The Milk of Hammamet

Our story begins in deep Antiquity, with a meteorite-worshipping cult in ancient Anatolia. Its self-castrating followers believed the sacred stone to be the Magna Mater — the mother of all gods — and the celestial relic inspired merry celebrations and ritual sacrifices.

In 204 BCE, when the rock was placed on a ship traveling to Rome, “two suns had been seen, and at night there had been light for a time”. That was how Livy described a spectacular portent in his Ab Urbe Condita (Book 29, Chapter 14), confirming a Sybilline prophecy that the meteorite would help Rome win its war against Hannibal of Carthage.

When our astronomer Errol stumbled across this passage in the late 1890s, his heart skipped a beat. Could it be that this meteorite had an astrophysical connection to the binary suns of “his” solar system such that he could use it to extract their stories? Was anything left of this meteorite, even just a sliver on which he could experiment?

So started a quest that nearly cost Errol his life. He tracked the rock to North Africa, where a piece of the meteorite ended up after the destruction of the Magna Mater temple in Rome. His explorations in Carthage made him an unwitting participant in a blood rite enacted by renegade Cybele cultists, the last keepers of the rock. In his escape, he managed to hide a meteorite piece near train tracks in Hammamet, Tunisia, hoping to retrieve it later – but the wrath of the cultists forced him to leave the continent.

Errol’s increasingly unhinged notes from this failed adventure kickstarted our mission: We would follow in his footsteps in Tunisia, see if we could find this last sliver and make it sing. And we did. An abandoned train was our resonating chamber, a short book and video our astonishing documentation. The video is still in progress, but we must at least share a few photos of our performance here.