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Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
  And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
  How strange it seems, and new!
Robert Browning ('Memorabilia'), on Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was born on this day in 1792

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.
Percy Bysshe Shelley; 'The Call to Freedom'

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

No living poet ever arrived at the fulness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be impannelled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many generations.
Percy Bysshe Shelley; 'Defence of Poetry'

Bitter, bitter oh to behoulde,
  The grasse to growe,
Where the walles of Walsingham
  So stately did shewe.
From 'Lament for Walsingham', a 16^th-Century poem on the dissolution of Walsingham Priory by Henry VIII, 1538

Who in their right mind would name anything after DeSoto? 

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Folklore of World Holidays
by Margaret Read MacDonald

The History of Sexuality

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Reading Lolita in Tehran

Internet Sacred Text Archive CD-ROM

The Elements of Ritual

The Spiral Dance
By Starhawk
20th Anniversary Edition

Encyclopedia of Ancient Asian Civilizations

Life in a Medieval Village

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Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilisation: Backstage With Barry Humphries

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Anthony Robbins


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Celtic Daily Prayer

Hidden Agendas

Poor Richard's Almanack
By Benjamin Franklin

Photo of the day

Wheel of the Year

The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

The Survival of the Pagan Gods

Zuni Corn Dance (Aug 4 - 7)
A festival in thanksgiving for the maize harvest to Mother Earth, the Kokos (Nature Spirits), and the Corn Maidens. Following the harvest, the Zuni (a Native American tribe, one of the Pueblo peoples) bid farewell to the Corn Maidens and the Kokos.
Source: Earth, Moon and Sky

Jubilation of the Heart of Re, ancient Egypt (source of date, Wikipedia)

Dog Days, ancient Rome (Jul 3 - Aug 11)

Feast day of St Aristarchus of Thessalonica

Feast day of St Ia

Feast day of St Isidore

Feast day of St Luanus (Lua; Lugid; Molua), of Ireland

Feast day of St John Baptist Mary Vianney
St Jean Baptiste Marie Vianney (English: St John Baptist Mary Vianney) (May 8, 1786 - August 4, 1859) is the Roman Catholic patron saint of parish priests.

Feast day of St Moluag (Lughaidh; Luanus; Lugid)
He beat St Columba in a race to the large island of the Lyn of Lorn in Argyll. Now called the Isle of Lismore it was the sacred island of the Western Picts and the burial place of their kings.

Feast day of Our Lady of Snows, Rome and Spain
Dedicated to a cognate of the Goddesses of Love, Fertility and Childbearing.

Feast day of St Sithney

Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days    Shop saints

Anniversary of the Revolution, Burkina Faso

Constitution Day, Cook Islands (celebrations begin on the last Friday in July and last up to two weeks)

Fiesta of Santo Domingo, Lima, Peru

Vigil of St Oswald
"Commemorates the Anglo-Saxon king of Northumbria, Oswald, who died in battle in 642 CE. In the tradition of sacred kingship, his body was dismembered and its dispersed parts became the foci for miracles of healing."
Pennick, Nigel, The Pagan Book of Days, Destiny Books, Rochester, Vermont, USA, 1992, 95

First Wednesday in August, Isle of Skye Highland Games, Portree, Scotland

On which day of the week were you born? Find out here

1521 Pope Urban VII, (d. 1590)

1792 Percy Bysshe Shelley ('Mad Shelley'; d. 1822), English poet.

Percy Shelley started life in a favoured position in British society, as his father was a baronet. At Sion House Academy the lad was a hell raiser, and he was expelled from Oxford for a booklet he wrote urging "the necessity of atheism", whereupon his father cut off his money. Shelley then lived on secret remittances from his sisters.

The young poet had such an active imagination that, although he detested falsehood, he could not give the same account of an event to two people.

After eloping to Scotland with Harriet Westbrook he became interested in the ideas of the radical/anarchist philosopher William Godwin. He began to visit Godwin's house and fell in love with Mary Godwin (later called Mary Shelley), the sixteen year-old daughter of Godwin by his first wife, the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who had written A Vindication of the Rights of Women and had died eight days after Mary's birth in 1797. (Mary wrote Frankenstein while with her husband, Lord Byron and others in Switzerland.)

Shelley drowned in a squall (July 8, 1822) while on a boat with his friend Captain Williams on the Bay of Spezzia, Italy. Byron, Leigh Hunt and Trelawny burned his body as required by quarantine law.

Complete Works    Shelley: poet, predator and prey

1840 Richard von Krafft-Ebing (d. December 22, 1902), German psychiatrist, wrote Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), a famous study of sexual perversity, and remains well-known for his coinage of the term sadism. Today his work is considered controversial for its construction of sexual preferences outside the bourgeois European norm as 'deviance'.

"This was in fact a science made up of evasions," wrote French philosopher Michel Foucault in his book The History of Sexuality, "given its inability or refusal to speak of sex itself, it concerned itself primarily with aberrations, perversions, exceptional oddities, pathological abatements, and morbid aggravations. Claiming to speak the truth, it stirred up people's fears ... Involuntarily naïve in the best of cases, more often intentionally mendacious, in complicity with what it denounced, haughty and coquettish, it established an entire pornography of the morbid, which was characteristic of the fin de siecle society."

"Krafft-Ebing elaborated an evolutionist theory considering homosexuality as an anomalous process developed during the gestation of the embryo and fetus, evolving into a sexual inversion of the brain. Some years later, in 1901, he corrected himself in an article published in the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, changing the term anomaly to differentiation. He thus revealed himself as, if not as the first, at least one of the first professionals seeing homosexuals as normal people with a different sexuality."   Source: Wikipedia

1859 Knut Hamsun (d. 1952), writer, recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature 1920

1870 Sir Harry Lauder, British music hall comedian and entertainer

Harry Lauder in Australia, 1914

1871 William Holman (William Arthur Holman; d. June 5, 1934), Australian Labor Party Premier of New South Wales, Australia, who sided with Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes and split with the party on the conscription issue in 1916 during World War I, and immediately became Premier of a conservative Nationalist Party Government.

As a young cabinet-maker in Sydney he had become interested in the ideas of John Stuart Mill, William Morris, Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin, and became very active in the Australian labour movement. Holman was also a friend of Henry Lawson and helped the poet when he was down and out due to alcoholism – in 1916 at the request of Bertram Stevens and a delegation of Lawson's friends, he organised for the poet a government sinecure at Leeton, NSW. His father was an actor and he was an excellent public speaker (the Australian Workman of July 21, 1894 said that he had no equal in Australia) and the most talented Leigh House lecturer. He and his family had immigrated from London in 1888 and lived at Balmain.

As a 21-year-old, at the end of 1892 did an Australian Socialist League (ASL, which he had joined the previous year) lecture tour of Newcastle, New South Wales, and some new branches were formed. He became a King's Counsel in 1920.

From Wikipedia: In 1916 the conscription issue divided the Labor Party and wider Australian community. While much of the Australian labour movement and general community were opposed to conscription, Australian Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes and Premier Holman strongly supported conscription, and both crossed the floor to join the conservative parties. Holman formed a coalition on November 15, 1916 with the leader of the opposition, Charles Wade, with himself as Premier. At the general election in March 1917 he was elected as a Nationalist Party of Australia candidate, and continued in the Premier's role.

"However, his manual occupation notwithstanding, Holman was perhaps a little remote from the class he was most earnestly seeking to influence. One Sunday evening at Leigh House, in the course of his lecture on Spencer, he digressed to illustrate a point: 'take a brick, ladies and gentlemen, weighing, let us say, about 4 lbs ...' Before he could continue his calculations, the secretary of the Builders labourers union sat bolt upright and exclaimed in an agitated stage whisper: 'Cripes, that's the blooming brick I've been looking for all me life'."
Burgmann, Verity, In Our Time: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885 - 1905, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985, p. 55

"Lawyer (barrister) and cabinet-maker. Educated in London. At fifteen apprenticed as cabinet-maker. Arrived in Melbourne with parents 1888, shortly afterwards journeyed to Sydney; worked at his trade but increasingly involved in lecturing and organising for Labor Leagues and briefly as organiser for Australia Workers' Union; part-owner and subeditor New Order 1894; part-owner and director of Daily Post 1895, the financial management of which led to charge of conspiracy to defraud and two months in gaol before conviction quashed. Contributor Grenfell Vedette 1895-1898, proprietor 1898-1904; read for Bar, admitted 1903, considerable practice mainly industrial; constitutional and common law; director of Sunday Times 1924-1926; in youth active Sydney. School of Arts Debating Society; Member Single Tax League 1890, Australia Socialist League 1891; delegate to the Trades and Labour Council (TLC) in 1892 for furnishing trades union; Executive Member Australia National Defence League 1905; Joint President of French-Australia League of Help 1914; Executive Member of Universal Service League 1915-1916; President of Food for Babies. Author with P.A. Jacobs of Australian Mercantile Law 1909, with D.R. Hall (q.v.) Cost of Living 1915, A National Stocktaking 1930, Three Lectures on the Australian Constitution 1938."   Source: NSW Parliament

Parliamentary Service

Lawson & Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson

1900 Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the Queen Mother of the United Kingdom until her death in 2002. Hitler called her "The most dangerous woman in Europe" because of her ability to rally the British people, most of whom were devoted to her.

She was born the Honourable Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon, one of ten children of Lord Glamis, later 14^th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, and spent her early childhood at her parents' country home, St Paul's Waldenbury in Hertfordshire, north of London.

The Bowes-Lyon family is descended from the Royal House of Scotland. One of The Queen Mother's 14^th-century ancestors became Thane of Glamis, home of Macbeth 300 years before, and Glamis Castle is the family seat.

"… she is most certainly the longest-living British Royal in memory, and bears testament to some of the most significant developments and historical moments of our century. When she was born, the British Army was fighting its last great imperial war in South Africa, aeroplanes had not flown and gas lamps were yet to be replaced by electricity."   Source

1901 Louis Armstrong (d. 1971), American jazz musician; he celebrated his birthday as July 4, 1900

From Wikipedia: Armstrong said he was not sure exactly when he was born, but celebrated his birthday on July 4. He usually gave the year as 1900 when speaking in public (although he used 1901 on his Social Security and other papers filed with the government). Using Roman Catholic Church documents from when his grandmother took him to be baptized, New Orleans music researcher Tad Jones established Armstrong's actual date of birth as August 4, 1901. With various other collaborative evidence, this date is now accepted by Armstrong scholars.

1906 Marie-José Van Sachsen Coburg-Gotha (d. 2001), last Queen of Italy

1906 Eugen Schuhmacher (d. 1973), German zoologist and pioneer of animal documentaries

1908 Kurt Eichhorn, conductor

1910 William Schuman (d. 1992), composer

1912 Raoul Wallenberg (d. 1947 presumed), Swedish diplomat

1924 Reg Grundy, the Australian radio announcer who went on to TV quiz shows and in 1995 sold his media business for $380 million. Colloquially, in Australia, 'Reg Grundies', or 'Grundies' is rhyming slang slang for 'undies' (underpants).

1925 Maurie Fields, Australian actor and comedian

1929 Yasser Arafat (d. November 11, 2004), born Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini (محمد عبد الرؤوف القدوة الحسيني) and also known by the kunya Abu `Ammar (أبو عمّار), Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) (1969 - 2004); President¹ of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) (1993- 2004); and a co-recipient of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize

Arafat claimed to have been born in Jerusalem on August 4, 1929; some of his legal personal documentation states the same. A birth certificate registered in Cairo, Egypt shows August 24, 1929 as his date of birth and Cairo as the place (Wikipedia); he appears at both dates in the Book of Days.

1929 Kishore Kuma (d. 1987)r, Indian singer and actor

1930 Götz Friedrich (d. 2000), opera director

1932 Guillermo Mordillo, Argentinian graphic artist and cartoonist who published his first cartoons in France in 1966. His titles include Le Galion, Crazy Cowboy, Crazy Crazy, Les Girafes and Mordillo Cartoons.

"... even today, after a fifty-year long career, Mordillo still keeps changing the houses he lives in, the countries he travels to and the languages in which he expresses himself. (but his drawings remain perpetually and decidedly silent, understandable all over in the same manner and entrusted only to the universal language of images). Over the years Mordillo has lived and worked in Peru, in the United States, in France and in Spain."   Source

Guillermo Mordillo site    Official Mordillo site    More

Comix, comics and cartoons in the Book of Days

1932 Hans Jürgen Fröhlich, writer

1937 David Bedford, musician

1940 Timi Yuro, American singer who had numerous minor Top 100 hits in the early 1960s ('Hurt'; 'Gotta Travel On')

1942 Graeme Dunstan, prominent Australian organizer of festivals and celebrations, and activist for environmental, political and peace issues. He is an an alumnus of Duntroon Military College and a graduate of the University of New South Wales (UNSW), where he was President of the Students' Union and co-editor of its newspaper, Tharunka.

In 1966, while President of the UNSW Labor Club, he was active in organizing anti-Vietnam War protests. As organizer of the LBJ Welcome Committee he stopped US President Lyndon Johnson's motorcade in Liverpool Street, Sydney, by lying in front of the president's car, upon which NSW Premier Robert Askin famously said "run over the bastards".

In 1973 with Johnny Allen as director of the Aquarius Foundation of the Australian Union of Students and Dunstan, as director of the Foundation's biennial Aquarius Festival, together they produced the Aquarius Festival which took place in Nimbin, New South Wales.

Dunstan was the first community arts officer (1981 - '85) employed by the City of Campbelltown and in that role set up the Friends of the Campbelltown Art Gallery which lobbied successfully to found the Campbelltown Regional Art Gallery.

In 1985-89 he was a Festivals Consultant to the Victorian Tourism Commission and in that role he was one of the initiators the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Ltd serving as its founding Secretary In 1987.

As a freelance event organizer, Dunstan founded the Lismore Lantern Festival in 1992-3 and produced other innovative celebrations including the Byron Bay NYE (1995), Bondi Beach Christmas and NYE celebration 1996, Nimbin 'Let It Grow' Mardi Grass (1998 - '99), the Sunshine Coast Schoolies Week (1997), the annual Eureka Dawn Walk (1998-) and the annual Independence from America Day Parade in Byron Bay (1998-).

He is presently captain of Peacebus.com which is both a website and a campaign vehicle from which he organizes Cyanide Watch and other actions of witness for peace, justice and a sustaining Earth.

Graeme Dunstan Curriculum Vitae    Wilson's Almanac Book of Days hip list    CounterCulture Wiki

1942 David Lange (d.