
Speaker 3: round two of this cold or a whole new cold
Speaker 3: has come into my life. So so apologies for the
Speaker 3: sinus noises today, but I'm doing what I can.
Speaker 1: Twelve days of Christmas over there, Yeah they're gathering around
Speaker 1: the fire, but anyway, Yeah, so I wanted to do
Speaker 1: a series of episodes looking into fireplaces.
Speaker 3: And sometimes when you're trying to understand what an experience
Speaker 3: means to people, you can really get some good insights
Speaker 3: by looking at attempts to simulate that experience in its
Speaker 3: literal absence, like which elements do people consider worth copying,
Speaker 3: which elements can be ignored, which elements are accentuated or
Speaker 3: exaggerated in simulation. And this got me thinking about the
Speaker 3: Netflix mega hit Fireplace for Your Home, which, for those
Speaker 3: of you somehow not familiar, is an hour long, unbroken
Speaker 3: shot of logs burning in a fireplace, and it is
Speaker 3: the hottest movie of the year for I don't know,
Speaker 3: seven or eight years running whenever this thing started playing
Speaker 3: on Netflix. I just checked on Netflix and there are
Speaker 3: three episodes. This is not a sponsored episode, by the way.
Speaker 3: Netflix had nothing to do with this. I just think
Speaker 3: this is an interesting subject on its own, and we'll
Speaker 3: explain more as we go on. But I checked on
Speaker 3: Netflix and there were three episodes of season one of
Speaker 3: fireplace for your home. There's crackling yule log fireplace. That
Speaker 3: one's the one that plays music like Joy to the
Speaker 3: World and we wish you a Merry Christmas kind of
Speaker 3: Muzaki versions of them. Yeah, And then there's the second
Speaker 3: one that's just crackling fireplace, so no music. You just
Speaker 3: get the pop, the hiss and all that good stuff.
Speaker 1: There you go.
Speaker 3: And then there's a third one with music, again I
Speaker 3: guess in different music than the first one. I don't.
Speaker 3: I think we mainly just listen. The one we put
Speaker 3: on is the one without music.
Speaker 1: That's the way to go. You can add your own
Speaker 1: music that way.
Speaker 3: So I don't remember what year it was we first
Speaker 3: discovered this thing, but it has played a number of
Speaker 3: times in our household, and so I was wondering, Rob,
Speaker 3: do you do you have experience with this thing?
Speaker 1: Yes, I do. You know, I've never owned or rented
Speaker 1: a home that had a hearth or a fireplace in it,
Speaker 1: not even like some of the scaleback versions where it's
Speaker 1: like gas generated and you know, or has some sort
Speaker 1: of other effect. So I have to depend on what
Speaker 1: a lot of people have to depend on for the
Speaker 1: spiritual center of their home and that's the television, and
Speaker 1: so of course I fire up a fake fireplace, and
Speaker 1: the one that's been our favorite for several years running
Speaker 1: now is on Netflix. So again, credit, where's credit? Where
Speaker 1: credits do? They'll cancel your favorite shows after two seasons,
Speaker 1: but they will give you an amazing virtual fireplace, and
Speaker 1: our favorite is Netflix The Witcher Fireplace. It is a
Speaker 1: Witcher tie in and it's not much to it. It's simple,
Speaker 1: it's awesome. It's just kind of a medieval fantasy world
Speaker 1: fire pit, like you know, wrought iron or something. It's blazing,
Speaker 1: it's crackling. There's no Henry cavill or Unifer back there
Speaker 1: and a hot tub or anything like that. It's just
Speaker 1: the fire pit and it's great. My only criticism is
Speaker 1: that it's only an hour long, and I either can't
Speaker 1: or I don't know how to put it on repeat,
Speaker 1: because I would just prefer to have it on all
Speaker 1: the time during the holidays.
Speaker 3: What's this emblazoned on the side of it? Is it
Speaker 3: like a kraken or something?
Speaker 1: Ah, since I've seen this show, that's probably like some
Speaker 1: sort of a monster. You know, Henry Cavell is a
Speaker 1: monster hunter. And that the Witch is a monster hunter
Speaker 1: and that's I don't know, a chimera or something.
Speaker 3: Oh, I know the Witcher from the game, the third
Speaker 3: game specifically. But yeah, so this thing does look really cool.
Speaker 3: I'll have to look this one up this year. But
Speaker 3: it's like sexy wrought iron brazier for your home.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's cool. Yeah, I legitimately love it.
Speaker 3: So I think Fireplace for Your Home and it's many
Speaker 3: derivatives are interesting cultural artifacts because on one hand, they're
Speaker 3: just like a genuine holiday fixture in millions of homes.
Speaker 3: I couldn't find any reliable sources on viewcount because Netflix
Speaker 3: doesn't release that kind of stuff as far as I know.
Speaker 3: But in an interview with The Independent in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 3: the director of Fireplace for Your Home, George Ford, I'll
Speaker 3: come back to this in a minute, estimated that it
Speaker 3: had been it had been watched more than seventy million
Speaker 3: times in twenty eighteen. No idea if he's right about that,
Speaker 3: But how am I going to argue with him? But
Speaker 3: at the same time, I think it's funny that people
Speaker 3: are putting this on to be cozy and feel good
Speaker 3: at Christmas time, and yet this movie is also a
Speaker 3: source of ironic amusement, Like when you bring it up,
Speaker 3: people kind of there's something funny, Like they find something
Speaker 3: kind of goofy about the idea of a cozy fire
Speaker 3: happening inside their television. And if you look at reviews,
Speaker 3: most of the reviews for this thing are jokes. They're
Speaker 3: things like, you know, zero stars, nearly burned down my house.
Speaker 3: It's like the joke is with the incongruity of the
Speaker 3: fact that this is not a real fire.
Speaker 1: It's not it won't it won't put out heat. And
Speaker 1: if it is putting out heat, there's probably something wrong
Speaker 1: with your television set. I mean, it'll put out a
Speaker 1: little heat, right, Like, you shouldn't be putting out a
Speaker 1: lot of heat. You shouldn't actually be able to warm
Speaker 1: your buns by it.
Speaker 3: You hope it's not putting out a lot. This is
Speaker 3: actually this is kind of a tangent. But I got
Speaker 3: interested thinking about what makes the difference between lovable holiday
Speaker 3: kitch like fireplace for your home and a divisive experimental
Speaker 3: art film like Andy Warhol's Empire, which if you're not
Speaker 3: familiar with Empire, this is worth looking up. It's an
Speaker 3: eight hour static shot of the illuminated upper floors of
Speaker 3: the Empire State Building. I think it was actually filmed
Speaker 3: over the course of roughly like six hours, and then
Speaker 3: it's supposed to be played back at slow motion, so
Speaker 3: the film takes like eight hours to watch. It was
Speaker 3: filmed over the course of one night in July nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty four, and you're just watching the buildings, like the
Speaker 3: sun sets and the floodlights come on, and you just
Speaker 3: watch the building through the night, and occasionally there'll be
Speaker 3: you know, a plane going by or flashes of light
Speaker 3: or something like that, but otherwise it's just a static shot. Obviously,
Speaker 3: the movie Empire is more likely to be regarded as
Speaker 3: either an important work of art with something interesting to
Speaker 3: illustrate about passage of time or the aesthetics of film, or,
Speaker 3: on the other hand, to be seen as a pretentious,
Speaker 3: self infatuated, artistic boondoggle. Fireplace for your home does not
Speaker 3: really invite either of these types of appraisal. It's just
Speaker 3: you know, cozy holiday kitsch. However, I would say that
Speaker 3: an hour long shot of a burning fireplace and an
Speaker 3: eight hour shot of the floodlights on top of a
Speaker 3: skyscraper have a lot of similarities. Both are what you
Speaker 3: might call slow or atmospheric films without plot, characters, or dialogue,
Speaker 3: primarily interested in just a purely aesthetic experience, maybe causing
Speaker 3: maybe something about causing the viewer to have time to
Speaker 3: relax and reflect without something directly taking up their attention
Speaker 3: to too aggressively. And both of them, in terms of
Speaker 3: visual display, are based on the interplay of light and shadow.
Speaker 3: I read somebody described the glowing crown of the building
Speaker 3: featured in Empire as a chandelier in the sky, and
Speaker 3: based on an interview I was looking at it's clear
Speaker 3: that fireplace for your home. It took a lot of
Speaker 3: care to try to get the right interplay of lights
Speaker 3: and colors in the fire and how they would be
Speaker 3: picked up by the camera and the contrast of that
Speaker 3: with the shadows in the room around. And so I
Speaker 3: was thinking about if I had to single out a
Speaker 3: major difference, like what would make the difference between the
Speaker 3: kinds of feelings people have about them? Apart from the
Speaker 3: length difference, I think a big thing is that there
Speaker 3: is an understanding of a different expectation put on the viewer,
Speaker 3: Like if you were asked to watch Andy Warhol's Empire.
Speaker 3: People probably think that they're supposed to like sit silently
Speaker 3: in an art house theater and look at the screen
Speaker 3: the whole run time and think deep thoughts, whereas fireplace
Speaker 3: for your home makes no such demands. You probably just
Speaker 3: put it on in the background while you're having coffee
Speaker 3: or while you're wrapping presents or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting to think about the different ways we're
Speaker 1: supposed to or do, interact with various media. Like I
Speaker 1: was thinking about this recently. I went to a performance
Speaker 1: that was maybe a little dry for my taste, and
Speaker 1: in the same way, you know, you sometimes say, well,
Speaker 1: this meeting could have been an email, I kind of
Speaker 1: felt like this performance could have been an art installation,
Speaker 1: you know, something where I walk through it, I spend
Speaker 1: as much time with it as I want and sort
Speaker 1: of like gain what I want from looking at it
Speaker 1: walking through it and so forth. You know, I think
Speaker 1: we've all been to This also sometimes breaks down into
Speaker 1: actual video pieces, right where you'll see like short short
Speaker 1: films or even longer pieces, and yeah, you could watch
Speaker 1: them all in their entirety, or you could sort of
Speaker 1: pass through and get a general sense of it, and
Speaker 1: then on the other end, of the spectrum. Like you
Speaker 1: look at the way people often treat their favorite television shows,
Speaker 1: be it to you know, something's often something they have
Speaker 1: a lot of nostalgia for. You hear people talking about,
Speaker 1: say The Office or a Siginfeld or something like that,
Speaker 1: and they talk about, well, you know, I just like
Speaker 1: to put it on in the background while I'm working.
Speaker 1: It just put it on while I'm working or you know,
Speaker 1: doing things around the house. And you know it's you're
Speaker 1: kind of treating the office like one of these virtual fireplaces,
Speaker 1: something that is just generating a feeling in the background
Speaker 1: of some stimuli in the background that you're not one
Speaker 1: hundred percent focused on. In fact, I would say if
Speaker 1: you are one hundred percent focused on one of these
Speaker 1: fireplace videos, that may be a warning sign. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like that's why not. I mean, however, you engage
Speaker 1: with your art, that's fine.
Speaker 3: Or it could be you're just trying to find the
Speaker 3: warholiness of it. I mean, on the I have read
Speaker 3: strange kinds of interpretations of fireplace for your home. Was
Speaker 3: reading something that referred to an almost Lynchian meditation on
Speaker 3: the synthetic and alienated faces of holiday cheer. That you
Speaker 3: could see in fireplace for your home if you're looking
Speaker 3: for it. But I was thinking about it in the
Speaker 3: opposite direction, with the contrast with the Andy Warhol movie.
Speaker 3: You could be like wrapping Christmas presents and you could
Speaker 3: put Empire on in the background. It might not feel
Speaker 3: any less appropriate. The other day, I just watched part
Speaker 3: of Empires, like you can find it online, and however
Speaker 3: orthogonal this is to Warhol's intensions, it actually does feel
Speaker 3: quite seasonally festive. There's something about like the art deco
Speaker 3: design of the Empire state building and the floodlights against
Speaker 3: the dark knight skies, extremely cozy and felt like Christmas time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there have been a number of interesting related I
Speaker 1: guess ambient audio visual experiences. Netflix hosted multiple moving art
Speaker 1: works by Lewis Schwarzberg. This is the guy who also
Speaker 1: directed the twenty nineteen film Fantastic Fun Guy, which is
Speaker 1: more traditional in its structure, But the moving art show,
Speaker 1: I guess, you know, they were like one hour long each,
Speaker 1: maybe less. You know, It's just pleasing music, a lot
Speaker 1: of cool ambient nature footage, and it's like great stuff.
Speaker 1: It was great stuff to take a nap to, you know.
Speaker 1: But still have something visual going on in the room
Speaker 1: as well. Disney has also got in on this with
Speaker 1: some great long ambient Star Wars themed av presentations like
Speaker 1: it'll be a landscape of Hath or something like that.
Speaker 1: So it seems like, you know, enough people were doing
Speaker 1: this kind of thing they realized, well, let's put that
Speaker 1: out there. I mean, we also have sort of screen
Speaker 1: savory type things that pop up on Apple televisions right
Speaker 1: and various apps and so forth, where instead of just
Speaker 1: looking at an ad, they're going to show you a
Speaker 1: city scape or something like that.
Speaker 3: I didn't know about the Star Wars thing.
Speaker 1: I don't look that up. They're pretty good Wampa attacks
Speaker 1: to study, relax to yeah, well yeah, nothing really happens.
Speaker 1: Maybe a spaceship flies over, you know. Yeah. They keep
Speaker 1: it chill, they keep it ambient. And it's an interesting
Speaker 1: I mean, because the idea of the TV being on
Speaker 1: NonStop as being this flood of ideas into your home
Speaker 1: and into your life, like this is nothing new. We've
Speaker 1: been doing this, We've been using our televisions like this
Speaker 1: since we've had televisions, and it's it's really almost kind
Speaker 1: of a refined idea to think, well, you know, let's
Speaker 1: let them have an hour two hour blocks of just
Speaker 1: you know, very ambient, chill audio visual stimuli instead of
Speaker 1: just NonStop ads and so forth.
Speaker 3: I don't know, well, yeah, yeah, and I mean and
Speaker 3: part of the reason I brought this up is to
Speaker 3: think about the the similarities and differences in the way
Speaker 3: people are now seeming to use a TV like would
Speaker 3: once or in many cases still do use a fireplace
Speaker 3: as a primarily you know, not primarily to heat the house,
Speaker 3: but because they probably have another heating system as well,
Speaker 3: but as an esthetic experience. It's something that supplies a
Speaker 3: kind of mood or ambience to the room that makes
Speaker 3: you feel a way you want to feel, or helps
Speaker 3: you focus your attention in a way that you want
Speaker 3: to Anyway, I just wanted to mention a couple of
Speaker 3: funny things that I found out about because I read
Speaker 3: a couple of interviews with the creator of Fireplace for
Speaker 3: Your Home, an American director named George Ford, who lives
Speaker 3: in Washington State, whose primary job is, or at least
Speaker 3: was at the time of these interviews, running a pet
Speaker 3: supply company, but he also directed a number of these
Speaker 3: like static shot genre films. One is like a mountain
Speaker 3: stream flowing. There's another thing of like fish bopping around
Speaker 3: in a saltwater aquarium. But apparently this started with him
Speaker 3: making these cat entertainment DVDs, the goal of which is
Speaker 3: to like drive your cat insane with images of mice
Speaker 3: running all over the place.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah. There are various YouTube accounts that specialized
Speaker 1: in this sort of thing as well, and some of
Speaker 1: those can be quite cheerful, you know, until the YouTube
Speaker 1: ads cut in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess YouTube must have really cut into the
Speaker 3: DVD market for these things. He used to like twenty
Speaker 3: years ago you'd pick up in Pet Smart or something.
Speaker 3: But anyway, these interviews, one of them was with The
Speaker 3: Independent in twenty eighteen and others with CBC in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty two. A few takeaways that seemed interesting to me.
Speaker 3: This guy was inspired in part by pre existing hearth
Speaker 3: and fireplace films, So Fireplace for your Home not the
Speaker 3: first thing of its type. One example is a film
Speaker 3: that used to run on Christmas even Christmas on the
Speaker 3: New York TV market. It was on a station called WPIX,
Speaker 3: Channel eleven. This started in the nineteen sixties and it
Speaker 3: was this thing that was like two to four hours
Speaker 3: long depending on the instance, that would play a video
Speaker 3: loop showing a log burning in a fireplace with Christmas
Speaker 3: music playing over the top. And I read in turn
Speaker 3: that this was the idea of somebody who worked at
Speaker 3: this TV station who was inspired by like a Coca
Speaker 3: Cola commercial that he saw. But another thing from these
Speaker 3: interviews is that Ford talked about how his kids would
Speaker 3: keep begging him to build a fire around the holidays
Speaker 3: because you know, yeah, I remember when I was a kid,
Speaker 3: I wanted a fire in the fireplace. That was fun.
Speaker 3: And it occurred to him that it would be easier too,
Speaker 3: in his words, quote, just place a television inside our fireplace,
Speaker 3: hearth easier than to keep making a real fire. So
Speaker 3: he like pitched this to Netflix multiple times. They initially
Speaker 3: ignored him or laughed him off, but eventually he got
Speaker 3: some traction. And he claims again it can't verify this,
Speaker 3: but according to the director, the First Fireplace for Your
Speaker 3: Home film took him two years to make and cost
Speaker 3: almost thirty five thousand dollars to produce. This would not
Speaker 3: be Netflix money, by the way. It was actually that
Speaker 3: he made these films independently, and then I think sold
Speaker 3: the Distro rights to Netflix later on, like, how on
Speaker 3: earth could it actually be that difficult? Well, again, can't
Speaker 3: verify the figures are true, but the explanation kind of
Speaker 3: makes sense to me. Speaking to The Independent, he said, quote,
Speaker 3: we battled timing issues, color audio and general high resolution
Speaker 3: problems along the way. Special cameras have to be used
Speaker 3: around flames, and only certain color temperatures work. That's why
Speaker 3: you just don't see an open flame much in movies.
Speaker 3: And I was like, oh, that is interesting. You know,
Speaker 3: I think for a cozy fire on a TV screen,
Speaker 3: we kind of have some criteria that we might not
Speaker 3: even be aware of. But we'd like to see the
Speaker 3: warmer colors of the fire, don't We want some red,
Speaker 3: orange and yellow. But a roaring fire on camera, especially
Speaker 3: not the right kind of camera and not the right
Speaker 3: kind of shot, just doesn't always look like that. I
Speaker 3: can think of a lot of old movies and video
Speaker 3: where camera where a camera catching a fireplace looks either
Speaker 3: just like a white glare or it's like invisible somehow.
Speaker 1: M that's a good point. Now I'm going to have
Speaker 1: to be extra judging when I watch films with fireplaces
Speaker 1: in them.
Speaker 3: Apart from the technical concerns. This gets back to the
Speaker 3: things about like what elements of the simulation are important
Speaker 3: to capture. They also went through a lot of tries
Speaker 3: actually getting the logs to burn right in like an
Speaker 3: aesthetically pleasing way. They wanted the right sounds of like
Speaker 3: a crackle and snap and a visually symmetrical flame. And
Speaker 3: also to make the fire in such a way that
Speaker 3: it requires no intervention so you don't have to keep
Speaker 3: like poking it reaching in front of the camera. And
Speaker 3: another hilarious thing that I did not know so you
Speaker 3: filled me in about the Witcher themed fireplace, But according
Speaker 3: to this guy, Netflix did a fireplace tie in with
Speaker 3: some dystopian movie they made called Bright and they summarized this,
Speaker 3: I haven't seen this movie, but it's like it's got
Speaker 3: like elves and orcs in what is otherwise just a
Speaker 3: buddy cop movie. And they called this burn barrel for
Speaker 3: your home.
Speaker 1: I have not seen this one, but I mean, in general,
Speaker 1: I'm all for this. Let's have let's have more of these.
Speaker 1: I'm just looking around. It's possible that they just unleashed
Speaker 1: one for squid Game. If so, excellent, keep it keep
Speaker 1: it going. I need all Netflix series. I'm really kind
Speaker 1: of pissed we didn't get one for Gama Do Toro's
Speaker 1: Cabinet of Curiosities. We knew we really needed, like a
Speaker 1: linel lasseter themed a fireplace that would have been ideal.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, like a fireplace that that talks extensively about
Speaker 3: what kind of drink it's making you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know, I mean, but seriously, can you
Speaker 1: imagine if Panels Coos Motos did a fireplace hour long
Speaker 1: video for Netflix? That would be amazing. Imagine how glorious
Speaker 1: that fireplace would.
Speaker 3: Look some kind of creature slowly melting. Oh but one
Speaker 3: last thing about the fireplace director. Speaking to the CBC,
Speaker 3: they ask him why do we love to stare at
Speaker 3: a fireplace even if it's not putting out heat like
Speaker 3: a real woman would. He mentioned a number of things,
Speaker 3: but one that he mentions this might seem kind of obvious,
Speaker 3: but he says, you know, a fireplace looks like safety,
Speaker 3: and I think that's true. Something feels very like safe,
Speaker 3: enclosed and contained about it, which is funny because actually,
Speaker 3: like putting a fire inside your house is one of
Speaker 3: the more dangerous things you might do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, but like this is the place to do it,
Speaker 1: and it's it's the thing that we have, and it's
Speaker 1: the thing we have a very long history with, you know,
Speaker 1: our you know, going back through times, will be discussing
Speaker 1: like this is what the house was built around. It
Speaker 1: is the heart of the house. It is the center
Speaker 1: of the house, and it is therefore the center of
Speaker 1: your lives.
Speaker 3: That's right. So I don't know if I meant to
Speaker 3: end up talking that long about fireplace for your home.
Speaker 3: Apologies it was a bit much, But I don't know.
Speaker 3: I think it does raise some issues that I might
Speaker 3: want to keep returning to as we think more about
Speaker 3: the fireplace and what it means to us over the
Speaker 3: course of the next couple episodes. But one thing I
Speaker 3: did want to cover briefly is the prehistory of human
Speaker 3: control of fire. Now, we've gone into this in depth
Speaker 3: in other episodes, so we're not going to rehash all
Speaker 3: that material in the same level of depth here. I
Speaker 3: just wanted to do a sort of quick overview of
Speaker 3: some things we've talked about. A paper we've referenced on
Speaker 3: the show before that is highly cited on this subject
Speaker 3: is from twenty sixteen published in Philosophical Transactions of the
Speaker 3: Royal Society. B by JAJ. Gawlett called the discovery of
Speaker 3: fire by humans a long and convoluted process. Now, this
Speaker 3: paper posits that human control of fire in prehistory probably
Speaker 3: constituted three general phases, and the first stage would be
Speaker 3: humans engaging in something we actually see in other animals,
Speaker 3: which is fire. Following this would be opportunistically taking advantage
Speaker 3: of natural fires caused most often by lightning strikes, lightning
Speaker 3: striking brush, but less often by like weird ignition sourcesvolcanic eruptions,
Speaker 3: but whatever the cause of the fire. This phase would
Speaker 3: be humans notice a natural fire is occurring and then
Speaker 3: swoop in to take advantage of it in various ways,
Speaker 3: like to capture prey that is flushed out of hiding,
Speaker 3: or to scavenge and eat a prey that has been
Speaker 3: killed and maybe even cooked by the fire in some
Speaker 3: way like oh, it's nicely roasted now, or to in
Speaker 3: various other ways take advantage of natural resources revealed or
Speaker 3: transformed by a burn. And then after the wildfire foraging stage,
Speaker 3: you've got the second and third phases, which postulate control
Speaker 3: of the fire within the living space. So the second
Speaker 3: phase is domestic fire primarily used for cooking and safety.
Speaker 3: And then the third phase is what you might call
Speaker 3: industrial fire, the transformation of used for the transformation of
Speaker 3: resources and technology, like the production of baked pottery, and
Speaker 3: so going into the second and third phases, you see
Speaker 3: this sporadic an opportunistic relationship to rare natural fires transform
Speaker 3: into the capture and maintenance of fire first, like feeding
Speaker 3: a fire continuous fuel to keep it burning after you've
Speaker 3: caught it from a natural source. And then eventually humans
Speaker 3: would learn to strike fire from nothing with implements like
Speaker 3: flintstone's and tender Now what's the general timeline for these
Speaker 3: early stages of fire control. Well, it's messy and it's
Speaker 3: still debated. The oldest evidence that anybody seriously proposes for
Speaker 3: human control of fire goes back to our hominin relatives
Speaker 3: roughly one to two million years ago, So at the
Speaker 3: farthest it might go back like two million years but
Speaker 3: this evidence is ambiguous. So you can have things like
Speaker 3: charred or baked remains buried at a site that was
Speaker 3: occupied by hominins around the same time between one and
Speaker 3: two million years ago. But with these cases it's not
Speaker 3: always clear if this is the result of deliberate fire
Speaker 3: control or of natural burning and like scavenging of burned materials.
Speaker 3: Gallot in the paper mentions a couple of sites of
Speaker 3: this kind in Kenya containing like burned sediments, stone tools
Speaker 3: that appear to have been altered by heat, and a
Speaker 3: couple of large hunks of baked clay, but again it's
Speaker 3: not clear if these are from natural fires or controlled burning.
Speaker 3: A lot of the archaeological investigation for the emergence of
Speaker 3: fire control has focused on looking for what are called hearths.
Speaker 3: In the literature, that's going to be a little bit
Speaker 3: different than the way we're using hearth primarily in these episodes,
Speaker 3: because this would not necessarily refer to indoor fireplaces, but
Speaker 3: could refer to any dedicated place for burning. So, in
Speaker 3: like the archaeological papers, a hearth just means the remains
Speaker 3: of a place that was used for a purposeful fire,
Speaker 3: and there is pretty unambiguous evidence for hearths starting several
Speaker 3: hundred thousand years ago. There are more traces of human
Speaker 3: associated burning beginning around one million years ago, and then
Speaker 3: the hearths really start popping up in Africa, Asia, Europe,
Speaker 3: in the Middle East around four hundred thousand years ago
Speaker 3: when you start seeing a lot of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just based on materials I've been looking at. The
Speaker 1: exact usage of the term hearth is going to depend
Speaker 1: on a large part on exactly what the researchers and
Speaker 1: or the paper or the book is dealing with, Like
Speaker 1: are we dealing with with an age in which people
Speaker 1: are living in homes or some other situation, and then
Speaker 1: the exact nature of the homes varies as well. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, hearth in the main way we're using it in
Speaker 3: this series is going to refer to a piece of
Speaker 3: infrastructure in a home, like a constructed enclosure made of
Speaker 3: fireproof materials that contains the fireplace.
Speaker 1: Right. But there may be a time or two where
Speaker 1: we use the term hearth and you might think are
Speaker 1: they talking about a home? Well, in a few cases
Speaker 1: we might be referring to some material that's dealing with
Speaker 1: some other situation. But yeah, for the most part, we're
Speaker 1: dealing with hear, hearthstones and gotten something along the lines
Speaker 1: of a fireplace.
Speaker 3: Now, there are tons of ways that gaining control over
Speaker 3: fire transformed humankind. Of course, one thing is it would
Speaker 3: have expanded our geographic range, making it easier to migrate
Speaker 3: into colder climates and higher altitudes. It allowed us to
Speaker 3: expand our technological regime through the transformation of natural resources. Again,
Speaker 3: a very good example is pottery fired pottery, but also
Speaker 3: things you might not think of as readily, like adhesives
Speaker 3: for hafting, the famous birch bark tar that we talked
Speaker 3: about in some episodes in the past, and other things
Speaker 3: you know you can make like various glues out of
Speaker 3: natural substances that involves some element of heating. Also the
Speaker 3: heating of stones for improved napping. Some silicon based stones
Speaker 3: they nap better, you know, they flake off into the
Speaker 3: kinds of sharp edges that you're looking for with a
Speaker 3: napping exercise if you heat them the right way. But
Speaker 3: a big thing, of course, is the importance of cooking.
Speaker 3: The importance of fire for cooking really hard to overstate.
Speaker 3: Now there is a real scholarly debate about the extent
Speaker 3: to which cooking actually could have transformed the human body.
Speaker 3: This is known as the cooking hypothesis. The base idea
Speaker 3: is that the ability to cook otherwise hard to digest
Speaker 3: foods actually steered hominine evolution, changing not just our culture
Speaker 3: but our bodies. Allowing us to grow more powerful brains
Speaker 3: by devoting less energy to a hardy gut. Though I
Speaker 3: should stress that the cooking hypothesis is not proven. There
Speaker 3: are arguments against it, mainly having to do with the
Speaker 3: timing that would be required and lack of evidence for
Speaker 3: control of fire at the required times. So we don't
Speaker 3: know about the cooking hypothesis hypothesis in terms of human evolution.
Speaker 3: But what cannot be doubted is that the invention of
Speaker 3: cooking massively expanded the base nutrition yield of food we acquired.
Speaker 3: So it just made it possible to get a lot
Speaker 3: more nutrition out of your food. And it also made
Speaker 3: food safer by calling food borne pathogens and neutralizing some
Speaker 3: plant toxins. So it just unlocked a gigantic level up
Speaker 3: in nutrition.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's like a real sort It's often described as
Speaker 1: kind of an externalization of digestion, like a lot of
Speaker 1: the chemistry of digestion and potential chemistry of digestion handled
Speaker 1: outside the body, taking the strain off of the body,
Speaker 1: making things that we could need otherwise edible or more
Speaker 1: nutritious and so forth. Yeah, and then there's you know,
Speaker 1: additional areas you can get into, like food preservation and
Speaker 1: so forth.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Also with control of fire, you have protection against
Speaker 3: wild predators which tend to be afraid of fire and
Speaker 3: are easier to drive away with it. And then finally
Speaker 3: you've got provision of light in the darkness. And the
Speaker 3: way in which fire provides light in the darkness I
Speaker 3: think is interesting because of how it is different from
Speaker 3: the light provided by the sun, and to say nothing
Speaker 3: of the way that it's different from the kind of
Speaker 3: light provided by electrical light sources that we have today.
Speaker 3: That's something I want to come back to in part two,
Speaker 3: to think about the particular light regime of fire based societies.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is something I was thinking a lot about recently.
Speaker 1: When I visited Wales with my family. We went to
Speaker 1: Saint Fagan's National Museum of History, which has a lot
Speaker 1: of these historic Welsh buildings that have been moved to
Speaker 1: this area where you can check them out, you can
Speaker 1: walk inside them, and in many of these buildings they
Speaker 1: had a fireplace going and that was often like the
Speaker 1: main form of illumination and there may or may not
Speaker 1: even be any windows, and it's such an insight into
Speaker 1: times when you would be inhabiting an indoor environment like that.
Speaker 1: You know, we were totally spoiled for indoor illumination. These days,
Speaker 1: you can have your house generally as bright as you
Speaker 1: want it, like astoundingly bright. But it's an interesting experience
Speaker 1: to sort of step back in time and appreciate like
Speaker 1: the challenges and not to say that they were restricted
Speaker 1: only to the hearth fire. There are other you know,
Speaker 1: tricks you could could you could utilize to up your elimination,
Speaker 1: but you were limited. Uh and yeah, it's it was
Speaker 1: a different world.
Speaker 3: And specifically, one of the things I want to come
Speaker 3: back to in part two is ways that that limitation
Speaker 3: could actually be create a kind of freedom or open
Speaker 3: opportunities for other things that that are not as a
Speaker 3: parent if you're just in a daylight type of light
Speaker 3: or in a very bright electrical lighting scenario.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, in addition to like the obvious, like it's dark,
Speaker 1: maybe we should go to sleep. Yeah, it's sometimes a
Speaker 1: kind of a revelation to modern humans. It's like it
Speaker 1: is nighttime, I could sleep, I could turn all of
Speaker 1: this off, and we often don't do that. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was about to be like, stop staring at your
Speaker 3: phone right before bed, which I do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really hard to shake. It's our little heart
Speaker 1: we bring to bed with us, our little fireplace.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all right, well, so from here for the rest
Speaker 3: of today's episode, I wanted to talk briefly about how
Speaker 3: fireplaces are normally constructed, how they normally work in the
Speaker 3: modern sense, and then Rob, I know you had some
Speaker 3: stuff you wanted to get into about fireplaces as kind
Speaker 3: of magical portals. But okay. So one of the things
Speaker 3: is that obviously, once humans started to build houses, to
Speaker 3: build enclosures to live inside, it can be easy to
Speaker 3: see why you would want to have the heat and
Speaker 3: light benefits of a fire inside the protection of the
Speaker 3: dwelling and not just outside. But this actually is not
Speaker 3: as easy as it sounds. You're presented with several concerns.
Speaker 3: One is, how do you keep the fire from burning
Speaker 3: down the house. To do so, you would need to
Speaker 3: build the fireplace kind of away from any flammable walls
Speaker 3: or furniture, or if it is touching walls, you would
Speaker 3: need a fireplace system built into non flammable infrastructure made
Speaker 3: out of something like stone, brick, clay, or metal. Other
Speaker 3: big thing this is huge, how do you keep the
Speaker 3: fire from filling your house? Up with smoke. You need
Speaker 3: to have some kind of channel through which smoke and
Speaker 3: hot gases can escape the building. Modern fireplaces are equipped
Speaker 3: with dedicated flues and chimneys, as we'll talk about in
Speaker 3: a second. But as we see, many early indoor fireplaces
Speaker 3: had more had cruder ventilation systems, often consisting of simply
Speaker 3: a hole in the roof directly above the fire. And
Speaker 3: this would work to a degree, but it also meant that, yeah,
Speaker 3: for like thousands of years, a lot of buildings that
Speaker 3: housed indoor fires were just going to be pretty smoky inside.
Speaker 1: I definitely got a taste of some of that at St. Fagan's. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, basic modern fireplace and chimney design goes roughly like this.
Speaker 3: Usually you've got the fire box. This is where the
Speaker 3: fire goes, built on top of what's called a hearth.
Speaker 3: This is the more specialized use of the word hearth.
Speaker 3: This is the base of the fireplace that is made
Speaker 3: out of some kind of fireproof material, often bricks or stones.
Speaker 3: And this material, of course is meant to absorb heat
Speaker 3: from the fire and then heat the room that it's
Speaker 3: in by radiating that heat back out into the air. Now,
Speaker 3: above the firebox You often have like a decorative shelf
Speaker 3: called a mantle, but that's not really part of the
Speaker 3: mechanics of the fireplace. That's just a common decorative feature.
Speaker 3: The channel above the firebox leading to the outside is
Speaker 3: what's called the flu, and then the flu is surrounded
Speaker 3: by the structure that we call the chimney. A lot
Speaker 3: of times the flu is slightly offset from the firebox,
Speaker 3: so it's not just a pipe straight up. Instead, it'll
Speaker 3: be kind of set off to the side or behind,
Speaker 3: and it will be the FLU will be positioned directly
Speaker 3: above something that is called the smoke shelf, where soot
Speaker 3: or anything that happens to penetrate the flu opening on
Speaker 3: top of the roof, anything comes in from outdoors can
Speaker 3: fall without landing directly on the fire. Instead, it falls
Speaker 3: onto this shelf. Often also there is a damper which
Speaker 3: allows you to close off the flu when there's no
Speaker 3: fire burning to stop cold air from coming down in
Speaker 3: the chimney. Very important to remember to open the damper
Speaker 3: before lighting a new fire.
Speaker 1: This is especially true. Yeah, if you're staying in a
Speaker 1: cabin or something it's not your home, maybe back at
Speaker 1: your own house, you're not used to using a fireplace.
Speaker 1: It is an absolutely necessary step.
Speaker 3: Now, we all know that a fire needs fuel and
Speaker 3: heat to burn, but it's also important to remember that
Speaker 3: it needs oxygen. So airflow is important in determining how
Speaker 3: a fire burns and also in determining what effect a
Speaker 3: fire has on the house and its occupants. The majority
Speaker 3: of the interior heat provided by a fireplace is radiant heat.
Speaker 3: It's the infrared radiation coming off of the fire itself
Speaker 3: and then also coming off of the heated parts of
Speaker 3: the hearth or whatever is enclosing the fire, so coming
Speaker 3: off of the heated bricks or stones, or the metal.
Speaker 3: If it's more of a stove design, I'll talk about
Speaker 3: that in a second. But there is an irony to
Speaker 3: this beloved fixture of the fireplace. Way back in the
Speaker 3: eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin wrote about how inefficient fireplaces were
Speaker 3: actually were at heating indoor spaces, just huge amounts of
Speaker 3: wasted energy. He noted that the majority of the convective
Speaker 3: heat that they produce just rushes straight up the flu
Speaker 3: and is lost to the outside air. And this is
Speaker 3: often true, though it can vary depending on particulars of
Speaker 3: the fireplace design. In fact, here's a weird thing. A
Speaker 3: lot of people might not know. A fire in the
Speaker 3: fireplace can actually make your house colder overall. So this
Speaker 3: again depends on particulars, depends on the design of the
Speaker 3: fireplace and the chimney, particularly how the vinylation system is configured.
Speaker 3: But in a lot of cases, you build a fire
Speaker 3: in the fireplace and it will increase the temperature in
Speaker 3: the area directly around the fire, you know, mostly again
Speaker 3: by way of radiant heat coming off the fire and
Speaker 3: the heated stone or brick or metal of the hearth.
Speaker 3: But meanwhile that fire is sucking in air from the
Speaker 3: inside of your house, relatively warm air, probably if it's
Speaker 3: winter time and you have the heat going, or just
Speaker 3: you know, there's warm stuff happening inside the house and
Speaker 3: so it's warmer than the air outside. So this air
Speaker 3: from the rest of the house is being sucked into
Speaker 3: the fireplace to feed the fire, and then the convection
Speaker 3: of the hot gas plume rising up through the flu
Speaker 3: is driving it outside as it gets superheated. As hot
Speaker 3: gas and smoke rushes up the chimney, a vacuum is
Speaker 3: created and more air continues to flow in from the
Speaker 3: inside of your house to the fireplace system, and thus
Speaker 3: a vacuum is created in the rest of the house,
Speaker 3: and then cold air is in from outside through whatever
Speaker 3: cracks your house has, cracks in the doors and windows
Speaker 3: and so forth. So plenty of tests have shown that
Speaker 3: an inefficient fireplace may feel warm to the room right
Speaker 3: there in front of the blaze, but actually freezes out
Speaker 3: the rest of the house. They even did an episode
Speaker 3: of MythBusters where they featured this one time. I haven't
Speaker 3: seen this, but I read about it, and I read
Speaker 3: that in their particular test rooms farther away in the
Speaker 3: house got a couple of degrees celsius colder.
Speaker 1: This is fascinating, and it makes me think back on
Speaker 1: times I've been in houses where there is a fireplace,
Speaker 1: and I'll, I mean, I will often find myself in
Speaker 1: this situation where it's like I'm somewhere else in the house,
Speaker 1: start feeling kind of chilly. Then I have to go
Speaker 1: like right next to the fireplace to warm up, and
Speaker 1: this pattern kind of continues. Yeah, and now I'm realizing
Speaker 1: it could be in part due to the presence of
Speaker 1: the fireplace to begin with, this inequality of temperature.
Speaker 3: Now, there are ways to improve the heating efficiency of
Speaker 3: a wood fire a one is to replace it with
Speaker 3: a wood is to replace your open fireplace with a
Speaker 3: wood stove. So this would be a fireplace completely enclosed
Speaker 3: in a metal box, which uses air more efficiently. It
Speaker 3: sucks less cold air into your house, and also it
Speaker 3: radiates heat into the house more efficiently, like the metal
Speaker 3: can radiate in all directions. You might notice a traditional
Speaker 3: stone or brick fireplace is usually built into a wall,
Speaker 3: whereas a wood stove is more often closer to the
Speaker 3: middle of the room and can radiate in all directions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, my late father in law was really into like
Speaker 1: passive solar and design and houses and you know, not
Speaker 1: quite like living off the grid kind of stuff, but
Speaker 1: like all the things you could do with a house
Speaker 1: to sort of like limit the need for electricity and
Speaker 1: so forth, and like that was a Keith aspect of
Speaker 1: his home design was having that wood stove. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not stuck in the wall, it's like out there
Speaker 1: basically in the center of the house.
Speaker 3: And we might talk more about this in part too.
Speaker 3: But there are also designs that improve the heating efficiency
Speaker 3: because they don't draw air from the interior of the house. Instead,
Speaker 3: they've got like an external intake vent of some kind
Speaker 3: feeding a fire that heats a structure made of again
Speaker 3: a fireproof material like brickstone or metal or tile, and
Speaker 3: then that radiates heat into the building, but the airflow
Speaker 3: system just doesn't really connect to the inside of the house.
Speaker 3: That also is a way of improving the heating efficiency.
Speaker 3: Though there's an interesting sort of a converse implication here
Speaker 3: which I discovered. Shout out one of my sources on
Speaker 3: fireplaces and how they generally work here was how stuff
Speaker 3: Works article our old employer. This one was by John Kelly,
Speaker 3: so a nice job, John, But basically the idea here
Speaker 3: is that if you notice you're building a fire and
Speaker 3: it's like having a hard time burning and the damper
Speaker 3: is open, and yet there's still a lot of smoke
Speaker 3: coming into the house, a problem could be that the
Speaker 3: house is too well sealed, like the doors and the
Speaker 3: windows are too well sealed, and the fire is not
Speaker 3: able to create this efficient river of air from the
Speaker 3: outside into the house into the fireplace, up the flu
Speaker 3: and then back outside. So instead it's pulling some air
Speaker 3: down the flu which is causing a counter draft and
Speaker 3: sending smoke into the room. So if you are having
Speaker 3: this problem, one thing to try is like opening a window,
Speaker 3: though of course that's going to let a bunch of
Speaker 3: cold air in, so that may just be the price.
Speaker 1: Wow, I had never thought about that, huh.
Speaker 3: But anyway, I'm just thinking about the implications of a
Speaker 3: fireplace often making the rest of the house colder, even
Speaker 3: while it makes one or two rooms much warmer. And
Speaker 3: this made me think about an unintended secondary effect of
Speaker 3: wood fire heating being the tendency to cause people to gather.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a great point. Yeah, drawing people to
Speaker 1: the hearth, to the fire, drawing them together, and thus
Speaker 1: and thus becoming like a center of the family of
Speaker 1: social interaction, storytelling and so forth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's like a sort of unstated little punishment for
Speaker 3: being off by yourself. It's just gonna make your room colder.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now you know it is. It is Christmas time,
Speaker 1: and so a lot of folks are engaging in different
Speaker 1: fireplace related traditions, the hanging of stockings and so forth.
Speaker 1: And what do you traditionally hang your stockings? Why you
Speaker 1: hang them by the hearth. You hang them above the fireplace.
Speaker 1: And of course we have tales of Santa Claus, or
Speaker 1: perhaps they masquerading grinch entering your home by crawling down
Speaker 1: your chimney and climbing in through the fireplace. This is
Speaker 1: this is one of those I think examples of the
Speaker 1: fireplace as a portal, fireplace as a as a gate
Speaker 1: through which something may travel that it's almost too close
Speaker 1: to us. You know, we grow up with this tradition,
Speaker 1: we're told it from an early age. We're familiar with
Speaker 1: this story before. We're familiar with many of the foundation
Speaker 1: stories of our own religions, you know, and important cultural
Speaker 1: other important cultural tales, arguably more important cultural tales. We
Speaker 1: have this story of a strange old man who climbs
Speaker 1: through the fireplace, again, almost too close for us to
Speaker 1: even think about it. We'll come back to that in
Speaker 1: a second. But another way, of course, that and this
Speaker 1: is one that may resonate more with fireplace owners, people
Speaker 1: who actually have hearts in their home, is the reality that, okay,
Speaker 1: as a literal aperture to the outside of your home,
Speaker 1: it is possible for animals to climb down that chimney
Speaker 1: and potentially enter your home. They may be prevented full
Speaker 1: access to the home by bats, raccoons, mice various squirrels
Speaker 1: are some of the examples of potential chimney splunkers. I
Speaker 1: know I've encountered bats in this manner before at a
Speaker 1: friend's house, where like a bat or two would come
Speaker 1: into the chimney, get trapped in the house, and then
Speaker 1: you would find them, often in the sink trying to
Speaker 1: get water. WHOA, yeah, I came to this house like
Speaker 1: some it was, you know, it's like a vacation home
Speaker 1: or something, so nobody had been in it for a
Speaker 1: little bit, and I saw something in the sink and
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, someone left a tea bag and I
Speaker 1: almost grabbed it throw it away, and then I, oh,
Speaker 1: that's a bat. And then I had to call my
Speaker 1: friend and be like, what's your bat protocol? The bat
Speaker 1: was fine, thiss.
Speaker 3: Never even occurred to me. I cannot relate. That's but
Speaker 3: that's incredible.
Speaker 1: Now. This idea, though, of a chimney is a portal
Speaker 1: through which other worldly powers may traverse, such as Santa Claus.
Speaker 1: This is a pretty deeply seated concept, certainly in European traditions,
Speaker 1: but you can also see examples of similar ideas from
Speaker 1: pretty far flung traditions. Seemingly to connect with the various
Speaker 1: supernatural concepts you might encounter about the home, about fire, technology,
Speaker 1: about cooking, and just the nature of the flame itself.
Speaker 1: For instance, Carol Rose, in her Encyclopedia of Giants, Monsters,
Speaker 1: and Dragons that I frequently cite, mentions a tradition of
Speaker 1: the clean Get peoples of Northwestern United States the tell
Speaker 1: of Heya Kannako, the old woman underneath us, an enormous
Speaker 1: protective deity of the earth who concentrates on supporting the world,
Speaker 1: almost in a similar sense to Atlas, you know, holding
Speaker 1: up the earth. But when her hunger gets the better
Speaker 1: off her, her concentration falters and earthquakes ensue. And so
Speaker 1: humans occasionally throw bits of fat into their hearths, and
Speaker 1: the Carol Rose describes it in order to help or
Speaker 1: overcome her hunger and to concentrate on keeping the earth imbalance.
Speaker 1: So you know, it's not something crawling through the fire
Speaker 1: through the hearth, but it's this idea of the hearth
Speaker 1: is kind of this connection in almost a physical connection
Speaker 1: to some sort of supernatural force.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think the general use of fire for burnt
Speaker 3: offering or sacrifice indicates a way of thinking of the
Speaker 3: fire as a kind of interface point between our world
Speaker 3: and the other world, that you can burn something to
Speaker 3: kind of send it through a portal to the gods.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and what I like about this one, though, is
Speaker 1: the idea that it's not a special fire created for
Speaker 1: a special ritual purpose. It's more like the everyday fire.
Speaker 1: But even the everyday fire has the potential to be
Speaker 1: this gateway. And you know, again, it makes sense when
Speaker 1: you think about all the convergence of activities and energies
Speaker 1: at the hearth, the warmth, the illumination, food preparation, social gathering.
Speaker 1: You know, perhaps due to the fact that it's in
Speaker 1: a home situation that the rest of the home is cold,
Speaker 1: and drawing people together to tell stories, tell jokes, share
Speaker 1: their experiences. And on top of that, it is an
Speaker 1: obvious aperture to the outside world, which certainly brings about
Speaker 1: the possibility of various natural world creatures gaining access to
Speaker 1: your abode. But let us also remember that we're also
Speaker 1: talking about a gateway through which air can pass and
Speaker 1: does pass. And as most of human history is pre
Speaker 1: germ theory, I think you can see where this is going.
Speaker 1: The idea that this is also an aperture through which
Speaker 1: bad air could travel, or something in the air, something
Speaker 1: that is not as constricted as physical as physical beings
Speaker 1: are constricted. That they could pass through that small hole.
Speaker 1: They could essentially, you know, pass through the keyhole and
Speaker 1: that's all the space they need. Interesting, it reminds me
Speaker 1: actually of a tradition we talked about an idea of
Speaker 1: the Dine or Navajo people. This came up in a
Speaker 1: couple of episodes, I think in Our Dust episodes, actually,
Speaker 1: the idea that you might have an adante, a practitioner
Speaker 1: of secret evil magic, who might introduce a magical poison
Speaker 1: or illness into a home through its smoke hole. So
Speaker 1: that definitely came to mind here, the smoke hole in
Speaker 1: a traditional home, this could be an aperture that could
Speaker 1: be exploited by an evil doer, and in European traditions,
Speaker 1: spilling over into early American colonial traditions, this concept carried
Speaker 1: a great deal of weight, something that previous guest on
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind Brian Hoggard discusses in his
Speaker 1: excellent twenty nineteen book Magical House Protection The Archaeology of
Speaker 1: counter Witchcraft. I know some of you probably listened to
Speaker 1: that episode. It's a great one if you want to
Speaker 1: go back and listen to an interview with the author.
Speaker 1: But I'm going to discuss some of the ideas that
Speaker 1: he brought up in that book here as it relates
Speaker 1: to this topic. So in the book, Hoggard discusses the
Speaker 1: various counter witchcraft rights and rituals that Europeans use, dating
Speaker 1: back at least to the Middle Ages, functioning alongside and generally,
Speaker 1: I guess in spite of protections offered by the Christian
Speaker 1: faith and Christian tradition. This is coming from the show before.
Speaker 1: You know, you have the various church approved methods that
Speaker 1: you might take against supernatural evil, but are you going
Speaker 1: to limit yourself to just those or are you going
Speaker 1: to also set other traps and wards in place? But
Speaker 1: in this case, we're talking about supernatural superstitious folk protections
Speaker 1: that were clearly deemed absolutely necessary by many to combat
Speaker 1: evil in a demon haunted world. Hoggard stresses that the
Speaker 1: archaeological evidence suggests that unseen supernaw natural threats, which just
Speaker 1: a standard part of everyday existence, supernatural evil was everywhere
Speaker 1: and you had to bust out all the tricks in
Speaker 1: order to if not completely protect yourself, then at least
Speaker 1: been the odds even slightly in your favor, and is
Speaker 1: explored in the book. These efforts often took the form
Speaker 1: of a ritual object or objects hidden in the home.
Speaker 1: He writes the most popular locations to conceal objects within
Speaker 1: buildings are usually at portals such as the hearth, the threshold,
Speaker 1: and also voids or dead spaces. This suggests that people
Speaker 1: believed it was possible for dark forces to travel through
Speaker 1: the landscape and attack them in their homes. Whether these
Speaker 1: forces were emanations from a witch in the form of
Speaker 1: a spell, a witch is familiar pestering their property, an
Speaker 1: actual witch flying in spirit, or a combination of all
Speaker 1: of those is difficult to tell. Additional sources of danger
Speaker 1: could be ghosts, fairies, and demons. People went to great
Speaker 1: lengths to ensure their homes and property were protected, highlighting
Speaker 1: the fact that these beliefs and fears were visceral and
Speaker 1: as far as they were concerned, literally terrifying.
Speaker 3: Interesting yet again, the way that some physical intuitions apply
Speaker 3: to these apparently magical substances, like the spell of a
Speaker 3: witch or a which is familiar, which you might well
Speaker 3: assume could just you know, pass magically through any wall
Speaker 3: or whatever. It seems people were especially concerned about voids
Speaker 3: and portals, like the physical gaps that a physical being
Speaker 3: would need to travel through.
Speaker 1: I mean, I imagine a lot of you have had
Speaker 1: this experience. I mean, to be clear, some of you
Speaker 1: may have the experience of finding some of these secreted
Speaker 1: and hidden items, and if so, do write in. We
Speaker 1: would love to hear from you. But I find it
Speaker 1: like a little strange when I encounter a void in
Speaker 1: my house, when you realize, like, here is a space
Speaker 1: within my home where there is nothing, you know, and
Speaker 1: that's that I don't know. It shouldn't feel creepy, but
Speaker 1: it does.
Speaker 3: What's under the stairs nothing, there's nothing there.
Speaker 1: Now, if you're not familiar with the details that HACKERD
Speaker 1: gets into and the details that came up in that
Speaker 1: interview I conducted a while back, you might be wondering, well,
Speaker 1: what sort of ritual objects are we talking about hidden
Speaker 1: away in homes and voids and so forth, potentially near
Speaker 1: the hearth to afford protection against these many evils. Well,
Speaker 1: there are various examples, but some of the main ones
Speaker 1: are as follows. First of all, there's just protective marks.
Speaker 1: And I feel like this is fairly self explanatory. You know,
Speaker 1: some sort of a symbol or a sigil that has
Speaker 1: protective properties and that may be hidden away somewhere in
Speaker 1: a home. This next one, though, this one was the
Speaker 1: one that I found surprising at the time I was
Speaker 1: not familiar with prior to reading this book, and that
Speaker 1: is shoes. And I think this is especially interesting because
Speaker 1: from our modern perspective, we often forget just what a
Speaker 1: shoe is. We can take it for granted, we can have,
Speaker 1: you know, hundreds of them, and we may love shoes
Speaker 1: to death without like, without really thinking about this vital
Speaker 1: aspect of what they are. Yeah. Yes, we put them
Speaker 1: on our feet to walk about in and you know,
Speaker 1: not step on nails and rocks and so forth, keep
Speaker 1: our feet warm, make our feet look you know, snazzy
Speaker 1: and cool. But they are also flesh like sheaths, sometimes
Speaker 1: made from animal products, that are sized, perhaps individually sized
Speaker 1: for the shape of our feet or if nothing else.
Speaker 1: Over time, they take on the shape of our feet.
Speaker 1: They take on the odor of our feet. These are
Speaker 1: two details, especially the odor that is often lost on us,
Speaker 1: perhaps not lost on our dogs and cats. They know
Speaker 1: these shoes smell like us and are like potent familiar
Speaker 1: items of us. You know, our cat will lay on
Speaker 1: shoes a lot, and I've had some commentary on this
Speaker 1: kind of behavior in cats and dogs, where they will
Speaker 1: be drawn to the shoes because they remind them of
Speaker 1: the owners of said shoes. And all. This would seem
Speaker 1: to be part of the superstitious calculus for these traditions.
Speaker 1: So a shoe may wear out beyond repair in the
Speaker 1: case of a child's shoes and shoes that they may
Speaker 1: outgrow them, but they are still then objects that have
Speaker 1: to a large extent become a part of us. You know,
Speaker 1: they are shaped after us, they smell of us, and
Speaker 1: they're therefore dangerous items to discard. In much the same
Speaker 1: way that nail clippings and hair were often seen as such,
Speaker 1: like they were a part of you. They still are
Speaker 1: a part of you, and that is dangerous material to
Speaker 1: just leave out in the world where you know an
Speaker 1: evil doer or an evil spirit may come across it
Speaker 1: and by doing so gain power over you.
Speaker 3: This type of folk belief is sometimes referred to as
Speaker 3: the law of contagion, that like things that were once
Speaker 3: united or in contact with one another. If they become separated,
Speaker 3: you may need to do some kind of cleansing or exorcism,
Speaker 3: or some kind of ritual acknowledgment of the severing there
Speaker 3: or destruction of the thing as it is separated from you,
Speaker 3: or else it can be used to have power over
Speaker 3: you by way of the associative magical connection.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, or in this case, you find another use
Speaker 1: for them. And so according to Hoggard, shoes and other
Speaker 1: objects we're often deposited on ledges, within the chimney breast
Speaker 1: or behind the fireback, and he stresses that quote. Shoes
Speaker 1: are perhaps the most commonly encountered apotropaic objects and often
Speaker 1: had an association with the hearth.
Speaker 3: Oh interesting, so the same object that could become your
Speaker 3: vulnerability if discarded and found by a witch, could be
Speaker 3: your protective amulet if you keep it, if you keep
Speaker 3: it in the home, right.
Speaker 1: And I'll come back to why this may be in
Speaker 1: just a second, but before we do, I want to
Speaker 1: talk briefly about witch bottles, which are I think the
Speaker 1: more exciting and exotic sounding version of abotropic objects hidden
Speaker 1: in a home, often in the area of the hearth. Now,
Speaker 1: there's some variety to what these will consist of but
Speaker 1: you know, they have been found, they've been analyzed, they're
Speaker 1: still being found. That's one of the great things that
Speaker 1: Hagard discusses is that you have so many different waves
Speaker 1: of renovation that take place with some of these old
Speaker 1: homes in Europe, in Britain, in the UK, and also
Speaker 1: in parts of the United States and Canada as well,
Speaker 1: where people will suddenly discover a pair of ancient shoes
Speaker 1: or a strange bottle. And he also discusses how there
Speaker 1: are cases where people have suddenly sort of given into
Speaker 1: some of the superstition of it and they've had to
Speaker 1: put sad item back. You know, it's like it's kind
Speaker 1: of like the reverse of finding a void. You find
Speaker 1: a purposeful item that you don't fully understand. You're not
Speaker 1: on the same mental wavelength with it, but you've come
Speaker 1: to believe, well, I should put it back. I don't
Speaker 1: know my way around all of this enough to say
Speaker 1: it doesn't belong there.
Speaker 3: I can sympathize with that, and this may just say
Speaker 3: something about my you know, personality or kind of tendencies,
Speaker 3: the character tendencies. But while I would never take active
Speaker 3: steps to do it to like you know, put shoes
Speaker 3: in a wall thinking it would protect my house or something.
Speaker 3: I would feel weird about taking something out. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: it seems like, well, feels like I shouldn't do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that may be a load bearing shoe.
Speaker 3: Just leave it alone.
Speaker 1: So with witch bottles, again there's some variation as to
Speaker 1: what they may hold, but there are various written instructions
Speaker 1: from historical records that talk about what goes into a
Speaker 1: witch bottle, and one that Hoggard shares This is from
Speaker 1: seventeen oh one and he includes it in his book,
Speaker 1: and basically the directions are to take a pint of
Speaker 1: your own urine, heat it to near scalding temperatures, pour
Speaker 1: it into a jug, and then add white salt and
Speaker 1: three new nails with the points down. Then you bind
Speaker 1: the jug with clay and leather and you heat it
Speaker 1: over embers for nine to ten days.
Speaker 3: It's gotta work because look at all the steps.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think sometimes there are more steps than
Speaker 1: may be a simplified version, but it's the basics are
Speaker 1: in play here. The urine, the pointy object. Sometimes they're
Speaker 1: pins or needles. Sometimes it's like a lot of like
Speaker 1: rusty nails, pins or needles and so forth. So in
Speaker 1: the case of the shoes and the witch bottle, here
Speaker 1: the basic idea would seem to be this. You have
Speaker 1: an unseen evil force, be it a demon, a fairy,
Speaker 1: a ghost, or some curse of a witch, and it
Speaker 1: is seeking you. It has entered your home, perhaps through
Speaker 1: a door, perhaps through a window, perhaps down the chimney
Speaker 1: and through the fireplace. It's seeking you out. But what
Speaker 1: does an encounter. Instead, it encounters your smell, and encounters
Speaker 1: the shoe that was so much a part of your
Speaker 1: body and now can be mistaken for your body, and
Speaker 1: it goes after that. Instead, it serves as a decoy.
Speaker 1: And in the case of the witch bottle, it's even
Speaker 1: more exciting. So it smells that deep uriny stench that
Speaker 1: is associated with you. But it's found the bottle first.
Speaker 1: And so what does this evil thing do, this spirit,
Speaker 1: this dark seeker in the night. It climbs inside that bottle.
Speaker 1: But uh oh, Now it is either trapped in the
Speaker 1: bottle or it is impaled upon all of those sharp
Speaker 1: pointy bits inside the bottle and therefore injured or perhaps
Speaker 1: killed by this witch bottle, this trap that has been
Speaker 1: set for it.
Speaker 3: That's ingenious. I didn't know it was going there with
Speaker 3: the nails, but that makes sense. I was wondering if
Speaker 3: the nails had some kind of you know, they might
Speaker 3: be iron nails unless the iron significance as like a
Speaker 3: protective magic against the fairy folk and so forth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there may be part of that to it
Speaker 1: as well, you know, and certainly protective magic like this,
Speaker 1: you know, they may sort of like drag various ideas
Speaker 1: with them across time. So I would not discount the
Speaker 1: importance of the iron at all. But this is all
Speaker 1: very interesting to think about in comparison to various Christmas traditions,
Speaker 1: like I instantly think about wooden clogs left out for
Speaker 1: Saint Nicholas or Santa though I've also read that prior
Speaker 1: to the sixteenth century, at least in some European countries,
Speaker 1: the clogs were left in the church rather than in
Speaker 1: the home. I'm not as well versed in the history
Speaker 1: of those traditions, but at any rate, you do have
Speaker 1: examples where shoes are left out so that some entity
Speaker 1: may deposit gifts inside them, and those shoes may be placed,
Speaker 1: I think often near doors or windows, so there still
Speaker 1: is that sense of put them near the aperture, put
Speaker 1: them near the portals. And where do we hang our
Speaker 1: stockings with care? We of course hang them again by
Speaker 1: the fireplace, by the hearth. Yeah, almost as if we're
Speaker 1: trying to throw Santa Claus off the scent. You know,
Speaker 1: there is no need, strange one, to bring the gifts
Speaker 1: directly to the children. Here is their sense, smell their feet.
Speaker 1: Here is the essence you seek. Leave the gifts here,
Speaker 1: leave the children alone in their room.
Speaker 3: Or the coal, I guess if applicable.
Speaker 1: Yes, there is no need to put the coal inside
Speaker 1: the children, leave it in the socks. And thus he
Speaker 1: is outsmarted, and he leaves the children alone for another year?
Speaker 3: What resonance this idea is now bounding about inside me?
Speaker 1: One more note from Brian Haggard. I was looking through
Speaker 1: the book to see I couldn't remember if he had
Speaker 1: mentioned anything Christmasy in particular, And he does mention a
Speaker 1: rhyme that was associated with ritual burn marks from tapers
Speaker 1: in homes. So, like I say, there were various There
Speaker 1: are various marks and signs inside some of these old
Speaker 1: homes that are interpreted as being associated with various protective
Speaker 1: magical activities. And rituals, and one of them I think
Speaker 1: could be easy to miss. It's just like burn marks
Speaker 1: in a house. I included a picture from his book
Speaker 1: here for you to look at, Joe, Like, if you
Speaker 1: didn't know what you're looking at, you might just think
Speaker 1: these were caused by some other you know, I don't know,
Speaker 1: something that occurred during construction or something like that. But
Speaker 1: an interpretation here is that these were ritual burn marks.
Speaker 1: And he includes this is a translation, but it is
Speaker 1: a translation of a German rhyme that apparently went along
Speaker 1: with some holiday traditions of protecting the home. So I'm
Speaker 1: going to read it here again. This is from Brian
Speaker 1: Huggrid's book and it goes as follows, and round about
Speaker 1: the house they go with torch or taper, clear that
Speaker 1: neither bread nor meat do want know which with dreadful
Speaker 1: charm have power to hurt their children or do the
Speaker 1: cattle harm. So I'm not saying burn beams in your
Speaker 1: house with fire as part of your holiday traditions. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's interesting to think about all of this. And again,
Speaker 1: this is another one that involves the power of fire,
Speaker 1: the power of the flame to protect us against unseen things.
Speaker 1: In the night. By the way, I know Brian would
Speaker 1: want me to pass this along to you. If you
Speaker 1: do encounter something like this in your house strange shoes,
Speaker 1: a strange item, a witch bottle and so forth, it
Speaker 1: is very helpful to like reach out to people who
Speaker 1: will document it all. And a lot of people do
Speaker 1: reach out to Brian Hoggard themselves. He's on Instagram as
Speaker 1: folk Magic Man. He also has a website, so just
Speaker 1: look him up. It's Brian Hoggart h O G A
Speaker 1: r D. And he can point you in the right
Speaker 1: direction if if you encounter something like this in your home,
Speaker 1: or email us and I'll forward it to him. Happy
Speaker 1: to do that.
Speaker 3: All right, Well, I think we're out of time for today.
Speaker 3: We've got more to say and to explore about the
Speaker 3: fireplace and the hearth, so join us again on Thursday.
Speaker 1: That's right. In the meantime, we'll remind you that this
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