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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hi,

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Speaker 1: my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Monster Fact,

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Speaker 1: a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,

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Speaker 1: focusing in on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.

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Speaker 1: In this episode, I'm beginning a four part Monster Fact

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Speaker 1: series on the four main demonic factions in games workshops

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Speaker 1: Warhammer forty thousand universe. So first a little background. The

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Speaker 1: fictional far future forty case setting depicts an interstellar human

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Speaker 1: imperium with various dark, fantasy, and medieval elements. This aggressive

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Speaker 1: imperium is challenged on all sides by equally warlike alien societies,

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Speaker 1: but they also face the threat of chaos. In the

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Speaker 1: forty case setting, the demons of chaos exist a psychic

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Speaker 1: dimension called the Warp, but they can spill over into

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Speaker 1: what is called real space through various methods and exploits.

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Speaker 1: So in this setting, demons are not the mere creation

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Speaker 1: of religion or occultism, but an actual spiritual and physical

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Speaker 1: threat to humanity. Heretical drift on a far flung planet

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Speaker 1: can mean far more than just mere rebellion. It can

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Speaker 1: lead to a demonic incursion that consumes billions of souls.

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Speaker 1: There are various ways to divide up demonic factions in

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Speaker 1: a created world like this, but forty K largely swits

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Speaker 1: the forces of chaos into four distinct flavors, red, blue, green,

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Speaker 1: and purple, representing bloodthirst, chaotic change, pestilence, and hedonism, each

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Speaker 1: a major conduit of mortal emotions and mortal souls in

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Speaker 1: the fictional forty first millennium, with each conduit accreting into

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Speaker 1: a powerful entity known as a chaos god. They are Corn, Zinch, Nergal,

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Speaker 1: and Slanesh. There are other lesser CHAOSK gods as well,

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Speaker 1: but these are the four main factions, and while they

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Speaker 1: sometimes come to a working agreement with each other, they're

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Speaker 1: mostly at war amongst themselves in what is referred to

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Speaker 1: as the Great Game. In this episode, will start with

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Speaker 1: Corn as the so called Blood God is a lot

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Speaker 1: more direct. He's powered by mortal violence and war. He's

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Speaker 1: all about rivers of blood and pyramids of bone. His

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Speaker 1: favorite color is obviously red, and he's not big on subtlety.

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Speaker 1: His demonic hords and mortal followers dig horns and blades.

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Speaker 1: They spill blood for the Blood God, so really there's

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Speaker 1: not much to elaborate on here. However, in browsing through

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Speaker 1: the ninth edition Chaos Demons Codex from Games Workshop, I

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Speaker 1: simply couldn't let the unit known as a skull canon

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Speaker 1: pass without comment. There's a lot of talk of skull

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Speaker 1: harvesting with some of the other their corn units, and

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Speaker 1: this one amounts to a big honking heavy metal cannon,

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Speaker 1: A couple of red demons called blood Letters crew the weapon,

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Speaker 1: loading it up with the fresh remains of slain enemy soldiers.

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Speaker 1: The cannon breaks everything down and then fires flaming skulls

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Speaker 1: across the battlefield, again fittingly direct. Thus far, in actual

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Speaker 1: human warfare, skulls and heads have proven poor missiles, but

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Speaker 1: the presentation of decapitated heads to the enemy has a

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Speaker 1: long history, with plentiful examples to be found. In the

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Speaker 1: classical and ancient world. The heads of enemy dead might

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Speaker 1: be delivered directly to enemy lines, that might be placed

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Speaker 1: on spikes or what have you. Ruth Schuster, writing for

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Speaker 1: Harets in twenty eighteen, points out that Iron Age Galls

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Speaker 1: even developed a resin based embalming method to ensure the

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Speaker 1: captured heads of their enemies didn't rot too fast. As

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Speaker 1: Peter Franca Pant points out in his book The First Crusade,

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Speaker 1: The Call from the East, the Crusades saw a lot

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Speaker 1: of head taking on both sides, and there are Western

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Speaker 1: accounts of crusader heads being catapulted back into their siege

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Speaker 1: camps in order to hurt morale. The same terror tactics

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Speaker 1: were said to have been used by French crusader host

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Speaker 1: as well. This according to the French themselves in the

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Speaker 1: Old French Crusader Cycle. According to Sarah Grace Heller in

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Speaker 1: twenty eleven's Terror in the Old Crusade Cycle, various other

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Speaker 1: catapult age accounts described the launching of dead bodies into

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Speaker 1: camps and besieged cities as a means of terror and

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Speaker 1: or biological attack. The age of the cannon presented various

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Speaker 1: new ideas of how cannons might be used in one

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Speaker 1: way or another to spread human remains. None of these

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Speaker 1: methods use the remains as ammo against other combatants are

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Speaker 1: worth noting. Nonetheless, the execution method known as blowing from

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Speaker 1: a gun often entailed the strapping of a live victim

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Speaker 1: to the mouth of a cannon, resulting in partial or

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Speaker 1: complete scattering of the remains on the other end of

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Speaker 1: the spectrum, cremated ashes are on occasion spread by cannon

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Speaker 1: fire as a desired dramatic funerary right in modern times.

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Speaker 1: In a broader sense, however, the use of human remains

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Speaker 1: as weapons dates back to prehistory. Europeans were crafting human

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Speaker 1: bones into weapons at least ten thousand years ago, practice

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Speaker 1: that continued into recent centuries for other far flung cultures,

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Speaker 1: at least for symbolic and spiritual reasons. Now, as far

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Speaker 1: as the creation and veneration of artifacts made from human

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Speaker 1: bones goes, this is the kind of thing that's probably

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Speaker 1: lost on the chaos god Corn. All he cares about

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Speaker 1: is the hacking, of the stabbing, and of course the

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Speaker 1: occasional explosively propelled pyrotechnic human skull. We'll continue through the

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Speaker 1: chaos factions in this manner over the next three weeks,

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Speaker 1: so tune in to the Monster Fact on Wednesdays in

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Speaker 1: the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast fee As always,

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Speaker 1: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow

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Speaker 1: your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is

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