00:00:03
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
00:00:10
Speaker 2: Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Artifact, a short-form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on particular objects, ideas, and moments in time. This week I have a spooky fictional artifact to discuss with you for the week of Halloween. It is The Devil's Country, a deeply haunted, tiled, mosaic room central to the plot of Clive Barker's 2001 horror novel, Cold Heart Canyon. Barker frequently incorporates a work of visual art and or craftsmanship into his fictions, a work that serves as some manner of gateway to another world, or it contains another world altogether. The biggest mainstream example of this is, of course, the Lament Configuration puzzle box from The Hellbound Heart and the ensuing Hellraiser film franchise. But we also find the art as portal element in Weave World and the Book of the Art series. It's a fitting recurring theme given Barker's work as both a writer and as a painter. I'm going to dig a bit more into spoilery territory on Coldheart Canyon from here on out. So if you want to venture into this Hollywood ghost story completely fresh, best go ahead and pause things now or skip ahead to the next episode. I'm not going to reveal how the book ends or anything like that, but I am going to reveal a few things. Alright, are we good? Here we go. When we first encounter the Devil's Country, it resides in the place it was commissioned, a subterranean room beneath a medieval Romanian castle. The tiles illustrate a phantasmagorical wilderness full of cruel hunters, monstrous beasts, and all manner of depravities. The setting at this point is 1920, and the work interests Hollywood agent Willem Zephyr, who's visiting with Romanian-born Hollywood starlet Katia Lupi. Zephyr buys the old masterwork from the monks who protect it, hoping to win Katia's heart by having it relocated to America and gifting it to her. And that's exactly what he attempts to do. He has it catalogued, disassembled, shipped across an ocean and a continent, and then reconstructed in the basement of a mansion located in what will become known as Cold Hard Canyon in the Hollywood Hills. But of course, the mysterious work of art is more than just a room made out of mosaics. It's a gateway into some other realm, and those who interact with it become addicted to its life-extending and soul-corrupting powers. It ultimately allows Caciolupi to live into the 21st century without visibly aging at all, while the ghosts of the various Hollywood elites of yesteryear once exposed to the room's power, haunt the grounds of her mansion, begging to be let back in so they can see it once more, so they can experience its power once more. But of course, Katja keeps it greedily to herself at this point, because she's not sure how much longer it will last. She doesn't want to use it up, and she just wants to keep on living, even though she's now a recluse and is removed from the Hollywood scene. In the book, we eventually learn the origin of the devil's country, this fabulous work of mosaic art now situated in the basement of a mansion in the Hollywood Hills. We learn that a Romanian duke by the name of Goga returned from the Crusades, hunted and killed a goat that turned out to actually be the devil's son. And his punishment, the devil's wife, Lilith, punished him and his fellow hunters with an eternal hunt to recapture her satyr-like child. They're trapped within this pocket world contained within the grand mosaic work that Lilith herself commissioned in the Duke's old castle in Romania. It's a richly imagined setting full of darkness and perversion. And with it, Barker plays with both elements of the folkloric wild hunt with Goga and his men, Mesopotamian and Jewish mythology with Lilith, who in some traditions is held to have been Adam's first wife. and then, in this telling anyway, becomes the wife of the devil. And then there is the room itself. So it's worth noting that all works of art are really portals of some sort, right? And naturally, any landscape painting is going to transport us there, perhaps even connecting with our primal hunter-gatherer survival instincts. We've talked about this in some older episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. There are some Some ideas that when we look at a landscape, we're kind of like looking where we think we should go, where we're going to have the best visibility and or protection or the best success as a forager, that sort of thing. But there have also certainly been various works, old and contemporary, that attempt to transform a single room into another world, an environment of some sort, a different space. And certainly you can go to places like Meow Wolf. You can go to various... art installations at airports. I can think of one at Atlanta's own Hartsville Jackson, where you're traveling through, you're on the conveyor belt, and oh, it's like you're in a jungle. You know, it's immersive. It transforms just another room into some sort of an environment. Now, for specific older examples, we might look to the Villa of the Mysteries on the outskirts of Pompeii, which features a well-preserved series of frescoes that wraps the room and seems to depict a Roman bride's initiation into the mystery cult of Bacchus. This dates to the first century BCE. You can look up images of this online. There's also the Villa of Livia from the same time period, which features a partially subterranean garden room. So floor-to-ceiling frescoes that immerse the visitor in a garden paradise. And this is fascinating to read about as well, the idea that you would... Travel through this hallway and then emerge into this lit room that gives you this feeling of being in a garden. Clive Barker's Imagined Devil's Country takes this concept more in the direction of the fantastic, the cryptic, and the hellish. Something more in line with what a lot of us think of when we think about the work of 15th and 16th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, who Barker directly references in the book. Of course, as we've discussed on Stuff to Blow Your Mind before, experts stress that the intended, or many experts stress, this is an area of some discussion over the years, but many experts stress that the intended viewers of Bosch's paintings would have understood its symbolism a lot more than the average viewer today. The Garden of Earthly Delights, for example, his perhaps most famous work, is full of Christian iconography and Netherlandish proverbs and that are brought to visual life, along with certain elements of intentional enigma as well. I don't think anyone's completely discounting the role of Riddle in his work, but the idea is that a lot of people would have known exactly what he was talking about or hinting at, more so than just casual viewers today. Though, to be clear, art historians have historically argued different points of view on Bosch's work. However, the work of Hieronymus Bosch certainly feels like a glimpse into an alien or psychedelic realm, or it can, and that's clearly an idea that Barker plays with in Coldheart Canyon, as well as the deeper idea that works of ingenious creation, be they mosaics, paintings, works of literature, they can all be entirely immersive and even difficult, if not impossible, to escape. Tune in to additional editions of The Artifact, The Monster Fact, or Atomalia Stupendium each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.
00:08:19
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
00:00:10
Speaker 2: Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Artifact, a short-form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on particular objects, ideas, and moments in time. This week I have a spooky fictional artifact to discuss with you for the week of Halloween. It is The Devil's Country, a deeply haunted, tiled, mosaic room central to the plot of Clive Barker's 2001 horror novel, Cold Heart Canyon. Barker frequently incorporates a work of visual art and or craftsmanship into his fictions, a work that serves as some manner of gateway to another world, or it contains another world altogether. The biggest mainstream example of this is, of course, the Lament Configuration puzzle box from The Hellbound Heart and the ensuing Hellraiser film franchise. But we also find the art as portal element in Weave World and the Book of the Art series. It's a fitting recurring theme given Barker's work as both a writer and as a painter. I'm going to dig a bit more into spoilery territory on Coldheart Canyon from here on out. So if you want to venture into this Hollywood ghost story completely fresh, best go ahead and pause things now or skip ahead to the next episode. I'm not going to reveal how the book ends or anything like that, but I am going to reveal a few things. Alright, are we good? Here we go. When we first encounter the Devil's Country, it resides in the place it was commissioned, a subterranean room beneath a medieval Romanian castle. The tiles illustrate a phantasmagorical wilderness full of cruel hunters, monstrous beasts, and all manner of depravities. The setting at this point is 1920, and the work interests Hollywood agent Willem Zephyr, who's visiting with Romanian-born Hollywood starlet Katia Lupi. Zephyr buys the old masterwork from the monks who protect it, hoping to win Katia's heart by having it relocated to America and gifting it to her. And that's exactly what he attempts to do. He has it catalogued, disassembled, shipped across an ocean and a continent, and then reconstructed in the basement of a mansion located in what will become known as Cold Hard Canyon in the Hollywood Hills. But of course, the mysterious work of art is more than just a room made out of mosaics. It's a gateway into some other realm, and those who interact with it become addicted to its life-extending and soul-corrupting powers. It ultimately allows Caciolupi to live into the 21st century without visibly aging at all, while the ghosts of the various Hollywood elites of yesteryear once exposed to the room's power, haunt the grounds of her mansion, begging to be let back in so they can see it once more, so they can experience its power once more. But of course, Katja keeps it greedily to herself at this point, because she's not sure how much longer it will last. She doesn't want to use it up, and she just wants to keep on living, even though she's now a recluse and is removed from the Hollywood scene. In the book, we eventually learn the origin of the devil's country, this fabulous work of mosaic art now situated in the basement of a mansion in the Hollywood Hills. We learn that a Romanian duke by the name of Goga returned from the Crusades, hunted and killed a goat that turned out to actually be the devil's son. And his punishment, the devil's wife, Lilith, punished him and his fellow hunters with an eternal hunt to recapture her satyr-like child. They're trapped within this pocket world contained within the grand mosaic work that Lilith herself commissioned in the Duke's old castle in Romania. It's a richly imagined setting full of darkness and perversion. And with it, Barker plays with both elements of the folkloric wild hunt with Goga and his men, Mesopotamian and Jewish mythology with Lilith, who in some traditions is held to have been Adam's first wife. and then, in this telling anyway, becomes the wife of the devil. And then there is the room itself. So it's worth noting that all works of art are really portals of some sort, right? And naturally, any landscape painting is going to transport us there, perhaps even connecting with our primal hunter-gatherer survival instincts. We've talked about this in some older episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. There are some Some ideas that when we look at a landscape, we're kind of like looking where we think we should go, where we're going to have the best visibility and or protection or the best success as a forager, that sort of thing. But there have also certainly been various works, old and contemporary, that attempt to transform a single room into another world, an environment of some sort, a different space. And certainly you can go to places like Meow Wolf. You can go to various... art installations at airports. I can think of one at Atlanta's own Hartsville Jackson, where you're traveling through, you're on the conveyor belt, and oh, it's like you're in a jungle. You know, it's immersive. It transforms just another room into some sort of an environment. Now, for specific older examples, we might look to the Villa of the Mysteries on the outskirts of Pompeii, which features a well-preserved series of frescoes that wraps the room and seems to depict a Roman bride's initiation into the mystery cult of Bacchus. This dates to the first century BCE. You can look up images of this online. There's also the Villa of Livia from the same time period, which features a partially subterranean garden room. So floor-to-ceiling frescoes that immerse the visitor in a garden paradise. And this is fascinating to read about as well, the idea that you would... Travel through this hallway and then emerge into this lit room that gives you this feeling of being in a garden. Clive Barker's Imagined Devil's Country takes this concept more in the direction of the fantastic, the cryptic, and the hellish. Something more in line with what a lot of us think of when we think about the work of 15th and 16th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, who Barker directly references in the book. Of course, as we've discussed on Stuff to Blow Your Mind before, experts stress that the intended, or many experts stress, this is an area of some discussion over the years, but many experts stress that the intended viewers of Bosch's paintings would have understood its symbolism a lot more than the average viewer today. The Garden of Earthly Delights, for example, his perhaps most famous work, is full of Christian iconography and Netherlandish proverbs and that are brought to visual life, along with certain elements of intentional enigma as well. I don't think anyone's completely discounting the role of Riddle in his work, but the idea is that a lot of people would have known exactly what he was talking about or hinting at, more so than just casual viewers today. Though, to be clear, art historians have historically argued different points of view on Bosch's work. However, the work of Hieronymus Bosch certainly feels like a glimpse into an alien or psychedelic realm, or it can, and that's clearly an idea that Barker plays with in Coldheart Canyon, as well as the deeper idea that works of ingenious creation, be they mosaics, paintings, works of literature, they can all be entirely immersive and even difficult, if not impossible, to escape. Tune in to additional editions of The Artifact, The Monster Fact, or Atomalia Stupendium each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.
00:08:19
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
