Feb 09, 2012 ‘Plasma mythology’ may be defined as the study of plasmas, specifically near-earth plasmas, in human traditions, such as mythology and proto-scientific records. If this is a discipline, one of its most notable pioneers must be the French savant, Jean-Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan (1678-1771). De Mairan was a…
Feb 07, 2012 Where does the idea of constellations come from? And how do these arbitrary groups of stars relate to mythology? The argument shapes up nicely in the light of traditions that name specific constellations as mythical creatures thus conveyed to the night sky. Examples are again in…
Feb 06, 2012 Where does the idea of constellations come from? And how do these arbitrary groups of stars relate to mythology? The early 20th century saw the ascendancy of a short-lived movement in scholarship called ‘Pan-Babylonianism’, soon bemoaned for its folly. Supporters of this group held that the…
Feb 02, 2012 History repeats itself – and that includes the history of science. Back in 1879, the very notion of ‘prehistoric cave art’ was unheard of. The famous Palaeolithic art galleries inside such caves as at Altamira, Trois Frères and Lascaux still lay undiscovered in the womb of the…
Dec 28, 2011 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…
Dec 23, 2011 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. 1910…
Dec 21, 2011 Nary a traditional culture failed to believe that the gods modelled the ‘lesser’ things on earth, including many aspects of human life, on the ‘greater’ things in the sky. European esoteric belief systems shared and elaborated this core idea. In its most common application, the ‘macrocosm’ or…
Sep 20, 2011 The previous Picture of the Day described several of the many myths that refer to a celestial chain of arrows or a celestial ladder. It asked, how is this theme to be explained? A significant pointer is the realisation that stories concerning the arrow-chain form a subset…
Striations in an electrical discharge tube filled with hydrogen. The left portion is 45.7 centimetres long, the right one 44.4 centimetres. The small tube terminates in a point, the large one in a ring. In the image on top, the point is positively charged, producing 62 disc-shaped strata in the…
Sep 13, 2011 The central challenge in comparative mythology is to account for the many similarities between traditions from different cultures and ages. This task is all the more daunting in cases where the pertinent cultures are not known to have been in touch with each other, even indirectly,…
