Historic Tales of Dragons and Reptilian Monsters
The Egyptians were said to be invaded each year by flying serpents from Arabia that threatened their frankincense trade, while Alexander the Great encountered a great hissing dragon when he invaded India. In 1035, a terrible dragon was killed in the swamps of Hungary, the memory of this event living on through the royalty of the Báthory family and the Báthory seal.
In Kradów, Poland, a dragon was said to terrify the inhabitants, requiring weekly an offering of cattle to appease its appetite lest it devour human flesh. The dragon’s demise, according to Polish folklore, traces to a poor cobbler’s apprentice. Cleverly concealing smoldering sulfur in the skin of a calf, this apprentice caused the fiery death of the dragon. Today, large bones said to belong to this dragon hang from the ceiling of the Wawel Cathedral.
The Voynich Manuscript is an enigmatic 240-page book penned in the early part of the 1400s, and which has consistently defied the world’s finest code-breakers, who have spent decades trying to decipher the odd text. It takes its name from a man named Wilfrid Voynich, a dealer of books who obtained the manuscript back in 1912. As for the contents of the Voynich Manuscript, they include a great deal of material relative to botany – as well as close to thirty- pages of imagery of the heavens: stars, planets and moons. But, as for why, and what the attendant text says, no one knows. As to how it fell into Voynich’s hands, we have this from the man himself:
What Merpeople Say About Us
How changing perceptions of mermaids and mermen reveal deeper understandings of myth, religion, science, wonder and capitalism.
By Vaughn Scribner
Merpeople’s hybridity has helped them maintain a presence in both scientific and mythological camps. In many people’s minds, mermaids and mermen remain mythical creatures more suitable for bedtime stories than scientific tracts. Yet for others merpeople symbolize the outer limits of our scientific and mythological investigations.
Just as the evolution of science has not done away with lingering notions of wonder and myth, so too has our innate need to push boundaries of knowledge led humanity into strange often mind-blowing frontiers of research and self-reflection. Humanity’s interaction with merpeople demonstrates our ongoing need for discovery as much as our attempts at regulation and classification. Like the hybrid monstrosities with which humankind has always grappled, humanity maintains a tenuo
1685 (undated)
Description
A remarkable finely engraved 1685 map of the surface of the Sun by Johann Zahn. The view provides a dramatic image of the Sun based upon the revolutionary 1665 work of the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602 - 1680). The map was engraved for Zahn s important study of optics and optical devices, the
Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus Sive Telescopium. In this view, the Sun, presented as a large wall hanging in an Italianate portico, is defined by erupting solar volcanoes, mountains, and dark smoke plumes. It is surrounded by two scientist/philosophers who discuss the mysteries of light and optics. A tablet in the lower right references letters coded to the diagram, including the solar axis, the solar equator, the northern and southern polar regions, the central equatorial region, sunspots (A), and solar prominences (puffs of smoke).
It’s a question that newbies often cannot get a straight answer to:
Which Tree of Life is the oldest?
There are several main versions of the Tree of Life that belong to different schools. Each one has different letter attributions and different shapes, so it can be difficult for the new student to decide which one they should be working with. We’re going to look at the history and development of each one and assess their merits.
Joseph ben Abraham Gikatilla, ‘Portae lucis’, (1516)
Credit: commons.wikimedia.org
In 1516 a diagram of the Tree of Life was drawn by Johann Reuchlin and it came to appear on the cover of Paolo Riccio’s Latin translation of Joseph Gikatilla’s