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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick.

And today we're going to begin a series of episodes on the theme of licking with the tongue as this behavior appears in nature, in human culture, in science, and even in the mass manufacture and consumption of candy, as we'll get into later today.

But Rob, I've got a kind of strange place I want to begin with this subject,

because I actually got the idea to talk about licking on the show,

not by watching a deer go for a salt lick or by observing a snake's tongue,

though I think we will end up talking about all those things in this series,

but by reading about ancient Egyptian curses last month.

All right.

That's always an interesting way to go, right?

Especially considering something that is kind of seemingly mundane and every day, we start start with the esoteric uh in the ritualistic

i think that's the way to do it because now every time we look at uh looking in the real world

we can think back to the ways that it's also infused with with evil or protective magic yeah uh

so yeah i came across the idea to do this when we did an episode earlier in October about ancient Egyptian curses. And in preparing for that episode, I was reading parts of some books about magical beliefs and practices in ancient Egypt. There's one that I mentioned in that episode already. That was the book by Geraldine Pinch called Magic in Ancient Egypt, University of Texas

Press, 1994. But there's another book that I have in digital form here that is by Robert K. Rittner

called The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practices, University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Rittner, I've also referenced in an episode last month, I think because he did some translations in a paper on a curse we talked about that cursed the reader for reading it.

But Rittner was an American Egyptologist who lived 1953 to 2021.

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