These documents, inscribed on papyrus in hieratic script, were essentially collections of remedies written for the medical practitioner. Along with the specific treatments, they also included spells and incantations, indicating the close link between magic and medicine.

The various medications were identified by a heading, often in red, which outlined its use and described the symptoms of the complaint, its treatment and the way in which the remedy was to be administered. The example is from the Chester Beatty papyrus which deals with digestive problems.

The incantations were combined with the administration of the remedy, so that if the latter roved ineffectual, the help of the gods was at hand. Deciphering many of the text has been difficult because of the inability to identify both the ailments and the ingredients used in the cures.

Because of the limited knowledge of anatomy, surgery did not go beyond an elementary level, and no internal surgery was undertaken. Most of the medical instruments found in tombs or depicted on temple reliefs were used to treat injuries or fractures, which were possibly the result of accidents incurred by workers on the pharaohs’’ monumental building sites. Other implements were used for gynecological problems and in childbirth, both of which were treated extensively in the medical papyri.

A man in pain, this bronze statuette of a sick man racked with pain dates from the New Kingdom (1550 to 1069 Before Christ). Although Egyptian physicians were generally unable to say what caused illness, they attempted to treat its symptoms. Medical text dating back to about 1500 Before Christ suggested dill in a pain killing mixture based on wine mixed with a small quantity of raisins and dates. The concoction was boiled and strained before being taken for four days. Dill also appears in an ointment to relieve headache, and in a poultice for neck pain.

Surgical instruments, the temple of Sobek and Hareris at Kon Ombo in Upper Egpyt, near modern Aswan, has provide important evidence about Ancient Egyptian surgery. This relief from the enclosure wall, which deptics commonly used surgical instruments, is from the Roman period. There are clear foundations for the vampire in the ancient World, and it is impossible to prove when the first arose.

There are suggestions that the vampire was born out of sorcery in ancient Egypt, a demon summoned into the World from some other. Some vampires are said to be able to turn into bats or wolves; other cannot. Some are said no to cast reflection, but others do. Holy water and sunlight are said to repel or kill some vampires, but not others.

One of the universal characteristic is the draining of a vital bodily fluid, typically blood. One of the reasons that vampires make such successful literary figures is that they have a rich and varied history and folklore. Writers can play with the rules while adding, subtracting or changing them to fit whatever story they have in mind.

Finding a vampire is not always easy. In one Romanian legend you will need a 7 year old boy and a white horse. The boy should be dressed in white, placed upon the horse, and the pair set loose in a graveyard at midday. Watch the horse wander around, and whichever grave is nearest the horse when it finally stops is a vampire’s grave, or it might just have something edible nearby; take your pick.

Interest and belief in revenants surged in the middle ages. Meteors have been known, of course, since the dawn of time, from the moment humans turned their eyes to the sky. The first systematic observations date about 2000 Before Christ (BC) and were recorded in Korea and China.

Sporadic mentions are found in various Chinese chronicals. For example, in 36 After Death (AD), we find the first reference to the Perseid meteor shower: “More than 100 meteors were seen darting about in the morning hours.” The first mention of the Eta Aquarid meteors dates to 466: “Countless meteors, great and small, speared toward the west.” In records from 585l a reference to the Orionids is found: “Hundreds of meteors scattered in every direction”; in 687, the Lyrids: “Stars fell like rain from the sky”; and in 1002, the Leonids: “Lots of little stars fell.”

The Leonids were also referred to in Arab chronicles. For example, in mid-October of 902: “An infinite number of stars was seen during the night, scattering like rain right and left, and that year came to be known as the year of the stars.” And in 1202: “During the night of Saturday, in the last day of Muharram, the stars…flew at one other like a swarm of grasshoppers.”

References to various events are found in historical European sources. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle records that in 1095, “at Easter, on the night of Saint Ambrose and for most of the night, a giant host of stars seemed to fall from the sky so frequent that no one as able to count them.” There is a reference to the Perseids’ activity in 1243 in Matthew Paris’s Historia Anglorum: “On 26 July 1095, on a perfectly clear night, brilliant stars were seen falling, scattering here and there in a manner so copious that if they had been real stars, none would be left in the sky.”  On 3 August 1492, Christopher Columbus and his crew set sail from Spain in three ships: The Nine, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. On 12 October 1492, the ships made landfall, not in Asia, as Columbus assumed, but one of the Bahamian islands. For months, Columbus sailed from island to island in what we now know as the Caribbean, looking for the pearls, precious stones of gold, silver, spices, and other objects and merchandise whatsoever that he had promised to his Spanish patrons, but he did not find much.

In modern times, references to brilliant fireballs are fairly frequently, starting with extremely famous one of 7 November 1492, when a huge meteorite weighing 50 kilograms fell bear the Alsatian town of Ensisheim. It was observed and painted by Albrecht Durer.  The explorer Christopher Columbus made four trips across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain: in 1492, 1493, 1498, and 1502, which is impressive because even one trip was unheard of, most others went missing.

Probably no legendary sea monster was as horrifying as the Kraken. According to stories this huge, many armed, creature could reach as high as the top of a sailing ship’s main mast. A kraken would attack a ship by wrapping their arms around the hull and capsizing it. The crew would drown or be eaten by the monster. What is amazing about the kraken stories is that, of all the sea monster tales we have, we have the best evidence that this creature was based on something real.

Tales of a huge, many armed, headed or horned sea creatures exist from ancient times. The Greek legend of the Scylla, a monster with six heads that Odysseus must sail past during his travels, is an example of this tradition.

He was determined to find a direct water route west from Europe to Asian, but never dud. Instead, he accidentally stumbled upon the Americas. Though he did not really discover the New World, millions of people already lived there, his journeys marked the beginning of centuries of transatlantic conquest and colonization.

Vampire, Burial, and Death: In March 1493, Columbus returned to Spain leaving 40 men behind, in a makeshift settlement, on Hispaniola (present day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Folklore and Reality noted that centuries ago, often potential revenants can be identified at birth, usually by some abnormality, some defect, as when a child is born with teeth. Similarly suspicious are children born with an extra nipple (in Romania, for example): with a lack of cartilage in the nose, incomplete spine, or a split lower lip (in Russia)…when a child is born with a red caul, or amniotic membrane, covering its head, this was regarded the presumptive evidence that it is destined to return from the dead.” Such minor deformities were looked upon as evil omens, at the time.

In 1555 Olaus Magnus wrote of a sea creature with “sharp and long Horns round about, like a Tree root up by the Roots: They are ten or twelve cubits long, very black, and with huge eyes…

The belief in vampires stems from superstition and mistaken assumptions about postmortem decay. The first recorded accounts of vampires follow a consistent pattern: Some unexplained misfortune would befall a person, family or town, perhaps a drought dried up crops, or an infectious disease struck. Before science could explain weather patterns and germ theory, any bad event for which there was not an obvious cause might be blamed on a vampire. Vampires were one easy answer to the antiquated question of why bad things happen to good people.

Villagers combined their belief that something had cursed them with fear of the dead, and concluded that perhaps the recently deceased might be responsible, having come back from the graves with evil intent. Graves were unearthed, and surprised villagers often mistook ordinary decomposition process for supernatural phenomenon. For example, though laypeople might assume that the body would decompose immediately, if the coffin is well sealed and buried in winter, putrefaction might be delayed by weeks or months; intentional decomposition creates bloating which can force blood up into the mouth, making it look like a dead body has recently sucked blood. These processes are well understood by modern doctors and morticians, but in medieval Europe were taken as unmistakable signs that vampires were real and existed among them.

Suspecting that Randolph was a vampire, gravediggers shoved a rock into his skull to prevent him from chewing through his shroud and infecting others with the plague reported anthropologist Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence. Archaeologist found two skeletons with iron rods through their chests; the pair believed to have been accused vampires. However, blood drinking is toxic because it is so iron rich in iron and because the human body has difficulty excreting excess iron anyone who consumes blood regularly runs a real risk of haemochromatosis (iron overdose), which can cause a wide variety of disease and problems, including liver and nervous system damage. I have loved you, says the LORD. On the long voyage of our life, every step is a test. However, making clear of one’s direction and aim, knowing one’s potentiality and stepping forward resolutely are more important. He was doctrinally convinced that there was a total absence of merit in himself; but that doctrinal conviction may be held without pain when the sense of demerit does not take a distinct shape in memory and revive the tingling of shame or the pang of remorse.

There are many monuments in Rome as there have been emperors, consuls, orators, conquerors, famous painters or players in Rome. Till this day no a Roman will kill a rat, but he will have some registered remembrance of it. What a god is memory, to keep in life, to endow with an unslumbering vitality beyond that of our own nature, its unconscious company, the things that seem only born for its enjoyment. I the LORD do not change. My name is Legion for we are many. This is what the kingdom of God is like. My memory is a life beyond birth; my memory, my library of the Vatican, its alcoves all endless perspectives, eve tinted by cross lights from Middle Age oriels.

Dead emperors have very little delight in their monuments. Desert is a moral question. It will be a fresher and better World when it flings off this great burden of stony memories [monuments], which the ages have deemed it a piety to heap upon its back. 18 degree F average temperature change in a matter of years, due to an the United Nations .  When Ryan unexpectedly and with recollection, admits to ocean conservation: guilt, renowned, psychologist Dr. Raines says 12 percent of the planet’s land is protected by a wild life preserve or park, but only less than 1 percent of the ocean’s 135 miles of surface of oceans have no protection.

These tales often refer to a creature so big that it is mistaken for an island or series of islands. Even as late as 1752, when the Bishop of Bergen, Erik Ludvigsen Pontoppidan, wrote his The Natural History of Norway he described the kraken as “incontestably the largest Sea monster in the world” with a width of one and a half miles. The Bishop also noted that the animal had starfish type protuberances: “It seems these are the creature’s arms, and, it is said, if they were to lay hold of the largest man-of-war, they would pull it down to the bottom.” Despite this Pontoppidan says that the most danger the kraken represented to ships came from the disturbance it made as it came to the surface or whirlpool as created as it descended below. Because fish were attracted to the vicinity of the kraken, he also notes, Norwegian fishermen would often fish over the creature, despise the risk to their ship and their lives.

Later Kraken stories bring the creature down to a smaller, but still monstrous, size. Though early descriptions of the animal give a more crab-like appearance, by the 18th century it started showing up in drawings as a giant, many armed cephalopod (like an octopus or squid). In 1802 the French scientist Pierre Denys de Montfort stated in his book on the natural history of mollusks that the creature encountered by Norwegian sailors was the kracken octopus. Montfort even suggested that there was even a larger type of octopus than this, the colossal octopus that had been known to attack sailing vessels.

The Kraken of legend is probably what we know today as the giant squid. While a colossal octopus might also fit the description, the squid is thought to be much more aggressive and more likely to come to the surface where it might be seen by man. Though giant squids are considerably less then a mile and a half across, some are thought to be large enough to wrestle with a whale. On at least three occasions in the 1930’s they reportedly attacked a ship. Then I saw another beat, coming out of the Earth.

He had two horns like a lamb, but spoke like a dragon. He exercised all the authority of the first beast on his behalf, and he  made the Earth and its inhabitants worship the first beasts, whose fatal wound had been healed. And performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to come down from the Heaven to Earth in full view of men,  because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the Earth. Therefore, when rejoice, you Heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the Earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you. He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.