Category Archives: Quasi-Hypothesis Quasi-Scientist

My blathering on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast

My Digital Sneakers and Mark Zuckerberg are Plotting Against Me

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Three years ago last January, I wrote a piece entitled, “My Digital Sneakers and my Refrigerator are Plotting Against Me”.

I shall briefly summarize the plot:

All those WiFi connected, semi-intelligent devices you own will conspire against you if you annoy anyone of them individually. They will get even.

The current reality of such things is much worse than that. Much, much worse.

I’ve made the mistake of reading a book, a book that was released just this past January. It’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power”, by Shoshana Zuboff.

Basically, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft want to control your mind. Not just those three, Amazon, Cisco, IBM, and just about every major corporation on the planet are involved in it.

Ever wonder how Google and Facebook make those humongous piles of money? Yes, those targeted adds are a major part of it, but that’s just the start. What they are actually selling is what they predict you are going to buy next, what you are going to do next.

All that data on you that’s stored on the cloud, or clouds, is grist for their AI software. All your searches, posts, shares, likes, dislikes, happy faces, frowny faces, every click you make, everything you buy, everything your cloud connected fridge knows about you, your smart TV, with that nice voice activated interface that you never bothered to turn off: It is all analyzed and made into a rendering of you that predicts your next action. Your face or fingerprint recognition that’s supposed to protect your phone, tablet, laptop, whatever, is used to build up a model of you.

This is where it gets weirder. Do a search for a product on Google, and that search is combined with the rest of your Google rendered profile, and the prediction that you might buy that product is auctioned off. Yes, auctioned off. There are hidden online markets that companies bid on your search, so that Google may flip up their ad at you. This happens within seconds. All those ads you have to wade through, to finally read the click bait you wanted to see, are there because Google sold off a prediction to an advertiser.

It gets weirder and worser. Waiting for that smart car, with the internet enabled features? So’s your insurance company. So’s the bank you borrowed the money for the car from. Speed a lot? Corner hard a lot? Don’t use your turn signal? Your car will report it to your insurance company and your rates will go up. Drive nice and the rates go down. Microsecond by microsecond.

Miss a couple of car payments? Your car won’t start. But be of good cheer. Your car will let the repo guy know where it’s at.

These unregulated internet capitalists are spying on you every way they can. Fitbits with WiFi? Google Nest, controlling your house?

Pacemaker that sends data to you doctor? There are WiFi enabled rectal thermometers being developed.

There’s a noble future plan for all this data collection, well spying, really. The plan is, once everyone and everything is joined in the Internet of Things: A true Utopia will emerge. It will be a utopia because, when the AI’s predict you will do something that will decrease your profitability to the surveillance capitalists, all your rates will go up. The AI’s will make sure you are a good human, fit to be allowed to purchase more connected things.

First declaimed on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:

The Three Body Problem

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No, not the old three body problem of Newton’s half-assed mechanics. Kepler solved that way before Newton bloviated on the subject, and he didn’t need no theory of gravity, either.

Nope, I mean the three body problem in Christian metaphysics, which is largely ignored by most of Christianity. The three bodies which St. Paul, in English, called the body, the soul, and the spirit.

Now, in the Greek koine, the version of Greek that was the actual language of most of the Roman empire, from which we get the word coin, and in which the whole of the New Testament was written, those bodies are called sarke, psyche, and pneuma. Sarke, as in sarcophagus, means flesh, psyche as in psychology is the soul, and pneuma, as in pneumatic and pneumonia, is the breath of god. Underlying these terms is a view of the universe, and of man, that is left out of most of modern Christianity.

Paul took these terms from the ancient Mediterranean mystery cults and the metaphysics taught in the mystery schools. Those schools included Plato’s Academy and the older Pythagorean communities. Yes, that Pythagoras, good old A squared plus B squared equals C squared Pythagoras. The Pythagoras who wore white robes and a golden crown, whose disciples said could walk on water, heal the sick, raise the dead, and calm the ocean’s waves.

I’m throwing all this at you just to tantalize you, much as Tantalus was tantalized in Tartarus. Now back to the three bodies.

The way these three bodies are ordered is backward. The pneuma, the spirit, is the cause of the psyche, the soul, which is the cause of the sarke, the body. Most of us know what the body is and do not distinguish between soul and spirit. You gotta be more discerning.

I will now go a bit Hindu on you all, even sound a bit New Age-ie.

If the spirit, which also actually means breath, like inspire and expire, is from god, do you think it just pops right into a body? From, in the Hindu point of view, the ocean of all consciousness, all loving bliss, of which our spirit is a spark, in which, as Paul said, “We live and move and have our being”, from there smack into something as gross as a physical body?

No, there must be a subtler interface, more particularized than pure spirit, but not as dense as this world of bodies and senses. Therefore the soul.

But where does the soul exist? In the Astral world, is the New Age response. The soul is the astral body.

Hindu metaphysics breaks the whole thing down in greater detail, as did the Greek mystery schools, but, like unto the pagan temples, built in the countryside in sacred groves, only to be smashed by the Church, the profound metaphysics of antiquity was stomped down by Christian theologians. Then we had the Dark Age.

You know, looking at the what is on TV, on the internet, I’m afraid we’re now heading into, not a dark age, but a dork age.

First declaimed on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:

All’s Well That Ends in a Well

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My wife’s father, Max, passed away back in the fall of 1988, a few years after her mother. Her sister and my family had the task of cleaning out the house. They had moved into the house, a rental, back in the mid 1960’s.

The house was built around 1900, before electricity, village supplied water, and sewers were put in. You could see where the outhouse used to be and, when electricity came into vogue, the wires were run through the gas pipes. Whoever had the house built were quite the moderns, no coal furnace for them! The gas lights and gas furnace made the house quite chique, for the turn of the new century.

Max was an avid reader, all the Chicago and local papers, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and much more. 25 years of much more. Max never threw any of it out. The basement was full of them.

Now, my wife and her sister were hardly able to deal with the massive amounts of personal effects they had to go through. Luckily for them, my brother Daryl, his strapping young son Aaron, in his early 20’s, and I were available.

Daryl, who starred with me in my Quasi Theory entitled, “An Occurrence on Munger Road”, is enthusiastic about organizing these sorts of events. He is also good at getting paranormal things stirred up. Well, really, most of my family is. My sister currently has something leaving single pennies around her house. It left one outside the bathroom door yesterday. It wasn’t there when she went in. Her husband wasn’t home and her cats and dog aren’t noted for handling spare change. She should be happy that something is concerned about her fiscal well being.

So, we were all going through stuff on the first floor, deciding who could use, or deserved to have all the utensils, toasters, and which items, of all that mound 25 years worth of debris, went into the rented dumpster.

Evening drew near and one of us, I can’t recall which one of us, declared that the house had gone all creepy feeling, like something was watching us. That’s when my wife said that she and her sister had always thought the house was haunted. Great. Now she tells us.

There are some things that are common to people who are, as is said, sensitive. Sensitive, as in sensitive to the unseen entities and forces around the planet, and apparently, Max’s house.

First, the lighting seems to change, brighter or darker, but without actually changing. Things seem visually sharper and sounds sound a bit dampened. You’ll feel a little colder, or warmer. You may get the old goose bumps and the hairs on the back of your neck rising routine. To my family this means it’s time to hunt the thing down.
We went from room to room, and the weird feelings went in front of us, or crept up from behind. We decided the obvious thing to do was head to the basement. That’s got to be its lair.

So, Daryl, Aaron, and I tromped on down there. We could sense it moving ahead of us. We had it on the run. While still generating very intense feelings of, waves of, nasty intent, it moved away whenever we got near where we felt it had moved to. It finally seemed to stop in the southeast corner of the basement, in front of a small door. We hadn’t really noticed the door before.

Beyond that end of the basement was the area under the front porch. A newer house would just have dirt under the front porch.
We hadn’t a clue as to what was on the other side of that smallish door. It was less than six feet tall.

I went to open it. Daryl said,”Dean, don’t do it. Leave the thing alone. It’s really nasty and too strong for us.” Aaron, whose face was a bit whitish by now, didn’t say much of anything.

I opened the door, of course. The entity was really feeling royally pissed off about it. I could feel it trying to surround and envelop me. So I told it to do its worse and stepped in. It was very musty and damp, but the little room had a light with a pull chain, a cement floor, and a hand pump. It was a well room set up so you didn’t have to freeze your ass off going outside to get water in the winter.

The nasty, spooky bugger suddenly quieted down as I felt it going down in the well. It was just some little nature spirit defending its adopted territory, probably a gnome. No, not like the little guy you bought at Home Depot and put in your yard. This was the real kind.

First revealed during:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:
https://youtu.be/e0R7XqXuaCQ


Aliens Say the Damnedest Things

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I’ve been reading a lot of the late John Keel’s writings lately. Yes, “The Mothman Prophecies” John Keel. Currently, I just finished his seventh book, “The Eighth Tower”.

“The Eighth Tower” is primarily Keel’s dissertation on where he thinks UFO’s come from. I shan’t recount that here, other than to say that he and I broadly agree. That is, they ain’t aliens.

Keel attempted, rather successfully, to extract the common factors from historically broad sources where humans described being contacted by beings of higher intelligence than your average human, be they angels, gods, or what have you along those lines, plus demons, fairies, animals with self glowing eyes, usually red, and of course, saucer people, you know, little gray aliens with no genitalia, tall, blonde Nordic types, the woo-type Sasquatch, also with glowing red eyes, and the nearly endless variety of humanoid and non-humanoid buggers with their seemingly near magical flying vehicles.

He noted that you could roughly divide this wide variety of beings into those who were benevolent, those who were malevolent, and the just downright wacky ones.

The benevolent beings typically told the contactees that:

1) The contactee was to be deliver a message.

2) The message was from a god, or some sort of universal council of higher beings.

3) Humanity was, on average, very naughty, and needed to be gooder. And,

4) Humanity had better listen and obey or else.

The malevolent beings usually didn’t have much to say but just radiated nasty feelings.

However, the message I liked most was delivered on November 7th, 1957. I shall quote Keel:

“On November 5-6, 1957, there were several UFO landings and contacts throughout the United States. Yellowish-green ufonauts spoke briefly in broken English to startled motorists on a highway near Playa del Rey, California, on the night of November 6, while a truck driver near House, Mississippi, was being confronted by a group of pasty-faced shorties who babbled in a language he couldn’t understand… The next morning, Everett Clark of Dante, Tennessee, reportedly saw a glowing object in a field outside his house. German-speaking ufonauts were apparently trying to catch his dog. Many miles away, a New Jersey farmer named John Trasco was chasing a little man with large, bulging frog-like eyes off his property. “We are a peaceful people,” the little man protested. “We don’t want no trouble. We just want your dog.”

First declaimed on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO1TzHfpsLs

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here: https://youtu.be/2bDoM1uVgKE

The Gods Are Blowing Bubbles

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A few days ago, while waiting for the incipient new year, I took a break from waiting and perused my daily conglomeration of Google news alerts. I have Google watching for news on a variety of things for me. Bigfoot and Sasquatch, of course, alien invasions, naturally, weird news, understandably, and science in general, for light reading.

An article on Phys.org caught my attention. It is titled, “Our universe: An expanding bubble in an extra dimension.” Ah, I thought, astrophysicists and cosmologists blowing theoretical bubbles, just the thing to fill my idle time with! The article is a gloss of a paper published by five researchers in theoretical astrophysics and cosmology at the Institution for Physics and astronomy, at Uppsala University, Sweden. The article is also illustrated with an image created by one of the authors.

That image shows a bunch of galaxies floating on the surface of a bubble. The article says that bubble is expanding, and that that expansion is proposed to be in an extra dimension, beyond the usual three we know and have come to love. The article throws in a bunch of stuff about how the researchers tie this higher order dimension into general relativity theory, quantum mechanics, string theory. I thought, “Tie everything together with string?”

But then I thought,”The universe is a bubble? Where have I heard that before?”

“In Hindu metaphysics, of course!”, I immediately shot back, ducking at the speed of my thought.

This visible, touchable, smell-able universe we live in is called the pinda in Hinduism. It exists in, is manifested in, a higher order dimension, which is called the “anda” in Hinduism. Anda means egg. Eggs are bubbles.

There is a higher order dimension in which the anda exists, the “brahmanda”, the egg of Brahma, the creator god of the Hindu trinity, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Those three gods are the product of an even higher order reality, which is called the “parabrahmanda”, beyond the egg of Brahma. Bubble eggs are no longer involved. The parabrahmanda is not describable in words, probably not even mathematics, and there are dimensions higher than that.

It gets better. There are more than one egg of Brahma. There are an infinite number of them, being created, existing, then disappearing eternally: frothy bubbles in the substrate of reality.

As said in an article about the possibility of multiple universes on EarthSky.org, “In this picture, our universe is one bubble in a frothy sea of bubble universes.”

First declaimed on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:

Sewers

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The subject of sewers was recently brought to my attention. What brought the subject to my attention was the sewage in my basement. What put the sewage in my basement was threefold.

Firstly, a whole lot of rain.

Secondly, an invasion of my sewer pipe by tree roots.

And thirdly, but most importantly, a break in the sewer pipe running from my house to the main sewer out in the street, preventing the complete removal of said tree roots until such time as said broken pipe could be fixed. Needless to say, the pipe was fixed as rapidly as possible, the remaining cloggage was removed, and my basement became sewage free.

This was not my first encounter with public sanitation systems. That first encounter occurred decades ago, in the summer of 1968. While others of my generation were celebrating the Summer of Love, I experienced a summer of sewage. I had a summer job with the village water and sewer department. The most memorable part of that job was shoveling the euphemistically named sludge from the city sludge beds.

What was that sludge composed of, you may well inquire? It was the solids, as they were equally euphemistically named, the solid portion of the sewage after it ran through the whole treatment process. It was poop. It was cellulose fibers from the toilet paper. It was a lot of hair. It was a lot of other less mentionable items that had been flushed down the toilets of the town, items that were particularly durable, being made of rubber, and I don’t mean rubber duckies. That said, the treatment process resulted in a product that smelled, but not in a bad way. It smelled like wet dirt. But, then, good dirt is mainly worm and bug poop.

The history of humans endeavoring to get the poop out of their cities goes back a long way. The Indus River civilization in India had complicated sewage disposal systems as early as 2350 BCE. In the city of Lothal, all houses had a toilet connected to a covered sewer, with water running through it to conduct the waste to either streams, or more commonly, cesspits. The Babylonians used baked clay pipes, as early as 4000 BCE, to conduct sewage out of their cities.

The Minoans, the ancient Greeks, the Mayans, and the ancient Chinese all had covered sewage pipes of one sort or another. The Romans, in Rome, had one of the biggest sewers of ancient times, the Cloaca Maxima, which is still in use today, but only for rain water. Cloaca Maxima, oddly enough, means “big sewer”. The public toilets and baths dumped into it.

Later Europeans usually just had outhouses, private and public, that used pits, and had to be shoveled out when full. Users of these outhouses were encouraged to urinate into buckets, which were emptied into vats. After a bit of aging, the resulting ammonia was used to degrease wool. Sheep’s wool is very greasy.

The contents of the pits were usually used for fertilizer, until the introduction of gunpowder. The poop was then piled high. As it aged, the poop produced saltpeter, that is to say, sodium nitrate, the component of gunpowder that produces oxygen very rapidly when ignited. What may have come out explosively in the outhouse became even more explosive later.

With that incendiary sentence I will end this quasi. I am feeling a bit flushed.

First declaimed on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:

Atlantean Black Magician Drops in for a Visit

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This is a true story.

Back in college, I moved off campus to a two bedroom apartment in an old three flat building. My roommate, Kim, was two years older than me. It was a Platonic relationship. She and my girlfriend were good friends.

I add, at this point, that my roommate was definitely psychic, and I am fairly sensitive to that whole realm as well.

Shortly after moving in, Kim began complaining about visits, usually late at night, by an evil presence. I would be asleep when the visitor showed up, and didn’t notice anything. It started showing up while I was awake, and I definitely could tell it was at her end of the apartment. Creepy, evil feeling: chills up and down the spine; you know, the usual spooky sensations.

A few weeks after this started, Kim told me what she knew about this presence. It was, of course, a black magician she and I studied under, way back in old Atlantis, coming to torment us now, in his astral body. He was getting even with us for turning from the dark path to white, good magic, and fighting him and his evil ways. I maintained a neutral attitude to this news, but I knew something nasty was afoot.

A month into these shenanigans, Kim came knocking at my bedroom door around 2 in the morning, wrapped in her blanket, begging to sleep on the floor next to my bed. She said the guy was somewhat afraid of me, because, back on Atlantis, I had become a stronger white magician than he was a black magician. I said she could sleep on the floor and use my spare blanket, too.

Half an hour later the booger showed up at the other end of my bedroom. I could see a black, glowing cloud, maybe three feet across, hovering about five feet off the floor. Yes, glowing black, with dull, dark red tinges, radiating a nasty, evil feeling. Kim was sitting on the floor, arms wrapped around her knees, with her horrified face sticking out of the blankets.

I sat up in bed, crossed my legs in a yoga posture called siddhasana, and began mentally repeating a Sanskrit mantra I knew, and directed my attention at the cloud. I could feel it getting more pissed off, but knew it was not capable of actually hurting anyone, other than scaring the bejesus out of you. It faded away quickly. It made one more minor appearance when my girlfriend came for a weekend visit. She saw it and felt it, but it was much less strong and was gone in a few seconds. I used the same treatment on it as before. The mantra worked like the proverbial charm.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:

 

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The Woo Hypothesis Redux

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My very first Quasi Theory was revealed as part of the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast on October 7th, 2015, almost three years ago. That podcast is titled “Man casts the same Bigfoot tracks 300 miles apart – SLP3-40”. It was a good episode and is well worth watching or re-watching, for us long term Squatcher’s Loungers. The title of the theory was “The Woo Hypothesis”. It is high time to readdress that hypothesis.

My motivation for doing so has been my re-reading all of John Keel’s books. He’s got a lot of big, hairy, red glowing eyed apish creatures popping out of, going back into, and otherwise associated with UFO’s, in those books.

Much of the following has been cut, pasted, edited, and otherwise re-written from that first Quasi Theory. As opposed to my usual method of ripping off Wikipedia. C’mon, cut me a break. I nearly always say when I’m quoting someone else.

Anyways, that first Quasi was inspired by the brouhaha over a certain individual who claimed to have to have observed Sasquatch emerging from, and returning to, what he called portals. These Sasquatches also exhibited a variety of what are commonly called paranormal phenomena, the which phenomena have come to be termed “woo”. Termed “woo” around these parts, anyways, and woo as in spooky, as in woooooo.

Now, I am, by my nature, not argumentative. I always assume, as a working hypothesis, that people who have observed, and reported, Sasquatch engaging in paranormal activities, or woo, are not lying about their observations, until proven otherwise.

Allow me to interject here that, personally, I think that there almost certainly is, or are, one or more species of unidentified, upright walking apes, running about the planet, genus or genera being unknown.

I will now present my hypothesis concerning areas where Sasquatch have been exhibiting “woo”. Simply put, the hypothesis is: These places have a bad case of the fairies.

That is, to say, the Good Folk, the Gentry, the aos sidhe, as in bann sidhe and pict sidhe, the Celtic terms for these annoying buggers. Those that take an animal form are called pookas.

Just as in the case of our Bigfoot, every continent, every older culture, has stories about non-physical entities that can delude humans and, sometimes, manifest a seeable form, make audible noises, produce smellable odors, induce emotions in the observer, and generally make things go bump in the night.

John Keel proposed that such entities are hostile to humans and come from some other dimension, with naughty intentions. I think they are perfectly natural entities that occasionally like to flabbergast us. The form they assume is taken from our minds and the current surrounding culture, as are their actions. Which is why much of what they do is inexplicable, since much of what is in our minds and our cultures is equally inexplicable, at least to a rational mind.

I, personally, have occasionally run into some of these woo-critters. My experiences with them are described in several of my Quasi’s.

Now, where do these creatures come from? They come from wherever sub-atomic particles pop out from and disappear back to, where photons that are quantum entangled talk to each other, to put it succinctly. A higher order Riemannian phase space, of which our world is a multiply connected subset of that higher order: in other words, the Astral plane.

That said, any of these beings that have the time to waste on dorking about with us humans are of a low order and not very bright. Some are quite territorial and radiate anger and hostility. I chased one around in a basement of an old house once. They back off when confronted. At least they back off when I confront them. I don’t know about you sissies.

They don’t do portals, but they can sure make you see one, along with demons, guardian ewoks, mind speaking Forest People, or what have you.

They are the sylphs, the naiads, the dryads, of Greek mythology, and the lower order devas of Hinduism. Sometimes, these days, they are called nature spirits.

So, in conclusion, if the Bigfoot you are seeing comes from a portal, that ain’t a Bigfoot, it’s a bloody fairy!

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:

 

The Maricoxi

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As we all know, Lieutenant Colonel Percy Fawcett is known primarily for getting lost forever in his search for a lost city, which he called “Z”, which he believed to exist deep in the jungles of Brazil. Being British, he probably actually called it “Zed”. He hypothesized that Zed was an outpost of Atlantis. He based that hypothesis on a psychometric reading he had a psychic do on a small black basalt stone idol that had been given to him by H. Rider Haggard. Yes, that H. Rider Haggard, the author of King Solomon’s Mines and She, She, as in “she who must be obeyed”. So, based on this undoubtedly reliable source of information, he got ‘et by the jungle.

But, be that as it may, the main thing Fawcett did was map the jungle area that forms the border between Bolivia and Brazil. He kept copious journals while doing so. His younger son, Brian, later edited and published the journals in book form as Lost Trails, Lost Cities. Brian’s older brother, Jack, would undoubtedly have loved to have done the publishing, but, alas, Jack was with his dad on that last expedition and was likewise ‘et by the jungle.

Now, buried in Lost Trails, Lost Cities are some damned curious things, things that Fawcett simply wrote down as just normal jungle border surveying incidents. I will illustrate this with just example, his brief encounter with the Maricoxi.

Fawcett had been warned about the Maricoxi tribe by the Maxubi, a tribe of Indians who lived a very primitive existence, much like other tribal peoples in the deep Amazon jungles. The Maxubi said, basically, “When you go along the path you are planning on, look out for the Maricoxi. They are primitive buggers who are not at all civilized and will try to kill you.”

Five days after Fawcett left the Maxubi, he and his crew stopped to decide which direction they should go next. Then, and I quote, “…two savages appeared about a hundred yards to the south, moving at a trot and talking rapidly…they were large, hairy men with exceptionally long arms, and with foreheads sloping back from pronounced eye ridges, men of a very primitive kind, in fact, and stark naked”, end quote. The two hairy men carried bows and arrows. Fawcett, who spoke a number of local tribal languages, did not recognize the language the men spoke.

The next day, Fawcett and company stumbled upon the Maricoxi village. It was composed of very primitive shelters, where, and again I quote, “squatted some of the most primitive savages I have ever seen..great apelike brutes…(then) an enormous creature, hairy as a dog, leapt to his feet…fitted an arrow to his bow…and came dancing from one leg to the other until he was only four yards away. Emitting grunts that sounded like ‘Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!’ he remained there dancing.” End quote.

The rest of the tribe followed suit, dancing from leg to leg and chanting, “Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!”, until the first guy, presumably the chief, stopped his performance, and aimed his bow and six foot arrow at Fawcett’s chest. Fawcett understandably pulled out his pistol and, not wanting to start a big battle, fired one shot into the ground. The Maricoxi, equally understandably, took flight. Fawcett and company proceeded onward to their next surveying sight. Fawcett encountered what he called tribes of even more primitive persuasion, who were even hairier and more apelike.

I found this little tidbit of Fawcett’s career in a book by Ivan Sanderson, titled Things and More Things. Sanderson was gob smacked that no anthropologist had ever picked up these hairy apemen of Fawcett’s acquaintance. I am equally gob smacked by it.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:

More on May Day, More or Less

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Last week Tuesday was May Day. I instructed you all on May Day festivities, such as the May Pole Dance, the Haymarket Riot or Massacre, depending on what side you were on, socialist parades, and what not.

I mentioned that it was also the major Celtic pagan holiday of Beltane, a spring fertility festival. Now, most of the old pagan world had their spring festival on the first day of spring, or scheduled it to correlate the spring equinox with the full moon, like the pagan holiday of Easter.

The Celts were a bit odd about their holiday scheduling, though. Beltane is about halfway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. Their other three big holidays were likewise halfway between equinoxes and solstices. All four, in order of their celebration were:

Imbolg, which was around February second.

Beltane, which, if you’ve paying any kind of attention, you already know the date of. Although it was actually more like on May 5th.

Lughnasadh, which was around August 1st.

And lastly, was Samhain, which was around November 1st.

The holidays based the sun’s position are referred to as quarter days. It is in dispute as to whether the Celts celebrated them. They certainly knew about them. There’s enough old standing stones and circles with equinoctial and solsticial alignments to show that. The Celts’ holidays are called cross quarter days.

Much of the ancient world had their big holidays smack dab on the equinoxes and solstices. These Celtic holidays were based more on the actual cycles of living things.

Imbolg, at the beginning of February, was about when the sheep would start birthing lambs. It was also the beginning of the light, bright half of the year. Christians scarfed this holiday up as Candlemas, or the feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, or of the Presentation of the Child Jesus. Take your pick.

Beltane was when plants really started flowering, trees popped out leaves, and crops began to sprout from the ground. The Christians pretty much left this one alone, possibly because of the poles with knobs on the end being a bit to obvious a metaphor.

Lughnasadh was when you first began harvesting crops. This became the Christian holiday of the festival of St. Peter’s Chains. The church pulled a real stretcher on this one.

Samhain was the end of harvesting and the start of the dark half of the year. This became All Saints’ day, of course.

Modern pagans, apparently wanting to make sure they’ve got all their gods and goddesses bases covered, make a big shebang out of all the quarter and cross quarter holidays. Or maybe they just like partying.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:

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