In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe dive into the world of shadows. How do human conceptions of shadows factor into our literature, art, history and monster making? What does it mean to cast a monstrous shadow, or to cast no shadow at all? Find out…
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lan and I am Joe McCormick. And today our October journey continues. If you're new to the show, we spend all of October covering spooky subjects, and we are plowing right on toward Halloween at a frightening pace, at such a pace that by the time we reach it, our skin may be seared by the wind. But today we wanted to embark on a new series of Halloween related episodes about shadows. Before we started, I was thinking about the series on necromancy that we published earlier this month, in which we explored a lot of ancient accounts of people summoning the dead, especially to get information about the future or some of the kind of hidden information from them. And we talked about stories that assumed the ancient and Greek model of the afterlife a subterranean realm of darkness called hades, where the souls of the dead dwell in a weak, pitiable and insubstantial form. So this would be unlike modern Christian notions of the dead dwelling either in heavenly bliss or infernal punishment had seems to be most often thought of as a gloomy, forlorn dungeon where your spirit is locked away forever, more like a slowly fading memory. It's not really a punishment, and basically everybody goes there, but it's not good. It's better to be alive. I guess the only real exception seems to be like if you're turned into a god, which occasionally happens if you're really cool.
Yeah, but you got to have you gotta have an end for that. Yeah, not just they don't have that out there, just anybody.
So anyway, relevant to our topic in this next series of episodes, I was thinking about how in English translations, for example, of the Homeric myths, these dead souls that populate the underworld here are sometimes known as shades. I think this terminology comes up in the story, for example, in the Odyssey, where Odysseus goes to the edge of the underworld in order to summon up shades. I think he wants to speak to the shade of Tyresius.
I believe that's right.
Yes, But he sees his mom, he sees a bunch of people, He waves a sword at him, he slaughters a ram and all that. And I was wondering, when the English translations use the word shade here, does that mean shadows just in the regular sense of shadow, And does that usage, if so, go back to the original Greek, as best I can tell, it does I'm not a Greek scholar here, but I was looking up some Greek English lexical sources, and from what I could find, it looks like the Greek word used here is skia, the Latin equivalent being umbra. And this word does indeed carry these multiple meanings. It could be used to refer to ghosts, to spirits of the dead, like the kind that are called forth to drink the blood of the Ram and tell the future to Odysseus. Or it could refer to the utterly mundane shade and shadow cast by a tree or a mountain, or a person, just whatever blocks out the sun. And I thought this double meaning was very interesting. What is it about the mundane shadows we experience every single day that would cause people to give them this hair raising secondary meaning?
This is a great question, Yeah, because shadows are everywhere there that you know, we encounter our own shadow every day, and yet the term shadow. The idea of a shadow carries a lot of weight, certainly supernaturally and fictionally and folklorically, as we'll get into in a bit here, but just linguistically it does a lot of legwork, you know. I decided to turn to brewers Dictionary of Phrase and fable on this one. It's often a fun way to sort of into not just the meaning of words, but also just like antiquated usages of those words. So the author here reminds us that shadow is a word with numerous figurative and applied meanings. A shadow may be a ghost, as we see in Macbeth hence horrible shadow. It may also be a faint representation, as in a shadow of a doubt. It may also mean a constant attendant. And Brewers specifically references Milton's paradise lost here sin and her shadow death.
It's hard for me to imagine that pearing of her shadow death does not in some sense derived from its usage in the Bible walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death exactly.
And of course, we often use the term shadow as a verb to follow someone around and sort of learn from them. To shadow someone at work, generally when that is used, there are no haunting connotations, but shadow may also be a moral darkness or gloom now Brewers, Like I said, is also always great for some antiquated sayings. Here are a few examples gone to the bad for the shadow of an ass aka, choose your battles and don't battle for something as dumb as the shadow of a donkey?
Does that go back to a story? I don't know.
I have no additional context, but feel free to start incorporating it into your daily conversations. Listeners. There's another one, May your shadow grow less? This one apparently has Eastern origins according to Brewers. And I'll get back to this one in a bit. And then the idea of being reduced to a shadow or emaciated. You so so slender, so starved that even your shadow is reduced. But you know, obviously your shadow would be reduced if your body was reduced. But it is also not that simple, right, because shadows can be manipulated. We can cast a very long shadow depending on where we are in reference to the sun. Joe, I don't know about your experiences with this as a father, but I remember when my son was a mere toddler that we would have some fun with our own shadows in the park, especially in the way that a child can be shown to manipulate their own shadow, to cast a long shadow, to cast a big shadow, and also have it interact with other shadows, like have your shadow dinosaur hand, you know, bite another person's shadow, and that sort of thing.
Yeah. I don't know how much consciousness my daughter has of her own shadow yet, but I have done some shadow puppet shows for her in the light of the setting sun, and it's interesting to watch because I think the few times I've done this, my daughter has tried to reach out and touch the shadows projected on the floor or on the wall, but of course there's nothing to touch, but she perceives that this moving display of shapes must be some kind of object that she could grasp.
Yeah, there's something about shadow. I think a child's fascination with them perhaps reveals much about what remains there, at least in some part of our mind. Even after we have grown accustomed to them, once they've become old hat, there are still going to be moments where we notice the peculiar when it comes to the shadow, that a shadow doesn't necessarily tell the truth but also at the same time, a shadow can reveal things that are there that you know, perhaps you can't see an individual, but you can see their shadow that sort of thing. So there's there's obviously a lot of rich room for interpretation. But then also just coming back to the linguistics of it, certainly when you get into translation. I know we are looking around for possible shadow poems to read at the top of this episode, and I was looking at some Borges poems in translation, of course, and for instance, there's one titled to the One who is Reading Me, which is a nice haunting poem with a number of different Borges sort of trademarks in it. But some translations will use shadow and others will not, So you know, it seems like a shat the shadow is one of those words that likely we've been saying it refers to so many things it may be invoked in translation, even if that was perhaps not the author or the poet's original intent.
Well, coming back to the representation of shadows in our minds, I dug up what I thought were a couple of pretty interesting cognitive science papers about shadow consciousness. So the first one I was looking at was a short paper published in Trendsing Cognitive Sciences in two thousand and six by Roberto Cassadi, an Italian professor. This paper is called the Cognitive Science of Holes and cast Shadows and this was published in two thousand and six. This paper asked an interesting question. It was what can quasi objects or negative objects such as shadows and holes tell us about how human brains perceive and understand physical objects. Of course, holes and cast shadows are interesting because they are not objects in themselves. They're actually just absences, in one case the absence of solid physical substance and in the other a relative absence of light. But despite the fact that things like holes and shadows are just absences, we intuitively often think of them as substances in themselves. Kasati writes, quote, both holes and cast shadows are dependent features. They cannot exist without objects hosting or casting them. Both shadows and holes are somewhere between being regions of space and fully fledged material objects. They are similar enough to bounded regions of space that they have a location, a shape, a size, and are as immaterial as space is, but are more object like as they can persist over time and move. And I think it's this ambiguity between being an object and not being an object that makes a shadow counterintuitive. One example I've seen is people to talking about the interesting fact that a shadow could technically move faster than the speed of light. How would that be possible? The example would often be given that like, if you have a source of light that you can project across the entire surface of a planet, maybe the surface of the moon, and then you, standing right next to that source of light, move your finger quickly in front of it, you could actually make your shadow travel across the surface of that distant object faster than light would be able to travel if it were going from one side of that object to the other. Though, of course nothing is actually traveling in the case of how you're altering the shadow there, so it's not actually a violation of the laws of physics. It's not any object going faster than the speed of light. But is it is a change propagating through space in some sense from our perspective, faster than the speed of light.
Interesting, So absence in a sense travels faster than anything material.
So I wanted to bring up a couple things mentioned in this paper that start me as interesting. One of them is a reference to another paper published a couple of years before this in the journal Perception, called Impossible Shadows and the Shadow Correspondence Problem by Pascal Mamasian published in two thousand and four, and the background on this paper is the observation that we can and do use shadows to estimate information about a scene. So we can use shadows to infer properties of both the light source where light is coming from and a scene we're looking at and the object casting the shadow. But getting information this way is not a computationally trivial task. It's actually somewhat difficult. Mamasian rites quote. In order to use that information, our visual system has first to segment regions in the image, decide that these regions are potential shadows rather than say, in blots, and then match these shadow candidates with objects in the scene. We call this last processing stage the shadow correspondence problem. It is reminiscent of the correspondence problem in stereopsis, and stereopsis is how the brain infers depth in our vision by comparing the images produced by our two different eyes and then going on they say quote or motion perception, where one has to match features between the left and right images or between consecutive frames of a movie. So inferring real accurate information about a scene you're looking at in a photograph or in front of you based on shadows is computationally intensive. We use shadows to get information, but it's a complex problem with multiple variables, and it's taxing on the brain. And so the author of this paper describes some experiments leading to the conclusion that we actually only infer information from shadows using a rough system. And one piece of evidence for that is that people usually seemed not to notice when projected shadows put in front of them were physically impossible. Rob I'd like, I've got an illustration for you to look at here that I pulled out of this paper. So there are a series of six objects shown that are kind of there. There are ray, a white to sort of like pole with an arm at the top, and then a shadow being cast by that object, And so you could try to infer some information about where the source of light is in relation to this object. But four of these are possible shadows that could be cast by an object of the shape, and two of them are impossible shadows.
Wow, So just looking at these six images here is it is a little taxing. It can feel the mental strain, because you know, I'm instantly trying to imagine light approaching the object from different directions at different angles. And when I start sort of doing that three dimensional computation in my head, I mean, it seems like all of them are probable, Like none of them are really standing out to me as necessarily impossible. I don't know, maybe gosh, I don't know, maybe number two. Oh yeah, two is the only one that I'm that I'm thinking is even just a little bit suspect here. But yeah, this is this is this is This is rough to think about.
You're in the same situation as most of the people who participated in this experiment. So most of the shadows given here are possible given the correct light source position, But the two on the right side of the image are impossible. If you look at them, you can see that the arm of the figure is pointed the wrong way in both of those cases.
Fascinating, I guess, I'm I'm this is why I've always been so forgiving too with video games, especially the ones where you could choose whether you wanted complex shadows or just sort of like the circle shadow like circle shadows good enough. If I'm having any kind of system issues, let's just go with this simple shadow.
That might be a good instinct. We'll get to some reasoning about that in a second. So a couple of these images are not possible shadows. But I think I don't know. I already knew that I've read about it before I looked at the image, So I can't really know what my reaction would be. But you had the same reaction a lot of the people in the study did. They just didn't notice. People seemed not to notice that these shadows were not possible. It had to be explained to them afterwards by the experimenters, And so they used these bits of impossible geometry to infer mundane information about physical objects, space, and light sources, just like normal. So in the end here the author says that this is evidence that our brains use a quick mechanism or what is called a quote course representation course meaning rough to solve the shadow correspondence problem. And another thing that gets pointed out in the discussion is surrealist art that makes use of impossible shadows. There is a painting called Indefinite Divisibility by a painter named eve TONGI. Again, that's called indefinite divisibility. If you want to look it up yourself. It is a sort of dolliesque surreal painting with these strange objects standing up in a landscape with very stark, you know, high contrast shadows that are falling long across the fading background. So there seems to be a strong directionally oriented source of light sort of where where the observer would be casting these long shadows. But in this paper there is a zoom in and some lines you can see if you scroll down in our outline here Rob showing that the shadows cast in this painting are again impossible. They don't line up the way they would if there were actually a single consistent point of light.
Yeah, this is fascinating. Yeah, once you start looking at it and really comparing object to shadow, then yeah, you start seeing you hit the problems here.
And yet I wouldn't noticed at all. So this raises a question like, were the impossible shadows in this painting included simply by accident because most people wouldn't notice, or is it an intended surreal effect to I don't know. Reward careful study of the painting for you to realize like, oh, wait a minute, this is not physically possible.
It's got to be the latter, right, I mean, it seems like the amount of work that would go into a piece like this, and being a surrealist piece, that would that would make sense to intentionally distort the shadows, even if it was done in such a way that many viewers of the painting would not notice.
Okay, so short story there. We do use shadows to get relevant information about a scene we're looking at, but we only look so close because we apparently do not detect when shadows violate the laws of physics or geometry. However, coming back to that paper I mentioned by Cassatti, shadows also, in addition to providing relevant information, they also represent noise. We might not think about this often, but in reality, it would be quite easy to mistake a shadow for a physical object or the outline of such to interpret, to misinterpret a shadow falling across an object as a contour on that object and the and Kasati points out this is one reason it is so difficult to represent shadows in line drawings. So Kasati says, our brains deal with this noise threat by mostly tuning out shadows as visual representations unless we suddenly decide to focus on them. And that seemed very true to me. You know, we we see shadows all the time. We are constantly surrounded by shadows, but our brain sort of makes them cognitively invisible unless we decide for some reason to focus on them. And Kasati calls this having quote limited conscious access to shadow.
Yeah, this is fascinating. So there is data there in the shadow, but there's just too much noise really to depend on it too heavily, and there's ultimately better visual and other sense data to go off of in any given situation that involves a shadow, I'm assuming.
So yeah, I found that really interesting that as a form of visual information, shadows exist in this middle realm where we can get useful information from them, but we're never looking too close, or at least not naturally unless we're like really forced to, because a lot of times we don't even notice if the shadow is eldritch in nature, it's doing something geometry can't do or wouldn't be justified by how light works. But secondarily, most of the time, even though we're looking right at shadows, we don't see them. I mean, I'm literally looking right at shadows right now, and I don't see them as shadows unless I notice to look at the shadows there. They don't, I don't know, strike my visualste them as relevant, and so I'm just like, I tune them out.
That's interesting. Yeah, we kind of have shadow blindness to a large degree, which I guess makes it even more fascinating to think that there might be other beings out there who can see shadows in ways that can appreciate shadows in ways that human beings cannot. I would like to at this point turn our attention to various fictional, legendary, folkloric, and literary examples of shadowless wizards, demons, and vampires, and much more in the shadows that may or may not be cast by these various individuals. So I've mentioned my fondness for the horror fantasy of Weird Tales era author Clark Ashton Smith before, and one of my all time favorites is a short story title The Double Shadow, about a pair of wizards who on Earth ancient dark magic that in turn dooms them both to a horrible death. Smith's own summary of the tale via eldrich Dark dot com, which is a great website that has just all of his writings available. This is how the author himself summarized it. Quote. A man sees a monstrous shadow following his own and merging with it gradually day by day, while coincidentally with this merging, he loses his own entity and becomes possessed by an evil thing from unknown worlds in his personality. The hideous invading spirit takes form and becomes manifest till his shadow is that which had followed him. And the story itself is very haunting, and the ending is really awesome, with the Doomed Wizard, the last of the doomed wizards, writing his last personal testimony in a locked study while his while this monstrous shadow crawls ever closer closes. As follows, so, knowing that the time is brief, I have shut myself in the room of volumes and books and have written this account. And I have taken the bright triangular tablet, whose solution was our undoing, and have cast it from the window into the sea, hoping that none will find it after us. And now I must make an end and enclose this writing in the sealed cylinder of ourcallum, and fling it forth to drift upon the wave, for the space between my shadow and the shadow of the horror is strained momently, and the space is no wider than the thickness of a wizard's pin. Now I had long thought that this was mere fantastic invention on Smith's part, and it doesn't just detract it all from the success of the story and the effect of the story. But based on what I was reading in Brewers, it would seem that he may have based this detail on that example of so called Eastern origin. This is, of course spectacularly vague and hartly limits the search too much. It just means that it must have originated outside of ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and European traditions. But the idea is explained in Brewers is that wizards studying the Black Arts, after they reach a certain advanced stage in their studies, are chased through a subterranean hall by the devil. I don't know if this is supposed to be in real life or in a dream, etc. But then the idea is, if the devil catches you, well, I guess maybe you're done for. But if the devil catches only your shadow or part of it, then you lose all over part of your shadow, but in doing so, you become a first rate wizard. And so therefore you might identify a wizard because the wizard's shadow will be uncanny, It'll be incomplete to some extent, or perhaps it will be missing altogether.
Oh but I wonder if most people would notice that, since we often don't notice impossible shadows.
That's right, That's right. It's almost kind of a safe bet, right. It's like, well, okay, if I lose part of my shadow, or even the whole thing, I'm probably going to be all right. Besides, I have all these dark magical spells to fall back on. Now, setting aside this vague claim of Eastern origins for a moment, we do see another variation of this idea in Icelandic traditions. And my source here is demonic magic in the Icelandic Wizard Legends by Mark Hanford. This was published in the Scottish Society for Northern Studies twenty nine back in nineteen ninety two. Now, Hanford's paper concerns a figure known as Samond Sigfisen or Semond the learned. This individual what was it is well to explain here was an historic individual. This is someone who actually lived, but there are also various legends about them, legends in which they are described as a gulderman, a type of wizard that was distinct from pagan slash evil magicians in early medieval Christian writings.
Yes, because despite so many of the legends of him having to deal with interactions with the devil, Semond was a Christian priest.
That's right, right, And apparently these guldermen were generally classified as priests in addition to wizards, they are generally strong Christian elements in their stories, and Hanford writes that Salmond is the earliest of the Icelandic wizards in this tradition, so, first of all, the real Seman according to the various annals, Salmon was born in ten fifty six and educated in France. He returned to Iceland around ten seventy six, built a church in the south of Iceland, and then went on to be very influential in ecclesiastical law and politics of the day, so he was able to raise his own family's position in the country to a position of power for many generations to come. He wrote important histories such as the Lost but Off sited history of the Kings of Normal. He died in eleven thirty three at the age of seventy seven, And yeah, that's that's the short version of the historical Semand. But he also takes on different powers within the realm of icelandic.
Legend, one of the many legends about Semand is that he was able to get control of his parish in southern Iceland because there were a group of I don't know, learned men or candidates who were brought before the King of Norway. King of Norway was like, okay, there's a parish in Iceland, and whichever one of you gets there first can have it. So Semond goes to the beach. He goes to the shore, and he calls up the devil and he says, okay, I need you to give me a ride to Iceland without getting my coat tails wet. And if you take me there without getting my coattails wet, then you can have my soul. So the devil transforms into a seal and let's Semond ride him all the way to Iceland. They're almost there, but then the devil is outsmarted because Semond beats the seal. The devil seal on the head with the salter I think either a bible or assalter. The devil is knocked unconscious and sinks under the water, and then of course the coattails get wet because he falls into the water. Therefore the pact is invalidated. So he outsmarted him with a good whack to the head.
In this outlandish story. Really does sum up a lot of the character of Samon in these legends, because he's nothing short of the ultimate demonic wizard in the classical Fostian sense. Yet while fast makes overall terrible deals with the devil, they come back to plague him. Samon is essentially he's like a wise trickster who knows how to outwit the devil himself when it comes to various contracts. You know, that sort of outlawyer the devil, I guess and even and as he goes on in legend, he's able to aid others in litigation of their own deals with the devil. So he got into a bad deal with the devil, Well, maybe Salmon will be able to help you. The author here says Samon is presented as an ambiguous character, one who uses diabolical means to do good against the forces of evil.
Oh, he's like Christopher Lee and the devil rides out. You know, he can know all the diabolical chants, he can know all the occult tones because he's using them for good. But Simon, you can't know about them.
That's right, Yes, the Holy Warlock figure here. Now, the context for all of this actually brings us back to something we were talking about earlier this month regarding necromancy, and that's clerical access to texts and tones that contain forbidden knowledge regarding communication with demons and the sometimes acceptable realm of astral magic, magic concerning the stars. Astral magic had been imported from the Arab world, so only learned physicians and clergy members had access to such texts, with the clergy especially having access to texts related to the command of demons for the purposes of exorcism. And as we take done previously, it's members of the clergy who were frequently accused of demonology or necromancy, or at least accused of possessing texts related to these alleged practices. It was also Hanford stresses here an easy accusation to make against clergy and physicians by their enemies and or those jealous of their success. So you don't like a given guy who's way up in the clergy, especially one who's like Samond at foreign educated. Well you just say, well, of course he's successful. He's a wizard.
He's doing deals with the devil.
Right, And then you know, maybe people are jumping to their defense and saying, well, Samon is doing a lot of great work if he made a deal with the devil. I guess he knows what he's doing. Yeah, but that doesn't mean you should make a deal with the devil. Leave it to individuals like Saman to pull it off.
But you know, one of the really interesting legendary motifs about Saman to the learned is the idea of him essentially going to devil school.
Yes, yeah, again he was. He's farign educated, educated in France, and and realistically he would have learned about pagan history, he would have learned about mathematics, astrology, and theology. But Hanford writes that, you know, this gets all stretched in the popular imagination and it becomes the version that becomes kind of the folkloric canon. Is that and then this was this was later recorded in I think seventeenth century by Arnie Magnuson in the states that Salmon was educated at the Black School, and which is of course a school of dark wizardry, and at the end of one studies there, the devil would claim the soul of the last student to leave.
This setting is not unique to stories about this guy's life. By the way, there is a more common folk story motif about the Scholomance or the School of the Devil, which is in some sense a college were people go to learn mystical evil magic powers. They are instructed by the devil, or maybe not by the devil, maybe they just get to go to this place and there's lots of books of forbidden knowledge there. But yes, the devil will claim at least one of the students of each class there to be his personal servant.
Yeah, and I like it's kind of the last person to leave, which I kind of interpreted as being like the most studious of the children, or not children, I guess, but his students, the most studious, the biggest wizardry nerd on campus, that will be the one that the devil hand selects. So anyway, Samon was very studious and he was often the last to leave. And I guess this was known about him because even back home in Iceland, they realized this kid is gonna get the devil on him if someone doesn't help him out. And so that's where Iceland's bishop John Augmundsen decides to jump in and help him out. He rushes there, he's there to help him out of the building, throws his coat over Salmon's back. As he leaves, the devil reaches out for him and snatches the coat instead of Salmon's soul. So this is the How does this relate to shadows, Well, we'll get there, But in this particular telling, the devil wasn't done though. He proclaimed that he had three days to claim Salmon's soul. So Salmon had to hide himself. He hit himself three times in a riverbank, in a boat at sea, and buried under a consecrated earth in a churchyard. And these tactics work, and the devil was thwarted. The idea being that like, where is he, Well, I'm getting a sense that he's he's he's out here at sea. He must he must have drowned, or I get the sense that he's under the earth. He must be dead. And so he's able to thwart the devil and avoid having his soul claimed.
The way I understood this, this was also connected to similar folk tales that weren't directly about the devil but were about some kind of mass stir of astral magic, somebody who was like a wicked astrologer who wanted to capture his student, and the student would evade him by like, yeah, so he would get his feet wet on the first day, and so the astrologer would consult the stars and see that he was wet and be like, oh, okay, he is drowned. And then another day he does something else to his body, like he puts blood on his feet or something, and then the astrologer consults the stars that day and sees blood and thinks that he has been killed, and then yeah, I guess the consecrated earth. The astrologer consults the stars and finds Ah, he is buried, so I can no longer claim.
Him right right now. In other versions of this story, though, it's not Salmond or the bishop's coat that is snatched by the devil, but Salmon's shadow, thus removing him of a shadow for the remainder of his life. So here we get back to this idea of wizards being chased around by the devil, having part of or their entire shadows snatched away, and thus being powerful and having all of this forbidden knowledge, being able to use it, but being deprived of something that may or may not be important, as we'll get into the shadow.
One version of the story I came across was same and using trickery. Actually, so he's the last student. He's trying to get out of the Devil's college, and the devil tries to reach out and claim him, but he says, wait a minute, no, I'm not the last. There is one more student still there, and he points to his shadow cast on the wall. So the devil reaches out to grab that and snatches his shadow away from him as he bodily makes his escape, but no longer with his shadow intact.
That version is good too. I like that. So Hanford writes that this escape from the Black School trope is a migratory legend, one that is largely unchanged over the centuries and pops up in different contexts, and the same can be said for what is known on the the Arnie Thompson Index of Folk Tale Types as tail type three twenty nine, a man gives or sell his shadow to the devil.
Unfortunately, I think Hanford says, there's not a lot of detail on that index type, and I wish there was.
Yeah, I had to look around. I found an Irish or Irish American tale that reflects this trope. This was recorded in nineteen seventy by Ruth and Music in Green Hills of Magic, West Virginia. Folk tales from Europe, and in this telling, you have a despondent man who's about to jump from a bridge when a stranger, guess what it's The devil arrives and says, hey, I'll buy that shadow off of you. And the man's like, oh, well, what are you going to give me for it? And he'll said. He says, well, i'll give you. I'll give you all the gold you'll ever need. And he's like, well, that sounds like a good deal. I wasn't using my shadow. I was about to really not be using it for anything. And so the he agrees to this, and the devil gives him a magic purse that always has coins in it. So this seems like a great deal, but then the townsfolk become suspicious of the fact that this guy always has money, and they also begin to notice, hey, he does not have a shadow, and so they throw him in prison I'm not sure on what charges exactly, and he dies there.
I thought this was going to take a different turn where he was going to give him all the gold he'd ever need and then just push him from the bridge, because once he's dead, he doesn't need gold.
Oh yeah, I mean that's the thing about deals with the Devil. Yeah, I guess. I guess they tend to take on the sort of lawful evil character right where there's some term, there's some detail in the contract. But yeah, I could have seen it going that darker direction as well.
I guess it's what kind of moral failing on the part of the protagonist do you want to emphasize In those kind of stories, it's inattention to detail, it's failure to read the fine print on the contract. On this it seems more like an inability to understand that suddenly being rich but also having something missing of your person will be noticed by people around you.
This trope is also reflected in The Marvelous Tale of Peter Schimmel from eighteen forty three by Attlbert von Camisso, which concerns another despondent young man who also sells his shadow to the devil and also sells it for a bottomless wallet. But in this story he ends up wandering the earth and depends and it spends the rest of his doomed life. Is kind of a holy fool attempting to reconnect with nature. Interestingly enough, DeForest Kelly of Star Trek Fame played this character in a nineteen fifty three episode of the anthology series Your Favorite Story, an episode titled The Man Who Sold His Shadow. Now, this trope pops up other places as well. Probably the most noticeable and one that a number of you are already thinking of, would be Peter Pan. You might remember this especially from the Disney animated adaptation of Old Peter. Pan is nearly caught in Wendy's house and his shadow is ripped off in the escape, and later they have to stick it back on, or they try to stick it back on with like soap and stuff. It doesn't work, they have to sew it back on.
It is a mischievous, fairy like shadow.
Yes. Now, as for those supposed Eastern influences on the idea, I wasn't able to find out anything really solid here, though I was looking at a few different sources. I found a book titled Folk Traditions of the Arab World, A Guide to motif Classification, Volume two by Hassan m el Shami, and the author does mention, at least in passing, that one quality of demons is that they cast no shadows. And I also was reading in Commanding Demons in Gin the Sorcerer in Early Islamic Thought by Travis Zeta that eleventh century Islamic author Abu al Fado Mohammad al Tabasi wrote in a book on Devil's in Gin that gin could be revealed by their shadows, and by their shadows only as inn like. You couldn't see the rest of them, but you could see the shadow of the gin.
Interesting.
So these two ideas are, of course, rather opposite from one another, and may well speak, you know, of different traditions and times. We're casting a large umbrello here over the concept. But they both do get at the idea of a shadow, or the lack thereof, is something key to an entity that doesn't completely fit into the human world or into human perception, and this brings us to the world of vampires. Ah okay, So I think a lot of you are probably up on the fact that in many tales, at least, vampires have no reflection in a mirror. That's a classic trope. It's one that's easy to visually represent in even a lower budget vampire film.
Yes, Gary Oldman comes across Keanu shaving, he hisses like a snake at the mirror and it shatters.
Yeah. Yeah, But at least in some tellings, the vampire also casts no shadow. And this is actually referenced in we've already referred to it here, the most influential vampire novel of all time, Bromstoker's Dracula. I'll read a bit from it here where this is specifically discussed. Quote. I was not alone. The room was the same, unchanged in any way since I came into it. I could see along the floor in the brilliant moonlight. My own footsteps marked where I had disturbed the long accumulation of dust in the moonlight. Opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time that I must be dreaming when I saw them, for though the moonlight was behind them, they threw no shadow on the floor. They came close to me and looked at me for some time, and then whispered together. Two or dark and had high aquilang noses like the Count, and great dark piercing eyes that seemed to be almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon. These are, of course, the brides of Dracula, the three female vampires that serve him in the book and then various adaptations of the book and elsewhere. In the Book of Dracula himself, it is written he throws no shadow, he makes in the mirror no reflect as again Jonathan observed, though the Prince of Darkness himself also tells Jonathan, I love the shade and the shadow.
Well, maybe you love to be in the shade. If you can make none with your own body.
Maybe so, all right. So we have this idea of the vampire, which, if you're not familiar, is a is a monstrous and cursed and corrupted, undead thing that was once human but has lost all humanity, and it has become nothing but supernatural hunger and cruelty and horror, And at least in some tellings of it, is the thing that no longer casts a shadow. And then we have other variations of this. We we've talked about wizards losing their shadows, of sort of fairy folk losing their shadows, and literary traditions. But then there are also related concepts like the portrait of Dorian Gray, in which you don't have a shadow, you have a painting of an individual, and that representation also has some sort of connection to the state of their soul. And so these various literary treatments especially would seem to be linked. And I found a really cool source on this. This is titled Vampire's Demons and the Disappearing Shadow in Folkloric Fictions of the Long nineteenth Century by Sam M. George, published in a twenty twenty edition of Gothic Studies. Now Dracula, of course, was the work of an Irish author, and as I believe we've discussed in the show previously, invokes various Irish folklore ideas concerning the undead, perhaps in any ways more than anything that Bromstoker actually absorbed from European traditions. But George Wrights of Dracula there may be some links to actual Romani folkloric beliefs that a vampire was a person's shadow, for example, and that there was also a practice of shadow traders, who quote traded shadows to architects who attempted to secure and wall up a person's shadow to ensure that their buildings were durable, with the result that after death that person would become a vampire.
WHOA, I don't think I've ever heard of this.
Yeah, this was new to me, and I think there may be sprinklings of this tradition spread elsewhere in European traditions as well. We may come back to that. But what Georgia ultimately argues is that this means that yes, Dracula and his spawn are all soulless. They have no souls. Again, they've lost every shred of their humanity, and in doing so they have also lost that shadow.
Well, it may be a coincidence, but I mean, obviously this has the at least superficial connection to the idea of Greek conceptions of disembodied souls as shades or shadows.
Yes. Yes, Now where it gets really interesting with George's article is that she references J. G. Fraser's The Golden Bough, the first volume of which I believe came out in eighteen ninety would have lined up with the writing of Dracula and some of the other writers and other works that invoke similar ideas of shadow or reflection or painting. Fraser writes of traditional belief systems in which the individual quote often regards his shadow or reflection as his soul, or at all events, as a vital part of himself, and as such it is a source of danger to him, for if it is trampled upon, struck, or stabbed, he will feel the injury as if it were done to his person. And if it is detached from him entirely, as he believes that it may be, he will die. And then elsewhere. Fraser writes, as with shadows and reflections, so with portraits, they are often believed to contain the soul of the person portrayed. People who hold this belief are naturally loath to have their likeness taken for if the portrait is the soul or at least a vital part of the person portrayed, whoever possesses the portrait will be able to exercise fatal influence over the original of it.
Oh okay, So this can next to a big theme that Fraser propounds in The Golden Bow, the Golden Bough is an early attempt at sort of anthropologically categorizing the different religious practices all around the world, and Fraser characterizes a lot of it as sympathetic magic, the idea that you would have an object that is, by connection of some sort associated with a person, and that like connection or association can be exploited for magical purposes to have influence over the person.
Yes. Yes, and again George brings us up, though not to argue at all that like, okay, Fraser is the authority on all of this. But again, this book would have come out at just the right time, and the book was a popular book. But also, she writes, would have had a certain amount of I wouldn't say maybe not a taboo quality to it, but there was kind of like a sense of like, oh, this is hidden knowledge, this is the good stuff. And if you want insight into how perhaps monsters and supernatural relationships work, well this is a book you might well pick up.
Oh, I think it was controversial when it came out. Was it was a very hot book. A lot of people were very excited about it. But it also, for example, set Christian practices in comparison to a lot of other religious practices around the world, which scandalized many conservative Christians.
Yeah, yeah, I can imagine that like that added context could be interpreted as dangerous to one's own worldview and belief systems.
Yeah, our religion is not like all the other religions now.
George also connects this to Lavatar's theory of physiognomy, which is more directly a pseudoscientific face reading practice, something that traces back to the ancient world, but something that then would there would be a resurgence of in medieval and Renaissance thought. Renaissance thought and then utilized by Swiss pastor and Cospar Lavatar, who lived seventeen forty one through eighteen oh one. And Lavatar argued that the shadow or silhouette more specifically, I think, could be used to understand a person's character. And I guess you could compare this easily to things like you know, alleged ara readings and so forth. You get into a pseudo scientific idea that like, okay, well here's here is the silhouette, here's the shadow. This is information about the physical person. But also we can then if we know what we're doing we can read that, and we can we can we can make all sorts of judgment calls about, you know, their inner character.
Yeah, and I think in the eighteenth and nineteenth century to some extent, physiognomy or physiognomy had some false scientific cachet, much like phrenology did. Like it's considered a pseudoscience now, but I think there were some people at the time who thought, oh, yeah, this is part of the new learning. You know, we can study actually the way you are shaped, or the way your face looks, or the bumps on your head, and these will tell us whether or not you're a criminal.
So, citing David Glover's Vampires, Mummies and Liberals, Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction, George notes that quote, without his shadow or mirror image, Dracula becomes physiognomy's true vanishing point, a profoundly unsettling figure.
No data. Yeah, that's funny.
I like that. So Dracula is just pure physical existence in hunger, no soul, no spirit, no depth beyond the immediate and all consuming thirst for blood. And of course, as Dracula resonates through cinematic traditions, the shadow also becomes important. Not so much in its absence, it's but in its perversion, as seen especially in nineteen twenty two's nos Veratu, and also coming back to Francis Ford Coppolo's nineteen ninety two adaptation of Dracula, we see the shadow of Dracula like reaching out and seeming to either act independently of the Prince of Darkness or to sort of telegraph his intense and hunger, Like his hunger is so intense that the shadow is reaching out to grasp Jonathan's neck.
By chance, I just happened to rewatch Bram Stoker's Dracula, the Copola version from ninety two, and oh man, that movie is so much fun. I don't know exactly how it was reviewed at the time it came out, but it is a hoot. Gary Oldman is just wonderful, and I love all of the shadow play scenes. You're exactly right. It's not that he doesn't have a shadow, it's that he has the wrong shadow. And I guess this comes back to what we were talking about with impossible shadows. There are multiple moments in the scene where like Keanu Reeves is in Dracula's castle and he looks where Dracula's shadow is, but Dracula's body is not there, and he turns around and he's on the other side of him, not where his shadow was, But he just kind of shrugs it off. That seems funny in the same way that a lot of things in the movie seem funny, with him just kind of I don't know, ignoring very strange things going on at this castle where I guess he really wants to close that real estate deal. Always be closing Jonathan Harker. But now that I've read this paper, it's like, well, I wonder if you would, you know, in real time, see a totally impossible shadow and not realize it. It would just kind of like you'd be blind to it. It would just kind of go into your mind and go out unrecognized.
Yeah, it would be just superseded by the visual information of the Count's body. Like whatever was weird and uncanny about the shadow, it's like, oh, well, never mind that there's the body. This is what we go on as human beings.
Of course, I don't know that's what would happen and if this were real life, but I don't know, it seems more plausible now.
Yeah, and again Dracula is a being of shadow, so I like this. Whether he casts a shadow or not, he has some sort of strange relationship with shadows, either you know, casting distorted shadows, manipulating shadows, or having no shadow at all. It all kind of gets around to the same idea that this is a creature out of step or out of place in the natural world, you know. Coming back to Francis fort Coppolo's Dracula for just a second, though, I was thinking about it in writing the notes for this episode, but also in watching one of the Christopher Lee Dracula films, which we're going to be talking about in Weird House Cinema this week, and I momentarily had the thought, it's a shame that Gary Oldman, such a great actor and such a great Dracula, only got to play Dracula once, whereas Christopher Lee got to play him so many times. But then I corrected myself and realized, no, Gary Oldman doesn't play one Dracula in this film. He plays multiple Draculas.
That's true.
Each Dracula has a different, slightly different feel and different visual presentation.
He's got the earthly count VLab from the prologue where like he stabs the cross and renounces God, and I guess that's how he becomes a vampire. In the story, he's old Grandma Gary oldman with the butt hair. He's young, sexy Gary oldman with the purple sunglasses in London. He's a lot of vampires.
He's wolf, he's bat. We also get the later version of the old account where he has instead of the hair being up, it's all slipped back and long. Oh yeah, so yeah there, And I may be forgetting one or two in the mix. So he ultimately did a whole franchise is worth of Draculas in just the one picture.
The ninety two Dracula is far from perfect. I would say it is a weird in great ways and in not so great ways. It's flawed, some parts of it kind of dragged. But it is really really worth watching just for how amazing Gary Oldman is. Yes, yeah, and there are other great things too, great sets and some other performances that are a lot of fun.
Oh yeah, yeah, a lot of great performances, great costumes, great blood, great monsters. And yeah, and Oldman's performance is perfect. I think I read somewhere that he mainly agreed to do it because he wanted to work with Francis Ford Coppola. But then also he said, once he read the line I've crossed oceans of time to find you, he was like, well, I've got to do it. I can't. I can't go on with my career without saying that line. Yeah.
I feel like Gary Oldman's performance is so good it can make you forget that there is no love story in the novel, or at least not one with Dracula. Like Dracula and Mina in the novel are not in love. Yeah, he's just bad in the novel. He's just a he's just a demon. He's not suave, he's not cool. He does not take her on a date to pet a wolf in the cinematograph.
Yeah, this is a good point. And you know, I and I think if you're if you're out there and you want more about the nature of Dracula and various depictions of Dracula, tune in for a Weird House Cinema this Friday, because I'm sure we'll have a lot to discuss regarding this and the version of Dracula that will be experiencing in that film. And as for Shadows, I believe we'll be back on Thursday with more.
The shadows fall longer and longer, they will not be denied.
All right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close it up there, but we will remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we do listener mail, On Wednesdays we do a short form artifactor Monster Fact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird Houses Cinema. And oh, you may have noticed that we have new host photos for Stuff to Blow your Mind here if you haven't seen them, run by our recently revived social media presences all linked off of Stuff to Blow Yourmind dot com and more specifically, we're stbym podcast on Instagram. Now let me tell you where we have those photos taken. We visited the Museum of Illusions Atlanta, a delightful and educational attraction located in Atlantic Station. They feature a whole host of visual illusions, including illusion rooms that you can walk into and interact with, so in a way, you may feel like a vampire in some of these places because your reflection especially will not be what you imagined it would be, or perhaps the way you look on your camera or on the cameras that are present in the room. The footage will not be right. Something is distorted, something is out of whack.
It's a great place to get to know the stranger sides of your own reflection and your own shadow.
Absolutely and it's fun for all ages. You can learn more about Museum of Illusions Atlanta at MOI Atlanta dot com.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway. 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 iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart You Up, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listen to your favorite shows.