Stuff You Should Know

And she started collecting all these different reports and published the reports along with sketches from the people who'd had, who's made these reports into a book called More Than a Legend in 1957.

So, Chuck, Nostradamus is settling down in Ceylon. Ceylon. Selectives. And he is deciding to put his awesome thoughts down into quatrains.

That's right. Into a book called The Centuries. But at the time, he just called it The Prophecies.

Yeah, The Prophecies of Michel Nostradamus.

And it wasn't chronological or anything like that?

No, and it became a huge sensation due to a few things. One, simply enough, was that the printing press was a recent invention and books were a big deal now. You know, like widespread books.

So, one of those pieces of documentation early on in London is a pamphlet written by, generally believed to be written by this guy named Robert Greene. It's called Greene's Grotesworth of Wit.

And there's a line where he references Shakespeare in it in a contemporaneous fashion. Where he kind of takes a shot at him. He says, it talks about Shakespeare, it says, there's an upstart crow in his own conceit, the only Shakespearean in a country, which kind of translates into he kind of thinks he's the only Shakespeare.

And one of the guys who defended him was a man named William Camden, who this guy in the video referred to as one of the most learned men in all of England. He was actually Ben Johnson's schoolmaster and apparently just knew everything on happening on the literary scene inside and out. And in one of his books, he, it was called the remains of a greater history. He talks about all the great writers of the time and he lists William Shakespeare of Avon in that book.

And one of the guys, Christopher Kelly, who wrote the very cool short story Variable, took us up on that. And he says that he has a creepy novella about two boys whose father tries to kill them called Abraham Road, not Bram Road.

It's available on Kindle. You can go find that on Amazon.com, Abraham Road ebook.

And then he also has a collection called I Held My Breath as Long as I Could, 23 stories of the strange, the sinister, and the literary. And you can get that on Amazon as well.

The publication of On the Origin of the Species from Darwin, which basically, you know, everyone knows what that did.

Charles Dickens wrote the memoir...he basically laid it all out there about what a ghastly, you know, sort of person that this guy was in real life. And it was a huge hit.

I didn't know that was a Steinbeck book. I knew about Grapes of Wrath as I lay dying mainly because that metal band. Travels with Charlie.

The Right Stuff is really amazing too.

There were a couple of sacred texts that survived, as we'll see later.

A lot of their written history was burned by Christian missionaries who said, you don't need that stuff anymore. You're going to be like us.

And a couple of them, the Popol Vuh and the Chilam Balam had these creation stories wherein there was a god of wind and sky called Huracan, hurricane, sound familiar?

And there was a ceiba tree planted on the earth to create space between the earth and sky for people and animals and plants and things to grow.

And humans came third after the plants and animals.

But in the text, it said that they were made out of mud, sound familiar?

And they could speak but could not think or move.

It sounds like a lot of modern day Americans.

Yeah, all they could say is, please kill me.

So the god said, no, that's not good. So they destroyed them with water.

Then they tried again and created a man from wood and woman from reeds.

And they were sort of like functional humans evidently, but were immortal and didn't have souls.

Zombies.

So the god said, well, that's no good.

Yeah, they got him with boiling water, right?

Yeah, that'll do if you're made of...

Well, I guess I thought if they were made of mud, that would do.

But I guess wood and reeds boiling water would, in their minds, it would kill them.

It sounds more torturous, but it didn't kill all of them because some people survived.

Some of the reed and wood people turned into monkeys.

Also very interesting.

Yes.

In terms of like evolutionary theory.

And then finally, they got it right in their minds.

They created what we think of modern humans in their creation story from maize, dough, and their own blood.

But then the gods thought, hey, they're a little too scary smart.

So they might threaten us one day, but we won't destroy them.

We will just cloud their minds and their eyes and make them not as smart.

Right.

And that's their creation story.

Yeah, it's pretty interesting.

And a couple of them, the Popol Vuh and the Chilam Balam had these creation stories wherein there was a god of wind and sky called Huracan, hurricane, sound familiar?

Libby included a quote from an astrophysicist that said, it's the most boring book I've ever read. Logarithm tables are cool compared to it.

Remember in our book of that chapter on Jack Kevorkian, he had that idea in the 60s or 70s where he was like, well, if we're going to execute people, let's just execute them through organ harvesting.

There's a lady named Angela Carter who wrote about the case. She actually factored into our fairy tales episode. She was the feminist writer who rewrote fairy tales.

She describes it as this way, a house full of locked doors that open only into other rooms with other locked doors for upstairs and downstairs. All the rooms led in and out of one another like a maze and a bad dream.

It is a house without passages. There is no part of the house that has not been marked as some inmates personal territory.

It is a house with no shared, no common spaces between one room and the next. It is a house of privacies sealed as close as if they had been sealed with wax on a legal document.

And he was really, really popular for a while, but then he started to really kind of take an increasingly Christian view, a worldview of history and politics, and placed a greater emphasis on the role of religions and Christianity, I believe, in particular, than historians in general were comfortable with, and his views kind of fell out of favor.

Suffice to say, he was a genuine original thinker who is definitely worth reading about, if not reading directly.

And it's a good thing his name was Toynbee. Yeah. It really made it a lot easier to narrow down the first mystery, basically.

It seems to be the centerpiece of the crux of the idea that the tile maker is, let's just say fixated on, the concept of the soul and the possibility that you could resurrect after death down to the molecular level.

There's apparently something in that book experienced by Arnold Toynbee. It's a bit of an autobiography as well and he talks about going to these places that these tiles appeared in in the 80s.

Because in 1983 Mamet wrote a play called 4 AM and he said later that it was an homage to Larry King who back in the early, early 80s was a late night radio talk show host long before he had his TV show.

And in the one-act play, the caller who calls into this radio show talks about resurrecting the dead on Jupiter and how people are dead molecules that you could bring back to life.

So David Mamet probably wrote a play based on a call he heard of the tile maker who called into Larry King in 1980 to explain his views on resurrecting the dead on Jupiter.

It's just not possible that it's a coincidence because of the language that's used in the one act like resurrect dead molecules. Just resurrect them on Jupiter. 2001 is mentioned. Toynbee is mentioned.

And she, in fact, referred to him as the Beast, which was from the Book of Revelations and a name that he would later, I think, kind of keep on using for himself.

It was like asking an experienced team of grave robbers to take up gardening.