Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb. Today is Saturday. We have a vault episode for you. This is going to be The Hogs of Hell Part one. It originally aired ten twenty four, twenty twenty four. Let's jump right in. I remember, indeed that in later years the Lord of my country, knowing I was acquainted with Italy, asked me why, as he had seen down there some lords went out to pasture their pigs. And I laughed, realizing that on the contrary,
they were going in search of truffles. But when I told him that these lords hoped to find the truffle underground to eat it, he thought I said they were seeking der Typhon, the devil, and he blessed himself devoutly, looking at me in amazement. Then the misunderstanding was cleared up, and we both laughed at it. Such is the magic of human languages, that, by human accord, often the same sounds mean different things. Had so of milk umberto echoes the name of the Rose.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick.
All right. In today's episode, as the title indicates, and as the quote suggest, we're turning our attention once more to beings and monsters that may verge on the demonic, and this time it is, of course, hogs of hell, pigs of hell, uh bores of the underworld, and so forth. We've of course discussed the Garrisne demoniac on the show before this, being Christ's exorcism of the demonic legion into a herd of swine, out of a man and into swine. We did a whole episode about that in the past.
This time, though, it's more about hell pigs of one sort or another. We're gonna we're gonna explore some different territory and different interpretations.
That's right, monster pigs, bl z of bores, and pigs of a more heavenly sword as well. But we start a lot of these October episodes with examples from horror movies of the types of creatures we're talking about, and so I figured we should do the same today. I know this has come up on the show several times. I'm not quite sure why we keep pinging back on this movie so often, but when it comes to horror
movies with monster pigs. I have to mention the nineteen eighty four Russell Mulcaheek killer pig movie from before the same director made Highlander in nineteen eighty six. This was eighty four and the movie is called Razorback Now. I've described the plot in the past as something like a combination of Australian Texas Chainsaw massacre and Jaws, but with a pig instead of a shark. I stand by that. I think that is a pretty that gives you a pretty good idea of what you're dealing with. It's been
a while since I've seen it. I don't super highly recommend it. Like my memory is that is extremely gooey and gross like at one of the major settings of the movie is a gray market dog food factory in the Australian outback, so you can imagine the kind of chainsaw massacre connotations you'd get there. There's a lot of body slop. But it is worth mentioning as a movie because it's one of the relatively few horror films I
can think of where the monster is a pig. I was looking it up and it seems there have been several more movies on this theme in recent decades, but I haven't seen any of those, so this is the one I'm aware of. And I recall that the movie does actually do a pretty commendable job of making the bores mouth a mind rending terror. It's just this hot, steaming maze of teeth and tusks, and for most of the movie, in fact, almost never really you really don't
see the creature's whole bit. You just see its mouth almost, like all there is is a mouth, which I think is a strong choice. You get a similar kind of thing in some shark movies, basically all you see or the gaping Jaws.
Yeah, this is not what I've seen, but I know you admire it, or in my aspects of it. And I'm looking at some stills here right now, and yeah, this monster pick looks amazing, Like this is this is the thoroughly deserving of the title Jaws, but with a pig.
I mean, it does take serious boldness to approach that as a concept, because do you can keep the You can keep the monster hidden much more easily in Jaws because it's underwater, right, but a boor is just running around, So yeah, it takes some clever photography to make the scene convincing and heighten the tension without ever showing us too much of the bore until the very end.
I guess the thing about a bore is you can have the boar moving through like the tall grass or the undergrowth to some extent, it's sort of like it's underwater.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right, you can have that. Uh though this boar I from what IVER call it's taller than any grass in the setting. It's like a fan sized bore. Okay, Now, as I said, I haven't really seen any of these other recent pig monster movies. Maybe there's some really good ones. I don't know, I can't say.
Uh.
But of course, beyond the realm of horror movies, there are a lot of fascinating pig beings in mythology, religion, and ancient literature, including good pigs, bad pigs, and everything in between.
Yeah. Yeah, And I have to admit I never really looked into them all that much before, and I think I probably kind of glossed over mentions of bores and pigs in mythology in the past, just because I don't know. I'm I didn't have really strong opinions about wild boars. I don't have any experiences with them. You know, I've seen various you know, pig and pig kin animals that the zoos, and they're interesting, but you know, I just
wasn't inspired. So I of course, when we were going to do this episode, I said, sure, let's do it. Let's dive in, and I turned to one of my favorite sources, initial sources for this sort of thing. I looked to one of folklore's Carol Rose's books, in this case, Giants, Monsters and Dragons and Encyclopedia Folklore, Legend and Myth great volume, easily one of my most loved and falling apart books.
But when I started looking around for bores and pig like creatures, I was surprised at how many there were. There are a lot of them. Dozens of creatures are referenced in this book. And I should stress that while she's pretty exhaustive in these volumes, she is by no means complete in her chronicling of global traditions. So if she has dozens, there are more out there as well. So there are a lot of monstrous, hellish and even divine pig bore and bore like beings in global traditions.
This just popped into my head. So it's not a fully formed thought. Maybe is this not worthy yet, but it just struck me that you know, a lot of these animals that we see having a major role in religion in mythology are animals that exist in both a wild and domesticated form around the culture. So like you see, you know, very common to have cattle related, cattle related imagery.
We were just talking about cattle related beings in ancient Mesopotamian religion, and of course they would have had both domesticated cattle and the wild orx around them. And we've seen similar things with goats. You could have domestic goats
and wild goats around you. Maybe something about that kind of dichotomy where you're seeing like the same animal body both you know, roaming and running around and doing its own thing in the wild, but also in a only slightly altered form as an animal that you keep on your farms, and that that seems to hit something in the brain.
Yeah, and definitely seems to influence the way we use those animals in our language and our symbols and in our mythology. You know, coming back to for instance, you know donkeys and asses. We talked about this in the Mesopotamian Demon episode, the idea of of a ferocious she demon being associated with a donkey, and how it seems perhaps laughable if you're thinking from a modern standpoint about a domestic donkey, but we're talking here about a wild creature.
It was swift, and therefore it's a fitting steed for a demon.
S Oh, yeah, that's right. So what was it? The demonus lamashe Tu is said to ride on a wild donkey, but also occasionally was depicted maybe with donkey ears.
Yeah, yeah, And to your point, we also see this with cattle versus you know, wilder forms of that creature. And we'll see that again time and time again. When it comes to pigs, bores, and pick like creatures. The various species compose the suborder of Suena known as the Sua forms. These can be found around the world, from wild and ferocious bores to pig like cavalinas, and of course the wild and domestic pigs of the genus sus. I had when I told my son about this, he
thought this was rich. I was like, you're never gonna forget the genus of wild and domestic pigs because they're sas.
Is it not sus? I would have said Sue's, but oh, it's got to be saus.
It's well sus maybe, but when I read it, I'm like, sus. Their genus is sus perfect us.
Okay, suck.
So human relationships with these animals, of course, has entailed many different things. Hunting, consumption, sort of just acknowledgment of their wild status, observation of their behavior in the wild,
and then poresine imagery and associations. These are going to vary somewhat from culture to culture and from time to time, and at times too and kind of counterintuitive ways that I think sometimes breaks down to, you know, the the idea of looking to the wild seuiforms as well as to the domestic suiform and then also having you know, different cultural influences enter into an area.
Yeah. Thinking about the cultural associations we have with pigs got me thinking on several different frequencies. I was like, for one thing, in our culture, isn't it funny how we we really associate pigs with eating when eating is something all animals do. Yeah, Like, why is that? And my best guess is maybe it has something just to do with the relatively omnivorous appetites of a pig that you know they famously will kind of they're kind of
not picky about what kinds of things they eat. But that's also true of many other animals that you think of us that way.
I think, yeah, we end up comparing ourselves more to the pig. And they're probably a number of ways to sort of slice that up, right. I mean, you could focus on the intelligence of the pig, and the domestic pig is a pretty bright creature. You could maybe focus on it's relative hairless. I mean, I say the pigs are hairless. They do have hair, but a lot of times they are you're seen or certainly depict it as being kind of hairless, especially when you're dealing with like
cartoon pigs. Yeah, and we're very we're very strange in the way that we are, especially with like roadside barbecue restaurants are very quick to personify the pig and invot cartoon pigs. Eat at a place where the flesh of pigs is served under the name of pork.
Yeah, the Pulled Pork restaurant where it shows a pig in a chef's hat, wearing just a shirt with like a knife and a fork.
Yeah, it's gonna often be horrific. So yeah, there's a to unpack and like American associations of the pig, but if you go, you know, across the board and throughout time, you'll find a lot more to look at. For instance, the wild boar is a powerful image in medieval heraldry. It's also pretty powerful and Hindu iconography, where it's at times linked to the divine, as we'll explore. In the Chinese zodiac the pig is associated with wealth and good fortune.
And I've heard other you know, sort of takes on, like how the pig is considered in say Thai culture, where I'm to understand that the term for pig, which I believe is MoU, is a common nickname of endearment. So something you might call a child with some endearment, you know, some some kid that you love, or your baby brother, and it wouldn't be a put down, it
wouldn't be an insult, that sort of thing. But meanwhile, elsewhere in time and space, here on Earth, poresine imagery of course has all these negative connotations tied to as you said, gluttony or sloth, or even to the unclean and the demonic.
That's right. And as we often bring up in these episodes about monster traditions, looking at beliefs about monsters, especially monsters based on an animal, I think usually tells us more about us and our relationship to that animal than it does about the animal itself. That's right.
So you know, we're going to dive into some examples from global traditions here, but I will say that as I was going through them and reading about them, and some of which they couldn't find enough to really mention here, but overall I found that you could basically divide them into sort of three categories with a certain amount of overlap. So there are primordial bores, often with a real emphasis on a connection to the earth. You know, they run around in the earth, they dig in the earth, kind
of as referenced in our cold open here. You know, they are concerned with things under the soil, and they go under the soil to get them. So they have this connection.
But by primordial, are you saying that they have something to do with like an initial state of the universe or with the creation of the world.
Yes, like something about like the state of at least the surface world, and we'll get into some examples of this. Then there are also divine bores. Often these are ethereocephalic, so you know it's the head of a bore on a humanoid body, but not always. There are also divine bares that are just straight up like a mighty boar
that is also a god. And then another huge area, and this is one that I think ties directly into the horror movie example that we kicked off the episode with, and that is the bore that hunts humans, which is basically not a huge twist because I mean history and just basic understanding of wild boars will tell you that they are they can be dangerous prey, and we can point to examples throughout history of even famous people, members of nobility dying in the conquest of a prize bore,
say a bore that they have injured in an attempt to kill, and then they themselves die of injuries sustained from the boar.
So the famous and within context somewhat ignoble death of Robert Barathian in fiction is based somewhat on real incidents. It's not implausible in royal.
History, no, not at all. Yeah, I mean, and to be clear, like wild boars can be dangerous today, and there are fatal incidents that occur. They can be very defensive and even aggressive if the circumstances are right. But these mythic treatments often take it one step beyond. It's not just that this is a dangerous game to hunt, but this game actively not only hunts you back, but might hunt you of its own accord. Like you're not even trying to hunt the monster boar. It just goes
out and hunts people at night. That sort of thing.
Okay, So to recaps, you've got boors from the creation, or bores from the beginning. You've got divine bores or heavenly bores, and then you've got the board that eats people.
Right, One more quick fictional example before we dive into these examples from global traditions, I should note that in Dante's Inferno, there are twelve named demons that compose the Malagrancia in the eighth circle of Hell, and one of them is clearly named with hogs in mind. This is Curiato, whose name means swine or a little pig, and we meet him in Canto twenty one verse one twenty two. So that's just a quick example of a literary pig in hell.
I don't remember what the context was, but we've talked about the Mala bronca before. There were the I think that name translates to evil claws. And this is the circle of demons who are shown like surrounding a boiling lake of pitch, and there are the like I don't know, like corrupt people and grafters or something that they keep having to force back down under the pitch. Pretty pretty nasty job.
They're demons with jobs, though they have a rope. All right, enough of the like straight up demonic here, Let's get into some other examples. So I'd like to start in Hindu traditions, since these traditions feature some of the most divine and I think powerful invocations of por sign imagery.
So I turned once more to Nanditha Krishna's excellent book Sacred Animals of India, in which the author chronicles a number of different animals and talks about like their you know, their their role in the natural world in India, conservation status, and then also the different ways that they're invoked. And so the author here describes a course, the scie and power of wild boars creatures that are that are of
course closely tied to the earth. As I mentioned earlier, they dig for roots in the soil, and in doing so they turn over the soil, perhaps as the author suggests informing humans about the value of tilled soil.
Oh, so they could be one of the sort of like agricultural knowledge givers in a way.
Exactly at the same time, they're also like this natural force that you know might be beneficial but might also be destructive. They can they can certainly hurt and kill humans, but they can also be destructive to human agricultural pursuits because they may raid crops, they may dig around in your gardens and so forth. So in essence, we have a fierce, wild, but not universally hostile creature that is
closely tied to the earth. The bore both tills and fertilizes the soil, and tradition holds that they're also tied to rain and monsoon seasons as well, digging right before the beginning of the monsoon. So one of the major uses of bor iconography and Hindu traditions is the tenth incarnation of the god Vishnu and that is of Vadaha. And there are different stories, of course concerning this incarnation, as you'll find with just about any particular detail and
the Hindu traditions. But one of the big tales does involve a demon of sorts. Now more precisely, it involves an osserra. This is the kind of power seeking demi god that is often in conflict with the benevolent devas. So one of these is one of these cases where the word demon in English seems a precise enough descriptor, but with certain caveats, you know, like it's the system of supernatural beings can be compared to that that you
find in Christian mythology. But there's still a lot of important differences, right.
We just recently talked about this in our series on the so called demons of age in Mesopotamia. To what extent that term does sort of apply and in other ways doesn't.
In this case, we have a demon or by the name of Hironyaksha that steals the earth itself, so rolls up the earth like a mat, we are told, and then takes it into the ocean depths. Wow, and yeah, and so Vishnu is not crazy about this. So Vishnu takes the form of a great bore, this is Vardaja, and dives into the ocean to retrieve it, slaying here
in Yaksha. In the fierce battle that ensues. Then Vardaja restores the earth, and while he is at it, teaches humans agriculture, because again this is connection between bores and tilling of the earth, fertilizing the soil. Uh And I want to note that while many illustrations and depictions of this battle show Vardaja as a bore and here in Yaksha as a human or a humanoid demon, there's at least one illustration that depicts them both as human boar hybrids.
I included this one here for you, Joe. This is a seventeen forty illustration by Indian painter Manaku of guler Oh.
I like this painting though, so they're shown in conflict here. Do you know which of the two beings in the painting is supposed to be the incarnation of Vishnu? Is it the one with the grayer skin or the green skin?
It would be the gray skin, I believe, because here you see a regal, multi armed, noble looking poor sign individual por sign being and then on the other hand, you see this wild green monster that is also poor sign that also has the features of a bore. And I love this imagery because you get in one image these two drastically different ways of invoking the imagery of the boar, the noble and the savage, the good and the evil, and so forth.
Yeah, that's right. So the vicious demonic boar here is mouth open, its jaws kind of like the to compare it to the the movie Razorback, it's just all mouthed a reaching out with its arms to attack, whereas the Vishnu version of the boar, Yeah, it's standing with its chin up, you know, raised in kind of lofty defiance.
Yeah. Yeah. And you'll find other depictions of Vardaja in which pretty much looks like this with gray skin, the head of a boar, multiple arms. But then you'll also find depictions where he is just a great bore. Uh. And I included an image of some sculpture art that depicts this. Now Naraka, the lord of the underworld Krishna rights is also held to be the offspring of Vadaha and the Earth via his spouse Boudevi, which I believe
the sculpture I included here. If you look at it, there is a female figure on there, kind of like hanging from one of his tusks. I believe that is bou Devi.
Whoa oh okay, so I initially interpreted this humanoid figure to be climbing the boar, as if to climb up its side and ride it. Be though she's hanging from its tusk. Wow. Yeah.
Krishna also points to a couple of other Hindu entities that feature bor iconography. There's the goddess of Vadahai, an aspect of the goddess Durga. The author also mentions that the boar is also invoked in Jainism and in Buddhism, where the goddess ma Richi or Marisi drives a chariot
drawn by seven bores. I believe this figure also factors into Hinduism and has sometimes depicted as writing a single boar, though not always all right, let's let's turn to the world of monstrous boars, because one really important example in Greco Roman traditions is, of course the Caledonian boar or the Itolian boar. This is a monstrous boar sent by the goddess Artemis to punish the King of Kaledon for lack of proper sacrifices. You didn't throw up the right sacrifices.
You ticked off a god. Have to deal with a monster pig. It brings great. Oh, it just destroys everything. It destroys people, It destroys the town, it destroys the land itself. And then you end up having to have the heroes Meleager and Atalanta hunt it with their friends, their allies, slay it, and then get into a big fight with their allies over who gets what part of the spoils from the monster pig. Because we see this time and time again. You'll have some sort of supernatural pig.
But then once you have killed that pig, its parts are used. You know, it is it is, it is food, it is you know it's hide has value and so forth.
Yeah, the drama is not done when the monster boor is slain. In fact, that factors into the next one you're gonna mention.
Right, Yeah, the Aramanthean boar. This is another monster bore of Greek myth. This is the one that ravaged Arcadia, and it ends up being one of the twelve labors of Hercules having to dispose of this monster boar king. Eurystheus tells her, you can't slay it, You've got to
bring it back alive. And in most of these tellings you have this wonderful scene where of course Hercules pulls this off, brings back this ferocious boar alive, and just the sight of Hercules carrying this thing is so terrifying that the tyrant king jumps inside of a jar and hides.
So I thought this was interesting because of the way the story ties into a weird art meme from the ancient world that I've noticed. I'll get to that in a second. But first of all, I was wondering if there was any like really good ancient texts that describes this hunt in detail. Maybe there is, but if so, I couldn't. I couldn't find it. I didn't really come across anything all that great. It's pretty sparse, you know, It's just like, oh, and he hunted the boar down.
The best example I came across was from the text of Pseudo Apollodorus the Library. This is the Phraser translation, which says, well, first of all, there's a bunch of drama with Hercules going out to hunt the boar and then gets into a bunch of stuff with some cinaurs and his companion gets killed. But then when Hercules, it says quote, when Hercules had chased the boar with shouts from a certain thicket, he drove the exhausted animal into deep snow, trapped it, and brought it to myceny. Now
here's the funny art note. If you look up ancient Greek pottery depicting this scene where Heracles in the Greek returns with the boar, multiple pieces I found have the same style of depicting the scene, so little things about it are different. It's not like a tracing, you know. You might have different characters on the sides of the scene, or different sort of posture or ways of rendering the Hercules's face and body, but the thing being shown is the same in every case. So you will have down
below there's an opening of a large jar. I guess this is the type of Greek jar known as a pithos, with the king hiding down in the jar, and you can see like his head and hands popping up out of it like oh, And then up above you will have Hercules standing above the opening of the jar, holding the boar up as if to dump it on top of the king, or like to plug the king in the jar with the boar as a cork. And I've got at least four different m foi from ancient Greece
that depict the scene almost exactly like this Robi. You can take a look and see what you noticed about all of these. The first one I've got in the outline here is from the British Museum. It's a Greek amphora from the sixth century BCE, and M four a is also a type of jar that was a smaller jar jar that would usually be used to store wine
or perfume or oil or something like that. So this a for a. Hercules is wearing some kind of armor, but also his thighs and butt cheeks are showing a little bit, and he's.
He's remarkably clo though. I have to say yes for Heracles.
Yes, so Heracles. He's got the boar up on his shoulder, and the king is down in the jar like no, don't dump the boar on me, and the boar is just going straight down on top of him. It looks like he's gonna to plug him up in there. And in most versions of this scene he's dropping the boar head first on the king, but in one I found it's the last one I've got for you to look at here, Rob, in this case, he's dropping the boar tail first onto the king. So I don't know what
the difference is there. I am in no way an expert on ancient Greek art. I couldn't find anything that's saying why this scene appears so often and looks so similar. And I could be totally wrong about this, but I wonder if this scene is popular to depict on MPI on jars because the king is hiding in a jar in the scene.
Yeah, I mean Heracles or Hercules, hero of the people we discussed in the pad. I can't remember we're talking about it this on a Core episode or a Weird House cinem episode. I think it was weird House because we're talking about the Mario Bava Hercules in the Underworld film. But Hercules stands up to power like this, but he does not proclaim himself a king, so he's kind of and he's kind of a workingman's.
Hero in that regard.
I guess, you know, take this job and shove it. Take this pig and shove it, right.
That is exactly the vibe of these scenes here. Yeah, take this pig and shove it.
I like how the fourth image that you shared Hercules is the most naked here, varying levels of nudity for Hercules in each of them. But then the second one you shared, Hercules is making this wild Gargonian face that is really great, almost as if he is saying, wahs up.
Yeah, it's asko. Yeah, any experts on ancient Greco Roman art out there you want to fill us in on why this scene appears so often and looks so similar? Yeah, right, in contact that stuff to blow your mind dot com.
All right, let's see which what other monster picks should I mention here? There's some that I couldn't find a lot on. Like, for instance, there's one in Icelandic tradition that is called by God, not like by God it's a pick, but like b E I G A D. And this apparently roughly translates to bringer of fear, which I like. But then there's one from Irish legend that's really interesting. This one is the bore of being Goldbain, and in this there's a whole story for this one.
So this is a monster that was once the mortal human son of Angus, but upon his son's death in a quarrel, the father you know, refused to accept this and refused to accept the custom of death gold from his killer in to sort of settle the dispute. Instead, he raises his son from the dead with dark magic into the form of a great bore that Carol Rose
says has neither tail nor ears. I'm not sure what the significance of that detail is, but if nothing else, it tends to show you that this is an unnatural boar. It is somehow not quite bore and certainly not man. Now. In doing this and raising up his son like this, he's also cursing his son's killer, Dimid and for telling that the two of them, the reincarnated son here and his killer Domed, are going to be the death of
each other. That he will live as long as this this unnatural boar that he's raised up, and indeed that's exactly how it goes down. They fight, they gore and stab each other. And I think we may have touched on this story before in our episode about Finn McCool, because this is where Finn McCool jumps in and tries to bring healing waters to the dying warrior, and he tries three times, but it slips through his fingers the first two times, and by the third time the hero
has already died. All right, This next one comes from Welsh traditions, and I'm going to butcher this. I know, my apologies, but it is something like hults do gut and it is it is the bobtailed black soal. It is definitely in the category of the boar that hunts. It was said to be active. I've seen it. I believe Carol Rose discusses it as being connected with Salin and then with the introduction of Christianity war that, of course that has warped more in the direction of Halloween,
and then this creature becomes associated with the devil. But in essence we're dealing with a with just another boar who hunts that is monstrous and terrible, certainly kind of like an evil monster. You're right again, I think the name here is Hawk du Gita or something to that effect. Again, I'm not really good with the Welsh tongue here.
Yeah, I don't know how to pronounce it hats off to you, Rob, But I was looking at the entry on this one in the Oxford Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, and it says that this is the spectral pig, later
often associated with the devil in Christianity. But the idea is that it's a spectral pig that would rise up out of the embers of a dying bonfire on the night of this like sort of autumn festival night, and it would rise up out of the embers of the dying bonfire, and it would catch the last person, I guess, to the last person in some case to like leave the festivities or to arrive.
Oh fascinating. Well, let's see we have some other ones here. There's a Comapoa. This is a Hawaiian primordial monster bore from Hawaiian mythology, the pig child who raised up the ocean mud with his snout to form the islands and some tellings. So again another primordial vision of the bore.
And I like the resonance is there with the Hindu idea of the incarnation of Vishnu that like has to swim down into the ocean to retrieve the mat of the earth and bring it back in this case, raising up the ocean mud from beneath.
Yeah, Like, is there an actual connection there, a reverberation of belief or is it just come from familiarity with the animal? You know, and these these sort of metaphors and ideas emerging from human observation of these animals that they live in close contact with.
Yeah, to be clear, I was not suggesting a causal connection. No, no, no, no, those two myths.
Yeah, yeah, but if if there, if there isn't a causal connection, it's it's clearly like observing the animal, and you know the ideas that emerge when we see the animal and it's on its natural turf. Let's see. Oh, the legends tell of a monstrous family of bors, like you could probably call these ogre boors. I think that fought King Arthur and his knights. May come back to some of this, but the tellings have a lot of gorings, Like it's just a whole series of gorings. They're chasing
these boors around, killing off certain boars. Yeah, we'll come back to these, because there are a few like examples of the King of Boars.
Did your source of say, which of King Arthur's knights got got gord because I was just thinking because it's funny. I know, one of the knights in Arthurian legend is Sir Bars, and it would be somewhat hilarious if Sir Bors got gored by a boar.
I do I don't know. I don't know if any like name knights were gored, but it's possible. Like some of the particular ones I'm scanning down, I do have notes on this. Let's say twitrich Tritch. This is a This is one of the wicked kings who was transformed into a monstrous boar. So, uh, this is one of the ones that they do battle with. Then, yeah, there are various other ones that have names and factor into
this whole series of battles between humans and bores. Oh now here's another one that Carol ro shares that is really interesting and has a very cool story to it. And this is concerning a particular monster pick by the name of Totoima or I've seen it also spelled dodo Ema. It's a monster pig of the Oro Kaiva people of Papua New Guinea. So essentially, this monster pig is a father of mortal humans who hunts them from their birth
and devours them if he finds them. So the basic story concerning this monster pig is that I guess at night it takes the form of the monster pig, but during the day it takes the form or can take the form of a mortal man. And in this form, toto Ema couples with human women, producing human offspring, which then at night, in the form of the beast, he seeks out and he consumes if he finds them.
Wow.
But then one woman ends up birthing twins, and of course he does what he always does in bore form. He chases after them to consume them. But when he finds them, he's only able to consume the boy twin and the female escapes. Well, the twins mother she's not
gonna take this, she stands up to it. So she goes to a shaman, and the shaman casts a spell that causes the boy to grow rapidly into adulthood inside of Totoima's stomach and then bursting out of him, killing the monster pig in the process, and then the shaman marries the daughter. The people feast on the body of Totolima, and in doing so they consume his power. His supernatural power the absorb it, and then this story is echoed in all of the boar feasts to follow in this culture.
Oh. Interesting, So the boy explodes out of the belly of the boar by growing rapidly. But does that mean the boy survives?
Yeah, I guess he either. I'm not sure of the details of the spell. Maybe he reforms and then grows, or maybe the monster consumed him whole, as we see, of course, in a lot of stories of monsters consuming people, they are swallowed whole, and then there's this chance for them to escape somehow, you know, clearly a popular idea, even in modern fiction and science fiction.
Yeah, I guess I'm more familiar with stories along these lines, where like, oh, you know the Little Red Riding Hood, the hunter comes along and cuts open the wolf's stomach and everybody, and everybody gets out. But I love this version with the magic spell that causes the yeah, the the eating child to grow and explode from the inside, and.
Then they eat the monster. Again. We see allusion to this in the Greek traditions as well. I'm not saying every monster boar ends up being consumed, but it does seem to be kind of a frequent idea, like it is a rare kind of this rare case where the monster is both for and also on the menu for human beings.
Yeah, yeah, I guess that's interesting. Where you know that the pig occupies this middle space between somewhere between just herbivorous prey animal and carnivore, which is, you know, carnivore is not usually thought of as great eating. Not to say people wouldn't eat, you know, eat a wolf or whatever, but but yeah, exactly, but that like the pig is sort of it's in both camps.
Yeah, okay, two more, just real quick ones here, speaking of pigs that are eaten there, there is also the eternally regenerating roasting pig of Valhalla. This is sasrm there or so soccrom there, whose name just means blackened.
I believe.
I think we've touched on him before, but that's his entire role. I don't think he has much of a backstory. He's just a never ending feast pig that reunites.
So this is not so much pig as pig, but divine pig as pork.
Right yeah, yeah, And then there is at least one supernatural pig or boar worth talking about here from Chinese traditions, and that is ping fing or bingfing. This is a black boar with either I think some tellings the head of a human, but I think most of the sellings that I was reading about it's a boar head at
either end. So kind of like the what the push me pull me from Doctor Doolittle, Doctor Doolittle, of course, yes, there's like a creature like this to push me, pull me in that where it has a head on either side. It's this is the push me pull me of bores and Chinese mythology.
Wow.
This is the variation that appears in the classic text of the Shanghai Jing, the classic of mountains and seas that we've touched on the show before, and as with other two headed creatures, said to be quite obstinate, according to Richard Strasburg in the book A Chinese bestI Area. So I guess in this, you know, it's like you have a two headed animal. Which one's in charge, which one's the boss. Well, they're both the boss. You have to talk to both ends.
Of the pain, especially stubborn. Yeah. Stubbornness comes from the head.
Yeah. So again this is just a brief overview of some of the varieties and some of the basic tropes you seem to encounter with mythic pigs, mythic bores, and so forth. I'm sure there are some other interesting ones that I didn't run across enough details regarding, so if you have a favorite, write in share them. We would love to hear about your hell pig.
All right, Well, it looks like we're out of time for today, but we are not done with the topic of monster pigs. So if you can't get enough you want to learn about more monster pigs, and in fact monster pigs not only in myth and legend, but in reality, come back and join us on Tuesday.
All right. Just a reminder to everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays episodes that are more likely to be monstrous and horror themed during the month of October, and then we do a short form episode on Wednesday, and then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
weird film on Weird House Cinema. Oh and just a reminder if you're on Instagram out there, you can follow us at st b ym podcast and if you would like to get a stuff to Blow your Mind Halloween shirt sticker or what have you, check out our tea public store that should be linked on the Instagram that should also be linked on our page at stuff to Blow Yourmind dot com.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.