The Monstrefact Omnibus: Creatures of Myth and Legend

single episode. I know some of you prefer to listen to these short form episodes in this format, so I'm going to continue to try and roll these out periodically over the course of the year, generally when I've built up enough to fit a particular theme. But this one is kind of a grab bag, so without further ado, let's jump right in. First of all, we will consider the Mummy in this episode. I like to discuss one of the classic monster icons of twentieth century heart cinema,

the Undead Mummy. You've all encountered some variation on this monster before, if not in the original six part Universal Pictures Mummy franchised, then perhaps in nineteen eighty seven's The Monster Squad or nineteen nineties Tales from the Dark Side, the movie, which has a very memorable adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Lot two forty nine, which I'll touch

on again in a bit. For my own part, I fondly remember reading a pair of kids books from the late eighties and nineties when I was a child, by Alita E. Young, Terror in the Tomb of Death and Return to the Tomb of Death, both of which featured undead mummies and ancient Egyptian curses. Now, to properly understand mummy horror fiction in general, we have to recognize its

place within the larger world of Egyptomania. The term Egyptomania is more often used to refer specifically to nineteenth century European fascination with all things Egypt in the way of Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign, but it can also generally be leveled at different points in time when various cultures have pursued

an interest in ancient Egyptian civilization and culture. In the excellent book Egyptomania, author Ronald H. Fritz discusses various forms of Egyptomania over the ages, from the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans to Europeans and afrocentrist movements. He also devotes

a chapter to Hollywood movies and literature. He writes that Egyptian themed fiction in its current forms emerged during the nineteenth century, again after Napoleon's campaign in Egypt inspired a new surge in European Egyptomania, surplanting Egypt's smaller place in the European culture of the time period, where it was mostly relegated to its role in Shakespearean theatre, freemasonry, and

sporadic fictional treatments. Fritz writes that Egyptian themed fiction basically falls into a number of subgenres theirs historical fiction, biblical fis, mysteries and thrillers, occult fiction, and yes, there is the Mummy fiction. But where does the idea of undead mummified

ancient Egyptians come from in all of this? Well, the nineteen thirty two universal horror movie The Mummy might seem like a good place to start, after all, it kicked off a rather influential franchise, but Fritz shares that early versions of the script didn't feature an undead mummy at all.

This element was only added later in subsequent rewrites. Unlike Dracula and Frankenstein, the Mummy franchise was not rooted in a particular work of literature, though there are clear literary forbears nineteen thirty twos, The Mummy wasn't even the first mummy motion picture. Consider instead that the likes of nineteen eleven's The Mummy, in which a scientist revives an Egyptian mummy with electricity and then falls in love with her sadly lost, is just one of a flurry of silent

mummy movies from the nineteen tens. As for literary sources, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories The Ring of Thoth eighteen ninety and Lot Number two forty nine in eighteen ninety two are important to note, as is Brahm Stoker's The Jewel of the Seven Stars from nineteen oh three. Fritz singles out The Mummy or a Tale of the twenty second Century by Jane C. Loudum from eighteen twenty seven as the earliest long work concerning a reanimated mummy.

Other early examples of reanimated mummy stories include Theophile Gottner's The Mummy's Foot and Edgar Allen Poe's eighteen forty five story Some Words with a Mummy. These stories, according to Fritz arise in general, again out of nineteenth century Egyptomania, but also out of European and American fascination with mummies

and mummy unwrapping parties. In particular, he also writes that we can't underestimate Victorian colonial guilt and misgivings about the desecration of Egyptian tombs and artifacts as a strong motivation for summoning so many tales in which over eager American and European archaeologists on Earth ancient tombs, ancient curses and

invoked the wrath of the Untead. In fact, he points out that initially mummy stories cast archaeologists firmly in the role of villains, but then the needle moved in the opposite direction quote after the discovery of Tutenkammen's tomb nineteen twenty two. Thanks to the film industry, archaeologists were portrayed as heroic, scholarly adventurers, while angry mummies were not avengers but the revived, corporeal forms of a mindless ancient evil.

This shift is in effect an affirmation or vindication of imperialism and colonialism. On top of all of this, there's, of course, the influence of pre existing tales of cursed objects and the unsettled dead, which would have found new life in Egyptomania fueled creations. These very elements all would seem to have contributed to the undead Mummy's place in our horror fiction. All right, Next, let's consider the curious

relationship between knots and monsters. Yesterday's core episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind concerned the fabled rat King, in which it is said the tales of rats become intertwined and knotted, a dire omen of impending doom. But what about elsewhere in the natural and unnatural worlds? To begin with, folklore is rife with magical knots, is Cyrus l. Day pointed out in Knots and Not Lore back in nineteen fifty.

Just as the use of knots extends back through prehistoric human times, so too does the idea that we might work magic with the various intricate knots that we tie. They observe that ancient people's attempted to control the weather, biology, reproduction, death, and various supernatural entities via the working of knots not magic was sometimes maleficent and other times beneficial. It could be an intentional magical effect, or something invoked by accident.

It might be said to work at close range, across vast distances and across various stretches of time. After all, what is the knot but the joining and the binding of things, the creation of something, the creation of a new complexity in the process. And of course the topic is closely aligned with all manner of fabric arts and even hair braids. As not so easily become the subject of magical thinking, they inevitably touch the world of monsters.

Among the many anti vampire traditions we find the notion that one may leave a complex array of knots out for the creature, which will then occupy its time trying to unravel them and figure them out till the sun rises once again. There are also other related tactics that don't involve knots at all, such as leaving out poppy

seeds that the vampire will feel compelled to count. Vitural complexity overpowers the undead senses, it would seem, but as with the fabled rat king, there are also some myths and legends of knotted creatures. The account of Heracles and Coccus is notable. While in some depictions Coccus is merely presented as a fire breathing giant, or even just a large muscular man that Heracles wrestles, other times he is described as a sort of giant spider, except with three

fire breathing human heads atop a long neck. In order to slay the monster, Heracles ties its neck in a knot. Dragon iconography often involves knots, as does serpentine iconography, and the knotting of tail or neck may be presented as a means of defeating the creature or as a self coiling behavior. In the natural world, climbing snakes have been observed to use lasso locomotion to scale trees and poles in search of prey, a configuration that indeed appears to

be a simple knot. Elsewhere, hagfish, when agitated, will twist themselves into a traveling overhand knot to squeeze off excess slime. All right, now, it is time to consider the salamander.

As mentioned in yesterday's Core episode The Nature of Diamonds, Part One, I'd like to discuss the fantastic salamander in today's Monster Fact Now Dungeons and Dragons players have long noticed the startling difference between salamanders of the natural world and salamanders as they appear in the D and D Monster Manual, where they are described as flaming snakes and snake like beings that quote slither across the sea of

ash on the elemental plane of fire. Meanwhile, real life salamanders are quite remarkable but are decidedly not on fire. Ancient and medieval bestieries are full of strange and often fiery tales of the salamander. I turned to the writings of Fulk historian Carol Rose in her book Monsters, Giants and Dragons, as well as poorge Luis Borges the Book of Imaginary Beings to piece together the different attributed features

of the mythic salamander. The creature pops up in various works from the ancient Greco Roman world, most notably the writings of Roman historian Plenty the Elder in seventy seven CE. He describes the salamander as a monstrous lizard that poisons anything it touches, known to live on the slopes of volcanoes as well as within the heart of a fire as borhes points out, Plenty highlights the creature's natural coldness as a reason for this. It's so cold it simply

resists the fire and even extinguishes it. But Plenty also writes of another creature, the pyrosta, that lives within the copper smelting furnaces of Cyprus, and the creature, he says, dies if they leave the flames. Borhes points out that the later traditions would take these attributes and apply them to the salamander. It's also worth noting, though, that as a creature of fire, the mythic salamander was, by some standards,

a necessary part of classical elemental theory. If earth, water, air, and fire are the prime building blocks of nature, then there have to be animals of each element, and that includes creatures of fire. As we discussed in yesterday's episode, sixteenth century Italian sculptor Benvenuto Cellini claimed in his autobiography to have seen a salamander in the fire as a child.

As Matt Simon discussed in a twenty fourteen article for Wired Magazine, Fantastically Wrong, the legend of the homicidal fire Bruce salamander. This common bit of lare likely came about as ancient people occasionally threw damp logs on their fires, damp logs that may have had tiny, unfortunate salamanders clinging to their underside. But as Borges stressed, the notion of a creature that lives in fire was a theologically useful

bit of lore as well. Saint Augustine, in his fifth century CE work The City of God, used the salamander as proof that fiery living torment in the afterlife was not that far fetched, a notion. Bor Has notes that the mythical phoenix, another mythical creature of fire, was often cited by theologians to support the idea of a bodily resurrection. During the Middle Ages, salamanders continued to tear it up.

In the bestiaries. Writers of the day described their abilities to poison the fruit of trees, they entwined, to stop up the mouths of lions, and of course, extinguish fires. The creature also became associated with fibrous minerals classified today as asbestos, which are highly fire resistant. Of course, natural salamanders do not live in or tolerate fire any more than the rest of the animal kingdom. In fact, they

are decidedly moist creatures. The truth of experience and experimentation easily extinguished the fantastic idea of a literal salamander of the flames, but the creature lived on in heraldry, alchemical symbolism, and of course fantasy. For this next one, let us consider the horror of the one who drills. In this episode, I'd like to turn to the traditions of the Inuit, specifically the Inuit of the eastern Hudson Bay region of

what is now Canada. In the Dictionary of Native American Mythology, Sam D. Gill and Irene F. Sullivan relate the story of a pair of killers. In other tellings, monsters who terrorized the people. Ikutuyuk, whose name means one who drills and his brother would capture people, pin them down on their backs, and then murder them by drilling holes in

their bodies. Afterwards, they would cover a corpse with piles of rocks like kerns or to the Inuit in nuksuk in Nuxiok, were largely used to aid navigation, but were sometimes used as warnings of dangerous grounds. According to the myth, the brothers continued their horrible crimes until a two Nit set out to stop them. The Tunit were a legendary people said to live long ago, possibly connected to an actual Paleo Eskimo culture. They were tall giants even and

possessed a fierce energy and competition. Gill and Sullivans share that tu Nit were said to die of exhaustion from fierce competitions and feats of hunting and archery, And so one brave Tunit took it on himself to rid the people of the Kutuyuk and his brother. He challenged Akutuyuk to a fight, and they battled while tied together with

a rope. The Canadian Museum of History features a nineteen sixty carving by Inuit artist Issa Kupirowala a la Usa depicting the back, which you can view on their website. In the end, the Tunit heroes succeeded in killing a kudu Yuk, and the remaining brother fled into the wilderness. The story of a kudu Yuk was also related by Inuit author Jonasi Kuinurayak, who lived eighteen ninety five through nineteen sixty four. Now you might wonder what manner of

drill this monstrous killer would have used. The Inuit traditionally made use of the pump drill, an ancient hand powered tool used in fire making as well as for drilling small holes and objects for jewelry and the like. It's a simple hand powered flywheel tool. The craftsperson revolves the drill shaft by vertically working a bow or bar carrying a cord attached at the center to the upper end of the shaft. I realize this is hard to picture,

so I recommend looking up an image or video. Materially, the pump typically involves some combination of wood, ivory, rawhide, metal stone, sometimes jadite. According to the Pin Museum, there's also the Inuit mouth drill. This was essentially a small bow drill used for firing making, and the user would brace the tool and provide downward pressure with the head via a mouth or chin block. Now to be clear,

neither of these tools was a weapon. But according to Robert Fortune in his nineteen eighty five article Lancets of Stone Traditional Methods of surgery among the Alaska Natives, there is reason to believe that dental drilling may have been practiced to alleviate tooth pain, and that cranial drilling may also have been practiced in some cases for either medical

or magico religious purposes, known as trepanation. This practice is found in cultures around the world dating back to prehistoric times, with some rare modern proponents of the procedure as well.

So one can imagine how the idea of murderous drillers might have emerged in Inuit mythology and storytelling based on everyday technology and or painful surgical procedures that had been experienced or witnessed, though the possibility of actual isolated drill based torture is I suppose not impossible across one reference to isolated drill marks on Inuit remains a nineteen ninety three article by Melby in Fairgrief titled a Massacre and

Possible Cannibalism in the Canadian Arctic, but the consensus would seem to be that the evidence in question suggested a mortuary practice, with drill holes being just one of the classifications of cuts found to the bone. Ykudu Yuk and his brother are haunting figures to consider, and yet another fascinating aspect of Inuit culture. Ah, what is that in the night sky? Why it's the moon? Rabbit? Let's find

out more. In celebration of the lunar New Year, I thought today would be a great time to consider the lunar rabbit. Now, exactly what you see in the dark splotches of the full moon will depend on your individual and or cultural priming. You may see a face, a man with a cane or a fork, a frog or toad, or some other animal reel or imagine. But the rabbit has been a popular choice since time out of mind, and why not. Indigenous rabbit or hair species exist on

every continent except Australia and Antarctica. The rabbit also boaths a great deal of character, inspiring numerous and varied tales that detail just how that rabbit made it to the Moon, or from the Moon to the Earth in the first place. Author Randolph S. Albright recounts several of these in his

twenty twenty book House of the Three Rabbits. According to Albright, the Yoruba people of Nigeria and the Woloff people of Senegal recount legends of a rabbit sent down from the Moon with the secret of immortality, but the rabbit got the message backwards or mangoled in one form or another, and instead bestowed mortality upon human beings. Oops the moon punished the rabbit by splitting its nose and forcing it

to accompany each dying mortal into the afterlife. The Siberian moon goddess kaltez Uku sometimes takes the form of a rabbit. The Mayan moon goddess Ixceel often carries a rabbit. The Cree people of North America tell of a rabbit who traveled up to the moon with the help of a passing crane, and the Celtic goddess Ostra took on the

form of a hare during the full moon. In Buddhist teachings, Albright shares the rabbit's image appears on the moon because the rabbit offered up its own body to feed a starving beggar who was actually Sacra, lord of Davas in disguise. The Aztecs told a similar tale concerning the god Quetzalkotl.

As Victoria Dickinson explores in her book Rabbit from the Excellent Rakotan Animals series, the Aztecs associated the rabbit with drunkenness as well as the moon, and held that the rabbit must first pass through fire on its way to the lunar surface, and of course, the luner rabbit has an important place in many East Asian traditions, often as a lunar zodiac animal, and Chinese traditions invoke the creature

in the myth of Chenga. We discussed various versions of this myth in great detail in our stuffed to Bow your Mind episode Chinese Mortality, which you can find in our archives. But the simple version is as follows. The hero Ye the archer, receives the elixir of immortality from the Queen Mother of the West, and then, while her

reasoning varies depending on the telling. Sometimes it's to protect the potion from theft by an enemy, Yi's wife Changa drank it instead and was instantly transported to the moon. In some earlier tellings, she is then transformed into a toad who pounds the elixir of immortality there, and it's of course the very toad we might see when we

gaze up at the full moon. Other times, and certainly in later tellings, she retains her human form and is accompanied by the jade rabbit, who pounds the elixir of immortality instead. Thus we see the rabbit on the moon. Dickinson writes quote to Chinese alchemists, the pale jade moon rabbit embodied the yin or female principle that was associated with the moon, not only in Asia, but in the West,

where the moon is often referred to as feminine. She also pointed out that in Japanese traditions, the rabbit doesn't pound the elixir of immortality, but instead pounds the rice that will be used in lunar new year mochikekes. And finally, let's consider the multi armed, multi headed madness of the Hekatonkis. And the gods, givers of good things, applauded when they heard his word, and their spirit longed for war even more than before, and they all both male and female,

stirred up hated battle. That the Titan gods and all that were born of Kronos, together with those dread mighty ones of overwhelming strength, whom Zeus brought up to the light from Erebus beneath the earth, one hundred arms sprang from the shoulders of all alike, and each had fifty heads growing upon his shoulders upon stout limbs. These then stood against the Titans in grim strife, holding huge rocks

in their strong hands. These are the words of Hesiod from his eighth century BCE text Theogony here in translation by Evelyn White, describing the one hundred handed warriors, the Hecatonkyries of Greek mythology. Naturally, the poet Hesiod compiled various tellings and traditions in his poetry, and in doing so solidified a number of characters, relationships, and tales concerning the Greek pantheon of deities. So what we read here is

effectively the most popular understanding of the Hecatonkyres. They were a very ancient race of multi headed and multi handed giants, and they stood among the various children of the primordial sky god Urunas. But Uruanas hated these monstrosities from the first and imprisoned them, locking them away out of sight. Eventually, Urunas's offspring, Cronos, rises against his father, overthrows him, but

seemingly keeps these earlier unsightly offspring locked away. It is not until Zeus, the child of Cronos, rises up with his fellow Olympian gods, rebels against the Titans. They free and recruit the Hecatonkyries, as well as their kin, the Cyclopses,

into their ensuing war for control of the cosmos. This was the Titanomachi, and Hesiod describes their role in its battles, naming the three most prominent of the one hundred handed warriors in surviving traditions, and amongst the foremost Cootus and Bryarias, and guys insatiate for war, raised fierce, fighting three hundred

rocks one upon another. They launched from their strong hands and overshadowed the Titans with their missiles, and buried them beneath the wide pathed earth, and bound them in bitter chains. When they had conquered them by their strength, for all their great spirit, as far beneath the earth to Tartarus. The Hecatonkyres, according to Hesiod, are much more than allies of the gods. In their war against the Titans, the

Hecatonkreis strike the final blow. They chain the Titans. They become the wardens of the Titans, and are quite ironically imprisoned once more in the process. Now it should be noted that in some traditions the Hecatonkyres may have fought instead on the side of the Titans, and in some compilations, such as Brewer's Dictionary, of phrase and fable. The authors go so far as to describe individuals, specifically Bryarius as a titan, so it gets a bit confusing at times.

And I suppose that's how I have always felt about the hecatonqures since I was a child and read about them and various books. Somewhat confused because the morphologies of so many other Greek monsters are just so well defined. There's so many illustrations of them, and as a child, you can draw them, you can roughly sketch them yourself, and it's a lot of fun. But the hecatonqures always

seem to defy logic. Their name feels more like a literary concept describing a force of nature as opposed to a codified creature, and indeed this is often how they are interpreted. They are difficult to envision or to reproduce visually, and certainly there are plenty of contemporary artists who have had a lot of fun producing various, surreal and just horrifying interpretations of the hecatonqures, but one is generally hard pressed to find representations of these creatures in art history.

Now I invite correction on this front, because I would very much love to see such images, to see like classical illustrations, medieval illustrations and so forth of the hecatonqureis. But my searches have generally come up well empty handed. Perhaps we've simply lost ancient Greek depictions of these creatures. I can only assume that they were too far removed

from actual human physiology to interest many sculptors. You know, I mean, if you're interested in capturing the reality of the human form, even in the telling of stories and the presentation of information about deities, then this might not be your first stop, right. Perhaps they were creatures best left for depiction in the ages of surrealism and cosmic horror to come. Indeed, outside of their role in the struggle against the Titans, little seems to have survived about

the Hecatonqures in general, aside from some tangents concerning Bryarias. Again, the Hecatonqures are perhaps best interpreted as embodiments of natural forces. Given their hundred hands and heads, they are like armies of men compiled into a single great entity, like a storm or earthquake, with the power of an army. As such, turning to the natural world of biology. Our best example of one hundred headed entities are actually large groups working together,

such as humans or use social insects. Now, some of you out there might be thinking to yourself, well, I know what as one hundred appendages. Well, even centipedes, despite their name which means one hundred footed, never have exactly one hundred limbs. They may have as few as something like twenty three leg bearing segments, or as many as I think one hundred and ninety one, but there is always an odd number of leg bearing segments, never the even fifty segments that would produce a total of one

hundred legs. By the way, the first millipede with more than a thousand legs wasn't discovered till twenty twenty one. Now, despite this disappointment, scientists have fouled room to invoke the

hecatonkreis in the naming of various organisms. Specifically, the name Bryarius is invoked in the scientific name for various organisms, including, but not limited to, the Caribbean reef octopus, the hairy sea cucumber, at least one species of seastar, the qirky seafinger coral, a sea slug, an extinct trilabite and a Central American moth as for their mythic namesake, the hecatoncaries. Well,

maybe we should heed the words ohesiate once more. Perhaps we lack for older depictions of the creature because they are not to be approached, They are not to be looked upon. Even Uruanas chose not to do so, And he used to hide them all away in a secret place of Earth so soon as each was born, and would not suffer them to come up into the light. And Heaven rejoiced in his evil doing, but vast earth

groaned within. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact, The Artifact, or Anamalius to Pendium each week on Wednesdays. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.