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“For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth…
everything that is on the earth shall die…For forty days,
the flood kept coming…The waters flooded the earth
for a hundred and fifty days…the Ark came to
rest on the mountains of Ararat.”
It is one of the most enigmatic and influential documents in the history of human thought. Alchemical in nature, the Emerald Tablet contains thirteen lines of text and is said to contain wisdom and understanding from the time of Hermes Trismegistus, one of the most significant sages of antiquity. For over a thousand years, this document has been influencing the thoughts of many great minds, including Isaac Newton.
In the annals of the ancient Near East, few peoples have left as profound and controversial a mark on religious memory as the Amalekites. Though they appear exclusively in the Hebrew Bible and have left no clear archaeological footprint, they stand out as the archetypal, unforgivable enemy of the Israelites. No other nation in Scripture receives quite the same eternal declaration of divine war:
"God will have war with the Amalekites from generation to generation".
When we think of King Arthur, we picture the quintessential British hero: a noble king pulling a sword from a stone, presiding over the Knights of the Round Table, and defending his homeland against Saxon invaders. He is the ultimate symbol of British mythology. But what if the roots of this legendary figure aren't entirely British? What if the origins of Camelot can be traced back to the ashes of Troy, the epic poetry of Virgil, and the classical heroes of ancient Greece and Rome?
![Bartolomeu Dias planting a cross]](/sites/default/files/diascross.jpg)
Imagine a country the size of modern-day London deciding to rewrite the map of the entire planet and succeeding. In the fifteenth century, while the rest of Europe was squabbling over borders, a handful of visionaries from a windswept Atlantic peninsula launched the most audacious startup in human history. Not only they just discover new lands, but they engineered the first global supply chain, disrupted a monopoly that had stood for centuries, and accidentally stumbled upon continents.
The past nine weeks have seen the exploration of profound insights provided by the great philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, who developed their models of the universe by employing the techniques of logical reasoning and analytical thought. However, what if there is another method of knowing that does not utilize logic, but relies on a direct experience of the universe itself?
"From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor. They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA."
— Professor Hans Eiberg, University of Copenhagen
On a tiny island in the Seine River, Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, was surrounded by flames when he made his last, terrifying curse. Both Pope Clement V and King Philip IV, the man who sentenced him to death, would both face God's judgment with him within a year of his death. Within a month of Jacques' cursing, Pope Clement V died; within a year of Jacques' cursing, King Philip IV died.
In 1872, British Museum curator George Smith made a discovery that would shake Victorian England's understanding of biblical history. Working late into the London evening, surrounded by fragments of cuneiform tablets recovered from the ruins of Nineveh, Smith deciphered an ancient Mesopotamian account of a great flood—complete with an ark, animals saved in pairs, and a righteous man chosen to preserve life. But this wasn't the biblical narrative he'd learned as a child.
Plato's Allegory of the Cave examined the radical possibility that our understanding of reality may be based on only a limited number of shadows. The philosopher Plato, who was an idealist of sorts, asked the question What is real? His student Aristotle was concerned with the practical question of how one should live; his question was more immediate than Plato's. While Plato pointed toward the transcendent world of Forms, Aristotle focused on how we can live "well" or flourish as a human being in the physical world.
