Located in Brazil. It is over 6,000 years old and has hundreds of strange symbols.
The archaeological site of the Ingá Stone, also known in the Tupi-Guarani language as the Itacoatiara do Ingá and Pedra do Ingá in Portuguese, is near the town of Ingá in northeast Brazil. The meaning of the carvings remain uncertain, but may allude to astronomy, animals and fruits.
The site was one of the first monuments of protected rock art in Brazil, exceptionally recognised for its artistic and historical importance. The Ingá Stone site consists of multiple basalt stones covered with glyphs. The main outcrop, featuring the three main rock art panels, forms a wall 24 metres long and 3.5 metres high at its highest point.
The engravings are generally non-figurative, and created using a technique of pecking at the stone and then polishing the grooves. Some of the figures also retain traces of pigment, suggesting they may have been coloured.
The first reports of rock art in the state of Paraíba were made by European settlers in the 16th century. The rock art at Ingá are the most representative group of a particular type of engraving tradition in Brazil.
Austrian-born Ludwig Schwennhagen, studied Brazilian history in the early twentieth century and found strong connections in appearance from the Inga symbols to not only the Phoenicians but also the demotic writings (linked more closely to business or literary document-style writings) of the ancient Egyptians. Further groups found a remarkable similarity of the carvings of Inga to the aboriginal artwork found on Easter Island.
James Edward Oglethorpe was born on December 22, 1696 in London England. He was one of ten children born to Eleanor and Theophilus Oglethorpe. James had a comfortable childhood, since his father owned land in different parts of England. The political nature of James Oglethorpe’s family had great influence on him. In 1698, Theophilus, James’ father, was elected to the House of Commons. While not much is know about Oglethorpe’s childhood, it is known that beginning in 1714 he was admitted to Corpus Christi College at Oxford University. Oglethorpe soon dropped out of school and joined the English military. He had a very successful campaign against the Turks. He returned to school after, but never graduated. Even though in 1731 Corpus Christi College awarded him an M.A. In 1722, Oglethorpe followed his father’s footsteps and was elected House of Commons where he focused on the domestic and international policies of England. At that time, in England, people could be jailed for their debt. This was the case with Robert Castell, one of Oglethorpe’s close friends. Due to the death of his friend in prison, as a result of bad prison conditions, Oglethorpe launched a campaign to improve prison conditions which earned him national notoriety.
It was during this time that Oglethorpe formed a plan to deal with all the poverty in England. His idea was to take all the “worthy poor” and move them to a new colony in the Americas where they could become farmers and merchants. Oglethorpe was also set on the idea that the structure of the social classes in England, which caused so much poverty, should be avoided in the new colony. This meant no one person would be allowed to hold much land and slavery would be prohibited. After he revealed his idea to King George II, he was given clearance to begin the colony of Georgia. Oglethorpe was also named one of the twenty-one trustees who would govern the colony. Unfortunately, when the new colonists were being selected, the original idea of picking people with debts was lost and the selection focused more on skills and usefulness.
In November 1732, 114 people left for Georgia to make their home there. Oglethorpe was on this first boat load of settlers. As a trustee, Oglethorpe worked hard, and at times, even broke the law, in order to allow Jews and other persecuted religious groups to settle in Georgia. He was strongly opposed to slavery. He did his best to make fair treaties with Native Americans and protect them from white traders. Though he was not officially a “governor”, because as a trustee he was not allowed to hold office, many considered him Georgia’s first governor for his clear leadership over the colony.
Georgia was agreed upon partially because it was a place the English could protect their colonies in America against the Spanish. It was because of this situation that Oglethorpe convinced the king to make him a Colonel. Oglethorpe launched a preemptive attack on the Spanish, which failed. The Spanish counter-attacked but Oglethorpe’s regiment managed to push back the Spanish in the Battle of Gully Hole Creek. In the Battle of the Bloody Marsh, Oglethorpe managed to beat the Spanish badly enough that they decided the heavy losses sustained were not worth the fight. Oglethorpe had successfully defended Georgia.
In 1744, Oglethorpe returned to England and married Elizabeth Wright. He settled in the small Essex town of Cranham. Oglethorpe remained a Trustee, but the other trustees in Georgia relaxed their restrictions on alcohol, slavery and land ownership. Oglethorpe lived to see the colony that he had made become part of the United States of America. After a brief sickness, Oglethorpe died on June 30, 1785.
In August 1669 three ships left with the first settlers. Each family had paid 500 Pounds for their part of the settlement. They founded the settlement of Charlestown. Within two years there were 271 men and 69 women in the settlement
The proprietors of the settlement set up a system of government that was called “the Fundamental Constitution of the Carolinas”. One of the authors of the Constitution was John Locke. It provided for an independent parliament in the colony, which gave greater power to the owners of large lands.
The growth of the Carolina colony was slow. The coastal land was swampy and many of the early inhabitants came down with malaria. The proprietors of the colony wanted to offer large land holdings to a small number of settlers. This limited the number of settlers and slowed down the growth of the colony.
The settlement of northern and southern Carolina were very different. Settlers from Virginia seeking more land, while settlers in the Southern part of the colony were coming from the West Indies and Europe mostly settled Northern Carolinas. Settlers in the northern part grew tobacco, while the settler in the Southern part of the colony grew rice. The parts of the colony grew apart and finally, in 1712 they separated and became North and South Carolina.
The British Monarchy did not have enough money to organize settlement activity in North America. Instead, they assigned that role to independent companies that raised money from merchants to accomplish this goal. King James gave the charter to settle the area around Virginia Company of London
On December 20th 1606, 105 settlers set sail to the New World to establish a colony for the London Virginia company. The group included 35 gentlemen, a minister, a doctor, 40 soldiers and a mixture of artisans and laborers. They arrived off the coast of Virginia in late April 1607. Captain Newport, who commanded the expeditions, was given instructions to find a site that was safe from Spanish attack, but gave access to the sea. Newport sailed up the James River. He found a site 50 miles up the river that was joined to the mainland by a small natural passageway, and thus defensible. He decided on that site and claimed it for James I. He called the new settlement “Jamestown”.
The settlers began by clearing the land and building a fortified settlement. They built small one and two room timber cottages and cleared additional land for planting crops. Initially, they found the Native Americans friendly and willing to trade, but relations with the native Indians remained uneven. Soon some of the negatives of the location of became apparent, as settlers began to die of disease– some from diseases they had brought from England and others from diseases they encountered in the mosquito infested swamp that they found initially in Jamestown. By winter, it was clear that not enough crops had been grown to survive the winter, a winter that turned out to be devastating. Despite trading with the Natives, by the end of the winter only 30 of the original settlers survived.
In the spring of 1608, Captain John Smith, who was a natural leader, took control of the settlement. Smith overcame one of the major problems of the settlement, the unwillingness of many of the noblemen to work. He made a simple rule: no work … no food.
Baron Samedi, “The Master of the dead” in Voodoo, occupies a popular place as the guardian of cemetries, and the spirit responsible for an individual’s transportation to the underworld. One of the more prevalent loas in Haitian voodoo is Baron Samedi. He fills a vital role in Haitian voodoo as the master of the dead, ushering the newly deceased into the afterlife. Who is Baron Samedi? In Haitian voodoo, Baron Samedi is the head of the Guede family of loa.
His name is often translated as Baron Saturday, Baron Samdi, Bawon Samedi, or Bawon Sanmdi. The last name of Saturday comes from the French translation of Samedi. Baron leads the Guede family, a group of loas with strong links to magic, ancestor worship, and death. The loas in the family consist primarily of lesser spirits, dress the same as Baron, have rude (even crude) attitudes, but lack the charm of their master. Baron is portrayed in Haitian voodoo wearing a top hat, black tuxedo, dark glasses, and cotton plugs in his nostrils. His image is often said to resemble that of a corpse that has been dressed and prepared for burial in traditional, Haitian manner. His face is said to resemble a skull, and he uses a nasal voice.
Baron spends the majority of his time in the invisible realm of Haitian voodoo spirits. His behaviour is described as outrageous. He is known to spend his time drinking rum and smoking cigars, swearing profusely, and making filthy jokes to the other loas. The other spirits in the Guede family are said to behave in the same manner, without the suave ability of Baron Samedi.
The Baron needs that suave nature because he is believed to chase mortal women, despite being married to the loa, Maman Brigitte. Baron’s time is spent lingering at the crossroads of life and death in the human world. When someone dies, Baron is said to dig their grave and meet their soul as it rises from the grave. He guides them into the underworld. Only Baron Samedi has the power to accept an individual into the world of the dead.
It is also said that Baron ensures that all those who have died rot in the ground as they should, ensuring that no soul can come back as a brainless zombie. He will demand payment for this act, which varies depending upon his mood at the time. On many occasions, he is content to accept gifts of cigars, rum, black coffee, or grilled peanuts.
One year after the United States doubled its territory with the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark expedition leaves St. Louis, Missouri, on a mission to explore the Northwest from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.
Even before the U.S. government concluded purchase negotiations with France, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned his private secretary Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, an army captain, to lead an expedition into what is now the U.S. Northwest. On May 14, the “Corps of Discovery”—featuring approximately 45 men (although only an approximate 33 men would make the full journey)—left St. Louis for the American interior.
The expedition traveled up the Missouri River in a 55-foot long keelboat and two smaller boats. In November, Toussaint Charbonneau, a French-Canadian fur trader accompanied by his young Native American wife Sacagawea, joined the expedition as an interpreter. The group wintered in present-day North Dakotabefore crossing into present-day Montana, where they first saw the Rocky Mountains. On the other side of the Continental Divide, they were met by Sacagawea’s tribe, the Shoshone Indians, who sold them horses for their journey down through the Bitterroot Mountains. After passing through the dangerous rapids of the Clearwater and Snake rivers in canoes, the explorers reached the calm of the Columbia River, which led them to the sea. On November 8, 1805, the expedition arrived at the Pacific Ocean. After pausing there for the winter, the explorers began their long journey back to St. Louis.
On September 23, 1806, after almost two and a half years, the expedition returned to the city, bringing back a wealth of information about the region (much of it already inhabited by Native Americans), as well as valuable U.S. claims to OregonTerritory.
The roots of Puritanism are to be found in the beginnings of the English Reformation. The name “Puritans” (they were sometimes called “precisionists”) was a term of contempt assigned to the movement by its enemies. Although the epithet first emerged in the 1560s, the movement began in the 1530s, when King Henry VIII repudiated papal authority and transformed the Church of Rome into a state Church of England. To Puritans, the Church of England retained too much of the liturgy and ritual of Roman Catholicism.
Well into the 16th century, many priests were barely literate and often very poor. Employment by more than one parish was common, so they moved often, preventing them from forming deep roots in their communities. Priests were immune to certain penalties of the civil law, further feeding anticlerical hostility and contributing to their isolation from the spiritual needs of the people.
In the early decades of the 17th century, some groups of worshipers began to separate themselves from the main body of their local parish church where preaching was inadequate and to engage an energetic “lecturer,” typically a young man with a fresh Cambridge degree, who was a lively speaker and steeped in reform theology. Some congregations went further, declared themselves separated from the national church, and remade themselves into communities of “visible saints,” withdrawn from the English City of Man into a self-proclaimed City of God.
One such faction was a group of separatist believers in the Yorkshire village of Scrooby, who, fearing for their safety, moved to Holland in 1608 and then, in 1620, to the place they called Plymouth in New England. We know them now as the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock. A decade later, a larger, better-financed group, mostly from East Anglia, migrated to Massachusetts Bay. There, they set up gathered churches on much the same model as the transplanted church at Plymouth (with deacons, preaching elders, and, though not right away, a communion restricted to full church members, or “saints”).
The main difference between the Pilgrims and the Puritans is that the Puritans did not consider themselves separatists. They called themselves “nonseparating congregationalists,” by which they meant that they had not repudiated the Church of England as a false church. But in practice they acted–from the point of view of Episcopalians and even Presbyterians at home–exactly as the separatists were acting.
By the 1640s, their enterprise at Massachusetts Bay had grown to about 10,000 people. They soon outgrew the bounds of the original settlement and spread into what would become Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Maine, and eventually beyond the limits of New England.
The Puritan migration was overwhelmingly a migration of families (unlike other migrations to early America, which were composed largely of young unattached men). The literacy rate was high, and the intensity of devotional life, as recorded in the many surviving diaries, sermon notes, poems, and letters, was seldom to be matched in American life.
The Puritans’ ecclesiastical order was as intolerant as the one they had fled. Yet, as a loosely confederated collection of gathered churches, Puritanism contained within itself the seed of its own fragmentation. Following hard upon the arrival in New England, dissident groups within the Puritan sect began to proliferate–Quakers, Antinomians, Baptists–fierce believers who carried the essential Puritan idea of the aloneness of each believer with an inscrutable God so far that even the ministry became an obstruction to faith.
Puritanism gave Americans a sense of history as a progressive drama under the direction of God, in which they played a role akin to, if not prophetically aligned with, that of the Old Testament Jews as a new chosen people.
Perhaps most important, as Max Weber profoundly understood, was the strength of Puritanism as a way of coping with the contradictory requirements of Christian ethics in a world on the verge of modernity. It supplied an ethics that somehow balanced charity and self-discipline. It counseled moderation within a psychology that saw worldly prosperity as a sign of divine favor. Such ethics were particularly urgent in a New World where opportunity was rich, but the source of moral authority obscure.
In March 1662, John and Bethia Kelly grieved over the body of their 8-year-old daughter inside their home. Little Elizabeth had been fine just days before when she returned home with a neighbor, Goodwife Ayres. The distraught parents, grasping at any explanation for their loss, saw the hand of the devil at work.
The parents were convinced that Elizabeth had been fatally possessed by Goody Ayres. The Kellys testified that their daughter first took ill the night after she returned home with her neighbor, and that she exclaimed, “Father! Father! Help me, help me! Goodwife Ayres is upon me. She chokes me. She kneels on my belly. She will break my bowels. She pinches me. She will make me black and blue.”
After Elizabeth’s death, accusations of bewitchment flew, and fingers were pointed at numerous townspeople. Hysteria gripped Hartford, a town that a generation before had witnessed the first execution of a suspected witch in the American colonies. Alse Young of Windsor, Connecticut, was sent to the gallows erected in Hartford’s Meeting House Square on May 26, 1647.
Witchcraft was one of 12 capital crimes decreed by Connecticut’s colonial government in 1642. The legal precedent cited by the devoutly Puritan colonists was of a divinely higher order: biblical passages such as Exodus 22:18 (“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”) and Leviticus 20:27 (“A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death”).
After Young’s public hanging, at least five other Connecticut residents met a similar fate. However, it was in Hartford in 1662, 30 years before the infamous Salem witch trials, that a witch hunt hysteria took hold, resulting in seven trials and four executions.
Shortly after Elizabeth Kelly’s death, the pious Ann Cole suddenly became “afflicted,” shaking violently and spouting blasphemy. According to one account, Cole was “taken with strange fits, wherein she held a discourse for a considerable time.” Cole blamed her bewitchment on neighbor Rebecca Greensmith, described by one townsperson as “a lewd, ignorant, considerably aged woman,” and others already suspected of witchcraft in the Kelly case. The accused began to accuse others, and even their spouses, of being the true witches. In what became a vicious circle, neighbors began testifying against neighbors. Goody Ayres’ husband, perhaps in an attempt to save his wife, joined in the chorus of Greensmith’s accusers.
The most damning testimony supposedly came from Greensmith herself, who reportedly admitted to having “familiarity with the devil” and said that “at Christmas they would have a merry meeting” to form a covenant. Greensmith implicated her husband and said she had met in the woods with seven other witches, including Goody Ayres, Mary Sanford and Elizabeth Seager. Neighbors testified that they saw Seager dancing with other women in the woods and cooking mysterious concoctions in black kettles.
Two of the suspects, likely the Greensmiths, were subjected to the swimming test in which their hands and feet were bound and they were cast into the water to test the theory that witches are unable to sink. After they were tried, the Greensmiths were indicted “for not having the fear of God before thine eyes; thou hast entertained familiarity with Satan the grand enemy of God and mankind and by his help hast acted things in a preternatural way.” The court’s verdict: “According to the law of God and the established law of this commonwealth, thou deserves to die.”
Rebecca Greensmith had confessed in open court. Nathaniel Greensmith had protested his innocence. But they both met the same fate: the noose. Sanford was also sent to the gallows. After their executions, Cole reportedly was “restored to health.” Ayres fled Hartford, while Seager was finally convicted of witchcraft in 1665, although the governor reversed the verdict the following year. Mary Barnes of Farmington, Connecticut, was also swept up in the region’s witch hunt and executed alongside the Greensmiths.
The four executions of suspected witches in Hartford were to be Connecticut’s last. Another hysteria broke out in Fairfield, Connecticut, in 1692, but none of those convicted met death. Connecticut held its final witch trial in 1697, a half century after Alse Young’s execution. During that period, there were 46 prosecutions and at least 11 executions.
One of the most famous witches in Virginia’s history is Grace Sherwood, whose neighbors alleged she killed their pigs and hexed their cotton. A farmer, healer, and midwife, she was accused by her neighbors of transforming herself into a cat, damaging crops, and causing the death of livestock. She was charged with witchcraft several times. Sherwood was accused of bewitching her neighbor, Elizabeth Hill, causing Hill to miscarry. Other accusations followed and Sherwood was brought to trial in 1706.
The court decided to use a controversial water test to determine her guilt or innocence. Sherwood’s arms and legs were bound and she was thrown into a body of water. It was thought if she sank, she was innocent; if she floated, she was guilty. Sherwood didn’t sink and was convicted of being a witch. She wasn’t killed but put in prison and for eight years.
A satirical article (supposedly written by Benjamin Franklin) about a witch trial in New Jersey was published in 1730 in the Pennsylvania Gazette. It brought to light the ridiculousness of some witchcraft accusations. It wasn’t long before witch mania died down in the New World and laws were passed to help protect people from being wrongly accused and convicted.
The power of the “Indian Curse” – whether in New England or in Virginia, as in the case of the equally famous Curse of Chief Cornstalk – was considered an irrefutable truth by the colonists because of their belief in the Native Americans as diabolical servants of Satan. This belief was strengthened early on by the Indian Massacre of 1622 in Virginia when, on the morning of 22 March 1622, the chief of the Powhatan Confederacy, Opchanacanough (l. 1554-1646) launched a surprise attack on the settlements, killing 347 people. Prior to the attack, the natives had appeared friendly (purposefully so, on Opchanacanough’s orders, to lower the colonists’ defenses), and this, to the colonists, was proof that no native could be trusted and all posed a potential threat.
The belief in natives wielding supernatural powers continued, however, as they became more marginalized, and it was understood that they had grounds for holding a grudge. Other minorities were equally apt to be suspect though, whether African slaves – who were thought to be able to cast spells through their own associations with Satan – or Catholics whose religious beliefs were considered diabolic by the majority of Protestants.
Witchcraft, thought to be practiced by all three of these groups, was understood as an intimate relationship between a person or people with Satan himself, God’s adversary, who continually plotted against those whom the Bible claimed God had made in his own image. Although the Salem Witch Trials are easily the most famous expression of the fear and hysteria generated by a belief in witchcraft, marginalized people – most often women – were charged, convicted, and hanged or otherwise dispatched in colonies from Massachusetts down to Florida.
Source: World History Encyclopedia Online, ancient.eu
Haunted South: Hauntings, Urban Legends, History, Folklore, Mythology and Southern Folk Magic 