Legendary Chickens
/Have you ever heard a rooster crowing in the new day and wondered why they did that? Would it surprise you to learn that there’s a bunch of myths explaining why? From China to Ancient Greece and Portugal, legendary roosters and chickens have captured the imagination of storytellers!
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of animal death, animal fighting, colonization, bodily functions, genitalia, child death, death, starvation, sexual content, infidelity, and execution.
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Cast & Crew
- Co-Hosts: Julia Schifini and Amanda McLoughlin
- Editor: Bren Frederick
- Music: Brandon Grugle, based on "Danger Storm" by Kevin MacLeod
- Artwork: Allyson Wakeman
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About Us
Spirits is a boozy podcast about mythology, legends, and folklore. Every episode, co-hosts Julia and Amanda mix a drink and discuss a new story or character from a wide range of places, eras, and cultures. Learn brand-new stories and enjoy retellings of your favorite myths, served over ice every week, on Spirits.
Transcript
[theme]
AMANDA: Welcome to Spirits Podcast, a boozy dive into mythology, legends, and folklore. Every week, we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. I'm Amanda.
JULIA: And I'm Julia. Amanda, you know, it's not very often in the history of this podcast, in the 10 years that we've been doing this podcast, that you request a specific episode topic.
AMANDA: That's true.
JULIA: Normally, we're sort of, like, very much driven by my interest, which I appreciate you allowing me to go down rabbit holes that I happen to find during any given week. But you very specifically requested an episode all about chickens and roosters. And I have to ask you, why'd you want to learn about these feathery little guys?
AMANDA: I think I spent more time around chickens and roosters than is typical and looked at them and their dinosaur little feet and thought to myself, "These guys are crazy." And they've also been living in proximity to humanity for a very long time. We have a ton of, of course, wolf and dog folklore, cat and lion folklore. So why not chickens? We have fish of knowledge. We have all kinds of insects that can suck your soul out. Maybe I'm kind of conflating the swan and a mosquito, but I'm just curious about a species that has been inextricable to humanity for about as long as we've been cultivating food.
JULIA: Oh, and don't worry, I'll tell you how long we've been cultivating chickens for, because this is one of my favorite things now is whenever we're talking about a certain animal, I'm like, "How did this happen? How did we start domesticating that?"
AMANDA: How long that guy been kicking around for?
JULIA: And I'm also really glad that you talked about the little dinosaur feet of chickens because lowkey, real talk, chickens scare me a little bit.
AMANDA: Yeah, I think more people should be more scared of more birds.
JULIA: Yes. Okay, so I love birds, right? Like I'm a big birder. The Merlin app is my version of Pokémon Go.
AMANDA: So good.
JULIA: But there is just something about chickens, like the way they move, like tiny, little velociraptors, and they're also way faster than you think that they are.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Just watching them charge each other down or, like, charge a fence when I'm outside looking at the chickens, that's scary to me.
AMANDA: I think I probably talked about this when I was visiting my sister Bailey, who lives in Hawaii. Lots of chickens live around her and in her backyard.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: She also has a pit bull named Koda, who knows better than to pick a fight with a chicken. He will go dig for and kill a crab that is, like 12, 14 inches across. But even like a baby chicken, he's like, "I don't— what's happening?"
JULIA: "I don't fuck with that." Koda knows what's up. Koda knows what's good, because chickens, they're a little bit scary. I also feel like— I think it's ground birds as a whole.
AMANDA: Hmm.
JULIA: Because I feel very similarly about turkeys, because turkeys are just like bigger and more aggressive, and also move very similar to chickens.
AMANDA: Yes. And anytime I come across a turkey in the wild, like I did visiting Catherine [3:24] at her convent in Boston, or one time going to my now sister-in-law's bridal shower on Staten Island, I was like, "Ah, ah, what is that? What is that?" And the answer is a turkey. But it made me— like, the first thing I thought when I saw a turkey up close a few weeks ago in Boston was like, "Do the ones we eat on Thanksgiving, are they like miniature?" Because the big, old boys, mostly it's feathers, look so big.
JULIA: You think it's mostly feathers, but at the same time, they're quite big birds.
AMANDA: Yeah. I watched them walk across snowpack and sink in. And I was like—
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: —"Oh, that's a heavy turkey right there."
JULIA: Yeah, because they don't fly.
AMANDA: No.
JULIA: I'm really happy to talk about these birds, in the abstract.
AMANDA: Thank you.
JULIA: But maybe, Amanda, some of the, I would say, spooky versions of chickens and roosters will get other people on board with the fact that they are scarier than what most people think of.
AMANDA: I appreciate you facing your fears, Julia. And by your fears, I mean them beady, little eyes and knobble-y, little claws.
JULIA: I hate that. Don't— please don't. Okay, first off though, kind of, like, we did in our most recent horse episode, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole when it comes to chickens and how they got domesticated. So do you want to take a wild guess at where the domesticated chicken originated from?
AMANDA: I am thinking to myself that they are, okay, animals that don't fly very much. They are ground-based. They are good at, like, scrabbling for bugs and seeds. So I would guess kind of, like, a forest floor type environment. Let me guess, I don't know, South Asia.
JULIA: Ding, ding, ding, right on the money.
AMANDA: Hey!
JULIA: So the chicken is actually domesticated from the red junglefowl, which is native to Southeast Asia. It extends all the way to, like, Pakistan and India, all the way across Southern China and through the islands of Malaysia and the Philippines.
AMANDA: That is a big swath of the earth.
JULIA: It is, it is indeed. So there are, like, a variety of different junglefowl, but we specifically get our domesticated chicken from the red junglefowl.
AMANDA: Cool.
JULIA: Now, they were domesticated over 8,000 years ago, pretty much around the same time that pigs and dogs were being domesticated by the Austronesian people of this region.
AMANDA: Very cool.
JULIA: So it has been suggested that their domestication coincided with the agricultural growth of rice. So, like, essentially people started growing rice. The wild junglefowl wanted to eat the rice seeds, and so they started nesting near human settlements, which is what led to the domestication.
AMANDA: Fascinating. I really thought you were gonna say, Julia, because rice and chicken have always been such a good combination. And we grew rice and we're like, "Hmm. Nom, nom, nom. You know what would taste really good on top of this?"
JULIA: Or eggs. Just like eggs—
AMANDA: Yeah.
JULIA: —and rice also delicious, you know?
AMANDA: I mean, they are.
JULIA: That's a great point, but no, it's because we started growing rice and then the chickens or the junglefowl were like, "I want some of that. Can I have some of that, please?"
AMANDA: Yeah. "Look at that concentrated crop on one area. What if we accidentally— oh, no, we've also concentrated ourselves."
JULIA: Yeah. So what's actually interesting is wild junglefowl can fly, but over the period of time where we domesticated junglefowl into chickens, they became too heavy to allow them to fly more than a short distance.
AMANDA: Oh.
JULIA: Which is kind of cute. So from Southeast Asia, they spread eventually through the Middle East and then to Northern Africa. We know that they were being widely bred in Egypt by 300 BCE.
AMANDA: Wow.
JULIA: We also have evidence that the Phoenicians helped with the spread of chickens across the Mediterranean. And we have evidence of art of chickens in Corinthian pottery from the seventh century BCE.
AMANDA: So cool.
JULIA: Isn't that so neat?
AMANDA: So cool. Like, yeah, just what are the— it’s like bunnies and squirrels and sparrows and stuff, like the, you know, animals kicking around my backyard. The fact that a doodle of those or beautifully preserved pottery of those could end up being significant to our understanding of the past, just like one of the many ways in which being a historian blows my mind.
JULIA: Yeah. I mean, like that they were important enough that someone was making art of them—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: —is huge, right? So from there, we actually get extremely popular breeding of chickens during the Roman Empire, so they were very important to the Romans. And there's also— this is like a theory. No one's confirmed it or not, but there are some, like, anthropological and biological theories that chickens spread to the Americas before European colonization.
AMANDA: Really?
JULIA: Presumably from populations in Polynesia, but again, hotly debated among, like, archaeologists.
AMANDA: But we definitely have evidence of seafaring people on the Pacific Coast having way more interconnection trade and mobility than I think the, you know, European West wants to take ownership of.
JULIA: Exactly. And there's some, like, genetic similarities between certain species that we found early on in the colonization of the Americas that they think might be connected to the species that came from the Polynesian people.
AMANDA: Rarely do I say cool in response to the sentence that involves the phrase, "Related to the colonization of the Americas." But in this case, that's cool.
JULIA: Kind of neat, kind of neat. Again, some debate as to the legitimacy of that or not, because sometimes genetics is weird, but I think it's neat the fact that we might have had chickens before the Europeans came to the Americas.
AMANDA: Indeed.
JULIA: All this to say, though, as a result of the importance of their domestication and spread, we have a lot of different chicken stories and lore across the world and dating back quite a bit.
AMANDA: I wanna learn about the chicken lore.
JULIA: It would make sense for us to start in East Asia for this episode, since that is where chickens have been domesticated the longest. Much like the horse from our recent episode, the rooster is one of the animals that is part of the Chinese zodiac.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Outside of that story, which we have rehashed several times at this point, the chicken has represented various different things in Chinese culture and mythology throughout the centuries. So, like, for example, at one point, the universal creation story featured the world being born from a chicken's egg.
AMANDA: Makes sense. And which came first?
JULIA: Yes, exactly. Which came first? I was going to do a whole bit at the beginning of this episode about the, like, why did the chicken cross the road and the origin of that joke? And the fact that the joke part of the joke is that it doesn't make sense. And I was like, "No, we don't need to get into that. That's too complicated."
AMANDA: You know, Julia, we are at this point professional podcasters and I would not probably recommend doing a, like, anti-humor joke without a punch line at the top of a given podcast episode. That's a great insight from you.
JULIA: Hey, for people who are thinking about doing podcasts, don't have to do that. Sometimes you have an idea—
AMANDA: No.
JULIA: —and you don't have to go with that first idea. So besides the universal creation from a chicken's egg, later, the chicken would become this sort of, like, spirit guardian, which was used to ward off evil. And as you'll sort of discover as we go through this episode, chickens later became associated with the sun. And in Chinese folklore specifically, it was referred to as the sunbird, which either heralded the rising of the sun or actually brought about the rising of the sun with its crowing.
AMANDA: I love how much an egg looks like the Earth. I love how the yolk reminds us of the sun. Not to mention for many of us, I'm sure historically as human beings, starting our day related to a rooster crowing. Makes total sense why the sun is an image that joins us.
JULIA: And you're going to see it multiple times in this episode. I'm really excited—
AMANDA: Yay.
JULIA: —for you to be like, "Oh, there it is, the sun again." But most interestingly to me in regards to chickens and Chinese folklore is that culturally the chicken became known as the Bird of Virtues or the Five-Virtue Fowl.
AMANDA: Wow. Okay, what is the chicken doing that is so virtuous?
JULIA: This comes from a Han dynasty philosopher who claimed that the rooster and its features possessed the five virtues exemplified in Confucianism.
AMANDA: Aha. Okay. So our Confucian Han dynasty, love a metaphor.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: One of the many reasons why this is one of my favorite periods to learn about.
JULIA: The rooster's crest, the little, like, you know— if you look at a rooster, it's got that sort of, like, floppy comb.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: That represents the virtue of civility.
AMANDA: Oh!
JULIA: Their spurs and their reputation for fighting represents the martial prowess of a person.
AMANDA: Okay.
JULIA: Their daring and willingness to fight represents courage. Calling to other chickens when food is found exemplifies benevolence, like letting everyone know like, "Oh, there's food around. Let's all share it together."
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: And then finally, roosters watching the rest of their flock at night and crowing in the new dawn represents their fidelity.
AMANDA: Those sound like great virtues. I love it. Some of them—
JULIA: Yeah?
AMANDA: —maybe a little bit of a stretch to tie to a rooster, but you know what? I don't know better than a Han dynasty philosopher.
JULIA: Listen, the virtue of civility, I think, is sort of the biggest stretch. I'm like, "Why— because he has, like, a little crown? What are we talking about here? It's a little hat that the rooster wears."
AMANDA: They're often red, which is a color of, you know, prosperity and luck, so maybe that is why.
JULIA: Very possible, very possible. So moving on from China, in Japan, as part of Shintoism, roosters are often kept at shrines of Amaterasu.
AMANDA: Hmm.
JULIA: Who is, as you might recall from previous episodes, the Sun Goddess, because again, they're associated with the sun. So they are said to act as sacred messengers of the goddess, and this is tied to a story in which the goddess, essentially, like went into hiding in a cave because her brother, Susanoo, who is the god of storms, started, like, acting out after he was in a competition with Amaterasu in a sort of, like, ritual trial situation. He starts doing a lot of stuff. He's, like, pissing on things. He's showing his cock. Aha. Not the cock that you're thinking of.
AMANDA: Yep.
JULIA: He's really dishonoring himself in winning this situation. And so horrified by his actions, she seals herself away in a cave, which as the sun goddess plunges the world into total darkness. So in order to coax her out of the cave, all the other gods decide to come up with a plan. There's a bunch of things. It's like mostly to kind of make her jealous. The idea of they're like all partying with this other goddess who they are saying is, like, fairer than her. But one of the other things that they do in order to, like, get her attention in the first place is, "The gods gathered together, the long crying birds of Tokyo and caused them to cry," AKA the rooster.
AMANDA: Hmm. So she hears a bunch of roosters freaking out and she's like, "Oh, no, they might need me."
JULIA: "What's going on?" And then she, like, holds her ear up to the cave entrance and they're all, like, being like, "This goddess is so cool. She's so much better than Amaterasu."
AMANDA: That is underhanded. That's, like, making it look as if a puppy needs help and then when you get there, it's a bunch of popular girls talking about, like, a great party you missed last night.
JULIA: Wow. Yeah, that's tough.
AMANDA: Right?
JULIA: That's really tough. So they make this sort of— they refer to as a joyful ruckus outside.
AMANDA: Okay, that's cute.
JULIA: They managed to lure her out of the cave and so roosters became associated with the symbolic call of the dawn, the announcer of the day. And it's really cool because, like, genuinely if you go to a bunch of shrines to the goddess in Japan, they keep a bunch of roosters just hanging around the shrine. It's really cool.
AMANDA: I love that. I am going to go to Japan at some point in the next few years and I—
JULIA: Hell yeah.
AMANDA: —want to make it a point to go and witness some of those roosters.
JULIA: Absolutely. You should. You definitely should. Now, Amanda, I would be remiss if we were talking about Japan and I didn't mention some yokai.
AMANDA: Let's do it. What kind of creepy-ass dinosaur bird yokai are out there?
JULIA: Well, I'll be kind to you. We'll start with one that might be familiar to you and also some of our ConSpiriters, because I have to remind you about the Basan or the Basa-Basa.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Do you remember this one, Amanda?
AMANDA: No.
JULIA: Okay, fair enough.
AMANDA: I hear yokai and my brain goes, "We better protect ourselves like a callous."
JULIA: You say, "Is this the Bigfoot?" It's not the Bigfoot.
AMANDA: You know, there's Bigfoot, there is Big Eye, and those are the ones that I'm mostly scared of.
JULIA: That's fair. You're not going to be totally scared of this one. So if you were to come across the Basan, you would probably think that it's just a normal chicken, albeit, a very beautiful and slightly larger rooster than what you would typically see. It's more the size of a turkey than the average chicken. And it has this very distinctly bright red comb, as well as plumage that is bright and multicolored to the point where it appears like the various colors of flame.
AMANDA: Oh. Is the chicken roasting itself?
JULIA: The chicken is not roasting itself.
AMANDA: Okay, good.
JULIA: Great question. No. So this makes sense because if you happened to come across it, it's most likely going to be at night because this is an exclusively nocturnal yokai.
AMANDA: Oh.
JULIA: And it inhabits bamboo groves.
AMANDA: Sure.
JULIA: Also notable, they breathe fire.
AMANDA: Aha. Okay, there it is. The fire is within, not without.
JULIA: And luckily for humans, the fire is not actually hot and it cannot light fires.
AMANDA: That's very helpful because it does live in a dense forest.
JULIA: So it's more like kind of, like, a ghost fire or like a cold flame, you know?
AMANDA: Cool.
JULIA: They emerge from the bamboo groves to enter villages or farms in order to enjoy their favorite meal, which is— do you want to guess what their favorite meal is?
AMANDA: Oh. Why would they have that adaptation of the, "Amanda, evolution does not apply to yokai?" Babies, babies.
JULIA: Babies? No. It's not that kind of yokai. So they enjoy charred wood and embers. That's their favorite snack.
AMANDA: Ew, okay. You know, if I have a bunch of fires put out outside and I get there the next day and the hearth is clean, that's some coexistence, baby. I'm happy with that.
JULIA: So when it is pleased or startled, it will beat its wings which make a sound, which gives it its other name which is Basa-Basa. Also, this is total aside, but you know, when you see a morning dove and you, like, startle it, and it takes off, and it makes that kind of like, "Woo-woo-woo-woo-woo-woo" noise.
AMANDA: It goes [18:14]
JULIA: Amanda, that's not the bird making the noise. That's their wings making that noise.
AMANDA: Really?
JULIA: Yeah. That is not a call that they make. There's just like— the way that they flap their wings makes that noise.
AMANDA: Okay, wait, the— they do coo, though. Like, they make some noises.
JULIA: Right? I mean, like, so they make, like, the, "Hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo." Right?
AMANDA: Uh-huh.
JULIA: But when they take off, that's just the sound of their wings.
AMANDA: It's like [18:40]
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: That's wings?
JULIA: Yes.
AMANDA: No shit.
JULIA: I know, right? It's so cool.
AMANDA: Damn.
JULIA: Anyway, chances are if you happen to see a Basan or a Basa-Basa, you won't get a chance to look at it for too long, because if they notice that they've been seen by a human, they will vanish into thin air or in a flash of fire before disappearing.
AMANDA: Oh. Very chic.
JULIA: Very chic, very cool. Love that for them.
AMANDA: I'm sure you too, Julia, have been in a room where, like, you spot someone you don't want to talk to, like an ex or like a former friend, and you're just like, "I wish the world would swallow me up." I wish that, but instead I leave in a puff of flame because that would be incredibly impressive.
JULIA: I'm thinking about that now. I wish I could just— when I didn't want to be somewhere anymore, just, "Poof," like Nightcrawler, you know? A little BAMF situation.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: So, Amanda, would you like to hear about another less cute and more fucked up yokai related to chickens?
AMANDA: I see that you are easing me in. Let's do it.
JULIA: So this is the Niwatori no sō, which translates to chicken monk.
AMANDA: Okay.
JULIA: Essentially, these are monks who have been transformed into human chicken hybrids.
AMANDA: Uh-oh.
JULIA: They have feathery tails like a rooster.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: They crow like roosters. And most disturbingly of all, get ready, when they open their human mouths, a crowing rooster's head will protrude out of their mouth.
AMANDA: Among the worst ways that these creatures could be mashed up.
JULIA: I do need to just quickly share the photo of it for you, just so you can, like, you know, experience it firsthand.
AMANDA: Folks, I'm not a journalist, but I am sacrificing for your pleasure.
JULIA: Okay, here you go, enjoy.
AMANDA: All right, we are clicking. Ahh. Oh, man. Oh, it looks painful.
JULIA: It would make sense for this to be painful because it is a sort of punishment situation.
AMANDA: What did these monks do wrong that they deserve this?
JULIA: The story of their origin goes that, essentially, Buddhist monks were expected to live of simple and devout life, right? As you kind of assume when you hear the word monk.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: They would wake up at dawn to pray, they would spend their days copying scripture, and meditating, et cetera. And also one of their vows was to never take a life, which also meant that they kept a vegetarian diet.
AMANDA: Yes.
JULIA: However, it is said that in a story from the 18th century, that a monk did not keep this strict vegetarian diet.
AMANDA: Hmm.
JULIA: In fact, he craved meat often and was so struck by a craving one day that he went into a neighbor's yard, stole a chicken, killed it, cooked it, ate it.
AMANDA: It's like four things against the principles that you signed up for all at once.
JULIA: Uh-huh. So when this neighbor noticed that the chicken was missing, he questioned the monk, which outraged the monk.
AMANDA: Oh, boy, we're adding some pride and some more lies, okay.
JULIA: He was like, "Look at my shaved head, look at my robes. I'm a monk, and as a monk, I would never steal anything, let alone a chicken to eat that goes against all of my vows."
AMANDA: He, like, swirls his robe as he's trying to leave, a chicken bone falls out.
JULIA: Not quite, Amanda. Instead, as he is lecturing this neighbor about virtue and compassion and charity, and he's putting it all into this hypocritical monologue, suddenly, it is interrupted by a loud "cock-a-doodle-doo" that emerges from his throat.
AMANDA: Damn! Followed by a whole rooster head?
JULIA: So the monk, obviously very confused, where did that cock-a-doodle-doo come from? When he starts to talk again, he's again cut off by the crowing of a rooster.
AMANDA: Wow.
JULIA: And then when he clears his throat one more time, tries to speak, the chicken's head erupts from his mouth, a feathery tail sprouts from his butt, and he is transformed into the Niwatori no sō, which exposes his crime to the neighbor and punishes him.
AMANDA: I love that the, like, object of his deception bursts forth from his mouth. There's also the wonderful pun, at least in English, of like, "When you're crowing, you are bragging about something and talking too loudly about it."
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Oh, I love it.
JULIA: Ooh, boy. It is a good one.
AMANDA: Hmm.
JULIA: Okay, Amanda. I have one more fucked up yokai for you.
AMANDA: Let's do it.
JULIA: And this is Onino Nuitari, [23:09]the Grudge Chicken.
AMANDA: The Grudge Chicken, okay.
JULIA: Uh-hmm. So this story comes from a period of time in Japan around the 1800s where cockfighting had been prohibited but it was done often in secret in the more, like, remote rural areas of Japan.
AMANDA: Sure.
JULIA: Also just like an aside, there was a lot in this research about, like, ritual cockfighting as a way of, like, including chickens in worship. And I felt a little weird about including that just because I don't want to really discuss too much violence against animals in these episodes. But for the audience to be aware, that was a thing that has pretty much historically been done with chickens since we started domesticating chickens.
AMANDA: And just like there are lots of examples of that using humans and other species, not our place to dwell on, so I concur with your judgment.
JULIA: This is a story about cockfighting, but only like vaguely. In this story, a bunch of people were gathered together for a cockfighting tournament with a fairly large cash prize for the winner. So a man named Takazuru ends up winning the tournament. And because the prize is quite large, the losers choose to conspire against him. So they follow him out of town after the tournament. And then when they're far away enough to not attract attention, they jump him, they tie him up, they weigh him down with stones, and then they toss him in the river to drown him.
AMANDA: Oh, so they didn't even just like say, "Beat me up, give me your money." No, no, no, they're trying to—
JULIA: No, they said, "This man has to die."
AMANDA: Yikes.
JULIA: As they are going to divvy up this prize money, they get attacked by his prize-winning chicken.
AMANDA: Nice.
JULIA: Now, annoyed by being attacked by a chicken, they debate on what they should do with the chicken. And some of them are like, "It's a pretty good chicken. Maybe we just eat him?"
AMANDA: Absorb his strength.
JULIA: And then the other conspirators are like, "No, no, no. This guy's spirit is going to give us indigestion if we eat his prized chicken."
AMANDA: Honestly, I wouldn't eat that chicken.
JULIA: No, I wouldn't either. So instead they decide to also drown the chicken to send him to the afterlife with his owner.
AMANDA: So that then he's in the afterlife with his most powerful chicken ready to exact revenge?
JULIA: So they pluck the feathers off the chicken. They go and they toss it in the river like they toss Takazuru and they tell the chicken to go and cockfight in hell as they do.
AMANDA: Wow. Fucking burn.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: I have no sympathy for these men.
JULIA: So they turn to go, but as they do, out of the river emerges a monster. And Amanda, you can click on the link that I sent you now so you can see what this monster is.
AMANDA: Oh.
JULIA: So this is a chicken-human hybrid, the size of a man with gray plucked skin, pincers for hands, and a large, red comb on the top of its head.
AMANDA: This, I can get behind, Julia.
JULIA: Oh.
AMANDA: This is roughly humanoid. It is a monstrous chicken. It is here to exact revenge. And there is the strength and resources of both man and beast that got, you know, unceremoniously murdered. Yes, I can live with this.
JULIA: So this is the fused spirits of the man and his chicken, and just the sight of the monster makes all of the men lose all of their strength and simply fall to the ground in fear.
AMANDA: Incredible.
JULIA: Basically, the story goes that many of these men ended up cursed to never move again and simply, like, starved to death.
AMANDA: Wow.
JULIA: But it was said that four of the men did manage to recover, but it took them five days before they could move again. They were never able to speak again as their mouths stiffened so much that they lost the ability of speech.
AMANDA: Wow. That is a profound fright, dude.
JULIA: Uh-hmm. And then, like, it ends up getting out what they did and they all go to jail, so—
AMANDA: Everyone's like, "Yeah, fair enough."
JULIA: "Fair enough fair, enough. You did kill the guy."
AMANDA: Julia, hell must be empty for all the devils are here and that chicken was cockfighting in hell.
JULIA: It was.
AMANDA: Right here.
JULIA: It was. It did do that. It cockfighted you guys to death.
AMANDA: Yes, because hell is other people.
JULIA: All right, Amanda, I promise that we will get to some less terrifying chicken myths for you. But before we get to that, we're gonna have to go grab our refill.
AMANDA: Let's do it.
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AMANDA: Hey, everybody, it's Amanda. And welcome to the refill, where first and foremost, I would love to thank the folks whose financial support every single month is the reason why we get to keep doing this podcast and we get to keep showing up for you every Wednesday. So thank you very much to our newest paying patrons, Denim and CatGoddess2000, [28:02] as well as our supporting producer-level patrons, Uhleeseeuh, Hannah, Scott, Anne, Matthew, Lily, and Wil. And our legend-level patrons, Captain Jonathan MAL-uh-kye Cosmos, Audra, Sarah, Bea Me Up Scotty, Morgan, Bex, Rikoelike, Chibi Yokai, and Michael. If you would like to join them, have your name read out on the show, get ad-free episodes, get director's commentary behind every single episode, and more, like bonus urban legends every month, who doesn't want that? You can join us at patreon.com/spiritspodcast. We are donating our ad space here on Spirits for the foreseeable future to small businesses and mutual aid efforts in Minneapolis that benefit immigrants, protesters, and activists. If you are a podcaster and want to join us in the effort, you can. Go to bit.ly/, M-N, podcastads. This week, we are shouting out Comma, an independent bookstore in Minneapolis that sells books and helps build community, particularly deepening connection between their community like themselves and Comma, the Bookstore and drawing connections between ideas. Julia found this bookstore online and I am obsessed with it because they are, this month, running a resistance book club, focused on a book that I read and really, really loved a couple years back called Dean Spade's Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). Couple of things you can do here, support Comma by just buying books from them online at the link in the description. Especially they have, like, a curated list about immigration, as well as democracy and fascism. So check them out, order some books, or just support them by buying a gift card from their site. You can donate it to another Spirits listener. If you'd like, you can email us, spiritspodcast.gmail.com to coordinate that or just buy a gift card and let your money support a great business. Speaking of great businesses, I'm a little biased, but Multitude, the podcast company that I founded, that Julia and I work at, that's been going for the last eight years, is another independent business trying our best to benefit our community and we need your support to keep existing. We specifically would love if you consider joining the MultiCrew, which is our membership program where we release weird, cool podcasts with new combinations of Multitude hosts, share behind the scenes details on making our shows, and exclusive monthly hangout sessions with you, the MultiCrew members. You can get exclusive access to stuff like the entire backlog of our friendly debate show, Head Heart Gut, our re-watch podcast all about the Emmy award-winning show, The Pit, or even immersive, medieval ASMR episodes. Who doesn't want that? Specifically, we've had the MultiCrew for several years. It helped us weather the storm of COVID, the podcast ad market collapse, so many things happening. And we realized that some people are like, "Yeah, it would be nice to go to multitudeshows.com/multicrew and sign up." But, like, that's a lot of work. You can also now just sign up on Apple. So if you go to Apple Podcasts, you search the word Multicrew, all one word, you can click on the MultiCrew podcast, see a preview of all of the great episodes that we have and join right there in Apple. We get a little bit less of the money because Apple takes a cut, but that's okay. If this helps you support us and doesn't make you sign up for a new membership, and that's a thing that has been, like, weighing you down as, like, making an account, doing whatever, we try to make it easy as possible. So go to Apple Podcasts if you are on an iOS device, search for MultiCrew, and you can subscribe right there in Apple. For the rest of you, you can subscribe anytime at multitudeshows.com.
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JULIA: We are back, Amanda, and there's quite a few cocktails out there that are related to roosters, I would say. There's a real, like, basic bitch style cocktail, and I mean this lovingly. If this is your kind of cocktail, no judgment whatsoever. But it's like vodka, cranberry, and orange juice.
AMANDA: Yes. The, you know, tequila sunrise, but vodka.
JULIA: Exactly. We can elevate that on this podcast. We've been doing this for 10 years, almost 500 episodes. We can elevate our "basic bitch cocktail" to something else. So this is a cocktail that is called the Rooster Tail, which is going to be sweet, but does have a great color and some really interesting flavors. So I think most people will at least somewhat enjoy it. So Peach Brandy.
AMANDA: Hmm.
JULIA: Madeira, which you can, like— if you can't find Madeira, you can substitute this for another, like, fortified white wine like Lillet Blanc. That's also a good option for you.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Lemon juice, raspberry syrup, and of course, importantly, Peychaud's Bitters.
AMANDA: Hmm, sure. You have to have that little touch of the brown dawn.
JULIA: Exactly. So brightly colored, bold, just like a rooster. You gotta respect it as a cocktail.
AMANDA: Delish. Is there, like, a beautiful layering situation?
JULIA: There is not, but I think that it is still such a great color of a cocktail that you're gonna love it.
AMANDA: Hmm.
JULIA: The raspberry syrup really brings that of, like, pop of color and flavor.
AMANDA: Delish.
JULIA: So I want to touch on Greek mythology next, if only because this story reminds me of those associations to the sun that Chinese and Japanese folklore made as well. This is a story that I believe I told in the Aries episode, but I think it is still really cool and super important. So the rooster was for the Ancient Greeks associated with Aries, Athena, and even Heracles because similarly to the Chinese folklore, roosters were associated with bravery, valor, and a fighting spirit.
AMANDA: Like those little guys sure do fight more than they probably should.
JULIA: Also like a fun sort of historical reference for you, we often talk about, like, what types of animals were used as sacrifices for the gods when an animal sacrifice was called for, right? Like oftentimes bulls were sacrificed to Zeus, et cetera, et cetera. Early Greeks would not have used chickens for sacrifices if only because at the time they were still considered exotic.
AMANDA: Hmm.
JULIA: Because they weren't as widespread as they would become in the Roman period.
AMANDA: I don't know why, but I'm almost picturing a peacock as to, like, this is, you know, similar to stuff we do eat, but also I'm not gonna be, like, chucking peacocks out left and right. Like, that is a thing I don't see every day.
JULIA: Yes, we talked about that because in the Hera episode, you might remember that Hera became represented by the peacock because it was like a very, like ,exotic and related to royalty bird.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: But before the peacock historically was introduced to Greece, Hera was actually represented by the cuckoo bird.
AMANDA: Oh.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: Another not everyday kind of fella.
JULIA: Uh-hmm. I mean, for the Greeks, it was a little bit more of a everyday kind of thing. For us, we don't often see it, you know, in our every day-to-day lives. But it's really cool that because historically the peacock was introduced to the Ancient Greeks, they said, "That's a bird for our girl, Hera."
AMANDA: "That's a weird and pretty one. Let's give it to Hera."
JULIA: Exactly. Isn't that neat? I love that.
AMANDA: So cool.
JULIA: So in terms of the Greeks, there is a particular story that features the rooster and specifically said to be the origin of the rooster.
AMANDA: Hmm.
JULIA: So like I said, I think we touched on this story in our Ares episode. I think it's worth retelling here. So this is the story of Alectryon, who was a young soldier that was considered the "Beloved" of Ares, which according to the writer Lucian, "Kept the god company at drinking parties, overindulged with him, and was his companion in lovemaking." Now, were they fucking? Probably.
AMANDA: I mean, he was the companion in lovemaking.
JULIA: Could also be like they were tag teaming is what I'm thinking as well.
AMANDA: You know, Julia, I think that is lovemaking of a sort.
JULIA: It's up to you, you know?
AMANDA: You know— yes. There are all kinds of people can do all kinds of things. What I will say is no lovemaking companion of mine has ever been not also a lovemaking partner, if that makes sense.
JULIA: Yeah. No, that's fair. Listen, I'm not here to tell you how to do your threesomes or more.
AMANDA: But and?
JULIA: But, you know, Ares was doing it with Alectryon.
AMANDA: Love it.
JULIA: So at this point, Ares is having an affair with Aphrodite, right? He was also at the same time fearful that the other gods were going to find out, especially Hephaestus, who is Aphrodite's husband.
AMANDA: I mean, yeah.
JULIA: So he turned to trusted Alectryon, companion in lovemaking, to guard the outside of his bedroom door to warn the god of war when the sun began to rise, because if the sun began to rise while they were still fucking, that means that all-seeing Helios would learn about the affair and would definitely be telling Hephaestus what they were up to.
AMANDA: Got it. So this has to happen under the cover of night because it's not possible to walk a shame when the literal sun is on the lookout.
JULIA: Exactly. So Alectryon sat outside of Ares' bedroom all night, but before dawn, he fell asleep, which led to, just as Ares feared, the couple being caught in the act by Helios.
AMANDA: Damn.
JULIA: Now, when Ares found out that they had been discovered, Ares became enraged with Alectryon and transformed him into a rooster in anger, so that Alectryon would never forget to announce the rising of the sun.
AMANDA: He should've just invited Alectryon in because then everyone would have been too wired and excited to go to sleep. And then they could have been like, "Oh, wait, what's that? The, like, blush of dawn? Get out, get out."
JULIA: I feel like he would have been even more distracted if he was in the mix.
AMANDA: Yeah, but he wouldn't have fallen asleep.
JULIA: Well, he wouldn't have fallen asleep, true, but he also would have been a little busy.
AMANDA: That's fair. I guess, you know, I don't know, respect your sex bros more.
JULIA: Fair. So this is why, according to the Ancient Greeks, the rooster crows at dawn every morning, it is Alectryon still at his task of—
AMANDA: Oh.
JULIA: —warning his patron god
AMANDA: I feel bad for Alectryon.
JULIA: Oh, well, yeah. Yep. I mean, classic Greek thing where it's like the gods ask you to do a thing, you don't do it. They transform you into an animal.
AMANDA: That's it. That's it for life.
JULIA: I also wanted to share a creature that I think you're going to love, Amanda, which is a lesser known creature from Ancient Greece and this is the Hippalectryon.
AMANDA: Oh.
JULIA: So this is a half-horse, half-rooster.
AMANDA: How—
JULIA: Horse in the front, rooster in the back with tail, wings and hind legs included.
AMANDA: Okay, I'm gonna need a visual reference.
JULIA: I'm going to share another photo for you so you can see.
AMANDA: Oh, okay. This is okay.
JULIA: Oh?
AMANDA: Because the proportions of both creatures are correct. This is essentially a sweet back half of a rooster with a proportional front half of a horse, but there are six legs and wings, which I think would be powerful.
JULIA: This is fine because it's not small chicken, big horse.
AMANDA: Correct. Or like— yeah. Or like little chicken head protruding from human-sized person, which is why the third yokai was also fine because it was simply, you know, chicken rendered monstrous the size and shape of a man.
JULIA: Okay, fair. Unlike a lot of Greek mythological creatures, we actually don't know a ton about the Hippalectryon. Some scholars believe that it might have been associated with Poseidon since he did invent the horse and was tasked with protecting ships. Art of the creature typically also features a rider, usually a young boy, but there's no specific myth that is associated with this creature. What?
AMANDA: Julia, what if it was that Boston duck boat, but of Ancient Greece?
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: It's a land to sea, all-terrain vehicle. I am now probably conflating chickens and ducks, but I do know chickens can do little dust baths.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: What if the idea was that you could, you know, either do a very little bit of flight, like some flapping assisted, you know, just a little hop over a battlefield or something.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Or maybe, you know, they learn about how to swim.
JULIA: Maybe, maybe. It also has real like Chocobo energy. I know you haven't played the Final Fantasy games, but it does kind of remind me of a Chocobo a little bit. Final Fantasy heads know what I'm talking about. Anyway, no real myth associated with this creature, but we do know that the playwright Aristophanes really enjoyed mentioning them in some of his plays.
AMANDA: Oh.
JULIA: And he used it as an insult specifically towards one of his rival playwrights, Aeschylus who referenced it in one of his plays.
AMANDA: No shit. So he's like, "Oh, you're, you're the little, weird chicken horse."
JULIA: Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm. So, like, Aeschylus just, like, used it casually and essentially Aristophanes was like, "What the fuck is that, bro? What is that? That's just nothing." He was making fun of Aeschylus for including this creature that has no real other origin. So he's like, "I don't know, we're just making up shit like Jabberwockies. [40:55] I don't know. Fuck it. I guess we could just make shit up, huh, Aeschylus?"
AMANDA: Incredible.
JULIA: I love beefing ancient playwrights.
AMANDA: Truly, Julia, nothing makes me feel more connected to the shared lineage of humanity than ancient beef.
JULIA: Yeah, it's the best. It's truly the best. Okay. So this is less of a mythological thing, but the Romans, who, as I mentioned before, very much embraced the breeding of chickens, used chickens a lot in oracular practices.
AMANDA: Like oracles of the future?
JULIA: Yes.
AMANDA: Cool.
JULIA: Augury, as you might know, is the divination based on the movement of birds. And you could use any bird to interpret the signs and everything, but the Romans specifically preferred to use chickens.
AMANDA: Wow.
JULIA: They also practice, and here's the word again, Alectryomancy.
AMANDA: Wow.
JULIA: Which translated to the movements of birds, specifically chickens, while they pecked at grain in order to divine the future.
AMANDA: Hell yeah, bro.
JULIA: So specifically, it was said that when it was time for a diviner to interpret the movement, the chickens were fed a special little kind of cake.
AMANDA: Aw, a special little treat.
JULIA: If when the food was laid out and the chicken ate it, good omen, good sign. Chickens eating things, that's the natural thing that chickens are supposed to do, right? However, if the chicken stayed in its cage, made any sort of noise or beat their wings, that meant the omen was bad.
AMANDA: Okay. I mean, it makes sense to me. If you get between me and like a, you know, vanilla glazed citrus scone of some kind.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: And I don't go for it, something is wrong, to be fair.
JULIA: I would be like, "Amanda, are you okay?"
AMANDA: Right.
JULIA: "Is everything all right?"
AMANDA: Yeah. Like, let me into a room with, like, some pastries and a cold brew if I don't walk over there. You're like, "Girl, what happened?"
JULIA: So chickens incredibly important, like held in high esteem, obviously have some sort of connection to the divine or the gods to the point where they were associated with them and actual, like, worship, right? So for example, the Roman general Publius Claudius Pulcher kept his own sacred chickens for divination.
AMANDA: Sure.
JULIA: However, at one point, he grew frustrated with them before a battle and threw them overboard when they refused to eat.
AMANDA: Oh, no.
JULIA: And so he proclaimed if they won't eat, perhaps they will drink.
AMANDA: I mean, kind of slayed with that line.
JULIA: Goes into battle, immediately loses extremely, extremely badly.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: And then to rub salt in the wound, Amanda, when he returned in disgrace after this loss, he was then also fined for impiety upon his return because of how he treated the chickens.
AMANDA: And also, you got a parking ticket, bitch.
JULIA: Yeah. And also, fuck you. I just really like that story. It's very fun.
AMANDA: Incredible. Damn.
JULIA: So the Norse interestingly had a couple of chickens that held importance in their mythology specifically related to Ragnarök as— is often the case.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: The first, though, is a chicken that is named Gullinkambi whose name translated to the Golden Comb. So this was a rooster that lived in the halls of Valhalla and is one of the roosters whose crowing is supposed to herald the beginnings of Ragnarök.
AMANDA: Nice.
JULIA: There are three roosters that are associated with Ragnarök. There is Gullinkambi, there is another rooster named Fjalar, and then another unnamed rooster that resides in hell which is described as Soot-Red. So here's, according to the Poetic Edda, "Then to the gods crowed Gullinkambi, he wakes the heroes in Odin's hall. And beneath the earth does another crow, the rust-red bird at the bars of hell."
AMANDA: As above, so below, baby, especially for a mythology so interested in cycles. It makes utter sense that a rooster has a place in heralding the beginning of one.
JULIA: Exactly. And three roosters, in fact.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: So that covers our two roosters from the Poetic Edda. We also have Fjalar, whose name translates to deceiver, for some reason.
AMANDA: Trickster rooster?
JULIA: He's not, though, because he's just, like, chilling. He doesn't do any actual—
AMANDA: Oh.
JULIA: —trickstering. There's very possibly, like, we lost a story in which he does do some deceiving, but for whatever reason, he's not. He's just calling.
AMANDA: Or maybe it's like calling a skinny guy gordo, I don't know.
JULIA: So he is a crimson rooster who first heralds the coming of Ragnarök to the Jötunn herdsman Eggther in the Fort Galgviðr. As it is put in the prophecy of the völva, who you remember is the one who told Odin about the coming of the Ragnarök. She predicted, "He sat on the mound and plucked his harp. The herdsman of the giantess, cheerful Eggther, a rooster crowed in gallows wood, that bright red cockerel whose name is Fjalar."
AMANDA: What an image.
JULIA: Very pretty. Very pretty. So he's just like chillin', plucking at his harp, and then a rooster crows and he's like, "Ah, shit, here comes Ragnarök."
AMANDA: "Gotta go."
JULIA: There is also Víðópnir, which is a rooster that is roosting on the top of the world tree Yggdrasil.
AMANDA: Of course.
JULIA: Now, sometimes he is described as also being perched on top of another cosmic bird, which is a cosmic eagle named Hræsvelgr.
AMANDA: Now, if I were a noble eagle, I probably would not let a chicken chill on top of me, but that's just me.
JULIA: Personally, I love the idea of a bird perched on another bird, perched on the tippy top of the tree that represents the universe. I think that's hilarious and adorable.
AMANDA: It is pretty cute. It's kind of like— yeah, I'm picturing like one those little birds on top of, like, a hippo's butt or like a gargoyle on a church and the church—
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: —is, like, on a hill and— yeah.
JULIA: It's really cute. Other than his location on the World Tree, we don't get much more from him in regards to the mythology. So it's just— he's just kind of there. It's good to know that he's there, but he doesn't do much.
AMANDA: It is sweet. It's like a weathervane on top of the house.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: Okay.
JULIA: Exactly. One last note that's just a little fun fact for you that I don't have a ton of information on besides the fact itself. It is suggested that the Pleiades, you know, the series of stars that we have in the sky were referred to in Norse astrology as the Hens of Freya.
AMANDA: Aw. Adorable. Yeah, clustering around, following her.
JULIA: I like that a lot. Okay. Shifting into the middle ages. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the cockatrice, which is a mythical beast that is associated with dragons, but also has a little chicken twist.
AMANDA: Oh. How so?
JULIA: So it is like somewhat related to the basilisk in which it is said to be the byproduct of an egg that is laid by a rooster and then incubated by a toad.
AMANDA: Okay, sure.
JULIA: Alternatively, a cockatrice would be born of a cock egg, which do you know what a cock egg is when they're talking about a cock egg?
AMANDA: No. I am being so polite in not saying the words that we're saying right now, but no, I don't know what that means.
JULIA: Essentially, it's a yolk-less egg.
AMANDA: Oh, oh, so an unfertilized egg?
JULIA: No, because it doesn't even have the yolk in it. So it's like just—
AMANDA: Oh.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: A discarded egg. Huh. Weird.
JULIA: And they're not super common, so that's why—
AMANDA: Sure.
JULIA: —this is associated with a scary monster. Basically, it is a creature. The cockatrice is a creature that is born from a cock egg and it can be prevented from being born if you, this is really fun, toss the egg over the family house so that it lands on the other side without actually touching the house. So you really gotta yeet it over the house so that it doesn't touch it.
AMANDA: You gotta yeet it over the roof, but yeah, don't make a mess on the house itself, just the lawn.
JULIA: If you don't manage to do this, the cockatrice is born. And when it is born, it is a two-legged dragon with a rooster's head.
AMANDA: I probably would not want that poking around my penthouse, to be fair.
JULIA: Horrifying on its own. But then it is also said to have the ability to kill a person simply by looking at them, touching them, or breathing on them.
AMANDA: Okay, yep. I'm gonna yeet that over the house then, instead.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: This creature became popularized by late medieval bestiaries and is even mentioned a couple times by Shakespeare in some of his plays.
AMANDA: No way.
JULIA: So in Richard III, it is, "O, ill-dispersing wind of misery! O, my accursed womb, the bed of death, a cockatrice hast thou hatched to the world whose unavoidable eye is murderous."
AMANDA: Yes, okay.
JULIA: And the also in Romeo and Juliet—
AMANDA: No way.
JULIA: —Juliet says, "Hath Romeo slain himself, say thou but ay. And that bare vowel I shall poison more than the death-darting eye of a cockatrice."
AMANDA: There you go. And Shakespeare really making the ay and cockatrice—
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: —rhyme happen there.
JULIA: That is what he would have actually said. I was like, "We're sticking with cockatrice. I know you're trying to make it rhyme, Shakespeare. I can't do that for you, though."
AMANDA: "Willie, it's been 500 years, give it up."
JULIA: It's not your fault that English has changed.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: And your pronunciations were weird. Or maybe our pronunciations are weird.
AMANDA: That is so cool, though. Love a Shakespeare analogy. Thank you.
JULIA: So the cockatrice, of course, is not the only other European tale about chickens. There is another one that I learned about recently in researching this episode called the Rooster of Barcelos.
AMANDA: Hmm.
JULIA: This story comes from 17th century Portugal, and it features a rooster that helps to prove the innocence of a man who has been unjustly sentenced to death.
AMANDA: Not the Innocence Project Rooster!
JULIA: Yeah, kinda. Kinda, honestly. Okay.
AMANDA: What did it do?
JULIA: So the story goes that once there was a landowner in the city of Barcelos who had silver stolen from him.
AMANDA: Sure.
JULIA: God forbid. And the city was on alert, trying to find the thief, right? Eventually, a man who was from Galicia was accused of the crime, despite the fact that he claimed to be innocent, that he was only passing through the city because he was on a pilgrimage.
AMANDA: Hmm, okay, but we blame the outsider.
JULIA: So a good and honest man. However, despite his insistence that he is innocent, he is arrested and condemned by a judge to hang. The day he is to be hanged, he makes a final request, which is to be brought before the judge who had condemned him.
AMANDA: Fair.
JULIA: Easy request, easy to honor. They do honor that request. He is brought to the house of the judge who at the time is holding a banquet. You know, like you do when you condemn a man to death, you hold a banquet the same day.
AMANDA: You know, Julia, ain't that just the human way, though?
JULIA: So the man is brought to the table and once again claims his innocence, though it doesn't seem to really move the judge at all, his argument.
AMANDA: Yeah, the judge is having a fucking barbecue.
JULIA: Essentially, yeah. so finally, in his frustration that he's not being taken seriously, the man points at the roasted rooster which is the centerpiece of the banquet, right? And declares, "It is as certain that I am innocent as that rooster will crow when they hang me."
AMANDA: Hmm.
JULIA: Wild thing to say to prove your argument, though.
AMANDA: Yes.
JULIA: Because it's basically saying, "I'm definitely not innocent. This dead bird is going to wake up and crow when they hang me."
AMANDA: Right?
JULIA: "A bold move, sir," is what I would say.
AMANDA: How does it work out?
JULIA: So this statement by a man who's about to get hanged, puts the judge off of his appetite. He pushes the plate to the side. So the rooster goes uneaten, right?
AMANDA: Oh, yes, probably no one else eats because the host is not eating.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: And he's like, "I don't even want to eat my delicious bird now, 'cause I have to think about the fact that my career commands people to die." [53:06]"
JULIA: He, however, still dismisses the man, sends him back to jail until it's time for him to hang later that night. When the time comes, the judge still at his table, and just as they are about to hang the man, the roasted rooster stands up from the plate and crows just as the innocent man had predicted.
AMANDA: Right? So the judge is, like, fucked?
JULIA: He's, like, shocked, but also realizing what that means. He rushes to the gallows, where thankfully, the man had been saved from hanging because the knot holding the noose broke.
AMANDA: So they did hang him, it didn't stick. Whoa. This is great. I love this story.
JULIA: So when the judge arrives, they were attempting to essentially hang him again.
AMANDA: Oh, no.
JULIA: And the judge is like, "Nah, nah. Free this man. His innocence has been proven. Let him go."
AMANDA: Damn, that's crazy!
JULIA: It is said that the innocent man later returned to Barcelos and sculpted a very famous sculpture, which is now held at the Archaeological Museum in the city to this day. And nowadays, if you visit the city of Barcelos, the rooster of Barcelos is a common symbol found in Portugal and is often sold as a souvenir.
AMANDA: Oh, my God.
JULIA: If you click the link, Amanda, you can see how cute he is.
AMANDA: Oh, he's such a cute, little rooster. I'm sorry—
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: —that he, you know, had to die and then crow in his sort of ignoble half-life afterlife, but he's adorable.
JULIA: In my version of the story, he gets up from the plate, he's revived to his full health, and he runs away to live a life of luxury in the countryside. I don't know.
AMANDA: You're right. He like— he shakes off the char of the roasting and there's a perfect rooster underneath.
JULIA: Yeah, isn't that nice?
AMANDA: Aw. Love it.
JULIA: Amanda, I'm glad. I really hope that you enjoyed these rooster stories, these chicken stories. I tried to really balance it out in terms of sweetness and also horrific, horrific stories for you.
AMANDA: You nailed it, Julia. Thank you so much for listening to the wanders, the cluckings, if you will, of my own heart. Because sometimes I think, "Let's deal with those little guys." And you make a great episode out of it.
JULIA: I'm always happy to answer what's the deal with those little guys for you.
AMANDA: Amazing. Well, Jules, I'm usually texting you this, but I just want to make sure I say it at the end of this recording as well. Next time you are unjustly captured for murder, just remember, point out whatever the person is barbecuing at the time and say, "When that shit speaks back, so will I." But remember—
JULIA: Stay creepy.
AMANDA: —stay cool.
JULIA: Later, Satyrs.
[theme]