On today’s show, we are going to talk about the mysterious origins of Halloween. Everyone is familiar with the death and dread theme of Halloween but did you know that there is a global culture of celebrating such a holiday all over the world both in the northern and southern hemisphere? Why would this be so?
Today we trackback on researchers from the 1800s that looked at why these cultures would celebrate such a unique and similar festival all over the world and what it meant and the implications for today, its astronomical implications. Today we trackback on research that showed that Halloween had some very similar themes that could be astronomically linked.
We look at the implications that the Halloween holiday could be implying and also the astronomy of meteors which seems to be observed in the late October and early November period. Also, the event in Siberia, Russia where a near-earth object could have been associated with a time that links to the Halloween holiday.
I hope you enjoy today’s show. If you do, please leave a review on iTunes. It helps us to propagate this information. If you’d like to discuss or read more you can visit our website, humanoriginproject.com and read the article The Spooky Origins Of Halloween.
Here’s the full transcript for this episode:
Steven: On today’s show, we are going to talk about the mysterious origins of Halloween. Everyone is familiar with the death and dread theme of Halloween but did you know that there is a global culture of celebrating such a holiday all over the world both in the northern and southern hemisphere? Why would this be so?
Today we track back on researchers from the 1800s that looked at why these cultures would celebrate such a unique and similar festival all over the world and what it meant and the implications for today, its astronomical implications. Today we track back on research that showed that Halloween had some very similar themes that could be astronomically linked.
We look at the implications that the Halloween holiday could be implying and also the astronomy of meteors which seems to be observed in the late October and early November period. Also, the event in Siberia, Russia where a near-earth object could have been associated with a time that links to the Halloween holiday.
I hope you enjoy today’s show. If you do, please leave a review on iTunes. It helps us to propagate this information. If you’d like to discuss or read more you can visit our website, humanoriginproject.com and read the article The Spooky Origins Of Halloween. I hope you enjoy today’s show. Hey Stef, how you doing?
Stefan: [0:00:06] I’m doing well. I had a big drive up here this morning from Wollongong. It was like three hours in the car.
Steven: [0:00:18] I find driving and travel a time to take content in like this is really interesting things. What did you listen to today?
Stefan: [0:00:26] I was listening to some stuff on Halloween and astronomy and things that we are going to be chatting about today. But I drive an old van and it’s quite loud so it’s kind of hard to focus because you’ve got the sound of the van and the highway and then the podcast raring in the background as well.
Steven: [0:00:47] You can get some sound-canceling, it’s not exactly the same thing.
Stefan: [0:00:49] Yeah, some big headphones on. I find it’s a really good time to absorb information because I’m not very good at sitting still when I’m at home. So being forced to just drive and then I can let myself think and absorb whatever podcasts I’m listening to, which is good.
Steven: [0:01:07] Yeah. The right time to learn and absorb things is some people do well in the morning, some people do well at night. I’m probably more night time, I think. But whether this is morning on night today we’ve got a really interesting topic about the origins of Halloween.
This is one we were talking about a while ago and there has been a number of different lines of research and investigation but I just found the story so interesting as to how the real true meaning of Halloween is something we don’t really think about.
You dress up in a funny way. But here in Australia, we don’t really celebrate it very much so I never really understood Halloween as a whole. But then you really look at countries that even do celebrate it there seems to be a lost meaning there. There’s just this constant thing of forgetting the origins of traditions and this one is really interesting.
Stefan: [0:02:08] Yeah and it’s so big. Halloween is huge. Not really where I grew up but in places like Sydney Halloween there are kids everywhere we are running around the streets eating chocolate and candy.
I was fascinated by researching this as well because I had no idea that there was anything more to it than that than just like another day, just a day for people to dress up and trick or treat and do all that that sort of stuff.
Steven: [0:02:36] In the US, Halloween is one of the biggest celebrations of the year. It probably rivals July 4th.
Stefan: [0:02:47] I’m not sure.
Steven: [0:02:50] Yeah, it’s July 4th which I think there’s an interesting story around that too. But the date of October 31st there’s a huge celebration in the US. But it was also across Britain as well.
Stefan: [0:03:03] And all over Mexico like with the Day of the Dead celebrations.
Steven: [0:03:08] Yes, this is the thing. It’s not just Halloween. Halloween is celebrated in the US and Britain and stuff. It has very similar traditions elsewhere, Mexico, Day of the Dead. It even goes further. It’s quite remarkable how global the same themed celebration is.
Stefan: [0:03:29] Yeah. When we started looking into this, trying to work out where this all comes from there’s a researcher that popped up called RG Haliburton who was a scholar from the 1800s. He was Canadian. I think he was born in 1831.
He was a historian and started documenting evidence for the earliest traditions of Halloween and found that there was evidence of people celebrating or commemorating this day all over the world going back hundreds and thousands of years and that there was no real connection. He couldn’t find any connection between them. So he was just fascinated by how again and again, these cultures were commemorating this time of the year.
Steven: [0:04:13] Yeah and we’ll go into that. Some people today suggest that Halloween is a celebration of the time of harvest and that period where the northern hemisphere is crossing into winter, the death and kind of rebirth symbolism of harvesting.
Often there are multi-meanings in these ancient cultures. But Haliburton found that there were cross similarities from the northern to southern hemisphere too which doesn’t make sense in terms of the seasonal explanation.
Stefan: [0:04:55] Yeah, because in this in the southern hemisphere we would be going into summer, which doesn’t line up.
Steven: [0:05:01] What he found is that there was this roughly three-day celebration. The big one was the connection between Peru and the Spanish, wasn’t it?
Stefan: [0:05:13] Yeah. When the Spanish arrived they already had this tradition and they found the Peruvians already had it too on the same day. I think it was over three days which was really similar to the early Christians who had All Saints Day and All Hallows Eve.
And it was like it wasn’t just there. It was back into ancient India and Peru, Japan, Persia, Egypt as well. All these places he just kept finding evidence of this celebration or commemoration. It all had similar themes and it was all kind of relating to a similar kind of collective memory or whatever it was. He found, again and again, it was popping up.
Steven: [0:05:59] The Christian tradition, and I didn’t really even connect it to the All Saints Day, it was a three-day celebration that links up to Halloween. And then there was even the druid connection in the UK as well. But then there’s also cross-Pacific Islands and Tonga and the Pacific Islanders, the same commemoration and Indigenous Australians as well. They had a Day of the Dead feast type.
Stefan: [0:06:24] Yeah, to commemorate the ancestors, I think.
Steven: [0:06:27] It’s just the same period and it all occurred roughly late October, early November.
Stefan: [0:06:34] Yeah and all commemorating something to do with death or rebirth. The way we think about Halloween now with ghosts and witches and the dead as it is still in Mexico and places like that. It’s all remembering whatever it was that happened that caused all this.
Steven: [0:06:59] Yeah. Everyone knows Halloween for this thing, these skeletons or witches or death and fire and all these kinds of symbolizing death. All of a sudden you see the whole world celebrating the same thing around the same time.
Not all exactly the same because it’s roughly a three-day period. And you have to start to wonder where that came from. How would two cultures on the other side of the planet commemorate the same themed holiday? We have to start looking for answers to that.
Stefan: [0:07:42] Yeah. That was one thing that Haliburton writes about a lot that he couldn’t understand what caused them all to have the same day. It was before the time of travel. Some cultures were capable of travelling but isolated cultures in Polynesia compared to Egypt, you know with differences of thousands of years between them all remembering the same date.
He started postulating that it must have been something visible in the sky or in the heavens or like some sort of rising of a constellation or whatever it was that everyone was seeing and everyone was recording and that that was the basis of this date that they were all commemorating.
Steven: [0:08:27] Yeah, he writes in his book that it was really striking and the apparent coincidences were just remarkably the same. That’s a really interesting story here. And at the Indo-European tradition that we see today being celebrated every year on 31st October is that hearkened back to something that was a global tradition before.
That’s pretty remarkable, really and even though we’ll look into this, but a lot of our holidays do seem to have these very ancient meanings and we do forget. Forgetting about what something was really about kind of defeats the purpose if you are putting on a witch costume, right?
Stefan: [0:09:07] Yeah.
Steven: [0:09:09] You forget what you are celebrating. The words and the different mythology sets that across different cultures seemed to have a certain theme, they seem to all link to the symbology of Taurus or the bull. There are different words described by, for instance, the Egyptians. Did they use them? It was Hathor, wasn’t it?
Stefan: [0:09:45] Yeah, when November starts the Egyptians called November Hathor which is also the name of that part of the sky of the bull. It wasn’t just the Egyptians though. I think the Persians and the Chaldeans and the Hebrews as well all had the same word that both signified the month of November but also this region of the sky where the Taurus sits. I think even the Arab name for that region is called Atoria, which is very similar to what we used today of Taurus.
Steven: [0:10:33] Yeah when you start to look at this because we’ll look at this in terms of how it leads to the calendar but we are starting to get a theme looks to the sky and then now we are starting to say, well, was the Halloween tradition commemorating an astronomical phenomena?
That seems, the reasonable explanation when you see a global tradition arising with the same rough date. So what could possibly cause this? What astronomical phenomena could possibly cause this?
The Mayans there was actually an astronomer called Hagar Stansbury who wrote in a book in 1931, [0:11:18], I think that’s pronounced correctly, the Mayan tradition of the lord of death falling from heaven to earth at this time. This is the same theme and there are astronomical links to the Taurus bull.
And it links very similarly across to the other things of what people seem to be commemorated at this time. It’s written in the Dresden Codex. There are many different ways that they represent it but so there’s a lot of symbology associated with the bull and this fire coming down.
Stefan: [0:11:55] Yeah, like fighting the bull because it’s like whatever was happening in that part of the sky that time of year it was the imagery of the ball that was kind of recording that story. I think it’s the oldest story in the world, The Epic of Gilgamesh.
In that, he’s fighting a bull or he stabs a bull. The imagery and symbolism of the bull have been there since the start. Every culture that had this idea of the bull it’s all pointing to the same time of year. Yeah, it’s crazy. I can’t imagine when Haliburton was uncovering all this back then, he would have just been surrounded by all these books and different obscure references and just piecing it all together.
Steven: [0:12:50] That’s a big job, isn’t it? And you’d see how it gets lost. But, you know when we started first talking about this, and you know it’s very difficult to find any discussion on the true meaning of Halloween besides that idea of the harvest and just a purely seasonal idea.
But that doesn’t make sense when you go to global tradition. When you start to think of this astronomically, you are like okay so what could that possibly be representing? Atorio which is the Arab word that is associated with this phenomena represents the constellation Taurus and so there is a torrid meteor stream too, that the earth passes through twice a year.
And so what we believe this was a huge meteor that actually broke up into many pieces. If you think our solar system on a flat plane which is the traditional way you see it, but it’s not, but we’ll talk about this later. But if you think of the sun and the planets revolving around the Taurid meteor stream an ellipse course through the path of the planets around the sun and back out again.
We pass it twice so if you think about that ellipse, if you draw this and we’ll put an image onto the show notes for this, you’ll see that the earth passes the Taurid meteor stream twice. We have data for this which is late in June and late October or early November. So now it seems like well, that could be an astronomical marking of the Taurid media stream associated with potentially maybe Halloween.
Stefan: [0:14:30] Yeah. The Taurid meteor stream is named after the constellation of Taurus because as we pass through it, it doesn’t actually originate from that constellation but it appears that way from our perspective. There are lots of different meteor streams. There’s Taurids. There are the Geminids which look like they are coming from Gemini. There are the Leonids. They name them because it looks as if they are coming.
Steven: [0:14:57] Yeah. So if you look at the constellation of Leo, November 17, you see the meteor streams? We’ll cover this in more detail later but just for the purpose of this—
Stefan: [0:15:08] Yeah, just to get your head around it. I had no idea that that happened until I started. And then you can go out at night and if there are enough stars in the sky and it’s a clear night and you go out, you can actually see huge activity, certain times of the year when we pass through this, these different streams.
Steven: [0:15:26] Yeah, different astronomical phenomena. Since then we’ve been able to record and understand and so on. In late October, early November if you go out in the middle of the night you’ll see the passing of the Taurid meteor stream. It’s like a flashing light through the sky.
What’s interesting is that the Halloween tradition says that if you put your clothes inside out and walk backwards which sounds pretty strange but on Halloween night, you will see a witch flying in the sky midnight. And people used to believe witches were the devil. And so then there’s this death and dread thing coming. But was it just a way to describe a meteor stream which kind of looks like the broom at the back, that stream of—
Stefan: [0:16:09] They say it kind of looks like when you sweep a broom, that flash. The look of the meteor when it enters the atmosphere, it’s kind of like you can imagine it’s just being swept across the sky. It’s interesting, different cultures had different symbolism. There are the skulls and death in Mexico and then there’s the witch and that sort of imagery. But it’s all like it’s all very linked to the same sort of central theme.
Steven: [0:16:40] Completely. You see this similar symbology and description of meteors across cultures too and it does seem to follow that theme.
Stefan: [0:16:56] Because what are they in? Is it in Peru or the Mayans used to call them hairs or hairs falling from the sky or something like that?
Steven: [0:17:02] Yeah and the main thing about the Mayans is that there were such fantastic mathematicians [0:17:08] that describe the time of year and the astronomical phases of which they come out of. But it all seems to follow this same idea, doesn’t it?
Stefan: [0:17:23] Yeah. So I think in the northern hemisphere, at least, in late October, early November when we pass through the Taurid meteor stream, it happens at night.
So like if you look at the night sky light at night or at midnight, or whenever it might be, it looks like you can see them all coming because it’s obviously night time and there’s no sun in the sky to hide it all. When the earth passes through in late June, in the northern hemisphere, if you look, it happens during the day so you can’t see. You can’t see it because the sun is in the way.
There’s a really famous example of this in 1908, I think, the Tunguska meteor impact. It happened in the daytime and people who observed it, there were all these accounts of people saying it looked like it was coming straight from the sun or it was born from the sun or it shot from the sun, which it wasn’t but just from our perspective. If the sun wasn’t there it would have looked like it was coming from the bull, not the sun.
Steven: [0:18:32] Yeah. And the Tunguska impact wasn’t even an impact. We’ve talked about it briefly that it was the megafauna episode. On BBC if you look up the article on this on the website the impact radius on the ground is actually from it’s a tiny little debris comment of the Taurid meteor stream. This is how big the scene is. It hit the atmosphere broke up and sent like a shockwave down that just flattened the trees for, I can’t remember the range.
Stefan: [0:19:05] Yes, you can see images online of a whole forest being flattened. I think it was 80 million trees got wiped out and that wasn’t even hitting the earth. That was just an air burst when once it entered the atmosphere.
Steven: [0:19:17] Wow. I remember seeing that. It was probably the late ‘90s, seeing the picture of this Tunguska. I was just like, whoa, what is this. I’d never heard of it.
Stefan: [0:19:26] Yeah, because you never think that there are things going on outside the earth. That’s why I’ve been so fascinated about this. It’s like not only is this astronomical memory still alive through Halloween but it was so important to the ancient cultures who remembered it.
It was part of their culture to commemorate and understand that this happens every year and it can potentially cause a lot of harm or destroy. If that Tunguska event happened over a city like over New York or anywhere in the world it was just completely flattened and completely just change an entire city.
Steven: [0:20:09] That’s right. If you think about Siberia, one of the most isolated areas on the planet, it’s probably the luckiest place beside the ocean. But we do have crossings with these things. And this is twice a year of crossing this stream. There are obviously big things so this is a little one.
But what’s interesting is that it happened late June so it was associated with, as you said, passing, so people described as the second sun coming. And when you look at ellipse that the Taurid meteor stream takes and the way the earth has it one time we cross in the morning so you won’t really see it.
But if there’s a big one we actually come into contact with then it comes into our realm. That’s what they saw. That’s what they the locals subscribe, the second sun shooting and then hitting and then the destruction. It didn’t kill many people but there were people in the [0:21:06] that experienced it.
The one in November is when I think we are passing out of the stream, or it’s the motions are a bit different. And so that’s why we just see the shooting in the night time rather than in the morning. So it’s two different relations to the sun because the Taurid meteor stream goes around the sun. And the second one is potentially leaving instead of going toward the sun. It might be the other way around. I’ll have to check.
Stefan: [0:21:37] Yeah, it’s hard to describe this without images to show. You forget how much is going on outside. It’s crazy how periodic, it’s just like clockwork like it’s the same time. It doesn’t really change at all and it’s obviously been the same for however many thousand. The Egyptians had the same celebration or recollection. The dynasty 3000-ish BC so that’s potentially 5000 years or more of this.
Steven: [0:22:16] Yeah. It’s a deep history, isn’t it? But now when you put it into modern astronomical terms and monitoring these asteroid belts and you sit and look at history, like, what was it, 1922, or was it ‘30s happened?
Stefan: [0:22:38] 1908, I think so not that long ago.
Steven: [0:22:40] No and that’s just like a little sneak peek of what could happen. Then you’ve got this death dread and evil spirit commemoration happening all around the earth at that period. It starts to build this interesting—
Stefan: [0:22:58] Yeah, did something happen to kind of make everyone be warned that it could happen again or just to commemorate the fact that there were people who were potentially impacted by an event that happened around that time of year.
Steven: [0:23:13] Yeah. And what’s really interesting is when you follow because this is why ancient cultures are so interesting and so important is because they seem to write levels of inflammation into their stuff.
So like for instance that epic of l Gilgamesh because of the slaying of the bull which could be seen as an astronomical reference to the Taurus. It starts to go a bit deeper, doesn’t it? And so we start to see, for instance, the times that time of year in the calendar systems, there is a connection therebetween in the equity of Gilgamesh, it’s the shoulder of the bull that is slain at this time.
That relates to what’s seen as the shoulder of the Tauran constellation as being the Pleiades and then so this Pleiades reference pops up more and more. And all throughout this Halloween tradition. So the rattlesnake which is the Mayan had that symbology around it.
Stefan: [0:24:23] So did the rattlesnake symbolize the Pleiades for the Mayans? It’s one of the codices depicting this kind of Taurid impact so like an astronomical meteor event. It’s always drawn with this rattlesnake that the two are really linked and connected together.
We’ve been talking about calendar systems and ancient calendars. The ancient Hindu calendar marked the start of the year by the rising of the Pleiades which happens at the same time as Halloween which is like another Pleiades link.
It’s hard to describe without images but it’s when if you look at midnight at late October, look at the sky at midnight in the northern hemisphere you see the Pleiades right in the middle of the sky if you look directly south.
That was kind of like imagine for the ancient Indians they’d see that as a kind of like a clock striking 12 and the year begins there. I think the Egyptians as well and other ancient cultures, the name to the Pleiades was the name they had for November. It was all kind of linked together, and they were remembering.
Steven: [0:25:46] It’s Hathor in Egyptian, wasn’t it?
Stefan: [0:25:49] Yeah. The interesting thing about Hathor is the Egyptian god Hathor is seen with bullhead. So there’s this symbolism that goes with through lots of layers but it’s always kind of circling around the Pleiades and circling around the bull and this event that potentially happened.
Steven: [0:26:12] Yeah, we touched on this a little bit and the Gregorian calendar how ancient cultures used to start the year by looking at that, the reference to Sirius. There were lots of different ways and we are going to cover this a lot more because every calendar system is remarkable how unique it is.
But there was a common theme of starting the year not on a set day like we do in the Gregorian system but on astronomical alignments. The Pleiades was the Hindu but also the Mayan as well. There was a link up to [0:26:43] to 2012 as to how the Pleiades lined up. There are many ways you can measure that as it lines up in the reading of the sky.
Stefan: [0:26:50] Yeah, that’s the fascinating thing about these old calendar systems and astronomical systems. They had so many different ways of measuring time. It wasn’t just the solar year or the lunar year. Some cultures had 5 or 10 different calendars all marking huge variations of astronomical events and different motions of bodies. But it was all connected in a way that was important enough to remember and to keep track of.
Steven: [0:27:23] Yeah and the really interesting like this whole wraps up is that the Pleiades these discussions in the mythology associated with the talk of Halloween, and so we talk about the Pleiades and the bull and the shoulder of the bull. You can say how this then relates to the Taurid meteor stream now because at this time, in early November or late October when the Pleiades is crossing the meridian, the Taurid meteor stream seems to come out of that area of the sky.
Stefan: [0:27:59] Yeah so you can imagine why in mythology that story would be remembered as the bulls attacking Thor attacking you and if you can defeat the bull, then you can get past that moment and move on and literally pass through the stream.
It’s crazy wrapping your head around that. I mean that’s a really great way of remembering something. But the fact that cultures all around the world have the same symbolism, the same memory and it’s still alive. The meaning of it isn’t as alive today as before but the celebration of it is everyone knows Halloween. It’s such a great way of recording information, I guess if you tell it in story form.
Steven: [0:28:42] Completely and yet the symbol of death might be commemorating people that were maybe killed during a previous impact. You know like you said, this goes back at least 5000 years so it could be a ton before that. We’ve talked about how there is good evidence now of a cataclysm level event around the Younger Dryas period.
We’ll look into that more and potentially how this connects. But what’s interesting is that when you look at meteor streams too, when you are looking at the sky they seem to stream out at one point which is called the radiant point. You can imagine one spot in the sky that doesn’t move and then everything else is streaming towards you which is what the Taurid meteor stream does.
The same thing happens with the [0:29:25] and so forth. But the Pleiades is that radiant point on the Taurid meteor stream. It goes beyond coincidence that cultures all around the world would be referring to the Pleiades and the Taurus and this date.
There has to be, in my mind, some kind of connection or reference to maybe it’s interesting to read the meteor streams. We know that broke up so in August 2000, Comet LINEAR, we observed break, a huge comet breakup into a meteor stream, which is what likely happened with the Taurid meteor stream that it was a big meteor that broke up. Maybe they are commemorating the time it broke out or they observed in the sky.
Stefan: [0:30:08] Yeah. It’s a completely astronomical phenomenon. The objects in the Taurid meteor stream are a lot smaller than they were once because it’s, you know it’s just been breaking up and disintegrating as it gets sucked into different orbits and that sort of thing.
But back I don’t know how far in history it would have been a lot more active with a lot more larger objects and a lot more potential for things like Tunguska to happen again and cause destruction and cause, you know things that would impact the people living on the earth or the animals or anything.
Steven: [0:30:42] Yeah, the evidence is quite compelling when you put it together. When you put the tradition that comes with the global single thing on the same day you’ve got the astronomical knowledge of the Taurid meteor stream and of those dates.
Then you’ve got the Tunguska event that happened not too long ago, just a century ago and then all of these references to the astronomy of it all. But then, for instance, these impacts happen a lot. And even the close encounters. We don’t really talk about [0:31:19] we watched Shoemaker-Levy 9 and it was a huge impact, and we knew this was going to happen.
Stefan: [0:31:26] Wasn’t the meteor bigger than earth? It was huge. If Jupiter hadn’t have sucked it into its orbit it would have been the end of the earth if it had hit earth.
Steven: [0:31:35] Yeah and that was just something we were like, oh that’s good. But like surely this is impacting the earth. And we do, we pass this thing twice so maybe it’s like a warning, the ancient culture saying you need to watch out for this thing.
Stefan: [0:31:49] Yeah, we are not as advanced as we thought we were. If one of these things comes, it’s game over, pretty much.
Steven: [0:31:55] Yeah. And the interesting thing is we are starting to form the technology like to mine meteors and so forth so there is potential technology to be able to maybe protect. You can calculate the path of, maybe it isn’t the path of the earth and what the probability of impact. So maybe we are at a time now where we should be thinking about this.
Stefan: [0:32:18] Yeah. I love looking into all this stuff and seeing the crossover from myth into, there are this folklore and mythology that exists. But then we are now at the stage where we have enough resources and technology to look into the geological record and look at all the work that’s been done that sort of validates a lot of these ancient traditions, which is so fascinating.
I remember when we were talking about the origins of geology and how when it first began they were trying to separate religious ideologies from science and all over religions in all religions all over the world there’s the talk of this huge deluge and destruction of the world by water.
That was kind of not taken seriously by the emerging scientific community because it was seen as just religious fantasy and didn’t really have a scientific foundation. But now it’s interesting seeing that a lot of these ancient stories talking about astronomical events or earth impacting events, there is ground for having these conversations that maybe there is more to these stories than just mythology.
I think reading Hamlet’s Mill was definitely really eye-opening for that. Just how that these stories if you trace them back far enough, they do have an astronomical sort of basis. It’s fascinating.
Steven: [0:33:59] Yeah and there’s no question that these ancient cultures, ancient sites had indeed an astronomical understanding and meaning. That’s been well established now across the world. There’s a lot of information here. We haven’t covered the Mayan calendar, quite a lot more on all the calendar systems.
There’s not a doubt that there was this high universal appreciation and you know how we fit. The reality is that humans fit into this whole picture of this, we are children of the universe, and you know our future generations depend on this planet being stable.
Maybe the idea that we do cross the Taurid meteor stream twice is something we need to think about. Maybe this Halloween tradition was there to remind us of this. I don’t know. I think these kinds of stories are important.
This is why I found it so fascinating to jump into ancient cultures and because then you find this amazing interface between what we know now and what they were alluding to then. And then it’s like, whoa, hang on, it’s time to think about this stuff.
Stefan: [0:35:03] Yeah. And you don’t really think earth as you know is in any danger because you think 65 million years ago, the earth was hit by a meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs but that sort of thing doesn’t happen. It just, you know it’s something we talk about.
But for me, learning about Halloween and understanding the Taurid meteor stream and meteor streams in general, there’s a lot going on. You could take it very literally and be terrified and never leave your house. But it’s just I think it’s good to be aware of it and to understand that it’s not only a risk for us but it’s been a risk everyone that’s walked on the earth.
Steven: [0:35:428] Yeah, and you know what we are learning about Mars now potentially is showing that was very much a planet like the earth that had thriving life on it. Its life cycle is a lot later than ours and so maybe that’s a sign what can happen. We know that can happen. We are intrinsically connected to what’s happening in our solar system and the wider systems as well.
Stefan: [0:36:15] Yeah. And if you stripped away the earth of all the water and all the trees and it was just laid bare, it would look just like the moon. It has been peppered by meteor since its creation. You can’t see it now because there’s so much light but yeah, as you said, if it were to be stripped like that it would just look like a big rock.
Steven: [0:36:34] And what’s interesting about Tunguska is you look at it now you can still see the impact now the terrain is flattened but you can see how in 60, 70, maybe 100 years it’d be gone. And so if no one recorded that it’s forgotten yet it was potentially a civilization changing event from a tiny part of this Taurid meteor stream.
Stefan: [0:36:55] Yeah, it’s crazy thinking about the scale of that if you put that, even if it was twice as big, it could potentially wipe out most of the country. Yeah, it’s crazy.
Steven: [0:37:08] Yeah. Let’s not get too [0:37:10].
Stefan: [0:37:11] It’s all doom and gloom.
Steven: [0:37:12] It’s interesting though because the Halloween thing kind of sends you down the lines of where did all this death and dread thing talking about an impact or potential impact.
Stefan: [0:37:20] Yeah. And it’s really, it changes your perspective on things, for me anyway. You can kind of realize things that aren’t so important in your life when there are things that could potentially end it. But it’s not doom and gloom. It’s just nice o if anyone has the chance to see the stars that time of year.
Steven: [0:37:42] You can see. You can watch this. So in Halloween this year, you can watch the Taurid meteor stream passing to go out between 12:00 and 2:00 AM, that kind of timeframe, you see it streaming through the sky.
All right, I think we covered it all, man. It’s such an interesting topic. We are going to do more on these meteor streams. They are really interesting and what for instance, the ancient cultures knew about them, referral to them, also the geological aspect to the history and prehistory. Next week we are going to talk about—
Stefan: [0:38:19] Let’s talk about the pineal gland.
Steven: [0:38:21] Yeah, well, that’s a big [0:38:23] for that one, okay.
Stefan: [0:38:28] Yeah. Thanks for listening guys. It’s been really exciting learning about this and sharing it.
