From the Vault: It Lurks in the Mine Shaft, Part 2

0:06 Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Today is Saturday, so we have a vault episode for you. It's going to be It Looks in the Mineshaft Part 2. It originally published 10-9-2025. Yes, more folkloric and legendary monsters tied to mineshafts and mining. Let's do it. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

0:40 And I'm Joe McCormick. And we're back with part two of our Halloween season series called It Lurks in the Mindshaft, about creatures and spirits said to haunt the minds. In part one, we talked about redcaps, bluecaps, and the Cornish mining spirit known as the knocker or Tommy knocker, which was originally the subject of labor lore in southwest England, but was later imported through immigrant oral tradition to the mines of the western United States. And we're back today to talk about more. So, Rob, in the last episode, we talked a bit about the creature from German folklore and known as the kobold. Would you mind if we do a little bit more on this one? Because I found an interesting theological history connection.

1:27 Yeah, yeah, this will be fun to get into. The kobold, of course, is also well known to Dungeons & Dragons players as the low-level dragonkin creature that is generally encountered at low levels and in beginner campaigns, but has apparently become increasingly popular as a character choice for players. Apparently, there's a whole... very popular meme among younger D & D folks where you would have three kobolds in a trench coat pretending to be a person. And like people make, you know, there's all sorts of fan art of this.

2:01 You can find 3D printed miniatures and so forth.

2:04 Okay, so you said a low-level dragon form. This is a draconic reptilian type creature, but also humanoid, kind of a long snout with scales and a tail.

2:13 Exactly. Yeah, basically goblinoid creatures with dragon features, draconic features, yeah. So not a lot to do with what we're going to get into here, except that they typically live underground.

2:26 Yeah, underground small stature would have in common with the real folklore. But the creature from actual historical folklore doesn't have any reptilian features that I read about. That seems to be a pure D & D invention. So this originally came up in the context of talking about the Tommyknockers, because there is a lot of overlap between these two creatures.

2:46 So I'm going to Go more lightly on the things that are essentially the same between them. The kobold seems to have been well known in German sources of the 16th and 17th centuries and is usually described as a type of goblin or fairy-like creature looking like a little old man. I believe Georgius Agricola, who we mentioned last time, says that they are about 27 inches tall. Other times they're said to be two feet tall, somewhere in that range.

3:13 They are sometimes described as wearing a conical hat and pointy shoes, or they can be dressed like a human miner in mining clothes and mining gear. Sometimes friendly, but often malicious and deceitful. The moral alignment of the kobold, from what I was reading, seems to have the same range as the Tommyknocker, but with a little more emphasis on the meaner side of the scale.

3:40 Okay.

3:41 The kobold is most notably associated with mines, but it's not limited only to mines. It can also inhabit households on the surface. So it can be a household trickster, like many of these other spirits we've talked about. In either place, it would often play tricks, even nasty tricks on people. So in your house, it might throw sawdust all over the floor or kick ashes around out of the fireplace or drop sand in your milk.

4:08 In the mine.

4:09 It could lead you astray, making you think you had discovered a great vein of silver only for you to waste many hours working on it and later realize you had been fooled. The element cobalt actually gets its name from the impish form of the cobalt because early modern miners believed the presence of cobalt ore near a vein of silver was problematic in some way. It made the silver harder to get out or it damaged the purity of the silver in some way. So cobalt was a demonic or mischievous mineral. One interesting thing about the cobalt is that I found references to a passage where Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation, talks about the cobalt as a type of devil or minion of Satan. I

4:59 came across this reference in a book called Early Modern Supernatural, The Dark Side of European Culture, 1400-1700, This is a book from 2012 by an author named Jane P. Davidson, who is a professor of art history at University of Nevada, Reno. Davidson is in the middle of writing about the blurring between categories of supernatural beings. And interesting that that's something that came up in part one of this series, that sometimes you have these creatures where it's not quite clear.

5:29 Are they considered a fairy type creature, something other than human or a ghost of a dead human? Sometimes there is a crossing of boundaries between these categories. A creature can be considered one or the other or maybe both at the same time. In the case of the kobold, some early modern authors treated them as a type of fairy or gnome. Others treated them as ghosts having qualities similar to a poltergeist, a noisy ghost moving things around and making a ruckus. But also they were sometimes considered to have the qualities of a demon or an imp.

6:08 And some authors embraced a fully Christian theological framing and simply said they were devils of Satan. So Martin Luther is an example of the latter. In a passage from his table talk, he says in translation, of course, quote, The devil vexes and harasses the workmen in the mines. He makes them think they have found new veins of silver, which when they have labored and labored, turn out to be more illusions. Even in open day on the surface of the earth, he causes people to think they see a treasure before them, which vanishes when they would pick it up. I have never had any success in the mines, but such was God's will, and I am content. And I thought this was interesting because it recasts the mining

6:58 imp as one associated not so much with the mind as a place, but with the mental space of searching for treasure. You know, he says, even in open day on the surface of the earth, if your mind is in prospector mode, if you are looking for treasures and riches, searching for little signs of ways to profit and get rich, this devil will find you and take advantage of your greed or your hope. So this made me think, is it worth thinking about the difference between devils with a theological framing and goblins or fairy folk with a more secular folklore framing? The latter seems to me to be more part of the geography or the environment, sort of a part of the natural world, but a magical part of the natural world. Whereas the former, the devil, is

7:53 part of a very human-focused cosmology. It's hard to think of a devil as something leading a life of its own, living a parallel existence in a hidden world where you might get in trouble for spying on it, going about its business. You know, like these stories, we have the knockers where people are peeking in on the knockers working and they get caught and that's no good for them.

8:17 It's not really going to happen with the devil because. Devils have no business. They're not going about their own business. Their business is exclusively the tempting and tormenting of human souls.

8:28 Yeah, to use a very late example, you can look at C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, in which, yeah, the demons are expressly concerned with us. They have no other business. Like, this is their entire life. This is their identity.

8:43 I don't know if I've ever thought about it in quite these terms before, but this strikes me as a potent distinction between different types of creatures or imps a person could believe they were crossing paths with. You have this more fairy folk tradition where these creatures are just part of the world and you might by chance cross paths with them. And, you know, things, lots of things could happen from that accidental meeting, but the meeting is an accident. The meeting with the devil is never an accident.

9:14 The devil is looking for you, you know, and if you meet it, it is because you have done something wrong and you have allowed it the opportunity to get you, which is something it's always trying to do.

9:25 Yeah, this is fascinating to think about because obviously if you experience a hallucination or see something in the natural world that you don't have context for, you could go with either explanation. but then you can also think about like the, the purpose, these different supernatural motifs serve. And in the unique environment of a mine, uh, like a deep rock mine, you have both the interaction with the natural world. And therefore you can see yourself leaning more towards these embodiments of nature. Um, nature spirits, nature guardians, nature deities. But then you are also in a highly social environment, you know, working with people, trusting people, having weird feelings about how your foreman is treating you and

10:14 so forth. And all of that seems like maybe a little richer area for the devils to do their work. And I guess the other thing to stress, you know, talking about how different people have characterized these things, I guess this is always the problem when you have, you know, at some later point, an academic or a bestiary writer wants to categorize everything, something that existed in an oral tradition and may, you know, differ from mind to mind, from storyteller to storyteller, and even, you know, situation to situation.

10:46 I think you can get a lot of things exactly like that, where something is much more in the fairy folk mold in how it is discussed among the people. That's its oral tradition mode of being. And then when it's time for someone to come along and catalog that belief in a book, it gets very much recategorized in the theological framing. Yeah.

11:07 And we want to know, what is its challenge rating? Is it a fairy or is it a devil? You have to tell me. Fae or infernal? Fae or fiend? Which is it?

11:16 Well, I've got another little alley to go down if you want to play some more Fey or Fiend games. Would you like to look at some creatures of Scandinavian mining folklore?

11:24 Let's do it. Okay.

11:26 So for this, I turned to a book called Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend by a couple of scholars named Raymond Kvitaland and Henning K.

11:36 Simsdorf.

11:37 This book is from the University of Minnesota Press, 1988. And the authors note that while mining legends are prolific throughout continental Europe, they're actually a little bit less common, though still present, in Scandinavia. So they were able to collect five different varieties of mining legend here based on accounts from different times and places, from Sweden and Norway.

12:03 It seems mostly collected in the first half of the 20th century. So in contrast to the most common subterranean mining spirit found elsewhere in Europe, which as we discussed last time, was usually this elf-like being shaped like a tiny old man, the creature that haunts a mine in Norway or Sweden is most often described as a solitary female being, often a fine lady. There are a few examples here that go by different names.

12:34 You have the.

12:34 Groovra, the ruler of the mine. The Groovefroken, the Lady of the Mine, or the Solvmora, the Silver Mother. Almost exactly like the Tommyknocker and other spirits we've discussed, the Spectral Lady of the Mine has a dual nature. In some tellings, she is benign and even helpful, leading the miner to loads of ore or protecting him from danger.

13:00 But in other situations, she is a jealous guardian of the riches of the earth, and she can cause disaster and strike the greedy miner dead. In addition to the Lady of the Mine and the Silver Mother, there are also stories in Scandinavian legend that depict mythological beings as miners themselves. For example, mythical dwarves are often depicted as industrious miners and smiths. And they could carry dangerous and powerful magic of their own. So the authors include a few specific tales. First, I'll mention a couple having to do with a lone female mining spirit like the silver mother.

13:40 One story from middle Sweden involves silver miners in a place called Halifors Forest. The story goes, when the mine first opened up, the miners worked for a while without finding much. But then one day they heard the voice of a lady calling out to them. It was a woman's voice. And she said, keep to the left. Otherwise you disturb the foot of my bed. These miners were, you know, they paid heed to the voice. They followed her instructions, keeping to the left of the pit. And what do you know? They struck silver. So turned out well for them. Who knows what would have happened if they had done otherwise? Maybe they would have angered the silver mother. Another story collected from near the same place

14:21 in the Swedish province of Vastmanland. This one was called The Lady of the Mine Warned Them. It goes like this, quote, In Clack Mountain, there was a mining pit called Sunshine Mountain. My father heard from my grandfather, who worked there in his time, that one day the miners had emerged from the mine and were eating their noon meal in a shack. Suddenly, a fine lady appeared and said, Go down into the shaft, pick up your gear and go home. The older men did as she told them, but the younger fellows just laughed and stayed. The mine collapsed and they were all buried under the rocks. It was the lady of the mine who had warned them. Whenever she showed herself, a miner would lose his life. Interesting detail here. The old

15:08 men listen and are saved. The young men ignore her and die. Are the old men simply more cautious, or is it that the old men have respect for the legend and thus are saved?

15:22 I think it's probably both. I mean, the youth of today, they just don't listen to the silver mother like the old codgers know how to do.

15:30 What did the young men think the silver mother was? Was she just like, oh, that's just a crazy random lady coming out of the mine?

15:36 I don't know. Maybe, you know, what it probably is, you know, getting back to some of what we were discussing in the last episode and discussing in this one, it probably comes back to that gut understanding of the mine. It sounds. In some cases, it smells. You know, being able to sort of feel the mine. And the young people, they just don't have the experience and or they're more brash.

16:00 Whereas the old men, they've been down there in the mine long enough. I mean, they didn't become old miners by not listening to the mine.

16:08 As George Orwell reports, they can feel the weight upon them.

16:12 Yeah, yeah.

16:14 Okay, so we have the Silver Mother leading you to Orr and the Silver Mother warning you of danger. And then finally, they also include a short remembrance from a place called the Nasa Mine near the border between Norway and Sweden. And that goes like this. Nils Olsen from northern Rana tells how his father once went over to look at the mines of NASA. As it turned out, he stayed away for quite a long time. And when he finally returned, the people were just getting ready to come after him. They had feared that the Silver Mother in NASA had taken him. So here the Silver Mother herself seems to be the threat, a malicious figure who In fact, in the story does not harm anyone, but the people assumed could seize you on a solitary survey

17:01 and make you disappear forever. But fortunately, the father in the story was spare. OK, now a couple more Scandinavian tales in the other tradition, not the lady of the mines or the silver mother. but the spirits and beings who are miners themselves, or at least make some claim over the ore in the mine. One of them is a story collected from Norway concerning a place called Klet Mountain, a mountain with silver hidden inside it. The main character of the story is a ferryman who works a boat taking people across a nearby sound. One day, two men come over and hire him to take them across the sound, Hmm.

18:15 I don't know if the implication is that they were actually dwarves, but there was some kind of spectral miner here. You know, they knew where to get the ore and they gave him the secret and then they're gone.

18:25 And here, well outside of the mine, too. Yeah. That's interesting. That's like if you were to encounter spectral dwarves on Wall Street. Yeah. Trading in like silver stocks or something. And they're like, where did they go? Oh, they were dwarves.

18:39 The taxi driver.

18:40 Yeah.

18:41 Drops them off and they disappear. Yeah. And then finally, here's one last story also collected from Vastmanland in Sweden in 1902. I'm just going to read this one directly. This one is called He Lost His Eyesight. Quote, According to legend, the copper deposits at Lundsnarberg were discovered at the beginning of the 17th century by a man named Martin Finn. One day he went fishing and slept by his fire. He was awakened by the sound of hammering and pounding in the mountain. A rough voice shouted, The first who our treasure espies will lose both eyes. When he pushed aside the coals to quench the fire, the rock was laid bare, and there glistened the red ore.

19:25 That's the copper. But as soon as the exploitation of the find began, Martin Finn went blind. So that story is interesting because there's some ambiguity, at least to me, in the way it's being told. I think, though I am not sure... That this should be interpreted as another example of supernatural minors or at least supernatural claimants to the discovery of the ore there. but it could also be like supernatural guardians or protectors of the mine more like the silver mother i guess it depends on how you interpret the sound of the hammering and pounding that woke martin up like was that the sound of the beings that cursed him pounding the rock trying to reach the ore first In other words, is the speaker of

20:10 the curse a competing spectral miner or was that hammering the sound of like human mine workers or explorers who were there at the same time as Martin? If it's the latter, I think you could interpret this more like the malevolent version of the silver mother. Like I am the spiritual owner or guardian of this mine and I will curse and punish the first person who finds the ore I've hidden there. But it reads to me more like these are You know, the dwarves or whatever other spectral beings, they want the ore. They want to get there first. You know, I saw it first. And if you lay your eyes on it, I will punish you.

20:47 Supernatural competition. Yeah.

20:50 So I was trying to think, are there any consistent moral themes in this Scandinavian mining lore? Like we saw in the early Cornish legends of the Tommyknockers. Because remember, in the Cornish examples... There were moral punishments, and what was punished was disrespect of the knockers themselves, excessive curiosity, like spying on the spirits, or excessive greed and ambition, trying to take more than your fair share or trying to swindle the spirits. By contrast, I tried to actually separate out what is being punished in the three Scandinavian examples here that feature punishment or feature the threat of punishment.

21:31 In one, it seems to be simply looking at the mines, like trespassing or possibly spying. That could be a curiosity punishment, but it could also just be a jealous guardianship of the mine. In another, it seems to be not listening to the warning of the Silver Mother. This might actually not be seen as a punishment, but merely a consequence.

21:52 And in the third, it is accidentally laying eyes on ore that the spirits either guard or seek to extract themselves. And this one, to me, doesn't feel like a moral punishment. It seems just random. So I think there's really no evidence here of punishment for greed or excessive ambition. The magical violence feels more capricious, random and purely dangerous.

22:18 Yeah. As in keeping with a natural force. Yeah. Yeah.

22:22 And I was also thinking about the silver mother. Does the fact that it is a regal, somber, solitary woman change anything comparing it to the idea of a cadre of mischievous, diminutive, old, gray-bearded men? Does that change how the legend is received and told by the people who believe in it? And I would note also that the curses here are more obvious. cute than we saw in the Cornish legends, because if you remember the original Cornish Tommyknockers, they would curse you if you crossed them. But that curse tended to be bad luck or bad luck in mining.

23:01 If the silver mother or any of these Scandinavian beings curse you, it seems more likely to mean violent death or being struck blind, something really acute. Uh, and that's more like the later American evolution of the Tommy knockers, which tended to give omens about death and disaster.

23:18 Yeah, this is interesting to think about. They're more likely to be like little, uh, Gromlin type creatures or, or little men, uh, if they are just cursing your luck. But then if we're looking at it as a, like a death dealer or death itself, um, then what does it mean that it is gendered and given this kind of, you know, almost the stature of a goddess? I've been thinking about that recently. You know, we see feminine versions of death in various cultures and in pop culture as well.

23:53 And like, what does that mean? Yeah. Valkyries are a great example. Like, what does that mean? You know, looking, I guess, considering like the heteronormative male view of on sexuality? Is it an eroticism of death or is it something more maternal? I mean, is it all these things, you know, and then what service does it do? Does it kind of lessen the blow or the fear of an approaching death?

24:20 You know, I want to change the subject. I want to come back to something that I was thinking about very early on in this, and that is that J.R.R. Tolkien's Ever the student of European myth, of course, nicely explored and reused many of these concepts with his depictions of the dwarves of Khazad-dûm, later known as Moria, who were digging too greedily and too deep in the relentless mining for the precious metal mithril. And, of course, you know, unlocked their own doom and released the Balrog upon them.

24:52 Yeah, that's a great connection. And it seems to have a lot in common with some of these tellings, though I would note that Tolkien actually makes the legend much more epic and grim. You know, the warning of awaking this demon of the ancient world, something that is more dangerous than anything you've ever seen, it seems like it goes much further beyond any of these actual old bits of folklore, where the worst thing that's going to happen is like, There's a being that causes a cave-in or seizes you in the mine, and it's just sort of death.

25:25 I mean, it doesn't have this epic, monstrous form like the Balrog.

25:29 Yeah, the Balrog is like a destroyer or ultimately a civilization. It's that level of threat to the dwarves that unlock it. All right. Well, it makes sense that next we're going to be diving a bit into German legend here. And like all these things, all these concepts have some degree of interconnectedness and Scandinavian and Norse. mythology, has strong connections going into German mythology and folklore. So I want to talk about one that was new to me that I found very exciting, and that is Der Bergmonk, which is translated as the mountain monk or even the mind monk.

26:07 More often than not, I found this entity described as the mind monk. Amazing.

26:12 Let's hear about this monk.

26:14 So one of the main sources I turned to for this was the work of the Brothers Grimm.

26:19 Yeah.

26:21 There are a couple of volumes that they put out titled German Legends in 1816 and 1818. And I was working from a 1981 translation by Donald Ward. And yeah, so we have the mind monk here. Sometimes he's given a proper name, Meister Hammerling or something like Master of Hammering. You know, other times Mountain Monk, Mind Monk and so forth.

26:45 And a Concerning the translation here, I found, I have to stress, this is something that's not directly about the mind monk, but it's talking about a German poem that references the mind monk and how we might translate that into English. This is from 1922. Leonard Dalti commented on the translation of the name Meister Hammerling in the poetry of 19th century German poet Henrik Heine. And this is from Notes on Translating Heine from the Texas Review. Basically, the author here notes that there are a few different possible meanings tied up in the name. So first of all, Hammerling is on its own like a hateful gnome or kobold who hammers underground. We've been talking about this throughout these episodes. And is therefore like a trickster, a devil,

27:35 or even a clown. You know, there's a wide spectrum by which this entity might manifest. The hammer, also in German, takes on the connotation of bully. Apparently that's something to consider as well when a hammer or the hammerling is mentioned. And the poem in question that the author is commenting on here concerns a passage where the poet is pleading for Master Hammerling to build a bridge for the poet. Like, hey, Master of Hammering, build me a bridge. And sometimes in English, this gets transmitted into hangman. Apparently, because I guess English readers aren't going to necessarily pick up on the mind monk thing and you need some sort of ominous presence like that you are calling to like, hey, hey, hangman,

28:28 or even like, hey, death, build me a bridge. So I found that interesting and perhaps speaks to the intimidating nature of the monk in question. Because descriptions of this entity sound rather intimidating. We're not talking about a little person here. We're talking about a gigantic figure. in a dark robe, a giant. And the Grimms write that he frequently appears in, there are several different mines that he mentions.

28:56 One is the Graubünden Alps, but especially on Fridays, that's when you will find him in the shafts. He's generally seen there emptying a bucket of ore into another bucket and then back again. So once more, we have this idea of the supernatural entity in the mine Creating a racket, messing with the tools and equipment, but not getting any work done. Okay.

29:23 We've seen this before.

29:24 Yeah. So in this case, you know, basically the Grimms tell a few different stories. And the Grimms explained that the mine owner in this particular case was well aware of this particular spirit and made sure everyone left him alone. Like, don't object to what he's doing. It seems pointless, but... just leave him alone and he won't harm us. And so he kept to himself, didn't cause any trouble. But then, of course, one day, a reckless miner, probably a young miner, scolded and cursed at the mine monk. And this did not go well for him. They explain that the giant hooded figure lunged at this reckless, I assume, youth picks they pick him up. It picks him up and then shakes him so severely that his face turns inside out

30:07 like it doesn't kill him. But for the rest of his life, he walks around with an inside out face.

30:12 Just one curse of that monk and you're inside out.

30:15 Yeah. Now. How are we supposed to interpret this? I couldn't find a lot of scholarly breakdown on this. This is not a grim story that's translated a lot, apparently. But, you know, we can easily imagine this as being a description of a very real disfigurement from a mining accident. It could very well just be a magical, you know, inversion of the face. Or it could be something related to trauma, you know, some sort of like a look of fear locked into the facial features or something. Hmm.

30:45 All right. So there are more mind monk stories, though. They share some accounts of the Anna mine. They say a dozen men were working in the silver-rich Rosencrantz shaft when a mind monk appeared, or the mind monk appeared, and breathed on them, causing them all to drop dead, and the shaft was abandoned thereafter. That's a bad breath. Yeah.

31:07 And this is very interesting, too, because it speaks to the very real dangers of mind gases, which are in mine terminology called damps. This comes from the German dampf, which means vapor. So we have, I was not familiar with this, but we have various types of damps that can occur in a mine environment. And again, in the language and terminology of miners. You have fire damp. This is a gas that occurs naturally in coal seams. It's apparently nearly always methane, highly flammable and explosive at higher concentrations.

31:42 Then we have white damp or carbon monoxide, particularly toxic and perhaps a reasonable fit for the breadth of the mine bunk because at the correct or the wrong concentrations, it can cause death within a few minutes. And this is a risk, particularly in coal mines. We have black damp. This is a situation where the atmosphere won't allow you to light a lamp, usually because of an excess of carbon dioxide and nitrogen in the air. Then there's stink damp.

32:11 hydrogen sulfide. So you have the smell, the rotten egg smell. And then there's after damp. And this is a mixture of gases found in a mine after an explosion or a fire.

32:21 Oh, so a lot of different gas hazards occurring in a mine. Yeah.

32:25 Yeah. But I like this idea of presenting one of these damps again, probably white damp as like the the killing breath weapon of the mine monk. Yeah. Though in this case, I don't you know, it doesn't sound like they did anything to particularly offend the mind monk, except maybe went into a shaft, went into a part of the mountain they were not supposed to venture into.

32:46 Yeah, so it could be that this story in particular has less of a moralistic bent and is instead an attempt to magically explain a natural phenomenon.

32:57 Exactly, yeah. And in most of these stories, I'll get to one where the mind monk talks, but most of the time it seems like the mind monk doesn't speak. You just encounter it. It's fearsome to look at and, you know, hope that he just continues to pour ore from one bucket to another and doesn't breathe on you. Now, let's see a few other tales of the mine monk.

33:17 They mentioned that in the Anna mine, the mine monk appeared as well in the shape of a steed with a long neck and terrifying eyes. So an alternate form here. And in the St. George mine, it said that he appeared in his standard form, you know, the tall man, black robed giant, grabbed a young miner, lifted him up into a silver rich shaft, and then sat him back down so violently that he injured all of the youth's limbs.

33:48 And in the Harz Mountains, the mine monk was said to punish a foreman who was cruel to his workers by positioning himself above the entrance to a particular shaft. And when the foreman emerged beneath him, he caught the man's head between his legs and crushed his skull. Whoa. OK. Yeah. So now we have a little bit of the like the moral, even you could maybe say devil work of the entity here because he's punishing a cruel foreman. Yeah.

34:15 All right. But the best story, and this is one where the mind monk speaks, is the tale they tell of the mind monk of the Harz Mountains, which I found some nice similarities between this and the Japanese ghost story concerning the Yuki Ono, the Lady of the Snow.

34:31 Is this the story of the woman whose secret is kept for many years, but then when the secret is revealed?

34:37 Okay. Yeah. And she's at once like a natural force, but also she takes pity on mortals. But, you know, it does ask for that secrecy in return. Okay.

34:46 Let's hear it.

34:47 Okay. So in this story, we have a pair of miners. They work as a team. And they descended into their shaft one day. And then, uh-oh, they realized that they didn't have enough lamp oil to complete their shift. They'd have to go all the way back home to get more lamp oil. And of course, that was just going to tick off the mine foreman in the process. So it seemed like a real losing situation. But then what occurs? Well, they see a light appearing down the shaft, deeper in the shaft, you know, coming from deeper into the mountain.

35:16 And lo and behold, approaching them is a towering figure in a black robe carrying a miner's lamp. It is the mine monk. And the two miners are, of course, terrified here. But the mind monk actually speaks to them and tells them not to be afraid. Quote, do not fear. I shall do you no harm, but rather good. All right.

35:36 What's he going to do? Well, he pours some of his lamp oil into their lamps and then he grabs their tools and begins to work, doing a week's worth of work in a single hour.

35:48 Seems like a good deal.

35:49 Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to read another passage here. Tell no one that you have seen me here, he says. And then he slammed his fist against the shaft wall, which shattered, revealing a long vein sparkling with pure gold and silver. So once more, you know, a spirit of the mountain revealing a rich vein of treasure inside the wall.

36:10 It's like boon, boon, boon. He gives them the oil, but in fact, they didn't even necessarily need the oil because he did all the work for them for a whole week's worth. And then is like, As a bonus, here's another vein.

36:21 Yeah, they really hit the jackpot with this guy. Sometimes the mind monk breathes toxic death on you. Other times he just gives you gift after unearned gift. But this one, it gets a little weird here because at this point, the gold and silver is so blinding, so dazzling, that the two mortal miners have to look away. And when they look back, the mind monk and the vein of riches are gone. Hmm. The Grimms here add that if these miners had been quicker, they might have heaved a pick into the shaft that had been open or the vein that had been open, but it was too late.

36:55 So they didn't get the full riches that the mind monk had revealed to them, but the oil in their lanterns proved inexhaustible. And this, of course, gave them a huge advantage over other miners. Other miners, their lamps can run dry, and then they have to go out and get more lamp oil. But these two Their lamps have been blessed by the mind monk's lamp oil, and they'll just burn, you know, without end.

37:18 Oh, that seems even better than the vein, right? I mean, you can use that the rest of your life.

37:22 Yeah, but the mind monk did say, tell no one that you have seen me here. And one Saturday night, what do they do? They're out drinking with their friends in the tavern, and they tell the whole story. They end up breaking their word to the mind monk, and the magical oil in their lanterns promptly gives out. Wow.

37:40 I mean, in terms of bad things that could happen after encountering the mind monk, this isn't too bad. They just basically lost the boon that the entity had given them. And it's similar to what occurs in The Lady of the Snow. You know, she, in most tellings anyway, she does not kill the man who has finally revealed what happened on that fateful night during the snowstorm. But she does leave him and I believe takes the children that she has had with him as well.

38:10 But it's not in this story like the mind monk breathes on them.

38:14 Because they have told. Yeah, they told, so they lost the magical lamp oil that he had given. So I like how we see in this tale of the mind monk, several of these various tales of the mind monk, several recurring themes of mind shaft entities. We've got that pointless labor that is sometimes beneficial. A power not to be offended, revelation of riches, deadly gas, lights in the dark, and also sudden violent action, not unlike a cave-in or various other related events. There are various sorts of rapid high-release energy phenomena inside of a mind that could stand in for one of these encounters where, again, the mind monk is picking you up and shaking you, or even picking you up and sticking you into a shaft and then

39:07 dropping you back down again. You have things like mine trimmers and rock bursts, seismic events, methane, coal dust explosions and groundfalls. As for the lights, you know, you have sensory deprivation that might result in visual hallucinations in a mining environment. But then also methane or coal dust explosions, open flame ignitions and even electrical arcing and detonations. lightning strikes in mines. This is apparently a significant risk for some mining operations, which might seem counterintuitive to a lot of folks that don't know anything about mining. You would think, oh, you're underground, you're safe. Not necessarily the case. And then mythologically, I can only assume there is at least some connection

39:50 here between, again, the towering mind monks and tales of stone giants, such as, you know, the Jotun of Norse myth, which included, yes, like storm giants and so forth, but also ice giants, but also mountain giants divided between mountain dwellers and cliff giants. A number of Norse mythological concepts find their way into German traditions, and this includes the figure of Rubzal, or the Lord of the Mountains. And there are various versions of him in other European traditions as well. Joe, I included a painting of this character, Rubezal, the Lord of the Mountains here. This is from 1859 by Morse von Schwendt, I believe. I'd seen this before in a book from my childhood. Maybe it was one of those fantastic legends from time-life books, a series on giants. But,

40:42 you know, we see like a monk-type figure with a A jutting beard, just walking through the forest here.

40:48 Looks like he's wearing flip-flops.

40:50 Yeah, yeah. Some sort of old-timey Crocs. Yeah, yeah. I like it. So I have two more entities I want to discuss here, and they're international entities, which I think rounds things out rather nicely. The first I want to bring up is El Tío of Bolivia. The author, Luke Fater, explored this one in a 2019 Atlas Obscura article that has some great photographs with it as well. So basically, the practices associated with this entity occur in the silver mines of Cerro Rico in the Bolivian Andes. And here, otherwise Catholic Christian local miners leave cigarettes at the base of some apparently 600 shrines to El Tio, which I believe translates to the uncle, And this is a goatish devil looking figure with horns like red skin, a goatee

41:41 and generally a jutting erection. They'll soak his impish likeness in alcohol. Llama blood is apparently offered once a year as well. There are some different accounts of that. And then you also will make offerings of cigarettes or even light a cigarette in his lips. And the degree to which the cigarette burns down might be a sign of good luck.

42:00 From what I understand, LTO, much like many of these other figures we've been talking about, is a being of both blessings and curses that you can do well by appeasing him or you could incur wrath and danger by not appeasing him.

42:17 Yeah, definitely. Definitely getting into this idea of it standing as a kind of nature entity. So as Fodder explains in the article, there seem to be several forces at work with the genesis of this practice. So under Spanish rule, colonial rule, the mountain was mined under just really brutal conditions.

42:35 He writes, quote, between four and eight million Kachuan Indians and enslaved Africans died mining the mountain. And among other names, the mountain was known as the mountain that eats men. So brutal conditions here. And you had this influx, too, of Christianity and its devil iconography melding, of course, with local folk beliefs and those of enslaved people from Africa, again, in a dangerous environment. I think that's one of the things that's so captivating about any of these mining tales is that we have folkloric elements being developed and nurtured like right at the edge of life and death. I mean, that's often the case, I guess, in life anyway, actual life and death scenarios, perceived life and death scenarios. But

43:19 in the mine, everything feels perhaps heightened, right? Like it's a pressure cooker for folkloric belief.

43:27 Well, yeah, I guess there is a temptation sometimes to think of the creativity that drives the emergence of new pieces of folklore, creatures, and stories as coming from an environment of ease and idleness. When do you make up stories? Maybe when you're chilling, when you've got nothing else to do, not much to worry about. But no, in fact, in reality, people are often making up the most interesting and creative stories folklore is developing under really harsh conditions, under times when people are facing threats of death or when they've got, you know, a lot to worry about.

44:01 Yeah. I mean, it's sometimes it's the case. Yeah. You may, you may make up the story or elements of the story when in your leisure time, when things are nice, but when things are bad, when maybe when the silver mother is not too far off in the distance, that's when you find out what the story means. So I don't know. It's interesting to think about here, but coming back to LTO here. Yeah. There apparently seems to be a strong sense that in order to take from the mountain, takes silver from the mountain you have to give back to the spirit of the mountain and that's what these offerings to lt over about um you know that it's ultimately a force that might bring good luck or terrible doom depending on how you've honored and respected him and

44:40 so you know clearly influenced by some visual ideas concerning the christian devil but he seems very rooted in indigenous ideas of earth deities and the entities phallus would seem to speak to this as well you know that um He's an entity that is associated with sometimes doom, but also life. But where does that life spring from? It would seem to be more elemental in nature. Yeah.

45:05 There's another... mining-related entity from the Andean region known as Muki that has some characteristics in common with LTO here. But the Muki in the Andean mines is a being that sometimes, like many of the other stories we've talked about, sometimes can lead people to riches or sometimes can lead them to danger and curses.

45:27 All right. I have one more I want to mention here, and this is one that I was initially reading about in Carol Rose's book of fairies and leprechauns. She brings up an example of a spirit that is also tied to both virility, again, coming back to the phallus of El Tio, but is also associated with minds. And that is the trickster spirit Eshu of the Yoruba people of Nigeria.

45:54 So apparently he, according to Rose, I'm going to caveat this in a minute. Um, This entity is portrayed as both a trickster and a protector, is the patron of both mothers in childbirth and minors in Nigerian coal fields. And he's depicted as having a large lock of plaited hair sculpted like a penis. Now, elsewhere, I've seen this described as more of a huge backward curving horn or like a horned headdress. And the god, while usually regarded as male, also sometimes either takes a feminine form or features feminine features such as breasts. I've also read Eshu described as the anger of the gods. And as one might expect, religions from afar, such as Christianity, have often attempted to recast Eshu as more of a devil figure,

46:40 though clearly he seems to have a more nuanced presence, sometimes described as a god of trickery, but also a god of surprise. And I found that really interesting. But again, a god that, you know, according to these sources... was both associated with mining, but also childbirth and surprise.

46:59 Yeah. So interesting that figures associated from mining from all these different parts of the world and different cultures have a few things seemingly in common. One is the bivalent nature that they can represent either dangers or boons and blessings that they might be helpful or they might be harmful.

47:20 and also that they are so often associated with tricks and mischief, pranks. That doesn't seem like, I mean, obviously I don't have, I'm not a miner, so I have no experience in the mine, but I think the lay person who has no experience would not assume a natural connection between the environment of a mine and the concept of tricks, trickster behavior or mischief or pranks, but that does seem to be very common.

47:49 Yeah, yeah. And as I mentioned in the last episode, I'm sure we have some listeners out there who are miners or have been in the mining business before. If that's the case, I would love to hear from anyone out there if you have particular insight on the, I don't know, just the headspace of miners, if not some of these traditions or remnants of these traditions that may or may not still exist today. I mean, some of them definitely do, but I'm Again, I would just like to hear from from from actual folks out there who have real life experience in the mines.

48:22 Contact at stuff to blow your mind dot com.

48:25 All right. We're going to go ahead and close off this shaft for today. But we'd love to hear from everyone out there. If you have some favorite mind spirits that we didn't cover in this episode, also write in with that or anything from like the wide world of pop culture, magic, things inspired. You know, we mentioned Dungeons and Dragons a bit, but, you know, any other fantasy spin on any of these concepts, we would love to hear from you on that as well. Just a reminder, Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do a short-form episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a

49:04 weird film on Weird House Cinema.

49:06 Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J.

49:09 Posway.

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