A strange relationship between mathematics and the occult began early on in Western history, and some of the most advanced intellectual minds fostered the study of numbers primarily as a stepping stone for understanding hidden truths about the physical world. This tendancy goes as far back as Pythagoras, but flourished notably in Early Modern Europe.
John Napier and the Relationship of Math and Occults Read More »
Although the Ancient Roman aristocracy certainly showed off their social status with elaborate banquets, they did not actually purge themselves in rooms called “Vomitoria.” This misconception arose from some 19th- and 20th- century writers, who claimed that a Vomitorium was where Romans deliberately threw up their food so they could keep eating. In fact, the
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“The Priestess of Delphi,” by John Collier (1891). This haunting painting of one of the famous oracles from Ancient Greece – known as the Sibyls – is reflective of the lack of certainty modern scholars have about what specific prophecies the oracles pronounced. We know that the Romans truly believed that one of the Sibyls
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Hormones, as author Randi Hutter Epstein relays in_Aroused: the History of Hormones and How They Control Just about Everything_ really do a lot — from metabolizing food, to regulating sleep and mood swings, to the act of sex, to prompting our immune systems. Hormones can make our lives both really amazing and really terrible. So
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow and Radio-Immunosassay Read More »
This is Erwin Schrodinger, Nobel-prize-winning architect of the famed equation with his name — along with silhouettes of his famous alive-and-dead cats. Born in Austria on 1887, Erwin’s chronic struggles with tuberculosis had him confined in a sanitorium in the 1920’s: it was during his stay that he developed his famous wave equation. Many conclusions
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Although popular culture promotes an idea that the belief in magic flourished mainly in the Medieval European past, maybe declining with the onset of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th-century, this is not necessarily the case. As Owen Davies, author of _Grimoires: A History of Magic Books_, relays, the so-called “Modern” era of Western history
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This watercolor by Julian Peters, called “I Have Come to Consume the World,” illustrates beautifully a central moment in the Hindu epic, _The Bhagavad Gita_. The _Gita_ is the most famous sacred scripture in Hinduism, dating to perhaps the second century BCE. This particular point comes in the eleventh chapter, when the hero Arjuna begs
Julian Peters “I Have Come to Consume the World” Read More »
In the early twentieth century near Mount Union, Pennsylvania, a mining company called Harbison-Walker profited from quarrying a type of sandstone known as “ganister” to make bricks. To get to the stone pits, the miners built a long trail into the mountainside in 1936 – here you see the trail today, known as the “Thousand
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The term “swan song” comes from an Ancient notion that swans are mute throughout their lives, but sing a beautiful last melody as they are about to die. As far back as the Roman Pliny the Elder (in 77 CE), people have known this is not the case, but regardless, a swan song refers to
Here is the coat-of-arms designed by Niels Bohr, after he was awarded the Order of the Elephant by the Danish king in 1947: it has a yin-yang symbol and the phrase “contraria sunt complemementa,” which means “opposite things are complementary.” The heraldry speaks well in terms of the discoveries in physics that Bohr undertook in
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Here is a portrait of a young Sophie Germain, the French mathematician whose celebrated work involved the properties of elasticity and number theory (especially prime numbers). When we read about Germain, we quickly encounter a narrative that focuses on the multiple limitations placed on her life: her parents initially discouraged her scholarship, she was banned
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In April of 1943 as Hitler’s forces and the Allied powers struggled for dominance, a Spanish fisherman discovered a corpse with documents labeling the man as a British military official (Major Martin’s ID card is the first photo) who seemed to have drowned off the coast. This set in play the most successful ruse in
Operation Mincemeat from World War II Read More »
This is one of the many stellar views at Hawk Mountain Preserve in eastern Pennsylvania, one of the best places in the northern United States to watch many native hawk species in their migrations and habitats. This beautiful wildlife sanctuary was made possible because of two people in particular. First, the ornithologist Robert Pough —
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Pennhurst asylum and school – formally called the Eastern Pennsylvania Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic — ran for the better part of the 20th century as a home for people with mental and physical disabilities, but it was forcibly shut down after exposures of patient abuse and decades of litigation. Pennhurst’s cases of horrific
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Here is Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, one of the first women (alongside biochemist Marjory Stephenson) to be innagurated as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1945 (as I wrote yesterday, the Society began in 1663, so this achievement was long in the coming). Lonsdale’s work was in material chemistry — proving, for instance,
Dame Kathleen Lonsdale and Crystallography Read More »
“The Kiss of the Enchantress,” painted by English artist Isobel Lilian Gloag (c.a. 1890) depicts a monster from Ancient Greek mythology called a Lamia. Like so many stories about horrifying females, the Lamia’s backstory involves a grizzly subversion of the ideal woman — she destroys children rather than nurtures them, and seduces men in order
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“The Lord and Lady of the Charnel Grounds/Pal Durdak Yab Yum,” 15th-c painting. Tibetian Buddhist traditions took much from Ancient India . . . As with the two Hindu deities featured in yesterday’s post, the juxtaposition of enlightenment with death and male-female pairings stands out. Tibetian art is highly symbolic, and the male-female, or “Yab-Yum,”
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This nineteenth-century Tibetian painting is of a well-known deity in the Tantric Buddhist tradition, named Vajrayogini. Unlike some other Buddhist traditions which have neither Gods nor Goddesses, the Vajrayana Tantric tradition has both, as we can see here. Vajrayana Buddhism differs from many other religious traditions in its elevation of the female. The eleventh-century Tantric
Vajrayogini in Buddhist Tradition Read More »
Kellys Run Nature Preserve near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is today part of a recently made ecological conservancy with beautiful views (see second photo) of the Susquehanna River amidst a great variety of forest life. The tree canopy and rugged terrain predominate the vista so much that you might never know earlier, human-driven economies had once existed
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This is Mary Grace Quackenbos, a.k.a. “Mrs. Sherlock Holmes,” and she was a good apple. Born in 1869, she came into a large estate in her youth and enrolled in law school. She used her fortune to help the poor and powerless, starting up “The People’s Law Firm”in 1905. When a young Italian immigrant headed
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