Esoterica

Stonehenge will livestream its summer solstice celebration for the first time ever

The ancient, mystical site typically hosts one of the world’s most popular summer solstice celebrations, attracting thousands of people, including the druid and pagan community, on the longest day of the year to watch the sun rise behind the Heel Stone.

This year, however, the usual celebration won’t be possible. The English Heritage organization, which manages Stonehenge, is asking people not to visit the site, and is instead offering a livestream of the sunrise.

. . .

The summer solstice at Stonehenge will stream live on Sunday morning, June 21 (local time), on English Heritage’s social media accounts.

Esoterica

Rare half-male, half-female cardinal spotted in Pennsylvania

Jeffrey and Shirley Caldwell have been attracting birds for 25 years with carefully tended backyard feeders. But the lifelong Erie, Pennsylvania, residents have never seen a creature so wondrous as the half-vermillion, half-taupe cardinal—its colors split right down the middle—that first showed up a few weeks ago in the dawn redwood tree 10 yards from their home.

. . .

The anomaly is known as a bilateral gynandromorph. In plain language: Half its body is male and the other half is female. “This remarkable bird is a genuine male/female chimera,” says Daniel Hooper, a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, in an email.

Gynandromorphs, known as “half-siders” among ornithologists, are uncommon but not unheard of. They likely occur across all species of birds, Hooper says, but we’re only likely to notice them in species where the adult males and females look distinct from each other, a trait known as sexual dimorphism. “Cardinals are one of the most well-known sexually dimorphic birds in North America—their bright red plumage in males is iconic—so people easily notice when they look different,” Hooper says.

Esoterica

Previously Unknown Tales Of Merlin And King Arthur Discovered Hidden In Medieval Texts

When academic Michael Richardson headed into the University of Bristol’s Special Collections Library, the task was a fairly simple and familiar one: look for new reading materials for the University's MA in Medieval Studies. What he didn’t expect to find was an entirely new rendering of the legends of King Arthur, Merlin, and the Holy Grail.

Found bound inside 16th-century books were seven hand-written parchment fragments that, upon closer investigation, Richardson recognized to contain several legendary names, including Merlin the wizard. He quickly contacted Leah Tether, President of the International Arthurian Society, to see if his finds were compelling. Together, the two found that fragments from the original manuscripts tell the stories of Arthurian legends with subtle but significant differences from traditional narratives.

. . .

The texts are thought to come from the Vulgate Cycle or Lancelot-Grail Cycle, old French texts dating back to the 13th century. It’s believed that Sir Thomas Malory, writer of King Arthur’s most famous account Le Morte D’Arthur, used these texts as the main source for his work, which has gone on to inspire most modern retellings of the legend.

Esoterica

Supermoon Lunar Eclipse To Become The First Pan-American Total Eclipse In 19 Years

When the Sun, Earth, and Moon line up just properly, the shadow cast by our planet can fall onto the Moon. If the alignment is perfect, the result will be a total lunar eclipse, where the entirety of the Moon enters the darkest part of Earth's shadow. During this time, anyplace on Earth's surface that experiences night will be treated to the spectacular show of a completely red, dim Moon.

Total lunar eclipses are relatively common; we get about one per year, on average. But something special is happening on the night of January 20th/21st: the entirety of the North and South American continents will get to experience the full show of the eclipse. This includes the penumbral, partial, and total stages from everywhere in the Americas. It's the first time this will happen since the year 2000, and the last time it will occur until 2058.

. . .

The next time we'll have a total lunar eclipse with the same visibility from Earth won't be until November 30th, 2058: nearly 40 years from now. Skywatchers from the Bering Strait, Iceland, Ireland and the United Kingdom will be able to join everyone living in the Americas in viewing this spectacular sight. This is also the last total lunar eclipse Earth will experience for more than two years, so make sure you take advantage of your chance if the weather allows.

Esoterica

Satanic Temple statue unveiled at the Arkansas State Capitol

Dozens attended a rally held by the Satanic Temple at the Arkansas State Capitol on Thursday.

The rally comes after the Arkansas legislature approved the placement of a Ten Commandments monument on the Capitol grounds.

During the Satanic Temple's Rally for the First Amendment, a more than 8-feet-tall Baphomet statue was unveiled.

. . .

Following the installation of the Ten Commandments monument, the Satanic Temple filed a lawsuit to have its statue placed on the same grounds in the name of religious pluralism and the First Amendment.

During the 2017 legislative session, the Satanic Temple sent a letter to Arkansas legislators asking for lawmakers to sponsor a bill that would allow a Baphomet statue on Capitol grounds, but not one lawmaker responded.

Esoterica

A controversial study has a new spin on the otherworldliness of the octopus

Octopuses are strange, smart creatures that certainly seem alien—what with the tentacles, camouflage, and shape-shifting skills. Still, the idea that they actually came from outer space would seem to fall strictly into the realm of sci-fi; an update of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, say.

But in these interesting times, real life reads like fiction. Recently, a group of 33 scientists worldwide—including molecular immunologist Edward Steele and astrobiologist Chandra Wickramasinghe—published a paper suggesting, in all seriousness, that octopuses may indeed be aliens.

The paper, published in the March issue of the the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, is controversial, obviously, and the vast majority of scientists would disagree. But the paper is still worthy of discussion—for one, as a thought exercise, because outlandish ideas are often initially rejected. And in provoking us with seemingly bizarre theories, it forces us to acknowledge that there are aspects of life on Earth for which classic evolutionary theory as yet has no explanation.

. . .

The transformative genes leading from the consensus ancestral nautilus to the common cuttlefish to squid to the common octopus can’t be found in any pre-existing life form, the authors say.

Esoterica

The strange power of the 'evil eye'

When it comes to warding off the mystic malevolent forces of the world, there is perhaps no charm more recognised or renowned than the ‘evil eye’. Ubiquitous in its use, the striking image of the cobalt-blue eye has appeared not only in the bazaars of Istanbul, but everywhere from the sides of planes to the pages of comic books.

In the last decade, evil eye imagery has most frequently appeared in the world of fashion. Kim Kardashian has been photographed on numerous occasions sporting bracelets and headpieces featuring the symbol, while fashion model Gigi Hadid jumped on the trend in late 2017, announcing that she would be launching the EyeLove shoe line.

. . .

To understand the origins of the evil eye, one must first understand the distinction between the amulet and the evil eye itself. Though often dubbed as ‘the evil eye’, the ocular amulet is actually the charm meant to ward off the true evil eye: a curse transmitted through a malicious glare, usually one inspired by envy. Though the amulet – often referred to as a nazar – has existed in various permutations for thousands of years, the curse which it repels is far older and more difficult to trace.

Esoterica

Triple treat: Eclipse, comet, full moon all coming Friday night

As required during any lunar eclipse, the moon will be full Friday night. And this month it's nicknamed the "snow" moon.

According to the Farmers' Almanac, full moon names date back to Native Americans in the northern and eastern U.S. Each full moon has its own name.

"The tribes kept track of the seasons by giving distinctive names to each recurring full moon," the almanac reports. "Their names were applied to the entire month in which each occurred."

. . .

A few hours after the eclipse, Comet 45P, which has been visible after sunset for the past two months through binoculars and telescopes, makes its closest approach to Earth, when it will be "only" 7.4 million miles away, NASA said.

Rapid Pole Shift in Our Lifetime?

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

As I mentioned here, pole shift appears to be underway. It also appears to be happening far more rapidly than has long been predicted by the establishment. In this episode of Dreamland, Linda Moulten Howe interviews UC Berkeley's Dr. Paul Renne about geological data that dramatically accelerates the predicted timeline. Renne worked with an international team of geologists to analyze volcanic ash sediments in a lake bed in Italy. They were able to track the shifting patterns that preceded the last pole shift, the Brunhes-Mutuyama event, and have determined it was quite rapid, probably under a hundred years.

The authors, including Berkeley graduate student Courtney Sprain and her supervisor Professor Paul Renne, are not the first to suggest the last flip was unusually fast, but Sprain says the evidence they have found in the Suilmona Basin, east of Rome, is very clear. “The paleomagnetic data are very well done. This is one of the best records we have so far of what happens during a reversal and how quickly these reversals can happen,” says Sprain.

Volcanoes upwind of the basin, including Sabatini and Vesuvius, erupted frequently during the reversal, and the changing magnetic field can be seen in the sediments laid down. Argon-argon isotopic dating allowed Sprain and Renne to date the ash layers far more precisely than has been done before.

“What’s incredible is that you go from reverse polarity to a field that is normal with essentially nothing in between, which means it had to have happened very quickly, probably in less than 100 years,” said Renne. “We don’t know whether the next reversal will occur as suddenly as this one did, but we also don’t know that it won’t.

We are left with a lot of unknowns. Geophysicists still don't understand why this happens, how frequently it happens, or how varied the effects are. What is clearer is that past events have caused enough thinning of the earth's magnetosphere to allow serious damage from solar and cosmic radiation. This may, in fact, have caused the extinction of the Neanderthals.

A complete write-up of this interview can be found here on Howe's website.

Are the Poles Shifting?

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

I've been talking about pole shift for a while now. Several years ago, I started getting intimations that it was imminent. There's a little more on these messages here. I just didn't really know what to make of it. The gist was that things were going to shift in some very surprising ways, that the systemic injustice that I find so excruciating had reached the end of the line, and that this was somehow connected to or simply concurrent with pole shift.

I first learned about the idea of pole shift many years ago when I was reading a book on Edgar Cayce. I had no frame of reference for the idea so it rolled off my brain like beads of water from an oily surface. Years later, when I first became acquainted with the work of Drunvalo Melchizedek, I heard it again and thought, so is that what Cayce was talking about? I liked Drunvalo's take on this. It was fairly optimistic and tied the idea of pole shift with an expansion in human consciousness.

Drunvalo says all kinds of things and some I really do take with a grain of salt. But he always struck me as a sincere fellow and so much of what I learned from him has proved itself to me that I keep a lot of his more outrageous material on the maybe pile. His ideas on pole shift fall into that category.

Pole shift has been a subject of debate. It's an accepted fact that Earth's magnetic poles have shifted more than once, in the distant past. That this has caused crustal displacement is disputed by most experts. Charles Hapgood theorized that they did and that it was associated with changes in land masses. His theories have not gained wide acceptance.

Mainstream science has been as strident and dismissive of concern as it has been vague on the particulars. The simple truth is that there's a lot they don't know about how this works and the potential effects. As discussed here, some theories have us already in the beginning stages of shift. The message from officialdom has been that while the magnetic field of the planet has been weakening for over a hundred years, and while we are probably overdue for a pole reversal, the last known one having occurred about 750,000 years ago, the next is probably at least hundreds of years off and will occur gradually, probably over thousands of years. In other words, calm down, people.

Excellent Drunvalo Interview on Red Ice Radio

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

I had noticed a couple of news items earlier this week regarding planetary magnetics that I wanted to put into some context. I was trying to remember which of Drunvalo's lectures addressed some of the theories regarding potential pole shift but I didn't have time to dig through it. As luck would have it, this freshly minted interview he did with Red Ice Radio pulls a lot of threads together that I had hoped to. The first hour of this interview is a particularly good overview of things Dru has been teaching for years with a level of clarity I've never heard before. The second hour is a bit more... conceptual. But it's all very enjoyable.

The first article I stumbled on is on a new theory that suggests a possible reason for the magnetic reversal of the Earth's poles that occurs periodically. And there is some indication that the next one may already be in process.

Lopsided growth of the Earth's core could explain why its magnetic field reverses direction every few thousand years. If it happened now, we would be exposed to solar winds capable of knocking out global communications and power grids.

One side of Earth's solid inner core grows slightly while the other half melts. Peter Olson and Renaud Deguen of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, used numerical modelling to establish that the axis of Earth's magnetic field lies in the growing hemisphere – a finding that suggests shifts in the field are connected to growth of the inner core.

There are signs that the next switch may be under way: rapid movements of the field's axis to the east in the last few hundred years may be a precursor to the north and south poles trading places, the researchers speculate.

Radiation and Quake Warnings for the West Coast

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

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I felt moved to glance at George Ure's blog this morning even though he rarely posts on the weekends. I'm glad I did. There are some observations on this unbelievably horrible situation with Japan and some of the ramifications. According to Clif High this incident is starting to fulfill some of the linguistics from earlier runs. Remember the "ill winds?"

This is important because in the meta set involved, the expected “Israeli mistake” which we had anticipated would be the ‘smoking/bombed out remains of Bushir’ where Iranian nuclear development continues (a plan which has apparently changed) the data suggested that shortly after the radiation/ill winds began to reach the West Coast USA that a major West Coast/US earthquake would follow within a few days/weeks.

We are now concerned that in the event there is such a release, for one (or more of the damaged plants) that we will then move into language which suggests 18-days – or so – of release related to the ‘radioactive volcanoes’ which seems to be in fill mode right now.

So this leave people, particularly west coasties, with two contingencies to prepare for: Arrival of potential radiation from Japan, and the possibility (small but non-zero) that an earthquake of even more devastating size could arrive semi-concurrently (roughly in the same temporal window) and we’re now also watching the release language for the March 25th period since tyhe timing is a little too close to be ignored.

Black Swans Overtake the Middle East

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Last night Natalie Portman took home the Oscar for her performance in The Black Swan. The excitement around this film has been building since it hit the screens to great critical acclaim and then won the Golden Globe and Independent Spirit Awards for Portman. I haven't seen The Black Swan yet but the buzz has been hard to escape. As with any phenomenon that captures headlines and imaginations, recognizable archetypes emerge. Even in the worst of pop culture, there are insights into the collective psyche and shared vision.

Several years before the Portman vehicle began making the news, a bestselling book by the same name created a different sort of buzz. Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes the convincing argument that events that create the greatest impact are unexpected and unpredictable based on past patterns. He uses the black swan as a metaphor for these unexpected events. Before the discovery and colonization of Australia, the black swan was a metaphor for something non-existent and, therefore, inconceivable. It was common knowledge throughout Europe and its colonies that all swans were white. But in 1697 the great birds were discovered by Willem de Vlaming's expedition along Australia's Swan River. With the discovery, a fundamental assumption about the world collapsed and a colloquialism was turned on its head.

So the black swan emerges as an archetype for radical shifts that fly in the face of our assumptions about our reality and have the greatest potential to create change in the world. And, it is against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world that Natalie Portman has been picking up her awards and accolades. Which, of course, brings me back to the Time Monks tipping point prediction.

The Birds... and Fish

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Well, the bird story just gets stranger and stranger. It was weird when it was just in Arkansas but the bird and fish kills are now being reported around the globe. Somehow, I was not mollified by the theory that they were startled by New Years Eve fireworks. Until I learn that there've been thousands of bird deaths every New Years and Fourth of July that have been previously unremarked upon, I will remain unconvinced. The fireworks theory is also undercut by the fact that birds are continuing to drop out of the sky all over the globe, with the most recent shocker coming out of Italy, where it rained 8,000 dead doves.

Reading the dove story this morning was something of a synchronicity for me. Last night, discussion of the bird deaths caused me to ruminate on a darkly comic anecdote from college theater days. I will probably get some of the details wrong, but this is how I remember it. One of the technical theater students returned from doing summer stock with this tale of stagecraft gone horribly wrong. He had been working on a production of The Sound of Music. In a daring attempt at spectacle, the director had called for live doves to be released during the opening number. There was some concern from the techs about the difficulty and expense. I, for one, would have had even larger concerns about things like bird crap on audience members, but I wasn't there. Besides, any objections were overruled. This was a director with a vision! So, cages with drop out bottoms were strung up above the stage. Doves were purchased and secured in the cages on opening night to be released at the appropriate moment. But, it seems, the cages were a bit too close to the lights. When the intrepid young actress playing Maria appeared onstage and began to belt out "The hills are alive..." she did so amidst the disturbing spectacle of dead, baked doves plummeting all around her like some bizarre snow storm.

Karen Bishop: We Made It!

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

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For those of you who aren't on Karen Bishop's email list, I'm going to post, in full, her recent update. I'm doing so because this will not be posted to her website and was only made available via email. As ever, she has really validated my own experience and reminded me as to why I miss her regular updates so much. So here is her text; my own observations to follow.

What a challenging and confusing ride it has been for these past several months! So many attempts have been made to put a successful plan (for raising the consciousness and vibration of the planet) into place, that this latest plan seemed to come out of the blue. And while we are in it and experiencing it in physical form, we can easily get blindsided and most certainly flattened, unable to see the forest for the trees.

At the end of April and beginning of May, it was clear that many of us were going to be "removed" from the planet for a while, while a cleansing was taking place. I can remember telling friends that we would be lifted up like beautiful ornaments on a table while the table was dusted and cleaned, and then we would be put back down. But I had no idea it would take this long...nor be so challenging! For the past three years or so, many of us at our soul levels (or those at the helm of this process) have been putting together new and revised plans to support this impending and certain Shift of the Ages. Many miscalculations were made, all with good intentions, and this resulted in many changes with the course and a much longer and drawn out plan than was anticipated. Very briefly put, it was thought that the souls here on the planet now would take over on their own, holding a high vibration and connecting together like a grid, but not enough souls chose to grow and expand and thus, we did not take over on our own.

California Quake Warnings, Earth Changes, Etc.

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

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The Time Monks have done several media appearances over the past month and I've been trying to figure out how to encapsulate this and other information into something cogent. I can't. So I'm just going to throw several of the better interviews up here for your consideration and babble in a stream of consciousness fashion. As ever, I endorse you, gentle reader, to try not to go into fear around some of the scarier predictions... like the economic stuff. It may even be irresponsible of me to say this but I just don't get that it's going to be as bad as they predict and that I see something really beautiful opening up behind the misery. We do, however, live in "interesting times" and some of this is can get very uncomfortable. It already has but it's going to get worse.

Earthquakes and California

That said, there is a lot of data here that I'm seeing cross-corroboration of; particularly on natural disasters. I have very real concerns about earthquakes. In late March I know I said to several people, privately, that I was feeling a build-up to another major natural disaster. A short time later this spate of quakes started. We're already way off the charts in terms of number and frequency which Clif High notes. I have very real concerns about California right now. A few days before the Mexico quake that was felt up through much of Southern California, I saw a fault line releasing a lot of light in a portion of California. (This came up in a private reading so I'm really not at liberty to say more than that.) Now here's what concerns me. Since that occurred I've been hearing information from numerous, diverse sources pointing to some very serious quake activity pending throughout much of California.

I'd like to think the Mexico quake -- which did mercifully little damage -- was the one that was predicted for the San Diego area. It's not looking like that. It looks more like it was a precursor to a much worse quake pending for that region. There are a number of psychics picking that up but it's also being validated by more empirical sources. Whitley Strieber did a brief segment with a geologist on Dreamland. (It's about the first 10 minutes of the 4/10 Starchild DNA interview which will go behind the pay wall shortly.) Here's the concerning part: This geologist says that while the Mexico quake released pressure on some fault lines, it actually increased pressure on a number of others around San Diego. And that what is pending is a 6-7 point quake for that area.

Time Monk Clif High on Pole Shift

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.



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A little over a year ago, I wrote a series of entries on the Time Monks webbot project, and the accuracy of these forecasts. As I said then, what I was getting intuitively was pole shift, but there was little in the predictive linguistics of the Time Monks to validate that. Instead, I turned to the most recent information I could find from Drunvalo Melchizedek on the subject. What a difference a year makes. Recent material from Drunvalo, posted here and here, goes into more depth on pole shift and how it fits into the Mayan prophecies. Now comes a wealth of information from Time Monk Clif High on his near certainty that there will be a dramatic pole shift event tied to that 2012 date.

Clif has been making the rounds talking about his most recent report. There's lots of stuff to make us all very nervous on the collapsing economy, the potential "death of the dollar," and more, but what will probably be most chilling to people unfamiliar with this idea is the prospect of the magnetic poles reversing and solid land masses rolling around. His most in depth interview on the subject was the other evening on Rense Radio.