During the 15th-century, citizens of Nuremberg, Germany, experienced spectacular Carnival parades highlighted by the appearance of floats known as “hells.”  Featuring immense figures, including dragons, ogres, and man-eating  giants, these hells were also peopled with costumed performers and enhanced with mechanized effects and pyrotechnics.

In this episode, adapted from a chapter of Mr. Ridenour’s new book, A Season of Madness: Fools, Monsters and Marvels of the Old-World Carnival, we examine the Nuremberg parade, the Schembartlauf, as it evolves from costumed dance performances staged by the local Butcher’s Guild in the mid-1 4th-century into a procession of fantastic and elaborately costumed figures, and finally — in 1475 – into a showcase for the rolling hells.

We begin, however, with an examination of a historical anecdotes sometimes presented as forerunners of  the Carnival parades, and of the Schembartlauf in particular, including two sometimes put forward to support a “pagan survival” theory.  The first involves a ceremonial wagon housing a figure of the putative fertility goddess, Nerthus, hauled about by Germanic peoples in the first century and mentioned in Tacitus’ Germania.  The second, also involving a wagon with fertility figure, is described by Gregory of Tours as being hauled through farmers’ fields in the 6th-century.

A third case involves the mysterious “land-ship,” a full-scale wheeled ship hauled from Germany into Belgium, and the Netherlands in 1135. Mentioned exclusively by the Flemish abbot, composer, and chronicler Rudolf of St. Trond in his Gesta Abbatum Trudonensium (Deeds of the Abbots of Trond), it’s characterized by the abbot as a sort of pagan temple on wheels and locus of orgiastic behavior, the precise purpose and nature of this peculiar incident remains largely a mystery.

We then hear a comic incident imagined in the early 13th-century story of the knight Parzival as told by Wolfram von Eschenbach. By way of analogy to the character’s ludicrous behavior, Carnival is mentioned for the first time, or more specifically von Eschenbach use the German word for Carnival, specifically the Carnival of Germany’s southwest called “Fastnacht.”

Our story of the Schembartlauf concludes the show with a description of its ironic downfall through local intrigues fired by the Protestant Reformation. Worth mentioning also, in our Schembart segment, is the heated scholarly debate around objects depicted in period illustrations, which look for all the world like oversized pyrotechnic artichokes.

New Patreon rewards related to Mr. Ridenour’s Carnival book are also announced in this episode, along with related Carnival-themed merch in our Etsy shop, including our “Party Like it’s 1598” shirts featuring Schembart figures.

Your favorite podcast is now seven years old!  As a birthday gift to our listeners, we decided to try a super short, experimental video podcast. For your pleasure, Mr. Ridenour yesterday edited together this vide0, entitled “The May Queen”.

Mr. Ridenour introduces his new book “A Season of Madness: Fools, Monsters, and Marvels of the Old-World Carnival,” explaining how the project grew out of his research for “The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas.”  In this episode, he sketches out chapter themes and topics, from ancient Rome to modern Bulgaria, focusing particularly on cultural hinterlands where festivities still echo the cruel realities of the old, agricultural world and where medieval Christianity intertwines with pagan practice. The Carnival portrayed is at once beautiful, strange, and savage. Spring is welcomed by clowns waving inflated pig bladders. Stalking sheepskin monsters brandish clubs bristling with hedgehog spines, and plows are dragged over cobblestone streets by celebrants wearing masks painted with cow’s blood. Folk horror fans take heart as the Old World welcomes Spring!

Available now for pre-order.  US Publication date, May 6, 20205.

A few advance reviews of the book:

“Sumptuously illustrated and written with clarity, eloquence, and wry humor, “A Season of Madness” is one of those rare books that can pass muster as an academic study yet also provide a good read. Al Ridenour’s meticulous research exposes the subtleties and outrageous quirks of a topic you didn’t know you wanted to learn about until you picked up his book. Under his direction, the madness once again reigns, as the neglected history of European Carnival is placed center stage before the reader, in all its seedy, wild, and triumphant glory.”

—Dr. Paul Koudounaris, author and photographer of: “Faithful unto Death,” “Heavenly Bodies,” and “Empire of Death“

“A Season of Madness“ is a fantastic carnival of a book. Equal parts irreverent and erudite, it lovingly captures the depth, complexity, and subversive nature of the carnival, from its ancient roots to modern expression. Gorgeously illustrated, intellectually hefty, and also fun, it is a seductive introduction to the material cultures, legends, and history of this perennially fascinating and slippery subject.”

—Joanna Ebenstein, Founder and Creative Director of Morbid Anatomy

The Sin-Eater was a figure associated with funerals of the 17th – 19th century, mostly in Wales, and the English counties along the Welsh border. According to tradition,  he was invited by grieving families to transfer the burden of sins from the deceased to himself by consuming bread and  beer in the vicinity of the corpse, after which he might receive some financial compensation. He typically came from the fringes of society and was said to be motivated by a combination of poverty, greed, and irreligious indifference to matters of eternal judgement.

After a quick montage of clips from the generally terrible films made on the theme —Sin Eater (2022), Curse of the Sin Eater (2024), The Last Sin Eater (2007) — we review  the historical references to the tradition, which are surprisingly few in number.

The first comes from a particularly early 1686 collection of British folklore written by John Aubrey, The Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme.  His characterization of the custom  is essentially that described above and despite the early date of the text, he describes the practice using the past tense, though qualifies this somewhat later mentioning that it is “rarely used in our days.”  Mrs. Karswell, of course, reads Aubrey’s original text along with our subsequent examples.

Our next account from 1715 comes from antiquarian John Bagford (published later, in 1776) in  John Lelan’s, compendium, Collectanea. It does not mention Wales but locates the custom in Shropshire, an English county bordering Wales.  It also has the Sin-Eater remaining outside the house where the body lies as he consumes his bread and ale.  Bagford also adds a verbal formula, which the Sin-Eater is supposed to pronounce, mentioning the deceased’s soul attaning  “ease and rest,” for which the Sin-Eater’s soul has been “pawned.” These phrases are recycled in later literature on the topic.

The next text comes from 1838, appearing in the travelogue Hill And Valley: Or Hours In England And Wales by the Scottish novelist, Catherine Sinclair. It’s particularly brief, adding little detail other than specifying the tradition as one (formerly) belonging to Monmouthshire, in eastern Wales.  She also characterizes the custom derisively as “popish,” or belonging to the Catholic past.

The next and final account (not counting clearly recycled retellings of those above) was contributed by Matthew Moggridge in an 1838 journal of the Cambrian Archaeological Association.  It also relegates the tradition to the past, placing it specifically in the Welsh town of f Llandybie. Moggridge removes the ale, keeps the bread, and

Aubrey’s, Bagford’s, an Moggridge’s accounts received greater attention when collected in an 1892 article by  E. Sidney Hartland in the journal Folk-Lore, the publication of the British Folk-Lore Society. Hartland’s “rediscovery” of these texts fueled the interest of the British public and corresponded with a rising fascination in such things as represented in the arts by the Celtic Revival instigated by William Butler Yeats’  1893 work, The Celtic Twilight and the ongoing publication between 1890 and 1915 of James Frazer’s evolving work on folklore, The Golden Bough.

As there are no firsthand accounts describing sin-eating as a custom still in existence a misinterpretation or garbled accounting of another tradition may lie behind the concept of the Sin-Eater. The second half of our show examines the extent to which creative myth-making formed the concept along with the role older Catholic practices may have contributed to the tales.

The earliest literary Sin-Eater we encounter appears in a chapter of Joseph Downes’ 1836 novel, The Mountain Decameron.  Mrs. Karswell reads an evocative passage or two describing a traveler stumbling into a scene of sin-eating while traveling through a haunted bog.  Along with several other quick summaries of post-Hartland novels treating the topic, we hear a sin-eater clip from a BBC adaptation of Mary Webb’s 1924 novel, Precious Bane and learn how  Christanna Brand’s 1939 short story “The Sins of the Fathers,” ended up in an episode of Rod Serling’s 1970s TV series, Night Gallery.

We then survey a number of transactional funeral customs possibly reinterpreted as Sin-Eater lore, among these: “funeral doles” and “avral feasts” at which property of the deceased was disbursed, unsavory pallbearers paid off in food and drink, and the distribution of “soul-cakes “and the custom of “souling” to assure the deceased’s heavenward ascent. Best of all, we learn  about that cousin to the soul-cake — the funeral cookie.

Mélusine is a female fairy of medieval legend. who suffers under a curse transforming her once weekly into a monstrous form. In various tales she becomes either a serpent or fish from the waist down, or fully transforms into a dragon. Mélusine can only break this curse via marriage to a mortal who is obliged to allow her certain secret freedoms.  In return, her husband enjoys magical assistance and sees his fortunes flourish, at least until that day pact is broken.

The most famous version of this story, and the one to which we devote the bulk of the show is a French tale set down in 1387 by Jean d’Arras, Mélusine or the Noble Story of the Lusignans. The patron for whom he wrote, Duke Jean de Berry, belonged to the House of Lusignan, whose ancestral claims to the lands around Poitiers were portrayed by Arras as a matter of supernatural destiny involving the fairy.

We learn how Jean de Berry’s ancestor, Raymondin (Raymond) became engaged to Mélusine after a meeting at an enchanted fountain. Raymond is unaware that this encounter, and all that follows, is the subject of a prophecy set in motion by his accidental killing of his uncle. We hear the curious way in which this transpires, of Raymond and Mélusine’s wedding attended by a multitude of fairy folk, and of the building of Château de Lusignan through a sly collaboration of fairy magic, ingenuity, and human agency.

We then learn of  Mélusine’s and Raymond’s offspring, all of whom are  handsome and strong yet also betray their supernatural parentage via certain disfigurements —  strange birthmarks, enormous stature, huge jutting teeth, or additional eyes.  Much of Arras’ narrative is devoted to the sons’ heroic exploits, particularly as Crusaders in the Middle East, where the historical Lusignans gained lands and reputations, but our episode, focuses only only two sons, “Geoffroy Big-Tooth” and Fromont, whose stories are more intertwined with that of Mélusine herself.

Next comes the central drama, the breaking of the secret pact between Raymond and his fairy wife, which I’ll leave for you to enjoy without spoilers. Mrs. Karswell delivers a fine dramatic reading of this lengthier passage.

While that  situation simmers, we hear how Geoffroy has returned from a giant-slaying adventure to discover that his brother, Fromont, is about to enter a monastery rather than devote himself to expanding the Lusignan empire.  This doesn’t sit well with Geoffroy, whose disproportionately wrathful response is at once horrible and comic.

Reacting to the tragic fall-out of Geoffroy’s rampage, Raymond himself flies into a rage, accusing  Mélusine of producing offspring supernaturally inclined toward evil. Cruel as his words may be, Mélusine seems to validate them, assuming a diabolical presence as she abandons their marriage,  flying away from Castle Lusignan in the form of a dragon.

Finally, we  examine the origins of the curse upon Mélusine, a strange backstory revealed through the discovery of a tablet in fantastic subterranean tomb, one which relates how she imprisoned  her human father inside a mountain and installed  there a giant as jailer.

Our episode then considers some folkloric parallels to the figure of  Mélusine, a possible kinship with the Irish Banshee, the Scottish Bean-nighe or the Lavandières (“midnight washer women) of Brittany as well as earlier 13th-century literary sources for Arras’s tale including works by Gervase of Tilbury, Marie de France, Walter Map, and others.

By the late 15th century, the story by Arras had been retold by the French author Coudrette in a version that became broadsheet fodder for German publishers.  We also hear how the tale  was embraced in Luxembourg, where it attached to Siegfried, Count of the Ardennes, and the magical construction of Luxembourg Castle.

Finally, we look at some  19th-century retellings of the legend as German folktales, some of which made their way into Czech lands, where Meluzina’s doleful howling at her fate is heard in the moaning of winter winds.  The show closes with a snippet of a modern Czech children’s song mentioning Meluzina, as an embodiment of the wind –“Vitr fouka do komina”  (The wind blows in the chimney).

Unfortunately, release of the episode scheduled for this month has been delayed thanks to the Eaton Wildfire in California.

Your hosts are safe and sound, but complications from the fire temporarily halted production.

The episode in question should be available in February.

Thank you for your patience!

The Victorian tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas has been celebrated by Bone and Sickle since 2018.  This year is no exception as we share two stories in this episode, one comic, and one frightening. We begin with the Introduction to the 1891 anthology, Told After Supper, by the British writer, Jerome K. Jerome, following this with “The Old Portrait” from  Scottish writer Hume Nisbet’s 1900 collection Stories Weird and Wonderful. Pour a brandy, douse the lights, and enjoy!

A short extra episode on Befana, the gift-bringing Italian witch associated with Twelfth Night, the end of the Christmas season.  Included in the show is material from the book, “The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas,” traditional music of the season, audio from actual celebrations, and a few pop songs associated with la Befana.

A figure of mythic proportions during his lifetime, Vlad the Impaler’s notoriety receded over the centuries only to be resurrected in the 1970s, when a pair of Boston University scholars went public with theories connecting him to Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula.

We begin with snippet of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the first film to connect the literary vampire with the Eastern European prince — a rather ironic departure from Stoker’s novel, which references the historic figure only in passing.

Vlad’s 15th-century  notoriety was sparked by two German texts both published around 1463, or shortly thereafter. Probably the earliest of these,written anonymously and published in Vienna, was titled, The History of Voivode Dracula, is sometimes called “the St. Gallen manuscript” named for the Swiss city where it is preserved. (“Voivode,” is a Slavic term, used in this context to mean, essentially, “Prince.”) The second  is a rhymed narrative written by Michel Beheim, a poet associated with the Meistersinger tradition and a performer at the court of the King Friedrich III. About three decades later, in 1490, Vlad’s story appeared in northwestern Russia. We don’t know its author but the monk who copied it from a lost original, mentions that his source was written in 1486.

All three of these narratives provide plenty of gruesome anecdotes detailing the voivode’s cruelties.  Before going further into Vlad’s history, and as a quick appetizer, Mrs. Karswell reads a description by Beheim of a ghastly picnic said to have been enjoyed  by the voivode.

Next, we clear away some misconceptions regarding Vlad the Impaler, the first having to do with his name. Called “Vlad Țepeș”  (Vlad the Impaler) in Romanian, he is less dramatically referred to as Vlad III. His father, Vlad II, was also known as  “Vlad Dracul.”  His son, using the Slavonic possessive form of that was referred to as Vlad Drăculea (that is, “of – the son of – Vlad Dracul). The father’s epitaph means “Vlad the Dragon,” referencing Vlad II’s  (and later Vlad III’s) membership in The Order of the Dragon, a society of Christian knights dedicated to staving off incursions of the Muslim Turks into Christendom.

We then have a look at Vlad III’s over-emphasized association with Transylvania, one of the three historical regions (along with Moldavia and Wallachia) that would later become Romania. In fact, it was not Transylvania but Wallachia over which both Vlad II and Vlad III served as voivodes.  While Transylvania was his birthplace, at the age of 4, he and his family departed for Wallachia, and Vlad’s historical relationship with Transylvania was later anything but friendly.

We then look at Wallachia’s role as a buffer between Ottoman regions to the south and Hungarian/German controlled regions to the north, as well as the regrettable deal Vlad II made with the Turks to keep the peace.

The last involved  the “child levy,” or “blood tax” demanded by Sultan Murad II.  Known in Turkish as “devshirme,” this was a sort of ransom imposed on Vlad II, requiring that he leave his sons Vlad and Radu with the Turkish court to ensure the ruler’s compliance with the sultan’s demands.  We hear some interesting details on this four-year exile, some of which likely shaped Vlad III’s actions later in life.

Before Vlad III is released, his father and eldst brother Mirea are murdered by Hungarian forces, who install their desired ruler on the Wallachian throne. While Vlad III manages to briefly seize his father’s throne while the Hungarians are distracted in conflicts with the Turks, he’s again forced into exile after only serving one month.

After several year in exile among the Ottomans and Moldavians, Dracula takes advantage of the death of the Hungarian ruler, János Hunyadi, to again sieze the Wallachian throne, and it’s during this second reign that he gains his notoriety.  The first order of importance is to  punish Transylvanians who aided the Hungarians responsible for his father and brother’s deaths. Beheim provides some gratuitously gruesome descriptions of exotic acts of revenge.

We then hear of Vlad III’s murder of Turkish emissaries, and of the campaign Sultan Mehmet II mounts to punish the Wallachians. Vasly outnumbered by the Turkish forces, Vlad and his men resort to guerrilla warfare to slow down the Ottoman army advancing on his capital city of Târgovişte.

On the night of June 17, 1462, Wallachian troops under Vlad conduct an attack on the sleeping Ottoman camp, in an assult known by  Romanians as the “The Night Battle” or “Battle with Torches.” The actual tactical gains made during this foray are debated, but the following day, the Ottomans are subjected to a powerful psychological assault as they encounter a forest of their comrades collected from the battlefield and impaled on stakes.  According to the Greek historian Laonikos Chalkokondyles, roughly 20,000 corpses were seen spitted in a field measuring two miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide.

After this, we hear of Dracula’s 14-year imprisonment by the Hungarians, during which he supposedly amused himself by impaling rats in his cell.  We then hear of the voivode’s death at the hands of his own men in 1476, and decapitation by the Turks.

The literary embellishments of some of our German texts, and the rationale for such, are next discussed and these are contrasted with stories from the Russian collection that offer a slightly more balanced picture of the ruler, portraying him through several anecdotes as one who maintains social order through highly effective (if brutally excessive) means.

We then take up the question of whether, or to what extent,  Bram Stoker based his vampire on Vlad III, finding but a few points of agreement as well as details (largely geographic)  arguing against the idea.

Last, we have a look at Vlad the Impaler’s rediscovery via the 1972 book, In Search of Dracula, by Romanian émigré Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, a scholar of Russian and Eastern European history.  Mr. Ridenour offers some sour grapes on the success of  this bestseller and ends the show with a clip featuring Christopher Lee from a 1975 same-name documentary inspired by the Florescu-McNally  book

The devilish reputation Ouija boards enjoy in horror films is a relatively new phenomenon.  In the Victorian era, they were regarded by “psychical researchers” as something to be embraced in a spirit of calm scientific inquiry, while Spiritualists saw in them a means of reaching out to those who’d passed into the “Summerland,” an anodyne realm of sweetness and light.

While these were the dominant attitudes of the day, the idea of spirit communications has  always been fraught with a sense of the uncanny, tainted even by an association with witchcraft and the Devil. We’ll see this element already present in those first communications of the Spiritualist movement, the dialogues the Fox sisters with an unseen presence at first presumed to be a sort of devil.

As we saw in our previous episode, spirit-boards represent a particular danger to those with psychologically fragile constitutions. Beyond the instances of obsessive madness detailed previously, this episode examines a handful of cases from the 1920s and ’30s involving actual bloodshed — murder, suicide, and explicit invocations of the Devil.

Of  course these remained isolated incidents, and historical distrust of the Ouija was generally low, and all but non-existent during the spiritual and occult explorations of the 1960s. But all of this would soon change with William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel, The Exorcist, and its 1973 cinematic adaptation, both of which famously depict the Ouija board as a channel through which the Devil enters.

Some listeners may know that Blatty’s novel was inspired by actual reports of an exorcism that took place in America of the late 1940s, one involving a teenage boy rather than girl, a change Blatty said he’d made to help preserve the privacy of the boy.

Within the last decade, as individuals involved in these incidents have passed on, more information on this case has made its way to public scrutiny.  In the last half of our show, we examine the role spirit-boards and Spiritualist practices played in these events as revealed by a day-to-day log kept by the lead exorcist during the rites . Mrs. Karswell reads for us the passages from the journal.

An element Blatty wove in with this source material was a specific identity of the demon possessing his fictional victim — Pazuzu, an ancient Mesopotamian wind spirit bringing dro ught, famine, storms, and all manner of ill fortune.  As this figure was digested into pop culture over the next decades, a version of its name, “Zozo,” would eventually appear in the  early 2000s as a destructive entity often channeled by unwary Ouija user.  We take a look at this bit of evolving web-lore, showcased in paranormal shows, like Ghost Adventures and at the heart of the 2012 indie horror film I am Zozo.