Episode 196: Bad Seed

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If I mention them to you, the first thing you'll think of is aliens, and that would be wrong.

Sadly, that's the first thing most people imagine when they hear about crop marks.

They see elaborate patterns, flattened stalks, and something that looks like a corn maze.

But crop marks are actually something else.

Yes, they are patterns visible in a field, but their origins aren't from up above, or even from tricky locals.

No, these crop marks originate from below.

And it all has to do with archaeology.

Here's how it works.

In places where there used to be a ditch that became filled in over time, the crops planted above those spaces have more fertile soil than the areas around it.

So in times of drought, the plants growing above those ancient ditches look more green and lush.

Wherever there are walls, though, the opposite happens.

The soil there is more shallow than other areas.

So during a drought, the plants growing above them look dead and yellow.

And if you add in the invention of the airplane, you have a recipe for discovery, which is what has happened in England for decades.

There are far too many examples to list here, but every time the weather gets overly dry and hot in the English countryside, it becomes possible to fly over normally green fields and spot shapes, the outlines of long-forgotten buildings, the contours of a Roman road, even the ring-shaped remnants of ancient Iron Age burial mounds.

Through crop marks, we can see how the archaeology below has an influence on the world above, and it's incredible.

But sometimes the opposite has been true.

For thousands of years, the things above us have altered the way we live our lives down below.

It's a realm of folklore that might seem boring and predictable, but in reality, it's one of the darkest homes of our weirdest behavior.

And I promise you this: you'll never look at the sky the same way again.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

Our weather isn't a mystery to us today.

We have computers in our pockets and on our wrists that give us up-to-the-minute temperature readings.

We can receive notifications for upcoming rain.

There are even AI-driven services that tell us where the clouds will be in the future.

For us, there's very little that's magical about the weather.

We also have one other problem, if I can call it that.

We don't depend on the weather for our food.

We depend on our paychecks and transportation to the grocery store.

Inside, we can buy things that normally wouldn't be in season in our neck of the woods, and we can stock up for months or just buy a little.

But thousands of years ago, life was incredibly different.

Bad weather could threaten the lives of entire communities or regions.

Drought or flooding, or even things like hail could wipe out months of effort spent growing the crops that our ancestors would need to survive throughout the rest of the year.

And for them, how it all worked was a complete mystery.

Because of all this, ancient preoccupation with the weather took on two different flavors.

The first was passive and had to do with reading the signs, because if they could understand what the weather was going to do, they could prepare and act, right?

So they did things that gave them the illusion of access to that sort of information.

And some bits of it are still here today.

What is Groundhog Day, if not the modern practice of divination with an animal oracle?

And if you've lived in New England for more than five minutes, you've probably heard someone recite that old favorite, red skies at night, sailors delight.

Red skies in morning, sailors take warning.

All these millennia later, we still think we can do it.

Just read the signs and all will be revealed.

They are holdovers from another age, when people desperately needed to know what to do and looked for any sign they could find to guide them.

But that also leads us to the second form of preoccupation our ancestors had with the weather, actively trying to control it.

For a very long time, humans were convinced that they could influence the weather with their behavior.

And before you scoff at this and make some comment about how you're glad we've left all that behind, think about how many times someone has said to you something like this, well, I packed my snow shovels away in the garage, so if it snows tomorrow, you can blame me.

It has an element of magical thinking, doesn't it?

That we can do things in a certain way, and if we do, the weather will bend to our wishes.

So is it any wonder that our ancestors had so many weather-focused gods?

In Egypt, there was Horus, who was, among other jobs, the god of good weather.

Another Egyptian god, Set, represented the opposite side, the storms.

The Greeks had Zeus with his big white beard and hands full of lightning bolts ready to throw them at us, and Tempestis was worshipped by the Romans as the goddess of sudden weather and storms.

Oh, and who could forget Thor, of course, with his own connection to thunder and lightning.

A centuries ago in Germany, it was common for farmers to gather up earthworms and dry them over a fire in order to prevent too much rain.

Why?

Because people noticed that worms dried out during dry weather, so they treated cause and effect like a recipe for a magical spell.

They also had another bizarre tradition there in the Rhineland.

You see, they noticed that whenever it was about to rain, the crayfish would crawl out of the river and onto the shore.

So whenever they needed rain, a group of naked maidens would enter the river and then crawl out like a crayfish, hoping it would nudge the rain into action.

Roughly 2,500 years ago in China, a philosopher named Yan Ying was asked by a local ruler how he might encourage rain to fall on his crops.

The teacher instructed him to strip naked and go into the woods, essentially exposing himself to the elements.

Some scholars today think the idea was linked to the belief that the gods would take pity on such a defenseless person.

In this case, it worked.

As a result, similar exposure rituals continued to be practiced for nearly 2,000 years.

Right up there with traditions like that are the rain-making rituals of a good number of Native American people groups.

Almost always in the form of a dance, these rituals were designed to call down rain on dry crops.

Participants would wear clothing decorated using special colors and patterns, and sometimes even masks used only for those occasions.

I hope it's clear just how desperately our ancestors wanted to control the weather.

From prayers to invisible gods and ritual dance ceremonies to running naked through the forest or cooking worms over a fire, the people who came before us expressed their need for control over the weather in some pretty unique ways.

But as is always the case with folklore, it gets much more weird.

And to see what I mean, we need to pack up and travel deep into Europe, because the things we can dig up there are beyond disturbing.

We have to start out by laying down the rules of the game.

Before Christianity entered the picture between the 7th and 12th centuries, the Slavic people of Eastern Europe had some pretty unique beliefs.

And even when the church moved in and started changing things, a lot of those old beliefs stuck around.

First, there was a strong belief in the burial of the dead as a sort of wedding ceremony between the deceased and the earth, referred to in some traditions by the super-appealing name of Mother Moist Earth.

By interring the body of the dead into the ground, people believed they were, in some magical way, planting seeds.

But not all of those seeds were good.

You see, another prominent belief was that some dead people were clean and others were unclean, spiritually speaking, of course.

If someone lived out their long life and died of natural causes, they followed the plan laid out for them by God and were therefore clean.

But if death came about for other reasons, murder, suicide, tragic accident or plague, or they lived lives that brushed up against evil forces, like drunkards, witches, and sorcerers, then they were seen as unclean.

I think you get the idea.

Now, if you combine both of those ingredients into a single dish, their views on unclean bodies plus the wedding union of Mother Earth with the dead, you get something unique and disturbing, the belief that planting bad seeds can only lead to evil outcomes.

Only the dead who were deemed clean were allowed to be buried in the churchyard, and if that rule was broken, bad things could happen.

Then, of course, in an agricultural society, a lot of those bad things were weather-related.

Drought, destructive winds, excessive rain.

You name it, if it harmed the crops, the unclean dead were to blame.

It was another of those cause and effect relationships that had been turned into a magical ritual.

Sin was punished by God, so if sinful people were honored by their community, God was believed to deliver wrath and judgment through the weather.

Granted, the list of things that made people sinful would cause most of us to roll our eyes today, but in that place, at that time, the stuff was the simple truth.

For example, in 1606, a pretender to the Russian throne was assassinated.

He had a lot going against him, too.

He was suspected to be a sorcerer, he was clearly a traitor, and he died an unnatural death through murder, which is why people got worried on the night his body was thrown into a grave in Moscow, only to see the city gripped by a vicious early frost that killed off everything from crops to trees.

So how does someone fight back against powerful supernatural mechanisms like that?

Well, you dug those unclean bodies back up, that's what.

In fact, all throughout Eastern Europe, there are stories of bodies being disinterred because of bad weather.

And honestly, they are disturbing.

In 1515, a Greek monk named creatively Maximus the Greek was working in Moscow when he actually witnessed a number of these weather-related exhumations.

He wrote about how the corpses of those who died by murder or drowning were dug up, carted out into the open countryside, and then left on the ground exposed to the elements.

In 1891, a Russian woman died of intoxication and after her burial, the community experienced a drought.

That symbolic connection between her overindulgence in drink and the absence of rain, a drink for the earth, was obvious to locals, so her corpse was exhumed and dumped into the nearby river, hoping it would call up some rain.

One of my favorite examples happened when a drought swept through a Czechoslovakian village in the summer of 1900.

Locals went looking for answers, and what they came up with was the realization that their schoolmaster had died months before and been buried with his head resting on a feather pillow.

So they dug him up and removed the pillow, hoping for rain.

And in 1868, people in the Taraskans region of Russia became so frustrated with their own drought that they dug up the coffin of a man everyone believed had been a sorcerer, opened the lid, and then hit the corpse over the head while chanting, Give us rain.

They then poured water over the body, again connecting it to the wish for rainfall, and then reburied it.

I think it's clear how our dependence on the weather for healthy crops has led many cultures to develop unusual traditions, even going so far as to violate the burial of the dead in search of answers.

Over time, it's been labeled as taboo by the church and illegal by governments, and yet, even as the decades ticked by, it has kept on popping up.

And in one instance, in particular, it did more than disturb people.

It led to tragedy.

Like a lot of similar stories, this one begins with a drought, but also a bunch of political unrest.

You see, in 1905, the world in Russia was changing.

Tsar Nicholas II had watched his country rise up in a revolution, ending only when he delivered some of the important things they'd been asking for, a semi-representative government and partial freedom of the press being two of the biggest.

In a lot of ways, it seemed like the old ways were passing away and new modern ways of living were about to appear.

But far south in Crimea, the past still had a stranglehold on the people there.

So when a terribly hot and dry summer gripped one community, the people became desperate.

I mentioned earlier that there was a long list of things that made someone unclean.

It might be the unusual way they died, or it could have been their occupation or reputation in life that earned them that title.

And one of those bad occupations was known as the Opir.

In a lot of instances, the word Opir is translated as a sorcerer.

But because these people were believed to possess the power to literally drain the life out of people and animals, it was sometimes translated as another equally familiar creature, a vampire.

There's a lot going on in that connection, all of which would take too long to dive into here, but just be aware of how that network of evil, from deviant unclean burials to sorcerers and witches, all had an impact on how people saw their world.

And when that world started to die around them, people became very afraid.

In this particular Crimean village, in the summer of 1905, the drought drove people to remember how an old man had died months before, and despite being known as a sorcerer, he had been buried inside the town.

So the people there began to plan how they might remedy the situation.

And you guessed it, they were going to dig him up and then douse his corpse with holy water.

Now, while the villagers were putting the finishing touches on their plans, someone knocked on the door of the local priest, a man named Father Constantine, and invited him to come along.

And I know that sounds odd.

The church had publicly been fighting rituals like this for years, after all.

But in a lot of communities across Eastern Europe, local priests were secret allies, sometimes visiting the graves of those seen as unclean and sprinkling holy water on the soil above them.

So they assumed Father Constantine would want to come and help.

That night, the ritual began.

An entire procession of people marched out from the center of the village, some of them armed with shovels, while others played flutes and fiddles to give the disturbing moment its own soundtrack.

According to the newspaper article that came out a few weeks later, once they reached the grave, the villagers dug up the coffin, opened the lid, and then yanked the corpse of the dead wizard out of it.

Then, after propping the body up against the base of a tree, as if he were sitting, 40 to 50 of the villagers danced around it, all while musicians carried the tune.

And that was when Father Constantine showed up.

At the sight of him, the villagers cheered, referred to as joyful greetings in the later newspaper account, and welcomed him into the circle.

But that's when the priest told everyone that he hadn't come to help after all, but to put a stop to what he called superstition and barbarity.

So the crowd reacted the only way that they knew how, through fear.

They accused the priest of also being a wizard.

Why else would he come to stop their plans after all?

And because of that fear, and more than a little vodka, according to the newspaper account, four of the men grabbed the priest and tossed him into the open grave.

Then, as he lay screaming inside the open coffin at the bottom of the pit, the villagers picked up the corpse of the sorcerer and dumped it back in right on top of the holy man.

After that, they grabbed their shovels and quickly pushed all of the stones and soil they had previously removed back into the hole, sealing them both in forever.

Intersections are a place of power.

And if you study folklore long enough, you'll start to notice how so many of the most fascinating beliefs are born at the intersection of two typically natural forces.

When it comes to weather folklore, that intersection occurs at the place where two human characteristics join forces, our innate desire to control things and our strong survival instincts.

When the very lives of our community are on the line, unusual weather often comes with the forecast of cloudy with the chance of death.

As I mentioned earlier, both the church and various governments have done their best to put a stop to these ancient rituals.

Remember the story of the woman who died from intoxication only to have her body exhumed and tossed into the river?

While the community itself believed it was essential, six people involved in the ritual were still arrested and sentenced to time in prison.

It's a story of the back and forth, of ancient fears and magical solutions, battling with what many people view as logic and rational thought.

It's a story of the staying power of folklore and how entire cultures can rise and fall and yet their traditions can live on.

And it's a story of real people.

with real problems doing the best they can.

And in Crimea in 1905, that manifested in the unusual graveside ritual that ended with the grave being refilled with an extra occupant, a living human being no less.

And as you'd probably guess, the village was abuzz with whispers about what had happened.

Honestly, how could they not talk about it, right?

The very next morning after those dark events, two women felt compelled enough to visit the local authorities and tell them what happened.

They had hope, however thin it might be, that if people acted fast enough, Father Constantine might be saved.

Men were sent to the graveyard, and the loose soil was once again lifted out, one shovel full at a time.

When they reached the priest, he was silent and unmoving, but they pulled him out, still hopeful, and handed him over to a team of physicians, and those doctors worked for more than an hour to resuscitate him.

Sadly, it wasn't meant to be.

That cold, dark grave had become an instrument of death, a sudden end to his life's journey, and the beginning of another from which there was no going back.

All of it, from start to finish, driven forward by the engine of fear.

And did it help?

Did the drought end in a massive shower of rain that answered all of their prayers and justified their desperate actions?

Of that, we have no record.

But then again, that's never the point, is it?

Because when it comes to magical cause and effect beliefs like this, only one truth is ever recorded.

If you can find find a way for it all to make sense, then any means will justify the end, however deadly they might be.

Stories of weather folklore are always a good way to bring a smile to someone's face or get them shaking their head in bewildered confusion.

Either way, they never fail to entertain and they never really go away because the weather is always there, always present, and always important.

And there's another branch to these stories that deserves exploring.

In fact, I have another fantastic story to share, and I can't begin to tell you how striking it is.

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It's hard to imagine bad weather, especially the sort with thunder and lightning, without the Norse god Thor.

And my guess is, even if there used to be a few people who had never heard of him, a decade of big-budget superhero films probably filled in the blanks.

But don't let the spandex and leather outfits fool you.

Lightning was a big deal for our ancestors.

In fact, it often acted like a bookmark, pointing out the moment where the divine stepped into the mundane, if only briefly.

According to Durham University professor Elizabeth Warren, the ancient Greeks held lightning in such high regard that they often built temples on the locations of known lightning strikes, and the Romans who came after them had their own reverence for it, requiring anyone killed by lightning to be buried right there, where the tragedy happened.

Oh, and if someone broke that rule, they'd be sacrificed to Jupiter.

the Roman pantheon's version of the Greek god Zeus.

Because of course,

in Russia, people killed by lightning strikes were classified as, you guessed it, unclean.

And that included things like house fires caused by lightning.

In fact, if your house caught on fire thanks to a freak storm, not only were you discouraged from rescuing any of your possessions inside, but it was also recommended that you use unusual liquids to put it out.

Things like beer or milk were preferred.

Again, this was all part of their worldview that saw God dishing out divine punishment from high above.

Most saw lightning as a marker that highlighted the sinful, and if their house or life were destroyed, it had to be for a good reason, right?

Today, I think we worry less about lightning strikes, and the stats help us with that.

Back in 2020, the National Lightning Safety Council, yes, that's a real thing, published a helpful report.

Between 2006 and 2019, only 418 people were recorded as having died from lightning strikes.

But those tiny numbers, statistically speaking, hide real pain.

And while it happened long before that report was ever written, there's one story in particular that I think illustrates the danger of lightning and why ancient peoples universally feared it.

It began on the evening of July 23rd of 1857.

Robert was a worker at the Navy Yard on the northwest edge of Brooklyn, and he lived nearby at the corner of High Street and Hudson Avenue.

And that evening, as he had probably done a number of times before, Robert left home on an errand.

He'd made the walk many times.

Living there with his wife and two kids meant that he knew exactly where to go to buy just about anything he needed.

And that night in July, it was a handful of groceries, which meant a trip down to Lafayette Avenue.

The sky above looked dark when he left home, but it was also evening, so I'm guessing Robert didn't fully realize why there was so little light.

But on his way there, the wind picked up, that sort of cool, sharp breeze that comes in ahead of a storm.

Maybe he picked up his pace a little.

He certainly didn't turn around and go home though.

Once there, he did his shopping as planned, but I can imagine the sound of the wind could be heard through the shop's open windows.

So after paying for what he came for, he headed back out, this time walking with a bit more urgency.

But almost immediately, the sky opened up and drenched him with a shower of rain.

And then, it got worse.

Thunder rumbled as he walked, and soon enough the rain grew thicker, less of a shower and more of an assault.

and every few steps the darkness was ripped open by a flash of lightning.

I imagine it wasn't long before before Robert decided that it would be best to step out of the storm and wait for it to pass, so he looked for some shelter.

What he found was the front step of a brownstone and the decorative stone casing that wrapped around the wooden door.

It didn't provide total protection, but it was enough to stop the rain and let him dry off a bit.

And it was at that moment that the lightning struck.

The bolt connected with the brownstone high up on the roof, back at the rear corner of the house.

But electricity is a lot like water.

It flows by nature, following the path of least resistance.

And that path took the lightning through the wall of the house, down to the second floor, and then forward to the front.

From there, it continued downward, eventually connecting with the top of the stone casing around the door.

The wet stone casing.

That entire journey, of course, only took a second or two, way too fast for anyone to notice at the time.

But as the lightning passed through the house itself, the windows on the front of the building exploded outward.

And at that very same moment, most likely, so too did Robert McKnight.

Actually, exploded might not be the best term to describe what happened to him.

The medical examiner would later report that the lightning entered Robert's brain through the left eye, having jumped the short distance from the stone casing above.

Once inside him, it shot straight down to the ground, passing through him in an instant.

When the windows exploded, the homeowner ran to the front door to see if any other homes in the neighborhood had been damaged.

But as soon as he opened the door, he stopped, because there, standing on his front steps, was a man, Robert, and that man was on fire.

But Robert was already dead.

The lightning had killed him instantly and then blown all of his clothing below his belt into nothing more than a bunch of ribbons.

Even his boots were destroyed, and the foot through which the lightning had exited had been smashed to pieces.

The newspaper account of his death has that delightful yet creepy perspective that so many Victorian papers had at the time.

Yes, it recounted his final tragic moments, but it also took time to list out the contents of his pocket.

Not much, if you're wondering, although the gold coins he had with him managed to survive.

The weather, like so much of life, is entirely unpredictable, and that's probably why it fascinates us so much.

We long to put logic to it, to wrap it in clothing we can understand.

And even then, just when we think we've got it, it throws a curveball at us.

Or, in this case, a lightning bolt.

It's no wonder that humans have longed to control it, but given all we know about the weather, perhaps we should fear it instead.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Sam Alberty and music by Chad Lawson.

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