Vomit Drink

Caffeine-loaded black drinks apparently dominated the heartland of America earlier than once thought — a beverage neither coffee nor cola, but instead brewed from holly leaves, researchers say. Made from the roasted leaves of the Yaupon holly (Ilex vomitoria) that grew more than 300 miles away, researchers found evidence that inhabitants at Cahokia, "North America's first city," were enjoying caffeinated tea beverages some 700 to 900 years ago. Cahokia existed near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers from about 1050 to 1350 in what is now in St. Louis, East St. Louis and the surrounding five counties, and inspired short-lived settlements as far away as Wisconsin. The core of this society, Greater Cahokia, had as many as 50,000 residents in its heyday living amidst earthen mounds, some more than 100 feet (30 meters) in height, making it the largest prehistoric North American settlement north of Mexico.

The “black drink” was used by different groups for different purposes, but according to researchers it was a key component in a purification ritual before battle or other important events. The drink had as much as six times the amount of caffeine as a strong cup of coffee, which induced sweating. Quick consumption of the hot beverage allowed men to vomit, an important part of the purification ritual according to researchers.

The ancient people may have downed the brew before ritual vomiting as part of purification ceremonies, the scientists added. “We’re not sure when Native Americans stopped using black drink,” researcher Thomas Emerson, the director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey, told LiveScience. “I think its use went more into the closet, due to pressure from Europeans to drop pagan practices.”

For many tribes of Native Americans, the black drink was a key component of purification rituals before war parties, religious ceremonies, important political councils or other important events. Rapid consumption of large quantities of the hot drink preceded ritual vomiting as part of the purification rituals. People in South America continue to make drinks from varieties of holly, such as yerba maté and té o' maté, albeit in more relaxed contexts.

"I would argue that it was the first pan-Indian city in North America, because there are both widespread contacts and emigrants," Emerson said. "The evidence from artifacts indicates that people from a broad region, what is now the Midwest and southeast U.S., were in contact with Cahokia. This is a level of population density, a level of political organization that has not been seen before in North America."

How this early city held together for as long as it did has remained a mystery.

incredipedia

Pagan Princess

Around this time last year, at the delightfully named Trumpington, just outside Cambridge, archaeologists discovered the burial of a 16 year-old Saxon girl who lived and died in the second half of the 7th century AD. This was a time when Christianity was taking hold in this region of England and the girl seemed to be at the heart of it.

Excavators immediately knew there was something special about the grave since the girl was laid to rest on a bed – a wooden frame supporting a straw mattress and held together with metal brackets. This type of burial (called, with great imagination, a ‘bed burial’) occurs only in a few other places and seems to cluster around the 7th century. All appear to have held women.

Laying the deceased on a bed may be an allusion to death being a form of sleep and it is interesting that the Old English word ‘leger’ (which gives us our modern word ‘lair’), was used in early literature to refer to both beds and graves. The arrangement of the bed in the grave may also hark back to ship burials, the most famous being at Sutton Hoo, where chiefs were laid in a chamber aboard a ship. These ship burials may incorporate even earlier beliefs about a ship taking the dead to the otherworld – and there is plenty of evidence for this in rock art from the Bronze Age onwards – but nothing in the Norse literature suggests that the belief was current at the time. Maybe a bed burial was a later equivalent of a ship burial, although the two women buried in a ship at Oseberg in Norway cautions that we should not assume a straight divide along gender lines.

Moreover, the ship burials were decidedly pagan, whereas many of the bed burials, including Trumpington, contained Christian imagery. In particular, the Trumpington girl wore a pectoral cross – a beautiful garnet-inlayed piece of jewellery made from solid gold – that marked her out as truly extraordinary. Such crosses are so rare that only five other examples are known, one from the grave of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. It raised speculation as to whether the girl was of royal blood – possibly a princess – and whether she could have been an abbess of one of the new monastic orders that catered specifically for women. Her young age may have been offset by royal connection.

Despite all the finery, there is another aspect of the burial that is less obvious and tells a richer story of life in these times. In addition to wearing the cross, the girl also had more typically pre-Christian Pagan items such as an iron knife, a chatelaine – which is a chain that hung from the waist – and some glass beads. Granted, it does not look much, but is possibly the equivalent of an abbess wearing a pentagram today. Clearly, neither the girl (assuming they were her usual clothes and accoutrements) nor those who buried her (who may have chosen the outfit she wore for her final journey) minded that the imagery shifted between Pagan and Christian.

In fact, Christianity might have been adopted by the Saxons, not because of its apparent message of self-sacrifice and care of the poor, but because of its presumed ability to win wars. An inscription with the Staffordshire hoard calls upon God to scatter his enemies and this is what people probably wanted first and foremost – a battling, champion God. This was a time when stories such as Beowulf were told around the evening fire and in the ‘Dream of the Rood’ Christ himself becomes a warrior (as does Judith, showing that Saxon women had pluck). It would not have been lost on people either that Christ, like the great Germanic God Odin, hung on a tree and descended the lowerworld for knowledge. Odin doubled for Christ just as Loki doubled for the Devil.

Although Saxon imagery became more Christian over time (albeit, until the coming of the Normans, churches were decorated with protective animals such as dragons), the 7th century was an age when traditions mingled. Odin set off to war alongside Christ, graves referenced the sleep and journey of death, and a young girl could wear the cross of a Christian abbess and the trappings of a Pagan princess. It is a fascinating time and perhaps, for a fleeting few decades, we can gain a glimpse of a more tolerant attitude towards religious affiliation that seems all but lost to us today.

ishtarsgate

 The remains of a mysterious Anglo-Saxon princess, who died  thirteen and a half centuries ago, have been found in a field three miles south of Cambridge.

Aged just 16 when she died, and buried lying on a special high status funerary bed, she was laid to rest with a small solid gold, garnet encrusted, Christian cross upon her chest.

Her exact identity is as yet a complete mystery. However, it’s likely that she was a member of one of the newly Christianized Anglo-Saxon royal families of the period.

She was buried fully clothed, her bronze and iron chatelaine (belt hook) and purse, still attached to her leather belt.

A clue to the circumstances of her death is the presence of three other individuals buried in separate graves alongside her (two women aged around 20 and one other slightly older individual of indeterminate sex, but conceivably female).  It’s likely that they died at the same time – probably from some sort of epidemic. Significantly, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions that England was devastated by the plague in 664 AD (around the very time that the archaeological evidence also suggests they died).

The Independent

Dancing Water

 “But it’s raining….”

At the next desk, another colleague shrugs, “ I think that’s the point”

And down the corridor she flies, grabbing the hand of a friend, “Come on!”.  Spun into the whirl of her determination, he stumbles and follows as she heads through the foyer, a whirlwind drawing towards her everybody’s attention.

“She’s mad,” someone murmurs.

“She’s Pagan,” is the response.

The receptionist laughs, “If you ask her, she’d tell you it’s a goddess thing.”

And they all stand up and watch as she skips through the doors, pushing off her shoes on the step, and runs out onto the tarmac of the car park, barefoot in the rain. And what rain! It’s been three weeks since the last drops fell, and now it pours and pours, the ground beneath her teeming, instantly flooded silver-white with dancing water, alive with the storm, and with her arms open, her face lifted to the skies, she sings, whirling round and round.

Her friend stands half sheltered by the office entrance, smiling with wonder at her behaviour, barely able to hear her voice through the clamour of the rain, longing to join her, to walk through this intangible barricade that keeps him tight and upright in his guise of an ordinary sensible man, knowing how embarrassed he would be to do otherwise.

Drenched, she turns towards him, her clothes clinging, sodden, her hair plastered down, her face glowing with life. She looks so completely vibrant, shining, wet and free, and she holds out her hand to him, calling out an invitation, words he cannot hear. And in that moment, uneasy and excited, he sees her as a wild force, as Aphrodite, as temptation and delight, as complete and somehow apocalyptic freedom.

And he wonders, amazed,-- Why doesn’t she look foolish?

Emma Restall Orr

Friday 13th

Does Friday the 13th freak you out? If so, hold on to your rabbit's foot extra tight, because there are three of these supposedly unlucky dates in 2012, though perhaps luckily, this Friday (July 13) is the last of them. Though, there's always some fear to be had next year, 2013.

Read on for 13 strange facts about this day of superstition.

1. This year is a special one for Friday the 13ths: There are three of them: Jan. 13, April 13 and July 13. The freaky thing? The dates fall exactly 13 weeks apart. That hasn't happened since 1984.

2. If that scares you, you may have paraskavedekatriaphobia (also known as friggatriskaidekaphobia). Those are the scientific terms for fear of Friday the 13th. Triskaidekaphobia is fear of the number 13.

3. It's not clear when or why Friday the 13th became associated with bad luck. The association may be biblical, given that the 13th guest at the Last Supper betrayed Jesus. His crucifixion was the next day, apparently a Friday. Or maybe 13 suffers from coming after the more-pleasing number 12, which gets to number the months, the days of Christmas and even the eggs in a dozen. (There are also 12 signs of the zodiac, 12 gods of Olympus, 12 labors of Hercules, 12 tribes of Israel and 12 apostles of Jesus.)

4. Whatever the reason, fear of 13 has spread far and wide: Hotels and hospitals often skip the 13th floor, and even airports quietly omit gate 13 sometimes.

5. The next year in which we'll have three Friday the 13ths is 2015. They'll fall in February, March and November.

6. If you think your Friday the 13th is likely to be bad, be glad you aren't a 14th-century Knight Templar. On Oct. 13, 1307, officers of King Philip IV of France raided the homes of thousands of these Crusades warriors, imprisoning them on charges of illegal activities. Though the charges weren't proven, more than a hundred died of terrible torture, according to "Tales of the Knights Templar"

7. Fittingly, director of psychological thrillers Alfred Hitchcock was born on the 13th — Friday, Aug. 13, 1999, would have been his 100th birthday. Perhaps aptly titled "Number 13," a film that was supposed to be Hitchcock's directorial debut never made it past the first few scenes and was shut down due to financial problems. He allegedly said the film wasn't very interesting. (Meanwhile, Fidel Castro was born on Friday the 13th, in August 1926.)

8. Why does the Friday the 13th superstition stick so firmly in our minds? According to Thomas Gilovich, who chairs the department of psychology at Cornell University, our brains are almost too good at making associations. "If anything bad happens to you on Friday the 13th, the two will be forever associated in your mind, and all those uneventful days in which the 13th fell on a Friday will be ignored," Gilovich said in a statement.

9. For pagans, 13 is actually a lucky number. It corresponds with the number of full moons in a year.

10. President Franklin D. Roosevelt is said to have avoided travel on the 13th day of any month, and would never host 13 guests at a meal. Napoleon and President Herbert Hoover were also triskaidekaphobic, with an abnormal fear of the number 13.

11. Mark Twain once was the 13th guest at a dinner party. A friend warned him not to go. "It was bad luck," Twain later told the friend. "They only had food for 12." Superstitious diners in Paris can hire a quatorzieme, or professional 14th guest. [13 Odd Occurrences on Friday the 13th]

12. Stock broker and author Thomas W. Lawson, in his 1907 novel "Friday the Thirteenth," wrote of a stockbroker's attempts to take down Wall Street on the unluckiest day of the month. Reportedly, stock brokers after this were as unlikely to buy or sell stocks on this unlucky day as they were to walk under a ladder, according to accounts of a 1925 New York Times article.

13. This fear of Friday the 13th can be serious business, according to the Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute in Asheville, N.C., which, among other things, offers therapy to help people overcome their fear of the freaky friday. Their estimates suggest hundreds of millions of dollars, up to $900 million are lost due to people's fear of flying or doing the business as usual that day, though that number isn't backed up with other estimates.

Litha

HAPPY MID-SUMMER

Also known as Summer Solstice, Litha, Alban Hefin, Sun Blessing, Gathering Day, Féill-Sheathain, Whit Sunday, Whitsuntide, Vestalia, Thing-tide, St. John's Day

In addition to the four great festivals of the Pagan Celtic year, there are four lesser holidays as well: the two solstices, and the two equinoxes. In folklore, these are referred to as the four 'quarter-days' of the year, and modern Witches call them the four 'Lesser Sabbats', or the four 'Low Holidays'. The Summer Solstice is one of them.

Litha is usually celebrated on June 21st, but varies somewhat from the 20th to the 23rd, dependant upon the Earth's rotation around the Sun. According to the old folklore calendar, Summer begins on Beltane (May 1st) and ends on Lughnassadh (August 1st), with the Summer Solstice midway between the two, marking mid-Summer. This makes more logical sense than suggesting that Summer begins on the day when the Sun's power begins to wane and the days grow shorter. The most common other names for this holiday are the Summer Solstice or Midsummer, and it celebrates the arrival of Summer, when the hours of daylight are longest. The Sun is now at the highest point before beginning its slide into darkness.

Esao Andrews_ "Joyride to Nettles Summit"

Humanity has been celebrating Litha and the triumph of light since ancient times. On the Wheel of the Year Litha lies directly across from Yule, the shortest day of the calendar year, that cold and dark winter turning when days begin to lengthen and humanity looks wistfully toward warmth, sunlight and growing things. Although Litha and Yule are low holidays or lesser sabats in the ancient parlance, they are celebrated with more revel and merriment than any other day on the wheel except perhaps Samhain (my own favourite). The joyous rituals of Litha celebrate the verdant Earth in high summer, abundance, fertility, and all the riches of Nature in full bloom. This is a madcap time of strong magic and empowerment, traditionally the time for handfasting or weddings and for communication with the spirits of Nature. At Litha, the veils between the worlds are thin; the portals between "the fields we know" and the worlds beyond stand open.