Month: November 2018

Julian Assange, at center. (credit: acidpolly)

Federal prosecutors have accidentally revealed that criminal charges have been filed against "Assange"—an apparent reference to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The feds filed the revealing document back in August, but the slip-up wasn't noticed until it was flagged in a Thursday evening tweet.

The filing was in an unrelated sex crimes case in the Eastern District of Virginia. Federal prosecutors asked the court to seal its criminal complaint and arrest warrant against a man named  Seitu Sulayman Kokayi—for "coercion and enticement of a juvenile to engage in unlawful sexual activity"—to avoid tipping the suspect off. But in two places, the document refers to "Assange" instead of the actual defendant in the case.

The document argues that the case should be sealed because, "due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged."

Enlarge / Only the onset of Ragnarok can defeat Hela, the goddess of death, in Marvel's Thor: Ragnarok. (credit: Marvel Studios)

In Norse mythology, Ragnarok is a cataclysmic series of events leading to the death of Odin and his fellow Asgardian gods, and ultimately to the end of the world. Some iconographic details of this mythical apocalypse that emerged around 1000 AD may have been influenced by astronomical events—notably comets and total eclipses.

This is not to say that the myth of Ragnarok originated with such events; rather, they reinforced mythologies that already existed in the popular imagination. That's the central thesis of Johnni Langer, a historian specializing in Old Norse mythology and literature at the Federal University of Paraiba in Brazil. He has outlined his argument in detail in a recent paper (translated from the original Portuguese) in the journal Archeoastronomy and Ancient Technologies.

Langer's analysis is based on the relatively young field of archaeoastronomy: the cultural study of myths, oral narratives, iconographic sources, and other forms of ancient beliefs, with the aim of identifying possible connections with historical observations in astronomy. Both total eclipses and the passage of large comets were theoretically visible in medieval Scandinavia, and there are corresponding direct records of such events in Anglo-Saxon and German chronicles from around the same time period. These could have had a cultural influence on evolving Norse mythology, including the concept of Ragnarok.