Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome to but why Real Talk on Messy Minds and Messier Systems, the podcast where two psychologists overanalyze everything so you don't have to. We're here to unpack the weird, the worrying, and the wildly unjust with just enough existential dread to keep it interesting. I'm Dr. Kristen.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: And I'm Dr. Laura. Let's dive into the mess.
[00:00:34] Speaker A: I feel like every time you take, like a long pause, like, you forget what your name is.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: I do. I do forget my name. I. Yes.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: Well, I love how you're like, yep, that's what's happening.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Yeah. I just trust the document too much, you know? Well, not my. Not my brain. Like, wait, what is it? This is.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Okay, what's next?
Oh, you know what? I forgot to. I was gonna send you this earlier as a surprise, but my sister sent me a message. Molly shot out.
She said, happy one Year Podcastiversary.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: No way.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: It's our one year podcast anniversary, apparently.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: I'm glad somebody knew. I know.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: I didn't know, so. Thanks, Malz.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: We should, like. We should post about that, shouldn't we? That seems like a thing we should. We should be on. Is it today? Like, literally this day?
[00:01:26] Speaker A: Yeah, it's today.
Today.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: Oh, my God. Yeah. I feel like I've learned a lot, you know, I feel like I've learned loads about the world, which has been nice.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: I feel like we know too much now when we already knew too much and now we're more stressed as a result.
[00:01:40] Speaker B: Yeah. This is one of our tangents, I think, isn't it? It'd be like, yeah, whoa, now you. Whoa. But it's good. I like, I enjoy it.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: We're trying to get better at tangents early in the episode because we feel like sometimes our 20 minute tangents about random shit puts new listeners off.
So let us know if you miss them.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Yeah, we can just go straight into the episode.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: So, yeah, report back because we're thinking about doing a very low tier Patreon situation for our more unhinged tangents.
Maybe a reflective episode on our first year would be a good one. This is also.
[00:02:21] Speaker B: We've got so many ideas.
[00:02:24] Speaker A: Yeah, we do have full time. Yeah. Full time jobs that usually take up more than the allocated full time contract.
[00:02:33] Speaker B: Totally. Well, that is very true. That's very true.
Oh, but yes, I would love to do that. We should do a little reflection. We should go through what we've done and.
[00:02:43] Speaker A: Yeah, we could use that for one of our, like, coffee ketchups.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: Coffee ketchup.
Yeah.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, you don't drink coffee.
Caffeine, ketchup.
[00:02:54] Speaker B: Coffee makes me feel. Physically.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: That sound was a lot.
[00:02:58] Speaker B: Sorry. Just to, like, think about coffee in the mouth. God.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: Well, I've never heard coffee described quite in that way before.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: I just can't. Honestly. I'd like it, but it's like.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: It's just so comforting.
[00:03:12] Speaker B: You know what I think is uncomfortable about coffee? It's got this, like, really, really strong smell, Right. Which kind of isn't that bad.
But. But then when you drink it, it's so liquidy, it, like, doesn't feel like the taste should match the liquid form. Do you know what I mean?
[00:03:31] Speaker A: No, because it's liquid. Of course it's going to be liquidy.
[00:03:34] Speaker B: Yeah. But do you. I feel like it shouldn't be that consistency to have that taste. And I.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: But it's just water. It's just water that was soaked in beans.
[00:03:46] Speaker B: Just.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: It's literally the same thing as tea.
But.
[00:03:48] Speaker B: No, no, but because it has that taste, they're, like, off. They feel like they're opposites, like, interesting. Should it be in the liquid in that way? But then, to be fair, I don't like, like, coffee cake either. So, you know, that's more taste.
[00:04:04] Speaker A: You don't like the taste of coffee in any of the things?
[00:04:07] Speaker B: No, no, I don't.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: It just doesn't match anything.
[00:04:09] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: Does anyone have a process that you.
[00:04:12] Speaker B: Have to tell me if anyone feels the same way or if I'm just being pecunia?
[00:04:17] Speaker A: I feel like there's a big difference between, like, not liking the taste of coffee and then just having this weird, like.
I'm not saying that you're weird. I'm saying, like, thinking that it is a weird match of taste and texture for coffee. I've never heard that before. I've just heard people go like, oh, it's like, sour or bitter or they just don't like it. Not like I don't like it because the taste doesn't match the consistency of the liquid.
[00:04:45] Speaker B: Well, there you go. I think that is what, at its core, that is the problem.
[00:04:52] Speaker A: Let's dig into the psychology behind that. What trauma you have that caused that. Because it's spooky season.
We are in episode two of our Halloween Monsters episode. If you can't tell, I freaking love Halloween.
So, I mean, I'm not, like, dressed in a costume. This is literally something I would wear to dinner. But for the purpose of this podcast, this is my Halloween outfit.
[00:05:17] Speaker B: Just put this jumper on for no reason. So that was my effort. But hey, you know, Sauron's on it.
[00:05:23] Speaker A: So, I mean, you could be like, technically a monster.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: Monstrous.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: We discussed. We discussed him last episode. We did, actually.
You know, you're a little behind in your outfit. Relevance.
[00:05:39] Speaker B: He wasn't scripted. He was just, you know, organic. Authentic Sauron. Who would have known?
[00:05:45] Speaker A: Here he is, probably any one of the people that listen to us.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: That is true. Yeah, that is true.
[00:05:52] Speaker A: Oh, my God. Okay, we are 10 minutes in. We promised.
We promised to be more efficient, so I'm gonna. Well, let us know if you enjoy our random shit talk because I feel really chaotic today.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: It's fine.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: Well, that's the thing. We all. We always have these 20 minute tangents because we're like, oh, excited to see each other and talk about random stuff. And we always have tangents popping into our head and we all have this, like, chaotic vibe. And then we kind of get in 20 minutes in. We're, like, focused. We're like, okay, we're deep into this topic.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: We'll get there. It's the transition.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: It's only been a year. What do you expect from us?
[00:06:31] Speaker B: Oh, no, don't remind us.
Okay, so shall we set the scene?
[00:06:39] Speaker A: Let's focus. Yes, set the scene.
Bring us into the scene, Laura.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: Okay, breathe, everyone. It's fine. Okay, so today. Well, this is our. Yours. Ours. Everyone's. It's our time travel episode.
So we are leaving the modern world momentarily, temporarily, and we are going to. Yeah. Go way back into the past, such as time travel does. Well, yeah, we're not going forward, going back. So Kristen is going to take us through this world of history and monsters and, yeah, we're going to chat about what monsters there were in the past and what this is telling us about culture and things like that. That was a great description, wasn't it?
[00:07:28] Speaker A: Amazing.
[00:07:29] Speaker B: I feel like I started really strong and then.
And then I got lost.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: I could tell that you were thinking about 14 other things at the same time. I could tell you were thinking ahead in the episode.
Oh, God, that's amazing. Thank you, Laura.
Thank you for situating us.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: I hope we all feel well situated.
[00:07:49] Speaker A: I feel very grounded.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: Good.
[00:07:52] Speaker A: I think essentially last episode we talked about kind of the modern monsters that we have, that we're monstering people currently. But we also wanted to look at the historical monsters because the monsters we have now aren't existing in isolation. And these arguably are the more fun monsters because while they are, a lot of them are based off of horrific stuff. They're not happening now. So it's Easier to look at it with a bit of context and I don't know, look at it more as like a history lesson than a actual thing that's happening right now.
[00:08:27] Speaker B: Yeah. And what I think is really interesting is a lot of the, I guess these historical monsters we're going to talk about, we see them still a lot in I guess like modern media. Right. So they more get depicted in like TV shows and so on as some things that are like, you know, fantastical, that are sci fi fantasy kind of vibes, but they kind of in a way did, didn't exist, but they were believed to, I suppose exist in the real world, which I think is interesting.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I find it super, super interesting. And guys, the next episode we're going to explain to you why this happen, which I'm also super excited for. So let's dig in. Before psychology, we understood things through very different means. So for example, when some things like plague or hunger or even new ideas that threaten the hierarchy like we discussed last time, kind of tear through our society, people tend to give it a story to make it something, something they can describe. And I want to emphasize for this episode we're focusing on European monsters because it's like we recognize that every single culture has their own iteration of monsters. But because that's where we're situated and have expertise, we thought we would dive in there. But essentially monsters start to appear when knowledge supersedes or outruns the comfort level of the society.
So what we're going to see here is that collision point of religion, law, economy, what people are doing with their bodies and autonomy.
And so we're going to start with arguably the earliest, earliest European in the general sense, monster the witch. If you guys want a deep, deep dive into this, look at last year's episodes. We did a two part series on witches because that is super interesting.
But I'm not going to. I can't, I can't. I want to. And I can't go like a deep dive now. But essentially we're looking at.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: Hold back.
[00:10:32] Speaker A: Kristen, chill out. Like the witch tattoo on my arm is like vibrating like, no, we will talk about.
But essentially we're looking at the 1400s through the 1700s. This is essentially, you know, that statement of they didn't burn witches, they burned women.
Because that's really what this was. It was an attack on women.
So essentially in this kind of late medieval period in Europe, the continent was under a lot of strain. There were plagues returning generation after generation. There was like a tiny little, little ice Age that froze a bunch of crops throughout the summer. And so a lot of livestock starved, famine upon famine upon famine. And there were a bunch of wars being fought between kingdoms. They were bankrupt as a result. And religion that was once the kind of solid center of everyone's life started to fracture because we were learning more about science and real life as a society. So this period is called the Reformation. And as this tore Christianity or Christendom in half, both sides kind of competed to prove their, like, purity. And so amongst this, the Church needed to craft some visible proof that evil was still prowling the world. Right. And that the Church alone could defeat it.
So, happy about it? Yeah. Yeah. You could just probably sense my angst right now. Good job.
Good job.
And while this is happening, new technologies like the printing press spread panic faster than ever before. And we dig into this in our deep dive. Literally, it is making me tense just thinking about it. And at the same time was this quieter thing that was happening a revolution in women starting to work?
So because the plague was wiping out half the population, women started to fill in that labor gap, similar to what you see at other periods in history, like after World War II, things like that. And the. The backlashes that happen after that. This is the kind of when it starts on a massive scale. So women are running inns, they're brewing ale, which is where we get the. The Black Cat association, from which you introduced to us last year, Laura. They are healing people, they're teaching, they're doing midwife work, they're delivering babies. And as built, many became literate, some ran their businesses. And that line between the, like, useful woman and the disobedient woman started to blur.
[00:13:08] Speaker B: How, like, ridiculous. Because literally the list of things you just gave. Also helpful. Fantastic. Thank you so much for contributing so well to our society. Like, it is amazing.
And then they're like, oh, whoa, you're too good now.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: Let's kill you.
[00:13:24] Speaker B: Like, thank you.
[00:13:25] Speaker A: Like, half our population is dead. And you have managed to fill in the gap and probably make some things better. This cannot happen.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: It's mad. It's just like. And I mean, it makes me angry.
And then it also makes me think how the people who were leading, I guess what you're going to go on to, like, the witch trials and things like how strong their fear must have been, is also crazy. Do you know what I mean?
[00:13:57] Speaker A: Well, let's. Let's dig into that, because I want to compare it to. And this is why we did the current Monsters episode first.
The fear was from Propaganda. But it's the same thing as nowadays, what you're getting with like, trans people and immigrants. It's. They're using media and systems of power to create this division into, like, to incite fear and violence in people, to actively uphold these systems of power. And it's the earliest example on a mass scale that we have.
And so, like, there was a real fear of the power systems, but the fear of the actual humans on the ground didn't exist until these power systems decided, yeah, this was an illegal thing that they needed to, you know, tell people about and hone in on and exterminate. Because it's a problem.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: It's the.
How do you say it? It's like the fear that people are feeling is real in itself in, like the emotion, but it's just been. The reason for it is just completely fake and false and wrong, which just makes it. I don't know.
[00:15:07] Speaker A: Well, it's their displacing fear because, honestly, you could probably blame the systems. The kingdom's going to war and bankrupting people, the, you know, the church. And honestly, there is some uncontrollable stuff like famine and like, environmental stuff happening. And we like to apply reasons to things. That's how we're evolved. So it's just like this sweet spot that these systems like to use to oppress people or to blame somebody specific. Because, like, the thing we noted last series was it was this weird first time that there was this weird agreement between the men who were like, both in the pulpit and the magistrate agreeing on something on a common enemy.
Right. So that's religion and government together both going like, this is some kind of cosmic disorder. Women in the workforce. What? Well, in the paying workforce, you know. Yeah, yeah.
So in 1486, the Malleus Maleficarum, known as the Hammer of the Witches, was published because the printing pub printing press was invented and started being able to print things on a mass scale. And essentially this was a manual for rooting out all female evil because we are evil. It argued that women were more carnal, were more impressionable, and more likely to consort with the devil. And we, like, saw so many hypocritical things from this as well, somehow were more carnal, but also more pure. So many hypocrisies in this alone, but that didn't matter. Right. And so these pamphlets and woodcuts were printed over and over and over and distributed throughout Europe and turned into like a mass education and heavy quotes tool after this.
It took 80 years. 80 years or so in Scotland they criminalized witchcraft as a felony, and England did it in the 1600s. And then torture spread over the continent. And over the next two centuries, the estimates of people who died ranges from 40,000 people and upwards of 150,000 people, mostly women, were executed across Europe and its colonies. And some people estimate it's more.
[00:17:29] Speaker B: Do you ever wonder, what if this. This is maybe. Sounds silly. What if this just didn't happen? Right. What if the women were just allowed to, like, brew their ale and live in peace and prosperity and have a good time and provide and support the world? What.
What would things have been like?
[00:17:49] Speaker A: Well, it probably won't surprise you that I think about this a lot. I think about specifically as well. Like, if the medieval times didn't happen, I think about a lot. As much as I love the, like, fun, like, I don't know, court systems and outfits, and I find it fascinating. It set us back as a society significantly. Right. And if this didn't happen with the women specifically, we wouldn't have had such a clear blueprint of backlash to put women in their place. You know what I mean? We probably would have been much further than we are now as a society. We probably wouldn't be talking about this in terms of. We wouldn't be talking about sexism in the same way. Misogyny, you know, all that kind of stuff.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I guess you'd instead be talking about the. I don't know how you want to term it, like the rise of, I don't know, women in the workforce and whatever it might be. Maybe that was then the starting point.
I don't know.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: It's so upsetting because, like, they're all these, Most of these confessions. Well, all of them, I would assume confessions were extracted under torture.
[00:18:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:51] Speaker A: And they, you know, and all this propaganda and images of women on brooms and, you know, packs with demons, sign and blood. But beneath all this supernatural theater, it was literally just the policing of knowledge and autonomy for women.
So midwives who understood fertility, widows who managed land.
So women who spoke too freely and heavy quotes. They were all kind of evidence for the church that the natural order had been inverted, which is just insane. Essentially, Europe punished women who knew things and had property and created a monster.
Dun, dun, dun.
So what was the cultural function of this?
This was society's pressure valve. Right.
This was the person that the plague, infertility and loss could be kind of projected onto and also absorbing that communal fear.
So the system could kind of, like, keep pretending like it made sense.
Like, obviously people have a Lot of anxieties. So they have to displace it.
And they kind of felt by the end of this, like, when the smoke clears, all the burnings have ended. There was a sense in Europe that literal smoke. Literal, literal smoke had cleared. Europe, like, had this feeling it had purified itself. But it was at the cost of silencing the women who had tried to keep it alive in the first place. Yeah, no, it's just crazy. It's just like.
Well, it's just patriarchal anxiety. It's the same hypocritical logic and heavy quotes that we have happening now, just in a different fort. So that's witches. Next we have the werewolf, which is kind of. It overlaps with the witches starting in the 1550s for about a hundred years or so. And it's almost the flip side of this coin. But I'll be a lot less pervasively dangerous.
[00:20:49] Speaker B: You'll be. You will be less dangerous? Is that what you said?
[00:20:53] Speaker A: I'll say it.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: Albeit. What does that mean?
[00:20:56] Speaker A: It means kind of like butt.
Oh, like. But it's more dangerous or less dangerous.
[00:21:02] Speaker B: Okay, okay, Sorry, continue.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: Sorry. I don't think I made that word up. I think it's a real word.
[00:21:09] Speaker B: No, I think that's.
Yeah, from like 200 years ago.
[00:21:14] Speaker A: My. Nice. Like, like 18th century vernacular coming through. When I'm wearing, like, a lace top with a high neckline.
[00:21:21] Speaker B: It makes sense.
[00:21:23] Speaker A: Yeah, makes sense.
So the werewolf is almost like the flip side of the coin, but a lot less harmful, albeit.
So, like, by the late Middle Ages, Europe was obviously starting to think of itself as a lot more civilized. Right. So feudal warlords were turning into bureaucrats. Cities were codifying manners to making them into laws. Moral philosophers were redefining human as, like, the human being as, like a rational, restrained person who's Christian. And so it was, like, where you really start to see this constriction of human nature that we talk about a lot of the time.
[00:22:09] Speaker B: Okay, yes.
[00:22:11] Speaker A: But at the same time, it was also chaos. It was a very chaotic time. Like, we just mentioned, there's plague, famine, religious war.
And we mentioned that little ice age that happened as a result of this. Wolves started entering villages into the harsh winters to steal food, attacking people. And these starving people were competing with beasts. And there was also a lot of rabies at this time, not just from wolves, but other animals. But, like, people were suddenly becoming beastly because they were bitten by all these starving, hungry animals. And, you know, it kind of started to blur this animal, human boundary, you know, because Obviously, if you have ra. You, like, in a frenzy, you're foaming at the mouth. And people are like, what the hell is going on? And not understanding how, like, the science behind it, Right? So at the same time, we have this colonial expansion that's starting as Europe's like, oh, I'm so civilized, but what are you? And so they're redrawing the map. And as the Europeans kind of venture out a lot more, and they're very recently civilized in heavy quotes societies, they're describing savages in heavy quotes in the Americas and Africa as like, half animals. So they're saying they're like, oh, they're hairy or, like, beastly, or they don't have any reason. This is literally just a different culture that has a different language and way of looking at the world. And so the werewolf also become this kind of, like, domestic, domesticized echo of the colonized other, Right? So this beast within that threatens Europe's claim to refinement. So you have this combination of seeing at home men turning into beasts and wolves invading towns. And then abroad, you have, like, men who are. What the European people feel like are beastly.
So that's kind of that historical backdrop to it. In it was mainly France and Germany.
There were men like. Am I gonna have to say this French word? Ghilais. Garnier.
Gil Garnier.
Gills Guarnier.
Sorry. French people. So sorry.
Seven in 1573, and then Peter Stump in 1589 in Germany were accused of transforming into wolves, murdering children and eating their flesh.
Obviously, we don't know what actually happened, right. This is like a thousand years ago, but they were. They confessed to pacts with the devil and magical ointments that changed their skin into werewolves under torture.
So this was all done under torture. And those were the two most famous ones. And they were executed, and there were quite a few executions. These were, like, very public morality displays. Right. So they started out as sermons about, like, over appetite, like, gluttony, violence and discipline.
[00:25:16] Speaker B: Do you think there's, like. I mean, we don't know, do we? But, like, it makes me wonder whether, you know, if they're living through these times where they literally were just, like, starving.
Did sometimes they go into the forest and kill children?
[00:25:29] Speaker A: Maybe.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: I don't know.
[00:25:30] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, look at what we have nowadays as people. Like, I would not be surprised. Like, these people literally could have just been murderers, right? Like serial killers.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: Yeah, they could have been.
But then I guess that still gives you that. An explanation almost of, like, you say, going through this refinement and actually society needing some sort of explanation for how a human being could do something so horrific.
So I suppose whether they, whether they actually committed these crimes or not, there's still this sort of monster like label, if you like being put on these people in order to try and help the people at that time make sense of what was happening.
[00:26:18] Speaker A: You're so right. This is before psychology. This is the labels they gave instead of like psychopathy or, you know, a mental illness or whatever. Nowadays we would have actual labels for the pathology of like say they committed these crimes.
And so for them it was werewolf. For us, you know, it's, it's serial killers or narcissistic personality disorder, the dark triad, things like that. They didn't have that vernacular. And they also were much more violent people. Well, I don't know. Looking at society now, they were very violent in different ways back then, right?
[00:26:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:51] Speaker A: And these things happening, as so often happens, were just co opted and used as like a PR stunt.
Essentially. They were public spectacles that I guess were designed to reinforce social norms. So yeah, I think that's totally right because like Europe was trying to teach men how to be tame at this point. And so like, even if they were guilty of these horrible crimes, that you can't explain that from the churches and the legal point of view. And so like, I guess just like, how do we look at it? Like we've kind of talked about the psychological thing, but what's the cultural function of this?
It's defining humanity by contrast, it's allowing this moral order to exist because it could point to what happened when this kind of reasoning failed.
So by the 18th century, the real wolves were gone because they hunted them to extinction, which pisses me off. And the monster moved into literature and folklore. So like a metaphor for inner conflict and it becomes like a fascination. And like people started to put it into storytelling more than an actual fear that they displaced onto humans.
[00:28:00] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:28:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:02] Speaker B: And I never knew that these like werewolf trials, I didn't realize that these ever happened because you hear so much about the witch trials.
I don't think I've ever actually heard of werewolf trials. I always just thought, you know, I don't know, like Twilight or whatever running around.
[00:28:18] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I always thought of them. I always thought of them more as like a, like a fiction that wasn't related to like real life.
[00:28:26] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:28:26] Speaker A: Until I started digging into it for this episode.
[00:28:30] Speaker B: But it's interesting how kind of like you say it's the.
Yeah, I guess the male version of like the witch. But it's just not, I suppose, just was not as extremely enacted, if you like, which means that, I suppose, yeah, we just. Yeah. As deadly. So we just haven't really heard about it. But it's still the same kind of messaging, I suppose, around, like, control and fear and so on.
[00:28:59] Speaker A: I think that's even like a mirror to society. Like, when it's trying to put women back in its place, it's much more violent and pervasive. And when it's putting men back in its place, it's like a couple examples here and there. Because, like, this was, you know, these things ranged over different time periods, but the death count is drastically different. The biggest estimations I found for dead were under 500. But the most common was 300 people in that 100 years, which is a lot of people, but it's not 60 to 150,000 or more, you know, across Europe in a couple hundred years. So that in itself, I think, is quite interesting. I mean, they both are wrong and they both suck. Right. But it just does tell us something. But then we get to the 1800s, but we're not as actively violent, and we have a better understanding that.
Well, we have a mostly better understanding that there aren't witches, there aren't werewolves, but still. No, like, we're still getting there, kind of with science. Right. Frankenstein is what I'm going to talk about. I'm getting there eventually, in my weird, roundabout way. So.
So the historical backdrop of Frankenstein was the early 1800s, when we were just trying, starting to experiment with electricity. Think of, like, industrial Britain. There's coal smoke, there's mills, there's child labor.
And just like this kind of sense that humanity had exchanged nature for machinery, which was a very common critique of philosophers at that time. Industrial cities were just glowing with gaslight. Scientists talked a lot about harnessing lightning itself. And newspapers were describing experiments, like various scientific experiments, and some of them talked about how electricity can make dead limbs twitch. And one scientist, Giovanni. Oh, no, all these European names. Giovanni Aldini, he publicly reanimated a hanged man's corpse in London, 1803. And crowds were there to see all of it. So, like, imagine seeing that at the first time. And it was the first time the public actively watched science play God and it terrified them.
[00:31:12] Speaker B: Right.
[00:31:13] Speaker A: And Europe was still reeling from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. And just kind of in this sense of like, has human ambition gone too far? Have we pushed our limits a bit? Kind of like the things around AI that we talked about.
[00:31:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:32] Speaker A: Similar vibes, factories multiplied wealth and suffering at the same time. It's a very similar era that we're in now.
[00:31:39] Speaker B: And it kind of brings up this sense of, like, I guess, like, lack of control, I suppose. Like, this reminds me of the mountain as well, right? From Game of Thrones when they kind of, like, reanimated him. Right. And there was this fear because actually, he was not. That he wasn't like. He wasn't, like, out of control, but he was very, very heavily controlled by other people who wanted to do bad.
[00:32:07] Speaker A: Right.
[00:32:08] Speaker B: So I think in that sense, things like this, I guess it's kind of similar to the scene, kind of Frankenstein, right? It's like, who is controlling that being, that soul, whatever it is. It's like the unknown, the uncontrollable sort of thing.
[00:32:25] Speaker A: Like AI, like we talked about last time, the reason they're so skeptical of AI is who's in control of it. That's so interesting. Like, the links with technology and the, you know, revolution and people being punished by the elites and everything like that. And as all this was happening, the Romantic poets and the philosophers and everything like that kind of, like, fled to the mountains or, like, to their.
Because obviously, only the rich could be these roles so that. To their little estates and start to ask, like, are machines killing the human soul? Like, you know, the fun, like, casual question.
Yeah. And one of these people was the Shelley family. So Lord Byron Coleridge and Shelley Sr.
Were debating whether progress was enlightenment or is it arrogance? And you know whose father that is?
Mary Shelley, the author of the first science fiction novel ever, Frankenstein, also known as the modern Prometheus.
[00:33:32] Speaker B: Ooh.
[00:33:32] Speaker A: She heard all these debates happening about whether humans could be perfected or who had overreached God's limits.
[00:33:39] Speaker B: It reminds me of this film. I cannot wish to remember the name of this film, but it was, again, this idea of, like, trying to perfect all humans, but what ends up happening is that everybody just becomes carbon copies of each other. And then just like we're talking about here, like, that soul, that, like, piece of you, which is just. You, like, kind of gets destroyed and we do all just turn into, like, robots. Whether that is something that is being done mechanically or whether it's something that's being done, I guess, more like societally, like through control and things like this. But I think it is. It's that.
Yeah, it's like the loss of the human part of ourselves, you know?
[00:34:21] Speaker A: Yeah. I think that's a massive fear with technology that we have.
[00:34:25] Speaker B: But I think we see that through the other monsters we've spoken about as well. So, like, with the werewolf, again, it's like the loss of this supposed human, I guess, Rush.
Rationality. Right.
[00:34:39] Speaker A: But it's like it's over focus on rationality. Like, that's. That's what European culture does. It's like an over focus on rationality and a minimization of what also makes us human, like emotions. And it makes us fear the things that do make us human.
[00:34:55] Speaker B: Yeah. Like, rather than thinking, okay, if someone does something slightly different or new, it's like, oh, what are the opportunities? How is that creative? How's that gonna, like, afford Is good stuff. There's this automatic, I guess, very prudent thinking of, like, well, actually, how is this dangerous? Or how is this going to.
Yeah.
Change how we know the world. Do you know what I mean? So a lot of this, I think, is fear of change. So on.
[00:35:24] Speaker A: 100%. 100%.
What also happened was there was. That was the year without a summer in 1816 where there was a bunch of volcanic ash across Europe's skies.
So at Lake Geneva, Mary Wollstonecroft Shelley joined a ghost story contest and. And that had her come up with her book Frankenstein or modern Prometheus in 1818.
And she invented science fiction, which is just so cool.
And it was just a new way of thinking about human creation and responsibility. And this is what I think is really interesting, is because Frankenstein's creature was the first monster that evoked sympathy, not just fear.
He was the unwanted child of progress. He was intelligent, and he was abandoned and he was unloved. And her story kind of captured, I guess, that anxiety of the world where technology could create life and not nurture it, which I think also resonates a lot with where we are now, with a lot of the, like, pro life stuff where, like, people want to control women's bodily autonomy, but they will not look after the child after it's born.
[00:36:45] Speaker B: Yes. And it reminds me as well of one of the films we mentioned last time of, you know, AI, Artificial Intelligence with Haley Joel Osmond. Right. So, yeah, we want to create this, like, these intelligent AIs. We want to be able to replace lost life with an AI bot.
[00:37:04] Speaker A: Right.
[00:37:04] Speaker B: But actually we're still not able to love them, and yet they end up being abandoned and feared.
[00:37:12] Speaker A: It's so weird. I mean, there must be something to it that resonates so much with our psychology that these stories reappear and reappear and reappear.
And I think it's really ironic as well, that.
Let me work this out. There's like a gendered irony, right, that a woman was writing the ultimate cautionary tale about male control of reproduction, and that's still resonating today.
[00:37:40] Speaker B: Male control of reproduction? What do you mean?
[00:37:42] Speaker A: How they're trying to control women's bodily autonomy. To control.
To make women have more babies and stay in the home, but they won't look after the babies that are born. So it's like literally, you know, 200 years ago, this cautionary tale written by a woman who was 18, about men controlling reproduction. Because that's what this is, right? It's reproducing life with electricity and then abandoning it.
[00:38:06] Speaker B: Okay, so you're kind of talking about. I was trying to think about how that's linking to the Frankenstein story, but. You mean from men. Yeah, creating life and then. Yeah, I see the link. Yeah.
[00:38:16] Speaker A: I just find that really interesting that it was already in their inner head.
And I think what's really interesting is like, there were a ton of stage adaptations, filled theaters, like, using a bunch of like thunder and sparks and like. Have you ever seen. Oh, what's that movie? There's. It's a magician movie from this time with Christian Bale.
[00:38:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I have seen it. The Prestige.
[00:38:39] Speaker A: You know what I'm talking? The Prestige. I freaking love that movie. It's like that kind of vibe, right? So you just see this like huge sensationalizations, like within months, these. There were so many adaptations. There were paper mache limbs. There was like a public fascination with it. This kind of fear became show business and not an inquisition. So here we have like, what started as like this real fear, like that arises from something logical. Right.
And now it's. Well, it's been capitalized, right. So it's now a business going back.
[00:39:14] Speaker B: To the bit around, I guess, like creating life almost.
It's like.
Yeah, I don't. I don't know. Dunno. My mind's thinking like, because the idea of like men being able to take control over the creation of life, you know, like it's seen almost like it's godlike. You know what I mean? So again, it's like, yeah, it's power creating life. But you, like you say you create the life and then what? And also then what, like society? Are you bringing like kids into what. So I think it's interesting as well in terms of like, what are these motivations behind the people who are creating life? Whether we're talking about that in a modern day or whether we're talking about this Back, like, when we're talking about Frankenstein, like, why. Why was there such the need to kind of harness that power, so to speak?
What was the point?
[00:40:12] Speaker A: I think there. There's a lot of discourse on this. Like, one of the reasons men have to oppress women is because they do not have control over reproduction in life. Like, they cannot have babies. And so there's just this need, especially in patriarchy, where there's this inherent distrust and disgust towards women, to control us rather than support us. Do you know what I mean? So, like, they just feel like they need to. Like, that's literally classic, disgusting displacement. Like, I cannot have baby. I will create Frankenstein instead. It's the same thing.
[00:40:44] Speaker B: But then, actually, I don't like it that much anyway.
[00:40:48] Speaker A: That's a society's problem now.
[00:40:50] Speaker B: I don't want it. Yeah, there's not a. There's not a woman here to look after it. So.
[00:40:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
Well, we just summed up a lot of stuff. The end of the episode. Goodbye, guys.
[00:41:02] Speaker B: Let's just stop.
[00:41:03] Speaker A: Just stop there. The next one is the vampire, which I find super interesting.
Like, there was always some, like, around the same time, like, suspicions of vampires, but they weren't, like, killing people for it. The vampire was, in the 17 and 1800s, born in the age of reason, but still kind of thrived on what reason couldn't explain because we didn't have the medical knowledge yet. In the early 1700s, with plagues in Serbia and Hungary, villagers kind of unearthed corpses that seemed untouched by the decay of death. So they, like, kind of looked like fresh with blood on their lips. Basically, they had just died, but they hadn't had anyone to bury them because it was a plague. Doctors and soldiers literally sent official vampire autopsies to Vienna. This.
[00:41:47] Speaker B: Does that work? I don't.
[00:41:48] Speaker A: It's just like, the mind of the 1700s, and you can see this, like, new fear forming in society that wasn't. Wasn't, like, divine wrath or wrath of the church. It was like a medical mystery when, like, churchyards started to become laboratories and, like, grave robbers literally started to lend their tools to doctors to perform autopsies. Like, it was just like this new understanding that we can learn from the human body. And by the 19th century, that kind of had, like, migrated. So that's the 1800s to Victorian London, which was crowded, filthy sick. There was lots of, like, syphilis, and there was a lot of public moralizing, essentially, that demanded chastity. But then there was also this huge market that was run on sexual hypocrisy like brothels and everything like that. And there was literally brothels existing right next to churches again. So in 1819, there was John Polidori's the Vampire, which kind of transformed that peasant ghoul that was like the initial one into like a handsome aristocrat. He was what you think of as a vampire empire. Right. He's predatory and elegant and like almost representing the nobility that lived off of the blood of the poor. So basically the capitalists. He's like represents. It's like a. It's like a representation of these rich aristocrats who are dead inside, basically. Yeah.
[00:43:20] Speaker B: It kind of gives me the. It makes me think of almost like. Like gluttony in a sense. Do you know what I mean? Like, they're kind of.
[00:43:27] Speaker A: Of.
[00:43:28] Speaker B: What's the word?
I don't know, but it's like this very over the topness. Very like, I guess lustful, you know, like have in excess of everything. It just feels like that kind of over dramatization.
Is that a word?
[00:43:45] Speaker A: Yes, it is. No, it literally is. It's a good way to. To compare. And then Dracula soon after, which kind of like fused all of that. So it was like everything the Victorian psyche was terrified of. Right. So it was like sex, disease, immigration, atheism, empire. And it was just like commenting on all of that.
[00:44:06] Speaker B: It's like the rebel, you know, like the rebel, like doing things that people are afraid to do, but maybe in like some senses people kind of wanna do it or. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's fear of something that actually. That has just been taught to them again, like by society that they shouldn't be doing or is scary, but actually they're like, I wish I could just let loose and. You know what I mean? Yeah.
[00:44:32] Speaker A: I mean, it's like. It's like reading any science fiction or fantasy book where people are just going on adventures that you can't go on. And especially in the Victorian area where it's like all this moralizing.
[00:44:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:44:44] Speaker A: And you literally can't step out of your box without going to jail. Like these.
I think I just find it really interesting that this is the first monster that wasn't like actually feared in real life, aside from like that, like 50 years where they were kind of like in these small towns. Like, is there. But really when it got kind of like famous was when it was used as escapism or as a comparison or something like that. So it was really became popular through its sensationalization in the media. And I just find that really Interesting.
Yeah, yeah. So, well, like you said, it was kind of repression made flesh. It kind of like allowed the desire people naturally have to be discussed under the mask of horror. Like, did you hear. You kind of hear that in gossip sometimes nowadays? Like, did you hear blah, blah, blah, or like, did it say it's turning sin into like something like a spectacle you're watching on a play where, like, witches and werewolves were burnt and executed, vampires were illustrated and applauded and just turned into more of like, just like a media movement, I suppose. And so this is really when you start to see the monster becoming entertainment. And that really kind of marks the beginning of the modern age of horror and monsters that we think of.
And then there's this in between stage before we get to kind of the modern stuff that we talked about last time. And the first one of those is the zombie. The zombie is an interesting one related to colonialism. So if we're looking at Haiti, this is where another monster was taking shape. Back in the 18th century, half a million enslaved Africans labored under code noir. It was horrific slavery. Right.
And as one survival mechanism, they started to merge West African religions and spirituality with Catholic ritual. And this is where voodoo came from. And a lot of people look at the at voodoo as a spiritual system of endurance, or we would term in psychology, like a coping mechanism. Right. And within that, the zombie is described as the most terrible fate. It's a person whose soul has been stolen, like their very soul has been stolen and condemned to endless work without will. And I said last time, like, we still look at zombies as a metaphor for capitalism. And this is where it began. And it wasn't even just a superstition.
It was a philosophy of enslavement. It was a way of directly naming what it felt like to be owned and enslaved. And the zombie took hold in the. In the west as well. After the Haitian revolution in the late 1700s. It was the only successful slave uprising in history, and it terrified Europe.
The zombie either became like a terror or a triumph. So, like, proof that even the soul could resist. And so that's what it kind of really embedded into Western culture is just like. And so after independence, French and American travelers rewrote Haitian beliefs as like an exotic horror. And by rewrote, I mean, co opted, stole, colonized. Right.
[00:48:02] Speaker B: So I was gonna say, like, I've.
Like, as you were describing the zombie then, I was like, this is interesting. This is not what I've thought of as a zombie.
That now makes the sense.
[00:48:15] Speaker A: Yes, colonizer is gonna Co opt. So it's very. And like to do that and then get rid of the history behind it really pisses me off by like the late 19th century travelogues describe kind of like voodoo rights for like their audience. Right. And they kind of use it as a way to make money. And the political power of the myth was completely stripped away.
And so like it kind of entered this western culture as a spectacle completely removed from its origins and its critiques of systemic power and what it really felt like to be a slave. But still, you know, from what I'm reading in Haiti and other areas that practice voodoo, it's still kind of like a warning of dehumanization that people still quite respect.
So I didn't know that. And I'm like sad that I didn't know that. And I find it very interesting, but also sad that it was just co opted and just completely erased, you know?
[00:49:15] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, totally. That's interesting because zombie, I feel like one of the. And maybe this is the thing again, it's like that the modern zombie, you say that you mention that to anyone and everybody just automatically thinks about, you know, living dead sort of vibes and whatever. But it's. Yeah, it's sad that the kind of history of it has been lost. But it's also interesting, I think, how there's still this talk of like a soul, right. It's still very much focused on if your soul had been stolen or condemned. Right. And again that's kind of similar in a sense with what we were talking about with Frankenstein. It's like this fear that there is not a soul in the body. And again like what that that then means.
[00:50:00] Speaker A: I think you're so right. And I think that like it brings up these immediate feelings of disgust which we discussed last episode of just like the feeling of disgust is such an inherent human emotion that like pops in before reason does. And so that. And then you immediately feel free fear because of that. And so like it. It is such a good job of really dragging up these real human emotions and or experiences. Like I don't think disgust is necessarily an emotion. I think it's more of like a, like a physical and mental reaction against something that is just so wrong. Like slavery.
[00:50:38] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely, but and I think also part of it, like people almost like that kind of existential dread, like in a sense with this idea of like a soul. Like people questioning who am I? What am I? Am I like mind, body, soul? Like what is it? Is it all of it? Like which part of me do I need to protect. And I think that the soul has been given almost that the power or the. I don't know, our authenticity is something that we need to protect. I think that's interesting. I suppose when we start to talk more about the psychology, like in the next episode is like how we make sense of who we are as human beings.
Yes.
[00:51:20] Speaker A: If you're not watching on YouTube, you can't see I'm smiling really big at once. I'm very excited because we will be talking about existential psychology in the next episode.
You've hit the nail on the head. I'm so excited. My voice is still really weird from Michael. Don't judge me. And around the same time, just like quickly moving on, just because for some reason I didn't have a transition. I just went straight to mummies around the same time we have the mummy. It's interesting, actually. All of our more modern monsters that we're not trying to murder are dead, but alive. Maybe that's why we're not trying to kill them, because they're already dead.
Yeah, but like witches and werewolves, people just assumed were just things, monsters in their own right, not just like dead humans of some sort.
[00:52:07] Speaker B: And maybe is that, I don't know, is it an echo of us just fearing death as like, you know, I suppose like Western society. Do you know what I mean?
[00:52:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because we do not do a good job.
[00:52:23] Speaker B: We did our.
No.
[00:52:26] Speaker A: So this is around the same time. So like this started around Napoleon's Egyptian campaign again, colonizing, digging up people's cultural things, like just horrific stuff. Europe was obsessed with Egypt because of this. So we have the combination of archaeology kind of as a science starting to arise and imperialism and science all merging into a spectacle that people had never seen before. So there were museums competing for relics, also known as countries stealing important cultural items and bringing them back to Europe.
Collectors, Collectors were buying mummies by the ton. They were literally ground into a powder for Victorian medicines. Literally, people put them in their food and they were sold as like, curia is like gross. Right, right. And then by the mid 19th century, London and Paris were staging mummy unwrapping parties. You know, obviously this is the rich and powerful powerful. This is the aristocracy. They're paying a ton of money to steal people's stuff and unwrap mummies. And there were surgeons entertaining these aristocrats. Like they were like peeling back 3000 year old bandages under gaslight. And like, just take yourself back to what that smelled like. Right. Resin and decay. Like, you think the smell of coffee is bad. Oh, my God.
And it just, like, grosses me out. Like, the Empire was dissecting history for its aristocrats to have entertainment, right?
And the biggest thing around the Mummy was like, okay, they knew it was real, so they had to invent another monster around it. It was the curse of the Mummy. So mummies became a monster through the curse.
So when excavators were starting to die of infection or heat from the desert, newspapers started to invent the Mummy's curse. The Mummy by Jane Louden. Is it Luden or Loudon? I don't know. And her series after and series after that transformed this looting that's happening into a moral theater. So, like, the Empire is haunted by its spoils. And like we said last episode, history often seems like, especially more modern history.
Actually, no, all of history's monsters just seems like they're haunting, haunting that time. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's like the monster is the specter that is haunting you for your sins as a society. Like, with witches, it's patriarchy. With the Mummy, it's, you know, the guilt of imperialism.
Right?
[00:55:07] Speaker B: And it's like what you said. What did you say last episode? Something about, like, looking behind, looking at who's, like, creating the monster to see what the reality is.
Something like that.
[00:55:21] Speaker A: Who's holding up the mirror, really? Yeah, yeah. Whoever is creating that monster is holding up the mirror to the society, essentially, the Mummy was that mirror to the Empire, A preserved body reminding colonizers of mortality and of theft. Like, this is what you are doing. And basically, again, this kind of went from, like, a superstition to a media event. People weren't really scared of this because it's not like they were going into tombs and doing it themselves. It became just, I don't know, more media superstition to make money and sensationalize and have fun with that. So that's the last monster for today.
So, yeah, I guess. From the witch to the Mummy's exhibition hall, these monsters are tracing how kind of our Western civilization learns as a group to externalize our fear. So as we can see, kind of imagination filled in the gap when our brains couldn't identify what was going on. And each one of these monsters that we discussed kind of demonstrated the area's anxiety. So the witch was the women's rebellion. The werewolf was man's incivility or hunger. Frankenstein was like loneliness or, like, unlooked after life or men reproducing things. The zombie was enslavement. And the mummy was the Empire's guilt. And obviously that's a much less nuanced take on it. We could probably do a whole episode on each of these. But that's a summary of monsters.
[00:57:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. And I think that we do, right? We do just think about them as things in, like, the modern day which are basically, like, just used for our entertainment, like, if we're being honest, right? Like through film, through media and so on. So it's really like. Like, it's really interesting and quite, I guess, kind of quite sad in a way to, like, look back and see where these monsters have all come from.
And the, like, you're saying, like the real fears, like the real, you know, challenges, I suppose, that were happening which led to the creation of these monsters. So what we're gonna do next time, so we're gonna move from history and to psychology, because that's what we do.
We're going to dig into. So why.
Why we make monsters in the first place. So you might be starting to get a little bit of an idea as to why this is happening. So we're going to chat about why, but why?
We must know more. So we're going to talk about that a bit more in relation to psychology. So why do we keep bringing our fears back in new forms instead of just dealing with them? You know, like, why not resolving, you know, the fear, the guilt and so on? Right. So the next episode, we're going to explore how fear and imagination work together and how we project what we can't face in ourselves and how fear helps bond social groups and why horror. I suppose fear can actually feel strangely satisfying. So in short, history is telling us when monsters appeared, and we're going to use psychology to explain why we still need them.
[00:58:49] Speaker A: Ooh, very eloquent, Laura.
Thank you guys so much for listening. As always, we probably left you with more questions than answers, but that's kind of the point. We love digging into the messy undercurrents of where our historical monsters came from. Do you guys have any thoughts or questions? We want to hear it. Drop a comment, message us, or shout it to the void. But actually, please tag us. It is much more effective. And if there's a topic you want us to dig into next, please get in touch because we are always down for a new rabbit hole. If you like this episode, don't forget to follow, like, or rate whatever your platform allows. And definitely tell your friends. You can find all our links on the but why Instagram page. Head to the bio for everything and remember the first step to understanding is asking, but why?
Yeah, Sam.
