Original Post January 23, 2014 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…
Original Post January 1, 2014 Did Helena Blavatsky and Sir William Crookes inadvertently help to discredit early theories of electromagnetism in the cosmos? Long before the Space Age, theories of a fourth, ‘radiant’ state of matter and electromagnetic explanations of the polar aurora, the zodiacal light, comets, the sun…
Original Post October 31, 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’ –…
Original Post September 27, 2013 Many cultures recalled a period of unbearable cold, which they associated with a distant mythical age of ‘creation’, when the sun did not yet shine or fire had not yet been obtained. Such tales are hardly surprising for higher latitudes, such as the Viking…
Original Post August 31, 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…
Original Post August 29, 2012 ‘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…
From left to right: F. Gutekunst, Ignatius Loyola Donnelly (c. 1898). Courtesy Minnesota Historical Society, Saint Paul, Minnesota. Anonymous, William Comyns Beaumont (date unknown). Bob Kobres, Immanuel Velikovsky (1978) Original Post July 23, 2012 In bestsellers published in 1882 and 1883, the American politician and amateur scientist Ignatius Loyola…
From left to right: Jacob Ferdinand Voet, Thomas Burnet (1675). Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London. William Whiston (18th century), anonymous. Giovanni Rinaldo of Carli-Rubbi (date unknown). Original Post July 20, 2012 Ever since 1950, ‘Velikovsky’ has been a household name, associated with a set of adventurous but highly…
Original Post February 2, 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…
Original Post December 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…
