In the desert. I saw a creature naked bestial who's squatting upon the ground, held his heart in his hands, and eight of it. I said, is it good, friend? It is bitter, bitter, he answered, But I like it because it is bitter and because it is my heart. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And that, of course is the poem in the Desert by Stephen crane Um, a poem that that i've I've I've long found nice and creepy and thought provoking. I think a lot of it depends on which word in the last sentence you emphasized. Does he like it because it is my heart or because it is my heart? M h Yeah, there are several ways to to to to the piece of apart there. But it's also the perfect poem for Valentine's Day. Today's Valentine's Day. I don't know if anyone has ever taken in the Desert and transformed it into a Valentine, but I think that's a fabulous idea. Depending on who you're giving it to you want to make sure that they're gonna understand the cleverness of this. Um. But it's just the right length. You know. You could put you know, half of it on the front, half of it inside. You could you could draw the bestial creature they're consuming its own heart. Uh. Somebody has to have done this before. I'm sure someone will send links to this effect to us. You could put it on those little heart shaped candies that look like they're like made a chalk basically. Oh yeah, that would be clever, as I mean, it has to have been done. It's such a great idea. Does anybody eat those? By the way, that somebody like the taste of chalk enough that they would consume that. I remember eating them that I was a child. Um, you know, and maybe and I don't know if they're bitter that would but they are shaped like hearts. Yeah, at a time when you ate a lot of candy, it made sense to at least try a few of them. But I think then you realize there were better candies to eat, easier candies to eat. That's such a childhood mentality. It's like, well it's not good, but it is candy, So I guess I have to eat it. I should at least at least try it. It's it's just polite. Yeah, so yes, It's Valentine's Day at time when we tend to think about the over commercialization of love and especially romantic love, as well as the symbolism of the human heart. Um, you know, I think this is a topic we've we've touched on before on the show. You know. We when it comes to the heart, we know that this is the the center of our circulatory system. We know it pumps our blood, but it's also seen as the symbolic or metaphoric seed of love and passion. And given all these complex ways of thinking about the heart, we also tend to feel a certain kind of way about the topic of heart removal when it comes up, be it something that comes up in the biological you know, the medical world, or if it comes up in random horror movies, or just as a turn of phrase. Is this how you landed on on heart removal? For for the topic this week? Where you watching a movie where a heart gets ripped out? I don't think I was specifically when I started thinking about this, but we have watched several movies on Weird House Cinema our Friday weird movie episodes that I like particularly, I think, um, some seventies films we've watched, such as The Lorealized Grasp, Horror Rizes from the Tomb, Return of the Blind Dead. I think all three of those features scene in which somebody's heart is cut out and it's eaten by say a monster or or or an occultist night that sort of thing. Am I remembering? Wrong? Is the whole point of Lorealized Grasp that the monster eats people's hearts? Yes? She does. Yeah, well, I mean there are other aspects of the film, but it clearly in terms of what is the the gory point of the film that seemed to be one of its main fascinations. Well, she eats people's hearts and she falls in love with that. I don't know, Spanish German, Elvis Peter Fonda kind of guy. Oh yes, yes, anyway, yes, yeah, go back to those episodes if you want more of that. Uh. Well, when it comes to to heart ripping, of course, there are some more famous examples have probably come to everyone's mind. There's fighting game Mortal Kombat. I think everybody had that was around in the nineties. Um, and and then in decades after, but especially in the nineties, you have that that very pixelized version of that that heart rip in mind. And then of course there's four film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which features a rather famous heart ripped scene that despite the film being set in India, this actual heart rip and all the things that the batties are up to a really take worry elements from at least a couple of non Indian cultures. Uh and uh. And so some of the cultures we're going to discuss in this episode and kind of make a patchwork villain um religion here for Indiana Jones to go up against. And I think they also incorporate more than a little bit of fictional satanic ritual like it, it's very unbelievable culture that Indiana Jones is supposedly encountering in that movie, to say the least. Yeah, now, other heart rips of of note, correct me if I'm wrong, But doesn't Jason Vorhees ripped out of heart at least once. Uh, Oh, I don't recall. Probably yeah, well I do know. Uh, that's one of the worst movies in the whole series. Ends up like the bunch of people, A bunch of like troops come in and blow up Jason, and then somebody eats Jason's heart and turns into Jason. It's brilliant. Okay, I was really I had I haven't. I don't think I've actually seen leprekn six ak LEPrecon Back to the Hood from two thousand and three. This is the last one to star Warwick Davis. But that has a heart rip in it. Like the heart rip scene I guess in a film is usually pretty easy to do because you just it's mostly sound effect and then the visual of somebody holding a bloody, um palpating heart. Oftentimes that's dumb by just having the person squeeze like kind of reever heart create the sound effect if you desire. Other examples come to mind the horror movie Valentine's Day. Um, I've forgotten about this, but the Prophecy films have a lot of this, with angels ripping each other's hearts out. Um. Dumb and Dumber has a heart rip scene that I had forgotten about. I can't remember. Is that supposed to be a dream sequence or is that supposed to really happen or does it matter? In dumb and dumber. It is a dream sequence. Okay, okay, h then there's a rambo, Last Blood and Last of the Mohicans. Actually seen very few of these movies. Oh well, we might. We might have to come back to the Prophecy films, but I don't know. Some of those you could probably miss um, especially maybe lepri kon six. But but yeah, there it's it's kind of a staple of horror um. Oftentimes, if you have any kind of like supernatural being, you know, you have some sort of really lightning quick heart rip. There's a great example of this on the HBO series True Blood, which I guess over overall looking back on it kind of a mixed bag. But the excellent character actor Dennis O'Hare does have this wonderful character, the vampire King of Mississippi. His name is Russell Eddington. Is a real highlight of the show. While he's on the show, and there's a scene where I forget exactly what ticks him off, but vampires are supposed to be secret in the in the series, and he just gets mad and instantly like speeds to um like a live news broadcast and rips the broadcasters hard out through his back along with a piece of his spine, and that stands out of and in my mind is one of the finest moments of that series. The main thing that comes to my mind is that the manual heart removal is the primary move of an unarmed Terminator in the Terminator films. Oh did he rip some hearts out? That's what That's what Arnold Schwarzenegger does in the first movie when he comes out to the punk. Yeah, he like, get Bill Paxxton or somebody or the guy Bill Paxiston's hanging out with. It's been so long since I saw the first Terminator. I really need to go back in and watch it. I don't know why that's the move they chose. I mean, it's scary in the movie. I don't know if that really speaks of robotic efficiency. It's like taking the batteries out right, all right. Well, with that out of the way, we're gonna begin to move into what we were ultimately really talking about in this pair of episodes this week, and that is um heart removals and and how they factored into uh different views, different supernatural understandings of the human body and the cosmos. We're not gonna we're probably not gonna go super in depth into heart symbolism and metaphors, and in terms of trying to be um, you know, to completely cover the topic because it is a broad topic. You have, like any given culture has some sort of idea about what the heart is, and there's a lot of overlap. But then there are some distinct ideas mixed in there as well, and we'll touch on some of these. I think a good place to start would be, of course, with the Egyptian heart. Now there was we had a past episode of the show this was there was an interview that I did with author Bill Shutt, who wrote a book called Pump. It's quite good. It gets into animal hearts and various um in the history of understanding the human heart, Medical history of the heart. Wonderful read. And in that book he he does bring up that, yes, the ancient Egyptians knew the heart is ab or eb or hati uh. It was treated with a great deal of reverence, as this was the organ said to contain a record of the individual's good and bad deeds. And I think a number any of if you've consumed any amount of Egyptology over the years, you're probably familiar with the basic scenario that is often related here, that after you have died, it is this heart that will be weighed against a feather of Matt, the Goddess of truth, to see if you can indeed pass on into the realms beyond our life here on earth, or if you're going to be consumed by this ferocious beast of annihilation and thus no longer exist. I think it's a crocodile type or crocodile issue beast, isn't it. Yes, yeah, it is. It is a crocodile esque I'm blanking on the name of the entity off the top of my head. But but yeah, you basically have the this uh, the split road between annihilation and continued existence. But you can only continue to exist if your heart matches up against this feather of Matt, the Goddess of truth. Now, as Geraldine Pinch mentions in her book Egyptian Mythology, yeah, the ancient Egyptians view the heart is the organ of thought and feeling, and it was the seat of consciousness itself, and the goddess here was is often seen as this ostrich, feather adorned goddess of truth and goodness, So thus her feather would match the weight of your heart if you had truth in your heart, if you had not at in your heart uh at all. So that's the basic scenario there now, Shut sites historian Roger K. French, who rationalized that the basic idea and the Egyptian model here is that life is warm. The heart is warm, the heart moves, and with its movements we we breathe, and our vessels carry blood to the rest of our body. Shut also points out that the teen fifty five b c. Book of the Heart may reveal some level of understanding regarding heart attacks and aneurysms among the ancient Egyptians, but historians are not all in agreement onto what degree we could interpret it this way. Now, given the importance of the heart in all of this, especially the continuation of the soul and ancient Egyptian belief, uh, this probably reminds a lot of people out there of another fact about the mummified remains of an individual, about what happens to various internal organs. Several of these internal organs are are often uh placed inside of a canopic jar, including the heart. Yes, and so that brings me to how I wanted to look at a specific example of a mummy to examine treatment of the heart in a case where it was well documented. So obviously, Egyptian embalming, mummification, and burial practices varied by time and place, and ancient Egyptian civilization spans have really long time, thousands of years, So the example I'm about to talk about is not characteristic of everything in age in Egypt. But I thought it was interesting to look at one example in particular, especially because it contradicts a generalization that many people have made over the years about Egyptian mummification, one that I definitely remember learning when I was younger, And the generalization is this that during mummification, the brain is always removed. Of course you get the famous grotesque image of the hook going through the face holes to remove the brain, and that the heart, being the seat of the soul, as you just explained, was left in place in the body. So maybe the other organs were removed, but the heart was left in the chest. And by the way, if if memory serves, I think I'm remembering from a past episode on mummies, the brain. We have to to remember the brain. I believe it has often thought to have gone rancid first, to rot it first, and therefore we have to factor that into all of this as well, along with these understandings for the ancient Egyptians about what organs we're doing now. The specific mummy I was reading about that that contradicted this generalization was featured in a in a paper based especially around some ct scan research that was published in in the journal the academic journal the Yearbook of Mummy Studies. It's a funny name. It makes you imagine the mummies are like writing, you know, stay cool, have a great summer, or they're like going through drawing hearts around all the mummies they have a crush on like this mummy is so cute anyway, I uh so, I was reading about this paper in a concurrent article in Live Science by Owen jaris called Ancient Egyptian mummy found with brain no heart. So this mummy is the body of a woman who lived about seventeen hundred years ago according to radio carbon dating, placing her under the period of Roman control of Egypt, and she died somewhere between the ages of thirty and fifty, and her body shows sign of severe dental health issues and tooth loss, which apparently is quite common for ancient Egyptian bodies from this period. I don't know if that's because they were getting lots of sugar or what. I don't know what the explanation is, but a lot of dental problems, and the religious and cultural context would be this was a person who still adhered to a version of traditional Egyptian religion, or the variant of it that was popular at this time, at a time when Christianity was actually spreading through the region and becoming more and more dominant. Now, in contradiction to the brain removed, heart left in place generalization I heard when I was growing up, this mummy is exactly the opposite. Analysis of CT scans by the researchers found that the embalmers in this case uh, they worked by making an incision in the paraneum, and then through here they removed the intestines, the stomach, the liver, and the heart. Heart came out too. So after all these organs were removed, they lined the incision that they had made with resin and linen cloth, and then they placed a couple of plaques on this woman's body, on the skin, over the stomach and over the stern um, and to read from Jaris's summary quote, something that may have been intended to ritually heal the damage the embalmers had done and act as a replacement of sorts for her removed heart. And this would not be the only example, uh in ancient Egyptian involving practices where the heart was taken out and something else was put in there, seemingly in its place or to replace it. I'll mention another couple of examples of that in a minute. But after this, her body was treated with um spices and with lichen covering. Uh I think her head and her her upper body, and she was wrapped and buried somewhere near lux Or. At the time of this article, by the way, the mummy was in the collection of the Red Path Museum at McGill University in Montreal. But anyway, this raises an interesting question. If the heart was so important in Egyptian religion, that so important that for a long time people assumed it was always left in place when body bodies were mummified, what was happening in the cases where it actually was removed, and how common was that um Well, to quote a professor named Andrew Wade from McMaster University, who's the author of another uh piece I'm gonna look at in a minute, Wade says, quote, we don't really know what's happening to the hearts that are removed, so it's assumed that, as you alluded to a minute ago, robed, they were usually when they were mooved, they were put into canopic jars, which we know we're used to hold internal organs removed from other mummies, but that's not always known for sure. So sometimes we just don't know what happened to the heart. And there's still the question of why why did they do this? Well, we don't know, but the authors of the ct study speculate that perhaps the two plaques on her abdomen and her stern um were meant as a kind of healing or a replacement for the wounds inflicted by the embalming process itself, Like, Okay, we had to cut a hole in your body in order to process your body for burial, so here's a plaster healing symbol to counteract that incision. And then perhaps the plaque on the stern um was somehow a replacement for the missing heart. But again we don't know for sure, and we don't know why the heart was removed, But I came across another piece that has some some interesting thoughts about this. So for a more general look at the treatment of the heart in Egyptian mummification, I was looking at. Uh. I don't think this is a paper in an academic journal. I think this is a fact sheet from a presentation at an academic conference that was put together by a couple of experts, by Andrew D. Wade and Andrew J. Nelson. I know that one of the two authors here, Wade, was the one who was quoted in that article we were just talking about. So the authors of of this presentation here say that many generalizations made these days about the treatment of the heart in Egyptian momification are based not on modern empirical research, but rather on accounts given by classical authors. So if we are going to use literary evidence, evidence from ancient texts for what these funeral practices were, uh, you know, it would be really good to have a lot of direct Egyptian accounts, And we have some Egyptian accounts about beliefs about funeral practices and and the afterlife. But instead a lot of the literary evidence we use is mostly in Greek and Roman texts from authors like Herodotus and Plutarch. And in fact, they say the only author specifically mentioning the heart as opposed to making more general statements about what is done with the organs during UH momification is the Ptolemaic period Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, who writes as follows quote, when they have gathered to treat the body after it has been split open, one of them thrusts his hand through the opening in the corpse into the trunk and extracts everything but the kidneys and the heart, and another one cleanses each of the viscera, washing them in palm wine and spices. So based on this, we've got Diodorus here saying that the heart is always left in place. But of course, remember he was Ptolemaic period, and this is one author. And this presentation I looked at was designed to compare those literary accounts of heart treatment UH to evidence again from CT scans or from mummies that have actually been empirically taken apart and described in the scientific literature. So we like looked to see what was left in them. And they say there are three basic patterns of of heart treatment in mummies. One is retention, the heart stays in the chest even if other organs are removed. Number two is removal, the heart is taken out of the body. And number three is replacement, where the heart is removed moved, and something symbolic is left in its place, generally something called a heart scare ub which is a type of amulet. So how do the empirical finding stack up the author's right quote, The heart was noted as intact in only twenty one of eighty individuals where this organ's disposition was recorded, and barely more than a quarter of the individuals, And this sample was the heart retained in situ, and only one case was the heart possibly sewn back into place, and in one other case was a heart scare of a present presumably to replace the removed heart. And so rob you can see I have included a chart from their presentation below where you can look at the trends where these are not percentages, but these are absolute numbers of examples from these different periods, and you can see that heart retention predominates in the small number of samples of mummies we have from the Middle and New Kingdoms. But then as time goes on, heart retention is outnumbered by heart removals and the third intermediate period, the Late period, and the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. So, in the words of the authors, quote, mummies were increasingly absent their hearts from the New Kingdom onward. As time goes on, more and more of the mummies we find have their hearts removed. And so the authors conclude, quote, the stereotype of universal heart retention or replacement on accidental removal is far from the truth. The heart was uncommonly retained in situ and rarely returned or replaced by a heart scare up. The hypothesis constructed from the stereotyped account by Diodorus is therefore falsified by these data. Interesting interesting, also worth just driving home though that this is all separate, of course, from the purely sort of mythological situation in which the heart is weighed. That's taking place in another realm, that is not taking place in the physical world. This is a study about what happened to the body, is not necessarily about what the people in question believed about what was happening in the afterlife, right, And though of it's also worth driving home that also with belief especially when we're talking about ancient Egypt. Again, like you said, we're talking about a very um long period of time in which practices change, but also beliefs also change. So it's hard to just you can't just sum everything up and like say a pamphlet about like here's what the ancient Egyptians believed or did, because you're covering such a broad period of time. Correct, And this is the point the authors here are making. Uh They they used this as evidence that the classical descriptions of English Egyptian mummification by like Greek and Latin authors should only be used, as they say, at best, quote a possible snapshot of mummification performed by one particular workshop unquote, and not like an adequate description of universal practices or even of the most common practices across time and space. Uh So, But I still had the question about, like why, though, is there any clue as to why this difference that in some cases the heart is retained, in other cases the heart is removed, And are there any trends in like whose hearts were removed and whose were left in place? The authors do offer a bit of speculation here. They say that you know. Interestingly, in the mummies available to us, there seems to be a somewhat of a correlation with access to mummification by different classes. So in the New Kingdom there essentially was a process of democratization of mummification. Previously, mummification had been an incredibly exclusive right which was only available to you know, the top top elites. But then they say, quote as time progressed, the nobles gained increasing access to mummification and retained their hearts. With the democratization of ummification, however, the commoners being mummified, we're not receiving the same treatment, possibly to ensure that the elite maintained a more favorable afterlife than their subjects. That went in a different direction than I was expecting. I thought it would just maybe be like, well, this is this is a premium service for premium customers. We can't offer the same level of mumification services for a lesser price. But it seems like it also could be ensuring the status quo in the afterlife. It could be because I mean so I don't know how it would necessarily be cheaper to remove the heart than not remove the heart, you know, like it just in terms of the actual cost in the like labor to the embalmers. Uh so, yeah, it could be a deliberate choice to sort of create an artificial, uh tiered system for quality of mummification and make sure, well, there's a really special kind of mummification where your heart stays in and that's only available to the elites. But we don't know that for sure. I want to be very clear, we don't know the reasoning. But that is an interesting, plausible scenario that it's like it was in order to create a kind of elite or premium tiered type of mummification at a time when more people were getting mummification at all. Fascinating, But we don't know for sure, and so I think this remains a really interesting question I would love to like know more of someone could have more evidence to shed direct light on on why this this difference emerged than now. Another scenario of heart removal that that's rather rather different in many respects, but one that probably instantly comes to many people's minds that I want to discuss is the ritual removal of human hearts by the Mayans and the Aztecs, but especially for research purposes. Here, the Mayans so the ancient minds are known to have performed human sacrifices involving the removal of the heart, though not in the postmortem sense. Um, the removal of the heart essentially via ritualistic sacrifice, ritualistic execution. You could think of it as vivisection or um or just or or even death by heart removal, I imagine. One article I was reading on the topic was Procedures in Human Heart Extraction and Ritual Meaning by Tessler and Zuccina, published in Latin American Antiquity in two thousand and six. And as you can tell by the title, this is a paper that deals predominantly with the procedures. How were they carrying this out? Um, not so much the you know, the the wise. We'll get into some of the wise, but essentially these were religious practices. Um. But I was not aware that there was. There's been so much sort of, so much discussion and attempts to understand exactly how the heart was removed. So they looked at skeletal remains a suspected heart removal human sacrifice cases and contended that the sacrificers would carry these procedures out. By quote, a trans diaphragmatic and I looked, I had to look that up. Webster says, use the hard g on trans diaphragmatic um. So I'm going with with with what Webster saying. In this case, the definition being occurring passing or performed through the diaphragm. You mean the diaphrag um, Yes, the diap um. And so this would yeah opening immediately below the rib cage, and this would help ensure rapid removal of the heart. And this is where they get into their going up against some some previous theories about how they carried this out. In particular, there was an eight to ten minute procedure estimate by Robestic and Hales in four These authors had argued that the sacrifice or would have cut through the thorax from side to side, collapsing the lung in the process us and this would make the victim unconscious within three to four minutes and allow the rest of the surgery to proceed without struggle. And they do kind of frame it as kind of a surgery vivisection, with heart removal occurring while the heart was still palpitating, which seemed to be the desired effect. To pull the heart out while the heart seems to still have life in it. Another analysis from Gonzalez Torres argued as well for a below the ribs approach, but stressed that the exact style may have varied from region to regions. So again we get into a similar situation with mummification. Just because one um mummification lab was doing it one way doesn't mean they were doing it the same way at another lab at another time. And likewise, the way hearts were removed via blood ritual blood sacrifice in one instance, it might be different in another. Uh, you know, different styles for different sacrifices, or some sort of evolution of style Tesla and chacina. Meanwhile, right quote, it must be underlined in this context that ritual heart removal entailed a violent vivisection of a struggling victim, and was therefore quicker and fundamentally distinctive from the cautious procedures implied in a quote unquote surgical operation as visualized by Rubasacon Hales. Now, the sacrificial victims in these situations were typically enslaved people, sometimes children or prisoners of war who were and and I'm reading that they were often either painted blue first or pelted with arrows, and once the heart was removed, its blood was generally used to smear or anoint some sort of divine icon or some sort of structure, that sort of thing. Now, as sacrifices, these would have had a religious significance. Is the significance of the act better understood than than maybe the significance of the removal or non removal of the heart in the Egyptian example, I believe so based on the work I was looking at. There's a paper here by Tesla and Oliver in Open Caskets and Broken Hearts. Great great title from a edition of Current Anthropology, and the authors here are right that the quote partitioning and the liberation of vitalizing matter, namely the heart and blood, fed specific sacred forces during divine cult and mythic reenactment. They also provide a note on Aztec sacrifices quote. As for the Aztecs, we conclude that different trunk opening procedures were practiced as part of ritual sequences that in each case enabled access to the cosmics sacred mountain with its vivifying essences. So, in other words, hearts and blood were essentially food for gods of the Sun and gods of the earth deities who in turn sacrificed or more intern or you could say, originally sacrificed something to create the universe. And the sacrifices here were acts of all the the actual blood ritual sacrifices, not the mythological sacrifices, were acts of quote, obligation, reciprocation, and re enactment. So there are several different things going on there, Like there's a sort of a mythic understanding of what the heart and the blood is. There's this re enactment of things that occurred in sacred time, the idea that there is some sort of of blood ritual and sacrifice that occurred with mythological beings, and the thing that is taking place in the sacrifice is important insofar as it is re enacting this mythic incident. And there's this also, you know, basically like what we we sort of generalize about sacrifice. Something is offered up so that something else may be offered down to us as humans. They also mentioned in this article that while the under the rib technique does seem more common, and I believe this is a slightly later work, there are three distinct tactics that were used. There's cutting directly under the ribs, there's making an incision between two ribs, and then there's horizontally severing the stern um in order to access the heart. But again it seems like going under the ribs was the most common technique mm hmm. Now additionally, and just sort of like trying to, you know, get into the whole, like what what did ancient people and in this case, what did the Mayans who are engaging in heart removal sacrifice? What did they think of the heart? What other ideas were we're going on regarding the center of our circulatory system. On this I found an interest discussion of ideas concerning the human body among the Satal people, because at all people are a Mayan people in southern Mexico. UM. So in this particular work, it is the ethno Physiology of the Satal Maya of the Highland Chapests by Cameron Littleton Adams. This was a Doctor's of Philosophy dissertation from the University of Georgia. So I'm not going to get into everything that's discussed here. And again this is not the Mayan people of old, but contempt arre Mayan people's um but there are these interesting ideas in their thinking about the connection of the heart to cognition. Uh, not thinking with the heart instead of the brain, but sort of thinking with it. So I found that kind of interesting because there are some other instances we'll get into as well. And in addition to the Egyptian model, where uh, this seems like maybe a modern twist on on these older ideas of the heart being the center of thought, in the center of being. Uh So, maybe it's a situation where like in the modern world, you know that the brain is the center of cognition, but there's still the symbolic and metaphorical importance of the heart as being something vital to who we are and having some sort of emotional connection which I think we can all relate to that, especially on Valentine's Day, like we're so on Valentine's Day, were so steeped in this idea that, yeah, the heart is not just a thing that pumps blood. Uh yeah, And there is to some degree some accurate re seeing wisdom in that way of thinking, because of course, well, I think it is quite clear that the brain is the necessary organ for cognition, Like you couldn't have thinking without the brain, that the rest of the body influences the thinking that happens in the brain, and the brain is not like a thing floating apart from the body. Yeah. Now, Adams has this wonderful little line in here. I want to read. Um. I found this very fascinating quote. Further, health is referred to by the semantic pair walking and working, and the heart is conceived of as a homunculous, an internal being that makes commands that must be obeyed. Now, I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth or or visualizations in anyone else's worldview, so I don't think this is supposed to literally be a homunculus or this idea that like the heart, that in each of us there's like a squat, little like tough, little um like red flesh being that lives in the center of our chest and sort of um, you know, puppet masters the rest of us. It's more like an idea of like what's going on in the heart versus what's going on on the outside. It's this It is more metaphorical, but I think it's still an intriguing idea. Well, and I could be misunderstanding, but I kind of read that as it sounds like it's suggesting the heart as a something that is separate from the conscious mind but has desires of its own that must be obeyed. Yeah, yeah, I think that's fair as well, though it is it's hard for me to not just picture like literal homunculous in the heart. But I know that's not what the what the the author is going for here, But it's it's interesting to think about all this. Like when we think about heart and brain, we think, okay, brain is thought, heart is his certain story system. But of course if we we know that the two need each other like they can, the brain cannot live independent of some sort of heart, uh that is doing the job of the heart, be that a transplanted heart or an artificial heart like that is a role that has to be filled for the brain to do its thing as well. And that feedback from an input from the rest of the body affects how the brain works. That that for in an incredibly mundane ways that you're familiar with, such as like you think different when you're hungry, like when you're getting feedback from your digestive system or something, or from your blood sugar, that's going to affect the way you feel and the way you think. But it's also in much subtler and stranger ways as well, that there's a relationship between what's happening and say, your gut microbiome and the way your brain works, and on and on. Yeah. Yeah, And then of course there's the very simple observation that, hey, when I am very excited, when I'm agitated, my heart is beating faster, and when I'm very calm, my heart is beating very slowly, and realizing that, yeah, they're they're all these very observable connections between the way that we uh, you know, what's going on in our mind and our being and what's going on seemingly in the center of our chest. All right, well, I think maybe we're gonna have to call this episode there for part one, but we will be back in part two to discuss more heart removal traditions and thoughts about heart removal from the point of view of other cultures. In in Norse traditions, in uh, in medieval Christianity, we're going to talk about boiling some crusaders. Uh, It's it's gonna be fun. Yes, there will be more human sacrifice, there will be more heart removal. Uh and and much more. So be sure to check back in on Thursday as we continue our our special Valentine's Day celebration of the removed heart. In the meantime, if you would like to listen to other episodes Stuff to Blow Your Mind, well you will find them all in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. We have our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Monday's we do a listener mail episode. On Wednesdays the normal schedule as we do a short form monster effect or Artifact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to do an episode of Weird House Cinema. That's where really most of the heart ripping takes place on this show, huge thanks to our audio producer J J. Pauseway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, this is the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows

In the desert. I saw a creature naked bestial who's squatting upon the ground, held his heart in his hands, and eight of it. I said, is it good, friend? It is bitter, bitter, he answered, But I like it because it is bitter and because it is my heart. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And that, of course is the poem in the Desert by Stephen crane Um, a poem that that i've I've I've long found nice and creepy and thought provoking. I think a lot of it depends on which word in the last sentence you emphasized. Does he like it because it is my heart or because it is my heart? M h Yeah, there are several ways to to to to the piece of apart there. But it's also the perfect poem for Valentine's Day. Today's Valentine's Day. I don't know if anyone has ever taken in the Desert and transformed it into a Valentine, but I think that's a fabulous idea. Depending on who you're giving it to you want to make sure that they're gonna understand the cleverness of this. Um. But it's just the right length. You know. You could put you know, half of it on the front, half of it inside. You could you could draw the bestial creature they're consuming its own heart. Uh. Somebody has to have done this before. I'm sure someone will send links to this effect to us. You could put it on those little heart shaped candies that look like they're like made a chalk basically. Oh yeah, that would be clever, as I mean, it has to have been done. It's such a great idea. Does anybody eat those? By the way, that somebody like the taste of chalk enough that they would consume that. I remember eating them that I was a child. Um, you know, and maybe and I don't know if they're bitter that would but they are shaped like hearts. Yeah, at a time when you ate a lot of candy, it made sense to at least try a few of them. But I think then you realize there were better candies to eat, easier candies to eat. That's such a childhood mentality. It's like, well it's not good, but it is candy, So I guess I have to eat it. I should at least at least try it. It's it's just polite. Yeah, so yes, It's Valentine's Day at time when we tend to think about the over commercialization of love and especially romantic love, as well as the symbolism of the human heart. Um, you know, I think this is a topic we've we've touched on before on the show. You know. We when it comes to the heart, we know that this is the the center of our circulatory system. We know it pumps our blood, but it's also seen as the symbolic or metaphoric seed of love and passion. And given all these complex ways of thinking about the heart, we also tend to feel a certain kind of way about the topic of heart removal when it comes up, be it something that comes up in the biological you know, the medical world, or if it comes up in random horror movies, or just as a turn of phrase. Is this how you landed on on heart removal? For for the topic this week? Where you watching a movie where a heart gets ripped out? I don't think I was specifically when I started thinking about this, but we have watched several movies on Weird House Cinema our Friday weird movie episodes that I like particularly, I think, um, some seventies films we've watched, such as The Lorealized Grasp, Horror Rizes from the Tomb, Return of the Blind Dead. I think all three of those features scene in which somebody's heart is cut out and it's eaten by say a monster or or or an occultist night that sort of thing. Am I remembering? Wrong? Is the whole point of Lorealized Grasp that the monster eats people's hearts? Yes? She does. Yeah, well, I mean there are other aspects of the film, but it clearly in terms of what is the the gory point of the film that seemed to be one of its main fascinations. Well, she eats people's hearts and she falls in love with that. I don't know, Spanish German, Elvis Peter Fonda kind of guy. Oh yes, yes, anyway, yes, yeah, go back to those episodes if you want more of that. Uh. Well, when it comes to to heart ripping, of course, there are some more famous examples have probably come to everyone's mind. There's fighting game Mortal Kombat. I think everybody had that was around in the nineties. Um, and and then in decades after, but especially in the nineties, you have that that very pixelized version of that that heart rip in mind. And then of course there's four film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which features a rather famous heart ripped scene that despite the film being set in India, this actual heart rip and all the things that the batties are up to a really take worry elements from at least a couple of non Indian cultures. Uh and uh. And so some of the cultures we're going to discuss in this episode and kind of make a patchwork villain um religion here for Indiana Jones to go up against. And I think they also incorporate more than a little bit of fictional satanic ritual like it, it's very unbelievable culture that Indiana Jones is supposedly encountering in that movie, to say the least. Yeah, now, other heart rips of of note, correct me if I'm wrong, But doesn't Jason Vorhees ripped out of heart at least once. Uh, Oh, I don't recall. Probably yeah, well I do know. Uh, that's one of the worst movies in the whole series. Ends up like the bunch of people, A bunch of like troops come in and blow up Jason, and then somebody eats Jason's heart and turns into Jason. It's brilliant. Okay, I was really I had I haven't. I don't think I've actually seen leprekn six ak LEPrecon Back to the Hood from two thousand and three. This is the last one to star Warwick Davis. But that has a heart rip in it. Like the heart rip scene I guess in a film is usually pretty easy to do because you just it's mostly sound effect and then the visual of somebody holding a bloody, um palpating heart. Oftentimes that's dumb by just having the person squeeze like kind of reever heart create the sound effect if you desire. Other examples come to mind the horror movie Valentine's Day. Um, I've forgotten about this, but the Prophecy films have a lot of this, with angels ripping each other's hearts out. Um. Dumb and Dumber has a heart rip scene that I had forgotten about. I can't remember. Is that supposed to be a dream sequence or is that supposed to really happen or does it matter? In dumb and dumber. It is a dream sequence. Okay, okay, h then there's a rambo, Last Blood and Last of the Mohicans. Actually seen very few of these movies. Oh well, we might. We might have to come back to the Prophecy films, but I don't know. Some of those you could probably miss um, especially maybe lepri kon six. But but yeah, there it's it's kind of a staple of horror um. Oftentimes, if you have any kind of like supernatural being, you know, you have some sort of really lightning quick heart rip. There's a great example of this on the HBO series True Blood, which I guess over overall looking back on it kind of a mixed bag. But the excellent character actor Dennis O'Hare does have this wonderful character, the vampire King of Mississippi. His name is Russell Eddington. Is a real highlight of the show. While he's on the show, and there's a scene where I forget exactly what ticks him off, but vampires are supposed to be secret in the in the series, and he just gets mad and instantly like speeds to um like a live news broadcast and rips the broadcasters hard out through his back along with a piece of his spine, and that stands out of and in my mind is one of the finest moments of that series. The main thing that comes to my mind is that the manual heart removal is the primary move of an unarmed Terminator in the Terminator films. Oh did he rip some hearts out? That's what That's what Arnold Schwarzenegger does in the first movie when he comes out to the punk. Yeah, he like, get Bill Paxxton or somebody or the guy Bill Paxiston's hanging out with. It's been so long since I saw the first Terminator. I really need to go back in and watch it. I don't know why that's the move they chose. I mean, it's scary in the movie. I don't know if that really speaks of robotic efficiency. It's like taking the batteries out right, all right. Well, with that out of the way, we're gonna begin to move into what we were ultimately really talking about in this pair of episodes this week, and that is um heart removals and and how they factored into uh different views, different supernatural understandings of the human body and the cosmos. We're not gonna we're probably not gonna go super in depth into heart symbolism and metaphors, and in terms of trying to be um, you know, to completely cover the topic because it is a broad topic. You have, like any given culture has some sort of idea about what the heart is, and there's a lot of overlap. But then there are some distinct ideas mixed in there as well, and we'll touch on some of these. I think a good place to start would be, of course, with the Egyptian heart. Now there was we had a past episode of the show this was there was an interview that I did with author Bill Shutt, who wrote a book called Pump. It's quite good. It gets into animal hearts and various um in the history of understanding the human heart, Medical history of the heart. Wonderful read. And in that book he he does bring up that, yes, the ancient Egyptians knew the heart is ab or eb or hati uh. It was treated with a great deal of reverence, as this was the organ said to contain a record of the individual's good and bad deeds. And I think a number any of if you've consumed any amount of Egyptology over the years, you're probably familiar with the basic scenario that is often related here, that after you have died, it is this heart that will be weighed against a feather of Matt, the Goddess of truth, to see if you can indeed pass on into the realms beyond our life here on earth, or if you're going to be consumed by this ferocious beast of annihilation and thus no longer exist. I think it's a crocodile type or crocodile issue beast, isn't it. Yes, yeah, it is. It is a crocodile esque I'm blanking on the name of the entity off the top of my head. But but yeah, you basically have the this uh, the split road between annihilation and continued existence. But you can only continue to exist if your heart matches up against this feather of Matt, the Goddess of truth. Now, as Geraldine Pinch mentions in her book Egyptian Mythology, yeah, the ancient Egyptians view the heart is the organ of thought and feeling, and it was the seat of consciousness itself, and the goddess here was is often seen as this ostrich, feather adorned goddess of truth and goodness, So thus her feather would match the weight of your heart if you had truth in your heart, if you had not at in your heart uh at all. So that's the basic scenario there now, Shut sites historian Roger K. French, who rationalized that the basic idea and the Egyptian model here is that life is warm. The heart is warm, the heart moves, and with its movements we we breathe, and our vessels carry blood to the rest of our body. Shut also points out that the teen fifty five b c. Book of the Heart may reveal some level of understanding regarding heart attacks and aneurysms among the ancient Egyptians, but historians are not all in agreement onto what degree we could interpret it this way. Now, given the importance of the heart in all of this, especially the continuation of the soul and ancient Egyptian belief, uh, this probably reminds a lot of people out there of another fact about the mummified remains of an individual, about what happens to various internal organs. Several of these internal organs are are often uh placed inside of a canopic jar, including the heart. Yes, and so that brings me to how I wanted to look at a specific example of a mummy to examine treatment of the heart in a case where it was well documented. So obviously, Egyptian embalming, mummification, and burial practices varied by time and place, and ancient Egyptian civilization spans have really long time, thousands of years, So the example I'm about to talk about is not characteristic of everything in age in Egypt. But I thought it was interesting to look at one example in particular, especially because it contradicts a generalization that many people have made over the years about Egyptian mummification, one that I definitely remember learning when I was younger, And the generalization is this that during mummification, the brain is always removed. Of course you get the famous grotesque image of the hook going through the face holes to remove the brain, and that the heart, being the seat of the soul, as you just explained, was left in place in the body. So maybe the other organs were removed, but the heart was left in the chest. And by the way, if if memory serves, I think I'm remembering from a past episode on mummies, the brain. We have to to remember the brain. I believe it has often thought to have gone rancid first, to rot it first, and therefore we have to factor that into all of this as well, along with these understandings for the ancient Egyptians about what organs we're doing now. The specific mummy I was reading about that that contradicted this generalization was featured in a in a paper based especially around some ct scan research that was published in in the journal the academic journal the Yearbook of Mummy Studies. It's a funny name. It makes you imagine the mummies are like writing, you know, stay cool, have a great summer, or they're like going through drawing hearts around all the mummies they have a crush on like this mummy is so cute anyway, I uh so, I was reading about this paper in a concurrent article in Live Science by Owen jaris called Ancient Egyptian mummy found with brain no heart. So this mummy is the body of a woman who lived about seventeen hundred years ago according to radio carbon dating, placing her under the period of Roman control of Egypt, and she died somewhere between the ages of thirty and fifty, and her body shows sign of severe dental health issues and tooth loss, which apparently is quite common for ancient Egyptian bodies from this period. I don't know if that's because they were getting lots of sugar or what. I don't know what the explanation is, but a lot of dental problems, and the religious and cultural context would be this was a person who still adhered to a version of traditional Egyptian religion, or the variant of it that was popular at this time, at a time when Christianity was actually spreading through the region and becoming more and more dominant. Now, in contradiction to the brain removed, heart left in place generalization I heard when I was growing up, this mummy is exactly the opposite. Analysis of CT scans by the researchers found that the embalmers in this case uh, they worked by making an incision in the paraneum, and then through here they removed the intestines, the stomach, the liver, and the heart. Heart came out too. So after all these organs were removed, they lined the incision that they had made with resin and linen cloth, and then they placed a couple of plaques on this woman's body, on the skin, over the stomach and over the stern um, and to read from Jaris's summary quote, something that may have been intended to ritually heal the damage the embalmers had done and act as a replacement of sorts for her removed heart. And this would not be the only example, uh in ancient Egyptian involving practices where the heart was taken out and something else was put in there, seemingly in its place or to replace it. I'll mention another couple of examples of that in a minute. But after this, her body was treated with um spices and with lichen covering. Uh I think her head and her her upper body, and she was wrapped and buried somewhere near lux Or. At the time of this article, by the way, the mummy was in the collection of the Red Path Museum at McGill University in Montreal. But anyway, this raises an interesting question. If the heart was so important in Egyptian religion, that so important that for a long time people assumed it was always left in place when body bodies were mummified, what was happening in the cases where it actually was removed, and how common was that um Well, to quote a professor named Andrew Wade from McMaster University, who's the author of another uh piece I'm gonna look at in a minute, Wade says, quote, we don't really know what's happening to the hearts that are removed, so it's assumed that, as you alluded to a minute ago, robed, they were usually when they were mooved, they were put into canopic jars, which we know we're used to hold internal organs removed from other mummies, but that's not always known for sure. So sometimes we just don't know what happened to the heart. And there's still the question of why why did they do this? Well, we don't know, but the authors of the ct study speculate that perhaps the two plaques on her abdomen and her stern um were meant as a kind of healing or a replacement for the wounds inflicted by the embalming process itself, Like, Okay, we had to cut a hole in your body in order to process your body for burial, so here's a plaster healing symbol to counteract that incision. And then perhaps the plaque on the stern um was somehow a replacement for the missing heart. But again we don't know for sure, and we don't know why the heart was removed, But I came across another piece that has some some interesting thoughts about this. So for a more general look at the treatment of the heart in Egyptian mummification, I was looking at. Uh. I don't think this is a paper in an academic journal. I think this is a fact sheet from a presentation at an academic conference that was put together by a couple of experts, by Andrew D. Wade and Andrew J. Nelson. I know that one of the two authors here, Wade, was the one who was quoted in that article we were just talking about. So the authors of of this presentation here say that many generalizations made these days about the treatment of the heart in Egyptian momification are based not on modern empirical research, but rather on accounts given by classical authors. So if we are going to use literary evidence, evidence from ancient texts for what these funeral practices were, uh, you know, it would be really good to have a lot of direct Egyptian accounts, And we have some Egyptian accounts about beliefs about funeral practices and and the afterlife. But instead a lot of the literary evidence we use is mostly in Greek and Roman texts from authors like Herodotus and Plutarch. And in fact, they say the only author specifically mentioning the heart as opposed to making more general statements about what is done with the organs during UH momification is the Ptolemaic period Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, who writes as follows quote, when they have gathered to treat the body after it has been split open, one of them thrusts his hand through the opening in the corpse into the trunk and extracts everything but the kidneys and the heart, and another one cleanses each of the viscera, washing them in palm wine and spices. So based on this, we've got Diodorus here saying that the heart is always left in place. But of course, remember he was Ptolemaic period, and this is one author. And this presentation I looked at was designed to compare those literary accounts of heart treatment UH to evidence again from CT scans or from mummies that have actually been empirically taken apart and described in the scientific literature. So we like looked to see what was left in them. And they say there are three basic patterns of of heart treatment in mummies. One is retention, the heart stays in the chest even if other organs are removed. Number two is removal, the heart is taken out of the body. And number three is replacement, where the heart is removed moved, and something symbolic is left in its place, generally something called a heart scare ub which is a type of amulet. So how do the empirical finding stack up the author's right quote, The heart was noted as intact in only twenty one of eighty individuals where this organ's disposition was recorded, and barely more than a quarter of the individuals, And this sample was the heart retained in situ, and only one case was the heart possibly sewn back into place, and in one other case was a heart scare of a present presumably to replace the removed heart. And so rob you can see I have included a chart from their presentation below where you can look at the trends where these are not percentages, but these are absolute numbers of examples from these different periods, and you can see that heart retention predominates in the small number of samples of mummies we have from the Middle and New Kingdoms. But then as time goes on, heart retention is outnumbered by heart removals and the third intermediate period, the Late period, and the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. So, in the words of the authors, quote, mummies were increasingly absent their hearts from the New Kingdom onward. As time goes on, more and more of the mummies we find have their hearts removed. And so the authors conclude, quote, the stereotype of universal heart retention or replacement on accidental removal is far from the truth. The heart was uncommonly retained in situ and rarely returned or replaced by a heart scare up. The hypothesis constructed from the stereotyped account by Diodorus is therefore falsified by these data. Interesting interesting, also worth just driving home though that this is all separate, of course, from the purely sort of mythological situation in which the heart is weighed. That's taking place in another realm, that is not taking place in the physical world. This is a study about what happened to the body, is not necessarily about what the people in question believed about what was happening in the afterlife, right, And though of it's also worth driving home that also with belief especially when we're talking about ancient Egypt. Again, like you said, we're talking about a very um long period of time in which practices change, but also beliefs also change. So it's hard to just you can't just sum everything up and like say a pamphlet about like here's what the ancient Egyptians believed or did, because you're covering such a broad period of time. Correct, And this is the point the authors here are making. Uh They they used this as evidence that the classical descriptions of English Egyptian mummification by like Greek and Latin authors should only be used, as they say, at best, quote a possible snapshot of mummification performed by one particular workshop unquote, and not like an adequate description of universal practices or even of the most common practices across time and space. Uh So, But I still had the question about, like why, though, is there any clue as to why this difference that in some cases the heart is retained, in other cases the heart is removed, And are there any trends in like whose hearts were removed and whose were left in place? The authors do offer a bit of speculation here. They say that you know. Interestingly, in the mummies available to us, there seems to be a somewhat of a correlation with access to mummification by different classes. So in the New Kingdom there essentially was a process of democratization of mummification. Previously, mummification had been an incredibly exclusive right which was only available to you know, the top top elites. But then they say, quote as time progressed, the nobles gained increasing access to mummification and retained their hearts. With the democratization of ummification, however, the commoners being mummified, we're not receiving the same treatment, possibly to ensure that the elite maintained a more favorable afterlife than their subjects. That went in a different direction than I was expecting. I thought it would just maybe be like, well, this is this is a premium service for premium customers. We can't offer the same level of mumification services for a lesser price. But it seems like it also could be ensuring the status quo in the afterlife. It could be because I mean so I don't know how it would necessarily be cheaper to remove the heart than not remove the heart, you know, like it just in terms of the actual cost in the like labor to the embalmers. Uh so, yeah, it could be a deliberate choice to sort of create an artificial, uh tiered system for quality of mummification and make sure, well, there's a really special kind of mummification where your heart stays in and that's only available to the elites. But we don't know that for sure. I want to be very clear, we don't know the reasoning. But that is an interesting, plausible scenario that it's like it was in order to create a kind of elite or premium tiered type of mummification at a time when more people were getting mummification at all. Fascinating, But we don't know for sure, and so I think this remains a really interesting question I would love to like know more of someone could have more evidence to shed direct light on on why this this difference emerged than now. Another scenario of heart removal that that's rather rather different in many respects, but one that probably instantly comes to many people's minds that I want to discuss is the ritual removal of human hearts by the Mayans and the Aztecs, but especially for research purposes. Here, the Mayans so the ancient minds are known to have performed human sacrifices involving the removal of the heart, though not in the postmortem sense. Um, the removal of the heart essentially via ritualistic sacrifice, ritualistic execution. You could think of it as vivisection or um or just or or even death by heart removal, I imagine. One article I was reading on the topic was Procedures in Human Heart Extraction and Ritual Meaning by Tessler and Zuccina, published in Latin American Antiquity in two thousand and six. And as you can tell by the title, this is a paper that deals predominantly with the procedures. How were they carrying this out? Um, not so much the you know, the the wise. We'll get into some of the wise, but essentially these were religious practices. Um. But I was not aware that there was. There's been so much sort of, so much discussion and attempts to understand exactly how the heart was removed. So they looked at skeletal remains a suspected heart removal human sacrifice cases and contended that the sacrificers would carry these procedures out. By quote, a trans diaphragmatic and I looked, I had to look that up. Webster says, use the hard g on trans diaphragmatic um. So I'm going with with with what Webster saying. In this case, the definition being occurring passing or performed through the diaphragm. You mean the diaphrag um, Yes, the diap um. And so this would yeah opening immediately below the rib cage, and this would help ensure rapid removal of the heart. And this is where they get into their going up against some some previous theories about how they carried this out. In particular, there was an eight to ten minute procedure estimate by Robestic and Hales in four These authors had argued that the sacrifice or would have cut through the thorax from side to side, collapsing the lung in the process us and this would make the victim unconscious within three to four minutes and allow the rest of the surgery to proceed without struggle. And they do kind of frame it as kind of a surgery vivisection, with heart removal occurring while the heart was still palpitating, which seemed to be the desired effect. To pull the heart out while the heart seems to still have life in it. Another analysis from Gonzalez Torres argued as well for a below the ribs approach, but stressed that the exact style may have varied from region to regions. So again we get into a similar situation with mummification. Just because one um mummification lab was doing it one way doesn't mean they were doing it the same way at another lab at another time. And likewise, the way hearts were removed via blood ritual blood sacrifice in one instance, it might be different in another. Uh, you know, different styles for different sacrifices, or some sort of evolution of style Tesla and chacina. Meanwhile, right quote, it must be underlined in this context that ritual heart removal entailed a violent vivisection of a struggling victim, and was therefore quicker and fundamentally distinctive from the cautious procedures implied in a quote unquote surgical operation as visualized by Rubasacon Hales. Now, the sacrificial victims in these situations were typically enslaved people, sometimes children or prisoners of war who were and and I'm reading that they were often either painted blue first or pelted with arrows, and once the heart was removed, its blood was generally used to smear or anoint some sort of divine icon or some sort of structure, that sort of thing. Now, as sacrifices, these would have had a religious significance. Is the significance of the act better understood than than maybe the significance of the removal or non removal of the heart in the Egyptian example, I believe so based on the work I was looking at. There's a paper here by Tesla and Oliver in Open Caskets and Broken Hearts. Great great title from a edition of Current Anthropology, and the authors here are right that the quote partitioning and the liberation of vitalizing matter, namely the heart and blood, fed specific sacred forces during divine cult and mythic reenactment. They also provide a note on Aztec sacrifices quote. As for the Aztecs, we conclude that different trunk opening procedures were practiced as part of ritual sequences that in each case enabled access to the cosmics sacred mountain with its vivifying essences. So, in other words, hearts and blood were essentially food for gods of the Sun and gods of the earth deities who in turn sacrificed or more intern or you could say, originally sacrificed something to create the universe. And the sacrifices here were acts of all the the actual blood ritual sacrifices, not the mythological sacrifices, were acts of quote, obligation, reciprocation, and re enactment. So there are several different things going on there, Like there's a sort of a mythic understanding of what the heart and the blood is. There's this re enactment of things that occurred in sacred time, the idea that there is some sort of of blood ritual and sacrifice that occurred with mythological beings, and the thing that is taking place in the sacrifice is important insofar as it is re enacting this mythic incident. And there's this also, you know, basically like what we we sort of generalize about sacrifice. Something is offered up so that something else may be offered down to us as humans. They also mentioned in this article that while the under the rib technique does seem more common, and I believe this is a slightly later work, there are three distinct tactics that were used. There's cutting directly under the ribs, there's making an incision between two ribs, and then there's horizontally severing the stern um in order to access the heart. But again it seems like going under the ribs was the most common technique mm hmm. Now additionally, and just sort of like trying to, you know, get into the whole, like what what did ancient people and in this case, what did the Mayans who are engaging in heart removal sacrifice? What did they think of the heart? What other ideas were we're going on regarding the center of our circulatory system. On this I found an interest discussion of ideas concerning the human body among the Satal people, because at all people are a Mayan people in southern Mexico. UM. So in this particular work, it is the ethno Physiology of the Satal Maya of the Highland Chapests by Cameron Littleton Adams. This was a Doctor's of Philosophy dissertation from the University of Georgia. So I'm not going to get into everything that's discussed here. And again this is not the Mayan people of old, but contempt arre Mayan people's um but there are these interesting ideas in their thinking about the connection of the heart to cognition. Uh, not thinking with the heart instead of the brain, but sort of thinking with it. So I found that kind of interesting because there are some other instances we'll get into as well. And in addition to the Egyptian model, where uh, this seems like maybe a modern twist on on these older ideas of the heart being the center of thought, in the center of being. Uh So, maybe it's a situation where like in the modern world, you know that the brain is the center of cognition, but there's still the symbolic and metaphorical importance of the heart as being something vital to who we are and having some sort of emotional connection which I think we can all relate to that, especially on Valentine's Day, like we're so on Valentine's Day, were so steeped in this idea that, yeah, the heart is not just a thing that pumps blood. Uh yeah, And there is to some degree some accurate re seeing wisdom in that way of thinking, because of course, well, I think it is quite clear that the brain is the necessary organ for cognition, Like you couldn't have thinking without the brain, that the rest of the body influences the thinking that happens in the brain, and the brain is not like a thing floating apart from the body. Yeah. Now, Adams has this wonderful little line in here. I want to read. Um. I found this very fascinating quote. Further, health is referred to by the semantic pair walking and working, and the heart is conceived of as a homunculous, an internal being that makes commands that must be obeyed. Now, I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth or or visualizations in anyone else's worldview, so I don't think this is supposed to literally be a homunculus or this idea that like the heart, that in each of us there's like a squat, little like tough, little um like red flesh being that lives in the center of our chest and sort of um, you know, puppet masters the rest of us. It's more like an idea of like what's going on in the heart versus what's going on on the outside. It's this It is more metaphorical, but I think it's still an intriguing idea. Well, and I could be misunderstanding, but I kind of read that as it sounds like it's suggesting the heart as a something that is separate from the conscious mind but has desires of its own that must be obeyed. Yeah, yeah, I think that's fair as well, though it is it's hard for me to not just picture like literal homunculous in the heart. But I know that's not what the what the the author is going for here, But it's it's interesting to think about all this. Like when we think about heart and brain, we think, okay, brain is thought, heart is his certain story system. But of course if we we know that the two need each other like they can, the brain cannot live independent of some sort of heart, uh that is doing the job of the heart, be that a transplanted heart or an artificial heart like that is a role that has to be filled for the brain to do its thing as well. And that feedback from an input from the rest of the body affects how the brain works. That that for in an incredibly mundane ways that you're familiar with, such as like you think different when you're hungry, like when you're getting feedback from your digestive system or something, or from your blood sugar, that's going to affect the way you feel and the way you think. But it's also in much subtler and stranger ways as well, that there's a relationship between what's happening and say, your gut microbiome and the way your brain works, and on and on. Yeah. Yeah, And then of course there's the very simple observation that, hey, when I am very excited, when I'm agitated, my heart is beating faster, and when I'm very calm, my heart is beating very slowly, and realizing that, yeah, they're they're all these very observable connections between the way that we uh, you know, what's going on in our mind and our being and what's going on seemingly in the center of our chest. All right, well, I think maybe we're gonna have to call this episode there for part one, but we will be back in part two to discuss more heart removal traditions and thoughts about heart removal from the point of view of other cultures. In in Norse traditions, in uh, in medieval Christianity, we're going to talk about boiling some crusaders. Uh, It's it's gonna be fun. Yes, there will be more human sacrifice, there will be more heart removal. Uh and and much more. So be sure to check back in on Thursday as we continue our our special Valentine's Day celebration of the removed heart. In the meantime, if you would like to listen to other episodes Stuff to Blow Your Mind, well you will find them all in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. We have our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Monday's we do a listener mail episode. On Wednesdays the normal schedule as we do a short form monster effect or Artifact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to do an episode of Weird House Cinema. That's where really most of the heart ripping takes place on this show, huge thanks to our audio producer J J. Pauseway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, this is the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows