From the Vault: Ghoul

structure in the next. So they might have began in the catacombs, they might have began in a tomb, but they ended up burrowing their way into the Stuff to Blow Your Mind Vault at some point, and now they pretty much have the run of the place. This episode was originally published on October. It was an October classic from a few years ago. So we hope you enjoy our exploration of the ghoul. Welcome to Stuff to Blow

Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. A man he had known in Boston, a painter of strange pictures with a secret studio and an ancient and unhallowed alley near a graveyard, had actually made friends with the ghouls and had taught him to understand the simpler part of their disgusting meeping and glibbering for all their laughter, ghouls or a dull lock. Hunger is the fire in which they burn, and it burns hotter than the hunger for power over men or for knowledge of the gods, and

a craze mortal. It vaporizes delicacy and leaves behind only a slag of anger and lust. Hey, welcome to stuff to bow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And those were two quick readings, the first from HP Lovecrafts The dream Quest of Unknown Cat and the second from Brian McNaughton's The Throne of Bones Um available via Wildside Press. And that, by the way, is not only one of my favorite publications that deal with Google's it's probably one of my favorite books of

all time. Now do you love it more than the D and D Monster Manual? Well, the two different types of reeds there, I mean, I do love the Monster Manual for my sort of catalog oriented monster consideration. And indeed, guls have have long had a cherished role in the Dungeons and Dragons setting. So what is throwing of Bones about? Throwing of bones is a it's a collection of short stories in one central novella set in a dark fantasy

setting that's vaguely Roman, vaguely tolkien Esque, I guess. But but what has more in common with the works of say Clark, Ashton Smith and some of the weird dark

fantasy writers of an earlier time. Oh, I should get into that, because I've recently discovered that I really dig Roman themes in in dark literature, because on your and Christians recommendation, I read The Great God Pan, which has that that fantastic reference to the statues from ancient Rome of the you know, the horrific visage of the goat,

the old goat skin. Yeah. Well, one of the things I love about McNaughton's work is that he brings this dark seriousness of weird fiction and horror into his writing. But there's also this gallows humor. There's this uh, especially prominent with the ghouls, because the ghoul is this creature that in It's in the versions that I like the most. They're they're gross, they're evil, they're sly, but they're also a little mischievous. They also have this weird, black sense

of humor about them. Uh, And I feel like mcnalton. It really brings that to life. Well, if you haven't figured it out by now, we're going to be talking about ghoules today, and sadly, I think this is going to have to be our final oct Ober podcast. It has been a great run this month of monsters and demons and madness. You're gonna have to sober up in the next episode a little bit and get back on

track for the holidays. But yeah, it's been a fun right, Okay, So Google's I think these days, when the average person is presented with the concept of a Google, what kind of descriptive features are you're going to get? I would say they'd be very generic. I mean, what is a ghoul to us today? It's just some kind of vaguely monstrous creature. In fact, you could even think of Google as a broader term into which other monsters fit, like the vampire is a type of Google. Well, the word

is used that way a lot. I have to admit that I have to bite my tongue to keep from correcting people when someone refers to a non Google as a Google. I want to say, no, that's that's technically not a Google. That is just a ghost that is somebody in a vampire costume. A google is a specific thing and you have to use the um appropriately. Yeah, well I brought that up specifically to provoke you. So Robert, come on, tell me, what is a ghoul really? All right?

So it's gonna it's gonna vary, and we're gonna get it before we end up at discussing actual science behind the google. So yes, that is coming in the second half. We're going to discuss the ancient roots and sort of the modern fictional roots. But in most cases, you're looking at this creature that might be unliving or maybe it's just living on the margins of what we think of as as an actual appropriate member of the natural world. It's very much the monster as outsider, a motif very

much so. Yeah, making its home graveyards and places of of of loss and death, and it feasts upon human remains. So it is essentially a cannibalistic scavenger and scavenger in the true sense, and that it's sort of dwells at the edges of the camp. You know, you have civilization as the encampment where our activity dwells. You don't find the ghoul in the mid of the city, you find

the goal trailing behind you, feasting on what you leave behind. Right, Yeah, I think in some cases you have Googles that are following armies. I always love that motif and would love to see that that that used more, especially in the fantasy settings. You have some some sort of army going out to fight a battle. If they always do well, then surely there are camp followers and there are Googles right behind them. Yeah, the other type of camp follower.

But based on what we've said so far, it should be clear that the concept of the goal has not remained static over time. I mean it's not even fully unified. Today. You've got this generic goal and then you've got Robert's very specific goal. How has the ghoul changed over time? And where did the idea originally come from? All right, well, let's go back to the beginnings then, if not the beginning of the universe, because we have to look at

pre Islamic Arabic mythology. This mythology is so cool and I was so delighted to read it, so our main sore son. This is a paper by Ahmed al Rawi called the Mythical Ghoul and Arabic Culture and this was a really fun read. Yes it was. This was one of my key sources on the how stuff Works article

How ghoules work. Um, yeah, and he gets into the you know, just the original root of the word word for starters, which is from the Arabic ghoule or g h u l that may stem from Galu, which is the name of an ancient demon correct and the galou played a role in some of their their key literature and mythology, one of them being the death and rebirth mythology of the god Demuzi or the Demuzi is sort of equal to Tamus, which is another god of the

ancient Middle East. But the death and rebirth mythology corresponds to the growth and harvest cycle of food crops. So there you can see another one of the ways that that our mythology ties into our way of life, the way we make a living in our and our basic material concerns informed the stories we tell about, you know, the creation of the world and the behavior of the gods.

And and there you've got just like the crops die every year and then are reborn later in the next season or regrow out of you know, the dead fields of the previous harvest. You've got the god Demuzi or Tamuse, who's a vegetation god, who is abducted and taken down into the realm of death. And who is the abductor of Demuzi or Tamus. It's the Galu, the demon right. And this is fascinating too, because we see the google tied into some of our our earliest and most powerful

myths concerning the flow of the seasons. Totally. Yeah, But following its role in the official mythology of of ancient Babylon and ancient Mesopotamia, you have this idea of the ghoule emerging as more of a ground level folklore creature. You know that that it's mentioned all in all of the standard mythology and folk tales and superstitions of the average person living in ther be In Peninsula, and Arabic scholars have actually documented the way in which this monster

emerged in the thinking of the people. Yeah, Arabic scholars of the eighth, ninth, and ten centuries, they compiled various Bedouin folk tales involving the Gooules, and many of these found their way into the collection The Thousand and One Nights and This is key because translations of this book of course traveled to Europe in the eighteenth century, as did the notion with the ghoul, and this is where, as we'll get into later, we see the google emerge

in Western culture and in the in eventually in fictional creations of the late eighteenth century and most importantly the nineteentie century. Yeah, so I get the feeling it's more the European grave ghoul that ends up becoming the D and D monster. Yes, um, though you do see at times, say the modern motifs kind of reaching back into into Arabic folklore for for some additional depth. Yeah. I here we should mention a couple of these pre Islamic ghoul

accounts because they are fascinating. So one of the stories that al Rawi tells in his paper is that it's recounted according to the scholar al Masudi, and he writes the following. Arabs before Islam believed that when God created genies from the gusts of fire, he made from this type of fire their female part, but one of their eggs was split into hince the kutrube, which looked like a cat, was created. As for the devils. They came

from another egg and settled in the seas. Other evil creatures such as the marid inhabited the islands, The ghoul resided in the wilderness, and the siloi dwelt in the lavatories and waste areas, and the hamma lived in the air in the form of a flying snake. So these are some awesome monsters that are being described here. I love the idea of a lavatory and waste area monster because that's again it's a it's a wonderful place for

a haunting. That's a wonderful borderland. Right. Well, it's a place where you're vulnerable and usually where you're isolated, right where do you have to go off by yourself? Yeah, and that's where you might encounter the supernatural. Um. But then, of course there is another source that says that quote. The devils wanted to eaves drop on heaven, so God threw meteors at them, whereupon some were burnt, fell into the sea and later turned into crocodiles, while others dropped

onto the ground and changed into ghouls. So there you've got a ghoule origin and a crocodile origin at the same time. They're essentially siblings um and plenty of the other stories also depict the ghoul as a shape shifter that's able to disguise its appearance. Uh. This appears to be a common feature. Other common features are that the traditional Arabic ghoul is often female in appearance. And I thought this was interesting. It can be killed with a

good chopped from a sword. And if I'm reading this right, it sort of makes it different from the vampire, the werewolf, and these other monsters which can often only be killed through magically appropriate means, like you have to have the you know, the one magic bullet that is known to kill the monster, as to the silver or holy water steaked through the heart or or whatever it is for

that monster. Individually, the ghoul can be killed by violence, but it does have to be a very mighty and strategic form of violence because an interesting development on the myth is that, according to some versions, the ghoul would only die if you hit it with one mighty blow with a sword, because if you hit it more than once, then you would have to hit it a thousand times

more before it would die. Yeah, that's so you had to time your one strike, you know, you had to get the one really good one in well, that could I could see that making sense In terms of the creature. You sort of have to get that surprise is hit in. You've got to get that. To put in D n D terms, you have to get that that that surprise attack bonus, right, and if you don't, then you're gonna have to apply a lot of smaller attacks to win.

I've also read and this would of course be post Islamic interpretations, but in these interpretations you could also at least drive a Google away with readings from the Koran. Yeah, that definitely comes up later where you can use the holy or spiritual power of of a of a good spiritual force by like saying the name of Allah or by quoting from the Koran, and that will tend to drive it into remission. Essentially, it will say, no, why

do you do this to me? But you can also whack it with the sword as long as you whack it really good. Just once. Now, speaking of Islamic traditions, you're probably wondering, what did Mohammed have to say about Google's. Well, Mohammed's words on the existence of Google's vary depending on which text you read. So the Koran does not mention them at all. That's important to stress here. Karan does

mention gin but not not ghoules. Yes, but contested references do pop up in the head Eat that's a book of Mohammed's attributed acts and sayings. Yeah, so they're they're definitely conflicting bits of scholarship about what Mohammed had to say about ghoules. If anything, but to quote, I'll RAWI again on the people who do say that the prophet

had something to say about ghouls. What he said was quote, Ghouls are the demons or enchantresses of genies that hurt human beings by eating or spoiling their food, or by frightening travelers when they're in the wilderness, and in order to avoid their harm, one can recite a verse from the Holy Koran or call for prayer, since they hate any reference to God. And that first part mentioned something

about the wilderness. This is something that pops up again and again in the literature about the about the ghouls. That you know these ancient ghoul folk tales is you don't expect to encounter them in the middle of civilization. There you counter them on the road in the wilderness. Between places they're in that intermediary world. I like to

how this mentions um eating and spoiling of food. It's tied uh inherently to our survival via consumption of food and the potential violation of that food, and and and just into general um ideas of purity and cleanliness in our food. Yeah, well, I mean, you certainly don't want something that eats corpse flesh getting into your pantry, right, Yeah, they're just going to tear it out in there, obviously.

But you may have noticed that so far there hasn't been a whole lot, if anything, about the eating of corpse flesh. That's right, And that's something that we'll get into in a bit now. In some accounts, Mohammed dismisses ghouls as completely non existent. In others, he gives advice on banishing them. His companion, though, abou Asada al Sadi, takes a more balanced approach, and he states that ghoules lived in the pre Islamic past, but that Allah no

longer permits them to exist. Meanwhile, there's also a legend that umar have been I'll caught him. Another of Mohammed's companions put a google to the sword on the road to Syria. Yeah, this was great. So the story goes a female ghoul stops him on the road and asks him where are you going, and Umar says it is none of her business, and then she does the move from the Exorcist where she turns her head all the way around. That's really part of the story. It said that. Uh,

and then he splits her down the middle with the sword. Alright, so single I'm guessing single blow there, right, he does it, right, he hits her with the one blow. But then later he comes back and the body is gone. So either she survived or the other googles came and took her body away, or more some sort of magical disappearance. Yeah. So, so if we consider the google that eats human flesh a kind of perversion of the idea of corpse cannibalism, what is the ghoul that eats ghoul flesh? It's like

meta cannibalism. Yeah, yeah, I mean, and it's only ties in with with how we see scavengers behave towards their own sometimes. And that's that's key here, because although ghouls were sometimes associated with scavenging hyenas in a in Arabic test, they really don't have this grave ghoul association where they're going to come and take your dead loved ones from the graveyard after the funeral and eat their corpses. Yeah.

This particular detail, according to al Rawi, seems to emerge from Anton Galan's French translation of The Thousand and One Nights in the early eighteenth century. So not only did Ghalan take liberties in his translation, he even introduced and allegedly created a female character named Amina who prefers the company of graveyard ghouls to that of her new husband. Yeah. So this and you can see this definitely appealing to

some of the Gothics andsibilities of the time in Europe. Right, But this inaccurate translation was hugely influential in the Western world and and in you know, informing their the Western worlds understanding of the Middle East, so inspiring the work of William Beckford, the eighteenth century author of the Arabian theme novel thatfic, and the folkloric studies of of another

individual named Sabine Baring Gould. So we see. So that's interesting, and you have this rich tradition of ghouls within in Arabic traditions. Just some wonderful details. They're already a fabulous creature, but then it gets tweaked a little bit, either in you know, mistranslation or creative embellishment of the myth as it translates into European um fiction and folklore and European

understandings of the Middle East. Yeah, it's fascinating, this evolution of the ghoul meme, because if you trace the ancient pre Islamic Arabic ghoul up through the way the grave ghoul comes to be understood in European culture. What's the common thread there? I mean, you've seen the evolution basically of a word, the word ghoul, But is there a common themeat dick element that remains the same throughout it despite just general monstrousness or malevolence. Yeah, I think it works.

Like I feel like that the google as we have seen it and discussed it in in pre European traditions. I feel like it's able to take on the mantle of of corpse eating rather rather honestly like it adds another dimension to it and certainly tweaks it in a new direction, but not in a direction that feels out of character with its origins. Okay, I can accept that. Now, if we look elsewhere in the world, do we find myths of creatures that are similar to the ghoul we do? Uh? Yeah.

It's definitely worth noting that even if the original Arabic ghouls didn't eat corpses, they have peers in Asian folk tales that do so. In the Tamil mythology of India, they have the shaggy haired creatures known as the pay who sought out human battle so as to lap blood from the open women of the dying um. Still, other ghoules emerge in the eighth century. In the eighth century Tibetan Book of the Dead, which details the Buddhist journey

through death and into the realms beyond death, the reincarnation um. Here, in the dream like state known as Bardo, the departed soul encounters that the the Pisach ghouls, and these are fierce female beings with be steel heads and an appetite

for bones and viscera. That's interesting. Now, another thing that we see commonly here is that in these early visions, the ghouls are very often female like, explicitly described as female and appearance, whereas the ghouls that I think we think of today tend to be either sort of um

androgyni is tending towards masculine or or fully male. Yeah. Yeah, I think there is a definite tendency to to generate a masculine idea of the ghoule in Western culture, though though some of my favorite books on the matter have definitely have female googles. Now. In the conclusion of his article uh al Rawi, he says that the ghoules may have been inspired just by you know, things that people

actually did encounter in reality, like people with various birth defects. Yeah, particularly things like cleft pal at cleft lip, distortions of the mouth, and facial features you know, which sadly do um can and do interfere in our interpretation of of of an individual substance. Yeah. I think this is a common feature you see in the origins of monster legends.

This is often hypothesized that we would just see someone that uh that had you know, some kind of atypical way of looking, and that we would interpret that as well, you know, this person is cursed or evil or there there's something wrong with them. They didn't have the light of modern medical science to just say no, they're a

person like anybody else. Yeah, very much in keeping with the change link to editions that you find in Europe, right that surely that this year your actual child was taken away by fairies and this is the goblin that's left in in its place. YEA. Now, on top of that, Victorian adventure and Middle Eastern scholar and just all around

fascinating individual. Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. Uh. He explained the Arabic ghoule as a mythical creature that embodies human fears and tampoos concerning graveyards check, desert wastes check and cannibalism and specifically survival cannibalism. If we're to tie it into other mid cycles that such as the Wind to Go, that did definitely have such a strong resonant place in uh in the Native peoples of North America, because it's tied with that fear of survival cannibalism as an a

as a possible necessity during harsh winters. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can see a very strong sort of theme emerging, which is that all of these disparate things are sort of united by the sense that they're playing on fears of the periphery, the edges, the outside, and the taboo, as as many monsters do. Yes, So, as previously mentioned, thousand and one Night serves as this cultural bridge, and it's kind of a slightly distorted cultural bridge by which

Middle Eastern ghoules migrate into Western fictional traditions. And in addition to the above examples, in the original Arabic text, the ghouls of thousand and one Nights are also vile tricksters and depending on again those translations, they may be flesh eaters. They kidnapped victims, They lure lustful me into their doom by taking on the guys of beautiful women.

Again that shape shifting motif. Yeah, that's a common thing you see in the Arabic stories, is that there's a like a female ghoul hanging out by the road and calling men to come over and see her. Yeah, and over come over and see me sometime and desert wells. And of course that's a wonderful uh, a classic monster troupe that we continue to play with today. Um. But then of course also sometimes they break into your storerooms and they much on your dates. I think that's what

Mohammed was mentioning. Yeah, but Some of the key early adapters, if you will, to Goulden were po Lord Byron and hands Christian Andersen. Yeah, they all made mention of ghouls um in the in the nineteenth century and their writings. What what did Hans Christian Andersen write about ghouls um? I think it's just in one particular story, and I don't think they play a huge role, but they pop up like clearly they were, you know, one of the many magical creatures. He was too, and they're just in

the mix there in the cultural mi asthma. Yeah. Yeah, So they end up picking him up, playing with him to a certain degree, and then you have a new generation come along in the twentieth century Lovecraft, of course, HP Lovecraft, who we've mentioned other weird fiction authors of the day, including Clark Ashton Smith who wrote some wonderful ghoul stories. They continue to cultivate gould them in a new dark form, tying it in with some of the

the dark weird motifs that are a part of weird fiction. Uh, particularly in lovecraft case. You have Pigman's model, Ah, yeah, which you read correct. Yeah, yeah. Robert told me before this episode that I should read Pickman's model and I did.

It was very interesting, and it's also one of the interesting things about it to me is that it is different from all these other stories that where we've been saying that the ghoul is sort of on the periphery, as a scavenger on the outside, trailing behind the camp

or whatever. In this story, the ghoul emerges as a feature of a sort of shadowy meta city, a shadowy city within a city that there's a part of the city that the narrator is taken to by Pickman, who's this creepy artist who draws creepy things or I guess paints creepy things, and they go to his house in this bizarre part of the city where suddenly there are tunnels going back to seemingly maybe back in time to Salem and witchcraft and monstrous things maybe emerging from them,

and it's right there in the heart of Boston in that story, right, Yeah, it is. There's very much this feeling that the ghoul kind of resides in the city's history as well as in its architectural history. So there's a there's a sense that the bodies that the ghoules feed on, or not even current graves they're they're kind of feasting on the past. So Pigman's model is a key work in the Western ghoul and we see here

that it really gets its clause into our our horror literature. Yeah, there are several key scenes describing well describing paintings of ghouls eating the dead flesh of human beings and uh. And from here this spreads that Lovecraft of Courses is hugely influential, and so his idea of Gouldham spreads into various works of fantasy and dark fantasy. Again Clark, Ashton Smith, Brian McNaughton, Neil Gaiman. More recently, do you even see ghouls show up in the Harry Potter series, though not

that convincingly. Now, if we're gonna go with the D and D model, what would you what type of creature would you say, Lord Voldemort is Is Is he more of a Lich or he's kind of got some ghoul features? Right? Then? He I feel like he's a he's a variation on the Lich, you know, like what with the whole of storing of the soul and the various hor cruxes. Yeah, but he has a ghoulish appearance for sure. Yeah. Now

I was curious. I didn't have time to look this up before we recorded, but I just had the thought, Um, what about the nasgool in Tolkien? Do you think that the ghoul in Nascol meaning the nasgoul or the ring wraiths in Lord of the Rings and these evil spirits who are obsessed with with finding the Ring of Power and they want to grab it and bring it back

to their master. Uh. And and I believe the word nasgoul means ring wraith, and so the ghoul there being some kind of evil spirit I won or if Tolkien was inspired by the Arabic word ghoul there, well, you know, I'm not that much of a Tolkien scholar, so we have to have to call out for our listeners to see if anybody has any insight on that. But and I don't know to what extent he was interested in

Arabic culture and Arabic languages. I know he was in the language end the language, and it seems completely possible that he would have been familiar with with these tales. So I would if I had to bet on it, I would say, yeah, he surely the nas goal has two has its origins in pre Islamic Arabic folklore, and of course we continue to see great works of horror and other fictions that involved the ghoul. Catlin R. Kiernan has a great um has a great novel called Daughter

of Hounds that deals with ghoules. I recommend that he's a wonderful old weird tale short story called Far Below by Robert Barbara Johnson, and this involves ghouls in the New York subway system. That's a great read if you can find a copy, oh man, that does sound great. Yeah, And and comics and TV we see plenty of examples there.

There's a wonderful episode of Tales from the Crypt called Morning Mess that involves uh a shadowy organization that seems to be very interested in in supplying burial for vagrants and transients who die. But of course there's a ghoulish secret at the heart of it. Oh No, Now, I recall a particular Tales from the Crypt comic segment that I read years ago that was about It was about

a tale of a tragic tale of young lovers. And the woman dies and she her body is entombed in a crypt, and then her lover is locked in the mausoleum with her like locked into the crypt and he cannot get out, and he's trying to escape and he can't. And then much later the police find him and they find that he actually survived in there for a long time. And the ominous ending is that I find he died

of formalde hyde poisoning. Well, that's that's a pretty good one. Yeah, I need to go back and read some of these old tales from the crypts. I don't have a lot of experience with actual comics, but oh I haven't read many either. That's a one. That's one a friend of mine recommended to me. Excellent to have to look that up. So, yeah, we men, and we mentioned Dungeons and Dragons already that the Gohougles have have a long played a role in

in in Dungeons and Dragons. They've always been in the monster manuals, both Googles and I believe, and they also have a like an advanced version of the Google called a gas and then variations on Googles that pop up in different add on. So tell me just basically, what is your encounter with the ghoul? Look like it's just basic sword fodder, Like it's not very very tough. The standard Google isn't particularly tough. We're intelligent. The gas is a little more potent and uh in a little more yeah,

and a little tougher to encounter. But they're not They're not high end monstering counters, unless, of course, you encountering them in significant numbers. But despite all this, the Ghoul has never really, as you I think eloquently put it in our notes, exploded into the main stream, at least not in the way that the vampire or the werewolf for or even Frankenstein's creature has. You know, we never

got the universal monster movie of the Ghoul. Yeah, yeah, I mean there have been occasional films that I think there was even a Boris Carla film titled the Ghoul though, really yeah, but it's not particularly in keeping obviously, I've never seen it. Yeah, So yeah, it's just I guess the Ghoul is not that sexy. The Ghoul the ideas that it represents are maybe maybe not as comfortably uh contemplated as that of vampires and werewolves. Well, certainly not

as sexy. I mean, that's the thing about if you go back and watch a bell Legostis Dracula, it's it's very slick. You know, it's Dracula is kind of sexy. He's not gross and monstrous. The ghoul is disgusting. Ye. Yeah, and I think that's a big reason, but it continues

to be. It's kind of like one of those bands that never really you know, takes off into stupid superstardom, but they always have their following, right, So I would say that ghouls are kind of like the Maybe they're the fish of the monster world, right, Like, not everybody's gonna have a lot of familiarity with them or be able to tell you what their top ten hits are, but they have a hardcore following and they're not going away even if you know some of the details about them,

you know, are a little ambiguous. So we've discussed the folkloric, mythological, fictional history of the ghoul from ancient pre pre Islamic Arabic traditions on up into the latest edition of The Dungeons and Dragons Monster Man. Yeah. But of course, the eating of dead flesh is not merely the stuff of fantasy. I mean, this is a This is not only something you commonly see in the natural world. It is a standard way of making a living for many organisms. Yeah,

I mean, we've discussed on this show before. In the past, we've discussed basic cannibalism as it occurs in nature is a very When you strip away all the human complications, it makes a certain economic sense. Sure, you're just talking about flash, you're talking about energy. You're talking about absorbing

the energy back into a viable being. I think a question we should keep in mind throughout the course of this part about science is the question of why cannibalism is such a taboo among humans and it's and obviously, I mean, it would be quite clear why violent cannibalism is so like you kill somebody and eat their flesh. But I'm talking about the kind of cannibalism that, as you just alluded to, makes a kind of basic energy economics sense, Like your loved one dies and then we

say no, no, you will not eat their flesh. Right. Well, I feel like the big theme here. We'll discuss another possible theme in a minute, but the big one, of course, ties right into what we've previously talked about concerning UH natural burial versus UH modern burial traditions. Is that we just get wrapped up in the idea of that corpse still being the person than it was. Yeah. Yeah, so we did definitely allude to this in our episode called

Human Remains Past President in the Future. But there there is the idea that we can never fully accept that the dead body of the person we loved is not in some sense still that person, not in some sense still in a way alive, and thus in that way, there really among humans at least may not be such

a thing psychologically as non violent cannibalism. Like if you if your cousin dies and you rationally know you're no longer hurting him by eating his body, you just can't on some level except that you're doing violence to his flesh, and it seems like you're doing a harmful thing. Okay, So let's go on a journey, Okay, traveling back down the highway of human evolution and human ascension. Uh, a road that as we travel, what you're gonna see some

rather ghoulish characters standing along the wayside. I think if we look back into early human history, we can see both of the major aspects of the goal, both the scavenger aspect and the cannibalistic aspect. Okay, so we're gonna travel back two point five million years to the dawn of the Polistocene epoch, and you'll find our austro look pithy scene ancestors scrambling to deserve diversify their diets in

a changing world. Okay, so these are people who are they're not living a comfortable existence like us, supported by agriculture and supply to stores of food. They're living at the edge r at the edge of hunger. They need

to find food constantly. Yeah, and uh, according to the two thousand fourteen paper Humans and Scavengers the Evolution of Interactions and Ecosystem Services that's published in the journal Bioscience, where specific we're talking about increasing seasonality in uh, precipitation in the African savannahs, and this is forcing our austro lepithasine ancestors to diversify again to cope with the developing

seasonal bottleneck in fruits and other soft plant foods. So it's becoming harder to make a living gathering plant matter exactly. So you end up with two approaches to responses to this bottleneck. Okay, you have some early hominides that turned to seeds and roots, they start diversifying in that direction. Uh, the roots are going to be available year round. UH seeds can be uh can be acquired in different seasons as well. That doesn't sound very good to me. Yeah,

well that's what's the what this other group decided. And they're the ones who decided to try out some of the meat to be found on large vertebrate carcasses. But they're not hunting because we're not like hunting. Hunting is a is a technological advancement, but also hadn't come along yet. Well, I mean, think about all of the deficiencies human human beings have as natural hunters, and we don't have uh teeth and claws and powerful jaws like a lion or

a tiger or something like that. We do have smarts and we can make tools, but we can't just chase down a gazelle and rip it apart the way that these other large predators can. And that's what these early meat eaters had to do. They had to they had to wait, they had to watch, they had to look for the signs they have vultures in the sky, or or the movements of known predators or larger known scavengers.

Strategic meat acquisition. Yeah, find find where they're going and try and either pick up the pieces afterwards, or try and steal it again. These are scavengers. Are their whole past is scavenging, and so if they're going to start in quote, encompassing meat into their diet as well, then they're gonna try to do it through scavenging strategies. Yeah. And you can even see this in what scientists say about the most ancient human tools we've discovered, because what

do you think the first human tools are. Obviously what would come to your mind is hunting tools, right, Yeah, you think about like, yeah, yeah, spears, axes, stuff like that to kill animals with. Uh. And obviously if we do go back to certain periods, we do find ancient hunting weapons, but a lot of what you find appears to be early tools used for the processing of animal carcasses, So not necessarily for the killing, but for for processing

for like a butchery. Yeah, like very much. The idea of finding the body and needing to get that narrow out right, trying to get some neat out of this, uh, this dead large vertebrate. Uh that can that you can can sustain you, but you're gonna have to use your tools to do it. Yeah, it's a smart strategy, and hominids are not the only animal species that has ever tried it. But yeah, you you look to what the predator has already done, and then you engage in klepto parasitism,

the stealing parasitism. You you take advantage of their word and claim it for your own. Yeah, and if you take you to the next level, you engage in confrontational scavenging. So this is uh. And this is something we still see to this day, uh in rare instances. And and they're these are the kind of traditions that you know, may not survive too much longer in our modern world. But there are Cameroonian villagers who continue to steal meat from lion kills to this day. I mean, it's a

smart strategy. It totally makes sense. The lion has done the work, and if you can bluff your way in just long enough to just to scare him away enough to where you can cut off a little bit of the kill and run off with it. And then instead of hopefully instead of coming after you, they'll just return to their own kill to harvest the rest of the meat for themselves. Yeah, you can bribe the lion with the work it's already done. Yeah, bribe it with the work.

It's already done. Steal just enough to where they're not going to miss it, and and come after you. Now, over time, this eventually develops into more powerful huntings hills. Right, we developed the technology and the strategies and the brain power to not only drive away the hunters, but to usurp their role as hunters. And according to that paper published in the General Bioscience quote, the close association between human hunters and vertebrate scavengers probably played a role in

the diversification of cultural services. So this is interesting because we're all used to these motifs of the the early hunter and gatherer, right, and we tend not to think about scavenging too much in that scenario. We don't think about the ghoulish history of human ascension and the idea that there was a time where we're essentially hyenas were essentially vultures. And maybe that's one of the reasons that the the the the idea of the google still is

so repellent because it does mirror our own history. Well, there is something that we find inherently distasteful about scavenging as a way of life. Right, Like, I think that is very common among humans to sort of see it as essentially ignoble or unchivalrous, almost like it is honorable to hunt and kill your food, you know, that's a sort of an admirable struggle. But there's something just kind of like gross and unpleasant about scavenging and looking through

you know, trash piles and dead bodies and stories roadkill. Right. It's probably one of the modern ideas that it's just you tend to just to triot b to like, oh, that's a screwed up hillbilly thing to do to eat the deer that you hit with your car. But really, why Like if you ran over a deer with your car and you're into eating deer meat and the problem and you have the means to process it, that's still a fresh kill. It's just as fresh as the one

that the dude shot from a deer stand. So why not. Now, if we think of these ancient hominids as in a way very economically conscious, essentially that they're making maximum use of what skills and tools they have to get inner resources from their environment, and the main way they find to do that is scavenging, even maybe kind of dangerous

and scary forms of scavenging. Did they ever turn that scavenging impulse in word, Yeah, that's the big, big question, right, because it leads into into concerns about, well, how does this scavenging creature, this creature that has that has learned the value of meat, has adapted to survive via meat, and then suddenly suddenly it puts new it applies new

meaning to their own debt. Suddenly, Hey, I could go out and I could try and steal this body from a lion, but here's a dead member of our own community. It's made out of meat. I can eat that meat. And it's also worth noting too that eventually, as we developed technologies to to better process and cook meat, we're better able to deal with some of the disease issues that are inherent with scavenging. Right, we reduced some of

the natural risk. Yeah, but why not why not turn to that meat, especially if I have and really built up as much uh, you know, human cultural whole taboos regarding the consumption of that food. Yeah, and I think some scientists think that we did make that leap. Yes. According to paleontologist Isabelle Cassaries, our ancestors likely turned to cannibalism due to lack of resources and competition for territory at critical points and their ascensions. So you basically we're

talking again about survival cannibalism. You find ways to supplement your diet when it gets tough, you can, you can deal with you can scavenge for meat. But then what happens when that runs low. Bat's when you turn to your own dead and you give it a try. Yeah. What did ancient hominids and the Donner Party have in common? Yeah, they knew what made economic sense. Yeah, and it makes sense.

We've talked about the economy of cannibalism. It's widespread death throughout the animal kingdom, including among human and non human primates. Because sure, killing and eating your own kind tends to interfere with the long term genetic mission of just reproducing and making more of yourself, but it works like a charm in terms of short term survival. Nevertheless, as I mentioned before, there is this intensely strong taboo against it.

We we just do not feel generally like this is an okay thing to do, or at least I can I can speak for myself and say that no, that does not seem like an okay idea, and it I think to most people seems that way. Yeah, Like, even if the sandwich is really good and you're like, oh man, this is such a good sandwich, in the back of your mind you're thinking, but this this used to be ron. Now I'm eating and ron as a sandwich and that's

really messing it up. Oh he's so savory. But there may be reasons for this taboo beyond what we mentioned before. So earlier we were talking about the idea that it's just hard to shake the feeling that the flesh of a dead person is not still in some way able to be harmed or in somebody still that person. But there could possibly be selection pressures that favor a taboo against cannibalism, right, yes, And this is uh, this is where we end up talking about curu disease and all

and and discussing prions. So what are prions. Well, prions are abnormal proteins that induce irregular protein folding in brain cells, and this construction leads to flawed brain tissue, resulting in progressive and incurable brain damage. One of the most notable examples here, certainly for our purposes, in this podcast is Curu disease, which is found in New Guinea among the for A people. It's a rare breed of of disorder

caused by by this type of prion. Also, it's known as the shaking disease what's what kuru means right, and sometimes referred to as the laughing disease because scientists observed fits of hysterical laughing among those afflicted. Yeah, and so obviously it is a it is a fatal, very terrible disease that you do not want to get at all.

But what scientists observed is that it only really tends to happen though it's comparable to some other prion diseases like like c j D, but it only really seems to happen in the for A tribe of New Guinea.

And this is related to the some of the rituals practiced by this tribe of Indo cannibalism, which sort of flips the script on cannibalism, like we've been talking about, I mean, from our cultural perspective, we've got this taboo on cannibalism because we think of it as a kind of disrespectful or harmful thing to do to the remains of a person, but it's not necessarily thought of by

everyone in that way. I mean, this is a sort of respectful cannibalism, the the the loving incorporation of a dead loved one's flesh back into your society in the form of food. Yeah, taking your dead loved one back into yourself as food into your body, taking their body and spirit into yourself. So it in their beliefs and their traditions that the cannibal indo cannibalism takes on a

form of of beauty. Really. Yeah, So this in a way that my seems strange to a lot of people, could be a beautiful way of looking at the consumption of human flesh, excepted that it did have this very very unfortunate medical consequence of leading to kuru disease, right, and doctors first first really focused in on this in the nineteen fifties when curu was popping up among the four A tribespeople decimating whole villages, and the science is

quickly discovered that the only way to acquire the disease was through the consumption of contaminated brain tissue. So they just had to shut down the funeral rights, and that is how they were actually able to to stop the

spread of Kuru disease among these tribes people. But the obvious idea here is if it is possible to get an extremely dangerous fatal disease by consuming In this case, I believe the brain tissue of your dead loved ones, but possibly there could be other cases where consuming the dead tissue of human beings is a disease threat. Would there eventually be an evolutionary selection pressure against cannibalism? Well, would there be enough of a pressure that that is

an argument is often made. However, I did find us some work by a medical researcher, Michael Alper's, and he points out that the widespread presence of genes protecting against prior disease suggests that human endo cannibalism was fairly common for thousands of years. So we see the genetic legacy of continuous Indo cannibalism, the continuous consumption of human debt enough to where we build up a certain amount of resistance to these prior on So why do we need

a gene for Indo cannibalism taboo? If we can just have a gene for Indo cannibalism, I don't know. Shield that makes it safe. It's basically like finding a cannibalism cookbook in your on your friends bookshelf. Yeah, and then confining what you have this if you didn't right right like clearly clearly that we know what the secret ingredient is in the meat loaf. Now, so it seems like there are some lines of evidence indicating that in the

past humans were eating some some some grave flesh. Yeah, that I believe so based on the research material we were looking at. Scavenging, just scavenging for dead meat is a part of our evolutionary history, and so is the consumption of our own debt. And therefore the the idea of the graveyard ghoule is very much a dark reflection of if not who we are today, then at least of who we have been as a species in the past.

The scavenger. Yes, so I think about that the next time you you see an episode of I don't know, Supernatural, I think sometimes as ghouls, or you watch an Old Tales from the Crypts episode, or read some delightful fiction that involves the Google death. Well, unfortunately, as I said at the beginning, I think this episode is going to have to conclude our October lineup of creepy and monstrous content.

But please keep listening because even after October, we will continue to serve up to all of you intellectual scavengers some tasty and sometimes forbidden morsels. Indeed, and in the meantime, be sure to check out Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's where you'll find all the podcast episodes. You'll find videos, including a new Monster Science episodes that have been going up. You'll find blog posts as well as links out to our social media

accounts uh such as Facebook and Twitter. We'll blow the mind on both of those, and we are Stuff to Blow your Mind on tumbler. And if you want to write to us and let us know your favorite appearance of ghouls in literature, or your favorite scientific fact about scavenging or cannibalism or any other eating of corpse flesh, you can email us at blow the Mind at how stuff Works at dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.