Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, this is Robert Lamb. We tend to avoid
Speaker 1: politics on the show. Most of you, like us, are
Speaker 1: probably looking for a break from all of that when
Speaker 1: it comes to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. But for
Speaker 1: our us listeners, I feel like I'd be remiss if
Speaker 1: I didn't urge y'all to head out there and vote.
Speaker 1: Vote with your hearts and vote with your minds. Early
Speaker 1: voting is up and running in various places, So get
Speaker 1: out there and make your voice heard if you can. Thanks.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is the
Speaker 1: Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind, focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.
Speaker 1: Since this week is Halloween, I decided to draw inspiration
Speaker 1: from a particular elder tome of other world evil. Nope,
Speaker 1: it's not the Necronomicon, not the Book of Ebon, and
Speaker 1: not even the Denton Affair. I'm talking about the two
Speaker 1: thousand and six Malius Monstrorum from the role playing game
Speaker 1: Call of Cthulhu. Now I realize there's a far more
Speaker 1: recent edition of this book. Essentially, it's a monster manual
Speaker 1: for the sixth edition of the Call of Cthulhu game
Speaker 1: from Chaosum, Inc. But the two thousand and six book
Speaker 1: this is the one that I really love. It features
Speaker 1: scrapbook style illustrations, so a mix of repurposed and altered
Speaker 1: images from various times and places that creates a haunting
Speaker 1: sense of horror. It implies that all of these things
Speaker 1: are lurking just beyond the limits of our senses, the
Speaker 1: limits of our sanity, just waiting to burst through. And
Speaker 1: we have all of these various illustrations, woodcuts, suspicious photographs,
Speaker 1: and so forth that hint at their forms. Dark gods
Speaker 1: and creatures in the books stem from many different sources,
Speaker 1: obviously from the works of HP Lovecraft, but also from
Speaker 1: many of his contemporaries such as Clark Ashton Smith and
Speaker 1: also later admires like Stephen King and Michael Shay. So
Speaker 1: in this special Halloween episode of The Monster Fact, I
Speaker 1: thought we'd dip into the Malleus Monstororum and discuss a
Speaker 1: few different unspeakable horrors from this dreaded volume of yore.
Speaker 1: First up, the dreaded gugs, black furred ogre like creatures
Speaker 1: with bifurcated four limbs branching into separate limbs. Their heads, however,
Speaker 1: are the most distinctive feature on these creatures. As Lovecraft
Speaker 1: described them in the dream Quest of Unknown Kadath quote,
Speaker 1: the eyes jutted two inches from each side, shaded by
Speaker 1: bony protuberances overgrown with coarse hairs. But the head was
Speaker 1: chiefly terrible because of the mouth. That mouth had great
Speaker 1: yellow fangs that ran from the top to the bottom
Speaker 1: of the head, opening vertically instead of horizontally. Now, there
Speaker 1: are many wonderful depictions of the Gug by talented human artists,
Speaker 1: including the legendary Wayne Barlow, one of the absolute bests.
Speaker 1: But I find the illustration in the two thousand and
Speaker 1: six Mallius Monstororum quite amusing, as it depicts what he's
Speaker 1: said to be a nineteen hundreds children's cutout doll of
Speaker 1: a gug as found in a Swiss museum. It makes
Speaker 1: me chuckle, and somehow it makes the unseen reality of
Speaker 1: the gug even stranger to contemplate. Again, the illustrations are
Speaker 1: tremendous in this edition, so if you get a chance
Speaker 1: to pick one up used, I highly recommend it. I
Speaker 1: bought one years ago, and then I somehow lost it
Speaker 1: and I had to purchase it again. So I definitely
Speaker 1: have one on the shelf now. But what can we
Speaker 1: say about the vertical mouth of a gug and therefore
Speaker 1: strictly horizontal chewing action for these eaters of human dreams. Well,
Speaker 1: certainly we see something like this in the mandibles of arthropods,
Speaker 1: with the mandibles possibly evolutionarily derived from legs. There's nothing
Speaker 1: quite like a gug in the history of the natural world.
Speaker 1: But his face does vaguely look like a taco lined
Speaker 1: with teeth, which leads me to a comparison to a
Speaker 1: very peculiar taco shaped creature from the Middle Cambrian period
Speaker 1: known as an Odoria. Its body enclosing shell does vaguely
Speaker 1: look like a taco, and it likely swam upside down,
Speaker 1: which enhances its comparison. According to Margarita Bassi in a
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four Smithsonian Magazine post, recent studies indicate that
Speaker 1: the creature also had a mandible lined toothed mouth, and
Speaker 1: that this makes it one of the earliest mandibulates or
Speaker 1: arthropods with mandibles, which is a course of an adaptation
Speaker 1: that we've given it tremendous chewing advantage over other organisms.
Speaker 1: It also had a trident shaped tongue. You can look
Speaker 1: up images of the odoriah and I guarantee you'll glimpse
Speaker 1: something as weird and wild as anything from Call of Cthula.
Speaker 1: Now for my taste some of the deeper cut myth
Speaker 1: those creatures are among the most interesting. Consider the vaguely
Speaker 1: elephant like reptilian elder god Chognon Foggen, whose long trunk
Speaker 1: terminates in a leechlike disc. This is a creation of
Speaker 1: Horror author Frank Belknep Long in The Horror from the Hills.
Speaker 1: Long's description of Chognar Fogin alone makes it one of
Speaker 1: the most interesting cosmic entities in this book, but consider
Speaker 1: also its strange servants, the merry Negris. These are naked,
Speaker 1: vaguely man shaped dwarfs that are not actual humans. They
Speaker 1: are fashioned from the flesh of toads that crawl around
Speaker 1: on the body of their dark god. Long rites that
Speaker 1: they quote were incapable of speech, and their thoughts were
Speaker 1: the thoughts of Chognar. Now the Malleus Monstrorum summarizes these
Speaker 1: creatures gather victims for their dark god and then drags
Speaker 1: them up to the hills. And this is so that
Speaker 1: the elephant like lizard deity can then suck their blood
Speaker 1: with its strange trunk. Now we might loosely compare Chognar's
Speaker 1: trunk to the mouth parts of a mosquito, and we
Speaker 1: might also compare them to the oral suckers of leeches
Speaker 1: and various analid worms. Again, remember that this dark being
Speaker 1: is supposed to have like a disc shaped feeding apparatus
Speaker 1: on the end of its trunk. And I'll also add
Speaker 1: here that the suction disks of leeches in particular has
Speaker 1: been singled out by scientists as a potential feature that
Speaker 1: could be adapted for use in medical technology. This is
Speaker 1: of course interesting as well, given that leeches were of
Speaker 1: course historically used in medicine and still occasionally have have
Speaker 1: usages today. Now, as for the creation of minions out
Speaker 1: of fraud flesh, well we might well bring up the
Speaker 1: human practice of zenograft here, by which the flesh of
Speaker 1: a non human animal is used in human skin grafts
Speaker 1: to repair skin damaged by fire, necrosis, or disease. Believe
Speaker 1: it or not, nineteenth century doctors did employ frog flesh
Speaker 1: in some of their procedures. As David Casey Cooper describes
Speaker 1: in twenty twelve's A Brief History of Cross Species organ Transplantation.
Speaker 1: Various mammal skins were also experimented with, but frog skin
Speaker 1: was considered ideal given its hairlessness, and apparently freshness was
Speaker 1: also prized, as the frog could be skinned alive and
Speaker 1: then immediately have its skin used during a transplant. However,
Speaker 1: Cooper stresses that these transplants likely didn't work, and any
Speaker 1: reported successes might have been due to the idea that
Speaker 1: the frog skin covered a skin ulcer and allowed that
Speaker 1: skin ulcer to heal beneath the attempted graft. Still, xenotransplantation
Speaker 1: remains a promising field in which genetically altered mammals such
Speaker 1: as pigs, produce organs and tissues for use in potential
Speaker 1: human transplants. The idea of creating a humanoid wholesale from
Speaker 1: the flesh of another creature remains the domain of science
Speaker 1: fiction and of course strange cosmic hor but the idea
Speaker 1: of patching up a humanoid with parts from another creature
Speaker 1: is just a promising part of scientific reality. All right,
Speaker 1: we should cover one more monster, don't you think make
Speaker 1: it an even three. Well, I've always found the Mego
Speaker 1: from Lovecrafts The Whisperer in Darkness to be one of
Speaker 1: the more fascinating of these creations, especially since we have
Speaker 1: a strong sci Fi twist everything here. They're described as fungal,
Speaker 1: intelligent interstellar aliens quote pinkish things about five feet long,
Speaker 1: with crustaceous bodies, bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or
Speaker 1: membranous wings and several sets of our ticket limbs, and
Speaker 1: with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid covered with multitudes of
Speaker 1: very short antenna where a head would ordinarily be. The
Speaker 1: creatures have described as a curious mix of biological and
Speaker 1: technological advancement. On one hand, we're told they travel through
Speaker 1: space without the aid of spacecraft, using their weird wings
Speaker 1: to flap or swim through the interstellared ether. This is
Speaker 1: mostly a reference to the classical and medieval idea that
Speaker 1: the universe beyond Earth was filled with a translucent fifth
Speaker 1: element known as ether, and in the early modern period
Speaker 1: there were ether theories that discussed space in terms of waves, fields,
Speaker 1: and even mediums. In either case, the migo were said
Speaker 1: to fly or swim or what have you through this
Speaker 1: strange imagined interplanetary soup. As impressive as such biology would seem,
Speaker 1: the Migo are also interested in Earth's rare minerals and
Speaker 1: use technology for things like mining and communication equipment, as
Speaker 1: well as special cylinders that can sustain surgically removed human
Speaker 1: brains for long distance space travel. We see this horror
Speaker 1: concept that of a brain in a jar throughout horror
Speaker 1: and sci fi, with ties going back to the seventeenth
Speaker 1: century writings of Reneedi Carts, for example, who considered, well,
Speaker 1: not a brain in a vat, but an existence in
Speaker 1: which a manipulative demon controlled all of our senses but
Speaker 1: the brain in a vat scenario. The basic idea is,
Speaker 1: if we're just a brain, what have we depended on
Speaker 1: something else for our senses, some sort of technology, alien
Speaker 1: technology in this case. A whole string of philosophical demons
Speaker 1: extend from this basic concept, including direct brain in a
Speaker 1: vat variations dating back to the early nineteen seventies. However,
Speaker 1: we should note that the use of such brains in
Speaker 1: fiction actually predates Lovecraft's nineteen thirty story, and of course
Speaker 1: subsequently has come to factor and do everything from the
Speaker 1: writings of philosopher Daniel Dinnett to the movie RoboCop two.
Speaker 1: The Migo deliver a number of tariff concepts in Lovecraft's
Speaker 1: story concerning both outer and inner space. What if the
Speaker 1: wider universe is not what we thought it was. What
Speaker 1: if my own human experience is not what I've long held?
Speaker 1: What happens when all preconceived meanings collapse and the waxen
Speaker 1: mask of sanity is lifted from the stranger's face. Such
Speaker 1: moments are cosmic horror at its finest. Happy Halloween Everywhere.
Speaker 1: Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact, The Artifact,
Speaker 1: or Animalia Stupendium each week. As always, you can email
Speaker 1: us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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