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The smooth running of Korean royal households depended upon the unseen hands of gungnyeo; the seamstresses, cooks, chambermaids, water- and firewood bearers and other servants. Behind the scenes a...
‘The Company of Avalon’ was a group of monks who allegedly directed excavations at Glastonbury Abbey from behind the scenes, so far behind the scenes in fact from the ‘other side’. In the early 1900’...
The crowd waited expectantly at Malta’s ancient Mnajdra Temple for the spring equinox sun to peek out from behind a nearby hill. Suddenly the sun broke through the low-lying morning mist. Warmed by...
Since its discovery in a shipwreck near Greece in 1900, an ancient metallic astronomical clock, called the ‘Antikythera Mechanism’ still baffles scientists. Research articles on the clock offer loose...
In AD 897 the holy space of the Basilica of St John of Lateran, Rome , was violated by a truly sinister event inside the dark walls of the house of God. In the august presence of the Emperor Lamberto...
The King of the Beasts triumphs in Chinese mythology, albeit in many shapes and forms. Chinese artists combined different creatures’ attributes to create a composite beast, which they called pixiu (...
Why would knights be fighting snails? Medieval art is a complex weave of surreal, bizarre and sometimes disturbing imagery and artists took creative license to a whole new experimental level. With...
Half-human half-beast creatures are found loving and lusting, warring and whoring in myths and legends of nearly every, if not all, cultures in the world. Although many of them made their debut in...
Presumed innocent, yet dirty dark secrets are imbedded in the bedtime stories told to children. Fairy tales are magical narratives that pervade the young minds of children so deeply, leaving imprints...
Why would an ancient, folkloric, but non-Biblical, character such as a mermaid find its way into so many medieval European churches? And can such mermaid imagery and symbology be correlated with the...
First century AD Roman statesman and orator, Cicero’s claim that he had found Archimedes’ tomb may be refuted. In Greek mythology Ciane is a freshwater nymph, who tried to save Persephone from being...
As ancient Egyptian architects gazed up at the night sky and built the three pyramids of Giza based on the celestial plan of the Constellation of Orion , so millennia apart and at the other side of...
Considering that fanciful animals, which the Chinese collectively dub pixiu ( pi hsieh ), typically stem from a real creature, the question must be asked: Were there once horses with horns? Although...
Since its discovery in 1994, 10,000-year old Göbekli Tepe has been an enigma, gradually revealing its ancient secrets to archaeologists and scientists. Meticulously excavating the site from soil that...
Stonehenge is one of the most famous monuments in the world. Although it stands in isolated countryside in south-central England, miles from any major town, it is one of Britain’s most popular...
What is the largest temple ever built on earth and do these man-made structures reveal secrets relating to the cosmos? To begin the quest for the largest religious temple, one needs to establish what...
Hamilcar Barca , the father of the battlefield genius, Hannibal , is considered even today as one of the greatest military commanders of all time, yet so little is known about the man and his battles...
A strange animal that preys upon unsuspecting travelers, who devours them but cannot swallow them, may be representative of the human sin of gluttony, as the taotie, a Chinese mythological fantastic...
During the Early Modern period of European history – from the Renaissance (1500) to the French Revolution (1800), hundreds of thousands of witches suffered the terrible fate of being burned at the...
Legends tell that Alaric, King of the Visigoths, who sacked Rome in the fifth century AD, was buried along with his horse and a vast amount of treasure, in the bed of the Busento River in the Cosenza...
Gazing at model replicas of the HMS Victory and the Bucentaure one conjures up the naval Battle of Trafalgar; breathing the toxic gun smoke, gagging on the smell of gun powder, deafening booms of...
Music has had the magical power to charm wild animals, seduce shrewd sirens and even sway Hades himself. Music provides the notes for mythology, where mortals melt the frozen hearts of ancient gods...
Descendant of Jesse James, author Daniel J Duke , uses a template, encoded with Kabbalah gematria and provided by the American Civil War secret society, Knights of the Golden Circle, to link sites of...
Scottish mythology and folklore make a finely woven tartan (travel) rug threaded with a collection of colorful and sometimes dark tales that have emerged from the long history of Scotland; each one...
