Feb 13, 2013 Most researchers address ‘known’ questions, such as ‘what causes ice ages?’, ‘how far is the moon?’ or ‘where did the ancestors of the human species live?’. Comparative mythologists face the double challenge of seeking answers to problems which most people are unfamiliar with in the first…
Aug 02, 2013 Leibniz’ beloved adage that natura non facit saltus or ‘nature does not make leaps’ has had to endure a fair amount of comeuppances since it gained currency. An arresting example today of our unpredictable world is the rapid wandering of the north geomagnetic pole in recent years –…
Aug 01, 2013 A common theme in creation myths is that the first human being appeared in the sky, often as a metamorphosis of a divine creator. On Tahiti, people remembered the time before creation when “an expanse of water … covered the abyss, and the god Tino-ta’ata ……
Jun 24, 2013 Science and folk tradition are supposed to be strictly separate domains of knowledge, but in practice they often shade into each other. The image shown above right attempts to map the entire visible universe. The galaxies tend to collect into vast sheets and superclusters of galaxies surrounding large…
Jun 11, 2013 In parts of the Amazonian rainforest, traditional costume included a headdress consisting of a circular arrangement of feathers. The ring of 36 feathers, most of which are white, lacks an obvious counterpart in the skies we see above us. The above example was collected in c….
May 20, 2013 The story of the ‘making of the world’ is a global legacy of all traditional cultures. One of many angles from which it can be approached is an interplay between darkness and light. From an ancient point of view, cosmic ‘creation’ was a protracted ‘dawn’, a…
May 17, 2013 The proverbial ‘golden age’ is a classic case study in the difference between local and global themes in mythology. It was the German ethnologist Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) who first introduced a systematic distinction between universal ‘elementary ideas’ (Elementargedanke) and culture-specific ‘folk ideas’ (Volksgedanke) in 1860. Taken…
May 15, 2013 The discovery of ‘mega-lightning’, upper-atmospheric lightning or transient luminous events (TLEs) is relatively recent, due to the fleeting nature of these phenomena: most last no longer than a few milliseconds. A menagerie of types – such as the playfully labelled ‘sprites’ and ‘ELVES’ – discharge energetically…
Mar 05, 2012 Leaving no stone unturned, some thunderstones may have acquired their association with lightning in still other ways. As mentioned in part three of this article, a future realisation that the Australites may actually have precipitated within the past 10,000 years would certainly hit hard. Yet even this hardly…
Mar 04, 2013 ‘Thunderstones’ in the form of tektites – Did human beings watch them falling? As an additional possibility of no small importance, the concept of the thunderstone may have been sparked by a conflation of lightning with meteors which, on occasion, do deposit rocks onto the surface…
