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Declaration of Báb, Bahá'í holy day, Bahá'í Faith

Commemorates Báb's prophecy of the coming of a spiritual leader (Bahá'u'lláh)who would usher in a new era in religious history. 

The Báb (a name meaning 'Gate'), Siyyid Mírzá 'Alí-Muhammad (1819 - 1850),  founded the Bábí religion which would become, in the days of Bahá'u'lláh and afterwards, the Bahá'í Faith.

The Bahá'í Faith is a monotheistic religion. Although it is not traditionally included among the Abrahamic religions, it recognises the same prophets, plus its own.

Lag Ba'omer (2008), Judaism

On the dating of items in the Almanac

Lag Ba'omer (Israeli and Ashkenazi) or Lag La'omer (Sephardi) is a Jewish holiday celebrated on the 33^rd day of the counting of the Omer which is on the 18^th of Iyar. It is a time of dancing and singing. Families go on picnics and outings. Children go out to the fields with their teachers with bows and (rubber-tipped) arrows, and bats and balls. Lag Ba'Omer in modern Israel is a school holiday. In Israel, one knows that Lag Ba'Omer is drawing near when children begin collecting wood boards, old doors, and anything made from wood that can burn in bonfires.

On the Mediterranean island of Djerba: "... women ensure fertility by crawling into the grotto in the historic Ghriba Synagogue and placing raw eggs with their names on them around the temple stone. A scarf-bedecked menorah is paraded through the streets, decorated with flowers and sprayed with perfume."   Source

Feast day of St Desiderius, Bishop of Langres, martyr

Feast day of St Desiderius, Bishop of Vienne, martyr

Feast day of St Euphrosyne of Polotsk

Feast day of St Goban Gobhnena

Feast day of St Guibertus

Feast day of St Yvo, or Ivo, confessor of Chartres
(Yellow star of Bethlehem; Tragopogon pratensis today's plant, dedicated to this saint.)
Born in 1040 at Beauvais, France, Yvo was a fellow student with St Anselm of Canterbury. Patron saint of lawyers.

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Feast day of St Jane Antide Thouret

Feast day of St John Baptist Rossi

Feast day of St Maria Angela Astorch

Feast day of St Martyrs of Cappadocia

Feast day of St Martyrs of Mesopotamia

Feast day of St Michael of Synnada

Feast day of St Quintian

Feast day of St William of Rochester
"William led a wild and misspent youth, but as an adult he had a complete conversion, devoting himself to God, caring especially for poor and neglected children. He worked as a baker, and gave every tenth loaf to the poor. He attended Mass daily, and one morning on his way to church he found an infant abandoned on the threshold. He named the baby David, and adopted him, and taught him his trade.

"Years later he and David set out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Lands. During a stopover in Rochester, England the boy David turned on William, clubbed him, cut his throat, robbed the body, and fled. Because he was on a holy journey, and because of the miraculous cures later reported at his tomb, he is considered a martyr.

"A local insane woman found William's body, and plaited a garland of honeysuckle flowers for it; she placed the garland on William, and then on herself whereupon her madness was cured. Local monks, seeing this as a sign from God, interred William in the local cathedral and began work on his shrine. His tomb and a chapel at his murder scene, called Palmersdene, soon became sites of pilgimage and donation, even by the crown. Remains of the chapel can be seen near the present Saint William's Hospital."   Source

Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days    Shop saints 

National Holiday, Morocco

Jamaican Labour Day
Public holiday; tribute to the Jamaican worker.

South Carolina, USA, Admission Day
SC became the 8th state of the union on May 23, 1788. 

The Last Hours of Freedom of Joan of Arc, Compiègne, France
"Compiègne celebrates Joan of Arc's last visit to the town before she was captured on 23 May 1430. As well as a reenactment of her visit, there is also a medieval procession and a range of other activities.

"On the Saturday evening a woman dressed as Joan of Arc is welcomed to the city with a medieval procession, which is followed by music and dancing until late into the night. A reenactment of the mass on Sunday morning echoes the mass that Joan attended at the church of Saint-Jacques in 1430. Finally, on the Sunday afternoon, 'Joan' is escorted to the bridge where she was finally captured."   Source

Full Moon in Gemini, World Invocation Day (2005)

"Since 1952 the full moon of Gemini has also been observed as World Invocation Day — a world day of prayer when men and women of every spiritual path join in a universal appeal to divinity and use The Great Invocation. Together they focus the invocative demand of humanity for the light, the love and the spiritual direction needed to build a world of justice, unity and peace."   Source

'The Great Invocation'

From the point of Light within the mind of God
Let light stream forth into human minds
Let Light descend on Earth.

From the point of Love within the Heart of God
Let love stream forth into human hearts
May the Coming One return to Earth.

From the centre where the Will of God is known
Let purpose guide all little human wills
The purpose which the Masters know and serve.

From the centre which we call the human race
Let the Plan of Love and Light work out
And may it seal the door where evil dwells.

Let Light and Love and Power restore the Plan on Earth.

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

1052 Philip I of France (French: Philippe Ier; d. July 29, 1108), King of France from 1060 to 1108

1617 Elias Ashmole (d. May 18, 1692), antiquarian, collector, politician and student of astrology, and alchemy. Throughout his life he was an avid collector of curiosities and other artefacts.

Many of these he acquired from the traveller, botanist, and collector John Tradescant, and most he donated to Oxford University to create the Ashmolean Museum (opened June 6, 1683, qv). He also donated his library and priceless manuscript collection to Oxford.

Pictured: Frontispiece to Ashmole's translation of Fasciculus Chemicus (click)

From Wikipedia: During the 1650s, Ashmole devoted a great deal of energy to the study of alchemy. In 1650 he published Fasciculus Chemicus under the anagrammatic pseudonym James Hasholle. This work was an English translation of two Latin alchemical works, one by Arthur Dee. In 1652, he published his most important alchemical work, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, an extensively annotated compilation of alchemical poems in English. The book preserved and made available many works that had previously existed only in privately-held manuscripts. It was avidly studied by other alchemists.

In 1653, the alchemist William Backhouse, who had made Ashmole his alchemical "son", confided the secret of the Philosopher's Stone to Ashmole when he believed himself to be close to death. (The Philosopher's Stone was a substance or object that had the power to convert base metals to gold, among other mystical virtues: its discovery was one of the key goals of European alchemists.) Ashmole is said to have passed the secret on to Robert Plot, the first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum. Ashmole published his final alchemical work, The Way to Bliss, in 1658. There is no evidence of him personally carrying out any actual experiments (or "operations", in the alchemical jargon of the time).

Wikisource has original works written by or about Elias Ashmole

Alchemists in the Almanac:  Cornelius Agrippa  Roger Bacon  Count Cagliostro  John Dee
Edward Kelley  Robert Fludd  Isaac Newton  Paracelsus  James Price  Tycho Brahe  Raymond Lulle

Alchemy clock at the Scriptorium    Works by Elias Ashmole at Project Gutenberg

1707 Carolus Linnaeus (born Carl Linné; d. 1778), Swedish botanist.

Born at Rashalt, a hamlet in south of Sweden, his father was a clergyman. Linnaeus's life was surrounded by a large garden and the natural environment and he would say of himself, that he went from the cradle into a garden. His father and uncle were horticulturists and inspired the child. Though destined for the church, he hated the thought of such a life, and was inclined to botany.

Those of us who seem not to excel academically can take heart from the story of Carl Linné. At the University of Lund, where he studied medicine, he was "less known for his knowledge of natural history than for his ignorance of everything else", but Professor of Medicine, Dr Stoboeus, took him under his wing. Soon he left Lund for University of Uppsala, where he met with poverty, but he determined to be a botanist no matter what.

He soon began his famous system of classification, still used today. On May 12, 1732, he began his famed journey to Lapland alone, on horseback and foot, travelling 4,000 miles in five months. Linnaeus brought back nearly 100 previously unknown or undescribed plants. In 1735 he went to Holland where he gained a medical degree; there he became famous when he published his own botanical books. In 1740 he became Professor of Medicine at Uppsala, then transferred to the chair of Botany.

"The Linné Herbarium, at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, preserves some of Linnaeus's original plant specimens. The Museum also has an excellent, detailed biography of Linnaeus. You can also view Linnaeus's botanical garden and Linnaeus's manor home and garden at Hamarby, courtesy of Uppsala University, Linnaeus's alma mater. Uppsala University also maintains Linné On Line, a rich source of information on Linnaeus and his times ...

"Founded a few years after Linnaeus's death, the Linnaean Society of London is still going strong as an international society for the study of natural history. The Society preserves the bulk of Linnaeus's surviving collections, manuscripts, and library. The Strandell Collection of Linneana, at Carnegie-Mellon University, and the Mackenzie Linneana collection at Kansas State University, are major American collections of writings by and about Linnaeus and his associates. The Linnaeus Link at the British Natural History Museum, aims to make available electronic versions of Linnaeus's writings and documents."   Source

1718 William Hunter (d.1783), anatomist

1734 Franz Mesmer, Austrian hypnotist, from whose name we get the word 'mesmerise'

The roots of the New Age movement

1790 Jules Dumont d'Urville (d. 1842), explorer

1795 Sir Charles Barry, English architect; designer of the British Houses of Parliament

1799 Thomas Hood (d. May 3, 1845), British humorist and poet

1810 Margaret Fuller, Marchioness Ossoli (d. July 19, 1850), American journalist, critic, women's rights activist, revolutionist; the first female foreign correspondent and book review editor in the USA, and the first female journalist to work on the staff of a major American newspaper (Horace Greeley's New York Tribune). 

In Europe she interviewed many prominent writers including George Sand and Thomas Carlyle, also meeting the Italian revolutionary Giovanni Ossoli by whom she had a son. In 1849, the Ossolis supported Giuseppe Mazzini's revolution for the establishment of a Roman Republic, Giovanni fighting in the struggle and Margaret doing voluntary hospital work.

Fuller was a friend of the Alcotts and Ralph Waldo Emerson and became part of the Concord transcendentalist circle with which they were associated. In 1850, when she disappeared with her husband and infant son in a shipwreck near Fire Island off the coast of New York, fellow transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau was one of those who searched for the victims.

"In 1846, Greeley named her a foreign correspondent for the Tribune. Fuller traveled to Europe and sent back articles about life in the European cities. Those articles were published in 1856 as At Home and Abroad. Her literary renown had reached the continent and helped her meet many European writers and artists.

"While visiting Rome in 1847 she fell in love with Marchese Giovanni Angelo d'Ossoli, a nobleman involved in revolutionary activities. They had a child a year later, a son named Angelo, and married the following year. During the Revolution of 1848 and during the siege of Rome by the French forces, Fuller assumed charge of one of the hospitals of the city, while her husband took part in the fighting. The city fell in 1850 and the Ossolis were forced to flee. In May 1850, they sailed to America. They were almost there, when off the coast of New York, near Fire Island, their ship ran aground in a storm and was wrecked on July 19, 1850. Her friends, among them Thoreau, initiated searches, but only the body of their two-year-old son was recovered."   Source

The Margaret Fuller Society    Early progressives in the Book of Days    More    Transcendentalism

1824 Ambrose Burnside (d. 1881), American Civil War general

1844 Abdu'l-Bahá (d. 1921), Bahá'í central figure

1848 Otto Lilienthal (d. 1896), engineer

1883 Douglas Fairbanks, Sr (d. December 12, 1939),  swashbuckling American actor and film producer, co-founder of the United Artists Corporation (1919), husband of Mary Pickford, father of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. During a Liberty Bond tour with Charles Chaplin he fell in love with Mary Pickford with whom he, Chaplin and DW Griffith had formed United Artists in 1919. Fairbanks was an excellent athlete and used his physical abilities to advantage. Movies include The Three Musketeers (1921); Robin Hood (1922); The Thief of Bagdad (1924); The Private Life of Don Juan (1934).

While passing a cinema in Hollywood one day, Charlie Chaplin stopped to examine the posters advertising the new Douglas Fairbanks comedy appearing there. "Have you seen this show?" Chaplin asked a young man standing nearby. "Sure," he replied. "Any good?" Chaplin asked. "Why, he's the best in the business," the man exclaimed. "He's a scream! Never laughed so much at anyone in all my life." "Is he as good as Chaplin?" "As good as Chaplin!" the man exclaimed. "Why, this Fairbanks person has got that Chaplin person looking like a gloom. They're not in the same class. Fairbanks is funny. I'm sorry you asked me, I feel so strongly about it." Hearing this Chaplin coolly revealed his identity: "I'm Chaplin." "I know you are," the other man laughed. "I'm Fairbanks!"

[The two soon became great friends.]

Source

1908 John Bardeen (d. 1991), physicist

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