Of Midgard and Middle Earth

in the past couple days the U.S. Senate -- slaves of Mammon as always -- approved oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

here's an apparent response from the Arctic's "polar twin":

Huge Iceberg Breaks Apart in Antarctica



LiveScience Staff
LiveScience.com 1 hour, 40 minutes ago

Capping a 5-year-long saga of destruction, an iceberg about the size of the Hawaiian island of Maui has split into three pieces in the frigid Antarctic, scientists said Friday.

The larger iceberg, named B-15A, calved into three smaller icebergs — B-15M, B-15N and B-15P. Two of the larger icebergs (B-15M and B-15N) are about the size of Grand Cayman and St. Croix, respectively.
The fresh splits mark the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth times that a portion of B-15 has broken off, or calved, since the first calving event on May 30, 2000.

B-15A has been careening around the Ross sea for months, slamming into the coast and breaking off chunks of protruding ice features as big as cities. Back in January in McMurdo Sound it blocked ocean currents and caused other sea ice to build up, threatening wildlife.

The latest breakup was first seen in satellite imagery from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program by researchers at the National Ice Center (NIC).

Iceberg names are derived from the Antarctic quadrant where they are first sighted. When they are first spotted, the NIC documents an iceberg's point of origin. The iceberg is assigned the letter of the quadrant, along with the sequential number.


here's Wikipedia's brief entry on McMurdo Sound:


McMurdo Sound is a sound about 55 km (35 mi) long and wide, lying at the junction of the Ross Sea and Ross Ice Shelf between Ross Island and Victoria Land. Discovered by Captain James Clark Ross in February 1841 and named after Lt. Archibald McMurdo of HMS Terror.
The United States's major Antarctic base, McMurdo Station, is located on Ross Island.



Antarctica, of course, is the continent surrounding Earth's South Pole -- correlating to the southern portion of the Leviathan or "Midgard Serpent" which is ouroboric -- that is, it's head swallows its own tail, a "ring" encircling the planet

in my Ragnarok blog-speculations, the Arctic Ocean was the "abode" of the huge "cockatrice" in Charles Manson's "Christmas Day 2000" artwork

because the "Midgard Serpent" is ouroboric, we can assume a twin, or mirroring entity, exits on or near the Antarctic

again, this isn't necessarily a single entity with overt, physical characteristics -- Manson's artwork primarily represents, and attempts to effect, the psycho-spiritual "world" -- the "primal reality," from which physical events (like massive ice shelves splitting into pieces) manifest

the original post of October 5, "Ragna Rok and Man Son Role" discussed various aspects of the word/concept of "ban" -- including Banba, the Celtic triple-goddess, and identification of the "ban" in both Norse myth and Hittite iconography with the Great Devouring Serpent, manifesting both in the natural world, and simultaneously within human beings as individuals and collectivity

in the Hittite seal (ca. 2,500 B.C.E.) mentioned, Father Ia urges his son:

'Go my son, Son Tas! Take the man to the House of Pure Sprinkling,
And remove his ban, and expel his ban


there's a connection between the "mythical" ban and the recent discovery of a new "twig" on the human family tree: Homo floresiensis

here's a link to Time Magazine's original piece on Homo floresiensis, titled, "Hobbits Of The South Pacific: Why the discovery of a 3-ft.-tall dragon slayer is rewriting human history"

it was published on November 1, 2004


Local folktales on the Indonesian island of Flores, some 350 miles west of Bali, tell of a race of shy little people — South Seas leprechauns who inhabited the limestone caves that dot the island, accepting gourds full of food that the Floresians would set out for them. It wasn't until Dutch traders arrived in the 1500s, according to the legends, that the diminutive race finally disappeared.

Western scientists have long dismissed these stories as pure fancy, but now they are having second thoughts. In a report that rocked the world of paleoanthropology last week, a team of Australian and Indonesian scientists announced in Nature that they had discovered that a tribe of tiny humans, only about 3 ft. tall, did indeed live in the caves of Flores. Digging into the sediments on the floor of a cave called Liang Bua, the team found bones from seven individuals, including the nearly intact skeleton of an adult female they nicknamed the Hobbit. And while there's no proof that the little people survived later than about 13,000 years ago, it's not beyond the realm of possibility.

What makes the discovery truly shocking is that the beings were not, like the Pygmies of equatorial Africa, just a short variety of modern Homo sapiens. Dubbed Homo floresiensis, they represent an entirely new twig on the human family tree. Until now, scientists believed that Neanderthals, who died out some 30,000 years ago, were the only human species that coexisted for any length of time with people like us. The chapter of biology textbooks that describes our family tree will have to be rewritten. . . .

Morwood goes a step further, suggesting that to achieve the kind of cooperation required to build rafts, H. floresiensis must have had language.

That's too speculative for most of his colleagues to accept at this point. But some of Morwood's other theories are being taken quite seriously. If the Hobbits evolved in isolation on Flores, there is every reason to believe that the same thing happened on other nearby islands. "I think we're going to have a plethora of new human species showing up," he says.

Moreover, if the creatures survived all the way to 13,000 years ago, it's not at all impossible that they survived much longer — perhaps long enough to provide a factual basis for the Floresian folktales.

And if the Hobbits hung on until as recently as 500 years ago, it is conceivable, though admittedly very far-fetched, that pockets survive even today — if not on Flores, then on other remote Pacific islands. "The probability is that they're extinct," says Stringer. "But since this is such an astounding and surprising find, I think it shows how little we know about events in Southeast Asia. You really have to keep an open mind."


that's an apt phrase to end with, because i think that these "alternate humans" not only still exist, but are distributed amongst most of the world's population, in limited amounts, and that their survival is directly attributable to their peculiar "niche" within the variants of the human species -- that niche involving acute and transtemporal mental/psychological/psychic abilities and characteristics

the story's sub-title is also striking, identifying these "hobbits" not with dragons, but dragonslayers, apparently based on evidence that Flores once contained giants rodents and lizards, including the Komodo Dragon:

Despite their minuscule brains, the Hobbit and her kin were evidently smart enough to use fire, make tools and hunt, challenging existing notions of the relationship of brain size to intelligence. The scientists found bones of Stegodon, Komodo dragons and an assortment of rodents and other animals in the Liang Bua sediments, some of them charred by what may have been cooking fires.


Time Online recently published a followup story confirming the original find, which now includes nine, uh, people . . . well, humans anyway!