Tag Archives: wesphelan

ATB Sacrifice1

Sacrifice

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Animal (and human) sacrifices  have been a terrible reality of many cultures for thousands of years. Below are excerpts from Wikipedia about the subject.

Animal sacrifice is the ritual killing of an animal as part of a religious event.  It is practiced as an act of obedience and as a means of appeasing a god or gods and changing the course of nature.  Animal sacrifice has [been a part of] almost all cultures [to include the] Hebrews … Greeks… Romans … Ancient Egyptians [and] Aztecs.ATB Sacrifice

[Human sacrifice has[also] been practiced by many cultures. The reasons include:

Idol worship.]

…death of a king, high priest or great leader; the sacrificed [humans] were supposed to serve or accompany the deceased leader in the next life…

…times of natural disaster. Droughts, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc. were seen as a sign of anger or displeasure by deities, and sacrifices were supposed to lessen the [god's anger]…

The Aztecs practiced human sacrifice on an unusually large scale; a sacrifice [was] made every day to aid the sun in rising… the dedication of the great temple at Tenochtitlán [required the sacrificing of thousands [of people]….

The Phoenicians of Carthage were reputed to practice child sacrifice…, there is archaeological evidence of large numbers of children’s skeletons buried … with sacrificial animals.

Human sacrifice still happens today as an underground practice …Human sacrifice is no longer officially condoned in any country, and [is now] regarded as murder.WTB Animal sacrifice5

ATBValleyKings4

Valley of the Kings: Cemetery of the Pharaohs

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The Valley of the Kings plays a large part in Awakening the Beast. it is the burial site of ancient Egyptian Pharaohs and royalty. The best known pharaoh to be buried there was Tutankhamun, better known as King Tut. Tutankhamun Coffin

Below is an excerpt about the Valley from the Supreme Council of Antiquities [http://www.sca-egypt.org/].

Nestled in the cliffs on the west bank of the Nile [River is the] Valley of the Kings, home to the tombs of the great pharaohs… (1550 – 1070 BC). They are hidden within a wadi (or valley)… Continue reading →

SOB British Prisoners

Were Starving Irishmen Convicted For Stealing Food?

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SOB Map Australia

 Soul of the Beast takes place in 1886 during the time of the British Empire. At the time, many Irishmen  were convicted of the same felony. Their crime? Stealing food to feed their starving families. For punishment, they were sent to the penal colony in Australia. Below are excerpts from an online article  on the subject by Independent Australia. You can read the article by clicking on the link.

In the early [1800's], …Australia became the first [British] colony to build a society [based] on the labour of convicted felons…Between 1787 and 1852, more than 150,000 convicts were transported to eastern Australia … around 50,000 prisoners being of Irish origin… SOB convicts on Shipminor thefts [like stealing food to survive were the predominant reasons for the Irish convictions]… Continue reading →

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HOW BIG CAN DIAMONDS GET?

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cullinan-diamond-worlds-largest

A gigantic diamond plays an important part in Soul Of The Beast and Awakening Of The Beast. How big can real diamonds get? No one knows for certain.The biggest real diamond ever found was the Cullinan diamond. It has 3106 carats and weighs 1.33 pounds (or 621.35 grams).

In the Soul Of The Beast, the fictional diamond is the same size and weight as a bull. The average weight of a  Angus bull is 2500 pounds or 1,825 times larger than the largest known diamond. The Soul Of The Beast diamond is  impossibly large which means it  may not be a diamond at all.  If that’s true, then  what is it?  The answer is in Awakening Of The Beast, the second book in the BEAST series.  

SOB Bull

 

Any comments about diamonds?  You can post them below. I’d like to hear from you! 

SOBSleepless

How Long Can We Survive Without Sleep?

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The main characters in Soul Of The Beast  and Awakening Of The Beast, are forced to go without sleep for days.   Below are excerpts from the website SLEEPIO: 

[How long can we survive without sleep? We don't actually know. What we do know is sleep, like breathing] is a fundamental human requirement. It has even been said that one could survive for three times as long without food as one could without sleep. [One animal experiment] found that depriving rats entirely of sleep resulted in their death, or near-dying state, within 11-32 days…

SOBSleepless3 Continue reading →

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Tsunamis: Killer Waves

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Tsunamis: Killer Waves

[Excerpted from National Geographic  online.]tsunami1

The Indian Ocean tsunami generated by the most powerful earthquake in decades [occurred] on December 26[. It] is believed to have killed more than 150,000 people and made millions homeless, making it perhaps the most destructive tsunami in history.

The epicenter of the 9.0 magnitude quake was under the Indian Ocean near the … Indonesian island of Sumatra…. Within hours killer waves … slammed into [coastlines] …snatching people out to sea, drowning others in their homes or on beaches, and demolishing property from Africa to Thailand. …

What Causes A Tsunami?

• A tsunami is a … great sea wave…caused by an underwater earthquake, landslide, or volcanic eruption. More rarely, a tsunami can be generated by a giant meteor impact with the ocean. Scientists have found traces of an asteroid-collision [3.5 billion years ago] that they say would have created a giant tsunami that swept around the Earth several times [and covered] everything except the mountains …

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SOBThug20

Are Thugs Real?

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Thugs were very real.thuggee3 They were an Indian assassin cult. Their name for themselves was Thuggee, but the British called them Thugs. Here is what the Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained says about Thugs:

No organized cult of killers has ever murdered as many people as the Thuggees. In the 1830s this Indian secret society strangled upward of 30,000 native people and travelers as sacrifices to their goddess Kali…  Continue reading →

SOBTethysOcean

THE ANCIENT OCEAN

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In SOUL OF THE BEAST, there is an ancient map that shows an ocean separating India from the Asian continent.The map is fiction, but the ocean was real and is called the Tethys Ocean.

The ancient ocean existed until the land mass of India shifted north and collided with Asia. When India and Asia came together, that eliminated the ocean and forced the land up. This elevation of the land is known today as the Himalayan Mountains. The movement of continents is called continental drift or tectonic shift and is still happening today.

Tectonic drift didn’t just happen between Asia and India. If you look at a map of the world, you’ll see that the continents of Europe, Africa, North America and South America  fit together like large pieces of a puzzle. That is because they were once part of a single and much larger land mass called Pangaea. (See the map above.) Unlike the collision of the Asia and India continents eliminating an ocean, here  the movement of tectonic plates created large bodies of water and  split the “super continent” into smaller continents.

SOB Himalayas6

You can enter your comments and insights below. I’d like to hear from you.

 

everest1

Is Climbing Mount Everest Dangerous?

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Himalayan Climb

Climbing Mount Everest is extremely dangerous. Jon Krakauer wrote “Into Thin Air”, a true life account of his disastrous climb to the top of Mt. Everest. What he experienced was beyond dangerous. Below are exerpts from his book that speak for themselves.

…a boulder the size of a small television came rocketing down from the cliffs above and smashed Andy Harris’s chest. It knocked him off his feet, slammed the wind out of him, and left him dangling from the fixed lie in a  state of shock for several minutes. Had he not been clipped in with a jumar he would have certainly fallen to his death.

Chen Yu-Nan…crawled out of his tent to evacuate his bowels shod only in smooth-soled liners of his mountaineering boots- a serious lapse of judgment. As he squatted, he lost his footing on the ice and went hurtling down the Lhotse Face. Incredibly, after falling only 70 feet he plunged headfirst in a crevasse, which arrested his tumble. Sherpas who had seen the incident lowered a rope, quickly pulled him out of the slot…(the) radio crackled to life: it was Jangbu reporting in a panicked voice that Chen had stopped breathing.everest8 Continue reading →

SOBearths-moon

HOW OLD IS IT REALLY?

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The age of old things is  most often taught as fact. What teachers and scientists don’t tell us (and often don’t know) is the techniques used to determine the age of old things are often based on assumptions [educated guesses] and can be wrong. Below are some examples of how old things are dated and how the dating can be wrong.

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