Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb. Today is Saturday, so we have a
Speaker 1: vault episode for you. This is going to be The
Speaker 1: hearth Part one. This is part one of two, originally
Speaker 1: published twelve seventeen, twenty twenty four. This is our look
Speaker 1: at the powerful resonance of the Fireplace and Hearthstone in
Speaker 1: human culture, psychology, and myth. Let's jump right in. As
Speaker 1: I drew in my head and was turning around on
Speaker 1: the chimney, Saint Nicholas came with a bound. He was
Speaker 1: dressed all in fur from his head to his foot,
Speaker 1: and his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.
Speaker 1: He was dressed all in fur from his head to
Speaker 1: his foot, and his clothes were all tarnished with ashes
Speaker 1: and soot. He was dressed all in fur from his
Speaker 1: head to his foot, and his clothes were all tarnished
Speaker 1: with ashes and soot.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2: And I am Joe McCormick, and today we're going to
Speaker 2: be kicking off a series of episodes on the Fireplace
Speaker 2: and the hearth, the infrastructure through which humans brought their
Speaker 2: campfires indoors, inside their homes and other dwelling structures. We're
Speaker 2: going to look at how fireplaces work, where they come from,
Speaker 2: and what they mean. And just got to apologize again
Speaker 2: this week like I did last week. I've still got
Speaker 2: a cold. It's either round two of this cold or
Speaker 2: a whole new cold has come into my life. So
Speaker 2: so apologies for the sinus noises today, but I'm doing
Speaker 2: what I can.
Speaker 1: Twelve days of Christmas over there, Yeah they're gathering around
Speaker 1: the fire, but anyway, Yeah, So I wanted to do
Speaker 1: a series of episodes looking into fireplaces, and sometimes when
Speaker 1: you're trying to understand what an experience means to people,
Speaker 1: you can really get some good insights by looking at
Speaker 1: attempts to simulate that experience in its literal absence, like
Speaker 1: which elements do people consider worth copying, which elements can
Speaker 1: be ignored, which elements are accentuated or exaggerated in simulation.
Speaker 2: And this got me thinking about the Netflix Megahit Fireplace
Speaker 2: for your Home, which, for those of you somehow not familiar,
Speaker 2: is an hour long, unbroken shot of logs burning in
Speaker 2: a Fireplace, and it is the hottest movie of the
Speaker 2: year for I don't know, seven or eight years running
Speaker 2: whenever this thing started playing on Netflix. I just checked
Speaker 2: on Netflix and there are three episodes. This is not
Speaker 2: a sponsored episode, by the way. Netflix had nothing to
Speaker 2: do with this. I just think this is an interesting
Speaker 2: subject on its own, and we'll explain more as we
Speaker 2: go on. But I checked on Netflix and there were
Speaker 2: three episodes of season one of Fireplace for your Home.
Speaker 2: There's Crackling yule Log Fireplace. That one's the one that
Speaker 2: plays music like Joy to the World and we Wish
Speaker 2: you a Merry Christmas kind of Muzaki versions of thing
Speaker 2: hard pass on that one, yeah, And then there's the
Speaker 2: second one that's just crackling Fireplace, so no music. You
Speaker 2: just get the pop, the hiss and all that good stuff.
Speaker 1: There you go.
Speaker 2: And then there's a third one with music, again I
Speaker 2: guess in different music than the first one. I don't.
Speaker 2: I think we mainly just listen. The one we put
Speaker 2: on is the one without music.
Speaker 1: That's the way to go. You can add your own
Speaker 1: music that way.
Speaker 2: So I don't remember what year it was we first
Speaker 2: discovered this thing, but it has played a number of
Speaker 2: times in our household, and so I was wondering, Rob,
Speaker 2: do you do you have experience with this thing?
Speaker 1: Yes, I do. You know, I've never owned or rented
Speaker 1: a home that had a hearth or a fireplace in it,
Speaker 1: not even like some of the scaleback versions where it's
Speaker 1: like gas generated and you know, or has some sort
Speaker 1: of other effect. So I have to depend on what
Speaker 1: a lot of people have to depend on for the
Speaker 1: spiritual center of their home, and that's the television. And
Speaker 1: so of course I fire up a fake fireplace. And
Speaker 1: the one that's been our favorite for several years running
Speaker 1: now is on Netflix. So again, credit where's credit where
Speaker 1: credits due? They'll cancel your favorite shows after two seasons,
Speaker 1: but they will give you an amazing virtual fireplace, and
Speaker 1: our favorite is Netflix the Witcher Fireplace. It is a
Speaker 1: Witcher tie in, and it's not much to it. It's simple,
Speaker 1: it's awesome. It's just kind of a medieval fantasy world
Speaker 1: fire pit, like you know, wrought iron or something. It's blazing,
Speaker 1: it's crackling. There's no Henry cavill or Unifer back there
Speaker 1: and a hot tub or anything like that. It's just
Speaker 1: the fire pit and it's great. My only criticism is
Speaker 1: that it's only an hour long, and I either can't
Speaker 1: or I don't know how to put it on repeat,
Speaker 1: because I would just prefer to have it on all
Speaker 1: the time during the holidays.
Speaker 2: What's this emblazoned on the side of it? Is it
Speaker 2: like a crack in or something?
Speaker 1: Since I've seen this show, that's probably like some sort
Speaker 1: of a monster you know, Henry Cavill's a monster hunter
Speaker 1: in that the Witch is a monster hunter and that's
Speaker 1: I don't know, a Kaimer or something.
Speaker 2: Oh, I know the Witcher from the game, the third
Speaker 2: game specifically. But yeah, so this thing does look really cool.
Speaker 2: I'll have to look this one up this year. But
Speaker 2: it's like sexy wrought iron brazier for your home.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's cool. Yeah, I legitimately love it.
Speaker 2: So I think Fireplace for your Home and its many
Speaker 2: derivatives are interesting cultural artifacts because on one hand, they're
Speaker 2: just like a genuine holiday fixture in millions of homes.
Speaker 2: I couldn't find any reliable sources on viewcount because Netflix
Speaker 2: doesn't release that kind of stuff as far as I know.
Speaker 2: But in an interview with The Independent in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: the director of Fireplace for Your Home, George Ford, I'll
Speaker 2: come back to the in a minute, estimated that it
Speaker 2: had been it had been watched more than seventy million
Speaker 2: times in twenty eighteen. Idea if he's right about that,
Speaker 2: But how am I gonna argue with him? But at
Speaker 2: the same time, I think it's funny that it's only
Speaker 2: people are putting this on to be cozy and feel
Speaker 2: good at Christmas time, and yet this movie is also
Speaker 2: a source of ironic amusement, Like when you bring it up,
Speaker 2: people kind of there's something funny, like they find something
Speaker 2: kind of goofy about the idea of a cozy fire
Speaker 2: happening inside their television. And if you look at reviews,
Speaker 2: most of the reviews for this thing are jokes. They're
Speaker 2: things like, you know, zero stars, nearly burned down my house.
Speaker 2: It's like the joke is with the incongruity of the
Speaker 2: fact that this is not a real fire.
Speaker 1: It's not it won't it won't put out heat. And
Speaker 1: if it is putting out heat, there's probably something wrong
Speaker 1: with your television set. I mean, it'll put out a
Speaker 1: little heat, right, Like you shouldn't be put putting out
Speaker 1: a lot of heat. You shouldn't actually be able to
Speaker 1: warm your buns by it.
Speaker 2: You hope it's not putting out a lot. This is
Speaker 2: actually this is kind of a tangent, but I got
Speaker 2: interested thinking about what makes the difference between lovable holiday
Speaker 2: kitch like fireplace for your home and a divisive experimental
Speaker 2: art film like Andy Warhol's Empire, which if you're not
Speaker 2: familiar with Empire, this is worth looking up. It's an
Speaker 2: eight hour static shot of the illuminated upper floors of
Speaker 2: the Empire State Building. I think it was actually filmed
Speaker 2: over the course of roughly like six hours, and then
Speaker 2: it's supposed to be played back at slow motion, so
Speaker 2: the film takes like eight hours to watch. It was
Speaker 2: filmed over the course of one night in July nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty four, and you're just watching the buildings, like the
Speaker 2: sun sets and the floodlights come on, and you just
Speaker 2: watch the building through the night, and occasionally there'll be
Speaker 2: you know, a plane going by or flashes of light
Speaker 2: or something like that, but otherwise it's just a static shot. Obviously,
Speaker 2: the movie Empire is more likely to be regarded as
Speaker 2: either an important work of art with something interesting to
Speaker 2: illustrate about passage of time or the aesthetics of film, or,
Speaker 2: on the other hand, to be seen as a pretentious,
Speaker 2: self infatuated, artistic boondoggle. Fireplace for your home does not
Speaker 2: really invite either of these types of appraisal. It's just
Speaker 2: you know, cozy holiday kitsch. However, I would say that
Speaker 2: an hour long shot of a burning fireplace and an
Speaker 2: eight hour shot of the floodlights on top of a
Speaker 2: skyscraper have a lot of similarities. Both are what you
Speaker 2: might call slow or atmospheric films without plot, characters, or dialogue,
Speaker 2: primarily interested in just a purely esthetic experience, maybe causing
Speaker 2: maybe something about causing the viewer to have time to
Speaker 2: relax and reflect without something directly taking up their attention
Speaker 2: to too aggressively. And both of them, in terms of
Speaker 2: visual display, are based on the interplay of light and shadow.
Speaker 2: I read somebody described the glowing crown of the building
Speaker 2: featured in Empire as a chandelier in the sky, and
Speaker 2: based on an interview I was looking at, it's clear
Speaker 2: that fireplace for your home it took a lot of
Speaker 2: care to try to get the right interplay of like
Speaker 2: lights and colors in the fire and how they would
Speaker 2: be picked up by the camera and the contrast of
Speaker 2: that with the shadows in the room around. And so
Speaker 2: I was thinking about if I had to like single
Speaker 2: out a major difference, like what would make the difference
Speaker 2: between the kinds of feelings people have about them? Apart
Speaker 2: from like the length difference, I think a big thing
Speaker 2: is that there is an understanding of a different expectation
Speaker 2: put on the viewer. Like if you are asked to
Speaker 2: watch Andy Warhol's Empire, people probably think that they're supposed
Speaker 2: to like sit silently in an art house theater and
Speaker 2: look at the screen the whole run time and think
Speaker 2: deep thoughts, whereas fireplace for your home makes no such demands.
Speaker 2: You probably just put it on in the background while
Speaker 2: you're having coffee or while you're wrapping presents or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting to think about the different ways we're
Speaker 1: supposed to or do, interact with various media. Like I
Speaker 1: was thinking about this recently. I went to performance that
Speaker 1: was maybe a little dry for my taste, and in
Speaker 1: the same way you know, you sometimes say, well, this
Speaker 1: meeting could have been an email, I kind of felt
Speaker 1: like this performance could have been an art installation. You know,
Speaker 1: something where I walk through it, I spend as much
Speaker 1: time with it as I want and sort of like
Speaker 1: gain what I want from looking at it walking through
Speaker 1: it and so forth. You know, I think we've all
Speaker 1: been to. This also sometimes breaks down into actual video
Speaker 1: pieces right where you'll see like short short films or
Speaker 1: even longer pieces, and yeah, you could watch them all
Speaker 1: in their entirety, or you could sort of pass through
Speaker 1: and get a general sense of it. And then on
Speaker 1: the other end of the spectrum, like you look at
Speaker 1: the way people often treat their favorite television shows, be
Speaker 1: it to you know, something's often something they have a
Speaker 1: lot of nostalgia for. You hear people talking about, say
Speaker 1: The Office or a Seinfeld or something like that, and
Speaker 1: they talk about, well, you know, I just like to
Speaker 1: put it on in the background while I'm working. It
Speaker 1: just put it on while I'm working or you know,
Speaker 1: doing things around the house, and you know, it's you're
Speaker 1: kind of treating the office like one of these virtual fireplaces,
Speaker 1: something that is just generating a feeling in the background,
Speaker 1: some stimuli in the background that you're not one hundred
Speaker 1: percent focused on. In fact, I would say if you
Speaker 1: are one hundred percent focused on one of these fireplace
Speaker 1: videos that may be a warning sign, you know, it's like,
Speaker 1: that's why not. I mean, however, you engage with your art,
Speaker 1: that's fine.
Speaker 2: Or it could be you're just trying to find the
Speaker 2: warholiness of it. I mean, on the I have read
Speaker 2: strange kinds of interpretations of Fireplace for your Home. Was
Speaker 2: reading something that referred to an almost Lynchian meditation on
Speaker 2: the synthetic and alienated faces of holiday cheer that you
Speaker 2: could see in Fireplace for your Home if you're looking
Speaker 2: for it. But I was thinking about it in the
Speaker 2: opposite direction. With the contrast with the Andy Warhol movie.
Speaker 2: You could be like wrapping Christmas presents and you could
Speaker 2: put Empire on in the background. It might not feel
Speaker 2: any less appropriate. The other day, I just watched part
Speaker 2: of Empire like you can find it online, and however
Speaker 2: orthogonal this is to Warhol's intensions, it actually does feel
Speaker 2: quite seasonally festive. There's something about like the Art Deco
Speaker 2: design of the Empire state building and the floodlights against
Speaker 2: the dark knight skies, extremely cozy and felt like Christmas time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there have been a number of interesting related I
Speaker 1: guess ambient audio visual experiences. Netflix hosted multiple moving art
Speaker 1: works by Lewis Schwarzburg. This is the guy who also
Speaker 1: directed the twenty nineteen film Fantastic Fun Guy, which is
Speaker 1: more traditional in its structure, But the moving art show,
Speaker 1: I guess, you know, there were like one hour long each,
Speaker 1: maybe less. You know, it's just pleasing music, a lot
Speaker 1: of cool ambient nature footage, and it's like great stuff.
Speaker 1: It was great stuff to take a nap to, you know,
Speaker 1: but still have something visual going on in the room
Speaker 1: as well. Disney has also got in on this with
Speaker 1: some great long ambient Star Wars themed av presentations, like
Speaker 1: it'll be a landscape of Hath or something like that.
Speaker 1: So it seems like, you know, enough people were doing
Speaker 1: this kind of thing they realized, well, let's let's put
Speaker 1: that out there. I mean, we also have sort of
Speaker 1: screen savory type things that pop up on Apple televisions,
Speaker 1: right and various apps and so forth, where instead of
Speaker 1: just looking at an ad, they're going to show you
Speaker 1: a city scape or something like that.
Speaker 2: I didn't know about the Star Wars thing. I don't
Speaker 2: look that up.
Speaker 1: Ya. They're pretty good.
Speaker 2: Wampa attacks to study relax to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well yeah, nothing really happens, maybe a spaceship flies over,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, they keep it chill, they keep it ambient.
Speaker 1: And it's an interesting I mean, because the idea of
Speaker 1: the TV being on NonStop, as being this flood of
Speaker 1: ideas into your home and into your life like this
Speaker 1: is nothing new. We've been doing this, We've been using
Speaker 1: our televisions like this since we've had televisions, and it's
Speaker 1: it's really almost kind of a refined idea to think, well,
Speaker 1: you know, let's let them have an hour two hour
Speaker 1: blocks of just you know, very ambient, chill audio visual
Speaker 1: stimuli instead of just NonStop ads and so forth.
Speaker 2: I don't know, well, yeah, yeah, and I mean, and
Speaker 2: part of the reason I brought this up is to
Speaker 2: think about the similarities and differences in the way people
Speaker 2: are now seeming to use a TV like people would
Speaker 2: once or in many cases still do use a fireplace
Speaker 2: as a primarily you know, not primarily to heat the
Speaker 2: house but because they probably have another heating system as well,
Speaker 2: but as an esthetic experience. It's something that supplies a
Speaker 2: kind of mood or ambience to the room that makes
Speaker 2: you feel a way you want to feel, or helps
Speaker 2: you focus your attention in a way that you want to. Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 2: I just wanted to mention a couple of funny things
Speaker 2: that I found out about because I read a couple
Speaker 2: of interviews with the creator of Fireplace for Your Home
Speaker 2: and American director named George Ford, who lives in Washington State,
Speaker 2: whose primary job is, or at least was at the
Speaker 2: time of these interviews, running a pet supply company. But
Speaker 2: he also directed a number of these like static shot
Speaker 2: genre films, ones like a mountain stream flowing. There's another
Speaker 2: thing of like fish bopping around in a saltwater aquarium.
Speaker 2: But apparently this started with him making these cat entertainment DVDs,
Speaker 2: the goal of which is to like drive your cat
Speaker 2: insane with images of mice running all over the place.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Yeah. There are various YouTube accounts that specialize
Speaker 1: in this sort of thing as well, and some of
Speaker 1: those can be quite cheerful, you know, until the YouTube
Speaker 1: ads cut in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess YouTube must have really cut into the
Speaker 2: DVD market for these things. He used to like twenty
Speaker 2: years ago, you'd pick up in Pet Smart or something.
Speaker 2: But anyway, these interviews, one of them was with The
Speaker 2: Independent in twenty eighteen and others with CBC in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two. A few takeaways that seemed interesting to me.
Speaker 2: This guy was inspired in part by pre existing hearth
Speaker 2: and fireplace films, So fireplace for your home not the
Speaker 2: first thing of its type. One example is a film
Speaker 2: that used to run on Christmas even Christmas on the
Speaker 2: New York TV market. It was on a station called WPIX,
Speaker 2: Channel eleven. This started in the nineteen sixties, and it
Speaker 2: was this thing that was like two to four hours long,
Speaker 2: depending on the instance, that would play a video loop
Speaker 2: showing a log burning in a fireplace with Christmas music
Speaker 2: playing over the top. And I read in turn that
Speaker 2: this thing was the idea of somebody who worked at
Speaker 2: this TV station who was inspired by like a Coca
Speaker 2: Cola commercial that he saw. But another thing from these
Speaker 2: interviews is that Ford talked about how his kids would
Speaker 2: keep begging him to build a fire around the holidays
Speaker 2: because you know, yeah, I remember when I was a kid,
Speaker 2: I wanted a fire in the fireplace. That was fun.
Speaker 2: And it occurred to him that it would be easier too,
Speaker 2: in his words, quote, just place a television inside our
Speaker 2: fireplace hearth easier than to keep making a real fire,
Speaker 2: So he like pitched this to Netflix multiple times. They
Speaker 2: initially ignored him or laughed him off, but eventually he
Speaker 2: got some traction and he claims again can't verify this,
Speaker 2: but according to the director, the First Fireplace for Your
Speaker 2: Home film took him two years to make and cost
Speaker 2: almost thirty five thousand dollars to produce. This would not
Speaker 2: be Netflix money, by the way. It was actually that
Speaker 2: he made these films independently and then I think sold
Speaker 2: the distro rights to Netflix later on, Like, how on
Speaker 2: earth could it actually be that difficult. Well, again, can't
Speaker 2: verify the figures are true, but the explanation kind of
Speaker 2: makes sense to me. Speaking to The Independent, he said, quote,
Speaker 2: we battled timing issues, color audio and general high resolution
Speaker 2: problems along the way. Special cameras have to be used
Speaker 2: around flames and only certain color temperatures work. That's why
Speaker 2: you just don't see an open flame much in movies.
Speaker 2: And I was like, oh, that is interesting. You know,
Speaker 2: I think for a cozy fire on a TV screen,
Speaker 2: we kind of have some criteria that we might not
Speaker 2: even be aware of. But we'd like to see the
Speaker 2: warmer colors of the fire, don't We want some red, orange,
Speaker 2: and yellow. But a roaring fire on camera, especially not
Speaker 2: the right kind of camera and not the right kind
Speaker 2: of shot just doesn't always look like that. I can
Speaker 2: think of a lot of old movies and video where
Speaker 2: camera where a camera catching a fireplace looks either just
Speaker 2: like a white glare or it's like invisible somehow.
Speaker 1: Mm. That's a good point. Now, I'm gonna have to
Speaker 1: be extra judging when I watch films with fireplaces in them.
Speaker 2: Apart from the technical concerns, this gets back to the
Speaker 2: things about like what elements of the simulation are important
Speaker 2: to capture. They also went through a lot of tries
Speaker 2: actually getting the logs to burn right in like an
Speaker 2: esthetically pleasing way. They wanted the right sounds of like
Speaker 2: a crackle and snap and a visually symmetrical flame, and
Speaker 2: also to make the fire in such a way that
Speaker 2: it requires no intervention so you don't have to keep
Speaker 2: like poking it reaching in front of the camera. And
Speaker 2: another hilarious thing that I did not know, so you
Speaker 2: you filled me in about the Witcher themed fireplace, but
Speaker 2: according to this guy, Netflix did a fireplace tie in
Speaker 2: with some dystopian movie they made called Bright and they
Speaker 2: summarized this. I haven't seen this movie, but it's like
Speaker 2: it's got like elves and orcs in what is otherwise
Speaker 2: just a buddy cop movie. And they they called this
Speaker 2: burn barrel for your Home.
Speaker 1: I have not seen this one, but I mean, in general,
Speaker 1: I'm all for this. Let's have let's have more of these.
Speaker 1: I'm just looking around. It's possible that they just unleashed
Speaker 1: one for Squid Game. If so, excellent, keep it, keep
Speaker 1: it going. I need all Netflix series. I'm really kind
Speaker 1: of pissed we didn't get one for Gama Do Toro's
Speaker 1: Cabinet of Curiosities. We really needed like a Linel Lasseter
Speaker 1: themed a fireplace that would have been ideal.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, like a fireplace that that talks extensively about
Speaker 2: kind of drink it's making you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know, I mean, but seriously, can you
Speaker 1: imagine if Panels Coos Motos did a fireplace hour long
Speaker 1: video for Netflix that would be amazing. Imagine how glorious
Speaker 1: that fireplace would.
Speaker 2: Look some kind of creature slowly melting. Oh but one
Speaker 2: last thing about the fireplace director speaking to the CBC,
Speaker 2: they ask him, why do we love to stare at
Speaker 2: a fireplace, even if it's not putting out heat like
Speaker 2: a real woman would. He mentioned a number of things,
Speaker 2: but one that he mentions this might seem kind of obvious,
Speaker 2: but he says, you know, a fireplace looks like safety,
Speaker 2: and I think that's true. Something feels very like safe,
Speaker 2: enclosed and contained about it, which is funny because actually,
Speaker 2: like putting a fire inside your house is one of
Speaker 2: the more dangerous things you might do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, but like this is the place to do it,
Speaker 1: and it's it's the thing that we have, and it's
Speaker 1: the thing we have a very long history with, you know,
Speaker 1: our you know, going back through times, will be discussing
Speaker 1: like this is what the house was built around. It
Speaker 1: is the heart of the house. It is the center
Speaker 1: of the house, and it is therefore the center of
Speaker 1: your lives.
Speaker 2: That's right. So I don't know if I meant to
Speaker 2: end up talking that long about fireplace for your home.
Speaker 2: Apologies it was a bit much, But I don't know.
Speaker 2: I think it does raise some issues that I might
Speaker 2: want to keep returning to as we think more about
Speaker 2: the fireplace and what it means to us over the
Speaker 2: course of the next couple episodes. But one thing I
Speaker 2: did want to cover briefly, is the prehistory of human
Speaker 2: control of fire. Now, we've gone into this in depth
Speaker 2: and other episodes, so we're not going to rehash all
Speaker 2: that material in the same level of depth here. I
Speaker 2: just wanted to do a sort of quick overview of
Speaker 2: some things we've talked about. A paper we've referenced on
Speaker 2: the show before that is highly cited on this subject
Speaker 2: is from twenty sixteen published in Philosophical Transactions of the
Speaker 2: Royal Society B by JAJ Gawlett called the Discovery of
Speaker 2: Fire by Humans Long and Convoluted Process. Now, this paper
Speaker 2: posits that human control of fire in prehistory probably constituted
Speaker 2: three general phases, and the first stage would be humans
Speaker 2: engaging in something we actually see in other animals, which
Speaker 2: is fire. Following this would be opportunistically taking advantage of
Speaker 2: natural fires caused most often by lightning strikes, lightning striking brush,
Speaker 2: but less often by like weird ignition sources like volcanic eruptions,
Speaker 2: but whatever the cause of the fire. This phase would
Speaker 2: be humans notice a natural fire is occurring and then
Speaker 2: swoop in to take advantage of it in various ways,
Speaker 2: like to capture prey that is flushed out of hiding,
Speaker 2: or to scavenge and eat a prey that has been
Speaker 2: killed and maybe even cooked by the fire in some
Speaker 2: way like oh, it's nicely roasted now, or to in
Speaker 2: various other ways take advantage of natural resources revealed or
Speaker 2: transformed by a burn. And then after the wildfire foraging stage,
Speaker 2: you've got the second and third phases, which postulate control
Speaker 2: of the fire within the living space. So the second
Speaker 2: phase is domestic fire, primarily used for cooking and safety,
Speaker 2: and then the third phase is what you might call
Speaker 2: industrial fire, the transformation of used for the transformation of
Speaker 2: resources and technology, like the production of baked pottery, and
Speaker 2: so going into the second and third phases, you see
Speaker 2: this sporadic and opportunistic relationship to rare natural fires transform
Speaker 2: into the capture and maintenance of fire first like feeding
Speaker 2: a fire continuous fuel to keep it burning after you've
Speaker 2: caught it from a natural source. And then eventually humans
Speaker 2: would learn to strike fire from nothing with implements like
Speaker 2: flintstone's and tender Now, what's the general timeline for these
Speaker 2: early stages of fire control. Well, it's messy and it's
Speaker 2: still debated. The oldest evidence that anybody seriously proposes for
Speaker 2: human control of fire goes back to our hominin relatives
Speaker 2: roughly one to two million years ago, so at the
Speaker 2: farthest it might go back like two million years but
Speaker 2: this evidence is ambiguous. So you can have things like
Speaker 2: charred or baked remains buried at a site that was
Speaker 2: occupied by hominins around the same time between one and
Speaker 2: two million years ago. But with these cases it's not
Speaker 2: always clear if this is the result of deliberate fire
Speaker 2: control or of natural burning and like scavenging of burned materials.
Speaker 2: Gallon in the paper mentions a couple of sites of
Speaker 2: this kind in Kenya containing like burned sediments, stone tools
Speaker 2: that appear to have been altered by heat, and a
Speaker 2: couple of large hunks of baked clay, but again it's
Speaker 2: not clear if these are from natural fires or controlled burning.
Speaker 2: A lot of the archaeological investigation for the emergence of
Speaker 2: fire control has focused on looking for what are called
Speaker 2: hearths in the literature. That's going to be a little
Speaker 2: bit different than the way we're using hearth, primarily in
Speaker 2: these episodes, because this would not necessarily refer to indoor fireplaces,
Speaker 2: but could refer to any dedicated place for burning. So,
Speaker 2: in like the archaeological papers, a hearth just means the
Speaker 2: remains of a place that was used for a purposeful fire.
Speaker 2: And there is pretty unambiguous evidence for hearths starting several
Speaker 2: hundred thousand years ago. There are more traces of human
Speaker 2: associated burning beginning around one million years ago, and then
Speaker 2: the hearths really start popping up in Africa, Asia, Europe,
Speaker 2: in the Middle East around four hundred thousand years ago
Speaker 2: when you start seeing a lot of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just based on materials I've been looking at. The
Speaker 1: exact usage of the term hearth is going to depend
Speaker 1: on a large part on exactly what the researchers and
Speaker 1: or the paper or the book is dealing with, Like
Speaker 1: are we dealing with an age in which people are
Speaker 1: living in homes or some other situation, and then the
Speaker 1: exact nature of the homes varies as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, hearth in the main way we're using it
Speaker 2: in this series is going to refer to a piece
Speaker 2: of infrastructure in a home, like a constructed enclosure made
Speaker 2: of fireproof materials that contains the fireplace.
Speaker 1: Right, But there may be a time or two where
Speaker 1: we use the term hearth and you might think, are
Speaker 1: they talking about a home. Well, in a few cases
Speaker 1: we might be referring to some material that's dealing with
Speaker 1: some other situation. But yeah, for the most part, we're
Speaker 1: dealing with hearthstones and have gotten something along the lines
Speaker 1: of a fireplace.
Speaker 2: Now, there are tons of ways that gaining control over
Speaker 2: fire transformed humankind. Of course, one thing is it would
Speaker 2: have expanded our geographic range, making it easier to migrate
Speaker 2: into colder climates and higher altitudes. It allowed us to
Speaker 2: expand our technological regime through the transformation of natural resources. Again,
Speaker 2: a very good example is pottery fired pottery, but also
Speaker 2: things you might not think of as readily, like adhesives
Speaker 2: for hafting, the famous birch bark tar that we talked
Speaker 2: about in some episodes in the past, and other things
Speaker 2: you can make like various glues out of natural substances
Speaker 2: that involves some element of heating. Also the heating of
Speaker 2: stones for improved napping. Some silicon based stones they nap better.
Speaker 2: You know, they flake off into the kinds of sharp
Speaker 2: edges that you're looking for with a napping exercise if
Speaker 2: you heat them the right way. But a big thing,
Speaker 2: of course, is the importance of cooking. The importance of
Speaker 2: fire for cooking really hard to overstate. Now, there is
Speaker 2: a real scholarly debate about the extent to which cooking
Speaker 2: actually could have transformed the human body. This is known
Speaker 2: as the cooking hypothesis. The basic idea is that the
Speaker 2: ability to cook otherwise hard to digest foods actually steered
Speaker 2: hominine evolution, changing not just our culture but our bodies,
Speaker 2: allowing us to grow more powerful brains by devoting less
Speaker 2: energy to a hardy gut. Though I should that the
Speaker 2: cooking hypothesis is not proven. There are arguments against it,
Speaker 2: mainly having to do with like the timing that would
Speaker 2: be required and a lack of evidence for control of
Speaker 2: fire at the required times. So we don't know about
Speaker 2: the cooking hypothesis hypothesis in terms of human evolution. But
Speaker 2: what cannot be doubted is that the invention of cooking
Speaker 2: massively expanded the base nutrition yield of food we acquired.
Speaker 2: So it just made it possible to get a lot
Speaker 2: more nutrition out of your food. And it also made
Speaker 2: food safer by killing food born pathogens and neutralizing some
Speaker 2: plant toxins. So it just unlocked a gigantic level up
Speaker 2: in nutrition.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's like a real sort. It's often described as
Speaker 1: kind of an externalization of digestion, like a lot of
Speaker 1: the chemistry of digestion and potential chemistry of digestion handled
Speaker 1: outside the body, taking the strain off of the body,
Speaker 1: making things that we could need otherwise edible or more
Speaker 1: nutritious and so forth. Oh yeah, and then there's you know,
Speaker 1: additional areas you can get into, like food preservation and
Speaker 1: so forth.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Also, with control of fire, you have protection against
Speaker 2: wild predators which tend to be afraid of fire and
Speaker 2: are easier to drive away with it. And then finally
Speaker 2: you've got provision of light in the darkness. And the
Speaker 2: way in which fire provides light in the darkness I
Speaker 2: think is interesting because of how it is different from
Speaker 2: the light provided by the sun, and to say nothing
Speaker 2: of the way that it's different from the kind of
Speaker 2: light provided by electrical light sources that we have today.
Speaker 2: That's something I want to come back to in part two,
Speaker 2: to think about the particular light regime of fire based societies.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, this is something I was thinking a lot
Speaker 1: about recently. When I visited Wales with my family. We
Speaker 1: went to Saint Fagan's National Museum of History, which has
Speaker 1: a lot of these historic Welsh buildings that have been
Speaker 1: moved to this area where you can check them out,
Speaker 1: you can walk inside them. And in many of these
Speaker 1: buildings they had a fireplace going and that was often
Speaker 1: like the main form of illumination and there may or
Speaker 1: may not even be any windows. And it's such an
Speaker 1: insight into it into times when you would be inhabiting
Speaker 1: an indoor environment like that. You know, we were totally
Speaker 1: spoiled for indoor illumination. These days, you can have your
Speaker 1: house generally as bright as you want it, like astoundingly bright.
Speaker 1: But it's an interesting experience to sort of step back
Speaker 1: in time and appreciate like the challenges and not to
Speaker 1: say that they were restricted only to the hearth fire.
Speaker 1: There are other, you know, tricks you could you could
Speaker 1: utilize to up your illumination, but you were limited. Uh,
Speaker 1: and yeah, it's it was a different world.
Speaker 2: And specifically, one of the things I want to come
Speaker 2: back to in part two is ways that that limitation
Speaker 2: could actually be create a kind of freedom or open
Speaker 2: opportunities for other things that are not as apparent. If
Speaker 2: you're just in a daylight type of light or in
Speaker 2: a very bright electrical lighting scenario.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, in addition to the obvious, like it's dark,
Speaker 1: maybe we should go to sleep. Yeah, it's sometimes a
Speaker 1: kind of a revelation to modern humans. It's like it
Speaker 1: is nighttime. I could sleep, I could turn all of
Speaker 1: this off, and we often don't do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I was about to be like, stop staring at
Speaker 2: your phone right before bed, which I do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really hard to shake. It's our little heart
Speaker 1: we bring to bed with us, our little fireplace. Yeah.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, so from here, for the rest of
Speaker 2: today's episode, I wanted to talk briefly about how fireplaces
Speaker 2: are normally constructed, how they normally work in the modern sense,
Speaker 2: and then Rob, I know you had some stuff you
Speaker 2: wanted to get into about fireplaces as kind of magical portals.
Speaker 2: But okay, So one of the things is, obviously, once
Speaker 2: humans started to build houses, to build enclosures to live inside,
Speaker 2: it can be easy to see why you would want
Speaker 2: to have the heat and light benefits of a fire
Speaker 2: inside the protection of the dwelling and not just outside.
Speaker 2: But this actually is not as easy as it sounds.
Speaker 2: You're presented with several concerns. One is how do you
Speaker 2: keep the fire from burning down the house. To do so,
Speaker 2: you would need to build the fireplace kind of away
Speaker 2: from any flammable walls or furniture, or if it is
Speaker 2: touching walls, you would need a fireplace system built into
Speaker 2: non flammable infrastructure, made out of something like stone, brick, clay,
Speaker 2: or metal. Other big thing this is huge how do
Speaker 2: you keep the fire from filling your house up with smoke?
Speaker 2: You need to have some kind of channel through which
Speaker 2: smoke and hot gases can escape the building. Modern fireplaces
Speaker 2: are equipped with dedicated flues and chimneys, as we'll talk
Speaker 2: about in a second, but as we see, many early
Speaker 2: indoor fireplaces had more had cruder ventilation systems, often consisting
Speaker 2: of simply a hole in the roof directly above the fire.
Speaker 2: And this would work to a degree, but it also
Speaker 2: meant that, yeah, for like thousands of years, a lot
Speaker 2: of buildings that housed indoor fires were just going to
Speaker 2: be pretty smoky inside.
Speaker 1: I definitely got a taste of some of that at St. Fagan's.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, basic modern fireplace and chimney design goes roughly
Speaker 2: like this. Usually you've got the firebox. This is where
Speaker 2: the fire goes built on top of what's called a hearth.
Speaker 2: This is the more specialized use of the word hearth.
Speaker 2: This is the base of the fireplace that is made
Speaker 2: out of some kind of fireproof material, often bricks or stones,
Speaker 2: and this material, of course, is meant to absorb heat
Speaker 2: from the fire and then heat the room that it's
Speaker 2: in by radiating that heat back out into the air. Now,
Speaker 2: above the firebox you often have like a decorative shelf
Speaker 2: called a mantle, but that's not really part of the
Speaker 2: mechanics of the fireplace. That's just a common decorative feature.
Speaker 2: The channel above the firebox leading to the outside is
Speaker 2: what's called the flu, and then the flu is surrounded
Speaker 2: by the structure that we call the chimney. A lot
Speaker 2: of times the flu is slightly offset from the firebox,
Speaker 2: so it's not just a pipe straight up. Instead, it'll
Speaker 2: be kind of set off to the side or behind,
Speaker 2: and it will be the FLU will be positioned directly
Speaker 2: above something that is called the smoke shelf, where soot
Speaker 2: or anything that happens to penetrate the flu. Opening on
Speaker 2: top of the roof, anything comes in from outdoors can
Speaker 2: fall without landing directly on the fire. Instead, it falls
Speaker 2: onto this shelf. Often. Also, there is a damper which
Speaker 2: allows you to close off the flu when there's no
Speaker 2: fire burning, to stop cold air from coming down in
Speaker 2: the chimney. Very important to remember to open the damper
Speaker 2: before lighting a new fire.
Speaker 1: This is especially true. Yeah, if you're staying in a
Speaker 1: cabin or something it's not your home, maybe back at
Speaker 1: your own house, you're not used to using a fireplace.
Speaker 1: It is an absolutely necessary step.
Speaker 2: Now, we all know that a fire needs fuel and
Speaker 2: heat to burn, but it's also important to remember that
Speaker 2: it needs oxygen, so airflow is important in determining how
Speaker 2: a fire burns and also in determining what effect a
Speaker 2: fire has on the house and its occupants. The majority
Speaker 2: of the interior heat provided by a fireplace is radiant heat.
Speaker 2: It's the infrared radiation coming off of the fire itself
Speaker 2: and then also coming off of the heated parts of
Speaker 2: the hearth or whatever is enclosing the fire, so coming
Speaker 2: off of the heated bricks or stones, or the metal.
Speaker 2: If it's more of a stove design, I'll talk about
Speaker 2: that in a second. But there is an irony to this,
Speaker 2: beloved fixture of the fireplace. Way back in the eighteenth century,
Speaker 2: Benjamin Franklin wrote about how inefficient fireplaces were actually were
Speaker 2: at heating indoor spaces, just huge amounts of wasted energy.
Speaker 2: He noted that the majority of the convective heat that
Speaker 2: they produce just rushes straight up the flu and is
Speaker 2: lost to the outside air. And this is often true,
Speaker 2: though it can vary depending on particulars of the fireplace design.
Speaker 2: In fact, here's a weird thing a lot of people
Speaker 2: might not know. A fire in the fireplace can actually
Speaker 2: make your house colder overall. So this again depends on particulars.
Speaker 2: It depends on the design of the fireplace and the chimney,
Speaker 2: particularly how the ventilation system is configured. But in a
Speaker 2: lot of cases, you build a fire in the fireplace
Speaker 2: and it will increase the temperature in the area directly
Speaker 2: around the fire, you know, mostly again by way of
Speaker 2: radiant heat coming off of the fire and the heated
Speaker 2: stone or brick or metal of the hearth. But meanwhile
Speaker 2: that fire is sucking in air from the inside of
Speaker 2: your house, relatively warm air, probably if it's winter time
Speaker 2: and you have the heat going, or just you know,
Speaker 2: there's warm stuff happening inside the house, and so it's
Speaker 2: warmer than the air outside. So this air from the
Speaker 2: rest of the house is being sucked into the fireplace
Speaker 2: to feed the fire, and then the convection of the
Speaker 2: hot gas plume rising up through the flu is driving
Speaker 2: it outside as it gets superheated. As hot gas and
Speaker 2: smoke rushes up the chimney, a vacuum is created and
Speaker 2: more air continues to flow in from the inside of
Speaker 2: your house to the fireplay system, and thus a vacuum
Speaker 2: is created in the rest of the house, and then
Speaker 2: cold air is pulled in from outside through whatever cracks
Speaker 2: your house has, cracks in the doors and windows and
Speaker 2: so forth. So plenty of tests have shown that an
Speaker 2: inefficient fireplace may feel warm to the room right there
Speaker 2: in front of the blaze, but actually freezes out the
Speaker 2: rest of the house. They even did an episode of
Speaker 2: MythBusters where they featured this one time. I haven't seen this,
Speaker 2: but I read about it, and I read that in
Speaker 2: their particular test rooms farther away in the house got
Speaker 2: a couple of degrees celsius colder.
Speaker 1: This is fascinating and it makes me think back on
Speaker 1: times I've been in houses where there is a fireplace,
Speaker 1: and I'll I mean, I will often find myself in
Speaker 1: this situation where it's like I'm somewhere else in the house,
Speaker 1: start feeling kind of chilly. Then I have to go
Speaker 1: like right next to the fireplace to warm up. And
Speaker 1: this pattern kind of continues. Yeah, and now I'm realizing
Speaker 1: it could be in part due to the presence of
Speaker 1: the fireplace to begin with inequality of temperature.
Speaker 2: Now, there are ways to improve the heating efficiency of
Speaker 2: a wood fire. One is to replace it with a
Speaker 2: wood is to replace your open fireplace with a wood stove.
Speaker 2: So this would be a fireplace completely enclosed in a
Speaker 2: metal box, which uses air more efficiently. It sucks less
Speaker 2: cold air into your house, and also it radiates heat
Speaker 2: into the house more efficiently, like the metal can radiate
Speaker 2: in all directions. You might notice a traditional stone or
Speaker 2: brick fireplace is usually built into a wall, whereas a
Speaker 2: wood stove is more often closer to the middle of
Speaker 2: the room and can radiate in all directions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, my late father in law was really into like
Speaker 1: passive solar and design and houses and you know, not
Speaker 1: quite like living off the grid kind of stuff. But
Speaker 1: like all the things you could do with a house
Speaker 1: to sort of like limit the need for electricity and
Speaker 1: so forth, and like that was a Keith aspect of
Speaker 1: his home design was having that wood stove and yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not stuck in the wall. It's like out there
Speaker 1: basically in the center of the house.
Speaker 2: And we might talk more about this in part too.
Speaker 2: But there are also designs that improve the heating efficiency
Speaker 2: because they don't draw air from the interior of the house. Instead,
Speaker 2: they've got like an external intake vent of some kind
Speaker 2: feeding a fire that heats a structure made of again
Speaker 2: a fireproof material like brickstone or metal or tile, and
Speaker 2: then that radiates heat into the building, but the airflow
Speaker 2: system just doesn't really connect to the inside of the house.
Speaker 2: That also is a way of improving the heating efficiency.
Speaker 2: Though there's an interesting sort of a converse implication here
Speaker 2: which I discovered. Shout out one of my sources on
Speaker 2: fireplaces and how they generally work here was how stuff
Speaker 2: Works article our old employer. This one was by John Kelly,
Speaker 2: So a nice job, John, But basically the idea here
Speaker 2: is that if you notice you're building a fire and
Speaker 2: it's like having a hard time burning and the damper
Speaker 2: is open, and yet there's still a lot of smoke
Speaker 2: coming into the house. A problem could be that the
Speaker 2: house is too well sealed, like the doors and the
Speaker 2: windows are too well sealed, and the fire is not
Speaker 2: able to create this efficient river of air from the
Speaker 2: outside into the house into the fireplace, up the flu
Speaker 2: and then back outside, so instead it's pulling some air
Speaker 2: down the flu, which is causing a counter draft and
Speaker 2: sending smoke into the room. So if you are having
Speaker 2: this problem, one thing to try is like opening a window,
Speaker 2: though of course that's going to let a bunch of
Speaker 2: cold air in, so that may just be the price.
Speaker 1: Wow, I had never thought about that, huh.
Speaker 2: But anyway, I'm just thinking about the implications of a
Speaker 2: fireplace often making the rest of the house colder, even
Speaker 2: while it makes one or two rooms much warmer. And
Speaker 2: this made me think about an unintended secondary effect of
Speaker 2: wood fire heating being the tendency to cause people to gather.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a great point. Yeah, drawing people to
Speaker 1: the hearth, to the fire, drawing them together and thus
Speaker 1: and thus becoming like a center of the family of
Speaker 1: social interaction, storytelling and so forth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's like a sort of unstated little punishment for
Speaker 2: being off by yourself. It's just gonna make your room colder.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now, you know it is Christmas time, and so
Speaker 1: a lot of folks are engaging in different fireplace related traditions,
Speaker 1: the hanging of stockings and so forth. And what do
Speaker 1: you use traditionally hang your stockings? Why you hang them
Speaker 1: by the hearth? You hang them above the fireplace. And
Speaker 1: of course we have tales of Santa Claus, or perhaps
Speaker 1: they masquerading Grinch, entering your home by crawling down your
Speaker 1: chimney and climbing in through the fireplace. This is one
Speaker 1: of those, I think, examples of the fireplace as a portal,
Speaker 1: a fireplace as a gate through which something may travel.
Speaker 1: That it's almost too close to us, you know, we
Speaker 1: grow up with this tradition, we're told it from an
Speaker 1: early age. We're familiar with this story before. We're familiar
Speaker 1: with many of the like foundation stories of our own religions,
Speaker 1: you know, and important cultural other important cultural tales, arguably
Speaker 1: more important cultural tales. We have this story of a
Speaker 1: strange old man who climbs through the fireplace, again, almost
Speaker 1: too close for us to even think about it. We'll
Speaker 1: come back to that in a second. But another way,
Speaker 1: of course that and this is one that may resonate
Speaker 1: more with fireplace owners people who actually have hearts in
Speaker 1: their home, is the reality that, okay, as a literal
Speaker 1: aperture to the outside of your home, it is possible
Speaker 1: for animals to climb down that chimney and potentially enter
Speaker 1: your home. They may be prevented full access to the home,
Speaker 1: but bats, raccoons, mice, various squirrels are just some of
Speaker 1: the examples of potential chimney splunkers. I know I've encountered
Speaker 1: bats in this manner before at a friend's house, where
Speaker 1: like a bat or two would come into the chimney,
Speaker 1: get trapped in the house, and then you would find them,
Speaker 1: often in the sink trying to get water. WHOA, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I came to this house like some it was, you know,
Speaker 1: it's like a vacation home or something, so nobody had
Speaker 1: been in it for a little bit, and I saw
Speaker 1: something in the sink and I'm like, oh, someone left
Speaker 1: a tea bag and I almost grabbed it throw it away,
Speaker 1: and then iized, oh, that's a bat. And then I
Speaker 1: had to call my friend and be like what's your
Speaker 1: bat protocol? The bat was fine.
Speaker 2: Thiss never even occurred to me. I cannot relate, but
Speaker 2: that's incredible now.
Speaker 1: This idea, though, of a chimney is a portal through
Speaker 1: which other worldly powers may traverse, such as Santa Claus.
Speaker 1: This is a pretty deeply seated concept, certainly in European traditions,
Speaker 1: but you can also see examples of similar ideas from
Speaker 1: pretty far flung traditions, seemingly to connect with the various
Speaker 1: supernatural concepts you might encounter about the home, about fire technology,
Speaker 1: about cooking, and just the nature of the flame itself.
Speaker 1: For instance, Carol Rose, in her Encyclopedia of Giants, Monsters,
Speaker 1: and Dragons that I frequently cite, mentions a tradition of
Speaker 1: the clean Get peoples of Northwestern United States the tell
Speaker 1: of Heya Kanako, the old woman underneath us, an enormous
Speaker 1: protective deity of the earth who concentrates on supporting the
Speaker 1: world almost in you know a similar sense to Atlas,
Speaker 1: you know, holding up the earth. But when her hunger
Speaker 1: gets the better off her, her concentration falters and earthquakes ensue,
Speaker 1: and so humans occasionally throw bits of fat into their
Speaker 1: hearths and, as Carol Rose describes it, in order to
Speaker 1: help her overcome her hunger and to concentrate on keeping
Speaker 1: the earth imbalance. So you know, it's not something crawling
Speaker 1: through the fire through the hearth, but it's this idea
Speaker 1: of the hearth is kind of this connection, in almost
Speaker 1: a physical connection to some sort of supernatural force.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think the general use of fire for burnt
Speaker 2: offering or sacrifice indicates a way of thinking of the
Speaker 2: fire as a kind of interface point between our world
Speaker 2: in the other world, that you can burn something to
Speaker 2: kind of send it through a portal to the gods.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And what I like about this one though, is
Speaker 1: the idea that it's not a special fire created for
Speaker 1: a special ritual purpose. It's more like the everyday fire.
Speaker 1: But even the everyday fire has the potential to be
Speaker 1: this gateway. And you know, again, it makes sense when
Speaker 1: you think about all the convergence of activities and energies
Speaker 1: at the hearth, the warmth, the illumination, food preparation, social gathering.
Speaker 1: You know, perhaps due to the fact that it's in
Speaker 1: a home situation that the rest of the home is cold,
Speaker 1: and drawing people together to tell stories, tell jokes, share
Speaker 1: their experiences, and on top of that, it is an
Speaker 1: obvious aperture to the outside world, which certainly brings about
Speaker 1: the possibility of various natural world creatures gaining access to
Speaker 1: your abode. But let us also remember that we're also
Speaker 1: talking about a gateway through which air can pass and
Speaker 1: does pass, And as most of human history is pre
Speaker 1: germ theory, I think you can see where this is going.
Speaker 1: The idea that this is also an aperture through which
Speaker 1: bad air could travel, or something in the air, something
Speaker 1: that is not as constricted as physical as physical beings
Speaker 1: are constricted, that they could pass through that small hole.
Speaker 1: They could essentially pass through the keyhole, and that's all
Speaker 1: the space they need.
Speaker 2: Interesting it reminds me.
Speaker 1: Actually of a tradition we talked about, an idea of
Speaker 1: the Dine or Navajo people. This came up in a
Speaker 1: couple of episodes, I think in our Dust episodes actually,
Speaker 1: the idea that you might have an adante, a practitioner
Speaker 1: of secret evil magic, who might introduce a magical poison
Speaker 1: or illness into a home through its smoke hole. So
Speaker 1: that definitely came to mind here, the smoke hole in
Speaker 1: a traditional home. This could be an aperture that could
Speaker 1: be exploited by an evil doer, and in European traditions,
Speaker 1: spilling over into early American colonial traditions, this concept carried
Speaker 1: a great deal of weight, something that previous guests on
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind Brian Hoggard discusses in his
Speaker 1: excellent twenty nineteen book Magical House Protection, The Archaeology of
Speaker 1: counter Witchcraft. I know some of you probably listened to
Speaker 1: that episode. It's a great one if you want to
Speaker 1: go back and listen to an interview with the author.
Speaker 1: But I'm going to discuss some of the ideas that
Speaker 1: he brought up in that book here as it relates
Speaker 1: to this topic. So, in the book, Hoggard discusses the
Speaker 1: various counter witchcraft rights and rituals that Europeans use, dating
Speaker 1: back at least to the Middle Ages, functioning alongside and generally,
Speaker 1: I guess in spite of protections offered by the Christian
Speaker 1: faith and Christian tradition. This is coming up on the
Speaker 1: show before you know. You have the various church approved
Speaker 1: methods that you might take against supernatural evil, but are
Speaker 1: you gonna limit yourself to just those or are you
Speaker 1: gonna also set other traps and wards in place. But
Speaker 1: in this case we're talking about supernatural, superstitious folk protections
Speaker 1: that were clearly deemed absolutely necessary by many to combat
Speaker 1: evil in a demon haunted world. Hoggard stresses that the
Speaker 1: archaeological evidence suggests that unseen supernatural threats were just a
Speaker 1: standard part of everyday existence. Supernatural evil was everywhere, and
Speaker 1: you had to bust out all the tricks in order
Speaker 1: to if not completely protect yourself, then at least been
Speaker 1: the odds even slightly in your favor, and is explored
Speaker 1: in the book. These efforts often took the form of
Speaker 1: a ritual object or objects hidden in the home. He writes,
Speaker 1: quote the most popular locations to conceal objects within buildings
Speaker 1: are usually at portals such as the hearth, the threshold,
Speaker 1: and also voids or dead spaces. This suggests that people
Speaker 1: believed it was possible for dark forces to travel through
Speaker 1: the landscape and attack them in their homes. Whether these
Speaker 1: forces were emanations from a witch in the form of
Speaker 1: a spell, a witch is familiar pestering their property, an
Speaker 1: actual witch flying in spirit, or a combination of all
Speaker 1: of those is difficult to tell. Additional sources of danger
Speaker 1: could be ghosts, fairies, and demons. People went to great
Speaker 1: lengths to ensure their homes and property were protected, highlighting
Speaker 1: the fact that these beliefs and fears were visceral and,
Speaker 1: as far as they were concerned, literally terrifying.
Speaker 2: Interesting yet again, the way that some physical intuitions apply
Speaker 2: to these apparently magical substances, like the spell of a
Speaker 2: witch or which is familiar, which you might well assume
Speaker 2: could just you know, pass magically through any wall or whatever.
Speaker 2: It seems people were especially concerned about voids and portals,
Speaker 2: like the physical gaps that a physical being would need
Speaker 2: to travel through.
Speaker 1: I mean, I imagine a lot of you have had
Speaker 1: this experience. I mean, to be clear, some of you
Speaker 1: may have the experience of finding some of these secreted
Speaker 1: and hidden items, and if so, do write in. We
Speaker 1: would love to hear from you. But I find it
Speaker 1: like a little strange when I encounter a void in
Speaker 1: my house. When you realize, like, here is a space
Speaker 1: within my home where there is nothing you know, and
Speaker 1: that's that I don't know. It shouldn't feel creepy, but
Speaker 1: it does.
Speaker 2: What's under the stairs nothing?
Speaker 1: There's nothing there. Now, if you're not familiar with the
Speaker 1: details that HAWKERD gets into and the details that came
Speaker 1: up in that interview I conducted a while back. You
Speaker 1: might be wondering, well, what sort of ritual objects are
Speaker 1: we talking about hidden away in homes and voids and
Speaker 1: so forth, potentially near the hearth to afford protection against
Speaker 1: these many evils. Well, there are various examples, but some
Speaker 1: of the main ones are as follows. First of all,
Speaker 1: there's just protective marks. And I feel like this is
Speaker 1: this is fairly self explanatory. You know, some sort of
Speaker 1: a symbol or a sigil that has protective properties and
Speaker 1: that may be hidden away somewhere in a home.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: This next one, though, this one was the one that
Speaker 1: I found surprising at the time I was not familiar
Speaker 1: with prior to reading this book, and that is shoes.
Speaker 1: And I think this one's especially interesting because from our
Speaker 1: modern perspective, we often forget just what a shoe is.
Speaker 1: We can take it for granted, we can have, you know,
Speaker 1: hundreds of them, and we may love shoes to death
Speaker 1: without like, without really thinking about this vital aspect of
Speaker 1: what they are. Yeah, yes, we put them on our
Speaker 1: feet to walk about in, and you know, not step
Speaker 1: on nails and rocks and so forth, keep our feet warm,
Speaker 1: make our feet look you know, snazzy and cool. But
Speaker 1: they are also flesh like sheaths, sometimes made from animal products,
Speaker 1: that are so perhaps individually sized for the shape of
Speaker 1: our feet, or if nothing else. Over time they take
Speaker 1: on the shape of our feet. They take on the
Speaker 1: odor of our feet. These are two details, especially the
Speaker 1: odor that is often lost on us, perhaps not lost
Speaker 1: on our dogs and cats. They know these shoes smell
Speaker 1: like us, and are like potent familiar items of us.
Speaker 1: You know, our cat will lay on shoes a lot,
Speaker 1: and I've read some commentary on this kind of behavior
Speaker 1: in cats and dogs, where they will be drawn to
Speaker 1: the shoes because they remind them of the owners of
Speaker 1: said shoes. And all this would seem to be part
Speaker 1: of the superstitious calculus for these traditions. So a shoe
Speaker 1: may wear out beyond repair in the case of a
Speaker 1: child's shoes and shoes that they may outgrow them, but
Speaker 1: they are still then objects that have to a large
Speaker 1: extent become a part of us. You know, they are
Speaker 1: shaped after us, they smell of us, and they're therefore
Speaker 1: dangerous items to discard in much the same way that
Speaker 1: nail clippings and hair were often seen as such like
Speaker 1: they were a part of you. They still are a
Speaker 1: part of you, and that is dangerous material to just
Speaker 1: leave out in the world where an evil doer or
Speaker 1: an evil spirit may come across it and by doing
Speaker 1: so gain power over you.
Speaker 2: This type of folk belief is sometimes referred to as
Speaker 2: the law of contagion. That like things that were once
Speaker 2: united or in contact with one another, if they become separated,
Speaker 2: you may need to do some kind of cleansing or exorcism,
Speaker 2: or some kind of ritual acknowledgment of the severing there
Speaker 2: or destruction of the thing as it is separated from you,
Speaker 2: or else it can be used to have power over
Speaker 2: you by way of the associative magical connection.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, or in this case, you find another use
Speaker 1: for them, and so. According to Hoggard, shoes and other
Speaker 1: objects were often deposited on ledges within the chimney, breast
Speaker 1: or behind the fireback any stresses that quote. Shoes are
Speaker 1: perhaps the most commonly encountered apotropaic objects and often had
Speaker 1: an association with the hearth.
Speaker 2: Oh interesting, so the same object that could become your
Speaker 2: vulnerability if discarded and found by a witch, could be
Speaker 2: your protective amulet if you keep it, if you keep
Speaker 2: it in the home right.
Speaker 1: And I'll come back to why this may be in
Speaker 1: just a second, but before we do, I want to
Speaker 1: talk briefly about witch bottles, which are I think the
Speaker 1: more exciting and exotic sounding version of apotropaic objects hidden
Speaker 1: in a home, often in the area of the hearth.
Speaker 1: Now there's some variety to what these will consist of,
Speaker 1: but you know, they have been found, they've been analyzed,
Speaker 1: they're still being found. That's one of the great things
Speaker 1: that as Hagard discusses, is that you have so many
Speaker 1: different waves of renovation that take place with some of
Speaker 1: these old homes in Europe, in Britain, in the UK,
Speaker 1: and also in parts of the United States and Canada
Speaker 1: as well, where people will suddenly discover a pair of
Speaker 1: ancient shoes or a strange bottle. And he also discusses
Speaker 1: how there are cases where people have suddenly sort of
Speaker 1: given into some of the superstition of it and they've
Speaker 1: had to put sad item back. You know, it's like
Speaker 1: it's kind of like the reverse of finding a void.
Speaker 1: You find a purposeful item but you don't fully understand.
Speaker 1: You're not on the same like mental wavelength with it,
Speaker 1: but you come to believe, well, I should put it back.
Speaker 1: I don't know my way around all of this enough
Speaker 1: to say it doesn't belong there.
Speaker 2: I can sympathize with that. And this may just say
Speaker 2: something about my you know, personality or kind of tendencies,
Speaker 2: the character tendencies. But while I would never take active
Speaker 2: steps to do it to like, you know, put shoes
Speaker 2: in a wall thinking it would protect my house or something,
Speaker 2: I would feel weird about taking something out. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it seems like, well, feels like I shouldn't do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that maybe a load bearing shoe.
Speaker 2: Just leave it alone.
Speaker 1: So with witch bottles, again there's some variation as to
Speaker 1: what they may hold, but there are various written instructions
Speaker 1: from historical records that talk about what goes into a
Speaker 1: witch bottle, and one that Hoggard shares. This is from
Speaker 1: seventeen oh one and he includes it in his book,
Speaker 1: and basically the directions are to take a pint of
Speaker 1: your own urine, heat it to near scalding temperatures, pour
Speaker 1: it into a jug, and then add white salt and
Speaker 1: three new nails with the points down. Then you bind
Speaker 1: the jug with clay and leather and you heat it
Speaker 1: over embers for nine to ten days.
Speaker 2: It's gotta work because look at all the steps.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think sometimes there are more steps that
Speaker 1: may be a simplified version, but it's the basics are
Speaker 1: in play here, the urine, the pointy objects. Sometimes they're
Speaker 1: pins or needles. Sometimes it's like a lot of like
Speaker 1: rusty nails, pins or needles, and so forth. So in
Speaker 1: the case of the shoes and the witch bottle, here
Speaker 1: basic idea would seem to be this. You have an
Speaker 1: unseen evil force, be it a demon, a fairy, a ghost,
Speaker 1: or some curse of a witch, and it is seeking you.
Speaker 1: It has entered your home, perhaps through a door, perhaps
Speaker 1: through a window, perhaps down the chimney and through the fireplace.
Speaker 1: It's seeking you out. But what does an encounter. Instead,
Speaker 1: it encounters your smell, and encounters the shoe that was
Speaker 1: so much a part of your body and now can
Speaker 1: be mistaken for your body, and it goes after that. Instead,
Speaker 1: it serves as a decoy. And in the case of
Speaker 1: the witch bottle, it's even more exciting. So it smells
Speaker 1: that deep uriny stench that is associated with you. But
Speaker 1: it's found the bottle first. And so what does this
Speaker 1: evil thing do, this spirit, this dark seeker in the night,
Speaker 1: It climbs inside that bottle. But uh oh, now it
Speaker 1: is either trapped in the bottle or it is hailed
Speaker 1: upon all of those sharp pointy bits inside the bottle
Speaker 1: and therefore injured or perhaps killed by this witch bottle,
Speaker 1: this trap that has been set for it.
Speaker 2: That's ingenious. I didn't know it was going there with
Speaker 2: the nails, but that makes sense. I was wondering if
Speaker 2: the nails had some kind of you know, they might
Speaker 2: be iron nails unless the iron significance as like a
Speaker 2: protective magic against the fairy folk and so forth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there may be part of that to it
Speaker 1: as well, you know. And certainly protective magics like this,
Speaker 1: you know, they may sort of like drag various ideas
Speaker 1: with them across time. So I would not discount the
Speaker 1: importance of the iron at all. But this is all
Speaker 1: very interesting to think about in comparison to various Christmas traditions,
Speaker 1: like I instantly think about wooden clogs left out for
Speaker 1: Saint Nicholas or Santa though I've also read that prior
Speaker 1: to the sixteenth century, at least in some European countries,
Speaker 1: the clogs were left in the church rather than in
Speaker 1: the home. I'm not as well versed in the history
Speaker 1: of those traditions, but at any rate, you do have
Speaker 1: examples where shoes are left out so that some entity
Speaker 1: may deposit gifts inside them. And those shoes may be placed,
Speaker 1: I think, often near doors or windows. So there still
Speaker 1: is that sense of put them near the aperture, put
Speaker 1: them near the portals. And where do we hang our
Speaker 1: stockings with care? We of course hang them again by
Speaker 1: the fireplace, oh, by the hearth. Yeah, almost as if
Speaker 1: we're trying to throw Santa Claus off the scent. You know,
Speaker 1: there is no need, strange one, to bring the gifts
Speaker 1: directly to the children. Here is their sense, smell their feet,
Speaker 1: Here is the essence you seek. Leave the gifts here,
Speaker 1: leave the children alone in their room, or the coal
Speaker 1: I guess if applicable, Yes, there is no need to
Speaker 1: put the coal inside the children, leave it in the socks,
Speaker 1: and thus he is outsmarted, and he leaves the children
Speaker 1: alone for another year.
Speaker 2: What res this idea is now bounding about inside me?
Speaker 1: One more note from Brian Haggard. I was looking through
Speaker 1: the book to see I couldn't remember if he had
Speaker 1: mentioned anything Christmasy in particular, And he does mention a
Speaker 1: rhyme that was associated with ritual burn marks from tapers
Speaker 1: in homes. So, like I said, there were various there
Speaker 1: were various marks and signs inside some of these old
Speaker 1: homes that are interpreted as being associated with various protective,
Speaker 1: magical activities and rituals. And one of them, you know,
Speaker 1: I think could be easy to miss. It's just like
Speaker 1: burn marks in a house. I included a picture from
Speaker 1: his book here for you to look at, Joe, Like,
Speaker 1: if you didn't know what you're looking at, you might
Speaker 1: just think these were caused by some other you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know, something that occurred during construction or something
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, But an interpretation here is that these
Speaker 1: were ritual burn marks. And he includes this is a translation,
Speaker 1: but it is a translation of a German rhyme that
Speaker 1: apparently went along with some holiday traditions of protecting the home.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to read it here again. This is
Speaker 1: from Brian Huggard's book, and it goes as follows and
Speaker 1: round about the house they go with torch or taper,
Speaker 1: clear that neither bread nor meat do want no which
Speaker 1: with dreadful charm have power to hurt their children or
Speaker 1: do the cattle harm. So I'm not saying burn beams
Speaker 1: in your house with fire as part of your holiday traditions.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's interesting to think about all of this.
Speaker 1: And again, this is another one that involves the power
Speaker 1: of fire. The power of the flame to protect us
Speaker 1: against unseen things in the night. By the way, I
Speaker 1: know Brian would want me to pass this along to you.
Speaker 1: If you do encounter something like this in your house,
Speaker 1: strange shoes, a strange item, a witch bottle, and so forth,
Speaker 1: it is very helpful to reach out to people who
Speaker 1: will document it all. And a lot of people do
Speaker 1: reach out to Brian Hoggar themselves. He's on Instagram as
Speaker 1: folk Magic Man. He also has a website, so just
Speaker 1: look him up. It's Brian Hoggart Hoggard and he can
Speaker 1: point you in the right direction if you encounter something
Speaker 1: like this in your home, or email us and I'll
Speaker 1: forward it to him. Happy to do that.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, I think we're out of time for today.
Speaker 2: We've got more to say and to explore about the
Speaker 2: fireplace and the hearth. So join us again on Thursday.
Speaker 1: That's right. In the meantime, we'll remind you that Stuff
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