Pour One Out

Published Jan 10, 2019, 10:00 AM

Some Curiosities are delightful and happy, but not on this tour. Today, we meet human cruelty and suffering head-on, but walk away richer for it.

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Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. His name was Pedro Gonzalez, and to some he was known as the Man of the woods. No, he didn't live among the trees or off the grid. It was the mid fifteen hundreds, there was no grid yet. He was born in Tenerife, one of the Spanish Canary islands off the coast of Africa, and he was well. He was a little strange to those who knew him. He was a curiosity, unlike anyone they'd ever seen before. Pedro had a condition now known as hypertrichosis, although at the time those who suffered from the condition were simply called wild men or animals. See Pedro had hair, a lot of hair. I don't mean long locks like Rapunzel. Rather, his entire face and body, from his forehead to his toes were covered with thick, dark hairs. Given the lack of human rights laws at the time, it wasn't long before young Pedro's condition made him a target for opportunistic kidnappers. He was taken from his home and thrown in a metal cage, where he was fed raw meats and kept like property a pet. In fact, he was eventually sent to France as a gift for King Henry the Second's coronation in Once in France, things didn't go as expected. I mean, they couldn't have got much worse. But King Henry didn't react the way any other king might have. Rather than except the gift and throw Pedro in a dungeon or parade him around the kingdom on a leash, he took mercy on the boy. He saw his human entity where others saw only an animal, and so the king decided to try something. He plucked the young man from his cage and had him educated by the best teachers in the land. In a not so benevolent gesture, he forced Pedro to use the Latin form of his name, Petrus Gonsalvus. He wore clothes of fine silk, a delicious warm meals, and learned to speak, read, and write in three different languages. He had reached noble status without having been born or marry into it, quite a feat for someone who only years earlier had been forced to eat raw meat in a cage where he slept. Unfortunately, no one else saw him as a nobleman. He still bore the symptoms of a man with hypertrichosis. Shaving didn't work, the hair just grew back. What's worse, Gonsalvas's adoptive father, King Henry, was killed in a jousting match twelve years after he'd taken the boy under his wing. Since he was still technically a gift for the king, he now became the property of the king's widow, Katherine de Medici. Catherine didn't prove as generous as her late husband. She too had an experiment plan for Petrus, one that changed the lives of two innocent people. In the name of morbid curiosity. Catherine wanted to know of Petrus and his wife could conceive children and pass on his condition. There was only one problem. Petrus didn't have a wife. Not to worry, though, Katherine was resourceful. She ordered the young daughter of one of her servants to marry him, and it didn't take long for the newlyweds to start a family. All in all, they had seven children, four of whom were also born with hypertrichosis. The Queen needless to say, was thrilled her experiment had paid off. And yeah, the whole story sounds awful and cringe worthy. These were not civilized times, but in a way, some good did come of Petrus's change in status. His story was told for generations, and like with any story, it took on a life of its own. Soon Petrus wasn't a medical anomaly, but accursed prince and his wife had turned into a villager, held captive in a hidden castle. Eventually, someone wrote it all down, someone named Gabriello Suzanne Barbo the Villa Nueva, and that story she wrote became the origin for a tale we all know and love today, a tale as old as time, you might say. And that's right. Before talking teapots and dancing candelabras, there was Petrus Gonsalvos and his wife Catherine, the real life inspirations for Beauty and the Beast. It's hard to accept when a loved one passes away. It can seem like they're not really gone, like they're still there with us as we process our grief. Ever since ancient Egypt, death has been treated as a kind of temporary status, as though the body had merely been a vessel for an immortal spirit to move on to the afterlife. One way in which spirits were sated was with an offering, not gold or jewels, but food and drink, usually alcoholic. Perhaps you've heard the phrase pour one out, where someone will tip their can or bottle and watch as a splash of beer is absorbed into the ground for a fallen friend or family member. That practice is nothing new, and its origins can be traced all the way back to the days of the Pharaohs. As time progressed, other cultures adopted it and even expanded upon it. Enter the Romans. They didn't just celebrate life with drunken parties. They paid sincere respect for the deceased loved ones of their life was by way of pouring a small amount of wine onto the ground so it could be absorbed and passed onto the bodies residing beneath them. The idea was simple, keep the dead happy and satisfied and their spirits wouldn't haunt the living. But how did they know their wine was making it through all those layers of dirt and stone to the graves below. Well, they didn't, and leaving it up the chance meant tempting fate, and let's be honest, no one wanted to be haunted by their beloved aunt because she hadn't gotten enough to drink in the afterlife. The Romans needed a sure fire away to verify their libations made it to their final destination, so they came up with a solution a tube. It began at the surface level and traveled all the way down to the grave, providing a way to transport food and drink to the dead, hence their name libation tubes. No one knows exactly what was poured down these tubes, scientists have deduced anything from wine to oil too. Flowers were sent down to a company the deceased. The tubes grew so popular they were incorporated into funerary rituals and ceremonies from the time of death and throughout the year. In mid February, families visited cemeteries for Parentalia, where people paid respect to their ancestors for a period of nine days, living eight meals together near the graves, and passed portions of their feasts down the libation tubes so that the dead could be part of the celebrations. Lamoralia was another festival, albeit a less celebratory one where Romans would provide beans to calm evil spirits to avoid the ghosts of their beloved ones coming back hungry and angry. Beans and other items were sent down the tubes to their resting places below. Eventually, as Christianity spread throughout Europe, the practice of building libation tubes died out. However, that didn't stop mourners from offering a swig of their wine or beer to the dead. They just did it in a less direct way. In Mexico, tequila and mescal are offered at altars on the day of the dead. In Russia, vodka isn't only poured over the grave, but a glass is covered with black bread while mourners celebrate the life of the deceased. Taoist believe that when a person dies of violent death, their spirit roams around in something called the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts. During the seventh month of the Chinese calendar, the realm opens and the ghosts within find their way to Earth in search of revenge. Thouist then offered gifts and food to these ghosts as part of a large feast meant to coax them back to where they came from. But Tibetan Buddhists might have the most extreme practice of all, one steeped in a deep reverence for the dead then all they accomplished during their life. A cup called akappala is crafted from a human skull and decorated with precious jewels. The cup is then filled with dough cakes shaped like human eyes, ears, and tongues, as well as a liquid of some kind, sometimes alcohol but oftentimes blood, and then offered to malevolent deities. Only the spiritual leaders who have achieved a level of expertise above all others may drink from the cappala, as it's believed that, along with the liquid inside, the knowledge of the skulls former owner is passed along to the drinker. So the next time you have a drink or celebrate something with a big meal, pause for a moment and reflect on the past. Some people, it seems, don't drink to forget, They drink to remember. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works, I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a pie cast book series and television show and you can learn all about it over at the world of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. H

Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

From the creator of the hit podcast Lore comes a new, bite-sized storytelling experience. Each twice 
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