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The Quest For The Holy Grail: Celtic Magic Cauldrons

The Quest For The Holy Grail: Celtic Magic Cauldrons

Growing up reading Arthurian legends, one would probably think the Grail is a cup. Not just any cup, of course, but a holy cup associated with Jesus and the Last Supper. One would probably also know...
Reviving The Ancient Intuitive Skill of Dowsing

Reviving The Ancient Intuitive Skill of Dowsing

Mankind’s ancient ancestors faced many challenges, for instance the need to be able to find drinkable water that did not show on the surface of the land. Many of these challenges were solved by way...
Dead Viking Dynasty Invade Scottish Neolithic Tombs

Dead Viking Dynasty Invade Scottish Neolithic Tombs

The Viking Age represents the earliest recorded raids made by Norsemen in 793 AD until the Norman conquest of England in 1066 AD. During this blood-thirsty period Scandinavians mastered shipbuilding...
The Holy Shroud And The Mandylion: One And The Same?

The Holy Shroud And The Mandylion: One And The Same?

The enigma of the Holy Shroud has fascinated and baffled both the faithful and scholars for hundreds of years. To unravel the history and secret journey of how it came to the lands of the French in...
The Legend of Lugalbanda, The First Sumerian Shaman

The Legend of Lugalbanda, The First Sumerian Shaman

According to the Sumerian King List , Lugalbanda was one of the kings who belonged to the First Dynasty of Uruk in Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia. What is particularly striking about Lugalbanda is the...
The Wild Hunt of Odin by Peter Nicolai Arbo (1872)(Public Domain)

The God-Gifted Weapons of Norse Mythology

The Vikings were warriors and therefore weaponry was at the forefront of their culture, and this is why the heroes and gods of Norse religion and folklore were armed with a range of awesome weapons...
The "Mexican Sphinx" near Tlayacapan, surrounded by mountains of the Sacred Valley and the landscape around the town of Tepoztlán. (Image: © Marco Vigato)

Atlantean Temples of Mexico: The Sacred Valley Of Tepoztlàn

Nestled in a sacred valley, at an altitude of about 1,700 meters (5,560 feet) above sea level, to the south of Mexico City, lies the town of Tepoztlán. The surrounding landscape has been shaped by...
The Comet Hunters Of Göbekli Tepe

The Comet Hunters Of Göbekli Tepe

The ancient peoples of Anatolia and the Near East did not go unaffected by the terrible consequences of the Younger Dryas comet impact event, now known to have devastated the North American continent...
Penglai, depiction of one of the mythical islands ( Public Domain ), and Qin Shi Huang in a 19th century portrait ( Public Domain );Deriv.

Management Practices Of The School Of Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu's Art of War was, one is told, written by an ancient Chinese soldier - except there is no evidence that there ever was a General Sun Tzu. In general, the commentary on Art of War just guesses...
Joshua passing the River Jordan with the Ark of the Covenant by Benjamin West (1800) Art Gallery of New South Wales (Public Domain)

The Ark Of The Covenant: A Fearsome Weapon Of Destruction

The Ark of the Covenant must be thought of as two or even three separate things. First of all it is a box with a cavity in the middle of it that can contain a medium-sized object, such as an...
Ariadne in Naxos’ (1877) by Evelyn De Morgan. (Public Domain)

Loves Of The Lady Of The Labyrinth: Ariadne Powerful Minoan Goddess

In the Myth of the Minotaur , if not for the ministrations of the humble Princess Ariadne, Theseus —the Greek hero—would not have had a prayer. Although often portrayed as a mere maiden, truth be...
From The Ashes Of Angels – The Forbidden Legacy of a Fallen Race

From The Ashes Of Angels – The Forbidden Legacy of a Fallen Race

“And after some days my son, Methuselah, took a wife for his son Lamech, and she became pregnant by him and bore him a son. And his body was white as snow and red as a rose; the hair of his head as...
Ice Age Diorama. From left to right: Equus hemionus, Mammuthus primigenius, Coelodonta antiquitatis, Bison exiguous skeletal mounts at the Tianjin Natural History Museum. (Jonathan Chen/ CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Younger Dryas Impact Research Debate – Are We There Yet?

The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis has received considerable attention since its publication in 2007 in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)...
Detail of ‘The Number of the Beast is 666’  by William Blake (1805). Rosenbach Museum & Library ( Public Domain)

666 Sanctified: The Beast Was Fake News

The number 666 has been sanctified and this should bring sighs of relief to all those who were wary at the number of the beast fearing it symbolised satanic forces. It has transpired that the number...
Hermetic Individuation: The Way Of Hermes and The Rite of Rebirth

Hermetic Individuation: The Way Of Hermes and The Rite of Rebirth

There are only a handful of surviving texts that describe what could be termed true “rites of passage” along the Way of Hermes. One such text—which contains what many consider the essential Hermetic...
Plato and Aristotle in The School of Athens by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (Public Domain)

Hermetic Individuation: The Discovery of the Self in the Teachings of Hermes Trismegistus

At the core of the philosophy of Plato, we find one of the oldest written accounts of a type of psychological physics in the history of Western literature. Drawing from Pythagorean and archaic Greek...
Zheng He’s fleet Cheng Ho Cultural Museum – Exhibition (CC0)

Zheng He, The Eunuch Who Became A Ming Dynasty Admiral

In 1127, the Song Dynasty (960 - 1279) lost control of northern China and, with it, access to the Silk Road and Persia's riches. After overthrowing the Song Dynasty and rising himself to the imperial...
The Adoration of the Golden Calf – Picture from the Hortus deliciarum of Herrad of Landsberg (12th century) (Public Domain)

Early Jewish Monotheism and Egyptian Atenism – One And The Same?

The religious influences upon both Akhenaten and his brother Tuthmose from the temples of Heliopolis went a long way in fashioning their comparative belief systems. By encouraging the older solar...
Charon accompanies the Souls across the Styx (CC0)

Psychopomp: Crossing Over Passage in Ancient Ghostlore

Modern science has, for the last two centuries, replaced most of the spirits, entities, demons and ghosts of the ancient world with logical explanations demonstrated through scientific...
Death of Muhammad II of Khwarezm. From Jami' al-tawarikh by Rashid-al-Din Hamadani. (Public Domain)

In Pursuit Of The Shah, The Mongols Discover The West

In 1219, Genghis Khan led his armies into the mighty Khwarazmain Empire (present-day Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran) and smashed it. The provocation of this attack was due to the mistreatment of...
Siege of Tyre by Sébastien Mamerot (1493) (Public Domain)

Ancient Engineering: The Art Of Siege Warfare

The word ‘siege‘ conjures up imagery of high wooden towers attacking thick stone castle walls, but in the ancient world sieges also required extreme engineering prowess. Innovations in attack...
Pura Ulun Danu Bratan at Bali, Indonesia (zephyr_p/ Adobe stock)

King Udayana Religious Financial Reformer of Ancient Bali

In ancient India, legendary King Udayana was a king of the city of Kaushambi in the north-central India as well as a patron of Shakyamuni Buddha. The Buddhist scripture Samyutta Nikaya records...
Puzzle of Ancient Anatolia, Istanbul Archaeological Museum (Image: Courtesy Micki Pistorius)

Ancient Gods In Anatolia: Founders Of The Neolithic Era

Almost 12,000 years ago, in the remote recesses of Anatolia, today's southeast Turkey, something happened that, seemingly overnight, completely changed the course of human evolution. Far flung bands...
Nan Madol ruins on Pohnpei island. ( CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Enigma Of Nan Madol: Home of Pre-Flood Stone Gods

Nan Madol is a mysterious place, there is nothing like it the world over. Its people are vanished and its purpose spectacularly obscure. Was it built by the mythical brothers Olishipa and Olosohpa,...

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