Latest Articles & Stories
Kept safely within one of the most beautiful old libraries in Spain is an amazing 1283 CE illuminated manuscript which quietly holds exceptional wisdom for one’s life. This insightful book is a compilation of games known in the thirteenth century and is entitled the Libro de los Juegos (Book of Games). It was commissioned by Alfonso X (1221-1284) during his reign as King of Castile and currently rests inside the magnificent Escorial. Read more…
In Issue 7 of The Heretic Magazine, we feature Francis O’Donnell, filmmaker, explorer and author of In the Footsteps of Marco Polo, a chronicle of his historic two-year, 25,000-mile journey retracing Marco Polos’s thirteenth-century Travels along the fabled Silk road. Francis was accompanied by photographer Denis Belliveau and the following is a selection of images taken on the journey. Read more…
We have all seen the images: ISIS Neanderthals smashing up their own heritage and history because they think that the entire universe revolves around a little book, no bigger than the average novel. So where did this barbarity come from? Why have large sections of humanity steered themselves off the tortuous road towards higher civilisation over the many centuries, and into the fetid ditch of depraved ignorance? Read more…
The Sator Square is a word square of five Latin words, each containing five letters, set out in a palindrome-like style, so that words can be read left to right, right to left, or even top to bottom and bottom to top. The earliest record of this was found in the ruined Roman city of Pompeii under the ashes from Mount Vesuvius. Read more…
Jeremi Wasiutynski offered, in his magisterial book The Solar Mystery, an in-depth re-evaluation of the influences that drove Nicholas Copernicus to formulate his heliocentric model. He noted that within the history of science the current understanding is ‘hampered by false preconceptions’ and ‘the prevailing ideas concerning the motives of Copernicus’s creative work are inadequate.’ Read more…
The most famous and successful of the scientists and engineers from the first century was Hero (Heron) of Alexandria, who was conjuring up all kinds of weird and wonderful mechanical gadgets and steam engines that both entertained the royalty and dumbfounded the faithful in the temples. The ancestry of Hero is unknown. He came from Alexandria in Egypt, but Carl Boyer, a historian of science and mathematics, has said that his work and mathematics demonstrate that Hero must also have had Parthian and Greek influences. Read more…