Skeptoid #1061: Hunting the Pictish Beast

Introduction to the Pictish Beast

0:00We're the Scottish Moors, once the realm of a strange and magical beast, unlike any other creature. It is known not from bones, nor from legend, but from countless detailed renditions carved into the Pictish Standing Stones, which have stood guard over Scotland for some 1,500 years. Whatever histories they may tell is lost to time, but the memory of the Pictish Beast will live forever, hewn into the living rock.

0:35And in our extended content for premium members, how the mathematical concept of Shannon entropy was used to unearth some more clues that may help us to solve this mystery. That's coming up right now on Skeptoid.

0:53Hey everyone, Brian here. This December, join me for another great Skeptoid adventure. This one to New Orleans, where we'll take a deep dive into the history, pseudo-history, myths and legends of one of America's most storied cities. We'll explore French Quarter ghost, voodoo, and vampire lore with local expert Chris Purley, and walk through the historic St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. Did you catch my recent episode on the legendary Honey Island Swamp Monster?

1:27We'll be heading out to tour that very swamp, one of the most pristine and least altered river swamps in the U.S. Perhaps we'll catch a glimpse. We'll also catch live jazz on Bourbon Street, run a Bourbon Street scavenger hunt, tour the historic mansions of the Garden District, and stop in at the Mardi Gras Museum, the Pharmacy Museum, an oddities shop, and much more. And of course, we'll eat real Creole and Cajun cuisine, plus beignets and café au lait.

1:59It's a full weekend of true stories, tall tales, and the city that inspired both. Get the full itinerary and book your spot now at Skeptoid.com slash adventures.

2:13You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. Hunting the Pictish Beast Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not. I first came upon the Pictish Beast while doing a bit of personal research on the village of Dunning in Perth and Kinross, Scotland. Dunning being my own family name.

2:45It is said to be the place where St. Cerf once slew a huge, loathsome dragon, whose look no mortal could endure with but a single blow of his pastoral staff. And the 12th century St. Cerf's church now sits in the center of the village. It now houses the 9th century Duplin Cross, which turns out to be one of the more important of the few hundred Pictish standing stones across Scotland. I found myself going down something of a rabbit hole of these beautifully carved standing stones from an ancient culture about which little is known,

3:22and thence to a creature which appears on more of them than any other animal. It is called the Pictish Beast, obviously of tremendous importance to the Pictish culture, a creature unlike anything you may have seen anywhere else. Today we're going to see what we can learn of this fantastic animal, one of the most mysterious in all of archaeology.

History and culture of the Picts

3:44No discussion of the Pictish Beast is complete without first laying the foundation for who the Picts were, as their depiction in pop culture has long been heavily mythologized. This has often been as a race of savage, face-painted barbarians from some exotic place like Scythia or Thrace, who took over Scotland and then mysteriously vanished. In fact, the Picts are simply the name for a group of peoples who inhabited much of the northern two-thirds of what is now Scotland during the early Middle Ages.

4:19We now know that, genetically, they descended from the Iron Age tribes who lived there before them, and that they are among the ancestors of the people who still live there now.

4:30Tradition holds that there were probably seven Pictish kingdoms, and probably also other minor ones. The names of several of these survive in real regions today. Records of these kingdoms go back to about 300 CE, which is arguably a fair place to call the beginning of the Picts. They converted to Christianity during the 6th and 7th centuries. Their decline began with the Viking raids in the 9th century, and within a few decades, surviving Picts and local Gaels merged and became the kingdom of Alba.

5:04Pictish culture never vanished. Instead, it became part of the cultural tapestry that eventually became Scotland.

5:14What we know of the Picts comes from historians from other cultures more than anything else. The Picts had a writing system, but little of it has been deciphered, in part because so little survived. Indeed, their name Picts comes from the Latin picti, meaning painted, as the Romans noted that Pictish soldiers were often painted or tattooed. It's not clear which. Recall Mel Gibson's dramatic face paint in the 1995 movie Braveheart.

5:45Although his character lived centuries after the disappearance of the Picts, and there's no evidence that the Scots of the day painted themselves for battle, this inaccurate choice by the filmmakers was certainly inspired by the wild and savage legends of the Picts. It's also possible that the Roman description was greatly exaggerated. But regardless, Picts, the painted people, is how we now know that culture. We actually have more knowledge of the Picts from several hundred carved standing stones,

6:19which constitute the bulk of the historical record. And even that is not much. The Pictish language was a Britonic-Celtic language, closely related to Welsh, but it's known from only a few dozen inscriptions. These comprise a very few Latin and Ogham scripts, which was primarily used in early Irish writing. Beyond that are abstract symbols and animals. These are all pretty consistent. The common symbols are a crescent and V-rod,

6:50a double-disc and Z-rod, and a mirror and comb. And the common animals are horses, bulls, boars, wolves, eagles, and salmon. These are rendered in detail and with excellent clarity, so it's easy to identify each animal. However, the most common animal, making up some 40% of animal depictions and rendered in the same clarity, is known only as the Pictish Beast and does not match any known animal.

7:22The Beast is surprisingly consistently rendered, given the sheer number of stones on which it appears, the large number of artists who carved them, and the number of centuries over which they were made. It appears to be a quadruped. It has a long, snout-like face which hangs down, nearly as long as its front legs. It has a tail, as well as what could be a second tail coming from the top of its head and falling back over its back. All of its appendages, feet and tails alike,

7:54end in a scroll-like spiral, an unusual feature, to say the least.

Theories on the identity of the beast

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9:01Some have interpreted the beast as a dolphin or other cetacean, with a rather imaginative interpretation of the appendage on its head being a spout of water coming from its blowhole, though that would go up, not back. Its scroll-like feet would be its fins, though it is hard to imagine someone seeing a dolphin fin and depicting it as a long leg that winds into a spiral at its end. Others have suggested a seahorse, but again, matching a seahorse's single prominent spiral tail

9:34to an animal whose appendages all end in spirals is quite a stretch. Some have said that it could be an elephant, perhaps an aquatic variant, though I don't find this to be particularly convincingly argued. It's extremely unlikely that any Picts or other ancient Scots would have ever seen an elephant, but plausible that some could have read Roman descriptions, seen one stamped on a coin, but Google that, most elephants on Roman coins were barely recognizable,

10:05or seen little art sculptures or representations on textiles. If so, they did a pretty terrible job recreating it, especially given how much better the picked representations of other animals were. An identification for the beast that many people find persuasive is one that's common in Scottish folklore, the Kelpie. Often described as a water horse, the Kelpie is a shape-shifting spirit associated with the rivers and lochs of Scotland.

10:37It is usually evil and fearsome, dragging people into the water and devouring or drowning them, and for this reason, became a tool for parents to frighten their children away from dangerous bodies of water. They sometimes shape-shift into human form, often retaining their horse hooves, and can lure people to their doom. But the Kelpie is a poor match for the beast. Many horses are carved very well on standing stones. If the beast was a water horse,

11:08you'd expect it to look like one, as the Picts were quite good at carving horses. However, there's at least one more fatal problem with the Kelpie as a candidate ID for the beast. The Kelpie is a modern invention. Its first mention in print was in the 18th century, a thousand years after the Picts stones were carved, a thousand-year gap in which no beast was carved and no Kelpie appeared in any known records. The identification remains a popular one,

11:40but this is not due to strength of evidence, more likely because it's simply evocative and satisfies our desire for a thematic explanation rooted in folklore.

Symbolism and lasting mystery

11:51We've no idea what the Pictish name for their beast was or what role it may have played in their culture. We can only infer that it was of significant importance, given that it's the single most common animal in their art. This evident importance suggests a symbolic or religious identification, an inference that's further bolstered by the fact that the beast simply doesn't resemble any actual animal, despite endless ham-handed attempts at matches.

12:22Carvings of the beast made both before and after the Pict's conversion to Christianity are consistent, so we can infer that it was probably not a deity of some kind. The fact that so little Pictish writing survives means we know little about it, but not nothing, and in those linguistic clues can be found about the only thing about the Pictish beast upon which there is general agreement among scholars. The Pictish symbolic system found on the standing stones,

12:53it can't definitively be called a writing system, appears to have been based on pairs of symbols, and the Pictish beast is most often paired with one of three other symbols, the crescent and V-rod, the double-disc and Z-rod, and the mirror and comb. We have a few leading contenders for what meaning these pairs might have. Personal names, or elements of names, or modifiers of names. Lineages, or marriage alliances, wherein each element of a pair represents a family lineage,

13:23and the pairing represents the marriage. A logographic proto-writing system which sits somewhere between decoration and script. And despite a few authors arguing more strongly for one or the other, this set of vague options, plus a few others like them, are about all we know about the Pictish symbology. And it tells us precious little about what the beast is. In my research for this episode, I scoured the Library of Congress

13:54and every academic paper database I have access to. No books have been written about the beast. There would be almost nothing to say. It is mentioned frequently in the academic literature, even in current work, but never more than a brief mention, and a note that its identity and meaning remain unknown. It's as if nobody is trying. Scholars simply have nothing to go on, and the likelihood of new evidence appearing declines with each passing year.

14:23And so, I will give you the only definitive thing we can say about the enigmatic Pictish beast. It was meaningful to a people that we know almost nothing about. Their language is lost, their writing is lost, even their appearance and lifestyle and culture are washed away by more than a millennium. All but a single written list of the names of their kings, mostly mythological, and mostly uncorroborated by any other culture. About all we know is that the Picts were here,

14:55that they may have decorated their bodies, that they left a legacy of standing stones, and that a strange beast, known only to them, was a part of their world. We continue with how information theory yielded some tempting clues into the meaning of Pictish symbols in the ad-free and extended premium feed. To access it, become a supporter at skeptoid.com slash gopremium.

15:26A great big Skeptoid shout-out to our premium supporters, including Francisco Gutierrez, Zambian Ken from Livingstone, Heather from Vermont, and happy birthday, Thrillho. I mean, Laura. Remember, we always do our best to publish any corrections, so if you find an error in any Skeptoid episode, come to skeptoid.com slash corrections to report it

15:57and provide the right documentation. And if it checks out, I'll include it in an upcoming corrections episode. I'll be at the California Freethought Day event on October 11th on the steps of the California State Capitol Building. Swing by, say hello, think freely, and have a beer. I hope to see you there. Information is at skeptoid.com slash events. To book me for your own event, come to skeptoid.com slash speaking. Skeptoid is a production

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