The Holy Undead, Part 1

We tend to relegate zombies and the walking dead to the infernal realm of demons, necromancers and the emptied charnel houses of Hell. So it might surprise you to know that, in some traditions, reanimated human corpses are pious church-goers. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the holy undead.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of
My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
of course it's October here on the podcast, so we've
got to be talking about the undead. But this is

(00:23):
a real special episode because today is the day that
the undead go to church. That's right. Uh. And this
topic ended up being a whole lot of fun to
research and uh and and right on, because I I
knew some of this, but I did not know all
of it. Uh. And I think the key thing is
when when you think of the undead, when you think

(00:43):
of zombies in particular, like, what do you think about?
For me, one line that instantly comes into my mind
that I remember hearing at a at a young age,
and is is from the trailer for George romero zombie
classic Dawn of the Dead. When there is no more
room in Hell, that dead will walk the earth very

(01:04):
much suggests that reanimated corpses shambling around are a distinctly
satanic phenomena. Uh though as in George Romero's universe, I
think it is. I think that's actually more a naturalistic interpretation.
Don't they say, what's the deal, like a satellite comes
to Earth or something like that. What do they say
in the first one, Yeah, I think it's some sort

(01:25):
of satellite crashes, and but there's kind of it's kind
of like hearsay, right, or it's what the media is saying.
It's it's it's ultimately, um, it's it's out of our hands.
And I guess that that leads me to the next
very broad distinction that I tend to make with zombie
films is that you have you have environmental zombie films,
and you have sort of necromantic or magical zombie films,

(01:46):
and the environmental something has happened that causes an extreme
reversal in how death works. The dead instead of staying dead,
they rise, and so it might be some sort of
supernatural event, which that that quote, uh kind of implies.
It's like, well, humans, you don't send up hell, and
now there's no more room, so the dead are going

(02:07):
to walk the earth. It's it's kind of our fault,
but it's ultimately a larger systematic error that's going on. Okay,
So in your view, environmental causes could still be supernatural
but they would be supernatural mechanistic rather than like supernatural
directed will yeah you know there or or if it's
if it is directed, it's it's like on a divine level,

(02:29):
it's like, well, God's had it, He's just letting the
zombies room now, you know, and it's God reasons for
that taking place, um or you know, it could even
be scientific, but it's like a scientific accident by human science.
So you're trying to make zombie bio weapons. Well you
shouldn't have done that. Now, look what's happening. The dead
are walking. Yeah, here's the rage virus. Though I guess

(02:50):
a complication with that is you know, resident evil twenty
eight days later, all that kind of stuff. A lot
of that is often, uh, there's a blurring of the
lines between what is undead and what is just some
infected form of human being right right now. That the
other area that the necromantic or magical interpretation this is
this is more where you have someone or something intentionally

(03:11):
raising the dead through the use of magic um generally
to do something to do the bidding of their master,
you know, who might be a warlock or a demon
or another powerful undead being, maybe a mad scientists, even
an alien mastermind or a dark like minor deity, that
sort of thing. But it's like, I need something done,
I need some I I need I need an army

(03:33):
of the dead. So I'm gonna raise up an army
of the dead to do specific dead things, as opposed
to like, well, now all the dead rise from the
grave and they do dead things, right, I am the
witch queens and Obia. I say, a bunch of skeletons,
you pop up out of the ground, get you some
swords and shields and go kills in bad Yeah. So
either way, I guess, very broadly speaking, there's plenty of

(03:55):
examples I know that kind of break this. Zombies are
either a thing that just kind of happens and as
part of the new natural order of things or the
unnatural order of things, or it's something that is done
by an agent at the evil um. Today we're gonna
be We're gonna be getting into I guess both of
these categories a little bit. But in a way we're
also discussing a third category, you know, the holy undead

(04:17):
pious zombies and church going perhaps god worshiping wraiths and
revenants who might just packed the local Cathedral. You know,
I would say that this is mostly new to me,
but it has been so wonderful getting into these stories
because they are so full of weird ambiguities and contradictions.
I think that often suggest very interesting and enlightening things

(04:39):
about the cultural climate in which these tales arise, right,
and also the sort of the cultural soil, sort of
oftentimes the pre Christian soil from which these myths and
folk tales have germinated and then change forms a little
bit in the Christian era. You know. Just to go
back to Donna the Dead briefly, though, the idea of
the dead going to church, Uh, it is a little

(05:02):
bit like the dad going to the mall in Dawn
of the Dead. You know, they just show up and
they're gonna do They're gonna do what humans do at
the mall, and they're just gonna wander around, um and
uh and and it. You know, I feel like it
matches up a little bit with some of the stories
we're talking about here, Yeah, and Dawn of the Dead.
It's interesting because, uh, there is an assumption in the

(05:23):
Ramiro zombie universe that the zombies are operating at a
very low, very reduced level of cognition. You know, they
have very limited ability to reason. I mean, they can
clearly like use their brains enough to sort of like
move towards the thing they want to eat. But but
it doesn't get much more complicated than that with them.
But I think one of the characters in Dawn of

(05:44):
the Dead says, why are they all coming here to
the mall? This must be someplace that was important to
them in life, and without anything else to do, without
any brains to eat in the nearby area, they just
sort of drift back to a place that was significant
in their lives and almost as if by worse of habit.
And that's kind of interesting too, because it suggests that

(06:04):
whatever it is you would really say you want to
be doing when in your afterlife, maybe you would say,
I'd i'd go, I don't know, visit my still living
relatives and give them news from beyond the grave or something.
In fact, what you do is walk the steps you've
walked a hundred times before. And where does that take you?
You go to the mall. Baby. Now, some would say
there's no ethical consumption of brains under capitalism, but I

(06:26):
guess that I'd have to discuss that another episode. Let
let's get back to religion though. Oh yeah, yeah, so
we should talk about maybe a specific example to get
us going of of one of these stories about about
the church going undead. So the story I wanted to
start with here. I wanted to start with because it's
ultimately the story I've had the longest, um exposure to,

(06:47):
I guess in my life. I started looking into this
and then I realized, oh, I have I've read some
version of this story before. Uh and Uh, I want
to take I want to take at least some of
you back to the enchant did World book series from
Time Life Books. Um. Uh. Some of us had these,
some of us didn't. I was lucky enough. I think

(07:08):
my aunt had purchased these and I kind of temporarily
inherited them. But I also still have them decades later.
Um and and ultimately it's gonna it will be hard
to make me give them up because they, ultimately, uh
put played I think an important role in my my childhood.
But if you were watching TV in the early nineteen eighties,
you might remember a TV spot for these books, starring

(07:31):
the legendary Vincent Price. I will buy anything Vincent Price
tells me to Yeah, I wonder what else was he? Uh?
Was was he a pitching back? Then unsleeved? The delicious
flaky crust of a hot pocket? Oh? Man, oh he
would have been great for Tombstone Pizza, right, Vincent Price
Tomstone because they were going for more of a Western thing. Though, Man,

(07:53):
Vincent Price impression was bad. I gotta work on that. Well,
why don't Why don't we? I encourage everyone to look
this up, this particular commercial up on YouTube. But let's
go and have just a little audio sample of it,
because it's yea, it's Vincent Price. It's fabulous. On evenings
like this, I like to curl up with a good book,

(08:14):
short of book that lets the imagination run away with you.
If you're like me and enjoy the mysterious and the unexpected,
you'll love the Enchanted World. Each volume brings to life
so vividly those inhabitants of the other world, Witches and Wizards,
ghost Scotland's and Avenging Nights. Call now and enter the

(08:38):
Enchanted World. With the first book, Wizards and Witches, my
favorite subject. It's an intriguing account of sorcery, spells, and deception.
Other books include Ghosts fairies and elves and dragons. Painstakingly
researched by the editors of Time Life books. Each volume
is exquisitely illustrated and portrayed if master works of art.

(09:01):
Each volume is you probably written and bound in luxurious fabric.
So Rob, I was never lucky enough to have these
books as a kid. But but I guess if you
had access to them, I would assume that these books
made you the terrible adult you are today. Oh yeah, probably.
So they were pretty great because each one well, first

(09:25):
of all, as as Vincent Price reminds us, each one
is bound in luxurious fabric. Curious, yes, and each one
is a different color, which I distinctly remember, because each
book deals with a different topic. And you know, so
you have fairies, you have camelot giants, uh, you know,
mermaids and so forth. I didn't have them all, but

(09:46):
I had a number of them, and I distinctly remember
there were of course two black books, black bound books.
One of them was on ghosts and the other one
was on night creatures. And these were in a you know,
sort of a childhood way. These were with my favorites
of the series, but also the most feared I remember
that they'd be on the shelf, and I could barely

(10:06):
bring myself to look at their spines on the bookshelf
if the sun had gone down, because I knew how
terrifying the illustrations were in there, and how terrifying the
contents of the stories were. UM, and I certainly wasn't
going to pull one of these books off the shelf
at night because the cover art was absolutely horrible on
each of them. Oh, that's so wonderful. And when I

(10:28):
say the mentioned the art, it was all the books
featured a combination of say, woodcuts and UH and old paintings,
you know, as well as new custom illustrations matching up
with the with the stories from different artists. And we'll
mention one in particular in a bit UH specific artists
all with different styles. So it was it's just a

(10:50):
visual to light. I highly recommend if you have a
chance to pick up any of these books and you're
interested in these topics, do so. I think they must
have printed billions of these things, because I just looked
around the other day, and you can pick him up
for like dollar a dollar or two dollars each. I
think in some cases if you buy them used I
wonder how that looks urious fabric holds up. I think
it holds up all right. I don't know how luxurious

(11:11):
it it really looks these days, but uh, you know,
the books are holding together and that's that's enough. So
the Ghost Book, like I said, was particularly scary, and
it featured a tale of the pious undead. So it's
it's a short section in the book titled the Hooded Congregation,
and it is fantastically illustrated and perhaps written. I think

(11:34):
the writers are all just it's listed as like by
folks at the Timeline Books or something, so he might
have written it as well, but he at least illustrated it.
Talking about Caldicott Medal winning author Chris van Allsburg. If
the name didn't ring a bell, let me just say
this is this is the artist who illustrated and wrote

(11:54):
the books Jumanji one and The Polar Express in n
H both known for very elegant illustrations. Yeah and ultimately
very you know, ghostly and you know kind of a yeah,
ultimately ghostly. And so it's like this. I never really
liked the Polar Express book because it did feel kind

(12:14):
of cold and uh, and like it's something of the
spirit world, and I was like this, I don't know this,
this isn't my Christmas. But the Hooded Congregation in the
Time Life books here, the illustration style apps absolutely works
and it's it's fabulous. It's um So, what we have
here is a series of haunting black and white images.

(12:35):
And I sent these two images of these two Joe,
so you could look at these as well. And then
you have text pages that feature tiny images of a
woman in a casket and as you proceed through the story,
her face shrivels towards the skull. It's absolutely wonderful. These
are indeed beautiful. Though I'm almost kind of glad I
didn't look at these illustrations as a kid, because if

(12:55):
I had, I am positive I would have cemented an
unbreakable sociation between the ghostly hooded figures in the congregation,
and in especially the second illustration here, and the bad
guys in Charlton Heston and the Omega man. Yeah, there's
this kind of a similar situation going on with the
hooded figures. All right, So I'm gonna briefly roll through

(13:18):
the story here. Uh, and I'm sorry for the Christmas
creep everyone, but This is a holiday story. So it
takes place Christmas morning. We're somewhere in the Swedish mountain
centuries ago, and a young woman has awoken extremely early
and she hears the sound of church bells. So what
does she do? Church bells are ringing. You need to
get your your butt to church. So she ventures out

(13:41):
into the darkness. Uh. And and you know, it's it's
a dark time of year. It's a cold time of year.
The cold, the cold is biting. She makes her way
to the village church and uh, the doors open. Inside
the pews are filled with black, hooded figures and a
hooded priest and gray stands at the stands on at
the front of the church is sighting in psalms, you know,

(14:01):
leading folks in song, that sort of thing, normal church business,
except everything's a little weird. Um. The woman is led in,
she takes a seat, and then a figure sits beside her.
And then that figure that is seated beside her pulls
back her hood and reveals the death shriveled face of
her dead sister. WHOA you don't see that coming. Yeah,

(14:23):
And she she cries out, you are the dead, And
then all the hoods fall back from the other worshippers,
and it's revealed that they are all indeed the dead
in various states of decay. Uh. It's written in this
telling of the story that the oldest are little more
than shadows. But you see, you know, some still have
flesh on them and there uh they seem to be

(14:44):
physical apparitions, though for the most part. Her sister, her
undead sister here, warns her to flee while she can,
and she gets up to do so, but of course
the congregation gets to their feet as well. They chase after,
they claw after with these skeletal fingers, and she feel
them jabbing at her back as she reaches the door
to to leave the church, and they pull the scarf

(15:07):
from her neck in the process. So she gets away.
She runs to the village priest's house and he's getting
ready to go to church to open it up. He
didn't know that the church has already open, at least
for some folks. Uh. So they go back together and
they find that the church is completely empty. But then
there is her scarf on the floor, shredded to pieces
by those skeletal fingers. This is such an unusual type

(15:31):
of story because of this strange blending of themes. So
there is clear menace implied by the beings of the church.
These are not just you know, righteous Christians who have
passed on the kind of people that Dante might encounter
in in the Paradiso, or they'd be you know, humbly
praising God from the point of the afterlife. Uh. No,

(15:54):
that they are in church and they are praising God.
But they're also dangerous, like they immediately they attack, and
they poke with the bony fingers, they shred the scarf.
These things, on the surface level at least, seem incongruous. Yeah,
like how can like, Okay, they hate the living, well,
we expect that of the dead and right, but they

(16:14):
love God. That seems kind of strange, right You think
that the uh, this would match up more with our
our idea of the satanic undead, the devil ish undead,
the unholy undead, as opposed to holy zombies at church.
So yeah, it's a simple, weird little ghost story. And
the illustrations especially always haunted me when I looked at

(16:34):
the pictures. But but I don't think I ever really
thought about about why. And uh, I think you know,
it had to do with the darkness of the undead
having such a presence in both a church and a
Christmas story. I know that that that, you know, I
did think about that when I was a kid. But
you know, but but you know, here was the kicker.
It was as if the ghosts were supposed to be there,
you know, not vile invaders intent on desecrating the church

(16:57):
and destroying those who love God or something, you know.
But but they were. They were doing their things like
it was their time to be in the church, and
the village girl had simply wandered into the night church,
where she did not belong and where the dead worship
while we sleep. It almost makes you wonder. The fact
that they're in church praying before they attack her makes

(17:18):
you kind of like reframe the story. It makes you
wonder did she do something wrong, Like did she step
on their turf or offend them in some way? Maybe
by pointing out the fact that her sister was dead. Um,
you know, was that unwelcome news to them in some
way or something like that. Yeah, So what does it
all mean? Well, we're gonna get into that. But uh,

(17:39):
initially though, I was like, all right, I've I've read
the timeline version. I've reread the timeline version. Now, well
what's what are some of the original versions of it? Well? Um,
I found a wonderful blog post, well written, nicely cited
by Camilla Christiansen on and on the blog Legends of
the North Legends of the North thought blog spot dot com. Um.

(18:00):
They are a native Norwegian blogger and uh. They write
about it a bit here and point out that the
tale is usually known as the Midnight Mass of the Dead.
And Christiansen writes that the tale seems to originate from
Germanic Romance and Slavic regions, and that while there were
there are many variations of this tale to be found

(18:20):
throughout Europe. The oldest date back to the sixth century
by historian Gregory of Tours, while it pops up in
Nordic writings during the seventeen hundreds and and we'll get
more into some other traditions that seemed to weave their
way into this particular tale as we proceed, but the
story generally follows a basic format. A man or a
woman they wait too early, perhaps confused by church bells

(18:43):
and or the darkness of winter months in northern climates,
thinking themselves late to church. They rushed to uh to
the church and soon realized that they have wandered into
the midnight mass of the dead. A deceased loved one
urges them to flee, and in some tellings um such
as the one in the Enchanted World Book, they make
it out alive and they merely lose a garment that

(19:04):
becomes proof of what occurred, you know. But in other tellings,
the dead just simply tear them to pieces or otherwise
drag them into the realm of death. And while it's
not always Christmas Eve, uh, we do see this idea that,
you know, what is Christmas but the darkest evening of
the year. It's this time when the veil between the
worlds of the living and the dead are the thinnest.

(19:26):
So it kind of while at first you might think, oh,
Christmas is not a time for the dead to come
back to life. Well, you know, maybe if if you're
talking about you know, modern Santa Claus traditions, but if
you're getting into the older ideas of of winter religion
and winter legends and winter traditions, then yes, this is

(19:46):
a time when death is very close. This reminds me
of a line that comes from another story that I'm
going to talk about in a bit from a from
a medieval Christian bishop who wrote about similar types of
tales of the is undead. This guy is like a
tenth to eleventh century German bishop named Teete Mar von Merseburg,

(20:09):
And after telling a story kind of similar to this,
uh teeth Mark concludes with the statement, as day is
to the living, so night is conceded to the dead. Uh.
And I love that phrase. Night is conceded to the dead,
as if it like it is ground that has been lost,
the dead have taken it and it belongs to them.
And of course I guess that would seem especially true

(20:30):
in the winter when the night is the longest. Yeah.
So it's easy to to see like this, this idea
of a dual world. There's the world of the nine,
in the world of of the day, that's the world
of the living. There's a little world of the dead. Uh.
It also makes me wonder too if tales like this
might have something to do with the idea that that
we have human spaces uh, in this case artificial human

(20:52):
spaces like church interiors, places of stone and wood that
exists for particular purposes. So if this space is for
you know X, then does X occur even when we
are not there? Uh? You know, an empty church is
not a church in some respects, so perhaps it remains
occupied even when we are not in the church. Um,

(21:12):
I'm not sure that that makes sense that I was
kind of mulling over it, and uh, yeah, like a
place that we have created, like absolutely, such as an
enclosed place. It you know, it can't it can't just
be a wild place again, you know, unless it decays
it becomes one with nature, like it's it's still a church,
but it's it's not a church if the people are

(21:33):
not gathered in it. That's a very good point about
the conceptualization of sacred spaces. So like is a to
a medieval Christian? Would they consider a building to be
a genuine Christian church if it is at its at
the time of its construction, say, consecrated to the Christian religion?
Or does it depend on its day to day use? Yeah, anyway,

(21:55):
just something worth worth worth keeping in mind as we proceed.
Than now, you know, if the undead here though, again
they sound pious, but they also sound a bit violent
and hostile. Um. You know, there seems to be strong
vibes of the dead hate the living here and Christiansen

(22:16):
points out in their blog that pre Christian traditions in
Norse folklore, you know, are often about undead beings who
have it in for the living, particularly when it comes
to uh at least a couple of different types of
undead creatures. Uh. And this led me to the work
of Inn K. Chadwick from six they wrote Norse Ghosts,

(22:40):
an article that was published in the journal Folklore. And
Chadwick points out that the ghosts of Scandinavian and Iceland, UH,
that they stand out for being physical, animated corpses, not
ethereal spirits, but but the actual reanimated bodies of the dead.
So when we talk about the dead coming back and
say walking through a wall in your house, uh, well,

(23:00):
in the in the North and s Line tradition, they're
coming through the wall. They're busting through like the kool
aid man. You know, They're not going to just pass
through it like a spirit. Yeah. And it's interesting because
sometimes stories of encounters with the living dead don't specify
one way or another whether you're talking about an insubstantial
spectral kind of reanimation or a reanimation of the physical body.

(23:22):
So I think there's a bias in modern ghost stories
towards the spectral apparition without mass. But in a lot
of these older stories, yeah, you're talking about a creature
with a body that might be more aptly called something
like a revenant rather than a rather than a ghost.
Though people describing stories that are clearly referring to beings
with physical bodies still use the term ghost stories a lot. Yeah,

(23:45):
you definitely see that in the in the literature. But
but yeah, these these are stories where the dead are
are so physical that you can wrestle them. Uh. There's
there's one that Chadwick mentions. Uh, this is the Swedish
tale of the shepherd Glamour, who, in the Greta Saka,
goes to work on a farm in Iceland and is
killed by a supernatural force. And so he then returns

(24:06):
to haunt the farm, killing both livestock and human servants.
And then the hero of the saga, Gretta the Strong,
shows up and waits for him, then wrestles him. And
many scholars have made the connection here between this tale
and that of Beowulf and Grendel. You know, it's like,
is the monster problem there's some sort of thing that
comes at night, so the hero waits for it and

(24:28):
then enters into a physical contest with it when it arrives. Now,
Gretis eventually slays the undead horror in this tale um used.
I think he uses a sword on it. But the site,
the mere sight of moonlight in the creature's eyes. It
it causes a sort of curse, and Gretis is never
comfortable alone in the dark again. It like scars him

(24:49):
for life and has this kind of deteriorating effect on
his psyche. And the modern context would would be tempted
to say he's gotten PTSD from this conflict. Yeah, exactly.
So there there are at least a couple of different
beings that are that are generally talked about in these traditions.
There's the Hugboy and the Dragger, and these are both
undead barrow dwellers. So in some cases, the dragger is

(25:13):
said to build his own barrow in life. So he's like,
you know, he's like a local lord or something, and
so he builds this barrow, this vault of stone and
earth fills it with riches, and in some cases the
individual uh is said to have themselves buried alive in
the barrow um. This is interesting, like the the idea

(25:36):
that Chadwick mentions that there are these accounts of of
this important individual, and there reaches the time when I
guess that this individual is thinking about death and the
end of their life. And rather than quote die on straw,
which you know, brings the vision, the idea of of
of dying of old age or dying of sickness in
a bed, the idea is you get you get twelve

(25:57):
of your men with you, and you just get apparently
just super drunk um on spirits, and then you all
go into the tomb, which again has filled with riches
and I think even some food and stuff, and then
they seal you in and that's that's it. That's your
that's your journey into the into the afterlife. This actually
reminds me of something that I was going to get

(26:17):
into later that is featured in in a paper that
we're going to talk about. This may actually end up
being in in the next part of this series, but
this is in a paper by a historian of the
Middle Ages at you see San Diego named Nancy Mandeville Cacciola,
and the paper is called revenance, resurrection, and burnt sacrifice.

(26:37):
It's the paper that gets strongly into these uh these
stories of the pious dead told by by Tetmar, the
medieval chronicler. I already mentioned, but there's a part that
I found very interesting where she explains sort of the
the frequently encountered common sense logic about what leads to
the state of restless death versus peace full death in

(27:01):
the Middle Ages, and that this is a an idea
that probably exists mostly outside of Christian teachings. It was
something that was common among pagan thinking of of medieval Europe,
but that had a sort of continued folk belief life
even after a region had often been supposedly Christianized, and
so she writes as follows, this was the notion that

(27:22):
those who were subject to a quote bad death that
was violent or sudden were unlikely to lie quietly in
their graves. In such cases, the life force exits the
body too quickly before the individual can make peace with
the prospect of dying, while the trauma of a painful
or violent death added to the fear among survivors that

(27:43):
such a dead person might feel resentful of the living.
In the felicitous phrase of Lester K. Little So quoting
another scholar. Here, these bodies expired with quote energy still unexpended,
and thus were considered to be at high risk of
returning from their graves. The flesh itself retained an element
of untrammeled vitality. Now I see some differences here because

(28:07):
that's emphasizing one of the main things about the so
called bad death that leads to a body getting back
up out of the grave being that they were not
ready for death when it happened. And the drawer here
that you're talking about, it seems like they are specifically
and intentionally ready, and yet there's still some kind of
element of badness about this. Uh, this death scenario, isn't there?

(28:29):
Like it seems like that there's something greedy about their
approach to death. Yeah, and this I think it gets
kind of complicated again. There is a very the idea
that it is very premeditated and and in fact, one
of the things that Chadwick brings up is that um
is that some cases, in some cases future draga individuals
are said to have undertaken a preliminary journey to supernatural

(28:50):
regions prior to their final disappearance into the barrow, which
makes which for me at least made me think about
the Necromongers and chronicles of Riddick. I remember this that
the the Lord Marshall there is said to have visited
the under verse and returned. You know this idea that
that you've you've kind of made. Yeah, this this initial
jaunt into death, and you've come back and you've checked

(29:11):
it out, and you can say, all right, it's good,
the lodgings are great, let's do this. I can guarantee
this is a connection that has never before been made
in the folklore literature. But I do wonder if the
writers of that were inspired. But um, anyway, there this
idea that that there's still something off. This seems to

(29:34):
be the kids. So first of all, they're multiple tales
of this going on. And in some of the tales,
the men don't stay content in their barrows. They hunger
for blood, they venture back out, you know, and in
the messing with with livestock or they're they're coming after
living humans. But there are also these cases where a
descendant of the individual and the barrow returns to it

(29:57):
and engages in a kind of ritual combat with them. So, um,
you can kind of, you know, imagine it as being
perhaps you know, about generational issues and family wealth and treasure.
It's pretty interesting, or at least it it makes me
think of this kind of scenario where a descendant might
come back and be like, hey, grandfather, Uh, you've got

(30:17):
a lot of a lot of gold in there. Um,
you know, the the living need that gold. Uh. So
I can imagine the kind of conflict that would ensue now.
Chadwick also shares two different accounts of note because they're
both examples of a story in which the undead don't
appear to hate the living, but they have issues with

(30:38):
the living that are that are pretty important. So one
is from the thirteenth or fourteenth century Brigya saga. It's
the story of Thorguna, who is this Christian woman who
wishes that her body be buried when she dies in
a Christian cemetery. But as as as it occurs, uh,

(30:58):
she dies two days journey away from the place that
she wants to be buried. So what is her family
has to do well that, to you meet her wishes,
they have to take her body on this two day
journey to a place where she can be buried. But
during the journey they have to find somewhere to sleep
rather than just sleep out of you know, exposed to

(31:19):
the elements. They stopped by a local farmhouse and they say, hey,
can we spend the night here, and the farmer says absolutely, not,
not having people come in here with a dead body.
So the farmer goes back into his house, you know,
they go about it, goes about his business with the family.
They go to bed, but then in the night they
hear a sound in the larder and they go and

(31:42):
they discover their the reanimated corpse of the woman, and
she is in their cooking supper for everybody. And so
at this point that what can you do? They humbly
accept the meal, enjoy the meal, and they let the
family stay to night. This is very interesting and how
it compares to the uh the undead going to church,
because again this is a kind of unusual, like it's

(32:04):
the undead engaging in the sort of uh, the wholesome
and nutritious activities of the living. Yeah. Chackwick also specifically
mentions that the womb the dead woman is naked whilst
um uh, you know, messing around in the larder and
cooking supper, which which is interesting too because it brings
to mind this idea of like um of of like

(32:26):
perfect honesty, you know, like like she is the one
who is also the honesty, but also there's something improper
about it as well, you know, like um, it seems
to match up well with this idea of the of
the the apparition that is sort of shaming the farmers
for not doing the right thing. But then on the
same level, I mean, it is like a zombie in

(32:46):
your kitchen cooking dinner. It's a little bit weird, uh,
but you brought it on yourself by not letting these
people stay in your barn, right. This also kind of
reminds me of one of the stories that we uh
in inverted form, but has some similarities to one of
the stories we looked at from Tales from a Chinese
studio that involves the travelers on the road. We were
forced to stay in the room with the dead woman's body.

(33:09):
Oh yes, yeah, and and that yeah, that deals to
with the proper burial of the dead and what happens
when you stand between um, the dead and the burial
that they desire. Now, there's a there's another um uh
story from that same saga, the Chadwick mentions, and this
one's This one's more humorous. I really like this one. Basically,

(33:30):
you have a boatload of drowned men, all from the
same boat, but they show up at a feast they
were going to anyway, and they first of all, the
insist on warming themselves by the fire, and I think
this kind of causes a stir. But then on top
of that, they insist on taking their seat at the
feast table. So the living guests are are perturbed by this,
and they say, no, you can't be here, You've got

(33:51):
to leave, and then quote legal proceedings were instituted against them.
So uh. From here, the story apparently takes on this
on the idea that takes on the guys of like
Icelandic legal pleadings, with the dead men making their case,
the living men making their case, and the dead men
lose and and then agree they're like, okay, we'll leave,

(34:14):
and they go I like that it. Oh, it's a
tale of the dead walking among the living, but ultimately
engaging in a llegal dispute. The dead countersue the living. Yeah,
that would make for a hell of a courtroom drama,
the dead sue the living like an undead lawyer hero
as sort of a zombie Tom Cruise, and a few

(34:34):
good men. Oh yeah, kind of a kind of kind
of a lawyer Lich. This is a gold Nobody steal
our idea. Um. I also love this too because I
think you know, if you, if you, if you don't
have any familiarity with the various sagas, it's easy to
think of it seems to imagine that these are gonna
be tales that are just about violence. And certainly there's

(34:55):
violence in them, but there's also a lot of like, yeah,
you know, family feud ing and intrigue and also legal proceedings,
so fitting that we have that match up with a
ghost story as well. Thank all right, well, I guess
the next thing I wanted to talk about was some

(35:16):
scholarship that I've been getting into on this historical figure
known as Bishop tet Mar of Mercyborg and uh and
his stories about the pious undead. And I think we're
not going to have time to fully discuss this one
in this episode, but we can start getting into it
and then we'll have to continue in the next part
of the series. But just a hat tip on sources here.

(35:38):
I know we first found out about this subject by
that there was a good short summary in uh in
j Store Daily by Olivia Gershon called the Pious Undead
of Medieval Europe. But this actually pointed to a long
scholarly paper that I, uh that I went and read
and it's just wonderful. So this paper is called Revenance,
Resurrection and Burnt Sacrifice by Nancy man Ville Cacciola, who

(36:01):
a can I mentioned her before, but she's a medieval
historian University of California, San Diego, focusing on religious history.
And this article was published in a in a journal
called Predator Nature Critical and Historical Studies on the Predator
Natural and uh, this appears to be some kind of
collection or journal that's put out by Penn State University Press.

(36:24):
And so it gets into this figure of the of
Bishop Teetmr and the stories that he tells. Now the
historical context of Bishop Teetmr. And I have to say,
by the way, I had to look up how his
name is pronounced. It is spelled h t h I
E t m e er, but I think it would
be tete Mar sort of deep Mar, kind of one
of those, you know, it's like that the difficult to

(36:46):
pronounce like D T H thing in the Germanic languages.
But I'm just gonna say tete mark because I think
that's about as close as we can consistently get. Um.
So his context is Autonian. He he is an Autonian figure.
And Uh. This is a historical designation that comes from
the name Otto. It describes the reign of a series

(37:07):
of kings. These were Saxon kings in medieval Germany, including
three named Otto and two named Henry. So you got
Henry the First, also known as Henry the Fowler, and
I think this is because he was allegedly tending to
a bunch of bird nets when he received news that
he had been made king. And then after Henry the First,
you got Otto one, then you got your Auto too,

(37:29):
then you got your Auto three, and then finally you're
Henry too. So these would have all been UH German
Saxon kings beginning in the ninth or tenth century and
then going into the eleventh seen in some ways as
an artistic and cultural revival period of the the older
Holy Roman Empire. So this would have artistic traditions with

(37:49):
a basis in Byzantine and carol Ingian art and architecture.
But these were also Christianizing kings who had a who
saw themselves as having an important role in the history
of the world as Christianizers, as as spreading the faith
of Jesus by conquest. And so to go to Cacciola's article,
the story begins with with a tale based in a

(38:12):
place called val Sleban, which is a town along the
Elba River. So this town could be seen as a
kind of colonial outpost in a way. Uh the Ottonian
king Henry the First again, that's Henry the Fowler, He's
the first one. He had been fighting a war of
conquest against the tribes of the surrounding lands to cement

(38:32):
the rule of his German Christian dynasty over the religiously
pagan and ethnically Slavic peoples in the area. And val
Sleban was a fortified town, one of a number like
it along the Elba, which served to protect this northeastern
region of Henry's Astonian kingdom. And in the year nine nine,

(38:54):
the town of walse Leban was attacked in a revolt
by the by the nearby people's and we're told that
all of its inhabitants were slaughtered. Caciola writes, quote our
chief source for this event, vidukind of Corve, reports in
his Deeds of the Saxons that other quote, barbarous nations
of Slavs likewise began to rebel when they saw the

(39:15):
successful devastation of this revolt led by a group known
as the Red Darii. The spread of the rebellion was checked, however,
when Henry the First seized the Slavic fortress of Lenzen,
and so after this massacre allegedly took place, vals Laban
was then rebuilt and the Ottonian dynasty again gained control

(39:36):
over the area. And Caciola tells us that the great
massacre at this town not only played a role in
the military and political history of the Astonian era, but
it also gave rise to supernatural urban legends, including one
reported by another chronicle er of the Ottonians. This is
the guy you know by now, This is tit Mar

(39:58):
of Merzburg. So t Temar was a bishop. I've seen
it claimed elsewhere somewhere that Temar was the first bishop
of Merziburg. But but no, Catchiola says he was the
second bishop of this town. He was born around nine
to what Cachiola calls an exalted warrior bloodline. I think
this means his family, including Teitmar himself, had served in

(40:21):
a military capacity under the Ottonian kings. Titmar himself had
been a military adviser to Henry the Second, the the
later Attonian king, and then from the years ten thirteen
to ten eighteen, Tetmar set out to record this massive
eight volume history of the Ottonian dynasty known as the
Chronic con And note this is probably not a super

(40:44):
objective history. It sounds like he was firmly in the
business of making the Ottonian kings look awesome, though nevertheless,
it's probably still also a pretty good source of of
of life and tales and beliefs of the period that
he though he definitely he's pro Autonian, he's going to
tell you good things about them. So apparently tit Mark

(41:05):
gets to this massacre at vals Laban towards the beginning
of his history, and Cacciola writes that here he starts
sort of drifting away from the public political history and
getting into personal memory first, talking a bunch of saying
a bunch of things about his own famili's association with
the history of the place, and then suddenly he just

(41:26):
starts getting into ghost stories. He tells a haunted church
story he once heard about this town. So here I'm
going to read directly from Cacciola's translation of the story
in tite Mar's chronicon quote, so that no one who
is faithful to Christ may doubt the future resurrection of
the dead, but may proceed to the joy of blessed

(41:47):
immortality zealously and through holy desire. I shall confide certain
things that I have verified as true, and which occurred
in the town of valse Laban when it was rebuilt
after its destruction. The priest of that church used to
sing Martin's there at the first blush of dawn. But
when he arrived at the cemetery for the dead, he

(42:08):
saw in it a great multitude of them making offerings
to a priest who was standing at the doors to
the sanctuary. At first he stopped in his tracks, but then,
strengthening himself with the sign of the Holy Cross, he
tremblingly went through the whole crowd to reach the oratory
without acknowledging any of them, one of them a woman

(42:29):
whom he knew well and who had died recently, asked
him what he was doing there after he told her
why he had come. She returned that everything had already
been taken care of by them, and also that he
did not have long to live. He reported this to
his neighbors, and it turned out to be true. I
love a ghost story or a weird story that that

(42:51):
Indians like that would just sort of a basic sourcing
of the material. Somebody told me this and or there
was evidence of it and it was true. Yes, antite
I love. Earlier On also says I have verified this
story is true. I'm not sure how, but that that's
what he says, and uh, and well, but the part
that turned out to be true in the implication in
the last sentences, they told him he did not have

(43:14):
long to live. He reported this to his neighbors, and
it turned out to be true. So that's that's also
saying like, oh, yeah, he did die shortly after that.
So Catchiola notes that, however weird this story is, its
point of view does not seem to be totally unique
for its time and place and for its place in history.
In medieval Europe, there were lots of stories about what
she calls the continuing vitality and power of the dead.

(43:39):
But the really funny thing about this history is that
it seems like as soon as Tete Martell's one story
about zombies, he gets so excited that he essentially derails
his history of the Ottonian kings for several pages, just
telling a bunch of other random stories about reanimated corpses
that he has heard. And I love this. I like

(43:59):
I wish more recent political hagiographies were like this. Today.
You know, some somebody's writing about the great George Washington
and how he never told a lie and all that,
but then they get sidetracked for like a ten page
digression about people they know who have seen were wolves.
Oh that would be good. So to finish off part
one here, I think maybe we can list and reflect

(44:20):
on some general observations that Catchiola makes about this story
in particular, and then in the next part we can
come back to more of of Tete Mar's tales of
ghosts and and and undead beings and and uh and
branch out from there. But regarding this one particular story,
a few things worth noting. First of all, Catchiola calls
these undead beings revenants, and this is worth pointing out

(44:42):
because although these are sometimes referred to as ghost stories,
like we were saying earlier, the word ghost in modern
parlance usually refers to a spectral in substantial being rather
than a bodily reanimation. Uh. The ladder of which again
may have been called revenants in the past, would probably
often be called zombies today. So even though the phrase

(45:04):
ghost story is often used to describe what tete Mar
is doing here, you should not automatically assume spectral in
substantial beings. In fact, these very clearly seemed to be
reanimated corpses that have physical mass, and so Catchiola goes
on to argue that tite Mar's ghost stories haven't received
a lot of scholarly attention uh, and in general, she

(45:25):
thinks that medieval historians have kind of underappreciated the importance
of ideas about the dead in medieval culture, and so
contra that that lack of attention to the subject, She argues,
for example, that quote the majority of medieval people who
believed that they had had direct experience of the supernatural
realm did so in intimate confrontation with dead human beings,

(45:49):
rather than through encounter with a transcendent deity. So if
she's correct in that argument, this mean according to Tacachiola,
people at the time were more likely to believe they'd
had an counter with a ghost or revenant rather than
with say God himself, or with Christ or the Virgin Mary,
and these might have, given the right context, be equally

(46:09):
taken as evidence of the supernatural realm, but that these
more mundane encounters with just dead people and dead souls
were were actually the more common thing for regular people
to experience, And she argues there there are a lot
of things that historians can potentially learn from these ghost stories.
So first of all, they can suggest details about local

(46:30):
pagan beliefs that existed before Christianity and then probably in
some form continued to exist after the Christianization of a region.
In the case of tet Mars ghost stories, these would
be local Slavic pagan beliefs uh. And these beliefs, even
though the Christian chroniclers might want to kind of suggest
that these beliefs are wiped out by the Christianization of

(46:53):
a population, in fact they may well be partially preserved
in stories like this, and so one example here is
that Catholic doctrine placed a pretty clear and strong emphasis
on what what is called in this paper the inertness
of the human body after death. And this would be
of course, apart from the general resurrection in Catholic beliefs.

(47:15):
So the the Catholic belief about the afterlife is, you know,
you die, and then your body goes to the grave
and it doesn't do anything after that until the second
coming of Christ when the dead are raised and then uh,
and then God will judge the living and the dead.
But these kind of stories reflect alternative beliefs about you know,
they don't reflect that emphasis on the inertness of the

(47:35):
human body before the general resurrection, they say. So the
fact that these stories involved dead bodies popping up from
the grave to go to church and worship together at
night suggests other sources of beliefs about the afterlife, not
just Catholic doctrines. But secondly, it's really interesting that you
remember that Titmar before he actually tells the story, he

(47:59):
sort of gives a dis claimer paragraph, like he he's like,
now I've got a rhetorical purpose in telling you this,
and is that and it is that this story will
affirm Catholic doctrine itself. He says that his story proves
the Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection and can be used
as evidence against anyone who is skeptical that the dead

(48:19):
will be raised in Christ at the end of time.
Uh So, he says that like the local Slavic people's
do not have a correct understanding of the resurrection, and
he hopes this story will help correct them and now
and then. A third point that Caciola makes is that
these stories provide some evidence not just of lingering pagan
beliefs alongside Christian beliefs, but of direct syncretism, actually the

(48:44):
blending of different religious inputs into new hybrid forms of religion. This,
of course happens constantly throughout the history of religions all
over the world. In fact, I think you could argue
that basically all existing religions today are a result of
path syncretisms, that that previous religious traditions have in a
in a way been combined or mixed and matched to

(49:06):
form new ones. And so the argument would be that
it appears to also be happening here in a frontier context,
where German Christianity and Slavic Paganism are mixing with one another,
not just existing alongside one another, but actually combining into
hybrid forms, producing what Cachiola calls quote paganized Christianities and

(49:29):
baptized pagan traditions. Uh. Quote they express a pagan logic
about life after death, but somewhere along the line of
transmission they were adapted to a Christian semantic field. And
I thought this is really interesting in the following way.
So I'll read another quote from Cachiola and then UH
say what I was thinking about it? She says that
this is uh, this is common throughout different parts of

(49:51):
partially Christianized medieval Europe. Quote. The Catholic Church, for all
its careful policing of dogma, was unusually tolerant of a
wide spectrum of ideas about death in the afterlife. It
is striking that stories of ghosts and revenants, for example,
while not quite orthodox, were never declared heretical either. They
occupied a capacious middle ground of toleration without endorsement, an

(50:16):
unusually ambiguous emplacement for such a significant area of thought. Uh.
And that really inspired me. I was wondering, like, what
is the logic, what is the even maybe the subconscious
logic lying behind this distinction of like which types of
doctrines are rigorously policed by the church, and deviation from

(50:36):
them is deemed heretical, versus which kinds of doctrines are
treated more loosely and with just kind of like a
look the other way tolerance. It seems that beliefs in
various forms of the undead, while they're not within the
church's belief structure, they're also not forbidden. They're just sort
of like allowed to go on, you know, like the
like the clergy would just kind of say like okay,

(50:59):
and they just look the other way and not bother
with it. Yeah, And I guess a lot of that
probably gets back into the reality of some of these
events that we're talking about, you know, uh, the same
sort of paranormal events that happened today, where someone has
an experience, they see something they can't quite explain, and
there are these pre existing ideas about what that might be,

(51:21):
and yeah, how far are you going to get are
rolling out and and maintaining this new religion in this
area if you just tell people, oh, well that that
thing you thought you saw it's not real. Um. But
then and then you can also imagine the inner experience
of that, like you you can't deny the mystery of
an experience that you you had better to to allow

(51:42):
that to exist under the umbrella of the faith than
to make it be a contest between the two, because
one of them the the the you know, the the
ghostly encounter. Like it's going to be possible that that
is going to be the experience that feels more real
and more authentic. Yeah, I think you're dead on with that.
And this is a sort of consideration that catch Gilla

(52:03):
raises in her paper. I think this seems highly plausible
to me that you could imagine that, you know, maybe
Catholic clergy of this time would be seeing a a
sort of trade off where they'd say, Okay, well, we
could be really strict about making sure people have no
pagan beliefs or practices, but if we do that, they're

(52:23):
not going to accept the Catholic Church at all. So
you kind of get them in the door by letting
them go halfway. That This isn't any any specific case
I'm looking at, but you can imagine them saying, well, maybe, okay,
so if they get baptized and they come to church
on certain occasions and stuff, you don't you don't have
to like fight them tooth and nail on believing in
drag or something, because if you did, maybe they'd stop

(52:45):
coming to church or wouldn't get baptized in the first place. Yeah, yeah,
I mean, ultimately with with you're gonna have to to
establish this, uh, this new religion on the on the bedrock,
on the soil of the pre existing culture. Now, I
think we're hitting the time limit on part one of
this series here, but there's so much more interesting stuff
to talk about. Tet Mark gets into some much more

(53:07):
grizzly stories later on, and so I can't wait to
further plumb his digression from the Ottonian Kings and and
just telling you about every weird ghost story he ever heard.
So I'm so excited to come back to that next time.
That's right when there's no more room and how the
dead shall go to church. So join us in the
next episode when we continue on in this fascinating journey.

(53:28):
In the meantime, if you would like to check out
other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you'll find
them in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed.
We have core episodes on Thursdays and Tuesdays. We have
an artifact episode on Wednesday, listener mail on Monday, and
on Fridays we do a little weird house cinema. That's
our time to set most of the most of the
serious consideration aside and just focus in on a weird film.

(53:48):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest topic for the future, just to say hello,
you can email us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow
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(54:11):
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