6 Ancient Bizarre Beliefs With Logical Explanations

6

Witches Brews Were Actually Effective Medicines (And at the Very Least, Got You High)

Witches fly on brooms, cackle in the night, and make terrible remakes starring Anne Hathaway; that's what the old myths tell us. But it's worth delving into who these old witches actually were and what they were doing trying to commune with the Devil. Turns out they were practicing medicine.  

Thing is, in the Middle Ages, 'real' doctors sucked. They were as likely to babble on about the four humors as they were to give you a hole in the head. Even with their heads full of nonsense, they were hard to train, which made them both rare and expensive. That's why most peasants relied on the folk remedies passed down by women, which wouldn't give you lead or mercury poisoning and had the added benefit of actually helping cure you. While this gave women a lot of power, doctors and the Church didn't much like this. It helped lead to the whole 'heads I kill you, tails you die' witch trials, where you could be killed just as easily for sexing the Devil as you could be for practicing medicine without a license.

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.

5

Garlic and Holy Water Would Actually Protect You From Monsters

Say hundreds of years ago, you were a writer coming up with a list of things that fight vampires, aside from a time-traveling Wesley Snipes. What would you come up with? A cross would make sense, because Christianity, but why holy water? And hell, garlic? Garlic's not exactly a spiritual powerhouse. And sunlight? Do you think the predator of the most dangerous game is going to be taken down by a little sun?

4

'Spirit Infused' Viking Steel Was Actually Stronger

Vikings were world-conquering badasses, as Cracked has covered at length before. Able to raid empires from Russia to England, they inspired more heavy metal albums than horror, boobs, and chrome combined.

3

Egyptian Eyeliner Protected Your Eyes

In this wonderland of bb guns, drugs, and random poop-flinging monkeys, our eyes are fragile things. Nowadays, you have the possibility of turning into a bitchin' cyborg with digital vision; that wasn't true of our ancient ancestors. Back then, it was fairly easy to get the ultimate case of pink-eye that would leave you blind forever. 

Ancient Egyptians actually had a way of dealing with this. They created an eyeliner that they thought blessed with the healing powers of the god Horus, the falcon god created from a phallus tossed into the ocean and Bill Maher's favorite Christ-themed superhero. Anyone who's watched a football game knows that black eyeliner protects the eye from glare, but nobody thinks of their mascara as having magic powers.

When an analytical chemist got ahold of some ancient Egyptian eyeliner (and probably a curse of some kind), they found something interesting: two types of lead salts that weren't naturally occurring. This meant that the Egyptians actually had to synthesize the salts, which isn't easy under the best of circumstances, and certainly not under ancient world conditions. Not to mention, lead is about as good for us as reality TV: a little will make you feel gross, and a lot will destroy both your body and mind.

Weirdly, these lead salts had protective properties in multiple ways. First, the lead salts had anti-microbial properties, making sure that none of the microbes that swam in the Nile had a chance to swim into Egyptian eyes. Second, because the body knows that lead isn't good for us, the lead near their eyes activated an inflammatory response, which is the body's first level of immune protection, and would help kill infection before it had a chance to take root.

2

Sunstones Weren't Magic, But They Did Help Vikings Navigate the Atlantic

In addition to being incredible fighters, Vikings were also incredible navigators. That was the only way they could hit up Iceland, Greenland, and North America long before a certain Italian backed by the Spanish crown. And they didn't have things like clocks, compasses, or astrolabes that could help a ship determine its location like they had in the Age of Sail. 

If you read the old Norse stories, you'll find references to a magic stone that allowed Vikings to navigate their ships across the Atlantic, divining the path of a ship through any sort of stormy seas. These magic stones were called Sunstones, or solarsteinns if you want to be all grimdark about it, and they could supposedly delineate the sun's position even if it was obscured. This kind of magic would've been essential in the North Atlantic, a region famous for its fog and clouds, which probably made for a lot of goth Vikings.

For centuries, people thought this was a myth, but recently, scientists have theorized that crystals (calcite, or Icelandic Spar, not the garbage geodes you can buy at a New Age store) could do exactly what the Norse stories said they could do by refracting sunlight, without any of the magic everyone thought they needed. 

1

Fire-breathing Dragons Were Underground Pockets of Gas

We all know that dragons aren't real -- your sad uncle, with the nickname that he tries to keep making happen, doesn't count -- but we can recognize that, if this is the case, fire-breathing dragons are a weird kind of monster. First, if they live primarily underground, why would they have wings and fly? Why would they be hoarding treasure? Why would they think they could fight the combined forces of Matthew McConaughey and Christian Bale at the same time?