If it Thunders in February...

This was a funny article. About how hearing thunder can presage events. 

So the fact that it's going to thunder in Scotland means some poor wealthy bloke will die? Heh. 

But don't laugh. People still believe in astrology, numerology, palmistry, religion etc. You can fool some people all the time eh? 

Have a lovely day son. 

And don't forget to take the photographs! 

Love

Baba

If it Thunders in February...
http://www.medievalists.net/2016/02/01/if-it-thunders-in-february/
(via Instapaper)

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If you hear thunder in February, it could mean bountiful crops are coming, or war and death will come down upon the wealthy. Here is your day-to-day guide on thunder from the sixth century.

Thunder Storm Clouds – photo by Per / Flickr

Some superstitions from ancient times continued into the Middle Ages, including beliefs about astrology and how signs and portents could be observed in the natural world. One of those who wrote about these beliefs was John Lydus, a Byzantine administrator and scholar who lived in the sixth century. Like many, he initially doubted that the skies could predict the future, but his attitude changed when he saw for himself a 'horse-headed' comet in the sky in the year 540, which was followed by news that the Persians had invaded and destroyed the city of Antioch.

He would go on to write the book De Ostentis – On Celestial Signs, in which he offers the learning of the ancient world regarding portents, giving them a Christian viewpoint. He explains,

We are eager to speak about both solar and lunar obscurations, for thus the aforesaid call the defections of the luminaries caused by eclipses, both comets and their difference, both their trailings and dartings, both lightning flashes and thunderbolts, also other aerial wonders and finally manifestly earthquakes and conflagrations and the presaging therefrom, not so as to recount their natural causes or the speculations about them, for the particulars about these things clearly should be reserved for philosophers, but to learn perhaps beforehand how it is possible naturally from these celestial signs the occurrence of future events.

Lydus devoted a considerable part of his book to interpreting thunder, going so far as to note what will happen if people hear a thunderbolt on a particular day. Here is section on detailing what would happen over each day during the month of February:

February 1st – If it thunders, it threatens war and death of wealthy men.

One of my heroines–Hypatia

Is Hypatia of Alexandria. An amazing lady who was a Greek Philosopher in Roman Egypt, one of the first guruines in Mathematics, she also was amazing in philosophy and astronomy. A contemporary Christian described her as

There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not infrequently appeared in public in the presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in going to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more

Can you fall in love with a woman from history? Yes, I can. What a woman. Here is a painting of her by Charles William Mitchell. Before you think it was prurient, remember this is showing her state after  a rabid Christian mob tore off her clothes and just few moments before tore her to pieces.

And guess who killed her? a howling mob of Christians who said that she was a blasphemer, she corrupted young ones and and and.

Yet even she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them.

I saw this recent article on her and was prompted to blog about this amazing woman. I quote: This is what she was faced with

In Politics, Aristotle tells us, “silence is a woman‟s glory.”  St. Paul wrote, “women should keep silent . . . they have no permission to talk, but should keep their place as the law directs” (1 Corinthians 33-34).  In 1 Timothy (2:12) St. Paul stated he did not “permit women to teach or dictate to the men”  In Moralia Plutarch states the Roman position on women clearly, “the two great duties of a virtuous woman . . . are to keep at home and be silent. For she is only to speak to her husband, as by her husband.  Nor is she to take amiss the uttering of her mind . . .”  By adopting Platonic/Aristotelian ideologies of women we have, in many ways, reconstructed the universal woman and the universal woman‟s condition in the ancient world as unvaried and universally oppressed.

One good point that the author says is worthy of reiteration:

 It is true that many women were probably prohibited from leading lives similar to Hypatia, however, there have been times and places like Alexandria that were less restricted and may have served to empower women.  Nor do misogynistic ideologies alleviate the responsibility of contemporary feminist scholars to contest the historical canon of ancient rhetoric.  Since traditional history has avoided or suppressed women in history, the trick for feminist scholars is to search for women everywhere, and to recreate historical periods and women‟s lifetimes as fully as possible.  With attention to race, class, orientation in addition to gender, we may be able to uncover likely pockets of women‟s empowerment and subsequent  activity.  I assure you, women like Hypatia of Alexandria were active in a variety of ways in the ancient world, of that there is little doubt.  It seems likely that then, as now, they performed work to serve their families, to earn wages, or to serve other interests and, in some places and times like ancient Greece and Alexandria, they participated in scholarly and public life. 

If one looks around, the situation is much much better (although its really shameful that the number of women in banking, technology, mathematics, physics and and and are so few and far between compared to men). But we still have problems, the state and men still decide your reproductive rights, women are still told that their virtue is based upon them hiding away behind a ghunghat or a veil, they are still aborted much more than boys. Women should fight, its not a fight that will end soon, remember Hypatia lived between 350-415AD, she faced these problems and she was a brave wonderful girl. Anybody who wears a ghunghat or a veil to me is betraying women down the ages and frankly is a bit of a muppet. Stand up, fight, be a woman, your face, body and mind are yours. And don't give me the answer that its your choice. Its your choice to be hidden away based upon what a man told you? bah.

But on to better things, she has been well documented in video as well.

Here is her death in a film, Agora 2009

A trailer from this film.

And the first of five segments on Hypatia.

I have not been to Alexandria yet, but one day I will go there to say hello to one of my mental goddess (as opposed to my domestic goddess, heh).

What a woman.

What does your birth month say?

Interesting research.

Winter (Dec. 22 to March 20):

Body weight: Men with a few pounds to lose may have another excuse why that stubborn fat won't leave. David Phillips of the University of Southampton in England analyzed the weight of 1,750 British seniors and found that 13.8% of men with birthdays from January to March qualified as obese but only 9.4% of those born from October to December did so. In women, seasonal trends were less apparent. Phillips argues that exposure to low temperatures in early life might promote development of fatty tissue and predispose winter-borns to obesity in adulthood. Lab studies support his theory: Rats subjected to cold before or soon after birth store more ingested energy as fat, even when the temperature is no longer low.

Temperament: A 2004 psychological questionnaire of 448 men and women found that 20- to 45-year-olds born during the half year containing winter (October to March) are more likely to be novelty seekers — curious, hating monotony, apt to choose sky diving over Sudoku as a hobby. The same didn't apply to those older than 45: At these ages, winter-borns were lessinterested in novelty-seeking than summer-borns, suggesting they settle down faster. "Season of birth does influence temperament; we just don't know exactly why," says Lars-Göran Nilsson, a psychologist at Stockholm University in Sweden, who in 2001 published a study on this subject in the journal Neuropsychobiology. He thinks it has something to do with levels of serotonin and dopamine, key brain chemicals that seem to be involved in formation of personality. "Throughout the year, their production fluctuates in a mother's body and might affect development of a fetus," Nilsson says. Animal studies suggest the fluctuations are due to changes in day length.

Schizophrenia: The rate of this severe mental illness in the general population is about 1%. But those born in winter develop it at higher rates, an observation that dates to 1929 and has since been confirmed in more than 200 studies. One of these, published in 1999 in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that people born in the Northern Hemisphere in early March were 11% more likely to develop schizophrenia than those born in early June or early December. South of the equator, the pattern is reversed. A popular hypothesis blames prenatal infections, with some researchers pointing fingers at the seasonal flu and others at the summer and autumn epidemics of rubella, polio and diphtheria that could harm the fetus during the first trimester of pregnancy. People born in August and September have the lowest risk of schizophrenia.

Spring (March 21 to June 21)

Height: People born in spring tend to be taller, according to Gerhard Weber, an anthropologist at the University of Vienna. Analyzing Austrian Federal Army measurements of more than half a million men, he found that the tallest recruits were born in April, the shortest in October. Although the average difference was small (0.2 inch), the finding, reported in 1998 in the journal Nature, was statistically significant. Weber speculated in his study that the effect could be due to concentrations of the light-dependent hormone melatonin in the mother's body, which might stimulate secretion of growth hormones. Since human fetuses and babies grow in spurts, the amount of daylight during periods of fast development would be crucial.

Multiple sclerosis: Spring-borns have an elevated risk of this inflammatory disease, known to be caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors. Studies have established that the higher the latitude of a country, the higher the prevalence of MS. How big a rise? Among Australian states, the risk in temperate Tasmania is fivefold that in subtropical Queensland, and a 2005 study of 17,874 Canadian and 11,502 British patients with MS found that those born in May have a 23% increased risk of developing MS compared with those born in November. The suspected cause: deficiency in maternal concentrations of vitamin D at the end of the second or third trimester.

Summer (June 22 to Sept. 22)

Sleep habits: Studies find that people whose birthdays fall in June to September are more likely to be evening than morning types when compared with those born in winter. A survey of 5,720 European students published in 2009 in the journal Sleep showed that those born in August went to bed 19 minutes later on average than December-borns. Study lead author Vincenzo Natale of the University of Bologna, Italy, argues that our internal clocks are set for life when we are born. Here's how he thinks it works: In the summer, abundant sunlight influences the maturing of the brain's circadian clock, setting it to a pattern of longer days. Experiments on mice support this theory, as does the finding that in Australia the patterns are shifted by six months. But the tendency to be an owl or lark is also strongly influenced by genes, Natale notes: "If someone genetically predisposed to being an evening type is born during summer, he will become an extreme evening type, but if he's born in winter, he will end somewhere in between an evening and a morning type."

Handedness: Summer- and spring-borns are more likely to be left-handed. A study published in 1994 in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills examined handedness among males conscripted to the French army, male American baseball players and data collected by the U.S. Bureau of the Census and the National Center for Health Statistics. It showed that 41.2% of all left-handed people were born in the five months from March to July, but only 38.2% of all right-handed people. According to psychology professor Maryanne Martin (University of Oxford) and Gregory Jones (University of Warwick), authors of a 1999 study that confirmed these results, it's not yet clear why such differences exist; possible factors include variations in maternal nutrition or exposures to sunshine, temperature or seasonal infections, such as flu or measles, during the second trimester of pregnancy.

Diabetes: Children born in summer (especially in August) are more likely to develop Type 1 diabetes, in which the body's immune system kills off the cells in the pancreas that secrete insulin. This was shown in a 1999 study of Swedish children published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood. In a sample of 1,248 children with diabetes, there were 24 patients more than expected born in August and 33 less than expected born in October. Again, viral infections may be why: Mouse studies have shown, for example, that coxsackieviruses disturb the immune system and can induce diabetes.

Fall (Sept. 23 to Dec. 21)

Life span: If you're born in the fall, you may have a better shot at living to a ripe old age. An example: A 2011 report in the Journal of Aging Research compared months of birth of 1,574 U.S. centenarians — people who have lived to 100 or beyond — and those of their spouses, brothers and sisters. "Siblings of centenarians born in September to November have 30 to 50% higher chances to live to 100 years compared to those born in March," says Leonid Gavrilov of the Center on the Demography and Economics of Aging at the University of Chicago, who coauthored the study with his wife, Natalia. He points to a variety of possible causes: maternal nutrition during the last months of pregnancy, seasonal infections, temperature during birth or conception and levels of vitamin D. All may influence the likelihood of health problems later in life.

Allergies: Scandinavian, Dutch and Japanese studies show a higher prevalence of food allergies in children born in fall or winter than in those born in summer. Allergy expert Dr. Milo Vassallo of Brooklyn, N.Y., reviewed cases of more than 1,000 patients at three Boston emergency rooms who had food-related acute allergic reactions. He found that fall and winter birth was associated with 53% higher odds of having a food allergy. He thinks it could be due to seasonal fluctuations in vitamin D, since deficiencies can weaken the immune system. The only two reliable sources of this vitamin are sunlight and supplements, so the risk will depend on where you live, he says: "Because of the higher latitude and more exaggerated fluctuations in sun exposure, children born in the fall and winter in Boston may be at increased risk than those in Los Angeles."

Complete bollocks of course, lol

Rahu and Ketu in mythological and astronomological contexts

Fascinating paper. Publicly available, go check. And a great set of references tracking the development of Rahu and Ketu as mythological, astronomical and astrological aspects.