Arigo–The Surgeon with the Rusty Knife

“In this story, so strange, so incredible, there are un-disputed facts, facts that cannot be denied, cannot be altered even by the most obdurate skeptic. It is an established fact that Ze Arigo, the peasant Brazilian surgeon-healer, could cut through the flesh and viscera with an unclean kitchen-or pocket knife and there would be no pain, no hemostasis-the tying off of blood vessels and no need for stitches. It is a fact that he could stop the flow of blood with a sharp verbal command. It is a fact that there would be no ensuing infection, even though no antiseptic was used. It is a fact that he could write swiftly some of the most sophisticated prescriptions in modern pharmacology,yet he never went beyond third grade and never studied the subject. It is a fact that he could almost instantly make clear, accurate, and confirmable diagnoses or blood pressure readings with scarcely  a glance at  the patient.It Is a fact that both Brazilian and American doctors have verified Arigo's healings and have taken explicit color motion pictures of his work and operations. It is a fact that Arigo treated over three hundred patients a day for nearly two decades and never charged for his  services. It is a fact that among his patients were leading executives, statesmen ,lawyers ,scientists, doctors, aristocrats from many countries,as well as the poor and desolate.It is a fact that Brazil's former President ,Juscelino Kubitschek,the  creator of the capital city of Brasilia and himself a physician, brought  his daughter to Arigo for successful treatment.It is a fact that Arigo also brought about medically confirmed cures in cases of different fatal diseases that had been given up as hopeless by leading doctors and hospitals in some of the most advanced countries in the Western world. But none of these facts, all carefully brought together and examined, can add up to an explanation. And it is for this reason that this story is so difficult  to write.” This is an excerpt from “Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife” by John G Fuller Now, this was a long ass explanation and you might be wondering why. This post deals with a miracle surgeon who was supposedly an expert in the art of Psychic Surgery.
José Pedro de Freitas (Zé Arigó ) was a psychic surgeon. He performed psychic surgery with his hands or simple kitchen utensils (knife being his preferred tool) while in a mediunic trance, channeling the spirit of the “hypothetical’ German Surgeon Dr. Adolf Fritz.
There is no evidence to prove the existence of a doctor of that name, however many mediums have claimed to be channeling his spirit. Arigó was the first to do so.


BIOGRAPHY(18 October 1921 – 1 November 1971)
Zé Arigó was born José Pedro de Freitas on a farm located 6 kilometers from Congonhas, in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. His family was very poor and he could only study up to the third grade of school.
As per his autobiography, Arigó began suffering from severe migraine, insomnia and hallucinations at the age of 29. One day he felt that the voice that had been pursuing him took over his body, and he had a vision of a bald man, dressed in a white apron and supervising a team of doctors and nurses in an enormous operating room. This entity identified itself as "Dr. Fritz."
After claiming to have channeled Dr. Fritz, Arigó began to perform operations using scalpels and needles. His reputation soared and spread throughout Brazil after it was alleged that he had removed a cancerous tumor from the lung of a well-known Brazilian senator. Over the next twenty years, thousands of people who mistrusted traditional medicine, or had not found help in it, came to Congonhas in search of a cure. However, there is no substantial evidence that he ever healed anyone.
In 1956 Arigó was convicted of illegally practicing medicine. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison, but was pardoned by President Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira. In 1962 he was arrested and held for seven months for practicing medicine without a license. However, he was allowed to continue treating people while held in jail. Despite the problems with the authorities, his fame Arigó died in 1971, in an automobile accident.

MIRACLE SURGERIES

Claiming to be guided by the wise voice of a long-deceased physician whom he had never known personally,the uneducated healer saw as many as 300 patients a day,diagnosing and treating them in minutes.He treated almost every known ailment, and most of his patients not only survived but actually improved or recovered.
He gained a cult following in his homeland and was considered as a miracle worker able to cure any disease. That he was performing his treatment with crude and presumably unhygienic tools, did not deter patients.
Arigo’s specialty was surgery. He has allegedly performed numerous surgeries for ailments ranging from cataract to malignant tumors – all with the help of his rusty knife.
Arigo’s “hospital was a dilapidated old church where patients would line up in a queue along the wall. The doctor would start with a prayer and then preach about the ill effects of drinking and smoking to all those who were gathered. Once this was done, he would call each patient into a cubicle where subsequent diagnose and treatment would be administered.

DOCUMENTED EVIDENCE
in the year 1970, renowned parapsychologist Dr. Andrija Puharich, shot 8 silent movies of Arigo in action while he was on his Brazilian expedition. One of the videos is included here

SCIENTIFIC PREMISES These miraculous acts perpetrated by Arigo may not be so far fetched after all because, the concept of “psychic surgery” is seemingly a perfect platform for them. Psychic surgery involves making incisions and surgeries with bare hands or cruse tools and their subsequent healing at an exponential rate.

 PERSECUTION & DEMISE
Despite his demi-god status, Arigo was persecuted by both the government and the Church. The government pressed charges on him for illegal practice of medicine. The church on the other hand, branded Arigo a Heretic and accused him of being a witch doctor performing with craft.
Arigo was convicted of illegally practicing medicine and sentenced to 15 years in prison, but was pardoned by the President himself
Arigo passed away in the yea 1971 in an automobile accident – without any fuss. However, he was very quickly forgotten by the people as well.

CONCLUSION
Despite the magnitude of his skills and fame in Brazil, it never made it to the world at large, probably because of the communication channels back then or lack thereof. A large number of psychologists and people in general are still very skeptic about Arigo and his skills. Whatever they may say, they cannot contradict the hundreds of patients who claim to have been cured by Arigo. Hoax or not, Arigo has provided the world with the precious few evidence we have for Psychic Surgery. If he were alive for a while longer, we may have known the story in its entirety.
As a final note, I would like to mention a movie that is being made around the story of Arigo. The link for that is provided here as well
http://www.arigothemovie.com/

Voynich Manuscript

When, in 1639, the Prague citizen Georg Baresch wrote to the famous Jesuit scientist Athanasius Kircher that he owned a mysterious book which was written in an unknown script and profusely illustrated with pictures of plants, stars and alchemical secrets, he thought that Kircher would be able to decipher this book for him. He could not have guessed that not only was Kircher unable to do this, but that a long row of vastly more expert codebreakers were equally going to fail. The book has come down to us and even now, more than 360 years later, not a single word from its 234 pages can be understood.
Nor was Baresch the first to attempt in vain to read the MS. Before him, various scientists which the Holy Roman emperor Rudolf II collected at his court may well have tried their hand.

The book is now known as the Voynich manuscript (MS), after its (re)discoverer in 1912

 

 

The Voynich Manuscript, as it is now commonly called, is one of the rarest wonders of the modern world. It is a book that quite literally should not exist. To call it a book is somewhat misleading, for it, as with most ancient manuscripts, resembles nothing of a book as we know it.

It is a collection of some 272 vellum pages (the skin of a mammal, often cow, stretched and dried to be used as a durable paper), 240 pages of which have survived the many handlings, transfers and inspections the book has encountered over the years.

The origins of the book are almost as interesting and mysterious as its contents. Many scholars believe the book was written, by quill pen and using coloured paint, at some point in the mid 15th or 16th centuries. By who is a completely different story, and the controversy over the authors identity is strongly connected to the mystery of the manuscripts contents.

The information contained in the book is largely unknown, and this is due completely, to the fact that the Voynich Manuscript is written in an entirely unknown and undecipherable language.

 

 

 

The surviving 240 pages, made up of some 170,000 discreet written characters or glyphs, making up 35,000 separate words, are accompanied by artfully crafted sketches and drawings, many of which are equally mysterious.

A large number of the sketches resemble known plant species, with subtle, and sometime drastic differences, others resemble complex aqueduct drawings and even anatomical type depictions of people (usually women).

 

 

 

 

 

The manuscript has been examined by no less than an army of cryptologists, linguists and a host of other scholars, including biblical scholars, and none of the countless hands and minds of these learned friends has ever been able to decipher a single word.

Very early on in the known existence of the book, several historians and cryptologists confirmed that the text in the manuscript is that of a learnable language, it holds with all the known rules and constructs of modern and ancient languages and quite often the sketches seem to correspond with titles and descriptions. In modern examination, most, if not all, experts continue to agree on this as fact.

Of course, with such a mysterious find in the hands of so many people, theories abound about the books origins.

The earliest known owner of the book was one Georg Barech, an obscure alchemist from Prague, in the early 17th century.

Theories content that Barech may have fabricated the book as a test for his patron. Others suggest that it was Voynich himself who fabricated both the book and the story, though evidence does exist to refute this claim.

Some claim that the book is the product of a lost middle European language, and that the book is a medical (or alchemist) instructional tome. Though some of the wilder claims cite both alien influence and even time travel.

The connection to the Society of Jesus and the Villa Mondragone might even suggest a Masonic origin to the manuscript, tying its information to the Knights Templar and the so-called secret knowledge they possessed, as passed down from King Solomon.

 

The truth is, no one alive has the ability to read or decipher the huge amount of information contained in this 600 (or so) year old book. It could possibly provide instructions for turning lead into gold, or it could be an interstellar gardening guide, or even still, it could be an early medieval alchemical textbook. Nonetheless, the Voynich Manuscript remains one of the oldest mysteries of modern history. Experts are in total disagreement about its origin and meaning, and thus, it will hold its place in the Yale Museum, as The Book That Shouldnt Exist. The book itself remains in Yale's rare book collection under catalog number "MS 408. and is open for examination by anyone who feels they can crack this bizarre mystery. If anyone wants to take a crack, I wish you all the best.

 

BACK AFTER A WHILE

Owing to the hectic workload that comes along with college life, I have been neglecting this blog – not that there is anyone to miss it anyway. But as was said before, this blog was setup to sate my own curiosity and as an archive for myself.

However, I am back with more mysteries for anyone out there to sink their teeth into.

 

Next post will be up soon

CROP CIRCLES

Crop circles are one of the most profound and mysterious phenomena of the modern age. Simply put, a crop circle is a sizable pattern created by the flattening of a crop such as wheat, barley, rye, maize, or rapeseed. They have been in existence since many centuries ago. The first crop circle was recorded in 1678.

The above picture is one of the more complex designs of crop circles.

The first recorded crop circles were simple spheres formed in a crop. When it was first recorded the phenomenon was attributed to the Mowing Devil.

The people claimed that it was the work of a super natural element. Over the years the numbers of recordings have increased tremendously. As its fame grew, the complexity of the circles also increased. So did the explanations provided. But what makes this phenomenon interesting is the possibility that they might be the work of ALIENS.

Most of the circles were investigated and many were proved to be hoax created by humans. But some of them still baffle scientists. Due to its fame and complexity, study of crop circles has become a separate scientific branch. Some more photos are given below, each one spans across acres of land. This phenomenon will be discussed at length in the next post

The Milk Miracle

The Mystery

The Milk Miracle was a phenomenon that began on September 21, 1995. It was considered a miracle by many across the world at the time - and still is. On that date a worshipper made an offering of milk to a statue of Ganesha, at a temple in New Delhi. When a spoonful of milk from the bowl was held up to the trunk of the statue, the liquid was seen to disappear, apparently taken in by the idol. Word of the event spread quickly, and by mid-morning it was found that statues in temples all over North India were taking in milk.
By noon the news had spread beyond India, and temples in Britain, Canada, Dubai and Nepal among other countries had successfully replicated the phenomenon, and the Vishwa Hindu Patishad (an Indian Hindu organisation) had announced that a Miracle was occurring.
The apparent miracle had a significant effect on the areas around major temples; vehicle and pedestrian traffic in New Delhi was dense enough to create a congestion lasting until late in the evening. Many stores in areas with significant Hindu communities saw a massive jump in sales of milk, with one Gateway store in England selling over 25,000 pints of milk. Many minor temples struggled to deal with the vast increase in numbers, and queues spilled out into the streets, reaching distances of over a mile.



The Miracle allegedly occurred again on 20-21 August 2006 in almost exactly the same fashion, although initial reports seem to indicate that it occurred only with statues of Ganesh, Shiva, and Durga. The first reported occurrence was on the evening of the 20th in the city of Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh, from where it quickly spread throughout India


Explanations Offered

As is usual a lot of people were sceptical about this phenomenon being a miracle.Infact some came foreward with explanations and even recreated the phenomenon.The most widely accepted theory is "the Capillary Effect"

Seeking to explain the phenomenon, scientists from India's Ministry of Science and Technology travelled to a temple in New Delhi and made an offering of milk containing a food colouring. As the level of liquid in the spoon dropped, the scientists theorized that after the milk disappeared from the spoon, it coated the statue beneath where the spoon was placed. With this result, the scientists offered capillary action as an explanation; the surface tension of the milk was pulling the liquid up and out of the spoon, before gravity caused it to run down the front of the statue. They were able to recreate it too.
Another theory that was brought forward was that it was a bout of mass hysteria and/or hallucination among the people that brought about this "miracle", thought this was, quite understandably, ignored as a "desperate attempt".

CREDIBILITY

Though this theory gives a perfectly logical explanation to the phenonenon, it has a few glaring flaws.
If it was just the milk running down the front, then the floors of the temple should have been flooded considering the number of devotees who fed milk to the statues.
Suzanne Goldenberg, a Delhi-based journalist, reported that: "Inside the darkened shrine, people held stainless steel cups and clay pots to the central figure of the five-headed Shiva, the destroyer of evil, and his snake companion, and watched the milk levels ebb. Although some devotees force-fed the idol enthusiastically, the floor was fairly dry."
It also fails to explain how this phenomenon occured all over the world at the same time and how it lasted only for two days.

As for the second theory one need only use his common sense to disprove it.If that is not enough then we are forced to conclude that the hundreds of cameras that captured videos and photographs of this event were also Hallucinating


CONCLUSION

With the available information we are unable to form a solid conclusion.Until somebody comes up wit yet another plausible explanation "the Milk Miracle" shall remain, as the name suggests, a Miracle.

Exploring the World

By Krishna

It has been said in the Bhagavat Geeta that the universe is ever- expanding. Modern science has also agreed to this theory. So the Universe is expanding every minute, every second. But where is it going? Does it have a destination? Will it stop? No one knows and quite possibly we will never know the answer to these questions.
We live in a small planet surrounded by the unknown. But wait, what about all the mysteries that are present in our own mother earth? There are so many things happening in this world that are beyond us. Crop Circles, The Milk Drinking Idols of India, Alien Sightings, mysterious animals and even Human beings with extraordinary abilities- the obscure,the occult and the just plain weird.
It is the fascination with such elements in this world that has prompted me to start this Blog. Here, I hope to bring forth, discuss and if possible find a conclusion to the various events, structures and beings that have eluded reason and understanding. All those who are similarly inclined can join me on this blog.
Thanks for reading.

Editor: Karthik.