The Monstrefact Redux: He Who Walks Behind the Rows

0:03Speaker 1:Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

0:09Speaker 2:Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short-form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time. In March of 1977, Penthouse magazine published a short story by Stephen King called Children of the Corn. alongside a pro-Nixon Watergate piece and photos of Polish model Jolanta von Zamuda. It was a nasty and highly effective little short story about a troubled couple on a road trip across America's heartland, right into the corn-choked expanses of Nebraska and the clutches of a strange youth cult that venerated a being known only as He Who Walks Behind the Rose, represented in crude local folk art as a kind of pagan green-haired Christ.

1:02Speaker 2:King writes of it as, quote, a strange green god, a god of corn grown old and strange and hungry. And later on, he describes it as a large shadow with great red eyes moving behind row upon row of perfect corn. The being in question here may have connections to the titular entity from it as well as other beings in the Stephen King universe. And in the 2006 Malleus Mostrorum monster book from the RPG Call of Cthulhu, he who walks behind the rose is identified as an avatar of the god Shub-Niggurath and described as a kind of twisted fertility and vegetation deity. Children of the Corn is a tale full of monocrop anxiety and religious horror.

1:53Speaker 2:And while the deity worshipped by the murderous children in the story is purely fictitious, it does tie into several different legacies of corn, crops, and associated deities. For starters, we should remind ourselves that corn, maize, was long a sacred crop of indigenous Americans and multiple Mesoamerican maize gods loom large, including the Aztec god Zenteatu and the goddess Chico Micuac. The rites concerning these deities, like the rites concerning harvest deities around the world, could certainly involve bloodshed and sacrifice. But I think a better match for what we're dealing with in Stephen King's short story here can be found in European folklore. I turned to Brad Steiger's Werewolf book from 1999 and was instantly captivated by an entry for The Cornwolf. Yes, that's spelled with a K like the new metal band. And the corn in question is not maize, but wheat. As we've discussed on Stuff to Blow Your Mind before, maize only entered into European usage after first contact with the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and the new-to-Europeans crop came to be known as corn in some English-speaking countries. But the word corn predated this

3:10Speaker 2:contact and referred to different grains and cereal grasses. German folklore in particular features various accounts of corn, Feldgeister, or field spirits, also known as Korndemon. There's also the Hofferman, or Oatman, as well as the Roggenwolf, and indeed, the Kornkinder. There are many such corn spirits, typically malicious in nature and prone to disappearing people, especially children. According to Steiger, one such spirit is the Kornwolf, a supernatural lupine predator said to haunt the fields and prey on the weak or unaware. The tale, it would seem, served as a kind of boogeyman to alert children to the risks of actual wolves amid the crops, drawn in by hares and small game in the unbalanced ecosystem of a farm, as well as referring to human outlaws and miscreants potentially hiding from capture amid the cover of pre-harvest fields, a place where you could hide and potentially sustain yourself on the ripening crops. Steiger goes on to mention various rural European rites in which the corpse of the corn wolf or related entities is symbolically burned each year. Now, I should mention that Steiger cites a particular book for this entry,

4:30Speaker 2:Robert Eisler's Man into Wolf, an anthropological interpretation of sadism, masochism, and lycanthropy from 1948. It's a rather interesting volume. It's not purely history or folklore, but rather a Jungian anthropological work arguing that the Jungian archetype of the werewolf connects with a primal evolutionary split that saw humans develop into opposing groups of peaceful and violent individuals, ultimately proposing his own version of, to borrow a term used by Terence McKenna, archaic revival, a return to primordial ways of human behavior in an attempt to prevent our own continual self-destruction. Indeed, Eisler does discuss the corn wolf, rye wolf, bean wolf, and pea wolf, and related entities as imaginative creatures, archetypes of, quote, the disguised outlaw and werewolf hiding and feeding in the ripe cornfield. Dream analysis and Jungian theory aside, the traditions presented here are fascinating and do match up with what I've read elsewhere, such as in James Fraser's section of The Golden Bough on the corn spirit as a wolf or dog. as well as more contemporary writings in folklore

5:43Speaker 2:and belief. You might also remember our past Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes on beans, in which we discussed the very old traditions of supernatural danger associated both with legumes as something you might eat, and also as haunted fields of legumes where you might dare to venture. And all of this brings us back once more to Stephen King. In Children of the Corn, He does a fantastic job of conveying the uncanny nature of the monocrop field. It sits both with the main character Bert and the reader as a sinister perversion of the natural order. Within the depths of the corn, dangerously close to the presence of he who walks behind the rose, Bert encounters corn so perfect, so flawless, that neither weed nor insect encroaches upon it.

6:33Speaker 2:As such, the green harvest god of the story stands as a fitting deity for modern, industrialized agriculture, brutal, unflinching, and alien to natural balance. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

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