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Folklore of World Holidays
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Read MacDonald
Against All
Enemies: Inside the White House's War on Terror – What Really Happened
The
Passion
Mel Gibson
A Guide to the
Passion
Power and Terror -
Noam Chomsky
The Pagan Prosperity
The Triumph of the Moon
The Celtic Dragon
Tarot
Sabbat Entertaining
The Pagan Book of Days
The Rise of the Creative
Class
Celebrate the Earth
A Year of Holidays in the Pagan
Tradition
Wheel of the Year
The Trouble
with Islam
Brave Hearts, Rebel
Spirits
The Five Biggest Lies Bush
Told Us About Iraq
Lady Godiva
Lucifer Ascending: The
Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture
Activists Beyond
Borders
The Book of Spells
Spellcraft
The Book of Saints
The Encyclopedia of Saints
Daily Everything
Brewer's
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
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What
Would Jefferson Do?
By Thom
Hartmann
The Price of Loyalty
The
Torture Debate in America
The
Culture of the New Capitalism
Pagan
Christianity
By Robert Fisk
The God Who Wasn't There
A
Question of Torture
By Alfred McCoy
When Corporations Rule the World
Outfoxed - Rupert Murdoch's War on
Journalism
The Corporation
Highly recommended DVD
Crimes Against Nature : How George W Bush and His Corporate
Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy
By Robert F Kennedy, Jr
The Skeptic's Dictionary
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
365 Goddess
Adventures in a TV Nation
Michael
Moore
Drawing Down the Moon
Globalization/Anti-Globalization
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Sunday after Easter, Slavic (2004)
A note
about the dating of items in Wilson's Almanac
"Krasnaja Gorka –
'beautiful' or 'red' hillock - the Sunday after Easter. In
Russia, a woman holding a red egg and round loaf of bread would face
East and sing a spring song which the chorus then took up.
Afterward, a doll representing Marzena, grandmother Winter, was
carried to the edge of the village and thrown out or destroyed.
Xorovods, Russian circle dances, started on this day as well as were
Spring game songs; A female performer would enter the center of a
circle and mime the sowing, pulling, spreading, etc..of the flax all
the way up to the spinning. She and all those in the circle would
sing:
Turn out well, turn out well,
my flax.
Turn out well, my white flax. *
"This
is a form of sympathetic magic to ensure a bountiful flax harvest.
(* - Reeder - Russian Folk lyrics)" Source
Angel Sunday,
Palma de
Mallorca, Spain (2004)
"The Sunday after Easter is known as
Domingo del Ángel (Angel Sunday) in Mallorca, a day celebrated in
the capital, Palma de Mallorca, with a procession, blessings and
plenty of traditional food.
"The fiesta dates back to the early 15th
century when it was known as the Festividad del Santo Custodio de
Palma. It was 'celebrated' through the 15th and 16th
centuries with a procession and blessing of bread for the poor.
After that the event seemed to disappear, only to be revived in 1982
under its present name.
"Today it is one of the biggest fiestas of
the year, starting in the early hours of the morning. Hundreds of
people walk from the town hall to the Castillo de Bellver, where
there are musicians and people dressed as giants. The food comes
out, the music and dancing begins and there are special games for
children."
Source
Day of the
Fire Dragons
(2004)
"This day always falls on the last Sunday
before the sign of Taurus. It's a day to honor the power of
the fire by lighting a dragon candle or other such thing." Source
Nwyvre:
The Dragon of the Inner Flame
"The Nwyvre is both a dragon and a force. All human beings carry a
piece of this dragon energy. In
some it lies quiescent and in others it rises. The eastern view of the
Nwyvre is known as the kundalini. The Druid term for life-force is Nwyvre - an old Welsh word
meaning energy and vigor. In common with Eastern symbology, the
snake or dragon is seen in Druidry as the prime symbol of the
life-force that snakes both through the land and through us …"
Source
Lyrid meteor
showers (Apr 15 - Apr 28,
peaking Apr
22)
Cerealia, for
goddess Ceres,
ancient Rome (Apr 12 - 19)
Circensian games, ancient Rome (Apr 12 - 19; Sep 4 - 19)
Feast day of St Agapitus
Feast day of St Agia
Feast day of St Apollonius, the
Apologist, martyr
(Musk narcisse, Narcissus
moschatus, is
today's plant, dedicated to this saint.)
St Apollonius (died around 186)
was a 2nd-century Christian
martyr
and apologist
who is not to be confused with Apollinaris
Claudius, an apologist of the same era.
Feast day of St Calocerus
of Brescia
Feast day of St Eusebius,
Bishop of Fano, Italy
Feast day of St Gabuinus
Feast day of St Galdinus
(Galdin; Galdino), Archbishop of Milan
St Galdino (d. 1176)
was a Christian
saint
and anti-Lombard.
More
Feast day of St Idesbald
Feast day of St James Oldo
Feast day of St
Laserian, Bishop of
Leighlin, Ireland
Feast day of St Maria Anna
Blondin
Feast day of St Marie of
the Incarnation
Feast day of St Pedro de
San Jose Betancur
Feast day of St Perfecto
Perfecto was a Christian
saint
and martyr
who died in 850.
The legend says that Perfecto's final words were to bless Jesus
Christ and
condemn Muhammad and his Qur'an.
More
Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days Shop saints
Republic Day,
Zimbabwe
News results for
Zimbabwe
Nagasaki
Takoage, or Kite-Flying Event,
Nagasaki,
Japan (Apr 3 - 29)
Bunsui
Oiran Dochu, or Courtesan (oiran)
Parade, Nishkanbara, Niigita Prefecture, Japan (Apr 16 - 23)
Ushibuka Haiya Matsuri,
Ushibuka,
Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan (Apr 18 - 20)
"One of the liveliest dance festivals in Kyushu. Incorporates
elements, brought over by boat from festivals from all over Japan.
It was originally thought up by fishermen who had nothing to do but
sit and drink when the southern wind set in. Held on the third
weekend of April."
Source
1480 Lucrezia
Borgia (d. 1519), illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI, known
popularly, but not conclusively, as a monstrous and Machiavellian
politician
"Borgia descendants would
influence European history for many generations, in the church
and politically, but none would gain as much notoriety as
Rodrigo, Cesare and Lucrezia. Authors like Machiavelli, Victor
Hugo and Alexandre Dumas wrote accounts and treatise of their
lives that are still popular today. Movies, plays, operas and
television series continue to characterise the Borgia triad as
licentious, bloodthirsty and power hungry. Some modern
historians believe Lucrezia's evil reputation is exaggerated,
that she was simply a victim of her father's and brother's
ruthless machinations." Source
1590 Ahmed I
(d. 1617),
Ottoman Emperor1605 Giacomo
Carissimi, Baroque era composer
1772 David Ricardo
(d. 1823),
economist 1819 Franz von Suppé
(d. 1895),
Croatian-Austrian composer
 1841
Henry Kendall (d. August 1, 1882), Australian poet, most remembered for his poetical works,
Leaves
from Australian Forests published in 1869. The son of
alcoholics, he was afflicted with the same disease.
On the death of his father, Basil, in 1852,
Kendall's mother took Henry and his twin bother, also named Basil,
to live with their grandfather, a strict Irish ex-soldier and
ex-policeman named Patrick McNally. Henry worked as a shepherd for
his grandfather, and had little education. Later, Henry spent two
years as a cabin boy at sea.
From about 1859 his poetry began to be
published in Sydney. His first volume of poems (1862) sold well, but
the second one (published by George Robertson in 1869) failed, and
eventually poverty and alcohol got the better of him, although the
actual cause of death was tuberculosis.
"Henry Kendall was born in 1839 near
Milton on the NSW coast. He lived in the coastal regions of
Illawarra in the south of NSW and Clarence River in the north
before spending two years aboard a whaling vessel. He returned to
live in Sydney and published his first volume of poetry, Poems
and Songs in 1862. He moved to Melbourne in 1868 after his
marriage and published his second volume, Leaves from
Australian Forests in 1869. His lack of success, however,
along with the death of his daughter Araluen drove him to alcohol
and he was to spend various periods in a Sydney asylum for his
addiction. He was finally cured, reunited with his wife and
achieved some level of success with his final volume of poetry, Songs
from the Mountains, in 1880. He died in 1882."
Source
From 'Ghost
Glen'
By Henry Kendall
"Shut your ears, stranger, or
turn from Ghost Glen now,
For the paths are grown over, untrodden by men now;
Shut your ears, stranger," saith the grey mother, crooning
Her sorcery runic, when sets the half-moon in.
To-night the north-easter goes travelling slowly,
But it never stoops down to that hollow unholy;
To-night it rolls loud on the ridges red-litten,
But it cannot abide in that forest, sin-smitten.
For over the pitfall the moon-dew is thawing,
And, with never a body, two shadows stand sawing --
The wraiths of two sawyers (~step under and under~),
Who did a foul murder and were blackened with
thunder!
 Louisa Lawson and Henry Kendall's grave
About four years after
the death of Henry Kendall (pictured), Louisa Lawson
(mother of Australia's foremost poet Henry Lawson
as well as mother of Australian women's
suffrage), although poor herself, began a subscription to raise
funds for a suitable memorial at his grave, which had only had a
simple cross marker until Louisa succeeded.
Lorna Ollif recounted the
story (Ollif, Lorna, Louisa Lawson: Henry Lawson's Crusading
Mother, Rigby, Sydney, 1978): When an artist named Lowe (not David Low
the cartoonist, who was not born yet) first came to Sydney (soon to
work for The
Bulletin), someone gave him the name of Louisa Lawson as
someone who might give him lodgings. She couldn't put him up, but
found someone who could. Louisa told Lowe of her concerns about the
poor state of Kendall's grave, and as her new friend was also
interested in Kendall, they went together to Waverley Cemetery to
see it. While Lowe sketched the grave by the South Pacific, Louisa
decided to take action ...
Read on at August
1 (date of Kendall's death in 1882) in the Book of Days
Henry Kendall Cottage
Kendall's
verse
Biography
More
Lawson
& Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson
1857 Clarence
Seward Darrow (d. March 13, 1938),
American lawyer in the 'Scopes
Monkey Trial' and some other celebrated and sensational 20th-Century
trials (eg, Leopold
and Loeb). He brought to the Scopes trial a memorable wit, sense
of humour and erudition.
Darrow was often lawyer to the underdog and
underprivileged; he was noted for his opposition to capital punishment
and as a popular public speaker on matters religious, social,
political, scientific and literary.
"He defended the right of John
Scopes, a Tennessee teacher, to lecture on the theories of
evolution in his classes, squaring off against William Jennings
Bryan in a trial that exemplified conflict between the past and
the modern world. He also defended Leopold and Loeb, the two
University of Chicago Laboratory School students who kidnapped
and killed a younger boy, but they were the only clients he ever
asked to plead guilty."
Source
Why
I Am an Agnostic, and Other Essays, by Darrow More
 1864 Rose Summerfield
(b. Rose Stone at Middleton Creek, near Ballarat in the gold mining districts of central
Victoria; d. April
14, 1922), Australian
socialist and pioneer feminist.
Rose
Summerfield was active in the Australasian
Secular Association (ASA) in Melbourne by 1886 and in that year
(March 23) the 21-year-old Rose married fellow freethinker Henry
Lewis Summerfield, a 55-year-old well-to-do Sydney businessman to
whom she bore a son. She wrote articles for the Hummer (soon to become the Sydney
Worker) under the name 'Rose Hummer', from April, 1892. In
the same year, she campaigned in Bourke on behalf of William
Lane's utopian scheme in South America, called New
Australia, and she delivered lectures on progressive topics in
Sydney. Following the death of her first husband, she
married Jack Cadogan, a shearers' cook in the spring of 1897.
A state socialist (she was a valued
campaigner and speaker in the Australian
Socialist League), disillusioned and
embittered by the labor politicians she knew in Australia, who she
believed had sold out the working class, Rose Cadogan and her
husband travelled in 1899 to New Australia in Paraguay, where they had four more sons. In
1908, like many others before them, they left William Lane's
failed utopia and settled in Yataity, north of the town of Villarrica, where Rose worked as a kind of district nurse, selling her own herbal
preparations, and Jack opened a store. It was Rose Cadogan, nee
Summerfield, who claimed the body of mercurial activist (some may
call him a terrorist) Larry Petrie
after he was hit by a train at Villa Rica railway station in
March
1901, where he worked as a watchman following his own
disillusionment with Lane's communalism.
Rose's life had many sad turns. One of Rose's sons, Hugh, was captured by Paraguayan rebels, escaped and died soon after of tuberculosis in New Australia. Another son, Bronte, died of TB in 1947. Two of her sons, Eric and Harry, came to tragic grief as adults in Australia
(Harry died in a crocodile attack in the Northern Territory), but she herself never saw Australia again – a Paraguayan bank failed and the Cadogans lost the money that would have brought them home.
Her son León became an authority on the culture of the Guaraní
indigenous people of Paraguay.
In 1915, the Queensland Worker
published a poem by Rose Cadogan, which ended:
I am longing for my own land,
my dear land, my home land;
I'm sighing for its peaceful shore,
'Neath its blue gums again to stand,
And scent the wattle blooms once more.
The crash of the Paraguayan bank in which
the Cadogans had all their savings foiled the family's return to
Australia, and she died of cancer. Her grave is at New Australia,
with gumtrees nearby in an abandoned communal plant nursery.
"Despite her relative youth, she
took to public speaking with ease: in Ballarat in January 1886
'the fair lecturess' held a Secular Society audience 'rapt' on the
subject of 'Social and Religious Reforms'. The Ballarat ASA
struggled in the face of the local 'orthodox party' led by a
leading local Bishop, which was 'very strong, and naturally very
bitter' at the challenge provided by the freethinkers ...
"During the 1890s Rose's secularism flourished into an impassioned mix of socialism, temperance and womens' rights. In April 1892 she began writing for the Hummer (soon to become the Sydney Worker) under the name 'Rose
Hummer'. Six feet tall with a strong face and intense gaze, Rose also developed as 'a rattling lecturer and organiser — full of fire and
energy'. In July 1892 she brought this talent for theatrical fire and energy to Leigh House, the ASL's headquarters in southern Castlereagh Street.
"By the 1890s the southern end of Castlereagh Street was the heart of a densely populated, working-class 'labour precinct' — a centre of radical agitation and
debate. Regularly on Sunday evenings radicals, trade union officials and workers gathered at Leigh House, at 233 Castlereagh Street, to listen to the League's speakers, searching for solutions to the hardship and injustice that daily confronted them. In June 1892 the young and ambitious Labor identity William Holman had issued 'A Plea for Liberty'; in the same month William Spence, the President of the Amalgamated Shearers Union, outlined 'The Ethics of the New
Unionism'.
"These addresses reflected conventional rhetorical flourish, and abstract notions of justice borrowed from traditional religious and political discourse. Master and Man also reflected these influences, but there was something intensely instinctive about Rose's narrative. On 17 July, Rose figuratively led her audience out of Leigh House and onto the street — to the places where her audience lived and worked, and where their hopes and fears were played out.
"Australia was, she said, gripped by an economic depression that had left working-class men walking about the city streets 'helpless and homeless, ragged and
breadless'." Source
Background Lawson
& Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson
CounterCulture
Wiki
1864 Richard
Harding Davis (d. 1916), author
1874 Ivana
Brlic-Mazuranic (d. 1938), Croat writer1882 Leopold Stokowski (d. 1977),
English-born composer, conductor
and founder of the
American Symphony Orchestra,
who wrote the music for Walt Disney's
Fantasia
1889
Jessie Street
('Red Jessie Street'; d.
July 2,
1970)
Australian
suffragette,
feminist and selective
human rights campaigner.
A
tireless propagandist for Joseph
Stalin's mass-murdering dictatorship, she refused to alter her
contact with leading lights of the Soviet dictatorship during the years of
widespread Soviet exterminations. Well into the 1960s, long after many had left
the pro-Marxist-Leninist ranks, Street remained a
prominent figure in such Communist front organisations as the World Peace
Council. The
Australian Labor Party, a moderate left-wing party, eventually found it
necessary to revoke her membership.
1897 Ardito Desio
(d. 2001),
Italian topographer and mountaineer 1901 László Németh
(d. 1975),
author 1902 Giuseppe Pella (d. 1981),
former Prime
Minister of Italy 1904 Pigmeat Markham
(d. 1981),
comedian 1921 Jean Richard
(d. 2001),
actor 1921 Barbara Hale,
actress
1925
Bob
Kaufman, American beat poet
"As a
youth, Kaufman had the opportunity to gain exposure to a wide
variety of religions. His father was German-Jewish, his mother was
Roman Catholic and his grandmother was a practitioner of voodoo.
Eventually however, Kaufman developed an interest in eastern
religions and like many of the other Beat writers, became a
Buddhist.
"In
1958, Kaufman moved to San Francisco and quickly became acclimated
to the lifestyle led by many of the writers and artists who were
prominent during the Beat period. Much of his writing became
"surreal" and was often inspired by jazz music. He
published Crowded with Loneliness and founded a magazine called
Beatitude in 1965.
"Kaufman
was most popular among European readers during the 1960's and
published his second collection, Golden Sardine in 1967.
"After
witnessing the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Kaufman was
compelled to take a vow of silence, which it is said was unbroken
until the end of the Viet Nam War. His writing became political
again and he produced a collection that included early works
called The Ancient Rain: Poems, 1956-78 (1981).
"It is
said that in 1978 Kaufman once again resumed his silence and
seldom broke the sacred vow until his death." Source
The Beat Museum
1928
Otto Piene,
painter1940 Robert N Kucey,
Canadian author 1946 Hayley Mills,
actress 1947 James
Woods, actor 1947 Kathy Acker,
author 1954 Rick Moranis,
Canadian comedian 1956 Anna
Kathryn Holbrook, soap opera
actress 1956 Melody
Thomas Scott, soap opera actress 1961 Jane
Leeves, British actress
1963 Conan O'Brien, American television
entertainer 1964 Niall Ferguson,
British historian 1969 Princess Sayako
of Japan's
Imperial Family 1976 Melissa Joan
Hart, actress
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