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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'm Joe McCormick. And today we're back with the third part in a series on Licking, Licking with the tongue, which we began before the week we were recently out for the holiday.

We thought we might end the series after the second part. We got some great listener mail on this subject and

decided we'd like to come back and talk about it for at least one more episode. So to refresh on

the previous two episodes, in part one, we talked about licking in the context of ancient Egyptian

ritual magic, where licking could bestow healing and divine blessings.

For example, in the licks of the cow goddess Hathor, who is described licking the limbs of

Pharaoh Hachepsut to give her life in kingly power.

And licking could also be a vehicle for curses and magical violence, like the danger

described in the book of the dead,

of the danger of being licked by the demon crocodile in the afterlife, where the lick is some

kind of attack, understood as removing protective magic from the dead person's soul.

We briefly talked about some research on at what age children start to get the idea that food or eating utensils can

be contaminated by being licked by other people. And we also talked about the surprisingly

interesting question, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop?

That question kind of, well, it starts from a classic candy commercial.

If you haven't seen it, where have you been?

Look it up.

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