Darryl Cooper — #7 - Approaching the Aztecs - A Drunken Introduction

Hey everybody, this

Speaker 1 (lower-pitched voice): is Daryl Cooper, and you're listening to the Martyr Maid Podcast. You're about to hear a somewhat lighthearted episode inspired by my friend Daniele's History on Fire podcast series on the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. I thought it would be fun to explore some related themes like mythology, human sacrifice, and cannibalism, and this is just a little intro episode to kick things off

If you

Speaker 1 (lower-pitched voice): enjoy this podcast, please consider subscribing to my Substack page, where you'll find supplemental writings and exclusive podcast episodes available to subscribers for just $5 a month or $50 a year. To all

of you who

Speaker 1 (lower-pitched voice): are already contributing, I really appreciate you allowing me to do what I do. You can find the Substack at martormade.substack.com. Without further ado, here we

Speaker 2: go

I'm

Speaker 2: content to die for my beliefs. So

cut off my

Speaker 2: head and

make me a

Speaker 3: martyr. The

people will

Speaker 3: always remember it

No, they won't forget

Speaker 5: God is a thought, God is an idea. It

is a place

Speaker 6: it is somewhere

hell does exist. But its reference

Speaker 7: is to something that transcends all things

We must tear

Speaker 8: ourselves apart for this small question of religion

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): So this is definitely not how I intended to start this series off. Let's just begin

with that. I had a few too

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): many Bloody Marys at breakfast this morning and I'm still feeling that pretty strongly. And this is not

so much a... fully

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): prepared episode as it is a very long introduction to what I'm going to be doing over the next few months

It seems

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): like every project that I put my hand to, the same thing happens. It always ends up growing into this monster

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): that I can't control. And before I know it, instead of digging into one topic that I wanted to talk to you guys about, I'm trying to solve some ancient human problem that people

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): infinitely smarter than me have been banging their heads against for centuries, as if I'm going to unlock the hidden

you

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): know, the hidden secret to it or something, but I can't help it. It just seems to be the way my brain works

And so I've

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): got a few notes here, but this is going to be very informal. I'm going to be winging this half drunk with you guys

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): because I've got a little bit more work to do on the first real episode, but I wanted to check in and kind of let you know what I got cooking

See, I've got this

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): really bad habit that makes getting these episodes out to you guys in a

I usually

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): pull out the excuse that, you know, unlike many of the other podcasters maybe on your playlist, I've got a full-time day job and

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): takes up most of my time. And that's true. That is true. But the truth is I still probably manage to put in at least as many hours per day as anybody

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): else that I know that does this kind of stuff. That's not really the issue. The

real problem

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): is that I have not learned

And I

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): have tried, but I've not learned at all. If any of you other podcasters that end up listening to this

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): have some tips for me, I'd love to hear it. I have not learned at all how to restrict the scope of these discussions so that I don't fall into this trap of mission creep, you know, where it just expands and expands. And we'll take the last series I did, Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem. It was... series on the Arab-Israeli conflict. When I started that, that was supposed to be one or two episodes, maybe an hour or two apiece. That's what I thought. And I thought that

one or two episodes

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): of an hour or two apiece were going to take me from the beginning of the story where I did start

All

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): the way up

Speaker 13: to the present day, right? So six episodes and 25, 26 hours later, I'd managed to tell the story of

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): the Arab-Israeli conflict only up to the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948. And even then, there's still a ton of stuff that I had to skim over or just leave out altogether that felt like cutting off one of my arms

It

Speaker 13: felt completely vital

even with

Speaker 13: the length that that thing ended up being

And it

Speaker 13: turns out that the more I investigate a topic, any topic it seems like, instead of having more to say about it, you know, instead of having more to say the more I know, I end up having less and less and less

that I

Speaker 13: feel like I can say with any confidence at all. When

I'd read six

Speaker 13: books on the Arab-Israeli conflict, just stay away from me. It was like

you

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): know... If you ventured too close to me, I'd sit you down and explain the whole history of the conflict and what it all meant and whose fault everything was and what should be done about it

And I

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): would just – if

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): you were unlucky enough to venture into my vicinity and be patient enough to listen to me talk, it was just not a good idea. I had all the answers when I'd read six books about

Speaker 13: it

By the

Speaker 13: time I'd read my 60th book

on it, I

Speaker 13: was in a place feeling like the issue is so complicated that

You

Speaker 13: can't understand anything about it at

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): all without taking it

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): all the way back to fundamental questions about human sociability and social identity and group dynamics and psychology. I mean it just keeps growing and growing. But people who show up for a discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict presumably wouldn't have a lot of patience for dry lectures on those abstract ideas, certainly not from

me. You

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): know, but I tend to have

Speaker 13: a really hard time figuring out which layer to draw that line under. You know, you work your way down and you say, "Well, you know, ideas and customs and our modes of daily interaction

Speaker 16: society, our habits of life, all these things that kind of make up our cultural milieu

all of

Speaker 16: these build on one another

Speaker 13: like a pyramid

Each layer

Speaker 13: above it is dependent

on

Speaker 13: the layer below it being fully secure and in place

Now when we look

Speaker 13: at a pyramid, our

eye is

Speaker 13: naturally drawn by the outline up the sides toward the peak

and then

Speaker 13: maybe from there vaulted up into the sky, up into

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): the heavens to some star, constellation, or dwelling place of the dead to which we imagine the thing is pointing, right? Because that might even be the point of the shape of a pyramid, to draw us upward like that

We

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): rarely spend much time in wonder or contemplation or awe over the base of the pyramid or those middle layers that

are

Speaker 17: almost there just to hold up that peak at the top. That's the way we treat it sometimes. Even

though the

Speaker 17: lower levels are closer to all of us, and the base does more to set the parameters of the overall structure than any section built above it

I'm kind of

Speaker 18: stretching this analogy, but again, I'm not talking really about a literal pyramid

Thank you. The

Speaker 17: ideas that form the base, this cultural pyramid, this pyramid of ideas, the ideas that form the base are the ones that we don't even think about

because

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): they're so self-evident and they're so fundamental to this

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): particular version of the world that we've built out for ourselves. When

you get yourself

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): up to the top of the pyramid, this pyramid of ideas or cultural pyramid

Maybe

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): it's crowned by a lofty idea like universal

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): human rights, for example, right? We'll use universal human rights. By the time you get up to something like universal human rights, that that could even pop into somebody's head in your culture, you're already standing on the shoulders of ideas that were in their own time, in their own day of novelty. They were world historical achievements

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): of the human race. At some point... If you trace our line of development back far enough

we had

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): to figure out, and I mean this on a very fundamental cognitive level, we had to figure out how to abstract the idea

of the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): human out from actual instances of individual humans

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): right? That didn't come naturally to us. We didn't climb out of the trees onto the savanna and naturally have the ability to draw an abstract concept out from the particularities

that

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): way

It was

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): something we had to learn how to do over a long period of time. And when we did, I mean, this was a tremendous achievement. It's

an antecedent to something

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): like universal

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): human rights. We don't even think about the fact that first you have to be able to abstract out the idea of the

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): human to even think about something like universal human rights

But we did, and we had

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): to go through that at some

Speaker 17: point

It's one

Speaker 17: of those lower levels of the pyramid, right? So we had to be able to posit the idea of abstract

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): values, good, bad, right, wrong and so forth. We had to abstract those out from their attachment to a given event or circumstance or person or thing, right? That bad thing, that good person. We had

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): to be able to abstract the principle of the good or the principle of bad out. That didn't come naturally. We had to learn

that. A whole

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): mountain of axioms, of a priori axioms, had to be drilled into us so deeply and so firmly that they were

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): completely solid and seemed unquestionable and self-evident before we could build anything on top of it. And

as you move from

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): the top down

toward the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): base of the pyramid, I might be stretching this analogy a little bit now, the consequences of destabilizing it, of beginning to question things, become more and more serious the lower you go

You start

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): asking questions about how the base is put together, and suddenly everything above it starts shifting

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): around. And that's kind of what

happens when I

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): start looking into a topic like I am here

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): the Mesoamerican civilization, the Aztecs, and the confrontation with the Spanish. I can

study Aztec mythology

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): for an explanation of the role human sacrifice played in their society, for example. That's

maybe up at the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): top of the pyramid

But

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): once I'm down at the level of asking fundamental questions about their social forms and their individual psychology, then all the consciously conjured explanations start to look secondary and almost superfluous

And so sure

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): enough, once I started going really hard on a lot of the topics involved here, I started getting pulled down into that vortex where

You

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): know, I start out reading an anthropology book specifically about Aztec sacrifice, and by the time I look up for my reading, I'm on my third book about developmental psychology, you know, something that is absolutely vital to understanding sacrifice, I think, but, you know, at a certain

point – And if you

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): have a mind like mine, you end up having to take it all the way back to the Garden of Eden and work your way up from

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): there. Because everything seems completely important when you start getting down that

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): deep. Dealing

with the Aztecs

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): makes me particularly vulnerable to this. Not just because I've been fascinated with Mesoamerican culture for a long time, but because to a modern Westerner, the Aztecs are so profoundly alien. That it's

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): very difficult not to be pulled into basic questions about what it means to be a human being. I'm

starting this off this

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): way because I think that there's a tendency, partly natural and partly ideological, to imagine that peoples of different cultures in past ages were more or less just like us, only with different ideas maybe, different beliefs that informed their ways of life

I don't

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): think that that is true. I don't believe that at all, actually. In fact, I'm going to make the case over the next few episodes that the consciously held beliefs, the things that people will tell you they believe, you know, their religious doctrines and so forth, those are way up at the top of the pyramid. And you could honestly change a lot of them back and forth and you would not see a tremendous structural change in a culture. By

the time you get

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): up to the consciously held and outwardly spoken beliefs, you know, those are... it's like shaving a couple inches off the top of that thing. The differences between cultures, the things that really make cultures different, are far deeper

In alien

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): peoples, especially a culture as isolated and as profoundly alien as the Mesoamericans are to us, I think that these cultures are producing profoundly different

Speaker 24: kinds of human beings. I

have to unpack that

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): a little bit because

Well, I

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): have to unpack what I mean by it and the extent to which I take it seriously

Speaker 13: because, you know, for one thing, it's a statement that is not without controversial political baggage, you know, but also because it's going to inform the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): way that I approach

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): this great world historical confrontation between the Aztecs and the Spanish as we move through this series of episodes. You

know, many people would

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): hear me say that peoples of past cultures

are

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): profoundly different from us, and they would interpret that as a slur somehow. But I think that that tells us a lot about how this particular point of ideology functions. The propagators of this kind of universalistic mainstream ideology in the West today have kind of pulled a very interesting jiu-jitsu trick. You

see, we

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): decided somewhere along the line, very remarkably, if you look at history, I don't know if there are too many parallels to this, but we decided to disavow

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): our own past of, you know, our own history of conquest and colonization, and to replace the false glory of

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): that past with this universalist religion based on tolerance and human rights and some of the accessories that go with those things, right? Well, down at the core of that ideology is a deep belief that people everywhere are pretty much the same. Now

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): conveniently for our geopolitical goals, I think, and for our own cultural self-understanding, we interpret that the idea that everybody everywhere is pretty much the same, we interpret that to mean that everyone is just like

us and must in

Speaker 26: their heart of

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): hearts, if they were free to express it or if they just had things explained to them properly, that they would want what we want and value what we value. They're just like

us. And so, of

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): course, the next thing you

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): know, we're invading countries so that their people can be free to express their true inner nature, which we imagine must be that of a docile progressive Democrat from New Hampshire or something. Former President George W. Bush's defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, he promised us that when we went into Iraq, we were going to be greeted with flowers in the streets by grateful people. And while there was... I'm sure some willful blindness and probably a little

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): cynicism in that claim. I don't think he was just lying, because it reflects a bias that's very common on both the left and the right in the United States

Simply put

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): there is only one kind of human being

We have

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): identified that type, and we best exemplify it. It's true nature, right

And

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): deviations from post-1960s western norms, wherever they're found in history

Speaker 17: or around the world today, we don't take them on their own terms, but

try

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): to figure out, even if we don't

put it

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): this way, what's wrong with them

If we see people

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): throughout history that are profoundly

Speaker 13: different from us, that requires explanation

of

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): course there are a lot of ways in which we're all similar especially with regard to our outward behavior you'll often hear people

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): point out that people everywhere just want to make a living and take care of their families and yeah sure true enough but

how far

Speaker 27: does that really get us those

drives are

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): not even uniquely human the desire to procure a living from the earth and to care for your kin group that's at least universal to social mammals and you can actually trace it back much further than

that So it

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): doesn't give us a

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): lot of information about ourselves. You're talking about the very base of the pyramid when you talk about things like that

And actually, that's

Speaker 28: another feature of the pyramid. Although, you know

let

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): me switch the metaphor up because that one's starting to lose its purpose. I was about to say that the lower

Speaker 17: you move down the pyramid, the more people share whatever's found at each successive level. But instead

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): let's think of it as a tree. And

the trunk

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): consists of those things that you share with all mankind

then a

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): major branch is what you share with your culture and a smaller offshoot is what you share with your particular

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): society and it's more and more finely articulated until you've run through the levels of social identification until you're talking about the twigs and leaves that are the small cultural universes you share with

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): you know with family and other local affiliations and then finally maybe pictured as the flower or the

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): fruit of the entire production the one-person culture

The

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): one-person little culture world that we call your individual inner life

This is the way to understand what

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): the great psychologist Carl Jung meant when he spoke of the archetypes of the collective unconscious

That idea, the

Speaker 30: collective unconscious, it often gets

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): twisted up into this sort of new-age-y myth, as if it's this metaphysical realm of platonic forms that somehow impress themselves upon us. They have an independent existence somewhere, and they're impressing themselves into the mind. that's not at all what he meant. Jung was a very rigorous thinker, and that's not what he was talking about. The collective unconscious is not one thing. It exists at each level of social identification. There's

a

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): constellation of symbols

Speaker 13: and meanings that you share with all mankind, and then others that you share only with your family, and then everything in between. And

each of those

Speaker 13: are a type of collective

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): unconscious

This is

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): mostly the result of experiences that you share with people at each level, and it allows social communion of

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): more or less depth and detail depending on the symbolic vocabulary you share with each

Speaker 31: level. So

what I

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): mean is, if

you meet an

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): absolute stranger, right, somebody from

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): another continent completely, you know, it could be somebody just a million miles away from you culturally, linguistically, everything, right

If you

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): meet an absolute stranger dying of thirst or crying

Speaker 13: out in pain, you'll find that you're perfectly able to understand his attempts to communicate with you and that you can actually respond

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): in a way that closes the loop of that interaction very naturally. You'll

be able to do

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): that because you're dealing with experiences that are absolutely universal to humans. But

to be able to

Speaker 33: see

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): through, say, an outward display of contentment

To

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): know that what somebody really needs is a hug. They might be smiling and seeming happy, but they're actually sad and they need a hug. That might only work for very close family members, right? With whom you can communicate in a much richer, more detailed, nuanced way. Because you share a constellation of symbols and a vocabulary of meaning that is much

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): deeper

So

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): again, for all of our cultural differences, there are many experiences that are fundamental or seem to be fundamental to the human condition that provide something like

I don't know, an initial

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): operating system into which the

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): culture comes along and loads its applications. I missed your analogy today. We'll see how all these go. So I'm thinking of universals like

Oh

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): the trauma of being pushed out of the birth canal, right? Or of having to traverse that terrifying gap between the unified experience of early infancy, right? Very early on when your sense of self, when your

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): perception of your mother and the rest of the world, that's all still one thing. It hasn't been differentiated out. So you've got this feeling of connectedness and oneness with everything. When all you have to do is cry out and just make a noise. If you're hungry, just make a noise and a nipple appears. and now you're not hungry anymore. I mean, just the omnipotence of that. This is what Freud thought was the root of all magical thinking, but that's going to be in a future episode. And

so to

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): traverse that gap

between the

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): experience of total unity and complete omnipotence, to

Speaker 17: first starting to notice that, you know, sometimes you cry out and nothing happens. What's up with that? And then that's followed by this horrible realization, traumatic. It's a truly traumatic realization that you

and Which

Speaker 17: you hadn't quite differentiated before as separate creatures. You know, your mother, who at this point in your life, as far as you know, is the source of all warmth and nourishment and affection and everything, everything important to your survival, that you two are actually separate beings. And she's got her own will that has nothing to do with you. She's got other beings in her life that concern her perhaps as much as you do

Right

Speaker 17: realizing that you've got to compete for your mother's attention and that one of your competitors is this gigantic male who

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): is much more complicated to relate to than she is. This

is your basic

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): Oedipus complex or

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): process, Oedipus process, I would prefer to say. And this is all very basic Freudian psychology. But the reason it's basic is that it's more or less common to more or less everybody

you

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): don't have to sexualize it like freud does to get the basic idea you know and you can keep carrying it on up through infancy and early childhood you can you can take this through life there are certain things

that we share you can keep going

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): through the experience as a small child of being

Speaker 35: fully dependent on and surrounded by these giants who

as

Speaker 36: far as you can tell are basically all powerful

you know how

Speaker 36: else is a small child supposed to

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): understand beings that were there from the very beginning as far as far as they

know who

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): control the environment that they inhabit

who is

Speaker 17: the source of all their food and water and clothing and everything else that's important who if they wanted to could just pick you up and throw you across the room or end your life if they chose by force

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): or

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): just through simple neglect they could forget about you and

you would die you got to

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): navigate that as a small child you got to figure out how to do that and there's no instruction manual

and and

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): everybody has to do that, no matter where you are or when you were born. By

the time we get

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): to be adults, we're not

Speaker 17: really so impressed by adults anymore because we look at ourselves and we're like, I hope this is not what all the fuss was about, but it's hard to overstate how large adults loom in the young child's world, as it's just starting to learn what a world is and what this one happens to be

like. And so then

Speaker 17: of course, we

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): have the experience of having to navigate the moods of these giants and how to manipulate them to get what you need from them and so forth. I mean, these are very basic human experiences

that

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): everybody from a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer to a Wall Street banker have shared. And there's information there

Speaker 13: that we can extract

And all those

Speaker 13: early childhood experiences, remember, these are happening not after

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): your ego has been consolidated and filled out. So it's not as if somebody plucked you today out of your house and dropped you among, you know, giant creatures that you had to figure out how to relate to. No, no, no. This is all happening before you even have a coherent self-concept or personality or any

Speaker 13: behavioral models that you can kind of follow to help you navigate any of this. In fact, this is the process that... creates all of those things for you

And so there is

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): going to be a substratum of human experience that serves as a more or less universal, say, foundation on which the culture

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): can build its unique human adult subjects

And then, so you

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): keep going. You think of the period when culture begins to take the reins from nature. Or maybe

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): you could

say

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): Nature quarries the stone and drags it over to the building site, and then

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): culture takes over with a hammer and chisel to start to work on your unique features

Adolescence is this period

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): where nature and culture both seem to have a hand very firmly on our shoulders, right

Right. As

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): we're experiencing awakening sexuality and our aggressive drives begin to become more dangerous than just a little child's tantrum, now we begin to interact with the culture in the form of taboos and customs that repress and sublimate and structure our

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): sexual and aggressive motivations in a mode that hopefully

you know, if

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): everything goes the way it's supposed to

Speaker 17: it structures our sexual and aggressive motivations in a way that allows them to be expressed within a pro-social framework. because... Human aggressive and sexual drives can tear a social body apart if you don't learn how to structure them

And you can keep on

Speaker 38: going on and on through the transition from dependency on

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): the society to responsibility for the society to the dawning awareness of your own death and

then of the

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): insubstantial and temporary nature of the things that draw your attraction and attachment through life

These are

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): primordial experiences that give rise first to behaviors and then to symbols and narrative. Narrative is just the means by which we string symbols

together

Speaker 17: and sort of alchemically meld them into various mythological alloys. And then straight on to abstract concepts that

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): can be stated theoretically. These are the three fundamental modes of human cognition and learning

A very

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): young child first learns through mimesis, by mimicking the behavior of others. A child

learns to

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): speak by mimicking the speech of others, for example

And it turns out

Speaker 39 (lower-pitched voice): that different things are more easily learned in different modes and more easily communicated in different modes. If

I wanted to teach a

Speaker 39 (lower-pitched voice): kid to

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): tie his shoes, for example, I'm not going to break that down theoretically for him. I don't even know what that would look like. I don't know how that would work. I'm going to primarily use mimesis

Just have

Speaker 17: them get their own shoe and watch me and copy what I do until they can replicate it on their own

That's the

Speaker 17: easiest way to teach someone to tie shoes. And maybe I'll reinforce it with a little bit of symbolic mythological language, let's say

I remember

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): some version of this from when I was a kid, and parents today still help their

Speaker 17: children learn to tie shoes with these little rhymes, I don't know if you remember anything like this, but you tell a kid to make a little bunny ear out of each

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): lace and hold one in each hand, and then you say, bunny ears, bunny ears, playing by a tree, crisscrossed the tree, trying

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): to catch me, bunny ears, bunny ears, jumped to the hole, popped out the other side, beautiful and bold. There's a lot of kids that learn how to tie their shoes that way. Through a combination of

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): mimicking, watching somebody and just copying them, and then having an easily memorable sort of mental ditty in their head that can kind

of keep

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): them on track. It's

a combination of

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): mimetic learning and symbolic mythological learning, let's

Speaker 13: say

And it might sound silly to

Speaker 13: call that a myth, but it's not as silly as it sounds

I

Speaker 13: think. When European explorers first

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): started to come across these very, very primitive aborigines in various parts of the world, they often

Speaker 17: found that they had religions, if you insist on calling them that. You don't want to call them religions, they're really not, but let's not get distracted by that right now. Their religions seem so primitive precisely because they're so

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): practical and particular. We often find that these very, very primitive tribes that we come across, that their rituals and their myths mostly have very direct day-to-day

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): concerns having to do with preserving the technical and environmental and social knowledge that they'd accumulated so far

Everything you

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): can think of, how to butcher game, how to make baskets, how to cook various foods, how to find water and draw water properly, anything you can think of that's just a part of daily life

was

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): a ritual act that had a corresponding myth explaining in story form how the first instance of that act was performed in the

Speaker 17: world. For pedagogical purposes, probably these instances, these stories, were strung together into a larger story

It

Speaker 17: was easier to remember if you just tied it all together into one thing and easier to pass down. So, you know, to go back to the example I just used, maybe it's a little weak, I'm not sure, but you get the point. To go back to the example I just used with the bunny ears, maybe I want to teach you how to tie shoes and how to tie a necktie, right

And

Speaker 17: so maybe you would tie two similar narratives together and say, bunny ears, bunny ears, playing by a tree, crisscrossed the tree, trying to catch me. Bunny ears, bunny ears, jumped into the hole, popped out the other side, beautiful and bold. But

then you

Speaker 17: might follow it up with, I climbed up the tree to look out on the lake, and what did I find but a big fat snake? So it's like you've climbed

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): up the body to the neck and

And

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): the tie is a snake hanging there. And then maybe you go through some permutations where the snake chases you through the motions of tying a necktie, say, right

Speaker 35: It's a trivial example, but very early primitive mythologies are full of this kind of thing

Scholars like Eric

Speaker 17: Havelock of the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): University of Toronto, he found similar things even in the Iliad. We're going to have a whole section in a future episode on that, but

Or

Speaker 17: the great professor of religious studies, Mircea Eliade, wrote extensively on how these very

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): early mythologies

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): described how various firsts came into the world. That's really what most of them were. It was either how did this river come into being, how did clouds come into being, why do magpies have a stripe on their back, or why do we cook things a certain way, how do we make baskets, and so forth. And... Eliade describes how basically these are providing models for the people in these societies to follow

Ancient

Speaker 17: mythologies from Africa to Australia to the New World are all full of the refrain, and this is why we build huts as we do, or this is why we make baskets to this day as we do, and so forth. And in its true form, it's not trivial

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): at all. It's the least trivial thing you can imagine. The vast majority of what these people needed to know about the world

and

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): really this is still true, is learned more easily through mimesis and narrative than it is by theory

If I want to tell you how to

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): tie your shoes over the phone, so we're

talking

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): on the phone and I want to tell you how to tie your shoes and you don't have shoes in front of you and neither do I, I would actually have to think about that for a second. I would have to visualize it in my mind and even

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): then it's kind

of hard

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): to keep track of what I'm doing. You take the right lace and loop it in front of the left lace and then back around to come through the space that they form. And even here, I'm already turning it into a narrative, right

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): Talking about the laces forming spaces and so forth. It's not easy to

Speaker 17: take something like that and just explain it theoretically. Certain modes of communication and cognition lend themselves to certain things. And

if you don't

Speaker 17: have shoes right in front of you to follow along as I speak, but instead have to remember the whole thing until later on when you do have your shoes, it's probably not going to happen

But if I

Speaker 17: tell you to take a lace in each hand

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): fold it over into bunny ears, and then tell you that rhyme from earlier, you'd probably remember it well enough to figure it out on your own after a few tries. For

us moderns, these three modes of

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): cognition

Speaker 17: are so natural

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): and so intertwined that they usually just melt together. We take all of them for granted, but understanding that they are in fact separate modes is extremely important

i can't

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): teach you

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): psychology through embodied mimesis i can teach you a very deep psychology through

narrative

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): though you read a good book by you know dostoevsky or camus or roth and you're learning psychology

but to

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): take the knowledge contained in all those novels and break it down into abstract concepts now you have to be able to deal in theoretical thinking

Psychology

Speaker 18: is an interesting example, because just like the shoe-tying example that draws on mimetic

Speaker 17: and narrative thinking, psychology moves between narrative and theoretical thinking so naturally that I'd say both are probably indispensable. You might lay out a psychological concept, but inevitably it's going to be followed by some kind of narrative example of how it

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): plays out through a person's

behavior. if I

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): want to explain what obsessive-compulsive disorder is, I might pull out a textbook and say, obsessive-compulsive disorder

Speaker 17: is a condition in which blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And maybe you'll get some idea of it. But then I'll tell you a story about someone who washes his hands a hundred times a day, and then that narrative crystallizes it for

you and gives the

Speaker 17: theory some

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): shape. And since... You'll actually envision in your mind the person engaging in the hand-washing behavior while I'm actually talking about it. There's actually a shade of mimesis in there as well since you're modeling the behavior internally as you listen. So we move back and forth between these three modes, focusing

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): on whichever mode is most appropriate for the subject at hand and

for the

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): developmental stage of the person that we're talking

to. because

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): that's the other part of this. On one hand, some kinds of knowledge or understanding are more easily expressed in a given mode, but

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): people also pass through these stages as their individual subjectivity is filled out. You

can't very

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): well teach a child anything through narrative or theory

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): until it's learned language through mimesis, and until it's been sufficiently socialized by imitating the

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): behavior of adults and older children, right

And from

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): there, you don't move straight into philosophical ethics or abstract theology if you want to teach them

Speaker 17: how to behave. You start giving them models of behavior through fairy tales and religious stories and so forth. You

have to progress through

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): these stages

in

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): that order because they represent developmental levels of abstraction. First, you learn how to act in the world

Then you

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): learn how to represent and model action through narrative and to... learn and absorb new behavioral models through language alone and then finally you learn to extract concepts and principles from those particularities

and then not just individuals

Speaker 13: but you can back it out a little further our social groups

human beings

Speaker 13: as groups had to make our way through these stages

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): as well

again we didn't

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): just climb out of the trees onto the savannah and

and

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): start speculating about the nature of love or the fundamental substance of the universe

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): That's not how it worked

The aboriginal

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): groups I mentioned a minute ago had completely different problems to solve

And few, if any

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): of them, required abstract theoretical cognition

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): very early on. Think about it. A paleolithic band of hunter-gatherers. Take a group like that and consider what they need to know in

order to

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): make their way in the world

They've got

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): to remember how to start fires, how to cook food, how to find water, how to fish, how to make baskets. Maybe

Speaker 13: their local group is 50, 100 individuals. So it's very plausible that they could forget these things if they're not really taking steps

to make

Speaker 13: sure that they're reinforced

Speaker 17: The ritual cycle of these very simple band societies, you wouldn't want to call the ritual cycle secular, certainly not, but their focus tends

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): to be very practical

Very often when

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): anthropologists and ethnographers ask such people why they do things a certain way, why do you make baskets this way, why do

Speaker 17: you do following a certain way, they often, this has always fascinated me, they get this puzzled look and some version of because this is how our people do it

As

Speaker 17: if no other explanation is necessary or even

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): imaginable

Because why

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): would those people ever have needed to articulate it beyond that

Language itself

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): evolves and expands to meet the specific needs of a people. And as it expands, it's pushing out the walls and filling in the details of their cultural world and each individual's

Speaker 31: subjective inner life. And

I want to say that again

Speaker 31: because I think it's very important

You

Speaker 31: know, we started off when we did climb

Speaker 17: out of the trees onto the savanna. We first started speaking. I don't know how that exactly played out, whether it was first through commands or

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): who knows. But we started with a very small vocabulary and thus a very, very limited

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): and dim subjectivity. And

as the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): language expanded to meet our new needs

Our

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): internal cognitive world and the cultural world that we all share expanded and filled out as well. We

create our cultures

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): and our cultures create us. And

for most

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): of us, we receive a lot more than we put in

When we think of

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): culture

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): we usually think of art and architecture, music and dance, religion and ritual

Speaker 17: But those things aren't interesting just for their own sake. The social purpose of all that stuff

is

Speaker 17: to serve as a kind of substrate

in

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): which a certain kind of human being can grow and thrive

The shared

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): biological and early developmental experiences at the very base of that pyramid that I started off with

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): those experiences provide the raw material, but most of what makes us interesting is informed by culture. And so

So, let me

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): rephrase that. Most of what makes us different is informed by culture. And

so we

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): wonder how

wide

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): the field is for possible modes of individual and shared human experience. How different can we be? You

know, we

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): all know

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): that we're working off of fairly similar biological

Speaker 17: and sort of developmental substructure

that, But the

Speaker 17: superstructure we build on top of that, that culture constructs for us, and the inner life that

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): culture informs for us

how different

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): can those things be? I think they can be very, very radically different. We

know, for

Speaker 17: example, certainly that the inner life of an individual comes in

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): all shapes and sizes

The

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): interior world of a person peeking on psilocybin mushrooms is a very different world from that of somebody that's soberly commuting

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): to the office on a Wednesday morning. We know that dreaming is nothing like waking life, and yet, nevertheless, it's an entirely convincing experience while it's happening. We know that people living with autism or schizophrenia are not just behaviorally affected, but that

their

Speaker 42: subjectivity itself

is

Speaker 42: somehow profoundly alien to common experience in the profane world for most of

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): us. If

you really want

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): some examples of the far reaches of the worlds we build out for ourselves, go read some of Oliver Sacks' books. Dr

Speaker 17: Sacks was this brilliant neurologist who frequently encountered people with all... I mean, it really opens your eyes to how widely our subjective experience can vary on the individual

level. And one

Speaker 17: patient

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): that he writes about in one of his books, his nervous system was under attack by a virus. And so he had lost all memory

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): except of music and his wife. He could play the piano and he knew and recognized his wife. And then the things that he had learned through mimicry, right? So he could play the piano. He could still

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): speak. He could do certain motor function things. He could use a pencil and he could do these behavioral things that he had learned in a behavioral way

But

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): conceptual memories, all of it was gone

And on top of

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): that, he had lost his ability to create any new memories. Every 30 seconds or so, and any new experiences he had

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): were completely gone

And suddenly

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): he'd be overcome by this sensation, absolutely convincing and emotionally overwhelming. He'd be overcome

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): by the sensation, or you might even say he was overcome by this revelation that That he had only just now, for the first time ever, become conscious

Every

Speaker 17: 30 seconds or so, he would be overwhelmed by this feeling. And, you know, it

became an

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): obsession for him. And finally, he's filling up dozens of journals with notes to himself, like 8.31 a.m. Now I am really completely awake

And then

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): that line is crossed out and followed by another entry, 9.06 a.m. Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake

And

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): then that's crossed out, followed by 9.34 a.m. Now I am superlatively, actually awake

And so on

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): Sachs writes

Speaker 17: Quote

Every few

Speaker 17: minutes, the rapture of having just become conscious would overwhelm him and compel him to record the moment. A

few times, when he

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): couldn't find the diary right away, he grabbed a pen and recorded his epiphany on walls or furniture

But since

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): he'd only just woken up, just now, old entries were clearly fake

Yeah

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): The thing to

keep

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): in mind is that this is not just a guy outwardly exhibiting odd

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): behaviors. There is an interior subjective experience that goes along with those behaviors. To

ask what it would

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): take for somebody to behave that way, you have to ask, what is his inner life like? It's not like yours and mine

sax

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): worked with another man who had had brain surgery and afterward he had no feeling at all for his family including his wife and

Speaker 17: daughters nothing he felt nothing for them but he suddenly felt overwhelming trust and love and affection for every stranger

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): he met

sax wrote an

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): article in lancet a few years ago and he wrote up

a

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): case study of this woman who when she looked at human faces she

would she

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): would see them

Speaker 17: transform into dragons before her eyes We'll see you next

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): time

Speaker 17: Complete with pointy ears, black or green scaly skin, you know, large eyes and a protruding snout. I mean, she would see it and it was absolutely convincing. As

real as

Speaker 17: anything else as far as her senses were concerned

And sometimes

Speaker 17: she would just hallucinate dragons floating toward her in the darkness or hiding in cracks and corners and stuff like that. Now, she'd grown up in a

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): culture that gave her a set of baseline assumptions against which she could compare her vision of dragons, right? So she could recognize that this was a strange experience and that maybe she needed to get some help

But the

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): images themselves were working overtime

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): to go right by her critical thinking. You know, impressing their actual reality on her very powerfully. They were that convincing. And

so what would it

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): have been like if she had not been born into a culture that said there's no such thing as dragons? What

Speaker 17: if she'd been born into a

Speaker 13: culture where dragons were completely expected to exist? Or

that the

Speaker 13: possibility was at least allowed for

Maybe in that

Speaker 13: case

And

Speaker 13: she just lives in

Speaker 17: a world where sometimes people turn into dragons and sometimes dragons come to visit her and just that's that. That's how the world works. And

maybe the

Speaker 17: tendency to see something like that in a society like that would be a little bit less repressed. So you get a subgroup of magical seers who are all able to detect the dragons when they're around. Let's try something closer to home maybe for most of us today. We all live in a culture where... We're taught about

Speaker 44: this phenomenon called thinking. We all know what thinking is. We're taught about it. And we're taught that the little voice in our head is something called a thought

Right

Speaker 17: So we're not alarmed when a little voice in our head starts speaking, even though all we really know, all we subjectively experience is that there's a voice in our head speaking to us. We don't know where it's located. We don't know where the content of what it's

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): saying comes from because it's not like we're able to select our thoughts before they come. Well imagine you grew up

in a cult

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): where all you had ever been told, right, from the time you crawled out of the womb, all you'd ever been told

was that

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): that voice in your head is a god or

a

Speaker 13: spirit communicating with you? How would you know any different

What basis would you

Speaker 13: have to even speculate differently? And

how would that

Speaker 13: affect your entire understanding and subsequent experience in the world? Right

And I think

Speaker 13: we

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): have to recognize that if you had grown up like that You would not just be the same person you are now Except that you mistakenly believe that you communicate with gods and spirits Your entire orientation in the

Speaker 17: world would be radically different Your

entire idea

Speaker 17: of how the world works and how it's structured Not just your behaviors or conscious beliefs But the very structure of your subjective inner world would

be

Speaker 17: Altered by the assumption, for example, that there was no inner private chamber in your mind that was private, kept to yourself, but that your being was somehow porous

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): that was being prodded and spoken to and penetrated by these other beings that could crawl into your mind. You'd be living in a reality populated with these hidden beings that interacted regularly with you in your

Speaker 13: daily life and kind of directed you around and told you what to do. How different would your entire world picture and the world picture of your people have developed if that one explanation for a general experience, an explanation that is as good

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): as any other for a Paleolithic people, really, if that one thing had been

changed and Even

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): with

Speaker 17: modern neuroscience and psychology, we are far from being able to tell you why your consciousness is structured just the way it is, or why one thought is presented to the mind instead of some other thought. You have to resort

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): to phenomenology to get any reasonable or even plausible take on why and how we select from among the various sense data that are out there, choosing and discarding from among this infinite

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): soup of incoming information to build a world in which we can meaningfully act

Let

Speaker 13: alone, we don't even understand that. We don't even come close to understanding this thing that

Speaker 17: you know, this way that we jack into each other's minds and share a symbolic world that

we call

Speaker 17: our culture

This is very complicated

Speaker 17: stuff, and we don't understand it very well. We

asked what culture was

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): before we discussed how widely individual human experiences can vary. We asked what culture

was before we discussed how widely individual human experiences can vary. You

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): know, human beings share the innate sociability of other great apes, but with the advent of language, we discovered a whole new realm of social life that is completely inaccessible to other animals. It's inaccessible to all flesh, if you want to put it that

way, right? This new

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): cultural world. Animals can wrestle and chase each other around and interact in those various ways, but human beings have opened out into this entirely new realm of experience where humans

have We

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): all are sort of locked into this linguistic cultural world now where we can tell each other stories. We can create and bat around concepts with one another. We can come up with mathematics. We can share experiences that we've had. All of these things that we can interact with other human beings on a completely different plane now

And we said

Speaker 46: that culture is not just the art and architecture and so forth, but that these are only culture's outward markers. And we build a physical culture around us kind of like a, I don't

know, like a

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): symbolic biodome, right? Where children are all reared on certain stories, they're reared in dwellings that are organized both internally and relative to one another in ways that imply a certain family and community

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): arrangement. You know, there are going to be certain styles of entertainment and art that carry information information not just

in

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): their content but in their form right the point of all this is to create a certain kind of human being

and to make

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): sure that that human

Speaker 39 (lower-pitched voice): type survives over time

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): everything grows all these individual manifestations grow out of a budding cultural soul and those outward manifestations are all fragmentary symbols of

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): that soul

right you

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): can reverse

Speaker 39 (lower-pitched voice): engineer those manifestations to get a glimpse into what those people were like I think the most engaging thing about history

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): for me the thing that really woke me up and brought the world beyond my immediate concerns out into the light for me was realizing that everything

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): everything is a symbol everything is a shard of glass from the window into someone else's soul

It

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): matters that the first

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): axiom of Western philosophy is, I think, therefore I am. Putting the subjective experience of the atomic individual at the center of

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): everything, that matters. It matters that that same culture rejected the social institutions of the Catholic Church as the means of salvation. Instead, looking to the individual human conscience. And it's not a coincidence that this individualistic culture discovered and perfected, say, perspectival painting, right? Which is a painting of a scene as it's viewed from the perspective of an individual observer, right? With a vanishing point and all that. And

it's not a

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): coincidence that this culture adopted the novel as a characteristic art form. You

go back and

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): tragedy and epic were forms that were intended to be experienced

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): with other people. They're public art forms, right

But a

Speaker 39 (lower-pitched voice): novel is read in silence by an individual who is reading, you know, the novel shines a light into the inner life of another person. So you have an individual person in silence reading the inner thoughts of another person. It's a profoundly individualistic art form. Our modern political forms enshrine the individual. The architecture of our homes and the layout of our neighborhoods tells you about the nuclear family structure. You

know, you

Speaker 39 (lower-pitched voice): don't have to adopt

Any

Speaker 39 (lower-pitched voice): particular interpretation of any of these symbols

but the

Speaker 39 (lower-pitched voice): physical and intellectual culture of a society, I think

on a

Speaker 39 (lower-pitched voice): very deep level, they're all held together in one great symphony, but each part provides us

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): information about what kind of human beings that culture is trying to grow

That's the

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): approach that I

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): take to historical and cultural phenomena, and it might be insufficiently rigorous for some people, maybe, but I'm not a historian, and it's a lot more fun

Speaker 39 (lower-pitched voice): You know, here's the thing: eventually you just start to notice little things. You notice

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): that the early European poets of Beowulf, for example, seem to have a lot more in common with the Greeks of Homer than they do with the Romans as we find them in Marcus Aurelius or Seneca

Even though, you

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): know, those latter writers are much closer to the writers of Beowulf than the Homeric writers were. Meanwhile, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca

you can

Speaker 39 (lower-pitched voice): read those today and their mentality is so, so, so recognizable that they might as well have been reading it last week. You

know, it's as if both

Speaker 39 (lower-pitched voice): cultures, the

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): classical Greco-Roman and the West European, have independent life courses

And that

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): they're more similar to each other at each stage than they are to themselves at different stages, right? And the way

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): that two children are more similar to one another than they are to the future adult versions of themselves. And

I should say

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): again that I hope this series has got to be interpreted as an impressionistic work

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): okay? Not as a pursuit of axioms or historical

law, okay? You know, we're

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): going to do a lot of speculating and playing around with ideas and kind of throwing things out there and batting them around. We'll see what happens. You

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): can't understand history through law. Dead

forms can

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): be described by law, but living systems have to be understood by analogy. Understanding

living

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): systems always has this element of participation involved, right? Of having a feel for

it. And we have a

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): tendency to want to reduce everything down to a list of rules, but it just doesn't work like that with a system that's still in the process of becoming. And

so when talking about a

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): people like the Aztecs, one

of the

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): unfortunate historical situations where Christians got their grimy mitts on another people's library before anyone got a chance to copy it down, so we don't have much in the way of direct sources, when you're dealing with something

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): like this, we might be able to draw on other historical examples to get some kind of a feel for the character of the society and the individuals that it was creating

We might notice, for

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): example, that the Aztecs were positioned relative to the Maya and the existing Mesoamerican societies, similarly in many ways to the way the Romans were

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): positioned relative to the Greeks, or the Ottoman Turks to the existing Muslim world, or the Americans to Old Europe

In

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): each case, you've

Speaker 39 (lower-pitched voice): got an ancient culture of almost unbelievable richness and spontaneous creativity that just seems to spring right out of the earth, throwing out historical novelties so profound that they inspire entire civilizations and they draw in surrounding tribal peoples for participation

all

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): collapse or exhaust themselves through internecine conflict

and

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): then they're inherited by people that they consider to be kind of rough barbarians

The Greeks exhausted

Speaker 48: themselves in the Peloponnesian Wars, and Socrates and Euripides

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): were well into their project of deconstructing the fundamental institutions and ideas on which Athenian society had been built, when first the Macedonians and then the Romans pretty much just

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): inherited a culture realm that

It had

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): stood up to imperial threats for centuries, but now could hardly even be bothered to defend itself. Even though the Greeks resented the rule of both the Macedonians and the Romans, they considered it to be vulgar warrior peoples, kind of unworthy of their high culture

When Rome wanted culture, it

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): imported Greeks to provide it for them. Even Roman masterpieces like Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphosis are very obviously derivative of Greek forms

Nothing

Speaker 39 (lower-pitched voice): really new in Islamic civilization emerged from the Ottoman Empire, not really

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): after those tribal warriors come down from the steppe and overwhelm the Muslim world that were very recently

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): devastated by the Mongols

And, of course

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): the United States, this is something that people talk about a lot. Like the previous two examples

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): we're really good at war, we're great engineers and builders, we're outstanding administrators, but if we want high culture, what do we do? We look to

Europe

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): whose geopolitical position we inherited after they bled themselves dry in two world wars that left them questioning their own foundations. So this is something that's kind of similar. In

the myth of

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): Sisyphus, Camus tells us that the only really important philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide. The Greeks and Arabs

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): were in a similar navel-gazing period for similar reasons when the younger, simpler, more vigorous Romans and Ottomans came in and

said, Just

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): like the Americans after World War II, fine, if you guys don't want it, I guess

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): we'll take it

Well now, the Aztecs were

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): also great engineers, amazing engineers actually, we're going to talk more about that later, but they were great warriors, great empire

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): administrators, but we don't see much from them in terms of truly novel culture forms

they seem to be

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): doing their best impression of the existing culture forms just as the romans kind of aped the greeks

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): the ottomans aped the abbasids and the americans the european each of them copying basically what had gone before and making up for the lack of originality through

you

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): know a sort of vulgar gigantism just do more of it make it bigger so

i think an idea

Speaker 49: like this you know you can't take it too seriously but it might give us a way to approach the aztecs

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): that allows us to extract some understanding that that isn't immediately available from direct sources it's just a way of approaching

it of course you

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): got to be careful coming at things this way you can't mistake the map for the

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): territory and you have to keep in mind that it's just a heuristic but there is information in there as long as we can remember that we're dealing with analogies not laws

something that

Speaker 45 (lower-pitched voice): can give us a feel for the thing not to provide us an instruction manual

so Now I'm going to

Speaker 50: slow things down a little bit and take us into the final stretch of this meandering introduction by talking about mythology. One

of the most useful ways to

Speaker 51 (lower-pitched voice): triangulate the similarities and differences between cultures is through their mythologies. And so, yeah, I'll spend the rest of the time here talking about that just a bit

And this

Speaker 51 (lower-pitched voice): will lead us into what I'm doing in the next two real episodes nicely, I think. So when you see a mythological motif that

seems to be

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): spread across the world and through time, you find it in mythologies

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): and cultures and continents and eras from front to back through world history. When you see a motif that seems to maintain itself through time and across cultures like that, I

think you can be

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): pretty sure that you're dealing

with... an

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): expression of those primordial human experiences that we were talking about

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): earlier. Or at least

if it's

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): not necessarily an expression of them, it doesn't contradict them. It resonates with them. It speaks to them

The question

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): of whether various mythological complexes developed independently or through a long

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): process of diffusion is something that has divided anthropologists for years. And American scholars usually fall very hard on the side of parallel independent development. But However, these similar motifs came to be found in these environments as apparently separate as Madagascar and North America, the similarities are certainly there. There are certain things that you find just across the world and throughout time in various mythologies, unquestionable similarities. And they point to the possibility that aspects of both the form and the content of these various constellations of symbols, again, resonate with certain features of individual

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): and social. experience I

mean

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): what are we to make of a widespread and complicated motif like the virgin

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): mother and her son that you find all over the place or the primordial dueling brothers usually one murders the other you find that all over the place the conquest and slaying of the great watery serpent by the celestial

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): gods and then the universe itself built out of its disarticulated corpse that's all over the place what do you make of

that Or take

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): for example, and now I'll appeal to Joseph Campbell, the well-known classical myth of Demeter, Hecate, and Persephone, and

the less

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): well-known Indonesian myths and rites of Satine, Rabia, and Hainaweli. The

19th century

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): English mythologist Sir James Fraser speaking – or British mythologist, I'm sorry – speaking in

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): support of the idea of cultural diffusion

T

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): The idea that these myths

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): actually spread across the world and weren't developed in similar ways independently. He said that the symbols

in play in

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): the classical and Indonesian myths that we're about to talk about were so remarkable and so exactly similar

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): that they just couldn't be the result of chance and they couldn't be the result of what he called the effect of similar causes acting on the similar constitutions of the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): human mind in different countries and under different skies. He said, that's just not possible. They're too close. There has to be a connection here

And so I'll let the

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): American mythologist Joseph Campbell tell the classical version. This is the story of Persephone, Demeter, and Hecate

Speaker 52 (lower-pitched voice): Quote, Persephone, who was known as Cori, the maiden, or the virgin

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): was conceived of Zeus

Her

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): mother was Demeter, the Cretan goddess of agriculture and the fruitful soil." So pay attention to that kind of stuff, like what the gods and goddesses particularly are associated with, because it's very important. I'll start over. "Persephone was also known as Cori, the maiden or the virgin. She was conceived of Zeus. Her mother was Demeter, the Cretan goddess of agriculture and of the fruitful soil. And the maiden was playing, we are told, in a meadow. culling flowers with the daughters of oceanus the great all-embracing sea when she spied a glorious plant with hundred blossoms spreading its fragrance all about which had been sent up expressly to seduce her by the goddess earth gaia at the behest of hades the lord of the underworld

so

Speaker 52 (lower-pitched voice): that when she hurried to pluck its flowers the earth gaped and a great god appeared in a chariot of gold who carried her down into his

Speaker 53: abyss despite

her cries the

Speaker 53: god was hades lord of the underworld and in the land of the dead she became his queen

persephone's cries

Speaker 54 (lower-pitched voice): had been heard only by demeter her mother and hecate a goddess of the

moon but when

Speaker 52 (lower-pitched voice): the mother bereaved sought to trace her daughter she

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): found that her footprints had been obliterated by those of

a pig for

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): it had chanced most curiously that at the time of persephone's abduction a herd of pigs had been rooting in the neighbourhood and the swineherd's name euboleus

means

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): the giver of good counsel

and was in

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): earlier times an appellation of the god of the underworld himself furthermore when

the earth

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): opened to receive persephone those pigs fell into the chasm too and that we are told is why pigs play such an important role in the rites of demeter and persephone

in a

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): festival celebrated in memory of the sorrows and later joy of demeter and persephone suckling pigs were offered in a manner suggestive not only of an earlier human sacrifice but one of precisely

the

Speaker 54 (lower-pitched voice): gruesome kind that we have observed in africa and among the merind anim of melanesia

the greek

Speaker 55: festival called thesmathoria

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): was exclusively for women and as jane harrison has demonstrated in her prologamena to the study of greek religion such women's rights in greece were pre-homeric that is to say survivals of the earlier so-called pelaskian period when the hieratic bronze age civilizations of crete and troy were in full flower and the warrior gods zeus and apollo of the later patriarchal greeks had not yet arrived to reduce the power of the

greek goddess The women

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): fasted for nine days in memory of the nine days of sorrow of Demeter as she wandered over the earth, holding a long, staff-like torch in either hand. Demeter

met the

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): moon goddess Hecate, and together they proceeded to the sun god Phoebus, who

had seen the

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): maid abducted and could tell them where she was. After which Demeter, in wrath and grief, quit the world of the gods

as an

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): old woman heavily veiled she sat for days by a well known as the well of

the virgin she

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): served as a nurse in a kingly household near eleusis which city then became the greatest sanctuary of her rights in greece and she cursed the earth to bear no fruit either for the man or for gods for a full year until when zeus and all the deities of olympus had come to her in vain one after another begging her to relent zeus at last caused persephone to be released

she had

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): eaten however a seed of the

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): pomegranate in the world below and as a consequence would now have to spend one-third of each year with hades embraced and accompanied by both her mother and the goddess hecate she

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): returned to olympus in glory and as though by magic the fields were covered again with flowers and life-giving

grain the

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): seed-time festival of the thesmophoria lasted three days and the first day was named kathados down-going and anados upcoming the second day was called nistea fasting and the last calaginea fair-born

or fair-birth and it

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): was during the first day that the suckling pigs were thrown probably alive into an underground chamber called a megara where they were left to rot for

a year

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): the bones from the previous year being carried up to the earth again and placed

upon an altar figures

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): of serpents and human beings made out of flour and wheat were also thrown into the chasm or chamber

at this time

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): and as they say writes the ancient author to whom we owe our knowledge of this matter

that

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): in and about the chasms are snakes which consume the most part of what is thrown

in hence

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): a rattling din is made when the women draw up the remains and when they replace the remains by those well-known images in order that the snakes which they hold to be the guardians of the sanctuaries may go

away The

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): rites were secret, hence little has been told of them. However, in the widely celebrated and extremely influential Mysteries of Eleusis, where the cathedos

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): and anidosis of the maiden Persephone was again the central theme, pigs were again important offerings. And there, moreover, a new motif appeared for the culminating episode

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): in the Holy Pageant performed in the Hall of Mystics at Eleusis, representing the sorrows of Demeter and the ultimate anidosis, a return of the maiden

was

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): the showing of an ear of grain, quote, "...that great and marvelous mystery of perfect revelation, a cut stalk of grain, as the early Christian bishop Hippolytus described it, forgetting for the knots, apparently, that the culminating revelation of his own Christian holy mass was a lifted wafer of bread made of the same grain

What could have

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): been the meaning of such a simple act as the lifting of a cut stalk of grain

What is the

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): meaning of the elevated host of the mass

as in

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): the play logic or dream logic of any traditional religious pageant the sacred object is to be identified at least for the moment of the ceremony with the god the cut stalk is the return persephone who was dead but now liveth in the

grain itself a

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): bronze gong was struck at this moment a young priestess

Speaker 56: representing cori herself appeared and the pageant terminated with

a pine of joy end quote now the

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): parallels here to the christian mythology probably don't even need to be stated but i'll state

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): them anyway they're pretty unmistakable right you've got the virgin persephone uh something that's not mentioned in the part of the story i just told the virgin persephone's son who was conceived in her by her father zeus her son was dionysus dionysus is the god of among other things bread and wine just as Jesus of Nazareth, the transformer of water into wine and the multiplier of loaves of bread, and whose primary rite involves the consecration of bread and wine, which are said to transmute into the literal presence of the Lord, just as the cut stalk of grain was to represent the literal presence of Persephone. And he was also the son of the Virgin Mary, just like Dionysus is the son of the Virgin Persephone, and the Father God of Heaven conceived Persephone, in the virgin, to give birth to this, you know, to this god of bread and wine. Obviously very, very, you know, clear parallels there. In the Greek instance, it's the maiden mother who descends into the underworld. In the Christian, it's her son, the culture hero, and that's not a neutral difference, but we'll get to that in an episode where it's relevant. In the Greek version, the

Speaker 57 (lower-pitched voice): mother is resurrected as the staple wheat crop. In the Christian version, the son is resurrected as the metaphysical bread of life, right? Right

And

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): even the primordial event that initiated the whole cycle in both stories was the lord of the underworld using a plant to tempt the maiden into his clutches, right? If

it feels like we're

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): missing one of the key ingredients to the story, Persephone's mother Demeter is actually associated with serpents. Her chariot is supposed

to

Speaker 54 (lower-pitched voice): have been pulled by two serpents, just as the serpent in the garden pulled Eve forward into consciousness and from there mankind into history

Speaker 54 (lower-pitched voice): From the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian worlds we're talking about here, you move

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): east now

That area

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): of the Aegean Sea and the East Mediterranean mythological complex. We're

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): going to head east over into the Indonesian islands in that cultural complex, and we find an intact myth in West Siram, a large

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): island just west of New Guinea. And very, very similar in structure, as you'll see here in a moment

And

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): except this centers

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): around a maiden called Hainuele, the frond of the cocoa palm. And

so I'll

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): go back to Joseph Campbell, because nobody tells these stories like he does. Quote

Nine families of

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): mankind came forth in the beginning from Mount Nunusaku, where the people had emerged from clusters of bananas. And these families stopped in West Siram, at a place known as the Nine Dance Grounds, which is in the jungle between Ahiolo and Veriloin

now there

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): was a man among them whose name was a meta meaning dark black or night and neither was he married nor had

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): he children he went off one day hunting with his dog and after a little while the dog smelt a wild pig which it traced to a pond into which the animal took flight but the dog remained

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): on the

shore and

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): the pig swimming grew tired and drowned but the man who had arrived meanwhile retrieved

it And he

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): found a coconut on its tusk, though at that time there were no cocoa-palms in the world. Returning to his hut, Amedda placed the nut on a stand and covered it with a cloth bearing a snake design, and they lay down to sleep. And

in the night

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): there appeared to him the figure of a man who said, The coconut that you placed upon the stand and covered with a cloth you must plant in the earth, otherwise it won't grow. So

Amedda planted

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): the cocoa-nut the next morning

and

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): in three days the palm was tall again three days and it was bearing blossoms he climbed the tree to cut the blossoms from which he wished to prepare himself a drink but as he cut he slashed his finger and the blood fell on

a leaf he

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): returned home to bandage his finger and in three days came back to the palm to find that where the blood on the leaf had mingled with the sap of the cut blossom the face of someone had

appeared three

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): days later the trunk of the person was there and when he returned again in three days he found that a little girl had developed from his drop of blood that night the same

Speaker 59 (lower-pitched voice): figure of a man appeared to him in a

dream take

Speaker 59 (lower-pitched voice): your cloth with the snake design he said wrap the girl of the cocoa palm in the cloth carefully and carry

her home so the next

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): morning amido went with his cloth to the cocoa palm climbed the tree and carefully wrapped the little girl

he

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): descended cautiously took her home and named her

hanuele she

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): grew quickly and in three days was a nubile maiden but she was not like an ordinary person for when she would answer the call of nature her excrement consisted of all sorts of valuable articles such as dishes and gongs so that her father became

very rich and

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): about that time there was to be celebrated in the place of the nine dance grounds a great maro

dance

Speaker 60: which was to

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): last nine full nights

and

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): the nine families of mankind were all to participate

Now when the

Speaker 54 (lower-pitched voice): people danced the Maro, the women sit in the center, and from there reach Betel-Nut out to the men, who form

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): in dancing a large nine-fold spiral. Hainoele stood in the center of this Maro festival, passing out Betel-Nut to the men, and at dawn when the performance ended, all went home to sleep

the

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): second night the nine families of mankind assembled on the second ground for when the morrow is celebrated it must be performed each night at a different place

and once

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): again it was heinewele who was placed in the center to reach betel nut out to the dancers but when they asked for it she gave them coral instead which they all found very nice the dancers and the others too then began pressing in to ask for a betel nut and she gave them coral

and so

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): the performance continued until dawn when they all went home to sleep

the next

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): night the dance was resumed on the third ground with heinaway lay again at the center but this time she gave beautiful dishes and everyone present received such a dish the fourth night she gave bigger dishes and the fate in the fifth great bush knives the sixth beautifully worked beetle boxes of copper the seventh golden earrings and the eighth glorious gongs

The

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): value of the articles thus increased from night to night, and the people thought this thing mysterious. They came together and discussed the matter

They were all extremely

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): jealous that Hinoele could distribute such wealth and decided to kill her

Okay, that's

Speaker 59 (lower-pitched voice): an overreaction, but anyway. The ninth night, therefore, when the girl

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): was again placed in the center of the dance ground to pass out Beetlenut

the men

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): dug a deep hole in the area

in

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): the innermost circle of the great nine-fold spiral the men of the lesiela family were dancing and in the course of the slowly cycling movement of their spiral they pressed the maiden heinewele toward the hole and threw

her in a loud

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): three-voiced maro song drowned out her cries they covered her quickly with earth and the dancers trampled this down firmly with their steps they danced on till dawn when the festival ended and the people returned to their huts but when the morrow festival ended hainewele failed to

return her

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): father knew that she had been killed he took nine branches of a certain bush-like plant whose wood is used in the casting of oracles and with these he reconstructed in his home the nine circles of maro dancers then he knew for certain that heinewele had been killed in the dancing

ground he

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): took nine fibers of the cocoa palm leaf and went with these to the dance place struck them one after the other into the earth and with the ninth came to what had been the innermost circle when he stuck the ninth fiber into the earth and drew it forth

on it were

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): some of the hairs and blood of hanawele

he dug up the

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): corpse and cut it into many pieces which he buried in the whole area about the dancing ground except for the two arms which he carried to the

maiden sateen the

Speaker 57 (lower-pitched voice): second of the supreme

Speaker 51 (lower-pitched voice): virgin goddesses

of west saram at the time of

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): the coming into being of mankind sateen had emerged from an unripe banana whereas the rest had come from ripe bananas and now she was the ruler of

them all but

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): the buried portions of hanuele meanwhile were already turning up things that up to that time had never existed anywhere on earth above all certain tuberous plants that have been the principal

Speaker 61: food of the people ever since

ameda

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): cursed mankind and the maiden sateen was furious at the people for having

killed So she

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): built on one of the dance grounds a great gate, consisting of a nine-fold spiral like the one formed by the men in the dance. Then she stood on a great log inside this gate, holding in her two hands the two arms of Hainoele. Then, summoning the people

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): she said to them, "'Because you have killed, I refuse to live here anymore. Today I shall leave you. And

so now

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): you must all try to come to me through this gate. Those who succeed will remain people

but to

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): those who fail something else will happen they tried

to come

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): through the spiral gate but not all succeeded

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): and everyone who failed was turned into either an animal or

a spirit that

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): is how it came about that pigs deer birds fish and many spirits inhabit

the earth

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): before that time there had only been

people those

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): however who came through walked to satin some to the right of the log on which she was standing others to the left

and

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): as each pass she struck them with one of Hainoele's arms those going left had to jump across five sticks of bamboo those to the right across nine and from these two groups respectively were derived the tribes known as the fivers and the niners

Speaker 54 (lower-pitched voice): setine said to them i am departing today and you will see me no more on this earth only

when you

Speaker 54 (lower-pitched voice): die will you see me again yet even

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): then you shall have to accomplish a very difficult journey before you attain

me and

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): with that she disappeared from the earth

she

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): now dwells on the mountains of the dead in the southern part of west ceram and whoever desires to go to her

must die but

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): the way to her mountain leads over eight other mountains and ever since that day there have not been only men but spirits

Speaker 59 (lower-pitched voice): and animals on earth while the tribes of men have often been divided into

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): the fivers and

niners end quote Now the

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): third maiden goddess of this cycle, Rabia, comes along in another part of this mythology. But you can see certain themes poking their heads through even this fragment, right? You've got a trio of goddesses. There are serpents dancing around the edges of the story. You know, here it was at the beginning. There was a cloth with the design of a snake on it that was supposed to cover the coconut that becomes Hainiwele. Okay

She is

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): the fruit of the

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): tree rather than being tempted to eat it in this one, but the association is there. In the Greek, you have the two serpents pulling Demeter's chariot

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): which in another part of their tale, she actually assigns to guard her daughter Persephone as she hides her out in a cave. One of the goddesses is killed, an event which is represented very directly in the West Saran myth and figuratively in the classical story, represented by Persephone's descent into the underworld. And yet the murdered

Speaker 57 (lower-pitched voice): maiden becomes the important foodstuffs that are depended on by the people once she's brought back. Or

you could rather say

Speaker 57 (lower-pitched voice): that that's the form in which she's brought back

So there seems

Speaker 57 (lower-pitched voice): to be a culture complex

Or at

Speaker 59 (lower-pitched voice): least a thread possibly interweaved with others, extending from Madagascar north along

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): the coast of Africa, East Africa, cross-pollinating with

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): existing forms in Egypt and the Middle East before moving along the northern shores of the Indian Ocean until we see this constellation of symbols which

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): although they might be strung together by different narratives or organized differently relative to one another, the symbols themselves

meet

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): keep popping up consistently in myths all along this route of human migration. And so, in

addition to

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): the symbol systems, there are cultural and linguistic forms that seem to bear out an ancient connection pretty clearly, this

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): Austronesian realm, let's say. So, for example, if you want to count to 10 in... In Malagasy, the traditional language of Madagascar, you would say Isa, Rua, Tela, Efatra, Limi. That's one through five. If you move along that route to Indonesia and count in Malay, you'll say instead of Isa, Rua, Tela, Efatra, Limi, you'll say Sa, Dua, Tiga, Ampat, Lima

Pretty

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): close. Or you keep going in Javanese, it's Sa, Ru, Telu, Pat, Lima. Very similar. And as the people hopped into their long canoes and started to brave the Pacific Ocean, you go out into Polynesia, a place like Samoa, and you're counting off Tasi, Lua, Tolu, Fa, and Lima. So again, take it all the way back to Madagascar

down

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): off the southeastern coast of Africa, and you'll say

again, you'll

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): say, Isa, Rua, Telu, Ephatra, Limi, where all the way out in Samoa in the Pacific Ocean, you've got Tasi, Lua, Tolu, Fa, Lima. Very, very similar. This Austronesian language group, as it's called, it transmutes over time, as languages always do. Old English looks and sounds like German Pig Latin to a modern English speaker, but the lineage is very well established. Well, the myths and symbols that structure the culture worlds went along with the language, and they morph and transmute somewhat too, but

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): they maintain a recognizable common structure

And given how deep

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): into history we have to

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): go to locate this migration, we've got to be dealing with a set of motifs that are almost unimaginably ancient, and

yet held

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): in mind by traveling human bands and

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): societies as they make their way across the globe

It brings to

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): mind something I read, although I can't remember where, that cultures always change just enough to allow them to remain the same. I can't remember where I heard that, but it's a good saying. Humans are supposed to have made it to Australia over 50,000 years ago, and in fact we find a bunch of

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): parallel motifs everywhere

among

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): the aboriginal tribes like the aranda in australia so so i mean these are connections that go way way way back they're things that

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): we share pretty much universally and

they speak

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): to things that we share as human

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): beings

The

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): really ingenious part of what these people did is how our ancestors altered the symbols over time

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): to better fit their environments and experience while still maintaining the core structure over what had to have been tens of thousands of years

For

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): example, when you start getting out into Polynesia where there are no snakes, they've got this whole mythological cycle that has snakes at various critical points, and now they live in Polynesia

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): and there's no snakes, they just switched it out with an eel. The role of the serpent was just swapped out with an eel, no big deal

In the

Speaker 54 (lower-pitched voice): Polynesian case, you have something like a maiden named Hina is married or otherwise joined to an eel

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): and she's again associated with the moon. That three-way constellation between woman, serpent, and moon is found all over the world. The woman is the consort of the serpent, both of them associated with the moon

You

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): can go out to southern France, you have something like the Venus of LaSalle, which is a Paleolithic carving from 25,000 years ago that was, again, found in southern France. And it shows a pregnant woman, an obviously pregnant woman, touching her belly with one hand and holding up a crescent with 13 lines scratched into it. So it's very

I

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): mean, you look at it, it's very obviously demonstrating that there's an awareness that these people had of the connection between the cycles of the moon and the timing of the menstrual cycle, of which there

are

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): 13 iterations each year. I

mean, it's very

Speaker 62: obviously pointing to that knowledge

The woman

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): sheds and regenerates her uterine lining as the moon is emptied

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): and refilled with light on the same time frame. The serpent is renewed by the

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): shedding of its skin

And

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): so, you know, there are certain things like that you can point to as to why they might be associated, but you look at the mythologies across the world, and there's no question

Speaker 63: that those three things are frequently associated. The

connection between the

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): moon and the tides was also made very early, and women break water to inaugurate their labors, so you have that. You've got the waving motion of the serpent that can be associated with the water. The earliest Bronze Age mythologies seem to have venerated... this mythological cycle and revered the goddess mother primarily but when the patriarchal warriors of the aryan steppe and the semitic desert conquered uh the these bronze age civilizations they inverted that symbol system to create the mother serpent of the primordial sea such as leviathan or tiamat representatives of

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): blind unconscious nature and darkness and chaos and who once the gods

Order

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): that there must be

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): light. And consciousness looked out and surveilled the world. Those mother goddess serpents, the dark, watery, moon-associated mother goddess were slaughtered and order was created by the

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): conscious rearrangement of their remains. Or in the classical world where we find a figure like Medusa

the

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): snake woman who is

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): associated with the moon and who in her original form wore a mask painted red to represent the mysterious power of menstrual blood i mean these things are all over the place sometimes you have them combined into one person like medusa you have the goddess the snakes who's associated with the moon all condensed down to one thing and that's the way you have to be able to read mythology if you see

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): say a virgin mother and then the father god right something we see in christianity and in egypt with isis and osiris and horus and all these things you have to look at that as a united

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): symbol there

are things you

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): can pull apart from them and that's you know that's why they are pulled apart in some stories to emphasize certain

Speaker 17: aspects of each but that thing by itself all of those things together is a symbol and you

have to

Speaker 17: be able to look at it that way too

You find

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): something very similar as you keep on going out into India, where Indo-European warriors swept down to conquer the existing Dravidian peoples

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): and the parallels between Medusa on one hand and the Indian goddess Kali are completely unmistakable, down to tight details

We

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): read that Asclepius, the god of healing

Speaker 17: in ancient Greece, is supposed to have taken blood from Medusa after she was killed, drawing some blood from her left side and some from her right

The

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): blood from her left is supposed to have had the power to kill, while the blood from her right side is supposed to have had the power to cure and revive from death. Meanwhile, Kali, the Hindu goddess of the new moon, who is the consort of the serpent god Shiva. It

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): mirrors Medusa in virtually all of her representations by brandishing a death-dealing sword in her left hand and a gift or boon of some kind in her right hand

And so

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): I mean, it's so exact and so specific that there's clearly some kind of a connection there. Otherwise, you have to go down the road of thinking that there are innate structures in our human

Speaker 17: mind that give rise to just... ideas and concepts that are so exactly similar. Again, there are people who believe either way on those. We're going to explore this really deeply. It's going to be the topic of an entire episode. This mythological complex that goes up and west into Europe

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): The other one heads east Through, you know, Indonesia out into Polynesia and through India, China and over into the New

Speaker 17: World. And eventually they go opposite ways around the world and they crash into each other. And we're going to trace those out, not in the next episode, but in the one after that

we're

Speaker 17: going to go real deep on this stuff so um if you like mythology you'll like that if you don't you might want to skip that one but i i think you'll like it even if you don't think you'll like mythology because there's a lot of a lot of deep stuff that uh ties over into other uh historical

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): topics you know

there are

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): there are these

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): matching mythological motifs across continents and through the millennia and as we'll see in that episode

uh

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): The Spanish found so many direct corollaries

Speaker 17: to their Christian practices and doctrines and Aztec rituals and beliefs that they actually thought for certain that the devil was throwing up a mocking parody of their faith in the New World. So

how do you explain

Speaker 17: something like that without

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): appealing to either historical migrations of peoples, which means that there's some really deep

Speaker 17: way in which

All of the

Speaker 17: peoples who have absorbed some kind of one

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): of these connected mythologies are very similar. You know, if you accept the fact that we start with a basic operating system, but then culture does most of the work of turning us into certain kinds of human beings, there

Speaker 17: are certain ways in which these mythologies have created us that lay the groundwork for a universal ability to communicate

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): with one another and understand one another. And yet

As we

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): see when the Spanish confront the Aztecs, I mean these things

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): can really go – by the time you get up to the top of that pyramid, you can be talking about ideas that are very, very different, manifest

in very different ways

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): right? I mean, again, it's – You can talk about it as the historical migration of peoples or by insisting

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): upon shared psychological and sociological structures that lead men throughout the ages to respond to common challenges in certain ways. But however these specific motifs and representations made their way across the earth

u

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): uh, or whether they popped up independently, you know, they, they have to be grafted on to individual humans

and

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): societies that weren't going to reject them or just relegate them to the level of folk tales and popular

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): stories, which all of these cultures also had. It's not like a story just shows up on their cultural border and they just work it into their religion because why not? It's, they had folk tales, they had popular stories that were just entertainment and all that stuff. So for things to get worked into their mythology, into their rites and rituals and their ritual

conditions

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): calendar and all that you

Speaker 17: know these things they built their entire culture around these stories and

so there's something in

Speaker 17: there that is resonating with something that all of them share you

know there's really powerful

Speaker 17: evidence

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): of the diffusion of motifs geographically over time in a way that unites the mesoamericans if

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): only by a tiny thread to the conquistadors that invaded them from the eastern sea

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): again i'm gonna have a whole episode to suss out the roots the shared roots of those two mythologies. Building very different structures upon the same foundations

But those

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): who are looking for psychological or sociological or environmental causes of similar parallel development

Speaker 17: independently, there are strong arguments for that position as well. There's a reason that it's still ongoing

And so to wrap up this

Speaker 17: introduction, because again, that's all this really is, I'm going to leave you with

A

Speaker 17: curious case of the parallel

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): development, maybe a counterpoint to the diffusion idea. Curious

case of

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): parallel development of a mythological behavior so similar in form and content that it's uncanny, but which we can be absolutely sure was not spread through migration or cultural mixing. So I'm pulling this from the subject of the next episode, which I'll have out shortly. I'm already pretty far into it. The subject of the next episode is what the Mesoamericans are most famous for, human sacrifice

The wonderful

Speaker 65: if

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): problematic, old book by Sir James Frazier, the guy we mentioned earlier, which, if you've ever seen Apocalypse Now, it's on the bookshelf of Colonel Kurtz as he and the bull are being sacrificed in the penultimate scene of

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): that film. It's

a book

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): called The Golden Bough, and... He draws an account of an Aztec ritual provided by the Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún. So I'll go ahead

and quote

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): it for you here

At a great

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): festival in September, which

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): was preceded by a strict fast of seven days, they sanctified a young

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): slave girl of 12 or 13 years, the prettiest they could find, to represent the maze goddess, Chico Mecowato

they

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): invested her with the ornaments of the goddess putting a mitre on her head and the maize cobs around her neck and in her hands and fastening a green feather upright on the crown

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): of her head to imitate an ear of maize

this they

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): did we are told in order to signify that the maize was almost ripe at the time of the festival but because it was still tender they chose a girl of tender years to play the part of the maize

goddess the whole

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): day long they led the poor child in all her finery with the green plume nodding

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): on her head from house to house dancing merrily to cheer people after the dullness and privations

of the fast in the evening

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): all the people assembled at the temple the courts of which they lit up by a multitude of lanterns and candles

there

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): they passed the night without sleeping and at midnight while trumpets flutes and horns discoursed solemn music a portable framework or pelanquin was brought forth bedecked with festoons of maize cobs and peppers and filled with seeds of all sorts this the bearers set down at the door of the chamber in which the wooden image of the goddess

stood now the

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): chamber was adorned and wreathed both outside and inside with wreaths of maize cobs peppers pumpkins roses and seeds of every kind a wonder to behold

the whole

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): floor was covered deep with these verdant offerings of the pious

when the

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): music ceased a solemn procession came forth of priests and dignitaries with flaring lights and smoking censers leading in their

Speaker 13: midst the girl who played the part

of the goddess then they made her

Speaker 13: mount the framework where

she

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): stood upright on the maize and peppers and pumpkins with which it was strewn her hands resting on the two banisters to keep

her from falling

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): then the priests swung the smoking censers around her and the music struck up again and while it played a great dignitary of the temple suddenly stepped forth to her with a razor in his hand and adroitly shore off the green feather she wore on her head together with the hair on which it was fastened snipping the lock off

by the root the feather and

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): the hair he then presented to the wooden image of the goddess with great solemnity and elaborate ceremony weeping and giving her thanks for the fruits of the earth and the abundant crops which she had bestowed on the people that

year And as

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): he wept and

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): prayed, all the people

standing in

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): the court of the temple, wept and prayed with him. When

that ceremony

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): was over, the girl descended from the framework and was escorted to the place where she was to spend the rest of the night. But

all the people

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): kept watch in the courts of the temple by the light of torches till the break of day. The

morning being

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): come, and the courts of the temple being still crowded by the multitude, who would have deemed it sacrilege to quit the precincts. the priests again brought forth the damsel attired in the costume

of the goddess

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): with the mitre on her head and the cobs of maize about

her neck again

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): she mounted the portable framework or pelanquin and stood on top of it supporting herself by her hands on the banisters then the elders of the temple lifted it on their shoulders and while some swung burning censers and others played on instruments or sang they carried it in the procession through the great courtyard to the hall of the god huizulopochtli and then back to the chamber where stood the wooden image of the maze goddess whom the girl impersonated

there they caused

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): the damsel to descend from the pelanquin and to stand on the heaps of corn and vegetables that had been spread in profusion on the floor of the sacred chamber

while

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): she stood there all the elders and nobles came in a line one behind the other carrying saucers full of dry and clotted blood which they had drawn from their ears by way of penance during the seven days fast

one by

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): one they squatted on their haunches before her which was the equivalent of falling on their knees with us and scraping the crust of blood from the saucer cast it down before her as an offering in return for the benefits which she as an embodiment of the maze goddess had conferred

upon them when the men had

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): thus humbly offered their blood to the human representative of the goddess the women forming a long line did so likewise each of them dropping on her hams before the girl and scraping her blood from the

saucer the

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): ceremony lasted a long time for great and small young and old all without exception had to pass before the incarnate deity and make their offering when it was over the people returned home with glad hearts to feast on flesh and vines of every

kind

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): as merrily, we are told, as good Christians at Easter partake of meat and other carnal mercies after the long abstinence of Lent

And when they had eaten

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): and drunk their fill, and rested after the night watch, they returned quite refreshed to the temple to see the end of the festival. And the end of the festival was this

The multitude

Speaker 66 (lower-pitched voice): being assembled, the priests

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): solemnly incensed the girl who impersonated the goddess— They then threw her on her back on a heap

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): of corn and seeds, cut off her head, caught the gushing blood in a tub, and sprinkled the blood on the wooden image of the goddess, the walls of the chamber, and the offerings of corn, peppers, pumpkins, seeds, and vegetables which cumbered the floor

After that, they

Speaker 30: flayed the headless trunk, and one of the priests made shift to squeeze himself into

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): her bloody skin

Having done

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): so, they clad him in all the robes which the girl had worn

they

Speaker 58 (lower-pitched voice): put a mitre on his head the necklace of golden maize cobs about his neck and the maize cobs of feathers and gold in his hands and thus arrayed they led him forth in public all of them dancing to the tuck of drum while he acted as fulumen skipping and posturing at the head of the procession as briskly as he could be expected to do incommoded as he was by the tight and clammy skin

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): of the girl and by her clothes which must have been far too small for a grown man Absent from that account, but confirmed in other sources, is the fact that the nourishing mother goddess here represented and sacrificed was also associated with the moon, and the night of the festival, the night before the killing

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): flaying, and dancing in the skin of the girl, was always one that had a full moon

So you hear

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): about something like that, and Again, it's easy to look at it behaviorally. What I want to focus on is the fact that there is an internal

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): subjective experience that goes along with that. And I don't think it's anything like if you just took – look. Nobody is just going to take you or me and put you in a place where you're going to cut a young girl's head off, skin her in public, wear her skin and her clothes and dance around leading a procession in public. And everybody is completely in on this and it's fine. You're not going to be just the person you are now who experiences the world as you do now except that you also do that thing. That's just not how it works. You're talking about a different type of human being here

and how

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): different i mean there's another story that i'm going to share with you and with this we'll wrap it up this story comes to us from the state of wisconsin in the united states in the 1950s

an old

Speaker 54 (lower-pitched voice): dilapidated farm run down beyond use and no longer productive inhabited by a single middle-aged

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): uneducated unworldly recluse of a man who had hardly ever left the property since he was a child

he'd

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): grown up with an unhealthy obsession with his extremely overbearing mother and when she died in his middle age he was just

it

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): completely wrecked him he was completely destroyed he sealed off most of the house so

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): that even as the areas he inhabited and the outside fell into complete entropy and chaos his mother's rooms upstairs and the parlor and living room that she used were exactly the same as the day she died you

may have

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): heard of this

guy His

Speaker 68: name was Ed Gein. He's one of the most famous murderers in American history. He's the

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): guy on whom the character Norman Bates in Hitchcock's

Speaker 69: movie Psycho and James Gunn in Silence of the Lambs was based

So the

Speaker 70: investigation of a murdered hardware store clerk lead police to Ed Gein's

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): farm. Someone had seen him there that

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): morning. And at his farm, they find this charnel house of depravity that is almost impossible to wrap our minds around without venturing to dangerously close to whichever abyss Ed Gein had fallen into

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): Gein had been exhuming graves and taking body parts back to his house for a long time. On his bed, they found skulls attached to the tops of the bedposts

In the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): kitchen, they

Speaker 17: found bowls made from the sawn-off tops of human skulls. There was a

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): wastebasket made of human skin. There were masks made from peeled human faces. He'd

made a

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): belt of human nipples, and a pair of lips were hanging from the

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): drawstring of a window shade. I'm

not trying to

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): just gross you out, but I'm kind of laying the groundwork here

Gein would always

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): choose nights with a full moon to do his dirty work, and you could say maybe he needed the light, but it's still

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): interesting, right? He said that he felt driven, as if from the outside

In a

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): daze-like state

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): he said, a full moon would come and he would just be overcome by a kind of trance and he would just feel driven from the outside to the graveyard and come back with his trophies. The loss of Gein's mother

from whom

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): he had utterly failed to liberate himself psychologically. He had fallen back into total psychological dependency rather than successfully

you know

Speaker 29 (lower-pitched voice): traversing that gap that

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): we mentioned earlier and taking on an independent life so when she died he was completely broken and he was searching compulsively as compulsively as a

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): self-harming teenager cuts herself or a bulimic binges and purges you know where knowing but not knowing what they're doing aware on some level of their actions and always aware of what they're doing but waking up after it's over kind of in a new state like that patient of oliver sax who He felt like he'd only just awaken into consciousness

He's

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): compulsively searching for a way to reconnect with his mother

And so perhaps

Speaker 71: you're aware of the most

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): infamous part of the story of this guy, the Butcher of Plainfield

Digging up

Speaker 54 (lower-pitched voice): bodies and murdering women that he thought resembled his mother

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): Ed Gein skinned the women. And he made himself a woman's suit, complete with real breasts. And

Speaker 17: on certain nights, always under a full moon, Gein would put the suit on, dressed as a woman

Even

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): putting, it's disgusting, but putting cut-out vulvas into panties that he would wear

And he would go out

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): under the moon and pretend to incarnate the great mother goddess of his life, spinning around and waving his arms, dancing

Speaker 59 (lower-pitched voice): under the full moon as his mother

Now, Gein was a

Speaker 59 (lower-pitched voice): secluded farm boy from... 1950s Wisconsin and there is absolutely no reason to believe that he'd ever heard of the Aztec ritual in which a priest wore the skin of the bountiful

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): mother goddess dancing in it during the dawn after a full moon

and so if you've

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): got a theory on that feel free to send it over on the Facebook page otherwise we'll pull it apart together in the next episode the first real episode when we'll try to get to the bottom of human sacrifice

Speaker 72: Thanks, guys

Thank you. We'll be right back. Thank you. To be continued