If you have ever played Zelda then you are likely very accustomed to finding magical cubes at the bottom of the river with strange inscriptions on them. However, you likely never expected to find them in real life, let alone at the bottom of a river in England. Will Read a fisherman from Coventry, England couldn’t believe it when that was exactly what he found.
Will Read was spending his coronavirus lockdown in a similar way to many. He wasn’t working and had lots of time at home with his family. He tried to think of different ways to entertain his children and they came up with a fun daily ritual. He and his family started magnet fishing. Magnet fishing is actually banned in some countries because they fear that you could find unexploded bombs and cause a huge accident.
While you could just go fishing, the best you usually catch in that case is fish. If you go magnet fishing you may find buried treasure, lots gold, and more. While I am sure that when Will was trying to get his children interested in magnet fishing he told them about the strange treasures they could possibly uncover, I doubt he really believed that hidden treasure lay on the riverbed. Yet it turns out that it did.
One day while magnet fishing, Will started to find a lot of metal objects. He started to live-stream his fishing expedition and on the video can be seen pulling these small metal cubes out of the water. Each cube is covered with a strange inscription from a different language and alphabet. Will continued to find more and more of these cubes until he uncovered a total of 60. He had found some real treasure, maybe.
Will still isn’t quite sure what the cubes mean. He returned to the site for another fishing expedition and this time found a strange coin to match the cubes. He has since posted the pictures on the internet and asked for help in identifying what the cubes are and what they could mean. Each grid was around 125 grams in weight and he now believes the inscriptions are in Sanskrit.
Many of the comments online are convinced that the cubes are part of a Hindu prayer ritual that is started by throwing the cubes in moving water. Each cube is identical with the exception of one face that is different on many of them. A different comment says that this is incorrect and that they are actually of Jyotish origin and that they can summon the protection of a God.
Whatever they are, they look incredible. I am not sure about Will Reed but if I found these magic cubes I would be struggling to sleep at night. Surely this is the start of every great movie where you think they are useless blocks but one night you hear a strange rumbling in the kitchen and go down to meet a genie who wants to grant you three wishes. A key part of this discovery will be to date the stones to find out whether they are an ancient discovery or something from an old Halloween party. Once the stones can be dated they can be better understood.
Can you imagine being one of Will’s children and being lucky enough to find this during your quarantine from school? Surely the Reed children will have the best story of any child when they go back and talk about how they spent the break. Aside from everything else, Will has shown us that there are some incredibly fun options to do during the coronavirus, you just have to think outside the box or magic cube in this case.
