"The European Space Agency (ESA) has uncovered relics of lost continents that have hidden under Antarctica for millions of years." Source: Daily Mail.
"Satellite images reveal a timeline of the ancient landmasses buried a mile (1.6 km) beneath the icy continent.
"Scientists said the snaps shed new light on Antarctica, the 'least understood continent on Earth'."
One example of the strange phenomena found in Antarctica.
Comment: These fools are meddling with forces they can't possibly understand. If they don't leave well enough alone, they could end up opening vistas of Space and Time that will drive the world mad.
It's a very bad idea to delve too deeply into these lost continents. Back in 1930, the geologist William Dyer, one of the few survivors of a disastrous Miskatonic University expedition to Antarctica (story here), tried to warn future expeditions to stay away from the region, but they didn't listen and now it's only a matter of time before these bumbling scientists uncover ... things ... too hideous to contemplate.
This 30-minute animated movie describing the basics of what happened to the Miskatonic expedition is nicely done. Closed captions in English available.
For the full story of the expedition, the best source is the original version published in 1931. There are a lot of different editions available, many of them of dubious quality, but one of the best can be found in a Library of America anthology brought out in 2005. Highly recommended for everyone who cares about the future of the planet.
"In the library of a famous Ivy League college rests an illuminated manuscript book, hundreds of pages long. No one knows how old it is, where it comes from, who wrote it, or what it is about. A monarch is believed to have bought it for a fabulous sum from a notorious practitioner of the black arts, after which it disappeared for centuries. Its illustrations are pictures of unidentifiable plants and incomprehensible scientific diagrams. The test is in an unknown script which some of the world's best codebreakers have been unable to decipher. The language of the script is also unknown, but computer analysis shows that the manuscript is written in no known human tongue." -- from the introduction to "The Voynich Manuscript for Beginners," by Richard Newmanson.
The Voynich Manuscript has been described as "the most mysterious book in the world." Its author and the date of its composition are unknown -- along with everything else about it -- but the medieval manuscript is probably(1) authentic and entropy analysis (PDF) of the text reveals that the book is highly organized and doesn't just consist of random gibberish. It may be an alchemical text or a Cathar bible (specifically a few books from the Bible) used for ritual purposes, but this is all speculation at this point. Whatever it is, the book was encrypted using a complicated and still unknown code, possibly to hide its contents from the Inquisition.
The short book by Richard Newmanson cited above gives a concise but relatively complete overview of the Voynich Manuscript. Highly recommended. Judging by the illustrations, the book appears to be divided into several sections dealing with herbs, astronomy, cosmology, biology, pharmaceuticals and recipes, but Newmanson points out the possibility that the figures may simply have been inserted in order to obfuscate the actual contents of the manuscript. The fact that no one knows what language was used to write the book makes it extremely difficult to break its code, but lots of people are working on it and every now and then someone will announce that the mystery has been solved.
The book has attracted a lot of attention and speculation, but as far as I can tell the text is still a mystery. Some experts have suggested that it was written by Roger Bacon or the notorious occultist John Dee, but no one really knows for sure (2). Considering its apparent medieval origin, the manuscript is likely alchemical or perhaps Rosicrucian.
(2) "Like its contents, the history of ownership of the Voynich manuscript is contested and filled with some gaps. The codex belonged to Emperor Rudolph II of Germany (Holy Roman Emperor, 1576-1612), who purchased it for 600 gold ducats and believed that it was the work of Roger Bacon. It is very likely that Emperor Rudolph acquired the manuscript from the English astrologer John Dee (1527-1608). Dee apparently owned the manuscript along with a number of other Roger Bacon manuscripts." Source: Yale University Library.
"The hoax hypothesis can’t be ruled out," according to The New Yorker (2013). "But if the Voynich is a fake, it’s an elaborate one. A twentieth-century scam artist would have to have located a hundred and twenty sheets of blank six-hundred-year-old vellum in anticipation of the invention of radiocarbon dating (which did not yet exist when the manuscript first reëmerged, in 1912). Scholars remain deeply divided over the question of whether the text is likely to be meaningful. But the distribution of letters and words is anything but random, even demonstrating statistical features generally associated with natural-language texts—features that weren’t discovered until the nineteen-thirties."
My favorite theory about the Voynich Manuscript is that it is either the real version of the Necronomicon invented by H.P. Lovecraft or that it inspired Lovecraft and other fantastic writers such as Arthur Machen. This is all fictional, though. "The link between those two mysterious manuscripts - Voynich’s book and the Necronomicon - was first hypothesized in the Cthulhu Mythos fiction of the English author and critic Colin Wilson," according to Daniel Harms (1998). Unfortunately, the Voynich MS is only a couple hundred pages long -- too short to be the Necronomicon - and linguistic analysis has shown that it wasn't originally written in Latin or any Arabic language.
Personally, I hope that the Voynich Manuscript is never decrypted. If it is, the book will probably turn out to be yet another medieval grimoire and lose all of its mystery.
Related:The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript Has Finally Been Decoded. According to this 2017 Ars Technica article, one researcher claims that the book is "mostly a plagiarized guide to women's health, " but "[s]cholars have started to debunk these claims about the Voynich manuscript, noting that the [researcher's] translation 'makes no sense' and that a lot of the so-called original findings were done by other researchers."
"In 1925, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett journeyed into the Brazilian jungle in search of ‘Z,’ an ancient lost city that he believed existed somewhere in the uncharted depths of the Amazon. The British-born explorer expected to make archaeological history, but following a final dispatch on May 29, he and his two companions vanished without a trace. Their disappearance inspired rampant speculation, and many would-be rescuers later died while trying to hunt down evidence of their fate." Source: History Channel.
Fawcett's story is straight out of an H. Ryder Haggard novel, but this time the hero didn't manage to get out alive. That's not surprising considering the primordial nature of the Brazilian jungle, a vast wilderness teeming with hostile tribes, vampire bats, poisonous spiders, dangerous animals and exotic diseases. But the biggest hazard was the jungle itself:
"Colonel Fawcett probably came closest to death during his trips not from human or animal agents but from the geography of the land itself," according to the Museum of Unnatural History. "While traveling down the uncharted Madidi River by raft, his expedition encountered a series of dangerous rapids. With each the speed of the rafts increased until they were rushing down the river uncontrolled. Finally, the river widened and the velocity slowed.
"The crews had just given a sigh of relief when they rounded a steep bluff and the roar of a waterfall filled their ears. One of the rafts was able to make it to shore, but Fawcett's was caught in the current. With the water too deep to use a pole to snag the bottom and turn away, the raft shot over the drop." They managed to survive, but lost most of their equipment.
As far as I know, the disappearance of Fawcett and his expedition remains an enigma to this day. No one knows what happened to them and a lot of people have died or gotten themselves into serious trouble trying to find out:
"In the years since the ... expedition, the mystery surrounding Fawcett’s disappearance has lured scores of other would-be rescuers and investigators into the Amazon. It’s estimated that as many as 100 of them have died in the jungle, and a few have followed in the explorers’ footsteps by vanishing without a trace. As recently as 1996, a team of Fawcett-hunters led by a wealthy businessman named James Lynch was captured by Amazonian Indians and held for ransom. They only escaped with their lives after giving up $30,000 worth of equipment." (History Channel)
Note: Fawcett's story was turned into a film in 2016. I haven't seen it, but it looks pretty bad and this review makes it clear that the story has been heavily pozzed with the usual politically-correct BS which is now the standard for the Hollywood propaganda machine. The movie was based on a book with the same title by David Grann. I haven't read the book, either, but it's probably a lot better. The books usually are.
Comment: How accurate is this description of the origins of Halloween? It's hard to say. "The three main sources for Celtic religion are Romano-Celtic epigraphy and iconography, the comments of classical authors, and insular Celtic tradition as represented by recorded Irish and Welsh literature." Source: The Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD), 3rd ed, revised.
From what I can tell, most of what we know about Celtic mythology was written down during the medieval period. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he Celtic peoples who maintained either their political or linguistic identities (such as the Gaels in Ireland, and the Brittonic tribes of Great Britain) left vestigial remnants of their ancestral mythologies, put into written form during the Middle Ages." (Emphasis added)
The Roman conquest and the gradual conversion of the Celts to Christianity created a kind of syncretic muddle that makes it difficult to separate the facts of Celtic religious practices from the myths that grew up around them. The problem is "one of reconciling [the] very different modalites and frames of reference [of the different sources], and of matching insular myth to Romano-Celtic image." (OCD)
The picture we have of the Celts is also complicated by Roman war propaganda, the most famous example of which is Julius Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic War. Caesar, for instance, described the practice of human sacrifice by the Druids, though he probably never witnessed such a sacrifice himself. Apparently, there's still some question about whether these sacrifices actually occurred and, if they did, who was responsible for carrying them out:
"How widespread human sacrifice was among the cultures that the druids served is another mystery," according to Live Science (2014). "It’s important to note that much of the writing that survives comes from Roman writers who could be hostile toward the druids and the cultures they served." Historical distortions, if not outright fabrications, could have easily crept into the descriptions of the Celts recorded by Christians hostile to pagan practices in general.
The bottom line, I guess, is that we don't really know if our standard history of the origin of Halloween is accurate or a mixture of truth and legend complicated by distortions introduced by later writers. The only thing certain is that the rituals practiced by modern "neopagans" probably don't have much to do with real pagan rituals and beliefs.
Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Red arrows are warm surface currents. Blue arrows indicate cooler deep currents. Video from 2008.
"A research team found the fingerprint of a massive flood of fresh water in the western Arctic, thought to be the cause of an ancient cold snap that began around 13,000 years ago. " Source: Science Daily (July, 2018).
"'This abrupt climate change -- known as the Younger Dryas -- ended more than 1,000 years of warming' ... The cause of the cooling event, which is named after a flower (Dryas octopetala) that flourished in the cold conditions in Europe throughout the time, has remained a mystery and a source of debate for decades."
Note: According to this research, the cause of the catastrophic flooding was "a huge influx of freshwater from melting ice sheets and glaciers that gushed into the North Atlantic, disrupting the deep-water circulation system -- Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) -- that transports warmer waters and releases heat to the atmosphere. However, geologic evidence tracing its exact path had been lacking."
This is yet another theory explaining the Younger Dryas period, an abrupt cooling which occurred around 12,000 years ago and apparently led to the extinction of large prehistoric mammals like the woolly mammoth across North America.
Comment: If nothing else, this huge labyrinthine archive proves that the Vatican, like any other bureaucracy, generates tons of paperwork. I suspect, though, that this "secret archive" isn't the real secret archive and I'm sure they've got more interesting -- and dangerous -- material hidden away in some underground, climate-controlled bunker that very few people know about.
The Vatican, after all, is a state in its own right with a very long history of intrigue, corruption and the occasional murder. I'm sure this book about the secret archives (The Vatican Secret Archives, Vdh Books) only contains documents that the Church decided can be safely shown to the public. Even though it's an interesting and historically important book in its own right, it's also a kind of PR effort by the church designed to counter popular conspiracy theories and show they have nothing to hide.
Nonsense. They've probably got all sorts of juicy documents hidden away somewhere. I'd love to know, for example, what kind of information they have about the early days of the church--how it was actually founded, who the original Popes were, how they managed to accumulate so much power and wealth. The real story, I think, will turn out to be radically different from anything we've been told so far.
I also suspect that they've got a lot of documents relating to more modern scandals like the alleged connections between the Vatican Bank and the Mafia and the death of "God's Banker," Roberto Calvi, who was found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge near the financial district in London back in 1982. (Take a look at the Wikipedia photograph of Calvi on his Wikipedia page; he looks like a mafiosi.) It would be interesting to read those documents, to say the least, and I'd also like to read the transcripts from the trial of Giordano Bruno, the 16th Century philosopher who was burned at the stake.
The thing I'd most like to find out, however, is how much the Vatican knows about the origins of Christianity. It's possible, I suppose, that they don't know anything more than we do, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they have secret histories that go all the way back which are locked up because they're too dangerous for the world to see. This assumes, of course, that the documents weren't destroyed long ago.
"Carvings uncovered in the Canadian Arctic may be the earliest portraits of the Vikings created in the Americas. But archaeologists have been puzzling over whether the artwork really shows the infamous seafarers." Source: Live Science.
"...One of the carvings was excavated in the 1970s at the Okivilialuk site [?] on southern Baffin Island.Two textiles found near the Okivilialuk carving date back to the 16th century, suggesting that the carving may also date back to that time, the scientists said. This carving may not show a Viking, but it could show someone from one of Sir Martin Frobisher's expeditions to the Canadian Arctic in the 1570s, the researchers said."
Note: While it's still unclear whether these particular carvings were made by Vikings, archaeologists have already found more definite evidence that Viking explorers did establish camps on Baffin Island. Life in these camps or settlements or whatever they were must have been pretty harsh. I'm not sure what the climate on the island was like back during the medieval period, but it probably wasn't all that different from what it is today -- extremely cold and cloudy with polar nights in the winter and midnight suns during the summer. This is one of the harshest and most remote wilderness areas on the planet and the toughness required to survive there can only be imagined.
Chartres Cathedral is a spectacular example of the way Christianity usurped the old pagan religions and literally built its churches over the sacred sites of the pagan world in an attempt to erase them from history.
According to Chartres Cathedral.net, "the town of Chartres has been of religious importance since ancient times. It was the site of Druid ceremonies, which were held around a well that was later discovered under the cathedral crypt.
"Sometime later, a Gallo-Roman temple stood on the same spot. The early Christians erected a basilica there during the 4th century, and St. Bernard preached the Second Crusade there in 1146. Later in history, Chartres was the coronation site of Henry IV in 1594."
Chartres is surrounded by legends, many of which can be traced back to pagan beliefs. According to Ancient Origins, "[the legendary roots of the site] come from the time when Druids, the Celtic priests of Britain and Gaul, held sacred rites there." A Druidic statue of the mother goddess of infants found at the site may have inspired the Christian legend that the pagans "had foretold the story of a virgin who would give birth to a child for the good of the world." This is speculative, but it makes sense considering the way the Christians hijacked pagan beliefs to support their new religion.
"During the Gallo-Roman times, the underground waters of the site were believed to have been revered by the Druids. Legend also says that Roman soldiers attacked Christians while they were celebrating their faith at the virgin shrine. It seems that Christians identified the mother goddess of the Druids with the virgin Mary." (Ibid)
The cathedral has been associated with the Knights Templar, the famous Catholic military order founded in 1199 to protect pilgrims traveling to the Kingdom of Jerusalem after its liberation by the First Crusade. Originally consisting of only nine men who could do little more than provide an armed escort for pilgrims to the Holy Land, the order grew into one of the richest and most powerful organizations of its day until it was violently suppressed and virtually exterminated in 1307.
Surrounded by conspiracy theories then as now, "[t]he Knights Templar have become associated with legends concerning secrets and mysteries handed down to the select from ancient times," (Wikipedia). According to Ancient Origins, the Chartres cathedral's association with the Templars comes from the two black madonnas which can be seen there:
"According to legend, the Black Madonna was a lady of the Templars. The statue of the Black Madonna with a child was commissioned in 1508. It is perhaps a black wooden copy of the silver Madonna that was located on the main altar before. The statue sits on the top of the pillar and is often called the ''Lady of the Pillar''. Before the French Revolution, the Chartres Cathedral had a second Black Madonna in the crypt. Unfortunately, it was probably burned during the revolution, although some resources are convinced that the church didn't suffer in this period. Today, tourists and pilgrims can see a copy in the church that was made in 1857. "
These black madonnas are apparently found in churches all over France and other countries in Europe.
"Throughout Europe, especially in France, about 500 Black Madonnas, painted or carved in wood or stone, stand in Catholic churches, with a few in museums. Most date from the 11th to the 15th centuries. These medieval images of the Virgin holding the Christ Child gaze benignly on their devotees, who come as pilgrims and associate them with miracles and healing." Source: Europe Up Close.
I'm not sure what to think about the Templar connection with these images, but they seem to have a pre-Christian origin. According to Europe Up Close, "[m]any scholars say that the Black Madonna is a link to religions that existed long before Christianity. Her shrines are often in locations that were once pagan shrines to Diana, Artemis of Ephesus, Cybele and other goddesses. Some Black Madonna figures look just like the Egyptian goddess Isis with her infant son Horus, showing the influence of old ways on changing faiths. Even further back than that, she may represent the archetypal Earth Mother, the ancient, eternal power of the feminine force."
The great Oswald Spengler saw the Gothic cathedrals as prime symbols of the Faustian spirit of Western civilization, but even though Spengler believed that the Classical and Western worlds were fundamentally separate, the pre-Christian influences on Christianity, especially on Catholicism, can be seen both in its teachings and its architecture. These fantastic cathedrals contain all sorts of mysteries that can be traced back to very ancient times. As for the Chartres cathedral, it's currently being restored (I'm not sure if the work has been completed yet). The renovation has apparently created a lot of controversy.
The El Castillo Cave art -- the oldest of which is thought to be around 40,800 years old -- could be "the oldest known well-dated cave paintings in the world—a title previously held by France's Chauvet cave paintings, believed to be at least 37,000 years old," according to National Geographic (2012). Very ancient cave paintings have also been discovered in Indonesia, but they seem to date to around the same period as the Chauvet paintings:
"Paintings of wild animals and hand markings left by adults and children on cave walls in Indonesia are at least 35,000 years old, making them some of the oldest artworks known." Source: The Guardian (2014). (See next video.)
What does all of this cave art mean? Why was it created in the first place? No one really knows and archaeologists have tended to focus on technical issues like dating the art rather than speculate about its purpose:
"Ever since the beginning of the 20th century, several attempts have been made to find the meaning(s) of Paleolithic rock art. Art for art’s sake, totemism, the Abbe Breuil’s hunting magic and Leroi-Gourhan’s and Laming-Emperaires’s structuralist theories were proposed and then abandoned one after the other .... Since then, most specialists have made up their minds that it would be hopeless to look for the meanings behind the art. They prefer to spend their time and efforts recording it, describing it and dating it, to endeavour to answer the questions 'what?', 'how?' and 'when?', thus carefully avoiding the fundamental question 'why?'." Source: Bradshaw Foundation.
The South African scholar David Lewis-Williams has proposed that Paleolithic cave art provides evidence for Stone Age shamanism. (Next video is from an interview with Graham Hancock.)
"Considering the fact that shamanism is so widespread among hunter-gatherers and that Upper Paleolithic people were admittedly hunter-gatherers, looking to shamanism as a likely religion for them should have been the first logical step whenever the question of meaning arose," according to the Bradshaw Foundation.
"... shamanic religions evidence several characteristics which can make us understand cave art better. The first one is their concept of a complex cosmos in which at least two worlds - or more - coexist, be they side by side or one above the other. Those worlds interact with one another and in our own world most events are believed to be the consequence of an influence from the other-world(s). The second one is the belief of the group in the ability for certain persons to have at will a direct controlled relationship with the other-world. This is done for very practical purposes : to cure the sick, to maintain a good relationship with the powers in the other-world, to restore an upset harmony, to reclaim a lost soul, to make good hunting possible, to forecast the future, to cast spells, etc." (Bradshaw foundation.)
Stone Age cave paintings are very similar around the world, a striking fact in itself. If Lewis-William's theory is correct, it means that some form of shamanism was the original religion - the primal religion - of the human race. It also suggests that religion may have a pre-human or pre-Homo Sapiens origin since some experts have conjectured that the art discovered in the El Castillo Cave may have been created by Neanderthals.
Note: "Dick Gill [featured in the documentary] was a most unusual person to put forward a bold new theory explaining the collapse of Mayan civilisation. When he started his hunt for clues, he was actually a banker." Source: BBC (2011). Gill spend a considerable amount of time investigating his theory that a major drought led to the collapse and believed that he had found conclusive evidence that this is what had happened:
"The drought theory holds that rapid climate change in the form of severe drought brought about the Classic Maya collapse. According to the particular version put forward by Gill in The Great Maya Droughts ... '[Studies of] Yucatecan lake sediment cores ... provide unambiguous evidence for a severe 200-year drought from AD 800 to 1000 ... the most severe in the last 7,000 years ... precisely at the time of the Maya Collapse." (Wikipedia)
The drought theory seems to be widely accepted now. LIDAR scans support the theory, according to Wikipedia, and Gill's evidence is apparently pretty solid -- I haven't found any sources questioning the evidence itself. Still, it's possible that drought may not be enough to explain what actually happened.
"David Webster, a critic of [Gill's] megadrought theory, says that much of the evidence provided by Gill comes from the northern Yucatán and not the southern part of the peninsula, where Classic Maya civilization flourished. He also states that if water sources were to have dried up, then several city-states would have moved to other water sources. That Gill suggests that all water in the region would have dried up and destroyed Maya civilization is a stretch, according to Webster, although Webster does not have a precise competing theory explaining the Classic Maya Collapse." (Wikipedia)
Earthquakes may have played a big part in the collapse as well:
"A study published in Scientific Reports in 2016 showed that between 750 and 900 a cluster of four earthquakes affected the wet tropical mountains south of the Yucatán lowlands, which are not vulnerable to drought, and include such important cities as Quirigua and Copán. These earthquakes left detectable destruction in several Maya cities and led to the abandonment of Quirigua. The study hypothesizes that repeated destruction combined with declining trade with the Maya kingdoms of the Yucatán lowlands to propagate the collapse to the southern part of the Maya realm." (Wikipedia)
Paleolithic Cave Art & Shamanism
The El Castillo Cave art -- the oldest of which is thought to be around 40,800 years old -- could be "the oldest known well-dated cave paintings in the world—a title previously held by France's Chauvet cave paintings, believed to be at least 37,000 years old," according to National Geographic (2012). Very ancient cave paintings have also been discovered in Indonesia, but they seem to date to around the same period as the Chauvet paintings:
"Paintings of wild animals and hand markings left by adults and children on cave walls in Indonesia are at least 35,000 years old, making them some of the oldest artworks known." Source: The Guardian (2014). (See next video.)
What does all of this cave art mean? Why was it created in the first place? No one really knows and archaeologists have tended to focus on technical issues like dating the art rather than speculate about its purpose:
"Ever since the beginning of the 20th century, several attempts have been made to find the meaning(s) of Paleolithic rock art. Art for art’s sake, totemism, the Abbe Breuil’s hunting magic and Leroi-Gourhan’s and Laming-Emperaires’s structuralist theories were proposed and then abandoned one after the other .... Since then, most specialists have made up their minds that it would be hopeless to look for the meanings behind the art. They prefer to spend their time and efforts recording it, describing it and dating it, to endeavour to answer the questions 'what?', 'how?' and 'when?', thus carefully avoiding the fundamental question 'why?'." Source: Bradshaw Foundation.
The South African scholar David Lewis-Williams has proposed that Paleolithic cave art provides evidence for Stone Age shamanism. (Next video is from an interview with Graham Hancock.)
"Considering the fact that shamanism is so widespread among hunter-gatherers and that Upper Paleolithic people were admittedly hunter-gatherers, looking to shamanism as a likely religion for them should have been the first logical step whenever the question of meaning arose," according to the Bradshaw Foundation.
"... shamanic religions evidence several characteristics which can make us understand cave art better. The first one is their concept of a complex cosmos in which at least two worlds - or more - coexist, be they side by side or one above the other. Those worlds interact with one another and in our own world most events are believed to be the consequence of an influence from the other-world(s). The second one is the belief of the group in the ability for certain persons to have at will a direct controlled relationship with the other-world. This is done for very practical purposes : to cure the sick, to maintain a good relationship with the powers in the other-world, to restore an upset harmony, to reclaim a lost soul, to make good hunting possible, to forecast the future, to cast spells, etc." (Bradshaw foundation.)
Stone Age cave paintings are very similar around the world, a striking fact in itself. If Lewis-William's theory is correct, it means that some form of shamanism was the original religion - the primal religion - of the human race. It also suggests that religion may have a pre-human or pre-Homo Sapiens origin since some experts have conjectured that the art discovered in the El Castillo Cave may have been created by Neanderthals.
Posted at 06:58 AM in Art, Commentary, Hidden History, Prehistory, Religion, Videos | Permalink