Pirates, maybe even more than mermaids and sea serpents, are the most fascinating and misunderstood entities of maritime history and while it is known today that mermaids were seals and giant...
In many folk tales from around the world there are accounts of a midwife who is taken by fairies to help with a birth. Apart from the overall otherworldly nature of these tales, the mode of transport...
In Rome "I saw written on top of a door." ( Inferno , III, v. 11, Dante) In Rome, hidden a corner of Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II, one will find the last remnant of the Academia dell’ Arcadia , an...
Could the underground cities in Cappadocia, Turkey date back to 12,800 years ago? In 1963, so the story goes, a man living in Cappadocia excavated some large stones from his basement while renovating...
Mythology presented in books, arts, cartoons and movies have subliminally forged impressions of mythical castles, magical mountains and enchanted forests in people’s minds, but many of the places...
In 1857 in a cell of the ruins of Imperial Palace on the Palantine Hill in Rome, a curious graffiti representing a crucified man ( corpus humanum... suffigitur in cruce ) but with the head and ears...
From the moment Christopher Columbus found land previously unknown to Europe in 1492, thousands of men came to the New World seeking their fortunes and for two centuries they explored and conquered...
Of all the ways to murder someone poisoning must be the most underhanded and downright evil way to proceed. The whole art of poisoning, as it is often referred too, was developed as a stealth way to...
Hidden deep within the bowels of the earth and ruled by the god Hades and his wife Persephone, the ancient Greek Underworld was the kingdom of the dead, the sunless, cold and shadowy place where the...
All are familiar with the burning of witches and criminals – who often died by asphyxia or cardiac arrest before their flesh was consumed by the flames - but since antiquity the cruel ingenuity of...
Thunderstorms were one of the most powerful and frightening natural phenomena encountered by the ancients. However, it paradoxically also brought life-giving rain. The universal experience of thunder...
It may not be long before Artificial Intelligence creates access to God via modern technology, however during the 19th century, a spiritualist by the name of John Murray Spear was inspired to build a...
“ Every year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Passover. When he was 12 years old, they went up to the festival, according to the custom. After the festival was over, while his...
The first people to construct widespread burial mounds and earthworks in the Ohio Valley were participants in the Adena Culture, which began around 500 BC and continued until about 300 AD. Sometime...
Legend has it that a metal library, containing valuable plates of inscriptions, recording an ancient history of some 250 000 years ago, written by an advanced previous civilization, is hidden in the...
The Cueva de Los Tayos Expedition 2019 was an adventure no one will forget! Our expedition had two main goals – to find more cave entrances and to solve the mystery of the rock formations we called...
For a moment, if one could conjure up in one’s mind's eye Istanbul, a city of magic, mystery, strategic geographical importance, and historic consequence: Standing on the Galata Bridge, facing north...
One afternoon in the 1960s, the people of Magelang in Java, Indonesia, gathered on the edge of the main road which connects Magelang and Yogyakarta and sounded anything they could find which could...
It would be difficult to find someone who did not know anything about the Nazis, whose reign ended with the outright slaughter of approximately six million Jews, whom they regarded as subhuman, and...
Modern man’s closest human relatives were Neanderthals - that famed ancient species pronounced with a ’t’ rather than a ‘th’, - with their defining large faces, angled cheek bones and broad noses...
The fate of Rome depended upon the chastity of the Vestal virgins and their transgressions could lead to live entombment. In the first century BC, Marcus Licinius Crassus , one of the richest and...
Christmastide traditions are a glorious amalgamation of customs and practices that have been appropriated wholesale from other belief systems, primarily those of Ancient Rome. But Rome is only part...
The ‘repentant prostitute’ or the ‘penitent whore’, this view of Mary Magdalene was cemented in Western ecclesiastical tradition by Gregory the Great in his sermons in the sixth Century, conflating...
That is the gods’ work, spinning threads of death through the lives of mortal men, and all to make a song for those to come. Homer The ancient Greek world was steeped in superstition and...
