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…
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and our month of creepy Topics continues. We are back with part two in our series on shadows. In part one, we talked about historical examples of people infusing the concept of the shadow with strange power or supernatural connotations. We talked about how the brain perceives shadows, and some cognitive science research regarding shadows, including the interesting finding that a lot of the time people do not detect when shadows apparently cast by objects are physically impossible. We also talked about legends of the Icelandic wizard who lost his shadow when it was snatched away by the devil, a kind of a violent tuition extra for his fees for going to which school. But also we talked about what it was understood to mean that a vampire had no shadow at the time Bram Stoker was writing the novel Dracula. Today, we're back to examine the shadows yet again, and to get started today, I wanted to talk about shadows with halos, so to introduce this item, I'm going to read a passage from the memoirs of one ben Venudo Cellini, a sixteenth century Italian sculptor and goldsmith who I had never heard of before. But this guy is interesting. He told his life story in a weird, passionate, melodramatic autobiography full of bragging that became widely celebrated in translation long after his death. This memoir was especially beloved by artists and authors of the Romantic movement in the late eighteen and early nineteenth centuries. Rob, Just so you can get a quick flavor of Chillini's comprehensive too muchness of personality, I attached an image for you to look at. This is a famous salt cellar that ben Venudo Chillini designed. This was used to store salt, like for cooking.
You know, I always find it weird that that it's essentially a salt box. And I think it's sometimes called a salt box, but it's also called a salt cellar and a salt pig. Neither of these terms really feel very true to what the thing is, at least to me.
Even less so in this case. So let me describe for those of you who cannot see the image. What we have here is a sculpture with two towering nude gods, one male, one female. They are lying back, their legs entangled with one another's, suggestively. The male immortal here is pointing with a trident, kind of holding it out, sort of languidly. He's like almost like he's, you know, very tired from having feasted long, but he's still he still wants that thing over there, so he's sort of gesturing with his trident as if to a servant, like bring me that. Meanwhile, the goddess here appears to be sort of pinching her own breast. Both figures are huge, they're made of gold. They are over a landscape of blue water crashing on a rocky shore, with golden horse heads shrieking from the surf, a golden temple with three archways under the giant goddess's shadow. I think this is supposed to be Poseidon and Gaya playing foot see here, or rather I guess in a Roman context it would be Neptune and Tara Mater. And if you think about it, the gods selected are actually on theme here because this is a salt cellar and these are if it's a Neptune and Ta Mater. This would be gods of the earth and sea.
And I think those are hippocampi there right behind the mail god right, so that would be a strong indicator of aquatic divinity.
Ah, that's a good point. I didn't think of that. Another thing here, So there's a dish next to the two gods and the salt I guess goes in the dish. But rob you see that little temple at the bottom underneath the goddess. That's for peppercorns.
Oh okay.
Also strange fact, this salt cellar was stolen from a museum in Austria in two thousand and three by a man who ran an alarm system company. I was reading about this in an article in The Guardian. The suspect later claimed that the theft was quote all rather spontaneous. The salt seller was valued at thirty five million pounds at the time. I think the thief tried to get a ransom, maybe from the insurance company or something, but eventually he was caught and the museum got the peace back.
Well that's good.
So in his memoirs, benven Nudo Cellini tells the story of creating this masterpiece. At one point, he says that he took a mock up design and showed it to the King of France at the time, Francis the First, who was so impressed by this model that he commissioned him to make the salt cellar out of gold from his own treasury. And he was like, Chillini, you are a genius. You're the best ever. And then Chillini says, okay. So he gets the gold. He's carrying it back to his workshop in a basket to make to cast the design in gold. When he was set upon by four armed highwaymen and then he had to draw his sword and defeat them single handedly, he says.
Okay.
He also brags about a time that he decided to stab some guys who had sued him and prevailed in court. He writes, in translation quote, I perceived that my cause had been unjustly lost. I had recourse for my to a great dagger I carried.
All right.
By the way, if you want to read more about the salt Cellar in particular, there's a good Jaystore Daily feature about this story by Giovanni Garcia Finitch. But needless to say, Chilini seems to have had a fairly grandiose idea of his own personal genius and historical significance. He thought he was pretty cool.
I mean, he sounds pretty cool just from this account, right, And he's going around getting into sword fights, stabbing people in legal disputes.
He says, But I don't know who knows.
Maybe.
Among Chillini's many adventures in Travail's, at one point he found himself imprisoned in Castle San Angelo in Rome after being accused of embezzlement. By the way, he escaped from prison later. Oh, and then he got caught and returned to prison. But then he got busted out of prison by like the like a rich family. Anyway, He tells stories of his time in prison in his memoirs, including the fact that he had a dream in which an angel came to him and wrote words of great importance on his forehead with a red and he says when he woke up that morning, he found that his forehead actually had marks on it, and he concludes that he was at the time receiving messages from a heavenly angel. But here we get to the passage that brings us back to shadows. Cellini writes quote another circumstance, I must not omit, which is one of the most extraordinary things that ever happened to any man, and I mention it in justice to God and the wondrous ways of His providence towards me. From the very moment that I beheld the phenomenon, there appeared strange to relate a resplendent light over my head, which has displayed itself conspicuously to all that I have thought proper to show it to, but those were very few. This shining light is to be seen in the morning over my shadow till two o'clock in the afternoon, and it appears to the greatest advantage when the grass is moist with dew. It is likewise visible in the evening at sunset. This phenomenon I took notice of when I was at Paris, because the air is exceedingly clear in that climate, so that I could distinguish it there, much plainer than in Italy, where mists are much more frequent. But I can still see it even here and show it to others, though not to the same advantage as in France.
All right, well, no, that's cool. Not only is he going around getting into sword fights and stabbing people in legal disputes. But he has some sort of mysterious halo that is visible about his shadow, at least for certain parts of the day, during certain environmental conditions.
That's right, he says, God likes me so much that he sometimes puts a halo around my shadow's head, and you can see the shadows radiance. Especially in the morning, when the grass is wet with dew, there will be visible to all a seraphic light in circling the face of my shadow, as if my shadow's head contained a second sun.
But not between the hours of two and six that's Willie's time. I get.
That's right. So it's a fantastic story. But the more fantastic part of it would probably do injury to Chillini's sense of specialness, because, unfortunately for him, other people have seen this same effect. In fact, it's very common when standing over a field of grass in the morning sunlight, you can often see a ring of golden light surrounding your shadow's head. M Rob, I've attached some pictures for you to look at here. Presumably the people who took these pictures are not specially blessed by God. They were not given a you know, plus four modifier on sword fighting bandits. They're not the most genius goldsmith that ever existed. These are just photographers. And what do you know, they're looking out of the field, they're taking a photo and there is a ring, like a sort of emanation of radiance off of the top of their shadow.
Absolutely, yeah, yeah, I see it.
Folks at home, you can look this up yourself with the term I'm about to give you. The phenomenon is known as hiligenshine h e i l I g e n s c h e i n, meaning the light of the Holy One or holy light, sometimes also known as Chilini's halo after the passage in question, and it is not in fact the flame of the Lord's favor for the rattus dude in Renaissance Italy. It is an optical effect created by the interplay of sunlight and certain types of backgrounds, especially backgrounds containing drops of dew.
Also not to be confused with heinegenshine, that's a different optical phenomenon.
So much like Chilini describes, the hiligenshine is most often seen in fields early in the morning, when the sun is at a low angle, and the observer has a long shadow falling over wet grass. The fact that the light is brightest right around your shadow's head here is of course not magic. It's also not really anything special about your shadow or the head of your shadow. Rather, it's about perspective. It's about light sources and reflecting backgrounds and perspective. The halo is located around your shadow's head because your eyes are in your head, and thus the head of your shadow is the place exactly opposite the sun from your eyes. Maybe even never thought about it that way before, but that's always true. This point opposite the sun from your head is known as your antisolar point. And another way to picture this concept is that you can always draw a straight line in three dimensional space from the sun through your head to your shadow's head. Your shadow's head is at one end of that line, the sun is at the other. The line goes straight through your face.
All right, all right, I can picture it.
So the explanation for the optical effect usually goes like this. The intensity of light reflected off of a drop of water or through a drop of water and back towards you depends on the angle of reflection. Rays of light that reflect straight back through a droplet of water are most intense that this straight bounce back angle of reflection would be one hundred and eighty degrees right, going straight into and back, like the reflection looking straight into a mirror. As the angle of reflection shifts further away from one hundred and eighty degrees, the reflected light becomes significantly less bright. Why would that be, well, I was reading about this in the American Meteorological Society's Glossary of Meteorology, and they write, quote, do drops held off the surface of the leaf by small hairs focus sunlight on the leaf where it is diffusely reflected. The drop, acting in a manner similar to the lens of a lighthouse, then collects a large fraction of this diffusely reflected light that would have otherwise gone in other directions, and sends it back toward the source and the observer. So, in other words, the dewdrop acts as a kind of focusing lens to reflect light directly back at the sun. Again, that's one hundred and eighty degrees the angle of reflection. Of course, when you look out at a field in the sunlight, no light from the sun is reflected to your eyes from exactly one hundred and eighty degrees because your head is in the way right that's where your shadow is, so you're blocking the exact one hundred and eighty reflection point. But light reflected in droplets from right around your antisolar point can be pretty close to one hundred and eighty degrees and thus significantly brighter when the rays are focused by the droplets like this than the light from all around. This is especially true if the angle of the sun is low and your shadow is long, and your antisolar point on the ground is thus farther away from you. And if you think about it for a minute, this makes sense because as your shadow's head gets farther away from your eyes because the sun is lower, the difference in the angle between like your exact antisolar point and some point on the ground maybe eight inches to the side of it. That difference in angle becomes smaller and smaller as the antisolar point gets farther away. You could compare this to like if you are aiming a bow and arrow at two targets that are one foot apart from each other, You'll have to make a larger adjustment if those targets are one foot apart from each other and ten feet in front of you than you would if they were one foot apart from each other and thirty feet in front of you. That smaller adjustment in aim is a smaller angle of difference. So this whole glow around your shadow's head has to do with the angle of reflected light hitting your eyes. It's closest to a one hundred and eighty degree angle of reflection near where your shadow's head is, so the light fro reflected from the surface around that area is brighter. If you could see it, it would be brightest exactly where your head is, but your head's in the way. One way of demonstrating this actually visually, that's quite simple. As I've seen online. Somebody takes a photo of themself with the Highligen shine and the camera is right in front of their face, and then they hold the camera away from their head over to the side, and the glow is around the camera and not around their shadows head.
Ah.
There you go.
One other tidbit from the American Meteorological Society entry. The glossary entry, though, is that while it's entirely true that this effect is much stronger on wet irregular surfaces like dewy grass. There's actually weaker version of the shadow halo effect that occurs even on dry surfaces. They write, quote, when an observer's shadow is cast on a dry irregular surface such as gravel or vegetation, each irregularity near the antisolar point covers its own shadow in other directions. The average brightness results from a mixture of sunlit and shaded surfaces. The lower the sun in the sky, the longer the shadows, and so the greater the contrast with the brighter region near the antisolar point. So even if there's no dew, you're still going to have the effect that if you look around the world places that are farther away from your antisolar point, you're going to be seeing light reflected kind of bouncing in all directions from both brightly sunlit areas and shaded areas. But when you're looking straight at your antisolar point, the stuff right around there, you're pretty much only going to be seeing non shaded areas because shaded areas are blocked by the objects, right.
Right, All right, so's it sounds then like that Seleni probably had a case here he was actually seeing this optical phenomenon when he was out walking in the fields and there was dew on the grass and so forth.
That's right, there's no reason to doubt his story that he saw this. Lots of other people have seen it. You can probably see it too in the right conditions. However, I am doubtful about Chilini's claims that other people could see his halo. Remember he says, like, I've showed it to a few special people and they said, yes, it's there. The hiligenshine is a phenomenon that is dependent on the position of the viewer. It is not actually an object out there in the world. Like you know, you and I can stand and look at a tree from different angles and both see the tree. The hiligenshine is about the angle of reflected rays of light hitting your eyes, and the rays are actually being reflected in this manner all over the surface of the Earth, the sunlit side of the Earth. It just happens to be around your shadow's head that you see it, because that's your particular anti solar point. So I don't know. Maybe they could see it if they got really close to him, like cheek to cheek and then they'd be like, oh wow, yeah, there is a glow around our heads. I'm curious how close exactly you would have to be to see the same thing. Maybe you don't have to be cheek to cheek, but you'd basically have to be looking from the same perspective that he is.
Yeah, I mean, I guess you can well imagine it being a scenario where since it's a subtle enough effect, if it was, if he's there like pointing it out to you, you might say, Okay, I think I see something. Or this is a guy that seemed to have a very strong personality. Yes, and there were at least stories about him stabbing people. You know, you might be inclined to just be like, yeah, totally, I do see that halo around your shadow. No, no, no, we don't have to. I don't have to put my head next to yours. It's fine. I got you.
I can see it too. Yes you're a genius, Yes you're really cool. Yes that coat looks cool on you.
Please put the dagger away.
So that's the Highligan shine. But I am I am so interested in this bombastic weirdo. I might try to find another way to keep reading about Benvenuto Cellini and see if I can bring him back to the show in the future.
And then it sounds like a big character who had a lot of thoughts about a lot of topics, So I wouldn't be surprised if he pops back up again. All right, I want to come back to a couple of things. In the last episode, we talked about people and things that, due to some sort of supernatural reason, do not cast a shadow, or a thought to not cast a shadow, and how this is generally a comment on something going on with their soul or thereof. As I was telling my wife about all of this, she was like, well, you've got to mention that episode of The Simpsons. I believe this is the episode where Lisa becomes a vegan for a little bit, or at least she encounters a vegan. I know she becomes vegan for an episode, but I can't remember if this is the same episode.
I think she becomes a vegetan unless this happens more than once. She becomes a vegetarian, and then she ruins Homer's barbecue by how.
Yeah, and then there's another episode where she meets and falls in love with a vegan who claims that he is a level five vegan and he doesn't eat anything that casts a shadow. Yes, now, I have to admit, you know, sometimes looking back, especially at vegetarian and vegan jokes from the nineteen nineties, a lot of them hit unnecessarily hard, and especially you know, as a vegetarian and someone has lots of vegan friends, you know, I often will be like, I think that's that's a much nineiest comedy. But this one, I don't know. I've always liked this one because you know, at one hand, it's a parody of it's poking fun at a particular dietary choice. But on the other hand, this idea of eating something that doesn't cast a shadow, it does line up with a lot of what we were talking about, the idea that like, okay, this is a creature with diminished or non existent personhood and therefore or a plant. Even I guess more and more likely it would be the scenario like this particular stalk of corn that doesn't cast a shadow, and therefore it is okay to eat corn from this plant. I don't like a lot of comedy. If you think about it too hard, it doesn't work. But I always found it a bit funny, all right, So I had to mention that one another thing, this is another one that came up and talking about these episodes with my wife, she said, oh, well, you've got to mention zero shadow days. So it's worth noting that if you're standing in just the right place at just the right time, you might well encounter a world with I don't want to say no shadows, but let's say significantly decrease shadow activity, like if you were let's say you're an individual in a supernatural horror show and you always have to be on guard for shadow monsters climbing out of the shadows and dragging you to hell. Well, these are the places you would want to be because you would, I guess, have fewer pools of shadow from which things might crop. As pointed out on NASA's Night Sky Network website, this is a reality of the solstice in the tropics between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. Here people experience two zero shadow days per year, so called when the sun is directly overhead at solar noon, and this makes objects and people cast a minimal shadow. It's often been observed that you may have to jump in the air to see your own shadow.
So it's not literally zero shadow, but it's as close as it gets on Earth to zero shadow. Because the sun is directly over so you're not casting. There's really no horizontality to your shadow, right right.
No lengthen shadows for the most part. Yeah, it's a minimal shadow activity.
Ooh. You know though, I wonder if you could say that there's actually even less shadow on days when the sun is obscured by clouds, because then the directionality of light is greatly reduced and light is more just kind of diffuse, So you know, there's much I guess you still have a shadow, but it's much much less intense.
It's very faint, yeah, fainter shadows. And then of course we also have to take into account our world of so much modern illumination, artificial illumination, it's going to continue to cast all sorts of interesting shadows as well. In fact, that's kind of a defining aspect of sort of the modern urban environment. You know, we've talked about that before, these various realities and conceptions of the big city, you know, having like gulches of shadow between skyscrapers that our position too closely or don't taper off as they climb into the sky, that sort of thing. And then you get into various forms of artificial illumination, particularly at night. I mean, this is a defining character of so many visuals that we have with you know, from various noir films, you know, where it's like this this shadowy night scape, urban nightscape in which there are all these places where one may hide, but also all these places where one will be starkly illuminated and be in more vulnerable perhaps to the nighttime city.
Well, yeah, the environment of the modern city makes for you can almost kind of recreate the striking lighting of like stage effects, but within a realistic context, you know, having like a dark street with a single street lamp illuminating something. It's like a spotlight, but you know it's plausible to reality.
Yeah, like that classic what it's the the movie poster for The Exorcist that way, you know, it's got a sort of noir styling to the poster, but also it's like, hey, here comes the Exorcist front and center, spotlights on you, buddy, Time to put on a show for the devil.
The way he's got the bag. Yet it almost looks like he's gonna put on like a costume and tap dancing shoes or something like.
The suitcase is full of like prop comedy.
Yeah, got a can of spring snakes.
Oh man, the devil won't see that kind of ye with devil?
Would you like a boiled peanut?
Now, at this point, I'd like to get once more into the world of art and shadow and get a little bit into philosophy and history here as well. And yeah, this is gonna be like a big tint discussion. I'm not gonna get into all the details here, because ultimately, you know, shadows have always been with us. They've they're never far from us. And so anytime throughout history when you've had a particularly contemplative individual who's gonna indulge in a bit of of navel gazing, the shadow was always there to aid us. And yeah, there's been a lot of deep thoughts about shadows, about what is and isn't a shadow? Can you actually look at a shadow? Does a moving bird cast one shadow or multiple shadows? And so forth? And I'm not saying it isn't interesting, but it all kind of started turning my brain upside down after a bit, so I'm gonna skip around a bit here, but I was initially reminded once more of our episode on necromancy, or one of our episodes on necromancy, when we briefly discussed shadow puppetry and its possible connections to shamanistic practices and or necromancy in the sense of some sort of ritualistic way of attempting to speak with the dead or to create the illusion of speaking with the dead.
Right, So, the example from the necromancy episode was a story about a Chinese emperor long ago who had a sort of wizard like advisor who told him that he could resurre the spirit of a concubine who he had loved very much but who had passed away, and that she could speak to him again, but she would appear as like a shadow behind a screen, and that this was attributed later to shadow puppetry.
Right, it's it's unknown exactly how this played out or you know, ultimately you know how true this account is. And there were some thoughts that it was like a statue behind the screen or scrim that it was more traditional shadow puppetry or that, and also disagreements over to what extent the emperor would have been conned by this, but it's it's an interesting slice of history. But at any rate, setting all that aside, shadow theater anyway you slice it is an ancient performance are that probably began in Central Asia or China or possibly India during the first millennium BC. That's at least, I mean, who knows ultimately how far back it goes, because of course people along before that were aware of their shadows, and they might have caught on to ways that you might manipulate that shadow. So as it stands, shadow puppetry contains a number of different styles and traditions, you know, their use of puppets, cut out or otherwise. Also you have instances where individuals are using their own bodies. I think the most famous example of this is of course shadow graphy, or the use of you know, like making a little bunny out of your hands and far more complicated things and then using that with light to create a shadow creature. And then that's a you know, you may think of that as just like a quick, little, you know, dad trick or something, but it's actually a very refined craft and it is likely it likely originated in China or the Far East, as well.
In my limited recent experiences doing hand shadow puppetry for my daughter. It's interesting the way that it's unlike some other art forms in that by re shaping your hand in front of the to block the light and looking at the shadow, you can kind of get a instant, continuous feedback on how close you're getting to the object you're trying to represent as you move your hand around. You know, it's unlike I would say in my experience drawing, which I'm not good at at all, which is a more laborious path to the realization of the image, and then if you make a mistake, it's laborious to undo it and try to change it. With the shadow puppet, I felt like my hand kind of became a form of jelly that was just automatically adjusting itself to try to look more and more like a dinosaur head.
Yeah, it's probably worth keeping in mind, this act of making your hand into this three dimensional object, this three dimensional arrangement of digits that can then be manipulated in three D space in order to change a two D silhouette and make it resemble something else. We're thinking about it when we get into a discussion of shadows as truth and shhados as lies or manipulation. So at any rate, I think you know shadow publishers worth thinking about here, though, of course, we can easily become lost in discussions over to what extent we're talking about shadow in these various performances rather than shade, silhouette, translucent materials, et cetera. You know, there's a lot going on in any given example of shadow theater, But what about shadows elsewhere in art? This is another huge topic that we're not going to be able to do full justice too. But I was reading a bit about this in a really excellent jay Store article type Jaystore Daily article titled do We Actually See Shadows? By Roy Sorensen, an article that I recommend for anyone wanting a nice look at the various philosophical arguments over whether we can see a shadow or not When you look at a shadow, are you looking at something? Or are you looking at nothing? That sort of thing.
This seems exactly the perfect kind of debate to like occupy the minds and debates of medieval scholastics.
Yes, yeah, so there's a great deal in there. This article also gets into some of these theological discussions. What does it mean that a shadow moves over the deep, et cetera, but it covers a lot of ground in here. At one point he mentions, quote, shadows were fringe phenomena in the European Dark Ages. They are rarely depicted in the era's paintings. Perhaps the artist portrayed only what they believe to be visible. So coming back to this idea that maybe a sort of negative view of the shadow was maybe more predominant during this period of time.
Oh, I'm having an idea. It's only sort of half formed, but I'm thinking about how when you look at like a medieval artwork that might to some modern critics appear kind of primitive somehow, because it's like a maybe a representation of a human that shows no optical effects or effects of perspective at all. Like so it doesn't show any difference is in illumination by the direction of light. It doesn't have any shadows or anything like that. That might look kind of unsophisticated as an artwork because it doesn't show all the tricks and plays of light that are so prized in the you know, in the passionate realistic artworks of I don't know, the Renaissance or whatever. But you could look at that and say, actually, by taking out all of those light effects, that is a that is a more highly processed visual representation. That is what the brain. That is the information the brain is trying to interpret in a scene, because, as we talked about it in the last episode, the brain has to kind of ignore a lot of things about shadows and effects of light to try to just get information about what are the physical objects in my space and what are the physical agents in my space that I need to understand as possibly having relevance to what I'm about to do. You know, you need to be able to see that there are two people standing in the room in front of you, and there's a rock right there that you could trip on, and not be confused by shadows and changes in shading due to the position of the light source. That might be literal differences that you see with your eyes, but are not relevant information about what the objects in your space are. So when you see that artwork that is like a picture of a person without any effects of light sources or shadows or anything like that, that is kind of a mental representation of a person. That's not how we actually see the world.
Yeah. Yeah, so it's still a true image, but in a different way. And again you can also factor into these various discussions about whether or not we actually see a shadow, that sort of thing. But Sorenson does get back to the idea of shadow theater in ways that I was not expecting. He writes, quote, if shadows were not seen as figures, shadow plays would be as visually inert. Shadows are enlivened by actions such as jumping, bowing, and kissing. This animation raised medieval concerns about idolatry to appease the pious puppets were perforated. The dots of light were reminders that shadows are lifeless effects of positive causes.
Hmm, it seems like even if it's perforated, the principle remains.
But I don't know.
That just seems like one of those funny, kind of ineffectual gesture is to try to appease somebody who just wants to complain about something.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it also reminds me of other stories and tales we've read about where it's like, if you don't complete a highly realistic painting, then it there's less risk of it coming alive, Like, do not dot the dragon's eye less the dragon climb out of the painting. That sort of thing. Hmm. Now, it is true that puppetry has at times raised the ire of iconoclasts and raised fears of idolatry, though at the same it's also been utilized by religious groups and it's still utilized by religious groups today. I mean, puppetry is just generally speaking, a performance medium that is very ancient and well entrenched in human tradition. But I was curious about this idea of perforation, the idea like we were discussing that, Okay, here's this shadow thing we've created on the wall, but don't worry, it has holes in it. It can't possibly be real because, on one hand, outside of European context especially, you see plenty of examples of shadow puppetry, thinking especially of Indonesian traditions that depend on perforated puppets structures in order to allow light to pass through and enhance the overall effect. It's those holes, at least to me as a viewer, they help bring the things alive more, not make them seem less alive. I don't know where you would stand on the argument of making it less real. But I did find something written about this as it concerns traditional Turkish shadow puppetry. This is from the article Karagaz and Hazavat Projections of Subversion and Conformance by James Smith. This was an Asian theater journal from back in two thousand and four. The author writes Islamic Sufi thought, one of the most powerful cultural forces within Islamic society from the twelfth century on, also affected Karrago's performance. According to Karragao's expert Linda Merceades, Turkish shadow puppetry was designed both to entertain and to achieve religious experience, based on the Sufi Islam doctrine that man is but a shadow manipulated by his creator. The opening poem, typically recited by either k or Hasavat, is a ghazal. The rules against forms of representation expressed by the Quran in Surutu are fairly strict, but Sufi clerics defended Karaga's performance a complex theological argument formulated because Islam forbids the representation of animate beings, and furthermore, because shadow puppets were perforated by holes, there was no possible reason to think of shadow puppets as animate beings. Thus shadow puppet shows could be performed. Now there's a lot to process there that I think is just fascinating. On one hand, this idea of human beings as shadows cast by God, and thus God is far beyond us, as a human being is beyond the substance of his own shadow. I think that's all really really deep and cool to think about. And we'll also see some reflections of that in another religious example coming up. And then we have this idea that, hey, puppets have holes in them, and therefore they can't possibly be mistaken for living, animate creatures. It's interesting as well, it seems again I still feel like the holes overall in any given shadow puppetry example they do aid to bring the thing to life more. But it's interesting to think of it as kind of like a theological loophole as well. All right, Now, moving along to some other areas, this is another one that I imagine is on listeners' minds already. It's worth at least noting that Plato's allegory of the cave concerns shadow images on a wall, essentially shadow puppets, I guess you could say. And this of course, regards humanity's ability to see beyond the material world and into something far greater. So it's an allegory in which shadows on a wall are taken for reality because there's no additional context for the viewer to understand them. And we also have this idea of shadows ultimately as something less than reality, something that can mislead us about the true nature of reality. Now they come back to visual art, Yeah, there is often the lack of shadows, like we're then discus and older works, unless shadow is key to the work itself. During the Dark Ages, again, Soresen suggests that perhaps artists were just more concerned with the visible as opposed to the invisible world of shadows. But shadows would of course become more popular again during the Renaissance as perspective became increasingly important in works of Western art, and post Renaissance shadows became just standard in all manner of Western art. As William Chapman Sharp points out in a twenty seventeen article for the Oxford University Press titled What's going On in the Shadows? A Visual arts Timeline, you eventually get to a point in the nineteenth century where standalone shadows without an in picture source, so like the shadow is cast by someone essentially out of frame or off screen. If you will, these begin to pop up. He specifically points to an eighteen thirty three p piece by William Collins that you can look up online titled Rustic Civility.
Oh boy, I don't know if this is the intended effect. Maybe I'm just in the Halloween mindset, but I'm finding this painting rather spooky. So what we see here is like a sort of road leading through a gate into a wooded grove, and there's a house in the distance. The gate is open, and there are three children standing beside the gate. They're sort of like squinting in the sun. I think one is holding up a holding up a hand to block the sun over his eyes, and two of the children seem to be kind of hiding behind the third. And then we see in the foreground on the road just a shadow of a figure and a hat. I think it's a man mounted on a horse. Maybe.
Yep, that's the impression I get.
We don't see the figure itself, we just see its shadow, but it seems rather ominous.
Yeah, I think that's a valid interpretation. Again, I'm not sure offhand what the artist's exact intent was here, but you could look at this like, oh, Dad's home. Yeah, the kids are excited. The kids don't look particularly fearful, but they are they are children. Yeah. The other interpretation is that this is a stranger and then therefore we have no idea what the intent is. But we don't see the individual in this in this, in this painting, all we see is the shadow they cast on the road in front of the children.
Well, I apologize to William Collins if I've read menace into his artwork that he did not intend. But yeah, this is looking to me, this is kind of like some of those paintings by Edward Hopper, like gas by Hopper that just to me always look more and more foreboding and ominous the more I look at them.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, but but nothing else. You know. It's an example of a case where in a painting the shadow is not merely incidental. The shadow is key to the work. It's not just oh, it's nice that things have shadows and people have shadows now like that. The shadow is key to whatever the artist is trying to say here. Now, once we reach the age of photography and then cinema, of course, shadow becomes increasingly essential. In fact, the author of this Oxford University Press piece sharp points out that Henry Fox Talbot originally discussed photography as a matter of fixing a shadow, and various others made this connection between photography and shadow as well. I mean, you can't engage in photography without at least thinking about shadows, right, if not exploiting them and using them. One example though, of people of the time period thinking about shadows and photography apparently a poet Elizabeth Barrett wrote to a friend in eighteen forty three that a photograph was like quote the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever. Ooh yeah, going around with your cameras just snatching shadows left and right. And then, of course, once we get into the era of film, which we touched on earlier. You, especially when you look at the work of German expressionists during the Silent Era, they made terrific use of shadow. Not only is just a way of capturing the mood, but making them become an active part of the visual narrative, which of course brings us back to Nosferatu, and you know those scenes of Nosferatu, the vampire creep or I guess his name's not nos Faratu, It's called crown Count Orlock or creeping up the stairs. His shadow lengthened and menacing. The shadow is an active part of the narrative that is being presented on the screen. Now rewinding things a bit. Our old friend Plenty of the Elder famously chimed in on the role of shadow in art. In the natural history, he shares the story of the Corinthian Butedes, who allegedly invented the art of modeling via shadow, or at least the art of modeling clay in relief utilizing shadow. In translation quote, it was through his daughter that he made the discovery, who, upon being deeply in love with a young man about to depart on a long journey, traced the profile of his face as thrown upon the wall by the light of the lamp. Upon seeing this, her father filled in the outline by compressing clay upon the surface, and so made a face in relief, which he then hardened by fire along with other articles of pottery.
Oh interesting, but so I would think via that method you could only get a two dimensional silhouette, not a three dimensional cast right.
Right right, So he would have to add in additional details via his craft, but he would have at least some aspect at least the silo out of the individual is captured on the wall. So it's interest especially when you sort of compare it to Plato. And again, Plato is making other points. Plato's not just talking about, hey, let me tell you all about shadows and what they're up to. He's using it to make a different point. But instead of shadow being a dangerous deceiver regarding the true nature of reality, in this case, it actually allows reality to at least a certain degree, be captured, to be recreated or duplicated. This story would apparently become a popular painting subject in and of itself in the eighteenth century and again because you're getting into a time period where painters want to make use of shadow, and here here is a story about artistic creation or recreation via shadow. So it's a perfect topic to consider in your art in the topic itself, and the idea of using silhouettes and shadow in portraits also became popular again in this time period. All right, And finally, I want to return back to the world of shadows and mythology and religion here just for a couple of examples that I didn't turn up earlier that turned out kind of late in my research. They're both really good. First of all, is the idea that in Hinduism there is a Hindu goddess of shadows and her name is Chaia, and Chaia is an interesting goddess from Hinduism. She is the cast shadow of the goddess surround you that the first wife of the sun and the sun god Surya, and I've seen some treatments that discuss her as a sort of shadow clone. I've seen the word clone used a lot. She becomes Surya's wife after the first wife, Saranyu, temporarily temporarily leaves him, and together they actually, the shadow wife here and the son actually have three children. He has other children with other wives, but at different points. But yeah, they they he has three children with the shadow wife. But anyway, this idea of like the shadow actually taking on the likeness of that which casts the shadow is really interesting. And then finally this is really interesting as well. I'd read a little bit about this before, certainly, but the idea of the shadow in ancient Egyptian religion and culture is also fascinating. The shadow is it would be called a shut or I've seen it. I think it's pronounced shut, but it's sometimes spelled swt in English translation. And you know, it should come as no surprise that many of the same elements we've discussed already concerning shadows in these episodes also is in play here. So first of all, the idea of the shadow as darkness, you know, they're almost used interchangeably in a lot of languages and traditions. But then of course we have the idea of the shadow as the soul, or in the case of the ancient Egyptian religion, one aspect of the human soul alongside at least the ba. So the shadow or shoot is more spiritual in nature, while the ba is more physical, or at least that's the rough overview of it. The concepts of the soul and ancient Egyptian religion are rather complicated and have multiple.
Parts to them.
And then also the idea of the shadow as a copy of something, and particularly it's interesting with the idea of a shadow of a god as a kind of manifestation of the god. So apparently a statue of a god was sometimes discussed as a shadow, and even a temple to a god was considered that God's shadow. All right. So I don't think any of those ideas comes as a complete shocker or anything. But there are two additional contexts here that that I thought were rather fascinating. One is that shadows are associated with quick movement without any sound, which I suppose is key given this. You know, the speedy and silent movement of the shadow, a thing that, according to may Ahmed Hasani in light, darkness and shadow in ancient Egypt was considered a physical entity. So it was largely thought like the shadow as being more or less physical in form.
So it's like a substance that moves, but it does so without making a sound and even without generating a breeze.
Yeah. Now, a lot of what we've discussed in terms of supernatural and mythic and religious treatments of shadows, you know, they get down to some sort of deep metaphysical truth. You know, it's connected to the soul or it is connected to the darkness. Right, So this last bit I found very fascinating, and this is something that Hasti mentions in the article. The idea that also to the ancient Egyptians, shadow was associated with protection from the sun and the heat. And also when you start factoring in these various divine invocations, it becomes a metaphor for the protection of the gods, you know. So it's one of those things that once it's pointed out to you, it seems kind of like a no brainer, because obviously, under the intense Egyptian sun, shadow is also a refuge, it's a place of protection or rest. But yeah, you factor in these divine aspects and so, you know, Hasting points out that shadow becomes a symbolic word for protection from the sun god, a metaphor for protection in general, in addition to being part of a human being's essence that survives moral death.
Oh yeah, so you can see how that complex of different symbols converging could generate some very interesting, I don't know, mythological grammar, like the idea that the shadow is both a reflection like sort of a soul copy of a person, but it is also the place in which you could stand to be sheltered by that person.
Right. Yeah, So this idea of like, step into my shadow would be an an invitation to enter into my protection. That sort of thing. And then we also get back to this idea that we referenced earlier about like a shadow of something, especially if we're talking about a god, a divine being of some sort, like the shadow is creation, the shadow is replication, at least to some lesser extent.
Yeah, I see that.
So just some final mythological and religious ideas about shadows, I think to sort of take us home for these episodes. It's been fascinating to go through all this. There were a lot of things I expected to find and expected to see other takes in the shadow that I I just was blisifully unaware of, or you know, we're not in the forefront of my mind when we first ventured into it. I know we didn't even we didn't even really get into any I guess real shadow monsters we talked about, not in like the sort of dungeons and dragons sense of the word. I did a little bit of looking around to see about mentions of shadows and shades and a couple of my favorite monster guides and so forth, but nothing else really came up. Maybe I missed something. It also can get a little difficult to research things related to the word shadow because of course, shadow is used so frequently to refer to things that are not specifically shadows, or things that are just metaphorically shadows.
I'm sure some of you out there are thinking of a shadow monster right now that you want to tell us about, right in.
That's right, send us your shadow monsters. We'd love to talk about them in a future listener Mail episode. All right, Well, on that note, we're going to go ahead and close out this episode, but yeah, write in, we'd love to hear from you. On Mondays we do listener Mail. Tuesdays and Thursdays are core episodes. On Wednesdays we do a short form monster fact or artifact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema. Also, I want to stress hey, you might have noticed that we have new host photos for Stuff to Blow your Mind. If you haven't seen them, run by our recently revived social media presences all linked off of Stuff to Blow Yourmind dot com, or you can look them up independently. Maybe you already follow them. We are STBYM podcast on Instagram, so you can go there. You can see these new photos of Joe and myself. If you're wondering, well, where did you take these fabulous and strange photos with these cool, weird mirrors and so forth, Well, we visited Museum of Illusions Atlanta, a delightful and educational attraction located in Atlantic Station. They feature a whole host of visual illusions, including illusion rooms you can walk into an interact with, and that includes use the cameras there or your own cameras to take some selfies and some cool shots. This is a real fun place, good for all ages, the whole family. These are not scary mirror rooms. These are awe inspiring mirror rooms. These are whimsical mirror based illusions and other sorts of illusions that you encounter.
Yeah, it's not like a creepy haunted house though. Well I don't know if they do something for October. Maybe they do, but.
It is I think they put some some decorations up now. The other thing is, since a number of the rooms do involve mirrors, if you yourself are creepy, then I'm afraid that your experience might be creepy because it will be built upon your own reflection, and if you have lost your reflection, due to some sort of wizardry, mishap or undead status. Well, I don't think you can get your money back.
It's a great place to find that out though, Yes.
So yeah. If you want to learn more about Museum of Illusions Atlanta, visit MOI Atlanta dot com.
It's a great place check it out. Huge Things, as always are excellent audio producer JJ Posway. 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.