I wonder if we can trace any ancient myths to this stuff. It's easy to picture an ancient person taking some back to their village and showing off the "hair of a god" that is "impervious to fire" and then selling it for a few drachma.
Is there a name for that field of study? I was reading about taking newly discovered comet orbit timings and correlating them to thousand-year-old Chinese astrology documents - fascinating. The entire idea of relating myths to geological/astrological events is obviously quite polluted (perhaps rightly so) by the biblical flood stuff, but even for the extremely critical there are a lot of fascinating links between newly discovered comets / supernovae / geological processes and ancient human mythology.
Yes, it all falls under the fuzzily defined umbrellas of history/archaeology/anthropology. What you're talking about would fall under archaeoastronomy, a subfield of archaeology.
And so are trinities, heavenly parents/mothers, virgin birth, and of course, being the Son Of God. Once you learn about enough religions, you realize how cliché their tropes are.
There are some interesting concepts in milder religions like Buddhism or Shinto, who are less about punishment and more about peace and harmony.
But moderns are jaded and blasé about stuff that's recycled.
When the Gospels were written, the known world was fascinated and captivated with what was being preached. Because it was familiar, logical, and somewhat inevitable to them. To Jews it was revolutionary, and to Greeks it was transcendent.
The inspired authors of the New Testament tugged on every heart string, checked every name, and copied every dank meme that mattered. This stuff is fulfillment of every prophecy. Of course it's cliché; that's a good thing!
We live in a society entirely molded by Abrahamic thought, so to a lot of people those lines of thinking feel obvious and natural when they were in actuality a progression of human thought.
I've always thought it was funny when people say then don't need religion to know morality-- well yes that's true because the morality of the Abrahamic faiths has become the morality of our times(broad strokes ways). People take for granted that we don't follow the moral rules of Carthage, or ancient Greece. Or else we'd allow child sacrifice in the case of Carthage, or pederasty in the case of Greece.
There were some epic floods at the end of the last ice age, pretty recently in human history. I wonder how many flood myths have their origin from that. Plus sea level rose 120 meters (~400ft). Humans like to live near the coast, imagine how many villages were flooded and abandoned.
Civilization "started" pretty soon right after the last ice age - my theory is that's when it actually restarted after earlier attempts at civilization were washed away.
So in the cosmology of the Wheel of Time, people always find themselves in the Third Age.
This is because there's always one Age before the current one, the Second Age, the Age of Legends, that is remembered as distorted legends of the truth of what happened.
And then there's the Age before the Age of Legends, the First Age, which is the remnants of the legends the people in the Second Age told about what happened before them, which have now fade to myth that is almost unrecognizable from anything that happened in truth.
Atlantis and the Garden of Eden would be examples of the latter -- stories that people in our distant past told about their distant past.
Not sure if you're familiar with the journalist Graham Hancock, who has been writing about this since the mid 90s, with similar conjecture. It's interesting.
He's often maligned by various scientists, but repeatedly says he's just a journalist chasing pieces of a puzzle about what was forgotten back then with all the ice age transition climate changes.
Just like societies so far apart all making pyramids. Aliens! is the only explanation of why such disparate societies all have such similarities. Anything you might think as rational to counter Aliens! is going to fall on deaf ears, at least once I stick my fingers in them ;-)
~20 years ago in college one of my best friend's had a 'break stuff' party in the basement of his off-campus house. The party goers took anything they could find around campus - things like discarded printers, etc - and destroyed them in the basement. Given it was a party, they also had lots of empty bottles of beer. The next morning, after spending some time in the basement cleaning up, one of the housemates came upstairs coughing blood. There were enough glass particles still in the air that he had inhaled some.
Reminds me of some of the now dangerous toys we used to play with when we were kids.
A relative of mine had one that involved some kind of Bunsen burner, and what we would, today consider a kiddie glass blowing kit. He used to try to make ever longer, and thinner glass strings similar to this.
There was also another one that wasn't glass, but some kind of reactive plasticy chemical that you could similarly blow into spheres, or stretch into strands, and would eventually harden into a glass-like substance that looked like it was tye-died. I don't know what it was called, but I can still remember the chemical smell very well.
So many wonderful things of youth that are now forbidden for our safety.
I found lots of articles touting that mercury can vaporize at room temperature and then be absorbed through the lungs but none of them had details of how much exposure this would cause.
My mother grew up in India. There were apparently some asectic 'sages' that would play with mercury she told me about. I don't really know what they were doing, just that my mom always remarked that she didn't understand how they would hold the mercury in their hands and seem to be fine. There's apparently something to it, whether it's a trick or otherwise.
My dad was gifted a vial of mercury, and he let us handle the mercury until it got dirty. And he was a primary school teacher!
Back then, some toys not only had lead paint, they were literally made of lead! There were capsules that "walked" down an incline. They were easy to open, and inside they had a lead ball lubricated by metallic dust (which I hope wasn't lead because it stuck everywhere). Crazy to think that was normal.
> some toys not only had lead paint, they were literally made of lead!
Some still is. Lookup reports on cheap toys from China that aren’t associated with a real brand.
And not just toys. Many cheap items like ceramic ware has detectable lead in it today. This stuff gets through in the global market, even at mainstream stores that source and brand but don’t oversee manufacturing.
I had mercury as a kid, taken from an old thermostat. I knew it was toxic, so I didn't handle it directly and certainly didn't show my parents. Eventually, I melted some solder into it to and made it my chemistry teacher's problem.
I definitely played with glass wool insulation too. How could we not?
In the early 90s, I had a plastic maze with a transparent cover where the object was to tilt it so that the blob of mercury in the middle would move around the maze.
No idea what happened to it, I’m sure it’s heavily polluting a landfill somewhere.
> While fragile and brittle, they are also sharp. As tiny pieces of glass, they can become lodged in human skin and much worse, eyes. Caution around the fibers is necessary to avoid injury from the slivers.
The basalt fiber material is neat, I've used it to reinforce concrete, works like fiberglass. I used stuff from this company: https://basfiber.com/products
People generally dont hang out that close to where the flow is active, however during the 2018 flow into Puna, there were a lot of people who got very close to it. Some wore gas masks, like the volcanologists who were taking lava samples but mostly because the fumes are noxious not because of Pele's hair.
It was that if they meant Pelé then they would have written Pelé in the headline. Not Pele. Because I don’t imagine they would publish a wrong name in a headline.
i'm on a mac, so it's a "much easier" opt-shift-8 for ° or opt-shift-e for ´. it's not like i really don't know how to do these things. i was just goofing with the poster for being so pedantic
Not too much more on Wikipedia except that it occurs naturally worldwide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pele%27s_hair