Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Onza
A large feline, unrecognized by zoologists, whose main habitat is reportedly the Sierra Madre Occidental range of northwest Mexico. Among the animals of folklore being considered by Cryptozoology but yet to be officially recognized by biologists is the onza. Accounts of the onza go back to the Aztecs, who called it cuitlamiztl. They clearly distinguished…
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Ontogeny and phylogeny
Theory that relates the development of an individual to its biological past. The phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” was, during the 19th century, one of the main arguments of scientific racism in the Western world. It was first stated by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel in Uber Arbeitstheilung in Natur und Menschenleben (1869) as a way of…
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Omen
Any phenomenon or circumstance purporting to portend good or evil. In order to believe in omens a specific prior belief is absolutely necessary that the future is knowable, in other words, that everything that is to be has been foreordained. Thus an omen is an event that presupposes destiny. The chief feature of an omen…
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Omega point
Supposedly the point in time when the evolutionary development of human culture theoretically reaches such an advanced stage of humanization that personal consciousness will merge with God. The idea was put forward by 20th-century French Jesuit philosopher and paleoanthropologist Pierre Teilhard De Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man, a book which, because of the disapproval…
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Ogopogo
Lake monster allegedly found in Lake Okanagan in British Columbia and related by name to several other Canadian lake monsters, including Manipogo of Lake Winnipeg and Igopogo of Lake Simco. Early Native legends told of a demon that possessed a human who then murdered an old man named O-Kan-He-Kan. In honor of the murdered man,…
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Occultism
Any doctrine, principle, or practice associated with unknown forces or spirits, whose existence is cut off from most of humanity and available only to an initiated few. The word occultism comes from the Latin occultus, meaning hidden, concealed, or cut off from view by interposing some other body between the eye and the object. In…
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Occult chemistry
A revised version of chemistry written in the early 20th century by Annie Besant and Charles Webster Lead beater (1854-1934) under the guidance of the theosophists’ spirit masters. The chemistry revealed in this manner ranged from the structure of atoms and molecules to the chemical properties of materials. It is said that some of the…
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Numerology
The belief in the magical power of numbers. This belief is probably universal in all sophisticated cultures. In the West it is based on the Pythagorean idea that all things can be ultimately reduced to a relationship with numbers. Pythagoras (sixth century B.C.E.), a mystic, regarded mathematics as a spiritual discipline leading to the discovery…
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N-rays
A new type of ray (following soon after the discovery of X rays, alpha, beta, and gamma rays), which Rene Blondlot, an eminent French physicist at the University of Nancy, believed he had discovered in 1903. This was the year in which Henri Becquerel and Pierre and Marie Curie were jointly awarded a Nobel Prize…
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Nostrums
Quack medicines, also referred to as patent or proprietary medicines. Nostrums emerged in the modern world of commerce from the folk remedies of the past. As early as 1692, a Boston newspaper advertised a product called “Aqua anti torminales” which was sup¬ posed to cure the “Griping of the Guts and the wind Cholick” and…
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