Tag Archives | History

400-Year-Old Masonic Secret Chamber Uncovered In Historic British Manor

By on February 28, 2013 in News 7

Do the rituals of freemasonry go back further than anyone has realized? The BBC reports:

A secret chamber, hidden for 400 years and with possible links to early freemasonry, has been discovered.

The entrance to the room, which has plastered walls, was found inside a cupboard at the National Trust-owned house Canons Ashby, near Daventry. It is a paneled room with walls showing crests of local families and enigmatic symbols.

Laura Malpas, community manager of the trust, said there was “speculation” the room had been an early masonic lodge. Ms. Malpas said it was “a fascinating and puzzling space” with walls that include “frankly odd Latin texts.” She added: “There has been speculation that this room was used as an early form of Masonic lodge before Freemasonry was established in England some 130 years later in 1717.”

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The Hidden Geography Of Optical Calibration Targets

By on February 27, 2013 in News 0

The Center for Land Use Interpretation on symbols strewn across the American landscape which make sense only to airborne machines:

There are dozens of aerial photo calibration targets across the USA, curious land-based two-dimensional optical artifacts made mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, and many are still in use, though their history is obscure.

Most of them follow the same form established by the Air Force and NASA. The pattern painted on the targets is sets of parallel and perpendicular bars that function like an eye chart at the optometrist. For aerial photography and satellites, it provides a platform to test, calibrate, and focus aerial cameras traveling at different speeds and altitudes.

Many of these resolution test targets are found in the Mojave desert of California, one of the principal development and test areas for surveillance aircraft. The largest concentration in one place is on the grounds of Edwards Air Force Base, where calibration targets run for 20 miles.

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Back When Valentines Cards Were Brutally Cruel

By on February 14, 2013 in News 2

Slate writes that vindictive Valentine’s cards, mailed anonymously, were once as popular as romantic ones. Is it time to bring back the tradition?

These “vinegar valentines” were produced between the middle of the 19th century and middle of the 20th. The tradition was quite popular. Some historians argue that comic valentines—of which vinegar valentines were one type—made up half of all U.S. valentine sales in the middle of the 19th century.

Vinegar valentines were a socially sanctioned chance to criticize, reject, and insult. They were often sent without a signature, enabling the sender to speak without fear. These cards were sent not just to significant others, friends, and family but to a larger social circle. People might post a vinegar card to a store clerk, a teacher, or a neighbor.

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The Evangelical Political Movement’s Racist Origins

By on February 10, 2013 in News 89

Religion Dispatches explains the actual galvanization of the modern evangelical conservative movement:

The right-wing evangelical movement was not an immediate backlash to Roe v. Wade. The evangelical community, unlike Roman Catholicism, showed little interest in combating abortion until almost 1980.

Although evangelicals were mostly silent on abortion after Roe v. Wade, they were not silent on other political issues. Paul Weyrich, one of the evangelical right’s most influential founders, recalls that the movement initially emerged to defend racially segregated Christian schools from government intrusion:

What galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment]. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed. What changed their minds was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.

In other words, as Randall Balmer has succinctly put it: “the religious right of the late twentieth century organized to perpetuate racial discrimination.” Only after the movement was underway did it begin advocacy on abortion.

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FBI Believed Nazi Monks Had A Secret Base In The Amazon Rainforest During World War II

By on February 8, 2013 in News 4

Another thing to worry about while hiking through the jungle. The Smithsonian writes:

In October 1941, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover received a strange bit of war intelligence in a classified document, warning that a secret German airbase had gone up deep in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. Particularly concerned about an attack on the Panama Canal, the FBI began collaborating with Brazil’s secret police.

In December, another worrying message came: the suspected culprits behind the scheme were a colony of German monks, [possibly] preparing for a secret base for the Luftwaffe, the airborne arm of the German military. The following July, large amounts of fuel were spotted traveling upriver in Bolivia. The FBI worried that the fuel could be headed to the secret jungle airbase, still yet to be discovered.

In the end, military leaders concluded that stockpiling enough supplies deep within the jungle would not be possible. The would-be Nazi monks were left to live their own quiet, solitary lives in nature.

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Skeleton Of English King Richard III Found Under Parking Lot

By on February 6, 2013 in News 9

King for a mere two years, turned into a hunchbacked Shakespeare villain after his gruesome death, Richard III has popped up in unbelievable fashion. The BBC reports:

A skeleton found beneath a Leicester car park has been confirmed as English king Richard III. Experts from the University of Leicester said DNA from the bones matched that of descendants of the monarch’s family. Lead archaeologist Richard Buckley told a press conference: “Beyond reasonable doubt it’s Richard.”

Richard, killed in battle in 1485, will be reinterred in Leicester Cathedral. Mr. Buckley said the bones had been subjected to “rigorous academic study” and had been carbon dated to a period from 1455-1540.

His skeleton had suffered 10 injuries, including eight to the skull, at around the time of death. Two of the skull wounds were potentially fatal. The wounds included stabs to the face and “humiliation” injuries, including a pelvic wound through the buttock.

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False Past And The Phantom Time Hypothesis

By on January 24, 2013 in News 10

Wikipedia lays out the phantom time hypothesis, the odd belief that certain eras of history did not occur:

The Phantom Time Hypothesis is a conspiracy theory developed by Heribert Illig in 1991. It proposes that periods of history, specifically that of Europe during the Early Middle Ages (AD 614–911), did not exist, and that there has been a systematic effort to cover up that fact. Illig believed that this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation and forgery of documentary and physical evidence.

The bases of Illig’s hypothesis include:

The scarcity of archaeological evidence that can be reliably dated to the period AD 614–911, on perceived inadequacies of radiometric and dendrochronological methods of dating this period.

The presence of Romanesque architecture in tenth-century Western Europe. This is taken as evidence that less than half a millennium could have passed since the fall of the Roman Empire, and concludes that the entire Carolingian period, including the person of Charlemagne, is a forgery by medieval chroniclers, more precisely a conspiracy instigated by Otto III and Gerbert d’Aurillac.

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W. B. Yeats’s Vision of Historical Cycles

By on January 17, 2013 in News 1

Neil Mann interprets:

General Outline

Since it affects the poetry more obviously and more directly than almost any other part of the System, the view of history proposed in A Vision has received more critical attention than any other area, not all of it entirely accurate. The basic principles are, however, relatively easy to grasp, and Yeats himself noted that the section treating history, ‘Dove or Swan’ (AV A Book III and AV B Book V), was among the more accessible parts of A Vision.

The title ‘Dove or Swan’ alludes to a particularly potent yoking of ideas through symbol. The Archangel Gabriel’s annunciation to the Virgin Mary is often accompanied in art by a descending dove to symbolise the angel’s message that she would conceive a child: ‘The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God’ (Luke 1:35).

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A Species Recovering from Amnesia: A Talk with Graham Hancock (Gabriel D. Roberts)

By on January 14, 2013 in News 15

Picture: Cpt. Muji (CC)

Few writers can match Graham Hancock’s influence as the author of several breakthrough books of alternative history, including Fingerprints of the Gods, Underworld, and Supernatural. His work has been instrumental in challenging institutional thinking about humanity’s lost past, while bringing the indigenous shamanic perspective to a broader audience. He’s certainly someone to talk with about the significance of our present moment, as the Mayan calendar cycle comes to an end, and we look beyond.

Via Reality Sandwich:

Gabriel D. Roberts: What message would you say the recent hurricane Sandy is sending us?

Graham Hancock: I would answer more broadly than just the storm. I think the whole state of human civilization on planet Earth right now, in the early years of the 21st century, has a message for us. It’s obvious that we’re not fulfilling our purpose here on this planet. I mean, it’s an incredible opportunity to be born in a human body and to be gifted by the universe with this amazing, vibrant garden of a homeland that we call planet Earth.

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World’s Largest Historical Collection Of Deviant Erotic And Drug-Related Cultural Works Now At Harvard

By on January 11, 2013 in News 4

Harvard Gazette on a treasure chest for anyone looking to explore the darkest corners of human experience:

Harvard’s newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection is the largest of its kind in the world. It includes a vast collection of boxes, drawers, shelves — whole rooms — full of art, literature, and popular culture artifacts dating back to the 16th century, related to the chief avenues to altered states of mind: sex and drugs.

The Santo Domingo collection is on long-term deposit at Harvard. “We do not own it,” said Morris, but the owners “want us to catalog it, and they want it available for research.” The largest collection of its kind in the world, it will gradually be available to scholars of literature, fine art, photography, film, history, medicine, popular culture, and more.

It has an estimated 30,000 books and 25,000 posters, photographs, and other ephemera assembled by Colombian businessman Julio Mario Santo Domingo Jr., who died in 2009.

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