Category: Ritual
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Imagine the weight of another person’s skin against your own. Not draped loosely like cloth, but pressed intimately, wetly, the residual warmth of their final heartbeat seeping through to your flesh. Now imagine wearing it for twenty days as it rots. Eating in it. Sleeping in it. Blessing children in it whilst the tissue liquefies…
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Archaeologists found 16 attendants possibly sealed alive with Lady Fu Hao, China’s warrior queen. What made them obey? The Anguished Ordeal Begins Lady Fu Hao And Her Sixteen Slaves For weeks, the attendants had watched their mistress decline, each laboured breath a countdown they dared not acknowledge. They probably swapped pointed looks, fiddled with their…
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They didn’t just eat the dead in Gough’s Cave, they drank from them. Gough’s Cave- 15 Thousand Years Ago The Cave That Remembered What happened here, it is important to say, was not carried out by primitive people. These were modern humans in every sense. They created art, music, and had abstract thought. They were families,…
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Volga River, A.D. 922 They asked for a volunteer, and she raised her hand, a small, petite, honourable slave girl. Ten days later, as part of ritual suicide, they would strangle and stab her on a burning ship while the whole village cheered them on. The air smelled of pine resin and blood. A longship…
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With Tollund Man, his eyes are closed as if in sleep, his lips opened as if about to speak. The stubble on his chin looks fresh, like it had grown just days ago. But this man has been dead for over 2,000 years—and someone had murdered him. On May 6, 1950, two brothers were cutting…
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In the suffocating darkness of a Swedish lake, where no sunlight has touched the bottom for eight millennia, wooden stakes pierced through ancient skulls tell a story of violence so brutal it defies explanation. These mounted heads are evidence of ritual from a time long forgotten. Here, in waters dark as dried blood, an atmosphere…
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At 22,000 feet above sea level, Llullaillaco on the border of Chile and Argentina is a place of silence. The mountain claws at the sky ominously, its slopes stripped bare, its nights colder than –20°C. Nothing human should survive there. Yet buried in its frozen skin, three children from around 1500AD were found sitting as…
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Seven thousand years ago, in what is now Southwest Germany, a settlement began to take shape. This was no ordinary Linear Pottery culture village of bustling longhouses and peaceful farmers. Beneath its soil, the bones of the dead would one day reveal chilling warnings of an ancient darkness. For this village, the future would be…