Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb. Today is Saturday, so we have another
Speaker 1: episode from the vault for you here. This originally published
Speaker 1: eleven seven, twenty twenty four. It is our episode on
Speaker 1: the Siren from Mythology. So let's dive right in.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert.
Speaker 3: Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And once again October
Speaker 3: content has spilled over the edge of the month.
Speaker 1: That's right. In today's episode, we're continuing our Halloween twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four express with an episode that was originally scheduled
Speaker 1: for late October, but our episode on the Hogs of
Speaker 1: Hell went a little long, ended up going into two episodes,
Speaker 1: so we bumped this one back a bit. It's a
Speaker 1: topic we've touched on briefly before, but it's a great one,
Speaker 1: taking us back to the world of oceanic monsters of
Speaker 1: myth and legend. We're going to be talking about the Siren.
Speaker 3: The Siren, So I realized Rob, correct me if I'm wrong,
Speaker 3: but I realized I think we both had we had
Speaker 3: different theeomorphic hybrids in mind when we were separately thinking
Speaker 3: about the siren, Because when I thought of the siren,
Speaker 3: I first thought of sort of half woman, half bird
Speaker 3: creatures that sing to the sailors. But I get the
Speaker 3: impression that your mind first went to half human, half fish.
Speaker 3: So I guess those are both within the siren tradition,
Speaker 3: aren't they?
Speaker 1: They are. This is one of the things about the siren,
Speaker 1: as we'll discuss, is that there are takes on them
Speaker 1: in which they are essentially mermaids. It's essentially some version
Speaker 1: of the European North European mermaid tradition. There are versions
Speaker 1: of it in which they are just sort of beautiful
Speaker 1: ladies who sing sailors to their death, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: And then other times they are essentially what we might
Speaker 1: think of as a harpie, you know. They are a
Speaker 1: winged creature, perhaps like an all out vulture type being,
Speaker 1: with even just the head of a maiden or the
Speaker 1: face of a maiden.
Speaker 3: But in either case, I think we're to assume that
Speaker 3: their voices may be lovely, but they sing sailors to
Speaker 3: their doom.
Speaker 1: Yes, And that's one thing we can be sure on
Speaker 1: when we look to really the most famous literary account
Speaker 1: of the sirens, but also the one that continues to
Speaker 1: raise a lot of questions because it does skim over
Speaker 1: some of the details, as we'll discuss. We are, of
Speaker 1: course talking about Homer's the Odyssey. I'm just going to
Speaker 1: read a quote here. This is from the Samuel Butler translation.
Speaker 1: I believe this is Circe warning Odysseus and his men
Speaker 1: about the challenges ahead. First, you will come to the sirens,
Speaker 1: who enchant all who come near them. If anyone unwarily
Speaker 1: draws in too close and hears the singing of the sirens,
Speaker 1: his wife and children will never welcome him home again,
Speaker 1: For they sit in a green field and warble him
Speaker 1: to death with the sweetness of their song. There is
Speaker 1: a great heap of dead men's bones lying all around,
Speaker 1: and the flesh still rotting off them.
Speaker 3: Number one, that's intense. Number two does not describe them physically.
Speaker 3: And number three warbled to death.
Speaker 1: Warbled to death. You know which, if you got to go,
Speaker 1: why not choose warbling? Why not? So this is you know, considered.
Speaker 1: You know, this is probably the most famous literary description
Speaker 1: and non description of the sirens. But we have a
Speaker 1: lot of other materials that have depicted the sirens, describe them,
Speaker 1: or depicted them visually that also sort of compete with
Speaker 1: our imaginations here and end up and this is often
Speaker 1: the case with these things, ends up coloring our absorption
Speaker 1: of Homer's original writings. We've had some great cinematic sirens
Speaker 1: over time. We have, for example, to get into the
Speaker 1: adaptations of the Odyssey itself, there, of course the Three
Speaker 1: Sirens and No Brother, Where art thou? The three strange
Speaker 1: women that appear as beautiful washer women singing go to sleep,
Speaker 1: little Baby. They of course lure end del Mar and
Speaker 1: turn him into a horny toad sort of.
Speaker 3: Wait does he get turned back? I haven't seen this
Speaker 3: movie in a while.
Speaker 1: Well, he doesn't. Actually, we end up finding out later
Speaker 1: that he was never turned into a horny toad. He
Speaker 1: was captured by authorities because he was wanted.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, they find him again in the movie Theater
Speaker 3: Do Not Seek the Treasure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you know, it's a great sequence in the film,
Speaker 1: a lot of laughs, and it works nicely in comparison
Speaker 1: to the theme of bat that's also employed in the work.
Speaker 1: Elsewhere in cinema, we tend to see the idea of
Speaker 1: sirens employed more in terms of the evil mermaid. You
Speaker 1: want to have a mermaid, but you want an evil
Speaker 1: one where you lean into this idea of the siren.
Speaker 1: Just a few quick mentions, and I'm missing a lot
Speaker 1: of them. I'm sure there's two thousand and one's Dagon.
Speaker 1: This is the Stuart Gordon film you have neat Split
Speaker 1: Tale at Kidneess style Mermaids in that. There's a two
Speaker 1: and another two thousand and one film titled She Creature
Speaker 1: that I have not seen since two thousand and one,
Speaker 1: but I remember having a nice little cast to it,
Speaker 1: and also having a monstrous mermaid more recently. I don't
Speaker 1: know much about the plot details here, so I don't
Speaker 1: know where this falls in terms of sirens. But there's
Speaker 1: a Polish musical horror film titled The Lure that seems
Speaker 1: to have resonated with a number of viewers. I've seen
Speaker 1: some nice reviews of that. And then I think we've
Speaker 1: had at least a couple of different Mermaid slash Siren
Speaker 1: TV shows in recent decades, but I have not seen them.
Speaker 1: So we'll have to lean on our listeners to write
Speaker 1: in and tell us what those are like now. Again
Speaker 1: to get back to what we were just talking about earlier.
Speaker 1: Though sirens are not definitively sea creatures or definitively mermaids. However,
Speaker 1: it's impossible to separate the two completely, so you know,
Speaker 1: we do have to acknowledge that to whatever extent sirens
Speaker 1: are based in this idea of undersea creatures, well, you know,
Speaker 1: the idea of people and creatures from beneath the waves. Naturally,
Speaker 1: it goes back very long ways. As long as humans
Speaker 1: have gazed out across the waves or peered down through
Speaker 1: clear waters from the side of their boats, they've dreamed
Speaker 1: of a mirror world to our own, a place where
Speaker 1: every animal has its watery reflection, where intelligent human like
Speaker 1: beings no doubt dwell as well, along with various monsters
Speaker 1: and gods and so forth. There is a paper by
Speaker 1: Nancy Easter. This is a two thousand and one paper
Speaker 1: again back to two thousand and one that we've we
Speaker 1: cited in a much older episode of the podcast titled
Speaker 1: Hans Christian Andersen's Fish out of Water, and she points
Speaker 1: out that the Babylonians recognize gods with fish features or
Speaker 1: hybridity you have, like what Adappa fish the fishermen of Onias,
Speaker 1: the teacher of wisdom. Even mighty Inky, the ancient Sumerian
Speaker 1: water god, is sometimes depicted as having a cloak of
Speaker 1: fish or scaled skin, and the chief place of worship
Speaker 1: was a ziggurat known as the House of the Subterranean Waters.
Speaker 1: And additionally fishtailed gods, water dragons and so forth found
Speaker 1: throughout the cultures of India, China and Japan and so forth.
Speaker 1: There's a quote from that Easter paper. She writes some
Speaker 1: other mythological sea beings and deities, such as Poseidon and
Speaker 1: the Sirens were not originally associated with water and pissine anatom.
Speaker 1: The sirens were originally birds. We'll get back to that
Speaker 1: in a minute, indicating that divine power and woman leolure
Speaker 1: became combined with the power and promise of the sea
Speaker 1: when ancient cultures overtook maritime war and trade. So in
Speaker 1: that paper gets into a familiar theme on this show
Speaker 1: when we're talking about deities and supernatural beings, is that
Speaker 1: of course they are passed down and they do not
Speaker 1: stay in one form or another. They are reused, recreated,
Speaker 1: you know, different, different, various relaunches and reboots of the
Speaker 1: brand over time.
Speaker 3: And in past episodes we've even talked about reasons for
Speaker 3: questioning the very idea of such a thing as a
Speaker 3: canonical form of a deity or a monster or something that.
Speaker 3: You know, that makes sense when you have something like
Speaker 3: intellectual property, like if a monster is the creation of
Speaker 3: a specific author and they describe it a certain way,
Speaker 3: and then other people could take the idea and vary it,
Speaker 3: but you would want to refer back to what is
Speaker 3: the original one, you know, with like gods and monsters
Speaker 3: and things that come out of folklore. You know, maybe
Speaker 3: sometimes it makes sense to say there's basically an authoritative
Speaker 3: version of a story, but most of the time there's not.
Speaker 3: Sometimes the characteristics aren't even given in the earliest works
Speaker 3: that are still extant today. So like searching after the
Speaker 3: canonical form of the monster or deity or whatever is fruitless.
Speaker 3: There just is no original that we can access.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we've talked about this before. You get
Speaker 1: kind of close to this idea when you look at
Speaker 1: a multi author of franchise like say Marvel Comics, where
Speaker 1: you can say, you know, you try to explain like, well,
Speaker 1: who's Venom, Oh, he's a villain of Spider man. Oh well, no,
Speaker 1: he's also kind of a hero. He's kind of an
Speaker 1: anti hero. Oh yeah. And sometimes he's just straight up
Speaker 1: what we would think I was the protagonist of a story,
Speaker 1: So it just it changes. And there are probably better
Speaker 1: examples than Venom to turn to.
Speaker 3: There. Yeah, well, I think that's a good one. Except
Speaker 3: it's like that. But imagine if most Marvel comics were
Speaker 3: lost and we don't know what they said or what
Speaker 3: was in them, and we don't know where the first
Speaker 3: appearance of Venom was.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, But coming back to the Siren and
Speaker 1: getting into the Greek traditions, here, we as the quote
Speaker 1: you read earlier attests to, we certainly experience the sirens
Speaker 1: and Homer's eighth century BCEE work The Odyssey, and they
Speaker 1: are described as malicious doomy women when we put in
Speaker 1: asterisk by that woman description, malicious doomy entities anyway, who
Speaker 1: hang out on rocks and sing to passing sailors. But
Speaker 1: Homer neglects to physically describe them at all. So again,
Speaker 1: even by just briefly mentioning them as women, I'm airing
Speaker 1: because he does not ascribe gender to these creatures. But
Speaker 1: the thing is it's really hard not to be infected
Speaker 1: by the various visual treatments of this encounter of these
Speaker 1: creatures from throughout Western art, you know, which has often
Speaker 1: served as a great opportunity to create dramatic and evocative
Speaker 1: scenes that make use of, you know, the the unclothed
Speaker 1: are partially unclothed male and female bodies. I was talking
Speaker 1: about this with my son yesterday when I was researching this,
Speaker 1: and I mentioned to him, and he already knows his
Speaker 1: way around myths and monsters pretty well, I mentioned, you
Speaker 1: know that Homer never actually describes them. So they could
Speaker 1: look like a woman, they could look like a fish monster,
Speaker 1: they could look like a bird person, we don't know.
Speaker 1: And he asked, well, could they just be like a
Speaker 1: banana peel? And I dare say they could. And he
Speaker 1: does not say that they do not look like banana peels,
Speaker 1: and provides no other physical description at all.
Speaker 3: They could literally be Ronald McDonald.
Speaker 1: They could be. There's nothing in the Odyssey that says
Speaker 1: they're not. So I was reading a bit more about
Speaker 1: this in this is an older book. This is an
Speaker 1: older publication. This is from nineteen seventy. The Homeric Sirens
Speaker 1: by Gerald K. Gressith. This was publishing the Transactions and
Speaker 1: Proceedings of the American Philological Association, and in it the
Speaker 1: but there spends a lot of time talking about what
Speaker 1: at the time were like two dueling interpretations of the
Speaker 1: sirens in Homer's the Odyssey, and I think that it's
Speaker 1: interesting to look at them here. So the first one
Speaker 1: that he references is the idea that the sirens are
Speaker 1: soul birds, again playing on the idea that in other
Speaker 1: texts we have the sirens described in Avian terms. And
Speaker 1: the connection here is that they would be representations of
Speaker 1: the souls of the dead in bird form, an idea
Speaker 1: that extends back through ancient Egyptian religion. This was an
Speaker 1: idea champion by the German classical archaeologist Georg Viker. In short,
Speaker 1: this view sees the sirens as things that emerge from
Speaker 1: hades and or the grave, and as grethis explains, Homer
Speaker 1: likely wouldn't have thought that the soul became a bird
Speaker 1: upon death in this scenario, but he might have been
Speaker 1: influenced by older ideas still present in art and culture
Speaker 1: of his time. Okay, then there's this other idea, and
Speaker 1: that is that the sirens are other world enchantresses, so
Speaker 1: an idea in this case champion by German archaeologist and
Speaker 1: translator Ernst Bouscher in response to Vicker arguing that Homer
Speaker 1: sirens are anthropomorphic. This view sees the sirens not as
Speaker 1: creatures of the afterlife, but as something else that doesn't
Speaker 1: reside in Hades, though perhaps does reside in a different
Speaker 1: other world and might not even be directly malicious. That's
Speaker 1: the interesting thing about this kind of view. They might
Speaker 1: be more in line with muses offering song and information
Speaker 1: that we're just not equipped to resist. We just can't
Speaker 1: handle a song this beautiful and or information this tantalizing,
Speaker 1: and therefore we are just drawn into it. And this
Speaker 1: actually gets into the vagueness of how they actually bring
Speaker 1: about these men's dooms, because, as Aggressive points out, we
Speaker 1: don't have an answer for this in Homer either and
Speaker 1: elsewhere interpretations range from an overt and then the sirens
Speaker 1: ate him sort of situation to this idea that enraptured
Speaker 1: individuals just slowly die of exposure on the shores of
Speaker 1: the sirens, like they're drawn by the song, and then
Speaker 1: they just you know, forget to eat, forget to stay
Speaker 1: out of the sun and just waste away.
Speaker 3: And so in that.
Speaker 1: Scenario, it's like, well, the muses, like they may not
Speaker 1: even be entities that are aware of what they are doing.
Speaker 1: They're just sharing song and information, but we just can't
Speaker 1: handle it as mortals.
Speaker 3: That's fascinating, And it's funny because the interpretation I always
Speaker 3: just had in the back of my mind isn't even
Speaker 3: listed there, which is the idea that they sit on
Speaker 3: the rocks and they sing to the sailors and they
Speaker 3: draw the sailors in close, and the ships wreck on
Speaker 3: the rocks and the sailors drone that I don't know
Speaker 3: where that idea came from, but that is what I
Speaker 3: thought was being described in the Odyssey.
Speaker 1: You know, Like I said, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: paintings of the Sirens and or Odysseus, and I think
Speaker 1: they also so almost at times subliminally charge one's understanding
Speaker 1: of this scenario. And there are several of these that
Speaker 1: I think I've just seen most of my life. There
Speaker 1: are a couple in particular that pop up in the
Speaker 1: time Life Enchanted World book series that of course makes
Speaker 1: use of a lot of excellent original art, but also
Speaker 1: a lot of classic art as well too, In particular
Speaker 1: John william Waterhouse is the Siren from nineteen hundred. This
Speaker 1: is a like a vertical piece in which there is
Speaker 1: a nude woman with a harp of some kind of
Speaker 1: or is this a lute?
Speaker 3: I believe it's a liar. Yeah, there you go, U
Speaker 3: shaped stringed instrument.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So she's playing it on the rocks, and there
Speaker 1: down in the water below her is an enraptured male,
Speaker 1: like a youthful male, who looks like he is probably
Speaker 1: going to drown. And so like, I think this really
Speaker 1: matches up with your read on it, and you know,
Speaker 1: I often I think thought about it in similar terms
Speaker 1: looking at these images, like the sirens just draw you
Speaker 1: in and then you know, stuff happens. But it's not
Speaker 1: like they're biting into you or anything.
Speaker 3: That's right. But in the Waterhouse painting, the siren does
Speaker 3: not look malicious. She does not look like she's even
Speaker 3: really attempting to lure him. She's just kind of there existing,
Speaker 3: and he is up to his neck in the water,
Speaker 3: clearly about to die, looking like he has this combination
Speaker 3: of just joy and terror.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then the other piece that was definitely in
Speaker 1: the Enchanted World series is Herbert James Draper's nineteen oh
Speaker 1: nine painting Ulysses and the Sirens. This is a very
Speaker 1: captivating piece in which you see the familiar scenario that
Speaker 1: I may again describe her in a second, where, of course,
Speaker 1: how does Odysseus how does he get past the sirens? Well,
Speaker 1: of course he clogs the earholes of all of his
Speaker 1: men with wax, and then he himself is strapped to
Speaker 1: the mast of the ship, and then they just keep
Speaker 1: moving that way. The siren song doesn't infect the oarsman.
Speaker 1: It infects him, but he can't do anything about it
Speaker 1: because he's strapped to the mast.
Speaker 3: And this is usually presented as a result of curiosity,
Speaker 3: like Odysseus wants to hear what the siren song is like,
Speaker 3: but doesn't want to allow himself under its spell to
Speaker 3: command his men to do otherwise, so he has himself
Speaker 3: tied up on purpose.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so in this particular piece by Draper, which
Speaker 1: you know is widely available you can find it on
Speaker 1: wiki commons, and so forth, we see, you know, this
Speaker 1: crazed look on Odysseus's eye. He's completely enraptured, straining against
Speaker 1: the ropes that bind him. Meanwhile, the naked sirens in
Speaker 1: this case seemingly seeming to transform out of mermaid form
Speaker 1: into humanoid form, just like the movie Splash as they
Speaker 1: crawl on the ship. And of course this is this
Speaker 1: image of course, like a lot of the like later
Speaker 1: treatments of sirens, is of course very there's a certain
Speaker 1: sexual politics to all this and gender politics to it,
Speaker 1: because it's clearly showed like the feminine form is the
Speaker 1: aggressively alluring temptation that is coming at the men on
Speaker 1: the ship.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it looked there are very different implied situations
Speaker 3: in these two paintings, Like in the Waterhouse painting. I
Speaker 3: don't know, you could interpret it multiple ways, but it
Speaker 3: doesn't look obvious to me. Like I said that the
Speaker 3: siren is even trying to attract the man. She's just
Speaker 3: sitting there. She might just be minding her own business. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and he's enraptured. In the second painting, the Draper painting
Speaker 3: from nine, these are beings that are obviously trying to
Speaker 3: seduce the men, and they are posed with seductive ill intent.
Speaker 1: Yes, so these are the two that I was most
Speaker 1: familiar with, But there's a third I want to mention,
Speaker 1: and this is the Sirens Annulylysses from eighteen thirty seven
Speaker 1: by William Edie or Eddie I'm not sure which, but
Speaker 1: this one is also tremendous. I was not familiar with this,
Speaker 1: but in this one, we see the sirens on their
Speaker 1: rocky island in the foreground, and in the background we
Speaker 1: see Ulysses send a ship and there's a lot of
Speaker 1: struggling going on there. But in the foreground the sirens
Speaker 1: are just kind of like, hey, Sirens, party, come on over, guys.
Speaker 1: And then next to them we see rotting bodies and bones.
Speaker 1: It's quite quite a quite a scene.
Speaker 3: It is wonderful. But to your point, yeah, I interpret
Speaker 3: this one more along the lines of the waterhouse painting.
Speaker 3: There's no indication that their attention even has anything to
Speaker 3: do with the men on the ship.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, So I already rolled through the basic
Speaker 1: scenario with Odysseus and the Odyssey and how they get
Speaker 1: past the sirens. But we have another encounter, and this
Speaker 1: one is detailed in the Argonautica from the third century BCE,
Speaker 1: and this one involves Jason and the Argonauts. How did
Speaker 1: they defeat the sirens? Well, they brought Orpheus along with them,
Speaker 1: the most famous bard of Greek mythology, at least as
Speaker 1: far as mortals go. And his song is even sweeter
Speaker 1: than the sirens, so you know, they explode or something.
Speaker 3: It's the Devil went down to Georgia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, actually, as Apollodorus described it, I believe the sweet
Speaker 1: song of Orpheus causes them to throw themselves into the
Speaker 1: sea and become rocks. And it would turn out that
Speaker 1: these were like the terms of their power, that if
Speaker 1: their song ever failed to enthrall someone, then they have
Speaker 1: to die. They were done for. And there are similar
Speaker 1: accounts with the Sphinx as well, you know, like if
Speaker 1: it's riddle as guest, it has to throw itself off
Speaker 1: a mountain, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: Wait, now that I said it, I'm trying to remember
Speaker 3: what happens to the devil at the end of Devil
Speaker 3: Went Down to Georgia. BET's a fiddle of gold against
Speaker 3: your soul. But what happens if Johnny wins, he.
Speaker 1: Gets to keep the golden.
Speaker 3: Golden Devil's just out of gold fiddle, that's it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There was some I forget who was some stand up
Speaker 1: comedian I think was talking about how you know, it's
Speaker 1: clear that the Devil's music is more impressive in that
Speaker 1: particular song, we still give the wind to the mortals.
Speaker 1: But yes, I agree, it is like very much like
Speaker 1: the Devil goes down to Jordan.
Speaker 3: Which text came first. I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: Now the exact number of sirens fairies. They're like between
Speaker 1: two and five depending on what telling you're looking at.
Speaker 1: They have various names different there are different takes on
Speaker 1: their parentage as well. Again it's just how many there
Speaker 1: are to begin with, but their exact nature in large
Speaker 1: part due to Homer being vague about it, This has
Speaker 1: always been an area of discussion, and apparently it's not
Speaker 1: the only area that Homer's vague, And for instance, according
Speaker 1: to Gressith, he never explains that the Cyclops as one eye.
Speaker 1: So I think there are moments like that where we
Speaker 1: just kind of like assume, like we knows as the
Speaker 1: reader what it's supposed to be or what it becomes
Speaker 1: canonized as later. But you can apparently get into discussions
Speaker 1: with any of this of like, well, what did the
Speaker 1: original author intend? What was the shape of it? Then?
Speaker 3: Yeah, of course, then again that because most of these
Speaker 3: stories would be drawing on pre existing concepts and stuff
Speaker 3: you never know, like what did people just naturally assume
Speaker 3: when you name a character or type of being, Like
Speaker 3: what did the reader bring to the reader or listener
Speaker 3: bring to the table.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's one thing that Gressith gets into as well,
Speaker 1: is that you have to end up looking for these
Speaker 1: answers in the contemporary religion, but also in contemporary folklore.
Speaker 1: To whatever extent you can, you pick at it through
Speaker 1: other sources. Now, I picked up a couple of my
Speaker 1: my favorite monster books for a little more on these
Speaker 1: these sirens, and I was looking at Jorge Luis Borges's
Speaker 1: Book of Imaginary Beings, and he points out three different traditions.
Speaker 1: He points out that Avid describes them as golden birds
Speaker 1: with the faces of virgins. He points out that Paulinius
Speaker 1: of Rhodes described them as women with the lower half
Speaker 1: of seabirds, and then much later medieval heraldry and bestiaries
Speaker 1: tend to present them just as straight up mermaids, again
Speaker 1: fusing these older classical tellings with Northern European traditions of mermaids.
Speaker 1: And I think this is a reality you just can't
Speaker 1: get away from. Then, when you keep tugging at siren
Speaker 1: myths because the terms are often used interchangeably, Like some
Speaker 1: some tales of the siren, you could sort of maybe
Speaker 1: make a better case that these are actually mermaid stories.
Speaker 1: But some of them are very are very juicy, and
Speaker 1: I just couldn't resist getting into a particular one. This
Speaker 1: is one that Borges also talks about. This would have
Speaker 1: been the sixth century in northern Wales. It has said
Speaker 1: that a siren was caught and baptized, eventually becoming at
Speaker 1: in some traditions by the name of Murgan or Murrgain,
Speaker 1: which I believe means Seaborn. She was reportedly carried to
Speaker 1: her baptism in a vat, and I believe and this
Speaker 1: is also tied to an Irish legend of lie Bon
Speaker 1: and in fact, I often I've elsewhere seen this character
Speaker 1: referenced as li Ban Murrgan, for example. I've also seen
Speaker 1: Mergan described as an early discredited saint, so I don't
Speaker 1: know if I don't believe that she is officially a
Speaker 1: saint in the Catholic Church. This would have been around
Speaker 1: what five eighty eight CE, I think, But she had
Speaker 1: a feast day at one point and it was January
Speaker 1: twenty seventh, which I think is also devoted to various
Speaker 1: other saints and so forth.
Speaker 3: This is an interesting story, but I'm thinking about the
Speaker 3: symbolic implications of the baptism of an animal that lives
Speaker 3: under the water.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and it, you know, comes back to what
Speaker 1: we were talking earlier about baptism and sirens. No, brother,
Speaker 1: we're art thou. There's apparently a more complete telling of
Speaker 1: this story, and I found that in Carol Rose's Spirits Fairies,
Speaker 1: Lecracrouns and Goblins, where this luban murrgan. She starts out
Speaker 1: as a human, a human daughter of the High King
Speaker 1: of Ireland and a goddess Iatawan I believe is her name,
Speaker 1: and she's just a normal human child. But then she
Speaker 1: is caught in the flood of a sacred spring with
Speaker 1: her dog and carried to an underwater cavern, and she's
Speaker 1: trapped there for a year. But then she prays that
Speaker 1: she might be free like the fishes, and so her
Speaker 1: lower half becomes like a fish, and her dog transforms
Speaker 1: into an otter.
Speaker 3: Well that is appropriate because otters are good boys.
Speaker 1: Three hundred years later, enter a cleric by the name
Speaker 1: of Bioch and he hears her singing, and then he's
Speaker 1: drawn to her singing. So they meet, and she asked
Speaker 1: him to bring her to Saint Comgall, an actual historic saint,
Speaker 1: and this is where the vat comes into the picture.
Speaker 1: They throw her in a vat and she is willingly,
Speaker 1: you know, brought to the saint so that she may
Speaker 1: be baptized. But at her baptism she is or upon
Speaker 1: her baptism, she is faced with the choice another three
Speaker 1: hundred years of life or immediate entry into heaven, so
Speaker 1: you know, do not pass go directly to heaven. She
Speaker 1: chooses heaven. So anyway, it's a lovely little little bit
Speaker 1: of folklore there. I like it quite a bit. And
Speaker 1: they're apparently depictions of the saint here, Saint leban or
Speaker 1: Saint Morgan, and yeah, sometimes she's depicted with a crown,
Speaker 1: yeah quite well. And then and some depictions you also
Speaker 1: see her order there beside her.
Speaker 3: Oh that's adorable.
Speaker 1: So essentially, you know, we have these Northern European mermaid traditions,
Speaker 1: not to be confused with similar tales from around the world,
Speaker 1: merging to some extent with classical tales of sirens, but
Speaker 1: plenty of winged descriptions remain that ultimately line up more
Speaker 1: with what you might think of today as a heartbeat.
Speaker 1: You know, ancient wind spirits eventually transformed into fiends through
Speaker 1: tellings of Greek myth. Depending on how you slice it,
Speaker 1: Harpies and sirens may have been both female bird human hybrids,
Speaker 1: but of different demeanors. So harpies you can think of
Speaker 1: more as vengeful cannibal to spoilers, while sirens are alluring,
Speaker 1: musical beings of temptation, and if faced with both, you'd
Speaker 1: need to fight the harpies off with physical weapons, while
Speaker 1: the siren demands a more cerebral approach. So you know,
Speaker 1: in some ways, they're kind of if you're looking at
Speaker 1: them both as avian beings, they're kind of reflections of
Speaker 1: each other, one targeting the body and the other targeting
Speaker 1: the mind.
Speaker 3: Interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we mentioned earlier the idea of the siren
Speaker 1: as a feminine monster, and Carol Rose in Giants, Monsters
Speaker 1: and Dragons discusses this. Briefly points out that in medieval
Speaker 1: European traditions, the siren takes on various symbolic powers. Quote
Speaker 1: for her attributed where the comb and the mirror of vanity,
Speaker 1: the fish or eel symbols of the entrapped Christian soul,
Speaker 1: ensnared by luxury and vice, the small dragon the symbol
Speaker 1: of her liaison with the devil, and her nakedness taken
Speaker 1: as a sign of wanton sexuality. So then and to
Speaker 1: this day, in some depictions we see the siren presented
Speaker 1: as this monstrous female temptress, a corruptor of menfolk, but
Speaker 1: also like this, indeed, like something that has been summoned
Speaker 1: up to test ones resolve. Still, as Rose points out,
Speaker 1: there were still descriptions of the siren as a bird
Speaker 1: woman you know, well, you know, out of of the
Speaker 1: ancient world. Pops up in the seventh and eighth century
Speaker 1: Liber Monstorum, also a twelfth century Latin bestiari which describes
Speaker 1: them in much more harpy terms as winged, rock dwelling
Speaker 1: beasts well that will not only lure sailors to their death,
Speaker 1: but pounce on them with flesh rending talons. And then
Speaker 1: during the nineteenth century we even see again kind of
Speaker 1: like bumping up against all of these depictions of sirens
Speaker 1: as mermaids and naked women in the water, we see
Speaker 1: John William waterhouses eighteen ninety one painting Ulysses and the Sirens.
Speaker 1: And what do we see here? We see big birds
Speaker 1: with the heads of women, and they are the ones
Speaker 1: of sailing Ulysses strapped to the mast and his various oarsmen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's no ambiguity about their intentions here they are
Speaker 3: swarming the boat.
Speaker 1: Yes there. Yeah, these are definitely aggressive human headed birds here. Waterhouse,
Speaker 1: it would seem drew more on those classical Greek descriptions
Speaker 1: and depictions on vases and urns rather than what his
Speaker 1: contemporaries were doing.
Speaker 3: It's interesting because I think it's the same painter John
Speaker 3: William Waterhouse did the siren from nineteen hundred we talked
Speaker 3: about earlier, the much more haunting and ambiguous image.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I can't help, but one, I don't know much
Speaker 1: about about the man in his work, and you know
Speaker 1: who's painting for. But I wonder if with the nineteen
Speaker 1: hundred someone was like, I'd like you to draw me
Speaker 1: a siren and no birds this time, John, I wanted
Speaker 1: to be a lady.
Speaker 3: The one from nine years later does seem a little
Speaker 3: more mysterious and maybe mature.
Speaker 1: And to be clear, these are just a few like
Speaker 1: very famous examples of sirens and paintings from this period.
Speaker 1: There are others, So if you have favorites, feel free
Speaker 1: to send them into us, and you know I'd love
Speaker 1: to take a look at them.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, absolutely, Contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 3: dot com. Get in touch as always. Now, the idea
Speaker 3: of the siren song luring sailors to their destruction by
Speaker 3: one means or another got me thinking about nature. I
Speaker 3: was wondering, are there any predators in nature that have
Speaker 3: the genuine biological equivalent of a siren song? A sound
Speaker 3: or a song or a vocalization that lures prey to
Speaker 3: their doom? And after I did a little digging, I
Speaker 3: discovered the answer is yes. Apparently it is not very
Speaker 3: common in nature, at least as far as we know.
Speaker 3: But there is one excellent example I want to talk about,
Speaker 3: and this predatory song involves an animal that we just
Speaker 3: did a series on earlier this year, the cicada. In
Speaker 3: this case, the cicada not as the predator, but as
Speaker 3: the prey. So I'm going to be referring to one
Speaker 3: major source here, a zoology paper from two thousand and
Speaker 3: nine published in Plus one by David C. Marshall and
Speaker 3: Kathy B. R. Hill called versatile aggressive mimicry of cicadas
Speaker 3: by an Australian predatory Katie did So. This paper begins
Speaker 3: by talking about the concept of mimicry in nature. Mimicry
Speaker 3: in the animal kingdom is when an animal has an
Speaker 3: adaptation that makes it seem like something other than what
Speaker 3: it is, and this can take a lot of different
Speaker 3: forms and serve a lot of different purposes. A lot
Speaker 3: of animal mimicry is defensive in purpose and visual in format.
Speaker 3: So a vulnerable prey animal might try to fool predators
Speaker 3: into leaving it alone, perhaps by looking like something totally
Speaker 3: uninteresting to the predator, like a leaf, or like another
Speaker 3: animal that tastes bad and is non nutritious. In some cases,
Speaker 3: visual defensive mimicry makes the prey animal look threatening. It
Speaker 3: makes it look like a different animal that is dangerous
Speaker 3: and could put up a fight, or one that is poisonous.
Speaker 3: But there are non visual forms of defensive mimicry as well.
Speaker 3: For example, a prey and can smell like something uninteresting
Speaker 3: or something dangerous, so that's defensive mimicry. But there's also
Speaker 3: what's called aggressive mimicry. This is when an animal disguises
Speaker 3: itself for aggressive purposes, usually to attract or gain advantage
Speaker 3: over prey if the mimic is a predator, or over
Speaker 3: a host if the mimic is a parasite. And apparently
Speaker 3: one of the most common strategies for aggressive mimics in
Speaker 3: nature is to exploit mating drive. So it's like, hello,
Speaker 3: fellow conspecifics, I am a member of your species and
Speaker 3: I'm very sexy. So the authors give some examples of this.
Speaker 3: One is the bolus spiders collectively known as a Mastophora,
Speaker 3: which have been documented to attract male moths of at
Speaker 3: least two different species by copying the sex pheromones of
Speaker 3: female moths of those same species, so this would be
Speaker 3: aggressive mimicry by smell. There's another into example, which is
Speaker 3: predatory fireflies known as Fouturis versicolor, which these animals use
Speaker 3: flashes of light to initiate mating within their own kind,
Speaker 3: but they can also copy the courtship flashes of females
Speaker 3: of other firefly species to trick the males of those
Speaker 3: species into getting close for a mating opportunity, and then
Speaker 3: the predatory fireflies just eat them, so this is aggressive
Speaker 3: mimicry by visual signal. And the authors note that this
Speaker 3: case is particularly interesting because the predatory Photurus fireflies can
Speaker 3: copy the flashing patterns of eleven different prey species of fireflies.
Speaker 3: So that's incredible versatility in the predatory mimic behavior, and
Speaker 3: it's an interesting evolutionary question in cases like this how
Speaker 3: that much versatility in the predatory behavior comes about. The
Speaker 3: authors speculate that it might be possible in part because
Speaker 3: in this case the predator and the prey are closely related.
Speaker 3: But whatever the explanation there, both of these previous examples
Speaker 3: work by the predator falsely appearing to be a female
Speaker 3: conspecific that is ready to mate, either by smelling like
Speaker 3: one or looking like one. This paper presents an example
Speaker 3: of aggressive mimicry that is interesting for several reasons. Like
Speaker 3: the fireflies, the predator in this case shows versatility in
Speaker 3: altering the mimic behavior to match multiple different prey species.
Speaker 3: But unlike the fireflies, the predator is not closely related
Speaker 3: to the prey in a phylogenetic sense. And then also,
Speaker 3: though I didn't notice this priority claim in the paper itself,
Speaker 3: a couple of news and blog sources I was reading
Speaker 3: about the paper say that this was the first scientifically
Speaker 3: documented case of an aggressive or predatory mimic relying on
Speaker 3: sound rather than on visual or smell based cues, though
Speaker 3: this mimic the mimic in question also does use visual
Speaker 3: mimicry as a secondary appeal. I can't confirm there were
Speaker 3: no earlier documented examples in nature, and I'm a little
Speaker 3: curious why I found that claim in the popular sources
Speaker 3: and not in the research itself. But I did not
Speaker 3: find any earlier examples. So if that is true, this
Speaker 3: is the first documented case or sound is the medium
Speaker 3: being used for the aggressive mimic to mimic something that
Speaker 3: gets it access to its prey. Wow, So what is
Speaker 3: this dangerous mimic? Well, it is the spotted predatory katie
Speaker 3: did or Chlorobalius leucoviritus. So this is a large green,
Speaker 3: green and white patterned katie did or bush cricket. It's
Speaker 3: a species native to Australia, mostly found in the dry
Speaker 3: interior regions of the continent, and it preys on multiple
Speaker 3: different species of cicadas, belonging to the tribe Cicadatini. Among
Speaker 3: other things. It's got multiple prey, but it likes to
Speaker 3: eat these cicadas of Cicadatini. Now, it's important to know
Speaker 3: that these prey cicadas rely on a two part acoustic
Speaker 3: signaling behavior to initiate sexual pair formation. And when we
Speaker 3: did our series on cicadas, we talked a lot about
Speaker 3: the songs of cicadas, how they use sound in their
Speaker 3: mating behaviors. But in this case, these specific cicadas rely
Speaker 3: on what the authors call signal response duets. So when
Speaker 3: it's time to mate, the male cicada initiates with a
Speaker 3: song particular to its species, and then if a female
Speaker 3: is nearby and she's receptive to mating, she will reply
Speaker 3: with a series of wing flicks, which can be recognized
Speaker 3: visually if you're very close. But more importantly, the wingflicks
Speaker 3: produce an audible sound that matches with that species specific
Speaker 3: mating call put out by the male. So the wingflicks
Speaker 3: can usually be heard for a range of several meters
Speaker 3: and they will help the male locate the female. Authors
Speaker 3: write quote. Because a wingflick reply is structurally nondescript, it
Speaker 3: must closely follow the cue in the male cicada's song
Speaker 3: in order to be recognized. But this leads to a
Speaker 3: kind of interesting situation where a clicking sound that has
Speaker 3: roughly the right sound quality and the right latency meaning
Speaker 3: I interpret this, I hope I'm right about this. I
Speaker 3: think they're talking about the time delay between the end
Speaker 3: of the male cicada's song and when the clicks start
Speaker 3: and stop in response to that. If it has these
Speaker 3: these sonic qualities correct, it can be interpreted as a
Speaker 3: female sexual signal by the male cicada. And as an example,
Speaker 3: the authors mentioned that with some of these cicadas in
Speaker 3: the tribe Cicadatini, you can attract males by like snapping
Speaker 3: your fingers if you time it right with respect to
Speaker 3: their songs. But different species listen for different things, and
Speaker 3: some are more wary than others. I guess some just
Speaker 3: kind of rush right in there. Now, coming back to
Speaker 3: the katie DIDs, Chlorobelius adults are most active in the summertime,
Speaker 3: and you will tend to find them perched in the
Speaker 3: upper branches of small trees and large shrubs, where they
Speaker 3: can take advantage of their green and white camouflage coloration
Speaker 3: pattern to hide in the foliage and rob I've attached
Speaker 3: a couple of pictures for you to look at, where
Speaker 3: one is against a white background, where this animal is
Speaker 3: very easy to see. Another one is of its standing
Speaker 3: in the tree branches, where it's much easier to see
Speaker 3: how it would just kind of blend in, especially if
Speaker 3: you weren't looking very close.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it is often the case. Right when you
Speaker 1: look at the specimen more in its natural habitat, it
Speaker 1: does blend in.
Speaker 3: So what do these katie diids do to mimic and
Speaker 3: hunt the cicadas they eat?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 3: The authors write that they can quote attract male cicadas
Speaker 3: Hemiptera cicatady by imitating the species specific wing flick replies
Speaker 3: of sexually receptive female cicadas. This aggressive mimicry is accomplished
Speaker 3: both acoustically with tegmental clicks and visually with synchronized body jerks,
Speaker 3: so it's a two part mimic They imitate both the
Speaker 3: sounds and the visually recognizable body movements produced by female
Speaker 3: cicadas that are ready to mate, attracting male cicadas from
Speaker 3: the surrounding area, and when the when the male cicada
Speaker 3: gets close enough, the katie did will promptly snatch it,
Speaker 3: bite into it, and eat it. And observations of these
Speaker 3: predatory encounters find that the kadi did typically just eats
Speaker 3: the whole thing. They the entire cicada except for the wings,
Speaker 3: and they leave the wings behind. And I thought that
Speaker 3: was interesting because I recall from our series on cicadas
Speaker 3: this was also true of some bird predators, which would
Speaker 3: eat the whole cicada except the wings and then just
Speaker 3: leave pairs of wings everywhere.
Speaker 1: Ah. Interesting.
Speaker 3: Now, one really interesting thing that the authors point out
Speaker 3: is that these predators are able to not only reproduce
Speaker 3: the different specific sounds of a bunch of different cicada species,
Speaker 3: experiments showed they can reproduce the songs of cicadas they
Speaker 3: have never come across before. So this acoustic mimicry is
Speaker 3: not just a singular, evolved, pre programmed behavior, but it's versatile.
Speaker 3: It is a versatile adaptable capacity to mimic and respond
Speaker 3: to cicada calls. Interestingly, and perhaps relatedly, Chlorobelius also uses
Speaker 3: acoustic signals for its own reproductive purposes. So when it's
Speaker 3: time for this Katie did to mate, the male Katie
Speaker 3: DIDs will produce a trilling sound with a file and
Speaker 3: scraper system on the edges of their fore wings, which
Speaker 3: is thought to attract females which are interested in mating. Now,
Speaker 3: coming to the discussion section of this paper, it's worth
Speaker 3: noting that this is not the only way that the
Speaker 3: mating call of cicada could be used to help a
Speaker 3: predator eat a cicada. The predator could, for example, just
Speaker 3: follow the song to its source and to eat the mail,
Speaker 3: and many predators do exactly this. They do follow the
Speaker 3: mating calls of prey animals to hunt. But this is
Speaker 3: a different strategy like the siren, or at least one
Speaker 3: version of the siren. The kdy did lures victims to itself,
Speaker 3: and I think that's kind of interesting to consider. It's
Speaker 3: like a different evolutionary investment. I don't believe the authors
Speaker 3: say this, so this could be on the wrong track,
Speaker 3: but I was just personally wondering if it could have
Speaker 3: something to do with the fact that the katy did
Speaker 3: already has a cryptic coloration pattern, It has camouflage, and
Speaker 3: so the fact that it may be using camouflage for
Speaker 3: one thing, it may be using camouflage defensively to hide
Speaker 3: from its own predators, from birds, and so forth. You know,
Speaker 3: whatever praise on it, it may be able to get
Speaker 3: double use out of that by specializing in a type
Speaker 3: of predation that allows it to hold still and hide
Speaker 3: among the leaves and have its prey come to it.
Speaker 1: Right, right, And also, I guess maybe it's helpful if
Speaker 1: if it's this way, it doesn't have to worry about
Speaker 1: the predators. They could potentially be seeking out the mating
Speaker 1: call of their very prey.
Speaker 3: Oh that's a very good point because as we talked
Speaker 3: about it in our cicada series. I don't know with
Speaker 3: this specific Australian family with the Cicadatinian Australia, but in
Speaker 3: most places everything eats cicadas when the cicadas come out
Speaker 3: their dinner, for everything out there, and most of the
Speaker 3: things that are eating them, or at least a lot
Speaker 3: of the things would be big enough to Eaticata did
Speaker 3: as well. Right now. The authors in this paper argue
Speaker 3: that the katie did's versatility and mimicry probably follows from
Speaker 3: the application of a few simple rules for one thing.
Speaker 3: Since their game to eat pretty much any cicada, and
Speaker 3: not just one particular species, they can probably ignore everything
Speaker 3: about the male cicada's song except whatever part of it
Speaker 3: cues the female cicada to respond, so there's less information
Speaker 3: to process. Just tune most of that out, focus on
Speaker 3: whatever part you need to pay attention to to time
Speaker 3: your response, your clicks and response, which is typically probably
Speaker 3: something about the onset of a pause at the end
Speaker 3: of a song segment. And this was funny because it
Speaker 3: made me think about like text message scammers who are
Speaker 3: going to possibly ignore basically everything you type to them
Speaker 3: and just be looking for a couple of keywords to
Speaker 3: advance the scam script to the next waypoint.
Speaker 1: Hmmm, yeah, I mean often predatory. There you go.
Speaker 3: Efficiency, Yeah, predatory efficiency. But in general, the authors point
Speaker 3: out that a complex adaptation like the Katie did has here.
Speaker 3: It requires multiple parts. Right, You've got to have sound
Speaker 3: producing organs, which they do in the four Wings. You've
Speaker 3: got to have sound perceiving organs. You've got to be
Speaker 3: able to listen so you know what to respond to,
Speaker 3: and you've got to have the neural processing required to
Speaker 3: make that match right, to produce the appropriate sound to
Speaker 3: match the call you just heard. And fortunately for the
Speaker 3: KDI DIDs, they already have all three capabilities for use
Speaker 3: in their own mating. I remember that from earlier they
Speaker 3: also sound in their own mating. However, there's an interesting
Speaker 3: complication here, which is that if this predatory mimicry of
Speaker 3: cicada mating duets were based on the mating behavior of
Speaker 3: the predator species, you would expect the katie DIDs to
Speaker 3: also engage in duets, and as far as the authors
Speaker 3: could tell, this was not the case. The kd DIDs
Speaker 3: do not seem to do male female duets. Instead, it
Speaker 3: seems as of the time of this paper that males
Speaker 3: generally produce a song which attracts a silent female to
Speaker 3: its source. So the male makes a song, the female
Speaker 3: comes and finds the male. But the authors acknowledge that
Speaker 3: not a lot is known about this Katie did species,
Speaker 3: so maybe some information is missing here. And also just
Speaker 3: a reminder that I said there was both an acoustic
Speaker 3: and a visual signal. The kt did also does this
Speaker 3: body jerking behavior which accompanies the mimicry clicks, and it
Speaker 3: does not seem to be physically necessary to make the
Speaker 3: click sound, so it's probably also a mimic behavior in
Speaker 3: this case to kind of look like a female cicada
Speaker 3: flicking its wings between the leaves. So the male's like,
Speaker 3: oh yeah, I see it right up there, and the
Speaker 3: male's crawling up and then it gets eaten.
Speaker 1: Fascinating it. I mean this lines up with the basic
Speaker 1: Sirens script.
Speaker 3: Right absolutely, But in fact, to come back to the Odyssey,
Speaker 3: one thing we see in the Odyssey is that the
Speaker 3: prey of the sirens, at least one member of the
Speaker 3: sirens prey, has a clever workaround a way of avoiding
Speaker 3: the sirens song by plugging the ears of the men
Speaker 3: rowing the ship and by lashing himself to the mast
Speaker 3: so that the sirens wouldn't get him. This is what
Speaker 3: Odysseus does, and you could see that as the beginning
Speaker 3: of a possible arms race in adaptations between sailors and sirens,
Speaker 3: And in fact there may be a fairly complex predator
Speaker 3: prey arms race in evolution between these cicadas and the
Speaker 3: katie DIDs. So here to read from the paper, the
Speaker 3: author's right. Even though Cobonga ox lay, the species we
Speaker 3: observed being attracted by Chlorobelius lucoviritis, has a structurally obvious
Speaker 3: song cue and an easily timed repetitive rhythm. We have
Speaker 3: found this species to be extremely resistant to our artificial signals.
Speaker 3: Poorly timed finger snaps cause males of many species to
Speaker 3: become wary, with kox Lay an especially strong example. Perhaps
Speaker 3: persistent aggressive mimicry by Chlorobelius lucoviritis has selected kox Lay
Speaker 3: males for greater sensitivity to the occasional poorly timed click.
Speaker 3: This possibility also suggests an additional evolutionary route for the
Speaker 3: cicada prey, the addition of false cues that ilicit premature
Speaker 3: katie did replies without queuing female cicadas, whose response depends
Speaker 3: on a particular combination of song elements. Long continued selection
Speaker 3: of this sort might account for the extraordinarily complex songs
Speaker 3: of many Australian cicatatine species found in the arid Acacia
Speaker 3: dominated habitats where see lucoviritis is most common. So that's
Speaker 3: very interesting. We may have some Cicada odysseus'es on hand
Speaker 3: who have evolved a defensive reaction to this type of
Speaker 3: predatory mimicry by, for one thing, throwing out some decoy
Speaker 3: sound signals that are not going to get females of
Speaker 3: its own species responding. But if you do hear clicks
Speaker 3: in response to them, that's something to be afraid of.
Speaker 3: Lets you know, there's a monster nearby. And then also
Speaker 3: perhaps by being more sensitive to incorrect timing on the
Speaker 3: response clicks in the duet.
Speaker 1: Interesting. Interesting. So yeah, so their use of the song
Speaker 1: becomes more nuanced in a way, in a way to
Speaker 1: outwit these pretenders. Yeah, I mean one is tempted to
Speaker 1: make various comparisons, to say, conversations between humans, perhaps in
Speaker 1: a dating scenario, you know, like a first date where
Speaker 1: one might throw out, hey, you know, did you see
Speaker 1: such and such movie? And I thought it was pretty
Speaker 1: good and they're like, yeah, it's great. Well, then you
Speaker 1: know that's a red flag fill in your own example. Sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm a little slow today. I can't come up with
Speaker 1: a good example that we can all stand behind as
Speaker 1: being the red flag for a first date.
Speaker 3: But I absolutely understand what you're talking about, sort of
Speaker 3: tossing out a sonic conversational bait to draw out the
Speaker 3: attention of anything that you should be avoiding.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well this is fascinating and again more evidence to
Speaker 1: a point that we're always making on the show, and
Speaker 1: that is that anything you find in myth and in
Speaker 1: legend and fictional monsters, there is almost always something equally
Speaker 1: weird in the natural world.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's you know, through doing a lot of these
Speaker 3: October Monster episodes, I find it varies how close of
Speaker 3: a match we can find in the natural world. Sometimes
Speaker 3: there's just not something in nature that is a real
Speaker 3: tight fit on whatever fictional example we're talking about, but
Speaker 3: there's always something more amazing. Yeah, but this was a
Speaker 3: case where I was shocked how close the fit is,
Speaker 3: especially with the Odysseus cicadas. To be clear, that's not
Speaker 3: their biological name, that's just what I'm calling him.
Speaker 1: Now, all right, I have one more little curiosity to
Speaker 1: consider here. Take it from the cabinet of curiosity, if
Speaker 1: you will, because it concerns a very learned individual who
Speaker 1: seems to have thought very long and hard on the
Speaker 1: reality of sirens, as well as the reality of some
Speaker 1: other things that I don't think one typically thinks of
Speaker 1: as having an objective reality. So I ran across this
Speaker 1: in Literature and a Lore of the Sea edited by
Speaker 1: Patricia Ann Karlson, specifically in an article titled the Extraordinary
Speaker 1: Being Death In The Mermaid and Baroque Literature by Eileen S. Goodman,
Speaker 1: she points out the seventeenth century German polymath and Jessuits
Speaker 1: scholar Athanasius Kircher, who is sixteen o two through sixteen eighty,
Speaker 1: in one of his natural history volumes, seems to give
Speaker 1: serious consideration to not only the objective reality of Noah's Ark,
Speaker 1: which isn't completely out of the ordinary. He still see
Speaker 1: that kind of thing going on today, but also spends
Speaker 1: a lot of time trying to figure out where Noah
Speaker 1: put all of the sirens.
Speaker 3: Right next to the unicorns.
Speaker 1: Obviously, well, we'll get to unicorns. He also believed in them.
Speaker 1: I guess brief refresher for those of you who don't
Speaker 1: remember the story of Noah's Ark is this Old Testament
Speaker 1: Book of Genesis tale concerning the Great Flood and one
Speaker 1: anti Theiluvian patriarch's mission to save all of the world's
Speaker 1: animals from the flood in a great big boat. It's
Speaker 1: one of various great flood myths found throughout the ancient world. Obviously,
Speaker 1: this is not a story that easily endures very close
Speaker 1: literal scrutiny. When you dig down into the two by
Speaker 1: two details of the endeavor. I think you know a
Speaker 1: lot of us who grew up, you know, going to
Speaker 1: Sunday school class. You reach that point where you're like, wait,
Speaker 1: how does this work? Now? Wait to two of each animal,
Speaker 1: you know, and then various questions arise. But Kircher was
Speaker 1: very into figuring out exactly how all of this would work,
Speaker 1: and he, to be clear, seems to have believed in
Speaker 1: the reality of mermaids or sirens as well as unicorns,
Speaker 1: based on some like the tail and the bones of
Speaker 1: a mermaid that were in his museum.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, so he had empirical evidence.
Speaker 1: It's like, we have evidence, this is what these were.
Speaker 1: And he describes them as amphibians and stresses that there
Speaker 1: is some controversy as to whether these particular amphibians were
Speaker 1: or were not received into the arc. And I imagine
Speaker 1: some of you might have wondered about this. How did
Speaker 1: what happened to the mermaids? So he explains in his writing,
Speaker 1: well that others have said, well, perhaps they lived on
Speaker 1: the outside of the arc, outside of this great boat,
Speaker 1: perhaps in some sort of a nest, something like a
Speaker 1: fixed to the hole.
Speaker 3: I'm finding it a little confusing here because I would
Speaker 3: not normally think that aquatic animals needed to be taken
Speaker 3: onto the arc at all, which I guess is part
Speaker 3: of why he's classifying them as amphibians. That like, they
Speaker 3: can't live their entire lives in the water. They must
Speaker 3: come to dry surface at some point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so there is some disagreement with people asking the
Speaker 1: same questions here where did the mermaids or sirens go?
Speaker 1: Some said they stayed in nests on the outside of
Speaker 1: the ark, but Kircher dismisses the idea, stating that this
Speaker 1: is a This is a quote translated quote from his work,
Speaker 1: as referenced in that article by Goodman. Holy writ is
Speaker 1: in agreement on the matter of the little stalls into
Speaker 1: which the animals were distributed, and it does not teach
Speaker 1: that any existed outside. And I believe he argues against
Speaker 1: the idea that any creature lived outside the ship during
Speaker 1: the cataclysm, like even fish. I mean it, it's I
Speaker 1: have no answer there. It's like, even if you're even
Speaker 1: if I'm going to assume that fish surely get away
Speaker 1: with living outside of the arc. I think he's making
Speaker 1: a case that amphibian creatures could not. They would have
Speaker 1: to be aboard the arc.
Speaker 2: HM.
Speaker 1: Okay, So I'm assuming here based on what I'm reading,
Speaker 1: Kircher is arguing that the sirens would have ridden inside
Speaker 1: the arc, and I have to acknowledge the Yes, that
Speaker 1: sounds ludicrous to even be wondering about that. But I
Speaker 1: also I don't want to give everyone the wrong idea
Speaker 1: about this man, because by all accounts, he was a
Speaker 1: brilliant mind, you know, a brilliant man of his time,
Speaker 1: sometimes described as being the last man to know everything.
Speaker 1: So this is a guy who studied religion, linguistics, geology, medicine.
Speaker 1: He tried to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and claimed that
Speaker 1: he had translated them, but apparently not. He wrote an
Speaker 1: encyclopedia on China. He kept a vundo kama, or a
Speaker 1: cabinet of curiosities, and he spent the majority of his
Speaker 1: career at Roman College. He was fascinated by fossils. He
Speaker 1: made proposals about the cause of plague that apparently line
Speaker 1: up with some of the the actual you know, the
Speaker 1: actual reality of it. He was intrigued by various devices,
Speaker 1: made little inventions. He was a science superstar of his day,
Speaker 1: even if He's often eclipsed in our recollection by such
Speaker 1: contemporaries as Galileo. And there is the fact that he
Speaker 1: seemed to believe in the existence of both mermaids and
Speaker 1: unicorns based on the evidence in his museum.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, well, I mean this would be, by no
Speaker 3: means the only example of a truly brilliant mind in
Speaker 3: history who spent a lot of time obsessing over minutia
Speaker 3: based on false premises. Yeah, you know, the all the
Speaker 3: all the devotion to to alchemy and trying to trying
Speaker 3: to work things out based on the literal interpretation of
Speaker 3: the Bible and things like that.
Speaker 1: So a lot of books have been written about him,
Speaker 1: and I ran across there's actually a review of a
Speaker 1: particular book about him. This was in this case, the
Speaker 1: review was written by the Vatican Observatory's brother, Guy Consumajno,
Speaker 1: who I the pleasure to hear speak here in Atlanta
Speaker 1: many years ago. It was not speaking about this, he
Speaker 1: was speaking, I believe about religion and extraterrestrials. That's sort
Speaker 1: of like speculative material. But yeah. He wrote this article
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one titled A mishmash of brilliance and absurdity,
Speaker 1: and he stressed that, Yeah, here's this guy Kirchner, who
Speaker 1: was brilliant, you know, was obsessed with optics, acoustics, you
Speaker 1: name it, just like everything that could be learned or
Speaker 1: known about the world. He was all in on it.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, he wrote three volumes on
Speaker 1: how Noah managed to fit all of the animals and
Speaker 1: their food into the arc, and then also speculates about
Speaker 1: the sirens as well.
Speaker 3: Isaac Newton, one of the most brilliant minds of all time,
Speaker 3: was spent a huge amount of intellectual energy obsessed with
Speaker 3: interpreting his with like his interpretations of biblical prophecies.
Speaker 1: Kanzemajno writes, quote, Kirchner makes a fascinating contrast in style
Speaker 1: with Galileo. While both were shameless self promoters, Galileo was
Speaker 1: far more rigorous, focused, and polemical in his science. Kirchner's
Speaker 1: theme was simply wonder and delight, reporting marvelous machines and novelties,
Speaker 1: like a seventeenth century version of Ripley's Believe It or.
Speaker 3: Not, Well, far be it from me to find fault
Speaker 3: there in wonder and delight.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know it kind of you know, drives
Speaker 1: home that you know, wonder and delight are great, but
Speaker 1: they too can be kind of a siren song, steering
Speaker 1: you off into I mean, in the worst cases, you know,
Speaker 1: misinformation and delusion, but even into maybe just ideas that
Speaker 1: are not ultimately that productive but maybe entertaining. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Did Kirchner's three volumes on Noah's art like hurt anything,
Speaker 1: Did his belief in the physical reality of unicorns and
Speaker 1: mermaids hurt anything? Well? Maybe not, Maybe it's fine.
Speaker 3: I guess it's hard to say about that kind of thing,
Speaker 3: though I would say in general, it's absolutely the case.
Speaker 3: I think that the estheticization of ideas can in some
Speaker 3: cases have very negative consequences. Appreciating ideas primarily for whether
Speaker 3: they are fun or exciting or how they make you feel,
Speaker 3: with not enough appreciation for testing whether they are true,
Speaker 3: can be in fact quite quite dangerous.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, we've We've discussed multiple times in the show
Speaker 1: various hypotheses that you know, sometimes are quite enthralling and
Speaker 1: and even inspiring, but are they the best hypotheses with
Speaker 1: which to understand the universe? And that's not always the case.
Speaker 1: And if you just follow what's exciting. Then you're you know,
Speaker 1: you're in search of with Leonard Nimoy or something. You know,
Speaker 1: you're you're in the realm of Let's just talk about
Speaker 1: these ideas because they are entertaining and not because they
Speaker 1: actually explain the world around us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, though, if we can make a persuasive case, I
Speaker 3: hope we could convince you that you can put truth
Speaker 3: testing as the first priority and ideas can still be fun.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, So you know, don't put wax in your ears,
Speaker 1: puts put a little Stuff to Blow your Mind in
Speaker 1: your ears. Hopefully that'll help you out. All Right, We're
Speaker 1: gonna go ahead and close up this episode, but we'll remind
Speaker 1: everyone out there. The Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
Speaker 1: primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on
Speaker 1: Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do a short form episode on Wednesdays,
Speaker 1: and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to
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Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
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