What reality lay behind ancient China’s flood legends?  Who was the Yellow Emperor?  Who was Archer Yi, what was his vermilion bow, how did he shoot down nine of ten suns, and why were there ten suns in the first place?

We now know the answers to these and other questions about ancient China.  These answers can lead us to a new understanding of Chinese history, of the worldwide Bronze Age catastrophes, and of the history of climate change.  (Ma Yuan, The Yellow River Breaches Its Course, Wikimedia Commons)

 

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choosing_a_mouthwash_or_rinse_thats_right_for_you_lg

Slipping endlessly through the crack between oral and respiratory medicine, the humble mouthwash has slowly won more respect among savvy practitioners and patients as a solution for a range of indications.1 In Japan many millions of people gargle three times a day with green tea extracts or other mouthwashes to ward off upper respiratory tract infections (URTIs), and Japanese clinical studies have confirmed the value of this approach (Furushima D et al. Molecules. 2018 Jul 20;23(7)). Worldwide, medical practitioners recommend gargling to patients.  Many people on their own have decided that gargling makes sense, while millions swish with mouthwash to protect teeth and gums as well as to combat halitosis.

Still, for curious reasons, this formidable method of suppressing infections remains in medical limbo. Not because there is no need. The average American suffers 2.5 episodes of URTI per year, with high costs for treatment, lost days of work, and morbidity. URTIs also exacerbate asthma, and they can enter the lungs and prove fatal.  As a generic adjuvant therapy, gargling can help reduce viral load during epidemics while remaining hard for mutating viruses to outflank.

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braceletThe Science of Medicinal Bracelets

The vision inspiring the study of medicinal bracelets is of an attractive, simple, easy-to-use, safe, naturally effective kind of medicine. Investigation of medicinal bracelets can also reveal fascinating deeper patterns of the body.

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Acting in a coherent fashion, the red blood cells play a much more important role in life processes than is commonly known.

The red blood cells’ unique, remarkable role in oxygen and carbon dioxide transport sharply distinguishes them from the body’s other cells.  So do their anaerobic energy metabolism, peculiar biconcave shape, 120-day life cycle (with 2,000,000 new RBCs formed every second), iron content, and extremely high hemoglobin content (roughly 270 million hemoglobin molecules are packed into each one of 25 trillion RBCs). While their counterparts in many vertebrates and invertebrates retain the nuclei and organelles that mammalian RBCs eject in the course of maturation, the erythrocyte group in general exhibits certain “prokaryotoid” characteristics,

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Crete Snake goddessThe famous Snake Goddess of ancient Crete has long attracted students of history and art. Elegant, risquée, enigmatic, she embodies the mystery and allure of Minoan civilization.

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Lunar Eclipse

Curiously, even though the Babylonians reported many details of celestial phenomena, the astrologers of Babylon are said not to have relied on actual observations.

According to a leading expert, “The existence of Babylonian omens for eclipses beginning and clearing in all four directions, or areas of the moon, despite the fact that a lunar eclipse will never begin on the western edge of the moon, indicates a lack of concern with observational veracity in favor of schematic order.”1

But there is another explanation that makes more sense of what the Babylonian astrologers were up to.

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Athena32immanuel-velikovsky-1

When Venus first appeared in the skies around 2525 BC, ancient peoples worldwide strove to come to terms with this brilliant and awesome new comet-planet (the best account is in Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, though it has been corrected in a Revised Venus Theory).  That meant assigning the deity a gender and a name.

In the Near East, they tried both genders.  In its masculine incarnation, Venus became the Bull of Heaven (as Velikovsky pointed out, the comet-planet’s body blocked the sun’s rays from the central portion of its tail and thus it was seen as having two horns).  In its feminine version, Venus was called Ishtar or Astarte; and in the Levant Astarte was depicted with serpents in her hands—the twin tails of the comet.

In Greece, according to Velikovsky, planet Venus was originally named Athena.

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Serpent Mound

411-meter long Great Serpent Mound in Ohio is the world’s longest effigy monument.  Archaeological investigations have yielded conflicting results about its initial construction date, and various theories regarding its meaning have failed to gain traction.  But a Revised Venus Theory–one that modifies Immanuel Velikovsky’s theory that the planet Venus was originally a comet that approached the Earth and caused great devastation–neatly matches key characteristics of the Great Serpent Mound.

Recently, this Revised Venus Theory has gained additional credibility from a commonsensical explanation of how a comet-like Venus could have seemed to emerge from Jupiter as in ancient Hindu and Greek myths (Jupiter’s gravity pulled it from the outer solar system), including a simple, obvious reinterpretation of the Metis myth.  Much new evidence has also emerged.  And the theory has found powerful substantiation from a reinterpretation of the headdress of Queen Nefertari of Egypt, consort of Pharaoh Ramses II, in this image from Abu Simbel (Ramses II’s headdress appears to contain Mars with two moons and a tail, either borrowed from Venus in an encounter or from Martian dust stirred up by an encounter).

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If we can interpret certain ancient myths correctly, they could lead us to more accurate and penetrating views of the history of the Earth and the solar system.  They might teach us about the forces at work and explain anomalies bequeathed to us by a long-hidden past.  But how can we interpret these myths, the products of minds so far removed from ours?  How do we know which interpretation is correct, if any?  Are we doomed to speculate without ever achieving certainty?

Here we will interpret two Bronze Age myths to illustrate the high scientific value such myths might contain.  We will also see how easy it can be to understand a myth once the right interpretation becomes available.

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KarnakSometimes we just need to listen carefully.  Definitely in regard to Karnak.

Egyptian priests told Herodotus, a careful listener, that four times since Egypt had become a kingdom “the Sun rose contrary to his wont; twice he rose where he now sets, and twice he set where he now rises.”

This evidence, and much else, was interpreted by

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stonehenge3One of the world’s most famous monuments, Stonehenge abounds in mysteries and anomalies.

Why was Stonehenge built in the first place?  Why was it radically transformed shortly before 2500 BC into a masterpiece of megalithic architecture?  What explains the intricate, changing patterns of the stones over time?   Why the extraordinary effort?

We now have answers to these and other questions, but to get to them we need to set aside preconceptions and come to terms with something that isn’t simple.

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Phaistos DiskThe famous spiral disk found in Phaistos, Crete in 1908 has long defied efforts to translate it or even to identify the language in which it is written or what kind of a document it might be (it is here in color to aid analysis). Though many scholars and amateurs have proposed theories and even translations, none has seemed persuasive to the great majority of observers. A skeptical view holds that the disk is a forgery, but most scholars reject this. Many scholars agree that the small sample of language in the disk makes a breakthrough very unlikely unless and until other samples of the writing are found.

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