The Hearth, Part 1

has come into my life. So so apologies for the sinus noises today, but I'm doing what I can.

exaggerated in simulation. And this got me thinking about the Netflix mega hit Fireplace for Your Home, which, for those of you somehow not familiar, is an hour long, unbroken shot of logs burning in a fireplace, and it is the hottest movie of the year for I don't know, seven or eight years running whenever this thing started playing on Netflix. I just checked on Netflix and there are three episodes. This is not a sponsored episode, by the way.

Netflix had nothing to do with this. I just think this is an interesting subject on its own, and we'll explain more as we go on. But I checked on Netflix and there were three episodes of season one of fireplace for your home. There's crackling yule log fireplace. That one's the one that plays music like Joy to the World and we wish you a Merry Christmas kind of Muzaki versions of them. Yeah, And then there's the second

one that's just crackling fireplace, so no music. You just get the pop, the hiss and all that good stuff.

now is on Netflix. So again, credit, where's credit? Where credits do? They'll cancel your favorite shows after two seasons, but they will give you an amazing virtual fireplace, and our favorite is Netflix The Witcher Fireplace. It is a Witcher tie in and it's not much to it. It's simple, it's awesome. It's just kind of a medieval fantasy world fire pit, like you know, wrought iron or something. It's blazing, it's crackling. There's no Henry cavill or Unifer back there

and a hot tub or anything like that. It's just the fire pit and it's great. My only criticism is that it's only an hour long, and I either can't or I don't know how to put it on repeat, because I would just prefer to have it on all the time during the holidays.

But in an interview with The Independent in twenty eighteen, the director of Fireplace for Your Home, George Ford, I'll come back to this in a minute, estimated that it had been it had been watched more than seventy million times in twenty eighteen. No idea if he's right about that,

But how am I going to argue with him? But at the same time, I think it's funny that people are putting this on to be cozy and feel good at Christmas time, and yet this movie is also a source of ironic amusement, Like when you bring it up, people kind of there's something funny, Like they find something kind of goofy about the idea of a cozy fire happening inside their television. And if you look at reviews,

most of the reviews for this thing are jokes. They're things like, you know, zero stars, nearly burned down my house. It's like the joke is with the incongruity of the fact that this is not a real fire.

the Empire State Building. I think it was actually filmed over the course of roughly like six hours, and then it's supposed to be played back at slow motion, so the film takes like eight hours to watch. It was filmed over the course of one night in July nineteen sixty four, and you're just watching the buildings, like the sun sets and the floodlights come on, and you just watch the building through the night, and occasionally there'll be you know, a plane going by or flashes of light

or something like that, but otherwise it's just a static shot. Obviously, the movie Empire is more likely to be regarded as either an important work of art with something interesting to illustrate about passage of time or the aesthetics of film, or, on the other hand, to be seen as a pretentious, self infatuated, artistic boondoggle. Fireplace for your home does not really invite either of these types of appraisal. It's just

you know, cozy holiday kitsch. However, I would say that an hour long shot of a burning fireplace and an eight hour shot of the floodlights on top of a skyscraper have a lot of similarities. Both are what you might call slow or atmospheric films without plot, characters, or dialogue, primarily interested in just a purely aesthetic experience, maybe causing maybe something about causing the viewer to have time to relax and reflect without something directly taking up their attention

to too aggressively. And both of them, in terms of visual display, are based on the interplay of light and shadow. I read somebody described the glowing crown of the building featured in Empire as a chandelier in the sky, and based on an interview I was looking at it's clear that fireplace for your home. It took a lot of care to try to get the right interplay of lights and colors in the fire and how they would be picked up by the camera and the contrast of that

with the shadows in the room around. And so I was thinking about if I had to single out a major difference, like what would make the difference between the kinds of feelings people have about them? Apart from the length difference, I think a big thing is that there is an understanding of a different expectation put on the viewer, Like if you were asked to watch Andy Warhol's Empire.

People probably think that they're supposed to like sit silently in an art house theater and look at the screen the whole run time and think deep thoughts, whereas fireplace for your home makes no such demands. You probably just put it on in the background while you're having coffee or while you're wrapping presents or something.

was thinking about this recently. I went to a performance that was maybe a little dry for my taste, and in the same way, you know, you sometimes say, well, this meeting could have been an email, I kind of felt like this performance could have been an art installation, you know, something where I walk through it, I spend as much time with it as I want and sort of like gain what I want from looking at it

walking through it and so forth. You know, I think we've all been to This also sometimes breaks down into actual video pieces, right where you'll see like short short films or even longer pieces, and yeah, you could watch them all in their entirety, or you could sort of pass through and get a general sense of it, and then on the other end, of the spectrum. Like you look at the way people often treat their favorite television shows, be it to you know, something's often something they have

a lot of nostalgia for. You hear people talking about, say The Office or a Siginfeld or something like that, and they talk about, well, you know, I just like to put it on in the background while I'm working. It just put it on while I'm working or you know, doing things around the house. And you know it's you're kind of treating the office like one of these virtual fireplaces, something that is just generating a feeling in the background of some stimuli in the background that you're not one

hundred percent focused on. In fact, I would say if you are one hundred percent focused on one of these fireplace videos, that may be a warning sign. You know, it's like that's why not. I mean, however, you engage with your art, that's fine.

You could be like wrapping Christmas presents and you could put Empire on in the background. It might not feel any less appropriate. The other day, I just watched part of Empires, like you can find it online, and however orthogonal this is to Warhol's intensions, it actually does feel quite seasonally festive. There's something about like the art deco design of the Empire state building and the floodlights against the dark knight skies, extremely cozy and felt like Christmas time.

It was great stuff to take a nap to, you know. But still have something visual going on in the room as well. Disney has also got in on this with some great long ambient Star Wars themed av presentations like it'll be a landscape of Hath or something like that. So it seems like, you know, enough people were doing this kind of thing they realized, well, let's put that

out there. I mean, we also have sort of screen savory type things that pop up on Apple televisions right and various apps and so forth, where instead of just looking at an ad, they're going to show you a city scape or something like that.

and into your life, like this is nothing new. We've been doing this, We've been using our televisions like this since we've had televisions, and it's it's really almost kind of a refined idea to think, well, you know, let's let them have an hour two hour blocks of just you know, very ambient, chill audio visual stimuli instead of just NonStop ads and so forth.

but as an esthetic experience. It's something that supplies a kind of mood or ambience to the room that makes you feel a way you want to feel, or helps you focus your attention in a way that you want to Anyway, I just wanted to mention a couple of funny things that I found out about because I read a couple of interviews with the creator of Fireplace for Your Home, an American director named George Ford, who lives in Washington State, whose primary job is, or at least

was at the time of these interviews, running a pet supply company, but he also directed a number of these like static shot genre films. One is like a mountain stream flowing. There's another thing of like fish bopping around in a saltwater aquarium. But apparently this started with him making these cat entertainment DVDs, the goal of which is to like drive your cat insane with images of mice running all over the place.

first thing of its type. One example is a film that used to run on Christmas even Christmas on the New York TV market. It was on a station called WPIX, Channel eleven. This started in the nineteen sixties and it was this thing that was like two to four hours long depending on the instance, that would play a video loop showing a log burning in a fireplace with Christmas

music playing over the top. And I read in turn that this was the idea of somebody who worked at this TV station who was inspired by like a Coca Cola commercial that he saw. But another thing from these interviews is that Ford talked about how his kids would keep begging him to build a fire around the holidays because you know, yeah, I remember when I was a kid, I wanted a fire in the fireplace. That was fun.

And it occurred to him that it would be easier too, in his words, quote, just place a television inside our fireplace, hearth easier than to keep making a real fire. So he like pitched this to Netflix multiple times. They initially ignored him or laughed him off, but eventually he got some traction. And he claims again it can't verify this, but according to the director, the First Fireplace for Your Home film took him two years to make and cost

almost thirty five thousand dollars to produce. This would not be Netflix money, by the way. It was actually that he made these films independently, and then I think sold the Distro rights to Netflix later on, like, how on earth could it actually be that difficult? Well, again, can't verify the figures are true, but the explanation kind of makes sense to me. Speaking to The Independent, he said, quote, we battled timing issues, color audio and general high resolution

problems along the way. Special cameras have to be used around flames, and only certain color temperatures work. That's why you just don't see an open flame much in movies. And I was like, oh, that is interesting. You know, I think for a cozy fire on a TV screen, we kind of have some criteria that we might not even be aware of. But we'd like to see the warmer colors of the fire, don't We want some red,

orange and yellow. But a roaring fire on camera, especially not the right kind of camera and not the right kind of shot, just doesn't always look like that. I can think of a lot of old movies and video where camera where a camera catching a fireplace looks either just like a white glare or it's like invisible somehow.

like poking it reaching in front of the camera. And another hilarious thing that I did not know so you filled me in about the Witcher themed fireplace, But according to this guy, Netflix did a fireplace tie in with some dystopian movie they made called Bright and they summarized this, I haven't seen this movie, but it's like it's got like elves and orcs in what is otherwise just a buddy cop movie. And they called this burn barrel for your home.

and I think that's true. Something feels very like safe, enclosed and contained about it, which is funny because actually, like putting a fire inside your house is one of the more dangerous things you might do.

that material in the same level of depth here. I just wanted to do a sort of quick overview of some things we've talked about. A paper we've referenced on the show before that is highly cited on this subject is from twenty sixteen published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. B by JAJ. Gawlett called the discovery of

fire by humans a long and convoluted process. Now, this paper posits that human control of fire in prehistory probably constituted three general phases, and the first stage would be humans engaging in something we actually see in other animals, which is fire. Following this would be opportunistically taking advantage of natural fires caused most often by lightning strikes, lightning striking brush, but less often by like weird ignition sourcesvolcanic eruptions,

but whatever the cause of the fire. This phase would be humans notice a natural fire is occurring and then swoop in to take advantage of it in various ways, like to capture prey that is flushed out of hiding, or to scavenge and eat a prey that has been killed and maybe even cooked by the fire in some way like oh, it's nicely roasted now, or to in various other ways take advantage of natural resources revealed or

transformed by a burn. And then after the wildfire foraging stage, you've got the second and third phases, which postulate control of the fire within the living space. So the second phase is domestic fire primarily used for cooking and safety.

And then the third phase is what you might call industrial fire, the transformation of used for the transformation of resources and technology, like the production of baked pottery, and so going into the second and third phases, you see this sporadic an opportunistic relationship to rare natural fires transform into the capture and maintenance of fire first, like feeding a fire continuous fuel to keep it burning after you've

caught it from a natural source. And then eventually humans would learn to strike fire from nothing with implements like flintstone's and tender Now what's the general timeline for these early stages of fire control. Well, it's messy and it's still debated. The oldest evidence that anybody seriously proposes for human control of fire goes back to our hominin relatives roughly one to two million years ago, So at the farthest it might go back like two million years but

this evidence is ambiguous. So you can have things like charred or baked remains buried at a site that was occupied by hominins around the same time between one and two million years ago. But with these cases it's not always clear if this is the result of deliberate fire control or of natural burning and like scavenging of burned materials.

Gallot in the paper mentions a couple of sites of this kind in Kenya containing like burned sediments, stone tools that appear to have been altered by heat, and a couple of large hunks of baked clay, but again it's not clear if these are from natural fires or controlled burning. A lot of the archaeological investigation for the emergence of fire control has focused on looking for what are called hearths.

In the literature, that's going to be a little bit different than the way we're using hearth primarily in these episodes, because this would not necessarily refer to indoor fireplaces, but could refer to any dedicated place for burning. So, in like the archaeological papers, a hearth just means the remains of a place that was used for a purposeful fire, and there is pretty unambiguous evidence for hearths starting several

hundred thousand years ago. There are more traces of human associated burning beginning around one million years ago, and then the hearths really start popping up in Africa, Asia, Europe, in the Middle East around four hundred thousand years ago when you start seeing a lot of them.

expand our technological regime through the transformation of natural resources. Again, a very good example is pottery fired pottery, but also things you might not think of as readily, like adhesives for hafting, the famous birch bark tar that we talked about in some episodes in the past, and other things you know you can make like various glues out of natural substances that involves some element of heating. Also the

heating of stones for improved napping. Some silicon based stones they nap better, you know, they flake off into the kinds of sharp edges that you're looking for with a napping exercise if you heat them the right way. But a big thing, of course, is the importance of cooking. The importance of fire for cooking really hard to overstate. Now there is a real scholarly debate about the extent to which cooking actually could have transformed the human body.

This is known as the cooking hypothesis. The base idea is that the ability to cook otherwise hard to digest foods actually steered hominine evolution, changing not just our culture but our bodies. Allowing us to grow more powerful brains by devoting less energy to a hardy gut. Though I should stress that the cooking hypothesis is not proven. There are arguments against it, mainly having to do with the timing that would be required and lack of evidence for

control of fire at the required times. So we don't know about the cooking hypothesis hypothesis in terms of human evolution. But what cannot be doubted is that the invention of cooking massively expanded the base nutrition yield of food we acquired. So it just made it possible to get a lot more nutrition out of your food. And it also made food safer by calling food borne pathogens and neutralizing some plant toxins. So it just unlocked a gigantic level up in nutrition.

That's something I want to come back to in part two, to think about the particular light regime of fire based societies.

When I visited Wales with my family. We went to Saint Fagan's National Museum of History, which has a lot of these historic Welsh buildings that have been moved to this area where you can check them out, you can walk inside them, and in many of these buildings they had a fireplace going and that was often like the main form of illumination and there may or may not even be any windows, and it's such an insight into times when you would be inhabiting an indoor environment like that.

You know, we were totally spoiled for indoor illumination. These days, you can have your house generally as bright as you want it, like astoundingly bright. But it's an interesting experience to sort of step back in time and appreciate like the challenges and not to say that they were restricted only to the hearth fire. There are other you know, tricks you could could you could utilize to up your elimination, but you were limited. Uh and yeah, it's it was a different world.

of magical portals. But okay. So one of the things is that obviously, once humans started to build houses, to build enclosures to live inside, it can be easy to see why you would want to have the heat and light benefits of a fire inside the protection of the dwelling and not just outside. But this actually is not as easy as it sounds. You're presented with several concerns. One is, how do you keep the fire from burning

down the house. To do so, you would need to build the fireplace kind of away from any flammable walls or furniture, or if it is touching walls, you would need a fireplace system built into non flammable infrastructure made out of something like stone, brick, clay, or metal. Other big thing this is huge, how do you keep the fire from filling your house? Up with smoke. You need to have some kind of channel through which smoke and

hot gases can escape the building. Modern fireplaces are equipped with dedicated flues and chimneys, as we'll talk about in a second. But as we see, many early indoor fireplaces had more had cruder ventilation systems, often consisting of simply a hole in the roof directly above the fire. And this would work to a degree, but it also meant that, yeah, for like thousands of years, a lot of buildings that housed indoor fires were just going to be pretty smoky inside.

in by radiating that heat back out into the air. Now, above the firebox You often have like a decorative shelf called a mantle, but that's not really part of the mechanics of the fireplace. That's just a common decorative feature. The channel above the firebox leading to the outside is what's called the flu, and then the flu is surrounded by the structure that we call the chimney. A lot of times the flu is slightly offset from the firebox,

so it's not just a pipe straight up. Instead, it'll be kind of set off to the side or behind, and it will be the FLU will be positioned directly above something that is called the smoke shelf, where soot or anything that happens to penetrate the flu opening on top of the roof, anything comes in from outdoors can fall without landing directly on the fire. Instead, it falls

onto this shelf. Often also there is a damper which allows you to close off the flu when there's no fire burning to stop cold air from coming down in the chimney. Very important to remember to open the damper before lighting a new fire.

It's the infrared radiation coming off of the fire itself and then also coming off of the heated parts of the hearth or whatever is enclosing the fire, so coming off of the heated bricks or stones, or the metal. If it's more of a stove design, I'll talk about that in a second. But there is an irony to this beloved fixture of the fireplace. Way back in the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin wrote about how inefficient fireplaces were actually were at heating indoor spaces, just huge amounts of

wasted energy. He noted that the majority of the convective heat that they produce just rushes straight up the flu and is lost to the outside air. And this is often true, though it can vary depending on particulars of the fireplace design. In fact, here's a weird thing. A lot of people might not know. A fire in the

fireplace can actually make your house colder overall. So this again depends on particulars, depends on the design of the fireplace and the chimney, particularly how the vinylation system is configured. But in a lot of cases, you build a fire in the fireplace and it will increase the temperature in the area directly around the fire, you know, mostly again by way of radiant heat coming off the fire and the heated stone or brick or metal of the hearth.

But meanwhile that fire is sucking in air from the inside of your house, relatively warm air, probably if it's winter time and you have the heat going, or just you know, there's warm stuff happening inside the house and so it's warmer than the air outside. So this air from the rest of the house is being sucked into the fireplace to feed the fire, and then the convection of the hot gas plume rising up through the flu

is driving it outside as it gets superheated. As hot gas and smoke rushes up the chimney, a vacuum is created and more air continues to flow in from the inside of your house to the fireplace system, and thus a vacuum is created in the rest of the house, and then cold air is in from outside through whatever cracks your house has, cracks in the doors and windows

and so forth. So plenty of tests have shown that an inefficient fireplace may feel warm to the room right there in front of the blaze, but actually freezes out the rest of the house. They even did an episode of MythBusters where they featured this one time. I haven't seen this, but I read about it, and I read that in their particular test rooms farther away in the house got a couple of degrees celsius colder.

can radiate in all directions. You might notice a traditional stone or brick fireplace is usually built into a wall, whereas a wood stove is more often closer to the middle of the room and can radiate in all directions.

That also is a way of improving the heating efficiency. Though there's an interesting sort of a converse implication here which I discovered. Shout out one of my sources on fireplaces and how they generally work here was how stuff

Works article our old employer. This one was by John Kelly, so a nice job, John, But basically the idea here is that if you notice you're building a fire and it's like having a hard time burning and the damper is open, and yet there's still a lot of smoke coming into the house, a problem could be that the house is too well sealed, like the doors and the windows are too well sealed, and the fire is not able to create this efficient river of air from the

outside into the house into the fireplace, up the flu and then back outside. So instead it's pulling some air down the flu which is causing a counter draft and sending smoke into the room. So if you are having this problem, one thing to try is like opening a window, though of course that's going to let a bunch of cold air in, so that may just be the price.

your chimney and climbing in through the fireplace. This is this is one of those I think examples of the fireplace as a portal, fireplace as a as a gate through which something may travel that it's almost too close to us. You know, we grow up with this tradition, we're told it from an early age. We're familiar with this story before. We're familiar with many of the foundation stories of our own religions, you know, and important cultural

other important cultural tales, arguably more important cultural tales. We have this story of a strange old man who climbs through the fireplace, again, almost too close for us to even think about it. We'll come back to that in

a second. But another way, of course, that and this is one that may resonate more with fireplace owners, people who actually have hearts in their home, is the reality that, okay, as a literal aperture to the outside of your home, it is possible for animals to climb down that chimney and potentially enter your home. They may be prevented full access to the home by bats, raccoons, mice various squirrels

are some of the examples of potential chimney splunkers. I know I've encountered bats in this manner before at a friend's house, where like a bat or two would come into the chimney, get trapped in the house, and then you would find them, often in the sink trying to

get water. WHOA, yeah, I came to this house like some it was, you know, it's like a vacation home or something, so nobody had been in it for a little bit, and I saw something in the sink and I'm like, oh, someone left a tea bag and I almost grabbed it throw it away, and then I, oh, that's a bat. And then I had to call my friend and be like, what's your bat protocol? The bat was fine, thiss.

For instance, Carol Rose, in her Encyclopedia of Giants, Monsters, and Dragons that I frequently cite, mentions a tradition of the clean Get peoples of Northwestern United States the tell of Heya Kannako, the old woman underneath us, an enormous protective deity of the earth who concentrates on supporting the world, almost in a similar sense to Atlas, you know, holding up the earth. But when her hunger gets the better

off her, her concentration falters and earthquakes ensue. And so humans occasionally throw bits of fat into their hearths, and the Carol Rose describes it in order to help or overcome her hunger and to concentrate on keeping the earth imbalance. So you know, it's not something crawling through the fire through the hearth, but it's this idea of the hearth is kind of this connection in almost a physical connection to some sort of supernatural force.

You know, perhaps due to the fact that it's in a home situation that the rest of the home is cold, and drawing people together to tell stories, tell jokes, share their experiences. And on top of that, it is an obvious aperture to the outside world, which certainly brings about the possibility of various natural world creatures gaining access to your abode. But let us also remember that we're also talking about a gateway through which air can pass and

does pass. And as most of human history is pre germ theory, I think you can see where this is going. The idea that this is also an aperture through which bad air could travel, or something in the air, something that is not as constricted as physical as physical beings are constricted. That they could pass through that small hole. They could essentially, you know, pass through the keyhole and

that's all the space they need. Interesting, it reminds me actually of a tradition we talked about an idea of the Dine or Navajo people. This came up in a couple of episodes, I think in Our Dust episodes, actually, the idea that you might have an adante, a practitioner of secret evil magic, who might introduce a magical poison

or illness into a home through its smoke hole. So that definitely came to mind here, the smoke hole in a traditional home, this could be an aperture that could be exploited by an evil doer, and in European traditions, spilling over into early American colonial traditions, this concept carried a great deal of weight, something that previous guest on Stuff to Blow your Mind Brian Hoggard discusses in his excellent twenty nineteen book Magical House Protection The Archaeology of

counter Witchcraft. I know some of you probably listened to that episode. It's a great one if you want to go back and listen to an interview with the author. But I'm going to discuss some of the ideas that he brought up in that book here as it relates

to this topic. So in the book, Hoggard discusses the various counter witchcraft rights and rituals that Europeans use, dating back at least to the Middle Ages, functioning alongside and generally, I guess in spite of protections offered by the Christian faith and Christian tradition. This is coming from the show before. You know, you have the various church approved methods that you might take against supernatural evil, but are you going to limit yourself to just those or are you going

to also set other traps and wards in place? But in this case, we're talking about supernatural superstitious folk protections that were clearly deemed absolutely necessary by many to combat

evil in a demon haunted world. Hoggard stresses that the archaeological evidence suggests that unseen supernaw natural threats, which just a standard part of everyday existence, supernatural evil was everywhere and you had to bust out all the tricks in order to if not completely protect yourself, then at least been the odds even slightly in your favor, and is explored in the book. These efforts often took the form of a ritual object or objects hidden in the home.

He writes the most popular locations to conceal objects within buildings are usually at portals such as the hearth, the threshold, and also voids or dead spaces. This suggests that people believed it was possible for dark forces to travel through the landscape and attack them in their homes. Whether these forces were emanations from a witch in the form of a spell, a witch is familiar pestering their property, an actual witch flying in spirit, or a combination of all

of those is difficult to tell. Additional sources of danger could be ghosts, fairies, and demons. People went to great lengths to ensure their homes and property were protected, highlighting the fact that these beliefs and fears were visceral and as far as they were concerned, literally terrifying.

And I feel like this is fairly self explanatory. You know, some sort of a symbol or a sigil that has protective properties and that may be hidden away somewhere in a home. This next one, though, this one was the one that I found surprising at the time I was not familiar with prior to reading this book, and that is shoes. And I think this is especially interesting because from our modern perspective, we often forget just what a

shoe is. We can take it for granted, we can have, you know, hundreds of them, and we may love shoes to death without like, without really thinking about this vital aspect of what they are. Yeah. Yes, we put them on our feet to walk about in and you know, not step on nails and rocks and so forth, keep our feet warm, make our feet look you know, snazzy

and cool. But they are also flesh like sheaths, sometimes made from animal products, that are sized, perhaps individually sized for the shape of our feet or if nothing else. Over time, they take on the shape of our feet. They take on the odor of our feet. These are two details, especially the odor that is often lost on us, perhaps not lost on our dogs and cats. They know these shoes smell like us and are like potent familiar

items of us. You know, our cat will lay on shoes a lot, and I've had some commentary on this kind of behavior in cats and dogs, where they will be drawn to the shoes because they remind them of the owners of said shoes. And all. This would seem to be part of the superstitious calculus for these traditions. So a shoe may wear out beyond repair in the case of a child's shoes and shoes that they may outgrow them, but they are still then objects that have

to a large extent become a part of us. You know, they are shaped after us, they smell of us, and they're therefore dangerous items to discard. In much the same way that nail clippings and hair were often seen as such, like they were a part of you. They still are a part of you, and that is dangerous material to just leave out in the world where you know an evil doer or an evil spirit may come across it and by doing so gain power over you.

still being found. That's one of the great things that Hagard discusses is that you have so many different waves of renovation that take place with some of these old homes in Europe, in Britain, in the UK, and also in parts of the United States and Canada as well, where people will suddenly discover a pair of ancient shoes or a strange bottle. And he also discusses how there are cases where people have suddenly sort of given into some of the superstition of it and they've had to

put sad item back. You know, it's like it's kind of like the reverse of finding a void. You find a purposeful item that you don't fully understand. You're not on the same mental wavelength with it, but you've come to believe, well, I should put it back. I don't know my way around all of this enough to say it doesn't belong there.

three new nails with the points down. Then you bind the jug with clay and leather and you heat it over embers for nine to ten days.

is seeking you. It has entered your home, perhaps through a door, perhaps through a window, perhaps down the chimney and through the fireplace. It's seeking you out. But what does an encounter. Instead, it encounters your smell, and encounters the shoe that was so much a part of your body and now can be mistaken for your body, and it goes after that. Instead, it serves as a decoy. And in the case of the witch bottle, it's even more exciting. So it smells that deep uriny stench that

is associated with you. But it's found the bottle first. And so what does this evil thing do, this spirit, this dark seeker in the night. It climbs inside that bottle. But uh oh, Now it is either trapped in the bottle or it is impaled upon all of those sharp pointy bits inside the bottle and therefore injured or perhaps killed by this witch bottle, this trap that has been set for it.

importance of the iron at all. But this is all very interesting to think about in comparison to various Christmas traditions, like I instantly think about wooden clogs left out for Saint Nicholas or Santa though I've also read that prior to the sixteenth century, at least in some European countries, the clogs were left in the church rather than in

the home. I'm not as well versed in the history of those traditions, but at any rate, you do have examples where shoes are left out so that some entity may deposit gifts inside them, and those shoes may be placed, I think often near doors or windows, so there still is that sense of put them near the aperture, put them near the portals. And where do we hang our stockings with care? We of course hang them again by the fireplace, by the hearth. Yeah, almost as if we're

trying to throw Santa Claus off the scent. You know, there is no need, strange one, to bring the gifts directly to the children. Here is their sense, smell their feet. Here is the essence you seek. Leave the gifts here, leave the children alone in their room.

could be easy to miss. It's just like burn marks in a house. I included a picture from his book here for you to look at, Joe, Like, if you didn't know what you're looking at, you might just think these were caused by some other you know, I don't know, something that occurred during construction or something like that. But an interpretation here is that these were ritual burn marks. And he includes this is a translation, but it is a translation of a German rhyme that apparently went along

with some holiday traditions of protecting the home. So I'm going to read it here again. This is from Brian Huggrid's book and it goes as follows, and round about the house they go with torch or taper, clear that neither bread nor meat do want know which with dreadful charm have power to hurt their children or do the cattle harm. So I'm not saying burn beams in your house with fire as part of your holiday traditions. But yeah,

it's interesting to think about all of this. And again, this is another one that involves the power of fire, the power of the flame to protect us against unseen things. In the night. By the way, I know Brian would want me to pass this along to you. If you do encounter something like this in your house strange shoes, a strange item, a witch bottle and so forth, it is very helpful to like reach out to people who will document it all. And a lot of people do

reach out to Brian Hoggard themselves. He's on Instagram as folk Magic Man. He also has a website, so just look him up. It's Brian Hoggart h O G A r D. And he can point you in the right direction if if you encounter something like this in your home, or email us and I'll forward it to him. Happy to do that.

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