Daily history

Good morning,


Quote of the day:

"You fall out of your mother's womb, crawl across open land under fire, and drop into your grave."

                                  Quentin Crisp
                         (Quentin was a pessimist)

After spending nearly 30 hours in my house because of the ice, I finally scratched my way out and went to lunch at a restaurant called "Stax". It was like getting reprieve from the electric chair. Our crack meteorologists locally are calling for a repeat of this incredibly bad weather again next Friday. I normally have a standing rule that I will not ever have any alcoholic beverages in my house. This is because I have no discipline and will drink it until it is gone and I have morphed into a zombie. I blame this personality fault on my Scottish heritage but I may alter that rule next Friday.

At one point in my life I did research on one subject at a time, especially ancient civilizations like the Greeks, Egyptians, Maya, etc. The most time I spent was on the Maya. I keep seeing the end of time being predicted on the Maya calendar because it ends on December 12, 2012. It is true that calendars from different city-states in Central America end on December 12, 2012 and they did not know each other existed, but let's examine the logic of allowing the Maya to scare the hell of us because of their calendar.

The Maya were superb mathematicians and astronomers. Their math was based on the number 20 rather than 10 like it is today. The Maya civilization reached it's peak between 1000 and 1300 and the last of their great cities was Chichen-Itza in the northern part of the Yucatan peninsula. It was in existence when the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortez and his fleet sailed by westbound to Vera Cruz, Mexico. I say the city was in "existence" but not nearly in the grandeur that it was in the past.

There is no question that the Maya were pagan. They had a God for every necessity and important event in their lives. They had a God of storms named Huracan. That is where we get the word hurricane. They had a God for rain, maize (corn), squash, etc. They also believed in human sacrifice. If a drought befell them, they would scour the countryside and adjacent areas for sacrifice victims attempting appease the rain God and continue the sacrifices until the drought ended. Not long ago archaeologists found thousands of human skulls that were sacrifice victims attempting to appease various Gods. They had a hell (underworld) known as Xibalba (shi-bal-ba). In fact, I was in the midst of this research during my marriage to wife number 3. I called this marriage "A Voyage Through Xibalba". Anyway, the method of killing their sacrifice victims was interesting. There was usually a sacrifice altar on the peak of a pyramid. The priests fashioned knives made of obsidian as the killing device. Obsidian is a hard glass-like mineral usually formed as the result of a volcano. The knife could be tooled to a razor sharp edge and was plunged into the victims chest, the heart cut out and raised in sacrifice while still beating. What was left of the corpse was thrown down the steps of the pyramid to the screaming crowds below. One other ceremony was when the "king" of one of the city-states would stick a sting-ray barb into his foreskin, catch the resulting blood on to sacred leaves or slivers of plants and these were set afire. While all of this is going on the king is saying a prayer to a specific God and the resulting smoke from the fire was suppose to carry the prayer to the ears of the God more expeditiously. I would not be praying y'all, I would be crying my eyes out and screaming bloody murder. These descriptions are just a few of the peculiarities of this great civilization that existed for nearly 1,500 years. They were building great cities while north of them on the Great Plains the American Indians were living a nomadic existence with no thought of organization
while south of them the Indians in the Amazon rain forest were eating each other and shrinking heads.

Here we have a gifted people that were skilled in math and astronomy and invented a calendar but were vicious pagans.

After their civilization failed those that followed are to be considered. Keep in mind the Greeks who gave us the great philosophers that we still honor and study to this day. They gave us the concept of democracy and free thought. None of those great thinkers predicted the end of time.

Then the rise of the great thinkers of Europe during the Renaissance among which were Nicoli Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Leonardo Da Vinci, Rafael, Michelangelo, Martin Luther, Galileo and many others none of which ever predicted the end of time except Isaac Newton. By the use of mathematics (naturally) Newton backtracked the book of Revelations and said that the end of time as he deduced from the bible was the year 2060. Of course we have Nostradamus. This guy saw the future by staring into a bowl of water lit by a candle. I think all of us would like to have some of what he was eating, drinking or smoking.

After this we have the likes of Robert Oppenmeimer, Albert Einstein, Max Planck and a myriad of other great minds from the past none of which predict the end of time.

Who are you going to put your trust in? A bright civilization that invented a way of tracking time but advocated mass murder as a ceremony and the kings stabbed themselves in the penis or some of the most brilliant minds that have ever existed?

I know where my money is.

That is all for today.

Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow