Phantom Time Theory: Did a Pope and an Emperor erase 297 years of history?

     Time is just a construct of humans, I’ve said it a million times. We needed something tangible to help us show the passage of time. Our ancestors used the stars, seasons and Moon’s phases to tell time. My 4 year old son uses TV shows to tell the passage of time, he knows when People’s Court is on that it’s lunch time (it comes on at noon) and he knows after 2 Hot Benches, the Steve Irwin Show and when Judge Judy comes on that Mom will be home. Okay, first of all , yes, I watch a lot of court shows, I like people watching and those shows have the best people to Watch! Secondly, I’m trying to imagine what my son’s watch would look like, I can see Judge Judy’s face were  4 o’clock should be! Anyhow,  As the years passed and science progressed we developed the current system of years, hours, minutes and seconds.  We even switched calendars from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian because of  flaws in the Julian system and this was in 1582. Since 1582 we have been using the same time and dating system.  So with all that said I will now explain the Phantom Time Theory  (briefly).

The Phantom Time Theory: This theory first asserted by Heribert Illig. Published in 1991, it hypothesizes a conspiracy by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Pope Sylvester II and possibly the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII, to fabricate the Anno Domini dating system retrospectively, in order to pace them at special year of AD 1000, and to rewrite history to legitimize Otto’s claim to the Holy Roman Empire. Illig believed that this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation and forgery of documentary and physical evidence. According to this scenario, the entire Carolingian period, including the figure of Charlemange, is a fabrication, with a phantom time years of 297 years (AD 614-911) added to the Early Middle Ages.  The proposal has found no favor among mainstream medievalists.  (Taken from Wikipedia)

 above image: Otto III

     Of course mainstream researchers deny this, they would lose their jobs and respectability if they supported something like this but there is evidence, including astronomical data to back this theory up. So technically it could be 1721 instead of 2018. Does this really matter? I mean we humans made up time so what is losing 300 years really? I have mentioned in various posts how this would mess up predictions, especially year specific predictions.  For instance the Mayan long count calendar has been proven real and was made using the same astronomical data that western civilizations were using, which means the Mayan calendar as we know it is 297 years (give or take a year) ahead of schedule. The end date of 2012 hasn’t come yet.  I should also mention that there is little to no archeological evidence that the years 600-999 AD existed, even though the legendary Charlemagne supposedly existed in this time there has been no artifacts other than written stuff that even suggests he was real. So did three men with a lot of power, influence and access to most if not all historical documents in existence at the time skip us ahead 300 years? Absolutely, why wouldn’t they? The Papacy considered the year 1000, the year of our Lord and to be associated with that very historic time would make the sitting Pope a legend. I myself believe this to be true and I have put it on my clipboard to further investigate it at a later date.

 above image: Pope Sylvester II and Constantine VII

In closing, I hope you all enjoyed this little tid bit of trivia or conspiracy, however you look at it. I also hope that it made you think a little, nothing is as it seems and if three guys back in the 600s could change time like that imagine what a few guys with today’s technology could do? Like maybe change our very universe? Everything connects and I love searching for the pieces to put this massive and mysterious puzzle together. Stay tuned, I have a lot more weird, wacky, eerie and scary information to share, until the have a great day and as always…….PEACE!!!!!!

The Secret History of Witches & Witchcraft, Part 4: Hand of Glory

     Today’s entry reminds me of a Dungeon’s and Dragon’s campaign I ran many years ago. It was about an ancient wizard’s magically preserved hand and the quest to retrieve it from an evil necromancer (wizard of the dead).  I really had no clue that the Hand of Glory was a real thing, I always just assumed it was made up by the D&D guru’s but just like most things in any Fantasy novel or game from D&D to Harry Potter are steeped in real ancient myth and legend.  Wait until you read what these hands were used for! It is hard to believe some of this stuff is real, but it makes things so much more fascinating. I am going to get right into what the Encyclopedia od Witches & Witchcraft has to say about Hand of Glory, remember this is a real thing that was done not too long ago in the past.

Hand of Glory: The severed hand of a hanged murderer, magically preserved, once used as a charm in black magic spells and was believed to aid burglars in breaking into homes and buildings.

The hand of glory was the right hand of a murderer, ideally severed while the corpse still swung from the gallows or cut during an eclipse of the Moon. It was wrapped in a shroud, squeezed of blood and pickled for two weeks in an earthenware jar with salt, long peppers and saltpeter. It was then either dried in an oven with vervain, an herb believed to repel demons, or laid out to dry in the sun, preferably during the dog days of August.

Once preserved, the hand was fitted with candles between the fingers. The candles, called “dead man’s candles,” were made from the murderer’s fat, with the wick being made from his hair. In another method of curing, the hand of glory was bled, dried and dipped in wax, so that the fingers themselves could be lit as candles.

With the candles or fingers burning, the hand of glory supposedly had the power to freeze people in their footsteps and render them speechless. Burglars lit hands of glory before breaking into a house, confident that the charm would keep the occupants in a deep sleep while they plundered the household. If the thumb refused to burn, it meant someone in the house was awake and could not be charmed. According to lore, once a hand was lit, nothing but milk could extinguish it.

As a counter-charm, homeowners made ointments from the blood of screech owls, the fat of white hens and the bile of black cats and smeared it on their thresholds.

Hands of glory were linked to witches during the witch-hunt centuries. In 1588 two German women, Nichel and Bessers, who were accused of witchcraft and the exhumation of corpses, admitted they poisoned helpless people after lighting hands of glory to immobilize them. John Fain, who was severely tortured in his witch trial in Scotland in 1590, confessed to using a hand of glory to break into a church, where he performed a service to the devil. (The Encyclopedia of Witches & Witchcraft, 2^nd edition,  Rosemary Ellen Guiley)

     So, there you have it. I think this may be one of the more interesting things I have found in recent weeks and I feel like I will have to do some more research on this. I wrote about Australian aborigines using Bone Pointing as a method of execution and how their absolute belief in the ritual made it work psychologically, so it is very possible that folks in the medieval ages truly believed the power of these charms and spells. These people really believed this stuff worked and with the right amount of luck and a little skill, I could see how a successful burglar could have imagined that his hand of glory helped in his break in. Just having something like the hand could give a person more confidence and as I have stated in previous posts, the power of suggestion and ancient beliefs can go a long way. An enterprising person could have robbed graves and made hands of glory to sell to nefarious folks for a pretty penny. As long as the people believed they were getting a real deal murderer’s hand they couldn’t care less. The hands just gave these criminals that little boost of motivation they needed. You have to remember this is the stuff these people believed for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years and even after the church cracked down a lot of common folk still believed in the stuff, they just did it quietly. Of course, the witches caught would say anything under the duress of torture and witch-hunters and inquisitors would often force them into horrifying confessions. The torturer would say something like, “You used a Hand of Glory to break into the church, correct?”  The tortured witch would reply, “Yes,” and so now the inquisitors than had the fodder they needed to fan the flames of hate and ignorance. I’m certain medieval burglars used severed hands dipped in wax to assure a good plunder, but we also had homeowners butchering poor little owls and cats just to smear blood or bile on a doorway in hopes of stopping the powerful hands of glory because as with any sort of magic or charm there is a counter measure. The power of belief and ritual goes both ways as we have seen in previous posts as well. So, we have a thief walking up to a house, ready to light his hand of glory and do his thieving until he sees the screech owl blood and black cat bile smeared in the doorway. He decides the home’s magic is more powerful then his own and he moves on down the block to look for a dwelling that isn’t protected. Much like now a days, a thief will case his potential target and if a home has a sign saying protected by such and such security, they will move onto the next house.  Owl blood and cat bile was the Brink’s Home Security system of the Dark Ages, I suppose.

In conclusion, not only was today’s post interesting and brought forth a lot of intriguing ideas, it once again shows just how much faith and belief the people of the dark/middle ages had and how much they actually believed in superstition and magick.  I often wonder how these beliefs come to be. Who was the first witch or burglar to use a murderer’s severed hand as a candelabra and why did it become such a powerful and well-known tool for witches and thieves?  These are the kind of things that make this research fun and intriguing. I am going to dig more into these hands and I’ll try to track down just were it could have come from. Until then, I hope you all enjoyed this post and look forward to sharing many more with you all. Have a great day and I shall return soon with another weird and wacky witch post! PEACE!