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Chapter 1: What historical fears about death are explored in this episode?
He was definitely not a cat person. In a world where the best and easiest way to learn about a person's likes and dislikes is by looking at their actions, he had sent a clear message. Cats, as far as he was concerned, were evil. Now, to be fair, judging between good and evil was sort of his forte. He was, after all, the Pope.
Pope Gregory IX, to be precise, who sat on the Holy Throne from 1227 to 1241, nearly 800 years ago. In 1233, he issued a decree known as Vox in Rama, which was a condemnation of something known as Luciferianism, a belief system that the Catholic Church had deemed heretical. And in the process of explaining why, Gregory described a satanic ritual supposedly performed in some parts of Europe.
A ritual, he said, that ended with the appearance of a black cat. The results of this decree were pretty complex, and it's led to a lot of misguided and inaccurate history. Simply put, cats, and black cats in particular, took on a bad reputation.
But while it's true that they became one of many symbols of things like witchcraft and the devil, the Pope's decree did not lead to the mass murder of millions of cats. That, my friend, is just internet rumor. Now, all that said, looking at the historical record, mass panic has happened before. All too often, actually.
But through the lens of Gregory IX and his mention of cats, it's easy to see why. We are, by nature, insecure beings who long for safety. We deeply desire security and comfort. And perhaps more than all of that, we want our fears to be left unfulfilled. Which makes sense, because there is a lot to be afraid about in life.
And for many people in the 17th and 18th centuries, there was even more to fear in death. I'm Aaron Manke, and this is Lore Legends. I think it's fair to say that Quicksand has played a significantly smaller role in our lives than most of us thought it would. Growing up, we were inundated with media that made it seem like Quicksand was waiting around every corner.
Superheroes were constantly getting trapped in its sticky jaws. Protagonists were always unwittingly sucked into it. To the innocent, untrained eye, it seemed like a real crisis. But then we all grew up. And I don't know about you, but I have yet to stumble across quicksand even once. That said, fear doesn't just come out of nowhere.
The stories we hear, the media we consume, they all lay the groundwork, telling us what we should and shouldn't be afraid of. And most of the time, we listen. That isn't to say that the threats we see in fiction aren't actually dangerous in real life. You really shouldn't go into a strange woman's house, whether the walls are made of candy or not.
And quicksand truly does exist, even if it's significantly more rare than we were led to believe as kids. And back in the day, people truly were buried alive, often enough that for centuries on end, it was one of the most pervasive fears in Europe. But it didn't happen nearly as often as the literature of the day would lead you to believe. Here's the thing.
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Chapter 2: How did Pope Gregory IX influence the perception of cats?
And sometimes, they got it wrong. Since the time of Pliny the Elder, there have been accounts of both medical professionals and family members mistakenly declaring people to be dead. Without a pulse, a heartbeat, or signs of breathing, they assumed the patient was gone. Of course, even back then, they knew that there were plenty of conditions that could weaken a pulse or shallow out a breath.
But without the proper tools, it was hard to tell when someone was really dead or when they just seemed to be dead. And if you're wondering how the medical field didn't find a way to untangle this mess faster, then that's totally fair. But really, it wasn't seen as a widespread problem until the early modern period.
Most of the time, not all of the time, but most of the time, doctors were actually pretty okay at identifying who was dead and who wasn't. Sure, there were always special cases, but most of the time they had a pretty good track record. Here's the thing, though. Doctors were almost never the ones to make the final call.
For most of human history, friends and family were the ones who decided whether or not their loved one had actually passed away. And since they didn't have any kind of a medical degree, they messed up. A lot.
The situation got even worse in the mid-19th century when an increase in approved graveyards meant that people were burying their dead significantly sooner, often without keeping the corpse in their home for a few days the way that they used to.
Gradually, everyone's confidence that they could tell who was dead and who wasn't began to waver, and that opened the door for a brand new kind of horror story, premature burial. In the 17th century, there was a huge uptick in publications about these still-living dead as they were once known. By the mid-18th century, people believed just about every story they ever heard about premature burial.
But therein lies the problem. Stories about premature burial sold like hotcakes. chalk it up to horrified fascination, or just a plain old adrenaline rush. Whatever the reason, these things were crazy popular. And while live internment absolutely happened, it didn't happen often enough for Europe's publishers. And so, they started to make up their own stories about it.
And eventually, people stopped being able to tell fact from fiction. Instead, they took all these stories at face value, and the panic began to spread. It was impossible to keep up. At one point, there were so many live burial stories out there that they made up their own literary genre. And like any other genre, it had its own set of tropes. Romance novels have enemies to lovers.
Fantasy has the chosen one. Sci-fi has world-ending technological advances. And when it came to the still-living dead, well, they had a million ways to keep you up at night. One of the more disturbing tropes to come out of this hyper-specific genre was that of the pregnant corpse. The broad strokes were usually the same. A pregnant woman was presumed to be dead and then buried.
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Chapter 3: What role did quicksand play in historical fears?
And that was all it took. With that declaration, everyone decided that Alice must be dead. One maid tried to point out that when she touched Alice's skin, the spot flushed red, meaning that her blood was still circulating. But the maid was ignored. Alice, they said, was gone. Throughout this entire debacle, Alice's husband had been traveling out of town.
When he was informed of his wife's tragic demise, he ordered everyone to delay her interment until he had returned from his trip. But Alice's family quickly grew tired of the stench that was emanating from, as they put it, Madame Blondin's huge body. And so, at an almost insulting speed, they prepared her corpse to be buried the very next day, completely ignoring the husband's wishes.
Alice's family afforded her as much dignity and death as they had in life. Rather than having a coffin specially made for her, they bought a standard-sized one, and then they used sticks to shove her ample form into it. And when one of the pallbearers claimed that he saw the coffin move, everyone just laughed him off.
Within 24 hours of her initial collapse, Alice was buried in the churchyard of the Chapel of the Holy Ghost. The deed was finished, and she would now rest in peace. A few days later, a group of boys from the nearby school were playing near her headstone when they heard a blood-curdling shriek. Someone was crying, "'Take me out of my grave! Take me out of my grave!'
Understandably terrified, the boys ran and told the schoolmaster what they had heard. But not only did the man not believe them, he berated them for lying. Later that same day, though, the boys heard the moans and shrieks coming from the grave yet again. This time, the schoolmaster humored them. He asked the church's verger to dig up Alice's coffin.
Unfortunately, the man refused to do anything until the church wardens had signed off on it, which didn't happen until later that night. By the time Alice's body was exhumed, she was no longer screaming, or for that matter, moving at all. She looked just as dead as she had when she was buried. Only now her body was swollen and her skin was covered in purple bruises.
She had been awake, and in her panic, she had beaten her body against the lid of the coffin. And you would think that by this point, they had all the proof they needed that Alice had been buried alive. That maybe they should take her to a doctor, or at least into the church. But they did neither. Seeing no obvious signs of life, the church wardens just shrugged and put the body back in its grave.
Now, to give them credit, they left the coffin lid open and posted guards to watch the body throughout the night. But after the sun went down, it began to rain, so the men standing watch put the coffin lid back on and went to wait out the storm inside. When they came back out in the morning, Alice was covered in bloody wounds.
From what they could tell, she had scratched herself in yet another attempt to escape. She had even beaten her mouth to the point that it was bloody and raw. And so finally, the church wardens did what they should have done from the very beginning. They called for a doctor. But by the time he arrived, there was nothing he could do. Long after her burial, Alice Blunden had finally died.
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