English myth and folklore with Professor Ronald Hutton

Professor Ronald Hutton is a leading British historian and author specialising in paganism, witchcraft, magic, folklore and the religious traditions of ancient Britain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:35Speaker 01

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• 1:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Squeeze the wheezing Jesus, you big-eared sheenous. Welcome to the Blind Eye Podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. Right now, I'm doing something that I have never, ever done before. In the nine years, in the nine years of showing up every week and doing this, as you know, I'm on tour, so I'm trying to get this week's podcast done while I am on tour. Usually, I use whatever available time I have in hotels, and we've had deeply strange situations over the years where I'm recording in a fucking hotel room underneath a duvet

• 1:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  in order to get the right sound, usually in a hot country like Australia or Spain, where there's tiles on the floor. Right now, I am hurtling through Surrey at about 95 miles an hour. I'm recording this on my van, on my tour van, which I kitted out with a makeshift studio so that I could fucking record while I'm literally on the road. I'm on a motorway right now. The sound isn't perfect, but it'll do, it'll do the job. I am hurtling through Surrey. I'm looking out the window at the rotten grey October clouds. I am hurtling through Surrey. I love saying that, it sounds like a Philip Larkin poem.

• 2:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  I am hurtling through Surrey, expunged from the hamlet of Guildford. I travel the tumescent A3. I am hurtling through Surrey, squeezing up the urethra of England. I am hurtling through Surrey, past hedgerows and retail parks and rain, the little houses smug with sleep. And London waits, her boroughs damp with Sunday gloom. The A3 motorway will discharge me in London's womb, where I will get people's minds pregnant with ideas at my gig tomorrow night in the fucking Barbican. That's what I'm doing.

• 3:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was a poem about Guildford getting London pregnant with me. Instead of just saying I'm on a mo— I'm on a motorway, travelling from Guildford to London. Last night, I was in Guildford, now I'm on the way to London, and I mean, I'm in a van, I'm in a van that I've turned into a mobile podcast recording studio. How glamorous is that? That's not free. I'm in the least glamorous situation whatsoever. I'm looking out at Surrey on a motorway. A motorway called the A3 motorway. And this van that I'm in, this tour van, it actually, it's Adam Ant's van.

• 3:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Adam Ant from Adam and the Ants, who were a pie—I don't even know what genre, that's a good complaint. I don't even know what genre to call them because they were so weird and new and influential. They weren't heavy metal, but I tell you what, heavy metal would sound very different without Adam and the Ants because of the way that they had two drummers. And Adam from—I can just reach over right now. As I say this on the van, I am touching the spot where Adam Ant usually sleeps, and thank you, Adam Ant, for allowing me to rent this, this tour van and turn it into a fucking mobile podcast recording studio. So, I'm touching Adam Ant's. It's not a bed, but it's the spot where he sleeps, over here.

• 4:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm the dandy highwayman that you're too scared to mention. I spend my cash on looking flash and grabbing your attention. Those are the lyrics from Adam and the Ants 1981 song Stand and Deliver, where Adam Ant used to dress up as a dandy highwayman, used to dress up as a very freaky and flamboyant Dick Tarpen, which ironically is quite relevant to the, the motorway that we're on right now, the A3. Now, first off, if you're wondering, why can't you hear anything? Why can't you hear the sound of the engine? I'm using a noise-canceling microphone, which is a bit shitty, so the sound isn't going

• 5:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  to be as good as it usually is, but it's noise-canceling, so it cancels everything outside of it. And I have the microphone on a spring-loaded arm that's attached to a table, and I've got heavy curtains around the windows, and this is quite well-suited as a, a mobile podcast recording studio, so you won't hear any of the rattling or the engine. But while we're here, doing this very unique thing of recording a podcast while I'm hurtling down a fucking motorway, let's speak about the lore of this motorway, the A3. And I want to think this way for, for a couple of reasons.

• 6:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because, you know, I'm always struck by the fact that the English people don't, they don't seem to have a connection with their mythology and folklore for many different reasons, but that, that makes me sad. And the thing is, if you search deep enough, everywhere has place lore, fucking everywhere, even this fucking motorway. This horrible grey, boring motorway called the A3 that goes between, it goes from Portsmouth, which is Port Mount, the mouth of the port.

• 6:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  It goes from southern England, the coast at the su—at the south. The A3 goes from there, up through Guildford and into the city of London. And also, just the fact that I'm in Adam Ant's van. And I mentioned there that Adam Ant would—the way that he would dress in the 80s, he would dress like a highwayman. The reason Adam Ant dresses the way he does is because of this motorway, the A3. So before this was the A3 motorway, the modern motorway that you drive cars on. It was a highway. Now, I'm talking 300, 400 years ago, I'm going back to the 1700s, the 1600s. This road was a highway.

• 7:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  A highway was an incredibly important road that often facilitated the transport of goods. So if you think of it, south coast of England, Portsmouth, where all the ships are coming in, 1700s, this is when the British Navy, Britain has expanded into colonisation, you know, around the world, East India Company, that type of shit. Goods were travelling from Portsmouth all the way up to London through Surrey on this fucking highway. And the A3 that I'm on right now, that was built over this highway, what is now a motorway,

• 8:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  was once just an important road that wouldn't have even have been paved. But as this highway, because it was very, very long, goes from the coast up to London, it would go through parts of rural Surrey, which were incredibly isolated. So as England becomes more wealthy through colonisation, you've got merchants, you've got the navy, you've got all this wealth travelling up to fucking London. Now, in the isolated parts of Surrey, like where I am right now, in this, in this van, emerged highwaymen. And highwaymen were people who robbed travellers on public roads.

• 8:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  They made public roads very unsafe for anyone who had a bit of money. And this A3 here, this was a deeply important highway. Some of the highwaymen became outlaw criminals like Dick Tarpen. Dick Tarpen would have stalked this fucking road here in the 1700s. And in the 1700s, the Brits brought in the Bloody Code, a set of laws that if you were a highwayman, you were to be executed. But more than just being executed, your, your corpse was publicly humiliated. Now, the severity of a punishment tells us something about what the authorities considered worth protecting.

• 9:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  So if the worst thing you could be in the 1700s and the 1800s was a highwayman or a pirate, what's being protected there is—

• 9:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  The wealth of the empire, all of the wealth that Britain is accruing through colonisation with its navy, with marching companies like the East India Company, anything to do with ships and money and the money from those ships travelling to cities, if you went at that, that was the worst crime imaginable. Now, just behind me on this A3 motorway, and I didn't get to go through it because it's before Guildford, there's an area called the Devil's Punchbowl. It's this huge dip, it's a natural geological dip in the earth from a mudslide that happened thousands of years ago, but it's like a crater in the earth and this is called the Devil's

• 10:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  Punchbowl. And the motorway goes underneath that, but then on top of that is a place called Jibbit Hill. So this A3 goes directly underneath Jibbit Hill. A jibbit, a jibbit wasn't necessarily a site of execution, a jibbit was a site of the public humiliation of corpses, the public display of corpses. Because in 1786, there was a famous murder just there on the Devil's Punchbowl, between, between Portsmouth and Guildford, a famous murder called the Murder of the Unknown Sailor in 1786.

• 11:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  And basically, there was a sailor who was quite wealthy, maybe pash, he went to an inn, met some other sailors there, bought them a lot of pines, bought them food, was very generous, and then three sailors followed him, murdered him at the Devil's Punchbowl. This, this big hill, this big dip, this dip in the side of the earth, they murdered him there, took all his wealth, stripped him naked, and they got caught because they were selling his clothes at a nearby town. Anyway, this crime in 1786 was outrageous. It was seen as a moral outrage because number one, the sailor had been so kind as to buy

• 11:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  the lad's food and then they murdered him, but also it's, you attacked a sailor, you attacked part of the British Navy, you attacked money. So those three murderers, they were executed and then on Jibbit Hill, where the A3 passes underneath, their corpses were put on jibbits. Now, this is 1786, now here's the fucking great irony. In 1786, Britain would have been colonising a lot of the world, including Ireland, and trying to civilise what it saw as savage. It would, it would identify a, a population as, as savage and then try and civilise it.

• 12:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  But the Brits were engaging in, in jibbiting, which is one of the most savage practices that you can imagine. A jibbit was a way of displaying a corpse. It's like a metal cage, but more like an exoskeleton. So those three criminals that murdered the unknown sailor, their bodies were hung up on, like a crane, right, on what is now the A3 up on Jibbit Hill, so it would have been a road. Imagine a metal exoskeleton that holds your limbs and your head in place, and its purpose

• 13:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  is for your body after you're executed to be, to publicly decompose. Bodies would be left on a jibbit for possibly 20 fucking years. So you're there trying to, it's on the side of the fucking road, there's a human's body in these metal shackles as animals eat at it, as it dissolves, as it turns into a skeleton, and it's left there for years. And the purpose of jibbiting is terror. It, it is terror. It was reserved for treason, if you tried to start a rebellion, maybe, a lot of Irish

• 14:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  revolutionaries were, were jibbited. It was reserved for pirates, piracy, the act of stealing things that the navy owns or that the East India Company owns, and it was reserved for highwaymen, and it was a warning, it was a warning. If, if you, if you steal, if you're a highwayman, if, if you stalk this road and you steal money or goods from the empire, then not only will you be executed, but your body is going to be put in a metal exoskeleton and displayed at the side of the road. So it served as, as a warning to people, but what it also did, it traumatised communities.

• 14:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, remember when you were a kid and you're like 12 and you're walking home at night time and it's dark and you think, you just think there's a ghost, so you run home until he get to your house. Imagine it's the 1700s and you live in a community and the only road that you can use is this main highway and you're walking at night time and you know that all along this highway are going to be rotting corpses in cages and you can't ignore them because they're there for you to see, like vending machines, they're there to, to, to traumatis

• 15:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  and instill fear in the peasant class, in the working class community who might be thinking of, I know you live beside this lovely road where goods and goods pass through, but don't ever think of stealing them because we'll do that to your corpse. And these people too, these people believed in an afterlife, these people believed in God, they believed in Christianity. So the real cruelty, from the context of a person living in the 1700s, the real cruelty here wasn't the execution, it was that you were denying the criminal, a Christian burial.

• 16:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  So by never allowing their corpse to touch the earth, to touch the soil, by hanging it up in the air in a metal cage for 20 years while it rots into a skeleton, you, you never allowed that dead person to rest, which meant that the spirit, the disturbed spirit of murderers would haunt the road and people really believed this and became terrified. So the A3 is quite a deeply haunted road. Like, if you can imagine even the sounds of it, like Jibbit Hill, let's go 1700s, all

• 16:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  you've got is moonlight, you live in a society which is very quiet, you don't have the sounds of machinery, you're walking by yourself at night time to get home, and the only sound that you hear in the wind is the sound of the metal creaking on the jibbit and the exoskeleton of a corpse and you can smell its rotting flesh in the wind. That was quite common in the 1700s. I'm so terrified in this, Bram Stoker, the Irish writer who wrote Dracula, he had a, a short story, he wrote a short story about that hill, he called it Jibbit Hill, that

• 17:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  exact hill there on the A3, he wrote a short story about that, about how terrifying it was. It was lost, the story didn't get discovered until 2023, so the area entered into local folklore with such certainty and terror that 1787 was when those bodies were displayed up there. Almost a hundred years later, 1851, the area had become so feared, and you remember here, this is just beside the Devil's Punchbowl, the landscape had become demonic, the local

• 18:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  people would just avoid it, you didn't go near that place, people were avoiding the road, which then inadvertently made it a less secure road because the highwaymen didn't give a fuck. So now the road is even more isolated because the regular people won't fucking go near it, they're terrified, this is hell, and the only people who had the courage were the highwaymen. So it got so bad that nearly a hundred years later, a Celtic cross, this is really strange, a Celtic cross had to be erected on Jibbit Hill, it's still there now, when you go through the A3, underneath the tunnel, it's right above you, that Celtic cross had to be placed

• 18:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  there in order for the local people to feel protected and safe, and I'm so fascinated by the fact that this is England, this is England who are colonising and quote unquote civilising Ireland. Why the fuck are English Protestants putting a granite Celtic fucking cross up on that hill in 1851? Specifically, it's an Iona cross, that's a cross from about the year 600, referencing the, the monastery of Iona that was founded by Irish monks. My feeling, my gut feeling is that-

• 19:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because Irish Christianity, Irish Christianity was kind of this weird half-Christian, half-pagan belief system. It was savage in comparison to Protestantism. By 1850, which is 10 years after the Great Irish Famine, Irish people had retreated back to a version of Christianity where they were going to Holy Wells and bringing statues of Holy Mary to fairy trees. So we had this strange hybrid Christian slash pagan Christianity. And my gut feeling is telling me that the Brits would have thought this Celtic cross

• 20:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  that represents the savage pagan Irish Christianity would have a deeper understanding of the demonic sickness of the land. But really what we're speaking about is trauma. Hang corpses up in a fucking cage on display for 20, 30 years at a time on the road that people use every single day and you're going to get community trauma. That's deeply unsettling. But the other thing that I've been thinking about as I'm going down this fucking A3, this A3 motorway, which was once the highway, the haunted highway. I keep thinking of

• 20:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  the gibbeting, the worst punishment possible, the defilement of the corpse. With the gibbeting, it's the punishment for the individual. It's not, it's more, how can we do worse than execution? How can we do worse than execute a person? Well, we can make sure that their soul is tormented. We can make sure that they will never see an afterlife because their corpse is not buried. It's not given a Christian burial. It's rotting in a cage, hanging in the air. The severity of a punishment tells us something about what the authorities considered worth protecting. So in the 1700s, the worst punishment was reserved for anything

• 21:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  to do with the money belonging to the empire, ships, merchants, the navy. Now, the first thing that stands out, that's a very disproportionate punishment. All you gotta do is rob a rich person on a road. You don't necessarily have to kill them. You don't necessarily have to hurt them. If you simply hang about one of these roads where it's isolated, these highways, and you see a rich person, a merchant, and you rob them, then you're gonna get gibbeted. You're gonna get executed and your body put on display in a cage. So that's a disproportionate punishment for that crime. But that was the fucking point. The severity of the punishment

• 22:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  tells us something about what the authorities consider worth protecting. The modern equivalent now is Palestine Action. What are the people, what are direct action protest groups doing? They're damaging property. They're damaging the property of weapons companies. That's what they're doing. They're damaging property. Now, the British government has decided that that is prescribed. It can be called terror now. So now, if you hit a printer with a hammer in protest of a genocide, you can be given, I believe it's 15 years in prison. If you say that you support a person hitting a printer with a hammer to stop a genocide,

• 22:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  you can also go to prison for 15 years for supporting that. The severity of that punishment tells us something about what the authorities consider worth protecting, what capital is being protected, what money is being protected. It's not just the interests of Israel. It's not just arms companies. It's the billionaire class and not allowing people to engage in direct protest, to criminalize direct protest entirely. The prescription of Palestine Action into a terrorist organization or its supporters, that is a modern day gibbeting. That's what it is. It's the gibbet, a wildly disproportionate punishment compared to the

• 23:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  actual crime. So that, that's the story of the A3, the A3 motorway that I'm on right now. And I wanted to tell you that story, especially if you're an English person listening, to go, that's an example of place lore right there. It's not just a boring motorway anymore.

• 23:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  I can use that motorway to tell you about things that are happening right now in politics, but Palestine Action right now, by going on a 300-year journey of a story of that fucking road and hauntings. And that's how you get your folklore back, which brings me on to the incredible guest that I have on this week's podcast. Earlier this week in Bristol, I had an unbelievable live podcast, sold-out audience, absolutely gorgeous audience. Bristol is a beautiful place. It just has a gorgeous sense of community in Bristol. Loads and loads of tiny little restaurants that aren't chains. They're run by people and families

• 24:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  who really care about what they're making. Lots of little shops. It's a gorgeous city. My guest anyway was Professor Ronald Hutton, who is one of the leading historians in the world on paganism, witchcraft, folklore, magic, pre-Christian religions. He's the person who would be able to answer my questions about the folklore of England, about the type of shit I'm just talking about there, about how you can look at a motorway like the A3 and then turn it into a, a place of lore, a place of legend. Cause I'd like people

• 25:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  to reconnect with that way of thinking. Cause if you can do it with a fucking motorway and go back a couple of hundred years, if you do it with a river, you might be getting stories that go back a couple of thousand years. So Ronald is the, he's the professor of history at the University of Bristol. And the respect that the people in the audience had for Ronald was, it was lovely to see. And it was a great night. And that's why I want to put this one out this week. So here's the chat I had with Professor Ronald Hutton. Can we bring the mic in a bit there, Ronald, where it's comfortable for you?

• 25:58Speaker 03

  It's staring me in the face. I'll, I'll confess anything now.

• 26:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  The, um, a lot of that story I just read, it was inspired by, uh, reading about Cú Cullen's Warp Spasm. Are you familiar with Cú Cullen's Warp Spasm?

• 26:20Speaker 03

  Not intimately, which was why I'm still alive. But by reputation, in theory, yes.

• 26:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  So like Cú Cullen was one of the great warriors of Irish mythology. And when he would go into battle, the way that it, what I love about old Irish literature is our use of hyperbole, right? Which is the incredible exaggerations. So they would, the old text would describe Cú Cullen going into battle and his entire body would change. But like, his arse would become the size of County Luton, you know? And flocks of, of gulls could, uh, could rest in the gaps between his teat. And it just became this impossibly

• 27:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  massive gargoyle, you know? Um, but the thing is, I can go to anyone in Ireland and I can say, do you know who Cú Cullen is? Or can you tell me about Cú Cullen's Warp Spasm? And most Irish people will say absolutely yes. And everyone will have a version of it. And why I want to speak to you so much is when I come to England in particular, less so in Wales, kind of a little bit in Scotland, but a lot of Scottish mythology is also Irish mythology. But with England, I just find that people on the streets don't have that

• 27:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  connection with their mythology. Like I was up in, uh, Brighton last night and I asked the whole audience, do you know who the Green Man is? No one knew. Do you know who the Green Man is? Fair play to you. Good. Um, can you give me a why? Can you give me a why? Why is mythology and folklore not as relevant to the people of England as it would be to people of Ireland?

• 28:09Speaker 03

  Okay, there's a negative reason and a positive reason. Negative reason is that people who are steeped in tradition, folklore, tend very often to be people in traditional societies, fishing, farming, herding. For example, I was studying with a shanakí.

• 28:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Traditional Irish.

• 28:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Keeper of the lore.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  On Eile Island.

• 28:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, come on, boy.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  And he told me that when you have no radio, no television, no theatre, and the wind has a lot, you need to have a story about every rock on the hillside. And England's industrialised and urbanised bigger and faster than most other nations. So that link was lost. That's the negative reason. The positive reason is in many ways, the English have a terrific literature which replaces folklore and mythology. So you have the cattle raid of Cooley, we have Midsummer Night's Dream, you have the wooing of Aideen, we have Oliver

• 29:21Speaker 03

  Twist, you have Finn McCool, we have Wuthering Heights. And these stories have replaced oral tradition.

• 29:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  So it's still the same stuff, we're kind of just calling it different things. It's now we have, we'd say, one author and a piece of book, a book which can be reproduced, whereas with us, we have a story that we collectively own, but can each kind of come in and out of it.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. You have Queen Maeve, we have Robin Hood. Now, these are stock characters that can be reprocessed for century after century in the way that great mythology is.

• 30:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is, can you trace Robin Hood to an author, or is that something that would have been oral culture?

• 30:10Speaker 03

  It's definitely oral culture to begin with, but very fast, it moves in and out of written and oral. And there's a dance between them, which informs English tradition for about 700 years. Robin Hood was almost certainly a real person, which is a kind of distinction. We can put him in South Yorkshire in the 1220s. And then his legend just snowballs.

• 30:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  King John was his nemesis, wasn't this?

• 30:42Speaker 03

  No, he's a bit after King John.

• 30:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  He gets mixed up with King John, Richard the Lionheart in the 18th century. The great thing about Robin is that he's that most unusual thing from the pre-modern period, a people's hero. He isn't a big wig. The, the modern Robin Hood subverts this. The modern Robin Hood, as in Cosner, as in Errol Flynn, is an aristocrat. He comes from a castle, he goes to the greenwood, meets a bunch of working class people, shacks up with them a while, gets them into shape, reclaims his birthright, comes back. In the original medieval stories, Robin is a man of the people, a lad of the people. He

• 31:28Speaker 03

  comes from the greenwood. And when at the end, the good king, the king's called Edward in the story, pardons him and takes him into the real court, Robin can't stand it, and neither can his men. They go back to the woods and become outlaws again. It's deeply subversive. You know, this is the tradition of the common people.

• 31:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is there, um, because I'm just trying to guess at this now, but from the outside looking in, what Robin Hood feels like to me is Anglo-Saxon people not liking these new Normans that are coming over. And the Woody part is the Anglo-Saxon bit. I mean, is, is that a valid reading of it? Or is it later than that?

• 32:11Speaker 03

  It's a valid modern reading.

• 32:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  Because the Victorians were obsessed with race.

• 32:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  And they gave us this Norman-Saxon face-off. But in the original Robin stories, he's in an integrated England without the, the racial divide.

• 32:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  What do you mean they gave, they gave us the, the face-off? Is that an invention?

• 32:34Speaker 03

  Sir Walter Scott.

• 32:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 32:36Speaker 03

  Sir Walter Scott invents lots of things. He's a Victorian, or almost Victorian novelist. And as I say, these give us, these people give us our mythology.

• 32:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, because it's an interesting one with, like with Ireland, with our mythology, we don't know what to trust because you've got the first written down in the 5th century by newly Christianised monks. So there's like, all of a sudden, well, Christ is involved in a lot of the stories. And you don't know, the other thing too, when we were discovering writing, when Patrick brought us writing, we were also discovering the Greek and Latin texts for the first time. So we could read a piece of mythology and not know, maybe this was just one brilliant monk who came up with this story because he based it on

• 33:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  some Greek stuff that he read. And then the mythology disappears for a bit. In the Gaelic Revival in the 1800s, they started to retranslate the mythology, but they took women out of the stories and made the stories about battle, things like Cú Chulainn, because now it had an agenda. And the agenda was, how do we radicalise young men so they would fight the British? So our mythology is, we can't know. I mean, the, the, I spoke to a, I can't remember his second name, but is it Dr. Padraig? And he's up there in Rathcrogan. And he, you know, the time, this is a big epic tale that we have, really, really huge, long

• 34:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  one. And Padraig was able to stand on a mountain, Rathcrogan, which used to be a, a festival site many, many years ago, hundreds, hundreds of years ago. And he could tell the tale in a circle, like a clock, reading the landscape. And his whole thing is, he reckons, this is how this story was told before writing existed, using the landscape as memory. And I love that because then the mythology, like the, the reason I speak about mythology, the reason I think it's important, yeah, they're lovely stories, isn't that great? But in Ireland, so much of our mythology is connected with the identity of a river,

• 34:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  the identity of something in the landscape, something about seasons. These are stories that we probably had before writing, that tell us things about survival, biodiversity, the landscape. And like even the story of Halloween is coming up soon. Oinigat Cave up there in, in Roscommon. The story we have is one night on the 31st of October, the Kailach, which is like this witchy goddess of winter, she emerges from the cave on the dark night, and she drags behind her horses with stinking breath and horrible creatures. And they go out into the night and terrify everybody. That's Halloween. And then the

• 35:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  next day, everything is stripped bare from the Kailach, from the witch that emerges from the cave. And that there is the story of Halloween. But it's not just a cool story that freaks you out. It's a very important story about winter is here, you must prepare. And the reason I think mythology is important is because it gets us caring about our landscape again. If you know the myth of your local river, and you can trace that story back, you're going to care a hell of a lot more when it's been exploited by data centres, or when it's been privatised. Do you know what I mean? You give it an identity, you

• 36:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  give it a story. And that's what I want for ye. That's what I want for ye. And then, like, in Ireland, we would go to a book called the Dinsankas, which is an 11th century book that has, it's the name lore of everything. Do you ever find yourself looking at the names of pieces of the landscape, or forests, or rivers, and trying to figure out the mythology based just on the name?

• 36:41Speaker 03

  Oh, yes. Most of what we know about medieval fairies comes from place names.

• 36:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go on.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  For example, if you find a, a nasty little hole, the kind of thing that, you know, wandering home from the pub at night and not being too sure of the road you're gonna tumble into, it's probably going to be called the Puck Hole.

• 37:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  After the Puka.

• 37:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  The Puka.

• 37:09Speaker 03

  We share that, don't we?

• 37:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  We do. I thought you were gonna say Puck Horse.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  Nah.

• 37:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  You've got Pukas too.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know him from Midsummer Night's Dream.

• 37:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ah, go away out of this.

• 37:20Speaker 03

  Puck. There you go. But the Puck was a goblin that lured people at night into bogs and over hillsides and into all sorts of nasty places. And so whenever you've got a tricky bit of landscape, it's often named after a being like that.

• 37:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  What, what can you tell us about Bristol, like where we are right now? What, what would stand, like, if, if I was in Limerick, where I'm from, and someone asked me this question, I would tell them the story of the Shannon River and the goddess Sinan or whatever. What would you say about Bristol?

• 37:58Speaker 03

  Okay. This is, this is the difference. We actually do have river stories, but not only are they fewer, but they're literary. So the big one, the great river, the Severn, has two stories about it. A really tragic tale of a princess called Havrim, who perished sadly. And she's given her name to the Welsh name of the river Severn, the Havrim.

• 38:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  But that's interesting, because if I was to tell the story of the Shannon in Ireland, it's the identical, it's, it's, our story is, you can go to the top of Ireland near, and I tell this story to, my, I have two tiny little kids, and I take them along this river, and I make sure they know the mythology of the river, you know? But they get bored, so characters from Paw Patrol have to get involved.

• 38:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  Or Peppa Pig. And that's fine, but.

• 38:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  You can go to the top of Ireland to Sligo and we have the Shannon Pot, which is otherwise known as Cunliss Well.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 39:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the story is, there was, i- in Ireland, the sacred wells used to be sources of knowledge of the other world, so poets would come to these wells to be beside them or to drink the water in hopes that they'd get inspiration. So there was a poet called Sinan and she wanted the best poetry. She wanted all the knowledge. She decided, drinking the water of this well isn't good enough, I'm gonna dive in and go to the source of the bubbles. So she did, and then the well rejected her, threw her body into the air, she died, and then carried it all the way down Ireland. And that became Sinan, the goddess Sinan became the Shannon, and that's the story. So the Severn has a similar story about a woman who died and was her body carried

• 39:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  and carved into the earth.

• 39:49Speaker 03

  It vanished into the river, they blended into each other.

• 39:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Lovely.

• 39:54Speaker 03

  And, but there's also John Milton, uh, who wrote a wonderful play called Comus, uh, and being a puritan in the making, he wrote it to try and stop us being party animals. And he wrote the party animal lines so wonderfully that they inspired me to be a debauché in my teens as nothing else would. And part of this story is that the goddess Sabrina, the goddess of the Severn, comes along to help a lady who's in danger of date rape and saves her. So that, that's an English mythology, but being English, it's literary. Hey, you asked me about Bristol.

• 40:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  It's a city. Now, you're right, we need to love our rivers now as we never have before because they need it. But if you want to look at the bedrock of stories, as a Bristolian, bless you, my lover, I would say that when I go down to the Bristol waterfront for a good jug of scrumpy, I remember that at the beginning of the 18th century, a man called Jonathan Swift came there and met a man called Alexander Selkirk who'd been shipwrecked on a desert island, and that gave him the idea for Robinson Crusoe.

• 41:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  And then along, a few decades later, came a, uh, an addict poet, a junkie called Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

• 41:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yes.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  Who met an old sailor with a story about an albatross and got the idea for the rhyme of the ancient mariner. And a few generations later, a Scot called Robert Louis Stevenson comes and puts up at the Land O'Gha Trow pub on King Street and runs into a one-legged landlord called Long John and gets the idea for Treasure Island.

• 41:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  So you see, these stories are embedded on our waterfront.

• 41:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  And these are city stories.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  They're city stories, but they're also stories of the Great Sea, the wide open ocean, that amazing waste of water, as we call the Atlantic, stretching on to infinity, west and south, and bringing the stories back to us.

• 42:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  What, what was here in Bristol, like is Bristol an old city?

• 42:15Speaker 03

  It's an Anglo-Saxon city.

• 42:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow, okay.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  Uh, it's not a Roman one. If you're a Roman, you're not afraid of anybody, at least um, for hundreds of years. And so you don't need to find really defensible places to put your towns. But once the Vikings turn up, it's really nice to have a barrier in the way. And so whereas the Roman Bristol was the far side of the Avon Gorge, where Seemills now is, just down river, the Anglo-Saxons found this gravel-spitted land between the Avon and the Froom River, which was easily defensible, and with the Whacking Great Gorge between them and the sea raiders.

• 42:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  So it's all, it's all about fear, really, constructing a viable city that's going to loss through troubled times.

• 43:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Before we cut for an interval, there's one question I want to ask you about the Anglo-Saxons, right? Because I just need to know if this is bullshit or not, and you're the person to ask. So I, the narrative that I heard about the Anglo-Saxons, and I love it because it's such a beautiful story, is, the Anglo-Saxons came here and because they were forest people, they had never seen a city, so when they saw things like London, they assumed the giants lived there and said, fuck that, we're not going in there, and went back to live in the trees. And it's based on one poem called The Ruin. Wha- what's your verdict there?

• 43:44Speaker 03

  They're, they're not, i- it's mostly right.

• 43:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Cool, where is this?

• 43:49Speaker 03

  They're not.

• 43:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ah, how cool is that? Because that's like, that's like if it go into Mars, like, you know, i- it'd be like if society collapsed, right? And, and you end up finding the ruins of Disneyland and assuming that everyone worshipped the giant mouse. Isn't that so, or, or like finding an a, an a, an alien civilization that's far more advanced? Like they're finding Rome and London and go, what the fuck is this? Get the fuck out. Sorry.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're absolutely right. Uh, for, for the English, it's like wandering through a post-apocalyptic landscape. These huge abandoned cities, crumbling temples, triumphal arches, mutilated statues, and it devastates their psyche, they are not worthy. Uh, just incidentally.

• 44:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  The technology they don't understand.

• 44:38Speaker 03

  A piece of Lord of the Rings trivia for you.

• 44:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go on.

• 44:42Speaker 03

  And that is that, uh, the Anglo-Saxon word for, uh, the giants who built these cities is Ents. And Tolkien didn't have any use for city-building giants because he had heroic humans who built cities, so he relocated the Ents to the woods where you have your Anglo-Saxons.

• 45:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 45:04Speaker 03

  So it's a kind of circular process.

• 45:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  The other thing I heard too, and I think this does tie in with Tolkien, is when the Anglo-Saxons were wandering the countryside and they came across much older Celtic mounds, that they assumed that inside that mound was like a dragon or a snake guarding gold.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 45:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is that true too?

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can go with that one. Yeah. But you see, once again, it's the power of ongoing literary creation.

• 45:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  So in many ways, for a modern Brit, our equivalent of the Ulster cycle is the Lord of the Rings, this immense modern mythology which has taken over the Western world.

• 45:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  But like, a part of that makes me kind of sad because it's like, do you not want to find out what was there before? I mean, Lord of the Rings is class, you know, like we've got James Joyce and stuff, but like we also want to know about stories from the 5th century or older. I mean, like what I'm fascinated with is indigenous Australian stories.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  With the songlines. And did you see the thing they did in, um, it was 2007, where geologists, it was off, it was the indigenous people of Melbourne, and there were geologists who reckoned in the ocean just over there, uh, we reckon at one point before the ocean rose, there were watering holes. And they consulted the stories of the indigenous people of Melbourne, and they have a way of telling stories called songlines, where it's not written, it's a way of walking with the land and they memorize the story that way. And their story ended at the coast, but it continued into the water. And that meant that their story may, may be as old as maybe 30, 40, 50,000 years ago

• 46:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  before the sea rose, and they had remembered it. And I love that, I love the thoughts of that, something being so deep and so old, or that flood mythology might be a memory of the ice caps melting, you know?

• 47:06Speaker 03

  You want, you want to plug into the deep past.

• 47:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  I do.

• 47:10Speaker 03

  I can do that for you with England.

• 47:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go on.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  Because to go back to Tolkien again, he based his entire new mythology upon early medieval mythology. All the motifs, the characters, some of the plots that he uses come right out of the early medieval literature, which he had to teach every day at Oxford University to students taking Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic literature.

• 47:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  He was a boar-wolf man, wasn't he?

• 47:39Speaker 03

  Oh, he certainly was. Uh, he was a terrible lecturer.

• 47:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Uh, he would start off with week one with, uh, a hall of a hundred students. By week two, it was 10.

• 47:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  By week three, it was five, and he would turn up and look reproachfully at them and ask them what they were doing there.

• 48:04Speaker 03

  But his way of getting silence from an audience when he first arrived was to shout the first word of the poem Beowulf, which it means listen. It's quiet! And everyone thought he was shouting quiet, so they shut up anyway.

• 48:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Did you know people who knew Tolkien?

• 48:25Speaker 03

  Yes, which is why I know about the diminishing audiences.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  But some of the people who heard him went on to become great fantasy writers in their own right.

• 48:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah. I'm gonna let ye have a little pint and a piss, okay? And then myself and Ronald will be back out in about 10 minutes. God bless.

• 48:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  All right.

• 48:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Let's have a bit of a small little bit of an Ocarina's Pause now as I continue to hurtle down the A3. First, just a little plug for the Patreon. This podcast is my full-time job and it's how I earn a living, it's how I pay all my bills, it's how I have the time to put a podcast out each week, it's why I will, I'm determined to put a podcast out, even when I'm on fucking tour, I'll make sure that happens. This is what I do for a living, it is my full-time job. And if this podcast brings you mirth or merriment or entertainment, if you find yourself listening regularly, then please consider supporting the podcast directly via the Patreon

• 49:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month, that's it. If you can't afford that, don't worry about it, listen for free. You listen for free because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free. And if you're paying, you're paying for the person who can't afford it. Everybody gets the exact same podcast, the same experience, whether you pay or not. So that's patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. It keeps the podcast independent, means I'm not beholden to advertisers, I do whatever the fuck I want. Any upcoming gigs? Well, as you listen to this podcast, it's gonna be Wednesday, which

• 50:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  means my gig tonight will be Glasgow, that's sold out. But then Thursday the 29th, which is tomorrow, that's Gateshead. If you're around, that's almost sold out. If you are around Gateshead, come along. And then the next gig after that is Sunday in Nottingham, and there's a small amount of tickets left for Gateshead and Nottingham, and then my tour will be over. After that then, I have one gig in Sligo in November that's sold out. Then I have a gig on the 11th of December in Waterford at a festival called Winterbelle, which is in a Spiegel tent. So if you're in Waterford, come along to that. Only thing after that really that I'm gonna be plugging is that Australia and New Zealand tour in

• 50:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  April 27. You'll get all the tickets at theblindbypodcast.ie. Now, Ocarina's Pause, I don't have a fucking Ocarina's Pause on this particular van. What I do have is my mug that I'm gonna hit with a spoon.

• 51:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Listen to those terrible acoustics.

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• 56:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  Right, let's get back to the chats with Professor Ronald Hutton.

• 56:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Did you have a lovely piss and a lovely pint?

• 56:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  I think this is my favourite venue in the whole country. It's absolutely gorgeous. And you're a lovely, a lovely shower.

• 56:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  I forgot about all ye, Jesus, sorry lads.

• 56:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  All the queens and kings up in the boxes.

• 56:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ronald went out into the audience asking for questions.

• 56:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've been having a great time with you in the interval. I've been given ideas for things we can discuss. And just for the record, folks, Blind Boy was not flanneling you when he said how much he likes this venue, because I've been chatting to his support people, and they reckon that Bristol is their favourite gig.

• 57:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  So, well, what I wanted to ask you first, right, before we get into the second question. Like, thinking back to when you were a little kid, when did you know I'm attracted to this stuff, either be it archaeology, history, or folklore?

• 57:39Speaker 03

  The first book I ever read, age of five, and it was a children's book of the Greek myths, you know, Jason and the Argon, or the Trojan War, that kind of thing, which my mama had been given as a school prize when she was a girl, and she handed it on to me, and that was my course set for life. I could never, ever, after that, hold down an ordinary job, or be a respectable citizen.

• 58:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  And... I heard a little story that used to kick the shit out of Nazis in the seventies. You were an anti-fascist, weren't you?

• 58:31Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, say that again?

• 58:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  You were an anti-fascist?

• 58:34Speaker 03

  Um, well, the military wing of the National Front, the British movement, attempted to persuade me of the reasonableness of their cause by breaking my nose and fracturing my skull. Took three bouts of surgery to repair me, but they made a great job. And the government liked me because I'd gone in to ask them not to beat up an old man, so understandably, they beat me up instead. And so I ended up getting an award for being a good citizen, and that's the last time that I ever tried to be a hero.

• 59:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  How do you feel about, because this is something, so in Ireland, we have no shame about celebrating our mythology, like, none whatsoever, this is totally okay, but some cultures, let's just take Germany for example, in Germany, folklore and mythology can be quite problematic because it was co-opted by Hitler. Sometimes, in the UK, if someone is very interested in mythology, it can be a signal that they might be quite far right, which is, I hate that type of shit. How do you feel about that, about elements of the far right co-opting mythology and trying to make it theirs?

• 59:55Speaker 03

  Well, I think elements of any political persuasion are going to co-opt mythology and folklore. I mean, it's no coincidence that the great socialist fest of the year is May Day, which is the opening of summer, and it's one of the most pagan times of the year, and becoming more and more intensively celebrated, you know, more Morris sides each year, more Jack in the Greens, more foliage parades in places like Kensington.

• 1:00:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  Foliage parade? What's a foliage parade?

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  Bringing in the May, it's where you go out and load yourself up with renewable greenery, and then deck the streets with it, dance in them, and deck yourself with flowers, be flower children again.

• 1:00:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  How much of that stuff is, because I know, you did a book on the origins of wicca, and it was, wicca, I was amazed to find this is like, almost Victorian period, isn't it? Like, how much of this stuff is old, old, or is it new?

• 1:00:58Speaker 03

  Well, very little is old, old, because everything changes over time, otherwise it doesn't survive. And wicca is modern pagan witchcraft, it's sold itself around about 1950 as being a continuously surviving pagan religion. We think now that instead, it's a distillation of some of the most powerful currents of culture in 19th, 20th century England in particular, but it has genuinely old ideas and images embedded in it, rather like the monarchy, like Parliament, like a cathedral, like a farm.

• 1:01:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm-hmm. Um, I would like to know a bit about witchcraft, because we never, the witchy thing never made it hugely over to Ireland. Most of our interactions with witchy stuff, such as, like, witch bottles, or, that's, a mad thing happened, actually, this would have been about 1890, it was after, you might know about this now, because I know you did a book on Cromwell, too, it would have been one of the plantations that Cromwell did in Ireland, not the Ulster plantation, probably

• 1:02:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Leinster, and the people that he was planting there, they weren't Scots, they were from the middle of England, and these were people that had a fear of witches. And in Ireland, people started to discover, they would move it, that plantation wasn't as effective, we'd say, as the plantation in the north of Ireland. So Catholics, after about 50, 60 years, would move into the houses that used to belong to English planters, and they would suddenly discover, Jesus, music sounds great in this house, we don't know why. And then this, and what would happen is that people, underneath the floorboards, the fucking

• 1:03:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  skulls of horses, and the skulls of horses underneath the floorboards, that Protestants had put there because they were terrified of witches, they were trying to scare the witches with the horse skulls. The Irish didn't know what this was for, but they, the horse's skull is a bit like, do you remember those microphones that you could sing into that don't have batteries that you'd have as a kid? A horse's skull is a reverberation chamber. So the Irish Catholics went, Jesus, let's get more of them, and they started filling the floorboards with horse's skulls, and making a pre-electronic sound system, basically. But it was Protestants, here's what I want to know, why do Protestants think that a horse's skull is going to scare a witch?

• 1:03:46Speaker 03

  Because they're British. And all sorts of things scare witches. Bits of powerful animals, horse is a friend.

• 1:03:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, because he's powerful?

• 1:03:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, horses and dogs, the animals...

• 1:04:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  Cats in the walls as well.

• 1:04:03Speaker 03

  Cats in the walls, they're to catch spirits, and they're the most beloved of cats, they're the cats you want to have around forever, so when they die of natural causes, you put them in the wall so they can catch evil spirits, the spirit cats. You know, I've got a question for you.

• 1:04:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go on.

• 1:04:22Speaker 03

  If you're a traditional native Irish person, and you find that you're blighted with bad luck, or your wife has suddenly vanished mysteriously, whom do you blame?

• 1:04:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  The fairies did that.

• 1:04:38Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 1:04:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:40Speaker 03

  And the Germanic peoples, like the English, blame witches.

• 1:04:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is that what it is?

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  That's it, you have fairies, not witches, we have witches, not fairies.

• 1:04:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because what I couldn't understand was, my understanding of a witch is a physical human being who can cast spells.

• 1:04:57Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:04:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  But it's like, like, the witch bottles were amazing, is, they would have a glass bottle full of piss and nails, and the piss was in there because it was human, it would attract, but the witches felt like, these are floating in the ether, these feel like fairies, or they could, in Ireland, the shapeshifting, we'd be scared of certain animals because that animal would actually be a fairy, and I wrote a whole story about it in my last book, about poochin, poochin, is it, you know about poochin?

• 1:05:29Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 1:05:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you? So if you don't know about poochin, it's Irish fucking moonshine, it's mad shit, but poochin makers in Ireland, they used to genuinely believe, because they didn't know the scientific method, they thought that they were stealing these spirits from the fairies. So poochin makers in particular were terrified of their children being stolen.

• 1:05:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  So they'd often cross-dress their children, they had a little boy to dress him as a girl and whatever, and they were scared of certain animals showing up because that was a fairy coming to steal their child, but really, we know it was massive infant mortality, you know, and same with people who might have been mentally disabled, that person was a changeling, you know?

• 1:06:12Speaker 03

  Let's zoom back big time for a moment, and look at the whole planet. If you look at all the inhabited continents of the world, the one thing that all humanity has in common in this respect is that it's very bad at handling uncanny bad luck. There always has to be something to blame. Most traditional human beings cannot believe that stuff just happens, and there are always three different explanations, and the fun thing is, they're mutually incompatible. If you blame one, you don't blame the others, and they are, number one, angry and spiteful land spirits, what you'd call the fairies.

• 1:06:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  The pooch.

• 1:06:59Speaker 03

  The people of the she.

• 1:07:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Or the people of the she are the other crowd, yeah.

• 1:07:02Speaker 03

  Yes, and second is ghosts, angry ancestral spirits, you've offended the ancestors, so they come for you big time. And third, which is unfortunately the most popular worldwide, is bad human beings working bad magic.

• 1:07:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 1:07:22Speaker 03

  Which, in the bad sense, the English would call witches.

• 1:07:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  And did the witch thing reach a point of hysteria? Like when it got to the witch trials and stuff? That that sounds really bad.

• 1:07:36Speaker 03

  It is really bad, but it's it's kind of cyclical. In other words, certain societies have a tradition of witch hunting, which goes very deep. Witch hunting in Europe happened way before Christianity. The Romans, the ancient Romans, the pagan Romans, were the biggest witch hunters in European record. In one wave of trials in the city of Rome, more than a couple of hundred years before the Christian era, the authorities put 3,000 people to death for witchcraft. Now, that's a body count bigger than anything achieved in the later Christian witch trials.

• 1:08:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  How did the Romans determine what was witchcraft? Because some of their regular religion seemed a bit witchcrafty already.

• 1:08:27Speaker 03

  That's right. In the Roman case, religion had nothing to do with it. The goddesses and gods aren't interested. It's the the usual deal, big infant mortality, people dying of unknown uncanny diseases. You blame somebody. And the Romans were one of those tribal peoples that blamed human beings and not fairies or ghosts. And then along comes Christianity, and it stops witch hunting across a lot of Europe, not because it's particularly benevolent in its first few hundred years, but because it has a simple problem. It believes in a single, all-powerful, totally good, omnipresent God.

• 1:09:09Speaker 03

  And it's hard to believe that a deity like that would empower wicked human beings to work magic against nice human beings. And so as Christianity spreads, so witch hunting damps down. But the fear is still there. And after near a thousand years, Christianity buckles and comes up with this weird new idea that God has licensed Satan to tempt human beings by giving evil humans the power to work real magic using demons. And the result is a bloodbath we call the Great Witch Hunt.

• 1:09:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Who decided? Was that a Vatican thing?

• 1:09:49Speaker 03

  No. It's the the brainchild of a bunch of wandering friars, nice Saint Francis of Assisi's people, Franciscans, and Saint Dominic's people, the Dominicans, although hundreds of years after Francis and Dominic are safely dead. These wandering friars get this idea and they spread it. They're people of the people. They're barefoot, they're ragged, they're wandering around preaching. They're great preachers, they're storytellers. And people buy it and it spreads because they're tapping straight into fears thousands of years old that had never gone away.

• 1:10:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Were they the ones who decided that witches were women?

• 1:10:31Speaker 03

  Nope. Again, it's ancient people who did. Across ancient Europe, most peoples had the idea that men can do magic, but they have to learn it from teachers or from books. Women can just do it.

• 1:10:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:10:50Speaker 03

  It's in them. They're the magical sect. That's that's why when everything goes pear-shaped, the men who lead societies turn to women prophetesses and soothsayers for the answers. The lady at Delphi, the Pythones, the sybil at Cumae, your friend Fedelm, friend of Queen Maeve in the Toine, the great German prophetess Vileida. But there are prehistoric peoples around Europe who had traditions that magicians are men. And they had the same religions, the same patriarchy, the same society as the societies

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  that blame women for magic or or venerate them for it. So, for example, in Iceland, when the witch hunts get there, 93% of the victims are male. Because in Iceland, magic is worked by runes, magical writing, and men use those. Across in the Baltic States and Finland, they have a system that we call shamanism. That is, you do magic by going into a trance and contacting spirits. And the most of the practitioners are male. So in the witch hunts get that far east, the men die. In Austria, it's vagrants who are the magicians. They're men, so most of the witches, they're male.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  In Normandy, it's shepherds who are the magicians, and they're mostly male. So they die when the witch hunts arrive. That's actually quite a lot of Europe. And when you throw in Russia, where witches are male as well, it's an enormous area. We tend to see the witch hunts as being anti-female because we are English-speaking Westerners. And in English-speaking societies, German societies, French societies, and Italian, witches are traditionally seen as women because women are the magical sex.

• 1:12:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow. And then it made its way over to America.

• 1:12:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, you've got to dig deep.

• 1:12:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  Something I'd love to know about is, I'm fascinated by the, there's a period in in early American colonial history, when the Puritans were there, and they were almost so isolated from Britain that they started to drift into folk magic slash Christianity. And you can trace that to Mormonism. Can you tell me about that? Or if I'm talking out of my arse?

• 1:13:28Speaker 03

  No. No. You're you're dead right. America, folk America, has a terrific folk magical tradition, or several traditions of their own. And after all, America is a terrific, multi-ethnic society, especially traditionally in European terms. You get Italian folk magic, German folk magic, Irish folk magic, and even some English folk magic there. And certain areas make their own traditions with this melting pot, like Hoodoo, which is the folk magic of the Appalachians.

• 1:14:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  And what what constitutes folk magic? When you when do you look at something to decide that this is folk magic?

• 1:14:11Speaker 03

  It's magic which has a practical end. It doesn't rely on books until relatively recently, and it's there for a purpose. It's for finding lost or stolen goods. It's for curing a whole range of physical and mental ailments. It's for breaking curses. It's for relieving people of the certainty that they've been bewitched and cursed, freeing them of it. It's about divining, which is either seeing the future or explaining why what's happening to you now is happening, et cetera. All this is folk magic.

• 1:14:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  He said something very beautiful to me backstage when we were speaking about these things and the impact of folk magic on the nervous system of a person who genuinely believes this.

• 1:15:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. This is based on my study of charmers. Now, charmers are a special division of folk magician, cunning people, wise people, and they're one-trick wonders. A charmer traditionally kills just one thing, a wart or warts, rashes, hemorrhaging of wounds, depression, headaches, and does so with one spell, which they use each time. And the interesting thing for me is that I've not found a case, and I've looked at hundreds of cases, of a traditional charmer failing.

• 1:15:47Speaker 03

  They always worked. And I I think that the reason is that the specific ailments in which charmers worked are all very responsive to the central nervous system. In other words, the people fully believed in the charm, that calmed them, boosted their immune system. And the result was a massive kick in of their own body's ability to repair itself.

• 1:16:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that, like, the things that we're learning now about, like, inflammation, you know?

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:16:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, inflammation and stress hormones in the body like cortisol and inflammation and what that does to your experience of pain, what it can do to how well you recover from things, even like cannabis, people who use cannabis medicinally, sometimes it's not necessarily the cannabis is like this drug that can cure the ailment, it's the cannabis does something to the nervous system which calms the person down and that reduces inflammation, you know what I mean? But then similarly, you were telling me about people who become cursed and really believe it.

• 1:17:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is a, a big headache in the modern world because magic can kill, uh, but it only harms you if you believe in it. Uh, we have lots of data from medics working in traditional societies between the world wars, when a lot of them were carved up by European and American imperial powers. And so there were Western-style medics working among the local people. And the autopsies showed that if people in a society which really believe that magic works, believe that they had been fatally cursed, they often

• 1:17:41Speaker 03

  died. And the autopsies revealed that their systems had been bombarded by adrenaline because they were so mortally afraid, literally. They wouldn't eat properly, wouldn't sleep properly, they wrecked themselves with fear. And all they needed was to have a latent weakness in one vital organ. And this tsunami of stress blew it open and they died. They were literally scared to death. Now, this does give us a dilemma, uh, in the world today because the abuse and killing of people as suspected bad witches is still rife in

• 1:18:24Speaker 03

  a lot of the developing world. If you want to attend a witch trial at the present day, just go to Saudi Arabia, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, or Malawi, because they've all revived laws against witchcraft. And I was hauled into the debate in South Africa in the 1990s about whether that should do it as well. And part of the argument here is that it's okay for Europeans not to want to hunt witches because we don't get scared to death of magic. But among people who do, if somebody curses somebody, they can actually die of it. Now, I actually don't believe that is a good argument, and I have argued against it. And I plays

• 1:19:09Speaker 03

  an infinitesimally small part in the decision of the South African government not to reintroduce laws against witchcraft. Because if instead of bringing back the laws to legitimize witch hunting, you persuade your people that if they don't fear magic, it can't hurt them, it's a total win-win because they're no longer vulnerable. And they're no longer hunting down their neighbors as suspected witches. I, I wrote a book to

• 1:19:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Jesus, that's mad.

• 1:19:42Speaker 03

  I wrote a book to, thank you, I wrote a book to argue this. And it helped inspire a conference at Lancaster University, uh, held by, uh, held, there's generally a few, and I'm always glad to hear from them, uh, inspired, uh, a, an organization that was pooling material information on current witch hunting to get the UN to send a rep. And the whole purpose of the conference was to draft a UN resolution, a United Nations resolution, uh, against witch hunting, to be issued to the world. And there were two

• 1:20:27Speaker 03

  keynote addresses, I gave one, the United Nations rep gave the other. And by the end of the conference, we had drafted the resolution. And in 2021, the UN passed it.

• 1:20:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 1:20:40Speaker 03

  Thereby showing that just, just occasionally, academics can be of use.

• 1:20:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, does your curiosity around, around folklore superstitions, do you ever cast that eye on things that are happening right now, such as conspiracy theories, the internet? Um, I mean, like, conspiracy theories have always been around, but after COVID, I always say, everyone in the room has lost somebody to a conspiracy theory, an uncle, or someone who's not invited to Christmas dinner anymore, you know what I mean? But because of Facebook or online yank brain, as I call it. Um, do you ever look at these things, these beliefs

• 1:21:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  that people have now? We're, we're seeing flat earthers again, you know?

• 1:21:33Speaker 03

  I, I don't myself, but I can comfort people who are appalled by the sheer number of conspiracy theories out there now. But all the internet, all that information technology does is act as a huge magnifying glass on attitudes, ideas, problems people have always had. Uh, we've, people, certain people have always loved conspiracy theories.

• 1:22:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:01Speaker 03

  And some of them end up ruling nations.

• 1:22:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  And, uh, for example, the whole idea of a satanic conspiracy of witches, which sweeps Europe and produces the early modern bloodbath of the witch trials, is a classic conspiracy theory.

• 1:22:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yes. Fuck it is actually, yeah. Um, something I'm thinking a lot about recently is, so that the way that the AI companies are warning everybody right now, oh, we've got this really powerful AI and it's gonna destroy the whole world. And, but we can't tell you how it's gonna do it, but you just have to believe in it and invest in it. That's just fucking indulgences. I mean, it's esoteric Christianity. It's, we have got specialized knowledge about Armageddon and it's gonna come at any minute, we can't tell you. But you must invest. It's, it's an old story, you know what I mean?

• 1:23:01Speaker 03

  I know. Um, part of the whole problem of technology is that, on the whole, before human beings learn how to create things, they learn how to blow them to bits.

• 1:23:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:23:17Speaker 03

  And we, well, you know, I think the mythology which explains us best is that of the, the Greek Orphic mysteries, uh, which held that human beings are an accident. And they are created as a result of a nuclear war between the gods or goddesses and the Titans, who are another great superhuman race. And the gods led by Zeus have this doomsday weapon, the thunderbolt. And they use it to fry the Titans, to destroy them. Otherwise, they wouldn't have won the war. And then they take over and become deities. But the ashes

• 1:24:00Speaker 03

  of the Titans fall to earth and get rained on.

• 1:24:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 1:24:04Speaker 03

  And become fertile mud and pollulate. And this new race of beings comes out of it. That's us, the human race.

• 1:24:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's accident.

• 1:24:15Speaker 03

  And as a result of that, we are such berserk hybrids. Because on the one hand, we're mortal, we are one with the world, we're part of the great web of natural being, we're flesh, we die, we rot. On the other hand, we can't leave it alone. There's always this restless feeling that we don't belong here, that we are something else.

• 1:24:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:41Speaker 03

  And we're always questing for power to get back to be that, because there's this bug of the Titans still inside us, wanting to get back to be superhumans.

• 1:24:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, it's just. If, I always wonder, if, if nature is so great, why did it create a creature that can destroy nature? And that's the bit that makes me think that's, I don't know, that we were put here by AI and we're just the sex organs of AI and we're gonna do. Do you ever get into Gnostic Christianity? For Gnosticism, now I could have this wrong, but isn't Gnosticism like, it's a reading of Christianity where God is just like a stupid prick and all the other gods hate him and he should never have created reality and everyone hates him?

• 1:25:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's one version of it. Um, although, I mean, you, you are, you're literally right in what you said. Uh, this is dualism.

• 1:25:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:42Speaker 03

  And it runs through history. There are lots of dualist religions through, through the centuries. And the basic idea is that, uh, the world is a mess. And therefore, somebody divine screwed up. And the, the usual version is that there is a good deity or a bunch of them, as you said. Uh, but we happen to be created by the dunce. Or we were an unsuccessful first model in the class before the creator got the hang of it.

• 1:26:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:14Speaker 03

  Uh, abandoning us and a kind of divine litterbin to get on with it. Uh, and that's why the world is so screwed up. And that's why we are so screwed up. And I, I, um, I'm not a dualist myself, eh, because I, I really don't like a politics of embittered opposed opposites. Uh, it's divisive. And also, I just love the world too much.

• 1:26:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um.

• 1:26:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  How do you define pagan? I mean, I always thought pagan was pre-Christian, but it's more complicated than that, isn't it?

• 1:26:56Speaker 03

  Not really.

• 1:26:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, really? Okay.

• 1:26:58Speaker 03

  No, I go through my life untangling things for people and trying to make them simple. Uh, maybe I'm a simple person, but pagan does mean the pre-Christian religions of Europe and the Near East. And it's a useful umbrella term. It was coined by Christians, uh, but it's initially quite objectively good. It means those who follow the religions of the pagus, which is the unit of local government. In other words, the old religions, the rooted religions, the trad religions, as opposed to brash, come along lately, world dominating religions, like religions of the book, like

• 1:27:42Speaker 03

  Christianity and then Islam. And paganism today, modern paganism, is a complex of relatively recently appeared religions, which draw upon ancient ideas and images from the pre-Christian world for modern needs. And the nice thing is, the good news is, that the pre-Christian ancient world did certain things really well that modernity needs. Feminism, having goddesses as well as gods, priestesses as well as priests, environmentalism, seeing nature as sacred, and personal growth. The ancient pagans didn't actually think that deities are much interested in us.

• 1:28:26Speaker 03

  We really have to attract their attention. In other words, they don't give us laws or commandments. They don't monitor us for behaviour. We're kind of on our own, needing to look after each other. And that's very much a modern humanist attitude to personal responsibility. So it's not for everybody. Uh, different people have different religious and emotional needs, which is why we should have a pluralist society, multi-faith, multi-ethnic, multi-everything. But the pagan ancient world can supply wonderful resources, imaginatively, creatively, for a lot of people with particular needs.

• 1:29:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, magnificent.

• 1:29:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  So something I want to know about, about, so in Ireland, if we have an old church, sixth century, seventh century, we can often find beside it, very close, a sacred well. And the belief is where the people would gather already with their pagan belief, the sacred well, this is where the early Christians in Ireland would decide, let's build a church there, let's mix these two things together. Um, I have a theory about Sheffield Cathedral. So you know where Sheffield Cathedral was? They have the Sheffield Cross, it's up there in the British Museum.

• 1:29:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  And on the Sheffield Cross, which is, I think, eighth century, it has vines all over it. And I saw that using kind of Irish pattern recognition. And I said, I fucking bet you that was an Anglo-Saxon sacred grove. There was a sacred grove, and that's why the initial cross has got vines in it, and now it's a cathedral. Now, that's just using Irish thinking. Is that mad?

• 1:30:20Speaker 03

  It, it, it could work. Uh, the, the problem is that we all love trees. Uh, most religions are tree huggers on the inside.

• 1:30:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  What, the Anglo-Saxon is particularly tree-ish?

• 1:30:34Speaker 03

  Uh, not particularly, just lots. No, everybody's tree-ish.

• 1:30:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 1:30:39Speaker 03

  And it's, uh, Greeks and Romans have sacred groves. Go away, did Celtic-speaking peoples have sacred groves? Germans have sacred groves. It's really interesting trying to find anywhere you doesn't have sacred groves. In fact.

• 1:30:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Can you think of why that is? It's, I mean, they're class. If you live in, but like, if there's no internet, no television, and you go into a forest, it's like, well, this is fucking brilliant.

• 1:31:04Speaker 03

  Because trees are so good to think with, uh, they shed their leaves and are reborn, that some of them keep their leaves for good. They have, they're like us in the sense, they have a body and a head and a thatch of foliage on top, and they have a lifespan, and they have veins with sap in them, and we have blood. Uh, on the other hand, they don't move the way that we do, and they have a much better chance of surviving if they're cut in half.

• 1:31:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:39Speaker 03

  So they're like us, but they're not. And also, if you don't have trees and a landscape, it can get a bit depressing. And they're, they're companions. Uh, but if you have a landscape entirely populated by trees, they literally tower over us and we get lost. So they're extremely menacing as well, the more of them that there are. When, uh, we have been up here in this part of the world long before trees were.

• 1:32:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:11Speaker 03

  Because we arrived here in the Ice Ages.

• 1:32:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yes.

• 1:32:14Speaker 03

  So for the first 90,000 years of Homo sapiens, let alone Homo everything previous, uh, up here in Europe, uh, we're wandering on these vast plains, uh, with all these wonderful herbs and plants for a vegetable diet, and all these Big Macs on the hoof, wandering around by way of, uh, grazing animals. And vast landscapes, far as the eye can see. And then the ice retreats only about 10,000 years ago, which is a blink compared with time.

• 1:32:54Speaker 03

  And the trees come north, and they come north fast at about a mile a year, and they engulf the landscape. And suddenly practically all our food supplies are gone.

• 1:33:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:33:07Speaker 03

  And we're pushed to the fringes, to riversides, to lakesides, to the coast. And we, we invent the bow, we domesticate the dog, we're trying to cope. Uh, but the next thing we do within a few generations is learn how to kill trees. We invent the Neolithic polished axe, which can ring-bark a tree and take it down. And the trees go. Uh, we're probably about 90% forested round about 5,000 years ago.

• 1:33:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:37Speaker 03

  By about, to about four and a half thousand years ago, that Stonehenge time, the trees are already down 25%. We know this from the study of pollen. So, uh, as, as a, a, a species, a European species, we love trees, but we don't get on with them if they take over. And so there's this power in a tree, both a dark and a frightening power, and a soothing and a life-giving power. And you put those two together and hey, you got divinity.

• 1:34:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  That is astounding. Um, but what I find incredible there is, and I'd never thought of it, I'd never thought of trees being an almost sudden event. You know what I mean?

• 1:34:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I hadn't either, but you asked the question, I suddenly thought of it.

• 1:34:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Did you wait to hear this? This is one of my favourite, uh, three things that keeps me up at night. Um, so the current, all the fossil fuels and all the carbon, right? The carbon that is warming the planet right now and like really causing a lot of hassle. Um, we are haunting ourselves with a previous extinction event. I'll tell you what I mean. So when trees evolved, so the bit in the tree that's hard, the wood bit, right? This is called lignin, and lignin is what makes it like stand up. Before lignin evolved, it was like, and now I'm talking maybe 400 million years ago, possibly a little bit more, the land was all like farney, and the plants were a bit

• 1:35:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  wobbly, and then lignin came about, and all of a sudden you had these big hard trees. But mushrooms didn't exist yet that could eat, that could decompose that lignin. And, and what the, what the tree does is it takes carbon from the air and then holds it in that lignin, in the tree trunk. There was a mass extinction event of trees about 390 million years ago, right? So loads of trees died at once and went into the ground, but nothing existed to decompose them. The, now we have mushrooms, mushrooms will go onto wood, and they'll break that carbon down and bring it back into the environment.

• 1:36:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Back then, dead trees were a bit like what plastic is now. There was nothing you can do with them. So all of those trees that died 390 million years ago, all of that carbon, that became the great coal seam. So when we dig up coal, when we dig up petrol, and we, we are, all that carbon that was supposed to stay down there, we're haunting ourselves with those ghosts. We're bringing an extinction event on us by burning another extinction event from nearly 400 million years ago. Isn't that mad?

• 1:36:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  Did you ever think of that?

• 1:36:40Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:36:43Speaker 03

  I, I, I come on these shows to get educated. It works.

• 1:36:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um.

• 1:36:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Can you tell me about the green man, right? Because I see the green man everywhere. And, and like I said, fair play to you, you knew about the green man. They didn't know in Brighton. If I said to people in Ireland, you know what a sheen of the gig is? Oh, we know what a fucking sheen of the gig is. But ye them as well, fair play. Um, I heard a beautiful theory about the sheen of the gig, actually, that's often it's viewed as a sexual thing, but it might possibly be, um, protection from, uh, death in childbirth. That it was allowing something to come out and go, you, you are safe from death in childbirth.

• 1:37:32Speaker 03

  I think that's overthinking because you're, uh, you were right right at the beginning, I think.

• 1:37:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  You think it's sexual?

• 1:37:39Speaker 03

  No. Uh. Well, the answer is yes and no, depends where the sheen of the gigs are.

• 1:37:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, we used to have them over churches, so it's like, what are they trying to tell us?

• 1:37:50Speaker 03

  Well, it's about, in Ireland, it's about protection. Elsewhere, it's about puritanism. Let me explain.

• 1:37:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go on.

• 1:37:57Speaker 03

  Uh, sheen of the gigs, uh, and in case those of you who are wondering what a sheen of the gig is, it falls to an embarrassed Brit to explain it.

• 1:38:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Instead of. Go on, I'm not gonna do it, go ahead, Ronald.

• 1:38:09Speaker 03

  Instead of a raunchy Irishman.

• 1:38:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:12Speaker 03

  To whom this is daily meat and drink.

• 1:38:17Speaker 03

  A sheen of the gig is a medieval carving of a, a naked woman who is facing the observer with her legs wide open and her vulva displayed. And they're, they're not sexy. Uh, none of them are beautiful, and this is quite deliberate. And they begin in France, they're as French as perno. Or baguette. And they're, they, they appear on the pilgrimage routes as the big Romanesque churches are built up round about the year ten fifty. And they are to warn people against the dangers of lust.

• 1:38:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  People having sex on pilgrimages?

• 1:38:59Speaker 03

  No, they're bromide. They're bromide and sculpture, the sheen of the gigs. Uh, but I agree, yes, you're not supposed to have sex on pilgrimage. You're not supposed to have sex on pilgrimage today. It's part of.

• 1:39:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  But wasn't there a big, um, certain pilgrimage sites in Europe used to sell kind of sexy ornaments? Like penis ornaments and stuff?

• 1:39:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, except they're not supposed to be sexy.

• 1:39:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's a warning against?

• 1:39:25Speaker 03

  It's a turn off.

• 1:39:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:39:28Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:39:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:29Speaker 03

  Uh, it's, it's, it's the Playboy warning of the month.

• 1:39:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:39:35Speaker 03

  And, uh, this motif clearly works because it spreads down to Spain and then makes the jump to England and Wales and then ends up in Ireland. But in Ireland alone, not only is the motif incredibly popular.

• 1:39:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:54Speaker 03

  But in Ireland, it appears also in places where the human eye can't see. And also on secular buildings like castles instead of just churches. And this harmonizes with an Irish folk tradition, which is that if somebody feels that they are cursed, unlucky, bewitched, if a helpful and loving lady exposes her vulva to that person, then the evil is driven away. Women's bits are scary things.

• 1:40:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  That sounds like something a drunk lad said to a woman in a pub. I have a curse, come on, please.

• 1:40:35Speaker 03

  So what is basically a sexual health warning in most of medieval Europe becomes a means of magical protection in Ireland. So let's hear it for the Irish.

• 1:40:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fucking fair play to us. Um.

• 1:40:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  The green man, I keep reaching a brick wall when I try and find out about the green man. I love them, they're so strange, they're so beautiful. They feel like they're very, very old, but I have a feeling you're gonna tell me they're not.

• 1:41:05Speaker 03

  I'm going to turn the key and open a fairy door through this brick wall. And take you through into an enchanted garden. A garden owned by an English aristocrat, despite the Welsh name, called Lady Raglan. And in nineteen thirty-nine, she unwittingly invented the green man.

• 1:41:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ah, go away.

• 1:41:29Speaker 03

  And so I honour her. Uh, but in doing so, she put together three very powerful and genuinely traditional images that nobody had rolled into one before.

• 1:41:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 1:41:41Speaker 03

  So, uh, it's rather like collecting three statues of powerful ancient deities that are really old. I'm putting them in the same room together to do the same work. Um, the three traditions are, number one, the foliate heads you find in medieval churches, carved heads gushing foliage from the noses and mouths. Number two is the Jack in the Green, which is, uh, a figure covered in greenery that danced in English May processions. And the third is the green man pub sign, which generally before, before Lady Raglan, shows a green clad Robin Hood like man.

• 1:42:23Speaker 03

  And the origin points are, the foliate head comes from India.

• 1:42:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Where? India.

• 1:42:30Speaker 03

  From India, where he starts out as a pagan god, a Hindu god. And there's this information superhighway called the Arab Empire, stretching all the way from Pakistan to France. And the motif travels along this, ends up in Spain and France. And it's a decoration. It actually doesn't seem to have a meaning.

• 1:42:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 1:42:51Speaker 03

  It's just a acute decoration. We, it's wonderful, there are certain things we don't have to take seriously.

• 1:42:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, it feels so, when I saw it, it felt so deeply pagan, but what, what I'm contrasting it with now that you tell me is.

• 1:43:05Speaker 03

  It's deeply Hindu.

• 1:43:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  But.

• 1:43:07Speaker 03

  Which is great.

• 1:43:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Have you ever seen some of the Catholic shit that Irish grannies have in their houses? Have you ever, like, we had like the child, we, like, we'd have Jesus Christ paintings, right? But they're that, what's that thing where you go like this and it, he's winking? You know what I mean? Or we'd have the Sacred Heart with his heart, or we'd have the Child of Prague. And they're so tacky. Or we'd have glow in the dark, Holy Mary with water inside this. And they're really, really tacky things. And you look at the tackiness of it and you wonder, at what point is this sacrilege? Do you know, at what point has this distanced itself from its religious? And now it's just a silly plastic bottle that looks like Holy Mary?

• 1:43:52Speaker 03

  Gias morregwich mochri, just to prove I can speak Irish. Uh, yeah, I know what you mean. Um, my heart goes out, I think there's a place for sacred kitsch.

• 1:44:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you have that here? Is that a Catholic thing or do Protestants do it too?

• 1:44:13Speaker 03

  Um, no, the Protestant version of sacred kitsch is the word. Uh, Catholics do material things really well. Protestants do the word pulpits preaching. And so the, the Protestant equivalent of kitsch is speaking in tongues and, and bad hymns.

• 1:44:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 1:44:35Speaker 03

  The, the kind of hymns that you don't have as, as favourites.

• 1:44:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  The passionate, um, people like Ian Paisley, the way he used to preach, that, that, and I hear street preachers now. I, there was a, I was comparing it to the, you know, about the basilisk, the, the basilisk, that motif. The, if you stare at this thing, this piece of knowledge, it will turn into stone. And there were street preachers. There are street preachers in Limerick now that come from this new evangelical tradition. And they're like a basilisk because what they're doing is they're screaming in the streets. I'm after telling you now, um, if you don't become born again, you're gonna burn in hell. And now that I've told you, it means that if you don't do it, you're ignoring it and I've told you.

• 1:45:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I was like, fuck off, I was doing granted, no one ever told, I was fine until you told me. I was going about, I was going, gonna claim ignorance when I go to heaven and go, Jesus, sorry, Christ. No one told me I had to be born again, I didn't know about that, can you leave me in? And now you've got these people in the streets going, well, I'm telling you, you've been told now. So if you don't become born again, now you know about it, you're ignoring it, so you're a baddie. Then that's a basilisk. I have to walk around like this, don't tell me about the word of God.

• 1:45:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:45:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  But is that an exact, that's kitsch, that to me is, it's so fucking tacky. I'm just trying to bring my children for ice cream and there's a man shouting at me. A tattoo on his neck because he was a heroin addict last year.

• 1:46:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  And.

• 1:46:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're spot on.

• 1:46:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's, that's kitsch.

• 1:46:11Speaker 03

  That is.

• 1:46:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  And tacky and, yeah, it, it's a child of Prague with a glow in the dark head.

• 1:46:18Speaker 03

  But it's, it's kind of kitsch when it doesn't work. When it's, makes people feel born again, gives them new confidence, a new sense of worth and belonging, that it becomes oratory.

• 1:46:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 1:46:32Speaker 03

  It becomes rhetoric, it becomes something semi-divine. Even though personally I wouldn't buy up to the messages punted by most bits of oratory and rhetoric.

• 1:46:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's, yeah, it's very strange stuff. Um, um, oh, we're, we're nearly at Carfu. Okay, we're gonna take some questions. Actually, can you bring the house lights up? And I gotta get a photograph of ye to prove to my mother that ye exist.

• 1:46:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Everyone say hello, look like you're having fun. Way! Go on, you gorgeous Bristol pricks. Um, do you know what this fellow at the front who looks a bit like a FX twin?

• 1:47:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh wait, it's the fellow who's been resting his pint on the stage. Okay, go on.

• 1:47:18Speaker 06

  Hey there, thank you. I, I, my mate introduced me to you six months ago. I live in France.

• 1:47:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  You met me six months ago?

• 1:47:25Speaker 06

  No, I live in France now, in the, in the, in the mountains. And my friend Rob Forbes, he was a cool boss. Uh, so anyway, he introduced me to your podcast and my mate Jordan Schmidt, he's up there somewhere, got me a ticket at the last minute. Anyway, question.

• 1:47:43Speaker 06

  I don't live, I live in the middle of nowhere in France, okay?

• 1:47:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  You live in the middle of nowhere in France?

• 1:47:49Speaker 06

  In the French mountains. We don't have to deal with woke and he, she and all this, okay? We're very lucky. How do you feel about the fact that Colston Hall is no longer, I don't even know the fucking name of it now. I call it Colston Hall and people shout at me. People shout at me about it.

• 1:48:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Coleslaw?

• 1:48:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you know what? I didn't hear what he heard, lads, so I don't think I need to hear it if it made you that upset. I heard Coleslaw.

• 1:48:14Speaker 06

  Colston Hall. Sorry.

• 1:48:18Speaker 06

  I danced with Sharon Jones and the Jack Kings on this stage. I saw Ray Lamontagne here. I just want, I just want to know, I need to know. I don't live here anymore.

• 1:48:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you know what? I literally haven't heard a word that he said, but I'm gonna believe ye. And can somebody else have the microphone, please?

• 1:48:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  I, I fucking think Coleslaw is okay. I quite like it, depending on where you, I, I prefer Delhi Coleslaw. I don't like fancy Coleslaw. The fancy Coleslaw that you get in hotels and shit is bullshit. I want bad Coleslaw that you get in the Delhi. That's my Coleslaw. Okay, go on, artist. You're not connected, eh?

• 1:48:59Speaker 05

  It's not working. It is working, sorry.

• 1:49:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 1:49:02Speaker 05

  Sorry, I don't actually know that guy. I don't know him. He keeps hugging me.

• 1:49:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay, Grant. We don't do that, sorry.

• 1:49:11Speaker 05

  Okay. First of all, thanks Blind Boy. I listen to you every week. Um, I just love your podcast. And, um, the first one I ever listened to was the one where you were playing the Red Dead Redemption game and you rode your horse off a cliff and you wrote a song about it. And I was like, yeah, this is a podcast for me.

• 1:49:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was a really strange time in my life.

• 1:49:31Speaker 05

  Yes. But I stayed. So, anyway, right. My question is, um, it's just about, um, King Arthur, which we haven't really brought up. Is he real? Or is it folklore? Or is it a story?

• 1:49:49Speaker 03

  Yes. The answer is, we don't know. But it's wide open. There is no actual solid evidence of a historical King Arthur, but there's no evidence of what's going on in most of Britain between about 410 and 597 of the common era. And there's an Arthur-sized hole in the record into which he would fit quite nicely. There's no evidence to prove that he didn't exist, no evidence to prove that he began as a legendary, a mythological personality.

• 1:50:33Speaker 03

  And the really interesting thing for archaeology is that the earliest sources to mention him all put him in the north of Britain, in what's now northern England and southern Scotland, uh, where there are thousands of archaeological sites that have never been excavated.

• 1:50:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 1:50:56Speaker 03

  And so it could be we'll never find him, or it could be that any day, somebody will dig through a post-Roman site around Hadrian's Wall or a bit north or south and find an inscription saying, "I was King Arthur, I was here. Why the hell did it take you so long?"

• 1:51:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 1:51:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  We have an, an equivalent thing in, uh, Ireland where there is a legend that one of our queens, long, long ago, 1500 years ago, was, uh, Egyptian. And it's called Scotia. It's down in Kerry. We have Scotia's grave. Now, there's nothing there because people have dug there, but we're waiting to find, is this a legend about this Egyptian princess who was in Ireland many, many years ago, or is it made up? Because we definitely had contact with Africa because, you know, they found the skull of the Barbary ape in Navan Fort, and that's about 1200 years ago. So why is there a monkey skull from Morocco down in the north of Ireland?

• 1:52:06Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And, uh, where, uh, an ape can go, a story can travel even faster.

• 1:52:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Exactly.

• 1:52:14Speaker 03

  But it does mess up our ideas of ethnicity.

• 1:52:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Completely.

• 1:52:18Speaker 03

  So one of the greatest artifacts of Celtic art makers is the Gundustrop Cauldron, which is this massive silver cauldron found in Denmark.

• 1:52:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the deers and the snakes.

• 1:52:32Speaker 03

  That's right. Uh, I mean, it's so big, you can take a bath in it. And we now know from the metallurgy that it was made in the Ukraine.

• 1:52:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 1:52:42Speaker 03

  On the Black Sea. And we've all, we've long been puzzled over a particular design on it that seems to show an elephant. And of course, the ancient Celts didn't have elephants. Uh, and then we found the original of the design in the Indus Valley. It is an elephant, and that's the goddess Lakshmi.

• 1:53:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 1:53:02Speaker 03

  So the designs for the Gundustrop Cauldron travelled right across Central Asia from the Indian subcontinent to be forged into an artifact in the Ukraine that could then be traded up to Scandinavia. You can't really beat that. And as I keep saying, where an artifact can go, a story can travel even faster.

• 1:53:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yes. Um, very quickly, do, do you think, do you think flood metallurgy is people remembering the ice caps melting?

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  Oh, no, because there are flood stories in parts of the world which would never have been affected by the ice caps. Uh, on the whole, people who have flood stories, and they are only found in certain parts of the world, call me a unimaginative, call me a plain stupid Westerner, but they tend to be people who have floods.

• 1:54:04Speaker 03

  So, you know, the, the flood story par excellence for Europeans and Middle Easterners, the one that becomes Noah and Deucalion in Greece starts off in Sumer. And Sumer is a civilization built, guess where? On a flood plain.

• 1:54:24Speaker 03

  And every couple of hundred years, things would go really badly pear-shaped and the snows would be too heavy up in what's now Turkey. And the cities would go, they'd submerge. So, uh, that is, uh, what's being remembered.

• 1:54:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  And we have, like, the Irish have flood metallurgy, but the thing is, we could have just read it in the Bible. Because Noah is involved in it. Um, yeah. I am going to ask a question up here now. No problematic statements about Coleslaw, please. Whatever the fuck that man said. He has now left the building. Um, by his own accord as well. No, no one asked him to leave. He just went, fuck that. I'm not, I've said some bad things about Coleslaw. Hold on.

• 1:55:09Speaker 03

  Yes, Coleslaw is deeply controversial. I hate Coleslaw. I think Coleslaw should be thrown into Bristol Harbour.

• 1:55:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, was that what it was about?

• 1:55:24Speaker 03

  Because at least it's.

• 1:55:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Was it about that cunt of a slave trader, Coles? Was that?

• 1:55:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  I can't believe, I thought it was Coleslaw. I wasn't joking there. I wasn't doing, oh, he's doing a clever wordplay, don't worry. No, no, no, no. I thought it was Coleslaw. And of course, it's the fucking slave trader, Coles. Fuck him.

• 1:55:48Speaker 03

  I, I, um, I was talking about Coleslaw.

• 1:55:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was an MI5 plant. MI5 plant. MI5, I'm telling you. Um, listen, a, a question, please, yonder, up, up beyond, about whatever the fuck you want. We do have a superposition of ushers, don't we?

• 1:56:10Speaker 05

  Hello?

• 1:56:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay, go on.

• 1:56:11Speaker 05

  Uh, first of all, just want to say, I absolutely love your podcast. I'm autistic and I've never felt more seen by podcasts in my entire life. So I just wanted to.

• 1:56:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm autistic, by the way, Randall, I didn't tell you. You might have guessed.

• 1:56:26Speaker 05

  I know, I'm not the only one. I imagine there's a lot of people here who also feel the exact same.

• 1:56:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  How many noradivergent people here?

• 1:56:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  I could tell when you did that.

• 1:56:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go on.

• 1:56:39Speaker 05

  You spoke earlier on about conspiracy theorists and how there are sometimes people who aren't just conspiracy theorists who we see as weird people down at the pub, but sometimes they take over countries. And I wanted to know what your thoughts are on how that happens and why that happens and why at specific points in time, conspiracy theorists aren't just dismissed as, you know, odd people and actually have the power to take over an entire country.

• 1:57:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah. Tell us that one. Because we've always had the old conspiracy theories, but at some points they become very dangerous and society needs them. What's the crack there?

• 1:57:17Speaker 03

  You've said it. I need to say no more.

• 1:57:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Society gets to a point where it needs them?

• 1:57:23Speaker 03

  No, society never needs conspiracy theories, just as society doesn't need tuberculosis. But they're around. They're part of our environment. So learning how to cope with them is the issue.

• 1:57:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm doing that thing where I'm looking for a solution instead of going, conspiracy theories are like the weather. They exist and they're part of the human condition.

• 1:57:50Speaker 03

  They are recurrent parts, but not a necessary part. Now, because I suffer from them myself and I've seen the damage they can do in him.

• 1:58:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  You? Which conspiracy theory did you go for? Well, go on.

• 1:58:06Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, any person, any scholar who is the least bit controversial are going to have anti fans who say they're actually writing the history they are in order to destroy X or subvert Y. So we live with this. But I think the analogy is not with the weather, but with particular types of organism, viruses and bacteria. In some cases, they can be harmless and others they can be lethal. So it's a question of finding antidotes and managing them.

• 1:58:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, I remember the good conspiracy theories, like Bigfoot.

• 1:58:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Although the Nazis had a crack at Bigfoot. They did actually. They were big into Bigfoot. No, not Bigfoot. Who's the one that's in The Himalayas?

• 1:58:58Speaker 03

  The Abominable Snowman.

• 1:59:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, the Nazis got into him because they were like, oh, we're just looking for the Abominable Snowman. Try and prove some shit about race. But they were just mapping out that area for conquest. Yeah, which is a good excuse. Listen, we have reached curfew. Professor, I know, I know, but there you go. Professor Ronald Hutton, this was so much crack. It was an absolute pleasure to have you here. I loved it. It's an honour to speak to you. You were gorgeous. Thank you so much, Bristol.

• 1:59:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  This was an absolutely beautiful night.

• 1:59:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I'm gonna get a video for my man.

• 1:59:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:59:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yart!

• 1:59:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  All right, that was the chat with the magnificent, wonderful Professor Ronald Hutton in Bristol. I mean, it was a cracking night. It was an amazing night. There was so much fun there. If you don't know the context, there was a slave trader from Bristol called, I think it was Edward Colston. Colston was his second name. And in 2022, the people of Bristol just went, there's a statue of him down by the docks. And the people of Bristol said, fuck that. We don't want a statue of a slave trader. So they shoved it into the

• 2:00:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  docks. And the venue that I played there, which is the Beacon Hall, the Bristol Beacon, that was called Colston Hall after that slave trader. It was called Colston Hall. And they renamed that a couple of years ago, too, which is brilliant, fantastic. I come from fucking Ireland. We renamed everything. All of our streets were named after genocidal Brits. And we renamed it. And I love it when Bristol looks at its history as a trading port and its involvement in the slave trade. And the people today go, fuck that. Throw the statue in the river. Rename Beacon Hall. Rename Colston Hall to Beacon Hall. But it

• 2:01:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  was controversial because some people don't like change. And that gentleman in the crowd there expressed his discomfort with that. He said, why is this called Colston Hall? And the people of Bristol in the audience got really pissed off. But I heard it as Colslaw. I couldn't understand him. Couldn't understand his accent. And the speakers were pointing out towards the crowd. So I couldn't really hear. So I legitimately was like, why the fuck? Why is everyone so upset about a controversial opinion about Colslaw?

• 2:01:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  This is a bit of a chaotic episode this week. I hope the fuck the sound was all right, Fee. Okay. I'm putting this together on tour. At this very moment, I am no longer in the van at the end of the podcast. I'm recording this. I'm in Glasgow. I'm recording this bit in Glasgow in a hotel room under a duvet. All right. That's what this end bit is. This week's episode, I had to cobble it together from different bits. I was editing the interview on a laptop. And I don't have my regular studio, so hopefully the sound quality was okay. I loved chatting to Professor Ronald Hutton. He was fantastic. And I hope to have

• 2:02:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  him on again because he's a legend. And he's an expert in his field. And he's, not only is he an expert in his field, he's still curious and passionate after all those years of doing what he does. But I loved, I loved that chat. That was a nice, long podcast, but fuck it, it's a podcast. You can listen to that all week long if you like. No one's forcing you to sit down and listen to that in its entirety. Next week's podcast, I'm still gonna be on tour. I'm still gonna be on tour when I put out next week's podcast. What I'm hoping to do, right? And I can't promise this because things can go wrong.

• 2:03:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'd love to do a gallery podcast. I'm gonna try and visit a gallery or a museum while I'm here and walk around and record a podcast. That's what I'm hoping for. But things can go wrong. So if I don't deliver that, it means some unplanned chaos presented itself to me on tour. And it meant I couldn't do it. Put it this way. I tried to do it in the British Museum yesterday in London. And I was ready to go out the fucking door in the morning to get to the British Museum. And then unplanned chaos descended upon me and I couldn't do it. So later this week, I have a museum picked and I'm gonna see if

• 2:03:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  I can do it. If I can, that's what we'll have next week. If I can't, we'll figure something out. All right. That's all I have time for this week. That was a very long podcast, I believe. I'll catch you next week. Don't owe that wit. In the meantime, rub a dog genuflick to a swan. Wink at a worm. Dog bless.

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