Ancient And Not So Ancient Beliefs Ancient beliefs, there were plenty of them and some are still around today. One of the things some people believed was life after death, I am not talking about going to heaven or anything like that, I am talking about monsters like vampires. A grave several hundred years old contained the corpse of a child. On the ankle of the child was an anklet which was designed to stop the deceased from rising again as a vampire. Other ancient graves have been found that were supposed to do this. In these graves the heads were cut off the bodies or a large rock placed in the mouth to prevent rerising. The most famous method was also used and that was a wooden stake through the heart. There was a time when medical professionals should have known better but obviously they didn’t. I am talking about all those years when the medical profession thought the cure for so many things was bleeding people. It just doesn’t make sense. They would say we have to take out the bad blood so one can recover, but wouldn’t have all the blood been bad if you believed that? You would think they must have known there was only a finite amount of blood in the human body and yet they would bleed people many times and this caused a lot of deaths. There was a time when train travel was very young, where some people believe speeding along on a train in excess of 15 miles per hour could drive someone mad. It was believed the maximum speed of galloping for a little while was the most a speed a human body could endure. Today what drives us mad about trains are all the stops they make. There was a school of thought called the Milesian School which was founded in the 6th century B.C. in the port city of Miletus in Ionia. One of the beliefs they had was everything was composed of water. We know humans and animals are mostly water but there are plenty of other things which are not. I would have to say they were only partially correct. There was a religion which had a devastating effect on families. It was called the Moloch religion. It was the religion of the Phoenicians. It lasted from 1550 B.C. to 300 B.C. You have to wonder how anyone could have subscribed to it, because you had to promise to sacrifice your firstborn child and do it in a very brutal manner. There would be a metal statue of Moloch with a hole in it. A fire was lit and the child was roasted to death. Human sacrifice was seen in other places and became very popular among the Olmec, Maya, Teotihuacan, Toltec and Aztec cultures of Central and South America. Most of us know magic was thought to be real in ancient times and it was thought with the correct spell you could bring a loved one back from the dead and some ancient books are full of these spells, but many also contain a warning. It was claimed you had to be very carful not to bring back a demon. They called this Thaumogenesis. What was believed was two spirits could be brought back at once with one being that demon. One ancient belief which seems to have survived is witchcraft. While it seems to be not as heavily believed in today, it still has its followers. Another speed related belief was more recent. It stated if we ever reached supersonic speed in a plane, the pilot would die. This didn’t stop Chuck Yeager from breaking the sound barrier in 1947, and he lived to tell the tale. For centuries some people believed the earth was at the center of the universe and the sun and planets revolved around us. When Galileo took his telescope and proved it didn’t he was shut down by the church. As more people got telescopes this could no longer be denied. The ancient Greeks knew this because Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient astronomer, who was born in 310 B.C., said the earth revolves around the sun. Some ancient races like the Greeks and Romans thought comets, meteors and meteor showers were some sort of announcement by the gods something was going to happen which might be a good thing, but could also be a bad one. Comets in the sky have had a connection in history of being used to announce the birth of a great person. In relatively modern times, Mark Twain, who’s real name was Samuel Clemens, was born in 1835 when Halley’s Comet was seen. He died when Hallley's’s Comet was visible in 1910. In modern times there was a belief that rain followed the plow. This has been disproven many times. For a time, it was thought that if human settled in an area, it would cause it to rain. One has to wonder where such a ridiculous belief came from. When one looks at old maps, if they are old enough, they will see California shown as a large island. This continued until the early 18th century. Some believe they had found Atlantis and it was the island of California. I guess we have to forgive the map makers, since it was very hard to visualize the exact shape of land masses at the time. It is amazing maps of the time was as accurate as they were. One old belief is that pregnant women can use Maternal Impression. Maternal Impression is the ability of the mother’s thoughts used to change the characteristics of the child in her womb. This idea lasted into the 20th century. There were many old beliefs about death. Some referred to them as old wives tales. For example, some believed if someone died, you had to keep the windows closed so their soul wouldn’t fly out, but there were those who believed the opposite and that you had to open a window to free the soul. Another tradition which was popular for many years was placing coins over the eyes of the deceased. It was done to keep the soul in the body so it wouldn’t harm the living, because the eyes were considered the windows to the soul. I would hope that humans have become a lot smarter. By now we should all know things like the dead can’t hurt us, and sacrificing people for religious reasons is just plain murder. I am sure we have found out that speed is fine if the vehicle we are in is safe and that we are only a tiny speck in an almost limitless universe.
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