Disc Men

Sometimes we struggle to peer into the past and unlock its secrets, while other times it is the future that seems mysterious. Our tour today will explore both of those topics, with a heavy dose of wonder.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales right
there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome
to the Cabinet of curiosities. In Greek mythology, Minos was

(00:29):
born to Zeus and Europa. He became the first king
of Crete, the largest of the Greek islands, where he
didn't exactly rule with kindness. Every nine years he would
demand another ruler to send seven boys and seven girls
into the labyrinth. The labyrinth was a kind of maze
created four Minos by the craftsman Dedalus, and within its

(00:49):
elusive center lived the king's son, the Minotaur, a creature
possessing the body of a man and the head of
a bull. King Minos, his labyrinth, and his minutes or
were all just stories, fables about gods and goddesses to
help explain how Greece had come to be. However, to
the ancient Greeks, they were more than just stories. They

(01:10):
were legendary tales of good and evil, about deities that
were worshiped by the masses. And if you look at
the ruins and remnants left behind by the early Greeks,
you start to wonder if they ever really were stories
at all. When English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans found the
Palace of Canosis, he called upon his knowledge of Greek
myths to aid in his search. He named the ancient

(01:32):
people who once lived there Minoans, after King Minos, and
then worked for several years excavating a large palace at
the site. By nineteen o five, the work had been completed,
and through it Sir Arthur had learned much about the
people who once lived in what he called the Palace
of Minos. But it wouldn't be until several years later
in nineteen o eight, when an Italian archaeologist by the

(01:54):
name of Luigi Parnier would find a new piece of
a very perplexing puzzle. Louis g had been digging around
in the basement of one of the buildings set off
from the main palace, when he found a small disc
only six inches in diameter. The circular object featured over
two hundred impressions of hyrid glyphs arranged clockwise in a
spiral pattern. He called it the Face Dose Disc. As

(02:17):
with many archaeological discoveries concerning ancient cultures, the first inclination
was to write the face dose disc off as a fake.
Many historical objects had been revealed as forgeries or hoaxes,
and there was no reason not to think the same
about this one. But surprisingly most scholars agreed it was legitimate.
One reason for that was the later discovery of an

(02:38):
axe nearby bearing similar glyphs as the disc. The two
forty two impressions or tokens were comprised of forty five
numbered symbols, each one unique. These symbols stood for common
things like person or child or arrow. Yet despite their
clear pictorial intent, every actual decipherment of the disc had

(02:58):
been unsuccessful. Amateur archaeologists had tried everything, turning the disc
as they read it, proposing possible stories it might have told,
but nothing seemed to work. It was thought for decades
that the disc might never be translated successfully at all
if more symbols couldn't be found elsewhere, either increte or
in the palace itself, or perhaps from where they originated.

(03:21):
Because a scholar back in the nineteen twenties claimed the
clay that had been used to form the disc hadn't
come from crete at all, but from somewhere else in
the a G and C. There may be more out there,
but we don't know where. However, in two thousand fourteen,
two linguists claimed they broke the code. Dr Gareth Owens,
a researcher from Crete, and John Coleman, a professor of

(03:43):
phonetics at Oxford University, worked together for six years analyzing
what Owens referred to as the first Minoan c d ram.
Early theories about the disc proposed that it had been
a story to entertain readers, declaration of war, a game
of some kind, or even a math amadical equation, but
Owens and Coleman figured out the trick to deciphering it.

(04:04):
They read it in a spiral direction, working their way
from the outside edge to the center, and compared the
glyphs to Cretan hieroglyphics as well as ancient Greek writings.
What they came up with were three words, which translated
to pregnant mother, shining mother, and goddess. According to Owens
and Coleman, the face those disc wasn't a story or

(04:26):
a call to arms, but a prayer to a Minoan goddess.
It might not be as riveting a conclusion as some
had hoped for, but Thanks to the work of these
two language experts, we now have a greater insight into
an unknown religion of an ancient culture. Just don't ask
me to try and read the disc it turns out

(04:46):
it's all Greek to me. Some people are just born
within eight talent Mozart began composing when he was only
five years old. Blaze Pascal, the French mathematician, wrote his

(05:10):
first theorem when he was only eleven, and British philosopher
John Stuart Mill had already learned to speak several dead
languages by the time he was eight. Andrew was born
in blooming Grove, New York, and he took a little
longer to find his calling. Born in eighteen twenty six,
he had received only five months of formal classroom education

(05:31):
by the age of seventeen. His father had been an alcoholic,
and Andrew, along with his mother and sister, had to
find work wherever they could to keep a roof over
their heads. The young man was a cobbler's apprentice by trade,
and found other odd jobs around town so his family
could stay afloat. He'd been in Poughkeepsie, New York in
eighteen forty three when he attended some lectures on hypnotism

(05:54):
from mesmerist J. S. Grimes. At the time, mesmerism was
referred to as animal magnetism, and the prevailing theory was
that every living thing on earth was born with the
ability to influence other creatures. Some could even use that
power to heal. Andrew believed that he possessed special powers,
specifically the ability to read minds. He explored these possibilities

(06:17):
for the next three years, calling himself the Poughkeepsie Seer,
as he practiced his own form of medicine. He used
his psychic site to diagnose sick people and to speak
with spirits from beyond the grave. In eighteen forty four,
Andrew woke up in the Catskills, claiming he'd gone into
a trance only hours before, where he spoke to Galen,
the Greek physician considered to be the father of modern medicine.

(06:41):
Though relatively uneducated himself, that didn't stop Andrew from writing
books about magnetic healing, many of which dictated to others
while in a trance. His first book, Principles of Nature,
sold one thousand copies in the week after its release.
One reason for its success, Davis wasn't a scholar. He
was a below average man born with above average skills,

(07:03):
and that made him appealing to the masses. If he
could become some kind of mental superhero, and so could
anyone else. Unfortunately, while his books were financially successful, they
were a critical flop, especially among the intellectual crowd. Critics
didn't take his work seriously, often citing factual errors as
well as jargon filled ramblings better suited towards science fiction

(07:26):
than credible textbooks. Things weren't looking good for Andrew Jackson Davis.
He even had to run in with the author Edgar
Allan Poe, who didn't care much for his brand of Shenanigans.
Poe wrote a short story just before his death called
Milanta Tata that featured a character named Martin van Buren
Mavis the two Keepsie Seer, a nice little dig at

(07:48):
the man whose trance sessions had influenced another story of his,
The Facts in the Case of m Valdemar. Poe had
written that one the very same year he and Davis
had first met, but Davis and Poe eventually fell out
of favor with one another. The Poughkeepsie Seer had grown
too positive for the Baltimore Native Zee. Davis had moved
past seances and spiritual contact. It wasn't just a medium anymore.

(08:12):
He was a progressive thinker and the founder of a movement,
one he coined in his magnum opus, The Great Harmonia.
A concept was called the law of attraction, and it
was much different from the law of attraction we know today.
To Davis, the spirits he contacted during a seance would
only be attracted to his attempts if they shared the
characteristics and intentions of the other living people present. Later on,

(08:36):
as mesmerism fell out of fashion, the term evolved to
be more about earthly prosperity for those with positive attitudes.
But Andrew Jackson Davis gave us two more things before
his death in nineteen ten, in the form of predictions
and his book Penetralia, published in eighteen fifty six. Davis wrote,
look out about these days for carriages and traveling saloons

(08:58):
on country roads, without horses, without steam, without any visible
motive power, moving with greater speed and far more safety
than at present. He said, these machines would move with
the help of a mixture of gas and liquid that
ignited safely within their shells. He also mentioned in the
same book a type of machine that could automatically transcribe

(09:21):
words for him. He called it a soul writer. And
he said, and I quote, it may be constructed something
like a piano one brace or scale of keys to
represent the elementary sounds, so that a person, instead of
playing a piece of music, may touch off a sermon
or a poem. In other words, the uneducated cobbler from

(09:42):
upstate New York didn't just learn how to talk to
the dead. He predicted the automobile and the typewriter decades
before they were revealed to the rest of the world.
Quite the progressive thinker. Indeed, I hope have enjoyed today's
guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free

(10:04):
on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by
visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by
me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I
make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast,
book series, and television show, and you can learn all
about it over at the World of Lore dot com.

(10:26):
And until next time, stay curious.