In his Muqaddimah, the fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun describes talismans that make use of “the loving numbers” 220 and 284 to create the perfect union between friends or lovers. Two effigies are created, and the larger number is placed on the effigy of “the person whose friendship is sought.” The result of this “magical operation,” he explains, is a connection between the two such that “one is hardly able to break away from the other.”
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Residents of North Yorkshire from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries were so afraid of the dead rising to attack the living that they would dismember, decapitate, burn, and otherwise mutilate corpses before burying them. The process was generally undertaken shortly after death, when the bones were still soft.
In his catalogue of the world’s people in his Natural History, Pliny the Elder mentioned Scythians who feed on human flesh, Africans who “are frequently seen to all appearance and then vanish in an instant,” the Arimaspi who have only one eye, the Adrogyni who possess male and female parts, and the Monocoli who are born with “only one leg, but are able to leap with surprising agility.”
When Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi was found guilty of corruption and fraud in 1975 by the Allahabad High Court, she instituted a state of emergency to control the opposition, suspending elections and arresting dissidents. She cabled world leaders to defend her decision, after which the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office declared that “an authoritarian regime is better equipped than a democracy” to “make India less of a burden on the world” and increased British aid to India by over 30 percent.
Country musician Garth Brooks sued an Oklahoma hospital over its handling of a $500,000 contribution he made in 2005. Brooks wanted a wing named after his late mother and claimed hospital officials showed him mock-ups with her name in neon lights; the hospital said the donation had been anonymous and that Brooks only established his conditions afterward. Brooks won the lawsuit, receiving twice the amount of his original gift.
Maria Theresa, archduchess of Austria, queen of Hungary and Bohemia, advised son Ferdinand in 1771 not to support the Mozart family of musicians. “You ask me about taking the young Salzburger into your service. I do not know why, believing you have no need for a composer or useless people,” she wrote. “Furthermore, he has a large family.” The Mozart family had four members. Ferdinand did not make an offer.
To promote malingering and desertion among German soldiers during World War II, the British Political Warfare Executive and Special Operations Executive produced innocuously titled German-language booklets, among them Exercise Protocol for War Marines, into which they inserted information on how to feign illness and escape service. The British then circulated such propaganda using various special-ops agents and balloon drops across Europe.
Astrologers of the Ayyubid Empire predicted in 1186 that the world would end September 16 of that year; a dust storm, stirred up by planetary alignment, would scour the earth of life. Sultan Saladin criticized the “feeble minds” of believers and planned an open-air, candlelit party for that evening. “We never saw a night as calm as that,” an attendee later remarked.
Opening night of Henry James’ Guy Domville, on January 5, 1895, was “an unmitigated disaster,” James wrote in a letter, “hooted at, as I was hooted at myself, by a brutal mob, and fruitless of any of the consequences for which I have striven.” The play’s reception, he wrote, “has completely sickened me with the theater and made me feel, at any rate for the present, like washing my hands of it forever.”
Archaeologists studying large-scale fishing operations in medieval Europe found that changes in marine fishing in England between 600 and 1600 occurred rapidly around 1000 and involved significant catches of herring and cod. “This revolution predated the documented postmedieval expansion of England’s sea fisheries,” they concluded. “The century between 950 and 1050 can now be pinpointed as the ultimate origin of today’s fishing crisis.”
A young nobleman in ancient Athens fell in love with a statue of Agathe Tyche, goddess of good fortune. He hugged and kissed it, then offered the local council a large sum of money to purchase it. When his request was denied, he decorated the statue extravagantly with crowns and garlands, offered a sacrifice, uttered a lengthy lamentation, and killed himself.
Charles Mackenzie, a fur trader in Missouri in 1805, noted that the local American Indians with whom he traded held a low opinion of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s party when it came through. “The Indians admired the air gun, as it could discharge forty shots out of one load,” Mackenzie reflected, “but they dreaded the magic of the owners. ‘Had I these white warriors in the upper plains,’ said the Gros Ventres chief, ‘my young men on horseback would soon do for them as they would do for so many wolves, for, there are only two sensible men among them, the worker of iron and the mender of guns.’” The “sensible men” in question included neither Lewis nor Clark.
For the treatment of “delirium and mania combined with shameless behavior,” ninth-century Persian polymath al-Razi offered a remedy by medical theorist Simʿun: “Bathe the patient’s head with a decoction of elecampane and sheep’s trotters, pour milk over him, put dung upon him, make him snuff sweet violet oil and breast milk, and feed him anything that is cold, fatty, and fills and moistens the brain.”
In November 1934 a team of American baseball stars, including Babe Ruth, toured Japan. When they arrived for a game in the town of Narashino, each man was presented with a horseshoe-shaped flower wreath. Ruth detested the gift; he later told a Japanese baseball magazine that he considered such wreaths bad luck and had never hit a home run after receiving one.
Fairy wren nestlings learn “passwords,” or unique single notes, from their mothers while still in their eggs; after birth they must use the passwords when calling for food, or the mothers will abandon the nest. In a 2012 study, scientists in Australia experimented with switching eggs and mothers, and found that passwords were not genetically inherited; the chicks assumed the passwords of their adopted mothers.