Thursday, the Day of Thor
Irrational Geographic is so often concerned with notions ancient and arcane that, in this novel entry, I’ve decided to take an opposite approach. Today is Thursday, the 6th of August. So as to remain as temporally present and as commonplace as possible, I have decided to make an inquiry into Thursday itself. One seventh of our shared existence is spent inside of this designated period of time, so its origins, both as an entity and as a word, are of undeniable interest.
An artistic representation of the months and seasons of the modern Gregorian calendar, here juxtaposed with the ancient Hebrew calendar.
Thursday is designated the fifth day of the week according to the Gregorian calendar, which is currently the Western standard for the temporal demarcation of the year (There are, of course, other calendrical systems currently in use, including the Jewish and Hindu calendars, and that of the Nigerian Igbo with their curious four-day week). This is only the case due to the fact that Sunday is widely designated as the week’s first day, an honor bestowed upon the day, named after the year-defining sun (from the Old English word Sunnendaeg, “Day of the sun”), by Judeo-Christian calendrical tradition. Some nations including The United Kingdom, on the other hand, still consider Sunday to be the week’s seventh day, making Thursday the fourth. The Chinese word for Thursday, in fact, means fourth. The ancient Greeks and Romans would have taken issue with this, however, each designating their equivalent of Sunday as the week’s first day, associating it with supreme divinity.
The legendary Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, depicted Helios, the Greek sun god, for whom the first day of the week was named.
Despite the fact that Thursday sits on the opposite side of the week from Sunday, its namesake is certainly a source of great historical power and significance. Its moniker originates in a culture very different than that of Sunday. Thursday takes its name from Thor, simultaneously the ancient Norse god of thunder and Germanic god of protection.
”Thor’s Battle Against the Giants” by Swedish painter Marten Eskil Winge, 1872.
One of the oldest recorded deities of Scandinavian polytheistic culture, Thor (also referred to as Donor in some Germanic linguistic traditions) served as a symbol of Pagan resistance and cultural pride in the face of the monotheistic Christian encroachment upon Scandenavia beginning in the 8th century. Perhaps the fact that remnants of Thor grace our modern calendars (Thursday having taken the place of Dies Iovis, the ancient Latin “Day of Jupiter”) suggests that this resistance was never fully quelled despite the fact that, by the 12th century, Christianity had all but beaten Paganism out of the region.
A Medieval map of Scandinavia.
Like the evergreen tree decorated with candles and ribbons displayed during the Christmas celebration, the prominent inclusion of Thor’s name in a predominantly Judeo-Christian calendar is an instance of the hybridization of Pagan and monotheistic traditions that has survived into modern times. While the Christian crusaders of the Middle Ages may have aimed to bend the world to their will, they themselves received some cultural battle scars that are still visible today. Our word for Thursday is just such a scar, scratched approximately fifty two times across the face of every modern Western calendar.
Some Further Reading:
A look at the Igbo calendar as it relates to the notion of a spiritual cosmic order
A simple breakdown of the Hindu calendar
A tool that allows for the conversion of dates between the Gregorian and Jewish calendars
An essay that discusses the origins of the Christmas tree and its Pagan connections
A Wikipedia entry including some excellent charts comparing day nomenclature cross-culturally
The Cryptocartography of Piri Reis
Hadji Muhiddin Piri Ibn Hadji Mehmed, better known as Piri Reis, was a Turkish admiral and cartographer who produced many historically important and remarkably accurate maps of the Mediterranean during the first half of the 16th century. Perhaps his most famous map, drawn in 1513, is known as the First World Map. This map has been the subject of much speculation and contention due to some of its striking and peculiar characteristics, specifically its depiction of South America and what may be Antarctica.
Drawn on gazelle skin and measuring 90 cm x 63 cm , the map was lost to the world until its rediscovery in 1929 in Istanbul’s Topkapı Palace, a discovery that has sparked decades of debate. Text on the map states that Reis drew it based largely on ancient cartographical information that he gathered from other maps drawn by Roman cartographer and all-around Renaissance man Claudius Ptolemaeus (better known as Ptolomy) who lived during the 2nd century AD. (Ptolomy, it should be noted, introduced the use of longitude and latitude, which are essential tools of modern cartography). Reis also drew information from Indian, Portuguese, and Arabic maps, and even a map drawn by Christopher Columbus. Some of his source maps, historians speculate, were derived from those housed in the legendary Library of Alexandria before it burned in 48 BC, depriving the modern world of incalculable volumes of ancient knowledge.
Synthesizing information from such diverse sources, Reis compiled one of the most accurate world maps of the 16th century. Here is an illustration of the remarkable precision with which the First World Map depicts the eastern coast of South America.
What makes this map truly fascinating, however, is the land mass depicted to the lower right. While some claim that is it a misplaced representation of Patagonia, others contend that it is in fact the coastline of Antarctica. This latter interpretation has forced historians to drastically reconsider the timeline of ancient geographical knowledge.
If the First World Map does indeed depict Antarctica, this invalidates the widely held assumption that humans first discovered Antarctica in 1820 when a Russian expedition stumbled upon the massive continent. Even more startling, however, is that fact that the area of Antarctica purportedly shown on the map, known as the Princess Martha Coast, has been covered by large sheets of ice, measuring a mile thick, for over 6,000 years. The U.S. Navy Hydrographic Bureau has employed modern technology to peer beneath this cover of ice and map the actual coastline, and has found that the First World Map depicts it with startling accuracy. Here is a letter from Air Force Commander Harold Z. Ohlmeyer to Charles H Hapgood, an expert who has written extensively about Piri Reis, regarding the map’s accuracy:
“6, July, 1960
Subject: Admiral Piri Reis Map
TO: Prof. Charles H. Hapgood Keene College Keene, New Hampshire
Dear Professor Hapgood,
Your request of evaluation of certain unusual features of the Piri Reis map of 1513 by this organization has been reviewed. The claim that the lower part of the map portrays the Princess Martha Coast of Queen Maud Land, Antarctic, and the Palmer Peninsular, is reasonable. We find that this is the most logical and in all probability the correct interpretation of the map. The geographical detail shown in the lower part of the map agrees very remarkably with the results of the seismic profile made across the top of the ice-cap by the Swedish-British Antarctic Expedition of 1949. This indicates the coastline had been mapped before it was covered by the ice-cap. The ice-cap in this region is now about a mile thick. We have no idea how the data on this map can be reconciled with the supposed state of geographical knowledge in 1513.
Harold Z. Ohlmeyer Lt. Colonel, USAF Commander”
Could it be possible that an ancient thalassocracy, unknown to modern historians, discovered and mapped in great detail the coastline of Antarctica 6,000 or more years ago, and then passed this information down through the millennia until it found its way into the Library of Alexandria only to be fortuitously reproduced before it would have otherwise been forever lost upon the library’s destruction? While many modern academics dismiss this theory as fantastical poppycock, I cannot bring myself to discard the possibility that ancient civilizations were advanced in ways that would astound us if only their accomplishments hadn’t been lost to the great eraser of time.
Some Further Reading:
Here is an extensive look at the controversies surrounding the map
A site devoted to the history of polar discovery
A blog that links to many interesting sites concerning cartography
A bit about the tragic destruction of the Library of Alexandria
The Haunting Specter of Phobos
The planet Mars is orbited by two irregularly shaped moons, neither larger that 15 kilometers across. The smaller of the two, named Phobos after the Greek god of terror, measures only about 11 kilometers across and is closer to its primary planet than any other moon in our solar system. It is so close to the surface of Mars, in fact, that it orbits the planet twice daily. What has led astronomers, writers, and science fiction enthusiasts to so much speculation regarding Phobos is its peculiar size and shape, making it look like a sinister extra terrestrial skull drifting through the void of space.
This series of photos shows Phobos passing in front of the sun, as seen from the surface of Mars by the NASA rover Opportunity
Discovered in 1877, Phobos has long stood out amongst non-planetary astronomical bodies due, in addition to its odd shape, to the non-reflective quality of its surface. This has led astronomers to speculate that it may have originally been an interstellar asteroid that was caught in Mars’ gravitational orbit. The porous nature of its composition suggests that Phobos’ mass is startlingly low, an observation which led to a widely-held theory, popular in the 1950s and 1960s, that Phobos is nothing more than a hollow metal shell, perhaps serving as a Martian space station. This reasoning has been called into serious question by more recent observations.
When studying Phobos from afar, much attention has been paid to its series of odd and quite large craters. Several of these are named after characters from Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels, which hypothesized that Mars has two moons many years before this was discovered to be the truth. The largest crater, dubbed Stickney after the wife of the astronomer who first identified Phobos, measures 9 kilometers across.
Stickney Crater as seen by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
What makes Phobos an object of particular interest, however, is not its curiously porous composition. Phobos stands out in the night sky because of the undefinably ghastly quality of its appearance. Whether imagined as the rotted skull of an immense species long extinct, a ghostly bit of refuse from a distant, wicked solar system, or a malicious eye socket gazing at us from a mere 35 million miles away, Phobos is aptly named. It seems fitting, then, that Phobos itself is not long for this world. Due to its low orbit, Phobos is expected to, in about 11 million years, crash into the surface of Mars, crushing this celestial wraith into bits of dust.
Some Further Reading:
Some interesting facts about Phobos
A succinct list of facts about Phobos, complete with various maps and images
The Mysterious Bloop
Anyone who has ever gazed at the expanse of the ocean and experienced a mixture of wonderment and terror will feel validated upon learning about the Bloop. This sonic phenomenon, so named due to its distinct sound (“bloop…bloop”), was first picked up via undersea microphones by the United States Navy in the summer of 1997. Instead of tracking Soviet submarines, these Cold War-era microphones detected a sound with an ultra-low frequency that suggests it a) originates from an animal, and b) that this animal is significantly larger than a blue whale (the largest creature ever known to live). Microphone triangulation has placed the origin of the Bloop off the southwestern coast of South America (50 degrees S, 100 degrees W). Listen to the Bloop here.
To give you a sense of scale.
The mysterious Bloop vanished as rapidly as it appeared. The sound has not been detected since 1997, although this does little to hamper the impassioned speculations of cryptozoologists, science fictions enthusiasts, and marine biologists alike. The notion that there may lie at the bottom of the sea a beast that dwarfs, both in size and in sound-making ability, history’s largest known animals is fodder for both daydreams and nightmares. I know that I, for one, will glance compulsively and fearfully downward into the darkened depths if I ever find myself afloat off the southwestern coast of South America.
Some Further Reading:
A thread on Physics Forum that discusses the Bloop
A 2002 article about the Bloop from Cnn.com
BloopWatch.org – A site for H.P. Lovecraft fans that explores the Bloop from a science fiction perspective
Irrational Geographic 