As Islamic Arabs of the day did not regard the ancient Egyptians as ancestors, the practice was widely accepted and so-called mummy powder was in sold in a variety of strengths. Powder procured from the crudely preserved bodies peasant folk buried in sand pits was said to be only good for relieving minor stomach aches, while the meticulously embalmed and bitumen-rich bodies of the Egyptian aristocracy were a highly valued commodity and supposedly capable of healing life-threatening wounds.

Mummy powder proved so profitable that soon after its introduction, Egyptian tombs were ransacked not only for the riches they might contain, but also for bodies that might be processed into the expensive folk medicine. It wasn’t long before the practice of applying mummy powder was incorporated into medieval Europe’s catalog of dubious medical practices. By the 16th century, the product had become so commonplace in both Europe and the Middle East that the once seemingly endless supply of authentic, mummified Egyptian cadavers quite literally dried up.

In order to keep their niche market going, some mummy powder salesmen began to stealthily acquire the bodies of executed criminals and the unburied poor, which they would then hastily dry out and grind into “authentic” doses of the anthropophagic cure-all.

Mummy powder, however, was not the only everyday use of the Egyptian dead that arose before the dawn of modern archaeological preservation. In the 16th and 17th centuries, pulverized mummy was the key ingredient in a popular shade of brown artist’s pigment, and preserved human and animal remains of Egyptian origin were used in the production of this “mummy brown” paint until the early 20th century.

As the first railroads were constructed in North Africa during the 19th century, mummies with a high content of petroleum-based bitumen were also supposedly sometimes substituted for coal in engines of the then-new locomotives. Mark Twain claimed to witnessed the practice firsthand in his 1869 travelogue, The Innocents Abroad, writing, “[The] fuel they use…is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard for that purpose.”

Whether this statement was merely jest on the part of the American literary icon, well known for his sense of humor, has been the subject of debate ever since it was published. What is known, however, is that the supply of authentic Egyptian corpses by the beginning of the 1800s was so small only that upper crust Europeans could afford to purchase one whole. In the wake of Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt, it became vogue amongst the aristocracy to hold “unwrapping parties,” where carefully preserved corpses would be haphazardly stripped of their bandages, so that revelers could gaze upon the millennia-old face concealed beneath them. Small burial ornaments concealed in the linens would then be dispensed to partygoers as souvenirs, while exposure to air caused the delicate bodies to crumble into dust, never to be seen again.

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Written in an arcane form of Aramaic, the Zohar purports to have been authored by second century rabbi and prominent critic of the Roman government in years following the destruction of the Second Temple, Shimon bar Yochai. Yochai claimed to have received the text from God himself, though most modern day scholars, however, attribute the work to Moses de Leon — a Spanish Kabbalist who lived some eleven hundred years later. Historians do concede, however, that, much like the books of the Bible, the disparate pieces of the Zohar were not all set down at one time. Rather, de Leon merely was the first to recorded several different tracts of the Oral Torah that passed been down from father to son, teacher to student over the course of many generations and that Yochai could have been an initial contributor.

The Kabbalah’s own inborn tradition details its spread. As the Jewish Diaspora spread throughout Europe and Eurasia after the fall of the Temple and, later, the crumbling of the Roman Empire, adepts of the “secret chain of mysteries” that is the Kabbalah brought the sacred knowledge with them, but shared it only with a select few. It would have been in this fashion that the original text of the Zohar was secreted out of the Holy Land and into one of Spain’s many Jewish communities.

And there was good reason for Jewish scholars to keep to the Zohar away from public scrutiny. The book maintains that the Torah and, by extension, all of reality exists on two distinct levels: the exoteric and the esoteric. It further posits that there is no one true interpretation of the Old Testament and that every soul is given – and, more importantly, encouraged — to make its own unique reading of scripture.

This statement alone – which happens to share a fair amount of philosophical overlap with the similarly persecuted Gnostics — would have been viewed as heresy by the religions by Spain’s then Judeo-friendly Catholic Church and citizens.

Consider then the anti-Semitism that swelled throughout the country in the years after Leon’s death. In 1492, all Spanish Jews were forcibly expelled; those that chose to convert in order to remain found themselves facing integration the hands of the Inquisition. And so, formal Kabbalic study was largely eradicated from the Iberian Peninsula – but not before the Zohar had managed become a key text of yet another secretive, albeit quasi-secular, sect: the European alchemists.

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According to legend, Apollo claimed Delphi as his own after slaying its original inhabitant, Python — a dragon born of the earth goddess Gaia – in a battle between the gods of the earth and sky. He then took the seas to conscript sailors into his first order of priests, though he would require a female virgin to serve as earthly mouthpiece.

Supplicants to Delphi would be first required to bathe themselves in the waters of the temple’s Castalian spring — later a popular inspirational spot for Roman poets — to purify themselves before entering the Oracle’s sacred presence. Only after paying a fee would they then be permitted to ask their questions of the presiding Pythia. She would then retire to her personal her chamber and enter shamanic trance. Accounts differ as to the method by which this was achieved, though the drinking blood, the chewing of laurel leaves, the inhalation of smoke or the breathing of hallucinogenic vapors emitted by the temple’s cavernous rock –a phenomenon recently confirmed by modern day geologists – have all been suggested. The Pythia would then speak in a cryptic tongue, which would be converted into hexameter verse by the temple’s priests.

Those seeking divination at Delphi came from all social strata. From criminals to kings, many sought advice from the Oracle, though how they interpreted her predictions differed wildly. Legend holds that King Croesus of Lydia went to war over the Oracle’s prediction that if he battled the Persians a great army would fall. Unfortunately for him, the army in question turned out to be his own.

Tales of the Oracle’s supposed prescience became so ingrained in Grecian culture that she appears as a character in the three most well known pieces of Greek literature, Virgil’s Aeneid, Homer’s Odyssey, and Sophocles’ Oedipus saga, along with dozens of others. Despite her role in these quasi-mythical epics, the Oracle’s existence as an authentic historical figure is confirmed by the more than five hundred recorded prophesies of the Pythia that survive to this day.

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In 605 BC, Babylon rose again and King Nebuchadnezzar repeatedly banished the Jews to disparate parts of the Arabian subcontinent several times – not only leading to widespread Jewish Diaspora, but ensuring that many of the deities of ancient Mesopotamia would be recorded in the Old Testament as well.

Idolatry was a then commonplace practice throughout ancient Canaan – popular gods included the fishtailed Dagon of the Philistines, the “he-goat” Asima of the Emathites and the fly Beezlebub worshipped in the kingdom of Accaron. The deity with the grisly repute of all, however, was Moloch, whose cult first arose in the city of Ammon in what is now modern day Jordan.

Several Biblical accounts record the followers’ belief that by appeasing Moloch with the lives of burnt children and animals, he would renew the vitality of their king, who in turn could then reap a plentiful harvest. That, however, is not to say that it was a tidy affair – on days of sacrifice, drums and cymbals had to be played at maximum ferocity to drown out screams of burning children.

In the 11th century, famed Talmudic commentator and rabbi Rashi stated that sacrifices to Moloch had taken place in a large brass cauldron that would have been heated to cook its victims alive. Later historians embellished this detail have the oven become a bull-shaped effigy of Moloch himself — recalling the form of the golden calf fashioned by Aaron to appease the Hebrews during Moses’ tribulation on Mount Sinai.

Interestingly enough, one of laws issued by Moses upon his return from the mountaintop, as stated in Leviticus 18:21, was “You shall not give any of your children to devote them by fire to Moloch, and so profane the name of your God.” To this day it remains unclear whether this was a preventative measure to prevent Moses’ flock from straying or whether certain contingents of Jews had already given themselves over to Moloch worship.

Modern archaeologists generally hold that the Canaanite god Moloch had analogs in the Greek titan Cronus and Carthaginian’s Ba’al Hammon – two pagan deities both reputed to have required the ritual sacrifice of children by flame. In fact, some of the first clues to historical Moloch worship appeared after the excavation of mass grave in Carthage in 1921, which produced hundreds of child and animal sacrifices, comingled with stones inscribed MLK.

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The term Halloween is a shortened version of All Hallows’ Eve which was the evening of All Hallows’ Day and was a day of northern European pagan festivities which was known as All Saints Day by the church which was a Christian celebration that occurred on May 13 but was moved to November 1^st by a couple of 9^th century popes. The church measured the days as starting at sunset so All Saints Day and Halloween were celebrated on the same day for a while though now All Saints Day is celebrated the day after Halloween since that calendar system has not been used for centuries. Many in the church see it is a demon worshipping holiday but historically it is the day when the living and dead can communicate for a short time. Halloween as we know it was brought to America in 1840 by Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine in their country.

Some of the traditions and their activities have their roots in historical stories and events. The Romans added some of the Celtic traditions into their own culture and one of those is honoring the goddess Pomona. The symbol of Pomona is an apple which may be an explanation of the modern Halloween tradition of bobbing for apples. Over time the custom of dressing like witches and goblins became more ceremonial than a belief that the dead were actually walking the earth. Trick or Treating is believed to have started as a 9^th century European custom known as souling. On November 2^nd Christians would roam from village to village asking for pieces of bread with currants baked into them known as Soul Cakes. They would promise to say prayers for the recently deceased from any of the people who gave them the cakes and the prayers were believed to help the soul on its way to heaven. The jack-o-lantern is a holdover from Irish legends about a drunkard named Jack who tricked Satan into climbing a tree and carved a cross into the tree trapping Satan. The tale says that Jack died but was not admitted to heaven because of his bad ways and was not let into hell since he had tricked the devil. The devil gave him a glowing ember to light his way which Jack placed in a hollowed turnip to make the light last longer. The Irish used turnips initially as their Jack-o-lanterns but the newly arrived Irish in America found that hollowed pumpkins made better lanterns and they have been a fixture of Halloween since. Halloween has become a large holiday in America from both the economic and social aspects and only gets bigger each year regardless of how it is celebrated.

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