Bugonia - Root your magic in myth and make bees from dead cows

I recently watched Begonia, or Wright Horror Flick I would say, and a fun distraction while being banished to the Pillow Realm by a grievous cult. But as you, dear viewer, will likely suspect, this will not be what this video will be about. At least the movie, that is. Instead, we will delve into its older namesake. Something more, and still somehow, somewhat, less esoteric than last time. And once again, go back to the sources of our own history and mythology for richer worldbuilding. So, why not join me once again, as we will take a look at Life Born from Death, the ancient rite that the aforementioned movie derives its name from, how you could use it to make the magic of your world more interesting, and how you perhaps could get yourself a brand new swarm of bees, though trying any of this at home would be very ill-advised. A common criticism of magic in fiction is that it sometimes feels a bit weightless. You have your fireballs, lightning bolts, glowing rune circles, and other arrays of spells and special effects. Lovely from a visual standpoint, but in some cases, sometimes to the point where magic users are indistinguishable from superheroes, which is usually the line for me, as far as my own taste is concerned. When magic in fiction is far too available, or convenient, it can easily feel less grounded. Especially when in myth, it is often, but not always, the opposite. It's use a matter of secrets only known to the initiated, or the divinely, or less divinely, blessed. Its application, often ritualistic, and its effects, while powerful, often less overt, or less direct than just throwing the equivalent of a lead stick of dynamite at your enemies. Then again, just making it overly complicated for the sake of it, and having to chant the chants and dance the dance, just as the first steps of a lengthy list of other conditions, without any rhyme or reason, doesn't exactly bring us further either. One has to still consider the conditions of the larger work they are taking part, and the medium it's told in, and then find the appropriate balance for it. Same goes for other considerations, choosing a hard or a soft magic system, certainly another interesting discussion to be had there, but not our subject for today. Rather, I think once again, it can be worthwhile to go back to the sources, take their measure, and let them inspire us, identify core themes, and work from there, without adhering blindly to them. Appropriately for the kind of worms that is magic, we will limit ourselves to a particular example and its surroundings, and have some musings about its application. This time, less theory, but more theorizing, as we delve into the fascinating transformation of dead cows into living beeswarms proposed by the ancient rite called Begonia. But before we can talk about the ritual in question, and take a closer look at one of the most well-known Roman sources describing it, as often in this field, we have to go on a quick detour to the Greeks, and talk about a larger concept with which it will make more sense, that being spontaneous generation. Well, let's have a talk about the birds and the bees, dear viewer, and where life is coming from. I jest, but especially in the latter case, their origins weren't always as clear or as well understood as they are today. In fact, for most of human history, people did not believe that all forms of life necessarily came from other life. They had some, or rather many, ideas about how exactly humans and most mammals reproduced, many of them lightly absurd or outrageous from our perspective when it comes to the exact process or its details, but evidently enough so that we are around today and perhaps should refrain from judging them too harshly, something that could perhaps be said more generally about much of premodern science. It's not that people lacked the will to understand their world, but rather the methods, and quite often the technological requirements, necessary for certain deductions and observations. This was very much the case when it came to the origins of other forms of life and their theories about how they came into being, namely through spontaneous generation, they believed, meaning that life could rise directly from non-living matter under the right conditions. While even earlier traces of this idea can be found, when it comes to ancient Greece, one of the most noteworthy precedents to look at are without a doubt the biological treaties of Aristotle. To give just one example, he thought that lives were not, as we know them today, parasitic insects that infect a living host, sustain themselves on the skin and blood and lay their eggs there, but instead living beings that as the result of a certain illness emerged from the flesh and were produced by the sick body itself, as one could clearly see with their mites emerging from it. Similarly, people believed that rotting meat produced maggots and mud produced frogs, as you could of course observe in daily life. I think you can already guess how they headed the wrong way around, if understandably so. As said, pre-modern science often wasn't simply wrong. It's just that when reasoning about causation based on the correlations they were able to observe, the former was very much limited by the latter. It's not like many medieval herbal-based remedies wouldn't have any positive effect today. I mean, sure, the active compounds are now highly processed and purified and isolated, but how exactly do you think pills and other modern forms of medicine were made before synthetic production? Or that balancing your diet according to the four humors would be downright disastrous? Ultimately they were wrong, of course, but very often they did get just enough things right. So many of these ideas endured and spread. For example, if we look westward to the Romans, Ovid entertains the notion that scorpions were born of crab shells, snakes from decomposing spinal cords, and, most relevant for our main topic, that bees and other insects could be cattle. One of the most interesting practical applications of the belief in spontaneous generation is without a doubt the ritualized practice called begonia. The idea that insects came into being from rotting animal corpses, in this case specifically that bees could be produced from cows, was elevated to a manual art found in many different sources. While far from the only example before or after, the most well-known is undoubtedly found in the fourth book of Virgil's Georgics, where the famous Roman poet recommends this method of artificial generation of bees as a means of replenishing hives that have died off. And how exactly did it work? Well, let's go step by step, although with a fair warning that it might not be a tale for those faint of heart. To begin, an appropriate site must be chosen and prepared. Then you have to build a small shed there, with a narrow arching roof and four windows that let a bit of light in. As for the choice of cattle, Virgil recommends a two-year-old calf with sprouting horns. Then the ride begins in proper, with the next steps being more or less consistent across most sources, although their order varies. In Virgil's case, you begin by sealing up the calf's nostrils and mouth, or as later sources recommend, all bodily orifices. How exactly Virgil doesn't tell, but those other sources mention pitch-soaked linen or sewing them shut. In any case, it seems to be an important step, although in some sources you can also do this one after the next one, which is, well, to take a whip, club or other blunt tool of choice in your able hands and then proceed to disable the animal from living in a rather permanent manner, although the skin must be left intact. After that horrific deed is done, you leave the carcass enclosed in the shed, but not before covering its flanks in thyme and freshly cut cinnamon. And then you wait. For how long, Virgil again is a bit cryptic on it, but other sources mention three weeks of keeping the shed sealed, followed by 11 days of leaving it open, for a total of 32 days, so something around about a month and longer seem to do the trick. After which, as the corpse fluids have heated and the pulverized bones have liquefied, those wonderfully fashioned creatures will appear, your bee larvae, which soon will develop into a fine and brand new swarm. There are some other variables in other sources. For example, the 9th century Book of the Cow, or Liber Vacae, which, while attributed to Plato, is more likely of Arabic origin. Among other differences, it prefers a cow to a calf, and sits on 14 instead of 4 small windows, all of which must be on the eastern side, and instead of beating the animal to death, you can simply behead it, as long as you reattach the head, that is, although you still need to beat it afterward to break the bones. Or the 10th century Byzantine Geopornica, which offers a method using an ox instead, for which the shed needs to be at least 10 cubits high, with all sides of equal dimensions and one window each, although in this version you at least don't seem to need the cinnamon. And just as the idea of begonia, and with it spontaneous generation, stuck around for quite a while, other later sources go into even greater detail about what kind of insect is generated from which kind of animal. For example, the etymologies of the 7th century Bishop Isidore of Seville let us know that honeybees are produced from rotting cattle, bumblebees from horses, drones from mules, and wasps from donkeys. Well, I only have a layman's understanding of beekeeping from helping out my grandfather with this house, and I'm not an expert on historical apiculture practice. So I do suppose that while far more labor-intensive, it might at least be faster than some of the more usual methods of raising new hive and it saves you the trouble of having to catch a swarm in the wild. So, in a way not uncommon for historical magical practice, we have an attempt to achieve a very worldly outcome in a more complicated but supposedly faster or more immediate way for a certain price that is. Though, from what little I know of ancient livestock prices, while bee hives certainly went without value far from it, exchanging a calf, cow, or ox for one would have you trading at a loss in most cases, even excluding the time and material invested in the shed, assuming the satisfaction of having forced nature's hand doesn't make it up to you. But while it doesn't actually work in creating bees, of course, some scholars have postulated that it may have worked in a different way or was inspired by another insect altogether. Decaying organic matter is a breeding ground for And as you can see, in the adult stage, they could be easily confused with honeybees, as they look quite a bit like them. And so they may have been a source of the confusion that later inspired Ovid and Virgil. So, while we surely don't want to try any of this at home, let's see if we can at least try to use it for our worldbuilding. Of course, both the idea of spontaneous generation and Bologna should hopefully stimulate your imagination a bit already, but let us entertain The first immediate option would of course be to use Bologna as the basis for a spell, ritual or general form of magic. As said, while magic in myth can be indirect or impractical and in fiction flashy but boring, drawing on historic traditions could be fun if adapted appropriately. Your first impulse here should be to think about the nature of magic and how it's handled in the setting and or system you want to adapt it to or that you yourself are working on. If you are just playing D&D, you could simply make it the basis for a kind of messed up and how exactly your swarmkeeper ranger gathers their swarm at third level or what kind of spell components they need for the associated spells. Or you could delve even deeper into it and add more of the time required in steps mentioned earlier. The more general, obvious and practical direction would be to include it in the repertoire of summoning and conjuration magic or matters of necromancy with the corpse-borne beasts following their creator's orders. Of course, you could play around with all kinds of spontaneously generated creatures. Spinal cord-borne snakes and maggots drawn from rotting meat certainly leave an impression. But there's also a certain visual appeal to the image of flying insects, so let's stay with them for now. Depending on how hard or soft the magic system is, how wondrous or dark its appeal, how flashy or more esoteric, as a rule of thumb, you can easily adjust things by going from the core idea and then including or excluding more of its necessary steps and conditions according to your needs and metaphysical wants. For example, do the 32 days fulfill a specific numerical symbolism? Or could an experienced mage simply perform the ritual in 32 hours or minutes, or the spell in 32 seconds and milliseconds? Which, going by most TTRPG systems, would mean in the first case about 4 to 5 rounds and perhaps some sustained action, or one simple action in the latter case? Well, I actually couldn't find any particular symbolic reason attached to that time period. Some scholars who support the drone-fly theory, notably among them a man with the rather memorable name of Karl Robert Austin Sarkin, have suggested that the roughly 32 days mentioned in the Geoponica simply correspond rather neatly to their developmental cycle from egg to adult stage. A sensible and logical explanation, but neither is necessarily required in the realm of magic, so at this point we shouldn't be ashamed of making use of a fair bit of artistic freedom. Following this, in most cases I would assume you could also digitally build the shed. You could of course still insist on the conditions created by that shed. That being a somewhat enclosed and sealed space, but with access to light and wind, as mentioned in some sources, and perhaps even the cardinal direction they are coming from. Or treat those simply as beneficial factors that give an advantage on the ritual or spell succeeding. More easily kept are the eventual spell components. Fine and cinnamon have many differing but powerful historical and mythical associations. Purification, protection and funerary use in the former case, warmth, vitality and use in preservation and embalming in the latter, just to name a few, or use whatever the equivalents would be in your world. A similar argument can be made for the sealing, no matter what kind you choose. Where in the actual practice of Belgunia it likely served to regulate purification and via that the production of the beast, that aspect could be easily retained and its more hands-on-the-matter nature gives magic a certain practical quality that may have its own appeal. That is why I included it, along with the aforementioned aromatics and beneficial factors, when I used it for inspirational campaign that I'm currently working on. Especially if you include the corpses of slain enemies and monsters as I plan to, having the summoned swarms depend on the kind of carcass used could allow for some escalation while also limiting excessive snowballing and furthermore just gives more variety to the practice. So, while ditching some aspects, we could even expand on others. What if, for example, more powerful monsters and not just mere livestock produce more powerful results? Or, going a bit darker, different humanoids produce different creatures. If a basic human carcass produces flies, do dwarven ones perhaps produce beetles or ants and elven ones butterflies or luminous moths? The choice is yours and your world, in this case, your rather putrid oyster. But what if beyond the application of the rite in some manner and spontaneous generation working in a magical context we go for it on a greater scale? Meaning that in your setting at least some form of life, particularly insects perhaps, are produced from dead matter. A swarm of insectoid beasts that rise up from the dead and make their hives in them are already seen in some fantasy settings. And even while most of those examples don't mention spontaneous generation or begonia specifically and likely weren't inspired directly by it, they nevertheless draw upon the associations and phenomena that likely gave rise to those ancient ideas in the first place. You of course could also take a step back and simply play with the aesthetics and larger themes in your design without even mentioning the concept. Monstrous insects rising from corpses or undead type creatures surrounded by a particularly nasty kind of insect that they perhaps control to some degree aren't unheard of either and would make for compelling monsters for obvious reasons, the powerful associations of death and putrid rot that come with them. Or you could make the inclusion and inspiration more overt. Perhaps in your next adventure such creatures were brought about by a good old traditional begonia rite gone horribly wrong. Or make it part of an entire faction of enemies, as very likely seen with the death blight in Elden Ring, as some theorists have pointed out. You could even take this further and turn the idea on its head, specific in how undeath and necromancy work in your setting, with such creatures being naturally generated by rotting corpses or serving as what animates the undead in the first place, what gives rise to unlife, controls its creatures and perhaps sooner or later corrupts the necromancers themselves. In that case, instead of simply giving your zombies glowing eyes, bloody teeth and gaping mouths, you could reintroduce an earlier idea and have the eyes and or mouth sealed, soon shut or stuffed with pilch soaked linen to keep the animating insects in. If done right, this could result in a unique and deeply unsettling visual design. Furthermore mechanically minded, you could then have methods of defeating them revolve around how quickly you can destroy their bodies as nets for the insects animating them, with those insects operating as separate enemies, or fleeing and if not destroyed along with the monster, returning to the necromancer, or taking up another corpse in the dungeon, adding urgency as well as a need for careful elimination to your adventure. And while we have mostly been talking fantasy here, as is befitting the topic, this doesn't mean that any of these ideas couldn't find their way into a space fantasy or even sci-fi setting eventually. Particularly the latter could easily serve as the inspiration for, or be part of a virus, a plague or parasite, or some other alien or otherwise unexplored phenomenon. While not an exhaustive list to the humble space zombie, there are other instances of life born from carcasses to draw from, the necromorphs from dead space being just one example. Or simply check Wormhole 40k, if they don't already have something like this in their canon as it would fit excellently into either Nergis Domain, the Nits or some other nasty Xenos creature's arsenal. Having presented this little bouquet of possible directions to take the idea in, what more general observations should we take note of? What did we get from Begonia? Well, apart from the bees. Well, I at least hope that this also served as a lesson on how to generally approach historical or mythical sources and as a possible rule of thumb for how to adapt them. After stumbling upon such a concept and finding that catches your interest, take a little time and look into it. Not only what it was and why, but also where it came from and where it eventually went. Look at what other instances are out there, how they compare, and which key points shouldn't be lost on the eventual translation. In our case, that would be first the prerequisite concept of spontaneous generation, that life can be produced from non-living matter, particularly from rotting carcasses. Leading to the core idea of Begonia, that one can force this process for one's own gain by And from there, if you aren't running an economy simulation type campaign, perhaps giving it a more martial purpose. Since magic is in the game, we can then, depending on what is appropriate for the medium and setting, shed, add, retain or modify some of the steps in question. Ditching the shed, but keeping the other ingredients. Significantly reducing the time while attaining the requirement of different carcasses for different creatures produced. And expanding the idea further with the sheer variety of lifeforms found in a fantasy world. By making spontaneous generation a larger principle within the world, it could serve as the origin of all sorts of monsters or undead critters. Perhaps even becoming a core part of our undeath and necromancy work in your setting. Here we would divest ourselves of even more specific details, instead playing with the aesthetics and underlying themes inspired by studying such ancient ideas from our own world. And while they and their roots more obviously evoke the realms of magic and alchemy, this could also be done for more modern or even sci-fi settings. But even then, while one shouldn't be afraid to cross genres, some translation work will be needed. Neither of the aforementioned approaches should fail you, as long as you understand both the bigger picture and the details, know the direction you want to take things in, and are clear about what to bring along and what to leave by the wayside. No matter how old, forgotten or dead a concept might be, with the necessary care, if you understand its bones well enough, you might actually still coax something living out of it. I was very happy to see the love the first video got, and am curious to see how the second one will go. And it's definitely something that greatly motivates me to keep going, even though I can't make any promises about a regular schedule just yet. As for future topics, it could of course be fun to delve deep into another alchemical or mythical magical concept like this, or again take a more philosophical direction like in my first video, though that would take and deserve more time to put right. I also have some more general and some more specific, if perhaps a bit obscure, ideas about worldbuilding that I might elaborate on in the meantime. But with that, I thank you for watching and bid you farewell, for now.