M.J. Rose

Tis the season for ornamentation and decking halls. This glorious book seems to fit right in…

Minaggio 116: A male Kestrel sits above a Siskin. In the background, a soldiers stands guard on a road leading to a church.

From Atlas Obscura,

See a 400-Year-Old Book Made Entirely from Feathers

“In 1618, Dionisio Minaggio, Chief Gardener of the State of Milan, created a series of pictures. They were images of birds and scenes from the era: hunters, tradesmen, musicians and actors from the Commedia Dell’Arte. The difference was that these pictures were made of feathers, along with some supplementary bird parts: skin, beak and feet. In total, there were 156 images, which were bound into a book: The Feather Book, or Il Bestario Barocco (The Baroque Bestiary).

While the book mostly shows the birds of the Lombardy region, some of the scenes are familiar to us today: one depicts a bloody patient enduring a 17^th-century dentist. Another shows a man waiting patiently for his dog to finish pooping. It’s not clear what prompted Minaggio to create the feather book; some have speculated that it was to occupy his staff during winter and use up the feathers from the kitchen. Others say the regional governor may have commissioned it…”

For the rest, and many photos, click here.

We’ve heard it before: EVERYTHING WE HAVE BEEN TAUGHT ABOUT OUR ORIGINS IS A LIE – But what is some of the more compelling evidence pointing to this drastic claim? This article has a few really interesting examples of OOPARTS (out of place artifacts) that we were previously unfamiliar with (check out the image of the bell, below. It looks Babylonian…or dare we say, Atlantean?)

Everything We Have Been Taught About Our Origins Is A Lie
from Delightful Knowledge

“In June 1936 Max Hahn and his wife Emma were on a walk beside a waterfall near to London, Texas, when they noticed a rock with wood protruding from its core. They decided to take the oddity home and later cracked it open with a hammer and a chisel. What they found within shocked the archaeological and scientific community. Embedded in the rock was what appeared to be some type of ancient man made hammer.

A team of archaeologists analysed and dated it. The rock encasing the hammer was dated to more than 400 million years old. The hammer itself turned out to be more than 500 million years old. Additionally, a section of the wooden handle had begun the metamorphosis into coal. The hammer’s head, made of more than 96% iron, is far more pure than anything nature could have achieved without assistance from relatively modern smelting methods.

In 1889 near Nampa, Idaho, whilst workers were boring an artesian well, a small figurine made of baked clay was extracted from a depth of 320 feet. To reach this depth the workers had to cut through fifteen feet of basalt lava and many other strata below that. That in itself does not seem remarkable, until one considers that the very top layer of lava has been dated to at least 15 million years old!

It is currently accepted by science and geology that coal is a by-product of decaying vegetation. The vegetation becomes buried over time and is covered with sediment. That sediment eventually fossilises and becomes rock. This natural process of coal formation takes up to 400 million years to accomplish.

Anything that is found in lumps of coal or in coal seams during mining, had to have been placed or dropped into the vegetation before it was buried in sediment….”

For the rest, and more photographs of OOPARTS, click here.

A 19th century exploration into “forces unrecognized by our senses” —

Detail from a depiction of thought-transference, the man behind dictating the movement of the other, from Magnetismus und Hypnotismus (1895) by Gustav Wilhelm Gessmann

From The Public Domain Review,

Worlds Without End
“At the end of the 19th century, inspired by radical advances in technology, physicists asserted the reality of invisible worlds — an idea through which they sought to address not only psychic phenomena such as telepathy, but also spiritual questions around the soul and immortality. Philip Ball explores this fascinating history, and how in this turn to the unseen in the face of mystery there exists a parallel to quantum physics today.

William Barrett was puzzled by flames. As the young assistant of the eminent John Tyndall at the Royal Institution in London in the 1860s, he noticed that flames seemed to be sensitive to high-pitched sounds. They would become flattened and crescent-shaped, as Barrett put it, like a “sensitive, nervous person uneasily starting and twitching at every little noise”. He was convinced that this “unseen connection” was mediated by some immaterial intangible influence — it was, he admitted, an effect “more appropriate for a conjuror’s stage than a scientific lecture table”.

Certain people, Barrett decided, were analogues of the sensitive flame, exquisitely attuned to vibrations that others could not perceive, to “forces unrecognized by our senses”. He considered these persons able to receive messages from super-normal spirit-beings existing in an intermediate state between the physical and the spiritual — a phenomenon that might account for telepathy…”

For the rest, click here.