However, following over two years of research into the Newgrange excavation archive and the personal papers of the O’Kelly archive held by the National Monuments Archive Unit, I believe these doubts, criticisms and conspiracy theories can finally be conclusively set aside. I’ve found that the roof-box, including the quartz block it contained, had indeed been well recorded. I have also discovered several previously unrecognised photographs of the surviving quartz block, which appear to have been used to seal the roof-box in the time between the annual winter solstice, actually in situ. Although I first presented these photographs at the ‘Pathways to the Cosmos’ conference at Dublin Castle in September 2018, to my knowledge this is the first time these photographs have been published anywhere.

https://boynevalleytombs.wordpress.com/2019/04/14/re-discovering-the-lost-records-of-the-newgrange-roof-box/

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Fairies are fallen angels who were not bad enough to be sent to hell. God gave them the choice of dwelling in the most beautiful country on earth and they picked Ireland.

A fairy pass was one place where a new house should not be built unless the fairies displeasure was to be incurred.

If a man wanted to build a new house in a particular place, he buried a coin usually a sixpence in the spot. If the coin were gone in a week the fairies did not want the house built but if it remained there it was safe to build.

https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/5009197/4996785/5105978

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[…] the faery cows that once came ashore at the Great Rock of MacNicol, on the farm of Scorribreac, in Skye. On this occasion, the entire herd was intercepted in its attempt to return to the sea, by the scattering of earth on the strip of land separating it from the water. In the Highlands and Western Isles it was held that a sprinkling of earth taken from a burying-ground was most efficacious in such circumstances.

Toward the evening of the day on which the faery cattle came ashore at Scorribreac, a voice from the sea was heard calling them back by name. And the names by which they were called were taken down at the time. These names, of course, were in the Gaelic; and the Gaelic rhyme by which they are remembered is still known among those interested in these matters. The rhyme illustrates, moreover, that these faery cows varied considerably in colour. One was brown; and another was black. There was a red one, and a brindled one, and so on. In response to the voice from the sea, the whole herd ultimately returned to its watery element.

https://www.themodernantiquarian.com/latest.php/0/5/6308

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For many hundreds of years Skye remained an island isolated from the rest of Scotland. It did not exist in a complete vacuum, as it was settled by both Celts and Norse, and probably by the Picts before them. There were always comings and goings by way of ships and boats from the mainland and abroad. Due to this sea access, Skye became a Viking hot spot, like so many of the other Scottish Isles. Its isolation became more pronounced toward the Industrial Revolution. As mechanized farming equipment, rail roads, and eventually motorways became the norm across mainland Britain, residents of Skye continued using traditional farming methods and modes of transport. It is no wonder, then, that fairy lore lingered on after it had begun to erode elsewhere.

http://www.medievalists.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Fairy-Lore-of-the-Isle-of-Skye.pdf

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Aillen or Áillen is a legendary being from Irish mythology. He played the harp and was known to sing beautiful songs. He was also called “the burner”, because of his “fiery breath”. He was a member of the Tuatha Dé Danann.

Here is the story about Aillén Mac Midgna – The Fire Breathing Goblin, which was described in the Fenian Cycle of Irish Mythology under The Boyhood Deeds of Fionn.

Aillén Mac Midgna was a fire breathing goblin from the other world, Mag Mell. for 23 years Aillén brought terror to Ireland’s most sacred location, the hill of Tara, the seat of Ireland’s High King.

Each year, on the eve of Samhain, Aillén would arrive at Tara and play the Irish harp with such enthusiasm causing everyone in the immediate area to fall asleep under his spell.

Once Aillén had cast all of the kings guards asleep he would use his fiery breath to set fire to the great halls of Tara with his fire breathing, leaving nothing but burning cinders behind. When done Aillén would return to his fairy mound at sídh Finnachaid leaving the people to rebuild the great halls.

http://oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2019/05/fire-breathing-goblin.html

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It has long been assumed that Indigenous Australia was isolated until Europeans arrived in 1788, except for trade with parts of present day Indonesia beginning at least 300 years ago. But our recent archaeological research hints of at least an extra 2,100 years of connections across the Coral Sea with Papua New Guinea.

Over the past decade, we have conducted research in the Gulf of Papua with local Indigenous communities.

During the excavations, the most common archaeological evidence found in the old village sites was fragments of pottery, which preserve well in tropical environments compared to artefacts made of wood or bone. As peoples of the Gulf of Papua have no known history of pottery making, and the materials are foreign, the discovered pottery sherds are evidence of trade.

This pottery began arriving in the Gulf of Papua some 2,700 years ago, according to carbon dating of charcoal found next to the sherds.

https://theconversation.com/archaeology-is-unravelling-new-stories-about-indigenous-seagoing-trade-on-australias-doorstep-111528

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This is quarter shekel from the British Museum. Struck before 333 BCE, it is considered to be the first Jewish coin. Following the description in Ezekiel of the flying throne of Yahveh with wheels and wings, the image is interpreted as the representation of Yahveh, The God…

Ezekiel is a Hebrew prophet and the central protagonist of the Book of Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible, which reveals prophecies regarding the destruction of Jerusalem and the first temple.

The author of the Book of Ezekiel presents himself as Ezekiel, the son of Buzzi, born into a priestly (Kohen) lineage. Apart from identifying himself, the author gives a date for the first divine encounter which he presents: “in the thirtieth year”. If this is a reference to Ezekiel’s age at the time, he was born around 622 BCE, about the time of Josiah’s reforms. His “thirtieth year” is given as five years after the exile of Judah’s king Jehoiachin by the Babylonians, which according to Josephus happened in 598 BCE.

The vision Ezekiel had “in his thirtieth year” and which turned him into a prophet was of Jahveh sitting on the throne carried by the “four living creatures”.

http://oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2019/04/four-living-creatures.html

The stone circle has several alignments:

1. Alignment with the sunrise on the day of Bealltaine (6th May, middle of Taurus), the Beginning of Summer.

2. Alignment with the sunrise on the day of the Winter Solstice (21st of December).

3. Alignment with the sunrise on the day of Samhain (1st of November, middle of Eagle, Scorpio), the Beginning of Winter.

4. Alignment with the sunrise on the day of the Equinoxes (21st March and 21st September).

So Bronze Age Irish were already aligning their solar circles with the climatic cross at least a thousand years before Ezekiel had his vision of the “four living creatures pulling the throne of god”. How did these symbols which make no sense in Middle East find their way there? Who brought them, when?

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Reindeer hunters at Howburn Farm, South Lanarkshire

A Late Hamburgian settlement in southern Scotland – its lithic artefacts and natural environment

In 2006 and 2009, excavations were carried out at Howburn Farm near Biggar, South Lanarkshire. A total of 5,070 lithic artefacts were recovered, including 2,091 pieces of flint, 2,906 pieces of chert, 33 pieces of pitchstone, as well as small numbers of other lithic raw materials. As in this part of Scotland chert usually relates to Mesolithic, Early Neolithic and Early Bronze Age industries (Paterson and Ward 2013), and as it is well known that much flint was imported into southern Scotland from north-east England during the later Neolithic (Ballin 2011b), the various elements of the assemblage were first thought to date to these periods. However, close inspection of the finds, and the identification of diagnostic types and technological attributes of pre-Mesolithic character, showed that probably almost all the flints date to the Late Upper Palaeolithic period (Ballin et al. 2010). It is estimated that approximately half of the lithic artefacts date to the Palaeolithic, and most of the remainder to the Late Mesolithic – Early Neolithic period, supplemented by a small number of later Neolithic and Early Bronze Age pieces.

http://www.archaeopress.com/ArchaeopressShop/Public/download.asp?id={F70B0E82-8EC0-4A15-8E8A-C9CE826C2AF8}

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The substance in question is called 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT), which was initially discovered in the bark of a plant. Researchers later realized the Bufo alvarius toad, more commonly known as the Colorado river toad, secretes a poisonous, milky-white substance in its skin and glands that also contains the 5-MeO-DMT compound.

People who smoke 5-MeO-DMT report having mystical-type experiences, characterized by awe, amazement, intense self-awareness and timelessness, among other effects. Past research has also shown that the compound is associated with a reduction in symptoms of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress, and has effectively helped consumers deal with alcoholism and drug abuse.

Psychedelic Toad Venom Relieves Depression, Anxiety And Stress, Studies Find

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In the midst of these theories, however, are those that believe in a kind of recycling of consciousness: that individual selves may be reincarnated in new bodies, sometimes retaining scraps of memory – and even physical features – from the lives they lived before. One of the most prominent proponents of that theory was Dr. Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist who worked for five decades at the University of Virginia’s School of Medicine, where he founded the Division of Perceptual Studies, which studies “phenomena related to consciousness clearly functioning beyond the confines of the physical body, as well as phenomena that are directly suggestive of post-mortem survival of consciousness.” Beginning in 1960, Stevenson traveled the world investigating thousands cases of reincarnation, documenting his findings and eventually writing several books on the subject, including his groundbreaking work Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and the massive, two-volume Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. The book documents 200 different cases of children – often from very remote areas of the world – who had memories and birthmarks that corresponded with those of deceased people whose lives they claimed to have lived before. Some, who claimed to have died violently, had birthmarks or physical defects where the deceased had suffered a mortal injury, while others suffered from phobias relating to their past death.

https://www.outerplaces.com/science/item/19328-reincarnation-ian-stevenson

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And Mencken once more,

“The Puritan’s utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous persecution—these things have put an almost unbearable burden upon the exchange of ideas in the United States.”

Perhaps remarkably, this is exactly the kind of thing that Peterson rose to fame by furiously attacking in recent years, invoking the kind of radical thinkers, such as Nietzsche and Jung, that Mencken would have, too. And yet Peterson is a Christian, arguing primarily against atheists. What gives?

It gets more bizarre, and definitely more to the annoyance of those who wanted fireworks from this so-called debate. Žižek, the atheist, suggested accepting the following deep spiritual value implicit in Christianity:

“In other religions you have God up there, we fall from God, and we try to climb back through spirituality, training, good deeds and so on. Christianity is totally different. You don’t climb to God. You are free in a Christian sense when you discover that the distance that separates you from God is inscribed into God himself … The crucifixion is something absolutely unique because in that moment of, father, why have you abandoned me?, for a brief moment, symbolically, God himself becomes an atheist, in the sense of getting a gap there. That is something absolutely unique. It means you are not simply separated from God. Your separation from God is a part of divinity itself.”

It was clear that Peterson was struck by both the originality and importance of this insight, took it entirely seriously, and reformulated the core idea in answer to Žižek’s probing criticism of Peterson’s own moral imperative of, “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.” Peterson described Žižek’s interpretation as demonstrating a scarcely believable mercifulness in God, that, “There is something that is built into the fabric of existence that tests us so severely in our faith about being that even God himself falls prey to the temptation to doubt.” And that,

https://merionwest.com/2019/04/25/jordan-peterson-slavoj-zizek-and-the-atheists-who-believe-in-god/

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The findings mirror what befell native human populations in the Americas when Europeans arrived but the presence of dogs from East Asia also perhaps offers some clues to where the native human populations there came from originally too.

‘We can use domestic animals as a proxy to try to understand human migrations at quite a granular level,’ added Prof. Larson.

The team have also shown that chickens appear to have been domesticated from wild Red Jungle Fowl in South East Asia during the Bronze Age before flocks spread into China and then later into Europe.

‘What is fascinating is that the relationship between humans and these animals in the past was probably very different from the one we have today,’ said Prof. Larson. ‘Eating chickens is a recent phenomenon, and perhaps only started when they came into Europe in around 700BC. They were probably drawn to humans initially for other reasons (such as easy access to food) and that relationship changed through time.’

Prof. Larson and his colleagues found that changes in human behaviour also had a big impact on the animals they were domesticating. Strict religious dietary restrictions that began to be enforced  around 1000AD made it acceptable to eat chickens and their eggs but not meat from four-legged animals during fasting. This led to a sudden leap in the frequency of a gene called TSHR, which is thought to be strongly associated with domestication, in the chicken genome.

https://horizon-magazine.eu/article/dna-gives-insight-prehistoric-bonds-between-dogs-and-humans.html#.XMdnmQZAYl4.twitter

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An international team of researchers has combined archaeological, historical and linguistic data with genetic information from over 700 newly analyzed individuals to construct a more detailed picture of the history of inner Eurasia than ever before available. In a study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, they found that the indigenous populations of inner Eurasia are very diverse in their genes, culture and languages, but divide into three groups that stretch across the area in east-west geographic bands.

Inner Eurasia, including areas of modern-day Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Mongolia, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan, was once the cross-roads connecting Asia and Europe, and a major intersection for the exchange of culture, trade goods and genes in prehistory and historical periods, including the era of the famous Silk Road.

This vast area can also be divided into several distinct ecological regions that stretch in largely east-west bands across Inner Eurasia, consisting of the deserts at the southern edge of the region, the steppe in the central part, taiga forests further north, and tundra towards the Arctic region. The subsistence strategies used by indigenous groups in these regions largely correlate with the ecological zones, for example reindeer herding and hunting in the tundra region and nomadic pastoralism on the steppe.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190429111902.htm

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To MacFarlane, this image could be “an annunciation scene from Giotto”.

But look more closely – in fact, it’s an “avalanche of vehicles”.
He abseiled down into an abandoned Welsh slate mine where locals have been dumping wrecked cars for 40 years. He says: “We are not just shaping the surface, but shaping the depth.”

Will our future fossils just be “car-chives” like this, along with the inevitable strata of plastic, lethal nuclear waste, and the spines of millions of intensively farmed cows and pigs?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-48054033

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People over the millennia have reported having deeply moving religious experiences either spontaneously or while under the influence of psychedelic substances such as psilocybin-containing mushrooms or the Amazonian brew ayahuasca, and a portion of those experiences have been encounters with what the person regards as “God” or “ultimate reality.” In a survey of thousands of people who reported having experienced personal encounters with God, Johns Hopkins researchers report that more than two-thirds of self-identified atheists shed that label after their encounter, regardless of whether it was spontaneous or while taking a psychedelic.

Moreover, the researchers say, a majority of respondents attributed lasting positive changes in their psychological health–e.g., life satisfaction, purpose and meaning–even decades after their initial experience.

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/experiences-of-ultimate-reality-or-god-confer-lasting-benefits-to-mental-health

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Introduction

Salient experiences interpreted as personal encounters with God, gods, or emissaries of God, have been documented for millennia, have been integral to the development of religious and spiritual beliefs, and have had a major influence in shaping human culture [1–5]. Such experiences, which often occur unexpectedly and in absence of drugs or physical illness, may involve visions, voices, or what is felt to be a mental or extrasensory apprehension of that which is encountered. Descriptions of such experiences sometimes overlap with mystical-type experiences, which have also been well documented and have been a focus of substantial empirical research [3,6]. The majority of rigorous empirical studies of mystical experiences [7–11] have used the Hood M Scale, which is based on the conceptual model of mystical experience described by Stace [4] and emphasizes a sense of unity as a central defining characteristic of mystical experience. Stace [4], but not all scholars of religion [12], explicitly exclude vision and voice phenomena from the descriptive definition of mystical experience thus suggesting that some God encounter experiences may be more appropriately classified as religious but not mystical experiences.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0214377

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Lost at the bottom of the North Sea almost eight millennia ago, a vast land area between England and southern Scandinavia which was home to thousands of stone age settlers is about to be rediscovered.

Marine experts, scientists and archaeologists have spent the past 15 years meticulously mapping thousands of kilometres under water in the hope of unearthing lost tribes of prehistoric Britain.

On Wednesday a crew of British and Belgian scientists set off on their voyage across the North Sea to reconstruct the ancient Mesolithic landscape hidden beneath the waves for 7,500 years. The area was submerged when thousands of cubic miles of sub-Arctic ice started to melt and sea levels began to rise.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/may/08/mapping-begins-of-lands-lost-to-north-sea-during-the-stone-age

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Some 2,000 years ago, Scotland was home to a group of people known as the Picts. To the Romans who controlled much of Britain at the time, they were but mere savages, men who fought completely naked, armed with little more than a spear. But the Picts were fearsome warriors.

Every time the Roman Empire tried to move into their territory, the Picts successfully fought back. The Roman legions were the greatest military force the world had ever seen and the only people they couldn’t conquer were this wild clan.

Yet despite their formidable warrior culture, the Picts mysteriously vanished during the 10th century. The wild men the Romans could not conquer faded away and barely left behind a trace of their existence. Today, historians still struggle to piece together a glimpse into who the Picts were and what happened to their mighty culture.

Meet The Picts: The Ancient Blue Wildmen Who Protected Scotland From The Roman Empire

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The next effect was on the brains of the mice, which led the team to say: “The experiences of a parent, even before conceiving, markedly influence both structure and function in the nervous system of subsequent generations.” This was proven when not just the direct offspring of the mice in question – but their “grandchildren” too – had all inherited this fear of cherry blossom, through the DNA of the parent mice. Dr. Dias said to the BBC: “This might be one mechanism that descendants show imprints of their ancestor. There is absolutely no doubt that what happens to the sperm and egg will affect subsequent generations.”

Memories of the Inherited Kind

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The team determined that five individuals, including two adults, an adolescent of about 11 years old, and two children of three and six years old, entered the cave barefoot and illuminated the way using wooden sticks. This suggests that young children were active group members during the late Stone Age, even when carrying out apparently dangerous activities.

https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2019/05/traces-of-crawling-in-italian-cave-give.html#BUGp7yks1eeCAF8D.99

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Here is an interesting puzzle to ponder :

The J haplogroup being found at Crimea AND at Paracas is telling us something. What could account for this ?

Brien Foerster suggests that they (Rothschild-type people with strange skulls) went from the Black Sea region across the Pacific to South America

It’s not just the strange anomaly, that similar peculiar elongated skulls occur at Crimea AND at Paracas, which, on its own, would be interesting. But in addition, there’s the same J haplogroup, AND it’s the Rothschild one !

AND Rothschilds have weirdly shaped heads !

https://www.familytreedna.com/public/rothschild/default.aspx?section=yresults

The conventional view is that, over the last 2 or 3 hundred thousand years, there have been ourselves, our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, and also Neanderthals and Denisovans. But perhaps these weird ‘Rothschild’ type skulls are another species or sub-species ?

It’s a sensitive topic, maybe why it’s not discussed openly…

Another odd snippet I found, seems there were some similar people in Appalachia…

Research Update: DNA of Paracas, Highland Apalache, Creek & and South Atlantic elite traced to region around Caucasus Mountains & Black Sea

https://www.stolenhistory.org/threads/elongated-skulls-and-their-implications-on-the-past.646/

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A Native American man in Montana has what may be the oldest DNA native to the Americas, according to news reports.

After getting his DNA tested, Darrell “Dusty” Crawford learned that his ancestors were already in the Americas about 17,000 years ago, according to the Great Falls Tribune, a Montana newspaper.

The company Cellular Research Institute (CRI) Genetics traced Crawford’s ancestry back 55 generations with 99% accuracy, a rare feat given how convoluted family trees can be.

The test also revealed the origins of his Blackfeet ancestors. According to his DNA, Crawford’s ancestors are from the Pacific Islands. Then, they journeyed to the South American coast and traveled north, according to a preliminary analysis.

Moreover, CRI Genetics looked at Crawford’s mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), genetic material that is passed down through mothers. An analysis showed that Crawford is part of the mtDNA haplotype B2 group, which originated in Arizona about 17,000 years ago, the Great Falls Tribune reported.

This group is one of the four major Native American groups in North America. These groups are traced back to four female ancestors: Ai, Ina, Chie and Sachi. Crawford appears to be a descendant of Ina.

“Today, this Native American line is found only in the Americas, with a strong frequency peak on the eastern coast of North America,” CRI Genetics reported.

https://www.livescience.com/65437-oldest-dna-north-america.html

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Haplogroup J2 is thought to have appeared somewhere in the Middle East towards the end of the last glaciation, between 15,000 and 22,000 years ago. The oldest known J2a samples at present were identified in remains from the Hotu Cave in northern Iran, dating from 9100-8600 BCE (Lazaridis et al. 2016), and from Kotias Klde in Georgia, dating from 7940-7600 BCE (Jones et al. (2015)). This confirms that haplogroup J2 was already found around the Caucasus and the southern Caspian region during the Mesolithic period. The first appearance of J2 during the Neolithic came in the form of a 10,000 year-old J2b sample from Tepe Abdul Hosein in north-western Iran in what was then the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (Broushaki et al. 2016).

Notwithstanding its strong presence in West Asia today, haplogroup J2 does not seem to have been one of the principal lineages associated with the rise and diffusion of cereal farming from the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia to Europe. It is likely that J2 men had settled over most of Anatolia, the South Caucasus and Iran by the end of the Last Glaciation 12,000 years ago. It is possible that J2 hunter-gatherers then goat/sheep herders also lived in the Fertile Crescent during the Neolithic period, although the development of early cereal agriculture is thought to have been conducted by men belonging primarily to haplogroups G2a (northern branch, from Anatolia to Europe), as well as E1b1b and T1a (southern branch, from the Levant to the Arabian peninsula and North Africa).

Mathieson et al. (2015) tested the Y-DNA of 13 Early Neolithic farmers from the Barcın site (6500-6200 BCE) in north-western Anatolia, and only one of them belonged to haplogroup J2a. Lazaridis et al. (2016) tested 44 ancient Near Eastern samples, including Neolithic farmers from Jordan and western Iran, but only the above-mentioned sample from Mesolithic Iran belonged to J2. Likewise, over 100 Y-DNA samples have been tested from Neolithic Europe, covering most of the important cultures, and only two J2 sample was found, in the Sopot and Proto-Lengyel cultures in Hungary, dating from 7,000 years ago. J2 was also absent from all Chalcolithic and Bronze Age Indo-European cultures, apart from one J2a1b sample in Hungary dating from the end of the Bronze Age (c. 1150 BCE, see Gamba et al. 2014), in the minor Kyjatice culture, an offshoot of the Urnfield culture, which differs from typical Indo-European cultures by its use of cremation instead of single-grave burials.

No Neolithic sample from Central or South Asia has been tested to date, but the present geographic distribution of haplogroup J2 suggests that it could initially have dispersed during the Neolithic from the Zagros mountains and northern Mesopotamia across the Iranian plateau to South Asia and Central Asia, and across the Caucasus to Russia (Volga-Ural). The first expansion probably correlated with the diffusion of domesticated of cattle and goats (starting c. 8000-9000 BCE), rather than with the development of cereal agriculture in the Levant.

A second expansion would have occured with the advent of metallurgy. J2 could have been the main paternal lineage of the Kura-Araxes culture (Late Copper to Early Bronze Age), which expanded from the southern Caucasus toward northern Mesopotamia and the Levant. After that J2 could have propagated through Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean with the rise of early civilizations during the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age.

Quite a few ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern civilisations flourished in territories where J2 lineages were preponderant. This is the case of the Hattians, the Hurrians, the Etruscans, the Minoans, the Greeks, the Phoenicians (and their Carthaginian offshoot), the Israelites, and to a lower extent also the Romans, the Assyrians and the Persians. All the great seafaring civilisations from the middle Bronze Age to the Iron Age were dominated by J2 men.

https://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_J2_Y-DNA.shtml

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Over more than two centuries, the Rothschild family has frequently been the subject of conspiracy theories. These theories take differing forms, such as claiming that the family controls the world’s wealth and financial institutions or encouraged or discouraged wars between governments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family#Conspiracy_theories

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The Rothschild family, who established an international banking business, acquired the largest fortune in modern world history and established a true dynasty in the 19th century, apparently belonged to haplogroup J2a1-Y23457 (under M67, Z467 and Y15238) based on the results from the Rothschild DNA Project and of the J2-M172 Haplogroup Research.

https://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_J2_Y-DNA.shtml

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Around 45,000 years before present, a mutation took place in the DNA of a woman who lived in the Near East or Caucasus. Further mutations occurred in the J line, which can be identified as the subclades J1a1,J1c1 (27,000 yrs ago), J2a (19,000 yrs ago), J2b2 (16,000 years ago), and J2b3 (5,800 yrs ago). Haplogroup J bearers along with persons carrying the T mtDNA clade settled in Europe from the Near East during the late Paleolithic and Mesolithic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_J_(mtDNA)

…….

RESEARCH UPDATE: DNA OF PARACAS, HIGHLAND APALACHE, CREEK & AND SOUTH ATLANTIC ELITE TRACED TO REGION AROUND CAUCASUS MOUNTAINS & BLACK SEA

Research Update: DNA of Paracas, Highland Apalache, Creek & and South Atlantic elite traced to region around Caucasus Mountains & Black Sea

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black sea elongated skulls

black sea elongated skulls

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The origins of Ashkenazi Jews—the great majority of living Jews—remain highly contested and enigmatic to this day. The Ashkenazim are Jews with a recent ancestry in central and Eastern Europe, in contrast to Sephardim (with an ancestry in Iberia, followed by exile after 1492), Mizrahim (who have always resided in the Near East) and North African Jews (comprising both Sephardim and Mizrahim). There is consensus that all Jewish Diaspora groups, including the Ashkenazim, trace their ancestry, at least in part, to the Levant, ~2,000–3,000 years ago5,12,13,14. There were Diaspora communities throughout Mediterranean Europe and the Near East for several centuries prior to the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE (Common Era), and some scholars suggest that their scale implies proselytism and wide-scale conversion, although this view is very controversial

The Ashkenazim are thought to have emerged from dispersals north into the Rhineland of Mediterranean Jews in the early Middle Ages, although there is little evidence before the twelfth century

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3543

Haplogroup J comprises 7% of the Ashkenazi control-region database. Around 72% of these can be assigned to J1c, now thought to have arisen within Late Glacial Europe, and 19% belong to J1b1a1, also restricted to Europe. Thus >90% of the Ashkenazi J lineages have a European origin, with ~7% (J1b and J2b) less clearly associated. Many have a probable west/central European source, despite (like H) being most frequent in eastern Ashkenazim. The four Ashkenazi J mitogenomes, in J1c5, J1c7a1a and J1c7d, once again show a striking pattern of Mediterranean, west and central European lineages enclosing Ashkenazi/east European ones

……..

Rothschild DNA Project – Y-DNA Classic Chart

https://www.familytreedna.com/public/rothschild/default.aspx?section=yresults

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This is my final blogpost. I am old and ill and wish to spend my remaining time doing some other things. (Also, I LOATHE this new version of WordPress.)

Here is my first blog post, May 1st 2012

Welcome to Mons Angelorum

Thanks to everyone of you who have read and commented since I began this blog, I wish you all well. My blessings to you.

In his book on the seal people, Gaelic historian John MacAulay puts forward an interesting theory, that the Selkie stories are actually a very old form of oral history. He suggests that for thousands of years, Eskimo type kayakers in sealskin canoes have been travelling down to Scotland from remote Arctic Norway. The Sea Sami, now extinct, were a nomadic tribe of hunter-gatherers that used Eskimo kayaks and technology to hunt and fish.

http://www.elisabethgifford.com/blog/2014/5/3/the-secret-history-hidden-in-the-selkie-story

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https://youtu.be/E-jS4e3zacI

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Ancient denizens of what is now Ireland and Scotland buried stashes of so-called “bog butter” in peat bogs, presumably to stave off spoilage. Thanks to the unique chemistry of those bogs, the stashes have survived for thousands of years. Now, scientists at University College Dublin have conducted chemical analysis and radiocarbon dating of several bog butters recovered from archaeological sites in Ireland. They found that the practice was a remarkably long-lived tradition, spanning at least 3,500 years, according to their new paper in Nature: Scientific Reports.

The researchers also uncovered the first conclusive evidence that Irish bog butters are derived from dairy fat as opposed to being meat-based. According to bioarchaeologist Kristina Killgrove, writing in Forbes, “Previous attempts at analyzing bog butter have come up short, because even though the butter is known to have an animal origin, techniques were unable to distinguish between adipose tissue where lipids or fats are stored and milk fats from ruminants like cows and sheep, particularly on an archaeological time-depth.”

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/03/study-finds-people-in-ireland-and-scotland-made-bog-butter-for-millennia/

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Alexander Belov, whose book on the wreck, Ship 17: a Baris from Thonis-Heracleion, is published this month, suggests that the wreck’s nautical architecture is so close to Herodotus’s description, it could have been made in the very shipyard that he visited. Word-by-word analysis of his text demonstrates that almost every detail corresponds “exactly to the evidence”.

Ship 17 is the 17th of more than 70 vessels dating from the 8th to the 2nd century BC, discovered by Franck Goddio and a team – including Belov – from the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology during excavations in Aboukir bay, with which the Oxford Centre is involved.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/17/nile-shipwreck-herodotus-archaeologists-thonis-heraclion

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The problem with evaluating your life based on “joy-sparking” is it’s not a fair judgement, it is only taking into account one thing – happiness. It doesn’t ask if it is the right thing to do, or the necessary thing to do.  If I used this method I would never do laundry again! When people forgo parenthood because they don’t think having children would “spark joy,” they are using happiness as the judge, and who made “happiness” the best judge of life? “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;  A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace” Ecclesiastes 3:1-3. Life must be seen for all its complexity and should not be reduced to happy or unhappy.

Happiness is Not the Standard

Underneath our judgments of life is an underlying belief that life is “supposed to be happy”.  A school of philosophers called Existentialists reject this view of the world. Instead they remind us of the intrinsic difficulty of life.  Jordan Peterson is an existentialist – like Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky before him. Growing up in the military, I traveled the world and saw that poverty and hardship were commonplace. Life seemed so arbitrary and unfair.  When I was a teenager I read The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky portrays suffering as intrinsic to the story of human experience. However, he shows that as we accept the fragility of life we can live life more fully.  

https://philosophyofmotherhood.com/2019/02/22/happiness-is-destroying-parenthood/?fbclid=IwAR0TSX_sohBJ0z278Lw9HTI5o434JKJZow46sK3ByHBcJStFHgMlKb3emwM

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Narrative really is that powerful. You see it in the behavior of social media users, you see it in the behavior of governments, you see it in religions, and you see it in abusive relationships which continue because of the narrative “He’s a good guy underneath it all and he really loves me” even though the facts say “He beats you and cheats on you all the time.” If you can control the stories that people tell themselves about a given situation, then you control those people on all matters pertaining to that situation. Regardless of facts.

Which is why the plutocratic class funnels so much money into buying up media influence, funding think tanks, and other means of narrative control: if you can control the narrative, no amount of facts will deter the mainstream public from going along with your agendas. This is why the behaviors of governments so consistently move in alignment with the interests of this same media-buying, think tank-funding, politician-owning plutocratic class. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world.

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/responses-to-this-tweet-show-how-people-fixate-on-narrative-over-fact-b43925719952

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In addition to the long-term stability of the major component of the Anatolian ancestry, the researchers also found a pattern of interactions with their neighbors. By the time that farming had taken hold in Anatolia between 8,300-7,800 BCE, the researchers found that the local population had about a 10 percent genetic contribution from populations related to those living in what is today Iran and the neighboring Caucasus, with almost the entire remaining 90 percent coming from Anatolian hunter-gatherers. By about 7000-6000 BCE, however, the Anatolian farmers derived about 20 percent of their ancestry from populations related to those living in the Levant region.

“There are some large gaps, both in time and geography, in the genomes we currently have available for study,” explains Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, senior author on the study. “This makes it difficult to say how these more subtle genetic interactions took place—whether it was through short-term large movements of people, or more frequent but low-level interactions.” The researchers hope that further research in this and neighboring regions could help to answer these questions.

https://phys.org/news/2019-03-anatolian-farmers-local-hunter-gatherers-agriculture.html#jCp

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Another account of telepathy and Dogmen was given to the site Week in Weird by a witness calling himself “Zay,” who claimed that he was in regular telepathic contact with Dogmen in the forests of rural Pennsylvania, in the United States. Similarly to the previous report, Zay has said that these creatures are not violent or malevolent in any way, and that although they are frustrated and displeased with humankind, they hold no ill-will or hatred for us. Zay explained of these beings:

https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/04/bizarre-encounters-with-telepathic-dogmen/

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Genesis – Chaos and Order

https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/episode-19/

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The iconic cover illustration of The New Yorker’s March 29, 1976, issue depicted a “view of the world from 9th Avenue,” starring a massive Manhattan that dwarfed not only other U.S. cities but entire countries, reducing the Pacific Ocean to a band of water not much wider across than the Hudson River.

But New Yorkers aren’t the only ones with a skewed perception of scale or an idiosyncratic sense of geography and place. Humans and other animals behave in ways that suggest they’re mapping out their “view of the world” by emphasizing the information they find valuable.

Two studies appearing in Science today show how deep that bias runs. Both research teams observed how the neurons that compile mental maps of physical space reprogram themselves to better reflect our experiences, activities and priorities. The findings also offer evidence for a link that other scientists have started to uncover: The brain’s way of encoding positional information may extend to the way it organizes volumes of other information to be navigated, including varieties of sounds and abstract concepts like social hierarchies.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/goals-and-rewards-redraw-the-brains-map-of-the-world-20190328/?utm_source=Quanta+Magazine&utm_campaign=c8cf578e59-RSS_Daily_Abstractions_Blog&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f0cb61321c-c8cf578e59-389872809&mc_cid=c8cf578e59&mc_eid=0e1b012064

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For some clues, we should turn to an Old Germanic language called Old Saxon. Its speakers were, quite obviously, related to the people who invaded Britain in the fifth century (compare the term “Anglo-Saxon England”), but the texts from the Saxons who remained on the continent go back to the second half of the ninth century. The main of them, a poem modern scholars call Heliand “The Savior,” is a magnificent retelling of the Gospels. In that poem, the word drōm appears multiple times and has three senses.

https://blog.oup.com/2019/03/perchance-dream-part-one/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=oupblogoxfordetymologist

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From the standpoint of fossils, the hypothesis of our species’ African origin has rested mainly on the discovery there of the oldest remains attributable to Homo sapiens. These include the Herto and Omo skulls from Ethiopia, which are between 160,000 and 180,000 years old. The Qafzeh and Skhul sites in the Near East have provided an important collection of fossils also attributed to our species, which are between 90,000 and 120,000 years old. And yet, the “Out of Africa” hypothesis holds that our species was not able to enter Europe and Asia until some 50,000 years ago, so the presence of Homo sapiens in Israel was not considered dispersion or “exodus” as such.

Over the last decade, however, a significant number of fossils brings the 50,000-year date into question. These include the teeth and jaw found in Daoxian (Fuyan Cave) and Zhirendong, in South China, and the finger bone discovered in Al-Wusta (Saudi Arabia), which place our species outside Africa at least 80,000 years ago, although their presence may even be earlier than 100,000 years ago. With the discovery at a dig in Misliya (Israel) of a human jawbone dating from around 190,000 years ago—this is as old as the oldest African fossils attributable to Homo sapiens—it is becoming increasingly clear that our species was able to adapt to other territories earlier than we thought, although the debate is still open. Arguably, genetic evidence continues to suggest that modern humanity comes mainly from a process of dispersion that took place around 50,000 years ago. That does not, however, rule out earlier forays that may not have left any mark on modern humans—or perhaps we have simply not detected them yet. When we limit ourselves to maps with arrows representing the spread of humans, we may easily forget that hominins do not migrate in linear, directional ways, as if they were on an excursion or march with a predetermined destination or purpose. Like any other animal’s, human migration should be understood as the expansion or broadening of an area of occupation by a group when a lack of barriers (ecological or climactic, for example) and the presence of favorable demographic conditions allow them to increase their territory. The “Out of Africa” migration was probably not a single event or voyage, but rather a more or less continuous flow of variable volume. There may have been various “Out of Africa” movements, and also several “Into Africa,” reentries that are not technically returns, because hominins do not “go home.” Instead, they expanded the diameter of their territory whenever nothing kept them from doing so.

 

https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/articles/anthropology-what-we-have-learned-over-the-last-decade/

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They move like ghosts along the shorelines of Canada’s Vancouver Island, so elusive that people rarely see them lurking in the mossy forests.

British filmmaker Bertie Gregory was one of the lucky ones: He saw coastal wolves—also known as sea wolves—in 2011.

“There is something about being in the presence of a coastal wolf—they just have this magic and aura around them,” he says.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/sea-oceans-wolves-animals-science/?utm_source=reddit.com

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I have been rather ill for sometime. Spectre of Eternity surrounds me. Maybe my health is picking up, maybe not, I don’t want to tempt Fate.

For those who are curious to see, here is a long long thesis that I have enjoyed, upon the topic of Lake Ladies. It  holds many secrets within mysteries and mysteries within secrets. Numerous levels or layers of meaning unfolding simultaneously.

http://e.bangor.ac.uk/4123/2/307244.pdf

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‘Beast Literature’, stories where human-like, talking animals and birds are the main characters became especially popular in the twelfth century (Salisbury, 1994:124-8).

But the Beast Literature tradition did not invent the concept of talking animals. There was a native tradition in Gaelic and Welsh literature (e.g. ‘Nauigatio Brendani’, ‘Culhwch ac Olwen’) which may have originally been derived from the biblical stories of the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3) and Baalam’s Donkey (Numbers 22). (Harris-Logan, 2007: 88-91).

Actually, the idea of animals learning to talk remains common in Scottish Gaelic folklore to this day. There is a literary saying (seanfhacal) in modern Gaelic. ‘Nuair a bha Ghaidhlig aig na h-eoin ‘s ann a bha linn an aigh’ (Back when birds spoke Gaelic…. that was the age of joy).

The most famous example of speaking animals from Scotland is probably a piece of poetry written by Eoghan MacLachlainn (Ewen MacLachlan) called ‘Dàn mu Chonaltradh’ (English title: The Colloquy of the Birds). It was first published in 1798, but is set in the distant age of joy. The translation I give is from Forbes (1905) and is tentative and literary rather than exact.

When MacLachlainn wrote this poem (c.1795) he was still a young man, working as a tutor at Clunes in Lochaber, south-west Scotland, saving money and hoping to go to university (Mackenzie, 1841:321-3). Perhaps the intended theme is one of hope – the world was once a magical place. Harris-Logan (2007:111) has pointed out that Gaelic poetry which represents birds talking is often written for escapist reasons or out of an aspiration for otherness.

Back when the birds spoke Gaelic

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More work on my favourite enigma, from New Earth Lady

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Dunsgaich, Dunsgathaich, Dunskahay (1424), etc.

The shadowy fort, fort of gloom. This name, as will be under­stood, has appeared under various spellings, even since above date, while the etymology of the word has also been varied; the shadowy town or fort, the fort of the jutting-out land, sgathaich, branches or brushwood, which no Gaelic scholar would give; even the latter word being pronounced differently should suffice, but worse is to follow in “ the hillock of the skates ” ! One, more probable, cannot be ignored, viz., Sgathach’s Fort, but the queen after-mentioned took her name or title from the fort and not the fort from her; in point of fact, the fort itself took the name from the bay or loch, Sgàth vik, shadow bay, and the district Sgàthavaig is always now in use. The queen above referred to was, according to one account, and accounts vary considerably, she whom Cuchullin fell in love with, the beautiful Aisè, Aoisè, or Aoife (long s mis­taken for /), a daughter to Ardgenny; another account gives it that a school of arms was kept by her (Aisè or Aisi) in conjunction with her father, here named Otha or Uathaidh; see “ Death of the Children of TJsnach.” Again, it is stated that Cuchullin fell in love with Uathach, “ daughter of the princess of the dun.” Anyway, this person seems to have been, as above stated, Aisè, who bore a son to Cuchullin, named Conlach, the word gu, con, it may be noted, appearing in the names of both father and son; this son was slain, in ignorance of whom’ he was, by his father.

Cuchullin came very young to Skye from Ireland, where one of his castles stood; he came to learn the feats taught in the military school kept by Sgatbach the Terrible,” her territorial title. This Cuchullin did so as to win the love of an Irish princess, “ Emer or Eimhir the Lovely,” the daughter of Forgall Manach, Forgall the Monk, also designated “ the wily.” While in Skye, he met Aisè, as above stated, but forsook her; see “ Bàs Chonlaoich,” the death of Conlaoch, as given in the Book of the Dean of Lismore. Cuchullin apparently returned to Ireland, and married Emer, Evir, Awoir, or Ayvir, in modern Gaelic.

Eimhear, for by all these names has she been referred to in ancient script, etc., in one or more of which she is said to have proved as faithless to Cuchullin as he was to Aisè,. or Bragela (Braighe Gheala) (fair-bosom, as a poetical title), and said to have been Cuchullin’s wife also, mother of Conlaoch at any rate, and whom he left to pine in Skye. Going to Ireland, he engaged in many combats there, in one of which he fell; various accounts, as may be understood, are given of this final fight, though an Irish poem has it that his death was due to the arts of magic, Cuchullin was still held as belonging to Skye, for in the Ossianic poems he is designed as “ Chief of the Ielei of Mist.” Among many adventures and feats in Ireland, Cuchullin attacked and slew a king of Munster, and carried off his queen, Blamait or Blathmaid, into Ulster; this, it is believed, he did “ for a friend.”

Queen or princess, “ Sgathach ” lived in the dun or fort with her two sons. Many and wonderful, it is said, were the feats taught in the college here, to which, as said, Cuchullin came as a pupil or student. Along with him, pursuing their military education also, were four grandsons of a certain Druid of the Piets of Ulster, called Cathbad; Cuchullin was one, three sons of Uisneach, and Conall Cearnach, five in all.

This queen or princess, “ fierce and ruthless warrior queen,” as she is styled in some accounts, or her daughter, Uathach, according to others, was in love with “ Cuchulainn, the son of Learg” ; none fairer had been seen by her or any other woman, though, it is also said, he loved no woman in Skye, though he was loved by “ three times fifty queens ” ! This warrior-queen Sgathach had the second sight, and foresaw the career and early death (at 30) of Cuchullin, who fell at Muirthemne in Ireland, fighting against great odds. Cuchullin was really older than thirty years, that age having been given poetically, as his full strength and his being “ beardless ” made him appear younger.

Despite the fierce character of this Queen Sgathach, she had other attractions, being passionately fond of music, especially of a melodious nature; she possessed a three-stringed magical harp, one string of which, when tuned, caused laughter and dancing, “ Geantraighe,” gean, good’ humour, cheerfulness, and traigh, strength; a second, crying or weeping, etc., “ G-ultraighe,” gul, guil, weeping, and trcdghe; while the third, “ Suantraighe,” suain, suaine, sleep, and tmighe, caused heavy, balmy sleep.

Queen Sgathach, in addition to the training to arms, etc., inculcated lessons of mutual friendship and fidelity, and bestowed prizes or gifts of arms upon at least two of her favourites, viz., Cuchullin and his friend Ferdagh; these two went to battle, after surmounting many diffi­culties, on behalf of the three amazons, Sgathach and her two daughters, Uathach and Aisè, while Cuchullin called the queen his “ tender tutoress/’ which apparently she was to him!

The faithlessness of Emer, Emire, Evir, etc., above referred to, is strongly questioned by Irish writers, and reference may be made to her “ Lament for Cuchulainn,” who is there designed Mhic Subhalt, Shubhailt, Shual- tain, also Mhic Sheimhi, in Irish, of course. In the notes to the 1760 “ Trànslation of Ossian’s Poems,” Cuchullin is designed as son of Semo, grandson of Cathbat, a celebrated Druid; there it is stated that he was married very young to Bragela, daughter of Sorglan, at his castle or palace at Dunsgaich; all these accounts conflict, and still another account has it that he married Uathach, the other daughter of Queen Sgathach, but had a son previously (Conlaoch) by her sister, Aoife (Eva); and, on his return to Ireland, he married the before-mentioned Emer or Eimer. All this took place in the first century a.d .

Aife, Aoibhe, Aoive, Aoisè, Aisè, or by whatever name she was known, gave Cuchullin, while in Skye, a model of a fatal—or at least deadly—spear called the “Gath Bolg ” or balg, a bag, etc., made from the bone or bones of some “ monster ” animal. See “ Tain Bo Chuailgne” a mythical tale; the bull referred to here supposed to have been a god.

One of the chief “ Captains ” of Queen Sgathach was “ Maev (Maebh) the Strong,” a warrior woman; there were at least five score of these female warriors, and on one occasion they executed twenty Vikings or Norse seamen, who had escaped drowning in the loch (Loch Scavaig.), by tying the long hair of each to the down-caught boughs of an oak, on which, being let go, the men swung till dead.

In more than one account of this famous fortress (Dunegàich) it is described as being on the “ North-east coast of Scotland,” also “ in the east of Alba ” (by Alba is meant Ireland), and a famous writer described it as a “ foreign academy ” !

Cuchullin’s name is more immediately associated with Dun Sgàthaich than any other place. In Skye to this day (as elsewhere), his very name is proverbial, “ Cho laidir ri Cuchulainn” and another of his names or titles was “ Setanta,” which was his first name, and which an authority says “ indirectly suggests British ancestry in his case” ; he was designed by another authority as a “ daughter’s son of Cathbad, Conchobar’s famous Druid, who had three daughters; the other two were mothers of Conall Cernach (Cearnach) and Naoise, thus cousins of Cuchullin.”

Many are the tales, traditions, and rumours, local and otherwise, as to this interesting castle, now in ruins; it was one of the most primitive, the keep having been, added about 1266. In an Act *of James V. occurs, “ donaldo gromych mcdonald gallich de dunskàwich,”u long, it should be noted. These tales, etc., are, however, vague and not to be depended upon, as, for example, the statement has been made that its origin has been attributed to the Homans, or even to giants, etc.! There are traces of a burial-place near the castle, but no exhumation of bodies or human remains have been made so far as known. Right below the castle, or dun, and resting on a huge flat rock, is a perfectly round stone of a very considerable size and apparent weight; tradition has it that this was the “ putting stone ” (clach-neart) in use by the “ men” of old; it can hardly be raised by two of the strongest “ men ” of this day. This stone, it may be mentioned, is supposed to be nothing more or less than a “ travelled ” boulder of the Ice Age.

In 1514 Dunsgaich was actually seized, and held for a time, by Lauchlan Maclean of Dowart or Duart (Dubhard) black height, and that on behalf of Sir Donald of Lochalsh. The name “Dunskaith” appears in a certain work, and is interpreted “ the fort of mischief” ; this fort, however, is situated on a little knoll on the northern “ sutor of Cromarty,” stated to have been a “royal ” fortress erected by William the Lion, now the site of another fortress; but this by the way.

Dunsgàich proper is shortly described as “ a vitrified fort near Tocavaig, above Gauscavaig Bay.” The present ruins even are thought to be secondary to the original fort built above the “ shadowy ” bay.

http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/files/PDFs/00915325_Place_Names_of_Skye.pdf

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Here is earlier Mons Angelorum blog post, 2015, from when I was investigating the Standing Stones….

To stumble across the idea (of a round world) by chance needs an unusual set of geographical features. The only location I have found that the idea can both be proven and stumbled across by chance is at Preseli: At this location, Neolithic constructions of unknown age are located in precisely the correct locations to show how this might have been found.

Immediately below these locations is the possible quarry that some archaeologists say is the source of the bluestones used at Stonehenge. Using the Geocentric Hypothesis, Stonehenge is a model of our Cosmos which shows, amongst other things, that the Earth is round (the circle of Stones representing our world).

http://www.monsangelorum.net/?p=23625

Katie-Jo Luxton, the director of RSPB Cymru, said: “Our beautiful, biodiverse and bewitching oak woodlands are some of the least known treasures of rural Wales. These natural forests feature strongly in Welsh folklore but have become undervalued and degraded in recent times. This project will help us restore these mysterious and special places, and encourage the people to celebrate and enjoy these places – and hopefully inspire a new generation of Welsh folklore writers.”

Four pieces of the Celtic rainforest in north and mid-Wales will be the focus of the project. They include Coed Felinrhyd and Llennyrch in Snowdonia, north Wales. Coed Felinrhyd was mentioned in the collection of Welsh legends, the Mabinogion, as the last resting place of King Pryderi of Dyfed, killed in combat with Gwydion the trickster.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/28/celtic-rainforest-wales-restore-eu

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https://youtu.be/RzbSz_i5t7I?list=PLinzJA0pkmAsCH7HGqd1EaHaKqMBh8W39

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https://youtu.be/vWHAM04tqd4

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‘If there’s one thing we know about ancient Egypt, they did death better than anyone else.’ So spoke the British archaeologist Tony Robinson on a dig at the Aswan tombs in 2018. What he didn’t say is that the more archaeologists dig up, the more they face the same baffling questions. Why, in different parts of Egypt, have so many tombs been found empty? Why mummification? What are the enigmatic Pyramid Texts and the Book of the Dead all about? And the biggest question of all: what did the ancient Egyptians know about death that, thousands of years later, we don’t? Immortality—life after death—seems to have preoccupied them above all else, and we don’t know why.

The Kolbrin contains six ancient Egyptian books, the remnants of scrolls written or copied by scribes from much earlier writings. These enigmatic books, whose provenance has not yet come to light, may one day be recognised as a record of humanity’s distant past—but something even more mysterious can be found there: dotted throughout are writings about ancient Egypt’s search for immortality.

Why mummification?

Surprisingly, what the Kolbrin says about immortality has little to do with mummification– indeed, it is rather dismissive of the practice. Mummification, it says, dates back to a far distant time when a group of refugee priests from an advanced civilisation arrived in Egypt after a global cataclysm and found the human beings around them reduced to barbarism.

‘Children wandered the plainland like the wild beasts, for men and women became stricken with a sickness that passed over the children.’¹

The Kolbrin On Immortality: How Egypt Regained the Secret of the Ages

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A set of highly decorated chalk cylinders, carved in Britain more than 4,000 years ago and known as the Folkton drums, could be ancient replicas of measuring devices used for laying out prehistoric monuments like Stonehenge, archaeologists say.

The researchers from the University of Manchester and University College London in the U.K. said that a fixed number of turns of a string around the hand-size objects gives a standard measurement of 3.22 meters — or about 10.5 feet — a length that was used to lay out many Neolithic stone and timber circles.

Three of the ornately carved chalk cylinders were found in 1889, near the village of Folkton, in Yorkshire in the north of England. The smallest is 4.09 inches (10.4 centimeters) across, the next is 4.88 inches (12.4 cm) and the largest is 5.75 inches (14.6 cm).

https://www.livescience.com/64603-ancient-carved-drums-measure-stonehenge.html

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One of the most famous psychic projects pursued by the U.S. military was a program that sought to delve into tapping into a wide variety of mental powers for military purposes, which was eventually called Project Stargate. Originally started in 1978 at Fort Meade, Maryland, it was the brainchild of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and a California company called SRI International, and its scope would become wide beyond what anyone could have expected. The idea was simply to try and develop psychic powers for use in military operations, initially focusing on remote viewing, wherein faraway objects and places can be seen by the psychic, but soon branching out to clairvoyance, manipulating computer systems with the mind, and even supposedly powers straight from a movie, such as levitation, invisibility, walking through walls, or killing with the power of the mind.

Psychic Warriors and Project Jedi

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For the last two decades, ghost hunters have relied on a fairly unchanging bag of tools, but a new parapsychological experiment is shaking up the field with jaw dropping results. After appearances in Travel Channel’s Kindred Spirits and Planet Weird’s Hellier, The Estes Method, sometimes called the SB7 Spirit Box Experiment, is changing the way people investigate the paranormal.

EMF meters, digital recorders, and full-spectrum cameras have been staples of paranormal investigation in various forms, but with a few exceptions, innovation in new tools – or the use of old ones – has been relatively stagnant. After all, one of the most sought-after ghost hunting tools, the Panasonic RR-DR60, is a digital recorder that’s nearly two-decades old and can fetch upwards of three-thousand dollars on eBay.

So, where are all the new ideas in the field? Just head to Colorado.

The Estes Method: How the Groundbreaking SB7 Spirit Box Experiment is Changing Paranormal Investigation

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Egypt’s first laws emerged when the Upper and Lower kingdoms were unified, according to tradition, under King Menes around 2950 B.C. From then on, different pharaohs would bring their own approaches to law and order. Although rulers would change, the unifying principle of the monarch’s sovereignty did not. Pharaohs held supreme authority in settling disputes, but they often delegated these powers to other officials such as governors, viziers, and magistrates, who could conduct investigations, hold trials, and issue punishments. Unlike the legal Code of Hammurabi, developed in the 18th century B.C. in Mesopotamia, ancient Egyptian law was not set in stone, and although power always flowed from the pharaoh, Egypt’s laws were rather like the Nile: fluid, organic, and changing with the times. (See also: The truth behind Egypt’s female pharaohs and their power.)

In Egyptian cosmology, the goddess Maat embodied the concepts of order, truth, and justice. Viziers often wore a pendant in the form of the goddess, who is often shown with an ostrich feather on her head. Egyptians believed that living according to her precepts—honesty, loyalty, and obedience to the king—would keep chaos at bay. Egyptian kings were not exempt from living by Maat’s principles. They too were expected to uphold order through wise rule, just decisions, and humility before the gods. This belief united commoners and kings in the responsibility for maintaining balance and harmony in society, which may have led to fewer periods of civil unrest in Egypt’s long history.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/archaeology-and-history/magazine/2019/01-02/egyptian-pharaohs-laws-and-punishments/

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Jasun Horsley’s book Vice of Kings is an exploration in the purpose, practice and importance of pedophilia.

Horsley begins with his own childhood among the British aristocracy. He explains the basis upon which he renounced his family and fortune. He branches out from the intimate into the scandal surrounding Jimmy Saville, the life and teachings of Aleister Crowley and the accumulated evidence to suggest that pedophilia is far more prevalent than we commonly believe.

Horsley is interested in exploring the philosophy and culture behind pedophilia. For me, this is a wholly unique approach.

I think of pedophilia as prevalent because it has been successful as a tool of power and wealth accumulation and control. Inducting children into the practice early creates an imprinting system – just as a farmer will hold a calf or foal when it is born to imprint it with the farmer instead of the mother.

These are the subconscious ties that bind. Children can then be trained to provide sex, data storage, courier services, even assassination. Child slaves are the basis of numerous personnel benefits. Child sex slaves create control files and the basis of blackmail. Pedophilia is one of the mechanisms by which covert operations can be implemented and kept secret on an economic basis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how the secrecy of the national security state could exist without pedophilia and related mind control technologies.

https://home.solari.com/book-review-vice-of-kings-how-socialism-occultism-and-the-sexual-revolution-engineered-a-culture-of-abuse/

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IN WESTERN SAHARA, A DISPUTED region on the northwest coast of Africa, there is a 3.5-square-mile plot of land that contains more than 400 ancient stone monuments—an incredible number, even for the Sahara, which “is absolutely full of stone monuments, usually located in places of particular topographical interest,” says Joanne Clarke, a specialist in prehistoric archaeology at the University of East Anglia. Clarke and Nick Brooks, an ecologist specializing in climate change, have been studying this area, just north of the village of Tifariti, since 2002 and recently published the results of their work, according to LiveScience. This remarkable collection of structures and landmarks dates from over 10,000 years ago to 3,000 years ago, and will help the researchers understand how people migrated into the region and adapted to the spread of the Sahara Desert.

The Tifariti area was once a natural basin, and as a water source in an region that was growing increasingly arid, it would certainly have been of interest to migrants thousands of years ago, from present-day Morocco, Libya, and Algeria to the north and what are now Mauritania and Mali to the south. “One of our theories is that as the Sahara dried in the mid Holocene—between five and six thousand years ago—this is one of the refugia, an area where water remained,” says Clarke. And where there was likely to be water, there were people. The variety of these monuments, archaeologists think, reflects the range of places from which these people migrated.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/archaeology-western-sahara-climate-change

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Kirk’s interest is not in the fairy tale but in the numenology of the fairies as superdimensional entities: ‘These sith,’s or Fairies, they call sluag[h] maith or the good people […] are said to be of a midle nature betwixt man and Angell (as were dæmons thought to be of old); of intelligent studious Spirits, and light changable bodies (lik those called Astrall) somewhat of the nature of a condens’d cloud, and best seen in twilight.’[9]

https://psychedelicpress.co.uk/blogs/psychedelic-press-blog/otherworld-gnosis-shaw

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Today is the second anniversary of the Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified archives being published online after a lengthy legal battle. While we’ll be examing some of the larger impact the release has had in a little bit, we also wanted to share what’s hands down the weirdest thing we’ve found so far.

If you find yourself wandering the creepier corridors of CREST, you might stumble upon a file entitled “PICTURE OF A MAN.” Pretty straightforward title, sure, but when you actually click on through …

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2019/jan/17/strangest-thing-weve-found-cias-declassified-archi/

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In the West, consciousness was long thought to be a divine gift bestowed solely on humans. Western philosophers historically conceived of nonhuman animals as unfeeling automatons. Even after Darwin demonstrated our kinship with animals, many scientists believed that the evolution of consciousness was a recent event. They thought the first mind sparked awake sometime after we split from chimps and bonobos. In his 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes argued that it was later still. He said the development of language led us, like Virgil, into the deep cognitive states capable of constructing experiential worlds.

This notion that consciousness was of recent vintage began to change in the decades following the Second World War, when more scientists were systematically studying the behaviors and brain states of Earth’s creatures. Now each year brings a raft of new research papers, which, taken together, suggest that a great many animals are conscious.

It was likely more than half a billion years ago that some sea-floor arms race between predator and prey roused Earth’s first conscious animal. That moment, when the first mind winked into being, was a cosmic event, opening up possibilities not previously contained in nature.

There now appears to exist, alongside the human world, a whole universe of vivid animal experience. Scientists deserve credit for illuminating, if only partially, this new dimension of our reality. But they can’t tell us how to do right by the trillions of minds with which we share the Earth’s surface. That’s a philosophical problem, and like most philosophical problems, it will be with us for a long time to come.

Apart from Pythagoras and a few others, ancient Western philosophers did not hand down a rich tradition of thinking about animal consciousness. But Eastern thinkers have long been haunted by its implications—especially the Jains, who have taken animal consciousness seriously as a moral matter for nearly 3,000 years.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/what-the-crow-knows/580726/

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If anyone feels inclined to assist with my transport appeal, the GoFundMe transport appeal page is here :

https://www.gofundme.com/help-chris-tend-his-apple-trees

Gratitude for setting it up, and to those who supported already ! 🙂

The mountain in the background is where I live, just where that tree on the middle horizon toward left extends up to the skyline

The wild Welsh daffodils are emerging here, which is glorious to see and soon they’ll be flowering, which is a wonder each year. These are not the big gawdy commercial varieties, these are some ancient native species that must have arrived here somehow after the last glaciers retreated.

http://www.daffodilcapitalofwales.co.uk/item/daffodil_facts.html

Well, my dear readership, I’m rather happy to relate that I’ve been having a fine stimulating exchange with a certain feral feline woman on the internet, and, so far, I have not crashed and burned in a storm of vitriol, slander, discord, woe and/or dismay, and I have to say, I’m somewhat proud of this, because in my view she’s a remarkably awesome person whose extraordinary work I’ve been admiring for some time.

Before any of you readers have the thought ‘…he’s MUCH too old for that sort of thing !’…. Well, of course he is ! He knows this as well as anyone, ya ninnies. Old an grim an savage and feckin knackered. But it IS the Springtime, the sap is rising, buds are swelling, there’s lamb’s tails on the hazels, and if an old man can’t catch the eye of a pretty woman and give her a wink, then what’s the point ? Might as well give up, dig a hole in the ground, jump in, and pull the soil over me head for the Big Sleep. There’s a few sparks left in me yet, I’ll have you know. I’m not quite ready to turn into moldy dust. So there !

Here’s one of her blog pages.

Scáthach, Charlie, Ireland & Sleat

I’m enjoying learning about this wild woman, Sgàthach an Eilean Sgitheanach, who taught martial arts up on the Isle of Skye, it’s all fascinating new information for me to explore. At least, I think it is new ? The stroke scrambled my old brain and deleted info, so that there are gaps and blanks, but I don’t recall having known about this stuff earlier in my life.

I’ve read a lot on ancient Celtic material, but for some reason or other I seem to have missed this very interesting area, so readers are welcome to try and follow me as I explore whatever is there to be found… whether I can make it coherent, lucid or just vaguely intelligible remains to be seen… 🙂

Scáthach, (Gaelic: “The Shadowy One”), in Celtic mythology, female warrior, especially noted as a teacher of warriors.

Scáthach was the daughter of Árd-Greimne of Lethra. She lived on an island (thought to be the Isle of Skye) in an impregnable castle, the gate of which was guarded by her daughter Uathach. At this fortress Scáthach trained numerous Celtic heroes in the arts of pole vaulting (useful in the assault of forts), underwater fighting, and combat with a barbed harpoon of her own invention, the gáe bolg. Her best-known student was Cú Chulainn, who stayed with her for a year in order to learn the skills that helped him win many battles. A number of other heroes of Celtic mythology also owed their prowess to the training of the Amazon Scáthach.

She seems to me less like an Amazon and more like a Ninja.

JP Mallory describes this book as a companion to his The Origins of the Irish, from 2013, in which he sketched the emergence in the early medieval period of a people who were recognisably Irish. In that book he briefly examined the legendary history of Ireland as written down in early-medieval times by clerical scholars who prized the vernacular traditions of poetry, myth and legend and gave them an honoured place side by side with the Latin learning of the church.

He returns to that subject in this latest valuable study written in his characteristic accessible and witty style. This reviewer at first sight thought that the title was the wheeze of a publisher anxious to attract new market segments, perhaps even New Age ones. But, no, it is the author’s own choice and he is clearly a little uneasy about its applicability as he writes in his introduction a wise precautionary apology to the aboriginal peoples of Australia for his appropriation or possible misappropriation of their concept of “a sacred time in which both the natural world and human culture and traditions originated and that these beginnings still resonate in the spiritual life of people today”. What this book really is, is a survey and analysis of the construction, in the Early Middle Ages, of an ancient history of Ireland and its people and the grafting of that history onto the Bible and an analysis of the historicity of famous dramatic stories such as the Táin Bó Cuailnge – the Cattle Raid of Cooley.

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/in-search-of-the-irish-dreamtime-archaeology-and-early-irish-literature-by-jp-mallory-review-1.2637831

The Ulster Cycle stories are set in and around the reign of King Conchobar mac Nessa, who rules the Ulaid from Emain Macha (now Navan Fort near Armagh). The most prominent hero of the cycle is Conchobar’s nephew, Cú Chulainn. ^[2]The Ulaid are most often in conflict with the Connachta, led by their queen, Medb, her husband, Ailill, and their ally Fergus mac Róich, a former king of the Ulaid in exile. The longest and most important story of the cycle is the Táin Bó Cúailnge or “Cattle Raid of Cooley”, in which Medb raises an enormous army to invade the Cooley peninsula and steal the Ulaid’s prize bull, Donn Cúailnge, opposed only by the seventeen-year-old Cú Chulainn. In the Mayo Táin, the Táin Bó Flidhais it is a white cow known as the ‘Maol’ that is the object of desire, for she can give enough milk at one milking to feed an army. Perhaps the best known story is the tragedy of Deirdre, source of plays by W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge. Other stories tell of the births, courtships and deaths of the characters and of the conflicts between them.

The stories are written in Old and Middle Irish, mostly in prose, interspersed with occasional verse passages. They are preserved in manuscripts of the 12th to 15th centuries but, in many cases, are much older. The language of the earliest stories is dateable to the 8th century, and events and characters are referred to in poems dating to the 7th.^[3]

The tone is terse, violent, sometimes comic, and mostly realistic, although supernatural elements intrude from time to time. Cú Chulainn in particular has superhuman fighting skills, the result of his semi-divine ancestry, and when particularly aroused his battle frenzy or ríastrad transforms him into an unrecognisable monster who knows neither friend nor foe. Evident deities like Lugh, the Morrígan, Aengus and Midir also make occasional appearances.

Unlike the majority of early Irish historical tradition, which presents ancient Ireland as largely united under a succession of High Kings, the stories of the Ulster Cycle depict a country with no effective central authority, divided into local and provincial kingdoms often at war with each other. The civilisation depicted is a pagan, pastoral one ruled by a warrior aristocracy. Bonds between aristocratic families are cemented by fosterage of each other’s children. Wealth is reckoned in cattle. Warfare mainly takes the form of cattle raids, or single combats between champions at fords. The characters’ actions are sometimes restricted by religious taboos known as geasa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Cycle

A geas can be compared with a curse or, paradoxically, a gift. If someone under a geas violates the associated taboo, the infractor will suffer dishonor or even death. On the other hand, the observing of one’s geas is believed to bring power. Often it is women who place geasa upon men. In some cases the woman turns out to be a goddess or other sovereignty figure.^[2]

The geas is often a key device in hero tales, such as that of Cúchulainn in Irish mythology. Traditionally, the doom of heroes comes about due to their violation of their geas, either by accident, or by having multiple geasa and then being placed in a position where they have no option but to violate one geas in order to maintain another. For instance, Cúchulainn has a geas to never eat dog meat, and he is also bound by a geas to eat any food offered to him by a woman. When a hag offers him dog meat, he has no way to emerge from the situation unscathed; this leads to his death.^[2][3]

A beneficial geas might involve a prophecy that a person would die in a particular way; the particulars of their death in the vision might be so bizarre that the person could then avoid their fate for many years.^{[citation needed]}

There is a considerable similarity between the Goidelic geasa and the Brythonic tynged. This is not surprising given the close origins of many of the variants of Celtic mythology.

For example, the Welsh hero Lleu Llaw Gyffes (in one version of his story) was destined to die neither “during the day or night, nor indoors or outdoors, neither riding nor walking, not clothed and not naked, nor by any weapon lawfully made.” He was safe until his wife, Blodeuwedd, learning of these foretold conditions, convinced him to show her how he could theoretically be stepping out of a river onto a riverbank sheltered by a roof and put one foot on a goat, and so on, thus enabling the conditions that allowed him to be killed.

• 

• 

When the Irish poet read the poem, the poem became his. It is his voice that reads the poem to me now. I have gone on to read it aloud to others, so vital does it seem to me, so honest. It’s possible these others may be reading the poem from time to time and hearing my voice or the voices of any and all the people they’ve heard read it. “Donal Og” is a fairly famous poem. It’s been translated numerous times (my favourite version is Lady Gregory’s, the translation I first fell in love with) and, as one of the great Irish ballads, it’s been sung and recorded over a good few generations. The poem in its original Irish has been dated to the 8th Century. We know “Donal Og” means “Young Donald”; we assume the speaker is a she. But Anon? Anon is a fabulous mystery. Anon is the poet who let loose the poem. Thinking about Anon this past month I’ve imagined what it would be like to publish a whole book as Anon, what things it might free me up to say, how unaccountable I’d be to anyone or anything. Sitting down with yourself and working as a poet is a privilege, but imagine, just imagine, saying something so well, so powerfully, that as a thing-in-itself the poem might go on speaking crucially: outlasting its need for a name and that name’s claim on an interval in history.

http://arcpoetry.ca/2008/12/08/when-i-see-the-world-and-do-not-see/

It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;

the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh.

It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;

and that you may be without a mate until you find me.

You promised me, and you said a lie to me,

that you would be before me where the sheep are flocked;

I gave a whistle and three hundred cries to you,

and I found nothing there but a bleating lamb.

You promised me a thing that was hard for you,

a ship of gold under a silver mast;

twelve towns with a market in all of them,

and a fine white court by the side of the sea.

You promised me a thing that is not possible,

that you would give me gloves of the skin of a fish;

that you would give me shoes of the skin of a bird;

and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland.

When I go by myself to the Well of Loneliness,

I sit down and I go through my trouble;

when I see the world and do not see my boy,

he that has an amber shade in his hair.

It was on that Sunday I gave my love to you;

the Sunday that is last before Easter Sunday.

And myself on my knees reading the Passion;

and my two eyes giving love to you for ever.

My mother said to me not to be talking with you today,

or tomorrow, or on the Sunday;

it was a bad time she took for telling me that;

it was shutting the door after the house was robbed.

My heart is as black as the blackness of the sloe,

or as the black coal that is on the smith’s forge;

or as the sole of a shoe left in white halls;

it was you that put that darkness over my life.

You have taken the east from me; you have taken the west from me;

you have taken what is before me and what is behind me;

you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me;

and my fear is great that you have taken God from me!

(Trans. Lady Gregory)

https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=14957

This version of an anonymous 8th century Irish poem was translated by Lady Augusta Gregory. For me it’s the poetry equivalent of an earworm, a catchy song you can’t stop humming along with.

The unusual syntax lends it a striking rhythm and the repetition – you promised me; you promised me – makes it easy to memorise, hard to forget. The pleasure is in the shape and the sound, as much as the old, sad story (the lament of the young woman betrayed, those impossible broken promises familiar from so many ballads and folk songs) – or the wonderful imagery: gloves of the skin of a fish; shoes of the skin of a bird. This is a mysterious, magical poem that begs to be read aloud.

Donal Óg

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/apr/19/poem-of-the-week-lady-augusta-gregory

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1. Introduction

The evolving relationship between humans and dogs has attracted significant research interest. This is partially because dogs were the earliest domesticated animal, but many people today have a close connection to this species fuelling interest into the origin of our familiar companion. The bond between humans and dogs developed to the extent that both species benefited in some manner and, for many millennia, dogs have been important in the lives of humans. The extent to which people found dogs a source of protection and comfort, as well as hunting tools are important questions as to how the early alliance flourished (Perri, 2016, Lupo, 2017, Guagnin et al., 2018).

In this paper, we present evidence from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) settlement of Shubayqa 6 in northeast Jordan where the close relationship between humans and dogs is evident. This reciprocal tie involved dogs extensively scavenging through waste discarded at the settlement and, in return, they may have provided humans with the means to hunt more effectively, as well as offering security and early warning of danger. Based on the longer-term patterns of faunal exploitation in the region, the cooperation between humans and dogs may have started earlier in the final stages of the Natufian at a time when widening of the resource base has been repeatedly linked to climate change and population expansion depleting environmental reserves (Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen, 2002, Stutz et al., 2009). The importance of the Younger Dryas (∼12,900–11,600 cal BP) as an influence on subsistence strategies has been questioned in recent years (Maher et al., 2011a, Caracuta et al., 2016) and the use of new hunting techniques offers a different factor that should be considered in the interpretation of these developments. It is impossible to assess the level of companionship dogs afforded people from the archaeological record, but this should also be born in mind (Manwell and Baker, 1984). Although cultural attitudes to dogs vary significantly, dogs may well have been more than just hunting tools. However, a main reason for humans to tolerate dogs living amongst them in large numbers would probably have been to utilise their hunting abilities. The question, therefore, is how did the use of dogs influence hunting and the prey targeted as people learnt to hunt more effectively with their new companions?

2. Background

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278416518301661

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Gregory Shushan has previously studied near-death experiences [NDE] in early Christianity, the Vedas, and as a methodological issue in the comparative study of religions. In this book, Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions, Shushan provides exhaustive research on textual accounts of Indigenous traditions in North America, Africa, and Oceania. Shushan characterizes Indigenous societies using terms of difference appropriate to the dynamism and variety of traditions covered by this global category–they did not produce written religious texts, they have diverse beliefs particular to their locations, with internal variations consistent with oral cultures and dynamic developments over time. Given that he is providing a compilation of written sources, Shushan acknowledges this as a study of crisis situations. These accounts are found in the records of missionaries and anthropologists from the 17th to the 20th century. “In general, the societies were first studied during periods of religious, cultural, social, and/or physical crises due to multipronged colonialist assaults on their land, resources, bodies and souls—which partly entailed the destruction or transformation of traditional beliefs and practices” (12). His methodological emphasis, therefore, is to provide accounts that are culturally contextualized to accurately represent the Indigenous hermeneutics of religious experience particular to the respective regions. Shushan identifies NDE as “exceptional experience” that he is not reductively explaining away in terms of cognitive science, for example, but rather through interdisciplinary research questions that build a more accurate description of the power of these experiences in the organization of communities, toward the fundamental question “what happens to us when we die?”

http://readingreligion.org/books/near-death-experience-indigenous-religions

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Rannoch Moor is a wide, elevated bowl that sits in the Central Highlands of Scotland. Rimmed by mountains, it’s a chalice that held some of the last ice of the last ice age. Ten thousand years later it’s still rising, a few millimetres a year: a long, slow decompression after the burden of a mile’s depth of ice. No roads cross the moor, but there is a railway line and the Glasgow to Fort William train trundles over it four times a day.

When the ice melted, the trees returned. The Black Wood of Rannoch survives as a fragment of the forest that once covered the moor. It would have been home to various flora and fauna including bear, elk, lynx, aurochs, red deer, wolf, and human. In the space of a few centuries, we chopped down the forest for timber and cleared the land of most of its wild animals. Legend has it that in the late 16th century, Domhnal mac Fhionnlaigh, a renowned local hunter and bard, killed all the remaining wolves of Rannoch. I prefer Jim Crumley’s version, which can be read in his book The Last Wolf (2010), where, rather than being killed by man, the last wolf takes herself off to a remote, wild place on the moor and dies of old age. Either way, by the 18th century, wolves were extinct throughout Scotland.

Rannoch Wolves

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Some kind people have organised this GoFundMe appeal and made some contributions, so if any readers feel inclined to help me with this Terrain Hopper project and thus earn my gratitude, here’s the link, please pass it around like a hat, across the wild turbulent invisible expanses of vastness out there, called the internet. This is not something I’ve ever done before, so it’s an interesting new exploration…

https://www.gofundme.com/help-chris-tend-his-apple-trees

I had an idea. I think it is fresh, but probably others have had the same thought before me. It has to do with time, and whatever constitutes who, or what, I am, and you are.

If, say, you begin at a particular time, say, 9pm, and spend an hour in some activity, until 10pm, are you the same person as the person you’d be if you’d spent that hour following a different activity ?

Seems a simple question that some annoying child might ask. But let’s take a look.

There’s an almost infinite number of possible actions that ‘you’ might have done during the course of that hour, and some of them would have, potentially, dramatic effects upon your subsequent existence.

You could be quite passive and doze in a chair by the fire, or you could go and rob someone at gunpoint, or you could seduce you best friend’s wife, or dance or play piano or cards or, if you’re Jordan Peterson, tidy your room….

Pretty much anything that any human being has ever done is available as an option….

And that’s kind of weird. Does anybody see it that way ? Probably, most just follow a habit or perform a necessary task, unaware that they could choose from other possibilities. Compelled, like a train following a track.

But this is karma, or one meaning of that term. Because if you do one thing, A, then the result is going to be B. And if you do a different thing, C, then the result is going to be D. If you wash the dishes then you’ll have clean plates and pans, but if you don’t, well, they stay dirty, but you did something else, for whatever reason and motive.

And the result is that you yourself will be, or be on the way to becoming, a slightly different character. The increments accumulate. If you go to the fridge for comfort food, you put on weight. If you do press-ups, you get stronger muscles. You can look at porn or read Voltaire, get drunk or struggle to master a musical instrument. Whatever it is, you can choose to make something of yourself, for better or worse

If you wish to advance your social standing, then you need to train yourself and develop skills and learn new and difficult stuff. There’s a hell of a lot of people out there, all competing for advancement and opportunity. A person who disciplines themselves to learn something will gain an advantage over those who don’t or can’t.

That’s fairly trivial and obvious. Obviously, it makes it much easier if you follow a path that gives you pleasure, satisfaction, a sense of achievement and accomplishment.

This is where zen meditation comes is. No sense of achievement or attainment. Just sitting absolutely still doing nothing. Well, not absolutely nothing, because your heart still beats and you breath. It’s not quite the same as being asleep. Or dead. But it gives a sort of gauge of reference for all other possible activities and ways of being.

Of course, it’s not that simple, zen meditation is not just ‘one thing’, there many different things that can be practiced.

For example, you might sit in lotus posture for an hour without any thoughts, just focussed on your breaths, completely single-minded, without letting your attention waver.

You, the reader, might consider such a practice to be absurd, a pointless waste of time. But unless you’ve actually tried it, unless you can actually DO it, you have no real insight or understanding as to what is involved. A person who can do this is not the same as a person who cannot do it, or someone who has never even tried.

When you CAN do it, then you can choose whether to arrange flowers in exquisite harmony, or whether to be a master of violent combat, like Musashi, or whether to assist the suffering of unfortunate people or animals, or whatever else your own personal calling might be.

http://www.musashi-miyamoto.com

An interesting topic to explore would be how this stuff relates to the Judaeo-Christian tradition as illuminated by Jordan Peterson in his Biblical series and also Jay Dyer’s work, because, as far as I’m aware neither have much knowledge of Buddhism or Taoism. Maybe I’ll get around to that if a future essay.

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Cinderella, for example, revolves around the perniciousness of what researchers call “female intrasexual competition”—the often-underhanded ways women compete with each other. While men evolved to be openly competitive, jockeying for position verbally or physically, female competition tends to be covert—indirect and sneaky—and often involves sabotaging another woman into being less appealing to men. Accordingly, in Cinderella, when the king throws a ball to find the prince a wife, the nasty stepsisters aren’t at all “let the best woman win!” They assign Cinderella extra chores so she won’t have time to pull together something to wear. (Mean Girls, the cartoon version, anyone?)

Psychologist Joyce Benenson, who researches sex differences, traces women’s evolved tendency to opt for indirectness—in both competition and communication—to a need to avoid physical altercation, either with men or other women. This strategy would have allowed ancestral women to protect their more fragile female reproductive machinery and to fulfill their roles as the primary caretaker for any children they might have.

Sure, today, a woman can protect herself against even the biggest, scariest intruder with a gun or a taser—but that’s not what our genes are telling us. We’re living in modern times with an antique psychological operating system—adapted for the mating and survival problems of ancestral humans. It’s often at a mismatch with our current environment.

Don’t Deny Girls the Evolutionary Wisdom of Fairy-Tales

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The word animism is derived from anima in Latin, which literally means ‘breath’, with an extended meaning of ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’. Animism recognises the potential of all objects – animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather-related phenomena, deceased human beings, even words – to be animated and alive, possessing distinctive spirits. As such, animism is considered to contain the oldest spiritual and supernatural perspectives in the world, dating back to the Palaeolithic Age when humans were still hunter-gatherers.

Viewed from the standpoint of today’s organised religions, animistic religions can seem ‘primitive’ and are often dismissed as containing nothing more than superstitious beliefs and practices. This belittling if not antagonistic attitude toward animism has been particularly strong among the Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For example, in the United States it was not until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act was passed in 1978 that indigenous peoples gained the legal right to practise their traditional animistic faiths.

Given this, as one of the world’s last still-flourishing animistic faiths, Shinto can provide a gateway to better understanding the origins of certain universal paradigms found in today’s organised religions.

https://aeon.co/essays/shinto-shows-the-debt-to-animism-of-organised-religions-today

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…It is a dreamland painted in the imagination’s most delicate tints; it is colour etherealised. One shade melts into the other, so that you cannot tell where one shade ends and the other begins, and yet they are all there. No forms – it is all faint, dreamy colour music, a faraway, long-drawn-out melody on muted strings.

The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration

Throughout the nineteenth century, ghosts and shadowy interlocutors featured in the narratives of British explorers in the Arctic and their audiences back home. Taking the history of Sir John Franklin’s last Arctic expedition from the 1840s as my central focus, in this book I examine how spectral experiences such as dreaming, clairvoyante travel, reverie, spiritualism and ghost-seeing informed ideas of the Arctic and the searches for a Northwest Passage through the Arctic. The role of spectral experiences in this geographical quest has not been adequately addressed before and I argue that integrating them into the cultural history of exploration revises traditional accounts of polar discovery that focus mainly on ‘men and maps’. This book, then, is about the cultural production of the spectral in Arctic narratives and what this can tell us about Victorian exploration and its legacies.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/the-spectral-arctic

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For those who assert there is such a thing as genuine poltergeist activity (as opposed to the skeptics who attribute it all to natural phenomena, over-imagination or hoaxes) the question becomes: “What is a poltergeist, anyway?” Believers fall into, roughly speaking, two different camps: some posit that polts are independent spirit beings–ghosts with a taste for nasty practical jokes. Others are of the opinion that what we are dealing with are manifestations unwittingly created by the troubled emotions of some member of the affected household–usually a child or teenager.

That debate will likely never be solved on this side of the grave. However, famed ghost researcher Harry Price recorded one English “poltergeist” case which strongly suggests that these “spirits” or “demons” are evidence of the awesome and little-understood power of our subconscious minds.

The story centers around the family of a Sutherland doctor named Wilkins. In 1940, Wilkins’ 19-year-old daughter Olive became engaged to a young flight lieutenant in the RAF. Her parents were not in favor of the match. Although they had nothing against her beau, Dr. and Mrs. Wilkins felt Olive was too young for marriage. Even more seriously, the current war meant that odds were good their daughter might soon go from bride to widow. In the end, however, the course of true love ran smoothly and the young couple married in the fall of 1941.

https://strangeco.blogspot.com/2019/01/where-is-olive-unusual-poltergeist.html

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A more detailed explanation surrounding this ancient description of a square-shaped Earth is provided in “ The Map that Talked ”; which looks at the creation of an intriguing Stone Age map, which uses the stars to create a relatively accurate map of Earth.

This archaic map can also explain the various aquatic descriptions that the Greeks gave to the constellations; where it is found that, when an expanded map of the stars is wrapped three times around Earth the Greek water constellations intriguingly mark the oceans and the constellations that describe heroes that did not drown mark the continents. The same book also describes the initial discovery of the original Babel Text.

https://www.ancient-origins.net/human-origins-science/babel-text-0011290

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Gol-e-Zard Cave lies in the shadow of Mount Damavand, which at more than 5,000 metres dominates the landscape of northern Iran. In this cave, stalagmites and stalactites are growing slowly over millennia and preserve in them clues about past climate events. Changes in stalagmite chemistry from this cave have now linked the collapse of the Akkadian Empire to climate changes more than 4,000 years ago.

Akkadia was the world’s first empire. It was established in Mesopotamia around 4,300 years ago after its ruler, Sargon of Akkad, united a series of independent city states. Akkadian influence spanned along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers from what is now southern Iraq, through to Syria and Turkey. The north-south extent of the empire meant that it covered regions with different climates, ranging from fertile lands in the north which were highly dependent on rainfall (one of Asia’s “bread baskets”), to the irrigation-fed alluvial plains to the south.

It appears that the empire became increasingly dependent on the productivity of the northern lands and used the grains sourced from this region to feed the army and redistribute the food supplies to key supporters. Then, about a century after its formation, the Akkadian Empire suddenly collapsed, followed by mass migration and conflicts. The anguish of the era is perfectly captured in the ancient Curse of Akkad text, which describes a period of turmoil with water and food shortages:

… the large arable tracts yielded no grain, the inundated fields yielded no fish, the irrigated orchards yielded no syrup or wine, the thick clouds did not rain.

How Climate Change Caused The World’s First Ever Empire To Collapse

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The problem of time is one of the greatest puzzles of modern physics. The first bit of the conundrum is cosmological. To understand time, scientists talk about finding a ‘First Cause’ or ‘initial condition’ – a description of the Universe at the very beginning (or at ‘time equals zero’). But to determine a system’s initial condition, we need to know the total system. We need to make measurements of the positions and velocities of its constituent parts, such as particles, atoms, fields and so forth. This problem hits a hard wall when we deal with the origin of the Universe itself, because we have no view from the outside. We can’t step outside the box in order to look within, because the box is all there is. A First Cause is not only unknowable, but also scientifically unintelligible.

The second part of the challenge is philosophical. Scientists have taken physical time to be the only real time – whereas experiential time, the subjective sense of time’s passing, is considered a cognitive fabrication of secondary importance. The young Albert Einstein made this position clear in his debate with philosopher Henri Bergson in the 1920s, when he claimed that the physicist’s time is the only time. With age, Einstein became more circumspect. Up to the time of his death, he remained deeply troubled about how to find a place for the human experience of time in the scientific worldview.

These quandaries rest on the presumption that physical time, with an absolute starting point, is the only real kind of time. But what if the question of the beginning of time is ill-posed? Many of us like to think that science can give us a complete, objective description of cosmic history, distinct from us and our perception of it. But this image of science is deeply flawed. In our urge for knowledge and control, we’ve created a vision of science as a series of discoveries about how reality is in itself, a God’s-eye view of nature.

Such an approach not only distorts the truth, but creates a false sense of distance between ourselves and the world. That divide arises from what we call the Blind Spot, which science itself cannot see. In the Blind Spot sits experience: the sheer presence and immediacy of lived perception.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-neglect-of-lived-experience

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But if you take Bentham’s formula to its logical conclusion—perfect pleasure, no pain—you end up with the rats in the cage. This rapturous state of existence is known as ‘wireheading’, and it’s a recurring theme in dystopian fiction: should anything unpleasant happen to the inhabitants of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, there’s always soma, delicious soma! “half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a weekend, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon…”

Huxley gave us the weak version of wireheading; his soma-addicts still have some semblance of a life. In the strong version, the pleasure floods the brain to the exclusion of any other activity—the equivalent of a never-ending heroin rush, or an endless orgasm. What if you were offered a pill that removed all pain, and made you experience the purest joy for the rest of your life? Unlike the starving rats, all your mundane physical needs would be taken care of. There’s no catch.

The Brave New World of Wireheading

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A couple of very kind people have set up a GoFundMe to try and assist my efforts to get

a Terrain Hopper to help me get around, seeing as I now have one semi-useless right leg.

Unfortunately I’m not able to place the ******* link here… ********* !

But I am working on it….