Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and it is Crab Season on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. That's not really a season corresponding to anything on the calendar, but every now and then we just kind of get crab fever. We have to let the decapods take over the show, and that's what we are doing today. We're kicking off the first in a series of crab Bag episodes, the sort of a grab bag of various topics that
caught our fancy related to crabs. And this was in part a listeners suggestion, so encouragement to all you listeners out there to send in topics you would like to hear more about. Obviously we can't always promise to cover them, but we do sometimes take inspiration on our show calendar from listener requests. So in our.
Specially if you asked, he has to do something we were going to do anyway, like more crab content. I think when that question came, we ran that listener mail episode and I was like, oh yeah, actually tomorrow's episode is Crabs. The Crabs will always return.
But a shout out to listener Hannah who asked very politely for new Crab content, and here we are too oblige.
Yeah, so if you are new to the show, we're stuffed to blow your mind. We've been around as an audio podcast forever and we've done video in the past. You can find we have a YouTube channel with some old content on it, but for the most part here on Netflix. If you're watching us on Netflix, it's a new effort. We're figuring things out, trying new things every day. We probably look a little everything looks a little bit different compared to the way it looked in the last episode.
So we're constantly trying to improve. But if you'll hear us reference episodes that are only in the audio archives, and you can find those wherever you get your audio podcasts.
And just to clarify so nobody's confused out there, the video version of the show now available on Netflix. If you are watching on Netflix, or if you would like to check it out on Netflix, the video version is the same content. It's the same show we're running in our audio feed. It's just with the cameras turned on so you can see us while we're talking. But it's the same show, same kind of thing we've been doing for many, many years. But now you can see our heads.
Yeah, see our heads, and I think there are fewer ads. So yeah, if that your deal, this is just another way to consume the show. All right, Well, Joe, should we go ahead and dig into the crab grab bag or crab bag or crab grab bag? What do we have? What have you got for us?
So the first thing I wanted to talk about today is a miracle crab, a holy crab. I'm going to begin by reading a passage from a book called The Life and Letters of Saint Francis Xavier. This book is by Henry James Coleridge from eighteen seventy two. The author of this book, Henry James Coleridge, was a nineteenth century English Jesuit priest and writer and a bit of trivia. The grand nephew or I don't know if it's called
great nephew. His grandfather's brother was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English Roman Romantic era poet and the author of Rhyme and the ancient mariner Kubla Khan, that sort of thing. So this is a decidedly less psychedelic and monstrous work than Rhyme and the Ancient Mariner. This is a biography of a Catholic saint of the sixteenth century Navarrees, Catholic priest and missionary, Saint Francis Xavier, who was one of the founders of the Society of jesus Aka the Jesuits.
You've probably heard of them, major Catholic order. He was one of its founders, and a big part of Saint Francis Xavier's legacy in the Church is missionary work, efforts to spread Christianity in parts of what is now India, Japan, and Indonesia. So the context of this biographical section in the book is that Francis Xavior is in the middle
of his mission in the Molucca Islands. So he's traveling between small ports on a kind of outrigor vessel and stopping to preach in different places, and I think also to visit communities of Christians, like in the Philippines and in Indonesia. And Coleridge says that we get the following story from a source called the Relatio, which is based on the alleged eyewitness testimony of a man named Fausto Rodriguez, a Portuguese soldier who had been traveling along with Saint
Francis Xavior on his journeys. So here I'm going to begin to read from Coleridge. They were sailing to Baranura when a sudden storm came on, and to appease it, Francis Xavier took from his neck a crucifix one finger long. Rodriguez says, so it was the small crucifix that he wore on his heart and dipped it into the sea, leaning over the boat's side. And I've read about this
encounter in other sources. There are different tellings of this story where the details vary somewhat, but the idea is it's a terrible storm, the ship is being tossed by the waves. In some of these other tellings it's even more dramatic, like people are being washed out of the
boat into the sea. Somehow they get rescued. And in the midst of this madness, the priest decides to invoke the power of the Cross to beg for safe passage, and he sort of uses the principle of blessing by touch, so he reaches out and he dips the crucifix into the water, and while he is dunking the cross in the waves. In the version of the story told by Coleridge, quote, it chanced that it slipped from his hand into the sea, which accidents so greatly afflicted Xavier that he gave great
signs of grief. But fortunately for the travelers, they survive the storm, and they make it to the shore of their destination, an island called Baranura in the Source, and they're unharmed. So they pull the boat up onto the beach and they start walking along the coast toward a town called Tamlow. And here's where the miracle part had Coleridge writes, quote when they had walked half a mile and were now many miles away from where the crucifix
had been lost. And then here I think it begins to quote from a direct translation of Fausto Rodriguez's account, quote, Behold, a sea crab runs out of the sea onto the shore with the aforesaid crucifix, holding it in his claws on either side, upright, and lifted up, and so ran
to Xavier and stopped in his sight. And Xavier flung himself on his knees, and the crab waited until he had taken the crucifix from its claws, and then ran back again into the sea whence it had come, and Xavier kissed and embraced the crucifix, and, crossing his arms on his breast, lay prostrate on the ground on for half an hour, and his companion, who was by his side, did the same, thanking the Lord Jesus Christ for so
strange a miracle. And so I love this story, and I'm glad that the original alleged witness of the event acknowledges that as far as miracles go, this has a weird flavor like especially I think because it involves the symbol of Christian salvation gripped in the claw of a crab, or in both claws, I think it.
Says, yeah, yeah, I'm imagining it lifted over its head. Yeahs.
I don't know why this is. Crabs to me, are not an image that naturally calls up thoughts of holiness and Heaven and God. We see a lot of Christian iconography that has especially mammals and birds and fishes, you know, being you know fish, you know, Jesus' disciples being fishermen, so they're fish, and Christian imagery we think of sheep,
of course, you know, being the flocks of Christ. Sometimes there are deer, sometimes there are lions, things like that, and then also you can think of birds like doves getting into the arthropod realm just feels more removed from the light of God than the other types of animals do. I don't know why.
Well, I mean, within the context of the Christian faith that God made all of these animals, so you should be able to see some reflection of God and everything. And I don't know, the crabs are hardly the most problematic creature in which to look for some portion of God, like you know, makes more sense than looking in some sort of terrifying parasite.
Parasitoid wasp is the image of God. Yeah, and apparently the crab is too.
Yeah. I mean, crabs do important work, absolutely the Lord's work. They are the children of God. But yeah, you don't see them, or at least you don't think of them as being a standout and religions psychography.
I do think, Yeah, maybe this should help us think more about the crabs role and say, the decomposition of dead matter in the natural environment and helping to break all that down and how that is quite a holy job.
Yeah, we have discussed in the past, how given how into crabs we are and how into crabs I think humans in general are, and crabs must be observed. I was thinking about this earlier, like, if you were near crabs, you must watch them like they are just amusing and you want to see more of them. So it is kind of surprising at times that you don't see more
crabs and crab like creatures in various mythologies. I mean, they're there, but oh yeah, they at least to my eye, they they often don't seem to play as large a role as I would like. You know, there are fewer crab gods than I would like.
I feel like maybe there are more crab gods outside of Christianity. Maybe Christianity is particularly crab deficient religion. But here's counter example. So despite the crabby weirdness of this story, it is not like a totally obscure thing tucked away that nobody's ever heard about. This is a widely discussed and well known legend of Francis Xavior, and it was one of the miracles discussed during his canonization in Rome. It's even depicted in Renaissance art, and here I stumbled
across something that I thought was amazing. Rob, I have a picture of a painting for you to look at in our outline. This is an oil on canvas painting from sixteen nineteen called Saint Francis Xavior and the Crab Miracle at Sarum Island. This is by the Portuguese painter Andre Reynoso and it is currently housed in the Church of Saint Rock in Lisbon. This painting includes multiple parts
of the story all shown at once. So in the upper right hand corner, in a kind of hazy cpia tone, almost like it's a dream, we see a ship rolling in the waves with thunderclouds above, so this shows the earlier peril in the story. And the upper left we see rays of light breaking through the clouds, almost like the power of God coming down to intervene. And then in the center of the frame you have Francis Xavier and his companions gathered on the beach looking down in astonishment.
And then at the bottom right there is a crab clutching the crucifix straight up above its body with both claws. And I was looking at the image of this crab and thinking, why does this pose look so familiar? It's pinging something that's like that I have seen and thought about many times, and it took me a minute to figure out what it was, and then I realized, Oh my god, this crab is Luke Skywalker in the original
handpainted poster for Star Wars from nineteen seventy seven. If you look up both paintings, I think you will see it. The resemblance is uncanny, especially because the crabs ribbed underside kind of resembles the like absurd and non representative muscles they give Mark Hamill's chest.
Yeah, yeah, you're talking about the original theatrical poster by Tom Young. Yeah, iconic, And you're absolutely right, it's the same pose like this. This either Luke Skywalker is channeling the Holy Crab or the Holy Crab is giving us a taste of what's wants it to come. I mean, it would sci fi cinema.
The Holy Crab is obviously hundreds of years earlier, so it would have to be inspired by I mean, I think it's just a coincidence. It would be bizarre to me if this truly were inspired by the crab painting, but it is the resemblance is unbelievable to me. Also because the lightsaber in the original Star Wars poster for some reason takes the shape of a cross. I don't know why it does that, that it's never cross shaped in the movies.
Yeah, I guess it's supposed to be just like the gleam the glare of the of the lightsaber here. But you're right, it even also forms a crucifix shape. Yeah. Wow, I mean he is unable. So it is true some direct, kind of direct comparison to be made between Luke Skywalker and Jesus Christ as well.
That's true, though I don't know if that comparison goes to the crab, excepted just sort of by general association, because I don't get any idea that the crab in the story is a metaphor for Jesus.
I don't know the crab ties it all together, I think. Yeah, So the nature of the miracle is thought provoking, right, because I would be tempted to think, well, maybe the real miracle was that they were saved from dangerous seas, and that's kind of a mine. This is a minor miracle on top of that, because in and of itself, like a crab saved your crucifix, like I would I don't know. I would think maybe we should have saved that miracle juice for for something a little more substantial.
But you know, I'm not going to question in the ways of the divine here.
Well, if something like this actually happened, I think it would be astonishing, Like, given the magnitude of the sea, if it truly happened that you dropped a crucifix into the ocean and then you know, days later, many miles later, you come ashore and you find a crab clutching the exact same crucifix, I don't know, that would be pretty remarkable to me, Like, what are the odds?
Yeah? Yeah, And it raises significant questions about about whether any variety of crab would be potentially carrying around something like this, a non organic morsel that's main value would be that it's shiny.
I mean, crabs do sometimes just like clutch things and carry them around non a food thing. We've talked about examples of this before, and in fact, maybe we can even come back to this question later in the series. Just the idea of crabs carrying things around that are not food didn't prepare notes on that for today, but that is something we could return to. So are you okay if I talked a little bit more about the crab in religious art?
Yeah, let's do it, okay.
So I was looking for more detail on this painting on the Xavier crab in art, and I found some discussion in a book called Jesuit Art Brill's Research Perspectives in Jesuit Studies. This is by an art scholar named
Mia Mochizuki, put out by the academic publisher Brill. And in this book, in this section of the book, Mochizuki gives a retelling of the story, emphasizing the most fantastical and embellished version of the miracle legend, in which Xavier not just gets the crucifix back later, but in this version he intentionally throws his crucifix into the sea and
this successfully calms the storm and saves the ship. So this is this version of the story has direct, intentional and successful command of the weather.
Do you think that the crucifix in this case does not have a little vial of oil in it? Right? To call back to a previous episode that we.
Did, Yeah, dropping oil in the water to calm the.
Waves also sometimes practiced by members of the clergy.
So the yeah, I've forgotten some of the details on that, but yeah, we go back and check that out in our archives if you want. But anyway, so in this version of the story, he intentionally does calm the storm, and then also you get the same detail we talked about earlier, the crucifix is returned by the crab on the beach. I'll have a bit more to say about the different versions of the story in a minute, But regarding the art and the legend here, Motchizuki adds a
few notes. One is that a Xavier scholar named Gaeorg Schurhammer, who lived eighteen eighty two to nineteen seventy one, argued that this story may have introduced devotion to the image of the crucifix within Japan, and also that it may have been based on actually a local Buddhist legend that Xavier or his traveling companions encountered during their time in Asia.
Here I'm going to read from Mochizuki's footnote quote the miracle of the Crab bears a number of similarities with the legend of the ninth century Buddhist priest Jikaku who used an image of a god of wisdom, Yakushi Yorai to calm the sea, one that was returned to him three years later by an octopus.
Oh wow. So, first of all, I love the idea of the octopus bringing the holy emblem back as well. But then also so we're looking at the possibility that this whole story was just appropriated, It was just co opted from existing traditions.
Potentially totally possible. Yeah, that the companions of Xavier to whom this story is traced back and again I'll talk about the versions of the story in a minute, may have been half remembering or somehow just co opting a folk tale that they heard from the lands that they were traveling to. And in fact, there are some other
cases where this could be what's happening as well. Mochizuki points out quote other legends of Xavier could also have been appropriations of local folklore encountered on their travels, like the miracle of Xavier turning salt water into freshwater from a Malaysian legend. So there are other cases where it's like places he traveled to had folk tales that are remarkably similar to miracles that are later attributed to him
after his death. Okay, so regardless of where the story came from, Mochizuki notes that images of crabs became a standard part of the iconography of Xavier. And another example I've got for you to look at in the outline here, Rob, is this seventeenth century silver cross held by a crab. This is now in the Portuguese city of Coimbra. But it's like a silver crab. I don't know if it
has the right number of legs. This looks like a crab with four legs and two claws, or maybe I'm missing something here, but anyway, it's a silver crab holding up across The cross is bigger than the crab itself, so it's a mighty feet of strength.
This is amazing. I had never seen this before.
There's another thing I've got for you to look at in the outline, Rob. This is a painting that Mochizuki is talking about. It is a seventeenth century Japanese portrait of Saint Francis Xavier from Kobe, which depicts Xavier with a flaming red heart gripped against his breast, so he's got his hands up in his chest like this and he's holding this red heart with almost kind of i don't know, kind of beams of little red tails coming
out of it. That looks sort of like the way you might represent the sun with rays coming out, except it's all pink and red, and like, oh, that's a kind of strange and interesting image. But then speaking about this heart in the image, Mochizuki writes, quote, it's stylized flames formed double duty as both fiery organ and miraculous crab. And I realized, oh my god, yes it's a heart, but it really looks like a crab. It's a crab and a heart.
Crab heart. And I'll add that the saint here looks a little bit like coffin Joe. So there are a number of things coming for it.
Absolutely, But the story of the Miraculous Crab does not end there, because it turns out the legend of Saint Francis Xavier has some connection, it seems, at least a llegened and a few sources, some connection to not just one individual miracle crab in the story, but to a fully extant species of decapod crustacean, known sometimes as the Holy crab or the crucifix Crab and Rob, I've got a picture of the Crucifix crab for you to look at here in the outline. It's a kind of flat,
wide crab like. It's large, it has big swimming legs in the back. It's kind of flat, and then you can see the the imagery on the top of it. I'll describe that for the listeners in just a second, but I should flag I found this photo along with a blog post for the Western Australian Museum by Andrew Josey called Holy Crab, the Crucifix crab caaribdis feriata and a bit of detail Yeah now, yeah, that's the genus name.
So a bit of detail from this postcaribdis feriata is found in the Indian and West Pacific Oceans and it ranges pretty far from as far west as the eastern coast of Africa to as far east as Japan and Australia. Generally living in shallow waters with a rocky or sandy bottom. It is eaten. Sometimes it is fished commercially and recreationally
in some parts of I think India and Indonesia. But I was reading other sources saying that some people I think probably especially some Christians do not eat it for reasons you might imagine because it has a crucifix on it, So the name crucifix crab comes from a cross shaped
pattern on the crab's carapace. On top of the crab, just behind its face, you will typically see a sort of cone or bullhorn shaped band of a darker orange or red set against a lighter background, and then within that red cone there is a pale hollow that is often in the shape of a cross or crucifix, though I think you could also easily read it as Zelda's master sword, as a kind of winged what do you
call it hilt and cross hilt like that crossguard. I don't know my sword terms, but from what I've read, different populations of this crab have somewhat different marking, so I think they are not all as clearly cruciform as the pictures I've got for you to look at, Rob.
Yeah, because the crab I'm seeing in this image. I don't know about you, Joe, but I would not feel confident trying to repel a vampire with this crab.
Yeah, it is a little weird. Like the crucifix, the beams of the fix do not feel like wooden planks. They're not of a consistent thickness. It's kind of thicker further away from the eyes, and then as it goes toward the face of the crab it narrows. But yeah, I don't know. I think I can see the cross or the sword.
Yeah, I think I'm more likely to see presence of the divine by looking into the crab's eyes here. Yeah, this is we've already established. I think by this point that crabs are clearly God's chosen and if one actually ascends to Paradise, there will mostly be crabs there.
I think that's quite possible. But also, if you rotate this around, do you kind of see an ant face if you look at it upside down the eyes and the mouth parts.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can see it.
So anyway, Hosey says that some Catholics regard this crab as holy or lucky, and its shells are sometimes used for religious reasons or possibly as good luck charms. I was also reading a bit more about the species in a twenty eleven unsigned article in Asian Scientist magazine called Crucifix Crab caaribdis feriatas spotted in the Straits of Malacca.
So the thing that spurred this article is that in twenty eleven, about a dozen crucifix crabs were caught by a fisherman in the Malaysian state of Malacca, after having not been found there since the nineteen sixties, and news of this catch spread and the fishermen was, according to this reporting, flooded by offers to buy the crabs. I think it's implied that local Catholics wanted them, but I'm not sure exactly who the buyers were. That's just kind
of an inference. The article says, quote, only minimal quantities of the crabs were caught. Many locals don't buy them to eat, but preserve the shell as it is considered sacred,
he told the Malaysian newspaper The Star. And this article goes on to explain the fact that crucifix crabs have mostly disappeared from the area around Malacca in recent decades, and it interviews They interview a local marine biologist who I think doesn't know for sure, but speculates that coastal development has destroyed or degraded the mangrove swamps where these crabs usually live, and so their numbers have been diminished
in the area. But the article also reports on how some Catholics in Goa, India believe that the Crucifix crab is a descendant of the crab from Francis Xavier's miracle story. And then the article cites a scientist at the National Institute of Oceanography in India named Anil Chatterjee who disregards this legend and says that the pigmentation on the shell has a natural cause. It helps the crab survive in
its environment. So I actually wanted to find I was looking is there a scientific paper that gets into studying the adaptive value of the cross shape on the Crucifix crab. Has anybody looked into what it actually does? I did not find any such research, so I don't think there is a specific scientific paper that digs into the cross markings on this crab in particular. But I was reading in general about patterns of coloration on a crab's carapace
and general body coloration patterns. So I'm no expert on this, but after my reading, my best guess is that the cross shape on this crab is part of a general design of spotting and modeling and striping that serves a function known as disruptive coloration. So color patterns on a crab's shell can help the crab hide from predators in its environment. And there are a couple of main strategies that researchers talk about here. One is called color matching
and the other is called disruption. Color matching is when you try to make the top of your shell nearly a solid color that matches the solid color of the background. A big example would here be crabs that live on mud flats. They often have a fairly solid, muddy color on their carapas to camouflage themselves from predators looking down
from above. And then other crabs like the crucifix crab, have these highly varied, sometimes high contrast patterns or patterns that sort of interrupt the edges of the top of the carapace, and these patterns are thought in many cases to protect the crab by disrupting the image of the crab's outline. So, in nature, a lot of predators and hunters hunt by a visual recognition pattern called edge detection, where what they're looking for is a certain kind of
outline that looks like food to them. And so these spotted or striped color patterns kind of break up the predator's ability to notice the outline of the animals, so they don't see an outline that recognize as crab. Instead, they see just a bunch of high contrasts, stripes and spots that probably blend in pretty easily with a heterogeneous substrate below, like maybe rocky tidal pools or gravel pebbles, things like that.
Yeah, as we've discussed on the show before, one of the challenges with understanding how the camouflage of an organism like this actually works is that very often the images that you have of the organism are set against an unnatural background, or at least they's they're out of context, and so therefore it can be a little more challenging to imagine how well they're blending in, because certainly to our eye, when we get in the water with organisms
like this or in their environment, their camouflage often just makes them completely invisible to us. Yeah, and of course we're you know, we're looking for them in a slightly different way and with different gear compared to their natural predators.
But you put them in a just a glass aquarium tank or on top of a table in like a research lab. Instead, the pattern really makes them stand out. It has the opposite effect.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And you can imagine then if you have this this shell with this cross like form on it, and that is, say, on an altar somewhere or on a mantle piece, you're even further removed from the natural context in which that camouflage would be utilized, and therefore you might be more inclined to lean into these ideas that this is a divine marking, This is the Divine communicating to me through the shell of this organ.
Yeah, a crab blessed by the Lord. But I just want to reiterate what I said at the beginning that was speculative about disruptive coloration being the reason, because again I could not find an authoritative scientific source that gives an answer on this. So really, I don't know. That's just my best guess, but.
It would seem to work, or at least not work from an evolutionary perspective.
Yeah.
But anyway, I've got one more thing I want to get into about the legend of the Holy Crab. So I was curious about development in the history of this legend because I was reading about it and kept coming across these different versions of it, I'm like, so, okay,
how did these versions emerge? And I went looking to see if any authors had gone into that subject in depth, and I found it discussed briefly in a famous book from eighteen ninety six called A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by the American historian Andrew Dixon White. So White is an interesting and controversial
figure in the history of science and religion. He was one of the founders of Cornell University, and in this book he advances a very robust to defense of what would come to be known as the conflict thesis. You've probably heard versions of this idea before. In short, it is the claim that there is an unavoidable conflict between science and religion, and that across human history, scientific discovery
has always been stifled by religious dogmatism. The conflict thesis, while clearly true in many particular instances, is not very popular among philosophers and historians of science today as a generalization about history. People who have looked into this subject tend to see it as overly simplistic and usually based
on a cherry picked survey of history. So what I think a lot of these scholars would say White does is he goes through history and focuses on historical cases of conflict between science and religion, especially where religion has stifled or suppressed science, and then just ignores all the cases of neutral interactions or complementarity. Though in partial defense
of the conflict thesis, I think it is wrong. But I think also the opposite view that like science and religion actually exist in perfect harmony, and you know, religion points towards scientific discoveries. Sometimes you hear this from certain religious apologists. I think that would be equally incorrect.
Yeah. Yeah, and then this, of course, this is a much larger topic, but you can certainly get into the nooks and Cranny's obit and talk about like, at the very basis, religion and science are attempting are often attempting to do totally different things. Yeah.
Sometimes they're attempting to do the same thing, but sometimes different things. Yeah. So it's just a complex relationship. And that seems to be the historical consensus now among most people who study this, that it's just a complex relationship with different dynamics depending on time, place, and situation. However, despite not going for White's overall thesis, his section on the history of the miracle craft legend couched within a
general discussion of the miracles of Francis Xavior. I thought was interesting. So the major theme of this section of his book is the tendency for the legends of miracles to evolve and to become more numerous and more miraculous over time. And I think this part is pretty much undeniably true, though it's certainly not unique to the miracles of Francis Xavior and not unique to the miracles of
Catholic saints. I would say in pretty much all contexts, amazing unverifiable stories tend to become more amazing as the years and the tellings go by.
Yeah. I think that matches up even with recent episodes that we've done about different saints and the supposed miracles that they were involved in.
Yeah. But in the specific case of Francis Xavier, White documents numerous specific miracle stories where the earliest accounts are much more modest, Sometimes the earliest acount are not even miraculous at all, and then later accounts of the same events become more and more supernatural and more embellished. So White sets this scene by talking about Xavier's canonization proceedings in Rome in sixteen twenty two. I think that's the year.
This would have been roughly seventy years after Xavier's death and leading up to this. Part of the canonization process is that you have advocates for a person's sainthood, which can only you can only get saintthood after you're dead. So a dead person's sainthood advocates get up and make a case for that, in part by giving testimony about
miracles the person is alleged to have performed. So at Saint Francis Xavier's proceedings, there's a guy named Cardinal Monte who gets up and gives a speech claiming that Francis turned seawater into fresh water so that people could drink it. That came up earlier. That was one of the legends that Mochizuki said may have actually been taken from a local Malaysian legend.
Okay, miraculous desalination.
I like, yeah, then you get some very standard ones. Healing the sick, raising the dead. White talks about how the number of instances of these miracles keep multiplying over time. There's a claim that he was levitated while praying, and then was transformed before a crowd of witnesses, and then finally Quote and that to punish a blaspheming town, he caused an earthquake and buried the offenders in cinders from a volcano. Oh, is that a miracle?
I don't know. That doesn't feel like a miracle to me. Then that I don't know if that should qualify one.
However, White says that the most curious of the miracle stories here is the one we've been talking about, the crucifix in the crab. And this story does show the same pattern of development over time that illustrates with other miracle stories about Xavier. Quote. In its first form, Xavier lost the crucifix in the sea, and the earlier biographers
dwell on the sorrow which he showed in consequence. But the later historians declared that the saint threw the crucifix into the sea in order to steal a tempest, and that after his safe getting to land, a crab brought it to him on the shore. So I was looking at this, and then I went digging in other sources to try to piece together the evolution of this story. I think it's complicated, so I can't get every detail right, but I think there are basically three layers of development
to the legend. You've got first Xavier's contemporary account preserved in his letters, which does not mention any supernatural events at all. There's no stilling of a storm with a crucifix, there's no miracle crab. This early account, directly from the letter is just says there's a storm while he's at sea, and Xavier clutches his crucifix and he prays fervently. And then later you get testimony from the eyewitness that the Portuguese soldier Fausto Rodriguez, and this is several years later,
and it adds new details. This is where we get that Xavier accidentally loses the crucifix while trying to still the storm, and the crucifix is returned by a crab. And then later still you have biographers playing up the weather control aspects and making that more stupendous. The later biographers say that Xavier successfully calms the storm by intentionally throwing the crucifix into the sea, and then same detail,
it is later returned by the crab. So the crab element seems to come out in a middle stage of development, you know, in this early eyewitness account by Fausto Rodriguez, but it's not in the earliest account from the letters. And then later on we get the really playing up of the intentional effective weather control by way of crucifix bomb.
Yeah, I mean then the mere fact that he doesn't mention it himself. I mean a granted, you know, busy guy, maybe he didn't have time to write everything down. But if a crab ever brought you a crucifix, I feel like that would be one of the most noteworthy things that ever happened in your life. Like, if it happened to me, I would never stop talking about.
It your diary. Yeah, going straight to the journals for this one, telling everybody I know.
Like, even if you were a complete atheist and this happened, you would still talk about it all the time. Yeah.
Oh yeah, it wouldn't be you wouldn't think it was supernatural. You'd just be like, that's really amazing. Yeah, yeah, what.
Were the chances, et cetera.
But anyway, so this story got me thinking about why there is such a strong tendency for hagiographic details, you know, details about the miracles of saints to develop like this. And I was wondering if it's sort of two different tendencies coming together. One is an omnipresent natural tendency to make amazing stories more and more amazing over time when you retell them. You know, would we started with that like I went fishing. The fish gets bigger, bigger every
time you tell the story. But then I wonder whether the other half of this is that there's a normal limiting principle on this tendency to keep exaggerating stories over time, and that limiting principle is a type of conscience, a kind of sense of honesty or moral obligation to be accurate. You feel bad, you know, you might feel bad if
you realize you're exaggerating at all. You might do so, you might exaggerate unconsciously, but you might feel bad if you're doing it at all, Or you might feel bad if you exaggerate too much. And I wonder if this moral limiting principle is largely removed when we feel like we're doing something morally good by telling an amazing story. So if you're, say a Christian recounting the good deeds or miracles of a saint, these stories provide evidence of the power of God from your point of view, or
they help spread the Gospel and convert the unconverted. So from your point of view, the amazing of the miracle story contributes directly to a good cause. So I wonder if the sense of goodness that you feel is accomplished by allowing the story to grow in amazingness can kind of overwhelm the moral limits we normally feel on exaggeration.
Yeah, I could see that being part of it. Certainly, you can also tie in various other things we've discussed before, like how memory retrieval can lead to the change of the memory and alteration of the memory. And then like even just the telling of the thing. You know, certainly you can embellish it each time on purpose, but also as we tell and retell stories, those stories do change, and maybe they do become a little we punch it up a little bit as we go.
Yeah. Absolutely, I think it's undeniable that there are some types and degrees of embellishment and exaggeration that occur unconsciously. But I do wonder about some big leaps, like when new concrete details of a story emerge, like when an earlier version of the story doesn't have a crab bringing across out of the ocean, and a later version does.
At that point, I start to wonder where does that detail come from, because that it seems hard for me to imagine that that is just an unintentional exaggeration or embellishment, because the concrete image of the crab has to come
from somewhere. I wonder if it could be unintentional if years later you are mixing up different stories in your head, maybe something like that, Like this comes back to the idea of the uh you know, the legend of the Buddhist the Buddhist figure who gets the the icon back from the ocean from an octopus. Like maybe having heard a version of that story and then having had this experience, you kind of accidentally combine them in your brain. Yeah.
Yeah, Like I can imagine a scenario where Xavior finds the cross that he lost washed up on the shore, which in of itself would be miraculous luck, but then recollection of this gets combined with a local folk tale about another sea creature, you know, restoring ownership of a particular holy icon. Yeah, you can see how these things
could come together and merge. I feel like the crab is is a slightly more believable choice though, right, I mean, because we do see crabs coming out of the ocean with more regularity as compared to the octopus.
That okay, So I have different thoughts, and this set of thoughts may bring us back to a topic I mentioned earlier. I feel like, just based on what I know about crabs versus octopuses, you'd be more likely to have an octopus carrying around a strange human artifact because octopuses are very curious, they like to play.
You know, some do do some form of possible tool use as well. I don't know that they would be using a silvery crucifix for anything, but it's not impossible. They're very tactile.
Yeah, whether or not the octopus is using it for any that would be amazing. If they saw the octopus crying open clamshells with the crucifix, I mean, that's wonderful. But no, like if it just brought up and I guess in the octopus version of the story, it wasn't a crucifix. It was it was an image of this god, this the Buddhist figure. But yeah, you know, a human made artifact is unusual in the octopus's environment, and the curiosity might just lead it to kind of want to
play with it and manipulate it. We see that in octopuses in captivity certainly, So yeah, I wonder about that. But then again, we do sometimes see crabs just grip something in the claw and carry it around. We've all seen the picture of the crab holding a knife.
That's true.
But maybe this should cause us to come back to crabs carrying objects in a subsequent part of the series to get to the bottom of what's going on there.
All right, sounds good? All right? Before we close up the episode, I think I'm going to move on to a single topic here we're going to deal with. This is going to be a much shorter exploration, but I want to talk briefly about something that is sometimes referred to as crab theory. I don't know about you, Joe, This is some I somehow missed out on this concept entirely until I was looking around for crab related topics
to discuss in these episodes. So we might have to come back to this one in greater detail much later on, because the psychology of it gets a bit complicated. The cultural aspects of it getting a bit complicated, and it spreads out in a number of directions. I'm also a little uncertain about the origin of the idea of crab theory. I've seen it suggested that the term has origins in the Philippines. I've seen a Filipino feminist author, Notchka Rosca
singled out as a possible originator. But I've also seen it sort of claimed culturally in other directions. Like I saw I believe it's a BBC article that briefly mentioned it as being a Scottish thing, you know, whether it originated. They didn't make the claim that the Scottish originated it, but it was like, like, hey, Scott's talk about this
from time to time. I believe the term was also popularized by a twenty ten episode of The Boondocks, the animated series, but I couldn't find much in the way of clarity on any of this. But assuming an origin in the Philippines, it would seem that the metaphor travels easily because first of all, the behavior and attitudes it attempts to describe are universal, and number two, you just need some understanding of crabs for it to make sense.
And again, crabs must be watched. We crabs are just fascinating. We can't help but watch what they're doing. You feel like you've got to decode the scuttling. Yeah, So what is this crab theory? Basically it boils down to this. If you have a bucket of crabs, any crab that attempts to climb too high and escape from that bucket will be pulled down by the other crabs. So the human situation here can be You can roll it out
in a few different ways. So, first of all, there's the broad idea that humans are engaging in various forms of jealousy, gatekeeping, social boundary maintenance, and competition of different varieties, and therefore may act in a way like this, this kind of this kind of attitude. Well, if I can't win, nobody can win. If I can't climb, no one will climb. If I can't escape, no one will escape. So that sort of thing. But then you also have this bucket
element to it. The bucket is an imposed environment. So the crabs were put in this bucket, and so the bucket can represent all manner of groups, communities, industries, cultures, social constructs, and especially any of these influenced by colonialism.
So especially this would apply in an artificialvironment that was not made for people to thrive in, but which into which they've been put.
Right, Like, you could take the crab theory scenario and you could, you could you could roll it out for a workplace and say like, hey, our workplace has this like toxic environment. It is like a crab bucket where everybody that is in this crab bucket, we just won't let anybody rise up. We keep pulling them down. And it says it says as much about the environment that we've been placed in as as it does about human.
Nature, right, because crabs don't naturally live in a bucket, and so the bucket environment maybe bringing out behaviors that are shown in the bucket, but wouldn't necessarily be shown if the crabs were just crawling around in their natural environment.
Right right. So so yeah, this seems to have this metaphorse, seems to have traveled rather well and again has been kind of like picked up in different areas by different people. And again it ties in crabs, which everyone likes to watch. But it does raise the question our crabs really like this? And I think broadly you can say yes and no.
So many crabs absolutely are solitary and competitive competitive. You know, individual humans can exhibit these qualities as well, but as a whole we are a highly social species and crabs are not. Still, some crabs species engage in various forms of at least limited cooperation, and we've talked about at least one of these before in the show, and that's the hermit crab vacancy chains. Hardly altruistic, but the process
benefits other crabs. So, just to remind everyone, sometimes called the congo line cooperation, where you have hermit crabs who have these shells that are not created, not grown by their own bodies. These are pilfered from various mollusks and they eventually outgrow them. They have to molt and then they have to get a new shell. But all the other crab are doing this at the same time, and so it creates these situations where a crab leaves one shell and then that creates a vacancy for another crab
to level up. And there's kind of a musical chair as that takes place, and you can you can certainly view this as a form of social cooperation, but you know, you have to strip away a lot of the human definitions of cooperation to get there.
Yeah, I think some people claim that this is similar to what they think are the beneficial aspects of market economies, right where you can have like a you know, a vacancy created in some sense, either like housing vacancy or job vacancy or things like that. When a sort of spot opens up within an economic zone, somebody can move into that spot, and they create a vacancy when they leave their spot, so somebody else can move into that.
And so even though the individual actors are just acting in their own best interest, it sort of creates a broad benefit for many different parties.
Right right now. In addition to this example, studies have also found that male fiddler crabs will appear to help neighboring crabs defend against their territory against intruders, so not out of the goodness of their tiny crab hearts, but because it suits their interests as well. So it's kind of selective coalitions that are formed among these crabs. So,
I don't know, it's interesting to think about that. There's certainly the case there's a very pessimistic view that you can take, and you can say, well, anytime humans engage in cooperation, they're still doing it for selfish interest and humans are essentially crabs. You can make that argument, but I think at at the end of the day, you still have to acknowledge that humans are a highly social creature. Crabs are not. But some forms of cooperation do emerge among crabs.
Yeah, in the case of humans, I would not argue that everything is ultimately selfish, but it's also impossible to disprove that is, how can you ever proved that there's not secretly an underlying selfish motivation for some rout you know, So that's just kind of a yeah, a matter of interpretation, I think. Yeah, But similarly with crabs, Yeah, you can see these situations in which some type of mutual benefit
occurs from cooperation. So in the crab world, it is in fact not always just just universal punishing chaos and destruction of your neighbors. There is some mutual benefit that occurs exactly.
Yeah, but it does make you wonder if there were to be a situation where a crab rescued a silver crucifix from the bottom of the ocean and returned it to its human owner on a on a far flung shore. I mean that would what is in't it for the crab? There nothing in the story about the crab being rewarded with, you know, a fresh piece of rotting fish or anything of that nature. In this story, I guess the crab just did it out of the goodness of its heart and out of its devotion to the divine. So I'm
not sure how we would beyond that. I'm not sure how we would really compare these two examples.
The original story, I believe, does not say what kind of crab it is, so the later association with the crucifix crab species the charybdis feriatis, is a subsequent connection people have made. But if it were the crucifix crab that returned to the crucifix, people do say that the crucifix crab is an especially aggressive crab species, So maybe the returning of the crucifix is some kind of veiled threat.
Oh yeah, or you know, in some of these tellings it did cause Xavier and his friend to lay upon the beach. Maybe that's when the crabs swarm and they're like, let's get them.
It works. Oh that's right, Yes, you do a miracle, so you get them praying, and that's your opportunity to strike.
The crabs are like you see a jess to it. You give them a crucifix, they'll lay down and then you can have whatever you want.
So does that do it for part one of the Crab Bag?
I think so. I think we've we've hit our time for today. But we have some other lovely crab related nuggets to pull out for tomorrow, some other specimens, some other scientific and cultural examples. Well, not for tomorrow, for the day after tomorrow.
You get it.
Yeah, So join us next time as we return to the Crab grab Bag. Just a reminder to everyone out there again, especially if you're new to the show. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Wednesdays we do a short form episode, and on Fridays rather we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.