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