Fear of a disease that seemed to turn people into beasts might have inspired belief in supernatural beings that live on in today’s creepy Halloween costumes.
The American Survival Research Foundation offered a reward of $1,000 for cracking one of Thouless’s two codes within three years of his death. It was not claimed.
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Computer capabilities have boosted our decryption technology to great heights. How will the future compare to a past, one in which codes were thought to be a means of communicating after death?
Examining chicken intestines, reading the tea leaves, watching the markets – people turn to experts for insight into the mysteries that surround them.
Manvir Singh
Hidden forces are always at work in the world, and people always want to control them, a cognitive anthropologist explains. Enter the human universal of shamanism.
From naked mole rats to the immortal jellyfish – the creatures that would make Dracula shudder.
In 2014, in, a small town in northern Israel, Christian worshippers gathered next to a statue of the Virgin Mary, that they said ‘weeps’ oil.
AP Photo/Ariel Schalit
Throughout Catholic history, miracles have been attributed to Virgin Mary’s power. She is understood to cry not only over the sins of the world, but over the pain she experienced in her earthly life.
Depiction of the miracle of the Resurrection, the central belief in Christianity.
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The underpinning of Christian faith is the belief in a miracle – the resurrection of Jesus. As we approach Easter, a philosopher-physician asks whether miracles can make sense.
A Menominee Tribal biology class in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
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A Christian movement led by popular independent religious entrepreneurs, often referred to as ‘apostles,’ is changing the religious landscape of America.
Richard Flory, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Americans are increasingly choosing not to identify with any religious tradition. But this group of irreligious people is a complex one – with different relationships to religion.
BBC One’s The Living and the Dead revels in the Victorians’ obsession with the supernatural and the limits of science.
From Horace Walpole to Steven King, Shakespeare has inspired centuries of supernatural Gothic terror.
Macbeth And Banquo, Théodore Chassériau, 1855. Via Wikimedia Commons
Hamlet begins with a ‘night of the living dead’; Banquo turns into a ghost . The Bard had a supernatural streak and it was crucial to the genesis of Gothic literature.
In Nigeria some children who are branded as witches suffer severe abuse.
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Formlings are representations of flying termites and their underground nests. They are associated with botantical subjects considered by the San to have great spiritual significance.
The San are the oldest inhabitants of southern Africa, where they have lived for millennia.
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Project Manager, International Rock Art Collaboration, Rock Art Research Institute, School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand