Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 2: is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I am Joe McCormick. And once again October content
Speaker 3: has spilled over the edge of the month.
Speaker 2: That's right. In today's episode, we're continuing our Halloween twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four express with an episode that was originally scheduled
Speaker 2: for late October, but our episode on the Hogs of
Speaker 2: Hell went a little long, ended up going to two episodes,
Speaker 2: so we bumped this one back a bit. It's a
Speaker 2: topic we've touched on briefly before, but it's a great one,
Speaker 2: taking us back to the world of oceanic monsters of
Speaker 2: 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 my and when we were separately
Speaker 3: thinking 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 2: They are. This is one of the things about the siren,
Speaker 2: as we'll discuss, is that there are takes on them
Speaker 2: in which they are essentially mermaids. It's essentially some version
Speaker 2: of the European North European mermaid tradition. There are versions
Speaker 2: of it in which they are just sort of beautiful
Speaker 2: ladies who sing sailors to their death, that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: And then other times they are essentially what we might
Speaker 2: think of as a harpie, you know, they are a
Speaker 2: winged creature, perhaps like an all out vulture type being,
Speaker 2: with even just the head of a maiden or the
Speaker 2: 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 2: Yes, And that's one thing we can be sure on
Speaker 2: when we look to really the most famous literary account
Speaker 2: of the sirens, but also the one that continues to
Speaker 2: raise a lot of questions because it does skim over
Speaker 2: some of the details. As we'll discuss, we are, of
Speaker 2: course talking about Homer's the Odyssey. I'm just going to
Speaker 2: read a quote here. This is from the Samuel Butler translation.
Speaker 2: I believe this is Circe warning Odysseus and his men
Speaker 2: about the challenges ahead. First, you will come to the sirens,
Speaker 2: who enchant all who come near them. If anyone unwarily
Speaker 2: draws in too close and hears the singing of the sirens,
Speaker 2: his wife and children will never welcome him home again,
Speaker 2: for they sit in a green field and warble him
Speaker 2: to death with the sweetness of their song. There is
Speaker 2: a great heap of dead men's bones lying all around,
Speaker 2: 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 2: Warbled to death. You know which, if you got to go,
Speaker 2: why not choose warbling? Why not? So this is you know, considered,
Speaker 2: You know this is This is probably the most famous
Speaker 2: literary description and non description of the sirens. But we
Speaker 2: have a lot of other materials that have depicted the sirens,
Speaker 2: described them or depicted them visually that also sort of
Speaker 2: compete with our imaginations here and end up in This
Speaker 2: is often the case with these things ends up coloring
Speaker 2: our absorption of Homer's original writings. We've had some great
Speaker 2: cinematic sirens over time, we've have, for example, to get
Speaker 2: into the adaptations of the Odyssey itself. There, of course
Speaker 2: the Three Sirens and No Brother, Where art thou? The
Speaker 2: three strange women that appear as beautiful washer women singing
Speaker 2: go to sleep, Little Baby. They of course lure in
Speaker 2: del Mar and 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 2: Well, he doesn't. Actually, we end up finding out later
Speaker 2: that he was never turned into a horny toad. He
Speaker 2: was captured by authorities because he was wanted.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, and they find him again in the movie
Speaker 3: theater Do Not Seek the Treasure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know, it's a great sequence in the film,
Speaker 2: a lot of laughs, and it works nicely in comparison
Speaker 2: to the theme of baptism that's also employed in the work.
Speaker 2: Elsewhere in cinema, we tend to see the idea of
Speaker 2: sirens employed more in terms of the evil mermaid. You
Speaker 2: want to have a mermaid, but you want an evil one. Well,
Speaker 2: you lean into this idea of the siren. Just a
Speaker 2: few quick mentions, and I'm missing a lot of them.
Speaker 2: I'm sure there's two thousand and one's Daygone. This is
Speaker 2: the Stuart Gordon film you have neat Split Tail that
Speaker 2: kidnaped Mermaids. In that, There's a two and another two
Speaker 2: thousand and one film titled She Creature that I have
Speaker 2: not seen since two thousand and one, but I remember
Speaker 2: having a nice little cast to it, and also having
Speaker 2: a monstrous mermaid. More recently, I don't know much about
Speaker 2: the plot details here, so I don't know where this
Speaker 2: falls in terms of sirens, but there's a Polish musical
Speaker 2: horror film titled The Lure that seems to have resonated
Speaker 2: with a number of viewers. I've seen some nice reviews
Speaker 2: of that. And then I think we've had at least
Speaker 2: a couple of different Mermaids slash Siren TV shows in
Speaker 2: recent decades, but I have not seen them, So we'll
Speaker 2: have to lean on our listeners to write in and
Speaker 2: tell us what those are like. Now again, to get
Speaker 2: back to what we were just talking about earlier, Though
Speaker 2: sirens are not definitively sea creatures or definitively mermaids, however,
Speaker 2: it's impossible to separate the two completely, so you know,
Speaker 2: we do have to acknowledge that to whatever extent. Sirens
Speaker 2: are based in this idea of undersea creature as well,
Speaker 2: you know, the idea of people and creatures from beneath
Speaker 2: the waves. Naturally, it goes back very long ways. As
Speaker 2: long as humans have gazed out across the waves or
Speaker 2: peered down through clear waters from the side of their boats,
Speaker 2: they've dreamed of a mirror world to our own, a
Speaker 2: place where every animal has its watery reflection, where intelligent
Speaker 2: human like beings, no doubt dwell as well, along with
Speaker 2: various monsters and gods and so forth. There is a
Speaker 2: paper by Nancy Easterlin. This is a two thousand and
Speaker 2: one paper again back to two thousand and one that
Speaker 2: we've we cited in a munch Older episode of the
Speaker 2: podcast titled Hans Christian Andersen's Fish out of Water, and
Speaker 2: she points out that the Babylonians recognize gods with fish
Speaker 2: features or hybridity. You have like what Adappa, the fishermen
Speaker 2: of Oneius, the teacher of wisdom, even Mighty Inky, the
Speaker 2: ancient Sumerian water god, is sometimes depicted as having a
Speaker 2: cloak of fish or scaled skin, and the chief place
Speaker 2: of worship was a ziggurat known as the House of
Speaker 2: the subterranean waters, and additionally fishtailed gods, water dragons and
Speaker 2: so forth found throughout the cultures of India, China and
Speaker 2: Japan and so forth. There's a quote from that Easter
Speaker 2: paper she writes some other mythological sea beings and deities,
Speaker 2: such as Poseidon and the Sirens were not originally associated
Speaker 2: with water and piicine anatomy. The sirens were originally birds.
Speaker 2: We'll get back to that in a minute, indicating that
Speaker 2: divine power and womanly allure became combined with the power
Speaker 2: and promise of the sea when ancient cultures overtook maritime
Speaker 2: war and trade. So in that paper she gets into
Speaker 2: a familiar theme on this show when we're talking about
Speaker 2: deities and supernatural beings, is that, of course they are
Speaker 2: passed down and they do not stay in one form
Speaker 2: or another. They are reused, recreated, you know, different different,
Speaker 2: various relaunches and reboots of the brand over time, and.
Speaker 3: In past episodes we've even talked about reasons for questioning
Speaker 3: the very idea of such a thing as a canonical
Speaker 3: 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 2: Yeah, I think we've talked about this before. You get
Speaker 2: kind of close to this idea when you look at
Speaker 2: a multi author of franchise, like say Marvel Comics, where
Speaker 2: you can set you know, you try to explain, like, well,
Speaker 2: who's Venom. Oh he's a villain of Spider Man. Oh well, no,
Speaker 2: he's also kind of a hero, he's kind of an
Speaker 2: anti hero. Oh yeah, And sometimes he's just straight up
Speaker 2: what we would think I was the protagonist of a story,
Speaker 2: So it just it changes. And there are probably better
Speaker 2: examples than Venom to turn to there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I think that's a good one, except it's
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 2: Yeah, all right, But coming back to the siren and
Speaker 2: getting into the Greek traditions here, we as the quote
Speaker 2: we read earlier attests to we certainly experienced the sirens
Speaker 2: and Homer's eighths century BCE work The Odyssey, and they
Speaker 2: are described as malicious, doomy women when we put in
Speaker 2: asterisk by that woman description, malicious do me entities anyway,
Speaker 2: who hang out on rocks and sing to passing sailors.
Speaker 2: But Homer neglects to physically describe them at all. So again,
Speaker 2: even by just briefly mentioning them as women, I'm airing
Speaker 2: because he does not ascribe gender to these creatures. But
Speaker 2: the thing is, it's really hard not to be infected
Speaker 2: by the various visual treatments of this encounter of these
Speaker 2: creatures from throughout Western art, you know, which has often
Speaker 2: served as a great opportunity to create dramatic and evocative
Speaker 2: scenes that make use of, you know, the the unclothed
Speaker 2: or partially unclothed male and female bodies. I was talking
Speaker 2: about this with my son yesterday when I was researching this,
Speaker 2: and I mentioned to him, and he already knows his
Speaker 2: way aroun myths and monsters pretty well. I mentioned, you
Speaker 2: know that that Homer never actually describes them. So they
Speaker 2: could look like a woman, they could look like a
Speaker 2: fish monster, they could look like a bird person. We
Speaker 2: don't know. And he asked, well, could they just be
Speaker 2: like a banana peal? And I I dare say they could.
Speaker 2: And he does not say that they do not look
Speaker 2: like banana peels, and provides no other physical description at all.
Speaker 3: They could literally be Ronald MacDonald.
Speaker 2: They could be. There's nothing in the Odyssey that says
Speaker 2: they're not. So I was reading a bit more about
Speaker 2: this in this is an older book. This is older publication.
Speaker 2: This is from nineteen seventy The Homeric Sirens by Gerald K. Gressith.
Speaker 2: This was publishing the Transactions and Proceedings of the American
Speaker 2: Philological Association, and in it the author spends a lot
Speaker 2: of time talking about what at the time were like
Speaker 2: two dueling interpretations of the sirens in Homer's the Odyssey,
Speaker 2: and I think it's interesting to look at them here.
Speaker 2: So the first one that he references is the idea
Speaker 2: that the sirens are soul birds, again playing on the
Speaker 2: idea that in other texts we have the sirens described
Speaker 2: an Avian term. And the connection here is that they
Speaker 2: would be representations of the souls of the dead in
Speaker 2: bird form, an idea that extends back through ancient Egyptian religion.
Speaker 2: This was an idea champion by the German classical archaeologist
Speaker 2: Georg Viker. In short, this view sees the sirens as
Speaker 2: things that emerge from hades and or the grave and
Speaker 2: as Grethis explains, Homer likely wouldn't have thought that the
Speaker 2: soul became a bird upon death in this scenario, but
Speaker 2: he might have been influenced by older ideas still present
Speaker 2: in art and culture of his time. Okay, then there's
Speaker 2: this other idea, and that is that the sirens are
Speaker 2: other world enchantresses. So an idea in this case champion
Speaker 2: by German archaeologist and translator Ernst Bouscher in response to
Speaker 2: Vicker arguing that homer sirens are anthropomorphic. This view sees
Speaker 2: the sirens not as creatures of the afterlife, but as
Speaker 2: something else that doesn't reside in Hades, though perhaps does
Speaker 2: resis guide in a different other world and might not
Speaker 2: even be directly malicious. That's the interesting thing about this
Speaker 2: kind of view. They might be more in line with
Speaker 2: muses offering song and information that were just not equipped
Speaker 2: to resist. We just can't handle a song this beautiful
Speaker 2: and or information that's tantalizing, and therefore we are just
Speaker 2: drawn into it. And this actually gets into the vagueness
Speaker 2: of how they actually bring about these men's dooms, because,
Speaker 2: as Aggressive points out, we don't have an answer for
Speaker 2: this in Homer either, and elsewhere, interpretations range from an
Speaker 2: overt and then the sirens ad him sort of situation
Speaker 2: to this idea that enraptured individuals just slowly die of
Speaker 2: exposure on the shores of the sirens, like they're drawn
Speaker 2: by the song, and then they just, you know, forget
Speaker 2: to eat, forget to stay out of the sun, and
Speaker 2: just waste away. And so in that scenario, it's like, well,
Speaker 2: the muses, like they may not even be entities that
Speaker 2: are aware of what they are doing. They're just sharing
Speaker 2: song and information, but we just can't 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 ship's wreck on
Speaker 3: the rocks and the sailors drone. I don't know where
Speaker 3: that idea came from, but that is what I thought
Speaker 3: was being described in the Odyssey.
Speaker 2: You know, Like I said, there are a lot of
Speaker 2: paintings of the sirens and or Odysseus, and I think
Speaker 2: they also almost at times subliminally charge one's understanding of
Speaker 2: this scenario. And there are several of these that I
Speaker 2: think I've just seen most of my life. There are
Speaker 2: a couple in particular that pop up in the time
Speaker 2: Life Enchanted World book series, of course makes use of
Speaker 2: a lot of excellent original art, but also a lot
Speaker 2: of classic art as well too. In particular, John William
Speaker 2: Waterhouse is the Siren from nineteen hundred. This is a
Speaker 2: like a vertical piece in which there is a nude
Speaker 2: woman with a harp some kind of or is this
Speaker 2: a lute?
Speaker 3: I believe it's a liar's Yeah, yeah, there you go,
Speaker 3: U shaped stringed instrument.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So she's playing it on the rocks, and there
Speaker 2: down in the water below her is an enraptured male,
Speaker 2: like a youthful male, who looks like he is probably
Speaker 2: going to drown. And so like, I think this really
Speaker 2: matches up with your read on it, and you know,
Speaker 2: I often I think thought about it in similar terms
Speaker 2: looking at these images, like the sirens just draw you
Speaker 2: in and then you know, stuff happens, but it's not
Speaker 2: like they're biting into you or anything that's right.
Speaker 3: But she in this in the waterhouse painting, the siren
Speaker 3: does not look malicious. She does not look like she's
Speaker 3: even really attempting to lure him. She's just kind of
Speaker 3: there existing, And he is up to his neck in
Speaker 3: the water, clearly about to die, looking like he has
Speaker 3: this combination of just joy and tear or yeah.
Speaker 2: And then the other piece that was definitely in the
Speaker 2: Enchanted World series is Herbert James Draper's nineteen oh nine
Speaker 2: painting Ulysses and the Sirens. This is a very captivating
Speaker 2: piece in which you see the familiar scenario that I
Speaker 2: may again describe her in a second where, of course,
Speaker 2: how does Odysseus how does he get past the sirens? Well,
Speaker 2: of course he clogs the ear holes of all of
Speaker 2: his men with wax, and then he himself is strapped
Speaker 2: to the mast of the ship, and then they just
Speaker 2: keep moving that way. The siren song doesn't infect the oarsman.
Speaker 2: It infects him, but he can't do anything about it
Speaker 2: 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 2: Yeah, and so in this particular piece by Draper, which
Speaker 2: you know is widely available you can find it on
Speaker 2: wiki commons, and so forth, we see, you know, this
Speaker 2: crazed look on Odysseus's eye. He's completely enraptured, straining against
Speaker 2: the ropes that bind him. Meanwhile, the naked sirens in
Speaker 2: this case seemingly seeming to transform out of mermaid form
Speaker 2: into humanoid form, just like the movie Splash as they
Speaker 2: crawl on the ship. And of course this is a.
Speaker 2: This image, of course, like a lot of the later
Speaker 2: treatments of Sirens, is of course very there's a certain
Speaker 2: sexual politics to all this and gender politics to it,
Speaker 2: because it's clearly showing like the feminine form is the
Speaker 2: aggressively alluring temptation that is coming at the men on
Speaker 2: 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 raptured. In the second painting, the Draper painting
Speaker 3: from nine These these are beings that are obviously trying
Speaker 3: to seduce the men, and they are posed with seductive
Speaker 3: ill intent.
Speaker 2: Yes, So these are the two that I was most
Speaker 2: familiar with. But there's a third I want to mention,
Speaker 2: and this is the Sirens and Ulysses from eighteen thirty
Speaker 2: seven by William Edie or Eddie I'm not sure which,
Speaker 2: but this one is also tremendous. I was not familiar
Speaker 2: with this but in this one, we see the sirens
Speaker 2: on their rocky island in the foreground, and in the
Speaker 2: background we see Ulysses send a ship and there's a
Speaker 2: lot of struggling going on there. But in the foreground
Speaker 2: the sirens are just kind of like, hey, sirens, party,
Speaker 2: come on over, guys. And then next to them we
Speaker 2: see rotting bodies and bones. It's quite quite a quite
Speaker 2: 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 that their attention even has anything
Speaker 3: to do with the men on the ship.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, So I already rolled through the basic
Speaker 2: scenario with Odysseus and the Odyssey and how they get
Speaker 2: past the sirens. But we have another encounter, and this
Speaker 2: one is detailed in the Argonautica from the third century BCE,
Speaker 2: and this one involves Jason in the Argonauts, how did
Speaker 2: they defeat the sirens? Well, they brought Orpheus along with them,
Speaker 2: the most famous bard of Greek mythology, at least as
Speaker 2: far as mortals go, and his song is even sweeter
Speaker 2: than the sirens. So you know, they explode or something.
Speaker 3: It's the Devil went down to Georgia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, actually, as Apollodorus described it, I believe the sweet
Speaker 2: song of Orpheus causes them to throw them selves into
Speaker 2: the sea and become rocks. And it would turn out
Speaker 2: that these were like the terms of their power, that
Speaker 2: if their song ever failed to enthrall someone, then they
Speaker 2: have to die. They were done for. And there are
Speaker 2: similar accounts with the Sphinx as well, you know, like
Speaker 2: if it's riddle as guest, it has to throw itself
Speaker 2: off 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.
Speaker 2: He gets to keep the golden golden.
Speaker 3: Devil's just out of gold fiddle. That's it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was some I forget who, some stand up
Speaker 2: comedian I think, was talking about how you know, it's
Speaker 2: clear that the Devil's music is more impressive in that
Speaker 2: particular song, we still give the wind to the mortals.
Speaker 2: But yes, I agree, it is like very much like
Speaker 2: the Devil goes down.
Speaker 3: To Geordia which text came first. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2: Now the exact number of sirens fairies. They're like between
Speaker 2: two and five, depending on what telling you're looking at.
Speaker 2: They have various names, different there are different takes on
Speaker 2: their parentage as well. Again, it's just how many there
Speaker 2: are to begin with, but their exact nature in large
Speaker 2: part due to Homer being vague about it. This has
Speaker 2: always been an area of discussion, and apparently it's not
Speaker 2: the only area that Homer's vague, and for instance, according
Speaker 2: to Gressith, he never explains that the cyclops as one eye.
Speaker 2: So I think there are moments like that where we
Speaker 2: just kind of like assume, like we like we know
Speaker 2: as the as the reader what it's supposed to be
Speaker 2: or what it becomes canonized as later. But you can
Speaker 2: apparently get into discussions with any of this of like, well,
Speaker 2: what did the original author intend? What was the shape
Speaker 2: of it? Then?
Speaker 3: Yeah, of course, then again, they 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 2: Yeah, And that's one thing that Gressi gets into as well,
Speaker 2: is that you have to end up looking for these
Speaker 2: answers in the contemporary religion, but also in contemporary folklore,
Speaker 2: to whatever extent you can pick at it through other sources. Now,
Speaker 2: I picked up a couple of my favorite monster books
Speaker 2: for a little more on these sirens, and I was
Speaker 2: looking at Jorge Luis Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings, and
Speaker 2: he points out three different traditions. He points out that
Speaker 2: Avid describes them as golden birds with the faces of virgins.
Speaker 2: He points out that Paulinius of Rhodes described them as
Speaker 2: women with the lower half of sea birds. And then
Speaker 2: much later medieval heraldry and bestiaries tend to present them
Speaker 2: just as straight up mermaids, again fusing these older classical
Speaker 2: tellings with Northern European traditions of mermaids. And I think
Speaker 2: it's this is a reality you just can't get away from. Then,
Speaker 2: when you keep tugging at siren myths, because the terms
Speaker 2: are often used interchangeably, like some some tales of the siren,
Speaker 2: you could sort of maybe make a better case that
Speaker 2: these are actually mermaid stories. But some of them are
Speaker 2: very are very juicy, and I just couldn't resist getting
Speaker 2: into a particular one. This is one that Borges also
Speaker 2: talks about. This This would have been the sixth century
Speaker 2: in northern Wales. It is said that a siren was
Speaker 2: caught and baptized, eventually becoming a saint in some traditions,
Speaker 2: by the name of Murgan or Murrgan, which I believe
Speaker 2: means Seaborn. She was reportedly carried to her baptism in
Speaker 2: a vat, and I believe and this is also tied
Speaker 2: to an Irish legend of lie Bon, and in fact
Speaker 2: I often I have elsewhere seen this character referenced as
Speaker 2: li Bon Murrgan, for example. I've also seen Morgan described
Speaker 2: as an early discredited saint, so I don't know if
Speaker 2: I don't believe that she is officially a saint in
Speaker 2: the Catholic Church. This would have been around what five
Speaker 2: eighty eight CE, I think, But she had a feast
Speaker 2: day at one point, and it was January twenty seventh,
Speaker 2: which I think is also devoted to various other saints
Speaker 2: 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 2: Yeah, yeah, And it comes back to what we were
Speaker 2: talking earlier about baptism and sirens and no brother where
Speaker 2: art thou. There's apparently a more complete telling of this story,
Speaker 2: and I found it in Carol Rose's Spirits Farries, Leprachauns
Speaker 2: and Goblins, where this luban murrgan. She starts out as
Speaker 2: a human, a human daughter of the High King of
Speaker 2: Ireland and a goddess Iatawan I believe is her name,
Speaker 2: and she's just a normal human child. But then she
Speaker 2: is caught in the flood of a sacred spring with
Speaker 2: her dog and carried to an underwater cavern and she's
Speaker 2: trapped there for a year. But then she prays that
Speaker 2: she might be free like the fishes, and so her
Speaker 2: lower half becomes like a fish, and her dog transforms
Speaker 2: into an otter.
Speaker 3: Well that is appropriate because otters are good boys.
Speaker 2: Three hundred years later, enter a cleric by the name
Speaker 2: of BioC and he hears her singing and then you
Speaker 2: know he's drawn to her singing. So they meet and
Speaker 2: she asked him to bring her to Saint Comgall, an
Speaker 2: actual historic saint, and this is where the vat comes
Speaker 2: into the picture. They throw her in a vat and
Speaker 2: she is willingly, you brought to the saint so that
Speaker 2: she may be baptized. But at her baptism she is
Speaker 2: or upon her baptism she is faced with a choice
Speaker 2: another three hundred years of life or immediate entry into heaven.
Speaker 2: So you know, do not pass go directly to heaven.
Speaker 2: She chooses heaven. So anyway, it's a lovely little little
Speaker 2: bit of folklore there. I like it quite a bit.
Speaker 2: And they're apparently depictions of the saint here, Saint leban
Speaker 2: or Saint Morgan, and yeah, sometimes she's depicted with a crown,
Speaker 2: yeah quite oh and then and some depictions you also
Speaker 2: see her order there beside her.
Speaker 3: Oh that's adorable.
Speaker 2: So essentially, you know, we have these Northern European mermaid traditions,
Speaker 2: not to be confused with similar tales from around the world,
Speaker 2: merging to some extent with classical tales of sirens, but
Speaker 2: plenty of winged descriptions remain that ultimately line up more
Speaker 2: with what you might think of today as a heartbeat.
Speaker 2: You know, ancient wind spirits eventually transformed into fiends through
Speaker 2: tellings of Greek myth depending on how you slice it.
Speaker 2: Harpies and sirens may have been both female bird human hybrids,
Speaker 2: but of different demeanors. So harpies you can think of
Speaker 2: more as vengeful cannibal to spoilers, while sirens are alluring,
Speaker 2: musical beings of temptation and is. If faced with both,
Speaker 2: you'd need to fight the harpies off with physical weapons,
Speaker 2: while the siren demands a more cerebral approach. So you know,
Speaker 2: in some ways, they're kind of if you're looking at
Speaker 2: them both as avian beings, they're kind of reflections of
Speaker 2: each other, one targeting the body and the other targeting
Speaker 2: the mind.
Speaker 3: Interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And we mentioned earlier the idea of the siren
Speaker 2: as a feminine monster, and Carol Rose in Giants, Monsters
Speaker 2: and Dragons discusses this. Briefly points out that in medieval
Speaker 2: European traditions, the siren takes on various symbolic powers. Quote
Speaker 2: for her attributed where the comb and the mirror of vanity,
Speaker 2: the fish or eel symbols of the entrapped Christian soul
Speaker 2: ensnared by luxury and vice, the small dragon the symbol
Speaker 2: of her liaison with the devil, and her nakedness taken
Speaker 2: as a sign of wanton sexuality. So then and to
Speaker 2: this day, in some depictions we see the siren presented
Speaker 2: as this monstrous female temptress, a corruptor of menfolk, but
Speaker 2: also like this, indeed, like something that has been summoned
Speaker 2: up to test ones resolve. Still, as Rose points out,
Speaker 2: there were still descriptions of the siren as a bird
Speaker 2: woman you know, well, you know, out of of the
Speaker 2: ancient world, pops up in the seventh and eighth century,
Speaker 2: leaving Monstroum also a twelfth century Latin Bestiaria, which describes
Speaker 2: them in much more harpy terms as winged, rock dwelling
Speaker 2: beasts well that will not only lure sailors to their death,
Speaker 2: but pounce on them with flesh rending talons. And then
Speaker 2: during the nineteenth century we even see again kind of
Speaker 2: like bumping up against all of these depictions of sirens
Speaker 2: as mermaids and naked women in the water, we see
Speaker 2: John William Waterhouse's eighteen ninety one pain Ulysses and the Sirens.
Speaker 2: And what do we see here? We see big birds
Speaker 2: with the heads of women, and they are the ones
Speaker 2: as 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 2: Yes these are Yeah, these are definitely aggressive human headed
Speaker 2: birds here. Waterhouse it would seem drew more on those
Speaker 2: classical Greek descriptions and depictions on vases and urns rather
Speaker 2: than what his contemporaries were doing.
Speaker 3: It's interesting because I think it's the same painter, John
Speaker 3: William Waterhouse that did the siren from nineteen hundred we
Speaker 3: talked about earlier, the much more haunting an ambiguous image.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can't help, but one I don't know much
Speaker 2: about about the man in his work, and you know
Speaker 2: who's painting for. But I wonder if with the nineteen
Speaker 2: hundred someone was like, I'd like you to draw me
Speaker 2: a siren and no birds this time, John, I wanted
Speaker 2: to be a lady.
Speaker 3: The one from nine years later does seem a little
Speaker 3: little more mysterious and maybe mature.
Speaker 2: And to be clear, these are just a few, like
Speaker 2: very famous examples of sirens and paintings from this period.
Speaker 2: There are others, So if you have favorites, feel free
Speaker 2: to send them into us, and you know, I'd love
Speaker 2: 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 pray 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 animal 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 interesting 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 fouturist 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 note
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: their mating behaviors. But in this case, these specific cicadas
Speaker 3: rely on what the authors call signal responds duets. So
Speaker 3: when it's time to mate, the male cicada initiates with
Speaker 3: a song particular to its species, and then if a
Speaker 3: female is nearby and she's receptive to mating, she will
Speaker 3: reply with a series of wing flicks, which can be
Speaker 3: recognized visually if you're very close. But more importantly, the
Speaker 3: wingflicks produce an audible sound that matches with that specie
Speaker 3: specific mating call put out by the male. So the
Speaker 3: wingflicks can usually be heard for a range of several
Speaker 3: meters and they will help the male locate the female
Speaker 3: the author's right quote. Because a wingflick reply is structurally nondescript,
Speaker 3: it must closely follow the queue in the male cicada's
Speaker 3: song in order to be recognized. But this leads to
Speaker 3: a kind of interesting situation where a clicking sound that
Speaker 3: has roughly the right sound quality and the right latency
Speaker 3: meaning I interpret this. I hope I'm right about this.
Speaker 3: I think they're talking about the the time delay between
Speaker 3: the end of the male cicada song and when the
Speaker 3: clicks start and stop in response to that. If it
Speaker 3: has these sonic qualities correct, it can be interpreted as
Speaker 3: a female sexual signal by the male cicada. And as
Speaker 3: an example, the authors mentioned that with some of these
Speaker 3: cicadas in the tribe Cicadatini, you can attract males by
Speaker 3: like snapping your fingers if you time it right with
Speaker 3: respect to their songs. But different species listen for different things,
Speaker 3: and some are more wary than others. I guess some
Speaker 3: just kind of rush right in there. Now, coming back
Speaker 3: to the katie DIDs, Chloribelius adults are most active in
Speaker 3: the summertime, and you will tend to find them perched
Speaker 3: in the upper branches of small trees and large shrubs,
Speaker 3: where they can take advantage of their green and white
Speaker 3: camouflage coloration pattern to hide in the foliage and rob
Speaker 3: I've attached a couple of pictures for you to look at,
Speaker 3: where one is against a white background where this animal
Speaker 3: is very easy to say see. Another one is of
Speaker 3: its standing in the tree branches, where it's much easier
Speaker 3: to see how it would just kind of blend in,
Speaker 3: especially if you weren't looking very close.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it is often the case. Right when you
Speaker 2: look at the specimen more in its natural habitat, it
Speaker 2: does blend in.
Speaker 3: So what do these kadieids do to mimic and hunt
Speaker 3: the cicadas they eat? Well? The authors write that they
Speaker 3: can quote attract male cicadas Hymiptera cicatada by imitating the
Speaker 3: species specific wing flick replies of sexually receptive female cicadas.
Speaker 3: This aggressive mimicry is accomplished both acoustically with tegmental clicks
Speaker 3: and visually with synchronized body jerks, so it's a two
Speaker 3: part mimic They imitate both the sounds and the visually
Speaker 3: recognizable body movements produced by female cicadas that are ready
Speaker 3: to mate, attracting male cicadas from the surrounding area, and
Speaker 3: when the male cicada gets close enough, the katie did
Speaker 3: will promptly snatch it, bite into it, and eat it.
Speaker 3: And observations of these predatory encounters find that the kdi
Speaker 3: did typically just eats the whole thing. The entire cicada
Speaker 3: except for the wings, and they leave the wings behind.
Speaker 3: And I thought that was interesting because I recall from
Speaker 3: our series on cicadas this was also true of some
Speaker 3: bird predators, which would eat the whole cicada except the
Speaker 3: wings and then just leave pairs of wings everywhere.
Speaker 2: Oh 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 KTI did to mate, the male KTI
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 a cicada could be used to help
Speaker 3: a predator eat a cicada. The predator could, for example,
Speaker 3: just follow the song to its source and eat the male,
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 kti 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 personally wondering if it could have something
Speaker 3: to do with the fact that the katie did already
Speaker 3: has a cryptic coloration pattern. It has camouflage, and so
Speaker 3: the fact that it may be using camouflage for one thing,
Speaker 3: it may be using camouflage defensively to hide from its
Speaker 3: own predators, from birds and so forth. You know, whatever
Speaker 3: preis on it, it may be able to get double
Speaker 3: use out of that by specializing in a type of
Speaker 3: predation that allows it to hold still and hide among
Speaker 3: the leaves and have its prey come to it right right.
Speaker 2: And also I guess maybe it's helpful if it's this way,
Speaker 2: it doesn't have to worry about the predators that could
Speaker 2: potentially be seeking out the mating 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 eaticated it
Speaker 3: as well. Right now. The authors in this paper argue
Speaker 3: that the katie DIDs versatility and mimicry probably follows from
Speaker 3: the application of a few simple rules. For one thing,
Speaker 3: Since they're 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 scamscript to the next waypoint.
Speaker 2: Hmmm, yeah, I mean often predatory. There you go, efficiency, yeah,
Speaker 2: predatory efficiency.
Speaker 3: But in general, the authors point out that a complex
Speaker 3: adaptation like the kd did has here, it requires multiple parts. Right,
Speaker 3: You've got to have sound producing organs, which they do
Speaker 3: in the four wings. You've got to have sound perceiving organs.
Speaker 3: You've got to be able to listen so you know
Speaker 3: what to respond to. And you've got to have the
Speaker 3: neural processing required to make that match right, to produce
Speaker 3: the appropriate sound to match the call you just heard.
Speaker 3: And fortunately for the kd DIDs, they already have all
Speaker 3: three capabilities for use in their own mating. Remember that
Speaker 3: from earlier they also use sound in their own mating. However,
Speaker 3: there's an interesting complication here, which is that if this
Speaker 3: predatory mimicry of cicada mating duets were based on the
Speaker 3: mating behavior of the predator species, you would expect the
Speaker 3: kd DIDs to also engage in duets, and as far
Speaker 3: as the authors could tell, this was not the case.
Speaker 3: The kd DIDs do not seem to do male female duets. Instead,
Speaker 3: it seems as of the time of this paper that
Speaker 3: males generally produce a song which attracts a silent female
Speaker 3: to its source. So the male makes a song, the
Speaker 3: female comes and finds the male. But the authors acknowledge
Speaker 3: that 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 that the katie did also does
Speaker 3: this body jerking behavior which accompanies the mimicry clicks, and
Speaker 3: it does not seem to be physically necessary to make
Speaker 3: the click sound, so it's probably also a mimic behavior
Speaker 3: in this case to kind of look like a female
Speaker 3: cicada 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.
Speaker 2: Eaten fascinating it, I mean as lines up with the
Speaker 2: basic siren script right absolutely.
Speaker 3: But in fact, to come back to the Odyssey, one
Speaker 3: thing we see in the Odyssey is that the prey
Speaker 3: of the sirens, at least one 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 write quote. Even though Cobonga ox lay, the species
Speaker 3: we observed being attracted by Chlorobelius luco viridus, has a
Speaker 3: structurally obvious song cue and an easily timed repetitive rhythm,
Speaker 3: we have found this species to be extremely resistant to
Speaker 3: our artificial signals. Poorly timed finger snaps cause males of
Speaker 3: many species to become wary with k i ox lay
Speaker 3: an especially strong example. Perhaps persistent aggressive mimicry by Chlorobelius
Speaker 3: lucoviritis has selected kox lay males for greater sensitivity to
Speaker 3: the occasional, poorly timed click. This possibility also suggests an
Speaker 3: additional evolutionary route for the cicada prey, the addition of
Speaker 3: false cues that elicit premature katie did replies without queuing
Speaker 3: female cicadas, whose response depends on a particular combination of
Speaker 3: song elements. Long continued selection of this sort might account
Speaker 3: for the extraordinarily complex songs of many Australian cicatatine species
Speaker 3: found in the arid Acacia dominated habitats where see Lucoviritus
Speaker 3: is most common. So that's very interesting. We may have
Speaker 3: some cicada odysseuses on hand who have evolved a defensive
Speaker 3: reaction to this type of predatory mimicry by, for one thing,
Speaker 3: throwing out some decoy sound signals that are not going
Speaker 3: to get females of its own species responding. But if
Speaker 3: you do hear clicks in response to them, that's something
Speaker 3: to be afraid of. Lets you know there's a monster
Speaker 3: nearby and then also perhaps by being more sensitive to
Speaker 3: incorrect timing on the response clicks in the duet.
Speaker 2: Interesting. Interesting, So yeah, so their use of the song
Speaker 2: become becomes more nuanced in a way, in a way
Speaker 2: to outwit these pretenders. Yeah, I mean one is tempted
Speaker 2: to make various comparisons, to say, conversations between humans, perhaps
Speaker 2: in a dating scenario, you know, like a first date
Speaker 2: where one might throw out, hey, you know, did you
Speaker 2: see such and such movie? And I thought it was
Speaker 2: pretty good and they're like, yeah, it's great. Well, then
Speaker 2: you know that's a red flag fill in your own example. Well, sorry,
Speaker 2: I'm a little slow today. I can't come up with
Speaker 2: a good example that we can all stand behind as
Speaker 2: being the red flag for a first day.
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 2: Yeah. Well this is fascinating and again more evidence to
Speaker 2: a point that we're always making on the show, and
Speaker 2: that is that anything you find in myth and in
Speaker 2: legend and fictional monsters, there is almost always something equally
Speaker 2: 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 2: Now, all right, I have one more little curiosity to
Speaker 2: consider here. Take it from the cabinet of curiosity, if
Speaker 2: you will, because it concerns a very learned individual who
Speaker 2: seems to have thought very long and hard on the
Speaker 2: reality of sirens, as well as the reality of some
Speaker 2: other things that I don't think one typically thinks of
Speaker 2: as having an objective reality. So I ran across this
Speaker 2: in Literature and Lore of the Sea, edited by Patricia
Speaker 2: Ann Karlson, specifically, in an article titled the Extraordinary being
Speaker 2: Death in the Mermaid and Baroque literature Eileen S. Goodman,
Speaker 2: She points out the seventeenth century German polymath and Jessuit
Speaker 2: scholar Athanasius Kircher, who is sixteen o two through sixteen eighty,
Speaker 2: in one of his natural history volumes, seems to give
Speaker 2: serious consideration to not only the objective reality of Noah's Ark,
Speaker 2: which isn't completely out of the ordinary. He still see
Speaker 2: that kind of thing going on today, but also spends
Speaker 2: a lot of time trying to figure out where Noah
Speaker 2: put all of the sirens.
Speaker 3: Right next to the unicorns.
Speaker 2: Obviously, well, we'll get to unicorns. He also believed in them.
Speaker 2: I guess brief refresher for those of you who don't
Speaker 2: remember the story of Noah's Ark is this Old Testament
Speaker 2: Book of Genesis tale concerning the Great flood and one
Speaker 2: anti Theiluvian patriarch's mission to save all of the world's
Speaker 2: animals from the flood in a great big boat. It's
Speaker 2: one of various great flood myths found throughout the ancient world. Obviously,
Speaker 2: this is not a story that easily endures. Is very close,
Speaker 2: you know, literal scrutiny. When you dig down into the
Speaker 2: two by two details of the endeavor. I think you
Speaker 2: know a lot of us who grew up, you know,
Speaker 2: going to Sunday school class. You reach that point where
Speaker 2: you're like, wait, how does this work? Now? Wait to
Speaker 2: two of each animal, you know, and then various questions arise.
Speaker 2: But Kircher was very into figuring out exactly how all
Speaker 2: of this would work, and he, to be clear, seems
Speaker 2: to have believed in the reality of mermaids or sirens
Speaker 2: as well as unicorns, based on some like the tail
Speaker 2: and the bones of a mermaid that were in his museum.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, so he had empirical evidence.
Speaker 2: He's like, we have evidence, this is what these were.
Speaker 2: And he describes them as amphibians and stresses that there
Speaker 2: is some controversy as to whether these particular amphibians were
Speaker 2: or were not received into the arc. And I imagine
Speaker 2: some of you might have wondered about this, how did
Speaker 2: what happened to the mermaids? So he explains in his writing,
Speaker 2: well that others have said, well, perhaps they lived on
Speaker 2: the outside of the arc, outside of this great boat,
Speaker 2: perhaps in some sort of a nest, something like a
Speaker 2: 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 2: Yeah, so there was some disagreement with people asking the
Speaker 2: same questions here. Where did the mermaids or sirens go?
Speaker 2: Some said they stayed in nests on the outside of
Speaker 2: the arc, but Kircher dismisses the idea, stating that this
Speaker 2: is a This is a quote translated quote from his work,
Speaker 2: as referenced in that article by Goodman Holy writ is
Speaker 2: in agreement on the matter of the little stalls into
Speaker 2: which the animals were district and it does not teach
Speaker 2: that any existed outside. And I believe he argues against
Speaker 2: the idea that any creature lived outside the ship during
Speaker 2: the cataclysm, like even fish. I mean it, it's I
Speaker 2: have no answer there. It's like, even if you're even
Speaker 2: if I'm going to assume that fish surely get away
Speaker 2: with living outside of the arc. I think he's making
Speaker 2: the case that amphibian creatures could not. They would have
Speaker 2: to be aboard the arc. H Okay, So I'm assuming here,
Speaker 2: based on what I'm reading, that Kircher is arguing that
Speaker 2: the sirens would have ridden inside the arc, and I
Speaker 2: have to acknowledge that, yes, that sounds ludicrous to even
Speaker 2: be wondering about that. But I also I don't want
Speaker 2: to give everyone the wrong idea about this man, because
Speaker 2: by all accounts he was. He was a brilliant mind,
Speaker 2: you know, a brilliant man of his time, sometimes described
Speaker 2: as being the last man to know everything. So this
Speaker 2: is a guy who studied religion, linguistics, geology, medicine. He
Speaker 2: tried to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and claimed that he
Speaker 2: had translated them, but apparently not. He wrote an encyclopedia
Speaker 2: on China. He kept a vundokama, or a cabinet of curiosities,
Speaker 2: and he spent the majority of his career at Roman College.
Speaker 2: He was fascinated by fossils. He made proposals about the
Speaker 2: cause of plague that apparently line up with some of
Speaker 2: the actual the actual reality of it. He was intrigued
Speaker 2: by various devices, made little inventions. He was a science
Speaker 2: superstar of his day, even if he's often eclipsed in
Speaker 2: our recollection by such contemporaries as Galileo. And there is
Speaker 2: the fact that he seemed to believe in the existence
Speaker 2: of both mermaids and unicorns based on the evidence in
Speaker 2: 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: devotion to to alchemy and trying to trying to work
Speaker 3: things out based on the literal interpretation of the Bible
Speaker 3: and things like that.
Speaker 2: So a lot of books have been written about him,
Speaker 2: and I ran across there's actually a review of a
Speaker 2: particular book about him. This was in this case, the
Speaker 2: review was written by the Vatican Observatory's brother, Guy Konsumajno,
Speaker 2: who I had the pleasure to hear speak here in
Speaker 2: Atlanta many years ago. Was not speaking about this. Who
Speaker 2: was speaking, I believe about religion and extraterrestrials, the sort
Speaker 2: of like speculative material. But yeah, he wrote this article
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty one titled a mishmash of brilliance and absurdity,
Speaker 2: and he stressed that, yeah, there's here's this guy Kirchner,
Speaker 2: who was brilliant, you know, was obsessed with optics, acoustics,
Speaker 2: you name it just like everything that could be learned
Speaker 2: or known about the world. He was all in on it.
Speaker 2: But on the other hand, he wrote three volumes on
Speaker 2: how Noah managed to fit all of the animals and
Speaker 2: their food into the arc, and then also speculates about
Speaker 2: 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 2: Kanzemaijno writes quote, Kirchner makes a fascinating contrast in style
Speaker 2: with Galileo. While both were shameless self promoters, Galileo was
Speaker 2: far more rigorous, focused, and polemical in his science. Kirchner's
Speaker 2: theme was simply wonder and delight, reporting marvelous machines and novelties,
Speaker 2: like a seventeenth century version of Ripley's Believe It or Not.
Speaker 3: Well, Far be it from me to find fault there
Speaker 3: in wonder and delight.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know it kind of you know, drives
Speaker 2: home that you know. Wonder and delight are great, but
Speaker 2: they too can be kind of a siren song, steering
Speaker 2: you off into I mean in the worst cases, you know,
Speaker 2: misinformation and delusion, but even into maybe just ideas that
Speaker 2: are not ultimately that productive but maybe entertaining. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Did Kirchner's three volumes on Noah's art like hurt anything,
Speaker 2: Did his belief in the physical reality of unicorns and
Speaker 2: mermaids hurt anything? Well? Maybe not, Maybe it's fine.
Speaker 3: I guess it's hard to say about that kind of thing, though,
Speaker 3: I would say in general, it's absolutely the case. I
Speaker 3: think that the estheticization of ideas can in some cases
Speaker 3: have very negative consequences. Appreciating ideas primarily for whether they
Speaker 3: 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 dangerous.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, We've We've discussed multiple times in the show
Speaker 2: various hypotheses that you know, sometimes are quite enthralling and
Speaker 2: and even inspiring, but are they the best hypotheses with
Speaker 2: which to understand the universe? And that's not always the case.
Speaker 2: And if you just follow what's exciting, then you're, you know,
Speaker 2: you're in search of with Leonard Nimoy or something, you know,
Speaker 2: you're you're in the realm of let's just talk about
Speaker 2: these ideas because they are entertaining and not because they
Speaker 2: 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 2: Absolutely, So you know, don't put wax in your ears.
Speaker 2: Put put put a little Stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 2: in your ears and hopefully that'll help you out. All right,
Speaker 2: We're gonna go ahead and close up this episode, but
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Speaker 2: Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core
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Speaker 3: Huge Thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
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