From the Vault: Fingernails, Part 2

Fingernails Toenails. In the last episode, we talked about how fast nails grow, what influences how fast they grow, some strange decades long self experimentation projects on the measurement of nails, And this time we're going to get out of some of that scientific minutia and jump in to the weirder world of nails and the role that nails and hair play in a lot of very very surprising and interesting,

magical and religious beliefs. Yeah, and it it makes sense that we would since the nails that we look down at every day, that we you know, find ourselves absent mindedly feeling uh that that in fact enhance our ability to engage physically with the world. They are strange to behold. Like we said before, they're both alive and dead at the same time, at least as you know, in the way that we we think of them. You know, they they're obviously a part of our body, uh, and yet

they feel slightly external. You know that there are these things that are like clause but not clause. So it makes sense that we would have some kind of complicated magical ideas at times about what they are and what

they do. Yeah, and I think some of the magical and religious ideas are going to connect with something that we talked about in the last episode, which was this the strange thing I was observing about how our hard body parts, the hard external parts like teeth and nails, though you would expect them to be sort of like the most uh I don't know what you would call like the most brutally disposable parts of our bodies because they're hard. You know, they're like what you put out

front in defense or attack. But in fact we've got these kind of vulnerability trauma obsessions with these parts of our bodies. Like if you just start worrying about what could go wrong with your body, how you could be injured,

how it could be damaged. A lot of the natural places that people go to go to worry about these things our teeth and nails, absolutely, and that's that's why towards the end of the at the last episode, we started talking a little bit about Glenn Danzi's fingernails and about how, at least in some music videos or posters that I kind of half remember um from my my teenage years, I recall that he had sharpened fingernails, and I would wonder to myself, well, what purpose did those have?

And indeed, you know, would sharpened fingernails age you in

in fights or something? Because I also remember, like Stephen King novels and short stories that I also was reading at the time, you'd occasionally have a character show up that's sharpened their teeth down to the to file points um or or perhaps even has some sort of like sharpened fingernails, I guess, and uh, and it brings them to wonder like would there be any kind of actual combat or defensive advantage to that sort of thing, And we we mostly decided that there would not really be yes,

you can scratch your way out of a out of a scrape here and there, But there's also a big possibility to damage your your fingernails if you're trying to

use like sharpened fingernails to attack somebody. More than likely, if you encounter somebody with really gnarly looking fingernails that have been sharpened to a point, or or indeed, um uh, you know, just look seemingly intentionally creepy, they probably are trying to look at the still a little bit like nos Feratu, right, And so this vampire association with long nails. In fact, we were just talking about this with Seth

the other day, uh and and uh Seth. Seth was sharing with us the idea that, you know, it's possible that the association between long fingernails and vampires could come from the idea that often in the old days, you might open up if you've you've exhumed a body from the graveyard and you notice that their nails look a little bit long, and so you think, wait a minute, are they still alive in some way or they're getting

up and roaming around and still growing body tissues. Yeah, I feel like this has coming up on the show in the past before and it's certainly it goes beyond the world of mere vampires. We talked about it a bit in the episode where we talked about the Kappa, the Japanese water demon um where you have varying monstrous conceptions in the human imagination that are based upon an analysis of a physical death to see what happens to the body after it dies and the seeming changes that

take place in the body. And in the case of the vampire, yeah, it's like the bloated form. Uh, the impression at least that the hair is still growing, the impression that the nails are still growing. So if you ask the question is that true, the answer is no, It is not true that hair and fingernails continue to grow after death, at least not to any significant degree. Now, if the nails and the hair don't keep growing after death, that that does leave the question of why so many

people thought that that was the case. Why Why would you look at a corpse and think that its nails appear long? And the most common explanation for this tends to be based on the dehydration of the corps, that as the body begins to decompose, it loses a lot of moisture, which causes the retraction of the skin tissues around the finger nails and around the nail plate, which makes the nail plates look longer because there's there's just less skin around them. Now, this helps inform more than

just our idea of vampires for starters. It also has factored into the bare aid a live panics that have existed at different times. I believe we we discussed this a bit in an episode of Invention on various casket innovations. So the idea is, oh, you know, you end up digging up this corpse later. Maybe you don't assume that they were some sort of undead fiend, but you might think, oh, my goodness, they were still alive for some time after

we buried them. They must have been buried alive. And this led to a fashionable demand in the nineteenth century for caskets with escape hatches and ways of getting out. If you happen to have been buried alive. Yes, so if you want to catch up on that, do check out that episode of Invention. It may still be in the stuff to boil your mind feed from when we put a bunch of those out earlier. In the year. But if not, you can find the dedicated fee to invention.

Even though we're not putting out new episodes of that show in that feed, you'll still find all of those episodes there for your listening. I think it was a three part last October. Yeah, that's what it was. Now. In addition to this, you'll also find various myths and legends just concerned just general monstrosity in the world. And oftentimes you'll have a monster that has long finger nails.

And this is roughly, you know, associated with the idea that, okay, long finger nails imply a wildness, to kind of beastial nature of the the entity or the being in question, right, what has claws wild animals? Yeah, and though the longer finger nails become, the more like the claws of an animal they become. Now, there are exceptions to this. Long

finger nails are sometimes considered fashionable for females. We see we see a lot of that in um in modern culture, and then also you sometimes see it as a fashion for males as well. Long nails, for example, were important symbols of social status at various points in Chinese history, and they were sometimes painted for visual effect. But also sometimes the painting or sometimes the lacquering of the nail was as much about strengthening the nail as it was

about making it fancy, which is an interesting point. And apparently this we see echoes of this and other cultures as well. I think the ancient Egyptians um are Are are thought to have engaged in this sort of thing as well, strengthening the nail in order to maintain it's elongated uh uh structure. Now, later on in Chinese history, ornate finger nail guards were used to protect outer nails. So this might be like on the pinky finger, for example, and the ring finger uh and uh. And we're we're

talking some pretty ornate finger coverings here. For instance, the six inch long golden nail protectors that were worn by the emperorus Dowager Sushi, who ruled China for forty three years from eighteen sixty one until her death in nineteen o eight. If you look her up, you can find

actual photographs of her decked out with these things. Now, Robert, can you describe Is this more of like a thimble type covering that would go over the end of the finger and extend out from there, or is it more like that finger armor stuff that has joints and goes over the whole finger. Um, not really joints per se. It is one gets the impression of like long tapering golden fingertip covers Um. I think this this sort of

thing has also been utilized in dance in various Asian cultures. Um. Yeah, so they're really neat looking now in terms of just longer finger nails in general, the style has also been popular with males at different times in Chinese history, with longer manicured nails still having a residual cultural association with higher classes in society. Uh. One also sees the retention of a long, pinky finger nail as a signifier of

social status. Uh. But then there are also varying levels of when you get into the actual reasons uh that the individuals um, you know, self identify uh and uh and certainly uh uh explain that their their pinky nail. They might be it's for good luck or you know, it might be there might be some idea of divinational aspects uh a finger morphology. They're various sort of cultural ideas that seemed to be floating around. Um explaining you

know why one would have a longer nail. If there's a class association that nails are, you know, for higher social status. I wonder if it has anything to do with demonstrating the lack of need to engage in physical or manual labor. Yes, sort of along the same lines as you know. There are some cultures. I think it was once common in uh in European culture, for and it was fashionable from me to where like long pointy shoes.

And one explanation given for this is, well, a long pointy shoe makes you look rich because it's a kind of shoe that you can't do any physical work in. Yeah. Yeah, The best explanations seemed to tie it to this like

a long standing idea that it informs social status. However, I should note that I've I've looked into this a couple of times over the years, and I've never found like a I have not found not to say it doesn't exist, but I have never found like a really good paper on this that really dives in with a lot of the information out there about this is more

informal in nature. But um traditional Chinese cultural hierarchies do seem to retain their power though according to one paper I was looking at Saving Face in China, Modernization, parental pressure and plastic Surgery by Andrew Lyndridge and Choufeng Wang, published in the Journal of Consumer Affairs in two thousand

and eight. UM, so you know, basically underlying the idea that you can you can have these ideas that are still floating around in society, and perhaps you know, perhaps the rationale for them isn't you know one uh in an individual's forethought. But it's just something that survives and is still done and perhaps on some level still does inform UH that notion that I have this longer nail, which means I am of a higher social status and maybe don't have to engage in as much physical labor.

For in his storical example of this getting outside of modern culture. UM, there's a book that I've I've been fond of for for for many years titled Tales from a Chinese Studio, and it's a collection from seventeen forty of these various weird tales that were compiled by the author Uh Pooh song Ling and Uh and it's these are wonderful stories. I recommend anyone who's even halfway interested in in strange Chinese ghost stories. You should pick up a copy of this because some of them are funny,

some of them are just really weird. Um. There's also a certain poetry to them, and I understand that if if one is actually reading these stories uh in Mandarin uh, they're also there are also a lot of various illusions that are going to be lost on the English language translation reader. But they're still they're still tremendous as translated pieces. I think you've quoted from it before. I have positive associations with this title. Yeah, it's a it's a great book,

and I think Penguin has an edition of it. Um. So I was looking back through that because I'm thinking, Okay, if there's a good example of a monster with long fingernails, perhaps i'll find it entails from a Chinese studio. I did not find it, but I did find this little note um about a particular line in one of his writings that I had skipped over before I didn't remember

from before. Basically, uh uh poohsong Ling mentions the bard of the long nails, which the translators and editors of this Penguin edition identify as Lee He who lived seven sixty through eight sixteen. So he was a late Tongue scholar, often characterized as a sort of quote doomed poet with a vision so intense the world will destroy him if he does not destroy himself. Whoa, and and so the the editors here they could they compared him to John Keats.

That's interesting because Keiths definitely he died young. But I don't really think of him as doom driven in that way. Uh. When I think of doom driven English poets, I guess I would think more like Byron or Percy Shelley. Yeah, Lord Byron definitely comes to mind, right, especially with when it comes to like a dark bad boy status walking around a skull goblet and a pet bear on a

chain exactly. Uh. And and interestingly enough, uh, if you look up some of uh Lee He's translated work, he's sometimes described as this is from the Amazon description to a nice collection of his work. Uh, the bad boy poet of the late Tang dynasty. Well that I got to hear more from this bad so it was it was he a bet. Was the fact that he was a bad boy at all related to the perception of

him having long nails? Um? Well, yes, and no, I think when I think this will maybe become a little more clear, Like, for instance, I don't think the fact that that he had long nails was like the signifying bad boy aspect about him. I take that to be probably we're in common with with professional scholars of the day, Like you know, you're you're you're a you're a scholar, you're a man of of words. Uh, you certainly don't need short nails in order to engage in a bunch

of physical labor, like you're a man of letters. I see that being said, he has a very gothic quality to him. The New Tang History of ten sixty described him as quote frail and thin, with eyebrows that met together and long fingernails. He was also known as the Demon Talent due to his love of weird and exotic subjects in his writings, and the New Tang History also said that he quote felt himself already halfway across the

boundary between the living and the dead. Now that being said, apparently he also wrote about mundane topics as well, like you know, earth like food and so forth. So it wasn't just all ghoulish content. Um, maybe a spooky food. Oh No, I think he generally, you know, wrote about food and acceptable non what we would think of in Western terms is of you know, a non Gothic sense. But anyway, if you if you look at his work,

it is really quite beautiful. Um. He is probably apparently most famous for this poem song of Magic Strings that the editors and translators of the pous song Ling text include. Uh. The poem itself was translated by john Fordsham in ninety three's Goddesses, Ghosts and Demons that Collected Poems of lee he He He, which you can you can buy in like e book or physical form. I'm thinking of picking up a copy. But but here's here's just a little bit

from that poem. Quote. Blue raccoons are weeping blood as shivering foxes die on the ancient wall. A painted dragon tail inlaid with gold. The rain god is writing it away to an autumn tarn. Owls that have lived a hundred years turned forest demons laugh wildly as an emerald fire leaps from their net. Wow. That that is electrifying. Man, I've got goose bumps. Yeah. Like I say, I think

I'm gonna pick up a copy for this Halloween season. Um, but there was there was another line when I was looking at the preview of that actual text, Fordsham wrote, quotely, he was temperamentally unable to write a conventional social poem, and consequently he is very rarely dull. Uh So, apparently to to be like a professional man of words, to be like, you know, a writer of the day, you had to engage in a lot of sort of boring,

sort of courtly writing. Uh. The example that he gave was it was apparently common to sort of to to write to patrons and compliment them on, say, the birth of a child. And there's an example of this short poetic poetic piece that he wrote to such a patron, and he makes it sound like Fortshune compares it to uh the child from the omen um about just how he describes this child as like being able to like see through people to their to their soul, or something

to that effect. It's pretty interesting. So I like the idea of this, uh, this Bard of the Long Nails, who when he tries to fit in and be like just a boring poet, he can't quite do it. He's just a little too weird. But I should drive home that I don't think the Long nails were the were the weird thing about him. No, it was that he would write you a note saying, congratulations on the birth of your child who will one day flay my soul

in the underworld. Yeah, that sort of thing. Um. So, anyway, I encourage everyone to check out both of those authors. But but anyway, back back to nails in general. Long nails have have apparently sometimes been seen as a luxury for those of upper classes in various cultures who don't

have to truly labor with their hands. And I've had a couple of studies at least that backed this up, such as excessively long fingernails as a risk factor for upper extremity soft tissue injury published in two thousand eight in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, and another pay or Effects of fingernail linked on finger and hand performance, published in the Journal hand Therapy back in two thousand and This the second paper here recommends keeping fingernails shortened

to at least point five centimeters to quote achieve optimal functional outcomes. Well, I guess, to be fair, I laughed because I was imagining optimal functional outcomes of hands just in regular life. But I guess this is talking about therapy, so that phrasing makes sense. Yes, yes, this this paper

does seem to be narrowing its focus somewhat. Uh. And I think it's also worth noting that, you know, I have for my own part, I've encountered people with with very long, you know, well maintained nails, uh, you know, sometimes very fancy looking nails. This seemed quite capable of manipulating their environment and say, an office setting. Uh. Though perhaps that's not that different from the sort of physical demands of of of of a scholar in um, you know,

in in in in China, of old Uh. You know, you're you're still not having to like actually physically in the earth or something to that effect. So so I'm not sure i'd be interesting to hear from anyone out there who does, who has had long nails in the past or keeps them maintains long nails today, Like are there things that you find that they get in the way of or are they just generally not in the way? Do you sort of adapt I mean, obviously, you know, we we we can adapt our body schema to a

accommodate for any number of of extra things. It seems like just longer nails. I mean, that's even more a part of our body than any tool or costume that we might acquire. All Right, it's time to take a quick break. But when we come back, we can talk about a demon warship made out of nails than all right, we're back, and I'm excited for this, Joe, because you were you were about to embark on a journey and you're you're going to uh tell us about what maybe

the the magical fingernail story par excellence. I mean, there are a lot of great magical figure nail stories that that I'm to get into, but this might be the most most thoroughly mythological one, the one that's like the most the most like a device in a story where the nails are sort of the mcguffin. Though there's also a very good Persian one that we'll get into. But anyway,

so I want to go to the prose Edda. This is a work that tells us a lot of what we know about ancient Norse mythology that was written or

edited by the medieval Icelandic author Snorri Sturlason. In the prose Edda, there are these collected literary works that tell many of the stories of Norse mythology, including the story of Ragnarok, the final confrontation, the destruction of the gods at the end of that era and there but early on, there's a passage in the prose edit that's just talking about ships, just mentioning what kinds of mythological ships there are, And it mentions one ship in passing, calling it the

Nagle Far. And it only says a couple of things about the Nagle Far. It says that it is in mu spell. Mu Spell is a realm of fire, home of the fire giants who you don't want to mess with. And the passage also mentions that Nagle Far is the largest, meaning the largest of all ships. So what is this Nagle Far the largest of all ships? Well, later the author here tells us that the Nagle Far will appear over the horizon during the calamity of Ragnarok, when the

gods will be destroyed. And the author also tells us something about its construction. And here I'm going to quote directly from the work quote the stars shall be hurled from heaven. Then it shall come to pass that the earth and the mountains will shake so violently that trees will be torn up by the roots, and the mountains will topple down, and all bonds and fetters will be

broken and snapped. The fin ris wolf gets loose, the sea rushes over the earth for the mid guard serpent writhes in giant rage and seeks to gain the land. The ship that is called nagle Are also becomes loose. It is made of the nails of dead men. Wherefore it is worth warning that when a man dies with unpaired nails, he supplies a large amount of materials for the building of this ship, which both gods and men wish maybe finished as late as possible. But in this

flood Naggle far gets afloat. The giant crime is its steersman, or there might be him h r y M. But okay, yeah, so it's got it's got giants on it. It's got the giant crime or h rim as it's steersman, and it's made out of the fingernails and toenails of dead men who did not care appropriately for their nails at the time of death. That is that is gnarly um. I by the way, I I'm not surprised at all to learn as well that there is a a longstanding Swedish black metal band that has naggle far as It's

as its name. They've been active since then the early nineties apparently. Oh wow, I've never heard of him, but of course yeah, I mean, in anything, this gnarly is going to end up as a metal band name. But I should also mention that in telling the same story the story of Ragnarok, you know, sort of the destruction of the gods at the end of at the end of time, or maybe not of time, at least at the end of the era the age of the gods

um it is. The same scene is described in the Voluspa, which is an old Norse poem describing a lot of mythological events that we've mentioned on the show pretty recently. Actually, I think, wait, which episode did it come up in? I cannot recall the context at the moment, but there's also a quatrain in the Voluspa that mentions it. It says, from the east comes crime with shield held high in giant wrath, does the serpent writhe or the waves he twists,

and the tawny eagle naws corpses screaming. Naggle Far is loose. I love, I love the idea that it's you know, this is just me reading into it, perhaps, but it it feels like it's not. It's not just the bones that are making it's not bones that are making up the ship. It is the toenails and the fingernails that seem more like the detritus of of the the dead body.

You know. It seems like this is like a ship that has been collecting and assembling, like at the bottom of the universe, throughout all of human conflict, you know, And so that that's why it is only it is only completely finished towards the very end of human existence. So there's a paper I want to talk about, Robert, if you're ready, called the Treatment of Hair and Fingernails

among the Indo Europeans. Oh, yes, I am ready for this because I've I've read about certainly nothing on the ship level, the ship building level, but I've I've read about some of these of these folk beliefs before. Yeah. So this is a paper by Bruce Lincoln, who is a scholar of religious studies at the University of Chicago. It was published in nineteen seventy seven, and that's worth noting.

This is an older paper. I'm citing it because it's still really interesting, but I just want to flag that it's older, because it's possible that in the intervening years some of Lincoln's factual assumptions might have been superseded by more recent anthropological or historical research. But I think the general thrust of the question he poses remains and uh, and some of the hypotheses he discusses in this article remain extremely interesting. Okay, so he starts like this quote.

One of the important lessons that has learned from the study of history of religions is that there is no act so small or insignificant that it cannot take on symbolic importance. In certain cultures, it is not always an easy task to recognize such symbolically invested action, although the existence of elaborate rules for behavior in a given situation may serve as a valuable clue. And if the identification of such action is sometimes difficult, the interpretation of a

given motion, gesture, or ritual is even more delicate. And the example that he gives that he's going to talk about in this paper is the extremely careful, meticulous rules governing the treatment of clippings from the hair and nails in many cultures and religions throughout the world, especially in many cultures that are descended from in some way the ancient speakers of Proto Indo European, which I'll get into

more later. So I'm going to start by just listing a number of examples that Lincoln brings up, and then we can go back and talk about possible explanations for

where these beliefs and religious practices come from. So the first one mentioned by Lincoln concerns the hair specifically, and is it's the right of the child's first haircut or first tonture, practiced historically by some people of India, and it's described in the Sankayana Gria Sutra, and the Gria Sutras are a number of manuals describing the steps of various domestic religious ceremonies. So I think specifically the kind of religious ceremonies that you you might perform around the house.

So this is performed for different children at front ages, I think also traditionally depending on cast. But the process goes like this in Lincoln's summary quote, the child's hair is untangled and anointed and a young cusa shoot is placed in it, Kusa being the sacred grass of ceremonial. His hair is then shaved with a copper razor and placed on a mound of bull dung mixed with kusa

grass that has been prepared to receive the hair. Finally, and here he quotes directly from translation of the Sankayana Gria Sutra quote to the northeast, in a place covered with herbs, or in the neighborhood of water, they bury the hairs in the earth. So that's interesting to begin with. You you have this ritual of at a certain age, the child's hair is shaved or cut, and then it is in a kind of symbolic ritual way planted within dung or within the earth. And there's this association with

vegetation or herbs. Interesting. Now, this may have absolutely no connection with it. But uh, a while back, I guess, oh man, probably more than probably about a year ago. Uh, my son and I had our hair cut at our house on our our front porch. And afterwards, um uh, the individual cut our hair encouraged us to take the clippings and put at least some of them in our garden um in order to help deter creatures from eating

our vegetables. I wonder if that actually works. I don't know, but I've I mean, I've heard also similar advice concerning a little like hair from your pet, like to to keep the road inside of your garden, to put some hair from your cat for for for instance, in there, which which I mean it sounds like it could work. I don't know that I've I've seen any thing to actually back that up, except I haven't noticed any any

mice or rats out there. But then again, um, just because you don't notice them doesn't mean they're not there. That's interesting. We'll definitely keep that in mind as we go through a few more of these examples. So the next one that Lincoln sites comes from ancient Roman religion. Uh. And this is the example of the flamand Alice, or the high priest of Jupiter, the chief god of the Roman pantheon, and the flamand Alice had numerous ceremonial requirements

and restrictions guiding his daily activities. There were rules about where he had to sleep, there were rules about what he was supposed to wear, about what kinds of things he could touch or couldn't touch. And one of these restrictions, as reported by the second century Roman author Aulus Gellius, in a text called Attic Nights, goes like this, and this is with some abridgments. Quote the ceremonies placed upon the flamand allies are many, and the forbearances are numerous.

No one should cut the hair of the de Aalie except a free man. The cuttings of the nails and hair of the deals are buried in the earth under a fruitful tree. There were almost the same ceremonies for the Flamenica de Alice, and I think that's the wife of the high priest of Jupiter. And they say that other different ones are to be observed, for instance, that she is covered with a dyed gown, and that in her veil she has the shoot of a fruitful tree.

And there are other similar practices elsewhere in ancient Roman religion. For example, in the Natural History, Plenty of the Elder recounts how the vestal virgins are expected to observe special ceremonies in the disposal of the trimmings from their hair. Plenty rights quote, truly, there is a lotus tree in Rome, in the area of Lucina. Now this tree is about five hundred years old or older. Its age is uncertain, and it is called the hairy one because the hair

of the vestal virgins is brought to it. So note again the kind of rough similarities with the Indian practice here, the association with vegetation, especially well, hair is a is a thing that grows out of us, not unlike a plant, right or some sort of vine. And then I guess a lot of this tube just has to do with the fact that hair and fingernails and toenails as well are the things that are paradoxically a part of us

and yet not a part of us. And then when we trim them away or cut them away, they are no longer part of our bodies that they came from our bodies. And therefore you could you could see where you could easily lean into this idea that's something appropriate must be done with these parts of ourselves. Yeah, and we'll get into more about that in the in the part where we talk about the possible explanations for these but I want to talk about the next example Lincoln sites,

which is German folkloric practices. He writes that there are a number of archaic rituals among German people speaking Germanic languages for dealing with the disposal of clippings from the hair and nails quote. Thus, in Oldenburg hair and nails are wrapped in a cloth and fastened under a tree three days before the new moon to cure infertility. Similarly, in Brandenburg, Dooseldorf, Swabia and elsewhere, hair and nails are placed in a hole board in a tree or our

place to on a branch. This is often done when one suffers from some sort of pain, and the pain is said to go with these moving to anyone who

comes close to them. Now, there are some differences here from the other examples we already talked about, because, you know, Lincoln points out it's important to note that these practices he just mentioned are targeted towards specific magical outcomes like the curing of infertility or the healing of pain, rather than a sort of free floating ritual without a specific outcome object. But he notes again the similarity in the association between hair and nails with plant life. Again, hair

and nails, and then trees and grass and branches. And then finally one more example, and this one is probably my favorite one, He draws attention to what is described in an ancient text in the Avestan language, which is associated with the ancient Iranian culture and is a foundational religious text of Zoroastrianism. So this text is known as the Vindidad or the vidv Dot. And in this writing the character of Zoroaster also known as Zarathustra, and I

think Zarathustra is probably the earlier pronunciation. Zarathustra is speaking to the wise Lord Ahura Mazda. And Zarathustra asks the wise Lord why it is that the demon named Ayosha, whose name literally means burning or destruction, Why Aosha harms

and punishes humans? And Ahura Mazda explains as follows, quote truly, that righteous Zarathustra, when one arranges and cuts his hair and clips his nails and then lets them fall into holes in the earth or into furrows, for by these improprieties, demons come forth, and from these improprieties monsters come forth from the earth, which mortals call lice, and which devour the grain in the fields and the clothes and the closets. Now, when you must arrange and cut your hair and clip

your nails in the world Zarathustra. Hereafter you should bear it ten steps from righteous men, twenty steps from fire, thirty steps from water, and fifty steps from the barisman, which is a bundle of sacred twigs. When it is laid out. Then you should dig a pit here, a disty deep in hard soil, and a vitasti deep in soft soil. To that pit. You should bear the cuttings. Then you should pronounce these words victorious Zarathustra. Now for me, may Mazda make the plants grow by means of asha,

and Asha means right. Uh. You should plow three or six or nine furrows for Zassura vira, meaning good dominion, and you should recite the Ajuna Vira prayer three or six or nine times. So here you're in in this ancient z or asterie and text. You're getting this elaborate ritual described for what you should do with the trimmings from your hair and nails, and that there are actual,

like real demonic consequences if you do not follow these rituals. Uh. And Lincoln points out several things he finds really interesting about the explanation from the Wise Lord to Zarathustra. So, first of all, there's the need to carry these clippings

from hair and nails away from sources of purification. Remember the mentions, if you've got to carry him this far away from righteous men, this far away from fire, from water, and from the sacred bundle of twigs, because these are all potentially sources of religious purity, and it seems like there's a desire to avoid cross contamination of all that purifying matter with impure matter that you've just trimmed off

of your body. But then there's also Lincoln points out the use of troughs to demarcate a sacred space, and then also the spontaneous production of monsters from the air and nail trimmings that are disposed of incorrectly. And if that sounds familiar based on stuff we were just talking about, isn't that kind of similar to the supposed origin of

the noggle far the nail ship. So in the Ragnarok myth, again from Norse religion, this ship is built out of the nails of dead men as a result of their nails not being trimmed and disposed of properly according to the correct rituals. So if you do the wrong thing with your nails, you make an accidental donation to the

construction of the demons galleon. Oh wow, So this is this is fascinating cause that on one hand, you can compare a lot of this with just kind of a basic understanding that this is bio waste, and there's there there's an appropriate and an inappropriate way to dispose of bio waste. But then of course we have this this whole magical domain as well of monsters and monstrous ships rising up from sort of the accretion of these materials. Yeah,

and it's it's interesting. Lincoln doesn't really get into this at all, but it's interesting to wonder about what role um I don't know, like practical biological facts could play into the origins of these practices. I don't know if there is, for example, any kind of real disease risk that you would get from from encountering the trimmings of

hair and nails from other people. Perhaps there's some, but it seems like there would be less of that than there would be from say, contact with blood or feces, though I'm not sure. I mean, it's interesting that there's a mention of lice and and one of the things talking about being disposed of. Here is hair. Yeah, I mean, you know, we might think, well, the hair is the place where the lice live. Therefore, you know, less inclined to pick up odd pieces of hair that we find

just out on the road. I mean, certainly, I think we can all attest to, you know, being on a walk or something, or and encountering a piece of someone's hair or you know, hair clippings, or perhaps even a fingernail or a toenail, and um, your first instinct is not to pick that material up and look closer up put it in your mouth. Yeah, yeah, that doesn't seem like a natural thing to do. All right, On that note, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be

right back. Alright, we're back. But we've been talking about all these examples from all of you know, different parts of the world of religious or magical significance that is granted to trimmings from the hair and nails. And this list is far from exhaustive. There are tons of examples

in practices all all over the place. But I think just the examples we've talked about do help paint a picture of the wide range of myths, beliefs, and practices about hair and nails and the many similarities between them. But the question is why why do so many different cultures place this important ritual or religious significance on the

correct procedures for trimming and disposing of hair and nails. Now, Lincoln in his paper goes over several possible answers to this question that had been advanced by the time he was writing in the seventies. And I would say the list of possible explanations is also not going to be exhaustive, but just to discuss a few possibilities. One is a very influential theory that's best known for its articulation by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Scottish anthropologist J. G.

Fraser in the Golden Bow. The Golden Bow has come up on the show before. Uh. Fraser, of course is very uh, you know, enormously influential, but also heavily criticized. We can talk about that in a minute, um. But Fraser argues that many of these practices have their roots in a widespread ancient belief in what he would have

called the contagious branch of sympathetic magic. So the basic idea here is that if something was once touching your body, or especially if it was part of your body, that matter, that object maintains a magical connection to your body even after being physically separated from it, and thus it could be used by a witch or a sorcerer to work curses on you or magically control you in some way. So if Jimmy the sorcerer gets hold of your hair or nail trimmings, you are in for a very bad time.

And so in order to protect yourself from this kind of sympathetic magic, you either had to destroy your hair and nail trimmings or hide them very well, or maybe also perform some kind of purging ritual to rid this matter of its contagious magical power. And I think it's interesting we still see evidence of this kind of magical

thinking even today. I mean, there there is magical thinking that persists into the modern modern era whereby you can have some kind of power over a person by by possessing a personal artifact of there's or an object that touched their body. You know, think about like doing magic on someone by by possessing their hair brush. Right, There's also interesting stuff about just how we think about the

contamination of of objects. Uh, there's a there's a there's this study back in the nineteen nineties by social psychologist Paul Rosen and um. This was actually recently mentioned on an episode of the excellent radio show Hidden Brain. Uh. They pointed out that they asked in this particular study, they asked people if they would consider wearing hitler sweater

and uh, and they almost always said no. Uh. And they said no even if they've been assured that it had been washed, then it had that it had been torn, you know, that it had been punished for being Hitler's sweater, or that it had been symbolically cleansed by being worn by say, mother Teresa before being passed on. And it was the you know, this, this idea that that this, this object, this sweater is is contaminated in a way that cannot be uh punished away, cannot be cleansed away.

It just remains the impure in a completely irrational manner. That is really funny. I mean, I can just say for myself, like I I rationally do not believe in any kind of sympathetic, contagious magic. So I don't think like Hitler's evil would be contained in the physical sweater in any way but still I wouldn't want to put it on. Well, I have a lot of nitpicky questions about that that scenario, like is it a good sweater? Like is there anything notable notable about the sweater other

than it was Hitler's sweater? Because obviously I'm not going to just wear a sweater because Hitler wore it? But what ither I like? Was it a store and there was like vintage stuff and there was like this really nice sweater and I'm like, oh, this is nice. And then I asked why is it so cheap? And they tell me, oh, because this was Hitler's sweater. Then okay, that might be different because I have some pre existing interest in it. There's something about that sweater that's really neat.

I don't necessarily get that from this this limited scenario. Uh you know, it's it's kind of implied that the notable thing about the sweater is that it was Hitler's. Well, you know, I actually can think of a reason I wouldn't want to wear that sweater or own it, even if even though I don't believe in any magical associations, which is that I mean, I guess if you were to wear a sweater that you knew had been warned by Hitler, you'd probably end up thinking about Hitler all

the time. And you know, it's like, every time you put it on, you have to be like, oh, yeah, Hitler, and you just don't want Hitler in your brain that much. Yeah. I mean, to a certain extent, one encounters this with the you know, the struggle to separate say an artist from the art. Uh. That can sort of be the Hitler's sweater scenario in some cases, where you're like, Okay, there's nothing wrong with the sweater, but I can't wear it without thinking about Hitler. So I just don't think

I'm gonna wear this anymore. So it's worth noting that Fraser's work on the origins of religions, again as I said earlier, was both enormously influential and has come under a lot of criticism. I you know, I'm not deep on this, but I think one common criticism is that Fraser would sometimes I think, kind of fudge or cherry pick the ethnographic evidence he cited in order to make

things fit more cleanly into his broader theories. And you know, this is something I think that a lot of writers who have grand theories about human culture and society end up being guilty of uh So, while the Golden Bow remains a fascinating read, I would advocate that you shouldn't rely on Fraser alone is your soul source for anything.

And in Lincoln's analysis of Fraser's thoughts on on the origins of these uh these rituals for dealing with hair and nails in in sympathetic contagious magic, Lincoln thinks that, well, probably a lot of practices do have some kind of roots like that, but he's not convinced that contagious sympathetic magic lies at the root of all of these practices, and certainly not the practices in the cultures that that have some origins in the speakers of Proto Indo European,

because he has a different theory about that that we can get into in just a minute. Lincoln also mentions the work of an anthropologist named Mary Douglas, who is a very influential twentieth century anthropologist. She proposed that uh that within human religious thinking quote that the body is a powerful model or image which can which can represent any bounded system, and which most often represents society itself.

The limits of the body then represent the limits of society, the points at which it encounters opposition and danger, and must thus be treated with appropriate care. So she's arguing basically that we symbolically make an an equivalence between our bodies and the society at large, and that margins in general are dangerous and ambiguous places, and thus the things that come off of our body represent ambiguity at the margins in the larger context of symbolic thinking about the society.

So you have to carefully regulate this marginal body matter. And uh Lincoln in this paper, he he similarly thinks this idea is interesting, that it might explain some things, but he's got a different theory that is based in the Proto Indo European creation myth. So, the Proto Indo Europeans are a hypothesized prehistoric culture that we know about primarily through reconstruction of their language, which is a direct ancestor to a huge number of historical and existing languages

throughout Asia and Europe. Just for example, English has a number of roots in different languages, including but not limited to Germanic languages and Romance languages, but both Germanic and Romance languages themselves have roots in Proto Indo European language, so you know, there was a root language that influenced these derivative languages that developed in you know, different ways, and then those derivative languages came back and in a

way combined to influence other languages like English. The Proto Indo European people left no written records, but linguists have been able to reconstruct a lot of their language by tracing back similar word roots in a widespread catalog of languages. Uh. Similarly,

scholars have tried to reconstruct other things about them. We don't know a lot of things for sure, but they probably lived somewhere around southern Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, sort of between and to the north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, probably a few thousand years b c. We don't have any direct records of their religious beliefs, their myths, and their practices, but scholars, including Bruce Lincoln, have used clues from other descendent religions to try as

best as possible to reconstruct elements such as their creation myth, and Lincoln explains his hypothetical reconstruction of this creation myth as follows, quote, this myth, as I have established elsewhere, told how the world and all the creatures in it were established by the first act of sacrifice, in the primordial offering, the first priest Manu meaning man, dismembered the first king Yemo meaning twin, and from his body built

up the material world. Now, certain steps in the process of creation were described in this myth, steps whereby the body of the primordial victim became the world. Thus his skull became the heavens, his eyes the sun and moon, his blood the seas, and what is most important for the issue at hand, his hair became the plants and trees, and so Lincoln quotes. He goes on to quote a bunch of related ancient religious texts that serve as evidence

for his reconstruction of the myth in this way. Um, And of course we don't know that this is actually what their creation myth was like, but it seems like a reasonable approximation of what their creation myth might have been like, given what we know from a lot of other religions that seem related to it. And this is, of course, I mean, you can immediately think of other samples of creation myths in which the parts of the world are made out of the body of a slain

primordial foe. Think about the ways that in say the Enema a leash, that the body of tiamat the dragon, you know, the sea monster gets turned into the you know, the mountains and the sky and the seas and all

that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, this is something you do see in a number of different mythologies like that, if nothing else you could even summarize just to say that the body, the primordial body of being such as this are important in the way that they are then taken apart and then redistributed in those parts become important

aspects of the world that follows right. And so Lincoln says that, you know, if his reconstruction of the Proto Indo European creation myth is is basically correct or is on the right track, that a lot of religious practices of round disposal of hair and nails in cultures that are in part descended from the Proto Indo Europeans could be rooted in a recapitulation of this creation myth. And this draws on a strain of thinking that I think

in some way is associated with the Eliade. For example, that a lot of religious rituals are in a way supposed to be a re enactment of a foundational myth. Yeah yeah, the idea that that that that everything we do is only important in the archaic sense if we are recreating something from our founding myths. Right, So that's ultimately Lincoln's theory here what what he thinks best explains the widespread nature of these these practices about the disposal

of hair and nails. That he thinks, when you dispose of hair and nail clippings in the correct way, you are furthering the life of the world's vegetation in keeping with the creation story. The sacrifice here is your own body, and the sacrifice of hair. Originally, he thinks hair and the nails were sort of added onto the hair. Sacrifice feeds the trees and the grasses the same way that this primordially slain foe originally created all that vegetation. And uh.

And then Lincoln says, the other half of the coin is quote. When such care is not taken, when disposal is not a ritual and does not repeat the acts of a mythic model, the reverse can be the effect. For if proper disposal serves to create the cosmos, then improper disposal can de create it, or to put it negatively,

conserved to create chaos out of cosmos. And think of the examples again we discussed here the destruction of crops by vice demons from the Avestan text, you know, the ancient Zoroastrian text, or the creation of the noggle far the ship that brings monsters to deliver the violent into the world, and the destruction of the gods that's made out of the nails of dead men improperly cared for.

So obviously, I mean, I would say in my final thoughts, obviously, Lincoln idea here about the origins of these practices could be wrong, but at the very least it provides some really interesting scaffolding for understanding ways in which complex symbolic religious thinking might enter into what we would consider an

extremely mundane grooming practice. How uh, it's it's possible that just clipping your nails and cutting your hair too many people might have cosmic significance because of the myths that informed their worldview. Yeah, this is this is all very fascinating. You know. It gets to the sort of the ambiguity of what our nails and our as well as our hair, Like, well, what what they really are? And and then yeah, what are we supposed to do with them once we once

they leave our body? And then what sort of ideas do we end up building up about uh those things and our identity and our place in the cosmos? Yeah, totally so maybe uh maybe if if you're somebody who has a say a partner or roommate or family member who gets mad when you just like clip your toe nails in a willy lily fashion, they shoot all over the room and you do not collect them in a clean and tidy way for proper disposal, think about this

interpretation of the proto Indo European creation myth. What if what if you are somehow creating chaos out of order by doing so, and you are summoning demons up from the earth. Yeah, yeah, indeed, I think they're there. There's probably like a wide variety of different takes on this

as well. Like I think I've run across the examples of a Chinese superstition um that at least exists in some places where you are not supposed to trim your toe nails at night while it's dark outside um or not to trim them outside at night for my own part, I mean, I prefer to to trim my my nails outside if I can. I feel like they just simplifies the whole scenario, you know, Um, you don't have to worry about finding them if they go flying or anything

like that. Now, one thing that comes to my mind is, you know, in terms of the the parts of our bodies that we leave behind on regular basis, I mean, humans have it fairly simple, you know. Well it's just the most mostly just the nails and the hair, and but and yet we still managed to build up all

these fabulous ideas to construct demonships of the mind. Um, Imagine what it would be like if we if we like molted um and left behind an exoskeleton that resembled ourselves, you know, sort of like the cicada shell that is left behind. Or imagine that we make something along the lines of squid that leave behind us a pseudomorph, you know, a cloud of of ink that is in the shape of their body to fool predators, that sort of thing. Imagine what sort of like strange ideas about self and

former self. Uh, such beings, intelligent beings might have. Yeah. Can you imagine the religion and the religious practices of intelligent arthropods that had to molten have a whole body shell that was left behind? Oh? Man, that that would be good. That's that's that's something good for your sci fi novel there, Yeah, I mean what shape would it take?

Would it be? Would there be like a would you have like special burial grounds where all of your your various um uh, you know exoskeletons go once you've morphed out of them. Um do do famous uh crab people did do their exoskeleton moldings wind up in a museum somewhere? I don't know. There's so many questions to ask. As always, Uh, if you've run across any examples in science fiction or fantasy to deal with these sort of issues, we'd love

to hear from you. We we always love your to hear advice from listeners on old works of science fiction and fantasy or new works as well. Um. Likewise, we touched on a lot of different traditions and cultures in this episode especially, so I would love to hear from absolutely anybody who has insight on this. Uh, particularly with with with long nails for example. Uh, do you keep your nails long? Have you ever kept your nails long? Um? You know, right in. I'd like to to know how

that has impacted your life or not impacted your life. Likewise, if there's a particular tradition in your culture or your culture of origin, I would like to hear about that as well. And certainly, as Joe mentioned, if there are any particular practices that you engage in, either culturally or just sort of as a as a as a quirk of your own individual nature regarding your your your nail and hair trimmings. Uh, we would love to hear what

they are totally. In the meantime, if you would like to listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you can find us wherever you find your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. We just asked that you rate, review, and subscribe. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us to answer any of the questions Robert just listed, or if you'd like to suggest a

topic for the future. You've got any other feedback on this episode, you can email us at contact that's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts to my heart Radio. This is the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen me to your favorite shows.