A survey over the still unabated quest for immortality and eternal youth!
“Around the World in Eighty days” was easily beaten by two women in 1889
A race few know of today
The silence
Two young women made headlines in their time as explorers, yet today we only celebrate Dr. Livingstone, Roald Amundsen, Sven Hedin, Fridtjof Nansen and all the other male explorers in this era of discoveries. How could they end up in obscurity and why aren’t they listed as honorary members in the famous The Explores club in their list of Famous First? http://www.explorers.org/index.php/about/history/honorary_members
The challenge
Two columnists at two competing newspapers, the New York World and Cosmopolitan were asked to take up a challenge by their respective editors: To beat Phileas Fogg’s 16 year old fictitious record for traveling around the world by any means available in 80 days, as was fantasized in Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days from 1873.
The contenders
In 1889, Nellie Bly was a 25 year old daring newspaper columnist who started a new type of investigative journalism. She conducted undercover infiltrating investigations more than 80 years before Günter Wallraff revealed his similar journalistic methods in 1969. She wrote, among many other subjects, about a mental asylum from the inside, about animal cruelties at a zoo and reported from the trenches in Europe during World War I at Przemysl, Austria. Among her many accomplishments in life, she was a leading industrialist, patenting and mass producing a steel milk-can. http://www.nellieblyonline.com/herwriting
Another driven journalist, with a more literary style, was the 28 year old Elisabeth Bisland, who later went on to write many highly acclaimed books. She had only been employed 6 hours at Cosmopolitan when the race against both the imaginary character Phileas Fogg and the very real Nelly Bly commenced.
The Race
In November 1889 both women started their tours in opposite directions around the world using trains, boats, horse carriages, rickshaws and what not. The daily newspaper New York World didn’t mention Bisland, and since Cosmopolitan only came out monthly it wasn’t until Bly reached Hong Kong in December that she learned she had a competitor. Millions of subscribers to the New York World, followers of Bly’s adventures in her daily columns, were also betting on how many days she would need to complete the race. Half way into the race Bisland had a lead, but due to a misunderstanding thought she had missed her quick steamer in England and instead took a slow boat to USA, which may well have cost her the race. Bly returned to Hoboken, New York, 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes after she had started, thus breaking Foggs’ record of 80 days, something which had never before been accomplished or even attempted. She was received by a huge cheering mass of people.
Board games were produced in her name, which became immensely popular.
But what about miss Bisland’s race result? She came to New York in 76 and a half days, which meant that she had also broken Mr. Phileas Fogg’s fabricated record.
Unfortunately, Bisland was not the winner and not as many people knew about her equally arduous and eventful journey as Bly’s.
Bisland finally received fair recognition when her book In Seven Stages: A Flying Trip Around The World, was published in 1891, a year after her quite unnoticed return. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bisland/stages/stages.html
The latest nonfictional book about these two women are the USA bestseller: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15796712-eighty-days
Nicola Tesla: a technical crackpot or a true genius and creator of modern life?
About todays guest author Jim Gage. He is a former international hornist and versatile musician and a inventor and creator of unusual things for theatre, role plays and more. He is interested in many different subjects and is a member of an amateur astronomical society and The British inventors society.
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Why is Nikola Tesla invisible?
In the history books about great inventors there is a name conspicuously missing, or at least more difficult to find than others of his graduating class. Nikola Tesla contributed so many ideas and developments to technology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that his name should be at the top of any respectable history book on the subject. He is not often spoken of in technological circles today, unless one has been enlightened to the magnitude of his role. Having been employed at an early age by Edison, Tesla was granted access to the inner circle of “modern genius.” His laboratory on 5th avenue in New York was known around around the world in the 1890’s as a place of magic, innovation and importance, a place where the miracles of the future were regularly revealed. Every VIP who visited the city during Tesla’s time of greatness stopped by the wizard’s workshop to witness demonstrations of his accomplishments in harnessing electricity.
The list of Tesla’s real and imagined inventions includes things like wireless transmission of electricity, the radio controlled boat (pic.2) a pocket-sized earthquake machine , the laser, radio, the electric induction motor (called one of the ten most important inventions of all time) (pic.4), a super efficient bladeless turbine (pic.5), robots, a death ray… and more visionary creations, many of which were realized and are in use today. And yet… he was left out in the cold socially, financially, historically.
His mind worked in different ways from the establishment. He heard radio signals from Mars. He invented things no one else had even dreamed of. He did not desire money or fame. He had no family or relationships. He probably thought we were all quite boring people. Mystery surrounded Tesla for his entire life. How can a scientist of this caliber have been forced into oblivion during his own lifetime, penniless and alone?
It is said that the American FBI confiscated all of his research papers at the time of his death. What knowledge did they believe he possessed, and what has happened to that knowledge? Who has profited from Tesla’s unpublished work? Who has profited from our ignorance of his unpublished work? What don’t we know about him? Who decides which celebrities survive, and which become…invisible? If you would like to learn more about Tesla, the website of the Tesla Society is an excellent place to begin. http://www.teslasociety.com/
Jim Gage August 22, 2014 Sweden
Was Jesus married to his disciple Mary?
In line with my video blog “The Holy Grail; The greatest treat to the church?”, I will look into the subject concerning Jesus’ debated marital status in this brief entry.
A small piece of papyrus with something written in an ancient Coptic text on was publicly announced in 2012 as ” The gospel of Jesus’ wife”.
This was immediately contested by the Vatican as an elaborated fraud, and from the academia it was hotly debated and questioned. The argument from this direction was about the authenticity of the small papyrus and whether the text was contemporary with the other gospel accounts.
The editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano first stated the piece as a modern fake but then he changed his mind and from now on he consider it a genuine artefact.
The line four on the papyrus piece says: “Jesus said to them, ‘my wife…'” And this part is of course highly controversial. Adding to this it says in line 5: “… she is able to be my disciple …”
Some considerations:
Jesus was of both of David’s and Aaron’s House and as a descent from both king David and the high priest Aaron, and as a Jewish minister over thirty years of age, Jesus could not have been unmarried. (And thus he had every legal and traditional right to claim the kingly throne)
Today Mary Magdalene is considered among scholars to have been an important leader in the emerging Christian sect. In the “Gospel of Mary”, from about the first century A.D., which is one of the apocrypha, i.e., texts which were excluded from the body of the texts which were considered to be constituting the Holy Bible’s New Testament in 508 A.D., she is described as having deeper understanding of Jesus’s teachings than the other disciples. She is also more loved by Jesus, which is something that Peter openly dislikes
In the apocrypha “The Gospel of Philip” from around the third century A.D., is Mary Magdalene described as Jesus’ consort.
Finally we have the two millennia old traditions of Mary’s ministry in a cave in France, and the strong tradition of the Desposyni, i.e. the children she got with Jesus, which were not an uncommon belief in the third century. (Sextus Julius Africanus—Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia Ecclesiae, 3:20)
Mary fled Jerusalem after the crucifixion around 33 A.D., and landed at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. From here, in the “La grotte de sainte Marie-Madeleine” she were supposed to have spread the words of the Christ until her dead around 63 A.D.
Summer thoughts.
While working on my translation and publication of my Facts Fiction novel “Ellipsis: The Secret Knowledge”, I wonder about what my next blog subject should be dealing with.
Here is some subjects on which I hope some of you out there can vote for to be my subject. If it’s a big subject i might stay with it and do a series of entries.
- The Arc of the Covenant, what do we know and where might it be today?
- The vote for Jesus’s divinity or not in Nicea in 325 AD. What happened really?
- A powder of gold; the ultimate secret in history?
I’ll return blogging soon, until then. Have a Nice summer.
Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?
Was the name Shakespeare a pseudonym?
The centuries old Shakespeare Authorship Controversy placed under the loupe.
Shakespeare and alchemy. Is there any connection?
The roof over the stage at The Globe Theatre is called The Heaven and you understand why with the sun, the moon and the whole zodiac painted in bright colours. Adjacent to the two pillars that hold up the roof is a sun and a moon depicted. All things considered suggests an alchemical / hermetic / Rosicrucian tradition showing that the modern theater-reconstuctors have done their homework well.
The link to the contemporary astrologer and alchemist Dr. John Dee in the 1500s, is clear. He was the Queens personal astrologer and maybe the most learned man in Europe in his time.
The most esoteric play by Shakespeare is “The tempest” which is considered to have been his last . Its first performance took place in 1611.
It’s very much about demons, spirits, a conjuror, spells , secret symbols and magic, and all of this was the traits of Dr. Dee.
It all seems very esoteric in its design and there are even more symbols around the stage, like Hermes with the Caduceus rod, Perseus with the head of Medusa and Pegasus fight with the Chimera, in the box next to the stage. All of these symbols were used in this era as allegories for the transcendent, metaphysics within the hermetic traditions, i.e., secret symbolism of how to get in contact with “the other side” of this world.
The alchemical tradition had it’s peak in the early 1600s, when the alleged RC brotherhood was the surge of the new sprouting world of science, the so called natural philosophy, or as we say as an over all term today; alchemy.
The mythology around the RC brotherhood (RCB) or Brothers of the Rosy Cross was, as evidence show today, one of histories most cunning pranks. Many of the most renowned alchemist and “scientists” in England and elsewhere of that period wanted to get in touch with RCB but of course no one ever did.
The questions here are: How come the inside of this theatre looks the way it does? There is only one drawing existing that shows the interior of an Elizabethan theatre. It was made by Johann de Witt, a Dutch visitor in 1596, and his drawing is NOT showing these symbols and signs of alchemy? What made the reconstruction architects decide what the decorations should look like? Why did those who built it in the 1990s paint these symbols of a hermetic world view, were everything were based on the idea of an ancient philosophy called “Prisca Sapientia” and its descriptions of how everything in the universe works?
Do some people, living today, know things about the original staging of the plays, i.e., the performances and the scenographies (stage sets), which they are only hinting at in an ancient classical esoteric tradition?
The Holy Grail, the greatest threat ever to the power of the popes?
Has the intrinsic powers of the Holy Grail posed the greatest threat ever to the church’s dominion over Europe and the whole Christendom?
The dragons of London. Eastern or western symbolism?
Both England’s flag and London’s heraldic crest has St. George’s red cross as a symbol, but what about the dragons? Why are they there at all? Why does it look like this and were does it all come from?
The crest with dragons with crosses on the wings and the motto “Domine routing Nose”, ” Lord guide us ” should have received its final form in 1609 , but was not London’s official crest until 1957.
The Dragons on the London crest are assumed to aim at the dragon St. George killed, which were the symbol of the alleged unfaithful Saracens of the east, but also a symbol for Satan and those allied with him.
Just as in the painting below from 1435, this symbolism began to appear in the visual arts in Europe around the 1300 s, about hundred years after the tradition came from the eastern parts of Christendom by the returning Nights Templars. These soldiers had the red cross on their shields and garments which later would be the red cross in the English flag. A strange twist to this is that when they rode out to recover the Holy Land from the Saracens the French army had the red cross and the English a white cross.
A thought about folk traditions of England from earlier immigrant dragon myths . We have the dragon in Beowulf myth about a hero from the Swedes (Svearnas) countries who came to Britannia and killed the dragon Grendel. We have also the saga of Sigurd Fafnesbane, or Siegfried, who were slaying the dragon Fafnir, which was both a Germanic and a Nordic myth that may have come to England in the 1200s or 1300s. The Norwegians, who fought in England in the 11 century, had its myth of the dragon Níðhöggr and from France came probably the dragon myths inherited from the Norwegians and Svear (Swedes) who conquered Normandy in the 800s. And this mythology came to England with the Norman Conquest in 1066.
The Welsh flag with its red dragon has possible origins in the Roman cavalry (49- 409 AD) who had an “Draco” on their standard. This was probably inspired from draco emblems from Dacia, i.e., the Romanian and Moldavian region of the Roman empire. This is just one of the originating possibilities for the Welsh red dragon.
Whatever the possible amalgamations of the many dragon myths, when well established on British soil, it seems like the accepted English dragon most likely originates from regions outside the British isles.
Was Moses an Egyptian pharaoh?
Was Moses an Egyptian pharaoh?
This episode of Arcana Orbis looks into the old idea of Moses as the deposed pharaoh Akhenaten.
The Secrets of the World by Mats David Ranaxe 