A heart eight loki. In the embers it lay and half cooked, found he the woman's heart with child from the woman Loki soon was, and thence among men came the monsters. All the sea, storm driven, seeks heaven itself o'er the earth it flows, The air grows sterile. Then follow the snows and the furious winds. For the gods are doomed, and the end is death. Then comes another, a greater than all. Though never I dare his name to speak. Few are they now that farther can see than the moment when Othan shall meet the wolf. Welcome to stuff to blow your mind production of My Heart radio. Hey you welcome do stuff to blow your mind. If my name is Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick. Oh, where did that poem come from? Rob Is that one of those Icelandic texts? Yeah? This is um from the Lay of Hindleam, a Norse poem from the twelfth century or perhaps a little later. But in this I know that the wording in this translation can maybe be a little confusing. Heart is not eating Loki Loki, the you know, the Norse trickster god is consuming a heart, and after consuming that heart, he becomes with child, and those children are the monsters that plague humanity. I think this poem is easier to follow if you read it in Yoda voice, because it follows Yoda syntax heart loki yeah, you know so. In this poem we see just one example of heart consumption in Norse mythology. Uh, there are other tales. There are tales of men eating the bloody hearts of slain dragons to gain their strength and courage. And this is a motif we see continued in other European myths as well, such as that of the Germanic orrow a Cigarette who consumes the heart of the dragon Fafnir after slaying the monster. In one telling of that I um this this kind of goes back to episodes from last year that will be rerunning shortly. In one telling of this victory, he has the dragon's heart. Um. He cooks it over the fire too, and so he can eat it, And in doing so, he burns his hand on those delicious blood juices of the heart. And he instinctively licks his hand because he's been burned, and the taste of the dragon's blood is said to give him the ability to understand all languages. Oh, this reminds me of the Salmon of Knowledge? Is that that the comparison there? Yeah, that's that's I think the exactly the comparison. I don't remember this coming up. And there's a lot of a lot of those tales are interconnected and some of their themes and sometimes the details. Well, obviously we are back with part two of our series on the removal of hearts, a topic that Rob you have brilliantly chosen for the week of valent Hinds Day, Because as much as we associate with love, with the the giving around and the trading of symbolic heart imagery, we we also do you know, love is a is a lot about like getting your heart ripped out? Yeah. Yeah, And and of course we love this metaphor is especially the week of Valentine's Day. Also in the previous episode we ended up focusing on some various traditions of heart removal in Uh, in ancient Egyptian religion and in um as we American context. And today we're going to be starting off in accordance with the poem you read, looking at some Norse traditions. That's right, uh, And I found a really great book that I used in putting this section together. It's called A History of the Heart by O. M. Hoistad of Telemark University College in Norway. The author here is of Norse descent and frequently mentions that in the book. Uh. In the book itself doesn't just deal with Norse traditions of the heart. He also touches on some of the examples we disc us in the last episode. But uh, he spends a lot of time discussing the Norse idea all of the heart and what what they thought the heart did, and kind of like the way that these ideas affected expectations of physiology. So it as Hoisted discusses the Norse saw the heart as the seat of courage, which you know that that squares with a lot of other traditions as well, and a lot of the way we way as we talk about the heart metaphorically today, but it was also seen as the seat of the mind. Now, obviously we get into into Norse culture and there's there's a lot in Norse culture beyond the warrior ethos and warrior culture. But Hoisted is pretty quick in this book to say like there was there was a certain ruthless edge to Norse culture as well, and we see that in the way they treated the heart and what Once more, in reading this, I was reminded again if that C. S. Lewis quote that we discussed in the previous episode about the unloving heart, how it becomes this dark, sing and an encased thing that is that is cold and in unflappable, but also you know, it's it cuts you off from from any like legitimate feeling and connection. Uh. Yeah, his point in that quote being that love is by nature becoming vulnerable, and you can defend yourself against becoming vulnerable, but that has its own consequences, right the nor I don't know how the Norse of old would have have taken that that quote. They would have been like, yeah, perhaps steel it, steal that hard off, let it grow nice and cold because some because that basically is one of the attributes of the ideal Norse warrior heart. His voice stud discusses in the book. In some accounts, it even seems to have to go beyond the merely metaphorical, and it seems to be seen as a biological reality, either the physiological result of bravery or its cause. So we're talking about a heart that is shriveled, that is cold, that is uh, that that doesn't have a lot of blood in it, and it doesn't quiver. So in the fullest broader saga, this is the saga of the foster Brothers, or the saga of the Sworn Brothers. This is a tale of the eleventh century uh, surviving in a trio of I think each one is incomplete thirteenth century manuscripts um and it's in this particular tale it said that following the death of a brave warrior named Torre gear Uh, they take the war, they lay him out. He's like laid out on a stone or a table or something, and they open up his chest so that it could be seen what a brave man's heart truly looks like, because they were curious. Is it is it like they say, is a brave, courageous man's heart? Is its small? Is it cold? Is it shriveled? Is it like the heart of the grinch before it grows three sizes? Is it in fact free of the blood that would cause it to to quiver and uh and then make one a coward? Um? Or is it indeed you have the small, firm, cold heart of a warrior. And in this account, supposedly this is exactly what they find. They kind of open then they say, yes, it's all true, like look at this heart. Behold this shriveled cold heart of a warrior. And uh so Hoist discusses this a betty. He references some other um accounts. There's the U one of the Norse warrior heart from the hell Gay saga. Uh this a quick quote from that quote. Fearless was he bold for battle? Bone hard, his heart within his breast. Now he stresses, in this case this is more of a metaphor than anatomical commentary. But he cites the work of a Norse historian named Claus Fonsi on the idea that courage and cowardice can still be thought of in Norse thought to stem from quote purely anatomical relations. So to quote of a SI on this quote. The important thing for the present argument is that the metaphors mentioned refer to the anatomical composition of the heart, and that they see in its smallness, hardness, and absence of blood a cause of courage and not only a symptom of it. Okay, so it is because your interior organs have certain properties that uh, that certain behaviors emerging you. And so for a warrior who's very courageous and uh and very strong in battle, it just happens to be because their heart is this I see little nugget. Yeah. Oh and speaking of of via I c nuggets. Uh. He also points to the giant Rugney in Norse mythology, who is said to be the strongest of all the giants because he has a heart of literal stone. That, yeah, that'll do it. And he also gets into this account of Rugney going up against Thor and and and so Rugney is really strong, but he knows that Thor also has a really tough heart and has these you know, a magical um you know, God given um hammer and so forth and some other magical items. They didn't want to go up into a direct battle against them, so they're like, build a giant and that then they have to give it a heart, but no, no hearts are available, So they put a mayor's heart in there, and it doesn't work, like it just throws off the whole construct, but they're there and then sorry, it's like you get the wrong voltage battery. Yeah. Basically, um, you know, and I think that's in that we get back. You know, we're talking about some of the the interpretations of the heart and its role in the body and the person that are more magical and and maybe to modern eyes and scientific understanding, a little backwards. But at the same time, they do realize that there is something about the heart that that powers everything. It is the center of the being, even if contrary to uh, this one leg of Norse's thought, it has nothing to do with with one's mind exactly. And as we talked about in the last episode, it is scientifically true that feedback from organs other than the brain contributes to the way the brain works. So uh, I think the way we put it last time is that you know, the brain is the necessary organ for cognition. You couldn't think without it. But also it doesn't think in a vacuum. It's influenced by organs throughout the body. So the digestive sys them has influence on how the brain works, how you feel, how you think, and the cardiovascular system does as well, your heart and your lungs and all that. So I think there is for example, I mean, I think courage and cowardice would be a great example because that would involve the the fight or flight response, which of course is based in the nervous system, but then involves feedback loops from organs throughout the body. And it does indeed include UH regulation of the circulatory and UH and respiration systems. So in a way, you are sort of getting feedback from the heart when you're feeling fear. Yeah, yeah, and and uh and and I think we've discussed this before, but I think it would be a mistake too to think that the Norse had like a simplistic understanding of, say, um, that the human inner experience, because you also look at things like the idea that of of Odin's crows. Um, what were their names, Hoogan and moon In. I think, um, I'm probably mispronouncing them. But um, we discussed this in the past, how each one has a different connotation dealing with like the mind and memory as about it. Thank thank So We're gonna move on from most of the North examples here, but we are going to get into another European example of heart removal, one that I wasn't familiar with until basically researching these episodes. Right, So, uh, we're gonna talk about heart burial or the Treatment of the Heart in Medieval and post Medieval Christian Europe. Now a major source I was consulting on this was a chapter in a collection of archaeology essays. The book that it's from is called Body Parts and Bodies Whole. That was from Oxbo Books, that's an Oxford Press UH in two thousand and ten and the editors were Katerina Rebe Salisbury, Marie Louise Stig Sorensen and Jessica Hughes and UH. The specific chapter in quest and is called Heart Burial and Medieval and early post Medieval Central Europe by A Stella Weiss Crecy, and I looked at up. She's a scholar affiliated with the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Austrian Archaeological Institute. So between the introduction of Christianity in Europe and roughly the nineteenth century, the usually near universal ideal for burial practices in Europe in Christian Europe was straightforward burial of the body whole with flesh intact. And their exceptions to this we're going to talk about, but that was basically the norm. And this could be connected in part to Christian beliefs about the afterlife, because strangely today, I think if you ask most Christians what they believe happens after death, they will say that their immaterial soul separates from the body and goes off to live in Heaven with God for eternity. And under this way of thinking, the body is not important. It's just it's just sort of the matter that the soul uses to live through, and the afterlife will not have a material basis. But this is not what the earliest Christians by and large believed, and this is not what's described in the earliest Christian texts. They instead speak of what theologians uh often call a general resurrection, that at the the end of the age, all of the dead, the righteous and the unrighteous will be resurrected in bodily form to face judgment. Though confusingly, the apostle Paul writes that it will be a kind of changed bodily form, because the present earthly flesh and bones that we have now are perishable, and so they can't inherit the kingdom. And yet we will be raised in bodily forms. So when our bodies are raised from the dead, we will be given new spiritual flesh, which is imperishable, synthetic flesh. You could look at it that way, but anyway, so, it was commonly understood by the dama at schools of early Christian theologians that the afterlife for believers would consist of some form of bodily resurrection, even if the body is changed somehow, thus giving rise to a desire for funeral practices that would keep the body relatively intact. And I think, knowing that I would never have conceived that that heart removal would be in the cards at all. Well, I think various procedures that in some way violate the wholeness or integrity of the body were controversial with certain people at certain times. Uh. And by the way, I want to say this whole thing about like the body. This leads to a great digression on the implications for cannibalism in early Christian thought, because like, okay, what if you are saved, but then you are killed and eaten by a cannibal and your body becomes part of the body of the cannibal. What will happen at the resurrection? Or what if two cannibals eat a Christian and then together the who cannibals have a baby? The baby will be made of parts of the Christian that the parents ate, So how will God retrieve the bits of the Christian from the baby's body and so forth? Like Thomas Aquinas participated in discussions about topics of this sort and it's a hoot. But anyway, one interesting area we see the theological implications of Europe shifting from mostly pagan to mostly Christian is in attitudes toward funeral practices, specifically towards cremation. Um because apart from the literal implications for the possibility of future resurrection, and there were different ideas about this. You know, some Christian theologians did not place as much importance on the integrity of the body. Uh, you know, some just didn't think it was a big deal. I think Augustine didn't think it was a big deal. But anyway, uh, cremation was not only a way of destroying the body, including in a way destroying the bones, but also just sort of it was it was culturally a soociated with paganism. It was something that the pagans did, and thus it was viewed as alien and unholy by Christian rulers. So for example, in the seven eighties, and I've seen two different years given for the seven five and seven eighty nine. I'm not sure why the difference or which one is correct, but sometimes in the seven eighties, the Christian king Charlemagne, who eventually style himself as the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, band of the practice of cremation of the dead as as practiced by the Saxons. And I was looking for a quote of this edict. I found it quoted in something called European Paganism The Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages by Ken Dowden Poli and this quotes it in translation as follows. If anyone causes the body of a dead man to be consumed by flame according to the right of the Pagans, and shall reduce its bones to ashes, he shall suffer capital punishment. So that's harsh. Cre cremating a friend or family member's body is punishable by death. So you get the idea of how strongly intact burial was was linked to cultural and religious orthodoxy in much of Christian Europe. Yeah, at the point that it needs to be enforced, apparently with the death penalty. Um, yeah, you know, I guess drawing just this this firm line that needs to be enforced uh in the view of the time between us and them. But to come back to White preaches article, despite intact burial being the norm, there were countercurrents of thinking and practice, both for cultural and theological reasons. Like again, there were some people who didn't think the intactedness of the body was as important as others did, and for purely practical reasons. For example, practical reasons would include space real estate. There was the common practice of removal of bones from a aerial place to be to be taken away to a charnel house because you know, there's just not enough space for all the bodies in the cemetery. Yeah. Absolutely, And this is I mean, this is something you see in cultures around the world where there might be some sort of uh predominant idea about how the dead should be buried. But you're gonna then come up against basic environmental constraints on that practice as well as size constraints based on various factors. Exactly. And I've got another practical time and place, time, place and manner uh constraint on what can be done with a body, and that would be processing the body in some way to delay putrefaction. Uh. This was to to preserve the corpse for some reason, often either for public display or for transport across a long distance. And some of these forms of processing, Okay, you can imagine some types of just like embalming to make the corpse last as long as possible. But sometimes this was a little more involved than that and could be thought to violate the the integrity of the body as a whole. Sometimes it involved removing things or even more extreme forms of processing, and these practices get weirder than you might imagine. So some of what we're talking about here is just disembowelment, removal of the internal organs from the abdominal cavity. Wise, Creachy says that this this became common in the Frankish Empire in the eighth and ninth centuries. So you take the guts out, or take all the internal organs out, that might have some kind of implication for preserving the rest of the body, uh for for a certain period of time to do something with. But in the twelfth century we see the rise of a practice called most teutonicus, which translates to the German custom. What is this custom of the Germans? It was boiling the honored dead. Sometimes a here's an example of how it would be used. Sometimes a high ranking warrior or commander would die on a campaign in southern Europe or in the Holy Land, far away from home. How are his retainers going to get the cadaver back to the crypt at the family estate. The German speaking crusaders often did not want to be buried away from home, you know, in the place where they were crusading. They wanted to be buried back at home. The body would obviously rot if it were transported intact or you know, by card or even by ship, trying to take it all the way back to Germany or Austria, wherever the warrior came from. So people came up with the solution of making that warrior into a bone broth. Uh, you would have crusader stock. So imagine Conrad here dies in battle trying to sack a Muslim city in Syria, and his servants or his kinsman get his body and they boil it until the You can be boiled in water or in like vinegar or wine, or I think sometimes in milk, but in some kind of liquid. You boil it until the flesh starts to separate from the bones, and then somehow you get the bones clean. I guess you if you boil it long enough, just basically everything will float off. Or you could boil it for a period and then it might require some additional scraping with sharp instruments, but you would boil first to get the meat off, and then you'd have clean, hygienic bones that could be taken back to the estate in in Europe for deposition. Yeah. To your point about the stock, we're really close to just to butchering here this. Yeah, And sometimes I've read that this was not in this book chapter I'm talking about. I read somewhere that sometimes the organs from this were discarded and other times the organs in the flesh were preserved like you might preserve a meat, like by salting them, uh, so that they could be transported somewhere, maybe to be buried separately. Wow, you know, this seems like a whole area of that is that is overdue for exploration and some sort of undead um you know, templar fick shit or something. You know. Um, you could have the skeletal reanimated remains of this crusader. And what does he want, while he wants his salted organs back, give me my body back in sausage forms his sausage now, uh, and how fitting for a German speaking medieval noble to become a sausage in death. But anyway, so most teutonic Us, by I guess its advocates, was thought to avoid violating the prohibition against cremation, as specifically Charlemagne's prohibition. Uh, because of course it did not involve destruction of the bones. You would not be reducing the bones to ashes. The bones would be intact. So I think that's good enough. You know, the body is intact enough to to be considered okay and not pagan. But some church officials still didn't like it, and it was ultimately forbidden as uh disgusting and unfitting of of proper disposal of the dead by the pope in twelve and their teen hundreds. So this would have been Pope I was wondering how to say this, Boniface, Boniface, I guess Boniface eight. I was looking for a translation of the original text of this edict as well, and so what I came across was part of a papal bull from hundred called bulld de Semple Tourists, which was quoted in a paper called The Popes and the History of Anatomy by James J. Walsh, published in nineteen o four in the Medical Library and Historical Journal, and the translation of the paper Bull says, persons cutting up the bodies of the dead barbarously cooking them in order that the bones, being separated from the flesh may be carried for burial into their own countries, are by the very fact excommunicated. So I think that means no no further discussion necessary if you do it automatic excommunication. And you know this does this sounds like a very top down edict right here, and obviously it is coming from the pope. But you can imagine this scenario where out in the field, out in the where you're actually having to deal with the challenge of bringing bodies back across vast distances. You you might this might be a lot clearer a situation like this body is going to rot, is going to be foul by the time you get it back. It is going to be a mess. Why don't we just do the messy part here, uh, and and speed it up a bit and then bring the bones back clean. Yes, So you can see the obvious practical advantages to this method, even though I mean, we are highlighting how it does seem extremely weird, and I'm not gonna lie it does, but like they're there, are there. The advantages are clear in terms of like hygiene and so forth. The boiling and milk especially gives me pause. That's the one that really sticks with me for some reason, because I'm like, boiling and wine, well, yeah, that just makes sense, But milk, I don't know. Walsh writes of more examples of famous rulers who underwent most Teutonicus. He says, quote the body of Frederick Barbarossa. I think that's Frederick the First, the Holy Roman emperor, who was drowned in the river cell Left near Jerusalem, was one of the first to be treated thus. Afterwards, the remains of Louis the ninth of France and a number of his relatives who perished on the ill fated crusade in Egypt were brought back to France in this fashion. And though this is a side issue, I did just want to quickly make note of it, because the main point of this paper by Walsh is to refute and apparently long propagated claim that this papal bull from hundred from Boniface eight uh forbade uh dissection for the purpose of anatomical research, so a lot of like early histories of science at oh, we could have learned so much through anatomical dissection if not for this papal bull. Walsh argues that it was actually neither intended to have this purpose nor understood as such, and it was a splicitly about boiling crusaders to bring their bones home from foreign lands. M and you know what. Coming back to that uh that chapter by wis Crechi, she says that despite the prohibition in the bull, evisceration and excarnation by boiling continued some people, I guess, I don't know. I don't know if they didn't know about it, or maybe they just ignored the pope. I'm not sure, um though, she says de fleshing by boiling eventually faded away mostly by the by the middle of the fifteenth century. However, a related but different practice is the focus of this chapter, and that is heart burial, or the separation of the heart from the body after death for burial usually in a different place. Now in some cases, various types of evisceration, including removal and separate treatment of the heart as well as other internal organs, may have been practical in the same sense as the boiling of a crusader's bone. It was, in some cases a practical solution to deal with the tricky situation of a death far away from home and the inevitable onset of decay in an era without freezers or modern embalming techniques. So I was looking for one big example of this, and I came across what I thought was a great one, the story of King Henry the First of England, which is interesting in a number of ways. My main source on this is some materials from the Reading Museum in the uk UH and the reason for the location at the Reading Museum will become apparent. Minute but tiny bit of background. Henry the First also known as Henry bow Clerk, which means good scholar. He was a very ambitious guy. He was kind of a Game of Thrones character. He was the fourth son of William the Conqueror, originally without a domain rulership of his own because he's the fourth son. But Henry became king of England after his eldest brother, William the second died in eleven hundred, and then Henry made some moves. He leap frogged over his older his other older brother Robert, to claim the English throne. And then he went out and seized control of the Duchy of Normandy in northern France from that same brother Robert in eleven oh six. Wow, he's making moves, making moves. I think he kept Robert in prison for the rest of his life or something. It was not not that nice on on that issue. But but but one thing you may have read about Henry, the first notable for it's like brutal pithiness, is the note about the cause of his death. And the note is that he died in eleven thirty five at a hunting lodge in Leone la Fora in Normandy as a result of eating quote, a surfeit of Lamprey's. It's just like that. It's like four perfect words. I could be wrong, but I think there's an episode of Horrible Histories that touches on this. Uh Okay, I should look that up. Well, this that that may cover some of the same stuff I'm about to mention. By the way, Lampreys if you're not familiar, there to a type of I don't know, kind of wormy looking jawless fish, superficially resembling eels. I think biologically they're not eels, but they're sometimes called eels. I think this death has been interpreted as maybe food poisoning, but it's not known for sure, as somehow it is insistently a hilarious idea to me, This conqueror king dies from just like eating eating Lamprey's until he died, but from the from the Anglo Saxon Chronicles. This is quoted on the website of the Museum of Reading. Quote that very year the king died in Normandy the next day after the Feast of St. Andrew. Then this land immediately grew dark because every man who could immediately robbed another. Then his son and his friends took and brought his body to England and buried it at Reading. I like that note to everybody immediately committing cry times. I don't buy it, but who knows. Okay, so, but they want to bring his body back to Reading. That makes sense, but it's not quite as simple as that. Henry had given instructions uh to take his body to Reading. He did want his body to be laid to rest within the abbey at Reading, where he had personally founded a sizeable monastery, but that was all the way over across the English Channel. Reading is a town a bit to the west of London, so it's inland as well. It's not like right on the coast, And apparently at the time of his death weather was bad. There was a winter winter gale blowing, making travel across the channel a treacherous proposition, and according to our chronicles, Henry started rotting and smelling bad very quickly. So instead of trying to take him to Reading as is, a different plan was followed. Henry's body was taken to the cathedral at Ruan, which was nearby Normandy, where it was embalmed in the following manner. He was vivisected and his heart and intestines were removed and buried separately at a priory in France. So here's a case of heart removal and burial, but along with the intestines at a different place than the rest of the body. His brain and his eyes were also removed. Not sure what happened to them, Uh, just somebody might be I'm not sure. The rest of his flesh was I think slashed open and rubbed with salt inside out as a preservative, and he was smeared with a kind of perfume. Finally, the body was wrapped in an ox hide that was sown shut uh and that part the rest of that body, the salted body inside the ox side, was taken back to the abbey at Reading for burial. But despite these precautions, Henry's retainers noticed during the journey back to England that the ox hides were leaking quote black fluid all over the place. It is gross. Oh. Also, despite the obvious caveats to be skeptical of accounts like this, the chroniclers at least tell us that the embalmer whose job it was to remove Henry's brain, was so overpowered by the stench that he died. Well that that that makes sense, because that that lines up with stuff we discuss in the past regarding Egyptian mummification, where one of the factors we have to take into account regarding the removal and disposal of the brain is that that would have gone rancid really quickly and would would not have been a pleasant material to have to deal with. Well, it makes me wonder, like, what can you actually die from a stinch? Obviously you can die from inhaling things that are harmful to your body, but like, could something actually smell so bad that in some way the smell is what kills you. That didn't really seem to make sense. But I don't know. Mm hmm, well, I don't know. There would be an interesting topic to discuss in the future. I mean, there are certain things you can smell that will kill you, but it's not the merely the stinch of the thing that makes it lethal. Um, so it's it's an open question. Okay, yeah, maybe we'll come back to that one day anyway. So here we have a case in Henry the First where there may have also been symbolic considerations involved, but there were clearly practical reasons for burying the heart and other organs separately from the rest of the body. And to come back to uh this uh, this article or this book chapter I was talking about, whatever the reasons involved the The author here writes that this type of practice was fairly common for the upper classes in Western Europe starting at around the time of Henry's reign. Quote the extraction of the inner Organs, and the separate burial of the heart and intestines was a hallmark of English and French aristocratic mortuary behavior from the twelfth century onwards. It is worth noting that the English often quickly discarded the viscera close to the side of corpse treatment, whereas the French treated them with great respect. The English aristocracy generally favored a double interment, one for the body, the other for the heart, while French aristocracy often requested that the corpses be buried in three separate places body, heart, and entrails. Now to end that quote, but summarize some other commons. A big focus of this chapter is about the practice of heart burial in Central Europe is like in mostly German speaking areas of Europe, where it was much less common than it was in France and England, though there were some examples there. There's one specific exception, which is that it was a standing tradition of the prince bishops of Wurtzburg. Wurtzburg is a city in the German state of Bavaria uh and these prince bishops established a tradition with a three part burial. The corpse would go off to Wurtzburg Cathedral, the intestines go to the castle church at of Marienburg, and the heart goes off to the monastery of Abroc And in these cases it would have been probably for or not probably almost certainly for mainly symbolic reasons rather than practical ones. And what were these symbolic reasons? While she writes in her conclusion that the primary symbolic purpose of the division of the corps in both Central and Western Europe in the Middle Ages was a desire to quote duplicate the body quote by physically fragmenting corpses, high ranking individuals could express loyalty to more than one site and comply with a range of political, religious, and social demands. Yeah, this makes sense. This is kind of like spreading it around. It's like it's almost like a royal, say, a royal official that has three parties on the same night, They're gonna try to attend each of them for a little bit, right, make an appearance at all three Yeah, yeah, And so this is a similar thing, except when ones remains right. So at this time, the choice of where to be buried was often interpreted as an important sign of what was important to you. So if you're a duke and you want to show your loyalty to your duchy, but maybe you're also a member of a consecrated religious order and you want to show your loyalty to that orders founding abbey, what can you do? Or maybe you're a duke and you want to be in part at your duchy, but also you are on some brutal military campaign and you want to be buried in part uh, you know, in the Holy Land where you're conquering cities. Is so what do you do? You duplicate your body, allowing it to be buried in both places. And one common way of doing that, especially in Western Europe, mainly England and France, was burying the body in one and the heart in the other. Uh. And a very common example here is English nobles having their hearts transported separately to or from the Holy Land. But the author also writes that in the post medieval period, such as seventeenth century Catholic Europe, the symbolic significance of separate heart burial becomes more complicated. Quote. The heart turns into something more than just a representative of a person. It becomes a political artifact which was used to renew spirituality and promote new types of religious beliefs. So a heart in this case, Uh, the way I'm understanding this is that it could be used more kind of like the relics of saints, or like a religious icon that was dedicated to maybe some kind of Catholic counter reformation movement. That would you know, people could look on it and meditate on it and it would or not the heart itself maybe, but you know, like a marker of its deposition somewhere and that would inspire them to feel certain religious feelings. Fascinating. Another interesting trend observed in this paper that she mentioned in the conclusion, especially in England, it seems like heart burial takes on a kind of fashionable nous, like it's kind of cool, and like so many things that are perceived as cool over the years, this had to do in part with being a practice of the rich. And it goes like this, transportation of a corpse is a marker of what she calls social distinction, So you know, whose corpse gets transported around after death, usually a powerful and wealthy person. Quote procedures associated with transportation and delayed burial, such as a visceration and separate burial of the inner organs eventually developed into symbols of high status even when transport was not necessary. So maybe if earlier transportation of different parts of the body around was a sign of like, wow, you're rich enough to go like lead people to to fight in the crusades, uh, and it was just a practical necessity there. Maybe later on it doesn't have any of those practical implications, but it's just like, well, that's what rich, important, powerful people used to do, so maybe we should do that. Also, division of the corps was more expensive than a regular burial, So if you are say rising up through the classes, like if you were somebody who was formerly more of a commoner but you've got appointed to a to like an administrative position somewhere within the government, you could try to signal your yours in class status with some kind of different funeral practice, maybe division of your body and deposition at different places. So it becomes a form of conspicuous consumption, a way to show off the fact that you have money to create the appearance of higher social class or prestige. M Yeah, like I can afford to not only have one funeral but three funeral. Yeah, Now, here's an interesting question, why did division of the corps, including heart burial spread more quickly in medieval England but remain comparatively rare in Central Europe. She suggests here that it's because in England it was practiced by men, women and children, whereas in medieval Central Europe basically meaning like the Holy Roman Empire area, it was mainly done to unmarried men without legitimate offspring. So obviously that would make a big difference. Another big difference here comes back to what we were talking about in the past episode about the symbolism of the heart. There appeared to be differences in the understanding of the unique symbolism in the heart in Western versus Central Europe. So example, here, uh, there was a twelfth century Austrian figure named had Mar of kun Ring, who, according to the author, is the only known German speaker ever to ask for his heart to be transported back home from a crusade. Because remember, among German speakers, what what's the solution there? The German speakers like the most Teutonic as the German custom making the bone broth out of the crusader. Yeah, bring back the bones. But this guy is saying the heart, right, that's what's hot. But had mar here he wanted his heart brought back. However, he did not ask for the heart alone. He wanted his heart and his right hand returned for burial. Why the hand well? Another example cited earlier in the paper, she mentioned Prince Bishop Gottfried of Spitzenberg, who died in the Third Crusade in the year eleven ninety. He asked not for his heart to be returned, but for his hand. Uh, and it got lost along the way. Whoops, But she ends up writing quote. It seems that for the English the heart was important because it represented humanities in her being. Among medieval German speaking people, especially the prince bishops, who represented both secular and religious powers, other body parts such as bones or arms could also fulfill that function. And I thought that was so interesting. It makes me wonder about the origin of this, this difference in in metaphor and and uh in an idiom. So if in medieval England it's commonly understood that your heart, the organ that pumps blood, is the symbol of your soul. You know, it's the most important seat of your character and your integrity. But in German speaking lands it might just as well be your bones or your right hand that symbolized that core part of you. What linguistic or cultural or literary differences in those different language traditions might have caused this, you know, Yeah, I mean, on one level, all this is making me think of all the potential for various horror movies and so forth, But it also makes me think of some of those crawling hand movies like The Beast with Five Fingers. You know, like, there is something about the hand that in the treatment given by these various horror films, and all of them are kind of interconnected and ultimately stemming from some of the same source material, but there is this idea in them that the hand retains something of of the original individual, and therefore you can it's really not that much of a stretch for even a very heart centric um or cardiocentric or I'm not sure what you would would call this, a very heart centric um um culture to realize that, Yeah, you can easily imagine how the hand could end up getting all of the attention instead, because we can see examples of that just in our various fictions and and folk tellings. So anyway, if it comes down to it, most teutonicus versus heart burial? Which team are you on? Uh? But it's the bones or or heart in hand? Boiling to take the bones home or taking the heart in the body different places? Well, I mean, I don't want to be an inconvenient so I don't know the heart. It seems like it might be a nice tidy way to go about things. Therefore, I don't know if if you know, it's ultimately about what what they feel comfortable with, if they would rather do the boiling, Okay, I would maybe it'd rather not be milk. Uh, but that's just me. And obviously I'm not gonna really care all that much. After after we've reached that point, I'm seeing visions of a gigantic instant pot that is not product integration. They did not they did not ask us to to put that image in everywhere. That would be the best bit of spawn ever. Alright, Well, obviously we'd love to hear from everyone else out there, which would you prefer bones or or heart? Hand or hand? And if you choose bones, what's the sub stance you want to hear your your bones stripped of their flesh? And I guess you can choose anything you can choose wine, you can choose milk, you can choose Yahoo. I don't know. You know what's your favorite beverage? Pour it up? Yeah? You know the chocolate who? You? Who? You Who? Not? Yeah? You who? Yahoo is the website? You who is the chocolate beverage? Though um they're there are other brands of the of of of the chocolate beverage as well, but yeah, you who boiled? And you Who? I think you're onto something. Yeah, so hey, we'd love to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts on what we've discussed in these two episodes, or if there are some other interesting ideas of how the heart is seen or treated either physically, is a part of a funeral custom or sacrificial custom in different cultures in different times in history, or if there's something from a mythological level or even a purely fictional level you'd like to bring up share it with us. We'd love to hear from you. I know, just be putting this episode together right across a few other monsters and creatures from various full glorees and folk traditions. Uh so, I may have to come back to some of those maybe on future episodes of The Monster Fact reminder for everyone out there that this is stuff to blow your mind were primarily a science podcast with our core episodes like this one on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on Monday's we do listener mail, on Wednesdays we do Monster Factor Artifact, and on Fridays we do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film, such as The Beast with Five Fingers that's about a crawling hand, or Return of the Evil Dead, which well it's also Return of the Blind Dead, depending on which time do you want to go in. That has to do with undead uh templars coming back to life, so uh some of those have touched on some of the ideas that we discussed in this episode. Mad Love also about possessed hands the soul in their hands in that movie, and that's right, How good iver you get? Mad Love? All right? Well, uh big 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 is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio with the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows.