While searching for the origins of the name ‘Walsall”…
“Walsall is at the heart of the English Midlands. The earliest reference to the town is in a will dating back to 1002, which refers to a place called ‘Walesho’. Walsall, the name, is believed to have originally been the Anglo-Saxon Wealhs Halh, which means something like the ‘sheltered place belonging to ‘Weala’ or possibly ‘the Welshman’.”
I came across this site, where they appear to be dream-makers
http://www.rotary.org.uk/walsall.html
“… an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time—the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries—embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist. In this one, which chance had favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words, but am in error, a phantom.
This excerpt from Jorge Borges’ “The Garden of the Forking Paths” taken from Ray Bradbury’s 1956 “The Silver Locusts: A classical collection of Science Fiction stories taken from the Martian Chronicles” illustrates the bizarre and highly counterintuitive world of parallel worlds. (Wolf: p. 42)
In parallel universes strange things happen. You and your doubles may have by and large identical lives and pasts, except for totally different behaviors all occurring at the same time. Or they may have totally different lives. Does reality consist of one universe or many? And how many universes are there? Do they exist simultaneously or at different times at different locations? Is it possible to communicate with them? Is there any scientific evidence for parallel universes?
The idea of strange parallel worlds touching our reality has been described by science fiction writers for quite some time, ever since the beginning of the genre. But for the last fifty years or so the realm of parallel universes has leaped from science fiction into serious scientific discussion.
The interesting fact is that the modern (by this I mean non-metaphysical) multiverse idea came to the scientists themselves from experiments in quantum mechanics, during which the particles behaved in a rather intriguing fashion. We will see these experiments in more detail later in Chapter 3. “
Until the early 1900’s, the Maya civilization was considered to be the parent culture in Mesoamerica from which all other societies sprouted. There have been many Mayan sculptures and carvings found in the region, so all other carvings were also considered to be that of the Maya. One difference in the carving is that some carvings of large heads had faces with more African looking features than many of the other Mayan works.
There was also evidence of a half-jaguar half-man beast, which also did not fit in with other Mayan finds. It wasn’t until 1929, when Marshall H Saville, the Director of the Museum of American Indian in New York, classified these new works as an entirely new culture not of Mayan heritage. He named this culture Olmec, which means the “rubber people” in Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica (“Aztec”) people. It was the Aztec name for the people who lived in this area at the much later time of Aztec dominance. Ancient Mesoamericans, spanning from ancient Olmecs to Aztecs, extracted latex from Castilla elastica, a type of rubber tree in the area. The juice of a local vine, Ipomoea alba, was then mixed with this latex to create rubber as early as 1600 BC.
It is not known what name the ancient Olmec used for themselves. Later Mesoamerican accounts seem to refer to the ancient Olmec as “Tamoanchan”.
The oldest Olmec site originated at its base in San Lorenzo, Tenochtitlan, where distinctively Olmec features begin to emerge around 1150 BC. The rise of civilization here was probably assisted by the local ecology of well watered rich alluvial soil, encouraging high maize production. This ecology may be compared to that of other ancient civilizations: Mesopotamia and the Nile River Valley.
At its height, this village had a population of less than 1,000 people. The inhabitants were farmers and fishermen who also did a small amount of hunting. The major crops were maize, beans, and squash. The fishing season coincided with the flooding of the river. The men would catch fish in landlocked ponds after the flooding of the river subsided. Along with fish, the Olmec would catch turtles for their main source of protein. If the fishing was slow and the turtle hunting was not going well, the Olmec would substitute domesticated dog and turkey meat in their diet.
It is speculated that the dense population concentration at San Lorenzo encouraged the rise of an elite class that eventually ensured Olmec dominance and provided the social basis for the production of the symbolic and sophisticated luxury artifacts that define Olmec culture.
Evidence of materials in San Lorenzo that must have come from distant locations suggests that early Olmec elites had access to an extensive trading network in Central America. This was most likely be protected by some sort of military system.
It is not known with any clarity what happened to this culture. Their main center at San Lorenzo, was all but abandoned around 900 BC, and La Venta became the main city. Environmental changes may have been responsible for this move, with certain important rivers changing course. However, there is also some evidence suggestive of an invasion and destruction of Olmec artifacts around this time.
Around 400 BC, La Venta also came to an end, although the importance of the ceremonial complexes apparently outlasted the Olmec state or culture. Within a few hundred years of the abandonment of their last cities, successor cultures had become firmly established in their former lands, most notably the Maya to the east, the Zapotec to the southwest, and the Teotihuacan culture to the west.
The word “Olmec” also refers to the rubber balls used for their ancient ball game. Early modern explorers applied the name “Olmec” to the rediscovered ruins and art from this area before it was understood that these had been already abandoned more than a thousand years before the time of the people the Aztecs knew as the Olmec.
Rubber ball games have great antiquity throughout the Americas, and the recent discovery of several rubber balls at the Olmec site of El Manati, near San Lorenzo, confirms that the game was played by the Olmec. Archaeologists working at La Venta twenty years ago discovered what they hypothesized were the remains of a ball court there, and it is possible that such ball courts were also part of the architecture at Olmec centers.
The Olmec were perhaps the originators of the Mesoamerican ballgame, prevalent among later cultures of the region and used for recreational and religious purposes. They were playing ball before anyone else has been documented doing so.
