Know thyself, and thou shalt know the gods.

Discoveries!

Nearly 2,000 years ago, Mount Vesuvius buried a vast collection of scrolls in ash and scorched them into solid black lumps. Now, without unrolling them, researchers have virtually read two of them —‬ and uncovered what may be a work by a well-known Stoic philosopher.

Ancient ‘curse’ burial in Spain reveals violent ritual of social exclusion

Archaeologists have uncovered a remarkable Iron Age burial in central Spain that suggests two men executed more than 2,200 years ago were deliberately denied traditional funerary rites and buried with deer antlers in what researchers believe was a ritual intended to protect the community from the dead.

Ancient-DNA analysis solves 500-year-old mystery of what killed two Medici brothers

An ancient-DNA analysis of the bones of two members of the Renaissance Medici family has confirmed they had malaria when they died.

Roman coins among finds along East West Rail route

Roman coins, a Late Iron Age vase and pottery are among the finds uncovered along the proposed route of East West Rail.

Archaeologists uncover ancient settlement and tombs at Tel El-Koa

An Egyptian archaeological mission has uncovered a remarkable ancient settlement at Tel El-Koa in the Wadi Tumilat region of Ismailia Governorate, revealing tombs, residential buildings and production facilities dating to Egypt’s Second Intermediate Period.

Human DNA in cave paintings can survive for millennia, study finds

The discovery points to the future potential of archaeogenetics in recovering the identities of ancient artists from thousands of years ago.

Ancient ring discovered underground in Scotland could be a Stonehenge-like monument

A hidden ring of stones or timbers detected beneath peat at Machrie Moor could represent a previously unknown Neolithic or Bronze Age monument.

Rare pithos tomb unearthed in ancient Hadrianopolis

A rare Roman-era burial inside a giant ceramic storage jar has been uncovered at the ancient city of Hadrianopolis in northern Türkiye, marking the first pithos tomb ever found in the inland western Black Sea region.

Skeletons uncovered at Thailand’s Don Yai Thong burial site

A ninth set of human remains has been unearthed at Don Yai Thong, a burial site in central Thailand dated to between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago.

Study finds cannibalism disappeared because it was biologically unsustainable

Cannibalism may have become one of humanity’s strongest taboos because it was ultimately too dangerous for the survival of societies that practised it, according to a new study by Polish and Czech researchers.

Largest Roman bath complex ever found in the Netherlands unearthed in Nijmegen

Archaeologists have uncovered the largest Roman bath complex ever discovered in the Netherlands, revealing fresh evidence of the wealth and sophistication of the ancient city of Ulpia Noviomagus Batavorum, now modern-day Nijmegen.

Study finds Neolithic tomb builders preserved prehistoric forests through sustainable land use

Neolithic communities that built some of Europe’s largest monumental tombs more than 5,600 years ago managed their environment sustainably rather than destroying prehistoric forests, according to new research by Polish scientists.

New archaeological research updates role of women in Oregon’s early timber industry

The artifacts recovered challenge mainstream notions of flannel-clad lumberjacks doing manly things in the woods into a more nuanced story, recognizing the important contributions families made in the male-dominated lumber industry.

Elite Toltec structure and carved tombstones discovered near Tula

Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of an elite Toltec building, two carved stone tombstones and the burials of six children during an archaeological salvage operation on the outskirts of the ancient city of Tollan Xicocotitlan in Hidalgo, central Mexico.

Researchers rediscover lost Ming Dynasty goldsmithing technique

A team of Chinese researchers has successfully reconstructed a long-lost Ming Dynasty goldsmithing technique, shedding new light on the remarkable craftsmanship behind some of imperial China’s finest jewellery.

Marble stele unearthed in Nineveh

An Assyrian stele that stood more than six feet tall has been uncovered near the Sun Gate in the eastern wall of the ancient city of Nineveh by a team of archaeologists from Iraq and the University of Chicago.

Elite chariot burial and noblewoman’s tomb unearthed

Archaeologists excavating a site in Sirolo, in Italy’s central Le Marche region, have uncovered an exceptionally rare 6th-century BC Picene princely burial featuring a ceremonial two-wheeled chariot, alongside the remarkably well-preserved grave of a noblewoman.

Rare copy of US Declaration of Independence found by volunteer in UK archives

A rare surviving copy of the Declaration of Independence has been discovered at The National Archives in Kew, the only known example of its kind outside the US.

Hundreds of pilgrim medallions spanning four centuries discovered in Switzerland

Heritage officials in Switzerland have uncovered an extraordinary collection of hundreds of religious pilgrim medallions dating from the 17th to the 20th centuries, offering a rare glimpse into centuries of European pilgrimage, faith and everyday devotion.

Elite families ruled nomadic Scythian society 2,500 years ago, DNA analysis reveals

Nomads of the Eurasian steppe were ruled by elite dynastic families, including women, a large-scale genetic analysis reveals.

Ancient basilica found beneath former fish market

Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of an early Christian basilica beneath the site of a former fish market in northeastern Italy, revealing what is believed to be the oldest known Christian place of worship in the ancient Roman city of Opitergium, now modern-day Oderzo.

Museums

The updated global framework sets out shared ethical principles to help museums protect cultural heritage, strengthen public trust, manage collections responsibly, and serve society. The code is structured around five core principles: Society: Museums serve society. Professionalism: Museums operate and communicate with professional expertise, knowledge and standards. Education: Museums offer diverse experiences for knowledge-sharing and reflection. Collections: Museums research, collect and conserve. Governance: Museums are not-for-profit, permanent institutions.

Palestinian exhibit at human rights museum 'should be rectified': federal heritage minister

Heritage Minister Marc Miller said Monday the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg has erred in how it curated an exhibit about displaced Palestinians. The federal cabinet minister said in an interview with The Canadian Press on Monday that the museum should change how it portrays the current conflict between Israel and Palestinians and update the museum's oversight.The exhibit, which opened to the public Saturday, focuses on the Nakba — the forcible displacement of about 750,000 Palestinians from the region during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Nakba is Arabic for catastrophe. One of the exhibit's panels discussing Israel's military occupation of Gaza says that after "the Hamas attack that killed about 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel launched a large-scale military campaign in Gaza. "The museum says it has referred to the Oct. 7 attack as a terrorist attack "on numerous occasions" and there is no doubt the intent of the attack was to murder Jews, a spokesperson told CBC News in a written statement on Monday. The museum's research has shown people of other nationalities and religious identities were also murdered by Hamas during the attack, which "informed the use of the word 'people' in our exhibit text," the spokesperson said. The museum's CEO told The Canadian Press earlier this month that many exhibits are meant to tell one community's story and raise awareness, instead of telling a comprehensive story about multi-faceted events.

Quoting at length because I know most people do not click the links.

Human rights museum’s Palestine exhibition sets off feud between Canadian politicians

The country’s heritage minister criticised curatorial choices in “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present”, drawing widespread rebukes including from the leader of the New Democratic Party

Facing protests and political pressure, Canadian Humans Rights opens Palestine exhibition

The leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party has criticized Heritage Minister Marc Miller for suggesting the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg should alter the language of its exhibition on Palestinian displacement.

Open letter: Dear museum, with love

A Letter to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights on the Opening of “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present” from Independent Jewish Voices, the Jewish Faculty Network, and United Jewish Peoples’ Order.

The Nakba exhibit is a breakthrough for a long-silenced Palestinian narrative

Despite the manufactured controversy, the 12-metre exhibit is the first time the story of Palestinian dispossession is being told in a national institution

Trans inclusion: Museum sector guidance updated in response to EHRC’s draft code of practice

The University of Leicester’s Trans-Inclusive Culture team has updated its guidance for museums and heritage bodies following the publication of the Equality and Human Rights Commission's draft code of practice for services, public functions and associations.

National Museum Cardiff in Wales may close for repairs to address ‘deteriorating condition’

The National Museum Cardiff in Wales may close for much-needed repair work, according to a workers’ union claim that it is in early discussions about a temporary closure in the wake of work last year to address what the institution’s director general described as the building’s “deteriorating condition.”

British Museum made false claims about its removal of ‘Palestine’ from displays

Internal emails reveal changes resulted directly from complaints by pro-Israel activists, with the museum and its director subsequently misleading prominent critics

Vatican Museums launch major restoration of Raphael’s famous frescoes

The Vatican Museums launched a restoration of the Renaissance masterpiece this week, unprecedented in scale: more than 20 experts are set to clean the artwork spanning 65 meters in the Apostolic Palace, also known as the Pope’s residence. The project will last five years, addressing a slew of restoration concerns accrued over the centuries, the weather being chief among them.

As the California African American Museum celebrates 50 years, its leader looks ahead

The California African American Museum marks its 50th anniversary next year, offering a blueprint for how museums can hold fast to their mission, regardless of what gathers at their periphery.

Tens of thousands rush for tickets to see Bayeux Tapestry in UK

More than 65,000 people joined in the online queue after the first batch of tickets were released on Wednesday.

Cooling off period: How did museums fare in their response to the heatwave?

Drop in temperature brings relief – and reflection on what the sector should be doing to better plan for extreme heat

What broke Monticello

How a right-wing smear campaign tried to silence the reality of Thomas Jefferson’s life, and in some ways succeeded.

Repatriation

A handover ceremony took place today at the University of Zurich between Swiss Federal Councillor Elisabeth Baume-Schneider and Nigeria’s Minister of Culture, Hannatu Musa Musawa. The university returned 14 objects from its Ethnographic Museum, while two additional Benin Bronzes came from Museum Rietberg Zurich and another two from the Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève.

Heir of German Jewish collector seeks return of Van Gogh painting from Musée d’Orsay

That painting, titled Hôpital Saint-Paul à Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (1889), is now in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay and is part of France’s national art collection. But Kallmann claims it rightfully belongs to him, according to Le Monde.

Manhattan DA’s Office seized dozens of antiquities from the Metropolitan Museum in June, bringing total to $95 m

Investigators from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office seized dozens of ancient artifacts from the Metropolitan Museum in June, reports the New York Times. According to an inventory produced by the office, this brings the total number of antiquities it has removed from the Met since 2017 to more than 120, collectively worth more than $95 million.

Heritage at risk

But Jamestown is under attack from rising waters. Sea level here has risen about 1.6ft over the last century. That’s now accelerating and scientists project another three feet of rise or more by 2075. The James River steadily chews away at one side of the island while expanding wetlands encroach from the other. Excavation pits now regularly flood after heavy rain or unusually high tides.

As America turns 250, museums and parks fight to preserve the country’s troubled history

As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, the debate over historical inclusion has become part of a larger national argument over how the country should tell its story: as a celebration of founding ideals and national achievement ​or a more nuanced reflection that includes slavery, Indigenous dispossession, immigration, exclusion and the struggles of marginalized groups to secure the rights promised in the nation's founding documents.

World Monuments Fund adds Black Mountain College building to U.S. Preservation Watch list

Just in time for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, World Monuments Fund has unveiled a list of 10 historic sites across the United States whose preservation is “essential to the richness and complexity” of the nation’s story. The sites range from colonial-era architecture and public health landmarks to early mission churches, all of which face deterioration without sustained preservation efforts, according to the organization.

Trump axed a Black history exhibit. Former park rangers are teaching it anyway

The summer of 2026 was going to be a triumphant debut for former National Park Ranger Elizabeth Kerwin. Kerwin had spent years building a wall of remembrance to highlight hundreds of enslaved people with ties to this historic site — best known as the place where a violent raid on the town's armory led to an uprising that helped end American slavery. Instead, the old stone building that was set to house Kerwin's exhibit has sat empty.

Warning traditional crafts in danger of dying out

Some of the South West's traditional crafts are in danger of dying out within a generation, according to arts organisations trying to save them.

'Absolute madness': Row over plan to demolish Nazi bunker under Berlin

There are plans in Berlin to tear down one of the last remnants of Adolf Hitler's power centre. Almost nothing remains of the Nazi leader's chancellery in central Berlin, except a bunker. But now there are plans to demolish it to build flats and offices.

I understand the historical preservationist argument, but like, demolish that sucker.

Record number of historic Scottish buildings added to 'at risk' list

Save Britain's Heritage has put 42 properties on its Buildings at Risk register, a move that almost doubles the number of Scottish entries.

Odds and ends

A veteran archaeologist whose work is being disputed by Newfoundland and Labrador’s Provincial Archaeology Office is speaking out about what Innu say is an effort by the provincial government to erase their history. Stephen Loring, an arctic archaeology and museum anthropologist with the Smithsonian’s Arctic Studies Centre in Washington, says it’s “convenient” for the province to claim that the Indigenous People who lived in Labrador prior to European contact disappeared or went extinct, rather than acknowledging the archaeological evidence and oral history linking Innu to the territory for 8,000 years. Loring says the province’s position that Innu have only been in the Labrador portion of Nitassinan, the Innu homeland, for around 300 years appears to be an attempt to disenfranchise Innu from their history and culture so the government can weaken the Innu’s position in their land claim negotiations and in their right to participate in future land-use and economic development in the province.

Research on Innu history in Labrador 'demolishes' government's 300-year argument, says MUN archaeologist

One of Newfoundland and Labrador’s academic leaders says it’s not clear why the Provincial Archaeology Office insists the Innu have only been in Labrador for 300 years. Peter Whitridge, an archaeology professor at Memorial University, is one of the eight social scientists who penned a letter to the provincial government this week in support of the Innu Nation, who maintain their history spans thousands of years.

Two legendary polar exploration shipwrecks are about to get their 21st-century close-up

Beginning this week, an expedition paid for by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society through a mix of private donors, philanthropy and corporate sponsors will attempt to create the most detailed digital record yet of the ship that carried famed Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton on his final voyage.

Sycamore Gap sapling stolen from castle grounds

The National Trust runs the estate and general manager Laura Lee said the tree's loss would be "deeply felt", adding: "The tree belongs to everyone."

Wales' oldest surviving synagogue saved after £3.9m cash boost

Emergency stabilisation work, partly funded by the heritage body Cadw, was completed in 2021, and the foundation later sought support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The successful bid means the 150-year-old building will be fully restored, creating jobs, volunteering opportunities and community activities.

New York mayor Zohran Mamdani announces a record $323.8 m in culture funding

New York mayor Zohran Mamdani and the speaker of the city council have announced their first budget, totaling $125.8 billion. That will include some $323.8 million for the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, its highest-ever appropriation, as part of the city’s 2027 fiscal year budget

Toxic lead levels in Paris’s Palais Garnier Opera delay renovation

The discovery of lead during renovation work at Paris’s historic Palais Garnier - opened in 1875 and summoned as inspiration for Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera - has “throw[n] a tight schedule of venue closures and the projected budget into disarray,”

Ancient city of Sardis earns UNESCO World Heritage status after nearly 70 years of excavation

Every year since 1958, archaeologists have returned to the ancient city as part of the Harvard-Cornell Exploration of Ancient Sardis, and excavations are still ongoing. Once the capital of the Iron Age kingdom of Lydia, Sardis stood at the crossroads of the Mediterranean and the Anatolian Plateau, a position that endowed it with a rich cultural legacy and a striking array of well-preserved ruins.

Ancient Rome's 'Google Maps' is here and working: Omnesviae

A new digital tool lets users explore the Roman Empire’s road network and, using historical data, estimate travel times between cities 2,000 years ago.

Celebrating America doesn’t have to mean erasing our history

How historians, academics and creatives shifted my perspective on the semiquincentennial

New Sweden: The US's long-lost 'secret' colony

It was the smallest, least-populated and shortest-lived colony in the US. But despite being virtually unheard of today, it helped shape the nation's birth 250 years ago.

Danger Tree is ‘the whole story of World War One,’ says N.L. historian

For soldiers fighting in northern France more than a century ago, a lone tree on the battlefield was the last thing they saw. Now, a ceremony is set to install a replica of what is now known as the Danger Tree.

'Newfoundland-made' Danger Tree unveiled in Beaumont-Hamel ceremony

"It was a magnificent display of trained and disciplined valour, and its assault only failed of success because dead men can advance no further."

Can the birthplace of Confederation catch up to the times?

Ten years after it was closed for renovations, PEI’s Province House confronts a changed world

Russia’s Hermitage Museum suspends archaeological expeditions in Crimea, citing fuel shortage

“The expeditions are being postponed until the situation improves,” Alexander Butyagin, head of the Hermitage archaeology department, told the Russian state-run news agency TASS on Monday. “It’s too difficult to organize normal operations right now.” According to local media reports, Butyagin was set to lead an expedition in Crimea last month that has reportedly been relocated to the southern Krasnodar region in Russia.

Could you live in a 200-room castle? The National Trust is offering a chance to move in

Employees residing at the neo-Norman Penrhyn Castle will be asked to help maintain its building and woodland grounds as well as at Plas Newydd House and Garden across the Menai Strait on Ynys Môn, also known as Anglesey.

Paleontologist Neil Shubin vows to keep National Academy of Sciences relevant

New NAS president discusses the future of the beleaguered institution and the precarious state of U.S. science under Trump

A rare dinosaur fossil from Antarctica is found tucked away in a drawer

It was discovered in 1985 during an expedition to Antarctica’s James Ross Island and collected by geologist Mike Thomson. Working with the British Antarctic Survey, Thomson was mapping the area’s rock layers and collected marine reptile fossils to help with future dating efforts. He recorded the find as a large reptile.

Scientists identify 294-million-year-old vomit

Ancient Egyptian statues of this kind usually portrayed married couples, yet two women depicted together in this way were uncommon, and their relationship remains unknown.

A beautiful reminder that history is often more complex, more layered, and more beautiful than we’re led to believe. Women have always loved women. History remembers more than we’re often told.

(Artistic reconstruction by Karol Schauer)

The pyramids were built by contemporary workers who received wages and were fed and taken care of during construction

The Dendera “lightbulb” is a representation of the creation myth and has nothing to do with electricity

We didn’t find “““copper wiring””” in the great pyramid either

Hatshepsut wasn’t transgender

The gods didn’t actually have animal heads

Hieroglyphs aren’t mysteriously magical; they’re just a language (seriously we have shopping lists and work rosters and even ancient erotica)

The ancient Egyptian ethnicity wasn’t homogeneous

While the Egyptians were fine-ass astronomers they didn’t align any of their enormous and/or important buildings to modern star constellations, because constellations look very different now than they did ~5000 years ago 

Speaking of that particular sphinx, the Napoleonic expedition is not responsible for its missing nose

Akhenaten was not a “heretic” by contemporary standards

Ramses II appropriated a lot of his predecessors’ buildings/reliefs and isn’t really deserving of the epithet “the Great”

It was not, in fact, practice to shave off eyebrows after cats died; Herodotus lied about that

Here are some vetted Egyptological books/sources (that are by and large appropriate for a lay-audience) you can find most, if not all of the above:

Lehner, M., The Complete Pyramids

Wilkinson, R. H., The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt

Hornung, E., The One and the Many: Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt

Dunand, F. & Zivie-Coche, C., Gods and Men in Egypt

Kemp, B., Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization

Bard, K., An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt

Stevenson Smith, W., The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt

Kitchen, K. A., The Life and Times of Ramesses II, King of Egypt

Sweeney, D., Sex and Gender (in Ancient Egypt)

McDowell, A. G., Village Life in Ancient Egypt:  Laundry Lists and Love Songs

Astrologers helped design the study

No one did better than random chance, even though they only included people in the study who are experienced with astrology and stated that they expect themselves to do better than random chance

They gave every astrologer a set of 50 things about a person and 5 birth charts to choose from. They weren’t even coming up with the chart themselves!

After taking the test, most thought they nailed it. Zero out of 152 did better than 5 out of 12. None nailed it

Astrologers who rated themselves highly experienced (“world class experts”) did the same or worse as those who said they have limited experience. Both performed the same as random chance

The authors themselves admit they were rejected by most astrologers and astrology groups they approached, including the two biggest astrology subreddits (which, given the kind of slop most Reddit groups allow, tells you a lot). They eventually found 152 people willing to participate by advertising a $1,000 prize in Facebook groups and recruiting 6 self-described “professional” astrologers through the same means, without any set standard for qualifications or even requiring participants to demonstrate knowledge of astrological concepts.

Besides the 6 “professionals,” literally anyone who claimed to believe in astrology could participate for a chance at winning $1,000, including people who may have merely seen it as gambling or may have been participating in bad faith to skew results (given the general response to this, there are clearly plenty of people who feel strongly enough about proving astrology doesn’t work to have motivation). This is not really very different from saying you want to test whether self-driving cars are better at driving than humans by going to the first bar you can find and offering $1,000 to anyone who can beat one in a race. Offering a cash reward fundamentally alters who will take the test, and inevitably some of the participants are going to be drunk, blind, or simply bad at driving, but will still try for $1,000.

Astrological readings are supposed to be iterative and dialogic; this was a one-shot multiple choice test with no feedback. If we’re taking astrology seriously enough to test it, this is like asking a doctor to diagnose and treat a patient from an intake form without examining them, and then concluding that medicine doesn’t work when they get it wrong.

What is actually hilarious though is that the study’s own data includes a finding that undermines its conclusion (near the bottom of their own publication), and the authors desperately wave it away. After coming back to the data after criticism and isolating the 17 participants they could verify as professional astrologers, that group performed above chance with a p-value of 0.003 (~ 1 in 333 odds against chance). They dismiss this as post-hoc analysis, but it’s also the only subgroup in the study where anyone bothered to verify the participants actually knew what they were doing. Even the authors conclude that seems like the kind of thing that deserves a follow-up study, but clearly doing that would be inconvenient to the smug astrology doesn’t work gotcha they wanted to produce I guess since they didn’t pursue it.

If you actually want to test whether or not astrology works, better studies have been done, and the results have been controversial to say the least: The Gauquelin Mars Effect research tested a specific, measurable claim about planetary positions at birth correlating with professional eminence, and skeptical groups initially replicated the results twice before the whole thing devolved into decades of arguments about data selection. The infamous Carlson double-blind study from 1985 published in Nature declared astrology dead, but a later reanalysis by Professor Ertel at Göttingen found that when you actually apply the study’s own protocol correctly and test the full sample rather than cherry-picked subgroups, astrologers performed above chance at statistically significant levels again. The Vernon Clark experiments from the early 1960s used a proper blind matching design with verified astrologers and found performance significant at 100 to 1 odds against chance across three separate tests.

Everyone always gets stuck at “there’s no mechanism for astrology to work by even if tests produce some weird results” but anyone who has been paying attention to science for the last half century should know that’s not actually true. We now have decades of scientific evidence showing that humans are biologically sensitive to and respond to everything from moon cycles (even when we can’t see the moon) and normal geomagnetic and solar activity to solar storms and sunspots etc. in a variety of different but physiologically verifiable ways.

NASA’s Dr. Jane Blizzard proved that planetary conjunctions, oppositions, and 90° alignments trigger violent solar disturbances and she accurately predicted 12 of 19 major solar flares using planetary positions alone. Researchers at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf have spent the last decade building a physical model that derives virtually all of the Sun’s known activity cycles from the tidal forces of Venus, Earth, and Jupiter, finding what lead author Dr. Frank Stefani called “complete parallelism with the planets over the course of 90 cycles.”

The sun’s activity literally follows the rhythm of the planets. A separate team at ETH Zurich independently reached the same conclusion using 10,000 years of ice core data.

Science has long known of magnetic particles in the human brain stem, cerebellum, and cerebrum, first identified by Caltech geophysicist Joe Kirschvink in 1992 and replicated many times since. In 2019 Kirschvink’s own lab went further and proved through EEG that the human brain actively detects and responds to changes in earth-strength magnetic fields, with the response tuned to the local geomagnetic environment rather than being a generic physical fluke. Studies also show geomagnetic field conditions play a major role in fetal development. We aren’t separate from the earth or the forces that influence it; we live inside and are biologically influenced by the earth itself, which means we are influenced by what influences it.

Astrophysicist and astrologer Percy Seymour’s proposed mechanism is that planets orchestrate solar activity through tidal resonance, solar activity drives geomagnetic fluctuations on earth, and those fluctuations influence every organism on the planet. Every claim in that chain has independent scientific support.

One of the original pioneers of the study of space weather, Professor Balfour Stewart, in 1872, without having any of the other evidence above and arriving at his conclusions solely from studying the relationship between planetary alignments and sunspots, said “if all these speculations are proved right, it means we were totally mistaken about Medieval Astrology.”

Ancient people weren’t stupid. They recognized that we are part of and subject to systems and forces larger than ourselves. The modern zodiac is the result of 5,000+ years of human observation and modeling across multiple civilizations. It is literally the oldest science that humans have consistently practiced and recorded data on.

If you think this is a closed or non-serious topic or that you’re smarter than anyone else because you ~don’t believe in astrology~ when there is active ongoing scientific debate that increasingly points toward a legitimate causal mechanism between planetary movements and biological life and behavior on earth, you are literally just anti-science.

If you marry a good-time girl

A joyful woman known to her town,

If she is wayward,

and revels in the moment,

do not reject her, but instead let her enjoy;

.....except for the Ancient Egypt nook

I have a long way to go, but I’m nearly done with the major arcana.

Here are some of my favorites:

I set myself a design challenge (as I often do). I wanted to limit the color palette and the brush styles to create a very consistent look.

And since each card focuses on black cats, it forces me to think deeply about symbolism and design to make sure the meaning of each card is clear and each design is unique.

But there’s still a lot of variety coming through. It’s not all class, or all silliness - just like cats

I have a forearm tattoo of the cats in this one ☝️

I’m so happy with how both of these two managed to feel dark, but adorable at the same time.

And then there’s this one absolute diva:

Most of these used my own feline friends for reference.

She was the center of attention at the exhibition and everyone's favorite.