O Death, Part 4: Santa Muerte and...

as Santemirte, which means Saint Death or Holy death in Spanish. Rob, I've got some imagery for you to look at in the outline. Here, would you say, in common appearance, a fairly typical in some ways grim repress, a female grim reaper, kind of a skeletal figure, clothed and enrobed in a way, with a garment covering the head, kind of a veil or a hood. In one representation we have here, she's drawn with a halo around her head or at least kind of an aura around the crown coming down.

And you know, I don't know if we really mentioned this or not, but the human skull in and of itself, you know, is a very evocative image for a number of reasons. You know, it's what's inside our head, that's what we look like with no skin on our head. But also it always appears to be grinning, you know, it is. There is a it's easy to read the skull as smiling, as if again there's a secret joke. And we've already described what it means when death jokes.

Kate Kingsbury and Our Andrew Chestnut. Kate Kingsbury is an anthropologist affiliated with the University of British Columbia, and Our Andrew Chestnut is a professor of Latin American history at Virginia Commonwealth University, and at the time this paper was published, the authors together explained they had fifteen years of cumulative experience studying Santa Marte across different parts of the Americas. So these are authors who have written a lot on

the Santa Marte figure and phenomenon. So, first of all, who is Santa Marte. She is a Latin American folk saint with devotees concentrated especially in Mexico, but in other countries of North, Central and South America as well. So a folk saint is a person or figure who many people, especially within a Catholic influenced culture, consider holy, but who has not been officially canonized.

to provide blessings. And so despite not being formally recognized by the Church and often being explicitly condemned by the Church, the authors say that these folk saints are usually seen as more relatable and with a greater ability to provide healing and aid and comfort, especially to the people of Latin American cultures, which the authors argue is in part because the origins of these folk saints are typically closer to the people in terms of time and space and

life experience than the origins of the canonized saints. Many people in Latin American cultures, also, the authors say, prefer folk saints to canonized saints, specifically because they exist outside the sanction of the official church, and therefore their relationship, you know, the people's relationship to the saint is kind of freer. It is not mediated by the costs of associating or going through the church, and it's not mediated

by the authority of a priest. So, for example, there's no priest that can tell you what is and is not an appropriate way to talk to or relate to a folk saint like there would be in you know, for official Catholic saints within the church.

Like what if I need a blessing, if I need supernatural help with something, but from the church active what if I am not asking for an appropriate goal, or what if the church judges me to be in a state of sin and you know, I show up saying I need help with a problem, but from the church's point of view, my problem is that I need to repent and confess my sins before I come asking for help.

And so you know, there's just kind of you're at an impasse there about like goals and priorities with the church, but with a folk saint, you're not going to be dealing with a hierarchy like that.

oppression of authorities, or maybe in extreme poverty. They cite the work of an anthropologist named Flores Matos, who calls these figures the miraculous dead, and so they give one example of another type of folk saint or miraculous dead figure known of in Mexico, who is named Juan Saltados and Wan Soldados is based on a soldier in Tijuana who was said to have been framed for a horrible crime and executed by firing squad in the nineteen thirties.

And then the story goes that after his death, his ghost began to cry out from his grave to proclaim his innocence, and the spirit of Juan Soldados started granting people miracles, giving people miracles if they came to his gravestone to ask for help, and a bunch of figures like this exist with the understanding that it is so thing about their tragic death and thus their relationship to

death that helps give them power to perform miracles. The followers of Santa Morte often believe her to be the most effective of these folk saints or miraculous dead, perhaps because she's not just one of the miraculous dead, but is the embodiment of death itself.

her hands in her left hand, usually a scythe. And there's one note in the later in the paper where the authors mention a common saying that wives whose husbands had gone out roaming would would come back, would come and ask Santa Marte to use her size to bring errant husbands back. Home, so you can think of it in that sense. It sounds almost not like a like a blade or weapon, but like a shepherd's crook, you know,

pull them back. But I think it also has the more common, you know, reaping imagery that we that we just get from your classic Grim Reaper. And then so that's her left hand. In her right hand she sometimes has a globe like a representation of the planet Earth or the scales of justice. She also has an animal companion, which is an owl, and this could be for a number of reasons. There are traditional associations between owls and

death in and some meso American religions. And then also there is the association of the owl with wisdom in a lot of traditions. And then to read here, I'm going to read directly from Chestnut and Kingsbury about how her name is put together. So they write quote in English, she is called Saint Death or Holy Death. The name Santa Muerte explicates her identity. In Spanish, Muerte means death.

Santa translates both as holy and as saint. But Santa, it should be noted, is the female word for saint in Spanish, and the saint is perceived by her followers as of the female gender. She is a quote liminal, fierce, feminine persona and is seen as an quote all powerful and protecting mother who can solve all problems, who has the power to.

mean anything. But in this case, it seems like the gendered embodiment is meaningful, Like she something about her being death being a woman brings meaning to the relationship with her.

of these other folk. Saints are miraculous dead, and often they believe she has the power to bring good health, to bring success in love, to bring deliverance from money troubles, and all other kinds of blessings. So it's not just stuff that we think of as inherently connected to death. She can bring boons of all sorts.

Another thing that's important is that the authors note that Santamerte has been grossly misrepresented by some sensationalist media reporting that has treated her as some kind of Narco saint. That's a term used to refer to her narco saint, a sort of cult figure worshiped exclusively by criminals and drug traffickers. The authors say this is not correct at all.

She's venerated by all kinds of people, especially by the poor and by people without much individual access to power, So it's not that she is never invoked by anybody related to the drug trade or drug war. The authors say that actually she is regularly supplicated by people on both sides of the law within the drug war in Mexico.

But she also says that lots of people were turning to Santa Marte for protection during the first year of the COVID pandemic, and that she is widely seen as a protector of women in places where there is a special thread of gender based violence. The author is also mentioned that there is you know, of course, no formal authority or structure within the faith, so there's nothing like the Catholic hierarchy. So you can have people kind of striking out to honor her or relate to her in

whatever way they see best. So you get these chapels and shrines that are sometimes opened and operated by independent religious entrepreneurs, but a lot of the faith is actually conducted in private, like in private homes and at family alters. And because there are no formal rules, there are no structures, there are no authorities. There's just great freedom in how the faith of Santa Marte is practiced. And the authors again I mentioned this a minute ago, but they identify

that freedom as a key part of the appeal. However, so you know, that's sort of the heteropraxy aspect. There's just a lot of diversity in how people honor and relate to Santa Marte. But they also say there are some common trends that they've identified in their study of this phenomenon.

The offerings might be flowers. They could be alcoholic beverages like beer or tequila. Sometimes it's cigarettes or other smokables. There are bottles of water. Actually, the authors say quote as the skeleton saint is said to be perpetually parched.

to be especially within her domain. The author's cite previous work by a scholar named Olaskyevitch Peralba, who argues that she is appealing quote among liminal sectors of population that deal with transitions and transgressions, such as people working on the streets e g. Street vendors, criminals and prostitutes, migrants, inmates, policemen, troops, prison guards, social workers, and lawyers. So it's interesting that it's not just like a cohort of natural allies there.

You know, you have people in all different types of professions, maybe on both sides of the law and so forth.

less connection to the priesthood of the institutional church. And the authors argue that her appeal in modern times extends to so many people in part because of a pervasive feeling of unsafety and a resulting metaphysics of disorder related to the ongoing drug war. Of course, this effects not just people involved in the drug trade or in fighting it, but it involves a lot of innocent people caught in

the crossfire. And the authors argue that in this context, for many people sort of within her domain, especially poor people in certain parts of Mexico, for these people, living entails a feeling of constantly standing up in the face of death.

bad thing to be protected from. There are elements of that in the understanding, but it's also a power you can appeal too to spare you and the people you love, or to be redirected into a kind of general power of blessing to bring you protection and boons in your life. And so in this the authors invoke an idea of a kind of interdependence between death and power. Just power to act within reality.

to something. If we personify some of what's going on, then we have something at least in our own minds that we can deal with, that we can reach out to, we can seek to appease, that we can seek the guidance of, and so forth.

argument about the origins and development of the Santamorte belief. Specifically, the authors are making the claim that, in contrast to some previous writing which they think over emphasized or exclusively acknowledged the Catholic or European cultural roots of the deaths ain't they say, In reality, Santa Morte is a syncretic figure. A syncretic meaning a figure that emerges from the combination or synthesis of elements from different cultures. In this case,

they're going to identify two main cultural inputs. One of them is European Catholicism. It's the Catholic or Iberian grim Repress. So this is a European and specifically Spanish Catholic moment of death figure in female form, which was not a god really as understood by the Christians, but it was more of an image that served as a memento mori or was a kind of teaching tool. So the image reminds you that death is coming, and thus you need to get right with Christ and confess right right.

religions and cultures of pre Hispanic meso American peoples. And then finally after this they also talk about this you might have heard in the title there's the bricolage aspect. They say that after this, the Senta morte belief continued to, especially in recent years, accumulate elements from other sources, including Afro Cuban, Santa Ria, Palomayumbe, and even.

rest of life. I think a naive misinterpretation of this reframing would be just that, oh, these meso American religions, they didn't think death was bad, they thought death was good. It's not exactly like that. I mean, in all cultures you find religious expressions of aversion to death and people wanting to find ways to put death off and other things.

But I think it is fair to say that as opposed to the Catholic vision of life and death as kind of binary opposite states of being, and the Catholic vision of death is like a kid of a kind of destruction that must be.

what the indigenous religious inputs on santamorte might be. So first of all, again you've got this distinction between the European Catholic understanding of death, which tends to be more often about destruction, death as destruction and death as finality in a sense of finality as a kind of finality that can be averted through you know, faith in Christ. But otherwise it's the hammer comes down and its finality.

a transition from one thing to another. They say, actually death is the ultimate and the most mysterious transition in life. It's the one where we genuinely can't see what's on the other side, at least for us, is there nothing? Is there something? If there is something, what is it? And so because liminal stages are so powerful, they're very

powerful and emotionally charged in our lives. Like if you think about a lot of the most emotionally important and you know, causally crucial things in our lives, they're these things we think of as liminal stages or turning points. Birth, death,

rights of passage, and initiation, marriage, stuff like that. These are the points where we transition into a new phase of life, and because of that, they tend to be the subject of a lot of prayer and ritual because we correctly identify them as literal, causal turning points, like they're the most important moments in our lives and they determine the course of the future. And thus, in many cultures, including these pre Hispanic meso American cultures, death was often

associated with the power to renew and restore life. Life is guided by these very powerful liminal points, these transition points, and death is the most powerful of them all. So that's how I understand the argument they're making that it has this association with liminality, the changes or the turning points in life, and this association with liminality gives death its perceived power over all important things in life, or at least most important things in life. And then there's

another point they make that I think is interesting. They say that death this is just a way that these religious beliefs tend to manifest within culture. Death seems to have more power over every aspect of life. If you feel that you live your life in close proximity to death. So if real danger is a big part of your everyday experience, then a deity of death comes to feel

more like it has power over everything you do. Another interesting note on the power of death, the authors cite an interview with a devote of Santa Marte named Zenia, who is asked why she worshiped Santamorte and she said, and this is a translation from the Spanish. In translation,

she says, because the only thing that is certain is death. Interesting. So, I don't know if I'm interpreting this right, but the way I took that meaning, it's kind of that death has undeniable power because unlike other spiritual entities, which you know, you name another god or saint, you're kind of having to put some faith in the idea that they have power. With death, There's no question about it. You absolutely know that it's real and it will be a factor in

your life. And that kind of certainty of real power in the world can get mapped onto this embodiment of the thing.

we will feel it. It has an absolute reality, and yeah, as we experience the reality of death, it does kind of take shape like we have Again, we have all

these personifications in our culture. And if you have a dominant personification like this that is just sort of like floating there, then yeah, the experience, the real experience of death, I can imagine, might bring you closer to it and realize like this, you know, if this entity has dominion over this thing that I feel like it's power, then is something I can feel as well.

opposite of life. It was widely associated with, as we've said, regeneration. The symbols of death in pre Hispanic indigenous cultures include often themes of fecundity, sexuality, and rebirth, so you have healing,

life giving, procreative properties. And they also say that Mesoamerican death deities were often not exactly gods and goddesses, but in the author's words quote conceptualized as representing or embodying the vital force of death, which vital force of death that almost sounds like a oxymoron, right, is the life force of death. But that is sort of what they

really were. It's hard, you know, to maybe identify with that from the outside, but there is a life force of death, and that is what they embody within their person. So they sometimes symbolized the places where the dead dwell, and they sometimes acted as psychopomps, which we've talked about in other episodes of this, so they might guide the souls or the dead in some form to their place

of dwelling after death. But they also had powers especially related to death, not just to cause death, but to do the opposite, so you could persuade them to delay death or to heal you in sick or wounded. And the authors bring up a pair of Aztec death deities. I apologize if I get the pronunciation wrong here, but they are mik Lantakoutli and mikta Kasiwatum. These are the male and female male deities associated with death and the underworld.

And the authors say that in pre Hispanic times their domain was not exclusively death, so you would possibly approach them for blessings having to do with the with preservation and enrichment of life. And in Aztec art they are associated with the imagery of regeneration, birth, sex, and fecundity. I believe the female deity here, miktakasi Wato, is often represented as as pregnant. Actually, so these these images include everything from sexual penetration to pregnancy and lactation.

and you would remember family members you had lost. And then after the Spanish conquest, as part of the imposition of Christianity by force, the authors say, quote, the Catholic Church exercised Miktakasiwat and moved the date to coincide with All Saints Day, the first of November, which is also known in Mexico as Day of the Innocence for its association with masses focusing on deceased infants and children, and All Souls Day the second of November, where the focus

is on departed adults. So there's this attempt by the Catholic Church to kind of hammer the original festival into shape and make it a part of a Catholic celebration instead of the traditional celebration. However, interestingly, for many followers of Santa Morte, the Second Day of the Dead has become the Skeleton Saints feast day, and the Church, they say, has tried to suppress this because the Catholic Church says, this is not an approved saint.

reaper type face. But also so she's not dressed in a dark hood with a scythe she is in a blouse like garment that you'd normally see worn by the vibrant, life giving female deities in post classic Mexican art. So you've got skull like imagery and life giving or life affirming imagery in the same figure. And so this seems again to be in line with beliefs about death as a transition to cyclical rebirth or a figure containing powers

of states of change. And finally, I just want to mention they talk a bit about the contestation over the origins of Santa Marte. So versions of Santa Marte go back to the colonial period, but there's no consensus about exactly where Santa Marte comes from. That's why you get these different theories abounding. So some argue that she is just a version of the grim reapress La Parca brought

from the Iberian traditions and made into a deity. But the authors here again argue that this theory doesn't really make sense because, for one thing, the grim Reaper was not venerated and did not provide blessings in a Catholic context. It was just an image to teach about death and to remind you, momento moray, remind you that death is coming. Christ is the only salvation.

And then, finally, to quote from the authors quote, since many turned to death deities for their earthly needs, some indigenous groups, as archives prove, took the Grim Reaper for a saint. Since the Grim Reaper was often referred to in connection to Una Santa Marte, a holy Death, the figure of Death was understood to be miraculous, much like the other saints that the Catholic Church had brought over

to New Spain, such as Santa Marta. Believing Death was a saint in its own right, some began worshiping it. This is the case for the Highland Maya in the state of Chiapas and Guatemala, and the Guarini in Argentina and Paraguay. So yeah, so there's this idea that that's

their argument about the origins. I guess we don't know for sure exactly what the origins are, and they highlight that that it's somewhat obscure, you know, this versions of this figure popping up hundreds of years ago, and then it kind of comes in and out of fashion for a long time. It seems to be it is only in secret or in hiding that Santa Marte is honored, and in recent decades it has become much more open,

you know, an there's open honoring of Santa Marte. However much the church tries to say like no don't do that. That's not part of Catholicism.

In both of these cases, I'm not introducing entirely new concepts to our discussion, but kind of building on things we've been discussing already. And first of all, I want to just take a few moments to talk about this idea of death entities is not merely an idea, you know, but also an experience one might have. Because to be clear, they don't have to be a death entity, a grim reaper or an angel of death or any of these things.

They don't have to be perceived as anything approach approaching literal incarnations or functional supernatural entities to have enormous cultural value obviously, but we do have to acknowledge that they certainly can be perceived and experienced as entities due to

a number of factors. And some of these are things we've touched on over the years on the show, because we often talk about things that may be described as paranormal experiences and when you dig underneath them, like for us anyway, the really fascinating part is figuring out like how this actually emerges within the natural world, within the inner workings of our mind and so forth. So I'm going to just run through a few of these as I related via my own experience in the last episode.

Dream states are a huge factor, sometimes enhanced by environment, anxiety, and the effects of certain medications, including anesthesia meds, and there have been many reports of people experiencing impactful visions of departed loved ones under anesthesia. Others report angels, demons,

and death entities are certainly on the menu as well. Also, we can have various entities come into play via tempo varietal junction disruptions TPJ disruptions, So due to trauma, illness, or even electrical stimulation, this can result in the brain interpreting its own signals is that of some sort of an other. As we've mentioned as well on the show, we're hardwired not to contemplate the enormity of death, but

rather for more localized social interactions as social animals. So we've also evolved something known as agent detection as a survival strategy, and this is tied in with something we've talked about in the show a lot before as well, idea of false positives. You know, we presume tigers to be where there are no tigers because if you think of tigers everywhere, then you have a survival advantage over people who don't think they are tigers anywhere. That sort of thing, Right.

creature we've ever dreamed up. I feel like, for me, like the simple version of this is and this is in a way, this is like childishness on my part, but I imagine many of you have done the same. You stub your toe, You might very on the say the coffee table. You might very well blame the coffee table, curse the coffee table as an entity that has hurt you.

where religious beliefs come from. We don't really know one way or another, whether you know, it's hard to prove that, but either way, I do think it's an interesting idea, and I think it's hard to deny that there is something like this at work, whether or not it's actually the correct cognitive explanation for the origin of religion and

human history. It's clear something like this is at work within us, Like we we believe that there are animals or people or things that act with intentions like animals or people in situations where there are not all the time.

death experiences. This is a topic undo itself, but basically, the neurochemical state of the dying brain makes us more susceptible to these sorts of images, and there is nothing paranormal about near death experiences twenty eleven by Dean Mobs and Carolyn Watt. This is and Trends and Cognitive science that they argue that the neurochemical state of the dying brain mirror that of individuals on disassociative anesthetics, which frequently

produce anthropomorphic hallucinations and out of body experiences. And finally, in a way that I think is equally profound as any of these, if not more so, is another concept we've touched on before, and that is that the brain does not just produce random static during a crisis. It uses top down processing to make sense of internal chaos. So there will be all these gaps in our understanding of what's happening, and our mind draws on relevant cultural

symbols and scripts to piece it all together. And that script might be alien abduction, that script might be angel visitation, it might be the fair folk who live unseen in the woods. And the death entity is also a highly accessible symbol that is never that far away from us.

where does that come from? That seems to maybe arise by somewhat different pathways, maybe have somewhat different triggers than say a deliberate imaginative exercise where you're trying to come up with imagery for a painting, or a psychologist is sitting you down and asking you to think.

of death, and that is the Valkyries. We want to come back to the Valkyries here, so on discord email us if you want to link to join the stuff to blow your mind. Discord Server. A listener by the name of Gorpi wrote in and highly recommended that we come back to the Valkyries and include mention of a particular Skaldic poem. It's included in chapter one fifty seven

of the Nile Saga. I'm going to probably butcher this pronunciation, but is It is titled dar Ratha the Song of the Spear, and Gorpi says that it contains quote the most metal description of fate being woven, and I agree, boy does it. Ever let's hear it all right. So I have to do some setup first, because it's not going to necessarily make sense to anyone out there who doesn't isn't already boned up on the loom or know

about weaving via allum. It's going to entail a number of technology references to the loomb, specifically to the warp weighted loom. This is an upright loom that was standard for the day, you know, back back in the days of the Viking sagas. So in order to get just how metal this is, you're gonna have to learn a little bit about textile crafting terminology. Okay, all right, so I'm gonna bust out some terminology here. So first of all,

what is the warp? I know it sounds magical and and already a little metal.

strings with a hole or eye in the middle. Each individual warp thread is threaded through one heddle, and when the headles are lifted or lower, they pull the warp threads with them to create a gap called a shed. All right, we also have heddle weights. These are small, heavy It's like a small heavy metal rod or weights attached to the bottom of an individual heddle. We have a headle rod. This is used to lift specific warp threads to create an opening. And then we have shuttles.

These are the tools used to pass the weft or the wolf through the warp. Okay, so I actually know several loom enthusiasts in real life, but I've never discussed the use of the loom with them, so I almost pretty much all this terminology was new to me. I know we have some loom users out there, just it has to be the case. So maybe y'all can throw in on this later on in a listener Mail episode.

But again, the idea here is that while many of us have no clue how this technology works or or what everything is called, this was an essential piece of technology of the day, and as clearly illustrated when I'm about to read it details, you know, its details were culturally relevant, kind of like how so much computer and internet terminology is found in our daily speech today, and I included an image of this for you, Joe, to look at. I think maybe this might clarify some of the ideas here.

The hatel rods are blood wet spears, the shafts are iron bound, and arrows are the shuttles. With swords, we will weave this web of battle. The Valkyries go weaving with drawn, swords killed and hothriml sangrid and svapal spears will shatter, shields will splinter swords will gnaw like wolves through armor. Let us now wind the web of war which the young King once waged. Let us advance and weigh through the ranks where friends of ours are exchanging blows.

And I'm going to skip a bit at this point, but we do indeed continue to wind the web of war. Here, as our Scott Baker would put it, death comes spiraling down. But then I'm going to pick back up at the end. Here it is horrible now to look around as a blood red cloud darkens the sky. The heavens are stained with the blood of men. As the Valkyries sing their song, we sang well victory songs for the young King. Hail to our singing. Let him who listens to our valkyrie

song learn it well and tell it to others. Let us ride our horses hard on bare backs with swords unsheathed, away from here. So I think you'd agree, Joe, pretty metal.

So once more, it's a textile product of destiny like we've discussed before, while also standing as a powerful metaphor for the battlefield itself, a place of chaos, of death, of strategy and will as well as fate and destiny. And when everything settles, the blood, the dust, the entrails, like some sort of destiny will be achieved, like a

king will rise or a king will fall. Something will have changed now in thinking about this, thinking about this idea though, of the valkyries, the choosers of the slain, wheeling over the battlefield like carrion birds, I'm reminded once more of the idea of reference in Herzog's Psyche and Death that the more archaic death demons in human traditions are or more pure animal forms, such as wolves, snakes, horses,

and of course birds. And of these wolves and vultures are exactly the sorts of creatures that would help themselves to the dead and dying on a battlefield, that could conceivably like physically visit you as you are on the threshold of death, not to do anything supernatural, but to you know, wait for you to expire, or maybe get in a little early on the.

birds swarming over a headless human corpse. And these are depicted on the seventh century BCE paintings at Chatilhuyuk in Anatolia, and it's been proposed that headless remains discovered at this location actual headless remains point to some sort of ritual defleshing of the dead prior to their burial, which might be another angle on the significance of birds in practices like this, lining up with practices like exposure or sky burial, which we see practice into the modern era, where generally

in places where bodies cannot be buried all that easily, or maybe cannot be burd learned all that easily. One way of returning them to the natural cycle of things is to allow birds to feast on the soft tissues and then you can do what you need to do with the bones. So there's obviously plenty of symbolic weight to throw around with all this. But you know, birds sailing from above coming down to visit the dead and

the dying, You know what are they doing? Yes, they're probably coming down to eat some eyeballs and so forth, But more on the mystical realm of things? Are they death dealers? Are they psychopomps? And so forth? And so these various aspects are combined with the feminine form to varying degrees to bring us the likes of the valkyries, which again are sometimes said to be clothed in feathers, as well as the cares or the cares of Greek tradition.

And you know, we might be tempted to describe them as harpy like, and we've discussed harpies on the show before, but I just want to throw in that harpies are more closely associated as personification, are more closely understood as personifications wind so a different personification going on there in its origin. But the keras Uh were the daughters of Nicks where to understand the goddess of night, and they were.

They're often described as death fates and that hover over the battlefield, deciding who will fall and or looking to exact a fate already decided by some higher deity, and then swooping down upon the dying to await their death so they can drag their soul into the afterlife. So they are scavenger like fearsome creatures of doom.

translation of this poem actually keeps the word keras. Some use other words to describe them, and sometimes it's been argue that, well, there's not really an appropriate English language word for this sort of thing. But I'm going to read from the nineteen fifty nine Richard Lattimore translation, and it puts it like this. And men, the seniors on whom old age had seized already, were sitting assembled outside the gates and holding up their hands to the immortal gods,

being in fear for the sake of their children. And these, for their part, were fighting their battle. And where they were the spirits of death, dark colored and clattering, their

white teeth, deadly faced, grim glaring, bloody and unapproachable. We're fighting over the fallen men, all of them rushing forward to drink of the black blood, and each as soon as she had snatched a man down already or just dropping from a wound, would hook her great claws about his body while his soul went down to the realm

of hades and cold tartarus. And then the spirits had sated their senses on the blood of men's slaughter, they would throw what was left behind them and go storming back into the battle clamor and the struggle.

But it's interesting how many things they have in common otherwise, and you know, we might wonder, you know, to what, to what extent they are partially based on observations of raptors feasting on the dead following battles throughout human history, I would say that they do not. They certainly don't feel like you should worship them. I don't and I haven't seen any any suggestions that one should.

open ended. We may come back next episode, We come back years from now, so we should be permitted to flourish in case that is the option we choose to pursue.