Today is Columbus Day, so I have time off to write a posting and also a ready made subject.

Stories repeated for centuries tend to gather a life of their own and take on the character of religious dogma. Any hint that the story may not actually be true used to be countered with "Everybody knows…," A modern version of course is “I saw it on TV.”

Well, it was Josh Billings who made the comment, “It isn’t what people don’t know that’s the problem. It’s what they do know that ain’t so.” And in the case of the Columbus material that is certainly true.

In the past few decades the orthodox views of ancient history have been presented with newly discovered, newly translated, or newly emphasized data that just don’t fit it with the tidy schemes and time lines of the academic world.

Since to many academics changing their minds is the equivalent of dying, the new data has been ignored or sneered at because the people who noticed what the experts hadn’t noticed don’t have degrees in the disciplines involved. That always happens. When Fulton built his steam ship the experts stood on the bank shouting in chorus, "It’ll never start." When it took off down stream they ran down the bank shouting, "It’ll never stop."

An extremely famous and much loved appearance of the Lady who is always called the Virgin Mary, unless she appears in India, Tibet, or Greece, is the Lady of Guadalupe. Thousands of Mexicans give the left-brained Christian world a wonderful example of what unconditional devotion and sincere worship mean, with regard to this Lady, who is obviously regarded as way up in the goddess category by many of her devotees. They illustrate perfectly the spiritual axiom of Gurumayi, a Siddha yogini, who said, “In your faith the Supreme Being dwells.” She had been tremendously impressed by the childlike innocence of the devotion of the Mexicans to the Lady, great examples of ‘God is Love.’