From the Vault: Cupid's Leaden Arrow

over the years? You get to learn all about the culinary virtues of lead. Don't cook with lead, but you'll find out why in the episode. So let's jump right in there. From his quiver full of shafts, two arrows? Did he take of sundry works to one causes love? The other doth hits slake? That causes love is all of gold with point, full, sharp and bright. That chase is love is blunt? Who steal with leadin? Head is dight? Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how stuff

weren't dot Com? Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and so obviously we're talking about Cupid today. That's right, it's Valentine's Day, is it? Yes? Is it actually Valentine's Yes, actual Valentine's Day. Okay, yeah, so we figured what we gotta we gotta do some sort of Valentine's episode. We had the the episode where we talked to Tomorrow Heart previously,

but this is the day itself Towers of Snail Sex. Yeah, so it seemed proper to get a little mythological here as we kick off this episode and to turn to that mythological figure that got of romantic love, Cupid, the creepy, smooth baby who shoots arrows with heart tips. Yes, now that the reading at the top of the episode was was Ovid. That was from the Metamorphosis, the Golden Translation, So that was how you get words like dita, which

means clothed or equipped. I had to look that one up. Yeah, it might not be completely clear, but what Ovid is basically saying is, hey, Cupid has two different arrows that he may pull from his quiver. You often forget this, or maybe he never even learned it in the first place. Well, right, if you're just going off of cheesy Valentine state cards.

You just think of that cartoon baby, and like you said, the arrows have just kind of a goofy cartoon heart at the end, and cupids launch and those at people and making them falling cartoon love with people. Yeah, well, you tend to not think of Cupid's arrow as literally being an arrow that strikes with force and penetrates the flesh. I guess we are to understand it that way, at

least the ancients did. Like there's this poem by Anna Creon that Robert and I were talking about before the episode where it's not actually that great of a poem. I don't know if it's reading, but it makes this joke about Cupid gets stung by a bee and he starts crying and his mother I guess this would be Aphrodite or Venus maybe comes to him and is trying to console him and says, uh, you know, you're crying about being stung by a bee, but you shoot people

with arrows all the time. That must hurt more shot through the heart. Um. Yeah, so he so he has two different arrows that he he chooses from when he decides to nail somebody one of these arrows, as the as Ovid says, is tipped in gold with a sharp point and bright right, and so that's the that's the

love arrow, that is the romantic love arrow. But then he has this leaden arrow, which it sounds like it's it's probably not an arrow head composed entirely of lad for reasons will explain, but it is at least coded or tipped in lead somehow well. And it also says that it's blunt, meaning I assume it is not meant to penetrate, but maybe strikes more like a like a bean bag gun. Yeah, like just to brain you with this dense leaden arrowhead. Yeah, just to just smack you hard.

And then it also it imparts aversion, so like it hits you, and now you you want to you want to not be around somebody. I guess, right. This seems that this seems to be the most popular interpretation of the leaden arrows power though I was looking around, uh, and I did see at least one description saying that the leaden arrow had to do with set with sensual passion. But I don't think that's the predominant interpretation. It's certainly not the one that we're going to spend much time

with here today because sensual passion. There are other gods for that. Uh, you know, Cupid's domain is more about that that that that romantic passion, the arrows or or the philos or I lose track of what love is. What in Greek philodough your love. Um, yeah, we'll be we'll be getting into the Greek and Roman stuff shortly, okay, but yes we're gonna be talking about Cupid. And I do I do encourage everyone to maybe he put aside the more cherubic interpretations of of Cupid as we discuss

this figure, because we have to remember he is a god. Um. He is capable of of of wrecking people's lives with his mischief. And he's not always depicted as a as a baby. He's he's often he's usually depicted as youthful, certainly, and that may be a male youth or a boy. He's very often and you know, depicted naked or nearly so. And sometimes he's blindfolded as well. I think it's blind right,

Oh yeah, I didn't think of that. Well. I think he's often depicted as a baby just because if he were an adult, he would be a horrifying, gross creep right, Well, they're still there's STI always room to find Cupid creepy for sure. All right, Well who is Cupid? Where did

he come from? In the pantheon and the mythology? Okay, so Cupid is the Roman variant of the Greek god Arrows, the prime evil god of love, a son of chao Us, though in later traditions he has depicted as a son of Aphrodite, who is the Roman Venus, whose goddess of sexual love and beauty. And as far as the father goes, it's all across the board. They're very different tellings. Sometimes

it's Zeus, sometimes it's it's Aries. There's at least one version where it's it's it seems like it's Vulcan, the god of the forge. But in but then a lot of stories have it have Hermes as the father, who of course is the Roman Mercury. So it's a real Mari show. Yes, yeah, you can very much imagine that there being a lot of drama around this. But he's a god of passion and love but also a fertility

to a certain extent as well. Now, in Roman traditions, Cupid is largely described as a son of Venus and Mercury, combining their roles into that of a divine messenger of love. Okay, so Mercury is the messenger, Aphrodite is love. So he brings you the love signals, the he's he's the radar of God. Yeah, don't you? So you can't really hate the messenger, right, I guess that's part of the story

here as well. Now he's often depicted as this kind of trubic creature like we describe, but also sometimes is more of a you know, in an androgeneous, youthful figure, sometimes clad in armor, because I guess love is also a battlefield, and he's sometimes a mischief maker other times generous patron of love. His targets include both mortals and other gods and uh. As always, the versions of the myth very with the teller and the time. But we certainly want to to tell the major Cupid story. We'll

tell me the story Robert. Alright. So his mother again is Venus, and Venus has is subject to bouts of jealousy pretty much like all of them, the major gods in the pantheon, right, and so she one day she has had enough of this beautiful mortal by the name of Psyche. She's just too too lovely. She's so lovely that other mortals are afraid to approach her. And in

Venus isn't having it. She tasks her son Cupid and says, go to this woman, shoot her with a golden arrow of love, and then make her fall in love with the first thing she sees, because that's the power of the arrow in this, in this interpretation of it. And she adds, make sure that the next thing she sees is the most hideous creature imaginable. I don't care what it is, usual imagination. She falls in love with the font papyrus. That would have been good. Um, so keep it.

Keep it. Goes down to Earth to do this, but he can't quite bring himself to finish the task, though he was certainly okay with the plan enough to trick her parents into abandoning her on a desolate hilltop so that she could wed a monster, but as far as actually yeah, because she's taken. The Psyche is taken to this hill and here you go. Sorry, the gods want you to marry a monster. It's gonna happen. See you later, because you know you do what do what the gods

say or her? But then he can't actually shoot her with arrows, so instead he pricks himself with the golden arrow and then gazes upon Psyche, falls in love with her, and so he takes her away, sets her up in a protected place like a palace, somewhere where he can visit her safely, but only in darkness. And then but then one night she cast light upon him and she learns his identity, spilling wax on him in the process,

and he flees. So Psyche is distraught. She's she's in love with this this god, this beautiful young god boy. So she searches for him, and finally Venus agrees to hand him over, but only if she completes a series of trials. Oh yeah, never a good sign in a myth. Right now, you get the feeling that a lot of these trials might be tricks. Yes, and indeed they are. Uh, the the exact trials can vary with the telling, but

this is the basic roll out here. First of all, she has to sort a massive pile of seeds in a sing gold night, and uh, fortunately some ants help her. Oh that's a great variation on all the tweety birds and scugs and the snow white story. Yeah, they'll come in and help with the chores. Now it's ants and

who knows, maybe Spider's pitch in a bit. Well. The next task is that she has to fetch the golden wool from a like a monstrous sheep, like a kind of sheep that disembowels anyone who gets near it, and a swarm of cockroaches. A sister, no actually a river god helps her out um and helps her acquire the woolf So she turns that in. But then she has to venture into the underworld and acquire a drop of

the Queen of the Underworld's beauty. Oh yeah, so uh Cupid, it scenes ends up sort of cluing her in, sends her some signals and was going to the underworld isn't easy, right, Yeah, it's it's a dangerous proposition. So Cupid clues her in, you know, secret messages, letting her know, make sure you bring coins for torone and treats for a service, important things that bring along. Right, So she does this, She wins that drop, brings it back in a golden box,

and brings it to the surface. She's on her way to deliver it to Venus, but then she decides, well, I'm going to steal a little bit of that beauty from the box for myself. And then she discovers the boxes full of sleep. Sleep comes over her, Cupid comes to her way and wakes her up, gives her the nectar of the gods and makes her a god as well the embodiment of the soul, and she later gives birth to pleasure. That's a heck of a story. Oh yeah,

there are various treatments of the story. The various you know, additional stories such as Beauty and the Beast take this basic structure and then uh, you know, employ it in a slightly different manner. But yeah, that's the major Cupid narrative. But there's also a fun one that employs his arrows in an interesting way in which both of them, this time both of them as he messes with the god Apollo. So Apollo is a powerful god and he's he's he's

lusting after the nymph Daphne. And while he's in the midst of this, he taunts Cupid's archery ability. He says, You're not much of an archer, are you? And so it's always good to taunt people holding ranged weapons. Well, again, the gods are vain and you know, kind of and it's in vengeful and but also kind of stupid at times. So what Cupid does is he shoots Apollo with a golden arrow that makes him of course, you know, lust

like crazy after Daphney. But then he shoots Daphne with a leaden arrow, ensuring that she wants nothing to do with exactly. In fact, she runs away to her father, who also happens to be a river god, and has him turned her into a tree so that Apollo will leave her alone. And then Cupid, you know, goes off and laughs about the whole affair. Now, wait, after this, is Apollo still in love with the tree or not? It really depends on the user agreement with the golden arrow.

How does the golden earrow magic work? Can you transform the essence of the target of the affection? And does that cancel the spell? Or do you have to roll a D twenty to find out? Don't know? And then we are the effects on god's Is that a little different than an effect on immortal? Who can say? Now you might think, okay, Cupid sounds like he makes some enemies here and there. Who's his greatest rival? Is there like a safety god who's always trying to take his

arrows away? No? No, no, it's none other than the great god Pan. What one of our favorites. Yeah, in one corner we have the flighty arrow shooting cherubic son of of this of Venus U, the lord of love. And in the other corner we have the wild rutting he goat king of fornication, uh, surrounded by nymphs prancing through the forest. And so it's divine love versus earthly love, and uh spoiler alert, Cupid often comes out on top. In fact, there's some there are paintings that depict Cupid

kind of wrestling Pan to the ground. Could you also say that this is like city love versus country love? I guess you could. Yeah, like Pan was sort of envisioned. Is the representative of the I don't know, the the amorous affairs of like shepherds and country people. Yeah, it is kind of country love versus you know, the divine love of Mount Olympus. Here. On the other hand, when you look up artistic interpretations of Pan, he is often

wrestling or doing something like wrestling. So it's it's hard to say. He's definitely on the losing end of the scenario here. The pan's a rascal. Yeah. Now, in terms of other treatments of of Cupid, you know, we're not going to go through, you know, all the the echoes in popular culture. I did notice just the most dignified one. Yes, I did notice that there is a There is a Cupid in what DC comics that's kind of a feisty redhead, and it's a it's a female. It's like a cohort

of the green arrow. Is she a got us or just a human named Cupid? I think she's just a human who shoots arrows at people. Yeah, it's not a thor situation. I don't think so. If any comic book fans out there that want to, um, you know, clue us in on this, we'd love to hear more. But I think she just shoots arrows at people and tries to kill them, you know. Independent of you coming up with this lead, Robert, I immediately was googling, like Cupid

horror movie? Is there one? And I I came across something only to discover that you'd already given it a little right up here. Yes, two thousand and one slasher film titled Valentine. Now have you seen this before? No? I looked up a couple of scenes on YouTube. One actually had kind of a cool set with like somebody's like walking through a maze made out of TV screens

or something that. Yeah, I kind of like that, but otherwise it looks so stupid, and it has the ultimate like two thousand one smart Face cast where it's got David Boreanaz and Denise Richards. It's like the cast of Starship Troopers. It also has a has a two thousand and one alternative rock album, like the most too thousand and one alternative rock album, Imaginable. Yeah, that the soundtrack is,

does it have what down with the sickness? It doesn't have that particular track, but Disturbed is present and and yeah, you can pretty much extrapolate from there what else is on the soundtrack. But it does have this killer stalking around, the slasher character with a cupid mask, and there is one scene at least where he kills somebody with arrows, and that's the sequence you're you're talking about with all

the TVs. So yeah, as far as slasher films we're seeing, it's been too long since I've seen it to really give it a firm recommendation, but as far as slasher films worth looking up the kills on YouTube, I give it give it a thumbs up. But in this movie, unless I'm mistaken, no gold arrows and lead blunt arrows right right. I think he just has normal killing arrows because he's ultimately not an actual god. That would have

been a fun twist. Though they don't get deep into the resonances of the mythology, no, because if there's a lot there you could really go go nuts with. For instance, the fact that Cupid is often depicted riding around on dolphins or even sometimes just on sea monsters. That's odd. Yeah, and uh, you know, you know we mentioned beating the Beast already, but I should throw out there even though I haven't read it, and I don't know why I haven't read it, because I read a whole lot of C. S.

Lewis at one point in my life. But C. S. Lewis retells the story of of Cupid and Psyche in the nine novel Till We Have Faces. I've never read that either, but that sounds maybe worth check now. So again, we could keep going on Cupid. We could keep talking about various mythological treatments, different versions of the stories. Um, But basically, what we want to drive home here is that, first of all, he has these two arrows. He has the leaden arrow and the golden arrow, and these are

the powers associated. And we also just want to drive home that he's he is more than just this ridiculous cartoon baby. Now he's an epic creep cartoon baby who wrestles goat man and rides on sea monsters. Indeed, he is so On that note, we're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we are going to discuss the leaden arrow of Cupid. We're going to get into what ancient people knew of lead, how they

used lead, what they thought about its properties. And then of course we'll well we'll we'll dive a little bit into the periodic table and discuss exactly what lad is. Thank alright, we're back. So, Robert, we have already told

the story of Cupid, as especially as described in Ovid's metamorphoses. Uh. And in the story of these two different arrows, he's got the gold arrow, which imparts love makes people fancy one another, and the lead arrow, which is blunt and maybe seems to cause a version, at least in some tellings of the story. Right Like if if you were hit with the lead arrow and somebody passed you a note in in in high school and said will you

go out with me? Yes and no, you would add a third box that said I would rather my father turned me into a tree. Yeah, your head would just explode, would like in scanners? Yes. Well, other than the general association of gold being thought of as good, is there anything any reason we can think of why these particular metals are picked to have the magical significance they do in the arrows in the myth? Well, yeah, exactly what

we with gold? Obviously, gold is beautiful, and humans have thought it's beautiful for ages, and we've been perfectly happy to squabble over it and kill each other over it. So it seems the perfect substance to sum up the appeal and then sometimes the dangers of love. Plus knowing what we know now, this was an element that was likely produced in the collisions of of neutron stars long before the formation of the Earth, which is amazing to consider. By the way, I mean, just to contemplate this for

a moment. Uh. You know, it was once thought that most of the universe is heavy elements, like elements heavier than iron, were created in supernovas, which is when a massive star at the end of its life cycle collapses on itself and then explodes, and supernovas can create ate some heavy elements. But some scientists have argued for a

while that there are too many heavy elements. The proportion of them that we find in the universe is too high to be accounted for by what's possible from supernovas alone. So in recent years there have been some cool experiments that have shown that the collision of neutron stars, like

you say, could be the alternative. For example, I was looking at there was a study published in in the Astrophysical Journal by Code at All that looked at data from a neutron star merger, and I love that's the technology they use, like two companies like mergers and acquisitions. But they should have used the language of love, because we are creating a substance that will one day be

used by the God of love. Right it is it should be neutron star copulation, yes, neutron starter course, but anyway, that this collision was between eighty five and a hundred and sixty million light years away, and the researchers calculated that this one event, these two neutron stars colliding, produced between one and five earth masses of an element called europium and between three and thirteen earth masses of gold

earth masses of gold. So just think about a solid gold Earth and then between three and thirteen of them, and then it just like spits a bunch of this out into the universe to get bound up with other gases and stuff like that and eventually end up in maybe say a planetary accretion disk, where it becomes part

of the crust of an Earth. So if you're wearing like a gold ring or any other piece of gold right now, or if you're maybe maybe say using an electronic device that has a bit of gold in it, just think about how that element was forged either in the guts of a dying star as it exploded, or was probably more likely created in the chaos of rapid neutron capture when two of the densest objects in the universe to neutron stars smashed together billions of years ago.

And of course I guess the even crazier thing is that that doesn't stop at gold, right, like our amazement that the elements shouldn't stop there, because all the heavy elements had to be formed at some point. In fact, all the elements of any kind had to be formed at some point. A few of the lightest ones are primordial, you know, you find hydrogen and helium and lithium out in the original universe. Uh, and then a few more I think are formed by like a cosmic rays and stuff.

But beyond that, pretty much everything that you could see and touch and that your body is made of was in some way forged inside a dying star. Uh. You know, you got this dying star forge that has slow neutron capture going on inside it, or it was a supernova explosion or the collision of neutron stars or something like that. Yeah, these are the very kind of forges one can imagine

a god like Vulcan would employ, right exactly. Yeah, that's what's happening when he pumps the bellows, he's just pumping it to smash neutron stars together. And of course, you know you mentioned that, you know, anything heavier than iron likely had this this kind cosmic origin and that includes lead.

So even though it's easy to say, oh, the golden arrow forged in in cosmic turmoil in in ages past, well, the same story applies to lead, even though it's not as shiny, Even though you probably don't have any leaden jewelry on your body right now. Uh, though, I mean, lead is an amazing element, and to consider the same way, I think. I think there are two main explanations for lead,

as I believe. One is that there's slow neutron capture like the s process that takes place within dying stars, and the other is the the hot dense starter course, the neutron star collision Sunday, Sunday Sunday. Now, to come back to Cupid's arrow, I imagine basically the idea of the leaden arrow is that lead is not attractive. Lead is not beautiful. Lead is something that even in ancient times, it was rarely used in jewelry, or at least as

the primary aspect of the jewelry. Well, no, and and even more, Uh, I don't know if you can be mean to lead, but if you, if lead has feelings, you could hurt its feelings even more by pointing out that lead. You know, lead doesn't occur generally free in nature. Lead occur is bound up in ores. Uh. And so primarily the way lead was created in the ancient world

was as a byproduct of the creation of silver. And so people are trying to extract silver for something from something, and you melt out some lead as a sort of waste product of that. And and it did have uses because it's got a high specific weight, so you could use it as like a weight for you know, if you have like fishing line, fishing nets or something you want to hold down that it's useful for that. It's not very good for making like solid like weapons or anything, right,

because it's very soft. Yeah, it's it's not gonna be it's not gonna be a good metal if you want to actually forage arrows for combat or forge any kind of say armor. Um. But but there are a lot of uses for it if you want to create say, drinking vessels or so certainly if you want to create pipes. We're not advocating that, by the way, no, no, but certainly from a very early point humans were figuring this out. Lead is one of the seven Medals of antiquity. Humans

were handling lead a long time ago. Cast. Lead beads found in modern day Turkey date from roughly BC. The ancient Egyptians used lead as early as five thousand BC for pottery glazes, solder, and casting. Yeah, and so I was looking at early examples of lead artifacts. One example I found was a sort of maybe aesthetic artifact or maybe something that was used in like a whirld for

for you know, working with textiles. Um. But this was in a cave in the Negev Desert in Israel, and it's supposedly dates to the late fifth millennium BC, and it's just basically this wooden wand that's got leaden beads at the end of it. And they don't know what it's for, though I wonder if maybe it's for some kind of heavy metal lead magic. Yeah, an anti love repulsion ray. Uh, so we can hope. So the Babylonians made inscriptions on lead plates soft you can inscribe things

on it. And just to refer everyone back to our October episode on Curses, we spend a fair amount of time discussing Roman curse tablets. Oh yeah, we did. And what were those made out of? Well, like the ones found in Um in like second or third century Roman

Britain were often they're made in lead. So there are these places where you can go around like modern day Lester and dig up these ancient sites where there would be maybe a shrine or a temple to an ancient god, maybe in the syncretic religions of Roman Britain, where you'd sort of combined maybe Roman gods with with native Celtic gods or or or the gods of Britain there, and people would be going there to say, curse somebody who stole something from them, like you know, Servandas shows up

and says, somebody stole my oake. Whoever stole my cloak, I want him to not be able to pee for three months unless he gives me my cloak back. And this would be inscribed on a lead tablet and hung up somewhere. And part of the idea there is that it was partially to invoke this power, but also maybe just to have it hung up in a public place so people could like know what was going on. Now. One other important aspect of lead that that I wonder, and I wonder if it played into the use of

into the creation of these cursed tablets, is that. Uh, lead does not corrode like other metals. So if you, if you, if you inscribe your curse and a piece of lead, like, that's a curse that could speak across the ages. Right, lead doesn't rust, I mean, well lead the lead oxides do form, but they're not they're they're not like like iron rust, you know, the red rusty stuff. Lead oxide tends to be great, but generally exposed lead

doesn't corrode. And uh and yeah, this does make it attractive, especially for some purposes, say like if you want to make something that holds liquids in it, something that is not gonna receive a lot of punishment, you don't have to worry about that. Uh, that the weakness of it. But yeah, you can use it for drinking vessels or certainly for plumbing pipes. Here's a gross piece of trivia. Next time you have to call a plumber because who knows what you tried to flush a whole roll of

paper towels down the toilet. Consider that the English words plumber and plumbing are derived from the Latin word plumb them, which means lead. And it's right there in the chemical elements symbol for lead on the periodic table. You ever noticed that it's one of those weird ones, like iron is f E. Why is that? Well, you know it comes from an archaic word of like the ferrest metal. Uh, lead on the periodic table is PB. Why is it pb?

That comes from plumb them because ancient Romans loved some lead pipes and lead aqueducts, and lead reservoirs, and lead cisterns, lead cooking vessels, and lead based even lead based food additives. And we'll come back to the food additives point now.

I was looking at at one text from Cassis and and sort of titled Lead Chemistry Analytical Aspects, Environmental Impact and Health Effects, and they pointed out that ancient text showed a bit of confusion over lead and other elements, using plum bum to describe quote any silvery white, low melting and easily oxidized metal, including lead, tin, zinc, et cetera. They pointed out though that yeah, lead pipes have been

used for a very long time. I see them in ancient Mesopotamia, Cypress, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, of course, and various Roman provinces. So you know the technology and the materials would have spread with the Romans as well, and the Romans likely learned it from the Greeks. And it wasn't just the pipes. It was used in cases where iron wire or wooden hoops are currently used today you know as reinforcing brands for bands, for tanks, vats, um, amphora, etcetera.

So you see it also used in masonry, cesspool coverings, roofing, damp proofing, foundations, uh, parapet walls, etcetera. Lead vessels were widely used and uh, this is interesting. Lead was also long associated with funeral rites, so Roman era caskets and urns are often made at least in part from lead, especially apparently in England. Lead was also used in ancient China in a variety of uses, from glassmaking to cosmetics.

Of course, and now in the modern world we know that lead can have extremely serious health consequences can and very often does. Like there there are tons of ways to get lead in your body, and lead exposure can happen through through ingestion when when you eat, it can happen through breathing in lead particles can happen through absorption through the skin, and lead gets incorporated into the body and leads to both short term and long term negative consequences.

The short term negative consequences are there are a lot of different one and so it can be sometimes it's hard to identify lead exposure in people, but it might be like you've got stomach distress, like your stomach hurts and you're constipated. But it also can lead to weakness and fatigue, and like your arms and legs are weak, and it can lead to psychological and neurological consequences. People can be like like tired and depressed and irritable, have

loss of appetite, have trouble remembering things. Yeah, I mean, it's enough to make you think it's my smartphone made out of lead, but uh, it is. It's We were actually talking about this before we recorded the episode, like there's so much to the story of of of our realization regarding the harmful effects of lead, that we really

need to come back to it and devote an entire episode. Absolutely, yes, yes, absolutely, We're gonna do a whole episode on leads someday soon, I think, maybe with a special focus on the Lord of Lead, Clacy Patterson. But yeah, we we now know lead to have all these problems and they're also the long term consequences, right, those are just like short term consequences I was mentioning, you know, it can there could be neurological damage from long term exposure to lead. Enough

lead in a concentrated dose can kill you. They're definitely like developmental problems that children who have lead exposure experience. So it's uh, yeah, it's no joke. And the fact that humans have constantly surrounded ourselves for centuries or even millennia with just constant routes of exposure to environmental lead is something that is really horrifying and ridiculous. But I

guess that's just what we do. All Right, We're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to get back to this idea of lead as a food headed song hanging there. Soon it'll be time to eat some lead than Alright, we're back. Okay, it's Valentine's Day. What do you get your sweetheart on Valentine's Day? Sometimes they're flowers, but oh, I guess it's already there

in the name, right, you get your sweethearts some sweets. Now, here's the question I've wondered about before, but I've never found a good answer to why is it that we associate sweet foods with like eroticism but not so much like other flavors, Like why isn't it that you get your sweethearts some salty foods on Valentine's Day or you get them some bitter foods or sour foods? Why sweet? I mean sweets are a decadent treat, right, I mean,

I guess that's part of it. Um, A sweet is something sweets or something we've always were always craving and uh, and we're just hardwired to want as much of it as possible, given that it would be a rarity in the natural world. But we also crave fat and salt. Why not, like for Valentine's Day, instead of a box of chocolates, it's like a bag of poor crimes and the stick of butter. Well, Um, I guess it would be harder to keep that secreted away in the back of the closet for a week or so. Um. But

I don't know. I feel like they're people. Cel rate cheese is on Valentine's you know, certainly there are other foods that have a like a romantic or afrodisiac you know, vibe to them. Yeah, I guess so. Uh, you know, I guess part of what I'm wondering is is that link between like love and eroticism and sweet foods? Is that cultural or is there some biological element to it? Oh? Man, We'll have to come back and explore that. That would be that would be interesting to look at, like when

you look at other cultures. Is there something else that is considered the romantic flavor profile? Um? I don't know. You know, considering how many like Scandinavian people have written into the show to to talk about the wonders of salty licorice, I bet that's what they use over there. Yeah. And plus it makes me wonder about, say, Chinese traditions, where there's so much emphasis placed on the balance of different flavors. Uh, you know, how does that impact uh

sort of ritualized sweets? All right, well, let's talk about the sweetest of all sweets, sweet lead. So I have found what has got to be the best entry ever in any Oxford companions, that is reading the Oxford Handyon to Sugar and Sweets. Yeah. So it's Oxford University Press, and there's an entry in it by the American chemist Michelle M. Francil and this has just got to be one of the best like Encyclopedia type entries I've ever read.

So Francial writes about this substance called sugar of lead, also known as lead lead acetate or lead to acetate. It looks kind of like large salt crystals if you look it up, or it looks maybe like translucent rock candy, that kind of stuff you get on a little stick, right, yeah, but like sort of like white, translucent in color. And Francial writes, quote, it is sweet, roughly as sweet per teaspoon as sugar, and only slightly more lethal than strychnine.

So sugar of lead was used as like a medical treatment in nineteenth century Europe. And even though it is sweet, it is technically a salt, which is an electrically neutral collection of positive ions and negative ions. And actually we only think of salts as salty in flavor because the most common salt that we refer to is sodium chloride table salt. But salts don't have to be salty. Salts can be bitter, and salts can be sweet, and in

this case it is sweet. So in lead acetate, this collection of oppositely charged ions is made from depositive lead ions and negatively charged acetate ions. And it turns out sugar of lead is not the only sweet metallic salt. French Will points out that lots of barrillium salts are very sweet, so sweet in fact, that the Greek word for the element beryllium is glucinium, from like glucose or glycos, the Greek word for sweet. But as good as these metal salts that are sweet taste, they are very bad

for you. Lead acetate can be fatal to a seventy or a hundred and fifty pound adult at a dose of three teaspoons. So basically what you're saying is that if anybody has any fancy dining plants this evening and they see any lead based sweeteners on the menu, I would advise against it. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that the ancient Romans used indirectly, I would say indirectly, used this lead salt as a kind of sweetener, or at least as a way of avoiding other types of taste

imparted into their foods. So here's how this goes. The Romans created a syrup that they called sapa, which was produced by boiling down a liquid called must. Must is basically weak wine. Frontal describes it as quote mildly fermented grape juice, so there'll be a little bit of alcohol content, maybe kind of like grape beer. Almost. Of course, must, like wine, has some acid in it. It has acetic acid,

and acetic acid is the acid basis of vinegar. Vinegar is usually just acetic acid diluted with water or some other aqueous substance. And acetic acid provides acetate ions, which can react with metals in the pots where they are boiled, and uh, and this can result in some salts. So if you boil your must in a copper pot, the resulting sappa will have some copper acetate salts in it, and these taste really bad, like they're bitter. Even ancient

Roman writers would would comment on this. In the Natural History, Plenty discusses the production of sappa and he writes, quote leaden vessels should be used for this purpose, not copper ones. So it's like, get that copper out of there, makes the sappa taste bad? You want lead except no less? So why use lead? Because remember lead salts are sweets. So not only does cooking in lead pots not foul your sappa, it might make it even a little bit sweeter. Uh. And this is a quote from This is a quote

from Franciles century quote. Chemical analysis of sappa, produced according to recipes dating from the classical Roman period using kettles of similar metallic composition as those found at Pompeii and other sites, suggests that the lead content of sappa was eight and fifty milligrams per leader, any thousand times higher than what is generally allowable in drinking water, even diluted and used sparingly. Sweetening with sappa was a serious risk.

Now I have seen some people phrase this is like that the lead pots were used specifically to make the sappa sweeter, and Francill sort of disagrees with that, because she says the lead was probably not really intended to add much sweetness to the wine because it wouldn't put It wouldn't add that much. Really, you you'd already have a pretty sweet substance and would be the equivalent of adding like a pinch of sugar to it, So it

wouldn't make a huge difference. It was more that the lead vessels, if they when they did add flavor, would sort of complement the existing sweetness rather than adding a foul, bitter flavor like copper vessels would. Okay, so in a blind taste test of the in which both vessels have the same already sweet or semi sweet wine, you're going to find that the leaden vessel is going going to impart a like a slightly sweeter, less foul experience, will

probably significantly less foul. But yeah, I don't know if there's evidence that they thought of it. As the lead comes out and makes it a lot sweeter, they just thought, oh, you use lead pots it tastes way better. In the end. However, this is one of those cases where we also can't just make fun of the ancients, because this this kind

of thing carried on into a ridiculously recent time. She points out that the use of lead as a food additive and treatment did not stop in ancient Rome, and that lead equipment and additives were used to prevent spoilage in wine in some cases up until the nineteenth century. Oh wow, now we do have to just drive home for everybody, even though again we're not getting deep into the the the the the dangers of lead in this episode. Please, if you were if you were tempted, all tempted it all.

Do not go out and drink a bunch of wine out of lead vessels just to to to test the sweetening ability of the of the vessel. The amount of lead you should be absorbing on purposes zero, whatever you're accidentally getting from the environment is still probably more than you want. And there's actually a lot more stuff that There's been an ongoing argument over the years about the role of lead ingestion and lead exposure in ancient Rome,

because before Ancient Rome there was lead. People did use lead to make some objects, but it wasn't used in wide like widespread construction and infrastructure and all that. The Romans were the ones that really started using lead for a lot of stuff. And in nineteen three, a Canadian researcher named Jerome Riyagu argued that lead poisoning actually lead

to the downfall of the Roman Empire. You've probably heard this before, Yeah, the idea that they just they built up all this lead essentially lead infrastructure and then poisoned themselves with yeah, and cooked with this, especially the cooking with lead vessels, I think um. And so this has later been called into doubt by others who said, you know, it doesn't necessarily seem like we can claim that, but there's no doubt that many robins were exposed to unsafe

levels of lead. I was just looking at a study from P. And A. S. By the by Delisle at All called lead in Ancient Rome city waters, and they found that the tap water, you know, basically the aqueduct delivered water or delivered through some kind of lead infrastructure, that water in ancient Rome would have roughly a hundred

times the lead content of local spring water. It's a lot of lead, all right, was we we wind down here, Let's just let's just talk once more about just the properties of lead, right, And I wonder if in looking at these properties we can figure out what makes it so special as as the opposite of the love inducing golden arrow. Yeah. Yeah, And and indeed, why Cupid would have walked up to his possible father Vulcan and said, hey, what medal should you use to make my repulsion arrows?

What would make Vulcans say, oh, yeah, lead, lead is what you want? Okay, Well, one thing we know about lead is that, for a metal has a pretty low mel thing point right right, And this means it's a lot easier to cast with, requires less equipment, and it made an ideal solder component. Yeah, so if you want to melt something easily to like seal things together, I think yeah, and I've read this also makes it like an attractive additive if you're like casting something in a mold, right.

And then to your point earlier, like it was there as a byproduct of going after other metals, so it was available um onto onto. An addition, we've talked about this a little bit. Lead is DNSE. It is. It's a heavy metal, and leads density is due to its high atomic mass, short bond lengths, and a small atomic radius. And this, along with its high number of electrons needed to maintain a neutral charge, makes it a useful radiation shield in our modern world, a scattering X rays and

gamma rays. Yeah, and so you'll actually see it in use in places where there's a radiation risk. There are sometimes lead blocks deployed as a as basically a like the sand bags of the radiation world. Yeah. I mean, my my father was a dentist, and and so I was often hanging out in dental offices, and part of

that is being being near an X ray machine. And of course that big, big heavy lead line smock that lead one where yeah so so yeah, you see you see this kind of radiation shielding all over kind of makes me think back to our our our episode on the X ray machine that we did for Invention. So certainly if you want more on on the use of X rays and the dangers of radiation associated with that with X rays, I highly recommend that episode of our

other show, Invention. And then the third major attribute of lead is that it is soft and it's malleable. Uh, it's limited usage somewhat. You know, while a god might be able to craft an arrow out of it or coat an arrow with lead anyway, you're not gonna be able to fashion anything with it that can sustain any

real stress. But when you're talking about something like water and sewage pipes or cooking vessels, uh yeah, that that is an area where lead can can excel as long as you're not getting into questions of whether it will poison you or not. Just from a physical and a physical basis, it can get the job done. You wouldn't want like a lead hammer, though, I think you can have like lead alloy hammers and stuff like you can

use alloys to strengthen metals that are inherently soft. So coming back to Cupid, I mean, maybe the idea is that the lead in arrows or somehow combating the radiation of intense, passionate love. The power of love is actually a it's a it's a type of ray. It's what's beyond gamma rays. Yeah, and you've got to scatter those love rays. And the only way to do it is with with some high end um god forged lead in ammunition.

I'm seeing another residence here because one of the sources we didn't mention, So we talked about how lead can be created in like events in space inside like a dying star and the collision of neutron stars. We also didn't talk about another. I think it probably accounts for a much much smaller percentage of it. But lead can be created as the byproduct of radioactive decay sometimes, like

uranium can decay into some isotopes of lead. So maybe if we're considering that love is a type of radioactivity or type of ray, they're actually lead represents what happens when love dies and decays, you know, like so like love fades and eventually it becomes lead. What starts as this golden, splendid, sharp arrow becomes this blunt, dull, lusterless instrument. We have crucified this myth and taken out all of the beauty and turned it into a chemical Frankenstein. I'm

so proud of us. Yeah, I I feel like we have. We've done a good job here today, taking the candy coated and kind of lame holiday of Valentine's Day, and I think we've injected some fresh life into it. We've fed it a lot of lead and uh and and and uh and in doing so, we've we've killed off a lot of the uh, the more irritable aspects of the holiday. Sweet sweet lead. Yes, So big takeaways from from today. Don't eat lead sugar, right, don't do not

do it. Don't cook in lead pots right, don't drink from lead leading vessels if you have a choice in the matter. Be wary of gods with bows and arrows, right, And and keep in mind that, yeah, cupid has two arrows, so if he's aiming at you, it's kind of a toss up which one he's trying to hit you with. And sometimes even the great god Pan gets out wrestled exactly all right, so we're gonna close out the special

Valentine's Day episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. But as always, if you want to check out more episodes of the show, you can always head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mother ship. That's where you will find all the episodes of the show. You'll find links out to various social media accounts. You can of course find us anywhere you get podcasts. That's that's true across the board, so just search for us there.

So wherever you find subscribe and if you have the power to do so on these platforms, give us a rating, throw as many stars as possible at us the golden kind not the lead ones, uh, and then leave a nice message about how how awesome the show is, because you know, these these may seem like small things, but they really help us out in the long run. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams

and Tory Harrison. If you would like to get in touch with us directly with feedback about this episode or any other to suggest topic for the future, we're just to say hi. You can email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it, How stuff works dot Com. They're able to set onto join the part