Spiritual reading; the sudden death of Herculaneum from Vesuvius

The Ancient Romans, like this couple in Herculaneum, were as white as any Anglo-Saxon today, with varying shades of brown and fair hair, and often straight, not hooked noses.

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….Spiritual reading for October 13

If you had no choice but to step, empty-handed, onto a tightrope in order to cross a canyon thousands of feet deep, if you could no longer remain on the side where you began, and there was no other way but across, how would you comport yourself ?

Of course this is exactly where you are and what you are doing right now, so our question bears serious consideration. There is no way but forward. If you stay where you are, you will perish for certain. If not physically, you know…. Stepping out over infinite emptiness, with the distinct possibility that you could plunge to your end.

Feeling like nothing really prepared you for this. When did I study tightrope walking? And yet, here you are.

The great news is that the other side is in sight. This is not an endless trial. You can walk this distance and arrive in a new place. You will be able to rest and to relax a little on the other side.

But for now, you are balanced precariously above the chasm, and you must move. You cannot sit down and weep, nor can you curl up in a ball and play dead. Not right now. If you do, well, you can see where that leads.

So what do you do? Every step counts. Every step is literally a life or death matter. (Actually, you are being cut a lot more slack than the metaphorical rope-walker, but it is still not much.) You need a focus and a commitment that is fierce and unwavering. You need to keep your eyes on the prize, which is the far shore.

You will not survive if you send your time looking down at the rocks where a fall would land you. It is now time for you to look around, to see that this is where you are in this moment. Again, we say that there is no way but ahead.

There is no way but an absolute adherence to the things which you know are true. Deviation or distraction will knock you off balance. This is time for uncompromising impeccability. Understand that we are not in any way haranguing you—this is the truth, and we say it because we love you.

How to do this? You may know, which is the best. But we want to remind you that you are surrounded, surrounded, by wonders, by miracles. As you struggle to hold onto your existence (or what seems so to you) there are in every corner of your world amazing and wondrous things to remember. The fall berries ripen, the birds eat. The sky is a gift of unearthly blue. There are the smells of bread baking, cinnamon simmering in cider, bitter black coffee brewing.

There is music that lifs the human heart, there are faces of those who love you, there is water running through streams and pounding the shores in grand waves.

You live, whether you know it or not, in a luminous world where beauty and love and joy abound. Above all, there is the indescribable power and glory of your own heart. You are going to need it, you are going to need all of it, if you want to make this journey safely.

Gratitude, appreciation and a willingness to simply be part of this extraordinary creation are the things that will keep you balanced.
We cannot hold you now. The time when you must walk on your own is at hand. We will be near, we will whisper in your ear, we will love and pray for you. But you must find your own burning desire to embrace your life and the life of your planet and all those who live upon it. If you can hold that, you will make your way across the tightrope safely.

There may be some slips, some frightening moments. You will see that they come when you forget to love your life, when you forget that you are both life and love.

We love you and say, live in your hearts, beloved ones. Don’t doubt the power and the correctness of that choice. Don’t look down.

We send all our blessings.

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……Herculaneum, a far better example of Ancient Roman life than Pompeii

In the video below, we see a wonderful Roman town with no idea what was about to hit it. In fact, there were no volcanologists back then, and it seems no one knew that Vesuvius was not just a mountain but a volcano!

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Ancient Roman cities like Herculaneum looked much better than the concrete wastelands full of traffic jams one sees so often today around the Mediterranean, and there was little crime. Murderers and other career criminals were thrown to the lions or had to slaughter each other as gladiators. (Notice the little gladiator arena on the upper left.)

It is appalling that the wonderful Roman water system of aqueducts, baths and sewers, seen in Herculaneum, fell apart when the Roman Empire did after AD 453; and Italian cities did not regain Roman-quality public water works until the 1800s!

In the video you can see how the true, Ancient Italians were racially WHITE, while modern Italy is Whites mixed — in the distant past — with various ancient slave races, and with conquering Arabs, and even with a small amount of negro blood down in Sicily. (I have seen the semi-woolly hair in a few Sicilians in America myself.)

Pompeii, first century, showing the Italians THEN…

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Of course, back then most Ancient Italian women had brown hair, but untanned, white (rosy) skin, except perhaps in the summertime. (Men, who are naturally ruddier in the face, also did not avoid the sun, as high-born women did, and Ancient Italian men were depicted as far more tanned. It was only a few generations ago in America that white women carried “parasols” — personal sun umbrellas — to keep the sun off their faces so as to AVOID getting a tan.)

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In Ancient Herculaneum, as elsewhere in Greco-Roman culture, the swastika was a common motif in floor tiles.

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Most Ancient Italians had light or medium brown hair, NOT BLACK, like many northern Europeans and white Americans of today.

From murals in Herculaneum, which, like its neighbor, Pompeii, was covered in ash and red-hot gusts of toxic gases by Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 

 

Auburn hair

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Apparently a romantic couple

Note this painted bust at Herculaneum, perhaps depicting an Amazon princess, a popular topic…..

Light eyes in this mosaic of a woman of Herculaneum

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The comforting delusion until recently about the fate of Herculaneum was that, unlike Pompeii, it seemed to have been engulfed by a huge mudflow which must have moved very slowly, so the people had time to get out safely. After all, almost no skeletons had been found as archeologists dug out the upper layers of the ash-filled town. But then they dug down to the layer with the old beach and the boat sheds — and the story changed completely…….OMG.

It was like Dresden, an oven. No building could protect the people hiding inside from 600 degrees C. Their skulls exploded from the heat. At least it seems that the the Herculaneans died very quickly.

The video, which is about a British archeological team and what they found (a lot!), bemoans the fact that if Vesuvius were to explode again tomorrow, there is no adequate evacuation plan for the six million modern Southern Italians, a black-haired race that inhabits the greater Naples area.

The scientific knowledge about the danger from volcanoes is there now, and especially the peril represented specifically by Vesuvius, which wiped out two whole cities!

But, between corruption and laziness, nothing gets done.

Too bad Mussolini cannot be cloned from some of his hair on a comb! 😉 If any country needs a benevolent dictator, it is Italy, the DNA of which has radically changed for the worse.

 

A history professor at Georgetown once talked about the surprising slowness of Roman technological progress. First, the legions took up at least 40% of the whole Roman budget, and often they fought and slaughtered each other! A whopping 30 of the 82 emperors were assassinated, among them the superb Aurelian, who had saved the Empire from multiple barbarian invasions, and Julian, who tried to stop the takeover of the empire by the judeophilic Paulianity.

Also, slavery impeded inventive progress. If there are lots of slaves around, who are more or less free labor, requiring only room and board, you think less of inventing labor-saving devices. Who needs to invent a motor and  design a truck when a slave, perhaps with a mule, can convey the load?

Finally, many slaves were eventually freed for good behavior, especially at their master’s death, and of them some were not white. As  freedmen, they could then marry local white-Italian girls and this started to change and darken the DNA of the Italian population…. resulting in what we see now.

In 1944, Vesuvius exploded again very violently, as depicted in this video. The British expert Mark Davies, Ph.D., a volcanologist, says at the end that obviously all volcanoes are dangerous, but the real issue is how many people does the government allow to build houses right next to it, and what plan has been implemented in practical terms to evacuate them all — given that there may be even as much as a two-week warning, starting with earthquakes?

Greater Naples already suffers non-stop traffic jams (which are incredible time- and fuel-wasters) on a daily basis. What kind of automobile chaos will erupt if Vesuvius again explodes?

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