Why Was The Staffordshire Hoard Buried?

I just finished watching the latest National Geographic piece about the Staffordshire hoard.  This was an amazing archaeological bounty found in a corner of a field in Staffordshire England.  And everything about the find was beyond the realm of archaeologists imaginations.

The was it came about was a gentleman by the name of Terry Herbert asked farmer Fred Johnson if he could do a little metal detecting on the farmer's land.  Not thinking he'd find anything, Mr. Johnson gave his permission and Terry set to work on what would what would become the greatest Anglo-Saxon hoard find in history.

Once Terry was able to convince professionals at the Birmingham museum to take a look, it didn't take long for the archaeologists to get involved.  When news finally broke across the world about the find, there were more than 1,600 pieces to be cleaned and cataloged.  That was in July of 2009.  Since that time, that number has more than doubled.  More pieces were found on the site, and some small pieces were found hidden within some of the larger pieces.  Once it was all said and done with, there were 3,500 pieces to the hoarde that totaled in value at around  £5M.

The only other hoard of Anglo-Saxon pieces ever found was known as the Sutton Hoo hoard.  The difference between the two was that the Sutton Hoo find wasn't a huge grouping of thousands of pieces.  It was the burial place of a great kind and showed signs of both pagan and Christian mentalities.  The most revered pieces found at Sutton Hoo were a beautifully crafted helmet and the 80-ft long burial boat.  And though experts can understand why the finds at Sutton Hoo were buried, why were the 3,500 pieces at Staffordshire buried?

Because nearly all the pieces found had been parts of swords, knives, and possibly helmets, it's thought that the site was a trophy hoard where those that had won the battle had removed the adornments of their enemies weapons and buried them for safe keeping, but either couldn't get back to them or forgot where they'd buried them.  The only issue I personally have with that is that there were no blades.  Of course, the enemy would have reused the blades for their own purposes, but why would they have removed the prestigious decorations in order to do so?  Wouldn't it have meant more to keep them on, as a way to say "Look what I won in battle".

The one thing that really struck me was that one of the objects found was a gold cross that had been folded up around itself.  It could have been that this was done simply to make it easier to move from one place to another, but these pieces were dated to be made and used somewhere between the end of the 6th century and the beginning of the 8th century. That coincides with the time when the pagans were being converted to Christianity, sometimes whether they wanted to be or not.

And watching the way these items were being taken out of the ground tells me that they weren't all put into the same hole at the same time.  If that had been the case, why did they have to dig a trench that measured 30'X43'?  That's a pretty big hole.  Experts now believe that the items were buried in the same area over a period of about 150 years.  And to me, that sounds like these items were being placed in the ground at a sacred place and perhaps they were offerings to the gods.

Here's my theory, for what it's worth.  It's obvious that if all these items were of Anglo-Saxon design, then they weren't the ones who won the battles.  And in the Celtic religion, people were drawn to groves of trees as places of worship or as sacred places.  The area where these items were found was on a hill, which would be both a highly visible place and a known place to those who lived in and around the area.  If these people were fighting to keep up with their way of life and didn't want to convert to the new religion, wouldn't it make sense that they offer up these beautiful objects to appease the gods?  Or maybe it was a way to say thank you for helping them win the battle.

Though I am no expert, I do know that this was a very contentious time in England's history.  It was a time when the Romans had just left Britain to defend their own country, people from the North and the East were invading the tiny island trying to stake out there own stretches of fertile land, and some local kings were actually inviting these warring nations to come in and protect their kingdoms only to end up trying to protect themselves from the warriors.  Burying a hoard of gold and garnet laiden treasure in a sacred grove as an offering to the spirits of the land wouldn't be that much of a stretch of the imagination.



(By geni (Photo by user:geni) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Happy Celtic New Year

Happy Celtic New Year!!!

I'm sure anyone who stopped by here yesterday wondered if I was planning on doing a post about Halloween.  And though I did think about it, I thought doing a piece on the Celtic New Year would be more fun.  And the truth of the matter is that the holiday we think of as Halloween is actually a Celtic--and pagan--celebration.

The Celtic festival, Samhain, is the celebration of the changing of the seasons.  The Celtic people believed in the duality of life; dark and light, cool and warm, male and female.  The Samhain celebration was their way of saying good-bye to the summer season and welcoming in the winter.  It was during this festival that they believed the spirits of their ancestors could cross the boundary of life and death, and as such, the people would hold a huge feast in their honor, and it's from this that we get many of our own Halloween ideals.

The Celtic people saw the apple as being a sacred fruit and the act of bobbing for apples was their vision of what the ancestral spirits would do to enter into immortality.  They also believed that evil spirits would cross over with the ancestors.  In order to keep these unwanted spirits at bay, the Celts would carve faces into turnips and set them out to ward off the evil spirits.  And though today we use pumpkins, it was done for the same reasons.

One of the main aspect of the Samhain feast was the bonfire.  This was a massive fire on which the bones of sacrificial animals would be thrown and burned for the spirits.  In fact, the term bonfire is a Celtic term meaning "bone fire".  In several archaeological digs, the bones of several hundred animals have been found.  One of the most famous is the small village found about 2 miles away from the world famous Stonehenge.  According to archaeologist Michael Parker Pearson, it appears that people from all over would congregate at the site at certain times of the year and throw huge celebrations.  Could some of this have been done during a Samhain festival?  It is possible as there is some evidence that Stonehenge was a site attributed with the winter solstice and the realm of the dead.  And though the winter solstice and Samhain were a couple months apart, it may have been the beginning of the winter festivities.

As we begin our decent into the cold, winter months, we must remember that the time of the paranormal is only beginning.  To our ancestors, the scary part of the year didn't just last one day.  The winter was a terrifying time, especially if the annual harvest had failed to bring in enough to feed the entire village.  There are still things out there that scare us, even though Halloween is over.  But don't be afraid, my little ones.  They're only legends, right?



(The bonfire picture is attributed to Wikimedia Commons and the GFDL)

The Voynich Manuscript

What is probably the most mysterious book in the world, The Voynich Manuscript has had scholars scratching their heads for almost 500 years.  The book itself is first known to exist in the late 1500s as a possession of the Bohemian monarch, Rudolph II.  There is some speculation that he was very much into the occult and had a flair for all things mystical and magical.  However, this was a time in history when such things could get a person imprisoned or killed by the Church, even if that person were nobility.

The problem with the manuscript then, as now, is that nobody could decipher it.  The language used throughout the entire manuscript is one that has never been figured out, ever.  The person known to have had the book after Rudolph II was his personal physician (?), Jacobus De Tepenecz.  There is some speculation as to who this person was to Rudolph.  Some say he was in charge of the Bohemian king's gardens, others say he was the king's potion maker.  Whatever the case, in the end, De Tepenecz was given the book--along with several others--as payment for his services.  The reason scholars know this is because his name was found written, then later removed, on the inside cover.  It took the use of an x-ray and black-lights to the see this, but it was found.

The Voynich Manuscript got it's name from Wilfrid Voynich (1865-1930).  This young man was a Polish revolutionary and had a love of British and American antiques. Yet he is most famous for owning this book.  And though there is a lot of speculation as to who else owned the book between the early 1600s and the mid-20th century, the real question is who wrote it and what does it say.   However, there is a lot in this manuscript that tells scholars what it is.  There are several pages filled with drawing of various plants, from root to flower.  There are also depictions of what are thought to be the Heavens and the Zodiac.  But again, this is just a guess made by some of the most brilliant minds in the world.

A few of the people thought to be behind this work of art are Leonardo DaVinci and Roger Bacon who happened to be a 13th century Friar who was known for his love of nature and scholarly demeanor.  However, the book has been proven to be far too old to have been the creation of DaVinci, and Bacon has been dismissed outright by most of today's experts.

It's been said by many that the Voynich Manuscript was the work of a single person, and from looking through the entire book, this seems to be true.  And though there doesn't seem to be anyone who can decipher it, nearly everyone had put the book as being created sometime in the late 15th century to the early 16th century.  However, Yale University, where the book is housed today, allowed experts to do radio carbon tests on 4 different samples of the book.  These samples were sent to different labs and all came back with the same results.  According to the tests, the pages of this book--all made from animal skin parchment--showed that the age of the parchment was from between 1404 and 1438.  However, this just means that is when the animal was alive and not necessarily when the book was made.

The mystery behind the Voynich manuscript doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon, but it does prove to be one of the greatest mysteries of the modern age.


(See the entire manuscript at Wiki Media Commons)

Shadow Kisses 50 Follower Giveaway

Okay, I'll admit that when I first started this site, I had no intentions of turning it into a giveaway blog.  However, what better way to get some traffic flowing around here than to start talking about some of the cool paranormal book giveaways that go on around the blogosphere.  After all, I did say that this site was going to be about all things paranormal, and winning a paranormal book or two does fall into this premise.  Even if I have to say it myself.

In honor of having 50 follower on her Google Friends list, the Shadow Kisses webmistress, (a.k.a., Cass) has decided to hold her very first giveaway and is offering one winner their choice of one of two books.  These books are the YA book The Splendor Falls by Rosemary Clement-Moore and the contemporary adult fiction novel, Wild Instinct by Sarah McCarty, which is actually 3 stories in one package.

The coolest thing about this giveaway is that these aren't just e-books that are being given out.  These are the real deal.  And because Miss Cass will be paying the S&H herself, this is a US only giveaway.  If you'd be willing to help help with the costs, however, she might be willing to consider sending outside the US.




Run over and check out this awesome giveaway.  I think it runs through the 18th of November, but I'm not certain of that.  I do know that according to the site, there's still 26 days to go, so you've got some time to get over there and get started.  While you're there, check out the rest of the site and see if there isn't a few other aspects of the place that will keep you coming back for more.  After all, some of the best kisses are those that stolen in the shadows.

The Oddities Of The World

Though the arena of the paranormal and of myths and legends can be a vast as the very heavens themselves, I will do my best to break things down and look at various bits and pieces in a more intimate light.  As such, let's look at a few of the oddities of our world.

Throughout history, we humans have had a fascination with animal oddities, strange beings, and those little things that go bump in the night.  We've created some of those little beasties in our minds, while others were thought to be fictional only to be proven to be fact.  For instance, let's look at the Kraken.  Since ancient times, sailors talked of this gigantic water beast with a thousand testicles and  a voracious appetite.  Legend held that this monster would come up from the deep, attack the ships above, and drag them back to the bottom.  And though over time we came to believe these stories to be just that, it seems now that there may be some truth to them with the newly discovered reality of the Giant Squid.

Can the same be true for other mythological creatures, or as they're now called, Cryptozoological creatures?  Is there really a creature called the Bigfoot out there, or can it be the Gigantopithecus.  A great ape from roughly one million years to three-hundred thousand years ago that stood at about 9.5 feet tall and weighed in at around 1,200lbs.  What about the Loch Ness Monster or the Thunderbirds or the Bunyip?  Can these creatures be real or at least a memory of something that was at one time real?

In recent history, we've found that a few of the creatures we believed to be imaginary were, in fact, actual animals.  At the turn of the 20th century, it was found that the stories the natives of Africa had been telling hunters about large hairy men in the forests turned out to be true in the form of the Mountain Gorillas.  They also found that a beast they believed to be an ancient Egyptian mythological beast was real in the form of the Okapi.  So there is some claim that a few of these animals may actually exist.

Our ancestors witnessed things we can only dream of.  I'm sure there are creatures that once existed, but no longer roam our world.  Is this what we all seem to have a suppressed memory of in our collective minds?  Could it be that somewhere in the past, our ancestors told of horrific beasts in order to keep us safe as we continued on through our lives?  As we go on though this world, we're sure to continue to find creatures we once thought to be imagined and our imaginations will remind us of others we still see in our dreams.

What Is Para-Mythic

In an effort to explain myself, let me tell you what Para-Mythic is and means to me.  It's a joining of 2 of my all-time favorite things; the world of the paranormal and the realm of myth and legend.  And because I've always felt the 2 were similar in nature, I've created a way to bring them both together.  In such, the vision of the para-mythic is born.

So, what are my plans for the site.  I want to delve into everything that has to do with the paranormal and myths/legends from around the world.  I want to talk about fairies and gnomes in one post, then ghosts and UFO's in the next.  I want discuss the latest paranormal romance novels and the people who write them, as well as the author who puts together a book about zombies or witches or magic rituals.  In essence, if it's not something we can find in the normal realm, it might just be found here.

Do I consider myself an expert in this field???  Oh hell no.  What I do know is that I've been reading about these kinds of things since I was old enough to know the difference.  I mean, what are we taught as children?  Red Riding Hood was chased by a big wolf that ate her grandmother.  Then that same wolf huffed and puffed and blew down 2 of the 3 little piggies houses.  Cinderella had a fairy godmother, as did Sleeping Beauty.  And Snow White's step mother had the ability to turn herself into various beings.  And to top it all off, I was told that if you kiss enough toads, one of them is bound to turn into a handsome prince.  It's been pounded into my brain my whole life and now I guess you could say I'm addicted.

The sad fact of the matter is that I know more about the way the ancients looked at their world, than I do about the way the Founding Fathers went about creating a new country for me to live in.  I know how bad that sounds, but it's the way it is.  And truthfully, I wouldn't have it any other way.

As time goes on, I hope to talk about all my favorite ghost hunting shows, the latest titles about the "other" realm, legends, heroes, myths, monsters, and whatever else I can think of.  I'll even throw in a site review or two of sites similar or just like this one.  So wish me luck, tag along, and let's see where this goofy little experiment of mine leads us.  Just watch out for what's behind us, because I'm sure I just heard something back there.  

Welcome To Para-Mythic

Welcome to my new site, Para-Mythic.  This site is basically an experiment to see if I can prove that certain niche sites can bring in traffic, even though they have nothing to do with the "make money online" niche.  I want to take a totally unrelated niche topic and try to make an entire blog out of it, and see if I can get it to bring in some kind of profit within a year.  As it may take me a little time to get this site just the way I want it, I'm going to make Halloween my target for next year.

The reason I'm doing this is because I write a weekly column for a company called Blog Engage.  The column is called "What's Your Niche" and it's about finding topics to create blogs about that have nothing to do with the MMO industry.  This is because the MMO industry is so overly inundated with bloggers that there's no room for the little guy looking to get his/her foot in the door.  That's where I come in.  I want to help you find a target market that you can write in and make a go of it.

In this week's column "The Paranormal", I came up with several ways in which the paranormal niche could bring in traffic and help a blogger make some money.  And rather than just say "go for it", I'm doing the one thing my Daddy always told me to do; put up or shut up.  If you can show the people that it's possible, they'll be more apt to follow your lead.

So this is my experiment and hopefully my next profitable blog.  No, I don't plan on this only being a place to post spam and crap and that kind of thing, but I do want this site to make me some money within the next year.  You may notice the theme change from time to time, you might notice a few other oddities around here before I'm done, but this is going to be my proof or my downfall, one or the other.

So join me as I jump into this thing with both feet.  I hope to show the world that if it's done correctly, any niche topic can bring in quality traffic and make a buck in the long run.  Wish me luck and if you have any suggestions, please feel free to share them.  Once I'm up and running, I may even begin taking some guest posts.  But that might be down the road a ways.  So, let's dance!!!!!!!!!!!