October 10, 2024 • 45 mins
In this series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss some of the more noteworthy, fascinating and potentially terrifying gods and demons from the religions and myths of the ancient Mesopotamian world. It’s a who’s who of Pazuzu-adjacent entities.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we have returned
with Part two of our Halloween season series on the
monsters and demons of ancient Mesopotamian religion. Now, if you
haven't heard part one yet, this is really one of
those series where I think you should go back and
listen to part one first. I would recommend that because
in that episode we have a general discussion about the
(00:38):
connotations of the English word demon and the ways it
both does and does not describe these entities from ancient Mesopotamia,
and we also get into some general general trends and
observations about the spirits and supernatural forces of ancient Mesopotamian religions.
But in that episode we also talk about a number
(00:59):
of specific horrifying creatures depicted in the literature and artworks
of this region and time period, including Humbaba or Huahwa,
whose breath is death and whose face is an omen
when seen in the spilled intestines of a sheep. We
talked about the terrifying oppressor Lamashtu, who threatens infants and
(01:21):
pregnant women, And we talked about Pazuzu, the demon or
perhaps god, depending on your take of the Southwest Winds,
known best to modern audiences as the devil that possesses
Reagan McNeil in the Exorcist. And then finally we talked
about some actually quite surprising qualities of Pazuzu in his
original cultural context, in which he was often seen as
(01:45):
not just a malevolent threat in himself, but as an
apotropaic protector, warding off other evil beings, the Riddic principle,
if you will.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
We also talked about how no one really knows for
sure how to pronounce any of these words or names.
We have some best practices recommended by scholars, and we
try to follow that, but ultimately no one can know
for sure. Like, for instance, inky do, What if it's
inky do? No one ever says it like that, But
it's not impossible that that was the original pronunciation, right,
(02:18):
I think people say it like that, inky do.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Yeah, I've heard that inky do.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
I don't know, it just feels wrong.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
It just thinks I've said it that way.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
It doesn't have the same gravitized you know, I don't
know it sounds a little like preschooler educational program.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
It does sound like a word my daughter would say,
just one of those words she makes up.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Now. When I told my wife that we were going
to do a couple of episodes about ancient Mesopotamian demons,
she jokingly asked if we were going to talk about Gooser. Ah.
And you know, readers of Tobin Spirit Guide know all
too well that Gozer the Gazarian is said to have
been an ancient extra dimensional entity worshiped in ancient Mesopotamia,
attended to by two guardians, Vince Clortho the key Master
(03:01):
and Zeel the Gatekeeper. Ah.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Yes, who can forget the frantic search of Rick moranis
for the Gatekeeper. I am Vince Clortho, key Master of Gozer.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yes, we are, of course talking about Ghostbusters again. And
to be very clear, Goser and their attendance are fictional
creations of Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis, and their names
have no connection to the actual mythologies the actual religions
of ancient Mesopotamia. In fact, in interviews, Ackroyd has pointed
to two key inspirations for the name Gozer. In the film,
(03:32):
he claims there was a Goser Chevrolet dealership in upstate
New York, and that the name Gozer is somehow connected
to her involved in an alleged Poltergeist haunting. So I
don't doubt Akroyd on either of these counts. But I
also couldn't find any solid evidence of either. But you know,
it seems very likely on both counts, because I believe
Gozer or something like it is a relatively common Turkish
(03:56):
last name, And as far as haunting stories go, I
mean sure, anything as possible.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
In the realm of ghosts. You can make up whatever
words you want.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Yeah. But that being said, Gozer is a pretty great
fictional demonic god played by Slaves Jovin and voiced by
Patty Edwards and the original Ghostbusters and Act and then
in the recent Ghostbusters Afterlife played by Olivia Wilde and
voice by show ray adashlu. I like both incarnations of
(04:30):
the deity. Both both awesome in my opinion.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
I haven't seen the new Ghostbusters stuff, but.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
It's worth it for Gozer, worthy for Gozer. Okay, So
Goser works, especially in the original Ghostbusters, in a large
part because Akroyd and Ramis really had a lot of
enthusiasm clearly for weird fiction acroid in particular for the
occult and spiritualism. I think he said, I have like
a family connection to some of that stuff, and you know,
(04:59):
to a limited degree, I would say the idea of
Gozer is a kind of guardian death god, guard of
the god of the underworld, feels appropriate for ancient Mesopotamia.
That being said, I believe in the film or supporting
material they give a date of like six thousand BCE
for Goser's worship, and that would put this figure well
(05:22):
outside the historical framework that we've been considering in these episodes.
So Gozer would in this case be like a firmly
Neolithic deity.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
It would be from before written sources.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Yeah, so again no actual grounding in ancient Mesopotamian myth.
Though the name, as you and I were discussing off
Mike the other day, does sound similar to the ancient
Egyptian pharaoh that is therefore essentially a god, an individual
by the name of Joser Jesser Zoser. Even often I
(05:55):
think the primary spelling you run across in English is Djosc,
but I've also seen it as Zeo z Er.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Hmm.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Okay, his name apparently refers to the ancient Egyptian symbol
of stability, a kind of terrorist pillar known as the Jed.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
I mainly associate the pharaoh Joser with his his pyramid,
which is a step pyramid, and it's different from the
pyramids on the Giza plateau. But this one is really early.
It was apparently like the first of the big stone
monuments of ancient Egypt. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Yeah, So anyway, that's just a brief aside about Gozer.
But and then when we may come back briefly to
the idea of Gozer, but let's turn now to some
more amazing actual demons and monsters from the world of
ancient Mesopotamian myth and religion.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
That's right, so to get to the real ones, but
not to leave the movie connections. I just had another
quick note on Pizuzu, which we talked about at length
in the last episode. I was looking at some artifacts
pictured photographed in a book that was published by the J.
Paul Getty Museum that had text by Arian Thomas and
Timothy Potts. This was published in twenty twenty. This book
(07:05):
features an image of a full bronze statuette of Pazuzu,
from the Neo Assyrian period, and it is depicted in
the statuette much like the common Pazuzu description we talked
about in the last episode, and there were lots of
depictions of Pazuzu because of his common use in protective
household magic. But I thought a really cool thing about
(07:29):
this is that the statuette has an inscription on the
back and it like says, here's who I am. It says,
I am Pazuzu, son of Hanbu, king of the Leelu demons.
I have scaled the powerful mountains. They trembled the contrary
winds sometimes seen translated as enemy winds or something like that.
(07:50):
The contrary winds were headed west one by one. I
broke their wings.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
Yeah, Pazuzu, the breaker of the wings of the wind.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
Once again reminds me of your Godzilla comparison from last time.
You know that you is like, this is the king
of monsters in a sense, the breaker of other monsters.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
That's right, but still dangerous in its own right.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Yeah. So this inscription mentions that Pazuzu ruled over the
other demons of the wind. He was strong enough to
repel and subjugate them, as in the description. One by one,
I broke their wings and he says he is king
of the Leelu demons. So who are these demons? Well,
I decided to look them up as well, because we
(08:33):
didn't end up talking about them by name in the
last episode. We may have sort of referred to a
class of wind associated demons that would include these demons.
But here I'm going to refer again to a text
that we brought up that we used in the last
episode and will refer to again in this episode. This
is God's Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia and illustrated
(08:54):
dictionary from British Museum Press, written by these scholars, Jeremy
Black and Antheon Green and illustrated by Tessa Rickards. So,
regarding the Leelu demons, Black and Green refer to them
as a family group of demons. So you got one
male demon named Leelu and two female demons named Li
(09:15):
Leitu and our dot lee Lee. The Leelu and Lilitu
are associated with the wilderness. They are malicious demons who
haunt the open desert in empty places, and much like
the demonus lamash Tou, they pray especially on pregnant women
and young children. The r dot le Lee, on the
other hand, is interesting because she seems to embody something
(09:39):
we see in a lot of monstrous imagery throughout the
ages that seems to embody, especially male anxieties about womanhood.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah, the are dot Lee Lee certainly betrays very strict
ideals about what a woman's role or roles are in society.
That she is mother and she is wife, and a
woman that cannot act in these roles is essentially a
monster worthy of treatment as such. In these myths Black
and Green include the translated quote she is not a
(10:11):
wife a mother, She has not known happiness, she has
not undressed in front of her husband, has no milk
in her breasts. And then, you know, the most monstrous
creature then spreads impudence and infertility to other mortals like
a curse. So real, really rough stuff. But you know,
certainly you can use it as a lens to sort
(10:33):
of see like what were like the accepted roles and
limitations for people during this age.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Yeah, and the idea of a feminine entity who does
not fit into any of the socially prescribed roles for
a woman so such as mother or wife is in
itself a terrifying thought.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Yeah. I also looked up the ar dot Lelee in
one of Carol Rose's books, or Encyclopaedia of Faaries and Leprechauns,
and she says that the name literally means made of
desolation and describes it as a wild haired, winged creature
that will entice mortals to lonely desolate places and then
attack them.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Yeah. And also, you know, in this century, Black and
Green compare the ar dot Lele to a figure from
Hebrew folklore known as Lilith, a sort of alternate accounts
of creation that are parallel to what we see in
the Book of Genesis. There's this figure of Lilith that
is also created that. I think there's a lot been
(11:34):
written about Lilith as well, commenting on the ways that
it reflects anxiety about socially nonconforming womanhood. I think this
is not limited to the ancient world, of course. There's
still a lot of men who are going to see
women who are not fitting into the social roles that
they believe women should fit into and thus conclude that
(11:55):
that woman is some kind of a monster.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah. I think this is always one of the interesting
things about in particular, but also other trappings of myth
and religion. It's like, no matter how fantastic the creature,
the story is like the ideas involved, you know, often
resonate across the ages, and they often do line up
with some of the same problems that we have today.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Yeah, I mean monsters. They may not exist in reality,
they are made up, but they reflect what people have
on their minds, so they are actually I think, informative
about reality. They show people, they show weird sort of
like cracks and fissures in our categories, in our minds,
because monsters often occur at the intersection of categories, or
(12:39):
when we encounter a kind of being or concept that
doesn't fit into our category matrix very well, then we
make a monster out of it, or we simply just
express what's worrying us in some kind of physical form
in the form of a monster. And those worries can
of course be in some cases very understandable even universal.
In other cases, they can be pretty nasty. They can
(13:01):
reflect nasty attitudes, they can reflect misogyny, they can reflect
whatever is preoccupying people, understandable or not.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Yeah, well, Joe, why don't we move on to something
for the men here, specifically the scorpion men.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
Hey, well, I'll give a preview that these next creatures
that gear tablulu are often referred to as scorpion men,
but there are scorpion women as well, so we will
get both. But in the previous episode we talked about
the various human animal hybrids depicted in Sumerian and Tikadian
literature and then depicted in artwork from throughout the region
(13:48):
in the Neosyrian, Neo Babylonian period and so forth. In
some cases, it could be debated whether it is better
to call these monsters demons or some other kind of ETag,
even in some cases a god. But however we classify
them they are awesome. There are mermaids and mermen with
the head of a human and the tail and lower
(14:09):
body of a fish. There are centaurs half human and
half horse. There are lion centaurs part lion, part human,
and finally there are the geartablulu, the scorpion men or
scorpion people. According to Black and Green, a scorpion man
is usually depicted as follows. So it's got a human
(14:30):
head with a majestic and luxurious beard on top of
his head. He often wears a horned cap and sidebar
on the horned cap because I got interested in this
and it seems like an important symbol. The horned cap
appears throughout Mesopotamian art beginning in the early third millennium BCE,
and seems to be associated with power and godhood in
(14:53):
different periods of history. It is associated with like different
primary gods from the pantheons. So it might be be
that the you know, in one period the horned cap
is really the symbol of this god, and another periods
the Southern God. But it remains fairly consistent as a
symbol of divine status. Now, why does a horned cap
(15:14):
mean divine status? Black and Green speculate that the godlike
associations might be derived from the horns of the now
extinct wild bovine Bose primogeneous, commonly known as the orux.
Now the orux was a wild ancestor of today's domestic cattle,
(15:34):
and still existed in its wild form during much of
human history, probably up until the seventeenth century CE in
some places, so just a few hundred years ago that
it finally went globally extinct, and they were still being
hunted by kings during the Neo Assyrian period in Mesopotamia.
These beasts were massive and awe inspiring, larger than most
(15:58):
domestic cattle today, with some bull oryx standing up nearly
six feet tall at the shoulder and having gigantic thick
horns more than eighty centimeters or about two point six
feet long, with each horn having a diameter of up
to between ten and eighteen centimeters, so huge horns. I
(16:19):
sometimes mention on the show that, like, if you're not
a farmer or a rancher and you only ever see
domestic farm animals like cattle and horses on TV, it
can be kind of shocking, like their size and power
when you actually get up close to one. An example
I've used before is that cattle can seem very docile
and bulky and slow moving until you see one suddenly
(16:42):
leap over a fence or start running at full speed,
and then you're like, WHOA, I did not imagine that
animal was capable of this. But the wild rix was
even larger, more powerful, less docile, with horns like tim
Curry and Legend. So just an awe and firing beast.
And with that in mind, it's not that hard to
(17:04):
imagine that the horns of the aurux could be a
perfect symbol of kingly power, power, strength, and will, and
thus a cap with horns on it would be a
marker of divinity in art. But ultimately this is speculative.
We can't know for sure exactly why this imagery was used,
but seems to me like a good gas.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Okay, so not actual horns growing out of the scorpion
man's head, but something more akin to a crown.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Right the horned cap. So back to the scorpion man
usually depicted as I said, with the human head, thick beard,
and the horned cap of divinity. The scorpion man typically
had a human's upper body, so it would be kind
of human shaped from the diaphragm up. This seems pretty
consistent throughout representations, but then going down from here there
(17:50):
is some variation. Sometimes you'd get what looks like a
human abdomen, human pelvis, human thighs, but then going down
in the lower lege into bird legs and bird feet
with the talons of a raptor.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
As we discussed in the last episode, this is pretty
common in a lot of different demons and godlike beings
in ancient Mesopotamia, and as we've talked about on the
show too, like this idea of demons having the legs
of a bird, this doesn't quite go away. We see
perhaps the reverberations of this on through like medieval and
post medieval times.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
That's right now. Another variation is that sometimes beneath the chest,
sort of from the bottom of the ribs on down,
you would instead get a more horizontal body, kind of
egg shaped body that I'm not sure if this is
supposed to represent a scorpion's body enlarged or maybe a
bird's body. It looks almost in some depictions, kind of
(18:48):
like a duck with instead of a duck's neck, just
a human's upper body from the chest up. And then
this also descends into feet with bird claws. I don't know, Rob,
you look at this, do you do you see scorpion
body or bird body?
Speaker 2 (19:02):
I mean it feels more bird body to me.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
So whether the midsection is human or avian or iraqanid,
in any case, you will get a scorpion tail. This
is the promise of the premise, right. It is raised
in a threatening pose, and it is ready to strike
with its deadly sting.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
And to be clear it does not look like the
Scorpion King has portrayed by Dwayne Johnson in one of
the Scorpion King sequels.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
Which is a real shame. Some of the best cgi
of all time.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
Also, sometimes you get wings in an X shape, like
we discussed with representations of Pazuzu and other wind demons,
these X shaped wings. And sometimes you get also, like
we discussed with Pazuzu, a penis that has a snakehead.
What is the meaning of the snakehead penis. It is
hard to say exactly, but I feel like I get
(19:55):
the gist. So scorpion men are mentioned in several of
the best known works of ancient Mesopotamian literature. First of all,
they appear among a catalog of demons and monsters in
the inuma Aleish, the Babylonian Epic of Creation. So in
the text, there is a character Tiamot, who is the
(20:18):
personification of the primordial ocean the salt waters, and Tiamot
is seeking revenge for the slaughter of her consort Opsu,
who is the personification of fresh water. These two are
kind of the original primordial deities. And then kind of
like in the kind of like in the In the
Greek stories, we get different generations of gods descending from them.
(20:41):
In this story, Opsu gets really mad at the younger
generations of gods because they are creating a commotion. I
think they're being too loud and boisterous, and he wants
to destroy them, but the gods kill Apsu first. And
then in preparing for vengeance, Tiamat creates or gathers a
bunch of monsters to her side to serve under her
(21:01):
son and new consort, Kingu. And then I'm going to
read from the inuma Elish. This is the Leonard William
King translation talking about these monsters serving Tiamot with poison
instead of blood. She hath filled their bodies fierce monster vipers.
She hath clothed with terror, with splendor. She hath decked them.
(21:22):
She hath made them of lofty stature. Whoever beholdeth them
is overcome by terror. Their bodies rear up, and none
can withstand their attack. She hath set up vipers and
dragons and the monster Lehamu, and hurricanes and raging hounds
and scorpion men and mighty tempests and fish men and rams.
(21:44):
They bear cruel weapons without fear of the fight. Okay,
so from this Acadian source from the second millennium BCE,
we can sort of see the company they keep, right,
they're among all of these monstrous beings who might run
out to fight against Marduk, but other we don't get
a lot of description here. However, the scorpion beings also
(22:05):
appear in the epic of Gilgamesh, where they play a
more active role in the plot, and they also, in
this case appear in both male and female forms. So
the scorpion beings show up in tablet nine of the
Gilgamesh epic, where a lot of the text of the
epic has been lost, leaving us with fragmentary and missing
(22:26):
lines throughout, but they still make quite an impression even
if some of their part of the story is gone. Now.
So the context is that Gilgamesh's friend, the wild man
in key Dou, has been killed by a curse from
the gods in punishment for the fact that together Gilgamesh
and in key Dou killed the monster Humbaba, who we
talked about at the beginning of the last episode. You know,
(22:47):
the big scary monster the guards the Cedar forest. Gilgamesh
and key Dou go in there and they fight Humbaba
and they kill him, and so in revenge for that,
the gods kill in key Dou with a curse. And
then Gilgamesh is distraught over the death of his friend,
and he embraces in Keydu's body, refusing to believe that
he has died, until finally maggots begin to fall from
(23:10):
in Keyedu's face. So Gilgamash is horrified not only by
the loss of his friend, but by the realization that
he is going to have to die one day himself.
It's in a lot of ways, it's a kind of
almost humorously self focused reaction to that. He starts thinking,
I can't this can't happen to me, because you know,
(23:30):
it means he would be taken down to the gloomy,
horrible nether world where dust is your food and clay
is your meat, and it's just horrible to think about
how this fate is unavoidable. Unavoidable that is for most mortals.
But there is one man within the story who knows
the secret to eternal life, and that is the aged Utnapishtim,
(23:54):
the son of Ubaratutu, who, along with his family, was
granted eternal life by the gods. Now, Utnapishtim is the
protagonist of another story. He is the survivor of the
Mesopotamian flood myth, of which Noah's flood story in the
Book of Genesis seems to be a very close analog,
(24:16):
so you can think of Utnapishtim and Noah as similar characters. Anyway,
Utnapishtim and his family they have the gift of immortality,
and so Gilgamash is going to try to get to
Utnapishtim to figure out how to live forever himself. But
to reach the old Man, Gilgamash has to go on
along and perilous journey, and at one point in his
(24:38):
journey he comes to the peaks of Mount Mashu, the
mountain of the horizon, and there, nestled in the belly
of the mountain is a great, yawning tunnel which he
must pass through to meet the immortal One. But it's
not just any tunnel. This tunnel is the path of
the Sun. So every at sunset, the sun god Shamash
(25:02):
must descend into one end of this tunnel and then
emerge out the other side at dawn. Anyway, guarding the
entrance of the path of the sun tunnel are two
monstrous beings. You've got a scorpion man and a scorpion woman.
So here I'm going to read from the Epic of
Gilgamesh Tablet. Nine. This is the Stephanie Dally translation. And
(25:24):
to be clear, there are some gaps in the text
here and speculative words filled in. I'll try to make
it smooth so it reads the name of the mountain
is Mashu. When he reached the mountain Mashu, which daily
guards the coming out of Shamash, their upper parts touch
the sky's foundation. Below their breasts reach Aralu, meaning the underworld.
(25:46):
They guard its gate. Scorpion men, whose aura is frightful
and whose glance is death. They're terrifying. Mantles of radiance
drape the mountains. They guard the sun at dawn and dusk.
Gilgamesh looked at them, and fear and terror clouded his face.
He took the initiative and gestured to them in greeting.
(26:07):
A scorpion man shouted to his woman, someone has come
to us. His body is the flesh of gods. The
scorpion man's woman answered him to thirds of him is
divine and one third of him is mortal, so I
like that there. The scorpion woman is a bit more
discerning in detecting mortality. Now, after this there is a
(26:28):
section where a lot is missing. But it seems that
what happens is the scorpion beings question Gilgamesh and where
he's going, and he tells them he is traveling to
meet his ancestor Napisht him they warn him not to
try it because to reach it Napishtim, Gilgamesh has to
pass through the tunnel under the mountain, which is filled
with the thickest darkness. No man has ever made the
(26:51):
journey alive, and missing text prevents us from knowing exactly
what happens. But it seems that maybe the scorpion beings
take pity on Gilga and then allow him to pass
into the deep and he has to travel a full
day in this hot, pitch blackness, but he does survive
the journey and he makes it out to the other side,
where he emerges into the garden of Shamash, where the
(27:14):
trees are made of stone and they bear jewels as
their fruits. So you can see different roles here in
the Alish The scorpion people seem to be simply grouped
among other poisonous monstrosities, the fighters of the primordial Sea,
mother of Chaos, and they're going to do battle against
(27:34):
Marduk and the younger generation of gods. But in Gilgamesh,
while they are still presented as deadly and terrifying, they're
more human and more humane. And though this part is speculative,
one interpretation of the fragmentary text is that they allow
Gilgamesh to pass the Gate of the Sun because they
take pity on him. And according to Black and Green,
(27:57):
you can see this duality in the way the image
of the scorpion person is used for artistic and magical purposes.
Much like Pazuzu, this horrifying entity can not only attack,
he can also protect. So they chart the history of
this imagery, saying that the scorpion person first appears in
the Akkadian period in the third dynasty of Ur, and
(28:20):
then the scorpion people images became more widespread during the
Neo Assyrian and Neo Babylonian times, and in accordance with
their role in Gilgamesh, they're often depicted as servants of
the sun god Shamash, sometimes even bearing the up the
image of the solar disc up on their bodies, and
in the Neo Assyrian period, the image of the scorpion
(28:42):
person in the form of a little wooden figurine serves
for apotropaic magic, just like Pazuzu, warding off the malice
of predatory demons and protecting the bearer's home from harm.
So it seems interesting that this theme recurs with multiple
horrible demons we've talkedalked about. Humbaba, Pazuzu, and the scorpion
(29:03):
people are apparently all apotropaic shields at some point. While
they're like some of the scariest monsters and demons that
people can think of, they're also serving as protective magic.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Yeah. Yeah, it's so so fascinating to think about this again,
within the trappings, and even just not in the trappings,
but in the shadow cultural shadow of monotheistic religions. This
is not something you tend to think about, you know.
It tends to be the kind of thing that monotheistic
religions have put a lot of effort into squashing, the
idea that you can turn to any figure except for,
(29:38):
you know, the supreme God, or maybe certain agents have
said Supreme God but you certainly can't turn to any
of the villains and ask for their help in matters.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
I'm going to recruit biels above to protect me against Belisle.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Yeah, and you get into a nuanced conversation about well,
I mean, one's far worse than the other. It makes
sense to use the lesser evil against the greater ema.
All right. Now moving on to a couple of other
(30:14):
demons from ancient Mesopotamia. These are the two we're going
to discuss here. Are both connected to some really striking imagery.
Imagery from bass relief slabs found in the ancient Assyrian
city of Nimrud in what is now Iraq now. Back
in the ninth century BCE, this city was known as Kalhu,
(30:35):
and the Assyrian king Ashur Nasirpal the second had them erected,
I think, to either side of the main entrance to
the Temple of Minurta. According to Black and Green, one
particular image from these slabs is so evocative that you
just find it all over the place, and if not,
(30:56):
you know the actual image like a recreation of it,
and you'll even find it on the Wikipedia page for
Ancient Mesopotamian religion. One I've seen it on the cover
of textbooks. I've seen it as like a striking image
for museum displays that have to do with this time
and or region. And it basically depicts two figures. One
(31:19):
is a winged, bearded humanoid with thunderbolts or some sort
of like Vodra type weapons in both of his hands,
like double bladed, and he's battling or chasing after some
sort of fearsome monster or demon. At least in my eyes,
it's uncertain how many feet this creature walks on, like
(31:40):
is it rearing up or does it just walk on
those rear feet, which of course look like the feet
of a bird. This thing is sometimes described as a
kind of winged lion or a monstrous griffin of some sort.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
Yeah, it's like it's got bird talons on its feet.
It looks like but then also clawed for Paul, like
maybe a lion's pause, though I don't know. Actually they
look more like hands with fingers, and then scales all
over the body and what looks kind of like a
lion's head, but weirdly, the neck doesn't look very leonine.
(32:14):
It looks more like a snake rising up like a
you know, venomous snake rising up and hissing with its
mouth open and then feathery wings.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Yeah, without a doubt, it is fearsome looking. And apparently
this is another case where we don't one hundred percent
know who these entities are. There seem to be some
best guesses and some some solid hypotheses, but sometimes they're
just presented as chaos demon and sun god or something
you know, generic like that British Museum sources. It should
(32:44):
be pointed out the British Museum this is where you'll
currently find the slabs, basically just as the god would
have been. The local thunder deity Nenurta. Black and Green
also present the god Adad as a possibility, but seem
to focus more on this character of Nunurta and what
is he battling. Well, British Museum sources suggest possibly the
(33:07):
monster Anzu, also known as the bird Imdigod. This is
a great lion headed bird that steals the Tablet of
Destinies from Inki or Inlil and the pictured god then
slays the monster in order to retrieve this sacred artifact.
(33:28):
Now you might be wondering, well, okay, what's the deal
with the tablet of destinies. The name like that, it's
got to be important, and yes, it is important. It
is essentially the most important binding legal document in the universe.
According to this mythology, as Black and Green point out,
the tablet was essentially a tablet of uniform writing impressed
(33:51):
also with cylinder seals, and it would give the possessor
power and authority to determine the destinies of the world
everyone in the world, and linked heaven to the underworld.
So I suppose you could almost think of it as
the world tree in a legal document form, no doubt,
you know, driving home the importance of writing in the
cultures of ancient Mesopotamia. So normally inlel or Inky holds
(34:16):
the tablet close to his chest, clutching it as the
guarantee of his rule. You don't want this to fall
into the wrong hands after all, or the wrong clause,
because that's exactly what happens, and then Ninuta has to
reclaim them and then return them to their rightful owner.
So in and of itself, pretty tremendous story and pretty
great role for a monster or demon. But Black and
(34:40):
Green also suggested the creature in this image could be
the great demon, a sag or a Saku. Carol Rose
describes the sog as a demon of disease who spreads pestilence,
poisons the earth, and causes wells to dry up. Black
and Green describe a demon so hideous and powerful that
the fish boil alive in the rivers at his approach. Whoa,
(35:03):
He is the offspring of the sky god, and he
himself has mate it with the mountains to produce monstrous offspring,
presumably the Stone warriors who follow him into battle. And
this kind of ties back in with the Zagros Mountains
because they write on one level the defeat of Nnuta.
In this myth of the Asag and the Stones expresses
(35:24):
the unease felt by the inhabitants of the Mesopotamian Plain
about the inhabitants of the Zagros Mountains. As you'll remember
in the last episode, these mountains to the west were
thought to produce winds of pestilence that would roll down
into the region in question.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Oh yeah, and you know when we see like what
actually are the effects that demons, like malevolent demons tend
to produce on human beings. It is often described in
Mesopotamian texts as as like winds sort of weather phenomena
and disease, and disease I think was often thought to
ride on the winds.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Yeah, and I will have to add a note here
that is a common occurrence when we're researching mythologies that
you'll encounter some sort of like monstrous entities or a
monstrous race and you're like, oh, these are really fascinating.
I wonder what the origin is, and then you'll look
into it and it's like, oh, it's because one people
distrusted in other people and describe them as monster. One
(36:23):
people wiped out another people and described them as monsters. So, uh,
you know again it's you know, we see this in
like certain aspects of Irish mythology if I recall correctly.
So again you know that the shadows of humanity's failings
certainly color even even some of our more fantastic and
uh and and captivating myths. But uh anyway, Zog was
(36:47):
also frequently mentioned in spells against illness, especially head fevers,
and uh, you know this is this is because I
guess you need to name the demon that you are saying,
don't come in, don't come in here, head fever demon.
And in some traditions, the asaku are said to be
a group of seven demons, not so much an individual
but a group of seven.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
Now, rob one thing we ended up talking about in
the last episode was the sort of proposed timeline of
the changing role of demons in ancient Mesopotamian religions and cosmologies,
and also how that affected views of the afterlife, because
of course, you know, the modern Christian vision of Hell
(37:28):
is one that is populated by demons often, but this
is not necessarily the case with all visions of an
embodied afterlife. You could imagine another world that doesn't really
have any demons running around in it, but at least
some versions of the ancient Mesopotamian underworld of the dead
did have a demonic population.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Yeah, and it's sometimes the case that they're not so
much just evil things that happen to live there, but
they have a job, they have a role, they're kind
of part of the overall cosmic order. Of course, we
see shades of this when we consider sort of the
wider loose and you know, it's the amorphous ideas about
even you know, the Christian cosmology and heaven and hell like, okay,
(38:13):
are the devils imprisoned in hell or do they work there,
like if they torment human souls there, in which some
of these beliefs would would have. What have you believe then?
Is it like who signs their paycheck? Is that a
Satan thing? Is that a God thing?
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Like?
Speaker 2 (38:30):
How does it work? You know, I don't know, big, big,
tough problems of religion and theology. Certainly you get into
if you follow this thread enough.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
The idea of a hell with demons working in it,
by the way, is as we talked about it in
the last episode, that's not in the Hebrew Bible at all.
That does emerge in Christian theology, but it's actually that
specific idea with demons working in hell to torture the
damned is not even in the Christian New Testament.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Yeah, yeah, it looks good. It looks really cool in
a wood cut, but you know, for my money, you
can kind of leave that on the table. Anyway, This
comes to a particular type of demon though in the
ancient Mesopotamian world that did have a job. So the
demons in question here are the Gala or the Galu
underworld demons charged with dragging people off to the underworld,
(39:18):
they were said to number seven, and there were numerous
spells that might be used to ward them away. So
there's another case where at least some spells are saying
like no, no, no, do not come here, Gala, We
do not want you. Do not drag me into the underworld.
When the goddess in Anna returns from her descent into
the underworld, she's accompanied by the Gala. And while again
(39:42):
they're generally perceived as horrific beings with a horrific purpose
from our standpoint, they're also not necessarily evil, just more
of a harsh part of the cosmic order, and so
they could also be invoked in a positive sense. So
there are references to both good Gala and evil God,
you know, like good Gala, come on in, Evil Goala
(40:03):
stay away, and and yeah, so I did wonder, like
you know how much of this is about individual natures
and or just their intentions, like just saying like Gala,
if you're here for me, please keep on moving. But
if you're here for souls that are not supposed to
be here, for ghosts or whatever, then come on come
on in. Do you do your job now? You might wonder, well,
(40:24):
how often does this occur? Like, what are the stories?
And there is one key story where they have a
major role, and it is the story of Ananna and
her descent into the underworld, which if I am understanding correctly,
we don't necessarily know why she goes into the underworld.
I think there have been a number of hypotheses as to,
you know, why this would be. And certainly you can
(40:44):
look at other descent into the underworld stories from other
traditions that come later and you know, get some idea about,
you know, why this would work. But it's essentially she
finds herself in a situation where she cannot leave without
some one taking her place, and so what did the
Gala do? Will they venture back to our world? And
(41:05):
they drag her young husband, Dumuzi, the shepherd god, away
in the night, so she's allowed to go free. But
Dumuzie dies and becomes a god of the underworld. And
there are accounts of the sheep skin that he slept
in was found empty, you know, because they dragged him
out of it in the night and took him off
to the underworld. But you know, he's a god, so
(41:27):
it gets to be a god in the underworld, and
you know, he ends up. I was reading some descriptions
in Black and Green where they talk about I believe
it was Black and Green talking about like his role
in the underworld is kind of guardian, kind of a shepherd,
and then he's you know, and then we have these
these gala around him as well. And this kind of
(41:48):
reminded me a little bit of what we're presented with
with Goser and Ghostbusters. You know, some sort of entity
that is supposed to you know, that is attended by
monstrous beings and perhaps has some role regarding the flow
in and out of the underworld, which you know in Ghostbusters,
the Ghostbusters have interrupted this, they have messed with things
(42:11):
with their ghostbusting and ghost capturing technology.
Speaker 3 (42:15):
Ah, that's very good. But you know, I was actually
thinking of another comparison that tied into some older episodes
we did, and that would be while acknowledging many of
the differences, some similarities there with the story of Osiris,
who dies, goes into the underworld, and you know, is
sometimes I think dubiously called like a god who dies
and rises again. O Cyrus actually stays in the underworld,
(42:38):
so sort of stays in this dead state, but is
transformed and in a way transforms the underworld himself becomes
an authority there.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Yeah, yeah, and yeah, I'm not sure. There's a lot
deeper one could go into, looking at like what does
it mean to have a shepherd God become a major
figure in the afterlife? And what does it say Tatus's
line up too, with the emergence of this concept of
a shadowy afterlife and our expectations for it, and the
(43:07):
things we might want for ourselves in it, and the
things we can do here for ourselves or for our
loved ones. Certainly this idea of the divine as a
shepherd does not go away, and it's with us still
today in some traditions.
Speaker 3 (43:23):
All right, well, you know what I promised in the
last episode that we were going to come back and
talk about Humbaba some more. But it seems like we're
really out of time on this series, So maybe we'll
have to return to Humbaba in the future, and in
fact to the general category of ancient Mesopotamian demons. There's
some whole other tangents I got really interested in but
didn't have time to fully develop or research, maybe having
(43:46):
to do with some connections to the Asiatic lion so
maybe we'll come back and do more ancient Mesopotamian demons
in the future.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
Yeah, I'm totally downd for that. There's a lot we
could discuss, and really there's even a lot more with
the epic of Gilgamesh that we eat into. Yeah, we've
covered aspects of it in the past, but it's certainly
something we could do a deep dive on. All right,
let's go ahead and close it out. Then, just a reminder,
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and
culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We
(44:17):
don't always talk about demons and monsters and so forth,
but it is October, so you're going to find mostly that,
if not only that, during the month of October, and then,
like you know, thirty forty percent of the time the
rest of the year. On Fridays, we set aside most
serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on
Weird House Cinema. You'll again find those episodes on Fridays,
(44:38):
and during the month of October they are all going
to be you know, horror and Halloween related.
Speaker 3 (44:43):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
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, or just to say hello.
You can email us at contact stuff to Blow Your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we have returned
with Part two of our Halloween season series on the
monsters and demons of ancient Mesopotamian religion. Now, if you
haven't heard part one yet, this is really one of
those series where I think you should go back and
listen to part one first. I would recommend that because
in that episode we have a general discussion about the
(00:38):
connotations of the English word demon and the ways it
both does and does not describe these entities from ancient Mesopotamia,
and we also get into some general general trends and
observations about the spirits and supernatural forces of ancient Mesopotamian religions.
But in that episode we also talk about a number
(00:59):
of specific horrifying creatures depicted in the literature and artworks
of this region and time period, including Humbaba or Huahwa,
whose breath is death and whose face is an omen
when seen in the spilled intestines of a sheep. We
talked about the terrifying oppressor Lamashtu, who threatens infants and
(01:21):
pregnant women, And we talked about Pazuzu, the demon or
perhaps god, depending on your take of the Southwest Winds,
known best to modern audiences as the devil that possesses
Reagan McNeil in the Exorcist. And then finally we talked
about some actually quite surprising qualities of Pazuzu in his
original cultural context, in which he was often seen as
(01:45):
not just a malevolent threat in himself, but as an
apotropaic protector, warding off other evil beings, the Riddic principle,
if you will.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
We also talked about how no one really knows for
sure how to pronounce any of these words or names.
We have some best practices recommended by scholars, and we
try to follow that, but ultimately no one can know
for sure. Like, for instance, inky do, What if it's
inky do? No one ever says it like that, But
it's not impossible that that was the original pronunciation, right,
(02:18):
I think people say it like that, inky do.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Yeah, I've heard that inky do.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
I don't know, it just feels wrong.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
It just thinks I've said it that way.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
It doesn't have the same gravitized you know, I don't
know it sounds a little like preschooler educational program.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
It does sound like a word my daughter would say,
just one of those words she makes up.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Now. When I told my wife that we were going
to do a couple of episodes about ancient Mesopotamian demons,
she jokingly asked if we were going to talk about Gooser. Ah.
And you know, readers of Tobin Spirit Guide know all
too well that Gozer the Gazarian is said to have
been an ancient extra dimensional entity worshiped in ancient Mesopotamia,
attended to by two guardians, Vince Clortho the key Master
(03:01):
and Zeel the Gatekeeper. Ah.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Yes, who can forget the frantic search of Rick moranis
for the Gatekeeper. I am Vince Clortho, key Master of Gozer.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yes, we are, of course talking about Ghostbusters again. And
to be very clear, Goser and their attendance are fictional
creations of Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis, and their names
have no connection to the actual mythologies the actual religions
of ancient Mesopotamia. In fact, in interviews, Ackroyd has pointed
to two key inspirations for the name Gozer. In the film,
(03:32):
he claims there was a Goser Chevrolet dealership in upstate
New York, and that the name Gozer is somehow connected
to her involved in an alleged Poltergeist haunting. So I
don't doubt Akroyd on either of these counts. But I
also couldn't find any solid evidence of either. But you know,
it seems very likely on both counts, because I believe
Gozer or something like it is a relatively common Turkish
(03:56):
last name, And as far as haunting stories go, I
mean sure, anything as possible.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
In the realm of ghosts. You can make up whatever
words you want.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Yeah. But that being said, Gozer is a pretty great
fictional demonic god played by Slaves Jovin and voiced by
Patty Edwards and the original Ghostbusters and Act and then
in the recent Ghostbusters Afterlife played by Olivia Wilde and
voice by show ray adashlu. I like both incarnations of
(04:30):
the deity. Both both awesome in my opinion.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
I haven't seen the new Ghostbusters stuff, but.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
It's worth it for Gozer, worthy for Gozer. Okay, So
Goser works, especially in the original Ghostbusters, in a large
part because Akroyd and Ramis really had a lot of
enthusiasm clearly for weird fiction acroid in particular for the
occult and spiritualism. I think he said, I have like
a family connection to some of that stuff, and you know,
(04:59):
to a limited degree, I would say the idea of
Gozer is a kind of guardian death god, guard of
the god of the underworld, feels appropriate for ancient Mesopotamia.
That being said, I believe in the film or supporting
material they give a date of like six thousand BCE
for Goser's worship, and that would put this figure well
(05:22):
outside the historical framework that we've been considering in these episodes.
So Gozer would in this case be like a firmly
Neolithic deity.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
It would be from before written sources.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Yeah, so again no actual grounding in ancient Mesopotamian myth.
Though the name, as you and I were discussing off
Mike the other day, does sound similar to the ancient
Egyptian pharaoh that is therefore essentially a god, an individual
by the name of Joser Jesser Zoser. Even often I
(05:55):
think the primary spelling you run across in English is Djosc,
but I've also seen it as Zeo z Er.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Hmm.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Okay, his name apparently refers to the ancient Egyptian symbol
of stability, a kind of terrorist pillar known as the Jed.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
I mainly associate the pharaoh Joser with his his pyramid,
which is a step pyramid, and it's different from the
pyramids on the Giza plateau. But this one is really early.
It was apparently like the first of the big stone
monuments of ancient Egypt. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Yeah, So anyway, that's just a brief aside about Gozer.
But and then when we may come back briefly to
the idea of Gozer, but let's turn now to some
more amazing actual demons and monsters from the world of
ancient Mesopotamian myth and religion.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
That's right, so to get to the real ones, but
not to leave the movie connections. I just had another
quick note on Pizuzu, which we talked about at length
in the last episode. I was looking at some artifacts
pictured photographed in a book that was published by the J.
Paul Getty Museum that had text by Arian Thomas and
Timothy Potts. This was published in twenty twenty. This book
(07:05):
features an image of a full bronze statuette of Pazuzu,
from the Neo Assyrian period, and it is depicted in
the statuette much like the common Pazuzu description we talked
about in the last episode, and there were lots of
depictions of Pazuzu because of his common use in protective
household magic. But I thought a really cool thing about
(07:29):
this is that the statuette has an inscription on the
back and it like says, here's who I am. It says,
I am Pazuzu, son of Hanbu, king of the Leelu demons.
I have scaled the powerful mountains. They trembled the contrary
winds sometimes seen translated as enemy winds or something like that.
(07:50):
The contrary winds were headed west one by one. I
broke their wings.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
Yeah, Pazuzu, the breaker of the wings of the wind.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
Once again reminds me of your Godzilla comparison from last time.
You know that you is like, this is the king
of monsters in a sense, the breaker of other monsters.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
That's right, but still dangerous in its own right.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Yeah. So this inscription mentions that Pazuzu ruled over the
other demons of the wind. He was strong enough to
repel and subjugate them, as in the description. One by one,
I broke their wings and he says he is king
of the Leelu demons. So who are these demons? Well,
I decided to look them up as well, because we
(08:33):
didn't end up talking about them by name in the
last episode. We may have sort of referred to a
class of wind associated demons that would include these demons.
But here I'm going to refer again to a text
that we brought up that we used in the last
episode and will refer to again in this episode. This
is God's Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia and illustrated
(08:54):
dictionary from British Museum Press, written by these scholars, Jeremy
Black and Antheon Green and illustrated by Tessa Rickards. So,
regarding the Leelu demons, Black and Green refer to them
as a family group of demons. So you got one
male demon named Leelu and two female demons named Li
(09:15):
Leitu and our dot lee Lee. The Leelu and Lilitu
are associated with the wilderness. They are malicious demons who
haunt the open desert in empty places, and much like
the demonus lamash Tou, they pray especially on pregnant women
and young children. The r dot le Lee, on the
other hand, is interesting because she seems to embody something
(09:39):
we see in a lot of monstrous imagery throughout the
ages that seems to embody, especially male anxieties about womanhood.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah, the are dot Lee Lee certainly betrays very strict
ideals about what a woman's role or roles are in society.
That she is mother and she is wife, and a
woman that cannot act in these roles is essentially a
monster worthy of treatment as such. In these myths Black
and Green include the translated quote she is not a
(10:11):
wife a mother, She has not known happiness, she has
not undressed in front of her husband, has no milk
in her breasts. And then, you know, the most monstrous
creature then spreads impudence and infertility to other mortals like
a curse. So real, really rough stuff. But you know,
certainly you can use it as a lens to sort
(10:33):
of see like what were like the accepted roles and
limitations for people during this age.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Yeah, and the idea of a feminine entity who does
not fit into any of the socially prescribed roles for
a woman so such as mother or wife is in
itself a terrifying thought.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Yeah. I also looked up the ar dot Lelee in
one of Carol Rose's books, or Encyclopaedia of Faaries and Leprechauns,
and she says that the name literally means made of
desolation and describes it as a wild haired, winged creature
that will entice mortals to lonely desolate places and then
attack them.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Yeah. And also, you know, in this century, Black and
Green compare the ar dot Lele to a figure from
Hebrew folklore known as Lilith, a sort of alternate accounts
of creation that are parallel to what we see in
the Book of Genesis. There's this figure of Lilith that
is also created that. I think there's a lot been
(11:34):
written about Lilith as well, commenting on the ways that
it reflects anxiety about socially nonconforming womanhood. I think this
is not limited to the ancient world, of course. There's
still a lot of men who are going to see
women who are not fitting into the social roles that
they believe women should fit into and thus conclude that
(11:55):
that woman is some kind of a monster.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah. I think this is always one of the interesting
things about in particular, but also other trappings of myth
and religion. It's like, no matter how fantastic the creature,
the story is like the ideas involved, you know, often
resonate across the ages, and they often do line up
with some of the same problems that we have today.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Yeah, I mean monsters. They may not exist in reality,
they are made up, but they reflect what people have
on their minds, so they are actually I think, informative
about reality. They show people, they show weird sort of
like cracks and fissures in our categories, in our minds,
because monsters often occur at the intersection of categories, or
(12:39):
when we encounter a kind of being or concept that
doesn't fit into our category matrix very well, then we
make a monster out of it, or we simply just
express what's worrying us in some kind of physical form
in the form of a monster. And those worries can
of course be in some cases very understandable even universal.
In other cases, they can be pretty nasty. They can
(13:01):
reflect nasty attitudes, they can reflect misogyny, they can reflect
whatever is preoccupying people, understandable or not.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Yeah, well, Joe, why don't we move on to something
for the men here, specifically the scorpion men.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
Hey, well, I'll give a preview that these next creatures
that gear tablulu are often referred to as scorpion men,
but there are scorpion women as well, so we will
get both. But in the previous episode we talked about
the various human animal hybrids depicted in Sumerian and Tikadian
literature and then depicted in artwork from throughout the region
(13:48):
in the Neosyrian, Neo Babylonian period and so forth. In
some cases, it could be debated whether it is better
to call these monsters demons or some other kind of ETag,
even in some cases a god. But however we classify
them they are awesome. There are mermaids and mermen with
the head of a human and the tail and lower
(14:09):
body of a fish. There are centaurs half human and
half horse. There are lion centaurs part lion, part human,
and finally there are the geartablulu, the scorpion men or
scorpion people. According to Black and Green, a scorpion man
is usually depicted as follows. So it's got a human
(14:30):
head with a majestic and luxurious beard on top of
his head. He often wears a horned cap and sidebar
on the horned cap because I got interested in this
and it seems like an important symbol. The horned cap
appears throughout Mesopotamian art beginning in the early third millennium BCE,
and seems to be associated with power and godhood in
(14:53):
different periods of history. It is associated with like different
primary gods from the pantheons. So it might be be
that the you know, in one period the horned cap
is really the symbol of this god, and another periods
the Southern God. But it remains fairly consistent as a
symbol of divine status. Now, why does a horned cap
(15:14):
mean divine status? Black and Green speculate that the godlike
associations might be derived from the horns of the now
extinct wild bovine Bose primogeneous, commonly known as the orux.
Now the orux was a wild ancestor of today's domestic cattle,
(15:34):
and still existed in its wild form during much of
human history, probably up until the seventeenth century CE in
some places, so just a few hundred years ago that
it finally went globally extinct, and they were still being
hunted by kings during the Neo Assyrian period in Mesopotamia.
These beasts were massive and awe inspiring, larger than most
(15:58):
domestic cattle today, with some bull oryx standing up nearly
six feet tall at the shoulder and having gigantic thick
horns more than eighty centimeters or about two point six
feet long, with each horn having a diameter of up
to between ten and eighteen centimeters, so huge horns. I
(16:19):
sometimes mention on the show that, like, if you're not
a farmer or a rancher and you only ever see
domestic farm animals like cattle and horses on TV, it
can be kind of shocking, like their size and power
when you actually get up close to one. An example
I've used before is that cattle can seem very docile
and bulky and slow moving until you see one suddenly
(16:42):
leap over a fence or start running at full speed,
and then you're like, WHOA, I did not imagine that
animal was capable of this. But the wild rix was
even larger, more powerful, less docile, with horns like tim
Curry and Legend. So just an awe and firing beast.
And with that in mind, it's not that hard to
(17:04):
imagine that the horns of the aurux could be a
perfect symbol of kingly power, power, strength, and will, and
thus a cap with horns on it would be a
marker of divinity in art. But ultimately this is speculative.
We can't know for sure exactly why this imagery was used,
but seems to me like a good gas.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Okay, so not actual horns growing out of the scorpion
man's head, but something more akin to a crown.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Right the horned cap. So back to the scorpion man
usually depicted as I said, with the human head, thick beard,
and the horned cap of divinity. The scorpion man typically
had a human's upper body, so it would be kind
of human shaped from the diaphragm up. This seems pretty
consistent throughout representations, but then going down from here there
(17:50):
is some variation. Sometimes you'd get what looks like a
human abdomen, human pelvis, human thighs, but then going down
in the lower lege into bird legs and bird feet
with the talons of a raptor.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
As we discussed in the last episode, this is pretty
common in a lot of different demons and godlike beings
in ancient Mesopotamia, and as we've talked about on the
show too, like this idea of demons having the legs
of a bird, this doesn't quite go away. We see
perhaps the reverberations of this on through like medieval and
post medieval times.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
That's right now. Another variation is that sometimes beneath the chest,
sort of from the bottom of the ribs on down,
you would instead get a more horizontal body, kind of
egg shaped body that I'm not sure if this is
supposed to represent a scorpion's body enlarged or maybe a
bird's body. It looks almost in some depictions, kind of
(18:48):
like a duck with instead of a duck's neck, just
a human's upper body from the chest up. And then
this also descends into feet with bird claws. I don't know, Rob,
you look at this, do you do you see scorpion
body or bird body?
Speaker 2 (19:02):
I mean it feels more bird body to me.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
So whether the midsection is human or avian or iraqanid,
in any case, you will get a scorpion tail. This
is the promise of the premise, right. It is raised
in a threatening pose, and it is ready to strike
with its deadly sting.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
And to be clear it does not look like the
Scorpion King has portrayed by Dwayne Johnson in one of
the Scorpion King sequels.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
Which is a real shame. Some of the best cgi
of all time.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
Also, sometimes you get wings in an X shape, like
we discussed with representations of Pazuzu and other wind demons,
these X shaped wings. And sometimes you get also, like
we discussed with Pazuzu, a penis that has a snakehead.
What is the meaning of the snakehead penis. It is
hard to say exactly, but I feel like I get
(19:55):
the gist. So scorpion men are mentioned in several of
the best known works of ancient Mesopotamian literature. First of all,
they appear among a catalog of demons and monsters in
the inuma Aleish, the Babylonian Epic of Creation. So in
the text, there is a character Tiamot, who is the
(20:18):
personification of the primordial ocean the salt waters, and Tiamot
is seeking revenge for the slaughter of her consort Opsu,
who is the personification of fresh water. These two are
kind of the original primordial deities. And then kind of
like in the kind of like in the In the
Greek stories, we get different generations of gods descending from them.
(20:41):
In this story, Opsu gets really mad at the younger
generations of gods because they are creating a commotion. I
think they're being too loud and boisterous, and he wants
to destroy them, but the gods kill Apsu first. And
then in preparing for vengeance, Tiamat creates or gathers a
bunch of monsters to her side to serve under her
(21:01):
son and new consort, Kingu. And then I'm going to
read from the inuma Elish. This is the Leonard William
King translation talking about these monsters serving Tiamot with poison
instead of blood. She hath filled their bodies fierce monster vipers.
She hath clothed with terror, with splendor. She hath decked them.
(21:22):
She hath made them of lofty stature. Whoever beholdeth them
is overcome by terror. Their bodies rear up, and none
can withstand their attack. She hath set up vipers and
dragons and the monster Lehamu, and hurricanes and raging hounds
and scorpion men and mighty tempests and fish men and rams.
(21:44):
They bear cruel weapons without fear of the fight. Okay,
so from this Acadian source from the second millennium BCE,
we can sort of see the company they keep, right,
they're among all of these monstrous beings who might run
out to fight against Marduk, but other we don't get
a lot of description here. However, the scorpion beings also
(22:05):
appear in the epic of Gilgamesh, where they play a
more active role in the plot, and they also, in
this case appear in both male and female forms. So
the scorpion beings show up in tablet nine of the
Gilgamesh epic, where a lot of the text of the
epic has been lost, leaving us with fragmentary and missing
(22:26):
lines throughout, but they still make quite an impression even
if some of their part of the story is gone. Now.
So the context is that Gilgamesh's friend, the wild man
in key Dou, has been killed by a curse from
the gods in punishment for the fact that together Gilgamesh
and in key Dou killed the monster Humbaba, who we
talked about at the beginning of the last episode. You know,
(22:47):
the big scary monster the guards the Cedar forest. Gilgamesh
and key Dou go in there and they fight Humbaba
and they kill him, and so in revenge for that,
the gods kill in key Dou with a curse. And
then Gilgamesh is distraught over the death of his friend,
and he embraces in Keydu's body, refusing to believe that
he has died, until finally maggots begin to fall from
(23:10):
in Keyedu's face. So Gilgamash is horrified not only by
the loss of his friend, but by the realization that
he is going to have to die one day himself.
It's in a lot of ways, it's a kind of
almost humorously self focused reaction to that. He starts thinking,
I can't this can't happen to me, because you know,
(23:30):
it means he would be taken down to the gloomy,
horrible nether world where dust is your food and clay
is your meat, and it's just horrible to think about
how this fate is unavoidable. Unavoidable that is for most mortals.
But there is one man within the story who knows
the secret to eternal life, and that is the aged Utnapishtim,
(23:54):
the son of Ubaratutu, who, along with his family, was
granted eternal life by the gods. Now, Utnapishtim is the
protagonist of another story. He is the survivor of the
Mesopotamian flood myth, of which Noah's flood story in the
Book of Genesis seems to be a very close analog,
(24:16):
so you can think of Utnapishtim and Noah as similar characters. Anyway,
Utnapishtim and his family they have the gift of immortality,
and so Gilgamash is going to try to get to
Utnapishtim to figure out how to live forever himself. But
to reach the old Man, Gilgamash has to go on
along and perilous journey, and at one point in his
(24:38):
journey he comes to the peaks of Mount Mashu, the
mountain of the horizon, and there, nestled in the belly
of the mountain is a great, yawning tunnel which he
must pass through to meet the immortal One. But it's
not just any tunnel. This tunnel is the path of
the Sun. So every at sunset, the sun god Shamash
(25:02):
must descend into one end of this tunnel and then
emerge out the other side at dawn. Anyway, guarding the
entrance of the path of the sun tunnel are two
monstrous beings. You've got a scorpion man and a scorpion woman.
So here I'm going to read from the Epic of
Gilgamesh Tablet. Nine. This is the Stephanie Dally translation. And
(25:24):
to be clear, there are some gaps in the text
here and speculative words filled in. I'll try to make
it smooth so it reads the name of the mountain
is Mashu. When he reached the mountain Mashu, which daily
guards the coming out of Shamash, their upper parts touch
the sky's foundation. Below their breasts reach Aralu, meaning the underworld.
(25:46):
They guard its gate. Scorpion men, whose aura is frightful
and whose glance is death. They're terrifying. Mantles of radiance
drape the mountains. They guard the sun at dawn and dusk.
Gilgamesh looked at them, and fear and terror clouded his face.
He took the initiative and gestured to them in greeting.
(26:07):
A scorpion man shouted to his woman, someone has come
to us. His body is the flesh of gods. The
scorpion man's woman answered him to thirds of him is
divine and one third of him is mortal, so I
like that there. The scorpion woman is a bit more
discerning in detecting mortality. Now, after this there is a
(26:28):
section where a lot is missing. But it seems that
what happens is the scorpion beings question Gilgamesh and where
he's going, and he tells them he is traveling to
meet his ancestor Napisht him they warn him not to
try it because to reach it Napishtim, Gilgamesh has to
pass through the tunnel under the mountain, which is filled
with the thickest darkness. No man has ever made the
(26:51):
journey alive, and missing text prevents us from knowing exactly
what happens. But it seems that maybe the scorpion beings
take pity on Gilga and then allow him to pass
into the deep and he has to travel a full
day in this hot, pitch blackness, but he does survive
the journey and he makes it out to the other side,
where he emerges into the garden of Shamash, where the
(27:14):
trees are made of stone and they bear jewels as
their fruits. So you can see different roles here in
the Alish The scorpion people seem to be simply grouped
among other poisonous monstrosities, the fighters of the primordial Sea,
mother of Chaos, and they're going to do battle against
(27:34):
Marduk and the younger generation of gods. But in Gilgamesh,
while they are still presented as deadly and terrifying, they're
more human and more humane. And though this part is speculative,
one interpretation of the fragmentary text is that they allow
Gilgamesh to pass the Gate of the Sun because they
take pity on him. And according to Black and Green,
(27:57):
you can see this duality in the way the image
of the scorpion person is used for artistic and magical purposes.
Much like Pazuzu, this horrifying entity can not only attack,
he can also protect. So they chart the history of
this imagery, saying that the scorpion person first appears in
the Akkadian period in the third dynasty of Ur, and
(28:20):
then the scorpion people images became more widespread during the
Neo Assyrian and Neo Babylonian times, and in accordance with
their role in Gilgamesh, they're often depicted as servants of
the sun god Shamash, sometimes even bearing the up the
image of the solar disc up on their bodies, and
in the Neo Assyrian period, the image of the scorpion
(28:42):
person in the form of a little wooden figurine serves
for apotropaic magic, just like Pazuzu, warding off the malice
of predatory demons and protecting the bearer's home from harm.
So it seems interesting that this theme recurs with multiple
horrible demons we've talkedalked about. Humbaba, Pazuzu, and the scorpion
(29:03):
people are apparently all apotropaic shields at some point. While
they're like some of the scariest monsters and demons that
people can think of, they're also serving as protective magic.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Yeah. Yeah, it's so so fascinating to think about this again,
within the trappings, and even just not in the trappings,
but in the shadow cultural shadow of monotheistic religions. This
is not something you tend to think about, you know.
It tends to be the kind of thing that monotheistic
religions have put a lot of effort into squashing, the
idea that you can turn to any figure except for,
(29:38):
you know, the supreme God, or maybe certain agents have
said Supreme God but you certainly can't turn to any
of the villains and ask for their help in matters.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
I'm going to recruit biels above to protect me against Belisle.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Yeah, and you get into a nuanced conversation about well,
I mean, one's far worse than the other. It makes
sense to use the lesser evil against the greater ema.
All right. Now moving on to a couple of other
(30:14):
demons from ancient Mesopotamia. These are the two we're going
to discuss here. Are both connected to some really striking imagery.
Imagery from bass relief slabs found in the ancient Assyrian
city of Nimrud in what is now Iraq now. Back
in the ninth century BCE, this city was known as Kalhu,
(30:35):
and the Assyrian king Ashur Nasirpal the second had them erected,
I think, to either side of the main entrance to
the Temple of Minurta. According to Black and Green, one
particular image from these slabs is so evocative that you
just find it all over the place, and if not,
(30:56):
you know the actual image like a recreation of it,
and you'll even find it on the Wikipedia page for
Ancient Mesopotamian religion. One I've seen it on the cover
of textbooks. I've seen it as like a striking image
for museum displays that have to do with this time
and or region. And it basically depicts two figures. One
(31:19):
is a winged, bearded humanoid with thunderbolts or some sort
of like Vodra type weapons in both of his hands,
like double bladed, and he's battling or chasing after some
sort of fearsome monster or demon. At least in my eyes,
it's uncertain how many feet this creature walks on, like
(31:40):
is it rearing up or does it just walk on
those rear feet, which of course look like the feet
of a bird. This thing is sometimes described as a
kind of winged lion or a monstrous griffin of some sort.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
Yeah, it's like it's got bird talons on its feet.
It looks like but then also clawed for Paul, like
maybe a lion's pause, though I don't know. Actually they
look more like hands with fingers, and then scales all
over the body and what looks kind of like a
lion's head, but weirdly, the neck doesn't look very leonine.
(32:14):
It looks more like a snake rising up like a
you know, venomous snake rising up and hissing with its
mouth open and then feathery wings.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Yeah, without a doubt, it is fearsome looking. And apparently
this is another case where we don't one hundred percent
know who these entities are. There seem to be some
best guesses and some some solid hypotheses, but sometimes they're
just presented as chaos demon and sun god or something
you know, generic like that British Museum sources. It should
(32:44):
be pointed out the British Museum this is where you'll
currently find the slabs, basically just as the god would
have been. The local thunder deity Nenurta. Black and Green
also present the god Adad as a possibility, but seem
to focus more on this character of Nunurta and what
is he battling. Well, British Museum sources suggest possibly the
(33:07):
monster Anzu, also known as the bird Imdigod. This is
a great lion headed bird that steals the Tablet of
Destinies from Inki or Inlil and the pictured god then
slays the monster in order to retrieve this sacred artifact.
(33:28):
Now you might be wondering, well, okay, what's the deal
with the tablet of destinies. The name like that, it's
got to be important, and yes, it is important. It
is essentially the most important binding legal document in the universe.
According to this mythology, as Black and Green point out,
the tablet was essentially a tablet of uniform writing impressed
(33:51):
also with cylinder seals, and it would give the possessor
power and authority to determine the destinies of the world
everyone in the world, and linked heaven to the underworld.
So I suppose you could almost think of it as
the world tree in a legal document form, no doubt,
you know, driving home the importance of writing in the
cultures of ancient Mesopotamia. So normally inlel or Inky holds
(34:16):
the tablet close to his chest, clutching it as the
guarantee of his rule. You don't want this to fall
into the wrong hands after all, or the wrong clause,
because that's exactly what happens, and then Ninuta has to
reclaim them and then return them to their rightful owner.
So in and of itself, pretty tremendous story and pretty
great role for a monster or demon. But Black and
(34:40):
Green also suggested the creature in this image could be
the great demon, a sag or a Saku. Carol Rose
describes the sog as a demon of disease who spreads pestilence,
poisons the earth, and causes wells to dry up. Black
and Green describe a demon so hideous and powerful that
the fish boil alive in the rivers at his approach. Whoa,
(35:03):
He is the offspring of the sky god, and he
himself has mate it with the mountains to produce monstrous offspring,
presumably the Stone warriors who follow him into battle. And
this kind of ties back in with the Zagros Mountains
because they write on one level the defeat of Nnuta.
In this myth of the Asag and the Stones expresses
(35:24):
the unease felt by the inhabitants of the Mesopotamian Plain
about the inhabitants of the Zagros Mountains. As you'll remember
in the last episode, these mountains to the west were
thought to produce winds of pestilence that would roll down
into the region in question.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Oh yeah, and you know when we see like what
actually are the effects that demons, like malevolent demons tend
to produce on human beings. It is often described in
Mesopotamian texts as as like winds sort of weather phenomena
and disease, and disease I think was often thought to
ride on the winds.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Yeah, and I will have to add a note here
that is a common occurrence when we're researching mythologies that
you'll encounter some sort of like monstrous entities or a
monstrous race and you're like, oh, these are really fascinating.
I wonder what the origin is, and then you'll look
into it and it's like, oh, it's because one people
distrusted in other people and describe them as monster. One
(36:23):
people wiped out another people and described them as monsters. So, uh,
you know again it's you know, we see this in
like certain aspects of Irish mythology if I recall correctly.
So again you know that the shadows of humanity's failings
certainly color even even some of our more fantastic and
uh and and captivating myths. But uh anyway, Zog was
(36:47):
also frequently mentioned in spells against illness, especially head fevers,
and uh, you know this is this is because I
guess you need to name the demon that you are saying,
don't come in, don't come in here, head fever demon.
And in some traditions, the asaku are said to be
a group of seven demons, not so much an individual
but a group of seven.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
Now, rob one thing we ended up talking about in
the last episode was the sort of proposed timeline of
the changing role of demons in ancient Mesopotamian religions and cosmologies,
and also how that affected views of the afterlife, because
of course, you know, the modern Christian vision of Hell
(37:28):
is one that is populated by demons often, but this
is not necessarily the case with all visions of an
embodied afterlife. You could imagine another world that doesn't really
have any demons running around in it, but at least
some versions of the ancient Mesopotamian underworld of the dead
did have a demonic population.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Yeah, and it's sometimes the case that they're not so
much just evil things that happen to live there, but
they have a job, they have a role, they're kind
of part of the overall cosmic order. Of course, we
see shades of this when we consider sort of the
wider loose and you know, it's the amorphous ideas about
even you know, the Christian cosmology and heaven and hell like, okay,
(38:13):
are the devils imprisoned in hell or do they work there,
like if they torment human souls there, in which some
of these beliefs would would have. What have you believe then?
Is it like who signs their paycheck? Is that a
Satan thing? Is that a God thing?
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Like?
Speaker 2 (38:30):
How does it work? You know, I don't know, big, big,
tough problems of religion and theology. Certainly you get into
if you follow this thread enough.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
The idea of a hell with demons working in it,
by the way, is as we talked about it in
the last episode, that's not in the Hebrew Bible at all.
That does emerge in Christian theology, but it's actually that
specific idea with demons working in hell to torture the
damned is not even in the Christian New Testament.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Yeah, yeah, it looks good. It looks really cool in
a wood cut, but you know, for my money, you
can kind of leave that on the table. Anyway, This
comes to a particular type of demon though in the
ancient Mesopotamian world that did have a job. So the
demons in question here are the Gala or the Galu
underworld demons charged with dragging people off to the underworld,
(39:18):
they were said to number seven, and there were numerous
spells that might be used to ward them away. So
there's another case where at least some spells are saying
like no, no, no, do not come here, Gala, We
do not want you. Do not drag me into the underworld.
When the goddess in Anna returns from her descent into
the underworld, she's accompanied by the Gala. And while again
(39:42):
they're generally perceived as horrific beings with a horrific purpose
from our standpoint, they're also not necessarily evil, just more
of a harsh part of the cosmic order, and so
they could also be invoked in a positive sense. So
there are references to both good Gala and evil God,
you know, like good Gala, come on in, Evil Goala
(40:03):
stay away, and and yeah, so I did wonder, like
you know how much of this is about individual natures
and or just their intentions, like just saying like Gala,
if you're here for me, please keep on moving. But
if you're here for souls that are not supposed to
be here, for ghosts or whatever, then come on come
on in. Do you do your job now? You might wonder, well,
(40:24):
how often does this occur? Like, what are the stories?
And there is one key story where they have a
major role, and it is the story of Ananna and
her descent into the underworld, which if I am understanding correctly,
we don't necessarily know why she goes into the underworld.
I think there have been a number of hypotheses as to,
you know, why this would be. And certainly you can
(40:44):
look at other descent into the underworld stories from other
traditions that come later and you know, get some idea about,
you know, why this would work. But it's essentially she
finds herself in a situation where she cannot leave without
some one taking her place, and so what did the
Gala do? Will they venture back to our world? And
(41:05):
they drag her young husband, Dumuzi, the shepherd god, away
in the night, so she's allowed to go free. But
Dumuzie dies and becomes a god of the underworld. And
there are accounts of the sheep skin that he slept
in was found empty, you know, because they dragged him
out of it in the night and took him off
to the underworld. But you know, he's a god, so
(41:27):
it gets to be a god in the underworld, and
you know, he ends up. I was reading some descriptions
in Black and Green where they talk about I believe
it was Black and Green talking about like his role
in the underworld is kind of guardian, kind of a shepherd,
and then he's you know, and then we have these
these gala around him as well. And this kind of
(41:48):
reminded me a little bit of what we're presented with
with Goser and Ghostbusters. You know, some sort of entity
that is supposed to you know, that is attended by
monstrous beings and perhaps has some role regarding the flow
in and out of the underworld, which you know in Ghostbusters,
the Ghostbusters have interrupted this, they have messed with things
(42:11):
with their ghostbusting and ghost capturing technology.
Speaker 3 (42:15):
Ah, that's very good. But you know, I was actually
thinking of another comparison that tied into some older episodes
we did, and that would be while acknowledging many of
the differences, some similarities there with the story of Osiris,
who dies, goes into the underworld, and you know, is
sometimes I think dubiously called like a god who dies
and rises again. O Cyrus actually stays in the underworld,
(42:38):
so sort of stays in this dead state, but is
transformed and in a way transforms the underworld himself becomes
an authority there.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Yeah, yeah, and yeah, I'm not sure. There's a lot
deeper one could go into, looking at like what does
it mean to have a shepherd God become a major
figure in the afterlife? And what does it say Tatus's
line up too, with the emergence of this concept of
a shadowy afterlife and our expectations for it, and the
(43:07):
things we might want for ourselves in it, and the
things we can do here for ourselves or for our
loved ones. Certainly this idea of the divine as a
shepherd does not go away, and it's with us still
today in some traditions.
Speaker 3 (43:23):
All right, well, you know what I promised in the
last episode that we were going to come back and
talk about Humbaba some more. But it seems like we're
really out of time on this series, So maybe we'll
have to return to Humbaba in the future, and in
fact to the general category of ancient Mesopotamian demons. There's
some whole other tangents I got really interested in but
didn't have time to fully develop or research, maybe having
(43:46):
to do with some connections to the Asiatic lion so
maybe we'll come back and do more ancient Mesopotamian demons
in the future.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
Yeah, I'm totally downd for that. There's a lot we
could discuss, and really there's even a lot more with
the epic of Gilgamesh that we eat into. Yeah, we've
covered aspects of it in the past, but it's certainly
something we could do a deep dive on. All right,
let's go ahead and close it out. Then, just a reminder,
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and
culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We
(44:17):
don't always talk about demons and monsters and so forth,
but it is October, so you're going to find mostly that,
if not only that, during the month of October, and then,
like you know, thirty forty percent of the time the
rest of the year. On Fridays, we set aside most
serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on
Weird House Cinema. You'll again find those episodes on Fridays,
(44:38):
and during the month of October they are all going
to be you know, horror and Halloween related.
Speaker 3 (44:43):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
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, or just to say hello.
You can email us at contact stuff to Blow Your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
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Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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