6 Ancient Bizarre Beliefs With Logical Explanations

At the time, people didn't know why these remedies worked, but when modern doctors researched them, they found they were, in fact, effective medicines. One scientist, William Withering, didn't have any medicine to cure a patient with heart trouble, so the patient went down to his local healer (read: witch), who offered him a folk remedy that worked. Because people had *mostly* stopped burning witches in 1775, Withering was able to track the healer down; she revealed the brew's active ingredient was foxglove, which is now the modern basis for heart failure drug digoxin.

A whole class of witches brews, called flying ointments, got you high. Witches would call the high "being on a journey," which someone interpreted as flying on brooms, and others interpreted as being, like, totally out there, you guys. Compounds like the Nightshade alkaloids hyoscine (a common treatment for motion sickness) and atropine (nerve gas antidote and muscle relaxant) were all part of these brews.

Even weirder, it's theorized that the Weird Sisters from Macbeth weren't just spouting nonsense; they were actually babbling about real medical herbs that witches used to help heal people.

Well, it turns out that the symptoms of vampirism are very, very close to symptoms of the disease furious rabies (which we're sure will star Vin Diesel some decades in the future). It's a neurological disease that attacks the brain and is incurable unless you have a very unpleasant set of shots to the belly if you get bit by an infected animal. 

Without those shots, its symptoms include a laundry list of vampire characteristics: an aversion to strong stimuli, including bright light and strong smells (read: garlic); hydrophobia, so you'd be thirsty as all get-out but unable to overcome your fear of water (read: holy water); and a fear of breezes and mirrors (read: Edward Cullen). 

Even weirder, the disease makes it really hard to swallow, so the victim starts foaming at the mouth and hissing, because again, why would a vampire hiss? We want vampires to be scary, and we call it a hissy-fit for a reason. Of course, furious rabies' biggest kicker is that the victim quickly gets crazy aggressive and wants to bite everything that moves, basically acting like any rabid animal would. 

European vampire hysteria often coincided with massive outbreaks of furious rabies, like the one in Hungary in the 1730s. And the European animals that spread rabies -- wolves, dogs, bats -- are all associated with vampirism. Combine that with the fact that fingernails and teeth appear to grow after death (thanks to dehydration), and decomposing entrails take on a dark red color that looks like horror-movie blood (thanks to the ever-presence of death that we can only distract through dick-jokes), and you've got the makings of an excellent, scary myth.

What's weird is that they had to do all this badass world-beating while only having access to poor quality iron. They called it bog iron, and although bog chemistry concentrated iron for extraction, it made for really terrible sword making. This meant that weapons wouldn't stay sharp, would break if stressed, and leave gross bog crumbs all over the table.

What the Vikings needed was all-business crucible steel, the kind you find in all the swords of legend and weirdly specific dating profiles. It was made by heating wrought iron to absurd temperatures with materials rich in carbon. This gave the metal a high carbon content, making it stronger and better able to maintain an edge.

The process for making it was originally discovered in India. But because Europeans didn't know where India was and were able to trade for Indian swords in Damascus, Syria, they called the metal in the blades Damascus Steel.

It was originally thought that Vikings got their steel through this trade. But there's a much more badass (one might say metal) explanation: Instead of trading, Vikings were able to turn their piss-poor iron into crucible steel swords through a ritual that infused their steel with the burnt bones of dead animals and ancestors. We know the practice was widespread because animal and human bone fragments remain common discoveries in old abandoned Viking forges. They did this thinking they were transferring the spirit of the bone's owners to their swords, but what they were doing was adding carbon to the iron, creating a form of crucible steel.

This meant that they had some of the best weaponry in Europe at the time and a kind of steel that Europe wouldn't see again until the Industrial Revolution. It's why the best Viking swords, called Ulfberth swords, were extremely strong, found all throughout the lands the Vikings conquered and were popular enough to inspire their own fakes market.

"Hey, wouldn't that just poison the hell out of Egyptians?" Well, yes, dear reader, it would, and it probably did. But because Egyptians didn't live much longer than their 30's, they didn't suffer as much from the bioaccumulation of lead if they would've lived longer.

Plus, they didn't straight up eat the stuff like the Romans did. So that probably helped.

When light goes through calcite, it separates into two beams in a process called birefringence. One beam takes a different path off the main beam, causing two images to form when you look through it or aim the light at a surface. However, if you move the calcite into a specific position, the images become equal, and this allows a sailor to determine the position of the light's source even without seeing it. As long as you took a sighting at least every three hours, you were pretty much set to go wherever the hell you wanted. They tested it with lasers in France, computers in Hungary, and built a device that could do it; trust us, it's legit.

To add even more weight to that theory, archeologists actually found a sample of a 'Sunstone' in a wreck off the English coast from 1592, theorizing that the British learned the trick from the Vikings, who made it a point to conquer the hell out of England during the Viking Age.

Well, it's hypothesized that, back in the Iron Age, people would seal up treasure in the tombs of kings and rich people. The thing is, they would seal these tombs with a ton of things that decomposed: people, animals, vegetables, etc. The buried flesh would emit gasses as they decomposed, and with nowhere to go, they would create pressurized gas pockets. Try to open the tombs with a torch so you could see, or cause a spark with an iron spade, and BOOM!: big, firey oblivion in a world where Michael Bay wouldn't be around for thousands of years.

In Wales, there was a king who was trying to make his walls impenetrable. The only thing is, the walls kept falling down. A young real-life Merlin told the king that it was dragons fighting underground, possibly because he believed it, possibly because when a king asks you a question, you give him an answer even if it's nonsense. Instead of underground lizards, it was more likely gas pockets buried in the vast Welsh coal deposits underground. 

That wasn't just true of the old Arthurian legends either. The Chimera, the famous creature with the tail of a snake, the body of a lion, and the head of a stag, also came about in a similar way. There was a mountain in Turkey named Mt. Chimera because ancient people are just as lazy as we are, that constantly leaked methane, which sometimes will shoot flame up from the earth. Mash of bunch of animals people are naturally afraid of together, and boom, you got your monster.

And honestly, if there's something terrible beneath the earth, waiting and guarding treasure, you can bet nobody's volunteering to check if there were huge monsters ready to murder them. Which is a good, logical policy we moderns routinely ignore.

Top image: T Studio, Alex_Maryna/Shutterstock