The Science of Thulsa Doom, Part 2

it kind of didn't. But it's it's definitely worth talking about. But one of the key centerpieces in this film is the cult of set thulsa dooms religion. I mean, he seems into the branding, even in the earlier portions of the film when he's just a warrior. Yeah, that's a little confusing, because the whole thing is that, like James Earl Jones, he was like once I was a young man and I was just a war lord running around raiding villages. You know, the sorry I killed your parents

and not that's a yeah. I don't think he ever said he was no. He didn't say no. In fact, he says, Dakona, and he's like, got Arnold Schwartzendinger on the floor. He's like, when when I destroyed your village, I made you You're welcome. Yeah, pretty much. Uh. But but then later in the film he's he's like, oh, I don't do that anymore. Now I'm just a regular cult leader. But in both cases he's carrying the symbol of his cult even though he's not a cult leader yet.

In in the earlier part, and the symbol of his cult, which is referred to in the movie as the Cult of set or the Temple of set Uh. And in the last episode we discussed the real ancient Egyptian not well maybe not real, but the real mythology of the ancient Egyptian god Set or Seth, and how he is very different than the set represented in the film. But the Cult of set in the film has the symbol of the two headed snake with with the two heads

facing off against each other. Right, I mean, maybe part of it is that just even though his approach to life changed a little bit, he just always had great branding, always loves snakes, or certainly he just maybe just took up the the the emblem at some point there was a pre existing cult of Set. I mean certainly that would if you're creating a cult leader. I mean, some cult leaders create their faith wholesale, uh, from from new parts.

But for the most part, for the most part, they're depending on something that came before and just inserting themselves into it. That's exactly right. I mean, in fact, I can scarcely think of a cult that doesn't draw on some existing mythology. I mean, uh, you think about the Heaven's Gate cult. I mean that was in a large

part based on like UFO mythology and existing Christianity. Even if you look at like the Raylians and Rileyans, one of the the UFO religions, they're the guy who found it, has this whole book going through like the books of the Bible and all this talking about how it's actually all about alien encounters and alien technology. It's basically an

ancient aliens religion. So the emblem for the Temple of Set in this film has this this really cool logo actually that it's like there are two different versions of it.

You kind of see one is like on the like the staffs and the armor that they carry, and then there's this like simple simplified logo, but it's a snake with two heads as a head on each end, like a like the head of the snake is a snakehead and the tail of the snake is a snakehead, and they're they're rising against each other, and in the background there is a son And in fact it's a plot point in the film because Conan and his friends go around looking for Falsa Doom played by James Earl Jones

by asking about this symbol. It's like, have you seen this symbol anywhere? That's how they they initially connect with him. So I should kind of surprise, as a surprise to nobody that the idea of a snake with a head on each end pre dates this film, that you know that this this is something that we can go back in time and we can find examples of in uh in the human use of symbols. Right now, you might be thinking about other existing snake symbols that are a

little bit different. You might be thinking about the orb corros where a snake is swallowing its own tail, But that's different than two snake heads facing each other, right though, I mean in Theora Boruss defense we usually don't see the tail because it's in his mouth. Who's to say that wasn't a hat on there? But yeah, the the or a Borus, the world serpent, the mid guard storm, Um, it's uh. It is yet depicted as the snake consuming itself.

On the other hand, one that is very similar but isn't quite the same thing does have snakeheads facing each other would be the Caducius. This is this is like the staff with the snakes staff of hers. Yeah. Yeah, So what we're talking about here is the the amphis beina and it's a it's a name that's derived from the Greek to go both ways because of the idea is that it's a snake that can move forwards or

backwards with ease. The one thing I've read is that snakes that just have one normal head and a normal tail can sometimes slither backwards. Like I was reading a book about how the author observed that coral snakes seem to be able to slither backwards just fine. Right, And so I mean, of course, in all of this you're talking, we're dealing with something on one level, there's the symbolism level of it, right, Like what does the idea of a snake with two heads mean, how does it? What

does it? How does it function in the human mind? But then also there is a certain degree of just like weird tales about what snakes look like. So, according to Carol Rose, the folklorist, his books always come back to She she has a nice write up about it in one of her monster books, and she points out that the Greek writer Lucan described it as a desert creature of North Africa. Um and um, and of course as well, we'll we'll see plenty of the Elder of

course also wrote about it. But I also was reading from a article Stalking the Emphis Beena by Sydney J. Levy from the Journal of Consumer Research. That but yeah, but that mentions that the this particular symbol quote was probably intended to express the horror and anguish associated with ambivalent situations. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean that. Um, it certainly goes with a kind of classic archetype of of psychodynamics, right, the idea that like this might not

be the most correct way of thinking about the mind. Now, but if you go back to Freudian thought, you know, he often seemed to emphasize that major problems in the mind. The psychoses and things were caused by states of ambivalence where you had, you know, conflicting desires or conflicting tendencies that couldn't be resolved. Should I stay or should I go?

I don't know. I'm of two snakes on the man. H. So this particular beast also shows up in a lot of medieval beast theories with as a winged creature with two legs at it as well. Uh, sometimes it's said that it can roll like a hoop snake, a hoop snake being kind of a form of an aura borous that's less, less concerned with what happens if a snake consumes itself. How does this house this play out in my mind? Versus what if a snake just at its own tail and then rolled like a wheel down a

down a hill. Now this is a mythical creature, no real creature, though there is a real wheel spider. Yeah, yeah, there are some real rolling creatures, but but not quite like a snake. Um Plenty of Here's what Plenty had to say about the the amphisbina in the Natural History

Glad Plenty was on it. The amphisbina has a twin head that is one at the tail end as well as though it were not enough for poison to be poured out of one mount, because that's another aspect of it is is that the creature is supposed to be like any mythic serpent. It's highly venomous, and so maybe the ideas it's just so venomous that one head is not enough. It needs two heads for all that venom. Uh. Then likewise, there their accounts of how you can use

its dried skin to say, treat rheumatism. Uh. So there's you know, there are all these different stories about it, and it reminds me a lot of the of some of the things we're discussing about the bassilisk. Now Rose writes that while exaggerated, she thinks it was likely based on some real venomous reptile in the Libyan desert, perhaps one that was capable of slithering in either direction, which, as you said, that's some real snakes. Not that impressive.

But if you didn't know that, it's kind of like if you don't know that horses can lay down, and then you see one laying down, sleeping and you're like, whoa. Then you start reporting you're gonna call it plenty immediately. I didn't tell him or the other possibilities that is that it's a snake that seemed to raise its tail a tail like a head when it was threatened. And we'll come back to to that because there are some

potential examples of that for sure. Then there. You know, if we look outside of Western traditions, we also see double headed serpents in the Aztec tradition. Yeah, with a with a you know, there's a particularly interesting fifteenth or sixteenth century turquoise example that I'm sure everyone's seeing photos of. There's a particularly a nice example of this in the British Museum. Uh. This this turquoise uh serpent creature uh with this like almost bear like head on on either end.

And it's uncertain exactly what it's depicting. So, you know, the the idea maybe that this is just representing that serpentine rebirth that we've talked about, So this is not so much a snake with two heads, but that it's a snake emerging from itself from its skin. It also may be well be related to quetzal codal, which we we did an episode on talking about the importance of

the plumed serpent in in meso American religion. And uh, and we should also point out that that particular god like there there's a snake god that is certainly far removed from anything Falsa Doom represents no thoroughly nondo me And then uh, I also read that it's it's possible that this is not like clearly maybe an Aztec creation, but maybe it's a creation of the mix the mixed

tech people. UM, so you're you're ultimately going with with perhaps several different degrees of separate between the people who originally um dreamed up and created this work of art versus those certainly who now possess it. So obviously the next question is are there two headed snakes in real life? Oh? Yes, yeah, the answer is clearly yes. Two headed snakes of a certain kind I will say, absolutely do exist and are

pretty regularly captured or breading captivity. It seems like maybe once every couple of years, herpetologists come across one new and interesting case of this that blows up in the media. I think they probably get discovered more oftense, just only

sometimes do they really catch fire on the internet. But yes, there are pretty frequently cases of two headed snakes known as diecephalic or polycephalic, meaning you know, two heads or many heads from species like ladder snakes, copper heads, king snakes I've read about in all those species and others, and these snakes generally have two heads, both growing from the neck end of the body. There is no species of snake that is regularly like this. Rather, this is

like this is not an adaptation or evolutionary change. It's a developmental anomaly. It occurs the same way that most other conjoined twins do when an embryo in in utero splits into twins, but it doesn't split all the way, leading to embryos that continue to develop while remaining attached

in some way. That's right, And if if you want some more information on conjoined twins, uh, we we actually discussed this in our Halloween episode whatever Halloween episodes last year, the Tales from the Crypt episode, because of course there's

a Tales from the Crypt episode. There's more than one actually that involves that in an insensitive manner, but so we we we use that episode as an excuse to like, all right, let's let's put aside the trash because let's face the tales in the crypt is ultimately a trashy show. But let's set all that aside and discuss, like, you know, what the actual science is. And so we went through all the various forms that occur, and so, yeah, this this occurs in all kinds of animals and in cases

I've read about. What happens with snakes is you've got two heads that are side by side, both extending from the neck at different um. Sometimes there will be different amounts of like length of the body that that are separated. Sometimes the heads are very close to each other. Sometimes they've got significant amounts of of separate neck, but they

share connections, usually to the top of the elementary canal. Um. But the question would be here, what about a snake with a head on both ends of the length of the body, like in Thulsa Dooms standard for the cult of set Could there be a snake that's got a

head for a tail? Well, we already mentioned that plenty of the elder Um discussed one, and uh, you know, we don't have plenty with us any any longer, but we do have the Daily mail, and uh, and so I was I was looking around, you know, for doing various searches for two headed snakes, and I found an article from September twenty third, two thousand twelve by Daily Mail reporter titled they Both Seemed to Control It. Family finds snake with two heads, one on each end of

its body. And so this all seemed to have happened in South Carolina, and it was originally reported by Fox Carolina presumably It's Fantastic Beasts news Beat newsdesk, and it was it was identified by the local high school's biology department as a rough earth snake. Uh. And you look at these pictures, they're not, you know, super clear. Um,

but there was video. There was video at some point, but the video I couldn't find actually alright good because the video footage I found had been removed, as as had the like I was getting a four or four on the original Fox reporting. But uh, the article was was pretty fun. My favorite line from it was quote, but while the snake pulls itself in opposite directions, young Savannah and Preston are also pulled in different directions on

what to name the snake. That's right. One of them wanted to name it Billy Bob and the other said Oreo right, um, uh yeah. I was looking for more on this story to see to try to dig underneath like the the Daily Mail article, and I couldn't. I couldn't get under it. I don't understand why there wasn't more follow up. I mean, I suspect it's because the snake died and everyone was like, oh no, I'm sad and let's move on with it. But or because the

original reporting might have been mistaken. That's the other. Yeah, we just don't We don't know ultimately. Yeah. So even though there's video, I mean I did watch video, and it's a small snake, but they've got it in like a little igloo cooler and it's slithering around and it has some kind of it wasn't super high definition, but it's got something on its tail. It looks sort of head shaped. Even though I saw some video, I'm still

a little bit skeptical. I wonder if what's being interpreted as a head on the tail end of the snake is not really ahead. Yeah, I mean that's that's a huge possibility. Uh yeah. So just to as as back up for that as that being a possibility, I was looking at a book from J h U Press two thousand eighteen called American Snakes by Sean P. Graham. Uh. And just as a side note before we get to the thing that I went to this book for. As a side note, there's a part I found where the

author is describing strange defense strategies that snakes employ. Uh. And this unrelated one is called cloacle popping. Oh okay, So sometimes have you read about this? No, I mean, if you tell, if you'd asked me what cloacle popping was, I would assume it's like the hottest new dance number that I'm not familiar with. So sometimes when threatened, Uh, some types of snakes will rapidly turn their cloaca inside out.

The cloaca is the common hole at the rear of the body that's used for urinary tract, digestive tract, and reproductive tract. So it's it's a common sort of hole back there that takes care of all the cummings and goings at the back side of the body. So when these snakes get captured or handled or encounter some kind of menace, they will sort of suddenly vigorously poop out part of their own rectum. Basically, it's not a rectum. It's cloaca, which produces these popping or squishing sounds which

are vaguely audible to us. Uh. It's not known what adaptive purpose, if any of this has. But there's your fact of the day, chloecal pot there, Okay. But also the reason I was reading about this is that I was looking for examples, and this is absolutely true that some snake species have a defensive strategy that's known as automimicry, which involves having a tail that looks like a second head. And examples of this include the rubber boa, which can use its tail as a decoy head if it's attacked.

Like if this snake is attacked, if you've seen pictures of the rubber boa, you might have seen it not just coiled, but sort of tied up in itself like a not it'll you know, be a jumble, and while it's in this tangle, it will raise its tail all up as if it were raising its head up, and allow whatever is attacking it to attack its tail, while you know, the real head is defended under the coiled

body and perhaps searching for an escape route. Right. And so in this it has a lot in common with various other animals where the ideas of a predator is going to attack, you draw their attack away from them. The more sensitive parts of your anatomy draw them away from them from like your brain or your Torso get them towards the tail. There are some creatures that even practice something that's known as autotomy, where they will like release their tail sort of as a distraction or a

gift to the predator while the rest of them can escape. Yeah. I encountered this on a nature path over the weekend. I was walking with my son and lo and behold, there in the path is we see a little lizard tail still moving, still flopping back and forth, no sign of the of its former owner. And so we were trying to decide, well, what happened here? Did did the lizard you know, an attempt to prevent predation and it didn't work? Or did it work? And it's ever all

the parties have gone their separate ways. Uh. Yeah, it's a fascinating survival adaptation. And there I believe there is an episode of stuff to blow your mind in the vault about it. Yeah. I think we did a two parter about tails. Long We talked about the scorpion scorpion autonomy, Yeah, where its tail will come off, But then it can't

live much longer after that because it can't poop. That's right, the tail or, one of the lost segments of the tail contained the scorpion anus, and therefore it can never poop again. Which I mean, as far as scorpion timelines get, it's probably not that bad. But that's the world of scorpions. Let's get back to the world. How do you know how bad it is I speak for the scorpions, Well,

I mean never having to poop again. I can just imagine, Yeah, there's gonna be there's gonna be some huge downsides to that, but then there are certain upsides, namely not having to poop again. Okay, so I want to be clear. I want to try to be humble about what's going on with the with the supposed two headed, you know, head on the tail snake here. I don't know that what's going on here is like a mistaken case of automimicry.

I I just will say that I'm not yet convinced that this is really a snake with a head on both ends. It seems a little hard for me to imagine exactly how that happens, Like, where is the cloaca for one thing, Is it in the middle of the snake? Well, the two heads go out from each side. All the snakes, all the snakes where we have confirmed accounts that, like a really well documented that I could find are where the heads appear at the same end. And so I'm yeah,

I'm I'm skeptical about this. I am not yet convinced that this is for real. Yeah, I definitely would love to see more evidence. Um, be it just visual evidence of this particular snake or just more people saying oh yeah, Like I would love to hear from the the actual uh science teacher who resumably weigh in on this. Oh yeah, if you've seen this thing up close and you're listening

now get in touch. Yeah. And likewise, I feel like the town that this occurred in, like this should be if this was real, this snake should be like the mascot for the city at this point. Um, so yeah, talking pulling itself into uh. But but anyway, just to get back to the broader subject of polycephaly or having two heads in the serpent world, Um, it's rare, but

it does seem to occur. It seems to occur more in the snake world, but it's really hard to say for sure because such specimens they tend to die fast in the wild. Yeah, I've seen it speculated, but not known for sure that it happens more often in snakes in captivity than it does in wild snakes. But we that's not something that's know and it's just kind of

a possibility. I found a two thousand twelve paper in the Bulletin of the Chicago or Herpetological Society titled two headed Snakes Make high Mate It's Pets by Van Walock, and the author points out that there was a nineteen thirty seven book by an individual by the name of Cunningham on the subject of two headed snakes, and that book catalog nine and fifty cases in one d and

sixty nine species from ninety four genera and um. The author here writes that currently, and this is two thousand twelve, currently, uh, there were one thousand fifty known cases one species in a hundred and three genera, and Van Wallack drove home that most of them end up just drowning in the egg, or they're still born, or they die shortly after birth. But if they if they do survive, one of the things is, and this is the key to the title

of the paper, they're difficult to care for. They require extra assistance in in uh, you know, in eating, they need extra systence even when they shed their skin. But they can survive in captivity in some cases. Yeah, but they do encounter all kinds of problems to survival. I mean, they're good reasons you don't usually come across them alive in the wild. For one thing, with two heads, movement is a lot more difficult. You know, you've got two

brains that can struggle for control of the body. Feeding can be more difficult as the two heads sometimes fight each other over access to the food. Also, in some cases after, of course, predation can be more difficult. And then in some cases after feeding, I was reading that if one of the snake's heads smells like prey because it just eight, the other head may sometimes mistake that head for prey and try to attack it, and then we're potentially back in oral Boras country at that point. Yeah.

And another thing that I thought was kind of morbidly interesting in the in the van Wallaka piece that that you just mentioned, there is a risk. For example, if you've got a snake in a two headed snake in a tank, a risk of the snake crawling into apertures or past obstacles, because of course, snakes very often like to hide inside holes and enclosures. But if they have two heads bifurcated at the neck, you can run into a situation where one head is trying to pass by

an obstacle or go into a hole. That's essentially like like smashing the other head against that aperture or that obstacle trying to get past it, and could end up sort of peeling the other head off as it struggles to go forward. That's not good. That's not good for anybody. And uh, and the snakes are not I mean, they don't have a lot of complex cognition. They can't usually think, oh, I should back up, you know, it just doesn't seem

to occur to them. Now, outside of the world of snakes, we should also know that real life worm lizards are also known as Emphis pina um, but they of course only have one head, but their tail does trunkate in a way that kind of resembles a head. So is it a form of automimicry. They think, I'm not entirely sure on that if it actually functions as a as as a mimic a mimic head, or it's just one of these things where where we look at and we say, oh, well, the end kind of looks like a head, and then

they decided to bestow this name upon them. Okay, I think we got to take a break, but we will be right back with more. Alright, we're back. Okay, So we're thinking about Fulsa doom in the Conan the Barbarian movie. One thing that the great Fulsa doom Uh does. One trick he's got up his sleeve is the snake arrow. Yes, so this is one of my my favorite snake tricks

from the film. And there are there's at least there are a couple of scenes where he employs this one extremely dramatically, where he'll he'll draw a venomous snake and then he'll he'll stretch it out and he'll make it rigid like an arrow. And then he will take the rigid snake and he will put it in a bow and then he will fire it as an arrow at one of his enemies. And so he like he takes a venomous snake and uses it as a venomous arrow. Yeah,

this is how he kills Conan's beloved the thief area. Yes, so if you're watching this, maybe you're not asking questions, but I can't help it. But wonder where does this come from? Like they had to have been inspired by this, And even if they weren't inspired by a particular detail from from history and mythology, uh, then clearly they weren't the ones to think of it first. Somebody else came up with this cool idea earlier. Uh. And indeed we do see some form of this in the Hindu epic

the Ramayana. So there are mentions in uh in the Ramayana of serpent arrows or sharpa vanna. And then there's also the Naga Pasha powerful snake turned arrow created created by Brahma. So one particular character, we have the Prince of Lanka, and this is the son of the tin headed Ravana Ravana being. Yeah, he's like the demon king

principal antagonist in in in this particular Hindu epic. Um. And anyway, the Prince of Lanka is named Indrajit and he employs a host of wondrous weapons, including serpent arrows. And I could have this wrong, but it seems like the descriptions vary as to whether these are snakes transformed into arrows or snakes fired as arrows. Again, I don't know, you know at what point you draw a line between

these two things. Also, I'm left wondering if they're venomous like those of the Fulsa doom uses, or do they coil around the victim? Now this is the later would seem to be the case, based on some of the depictions I've seen of Hanuman, the monkey bound up by such an arrow, and so it would almost be something more like a bolus or something like it, Like it binds the enemy, you shoot it at them, and it wraps them up. Yeah, that definitely seems to be what's

taking place in some of these illustrations. I was looking at like you've been shot by a snake and now you're wrapped up in the snake. Now, of course that's again we've gone from um Hollywood film to Hindu mythology. But let's bring it back to history. Okay, So what about just snake venom arrows, not a snake, Like we're not even explore we're not gonna even attempt to mythbust the idea that you could that you could string a snake in a bow and arrow and fire it at somebody.

That's not gonna work. I don't think that would work. I don't think you could get the snake to stay rigid for that. But I do think there have been cases where snakes have been used, uh, you know, in intact as bioweapons, you know, just sort of like seeding enemy territory with poisonous snakes. And certainly the idea of using snake venom on an arrow, Uh, this does seem

to be a thing. I was looking uh at a paper titled Chemical and Biological Warfare and Antiquity from by Stanford's Adrian Mayor of the Geomethology episode, and this was in History of Toxicology and Environmental health. So, um, some of the points that Mayor makes. First of all, snake venom is digestible, so it's actually suitable for killing game.

Oh that's interesting. So like you can eat it without it necessarily harming you, right, yeah, or you don't have to worry about Yeah, I've I've I've felled a deer and now I could potentially eat this deer. I haven't liked, you know, ruined the deer. Another point they make is that in warfare UH, the venom can produce agonizing pain and or a never healing wound. And then there are numerous venomous snakes in the Mediterranean and UH and in

Africa and Asia that one could turn to. And the Greeks and Romans recorded numerous groups that were known to utilize their venom on arrows. Greek geographer Strabo, she writes, wrote of Ethiopian arrows dipped in quote the gall of serpents, and that the so ends of the Caucusus used arrow poison so noxious that the smell alone was supposed to injure you. And then poisonous arrows, though perhaps not snake based, pop up in ancient China and South America as well.

We'll come back to China in a second. Um, oh, this is a big one. Snake venom crystallizes so it can cling and remain viable on a wooden bone and metal points. Okay, so it wouldn't just be like dipping it in water that would run off right, yeah, and fly off as you send the arrow sailing like it would have some sticking potential there um. Also, the Greeks wrote of the deadly arrows of the Scythians coated in scythocon, which was said to be a combination of venom in

various other infectious agents like dung and human blood. Yeah, this comes back to something we'll see in the Chinese example of like people potentially just taking a bunch of things that were known or suspected to be nasty and infectious and combining them together and then using that as a coding for a weapon. Yeah. So the the it might be that there were some vague concepts about biowarfare in the ancient world or you know, before we had a germ theory of disease, say, or modern modern theories

of toxicology and biology and chemistry. But still they would have some vague ideas that there's a bunch of stuff you just group under poison and those things that will will poison you in the direct chemical sense or cause infections exactly. Uh. Mayor also points out that several venomous snakes would have been at the disposal of the Scythians, so the Caucus viper, the European adder, and the sand viper, Alexander the Great, according to his campaign historians encountered snake

venom weapons in the conquest of India. Uh, specifically in Harmatilia in modern day Pakistan. Quote, any man who suffered even a slight wound felt immediately numb and experienced stabbing, pains and convulsions. The victim's skin became pale and cold, and he vomited bile. Soon a black froth exuded from the wound. Purplish green gang green spread rapidly, followed by death.

So the idea was what perhaps this was cobra venom, but uh and that was long the theory, she points out, but that the counter to that is the cobra venom brings on a largely painless death due to respiratory paralysis, so it's likely that it was another species of venomous

snake that was utilized there. Now. On the subject of snake venom and Chinese weapons, Christian and I did an episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind years ago titled Six Deadly Venoms, where we discussed various venoms from history and what their biological component was, and we discussed the Chinese poison goo and what it might have actually been with all of the folklore and superstition removed the idea of being that this was goog was supposed to be a poison that was used by by um um Uh

sort of rival ethnic groups on the border, and so it doesn't it doesn't. The the idea of goo also has connotations of like decay or something. You know, well, they're they're kind of two different there's it's kind of becomes a complex topic because it's you can sort of view it as being a poison that was utilized by a foreign adversary, or it's kind of like an aspect of their foreignness. It gets kind of complicated, and we certainly give it more of a robust treatment in that episode.

But one of the main sources we turned to it on that was the Meal and Poison Interactions on China's Southwest Frontier by Norma Diamond publishing a edition of Ethnology and um this was yeah, this was said to be a poison used by the male people, one of Chinese China's fifty five ethnic groups, mostly in the mountains of southern China, and um the Google folklore of the Tang dynasty from around six eighteen CE onward took a couple

of different forms. Uh. One was that it was just a quasi magical poison created by sealing five different poisonous creatures together in a jar and keeping it in a dark place for a year. So you're throwing a snake, a sinipede, the toad, the scorpion, and the lizard and you just let them duke get out in there until there's only one survivor, and then that survivor dies and then when you open up the jar, bam, you've got

some poison. It's like the Doomsday of poison. Yeah. Um, But in terms of figuring out what the actual poison might be like, if if there's a real poison that was utilized by by this group of people, you have to ask, well, what what was it really? What were they getting it where they weren't really creating a magical poison. But if we set aside all these supernatural ideas, um, you know, there are various theories that arise, but one of them is that there were poisons. Uh, they were

used in hunting by the male. There is the you know, the sap of a particular tree, but also sometimes they would mix this sap with the snake venom and it was widely traded in the area around n Nie. So this is a case where it doesn't sound like they definitely depended on snake venom, but snake venom might have been part of the cocktail, and then we of course have to or like to to what extent it was

an active part of the cocktail. If it was really more about the the the herbal ingredients and the you know, like that the tree sap that was utilized as opposed to the strength of the the snake venom, this would be an interesting topic to come back to because of course one's reminded of to branch over into the amphibian world the various poisoned dart frogs uh and and they

are high toxicity. But of course, the fact of the matter with with with these species is that if you go and see them like your local um, you know, botanical garden or zoo, they're not actually gonna be poisonous there because they don't have access to, uh, the the vegetation that they consume to give them, uh that that

high degree of toxicity. Oh yeah, I mean a lot of extremely poisonous or extremely venomous animals get their potency from something in their natural ecology, often from like a bacterium or something it's from from their their microbiome or something else that they consume. But anyway to bring it all act told thulsa doom venomous arrows. Uh, definitely a thing. Shooting actual snakes at people. Uh, not a thing unless

you are a mythological figure. You know, there are many animals mentioned in the Bible that actually we don't know exactly how to translate them, Like modern scholars aren't sure what this name of an animal refers to. And one of them that's often been kind of confusing is this animal that's mentioned called the arrow snake. Uh, so that's how the name of it is translated, but I never made the connection. I don't know if that means that there's some suggestion that it's a snake that would have

had venom used in arrows. I kind of doubt it, but that's possibility. I mean, you're also left with just the the undeniable comparison between an arrow, which is a very old bit of human technology, and then naturally occurring snake. Like the snake can be stretched out and it looks kind of like an arrow. The comparison is unavoidable, both in understanding what it arrow is and understanding what a snake is. They're both considered deadly, yes, even though most

snakes not deadly. We don't want to contribute to snake panic on here. Snakes are great. You want snakes living around your house, You want them, And in fact, I would love to come back to that. I've already sort of planted the seeds. We'll see, but I'm I'm thinking about having a guest come back on the show and discuss the importance of snakes in our our local habitats. I am so on board for that. I want to

do whatever we can to fight reptile hate. Al Right, Well, on that note, we're gonna take one more break, and when we come back, we will discuss one more aspect of Falsa Doom's cult and how it compares to the natural world. Thank alright, we're back. So clearly, the best thing about the Cone of the Barbarian movie, as we've discussed before, is James Earl Jones and the role of Fulsa Doom. But but he does one thing in the

movie that we haven't gotten to yet. I don't think we've mentioned, which is that he turn himself into a giant snake. Oh, yes, he does this. He changes into a giant snake in order to escape the vengeance of Conan. Yeah, there's also a part where Conan just goes into a tower and kills a giant snake for no good reason except I guess he wanted to steal and the snake woke up while he was stealing. Well, the snake was a pet, that was it was it Rex or had right?

Which one? Was it by spinel a Thora secundus from a practis guardian of the universe. Yes, so he had raised this snake from a child he lived in the temple. It was the pet of Thusa Doom. So, but it's also like the security device and Conan and his compatriots had broken into the temple to steal things. It's just one of the many examples in the movie where you see Conan, like uh enacting brutal violence on something where you kind of take the other things side. It's like,

I'd kind of like to see the snake win here. Yeah, Conan is just chopping its head off. I'm trying to steal a gym. Wou't you leave me alone? Yeah? And certainly Conan does succeed in mass occurring this giant, beautiful reptile um, but also James Earl Jones can turn himself into a massive giant snake, which appears is not the same as the earlier snake. There's just multiple giant snakes

in the movie. Yeah, I mean that's one of the authentically this is one of the aspects of like old pulpe wizards is you don't know what they're capable of. They can pull off any any number of of dark sorceries. Uh, they have a pet snake, they can turn into a pet snake. There they can make snakes and arrows. There's no limit. But it leads to the the unavoidable question like how big due terrestrial snakes get? How big have

they gotten in the past? Is there anything in the world today as big as the snake we see in the Temple of set And if not, was there ever anything that big? So let's start with the present and work our way back. So this is a topic I've I've looked into previously, actually ended up writing an article about this for How Stuff Works a few years back.

And when we look when we discuss the biggest snakes, there are a couple of species that we turned to, and in both cases we turned to the females because they run larger. So we have the Asian reticulated python or python reticulattice. And these tend to be the longest snakes that you find in the natural world. The most uh reputable record lengths are around twenty five ft or

seven point six meters. Field measurements in a survey averaged a little under twelve feet or three point two meters in the jungles of southern Sumatra, maxing out at just shy of twenty ft or six point one ms um and uh. Then in South America we have the green anaconda. Okay, this would be of the movie Anaconda. To bring in another another giant snake movie, another great cheesy, cheesy action movie, the one that it ends up eating John Voyd for

a while for a while. Speaking of films I loved when I was younger and recently went back and revisited, Anaconda is another one. Yeah, I I love that when I was a kid. I went back and watched it within the past couple of years, and that is a great cheesy creature flick. It is worth a watch now is the creature in question the giant snake or John Voyd because he's the villain. But John Voyd in it is also speaking of like like actors who go whole

hog just like go over the horizon with their villain performances. Uh, John Void's doing it in this movie. He's got this accent that who knows what it's supposed to sound like. He's like a he's playing like a South American Dracula who hunts snakes. It's just amazing. I need to see that one again. So yes, if you go to South America, you'll get the green anaconda. And these tend to be

the more massive of the two species here. Larger females typical rate typically reach lengths of nine ft two point seven meters, and they way upward of two hundred pounds or nine point seven krams. Up to twenty nine and thirty thirty two ft lengths have been considered possible by experts. So this tends to be when you get into arguments about what's the largest living snake. Uh, you know you're gonna have people that are on team articulated python. You're

gonna have people that are on team green anaconda. If you go to a zoo or a reptile house and you happen to see um specimens of both species, you could probably make a case for either depending on how large the individual is. And also in either case, they're also wilder stories and even some photo evidence of skins UH that suggest larger creatures. So it might be just a reported sighting or someone said, look, here's a picture

of the skin we got from the snake. The problem in these situations is that snake skins, once they've been removed from the snake, may be stretched out a bit. So not only you can stretch your story, and you can stretch your physical evidence and it becomes harder to lean on it um. But to just give an idea about the about some of the crazier sightings UH. In ninety three, Fritz w Uptograph reported seeing a fifty to sixty ft or fifteen to eighteen meter green anaconda. And

that's one that I've seen the experts do. They really kind of rolled their eyes at that one. But that's so that both of these are cases where those giant snakes, those are impressive creatures if you get to see them at any kind of a reptile house or certainly if you ever get to see one in the wild, like

that's that's impressive. But they're not as big as the as the giant snake we see in Cone in the Barbarian To find something that big, we have to go back in time, uh, you know, not to the Hyborian age, you know, we have we have to go well past the time of my adventure. We have to go back sixty million years. Uh. Specifically have to go to what is now known as because the country of Colombia, and we have to go to the Sera John rainforest, and

that is where we will find the Titana Boa. Titana Boa, yes, uh, and this is uh, this is a creature that's received a lot of press. Uh. There's been a lot of there's some cool artwork that was created with to go along with the studies about the Titana Boa and the fossil evidence that that informs us about its size. But this was an impressive serpent. This was this is kind of a very like a hot box jungle environment. And that's one of the reasons that, uh, this serpent could

reach such a size sixty million years ago. Uh. The temperatures there uh probably an average yearly temperature of eighty six to ninety three degrees fahrenheit or thirty to thirty four degrees celsius, far hotter than modern tropical rainforest temperatures. And and the size of this creature was impressive. University of Florida paleontologists estimate its tip to tail link that a whopping forty two eight or thirteen meters, and it would have had a crushing it would have had a

crushing weight of more than a ton. Wow. So this particular species, titanaboa, would definitely be able to stand in for that giant snake we see in ConA, the Barbarian. And don't you lay a finger on it? Conan, don't you hurt the snake. It is a holy, blameless creature. It is uh. You know, whatever your feelings are about Fulsa Doom and his awful death cult um which grant it is an awful death cult. You know, we can't

blame that on the snake. Why don't they look I have a question about snake size and uh and are supposed instincts. Now. We talked a little bit in the last episode about the idea that there's there's an ongoing debate about the extent to which are the common fear of certain types of animal forms, particularly things like snakes and spiders. Is is hardwired into human brains, it's the thing that you're born being afraid of with out even

having having been told it exists. Or is it a culturally conditioned fear and something we learn about from fiction and from people around us that we're supposed to be afraid of. And there's obviously going to be some cultural conditioning. The question is is there something that's there before that is? Is it there in the brain before the culture gets

to you. And there's some evidence I think that, you know, even like babies looking at pictures of snakes get people dilation when when they see an image of a snake. But my question would be does that scale like does the I mean like, once you get to a snake of this size, it's so big it's not even really recognizable as a snake in the way you would normally perceive snake threats. It becomes a dragon, it becomes some

kind of completely other thing. I mean, the kind of snakes that would be any sort of normal threat that you might have biological conditioning to avoid would be relatively small snakes. Their threat would be in their venom, not in their size. But you're you're saying, like, if we were to encounter a titana boa in the wild, would it even register as a snake to us? Well, I think on on one level, you know, yeah, it wouldn't

have to. Like, I think there is something, there's that kind of magical moment, like a darkly magical moment, whenever you perceive a predator in the wild, like like, not not not just any predator, but a creature that that could conceivably prey upon a human um at least, you know,

a weakened human. Uh, it seems to it feels like it sets off different alarms in your brain, you know, like when you lock eyes with that lion when you're I've certainly been in this situation when you're the first person to the zoo and and the lion sees you, and you lock eyes with a lion, or perhaps the lion looks at the small child that's traveling with you, um, and you realize, oh, I would you know if if if not for this glass wall, if not for for

the artificial as acts of this encounter, Um, I would be the one fleeing. Now, I would be the one, you know, at least backing away, if not running in tearror. Uh So I feel like that would certainly kick in if you were to encounter the Titana bo. Yeah. I guess I'm not saying people wouldn't be afraid of it with good reason. I would. I think they wouldn't say eke is the is the difference. They wouldn't say, eke a snake. They would say, oh my god, a snake.

But I guess humans in the Titana bow never existed at the same time, so there'll be no reason to have this kind of conditioned fear. Yeah. I mean the closest would be, you know, any degree of conditioning that might come from being around um. You know green anicon is in reticulated pythons. But that's a different that's a different level of It's totally not the same thing as the danger of a venomous snake, where I could conceivably accidentally,

um wind up bitten by the snake. But I think also a lot of the danger there with the venomous snakes that it has been hypothesized if we have some kind of hardwired instinctual reaction to snakes. It was mainly about children, right, that there would be small children would be vulnerable to them, right, And of course that's going to be the case with a lot of predators in general. You know, the the wild cat that is not a danger to an adult human could be a danger to

a small child. I mean, definitely that's the case, even with modern day crocodilians. Oh but they're also they're definitely crocodilians that are a danger to adults. Yes, yes, but but but even you know, more so so to a diminutive human. Yeah. Well, I'd just like to wrap up today by saying I'm on thulsa doom side. I would join his cult. I would take his side against Conan and his evil friends. And uh yeah, there's where my loyalty is. Okay, even even though, just to be clear,

they do practice cannibalism. It's firmly established, you know, big cannib annibalism here and there. To hang out with spin only thorson, you know, yeah, they don't seem to be a certain amount of just hanging out and chill. Uh. In the temple set flesh is stronger than steel. That's right, that's what he tells us. All right, So there you have it. Um Again, we set out to do one episode.

We had to break this one into two. But I think it was worthwhile because we got to explore a few things that I don't think we would have necessarily have recovered on the show had we not been prompted by Fulsa Doom's teachings. Likewise, we get to highlight some areas we might come back to in the future. Uh, were related to the study of of serpents. Yeah, totally. I'm not done. This is not this is not just another snake cult. We will be the snake religion by

the time we're finished. All right. Well, Uh. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you want to check out those past movie episodes that we've done Highlander two, two thousand and one, of Space Odyssey, The Dark Crystal. You can find them all. It's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. And if you want to support the show, the best thing you can do is rate and review us wherever

you have the power to do so. Um, you know, wherever you get this podcast asked give us some stars leave a nice comment that helps us out. Also, if you haven't checked out Invention, check out Invention. It's the other podcast that we do. It is an invention by invention exploration of human techno history. We've been looking at a lot of photography and motion picture. So you know, if you perhaps you check this episode out because you're into films and you're like, what kind of science are

they going to squeeze out of this? Uh, this puppy well, uh, then go check out Invention and learn about where the technology of films came from. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and Tory Harrison. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest a topic for the future, just to say oh, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production

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