Lore 288: Doom & Gloom

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When Giuseppe Fiorelli took over as head excavator on the ruins of Pompeii in 1863, he decided to do things a little differently than his predecessors.

Up till then, the go-to move had been to clear the streets first, then dig out the houses from the ground floor up.

But Fiorelli flipped that on its head, literally.

That is, instead of digging from the bottom up, he decided to uncover the city from the top down.

As it turned out, this technique would be revolutionary.

It allowed excavators to preserve the relics of the lost city with more delicate precision than ever before, and it also made way for an entirely new sort of discovery, one that continues to haunt visitors to this day.

You see, as Fiarelli dug, he began to notice something strange.

Within the hardened layers of ash, he started to come upon odd odd twisting holes, but these holes weren't entirely empty.

No, piled in the bottom were bones.

Human bones.

Soon, with what I imagined to be a blend of horror and scientific excitement, he realized what he had found.

These were none other than the voids left behind by decomposed bodies.

In short, when victims died under the ash, they slowly rotted away, leaving perfect person-shaped hollows in their wake.

And this gave Fiarelli an idea.

He began by injecting plaster into these hollow spaces before cracking away the sediment around them to leave a sort of statue.

The result?

Terrifyingly detailed plaster casts of Pompey's residence frozen forever at the very moment they died 2,000 years before.

The technique became known as the Fiarelli process and it's still in use to this day.

And I have to say, as creepy as they are, it's worth looking up photos of these casts if you haven't already seen them.

They are deeply chilling and heartbreakingly human, and above all, they are a reminder that even the most advanced civilizations are not safe from the end of the world.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

This is how they say it happens.

First, the dead rise from their graves, then a meteor plummets to Earth, starting such a great fire that every mountain in the world melts into a river of molten metal.

And if that sounds bad, just wait for the next part when every human is required to splash into this molten metal lazy river for a little swim.

Now, if you're pure of heart, it will only feel like a bath of warm milk.

For the not-so-righteous, though, well, best not dwell on that, right?

Once the burning river has cleansed mankind of evil and purified hell itself, the world will finally begin again.

Or, so the Zoroastrian apocalypse story claims.

Every culture in the world, it seems, has a myth dictating how the world will end.

For the Chuang people of Malaysia, it involves a disc-shaped planet flipping over like a coin.

Everything that was once on top is destroyed and a new world sprouts from the former underside of the earth.

In Aztec mythology, the world has already ended multiple times, first after being consumed by jaguars, second by hurricane, third by fire, and fourth by flood.

Currently, we are in the world's fifth incarnation, they say, doomed to be destroyed by earthquakes, which to be fair does seem like the direction that we're all headed in.

Now, you might notice that all of these stories don't only involve the world ending, but also starting over again.

And in fact, most apocalypse stories aren't actually irrevocable endings from which there is no return.

Instead, the majority are what's known as cyclical apocalypse stories, or the idea that the world will be and has been destroyed, cleansed, and rebuilt over and over again.

Of course, the most well-known of these in the Western world is the biblical flood.

You know, God comes to Noah, tells him to build an ark, and directs him to bring two of each animal on board.

That old classic, right?

But guess what?

The Bible's rendition isn't the first version of that story.

Far from it.

Because it turns out many other cultures have strikingly similar and often far older myths about a divine flood wiping out the world and the humans selected to build the world anew.

Take the ancient Mesopotamian rendition from 2300 BCE.

And to put that in perspective, the first written version of Noah's Ark comes from 1600 BCE, a full 700 years later.

Here, several powerful gods create the world and all its creatures, but after a while decide that they're over it and send a great flood to wipe out humanity.

One god named Enki isn't crazy about this plan and so decides to warn one particularly virtuous human, a priest named Ziadsira, who builds a giant boat containing various animals with which to repopulate the earth.

Sounds familiar, right?

And then there's the Greek myth in which none other than Zeus figures it's time to give humanity a little rinse.

So he sends a giant flood, wiping out everyone but two two righteous human beings who, you guessed it, construct an ark on which to wait out the flood.

In Hindu mythology, a man named Manu befriends a little fish who becomes a big fish, who turns out to be no fish at all, but the god Vishnu.

This Vishnu fish, or as I like to call him, Vishnu, warns Manu of a great flood that is coming to rid the world of evil and tells him to, surprise, surprise, build an ark.

He also instructs him to save a pair of every animal and then goes one step further than the biblical god insisting Manu also brings seeds from every plant on earth to replant once the tides recede.

Then, when the Great Flood comes, Manu is able to tie a rope between his ark and the horn of the divine fish and safely ride out the deluge.

Stories of the Great Flood exist in the Americas too.

In the Ojibwe and Anishinaab tradition, the creator is sick of watching humans argue with each other, so figures a reasonable response would be to drown everyone.

The only survivor is a guy named Nanabuziu who manages to float his way into the next world atop a log raft.

After a full month riding the waves of apocalyptic water, Nanabuziu and some of his animal buddies attempt to dive down to the old world and bring up a piece of earth with which to create a new one.

First, he himself tries and then a loon makes an attempt, then a beaver, but one by one they all fail to reach the bottom.

Finally, a small aquatic bird called a coot wants to try, despite the fact that no one will take the little bird seriously.

And lo and behold, the coot succeeds, and although it bobs back to the surface dead, it clings tight to a little piece of mud, from which the new world is formed.

The very world, in fact, on which we live today.

And I know what you're wondering.

These stories are all so similar.

Surely they must all be reporting on the same real historical flood, right?

A flood big enough to touch everyone on these disparate countries and continents.

Well, for a long time, scholars were right there with you.

But today, most of them have come to a different conclusion.

Think of it like a game of telephone.

The ancient Mesopotamian version came first, which, yes, was probably based on a real flood.

Then, as the trade routes evolved, merchants and travelers carried more than just goods on their voyages.

They also brought with them stories.

And thus the tale of the great flood moved across the world, shifting and adapting to match each new culture that adopted it, covering the planet not unlike, well, a flood.

From jaguars and fire to the world flipping over, there seems to be as many theories about how the world will end as there are cultures on Earth.

But there's one thing they all have in common.

So far, all of them have been proven wrong.

But some, it seems, have been proven more wrong than others.

When you think of doomsday prophets, you probably envision dudes wearing sandwich board signs and wacky cults.

Maybe those ominous billboards on the highway warning that the end is unfortunately nigh.

What I bet you don't imagine is Christopher Columbus.

But as it turns out, the Italian explorer did indeed predict the apocalypse.

Specifically, he thought that the world would end exactly 7,000 years after its creation, which, by his calculations, meant the year 1656.

Now, Columbus was born in 1451, so he knew that he wouldn't live to see the great revelations he predicted.

But even so, it really wasn't that far into the future.

Close enough, in fact, that it filled him with a great sense of urgency to make sure the rest of the world would be prepared for the second coming.

If there were a shortcut to the east by sea, he wrote, missionaries could be sent there faster, thus Christians could meet the provision for world evangelism before the Lord could return.

That's right, his exploratory missions, including the so-called discovery of the new world, were fueled by none other than a doomsday prophecy.

A prophecy that, spoiler alert, would not ultimately come to pass.

It's hard to ignore the irony of it all, because in attempting to warn people about a fake apocalypse, Columbus himself would be the one to set a very real apocalypse in motion, for the native peoples of the Americas, that is.

Between genocide and disease, some sources estimate that over 90% of the population of the Americas died as a result of European contact.

Yes, 9 out of every 10 people.

Think about that for a moment.

It's unimaginable.

In fact, the calamity was so immense, it came to be known as the Great Dying.

And sure, it's easy to think it was horrendous, no question, but does this really qualify as the end of the world?

After all, to qualify as an apocalypse, you would think that it would have to impact the whole planet, not just the Americas, right?

Well, believe it or not, the Great Dying checks that box.

You see, science shows that the death toll was so dramatic that in addition to wiping out entire societies, the genocide had an effect on the Earth's atmosphere.

Basically, the death toll was so high that previously tended land was, with no one alive to care for it, abandoned and left to rewild.

So many new forests grew up that they hugely lowered carbon dioxide levels, unnaturally cooling the entire planet.

Columbus, it seems, was right to predict that the world would end sooner rather than later.

Just not exactly the way that he expected.

Now, Columbus's prophecy didn't actually garner many followers, but that wasn't the case for other prophets.

In fact, some spawned entire movements.

Take, for example, the buzz that followed doomsday prophet William Miller.

Miller had been an army captain during the War of 1812, and seeing death up close and personal had made him slightly obsessed with questions of the afterlife.

He started poring over the Bible, desperate to figure out what exactly happens after we die.

And it was through this process that he stumbled upon something rather shocking within the book of Daniel.

It was, he became convinced, the key to calculating the exact date of the second coming of Christ.

And that date was pretty dang soon, 25 years later, in fact, on March 23rd of 1843.

At first, Miller was hesitant to share his findings.

After all, it wasn't exactly great news, and he wasn't big on public speaking either.

To quote Miller himself, I told the Lord that I was not used to speaking, that I was slow of speech and slow of tongue.

Despite this though, he had the sense that God wanted him to spread the word, and so by the early 1830s, he had begun letting close friends in on the secret, and then a few select churches, and before long, William Miller was touring New England and Canada alike, sharing his divine warning.

In 1839, a fervent believer named Joshua Von Himes jumped on board as his tour manager of sorts, and from there, Miller absolutely blew up.

By 1840, his message was being printed and reprinted in public journals, and he was selling out revival tents.

For someone who hated public speaking, he sure did a lot of it.

During one six-month period in 1842, this guy preached some 300 times.

Think of it like the Eras tour, but apocalypse style.

Now, sure, not everyone believed him.

He had definitely been pelted with eggs and rotten vegetables a time or two, but amazingly, many people did take his teachings to heart and started preparing for the second coming.

They sold their belongings, they quit their jobs, farmers didn't bother planting for the next season because after all there wouldn't be a next season.

And this wasn't just some fringe group either.

Oh no, by 1834 it's estimated that there were some 50,000 die-hard Millerites along with countless more who were, well, let's just say, Miller curious.

And suffice to say, the press took notice.

Papers started printing wild, sensationalized stories of Millerites driven to insanity and even committing suicide in the wake of his fervent speeches.

None of which was exactly true, but that didn't stop the rumors.

Now, as you may be aware, the world did not in fact end on March 23rd of 1843.

But don't worry, Miller had an explanation for this.

He'd simply miscalculated, he said, and after doing some quick recalibration, he named a new date, a year later, on March 21st of 1844.

Naturally, you might think folks would be a tad hesitant to accept this new new prophecy after the first Nafu, fool me once and all of that.

But amazingly, he gained even more followers.

Followers who were once again let down when the second second coming didn't arrive as promised.

But hey, third time's a charm, right?

Miller named a new date, October 22nd of the same year.

And yet again, the Millerites stayed true and waited for Christ's return.

And I know that I'm starting to sound like a broken record here, but for the third time, the world did not end.

And this time, the Millerites were finally starting to catch on to the fact that maybe this prophet wasn't all he claimed to be.

The event, or rather the lack thereof, became known as the Great Disappointment and marked the final straw for Miller's followers.

The groups disbanded, and Miller even awkwardly took up collections for those who had given away their worldly goods or failed to harvest their crops in anticipation of the end.

But here's what's wild.

Even after all of that, there were a few followers who refused to stop believing.

Namely, one husband and wife duo from New England who insisted that Miller had set the right date but interpreted the events incorrectly.

It wasn't marking the day of Christ's return, they said, but the day when God would start preparing for the second coming.

And so this couple, Ellen Gould White and James White, began preaching their amended Millerite agenda far and wide.

And surprisingly, it caught on.

In fact, it continues to garner followers to this very day.

That group is called the Seventh-day Adventists.

It only happens once every 76 years.

And no, I'm not referring to George R.R.

Martin publishing a new book.

I'm talking about the arrival of a certain comet, Halley's Comet, it's called, and in 1910, this all-star was about about to make a comeback.

Now given the fact that it had been meandering past our planet with regularity since, well, who knows when, you would think that people would have been at least a little blasé about the whole affair.

But buckle up because let me tell you, the world was about to go absolutely bonkers for this celestial event.

It all started in 1907 when a Kentucky newspaper article headlined, Will Cumming Comets Collide with Earth, assured readers that no, of course it wouldn't, before quoting a Parisian medium implying the exact opposite.

Over the next two years a trickling of articles dropped similar ominous breadcrumbs but it was in 1909 that things got a little out of hand and that was all the fault of a guy named Camille Flammarion.

Now he was a super famous French astronomer basically the Carl Sagan of his generation and he was also notably a bit of an odd duck.

For example, at the age of 67, he attributed his youthful energy to the fact that he had never drank water, which was, and I quote, for external use only.

His drink of choice?

Why, that would be wine, of course.

Anyway, in November of 1909, he published an article that was mostly a simple update on the science surrounding Halley's comet.

Nothing crazy, just predictions about when it would be visible via telescope versus the naked eye, that sort of thing.

But Flammarion being, well, Flammarion, couldn't resist a bit of speculation.

Speculation on what, you might ask?

Well, nothing major, just the end of the world.

You see, he noted that the Earth would likely pass through the tail of the comet and remain there for several hours, and science truly could not say what would happen during that time.

Humanity probably wouldn't be poisoned to death en masse by gases in the comet's tail.

No need to worry about all of that, he insisted.

But then for the sake of speculation, Flammarion proceeded to write an entire paragraph describing exactly what it would look like if the comet did horrifically kill every person on Earth.

There were a few fun options.

Maybe the oxygen in our atmosphere would combine with the hydrogen, blowing us all up.

Or carbonic oxide might poison our lungs.

Or hey, maybe our brains would be filled with nitrogen at which point, and I quote, every one of us would experience an unexpected sensation of physical activity and the human race would come to a sudden end in a paroxysm of joy, universal delirium, and madness.

Yeah, not great, right?

Suffice to say, people absolutely lost their minds.

American newspapers spread this description far and wide, casually failing to linger on the improbable portion of Flammarion's statements.

He frantically tried to calm the panic, but it was too late.

The fuse had been lit.

And Flammarion wasn't the only scientist the press took out of context.

Papers gleefully quoted one California professor as saying the comet's tail might lead humanity to feel, and I quote, the sensation of the bugs and insects which are killed by the use of this deadly gas as an exterminator.

And sometimes the headline was all it took.

Comets may kill all life on Earth, says scientists, read a paper in San Francisco.

Coming end of world, said a front page in Utah.

The Baltimore Sun ran a banner headline asking the question, what would happen should Halley's Comet and the Earth get together?

Accompanied by a cheery illustration of the U.S.

Capitol surrounded by charred ruins.

Also decidedly not helping was a historian named Edwin Emerson who published a wildly popular book filled with horrifying speculation, including claims that the comet's tail would have a quote weird effect on a man's brain as moonshine is believed to have on some men, making them lunatics.

But hey, there was an upside too.

Emerson claimed that the comet would also awaken latent powers of divination or second sight.

One man even predicted his own death.

He had been born the same year as the comet's last visit and thought that it would be rather fitting to die on its return.

I came in with Hallie's comet in 1835, he famously said.

It is coming again next year and I expect to go out with it.

It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Hallie's Comet.

The Almighty has said, no doubt, now here are these two unaccountable freaks.

They came in together, they must go out together.

Oh, I am looking forward to that.

Naturally, as 1910 dawned, people started blaming everything that went wrong on the comet.

Flooding in France, comet, volcano eruption, comet, death of England's King Edward VII, definitely the comet.

Now, obviously, the comet was a worldwide problem, but here in the United States, people had a particularly American way of dealing with the potential calamity.

They looked at those headlines and they did not see doom.

Oh no, they saw dollar signs.

Enter a whole new kind of snake oil salesman.

Worried about the end of the world?

Don't fear, this pill will protect you.

So-called anti-comet tinctures flooded the market.

One such tonic was even advertised as an elixir for escaping the wrath of the heavens.

What exactly was in these medicines, you might ask?

Well, when two Texas men were arrested for selling this stuff, their pills were found to be a mixture of sugar and quinine.

Yeah, probably not helpful in the event of cosmic apocalypse.

Some enterprising capitalists also did brisk business selling life insurance policies that would only pay pay out in the event of a comet-related death.

While several psychic mediums in New York were arrested peddling amulets that supposedly protected the wearer from toxic gas, industrious New York bartenders had spread a rumor that the antidote for comet sickness was none other than a healthy swig of whiskey and water.

To quote one real character of a bartender named Tom Sharkey, just keep drinking high balls with plain water, kid, from sunrise to sunset, and there's nothing to it.

But don't think that it it was all doom and gloom.

People were still kind of excited about the whole affair.

One New York socialite named Gertrude Crusser threw a 2 a.m.

bash at her family mansion, which she decorated with skeletons, paper satans, and bats with glowing eyes dangling from the ceiling.

Guests wore white robes as they stared upward, waiting for Hallie's comet to arrive.

And across the country, people indulged in everything from bonfires to hot air balloon flights, eager to catch a glimpse of the celestial spectacle.

Yes, for one strange, unified night, the whole world climbed onto rooftops and bridges, stone walls, and hilltops, eager for a glimpse of the heavens.

But whether you were hoping for a good view or a good old end of the world, you would have been disappointed because the comet's tail produced neither spectacular views nor poisonous gases.

Eventually, dawn arrived, life continued, and the world kept spinning.

Comets and superstition have long gone hand in hand.

In ancient China, astronomers believed that a comet with four branches in its tail was a portent of plague.

Three branches, political ruin.

Pliny the Elder blamed comets for political upheaval, calling them terrifying and difficult to appease.

while in Christian mythology, comets were seen as a symbol of divine anger.

In 1680, Cotton Mather, Puritan clergyman of the Salem Witch Trials fame, published a pamphlet claiming that a comet over Boston had predicted disease, natural disasters, and more.

Across seas and centuries alike, everyone seemed to be in agreement.

Comets were bad news.

One article on Halley's Comet actually referred to them as, and I quote, those erratic tramps of the heavens.

It may seem like a stretch to attribute so much death and destruction to a single object streaking through space, but in times of great uncertainty, people tend to reach for two things above all else, an explanation and someone to blame.

So, hey, why not kill two birds with one stone?

Well, actually, less a stone and more a giant ball of ice and dust, but you get what I mean.

Now, luckily, when it came to Halley's Comet in 1910, none of those terrifying disasters came to pass.

Humanity carried on and a century later we are still here.

Except, well there was one ominous prediction that did come true.

Remember the guy who foresaw his own death?

The one who had been born during the comet's 1835 visits and said that it would be the greatest disappointment of his life if he didn't go out during the 1910 edition?

Well his wish came to pass.

That man passed away on April 21st of 1910, mere weeks from the Earth's brush with the comet's tail.

Oh, and you may may have heard of him, by the way.

This man you see was none other than Mark Twain.

I hope you've enjoyed this visit to the end of the world from floods and comets to doomsday preachers.

We might not know what the apocalypse will look like when it happens, but that hasn't stopped scientists from coming up with a game plan for whatever comes after.

And I have one last story that should explain exactly what I mean by that.

Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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Quince.com slash lore.

This episode of lore is made possible by Quince.

Cooler temps are rolling in and as always Quince is where I am turning for fall staples that actually last.

From cashmere to denim to boots, the quality holds up and the price still blows me away.

Quince has the kind of fall staples you'll wear non-stop, like super soft 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters starting at just $60.

Their denim is durable and it fits right and their real leather jackets bring that clean classic edge without the elevated price tag.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again.

I wear one of their 100% merino wool all-season t-shirts every single day and I've ordered more recently.

If you've been looking for t-shirts that fit great and hold up over time, you really should give Quince a try.

What makes Quince different?

They partner directly with Ethical Factories and Skip the Middlemen, so you can get top-tier fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands.

Keep it classic and cool this fall with long-lasting staples from Quince.

Go to quince.com/slash lore for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.

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When we imagine the apocalypse, it's tempting to speculate about what the world will look like after.

Heck, the entire genre of dystopian novels offers roughly a billion ideas about how the surviving dregs of society will piece civilization back together.

What pieces of our culture will survive?

Our technology, our cities and roads and political structures?

The truth is, it's impossible to know, at least in most cases.

But there's one product of our civilization that unfortunately isn't going anywhere.

Our nuclear waste.

Chillingly enough, some of the nuclear gunk that's being generated right as I speak will continue to be radioactive for millions of years to come.

And this has left scientists with a bit of a problem to solve, to say the least.

How are we possibly supposed to warn people that far in the future to not touch the stuff?

Well, in 1980, the US put a task force together to determine just that.

Basically, the goal was to invent a warning system for nuclear waste repositories that could be understood as far as 10,000 years or some 300 generations into the future.

One idea was to simply write a message.

It seems easy enough, right?

Well, not so much.

You see, even though the task force considered translating their message into every single one of the primary written languages that we now have, plus liturgical languages like Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic, and the native languages spoken near the site of the waste, there's still no guarantee that any of those would still be around in 10,000 years.

After all, if we look back that same distance into our history, written language hadn't even been invented yet.

Who's to say even a scrap of our known languages will still be around 10,000 years from now?

Okay, so language is out, so what else?

Well, what about images?

One suggestion was to carve pictographic symbols into hazardous sites, specifically of human faces in clear states of horrible agony.

One of these even included an obvious spin on Edward Monk's painting The Scream, which seems like a pretty good deterrent, right?

Except there's problems with this one too.

For one, who knows how our faces will have evolved by then?

Not to mention the fact that elements such as ice or stones or water may have overtaken the area, obscuring the image.

No, it would be all too much of a gamble.

A third strategy the task force suggested was to install some kind of hostile architecture around radioactive burial sites, making it difficult to access it in the first place.

One report mentioned ideas with names like landscape of thorns, spike field, spikes bursting through grid, leaning stone spikes, menacing earthworks, black hole, rubble landscape, and forbidding blocks, which sound more like the names of death metal bands than the keys to saving humanity, but who am I to judge, right?

Unfortunately, these plans too relied on physical objects still being able to withstand 300 generations of planetary changes.

These scientists were really going to have to start thinking outside the box, which is very much what they did.

And I had two words for you, glowing cats.

Yes, you heard me right.

Cats.

In 1984, two scientists proposed genetically modifying felines to change color when radiation was near.

Their theory being, since people have been slightly obsessed with cats since ancient times, we'll probably keep them around as a species as long as we can.

In short, because people like cats, cats will likely still exist thousands of years from now.

If you're wondering how exactly a radiation-detecting color-changing cat would be of any use whatsoever to anyone, here's what the scientists had in mind.

The thought was, when future humans and their pets passed through lands contaminated with nuclear radiation, they would notice their cats changing color and would conclude that this must mean radiation was present.

Glowing cat, better keep moving.

Not glowing cat, you're safe.

But you may have noticed that all of this rides on the assumption that people understand why the cat is glowing in the first place.

Which brings us to perhaps the most promising strategy of all.

Because here's the thing, there is one communication tool that has the power to change and adapt and survive in any community that adopts it.

It can hop from language to language and is fluid enough to continually incorporate new details to keep itself ever relevant.

For the entirety of human history and across every culture, it has helped to transmit important lessons and impart cautionary tales, some of which have survived for thousands upon thousands of years.

I'm talking, of course, about folklore.

Think about it.

We today are still influenced by the teachings of everything from ancient Greek myths and religious texts to Grimm's fairy tales and folk medicine, all of which had origins thousands of years before our births and some in languages no longer spoken.

So how do we get people to know that a glowing cat means radioactivity is near?

You just spread folklore about it for people to tell and retell and keep on telling.

How do you make specific hazardous sites famous for their dangers?

Create a fairy tale about how the space is cursed, or start a religion that marks the spot as evil.

One member of the task force named Thomas A.

Sebiak even advocated for the creation of what he called an atomic priesthood.

These priests would be sacred keepers of the true knowledge around nuclear radiation, even performing rituals and storytelling rites, encouraging people to shun the dangerous waste sites.

In the end though, the team's theories were inconclusive.

No solid plan has yet been agreed upon, but I have to say, there is some promising stuff stuff here.

After all, at the end of the day, the only thing with a longer half-life than a heap of toxic waste is a really good story.

This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with writing by Jenna Rose Nethercott, research by Cassandra De Alba, and music music by Chad Lawson.

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