I found some cow skulls under my great Grandfather's floorboards in Geneva Nebraska; a rural farming town of 2,000 in the middle of the country (USA). I have a feeling there's a lot more in rural America.
Hello fellow Nebraskan!! That actually was something I thought about along side the horseshoe tradition I see in rural parts of Nebraska and South Dakota
Seriously, check this out. A friend of mine was doing work on this old, old house last year, remodeling and all this different stuff. One of the things he found inside of the walls (and he took pictures of everything with his cell phone) was around 9 or so cat skeletons. Discussing this, we thought it was a bit strange to find that many, and the thought is disturbing... but moving on with the story. At some point he noticed that the roof seemed to sag in the middle, meaning it needed a support beam put in to help with this. So down in the basement he went to the middle, tore out a bit of wall, and started on the floor. He had to dig down deep enough for this, but there was all these layers of wood and dirt and rock. A lot to get through. Then came a big boulder he had to lift out, and finally after struggling to remove that from the hole, he found what appeared to be human bones along with what looked like really old panty hose or something. As though at some point in this really old house's long history, something happened or someone tried to hide something. Anyway. After a few days had passed, he was there again at the house, up near the road getting some things together. A neighbor walking by decided to stop and talk, and according to this neighbor, the people who used to live there had said something about "strange occurrences" in the home. To the point that they had a priest come in and bless the house. Also, the priest stopped at the basement, because it "gave him a bad feeling" and he wasn't comfortable going down there. He didn't tell anyone else about what he found in there so... it is a creepy situation. If people put bones in walls for a reason, then maybe more of this makes some sense now. The 'odd' bones hidden deep under the floor though. No idea.
@@Survivethejivewe also had this traditions in Albania up to late 20th cetury. It mostly were goats sheep or cow that were sacrificed. We also have a legend in north Albania in the city of Shkoder for the castle origin.
In Ireland a lot of pagan rites were dressed up in Christian or secular customs to make them acceptable. Water spirits or deities became holy wells etc.. I wonder if the acoustic explanation was a cover for the true purpose as a ward which the parish priest would frown on.
This doesn't surprise me at all. Christmas and Easter were originally Pagan festivals that had a Christian re-writing. I wonder how many different versions of Paganism and their beliefs have been lost to the Christian conversion of Europe.
I once overheard in a shop in Ireland a woman saying to another with amazement that apparently worshipping at holy wells was not in the bible. It's that ingrained and amalgamated.
You can never fully take the pagan out of our folk, it's an integral part of who we are deep down. I'm sure we'll be giving our homes equine acoustic boosts for centuries to come. 😁
It’s not who we are. Barbaric Canaanites. Who later became the Romans the Egyptians may be even as far as the Aztecs were all from the Same wicked seed.
@Darknscary13 It really is true. This fire I have for our culture is an inferno.. I intend to let it all out if things continue as I suspect they will in America.. things are really out of hand.. wars on many fronts, we have masses of flooding immigrants who create chaos.. our government is all traitors.. we have radical Marxists who have infiltrated every institution.. I am going full homestead with the family.. Nithing poles are going up and skull will decorate the perimeter
I'm quite sure my childhood home that was built by my Swedish great great grandfather in the United States had horse 🐴 skulls in the crawl space below the house. I was quite young but remember when my parents inherited the house and were renovating things they had to do some plumbing work below the house. If I remember correctly there were at least 3 skulls down there. Maybe more. None of us had any clue what it was about. The house was built in 1903 or something but had previously had an older mud brick structure in the same place so they could have been from my ancestors that came directly from Sweden in the 1850's who placed them there.
Based on your username and comment, sounds like you might be a fellow Scandinavian-descended Utahn gone pagan? Fascinating if so, as I wouldn't have thought those old folk ways very welcome in the Scandinavian Mormon immigrant communities here, because they're, well, not very Mormon. Lol.
@varalderfreyr8438 Most Mormons would actually think paganism is just weird. Mormonism is cartoonishly literalist, so they'd think you believe in a Thor that has a literal hammer, literal goats, and a literal chariot in the physical universe. If you actually explained it and made them understand it better, they'd probably just think it's a deception of the devil and that you're a good person who's deceived. I haven't told any of my Mormon family I'm pagan. They just know I'm ExMormon. But as for some of these old folk ways, as long as it wasn't labeled as pagan, I'm sure many of the first generations of Mormons would have continued traditions they thought were Christian but we're actually pagan. Many of them settled in isolated communities of Mormon Danes and Swedes that all felt comfortable with these ways.
Funny, last year I was speaking with a "Macedonian" and she said theres a tradition/supersition of burying a sheeps skull under a house when building it
My husband was a builder in Adelaide, South Australia. He would purchase old decrepit houses, restore them & sell them on. In one old coachman's cottage, built c. 1840 - 50, we had to pull up the floor & found single shoes deposited under each external door, along with small items (parts of a tiny child's teaset, coins & glass marbles) under the windows. He said they often found shoes under the door frames of the older houses. Never knew why until years later. No skulls, though, but I seem to recall a cat skeleton once, in the floor space under an old building, which we wondered how it got there, considering the fact that you had to take the floor off to get to the foundations. So, they carried these beliefs to Australia as well.
Found lower jaw of a horse skull in our old cottage in Suffolk (in the original exterior flint wall). Figured it was for protection for the cottage so put it back. Also found half a cart wheel in the roof and left that too. In my current 1970’s built house I put stones with holes in rooms for protection and have 4 horse shoes in the garden - some open side up and some facing down reflecting my English/Finnish heritage…some of us still do these things!
I'm reminded of Poe's story The Black Cat. Perhaps he found a petrified cat in the wall of his house, and wondering why it was there, wrote that story.
It's worthy of note that in New England (USA) there was a rash of discoveries of old shoes and clothing like dresses or vests found in the walls or under the threshold of homes. Locals believe it was a form of protecting a generational home. A homeowner and builder adding his blood to the mortar of the cornerstone or flagstone was another custom that got attention for a brief amount of time. I can only assume it has similar roots.
Seriously, check this out. A friend of mine was doing work on this old, old house last year, remodeling and all this different stuff. One of the things he found inside of the walls (and he took pictures of everything with his cell phone) was around 9 or so cat skeletons. Discussing this, we thought it was a bit strange to find that many, and the thought is disturbing... but moving on with the story. At some point he noticed that the roof seemed to sag in the middle, meaning it needed a support beam put in to help with this. So down in the basement he went to the middle, tore out a bit of wall, and started on the floor. He had to dig down deep enough for this, but there was all these layers of wood and dirt and rock. A lot to get through. Then came a big boulder he had to lift out, and finally after struggling to remove that from the hole, he found what appeared to be human bones along with what looked like really old panty hose or something. As though at some point in this really old house's long history, something happened or someone tried to hide something. Anyway. After a few days had passed, he was there again at the house, up near the road getting some things together. A neighbor walking by decided to stop and talk, and according to this neighbor, the people who used to live there had said something about "strange occurrences" in the home. To the point that they had a priest come in and bless the house. Also, the priest stopped at the basement, because it "gave him a bad feeling" and he wasn't comfortable going down there. He didn't tell anyone else about what he found in there so... it is a creepy situation. If people put bones in walls for a reason, then maybe more of this makes some sense now. The 'odd' bones hidden deep under the floor though. No idea.
2:47 The house I grew up in, in a Scandinavian village, had a horse shoe over the main door. I never investigated what might have been buried under it, though. 🙂
Tom, once again you hit it out of the park. As usual the detail, cross references, and tying everything together was on spot, I learned a lot. We keep a horse shoe up in our house. Also thank you for mentioning the Corded Ware, it is completely relevant, it’s catching on👍
Having a horseshoe nailed over a doorway means good luck in Norway, I've always sort of taken it for granted so I've never thought of it in terms of Indo-European traditional roots until now.
Same here, I always new it represented good luck, but kind of took it for granted as well. Incidentally I have a good dose of Norwegian in my heritage, enjoyed visiting family there back in 88 just out of high school. I live in California.
Its worth mentioning that the aspect of human sacrifice also exists in Europe to this day in a bit of a different form. In Greece and some other balkan states, there is a little-known custom of measuring a stranger's shadow and then burying said measurement beneath the cornerstone or door of a building. This is believed to trap the soul of the unwitting stranger in the stone of the building to protect it, and there are tales of these people soon meeting their untimely end shortly after the building is constructed. This stems from earlier practices of sacrificing a slave and burying them, sometimes while still alive, under a temple's cornerstone.
Even though I count myself an ardent roman catholic this is somewhat interesting to me. My maternal great-great-grandfather discovered all kinds of things in the walls of house on the family estate, when they were renovating it around the turn of the century. According to my mother they found: half a horse skull (it was missing its jaw), a small cart wheel, iron nails bound together in a circle, broken horseshoes, two damaged axeheads, and a wooden crucifix with a corpus made of some type of silver (I am guessing it is the typical 830). Most of it was either immediately burnt or disposed of in another way along with trash from the renovation effort. The cart wheel was hung up on the side of the old barn though, until they tore it down in the 1920s, while the crucifix disappeared at some point during ww2. As a side note painting crosses on the doors/walls and carving/painting the Rose of Holy Olaf on buildings was really common in the region I come from (Telemark). And of course we still paint plauge crosses. There was also a case in the national news here in Norway some time ago where someone found human remains embedded in the concrete foundations of the staircase leading into the finders house.
@@noreply-7069 We do exist and have done so since the late 1800s. We are slowly but steadily growing in numbers and influence too, especially considering the significant number of so-called "intellectual converts" among Norwegian Catholics, meaning we have considerable cultural capital. In reality this is really just a reification of the natural Norwegian religious expression, because the Norwegian Reformation was both top-down and imposed by a monarch no longer concerned with the rights of his subjects.
@@OlavEngelbrektson That's interesting, thanks for the information. I'm not that familiar with Norwegian religiousness, as a Finn I just assumed that basically Nordic Christians are mostly protestant.
@@noreply-7069 That's like saying "An American atheist? That's odd, shouldn't you be Protestant?" Not everyone is a carbon copy of their national stereotypes.
Here in Louisiana US we usually bury a united states gay pride flag worn by a hispanic vet in iraq its an old tradition here because our ancestors were gay refugees
As an odd side note: how did decomposing large animal remains (say a horse) buried under a foundation or corner stone or the threshold, etc. not cause the building to shift as the animals decomposed?
I heard a story of an Indian ruler who buried slaves alive under the pillars of his palace under construction. Now it makes sense, I thought he was being sadistic but instead he was just honoring this ancient noble tradition.
Brilliant video as always! One interesting fact: in the book "Bridge on the river Drina" by the Bosnian winner of Nobel prize for literature Ivo Andrić mentions that in order to build the bridge on the river Drina, children had to be walled in to placate local vilas (nymphs).
The Mayan sacrifice turkeys, before they constructed a house. They distributed the blod and parts of the corps of the turkey according to the four cardinal points.
If I remember right...Serbian/South Slavic folk would have animal bones and/or ancestor bones that were later replaced with red rope the same length as the person. -Stefan Cvetković, The World Tree youtube channel
Great video, Tom. Appreciated. As a musician, pagan, and someome who will be building a house next year on a rather large island in the pacific ocean, i will be sure to pick several choice skulls to lay under the floorboards overwhich i plan to die in 50 - 60 years. Your videos are essential. Thank you.
That is interesting. I had never thought about that. I guess there is great symbolism in someone like Hernán Cortés being buried under a church in Mexico.
@@charleskistner1064 In Christian Mythology I'm not sure what's supposed to represent. sacred ground is supposed to represent protection itself. I'm not sure if the Christians took the concept themselves or if the ground is just sacred because the church is there. So is the ground sacred because of the bodies buried there or because the building?
I’m pleased to see that he has upgraded to a true UA-camr-styled studio with the audio and backlighting and all that. I’ve watched Thom for years and have never seen him treat himself to a studio! Looks great 🫡
Many years ago I was doing some building work on an old farmhouse in north Dorset and dug up a great pile of cow horns buried about two feet down right next to the outside of the house . There were scores of them . I heard from the people who lived there that they subsequently found even more . There were no other remains .just loads of horns . I am puzzled not by what the purpose was but where they got that many horns and what they did with the rest of the animal.
They may have been intended to make things like gunpowder flasks, drinking vessels or snuff containers (mulls) and then not bothered with. Cattle are regularly de-horned on farms.
How were the horns sat within the ground (were they upright), did they contain anything? Cow horns are used in biodynamic agriculture - filled with an organic mix, left to ferment over Winter until Spring - and the contents then mixed in barrels of water to make an organic fertiliser feed.
I explored a lot of old and rural abandones houses in my place in Central Italy in my life, I never noticed animals bones under the floor (because I never searched them) except mummified recent animals or, one time, a dog in a plastic bag into the fireplace but I think it was just a pet's burial of someone too lazy to dig a grave. But very commonly I found the horse shoes on the door or on the fireplace, I also kept the one I found in the very small house I have now.
Besides mummified cats, I've also found ancient hobnailed boots under the hearth or at the foot of the stairs; apparently this was another way to ward off witchcraft. And since keeping one in my toolshed, I've never had a break-in. Highly recommended. 🥾 😉👍
My grandpa's unit was in Bengal (and then Burma) during WWII. He came back with a host of goodies, one of which, he was told, was a charm to keep him safe from tigers. Amazingly, he was never attacked by a tiger, neither overseas nor back in Blighty.
9:42 All Indians to en extent descend from late bronze age steppe people, not just the high castes. Even the high castes have only 30% Steppe DNA, the rest is Indus Valley. Not to be political, but I would rephrase the wording.
I am not indian myself, but some recent studies have suggested that the Steppe may not be home to Indo's but actually Caucasus and Anatolia. Problem is that some Indo-european groups like Hittites and Armenians have very little to none of steppe ancestry. These people live very close to where Indo's supposed homeland so how these groups didn't have so much steppe ancestry. For the case of supposed invasion Armenians, there's no archeological, genetic or even historical evidence for that (we talk about bronze age, writing was invented)
@@varjovirta3085Steppe is the IE homeland. Anatolian theory is BS. The most recent genetic samples found in in the Steppe prove it. Armenians are descended from Yamnaya culture. We have genetic evidence. Don't talk without knowing anything.
Thank you for this presentation. I have looked for information on traditional location sighting, building position, blessings, and such as related to our people's houses. I hope you will address more videos on our folk beliefs regarding homes.
We don’t have many interactions with horses in the modern era. Its a bit amazing to think they were everywhere like cars, all filling the cities and pretty much everyone having one… horse sales were like car sales with different qualities and prices…
I will have to check out your other videos. A fantastic book to read about this subject is : The Threshold Covenant or The Beginning of Religious Rites by H. Clay Trumbull 1896. I built my house and never did bury anything under a cornerstone or such. I grew up with horses, they do have power and see the world unlike us. As far as I know there is only one grave under Enclosure D in Gobekli Tepe. The Tas Tepeler Culture venerated the radiant of The Taurid Meteor Stream, the causation of The Younger Dryas Impacts Theory / Fact, the bovine skull represents The Constellation of Taurus and the two scapula placed over a grave in a sister site, the exact radiant of the Pleiades, which is the seven birds in a row under Pillar 18. Same thing as Isis and Nefertiti each holding bull's shoulder blade at the Pleiades and Tauroctony blade placement. J. G. Frazer goes over this type of thing, I've read 6-8 vols., the Thunder Stones were pertinent in my work, because it was the superbolide not lightning that people were mostly afraid of.
I live in a flat so it's a bit hard for me to check! 😂 Iv got a big scull of a dog or wolf that I found in the pyrenees mountains fully displayed on my shelf. I'm not sure why, but something told me to keep it there!😊
My immediate thought was to ward off evil or guard the house. Reminds me of the Ghost Adventures Demon House episode. I never really trusted any paranormal show since I think it's the producers fucking with the crew. Our dogs were cremated but I figured we should use their ashes and grow some bushes with them. They grew fantastic and it's a nice way to honour them.
In the US finding a cat skeleton with shoes and iron nails and sometimes bottles is not uncommon in older houses. They tend to be collected in the walls, though, rather than the floors or foundation.
There's an old Serbian epic poem called "The building of Skadar" Zidanje Skadra, where in order to have the castle stand, they're commanded by a fairy to sacrifice a brother and sister (who need to have specific similar names) , but having been unable to find them the three brothers that are building the castle are asked to sacrifice one of their wives, the one that brings lunch to the workers first tomorrow. Two of the brothers break the pact and tell their wives not to come, but the third one keeps quiet and his wife gets built into the foundations, requesting that her breasts remain exposed, so she could feed her kids.
The myth also exists in Hungary, Kőmíves Kelemen-Mason Kelemen and the building of the fortress in Déva. (nowadays part of Romania) It's a bit different but essentially the same story. Also in Greece, apparently.
In my region, in the Highlands of the Banat (nowaday's Romania, former Hungary) our custom is to sacrifice a rooster and bury it's head in the foundation of a new building. Then with it's blood we wash the tools to be used in the building. My population has a quite a lot of Celtic inheritage, usually mixed with Roman. Also Germanic, Turanic, Magyar and some Serbian.
Also bull skulls with the horns projecting into the living areas. Human craniums in Catal Huyuk were probably redistributed ancestor remains, but maybe sacrifices.
I got the impression that the family burials, with the floor re-layered with each of them, had a heavy facet of ancestor worship. Which would probably also inherently include the "luck" and protection themes too, I suppose.
In the region of the USA where I grew up, there is a long tradition of interring cat skeletons in the walls of houses near the foundation for good luck. I have a childhood memory of helping my dad tear out a portion of plaster wall in a 19th century farmhouse and finding a cat skeleton trapped inside the plaster. At the time, I flummoxed as to how it could have gotten there. Later, I found out that such finds are typical.
I’m in a house from the 1930s and our builder found a horse when renovating our house, I’m in my late fifties and remember people of my Grandparents age had horse shoes on garage doors, I remember being told it had to be the right way up to catch the luck in the horse’s shoe. I remember a lot of people of that generation had rabbit paws as well.
I'm Swedish and I knew about the lightning protection from my grandmother. And i've been hit by the lightning myself so people can feel safe around me when the gods are hunting through the sky. 😄 My grandmother told me about the wild hunt too when I was a kid. She liked to tell folklore stories.
A few years ago, I was working with four other people on renovating a old Shropshire farm house.Two of us where working on the front porch and on the floor of the porch.They lifted the large stone slab on the porch floor and found two skulls, which looked like either a cow or horse.The owner took some photos and said "It'd be better to leave them there" . The work was completed with the skulls left in situ.
I read about it in the lecoteux book about household spirits. In my country we were cheap as fuck for this kind of thing, instead of using animals, using eggs.
these customs died out recently. But we can be glad that in video games and other fiction these old customs still are being enjoyed. In various games on Steam there are portals made of stone similar to the holy holes video. We can keep the old ways alive in our fiction, video games, and film.
I knew an elderly lady who lived in a very old house. She told me perplexed that she see's what she thinks is the ghost of a horse. So I looked it up and even back to Victorian times a horse was led through a house for good luck before a married couple moved in
There is evidence that the practice of human burials under dwellings was already widespread in the Neolithic Comb Ceramic culture. For example, in the CCC sites of Tamula and Akali in South Estonia, the layer with burials includes wooden poles that were likely parts of houses. Could this be related to the customs of the later Corded Ware culture?
i dont think its an indoeuropean practice...it was a universal practice maybe,ancient turks had similiar rituals as well..today u place bullskulls or goat,sheepskulls in front of your house to keep evil away...or people would bury sacrificed horses with the decayed in kurgans..so,humanity has much more in common than seperates us...
@@Survivethejive a favour...could u please make a video on that?the ancestors of turks?prototurks?because i see ancient turkish tribes getting into contact with norsemen,mixing with hungarians,up to siberia,down to the altays,into central asia...when exactly did what happen?
'Holes', openings in the Earth, stones etc, represent the Volva of Great Mother (Nerthus , among other names) source of Universe. Entrance to Otherworld. Also goes back to Paleolithic.
Water and all watery places represent the womb of Great Mother (Nerthus ) ... the place of origin and destination of everything in the Universe. She is the Cosmic Ocean, the Substratum of all that exists. Flowing water is Her birth fluid. Salt water represents Matter (Mother, Freya, the Lady) and fresh water represents Her Son Lover - Consciousness (Father, Frey, the Lord). They are both aspects of the One - Great Mother, Nerthus. They and She have many names. This is True.
They did it/do it to trap a spirit in a new house. The spirit then watches over the house. Or if there's already a spirit on site then the sacrifice feeds it.
Very interesting. I'm struggling with the acoustic idea tbh. I seem to recall a programme I saw once, where they found human bodies buried under round houses in Scotland. I can't remember much about it now. I think they were relatives, ancestors etc. On another note, something you might find interesting is corn dollies. You probably know about them. My dad's uncle used to have some, I think my dad has them somewhere. Apparently that goes back a long way, from when they used to save the last sheaf of corn, which is where they believed the corn spirit had been chased into by the scythe. Originally I think they used to sacrifice to the corn dolly, but they persisted with making them (without sacrifice) until recent times (maybe some still do).
I've heard of burials under the house entrance in my Ukrainian culture. This custom is not practiced anymore. Due to the constant battlefield, repressions, and deportations, I can see why this custom is no longer even remembered.
I'm from eastern Poland, during renovation of 2 houses i found dead cats in the walls so that tradition is here too. One of those houses was owned by jews before war, fun fact, when nazis were removing ghetto in that town this house was used as train station, and i found a lot of Hebrew papers under wallpaper, one talking about "what can we expect from Germany's new chancellor" lol.
Hmmm, i was kind of hoping there would be a mentioning of origins of "domovoi"(home spirit) of the slavs. I have heard that the origin of that spirit goes back in time when ancestors or family members were burried either under the house or infront of it. This way the ancestors would protect it. Later on "domovoi" would become something like a house per, often depicted as a form of a cat or a small human with feline face features. Many people still pay homage to the old myth and buy the dolls of that spirit to protect home, or tell their children of this myth, that sounds in the night must be coming from the domovoi.
My country in South east Asia does some sacrificial rituals prior to construction. Usually scattering the blood of a chicken. Helps to have an accident free construction.
In Meso-American cultures, it was common to bury a freshly killed chicken underneath the roof’s central support beam. It’s believed to act as a way to ‘animate’ the house by entrapping the animals soul within the structure. There’s a lot of analog references between housing and the human body, with windows and eyes sharing the same name, door and mouth, roof and head etc. Placing a fresh kill within the structure was therefore a way entrap the soul essence within the home akin to how the binding of the head ensures a child’s soul essence doesn’t escape - does this hold any water in pagen tradition?
I never even heard of this before. They should be teaching us this and about our own fascinating history, instead of nonsense like Mary Seacole and John Blanke.
Here in the southern US, horseshoes are still considered lucky and many will hang them over or beside doorways of houses and barns. You see it more in those of English/scots/Irish descent than others.
I would intuit the acoustic concern with the word, that the word the resonance can represent the will in religious rites, interpretation being the skull amplifies the power of the Will and the home as a temple and that it’s prayers be amplified, as sanskrit words and under assumption the local tongues would possibly be understood to be sacred , words are vibrations of the inner willpower. Just intuiting on that as a possibility. Cheers an 77. Added note found a Pigs skull and thigh bones digging up my kitchen floor in Scituate Massachusetts, and even more interesting was the foundation made of circled stones , We also found what I believe were human spinal bones but I never investigated further before we had to move.
This reminds me of a video you made, in which you spoke of those who believe you can see the supernatural between the ears of a horse. It may have been the "Holy Holes" video, referenced at the end.
I found some cow skulls under my great Grandfather's floorboards in Geneva Nebraska; a rural farming town of 2,000 in the middle of the country (USA). I have a feeling there's a lot more in rural America.
That is awesome!
Can you explain in detail? I'm curious how big the structure, where exactly were the skulls, and anything else helpful in constructing a diorama. Thx
Hello fellow Nebraskan!! That actually was something I thought about along side the horseshoe tradition I see in rural parts of Nebraska and South Dakota
Seriously, check this out. A friend of mine was doing work on this old, old house last year, remodeling and all this different stuff. One of the things he found inside of the walls (and he took pictures of everything with his cell phone) was around 9 or so cat skeletons. Discussing this, we thought it was a bit strange to find that many, and the thought is disturbing... but moving on with the story. At some point he noticed that the roof seemed to sag in the middle, meaning it needed a support beam put in to help with this. So down in the basement he went to the middle, tore out a bit of wall, and started on the floor. He had to dig down deep enough for this, but there was all these layers of wood and dirt and rock. A lot to get through. Then came a big boulder he had to lift out, and finally after struggling to remove that from the hole, he found what appeared to be human bones along with what looked like really old panty hose or something. As though at some point in this really old house's long history, something happened or someone tried to hide something.
Anyway. After a few days had passed, he was there again at the house, up near the road getting some things together. A neighbor walking by decided to stop and talk, and according to this neighbor, the people who used to live there had said something about "strange occurrences" in the home. To the point that they had a priest come in and bless the house. Also, the priest stopped at the basement, because it "gave him a bad feeling" and he wasn't comfortable going down there. He didn't tell anyone else about what he found in there so... it is a creepy situation.
If people put bones in walls for a reason, then maybe more of this makes some sense now. The 'odd' bones hidden deep under the floor though. No idea.
@@Survivethejivewe also had this traditions in Albania up to late 20th cetury. It mostly were goats sheep or cow that were sacrificed. We also have a legend in north Albania in the city of Shkoder for the castle origin.
In Ireland a lot of pagan rites were dressed up in Christian or secular customs to make them acceptable. Water spirits or deities became holy wells etc.. I wonder if the acoustic explanation was a cover for the true purpose as a ward which the parish priest would frown on.
That's my guess. It started as a cover, and people forgot that it was a cover and just kept it up, not really knowing why their ancestors once did it.
This doesn't surprise me at all. Christmas and Easter were originally Pagan festivals that had a Christian re-writing. I wonder how many different versions of Paganism and their beliefs have been lost to the Christian conversion of Europe.
That is a good explanation and very possible.
I once overheard in a shop in Ireland a woman saying to another with amazement that apparently worshipping at holy wells was not in the bible. It's that ingrained and amalgamated.
From now on when a video has poor audio quality, instead of suggesting a new mic or EQ, I will suggest skulls!
King James required special markings on the walls of any room he slept in to protect him from witches, so prevelant in the late 15th century.
Wouldnt the skulls also work as isolation against the cold ground?.
You can never fully take the pagan out of our folk, it's an integral part of who we are deep down. I'm sure we'll be giving our homes equine acoustic boosts for centuries to come. 😁
It’s not who we are. Barbaric Canaanites. Who later became the Romans the Egyptians may be even as far as the Aztecs were all from the Same wicked seed.
“… and he offered to be buried alive”.
Just to get a building up! They don’t make men like they used to.
Actually they can take it out of us by breeding us out of existence.
@Darknscary13
It really is true. This fire I have for our culture is an inferno.. I intend to let it all out if things continue as I suspect they will in America.. things are really out of hand.. wars on many fronts, we have masses of flooding immigrants who create chaos.. our government is all traitors.. we have radical Marxists who have infiltrated every institution..
I am going full homestead with the family.. Nithing poles are going up and skull will decorate the perimeter
Yep, even in Finland during the 1600s there were arrests made in Tavastia for making offerings to Ukko who was the God of thunder and harvest.
I'm quite sure my childhood home that was built by my Swedish great great grandfather in the United States had horse 🐴 skulls in the crawl space below the house. I was quite young but remember when my parents inherited the house and were renovating things they had to do some plumbing work below the house. If I remember correctly there were at least 3 skulls down there. Maybe more. None of us had any clue what it was about. The house was built in 1903 or something but had previously had an older mud brick structure in the same place so they could have been from my ancestors that came directly from Sweden in the 1850's who placed them there.
Based on your username and comment, sounds like you might be a fellow Scandinavian-descended Utahn gone pagan? Fascinating if so, as I wouldn't have thought those old folk ways very welcome in the Scandinavian Mormon immigrant communities here, because they're, well, not very Mormon. Lol.
@varalderfreyr8438 Most Mormons would actually think paganism is just weird. Mormonism is cartoonishly literalist, so they'd think you believe in a Thor that has a literal hammer, literal goats, and a literal chariot in the physical universe. If you actually explained it and made them understand it better, they'd probably just think it's a deception of the devil and that you're a good person who's deceived. I haven't told any of my Mormon family I'm pagan. They just know I'm ExMormon.
But as for some of these old folk ways, as long as it wasn't labeled as pagan, I'm sure many of the first generations of Mormons would have continued traditions they thought were Christian but we're actually pagan. Many of them settled in isolated communities of Mormon Danes and Swedes that all felt comfortable with these ways.
P.S. I wonder how my band mates would feel about me bringing horse head skulls and penny rolls to our next rehearsal;)
Funny, last year I was speaking with a "Macedonian" and she said theres a tradition/supersition of burying a sheeps skull under a house when building it
As an internet oldhead I do love a classic "Problem?" trollface reference.
My husband was a builder in Adelaide, South Australia. He would purchase old decrepit houses, restore them & sell them on. In one old coachman's cottage, built c. 1840 - 50, we had to pull up the floor & found single shoes deposited under each external door, along with small items (parts of a tiny child's teaset, coins & glass marbles) under the windows. He said they often found shoes under the door frames of the older houses. Never knew why until years later. No skulls, though, but I seem to recall a cat skeleton once, in the floor space under an old building, which we wondered how it got there, considering the fact that you had to take the floor off to get to the foundations. So, they carried these beliefs to Australia as well.
Found lower jaw of a horse skull in our old cottage in Suffolk (in the original exterior flint wall). Figured it was for protection for the cottage so put it back. Also found half a cart wheel in the roof and left that too. In my current 1970’s built house I put stones with holes in rooms for protection and have 4 horse shoes in the garden - some open side up and some facing down reflecting my English/Finnish heritage…some of us still do these things!
The stones with holes, are they commonly known as hag stones?
We all need to "strengthen our spiritual defence" for what's to come.
This was also done in Slovakia and Czech Republic but I suspect everywhere where Indo-Europeans went
Not so much in southern Europe
@@Survivethejive Not even in prehistory?
@@Survivethejive then how on earth it could be IE practise if for example Romans and Greeks didn't do it?
@varalderfreyr8438 they were indo european
This is one of the most insightful channels I've come across. I've been watching a lot of your older videos too recently. Great work.
I'm reminded of Poe's story The Black Cat. Perhaps he found a petrified cat in the wall of his house, and wondering why it was there, wrote that story.
"No Mr. Rowsell, you can't place a whore's skull under the bulding."
It's worthy of note that in New England (USA) there was a rash of discoveries of old shoes and clothing like dresses or vests found in the walls or under the threshold of homes. Locals believe it was a form of protecting a generational home. A homeowner and builder adding his blood to the mortar of the cornerstone or flagstone was another custom that got attention for a brief amount of time. I can only assume it has similar roots.
Seriously, check this out. A friend of mine was doing work on this old, old house last year, remodeling and all this different stuff. One of the things he found inside of the walls (and he took pictures of everything with his cell phone) was around 9 or so cat skeletons. Discussing this, we thought it was a bit strange to find that many, and the thought is disturbing... but moving on with the story. At some point he noticed that the roof seemed to sag in the middle, meaning it needed a support beam put in to help with this. So down in the basement he went to the middle, tore out a bit of wall, and started on the floor. He had to dig down deep enough for this, but there was all these layers of wood and dirt and rock. A lot to get through. Then came a big boulder he had to lift out, and finally after struggling to remove that from the hole, he found what appeared to be human bones along with what looked like really old panty hose or something. As though at some point in this really old house's long history, something happened or someone tried to hide something.
Anyway. After a few days had passed, he was there again at the house, up near the road getting some things together. A neighbor walking by decided to stop and talk, and according to this neighbor, the people who used to live there had said something about "strange occurrences" in the home. To the point that they had a priest come in and bless the house. Also, the priest stopped at the basement, because it "gave him a bad feeling" and he wasn't comfortable going down there. He didn't tell anyone else about what he found in there so... it is a creepy situation.
If people put bones in walls for a reason, then maybe more of this makes some sense now. The 'odd' bones hidden deep under the floor though. No idea.
2:47 The house I grew up in, in a Scandinavian village, had a horse shoe over the main door. I never investigated what might have been buried under it, though. 🙂
Tom, once again you hit it out of the park. As usual the detail, cross references, and tying everything together was on spot, I learned a lot. We keep a horse shoe up in our house. Also thank you for mentioning the Corded Ware, it is completely relevant, it’s catching on👍
Having a horseshoe nailed over a doorway means good luck in Norway, I've always sort of taken it for granted so I've never thought of it in terms of Indo-European traditional roots until now.
Same here, I always new it represented good luck, but kind of took it for granted as well. Incidentally I have a good dose of Norwegian in my heritage, enjoyed visiting family there back in 88 just out of high school. I live in California.
Its worth mentioning that the aspect of human sacrifice also exists in Europe to this day in a bit of a different form.
In Greece and some other balkan states, there is a little-known custom of measuring a stranger's shadow and then burying said measurement beneath the cornerstone or door of a building. This is believed to trap the soul of the unwitting stranger in the stone of the building to protect it, and there are tales of these people soon meeting their untimely end shortly after the building is constructed. This stems from earlier practices of sacrificing a slave and burying them, sometimes while still alive, under a temple's cornerstone.
That’s low down. Highly unethical.
Even though I count myself an ardent roman catholic this is somewhat interesting to me. My maternal great-great-grandfather discovered all kinds of things in the walls of house on the family estate, when they were renovating it around the turn of the century. According to my mother they found: half a horse skull (it was missing its jaw), a small cart wheel, iron nails bound together in a circle, broken horseshoes, two damaged axeheads, and a wooden crucifix with a corpus made of some type of silver (I am guessing it is the typical 830). Most of it was either immediately burnt or disposed of in another way along with trash from the renovation effort. The cart wheel was hung up on the side of the old barn though, until they tore it down in the 1920s, while the crucifix disappeared at some point during ww2. As a side note painting crosses on the doors/walls and carving/painting the Rose of Holy Olaf on buildings was really common in the region I come from (Telemark). And of course we still paint plauge crosses. There was also a case in the national news here in Norway some time ago where someone found human remains embedded in the concrete foundations of the staircase leading into the finders house.
A Roman Catholic Norwegian? That's odd, shouldn't you be Protestant?
@@noreply-7069 We do exist and have done so since the late 1800s. We are slowly but steadily growing in numbers and influence too, especially considering the significant number of so-called "intellectual converts" among Norwegian Catholics, meaning we have considerable cultural capital. In reality this is really just a reification of the natural Norwegian religious expression, because the Norwegian Reformation was both top-down and imposed by a monarch no longer concerned with the rights of his subjects.
@@OlavEngelbrektson That's interesting, thanks for the information. I'm not that familiar with Norwegian religiousness, as a Finn I just assumed that basically Nordic Christians are mostly protestant.
@@noreply-7069 That's like saying "An American atheist? That's odd, shouldn't you be Protestant?"
Not everyone is a carbon copy of their national stereotypes.
@@noreply-7069 The Christians in Norway would have all been Catholic by default before the Protestant reformation.
Plenty of examples in Tasmania even.
This belief is found in the Serbian epic poem “The Building of Skadar”
Here in Louisiana US we usually bury a united states gay pride flag worn by a hispanic vet in iraq
its an old tradition here because our ancestors were gay refugees
cover yourself in lightning struck cows 🗿
I wonder if there is any link to the IIRC neolithic anatolian practice of burying humans (not always family) under the home.
As an odd side note: how did decomposing large animal remains (say a horse) buried under a foundation or corner stone or the threshold, etc. not cause the building to shift as the animals decomposed?
I heard a story of an Indian ruler who buried slaves alive under the pillars of his palace under construction. Now it makes sense, I thought he was being sadistic but instead he was just honoring this ancient noble tradition.
Probably your most Lovecraftian title yet!
Brilliant video as always! One interesting fact: in the book "Bridge on the river Drina" by the Bosnian winner of Nobel prize for literature Ivo Andrić mentions that in order to build the bridge on the river Drina, children had to be walled in to placate local vilas (nymphs).
When they moved London Bridge to Arizona they found multiple bodies
The Mayan sacrifice turkeys, before they constructed a house. They distributed the blod and parts of the corps of the turkey according to the four cardinal points.
Here in the Appalachian area , they put rattlesnake rattles in 🎻 fiddles 🎻 . There's a good folk tale on the different reasons
Interesting topic, I know people used to leave shoes in walls to ward off evil spirits.
If I remember right...Serbian/South Slavic folk would have animal bones and/or ancestor bones that were later replaced with red rope the same length as the person.
-Stefan Cvetković, The World Tree youtube channel
Great video, Tom. Appreciated.
As a musician, pagan, and someome who will be building a house next year on a rather large island in the pacific ocean, i will be sure to pick several choice skulls to lay under the floorboards overwhich i plan to die in 50 - 60 years.
Your videos are essential. Thank you.
Check Catal Hoyuk. They buried dead under the posts inside their homes.
Interesting story, BTW wasen't there a lot of Kings buried under the church? The same, I believe goes with christian saints in Rome?
That is interesting. I had never thought about that. I guess there is great symbolism in someone like Hernán Cortés being buried under a church in Mexico.
@@charleskistner1064 In Christian Mythology I'm not sure what's supposed to represent. sacred ground is supposed to represent protection itself. I'm not sure if the Christians took the concept themselves or if the ground is just sacred because the church is there. So is the ground sacred because of the bodies buried there or because the building?
As a structural engineer I disavow putting dead animals into your foundations or masonry.
They don't add much to the structural integrity of the building, eh?
I’m pleased to see that he has upgraded to a true UA-camr-styled studio with the audio and backlighting and all that. I’ve watched Thom for years and have never seen him treat himself to a studio! Looks great 🫡
Many years ago I was doing some building work on an old farmhouse in north Dorset and dug up a great pile of cow horns buried about two feet down right next to the outside of the house . There were scores of them . I heard from the people who lived there that they subsequently found even more . There were no other remains .just loads of horns . I am puzzled not by what the purpose was but where they got that many horns and what they did with the rest of the animal.
Well, cows _do_ have a great deal of tasty meat and useful products on them.
They may have been intended to make things like gunpowder flasks, drinking vessels or snuff containers (mulls) and then not bothered with. Cattle are regularly de-horned on farms.
How were the horns sat within the ground (were they upright), did they contain anything? Cow horns are used in biodynamic agriculture - filled with an organic mix, left to ferment over Winter until Spring - and the contents then mixed in barrels of water to make an organic fertiliser feed.
It was somehow common ritual in Poland. Maybe other Slavic nations also did it
I explored a lot of old and rural abandones houses in my place in Central Italy in my life, I never noticed animals bones under the floor (because I never searched them) except mummified recent animals or, one time, a dog in a plastic bag into the fireplace but I think it was just a pet's burial of someone too lazy to dig a grave.
But very commonly I found the horse shoes on the door or on the fireplace, I also kept the one I found in the very small house I have now.
Bulgarian folklore is full of stories and songs where the husband builder had to "entomb" his wife (newlyweds with one child) in the house.
"I do not condone child sacrifices". Okay, noted.
Or as Brits call them, "the last dollymop or coalboy we bought for a shilling".
Besides mummified cats, I've also found ancient hobnailed boots under the hearth or at the foot of the stairs; apparently this was another way to ward off witchcraft.
And since keeping one in my toolshed, I've never had a break-in.
Highly recommended.
🥾 😉👍
My grandpa's unit was in Bengal (and then Burma) during WWII. He came back with a host of goodies, one of which, he was told, was a charm to keep him safe from tigers. Amazingly, he was never attacked by a tiger, neither overseas nor back in Blighty.
It didn't happen to be a monkey's paw, did it?@@auntiecarol
@@lairdkilbarchan 😅
Dad left a pair of shoes and some vodka inside the walls of our house for the domovoi
Iron was said to repel fairies. 😊
9:42 All Indians to en extent descend from late bronze age steppe people, not just the high castes. Even the high castes have only 30% Steppe DNA, the rest is Indus Valley. Not to be political, but I would rephrase the wording.
I am not indian myself, but some recent studies have suggested that the Steppe may not be home to Indo's but actually Caucasus and Anatolia. Problem is that some Indo-european groups like Hittites and Armenians have very little to none of steppe ancestry. These people live very close to where Indo's supposed homeland so how these groups didn't have so much steppe ancestry.
For the case of supposed invasion Armenians, there's no archeological, genetic or even historical evidence for that (we talk about bronze age, writing was invented)
@@varjovirta3085Steppe is the IE homeland. Anatolian theory is BS. The most recent genetic samples found in in the Steppe prove it. Armenians are descended from Yamnaya culture. We have genetic evidence. Don't talk without knowing anything.
Thank you for this presentation. I have looked for information on traditional location sighting, building position, blessings, and such as related to our people's houses. I hope you will address more videos on our folk beliefs regarding homes.
We don’t have many interactions with horses in the modern era. Its a bit amazing to think they were everywhere like cars, all filling the cities and pretty much everyone having one… horse sales were like car sales with different qualities and prices…
I will have to check out your other videos. A fantastic book to read about this subject is : The Threshold Covenant or The Beginning of Religious Rites by H. Clay Trumbull 1896. I built my house and never did bury anything under a cornerstone or such. I grew up with horses, they do have power and see the world unlike us. As far as I know there is only one grave under Enclosure D in Gobekli Tepe. The Tas Tepeler Culture venerated the radiant of The Taurid Meteor Stream, the causation of The Younger Dryas Impacts Theory / Fact, the bovine skull represents The Constellation of Taurus and the two scapula placed over a grave in a sister site, the exact radiant of the Pleiades, which is the seven birds in a row under Pillar 18. Same thing as Isis and Nefertiti each holding bull's shoulder blade at the Pleiades and Tauroctony blade placement. J. G. Frazer goes over this type of thing, I've read 6-8 vols., the Thunder Stones were pertinent in my work, because it was the superbolide not lightning that people were mostly afraid of.
Benjamin Franklin used to own this home.
I live in a flat so it's a bit hard for me to check! 😂
Iv got a big scull of a dog or wolf that I found in the pyrenees mountains fully displayed on my shelf. I'm not sure why, but something told me to keep it there!😊
They did a lot of burying of both people and animals under the house in Anatolia. Like around the time of Gobekli Tepe.
My immediate thought was to ward off evil or guard the house. Reminds me of the Ghost Adventures Demon House episode. I never really trusted any paranormal show since I think it's the producers fucking with the crew.
Our dogs were cremated but I figured we should use their ashes and grow some bushes with them. They grew fantastic and it's a nice way to honour them.
In the US finding a cat skeleton with shoes and iron nails and sometimes bottles is not uncommon in older houses. They tend to be collected in the walls, though, rather than the floors or foundation.
Thank the God's for you sir.
Smudge my house, just in case.
There's an old Serbian epic poem called "The building of Skadar" Zidanje Skadra, where in order to have the castle stand, they're commanded by a fairy to sacrifice a brother and sister (who need to have specific similar names) , but having been unable to find them the three brothers that are building the castle are asked to sacrifice one of their wives, the one that brings lunch to the workers first tomorrow. Two of the brothers break the pact and tell their wives not to come, but the third one keeps quiet and his wife gets built into the foundations, requesting that her breasts remain exposed, so she could feed her kids.
The myth also exists in Hungary, Kőmíves Kelemen-Mason Kelemen and the building of the fortress in Déva. (nowadays part of Romania)
It's a bit different but essentially the same story.
Also in Greece, apparently.
In my region, in the Highlands of the Banat (nowaday's Romania, former Hungary) our custom is to sacrifice a rooster and bury it's head in the foundation of a new building. Then with it's blood we wash the tools to be used in the building. My population has a quite a lot of Celtic inheritage, usually mixed with Roman. Also Germanic, Turanic, Magyar and some Serbian.
Fascinating
the people at Catalhoyuk in Turkey buried people under their houses
Wow I didn’t know that
@@Survivethejive takes the possible origin of the custom way way back into early neolithic.
Also bull skulls with the horns projecting into the living areas. Human craniums in Catal Huyuk were probably redistributed ancestor remains, but maybe sacrifices.
I got the impression that the family burials, with the floor re-layered with each of them, had a heavy facet of ancestor worship. Which would probably also inherently include the "luck" and protection themes too, I suppose.
All very interesting ideas and thoughts here chaps
the aryan myth invasion theory bullshit - I thought you were better then this but obviously not...
You are wrong. See my video on the subject
In the region of the USA where I grew up, there is a long tradition of interring cat skeletons in the walls of houses near the foundation for good luck. I have a childhood memory of helping my dad tear out a portion of plaster wall in a 19th century farmhouse and finding a cat skeleton trapped inside the plaster. At the time, I flummoxed as to how it could have gotten there. Later, I found out that such finds are typical.
I’m in a house from the 1930s and our builder found a horse when renovating our house, I’m in my late fifties and remember people of my Grandparents age had horse shoes on garage doors, I remember being told it had to be the right way up to catch the luck in the horse’s shoe. I remember a lot of people of that generation had rabbit paws as well.
I’m around your age and had a rabbit’s foot. Horseshoes on homes were very common too in the 70s
I am unfortunately in a new build but we are at least on top of the site of the pub where I first kissed my wife.
Cats are very important in occult practices, magick and sorcery 🌝
Yes, cats, like horses and dogs, are reputed to see ghosts. 👻😸
@@patriciahayes2664 you can also tell when your magicks work by cats or dogs or these symbolic animals liking you lol 😆
@@howardhavardramberg333 One of the signs of being a natural witch is that animals are attracted to you, or so it's said. 😀
I'm Swedish and I knew about the lightning protection from my grandmother.
And i've been hit by the lightning myself so people can feel safe around me when the gods are hunting through the sky. 😄
My grandmother told me about the wild hunt too when I was a kid. She liked to tell folklore stories.
@Survivethejive I have a few witch stones! (Stones with holes through which you can see the true form of a Sídhe.
Your channel is a gem
See my video on holy holes
are there any Finns here who know what the "alder horse" is called in our language?
i don't know, sorry.
A few years ago, I was working with four other people on renovating a old Shropshire farm house.Two of us where working on the front porch and on the floor of the porch.They lifted the large stone slab on the porch floor and found two skulls, which looked like either a cow or horse.The owner took some photos and said "It'd be better to leave them there" . The work was completed with the skulls left in situ.
sacrifices beneath the floor.... boards.. *mp40 firing*
My home has very good acoustics. Many horses must be buried below it. Many thanks for the explanation.
I read about it in the lecoteux book about household spirits. In my country we were cheap as fuck for this kind of thing, instead of using animals, using eggs.
these customs died out recently. But we can be glad that in video games and other fiction these old customs still are being enjoyed. In various games on Steam there are portals made of stone similar to the holy holes video. We can keep the old ways alive in our fiction, video games, and film.
I knew an elderly lady who lived in a very old house. She told me perplexed that she see's what she thinks is the ghost of a horse. So I looked it up and even back to Victorian times a horse was led through a house for good luck before a married couple moved in
While watching, I kept thinking about the Neolithic’s plastered human skulls of the Levant.
There is evidence that the practice of human burials under dwellings was already widespread in the Neolithic Comb Ceramic culture. For example, in the CCC sites of Tamula and Akali in South Estonia, the layer with burials includes wooden poles that were likely parts of houses. Could this be related to the customs of the later Corded Ware culture?
well are those comb ceramic?
i dont think its an indoeuropean practice...it was a universal practice maybe,ancient turks had similiar rituals as well..today u place bullskulls or goat,sheepskulls in front of your house to keep evil away...or people would bury sacrificed horses with the decayed in kurgans..so,humanity has much more in common than seperates us...
Turks descended from Scythians who descend from the aforementioned Sintashta
@@Survivethejive a favour...could u please make a video on that?the ancestors of turks?prototurks?because i see ancient turkish tribes getting into contact with norsemen,mixing with hungarians,up to siberia,down to the altays,into central asia...when exactly did what happen?
'Holes', openings in the Earth, stones etc, represent the Volva of Great Mother (Nerthus , among other names) source of Universe. Entrance to Otherworld. Also goes back to Paleolithic.
Water and all watery places represent the womb of Great Mother (Nerthus ) ... the place of origin and destination of everything in the Universe. She is the Cosmic Ocean, the Substratum of all that exists. Flowing water is Her birth fluid. Salt water represents Matter (Mother, Freya, the Lady) and fresh water represents Her Son Lover - Consciousness (Father, Frey, the Lord). They are both aspects of the One - Great Mother, Nerthus. They and She have many names. This is True.
I’m 38 from Michigan USA and I have heard people like thier grandfathers generation doing it here as well although unheard of now
They did it/do it to trap a spirit in a new house. The spirit then watches over the house. Or if there's already a spirit on site then the sacrifice feeds it.
Very interesting. Any connection with public houses / hotels named The Nags Head?
I wonder if the acoustic explanation came about to keep from scaring the more squeamish Christians.
Very interesting. I'm struggling with the acoustic idea tbh. I seem to recall a programme I saw once, where they found human bodies buried under round houses in Scotland. I can't remember much about it now. I think they were relatives, ancestors etc. On another note, something you might find interesting is corn dollies. You probably know about them. My dad's uncle used to have some, I think my dad has them somewhere. Apparently that goes back a long way, from when they used to save the last sheaf of corn, which is where they believed the corn spirit had been chased into by the scythe. Originally I think they used to sacrifice to the corn dolly, but they persisted with making them (without sacrifice) until recent times (maybe some still do).
I've heard of burials under the house entrance in my Ukrainian culture. This custom is not practiced anymore. Due to the constant battlefield, repressions, and deportations, I can see why this custom is no longer even remembered.
I'm from eastern Poland, during renovation of 2 houses i found dead cats in the walls so that tradition is here too.
One of those houses was owned by jews before war, fun fact, when nazis were removing ghetto in that town this house was used as train station, and i found a lot of Hebrew papers under wallpaper, one talking about "what can we expect from Germany's new chancellor" lol.
Hmmm, i was kind of hoping there would be a mentioning of origins of "domovoi"(home spirit) of the slavs. I have heard that the origin of that spirit goes back in time when ancestors or family members were burried either under the house or infront of it. This way the ancestors would protect it. Later on "domovoi" would become something like a house per, often depicted as a form of a cat or a small human with feline face features. Many people still pay homage to the old myth and buy the dolls of that spirit to protect home, or tell their children of this myth, that sounds in the night must be coming from the domovoi.
Doesn't the horseshoe custom go back to the Celtic goddess Epona? And her cult venerating and decorating stables.
My country in South east Asia does some sacrificial rituals prior to construction. Usually scattering the blood of a chicken. Helps to have an accident free construction.
In Meso-American cultures, it was common to bury a freshly killed chicken underneath the roof’s central support beam. It’s believed to act as a way to ‘animate’ the house by entrapping the animals soul within the structure. There’s a lot of analog references between housing and the human body, with windows and eyes sharing the same name, door and mouth, roof and head etc. Placing a fresh kill within the structure was therefore a way entrap the soul essence within the home akin to how the binding of the head ensures a child’s soul essence doesn’t escape - does this hold any water in pagen tradition?
I never even heard of this before. They should be teaching us this and about our own fascinating history, instead of nonsense like Mary Seacole and John Blanke.
The Romans buried alive one man and one woman from each conquered land under the forum of Rome. I believe they found 116ish bodies overall.
Here in the southern US, horseshoes are still considered lucky and many will hang them over or beside doorways of houses and barns. You see it more in those of English/scots/Irish descent than others.
I would intuit the acoustic concern with the word, that the word the resonance can represent the will in religious rites, interpretation being the skull amplifies the power of the Will and the home as a temple and that it’s prayers be amplified, as sanskrit words and under assumption the local tongues would possibly be understood to be sacred , words are vibrations of the inner willpower. Just intuiting on that as a possibility. Cheers an 77.
Added note found a Pigs skull and thigh bones digging up my kitchen floor in Scituate Massachusetts, and even more interesting was the foundation made of circled stones , We also found what I believe were human spinal bones but I never investigated further before we had to move.
I hadn't heard of this until now. Thanks for uploading this, Tom! I learn something new every time I watch (or rewatch) one of your videos.
This reminds me of a video you made, in which you spoke of those who believe you can see the supernatural between the ears of a horse. It may have been the "Holy Holes" video, referenced at the end.
They found mammoth bones under the houses of some Vestonice Gravettians as well.