Two Wings and a Prayer

You're listening to season 10 of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of sci fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.

This is episode 10.452 Wings and a Prayer, and we're your hosts. I'm Tom, a longtime Gundam fan, and if we had to have another clip show episode, I'm glad they decided to get weird with it.

And I'm Nina, new to Victory Gundam and wondering what the deal is with the psychickers in the Angel Halo. Are they asleep? In comas? Paralyzed?

Are they aware?

Do they dream? Mobile Suit Breakdown is made possible by our incomprehensibly inspiring paying subscribers. Thank you all and special thanks to our newest Sophie E. Casey B. John N. Forged Horizons, M Otero Mecha and horror author.

I'll let that one pass. That was clever.

Slapworth and bait. You keep us Genki.

This week we're covering Victory Episode 45, Genkaku ni Odoru Uso aka Uso dances in hallucination. The episode was written and storyboarded by series director Tomino Yoshiyuki under his Yokitani Minoru pseudonym, and it was directed by Tamada Hiroshi. His seventh and last episode of Victory. After this, he transfers over to work on the Super Dimension century orgas over OVAs. Character designer Osaka Hiroshi directed the animation. Now the recap Queen Maria, Pure Armonia arrives at Angel Halo in time and for the psychic superweapon's first field test. Its rings are lined with sleeping Psychikers, though more are still expected to arrive soon. At the center of the globe is the Key Chamber, where Maria herself will harness and direct their collective psychic might. Gathering their wills around her, she begins to pray. Sinners answer to us. At the same time, Admiral Sugen dispatches a squadron of three Psychomu equipped Zoloats to monitor the Halo's effect on the battlefield. USO is immediately drawn into the Queen's psychic embrace. He imagines the interior of the White Ark to be a forest glade near Cassarellia. Some part of him remembers that he's looking for Shaak Ti, but in the dreamscape he finds her with Flanders and Harrow, washing the baby Carlman in a stream. He remembers danger. Wasn't it because of all the wild boars around here? He drifts in and out of hallucinations. He's searching the hold for equipment to help rescue Shaak Ti. He's poking around the cabin. He's relaxing on the camion, watching Haro blow soap bubbles. He's slumped against a bulkhead. His Head throbbing, He's in the V2, getting ready to launch. He's creeping through marsh reeds with Odello and Warren to peep on Shaakti while she bathes in the lake. As Maria's prayer continues, he starts acting erratically, unsure where he is or what he's doing. Tomash and Odello try to restrain him, but the Zolo ETS attack while they're preoccupied. As USO fights, he has visions of other battles, clashing with Chronicle, arguing with Katagina. His resistance disturbs Maria, disrupts the harmony of the gathered Psychikers. She batters him with waves of revulsion and horror, triggering flashbacks and the deaths of so many friends, allies, mentors. It's also hopeless. He's powerless. But even so, the priestess queen cannot break this boy's defiant will. When Odello launches his suit's wing binders as part of a desperate gamble, USO sees a vision of the wings of light and snaps out of his reverie. The psychic backlash he creates overwhelms Maria and the Psychikers, and Cagate is forced to call an end to the test. It seems the machine is harder on Maria than they had expected. Alright, folks, this week Nina and I are going to do something a little bit different. We are testing out some new podcasting technology, which, if it works correctly, should beam our impressions of this episode directly into your brain. No words necessary. Okay, we're going to start now.

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All right, good podcast, everybody. Let's go home. But just in case it didn't work, I guess we should probably still do this the old fashioned way.

How retro. This is our first glimpse of the Angel Halo in action. It's presented to us as a test run, but it certainly seems as though everyone involved is taking it very seriously and going about it as though this is at least a reflection of what they hope the full capacity of it will be.

But they don't yet have the full complement of volunteer psychikers, and so the power level seems low. It can affect people like uso. Some other people on the white arc are definitely feeling the bad vibes, but only USO is getting lost in these hallucinations. Does make me wonder what Shaak Ti is experiencing during all of this. What about Carlman? What visions is Carlman having?

Someone on the white arc does note that Carlman is a bit too quiet. Did you notice that some of the Psychikers are children?

Mm. Maria is the one who says, oh, the volunteer psychikers. Are they. Well, are they happy? Like, are we treating them good? Revealing once again, a certain naivete from the Queen, because I think it seems fairly evident to me that these people are not really here under their own free will. If they volunteered, it was under duress. And that line from Cagaty about like, oh, once we've conquered Earth, I plan to give all the psychic ers leave. It's just so absurd on its face. Yet when Maria starts giving her her speech, when she starts doing this like psychic prayer, she's. She's really invested in it. She truly believes in what they're doing with the angel halo.

It seems as though the psychikers sort of amplify her own inborn abilities, but at the same time, they're not just projecting outward. They can be affected by what they encounter out there in space. I'm glad you brought up the line about calling it Maria's prayer, because there's a moment when uso, in really intense distress in his own cockpit, claps his hands together in front of his chest several times, which is very like, though not exactly like the way a person would pray at a Shinto shrine. There's a bell you ring and you clap to call the attention of the gods before you pray and then you clap again afterwards. He also has his hands clasped in a prayer like position when Margot is comforting him after this whole ordeal.

And what snaps him out of the reverie is seeing what kind of looks like the wings of light when Odello shoots the mobility pods off of his gun blaster. So there's a strong sense of divine intervention, the protection of some kind of extra real entity that is helping USO to escape from Maria's prayer.

At the same time, it's like their prayers are competing on the battlefield. His prayer overcomes hers briefly for him to be free. I'll talk about the specific moment later, but there is a point where his reaction to something that the angel halo has caused him to hallucinate reverberates back at Maria and she gets like a new type flash flash on herself of like, ow, someone new typed at me. The way in which these two characters conceive of the world and of what constitutes goodness is very different. And their prayers for humanity are very different and coming into violent conflict basically within USO's psyche.

Did you get the sense of divine intervention, of some power outside of USO's self that was helping him?

No, I. I got the impression that seeing the wings did bring him back to reality, but that it had more to do with that. His friends have been protecting him on the battlefield while all of this is happening, and now they need his help.

And that's certainly true. But what about the song when USO snaps out of it? Shakti's song, which is to say Maria's song plays for us, but it is also playing for the characters because Maria notices it. Maria hears the song, and if it's not coming from her and it's not coming from uso, is it coming from Shakti? Is it coming from some third place? Fourth place, I guess Shakti would be the third one.

That song is strongly associated with the deploying of the V2's wings, but it has come up at plenty of other times. I'm not entirely certain of its significance here.

Yeah, I guess. Since it is a song sung by mothers to their children, it occurred to me that the outside influence protecting USO here might be the spirit of his mother. That would certainly be a classic Gundam trope, to have the spirit of a departed woman return to protect the main boy from psychic attack, as happened in Zeta and Double Zeta. But there isn't really a lot like in the episode, to sustain that.

No.

So I thought, what if it's the idea of Gundam itself? What if the Gundam is like one of those great old trees that has acquired its own spirit?

I wrote down a line of Usos from the episode. It's once he has realized that something is wrong, even though he can't tell the difference between what's real and what's a hallucination, he knows something is up and he says, you're trying to deceive me. It's useless against the V2. So this idea that he and the V2 are deeply connected, somewhat interchangeable, kind of the same, but also not.

There's a moment when USO dodges some attacks from these glory hungry Zoloat pilots, and one of them is like, oh, is it returning on Autopilot? Like the V2 is defending itself, even though USO is busy dancing with hallucinations.

And USO later refers to the hallucinations as temptations. So there is a certain amount of biblical yes. Stuff going on here.

In a series that has been big on the roles of religion, conflict between religions, and of course, the legacy of the Gundam. In early episodes, they talk a lot about how they are reviving the legend of the Gundam. Reviving the spirit of Gundam to give the League Militaire, whose name again is like Holy Military alliance when they render it in Japanese to give it the power of Gundam Ness, the strength of the Gundam behind them, their main ship is called the Joan of Arc. That line about temptations, though, is really interesting because the visions, the specific visions that Maria is showing to USO kind of align with the things that Zanskar soldiers have been fighting for, like with Dukarik and Lt. Mathis, and how they wanted a patch of earth that they could live peacefully on for themselves. And then these new guys who show up in this episode, they are looking for glory. They are terrified by the idea of an ordinary, boring civilian life. It's all extremely selfish and personal. And that's what Maria uses to try to tempt. She doesn't tempt him with a world in which there is no war. She tempts him with a world in which he has chosen not to participate in it. The Camion is still out there. They still got Carlman from the ruins of uig. But in this alternate scenario, USO has decided not to go and rejoin the Chameon. He's just gonna stay at home, live his good life in Cassarelia, and protect his farm and his family.

That's a good point. However, there's a whole sequence to Maria's prayer. And which visions USO sees during which or immediately following which instructions she has given to the psychickers is really significant. First, it's about projecting the importance of kind acts as the ultimate thing that matters in life. Which I believe is when he says, initially, I have to find Shakti and is like, what are you doing out here? There could be a boar.

I think the sequence is, first she says, seek out the wicked and turn them from their ways. Then recall the memories of peace in the hearts of the mighty upon the battlefield. Then, O proud hearts, the most important thing in life are the kind acts you accumulate. So there's. It's like directly keyed for the wicked. Turn them from their wickedness for the mighty. Remind them of the peace that lives in their hearts. For the proud. Teach them that the most important thing in life, the thing to be proud of, is kind actions.

Then she says, show them the terror of the battlefield. If they won't turn towards what is good, perhaps they will turn away from what is horrible. Then make them forget their instinct for belligerence.

And if they will not, then just kill them because they're animals. It's not murder if it's an animal.

But USO's knowledge that he has now, the things that he has learned as we've gotten to know him through these 40 odd episodes are intruding on these memories. In that hallucination of the cabin. Suddenly Shakti knows that Maria's not her aunt. And USO is saying, when you find out who your mom is, you can live with her. Just not a thing they talked about previously ever.

I am fascinated by these recap episodes where scenes have different dialogue. It's been recorded again, it's been written again, often with subtle differences that I think are important.

I love the one of the knife throwing again with his mother. Well, and of him sort of getting into scrapes out and about. Right. Because there is this dissonance between his childhood memories and his parents trying to inculcate in him from a very young age a lot of independence and self reliance with what Maria is trying to use the angel halo to project at him. Which is how wrong it is for children to be involved in war in any way. How wrong it is for them to be involved in violence. And so when he's practicing knife throwing the first time we see that true memory, it's for a useful skill or maybe for fun. And his mother coaches him to try using his dominant hand because he's been practicing with his non dominant hand. But there's never anything about how, oh, this is just a survival tool because we live in the wilderness.

Absolutely not in the memory with his dad, his dad says, don't play with knives. But the first time that memory is shown many episodes ago, what his dad actually says is trees have their own quirks. This is what you get for recklessly trying to cut one down.

Right. They're not telling him not to use weapons or not to use violence. They're telling him to think things through before he takes action. It's very different.

What his dad says is almost a metaphor for resistance. Like, you have tried to impose your will on the tree without thinking it through and the tree has hurt you in return. Not a message that Maria wants getting through to the kid.

He sees a basically supercut of all of the Shrike deaths. And it's meant to be horrible and repulsive. And yet this is the moment that inspires him to like new type energy back at them. This is the moment when there's almost like a recoil from Maria because those deaths actually firm up his desire to fight against Zanskar.

Yeah, like, and also obviously, come on, Maria. Seeing a supercut of all of my friends getting murdered by a bunch of enemy soldiers is not going to make me walk away from the battlefield.

But how much control does she have over the specifics of what he sees if she's told all the psychickers. Show him the horrors of the battlefield. Show him things that are terrible and repulsive. Like yeah, his friends deaths are certainly terrible and repulsive. They are horrors of the battlefield. So they fit the criteria. They just have an unanticipated effect.

I mean this is just like it's torture. It's psychological torture.

It's when she says if nothing else has worked, then wash away their sins in their blood. They're animals. There's nothing wrong with killing them. He thinks of Chronicle talking about USO polluting the earth and the need for the earth to be cleansed. And when she talks about turning malevolent hearts on themselves to be drowned in their passions, he thinks of Katagina.

Yes, he does. That interaction with Katagina is fascinating.

Well that he has this initial reaction of Ms. Katajina from UIG would never say that. Shakti's mother Maria would never say that.

I think this shines a light back onto his interactions with his dad a few episodes ago when USO was really upset about his dad being kind of cold to him at that military meeting.

The idea that everyone you know is actually like dozens or hundreds of people, right?

And if a person is actually like fragmentary and situational in their personality, in their presentation and what they do, then that's scary. Like can you really ever know a person? He thought he knew Katagina. He thought he knew Maria after meeting her like one time.

But then that last Katagina line is almost a rebuttal of his attempt to. To say like there's some part of Katagina that is good and would never do this. Because I can't remember if she ever actually really said this line or if this is just from the hallucination. But the why should I have to play along with a boy's romantic crush?

That's new. And I wondered about that. Does that come from the psychikers? Does that come from Maria or does that come from USO? Is that USO's own awareness, his own self critical voice speaking up there?

That he has romanticized this girl because he had feelings for her, or still does, and that other people are not obliged to live up to our fantasy of them.

This is critical for the episode because USO here is realizing that he cannot force his impressions of who Katagina ought to be onto her. The exact thing Maria and Zanskar are trying to do. They are trying to use the angel halo to force their idea of how people ought to behave onto the world.

And USO's rejection of it really disturbs Maria and the psychikers. What throws me off somewhat about Maria is that the language that she uses to refer to the target of their angel halo waves or whatever runs the gamut from fairly positive to really negative. And, like, what do you actually think of all these people? You know, she describes them as mighty, as proud, hearts as sinners, as deficient wills, as malevolent, strong wills, predatory.

It feels like a classic thing for a person operating from a position of authority to do. Imagine a mother, and first you say, if you clean up your room, we can go to the candy store, and the child refuses.

Good kids clean up their rooms, right?

Mighty kids have the strength to pick up their clothes off the floor. Proud kids want to be the kind of good child who has a clean room.

Kids who don't pick up their room are deficient wills.

And then they go down to like, well, if you want to live in a pigsty, then I'll treat you like a pig, because that's the place where they end up. Here is dehumanizing their opponents so that they feel okay killing them.

And Maria, the mother, acting like a mother. Not necessarily, you know, a good one, but a one.

Well, it's a bit like she has come upon a fight between two of her children, and she's. Or not even her children. She has come upon a fight between two children, and she just says, stop it. Stop fighting. Without inquiring at all into why the fight is happening. She just wants the fighting to end. And if the fight is happening because the larger child stole something from the smaller child, she doesn't care about that. She takes no steps to figure out what went wrong. She doesn't do anything to restore justice to the situation. She just wants the fighting to end. And the fact is, Maria, if that was really all you wanted, you could end the war today. You could stop. You started it. You could just stop attacking. You could surrender. You might lose your power. You might lose your position. Or maybe not. Maybe you get the Hirohito treatment. Maybe you get to stay on as queen of Zanskar to maintain stability. But the point is, you could stop without doing a big mind control thing. But you don't want to because you don't really want the war to end. You want the war to end on your terms.

Remember last week we talked about the likely intense mental and emotional and possibly physical discomfort or even pain that the violent emotions around her seem to cause Maria because she has a line early in the episode about how the sense of anger and anxiety radiating off of the battlefield is disturbing to the psychickers as well as in. In addition to disturbing her. And I believe that. Not that this, you know, absolves her of any responsibility, she's an adult person making choices, but she has allowed herself to be convinced that if they can end this war on their terms, not only will this war be over, but it will be an end to war forever. Like, if they can win on their own terms, then she can make sure that humanity will never go to war ever again.

Well, it's this idea that war is a human instinct, a throwback to our predatory days as mere beasts who had not yet developed the faculties that we enjoy today. And so if through the use of psychic mind control, she can excise that instinct, then war will simply end. It's the idea that we do war because we want to. But it ignores the possibility that these wars are happening for rational, material reasons. That people who feel, in the case of a Fonz cagaty, probably correctly, that they have more to gain from war than they have to lose from it will use the power that they have accumulated by ascending to the top of whatever hierarchy is available to do violence to other people.

You're right, but I think you're approaching this too rationally for it to be representative of Maria's perspective. Maria is so messed up from all of the emotional static, let's call it, that she is not really in a place to make logical decisions. I'm thinking of her like someone who, and this is the metaphor I used last time, is living with chronic pain or living with some other kind of really intense intrusive discomfort that makes it hard to think complete thoughts, even much less logical ones.

Maybe someone should simply use mind control to prevent her from feeling that pain. What could go wrong?

One point about USO that I forgot to bring up earlier, sort of tangentially connected, I guess, to Maria as mother of Zanskar. But in the worst moments of the hallucinations, in the deepest sadness and revulsion, USO calls for Haro. He reaches for Haro, he reaches for childhood. He reaches for his past. But he doesn't think of Hangurg and Mira. He thinks of Oliver and Junko. And it's almost as though he's spanning his entire past, right? He's reaching through the entirety of his life for strength. In this moment that Harrow is connected to Hangar and Meera. Haro is connected to his earliest childhood and is even like an actual repository for video of some of those memories, some of those moments Oliver and Junko represent the part of his life since he joined the war, since he became a pilot.

Well, they represent the ability to actually do something. When he reaches that lowest ebb, it's when he feels powerless.

But it's important that it is in concert with his farther past. Right. He couldn't have taken action, he couldn't have become a pilot and joined Oliver and Junkel if he hadn't had these formative experiences of, like, building up his independence and self confidence and all of that together is what he reaches for in these horrible moments.

Overcoming that sense of powerlessness is then crucial to rebutting Maria's argument here. Because his power, his power to protect people, his power to resist the invasion of Earth by the Zanskar, that's what he's fighting for. And that's not something that any of Maria's psychic attacks can target. She tries to appeal to many different urges. She tries to overwhelm him with revulsion, with sadness, with the feeling of impotence. But at the end of the day, he has people he wants to protect.

Did you notice his memories and memory hallucinations after she talks about kind acts are the most important thing? They are all acts of kindness, but they're all somewhat like violent or unpleasant.

Mm.

He has this instinctive, deep knowledge or acceptance or wisdom that sometimes what is kind doesn't seem kind in the moment. Sometimes what is kind is not nice. Odello having to drag Susie through the woods and yell at her to stop crying because they're trying not to get bombed. Or telling her she can cry all she wants, but they need to run Susie jamming Flanders into a normal suit against his doggy protestations so that he doesn't die.

And these are acts that, at least to me, read as parent coded. These are things that a loving parent might do for their child to protect them. Things Maria has not done for Shakti.

Speaking of Shakti and parents, especially mothers, the other thing this episode made me really want to talk about is the use of nudity in this show and how many different ways they use nudity. Because it's not consistent at all. No, sometimes it's vulnerability. The nakedness of birth, the vulnerability and figurative nakedness of death, as in the case of Junko's death, contrasted with, for.

Instance, the way Karlman appears in the end credits. Just a naked baby drifting through space.

There's a bit of an association between nudity or sort of unveiling and truth. When USO has that Wings of Light moment at the end, his normal Suit, helmet disappears. He's not naked, but he is unveiled in a way.

And when Sarah was visiting the podcast, we Talked about how USO has to be naked before he gets the V2, because it's a moment of spiritual rebirth.

Nudity can imply violence and the threat of violence, as in the case of Lupe, both in person, for real, and when she projects her naked self through space at him. And then, aside from the sexual implications, that hallucination of uso, Odello and Warren spying on Shakti while she skinny dips, which obviously is like teenage boys being like, ooh, we get to look at a naked girl. But here, nudity is something joyful, something natural. It's extremely earth mother for Shakti to be like, naked bathing in a pond. And the fact that Carlman is there with her and also to be bathed casts her as a mother.

Well, and uso, initially, I think the implication is because he and the boys are all together and they're like, oh, do you see that hot naked girl over there? And USO is like, what girl? And then he sees Shakti. But I think the idea is initially he's like, shakti's not a girl. Shakti's a mother.

Do you think he is awakening, perhaps, to his sexual interest in her?

Perhaps. I'm not prepared to go there yet. I think uso, through his experiences with Katagina and Lupe and etcetera, Maybe somewhat repressed in that matter, maybe feeling a certain suppression of desires that might otherwise be burgeoning at his age.

And that hallucination is odd because on the one hand, they've all said explicitly like, oh, we're gonna go spy on a girl who's skinny dipping. But I didn't find it a prurient kind of scene. It felt much more joyful, much more like, look at this earth mother of a girl.

Sure. I mean, from the art, it's clear that USO is getting something different out of it from Odello and Warren.

He looks happy to see her like this, to see her playing in the water and the sunshine, but he doesn't look as though he's leering.

Mm. He's also, like, standing while the two of them are crawling, suggesting visually a certain elevation of mindset compared to the lecherous boys who he is accompanying. It's also a vision of a certain idea of normalcy that, like, this is what life would be like if they weren't caught in the war. USO and his buddies out in the woods doing teenage boy stuff, and Shakti doing normal 12 year old girl, things like raising a child.

I don't have anything to add. I have no response to that.

And now Nina's research on the healing power of royal hands.

Many weeks ago, watching Queen Maria Pure Harmonia heal a crowd of enraptured subjects in the Zanskar homeland, I thought of the royal touch, a practice I. I'm mostly familiar with through the lens of historical fiction tv like the Tudors and Versailles. A monarch lays their hands on a sick person, says a little prayer, sometimes gives them a gold coin or medallion as a memento, and the sick person is supposed to be healed. And the more I looked into the history of this practice, the more certain I was that this was the right trek. Although the concept of divine healing is present in Japanese history and in Shinto, this divine healing is not confined to or even really associated with the imperial family. And with respect to the royal touch in the European context, as one source succinctly put it, the claimed power was most notably exercised by monarchs who sought to demonstrate the legitimacy of their reign and of their newly founded dynasties.

Hmm.

There have been numerous miraculous healing powers attributed to different European rulers and royal lineages. Medieval Castilian monarchs were said to be able to exorcise demons, monarchs in Hungary to cure jaundice. In many parts of the continent, individual rulers, especially those reputed as saintly, carried out miraculous healings as well. But the hereditary, institutional and formalized practice of a monarch healing the sick saw its fullest form in England and France. The act itself was an imitation of Christ's healing powers as presented in the Bible. And there was already a long history of churchmen healing by touch. Both England and France had adopted the Frankish practice of having kings anointed at their coronation, which is to say like rubbed with holy oils, which was similar to the way in which priests at that time were anointed when they took holy orders. When they became official priests. The anointing marked the investment of the king with a sacred character, an infusion of grace from heaven, and allowed the monarchy to appropriate the props and ceremonies of the church. Though the earliest example of the royal touch ritual seems to date to the time of Clovis of France in 496, and in England to Edward the Confessor, who reigned from 1042 to 1066. Sources disagree on when exactly the continuous practice began, with one pointing to the reign of King Philip I in France, 1060-1108, and King Henry I of England, 1272-1307. Another set it more than a hundred years later in the mid-1200s under St. Louis IX and Edward I, and a third agreed that it began during the reign of Louis IX in France France, but that in England it began in the reign of Edward II 1327-1377 and the continuous practice lasted until the 18th century. Although there was one notable use of the Royal Touch ritual in France in the early 19th century. So regardless of the specific dates, the practice lasted 500 years or more, and those 500 years are more recent than.

I would have guessed.

Despite being called the Royal Touch, the process did not always involve direct physical contact. Some more squeamish monarchs would hold their hand over the afflicted area, for instance, while speaking the appropriate prayer or blessing. One source described a cure administered by sprinkling water which had been used to rinse the hands of the king on the ill and at other times certain relics of dead kings, from a blood soaked handkerchief to whole body parts, were thought to still possess the monarch's healing power. But generally the Royal Touch ritual involved the king touching or stroking the face or neck of the petitioner and the king and or a chaplain reciting passages from the Bible or other prayers. These prayers usually reference the Gospel of Mark, chapter 18, verses 14 to 20, and sometimes also the gospel of John, chapter 1, verses 1 to 14. The passage from Mark includes Christ telling his disciples that those of them who believe will be marked by certain abilities, including the ability to heal the sick by the laying on of hands and the passage from John would have cast the monarch as existing by God's will and sent by God to bring their subjects closer to God. Throughout much of the ritual's history, petitioners would have been given a gold plated coin or medallion to wear as a talisman against illness, sometimes called a touchpiece. In its earliest incarnations, the royal touch was purported to have cured rheumatism, convulsions, fevers, blindness, goiters and other ailments, but over time came to be associated specifically with the curing of the king's evil. The evil the king had the power to heal. Also known at the time as struma glands or scrofula, Scrofula is a tubercular infection of the lymph nodes of the neck causing painless swellings and growths, although severe cases can develop into open sores and nearly half of cases experience other symptoms of tuberculosis infection like fatigue, fever and weight loss. Side note that in children scrofula is most often caused by a different bacteria, but the presentation is more or less the same as the tubercular form. Some contemporary accounts, such as those by John Brown, royal surgeon to Charles ii, and William Clow, royal surgeon to Elizabeth I, credit the Royal touch with a 50% cure rate, at least as if not more successful than the standard treatments in medical treatises of the time. Given that those treatments were usually things like purgatives, change of diet, exercise, bleeding, blistering of the skin with caustic agents, and plasters made of goat dung and honey, this is not terribly surprising. Besides which, scrofula was rarely deadly and often went into remission on its own, giving the impression that the monarch's touch had cured it, an intriguing wrinkle that feels relevant to Victory Gundam. Over the time period in which the royal touch was continuously practiced, some medical professionals thought scrofula was caused by sin and towards the end of that period also considered it heritable. Descriptions of scrofula causing a pig like appearance due to the swelling of the face and neck date back to Aristotle. So of course the disease came to be associated with gluttony, especially in children. Other causes included a range of immoral behaviors, sexual promiscuity, financial profligacy and physiological degeneration, debauchery, sloth and overindulgence. In the case of children, some physicians alleged that scrofula was passed down by irresponsible parents to their innocent, unwilling offspring, caused by the parents immoral behavior, including behavior before the child was born or even conceived. Viewed in this light, scrofula became a sign of catastrophic cultural and biological decline. Over time, the Royal Touch ritual grew from occasional individual healings to vast spectacles, grand occasions with official liturgy, which is to say, church approved, specific prayers and procedures, and hundreds of supplicants. James Turrell sums up the practice's development rather through the chronological development of the ritual for royal healing. Two distinct but related issues the question of the source of the healing power and the use of the power as a political tool. With regard to the source of the healing power, it was personal sanctity, the anointing of the monarch with holy oil at the coronation, and simple hereditary right as the true monarch and the source of the healing power came to be linked either to the act of crowning or to a claim to the throne. At the same time, the act of healing scrofula by touch became a political action used to demonstrate one's authority as monarch. By the late Middle Ages, the royal touch ritual had become a major part of the coronation ceremony for French monarchs who would be crowned and Anointed at Reims Cathedral, pronounced in English Reims, then immediately make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Marcouf, the patron saint of scrofulous people, after which the newly crowned king was deemed to possess the sacred power of Touch. Philip VI, reigning 1328-1350. The first Valois king used the ritual to demonstrate that he shared the thaumaturgic, magical or miraculous powers of his sovereign, cousins and ancestors, thus proving himself to be the rightful heir. During the French wars of religion in the 1500s, there seemed to be an increase in the incidence of scrofula, likely the result of worsening living conditions caused by the war. But remember how scrofula was linked to immorality? Well, the Catholic League started a propaganda campaign against Henry iii, alleging that God had withdrawn the gift of divine healing due to Henry's immorality. After Henry III was assassinated and Henry iv, a Protestant, ascended to the throne, they argued that God would revoke his gift if the French accepted a Protestant as their sovereign and that the scrofulus would never be cured again. Scrofulus is just a funny word, isn't.

Sounds like something an old timey villain would call his nemesis. Get back here you scrofulous cur. Give me back my monocle.

That's a good insult. Henry IV went on to convert to Catholicism and was hailed not only as the healer of the scrofulus, but also the healer of the kingdom. He was the first Bourbon king of France and wanted to use the royal touch ritual as proof of the legitimacy of his reign. Seeing the pattern here, everybody. But his plan hit a bit of a snag. He was crowned at Chartres Cathedral, not at Reims, and had not made the pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Marcouf. His solution was to argue that the royal touch was handed down by his predecessors and by God's grace, not by some ceremony. He went on to hold healing ceremonies in Paris and in other cities around France, and to hold them at least four times each at Easter, Pentecost, All Saints Day and Christmas. Contemporary reports describe him touching and healing as many as 1,500 individuals at a single event. In at least one instance, Henry complained that the hours long ceremony exhausted him, but continued the practice and consistently gave the impression that he was doing it only out of concern for the well being of his subjects. Cough, cough. Queen Maria.

Cough, cough.

You know Queen Maria might be able to cure that cough of yours.

Louis XIII and Louis XIV also conducted royal touch ceremonies, including one Easter 1680 that involved the touch healing of 1600 people. Voltaire wrote that he lost confidence in the Royal touch upon hearing that a mistress of Louis XIV died of scrofula, despite being very well touched by the king. Oh, Voltaire, what a card. There's no record that Louis xviii, who became the king after the Bourbon Restoration, ever held any royal touch ceremonies. But the last known use of the Royal Touch in France was by his successor, Charles x, who touched 121 of his subjects at his coronation on 29 May 1824, in an attempt to assert continuity with the monarchy of the ancien regime and and its claim to divine right.

And look how well that worked out for him.

As the first Tudor king of England, Henry VII was preoccupied with legitimizing his reign, leading him to take the ritual as practiced by his predecessors and make.

It much more formally codified.

Although these rituals would seem to be at odds with the Protestant Reformation's dismantling of similar practices, it was simply too politically useful to dispense with. For example, some historians describe Elizabeth I as reluctant to conduct these ceremonies until the Pope issued a bowl of excommunication against her that not only released her Catholic subjects from any obedience to her, but encouraged them to act against her. There were claims that due to her apostasy from Rome, God had withdrawn his favor and Elizabeth needed a rebuttal. The Royal Touch ritual, as public demonstration of God's favor, had significant political importance, and Elizabeth was later described by her royal surgeons as healing large crowds. Cue me starting to wonder if Elizabeth I could have been another inspiration for Maria Armonia. One small change Elizabeth wrought in the ceremony is that she changed the prayers to emphasize that the healing power was not inborn, not hers, but was the power of God channeled through her. In the mid-1600s, England was in the midst of fierce debates on the nature of monarchy. Did kings rule by divine appointment or by the consent of their subjects? And the Royal Touch was seen as evidence in favor of divine empowerment of the monarch. It was at the execution of Charles I that many who came to witness the event rushed for forward to dip handkerchiefs in his blood. These handkerchiefs were later purported to have healed multiple people, including curing one woman's blindness. Not long after, royalists published pamphlets lamenting his death, musing on how many more people could have been healed if his reign had continued. By the time of the restoration of the monarchy, the royal touchability in England had been separated from the coronation and anointing of the monarch and was attributed solely to hereditary right to the throne. Charles II conducted healings before he was crowned and throughout his reign conducted many royal touch ceremonies. Popular demand was so great that a regular schedule of ceremonies was quickly instituted with sergeant surgeons appointed to preside over the procedure. From a medical perspective, the surgeons also screened supplicants, checking to be sure they actually had scrofula and weren't just there for the gold plated medallion. This era was really the heyday of the practice, with one source quoting historian Stephen Brogan, that greater numbers of people were touched for scrofula during the Restoration by both Charles II and James II and with greater regularity than at any other time in English history. Charles II touched new nearly 6,000 people per year and during his reign is reported to have engaged 96,000 in the ceremony. Act four, scene three of Shakespeare's Macbeth includes a description of the royal touch ritual. Likely to pander to the interests of then reigning James I, who had just given Shakespeare's acting company his patronage. William of Orange ended the practice. He seemed to consider it superstitious quackery and was famous for his reluctance to perform healings. Multiple accounts mention that the one time he was prevailed upon to touch a sufferer from the King's evil, he prayed to God to heal the patient and grant him more wisdom at the same time. Yet the practice was revived later, again because it was politically expedient. There is so much about this that relates to Queen Maria of Zanskar. Clearly the Zanskar government see the value of mass healing ceremonies as propaganda. Surely a monarch with such power must have divine favor. It's proof of her fitness to rule and a tool to encourage obedience. These miraculous healings could be withdrawn, which may seem a bit woo woo for a modern space dwelling society, but that's the whole Zanskar monarchy. It harkens back to an imagined past. Perhaps a restoration of the rightful social order where sufficiently pure and harmonious monarchs channel divine blessings, mercifully healing their tumultuous realm and sinful subjects. After all, the King's powers went beyond simply effecting a remedy to the disease and the thousands of rituals performed also helped to cure the nation's sins and make the whole of society more godly.

What is her use of the angel.

Halo but another kind of mass healing.

From her perspective, purging the sin from the body politic.

Mm. Next time on episode 10.46 now I lay Me down to Sleep we research and discuss victory gundam episode 46 and shaakti is no longer asking. Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal the existence of the v2 buster configuration implies the existence of Michael Jobe and Lindsey configurations. Pregnert Prangent is space madness. Catching space is perfect for non hierarchical decision making. Who is on top depends entirely on your perspective. Mama Bear Hater's gonna make some good points. Iron Maiden Do I look like a clown to you? At least one member of the Zanskar royal family knows how to give orders and I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for you meddling kids. Please listen to it.

Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unceded land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is Wasp by Misha Dayakson. The closing music is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio. The recap music is Slow by Lloyd Rogers. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the Lenape people, and more in the show notes on our website gundampodcast.com if you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email hostsundompodcast.com or look for links to our social media accounts on our website. And if you would like to support the show, please share us with your friends. Leave a nice review wherever you listen to podcasts or support us financially@gundumpodcast.com Patreon you can find links and more ways to help out@gundumpodcast.com support thank you for listening and how would you like me.

To introduce the research and now Nina's research on the Royal Healing Touch or note do the healing powers of monarchs or research on the Royal touch if.

You just want to call it that. It does sound sketchy, which is kind of fun.

Monarchic healing? I don't know.

What do you want to call it?

I really like that Haro has taken to just clamping onto USO's ankle for travel.

Did they give him a little magnet on a tether to help himself around or was that a different Haro?

No, he has a he has a little magnet. He also has oxygen canisters that he can use to like jet around.

It's probably easiest to just clamp onto.

So it's way more efficient and there's no risk of being left behind. Maybe she had developed a new Royal Touch resistant strain of Scropula.

SA.