Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
It's fall and many kids are headed back to school and they're on the hunt for the perfect book to read. Don't forget to check out our But Why book series. We have two books perfect for young readers about age 8 to 10. Look for Our Llamas Ticklish and Do Fish Breathe Underwater wherever you buy your books. And if you prefer to listen to books, check out the audiobook versions as well. You can find out more at butwhykids.org books.
But why is supported by Progressive, home of the Name Your Price tool. You say how much you want to pay for car insurance, and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget. It's easy to start a quote. Visit Progressive.com to get started. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. ♪♪
I'm Jane Lindholm, and this is But Why, a podcast for curious kids. It's a show where you ask the questions and we help find cool people to answer them. We'll tell you how to ask your own question at the end of the episode.
If you live in the United States, the jack-o'-lantern on your doorstep might have finally turned to mush and you're at the end of your Halloween candy. Halloween, the season of tricks and treats, is behind us. But all of that talk of ghosts and ghouls has some of you curious about all things supernatural. Do you remember what that word means, supernatural? It came up in our episode on why there are so many different religions. Supernatural means things that don't exist in the natural world.
Today we're going to tackle two questions about supernatural beings. But don't worry, we're actually not talking about things that are scary. Later in the episode, we'll be talking with a guy in Iceland who studies folklore, including the long tradition of believing in gnomes and elves in that country. But first, this. My name is Avery, and I'm nine years old. I live in Jeffersonville, Vermont, and I'm wondering if ghosts are real.
My name is Justin McDaniel.
And I'm a professor and I teach religious studies, especially about Asian religions, things in Thailand and India and China at the University of Pennsylvania. You know, if we study history and we study other cultures, every culture,
Every religion, every race, every ethnicity on the planet Earth, for as long as we have recorded history, has had some belief in ghosts. So people in ancient China, people in modern India, people in medieval China.
Ghana, people in Peru, no matter what time period and no matter what religion and no matter what part of the world, every culture has some sort of belief in ghosts or some sort of belief that we have a life after our death.
Now, it doesn't mean that every person on Earth believes in ghosts. It means that all cultures have had some form of belief and all religions have had some form of belief. And certainly some people in Ghana or Peru or Thailand or India or Poland or Russia, they don't believe in ghosts. But actually, the vast majority of people on the planet, when we've done surveys and done studies, do believe in ghosts. And so why is that?
There's many different theories about why humans believe in ghosts. Some theories are that when people die, they have a soul, and that soul goes out of their human body, out of their flesh and bone, and that it goes to another place. And that ghosts are those souls reaching out to us because they miss us.
Some cultures, for example, in places like India, believe that these beings that exist after death, they want to guide us. They want to give us advice. They want to warn us. They want to protect us. And so that they might not have had a chance to tell us that they loved us in life, that they missed us.
And they might not have had a chance to give us all the good advice and wisdom that they had built up in their life. And they want to share it with us.
In some places like Thailand, in some places like Cuba, it's belief that people or beings that live in the afterlife, they actually can heal us. And so if we do certain rituals, we do certain ceremonies, we offer them certain gifts that they can use in the afterlife, that they actually can protect us in this life. They can heal disease or they can even help us win the lottery sometimes. And so different cultures have different beliefs.
Many cultures, especially Anglo-American cultures, cultures in the United States and in parts of Europe, believe that ghosts are because souls, when a person dies, their soul goes to an afterlife, and that they had unfinished business on Earth, meaning that they died before they had a chance to tell someone that they loved them. They died before they had a chance to
create a great work of art or they died before they had a chance to resolve a particular issue that they had in their life. And so that they're trying to get back to human life and they're trying to finish that business that was left unfinished.
All of these different cultures have different beliefs about what happens in the afterlife. Some cultures, especially what we call the Abrahamic cultures, the Christians and Jewish people and Muslims, they believe that there's a heaven, that there's a paradise. Other cultures like Zoroastrians coming out of Persia or Iran or Hindus in India or Buddhists,
they believe that there's many levels of heaven, that there's sometimes 31 levels or 33 levels of heaven, and heaven is like a tall skyscraper in a sense, and each floor is a different type of heaven. And you go there to particular heavens because of what you did while you were alive on Earth. Now, also these cultures have sometimes a belief in different levels of hell that you go to, places that cause suffering, that are scary.
If you look at the different cultures throughout the Earth and you look at the history of religions, it's really complex to see all these different beliefs between Buddhists and Hindus and Christians and Jews and Muslims and other religions.
Scientists have no proof that ghosts exist. There might not be any ghosts. It might just be a belief that humans have. But there actually is no scientific proof in ghosts. There's been some studies of it, but we have no definitive proof that there's ghosts. We have no facts that there are ghosts. And so if there's no scientific proof and there's no facts, then why do we continue to believe in ghosts? Why do we...
hold on to this idea? Well, some people believe, well, even if there's no factual reason that we have ghosts, is that it can't hurt, that the belief in ghosts can't hurt, that why not believe in it? It's nice to believe that if your grandfather or your aunt or
a friend or a friend's mom or dad passes away is that we can contact them that they they don't fully disappear that they can hear our prayers or they can hear our voices or that we can reach out to them and there's many people in different cultures called mediums these people that are able to be like a bridge between the world of the living and the world of the ghostly realms and
And so why not? Why not be able to reach out to them? It helps us understand more about the value of our own life. And also some scientists believe that actually believing in ghosts makes us in a sense different from animals. Believing and hoping that you have a life after death makes you work hard in this life.
Different historians and different scientists and different specialists in religion have kind of wondered about your question and asked the exact same question you have and have come up with different ideas and different theories, we call them.
for do ghosts exist or not? And so I would say that it's a great question. And I think that, you know, it makes us think as ghosts aren't necessarily scary. They're not necessarily haunting us. Is that belief in ghosts, meaning that your belief is that there's hope after life and that maybe in the
this life and in the afterlife we can have a lot more people to communicate with us and a lot more people that care about us even if they're ghosts
That was Justin McDaniel, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. As you heard, Justin didn't have a definitive answer for you, Avery, about whether or not ghosts are real. So here's what I would say. Ghosts mean different things to different people and in different cultures. It's okay if you believe in ghosts, and it's okay if you don't. But as for the science, there's no way to disprove the existence of ghosts and
and no way scientists have come up with to actually prove the existence of supernatural beings either. If believing in the kinds of ghosts that Justin was talking about makes you feel comforted, that's great. But if ghosts are making you scared, that's another thing altogether. So Avery and others, if you're feeling scared about ghosts, I want you to talk to an adult that you trust, because ghosts should not be something that's making you worried. Coming up, we head to Iceland to learn about gnomes.
We had another question about the supernatural and different belief systems from Aurelia. Hi, my name is Aurelia. I live in St. Paul, Minnesota. I'm five years old. My question is, why do some cultures believe in fairies and omens and some don't?
We just heard from Justin McDaniel about different religions and cultures that incorporate ghosts into their belief systems. Well, fairies and gnomes are kind of the same, but often these creatures have less to do with religion and death and more to do with landscapes. One country where there's still a strong cultural belief in things like gnomes and elves is Iceland.
Iceland is a small island in the North Atlantic, just below the Arctic Circle. It's a mostly rural country, and it has a long tradition of believing in elves and other spirits. So in Iceland, you have to be careful about things like moving big rocks to build a new road, because it might disturb the elves. I got in touch with a man named Terry Gunnell. He lives in Iceland, and he studies folklore, cultural stories, and beliefs and customs.
Terry says there are two words in Icelandic that typically describe the supernatural beings that inhabit the landscape. Árvar and hildufolk. Hildufolk means hidden people. Árvar means the elves. Although they're not like the sort of elves that we imagine in England or America. They're the same size as us. They look like us. But many people who say that they have experience of these beings...
They talk about imaginary friends that they had to play with when they were children. And that's a phenomenon that I think many kids know themselves, even nowadays, imaginary friends that they play with. But in Iceland they'll be called Þorvar people or the Þorvar, the elves. We're living in a country here that is very alive. I think it's a good way to put it. My house can be knocked, can be destroyed by something that I can't see in the shape of an earthquake here. I can be knocked off my feet by the wind.
I turn on a tap and I get boiling hot water coming out of it with the smell of sulphur, which tells us that out of sight below the ground there is lava running there. You look at the sky and you have the northern lights flickering right across them like the biggest television screen in the world. And the snow makes shapes in the wind outside.
And as you walk into the landscape, the land is made of lava and it has strange shapes in it which encourage people to see things within it. You know certainly the land you're standing on was once upon a time alive. So Iceland is very much alive. You go out to the hot springs, you can hear the water glubbing to itself. You go to a glacier and you can hear it grinding as it moves forward. So the landscape is very much alive and will talk to you in its own way.
And you can understand why farmers believe that they need to work with it. They need to show respect for it, for the nature around them. Whether they do it personally in terms of elves or simply in the sense that they need to show respect for the landscape, which is, in a sense, personified or turned into the idea of the elves. If you've never seen pictures of the landscape in Iceland, you should. It is stunning and bizarre and very much alive, as Terry said.
There are glaciers and lava fields and volcanoes that still erupt, frequent earthquakes, geysers that shoot water 100 feet into the air, and hot springs all around the country. Some of them are the right temperature for swimming or soaking in, kind of like a giant bathtub. It's an amazing place, and it makes sense with a landscape that changes so frequently that people think of it as alive.
That understanding of the world as alive translates into a cultural belief in things like elves that live inside the rocks and trees. But Terry says it's not quite as simple as saying that everyone in Iceland believes in elves. We did a big national survey of what people believed, ranging from God down to nature spirits and dreams and things. We had about a thousand people answering questions. We talk about the belief in elves and things of this kind regularly,
The figures are that maybe only 10% believe in these beings, but then only about 10% of them don't believe. That leaves about 80%, most of the people in the country, who fall somewhere in between. Terry says here's an example of how this cultural belief might express itself in a typical person in Iceland, somebody who's in that 80%. Speak to an Icelander and ask them,
tell them that they have a rock in their garden outside and they're thinking of getting rid of the rock to put in a small swimming pool or a hot pot. And as they're getting ready to get rid of this rock, their neighbour looks over the wall and says, what are you doing? And they say, I'm going to build a jacuzzi out here. And the neighbour says, but you know what that rock is, don't you? That's an elf rock. And then comes the question, will that person who owns the garden remove the rock or not? And I would say 90% of people won't touch it.
partly because it's part of Icelandic culture, but partly also because there's a sense of maybe something will go wrong if I do it. And when you live in a country as close to natural power as Iceland, you don't mess with it. So there's a strong superstition. I think it's more of a sort of superstition rather than anything else. And it adds magic to the landscape and what's wrong with it. So don't move an elf rock if you live in Iceland.
Terry says he's never seen a ghost or an elf, but his wife has, and he's open to these ideas. He told me we should respect each other's beliefs, no matter what we personally believe. As for why some cultures don't believe in elves and gnomes, Terry says most original cultures actually did have a belief in the supernatural, but in some cases those beliefs have been lost.
A lot of times that's actually because a group of people arrived in an area and kind of took over and imposed their beliefs on the people who were already living there. A lot of times those beliefs were influenced by a particular religion and the church. And the people in charge of the church didn't want Native beliefs to take away from a belief in God. So they tried to discourage or even forbid Native people from their belief in spirits.
That happened to the Native American beliefs, for example, and to a lot of Native cultures in South America when European explorers came in and took over the land. In our modern culture, some people believe and some don't. It might be based on what your parents think or your friends, or your opinions might be built on your own experiences. Aurelia, I hope that gives you something to think about, at least. Thank you for the fantastic question.
But Why is produced by me, Jane Lindholm, and by Melody Beaudet at Vermont Public Radio. Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. We had other music this week from Simon Waldrom and XX. If you have a question that you'd like us to tackle on this show, have an adult in your life record it on a smartphone and then send the file to questions at butwhykids.org. Be sure to tell us your first name, where you live, and how old you are.
We'll be back in two weeks with a whole new episode about food, just in time for Thanksgiving. We'll be exploring this cool question from Alex. Why do we like to eat certain foods? For example, why do some people like to eat spicy food and some people not like to eat their vegetables and that stuff? Answers in less than two weeks. Until then, stay curious.
From PR.
