Sun City (South Africa)

Zimbabwean banknotes ranging from 10 dollars to 100 billion dollars printed within a one-year period. The magnitude of the currency scalars signifies the extent of the hyperinflation.

Corybantian dance , the type of dance most likely danced on Gymnopedia festivals (image from Smith 's Dictionary of Antiquities ).

01Lilly received early funding from the U.S. Navy and NIMH for dolphin communication research while designing his first isolation tanks.
02During his ketamine period, Lilly reported contact with entities he called ECCO — the 'Earth Coincidence Control Office' — in published accounts.
03He injected ketamine inside a floatation tank while the tank itself was submerged in a swimming pool, compounding the dissociation.

Sun City (South Africa)

Apartheid law banned gambling and interracial sex in South Africa proper — so the government built Sun City inside the 'independent' bantustan of Bophuthatswana, where neither law applied. Frank Sinatra played there in 1981.

Order of the Solar Temple

In October 1994, 53 Solar Temple members died across Switzerland, Quebec, and France in synchronized rituals — stabbed, suffocated, shot, then burned. More followed in 1995 and 1997. Leaders claimed transit to Sirius.

Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe

At its worst, Zimbabwe's inflation hit 89.7 sextillion percent annually. Workers were paid twice a day so they could spend wages before lunch erased the value.

Joel-Peter Witkin

Joel-Peter Witkin sources severed heads and amputated limbs from morgues, arranges them with live models into Caravaggio-style compositions, and photographs them. Mexican authorities gave him unclaimed cadavers. The prints sell for $10,000 each.

Patti Smith

Patti Smith spent years photographing Robert Mapplethorpe's hands — obsessively, serially — because, she wrote, she couldn't stop seeing them. Her 2010 memoir 'Just Kids' won the National Book Award and was written, she said, to keep a promise to a dying man.

Sutton Hoo helmet

Buried in a Suffolk mound around 625 CE with a 27-metre ship and a king's full treasure, the Sutton Hoo helmet was found in 1939 in over 500 fragments — reconstructed, it still carries the pressed impression of a human face in its iron cheekplates.

Battle of Caporetto

Italy collapsed so completely at Caporetto in 1917 that 300,000 soldiers were taken prisoner in one week. A 29-year-old Lieutenant Erwin Rommel, with fewer than 200 men, personally accepted the surrender of 9,000 Italians.

Gymnopaedia

At the Gymnopaedia, naked Spartan youths danced in full summer sun on the Spartan agora for days — a festival honoring the dead of Thyreatis. The audience was the entire citizen body.

John C. Lilly

Lilly invented the isolation tank, mapped dolphin cognition for the government, and spent stretches of the 1970s submerged in ketamine for weeks at a time — still publishing, still funded, still presenting at conferences. The line between experiment and subject dissolved.