Quick Black Hole Spin-Change

I don’t like it–

two massive Black Holes
each twirling at the core of
two merging galaxies

get close enough
to fuse together

then quick as a wink
just as they are melting into a New Black Hole Blob

they undergo something called a “spin-flip”

they change the axes of their spins
and the fused-together Black Hole Blob
gets its own
quick as a cricket’s foot

Don’t like it at all

And then the new Black Hole Blob sometimes
bounces back and forth inside
its mergèd Galaxy

till it settles at the center

but sometimes a “newly” up-sized Black Hole
leaves its Galaxy
to sail out munchingly on its own
into the Universal It

I don’t like it

Nothing about it
in the Bhagavad Gita
the Book of Revelation
Shakespeare, Sappho, or Allen Ginsberg

– Edward Sanders

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Odin and the Morrigan

This week’s post could easily have been called “fearsome deities“: Odin, whose name means “fury”, and the Morrigan, who steps out of the fairy realm to stir up war and slaughter. It’s not hard to see what they have in common.

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Do you still remember: falling stars

Do you still remember: falling stars,
how they leapt slantwise through the sky
like horses over suddenly held-out hurdles
of our wishes—did we have so many?—
for stars, innumerable, leapt everywhere;
almost every gaze upward became
wedded to the swift hazard of their play,
and our heart felt like a single thing
beneath that vast disintegration of their brilliance—
and was whole, as if it would survive them!

-Rainer Maria Rilke

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Milk and Blood: Brigit and the Morrigan

Back in 1977 Patrick Ford published a paper called “Celtic Women: the Opposing Sex”. It could have been tailor-made for the Morrigan, a fearsome goddess who spends most of the Tain trying to destroy the hero Cúchulainn. By contrast, Brigid seems to be the “good girl” of Irish myth.

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After scanning the vast reaches of the cosmos for Earth-like planets where life might exist, astronomers have found one right next door.

Source: Earth-like planet found orbiting the star next door – Technology & Science – CBC News

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Remarkable new archaeological discoveries are beginning to suggest that Stonehenge was built at a time of particularly intense religious and political rivalry. Just two miles north-east of the World Heritage site, at an important archaeological complex known as Durrington Walls, archaeologists have just discovered what appears to have been a vast 500-metre diameter circle of giant timber posts. The find is of international significance.

Source: Remarkable ancient structure found just two miles from Stonehenge

Disposing of the Body: Kvasir, Mimir and Ymir

We’re all familiar with nose-to-tail eating, the idea that you should use all of an animal once it’s been slaughtered. Thanks to the taboo on cannibalism and various laws about indignity to dead bodies, we tend not to put human bodies to post-death use. Gods, however, are not so squeamish. The Norse gods in particular show thrift and ingenuity, as well as a strong stomach, in their use of their dead compatriots.

I should point out that the Norse gods could, on occasion, lay on a proper funeral: Baldr was buried with full honours. But the dead bodies of one giant and two gods were clearly too valuable to be left lying around.

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Volunteer archaeologists have unearthed a miniature bronze figure of a Roman goddess from Arbeia Roman Fort in South Shields. Helpers from the WallQuest community archaeology project and the Earthwatch Institute dug up the figure of the goddess Ceres which is thought to be a mount from a larger piece of furniture. Ceres was the goddess of agriculture, grain and fertility. Arbeia was a supply base where thousands of tons of grain were stored in granaries to feed the army stationed along Hadrian’s Wall. This is the second goddess that the WallQuest project has found at Arbeia in two years. In 2014, a local volunteer found a carved stone head of a protective goddess, or tutela.

Source: Mini figure of Roman goddess uncovered at Arbeia | Tyne Tees – ITV News

Deneb: swan’s head

Like the eagle in Aquila, the swan is a bird with many associations, so it seems logical to put a swan in the sky. It was Venus’ bird; the Romans sometimes called the constellation Myrtilus because of this, myrtle also being Venusian.

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