Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday. You know where we're going. We're going to the vault for an elder episode of the show. This one from last year aired on April nineteenth, that's twenty twenty two, and it is the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, Part one, where we explore the strange tale of a sort of vegetable mammal hybrid from far away.
Yeah. These were a lot of fun, so I hope you enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Last week's episodes discussed contemplations of plant and memory and other topics that can blur our understanding of the animal plant divide. And while we were talking about all of this, I mentioned very briefly that hybrid creatures of myth and legend often serve, among other purposes, as a kind of reflection on the similarities and differences between animals and plants, and at times maybe a contemplation of places where the distinction becomes a little confusing for one reason or another.
So I thought we might discuss one of them this week in greater detail, and that is the vegetable Lamb of Tartary. This is one of those creatures I thought I might do like a short form monster fact on. But the more I looked into it, the more it seemed to have legs.
Oh, very nice. So you were drawn to this? Was this a nominative determinism thing? I?
Well, this is one I had been vaguely familiar with, in part because it does pop up in various bestiaries and monster books. Jorge Lewis Borges wrote about it and was enticed by it. But yeah, when you start looking into it, there's a lot more to it than just a simple definition and explanation of what it was or wasn't.
Well, this was clearly one of the most popular fantastic creatures of medieval bestiaries. It's all over the place, and it's treated with varying degrees of credulity, more credulity early on and less later on.
That's right, so it's It was referred to as the vegetable Lamb of Chartary by Sir Thomas Brown and his sixteen forty six work Pseudodoxia Epidemica, and it was known by many other names as well. Two of the first sources I looked at concerning this where, of course, the Carol Rose's books The Book of Monsters, and also the writings of Jorge Lewis Borges. They point out in their works that the creature is also known as the boor Mets or the Barromets. That's a prime, that's an important
name that comes up a lot. There's also the polypodium boromets, the Chinese polypodium, the lycopodium or Chinese lycopodium, the jadua, the Scythian lamb, and I've also seen it referred to as the Tartar lamb, and we'll get into the differences.
But the basic description of the Boromets or the baro Mets, as Borges and Rose catalog respectfully, is that it's a plant shaped like a sheep that grows out of the ground, and if you cut it open, you'll find the insides are exactly what you would find if you cut open an actual lamb or sheep, blood, flesh, bones, et cetera. People allegedly encountered this strange thing in parts of Asia and then brought back stories about it which were elaborated upon.
Yes, and there's a great principle at play here, which is the same as a friend of my cousin's principle. You know that you place the origin of your really cool story sort of several links or geographically far away,
so that it's harder to check up on. Because again, this is something that was said to exist in the land of Tartary, and a European chronicler in the Middle Ages saying that a wondrous life form is found in Tartary is not especially helpful to a reader who might want to look for evidence of this thing beyond the text they're reading, or especially if they want to go
try to find it in the real world. Since the European medieval concept of Tartary was a huge and vaguely defined area of land, it's not like saying it's in Chicago.
Right, And it's a large area of land that not much was known about to Europeans prior to the eighteenth century.
Right. A lot of it was these fantastical travel books, like some of the ones we're going to talk about today.
So this was, Yes, the European name for the vast stretch of Asia that was north of the then borders of China, India, and Persia as understood by the west.
Right, you can think of it broadly as the central and northern area of the Asian mainland, including parts of what today would be Central Asia and Siberia, but running all the way down to the Himalayas, including Kazakhstan and Mongolia, what is today part of China, and the whole eastern part of Russia. So this is a huge stretch of land.
This is not being very specific at all to say that something is in Tartary, which is actually great because if you want to get away with weaving a tall tail for a European audience, this is an excellent place to set it. It's a vast much of it is sparsely populated, very little is known or understood by the reader, so it's going to be very difficult to check up
on your story at that time. Now, one more thing before we get started looking at some of these great old sources is there's a really great more recent source tracing the history of the vegetable lamb of Tartari legend and offering what I think is a very convincing argument about its natural origins. And we'll get more into the explanation of the natural origins in part two of this series. I think today we're going to focus more on the
legend itself and its development. But this source was by a nineteenth century English naturalist named Henry Lee, and it's called The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, published in eighteen eighty seven. I'm going to be referring to that work repeatedly throughout
these episodes. But a little bit about Henry Lee. He was apparently an aquarium a naturalist and an aquarium manager, and he published books in the eighteen seventies and eighties investigating claims of various sea monsters and offering natural explanations for these sightings and stories. He seems to me to be a very early model of the skeptical cryptozoologist.
All right, But before we get into the realm of skeptical cryptozoologists, let's back it way up. Let's deal with some less reputable sources by authors that may not have been actual people, at least in one case.
Interstage left, Sir John Mandeville.
That's right, the book The Sir John Mandeville's Travels from thirteen fifty C. Now, the first thing you're probably asking is, Okay, who's this John Mandevil guy that's going to tell me about his travels? Well, Mandevell is the supposed author of the Travels of Sir John Mandevil, a travel memoir that circulated during the mid fourteenth century, and this individual was
said to have been an English knight. But it's widely thought that this individual did not actually exist, and that the true author may have been a Flemish monk, perhaps one Gen DeLonge, who was himself a prolific writer and a collector of various travel logs. But I think it's still it's not something we're one hundred percent certain on, but I've seen some sources that indicate that this guy is a possible bet, just because he was sort of all the interests and resources lined up well.
One of the wonderful things about reading Sir John Mandeville is if you find one of the archaic original texts, the spellings of all the English words like, you can sort of make sense of it as a modern English reader if you labor through it. But the spellings are just tremendous. He calls himself a Night of Ingel One Night with a y, and England is spelled I N G E l O N D Oh my heart.
That's great. I should also point out that there's there's been a lot of work over the years just analyzing how much of this book is Again, the author was not a real person, but how much of this may have been based on somebody's actual travels versus how much of it is just pure invention or generated off of the backs of other works.
Yeah, it's difficult to tell that. I think it's pretty clear that his story of the vegetable lamb of Tartary is a fabrication because number one, he claims to have seen it himself, and as we'll get to it, we're pretty sure nothing of this description ever actually existed, and it may be a garbled version of sightings of something that did really exist, but it wouldn't look anything like what John Mandevil describes, right, So the fact that he claims to see it and his description does not match
anything in nature, including real plants that could have inspired it, That seems to point to this just being made up, But it could but it's also likely that he based this story on something else. That he read from maybe one hundred years before him or even earlier. His encounter with the alleged Lamb of Tartari comes in the twenty sixth chapter of this travel book, where he is describing the curiosities he came across in the dominion of the cham of Tartari.
All right, here's the bet. I'm gonna read it here, and my copy has the original spellings in it, so I'm going to try and lean into those spellings. Okay. Quote and there grow with a manner of fruit as though it were Gored's, and when they been ripe men cutting him at and then find in within a little beast in flesh, in bond and blood as though it were a little lamb without in wool.
Fruit is f r u y t y and and Gord's's gowerdies.
G O w r d E s yea love it. Yeah, So it's it's worth looking up just to to take in these spellings. And I have to say, I when I read this, in my mind, I'm reading it in the voice of Mary from the British comedy Ghosts, who's like this medieval peasant ghost who I can easily imagine going through this this this statement here.
You know who I really want to get a reading of the I want to get Matt Barry to do it.
Yeah, that would be good too. I could do a whole audiobook of the travels of John Mandifal.
It were a little lomb without in wool. Wait wait a minute, So you cut it off there, and that's that's a great part of the quote. But the quote does go on. Do you mind if I feature the next sentence?
Go for it?
Okay? After that it's uh no, I'm not going to do a Matt Berry voice. It's and men eaten both the fruit and the beast, and that is a great marvel of that fruit I have eaten, although it were wonderful. But that I know well that God is marvelous in his workies W. E. R. K Ees. So let's review what we know from Mandeville now, right. So in Tartary, there is a plant that grows a fruit that resembles a gourd. And when these gourds are ripe, you can cut them open and inside you will find a tiny
beast that is exactly like a lamb. Like a real lamb doesn't just look like one. It has meat and bone, and blood, and men in Tartary will eat these little lambs. John Mandeville says, I myself ate one too, and it was delicious. And the existence of the lamb of Tartary is so marvelous that it proves the greatness of God.
Wow, this is a great source. I saw the baby, and the baby looked at me.
Yes, yes, the baby looked at you. Oh no, Yeah, Chief Wygum is all the subsequent chroniclers who report on this passage.
Yeah. So I just love every part. I mean, just the idea that you it looks like a lamb and you cut it open and it's got it's not on the online. Does it bleed and have flesh but it has bones? Yeah, it's it's and this is not. There is even more. There are more layers of the absurd that will come in later tellings.
Yeah. Mandeville seems to be one of the earliest widespread accounts of the lamb in medieval European sources, but the legend is repeated with many variations in books of the following centuries up until people start getting skeptical, I think, basically during the Enlightenment. But another one we should look at before we try to trace any farther forward or backward. Is the one by Thomas Brown in the mid seventeenth century.
Right in the book Pseudodoxia Epidemica. This is sixteen forty six. Now Thomas Brown, this was certainly a real historic person who lives sixteen oh five through sixteen eighty two. An English author, physician, and polymath. He wrote on numerous topics, but was best known for Religio Medici, a very popular work of the day on the connections between science and religion. And the Borometz becomes even more extraordinary by the time
of Brown, who writes the following quote. Much wonder is made of the boramez, that strange plant, animal or vegetable lamb of tartary, which wolve's delight to feed on, which hath the shape of a lamb, affordeth a bloody juice upon breaking and liveth while the plants be consumed about it. And that much is typically quoted. You'll find that quoted
on various discuss of the Bormetz. But there's more which is insightful, because he continues, And yet, if all this be no more than the shape of a lamb in the flower or seed upon the top of the stalk, as we meet with the forms of bees, flies, and dogs in some others, he has seen nothing that shall much wonder at all. So in other words, however, if this is just something on the plant that is shaped more or less like an animal, we've seen that before and it's nothing really to write home about.
But I'm wondering I can't quite tell from the text. Is he's saying that he thinks it's more likely just that it's like a flower that's shaped like a lamb. Or is he saying, well, it could be one or the other.
You know, it's hard to say, right. I mean, it's easy to a lot of people seem to lean into the idea that he's saying, hey, this is real, because they leave off the skeptical part of the quote. But I'm not sure exactly which way the author is leaning him self here. But certainly there's a note of skepticism here that is sometimes lacking in the discussion of fantastic creatures even today.
I actually looked up the context of this to see what else he's talking about in the other paragraphs around this, and in the paragraph right above his passage on the boramets or the lamb of Tartary. He's talking about, quote, the tarantula or poisonous spider of Collabria, and that magical cure of the bite thereof by music. So this is a spider whose bite is cured by music. I think.
He also says that tarantulas will dance to music. I was trying to figure out what this meant, he says, quote some also affirm that the tarantula itself will dance upon certain strokes.
The more you know, yeah, So I mentioned Carol Rose earlier a source i'phant turned too, and in her book Giants, Monsters and Dragons, she summarizes many the oral the overall traditions of the bora met as follows quote.
In general, the Borometz was believed to be a creature with roots that held it fast. In one place, it resembled a lamb sheep with golden colored fleece. The stalk allowed it to browse the surrounding pasture, but as soon as this was consumed, the creature died of starvation. Humans or wolves then came and harvested the body, which was said to taste like crab meat. Its hooves were made of hair, which like its fleece was used by humans for weaving clothes.
Yeah, so this seems to be a pretty good description of that other version. We have the two main models, which are very different. The one of Mandeville, which is like, there are lambs in the fruits. The fruits are like these gourds. You cut them open inside their little tiny
lambs and you can eat them. And then there's this other version sighted in a bunch of sources and summarized by Rose here, where it's a full sized lamb or sheep and it is attached to the plant stem by its navel which acts like a tether, and it eats all of the vegetation around it, which I love this detail.
Can only survive until it has grazed all of the plant life within the radius of its umbilical stem, and then when it can't reach any more vegetation to graze on, it starves to death and dies unless a wolf or a human gets to it first and kills it for meat.
Right, And I think we'll have more on the wolf. The wolf side of the part of this changes. I love that it tastes like crab, and it's just it's just such a thing. You can also just see like this is what happens when an already fabulous account is given time to sort of fester or ripen, and also with the help of you know, books talking to other books, and translations and mistranslations taking place.
Now, based on all these medieval sources I found cataloged in Lee's book, Rose's summary seems to me very correct, with one exception, which is the characterization. She says that the flea of the vegetable lamb is golden in color. But based on everything I've read, that's something that you find more in the later sources. The earlier sources, if they mentioned the color of the fleece, they describe it as pale white, and later it's only in later sources
like Erasmus Darwin that changed this to golden. And Lee will will end up arguing that there's a very specific reason for this change that has to do with the rationalist explanation of the lamb given in later centuries. And in fact, since I mentioned it, maybe I should go
ahead and read a passage from Erasmus Darwin. This is written much later, but in Darwin's work The Botanic Garden, which is a grand poem about the natural world, about The Plant World, written in seventeen eighty one, Darwin writes, quote, even round the poll, the flames of love aspire, and icy bosoms feel. The secret fire, cradled in snow and fanned by Arctic air, shines gentle boramets like golden hair in the earth. Each cloven foot descends and round and
round her flexile necks. She bends crops the gray coral moss in hoary time, or laps with rosy tongue, the melting rhyme, eyes with mute tenderness, her distant dam and seems to bleat a vegetable lamb.
Oh that's wonderful. Yeah, well, I can't top that. One of the sources I was looking at is the work Ingelbert Comfort and the Myth of the Scythian Lamb by Robert W. Caruba, and this was published in the Classical World in nineteen ninety three. In this the author points out that while the lamb is largely a product of the Middle Ages, some passages by classical authors such as Herodotus and Theophrastus quote played an innocent role in its development.
And we'll have more on those two authors in a pit. Yeah.
I think we'll have to revisit the links to Herodotus and the other Greek authors in Part two, because that ties directly into what I think is probably the best theory for explaining the lamb legend. But it is I think worth noting in this part some other works preceding the story as told by John Mandeville, and I guess we'll come back to those in just a little bit.
Yeah. Now, Karupa also describes the lamb as a zoophyte, which is an actual classification or was actual classification for plant like animals, And this kind of comes back to our larger discussion that we were having having last week on the show. So the sessile nature of plants is a big part of their identity, but we do have non plants and even animals that have taken on similar
modes of existence. However, I do wonder if it's correct to think of the lamb here fantastic as it may be, as a plant like animal or an animal like plant. In my notes, I kept wanting to refer to it as the creature, but then felt weird about calling it a creature when it really seems more like a creature like plant.
Yeah, I don't know exactly what takes taxonomic precedence there. I mean, obviously, in the real world, there are plants that have interesting characteristics of animals, like the ones we talked about in the episodes from last week, the sensitive plant Mimosa putico, which shows rapid movement. Of course, the venus flytrap is another example. These seis monastic movements that allow a plant to have movement on the timescale you
would normally only associate with an animal. And then of course you can have animals that have characteristics we would associate with plants that might animals that might look like plants in some way. They have some kind of camouflage that looks like vegetation. I think of the you know, like the sloths that look like they're covered in some
kind of plant life. Or there are even some animals that have the power to absorb energy from the sunlight like plants do, like I believe there are there are certain salamanders that have evolved ways to do this, and there might be a seak cucumber example. So you can
find characteristics normally associated with one in the other. But then again, there are no such things as animal plant combinations like animals and plants are too far removed, too far removed in the tree of life to like inter breed or anything like that, right, right, But nevertheless, we do get this concept in the Middle Ages of the zoophyte. One I was reading about in the same context as the vegetable lamb of Tartary was the so called barnacle
goose myth. I think there are different ways this has been conceptualized, but there's like a type of goose that at various times in history has been thought to bud off of barnacles, like in the water. So it's not actually a land animal or a bird, it's actually some kind of fish or water animal. Or they even say that this goose maybe came out of trees. So it's okay to eat this goose on Fridays, even if you're supposed to fast from meat on Fridays, because it's not actually a bird, it is a plant.
That reminds me of our episode The Furry Fish, in which we were discussing otters a bit. Uh, And if you didn't listen to it, why would we discuss otters in an episode about the furry fish. Well, that was because in some places there were discussions, Well, what do we call the otter like? Is it lives in the water, It does things that seem very fish like. Therefore, is it okay for us to to to eat the flesh
of the otter as if it were a fish? Is it going to be is it going to be subject to the same rules concerning dietary rules concerning the consumption of non fish meat that sort of thing.
That kind of thing just doesn't really fly anymore, does it. Like, you can't you can't bring a goose to a vegan pot luck and say no, this goose came off of a tree. It was it's actually a fruit.
Well, we can't say it yet, but something we might get into in a later episode or even in the next episode a little bit is will we reach the day when you can do that? When you can't say no, this goose meat is all right because it was not harvested from the wild. It was grown off of something I picked it this morning. Another example that sometimes mentioned in terms of zoophytes from Chinese traditions. It frequently comes up,
is that of court aceps. This is, of course, when you have court aceps, you have these parasitic funguses that will overtake an insect, resulting in something They would certainly be confusing and difficult to classify if you didn't know
what was going on. These have long been a part of Chinese traditional medicine, quite popular, and I remember when I was last in China about I think nine years ago, I remember seeing an entire storefront filled with these, and you can still you can find court aceps for sale anywhere Chinese traditional medicine and Chinese traditional medical products are sold.
But yeah, it's quite If you just look at one of these specimens, it's quote you can see where the confusion might might occur, and you might think, well, this is clearly neither not quite an animal, but it's not quite something else either.
Yeah.
So if things like this exist, I mean, why not a vegetable lamb? Right?
Well, we can talk about why not later on, but yeah, I mean one wants to have some you know, give some leeway to medieval thinkers, because if you don't have a theory that helps you organize claims about the natural world indeplausible and implausible, you do at least know, well, the natural world is full of surprising things, So why not a vegetable lamb, Why not a plant that grows a mammal out of it?
Yeah, So, going back to that work by Karuba, the author points to ways that the idea was popularized later on by such writers as doctor Rasmus Darwin, who we quoted earlier with the bleeding quote. There we also have Guero Lama Cardano and Julius Caesar Scalager. But Karuba here is chiefly dealing with the work of Ingelbert Comfort on
the subject. Kamfor was a German naturalist who lived sixteen fifty one through seventeen sixteen, and who was actually himself widely traveled, having toured Russia, Persia, India, Southeast Asia and Japan. His book History of Japan was the main Western source on Japan for nearly two centuries. So he's kind of the ideal individual to weigh in on the lamb of Tartary,
and so he does. He Now, as far as the Karuba here goes, he begins by citing yet another description of this marvel, this time from the writings of French botanist Claude Duay, and this one was apparently highly influential during the eighteenth century. Quote in Tartary there are seeds which are like the seeds of gourds, only shorter in size, which grow and blossom like a stem to the navel of an animal, which is called aboromets in their language, I e. Lamb, because it resembles a and all its
limbs from head to foot. Its hooves are clothing. Its skin is soft, its wool is adapted for clothing. But it has no horns, only hairs on its head, which grow and are intertwined like horns. Its height is half a cubit and more according to those who speak of this wondrous thing. Its taste is like the flesh of fish. It's blood as sweet as honey, and it lives as long as there is herbage within range of the stem from which it derives its life. If the herbage is
destroyed or perishes, the animal also dies away. It has rest from all beasts and birds of prey, except the wolf, which seeks to destroy it.
Wonder why only the wolf?
I don't know, only the wolf, and I guess in some tellings people.
But okay, so this time, it's flesh tastes like fish, its blood is as sweet as honey, and it lives until the wolf gets it or again it eats all of the herbage within reach of the stem.
Right. So Comfer was interested in this, and in Comfort's writing he discusses the origin of the word as he derived at the boromets or boramets to the Slavac baran and the Persian baret, both meaning sheep apparently, but he also points out that the actual Scythian sheep is rather different from the common variety of sheep in Germany. He says, it's bigger, it has different I believe it is later described as a massive tail, and it has a massive
fat that drags around behind it. It's fat and meat and are both delicious, and it's hide is prized as well. I don't know quite what to make of this description of a massive fat tail, and Karuba doesn't really go into it. But having related this, Comfort is basically saying, okay, look, granted, the sheep over there don't look quite like the sheep we have here. But when I was traveling in regions you know that would have been familiar with this. Surely
no one knew what I was talking about. No one had ever heard of a borometz as described in these traditions, and so he ruled that it is quote pure fiction and fable.
Yeah, it seems to me that while the story was taken as generally true by authors in the Middle Ages, by like the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, authors who wrote about it seemed to be more often skeptical. Like. Another one who is skeptical not so much of the initial reports but of their interpretation was the seventeenth century German polymath athanacious Kircher, who's come up on the podcast several
times before. Apparently, Kercher wrote quote. Some authors have regarded it as an animal, some as a plant, whilst others have classified it as a true zoophyte. In order not to multiply miracles, we assert that it is a plant, though its form be that of a quadruped and the juice beneath its willy covering bee blood which flows. If an incision be made in its these things will not move us. It will be found to be a plant. And I was like, WHOA tell it like it is?
I mean, I think once this series is over, Kircher will be vindicated. But it's interesting how certain he is in this writing of this thing he's never seen for himself.
Well, you know, the thing is if you have even even a halfway broad familiarity with plants of many of any given region, you know, there's a good chance you'll be familiar with things that do resemble, say blood, like if you know anything about beats, then the idea that some sort of plant has blood in it or something that looks like blood shouldn't be that shocking.
In fact, this brings to mind something we talked about in our episode on beans. You remember that strange observation from the ancient world that the Pythagoreans did not eat beans, And in fact, there's even a story. I mean, it's hard to know if it's true, but there's a claim that Pythagoras died being pursued by a violent mob because he was running away from them, but he wouldn't run through a bean field, because I don't know. That's a strange thing to wonder why, And so people want to
know what's the secret of the beans. Why does Pythagoras have this bean problem? And there were a lot of different explanations we talked about in that episode, but one of the possibilities was the modern observation that bean plants sometimes appear to bleed like bean plants have these little nodes in their roots that can become infected with a
bacterium known as rhizobium. And I think if you cut these open, these bacterial nodes actually produce a hemoglobin like molecule that works pretty much the same way as the hemoglobin in our blood, binding with oxygen. And the result is that if you cut these things open, you get this red juice coming out of them that looks almost exactly like human blood. So somebody might have cut a bean plant open and been like, WHOA, this thing is bleeding like a human, or at least like an animal.
So so I don't know, maybe we shouldn't need these things. Maybe they have the souls of our ancestors in them or something. You can imagine a similar thing going on with some other plant, right, you know, you could observe that it might produce a juice that looks shockingly like animal blood.
Yeah, Like, I don't really I don't cook with with, you know, meats that have blood in them anymore. But on the when I do cook with beats, and I'm like cutting beats, I'm always just taken by how horrific everything looks. You know, yes, it's you know, I feel like I'm in a horror movie because I'm covered with this red juice and I'm holding a butcher knife and so forth.
Yeah, I'll save you. If you're eating beats for the first time, let me save you some googling. If you go to the bathroom later, you're not dying, that's normal.
Yeah, just remember that you had beats earlier.
Yeah.
Anyway, back to Karuba and his writing's on Comfort here from from here. In his work, Comfort goes on to discuss the possible origins of the myth, and this is what Karuba has to say about it is how he summarizes it. Quote. As to the origin of the myth, Comfort can only speculate that the museum specimens of delicate fetal fur can easily be confused with vegetable substance, and that geological distance, linguistic misunderstanding, and the inclination to believe
in wonders or prodigies provide the explanation. Comfort's account is noteworthy because it debunked the myth by eyewitness investigation, provided a first detailed description of the real Scythian lamb. You know that's the one with the supposed fat tale and practice is associated with it. You know what people do with it that they like to eat, eat it, and you know they use the hide and attempted to explain rationally the origin of the myth.
This is similar to what Lee says actually about Camphor. He says that he thinks that Camphor got the rational explanation of the myth wrong, like he thinks for many reasons it is not actually it was not actually inspired by this practices of harvesting the hides of fetal Scythian lambs. But at least that Camphor was like, no, let's look for an explanation that's more biologically plausible than a plant that grows into a mammal.
Yeah, you know, one of the things. And maybe this is one of the things that's so attracted me about the weirdness of the vegetable lamb of Chartari is that, in its most elaborate form, it seems like such a contradiction to our other tales of the fantastics. So many creatures you encounter in a medieval bestiaria or any kind of folklore mythology. The wilder the form, the more dangerous, the more mysterious, the further away from human culture. And this is a thing that is like the domes lamb
made even more harmless. You know. It's just the fantastic but mundane qualities of the of the vegetable lamb.
Right, It's not something that is fearsome and free and uncontrollable and all that. It's it's something that's like a standard part of animal agriculture, except it's just like mixing these different categories together. It's an utterly mundane part of life. It's like a story about a psychic TV dinner.
It's just you know, yeah, it's so it really seems to buck the trend in so many ways. And and I'm I'm guessing maybe that's why people were fascinated back then as well. You know, like, you know, everybody was into the You're always into the idea of dragons and strange snakes and yeah, all the monsters of the sea. But here's something that just sounds crazy and and uh and and it's helpless out there, you know. I mean the wolves are just coming up and chopping these things.
Yeah, you feel sad for it when you hear the myth. Yeah, like if the wolves don't get it, it's it's doomed. To starve to death pretty quick, because you know it's only got that short radius of stem length to eat the vegetation from right. Well, okay, there's one more thing I wanted to get to from the Henry Lee book, which is that Lee actually includes analysis of similar legends that are traced back to a little bit before the
time of Sir John Mandevil. Okay, so this is about to turn into a chain of citations for a minute, but it gets pretty interesting, so stick with me. So Henry Lee notices first that Claude Durray, when you were talking about earlier in a work called the Istoire Admirab,
I don't know how you say that in French. Admirable Admirab des plant in sixteen oh five writes that he once read in a Latin version of the of the Jewish commentary work the Jerusalem Talmud, a claim attributed to an Ethiopian scholar named Moses Chusensus quote that there was a certain country the earth which bore a zoophyte or
plant animal called in Hebrew Jedua. It was in form like a lamb, and from its navel grew a stem or root by which this zoophyte or plant animal was fixed attached like a gored to the soil below the surface of the ground, and according to the length of its stem or root, it devoured all the herbage which it was able to reach within the circle of its tether.
The hunters who went in search of this creature were unable to capture or remove it until they had succeeded in cutting the stem by well aimed arrows or darts. When the animal immediately fell prostrate to the earth and died, its bones being placed with certain ceremonies and incantations in the mouth of one desiring to foretell the future, he was instantly seized with a spirit of divination and endowed with the gift of prophecy.
Oh wow, so.
That's a new wrinkle. Okay, So this lamb is not only a vegetable that's tethered to the ground by stem. You have to kill it by severing the stem with arrows or darts. They don't say why in this source, but we'll get to another one in a minute. And then it falls down, and then you take this lamb's bones and you put the bones in your mouth with special magic spells that allow you to tell the future.
That's interesting because yeah, so many of these other accounts we are looking at they just say, oh, well, it tastes great, it tastes like fish, it tastes like crab. It's just really good to eat and you can use the hide, and you know, generally that's in most traditions, like that's what you're concerned with with the body of an animal. But then of course when you're dealing with the with the body of a plant and the parts
of a plant. You know, as we've got into a bit in last week's episodes, I mean, you know, history is a tale of humans figuring out how to use different parts of the plant, what it will do, what it seems to do, you know, and figuring out all the ways that the natural chemical properties and chemical weapons and defenses off the plant can be used for for curative reasons or preventative reasons. And so in this yeah, we're kind of leaning more into the plantiness of it
that it's going to have. They're going to be effects to eating it, and you know, certainly these are magical effects, but there are effects. Nonetheless.
Oh, I thought you were going to go in the direction of wondering about psychopharmacology. So if this is a play. You put it in your mouth and then you can see the future.
Okay, well no, I mean that's that's part of it too.
Yeah. So anyway, this is Deray referring back to what he calls the Jerusalem Talmud. Technically, there are two major Talmud traditions. I think that the Babylonian and the Jerusalem Talmud. And the Talmud is the text of Jewish rabbinical law, so it includes records of oral teaching and Judaism and
commentary on the Torah and things like that. So Lee says that he went searching for this story in the Talmud and he couldn't find it, so he had to consult a scholar named Reverend Doctor Hermann Adler, who was Chief Rabbi Delegate of the United Congregations of the British Empire. So this would have been at the time that Lee was writing in the eighteen eighties. And he says that Adler was actually able to find the real source. So
this goes back to from before John Mandeville. So it's in a section of the Jerusalem Talmud called the Mishna Kilaim, and there is a section here that reads as quote. Creatures called abne hasada or literally lords of the field are regarded as beasts. And there is a variant reading of abne hasada meaning stones of the field, not lords of the field. And so Adler was writing about this, and he found that there was a medieval commentary on this passage written by a Rabbi Simon of Sins, which
is a place in France. And Rabbi Simon lived in the twelfth and early thirteenth century, and he writes quote, it is stated in the Jerusalem Talmud that this is a human being of the mountains. It lives by means of its navel. If its naveal be cut, it cannot live. I have heard in the name of Rabbi Meyer, the son of Calanaimus of Spire, that this is the animal called Jedua. This is the Jedui mentioned in scripture literally wizard from Leviticus nineteen. With its bones. Witchcraft is practiced.
A kind of large stem issues from a root in the earth on which this animal called jadua grows, just as gourds and melons, Only the jadua has in all respects a human shape in face, body, hands, and feet. By its navel. It is joined to the stem that issues from the root. No creature can approach within the tether of the stem, for it seizes and kills them. Within the tether of the stem, it devours the herbage
all around. When they want to capture it, no man dares approach, but they tear it the stem until it is ruptured, whereupon the animal dies. And then there's another commentator named Rabbi Obadia Obadia of Bourbon Ooro that adds that you have to use arrows to sever the stem, presumably because you can't get close enough to hack at it with the sword or the jeduo will kill you.
And I think this is really interesting. So if you go back even earlier than Mandevill, of course Mandeville wasn't telling the story about it being this beast on the tether. Mandeville's version was the gourd fruits that had the little lambs inside. But if you go back earlier than these other stories, you have this version that's similar in pretty much every way, except it's not a lamb. It's like a human shape.
Yeah, this is fascinating. First of all, I love how all these later accounts were looking at They're all about that herbage. It's all about eatting up that herbage. But yeah, here with this, we have this, we have this, this ferocious version of it, something that's more in keeping with what we were saying, what you tend to want to expect from the wild world of myth and monsters, something you dare not approach, and if you do, you better
know exactly where its weak spot is. And yeah, so it's I mean, I guess this is kind of a you have shades of umbilical cords and mammals here being compared two plants being rooted to the soil. And of course not only plants, but this would have been observed with things like mushrooms as well, with stems emerging from the soil and so forth. Yeah, and then I guess one would imagine then that essentially you have converging mythologies about things that are not plants rooted to the ground.
Yeah. Yeah, it's so strange and interesting. And anyway, I think in the next episode is when we'll have to come back to discuss some of the rational theories about the origin of the myth, and I think there's some pretty good explanations on offer, especially the one by Henry Lee, but there are multiple ones that have been put forward
over the years. One last thing before we wrap up this episode is I wanted to mention how reading about the history of this mythological creature really makes me think about the benefits of having an evolutionary perspective on biology, because, of course, in nature is full of surprises, shocking surprises, but it also obeys deterministic physical laws, the most important of which are probably common descent and evolution by natural selection.
And I think having an evolutionary perspective on life can help you sort out which types of surprising claims about nature are actually plausible in which are not so. The idea of a lamb that grows from a plant is not really remotely plausible if you understand that complex multicellular life forms arise only by varying and building upon the morphology of direct ancestors. You know, plants and animals arise from different chains of ancestors that diverged more than one
point five billion years ago. So given what we know about plants and animals today, you're not going to get a plant that grows quadrupedal mammalians with bones and blood and fur out of it. Like, you know, there are tons of shocking, amazing things about the natural world, but they're shocking and amazing within something that makes sense, cladistically, within something that makes sense from the ancestors they emerge from.
There's no physically plausible scenario in which a plant like that exists, given what we know about the history of life on Earth. But the authors of the Middle Ages, even if they were intelligent and well informed people, were not armed with a theory of biology that would allow them to tell the difference between an extraordinary but physically plausible claim about nature, and there are tons of those that turn out to be true, and a claim that
just simply wouldn't happen because it doesn't make sense. Though, I think it's also interesting that even without a theory, even without a formal scientific theory explaining why this organism is pretty much impossible within the context of known Earth life, some people of the pre evil, the pre Darwin past had some kind of intuition that caused them to reject this story. Like Kercher, for example, he wasn't the only one, but you know, affamacious Kircher looks at these stories, he says, no,
this is people are just getting confused. This is a planned and so even without a theory of evolution, some people were able to look at that story and think, Nah, nature is full of wonders, but that's not one of them, And I wonder, like, what are those intuitions? That's an interesting question on its own.
Yeah, yeah, because it's likewise, it's hard for us to divorce ourselves from our basic understanding of the differences between plant and animals, you know. Yeah, Like my mind instantly goes to some of the just really amazing examples of mimicry in the world, you know, and a lot of times they are just really really amazing, but there are
sort of limits to them. You know. It's like this, here's an organism that has evolved over time to have part of its anatomy or some function of its anatomy resembling that of another world organism.
Yeah, you know, well there.
Are various examples of this, but like one simple one is a non toxic organism resembling the coloration of a toxic organism organism, right, but that's but there's a limit to it, right. It's not like where the act of mimicry also involves having the toxin you know, right, and so forth.
Not without a long intervening period of having to develop that yeah.
Right, right, or likewise, you know, part of an animal resembling a false head, it doesn't actually that head doesn't have functional eyeballs inside it, and so forth. Right, But but but yeah, it's hard to put yourself in the mindset where you don't have some of these basic laws in place and these basic differences in place in your mind.
Yeah, you just don't know what goes and what doesn't. Yeah, I mean it is actually interesting reading some of the reasons given by these by these late medieval authors or Renaissance authors that came before they had a theory of evolution, but they had other reasons, some of which are spurio but interesting to read through. Like you mentioned earlier, a
guy named Girolamo Cardano. This was an author of Pavia, and he was writing in the mid sixteenth century, and I remember he argued that this plant animal thing couldn't really exist because in order to have blood, it has to have a heart, and the soil that the plant was growing in did not have enough heat to create a heart.
That's what he said, All right, Well, I mean it's his reason it's irrationale.
I mean, I think he's sort of on the right track, but it also sounds kind of ad hoc. It's like he's just sort of making this up.
Well, you know, to take it in another direction here, Like I was thinking back to some of the things we discussed last week, and Okay, so the idea that you would have a plant that would grow and it would essentially grow itself a sheep, and that sheep would eat the plants growing around, you know, feast on the herbage, and like the basic relationship there between this plan and
the plant surrounding it is not that crazy. I mean, one of the things we discussed is that sometimes the places where you see the most dynamic interactions in the plant world are between one plant and another. Remind competition, yeah, competition, even if it's just you know, like two beam plants looking at the same pole, not looking at it, you know, sensing the same pole, sensing each other, and there's a
competition for that resource. And then in some cases, you know, the competition that's taking place, it's not being you know, there's no need for some sort of fabulous sheep morph that grows out of the plant because the battle is taking place at the chemical level, you know, it's a more subtle battle. It's not, and it's not a battle that's taking place within the human realm and with the human time. It's taking place on the level of plant time. And therefore, for the most part, we do not.
See Yeah, and I see what you're getting at there, because some attempts to explain the origin of this myth have looked into, well, what are some plants that essentially rob all of the area surrounding the plant of nutrition or poison its neighbors or something that plants that keep other plants from getting anywhere near them to make it look like they're surrounded by these patches of barren earth.
Oh yeah, But anyway, I think we'll have to wait until part two to come back and explore those explanations.
That's right. But in the meantime, we would love to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts on the vegetable lamb of Tartary and just you know, basically plants in general, the weirdness of plants, the weirdness of mythic and legendary plants as well. I'm also kind of surprised there's not a Pokemon of this thing, because I was, I was, I've been. My son has been showing me a lot of Pokemon creatures in his book that he has,
his big compendium. It's it's a besty area of Pokemon, which I applaud and often have fantastic forms, and sometimes they have forms that remind me a little bit of vegetable lamb. Here, Like there's a creature that has like the legs of a turtle, but then it's instead of a shell, it has like an apple pie. And then you know, so there are a number of different creatures in there that have kind of animal and vegetable properties, you know, intertwined, and I feel like the vegetable Lamb
of Tartary should have been in there. So I guess, Pokemon masters, if you are out there, the people who make these things, when you create some more Pokemon monsters, consider making the Lamb of Tartary. I don't know what the three different evolutions would be, but I'm sure you'll figure it out.
Tell them right.
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