From the Vault: Because It Is My Heart, Part 2

to speak. Few are they now that farther can see than the moment when Othen shall meet the Wolf.

In one telling of that, this kind of goes back to episodes from last year that will be rerunning shortly. In one telling of this, avac he has the dragon's heart. He cooks it over the fire too, and so he can eat it, and in doing so he burns his hand on those delicious blood juices of the heart, and he instinctively licks his hand because he's been burned. And the taste of the dragon's blood is said to give him the ability to understand all languages.

in the last episode. But he spends a lot of time discussing the Norse idea of the heart and what they thought the heart did, and kind of like the way that these ideas affected expectations of physiology. So as Hoystod discusses, the Norse saw the heart as the seat of courage, which you know, that squares with a lot of other traditions as well, and a lot of the ways we talk about the heart metaphorically today, but it

was also seen as the seed of the mind. Now, obviously we get into Norse culture, and there's there's a lot in Norse culture beyond the warrior ethos and warrior culture.

But Hoystot is pretty quick in this book to say like there was there was a certain ruthless edge to Norse culture as well, and we see that in the way they treated the heart and what Once more, in reading this, I was reminded again of that C. S. Lewis quote that we discussed in a previous episode of about the unloving heart, how it becomes this dark thing and an encased thing that is that is cold and and and unflappable, but also you know, it's it cuts

you off from from any like legitimate feeling and connection.

or its cause. So we're talking about a heart that is shriveled, that is cold, that doesn't have a lot of blood in it, and it doesn't quiver. So in the fust Broad saga, this is the saga of the foster Brothers, or the saga of the Sworn Brothers. This is a tale of the eleventh century surviving in a trio of I think each one is incomplete thirteenth century manuscripts, and it's in this particular tale it's said that following the death of a brave warrior named tor Gear, they

take the warrior, they lay him out. He's like laid out on a stone or a table or something, and they open up his guest so that it could be seen what a brave man's heart truly looks like, because they were curious, is it, like they say, is a brave courageous man's heart? Is it small? Is it cold? Is it shriveled? Is it like the heart of the grinch? Before it grows three sizes. M Is it in fact free of the blood that would cause it to quiver and make one a coward? Or is it? Indeed you

have the small, firm, cold heart of a warrior. And in this account, supposedly this is exactly what they find. They cut him open and they say, yes, it's all true, like look at this heart. Behold this shrivelled cold heart of a warrior. And so hoist I discusses this a bit. He he references some other accounts. There's a one of a Norse warrior heart from the hell Gees saga. This is a quick quote from that quote. Fearless was he

bold for battle? Bone hard, his heart within his breast. Now, he stresses, in this case this is more of a metaphor than anatomical commentary. But he cites the work of a Norse his story in a named Claus von See on the idea that courage and cowardice can still be thought of in Norse thought to stem from quote purely

anatomical relations. So to quote of this quote. The important thing for the present argument is that the metaphors mentioned refer to the anatomical composition of the heart, and that they see in its smallness, hardness, and absence of blood a cause of courage, and not only a symptom of it.

hammer and so forth and some other magical items. They don't want to go up into a direct battle against them, so they're like, build a giant, and then they have to give it a heart, but no, no hearts are available, so they put a mayor's heart in there, and it doesn't work, like it just throws off the whole construct but there and then.

is something about the heart that that powers everything. It is the center of the being, even if contrary to this one leg of Norse thought, it has nothing to do with one's mind exactly.

So the digestive system has influence on how the brain works, how you feel, how you think, and the cardiovascular system does as well, your heart and your lungs and all that.

So I think there is for example, I mean, I think courage and cowardice would be a great example, because that would involve the fight or flight response, which of course is based in the nervous system, but then involves feedback loops from organs throughout the body, and it does indeed include regulation of the circulatory and respiration systems, so in a way, you are sort of getting feedback from the heart when you're feeling fear.

as of Oden. So we're going to move on from most of the Norse examples here, but we are going to get into another European example of heart removal, one that I wasn't familiar with until basically researching these episodes.

Marie Luis Stigsrensen and Jessica Hughes. And the specific chapter in question is called heart Burial in Medieval and early post Medieval Central Europe by Estella Weiss Crachie, and I looked her up. She's a scholar affiliated with the Austrian

Academy of Sciences and the Austrian Archaeological Institute. So between the introduction of Christianity in Europe and roughly the nineteenth century, the usually near universal ideal for burial practices in Europe in Christian Europe was straightforward burial of the body whole with flesh intact. And there are exceptions to this we're going to talk about, but that was basically the norm.

And this could be connected in part to Christian beliefs about the afterlife, because strangely, today, I think if you ask most Christians what they believe happens after death, they will say that their immaterial soul separates from the body and goes off to live in Heaven with God for eternity. And under this way of thinking, the body is not important. It's just sort of the matter that the soul uses to live through, and the afterlife will not have a

material basis. But this is not what the earliest Christians buy and large believed, and this is not what's described

in the earliest Christian texts. They instead speak of what theologians often call a general resurrection, that at the end of the age, all of the dead, the righteous and the unrighteous will be resurrected in bodily form to face judgment, though canfusingly, the apostle Paul writes that it will be a kind of changed bodily form, because the present earthly flesh and bones that we have now are perishable, and so they can't inherit the kingdom. And yet we will

be raised in bodily forms. So when our bodies are raised from the dead, we will be given new spiritual flesh, which is imperishable.

This leads to a great digression on the implications for cannibalism in early Christian thought, because like, okay, what if you are saved, but then you are killed and eaten by a cannibal and your body becomes part of the body of the cannibal, what will happen at the resurrection? Or what if two cannibals eat a Christian and then together the two cannibals have a baby. The baby will be made of parts of the Christian that the parents ate, So how will God retrieve the bits of the Christian

from the baby's body and so forth? Like Thomas Aquinas participated in discussions about topics of this sort, and it's

a hoot. But anyway, one interesting area we see the theological implications of Europe shifting from mostly Pagan to mostly Christian is in attitudes toward funeral practices, specifically toward cremation, because apart from the literal implications for the possibility of future resurrection, and there were different ideas about this, you know, some Christian theologians did not place as much importance on the integrity of the body, you know, some just didn't

think it was a big deal. I think Augustine didn't think it was a big deal. But anyway, cremation was not only a way of destroying the body, including in a way destroying the bones, but also just sort of it was it was culturally associated with paganism. It was something that the Pagans did, and thus it was viewed as alien and unholy by Christian rulers. So, for example, in the seven eighties, and I've seen two different years given for this, seven eighty five and seven eighty nine.

I'm not sure why the difference or which one is correct, but sometime in the seven eighties, the Christian king Charlemagne, who eventually style himself as the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, banned the practice of cremation of the dead as practiced by the Saxons. And I was looking for a quote of this edict. I found it quoted in something called European Paganism The Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages by Ken Dowden, published in twenty thirteen,

and this quotes it in translation as follows. If anyone causes the body of a dead man to be consumed by flame according to the right of the Pagans, and shall reduce its bones to ashes, he shall suffer capital punishment. So that's harsh. Cremating a friend or family member's body is punishable by death. So you get the idea of how strongly intact burial was was linked to cultural and religious orthodoxy in much of Christian Europe.

For example, practical reasons would include space real estate. There was the common practice of removal of bones from a burial place to be taken away to a charnel house because you know, there's just not enough space for all the bodies in the cemetery.

as possible. But sometimes this was a little more involved than that and could be thought to violate the integrity of the body as a whole. Sometimes it involved removing things or even more extreme forms of processing, and these practices get weirder than you might imagine. So some of what we're talking about here is just disembowelment, removal of the internal organs from the abdominal cavity. Weiscrazi says that this became common in the Frankish Empire in the eighth

and ninth centuries. So you take the guts out, or take all the internal organs out. That might have some kind of implication for preserving the rest of the body for a certain period of time to do something with. But in the twelfth century we see the rise of a practice called most teutonicus, which translates to the German custom. What is this custom of the Germans? It was boiling the honored dead.

The body would obviously rot if it were transported intact, or you know, by cart or even by ship, trying to take it all the way back to Germany or Australia where where the warrior came from. So people came up with the solution of making that warrior into a

bone broth. You would have crusader stock. So imagine Conrad here dies in battle trying to sack a Muslim city in Syria, and his servants or his kinsmen get his body and they boil it until you can be boiled in water or in like vinegar or wine, or I think sometimes in milk, but in some kind of liquid. You boil it until the flesh starts to separate from the bones, and then somehow you get the bones clean I guess if you boil it long enough, just basically

everything will float off. Or you could boil it for a period and then it might require some additional scraping with sharp instruments, but you would boil first to get the meat off, and then you'd have clean, hygienic bones that could be taken back to the estate in Europe for deposition.

I was looking for a translation of the original text of this edict as well, and so what I came across was part of a papal bull from thirteen hundred called bold A Sepulturus, which was quoted in a paper called The Popes and the History of anatomy by James J. Walsh, published in nineteen oh four in the Medical Library and Historical Journal, and the translation of the Papal Bull says, person's cutting up the bodies of the dead barbarously cooking

them in order that the bones being separated from the flesh, maybe carried for burial into their own countries, are by the very fact excommunicated. So I think that means no further discussion necessary if you do it automatic excommunication.

Why don't we just do the messy part here and speed it up a bit and then bring the bones back clean.

And though this is a side issue, I did just want to quickly make note of it, because the main point of this paper by Walsh is to refute an apparently long propagated claim that this papal bull from thirteen hundred from Boniface the eighth forbade dissection for the purpose of anatomical research. So a lot of early histories of science said, oh, we could have learned so much through

anatomical dissection if not for this Papal bull. Walsh argues that it was actually neither intended to have this purpose nor understood as such, and it was explicitly about boiling crusaders to bring their bones home from foreign lands.

of the fifteenth century. However, a related but different practice is the focus of this chapter, and that is heart burial, or the separation of the heart from the body after death for burial, usually in a different place. Now in some cases, various types of evisceration, including removal and separate treatment of the heart as well as other internal organs, may have been practical in the same sense as the

boiling of a crusader's bones. It was in some cases a practical solution to deal with the tricky situation of a death far away from home and the inevitable onset of decay in an era without freezers or modern embalming techniques. So I was looking for one big example of this, and I came across what I thought was a great one, the story of King Henry the First of England, which

is interesting in a number of ways. My main source on this is some materials from the Reading Museum in the UK, and the reason for the location of the Ready Museum will become apparent. Minute but tiny bit of background. Henry the First, also known as Henry bow Clerk, which means good scholar, was He was a very ambitious guy. He was a kind of a Game of Thrones character. He was the fourth son of William the Conqueror, originally without a domain rulership of his own because he's the

fourth son. But Henry became king of England after his eldest brother, William the Second, died in eleven hundred, and then Henry made some moves. He leapfrogged over his older his other older brother Robert, to claim the English throne, and then he went out and seized control of the Duchy of Normandy in northern France from that same brother, Robert in eleven o six.

but they're sometimes called eels. I think this death has been interpreted as maybe food poisoning, but it's not known for sure, as somehow it is insistently a hilarious idea to me, This conqueror king dies from just like eating eating lampreys until he died. But from the Anglo Saxon Chronicles. This is quoted on the website of the Museum of Reading. Quote that very year the king died in Normandy the

next day after the feast of Saint Andrew. Then this land immediately grew dark because every man who could immediately robbed another. Then his son and his friends took and brought his body to England and buried it at Reading. I like that note everybody immediately committing crimes. I don't buy it, but who knows. Okay, so, but they want to bring his body back to Redding. That makes sense, But it's not quite as simple as that. Henry had

given instructions to take his body to Redding. He did want his body to be laid to rest within the abbey at Reading, where he had personally found it a sizeable monastery, but that was all the way over across the English Channel. Reading is a town a bit to the west of London, so it's inland as well. It's not like right on the coast, And apparently at the

time of his death was bad. There was a winter gale blowing, making travel across the channel a treacherous proposition, and according to our chronicles, Henry started rotting and smelling bad very quickly. So instead of trying to take him to Redding as is, a different plan was followed. Henry's body was taken to the cathedral at Ruan, which was nearby Normandy, where it was embalmed in the following manner. He was vivisected and his heart and intestines were removed

and buried separately at a priory in France. So here's a case of heart removal and burial along with the intestines at a different place than the rest of the body. His brain and his eyes were also removed. Not sure what happened to them, somebody might be I'm not sure. The rest of his flesh was I think slashed open and rubbed with salt inside out as a preservative, and

he was smeared with a kind of perfume. Finally, the body was wrapped in an ox hide that was sown shut, and that part the rest of that body, the salted body inside the oxide, was taken back to the abbey at Reading for burial. But despite these precautions, Henry's retainers noticed during the journey back to England that the ox hides were leaking quote black fluid all over the place. It is gross.

chapter I was talking about, whatever the reasons involved. The author here writes that this type of practice was fairly common for the upper classes in Western Europe, starting it around the time of Henry's reign.

the French treated them with great respect. The English aristocracy generally favored a double interment, one for the body, the other for the heart, while French aristocracy often requested that the corpses be buried in three separate places body, heart, and entrails. Now to end that quote, but summarize some

other comments. A big focus of this chapter is about the practice of heart burial in Central Europe, so in mostly German speaking areas of Europe, where it was much less common than it was in France and England, though there were some examples. There's one specific exception, which is that it was a standing tradition of the prince bishops of Wurtzburg. Wurtzburg is a city in the German state of Bavaria, and these prince bishops established a tradition with

a three part burial. The corpse would go off to Wurtzburg Cathedral, the intestines go to the castle church of Marienburg, and the heart goes off to the monastery of Ebrach. And in these cases it would have been probably for or not probably almost certainly for mainly symbolic reasons rather

than practical ones. And what were these symbolic reasons, while she writes in her conclusion that the primary symbolic purpose of the division of the corpse in both Central and Western Europe in the Middle Ages was a desire to quote duplicate the body quote by physically fragmenting corpses, high ranking individuals could express loyalty to more than one site and comply with a range of political, religious, and social demands.

founding abbey, what can you do? Or maybe you're a duke and you want to be in part at your duchy, but also you are on some brutal military campaign and you want to be buried in part, you know, in the Holy Land where you're conquering cities. Is so what do you do? You duplicate your body, allowing it to be buried in both places. And one common way of doing that, especially in Western Europe, mainly England and France, was burying the body in one and the heart in

the other. A very common example here is English nobles having their hearts transported separately to or from the Holy Land. But the author also writes that in the post medieval period, such as seventeenth century Catholic Europe, the symbolic significance of separate heart burial becomes more complicated. Quote, the heart turns into something more than just a representative of a person. It becomes a political artifact which was used to renew

spirituality and promote new types of religious beliefs. So a heart in this case, the way I'm understanding this is that it could be used more kind of like the relics of saints, or like a religious icon that was dedicated to maybe some kind of Catholic counter reformation movement that would you know, people could look on it and meditate on it, and it would or not the heart itself maybe, but you know, like a marker of its deposition somewhere, and that would inspire them to feel certain

religious feelings.

of what she calls social distinction. So you know, whose corpse gets transported around after death, usually a powerful and wealthy person.

So maybe if earlier transportation of different parts of the body around was a sign of like, wow, you're rich enough to go like lead people to fight in the Crusades, and it was just a practical necessity there, maybe later on, and it doesn't have any of those practical implications, but it's just like, well, that's what rich, important, powerful people used to do, so maybe we should do that. Also, division of the corpse was more expensive than a regular burial.

So if you are say, rising up through the classes, like if you were somebody who was formerly more of a commoner but you got appointed to a to like an administrative position somewhere within the government, you could try to signal your rising class status with some kind of different funeral practice, maybe division of your body and deposition

at different places. So it becomes a form of conspicuous consumption, a way to show off the fact that you have money to create the appearance of higher social class or prestige.

a big difference. Another big difference here comes back to what we were talking about in the past episode about the symbolism of the heart. There appear to be differences in the understanding of the unique symbolism in the heart in western versus Central Europe. So example, here there was a twelfth century Austrian figure named Hadmar of kun Ring, who, according to the author, is the only known German speaker ever to ask for his heart to be transported back

home from a crusade. Because remember, among German speakers, what's the solution there? The German speakers like the most Teutonicus, the German custom may in the bone broth out of the crusader.

but she ends up writing quote. It seems that for the English the heart was important because it represented humanity's in her being. Among medieval German speaking people, especially the prince bishops, who represented both secular and religious powers, other body parts such as bones or arms could also fulfill that function. And I thought that was so interesting. It makes me wonder about the ore of this difference in

metaphor and an idioms. So if in medieval England it's commonly understood that your heart, the organ that pumps blood, is the symbol of your soul, you know, it's the most important seat of your character and your integrity, but in German speaking lands it might just as well be your bones or your right hand that symbolize that core part of you. What linguistic or cultural or literary differences in those different language traditions might have caused this, you know?

five fingers. You know, like there is something about the hand that in the treatment given by these various horror films, and all of them are kind of interconnected and ultimately stemming from some of the same source material, but there is this idea in them that the hand retains something of the original individual, and therefore you can it's really not that much of a stretch for even a very heart centric or cardiocentric I'm not sure what you would

you would call this a very heart centric culture to realize that, Yeah, you can easily imagine how the hand could end up getting all of the attention instead, because we can see examples of that just in our various fictions and folk tellings.

You who? Yahoo is the website? You who is the chocolate beverage, though there are other brands of the of the chocolate beverage as well, But yeah, you who boiled? And you who?

it with us. We'd love to hear from you. I know, just in putting this episode together, run across a few other monsters and creatures from various folklores and folk traditions, so I may have to come back to some of those maybe on future episodes of The Monster Fact. Reminder for everyone out there that this is stuff to blow your mind. We're primarily a science podcast with our core episodes like this one on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on

Mondays we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do Monster Factor Artifact, and on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film such as The Beast with five fingers. That's about a crawling hand or Returnity Evil Dead, which well it's also Return of the Blind Dead, depending on which title you want to go in. That has to do with undead templars coming back to live.

So some of those have touched on some of the ideas that we discussed in this episode.