From the Vault: The Whistling, Part 4

and much more. So we're going to continue this journey through folklore and mythology concerning whistling, and we're going to be referencing some of what we covered in another previous episode about Chinese transcendental whistling, in which a specialized Taoist form of whistling was almost like meditation, but was also said to give one both insight and perhaps even power over the energy of things in the world. So once more I'm going to be referencing that excellent whistling and

Antiquity paper by AV Van Stakellenberg, but also some other sources. Now, according to Ed Edwards, in the two thousand and nine paper The Principles of Whistling, a ten dynasty text called the shau Chi says that whistling simply calls out to all spirits, good or bad, and sta Kellenberg summarizes this as kind of a supernatural neutrality concerning whistling. So whistling isn't something that is used by bad people or necessarily

use by good people. It's just it's this thing that signals out into the world around us, into the unknown, and you know, you could potentially attract the attention of things you don't want to attract the attention of. But it also could be basically harmless. It kind of depends on the circumstances.

view of it versus another thing. But mainly, I don't want to imply here that that whistling was just something that Dallas sorcerers engaged in. I was looking at a paper by Julungsu from two thousand and six titled Whistling and its Magico Religious Tradition, A comparative Perspective, and at this points out that there are Han Dynasty accounts of women whistling for both sorrow and this seems in some

cases to tap into this idea of sighing as well. Again, look thinking back to previous episodes where we've discussed whistling and it's similarity to other non linguistic sounds that we make, other breath based sounds that can be used to communicate something or to get somebody's attention.

or it might mean a sigh. And in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Queen Mother uses a whistle as a kind of battle cry to disply her ferocity. So it's kind of a wide spectrum of possible uses

for the whistle even within Chinese tradition here now. Sue also points out that while yes, in English customs and Western customs there are a lot of these superstitions against women whistling particularly, and we don't really see this in Chinese traditions, though it is sometimes seen as ominous in general whistling due to the connection between whistling and various death rituals and you know, and attracting the spirits, but

it is more in inherently magical and not gendered. Sue also shares some other examples from Western traditions to you know, for a comparative experience here, but they point out here quote the Germans believe that a woman's whistling will make the angels weep and the devil's rejoice.

was discouraged. This Sioue Stresses does not seem to be linked to say dallast ideas regarding whistling, but is instead rooted in particular folk traditions. Now here's another really interesting one that Sue brings up. Sue shares an example from Mythraism.

So Mythraism for sci fi fans out there, some of you might be familiar with this religion because you may have watched the really excellently weird HBO mac sci fi series Raised by Wolves, in which one of the two factions that's going out into space and colonizing other worlds are are devoted Mithraists. And you might well think, oh, this is some sort of cool religion they made up

for the show, but it is not. It is this is a reference to the Roman street cult of mithras and in there recorded rituals, and Joe, You're going to get into this a little bit and talk about what we mean when we when we bring out the idea of recorded rituals of Mithraism. But supposedly there is a system of whistling and tongue clicking that was used to attract what Sue refers to as theeomorphic star deities.

Like you can find the ruins of their underground temples called Mithrium, and they're all throughout Roman settlements, and yet we know way less about this religion than one might assume. And one of the big reasons for that is that, as far as I understood, and I guess the text that you just referred to maybe a counterexample to this, but modern scholars generally thought, we have basically no access

to any primary literary sources about the religion. So if it had religious texts, we don't have any of them, and so what we know about it we've had to try to piece together through detective work based on imagery and simple inscriptions and archaeological clues and comments and references made by external writers trying to say, hey, you know,

this is what's going on with Mithraism. So for a kind of hopefully interesting analogy, imagine trying to understand what Christianity was if it like mostly died out and disappeared in the fourth century or so, and we did not have any of the writings of the New Testament or any other writings by Church fathers or any other early Christians, and we were trying to reconstruct what Christianity was based entirely on like imagery and artifacts and what other external

writers said about it. So it's a really fascinating problem, and one of the most common images in Roman mythraism is apparently important scene from their mythology of the god

Mithras slaughtering some kind of divine bull. But there's another interesting complication here too, which is that there is a pre Roman Persian cult of Mithras or Mitra, which is a Zoroastrian or pre Zoroastrian god of the Persian people who's kind of a solar deity of justice who I think was associated with contracts and the honoring of bargains. And then later you get this widespread Roman mystery cult that seems to be based on an appropriated version of

that deity. And of course we know the Romans loved absorbing and reprocessing other cultures gods, like the main Roman

pantheon is mostly a photocopy of the Greek. And then you've got the Persian Mithras becoming the Roman savior god of some kind, and even the way you can think about a Jewish messianic figure in Jesus and the original context of monotheistic Judaism rather quickly becomes a popular savior god to people throughout the empire who had been Polytheists up until the moment they converted to Christianity, So that

whole process is really interesting. But the idea of a text of Mithraism was very interesting to me because I didn't think we had one of these. But this is referring to something called the mithras Liturgy, which I think is commonly dated to roughly the fourth century. But there's dispute about whether it actually reflects original Mithraic theology or whether it's some kind of later synthesis.

So this is an interesting concept, and it was also done by other classes as well, Sue writes quote in general, poets, hermits, and people of all types in the Six Dynasties utilized whistling to express a sense of untrammeled individual freedom, or an attitude of disobedience to authority or traditional ceremony, or to dispel suppressed feelings and indignation. Whistling was not limited to a certain class, but was practiced by men from all walks of life.

This is California Miners Folklore. This is from a nineteen forty two edition of California Folklore Quarterly written by Waylan d Hand. And yeah, it's a really interesting read. This one's out there on the internet if anyone wants a deeper dive into it. But for example, he goes into the fear of the Tommy Knockers in the tunnels.

men elf like be whiskered and wizened. They are usually thought of as benign, occasionally even assisting in the location of ore bodies. If they are not so well disposed, their conduct tends to be mischievous rather than malignant. Many California miners, though not having themselves seen these creatures in person, recall having seen small effigies of them made of clay and set upon portal, sets to a tunnel or on

the lagging or elsewhere where their patronage is desired. So I love that image of not only the idea that there are these beings living elsewhere in the tunnels, but there's this kind of we talked about a little, you know, we were talking about when people set to sea, when they return, when they're when seamen are out there on the waters, there the newer religions that they have taken to might be set aside for the older ways, the

older gods. And here we have this example of California miners potentially having little altars to kind of dwarven elven beings in the mines.

phantom white mules, headless mules, and strange lights. Apparently he said that there weren't really that many creature myths concerning the minds, though occasionally you would have like a cat come down into the mines and would just scare the Bejesus out of everybody, because it would either way, I'm imagining, you know, the cat would get down there, it would be lurking about, its eyes gleaming and the light and

just give everyone the proper spooks. But there were also these superstitions about the about bad luck concerning well, first of all, bringing women anywhere near the cave, but also there was a widespread superstition against anyone whistling down there, and it seems to be sort of twofold. On one hand, there was a real fear of vibrations in the caves and So there's this idea that you shouldn't whistle because

you don't know what that's going to do. You're going to set up vibrations that could potentially cause a cave in. But it also seems linked to this older, wider idea that if you're whistling, you could draw in spirits and hand shares. A fun little rhyme here quote whistle by night you'll bring the sprite. Whistle by day you'll drive them away.

stood out. One of them is an interesting monster of the people of the Xingu River in Brazil, and this creature is called midhata karaya, and these are said to have been giants that were as tall as the trees, with fruit growing out of their armpits, which the giants then consume to sustain themselves. So it sounds like they weren't themselves dangerous. They weren't like eating humans. But they're big, tall giants. So if they're coming your way, you want

to know to get out of their way. And the way you knew this is because the male giants had a hole in the top of their head and it emitted a high pitched whistle when they moved.

it does. Others don't mention it, so I can't be one hundred persent certain if this is something that is actually part of it or a lot of these yokaia too. They and when you get into modern ghost stories as well, like there's there's there's still kind of rich in alive, so something's could add it and also somethings could added in translation, but this one is called Oa Guru Batari and its name apparently means nothing but blackened teeth, which

already sounds pretty pretty amazing. So this is the way this okais encountered. She appears as a beautiful woman in a traditional wedding kimono, and I guess you might see her at a distance, and in some cases as you get as you're interested and you move closer, she may whistle to get the attention of single men. Other accounts say that she may speak in the voice of a loved one. Others don't seem to mention any kind of real sound at all. But as you get closer, this

is the main thing that happens. She, like a lot of these type creatures, will reveal her face. And when she reveals her face, you find not a not a beautiful humanoid face, but instead a face that is largely blank except for a great, big, gaping mouth that's filled with nothing but blackened teeth. And then she cackles, and you just scream and run away terrified, And that's it. She's not interested in hurting you. She's just here to scare the Bejesus out of you.

you'll hear the whistling. And then if you happen to witness what it does when it gets there, well it's whistling the whole time as well as it's doing, you know, horrible, gruesome things to people. Now I was I was interested to run across this. I don't really know much about old radio dramas, but there was also an old radio drama about crime and fate titled The Whistler, And apparently on this show, the titular whistler kind of emerges out of the night. It's very much a kind of you know,

crime noir kind of a figure. You hear him whistling a catchy tune, and then he serves as the narrator and kind of host of the program. And there were apparently eight different Whistler films during the nineteen forties, and the first of them was nineteen forty four is the Whistler, and it was directed by William Castle.

think you really hear about the Whistler much anymore. I think there was a nineteen fifties TV series, and I don't know that anyone's really gone back to this, but I like this idea because it's essentially it's kind of like a cripkeeper, you know, it's an anthology host and Apparently the deal with the movies is you would have the same star actor in each of them, not the Whistler but somebody else, though each story is different, and so he's playing a different character. So it's kind of like

the modern version would be. I don't know, Ryan Gosling is in every Whistler movie, but Ryan Gosling plays a different protagonist, a different character that's all wound up in some sort of tale of crime and fate.

It brings to mind a nineteen ninety one TV movie that I don't remember was especially good, but it was creepy, and it was called Into the bad Lands, and it starred Bruce Dern as this creepy old bounty hunter in black, and if memory serves, he does various things. He cooks some eggs, he shoots some outlaws, and drags him around kind of rotting behind his cart. He smiles a big creepy grin. But I think he also whistles in that one, And there's a particular ditty that's reoccurring, So there is

something to this. The stranger who whistles, what is he whistling about? He kind of ties into some of these other ideas, like he's an outsider that is not tied to the same rules as everything else. He may have some sort of communication with knowledge beyond himself, with spirits, et cetera.

for now anyway, concerning whistling superstitions and whistling monsters. Certainly we'd love to hear from everyone out there who has additional things they would like to bring up, be it you know, folkloric creatures, strange traditions, and certainly any kind of you know, movie tie in characters who whistle. I'd love to hear about any of that. So yes, by all means right in.

experimental in nature. It was very theoretical, and though it had a few interesting ideas in it that I do want to talk about, to the extent that it is theoretical, it seems kind of based in Freudianism, So it's gonna be a big caveat there. But before we get to that, I did want to talk about a medical case report I came across that had a title that really grabbed my attention. So this is a paper by pallac at All published in BMC Psychiatry in twenty twelve, and it's

called Compulsive Carnival Song Whistling following Cardiac arrest. A case study Compulsive Carnival Song Whistling.

His heart had stopped, there was reduced a supply of oxygen to the brain, but they resuscitated him and he was all right. But during rehabilitation he presented with some symptoms, including neurological impairment, and so several of the things they report are disorientation, apathy, what they call bradyphrenia meaning slowness of thought, short term memory problems and things like that.

And imaging, particularly EEG showed decreased functioning in the brain, especially in the bezo temporal areas, and he continued to exhibit some neurological symptoms in the following years. And here's where we get to the music. I'll read straight from the case report quote. We were approached in May two thousand and eight by the patient's wife, who got to know our center of expertise through the internet. She was close to desperation from listening to the whistling of the

same carnival song for nearly sixteen years. It would go on for five to eight hours every day and got worse when the patient was tired. Oh wow, so it's a mix. Like obviously it's you know, I was snagged by the idea of repetitive whistling of a carnival song, but when you actually hear the details, it is I don't know, it's a very unfortunate situation to imagine that, like the whistling of the same song goes on for five to eight hours a day for sixteen years.

among other conditions. But basically this drug regimen did manage to decrease the whistling by about half, but it also came with some very difficult side effects in this man's case, and the repetitive whistling of a carnival song non stop for five to eight hours a day could be considered an example of what psychiatrists would call compulsivity, which the authors describe as quote, the repetitive, irresistible urge to perform a behavior, the experience of loss of voluntary control over

this intense urge, and the tendency to perform repetitive acts in a habitual or stereotyped manner. So they talk about how the man would whistle the song on a loop all day pretty much, and that at certain points they could make him stop doing it, though he reported after he stopped that he experienced anxiety. And in their discussion, the authors explain how the man in this report showed symptoms that could be consistent with three different interpretations of

his condition. So, first of all, they talk about the idea of a frontal syndrome characterized by impulsivity and disinhibition. I think frontal syndrome there because it's the frontal lobe that is very important for inhibiting behavior that's your sort

of like self control mechanism. And then second a compulsivity condition known as punding, which is characterized by quote purposeless and repetitive behavior such as collecting or arranging things often related to the patient's personal hobbies or occupation, and attributed to alterations of the brain's reward and motor systems in both the ventral and dorsal stra atom. And then the final interpretation would be a sort of acquired form of

obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD. And there are other examples of people acquiring OCD after a brain injury later in life. The OCD is usually acquired gradually earlier on in life. And they say all of these explanations match the observations in some ways but not in others. But one thing they got into that I thought was interesting here was talking about the different characteristics of impulsivity versus compulsivity in

the brain. So they write, quote, one may conclude that the whistling with its repetitions is primarily compulsive rather than impulsive or disinhibitive, as the patient had a constant urge to whistle and felt anxiety when asked to stop rather than acting without foresight. The fact that anxiety was felt is in line with compulsivity rather than impulsivity, assuming that compulsive behaviors are performed to prevent perceived negative consequences from happening.

So this is a useful distinction for thinking about because when we you know, outside of the medical context, when we think about these words impulsive or compulsive, they both I think usually refer to situations where a person seems to lack executive control. They lack the ability to control their own behavior or prevent themselves from doing something, but

in very different ways. So in impulsivity, you feel an urge to do something, but some process taking place in your frontal lobe tells you that's not appropriate and stops you from doing it. But the urge itself might be something normal that like we would all think of doing for a second. It might cross our mind to do it, but then we would turn away from actually doing it

because of some inhibition mechanism in the brain. Examples of this include all kinds of stuff, spitting on the floor or making a rude or inappropriate comment and conversation, or jumping out of a moving car. They can vary wildly from you know, minor things to extreme things. They would all be things though, that even a person with typical neuroanatomy might think for a second about doing, but then they would be able to stop themselves.

to think that you even thought about doing that. Why did I think that, hey, I could take my wallet out and throw it off of this building or off of this bridge that I'm on. Yeah.

I shouldn't do that. People with a frontal syndrome often have impulsivity problems because they whatever the normal disinhibition mechanism in the brain is, that has been damaged in some way by their injury. Right, So contrasts that that impulsivity with compulsivity, where a person also lacks the ability to stop themselves from performing an action, but it's an action that they feel they must do repetitively in order to

prevent some kind of bad consequence from happening. So remember it was said that the man here would whistle constantly, but he felt the immediate onset of anxiety if he stopped whistling the carnival song. So that makes it sound more like it's compulsivity here, that it's something that he felt he had to do repetitively or else negative consequences

would emerge. And the case history here mentions that the man once worked as head of a carnival association, and the authors don't say this, so we don't know this, but it seems like a reasonable guess that the carnival tune he was whistling was one he was familiar with from his own past to working as the head of a carnival association, maybe even one he associated with a time when he was more in control.

compulsive whistling. And I thought it was interesting that the whistling, if it is best interpreted as a way of staving off anxiety, which the authors here suggested, is it made me think of our discussion about whistling past the graveyard or whistling in the dark, other cases where it's commonly observed that people whistle in order to push out a fear or thoughts of danger.

But the other major one I found, and this was cited in some other papers, is a paper from nineteen fifty nine published in the journal Language and Speech called When People Whistle, and it's by the UC San Francisco professor of psychiatry, Peter F. Austwald. As I said earlier, I do want to mention this one because it has some interesting ideas in it, but also it is an older paper. It clearly is not constricted by empirical method.

This is not like reporting on original experiments. It's more kind of theorizing about what whistling might mean and why people whistle, based on models that seem at least influenced by Freudianism. A lot of it's about fixations that are sort of emerge from childhood development. But anyway, okay, so who is this guy who wrote this? Ostwald? He seems

like a kind of interesting guy. So he lived from nineteen twenty eight to nineteen ninety six, and his life is sort of divided between an interest in psychiatry on one hand, and music and music history on the other. So he wrote biographies of musicians and composers like Schumann

and Glenn Gould. But also, to quote from his New York Times obituary quote, in nineteen eighty six, he founded the Health Program for Performing Artists, a voluntary group of specialists engaged in research, education, and clinical care of the particular mental and medical problems afflicting musicians, dancers, and other

performing artists, both professionals and students. And I thought that was very interesting because now that I think about it, it clearly makes sense that you could have medical center focused on the mental and physical health needs of performing artists in particular, because I'd imagine there would be patterns in their needs. But it never occurred to me that such a thing would exist.

it often seems to be, why is it pleasurable? So to check one of the very Freudian boxes, he argues that, first of all, the act of whistling involves manipulation of the muscles in the face and the mouth in a way that may produce hedonic states feelings of comfort and pleasure because of its similarity to the facial and mouth movements of what he calls oral gratification, and so he expands that to all kinds of things like eating and smoking, but he specifically ties it into the facial and mouth

muscle movements of a feeding infant. So this is one of those things that, well, it's hard to disprove that, but I'm not convinced there's much evidence to establish that exact causal chain that like doing the same thing with your face muscles that you did when you were a baby in your mother's arms produces comfort and for the

same reason. I don't know how you would show that, yeah, Yeah, And also I'd be skeptical that there's a general principle that doing something with the you know, the skeletal muscle in your body that is similar to what that muscle does in some other unrelated activity that is pleasurable in some way gives you pleasure in the secondary activity just

because you're using the same muscles. I don't know. I mean, you could think of ways that you would use the same muscles you might use in some pleasurable activity, but it doesn't bring pleasure. Does just like pretending to chew bring you the same kind of pleasure you get from eating and so forth?

these automatic movements. Psychological studies show that if the individual is rewarded by attention or praise when he first gains control over such automatic processes, he may continue to expect satisfaction from this display of skill. As will be shown later, whistling arouses the attention of listeners so that the whistler's

bodily mastery is almost universally rewarded in some way. And I don't know, at a gut level, this seemed a little more plausible to me that there could be like a learned association of positive reinforcement upon gaining conscious control

over previously automatic or autonomic processes. And I think one of the main ideas this ties into here is like toilet training, that you know, there could be some kind of bleed over with pleasure upon a general pleasure upon taking conscious control of things like breath, and that would sort of check out with other things. I mean, there are a lot of things people do to seemingly bring themselves pleasure and comfort just by taking conscious control of breath, which is normally automatic.

and those sounds which came from his own body. During this phase of personality development, one is unsure of the significance of sounds. One cannot tell whether a certain noise, say one's footsteps, has personal meaning referable only to his own body, or has a public meaning with some reference to the world of other people. In this confused state, the individual may come to believe that the sounds he

produces have some causal relationship to what he experiences. Whistling, like other noises he makes, may thus be associated with fantasies of omnipotence, which, unless corrected by reality can lead to delusions of grandeur. This was really interesting to me because think about how many things we've already looked at where there's some belief that, like whistling gives you power to like change the external world somehow.

You know, think of the god pan and the magical syringx and so forth, but.

wordless signals usually have a vague and imprecise meaning. They do not usually communicate ideas, but serve rather to attract attention. And he described some of the same research we've already talked about, for example, that whistling is a type of noise making that travels especially well by concentrating energy in the one to four kilohertz range, which is the best window for humans to hear. It's sort of a perfect attention getter. But in the context of most cultures, cultures

where whistling does not constitute a language. It doesn't contain words or precise information. Again, its meaning is vague. It's just an attention getter. And personally, I think maybe it's in this vagueness that a lot of the superstitions and ideas about the magical danger of whistling could emerge, because it's sort of a one to two punch. It's this paradox. Whistling is like the most powerful signal you can make with your body to attract attention, the most powerful sound

signal you can make. Right, it's this piercing sound. It travels far, it it makes people turn their heads. It's like a beacon, and yet in most cases it doesn't form precise words or phrases, so you can't be sure what kind of attention you are attracting. It's just a general beacon. It could attract a friend, or if you're in a dangerous place, maybe you're on the sea and there are all kinds of forces at work, it could just as likely attract unwanted attention, a dangerous enemy of

some kind. And because you can't form precise words with it, you also don't know what you're saying or what you're asking for. It's like the scene in the movie where you know, you like read a spell from an ancient book in another language and you don't know what the words are, so you don't know what kind of spell you're enacting or what kind of trouble you're getting into.

just start transmitting. There would obviously be some real concerns about that from some of the less sanguine of extraterrestrial theorists.

this is fair game. Writ in. We would love to hear from you. In the meantime, you can always find core episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind on Tuesdays and Thursdays in these Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. On Mondays we do listener mail, on Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film.