When Hellish Nell claimed to have channeled spirits of the dead (who gave away wartime secrets), she was charged under Witchcraft Act of 1735 (and was in 1944 the last person so convicted) for being the agency through which spirits of deceased persons communicated with living persons.The book “The Strange Case of Hellish Nell: the story of Helen Duncan and the witch trial of World War II” by Nina Shandler traces the story from start to finish, including why the Public Prosecutor tried her as a witch and not a spy, Churchill’s demand to know what was behind the obsolete tom foolery of the Witchcraft Act of 1735 being used in a modern court of justice, through the appeal to the Supreme Court where the Lord Chief Justice delivered the punch line (9 months in prison was in no way excessive).You can’t make stuff like this up! This book is a fascinating read – one that gives pause and brings to mind why old laws of “no possible use” should be taken off the books least they be used in unreasonable ways by minions of the state.
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NASA image of the day
A Mosaic of Cassiopeia
This mosaic of images from the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explore, or WISE, in the constellation of Cassiopeia contains a large star-forming nebula within the Milky Way Galaxy, called IC 1805 or the Heart Nebula, a portion of which is seen at the right of the image. IC 1805 is more than 6,000 light-years from Earth. Also visible in this image are two nearby galaxies, Maffei 1 and Maffei 2. In visible light these galaxies are hidden by dust in IC 1805 and were unknown until 1968 when Paolo Maffei found them using infrared observations. Both galaxies contain billions of stars and are located some 10 million light-years away. Maffei 1 is a lenticular galaxy, which has a disk-like structure and a central bulge but no spiral structure or appreciable dust content. Maffei 2 is a spiral galaxy that also has a disk shape, but with a bar-like central bulge and two prominent dusty spiral arms. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
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