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Everything we’re told about the Magi and the Star of Bethlehem is in Matthew 2: 1-12 :
After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”
Let’s travel back in time. We are in Malta, deep beneath the earth, inside a chamber, where the only light is that of torches. We hear a low hum that reverberates through the stone walls. A priestess enters, chanting a mantra, resonating within the walls, and her voice echoes with unparallel precision, while rhythmic drumbeats pulse like a heartbeat. The participants are entranced, they feel their minds slip from this mundane world into realms of heightened awareness. Suddenly, visions of spirits, out-of-body journeys, and profound insights interfere with the very nature of reality.
In the shadowy halls of Prague's imperial court, where the boundaries between science, magic, and divine revelation blurred, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II gathered the era's most enigmatic minds. Obsessed with unlocking the secrets of nature through experimentation and esoteric wisdom, Rudolf's realm became a crucible for alchemists, astrologers, and visionaries.
"The ice remembers what we've forgotten. Beneath two miles of frozen silence lies an ecosystem older than human memory—and something is waking up."
- Dr. Robin E. Bell, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
After twenty-three years filled with fear, paranoia, and the countless lives lost in its reckless pursuit, the grim and wholly unlikable Emperor Tiberius died at the ripe old age of 78 - a milestone many of his victims would have envied. All of Rome breathed a collective sigh of relief with some debating whether Tiberius should be thrown down the Gemonian steps (a fate reserved for the most heinous of criminals) or cast into the river. In no time "Tiberius in the Tiberim" became a catch-all slogan.
Dr. Kara Cooney is a professor of Egyptian Art and Architecture at UCLA, where she serves as Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. With a Ph.D. in Egyptology from Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Cooney specializes in craft production, coffin studies, and ancient economies - particularly during the Ramesside era (Nineteenth through Twentieth Dynasties).
They called Mohenjo Daro, the Mound of the Dead.
For almost four thousand years the hills near the Indus River in modern-day Sindh, in Pakistan, kept their secrets. The local villagers avoided the place, they said anyone who climbed the highest mound at night would wake up the next morning with blue skin, a mark of the angry spirits that guarded the ruins. Children were warned never to play there. And even British surveyors in the 19th century marked the spot on their maps and moved on.
It is one of the greatest enigmas of the Old Kingdom. Following the stunning engineering and organizational feat of the Great Pyramid of Giza, something unexpected happened. Instead of continuing and perfecting this formula, subsequent pyramids became... smaller and smaller. Why, after reaching the zenith, did Khufu’s successors, his son and grandson, and later the pharaohs of the 5th and 6th Dynasties, begin to drastically and systematically reduce the scale of their monuments?
"...when one side goes against the enemy with the god's gift of a stronger morale, then their adversaries, as a rule, cannot withstand them"
— Xenophon
“I Have Flown Out of My Body and I Know Death Is a Lie”
