Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing in on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time. In this episode, we will finish our look at the four chaos gods of the fictional far future universe in Games Workshops Warhammer forty thousand. In previous episodes, we looked at Bloodthirsty Corn, the hyper protean Zinch, and the plague
lord Nergle. Today we enter the domain of Slanesh, the Lord of Excess. In forty k Lore, we are told that Slanesh is the youngest of the chaos gods, having only truly accreted out of mortal souls and emotions with the fall of the decadent Aldari civilization, an event that all but destroy the Alvari and pour open a massive warp rift known as the Eye of Terror. Slanesh's domain is that of hedonistic excess, but also that of need, want,
and obsession. The demons that manifest in Slanesh's service are alluring contradictions that blur the line between pleasure and pain, desire and revulsion. The demonets of Slanesh make up most of the chaos God's battle force, and they feature some favored characteristics of Slanesh's servants. They are humanoid beings with pale flesh and long purple hair, alluring yet also equally ghoulish.
Their feet and legs are reminiscent of reptiles or birds, bringing to mind such real world mythic traditions as that of harpies and succubie. Oh yes, and they also have crab claws, lots of crab claws, something that doesn't really connect to any mythic or folkloric traditions that I'm aware of, but they absolutely make it work and it has become a signature aspect of their look. Demonets also appear bilaterally asymmetrical, particularly in the chest region, where one side features a
female breast and the other a male breast. While titillation is clearly part of this design, it also strongly echoes the male female duality in the symbolism of bathom from occult in Western esoteric traditions. This influence is especially prevalent in the Towering Keeper of Secrets, the deadly Slaneshi demon champions, which often, especially in recent depictions, feature strong goatlike characteristics
such as foot and head reminiscent of Bathomea. But there's another servant of Slanesh that I'd like to talk about here, and that's the Mask of Slanesh. This purple hued Harold once danced in the good graces of the Lord of Excess. But according to the ninth edition Chaos Demons Codex from Games Workshop, the Mask fell out of favor with Slenesh and is now cursed to dance and cavort forever across
strange realms and battlefields. The dance of the Mask emboldened surrounding Slaneshi forces, but also in sourcel's enemy troops to join into its spiraling dance, where it slices them to exotic ribbons of flesh. This, of course, brings to mind a famous mania from our own history, the dancing plagues off the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, as pointed out by John Waller in a Forgotten Plague, Making Sense of Dancing Mania,
published in two thousand and nine in The Lancet. A certain degree of embellishment stains some of these accounts, but cases in thirteen seventy four in fifteen eighteen are pretty well documented. Most sources agree that dancing plague incidents involved groups of individuals swept up in long bouts of involuntary dancing. The dancers cried out in pain or pleaded for mercy.
In some accounts, they danced until they died. While enigmatic and certainly hard to believe from a modern perspective, dancing plagues are not without skeptical explanation. Wilder explores a few leading ideas in the paper. First, there's the possibility of urgot poisoning, a topic we've discussed in depth on Stuff to Blow Your Mind before. It's caused by the consumption of fungus infected grains that can lead to nightmarish altered
states of consciousness. Waller also discusses the possibility that the dancers could have been in an involuntary trance state, something people are far more susceptible to during states of intense psychological distress, and these centuries certainly provided plenty of stressors.
This explanation also require exposure to a pre existing belief about dancing plagues, and in these cases, the cause would be believed to be some sort of a spirit or a curse, and there is evidence for this in art, literature, and law from these time periods and regions. So Waller writes quote every so often, when physical and mental distress rendered people more than usually suggestible, the specter of the
dancing plague could quickly return. All it then took was for one or a few poor souls, believing themselves to have been subject to the curse, to slip into a spontaneous trance. Then they would unconsciously act out the part of the accursed, dancing, leaping and hopping for days on end.
It's a different sort of compulsion than that found among the followers of Slanesh, but there are other examples of mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness to consider, such as laughing epidemics and witchcraft panics, though of course slantash doesn't have to work through such real world means to control people. That's all for this monster fact series, but I think I'm going to continue the basic format here, with future episodes drawing on groups of creatures from other fandoms and
other traditions. So tune in for additional episodes each Wednesday. And the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows.