Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3: My name is Robert Lan and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 3: And today our October journey continues. If you're new to
Speaker 3: the show, we spend all of October covering spooky subjects,
Speaker 3: and we are plowing right on toward Halloween at a
Speaker 3: frightening pace, at such a pace that by the time
Speaker 3: we reach it, our skin may be seared by the wind.
Speaker 3: But today we wanted to embark on a new series
Speaker 3: of Halloween related episodes about shadows. Before we started, I
Speaker 3: was thinking about the series on necromancy that we published
Speaker 3: earlier this month, in which we explored a lot of
Speaker 3: ancient accounts of people summoning the dead, especially to get
Speaker 3: information about the future or some of the kind of
Speaker 3: hidden information from them. And we talked about stories that
Speaker 3: assumed the ancient and Greek model of the afterlife a
Speaker 3: subterranean realm of darkness called hades, where the souls of
Speaker 3: the dead dwell in a weak, pitiable and insubstantial form.
Speaker 3: So this would be unlike modern Christian notions of the
Speaker 3: dead dwelling either in heavenly bliss or infernal punishment had
Speaker 3: seems to be most often thought of as a gloomy,
Speaker 3: forlorn dungeon where your spirit is locked away forever, more
Speaker 3: like a slowly fading memory. It's not really a punishment,
Speaker 3: and basically everybody goes there, but it's not good. It's
Speaker 3: better to be alive. I guess the only real exception
Speaker 3: seems to be like if you're turned into a god,
Speaker 3: which occasionally happens if you're really cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you got to have you gotta have an
Speaker 2: end for that. Yeah, not just they don't have that
Speaker 2: out there, just anybody.
Speaker 3: So anyway, relevant to our topic in this next series
Speaker 3: of episodes, I was thinking about how in English translations,
Speaker 3: for example, of the Homeric myths, these dead souls that
Speaker 3: populate the underworld here are sometimes known as shades. I
Speaker 3: think this terminology comes up in the story, for example,
Speaker 3: in the Odyssey, where Odysseus goes to the edge of
Speaker 3: the underworld in order to summon up shades. I think
Speaker 3: he wants to speak to the shade of Tyresius.
Speaker 2: I believe that's right.
Speaker 3: Yes, But he sees his mom, he sees a bunch
Speaker 3: of people, He waves a sword at him, he slaughters
Speaker 3: a ram and all that. And I was wondering, when
Speaker 3: the English translations use the word shade here, does that
Speaker 3: mean shadows just in the regular sense of shadow, And
Speaker 3: does that usage, if so, go back to the original Greek,
Speaker 3: as best I can tell, it does I'm not a
Speaker 3: Greek scholar here, but I was looking up some Greek
Speaker 3: English lexical sources, and from what I could find, it
Speaker 3: looks like the Greek word used here is skia, the
Speaker 3: Latin equivalent being umbra. And this word does indeed carry
Speaker 3: these multiple meanings. It could be used to refer to ghosts,
Speaker 3: to spirits of the dead, like the kind that are
Speaker 3: called forth to drink the blood of the Ram and
Speaker 3: tell the future to Odysseus. Or it could refer to
Speaker 3: the utterly mundane shade and shadow cast by a tree
Speaker 3: or a mountain, or a person, just whatever blocks out
Speaker 3: the sun. And I thought this double meaning was very interesting.
Speaker 3: What is it about the mundane shadows we experience every
Speaker 3: single day that would cause people to give them this
Speaker 3: hair raising secondary meaning?
Speaker 2: This is a great question, Yeah, because shadows are everywhere
Speaker 2: there that you know, we encounter our own shadow every day,
Speaker 2: and yet the term shadow. The idea of a shadow
Speaker 2: carries a lot of weight, certainly supernaturally and fictionally and folklorically,
Speaker 2: as we'll get into in a bit here, but just
Speaker 2: linguistically it does a lot of legwork, you know. I
Speaker 2: decided to turn to brewers Dictionary of Phrase and fable
Speaker 2: on this one. It's often a fun way to sort
Speaker 2: of into not just the meaning of words, but also
Speaker 2: just like antiquated usages of those words. So the author
Speaker 2: here reminds us that shadow is a word with numerous
Speaker 2: figurative and applied meanings. A shadow may be a ghost,
Speaker 2: as we see in Macbeth hence horrible shadow. It may
Speaker 2: also be a faint representation, as in a shadow of
Speaker 2: a doubt. It may also mean a constant attendant. And
Speaker 2: Brewers specifically references Milton's paradise lost here sin and her
Speaker 2: shadow death.
Speaker 3: It's hard for me to imagine that pearing of her
Speaker 3: shadow death does not in some sense derived from its
Speaker 3: usage in the Bible walk through the Valley of the
Speaker 3: Shadow of Death exactly.
Speaker 2: And of course, we often use the term shadow as
Speaker 2: a verb to follow someone around and sort of learn
Speaker 2: from them. To shadow someone at work, generally when that
Speaker 2: is used, there are no haunting connotations, but shadow may
Speaker 2: also be a moral darkness or gloom now Brewers, Like
Speaker 2: I said, is also always great for some antiquated sayings.
Speaker 2: Here are a few examples gone to the bad for
Speaker 2: the shadow of an ass aka, choose your battles and
Speaker 2: don't battle for something as dumb as the shadow of
Speaker 2: a donkey?
Speaker 3: Does that go back to a story? I don't know.
Speaker 2: I have no additional context, but feel free to start
Speaker 2: incorporating it into your daily conversations. Listeners. There's another one,
Speaker 2: May your shadow grow less? This one apparently has Eastern
Speaker 2: origins according to Brewers. And I'll get back to this
Speaker 2: one in a bit. And then the idea of being
Speaker 2: reduced to a shadow or emaciated. You so so slender,
Speaker 2: so starved that even your shadow is reduced. But you know,
Speaker 2: obviously your shadow would be reduced if your body was reduced.
Speaker 2: But it is also not that simple, right, because shadows
Speaker 2: can be manipulated. We can cast a very long shadow
Speaker 2: depending on where we are in reference to the sun. Joe,
Speaker 2: I don't know about your experiences with this as a father,
Speaker 2: but I remember when my son was a mere toddler
Speaker 2: that we would have some fun with our own shadows
Speaker 2: in the park, especially in the way that a child
Speaker 2: can be shown to manipulate their own shadow, to cast
Speaker 2: a long shadow, to cast a big shadow, and also
Speaker 2: have it interact with other shadows, like have your shadow
Speaker 2: dinosaur hand, you know, bite another person's shadow, and that
Speaker 2: sort of thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I don't know how much consciousness my daughter has
Speaker 3: of her own shadow yet, but I have done some
Speaker 3: shadow puppet shows for her in the light of the
Speaker 3: setting sun, and it's interesting to watch because I think
Speaker 3: the few times I've done this, my daughter has tried
Speaker 3: to reach out and touch the shadows projected on the
Speaker 3: floor or on the wall, but of course there's nothing
Speaker 3: to touch, but she perceives that this moving display of
Speaker 3: shapes must be some kind of object that she could grasp.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's something about shadow. I think a child's fascination
Speaker 2: with them perhaps reveals much about what remains there, at
Speaker 2: least in some part of our mind. Even after we
Speaker 2: have grown accustomed to them, once they've become old hat,
Speaker 2: there are still going to be moments where we notice
Speaker 2: the peculiar when it comes to the shadow, that a
Speaker 2: shadow doesn't necessarily tell the truth but also at the
Speaker 2: same time, a shadow can reveal things that are there
Speaker 2: that you know, perhaps you can't see an individual, but
Speaker 2: you can see their shadow that sort of thing. So
Speaker 2: there's there's obviously a lot of rich room for interpretation.
Speaker 2: But then also just coming back to the linguistics of it,
Speaker 2: certainly when you get into translation. I know we are
Speaker 2: looking around for possible shadow poems to read at the
Speaker 2: top of this episode, and I was looking at some
Speaker 2: Borges poems in translation, of course, and for instance, there's
Speaker 2: one titled to the One who is Reading Me, which
Speaker 2: is a nice haunting poem with a number of different
Speaker 2: Borges sort of trademarks in it. But some translations will
Speaker 2: use shadow and others will not, So you know, it
Speaker 2: seems like a shat the shadow is one of those
Speaker 2: words that likely we've been saying it refers to so
Speaker 2: many things it may be invoked in translation, even if
Speaker 2: that was perhaps not the author or the poet's original intent.
Speaker 3: Well, coming back to the representation of shadows in our minds,
Speaker 3: I dug up what I thought were a couple of
Speaker 3: pretty interesting cognitive science papers about shadow consciousness. So the
Speaker 3: first one I was looking at was a short paper
Speaker 3: published in Trendsing Cognitive Sciences in two thousand and six
Speaker 3: by Roberto Cassadi, an Italian professor. This paper is called
Speaker 3: the Cognitive Science of Holes and cast Shadows and this
Speaker 3: was published in two thousand and six. This paper asked
Speaker 3: an interesting question. It was what can quasi objects or
Speaker 3: negative objects such as shadows and holes tell us about
Speaker 3: how human brains perceive and understand physical objects. Of course,
Speaker 3: holes and cast shadows are interesting because they are not
Speaker 3: objects in themselves. They're actually just absences, in one case
Speaker 3: the absence of solid physical substance and in the other
Speaker 3: a relative absence of light. But despite the fact that
Speaker 3: things like holes and shadows are just absences, we intuitively
Speaker 3: often think of them as substances in themselves. Kasati writes, quote,
Speaker 3: both holes and cast shadows are dependent features. They cannot
Speaker 3: exist without objects hosting or casting them. Both shadows and
Speaker 3: holes are somewhere between being regions of space and fully
Speaker 3: fledged material objects. They are similar enough to bounded regions
Speaker 3: of space that they have a location, a shape, a size,
Speaker 3: and are as immaterial as space is, but are more
Speaker 3: object like as they can persist over time and move.
Speaker 3: And I think it's this ambiguity between being an object
Speaker 3: and not being an object that makes a shadow counterintuitive.
Speaker 3: One example I've seen is people to talking about the
Speaker 3: interesting fact that a shadow could technically move faster than
Speaker 3: the speed of light. How would that be possible? The
Speaker 3: example would often be given that like, if you have
Speaker 3: a source of light that you can project across the
Speaker 3: entire surface of a planet, maybe the surface of the moon,
Speaker 3: and then you, standing right next to that source of light,
Speaker 3: move your finger quickly in front of it, you could
Speaker 3: actually make your shadow travel across the surface of that
Speaker 3: distant object faster than light would be able to travel
Speaker 3: if it were going from one side of that object
Speaker 3: to the other. Though, of course nothing is actually traveling
Speaker 3: in the case of how you're altering the shadow there,
Speaker 3: so it's not actually a violation of the laws of physics.
Speaker 3: It's not any object going faster than the speed of light.
Speaker 3: But is it is a change propagating through space in
Speaker 3: some sense from our perspective, faster than the speed of light.
Speaker 2: Interesting, So absence in a sense travels faster than anything material.
Speaker 3: So I wanted to bring up a couple things mentioned
Speaker 3: in this paper that start me as interesting. One of
Speaker 3: them is a reference to another paper published a couple
Speaker 3: of years before this in the journal Perception, called Impossible
Speaker 3: Shadows and the Shadow Correspondence Problem by Pascal Mamasian published
Speaker 3: in two thousand and four, and the background on this
Speaker 3: paper is the observation that we can and do use
Speaker 3: shadows to estimate information about a scene. So we can
Speaker 3: use shadows to infer properties of both the light source
Speaker 3: where light is coming from and a scene we're looking
Speaker 3: at and the object casting the shadow. But getting information
Speaker 3: this way is not a computationally trivial task. It's actually
Speaker 3: somewhat difficult. Mamasian rites quote. In order to use that information,
Speaker 3: our visual system has first to segment regions in the image,
Speaker 3: decide that these regions are potential shadows rather than say,
Speaker 3: in blots, and then match these shadow candidates with objects
Speaker 3: in the scene. We call this last processing stage the
Speaker 3: shadow correspondence problem. It is reminiscent of the correspondence problem
Speaker 3: in stereopsis, and stereopsis is how the brain infers depth
Speaker 3: in our vision by comparing the images produced by our
Speaker 3: two different eyes and then going on they say quote
Speaker 3: or motion perception, where one has to match features between
Speaker 3: the left and right images or between consecutive frames of
Speaker 3: a movie. So inferring real accurate information about a scene
Speaker 3: you're looking at in a photograph or in front of
Speaker 3: you based on shadows is computationally intensive. We use shadows
Speaker 3: to get information, but it's a complex problem with multiple variables,
Speaker 3: and it's taxing on the brain. And so the author
Speaker 3: of this paper describes some experiments leading to the conclusion
Speaker 3: that we actually only infer information from shadows using a
Speaker 3: rough system. And one piece of evidence for that is
Speaker 3: that people usually seemed not to notice when projected shadows
Speaker 3: put in front of them were physically impossible. Rob I'd like,
Speaker 3: I've got an illustration for you to look at here
Speaker 3: that I pulled out of this paper. So there are
Speaker 3: a series of six objects shown that are kind of there.
Speaker 3: There are ray, a white to sort of like pole
Speaker 3: with an arm at the top, and then a shadow
Speaker 3: being cast by that object, And so you could try
Speaker 3: to infer some information about where the source of light
Speaker 3: is in relation to this object. But four of these
Speaker 3: are possible shadows that could be cast by an object
Speaker 3: of the shape, and two of them are impossible shadows.
Speaker 2: Wow, So just looking at these six images here is
Speaker 2: it is a little taxing. It can feel the mental strain,
Speaker 2: because you know, I'm instantly trying to imagine light approaching
Speaker 2: the object from different directions at different angles. And when
Speaker 2: I start sort of doing that three dimensional computation in
Speaker 2: my head, I mean, it seems like all of them
Speaker 2: are probable, Like none of them are really standing out
Speaker 2: to me as necessarily impossible. I don't know, maybe gosh,
Speaker 2: I don't know, maybe number two. Oh yeah, two is
Speaker 2: the only one that I'm that I'm thinking is even
Speaker 2: just a little bit suspect here. But yeah, this is
Speaker 2: this is this is This is rough to think about.
Speaker 3: You're in the same situation as most of the people
Speaker 3: who participated in this experiment. So most of the shadows
Speaker 3: given here are possible given the correct light source position,
Speaker 3: But the two on the right side of the image
Speaker 3: are impossible. If you look at them, you can see
Speaker 3: that the arm of the figure is pointed the wrong
Speaker 3: way in both of those cases.
Speaker 2: Fascinating, I guess, I'm I'm this is why I've always
Speaker 2: been so forgiving too with video games, especially the ones
Speaker 2: where you could choose whether you wanted complex shadows or
Speaker 2: just sort of like the circle shadow like circle shadows
Speaker 2: good enough. If I'm having any kind of system issues,
Speaker 2: let's just go with this simple shadow.
Speaker 3: That might be a good instinct. We'll get to some
Speaker 3: reasoning about that in a second. So a couple of
Speaker 3: these images are not possible shadows. But I think I
Speaker 3: don't know. I already knew that I've read about it
Speaker 3: before I looked at the image, So I can't really
Speaker 3: know what my reaction would be. But you had the
Speaker 3: same reaction a lot of the people in the study did.
Speaker 3: They just didn't notice. People seemed not to notice that
Speaker 3: these shadows were not possible. It had to be explained
Speaker 3: to them afterwards by the experimenters, And so they used
Speaker 3: these bits of impossible geometry to infer mundane information about
Speaker 3: physical objects, space, and light sources, just like normal. So
Speaker 3: in the end here the author says that this is
Speaker 3: evidence that our brains use a quick mechanism or what
Speaker 3: is called a quote course representation course meaning rough to
Speaker 3: solve the shadow correspondence problem. And another thing that gets
Speaker 3: pointed out in the discussion is surrealist art that makes
Speaker 3: use of impossible shadows. There is a painting called Indefinite
Speaker 3: Divisibility by a painter named eve TONGI. Again, that's called
Speaker 3: indefinite divisibility. If you want to look it up yourself.
Speaker 3: It is a sort of dolliesque surreal painting with these
Speaker 3: strange objects standing up in a landscape with very stark,
Speaker 3: you know, high contrast shadows that are falling long across
Speaker 3: the fading background. So there seems to be a strong
Speaker 3: directionally oriented source of light sort of where where the
Speaker 3: observer would be casting these long shadows. But in this
Speaker 3: paper there is a zoom in and some lines you
Speaker 3: can see if you scroll down in our outline here
Speaker 3: Rob showing that the shadows cast in this painting are
Speaker 3: again impossible. They don't line up the way they would
Speaker 3: if there were actually a single consistent point of light.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is fascinating. Yeah, once you start looking at
Speaker 2: it and really comparing object to shadow, then yeah, you
Speaker 2: start seeing you hit the problems here.
Speaker 3: And yet I wouldn't noticed at all. So this raises
Speaker 3: a question like, were the impossible shadows in this painting
Speaker 3: included simply by accident because most people wouldn't notice, or
Speaker 3: is it an intended surreal effect to I don't know.
Speaker 3: Reward careful study of the painting for you to realize like, oh,
Speaker 3: wait a minute, this is not physically possible.
Speaker 2: It's got to be the latter, right, I mean, it
Speaker 2: seems like the amount of work that would go into
Speaker 2: a piece like this, and being a surrealist piece, that
Speaker 2: would that would make sense to intentionally distort the shadows,
Speaker 2: even if it was done in such a way that
Speaker 2: many viewers of the painting would not notice.
Speaker 3: Okay, so short story there. We do use shadows to
Speaker 3: get relevant information about a scene we're looking at, but
Speaker 3: we only look so close because we apparently do not
Speaker 3: detect when shadows violate the laws of physics or geometry. However,
Speaker 3: coming back to that paper I mentioned by Cassatti, shadows also,
Speaker 3: in addition to providing relevant information, they also represent noise.
Speaker 3: We might not think about this often, but in reality,
Speaker 3: it would be quite easy to mistake a shadow for
Speaker 3: a physical object or the outline of such to interpret,
Speaker 3: to misinterpret a shadow falling across an object as a
Speaker 3: contour on that object and the and Kasati points out
Speaker 3: this is one reason it is so difficult to represent
Speaker 3: shadows in line drawings. So Kasati says, our brains deal
Speaker 3: with this noise threat by mostly tuning out shadows as
Speaker 3: visual representations unless we suddenly decide to focus on them.
Speaker 3: And that seemed very true to me. You know, we
Speaker 3: we see shadows all the time. We are constantly surrounded
Speaker 3: by shadows, but our brain sort of makes them cognitively
Speaker 3: invisible unless we decide for some reason to focus on them.
Speaker 3: And Kasati calls this having quote limited conscious access to shadow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is fascinating. So there is data there in
Speaker 2: the shadow, but there's just too much noise really to
Speaker 2: depend on it too heavily, and there's ultimately better visual
Speaker 2: and other sense data to go off of in any
Speaker 2: given situation that involves a shadow, I'm assuming.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I found that really interesting that as a
Speaker 3: form of visual information, shadows exist in this middle realm
Speaker 3: where we can get useful information from them, but we're
Speaker 3: never looking too close, or at least not naturally unless
Speaker 3: we're like really forced to, because a lot of times
Speaker 3: we don't even notice if the shadow is eldritch in nature,
Speaker 3: it's doing something geometry can't do or wouldn't be justified
Speaker 3: by how light works. But secondarily, most of the time,
Speaker 3: even though we're looking right at shadows, we don't see them.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm literally looking right at shadows right now,
Speaker 3: and I don't see them as shadows unless I notice
Speaker 3: to look at the shadows there. They don't, I don't know,
Speaker 3: strike my visualste them as relevant, and so I'm just like,
Speaker 3: I tune them out.
Speaker 2: That's interesting. Yeah, we kind of have shadow blindness to
Speaker 2: a large degree, which I guess makes it even more
Speaker 2: fascinating to think that there might be other beings out
Speaker 2: there who can see shadows in ways that can appreciate
Speaker 2: shadows in ways that human beings cannot. I would like
Speaker 2: to at this point turn our attention to various fictional, legendary, folkloric,
Speaker 2: and literary examples of shadowless wizards, demons, and vampires, and
Speaker 2: much more in the shadows that may or may not
Speaker 2: be cast by these various individuals. So I've mentioned my
Speaker 2: fondness for the horror fantasy of Weird Tales era author
Speaker 2: Clark Ashton Smith before, and one of my all time
Speaker 2: favorites is a short story title The Double Shadow, about
Speaker 2: a pair of wizards who on Earth ancient dark magic
Speaker 2: that in turn dooms them both to a horrible death.
Speaker 2: Smith's own summary of the tale via eldrich Dark dot com,
Speaker 2: which is a great website that has just all of
Speaker 2: his writings available. This is how the author himself summarized it. Quote.
Speaker 2: A man sees a monstrous shadow following his own and
Speaker 2: merging with it gradually day by day, while coincidentally with
Speaker 2: this merging, he loses his own entity and becomes possessed
Speaker 2: by an evil thing from unknown worlds in his personality.
Speaker 2: The hideous invading spirit takes form and becomes manifest till
Speaker 2: his shadow is that which had followed him. And the
Speaker 2: story itself is very haunting, and the ending is really awesome,
Speaker 2: with the Doomed Wizard, the last of the doomed wizards,
Speaker 2: writing his last personal testimony in a locked study while
Speaker 2: his while this monstrous shadow crawls ever closer closes. As follows, so,
Speaker 2: knowing that the time is brief, I have shut myself
Speaker 2: in the room of volumes and books and have written
Speaker 2: this account. And I have taken the bright triangular tablet,
Speaker 2: whose solution was our undoing, and have cast it from
Speaker 2: the window into the sea, hoping that none will find
Speaker 2: it after us. And now I must make an end
Speaker 2: and enclose this writing in the sealed cylinder of ourcallum,
Speaker 2: and fling it forth to drift upon the wave, for
Speaker 2: the space between my shadow and the shadow of the
Speaker 2: horror is strained momently, and the space is no wider
Speaker 2: than the thickness of a wizard's pin. Now I had
Speaker 2: long thought that this was mere fantastic invention on Smith's part,
Speaker 2: and it doesn't just detract it all from the success
Speaker 2: of the story and the effect of the story. But
Speaker 2: based on what I was reading in Brewers, it would
Speaker 2: seem that he may have based this detail on that
Speaker 2: example of so called Eastern origin. This is, of course
Speaker 2: spectacularly vague and hartly limits the search too much. It
Speaker 2: just means that it must have originated outside of ancient Greece,
Speaker 2: Ancient Rome, and European traditions. But the idea is explained
Speaker 2: in Brewers is that wizards studying the Black Arts, after
Speaker 2: they reach a certain advanced stage in their studies, are
Speaker 2: chased through a subterranean hall by the devil. I don't
Speaker 2: know if this is supposed to be in real life
Speaker 2: or in a dream, etc. But then the idea is,
Speaker 2: if the devil catches you, well, I guess maybe you're
Speaker 2: done for. But if the devil catches only your shadow
Speaker 2: or part of it, then you lose all over part
Speaker 2: of your shadow, but in doing so, you become a
Speaker 2: first rate wizard. And so therefore you might identify a
Speaker 2: wizard because the wizard's shadow will be uncanny, It'll be
Speaker 2: incomplete to some extent, or perhaps it will be missing altogether.
Speaker 3: Oh but I wonder if most people would notice that,
Speaker 3: since we often don't notice impossible shadows.
Speaker 2: That's right, That's right. It's almost kind of a safe bet, right.
Speaker 2: It's like, well, okay, if I lose part of my shadow,
Speaker 2: or even the whole thing, I'm probably going to be
Speaker 2: all right. Besides, I have all these dark magical spells
Speaker 2: to fall back on. Now, setting aside this vague claim
Speaker 2: of Eastern origins for a moment, we do see another
Speaker 2: variation of this idea in Icelandic traditions. And my source
Speaker 2: here is demonic magic in the Icelandic Wizard Legends by
Speaker 2: Mark Hanford. This was published in the Scottish Society for
Speaker 2: Northern Studies twenty nine back in nineteen ninety two. Now,
Speaker 2: Hanford's paper concerns a figure known as Samond Sigfisen or
Speaker 2: Semond the learned. This individual what was it is well
Speaker 2: to explain here was an historic individual. This is someone
Speaker 2: who actually lived, but there are also various legends about them,
Speaker 2: legends in which they are described as a gulderman, a
Speaker 2: type of wizard that was distinct from pagan slash evil
Speaker 2: magicians in early medieval Christian writings.
Speaker 3: Yes, because despite so many of the legends of him
Speaker 3: having to deal with interactions with the devil, Semond was
Speaker 3: a Christian priest.
Speaker 2: That's right, right, And apparently these guldermen were generally classified
Speaker 2: as priests in addition to wizards, they are generally strong
Speaker 2: Christian elements in their stories, and Hanford writes that Salmond
Speaker 2: is the earliest of the Icelandic wizards in this tradition, so,
Speaker 2: first of all, the real Seman according to the various annals,
Speaker 2: Salmon was born in ten fifty six and educated in France.
Speaker 2: He returned to Iceland around ten seventy six, built a
Speaker 2: church in the south of Iceland, and then went on
Speaker 2: to be very influential in ecclesiastical law and politics of
Speaker 2: the day, so he was able to raise his own
Speaker 2: family's position in the country to a position of power
Speaker 2: for many generations to come. He wrote important histories such
Speaker 2: as the Lost but Off sited history of the Kings
Speaker 2: of Normal. He died in eleven thirty three at the
Speaker 2: age of seventy seven, And yeah, that's that's the short
Speaker 2: version of the historical Semand. But he also takes on
Speaker 2: different powers within the realm of icelandic.
Speaker 3: Legend, one of the many legends about Semand is that
Speaker 3: he was able to get control of his parish in
Speaker 3: southern Iceland because there were a group of I don't know,
Speaker 3: learned men or candidates who were brought before the King
Speaker 3: of Norway. King of Norway was like, okay, there's a
Speaker 3: parish in Iceland, and whichever one of you gets there
Speaker 3: first can have it. So Semond goes to the beach.
Speaker 3: He goes to the shore, and he calls up the
Speaker 3: devil and he says, okay, I need you to give
Speaker 3: me a ride to Iceland without getting my coat tails wet.
Speaker 3: And if you take me there without getting my coattails wet,
Speaker 3: then you can have my soul. So the devil transforms
Speaker 3: into a seal and let's Semond ride him all the
Speaker 3: way to Iceland. They're almost there, but then the devil
Speaker 3: is outsmarted because Semond beats the seal. The devil seal
Speaker 3: on the head with the salter I think either a
Speaker 3: bible or assalter. The devil is knocked unconscious and sinks
Speaker 3: under the water, and then of course the coattails get
Speaker 3: wet because he falls into the water. Therefore the pact
Speaker 3: is invalidated. So he outsmarted him with a good whack
Speaker 3: to the head.
Speaker 2: In this outlandish story. Really does sum up a lot
Speaker 2: of the character of Samon in these legends, because he's
Speaker 2: nothing short of the ultimate demonic wizard in the classical
Speaker 2: Fostian sense. Yet while fast makes overall terrible deals with
Speaker 2: the devil, they come back to plague him. Samon is
Speaker 2: essentially he's like a wise trickster who knows how to
Speaker 2: outwit the devil himself when it comes to various contracts.
Speaker 2: You know, that sort of outlawyer the devil, I guess
Speaker 2: and even and as he goes on in legend, he's
Speaker 2: able to aid others in litigation of their own deals
Speaker 2: with the devil. So he got into a bad deal
Speaker 2: with the devil, Well, maybe Salmon will be able to
Speaker 2: help you. The author here says Samon is presented as
Speaker 2: an ambiguous character, one who uses diabolical means to do
Speaker 2: good against the forces of evil.
Speaker 3: Oh, he's like Christopher Lee and the devil rides out.
Speaker 3: You know, he can know all the diabolical chants, he
Speaker 3: can know all the occult tones because he's using them
Speaker 3: for good. But Simon, you can't know about them.
Speaker 2: That's right, Yes, the Holy Warlock figure here. Now, the
Speaker 2: context for all of this actually brings us back to
Speaker 2: something we were talking about earlier this month regarding necromancy,
Speaker 2: and that's clerical access to texts and tones that contain
Speaker 2: forbidden knowledge regarding communication with demons and the sometimes acceptable
Speaker 2: realm of astral magic, magic concerning the stars. Astral magic
Speaker 2: had been imported from the Arab world, so only learned
Speaker 2: physicians and clergy members had access to such texts, with
Speaker 2: the clergy especially having access to texts related to the
Speaker 2: command of demons for the purposes of exorcism. And as
Speaker 2: we take done previously, it's members of the clergy who
Speaker 2: were frequently accused of demonology or necromancy, or at least
Speaker 2: accused of possessing texts related to these alleged practices. It
Speaker 2: was also Hanford stresses here an easy accusation to make
Speaker 2: against clergy and physicians by their enemies and or those
Speaker 2: jealous of their success. So you don't like a given
Speaker 2: guy who's way up in the clergy, especially one who's
Speaker 2: like Samond at foreign educated. Well you just say, well,
Speaker 2: of course he's successful. He's a wizard.
Speaker 3: He's doing deals with the devil.
Speaker 2: Right, And then you know, maybe people are jumping to
Speaker 2: their defense and saying, well, Samon is doing a lot
Speaker 2: of great work if he made a deal with the devil.
Speaker 2: I guess he knows what he's doing. Yeah, but that
Speaker 2: doesn't mean you should make a deal with the devil.
Speaker 2: Leave it to individuals like Saman to pull it off.
Speaker 3: But you know, one of the really interesting legendary motifs
Speaker 3: about Saman to the learned is the idea of him
Speaker 3: essentially going to devil school.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, again he was. He's farign educated, educated in France,
Speaker 2: and and realistically he would have learned about pagan history,
Speaker 2: he would have learned about mathematics, astrology, and theology. But
Speaker 2: Hanford writes that, you know, this gets all stretched in
Speaker 2: the popular imagination and it becomes the version that becomes
Speaker 2: kind of the folkloric canon. Is that and then this
Speaker 2: was this was later recorded in I think seventeenth century
Speaker 2: by Arnie Magnuson in the states that Salmon was educated
Speaker 2: at the Black School, and which is of course a
Speaker 2: school of dark wizardry, and at the end of one
Speaker 2: studies there, the devil would claim the soul of the
Speaker 2: last student to leave.
Speaker 3: This setting is not unique to stories about this guy's life.
Speaker 3: By the way, there is a more common folk story
Speaker 3: motif about the Scholomance or the School of the Devil,
Speaker 3: which is in some sense a college were people go
Speaker 3: to learn mystical evil magic powers. They are instructed by
Speaker 3: the devil, or maybe not by the devil, maybe they
Speaker 3: just get to go to this place and there's lots
Speaker 3: of books of forbidden knowledge there. But yes, the devil
Speaker 3: will claim at least one of the students of each
Speaker 3: class there to be his personal servant.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I like it's kind of the last person
Speaker 2: to leave, which I kind of interpreted as being like
Speaker 2: the most studious of the children, or not children, I guess,
Speaker 2: but his students, the most studious, the biggest wizardry nerd
Speaker 2: on campus, that will be the one that the devil
Speaker 2: hand selects. So anyway, Samon was very studious and he
Speaker 2: was often the last to leave. And I guess this
Speaker 2: was known about him because even back home in Iceland,
Speaker 2: they realized this kid is gonna get the devil on
Speaker 2: him if someone doesn't help him out. And so that's
Speaker 2: where Iceland's bishop John Augmundsen decides to jump in and
Speaker 2: help him out. He rushes there, he's there to help
Speaker 2: him out of the building, throws his coat over Salmon's back.
Speaker 2: As he leaves, the devil reaches out for him and
Speaker 2: snatches the coat instead of Salmon's soul. So this is
Speaker 2: the How does this relate to shadows, Well, we'll get there,
Speaker 2: But in this particular telling, the devil wasn't done though.
Speaker 2: He proclaimed that he had three days to claim Salmon's soul.
Speaker 2: So Salmon had to hide himself. He hit himself three
Speaker 2: times in a riverbank, in a boat at sea, and
Speaker 2: buried under a consecrated earth in a churchyard. And these
Speaker 2: tactics work, and the devil was thwarted. The idea being
Speaker 2: that like, where is he, Well, I'm getting a sense
Speaker 2: that he's he's he's out here at sea. He must
Speaker 2: he must have drowned, or I get the sense that
Speaker 2: he's under the earth. He must be dead. And so
Speaker 2: he's able to thwart the devil and avoid having his
Speaker 2: soul claimed.
Speaker 3: The way I understood this, this was also connected to
Speaker 3: similar folk tales that weren't directly about the devil but
Speaker 3: were about some kind of mass stir of astral magic,
Speaker 3: somebody who was like a wicked astrologer who wanted to
Speaker 3: capture his student, and the student would evade him by like, yeah,
Speaker 3: so he would get his feet wet on the first day,
Speaker 3: and so the astrologer would consult the stars and see
Speaker 3: that he was wet and be like, oh, okay, he
Speaker 3: is drowned. And then another day he does something else
Speaker 3: to his body, like he puts blood on his feet
Speaker 3: or something, and then the astrologer consults the stars that
Speaker 3: day and sees blood and thinks that he has been killed,
Speaker 3: and then yeah, I guess the consecrated earth. The astrologer
Speaker 3: consults the stars and finds Ah, he is buried, so
Speaker 3: I can no longer claim.
Speaker 2: Him right right now. In other versions of this story, though,
Speaker 2: it's not Salmond or the bishop's coat that is snatched
Speaker 2: by the devil, but Salmon's shadow, thus removing him of
Speaker 2: a shadow for the remainder of his life. So here
Speaker 2: we get back to this idea of wizards being chased
Speaker 2: around by the devil, having part of or their entire
Speaker 2: shadows snatched away, and thus being powerful and having all
Speaker 2: of this forbidden knowledge, being able to use it, but
Speaker 2: being deprived of something that may or may not be important,
Speaker 2: as we'll get into the shadow.
Speaker 3: One version of the story I came across was same
Speaker 3: and using trickery. Actually, so he's the last student. He's
Speaker 3: trying to get out of the Devil's college, and the
Speaker 3: devil tries to reach out and claim him, but he says,
Speaker 3: wait a minute, no, I'm not the last. There is
Speaker 3: one more student still there, and he points to his
Speaker 3: shadow cast on the wall. So the devil reaches out
Speaker 3: to grab that and snatches his shadow away from him
Speaker 3: as he bodily makes his escape, but no longer with
Speaker 3: his shadow intact.
Speaker 2: That version is good too. I like that. So Hanford
Speaker 2: writes that this escape from the Black School trope is
Speaker 2: a migratory legend, one that is largely unchanged over the
Speaker 2: centuries and pops up in different contexts, and the same
Speaker 2: can be said for what is known on the the
Speaker 2: Arnie Thompson Index of Folk Tale Types as tail type
Speaker 2: three twenty nine, a man gives or sell his shadow
Speaker 2: to the devil.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, I think Hanford says, there's not a lot of
Speaker 3: detail on that index type, and I wish there was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I had to look around. I found an Irish
Speaker 2: or Irish American tale that reflects this trope. This was
Speaker 2: recorded in nineteen seventy by Ruth and Music in Green
Speaker 2: Hills of Magic, West Virginia. Folk tales from Europe, and
Speaker 2: in this telling, you have a despondent man who's about
Speaker 2: to jump from a bridge when a stranger, guess what
Speaker 2: it's The devil arrives and says, hey, I'll buy that
Speaker 2: shadow off of you. And the man's like, oh, well,
Speaker 2: what are you going to give me for it? And
Speaker 2: he'll said. He says, well, i'll give you. I'll give
Speaker 2: you all the gold you'll ever need. And he's like, well,
Speaker 2: that sounds like a good deal. I wasn't using my shadow.
Speaker 2: I was about to really not be using it for anything.
Speaker 2: And so the he agrees to this, and the devil
Speaker 2: gives him a magic purse that always has coins in it.
Speaker 2: So this seems like a great deal, but then the
Speaker 2: townsfolk become suspicious of the fact that this guy always
Speaker 2: has money, and they also begin to notice, hey, he
Speaker 2: does not have a shadow, and so they throw him
Speaker 2: in prison I'm not sure on what charges exactly, and
Speaker 2: he dies there.
Speaker 3: I thought this was going to take a different turn
Speaker 3: where he was going to give him all the gold
Speaker 3: he'd ever need and then just push him from the bridge,
Speaker 3: because once he's dead, he doesn't need gold.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean that's the thing about deals with
Speaker 2: the Devil. Yeah, I guess. I guess they tend to
Speaker 2: take on the sort of lawful evil character right where
Speaker 2: there's some term, there's some detail in the contract. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I could have seen it going that darker direction as well.
Speaker 3: I guess it's what kind of moral failing on the
Speaker 3: part of the protagonist do you want to emphasize In
Speaker 3: those kind of stories, it's inattention to detail, it's failure
Speaker 3: to read the fine print on the contract. On this
Speaker 3: it seems more like an inability to understand that suddenly
Speaker 3: being rich but also having something missing of your person
Speaker 3: will be noticed by people around you.
Speaker 2: This trope is also reflected in The Marvelous Tale of
Speaker 2: Peter Schimmel from eighteen forty three by Attlbert von Camisso,
Speaker 2: which concerns another despondent young man who also sells his
Speaker 2: shadow to the devil and also sells it for a
Speaker 2: bottomless wallet. But in this story he ends up wandering
Speaker 2: the earth and depends and it spends the rest of
Speaker 2: his doomed life. Is kind of a holy fool attempting
Speaker 2: to reconnect with nature. Interestingly enough, DeForest Kelly of Star
Speaker 2: Trek Fame played this character in a nineteen fifty three
Speaker 2: episode of the anthology series Your Favorite Story, an episode
Speaker 2: titled The Man Who Sold His Shadow. Now, this trope
Speaker 2: pops up other places as well. Probably the most noticeable
Speaker 2: and one that a number of you are already thinking of,
Speaker 2: would be Peter Pan. You might remember this especially from
Speaker 2: the Disney animated adaptation of Old Peter. Pan is nearly
Speaker 2: caught in Wendy's house and his shadow is ripped off
Speaker 2: in the escape, and later they have to stick it
Speaker 2: back on, or they try to stick it back on
Speaker 2: with like soap and stuff. It doesn't work, they have
Speaker 2: to sew it back on.
Speaker 3: It is a mischievous, fairy like shadow.
Speaker 2: Yes. Now, as for those supposed Eastern influences on the idea,
Speaker 2: I wasn't able to find out anything really solid here,
Speaker 2: though I was looking at a few different sources. I
Speaker 2: found a book titled Folk Traditions of the Arab World,
Speaker 2: A Guide to motif Classification, Volume two by Hassan m
Speaker 2: el Shami, and the author does mention, at least in passing,
Speaker 2: that one quality of demons is that they cast no shadows.
Speaker 2: And I also was reading in Commanding Demons in Gin
Speaker 2: the Sorcerer in Early Islamic Thought by Travis Zeta that
Speaker 2: eleventh century Islamic author Abu al Fado Mohammad al Tabasi
Speaker 2: wrote in a book on Devil's in Gin that gin
Speaker 2: could be revealed by their shadows, and by their shadows
Speaker 2: only as inn like. You couldn't see the rest of them,
Speaker 2: but you could see the shadow of the gin.
Speaker 3: Interesting.
Speaker 2: So these two ideas are, of course, rather opposite from
Speaker 2: one another, and may well speak, you know, of different
Speaker 2: traditions and times. We're casting a large umbrello here over
Speaker 2: the concept. But they both do get at the idea
Speaker 2: of a shadow, or the lack thereof, is something key
Speaker 2: to an entity that doesn't completely fit into the human
Speaker 2: world or into human perception, and this brings us to
Speaker 2: the world of vampires. Ah okay, So I think a
Speaker 2: lot of you are probably up on the fact that
Speaker 2: in many tales, at least, vampires have no reflection in
Speaker 2: a mirror. That's a classic trope. It's one that's easy
Speaker 2: to visually represent in even a lower budget vampire film.
Speaker 3: Yes, Gary Oldman comes across Keanu shaving, he hisses like
Speaker 3: a snake at the mirror and it shatters.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, But at least in some tellings, the vampire
Speaker 2: also casts no shadow. And this is actually referenced in
Speaker 2: we've already referred to it here, the most influential vampire
Speaker 2: novel of all time, Bromstoker's Dracula. I'll read a bit
Speaker 2: from it here where this is specifically discussed. Quote. I
Speaker 2: was not alone. The room was the same, unchanged in
Speaker 2: any way since I came into it. I could see
Speaker 2: along the floor in the brilliant moonlight. My own footsteps
Speaker 2: marked where I had disturbed the long accumulation of dust
Speaker 2: in the moonlight. Opposite me were three young women, ladies
Speaker 2: by their dress and manner. I thought at the time
Speaker 2: that I must be dreaming when I saw them, for
Speaker 2: though the moonlight was behind them, they threw no shadow
Speaker 2: on the floor. They came close to me and looked
Speaker 2: at me for some time, and then whispered together. Two
Speaker 2: or dark and had high aquilang noses like the Count,
Speaker 2: and great dark piercing eyes that seemed to be almost
Speaker 2: red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon. These are,
Speaker 2: of course, the brides of Dracula, the three female vampires
Speaker 2: that serve him in the book and then various adaptations
Speaker 2: of the book and elsewhere. In the Book of Dracula himself,
Speaker 2: it is written he throws no shadow, he makes in
Speaker 2: the mirror no reflect as again Jonathan observed, though the
Speaker 2: Prince of Darkness himself also tells Jonathan, I love the
Speaker 2: shade and the shadow.
Speaker 3: Well, maybe you love to be in the shade. If
Speaker 3: you can make none with your own body.
Speaker 2: Maybe so, all right. So we have this idea of
Speaker 2: the vampire, which, if you're not familiar, is a is
Speaker 2: a monstrous and cursed and corrupted, undead thing that was
Speaker 2: once human but has lost all humanity, and it has
Speaker 2: become nothing but supernatural hunger and cruelty and horror, And
Speaker 2: at least in some tellings of it, is the thing
Speaker 2: that no longer casts a shadow. And then we have
Speaker 2: other variations of this. We we've talked about wizards losing
Speaker 2: their shadows, of sort of fairy folk losing their shadows,
Speaker 2: and literary traditions. But then there are also related concepts
Speaker 2: like the portrait of Dorian Gray, in which you don't
Speaker 2: have a shadow, you have a painting of an individual,
Speaker 2: and that representation also has some sort of connection to
Speaker 2: the state of their soul. And so these various literary
Speaker 2: treatments especially would seem to be linked. And I found
Speaker 2: a really cool source on this. This is titled Vampire's
Speaker 2: Demons and the Disappearing Shadow in Folkloric Fictions of the
Speaker 2: Long nineteenth Century by Sam M. George, published in a
Speaker 2: twenty twenty edition of Gothic Studies. Now Dracula, of course,
Speaker 2: was the work of an Irish author, and as I
Speaker 2: believe we've discussed in the show previously, invokes various Irish
Speaker 2: folklore ideas concerning the undead, perhaps in any ways more
Speaker 2: than anything that Bromstoker actually absorbed from European traditions. But
Speaker 2: George Wrights of Dracula there may be some links to
Speaker 2: actual Romani folkloric beliefs that a vampire was a person's shadow,
Speaker 2: for example, and that there was also a practice of
Speaker 2: shadow traders, who quote traded shadows to architects who attempted
Speaker 2: to secure and wall up a person's shadow to ensure
Speaker 2: that their buildings were durable, with the result that after
Speaker 2: death that person would become a vampire.
Speaker 3: WHOA, I don't think I've ever heard of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this was new to me, and I think there
Speaker 2: may be sprinklings of this tradition spread elsewhere in European
Speaker 2: traditions as well. We may come back to that. But
Speaker 2: what Georgia ultimately argues is that this means that yes,
Speaker 2: Dracula and his spawn are all soulless. They have no souls. Again,
Speaker 2: they've lost every shred of their humanity, and in doing
Speaker 2: so they have also lost that shadow.
Speaker 3: Well, it may be a coincidence, but I mean, obviously
Speaker 3: this has the at least superficial connection to the idea
Speaker 3: of Greek conceptions of disembodied souls as shades or shadows.
Speaker 2: Yes. Yes, Now where it gets really interesting with George's
Speaker 2: article is that she references J. G. Fraser's The Golden Bough,
Speaker 2: the first volume of which I believe came out in
Speaker 2: eighteen ninety would have lined up with the writing of
Speaker 2: Dracula and some of the other writers and other works
Speaker 2: that invoke similar ideas of shadow or reflection or painting.
Speaker 2: Fraser writes of traditional belief systems in which the individual
Speaker 2: quote often regards his shadow or reflection as his soul,
Speaker 2: or at all events, as a vital part of himself,
Speaker 2: and as such it is a source of danger to him,
Speaker 2: for if it is trampled upon, struck, or stabbed, he
Speaker 2: will feel the injury as if it were done to
Speaker 2: his person. And if it is detached from him entirely,
Speaker 2: as he believes that it may be, he will die.
Speaker 2: And then elsewhere. Fraser writes, as with shadows and reflections,
Speaker 2: so with portraits, they are often believed to contain the
Speaker 2: soul of the person portrayed. People who hold this belief
Speaker 2: are naturally loath to have their likeness taken for if
Speaker 2: the portrait is the soul or at least a vital
Speaker 2: part of the person portrayed, whoever possesses the portrait will
Speaker 2: be able to exercise fatal influence over the original of it.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, So this can next to a big theme
Speaker 3: that Fraser propounds in The Golden Bow, the Golden Bough
Speaker 3: is an early attempt at sort of anthropologically categorizing the
Speaker 3: different religious practices all around the world, and Fraser characterizes
Speaker 3: a lot of it as sympathetic magic, the idea that
Speaker 3: you would have an object that is, by connection of
Speaker 3: some sort associated with a person, and that like connection
Speaker 3: or association can be exploited for magical purposes to have
Speaker 3: influence over the person.
Speaker 2: Yes. Yes, and again George brings us up, though not
Speaker 2: to argue at all that like, okay, Fraser is the
Speaker 2: authority on all of this. But again, this book would
Speaker 2: have come out at just the right time, and the
Speaker 2: book was a popular book. But also, she writes, would
Speaker 2: have had a certain amount of I wouldn't say maybe
Speaker 2: not a taboo quality to it, but there was kind
Speaker 2: of like a sense of like, oh, this is hidden knowledge,
Speaker 2: this is the good stuff. And if you want insight
Speaker 2: into how perhaps monsters and supernatural relationships work, well this
Speaker 2: is a book you might well pick up.
Speaker 3: Oh, I think it was controversial when it came out.
Speaker 3: Was it was a very hot book. A lot of
Speaker 3: people were very excited about it. But it also, for example,
Speaker 3: set Christian practices in comparison to a lot of other
Speaker 3: religious practices around the world, which scandalized many conservative Christians.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I can imagine that like that added context
Speaker 2: could be interpreted as dangerous to one's own worldview and
Speaker 2: belief systems.
Speaker 3: Yeah, our religion is not like all the other religions now.
Speaker 2: George also connects this to Lavatar's theory of physiognomy, which
Speaker 2: is more directly a pseudoscientific face reading practice, something that
Speaker 2: traces back to the ancient world, but something that then
Speaker 2: would there would be a resurgence of in medieval and
Speaker 2: Renaissance thought. Renaissance thought and then utilized by Swiss pastor
Speaker 2: and Cospar Lavatar, who lived seventeen forty one through eighteen
Speaker 2: oh one. And Lavatar argued that the shadow or silhouette
Speaker 2: more specifically, I think, could be used to understand a
Speaker 2: person's character. And I guess you could compare this easily
Speaker 2: to things like you know, alleged ara readings and so forth.
Speaker 2: You get into a pseudo scientific idea that like, okay,
Speaker 2: well here's here is the silhouette, here's the shadow. This
Speaker 2: is information about the physical person. But also we can
Speaker 2: then if we know what we're doing we can read that,
Speaker 2: and we can we can we can make all sorts
Speaker 2: of judgment calls about, you know, their inner character.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think in the eighteenth and nineteenth century
Speaker 3: to some extent, physiognomy or physiognomy had some false scientific cachet,
Speaker 3: much like phrenology did. Like it's considered a pseudoscience now,
Speaker 3: but I think there were some people at the time
Speaker 3: who thought, oh, yeah, this is part of the new learning.
Speaker 3: You know, we can study actually the way you are shaped,
Speaker 3: or the way your face looks, or the bumps on
Speaker 3: your head, and these will tell us whether or not
Speaker 3: you're a criminal.
Speaker 2: So, citing David Glover's Vampires, Mummies and Liberals, Bram Stoker
Speaker 2: and the Politics of Popular Fiction, George notes that quote,
Speaker 2: without his shadow or mirror image, Dracula becomes physiognomy's true
Speaker 2: vanishing point, a profoundly unsettling figure.
Speaker 3: No data. Yeah, that's funny.
Speaker 2: I like that. So Dracula is just pure physical existence
Speaker 2: in hunger, no soul, no spirit, no depth beyond the
Speaker 2: immediate and all consuming thirst for blood. And of course,
Speaker 2: as Dracula resonates through cinematic traditions, the shadow also becomes important.
Speaker 2: Not so much in its absence, it's but in its perversion,
Speaker 2: as seen especially in nineteen twenty two's nos Veratu, and
Speaker 2: also coming back to Francis Ford Coppolo's nineteen ninety two
Speaker 2: adaptation of Dracula, we see the shadow of Dracula like
Speaker 2: reaching out and seeming to either act independently of the
Speaker 2: Prince of Darkness or to sort of telegraph his intense
Speaker 2: and hunger, Like his hunger is so intense that the
Speaker 2: shadow is reaching out to grasp Jonathan's neck.
Speaker 3: By chance, I just happened to rewatch Bram Stoker's Dracula,
Speaker 3: the Copola version from ninety two, and oh man, that
Speaker 3: movie is so much fun. I don't know exactly how
Speaker 3: it was reviewed at the time it came out, but
Speaker 3: it is a hoot. Gary Oldman is just wonderful, and
Speaker 3: I love all of the shadow play scenes. You're exactly right.
Speaker 3: It's not that he doesn't have a shadow, it's that
Speaker 3: he has the wrong shadow. And I guess this comes
Speaker 3: back to what we were talking about with impossible shadows.
Speaker 3: There are multiple moments in the scene where like Keanu
Speaker 3: Reeves is in Dracula's castle and he looks where Dracula's
Speaker 3: shadow is, but Dracula's body is not there, and he
Speaker 3: turns around and he's on the other side of him,
Speaker 3: not where his shadow was, But he just kind of
Speaker 3: shrugs it off. That seems funny in the same way
Speaker 3: that a lot of things in the movie seem funny,
Speaker 3: with him just kind of I don't know, ignoring very
Speaker 3: strange things going on at this castle where I guess
Speaker 3: he really wants to close that real estate deal. Always
Speaker 3: be closing Jonathan Harker. But now that I've read this paper,
Speaker 3: it's like, well, I wonder if you would, you know,
Speaker 3: in real time, see a totally impossible shadow and not
Speaker 3: realize it. It would just kind of like you'd be blind
Speaker 3: to it. It would just kind of go into your
Speaker 3: mind and go out unrecognized.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it would be just superseded by the visual information
Speaker 2: of the Count's body. Like whatever was weird and uncanny
Speaker 2: about the shadow, it's like, oh, well, never mind that
Speaker 2: there's the body. This is what we go on as
Speaker 2: human beings.
Speaker 3: Of course, I don't know that's what would happen and
Speaker 3: if this were real life, but I don't know, it
Speaker 3: seems more plausible now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and again Dracula is a being of shadow, so
Speaker 2: I like this. Whether he casts a shadow or not,
Speaker 2: he has some sort of strange relationship with shadows, either
Speaker 2: you know, casting distorted shadows, manipulating shadows, or having no
Speaker 2: shadow at all. It all kind of gets around to
Speaker 2: the same idea that this is a creature out of
Speaker 2: step or out of place in the natural world, you know.
Speaker 2: Coming back to Francis fort Coppolo's Dracula for just a second, though,
Speaker 2: I was thinking about it in writing the notes for
Speaker 2: this episode, but also in watching one of the Christopher
Speaker 2: Lee Dracula films, which we're going to be talking about
Speaker 2: in Weird House Cinema this week, and I momentarily had
Speaker 2: the thought, it's a shame that Gary Oldman, such a
Speaker 2: great actor and such a great Dracula, only got to
Speaker 2: play Dracula once, whereas Christopher Lee got to play him
Speaker 2: so many times. But then I corrected myself and realized, no,
Speaker 2: Gary Oldman doesn't play one Dracula in this film. He
Speaker 2: plays multiple Draculas.
Speaker 3: That's true.
Speaker 2: Each Dracula has a different, slightly different feel and different
Speaker 2: visual presentation.
Speaker 3: He's got the earthly count VLab from the prologue where
Speaker 3: like he stabs the cross and renounces God, and I
Speaker 3: guess that's how he becomes a vampire. In the story,
Speaker 3: he's old Grandma Gary oldman with the butt hair. He's young,
Speaker 3: sexy Gary oldman with the purple sunglasses in London. He's
Speaker 3: a lot of vampires.
Speaker 2: He's wolf, he's bat. We also get the later version
Speaker 2: of the old account where he has instead of the
Speaker 2: hair being up, it's all slipped back and long. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: so yeah there, And I may be forgetting one or
Speaker 2: two in the mix. So he ultimately did a whole
Speaker 2: franchise is worth of Draculas in just the one picture.
Speaker 3: The ninety two Dracula is far from perfect. I would
Speaker 3: say it is a weird in great ways and in
Speaker 3: not so great ways. It's flawed, some parts of it
Speaker 3: kind of dragged. But it is really really worth watching
Speaker 3: just for how amazing Gary Oldman is. Yes, yeah, and
Speaker 3: there are other great things too, great sets and some
Speaker 3: other performances that are a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, a lot of great performances, great costumes,
Speaker 2: great blood, great monsters. And yeah, and Oldman's performance is perfect.
Speaker 2: I think I read somewhere that he mainly agreed to
Speaker 2: do it because he wanted to work with Francis Ford Coppola.
Speaker 2: But then also he said, once he read the line
Speaker 2: I've crossed oceans of time to find you, he was like, well,
Speaker 2: I've got to do it. I can't. I can't go
Speaker 2: on with my career without saying that line. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I feel like Gary Oldman's performance is so good it
Speaker 3: can make you forget that there is no love story
Speaker 3: in the novel, or at least not one with Dracula.
Speaker 3: Like Dracula and Mina in the novel are not in love. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he's just bad in the novel. He's just a he's
Speaker 3: just a demon. He's not suave, he's not cool. He
Speaker 3: does not take her on a date to pet a
Speaker 3: wolf in the cinematograph.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a good point. And you know, I
Speaker 2: and I think if you're if you're out there and
Speaker 2: you want more about the nature of Dracula and various
Speaker 2: depictions of Dracula, tune in for a Weird House Cinema
Speaker 2: this Friday, because I'm sure we'll have a lot to
Speaker 2: discuss regarding this and the version of Dracula that will
Speaker 2: be experiencing in that film. And as for Shadows, I
Speaker 2: believe we'll be back on Thursday with more.
Speaker 3: The shadows fall longer and longer, they will not be denied.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close it
Speaker 2: up there, but we will remind you that Stuff to
Speaker 2: Blow Your Mind is a science podcast with core episodes
Speaker 2: on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we do listener mail,
Speaker 2: On Wednesdays we do a short form artifactor Monster Fact episode,
Speaker 2: and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to
Speaker 2: just talk about a weird film on Weird Houses Cinema.
Speaker 2: And oh, you may have noticed that we have new
Speaker 2: host photos for Stuff to Blow your Mind here if
Speaker 2: you haven't seen them, run by our recently revived social
Speaker 2: media presences all linked off of Stuff to Blow Yourmind
Speaker 2: dot com and more specifically, we're stbym podcast on Instagram.
Speaker 2: Now let me tell you where we have those photos taken.
Speaker 2: We visited the Museum of Illusions Atlanta, a delightful and
Speaker 2: educational attraction located in Atlantic Station. They feature a whole
Speaker 2: host of visual illusions, including illusion rooms that you can
Speaker 2: walk into and interact with, so in a way, you
Speaker 2: may feel like a vampire in some of these places
Speaker 2: because your reflection especially will not be what you imagined
Speaker 2: it would be, or perhaps the way you look on
Speaker 2: your camera or on the cameras that are present in
Speaker 2: the room. The footage will not be right. Something is distorted,
Speaker 2: something is out of whack.
Speaker 3: It's a great place to get to know the stranger
Speaker 3: sides of your own reflection and your own shadow.
Speaker 2: Absolutely and it's fun for all ages. You can learn
Speaker 2: more about Museum of Illusions Atlanta at MOI Atlanta dot com.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 3: your Mind dot com.
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