The Very Dust, Part 4: Mythology in Dust

horrible pyroglyphid dust mites. We also talked about some of the complicated interactions between atmospheric dust and climate and weather. In Part two, we talked about dust bunnies both inside the home and potent in outer space, as well as some historical attitudes about dust and how those attitudes relate

to things like interior design and horror literature. And then in part three, we talked about the role of dust in urban Victorian London and in nineteenth century literature again and also got into dust as an illustration of the philosophical puzzle known as the Sororiety's paradox or the paradox of the heap. And now we're back today to talk more about dust. I think we're going to focus today primarily on dust, the role of dust in religion and mythology.

It's minuscule scale, it's almost invisible accumulation, and it takes on additional meanings in the light then of both mythological and scientific explanation. So it's something that, yeah, it's everywhere, it's every day, but it also works in such a subtle way and can be quite beautiful that it does seem to attract this kind of dream making attention.

It's just something that's everywhere and is worth nothing. At the same time, I sort of like what you're talking about, rob with dust being both mundane and all around us, but also seemingly sort of magical. Sometimes. I think it's an interesting that dust has, even in its use as a symbol of meaninglessness or worthlessness, a real potency like it is, so it is considered so worthless that it is really captivating image and it matters.

dust and mythic, legendary, folkloric, and religious traditions here. So we're going to try and cover some cantilagizing examples, but will inevitably leave some things off, in which case, you know, that's an opportunity for folks to write into us and share other examples of dust from mythology, folklore, and so forth that we might find interesting and we can discuss on future listener mail episodes.

Halloween episodes. But anyway, so I was going to look up some of the most interesting references to dust in Mesopotamian literature, and so I ended up searching for references to dust in the myths from Mesopotamia, Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and others from Oxford University Press, nineteen ninety eight, edited by Stephanie Dally, And the most interesting one that I came across is one you might know, the sort of

famous house of Dust passage in the Gilgamesh epic. This is in tablet seven of the Gilgamesh story and this imagery comes in when Gilgamesh's friend, the wild Man in key Dou, is cursed and dying. Basically, he is being punished by the gods. The gods are getting revenged because the two of them, both Gilgamesh and in key Dou, for some reason, only in key Dou gets punished here. They both attacked the demon Humbaba in the Cedar forest, and they attacked another god to They've been doing a

lot of damage. They're they're a wild pair. So in key Dou is cursed by the gods. He's on his deathbed here and he has a terrifying dream, a truly revolting and disturbing vision of the underworld, the land of the dead. And I'm not going to quote the whole thing here, I'm gonna skip around a bit and pull out some passages from his description of the dream. And again this is the translation in that Myths and Misopotamia I described then in Kidu wept, for he was sick

at heart. He lay down alone. He spoke what was in his mind to his friend. Listen again, my friend, I had a dream in the night. The sky called out, the earth replied. I was standing between them. There was a young man whose face was obscured. His face was like that of an Anzu bird. He had the paws of a lion. He had the claws of an eagle. He seized me by my locks, using great force against me, like a wild bull. He trampled on me. He squeezed my whole body. I cried out, save me, my friend,

don't desert me. But you were afraid and did not help me. He seized me, drove me down to the dark house dwelling of Rkala's god, to the house where those who stay are deprived of light, where dust is their food and clay their bread. They are clothed like birds with feathers, and they no light, and they dwell in darkness. Over the door and the bolt dust has settled. Oh wow, so some of this does depend on the

English translation. Some of the you know the hauntingness like you can read different translations of this passage that kind of hit in slightly different ways. And I will say that sometimes the word dust here is in some cases translated as dirt, but most often I've seen it as dust,

and it really makes sense as dust. When you think about the idea that, like, to this house of dust, to this land of darkness over the door and the bolt the dust has settled, it's a really striking, powerful, creepy image that you know, it's like there's no coming and going anyway. And Kido goes on to describe how great kings of the world have their crowns piled up in heaps in the underworld, though I did wonder how many crowns makes a heap?

their food and clay is their bread. So finally, in this passage, in key Do does die from the god curse, and this vision of death is so awful that it drives Gilgamesh to go on his epic quest to discover the secret of immortality. And so he ends up, you know, searching for like a plant at the bottom of the ocean that he thinks can save him from death, because he cannot end up like in key Do in the house of dust. So it's literature like this that makes

me think. In some cases, the imagery of dust is used, of course, to signal something about worthlessness, like dust is not good as food, so it is not worthwhile as food. You do not want to be forced to eat it because it does not serve the function food should serve. But there is also a deeper meaning here. It's like there's a worthlessness deeper than mere trash or unwanted physical substance.

There is a cosmic horror to this dust that the eating of the dust it seems to me to symbolize a fear so deep that it can't even be articulated. It's the fear of that, which is the opposite of vitality, the opposite of life, and the opposite of all meaning.

I think there's one where Pluto the dog is visited by a canine sandman, and you get to see all this play out in animated form. But if you're like me, you probably didn't. Were rarely paused to consider how weird this is, right, because.

Sandman maybe sounds more abrasive dust man, And the idea of dust in your eyes is ultimately, I think more where this is based. And indeed the sand man is also known as the dust man, and Brewers includes examples of sayings that would have invoked the dust man. So you might have a situation where I suppose you might be becoming sleepy, or more likely there are children becoming sleepy, and you might say something like, oh, the dust man has arrived.

ultimately pleasant dreams. She mentions that the dust man in Danish and Swedish lore is known as only luke oui, which means, and I'm probably mispronouncing that, only close your eyes. And in this tradition he is a tiny elf or fairy in a silk jacket that changes color with the light. Which I like that detail because to me, it makes me think of what we've been discussing about, you know, motes of dust being caught in a ray of light and having this ethereal quality. And so what does he do?

He comes up and he blows magic dust into a child's eyes and onto their neck. This makes your eyelids heavy and makes your head heavy. You can't hold your head up straight anymore. So it's time to go to bed. And then once you're in bed, once you're safely a snooze, he'll come to your bed and open up a magical umbrella over you, and there will be all these wonderful pictures on the underside of the umbrella that will fill

your dreams with wonderful stories. Now, isn't that delightful? Now this is not true for naughty kids, however, but it's not too bad. You know, naughty kids can get it, can have a pretty hard time in these sorts of tales. But according to Rose, naughty kids just get a standard umbrella. So it's not the umbrella we've met with beautiful stories on the underside of it. It's just an umbrella, So

no special dreams for you. But also you're not like chased around by you know, some strange demons or anything. And of course there are other varieties of this sort of spirit in European tradition, but they don't all use dust, and they don't certainly don't all use umbrellas.

Sometimes it's spelled g o O f e r and other times it's spelled g o O p h e R. And I was reading a about this in an article on the low Country Digital History Initiative website. This is affiliated with South Carolina's College of Charleston, titled Spiritual Practices in the low Country discussing African American religious practices in

the Antebellum and post Bellum periods. These are particular traditions that are sometimes referred to broadly as who do and the article here discusses conjuring magic of West and West Central African origin that enslaved people's practiced outside of or alongside Christian religious traditions. It notes individuals given the title

of goopher doctor. The term seemingly related to the Congo word kufwa, meaning to die, And I was reading elsewhere in folk Belief and Custom in the Blues by Mimi Klarr published in Western Folklore back in nineteen sixty that describes this goopher dust as a powder to be burned in a kind of long disay since conjuring of the illness, and mentions that the powder is generally associated with graves.

And by long distance, I mean, you know, it doesn't necessarily need to be cross country, but just like the target is not maybe physically present at the conjuring. Now, the next one I want to touch on is a concept involving a kind of corpse dust in Navajo traditions.

So a while back I was researching a topic related to rituals and folk beliefs of the Navajo people in various sources I reached out to pointed me in the direction of a work by an anthropologist by the name of Clyde Klockhon who lived nineteen oh five through nineteen sixty, particularly his book Navajo Witchcraft from nineteen forty four. The version I have as a publication from nineteen eighty nine,

and I think there were some editions made. I'm not sure if those editions were made in the eighties or if they had been made previously in the nineteen sixties. However, so Klokhoon's anthropology work was very well regarded. But I do want to against stress that the timeframe of the working question here. So he worked among the Navajo people during the nineteen thirties and the late nineteen twenties, that's

when his field work took place. But you know, he was an outsider working within those communities, and that this is not like modern anthropological work, but it's still fascinating.

And he uses Western terms such as witchcraft in discussing these magical concepts, though he himself wrote that this term was not completely accurate, as you know, it's more of a dependence on a broadly comparable Western concept to understand or discuss what is occurring in Navajo culture, and he suggested that a more precise description would be quote Navajo idea and action patterns concerned with the influencing of events

by supernatural techniques that are socially disapproved. So what we're talking about here, it's not something you would want to confuse with other examples of Navajo rituals and beliefs. This would be like a subset of those in which the techniques were generally disapproved of, or I would say even broadly disapproved of.

traditions concerning concerning adente. These would be men and women that were thought to pursue a sort of morally descendant path to magical power, the path of the Adante, the witchery way, as the author describes it here, is a path of death, desecration, poison, and beast forms. It also sometimes involves a special preparation of dust. He describes the alleged use of a preparation often translated as a poison ground from corpses and said to look like pollen. Quote.

It may be dropped into a hogan from the smoke hole, placed in the nose or mouth of a sleeping victim, or blown from furrowed sticks into the face of someone in a large crowd. Now, depending on the telling of the story, there may be immediate symptoms, such as the blackening of the tongue or lockjaw, but in other other tellings there's nothing so obvious. But generally the way it's supposed to go is that the victim begins to waste

away and ultimately dies the witchery way. He writes pursuit for various reasons, inclu vengeance the pursuit of riches, and the riches would primarily be obtained via grave robbing or something he discusses as fee splitting, in which an audane would partner with a healer and then split the healer's fee. So basically something like an illness scam with a healer where you're like, I'll cause the illness and you treat the illness, and you just give me half of what

they pay you. To treat it, but other audente seemingly pursued a more chaotic evil path, just doing harm for the sake of doing harm. Now, I want to note here that the clock on himself in the book and made no claim that witchcraft and sorcery as cited in these examples were indeed actually practiced. You know, it's ultimately a lot of mystery here. But rather what we can focus on are that these were stories and traditions. These were stories told, These were ideas that were discussed, you know,

concerning unexplained illness, superstition, suspicion of other individuals. And he writes a link than the book about the various reasons for so called witchcraft traditions in a given culture, including various social functions, the management of anxiety, and more. So, you know, his treatment ultimately is not saying like, here's this, here's this weird story. Look how weird it is. It's also not here's this thing that is said people definitely

did this. It's it's more complicated than that. But I mainly wanted to focus on the idea that here is another culture where we see some idea of a corpse derived dust being used in magical rituals of one sort or another that are socially disapproved of within the culture

in which these stories originate. Right in this case, in this particular case with the adante, this would be someone who is doing you know, bad, socially reprehensible magic, and therefore the idea that they're using some sort of a

corpse powder see seems based in that. But there are other examples we find around the world where the corpse does takes on a different hear And so, continuing this theme of magical dust connected to the bodies of the dead, let's turn to some European traditions that get into this. I was looking at a paper titled Dynamic Dirt Medieval

Holy Dust ritual Erosion and Pilgrimage Eco Poetics. This is by Susan Signy Morrison, published in special collection Waste, Disposability, Decay and Depletion from twenty nineteen.

to carry away mud, They're going to erode things. That's just how it goes.

So she points out that while manure might be seen more as a pure waste product by modern and urban standards, medieval Europeans would have had a more unquote redemptive view of manure. So it's not an end product, but a transition, a beginning even in some ways.

have soil. You may have different types of soil, and perhaps that also opens up room for some soils to have healing qualities and be rather different in character compared to other soils. Anyway, she ultimately discusses two sorts of dust and dirt that I think are note here for us. The first is dirt that has come into contact with the bodies, the blood, or other substances of holy individuals. So in the same way that the finger of a deceased saint may be deemed holy, the dirt that soaked

up their blood also becomes holy. And she cites two different descriptions here from the English monk the Venerable Bead, who lives six seventy two or six seventy three through seven thirty five. We've talked about Bead briefly on the show before. I believe yes, so here's the first one. And when he had reverently deposited these relics, Germanus took away with him a portion of the earth from the

place where the blessed martyr's blood had been shed. The martyr here is one alban By the way, the earth was seen to have retained the marcher's blood, which had reddened the shrine where his persecutor had grown pale with fear. And this next one is really good too. Okay, at the place where he and he is King Oswald here was killed fighting for his country against the heathen. Sick

men and beasts are healed to this day. Many people took away the very dust from the place where his body fell and put it in water, from which sick folk who drank it received great benefit. This practice became so popular that, as the earth was gradually removed, a pit was left in which a man could stand. Many miracles are reported as having occurred at this spot or by means of the earth taken from it.

You know, there is now a plaque there, Maybe the concrete has been changed since people were going there. You have to do things to keep from eroding everything. So it's you know, we but we lean into the magic of it. I am here where this thing happened, and therefore I am closer to sort of the the idea of the event, the spirit of the event, and so forth. Yeah,

now I guess I shouldn't feel shocking. I imagine within a faith that includes the doctrine of trends of substantiation, you know, the idea that the matter of communion is or becomes the flesh and blood of Christ and the body. But also again it plays into this understanding of ashes to ashes that we see in other traditions, and it gets into this idea of the transitional nature of dirt

and soil. So it's not purely tied to theoretical matters, but it also may be tied to sort of ecological realities, you know, things that would have been sort of observable about dirt and soil in the cycle of life in the world around you. Now another area she gets into, though, is that there's also just dust that gathers on certain holy relics, and this dust in and of itself, in some context is thought to be holy, so it's often called tomb dust, and it will settle on reliquaries of

saints and also within actual tombs. And I found this quite fascinating because it kind of it seems to line up with some of these ideas we've talked about concerning the natural accumulation of dust and a house or other human space, you know, the times invisible aspect of this accumulation, as well as the ethereal nature of glimpsing those motes of dust floating in a ray of sunlight, which I was thinking too. It was like, oh, this is is kind of like the golden rain of Zeus, which is

sometimes described as golden dust. I think it's more oftentimes described as as a rain or a shower of gold, but sometimes as golden dust. This being the form that Zeus takes to impregnate the mortal princess Dana.

the Earth, the stars, and like all humans. Elsewhere in this book they mentioned various Han Chinese myths that allude to the need to regularly wash the sun and moon, as even the sun and moon acquired dust over time, and this is also echoed and I think in some other traditions in various other Chinese ethnic groups. Now, I was reminded of something that this is actually something I discussed on the podcast years and years ago, an episode on poisons that I did with Christian But I went

back and looked at the source again. It was titled The Mail and Poison Interactions on China's Southwest Frontier by Norma Diamond. This was published in a nineteen eighty eight edition of Ethnology, and this one gets it basically deals with various ideas of poison in this border country. And I'm not necessarily going to get into all of this again. I think the episode was titled The Six Deadly Poisons, where were talked about different poisons but she discusses this

idea of Goo folklore from the Tang dynasty. So this one in six eighteens ce onward, and in particular, you

have this idea of the five poisonous creatures. So in this idea goo, this special poison was kind of a quasi magical poison created by a kind of by this process that I think aligns with some of these kind of like Western alchemical processes that we've talked about, you know, where clearly what we're describing here is impossible, but it has kind of like the trappings of chemical ritual and so forth.

one survivor. They're going to become a tra duncan of poisonous creatures trae duncan. Yeah, like the what is it?

amount of xenophobia and accusations of witchcraft. But but that's and then also as Diamond gets into in this article, there also are theories about, well, if this was an actually there was an actual poison, what could it have been? Not something made by forcing poisonous creatures to eat each other and then grounding up the victor, but rather something maybe based in the use of arsenic or various other substances.

forced on them one their asleep. That sort of thing lining up, you know, with the idea of the Navajo corpse powder that we discussed earlier, and I think more broadly kind of getting into this realization that sometimes there are particles in the air that might not be good for us, you know, and without a germ theory, without you know, real scientific knowledge to go on, you just kind of had to sort of guess. Like it was

a you know, certainly had this idea. You see them in various parts of the world of bad air, harmful air, or I was reading a Navajo traditions, you have this idea sometimes of of there being like a various types of wind. I was looking at a book titled Holy Wind and Navajo Philosophy by James kle McNelly, and like sometimes a wind would have like a like a bad smell to it that might be associated with dead animals

or said to emerge from the mouths of animals. And so yeah, it's like, I think there's a certain amount of trying to make sense of how the air or things in the air can influence human health and or behavior. And in some cases it might be connected to nefarious individuals within your group or just outside of your group.

you malaria or some other disease. And so even though these beliefs didn't get the full way there, it does seem like they may have been based on picking up some kind of correlation.

So if you have additional ones you want to bring up, or if you have an added insight on anything we've discussed here, certainly write in We'd love to discuss it on a future episode of Listener Mail or episodes published every Monday and Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. Our core episodes of science and Culture are on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a short form episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.