THE ANCIENT ICELAND.

In geological terms, Iceland is a young Island. It started to form about 20 million years ago from a series of volcanic eruptions on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where it lies between the North American and Eurasian plates that spread at a rate of approximately 2.5 centimeters per year.
Iceland remained, for a long time, one of the world's last larger islands uninhabited by humans (the others being New Zealand and Madagascar). The exact date that humans first reached the Island is uncertain.
The Iceland is one of the most active volcanic regions in the world, with eruptions occurring on average roughly every 3 years (in the 20th century 39 volcanic eruptions occurred on and around). The hotspot is partially responsible for the high volcanic activity which has formed the Island of Iceland. The first documented eruption in 939 was the largest flood basalt in historic time. An estimated 18km3 of magma poured out of the earth. Evidence from tree rings from around the Northern Hemisphere indicated that the eruption caused the summer of 940 to be one of the coolest summers in 1,500 years. Summer average temperatures in places as Central Europe, Scandinavia, Canada, Alaska, and Central Asia were lower than normal.
The first permanent settler in the Island is usually considered to have been a Norwegian chieftain named Ing'Olfr and his wife, Hall'Veig  Fro'Oad'Ottir, together with his brother Hj'Orl'Eif. A medieval Icelandic written work describes in considerable detail the settlement (Land'Nam) of Iceland by the Norse in the 9th and 10th CE. The people were primarily of Norwegian, Irish and Scottish origin. Some of the Irish and Scots were slave and servants of the Norse chiefs, according to the sagas of Icelanders, the Land'Nama'Bok, and other documents.
The traditional explanation for the exodus from Norway is that people were fleeing the harsh rule of the Norwegian king Har'Ald  Fair'Hair. He reigned from 872 to 930 CE.
The settlers worshipped the Norse gods, among them Odin, Thor, Freyr and Freyja. By the 10th CE, political pressure from Europe to convert to Christianity mounted. In the year 1,000 CE, as a civil war between the religious groups seemed to arouse strongly in debating which religion they should practice: Norse or Christianity, the established assembly (Al'Thing=Al'Pingi) appointed one of the chieftains, Thor'Geir  Lj'Osvet'Nin'Gag'Odi (law speaker from 985 to 1001), to decide over the matter. Thor'Geir himself a Norse priest, decided in favor of Christianity after a day and night of silent meditation under a fur blanket. Under the compromise, Norse religion could still be practiced in private and several old customs were retained. After his decision, Thor'Geir himself converted to Christianity. Upon returning to his farm, he is said to have thrown the idols of his gods into a nearby waterfall, for which it is now known in Icelandic as the "waterfall of the gods" (Goda'Foss).
Iceland is unusually suited for waterfalls. The Island has a North Atlantic climate that produces frequent rain and snow and a near-Arctic location that produces large glaciers, whose summer melts feed many rivers. As a result, it is home to a number of large and powerful waterfalls.

THE BELIEFS OF THE ANCIENT MAYANS.

The Maya civilization occupied a wide territory that included South Western Mexico and Central America. This area included the entire Yucatan Peninsula, the highlands to the South of Sierra Madre, and all of the territory now incorporated into modern countries of Guatemala and Belize, as well as the Western portions of Honduras and El Salvador. The limestone of the Yucatan Peninsula was easily quarried and used for building and tool making. In the South, volcanoes stretched over the highlands and yielded valuable resources. The fertile volcanic soil allowed the people to grow crops.
The Mayans centered their power in the tropical lowlands of what is now Guatemala. They excelled at agriculture, pottery, hieroglyph writing, calendar making, mathematics, and astronomical system. They left behind an great amount of impressive architecture and symbolic artwork. They built city-states that included great pyramid temples and public plazas featuring huge stone columns that recounted their history.
The earliest Maya settlements date around 1800 BC. The rise and fall of the civilization lasted over 3,000 years. Maya royalty recorded their history in writing and in imagery carved on monuments. The commoners recorded their own history in a different way, not only their history as a family but also their place in the cosmos.
Anthropologists say they have found evidence indicating that Mayans recorded their family history by burying it within their homes. They regularly ended their homes by razing the walls, burning the floors and placing artifacts and human remains on top before burning them again. The things buried didn't mean that people forgot about them. They buried his people in the exact same spot and removing bones from earlier ancestors to place them in other sacred spots, or removed pieces of them to be kept as mementos. The de-animation and re-animation of the home marked the passage of time and the cyclical nature of life. The arrangements, color and condition of the buried artifacts represented a sacred language of symbolic meaning.
These rituals occurred every 40 or 50 years and marked important dates in the Maya calendar. After termination, the family built a new home on the old foundation, using broken and whole vessels that had a very significant part of the dedication rites, colorful fragments, animal bones and rocks to mark important areas and to provide ballast for a new plaster floor.
Colors, such as red, which represented the East, Life, and Rebirth, were commonly used in burials and were generally found on the East side of the body or group of artifacts. Burial in the homes was common but only a few family members were entombed in there. Other artifacts -including groups of obsidian rocks- were also used in burials representing Mayan belief in the 9 levels of the underworld or the 13 levels of heaven.
Maya rulers and elite class had a basis in the domestic rituals of their subjects. Every royal emperor emerged or developed from domestic practices.

THE ANCIENT AFRICA.

The ancient name of the African continent is "Al'Kebul'An" meaning "Mother of Mankind." It is the oldest and the only word of indigenous origin that was used by the Moors, Nubians, Carthagenians (Khart-Haddans), and Ethiopians.
The name Africa, adopted by almost everyone today, was given by the Greeks and continued by the Romans. It is recorded from the time when the Roman Empire took occupation of the majority of the continent. The practice in these type of occupation was the complete disconnection of the local people with their own culture, deities and knowledge, by renaming all the icons, thereby disconnecting the significance, meaning, and sacredness from any specific belief.
Africa is distinctly unique among the 7 continents. It is the second-largest (a fifth of the earth's total land mass) continent both in size and population (1 billion). About 15% of the world's population resides in Africa. It is rich in cultural heritage and diversity (people speak over 1,500 different languages), and has an enormous wealth of natural resources.
The longest river in the world, the Nile (6,650 km/4,132 mi), is located in Africa. The world's largest desert, the Sahara, is in Africa too, which is almost the size of the United States. Victoria Falls, in addition, is the largest waterfall in the African continent, it is 355 feet high and one mile wide. The largest island in Africa, also the fourth largest in the world, is Madagascar. Lake Victoria is the largest one in the continent and the second-largest freshwater lake in the world, spanning 26,830 square miles.
The highest point of the continent is Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. It rises 5,895 m/19,340 ft above sea level.
According to paleontology, the early hominids evolved in Africa 10 to 5 million years ago. Around 1.8 million years ago, the working man first appeared in the fossil record. They were fairly small brained and used primitive stone tools. The earliest physical evidence of astronomical activity appears to be a lunar calendar found on a bone dated to between 23,000 and 18,000 BC. Around 16,000 BC, from the Red Sea hills to the Northern Ethiopian Highlands, nuts, grasses, and tubers were being collected for food. By 13,000 to 11,000, people began collecting wild grains. Between 10,000 and 8,000 BC, North East Africa was cultivating wheat and barley and raising sheep and cattle. A wet climatic phase turned the Ethiopian Highlands into a mountain forest. Around 7,000BC, the settlers domesticated donkeys. Cushitic speakers, partially turning away from cattle herding, domesticated love-grass (teff) and finger millet between 5,500 and 3,500 BC.
The first major civilization in Africa was Egypt, centered about the Nile River delta, and it truly began around 3,150 BC when the ruler Nemes unified the entire area into a kingdom. They referred to the people West of the Nile, ancestral to the Berbers, as Libyans. The Libyans were agriculturalists like the Mauri of Morocco and the Numidians of Central and Eastern Algeria and Tunis. They were also nomadic, having the horse, and occupied the arid pastures and desert. Berber desert nomads were typically in conflict with Berber coastal agriculturalists.
The ancient history of ancient Africa is inextricable linked to that of the Ancient Near East. Nubia was a major source of copper as well as gold. The use of gold and silver in Egypt dates back to the pre-dynastic period.
The Phoenicians were Mediterranean seamen in constant search for valuable metals such as copper, gold, tin, and lead. They began to populate the North African coast with settlements -trading and mixing with the native Berbers.
In the Horn of Africa, a peninsula in the East, South West of the Red Sea, an ancient kingdom centered in then city of Axum ruled modern-day Eritrea, Northern Ethiopia and the coastal area of the Western part of the Arabian Peninsula. The ancient Egyptians established ties with the Land of Punt, an ancient kingdom, in 2,350 BC. Punt was a trade partner and it was located in modern-day Somalia, Dji'Bouti or Eritrea.
South Africa, the area of the continent that lies South of the Sahara desert, developed independent in those times.

THE AZTEC WAY OF LIFE.

Religion was extremely important in Aztec life and was part of all levels of their society. The word for priest was "Tlamac'Azqui " meaning "giver of things." The main responsibility of the priesthood was to make sure that the gods were given their due in the form of offerings, ceremonies, and sacrifices. They had a very strict training, and had to live very austere and ethical lives. Additionally they had classes of religious specialists not affiliated with the established priesthood. This included wandering curers, black magicians, and other occultists (most of which they feared) and hermits. Military orders, professions, and wards each operated their own lodge dedicated to their specific god. The heads of these lodges had some ritual and moral duties, that included annually obtaining and training a suitable slave or captive to represent and die as the "image" of their deity in a specific festival.
The Aztec world consisted of three main parts, the earth world on which humans lived, an underworld (Mic'Tlan) which belonged to the dead and the upper plane in the sky. Each world was associated with specific set of deities and astronomical objects.
The earth and the nether world were both open for humans to enter, whereas the upper plane in the sky was impenetrable to humans. Geographical features such as caves and mountains held symbolic value as places of crossing between worlds. Existence was envisioned as being cyclical, straddling the two worlds in a cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. The cardinal directions were connected to the layout of the spiritual world, each direction associated with specific colors and gods.
The upper and nether worlds were both layered. The underworld had 9 layers which were inhabited by different deities and mythical beings. The sky had 13 layers, the highest of which was called "place of duality"(Omey'Ocan) and which held the progenitor dual god Omet'Eotl.
Other places were "the place of Tlal'Oc"(Tlal'Ocan), a verdant spring-like place with abundant water where people who drowned had their afterlife, and a mythical "place of origin of the gods"(Tamoan-Chan).
The Aztecs believed that after death the soul went to one of these three places: Tlal'Ocan, Mic'Tlan, and the sun. For fallen warriors' souls and women who died in childbirth, they were transformed into hummingbirds that would follow the sun on its journey through the sky. Souls of people who died from less glorious causes would go to Mic'Tlan (place of the dead). And those who drowned would go to Tlal'Ocan.
According to tradition, the Major Temple (Templo Mayor) was one of the main temples of the Aztecs in their capital city of Ten'Och'Titlan, which is now Mexico City. It was dedicated simultaneously to two gods, Hui'Zilopoch'Tli, god of war and Tlaloc, god of rain and agriculture, each of which had a shrine at the top of the pyramid with separate staircases. The temple is located on the exact spot where the god Huit'Zilopoch'Tli was born. He emerged from his mother (Coat'Licue) fully grown and fully armed to battle his sister Coyol'Xauhqui and her brothers who intended to kill him and their mother.
Huit'Zilpoch'Tli was victorious, slaying and dismembering his sister. Her body was then thrown to the bottom of the hill. The various levels of the Temple represent the cosmology of the Aztec world. First of all, it is aligned with the cardinal directions with gates that connect to roads leading in these directions. This indicates the place where the plane of the human world in which the human race live in intersect the 13 levels of the heavens, called Topan, and the 9 levels of the underworld, called Mic'Tlan.
It was at the time the largest and most important active ceremonial center.