Noumenal News

I once did a column on the origin of Easter.
Easter descended from a Pagan holiday. In that column I made some disparaging remarks about Pagans, which didn’t go over very well with the local Pagans.
Are there local Pagans? Yes there are. Trust me on this one.
Anyway, I apologize again to any and all Pagans for […]

Hair samples from naturally preserved child mummies discovered at the world’s highest archaeological site in the Andes have provided a startling insight into the lives of the children chosen for sacrifice. Researchers funded by the Wellcome Trust used DNA and stable isotope analysis to show how children as young as 6-years old were “fattened up” […]

A study into the mysterious changing skull shape of medieval man casts serious doubt on current theories.
The peculiar shift from long narrow heads to those of a rounder shape, and back again, which took place between the 11th and 13th centuries, has been noted at sites throughout western Europe. But a study of skulls found […]

Magic continues to fascinate us, even in the midst of all our technology, as the incredible success of the Harry Potter books and movies demonstrates.
But magic has been part of human life since the darkest and most ancient times, according to archivist Gionni Di Gravio, who has unearthed a rare French manuscript about magic and […]

The execution of the last European witch to be
sentenced to death by a court of law has plunged Switzerland into an
unlikely political debate over whether she should now be pardoned.
Anna
Goeldi, a housemaid, was executed by decapitation after being found
guilty of witchcraft in the small Alpine town of Glarus in 1782.
Full Article

Devotion isn’t for the lazy. Or at least it wasn’t in Ireland, in the days of the druids and, later, St. Patrick.
Visitors to the Emerald Isle today see ancient earthworks and burial mounds, sites of pagan ceremony. Ruins of abbeys. The Gospel, elaborately decorated. All created with vast expenditures of human labor that honored or […]

A famed rationalist, who secured a royal exemption from the ordination in the Church of England that was normally expected of academics of his day so he would not have to follow its teachings, Newton nonetheless based his prediction on a Biblical text.
Working from verses in the Book of Daniel, the elaborator of […]

The ancient Romans have become favourite villains of every archaeologist seeking to put an anti-imperialist spin on an exciting new find or of every TV historian drawing cheap parallels with George Bush’s administration. It seems that ancient Rome was essentially the British empire with gladiators. Or even a predecessor of the Third Reich, according to […]

To the great and good of 17th-century Edinburgh, Major Thomas Weir was the epitome of puritanical respectability. An esteemed preacher who railed against sin from his pulpit in the city’s West Bow thoroughfare, he and his sister Jean were considered so devout they were known locally as the “Bowhead Saints”.
So it came as something of […]

Major Thomas Weir was a preacher and captain of the town guard, a pillar of the community whose life ended in scandal - as an unrepentant sorcerer who was burned at the stake.
Ian Rankin, creator of Inspector Rebus, believes Major Weir could also be the real Dr Jekyll, principal character in one of Robert Louis […]