Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to cool people, get cool stuff. My
Speaker 1: name is Margaret Kiljoy. And I will not continue the
Speaker 1: bit where I set up the expectation that I will
Speaker 1: tell a new joke eating introduction, because if I do,
Speaker 1: my life get so much worse. And I don't jokes.
Speaker 1: So if you got joke, shine anyone, Shine is like
Speaker 1: the funniest person right now to pay no pressure. I
Speaker 1: don't know if I have a joke right now. A
Speaker 1: lot of my jokes are like annoyingly visual. Um, Like
Speaker 1: my go to is like the daddy is joke, not
Speaker 1: daddy is you? Like daddy joke is very different than joke.
Speaker 1: But let me think. I mean I was inslated so
Speaker 1: you can use irrigination. But basically, you put your hand
Speaker 1: up as like a little cut, like you're making your
Speaker 1: hand into a U shape, uh, and you ask people
Speaker 1: what is that? What is this? And they're like, what
Speaker 1: are you doing? You're a weirdo. And then you put
Speaker 1: your upper forearm from the other arm on it and
Speaker 1: you're like, it's a gun. Rack. I love that joke
Speaker 1: because muscles are guns. I think it's funny because that's
Speaker 1: the only gun that I approve of. Everybody who's there?
Speaker 1: Beats me? Okay, Sophie, Okay, I got a knock knock joke.
Speaker 1: You start knock knock, who's there? I don't know this
Speaker 1: is your That's the point of the joke. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, this is your bit Like you know,
Speaker 1: I got nothing. Okay. My guest today is Sharne Shrine.
Speaker 1: How are you doing today? I'm I'm good. I'm good.
Speaker 1: I actually I'm excited about the continuation of the story
Speaker 1: because you've definitely got me intrigued. Uh and not much
Speaker 1: can do that these days. So hell yeah, Cliffhangers for
Speaker 1: the wind. Yes, Sophie is our producer. Hi, Sophie him Margaret, Hi,
Speaker 1: I like this little trio. I like and Ian as
Speaker 1: our editor. He's in charge of editing. Now the parts
Speaker 1: where Sophie reveals the secret of the alchemist Stone and on.
Speaker 1: Women wrote out our theme music. So this is part
Speaker 1: two of our two part series of women who murdered
Speaker 1: their husbands or rather, um well, the people who provided
Speaker 1: the poison. Good times were had by all except potentially
Speaker 1: the husbands, which deserved it probably, so yeah, many of them.
Speaker 1: So we heard about the legend of Aquata fauna the
Speaker 1: cosmetic poison made by one brilliant poison lady. So let's
Speaker 1: figure out what we know of the truth. We will
Speaker 1: start in pal Merrow, a city in southern Italy. Well
Speaker 1: it's in Sicily, which is part of Spain at the time,
Speaker 1: where we meet two aspiring widows, so Fania Diadama and
Speaker 1: Francesca Lisarda, And they were part of a thriving scene
Speaker 1: in Italy which someone describing a similar community in Paris
Speaker 1: referred to as the criminal magical underworld. Rome, for example,
Speaker 1: at the time, had upwards of two d magical practitioners.
Speaker 1: We don't actually know how many Palmaro had, but you know,
Speaker 1: as a capital of the region, what qualifies is magical.
Speaker 1: We will tell you. Oh hell yeah, did I set
Speaker 1: that up perfectly? Everyone who couldn't go to the proper
Speaker 1: channels of like doctors with leeches, would go to magicians
Speaker 1: on the street who would sell them ship that honestly
Speaker 1: was probably about as effective as what the leech doctors
Speaker 1: had on offer. There were witches, they were sorcerers, and
Speaker 1: they were priests. The underworld included and possibly revolved around
Speaker 1: these priests who had gone all in for evil ship
Speaker 1: and lived double lives and lead black masses and this, okay,
Speaker 1: I'll get to what I do and don't believe in
Speaker 1: this particular part. But these evil priests would live double lives,
Speaker 1: lead black masses with naked women as the altar in
Speaker 1: order to imbue different potions and saves, and ship with magic.
Speaker 1: And they chanted in a made up mystical language that
Speaker 1: they all came up put together that was just Latin
Speaker 1: and Greek and Hebrew while stuck together basically like all
Speaker 1: the old timey languages they had access to. And they
Speaker 1: weren't quite like Satanists. Their magic supposedly came from God,
Speaker 1: just in really weird ways. They would use blessed wands
Speaker 1: to make potions in the shadow of a cross that
Speaker 1: contained a fragment of the true Cross, while like leading
Speaker 1: black masses with naked ladies as the altar. And I
Speaker 1: wasn't sure I believed any of this ship, but there
Speaker 1: are a ton of documents from the time attesting to
Speaker 1: it and lots of confessions, although come on which unts
Speaker 1: and inquisitions. I don't trust the confessions, but I think
Speaker 1: some of the ship was actually real. I believe it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: To quote the historian Mike dash this quote just because
Speaker 1: it's cool. Raids conducted by the police on the on
Speaker 1: the Paris Underworld of the sixteen eighties uncovered quantities of
Speaker 1: Grimore's incense wands and a rich ariety of ingredients used
Speaker 1: in sexual magic, including breast milk and bags of powdered
Speaker 1: menstrual blood. Um, how do you make the idea of powder?
Speaker 1: I guess it's like you just dry it out and
Speaker 1: crush it up. That's interesting. Well, I also we still
Speaker 1: do know everybody, but the culture of which witchiness is
Speaker 1: still alive and well, whether it comes to like crystals
Speaker 1: or even like even meditation, in my opinion, can be
Speaker 1: a form of that kind of energetic change so or
Speaker 1: even like I don't know, it's just I think it's
Speaker 1: very interesting how it's evolved, but it's still here very much,
Speaker 1: and like a lot of it is super legit and
Speaker 1: a lot of it's not. And it's impossible to tell
Speaker 1: who's a grifter and who's legit, just like back then,
Speaker 1: because I think a lot of that ship that people
Speaker 1: did probably fucking worked right, because you could go to
Speaker 1: the Magical Underworld and get an abortion, and you could
Speaker 1: get poison, and you get general he lane. You can
Speaker 1: get fortunes and horoscopes, you can get love charms, you
Speaker 1: could get cures for your bad breath. Whatever ailed you,
Speaker 1: they take care of you, no questions asked. They would
Speaker 1: sell stillborn fetuses to gamblers who used them as good
Speaker 1: luck charms. WHOA. They also dealt with quote unwanted babies,
Speaker 1: And I don't know whether that means abortion and fanticide
Speaker 1: or selling children through underground adoption services or to slave traders.
Speaker 1: I have no idea, Honestly, I kind of think it
Speaker 1: was all of the above. Mhm. At the time. At
Speaker 1: the same time, you have this magical not underworld that
Speaker 1: was flourishing, right because science and magic are fucking at
Speaker 1: the time, and Royalty was dumping tons of money on alchemists.
Speaker 1: Who the like most famous thing that alchemists were trying
Speaker 1: to do was like transmute base metals into gold. They
Speaker 1: were like, oh, well, turn lead into gold or whatever.
Speaker 1: But then they were also trying to cure disease and
Speaker 1: live forever and improve crop yields and basically just like
Speaker 1: do science and magic all put together, and well not
Speaker 1: everyone involved in magic car alchemy were up to the
Speaker 1: poison thing. These two women. They they might have done
Speaker 1: some other ship. They probably sold charms and potions or whatever,
Speaker 1: but they also sold poison. It's likely that Tofania was
Speaker 1: who invented aquatfauna named after herself. It's also possible they
Speaker 1: just sold people arsenic mhm. And I suspect that they
Speaker 1: were breaking the law by working without their husband's permission um,
Speaker 1: which is just terrible. I bet their husbands and even
Speaker 1: what they were doing, and they did. They reached their
Speaker 1: main aspiration, which was to become widows. As best as
Speaker 1: I could tell, they both off their husbands in order
Speaker 1: to return to the status of free people. But it
Speaker 1: didn't go well for these two particular women. First Francesca
Speaker 1: and then too Fania went down for the magic trick
Speaker 1: of turning their husbands into corpses. So the state pulled
Speaker 1: the magic trick of turning them into corpses um by
Speaker 1: a bit more gruesome of a method. So for all
Speaker 1: of the like, oh, these like evil poisoners, like the
Speaker 1: ship that happens to people is from the state is
Speaker 1: so much worse than what these fucking poisoners are doing.
Speaker 1: So Fanio was either hang, drawled, and quartered or one
Speaker 1: account at the time says that she was sewing up
Speaker 1: alive into a canvas sack and then thrown from the
Speaker 1: roof of the bishop's palace into the street in front
Speaker 1: of a large crowd. Oh that's brutal. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: think they pulled off being poisoners for a long time though,
Speaker 1: and maybe had a good run of it before they
Speaker 1: got thrown from sacks from the bishop's roof, so maybe
Speaker 1: it was all worth it mhm. And most everything focuses
Speaker 1: on this other woman, Julia to Fauna, who was born
Speaker 1: Julia Mangiardi and legend hazardus to Fania's daughter who learned
Speaker 1: the trade from Mom and then after Mom's execution, took
Speaker 1: off to Rome with some of the other students to
Speaker 1: set up a poison shop in the big city. And
Speaker 1: apparently it was a vaguely normal thing at the time
Speaker 1: in Italy or Sicily or whatever too for a woman
Speaker 1: to take her mother's first name as her own last name.
Speaker 1: But it's is just as likely that she took the
Speaker 1: name to Fauna as a last name because she was
Speaker 1: selling aquata Fauna. It also seems possible that she never
Speaker 1: went by to Fauna, and this is the name that
Speaker 1: folklore has abscribed to her and she has been her
Speaker 1: whole life. Going by Mangiardi, there's no evidence that she
Speaker 1: was to Fani's kid to Fani's kid, but there is
Speaker 1: also no evidence that she wasn't whatever. It's also possible
Speaker 1: she left her room before anyway, okay, whatever, but aquata fauna.
Speaker 1: The symptoms, according to a public notice that was put
Speaker 1: out later once everyone got busted, were, to quote the
Speaker 1: book Toxicology in the Middle Ages and Renaissance in a
Speaker 1: chapter by Mike dash the symptoms were a burning pain
Speaker 1: in the throat and stomach, vomiting, extreme thirst, and diarrhea,
Speaker 1: all of which point to arsenic as the active ingredient
Speaker 1: of the poison. That suggested antidote was lemon juice and vinegar,
Speaker 1: and to to continue the quote, aquata fauna was described
Speaker 1: as clear and tasteless, suggesting that a key part of
Speaker 1: the manufacturing process was masking the characterist the metallic taste
Speaker 1: of arsenic. It was also considered to be a relatively
Speaker 1: gentle poison which did not produce so much vomiting as
Speaker 1: and hence aroused less suspicious than other preparations known at
Speaker 1: the time, So basically all of the different poisons that
Speaker 1: you were getting on the street that were any good
Speaker 1: were just different concoctions of arsenic And it was just
Speaker 1: like people figuring out different ways to like prepare the arsenic, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, it is interesting. I wonder how they did
Speaker 1: mask that taste, because it's impressive, I know, and I
Speaker 1: think that there's some suspicion that they like did some
Speaker 1: mask into the taste, but not actually as much as
Speaker 1: people claim. It was not as perfect of a poison
Speaker 1: as people claim. It was a very good poison, but
Speaker 1: mostly it was added to wine because wine I was
Speaker 1: going to say, like, if you had like a couple
Speaker 1: drops to wine, it's probably not even traced or like
Speaker 1: you can't taste it at all. And so Tafano wasn't alone.
Speaker 1: Her stepdaughter, who just happened to be a widow surprised
Speaker 1: there named Girolamas Bara or Spawna, depending on which book
Speaker 1: you read. Both books are people are very committed to
Speaker 1: these different spellings, and they're very legitimate, seeming sources. Spara
Speaker 1: sold to the aristocratic circles that she worked in as
Speaker 1: a professional astrologer, right, so she would get hired to
Speaker 1: predict the future and find missing objects and tell people
Speaker 1: about themselves and ship. Well, Giovanna de Grandie sold to
Speaker 1: working class women. Um mostly she was a beggar, and
Speaker 1: she would hang out outside churches, because churches where women
Speaker 1: could gather and talk. And there's all these like cartoons
Speaker 1: at the time about how like when women talk at church,
Speaker 1: it's the devil talking through them, which most of the
Speaker 1: time is bullshit. But I guess sometimes they were inspiring
Speaker 1: to kill all their husbands or whatever. So whatever every
Speaker 1: joke they say as a layer of truth. But yeah,
Speaker 1: and they also sold other ship, right, They weren't just poisoners.
Speaker 1: They worked as cunning women or sometimes wise women or
Speaker 1: divine arresses, and they were selling charms and you know,
Speaker 1: telling fortunes and ship. They started exporting poison to other
Speaker 1: cities too, through women they trusted, and they had this
Speaker 1: whole regional distribution network for husband killing poison. They found
Speaker 1: their clients not by you'll be shocked to know this.
Speaker 1: They don't just like hang up a sign and that
Speaker 1: like in a you know, just like go into an
Speaker 1: alley and there's a sign it's like kill your husband
Speaker 1: five dollars. They were fortune tellers and likely abortionists and
Speaker 1: all of that, and so they would slowly learn who
Speaker 1: they could trust, and they also learned who was stuck
Speaker 1: in unhappy marriages. So it's like they're they're witches and
Speaker 1: terror readers and fortune tellers and therapists, you know, absolutely, yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I mean it's like it's a necessary thing for society
Speaker 1: to have. Are these people who provide all of these services.
Speaker 1: So to make their poison they needed arsenic and then
Speaker 1: actually theoretically the best guesses about Aquata fauna is that
Speaker 1: it had antinomy and lead and maybe mercuric chloride, which
Speaker 1: was a treatment for venereal disease at the time, And
Speaker 1: my guess is what killed um Pathri's husband, but I
Speaker 1: don't know. Rather than Bella Donna, which is what was
Speaker 1: like rumored to be in it because Belladonna is a
Speaker 1: poison and you know, has a romantic sounding name, there
Speaker 1: are other things that were rumored to be in it,
Speaker 1: including many of which I've never heard of before, toad flax,
Speaker 1: Spanish fly, snap dragon, penny wart, and the spittle of
Speaker 1: mad men. The spittle of mad men, you know, like
Speaker 1: imagine being like someone whose job it is to be
Speaker 1: like the madman who sells his spittle. Yeah, like what
Speaker 1: if you went to therapy and you're like feeling better
Speaker 1: to be like, no, I gotta keep it up. My
Speaker 1: job depends on this. Yeah. I also because I am
Speaker 1: a dummy sometimes I wanted to make sure I want.
Speaker 1: I don't know exactly, or I didn't know before I
Speaker 1: read it right now, Like where arsenic actually comes from? Okay,
Speaker 1: I don't know, well it sounds like okay, inorganic arsenic compounds,
Speaker 1: they're found in soils, sediments, and groundwater. They either occur
Speaker 1: naturally or as a result of mining or smelting and
Speaker 1: industrial use of arsenic. Okay. Organic arsenic compounds are mainly
Speaker 1: found also in fish and in shellfish. So I'm wondering, like,
Speaker 1: how did these women procure this? Is perfect? That is
Speaker 1: literally the next sentence in the script. Oh hell, make see.
Speaker 1: It was worth the little flip fumble there, but like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it says arsenic is found in the natural environment, in
Speaker 1: some abundance in the Earth's crust and in small quantities
Speaker 1: and rock, soil, water, and air like that is that's wild?
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's just a yeah, something to think about.
Speaker 1: So they needed arsenic, so they found a priest they
Speaker 1: found one of these sort of fallen priests that was
Speaker 1: talking about earlier in the Magical Underworld. His name was
Speaker 1: Father giro Lama and his brother was an apothecary, and
Speaker 1: so he hooked them up and this religious overlap continued.
Speaker 1: They didn't always sell it as aqua to fauna, and
Speaker 1: it's actually possible they never sold as aqua to fauna,
Speaker 1: and that's just like the myth name that gets attached
Speaker 1: to it. But they definitely sold it for a while
Speaker 1: under the name Mana of St. Nicholas. And because when
Speaker 1: I first started researching this, it would talk about how
Speaker 1: sold as holy water or cosmetics, but the wacky thing
Speaker 1: is that it was both at once. Speaking of skincare routines,
Speaker 1: Mana of St. Nicholas was meant to be the oil
Speaker 1: that dropped from St. Nicholas's bones where it was held
Speaker 1: in a church. Or maybe they like pour the oil
Speaker 1: over his bones, I'm not sure. And this holy oil
Speaker 1: got sold in the street as not as poison, as
Speaker 1: a as a kind of regular scam. So this holy oil,
Speaker 1: when it wasn't just poison, the regular scam and it
Speaker 1: was sold for the purpose of fighting acne and other
Speaker 1: facial blemishes. Interesting, So this is what they labeled their
Speaker 1: poison as because basically it's like the woman will have
Speaker 1: all of the different you know, cosmetics on the shelf
Speaker 1: and the man never touches any of it whatever, So
Speaker 1: it's a safe place to put it. And so they
Speaker 1: labeled it in these like vials that look very holy
Speaker 1: and the St. Nicholas on them or whatever. But it's
Speaker 1: just meant to be this like fucking you know, face
Speaker 1: blemish cream oil whatever. Hey, facial oils are still used today.
Speaker 1: People stand by them, so it's like you're wrong too something. Again,
Speaker 1: I don't use an oil, use a cream. But I
Speaker 1: also but I'm like, I like my crow's feet. I
Speaker 1: want everything else to stay youthful, but I like my
Speaker 1: crows feet is like a sign of like you've lived
Speaker 1: happy time. Yeah, totally get out and the sun enough
Speaker 1: the forehead wrinkles. I would take some oil that dropped
Speaker 1: off of St. Nicholas's bones. Maybe the blood of innocence,
Speaker 1: especially billionaires, the blood of available. Yeah can we can?
Speaker 1: So if you can, we be sponsored by the blood
Speaker 1: of billionaires. Yeah? Why not? Hell? Yeah? Wow, she's the best. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh it is. It is that time. It's that time.
Speaker 1: Well that you did that without even trying. Do you
Speaker 1: have a husband, is he a great person? If he's
Speaker 1: not a great person, are you living in a time
Speaker 1: when divorce is not an option? Well, akwa toe fauna.
Speaker 1: Four drops administered to wine over the course of four months,
Speaker 1: and you will be a widow. Here's some other ads.
Speaker 1: We are back and speaking of people who are mostly
Speaker 1: in money, these women were mostly in it for the money,
Speaker 1: right as you know the whole thing which is like
Speaker 1: people are like, oh, they're in it for the money.
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, yeah, they're in it for the like
Speaker 1: means by which they feed themselves and take care of
Speaker 1: their families, like when a bunch of monsters, right, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: because but I mean it's like freedom in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways, like freedom from their husbands, but also like
Speaker 1: money will give you freedom as well, and then a
Speaker 1: lot of ways to write totally, it's the it's it's
Speaker 1: a agency in a lot of ways. The problem is
Speaker 1: that people have too much agency and other people too
Speaker 1: little agency. But they did have some altruistic moments, and
Speaker 1: in particular, they would give the poison out for free
Speaker 1: to women who couldn't afford it, who really needed to
Speaker 1: reach widowhood decades into her poisoner's career, at least twenty
Speaker 1: one years into it, probably longer than that. Juliet Tefauna
Speaker 1: died peacefully in her bed in sixteen fifty one. She
Speaker 1: was like seventy years old. She didn't die from poison.
Speaker 1: She'd never been caught. She lived her whole fucking life
Speaker 1: as fucking and she's Actually it's possible she invented to
Speaker 1: Fauna and then like named it after her mentor you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Um, and her friends, including possibly her stepdaughter,
Speaker 1: carried on without her, and I tried really hard. I
Speaker 1: think that I think this is enough of a pop
Speaker 1: culture reference that I'll get Sophie's attention and love, um,
Speaker 1: which is why I make this podcast, UM free. Thanks.
Speaker 1: So I tried to find an earl killed by the
Speaker 1: gang because of the country song about killion earl or
Speaker 1: almost died. Yeah, thanks, um, because I want to make
Speaker 1: the girls about to die joke. Yeah. Um. But I
Speaker 1: didn't find an earl, but I did find a duke.
Speaker 1: Francesco Cessi, the Duke of Seray, was thirty years older
Speaker 1: than his wife when he suddenly died and she was
Speaker 1: suddenly doing way better in life. But in sixteen fifty
Speaker 1: eight the Poisoner's gang came to the attention of the authorities.
Speaker 1: And I, as the way it's always phrased, right, I
Speaker 1: struggle to imagine that they kept it up for thirty
Speaker 1: years unnoticed. I bet they were paying someone off. They
Speaker 1: were protected by some kind of crime syndicate or just
Speaker 1: I don't know the Catholic Church, which was basically the
Speaker 1: biggest crime syndicate in Rome at the time, because why
Speaker 1: would they protect them, though I presume money is my
Speaker 1: main guess. Um. I presume that they were paying someone
Speaker 1: off or power, right, yeah, giving them poison, I you know,
Speaker 1: providing abortions for their mistresses. Like it's a good point
Speaker 1: because the magical underworld was an open secret. And the
Speaker 1: reason we know this is that the women who are
Speaker 1: selling this poison ship, they like kept receipts, and they
Speaker 1: like with like issue written promises of payment like and
Speaker 1: I think it wasn't like payment for services rendered dead
Speaker 1: husband or whatever. But they were like being very above
Speaker 1: ground about how they handled a lot of their finances.
Speaker 1: But history doesn't like talking about whether or not they
Speaker 1: were in the bed with Catholic Church or some other
Speaker 1: crime syndicate or something. I don't know. I don't know exactly,
Speaker 1: but it seemed like an open secret, and I doubt
Speaker 1: that they were doing this for thirty years unnoticed. How
Speaker 1: did they get caught? Multiple versions of the story you
Speaker 1: will be shocked to know. One version of the story
Speaker 1: is that so many people were fessing up and confessional
Speaker 1: that the pope decided to do something about it, because
Speaker 1: I guess the people, you know, the priests would like
Speaker 1: turn around and tell the confessions to the pope or whatever.
Speaker 1: I don't believe that one. It's also possible that de
Speaker 1: grand Is, the lower class poisoner, got entrapped by a
Speaker 1: woman working for the police who showed up with a a
Speaker 1: sob story and desire to kill her husband. My my guess,
Speaker 1: and this is I'm not a historian. I'm not allowed
Speaker 1: to make whatever I'm making. This guess. I think they
Speaker 1: went down because they killed that earl because he died
Speaker 1: a year before the investigation into them started, right the duke.
Speaker 1: They didn't kill an or only killed a duke. Interesting
Speaker 1: And because when you're helping random people kill people like whatever,
Speaker 1: But then when you when you get to a duke,
Speaker 1: maybe it's a step too. Yeah, but I guess like
Speaker 1: if you're if they're doing pro bono poison poison services,
Speaker 1: then the duke client must have been a good Like
Speaker 1: there was probably money and that how do you turn
Speaker 1: that down? I know? And like maybe the duchess was like,
Speaker 1: it's really bad, right, and she's married to some thirty
Speaker 1: year old older than her dude that like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean whatever, maybe there's a happy no, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm if you are forty and you date a seventy
Speaker 1: year old, I don't care. Yeah. Anyway, Also around that time,
Speaker 1: they might have been stepping up their murders around the
Speaker 1: time that they started to get caught, because there was
Speaker 1: a plague going through room at the time, which was
Speaker 1: a particularly good time for men to die unnoticed. So
Speaker 1: either they were stepping up their murders or suspicion of
Speaker 1: them being murderers was going through the roof because all
Speaker 1: of these people were dying right. Either way, the poisoner's
Speaker 1: ring goes down after at least thirty years, easily fifty years.
Speaker 1: Five poisoners are put up on trial, mostly poor women.
Speaker 1: Several of them are the are beggars. One of them
Speaker 1: Maria Spinola. Her nickname is Griffola, which is a type
Speaker 1: of mushroom more commonly known as head of the woods.
Speaker 1: And it's just a sick name. And anyone out there
Speaker 1: is looking for a new name, Yeah, Griffola, you know
Speaker 1: the Yeah. And not all of the five who went
Speaker 1: down were widows. Two of them were happily married, although
Speaker 1: one was married to her like fourth husband. I wonder
Speaker 1: what happened to the first three. I know she really, uh,
Speaker 1: I don't know how some trial runs, yeah exactly. Stefana
Speaker 1: herself had remarried and stayed remarried. And actually it was
Speaker 1: like her husband's daughter who continued on the gang after
Speaker 1: she died. And I would say, the kind of man
Speaker 1: who is willingly married to a crime lord, poisoner, who
Speaker 1: helps people murdered her husband's is a keeper mm hmmm.
Speaker 1: He's an ally, Yeah, an ally man, God bless whoever
Speaker 1: whoever those people are. But yeah, he knows, he's he
Speaker 1: knows he's part of the problem or is tight, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I suspect he would never occurred to him to
Speaker 1: do anything abusive or cruel to his wife. That's yes, exactly, Uh,
Speaker 1: but you hear that that's how you become an ally everybody? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So the first poisoner who got arrested de Grandis. She
Speaker 1: she named names, presumably after torture h Spana or Spara,
Speaker 1: the astrologer. She held out for months of torture before
Speaker 1: she confessed, and the torture they faced was another one
Speaker 1: I'd never heard of, called strapado, where your wrists are
Speaker 1: tied together behind your back and you're hung from your
Speaker 1: arms while your shoulders slowly dislocate. What the funk Medievo era?
Speaker 1: No that I don't like that either. Yeah. I hate
Speaker 1: the people that made these up, Like right, it's just
Speaker 1: like what not into it? Right? And then they turned
Speaker 1: around and they're like that woman is an evil, murderous
Speaker 1: as They're like, how else do you think we could
Speaker 1: make people unhappy? Yeah? I want to hear them scream more. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe that's what it was. There's just a lot of
Speaker 1: migraines going around from like the smoke in the air,
Speaker 1: burning trash, air pollution. Yeah really, Um, you blame them? Yes?
Speaker 1: The answers, yes, but worth noting for any listeners today.
Speaker 1: A couple of the women named names, right, away and
Speaker 1: they were hanged with the rest because snitching doesn't pay.
Speaker 1: Only for that kids only starting off rich pays. Unfortunately
Speaker 1: when it comes to crime. Based on who survived this ordeal,
Speaker 1: I mean also true today, soop forty six murders get
Speaker 1: hurt out in court and the five woman women plus
Speaker 1: one of their clients were hanged in front of a
Speaker 1: huge crowd in sixteen and before her execution, Spannah said,
Speaker 1: I've given this liquid to more people than I've got
Speaker 1: hairs on my head. That rules. I love that. Also,
Speaker 1: just like, even if they got caught, they helped so
Speaker 1: many women probably you know what I mean. They they
Speaker 1: like not all those women that their clients, like, their
Speaker 1: clients didn't get caught. I'm assuming right many of them did.
Speaker 1: But um, about forty of them got put on trial.
Speaker 1: Um but out of six hundred, yeah, more than forty.
Speaker 1: Lower class widows get put on trial. Most of them
Speaker 1: get life in prison. One of them got hanged. And Okay,
Speaker 1: the fucked up thing we know the men who were
Speaker 1: killed were pretty monstrous because of the court record, because
Speaker 1: all of their abuse against their wives was heard in
Speaker 1: court as evidence, but it was evidence for the prosecution
Speaker 1: because the fact that the men like beat their wives
Speaker 1: and ship was considered not as justification but as motive.
Speaker 1: M M. So it would be like, how do you
Speaker 1: know this woman you know, murdered her husband and someone
Speaker 1: would be like, well, her husband used to beat her,
Speaker 1: and so they'd be like, ah ha, she's the murderous,
Speaker 1: interesting and scruel. Well. Also, I guess it was like
Speaker 1: legal right to be your wife. Yeah, I presume so, yeah,
Speaker 1: the complicated part. To complicate, no one's perfect. A few
Speaker 1: of the husbands were murdered, maybe for being gay, basically
Speaker 1: like he was fucking boys instead of me. But at
Speaker 1: least in one of the cases, it was he was
Speaker 1: bringing home boys and making me watch and I don't
Speaker 1: know what is meant by boys in this context, and
Speaker 1: also forcing someone to watch this funked up so like
Speaker 1: maybe deserved a murdering. Maybe it's I guess you can't
Speaker 1: just sell poison and expected to only be used in
Speaker 1: good ways. There's another moral of the story, unfortunately, But
Speaker 1: you know who didn't have to go on trial, Suan
Speaker 1: they're rich clients. Oh yeah, right, so the duke's the
Speaker 1: duke's person wife person probably just had a great, rich
Speaker 1: life after that well. Yeah, like basically, okay, so the
Speaker 1: priests that hooked them up with the arsenic and the
Speaker 1: clients weren't put on trial. The Pope himself intervened to
Speaker 1: keep the names of the rich ladies out of the trial.
Speaker 1: They were interrogated separately for information, but not dragged in
Speaker 1: front of the judge and face no charges. So basically
Speaker 1: they were just like turn state's evidence. Yeah, and assumably
Speaker 1: like they paid off, like they were like they bribed
Speaker 1: them or something like. I don't know whether it was
Speaker 1: a bribe thing or whether it was a like we
Speaker 1: don't want to look bad and these women matter and
Speaker 1: these other women don't. Um, but I'm not I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: I mean it was you know, I think you could
Speaker 1: buy indulgences from the Catholic Church at the time where
Speaker 1: he'd be like I did a sin. They'd be like,
Speaker 1: all right, a hundred bucks, you know, because I definitely
Speaker 1: had bucks. Dollars was the currency of choices renaissance and medioidally. Yeah,
Speaker 1: George Washington, Yeah, totally, yeah, Like who is this guy?
Speaker 1: Oh you'll know one day. M and the priest guy,
Speaker 1: no one knows why he wasn't put on trial. He
Speaker 1: could have honestly been dead by then, or the church
Speaker 1: could have taken care of their own. Who knows. But
Speaker 1: while only forty six of the murders were heard in court,
Speaker 1: the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the sixth later had legal
Speaker 1: papers describing the death of six people caused by that
Speaker 1: particular poison. So that's where we get the six hundred
Speaker 1: head count from them, and the court records from the
Speaker 1: whole trial were locked up in a castle because the
Speaker 1: pope didn't want anyone knowing how to make the poison.
Speaker 1: They weren't uncovered until eighty. So there was two hundred
Speaker 1: years of like myth making and folklore that muddied historic
Speaker 1: waters and are part of why we have such a
Speaker 1: hard time like tracking what happened. The name aquata fauna,
Speaker 1: it lived on. It became a folkloric term alongside water
Speaker 1: from Palmero Renny quote slow poison, and for centuries men
Speaker 1: lived in fear of this slow poison. Mozart, when he died,
Speaker 1: admittedly kind of suddenly at thirty five years old, which
Speaker 1: is like a hundred years later or whatever, he's like,
Speaker 1: I have been poisoned by akuata fauna, he said, But
Speaker 1: no one actually knows how he died. Um. It could
Speaker 1: have been poison It could have been syphilis, it could
Speaker 1: have been food poisoning poisons. Um. Yeah, there's like one
Speaker 1: that's like maybe it's like undercooked pork chops or whatever.
Speaker 1: I don't know. It could have been a variety of things,
Speaker 1: you're right at that time. Yeah, And actually one of
Speaker 1: the main things that people thought was poisoning but wasn't
Speaker 1: was friend of the pod tuberculosis. Anytime anyone died of tuberculosis,
Speaker 1: people will be like it was poison, Like no, honey,
Speaker 1: you're just living in the pre antibiotic era. Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess it's like if you have no
Speaker 1: way of knowing how someone dies and then you assume
Speaker 1: it's like this magical or like out of nowhere thing
Speaker 1: and you can't exactly like prove otherwise, I don't know,
Speaker 1: poison seems likely if it's like also this like fearmongering
Speaker 1: like big yeah, yeah, everyone's afraid that there's all of
Speaker 1: these you know, women running around poisoning everything, and some
Speaker 1: of them are right, Like hundreds of men you know,
Speaker 1: met their end because of this. But that what's kind
Speaker 1: of interesting is that there were ways to find out.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you could tell an autopsy if someone had been poisoned,
Speaker 1: and you know, you cut them up and you look
Speaker 1: to see what happened to their intestines and guts and
Speaker 1: stomach and ship see if there's like different kinds of damage.
Speaker 1: But the thing about akwatafauna that became sort of magical.
Speaker 1: It was this poison that defied autopsy and ship and
Speaker 1: it's like yes and no, this concept of the slow
Speaker 1: poison that you could if you control it just right,
Speaker 1: you could poison someone one drop of time over months
Speaker 1: and they die of natural causes months later. That's not
Speaker 1: real or at least it wasn't real then, and I
Speaker 1: think it's not real now. And it was basically this
Speaker 1: like boogeyman moral panic thing that help men become more
Speaker 1: afraid of women because they're like, oh, I'm slowly getting
Speaker 1: sick and then died. I've been slow poisoned by my wife.
Speaker 1: Like most poisons that kill people at the time, including
Speaker 1: arsenic and probably including the actualk with tafauna, you put
Speaker 1: some drops in someone's food or wine or whatever, and
Speaker 1: then they fucking die. And awkward sefauna was really good
Speaker 1: and that you didn't vomit all over the place, and
Speaker 1: you know, it was like a it was a better poison,
Speaker 1: but and it was like harder to detect the damage
Speaker 1: the organs and ship m hm. Also, have you seen
Speaker 1: the movie Phantom Thread? I have not. This is I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess I don't know if it's spoiler alert if
Speaker 1: I mean, if you want to go watch it, go
Speaker 1: watch it. But essentially the couple, the woman is poisoning
Speaker 1: her husband over time because she wants him to like
Speaker 1: need her so she can take care of him. So
Speaker 1: maybe like was love behind at of these motives, you know,
Speaker 1: like they just wanted to the men to be like
Speaker 1: little babies that they should take care of. But I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just Paul Thomas Anderson movie, and he deserves to
Speaker 1: be in jail solely because of how we treated you
Speaker 1: and Apple. But that's another story. Um, But I don't
Speaker 1: think it's another I mean, okay, I don't know at
Speaker 1: that particular story, but in some ways I don't think
Speaker 1: it's another story because I think that's a misogynist. Take
Speaker 1: this concept of the woman who is poisoning the husband,
Speaker 1: whether it's a literal poison or whether it's the like
Speaker 1: draining his soul to make him reliant on her or whatever.
Speaker 1: Is this misogynist myth and it kind of has the
Speaker 1: roots in that's very true. Well in the movie too,
Speaker 1: it's very much romanticized because he eventually finds out and
Speaker 1: he just keeps going along with it because it's like
Speaker 1: she loves me or whatever the moral that was. But yeah, wow, um,
Speaker 1: but I guess that's a really good point. That is
Speaker 1: also a missogyn to take to be like, oh, she
Speaker 1: wants his attention so bad, or like she like it's
Speaker 1: so desperately wanting to seem valuable to someone. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I'm I am sure there is someone in history who
Speaker 1: has done something like this, you know. But yeah, just
Speaker 1: like concept. But the one upside, right, So you have
Speaker 1: all of these these women to these men, now like
Speaker 1: I if men die people like it was the wife, right,
Speaker 1: And I'm sure like a lot of god people got
Speaker 1: murdered for being poisoners who weren't poisoners. The one upside is,
Speaker 1: I bet a lot of men stayed their hand because
Speaker 1: they realized the power that women had because of the
Speaker 1: existence of aqua to fauna. Yeah, put them in place, yea.
Speaker 1: So so as as this thing became a legend, right,
Speaker 1: more poisoners took the name to Fauna, at least one
Speaker 1: that we have a record of as a prisoner. In
Speaker 1: seventeen thirty, a hundred years after the Heyday, she took
Speaker 1: the name to Fauna. Another Italian poisoner, which who is
Speaker 1: still in Palmero, was Giovanna Bana No. And her nickname
Speaker 1: and I'm literally including in her in this because I
Speaker 1: like her nickname was the Old Vinegar Lady, oh, which
Speaker 1: ruled her poison got called vinegar and it was a
Speaker 1: mixture of arsenic white wine and vinegar. And she worked
Speaker 1: as a beggar and a poisoner. And she was hanged
Speaker 1: in nine because I guess being a poisoner is illegal
Speaker 1: for some reason. Um, but Old Vinegar Lady also a
Speaker 1: sick name might not be as good as a choice
Speaker 1: for someone, um who's looking for a new name. Up
Speaker 1: to you. Yeah, but has a bite that's true, that's true. No, No, No,
Speaker 1: twenty years there's more poison hell yeah years. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I feel maybe I'm maybe I'm too excited about this. No, no, whatever,
Speaker 1: like this is this is cool. People do cool stuff,
Speaker 1: like like it's complicated, right, but like overall, like what
Speaker 1: do you fucking want you create a society where women
Speaker 1: the only way that they can have freedom is to
Speaker 1: poison people. They're gonna fucking poison people, and that's on
Speaker 1: fucking you. Women did not create that society. If anything,
Speaker 1: equality at that point would have helped the men, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, Like if they want killing to
Speaker 1: stop happening, they can just treat women like human beings,
Speaker 1: you know. But that's that they would rather not have,
Speaker 1: Like they would rather the casualties than actual freedom for women,
Speaker 1: which is another interesting shitty thing. Yeah, some of us
Speaker 1: will die so that we can all hold our power
Speaker 1: over our wives. That makes us miserable too, because of
Speaker 1: sucking patriarchies of prison for everyone. Twenty years after the
Speaker 1: main circle of poisoners from sixteen seventy to sixteen eighty two,
Speaker 1: King Louis the fourteenth Court in France was rocked by
Speaker 1: a scandal called the Affair of Poisons that was kind
Speaker 1: of just a moral panic, but with some actual poison involved. Oh.
Speaker 1: It started with an aristocratic lady, Madame de brund Vier,
Speaker 1: who killed her father and two brothers and tried to
Speaker 1: kill her husband, and she theoretically did this to get
Speaker 1: all their ship like at their a EIDs or whatever. Right, Um,
Speaker 1: that's the easy answer of why she did it. The
Speaker 1: real answer is you we shoked to know patriarchy. She
Speaker 1: supposedly and I think this part is not true. But
Speaker 1: the legend against her claims that she practiced her poison
Speaker 1: by poisoning poor people in the hospital. First, like, she
Speaker 1: killed thirty peasants in the hospital, and she was accused
Speaker 1: of the murder of her brothers and dad, which was true.
Speaker 1: She murdered them. She fled, she got arrested, and then
Speaker 1: she was tortured because let's be real, its fucking whatever.
Speaker 1: That feels like there's no death without torture at this
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, there's one historian who claims that she wasn't tortured. Um,
Speaker 1: this whole thing became a bigger deal because it like
Speaker 1: goes all the way up in the court. But the torture,
Speaker 1: I guess now called the water cure. At the time,
Speaker 1: it was called being put to the question in France,
Speaker 1: and basically she was forced to drink sixteen pints of water,
Speaker 1: two gallons of water. She confessed, and she was beheaded.
Speaker 1: But so she probably did it, but when she confessed,
Speaker 1: it came out that she had been sexually assaulted, probably
Speaker 1: by her dad, as a kid. When she was seven,
Speaker 1: she had been sexually assaulted, she didn't say by whom,
Speaker 1: and also that she started sleeping with one of her
Speaker 1: younger brothers who she later murdered. And I have no
Speaker 1: idea what age that happened or what direction the abuse
Speaker 1: went in that setup. Then she grew up and got married,
Speaker 1: even though she didn't want to get married. She wanted
Speaker 1: a divorce because she liked sucking around and be She
Speaker 1: liked being a free person who was in charge of
Speaker 1: herself um and specifically, she knew a divorce wasn't possible,
Speaker 1: so she tried to separate her money from her husband's money.
Speaker 1: And this pisss off her dad because it would ruin
Speaker 1: his reputation because royalty is fucking dumb. So her dad
Speaker 1: had her lover, a captain in the army, thrown into prison.
Speaker 1: In that prison, her boyfriend meant it and poisoner named
Speaker 1: ex Silly who had been the court the court poisoner
Speaker 1: for a bunch of royalty in a bunch of countries,
Speaker 1: and he teaches boyfriend the art of poison, and boyfriend
Speaker 1: gets out of prison and he becomes a licensed alchemist
Speaker 1: so he can get arsenic and all that ship and
Speaker 1: starts making poisons. And the cool thread is that a
Speaker 1: silly might have gotten his information? Who might have gotten
Speaker 1: his information? I read this whole article tracing the lineage
Speaker 1: between the fauna are our heroes from last time, right
Speaker 1: and ex silly and therefore all of these other murders um,
Speaker 1: So this whole long line, you know, it's the gift
Speaker 1: that keeps on giving. Yeah, her boyfriend gets pretty good
Speaker 1: at making poisons, or maybe he just bought the poisons.
Speaker 1: Suing stories change have a question alchemists. There there are
Speaker 1: legal professions back then. Apparently what are they? What are
Speaker 1: they doing? So, like, what are what is alchemy? As
Speaker 1: far as like if they're not killing people, are they
Speaker 1: like having little potions that heal? You like? Is that
Speaker 1: the like what is what is it? So alchemy was
Speaker 1: like in some ways was kind of the word for
Speaker 1: science before science and um and so it was like
Speaker 1: people who were like studying ship and trying to invent
Speaker 1: different chemical ship. Again with the theoretical long lineage of
Speaker 1: trying to create the philosopher's stone and make gold out
Speaker 1: of lead or whatever. But mostly alchemists, I believe at
Speaker 1: the time we're essentially apothecaries and we're like druggists and
Speaker 1: you can go yeah, um. And I don't know exactly
Speaker 1: how the licensing thing worked in France at the time,
Speaker 1: but apparently he was able to get his license to
Speaker 1: be an alchemist in the same way that the arsenic
Speaker 1: that the other people got was through an apothecary, you know, um,
Speaker 1: someone who had legal access to it, who then turned
Speaker 1: around and sold it on the side. And the suspected
Speaker 1: poison this time was oursnic and the essence of toads.
Speaker 1: And it really seems like all the poison at the
Speaker 1: time was just arsenic, was something for flavor. You know.
Speaker 1: They're like, what if you mix arsnic with this, and
Speaker 1: you're like, well, yeah, it's gonna kill someone because it's
Speaker 1: sucking arsenic. It's like the fucking I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like your your style, your brand. But one of
Speaker 1: the things that is interesting, she actually killed her husband,
Speaker 1: and I'm sorry her. She didn't kill her husband. She
Speaker 1: tried to kill her husband. She killed her brothers and
Speaker 1: her dad with like a super basic poison that was
Speaker 1: like really obvious when they like cut open, cut them
Speaker 1: open and looked at their organs. And when they found her,
Speaker 1: they found super basic shitty poison which I don't even
Speaker 1: think was arsenic based. I can't remember what it was
Speaker 1: based on. And they also found clear vials of a
Speaker 1: suspected our snake based one, and in order to test it,
Speaker 1: they gave it to stray dogs and killed those dogs,
Speaker 1: which happened a lot of the time. But did you
Speaker 1: know that aquata fauna would never kill a dog. Aquata
Speaker 1: fauna only kills husbands. It will kill a hundred percent
Speaker 1: of husbands one of the time. It is available for
Speaker 1: purchase where ever you get your magical charms. Any person
Speaker 1: you meet on the street who will give your fortune. Actually,
Speaker 1: don't go acost actual fortune tellers asking them for poison.
Speaker 1: But but they can get off right with the with
Speaker 1: the code with the code cool people. Yeah, you go
Speaker 1: in and say I'm with cool people and get off
Speaker 1: your aquata fauna. Remember to ask for aquata fauna. Margaret
Speaker 1: Killjoyce sent you and then murder your huh uh nope, Okay,
Speaker 1: Sophie is shaking her head. Uh as we are back
Speaker 1: from ads and we are talking about how some poisoned
Speaker 1: ship poisoned. But the husband may have been making sorry,
Speaker 1: the boyfriend may or may not have been. I'm just
Speaker 1: using boyfriend andship because if I started writing it all
Speaker 1: out with all the her names used every time, and
Speaker 1: then I was like, I can't keep track of this
Speaker 1: many names. And if I was a listener, I would
Speaker 1: also not keep track of this many names. And so
Speaker 1: I'm just going with boyfriend. You can look up the
Speaker 1: affairs of the poisons if you want to learn all
Speaker 1: of these people's names. He wasn't very good at security culture.
Speaker 1: He might have been good at poison not good at
Speaker 1: security culture because he saved all of the letters from
Speaker 1: his girlfriend that said things like, hey, babe, what if
Speaker 1: I killed everyone in my family so we could own
Speaker 1: more land or whatever? He dies, I actually don't know
Speaker 1: how he dies. I couldn't find out how he dies.
Speaker 1: It's he's a captain in the army. It's the seventeenth century,
Speaker 1: and he had just murdered some people. So stabbed with
Speaker 1: a sword, hanged by the state, and tuberculosis are my
Speaker 1: three guesses. After he dies, they found all the letters
Speaker 1: and that's how she gets found out and torture and executed. Well,
Speaker 1: during her confession she says, half the people of quality
Speaker 1: are involved in this sort of thing and it could
Speaker 1: ruin them if I were to talk, And by basically
Speaker 1: hating that, she sent everyone into a panic and put
Speaker 1: serious fear into the men at court. And my argument
Speaker 1: would be, if you don't want to be murdered by women,
Speaker 1: then don't create an economic system by which women can
Speaker 1: only inherit wealth if they murder you. But whatever, And
Speaker 1: this is the start of the affair of the poisons,
Speaker 1: because her killing the people isn't the affair of the poisons.
Speaker 1: That's just the actual poison murder um. Instead, it's this
Speaker 1: like break up of the magical underworld scene of Paris.
Speaker 1: And and I'm not going to do the whole details
Speaker 1: of the affair of the poisons because it's not actually cool.
Speaker 1: I think the underworld people are super cool, but I
Speaker 1: don't give a shit about royalty. It led to this
Speaker 1: crackdown of the criminal magical underworld of France. All the
Speaker 1: fortune tellers and alchemist everyone's selling aphrodisiacts and horoscopes and
Speaker 1: ship and they might have sold poison and called it
Speaker 1: quote inheritance powder, which rules they're inventive with these names.
Speaker 1: I know, I know, oh one woman who gets called
Speaker 1: a witch and fuck it, I don't know she's a witch.
Speaker 1: That's cool. Um, she might have been in charge of
Speaker 1: it all. She might have been in charge of this
Speaker 1: whole poisoner's ring, or there might not have been a
Speaker 1: fucking poisoner's ring in the magical on the world at
Speaker 1: the time. I don't fucking know. Her name was lavois In,
Speaker 1: which means the neighbor, which is a sick name for
Speaker 1: a witch. Uh, anyone searching for new names whatever, Okay,
Speaker 1: that one might come off oddly. She made her living
Speaker 1: selling love potions made with like after birth and ship.
Speaker 1: She was also maybe responsible for poisoning more than a
Speaker 1: thousand people, and after hours of looking into it, I
Speaker 1: cannot decide whether I think it's true. She ends up
Speaker 1: burned at the stake and it I kind of think
Speaker 1: that the whole thing was made up after the woman
Speaker 1: murdered the husband, the father right, and the brothers. But
Speaker 1: the affair of the poisons leads to thirty six people
Speaker 1: being executed, possibly as witch hysteria, or there might have
Speaker 1: been pre with black masses and incest and poison and
Speaker 1: a garden with the bones of two thousand, five hundred infants.
Speaker 1: Voison's garden. Can you repeat that? Yeah, So supposedly when
Speaker 1: they when they caught Levois in I'm just gonna say
Speaker 1: the neighbor because they can't pronounce French, when they catch
Speaker 1: the neighbor in her garden is buried the bones of
Speaker 1: two thousand, five hundred infants. Oh, and here's a contemporary
Speaker 1: description of one of the black masses from around from
Speaker 1: the poison affair, which I'm guessing didn't happen whatever, Maybe
Speaker 1: it did, there's a lot of evidence it did. It's
Speaker 1: actually literally my skepticism is the only thing holding me
Speaker 1: from just saying this is true. Everyone else is like,
Speaker 1: this fucking happened, and I'm like, I don't fucking know
Speaker 1: about this. Right, historians say this ship happened, It probably
Speaker 1: fucking happened. Maybe not the garden of bones, We're not sure.
Speaker 1: And this is talking about the King's mistress, and who
Speaker 1: was implicated in the whole affair but ended up surviving
Speaker 1: because she was the King's mistress. So here's a contemporary
Speaker 1: description quote a long black velvet paul was spread over
Speaker 1: the altar, and upon this the Royal Mistress laid herself
Speaker 1: in a state of perfect nudity. Six black candles were lit.
Speaker 1: The celebrants robed himself in a chawsable embroidered with esoteric
Speaker 1: characters rotten silver. The gold pattern and chalice were placed
Speaker 1: upon the naked belly of the living altar. All was
Speaker 1: silent save for the low, monotonous murmur of the blasphemous liturgy.
Speaker 1: An assistant crept forward, bearing an infant in her arms.
Speaker 1: The child was held over the altar, a sharp gash
Speaker 1: across the neck, a stifled cry, and warm drops fell
Speaker 1: into the chalice and streamed upon the white figure beneath.
Speaker 1: The corpse was handed to olive O's inn, who flung
Speaker 1: it callously into an oven fashioned for that purpose, which
Speaker 1: glowed white hot in its fierceness. Yeah the incantation of
Speaker 1: the priest, in case anyone needs the incantation, asked her
Speaker 1: off Asmadeus, Princes of friendship and love, I invoke you
Speaker 1: to accept the sacrifice this child that I offer you
Speaker 1: for the things I ask of you. They are that
Speaker 1: the friendship and love of the King and the Dolphin
Speaker 1: may be assured to me, that I may be honored
Speaker 1: by all the princes and princesses of the court. That
Speaker 1: the King denied me nothing. I ask, whether it be
Speaker 1: for my relatives or for any of my household. Wow.
Speaker 1: First of all, what a pathetic little chant, very desperate.
Speaker 1: What if he loves me? What if he loves me? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Also the princes of friendship and love threw me off,
Speaker 1: Like that's assurance has confirmed not a sligh not al.
Speaker 1: But also I mean like most of that stuff for
Speaker 1: me definitely sounds kind of made up, like the right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that is I mean this was written as a
Speaker 1: thing that happened at the time. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: like the affairs of the poisons like gets reported on
Speaker 1: is like all this ship happened, and I don't really
Speaker 1: believe a lot of it. I know that the I
Speaker 1: know that people got hanged. I think it was witch hysteria. Um,
Speaker 1: and probably someone listening knows why. Probably truth? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's probably a starting point of truth. And then people
Speaker 1: get scared and take up a bunch of stuff and yeah,
Speaker 1: just implement misogyny over and over the infants that we're
Speaker 1: supposedly used in these rituals were alleged to have been
Speaker 1: acquired from sex workers, or maybe are the fate of
Speaker 1: the people who come to the Magical World asking for
Speaker 1: help getting rid of a baby. The priest involved was
Speaker 1: arrested and confessed. But again that means nothing to me,
Speaker 1: because everyone's being tortured, you know. But he theoretically confessed
Speaker 1: it that black mass, and he died in prison, and
Speaker 1: in his confession he claims that he sacrificed several of
Speaker 1: his own newborn children. I I don't believe anything people
Speaker 1: who are confessing to saying, but there were several homes
Speaker 1: for wayward priests around Europe, for priests who had started
Speaker 1: doing weird ship like that, like having black masses and things.
Speaker 1: So maybe it was actually kind of a big problem,
Speaker 1: or maybe the moral panic was everywhere, and every priest
Speaker 1: who seemed a little sketchy, you throw them in the
Speaker 1: fucking home for wayward Priests and the whole conspiracy, right,
Speaker 1: I'm curious, like, yeah, I don't know, Um, I mean,
Speaker 1: do you can the baby stuff be true? Like do
Speaker 1: they really kill little babies for blood? Maybe I bet
Speaker 1: that some of the magical underworld ship included killing babies,
Speaker 1: but also killing of babies and ship with blood is
Speaker 1: like the core of like bullshit conspiracy type stuff and
Speaker 1: moral panics and things. So like I bet mostly they
Speaker 1: were abortionists and they were like, you know, love filter
Speaker 1: people and whatever like mm hmm. But and I and
Speaker 1: I bet you the I bet you the evil priests
Speaker 1: were just like also making love potions where they were like, hell, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna use my holy powers of God to like
Speaker 1: you know, make some love potions for people or whatever.
Speaker 1: And and they all like had mistresses and we're like
Speaker 1: doing like or misters I guess, and doing all kinds
Speaker 1: of ship that they weren't supposed to. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean I can't. I can't stop thinking about Raspuchin.
Speaker 1: I don't know why. I feel like he's like a
Speaker 1: very famous man which or wizard or whatever mystic, right,
Speaker 1: I like man which is a snack. I'm just saying
Speaker 1: that's funny. Um, But it's interesting that I don't know,
Speaker 1: like he was a very public royal like yeah, my
Speaker 1: essentially your mystic, you know what I mean. Like it's
Speaker 1: just very uh that was like not even that long ago,
Speaker 1: that was like late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds or something.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean like this underworld existed like and
Speaker 1: a lot of times it was really out in the open.
Speaker 1: And the question for me is just like whether or not,
Speaker 1: because I I could imagine, like, I don't know, if
Speaker 1: you came to my house and arrested me, it would
Speaker 1: look real bad. Some of the ship I keep around
Speaker 1: and the ship that I talked about on this podcast
Speaker 1: and whatever. Right, but I don't like sacrifice babies or whatever,
Speaker 1: you know, but if they would be like it would
Speaker 1: be easy to make these jumps with a moral panic
Speaker 1: mm hmm. Yeah, the collapse of this whole conspiracy of poisoners,
Speaker 1: this particular new conspiracy of poisoners apparently, and this woman
Speaker 1: probably was a poisoner, right, She probably was a selling
Speaker 1: people poison person. And I think the neighbor was to um.
Speaker 1: She she was a widow and a fortune teller, and
Speaker 1: she bragged drunk at a party. It was sort of
Speaker 1: like a girlfriend's party. She bragged drunk at a party
Speaker 1: that she was doing so well in the poison game
Speaker 1: that she could retire soon, which got the cops onto her,
Speaker 1: who were like, hello, I would like to buy a
Speaker 1: poison please, and she was like, hell, yeah, I got
Speaker 1: you here some poison and they were like, just kidding,
Speaker 1: we are the police. And so her whole family gets
Speaker 1: arrested and her and her kids are all executed I think,
Speaker 1: burned at the steak so don't brag drunk at parties
Speaker 1: about felonies are doing. And then maybe her whole family
Speaker 1: slept in one bed, all incest style. And this is
Speaker 1: a messier episode that I'm used to doing. Her lesbian
Speaker 1: lover whose party it was died under torture, and in
Speaker 1: the end, the state killed thirty six people, not including
Speaker 1: to Die who died under torture, and an unknown number
Speaker 1: who killed themselves. During the repression, forty renegade priests were arrested,
Speaker 1: many of whom got life in prison or I think
Speaker 1: that probably translates to sent to those homes for wayward priests.
Speaker 1: But the affair got kind of shut down once it
Speaker 1: reached the King's mistress and she was never put up
Speaker 1: on charges, and the whole thing fucked France's reputation internationally,
Speaker 1: so much so that when the next crew of occultists
Speaker 1: poisoners cropped up a couple of decades later, because apparently
Speaker 1: there's a social need. In seventeen o two, they just
Speaker 1: kind of quietly imprisoned the ringleaders and definitely without trial,
Speaker 1: and just we're like, we're going to make this problem
Speaker 1: go away. We're not going to make it do another
Speaker 1: big stink. But anyway, men everywhere can rest a little
Speaker 1: bit easier knowing that divorce is legal and their wives
Speaker 1: have an easier way out of a bad relationship than arsenic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: why are they complaining? Now? You know what I mean,
Speaker 1: You'll have it easy. You'll have it so easy. Way
Speaker 1: to the men or the time men, they should there
Speaker 1: should not be any reason for any complaints at this juncture.
Speaker 1: But I mean, like you brought up a good point
Speaker 1: though about it being a need. It kept popping up
Speaker 1: generation after generation or whatever, right, So it's really it's
Speaker 1: pathetic actually how long it took them to even consider
Speaker 1: making men or women and men equal, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, to hold onto that power or even just
Speaker 1: able to leave each other. Yes, exactly. The concept of
Speaker 1: someone being property was also a huge issue obviously, but like, no,
Speaker 1: I never never affected anything else, right now, that's not
Speaker 1: even sure, Yeah no, yeah, absolutely, yeah yeah yeah, And
Speaker 1: it kept like like white men to be the people
Speaker 1: that can wield power and only them, and so, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, power is a disease, and I don't
Speaker 1: know most people when they get it, they I don't know,
Speaker 1: they'll do anything to keep it. And that's unsettledly to me.
Speaker 1: Would you say that the cure for the power disease
Speaker 1: is arsenic? Maybe not in a legally binding way. What
Speaker 1: I would the fact that it's like literally in our earth.
Speaker 1: It's really magical to me, if you want to use
Speaker 1: that word. It's pretty sick. The fact that, like I
Speaker 1: mean a lot of things grow that are bad for us,
Speaker 1: or or even just like roots or whatever is bad
Speaker 1: for us. Yes, ouri is bad for us. There's like
Speaker 1: certain berries you can't eat. But I mean, at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, we are on this globe and
Speaker 1: the Earth is deciding what happens, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: If the Earth wants to have some things that float around,
Speaker 1: it can kill us. Yeah, you do? You like I
Speaker 1: support her? You know? Yeah? Yeah, Well thanks for coming
Speaker 1: on my How to Kill Your Husband episode. It was
Speaker 1: fun to do something a little bit out of my
Speaker 1: usual wheelhouse, you know. Yeah, I mean, I'm honored I
Speaker 1: was chosen for this. It was very fun. I learned
Speaker 1: a lot um and uh yeah, this is the only
Speaker 1: I think podcasts are the way I learned things now,
Speaker 1: and so I appreciate when they're kid you know. Well,
Speaker 1: I learned a lot from Sharene's history episodes on it
Speaker 1: Could Happen here, And other people want to learn from Sharine,
Speaker 1: they can do so by listening to Shrine on it
Speaker 1: Could Happen. Yeah, I'm on that. I am also the
Speaker 1: co host of Ethnically Ambiguous, and you can follow me
Speaker 1: on social media if you want, Sure Hero Instagram, I'm
Speaker 1: sure hero Twitter. Also, after we're gonna have a joke
Speaker 1: to wrap this up, okay, well my plug that you
Speaker 1: can before you wrap it up with a joke, you
Speaker 1: can also follow me on social media. I also wish
Speaker 1: I wasn't on social media, but I feel more hooked
Speaker 1: into it than I want to be. I'm on Twitter
Speaker 1: at Magpie Killjoy and on Instagram at Margaret Killjoy. And
Speaker 1: I have a book called We Won't Be Here Tomorrow
Speaker 1: that is available now in stores by It go buy it. Yeah. Also,
Speaker 1: we like kind of shot ourselves in the foot Because
Speaker 1: I also don't like social media and hate that I'm
Speaker 1: that and connected. But like I feel like if you're
Speaker 1: on a podcast, you kind of have to be front
Speaker 1: facing in a lot of ways. Right, That's why I'm
Speaker 1: on social media. That's called self outage. Yeah, um, all
Speaker 1: ready for my joke. I am absolutely what kind of
Speaker 1: t is hard to swallow? Honestly. Oh that's a good one.
Speaker 1: But IoT the answer, But I take it. I will
Speaker 1: take that though. I mean, honesty is better. I was
Speaker 1: gonna say reality also true, so true. So yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's my joke. Thank you for coming to my joke.
Speaker 1: Join next week joke our with Sharine. That wasn't a
Speaker 1: very good joke. That's why it's a Sharina, not me.
Speaker 1: We'll be We'll be We'll be back next week. We'll
Speaker 1: be bad. We'll be bad, and you'll you'll be here too,
Speaker 1: and you'll listen to because that's what you do. Cool
Speaker 1: People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media. But more podcasts on cool Zone Media. Visit
Speaker 1: our website cool zone media dot com, or check us
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Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts.