It Lurks in the Mine Shaft, Part 1

on this level before. So yeah, this one should be good. So, as we've covered on the show before, whenever humans venture where they don't quite belong, they inevitably encounter monsters of one form or another. There are monsters of the deep forest and the deep ocean, of the desert and the snow, and there are monsters too that haunt places of human construction, obviously our tombs, the necropolis, even spaces like empty bathrooms

at night and lonely expanses of country road. These places too may be home to monsters and monstrous spirits and other entities, each in their own way. These are all places of mystery, and the monster is in some ways

an answer to that mystery. And in discussing monsters, ghosts, and legends associated with mining, we're dealing with a very fascinating environment because on one level, the solid earth beneath our feet or deep within the heart of a mountain is exactly the sort of place where we do not belong. It's either we're talking about the grave, or we're just talking about solid earth that affords us no place to exist.

Or another level, a cavern or other natural or artificial formation in the earth, some sort of hollow in the earth that we might venture into. And so, as we've discussed in the show before, caves have of course long been a place of fascination for humans, well back through prehistoric times. From what we can tell, they seem to have been places that offered a number of resources and ideas. They might offer shelter, water, warmth, and even in limited

ways food. There were also places of strange sights and sounds, places to speak to the future or learn from the past through art, and of course, to venture farther into the caverns was to court additional dangers. Then, as now, you could become lost, stuck, or just overcome by deprivation of the senses. And humans also learned pretty early on that these subterranean spaces could also offer substances of additional value to them, such as red ochre or flint and

other hard rocks and ultimately copper and gold. Now, to get these resources, humans sometimes had to brave the depths of the Earth, not only descending into naturally occurring openings, but forging their own tunnels and pits mines for the harvesting of Earth's riches. Now, we can't summarize the history of mining in much detail for these episodes, but suffice to say that the enterprise became increasingly complicated and daring. Humans cut deeper and deeper into the earth, and in

doing so perpetually faced safety challenges. Mining could prove really dangerous work, and this was of course coupled with the ominous atmosphere of the mind, a world of darkness of strange sights and strange sounds. Again, sensory deprivation that could bring on sights and sounds that are not quite real,

hallucinations both visual and auditory. And on top of this, there was this seeming proximity to these very traditions of the underworld, traditions regarding some sort of a mythic underground world that date back at least to ancient Mesopotamia.

mine things. But of course that's the model that is going to factor into many of the examples we're going to be discussing here today.

the belief in supernatural entities and beings there is. It seems to me, there is less less monstrous, less ghostly, less spiritual associated with say open pit mining or placer mining, where you know, you're you're sifting a sediment from a stream bed or and things like that. Probably just because you know there you're open to the sky. It's just less eerie and it is less likely to conjure you know, kind of spooky eerie feelings for a number of reasons that we can discuss as.

Many of the traditions that we're going to be talking about concern beings that fall roughly into a category that may often be described as fairies or fair folk, And as Carol Rose the Folklorus writes in her works, you know, they might be thought of as beings that exist between

heroes and the gods. Folkloris Charlotte Sophie Byrne described them in her nineteen fourteen book The Handbook of Folklore as quote various races of beings not human and yet not divine, who are supposed to share this lower earth more or less invisibly with mankind. And I really like that definition more or less invisibly, because you know, sometimes we talk about them being fair or invisible, but other times we talk about how they are small, you know, they're like

the leprechaun. And sometimes this ends up just taking on, you know, the pure idea of them being very small in stature or being miniature people. But I was thinking about this over the weekend that it is also it's like they just have a different spatial reality, like they live in different spatial dimensions and they can fold themselves in and out of those spaces.

though they're often situated somewhere in between. They're not always right in the middle, so they might be largely benign. You know, maybe they can be wooed by humans, you know, with offerings and so forth, or they might just be very easily offended. And if you offend them, you know, they might just have a good laugh at your expense, or it might be the end of you. They might play a joke, but just how severe is that joke going to be?

exactly which way it's going to fall, right. So, just as there's a fair amount of variety and just how they're going to act towards humans, their exact origins very wildly as well, you know, including everything from the idea of them being transformed humans to personifications of natural phenomena and in some cases defeated elder races or even cast

down gods. How whatever their origins are, generally they're cast in a place where there's some sort of friction that occurs between their world and our world, where these two

worlds meet. All right, Given what we're going to be discussing here in this episode, I think it'd probably be helpful to start with a sort of predecessor, and that is the tradition of the Red Caps and the Blue Caps, both supernatural entities from the British Isles and to a certain degree elsewhere, you know, given the sort of the basic nature of these names.

of more as a halo or an aura. But we just describe it as a cap because you know, basically it's relatable. Everybody has a cap. Everybody wears a cap from time to time, you know what we're talking about if we describe something in that in those terms. And then also they're just a wealth of traditions regarding caps that provide various powers or carry with them curses. So you know, caps are to a certain degree inherently magical,

at least in you know, our magical thinking. Yeah, so let's start with the red cap, also known as bloody cap or red comb. This one is one that many of you are probably familiar with to some degree. I feel like I grew up looking through various folklore books that had pictures of or you know, the ideas of

what this creature looked like. And as Carol Rose describes it in Spirits, Farries, leprechauns, and Goblins, the red cap in its English usage is a largely evil spirit, sometimes described as a hobgoblin originating in the full traditions of the English Scottish border country.

Where do you find this entity? Well, it's said to haunt old ruins and sights of historic bloodshed, and if you venture near such places, it might just kill you, maybe all there is to it, and then use its cap to sop up your blood unless you recite scripture at it and drive and drive it away. It's also said that if the blood of this creature's cap ever dries, then it will shrivel up and die, so almost kind

of a Kappa sensibility to it. In the sense that it has to keep some part of itself damp, but this time it has to keep itself damp with human blood.

simply a helpful household spirit, not soopping up blood. And I should also point out there are a number of different variations of the English red cap tail, some of which connect the entity with the fourteenth century Scottish border noble William the Ti de sulis sometimes embellished as a villain who was tutored in the Black Arts with the imp robin redcap serving as is familiar, and in some accounts, this cruel lord is eventually boiled alive by the people

who suffered under him. And I've also read versions where the Red Cap creature is encased in lead and boiled. WHOA. In reality, I'm to understand, Desiulis died in prison after allegedly playing in a part of his part in a conspiracy against King Robert the Bruce. All right, so that's red caps. Let's switch colors and let's go to Blue Caps,

and this will get as closer to the mines. This is another spirit of English folklore, also known as the blue Bonnet, and this entity, according to Carol Rose, was said to reside deep within the earth, and you would only encounter it if you happen to venture down into the mines, you know, labored in the minds and reach some depth that humans would normally encounter. And so this entity is often invisible, but it also might manifest as a light blue flame, you know, this kind of like

a low effect, thus its name. And this one wasn't nefarious at all, like very like polar opposite. Really compared to the Red Cap, the blue Cap would mimic human miners and sometimes put in a full day's work, so moving tubs of coal or around, and then the miners would leave out carefully calculated offerings for the blue caps

in thanks for their practice. You know, So this is this one's kind of this one's This one really seems almost downright benevolent, and you would tip your blue cap and make sure that it kept occasionally doing this.

nineteenth and twentieth century beliefs of Cornish immigrants and others working in mines in the American West. This article is called Knockers, Knackers and Ghosts, Immigrant Folklore in the Western Mines, published in the journal Western Folklore in nineteen ninety two by Ronald M.

the early twentieth century. So Calhoun is in the middle of talking about an illicit practice of some miners at the time who I think this was called high grading. They would smuggle out high graded or from the mines, you know, pack it secretly somewhere on themselves, smuggle it out, bring it home, and then mill the ore in their cellars at night. And of course, the milling of ore is an important stage in the processing of raw minerals.

Usually it involves crushing, smashing, or grinding down large pieces of rock into a relatively fine powder. And this increases the surface area of the desirable minerals, making them easier to separate and extract from the parts of the rock that you don't care about. And you might do this several different ways. You know, it might involve just hammer or you know, mortar and pestle of some kind, or hammer smashing on a surface, or some kind of stamp mill.

But as you can imagine, this secret milling operation would be noisy. It involved the pounding or stamping of hammers or stamps, and this could lead children in the house to wonder what their parents were up to. Why did they hear repetitive hammer blows coming from the basement when they were trying to sleep, And according to Calhoun, these parents would often blame the commotion on the tommy knockers. So to quote from Calhoun here, supposedly the little miners

gathered under the house where children were especially good. If they listened and were real quiet. After they had gone to bed and were supposed to be going to sleep, they just might hear their little friends hammering away with their tiny single jacks. It is surprising how many residents of the mining town still tell of being lulled to

sleep by the rhythmical pounding from deep below. If the rock was especially hard and the pounding unusually loud, the children were told that the tommy knockers must have been using double jacks the evening before.

century California. So by this point, according to Calhoun's telling, the Tommy Knocker had come to be used, among other roles, as what James calls a FicT, citing as FicT citing the terminology of the folklorist Carl Wilhelm von Sidao actually father of the actor Max von.

the teller. And this is distinguished from legends, which would be third person stories that are sincerely believed by the teller and expected to be believed by the audience, and then fairy tales or folk tales, which are third person stories that are understood by both teller and audience as fictional because of this asymmetry in the relationship here, ficts are often told by adults to children, and a great

example would be nursery bogies such as Jenny Green Teeth. Presumably, Grandpa does not actually believe that there is a hag living in the water that will pull you down by the ankle, but he knows that the standing water is actually dangerous for less mentally gripping reasons, so he tells the story of Jenny Green Teeth in the hopes that it will stick in the child's head and get them to stay away.

affected by cultural and technological changes across time. How for example, changes in mining techniques and technology lead to changes in what sort of entities haunt the minds. So the belief in supernatural beings that live within minds seems to be quite widespread, as we were just talking about, and we will talk about more examples from different cultures in part

two of the series. But James says that the form this creature most often takes in European traditions is some sort of diminutive old man who makes mischief and plays tricks and either provides useful information to miners, and this could be leading them to riches or warning them of imminent danger and death, or the mining spirit punishes transgressions, defilements, and evil deeds within the mind.

but it's likely. But speaking of a German creature known to him as cobalos or, I think this would be the equivalent of the cobald, Agricola wrote that the creature was jolly and loved to imitate human work, like what you were saying with the blue cap. So there's a lot of similarities in these different European mining creature legends. To read from a translation of Agricola quote, they are called little miners because of their dwarfish stature, which is

about two feet. They are venerable looking and are clothed like miners in a fillited garment, with leather apron about their loins. This kind does not often trouble the miners, but they idle about in the shafts and tunnels and really do nothing, although they pretend to be busy in all kinds of labor, sometimes digging or sometimes putting into buckets that which has been dug. Sometimes they throw pebbles at workmen, but they rarely injure them unless the workmen

first ridicule or curse them. The mining nome are especially active in the workings where metal has already been found or where there are hopes of discovering them and cause them cause them to labor more vigorously. So that's kind

of interesting. They're more concentrated in hot zones, you know, in places where there's likely to be a big discovery or where a big discovery of war has already been made, which is an interesting contrast to other stories that would you know, imagine the creature in the mine as the one that lurks in the abandoned mine. This is exactly the opposite. It's like, you know, the economic hot zone of the mine is where these things show up.

James says that the name knocker may have originally been more widespread, but it really came to be associated with Cornish legend, in particular as mining was a common occupation for Cornish men and the region of Cornwall itself had been a very important mining hub going back to ancient times.

Actually specifically, Cornwall was known for having deposits of metal such as copper and tin, and it was an especially crucial source of tin going all the way back to the Bronze Age, where ten was in high demand for the manufacture of bronze, which you make bronze by combining copper and tin. Of these two ingredients, ten was the much more difficult to source metal and relied on sophisticated

trade and distribution networks. So these big civilizations that are producing a lot of bronze artifacts during the Bronze Age, a lot of times they might be sourcing their tin from very far away, and so they were lying on a lot of trade to support that bronze industry. So, getting into the early records we have about what the

Cornition ockers were, James compares several sources. Many of these authors are what he calls nineteenth century or turn of the twentieth century antiquarians, collectors of a piece of antiques or of intangible antiques like folklore. So these include a folklore collector named William Bottrell who lived eighteen sixteen to eighteen eighty one, who wrote a column for the Cornish

Telegraph in which he documented local folk traditions. James also names a nineteenth century writer named Robert Hunt and a slightly later writer named Walter Yielding Evans WinCE, and then after that. There are also some later likely derivative sources and some literary references to Tommy Knockers in fiction, which we can mention in a bit. But to generalize from what we have, here's what we know the Cornish Tommy Knockers. The older version, they were usually described as supernatural, dwarf

like men with long, gray beards and wrinkled faces. Their name, as you might guess, comes from the knocking and tapping sounds of uncertain origin that you would often hear propagating through mind tunnels. They were widely regarded as mischievous, playing pranks, causing trouble and fouling equipment. So that's in line with some other things we've talked about. But in some cases, especially if you knew how to butter them up and get on their good side, they could be quite helpful.

Now here's a very strange twist on the legend. Basically all of the early Cornish sources agree on an origin story for the knockers, and it is this. They were said to be the ghosts or spirits of Jewish people who had been sent to work in the Cornish mines, either in the ancient past, during the Roman period, or perhaps in the Middle Ages, as some sort of punishment for having been responsible, in the minds of their Christian

persecutors for the death of Christ. Now, according to James, there is basically no evidence for this belief that Jews were sent to work in the Cornish minds during the Roman period or during the during the Middle Ages. No evidence this actually happened. Of course, Jews certainly were persecuted in various ways by Christians throughout Europe in the medieval period, but there's no evidence this ever involved work in Cornish minds. So it's not entirely clear where this latter belief about

the origins of the Knockers came from. Despite the fact that this has no basis in history, the origin story appears widespread and a very important part of the legend. So it's not just like something that one person said at one time. This seems to be a common belief about the Tommy Knockers.

the Roman emperors to work the mines. And we find their old smelting houses, which we call Jews houses, and their blocks of tin at the bottom of the great bogs, which we call Jews ten. As a point of historical fact, by the way, it was, of course the Roman authorities

under Pontius Pilot who crucified Jesus, not the Jews. However, setting aside whatever anti Jewish attitudes may be contained in this ideological myth, it's interesting to note the way that the physical artifacts of prior industry feed into beliefs about

supernatural beings that occupy the same space. What is, in fact, the remains of mundane mining from decades or centuries ago becomes either the physical imprint of work from a mythic past, you know, done by people who you imagine were there but were not actually there, or from a ghostly present. It's like, this is the stuff left behind by the

supernatural creatures. Now you know. That connection between physical artifacts left by real people in the past to supernatural beings reminds me of our series on Elfshot.

between these concepts. These fairy folk were often said in one way to actually be spirits of people from long ago, even though they were treated as basically a magical species that wasn't quite human. James explains this fuzziness by saying, quote, thus the she the above the above. Ground fairies of Ireland are often associated with the ancient tribes displaced by the Celts. The Tommy Knockers can be understood as underground elves who acted the array of legends and beliefs associated

with ancient Jewish miners. Like many other European supernatural beings, the Tommy Knockers show a muddling of the distinction between ghosts, particularly the long dead, and elves. So, yeah, it could be a kind of collision of different traditions here. Maybe you've got an underground elf like creature or fairy type creature who lives in the mines, and then you also have this folklore tradition, this story about Jewish miners in Cornwall and people long ago, and then people just kind

of combine these stories. Yeah, So what did the original Cornish Knockers do well? It seems a lot of the stories about them focused on their reactions to the behavior of human miners. Usually, if you were respectful to them and you were well behaved, you treated them with courtesy and you obeyed the general rules of good behavior, they would either leave you alone, or they would even be

very hell helpful. They might lead you to riches. But if you were nasty or neglectful to the spirits, or if you were just a bad person in one way or another, the knockers would get revenge. There are a number of stories featured here. I'm going to mention a few that James brings up. There's the story of the Cornish miner Tom Trevorro collected by William Battrell in the nineteenth century. So in this story, Tom for some reason got angry at the knockers in the mine, and he

ordered them to be quiet. In fact, he spoke harshly to them, saying that if they did not shut up, he would quote scat their brains out. Also, Tom is having some supper in the mine or around the mine, and his supper is a kind of Cornish baked good called a fuggin fugga n which appears to be some kind of heavy cake or pastry, maybe often packed with

meat inside. They wanted some, He refused to share his food with them, and this was also a no no because sharing a food offering with hobgoblins, brownies and other household spirits was a common practice in the British Isles. You might set out a dish of milk by the hearth for the hobgoblin or the household spirit. And so the knockers they sing in a rhyme to Tom. They say, Tom Trevoro, Tom Trevoro, leave some of the fuggin for bucca or bad luck to thee tomorrow. I think it's

kind of rhyming Trevoro with tomorrow. By the way, Bucca b u c c A is another type of Cornish spirit, which is occasionally associated with minds, but more often with the sea. Actually here there seems to be some overlap between the Bucka and the knockers, but they're both again mythical beings that can kind of blur together. Anyway, The knockers or the Bucka, they want some of that cake.

But Tom is like, no, this is my cake. And the knockers said again, Tommy Trevoro, Tommy Trevoro, will send thee bad luck tomorrow, old curmudgeon, eat all they fuggin' and not leave a digeon for bucca. Digon means a little piece, I think, like a crumb. But still he refused so the knockers cursed him, and after that he had no luck finding riches in the mines, and then James says, quote in desperation, he took up farming. A despised fate for a Cornish miner.

out that they're going to leave a tool. You know, I'm gonna leave my hammer on the on the chair, you know, saying where they're gonna leave a tool, And then finally the last one says, I'll put my hammer on Barker's knee, And suddenly Barker felt a great pain in the knee, and he was never able to walk on that leg again.

miners made a deal with the knockers. If the miners could be allowed to work the knocker's mind, they would give the knockers ten percent of their profits. The knockers agreed, and things went well until there died and left Trendw in charge. His son, Trenwith, is described in the story as selfish and avaricious, and he decides he's going to cheat the knockers and keep all the profit for himself. That's such a bad idea. The knockers, of course, they

know that he did that. They curse him, and he loses all his luck, and then quote he took to drink, squandered all the money his father had made, and died a beggar. Interesting thing. In several of the stories here, the Knocker's magical attack against offenders and enemies is not a direct attack but an attack on luck. You cross them and you will henceforth have bad luck in the mine,

or just bad luck in general. So now that you've crossed the Knockers, you are just rolling natural ones on all your attempts to find valuable caches and veins, and usually this ends up with you having to leave mining as a profession and end up in some other revolting fate, apparently including farming. But this brings us to the second part of the story, which is the question of how the characteristics of the Tommy Knocker legend change when it

is carried over into new locales and new cultures. So, in the nineteenth century, lots of Cornish people immigrated to the United States, where they became very important in the fledgling Western mining industry, despite their relatively small proportion to

the overall workforce. This immigration was in part driven by economic changes, apparently at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in eighteen fifteen, there was a substantial decline in the price of copper and ten, the two metals that formed the backbone of the Cornish mining industry, and also after thousands of years of mining, at this point many of the most exploitable known deposits had already been heavily extracted, so you know, you've got your depleting caches and the

price is going down. On top of that, Beginning in the eighteen twenties, there was a general economic depression in

Southwest England that affected basically everyone, whatever their trade. So metal mining in Cornwall appeared to be a declining prospect, but experienced mine workers could take their skills to new opportunities, such as digging tin and copper in Michigan in the United States, or digging for gold or other medals in California, Colorado, Utah, Montana, and so Cornish immigrant miners in the Western United States

were often called cousin Jack's. I think the origin story of this is that, you know, the boss at the mine would say we need more workers, you know, can you bring some more people like you? And they would say, yeah, I've got a cousin jack back in Cornwall we could bring over. Now, note that there were different extraction methods

used at the time for various metals. There was placer mining, which is where you're searching for ore and maybe loose gravel or soil in a stream bed, open pit mining, and then also underground hard rock mining tunneling mining, and the latter was the method with which the Cornish had the most valuable experience. Other forms of mining could better make use of inexperienced labor in say an open pit mine.

And it's interesting I think that the type of mining with which the Cornish had relevant experience, deep hard rock tunneling is the kind that is facially at least most likely to give rise to legends and supernatural beings for the obvious environmental reasons. You've got dark, creepy tunnels, echoes and bizarre sound phenomena, and also lethal dangers due to cave ins, gas and all kinds of stuff.

meat and vegetables. And this wasn't just with the Cornish, and it's became popular with miners of all ethnic backgrounds. There was a techno culture that was imported where mines in the American West used a particular kind of water pump that was common in Cornish mines. There's something called Cornish wrestling popular among Western miners. I didn't have time to look that up, so I don't know how that's different from other wrestling.

its new context. So I'm not going to mention everything that James covers in this regard, but I want to discuss some highlights that struck me. First of all, in the American West, there was some diversity of forms. Sometimes American Tommy knockers were thought to be benign, even helpful, leading miners to valuable bodies of ore, like you would follow the tapping sound and that would lead you to

claim great riches. Other times, the Tommy knockers represented a sinister threat within the mine, and the tapping sound that they made actually spelled doom, indicating that a cave in was imminent. So you've got exactly opposite things indicated by hearing the tapping.

lore even after the Tommy Knocker legend itself died. The folklorist Carolyn Bancroft recorded a saying in the Minds of Colorado that dangerous falling rocks were caused by an entity called not a Tommy Knocker, but the guy in the red shirto. I thought that was a little spooky.

grimlins in this regard. They could be represented by little clay effigies that miners may or had made for them and would leave near the entrance of a mine, and the tradition of giving little food offerings to the knockers sometimes did continue in the American context, though not everywhere. So you might leave a pastry or a bit of tallow in front of one of these clay effigies near the entrance to a mine, that's giving it to the knockers as a you know, hey, I'm doing my part.

I'm giving you a tip. Please treat me well. And what seems like a big difference between the American version and the Cornish version is the origin story. This idea about ancient Jewish miners sent in the Middle Ages or sent by the Romans, that's gone in the American context. In the American West, the knockers were usually just said

to be the ghosts of dead miners. References to Tommy Knockers appear in newspapers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and I want to read one funny example from eighteen eighty four in the Evening Chronicle of Virginia City, Nevada, that James includes. So here's the article.

one had been there in years. Following up the sound, they were astonished to see two striking hammers work on the head of a rusty drill, which was deftly turned by unseen hands. And though not a soul was in sight except themselves, they heard a lively conversation but could make out no words. They looked and listened for some minutes, when fear took hold of them and they ran out

of the mine quickly. At the toolhouse, they related their experience and were laughed at, But to prove that their heads were clear, they conducted a couple of skeptics to the spot and found the hammer still at work. The men insisted that they did not deceive themselves, and those who went with them say that the above statements are facts.

I love how no names are given. There is also a newspaper story from Virginia City, Nevada of miners who see a floating lantern going up and down a mine shaft and they think, oh, it's being carried by an invisible spirit. That must be a Tommy knocker. But they later discover there's a practical explanation here. The superintendent of the mine was plumbing the shaft with a lantern dangling from a wire, and the slow is going up and

down and they're like, that's a ghost. James also talks about fiction of the time, which you can find a bunch of examples of fiction incorporating these types of folk beliefs. So they're nineteenth century stories and novels that mention the Tommy knockers and the mines. But a main change to Hammer Home, apart from the origin story change is also the distinction of the subtle shift, and it is somewhat

subtle from elf like beings to ghosts. This again is confusing because in the Cornish context, these elf like beings are said to be the spirits of humans from long ago, but are treated less like human souls and more like an elf for kind of otherworldly being a different species.

I think again, there's just some fuzziness here that goes back a long long time in what exactly elves are, and some elf like qualities remained in these later American tellings, for example the clay effigies that seems to be more like the elves or the gnomes than human ghosts, and of course the tradition of food offerings is more like the Cornish form. Another major change in the tradition is what the spirits did for the miners. The Cornish knocker

legends are much more moralistic. The Tommy Knockers reward good moral qualities in miners and they punish wickedness. Meanwhile, in the American context, there is essentially no moralism. There's no rewarding good and punishing evil. There's a little bit of you know, appeasement, rewarding if you give them the food offerings with the effigies, but there's no real moral quality consideration in how they behave towards you instead, the relationship

is just transactional and practical. What the Tommy Knocker primarily does in America is in either a helpful or sinister way, it warns miners of imminent danger. And James explains this in part by appealing to the idea of different moral cultural environments where these legends propagate. He says, in traditional Cornish culture, excessive greed, ambition, and curiosity are policed and punished.

The moral of these stories is do not be too greedy, take your fair share, don't be too curious or inquisitive,

mind your own business. And in talking about this, James draws on a framework I'm an author named George Foster to describe this as a morality based on the concept of limited good and this is a common way of thinking in many cultures, where it essentially views the world as a kind of closed, zero sum system, where being a good person is equated with a kind of egalitarian humility, where you know, one of the main things that's discouraged is when people attempt to quote major change in their

economic or other statuses, and the underlying assumption behind that discouragement is my gain would be everyone else's loss. So you know, there's a limited good. American culture was very different, almost the opposite. There was a culture of admiring acquisitiveness and ambition and curiosity, a worldview that is not zero sum, limited good, but a positive sum world where it's good for people to achieve, to go out and achieve all the success they can and it it doesn't necessarily hurt

anyone else for them to do. So, you know, I was thinking about this. I think obviously there can in reality be some insight in both world views. Of course, it is true that there can be positive some interactions, and one person's success doesn't have to come at somebody else's suffering. You can like create wealth, you can add new value to the world. Then again, sometimes success does

come at somebody else's suffering. And when we are racing towards success, mad with ambition, it's easy to be blind to the ways that our gain actually is somebody else's loss. And so like having stories in place to make you think about that is actually valuable.

deadly accidents. To quote James here quote, the Tommy Knockers were omens of danger, giving the miners something on which to focus their interpretations of subtle signs of cave ins. The miners could not necessarily distinguish between the diverse subtle sounds in the mind, and failed to realize consciously that when the timbers of the mine moaned one way, it was safe but when the mines echoed with another sound, it meant danger. Much of nineteenth century mining expertise was

based on experience, not science. As late as the nineteen thirties, George Orwell was able to observe English miners relying on the quote feel of the mine. And then here it quotes Orwell. I love this passage. An experienced miner claims to know by a sort of instinct when the roof is unsafe. The way he puts it is that he can feel the weight upon him. He can, for instance,

hear the faint creaking of the props. The reason why wooden props are still generally preferred to iron girders is that a wooden prop which is about to collapse gives a warning by creaking, whereas a girder flies out unexpectedly. The devastating noise of the machines makes it impossible to hear anything else. Thus the danger is increasing. So I love this. This is something we've talked about before. Supernatural beings in imagined as the physical embodiment of sensory intuitions.

So I have some experience in an environment, and thus I can associate subtle sensory cues with coming effects. But this association is a little bit below my ability to consciously put it into words. So instead, there's some kind of being that is here giving me a warning.

practical signals are actually coming from. I mean, other times it might just be your imagine, but in some cases it could seem to be actually quite prescient because you're relying on like little sounds you're hearing, feeling the weight upon you. Also interesting how technological changes over the history of mining could have contributed to changes in the Tommy Knocker lore or the decline of lore altogether. There are

a number of things to mention here. I'm thinking about how Orwell calls out the sound of the heavy machinery making you no longer sensitive to those little creeks that give you the four warnings. So the sound of the machines may have changed the environment of the minds in other ways to become less conducive. To Tommy knocker lore, I bet a quieter mine is eerier if you don't have stuff like, you know, loudly thrumbing in your ear.

If you've got a somewhat quieter mind, where small sounds can echo and propagate more easily and don't get drowned out, I would just suspect that makes you think that there are creatures about.

how the traditions tend to change. Quote from longer to shorter, from complex to simple, from sacred to secular, from supernatural to realistic, from communal to individualistic. I think you can see a lot of those, maybe not all of them, but a lot of those elements and the changes that occur with the Tommy Knocker legend.

Tommy Knocker legend. But I think we will have a lot more to talk about with mining spirits and entities in the tunnels for the next episode.