M

Martian Meteorite Found in Antarctica

Of approximately 13,000 meteorites found in Antarctica, only seven have come from Mars. “This is in many ways the most significant discovery to date,” said Professor Juan O’Gorman of the Museo nacional de Buenos Aires.

A meteorite found some 500 miles from the South Pole in 1996 appeared to contain evidences of microscopic life, but, according to Professor O’Gorman, this one has been even more unequivocally shaped by “biological processes,” as well as the action of wind and water.

“It looks a lot like a brick from an ancient canal!” claims Phillip Payne of the Schiaparelli Institute. “For years people have been laughing at Percival Lowell’s maps, but now it looks as if he might have been right all along!”

Lowell, a turn-of-the-century American astronomer, published detailed maps of a chain of canals which he claimed criss-crossed the surface of the red planet. Contemporary telescopes (such as the Hubble space satellite) have, however, failed to reveal any traces of these canals, which are now believed to have been caused by a combination of atmospheric distortion and minute irregularities on the observer’s retina.

Representatives of the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs (author of Tarzan, A Princess of Mars[*], John Carter of Mars, and other novels set in the imaginary land of “Barsoom”) were unavailable for comment.

[International Newzbreaks (22/07/04), sect. C, p. 3]

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[*] See >Xanthippe.

Memory Theatre

According to Cicero’s rhetorical treatise the Ad Herennium, the classical art of artificial – as opposed to normal, or natural – memory comes from a systematic visualization of places and images [ex loci et imaginibus]:

the places are very much like wax tablets or papyrus, the images like the letters, the arrangement and disposition of the images like the script, and the delivery is like the reading.

You should first memorise a great many places, arranged in a very particular order. The easiest way of doing this is to visit a large public building, and commit every corner and room of it to memory. To keep the order of these sites clear in the mind, Cicero advises giving every fifth location “some distinguishing mark:”

We may for example mark the fifth locus with a golden hand, and place in the tenth the image of some acquaintance whose name is Decimus [= tenth].

The next step is to place images in each of the places, images which should be as striking and memorable as possible:

things immediate to our eye or ear we commonly forget; incidents of our childhood we often remember best. A sunrise, the sun’s course, a sunset are marvellous to no-one because they occur daily. Solar eclipses are a source of wonder because they occur seldom.[*]

We ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in memory. if we set up images that are not many and vague but active; if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we ornament some of them, as with crowns or purple cloaks, or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, or by assigning certain comic effects to our images, that will ensure our remembering them more readily.

[G. de Souza, Masters of Memory, pp. 22-26]

stained with blood, or mud, or with red paint

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[*] See >Zodiac.

Mu

The Garden of Eden was not in Asia but on a now sunken continent in the Pacific Ocean. The Biblical story of creation – the epic of the seven days and the seven nights – came not from the people of the Nile or of the Euphrates valley but from this now submerged continent, Mu – the Motherland of Man.

These assertions can be proved by the complex records I discovered upon long-forgotten sacred tablets in India, together with records from other countries. They tell of this strange country of 64,000,000 inhabitants, who, 50,000 years ago, had developed a civilization superior in many respects to our own. They also described the creation of man[*] in this mysterious land of Mu.

The plausibility of this will be apparent even to those who have not studied the subject carefully

[J. Churchward, The Lost Continent of Mu, pp. 9-13]

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[*] See >Xanthippe.