tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38387312703724514312024-02-21T00:10:40.328+00:00Worlds of FascinationDo you find the world a fascinating place? How many worlds are there out there? There are so many amazing things going on in the world, so many facts to learn and so many mysteries to solve. So join my Worlds of Fascination for a articles on everything from the profound to the trivial, the odd to the mysterious.HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.comBlogger77125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-60818999817917575452013-10-16T20:52:00.000+01:002013-10-16T20:52:06.228+01:00Halloween Customs in Great Britain<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Halloween in the 21<sup>st</sup> century is a party night of grinning Jack O'Lanterns and kids in costumes going out ‘Trick or
Treating’. It is now very much a
commercial event, with costumes, make-up, Halloween sweets and pumpkins being
sold. But here in Great Britain the origins of Halloween are much older and go
back to ancient times.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">As the summer fades into a memory, the harvest has been
brought safely in and the nights grow colder our Celtic ancestors celebrated
the great feast of Samhain. For the
Celts, the year was divided into two seasons which were marked by two great
festivals. Beltane, celebrated on 1<sup>st</sup>
May ushered in the light season and Samhain marked the beginning of the dark
season on November 1<sup>st</sup>, the first day of winter. In ancient times, winter was a time of
stillness and waiting, a time where little new work could begin and survival
depended on the success of the summer harvests.
The animals would be brought down from the high pastures either to be
slaughtered and salted for winter use or to be sheltered in stables during the
bad weather, firewood would be chopped and stacked, and crops would be stored
and fruits preserved.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-DfghIcFISMw/Ul7qAMaTvhI/AAAAAAAABGg/5xIb7cyokRA/s1600/Book_of_Hallowe'en.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Old English Halloween Festivities" border="0" height="210" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-DfghIcFISMw/Ul7qAMaTvhI/AAAAAAAABGg/5xIb7cyokRA/s320/Book_of_Hallowe'en.jpg" title="Old English Halloween Festivities" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Old English Halloween Festivities</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Bonfires were traditionally lit on Samhain and sacrifices and
votive objects were thrown into the flames to ask for blessings, seek answers
to problems or plead for the healing of a sickness. These bonfires were lit, especially in
Scotland, as recently as the early part of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. People would dance around them, light torches
from them, and run around the fields so that parish boundaries would be
surrounded with a protective circle of light.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The bonfires are still lit in Britain at this time of year,
but now it is mainly on the 5<sup>th</sup> November to commemorate Guy Fawkes
and his Gunpowder Plot to blow up the English Parliament in 1605. The 5<sup>th</sup> November is known as
‘Bonfire Night’ and effigies of men known as ‘Guys’ are made and dressed in old
clothes, mainly by children, who then sit with their ‘Guy’ and ask passersby
for a ‘penny for the Guy’. The money is
traditionally used to buy fireworks and the Guy is placed on the bonfire as
it’s centrepiece before it is lit. The
fireworks are then set off while the bonfire is burning. There is also an old
rhyme that was chanted ‘Remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder
treason and plot, I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be
forgot...’ Poor Guy Fawkes paid a heavy
price for his crime as he was hung, drawn and quartered, which in those days
was the penalty for treason.</span><br />
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<iframe border="0" frameborder="0" height="150" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?t=cmhypnothypno-21&o=2&p=9&l=st1&mode=books-uk&search=halloween history&fc1=000000&lt1=_blank&lc1=3366FF&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="border: none;" width="180"></iframe>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">In <a href="http://www.otterytarbarrels.co.uk/" target="_blank">Ottery St Mary</a> in the county of Devon, there is a custom which dates back to 1688 where on 5<sup>th</sup>
November men run through the streets of
the town carrying flaming barrels of tar around on their shoulders until they
can no longer bear the heat or the weight.
Another man then takes over, and then another, until the barrel starts
disintegrating and is left to burn itself out.
Earlier in the proceedings there are smaller boy’s and women’s barrels and,
as the evening goes on, the barrels get bigger and heavier. One of the most sought after souvenirs is one
of the metal rings from a burnt out barrel.
The custom started as a pagan cleansing ritual, designed to clear the
town of evil spirits. An alternative theory is that the burning barrels were
used in shops as a form of fumigation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">As Christianity came to Britain, the old customs were not
forgotten or given up. The churches of
this new religion were often built on sites that had been used for many centuries
for pagan ceremonies and worship. The new churches were given new names, new
religious rites were practiced but the old customs were continued. The feast of Samhain was changed to All
Saints Day or Hallowmas and the 2<sup>nd</sup> November was celebrated as All
Souls Day. All Saints Day honoured all of
the saints in heaven and All Souls Day was a day when prayers were said for all
the souls in Purgatory who were waiting to be forgiven. So the 31<sup>st</sup> October became known
as All Hallows, Hollantide in Wales and the Isle of Man or what we in modern
times call Halloween.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-q59lvKU0-z4/Ul7q4O6f7AI/AAAAAAAABGo/qCpHRGwXPts/s1600/503px-Balle-%C3%A0-leunettes_Halloween.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Jack o'Lantern" border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-q59lvKU0-z4/Ul7q4O6f7AI/AAAAAAAABGo/qCpHRGwXPts/s320/503px-Balle-%C3%A0-leunettes_Halloween.jpg" title="Jack o'Lantern" width="268" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jack o'Lantern</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">In Cornwall the 31<sup>st</sup> October was known as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allantide" target="_blank">Allantide</a>
and was connected to a little known Cornish saint called St Allen or
Arlan. One of the customs of Allantide
was the giving of large, highly polished apples. They would be given to family members as
tokens of good luck and teenage girls would put them under their pillow in the
hope that they would dream of the person that they would marry one day. There was also a game played where pieces of
wood were put together to make a cross and then suspended with four candles
attached. The Allan apples would then be
hung under the cross and you would have to try and catch an apple in your
mouth. If you were clumsy or not quick
enough you would be punished by the hot wax from the candles dripping on you.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Indeed apples feature very heavily in Halloween customs and
dunking apples or apple bobbing is a widespread game that is played on this
night. Apples are placed in a large tub
of water and players have to get the apples out using only their teeth and with
their hands behind their backs. A
variation of this is where doughnuts or sticky cakes are suspended from a
string and eaten, again without the use of hands. Another method of divination
to find out who your future spouse was going to be was to peel an apple in one
strip, toss the peel behind your shoulder and see what letter of the alphabet
was formed when it landed. This letter
was believed to be the first letter of their name. It was also believed that if a single girl sat
in front of a mirror in a darkened room on Halloween the face of her future
husband would appear in the mirror; if she were due to die unwed the image of a
skull would appear instead.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">A young girl could also guarantee dreaming of any future
romances by the way she arranged her shoes on this special night. If she put them in a ‘T’ shape and then
chanted ‘Hoping this night my true love to see, I place my shoes in the form of
a ‘T’. Apparently the ‘T’ was such a
powerful symbol because it resembled the shape of the hammer of the mighty
Norse god Thor. Another popular
divination game played at Halloween in order to discover the name of a future
husband was to put a line of hazelnuts across a hot grate. Each hazelnut was given the name of one of these
potential suitors and this rhyme was recited ‘If you love me pop and fly; if
you hate me, burn and die.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The Ancient Celts also believed that on the eve of Samhain
the veil between the world of the living and the dead became thinner and that
the dead could wreak havoc among the living by causing sickness or ruining
crops. Masks and costumes were donned to
mimic the spirits and perhaps to pacify them.
In Scotland young men would blacken their faces and dress in white. The Celts would also put skeletons by their
windows to represent those who had died.
They also believed that the head was the most powerful part of the body
as it contained a person’s wisdom and spirit, so they would carve a lantern
from a swede or a turnip that represented a head and light these on Samhain Eve.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">These came to known as Jack –o’-Lanterns after an Irish
legend where a man called Jack the Smith encountered the Devil when he was
drunk and managed to trap him up a tree.
To gain his release the Devil granted Jack’s request that his soul would
never be taken to Hell. When Jack came
to die a few years later, he was denied entry to Heaven because of his previous
drunken lifestyle and so went to the gates of Hell. Due to the promise that the Devil had made,
however, he was not admitted there either but was given a glowing ember to
carry with him in a turnip to light his way and brand him as a soul who
belonged in hell. It is believed that he
forever roams the night, not welcome in either the world of the living or the
world of the dead.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">So as you see, there is a lot more to Halloween than a
horror film on the television and too much candy. It is a night that is steeped in tradition
and was a significant night in the spiritual beliefs of our ancient
ancestors. A night perhaps where it
would be better for you to curl up cosily under your duvet, for who knows who
or what you might encounter if you go wandering alone the swirling mists and darkness?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13px; text-align: center;"><a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Book_of_Hallowe%27en.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Old English Halloween Festivities</a> Image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13px; text-align: center;"><a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Balle-%C3%A0-leunettes_Halloween.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Jack o' Lantern </a></span><span style="font-size: 13px; text-align: center;"><a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Balle-%C3%A0-leunettes_Halloween.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Image</a> Wikimedia Commons Public Domain</span></div>
HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-78825637460703065712013-06-25T17:40:00.000+01:002013-06-26T16:25:13.495+01:00The Ghosts of Muncaster Castle<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-outline-level: 2;">
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Have you ever visited the ghosts at haunted Muncaster Castle? Britain
has a very long and often bloody history, with a landscape that is scattered
with many historic buildings and monuments. So it is not surprising that many
of these historic stately homes, castles and old churches are reputed to be
haunted; reputedly being regularly visited by phantoms from the ghostly realms.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">The region known as the Lake District, in the North West corner of
England, has had an especially turbulent past. Close to the Scottish border,
armies have marched through this wild, mountainous area scattered with lakes
since Roman times, to try and subdue the warlike and turbulent Scots north of
the border. It is even said that the Ninth Roman Legion that disappeared in the
second century AD, was lost in the Lake District; their remains still lying out
there somewhere waiting to be found.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-p2ZTQAejXn0/UcnAUWQ6R2I/AAAAAAAABCc/zl-EgkH5374/s1600/800px-Muncaster_Castle,_2009_(2).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Muncaster Castle" border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-p2ZTQAejXn0/UcnAUWQ6R2I/AAAAAAAABCc/zl-EgkH5374/s320/800px-Muncaster_Castle,_2009_(2).jpg" title="Muncaster Castle" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Muncaster Castle</td></tr>
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<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Introducing Haunted Muncaster Castle<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Of the old stately homes and castles in the area, Muncaster Castle is
possibly the most haunted old building in the whole of the Lakes. Castra is the
old Roman word for fort or military encampment and current archaeological work
in the area of Muncaster Castle is beginning to suggest that there was indeed
once a very large Roman Fort in the vicinity of where the castle now stands.
There are also the fairly extensive ruins of an old Roman Baths just a few
miles away in nearby Ravenglass, so the Romans were definitely living and
working in the area.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Muncaster Castle has been occupied by the same family, the Penningtons,
since around 1208, a tenancy that has currently lasted for over eight hundred
years. Muncaster is a very beautiful castle, which is still in very good
condition. It is open to the public, offering what is called ‘The Muncaster
Experience’. In the castle itself, you can explore the unique Octagonal
Library, the vast dining room and Great Hall. All of the rooms are full of
antiques, paintings, tapestries and interesting historical objects. Outside
there are seventy acres of glorious gardens to wander through, including the
Muncaster Himalayan Gardens, containing many rare species and a large collection
of rhododendrons. The castle grounds are also home to the World Owl Centre,
which houses one of the largest collections of owls and birds of prey in the
world.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">The Haunted Tapestry Room<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">But however attractive and interesting the interior of the castle and
grounds are, it is Muncaster Castle’s ghostly visitors that fascinate us the
most. Paranormal investigators and scientists have been investigating the
ghostly goings-on in and around the castle since 1992 without being able to
come up with any rational explanation for the hauntings. These include Jason
Braithwaite of Birmingham University who is a neuroscientist and cognitive
psychologist who believes that there are ‘strange and anomalous magnetic
fields’ in the areas of the castle where the hauntings are reputed to take
place. One of his theories is that these strange magnetic fields might affect
the brain functions of certain people, such as those who suffer from epilepsy
and migraines, which causes them to experience these apparently paranormal
phenomena when they are within range of the magnetic field.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Muncaster Castle</td></tr>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">One of the most famous haunted rooms at Muncaster Castle is the infamous
Tapestry room. It was discovered that the Tapestry Room had previously been used
as a children’s nursery and visitors staying overnight report that they have
heard children crying. One theory is that the crying child is the ghost of
Margaret Susan Pennington who died at a young age of screaming fits in the
nineteenth century. The walls of the Tapestry Room are adorned with sombre
paintings and there is an iron fire dog in the shape of the devil in the
fireplace. Moreover, the mattress of the bed in the Tapestry Room lies on a
sheet of chain mail. Guests staying the night in the room have also heard a
woman singing, disembodied ghostly footsteps, doors swinging open of their own
volition and the feeling of hands touching them in the night or even throwing
them from the bed.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Tom Fool<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Probably the most famous ghost of Muncaster Castle is that of Tom Fool,
who was a sixteenth century jester. His real name was Tom Skelton and he was
reputedly the last court jester in Britain and a friend of William Shakespeare.
His ghost has a reputation for playing jokes on people he takes a dislike to or
that he believes are threatening the Pennington family. Tom Fool also had a
very dark side, as it is said that he murdered an apprentice carpenter by
hacking off his head while he was asleep. He had been bribed into committing
this dastardly act by Lord Ferdinand Hoddleston of Millom Castle. Apparently
the hapless apprentice had committed the crime of falling in love with Sir Alan
Pennington's daughter Helwise, who was Sir Ferdinand's promised bride and the
lovers had enjoyed a secret tryst at the May Day Fair. The grief stricken woman
retired to a convent and the ghost of her poor apprentice lover is now said to walk
the halls of the castle at night with his severed head tucked neatly under his
arm. This is not the only murder that Tom Skelton has said to have been
involved in. It is believed that when travellers asked him the best way to get
to London, he would point them in the direction of the treacherous quick sands
of the area where they perished, rather than to the relevant ford over the
river. Tom Skelton died in or around 1600 and Muncaster Castle has a special
day every year called ‘Tom Fool’s Day’ in his memory. You can still see his portrait
hanging on the castle’s walls.</span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">The White Lady<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Another of Muncaster Castle’s famous ghosts is The Muncaster Boggle or
White Lady. This apparition is thought to be the ghost of a young woman called
Mary Bragg who was murdered in 1805. There seem to be several versions of the
story of her murder in existence. One was that she had been a young local girl
who was prone to swearing, who was hanged from the castle’s main gate by a
group of drunken men after they had kidnapped her for a joke. In another version
of the story, she was a housekeeper at the castle and unfortunately fell in
love with a footman who was also greatly fancied by one of the housemaids. It
is claimed that one night two men called at the castle saying that Mary’s lover
was ill and that they would take her to see him. Instead of taking her to her
lover, they took her to a lonely road and killed her. Her body wasn’t found for
some weeks, eventually being found floating in a badly decomposed state in the
Esk River. It is said that her head had been partially eaten by eels. It is
also claimed that a tree near to where Mary met her fate started to bleed when
it was cut down. Her lonely wraith haunts the grounds and roads around
Muncaster, so be careful of who you may meet if you dare to walk those roads
after dark.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><a href="http://www.muncaster.co.uk/" target="_blank">Muncaster Castle</a> also boasts a royal ghost. King Henry VI was said to
have hidden here at the time of the War of the Roses after the Lancastrian
defeat at the battle of Hexham in 1464, and that his ghost still walks through
the shadowy passages and rooms at night. To show his gratitude to Sir John
Pennington for giving him refuge, Henry VI gave him an elaborate enamelled
drinking bowl in white and gold known as the 'Luck of Muncaster'. The defeated
Lancastrian monarch blessed the bowl and promised that the Pennington family
would prosper as long as it remained unbroken. There is also a ghostly lion
that is said to roam the castle and grounds, and is heard growling gently at
dusk. This lion was supposedly shot by the last Lord Muncaster in Kenya and the
lion’s skull is still kept in the castle.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">So if you want to experience the creepy atmosphere and haunting of
<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/northwest/series1/muncaster-castle.shtml" target="_blank">Muncaster Castle</a> for yourself, you can book a ‘ghost sit’ for up to six people
to stay overnight in the truly spooky Tapestry Room. Other events and conferences
are often held so hopefully you will get the chance to investigate and,
experience its paranormal activity for yourself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">2nd <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muncaster_Castle.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Muncaster Castle</a> Image Neil Hanson </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution - </span><a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en" rel="nofollow" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;" target="_blank">Share Alike 2.0 generic</a></div>
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HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-76833055989384033672013-02-14T13:16:00.001+00:002013-02-14T13:16:52.353+00:00Explore Tree Myths and SuperstitionsAre you a tree lover? Before there were so many people,
before there was an industrial revolution and mass farming, the British Isles
and most of Europe was covered with trees. Vast, dense forests covered hundreds
of square miles and our ancient ancestors venerated some of these trees as
gods, believed some of them could be used to heal their bodies and even that
some of them were unlucky or evil and had to be appeased. Even in our modern world, many of us find the
idea of venturing alone into a deep, dark wood daunting and many horror films
and books, such as ‘The Blair Witch Project’, centre around something dark and
terrifying lurking in the shadows deep in the heart of the forest. And who didn't listen to the fairy tale of
‘Hansel and Gretel’ when they were young, where the two little children laid a
trail of breadcrumbs through the woods to find their way home again? So it is
not perhaps surprising that there are many myths and superstitions about trees
that have been passed down from our distant pagan past. And when Christianity arrived and started
spreading across Europe, the ancient beliefs about trees were not forgotten,
but were incorporated into the new religion’s beliefs, and many trees came to
be regarded as Christian symbols and had new myths attached to them.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Party Tree at Hobbiton, New Zealand</td></tr>
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In Britain before the coming of Christ, the gods, spirits
and elements were worshipped in groves of sacred trees by the Druids. The three most sacred trees were thought to
be the oak, the ash and thorn, and this triad was attributed with great powers
and magical properties. It was thought that guardian spirits inhabited the
trees, and our saying ‘touch wood’ comes from the old custom of gently touching
a tree to show your respect for the spirit that dwelt within in it and to ask
for healing, blessings and favours. In
ancient Greece, there was thought to be a type of nymph called a Hamadryad that
was eternally bonded to their own tree.
If that tree was felled or destroyed, the tree’s resident Hamadryad was
also thought to die, so the Greek gods severely punished any mere mortal who
damaged a sacred tree.</div>
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Because they are very long-lived, trees were also regarded
as a symbol of immortality, fertility and the never ending cycle of the
seasons. Their longevity was a promise to our ancestors that life always
renewed itself, and they would have known that many generations of their people
would have met and worshipped under the shady branches of the same tree. This
gave these leafy, shaded spaces a numinous quality, which allowed the echoes of
the past to ripple into the present, providing continuity; a thread that bound
them both to their ancestors and to the generations to come, so that wisdom and
knowledge would never be lost. Trees were also an important source of fuel for
their fires, building materials for their homes and provided fruit and berries
for both food and medicine. When Christianity arrived in Europe, it seamlessly
absorbed much of the mythology and the beliefs that surrounded pagan tree worship
and turned it into Christian stories and legends. Indeed, the very first story of this new
religion involves the first man and woman, Adam and Eve plucking a forbidden apple
from the Tree of Knowledge and the redeemer Jesus Christ being sacrificially
slain on a cross made of wood.</div>
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So what are some of the myths and superstitions associated
with certain trees?</div>
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<b>Oak Trees</b></div>
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Oak trees were probably the most important, magical tree in
European pagan mythology. They were worshipped
in sacred groves by the Druids and individual oaks were venerated. As they can make
wailing, moaning noises when they are cut into or felled, they were thought to
have human traits. Oaks possessed powerful magic that could cure you of your
toothache if you drove a nail into the trunk, could stop you from ageing if you
carried an acorn in your pocket and offered you protection from lightning
strikes. Oak was associated with Zeus
and Thor, the powerful pagan male gods of storms and lightning, and, because of
their shape, were regarded as symbols of male virility and power. It is a good thing that oak trees offered
protection from lightning, as they are more liable than other trees to be
struck, partly because they are often the tallest object in the immediate
landscape, but also because oak wood has low resistance to electricity. But being
struck by lightning was also important to the oak tree, as sacred mistletoe was
thought to have been left in the branches during lightning strikes. Oak leaves
were used as symbols of power, conquest and military expertise, and Roman
military leaders used to wear crowns woven from oak leaves during their victory
parades.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lone Tree in British Park</td></tr>
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There are many famous, historic oaks in Britain that have
had their own stories and legends woven around them. Perhaps the most famous of them is the oak
tree that stands in the grounds of <a href="http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/boscobel-house-and-the-royal-oak/" target="_blank">Boscobel House</a> in Staffordshire, where in
1651 the future King Charles II hid after the Battle of Worcester to escape
from Oliver Cromwell’s men. The day of
his restoration to the throne, 29<sup>th</sup> May, has ever since been
celebrated with feasting, singing and dancing as ‘Royal Oak Day’ or ‘Oak Apple
Day’. It was traditional on this day to
pin oak leaves or oak apples to your clothes and if you saw someone who was not
wearing any then you were allowed to physically punish them with a sly pinch,
slap or kick. There is also a legend that Elizabeth I first heard about the
death of her sister Queen Mary and her accession to the throne while she was standing under the
oak that stands in the grounds of Hatfield House, which has ever since been
called The Queen Elizabeth Oak. </div>
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Another famous oak stands in Windsor Great Park, where legend
has it that one of the keepers, known as Herne the Hunter, hung himself from
one of the branches. Herne had rescued
Richard II from being gored by a white hart, but sustained mortal wounds while
he was doing it. He was healed by having
the white hart’s antlers attached to his head by a mysterious stranger called
Philip Urswick. Unbeknownst to him Urswick had struck a deal with the other
keepers in Windsor Great Park, and after he healed Herne lost his
position. In desperation he hung himself
from a large branch of the oak, where his swinging, antlered corpse was spotted
by a pedlar. By the time the pedlar had
returned with the other keepers, Herne’s body had disappeared and that night
the great oak tree was struck by lightning.
When the keepers returned to the oak at midnight they were confronted by
Herne’s ghost who compelled them to ride with him forever in his Wild Hunt.<br />
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<b>Ash</b></div>
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Ash is another tree that was once thought to possess magical
powers. If a child was suffering from a hernia or rickets, it would be taken
before the sun rose to be passed naked through a split in the trunk of an ash
tree. The split would then be bound back together, sealed with clay and left to
heal. As the trunk healed, the child
would miraculously recover from its ailment.
Ash was also used to heal lame animals by carving a hole into the trunk
and placing a live shrew inside it. The
hole would be sealed over and when the shrew died and the ash healed, the lame
animal would come sound again. Ash
faggots were traditionally burned in hearths at Christmas. They would be bound together with green
twigs, and as the ash burned you could make a wish every time one of the twig
bindings snapped open. The single girls
of the household would each choose one of the twig bindings, and if you had
chosen the first one that burst open in the flames then you would be the first
of the girls to get married. </div>
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Ash trees were an important part of Norse myths, because
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil" target="_blank">Yggdrasil</a> the World Tree was a mighty ash that grew in the centre of everything
and spread out into everything, as its roots grew down into the dark mysteries
of the underworld, its branches shaded every part of the world, and its trunk
grew so tall that it penetrated heaven itself. Yggdrasil was the sacred place
where the Norse gods would come to sit in council and where Odin hung himself
in sacrifice, losing an eye when the ravens pecked it out. Hanging from a sacred tree is a continuing
theme in tree mythology and one that carries on into Christian belief, as Jesus
was nailed and hung from a tree to make his ultimate sacrifice for the sake of
humanity, enabling their redemption.
This symbolism is carried on into the modern tarot where the Hanged Man
card drawn in a reading suggests sacrifice, limitations and a time of waiting.</div>
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Yggdrasil was also associated with nurturing and abundance,
as a miraculous goat that grazed at the foot of the trunk produced mead from
its udder rather than milk, and this potent alcoholic beverage was served at
the great feasts held by the gods in their Great Hall. Mead is made from honey and water, and this
association with the ash tree may have come from the fact that some species of
ash found in the mountains of Greece and in Northern Europe ooze a sticky,
sweet substance that is a bit like honey.
Yggdrasil was also said to rain honey down from the skies for the
sustenance of mankind below, so this miraculous ash could truly claim to be the
tree of life.</div>
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Mountain ash is also known by the name rowan and is commonly
found growing in Northern England, Scotland and Wales. It is another tree that
offers you great protection for your household and can protect you and your family
from witchcraft and evil spirits. It was used to protect and help farm
livestock, as milkmaids used to tie rowan twigs to their buckets so that the
milk would not sour and wreaths woven from rowan twigs were put around pig’s
necks to fatten them up faster. Mares and cows would be fed rowan berries while
they were giving birth, so that their labour would progress smoothly and the
baby animal be born alive and healthy.</div>
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<b>Hawthorn</b></div>
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Hawthorn with its glorious white blossom is the tree that is
associated with the return of the sun after the winter and the month of May, so
much so that it is also known as the May tree.
The traditional maypoles that were set up on village greens to help
celebrate the first day of May were often made from hawthorn wood and it was
also used to make the garland that was used to crown the chosen ‘Green Man’ of
that summer. In pagan times hawthorn was
very much associated with fertility, passionate love and marriage. But the rise of Christianity saw the
symbolism change as the white colour of the flowers were linked to purity and
the Virgin Mary, to whom the month of May was dedicated. Probably the most famous thorn tree in Britain
is the ancient one that grows in the Somerset town of Glastonbury. The Glastonbury Thorn was said to have sprung
from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea after he stuck it in the ground and it only
flowers once in May and once during the Christmas season. Joseph of Arimathea
was said to have carried the Holy Grail with him as he travelled, and hid it
away somewhere in the British Isles where it still lays waiting to be
discovered. Tradition also has it that the crown of thorns that was placed on
Jesus’ head was made from hawthorn wood.<br />
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Hawthorn could also be used to protect your home from
ghosts, witches and storms, by having the branches placed across the rafters by
a person who was not a member of your immediate family. Bundles of hawthorn twigs were also hung
outside cowsheds to ensure that the cows carried on giving an abundant supply
of milk. However, it was thought to be very unlucky to bring hawthorn into the
house, and if you decorated the interior of your house with it you could expect
illness and death to swiftly follow. This could be because during medieval
times people thought that hawthorn blossom smelled like London during the time
of the Black Death. In fact, May flowers
do contain a compound called trimethylamine, which is one of the chemicals that
is formed in decomposing animal flesh, so would have given off a whiff of
rotting bodies which would not been appreciated in someone’s parlour.</div>
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<b>Yew Trees</b></div>
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Ancient <a href="http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/forest/mythfolk/yew.html" target="_blank">yew trees</a> can be found growing in many of the
churchyards of rural Britain. They are a very long living species and can live
for up to 1,000 years. In fact, the Fortingall Yew that grows in the churchyard
at Fortingall in Scotland is thought to be between 2,000 and 5,000 years old.
The trunk of the tree has split off into different offshoots over the years, so
the true age cannot be determined by examining the rings within the trunk. Local legend has it that Pontius Pilate, the
Roman Governor that handed Jesus over to be crucified, once played under the
Fortingall Yew as a child and archaeologists think that it used to be the focal
point of a local Iron Age cult.<br />
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Because of their extreme longevity, it is therefore perhaps not
surprising that yew trees symbolized immortality for our pagan forebears and
that many Christian churches came to be built where sacred groves of yew used
to stand. The yew also has what would
have been viewed as miraculous powers of regeneration, as when one of the
branches droops so low that it hits the earth, that branch can grow roots and
start forming new trunks. Because of this link to a promised eternal life, in
medieval times they used to line newly dug graves with yew branches to help
guarantee the resurrection of the recently deceased soul. Yew is also one of the woods that
traditionally have been thought to have been used to make the cross that Jesus
was crucified on. This link with death may have come about as yew is also
poisonous, and can easily kill a man if ingested in sufficient quantity. The
yew was also believed to be able to protect churchyards from storms that had
been conjured up by angry, vengeful witches.
In the middle ages, yew was a favoured wood for making long bows; that
ultimate weapon of the fighting man that was so vital to the English for
gaining victory in battles such as Agincourt in October 1415. At that time archery practice with the
longbow was enforced by law, and each man in England who was of an age to fight
was compelled to spend time practising his technique and skills until they were
deadly accurate.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aXNCL14oQdA/URziiXATGRI/AAAAAAAAA3A/vYj6idhNeYs/s1600/Weir+in+the+woods.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="British Woodland - own image" border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aXNCL14oQdA/URziiXATGRI/AAAAAAAAA3A/vYj6idhNeYs/s320/Weir+in+the+woods.jpg" title="British Woodland - own image" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">British Woodland</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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There were myths and superstitions surrounding practically
every species of tree and they varied from culture to culture, even from
village to village. It used to be thought
that sawing up willow was very unlucky, so even very poor folk would not cut
down the branches to use as firewood. But willow could also be very lucky if
someone gave you a gift of willow branches on a morning in May. The poplar,
also called the aspen, sometimes looks like it is shivering in the breeze. This was thought to be because its wood had
been used to make the cross for the crucifixion and that the poplar was so
traumatised by this that it still shakes in horror. People used to believe that
if they suffered from tremors or shivering while they were ill, that attaching
a lock of their hair to a poplar and chanting an incantation could cure them. </div>
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The causes of disease were very poorly understood in years
gone by, so folk thought that if they burned a fire of juniper wood during a
plague epidemic that the resulting smoke would drive away the demons that were
causing the terrible disease. If you dreamed of juniper berries you could
expect the birth of a first male child, but dreaming of the juniper tree was a
harbinger of bad luck. The elder was another tree that was a candidate for
providing the wood that the cross of Jesus had been made from, so it also
brought bad luck if it was brought into the house. Its unfortunate reputation was further
bolstered by another tradition that Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus at the
Last Supper leading him to be universally reviled, had hung himself from an
elder tree branch. Elder trees were also dangerous to approach during the hours
of darkness, as witches gathered under them and if they caught you, then you
could expect no mercy. <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9zZfm-C6izs/URzjW72BoAI/AAAAAAAAA3I/N-2_gStJ_P0/s1600/Oxford+(3).JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Winter Trees in Oxford - own image" border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9zZfm-C6izs/URzjW72BoAI/AAAAAAAAA3I/N-2_gStJ_P0/s320/Oxford+(3).JPG" title="Winter Trees in Oxford - own image" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Winter Trees in Oxford</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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So these are just a few of the myths and superstitions that
are associated with trees. Across all cultures and in many different regions
there are common themes of fertility, virility, the cycle of the seasons,
protection, and great leaders sacrificing themselves by hanging themselves from
their boughs to bring healing and renewal to their people. Trees are companionable, shady places to sit
and dream under on a hot, sunny day, so the next time that you are sitting
propped up against the trunk of your favourite tree, why not say hello to the
spirit that lives there and give thanks to the tree for the healing and
protection it gives you.</div>
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HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-29379173071348109782013-02-03T21:38:00.000+00:002013-02-03T21:38:33.265+00:00What is Salt and Why Do We Sprinkle It on Our Food?<br />
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<b>What is Salt and Why Do We Need It in Our Diet?</b></div>
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Luckily for us salt is one of the most common minerals on
Earth and is formed mainly from sodium chloride. It is a crystalline solid and
is white, light grey or pale pink in colour. It is an essential part of the
diet for all humans and animals, as the sodium and chloride ions are necessary
for our survival.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ynFCpNX7s9M/UQ7TufQVmVI/AAAAAAAAA1U/qi1dpJCKtec/s1600/800px-France-Noirmoutier-Sel_brut.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Sea Salt" border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ynFCpNX7s9M/UQ7TufQVmVI/AAAAAAAAA1U/qi1dpJCKtec/s320/800px-France-Noirmoutier-Sel_brut.jpg" title="Sea Salt" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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It plays an important part in the regulation of the fluid
balance of the body. Salt cravings can
be caused by a deficiency of sodium chloride or by a lack of other trace
minerals. What we use on our tables
today is produced in several different forms, in unrefined forms like sea salt
or refined like table and iodized salt.
It is also an important preservative and is used extensively to preserve
food. The flavour is one of the basic
tastes, making it one of the oldest and most commonly used seasoning. In the Western world traditionally there are
four taste sensations: sweet, salty, sour and bitter. We lose salt from our bodies through sweating
and excretion, so we constantly need to replace what we lose, especially in
very hot weather.</div>
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<b>Health Problems Associated with Salt</b></div>
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However vital <a href="http://www.actiononsalt.org.uk/" target="_blank">salt</a> is to us, having too much in your diet
can cause you to experience health problems, such as high blood pressure, heart
disease and an increased risk of stroke.
Having too much in your diet can also cause water retention. Fully grown
adults should eat no more than 6g a day, which is approximately a teaspoonful.
And in the UK alone, reducing the average daily intake by adults could prevent
around 17500 premature deaths a year. Children
and babies need a lot less than this. A
baby only needs less than 1g a day up until it is around a year old. Breast milk and infant formula contain the
right levels, but it is important not to add it to baby’s food when they start
eating solids and to not give them processed foods that are not specifically
made for infants. Another benefit of reducing your salt intake is that you
might begin to notice a broader range of flavours in your food. </div>
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Much of what we consume is hidden in the food that we eat,
so it is not just the salt that we add to our food that is the problem. Foods that have a high salt content are
processed foods, bread, cereals, salty snacks and foods that have been canned
in brine or preserved in salt. They
should be avoided or cut down on where possible and replaced with fresh,
home-cooked meals.</div>
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Iodine is also commonly added to salt, especially in inland
areas where there is little iodine in the soil for the crops to absorb. A lack of iodine in the diet can lead to
problems with the thyroid gland in the neck known as goitre. In the United Kingdom this was commonly known
as ‘Derbyshire Neck’ as it was a condition particularly prevalent among the
poorer sections of society in Derbyshire, particularly young women of child bearing
age, a century or so ago.</div>
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<b>History of Salt</b></div>
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It is believed that we first started adding it to our food
when our early ancestors started cultivating crops in about 10,000 BC and
started to eat less meat. Earlier,
prehistoric hunter gatherers had derived all the sodium that they needed from
the large amounts of meat and fish that they ate. They also discovered that you could use it to
preserve food, so that they could store it at times when food was plentiful to
be used when the food supplies were running low.</div>
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Early civilisations learned that they could obtain it from
dried out lakes, by boiling or evaporating sea water or mining in areas where
solid salt forms in the ground. However,
supplies remained scarce until modern times and for most of recorded history it
was regarded as a rare and valuable commodity, due to the expense of extracting
it and then conveying it overland or by sea.
In Iran in 2005 a group of <a href="http://www.mummytombs.com/mummylocator/featured/saltmummies.htm" target="_blank">salt mummies</a> were discovered in ancient salt
mines. These were bodies of workers who
had perished in the mines around 1700 years ago and whose bodies had been
naturally preserved by the salt.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<iframe border="0" frameborder="0" height="250" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=cmhypnotherap-20&o=1&p=12&l=st1&mode=grocery&search=table salt&fc1=000000&lt1=_blank&lc1=3366FF&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="border: none;" width="300"></iframe>
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Taxes on salt were introduced by the ancient Chinese and
there were times when the revenues raised made up half of the Chinese Empire’s
tax revenues. The Great Wall of China
would probably never have been built without this tax! The Romans also taxed it and one of the
famous Roman roads the ‘Via Salaria’ or salt road was built to transport it. The infamous French salt tax known as the
‘Gabelle’ was hugely unpopular with the French people. It was first imposed in 1286 by King Philip
IV and was not repealed until 1790.
There was also a long history of taxing it in India and the huge
increase of this tax by the British which led to it becoming unaffordable for a
lot of Indians was one of the issues that flared up and helped pave the way to
Indian Independence.</div>
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It is said that in ancient times, when an enemy was
conquered, the victorious army would sow it into their fields so that they
would not be able to grow their crops.
The most well known example is the Romans ploughing it into the soil
after they conquered Carthage in 146 BC, although this is disputed as it is not
mentioned in ancient texts but is mentioned by the 19<sup>th</sup> century
German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius.</div>
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We still commonly use the term ‘above the salt’, which originated
in the Middle Ages when a salt cellar was placed on the dining table and the
important people of the household were seated above it and the lesser folk and
servants were seated on the other side.
The fact that it was expensive was shown by the fact that these salt
cellars in prosperous households were often quite large, very ornate and made
of precious metals. Other phrases that
we still use are ‘salt of the earth’ denoting a person who is very worthy which
reflects how precious it used to be. “Taken with a pinch of salt’ means that
what has been said should not be taken too seriously and ‘worth one’s salt’ harks
back to the custom of Roman Legionnaires receiving some of their wages in the
form of salt.</div>
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Spilling salt is still thought to signify bad luck and that
it can only be countered by tossing some of what you have spilled over your
left shoulder. It has to be the left
shoulder, because that is where the devil sits. Toss it over your right
shoulder and you will be throwing it into the eyes of your guardian angel. This belief may have come from the story that
Judas overturned a salt cellar at the Last Supper and spilling some of the
precious condiment over the table. It also used to be believed that salt, along
with earth and fire could protect you from demons. It used to be placed in baby’s cots to keep
them safe and a plate of salt would be placed on the breast of someone who had
just died to prevent the devil from taking their soul.</div>
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<b>Dangers of Salt to the Environment</b></div>
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Too much is toxic to many plants and soil that contains too
much salt is not suitable for agriculture and tends to be very
unproductive. Natural salt lakes tend to
be very dry and arid areas. Worryingly,
salt sterilizing the soil in regions that are normally fertile is beginning to
be a major environmental and economic issue in parts of the world. In some parts of Australia, soil salinization
is occurring in some regions partly due to sea salt being brought inland by
wind and flooding and then being brought to the surface by modern farming
practices such as irrigation and clearing the land. The thin top-soil layers have become far too
salty for successful agriculture and it is estimated that more than 2.5 million
hectares of land has become unusable because of these modern farming practices</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9QrsCnEHWDU/UQ7V0cHEXMI/AAAAAAAAA1c/YWJBUqF1bSU/s1600/On+the+road+to+Uluru.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Salt Lake, Northern Territory Australia - own image" border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9QrsCnEHWDU/UQ7V0cHEXMI/AAAAAAAAA1c/YWJBUqF1bSU/s320/On+the+road+to+Uluru.JPG" title="Salt Lake, Northern Territory Australia - own image" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Salt Lake, Northern Territory Australia</td></tr>
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<b>Off The Beaten Salt Track</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Finally,
you would normally feel safe from a shark attack swimming in the fresh water of
a river, right? Sharks live in the salty
waters of the oceans, don’t they? Wrong! <a href="http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/fish/bull-shark.html" target="_blank">Bull sharks</a> are considered by experts
to be one of the three species of shark most likely to be aggressive to humans,
along with great whites and tiger sharks.
They generally live in shallow waters near the coast in tropical
regions, but they are among the only sharks that can survive in brackish and
fresh water. They have been spotted
thousands of miles up the Amazon River, been caught 900 miles up the
Mississippi River and leap the river rapids in Nicaragua to reach Lake
Nicaragua which is inland. So that river
you like to have a swim in might not be so safe at all!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Sea Salt Image <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pinpin" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">PinPin</a> Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/deed.en" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Share Alike 2.5 Generic</a></span><br />
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HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-71430743329465145562013-01-19T13:07:00.000+00:002013-01-19T18:25:19.182+00:00Join the Guided Tour of Greek Mythology!<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All aboard, all aboard!
Please take your seats and make yourselves comfortable as we take an
incredible journey around some of he key sites and locations that feature in
the Greek myths. On this very special
tour, not only will you get to relax and enjoy some amazing scenery as we
travel through the Greek countryside, but you will also have some exclusive
introductions to the gods, goddesses and heroes who played the crucial parts in
these ancient legends. So please make
sure that you have your seat belts buckled and your tables in the upright
position and we will travel back over two thousand years to our first
destination.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Sparta</span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And see how fast we have arrived out our very first
destination, Ancient Sparta. During the
classical period Greece was mainly comprised of independent city states, but
what made Sparta stand out from the rest is that it was the only one that had a
full time standing army and the Spartans gloried in war and physical
fitness. Young boys were sent off to the
army barracks for training at the age of seven and even the little girls were
made to participate in sport and feats of physical endurance so that they could
go on to have many healthy Spartan children when they grew up. In fact, in our day and age the term ‘spartan’ has come
to mean harsh, austere conditions and
living a life with few luxuries or comforts.
The Spartan army was a disciplined, awesome fighting machine and was
regarded with respect and fear throughout the classical world. Their most famous military engagement was the
stand they took at Thermopylae in 480 BC.
Along with a small force of Thebans and Thespians, they stood their
ground against a much larger army of invading Persians, inflicting a huge
amount of casualties before they were finally overcome.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Z5js47bcfk8/UPqRZnffAbI/AAAAAAAAAxM/xfiGrz7IZMM/s1600/Ancient_sparta_theater.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Ancient Theatre, Sparta" border="0" height="211" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Z5js47bcfk8/UPqRZnffAbI/AAAAAAAAAxM/xfiGrz7IZMM/s320/Ancient_sparta_theater.jpg" title="Ancient Theatre, Sparta" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The founding of Sparta came about after the great god Zeus,
King of Olympus indulged in one of his favourite pastimes and pursued a local
nymph called Taygete, the result of which was a son called Lacedaemon. When he grew to manhood he founded the city
of Sparta and named it after his wife.
Probably the most famous citizen to have ever been born in Sparta was
the legendary beauty Helen of Troy. The
girl that was destined to grow into ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’
was another of the prolific progeny of the god Zeus, this time pursing the wife
of the Spartan King Tyndareus, who was called Leda. Now Greek myths tend to have several
versions, but it was said that as Zeus pursued Leda she turned into a
swan. After he had made her succumb to
him, she laid an egg out of which emerged the beautiful Helen. In some versions of this myth there were two
eggs laid, one of which produced Helen and Clytemnestra and the other the
heavenly twins Castor and Pollux. One dark twin and one light twin emerging
from each egg.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Garden of the
Hesperides</span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now we have to wave goodbye to the beautiful Helen of Troy
and the mountains of Sparta, although we will meet her again later on in our
journey. It is time to take some
refreshment and relax in the beautiful Garden of the Hesperides. Now you might be tempted to pluck one of the
exquisite golden apples growing on the many apple trees in the grove, but we
would advise you against this and would encourage you to stick with the packed lunch
that we have provided for your delectation.
Although the garden is tended by the beautiful nymphs, the Hesperides,
the golden apples which confer immortality on those that eat from them, are
guarded jealously by a fearsome dragon with a hundred heads called Ladon.
Please note that your travel insurance does not cover any injuries
sustained while trying to pat the dragon.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-geEHEcQD7_Y/UPqStgHceqI/AAAAAAAAAxc/ae04J7TmgHQ/s1600/478px-The_Garden_of_the_Hesperides.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Garden of the Hesperides - Wikimedia Commons Public Domain" border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-geEHEcQD7_Y/UPqStgHceqI/AAAAAAAAAxc/ae04J7TmgHQ/s320/478px-The_Garden_of_the_Hesperides.jpg" title="Garden of the Hesperides - Wikimedia Commons Public Domain" width="255" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Garden of the Hesperides</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The garden is owned by Zeus’s long suffering wife Hera, and
we are hoping that she will pop in while we are there to have a cup of teas
with us and tell us some more about this fantastic garden and the problems that
she is always having with her husband.
One of the most famous stories is of the time when one of the golden
apples was stolen and secreted out of the sacred grove. It was taken by the goddess of discord, Eris,
who then had engraved on it ‘for the fairest’.
Now the unpleasant events that were to follow the stealing of the golden
apple, including the Trojan Wars, were all down to Eris’s nose being put out of
joint because she had not been invited to the wedding of Peleus and
Thetis. She secretly snuck into the
wedding reception and rolled the engraved golden apple in amongst the
revellers. On reading the inscription,
three of the most powerful goddesses instantly claimed it as theirs. A un-deity like fracas broke out which had to
be mediated by the all powerful Zeus, who decided that a handsome youth called
Paris, who was a prince of Troy, would
get to choose who was the most beautiful goddess. The three contenders immediately got their
kit off, had a quick bathe in the Spring of Ida and proceeded to bribe the
judge just in case he was not impressed enough by their naked beauty. Athena offered to teach him military skills
and guarantee him prowess in war, Hera offered the young prince the chance to
rule all of Europe and Asia, and the goddess of love Aphrodite tempted him with
the possession of the most beautiful woman in the world. Being a typical man, Paris rejected the more practical
offers of Athena and Hera, and tossed the golden apple to Aphrodite, bagging
for himself the pulchritudinous Helen of Troy (told you we would meet her
again!) in the process. Now there were a
few little snags that he hadn’t taken into consideration when he made his
choice, such as the fact that the gorgeous Helen was already married to King
Menelaus and that it is never a good idea to get on the wrong side of two
important goddesses. The Judgement of Paris was to prove another of the steps
on the way to the Trojan War.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Labyrinth of
Crete</span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now I am very aware that the tour so far has been a bit
short on visitor attractions, so we are going to get some sea air and explore
the <a href="http://worldsoffascination.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/labyrinths-walking-meditation.html" target="_blank">legendary Labyrinth</a> on the island of Crete.
The price of admission was included in the tour price and we will give
you several hours to see if you can find your way into the centre and then get
out again. We have only lost seven
tourists in the last three seasons, so we are very proud of our record. The mythical Labyrinth was constructed for
King Minos by Daedalus to house the half-bull and half-human monster that was
the Minotaur. Legend has it that the
god of the seas, Poseidon, gave Minos a white bull to sacrifice. But Minos
decided in his infinite wisdom to keep the white bull for himself, so to teach
him a lesson Poseidon, with a little help from Aphrodite, fixed it so that
Minos’s wife fell into lust with the white bull and several months later gave birth to the Minotaur. Now please note that the Labyrinth was built
to a very complicated design and apparently even Daedalus had trouble finding
his way out. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WvqmhzFc6B4/UPqUQaYZlvI/AAAAAAAAAxs/NUCvO24QRWY/s1600/Knossos_silver_coin_400bc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Silver Coin from Knossos showing the Labyrinth" border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WvqmhzFc6B4/UPqUQaYZlvI/AAAAAAAAAxs/NUCvO24QRWY/s320/Knossos_silver_coin_400bc.jpg" title="Silver Coin from Knossos showing the Labyrinth" width="290" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Silver Coin from Knossos showing the Labyrinth</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now to keep the Minotaur fed and watered, Minos demanded a
tribute of seven brave young men and seven beauteous young girls every seven years
from the city state of Athens. This was
so that Athens could pay a suitably high price for assassinating King Minos’s
eldest son Androgeus some years previously.
The Greek hero Theseus decided that enough was enough and took over from
one of the doomed youths so that he could go and slay the monster. Although he had been divested of all his
weapons when he sailed for Crete he had managed to secrete his sword under his
tunic, and fortunately for the dashing hero Minos’s daughter Ariadne slipped
him a ball of twine before he was shoved into the Labyrinth. He tied the end of the twine to the door post and
managed to find his way through the dark to its very centre, where the Minotaur
lay sleeping. A tremendous fight ensued
and Theseus eventually cut off the monster’s head. He followed the twine back out into the
Cretan sunshine and took off with the Athenian youngsters that he had saved and
Ariadne and her sister Phaedra. However,
to show his gratitude to the Cretan princess he left Ariadne asleep on the
beach on the island of Naxos one morning and then he forgot to change the sails
of the ship to the white ones from the black ones as they approached Athens to
signal that the youths were safe, so the poor old king committed suicide out of
grief.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Cruise on the Argo</span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now we have to leave the beautiful island of Crete behind us
as we embark on the Argo for a cruise through the Mediterranean to the Black
Sea with Jason and the Argonauts. We are
glad that in Crete you have had the chance to swim in Homer’s ‘wine dark sea’,
but there will be many further opportunities for sea bathing as our cruise
stops at the island of Lemnos, then
Samothrace, and then through the Bosphorous into the Black Sea. On this cruise
you can join Jason and his Argonauts in their quest for the fabled Golden
Fleece that Jason needs to find in order to claim his kingdom. Now the
Argonauts are a pretty VIP bunch, so you will be priviledged to rub shoulders
with the likes of the son of Zeus, Pollux, the Greek hero Perseus who rescued the
fair Andromeda from the sea serpent, and chat with the legendary Hercules,
another son of Zeus, about his twelve labours.
When the tour reaches the city of Aria in Colchis you will be given the
chance to pan for gold using a sheep’s fleece, and will be given a souvenir
grain of gold set in a tasteful plastic frame to take home with you as a
treasured memory of your trip.</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Troy</span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The next stop is one of the highlights of the tour as we
travel overland by luxury coach to the fabulous city of Troy on the coast of
Turkey. Here you can choose which side
you would rather be on, and join the siege of the city either on the side of
the Greeks or the Trojans. The fair
Helen enters our story once more, as to gain possession of the most beautiful
woman in the world, our hero Prince Paris had to steal her away from her
husband King Menelaus’s palace at Mycenae.
With his pride and his honour severely dented, King Menelaus raised an
army stuffed full of Greek heroes to go and reclaim his wife. As it was a long and tiring siege that lasted
ten years, there will be optional tours of Achilles’ tent, lessons in how to
deliver prophecies that won’t be believed with Cassandra, and workshops on how
to build a Trojan horse. After a decade,
you will be really looking forward to the grand finale when the great wooden
horse is rolled through the gates of Troy and the Greek warriors leap out and
fall upon the unsuspecting Trojans. We
have to tell you, however, that at this stage of the tour your travel insurance
will not cover you if you accidentally get run through with a sword or are hit
by an arrow through the heart. And to
show that all men are fools for love, when Menelaus reclaimed his wife after
the death of Paris he fully intended to have her killed for her betrayal, but
she somehow she managed to charm him all over again and he put off killing her
until an unspecified later date.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> <b><span style="font-size: large;">Hades</span> <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now we had hoped to round off this tour with a very special,
VIP trip to visit the gods on Mount Olympus. We even had Ares, Apollo, Hermes
and Artemis lined up to give you exclusive audiences and photo opportunities
with the deities. However, all is not lost
as the god of the underworld Pluto and his gorgeous young wife Persephone have
invited us to visit with them in Hades.
You will get to enter Hades through the cavern at Avernus, and you will
then be given a souvenir coin to put under your tongue to pay the ferryman
Charon for the crossing of the river Acheron.
On the far side of the river you will be given a few minutes for a photo
opportunity with the three headed guard dog Cerberus and then you will be given
plenty of free time to chat with the shades of the dead and find out what the
underworld is really like. For a small
extra fee, you can enjoy the whole abduction by Pluto experience, where we will
leave you in a grassy meadow plucking flowers, and the dark lord of the
underworld will spring out of the earth in his chariot and drag you down into
Hades and feed you pomegranates. Now
unless your name is Orpheus, Theseus or Hercules, we have some unfortunate news
for you. Hades, like the Hotel
California in the song by the Eagles, is somewhere you can check in but you can
never leave, so make sure that you have packed enough for an extended stay.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We would like to thank you for joining us on our
exciting trip around Greek mythology and we would be very grateful if you could
fill in our feedback forms and hand them in to your representative. As you are now a permanent resident of Hades,
we have taken all the necessary steps to inform your relatives and wind up your
earthly affairs. If you ever manage to
find a Greek hero who is willing to bust you out from the underworld, we would
be very happy if you choose to travel with us again. Have a nice day and mind
how you go<span style="font-size: 11pt;">.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ancient Sparta Theatre image <a href="http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A7%CF%81%CE%AE%CF%83%CF%84%CE%B7%CF%82:Nickthegreek82" target="_blank">NicktheGreek82</a> Wikimedia Commons</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Garden of the Hesperides Image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Knossos Silver Coin image <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:AlMare" target="_blank">Almare</a> Wikimedia Creative Commons <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported</a></span></span>HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-76106738289356249982012-11-05T18:15:00.000+00:002012-11-05T18:15:50.328+00:00The Ghosts of Haunted Rye<br />
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Have you heard of the ghosts of haunted Rye? The history of
Britain is long and has frequently been bloody, so it has perhaps not
surprising that there are so many stories of hauntings and the paranormal. And Rye is one of the towns that is most famed
for its ghosts and hauntings. Rye was
once one of England’s ancient Cinque Ports and is perhaps the quaintest and
most picturesque old town in the whole of the United Kingdom. The position of Rye, high on the hill, commands
beautiful views across Romney Marshes and to the sea. Rye was heavily fortified in medieval times
although only the Landgate, Ypres Tower and a small part of the town wall still
survive. The centre of Rye is filled
with sloping cobbled streets, 16<sup>th</sup> century half-timbered houses, old
inns and little shops. The town used to
be a thriving port before the harbour silted up and its colourful history contains
many tales of smugglers, pirates and the revenue men who tried to catch them
and stop their illicit trade. Indeed
during the 18<sup>th</sup> century Rye’s prosperity was very heavily dependent
on the smuggling trade, much to the dismay of the evangelical preacher John
Wesley who visited the town in 1773. It
has also been home to many writers in its time, including Henry James, E F
Benson, Joseph Conrad, G K Chesterton and H G Wells. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eNaksSfNyTI/UJf-Q951-jI/AAAAAAAAAoU/U-UmMsSyMC0/s1600/Mermaid_Street,_Rye,_East_Sussex_-_geograph.org.uk_-_652684.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Mermaid Street, Rye - Wikimedia Commons" border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eNaksSfNyTI/UJf-Q951-jI/AAAAAAAAAoU/U-UmMsSyMC0/s320/Mermaid_Street,_Rye,_East_Sussex_-_geograph.org.uk_-_652684.jpg" title="Mermaid Street, Rye - Wikimedia Commons" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mermaid Street, Rye</td></tr>
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So where in this old town do you go to possibly see one of
its famous ghosts?</div>
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<b>Lamb House</b> </div>
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This old house was built in the 1723 and is now owned by the
National Trust. Henry James moved into
Lamb House in 1898 and his later novels were written there. Henry James claimed
that a ghost of an old lady used to visit him and help him with his
writing. Poltergeist activity has also
been recorded in Lamb and the house is also said to be haunted by a man called
Allen Grebell who was murdered by a butcher. </div>
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<b>Mermaid Inn</b></div>
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Reputed to be one of the most haunted pubs in the United
Kingdom, the Mermaid Inn dates to the early 15<sup>th</sup> century, though it
is thought that parts of the cellars and the foundations may date as far back
as 1150. During the 18<sup>th</sup>
century the Mermaid Inn notorious for being a smuggler’s haunt, and the inn has
concealed staircases, rooms with moving wall panels, an a concealed entrance to
a ‘Priest’s Hole’. Room 16 of the
Mermaid Inn is known as the Elizabethan Chamber and during the 1930’s a guest
sleeping in the room witness a pair of phantom duellers fighting with
rapiers. The ghost who won the duel is
then said to have dragged the loser’s dead body through the Inn and dropped it
through a trapdoor. A grey lady is also
said to haunt the upper floors of the building, with Room 5, which is known as
the Nutcracker suite, being one of her regular locations to materialise. She is seen drifting through the closed door
and halts once at the foot of the bed before disappearing. It is thought that she is the ghost of a girl
who was murdered for being too indiscreet about her smuggler lover’s illicit
activities and that she is now endlessly searching through Mermaid Inn to find
her murderous beau.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--tflyIdKes4/UJf_eModI8I/AAAAAAAAAoc/2mQgz7h919Y/s1600/The_Mermaid_Inn,_Rye_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1423171.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="The Mermaid Inn, Rye - Wikimedia Commons" border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--tflyIdKes4/UJf_eModI8I/AAAAAAAAAoc/2mQgz7h919Y/s320/The_Mermaid_Inn,_Rye_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1423171.jpg" title="The Mermaid Inn, Rye - Wikimedia Commons" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Mermaid Inn, Rye</td></tr>
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In rooms 10 and 18 a man who fades away has been seen
entering and leaving, and he is often seen disappearing through the wall. In
room 1 a lady wearing pale garments has been seen sitting in a chair by the
fireplace, and even guests who have not seen the apparition have complained
that they have hung their clothes over the chair at night only to find them
soaked with water the next morning. One
of the rocking chairs at the Mermaid Inn is has also been seen rocking of its
own accord and the chair cushion was seen to squeeze down as though an
invisible someone had sat down on it.</div>
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<b>Monastery Hall</b> </div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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In Rye’s Monastery Hall during the 1940’s a line of monks
was seen in the hall and gardens. This
may have been related to the digging up of several skeletons in the garden at
that time and there was some evidence that they had been buried alive.</div>
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<b>Needles Passage</b> </div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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In Needles Passage echoing footsteps can be heard by people
walking through the passage although there nobody can be seen when they pass
by.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>Reysons Farm</b> </div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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In the 1930s loud footsteps were heard going up and down the
stairs and the ghost of a man was also seen at night.</div>
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<b>The Union Inn</b> </div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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The Union Inn is an old, medieval building and has been a
pub since 1420. The name of the Inn
probably derives from the union of England and Scotland at the accession to the
throne of King James I, who had previously been James VI of Scotland. The inn boasts the ghost of a little girl who
was often seen wandering through the kitchen and restaurant of this old inn in the
mid 1990’s, many of the people spotting her believing her to be real. It is also thought that the inn is haunted by
the ghost of an unmarried mother who died when she fell down the cellar
steps.</div>
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</div>
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<b>Rye Town Centre</b> </div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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In the town centre of Rye, two female ghosts have been
observed walking down Mermaid Street wearing long dresses and a little girl
dressed in blue has been seen crossing the street. In Watchbell Street the ghost of a little boy
wrapped in a white sheet has been seen and disembodied footsteps have also been
heard. In the Old Tuck Shoppe in Market
Street there is said to be the ghost of a grey lady.</div>
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<b>Turkey Cock Lane</b> </div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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Ghostly sounds like those of a turkey gobbling used to be
heard in Turkey Cock Lane. They
apparently emanated from the ghost of a monk who broke his vows of chastity and
went mad after he was bricked up alive after being caught trying to elope with
a local girl that he had fallen in love with.
The shade of the monk is apparently still sometimes seen, but the spectral
sounds are no longer heard</div>
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.</div>
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<b>White Vine Hotel</b> </div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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From November 1995 the White Vine Hotel in Rye has been a
focus of poltergeist activity. The
kitchen gets rearranged by unseen hands and food gets moved around and
hidden. Sometimes the poltergeist
activity moves to the bedrooms, but always eventually comes back to the
kitchen.</div>
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So could <a href="http://www.visitrye.co.uk/" target="_blank">Rye</a> be the most haunted town in Britain? If you wanted to visit haunted Rye for
yourself, there is a good range of accommodation available from self-catering
through to hotels and old inns. For a
taste of the paranormal, try staying among the ghosts at the Mermaid Inn itself
or Rye Heritage Centre runs a Ghost Tour Experience which you can book onto. There is plenty to see in the old town, such
as Rye Castle Museum, and some glorious walks in the surrounding
countryside. So have a happy ghost
hunting break in ancient Rye!</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Mermaid Street Image <a href="http://www.geograph.org.uk/profile/8428" target="_blank">Ian Macnab</a> Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 </div>
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Mermaid Inn Image <a href="http://www.geograph.org.uk/profile/27922" target="_blank">Chris Whippet</a> Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0</div>
HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-49971206438373270902012-11-01T21:04:00.000+00:002012-11-01T21:04:11.134+00:00The Story of St Nicholas, Father Christmas and Santa Claus<br />
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Did you know that the origins of Father Christmas and Santa
Claus lie with an early Christian Saint called Nicholas of Myra? He came from the Lycian port of Myra in south
west Turkey and lived in the fourth century AD.
He was an early Christian bishop and he probably died on 6<sup>th</sup>
December as this was celebrated as his feast day in the medieval calendar. He was regarded as a patron of sailors and
navigation. It is thought that he was a survivor of the persecutions of Diocletian,
and that he had been exiled and imprisoned.
Later accounts state that he attended the Council of Nicaea and argued
against the Arian heresy.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oWiV_d1ZAcw/UJLfX6Ezc_I/AAAAAAAAAnQ/FJFm8vPVNr0/s1600/404px-Old_Father_Christmas_Image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Old Father Christmas - Wikimedia Commons Public Domain" border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oWiV_d1ZAcw/UJLfX6Ezc_I/AAAAAAAAAnQ/FJFm8vPVNr0/s320/404px-Old_Father_Christmas_Image.jpg" title="Old Father Christmas" width="215" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Old Father Christmas</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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There are several legends that surround St Nicholas. One that is credited with being the legend
that linked St Nicholas to gift giving is that he was told of a man who could
not get the money together to provide dowries for his three daughters. Because of this man’s pecuniary difficulties,
he was planning to send them to work in a brothel. St Nicholas reputedly saved them from this
fate by throwing three bags of gold through their window one night. This legend led to St Nicholas being regarded
as a protector of marriage.</div>
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Another legend of St Nicholas is that he found out that the
cook of an inn offered the meat of children that he killed to his patrons. When he investigated, he found the bodies of
three small boys pickled in a tub. He
blessed the bodies of the dead children, which instantly restored them to life.
Because of this legend, St Nicholas became
a patron of children and it became a custom in some countries, such as the
Netherlands and Belgium, to give children presents on his feast day of 6<sup>th</sup>
December. </div>
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He was buried in the cathedral church in Myra and a unique
relic called manna was said to form in his grave. This manna was a miraculous liquid that was
purported to heal people. The bones of St Nicholas were brought to Bari in
Italy in 1087 by a group of Greek merchants, after the Turks captured Myra, and
buried under the altar of a new church, the Basilica San Nicola, inaugurated by
Pope Urban II. Some of the bones were
taken to Port in France and others were taken to Worms in Germany. Many churches in Europe were dedicated to St
Nicholas, especially in the ports of the Hanseatic League. The reformation in many parts of Europe,
brought to an end the veneration of Catholic saints, but the old customs and
legends of St Nicholas persisted and developed into modern times.</div>
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It came to be believed that St Nicholas judged whether or
not children had been good or bad and in the Netherlands he was supposed to
ride his white horse across the sky, dropping presents down the chimneys of the
good children on the evening of 5<sup>th</sup>/6<sup>th</sup> December. They would find these gifts the next
morning, and they would often be hidden in shoes. If the child had been bad during the year, it
was believed that a small bag of salt would be left in place of the presents. Hiding
the gifts in the shoes was a reflection of the older custom of putting money
into poor people’s shoes on the feast of St Nicholas. He became known as
Sinterklaas, and actors would dress up in bishop’s robes and visit children and
tell them how to behave. In Germany they
developed the custom of electing a boy bishop on December 6<sup>th</sup>.<br />
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Sinterklaas is said to have had a helper or helpers, known
as ‘Black Pete’, and they carry a bag containing sweets for good children and a
swatch of willow branches with which to spank naughty children. This is linked to the legend of St Nicholas
saving the lives of three small Moorish boys who had been condemned to death
for a crime that they had not committed.
In gratitude they stayed with the Saint and helped him to deliver the
gifts from the rooftops. The dark colour
of their skin is said to be linked to the Moorish origins of the three boys
rescued by or because they are associated with chimney sweeps. Traditionally
Sinterklaas and Black Pete arrive in the Netherlands and Belgium on a steamboat
from Spain, and nowadays they are then paraded through the towns, cheered on by
crowds and even broadcast on television.
Sweets and ginger biscuits are tossed to the children in the crowds and traditional
Sinterklaas songs are sung.</div>
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Sinterklaas is the basis for the American figure of Santa
Claus. New York started life as an old
Dutch colonial town called New Amsterdam which had been traded by the Dutch for
other territories. It is believed that
during the American War of Independence, because the customs surrounding
Sinterklaas were not of English origin, they were changed and incorporated into
a figure called Santa Claus. In 1835 the
Saint Nicholas Society was formed by a group of New Yorkers, including
Washington Irving, to celebrate the heritage of New York City, and in 1850 a
teacher called Jan Schenkman published an illustrated children’s book called
‘St Nicholas and His Helper’ which introduced the concept of Christmas presents
being delivered down the chimney.</div>
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The modern American Santa Claus is depicted as a rotund
figure that is dressed in a red suit with white fur rather than a bishop’s
robes and has a sleigh with flying reindeer rather than a flying horse. Drawings by Thomas Nast in Harper’s
Illustrated Weekly in 1863-66 encapsulated this modern vision of Santa, and
this figure was used by several large advertisers such as Coca-Cola. Santa Claus is believed to live for most of
the year at the North Pole with his wife Mrs Claus, his myriad helper elves and
the magical flying reindeer, where they make all the toys that they will need
for the coming Christmas. Children now write
a letter to Santa just before Christmas that lists all the toys that they would
like Santa to bring them and outlining how good they have been throughout the
year. In turn, Santa Claus is said to
make a list of all the children who were ‘naughty or nice’ that he uses to
calculate how many Christmas presents each child is to receive. Especially naughty children are believed to
be left a lump of coal on Christmas Eve by Santa rather than presents. It has also become a tradition to leave out a
glass of milk and a plate of cookies for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve and some
carrots for the reindeer.</div>
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The English Father Christmas was initially represented as a
Christmas visitor and the personification of the spirit of Christmas, rather
than an entity that delivered presents at Christmastime. In
Saxon times, they had a ‘King Frost’ or ‘King Winter’, who was someone who was
chosen, dressed in green and given a big hat or crown to wear. ‘King Winter’
was believed to be able to make the winter weather less harsh and help them get
through to the spring. In the Middle
Ages in England the local parish would hire an actor or borrow a religious
person from another parish to disguise themselves and go around the homes in
the area to see which families had any problems. They would then go back and report to the
Parish Priest, who would then try to make sure that those families received
help.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-H_LRqfGvRig/UJLf9-VH5GI/AAAAAAAAAnY/w0vc1uE-1tk/s1600/413px-Father_Christmas_at_T._Armstrong_&_Co._premises.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Father Christmas - Wikimedia Commons Public Domain" border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-H_LRqfGvRig/UJLf9-VH5GI/AAAAAAAAAnY/w0vc1uE-1tk/s320/413px-Father_Christmas_at_T._Armstrong_&_Co._premises.jpg" title="Father Christmas" width="220" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Father Christmas</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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An archaic version of
Father Christmas was mentioned in an old carol in the fifteenth century, and he
became more popular with the publication of Ben Johnson’s ‘Captaine Christmas’
in the seventeenth century. The Puritans
tried to do away with all English Christmas traditions, including that of
Father Christmas, but they were not successful and Father Christmas continued
to make his Yuletide visits. He was
often depicted as a pagan figure with either ivy or icicles around his head. The
whole concept of Christmas went through a great revival during the Victorian
era in England, and by the 1870’s Father Christmas was delivering Christmas
presents and hanging Christmas Stockings from the end of beds just like the
American Santa Claus.</div>
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These days the English Father Christmas and the American
Santa Claus are almost indistinguishable and a fat jolly old gentleman in a red
suit with a white beard can be found in Santa’s Grotto in most major department
stores in the towns of America and the United Kingdom. He is surrounded by elves giving out candy
canes, no longer admonishes naughty children and hands out presents. He is now a totally benign figure that adorns
our Christmas cards and decorations, and slides down our chimneys on Christmas
Eve to stuff our stockings with gifts!</div>
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HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-29529286176341237422012-02-18T13:25:00.000+00:002012-02-18T13:25:46.615+00:00Who Was Mother Shipton?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zjV9o67V1qc/Tz-i3YYt7fI/AAAAAAAAAh4/e-W13qfcBcE/s1600/Mother_Shipton_and_Cardinal_Wolsey.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="242" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zjV9o67V1qc/Tz-i3YYt7fI/AAAAAAAAAh4/e-W13qfcBcE/s320/Mother_Shipton_and_Cardinal_Wolsey.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mother Shipton and Cardinal Wolsey<br />
<br />
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On a dark and stormy night in 1488 a young woman lay in a
dark cave on the banks of the River Nidd in Knaresborough in North Yorkshire struggling
to give birth to her illegitimate daughter.
As the rain lashed down and the lightning crackled across the sky, Agnes
Sontheil laboured through the night until her baby was born. The young mother called her infant daughter
Ursula and the cave was to be their home for the next two years. Eventually, after the Abbott of Beverley
brought pressure to bear, the small child was removed from her mother and the
cave, and placed in the care of a respectable local family. When Ursula
Sontheil grew up she married a carpenter from the city of York called Tom
Shipton in 1512. </div>
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Ursula Shipton, or Mother Shipton as she became known as,
started a career of telling fortunes and creating prophetic poems. The local people, who were very wary and
superstitious, believed that she was a witch.
This belief was reinforced by her appearances, because by many accounts <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Shipton" target="_blank">MotherShipton</a> was disfigured and deformed, unable to walk without the aid of a stick
and with a large hooked nose on her terrifyingly ugly face. She was so taunted and bullied by her
neighbours that she began spending most of her time back in the cave where she
had been born, wandering in the local woods looking for the herbs and healing
plants that she used in her remedies and potions.</div>
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Mother Shipton lived during the reign of the Tudor King
Henry VIII, and she confirmed her reputation as an incredibly accurate
soothsayer when she made a prediction concerning Cardinal Wolsey, Henry’s
powerful Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of York. Cardinal Wolsey’s influence over Henry VIII
was on the wane when she made a prophecy that he would never get to see York in
his lifetime, even though he was the appointed Archbishop of that city. The mighty statesman was, not surprisingly,
unimpressed with this prediction, and moved swiftly to prove Mother Shipton
wrong. He sent three Lords from his
retinue to remonstrate with her and to get her to withdraw what she had said,
but she merely laughed in their faces.
Even when they threatened to have her burned at the stake as a witch
unless she kept her mouth shut, she did not back down and just repeated her
prediction that the great Cardinal would never set his eyes on the city of
York.</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZnC8aFbYgtY/Tz-kX0nVLHI/AAAAAAAAAiY/VJrbepHcv4U/s1600/800px-MotherShipton'sCave.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZnC8aFbYgtY/Tz-kX0nVLHI/AAAAAAAAAiY/VJrbepHcv4U/s320/800px-MotherShipton'sCave.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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This intransigence so incensed Cardinal Wolsey that he
immediately set out to travel to York. He
reached a place called <a href="http://www.cawoodpark.com/holiday-park-yorkshire/local-information.php" target="_blank">Cawood Tower</a>, some ten miles south of the city, when his
travelling party was forced to stop for the night. Determined to get his first sight of the
city, the Cardinal made to climb the tower, but before he could do it he was
arrested by the King’s men on a charge of high treason. The accuracy of this prophecy struck fear
into the hearts of many, and she was now feared as well as reviled.</div>
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Mother Shipton reputedly lived until 1561, which would have
made her an elderly lady of 73 when she died. During her life she had spoken
her predictions, not written them, and it wasn’t until around 1641 that the
first book recording her prophecies was produced. This book was put together by a lady called
Joanne Waller who compiled it just before she died at the age of 94. She claimed that she had heard the
predictions directly from Mother Shipton herself, so she must have been talking
to the famous soothsayer in the last few years of her life.</div>
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Since this first publication of Mother Shipton’s prophecies,
there have been over fifty other editions of her sayings. With many of these predictions, it is very
questionable as to how many of them were ever uttered by Mother Shipton, or
were made up in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the most famous was her supposed
prediction about the end of the world coming in 1881, but as we are still here
over a hundred years later this one, thankfully, did not come true. Various other dates were quoted in different
publications and in different countries, but probably none of them came from
the lips of Mother Shipton. Other famous
predictions were the Civil War in England, the coming of iron ships and Samuel
Pepys wrote in his famous diary that while they were surveying the damage
wrought by the Great Fire of London that he had overheard people talking about Mother
Shipton prophesying the fiery conflagration.</div>
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Of course the reality is that we do not even really know if
Mother Shipton was an historical figure or just a local legend. The cave where
she was born, and brewed her healing potions is now a major tourist attraction
in Knaresborough called Mother Shipton’s Caves.
The caves also feature a local curiosity called the Petrifying
Well. Since the Middle Ages people have
hung objects in the waters of the Petrifying Well and returned a couple of
months later to find that they have been turned to stone. In earlier times it would be dead animals and
birds and things like wigs that would be left in the well, but these days teddy
bears are hung in the water, and once they have petrified they are sold in the
Gift Shop. The Petrifying Well is fed
from the waters of the Petrifying Well Spring, which in turn is fed through an
aquifer from a natural underground lake.
As the water travels through the aquifer it dissolves a very high
concentration of minerals from the surrounding rocks, and it is this high mineral
concentration in the spring water that turns things into stone if they are left
immersed long enough. In past centuries
people would bring the sick and infirm to the Petrifying Well to drink the
waters and bathe so that they would be healed, but these days you cannot drink
the water as the high mineral content renders it not suitable. Another feature
of Mother Shipton’s Caves is the Wishing Well, where apparently many of the
wishes made have really come true.</div>
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So do you believe that some people can see into the future
and that the prophecies of Mother Shipton were true? If so, maybe you should
visit <a href="http://mothershipton.co.uk/" target="_blank">Mother Shipton’s Cave</a>, make a wish at the Wishing Well and buy a teddy
that was turned to stone in the Petrifying Well.</div>
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Mother Shipton image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain</div>
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Mother Shipton's Cave <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Chrkl" target="_blank">Chris</a> Wikimedia Creative Commons <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en" target="_blank">Attribution 3.0 Unported</a></div>
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</div>HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-84767431059785144872012-02-07T18:12:00.000+00:002012-02-23T11:15:50.610+00:00UK Invasive Species – War of the Grey and Black Squirrels<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In the UK there are several very common and familiar animal,
insect and plant species that are not actually native to our country. They are species that have been introduced into
our countryside in one way or another, and have often driven our native species
from their habitats by out-competing them for food, passing on disease and
taking over territory. Invasive species
can be very destructive to often fragile habitats, and can cost the economy
millions of pounds a year. In fact, you may well have one of these alien
animals in your garden right now, and you may have spent many happy hours
watching their antics and admiring their aerial acrobatics in the trees. This cute little invader is the grey
squirrel, and although they seem so ubiquitous they have only been scampering
around our gardens and woodlands for the last hundred years or so.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Our native squirrel species is the smaller <a href="http://www.forestry.gov.uk/forestry/Redsquirrel">red squirrel</a>, and
before the last quarter of the 19<sup>th</sup> century they numbered in the
millions and ranged across the whole country. Red squirrels are easily
recognisable by their striking red coats, bushy tails and tufts of red fur on
their ears. Their preferred habitat is conifer forest, where they live off pine
cones, seeds, shoots and fruit. The red
squirrel tends to be a solitary animal except during the mating season, when they
build large nests called dreys in the forks of trees producing a litter of between
2-3 kittens in the spring. However, it
is now estimated that there are as few as 120,000 red squirrels left in the
wild, and the major cause of their decline was the introduction of grey
squirrels into the UK.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The grey squirrel is a North American species, which arrived
in the UK between 1876 and 1929 when they were introduced into many parks and
private animal collections. Inevitably
some of the animals escaped or were released into the wild, where they thrived
and bred successfully. Because they were
so much bigger, stronger and ate a wider variety of food than the native reds,
they started to drive them out of their territory, so that now the red squirrel
is confined to parts of Scotland, northern England, Wales and the Isle of
Wight. The grey squirrels also passed on
disease to the reds, which they had no natural immunity to.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But although the grey squirrels have been the victorious conquerors
of our gardens and parks for decades now, they do have a new challenger that is
beginning to drive them out of their territory and ironically this new invasive
species is a member of their own family.
So don’t go and get your eyes tested if the squirrel running down your
fence looks black and not grey, as the black squirrel is slowly but surely
increasing its numbers in some parts of Britain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Like its grey cousin, the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093826/Nationwide-hunt-Britains-rare-black-squirrel-100-years-introduced.html">black
squirrel</a> also arrived from the US in the late 19<sup>th</sup> century,
where they were kept as exotic pets in a private zoo in Bedfordshire. Some of these animals escaped from captivity,
and in 1912 the first wild black squirrel was spotted in the environs of Letchworth,
Hertfordshire. It is now estimated that
there are more than 25,000 of them living in the UK, most of which are in the
East Anglia region, and some scientists think that they could eventually become
the dominant squirrel species in this country as there are more sightings of
black squirrels being reported from other parts of the UK.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Grey and black squirrels
are actually the same species, but a genetic mutation caused an excess of
melanin to be produced in some squirrels that caused the black pigmentation of
the fur. It is thought that having black
fur could help the squirrels to survive in colder climates, as it absorbs heat
more readily. Being so closely related,
the grey and black squirrels can breed with each other, but when they do the
black gene is dominant, which is another reason why they may eventually
overtake the grey squirrels in numbers.
There has been a major research project undertaken on the spread of
black squirrels by Anglia Ruskin University since 2004, where they have set up
a website asking the public to report any <a href="http://blacksquirrelproject.org/">black squirrel sightings</a> they have
made. So a seemingly successful invasive
species, can in its turn be overtaken by a more recently introduced species, so
that in a few years time we could all be watching black squirrels in our parks,
and the grey squirrels, just like the reds, might well have been pushed out and
be only surviving in small colonies in the remoter, more inhospitable parts of
the UK.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Black squirrel image <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sujit_kumar" target="_blank">Sujit kumar</a> Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en" target="_blank">Share Alike 2.0 Generic</a></span></span><br />
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<br /></div>HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-61535695573912595202012-01-28T14:22:00.000+00:002012-02-23T11:17:34.981+00:00The Enigma of the Indonesian Hobbits<span style="text-align: left;">Every so often a discovery is made that rocks the
archaeological world to its core. One of these amazing discoveries was the uncovering
of a strange, diminutive hominid skeleton on the island of Flores in Indonesia.
Nicknamed the ‘Hobbit’, the remains of the this new dwarf species of human was
discovered in 2003 in the vast limestone caves at Liang Bua Cave by a joint
Australian-Indonesian team led by </span><a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/alien-earth-ask-expert.html" style="text-align: left;" target="_blank">Mike Morwood</a><span style="text-align: left;"> from Australia’s Wollongong
University. At the time, Morwood’s team were investigating whether there was
any evidence for the migration of H. erectus, an early human species, from Asia
to Australia and were very surprised to come across a brand new species of
early human. This new species was named H. Floresiensis, and from the start
these ancient human remains have been the cause of much speculations,
disagreement and debate among the scientific community.</span>
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To date, partial skeletons of nine individuals have been
unearthed including one complete skull.
The most complete skeleton is known as LB1, and by the pelvis is judged
to be a female who was around the age of thirty when she died. Because of the very damp conditions in the
Liang Bua caves and the relatively recent age of the remains, the skeleton had
not been fossilised and the bones were in a very fragile condition when they
were found. The ‘hobbit’ remains are remarkable for several reasons. The single
most surprising thing is their small stature; they stood only about 1 metre
tall and were fully bipedal. They also had a very small brain size, around
417cc. This brain size is smaller than
the brain size range of chimpanzees, which is between 300 to 500cc, and also
those of the Australopithecines, who were a species of very early human. These ‘<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/feb/21/hobbit-rewriting-history-human-race" target="_blank">hobbits</a>’
had human like teeth, but had a receding forehead and no chin. The bone
structure of the wrists, shoulders and arms are also proved to be more similar
to those of chimpanzees and Australopithecines than modern humans or H. erectus
in a 2007 study. </div>
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So how old were these remarkable skeletal remains of a new
species of dwarf human? The fossil skeletons range from being between 38,000
and 18,000 years old, but other archaeological evidence such as stone tools
suggests that <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/flores.html" target="_blank">H. floresiensis</a> inhabited the island of Flores from as long ago
as 95,000 years ago and up to as recently as 13,000 years ago. This makes the
‘Hobbits’ the last-known surviving non-modern humans in the world, as the
Neanderthals had last walked the earth about 35,000 years ago. As modern humans
arrived on Flores between 55,000 and 35,000 years ago, these two very different
species of human would have presumably shared territory and interacted with
each other for thousands of years, although there is no archaeological proof of
this.<br />
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There are theories that the ‘hobbits’ survived until much
more recently and could even still be alive today, deep in the unexplored
tropical rainforests of Indonesia.
Folklore on Flores speaks of a strange creature called Ebu Gogo who were
small, human-like cave-dwellers who did not communicate and walked with a
strange gait. Reputedly they were covered in hair and had broad faces and large
mouths. The Ebu Gogo were known for stealing human crops and kidnapping
children, so the legend goes that sometime in the 18<sup>th</sup> century the
Flores Islanders tricked the Ebu Gogo into accepting gifts of rattan mats. As they returned to their caves with these
mats, the Flores Islanders followed them and set fire to the mats killing
nearly all of the Ebu Gogo, except perhaps for one couple who escaped to
continue on the Ebu Gogo line. Also, on
the Indonesian island of Sumatra, deep in the jungle, sightings are still
reported of a 1.5 metre high hominid the locals call Orang Pendek, which is
Indonesian for short person. But why
would H. floresiensis suddenly die out 12,000 years ago after surviving
successfully for so many thousands of years?
It is thought that a volcanic eruption in the region 12,000 years ago
could have been responsible for the demise of the ‘Hobbits’, the same eruption
that led to the extinction of the pygmy elephant Stegodon on Flores.</div>
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H. floresiensis was an unexpected discovery and it was a big
surprise that a non-modern human species existed on the earth until so recently
and was so small in stature, but what other controversy did the discovery of
the ‘Hobbits’ cause. Well, the big
debate is where they came from and how they evolved. Some experts believe that they
were a direct descendant of H. erectus, and that for some reason there had been
active selection for smaller brain size and stature. So did the ‘Hobbits’
shrink over thousands of years because of the evolutionary pressures caused by being
on an island with limited resources? Don’t forget that Flores had also been
home to a species of dwarf elephants that had adapted to their environment and
shrunk, and these dwarf elephants had been an important food source for the ‘hobbits’.
However, the study of the H. floresiensis
wrist bones showed them to be nothing like H. erectus carpal bones, as the ‘hobbit’
wrist bones lack features that had been present in early species of modern
humans from at least 800,000 years ago. If H. Floresiensis were a dwarf
variation of these earlier humans, it challenges the traditional view that H.
erectus could not cross sea barriers.
The island of Flores has always been separated from its neighbour Java
by a deep sea barrier, so if H. erectus was living on Flores, and in 1998 Mike
Morwood announced the discovery of stone tools believed to have been made by these
early humans dating back 840,000 years, then this theory is totally overturned
and they were indeed capable of travelling by sea.</div>
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However, an even more daring theory is that the ‘hobbits’
evolved directly from Australopithecines, who were some of our very earliest
human ancestors. Australopithecus first
emerged around seven million years ago in the Rift Valley of East Africa, and
australopithecine fossils show great similarities to the remains of the
‘Hobbits’, including small brain size, small stature and primitive wrist bones,
teeth and feet. This would mean that H. floresiensis did not shrink due to
environmental pressures, but started off small and stayed small. But the most startling aspect of this theory
is that Australopithecus was not previously thought to have ever left
Africa. The first modern human migration
from Africa was believed to have occurred around 65,000 years ago, with small
bands of our early ancestors migrating out of Africa via the coastal routes
through the Middle East and maybe making the short sea crossing to Arabia. If the ‘hobbits’ were descended from
Australopithecus it meant that Australopithecines possessed hitherto
undiscovered seafaring abilities and also that they possibly migrated out of
Africa into Asia millions of years
before any species of human was thought to have done? Mike Morwood has now
uncovered stone tools on nearby Sulawesi that could be almost 2 million years
old, so will more H. floresiensis skeletons and archaeological artefacts be discovered
that could provide further vital evidence?</div>
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There are some experts who argue that the controversial ‘hobbit’
remains are just modern human skeletons that are somehow abnormal and that the
individuals suffered from a disease such as microcephaly that leads to small
brain sizes. However, all of the ‘hobbit’
skeletons display the same features and that they are just too different from
modern humans to simply be diseased modern humans. What might be able to settle the argument is
if some mitochondrial DNA is recovered from the H. floresiensis specimens and
sent for analysis. However the hot, damp
climate of the Liang Bua caves reduces the chances of it being recovered, as
extreme heat degrades DNA. In addition,
the bones were not fossilised, which also does not help DNA recovery. </div>
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Hopefully, future discoveries will throw further light on
where the ‘hobbits’ came from and how they evolved. Also, they may give us more
information on when the first humans really did leave Africa to spread to other
parts of the world. Of course, the most amazing thing would be if a population
of diminutive ‘hobbits’ were discovered to be still living today deep in the
tropical jungles of Indonesia, and then suddenly we would not be the only human
species alive on our planet today.</div>
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<a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Homo_floresiensis.jpg" target="_blank">H. floresiensis skull </a>image FunkMonk Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en" target="_blank">Attribution Share Alike 2.0 Generic</a></div>
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</div>HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-62766126530090503542012-01-26T18:18:00.000+00:002012-03-05T22:25:00.895+00:00Is There A Wild Big Cat Roaming The Cotswolds?<div style="text-align: center;">
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The UK doesn’t have any very large native big cat species, but
over the past few weeks there has been a spate of mutilated animal carcasses
found across the Cotswolds. Our largest native cat is the <a href="http://www.scottishwildcats.co.uk/index.html" target="_blank">ScottishWildcat</a>, which is now unfortunately a very rare and reclusive species, with
only around four hundred still remaining in the more remote areas of the
Scottish Highlands. So what creature is
it that has now killed several deer and three wallabies in the rolling English
countryside, where the largest local native predator is the fox?</div>
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This mysterious creature has been dubbed the ‘<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jan/20/woodchester-wild-cat-dna-tests" target="_blank">Wildcat ofWoodchester</a>’ and there have dozens of reported sightings. The terrain around this area is very rugged,
with wooded ravines and heavy undergrowth, where a large feline predator could
easily hide and be very difficult to spot.
Between 2005 and 2011 Gloucestershire police received seventy five
different reports of alleged big cat sightings that ranged from glimpses of pumas,
panthers and even a lion close to junction 9 on the M5. </div>
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The first mutilated deer carcass was found by someone
walking their dog on January 4<sup>th</sup>, and when the corpse was examined there
was plenty of evidence that it was a big cat kill, rather than a dog
attack. The nose of the animal has been
bitten off, which is a sign of a cat attack as they sometimes suffocate their
prey, and also the deer’s innards had been cleanly removed and placed by the
body. Because the deer had been so
recently killed and the corpse was unlikely to have been scavenged by any other
animals, samples were removed to be tested for DNA and the results are due in
the next few days. Hopefully the DNA
testing will prove to have been successful and whatever animal it was that
killed the deer will be identified.</div>
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Two more mutilated deer carcasses have been found in the
last couple of weeks, and in the last couple of days three wallabies have been
found dead in their enclosure at a private wildlife collection only twelve
miles from where the deer were devoured in Woodchester. The animals that killed the unfortunate
wallabies had to jump a 7ft fence to get into their paddock, showing that it is
a very powerful creature, and the dead wallabies were found to have puncture
wounds in their necks, their bodies completely devoured and their internal organs
placed alongside what remained of them.<br />
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Many locals believe that <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2091613/Three-wallabies-savaged-death-big-cat-mystery-predator-stalking-Cotswolds-strikes-again.html" target="_blank">big cats</a> have been on the loose in
the area for many years, and that their prescence might go back to the 1970’s
when it became illegal to own exotic big cats and many were thought to have
been released into the wild by their owners.
But if it is found that there is a big cat population roaming
Gloucestershire, is there any danger to people?
This is very unlikely as big cats generally avoid people where they can
and there have not been any reported incidents of an alien big cat attacking a
human in the UK. In the Cotswolds there
is a plentiful supply of wildlife, such as deer, for them to hunt, so the
danger to people is minimal. The big
danger is that if the DNA tests do come back positive or there is an identified
sighting that fear will drive a campaign to hunt them down and kill them. Although these leopards, pumas or lynxes are
an invasive species in the United Kingdom, it is likely that they have been
quietly living and breeding here for many years, with no danger to humans or the
local habitat. So if we do have a
population of beautiful big cats breeding in this country, would it not be
better to protect them and learn about them rather than destroy them?</div>HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-75964828381638107362012-01-25T16:34:00.000+00:002012-02-23T11:19:33.391+00:00Where Is The Lost Amber Room?<div style="text-align: left;">
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Throughout history there have been many lost treasures. Some have been miraculously found like the
gold treasure of Troy unearthed by Heinrich Schliemann and some remain lost in
the sands of time, perhaps still awaiting discovery. One such lost treasure that has not yet been
found again is the Amber Room, which is believed to be worth at least £150
million in today’s money. What makes the
disappearance of the Amber Room so unusual is that it was a whole dismantled
room that was lost and that it vanished fairly recently at the end of the
Second World War. So this was no ancient
mystery, where there are only a few tantalising clues or documents and
sometimes even the existence of the treasure is disputed. The existence of the Amber Room is
historically well documented and photographed, and we know that it was the
Nazis who looted the Amber Room during World War II and removed it from
Russia. But it is what happened to the
Amber Room after the fall of the Nazis in 1945 that is so intriguing and so
mysterious, for the whereabouts of the Amber Room has been lost despite all of
the attempts to find it.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Q81nfXiR9cI/TyAtpn8nWaI/AAAAAAAAAgA/cKogP5W47-E/s1600/461px-Catherine_Palace_Amber_Room.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Q81nfXiR9cI/TyAtpn8nWaI/AAAAAAAAAgA/cKogP5W47-E/s320/461px-Catherine_Palace_Amber_Room.jpg" width="246" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Amber Room, Catherine Palace</td></tr>
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<b>History of the Amber Room</b></div>
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Amber is an organic gemstone made from tree resin that was
fossilized millions of years ago. Amber
ranges in colour from warm yellows to rich tawny browns and is widely used in
jewelry and decoration. However, to
create an entire large room lined with precious amber panels backed with gold
leaf and encrusted with gemstones was a hugely ambitious and creative
endeavour. When it was completed the Amber Room comprised of more than 55
square metres of amber that weighed over six tonnes. The beginning of the Amber
Room was in 1701 when Andreas Schluter, a German sculptor, created the concept
of the Amber Room for the Prussian King Friedrich I. It was constructed in
Friedrich’s Charlottenburg Palace by Gottfried Wolfram. The Russian Czar Peter
the Great visited the Charlottenburg Palace a few years after the installation
of the Amber Room and greatly admired it, so in 1716 Friedrich I’s son, King
Friedrich Wilhelm I, gave it to the Czar to cement a Prussian-Russian
alliance. The Amber Room was installed
in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, Russia in 1755 and subsequently moved to
the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo. The new design of the Amber Room was
conceived by Bartolomeo Rastrelli, court architect to Czarina Elizabeth of
Russia and Frederick the Great sent further supplies of amber to complete the
ambitious design.</div>
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<b>What Happened to the Amber Room During World War II?</b></div>
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When the Nazis invaded Russia in 1941, those who were
responsible for the treasures in the Russian palaces and museums made valiant
attempt to hide what they could, but when they attempted to remove the Amber
Room from the Catherine Palace they found that the amber covering on the walls
had become too brittle and fragile to move.
Their solution was to wallpaper over the amber in the hope that the Nazi
invaders would not realise that the amber was there, but the Amber Room was
such an iconic, well known world treasure that this measure proved futile. The Nazi soldiers found and disassembled the
Amber Room within a very short time of taking over the Catherine Palace, and
shipped the precious sheets of amber into crates and shipped them off to
Konigsberg in East Prussia. It was housed in Konigsberg Castle and parts of the
Amber room were put on display.<br />
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<b>What Happened to the Amber Room When the Second World War
Ended?</b></div>
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It is the mystery of what happened to the Amber Room in the
confused, chaotic last year of World War II that no one has ever really solved. Was the Amber Room removed from Konigsberg
Castle or was it hidden away somewhere in a vault within the ancient castle or
in the town? There were reports that crates large enough to contain the sheets
of amber were seen at Konigsberg railway station early in 1945, and there have
been rumours that the Amber Room was hidden away in a disused mine. There was
also a rumour that the Amber Room was put on board the ship MV Wilhelm Gustloff
during Operation Hannibal, when the ship was being used to evacuate military
personnel and civilians from Gotenhafen to Kiel who had been trapped by the
oncoming Red Army. Unfortunately, the MV
Wilhelm Gustloff was torpedoed by a Russian submarine and sunk, with the tragic
loss of over 9,000 souls. So if the Amber Room had been evacuated on this ship
it is now at the bottom of the sea, and as the site of the wreck has been
designated as a war memorial, it will never be open for exploration or salvage.
At the very end of the war, the British Royal Air Force extensively bombed
Konigsberg. Including the castle, so there is also the possibility that the
Amber Room was destroyed during this bombing campaign or in the ensuing ground
assaults.</div>
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<b>Hunting For the Amber Room</b></div>
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The mysterious disappearance of the Amber Room has
inevitably produced many groups of people who have hunted for the treasure, and
some have even claimed to have found it, although none of the amber has ever
been recovered. One of the most recent
claims in 2008 that the Amber Room has been discovered comes from Deutschneudorf in the Ore Mountain area of South East Germany. A team of treasure hunters located an underground
man-made cavern which they believed contained the Amber Room, and
electromagnetic pulse measurements showed that the cavern also possibly
contained over two tonnes of gold. There
had been eye-witness reports that the Nazis had brought trains and trucks full
of treasures, artwork and valuable goods into the area in the spring of 1945,
although they had never been found again when the hostilities ended. However,
the digging was halted, and no conclusive proof of the presence of the Amber
Room in Deutschneudorf has ever been presented.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In January 2010 a Russian treasure
hunter called Sergei Trifonov reported that he has found a World War II bunker
that had been used by the German High Command in Konigsberg during 1945 that he
believes may contain the fabled Amber Room. The bunker is situated around 1,000 metres from
Konigsberg Castle, which was demolished in 1967, where it is believed that the
Amber Room was housed during the course of World War II, and excavations have
already uncovered a brick lined room.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Only time and further excavations will
prove whether or not the Amber Room was hidden in either Deutschneudorf or
Konigsberg. If it is ever found again,
the amber panels and precious metal decoration of the Amber Room will need
careful restoration, or maybe will even be so badly damaged that it could never
again be recreated in the Russian palace. However, if you do want to see what
the Amber Room would have looked like, you can go and visit a recreation of the
Amber Room that was completed in 2003 at the Catherine Palace Museum just
outside St Petersburg. It is to be hoped that the Amber Room will be found one
day, and not like so many of the world’s treasures lost forever, so once more
we can marvel at this incredibly crafted Baroque masterpiece.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
Amber Room Image <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Stan_Shebs">Stan Shebs</a> Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons Attribution <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en">Share Alike 3.0 Unported</a></div>
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</div>HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-66081354142472718332012-01-25T16:17:00.000+00:002013-03-03T11:50:25.242+00:00Invasive Red Fire Ants in the USA<div style="text-align: left;">
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<b>Introduced Red Fire Ants – Relentless Invaders</b></div>
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Did you know that the southern parts of the United States
are being invaded by a relentless enemy? This diminutive foe started arriving
from South America during the 1930s and has left a trail of destruction
wherever they have colonised ever since, and now they also seem to be moving on
towards world domination. This successful invader is the red fire ant, and fear
of this small insect is leaving some parks, gardens and camping grounds in
affected areas of the US unused and empty. The red fire ant arrived in the
United States by hitching a lift in ships ballast, and so is an accidental
invasive species, unlike some introduced species, such as the cane toad in
Australia, that were deliberately released in a country for a purpose such as
pest control. The introduced red fire ant has also already caused millions of
dollars of damage to crops, property and vital infrastructure, and are proving
very difficult to eradicate.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Queen Red Fire Ant</td></tr>
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<b>What Are Red Fire Ants?</b></div>
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Red fire ants, or Solenopsis invicta, are native to Brazil
in South America. The southern US does have its own two native species of fire
ant, the southern fire ant and the fire ant, but it is the introduced fire ants
that are causing most of the damage and environmental problems. There is
another invasive species of fire ant, the black fire ant, which is only as yet only
found in Alabama and northern Mississippi, but some experts believe that they
could be just the same species as the red fire ant as they are so similar.
Introduced fire ants live in colonies, and they build large above-ground nests
which can have extensive networks of interconnected underground galleries. The
red fire ants build these nest mounds in sunny spots in gardens, parks and
fields, and they are rarely to be found in shady areas or dense forest. One of
the reasons that introduced red fire ants can grow in numbers so rapidly is
that the ants build their nests so that they can control the temperature and
humidity inside them. This means that
the ants can keep the temperature in the nest high enough to keep on
reproducing, even during the colder weather of the winter season. This rapid
expansion of the red fire ant population has seen them spread like wildfire
through suitable habitat across the south eastern United States and into
western Texas.</div>
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<b>What Damage Do Introduced Red Fire Ants Cause?</b></div>
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Red fire ants are very destructive and are costing the US
millions of dollars in damage repair. They cause real problems for farmers, as
their nest mounds can make ploughing fields and sowing crops very difficult.
The red fire ants also feed directly on crops such as strawberries, potatoes,
okra, corn and soybeans and their presence can also protect some other insect
pest species. However, on a more positive note, they feed on some other pests
such as cockroaches, ticks, boll weevils and sugarcane borers. The lone star tick is regarded as a major
livestock pest by farmers, and the red fire ant has been credited with
significantly reducing its range. Red fire ants are also bad news for citrus
fruit trees, as they chew on the bark and damage it and also feed on the fruit
and the growing tips. Red fire ants also cause major problems and damage in
homes and commercial properties. The introduced fire ants can get into homes
and build nests in wall cavities, under flooring and carpets and around the
plumbing. One of the strangest things about the red fire ants is that they seem
to be attracted to electrical fields, and so they swarm into electrical
appliances, chewing wires and causing damage. The especial love of red fire
ants is microwave ovens, and they even seem to be able to survive the high
temperatures when the appliances are switched on. They also get into outdoor
electrical equipment, sometimes with the potential to cause dangerous
accidents, as they can infest traffic signal control boxes or electric metres
on properties. Scarily, they have even been found in the lights on airport
runways. Even major infrastructure can be destroyed by these ants, as sections
of road have collapsed due to the red fire ants removing soil from under the
asphalt to build their nests.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Red Fire Ant Distribution Map USA</td></tr>
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<b>So Why Are People So Scared of Red Fire Ants?</b></div>
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An individual red fire ant sting is not that painful, and is
probably not even as painful as the sting of a wasp or a bee. They sting like a wasp, by injecting a
stinger into your skin, and the red fire ant’s sting initially causes a burning
feeling. This burning sensation gives
way to small, itching pustules on the skin. Sometimes these pustules can become
infected if they are broken, which can cause scars that take a few months to
fade. In some severe cases, there are people who have had to undergo skin
grafts or even have had limbs amputated. As with most insect stings, there are
also people who are allergic to red fire ant stings, and require immediate
hospitalisation for treatment. What causes the great fear of the red fire ants
is that most people are not usually only stung the one time. Red fire ants are
very aggressive defenders of their nests and territories and will rush to
attack any perceived threat. This could be you, one of your children or a
family pet, and the ants will swarm over you, stinging you multiple times. It
is not just the huge number of ants that is the problem, but the fact that each
individual red fire ant has the capability of stinging you several times over.
In an area heavily infested with red fire ants it is very difficult to avoid
stepping on a nest and disturbing it, as they can quite difficult to spot.
Camping in an infested area can also be a nightmare as it is very difficult to
avoid being stung, and even leaning on your own garden fence can cause the red
fire ants to swarm over you in defence of their territory. Unfortunately, there
have even been some people killed by the effects of multiple fire ant stings
and the scary reputation of these invaders has also been enhanced by some gory
urban myths and scare stories.<br />
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<b>Red Fire Ants Go For World Domination</b></div>
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Once colonies of red fire ants are established in an area
they are very difficult and expensive to eradicate, and methods range from
pouring boiling water into nests, mechanically digging them out and using
chemical pesticides. Like a lot of introduced species, the red fire ants are
short on natural predators, and in killing the fire ants there is always the
risk of also destroying native species. However, red fire ants have now managed
to establish themselves in several other countries around the globe, and seem
to be bidding for world domination. There are now populations of invasive red
fire ants in Taiwan, China, Australia, New Zealand and the Caribbean, and
recently genetic experts have discovered that these invasions probably emanated
from the US. The ants probably reached these other countries as stowaways in
the cargo holds of ships, where they can survive for long periods of time. One
of their survival techniques is that if their nest is flooded, they grab the
juvenile red fire ants and grip on to each other to form a floating raft of
live ants. If the fire ants become too
hungry, they will snack on the youngsters they are carrying to survive. It has also been suggested by scientists that
during the years that the red fire ants have been invading the southern states
of the US, that the species has become hardier and have adapted to become even
more invasive and aggressive. </div>
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The red fire ant has cost the United Stated millions of
pounds in damage and destruction of crops, and a wealth of pain and fear for
people, livestock and family pets. There
are also many recreational areas that are no longer being enjoyed because of
the presence of red fire ants. But can anything be done to halt the march of
this little red invader? Or will the
rest of the world soon have to learn to live with huge ant nest mounds on their
lawns, stinging ants in their microwaves and extensive damage to their valuable
crops and property.</div>
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HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-65289529209444183582012-01-08T10:41:00.000+00:002012-02-23T11:22:34.857+00:00Do We Know Who the Real St Valentine Was?<div style="text-align: left;">
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The US Greeting Card Association estimates that around one
billion Valentine’s cards are sent each year around the world timed to arrive
on the 14<sup>th</sup> February, a huge number that is only eclipsed by the
number of Christmas cards sent annually.
The modern phenomenon that is St Valentine’s Day is a triumph of
marketing and consumerism; a day where lovers take their partners out for meals
in restaurants where the prices have been inflated for the day and plied with
red roses, champagne, saucy lingerie, chocolates or expensive jewellery. But what are the true origins of this St
Valentine’s Day celebration?</div>
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We may view St Valentine as a saucy little cupid shooting
love’s arrows, but in a less romantic reality St Valentine was probably not
even one person. Valentine or Valentinus was the name of several saints in late
antiquity, maybe as many as fifty, who were martyred during the Roman
period. The name Valentine derives from
the Latin word ‘valens’ which means worthy and it was a fairly popular name
back in those times. One of those saints
just happened to have a feast day that fell on February 14<sup>th</sup> and it
was from this saint’s feast day that our modern celebrations for St Valentine’s
Day have evolved. Very little is known about this obscure saint except for the
fact that he was buried north of Rome on the Via Flaminia. The feast day of St Valentine was established
by Pope Gelasius I in 496 AD, and even then it seems as though very little was
known about this saint as Valentine was included in the list of those ‘...whose
names are greatly reverenced among men, but whose acts are only known to God.’</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Silver Reliquary of St Valentine</td></tr>
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St Valentine does appear in several lists of martyrs or
‘martyrologies’, and he is described variously as a martyr in the Roman
province of Africa, a bishop of Interamna or as a priest in Rome. We have to wait until 1493 and the Nuremberg
Chronicle to get the first graphical representation of St Valentine and his
woodcut picture is accompanied by a text that states that he was a Roman priest
martyred during the reign of Emperor Claudius Gothicus.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=cmhypnotherap-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1590781813&ref=tf_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="height: 240px; width: 120px;"></iframe>
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Emperor Claudius was busily persecuting the Christians in
Rome at that time, and Valentine was arrested for marrying couples using the
Christian rites and helping the Christians to evade the persecution. He is said to have converted his jailer to
Christianity by miraculously restoring the sight of his daughter. Valentine befriended the jailer’s daughter
and left her a goodbye note reputedly signed ‘From Your Valentine’. According to the legend the Roman Emperor then
took a strong liking to Valentine, but he then tried to convert him to
Christianity and was condemned to death for his zeal. It is believed that he was clubbed and
stoned, but that his executioners did not manage to kill him, so they
eventually had to behead him outside of the Flaminian Gate in Rome. Various dates have been put forward for
Valentine’s martyrdom, including 269, 270 or 273 AD and in the Middle Ages two
churches were built in Rome dedicated to this St Valentine.</div>
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Relics, believed to be those of <a href="http://saints.sqpn.com/saint-valentine-of-rome" target="_blank">St Valentine</a>, were exhumed
from the catacombs of St Hippolytus in 1836 and sent to the Whitefriar Street
Carmelite Church in Dublin. The casket
containing the relics are carried in procession to the church’s high altar
every February 14<sup>th</sup> for a special mass dedicated to young lovers. As relics of saints tended to be very numerous and widespread in the Middle
Ages, there are also reputed relics of St Valentine in Stephansdom in Vienna,
Roquemaure in France, the Gorbals in Glasgow and the Birmingham Oratory.</div>
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It was believed by two eighteenth century antiquarians,
Alban Butler and Francis Douce that St Valentine may have been an invention of
the early Roman Catholic Church as a means of suppressing the Roman pagan
pastoral festival of Lupercalia which was celebrated on February 15<sup>th</sup>
each year, but this theory is not universally upheld. It is believed that during this Roman
festival boys drew the names of girls to honour the goddess Februata Juno who
was a goddess of fertility and physical love.
This was repeated in the Middle Ages when youngsters would draw a name
out of a bowl to determine who their Valentine would be and then sew this name
onto their sleeve for one week. This is
where the term ‘wearing your heart on your sleeve’ comes from, meaning that you
are showing your feelings so clearly that other people easily can gauge exactly
what you are feeling.</div>
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St Valentine’s Day
first became associated with romance and love in the 14<sup>th</sup> century in
England, and many of the stories around this festival were created by the poet
Geoffrey Chaucer in his ‘Parliament of Foules’. In the ‘Parliament of Foules’ the story goes
that the birds choose their mates on February 14<sup>th</sup>, and this is what
is believed to have started the tradition of people sending letters to their
loved ones on this date. Another
romantic tradition is the one of pinning bay leaves to your pillow on St
Valentine’s Eve with the aim of dreaming of your future husband or wife. There is also a tradition that if you see a
robin flying above you on Valentine’s Day you will marry a sailor, if it was a
sparrow that you saw you would be blissfully married to a pauper and if it was
a goldfinch you would marry a very rich person.</div>
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The earliest known Valentine greeting was a rondeau written
by Charles, Duke of Orleans, addressed to his ‘valentined’ wife while he was
imprisoned in the Tower of London after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. In 1797 ‘The Young Man’s Valentine Writer’
was produced in the UK, which contained romantic verses that young men could
use for Valentine’s greetings if they were too shy or were unable to think up
their own. The nineteenth century
ushered in the mass sending of greeting cards for Valentine’s Day and the
practice of sending cards anonymously to someone that you fancied.</div>
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As there was so little information known about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Valentine" target="_blank">St Valentine</a>,
his feast day was removed from the Roman Catholic General Calendar for
universal liturgical veneration in 1969.
However, St Valentine is not only the patron saint of lovers; his
saintly patronage extends to apiarists, greeting card manufacturers, travellers,
young people and he also offers protection from plague, epilepsy and fainting.</div>
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So while you are munching your chocolates, admiring your
diamond or sipping your champagne, spare a thought for poor St Valentine who
had to be stoned, clubbed and beheaded so that you can whisper sweet nothings
to your loved one and send soppy greetings cards on the 14<sup>th</sup>
February every year!</div>
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<a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reliquary_of_St._Valentine.jpg" target="_blank">Saint Valentine Reliquary Image</a> Wikimedia Commons <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-UK-unknown" target="_blank">Public Domain</a></div>
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</div>HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-50922726650100562142011-12-11T11:08:00.001+00:002012-02-23T11:24:07.268+00:00Mitchell Siegel Murder – Mystery of the Origins of Superman<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
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Superman is possibly the best known and most iconic action
comic superhero of our time, and this bullet-proof hero from the planet Krypton
dressed in his distinctive bright blue and red costume has appeared in many films,
TV shows, action comics, books and on a huge array of Superman
merchandise. The accepted story is that
Superman was created by two shy and friendless high school students to make some
money and help them to get girlfriends, but could the true story of Superman’s
creation be a lot darker than that?
Could the character of Superman have been created because a young
teenage boy had lost his father in shocking and tragic circumstances, causing
him to create a fantasy world where good always prevails over evil and where
there is an indestructible Man of Steel who will fly to your aid at your time
of peril? Did this young, grieving boy wish that his father had been
bullet-proof and that one day there would be justice done for a horrendous
crime?<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Superman</td></tr>
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Superman was the creation of two teenagers called Jerry
Siegel and Joe Shuster, and was destined to be the first of the celebrated American
comic book superheroes. Jerry Siegel was
born in 1914 and was the youngest son of Mitchell Siegel, a Lithuanian
immigrant who had opened a clothing and haberdashery store in Cleveland. Jerry
was a shy child, who was not good at making friends, and whose greatest love
was drawing. His father Mitchell
encouraged his son’s artistic talent, but on one tragic night in 1932 the young
teenager’s life would be changed forever.
On the 2<sup>nd</sup> June in 1932 Mitchell Siegel’s store was robbed at
around 8.30 in the evening. During the
course of the robbery Siegel slumped to the floor and died; the robbers fleeing
and they were never being brought to justice.
The Siegel family and the coroner stated that Mitchell had died of a
heart attack, but police reports stated that gunshots had been reported during
the robbery. So had Mitchell Siegel
really been murdered by being shot to death, and if so, why the cover up and why
was there no murder enquiry?</div>
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Whether this was a murder or a tragic natural death brought
on by the robbery, the impact on the shy teenager Jerry Siegel who loved and
admired his father must have been devastating.
Also the fact that nobody was ever arrested for the robbery must have
seemed highly unjust to the idealistic teenager, who would have naturally
wanted justice for his father and to see his assailants brought to trial. But was this tragic event the catalyst for the
creation of the bullet-proof superhero whose mission was to destroy evil so
that justice could be done and good prevail?
It could be said that making Superman bullet-proof was a way of admitting
to the world that he knew that his father had really been shot to death,
although we will never really know. Did Spiegel wish that his father had been
bullet-proof and invincible, and that there had been a superhero that could
swoop down from the skies to protect his father from being killed and destroy
the evil villains, restoring justice to the world?</div>
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Immediately after his father’s death Jerry and Joe Shuster
seemed to be driven to create a comic book world where there was a strong sense
of good and evil, and where there would always be a superhero on hand that
fought tirelessly for good and justice for the wronged. Was this because the young Siegel could not
believe that there would be any real justice for his dead father in this world?
Which then led him to create a world of his own where his father’s death would
have been avenged? The character of Superman also had other correlations with
the young <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2008-08-25-superman-creators_N.htm" target="_blank">Jerry Spiegel</a>’s life, as Superman had also lost his family, his
familiar home environment and was an outsider in a strange land. As well as
having to deal with the loss of his father, Jerry had to cope with being bullied at school, where he was shy, had no
interests other than reading magazines and books, and did not excel
academically. Practically the only friend he had made at high school was Joe
Shuster, who was his collaborator on the comic book strips, and Shuster was a
shy and introverted character like himself. In fact, they were so similar that
both he and Shuster had to repeat their final year of High School. Ironically,
even though many of the characters they would go on to create would be
physically strong with superhuman abilities, Spiegel was also not much of an
athlete or team sport player, and displayed none of his action comic characters
physical prowess.<br />
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Since his early childhood years, the young Siegel had been a
huge fan of comic strips, films and science fiction pulp magazines. His career started around 1929, when Jerry
published a SF fanzine called Cosmic Stories, which he had created on a manual
typewriter and advertised in the classified section of the Science Wonder
Stories. He was active over the next few
years and produced several other comic strips and magazines. After he met Joe
Shuster they would both spend hours, day and night, creating their comic strip
stories and action heroes, to the detriment of their education and social
lives. The creative duo broke into comics when they made their debut with Henri
Duval, a swashbuckling musketeer and the supernatural crime fighter Dr Occult
in the publication New Fun.</div>
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However, the character of Superman did not make his
appearance until just after Mitchell Siegel’s tragic death, when the younger
Siegel and Shuster unveiled a bald villain with telepathic powers whose mission
was to dominate the world, that they called ‘The Superman’. This version of the
character did not take off, and after a sleepless night spent tossing and
turning, Spiegel came up with the idea for the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/2628733/The-tragic-real-story-behind-Supermans-birth.html" target="_blank">Superman character</a> that we are now
all familiar with. However it would take years for them to find a publisher for
their new comic strip character, Superman, and after one more rejection by
Consolidated Book Publishing, Shuster was so enraged that he burned all the
Superman material. Siegel managed to save the front cover from the flames, and
in 1938 the publisher of Action Comics decided to use an illustration of
Superman lifting a car with his bare hands as a cover for his new action comic. He contacted Spiegel and Shuster and asked
them to create a 13 page Superman story for Action Comics#1 and the legend of
Superman was born. By the time that
ActionComics#4 hit the newsstands, the comic was selling in huge numbers and
all because Superman was featured in its pages.</div>
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You might think that
this would have been a turning point in the lives of Jerry Spiegel and Joe
Shuster, and that their futures were destined to be rosy from then on. However, misfortune never seemed to be
lurking too far away from the talented pair. When Superman had been first
published in Action Comics in June 1938, they sold all the rights to Superman
for only $130 and a contract to supply ongoing Superman material to the
publishers. DC Comics were making a
fortune from publishing Superman, but the creators Spiegel and Shuster were
still being paid relatively little for their work. They eventually got so
frustrated with the situation that they sued DC Comics in 1946. They were
promptly fired and the fight went on until in 1948 they accepted $200,000 to
sign away all the rights to Superman and any character that was a spin off from
Superman, and their names were even removed from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Superman" target="_blank">Superman</a> byline. It wasn’t
until newspaper reports began to surface in the 1970s of the duo’s impoverished
circumstances, that Warner Communications, who were not happy about the bad PR
they were receiving, started giving Spiegel and Shuster a $35,000 annual
pension and health care benefits. Also they ensured that any material they
produced containing the Superman character had to contain the credit ‘Superman
created by Jerry Spiegel and Joe Shuster’.</div>
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So was Superman really created because a teenage boy had
lost his father in a tragic and shocking way, and who wished that his father
could have been bullet-proof and have a superhero to save him? It is unlikely
that we will never find out what was really going on in their minds as Joe
Shuster passed away in 1992 and Jerry Spiegel in 1996 and during his life Jerry
never once mentioned the Cleveland robbery that led to his father’s death in an
interview.</div>
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Image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain</div>
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<iframe border="0" frameborder="0" height="60" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?t=cmhypnothypno-21&o=2&p=13&l=st1&mode=books-uk&search=Superman&fc1=000000&lt1=_blank&lc1=3366FF&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="border: none;" width="468"></iframe></div>HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-36780148673191938952011-12-08T12:12:00.001+00:002014-08-14T10:58:46.808+01:00Want To Be a Treasure Hunter? – The Lessons of the Staffordshire Hoard<div style="text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Staffordshire Hoard</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Staffordshire Hoard – Buried Anglo-Saxon Treasure</b>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Have you ever heard of the Staffordshire Hoard, the amazing
Anglo-Saxon gold and silver treasure found by a lone man with a metal detector
in an English field? Many of us have
been brought up on tales of buried treasure and maps where X marks the spot, so
the discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard must have seemed like a dream come
true to that lucky treasure hunter. Finding an ancient treasure or chest full of
gold coins may seem like a bit of a pipe dream, but it is one that many people
hope to fulfil as they scour the countryside with their metal detectors hoping
to strike it rich. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But just as many lottery winners have discovered to their
cost, hitting the jackpot and finding a unique, golden treasure does not always
lead to happiness ever after and can even cause the people involved to regret
ever having been part of their remarkable discovery. So was finding the
Staffordshire Hoard a wonderful, life-changing event for those involved or
merely the precursor to arguing, bitterness and remorse?</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Finding of the Staffordshire Hoard</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Back in 2009 Terry Herbert was just an amateur metal
detector enthusiast, who was living on disability allowance in a council flat.
He had found some small archaeological artefacts in the past, but could have
had no idea of was he was about to unearth in a muddy field near Lichfield in
Staffordshire. For what he pulled out of the mud that day in Fred Johnson’s
field were the very first pieces of what would turn out to be a fabulous
Anglo-Saxon treasure, comprising of over 1500 items in gold and silver, some
studded with precious stones that dated from the 7<sup>th</sup> century AD. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Most
of the precious objects were associated with warfare, such as parts of
decorated helmets, sword pommels, and hilt collars. There were also three gold
crosses discovered that had had the arms folded inwards, possibly so that they
would not take up so much space when they were buried. Mr Herbert reported his
amazing find to the local authorities and Birmingham archaeology undertook the
full archaeological excavation between July and August 2009.</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So What is the Staffordshire Hoard?</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The items recovered
in <a href="http://www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk/" target="_blank">the Staffordshire Hoard</a> are of the most superb craftsmanship and show what
expert metal workers the Anglo Saxons were. The huge quantities of gold and
silver found also shows that these were once the possessions of very high
status individuals, possibly even royalty. One of the more interesting facts is
that none of the objects found would have belonged to women; they were all
parts of the trappings of an Anglo-Saxon warrior, which had been ripped off the
original swords and helmets. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There has
been fierce debate as to how this collection of treasure was originally
accumulated and why, but it has been suggested that they are trophies collected
from vanquished warriors after a battle, or that the gold and silver
embellishments had been removed so that the sword blades or metal helmets could
then be redecorated to reflect the new owner’s identity. Also there have been various reasons put
forward as to why the Staffordshire Hoard was buried in that field, ranging
from the treasure being an offering to a pagan god to the artefacts being
hastily concealed due to protect them from being pillaged during a battle.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Who Were The Anglo-Saxons?</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Anglo-Saxons were a group of Germanic tribesmen that
invaded the south and east of England during the early 5<sup>th</sup> century
AD. This period of British history is usually known as the Dark Ages, a time
from which there are very few surviving written records and it used to be
thought that any culture had fled the country with the retreating Romans and
that the invading Anglo-Saxons were merely blood-thirsty savages. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However, some
of the archaeological finds from this period, such as the Sutton Hoo burial and
now the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staffordshire_Hoard" target="_blank">Staffordshire Hoard</a>, show that the Anglo-Saxons were exceptionally
skilled at working precious metals, setting them with garnet gemstones. The
field where the Staffordshire Hoard was found was in the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of
Mercia, ruled by warrior kings such as Aethelred, Penda and Wulfhere. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">During
the 7<sup>th</sup> century AD Mercia was trying to expand its territory and
influence and was being militarily aggressive, so the booty of the
Staffordshire Hoard could easily have been stripped from bodies on the
battlefield. The Staffordshire Hoard also shows that at that time, Anglo-Saxon
Britain was in transition from being a pagan country to a Christian one, as
some of the objects show a mix between being decorated with pagan or Christian
symbols.</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Valuing the Staffordshire Hoard</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Staffordshire Hoard was valued by the Independent
Treasure Valuation Committee at the British Museum at £3.28 million. This small
fortune was divided equally between the farmer who owned the field, Fred
Johnson, and the man who had made the discovery with his metal detector, Terry
Herbert. You would have thought that becoming millionaires overnight would have
been a cause for celebration, but instead it appears to have led to a souring
of relations and bitter recriminations between these two men. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The relationship
has even deteriorated to the point where Mr Johnson has banned Terry Herbert
from ever setting foot on his land again. It seems that both men have expressed
regret that they ever had any part in discovering the Staffordshire Hoard. Fred
Johnson has stated in the media that he believes that Terry Herbert is just a greedy,
grasping man and that he has been incensed by Mr Johnson’s desire to search for
more treasure on the farm. Mr Johnson says that he was never interested in
gaining money from the find and was only ever interested in protecting the find
for the country, and also that he did not welcome any of the publicity or media
interest. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mr Herbert has riposted by saying that Fred Johnson was just unhappy
that he had to share any of the payout and that he wanted to keep all the money
for himself. So despite the fact that Fred Johnson has been able to build
himself a new house on his farm and that Terry Herbert has moved from his
council flat to a luxury bungalow, their new found wealth does not seem to have
brought either man very much happiness or peace of mind.</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So maybe we should all be a bit more careful of what we wish
for, as even something as fabulous as discovering a buried hoard of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-13991723" target="_blank">Anglo-Saxon treasure</a> can bring stress and unhappiness with it. But perhaps the most
important thing to have come out of all this is the Staffordshire Hoard itself. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This fascinating piece of Anglo-Saxon history is now housed in several museums
in the UK, including the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the Potteries
Museum and the British Museum, where visitors can wonder at their beauty and
experts can continue to examine them and discover more about their history, how
they were made and fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon
history.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Staffordshire_hoard_annotated.jpg" target="_blank">Staffordshire Hoard</a> Image Wikimedia Creative Commons <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en" target="_blank">Attribution 2.0 Generic</a></span></div>
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HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-46208411617173660082011-11-29T11:47:00.001+00:002016-01-16T21:50:36.756+00:00Labyrinths – A Walking Meditation<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Meditation and
Labyrinths</span><o:p></o:p></b>
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The practice of meditation is a personal journey inwards in
order to find a new sense of serenity and joy, and also to learn more about
ourselves and to promote our spiritual growth.
There are very many different ways of meditating and all religions have
their own practices and prayer rituals designed to create stillness and
contentment within and to help develop your own direct contact with the
spiritual world. Although many types of
meditation involve sitting in silence and solitude, there are also forms of
meditation that involve movement, and walking a labyrinth is one of them.
People often confuse labyrinths with mazes, but whereas mazes are designed to
confuse, get people lost and have many dead-ends, a labyrinth only ever has a
single path that always leads you towards the centre. Labyrinths are not
supposed to be difficult to find your way through, as the walker may be lost deep
in prayer or meditation.</div>
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Walking A Labyrinth</span><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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The three classical designs of a labyrinth are seven
circuit, eleven circuit and twelve circuit.
These are regarded as spiritually powerful patterns as when they are
being walked, the backwards and forwards route that turns the walker 180
degrees when they go into another circuit, can encourage their awareness to shift
between the two sides of their brain. This can lead to experiencing deep states
of meditation, even a hypnotic trance, which can help the walker on their inner
journey. Once the centre of the
labyrinth has been gained, it could be an opportunity to spend some more time
in contemplation or even to sing and dance.
The same path has to be retraced to get out, which reinforces the key
insights gained on your journey to your centre. The seven circuit layout has
been known since Greek and Roman times, and appeared as decoration on coins,
wall paintings, baskets, pots and is seen in early depictions of body art from
as early as 430 BC. In Roman times,
labyrinths were created from tiles or mosaic on the walls or floors of their
villas, but these appeared to be mainly for decorative or symbolic purposes.</div>
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Labyrinth of the
Minotaur</span><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Labyrinths are very powerful, sacred spaces and have been
used since ancient times, and they are represented in many of the great ancient
civilisations including the Celts, Ancient Greeks and the Native American
Indians. Perhaps one of the best known
labyrinths from antiquity, although a legendary one, is the massive one
constructed by Daedalus in order to contain the Minotaur, the monstrous half
bull/half man, at the palace of King Minos in Crete. The Greek hero Theseus managed to kill the
Minotaur, but the labyrinth was so convoluted and tricky, that he had to be
aided by King Minos’s daughter Ariadne, who gave him a ball of thread which he
could use to find his way back out again. As her reward, the gallant Theseus
left her as she lay asleep on a beach on the Greek island of Naxos. It is thought
that the location of the Minotaur’s labyrinth was at the Minoan Palace of
Knossos, which was excavated by Sir Arthur Evans in 1900.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/---wogQA0Zc8/TtTJoHHtKnI/AAAAAAAAAZo/xVM9bxDMJHw/s1600/Labyrinth_Lucca.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="307" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/---wogQA0Zc8/TtTJoHHtKnI/AAAAAAAAAZo/xVM9bxDMJHw/s320/Labyrinth_Lucca.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Labyrinth at Cathedral in Lucca, Tuscany</td></tr>
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Labyrinth at
Hawara</span><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Another famous ancient labyrinth was situated in Hawara in
the Fayoum in Egypt and is thought to have been the galleries, chambers and
passages of a huge funerary temple complex attached to the pyramid of the
Middle Kingdom pharaoh Amenemhat III.
This great structure was described by ancient writers such as Herodotus
and Strabo as containing as many as 3,000 rooms all of which were elaborately
decorated with images and hieroglyphic texts.
The exact location of this ancient labyrinth has been lost since
antiquity, but modern archaeological expeditions, such as the Mataha Expedition
to Hawara in 2008, have been slowly uncovering what remains of this vast
ancient complex using modern technology.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><b>Labyrinths in the Middle Ages</b></span></div>
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The Middle Ages in Europe was the time when the great Gothic
cathedrals were built and pilgrimages to holy shrines were considered to be an
important part of spiritual life. For those
who could not travel many of these vast stone cathedrals had labyrinths created
in them, carved into the stones of the floors, which allowed the worshipper to
walk in meditation, prayer or repentance in lieu of undertaking an arduous and potentially
expensive pilgrimage. It is known that
the clergy would dance in the labyrinths during the Easter season and they were
also thought to be symbolic of the long and difficult journeys that many
pilgrims had undergone to visit the shrines housed in the cathedrals. Many of
these labyrinths have either been removed or destroyed over the centuries, but
a very good example still survives in Chartres Cathedral. The Chartres Cathedral labyrinth was created
on the floor of the nave below the famous Rose Window over the West Door during
the early years of the 13<sup>th</sup> century and is an eleven circuit
labyrinth divided into quadrants.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><b>Labyrinths and the Inner Journey</b></span></div>
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Labyrinths have enjoyed something of a revival in recent
years, as people in the West have started exploring meditation and the inner
journey in greater numbers. If you want
to undertake this form of walking meditation, you can create your own temporary
labyrinth on the floor with sand, flour, masking tape or string. If you want something a bit more permanent,
you could paint one on some canvas or even a sheet to lie down across the
ground when you needed it. And, of
course, real devotees with the space and money could have one carved into the
floor, marked out with stones or even a topiary labyrinth planted in the back
garden.</div>
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Remember though that although labyrinths always lead you to the
same place, the very centre, that your own journey to get there will be unique
and personal to you. This is not
something that you can do ‘wrong’ and every time that you undertake the journey
it will be different. It can be likened
to your life path, and the deeper you penetrate into the labyrinth, the closer
that you will come to the meaning and centre of your current existence. If you
are meditating and walking as a group it can be very beneficial and interesting
to share your experiences, but do not allow yourself to be pressured to do so
and never compare your experience to someone else’s. You are at your own unique point in your spiritual
journey and the speed at which you move and what your soul chooses to experience
is a very individual and sacred choice.</div>
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Image <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Labyrinth_Lucca.jpg" target="_blank">Lucca Labyrinth</a> Wikimedia Commons Public Domain<br />
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HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-82620078514307035352011-11-26T19:14:00.001+00:002012-02-23T11:33:21.013+00:00What Was The Permian Mass Extinction And What Caused It?<div>
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<b>What Was the Permian Mass Extinction?</b></div>
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Have you ever heard of the Permian Mass Extinction, also
known as the ‘Great Dying’? If you are
worried by the prophecies that the world as we know it is going to end in 2012,
you may not be too cheered by the fact that our planet has already undergone
several mass extinctions where a significant percentage of all the animal and
plant species then alive were suddenly wiped off the face of the Earth. The
mass extinction that we are all perhaps the most familiar with is that of the
dinosaurs 65 million years ago, when 70% of all the species on the Earth died
out. However, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event" target="_blank">Permian Mass Extinction</a> was even more devastating to our
planet, and yet many people have never heard of this sudden period of mass
destruction. The Permian Mass Extinction occurred around 251.4 million years
ago and constitutes the borderline between the Permian and Triassic
periods. During the Permian, there was
only one big land mass, known as the super-continent Pangaea and the
destruction of species was savage, with 70% of terrestrial vertebrates
disappearing, 96% of all marine species disappearing, and what is thought to be
the only mass extinction of insect species in the planet’s long history occurring. The destruction of species was so complete
that it took the Earth from 4-6 million years to recover, and when it did the
foundations had been laid for the dawn of the age of the dinosaurs. So what
could possibly have caused this disaster and wreaked such a trail of total
destruction? The Permian Mass Extinction
has baffled scientists, and there have been many theories put forward as to
what natural event or chain of events could possibly have caused this maelstrom.</div>
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<b>What Are The Possible Causes of the Permian Extinction?</b></div>
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So what type of natural disaster could have triggered what
is known as the ‘<a href="http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/Essays/wipeout/default.html" target="_blank">Great Dying</a>’? Globally most complex ecosystems were destroyed,
and with only 5% of all species surviving there was a huge question mark as to
whether life on Earth could continue to survive at all. It is believed that the
extinction event that led to the end of the dinosaurs was a huge impact event;
with the impact of a huge asteroid or comet hitting the earth and triggering
global destruction. So could an impact event have been the cause of the Permian
Mass Extinction? Many scientists have combed the surface of the Earth for
evidence of an impact crater that was large enough to have been the catalyst.
One of the problems that they have encountered is the huge 250 million time gap
between then and now. There is every chance that the impact crater simply no
longer exists. Around 70% of the world’s surface is covered by the oceans, and
no part of the ocean floor is older than 200 million years old. This is because
the sea floor is destroyed by spreading and subduction, and it has been
surmised that extensive lava flow could also have concealed any large crater
site. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Basalt Lava Flow</td></tr>
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<b>Could A Meteorite Impact Have Caused The Permian Mass
Extinction?</b></div>
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So evidence of an impact event at the Permian-Triassic
boundary is sparse. In 2001 a team from the University of Washington, led by
Luanne Becker, published a paper that outlined their discoveries of
extraterrestrial argon and helium in rocks of the right age in Japan and China.
These two gases were found trapped in something called fullerenes or
buckyballs, which are often linked to debris from meteor impacts. The team’s
findings were brought into question by other scientists, but they have stood by
their findings. There are also a couple of possible sites that have been
proposed as the point of impact 250 million years ago. One of these is the
Bedout High off the coast of northwest Australia, which is a 30km in diameter
circular area where older rocks have been uplifted by as much as 4 km towards
the surface. It has been theorised that the Bedout High may be the centre of a
huge buried impact crater that dates towards the end of the Permian period.
Another proposed impact site is in Antarctica and is known as the Wilkes Land
crater, which is actually two hypothetical giant crater impact sites that are
hidden deep beneath the Antarctic ice sheets.
Both of these locations have been questioned by the experts, as it has
been queried as to whether the geological structures were really caused by
meteorite or asteroid hits.</div>
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<b>Did Massive Volcanic Eruptions Trigger the ‘Great Dying’</b></div>
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Can you imagine huge volcanic eruptions that carried on for
over half-a-million years? Well the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/extinction_events/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event" target="_blank">close of the Permian period</a> was marked by
massive volcanic events. This type of sustained volcanic activity could have
accelerated massive global climate changes, covered huge areas with boiling hot
volcanic rock and released tremendous amounts of poisonous gases and ash into
the atmosphere. What remains of some of these ancient volcanic eruptions are
known as the Siberian Traps, where around two million square kilometres of what
now is Eastern Russia was covered with basalt lava. Usually, these are not the type of explosive
volcanic eruptions that form the tall cone-shaped volcanoes that most of us are
familiar with, but rather huge amounts of basalt lava is pushed out through
long fissures in the rocks spreads across large areas. However, there is
evidence from the Siberian Traps, in the form of a large amount of pyroclastic
deposits in comparison with other basalt floods, that these eruptions were very
explosive pumping vast quantities of gases and ash into the atmosphere.
However, again scientists have questioned whether these volcanic eruptions,
long lasting and as explosive as they were, would have been enough to cause the
extinction on the scale of the ‘Great Dying’.</div>
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However, there is new evidence that these massive volcanic
eruptions could have been the cause of the Permian Mass Extinction after
all. Scientists from the University of
Calgary have discovered layers of coal ash in the rocks dating to the
Permian-Triassic boundary in the Canadian Arctic, which they believe were
deposited as the result of massive coal combustion that was set off by the
volcanic activity. This widespread coal fire would have been responsible for
the emission of large quantities of greenhouse gases, at a time when the Earth
was suffering from a decrease in oxygen levels, acid rainfall and the effects
of massive amounts of toxic ash in the air.</div>
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So although it may never be conclusively proved that massive
volcanic eruptions are what were responsible for the Permian Mass extinctions,
there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that this is the case. However an impact event as the trigger cannot
be totally discounted and it may well be that the meteorite or asteroid comet
impact was what started off the catastrophic volcanic activity. No doubt the Earth will continue to yield new
evidence as to what was the cause of this greatest of mass extinctions, and
that one day the full story will be known.</div>
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</div>HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-43953707786060281752011-11-08T13:14:00.000+00:002012-08-18T18:48:11.400+01:00Traditions and Customs of The Twelve Days of Christmas<div>
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‘If music be the food of love, play on!’ proclaimed Count
Orsino as the iconic opening line of William Shakespeare’s famous play ’Twelfth
Night’. But what is the meaning of the Twelfth
Night and what are the origins, history and traditions behind <b>The Twelve Days
of Christmas</b>?<br />
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Traditionally, the Twelve Days of Christmas begin with
Christmas Day as the first day and end on the eve of Epiphany on 5<sup>th</sup>
December. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Days_of_Christmas">Twelve Days of Christmas</a>
are celebrated very differently from country to country, as in some places they
give gifts on Christmas Day, in some gifts are given on Twelfth Night and in
some places gifts are given on each of the twelve days. As this time of year is the darkest in the
northern hemisphere bringing the light back is a very important part of the
traditions, so in some countries a candle is lit on each of the days and there
is also a tradition of lighting a Yule Log on the first night of Christmas and
letting it burn until Twelfth Night. Celebrating
for twelve days at the this time of year, the time of the Winter Equinox, has
its origins way back in pagan traditions and the Roman festival of Saturnalia.</div>
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During the Middle Ages the Twelve Days of Christmas was a
time of great celebration and there would be feasting on every day and long
into the night. The climax of the
Christmastide celebrations was the festivities of Twelfth Night. A Lord of Misrule would have been chosen and
he was responsible for overseeing all of the feasting and revelries during the
Christmas period. The Lord of Misrule
was generally a peasant, and was known as the Prince des Sots in France, the
Abbot of Unreason in Scotland and a Boy Bishop was appointed for festivities
run by the Catholic Church. The
celebrations held during the Twelve Days of Christmas were often drunken, debauched,
wild affairs, and it was the job of the Lord of Misrule to try and create as
much mayhem as possible and disrupt the normal, smooth running of the household. Another tradition was that the Lords and
Ladies switched places with the servants and peasants so they in turn had their chance of living the
high life for a few hours! A cake, known
as the King cake, would have been specially baked for the Twelfth Night
celebrations that contained a bean or a small bauble, and the reveller who got
the piece of cake would have to do certain things and received various
privileges. The rule of the Lord of
Misrule ended at midnight and normal service resumed!</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Twelfth Night Merrymaking in Farmer Shakeshaft's Barn</td></tr>
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A special alcoholic drink called wassail was prepared to be
drunk during The Twelve Days of Christmas, and especially on Twelfth
Night. Wassail was a hot, spicy punch
and the practice of wassailing is toasting the gods to ask for abundance
and a good harvest. In the Middle Ages in
Europe, the ingredients of the wassail would have included sugar, which was a
rare and expensive commodity back then, nutmeg, ginger, ale and cinnamon. These would have all been put into a large
bowl, heated up and then had ‘sops’ of toasted bread placed on top. Another festive sweet treat was mince pies, which have been eaten during the Christmas season since the 16th century. Tradition has it that if you eat a mince pie on each of the twelve days then the following twelve months will exceptionally happy. The
celebration of Epiphany, where the Three Wise Men or ‘Magi’ arrived to give
gifts of gold, frankincense or myrrh to the infant Jesus, is an important
occasion in some countries. In Spain
they have processions with people dressed as the Three Kings who throw out
sweets for the children in the crowd to catch.</div>
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It is believed that the traditions of The Twelve Days of
Christmas were taken to America by the early Colonists. They probably started the tradition of
hanging evergreen wreaths on the front door of their houses during the Festive
Season. They would create a wreath from
local produce and greenery on Christmas Eve, and then hang it out on the first
day of Christmas and would bring it back in on the morning of Epiphany. It is still a common tradition in England and
other parts of the world that all Christmas decorations and Christmas Trees have
to be taken down by 6<sup>th</sup> January, which is Epiphany, and that any
festive food that remained had to be eaten or stored away. It is considered to be bad luck if any
decorations are left hanging after that date, but if they are not down by
Twelfth Night to stave off that bad luck
they are supposed to be left hanging for the rest of the year. In earlier times the evergreen wreaths and
garlands would have been left in place until Candlemas which is the 2<sup>nd</sup>
January. The bad luck was supposed to
stem from the spirits of the holly, ivy, mistletoe and other Christmas greenery. These plant spirits were said to be happy to
be in the warmth and comfort of the house during the snow and frost of the mid-winter,
but once the milder days returned they wanted to go back outside where they
belonged in nature. It was said that if
they were not returned to the woods and hedgerows all the plants and leaves
would not start to grow again and the spring would not come back again, causing
great hardship for all. </div>
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There is an <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/christmas/carols_3.shtml">English Christmas Carol</a> called ‘The Twelve Days
of Christmas’ that enumerates the gifts that a very special someone received on
each of the Twelve Days of Christmas. It
starts with a ‘Partridge in A Pear Tree’ on the first day and ends with ‘Twelve
Drummers Drumming’ on the twelfth day.
In my experience most people know the words up until the fifth day, but
once past the golden rings they tend to start getting their ‘Lords a-Leaping’
and ‘Maids a-Milking’ pretty mixed up.
It also depends how much wine was consumed with Christmas Dinner! The carol may have been French in origin, and
could date back until the 16<sup>th</sup> century, but was first published in
England in 1780. </div>
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It is believed that this <a href="http://www.12days.com/library/carols/12daysofxmas.htm">famous carol</a> first started out as a
memory game that was played by the revellers who attended Twelfth Night feasts. The participants in the game would have to
remember all of the earlier verses that had been sung and then add a verse on
the end. If they failed to remember the
verses, they would most likely have to pay a forfeit, such as giving someone a
kiss or giving a sweetmeat to another reveller. The lyrics of the carol are also
said to contain religious symbolism, such as the ‘Seven Swans a-Swimming’
referring to the seven sacraments of the Church, or the seven gifts of the Holy
Spirit. This may have originated from
the time when the Roman Catholic Church was being suppressed in England, and
needed to pass on the Catholic faith in a hidden manner, such as in the words
of a popular song, although there is no evidence to support this.</div>
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So when you find yourself singing this popular carol this
Christmas season, or you start to get anxious about getting your Christmas
Decorations down on time, stop and take some time out to remember the history
and traditions of The Twelve Days of Christmas and where these seasonal customs
came from.</div>
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Image <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Twelfth001.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a> Public Domain </div>
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HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-8290807157379196122011-10-07T19:22:00.001+01:002012-02-23T11:35:20.490+00:00Why Explore The Valley of the Queens?<div class="MsoNormal">
Do you long to visit Luxor and explore the many monuments of the Ancient Egyptians? Luxor offers many spectacular monuments such as the great temples of Karnak, Luxor and Deir el-Bahri, the magnificent pharaoh’s tombs in the Valley of the Kings and the workmen’s village at Deir el-Medina. However, one of the ancient sites that you should not miss is the Valley of the Queens. The Valley of the Queens is a small wadi on the West Bank of the Nile that contains between 75-80 tombs of queens, princes, princesses and high officials from the early 18<sup>th</sup> dynasty until the 20<sup>th</sup> dynasty of Ancient Egypt. In Arabic the valley is known as the ‘Biban al-Harim’ and in ancient times it was called ‘Ta-Set-Neferu’ or ‘The Place of Beauty’. During the time when the Valley of the Queens was being used as a necropolis, it would have been a busy place with teams of tomb builders working and mortuary priests performing daily rituals and giving offerings and prayers for the deceased.</div>
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Many of the tombs were simple, undecorated affairs and the owners have not been identified as there are no inscriptions on the walls and no funerary equipment with the owner’s name on it has been found. All of the tombs in the Valley of the Queens are numbered, like all Theban tombs, and are prefixed QV for Queen’s Valley. There may also be tombs that have not yet been discovered in the Valley, as there are also remnants of funerary equipment from other interments that have been found during excavation, which give an indication that their owners may have been buried in the Valley of the Queens.</div>
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So who we know was buried in the Valley of the Queens? There are several tombs of the family of Ramesses the Great to be found in the valley and the most famous is the tomb that he carved out for his beloved wife Queen Nefertari (1290-1224 BC). This jewel-bright tomb was excavated by Ernesto Schiaparelli and the Italian Archaeological Mission in 1904 and is thought to be one of the most beautifully decorated tombs in all of Egypt. The walls are decorated with brightly coloured painted scenes, many which depict Nefertari accompanied by various Egyptian deities. She is also often shown on the painted walls wearing a golden vulture headdress. This dazzling tomb also boasts an arresting astronomical ceiling painted dark blue and studded with painted golden stars. The tomb was extensively robbed in antiquity, and most of the rich funerary equipment, including the coffins and royal mummy, were ransacked. The only fragments of Nefertari’s mummy that remain are pieces of her knees that are now housed in the Egyptian Museum in Turin.</div>
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The origins of Nefertari are unknown, but she may have been related to the Amarna royal family from the late 18<sup>th</sup> dynasty as a cartouche of the Pharaoh Ay was found on a fragment of furniture or the pommel of a cane in her tomb. Her name means ‘beautiful companion’ and she was married to Ramesses II when she was a young teenager and was his most prominent and favourite wife until her death in her early forties in around year 25 of her husband’s reign. Unlike most Egyptian queens, Nefertari was featured prominently on Ramesses II’s statues and monuments and he even built her a temple next to his own at Abu Simbel. There is every indication that there was real affection between this royal couple and Ramesses II had a love poem inscribed on the walls of her tomb and she was referred to in an inscription at Abu Simbel as ‘she for whom the sun doth shine’.</div>
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The limestone of in the Valley of the Queens is not of the highest quality, so Nefertari’s tomb was plastered several times before the painted funerary scenes could be executed by the ancient artists. The area is also subject to earthquakes and the precious wall paintings developed cracks and damage, which led to the tomb to being closed to the public in the 1950s for conservation. In 1986 serious works were undertaken by the Getty Conservation Institute, and further work was done in 1988. It was discovered that one of the main offenders was salt. Both the local Theban limestone and the plaster that the ancient Egyptian tomb builders used contained large amounts of salt which crystallised and forced parts of the plaster away from the walls and peeled off areas of the painted scenes. The earlier restoration project had actually further damaged the irreplaceable painted images, so the whole of QV66 had to be cleaned and the wall paintings stabilised. This restoration was an immense project and was not completed until 1992. The tomb of Nefertari was reopened to the public again in 1995, but the number of tickets sold was severely restricted. However, even the small amounts of tourists that were allowed to enter the tomb caused further damage to the painted images on the wall and it was closed again in 2003. These days only a very few lucky tourists on certain private tours or with special permission can view this most exquisite of Egyptian tombs.</div>
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There are also several tombs of the sons of Ramesses III to be found in the Valley of the Queens, and after the tomb of Nefertari they are regarded as some of the finest to be found in the Valley. They include QV55, which is the tomb of Prince Amunherkhepshef who was a son of Pharaoh Ramesses III and his Great Royal Wife, Queen Tyti, who also has a tomb nearby in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_the_Queens">Valley of the Queens</a>. It is thought that Prince Amunherkhepshef was only about 15 years old when he died around year 30 of his father’s reign and he is shown in most of the wall paintings in the tomb wearing the side locks of youth. Although he was one of the pharaoh’s younger sons, he still held some very important titles such as ‘Fan Bearer to the Right of the King’ ‘Superior of the Two Lands’ and ‘Royal Scribe’</div>
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The tomb of Prince Amunherkhepshef was unfortunately discovered to have been completely looted in antiquity, probably not long after it had been sealed during the 19<sup>th</sup> dynasty, when it was excavated between 1903 and 1904 during the second campaign undertaken by the Italian Archaeological Mission. The tomb is decorated with well-executed painted scenes which mainly depict Amunherkhepshef’s father presenting him to the various Egyptian gods and goddesses.</div>
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Apart from an unfinished pink granite sarcophagus, very little in the way of funerary equipment was ever recovered during the excavation of this tomb. In fact, further research has shown that Amunherkhepshef was never actually buried in this tomb, but was in fact interred in an adapted sarcophagus once belonging to Queen Tausert in the tomb of Chancellor Bay in the Valley of the Kings (KV13). There is, however, one fascinating, albeit slightly gruesome artefact still on display in QV55 and that is the mummy of a foetus wrapped in linen bindings. This tiny mummy was originally found in a tiny wooden chest, but is now kept in an urn in the back chamber of the tomb.</div>
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The opening hours are 6am to 5pm, but the best time to visit the <a href="http://www.touregypt.net/queens.htm">Valley of the Queens</a> is very early in the morning, before the sun gets too hot and the crowds have descended. The tombs that are generally open on a daily basis are those of Tyti, Amunherkhepshef and Khaemwaset, although this may vary. There are local vendors at the entrance to the site selling souvenirs and there are toilets. As with all the ancient sites in Luxor, it is a good idea to wear a hat and cover your arms to protect yourself from the hot Egyptian sun, wear suitable footwear and take a bottle of water with you.</div>
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<br /></div>HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-16042239201903984352011-08-16T19:37:00.001+01:002012-02-23T11:35:37.074+00:00What Was The Fate of Queen Nefertiti?Nefertiti is regarded as being one of the most beautiful of the Ancient Egyptian Queens, but she is also a very enigmatic Queen. Although today the image of Nefertiti is famous the world over, with the bust of Nefertiti in the Berlin museum being one of the most famous sculptures of the ancient world and her exquisite face adorning everything from jewelry, to scarves to tea towels, we still do not know the origins of Nefertiti or what happened to her at the end.<br />
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There has been much speculation among Egyptologists as to who the parents of Nefertiti were and how she came to marry a future Pharaoh. Was she an Egyptian royal princess, or was she a foreign princess who had been sent from a foreign court? Or was she the daughter of a noble Egyptian family, who were somehow well connected enough to the royal family to be able to wed their daughter to Pharaoh's son?<br />
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Nefertiti became an exceptionally influential figure during the Amarna period of Egypt's history, and was shown in equal stature to her husband, the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten, and seems to have enthusiastically promoted his new beliefs in the single god Aten. The royal couple had six daughters, but are not recorded as having had a son.<br />
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What happens to Nefertiti at the end of her life is as mysterious as where she came from, so read on to find out more about the mysterious fate of <a href="http://cmhypno.hubpages.com/_cmblog/hub/Nefertiti--Where-Did-She-Come-From-and-Where-Did-She-Go">Queen Nefertiti</a>.<br />
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<br /></div>HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-80714546411354831132011-07-05T11:28:00.001+01:002011-12-03T10:51:26.347+00:00Giant Fossil Wombat Found In AustraliaHow would you feel if you were taking a gentle stroll through the bush in the Australian Outback, and you suddenly found yourself nose-to-nose with a giant wombat-like creature? Well, this would have been the experience of the first aboriginal people who landed in Australia, as the island continent was at that time home to a creature called Diprotodon. Diprotodon was probably the largest marsupial that ever walked the planet and made its home in Australia between 2 million and 25,000 years ago.<br />
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Previously only fragments of these fossil giant wombats have been discovered, but now scientists are excited because a complete Diprotodon fossil has been discovered in a remote part of Northern Queensland on the Gulf of Carpentaria.<br />
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The discovery of the complete Diprotodon skeleton will help scientists more accurately assess the size, weight and movements of this huge prehistoric marsupial. It is thought that Diprotodon could grow up to 14 feet long and weigh up to three tons. Luckily, the giant wombat was a vegetarian, but with its great size and weight, would be able to crush anything in its path.<br />
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Scientists are not sure why this giant beast, a member of the Australian megafauna, became extinct, but one fossil bone found in New South Wales, shows signs that it had been pierced with an arrowhead. As the Diprotodon died out not long after humans first settled in Australia, the question has to be asked as to whether the giant wombat was hunted to extinction?<br />
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Hopefully, this amazing fossil discovery in Australia, will help scientists to piece together much more information on Diprotodon, so that we can learn much more about how they lived and what exactly it was that led to their extinction.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-u_5mOPICXy4/ThLmOQKfD_I/AAAAAAAAATo/lIw83X8xXUo/s1600/Diprotodon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="211" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-u_5mOPICXy4/ThLmOQKfD_I/AAAAAAAAATo/lIw83X8xXUo/s320/Diprotodon.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Diprotodon - cast of composite skeleton Queensland Museum </td></tr>
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<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=cmhypnotherap-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=1892391139&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe>HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-6841817852241416152011-05-25T17:35:00.001+01:002011-12-03T10:52:23.236+00:00Ancient Egypt Revealed - Thousands of Lost Tombs and Seventeen PyramidsModern technology has now very firmly got a grip on the world of Egyptology with some very exciting results. Researchers have been using infrared satellite imaging, known as space archaeology, to survey parts of Egypt and so far they have located seventeen lost pyramids, one thousand lost tombs and scores of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011pwms">buried ancient settlements</a>.<br />
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</div><div>Egyptologists have already confirmed that they already know of the existence of two of those lost pyramids and they are highly impressed with the accuracy of the information that has been produced so far. The researchers also think that there are still many more major sites to be discovered that have been deeply covered silt along the banks of the River Nile.</div><div><br />
</div><div>One excavation site that is proving to be particularly exciting is the ancient city of Tanis in the Nile Delta, where a 3,000 year old house is being dug by the Egyptologists. As they have gradually uncovered this ancient dwelling, it has proved to match almost exactly the outline shown on the satellite images from space.</div><div><br />
</div><div>So hopefully we can all look forward many exciting future finds, which will greatly add to our understanding of the magnificent culture that is Ancient Egypt!</div><div><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IwaDgJNmb20/Td0udyshQCI/AAAAAAAAATc/yY3WzPc5ioA/s1600/Deir+el+Medina+%252822%2529.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IwaDgJNmb20/Td0udyshQCI/AAAAAAAAATc/yY3WzPc5ioA/s320/Deir+el+Medina+%252822%2529.JPG" width="240" /></a></div><div><br />
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</div><div><iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=cmhypnotherap-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0500051593&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe></div><div><iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=cmhypnotherap-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B00007G201&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe></div><div><iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=cmhypnotherap-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0762430184&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe></div><div><iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=cmhypnotherap-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=2913805027&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe></div>HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-84805215767957892532011-05-20T15:07:00.001+01:002011-12-03T10:53:03.892+00:00Did the Neanderthals Survive Longer Than We Thought?Neanderthals were an ancient species of human that flourished in Europe for around 200,000 years until modern humans put in an appearance around 40,000 years again. The disappearance of the Neanderthals has caused fierce debate among the experts, with many different theories being put forward and many being shot down again. It has been thought that the last bands of Neanderthals to survive in Europe were living at the extremes of the Iberian Peninsula, in Gibraltar, Spain and Portugal.<br />
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However, new archaeological evidence shows that Neanderthals may have survived for much longer than was previously thought on the icy tundra of sub-Arctic Russia. A typically Neanderthal tool kit has been excavated at a site called Byzovaya in the Ural Mountains, that comprises of hundreds of stone tools. These ancient stone tools have shown that the site was last occupied around 33,000 years ago and were dated by using both radiocarbon and luminescence dating. Why they are thought to be Neanderthal tools is because they are the classic scrapers and flakes that are associated with this prehistoric species of humans, and are known as Mousterian Technology.<br />
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This late date is believed to be after the last Neanderthals had supposedly died out, but although the tool kits are typically Neanderthal, as no human fossil remains have yet been discovered it can not be taken as definitive evidence that the Neanderthals had survived this long. The location of Byzovaya is also surprising as it is 620 miles outside the previously accepted range of the Neanderthal people, and to survive there these hardy early humans would have had to learn to cope with very harsh and cold weather conditions.<br />
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So did the Neanderthals really make their last stand in the icy wastes of the sub-Arctic and did they really survive for thousands of years later than was previously thought?<br />
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<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=cmhypnotherap-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0674025598&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe>HypnoGirlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15620669278505860135noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3838731270372451431.post-43319498563095941522011-05-18T18:26:00.001+01:002011-12-03T10:53:28.326+00:00Coronary Heart Disease Found in Ancient Egyptian PrincessMost of us think that heart disease is a modern phenomenon and that people in antiquity lived lives blessedly free of these debilitating conditions. Well it seems that coronary heart disease is truly an ancient condition and the oldest ever case has just been diagnosed in the mummy of an Ancient Egyptian Princess.<br />
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<a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110517121824.htm">Princess Ahmose Meryet Amun</a> was a daughter of the Pharaoh Seqenenre Tao II of Ancient Egypt's 17th dynasty and died around 3,500 years ago sometime in her 40's. This might seem to be a young age to die for us folks of the 21st century, but this was a fairly average age to die for Ancient Egyptians. Her mummy is housed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and it was during the recent scans of the royal mummies that the royal princess's heart disease was detected.<br />
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During the scan it was found that Princess Ahmose Meryet Amun suffered from coronary atherosclerosis during her life, which is a potentially fatal condition that is caused by plaque building up in the arteries, causing blockages that can lead to strokes or heart attacks. It was discovered that the Egyptian princess had blockages in five of her major arteries, including those that supply the heart and the brain, which would have required her to have a double bypass operation today.<br />
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One of the causes of coronary heart disease is thought to be lifestyle, with modern diets rich in trans fats and sugar, lack of exercise and smoking being among the main culprits. But although the average Ancient Egyptian diet and lifestyle was probably low in risk factors for coronary heart disease, Ahmose Meryet Amun was a member of the royal family and a such probably ate a much richer diet and did far less physical exercise than other members of the population at that time.<br />
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There is also the suggestion that her atherosclerosis could have a genetic element, as several other of her female relative's mummies also showed signs of this disease. The cause of her disease could also be inflammation brought on by her immune system responding to the infections that were prevalent in Egypt during that period.<br />
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So it seems that the royalty of Ancient Egypt also suffered from a disease that is a scourge of the modern world.<br />
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