Of the dozens of texts held sacred by the school of Judaic mysticism known as Kabbalah, perhaps the most important is the Sefer Hazohar, (literally the Book of Splendor. Indeed, students of this collection of several lengthy Kabbalistic commentaries on the Torah — most commonly known in the West as the Holy Zohar – often assign it the same stature as Judaism’s two most holy books, the Torah and the Talmud. 
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. 
The plague took the lives of million of Europeans from the 14th until the 17th century. In England, its destruction stayed mainly in the south of England concentrating around the poor quarters of London. But for one small village in England’s rural north, the plague would be devastating and historic. The case of the small village of Eyam in Derbyshire is famed throughout England and serves in the modern age of an example of the importance of self quarantine in the face of deadly disease.
It all began with the decision of the village tailor, George Viccars to purchase a box of fabric from a London dealer and bring it to Eyam to make clothes for the locals. Viccars didn’t know the box was full of fleas carrying the bubonic plague. Three days later he was dead.
The village knew plague when they saw it and drastic action was taken to ensure it didn’t spread outside of the village. The village went into self induced quarantine under the guidance of the retired vicar and the serving vicar. They asked the villagers to make this sacrifice to save the lives of everyone else. The villages made the difficult moral decision and complied.
The next few months were hard, families, men, women and children became sick and died. One woman lost her husband and six children within the space of a single week. The village lived with the disease throughout September and October of 1665, minimizing contact with each other, receiving provisions from neighboring villages who left food for them at the town boundaries and holding all public ceremonies outside to minimize the spread of the illness.
During that time, the small village of Eyam with a population of approximately 700 people lost 260 of its inhabitants to the plague. The plague affected 76 different families and wiped out a few of them forever. Many households had only a single survivor who lived to tell the tale of those terrible months.
Many people did survive and they recorded the histories and passings of their neighbors on the front of their home and these records still exist. All the villagers learned how to bury their neighbors, friends and family members. It was a time unimaginable for most of us today as these simple country folk showed a spirit of community almost gone in these modern times.
Today, Eyam pays homage to those that lost their lives in 1665 with a plague museum as well as plaques on the house of the victims. The cemetery still keeps their bones and the locals still hold testament to their title of England’s “plague village.” They may have not realized it at the time but those few deaths became famed throughout England, making their way into every child’s schoolbook and taught as an example of ill fate.
Eyam was just one small village of the hundreds affected by the bubonic plague but its history provides a glimpse into the lives of its survivors and victims, making the epidemic more than just statistics of people who live long ago but a testament of human endurance and the belief in the sacrifice of a few to save the lives of many.
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Eyeglasses are a common feature on the faces of many people around the world. We are accustomed to waiting an hour from start to finish for a pair of glasses that correct our vision and are often taken for granted as is much technology of our era. 
Initially eyeglasses just helped with farsightedness but when Johannes Kepler explained how concave and convex lenses worked in 1604 they were developed to correct nearsightedness too. In 1784 Benjamin Franklin grew tired of switching eyeglasses so he developed the bifocal which meant he could wear one pair of glasses to correct both near and farsightedness. Sunglasses were developed in 1929 by Sam Foster who convinced an Atlantic City store to carry his FosterGrant brand and they became an instant success. Movie stars were often seen in his glasses and he is due credit for creating the first eye protection from ultraviolet rays.
Beneath the Great Courtyard of the Belvedere in Vatican City lies the Secret Vatican Archive. Though no official index or inventory of its contents exists for public inspection, its collection runs through some 25 miles of shelving and contains not only all of the Catholic Church’s official records, but thousands of documents pertaining to important events in world history as well - including English monarch Henry VIII’s petition for a marriage annulment from Pope Clement VII.
Since that time, the Archive’s overseers have granted scholars access to their collection on an application-only basis; on average, only two hundred historians from outside of the Catholic hierarchy are permitted entrance each year. Among the records that those select few have inspected are accounts of the goings-on behind the canonization of saints, architectural schematics for Vatican City’s buildings, chapels and infrastructure, transcripts and evidence from the trials of Galileo and the Knights Templar and papal reports, correspondence and diaries.
The wide-ranging subject matter and depth of the Vatican’s closely guarded collection has made it ripe for conquest by would-be conquerors. In 1810, during Napoleon’s occupation of Rome, the Emperor annexed the Archives in his bid to create a world library and had its contents packaged and shipped to Paris by wagon. After his fall in 1814, it was immediately recalled to Rome – but only after many “unimportant” pieces of parchment were sold off to French paper manufactures in bulk. One story tells of the Archive’s former prefect visiting Paris to oversee its restoration, only to discover that a seven hundred-volume registry of papal bulls had been distributed as wrapping paper to butcher shops throughout the city.
Though it today boasts a population of only 20,000, at its peak during the 14th century, the Bohemian town of Kutna Hora was the region’s second largest city next to the relative metropolis of Prague, some fifty miles away. In the subsequent centuries, that began to change as the city’s silver deposits ran dry and the consequences of the Thirty Years War decimated its populace.
The gruesome saga of the Sedlec chapel begins in the 12th century, when Church orthodoxy scattered earth from Golgotha over their graveyard. Soon, throngs of nobility, anxious to secure burial beneath dirt culled from the site of Christ’s crucifixion, pushed the cemetery’s capacity to its limits. Burials continued abreast over the next three hundred years – through plague outbreaks and the Hussite wars - until the Church grounds grew to contain more than 40,000 graves. 
Using the remains of his countryman as his sole building material, Rint constructed four giant bells in each of the chapel’s four corners, an oversized coat of arms in tribute to Bohemia’s ruling aristocratic family, the Schwarzenbergs, and, at its center, a candle-bearing chandelier made out of every bone in the human body. Proud of his work to the last, Rist left his signature – in bone, of course – upon the steps of the chapel’s entrance.
