DECEMBER 4th - People Used to Believe Some Messed Up Stuff



People used to believe some messed up stuff, but looking back you can understand why they came to certain conclusions. Like without any existing knowledge of heavenly bodies, it seems a perfectly reasonable explanation that there was a Sun God who brought the dawn each day. Thinking that the earth was flat? Not all that crazy to think without knowledge of perspective. And it’s also fairly easy to see how things could have gotten embellished. Think about it. You’re a squire in the Middle Ages entrusted with delivering a sword to a knight two kingdoms over, but you, being rather irresponsible and, truthfully, a bit of a smarmy squire, lose the sword in a poker game trying to impress the rather handsome bar wench at the local tavern. But besides smarm and irresponsibility, you know that everyone loves a good tale, and if it keeps your head off the chopping block, what’s the harm? So you tell a little fib that you were attacked by a flying, fire-breathing animal that looked like a giant lizard and lost the sword. Burn a little patch of forest and you’re golden. Cept now everybody believes in dragons, but still--no harm. Or perhaps it was more like the manatee-mermaid situation, and someone got scared by a Komodo Dragon and embellished a bit. In any case, that was just a really long introduction to give you something to think about when I inform you that on this day in 1680 a hen in Rome laid an egg that foretold the coming of a comet that hadn’t yet been seen, but would be on December 16th. Apparently, people around this time believed that comets had special powers and such--which is completely understandable. They also believed one of the ways of understanding what these comets had in store for the masses was to read the markings that appeared on hen eggs after the comet had passed--kind of lose me there. Well, apparently this hen in 1680 was a fortune-teller or a time traveller. Perhaps she had unknowingly clucked her way into a wormhole to December 16th and her egg was affected by the comet. Or perhaps the egg collector was a bit of an irresponsible, smarmy sort of fellow and failed to stop a wily fox from getting into that henhouse, so he purposely made a little marking on the Fortune Teller Hen’s egg saying it foretold the coming of a comet to distract the powers that be that all the other eggs were missing. He was dumbfounded when that comet flew by, but hey--no harm done. Of course maybe people just used to believe some messed up stuff.

This day has been Marked.

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