bizarre stories Archives - Page 5 of 7 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Why Is Tutankhamun So Famous?

Pharaoh Tutankhamun is undoubtedly the most famous of all ancient Egyptian pharaohs. He is one of the very few Egyptian pharaohs that most ordinary people are able to name. Most people have never heard of Hatshepsut and even fewer have heard of her nephew and successor Thutmose III, but everyone has heard of Tutankhamun. He even has a Batman villain named after him!

Things were not always the way they are today, though; up until the discovery of his tomb in 1922, Tutankhamun was utterly obscure. If you asked someone on the street in 1921 who Tutankhamun was, no one would have been able to tell you. Even if you asked an Egyptologist about him, many of them probably would not have known who he was. Ironically, it is precisely because of his former obscurity that Tutankhamun is so famous today.

Was Jesus Copied Off the Egyptian God Horus?

Every year, around this time, you start seeing memes claiming that Jesus is “a copy of” some pre-Christian deity. One of the most popular deities for people to claim Jesus is “a copy of” is Horus, a god who was worshipped in ancient Egypt from prehistoric times until after the rise of Christianity in around the fourth century AD. Horus was believed to have been the son of the god Osiris and the goddess Isis. He was closely associated with the pharaoh and he is usually depicted in ancient Egyptian art with the head of a falcon.

The truth is, all the memes claiming that Jesus is “a copy of” such-and-such deity are wrong. Historians agree that Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure who lived in Galilee in the early first century AD and who was crucified in Jerusalem in either 30 or 33 AD under the orders of the Roman governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilatus. The stories about Jesus’s life recorded in the gospels are certainly heavily embellished with legend and fiction, but, ultimately, there was a real man who stands behind the mythological tradition. While the stories about Jesus recorded in the gospels have probably been influenced to varying extents by stories of various pagan deities, it is entirely wrong for anyone to claim that the whole story of Jesus is copied directly from any single pagan deity.

Of all the deities Jesus is often claimed to have been copied off of, Horus is one of the most commonly mentioned, but also one of the most absurd. I actually included an extremely brief debunking of the claim that Jesus is based on Horus in this article I published on my website in March 2018, but I received some flak over the fact that I did not quote any specific claims from proponents of the Jesus-Horus connection and respond to them. I suppose, then, it is about time that I wrote a more complete response to the alleged connections between Jesus and Horus.

Why Most So-Called “Medieval Torture Devices” Are Fake

We’ve all heard of so-called “medieval torture devices.” You can find tons of clickbait-y articles online and videos on YouTube and so forth talking about the most gruesome of these alleged devices. For instance, here is a YouTube video from BuzzFeed titled “5 Of The Most Gruesome Medieval Torture Devices.” It lists the “scold’s bridle,” the “rack,” the “iron maiden,” the “pear of anguish,” and the “brazen bull.”

Unfortunately for those who love reading about gruesome torture devices, most of the so-called “medieval torture devices” you hear about never existed at all during the Middle Ages. In fact, of the five devices listed in the aforementioned video, only the rack actually existed during the Middle Ages and, even then, it seems to have been rarely ever used.

Many alleged “medieval torture devices” were actually made up by hoaxers, showmen, and con artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These hoaxers would display these phony instruments of torture for commercial gain, telling people they were real medieval torture devices and charging people to see them.

Other supposed “medieval torture devices” were made up more recently. For instance, the notorious “Spanish tickler” (not mentioned in the video linked above) was only made up in 2005 as a hoax article on Wikipedia. Meanwhile, other supposed “medieval torture devices” are real torture devices, but they didn’t exist during the Middle Ages. Let’s go through in alphabetical order and debunk supposed medieval torture devices one-by-one.

Who Was the Strangest Roman Emperor?

A number of ancient Roman emperors have acquired reputations for being very strange. In particular, emperors such as Caligula, Nero, and Domitian are well-known for their alleged bizarre antics. It is unclear, however, to what extent these reputations for bizarreness are warranted, since many of the most famous stories concerning these emperors are apocryphal. (For instance, Nero definitely never played the fiddle while Rome burned and Caligula definitely never made his horse a senator.)

I think it is generally agreed, though, that the strangest Roman emperor—at least in terms of how he is portrayed in our extant sources—was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus, known to later generations as Elagabalus. Elagabalus had a brief, but notoriously bizarre reign, which lasted from 16 May 218 AD until 11 March 222 AD. According to historical sources, Elagabalus was highly eccentric and his reign was ridden with scandal.

Were Ancient People Conscious?

In 1976, the American psychologist Julian Jaynes (lived 1920 – 1997) published a controversial book titled The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. In this book, Jaynes claimed that human beings were not conscious of their own thoughts until around 1000 BC and that stories about gods speaking to people originated from people hearing their own inner voices and mistaking them for the voices of external deities telling them what to do.

Jaynes’s claims were regarded as fringe, baseless, and bizarre even when he first proposed them back in the 1970s and today they are almost universally regarded by psychologists as the debunked relic of an earlier, less scientific stage in the development of modern psychology. Nonetheless, Jaynes’s hypothesis of the bicameral mind has garnered something of a cult following among non-scholars and has had considerable influence in popular culture, so I suppose it is worth writing a lengthy rebuttal to it.

Were Cats Really Killed En Masse During the Middle Ages?

The Middle Ages always seem to be the most misunderstood period in history. I wrote an article in May 2019 debunking a number of popular misconceptions about the Middle Ages, but now I think it is time for me to debunk another. There is something of a widespread notion these days that, in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church hated cats because they associated them with witches and that they instigated a massive pogrom to exterminate them. Supposedly, according to the major proponents of this story, this mass killing of cats either resulted in the Black Death or promoted the Black Death’s spread across Europe.

I will admit that my hands are not entirely clean here, since, when I was a freshman in high school, I gave a presentation in one of my classes about the Black Death in which I claimed that people during the time of the Black Death blamed cats for the disease and killed them, thus inadvertently allowing the disease to spread further. Since then, however, I have learned better. The idea people in the Middle Ages killed cats en masse is a misconception. Although some people in the Middle Ages may have killed cats occasionally, the idea of a massive pogrom instigated by the Catholic Church that resulted in the spread of the Black Death is 100% pure fantasy.

Why Are Babies in Medieval Paintings So Creepy?

I have recently discovered that there seems to be something of a widespread notion that babies in medieval paintings look “creepy.” I have never personally thought that babies in medieval paintings look particularly “creepy,” but this seems to be a notion that a lot of other people have.

Even if you’re like me and you don’t think that medieval babies necessarily look “creepy,” there is no denying that babies in a lot of medieval paintings don’t exactly look like real-life babies. Instead, for the most part, they look like tiny middle-aged men. The reason why they are portrayed this way is actually extremely fascinating and has to do with the way people in the Middle Ages thought about the purpose of art.

Why Are Ghosts Depicted Wearing Bedsheets?

We are all familiar with the traditional “bedsheet ghost,” but have you ever wondered where this image comes from? Why on Earth do we imagine ghosts wearing bedsheets? As strange as it sounds, the history of the Halloween bedsheet ghost is far darker and more mysterious than most people probably realize.

The Bizarre Origin Story of the Demogorgon

Most people are familiar with the term Demogorgon. It is the name of a monster in Dungeons and Dragons and also the name of a monster in the American science fiction horror web television series Stranger Things. The story of how the name Demogorgon came about, though, is actually really bizarre.

As it turns out, this famous monster most likely originates from a single scribal error made by an unknown copyist in an unknown manuscript sometime around 2,000 years ago or so. Somehow, from these humble origins, Demogorgon went on to be mentioned by great writers including Christopher Marlowe and John Milton before eventually becoming one of the most iconic monsters of today.

Who Were the Green Children of Woolpit?

The story of the so-called “Green Children of Woolpit” is one of the strangest stories that has come out of medieval England. It is the story of two children, a boy and a girl, with green skin who were, according to two chroniclers writing independently, discovered outside the village of Woolpit in around the middle of the twelfth century. Although all kinds of bizarre explanations have been proposed, I think that the most mundane explanation is probably the most likely.