|
 Feast day of St
Henry,
Bishop of
Uppsala
(St Henry of England; Henry
of Finland; Henry of Sweden; Henrik; Heikki; Piispa
Henrik)
Henry was the
English-born bishop of Uppsala, Finland, who was martyred on January
20, 1156
by a Finnish soldier (or wealthy landowner) named Lalli whom he
had just excommunicated for murdering a Swedish soldier. Legend says that Lalli had a long
life – continually tormented by mice as a penance for his attack.
Henry
came to Sweden in 1153
with the papal legate Nicolas
Breakspear (the future Pope Adrian IV)
and was made bishop of Uppsala.
In 1154, Henry was with King Saint
Eric of
Sweden during the that monarch's crusade into Finland to punish the
Finnish pirates who repeatedly invaded Sweden. Eric, it is said, offered
peace and the Christian faith, both of which were refused by the Finns. A
battle followed and Eric prevailed. Thereafter, Henry baptised the
defeated Finns in the spring of Kuppis near Abo, and built a church at Nousis, which
became his headquarters. Henry was canonized in 1158 by Pope Adrian IV and
he became the patron
saint of Finland, where he is invoked against storms. His relics were
translated to Torku on June 18, 1300, but were stolen by Russian troops in 1720.
The Legend
From
Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia.
Very
few facts are known about the real causes for this, but the incident is
replete with legend.
A folk poem from the 13th Century called the 'Piispa Henrikin
surmavirsi' (The death-psalm of Bishop Henry), written in the
same manner as the Kalevala, has survived.
In
the most well known legend Lallis wife, Kerttu, alleged to him
that upon leaving the manor, their ungrateful guest had without permission
or recompense through violence taken food for himself and hay for his
horse. This is supposed to have enraged Lalli so that he directly grabbed
his skis and went in pursuit of the thief, and finally skied Henry down on
the ice of
Lake Köyliönjärvi, and executed him on the spot
with an axe. Some other accounts describe Lalli as a miscreant and a
criminal who, when reprimanded by Bishop Henry for his deeds, became
enraged and killed the man.
In the Bishopric of
Turku, the annual feast
day of Henry was
January 20 (talviheikki, 'Winter Henry'), according to
traditions the day of his death. Elsewhere his memorial was held already
in January 19, since more prominent saints were already commemorated on
January 20. After the
Reformation, Henry's day was moved to January
19 in Finland as well. The existence of the feast day is first mentioned
in 1335, and is known to have been marked in the
liturgical calendar from the early 15th
Century onwards. Another memorial was held in
June 18 (kesäheikki,
'Summer Henry') which was the day of the translation of his relics to
the Cathedral of Turku.
Heavenly retribution
Further
legends enumerate the pestilences and misfortunes which befell Lalli after
his 'treacherous slaying' of the holy benefactor of the miserable
Finnish pagans
who were 'twice removed' from the grace afforded by knowledge of
Christ. His
hair and scalp are said to have fallen out as he took off the bishop's cap,
which he had taken as a trophy. Furthermore he is said to have been
constantly been nibbled by mice, which finally caused him such distress
that he finally ran into a lake and drowned himself.
Political use of the legend
This
legend of Finnish ingratitude was much much expanded upon by preachers to
justify later harsh measures they took to ensure that Finnish conversions
to Christianity were not mere words, but that they sincerely and
unreservedly accepted church authority. Bishop Henry took the status of
holy martyr, and Finnish folk revered him as a saint, even though he never
gained that status officially from the Holy See.
More
Julian
Calendar Theophany (Epiphany),
Eastern
and Oriental
Orthodoxy Julian day calculator (pop-up)
Feast day of St Albert of Cashel
Feast day of St Bassian of Lodi
Feast day of St Blaithmaic of Iona, Scottish
abbot
Numerous sources give this as the feast day of St
Fillan,
Scottish abbot. Just as many others give January 9, which
is where he resides in the Book of Days.
Feast day of St Firminus of
Gabales
Feast day of St Germana
Feast day of St Gerontius
Feast day of St Gudule in the diocese of Ham and Moorzeele,
otherwise January 8
Feast day of St Januarius
Feast day of St Joseph Sebastian
Pelczar
Feast day of St Julius
Feast day of St Knud (Knut;
Canutus), bastard king of Denmark (nephew of England's famous King
Canute), martyr
Feast day of St Lomer of Corbion
Feast day of Saints Maris, Martha (White dead nettle, Larnium album is
today's plant,
dedicated to this saint), Audifax and Abachum,
martyrs
Feast day of St Mark
of Ephesus
Feast day of St Remigius of Rouen
Feast day of St Saturninus
Feast day of St Successus
Feast day of St Thomas of Cori
Feast day of St Wulstan
(Wolstan; Wulfstan), Bishop
of Worcester
Wulstan (b. c. 1009 at Icentum, Warwickshire, England; d.
January 19, 1095) was the last saint of the Anglo-Saxon Church, the link between the old and the Norman hierarchies. He was a great preacher and cared for the common
people; he was influential in ending the sale of Irish prisoners as slaves in England.
He confessed that he once was so obsessed with thoughts about a large stuffed goose he was going to eat, that he couldn't perform the service he should, so he gave up eating meat. When two Roman cardinals appointed him bishop of Worcester, he said he would rather lose his head than be bishop; nonetheless, King
Edward the Confessor installed him. His wasn't a withdrawn and scholarly life, but one of involvement with people. "No one ever begged of Wulstan in vain," it was said.
A certain cleric named Lanfranc tried to depose him. St Wulstan drove his pastoral staff into the tomb of Edward the
Confessor; the Bishop of Rochester, King William and
Archbishop
of Canterbury Lanfranc could not remove it, but the saint could
easily – a feat similar to that in the King Arthur and Excalibur legend. He and Lanfranc were reconciled and cooperated in abolishing the slave trade carried on for many years by the merchants of Bristol with Ireland. Wulstan died on January 19,
1095, allegedly while engaged in his daily ritual of washing of the
feet of a dozen poor men; the Roman
Catholic Church made today a feast day in his honour.
In Easter
of 1158, Henry
II and his wife Eleanor
of Aquitaine visited Worcester Cathedral and placed their crowns on
the shrine of Wulfstan, vowing not to wear them again.
Wulfstan was canonised
in 1203 by
Pope Innocent III.
One of the miracles
attributed to Wulfstan was the curing of King Harold's
daughter.
Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days Shop saints
La Tamborrada,
San Sebastian, Spain
(Jan 19 - 20)
"In 1720, young girls stopped to accompany a singing baker by
drumming on the water barrels he was filling at a fountain. That
impromptu jam session evolved into a festival with 24-hour-long drum
parades; each drum corps represents a different gastronomic
society."
Source
Robert E Lee's
Birthday, some USA States
Confederate
Heroes' Day, Texas, USA
Lee-Jackson Day,
Virginia, USA
Julian Calendar Theophany (Epiphany)
(Catholicism)
Feast of Sultán (Sovereignty), first day of the 17th month of the Bahá'í Calendar
Feast of Thor, Iceland
Celebration
welcoming Thor into the home by the
patriarch.
Source: The Phoenix
and Arabeth
1992 Calendar
399 Pulcheria
(d. 453), Byzantine empress570 Muhammad,
Islamic prophet (the date of the prophet's birth is uncertain;
different dates are given by different sources – May 2, April
20, 570, or
571 are sometimes given as his birth
date). It is believed he died on June
8, 632
(or 634)
in Medina,
Saudi Arabia.
The Book of Days covers the prophet's birthday more
thoroughly at May 15, 570
CE.
1200
Dōgen Zenji
(Dogen Kigen; d. September
22, 1253),
Japanese
Zen Buddhist
teacher and founder of the Soto
school of Zen in Japan. He was a leading religious figure and
important philosopher.
'Zenji' is a title meaning Zen master, and the name 'Dogen'
means roughly 'Source of the Way'.
Creative
Commons-licensed, accessible translations of Dogen's Genjo Koan,
Bendowa, and Uji
1544 Francis II of
France1736 James
Watt (d. 1819), builder of steam engines;
invented the centrifugal governor to regulate
the speed of a steam engine; member of the Lunar Society
"Anderson,
a man of an advanced and liberal mind, was Professor of Natural
Philosophy, and had, among his class apparatus, a model of
Newcomen's steam engine. He required to have it repaired, and put
it into Watt's hands for the purpose. Through this trivial
accident it was that the young mechanician was led to make that
improvement of the steam-engine which gave a new power to
civilized man, and has revolutionised the world."
Robert Chambers, (Ed.),
The Book of Days: A miscellany of popular antiquities in
connection with the calendar, etc,
W & R
Chambers, London, 1881 (1879
Edition is online and
1869 edition here with CD-ROM available;
See also
The English Year: A Personal Selection from Chambers's Book of
Days)
1807 Robert
E Lee (d. 1870), Confederate
general1808 Lysander Spooner (d. May
14, 1887),
American individualist anarchist political philosopher, abolitionist,
and legal theorist of the 19th
Century. He is best known for his role in the abolitionist movement to
end slavery, competing with the US Post Office, and for his contributions
to American
individualist anarchism.
Early
progressives in the Book of Days
CounterCulture
Wiki
1809 Edgar Allan Poe
(d. October
7, 1849),
American poet ('Annabel
Lee'; 'The Raven')
and short story author ('The Tell-Tale Heart';
'The
Pit and the Pendulum').
Poe's
mysterious visitor: an article at the Scriptorium
Edgar Allan Poe's prescient
cosmology
Poe wrote in Eureka, A Prose Poem (1848):
That the Universe of Stars might endure throughout an aera at all
commensurate with the grandeur of its component material portions
and with the high majesty of its spiritual purposes, it was
necessary that the original atomic diffusion be made to so
inconceivable an extent as to be only not infinite. It was required,
in a word, that the stars should be gathered into visibility from
invisible nebulosity -proceed from visibility to consolidation- and
so grow grey in giving birth and death to unspeakably numerous and
complex variations of vitalic development: – it was required that
the stars should do all this – should have time thoroughly to
accomplish all these Divine purposes- during the period in which all
things were effecting their return into Unity with a velocity
accumulating in the inverse proportion of the squares of the
distances at which lay the inevitable End.
Here is what modern astrophysicist John
Barrow writes in his book The World within the World
(Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988, p. 354); note the similarity:
This state of expansion means that the size of the Universe is
inextricably entwined with its age. The reason that the Visible
Universe is more than 13 billion light-years in size today is that
it is more than 13 billion years old. A Universe that contained just
one galaxy like our own Milky Way, with its 100 billion stars, each
perhaps surrounded by planetary systems, might seem a reasonable
economy if one were in the universal construction business. But such
a universe, with more than a 100 billion fewer galaxies than our
own, could have expanded for little more than a few months. It could
have produced neither stars nor biological elements. It could
contain no astronomers.
More of Poe's amazing scientific insights in Poe's
Cosmology
Shop Poe
Poe
coincidences
There
are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not
occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling
half-credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly
marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect
has been unable to receive them.
Edgar Allan Poe
October
28, 1884: The Times of London reported that in a life boat on the open sea,
a cabin boy named
Richard Parker had been cannibalised by the three surviving crew
members of the wrecked yawl Mignonette.
In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe had published a story called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym which
told of a parallel set of circumstances to the Mignonette's misfortune, in which a sailor was also eaten. His
name was Richard Parker.
Craig Hamilton-Parker writes:
"In the summer of 1993, my parents took in three Spanish
language students. My father told them about Richard Parker one
evening over supper … All conversation stopped when a local
programme started talking about the remarkable story. Dad went on
to break the silence by saying how weird coincidences always occur
whenever Richard's tale is mentioned. He told them about Edgar
Allan Poe.
"Two of the
girls went white. 'Look what I bought today' said one. She
reached into her bag and pulled out a copy of the Poe story. 'So
have I!' said the other girl. Both had gone shopping that day
and independently bought the very same book containing the
Richard Parker story. And as if events are trying make my story
totally unbelievable my father told the same story to his
language class the following year. Again one of the girls pulled
a copy of the Poe book from out of her bag!"
Craig Hamilton-Parker's grandfather's cousin was the
real-life Richard Parker. More
 Postscript:
Another coincidence
I
noticed another remarkable coincidence as I read Mr
Hamilton-Parker's interesting tale (above). As a background
to his site, he has a design that features the
ouroboros – an
ancient symbol of a snake in a circle, swallowing its own tail.
Remarkably,
the ouroboros is clearly seen as the printer's mark on the first edition of Poe's collected works.
I emailed
Mr Hamilton-Parker asking whether he had deliberately used the
ouroboros symbol on his page. He answered that he had not; it
was just another coincidence, one of many in this episode that
would have Edgar himself chuckling, I'm sure.
::Aha!::
Synchronicity Central
– log your coincidences and unusual experiences
The Poe Toaster
 Poe is buried in the
Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in Baltimore. Since 1949, every
January 19, Poe's birthday, a mysterious visitor dressed in black and wearing a fedora hat has left on
the original marker of
Poe's grave a half-filled bottle of cognac accompanied by three red roses. The significance of cognac is uncertain as it does not feature in Poe's works as does, for example, amontillado. Several of the bottles of cognac from prior years are on display in the
Baltimore
Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum. It has been suggested that the roses represent Poe himself and the two women who were most important to the poet during his troubled life: his mother, and his wife, both of whom are in repose in the same cemetery.
One source suggests that the mysterious man is in fact a succession of men, and when one mourner retires he hands the torch of this enigmatic remembrance to another. In fact, in 1993, the original dark stranger left a note saying,
"The torch will be passed" ...
Read on at the Edgar Allan Poe
page in the Scriptorium
Mike Keith
has some wonderful excursions into Poeiana
Mike Keith's
complete anagram of The Raven
EA Poe Society of Baltimore
A Poe
Webliography
Poe
Decoder
Poe and alcohol
Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
Short stories by Poe
Poe's
mysterious visitor: an article at the Scriptorium
1813 Sir Henry Bessemer (d.
March
15, 1898),
prolific inventor whose name is chiefly known in connection with the
Bessemer process for the manufacture of
steel
1839
Paul
Cézanne (d. 1906), painter1848 John
F Stairs (d. 1904) | reetings from Australia.
How it works
Timkat (Timqat;
Timket; Epiphany), Ethiopia (January
20 in Leap Year)
