Month: March 2025

There are many mysterious discs being seen in the skies around the world. This disc was not seen in the sky but dug up on the island of Crete. It’s called the Phaistos Disc and no one has been able to decipher it. There are numerous guesses about what it might be. Of the many guesses, I think my favorite is that it’s some type of ancient board game. It amuses me to picture our ancient ancestors, some 3500 years ago, playing their version of Monopoly!

There’s little hope of ever translating the symbols on the disc. We don’t have any other examples of this ‘language.’ Without a larger sampling, it’s simply impossible to figure out the intended meaning. Though human beings have never stopped trying to accomplish the impossible. Our one chance to solve the mystery would be a new archaeological discovery that contained another sampling of the symbols. Or better yet, a Rosetta Stone type tablet that would give us a translation in a language already known.

I was fortunate enough to see this disc on display in a museum. I even bought a book about it. Yet I’m unable to make any sense of it. Of course, I’m unable to make sense of a lot of things, but that’s another story. However, the disc did set my mind to considering the place of mystery in our lives. Humans don’t like mystery. We want to know all the answers. The universe is not designed to allow us to know all the answers. No matter how much we learn or how much we advance our technology, there will be mysteries. Mysteries in the far reaches of the universe. Mysteries within our own human nature. And definitely mysteries about God.

I think I have rocks on the brain this past month, as I keep writing about them. But it’s apparently something I have in common with ancient people in Europe who were apparently obsessed with them. This picture depicts Carnac, a collection of some 3000 standing stones located in Northwestern France. These stones were carved and erected about 6000 years ago, forming the largest collection of megaliths in the world.

For all the research and archaeology done, we still don’t know exactly why ancient Europeans were creating these sites. Were they some sort of ancient astronomical observatories? Were they aligned for the winter and summer solstices? Were they places of religious worship? I rather prefer the more legendary explanations. Pope Cornelius, being chased by an army of pagans, turned that army to stone. Or Merlin turned a Roman army to stone to protect King Arthur. Ultimately, we don’t know. It seems like we should be able to figure out why they were constructed, but I can’t even figure out why the builder of my house put in certain features. And that was only 20 years ago.

Carnac, and all the standing stone sites, represent for me a basic human problem. We want to understand things, but frequently it’s beyond our power to do so. Whenever humans are faced with an unknown, we try to make sense of it. We see strange shadows and our minds force those shadows to conform to shapes that are familiar to us. We see odd lights in the sky and we come up with explanations for them. Sometimes those explanations can be quite bizarre. But it’s something uniquely human, the need to make sense out of the world around us. Whatever those ancient builders were doing 6000 years ago, I’m pretty sure they were trying to make sense of the world by doing it. They’re not so different from us.