Great British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the most successful writers in the beginning of the twentieth century. His most famous work - stories about detective Sherlock Holmes brought him fame and fortune. As we know, Sherlock was a hard core realist and intellectual who relied on the method of “deductive reasoning”. This helped him to solve any case of crime no matter how weird, bizarre or fantastic it looked.

Unfortunately Sherlock’s creator himself in the second half of his life did not follow the steps of his hero. Conan Doyle fell the victim to the Spiritualism. The reason for this were very tragic events in his family that affected and traumatized Doyle on the deep personal level. His beloved wife Louisa died in 1906. Some years later other started happening one after the other. Doyle lost one by one his son Kingsley, his brother Innes, his two brothers-in-law, and his two nephews. After World War I, because of these unfortunate and sad deaths, Conan Doyle sank into deep depression. So it happened that the only solace he found was Spiritualism and its alleged scientific proof of existence beyond the grave.

Read more …

Lord Rokeby refused to have a fire in his house even in the coldest weather. He grew an immense and bizarre looking beard, that was not in fashion at any times Thick beard stuck out under his arms and could be seen from behind. A couple of years later he built a swimming pool under glass which was heated only by the sun. There he spent most of the time, preferably alone.

In the end his neighbors and other locals became scared of him because his increased isolation gave birth to all kind of rumors. One of them was that Lord Rokeby became a cannibal and ate only raw meat. But, in fact he rarely ate meat at all and refused to see any doctors. He did not go to church either because he complained that sermons were boring and that he preferred to worship God at natural altar of the earth, sea and the sky.

He never married. On the extremely rare occasions when Matthew had to accept visitors he tried to get rid of them fast by entertaining them with lengthy boring poems. All his aristocratic relatives were ashamed of him, especially during his occasional visits to court. His presence usually gathered big crowds of people on the streets who thought that Matthew was an ambassador of Turkey - because of his unusual appearance.

In the 18th English nobleman Matthew Robinson suddenly became a big supporter of baths. He was born in the aristocratic family and later inherited a title of Lord Rokeby. Matthew was acting normal for the first part of his life but later changed his ways and became quite an eccentric. We don’t know what happened, it might well be midlife crisis. We just know when his eccentricity originated. When Matthew inherited big estate new Canterbury. That is when he became an extreme enthusiast about baths.

This passion was definitely very bizarre even for our modern times, so you might imagine how it looked like in the eighteenth century. Lord Rokeby daily went to the seashore to swim in salt water regardless of the weather. He spent so much time there that sometimes he even fainted and had to be rescued. Most of the times his servants had to come to the seashore to convince Matthew to return back home. Along the route to the beach he built drinking fountains and in the end of the road, right on the seashore he built a hut. His servants would follow Lord Rokeby in the carriage with full livery while he walked all the way to the hut. And if he noticed a person drinking from his fountain, he would give him a tip.

Read more …

There was no end to humiliation suffered by helots from Spartans. They made helots wear hats from dog’s skin, so they would not mix with Spartans. Dogs were considered servile and cowardly animals, thus the canine symbolism was clear to the Greeks.  Each year, the helots were ritually flogged, apparently for no other reason than to affirm their servitude.  Any Spartan could to kill helots without any repercussion or punishment. In fact, mass murders of helots were quite usual in Spartan society.  For example, in 425 B.C. over two thousand helots were massacred in a carefully staged event.

It would seem to make good sense to keep the slaves well nourished, but Spartans were too weird.  Any helots who became overweight were put to death, with their Spartan masters fined for “letting them get fat”.  What is more, the Spartans used to rape helot women as a means of meeting the state’s needs in terms of human resources. Born from this rape girls were left to die, while boys were taken to serve as soldiers for a Spartan war machine.

Have you ever wondered why Spartans were able to spend so much time of the lives on military exercises?  I guess, everyone watched the movie about 300 brave Spartans and their king Leonidas who did not let Persian king to invade ancient Greece. Everyday life of Spartans was shown in great details omitting one “dirty” secret.  The helots.

Spartans were one a very few ancient Greek nations who had their own slaves of the same Dorian origin. In other words, these slaves were their Greek fellows by birth, mostly from Messenia. This was quite unusual for the rest of Greece, where slaves were mostly foreigners, who were captures during wars.

The helots outnumbered Spartans many times by its population. They either worked on Spartans lands or were carrying all domestic work. Yet Spartans hated them as much as anybody could hate his worst enemy.  This unusual hatred of the Spartans towards the helots originates in fear. Given the relatively small number of Spartans in comparison with huge slave population, they feared that helots would attempt to destroy them.

This  fear contributed to mistreatment of helots.  Because of it,  Spartan men always carried their spears, undid the straps of their bucklers only at home.  That may also explain why there were so inclined to succeed in military training.

Read more …

In the beginning of the 4th century AD Persian Sassanid Kingdom was in bad shape. There was a chain of weak rulers that were losing big parts of the kingdom to Roman emperors. Last one Hormizd II could not even control his nobles and was killed by Arab Bedouins while hunting in 309.

The the situation got completely out of control. While Arabs continued to plunder Sassanid kingdom, Persian nobles killed the eldest son of Hormizd II. They did not stop there and blinded the second son and imprisoned the third son who managed to escape to Romans after years of imprisonment. They wanted somebody that would completely control in future, so they stopped their choice on the unborn child! One of Hormizd’s wives was pregnant and she did not pose any threat to the nobles.

So they did the unthinkable, which does not have the precedent in the ancient or modern history. In 309 A.D. they crowned the unborn child who was still in uterus! The coronation of the unborn king was also the strangest one - the crown was put on mother’s belly. Therefore, the boy, who was given a name Shapur became a king even before he was born. In the end Persian nobles miscalculated.

Although, Shapur II was completely controlled by nobles and his mother, as soon as he came of age he quickly assumed the power and became the absolute and very effective ruler. He was a king for full seventy years till his death in 379. And this is considered the First Golden Era of Sassanid Empire.

Each Easter one can hear the same questions from children, that adults usually can’t answer. What has bunny to do with the religious holiday of Easter? And why Easter Bunny lays eggs anyways? Usually adults don’t know what to say and joke their way out.

Yet, if we go back in history, there are several explanations. In the archives of my local web analytics company, I found one story that is worth mentioning. The origin of Easter Bunny as well as the word “Easter” comes from the pre-Christian customs honoring the fertility goddess Eostre of old German tribes, including Anglo-Saxon ones. According to popular folklore, Eostre once saved a bird whose wings had frozen during the winter by turning it into a rabbit. Because the rabbit had once been a bird, it could still lay eggs. As it happens a lot with old lore, that rabbit in the end became the modern Easter Bunny.

This legend arrived to the United States with German immigrants and Amish somewhere in the eighteenth century. These guys were telling their children stories about bunnies, although very often in their stories the rabbit laying eggs was replaced with a hare.

I would like to tell you about one of the strangest barbaric rituals of ancient Rome that started after 390 B.C. and took place for centuries. Once a year dozens of Roman guard dogs were crucified on the Capitoline hill. At the same time Capitoline geese were present at the ceremony. They were watching the ceremony of poor dogs crucification, from the most prestigious place, sitting on gilded purple cushions.

This way Roman citizens were commemorating a tragic event that occurred in 390 B.C. which is known to historians as sack of Rome by Gauls. It was a collective initial shock for people of Rome that was hard to forget. The memory of the catastrophic defeat stayed with Rome for generations. The dogs were crucified because they did not alert Romans when the Gallic troops attacked. And the geese were rewarded because honking provided the only warning of approaching Gauls.