Lore - Episode 203: Blurry Pictures

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

One of the old and most popular types of folklore throughout history is something that most of us take for granted today. But just how thrilling the stories about it could be…well, few people ever saw that coming. ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ———————— ©2022 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved. Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here.

When archaeologists first uncovered them, they knew there was something special about the two cities. While so many ancient settlements around the world have a more organic, haphazard shape and form, the twin capitals of the Indus Valley in eastern Pakistan, the cities of Mohenjo-Dara and Harappa looked entirely different. They were planned out. Instead of beginning life as a collection of small homes and then growing over the centuries, these ancient cities were laid out along a grid pattern from the start.

In a lot of ways, they look less like the sprawling maze of tiny streets you might find in some parts of London and more like a rudimentary New York City. They are a memorial to one of humanity's oldest urges to plan ahead. We love to map things out and see where it's all going. From the daily planners that many of us keep on our desks to the strategy meetings that build the roadmaps for tech devices, feature films and family road trips, people are planners. There's just one problem with that. The future is unpredictable.

If you've been around this planet long enough, one of the key truths that becomes apparent is that we honestly have no idea what will happen next. We can hope, we can plan, we can dream up big and wonderful ideas. But the future isn't an open book, and more times than not, we'll be completely surprised. Except, well, there have been some throughout history who have disagreed. To them, the future was right there to examine, to know, to follow. Entire subcultures and religions were built around this idea, and for thousands of years everyday people have believed it's all possible.

So can some people predict the future? Can individual human beings living in a certain time and place glimpse the things to come and give us all a preview? If the stories found in history are any indication, maybe. But seeing what's ahead of us can't always prevent disaster. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Let's spend a moment talking about language. Full confession, I love words.

I love the way you can see their history, their DNA, right inside the letters. Words, if examined properly, can tell us stories. In ancient Greek, the word-forming element pro means in advance. So think of words we use today, like provide or prologue, and you can see the hints of the story in them. Now another word in Greek is phesion, which means to speak or to tell. Put them together and you get prophesion, or prophesy, literally to tell things in advance. And that's the core of everything related to this idea of seeing the future.

For thousands of years, long before recorded history gave us words like prophesy, there have been individuals in society all around the globe who served this purpose. And that root word, buried inside the term, the one that means to speak, holds another clue for us. Because for a very, very long time, prophecies were delivered orally, by speaking. Of course, these types of people have taken different titles and roles throughout history. Two of the most common terms you might bump into are prophets and oracles. But they aren't interchangeable.

While prophets received a word from the divine and then carry it out into the world for others to hear, an oracle traditionally was someone you would go visit, ask a question, and then wait for the answer. And to make things more complicated, you also might hear or read about people who were called seers. And these were different yet. A seer technically is someone who reads the signs and makes a trained guest to the meaning behind them.

Here's the best way I can explain it. An oracle, or prophet, receives text messages directly from a deity, while a seer just sort of scrolls that deity's social media posts and draws conclusions from the general public things they say. They both had power in the ancient world, but hopefully you can see the difference between them. So how did prophets work? Well, that was really a mixed bag, and it all depended on where and when that prophet

worked. However, this concept has always been global, so there are a lot of variations. Some prophets used involuntary dreams, while others used intentional meditation. A frequent element was some sort of substance that altered their perception of reality, like a powerful drug or herb, whatever it would take to put the prophet in the right state of mind. I mentioned oracles a couple of minutes ago, and if you've gotten even a basic understanding of the ancient Greek world, that term probably makes you think of the oracle of Delphi.

Delphi was a community located on the lower slope of Mount Parnassus, and it was the home to an ongoing group of prophetesses known as the Pythia. In some ways, the Pythia were sort of like nuns or priests. They dressed in special clothing, they lived apart from the rest of the community, and they worked at the temple there in Delphi, giving out prophecies to those who came to see them. Some of the oracles' mystique and power certainly came from some, well, controlled substances. Historians are now pretty certain that the Pythia entered their trances through a mix

of chewing on laurel leaves and inhaling the smoke from burning oleander. It was a pretty toxic mix, and so the Pythia would typically be pushed into an epileptic like seizure, something the Greeks referred to as the sacred disease. It was this unnatural movement that convinced the Greeks that the Pythia were under the control of the god Apollo, and as she spoke, priests would scribble down the words she said regardless of whether or not they made sense, and then, from those words, predictions would be made. Trippy?

Absolutely. But it was also powerful, and it's a legacy that's held on for thousands of years, but not all prophecy stayed in the ancient world. In fact, some of the most well-known examples happened much later, and I'd like to tell you about a couple of them, but you probably saw that coming, didn't you? There's the story you know, and the actual truth, and sometimes they look very different from one another. And that's exactly the situation when it comes to a guy named Michel du Nostradam,

otherwise known to history as Nostradamus. Now we don't know a ton about his early life. We know that he was born into a big family with close to 10 siblings, and that he was considered incredibly bright. In fact, he was already studying at the University of Avignon by just the age of 14, so not too shabby. About a year into his studies, though, the school shut down because of a wave of plague that was raging across the countryside.

So for the next eight years, he simply traveled France helping out where he could, and developing a reputation as a skilled apothecary, using herbs to help heal the sick. After that, life was full of a series of disappointments. He enrolled in medical school, but was expelled a short time later due to his previous work as an apothecary, something those stuffy, snobbish medical professors didn't approve of. He married in 1531, and they had two children, but the plague returned shortly after, and everyone but Michel died, so back to traveling for him.

Roughly 15 years later, he was back in France working as a physician's assistant, married again and growing a family, but he was also doing something else. He was writing an almanac, sort of a cross between an annual calendar and an astrological guidebook for the year to come. And wouldn't you know it, it took off in popularity, so he wrote another. Soon people were writing to him asking for personal horoscopes, and he would send back replies, and along the way he caught the attention of nobles and royalty like Catherine de Medici, wife of France's King Henry II.

About a decade before he passed away in 1566, he started publishing collections of prophecies. They were written in quatrains, a set of four rhyming lines, sort of like the verses in a pop song today. Then they were organized into groups of 100 quatrains, which is why they were called centuries, not because they refer to a period of history, but because century literally means a group of 100. By the time he died, he had written nine centuries, or 900 quatrains, plus another 42, so 942 quatrains in total.

And how'd he do? Well, that depends on who you ask. In one quatrain, he wrote, A lot of people see that as a prediction of the Great Fire of London in 1666, a century later, right down to the statue of the Virgin toppling from the steeple of St. Paul's Cathedral. But most of his successful predictions, if we can call it that, are actually post-dictions, meaning that they only seem to make sense when looking backwards into history. Never mind the fact that most of the stuff Nostradamus wrote was actually lifted from

the works of earlier historians, then written out in a cryptic mixture of word games, multiple languages, and frustratingly nonspecific details. Still, if you mention predictions to just about anyone today, there's a high probability that they'll first think of one man, Nostradamus. But there's another figure we need to talk about as well. Thomas Learmont was a Scottishman born in the early part of the 13th century, down near the English border. Now, his story is even less documented than that of Nostradamus, but it has a much more

entertaining edge to it. Here's how it goes. Thomas was apparently taking a nap under a Hawthorne tree when a beautiful woman in a green velvet dress rode up to him on a white horse. Naturally, she introduced herself as the Queen of Elfland and motioned to the back of the horse. So, climb on and let's go for a ride, that sort of thing. And so she rides off with him and straight into the alternate dimension that is Elfland.

And for seven long years, Thomas parties it up there, becomes friendly with the locals, and really just sort of endears himself to the elves. But then the Queen gives him some bad news. You see, typically they would sacrifice their seven-year guest to the devil, but they ended up liking Thomas a bit too much to do that. So instead of killing him, they sent him back home to Scotland, and in the process, gifted him with the ability to see the future. Today, Thomas is known as Thomas the Rimer, and his reputation pretty much hangs on one

event. One day in 1286, Thomas apparently visited Dunbar Castle and told the Earl of March that the king, Scotland's Alexander the Third, would fall off his horse and die. The very next day? That's exactly what happened. Kenneth was born on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, on land that was owned by the Earl of Seaforth and part of the McKinsey clan, which is why he's sometimes called Kenneth McKinsey.

Others though prefer to call him by his Gaelic name, Conyachor. Kenneth wasn't much more than a common laborer, working hard for a living just about everyone else around him. But after his mother had a mysterious encounter in a graveyard, things began to change for him. It seems that one night she was out in the field near the church, and noticed that all of the graves were open, and the dead were walking out. After walking over to investigate, she could see that all of them were returning.

All but one, and that dark empty grave seemed like a curiosity to her, so she stood next to it, wondering where its occupants had gone. And that's when they walked out behind her. This ghostly revenant had apparently once been the daughter of a king of Norway, thus the long walk there and back to the grave. And when Kenneth's mother kindly stepped aside to let her return to her resting place, she thanked her and gave her a blue stone with a hole through its center as a gift. A stone, she said, that would give her son the gift of prophecy.

After the years that followed, Kenneth's reputation grew, and soon he left the Isle of Lewis for the mainland, where he took on work for the Earl of Seaforth at Bran Castle, which is why, as more and more people learned about his abilities, they began to refer to him simply as the Bran Seer. What could he do? Well, it seems that all he needed to do was lift that stone up to his eyes and look straight through the hole down its center. Through it, he would be able to see the future, and then answer the questions that others

asked of him. But he knew it worked, too, because once, early on, he glanced through it and saw the wife of his foreman putting poison into his lunch. After she delivered it to him, he gave a bite to his dog as a test, and the poor animal quickly died. Over the years, he foresaw a number of key events. It's said that he witnessed a vision of the Battle of Culloden and the discovery of oil in the North Sea.

He also once stated that Scotland would never see the return of its own parliament unless people found the ability to walk across the channel between England and France. Amazingly, in 1994, the channel tunnel was open to the public, making the impossible possible. And five years after that, the Scottish Parliament returned. The story and the life of the Bran Seer came to an end one day when he was summoned to Bran Castle, seat of power for the Earl of Seaforth and his wife. It seems that the Earl had traveled to Paris on a business trip, but had been gone so long

that Lady Seaforth had begun to worry about his safety. So she called for the famous Bran Seer to come and shed some light on the situation. Kenneth was said to have gladly visited to help out. And after being asked the question by the lady, he held his stone up to the light and looked through the hole at its center. A moment later, he lowered it and nodded. Yes, my lady, he told her, your husband is alive and well and still in Paris. Lady Seaforth was naturally relieved, but as Kenneth turned to go, she stopped him.

Tell me more, she said. I would like to know why he has been gone so long. Kenneth replied that she should just be satisfied with his answer, but she begged for more detail. So reluctantly, he closed his eyes and told her everything else he had seen through the stone. The Earl of Seaforth was indeed in Paris and had been inside a beautifully ornate room complete with velvet and silk, and he had been kneeling before a beautiful woman, one arm around her waist and the other lifting her hand to his lips.

Enraged by the vision, Lady Seaforth screamed at him. How dare he say such slanderous things about the Earl? And before he could defend himself, she had imbued and carried from the castle out to nearby Shannon Repointe for an immediate execution. There on the shore of the water where witches had been executed in centuries past, a large barrel of tar was set on fire. Kenneth didn't have to be a seer to know what was going to happen next, so it said that he shouted one last prediction.

When I look far into the future, he cried, I see the end of the house of Seaforth. Generations from now, it will all end in sorrow. And with that, he was dragged to the burning barrel, and his head was dunked into the flaming liquid inside. It was an act as old as time, and one that has never really gone away, although it might look different in modern days. When people in power don't like the truth, they are very good at silencing it. It's an idea that offers a bit of hope in the face of an uncertain world.

We don't know what's just around the corner. It could be something good, or something unfortunate. But whatever it is, I bet most of us would welcome a sneak peek. And I think that desire is something that ties us to our ancestors. We can go all the way back to the epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known literary work in the world, and see prophecies and visions of the future at work in the story, and then we can pull up any number of films on our streaming apps and see the same thing today. The future's tempting position, just out of our reach, is something that humans will

always return to, time and time again. For me, if I'm going to get a glimpse, I want specifics. That's the frustrating thing about Nostradamus for a lot of people. His wording and diction is like one of those 3D stereogram posters from the 90s. You can see their meaning and power, but only if you squint really hard, blur your vision, and maybe stand on one leg. In the end, looking back at how prophecy has been handled across the millennia, those of us who want it to be as easy as owning a copy of Grey's Sports Almanac from Back

to the Future 2 are going to be sorely disappointed. The best anyone has ever been able to do honestly just feels like a good guess. Most of the time. I do think that there was something going on with Kenneth McKenzie, the brand seer, though. If he was a real historical figure, that is. Why? Well, it has to do with how his story really ends. Yes, he died in a horrible way, having his head dunked into a barrel of burning tar.

But folks around Bran Castle felt his presence for many more years. For one, there's a monument stone down at Shannon Re point, briefly telling his story. But then there's the Seaforth family line. You see, in 1781, the last Earl of Seaforth passed away without a son. His daughter, Caroline McKenzie, lived at Bran Castle for a number of decades after that. But she tragically died in 1823 after being thrown from her horse. A distant, non-direct branch of the McKenzie's took over after that.

But by 1923, they too were left without an heir. It seems that the brand seer had been right, calling the shot before it ever happened. How? Well, we'll never know. But there's one thing I am certain of. Many years from now, far into the future, I predict that the people who live in the area around the ruins of Bran Castle will still be talking about him. And that's a guarantee.

The future is often foggy, and peering through that haze is one of the most attractive elements of the folklore behind the idea of prophecy. But sometimes even popular profits get forgotten, and in one case at least, turned into something even more special. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to find out exactly what and who I mean. Oil sands operations contribute significant carbon emissions in Canada, so the six largest companies have teamed up to make strides on the path to net zero. Working in technology and innovation.

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How well would you take care of your car if you had to keep the same one for your entire life? That's how our brains work too, so why don't we treat them the same way? How we care for our minds affects how we experience life, so it's important to invest time and care into keeping them healthy. One of the things that I do to take care of my mind is balancing my busy work schedule with unplugged non-work activities like golf or role-playing games. It keeps me refreshed and safer from burnout, which is so important.

There are plenty of ways to support a healthy brain, learning a new language, or taking power naps, and there's also BetterHelp Online Therapy. BetterHelp is online therapy that offers video phone and even live chat-only therapy sessions, so you don't have to see anyone on camera if you don't want to. It's much more affordable than in-person therapy, and you can be matched with a therapist in under 48 hours. My listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com-slash-lore, that's B-E-T-T-E-R-H-E-L-P-dot-com-slash-lore. And finally, this episode was made possible by my good friends over at Squarespace.

A couple of years ago, I had an idea. I was making more podcasts than just lore and had begun to hire people. Heck, I was even thinking about a physical office space, so I decided to bundle it all together under one big production label, Grim and Mild. To make it official, the company needed a digital home, a place to list all of our amazing researchers and writers and where folks could go and find and listen to any of the great shows we make. And for that, I turned to Squarespace. Why?

Because Squarespace has everything you need to build the perfect website. Check out the website I built over at Grimandmild.com. That's all drag and drop, using Squarespace's amazing features to lay out the entire website. And best of all, Squarespace has a huge library of beautiful templates to help get you started, powerful e-commerce features if you want to sell something, plus free web hosting and award-winning 24-7 customer support. Honestly, it's the perfect secret weapon for launching a new business in style. Do what I did and get started today for free.

Just visit squarespace.com-slash-lore to start your free trial website, and when you're ready to launch it, be sure to use the offer code LORE at checkout to save 10%. Squarespace, build something beautiful. When he first appeared, it was in Welsh mythology as a warrior in the courts of a 6th century chieftain. The way his story is told, he accompanied his ruler to battle, and when that chieftain was killed, our hero was so overcome by grief and despair that he ran off into the nearby forest, spending the next few decades living the life of a hermit, or some sort of wild

man of the woods. But that mental break that sent him running apparently did something else. It gifted him with the ability to prophesy about the future. Keep in mind, for a lot of cultures throughout history, there was a very thin, permeable line between those suffering from madness, and those seen as touched by the powers that be. And that was his story 1500 years ago. When another writer, a Welsh monk named Neneus, arrived in the 9th century, he included this

warrior prophet in his collection of historical tales called History of the Britons. There he was known as Ambrose, and his life was given some differences, most notably something that took place when he was a boy. It's said that a powerful warlord named Vortigern was trying to build a castle, but the work his builders were doing kept falling down, so he was told to consult Ambrose, then living as a boy with a reputation for prophecy. When asked about the trouble with building the castle, Ambrose told the warlord that the problem was actually below the foundation, deep inside the earth.

It seems that they were building over an ancient pool that contained two dragons, one red, and one white. The dragons were soon uncovered, and after an intense battle between them, the red dragon won. Ambrose tells Vortigern that it's a prediction about the future battle between the Britons and the Saxons, and how the Britons would be victorious. The 12th century writer Geoffrey of Monmouth is the next to put this prophet into his work. His multi-volume collection known as History of the Kings of Britain covers a lot of the

same ground as his predecessors. Even the battle between the white and red dragons makes an appearance. In Geoffrey's retelling of this prophet's life, though, some details are changed and new ones are added. For one, the boy prophet isn't consulted by Vortigern, he's captured on orders of the court magicians to become a human sacrifice as a solution to the castle building problems. It's only after the boy stands up to the magicians and warlord, lecturing them on the true nature of their problem that the pool and dragons are revealed.

And what was added? Well, it turns out that hundreds of this prophet's predictions are recorded in the book, making it clear that's how he was still viewed by people in the 1100s. After Geoffrey of Monmouth's depiction of this prophet, though, popular culture began to change him. Gone were the stories of his prophetic visions of the future, and in their place came intricate tales about magical powers. For example, he apparently once traveled to Ireland and used magic to steal a ring of

giant stones and then move them to the Salisbury Plain, where they ended up becoming, you guessed it, Stonehenge. Oh, and he also helped another warlord, a guy named Uther Pendragon, find a wife who then gave birth to a son, quite possibly fathered by this prophet, a son named Arthur. And there you go. How an ancient Welsh warrior was transformed over time from a prophet named Merthyn to a powerful magician named Merlin. Over the centuries, a number of other familiar pieces have been added on, from a sword embedded

in a stone, a mysterious lady in a lake, and even the holy grail in the round table. It's fair to say that the Merlin of today looks nothing like the one who first appeared over 1500 years ago. And that's the tricky part about folklore. Over time, it evolves and changes shape, becoming something new for a new generation, filling the gaps in each era's understanding of the world as it does, which is why folklore can be described two ways. It's impervious to prediction, and it's very much like a box of chocolates.

Because you never know what you're going to get. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Menke, with research by Megan De Roche and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more Lore in your life. I also make and executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think

you'd enjoy. My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical. You can learn more about all of those shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grimandmild.com. And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.