Between 1582 to 1589, the British occultists John Dee and Edward Kelly claimed to have received multiple messages from angels. Writing these transmissions up, they formed the basis of the Enochian magical system, which was re-discovered and popularized over 300 years later by Alistair Crowley, a controversial (and free-love promoting) spiritualist. Pictured here is a […]
Syphilis caused widespread suffering in Early Modern Europe – this portrait by Rembrandt van Rijn of a sufferer from about 1665 illustrates the facial deformities that occurred as the disease progressed. Scientists still debate where the disease originated, but one idea is that strains of the bacteria causing syphilis had developed independently Europe and in
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Rocks! But wait, there’s more: the technology heralded by these Acheulean hand-axes that you see (noted for their pear and oval shapes) signify not just the very cutting-edge (groan) way to cut into bone developed between 2 and 1.6 million years ago, but also, the formation of human language and maybe even the genesis of
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Look above the manager roof in this scene from Italian Renaissance master Giotto di Bondone’s _Adoration of the Magi_. The “star” that Giotto painted had been famous for centuries as the one featured in the Gospel of Matthew which inspired the wise men to travel to King Herod of Judea to inquire about the prophecy
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Potential happy post-extinction post! The drawing you see here is artist Nirupa Rao’s rendition of a plant that some believe to be an extremely rare survivor of Silphium (also known as silphion), an Ancient Mediterranean species so valued that it was hunted to extinction — but maybe, believe some plant historians, it’s been rediscovered. I
Being a hat maker was a deadly profession of the 19th century, as the life of Boston Corbett (died probably 1894) shows. Corbett is most famous for being the man who shot President Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Less well known is his unfortunate history of mental illness, likely caused or very much exacerbated by
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Big history post here (big history meaning all of history, not just human), about the fabulousness of how evolution works. This is about the ways bees created the colors we see on flowers. We know that bees are super-pollinators critical for much of earth’s plant life. And we observe how bees are drawn to sweet
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Ringing Rocks County Park contains a 7-acre boulder field with an unusual feature: about a third of these rocks clang with a metallic ring when struck. The boulder field reached its current position about 12,000 years ago when the last Ice Age melted the great Wisconsin Glacier away from this part of Bucks County Pennsylvania.
This is a photo of the Charles Bridge, spanning the Vltava River in the city of Prague. One of the loveliest Medieval bridges still extant, it was finished in 1402. There is a really neat animation that in three minutes shows how the bridge was built (it actually took 45 years IRL). Unfortunately Instagram won’t
This is the Pont du Guard, an aqueduct bridge made in the first century by Romans who used it to supply a colony where the modern French city Nîmes now exists. Think about the most recent modern cement structures that you have seen which have cracks and crumbles, and it will drive home just how
There’s a famous children’s book called _Everybody Poops_, and this photo might look like some sort of rendition of that. Here you can see birds, horses, dogs, pigs, and rabbits all in the act of defecating. Our own human species is represented in the second row, right next to the donkey. This visual diagram is
You’re looking at a recreation of a funerary site from ancient Ecuador, where these three levels of human remains were unearthed in 1980 as builders were getting ready to construct an airport at the capital city of Quito: a total of nine vertical burial tunnel-chambers were found. These bodies date from 680 CE, to a
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In an article published in the premier science journal _Nature_ earlier this week, a team of scholars announced their analyses of the operations of the first-ever discovered mummification workshop, and what they found was fascinating! This picture shows the layout of the “mummy factory”, first unearthed at the Egyptian site of Saqqara, about 20 miles
Trofim Lysenko, the Stalinist-era biologist who tailored his scientific ideas to suit the Soviet communist party. Denying natural selection and arguing that character traits developed in a parent’s lifetime could be passed onto offspring (like Lamarck), Lysenko put the study of biology in the Soviet Union back by decades. Many actual scientists he competed against
This tooth from the mid-6th century contains DNA from the plague, that same pathogen responsible for the Black Death in 14th- Europe. This version of the bubonic plague is known as the “Justinianic Plague,” named after the Byzantine Emperor who reigned during its outbreak in the capital of Constantinople in 541 CE. Many historians have
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This picture of the solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, is not only beautiful but also scientifically important. It was taken by British scientist Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), and was the first physical test of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Of course, in retrospect, over 100 years later it might seem obvious that massive objects
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This is an early 14th copy of the _Trotula_, a medical text on women’s conditions. Trota of Salerno was one of the book’s authors. She was from the 1100s, and was called “magistra” or “female master” because her medical knowledge was so respected in her day.
The origins of human history keeps getting pushed further back in time, as a recent analysis of a wooden structure in Africa dating back almost a half a million years demonstrates. For reference, anthropologists now date the emergence of homo sapiens to about 200,000 years ago (although some argue for 300,000). The wooden structure discovered
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And what, pray tell, is going on here? This macabre device is a 1694 illustration of the weighing chair of Sanctorius Sanctorius (1561-1636), an Italian scientist who was the first (that we know of) to mesh quantitative experiments with the study of how the human body works. For thirty years, Santorio measured people’s sweat. Influenced
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This is a 16th century translation of “The Emerald Tablet”, among the most famous texts on alchemy ever. Although it purports to be from Egypt (that’s where a lot of medieval alchemists thought their sources originated), the first text we know of comes from an Arabic 6th/7th century source. Isaac Newton, himself an occultist, translated
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