Speaker 1: Welcome to Stove to Blow Your Mind, the production of
Speaker 1: My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
Speaker 1: and we're back with part two of our talk about
Speaker 1: halos and the nimbus and the the aureole, the glory
Speaker 1: that glows behind the figure, whether that's a Christian saint
Speaker 1: or Huahwa the Terrible Or did we end up last
Speaker 1: week actually talking about Lucca doors at all? I think
Speaker 1: we did very briefly, partially because we were in the
Speaker 1: process of putting together a weird house cinema episode on
Speaker 1: us on a El Santo film. But yeah, the question
Speaker 1: came up, are there any halos used with Luchador designs? Uh?
Speaker 1: With the idea being that, yeah, they're a number of
Speaker 1: different Catholicism themed Lucia doors. So after we recorded, I
Speaker 1: did look into it a little bit. I looked at
Speaker 1: some of the usual specs, and looked on Luca Wicki
Speaker 1: and looked at some photos. I didn't notice any halo
Speaker 1: motifs in the mask for the most part, like nothing
Speaker 1: nothing like um like actually physically emerging and positioned above
Speaker 1: the head, you know. You see a lot of crosses, etcetera.
Speaker 1: The best example I did find, though, was a luchador
Speaker 1: named Angel azul Um, one of at least four different
Speaker 1: luchadors who's used that name. And this particular mask depicts
Speaker 1: an entire angel, like a like a Christmas top or
Speaker 1: angel on the front of the mask, and that angel
Speaker 1: has a halo. So it's positions so that that the
Speaker 1: angel's head and halo appear more or less in the
Speaker 1: center of the forehead. So I assume this is a
Speaker 1: technico not a rudeo. I guess. So. Um. I don't
Speaker 1: know anything about this guy, but it looks like a
Speaker 1: technico mask. You know, if you have an angel like that, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's got to be. But then again,
Speaker 1: he could easily turn Ruto and become a fallen angel,
Speaker 1: especially if he loses that mask. Oh yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: a bad angel can be really bad out where you
Speaker 1: get angels of death, You've got, you've got. Uh Remember
Speaker 1: a particularly haunting mickloshred Noty poem called The Terrifying Angel,
Speaker 1: where he an angel appears to him and advises him
Speaker 1: to remove his own skin. Yeah, there's there are a
Speaker 1: number of different and Lucia. There have been a few
Speaker 1: different angels of death, Angel de la Monta. Um, there's
Speaker 1: one I remember seeing on TV that did not really
Speaker 1: have any any kind of angelic themes in his outfit.
Speaker 1: But I did run across on Luca Wicki an old
Speaker 1: photo from a magazine that had showed a guy with
Speaker 1: a halo motif again on the forehead, almost like a
Speaker 1: third eye. But that's the only thing I could really
Speaker 1: find in terms of uh, dudes like this with with halos.
Speaker 1: Now another thing that comes to mind, though you know,
Speaker 1: we're talking a little bit about a halos and and
Speaker 1: angels and um certainly an art. But I started thinking
Speaker 1: more and more about films, and I can't think of
Speaker 1: a single example of of of an angelic being presented
Speaker 1: in say horror film or some sort of supernatural film
Speaker 1: in which they have a halo. Like. I was thinking, like,
Speaker 1: what are some of the the the angel visitation scenes
Speaker 1: that come to mind? And I thought of, well, the
Speaker 1: I thought of Bill Paxton's film Frailty, which has a
Speaker 1: great angel visitation scene like a um, you know, hallucination
Speaker 1: that emerges in his mind, but there's no halo. Now,
Speaker 1: I might be remembering that wrong. I thought that the
Speaker 1: angel in that it doesn't have like a ring halo
Speaker 1: around the head or anything specifically concentrated on the head,
Speaker 1: but I did recall a kind of like full body glow.
Speaker 1: Am I wrong? But definitely definitely has a glow to it,
Speaker 1: and there is there's a lot of like heavenly architecture
Speaker 1: going on above it, but in terms of something more
Speaker 1: instantly recognizable as a halo, not so much. Um Likewise,
Speaker 1: I was thinking back to the Prophecy films with Christopher Walkin. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of angels in that, a lot of
Speaker 1: angel wings, and you can think of various things that
Speaker 1: were clearly influenced by that. You know, we have angels
Speaker 1: and fallen angels popping up and filmmakers will go nuts
Speaker 1: given him big, big, feathery wings, but I don't think
Speaker 1: they ever really include the halo. And it's kind of
Speaker 1: interesting because I guess it comes down to the fact
Speaker 1: that it's easy to think of it as such a
Speaker 1: cliche thing, but at the same time it is so
Speaker 1: weird and it and there's so many ways to depict it.
Speaker 1: You think you would you would see more of it.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'd love to hear from folks out
Speaker 1: there who have encountered really cool halos in genre pictures,
Speaker 1: because I'd love to I'd love to see it. Now.
Speaker 1: In the last episode, did you bring up the idea
Speaker 1: of a cinembyte from like the Clive Barker verse with
Speaker 1: the with a halo? I can't remember if we if
Speaker 1: we did, but I started looking into it after the podcast,
Speaker 1: and um, I think there's in a comic hell Raiser
Speaker 1: comic book there's a there's a cinembyte named Halo, but
Speaker 1: he doesn't really have a halo. Now, there was a
Speaker 1: a Clive Barker action figure for the Todd McFarlane toys
Speaker 1: for the Tortured Souls line, and this guy, uh, this
Speaker 1: particular guy agonists has kind of a surgery, has like
Speaker 1: a surgical halo around his head, like a halo, and
Speaker 1: then he also has what I think is like a
Speaker 1: human face maybe his own human face position behind him. Uh.
Speaker 1: That also seems to mimic halo iconography. So it's a
Speaker 1: very Cinabitte esque character. So I'm this seems to come
Speaker 1: close and certainly Clive Barker loves uh toying around with
Speaker 1: religious imagery, so it makes sense that we would find
Speaker 1: an example of this and something he designed. Yeah. Fun fact,
Speaker 1: those those figures that came out, UM turns out they
Speaker 1: each had a portion of a novella in them that
Speaker 1: I think for a long time you could only get
Speaker 1: if you bought all the figures, but it's subsequently been
Speaker 1: put out since sometime in the last five years or so.
Speaker 1: UM the titled Tortured Souls the Legend of Primordium, and
Speaker 1: I read it over the weekend UM joined some time
Speaker 1: out in the Hammock, and it was pretty fun. You know.
Speaker 1: It's a it's like, there's not a relatable human character
Speaker 1: in the whole thing. It's just like a bunch of
Speaker 1: like sort of monsters and uh and so forth. It's
Speaker 1: in a kind of a dark fantasy setting. UM. Kind
Speaker 1: of hell razory at times, for sure, but but not
Speaker 1: entirely like it felt. It was really good. It is
Speaker 1: one of the I haven't read a lot of Clive
Speaker 1: Barker recently, but this one was new to me and
Speaker 1: I enjoyed it. So a novella that comes serially within
Speaker 1: the action figures that you would buy at Spencer's Gifts
Speaker 1: in the nineties. Yeah, and it was, and to my
Speaker 1: shock it was like it was it was actually really enjoyable.
Speaker 1: So there you go. I wonder if the Insane Clown
Speaker 1: Posse action figures had a novella that came with them.
Speaker 1: I doubt it. I think this was the only I
Speaker 1: think there was actually another Clive Barker line, who is
Speaker 1: some sort of like Carnival kind of a theme, where
Speaker 1: he did another one like this where he had different
Speaker 1: different chapters in a novella that all came together if
Speaker 1: you bought all the figures. But but and that one
Speaker 1: when that one is also available to read now, but
Speaker 1: I haven't read it. It's interesting though, with the Action
Speaker 1: figures though, because the whole thing, right is that you
Speaker 1: don't take them out of the box if you're collecting them.
Speaker 1: And if that was the case, you wouldn't get to
Speaker 1: read the cool little novella chapters that are hidden within there. Well,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't get to play with them either. I mean,
Speaker 1: what are you supposed to do with these things? I
Speaker 1: don't know. They don't look tremendously fun to play with.
Speaker 1: They kind of they're very grizzly. Have a little tea
Speaker 1: party with your barbie and your cinebites. Yeah, but but
Speaker 1: that's that's like I said that the novella was fun.
Speaker 1: So in the last episode we ended up talking about
Speaker 1: a lot of the different ways that the halo or
Speaker 1: the nimbus has been represented or characterized in history. You know,
Speaker 1: sometimes as a glowing disc behind the head, or even
Speaker 1: a solid looking kind of gold disc, sometimes even as
Speaker 1: a square or as a ring around the head. Other
Speaker 1: times as a kind of just general emanation of light,
Speaker 1: like a glow coming from behind the head, almost as
Speaker 1: if there's bioluminescent hair or a light bulb behind the
Speaker 1: head or behind the whole body. A full body glow
Speaker 1: is sometimes characterized as a halo or a reole or nimbus.
Speaker 1: And when it comes to the kind that's just like
Speaker 1: a glow or an emanation of divine light from around
Speaker 1: the body, I started to wonder about the idea of
Speaker 1: the aura. Now, I guess there's a general concept of
Speaker 1: an aura that you could just think of as like,
Speaker 1: this is any emanation of color or light from a body,
Speaker 1: like in the u in the ancient Mesopotamian mythology, where
Speaker 1: we talked about Humbaba or Huahwa having the seven terrors
Speaker 1: or the radiance terrifying radiance that emanated from his body. Uh.
Speaker 1: Those things could be viewed as an aura. But there's
Speaker 1: also a more specific definition of an aura, which is
Speaker 1: a sort of standard claim in the modern world of
Speaker 1: psychics and New Age spirituality and parapsychology. People often claim
Speaker 1: to be able to see some kind of aura around
Speaker 1: human bodies and sometimes around other objects. So I wonder
Speaker 1: could this modern belief in auras in any way be
Speaker 1: related to the origins of the religious belief in the halo,
Speaker 1: the glory, the melom, the sun, disk, crown, etcetera. And
Speaker 1: this sounds perfectly reasonable, right, I mean, this is a
Speaker 1: lot of it is getting would seem on the surface
Speaker 1: at least to get to the same idea, the idea
Speaker 1: that there's something either emanating out of you or through you. Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: totally uh. And And the secondary question, if people do
Speaker 1: really sometimes see a glow of color or cloud of
Speaker 1: blazing light around someone, what would cause that? Uh? So
Speaker 1: I'm going to transition into this subject for a bit
Speaker 1: and look at it a few different ways. The first
Speaker 1: thing I wanted to know was, wait a second, is
Speaker 1: it actually possible in just a straightforward scientific physical sense
Speaker 1: that humans do actually sometimes glow. I don't know. I've
Speaker 1: come across weirder facts on this show before, so I
Speaker 1: started looking into this. H The first thing I thought
Speaker 1: of was, I wonder if there's ever been a case
Speaker 1: where somebody was was made to glow by exposure to
Speaker 1: I don't know, something in the environment. And the thing
Speaker 1: that popped to my mind was in the Simpsons and
Speaker 1: art ters who work at the nuclear power plant acquire
Speaker 1: what Mr Burns would call a healthy green glow. Uh.
Speaker 1: So I was wondering, does exposure to radiation actually have
Speaker 1: the potential to make people glow? Unfortunately, it seems the
Speaker 1: answer is no. Ionizing radiation is generally invisible itself, and
Speaker 1: being exposed to it can of course wreck your body,
Speaker 1: but it won't make you glow. This myth actually probably
Speaker 1: comes from a combination of facts, the first of which
Speaker 1: would be about radio luminescence. So there are some materials
Speaker 1: that do glow in the presence of ionizing radiation. For example,
Speaker 1: the paint that was once commonly used for radium dials
Speaker 1: on clock faces and and is sometimes still used for
Speaker 1: like um instruments that are made to be viewed in
Speaker 1: the dark, for example, in in spacecraft. You know, so
Speaker 1: you want a dial or an instrument that will glow
Speaker 1: in the dark without having to have any kind of
Speaker 1: power supply to it or you know, uh, or an
Speaker 1: elle de inside it or anything like that. Uh. This
Speaker 1: radio luminescent paint actually had to have a combination of
Speaker 1: two major elements in order to make it glow. Uh.
Speaker 1: In in the old school kind that was used by
Speaker 1: like the company Undark or you know that was tragically
Speaker 1: the cause of the death and sickening of the Radium girls.
Speaker 1: This was a paint that was made with radium, which
Speaker 1: is the radioactive element that's applied the ionizing radiation. But
Speaker 1: then it also had to have an element that is
Speaker 1: known as a phosph four, which is a chemical that
Speaker 1: glows when it's stimulated by alpha and beta particles and
Speaker 1: gamma rays from the from the radioactive element. And in
Speaker 1: the case of the radioluminescent paint that was used by
Speaker 1: Undark in companies like that in the first half of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, the phosphour was usually zinc sulfide that
Speaker 1: was then laced with a metal like copper to give
Speaker 1: it a green color. And so because of the specific
Speaker 1: nature of this material, this phosphour, when the atoms in
Speaker 1: it are struck by ionizing radiation, they get excited, their
Speaker 1: electrons jump up to a higher energy level, and then
Speaker 1: they fall back down to their ground state. And when
Speaker 1: they fall back down to their ground state, they emit
Speaker 1: a photon of light. As they do that, they release
Speaker 1: the energy back out and this is the glow we see.
Speaker 1: And of course the color of the glow can be
Speaker 1: determined by what kind of metal it's laced with. Again, uh,
Speaker 1: copper tends to give a green color. So I think
Speaker 1: this is the source of the belief that radiation will
Speaker 1: cause something to have a green glow. Won't cause anything
Speaker 1: to have a green glow. It will specifically give a
Speaker 1: green glow to paint with a phosphour in it, and
Speaker 1: something to make that glow the color green, like copper. So,
Speaker 1: long story short, exposure to ionizing radiation can absolutely kill you,
Speaker 1: but it will not make you glow, I guess, unless
Speaker 1: you coat yourself in a phosphour. Okay, so that this
Speaker 1: that one episode of The Simpsons where Mr Burns has
Speaker 1: been found to be wandering through the woods. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: no, no no, unless yeah, maybe he somehow paints his body
Speaker 1: and zinc sulfide or something zinc sulfide and copper and
Speaker 1: then just get some plutonium in there. Maybe I don't
Speaker 1: know how long he would survive that though well, as
Speaker 1: we and I think was explained on the show, Mr
Speaker 1: Burns is imperil from so many different causes of death
Speaker 1: that they're they're stuck in the door right right three
Speaker 1: Stooges syndrome. So even the ionizing radiation is going WHOA.
Speaker 1: So anyway, you know you're not going to have a
Speaker 1: situation where I don't know, an ancient a person in
Speaker 1: the ancient world came across a stash of uranium or
Speaker 1: and then somehow ended up glowing green, so everybody would
Speaker 1: see him and think, wow, you know that guy's god
Speaker 1: or something that that just wouldn't happen. But I came
Speaker 1: across another fact that is pretty weird, which is that,
Speaker 1: in a qualified sense, the human body actually does just
Speaker 1: naturally glow, meaning it doesn't only reflect light from external sources,
Speaker 1: but the body actually does emit electromagnetic radiation in the
Speaker 1: visible spectrum. Visible light comes out of your body. But
Speaker 1: before you get too excited. The amount of light that
Speaker 1: our bodies put out on average is really really tiny.
Speaker 1: It's roughly a thousand times too dim to see with
Speaker 1: the naked eye. You need special scientific instruments in a
Speaker 1: very dark room to pick it up. Uh. And but
Speaker 1: you should know that this is different from like the
Speaker 1: heat that we emit as infrared radiation. If this light
Speaker 1: were bright enough, it would be light that would actually
Speaker 1: have a color that you could see with your eyes.
Speaker 1: It is that kind of light. Um And of course
Speaker 1: it's not just us, most or maybe all other animals
Speaker 1: would also emit a similar kind of light. Nevertheless, this
Speaker 1: glow is kind of interesting. I was wondering, so what
Speaker 1: what makes this glow happen? It appears to be chemical
Speaker 1: reactions involving free radicals within the body. There was a
Speaker 1: two thousand nine study that tried to measure this photon
Speaker 1: mission from the human body using special equipment. So this
Speaker 1: was by Misaki Kobayashi, di suk Kikuchi, and Hitoshi Okamura
Speaker 1: published in PLS one in two thousand nine called Imaging
Speaker 1: of ultra week spontaneous photon emission from the human body
Speaker 1: displaying diurnal rhythm. And so what the researchers did here
Speaker 1: was they used a cryogenic CCD camera to image five
Speaker 1: healthy male subjects in their twenties at different times throughout
Speaker 1: the day. So the subjects would come in, they'd sit
Speaker 1: in a chair. I think they were partially naked or
Speaker 1: at least bare chested in the chair in a dark
Speaker 1: room for at least twenty minutes. I think there was
Speaker 1: a period of adjustment to the darkness, and then after
Speaker 1: that they'd be photographed for twenty minutes with the special camera.
Speaker 1: And they do this every day for every three hours,
Speaker 1: from ten am to ten pm. And the researchers actually
Speaker 1: found that the amount of light emitted from the body
Speaker 1: varied significantly over the day, so people glowed the most
Speaker 1: at about four p m and the least at ten am.
Speaker 1: And they hypothesized that this probably has something to do
Speaker 1: with how energy metabolism changes throughout the day according to
Speaker 1: our circadian rhythms. But also interesting, or at least I
Speaker 1: thought this was interesting, Rob. I've attached a picture for
Speaker 1: you to look at down here. The body did not
Speaker 1: glow equally everywhere. In fact, faces tended to glow more
Speaker 1: than the rest of the body, it seems like and
Speaker 1: and there were other kinds of differences, like upper shoulders
Speaker 1: seemed to glow a little bit more than down lower
Speaker 1: around like the chest or the stomach, And different parts
Speaker 1: of the face glowed more than other parts. So it
Speaker 1: looks like the area around the mouth in particular, was
Speaker 1: usually glowing more than say, like the forehead or or
Speaker 1: around the eyes or the sides of the face. This
Speaker 1: thing about the mouth especially makes me imagine an alternate
Speaker 1: history of halo imagery where the glow is not just
Speaker 1: surrounding the crown of the head but emanating from the
Speaker 1: mouth and jaw. Kind of glory beard okay, also kind
Speaker 1: of a low Pan effect, right, Oh, yes, when we
Speaker 1: first encountered low Pan and he has light coming out
Speaker 1: of his eyes and then out of his mouth. One
Speaker 1: of my favorite line deliveries there is the incredulous way
Speaker 1: that Kurt Russell says that he had light coming out
Speaker 1: of his mouth. Yes, big trouble, Little China for anyone
Speaker 1: who's not familiar. But anyway, so I was reading an
Speaker 1: NBC news report about this study from two thousand nine
Speaker 1: by Charles Q. Choi and and he wrote that um
Speaker 1: one reason that the face might glow more than the
Speaker 1: rest of the body is that is that usually faces
Speaker 1: are more tanned than the rest of the body since
Speaker 1: they get it more exposure to sunlight. And that he
Speaker 1: said that the pigment behind that that tanning in the skin, melanin,
Speaker 1: has fluorescent compounds that might might help the skin produce
Speaker 1: even more light than other skin on the body does. Okay,
Speaker 1: but since this glow is not detectable with the naked eye,
Speaker 1: none of this is going to have anything to do
Speaker 1: with the origins of of halo or nimbus or arial imagery,
Speaker 1: though it is a nice thing to know, nonetheless, But
Speaker 1: to come back to the place we started, people do,
Speaker 1: of course, sometimes make various paranormal claims that they can
Speaker 1: see a glow of colored light emanating from human beings. Again,
Speaker 1: this is sometimes called like an aura or an energy field. Um,
Speaker 1: so I have to be kind of circumspect here. The
Speaker 1: belief in auras is I have discovered an exceedingly complicated
Speaker 1: subject with a weird and interesting history. Maybe one will
Speaker 1: have to come back to and explore more in the future.
Speaker 1: Since this is one of those subjects, I'm sure you've
Speaker 1: had this experience on the show before, Rob where like
Speaker 1: I was trying to read into it so I could
Speaker 1: give a brief overview. But it was kind of like
Speaker 1: you go down into a basement and you open an
Speaker 1: old chest to just like get the things out and
Speaker 1: see what's inside it. But then something in there starts
Speaker 1: moving and uh, and I'm like, okay, Uh, So I
Speaker 1: I cannot I cannot get my brain fully around this subject.
Speaker 1: I think I can only mention some aspects of it.
Speaker 1: From what I can tell, the New Age belief in
Speaker 1: seeing aur as seems to stem from a kind of
Speaker 1: reinterpretation of the medieval tantric belief in chakras, so chakras
Speaker 1: would have been a belief original to esoteric Hindu It's
Speaker 1: also it's kind of hard to succinctly describe even what
Speaker 1: these are, but I think you can think of them
Speaker 1: as sort of a collection of nodes or channels that
Speaker 1: are positioned at different points inside the body and correspond
Speaker 1: to elements of an imagined subtle body, a second non
Speaker 1: material energy based body, and the images of these channels
Speaker 1: or nodes throughout the body would be used in some
Speaker 1: kinds of tantric meditation. So you might focus mental imagery
Speaker 1: on one of these nodes at various points. It's positioned,
Speaker 1: often along the sort of vertical access through the middle
Speaker 1: of the body, but also at a few other points. So, Rob,
Speaker 1: I think you probably know more about this world. Is
Speaker 1: that basically your understanding? Yeah, I think that's a good
Speaker 1: basic summary of it. And I've I've engaged in yoga
Speaker 1: and meditation that uses chakras as well. UM, And I
Speaker 1: find that I guess one way that I like to
Speaker 1: think of it is it is not it is not
Speaker 1: the way the body actually works, but it is a
Speaker 1: way that the body can be interpreted, uh, to aid
Speaker 1: in meditation or yoga, like thinking about um, you know,
Speaker 1: like this energy point moving from chakra to chakra, focusing
Speaker 1: on say, like breathing through your third eye. You know,
Speaker 1: obviously you're not really breathing through a hole in your
Speaker 1: your skull, um, but somehow like focusing on that can
Speaker 1: be very helpful. It gives you like a different physical
Speaker 1: focus to get out of your thoughts and and even
Speaker 1: you know, sort of focused on the on the physicality
Speaker 1: of that part of your body. Uh. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: find it very helpful though though again I do not
Speaker 1: engage with it in a way where I think of
Speaker 1: this is like the actual way that the energy of
Speaker 1: my body is working. Right, it might not correspond to
Speaker 1: like physical anatomical realities, but can serve as a focal
Speaker 1: point for mental imagery and in a way of directing
Speaker 1: the thoughts. Yeah, but so that's that's chakras. I think
Speaker 1: like within the the the esoteric Hindu tradition. Then in
Speaker 1: the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it seems this
Speaker 1: idea somehow got sort of picked up and reinterpreted by
Speaker 1: various people associated with new religious movements like Theosophy, and
Speaker 1: a lot of the twentieth century New Age. Belief in
Speaker 1: auras as an emanation from the body seems to trace
Speaker 1: back to a British spiritualist and theosophist writer named Charles
Speaker 1: Webster Leadbetter who lived from eighteen fifty four to nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty four. I was just again, I can only give
Speaker 1: the briefest glance into this world, because it seems very
Speaker 1: It's it's like looking at gnosticism or something. It's just
Speaker 1: like you cannot really understand it from the outside. But
Speaker 1: I was trying to peek in and get some kind
Speaker 1: of characterization here. So I found a couple of quotes
Speaker 1: from a writing by lead Better called this was a
Speaker 1: book called Man Visible and Invisible. I think this was
Speaker 1: actually a reproduction of an earlier pamphlet or essay he
Speaker 1: had done about the belief in auras. And he writes
Speaker 1: the following, All members of our society will be familiar
Speaker 1: with the idea that every human being is surrounded by
Speaker 1: a sort of luminous cloud, which we have agreed to
Speaker 1: call the aura. And we have heard from those who
Speaker 1: have succeeded in developing the special sense by which it
Speaker 1: is cognized, that it has various beautiful colors, and that
Speaker 1: from a study of it much maybe learned as to
Speaker 1: the disposition, the thoughts, and even the past life of
Speaker 1: its possessor. And then later he comes to a physical
Speaker 1: description of what this aura it is. It looks like,
Speaker 1: he writes, we find that it is exceedingly complex in structure.
Speaker 1: At the first glance, it is seen as a luminous cloud,
Speaker 1: extending to a distance of about eighteen inches or two
Speaker 1: feet from the body in all directions, and therefore approximately
Speaker 1: oval in shape. Whence it is sometimes spoken of in
Speaker 1: occult writings as the auric egg. In most cases, it
Speaker 1: has no well defined outline, but its edges fade into
Speaker 1: invisibility very gradually. Uh. And I think this is interesting
Speaker 1: because this really does sound like he's describing the halo
Speaker 1: glow that we see in a lot of religious artwork,
Speaker 1: or here described in in a lot of religious poetry,
Speaker 1: a sort of oval shaped framing or emanation of light
Speaker 1: from the body that sort of gradually dissipates as it
Speaker 1: gets farther away. Yeah, it also kind of feels like
Speaker 1: my holy personal space, shout not intrude upon right, don't
Speaker 1: put anything in my uric egg. And then he goes
Speaker 1: on to explain a bunch more stuff like that these
Speaker 1: are actually composed of a number umber of layers of
Speaker 1: underlying auras, one that he calls the health aura, which
Speaker 1: what There's one that has something to do with the
Speaker 1: Hindu concept of prana or life force. There's one that
Speaker 1: has something to do with desire. And the ability to
Speaker 1: see these alleged auras in this context is usually ascribed
Speaker 1: to people either with special powers of sight, some kind
Speaker 1: of psychic perception, or even more often, it seems, with
Speaker 1: special training, who have worked to harness their ability to
Speaker 1: see the auras of others. Now, as with many other
Speaker 1: psychic and paranormal phenomena. People who claim to be able
Speaker 1: to see auras as an objective physical phenomenon have have
Speaker 1: repeatedly been put to the test in parapsychology research, which
Speaker 1: from what I read, usually finds no evidence for any
Speaker 1: consistency in the perception of ouras. It seems to me
Speaker 1: like it is more likely an internal, subjective interpreted experience,
Speaker 1: not a perception of an objectively verifiable external reality. And
Speaker 1: these tests can include lots of different things. Like some
Speaker 1: of them, you might look at the auras of different
Speaker 1: people who are obscured by a screen, and then later
Speaker 1: try to identify the same people again when the screen
Speaker 1: is removed. Okay, so you saw there areas which person
Speaker 1: was standing where behind the screen, And usually people who
Speaker 1: claim to have our perception abilities cannot perform better than
Speaker 1: chance at this. Nevertheless, there does seem to be a
Speaker 1: real perception of the ability to uh to view a
Speaker 1: glow emanating from people, and so that does make you
Speaker 1: wonder like, okay, well, even if this is not an
Speaker 1: externally verifiable physical reality, people are for some reason believing
Speaker 1: that they see something. They look at somebody and they
Speaker 1: think they see a luminous clouds surrounding them. So, uh,
Speaker 1: could that have anything to do with the with the
Speaker 1: halo or nimbus tradition? One interesting coincidence that this might
Speaker 1: just be a total coincidence actually not have anything to
Speaker 1: not have any causal link. But one interesting thing I
Speaker 1: come across while I was poking around it or a
Speaker 1: perception on the internet, is that there is often a
Speaker 1: belief that there are seven layers of auras. They're actually
Speaker 1: different systems where people say there are different numbers of layers,
Speaker 1: but a common one is seven layers, which takes me
Speaker 1: back to the ancient Mesopotamian ogre HuaHua or Humbaba, who
Speaker 1: is said to have seven terrors or seven auras that
Speaker 1: he could take off one at a time. Oh, no,
Speaker 1: that that is that it's a very good, very good point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wonder if there's an actual connection there or mhm,
Speaker 1: because I mean we also we also have to think
Speaker 1: again back to the chakra tradition in which they're you know,
Speaker 1: you're generally dealing with the seven chakra systems, so that
Speaker 1: might be the way it's connected as well, right, But
Speaker 1: I think it's also worth noting that there are some
Speaker 1: major differences as far as I can see, between how
Speaker 1: these different religious concepts like the halo versus the aura
Speaker 1: are described. For example, in in a New Age mysticism,
Speaker 1: the aura is usually said to emanate from every living being. Again,
Speaker 1: I think there's probably some variation there, but it's a
Speaker 1: common claim that like even insects and plants and even
Speaker 1: sometimes inanimate objects would have their own aura, whereas the halo,
Speaker 1: both in Christian iconography and in its predecessors from ancient religion, uh,
Speaker 1: this would be reserved for special beings. It's the divine spotlight,
Speaker 1: like you said last time, where it's the emanation of
Speaker 1: terrifying God power. I mean, it does make me think
Speaker 1: about just the the idea of beholding somebody and that
Speaker 1: person being said particularly beautiful or charismatic, you know, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, interpreting that is kind of a holy glow.
Speaker 1: And in a way it does get back to the
Speaker 1: actual way that we we would behold someone, you know,
Speaker 1: in terms of how light you reflecting off of off
Speaker 1: of people or things, uh, you know, light entering our eyes, etcetera. Well,
Speaker 1: I think I'm gonna get to this in a minute,
Speaker 1: but I think there could well be something to the
Speaker 1: idea that beliefs about out things like halos or auras
Speaker 1: could very well be quite literally in the eye of
Speaker 1: the beholder. So I came across a study that asks
Speaker 1: an interesting question. Again, you remember I was trying to think. Okay,
Speaker 1: So if people do sometimes look at other people, or
Speaker 1: at figures or even statues of God's or something, and
Speaker 1: believe they see an an emanation of light around them,
Speaker 1: believe they see a nimbus or or a holy glow,
Speaker 1: could people's perceptions of these auras or halos sometimes be
Speaker 1: explained by cases of synesthesia. This was explored in a
Speaker 1: paper I was looking at. It was published in Consciousness
Speaker 1: and Cognition in the year twelve by Milan at All
Speaker 1: called auras and mysticism and synesthesia a comparison. So the
Speaker 1: authors here right that synesthesia quote is a condition in
Speaker 1: which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another,
Speaker 1: as when hearing a sound leads to the perception of
Speaker 1: mental colors or photisms, photisms or that's a standard term
Speaker 1: in the synesthesia literature. It's a type of visual stimulation
Speaker 1: that associates something that is not originally visual in nature,
Speaker 1: or is a different kind of stimulus. So one common
Speaker 1: example in synesthesia is grapheme color synesthesia, where certain letters
Speaker 1: of the alphabet or numerals are consistently associated with a
Speaker 1: color sensation. So imagine if, like if you don't experience
Speaker 1: synesthesia personally, try to imagine if, for some reason in
Speaker 1: your mind, the letter G was purple and the letter
Speaker 1: H was yellow. And there are a bunch of different
Speaker 1: kinds of this. There are people for whom I remember
Speaker 1: reading that. One classic attribution of synesthesia was that there
Speaker 1: was an account of a man I think maybe reported
Speaker 1: by John Locke, who said that every time he heard
Speaker 1: the sound of a trumpet or a French horn or something,
Speaker 1: he saw the color red. But there are also some
Speaker 1: less common types of synaesthesia that have specifically to do
Speaker 1: with the idea or image of individual people. So the
Speaker 1: authors here right quote. One of the relatively infrequent varieties
Speaker 1: is the one where photoisms are triggered by emotion affect
Speaker 1: laden stimulis, such as emotional words, photographs, human figures, and
Speaker 1: the faces of familiar people. For instance, for our a
Speaker 1: cynisthat who participated in this study, the side of a
Speaker 1: familiar person automatically triggers a mental image of a human
Speaker 1: silhouette filled with color. Different people are typically associated with
Speaker 1: different color hues depending on ours affective relationship with the
Speaker 1: person in question. E g. He claims that he has
Speaker 1: always associated his mother with the color blue. And I
Speaker 1: looked this up, and I found people online in forums
Speaker 1: sure enough talking about this exact experience today. Like I
Speaker 1: recall just one example, I came across one person saying
Speaker 1: that with their person color synis, these you have both
Speaker 1: of their parents were blue, but different shades of blue.
Speaker 1: But so anyway, the authors here wanted to tie this
Speaker 1: to the mystical concept of aura reading or aura perception
Speaker 1: and ask is it possible that the neurological phenomenon of
Speaker 1: person color synesthesia could be responsible for some of the
Speaker 1: claims of aura vision in these New age religious experiences?
Speaker 1: And they tried to figure this out by comparing the
Speaker 1: first person reports of four test subjects with person color
Speaker 1: synesthesia against the performance of aura readers and the reports
Speaker 1: of auras from the literature. Now, long story short, the
Speaker 1: authors here actually conclude that these phenomena are described in
Speaker 1: usually very different ways with different characteristics, and that experiences
Speaker 1: of person color synesthesia are probably not a major cause
Speaker 1: of belief in auras and are. They put up a
Speaker 1: table in their conclusion comparing a lot of the differences
Speaker 1: between these things, just to mention what I thought were
Speaker 1: a couple of the most relevant takeaways, and this one
Speaker 1: seemed maybe the most signific get to me. They say
Speaker 1: that people with person color synesthesia usually report seeing the
Speaker 1: photism quote in the mind's eye, so there would be
Speaker 1: like a strong mental association between a person and a color,
Speaker 1: But most synaesthetics do not believe that they are literally
Speaker 1: seeing the color radiating from the person's body directly in
Speaker 1: and mingled with their actual vision. It's a mental association,
Speaker 1: whereas the aura that the clairvoyant reports is usually said
Speaker 1: to be a direct visual stimulus, like it's a literal
Speaker 1: cloud or halo around the body that can be directly
Speaker 1: observed as you observe things with your eyes. Now, again,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of variation in this tradition, so I'm
Speaker 1: sure there are some some counter examples to that, but
Speaker 1: that seems to be the dominant way that it's reported.
Speaker 1: A couple of other things they report. Synesthesia is usually
Speaker 1: a lifelong condition, which is probably congenital, whereas the reported
Speaker 1: clairvoyant ability to eve auras is said to be a
Speaker 1: learned skill more often. Uh, they also say that person
Speaker 1: color synesthesia is triggered automatically and requires no effort. It's
Speaker 1: just a natural association. As naturally triggered as if I said, like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, what's the color of a banana? Like, you
Speaker 1: can't help but think it. It just comes automatically to
Speaker 1: your brain upon hearing the words that they say. Counter
Speaker 1: to that, or reading usually is said to be something
Speaker 1: that requires concentration and special conditions. Now it does make
Speaker 1: me wonder if now, obviously you would not have to
Speaker 1: be a synaestheistic person to engage in our reading. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, you could easily take on the trappings and
Speaker 1: the you know, the the dramatic aspects of this kind
Speaker 1: of performance. But if you were person with synesthesia, you
Speaker 1: would be uniquely outfitted to do this kind of work.
Speaker 1: You know, uh yeah, sure, you know, you know to
Speaker 1: not just say oh yeah, you're you're blue, you're light
Speaker 1: blue with that, right, you know, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: to pause and to concentrate and to put on the
Speaker 1: show that people need to see. But then you would
Speaker 1: have an actual color to refer to, right, oh, because
Speaker 1: you'd have an automatic association in your mind that sort
Speaker 1: of comes naturally there, like you wouldn't have to be
Speaker 1: straining for something, right. But I guess then you're probably
Speaker 1: getting into a question. Okay, in the field of aura reading,
Speaker 1: are there certain color you know? I'm sure there are
Speaker 1: certain colors associated with different things. There's probably a system,
Speaker 1: there's a color code, and that color code might not
Speaker 1: match up with the way that the synaesthesia because brain
Speaker 1: is is coding the world right exactly. That's another major
Speaker 1: difference is that that and they talk about this in
Speaker 1: the paper. The for people with person color synesthesia, they
Speaker 1: generally understand their individual pairings of certain colors with certain
Speaker 1: people to be to be ideopathic that you like, to
Speaker 1: come from their own personal associations, whereas usually people who
Speaker 1: believe that they can read auras say that they're like,
Speaker 1: we're they're referring to some kind of like objectively external
Speaker 1: thing that other our readers would supposedly see the same thing,
Speaker 1: and it would have a specific meaning. Yeah, yeah, you
Speaker 1: you you want to feel like you're tapping into some
Speaker 1: sort of cosmic overarching order when you have your r
Speaker 1: at as opposed to just like what this this guy
Speaker 1: uh thinks in his head when he remembers you. Sure,
Speaker 1: but one thing I did want to say, so a
Speaker 1: couple of things. First of all, I did think it
Speaker 1: was worth noting before relying too heavily on the study
Speaker 1: I just mentioned. I did find a pretty scathing criticism
Speaker 1: published in the same journal and Consciousness and Cognition the
Speaker 1: same year by Cardenia at All that basically like, while
Speaker 1: lauding the general thrust of this study, it also criticized
Speaker 1: the authors for allegedly being sloppy with a couple of
Speaker 1: things about like how they represented or presented parapsychology and
Speaker 1: the ura literature. I don't know that this would necessarily
Speaker 1: change the main findings, but but there was some criticism there,
Speaker 1: So if you're looking to this, look up the critical
Speaker 1: review as well. Um. But also I wanted to hand
Speaker 1: over my nothing to see here reward to the authors
Speaker 1: on this one, because it's always nice to see a
Speaker 1: full ride up of a hypothesis that does not pan out.
Speaker 1: But the authors in their conclusion do refer to something
Speaker 1: else that I thought was interesting. Uh They say, Okay,
Speaker 1: it doesn't look like there's all that strong of a
Speaker 1: link between the phenomenology of synesthesia and the phenomenology reported
Speaker 1: by people who do aura readings. It looks like they're
Speaker 1: reporting different kinds of experiences, so there's probably not a
Speaker 1: strong causal link. But they also say quote claims made
Speaker 1: by people claiming to be psychic or aura readers can
Speaker 1: be alternatively explained by proven science, And they refer to
Speaker 1: a paper by Dirden from two thousand four which they say,
Speaker 1: quote shows how phenomena which arise as a consequence of
Speaker 1: the normal functioning of the human visual system can explain
Speaker 1: the purported direct experience of the aura. For instance, the
Speaker 1: complementary color effect, which results from a temporary exhaustion of
Speaker 1: the color sensitive cells in the retina, could account for
Speaker 1: the presence of auric colors seen by a sensitive viewer
Speaker 1: when staring at a person. Uh. And they also say
Speaker 1: staring at a darker object a human figure against a
Speaker 1: bright background may induce the perception of a bright halo
Speaker 1: around the object. This is due to a contrast amplification
Speaker 1: mechanism built into the human visual system which allows for
Speaker 1: an efficient detection of edges. And so I thought this
Speaker 1: was interesting that Okay, uh, maybe this would apply even
Speaker 1: more directly to the halo or the nimbus than, uh,
Speaker 1: than than it would to the the aura perception. Because
Speaker 1: you can imagine a certain number of optical effects, one
Speaker 1: of which, of course, is is the afterimage. You know,
Speaker 1: so if you do you ever do that thing when
Speaker 1: you're a kid, where like you look at a picture,
Speaker 1: a certain sort of like negative image of a face
Speaker 1: on a page, and then they say, Okay, stare at
Speaker 1: this for twenty seconds, and then close your eyes and
Speaker 1: turn your head up, and you'll like see a face
Speaker 1: stare ring at you from behind your eyelids. That's a
Speaker 1: natural optical effect that the afterimage effects. That has to
Speaker 1: do with with the latent uh activation of retinal cells
Speaker 1: when you've been concentrating on an image. I think it's
Speaker 1: quite easy to see how something like that could create
Speaker 1: optical effects that seem quite mystical in nature and could
Speaker 1: allow you to believe you're perceiving either an aura of
Speaker 1: color in the shape of a person or surrounding a person,
Speaker 1: or imagining that you're seeing light emanating from a person. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I mean they're a whole host of optical of effects
Speaker 1: like that oftentimes you'll see them um utilized at a
Speaker 1: like a hands on science center. You'll you'll have a
Speaker 1: number of them you can do where it's like stare
Speaker 1: at this spinning thing and then look over here, or
Speaker 1: you know, look at these lines and then look at
Speaker 1: these lines and it's it's it's all really quite interesting.
Speaker 1: I mean, so sometimes it's something you do when you're
Speaker 1: a kid. Maybe you forget how how interesting it can be,
Speaker 1: but you know it. It goes to show just how
Speaker 1: how how our visual system, how it can be tricked
Speaker 1: into seeing things that are not quite there or enhanced
Speaker 1: to degrees that that you know, don't seem to line
Speaker 1: up with our normal day to day sensory world. One
Speaker 1: of my favorite things actually about our visual systems is
Speaker 1: that like you can prove to people through direct experience
Speaker 1: that their visual perception of reality is an illusion. Now
Speaker 1: it's not an illusion as in it's like a totally
Speaker 1: imagined hallucination. It's obviously based on real objects and light
Speaker 1: coming in around you, but the perception that you see
Speaker 1: an unbroken visual field of full color all around you,
Speaker 1: it really feels like you might see that, but you don't.
Speaker 1: And a couple of great examples for that you can
Speaker 1: show people are if you hold up like colored flags
Speaker 1: at the very periphery of somebody's vision, you can immediately
Speaker 1: people immediately realize like, oh, I think I perceive color
Speaker 1: in every direction, but I'm color blind in my peripheral vision.
Speaker 1: That that's like to try it sometime if you never
Speaker 1: have or get like different colored markers or flags or
Speaker 1: something to hold him up at the very edge of
Speaker 1: where you can see, you can't tell the difference in
Speaker 1: the colors. Another one is if you ever want to
Speaker 1: look up how to do this, there's a way where
Speaker 1: you can find the blind spot caused by your optic
Speaker 1: nerve as it as it routes information away from the
Speaker 1: retina in the back of your eye. Uh. There is
Speaker 1: a blind spot just right in the middle of your
Speaker 1: vision wherever you're looking and stuff where you can't see anything.
Speaker 1: And you can actually do experiments to bring this out,
Speaker 1: but it's totally invisible to you. You can't see the
Speaker 1: fact that you can't see this area. I think we uh,
Speaker 1: I think we talked about something like this one time
Speaker 1: with our Scott Baker about the fact that he he
Speaker 1: had like an injury to his eye or something that
Speaker 1: caused him to have an illusion of this kind where
Speaker 1: in fact he had a large blind spot in the
Speaker 1: center of his vision, but it didn't register as a
Speaker 1: blind spot as in what you might imagine like a
Speaker 1: like a field of black or white or something where
Speaker 1: there was no vision. Instead, the brain just tricked him
Speaker 1: into thinking he had total vision. But there were places
Speaker 1: where he actually couldn't see anything, right, So he would
Speaker 1: look at his dog and the dog would just have
Speaker 1: no face, right, But still the brains saying like, no,
Speaker 1: you're seeing fine, Yeah, this is this is everything's fine. Well,
Speaker 1: I want to go from here to talk to talk
Speaker 1: about halo's um as a as a purely optical phenomenon.
Speaker 1: So these are examples of halos that cannot not only
Speaker 1: are are visible to the naked eye, but they can
Speaker 1: be they can be captured via photography and frequently are
Speaker 1: um You know I've mentioned in the previous episode there
Speaker 1: are at least a couple of solar and lunar optical phenomena,
Speaker 1: you know, broad broad categories of of them that are
Speaker 1: worth singling out. And these phenomena have been observed for
Speaker 1: thousands of years. Yeah, this this is a really good point,
Speaker 1: and we sort of alluded to this in the last episode,
Speaker 1: but I just want to emphasize again that I wouldn't
Speaker 1: suggest that a person needed to have of a direct
Speaker 1: vision of light emanating from another person's body at some
Speaker 1: point in order to imagine something like a halo or nimbus.
Speaker 1: It could be it could be just pure imagination that
Speaker 1: brings out this imagery, or it could well be basic
Speaker 1: associate of thinking, mapping the properties of celestial objects or
Speaker 1: interesting optical phenomena in the skies or on the earth,
Speaker 1: and then associating that with a person, you know, with
Speaker 1: with godhood or transcending power, and then putting that on
Speaker 1: the body of somebody who is feared or revered. Right,
Speaker 1: And in the previous episode we mentioned some Roman and
Speaker 1: Greek examples of of these being observed and recorded. But
Speaker 1: I do want to drive home that, you know, the
Speaker 1: sun has always been of importance to two cultures throughout
Speaker 1: time and around the world. So anyone looking around looking
Speaker 1: up at the sun or the moon, we're likely to
Speaker 1: encounter these things. We just have, you know, certain recorded
Speaker 1: records that are that stand out, that are a little older. Um.
Speaker 1: I was looking around and I found a paper title
Speaker 1: the Sun Recorded throughout History by M. Vasquaz from two
Speaker 1: thousand nine, and they point to bone inscriptions from the
Speaker 1: Shang dynasty in ancient China, where we where they recorded
Speaker 1: solar phenomena. During the second millennium b C. They reported
Speaker 1: at least four phenomena, including a dark and gloomy sun,
Speaker 1: solar eclipses, and the solar halo, which I believe was
Speaker 1: a re un Interestingly enough, there's another one, uh that
Speaker 1: there's no translation of. Uh, So it does make me
Speaker 1: wonder what that particular solar phenomena might have been. Oh boy,
Speaker 1: I bet people have a lot of fun with that one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's when the Sun turns inside out and becomes the
Speaker 1: black hole Sun. I mean, I'm sure it's just another
Speaker 1: you know, commonly uh scene occurrence, so with the with
Speaker 1: the sun. But anyway, broadly speaking, a halo can occur
Speaker 1: anytime the Sun or the moon shines through thin clouds
Speaker 1: composed of ice crystals, and the effect can be caused
Speaker 1: by one of two or a combination of refraction and
Speaker 1: or reflection via these crystals. So the refractions are going
Speaker 1: to cause color separations, meaning the final results may be
Speaker 1: colored while we're reflected, light remains uncolored. The twenty two
Speaker 1: degree halo is the most common form of this, consisting
Speaker 1: of either a series of colored arcs or even complete
Speaker 1: circles of twenty two degree angular radius is around the
Speaker 1: sun or the moon and the coloration. If there's coloration,
Speaker 1: it seems to be red um on the on the
Speaker 1: on the on the inside, and a blur on the
Speaker 1: outside with the moon. These are sometimes called lunar halos
Speaker 1: or winter halos. And I was lucky enough to see
Speaker 1: one of these the last time I was at the beach.
Speaker 1: I was out walking on the beach at night, and
Speaker 1: you know, looking up at the moon and everything was,
Speaker 1: you know, beautiful but normal, and then all of a sudden, Uh,
Speaker 1: there's this tremendous halo effect, which if you don't know
Speaker 1: what you're you're looking at, it can look like a
Speaker 1: portal has opened up, like a great circular portal has
Speaker 1: opened up around the moon moon between you and the moon,
Speaker 1: like there's some sort of a connection or a cylindrical
Speaker 1: highway between you, uh and the lunar surface. It's pretty
Speaker 1: pretty interesting. Yeah. It makes me think about images and
Speaker 1: the paradiso of like rings or wheels of angels running
Speaker 1: about in concentric circles around the heavenly bodies. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I you know again, people throughout time would have witnessed these,
Speaker 1: and so you can you can imagine this having an
Speaker 1: impact on our our perception of you know, the world
Speaker 1: beyond and of the higher cosmos. Now, these are just
Speaker 1: the most common halo effects, these twenty two degrees, but
Speaker 1: there are many others, including the forty six degree halo.
Speaker 1: It's similar, but at twice the distance roughly uh, sometimes
Speaker 1: occurring in conjunction with twenty two degree halos and even
Speaker 1: other optical effects. So you might encounter, say a sun
Speaker 1: dog with a double halo. Now, what what are sun dogs?
Speaker 1: That's a different optical phenomenon caused by the sunlight. Yeah,
Speaker 1: SunDog also known as a mock sun. This is caused
Speaker 1: by refraction of sunlight in atmospheric ice crystals. These are
Speaker 1: generally colored patches of light to either side of the
Speaker 1: Sun at the same altitude as the Sun itself, So
Speaker 1: to a certain extent, it can look like three sons
Speaker 1: dawning over the Earth, or at least like one major
Speaker 1: son and like two sort of weirdly shaped. Many sons
Speaker 1: out on either side, the son's two sons. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: of course this instantly brings to mind the Chinese myth
Speaker 1: of the tin surplus sons that Ho Yee had to
Speaker 1: shoot down out of the sky. And I've not actually
Speaker 1: seen a connection. I couldn't find a connection drawn between
Speaker 1: those two, uh, though it wouldn't surprise me if there was.
Speaker 1: But there does seem to be a connection in Norse
Speaker 1: mythology the two wolves hunting the sun in the moon,
Speaker 1: So these would be Finier's son's skull and Hati wror Vintonson. Um.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if I got that second one wolf's
Speaker 1: name right, so um, cosmic wolves, go easy on me.
Speaker 1: But but there there there's obviously an eclipse connection as
Speaker 1: well here because these are supposed to be um like
Speaker 1: sun and moon consumers. But but I I did run
Speaker 1: across direct connections between the sun dogs that are sometimes
Speaker 1: seen to either side of the Sun and these these
Speaker 1: supernatural beasts. Well, coming back to the version of the
Speaker 1: halo that is either a ring around the head or
Speaker 1: an emanation of light as if from behind the head.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously, if you have never witnessed a solar
Speaker 1: eclipse before, and seeing the corona of the sun around
Speaker 1: the moon. I mean that that is a probably the
Speaker 1: most awe inspiring physical real thing I've I've ever witnessed
Speaker 1: like it. Well, it is a life changing thing to
Speaker 1: see with your eyes. And but be very careful of
Speaker 1: your eyes when when observing one. Oh yeah, and that
Speaker 1: that will come back to that in a second. Uh So,
Speaker 1: their whole host of rare optical effects related to these
Speaker 1: exam peoples I've shared that produced various halos, and and
Speaker 1: these have again been observed throughout time and and depicted
Speaker 1: in art two of the earlier Western examples of their
Speaker 1: recording are off cited are often Aristotle's writings on them,
Speaker 1: as well as the fifteen thirty five sun Dog painting,
Speaker 1: often held up as the oldest example of a clear
Speaker 1: atmospheric halo in art Um too to quote Aristotle, though
Speaker 1: in Meteorology from three BC this is the Webster translation quote.
Speaker 1: The halo often appears as a complete circle. It is
Speaker 1: seen around the sun and the moon and bright stars
Speaker 1: by night as well as by day and at midday
Speaker 1: or even in the afternoon, more rarely about sunrise or sunset. Now,
Speaker 1: it's obvious that seeing things like this in the sky
Speaker 1: can be awe inspiring. But is there reason to suspect
Speaker 1: connections naturally in history between seeing things like this and
Speaker 1: religious concepts. Yeah, absolutely it seems to be the case.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the best examples of this
Speaker 1: is to to look at the Miracle of the Sun
Speaker 1: or the Miracle of Fatima on October thirteenth, nineteen seventeen
Speaker 1: and Fatima, Portugal. Um A number if you've probably run
Speaker 1: across this before you read an article about it. Uh.
Speaker 1: It involved a variety of reports of colored lights in
Speaker 1: the daytime sky, of a dancing sun that seemed to
Speaker 1: move around in the sky, and even angelic apparitions. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and there are various interpretations of this, none of
Speaker 1: which are you know, can be held up as the
Speaker 1: definitive answers. Some have pointed to the possibility of mass
Speaker 1: hallucination or mass hysteria. Um, you know, you would have
Speaker 1: been dealing with a you know, a pretty religious bunch
Speaker 1: observing this, And in some cases you're dealing with the
Speaker 1: observations and um, you know, in recollections of children. But
Speaker 1: it does sound increasingly likely that it's more a matter
Speaker 1: of their having been first of all, a variety of
Speaker 1: alleged reports, you know, different stories people seeing different things
Speaker 1: in the sky and some seeing nothing at all out
Speaker 1: of the ordinary. So it's not like everybody looked up
Speaker 1: and saw something interesting. Some people looked up and didn't
Speaker 1: see what anybody was talking about. But it's the most outrageous,
Speaker 1: the most extreme accounts. They're the ones that survive and
Speaker 1: then evolve in retellings and in recordings. So again, skeptics
Speaker 1: OFVVOR a host of possible explanations for this particular incident,
Speaker 1: but it's um. It has been proposed that the whole
Speaker 1: thing might have started with some manner of a halo
Speaker 1: or sun dog sighting, or some sort of unique combination
Speaker 1: of these, you know, like the sun dogs with a
Speaker 1: couple of halos around the sun. And then here's the thing.
Speaker 1: As various folks start staring at the sun in all
Speaker 1: of these phenomena, or trying to see what the person
Speaker 1: next to them is is looking at, they end up
Speaker 1: staring at the sun too long and the experience temporary
Speaker 1: retinal distortion due to prolonged solar staring. Don't stare at
Speaker 1: the sun, folks, Yeah, I mean, remember when we had
Speaker 1: that solar eclipse in the last few years, you know,
Speaker 1: that was were everybody had to drive that home, Like,
Speaker 1: even though the sun is doing something really interesting or
Speaker 1: and it is even being you know, is even darkening,
Speaker 1: do not stare ahead because you can you can seriously
Speaker 1: damage your eyes and in the short term, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: could experience temporary retinal distortion, which could have just just
Speaker 1: add to these interpretations of like crazy things going on
Speaker 1: in the sky. Well, if you pair this with what
Speaker 1: I was saying earlier about the possible like the known
Speaker 1: effects of vision and optical effects within the eye and
Speaker 1: within the brain that are caused by say staring for
Speaker 1: a long time at a bright light source, like you
Speaker 1: could get effects that wouldn't even necessarily have to be
Speaker 1: something in the sky, but would also not just be
Speaker 1: people using their imaginations. They'd be real perceptions for the people,
Speaker 1: but they could be based on things like retinal effects
Speaker 1: afterimage things, or or over perceiving the edges of of
Speaker 1: outlines due to intense strain on the eyes. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: then once something like this is observed and thought about,
Speaker 1: and then once you've had a chance to ask other
Speaker 1: people about it, then you can often turn to pre
Speaker 1: existing scripts to explain what that might have been, such as, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, angelic beings such as aliens in an unidentified
Speaker 1: flying objects, that sort of thing. I just thought of
Speaker 1: a really great opening for a movie. Okay, So it's
Speaker 1: it's Fatima Portugal. Everybody's staring at the sun. They think
Speaker 1: they see angelic beings or a vision of the Virgin
Speaker 1: Mary or something like that, apparitions in the sky and uh,
Speaker 1: and then it slowly resolves and it's coming in, and
Speaker 1: it's coming in and what is it? And it's the
Speaker 1: predators drop ship and and this is Predator Portugal, and
Speaker 1: so all of the yacht hop out and they begin
Speaker 1: they begin their hunt. Is that in bad taste enough
Speaker 1: to be a Predator movie? Uh? Maybe, I just don't
Speaker 1: know that they'd get a lot of good sport. Like,
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're they're drawn to the really rough
Speaker 1: parts of the world, right. Oh, I guess there's not
Speaker 1: enough conflict here. There's gotta be like a war going
Speaker 1: on or something. Yeah, like futuristic l A And what
Speaker 1: was that one I'm supposed to take place for Danny
Speaker 1: Glover one? Yeah? Yeah, what if they arrived the predators
Speaker 1: were to arrive and they're like, okay, we have detected
Speaker 1: there's a lot of conflict right now. And then they
Speaker 1: get to their location and then they find out all
Speaker 1: the conflict is online, like in social media streams, and
Speaker 1: they're like, we brought all these weapons, and now we
Speaker 1: just have to get we have to get Twitter accounts
Speaker 1: instead and learn English. Oh no, no no. So they
Speaker 1: show up because they're like, okay, the heat signatures we've
Speaker 1: detected on this place in the surface of the earth
Speaker 1: indicate ongoing thermonuclear warfare. But then when they arrive it's
Speaker 1: just a bitcoin mining facility. Ah. They're like, well, we
Speaker 1: gotta go all in on bitcoin now. I guess we
Speaker 1: can travel it all the way here. But then they
Speaker 1: get to launch the new predator cryptocurrency, right assuming there's
Speaker 1: not already one. I'm sure there's already one. Is that there?
Speaker 1: There's probably there's already like a Garfield cryptocurrency, isn't there? Um?
Speaker 1: And I don't know, but I would not that they
Speaker 1: could be. I wouldn't. I wouldn't put money against you coin. Well,
Speaker 1: I guess we'll closest one out right here. But you know,
Speaker 1: we're gonna keep going with this um, this line of
Speaker 1: thinking though this idea of optical effects that then get
Speaker 1: interpreted in various ways. Unless plans change, I think the
Speaker 1: next episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind will continue
Speaker 1: on a similar topic. Yeah, I'm very excited about that.
Speaker 1: We're gonna be sort of moving on from Halo's mostly
Speaker 1: I don't know, it might come back up, but but
Speaker 1: but yeah, it's gonna be a lot of fun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right. Well, in the meantime, if you want to
Speaker 1: catch up on episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 1: you know where to find them. They're in the Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind fee. These are our core episodes,
Speaker 1: you know, mostly science and culture and so forth. They
Speaker 1: published on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays, we throw out
Speaker 1: our short form artifact episodes. On Monday's you got your
Speaker 1: listener mail, And on Friday, uh, you know, we we
Speaker 1: leave the most of the science up on the shelf
Speaker 1: and we take a little time to discuss a weird
Speaker 1: movie with our Weird House Cinema episodes. So yeah, again,
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts, wherever you find that podcast stream,
Speaker 1: just rate, review and subscribe. You know, if you have
Speaker 1: the ability to do those things, that helps us out
Speaker 1: huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Speaker 1: Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
Speaker 1: with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
Speaker 1: to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello,
Speaker 1: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
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