Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 1: today I want to start off by telling a short story.
Speaker 1: So in the second or third century CE in Roman Britain,
Speaker 1: in the settlement that is now the English city of Leicester,
Speaker 1: there was a Roman named Servandas, and Servanda's discovered that
Speaker 1: his cloak was missing. Not just missing, he knew it
Speaker 1: had to have been stolen, but who stole it? Well,
Speaker 1: he'd have to draw up a list of suspects. He
Speaker 1: didn't know for sure. Now, Servandas was not plenty of
Speaker 1: the younger. He was not an elite. He was not
Speaker 1: some rich big shot with diarrhea of the pen. Hey,
Speaker 1: we love plenty of this show, we do. But he
Speaker 1: he was originally who had diary of the pen Uh,
Speaker 1: not one of these people, one of these power people
Speaker 1: who had their memoirs preserved for us. So how do
Speaker 1: we know about the stolen cloak of this common person, Servanda's.
Speaker 1: Well we know about it because in the mid two thousand's,
Speaker 1: researchers from the University of Lester working at a site
Speaker 1: within Lester dug up a rectangular sheet of lead about
Speaker 1: seven inches by three inches, carved with an inscription a curse.
Speaker 1: It was an entreaty to a god to smite his
Speaker 1: enemy for stealing from him, and it reads quote to
Speaker 1: the god Maglus, I give the wrong doer who stole
Speaker 1: the cloak of Servandas that he destroy him before the
Speaker 1: ninth day, the person who stole the cloak of Servandas.
Speaker 1: So you got a nine day timeline basically nine days
Speaker 1: to get me back the cloak, or may you be
Speaker 1: destroyed by Maglus. And then Servanda's helpfully supplies Maglus, which may,
Speaker 1: I think it's been speculated be a Celtic word meaning prints,
Speaker 1: often names of gods or things that are just a
Speaker 1: word for prince or king, like bay All or moluk Um.
Speaker 1: But there there's a list of eighteen or nineteen possible subjects,
Speaker 1: including people like and we don't know who these people are,
Speaker 1: but people like Sylvester and Germanis, and Riomandus and Regulus.
Speaker 1: So who are these guys? No idea, but Servandas was
Speaker 1: comfortable condemning them to the talents of Maglus with this curse.
Speaker 1: Now I know some of you are probably wondering, well,
Speaker 1: who stole the cloak? Who you know? Who is the thief? Here?
Speaker 1: My question is was this a nice cloak? Was it
Speaker 1: just was? Is that the thing? Was it just really nice?
Speaker 1: Or is he just very spiteful over it's it's lost? Well,
Speaker 1: it could be those things, or it could be that
Speaker 1: Servandas was very poor and could only afford one cloak,
Speaker 1: and you know that that a cloak was a significant
Speaker 1: possession to him, and so stealing a cloak from Servandas
Speaker 1: in second or third century Roman Britain might be like
Speaker 1: stealing your car. Now he has time and energy to
Speaker 1: put into this whole curse business, though I'm I'm assuming
Speaker 1: there's a fee associated with that. Well that's a good point,
Speaker 1: and we'll come back to that in a minute. Yes,
Speaker 1: you raise good questions. So today, obviously we're going to
Speaker 1: be talking about curses, and Robert, I don't know about you,
Speaker 1: but I love curse movies. I think like which is,
Speaker 1: curse movies are really fun. They're one of my favorite
Speaker 1: genres of horror. Like a witch puts a curse on
Speaker 1: somebody and you've got to figure out what to do.
Speaker 1: So in this case, you're talking about films where where
Speaker 1: the protagonist is cursed and has to work their way
Speaker 1: out of the curse. Yeah. Now there's a variation on
Speaker 1: this that I don't like at all, which is like
Speaker 1: the Thinner model, which I don't even want to get
Speaker 1: into the details of. But that is just like an
Speaker 1: unusually reprehensible movie or story in general, putting that kind
Speaker 1: of thing aside, where like the person cursed really deserved it. Well,
Speaker 1: that's a film that that explores a very common trope,
Speaker 1: right where the making and the spitting of curses is
Speaker 1: the domain of an outsider people or a people of
Speaker 1: like a lower cast within a given society. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a very common trope. I I don't I don't really
Speaker 1: like that kind as much. I like the Witch curses.
Speaker 1: But we should specify for the purposes of the episode
Speaker 1: what a curse is. So, a curse is an invocation
Speaker 1: of magic power to cause injury or misfortune to someone
Speaker 1: or something. It is essentially the inversion of a blessing.
Speaker 1: A blessing is a benediction, it's a wish of good
Speaker 1: will towards someone, and a curse is a malediction, a
Speaker 1: wish invoking magic to cause ill will, to to convey
Speaker 1: ill will and cause ill fortune on somebody else. Other
Speaker 1: names would be like schaden zob or black magic, binding,
Speaker 1: cutting off. It's using supernatural power to hurt someone. An
Speaker 1: invocation aspect here is key because it's not a mere prophecy.
Speaker 1: It's not someone uh, you know, casting bones and saying, oh,
Speaker 1: this will transpire, even saying this will transpire because of
Speaker 1: this transgression. No, it's a it's it's an appeal to uh,
Speaker 1: to a god or some divine force to to punish,
Speaker 1: or just simply a magical punishment that essentially emerges from
Speaker 1: the lips or from writing and then works its its
Speaker 1: will on its own. Yeah, curses are not just predictions.
Speaker 1: They are spoken into existence. Now. Curses are often unleashed
Speaker 1: by the gods in our our myth and our fiction,
Speaker 1: cursed placed upon individuals or groups of individuals. One thinks of, say,
Speaker 1: the curse of Eve, the mark of Cain uh, the
Speaker 1: various individuals that have been cursed in other fictions, the
Speaker 1: curse of Innocus uh, dire words becoming dire realities uh,
Speaker 1: and is one would expect right when the words are
Speaker 1: rolling off the lips of a god. All a god
Speaker 1: needs to do is speak right and things start happening.
Speaker 1: You also have various monsters that are born from curses,
Speaker 1: ghosts that are born from curses, even animals too that
Speaker 1: are the prod up of curses. I'm thinking about, Uh,
Speaker 1: some of the Greek myths concerning spiders and the curse
Speaker 1: placed on a rackney. Um, Pumpkinheads a curse. Pumpkin Heads.
Speaker 1: The werewolf is often a curse as well. Uh, So
Speaker 1: we have a number of different pots. But I kind
Speaker 1: of forgotten about Pumpkinhead. Of exactly how Pumpkinhead worked in
Speaker 1: the horror movie was a witches curse. Yeah, guy, He
Speaker 1: he wants revenge on some teenage motor bikers, so he
Speaker 1: goes to a witch to cast a curse on them.
Speaker 1: Not a great film, but it does have some great
Speaker 1: monster effects. And there are any number of cursed villains
Speaker 1: in fiction, right, I mean, everybody loves a good good
Speaker 1: villain was some sort of significant curse placed upon them.
Speaker 1: For instance, in Big Trouble and Little China, we're told
Speaker 1: that Lo Pon is cursed by China's first sovereign emperor,
Speaker 1: uh quinn s Long, and he has the curse of
Speaker 1: no flesh. Interestingly enough, will return to lo Pan in
Speaker 1: a bit. Oh well, I look forward to that now.
Speaker 1: We also would be remnist if we didn't mention our
Speaker 1: old fend for uh Connor McCloud, Connie mack. The is
Speaker 1: essentially of a version of the wandering immortal character, a
Speaker 1: character that is, that is, to some extent cursed with immortality.
Speaker 1: This is always a lovely a trope in fiction and
Speaker 1: mythology folklore as well, the thing that might seem a
Speaker 1: blessing but is actually a curse. Oh yeah, like the
Speaker 1: idea that when Jesus prophesied that there was at least
Speaker 1: someone standing there who was watching him preach, who would
Speaker 1: not pass away before the Kingdom of God came with power.
Speaker 1: Um that you know that that has led to the
Speaker 1: idea of the wandering Jew, that someone standing there that
Speaker 1: day is actually immortal and still walking around. Right. There's
Speaker 1: a there's another variation on this theme. There is I
Speaker 1: believe it's a Russian tale um or at least East
Speaker 1: Eastern European tale called the Soldier in Death. Anyone is
Speaker 1: a frank fan of Jim Hinson's The Storyteller series, there's
Speaker 1: a wonderful rendition of that little number. But it in
Speaker 1: this story that the soldier eventually is cursed with a
Speaker 1: form of immortality because he's basically um frightened. Everyone death
Speaker 1: is afraid of him, the devils are afraid of him.
Speaker 1: Nobody will let him into heaven or hell. Oh that's
Speaker 1: a good story. Uh. So I want to bring it
Speaker 1: back to to the curse invoking Maglas against the person
Speaker 1: who stole the cloak of servandas so, I mentioned that
Speaker 1: this was inscribed on a lead tablet, right, And it
Speaker 1: turns out that there are thousands of curse tablets like
Speaker 1: this from the ancient world. Uh. This one, like most
Speaker 1: of them, is a small lead or pewter sheet on
Speaker 1: which a curse is inscribed with the stylus. And uh,
Speaker 1: sometimes they'll be rolled up into kind of a scroll,
Speaker 1: like the metal will be rolled up. And one thing
Speaker 1: that you can discover by reading various curse tablets from
Speaker 1: antiquity is that an extremely common genre of curses in
Speaker 1: actual history appears to consist of curses against people who
Speaker 1: stole things from you. And one quote I came across
Speaker 1: that I thought was interesting. Richard Buckley, co director of
Speaker 1: the University of Lesser Archaeological Services who is involved in
Speaker 1: that discovery, uh said quote. It has been suggested, on
Speaker 1: the basis of name forms and the value of items stolen,
Speaker 1: that the curses relate to the lives of ordinary people
Speaker 1: rather than the wealthy, and that they were perhaps commissioned
Speaker 1: by the dedicator from a professional curse writer. So so
Speaker 1: generally here we're not dealing with rich people coming to
Speaker 1: do curses. We're dealing with common people dealing with common problems,
Speaker 1: like the theft of an item from their from their
Speaker 1: person or from their house. And when that gets stolen
Speaker 1: and they don't know what to do, they can go
Speaker 1: say to a scribe and pay that person, you know,
Speaker 1: somebody who's literate, and pay that person to write out
Speaker 1: a curse on a tablet for them. You know, I
Speaker 1: think we can all understand and relate to this, uh,
Speaker 1: this impulse. If you've ever been a victim of a
Speaker 1: crime like this and in a theft for instance, and
Speaker 1: the police are like, yeah, there's nothing we can do, sorry,
Speaker 1: you're just out however much money you lost on that
Speaker 1: iPhone charger or whatever it was stolen out of your car. Uh,
Speaker 1: And then you uh, you know, what what what's left
Speaker 1: to do? Maybe spend a few dollars and and curse
Speaker 1: the individual, right, I mean what percentage of small thefts
Speaker 1: are actually solved and you get your stuff returned? I
Speaker 1: would have to guess almost none. Yeah. Absolutely. Now. Now
Speaker 1: this does make me think though, that if I were
Speaker 1: a professional um cursed tablet manufacturer in olden times, it
Speaker 1: sounds like the best thing you could do to to
Speaker 1: drum up business is to go around stealing random things
Speaker 1: from people and just like burying them somewhere. Uh, because
Speaker 1: then people are gonna get piste off and they're gonna say,
Speaker 1: who stole my cloak? And then they're gonna go buy
Speaker 1: another tablet from you. Well, I would guess that would
Speaker 1: depend on you not believing that the curses are efficacious,
Speaker 1: Otherwise you'd just be accumulating curses that would actually harm you.
Speaker 1: Well I would I guess. Yeah. In this model, the
Speaker 1: the individual making the curses is in on a game.
Speaker 1: You know, they can't be a true believer. They have
Speaker 1: to be uh, you know, the the con artist in
Speaker 1: the scenario. Well, that is something that we could definitely
Speaker 1: talk about, because there are obviously differences in belief in
Speaker 1: the power of curses in witchcraft all throughout history. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we we find these curse tablets all throughout
Speaker 1: the ancient Mediterranean. They're these wonderful artifacts of evil magic
Speaker 1: or you know, you could think of it as evil,
Speaker 1: because we usually think of curses as evil. But really
Speaker 1: the people who were who were commissioning these, in many
Speaker 1: cases we're seeking justice. You know, that they were trying
Speaker 1: to get back something that had been unfairly taken from them.
Speaker 1: But there are other varieties of curse tablets that are
Speaker 1: more just kind of a a desire to get power
Speaker 1: over arrival or to you know, a desire to hurt
Speaker 1: some kind of competitor or enemy. In Latin, the curse
Speaker 1: tablets are known as deficitions. In Greek, they're known as
Speaker 1: cata desmoi. I don't know if I pronounced those correctly,
Speaker 1: but close enough. You know, you'll sometimes hear people from
Speaker 1: the you know, people talking about the ancient Greco Roman
Speaker 1: world as a place of unusual reason and skepticism for
Speaker 1: its time. You know, that sort of characterization of like
Speaker 1: ancient Greece in ancient Romans places of like philosophy or something.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, there's an there's an entire argument that that
Speaker 1: science and reason is is birthed solely out of out
Speaker 1: of Greco Roman tradition, and that and that it only
Speaker 1: spreads to the far corners of the world, that anything
Speaker 1: that the you know, the that there were there was
Speaker 1: taking place in ancient India or ancient China or meso America,
Speaker 1: that these these didn't really count because they hadn't been
Speaker 1: touched by a by the Greco Roman vibe yet. Now
Speaker 1: obviously that's a nonsense. In fact, I don't really know.
Speaker 1: I don't come across people making that argument anymore. I
Speaker 1: think I feel like most most thinkers have have moved
Speaker 1: beyond that. But I know that in The Demon Hunted World,
Speaker 1: Segan spends a little time discrediting this notion as well.
Speaker 1: But the other side of that is just the belief
Speaker 1: that the ancient Greco Roman and world was this unusually
Speaker 1: reasonable and skeptical place, relatively free from superstition and paranoia
Speaker 1: about witchcraft. But the evidence indicates that just really is
Speaker 1: not the case. It might be the case among some
Speaker 1: particular you know, members of the elite or the intelligencia
Speaker 1: or something. You might read their own memoirs and find
Speaker 1: that this person in history who left a lot of
Speaker 1: writing happened to be skeptical about things. But among people
Speaker 1: in general, the ancient Mediterranean appears to have been run
Speaker 1: through with fear of witchcraft and with the use of curses,
Speaker 1: even in the Roman period. Plenty of the Elder rights
Speaker 1: in his Natural History in the first century CE. We
Speaker 1: mentioned him a minute ago in the middle of a
Speaker 1: section about the power of portents and spells. Quote, there
Speaker 1: is no one who does not dread being spell bound
Speaker 1: by means of evil imprecations, and hints the practice after
Speaker 1: eating eggs or snails of immediately breaking the shells or
Speaker 1: piercing them with a spoon. I was like, well, what
Speaker 1: is that about? So this is from the translation the
Speaker 1: eight translation by John Bostock. Bostock or Bostock however you
Speaker 1: say that, And there's a footnote that says, quote, it
Speaker 1: is a superstition still practice to pierce the shell of
Speaker 1: an egg after eating it. Less to the witches should come.
Speaker 1: I've been doing it wrong this whole time, I know.
Speaker 1: So I went and read a little bit more about this. Basically,
Speaker 1: the idea is that if you eat an egg and
Speaker 1: you leave the shell just sitting around. A witch can
Speaker 1: come along and prick that shell with a needle while
Speaker 1: citing the name of a person who wants to cast
Speaker 1: a curse against you, and that will allow them to
Speaker 1: do a curse. And this is a common part of
Speaker 1: like sympathetic magic, like you touch the thing. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: am I peeling eggs wrong? That's what I'm wondering, because
Speaker 1: whenever I peel an egg, I like I end up
Speaker 1: just destroying the eggshell. Like it looks pretty pierced to
Speaker 1: me because I've just ripped it to pieces. Well, maybe
Speaker 1: it's if they find a big shard of it and
Speaker 1: they can pierce it, or maybe there's this is like
Speaker 1: a post egg sucking scenario. People are just you know,
Speaker 1: putting one hole in it and sucking it out. I
Speaker 1: don't know, you took that to a nasty place. There's
Speaker 1: nothing wrong with the eating raw egg that way, I guess.
Speaker 1: I mean of the things one could be doing in
Speaker 1: in in ancient Greece, as egg sucking sounds reasonable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it leaves you vulnerable to witchcraft, I guess so. Famously,
Speaker 1: many curse tablets have been found in the city of Bath,
Speaker 1: which was a settlement known for its hot springs used
Speaker 1: as a spa in a bath during Roman times, and
Speaker 1: the goddess of these hot springs was a Celtic deity
Speaker 1: named Soulis, who in many of these curses that have
Speaker 1: been found at Bath, seems to be merged through syncretism
Speaker 1: with the Roman goddess Minerva as Sulis Minerva. I read
Speaker 1: that one of these curses from Bath is a bronze
Speaker 1: It's for a bronze container that had been stolen. It
Speaker 1: seems like most of these also have to do with theft,
Speaker 1: and the curse asked the goddess to make sure that
Speaker 1: the stolen container ended up old with the thief's blood.
Speaker 1: That's pretty good. That is really good. That's clever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it basically comes back to that old adage,
Speaker 1: I hope you choke on it. You know, so somebody
Speaker 1: has has has has obtained something of yours or something
Speaker 1: that you feel should be yours through underhanded actions. Then
Speaker 1: you just you just say, well, I hope, I hope
Speaker 1: you choke on that. I hope that this brings about
Speaker 1: your death. And we just kind of we kind of
Speaker 1: throw that one out. But that is essentially a curse.
Speaker 1: Even if we we say it, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: flippantly or comedically. It's the unspoken part of you can
Speaker 1: have it, you know, and you can have it just
Speaker 1: meaning like and something bad is going to happen to you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this thing is, this is curse now anyway, I don't
Speaker 1: want it. But then again, a lot of these curses
Speaker 1: demand the return of the item, and they say like,
Speaker 1: if you don't return the items, say, you know, in
Speaker 1: nine days, may he be destroyed by the ninth day
Speaker 1: or something like that. Another one quote Docillianus, son of
Speaker 1: Bruce Serra's to the Most Holy God, Sulus, I curse
Speaker 1: him who has stolen my hooded cloak, whether and or woman,
Speaker 1: whether slave or free, that Sulis inflict death upon him,
Speaker 1: and not allow him sleep or children now and in
Speaker 1: the future until he has brought my hooded cloak to
Speaker 1: the temple of her divinity. Now, I like how this
Speaker 1: particular curse is nice and uh and and and broad.
Speaker 1: Here you know, it's it's the it's the buckshot of curses,
Speaker 1: because it is it is promising for what problem sleeping
Speaker 1: and potentially problem bearing children. Uh, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: room here. So if one if the individual who is
Speaker 1: cursed and like knows that the curses leveled at them, like, Oh,
Speaker 1: I think he's talking about me because I totally stole
Speaker 1: that cloak. Uh. Chances are they might encounter a situation where, oh, man,
Speaker 1: I'm having a little trouble sleeping, or I'm or are
Speaker 1: or I'm having trouble conceiving. Maybe it was that curse. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: in the secular interpretation, you're trying to get the victim's
Speaker 1: mind working against them, and we can talk about that
Speaker 1: more later when we discuss like the psychological and scientific
Speaker 1: aspects of cursing. But but you're also probably believing in
Speaker 1: real magic power and thinking, yeah, something bad is going
Speaker 1: to happen to this person. That's true. We do have
Speaker 1: to come back time and time again to the idea
Speaker 1: that we're dealing with people, more often than the common
Speaker 1: people here, who do not have anything approaching the scientific
Speaker 1: understanding of the world. They have magical explanations for how
Speaker 1: the world works, and therefore that worldview is open to
Speaker 1: magical manipulation. Now, you mentioned that you liked the things
Speaker 1: that have been picked out in this curse, denying you
Speaker 1: sleep and denying your children general things that are invoked
Speaker 1: in these curses would be to like make it so
Speaker 1: the thief cannot defecate or urinate, to make the thief bleed,
Speaker 1: to cause sexual problems, to prevent them from sleeping or eating.
Speaker 1: There's all kinds of stuff. But I wonder who picks
Speaker 1: out what goes in the curse. Is that up to
Speaker 1: the scribe who you're commissioning the curse from, or is
Speaker 1: that up to you? Do you go to a scribe
Speaker 1: and say, Okay, here's what I want. I want the
Speaker 1: bleeding and I want the sexual problems. Yeah. Do you
Speaker 1: think it's it's package based or it's all a cart right,
Speaker 1: I don't know. You know, I think this would have
Speaker 1: been a great, a great curse if you just said,
Speaker 1: all right, whoever stole this cloak from me, every time
Speaker 1: from now on, for the rest of your life, every
Speaker 1: time you stub your toe, that's me. That's this curse,
Speaker 1: you know, that's that That would be a good one,
Speaker 1: because nothing is worse than stubbing your toe in that
Speaker 1: second that you have stubbed it, um and you always
Speaker 1: feel like somebody's to blame, yes, and you need to blame.
Speaker 1: So usually, if you're me, you just curse at the
Speaker 1: coffee table or what have you put that there? Yeah,
Speaker 1: but then you're like, oh, servandas it was you. So
Speaker 1: these tablets are actually they're more than just sort of
Speaker 1: a magical curiosity. Uh. The tablets of Bath and many
Speaker 1: others have actually proven useful in helping experts understand the
Speaker 1: common vernacular language of say Roman Britain in the second
Speaker 1: to fourth century. Because again, when you think about it,
Speaker 1: curse tablets are kind of like graffiti. It's a window
Speaker 1: into how written language was used by people who we're
Speaker 1: not writing the kinds of works that get copied and
Speaker 1: stored in libraries and come down to us through history,
Speaker 1: you know, like nowadays, I assume future historians will probably
Speaker 1: get to know what it was like when the average
Speaker 1: English speaker in the United States used written English because
Speaker 1: they can see it all over the internet. But in
Speaker 1: ancient Rome, unless you like, wrote books that people thought
Speaker 1: were very valuable, most of the time, people weren't going
Speaker 1: to see what it looked like when you were, you know,
Speaker 1: using language. Side note, I wonder if in hip hop,
Speaker 1: like a distract is considered a curse. That's interesting sort
Speaker 1: of kind of maybe do you well, I mean, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of insults but does it actually like, does
Speaker 1: it invoke a power to wish harm upon you? Maybe?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean sometimes you could say that, well,
Speaker 1: they're threats, but their self actualized things. They're like I'm
Speaker 1: going to do something to you. Yeah, I guess they are.
Speaker 1: They tend to be more threats than though, though I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know. There might be some distracts out there.
Speaker 1: I would love to hear about any distracts that invoke
Speaker 1: magical forces or sort of the the inner workings of fate. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's good. I bet there are some. I bet there
Speaker 1: have to be some religious ones. Surely there's some like
Speaker 1: religious sort of distracts. Maybe they're not individual, but I
Speaker 1: mean one of the big uh selling points of religion,
Speaker 1: and we'll discuss this more as we go forward, is
Speaker 1: the idea that God or God's are going to punish
Speaker 1: those who wronged you or are wronging you or living
Speaker 1: their life in a way that you don't agree with. Now,
Speaker 1: there will be some sort of divine vengeance, and therefore
Speaker 1: you know to invoke that divine vengeance is essentially a curse.
Speaker 1: Like anybody has ever stood on a street corner and
Speaker 1: yelled nasty things with a God sign at participants in
Speaker 1: a parade or something like that, they're essentially spitting out curses. Now,
Speaker 1: they probably wouldn't think of it that way because they
Speaker 1: wouldn't think like, I'm asking the divine power to do
Speaker 1: something to you. They would probably think of it as
Speaker 1: saying like, I'm just telling you what the divine power
Speaker 1: is going to do to you. Anyway, right, Well, they
Speaker 1: had their view and it's probably the same. But from
Speaker 1: this side of the curse, I feel like the two
Speaker 1: are are basically indistinguishable, Like the guy with the sign
Speaker 1: is still the jerk in the scenario. Agreed. Now, we
Speaker 1: have been talking about how often curses are used sort
Speaker 1: of after the fact to get back at somebody who
Speaker 1: wronged you, usually somebody who stole something from you. But
Speaker 1: there's another way you could use an anti theft curse,
Speaker 1: which would be a curse employed preemptively against thieves. So
Speaker 1: I want to talk about medieval anti theft curses in
Speaker 1: monastic libraries. Uh. Last year, the British Library put up
Speaker 1: this awesome blog post by a medieval studies scholar named
Speaker 1: Clark Dreyschen, highlighting medieval books in their collection that contained curses. So,
Speaker 1: for example, and early fourteenth century copy of a thirteenth
Speaker 1: century Middle Dutch encyclopedia and beastiary called The Flower of
Speaker 1: Nature by Jacob von Merland. It has its own little
Speaker 1: checkout ledger within the book, you know, like you at
Speaker 1: a library book, you put the card in. So what
Speaker 1: you have to picture here is there's a cross under
Speaker 1: which anyone borrowing the book had to sign their name
Speaker 1: and then had to swear a dear oath that if
Speaker 1: they did not return the book they would die. And
Speaker 1: there's there's one name at least there. It's a midwife
Speaker 1: named Abstricts hype Motor who signed the oath. So we
Speaker 1: we hope Absterricts brought the book back. There's also a
Speaker 1: fourteenth century commentary on the harmony of the Gospels, inscribed
Speaker 1: with a printer's note saying, anyone who steals this book
Speaker 1: will receive quote death from evil things. May the thief
Speaker 1: of this book die. So instead of a sticker that
Speaker 1: says this book belongs to blank, it's essentially the same thing.
Speaker 1: It's that sticker, but it's like this book belongs to blank,
Speaker 1: and if you were not blank, you will die, right
Speaker 1: and it But you know, we're we're getting into an
Speaker 1: area here. We're talking about books that were tremendously valuable
Speaker 1: in some cases and uh and also probably had a
Speaker 1: bit of the a bit of magic to them. You know,
Speaker 1: this reminds me of episode that I did with Christian
Speaker 1: while back about books that were attributed magical properties in
Speaker 1: a large part base just because of the like the
Speaker 1: power of writing, like the ideas that were contained within
Speaker 1: it and made it special. Oh yeah. The author of
Speaker 1: this blog post actually points out that while some of
Speaker 1: the curses seem like overkill, I'm going to mention a
Speaker 1: couple more in a minute that are really overkill, um
Speaker 1: for what's deserving of a simple book thief. In context,
Speaker 1: it makes more sense because of what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: Like we would today consider stealing a book to be
Speaker 1: a pretty minor petty crime like shoplifting or something. But
Speaker 1: this was before the printing press, when books were extremely
Speaker 1: labor intensive to produce and a copy and often if
Speaker 1: you lost a copy of the book, you weren't just
Speaker 1: out a lot of monetary value. It might have been
Speaker 1: something that you can't get another copy of. And now
Speaker 1: add to that exactly what you're saying, maybe this book
Speaker 1: has important information about how to interpret the Bible that
Speaker 1: you consider important to saving your eternal soul. This is
Speaker 1: a book of extremely important ma jical significance in a way,
Speaker 1: So for a medieval Christian monk, stealing or damaging someone
Speaker 1: else's religious literature, was this extremely costly and perhaps even
Speaker 1: dangerous thing to do to them? Yeah, you're you're stealing
Speaker 1: from the pool of collected knowledge. Yeah. Now, a couple
Speaker 1: of other great book curses. One was this book that
Speaker 1: belonged to the Church of St. Al Dad. In the
Speaker 1: Gloucester States quote, this book is of St. Al Date.
Speaker 1: He that takes this book shall be hauled by the neck,
Speaker 1: bye bye, by who, well, presumably by Christ himself. Also
Speaker 1: later in the book, a curse is attributed directly to
Speaker 1: the mouth of Jesus Christ and the curses this book
Speaker 1: belongs to the Church of St. Al Dad. This book
Speaker 1: is one and Christ's curses another. He that takes the
Speaker 1: one takes the other. I'm in a couple more. There's
Speaker 1: a twelfth century manuscript known as the Arnstein Bible. It's
Speaker 1: owned by the Abbey of St. Mary and St. Nicholas
Speaker 1: and what's now Germany. Uh here here is the inscript
Speaker 1: and quote a book of Saints Mary and Nicholas of Arnstein.
Speaker 1: If anyone steals it, may he die, May he be
Speaker 1: roasted in a frying pan, May the falling sickness and
Speaker 1: fever attack him, and may he be rotated and hanged. Amen.
Speaker 1: I think the rotated is on the wheel, and the
Speaker 1: falling sickness. I think they're saying that's supposed to be epilepsy.
Speaker 1: These are odd prayers. I never really heard amen thrown
Speaker 1: on anything this, uh, you know, overtly ghastly in a while. Well,
Speaker 1: it makes me think about the version of amen. That's
Speaker 1: like when someone in church yells that out after after
Speaker 1: the preacher says something that they agree with. You know,
Speaker 1: the preacher has had something you agree with, you yell amen.
Speaker 1: This is like the person writing the curse being like
Speaker 1: that was a good curse. I agree with it. I
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe that's not the best reading. One more,
Speaker 1: how about a mid fifteenth century book belonging to the
Speaker 1: Benedictine monastery of St. Albans. It was loaned to monks
Speaker 1: studying in Oxford. Quote this book is given and used
Speaker 1: to the Brothers of Oxford by John Weatham Steed father
Speaker 1: of the Flock of the proto Martyr of the English.
Speaker 1: If anyone secretly tears this inscription or removes it, may
Speaker 1: he feel Judas is noose or forks. And I think
Speaker 1: that's referring to like being either pitchforks or maybe being
Speaker 1: impaled on forked trees. But then there are other more
Speaker 1: spiritual curses, like some of them say, you know, if
Speaker 1: you steal this book, your name will be deleted from
Speaker 1: the Book of Life. It's essentially excommunicating you or sending
Speaker 1: you to Hell. I wonder if that was thought to
Speaker 1: be binding or you know, of what extent too, were
Speaker 1: some of these kind of jokes, if they were if
Speaker 1: these books were going to be checked out and read
Speaker 1: by other monks. I mean, is there a certain tongue
Speaker 1: in cheek vibe going on here? Oh, I wonder that
Speaker 1: could be the case. I mean, you can see something
Speaker 1: like that today. It's like the sign that says, uh, so,
Speaker 1: you know, employee parking only all offenders cars will be
Speaker 1: crushed and melted. Yeah, or trespassers will be eaten that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. Yeah. Like, generally one assumes that these
Speaker 1: are these are are not meant to be taking at
Speaker 1: face value. No, I mean I think the books were
Speaker 1: value bill and they were legit trying to scare people. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, on on one hand, I can I can
Speaker 1: see that, see it as a as a legit a
Speaker 1: scare tactic. But on the other it's also just if
Speaker 1: you have like a really ridiculous, outlandish, um a curse
Speaker 1: in the book. I mean, it's kind of a great reminder.
Speaker 1: It sticks in your head. It makes you realize, oh,
Speaker 1: I need to return this. I don't need to just
Speaker 1: let this sit on my corner of the study or
Speaker 1: what have you. I don't need to let it gather
Speaker 1: dust in the scriptorium. I need to return it. That's
Speaker 1: a very good point. I mean, I think we can
Speaker 1: return to that again when we discuss the psychological impact
Speaker 1: of curses. But yeah, a curse sticks in the mind
Speaker 1: in a way that a general sort of moral injunction
Speaker 1: might not. You know, just selling somebody you need to
Speaker 1: return books you've borrowed. That's easy to forget saying people
Speaker 1: who don't return books they've borrowed will be roasted and
Speaker 1: rotated and hanged. Uh. You know you might not believe that,
Speaker 1: but you're more likely to remember that now we've been
Speaker 1: talking about warning curses here with library books essentially says
Speaker 1: a curse will happen to you if you do this thing.
Speaker 1: One of the obvious examples I can think of this,
Speaker 1: which may be a real curse or maybe sort of
Speaker 1: a myth about a myth, um would be would be
Speaker 1: the idea of tomb curses, like the curse of the Pharaohs.
Speaker 1: You know, do not enter here or ye shall be cursed.
Speaker 1: Maybe we can address that when we come back from
Speaker 1: a break. Yes, and I need to add that if
Speaker 1: you skip over the ad you will be cursed. Than alright,
Speaker 1: we're back now, Robert, can you tell me about tomb curses?
Speaker 1: Is the curse of the Pharaoh's real Well, if you
Speaker 1: watch enough movies, it seems like it is, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's become a tremendously fun trope and so
Speaker 1: many different uh, pictures that we watch, fiction that we read. Um,
Speaker 1: you can't really mention curses at all else without summoning
Speaker 1: thoughts of the Curse of the Pharaohs, the curse of
Speaker 1: the Mummy, etcetera. Um. So for starters, we should point
Speaker 1: out that, yes, you will find curses and things like
Speaker 1: curses in a ancient Egyptian magic in setting sail for
Speaker 1: the afterlife, the dead had to be prepared with spells
Speaker 1: to counter curses in the realms beyond death, and pyramids
Speaker 1: and tombs also sometimes engage security features nothing like you'd
Speaker 1: find in an Indiana Jones movie, really, but certainly sturdy
Speaker 1: doors and sometimes false burial chambers as well. But really
Speaker 1: you can encounter only a very few written warnings in tombs,
Speaker 1: and from what I've read, you find them protecting the
Speaker 1: graves of common people as well as as pharaohs, but
Speaker 1: again very very few cases, and they tended to promise
Speaker 1: punishment in the afterlife for things like stolen bricks, don't
Speaker 1: steal bricks from this tomb, or you're you'll get it,
Speaker 1: or in one case there was a threat of crocodile
Speaker 1: attacks in the living world should you mess with the tomb.
Speaker 1: That's a good one. But this idea of the of
Speaker 1: the Mummy's curse, this is largely a product of Victorian
Speaker 1: England and the popular writings of one individual, in particular
Speaker 1: Marie Corelli, who was a novelist and a stick of
Speaker 1: the time. Um again, we're getting back to the idea
Speaker 1: of of just like spiritual ideas, uh, you know, un
Speaker 1: scientific ideas that are popular with people at the time,
Speaker 1: and certainly Victorian England we're dealing with. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of spiritualism going on, right, and so that is the
Speaker 1: that that is the the environment from which this emerges.
Speaker 1: So Correlli, she quoted a quote unquote rare book which
Speaker 1: she said stated that quote the most dire punishment follows
Speaker 1: any rash intruder into a sealed tomb, diverse secret poisons
Speaker 1: enclosed in boxes in such wise that they who touched
Speaker 1: them should not know how they come to suffer secret poison.
Speaker 1: Huh yeah, So and then it sounds good, right, you know,
Speaker 1: the idea that there's gonna be secret poison something or
Speaker 1: some sort of magical effect that's going to punish anyone
Speaker 1: who who dares, you know, break open a tomb. Well,
Speaker 1: Tomb desecration is is widely you know, one of the
Speaker 1: most prohibited things in many ancient law codes and stuff like.
Speaker 1: I know, it's clear, as you mentioned that the ancient
Speaker 1: Egyptians were very invested in preventing tomb desecration. You're just
Speaker 1: saying that like achieving that by writing a curse on
Speaker 1: the tomb was not especially common I know of also
Speaker 1: worth knowing they universally failed at it, at least in
Speaker 1: the long term, but also sometimes in the short term.
Speaker 1: We've we've discussed this before on the podcast that You'll
Speaker 1: You'll Have, not not only in Egyptian traditions, but in
Speaker 1: other traditions as well. It's pretty common to find evidence
Speaker 1: of tombs having been broken into rated Pilford like we
Speaker 1: within a lifetime of their construction. Right, it wasn't just
Speaker 1: modern people going through ancient Egyptian tombs. That being said,
Speaker 1: nobody robs an ancient tomb quite like like a Victorian
Speaker 1: era Western explorer. So, as a science journalist Joe Marchant
Speaker 1: explains in their Ian magazine article The Mummy's Curse Um
Speaker 1: CORRELLI here was it was kind of ground zero for
Speaker 1: all of this curse nonsense. So she at the time
Speaker 1: she had monished George Herbert for the fifth Earl of Carnarvon,
Speaker 1: for his involvement in an architect archaeological dig in Egypt,
Speaker 1: in particular the Tomb of Tuton Common and Uh. And
Speaker 1: then an interesting thing happened. Herbert died from a mosquito
Speaker 1: born illness in a Cairo hotel. Okay, or one assumes
Speaker 1: it was a mosquito born illness because he was bitten
Speaker 1: by a mosquito and then grew ill and died. But
Speaker 1: so he's a guy involved in in excavating the tomb
Speaker 1: and he dies of some illness, right, and so the
Speaker 1: stories began to spin out from there. From there, the
Speaker 1: idea going around that that British archaeologist Howard Carter, who
Speaker 1: was also a part of this particular endeavor, that he
Speaker 1: discovered a tablet warning death to tomb raiders, and that
Speaker 1: he quickly hit it away buried in the sand to
Speaker 1: keep the workers from seeing. Now, as as marchant explorers,
Speaker 1: you you had skeptics of the day saying that this
Speaker 1: was clearly all bologny. But this was again in the
Speaker 1: midst of a spiritualist boom. Uh So you had famous minds,
Speaker 1: including the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was
Speaker 1: definitely susceptible to uh to this line of thinking. He
Speaker 1: he ends up, you know, jumping in when people say, well, look,
Speaker 1: if there's a curse, why didn't Carter die from the curse?
Speaker 1: To why did only one of the two principles on
Speaker 1: this dig die from the curse, and uh, Sir Arthur
Speaker 1: Conan Doel's response was apparently, quote one might as well
Speaker 1: say that because bulldogs do not bite everybody, therefore bulldogs
Speaker 1: do not exist, which is such a ludicrous counter argument
Speaker 1: Like this is the kind of counter argument one expects
Speaker 1: to find on you know, in talk radio nowadays, or
Speaker 1: on you know, political commentating on certain channels. I disagree.
Speaker 1: Incredibly tight logic, exactly parallel. You can guess what fall
Speaker 1: allow it? Right, anybody with the slightest connection to Herbert
Speaker 1: was looped into the curse. If they happen to die,
Speaker 1: and if they didn't die, well you just ignored that,
Speaker 1: right You only focus this is this is key to
Speaker 1: any kind of supernatural thinking, right you only you only
Speaker 1: focus on the bits of information that back up your
Speaker 1: supernatural premise. Uh. Now, one of the things that we
Speaker 1: have to acknowledge here is that everybody from this scenario
Speaker 1: is dead now. So if you want to, you could say, yeah,
Speaker 1: well the curse must have worked because now nobody is alive.
Speaker 1: Who who was originally in on the cracking of this tune?
Speaker 1: Time the ultimate enforcer of all curses? Right? I mean
Speaker 1: in a way, it's it's perfectly safe to cast a
Speaker 1: curse because everybody will die and or something bad is
Speaker 1: liable to happen to everybody involved. Now, the cool thing
Speaker 1: is is that scientists and uh and more skeptical minds
Speaker 1: have applied our scientific understanding of contagions to this idea
Speaker 1: of a mummy's curse. Egyptologist Herbert Winlock published a chart
Speaker 1: in the New York Times back in nineteen thirty four
Speaker 1: that attempted to dismiss a lot of this, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: mummies curse nonsense by pointing out that of forty people
Speaker 1: who entered the tomb in question, only six died in
Speaker 1: the following twelve years. And some of those people who
Speaker 1: entered may have happened to be Westerners who were in
Speaker 1: Egypt in a place with mosquito born diseases that they
Speaker 1: were not resistant too. Oh yeah, there's so many factors
Speaker 1: that have nothing to do with any kind of supernatural model. Um.
Speaker 1: But by the way, if anybody wants to to read this,
Speaker 1: you can find it on the New York Times website
Speaker 1: in their archive. But the full title is Curse of
Speaker 1: Pharaoh Denied by Winlock. Metropolitan museum director ridicules tale of
Speaker 1: malediction about Teuton Common tomb. Quote. The so called curse
Speaker 1: of tutin Common is a superstition, so holy, devoid a
Speaker 1: foundation foundation that only the most credulous and ill informed
Speaker 1: person can of a moment's credence to it, according to
Speaker 1: Herbert Ewinlock, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and
Speaker 1: its curator of Egyptology. So this is false on multiple levels.
Speaker 1: Like the the idea of the curse of the Pharaoh's
Speaker 1: It's not only not true that everybody who went in
Speaker 1: the tomb died, it's also not even true that there
Speaker 1: was a curse involved as far as we know, never issued,
Speaker 1: never enforced, Whereas if you listen to all of the bologna,
Speaker 1: it sounds like, oh, it was issued and it was enforced.
Speaker 1: Isn't it creepy right now? Another individual who sought to
Speaker 1: apply some common sense to the scenario was Mark Nelson
Speaker 1: from the University of Tasmania, and he had a study
Speaker 1: published in a two edition of the British British Medical
Speaker 1: Journal that compared the death rates for people who entered
Speaker 1: the tomb at key times with people who are simply
Speaker 1: in Egypt not only did the tomb not make you
Speaker 1: more likely to die, everyone that was analyzed in this
Speaker 1: particulars particular study generally lived twenty more years. Okay, so
Speaker 1: actually going into the tomb seems to be like a
Speaker 1: fountain of youth. Well, or I think I think more
Speaker 1: along the line is like everybody involved, whether you went
Speaker 1: into the tomb or not, you had at least twenty
Speaker 1: more years. So if there was a curse in place,
Speaker 1: it's working, Like what it takes that long to kick in? Uh,
Speaker 1: that's not a curse, that's just that's just you living
Speaker 1: two more decades. And you have to think about like
Speaker 1: the what are the what are the probable ages of
Speaker 1: the individuals that are going out on one of these expeditions. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: twenty years does not a curse make, but the appeal
Speaker 1: of the curse, you know, it seems to play I think,
Speaker 1: in part on the modern trope of you know, the
Speaker 1: the modern expert has has gone too far. You know,
Speaker 1: it's it's essentially the Frankenstein idea, Right, your curiosity led
Speaker 1: you to to places that should not be tread by humans. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then also I can't help but suspect that there's
Speaker 1: a certain sense of of you know, buried colonial grave
Speaker 1: robin guilt here as well. You know, like there's maybe
Speaker 1: there's this deep idea that what I'm doing is, yes,
Speaker 1: it's archaeology, but I'm also kind of desecrating a grave here,
Speaker 1: and uh and and and maybe it ends up playing
Speaker 1: on some of these like these older, more primal ideas
Speaker 1: about um, the inherent defilement of that act. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think this is always something strange to consider an archaeology,
Speaker 1: because of course I love archaeology, and I love what
Speaker 1: we can discover about the past from it, but it
Speaker 1: very often involves exposing things that ancient people's did not
Speaker 1: want exposed, that they wanted left alone. Uh. And that's
Speaker 1: true not just in Egyptian archaeology, but everywhere. One of
Speaker 1: one of the funny things I find about that, though,
Speaker 1: is that the anxiety, like with the Curse of the
Speaker 1: Pharaohs as an example, tends to only come up with
Speaker 1: regard to unearthing the remains or or hidden things of
Speaker 1: rich people of the past. And you know, when you
Speaker 1: just dig up like a common mask grave from the
Speaker 1: past or something, people don't seem to worry about the
Speaker 1: same stuff. I feel like that just betrays an extra
Speaker 1: sort of level of bio us in the way we
Speaker 1: think about what sort of ancient people's wishes should be honored.
Speaker 1: If your remains are old enough and you were poor enough,
Speaker 1: than nobody cares. But if you were very rich, there
Speaker 1: might be a curse. You never know. If they could
Speaker 1: afford all this, then they could probably pay the curse
Speaker 1: crafter Now, and in talking about curses and exploring curses,
Speaker 1: there's so many different cultures we could look at, so
Speaker 1: many different periods of history. I ended up looking around
Speaker 1: a little bit in Chinese history, and I ended up
Speaker 1: focusing on a sorcery scare that occurred rather late in
Speaker 1: Chinese history during the the Ching Dynasty, the last dynasty
Speaker 1: of China that that last at sixteen forty four through
Speaker 1: nineteen twelve. Now, I read before that the Ching Dynasty's
Speaker 1: penal code was rather harsh on sorcery and called for
Speaker 1: the execution of not only all those who employed spells
Speaker 1: and incantations quote to agitate and influence the minds of
Speaker 1: the people, but also anyone who wrote or edited books
Speaker 1: of sorcery. So all you had to do is just
Speaker 1: be the editor you know, or or one would presume,
Speaker 1: like just proof reading a copy of of a sorceress
Speaker 1: text could get you end up getting you beheaded. That's harsh.
Speaker 1: Now read about about this in the notations to Herbert A.
Speaker 1: Giles's translation of Pooh Song Wings Strange Tales from a
Speaker 1: Chinese studio. This is a fabulous book. It's it's widely
Speaker 1: available in English translation, uh, and it's it's from seventeenth
Speaker 1: century China, and it collects and retails various weird tales,
Speaker 1: some of which are horrifying ghost stories about like awful
Speaker 1: spirits jumping out and gnawing on your head, you know,
Speaker 1: strange goblins living uh in the forest, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Others are more whimsical, like a pen dragon that infiltrates
Speaker 1: a scholars office, or there's there's also a few that
Speaker 1: are kind of body and hilarious as well. But again,
Speaker 1: this is a book from seventeenth century China, and it
Speaker 1: was written in a time that it was sometimes referred
Speaker 1: to as the troubles Uh. This was in the coastal
Speaker 1: province of shang Dong. That's where Pusson ling U lived,
Speaker 1: and there it was an area subject to a various
Speaker 1: peasant rebellions. Manshu uprisings. They were unstable times and then
Speaker 1: UH during the eighteenth century it was also a time
Speaker 1: of mass panic. I was looking at a book by
Speaker 1: Philip A. Kun titled Soul Steel Steelers The Chinese Sorcery
Speaker 1: Scare of seventeen sixty eight. This came out in two
Speaker 1: thousand six. Uh and um It points out that during
Speaker 1: the reign of the Qing Long Emperor, a mass hysteria
Speaker 1: swept through the people. Quote in the year seventeen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: on the eve of China's tragic modern age, there ran
Speaker 1: through her society a premonitory shiver, a vision of sorcerers
Speaker 1: roaming the land, stealing souls. By enchanting either the written
Speaker 1: name of the victim or a piece of his hair
Speaker 1: or thing. The sorcerer would cause him to sicken and die.
Speaker 1: He then would use the stolen soul force for his
Speaker 1: own purposes. Now. Coon points out that a lot of Chinese,
Speaker 1: a lot of Chinese sorcery, concerns the fragility of this
Speaker 1: supposed link between the body and the soul, and he
Speaker 1: also specifically mentions the power of the beggar's curse UH
Speaker 1: leveled at one who you know refuses to give alms
Speaker 1: to the poor. Quote, his polluted nature was entirely combatible
Speaker 1: with magical terrorism. So in this way, we kind of
Speaker 1: returned to that idea we talked about earlier, the idea
Speaker 1: that like the curse is kind of like it's it's
Speaker 1: the last bit of power that somebody in a in
Speaker 1: a reduced cast or in a reduced level of society,
Speaker 1: the last thing they have that they can turn to
Speaker 1: if they're you know, they're on the street corner and
Speaker 1: they're asking for a coin from the from the rich man,
Speaker 1: and the rich man doesn't give them to them. You know,
Speaker 1: what can you do? You can curse them. You can
Speaker 1: you can spit that curse. Uh, And they can't quite
Speaker 1: take that way from you. They like, even no matter
Speaker 1: what your position in life, they're they're going to have
Speaker 1: to deal with that curse that you that you unleashed. Well,
Speaker 1: I feel like a version of this comes through so
Speaker 1: often even um, not just in all the real history
Speaker 1: we've been talking about how curses have been used by people,
Speaker 1: but even in like say the Witch literature, I mean,
Speaker 1: the witch we often forget is an outcast figure. Right
Speaker 1: that the witch is oppressed, the witch tends to be
Speaker 1: an ugly old woman at a time when an ugly
Speaker 1: old woman generally did not hold much power in society,
Speaker 1: and at times and places where government and society are
Speaker 1: very misogynist that would look on a single old woman
Speaker 1: with with disdain and say, you know, why should she
Speaker 1: have any say over how anything goes? And so maybe
Speaker 1: she needs some magic to have a say. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: I feel like there's so much potentially unpack with the
Speaker 1: idea of of of of the beggar figure in their
Speaker 1: power to curse. You know, it's kind of like you've
Speaker 1: like you've reduced their stature and you've kind of associated
Speaker 1: a certain amount of pollution with them, and in doing so,
Speaker 1: you've kind of given them the power to curse you,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah. Now, I mentioned at the top of
Speaker 1: the podcast that we would come back to Lo Pan
Speaker 1: because Lo Pan in a sense, does pop up in
Speaker 1: Kuhn's book. So Lo Pan, the character from Victor Little China,
Speaker 1: does not really exist in um in Chinese myth or history,
Speaker 1: but we do have the figure of Lupan um and
Speaker 1: he and he does come up in this particular book book,
Speaker 1: Lupan being the mystic figure uh and inventor Chinese god
Speaker 1: of carpentry. You have a particular book called the Lupan Qing,
Speaker 1: and this text includes instructions for the construction of a
Speaker 1: house in such a way to deal with the quote
Speaker 1: various kinds of carpenters, mason's and plasters who will plot
Speaker 1: to poison, curse and harm the owner. Whoa why would
Speaker 1: they do that? Well? Uh, I mean, on one hand,
Speaker 1: maybe it's just that, you know, how he's dealing with contractors.
Speaker 1: You never know when they're going to curse you behind
Speaker 1: your back, right. Uh, seems to belie maybe a guilty
Speaker 1: conscience on the owner's part, exactly maybe exactly um, or
Speaker 1: just to sort of a general distrust of everybody that
Speaker 1: you've you know, I'm assuming in this case, you're probably
Speaker 1: dealing with a wealthy individual. Who's who's who's either building
Speaker 1: the house for themselves or or for another wealthy member
Speaker 1: of society. Uh So, yeah, they're they're they're a number
Speaker 1: of different societal elements and economic factors to consider and
Speaker 1: why they might be uh subject to being cursed or
Speaker 1: just be paranoid about being cursed. Yeah, okay, I can
Speaker 1: see that. I Mean, generally, wealth might tend to cause
Speaker 1: a sense of isolation in your brain, where you start
Speaker 1: to look around at everybody else and think, oh, they're
Speaker 1: all jealous of me. Well, luckily, this particular book included
Speaker 1: some instructions how to how to create a counter curse
Speaker 1: against the curse spitting contractor Okay, what do you do?
Speaker 1: All right? So, first of all, when the roof beam
Speaker 1: is raised, quote, offer a sacrifice to three types of animal.
Speaker 1: And then the next recite the following secret charm to
Speaker 1: master lupon quote. Evil artisans, do you not know that
Speaker 1: poisons and curses will rebound upon yourselves and bring no
Speaker 1: harm to the owner. Let the artisan responsible for the
Speaker 1: sorcery meet misfortune. I have received the proclamation of the
Speaker 1: Supreme Ruler, the Jade Emperor, ordering that I shall suffer
Speaker 1: no harm from others, and that all will redound to
Speaker 1: my good fortune an urgent decree. Next, you burn a
Speaker 1: copy of the charm in a private place where no
Speaker 1: pregnant woman can see it. Then you mix ashes with
Speaker 1: blood of both a black and a yellow dog. Uh
Speaker 1: dog blood apparently often factored into magical spells of the time.
Speaker 1: Then you dissolve all of this in wine. And then
Speaker 1: when the main roof beam is raised. You serve this
Speaker 1: potion to the builders, and the boss of the builders
Speaker 1: uh that they have to drink three cups of it,
Speaker 1: and then whoever is plotting sorcery against you will perish. Also,
Speaker 1: you want to paste of a million inc copy of
Speaker 1: this um this anti curse a top of the roof beam.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of lengths to go to. But it
Speaker 1: makes me think again how sometimes we've talked about sometimes
Speaker 1: it seems like magic operates on like the sunk costs
Speaker 1: kind of issue. Like the more work you put into
Speaker 1: making a magic spell work, maybe the more effective it
Speaker 1: feels to you, because it will become harder for you
Speaker 1: to admit that it didn't work. Yeah, I wonder too
Speaker 1: if this is Like I wonder how much of this
Speaker 1: scenario though, is about legitimate concern that underlings will work
Speaker 1: evil sorcery against you, or the fear that their their
Speaker 1: their work will be shoddy, or that they might steal
Speaker 1: from you, etcetera. Like how much of this is is
Speaker 1: just making up for lack of oversight in the construction process. Essentially,
Speaker 1: I do not steal this book, warning that's possible. But
Speaker 1: then there's all there's just all kinds of weird psychology
Speaker 1: about the way that owners tend to resent the people
Speaker 1: who work for them. You know. Uh, this is almost
Speaker 1: like a like a weird magical version of an employment contract. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: I do have to say I I have never had
Speaker 1: an experience with a contractor or repair person, etcetera where
Speaker 1: I felt that they were cursing me. Now, just in
Speaker 1: case anyone out there is listening and they're thinking, hey,
Speaker 1: well I I worked on Robert's house or I fixed
Speaker 1: one of Robert's appliances, let me assure you I have
Speaker 1: never had any experience with with a with a a
Speaker 1: pair person, or a contractor where I felt like they
Speaker 1: were cursing me in any way, shape or form. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, I do think you need to return
Speaker 1: that bronze vase pretty soon, because I can see it's
Speaker 1: filling up with your blood rather quickly. What if Yelp reviews,
Speaker 1: like negative Route Yelp reviews were um were overtly curses.
Speaker 1: What if they were they were worded in that way,
Speaker 1: there's probably something in the in the by laws for
Speaker 1: for Yelp that you from doing that. From doing evil magic, Yeah,
Speaker 1: no evil magic, no linguistic sorcery. It privent permitted on
Speaker 1: the beat on the website. You know, one of the
Speaker 1: things that's interesting about curses is that it seems like
Speaker 1: words are very important to them. Like it is definitely
Speaker 1: not enough to simply think that you wish ill will
Speaker 1: to come upon somebody. It is often the case that
Speaker 1: you need to put it down in writing or have
Speaker 1: a spell spoken allowed in in conjunction with some kind
Speaker 1: of ritual. It's putting the ill will into words that
Speaker 1: makes it real. Yeah. We see that in the Roman example,
Speaker 1: and we certainly see it here in this Chinese example,
Speaker 1: both in that it is plastered to the beam and
Speaker 1: then also the physical writing is used in a potion
Speaker 1: that will become a part of the contractor's bodies. So
Speaker 1: I think maybe this is a good opportunity to transition
Speaker 1: to talking about the psychology of curses. What's going on
Speaker 1: when people cast curse spells against others? Are curse spells
Speaker 1: maybe sometimes actually effective in a way even though magic
Speaker 1: isn't real. I'm ready to do that, Are you ready, Robert, Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's do it. I mean, I think one thing that's
Speaker 1: important to note here is that a curse need not
Speaker 1: be entirely psychological or or or or you know, even social.
Speaker 1: But certainly if if like someone publicly curses you, there's
Speaker 1: probably gonna be a certain societal pressure. Like if you're
Speaker 1: the guy who walks by the beggar and doesn't give
Speaker 1: them a coin, and the beggar curses you in front
Speaker 1: of other people, that's I mean, that's essentially like a
Speaker 1: public shaming to to a certain extent, So there may
Speaker 1: well be a pipe a price to pay, uh of
Speaker 1: on a social level. But then if you have other
Speaker 1: examples where like a curse is but perhaps accompanied by
Speaker 1: some sort of a monetary penalty or some other kind
Speaker 1: of penalty, then um, yeah, again it's not mirror. It's
Speaker 1: not just a psychological attack. It may have these other components,
Speaker 1: but for the most part, when we're talking especially about
Speaker 1: the beggar's curse or the curse of the end of
Speaker 1: the role who's whose cloak is stolen with no hope
Speaker 1: of ever getting it back, all you have are the
Speaker 1: words of the curse, and and to to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: they might not even be heard or processed by the
Speaker 1: individual that is the target. Right, Well, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: important to think about the curse existing at two levels.
Speaker 1: It's working at two levels. On one level, or maybe
Speaker 1: you can even say three levels. One is it works
Speaker 1: on the person who cast the curse. The other is
Speaker 1: that it works on the you know, the target of
Speaker 1: the curse. And the third is that it works on
Speaker 1: the society in general, the people who you know, the context,
Speaker 1: people who observe the curse happening. UM. Now to focus
Speaker 1: first on the idea of the target of the curse,
Speaker 1: Like you have had a curse put on you, are
Speaker 1: there ways that that might actually be effective, that you
Speaker 1: might think that you are actually suffering from a curse
Speaker 1: even though there's no magic. And I think quite clearly
Speaker 1: the answer to that is yes, you know, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of psychological power. UM. Like the I guess we
Speaker 1: should talk about the no Seebo effect. Yeah, we've we've
Speaker 1: talked about this on the show before in the past.
Speaker 1: There was an episode from I think eleven about placebos,
Speaker 1: and then we of course end up talking about no
Speaker 1: sepos which is in the same way that a curse
Speaker 1: is the kind of the opposite of a prayer or
Speaker 1: a or a blessing, the no Seebo effect is the
Speaker 1: dark reflection of the plus sebo effect exactly. So we're
Speaker 1: all very aware of the placebo effect now, right. So
Speaker 1: the human body responds favorably sometimes to treatments that don't
Speaker 1: actually chemically do anything to you. So you've got pain
Speaker 1: in your shoulder, and I give you a pill and
Speaker 1: tell you it's a pain killer. Even though the pill
Speaker 1: contains no medicine whatsoever, many people will report that their
Speaker 1: symptoms are being healed, and sometimes the expectation of benefit
Speaker 1: leads people to have a greater chance of improvement over
Speaker 1: the baseline from all kinds of negative conditions. The effect
Speaker 1: is powerful enough that it's a standard part of the
Speaker 1: scientific method in medicine. We always have to control for
Speaker 1: placebo effect if you want your study to be valid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: place the placebo effect is is one of the reasons
Speaker 1: that any number of like faith healing or alternative medicine, uh,
Speaker 1: these various practices may be perceived as having a positive
Speaker 1: benefit because they may well have a marginally measurable positive
Speaker 1: benefit in the short term, but it's all due to
Speaker 1: the placebo effect. Or well that I'd say, there are
Speaker 1: actually two things. Placebo effect is a strong part. Another
Speaker 1: strong part I want to mention just real quick is
Speaker 1: the idea of regression to the mean. Um. So, sometimes
Speaker 1: I think people overstate the power of the placebo effect,
Speaker 1: attributing almost magical powers to it. I'm sure you've encountered
Speaker 1: this to where people think it proves some kind of
Speaker 1: radical mind over matter state of affairs. I don't think
Speaker 1: it goes that far. Though. The placebo effect is very
Speaker 1: real and very interesting and absolutely worth talking about. It's
Speaker 1: not like, you know, a magic, almost psychic power kind
Speaker 1: of right. Sometimes it can be presented it almost like
Speaker 1: it's it's it's like a lucid dreaming, right, like I
Speaker 1: have broken free from the boundaries of my physical body.
Speaker 1: Thank you placebo effect. All hell the mighty sugar bill. Right,
Speaker 1: I've I've changed the laws of chemistry with my brain
Speaker 1: and no uh and And the idea of regression to
Speaker 1: the mean is important to understand because in fact, many
Speaker 1: placebo effects can probably be attributed to it. Whenever you
Speaker 1: hear the words this is a science e term regression
Speaker 1: to the mean, Basically, you can just think of regression
Speaker 1: to the mean as going back to normal. So most
Speaker 1: of the time you're in a position to be studied
Speaker 1: for some kind of medical treatment, it's because something has
Speaker 1: gone wrong with your body. And often after something goes
Speaker 1: wrong with your body, eventually you just get better. Right
Speaker 1: whether or not you've got any kind of treatment. Something
Speaker 1: went wrong and then it went away. So to test
Speaker 1: the real effectiveness of placebo's qua placebo effects, you need
Speaker 1: to not only get a test group getting the real
Speaker 1: treatment under study, and then a test group getting a
Speaker 1: fake treatment the placebo group, but also a group that
Speaker 1: gets no treatment whatsoever, and compare the three of those.
Speaker 1: In many cases, a significant number of people will get
Speaker 1: better even despite getting no treatment at all. But then
Speaker 1: usually on top of that, you'll get more people getting
Speaker 1: better in the placebo group, people who think that they're
Speaker 1: getting treated even though they're not getting anything that does
Speaker 1: anything chemically real to their body. But, like we said,
Speaker 1: placebo is robustly observed, very real anyway, The no sebo
Speaker 1: effect is the evil twin of the placebo effect. If
Speaker 1: a placebo can make you feel like you're getting better
Speaker 1: when there's no physical cause, the no sebo can make
Speaker 1: you feel worse when there's no physical cause. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is the idea that the sugar pill is hurting me
Speaker 1: as opposed to the sugar peel A pill is healing me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so in randomized placebo controlled trials of drugs and
Speaker 1: other medical treatments, people in the placebo group sometimes report
Speaker 1: not only feeling better despite not receiving the real drug,
Speaker 1: sometimes they report negative side effects despite not receiving the
Speaker 1: real drug, and researchers have determined that this is likely
Speaker 1: due to the process of informed consent. Right, so, before
Speaker 1: you sign up to an experiment, subjects have to be
Speaker 1: told of any known adverse side effects that they might
Speaker 1: experience due to the drug, even if they end up
Speaker 1: sorted into the control group. So having been informed of
Speaker 1: those possible side effects, people sometimes experience and report them
Speaker 1: even though they're not getting any active ingredients. In other words,
Speaker 1: a placebo effect for bad things. And there are all
Speaker 1: kinds of examples of this. One of them is that
Speaker 1: the no sebo effect can absolutely make people feel pain.
Speaker 1: Uh an example cited and I was just reading an
Speaker 1: article about this in Science from seventeen by Luana Colloca,
Speaker 1: and Colloca writes about there's a concurrent study in in
Speaker 1: the journal that talks about how so you can take
Speaker 1: two creams. I would put some creams on your skin.
Speaker 1: Robert and these two creams are actually both placebos. Neither
Speaker 1: of them do anything. But I've told you that one
Speaker 1: of the or I've given you indications a visual indications,
Speaker 1: that one of them is very expensive and one of
Speaker 1: them is very cheap. And what I tell you they're
Speaker 1: supposed to do is they will stop itching, but they
Speaker 1: will increase your sensitivity to pain in the affected area.
Speaker 1: So not only does this cause people to think that
Speaker 1: they're experiencing heightened pain, they actually think that the more
Speaker 1: expensive looking cream causes them to feel more pain. I
Speaker 1: think there's another thing going on there that's interesting with
Speaker 1: like the idea of you having to cast a spell
Speaker 1: that involves like a cost, like you pay the scribe,
Speaker 1: or you have to do a lot of steps like
Speaker 1: building the house. You know, that's something that's costly to you.
Speaker 1: It seems like the more you spend on a magical
Speaker 1: spell or a curse, maybe the more effective it is
Speaker 1: because of some version of this effect, like the more
Speaker 1: expensive cream seems like it's giving you worse side effects. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and plus just the sunk cost. Right, I put this
Speaker 1: much time and energy into this magical vendetta. It has
Speaker 1: to work, That's exactly. Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. Now, Coloca,
Speaker 1: just note something very quickly that I thought was kind
Speaker 1: of interesting. What are the evolutionary explanations for the placebo
Speaker 1: and no cebo effects? Why would there be a pressure
Speaker 1: on the creation of our brains through evolution to feel
Speaker 1: better or worse depending on suggestion rather than actual physical stimuli.
Speaker 1: Uh and she she mentions quote. In evolutionary terms, no
Speaker 1: cebo and placebo effects coexist to favor perceptual mechanisms that
Speaker 1: anticipate threat and dangerous events no cebo effects and promote
Speaker 1: appetitive and safety behaviors in placebo effects. So it's almost
Speaker 1: like giving you a taste of what's to come. I
Speaker 1: think this also makes sense if you you unroot um
Speaker 1: our experience with placebo and no cebo no cebo effects,
Speaker 1: if you if you try and take it outside of
Speaker 1: the context of of of the human mind and thinking
Speaker 1: so intently about the future and worrying about what the
Speaker 1: future is, and you think of it in terms of
Speaker 1: like a longer biological history of essentially like a dog
Speaker 1: eating grass when its stomach is bothering it. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: um So, so you can clearly see how something like
Speaker 1: the no cebo effect could be at play and somebody
Speaker 1: who knows they're the target of a curse. Right, if
Speaker 1: you're the target of a curse, it might not do
Speaker 1: everything to you, Like somebody who curses you and says,
Speaker 1: may he grow horns or something like that, that's not
Speaker 1: going to happen. But if it is something like, may
Speaker 1: you're urine sting ever so slightly when you urinate, or
Speaker 1: more and more intently, may your may your stomach hurt?
Speaker 1: May you have stomach pains? And you might start thinking,
Speaker 1: I think I might have stomach pains. I think there's
Speaker 1: something going on, And then there to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: is something going on via the no cebo effect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we know we're vulnerable to stuff like this, and
Speaker 1: I think in those kinds of cases, curses could actually
Speaker 1: be highly effective, depending on if the person believes that
Speaker 1: the curse could be effective, and especially if the curse
Speaker 1: appears expensive like the more expensive cream, and if it
Speaker 1: is creating stress in the body. And that's always something
Speaker 1: to look at too there because when we feel heightened
Speaker 1: levels of stress there there can be physical ramifications for that.
Speaker 1: There are limits to that, as we'll discussing in in
Speaker 1: a minute, but but still stress in the body. Uh,
Speaker 1: can have ill effects on the body. Yes, And now
Speaker 1: here's another way that we could think of curses as
Speaker 1: maybe being effective, just in what you're talking about, the
Speaker 1: idea of the the the threat of a curse causing
Speaker 1: stress or anxiety. Um, what about the cases where the
Speaker 1: person's cloak is stolen and the person doesn't know who
Speaker 1: stole the cloak and the cast a curse anyway, how
Speaker 1: could that be doing anything well? I would argue that
Speaker 1: maybe that could and sort of like an economic standpoint,
Speaker 1: So take the context of the curse tablets against an
Speaker 1: unknown thieves. Let's say you remember of the you know,
Speaker 1: the common classes in in the ancient Mediterranean. Somewhere, one
Speaker 1: of your most valuable possessions gets stolen. Somebody takes your
Speaker 1: bronze pot, or somebody takes your cloak, and you live
Speaker 1: in a time and place when the authorities are not
Speaker 1: very helpful to you. They might be Uh, they might
Speaker 1: not be especially interested in solving the case or getting
Speaker 1: your stuff back, especially if you're poor. And I checked
Speaker 1: out what what it was like in the Roman Empire,
Speaker 1: like if you got your stuff stolen. I was trying
Speaker 1: to find evidence of what you would do, right, you know,
Speaker 1: if you could go to the police or something, what
Speaker 1: kind of access to justice he would have. And as
Speaker 1: far as I could tell, the Romans did at different
Speaker 1: periods have various internal forces which might be thought of
Speaker 1: as something like police, like the vigil as or the
Speaker 1: watchman or the urban cohorts. But I've not found any
Speaker 1: evidence that these forces would actually help common people in
Speaker 1: solving petty crimes. Maybe they did in some cases, but
Speaker 1: I have not found anything about that. It seems more
Speaker 1: like they were oriented toward heavy jobs like firefighting or
Speaker 1: putting down riots or violent gangs or mobs. It's almost
Speaker 1: more like an uh, you know, a domestic military force
Speaker 1: or something. It is just so difficult for the modernist
Speaker 1: to imagine this world you're describing. No, I mean there
Speaker 1: are many yeah, exactly. I mean a lot of people
Speaker 1: do not have access to any kind of police force
Speaker 1: that could give them justice on a small scale. And
Speaker 1: even if you were privileged enough to like have access
Speaker 1: to a police force, who's going to take down a
Speaker 1: report about you getting your cloak stolen or something like that,
Speaker 1: They're probably not going to be able to get it
Speaker 1: back for you. A lot of times that written report
Speaker 1: is about as useful as a written curse. You might
Speaker 1: pay for a good point, dollars are paying for that
Speaker 1: written curse, I suppose. So the state can't help you.
Speaker 1: You don't really have the power to take matters into
Speaker 1: your own hands, especially if you're not sure who the
Speaker 1: culprit is. So what can you do about your stolen cloak? Well,
Speaker 1: you go to the temple and you pay ascribe to
Speaker 1: write out a curse tablet for you. It's not actually magic,
Speaker 1: but imagine if enough people do this and believe in
Speaker 1: the power of the curses to find and inflict pain
Speaker 1: on the culprits. I wonder if it might actually discourage
Speaker 1: thieves from praying on the power of lists to begin with, Right,
Speaker 1: if you're surrounded by these cursed tablets nailed up everywhere,
Speaker 1: they're giving you all these reminders that if I steal
Speaker 1: something from somebody, I might get a curse cast against me,
Speaker 1: and that would be really bad. Then I wouldn't be
Speaker 1: able to defecate, or you know, I'd bleed into a pot,
Speaker 1: or have sexual problems or something that might prevent me
Speaker 1: from stealing somebody's cloak to begin with, Yeah, this, This
Speaker 1: almost makes me want to devote an episode to to
Speaker 1: figuring out like what, you know, what sort of mindset
Speaker 1: the career uh cloak thief, a career criminal might have
Speaker 1: had then in ancient times? Were they perhaps okay with
Speaker 1: being cursed? Were they to some degree or even a
Speaker 1: large degree? Uh? Did they see through the bologna of
Speaker 1: the curse and like realize this is just a bunch
Speaker 1: of people who are angry because I'm really good at
Speaker 1: stealing cloaks, but so far I can still urinate, so
Speaker 1: I'm in the clear. Or were there perhaps other magical
Speaker 1: protections like ultimately, does the does the does the the
Speaker 1: curse spitting only work with an certain religious worldview? And
Speaker 1: if you have a slightly different religion or perhaps different
Speaker 1: religious values, perhaps you worship another god, then you're protected.
Speaker 1: At any rate, it still make it probably, it's still
Speaker 1: definitely makes that the individual feel good, like, well, I'm
Speaker 1: not going to get that cloak back, but at least
Speaker 1: I got this curse rolled out. Yeah, it's hard to tell.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's hard to look into the two the
Speaker 1: minds of ancient people and know whether they expected it
Speaker 1: to work or maybe I don't know, maybe it's possible
Speaker 1: that people who were putting these curves, you know, paying
Speaker 1: to get these curses done, or writing them themselves or whatever,
Speaker 1: we're not always expecting to actually get their thing back.
Speaker 1: But they were trying to create a kind of curse
Speaker 1: culture that might offer a deterrent from committing crimes. It
Speaker 1: was almost like an altruistic you know, for the greater
Speaker 1: good kind of thing that I'm doing to discourage cloak
Speaker 1: stealing in general. Alright, well, on that note, we're gonna
Speaker 1: do one more break and again. You'll be cursed if
Speaker 1: you skip the advertisement, but then we'll be right back.
Speaker 1: Thank thank Alright, we're back. So we've been talking about
Speaker 1: the ways that curses, even though they're not magic, might
Speaker 1: be effective in one way or another. They might be
Speaker 1: effective against the target of the curse via the no
Speaker 1: Seebo effect. They might be effective on the society in
Speaker 1: general via some kind of magic belief system in a
Speaker 1: deterrent or that would create a deterrent from committing crimes
Speaker 1: or something. Um then I wonder how they work on
Speaker 1: the self. But one quick idea I had. I don't
Speaker 1: have a whole lot to say about this, but just
Speaker 1: a thought, is I wonder if sometimes a curse could
Speaker 1: be a psychological self manipulation technique, like a way to
Speaker 1: persuade yourself to fully turn against someone you previously had
Speaker 1: some kind of relationship. Probably not with the curses against
Speaker 1: like unknown enemies, you know, whoever took my cloak. But
Speaker 1: when you're cursing somebody, you know, it almost reminds me
Speaker 1: of um. You know, sometimes you see people like in
Speaker 1: movies and stuff, like they go through a breakup or something,
Speaker 1: and while they're going through the breakup, they just suddenly
Speaker 1: say lots of really mean, hurtful things to the person
Speaker 1: they're breaking up with. And obviously, you know you see that,
Speaker 1: so you know that happens sometimes in reality. That's that's
Speaker 1: based off people's experiences, And I wonder if people do
Speaker 1: stuff like that to help themselves enforce a clean break.
Speaker 1: It's like, you know, like once I say something like this,
Speaker 1: I've crossed the line, and now this person is quote
Speaker 1: dead to me or you know that that you're not
Speaker 1: going to go back and rekindle the relationship. Perhaps, But
Speaker 1: then also these curses feel so formal that it feels
Speaker 1: like it would be easier to take back a formal
Speaker 1: curse than something that is uh, that is you know
Speaker 1: that that you just say in a moment of anger,
Speaker 1: you know those things that you can truly never unsay. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wonder, But I wonder also if putting it into words,
Speaker 1: written down as a way of trying to make it
Speaker 1: like untake back double from you know, like if somebody's
Speaker 1: written it on a lead sheet and then nailed it
Speaker 1: up somewhere, you can't say like, I take it back now,
Speaker 1: it's external to you. You've made the curse and you're
Speaker 1: you're that person is dead to me. Sentiment sort of
Speaker 1: public and unalterable. I don't know if people take down
Speaker 1: crazy Facebook and Twitter posts every day, though I guess
Speaker 1: sometimes you have. You can say my account was hacked. Sorry.
Speaker 1: That curse is not really intended for everybody. But I
Speaker 1: mean there are a lot of ways that I think
Speaker 1: modern behaviors like you're talking about could be considered equivalent
Speaker 1: to curses. I mean, putting aside people who would still
Speaker 1: practice some form of witchcraft and like literally think they're
Speaker 1: enacting evil magic against somebody else. There are other like
Speaker 1: modern equivalents of curses. I think. Yeah, I mean, just
Speaker 1: to go back to social media, I think We've probably
Speaker 1: all seen examples of someone pointing out some wrongdoing and saying,
Speaker 1: in varying degrees of viciousness, saying like, I hope something
Speaker 1: bad happens to you because of this. But then also
Speaker 1: you see the the opposite of that sometimes where someone
Speaker 1: is going out of their way to to either not
Speaker 1: make a curse or even to a certain extent, kind
Speaker 1: of bless the perpetrator. You know, where someone says like, hey,
Speaker 1: whoever it was who mugged me, uh the other day? Uh,
Speaker 1: I hope, I hope you find the help that you need.
Speaker 1: You know that that sort of statement, which can be
Speaker 1: a very positive statement to make. Can you see someone
Speaker 1: make a statement like that and you you're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a person who had every right to curse
Speaker 1: the individual who wronged them, but they did not. And
Speaker 1: there's something noble in that. But it's kind of playing
Speaker 1: upon the same energy of the curse. It is in
Speaker 1: the it is in the tradition of the curse. Even
Speaker 1: if it is if it is a significant improvement. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can see that. And of course, I mean we
Speaker 1: should not ignore that modern religions that are widely practiced
Speaker 1: to do have things that are I don't know, maybe
Speaker 1: not exactly like the you know, curse tablets or something,
Speaker 1: but are in some form like invoking of supernatural authority
Speaker 1: against someone. Oh yeah, I mean you can still find
Speaker 1: yourself excommunicated in any number of faith and did not
Speaker 1: nations where you were essentially kicked out of the religion,
Speaker 1: and any rewards that might await you in the afterlife
Speaker 1: are therefore denied you. And the time was when you
Speaker 1: could you could essentially perform this on an entire nation.
Speaker 1: Uh what a writ of interdict? I believe? Yeah, I think.
Speaker 1: Uh well, I just looked at a pope innocent. The
Speaker 1: third issued an interdict against Norway. It's just like Norwegians.
Speaker 1: You're out. Sorry, the outside curse on all of you
Speaker 1: until presumably you know, work things out. Um. And there
Speaker 1: are forms of excommunication and other religions as well, um
Speaker 1: in um. In Islamic traditions, there is tach fear, which
Speaker 1: is a contentious declaration that an individual is a nonbeliever
Speaker 1: that is sometimes compared to excommunication. And there was a
Speaker 1: practice of cast excommunication in medieval India, and in Judaism
Speaker 1: there is hiram, which is supposedly similar as well. Now
Speaker 1: if you turn on evangelical television programming in the United States,
Speaker 1: or if you've had an opportunity to watch any of
Speaker 1: it um in the last few decades, you've probably seen
Speaker 1: a lot of prayer activity and m and as well
Speaker 1: as sometimes something that could definitely be considered a curse. Right, So,
Speaker 1: if you're praying to God to invoke religious texts, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, to spit doom at someone in particular, then
Speaker 1: you're I think you're essentially talking about a curse. Again,
Speaker 1: it comes back to the idea of the protester with
Speaker 1: the sign. They may see it as them just invoking
Speaker 1: the rule or reminding everybody how God works. But when
Speaker 1: push comes to shove, how is that different? Really? Well? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean from the from the third party's perspective, it
Speaker 1: looks a lot like a curse. The person might say, no, no,
Speaker 1: no, no no, I'm not making this happen. I'm just telling
Speaker 1: you how it is. But the victim or the target
Speaker 1: of this threat is probably going to perceive it essentially
Speaker 1: as being something like a curse, like I I cast
Speaker 1: down ill fortune upon you. Yeah, like so many, so
Speaker 1: many different religion. Let's say, any religion that has a
Speaker 1: theology of hell. Essentially you have a built in revenge fantasy.
Speaker 1: And and I think this plays into some of the
Speaker 1: psychology of the curse, issuing the curse, right, Like I'm
Speaker 1: I I can't actually get back at whoever stole this
Speaker 1: cloak from me, But in my mind they're suffering. In
Speaker 1: my mind, they're they're going to be tormented. And that's
Speaker 1: essentially what any health theology really is, like, Oh, those
Speaker 1: people who didn't believe like me, or the people who
Speaker 1: actually did something nefarious in a life, they may get
Speaker 1: away with it now, but in the afterlife they will,
Speaker 1: they will burn, And in my mind they are burning
Speaker 1: in the depraved notions that I have incorporated into my worldview. Well,
Speaker 1: you could also say, in like the economic example we gave,
Speaker 1: that perhaps a belief like that might create a deterrent
Speaker 1: among people from doing something negative. Unfortunately, now I think
Speaker 1: you could take strong issue with saying that that a
Speaker 1: that it was worth it to do that deterrent, or
Speaker 1: be that it actually worked or did anything. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: this we kind of get into the whole theological idea
Speaker 1: that if people were not threatened with hell, they will
Speaker 1: just they won't. They won't obey any law right, right.
Speaker 1: I don't put much stock in that, but for my money,
Speaker 1: especially in today's world, everyone has any kind of access
Speaker 1: to the to the marketplace of of religious ideas. Like you,
Speaker 1: you ultimately choose which version of a particular faith you're
Speaker 1: going to adhere to, and if you choose the one
Speaker 1: with the more elaborate, uh, you know, all inclusive revenge fantasy,
Speaker 1: then you were deciding, like what curses you want to
Speaker 1: level against nonbelievers or people who have who have sinned, etcetera. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's sort of a cursed by interpretation. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: of course you have plenty of individuals in our modern
Speaker 1: world who have if they're not actually cursing people, they're
Speaker 1: at least pushing the narrative that there are those out
Speaker 1: there who are cursing. There have been specific examples with
Speaker 1: Pat Robertson's claim that Satanist were cursing babies, or Alec
Speaker 1: Jones saying that, which is, we're using curses and witchcraft
Speaker 1: against Donald Trump, that sort of thing. Wait, does Jones
Speaker 1: believe that the curse or does he claim to believe
Speaker 1: that the curses are working? I don't know. You'd have
Speaker 1: to ask Alex Jones about that. But to pick up
Speaker 1: on what you're saying, a curse can also serve as
Speaker 1: a form sort of a public shaming, right. You know,
Speaker 1: it's been hypothesized that the bath curse tablets I think
Speaker 1: I mentioned this a little bit earlier, may have been
Speaker 1: publicly displayed, meaning that people could see the allegations, they
Speaker 1: could sympathize with the victim, they could shame or punish
Speaker 1: the perpetrator, they could help the victim with details, maybe
Speaker 1: to discover who the perpetrator was. Like, something about this
Speaker 1: historical scenario is saying maybe maybe it wasn't just the
Speaker 1: magical qualities. I mean, these people probably did believe in
Speaker 1: curses and believe there was a magic kind of work
Speaker 1: being done, but it also might have also been just
Speaker 1: kind of like the curse is part of a public
Speaker 1: bulletin board system that helps keep everybody informed about crimes
Speaker 1: that are going on and and what your friend might
Speaker 1: need help with. Now, I'm also reminded in all of
Speaker 1: this of prosperity churches, you know, churches that in many
Speaker 1: cases they interpret poverty or even illness as divine punishment,
Speaker 1: as is essentially a curse from God, which which which
Speaker 1: really really plays into this older idea, right, if things,
Speaker 1: if bad things are happening to people and we don't
Speaker 1: know why, we we we end up attributing all of
Speaker 1: these magical causes to it. Uh. And we still see
Speaker 1: this throughout the world. I mean, they're they're. There are
Speaker 1: a number of different examples. I was looking at a
Speaker 1: particular paper though, published in the journal Plos one from
Speaker 1: researchers at the University of East Anglia, and they point
Speaker 1: out that many people in rural African communities still believe
Speaker 1: that disability occurs due to some sort of supernatural force,
Speaker 1: such as curses such as, you know, a demon afflicting
Speaker 1: a child, that sort of thing um, and these are
Speaker 1: caused by wrongdoing. So, for instance, one of the common
Speaker 1: versions of the US is there's a there's infidelity and
Speaker 1: therefore the child of that infidelity is punished with some
Speaker 1: sort of deformity. But the research has found that as
Speaker 1: medical understanding grows, apparents are more likely to seek medical
Speaker 1: aid first rather than a which doctor to you know,
Speaker 1: interpret what is going on, like why this deformity has
Speaker 1: taken place, etcetera. This particular research was condicted conducted in Kenya,
Speaker 1: by the way, but I think it does illustrate you know,
Speaker 1: why the idea of a curse work so well, you know, right,
Speaker 1: because it can what play on anxieties you have about
Speaker 1: guilt and inadequacy. Yeah, and then on top of just
Speaker 1: not having access to information about how deformities work, how
Speaker 1: how medical science works, you know that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: And then also especially the curses vague enough. I mean,
Speaker 1: we're all going to violate a moral value to some extent.
Speaker 1: At some point, We're all going to do something we
Speaker 1: are not proud of and we feel guilty about, and
Speaker 1: then something that we can interpret as bad luck is
Speaker 1: going to happen to all of us. I mean, if
Speaker 1: nothing else, you may find yourself in a situation where
Speaker 1: you accidentally say a square word in front of a child,
Speaker 1: and then later you'll stub your toe. And if you
Speaker 1: and if you wanted to, if there was, if there
Speaker 1: was support for this interpretation in your worldview, you could say,
Speaker 1: oh h, that the god of toe stubbing punished me
Speaker 1: for having sworn in front of that child. So it's
Speaker 1: quite easy for us to make ourselves the victims of
Speaker 1: magical causality via magical thinking, even if you know nobody
Speaker 1: else out there is telling you I'm cursing you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because we was. We've discussed plenty of times in the
Speaker 1: show before. Our brains are just pattern recognition engines, and
Speaker 1: we'll often make connections that are not really there. And
Speaker 1: uh and this is where we see so many different
Speaker 1: magical ideas about how the world works emerging, right. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, even outside of traditional beliefs and the developing world.
Speaker 1: Who I mean, who out there has encountered the the
Speaker 1: the negative people get cancer model, you know, that kind
Speaker 1: of Western New Age thinking. It's like, you know what,
Speaker 1: it's like the secret kind of Yeah. And and I
Speaker 1: can see why this is attractive too, because in the
Speaker 1: same way that if one doesn't have access tom like
Speaker 1: a modern scientific understanding of disease, they might be susceptible
Speaker 1: to to to some sort of magical explanation. I can
Speaker 1: see where even with access to uh uh to medical
Speaker 1: understanding of the world, if the if modern medicine is
Speaker 1: not able to you know, provide the level of of
Speaker 1: treatment that you would require, I can see where you
Speaker 1: might turn to some of these magical ideas, you know,
Speaker 1: or you might sort of stumble back into them or
Speaker 1: even sort of have them at the same time, I mean,
Speaker 1: are are we're certainly capable of having to conflicting ideas
Speaker 1: in our head at the same time. We're on one level.
Speaker 1: You know what cancer is, and you know that it
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with your personality or your life decisions.
Speaker 1: But still somewhere in the back of your mind there's
Speaker 1: that old bit of magical thinking, sort of clawing at
Speaker 1: the door, you know, trying to to to tear you
Speaker 1: down into believing some other bit of nonsense about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you brought all this on yourself with, like you say,
Speaker 1: all that negative thinking. Yeah. Now that being said, psychological
Speaker 1: stress cannon does have an effect on the body in
Speaker 1: many ways. Stress can cause a number of physical health problems.
Speaker 1: But the experts say, if you look, you can find
Speaker 1: this answer if you look at cancer dot gov. The
Speaker 1: link between stress and cancer is weak at best. Yeah, though,
Speaker 1: as we explained earlier, of course we know all about
Speaker 1: no cebo effects and stuff, so I can certainly see
Speaker 1: that ways you know that the ways you're thinking could
Speaker 1: have especially effects on the subjective experience of the negative
Speaker 1: parts of an illness. Right, pain might feel like it
Speaker 1: hurts more if there if your brain is in certain
Speaker 1: states of of bad feelings or bad expectations or expectations
Speaker 1: that you will feel pain. So it's interesting anyway you
Speaker 1: cut it, uh, the curse at one On one hand,
Speaker 1: the curse has no power, the curse is just pure
Speaker 1: magical thinking. But on the other hand, a curse carry
Speaker 1: some weight. And that's probably why people have been have
Speaker 1: been spitting curses at each other for so long, and
Speaker 1: we'll continue to do so in one form or another. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you're right. Really, I'm surprised there aren't more
Speaker 1: curses today because I imagine a curse gives you a
Speaker 1: certain amount of legal protection. Like if like, if you
Speaker 1: threaten somebody, you can be arrested like that. That that
Speaker 1: is a that is a crime. But is it a
Speaker 1: crime to curse someone? Is it a crime to invoke
Speaker 1: divine powers against them? So if you say I will
Speaker 1: make you unable to defecate, that that's a crime. But
Speaker 1: if if you say I will invoke maglus to make
Speaker 1: it unable make you unable to defecate, man, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like that's a harder sell to the local
Speaker 1: police force. I guess one last thing I would end
Speaker 1: on is I would say, when I think about curses
Speaker 1: and stuff. I think it's the kind of thing that,
Speaker 1: even though I don't believe in magic, I think it's
Speaker 1: the kind of thing you shouldn't do really because, as
Speaker 1: you know, because it does have these effects, especially I
Speaker 1: would say effects on the self, Like even if you
Speaker 1: don't tell the person about it, you know it, it
Speaker 1: kind of dirties your mind. To cast a curse, wishing
Speaker 1: ill on other people hurts you, It hurts your hurts
Speaker 1: your mind, it hurts your character absolutely, So hopefully in
Speaker 1: this episode we've been able to, you know, to make
Speaker 1: you rethink the world of of the curse. And heck,
Speaker 1: we didn't even get into the idea of cursed items
Speaker 1: and allegedly cursed items so much. But that's a whole
Speaker 1: other area that we could potentially explore in the future. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, you should check out our website, No
Speaker 1: Curses at All, to be found at stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com. That's where we'll find all the
Speaker 1: podcast episodes, links out to our various social media accounts
Speaker 1: of a button for our store at the top of
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Speaker 1: podcast and rate and review us huge thing as always
Speaker 1: to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and Tory Harrison.
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Speaker 1: to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
Speaker 1: say hi, you can email us at blow the Mind
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