From the Vault: The Holy Undead, Part 1

these were our Halloween episodes. Are some of our Halloween episodes from last year, but they're also really kind of Christmas episodes as well, so uh so, so take them however way you wish to take them, either celebrate Halloween or celebrate Christmas a little bit early, or both. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is

Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And of course it's October here on the podcast, so we've got to be talking about the undead. But this is a real special episode because today is the day that the undead go to church. That's right. Uh And this topic ended up being a whole lot of fun to research and uh and and right on, because I I knew some of this, but I did not know all of it. Uh. And I think the key thing is when when you think of the undead, when you think of zombies in particular, like,

what what do you think about? For me? One line that instantly comes into my mind that I remember hearing at a at a young age and is is from the trailer for George romero zombie classic Dawn of the Dead, When there is no more room in Hell that dead will walk the earth very much suggests that reanimated corpses shambling around are a distinctly satanic phenomena. Uh, though as in George Romero's universe, I think it is. I think

that's actually more a naturalistic interpretation. Don't they say, what's the deal? Like a satellite comes to Earth or something like that? What do they say in the first one? Yeah, I think it's some sort of satellite crashes, And but there's kind of it's kind of like hearsay, right, or it's what the media is saying. It's it's it's ultimately um,

it's it's out of our hands. And I guess that that leads me to the next very broad distinction that I tend to make with zombie films is that you have you have environmental zombie films, and you have sort of necromantic or magical zombie films, and the environmental something has happened that causes an extreme reversal in how death works. The dead instead of staying dead, they rise, and so it might be some sort of supernatural event, which that

that quote uh kind of implies. It's like, well, humans, you done send up Hell and now there's no more room, so the dead are going to walk the earth. It's it's kind of our fault, but it's ultimately a larger

systematic error that's going on. Okay, So in your view, environmental causes could still be supernatural, but they would be supernatural mechanistic rather than like supernatural directed will yeah you know there or or if it's if it is directed, it's it's like on a divine level, it's like, well, God's had it. He's just letting the zombies rome now, you know, and it's God reasons for that taking place, um or you know, it could even be scientific, but

it's like a scientific accident by human science. So you're trying to make zombie bio weapons. Well you shouldn't have done that. Now, look what's happening. The dead are walking. Yeah, here's the rage virus. Though I guess a complication with that is you know, resident Evil twenty eight days later, all that kind of stuff. A lot of that is often, uh, there's a blurring of the lines between what is undead and what is just some infected form of human being

right right now. That The other area that the necromantic or magical interpretation this is. This is more where you have someone or something intentionally raising the dead through the use of mad um generally to do something, to do the bidding of their master, you know, who might be a warlock or a demon or another powerful undead being, maybe a mad scientist, even an alien mastermind or a dark like minor deity. That's sort of thing. But it's like, I need something done, I need some I need I

need an army of the dead. So I'm gonna raise up an army of the dead to do specific dead things, as opposed to like, well, now all the dead rise from the grave and they do dead things. Right, I am the witch queens and Obia I say a bunch of skeletons, you pop up out of the ground and get you some swords and shields and go kills in bad so. Either way, I guess, very broadly speaking, there's plenty of examples I know that kind of break this.

Zombies are either a thing that just kind of happens and as part of the new natural order of things or the unnatural order of things, or it's something that is done by an agent of the evil. Um today we're gonna be We're gonna be getting into I guess both of these categories a little bit. But in a way, we're also discussing a third category, you know, the holy, undead pious zombies and church going perhaps god worshiping wraiths and revenants who might just pack the local cathedral. You know.

I would say that this is mostly new to me, but it has been so wonderful getting into these stories because they are so full of weird ambiguities and contradictions.

I think that often suggest very interesting and enlightening things about the cultural climate in which these tales arise, right, and also the sort of the cultural soil, sort of oftentimes the pre Christian soil from which these myths and folk tales have germinated and then changed forms a little bit in the Christian era, you know, just to go back to Donna the Dead briefly though, the idea of the dead going to church, Uh, it is a little bit like the dead going to the mall and Don

of the Dead. You know, they just show up and they're gonna do They're gonna do what humans do at the mall. They're just gonna wander around, um and uh and in Yeah, I feel like it manages up a little bit with some of the stories we're talking about here, yeah, and Dawn of the Dead. It's interesting because, uh, there is an assumption in the Rameiro zombie universe that the zombies are operating at a very low, very reduced level of cognition. You know, they have very limited ability to reason.

I mean, they can clearly like use their brains enough to sort of like move towards the thing they want to eat. But but it doesn't get much more complicated than that with them. But I think one of the characters in Dawn of the Dead says, why are they

all coming here to the mall? This must be someplace that was important to them in life and without anything else to do without any brains to eat in the nearby area, they just sort of drift back to a place that was significant in their lives and almost as

if by force of habit. And that's kind of interesting too, because it suggests that whatever it is you would really say you want to be doing when in your afterlife, maybe you would say, i'd I'd go, I don't know, visit my still living relatives and give them new is from beyond the grave or something. In fact, what you do is walk the steps you've walked a hundred times before.

And where does that take you? You go to the mall. Baby. Now, some would say there's no ethical consumption of brains under capitalism, but I guess that I'd have to discuss that another episode. Let's let's get back to religion though. Oh yeah, yeah, so we should talk about maybe a specific example to get us going of of one of these stories about

about the church going undead. So the story I wanted to start with here, I wanted to start with because it's ultimately the story I've had the longest um exposure to, I guess in my life. I started looking into this and then I realized, oh, I have I've read some version of this story before. Uh and uh, I want to take I want to take at least some of you back to the Enchanted World book series from Time Life Books. Um. Uh. Some of us had these, some

of us didn't. I was lucky enough. I think my aunt had purchased these, and I kind of temporarily inherited them. But I also still have them decades later. Um and and ultimately it's gonna it will be hard to make me give them up because they, ultimately, uh put played I think an important role in my my childhood. But if you were watching TV in the early nineteen eighties, you might remember a TV spot for these books, starring the legendary Vincent Price. I will buy anything Vincent Price

tells me to. Yeah, I wonder what else was he? Uh? Was was he a pitching back then unsleeved? The delicious flaky crust of a hot pocket? Oh? Man? Oh? He would have been great for Tomstone Pizza, right, Vincent Price Tomstone because they were going for more of a Western thing. Though, Man, Vincent Price impression was bad. I gotta work on that. Well, why don't why don't we? I encourage everyone to look

this up. This particular commercial up on YouTube. But let's go and have just a little audio sample of it, because it's Yeah, it's vincent price, it's fabulous. On evenings, to like this, I'd like to parrol up with a good books short of book that lets the imagination run away with you. If you're like me and enjoy the

mysterious and the unexpected, you'll love the Enchanted World. Each volume brings to life so vividly those inhabitants of the other world, witches and wizards, goh Scoblands, and avenging Nights. Call now and enter the Enchanted World with the first book, Wizards and Witches my favorite subject. It's an intriguing account of sorcery, spells, and deception. Other books include ghosts, fairies,

and elves and dragons. Painstakingly researched by the editors of Time Life Books, each volume is exquisitely illustrated and portrayed with master works of art. Each volume is superbly written and bound in luxurious fabric. So rob I I was never lucky enough to have these books as a kid, But but I guess if you had access to them, I would assume that these books made you the terrible

adult you are today. Oh yeah, probably so they were pretty great because each one well, first of all, as as Vincent Price reminds us, each one is bound in luxurious fabric, curious, yes, And each one is a different color, which I distinctly remember, because each book deals with a different topic, and you know, c have fairies, you have

camelo giants, uh, you know, mermaids and so forth. I didn't have them all, but I had a number of them, and I distinctly remember there were, of course two black books, black bound books. One of them was on ghosts and the other one was on night creatures, and these were in a you know, sort of a childhood way. These were both my favorites of the series, but also the

most feared. I remember that they'd be on the shelf and I could barely bring myself to look at their spines on the bookshelf if the sun had gone down, because I knew how terrifying the illustrations were in there, and how terrifying the contents of the stories were. Um and I certainly wasn't going to pull one of these books off the shelf at night, because the cover art was absolutely horrible on each of them. Oh that's so wonderful.

And when I say the mentioned the art, it was all the books featured a combination of say, woodcuts and uh and old paintings, you know, as well as new custom illustrations matching up with the with the stories from different artists. And we'll mention one in particular in a bit, uh, specific artists, all with different styles. So it was it's just a visual to light. I highly recommend if you have a chance to pick up any of these books

and you're interested in these topics, do so. I think they must have printed billions of these things, because I just looked around the other day, and you can pick them up for like dollar a dollar or two dollars each. I think in some cases if you buy them used. I wonder how that looks urious fabric holds up. I think it holds up all right. I don't know how luxurious it it really looks these days, but uh, you know,

the books are holding together, and that's that's enough. So the Ghost Book, like I said, was particularly scary, and it featured a tale of the pious undead. So it's it's a short section in the book titled the Hooded Congregation, and it is fantastically illustrated and perhaps written. I think the writers are all just it's listed as like by folks at the Time Life Books or something, so he might have written it as well, but he at least

illustrated it. Talking about Caldicott Medal winning author Chris Van Allsburg, if the name didn't ring a bell, let me just say this is this is the artist who illustrated and wrote the books Jumanji in one and The Polar Express in uh, both known for very elegant illustrations. Yeah, and ultimately very you know, ghostly and you know, kind of

a yeah, ultimately ghostly. And so it's like this. I never really liked the Polar Express because it did feel kind of cold and uh and like it's something of the spirit world. And I was like this, I don't know this, this isn't my Christmas. But the Hooded Congregation in the Time Life Books. Here the illustration style apps absolutely works and it's it's fabulous. It's um. So what we have here is a series of haunting black and

white images. And I sent these two images of these two Joe, so you could look at these as well. And then you have text pages that feature tiny images of a woman in a casket, and as you proceed through the story, her face shrivels towards the skull. It's

absolutely wonderful. These are indeed beautiful. Though I'm almost kind of glad I didn't look at these illustrations as a kid, because if I had, I am positive, I would have cemented an unbreakable association between the ghostly hooded figures in the congregation, and especially the second illustration here, and the bad guys in Charlton Heston and the Omega man. Yeah, there's this kind of a similar such way and going on with the hooded figures. All right, So I'm gonna

briefly roll through the story here. Uh And I'm sorry for the Christmas creep everyone, but this is a holiday story. So it takes place Christmas morning. We're somewhere in the Swedish mountain centuries ago, and a young woman has awoken extremely early and she hears the sound of church bells. So what does she do? The church bells are ringing. You need to get your your butt to church. So she ventures out into the darkness. Uh And and you know, it's it's a dark time of year, it's a cold time,

of year, the cold, the cold is biting. She makes her way to the village church and uh the door is open. Inside the pews are filled with black, hooded figures and a hooded priest and gray stands at the stands on at the front of the church is reciting in psalms, you know, leading folks and song, that sort of thing, normal church business, except everything's a little weird. Um. The woman is led in, she takes a seat, and

then a figure sits beside her. And then that figure that is seated beside her pulls back her hood and reveals the death shriveled face of her dead sister. Whoa, you don't see that coming. Yeah, And she she cries out, you are the dead. And then all the hoods fall back from the other worshippers, and it's revealed that they are all indeed the dead in various states of decay. Uh. It's written in this telling of the story that the

oldest are little more than shadows. But you see, you know, some still have flesh on them, and they're uh, they seem to be physical apparitions, though for the most part. Her sister, her undead sister here warns her to flee while she can, and she gets up to do so, but of course the congregation gets to their feet as well. They chase after, they claw after with these skeletal fingers, and she feels them jabbing at her back as she reaches the door to to leave the church, and they

pull the scarf from her neck and the process. So she gets away. She runs to the village priest's house and he's being ready to go to church to open it up. He didn't know that the church has already open, at least for some folks. Uh So they go back together and they find that the church is completely empty. But then there is her scarf on the floor, shredded to pieces by those skeletal fingers. This is such an unusual type of story because of this strange blending of themes.

So there is clear menace implied by the beings of the church. These are not just you know, righteous Christians who have passed on the kind of people that Dante might encounter in in the paradiso, where they'd be, you know, humbly praising God from the point of the afterlife. Uh. No, that they are in church and they are praising God. But they're also dangerous, Like they immediately they attack and they poke with the bony fingers, they shred the scarf.

These things, on the surface level at least, seem incongruous. Yeah, like how can like, Okay, they hate the living, well we expect that of the death and right, but they love God. That seems kind of strange, right you think that the uh, this would match up more with our our idea of the satanic undead, the devilish undead, the unholy undead, as opposed to holy zombies at church. So yeah,

it's a simple, weird little ghost story. And the illustrations especially always haunted me when I looked at the pictures. But but I don't think I ever really thought about about why. And uh, I think, you know, it had to do with the darkness of the undead having such a presence in both a church and a Christmas story. I know that that that you know, I did think about that when I was a kid. But you know,

but but you know, here was the kicker. It was as if the ghosts were supposed to be there, you know, not vile invaders intent on desecrating the church and destroying those who love God or something, you know. But but they were, they were doing their thing. It was like it was their time to be in the church, and the village girl had simply wandered into the night church, where she did not belong and where the dead worship

while we sleep. It almost makes you wonder. The fact that they're in church praying before they attack her makes you kind of like reframe the story. It makes you wonder did she do something wrong, like did she step on their turf or offend them in some way maybe by pointing out the fact that her sister was dead. Um, you know, is that unwelcome news to them in some way or something like that? Yeah, so what does it

all mean? Well, we're gonna get into that. But uh, initially though, I was like, all right, I've i've I've read the timeline version, I've reread the timeline version. Now, well what's what are some of the original versions of it? Well? Um, I I found a wonderful blog post, well written nicely cited by Camilla Christiansen on and on the blog Legends of the North Legends of the North thought blog spot

dot com. Um they are a native Norwegian blogger, and uh they write about it a bit here and point out that the tale is usually known as the Midnight Mass of the Dead, and Christiansen writes that the tale seems to originate from Germanic Romance and Slavic regions, and that while there were there are many variations of this

tale to be found throughout Europe. The oldest date back to the sixth century by historian Gregory of Tours, while it pops up in Nordic writings during the seventeen hundreds, and and we'll get more into some other traditions that seemed to weave their way into this particular tale as we proceed, but the story generally follows a basic format. A man or a woman they wait too early, perhaps confused by church bells and or the darkness of winter

months in northern climates. Thinking themselves late to church, they rushed to u to the church and soon realized that they have wandered into the midnight Mass of the dead. A deceased loved one urges them to flee, and in some tellings um such as the one in the Enchanted World Book, they make it out alive and they merely lose a garment that becomes proof of what occurred, you know. But in other tellings the dead just simply tear them to pieces or otherwise drag them into the realm of death.

And while it's not always Christmas Eve, uh, we do see this idea that, you know, what is Christmas but the darkest evening of the year. It's this time when the veil between the worlds of the living and the

dead are the thinnest. So it kind of while at first you might think, oh, Christmas is not a time for the dead to come back to life, Well, you know, maybe if if you're talking about you know, modern and Santa Claus traditions, but if you're getting into the older ideas of of winter religion and winter legends and winter traditions, then then yes, this is a time when death is

very close. This reminds me of a line that comes from another story that I'm going to talk about in a bit from a from a medieval Christian bishop who wrote about similar types of tales of of the pious undead. This guy is like a tenth to eleventh century German bishop named teet marvon Merseburg, and after telling a story kind of similar to this, uh, teeth Mark concludes with the statement, as day is to the living, So night

is conceded to the dead. Uh. And I love that phrase night is conceded to the dead, as if, like it, it is ground that has been lost. The dead have taken it and it belongs to them. And of course I guess that would seem especially true in the winter, when the night is the longest. Yeah. So it's easy to see like this, this idea of a dual world. There's the world of the night, in the world of of the day, there's the world of the living. There's

a little world of the dead. Uh. It also makes me wonder too if tales like this might have something to do with the idea that if we have human spaces uh, in this case, artificial human spaces like church interiors, the places of stone and wood that exists for particular purposes. So if this space is for you know, X, then does X occur even when we are not there? Uh? You know, an empty church is not at a church in some respects, so perhaps it remains occupied even when

we are not in the church. Um, I'm not sure that that makes sense. That I was kind of mulling over it, and uh, yeah, like a place that we have created, like absolutely, such as an enclosed place it, you know, it can't it can't just be a wild place again, you know, unless it decays and becomes one with nature. Like it's it's still a church, but it's it's not a church if the people are not gathered in it. That's a very good point about the conceptualization

of sacred spaces. So like is a to a medieval Christian would they consider a building to be a genuine Christian church if it is at its at the time of its construction, say, consecrated to the Christian religion? Or does it depend on its day to day use. Yeah, anyway, just something worth worth worth keeping in mind as we proceed. Now, you know, if the undead here though, again they sound pious,

but they also sound a bit violent and hostile. Um, you know, there seems to be wrong vibes of the dead hate the living here and Christiansen points out in their blog that pre Christian traditions and Norse folklore, you know, are are often about undead beings who have it in for the living, particularly when it comes to uh at

least a couple of different types of undead creatures. Uh. And this led me to the work of in k Chadwick from six they wrote Norse Ghosts, an article that was published in the journal Folklore, and Chadwick points out that the ghosts of Scandinavian and Iceland, uh that they stand out for being physical animated corpses, not ethereal spirits,

but but the actual reanimated bodies of the dead. So when we talk about the dead coming back and say walking through a wall in your house, uh, well, in the in the North and s Line tradition, they're coming through the wall. They're busting through like the kool aid man. You know, they're not going to just pass through it

like a spirit. Yeah. And it's interesting because sometimes stories of encounters with the living dead don't specify one way or another whether you're talking about an insubstantial spectral kind of reanimation or a reanimation of the physical body. So I think there's a bias in modern ghost stories towards the spectral apparition without mass. But in a lot of these older stories, yeah, you're talking about a creature with a body that might be more aptly called something like

a revenant rather than a rather than a ghost. Though people describing stories that are clearly referring to beings with physical bodies still use the term ghost stories a lot. Yeah, you definitely see that in the in the literature. But but yeah, these are these are stories where the dead are are so physical that you can wrestle them. Uh.

There's there's one that Chadwick mentions. Uh, this is the Swedish tale of the shepherd Glamor, who in the gretast Saka, goes to work on a farm in Iceland and is killed by a supernatural force. And so he then returns to haunt the farm, killing both livestock and human servants. And in the hero of the saga, Greta Are the strong shows up and waits for him, then wrestles him. And many scholars have made the connection here between this tale and that of Beowulf and Grenville. You know, it's like,

is the monster problem. There's some sort of thing that comes at night, so the hero waits for it and then enters into a physical contest with it when it arrives. Now, Gretis eventually slays the undead horror in this tale um used. I think he uses a sword on it, but the site, the mere sight of moonlight and the creature's eyes it it causes a sort of curse, and Grets is never comfortable alone in the dark again, it like scars him for life and has this kind of deteriorating effect on

his psyche. And the modern context wouldn't be tempted to say he's gotten PTSD from this conflict. Yeah, exactly. So there there are at least a couple of different beings that are that are generally any talked about in these traditions. There's the hugboy and the dragger, and these are both undead barrow dwellers. So in some cases the draw already

said to build his own barrow in life. So he's like, you know, he's like a local lord or something, and so he builds this barrow, this vault of stone and earth, fills it with riches, and in some cases the individual

uh is said to have themselves buried alive in the barrow. Um. This is interesting, like the the idea that Chadwick mentions that there are these accounts of of this important individual, and there reaches the time when I guess that this individual is thinking about death and the end of their life. And rather than quote die on straw, which you know, brings the vision the idea of of of dying of

old age or dying of sickness in a bed. The idea is you get you get twelve of your men with you, and you just get apparently just super drunk um on spirits, and then you all go into the tomb, which again has filled with riches and I think even some food and stuff, and then they seal you in and that's that's it. That's your that's your ernie into the end of the afterlife. This actually reminds me of something that I was going to get into later that is featured in in a paper that we're going to

talk about. This may actually end up being in in the next part of this series, but this is in a paper by a historian of the Middle Ages at you see San Diego named Nancy Mandeville Cacciola, and the paper is called Revenants, Resurrection and Burnt Sacrifice. It's the paper that gets strongly into these, uh, these stories of the pious dead told by by Tetmar, the medieval chronicler.

I already mentioned, but there's a part that I found very interesting where she explains sort of the the frequently encountered common sense logic about what leads to the state of restless death versus peaceful death in the Middle Ages, and that this is a an idea that probably exists

mostly outside of Christian teachings. It was something that was common among pagan thinking of of medieval Europe, but that had a sort of continent innued folk belief life, even after a region had often been supposedly Christianized, and so she writes as follows, this was the notion that those who were subject to a quote bad death that was violent or sudden were unlikely to lie quietly in their graves.

In such cases, the life force exits the body too quickly before the individual can make peace with the prospect of dying, while the trauma of a painful or violent death added to the fear among survivors that such a dead person might feel resentful of the living. In the felicitous phrase of Lesser k Little So, quoting another scholar here, these bodies expired with quote energy still unexpended, and thus were considered to be at high risk of returning from

their graves. The flesh itself retained an element of untrammeled vitality. Now I see some differences here, because that's emphasizing one of the main things about the so called bad death that leads to a body getting back up out of the grave being that they were not ready for death when it happened. And the drawer here that you're talking about, it seems like they are specifically and intentionally ready and yet there's still some kind of element of badness about this. Uh,

this death scenario, isn't there? Like it seems like that there's something greedy about their approach to death. Yeah, and

this I think it gets kind of complicated again. There is a very the idea that it is very premeditated and and in fact, one of the things that Chadwick brings up is that um is that some cases, in some cases future Draga individuals are said to have undertaken a preliminary journey to supernatural regions prior to their final disappearance into the barrow, which makes which for me at least made me think about the Necromongers and chronicles of Riddick.

I don't have remember this that the Lord Marshall there is said to have visited the under verse and returned. You know this idea that that you've you've kind of made. Yeah, this this initial jaunt into death and you've come back and you've checked it out and you can say, all right, it's good, the lodgings are great, let's do this. I can guarantee this is a connection that has never before been made in the folklore literature. But I do wonder if the writers of that were inspired. But um, anyway,

there this idea that that there's still something off. This seems to be the kids. So first of all, they're multiple tales of this going on. And in some of the tales, the men don't stay content in their barrows. They hunger for blood, they venture back out, you know, and and the messing with with livestock or they're they're coming after living humans. But there are also these cases where a descendant of the individual and the barrow returns to it and engages in a kind of ritual combat

with them. So, um, you can kind of, you know, imagine it as being perhaps you know, about generational issues and family wealth and treasure. It's pretty interesting, or at least it it makes me think of this kind of scenario. Descendant might come back and be like, hey, grandfather, Uh, you've got a lot of a lot of gold in there. Um, you know, the living need that gold. Uh, So I can imagine the kind of conflict that would ensue. Now.

Chadwick also shares two different accounts of note because they're both examples of a story in which the undead don't appear to hate the living, but they have issues with the living that are that are pretty important. So one is from thet or fourteenth century Abrigia saga. It's the story of Thorguna, who is this Christian woman who wishes that her body be buried when she dies in a Christian cemetery. But as as as it occurs, uh, she dies two days journey away from the place that she

wants to be buried. So what is her family has to do well that to to you know, meet her wishes, they have to take her body on this two day journey to a place where she can be buried. But during the journey they have to find somewhere to sleep rather than just sleep out of you know, exposed to the elements. They stopped by a local farmhouse and they say, hey, can we spend the night here? And the farmer says absolutely not, not having people come in here with a

dead body. So the farmer goes back into his house, you know, they go about it, goes about his business with the family. They go to bed, but then in the night they hear a sound in the larder, and they go and they discover their the reanimated corpse of the woman, and she is in their cooking supper for everybody. And so at this point that what can you do? They humbly accept the meal, enjoy the meal, and they

let the family stay tonight. This is very interesting and how it compares to the the undead going to church, because again this is a kind of unusual, like it's the undead engaging in the sort of uh, the wholesome

and nutritious activities of the living. Yeah. Chadwick also specific he mentions that the woe the dead woman is naked whilst um uh you know, messing around in the larger and cooking supper, which which is interesting too because it brings to mind this idea of like um of of like perfect honesty, you know, like like she is the one who is also the honesty, but also there's something improper about it as well, you know, like um, it seems to match up well with this idea of the

of the the apparition that is sort of shaming the farmers for not doing the right thing. But then on the same level, I mean, it is like a zombie in your kitchen cooking dinner. It's a little bit weird, uh, But you brought it on yourself by not letting these

people stay in your barn, right. This also kind of reminds me of one of the stories that we uh in inverted form, but it has some similarities to one of the stories we looked at from Tales from a Chinese studio that involves the travelers on the road who are forced to stay in the room with the dead woman's body. Oh yes, yeah, and and that yeah, that deals to with the proper bear with the dead and what happens when you stand between um the dead and

the burial that they desire. Now there's a there's another um uh story from that same saga the Chadwick mentions, and this one's This one's more humorous. I really like this one. Basically, you have a boatload of drowned men, all from the same boat, but they show up at a feast they were going to anyway, and they first of all the insist on warming themselves by the fire, and I think this kind of causes a stir. But then on top of that, they insist on taking their

seat at the feast table. So the living guests are are perturbed by this, and they say, no, you can't be here, You've got to leave, and then quote legal proceedings were instituted against them. Uh from here. The story apparently takes on this on the idea that takes on the guys of like Icelandic legal pleadings, with the dead men making their case, the living men making their case, and the dead men lose and and then agree. They're like, okay, I will leave, and they go I like that it all.

It's a tale of the dead walking among the living, but ultimately engaging in a legal dispute. The dead countersue the living. Yeah, that would make for a hell of a courtroom drama. The dead sue living like an undead lawyer hero as sort of a zombie Tom Cruise and a few good men. Oh yeah, kind of a kind of kind of a lawyer Lich. This is a gold

nobody steal our idea. UM. I also love this too because I think you know, if you if you if you don't have any familiarity with the various sagas, it's easy to think of it's easy to imagine that these are gonna be tales that are just about violence, and certainly there's violence in them, but there's also a lot of like, yeah, you know, family feuding and intrigue and

also legal proceedings. So fitting that we have that matchup with a ghost story as well, Thank thank thank All Right, well, I guess the next thing I wanted to talk about was some scholarship that I've been getting into on this historical figure known as Bishop tet Mar of Mercyborg and UH and his stories about the pious undead. And I think we're not going to have time to fully discuss this one in this episode, but we can start getting into it and then we'll have to continue in the

next part of the series. But just a hat tip on sources here. I know we first found out about this subject by that there was a good short summary in UH in j Store Daily by Olivia Gershon called the Pious Undead of Medieval Europe. But this actually pointed to a long scholarly paper that I UH that I

went and read and it's just wonderful. So this paper is called Revenance, Resurrection and Burnt Sacrifice by Nancy Mandeville Cacciola, who again I mentioned her before, but she's a medieval historian University of California, San Diego, focusing on religious history. And this article was published in a in a journal called pred Nature Critical and Historical Studies on the Predator

Natural inteen. Uh. This appears to be some kind of collection or journal that's put out by Penn State University Press. And so it gets into this figure of the the of Bishop Teetmr and the stories that he tells. Now, the historical context of Bishop Tetmr. And I have to say, by the way, I had to look up how his name is pronounced. It is spelled t h i e t m e er, but I think it would be teete Mar, sort of deep mar, kind of one of those you know, it's like that the difficult to pronounce,

like d t h thing in the Germanic languages. But I'm just gonna say tete Mark because I think that's about as close as we can consistently get. Um. So his context is Autonian. He he is an Autonian figure. And uh, this is a historical designation that comes from the name Otto. It describes the reign of a series of kings. These were Saxon kings in medieval Germany, including

three animed Otto and two named Henry. So you got Henry the First, also known as Henry the Fowler, and I think this is because he was allegedly tending to a bunch of bird nets when he received news that he had been made king. And then after Henry the First, you got Auto one, then you got your Auto too, then you got your Auto three, and then finally you're

Henry two. So these would have all been uh German Saxon king's beginning in the ninth or tenth century and then going into the eleventh seen in some ways as an artistic and cultural revival period of the the older Holy Roman Empire. So this would have artistic traditions with the basis in Byzantine and carol Ingian art and architecture.

But these were also Christianizing kings who had a who saw themselves as having an important role in the history of the world as Christianizers, as as spreading the faith of Jesus by conquest and so to go to Cacciola's article, the story begins with with a tale based in a place called vals Leban, which is a town along the Elba River. So this town could be seen as a kind of colonial outpost in a way. Uh the Ottonian king Henry the First again, that's Henry the Fowler, He's

the first one. He had been fighting a war of conquest against the tribes of the surrounding lands to cement the rule of his German Christian dynasty over the religiously pagan and ethnically Slavic peoples in the area. And vals Laban was a fortified town, one of a number like it along the Elba which served to protect this northeastern region of Henry's Astonian kingdom. And in the year nine nine, the town of wals Laban was attacked in a revolt by the by the nearby people's and we're told that

all of its inhabitants were slaughtered. Caciola writes, quote our chief source for this event, videkind of Corve reports in his Deeds of the Saxons that other quote barbarous nations of Slaw likewise began to rebel when they saw the successful devastation of this revolt led by a group known as the Red dari I. The spread of the rebellion was checked, however, when Henry the First seized the Slavic fortress of Lenzen, and so after this massacre allegedly took place,

vals Laban was then rebuilt and the Ottonian dynasty again gained control over the area. And Caciola tells us that the great massacre at this town not only played a role in the military and political history of the Ottonian era, but it also gave rise to supernatural urban legends, including one reported by another chronicler of the Ottonians. This is the guy you know by now, This is Titmar of Merzeburg.

So Titmar was a bishop. I've seen it claimed elsewhere somewhere that Titmar was the first bishop of Merzeburg, but but no, Cachiola says he was the second bishop of this town. He was born around nine to what Catchiola calls an exalted warrior bloodline. I think this means his family, including Tetmar himself, had served in a military capacity under

the Ottonian kings. Tetemar himself had been a military adviser to Henry the Second, the the later Autonian king, and then from the years ten thirteen to ten eighteen Tetmar set out to record this massive eight volume history of the Autonian dynasty known as the chronic Con And note

this is probably not a super objective history. It sounds like he was firmly in the business of making the Ottonian kings look awesome, though nevertheless, it's probably still also a pretty good source of of of life and tales and beliefs of the period that he though he definitely he's pro Autonian, he's going to tell you good things

about them. So apparently tete Mark gets to this massacre at Valls Laban toward the beginning of his history, and Catchiola writes that here he starts sort of drif sting away from the public political history and getting into personal memory. First, talking a bunch of saying a bunch of things about his own famili's association with the history of the place. And then suddenly he just starts getting into ghost stories. He tells a haunted church story he once heard about

this town. So here I'm going to read directly from Caciola's translation of the story in tit Mar's Chronicon quote. So that no one who is faithful to Christ may doubt the future resurrection of the dead, but may proceed to the joy of blessed immortality zealously and through holy desire. I shall confide certain things that I have verified as true, and which occurred in the town of valse Laban when

it was rebuilt after its destruction. The priest of that church used to sing Matin's there at the first blush of dawn. But when he arrived at the cemetery for the dead, he saw in it a great multitude of them making offerings to a priest who was standing at the doors to the sanctuary. At first he stopped in his tracks, but then, strengthening himself with the sign of the Holy Cross, he tremblingly went through the whole crowd

to reach the oratory without acknowledging any of them. One of them, a woman whom he knew well and who had died recently, asked him what he was doing there. After he told her why he had come. She returned that everything had already been taken care of by them, and also that he did not have long to live. He reported this to his neighbors, and it turned out to be true. I love a ghost story or a weird story that that Indians like. That was just sort

of a basic sourcing of the material. Somebody told me this and or there was evidence of it and it was true. Yes, And Tite mar I love earlier on also says, I have verified this story is true. I'm not sure how, but that's what he says. And uh, and well, but the part that turned out to be true and the implication in the last sentences they told him he did not have long to live. He reported this to his neighbors and it turned out to be true, So that's that's also saying like, oh, yeah, he did

die shortly after that. So Catchiola notes that, however weird this story is, its point of view does not seem to be totally unique for its time and place and for its place in history. In medieval Europe, there were lots of stories about what she calls the continuing vitality

and power of the dead. But the really funny thing about this history is that it seems like as soon as Tete Martell's one story about zombies, he gets so excited that he essentially derails his history of the Ottonian kings for several pages, just telling a bunch of other random stories about reanimated corpses that he has heard and I love this. I like I wish more recent political

hagiographies were like this. Today. You know, some somebody's writing about the great George Washington and how he never told a lie and all that, But then they get sidetracked for like a ten page digression about people they know who have seen werewolf wolves. Oh, that would be good.

So to finish off part one here, I think maybe we can list and reflect on some general observations that Cacchiola makes about this story in particular, and then in the next part we can come back to more of of teite Mar's tales of ghosts and and and undead beings and and uh and branch out from there. But regarding this one particular story, a few things worth noting.

First of all, Catchiola calls these undead beings revenants, and this is worth pointing out because although these are sometimes referred to as ghost stories, like we were saying earlier, the word ghost in modern parlance usually refers to a spectral in substantial being rather than a bodily reanimation. Uh. The ladder of which again may have been called revenants in the past, would probably often be called zombies today.

So even though the phrase ghost story is often used to describe what teite Mar is doing here, you should not automatically assume spectral in substantial beings. In fact, these very clearly seemed to be reanimated corpses that have physical mass, and so Cacchiola goes on to argue that tit Mar's

ghost stories haven't received a lot of scholarly attention. Uh and in general, she thinks that medieval historians have kind of underappreciated the importance of ideas about the dead in medieval culture, and so contra that that lack of attention to the subject. She argues, for example, that quote the majority of medieval people who believed that they had had direct experience of the supernatural realm did so in intimate confrontation with dead human beings, rather than through encounter with

a transcendent deity. So if she's correct in that argument, this mean, according to Tacchiola, people at the time were more likely to believe they'd had an encounter with a ghost or revenant rather than with say, God himself, or

with Christ or the Virgin Mary. And these might have, given the right context, be equally taken as evidence of the supernatural realm, but the these more mundane encounters with just dead people and dead souls were were actually the more common thing for regular people to experience, and she argues there are there are a lot of things that

historians can potentially learn from these ghost stories. So first of all, they can suggest details about local pagan beliefs that existed before Christianity and then probably in some form continued to exist after the Christianization of a region. Uh. In the case of tet Mars ghost stories, these would

be local Slavic pagan beliefs UH. And these beliefs, even though the Christian chroniclers might want to kind of suggest that these beliefs are wiped out by the Christianization of a population, in fact they may well be partially preserved in stories like this. And so one example here is that Catholic doctrine placed a pretty clear and strong emphasis on what what is called in this paper the inertness

of the human body after death. And this would be of course apart from the general resurrection in Catholic beliefs. So the the Catholic belief about the afterlife is you know, you die and then your body goes to the grave, and it doesn't do anything after that until the second coming of Christ, when the dead are raised and then uh, and then God will judge the living and the dead.

But these kind of stories reflect alternative beliefs about you know, they don't reflect that emphasis on the inertness of the human body before the general resurrection. They say. So, the fact that these stories involved dead bodies popping up from the grave to go to church and worship together at night suggests other sources of beliefs about the afterlife, not

just Catholic doctrines. But secondly, it's really interesting that you remember that Titmar Before he actually tells the story, he sort of gives a disclaimer paragraph, like he He's like, now, I've got a rhetorical purpose in telling you this, and is that and it is that this story will affirm Catholic doctrine itself. He says that his story proves the Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection and can be used as evidence against anyone who is skeptical that the dead will

be raised in Christ at the end of time. Uh So, he says that like the local Slavic people's do not have a correct understanding of the resurrection, and he hopes this story will help correct them and now and then. A third point that Caciola makes is that these stories provide some evidence not just of lingering pagan beliefs alongside Christian beliefs, but of direct syncretism, actually the blending of

different religious inputs into new hybrid forms of religion. This, of course, happens constantly throughout the history of religions all over the world. In fact, I think you could argue that basically all existing religions today are a result of past syncretisms, that previous religious traditions have in a way been combined or mixed and matched to form new ones.

And so the argument would be that it appears to also be happening here in a frontier context, where German Christianity and Slavic Paganism are mixing with one another, not just existing alongside one another, but actually combining into hybrid forms, producing what Cachiola calls quote paganized Christianities and baptized pagan

traditions uh quote. They express a pagan logic about life after death, but somewhere along the line of transmission they were adapted to a Christian semantic field and I thought this was really interesting in the following way. So I'll read another quote from Kachiola and then, uh, let's say what I was thinking about it. She says that this is uh, this is common throughout different parts of partially

Christianized medieval Europe. Quote. The Catholic Church, for all its careful policing of dogma, was unusually tolerant of a wide spectrum of ideas about death in the afterlife. It is striking that stories of ghosts and revenants, for example, while not quite orthodox, were never declared heretical either. They occupied a capacious middle round of toleration without endorsement, an unusually ambiguous emplacement for such a significant area of thought. Uh,

and that really inspired me. I was wondering, like, what is the logic, what is the even maybe the subconscious logic lying behind this distinction of like which types of doctrines are rigorously policed by the Church and deviation from them is deemed heretical versus which kinds of doctrines are treated more loosely and with just kind of like a look the other way tolerance. It seems that beliefs in various forms of the undead, while they're not within the

church's belief structure. They're also not forbidden. They're just sort of like allowed to go on, you know, like the like the clergy would just kind of say like okay, and they just look the other way and not bother

with it. Yeah, and I guess a lot of that probably gets back into the reality of of some of these events that were talking about, you know, uh, the same sort of paranormal events that happened today where someone has an ex arians they see something they can't quite explain, and there are these pre existing ideas about what that might be, and yeah, how far are you going to get are rolling out and and maintaining this new religion in this area if you just tell people, oh, well

that that thing you thought you saw it's not real. Um. But then and then you can also imagine the inner experience of that, Like you you can't deny the mystery of an experience that you you had better to to allow that to exist under the umbrella of the faith than to make it be a contest between the two, because one of them the the you know, the the ghostly encounter, Like it's going to be possible that that is going to be the experience that feels more real

and more authentic. Yeah, I think you're you're dead on with that. And this is a sort of consideration that Catchilo raises in her paper. I think this seems highly plausible to me that you could imagine that, you know, maybe Catholic clergy of this time would be seeing a a sort of trade off where they'd say, Okay, well, we could be really strict about making sure people have no pagan beliefs or practices, but if we do that, they're not going to accept the Catholic Church at all.

So you kind of get them in the door by letting them go halfway. That This isn't any any specific case I'm looking at, but you can imagine them saying, well, maybe, okay, so if they get baptized and they come to church on certain occasions and stuff, you don't you don't have to like fight them tooth and nail on believing in dragger or something, because if you did, maybe they'd stop

coming to church or wouldn't get baptized in the first place. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, with with you're gonna have to to establish this, uh, this new religion on the on the bedrock, on the soil of the pre existing culture. Now, I think we're hitting the time limit on part one of this series here, but there's so much more interesting stuff

to talk about. Tet Mark gets into some much more grizzly stories later on, and so I can't wait to further plumb his digression from the autone Me and King's and and just telling you about every weird ghost story he ever heard. So I'm so excited to come back to that next time. That's right when there's no more room, and how the dead shall go to church. So join us in the next episode when we continue on in

this fascinating journey. In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you'll find them in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. We have core episodes on Thursdays and Tuesdays. We have an artifact episode on Wednesday, listener mail on Monday, and on Fridays we do a little weird house cinema. That's our time to set most of the most of the serious consideration aside and just focus in on a weird film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio

producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, 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 I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for My heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen me to your favorite shows.