Footprint of Comet Encke?

Featured image: Detail of Astrology Manuscript, ink on silk, BCE 2th century, Han, unearthed from Mawangdui tomb 3rd, Chansha, Hunan Province, China. Hunan Province Museum by Unknown author – China Arts, Volume 1st, Wen Wu Publishing, Beijing, China, 1979-10, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19264187

Philip Jamieson and Marianne Schmidt

In the last weeks of 2020 the Sydney Dance Company performed Indian-Australian Raghav Handa’s Cult of the Titans, a work exploring the Nazi appropriation of the swastika from Hindu culture. The Company was so concerned at the depth of animosity in the community towards the symbol that it provided a content warning that the work contained swastika images and invited concerned audience members to leave if they wished. In a video introduction, Handa explained his piece as an attempt to reclaim from its horrific association with Nazism the Swastika’s ancient symbolism in Hinduism of light and peace.

While this positive symbolism in Hinduism is indeed millenia old, the origins of the swastika are actually far more ancient and its original meaning still the subject of much speculation. While long found in Eastern religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, its use is also found in many ancient cultures around the world, in some cases dating from the Neolithic and even late Paleolithic Periods. The earliest known example, excavated at an Ice Age site at Mezin in the Ukraine and dating from at least 12,000 years ago (in some accounts 15,000 years old and possibly even older), is a bird figurine carved from mammoth ivory tusk, its torso displaying what Mukti Jain Campion has elegantly described as “an intricate meander pattern of joined-up swastikas”. Photos of the figurine can be seen in her article at https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29644591.

So what might this swastika imagery have been intended to represent in antiquity? Continue reading “Footprint of Comet Encke?” →

A Note on “We are NOT Alone: Thoughts on Comets and Meteorites – Where Life Began?”

Our post, We are NOT Alone: Thoughts on Comets and Meteorites – Where Life Began?, by Marianne Schmidt and myself has been published in New Dawn magazine: July-August 2020 issue (volume 181: 25-30).

New Dawn is an excellent magazine first published back in 1991. It publishes material exploring ancient wisdom and new thinking. It has an online presence at https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/

Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ Tower of Wisdom

Featured image by Idontfindaoriginalname – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77784213

A piece on the topic, Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ Tower of Wisdom, that I co-authored with my writing colleague, Marianne Schmidt, was published on Ancient Origins on 23 December 2019. The following link is to a preview of the piece:

https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/mary-magdalene-0013047

The full text of the piece is available with Premium membership on the magazine’s main site.

Ancient Origins is a thoroughly engaging ancient history website that aims to inspire open-minded learning about our past for the betterment of our future through the sharing of research, education and knowledge.

Ancient Origins of the Zodiac

A piece I prepared on this topic was published in 176 (September – October 2019) New Dawn 61-64.

This is an updated, broader and more well developed revision of an earlier piece I wrote on The Lion Man and the Age of Leo.

New Dawn is an excellent magazine first published back in 1991. It publishes material exploring ancient wisdom and new thinking.

New Dawn has an online presence at https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/

Uncovering the Truth Behind Matriarchal Societies in the Ancient World

A piece I prepared on this topic was published on Ancient Origins on 7 March 2019. The link appears below:

https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-ancient-traditions/ancient-cultures-matriarchal-society-0011588

Animal Insights into Risky Play

Play it seems is ubiquitous across both cultures and time. The archaeological record supports play amongst our ancestors from at least the Paleolithic era. Much of that record is to be found in physical artefacts like balls, dice, gaming boards and other toys, but some “astonishingly beautiful” children’s footprints preserved beneath the Namibian Sands some 1500 years ago delightfully show a small group of children skipping, hopping and jumping as they shepherded the family flock (Bennett and Reynolds).

And children amongst our ancestors were not accorded the constancy of care so characteristic in today’s society. Footprints found in Southern Ethiopia and probably made by the extinct species Homo heidelbergensis (600,000 to 200,000 years ago) “may have been made by children as young as one or two, standing in the mud while their parents and older siblings got on with their activities” – “[t]his was their school room, and the curriculum was the acquisition of survival skills” (Bennett and Reynolds). The apparently “overwhelming parenting lesson from the distant past … [in which] children had more responsibilities, less adult supervision and certainly no indulgence from their parents” presents “a picture of a childhood very different from our own, at least from the privileged perspective of life in Western society” (Bennett and Reynolds).

It is in the realm of “risky play” that the protectiveness of our modern society is most clearly evident. That area of “thrilling and exciting activity that involves a risk of physical injury, … [but] provides opportunities for challenge, testing limits, exploring boundaries and learning about injury risk” (Carrig). Continue reading “Animal Insights into Risky Play” →

The Lion Man and the Age of Leo

The lion man from the Stadel Cave in Hohlenstein, Lonetal — Thilo Parg / Wikimedia Commons, License: CC BY-SA 3.0

In a paper recently accepted for publication in the Athens Journal of History, two British academics (Martin Sweatman and Alistair Coombs ) have greatly expanded “our understanding of the astronomical knowledge of ancient people” from a study of Palaeolithic cave art sites in Germany, France and Spain, and Neolithic sites in Turkey. They conclude that “[t]his knowledge, it seems, enabled [the ancients] to record dates, using animal symbols to represent star constellations, in terms of precession of the equinoxes”. They present these conclusions as “at odds with the conventional view that astronomy began in Mesopotamia a few millennia BC and that precession of the equinoxes was discovered by Hipparchus in the 2nd Century BC” which they consider must now be seen as “unsafe”.

Outside the cautious understated expression common in the scientific world, the authors more closely reflect the true impact of their conclusions in observing that “we have undoubtedly cracked [an] ancient zodiacal code”: “This code was likely used for many tens of thousands of years, from at least the time Homo sapiens migrated into Western Europe, around 40,000 years ago, until comparatively recently”.

Continue reading “The Lion Man and the Age of Leo” →

Are Animals Spiritual?

On 21 August this year a woman died in a road accident in China. Tragically, more than 700 such deaths are likely to have occurred in China on that single day. However, in the months since, her passing has become a matter of international public interest as her canine companion has continued to stand steadfastly by the guard rail near the spot where she was killed. Allusions have been made to Hachiko, the Akita dog that for almost 10 years from 1925 waited at the end of each day for its dead owner outside a train station in Tokyo (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-13/loyal-dog-waits-for-almost-three-months-for-dead-owner-to-return/10491620), although there are many examples upon which one could draw of such canine “loyalty”.

I wonder though if the commonly used term “loyalty” properly captures the sentiment behind these actions. I consider them more properly understood as “faith”, a steadfast and unwavering belief that their human companion will rejoin them. Is “faith” spiritual? Are the actions of these dogs evidence to a human mind of a spiritual ethos? And the deeper question: Are animals spiritual? Continue reading “Are Animals Spiritual?” →

From knowledge, truth, from truth, understanding

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Seek first to understand, then to be understood

– Stephen R Covey

On this blog site I generally post pieces that reflect my values and beliefs. Should readers be interested I also have another blog site on which I post pieces more concerned with my personal experiences in life:

https://mybitesizecredo.wordpress.com/

Posts – links by topic

Aboriginal Australians

Central Australia’s Caterpillar Dreaming: Gleaning an insight into Indigenous ritual and ceremony

Central Australian Dreaming Sparks a Glimmer of Hope at a Time of Global Crisis