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30


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You say that you are my judge, I don't know if you are [or not]; but take care not to judge wrongly, lest you place yourself in great danger; and [I] notify you of this, so that if our Lord punishes you for it, I will have done my duty in telling you.
Joan of Arc, burnt at the stake on May 30, 1431
 
Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Blessed be God.
Last words of Joan of Arc

What colour goes with smoke?
Joan of Arc, to her wardrobe maid

Comparisons are odious.
Christopher Marlowe, English playwright, killed on May 30, 1593; Lust's Dominion, Act iii. Sc.

I'm armed with more than complete steel,—
The justice of my quarrel.

Christopher Marlowe; ibid

Come live with me, and be my love;
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields.

Christopher Marlowe; 'The Passionate Shepherd to his Love'

There is nothing that is meritorious but virtue and friendship, and indeed, friendship itself is but a part of virtue.
Last words of Alexander Pope, English poet, who died on May 30, 1744 

Do let me die in peace.
Last words of French writer, Voltaire, died on May 30, 1778

Joan of Arc, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Joan of Arc, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti


It clearly follows that to make men moral it is necessary to make their social environment moral. And that can be done in only one way; by assuring the triumph of justice, that is, the complete liberty of everyone in the most perfect equality for all. Inequality of conditions and rights, and the resulting lack of liberty for all, is the great collective iniquity begetting all individual iniquities.
Mikhail Bakunin, Russian anarchist theorist, born on May 30, 1814

I am a free man only so far as I recognise the humanity and liberty of all men around me. In respecting their humanity, I respect my own.
Mikhail Bakunin

... if instinct alone sufficed to liberate peoples, they would long since have freed themselves. These instincts did not prevent them from accepting... all the religious, political, and economic absurdities of which they have been the eternal victims. They are ineffectual because they lack two things ... organisation and knowledge.
Mikhail Bakunin

I shall continue to be an impossible person so long as those who are possible remain possible.
Mikhail Bakunin
 
The desire for destruction is, at the same time, a creative desire too.
Mikhail Bakunin; The Reaction in Germany, 1842 

God being master, man is the slave.
Mikhail Bakunin; God and the State 

If you pull a sapling out of the ground, cut off all the leaves, and branches and make it into a club, you cannot expect to plant it back in the ground and have it grow into a beautiful tree.
Mikhail Bakunin; to Karl Marx

There  is  no  horror,  no  cruelty,  sacrilege,  or  perjury, no imposture,  no  infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder  or  shabby  betrayal  that  has not been or is not daily being  perpetrated by the representatives of the states, under no other  pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible: "… for reasons of state".
Mikhail Bakunin; Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism

The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice. He who desires to worship God must harbour no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
Mikhail Bakunin; ibid

All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete personality of their intellectual powers.
Mikhail Bakunin; God and the State (1874), quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt, edited by James A Haught

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
Mikhail Bakunin; ibid

God, or rather the fiction of God, is thus the sanction and the intellectual and moral cause of all the slavery on earth, and the liberty of men will not be complete, unless it will have completely annihilated the inauspicious fiction of a heavenly master.
Mikhail Bakunin; ibid

When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.
Mikhail Bakunin

The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such.
Mikhail Bakunin

The trouble lies not in any particular form of government, but in ... the very existence of government itself.
Mikhail Bakunin

"What queer people you are!" said the mother to the Ukrainian one day. "All are your comrades – the Armenians and the Jews and the Austrians. You speak about all as of your friends; you grieve for all, and you rejoice for all!"
  "For all, mother dear, for all! The world is ours! The world is for the workers! For us there is no nation, no race. For us there are only comrades and foe ..."

Maxim Gorky, arrested for his writings on May 30, 1901; Mother

For me, it meant 8,000 days of hunger, of systematic beatings, of hard labor, of solitary confinement and solitude, 8,000 days of struggling to prove that I was a human being, 8,000 days of proving that my spirit could triumph over exhaustion and pain, 8,000 days of testing my religious convictions, my faith, of fighting the hate my atheist jailers were trying to instill in me with each bayonet thrust, fighting so that hate would not flourish in my heart, 8,000 days of struggling so that I would not become like them.
Armando Valladares, one of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro's thousands of victims, born on May 30, 1937   Source

I have been expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers so that I shall starve. No one publishes my poetry or my translations anymore, which was my daily bread. The first payments from my editor have been confiscated by order of the authorities.
Boris Pasternak, Nobel prize-winning author who died on May 30, 1960, possibly starved to death by the refusal of the USSR to allow him to work

Am I a gangster or murderer?
Of what crime do I stand condemned?
I made the whole world weep at the beauty of my land.

Boris Pasternak; in
Viro, Roberti, Moscow: Under the Skin, Geoffrey Bles, London, 1961, pp. 212 - 216

The aim of art is self-discharge
And not the clap-trap of success.
It's shameless to be looming large
For merits which are but a guess.

Boris Pasternak 

Good-bye … why am I haemorrhaging?
Boris Pasternak, last words

War should belong to the tragic past, to history: it should find no place on humanity's agenda for the future.
Pope John Paul II, in a speech in Coventry, UK, May 30, 1982

 

 

 

May 30 is the 150th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (151st in leap years), with 215 days remaining.
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Feast day of St Joan of Arc (Jeanne d'Arc; Jehanne la Pucelle)

Joan of Arc, also called the Maid of Orléans, is a national heroine of France and saint of the Catholic Church. During the Hundred Years' War she led the French against the English and was ultimately captured and executed.

This is the traditional date in 1431 of her death at the stake, but there is evidence to show Joan of Arc was alive, married with children as late as 1436 at Mentz and 1439 at Orleans. The marriage contract between Robert d'Armoise, Knight, and Jeanne d'Arc, la Pulcelle d'Orleans, has been discovered.

After she was captured, she was willing to recant in the face of the terrible punishment awaiting her, and her enemies were prepared to give her life imprisonment on bread and water. However, some of them put men's armour in her cell, and she was naturally tempted to put it on and gain the courage that it imparted to her. Her enemies caught her and said she was an unrepentant heretic, and no pardon could be granted to her, so she was burnt in the marketplace at Rouen.

Her real name was Darc, not d'Arc, so  she has no association with a village named Arc. Born at Domremi, a small village on the river Meuse, 1410 (some sources say January 6, 1412, which is where we have her in the Book of Days), she was the youngest child of peasants Jacques and Isabell Darc. Domremi lay in the territory of the Duke of Bar, a staunch supporter of the dauphin Charles VII, near the border with territory of Duke of Lorraine, who was an adherent of the Duke of Burgundy and the English party. The archangel Michael came to her in a vision and told her that she was destined to be the saviour of the French, as well as introducing her to her two saintly guides, Catherine and Margaret.

Two French historians, Pierre de Sermoise and Emile Grillot de Givry have both suggested that there is evidence to say that she was not executed. Another "witch" was substituted, wearing a hood. Five years later Joan apparently married Robert des Armoises and lived as wife and mother for another 18 years. Or. so it is said.

Told at her trial she ignored "the duties natural to a woman", it's also said that Jeanne responded, "There are enough women to do the work of which you speak".

Gallery (lots of pix, slow as a wet week to download)    Joan of Arc in WWI    More    More    More

 

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Frigg spinning cloudsFeast day of Frigg, Norse goddess

In Norse mythology, Frigg, Frige, Fricka, Frigga (shown here spinning clouds), one of the foremost goddesses of Norse mythology, was the mother goddess and the wife of Odin or Odr. Considered queen of the Aesir, and goddess of the sky, the goddess of motherhood, fertility, love, household management, and domestic arts. Indeed strong parallels exist between Frigg and Freya of whom she may be a different aspect.

She has the power of prophecy although she does not tell what she knows, and is the only one other than Odin who is permitted to sit on his high seat Hlidskjalf and look out over the universe. She also participates in the Wild Hunt (Asgardreid) along with her husband. Frigg's children are Baldr, Hod and Wecta; her stepchildren are Hermod, Heimdall, Tyr, Vidar, Vali, and Skjoldr. Thor is either her brother or a stepson.

Frigg's compainion is Eir, the gods' doctor and goddess of healing. Frigg's attendants are Hlin (a goddess of protection), Gna (a messenger goddess), and Fulla (a fertility goddess). It is unclear whether Frigg's companions and attendants are simply different aspects of Frigg herself. (c.f. avatar.) According to the poem Lokasenna Frigg is the daughter of Fjorgyn (masculine version of 'Earth,' c.f. feminine version of 'Earth,' Thor's mother), her mother is not identified in the stories that have survived.

Frigg is the highest goddess of the Aesir, while Freya is the highest goddess of the Vanir. Many arguments have been made both for and against the idea that Frigg and Freya are really the same goddess, avatars of one another. 7 Some arguments are based on linguistic analysis, others on the fact that Freya wasn't known in southern Germany, only in the north, and in some places the two goddesses were considered to be the same, while in others they were considered to be different. There are clearly many similarities between the two: both had flying cloaks of falcon feathers and engaged in shape-shifting, Frigg was married to Odin while Freya was married to Odr, both had special necklaces, both had a personification of the Earth as a parent, both were called upon for assistance in childbirth, etc. On the other hand, they sometimes appear at the same time in the same text.

There is also an argument that Frigg and Freya are part of a triad of goddesses (together with either Hnoss or Idun) associated with the different ages of womankind. The areas of influence of Frigg and Freya don't quite match up with the areas of influence often seen in other goddess triads. This may may mean that the argument isn't a good one, or it may tell us something interesting about northern European culture as compared to Celtic and southern European culture.

Finally, there is an argument is that Frigg and Freya are similar goddesses from different pantheons who were first conflated into each other and then later seen as separate goddesses again. (See also Wikipedia entry for Frige.) This is consistent with the theological treatment of some Greek, Roman, and Egyptian deities in the late classical period.

Sources: Wikipedia, Pantheon.org et al

Deities of many cultures in the Book of Days

 

Festival of the goddess Diana, Roman Empire (May 26 - 31, 17 BCE)

Feast day of St Anastasius XV

Feast day of St Felix, pope and martyr

Feast day of St Ferdinand III, first king of Castille and Leon in Union
(Lesser spearwort, Ranunculus flammula, is today's plant, dedicated to this saint.)
Patron saint of engineers.

Feast day of St Gabinus

Feast day of St Gamo

Feast day of St Hubert of Bretigny

Feast day of St Isaac

Feast day of St James Bertoni

Feast day of St Joseph Marello

Feast day of St Lawrence Richardson

Feast day of St Luke Kirby

Feast day of St Madelgisilus

Feast day of St Maguil, recluse in Picardy

Feast day of St Walstan, farm labourer at Taverham in Norfolk, devoted to God

Feast day of St William Filby

Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days    Shop saints

Corn and Flag Dances, New Mexico

Chanté-messes (sung masses in the Roman Catholic Churches), Martinique dances, Bamboches, Voudon (Voodoo)   Source

Corn and Flag Dances, New Mexico
Blessing of the fields of Tesuque Pueblo.
Source: The Phoenix and Arabeth 1992 Calendar

 

Around this time of year, Pentecost/Whitsunday

On the dating of items in the Almanac

In 2004, in the Western Christian calendar, today was Pentecost, known also as Whitsunday, originally called White Sunday – one of the great seasons for baptism when the candidates wore white garments, hence the name. The period around Whitsunday is known as Whitsuntide, the suffix -tide being Old English for 'time'.  Whitsunday is the seventh Sunday after Easter, to commemorate the descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost.

European folklore is rich in the traditions of Whitsuntide. In England, it is the traditional date of the Cotswold Games ...

Read more at the Whitsuntide article at the Scriptorium

 

National Reconciliation Week, Australia (May 27 - Jun 3)

Memorial Day, USA (originally – currently last Monday in May)
Memorial Day is a United States federal holiday that is observed on the last Monday of May. It was formerly known as Decoration Day. This holiday commemorates US men and women who have died in military service to their country.

The History and Origin of Memorial Day in Waterloo, New York

Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna Day, Fiji (last Monday in May)
Honours Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna (1888 - 1958), a founder of modern Fiji.

National Potato Day, Peru

Indian Arrival Day, Trinidad and Tobago
Indian Arrival Day commemorates the first arrivals from India to Trinidad, on this day in 1845, on the ship Fath Al Razak ('Victory to Allah the Sustainer'; it is commonly called Fatel Razack) or Fatel Rozack. Indian Arrival Day was first celebrated in Skinner Park, San Fernando, as the East Indian Centenary on May 30, 1945, which marked the centenary of the coming of Indians to Trinidad.

 

 

 

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

1672 Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia (June 9 [May 30, Old Style], 1672 - February 8, [January 28, Old Style], 1725), first Emperor of the Russian Empire (1721 - 1725).

Tsar Peter, a man who was two metres tall, had a program of Westernising Russia. Because beards were unfashionable in Europe but not in Russia at that time, Peter levied a tax on beards. However, not all his subjects complied, on his order bearded men were then forcibly shaved with a blunt razor, or had their whiskers removed one at a time with a pair of pincers. Once, Peter even personally cut off the beards of his noblemen. Men also had to wear Western dress and were encouraged to take up smoking and coffee drinking. 

In his earnest endeavour to bring Russia out of medieval ways and to Westernise his country, Peter showed his sincerity by actually travelling all round Europe and Britain, learning about modernity as he went. In 1697 - 98, under the pseudonym Pyotr Mikhaylov, he worked as a ship's carpenter in Holland and on the docks in London. He visited factories, schools, museums and arsenals and even anonymously sat in on parliament in England.


1814 Anarchist activist/philosopher and chief nemesis of Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin (d. 1876) was born at Prjamuchino, Russia. He saw Marx's formula for revolution as leading inevitably to tyranny. His birth date by the Julian calendar then in use in Russia was May 18.

Bakunin timeline    More at Wikipedia

1846 Peter Carl Fabergé (d. September 24, 1920), Russian goldsmith/jeweller to royalty, who created the famous precious Easter eggs that bear his name

1896 Howard Hawks (d. 1977), American film director, screenwriter and producer whose works gained considerable stature first among French film cultists, then among American critics. He directed Viva Villa!; To Have and Have Not (co-scripted by William Faulkner); The Big Sleep (also co-scripted by Faulkner); Rio Bravo. Hawks was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1975.

More

1899 Irving Thalberg (d. 1936), producer

1901 Cornelia Otis Skinner (d. 1979), Broadway producer, writer, director, actress

1902 Stepin Fetchit (d. 1985), dancer, actor

1907 Elly Beinhorn, German pilot, the second woman to fly from Europe to Australia

1908 Mel Blanc (born Mervin Jerome Blank; d. July 10, 1989), American vocal artist who provided the voices for all Warner Bros cartoon characters, such as Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester Pussycat, Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, Porky Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Tasmanian Devil, Pepe LePew, Marvin the Martian and Yosemite Sam.

The versatile Blanc also voiced dozens of Hanna-Barbera characters, starting in 1960 with Barney Rubble of The Flintstones. His autobiography, That's Not All, Folks! was published in 1988. Since Blanc's death, his son Noel has taken up some of his father's mantle.

Despite his most famous character's connection to them, he was allergic to carrots as they tended to affect his vocal cords. Thus he often did the eating sounds last in a recording session and had the sound technicians edit them in the soundtrack as needed.

The epitaph on headstone at his burial site in Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood reads, "That's All Folks!"

Voiceography

Mel Blanc obituary

1909 Benny Goodman (d. 1986), clarinetist, bandleader

1920 Franklin Schaffner (d. 1989), film director

1922 Hal Clement, science fiction writer

1926 Christine Jorgensen (d. 1989), transsexual

1927 Clint Walker, American actor (TV series: Cheyenne)

1928 Pro Hart (Kevin Charles Hart), MBE (d. March 28, 2006, Australian artist, considered the father of the Australian Outback painting movement

1934 Aleksei Leonov, cosmonaut and first person to walk in space

1936 Keir Dullea, actor

1937 Armando Valladares, political prisoner and prisoner of conscience in Cuba. Valladares was jailed in 1960, at age 23, when the new regime under Fidel Castro and Che Guevara cracked down on dissidents. He was imprisoned for refusing to place a placard on his desk at work stating that he supported Communism. He spent 22 years in prison, including years of solitary confinement.

1939 Michael J Pollard, American actor

1953 Colm Meaney, Irish actor (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine)

1972 Trey Parker, animator, comedian (South Park)

 

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May

27 International Jazz Day
27 Bridge Day
28 Whale Day
29 Mount Everest Day
29 Wisconsin Day
30 Compact Disc Day
31 Poetry Day
31 World No Tobacco Day

June

1 Children's Day (China)
3 Love Conquers All Day
3 Egg Day
3 Family Day
3 Tattoo Day
3 Repeat Day
3 Strawberry Festival (New Jersey, USA)
3 Blueberry Festival (Florida, USA)
4 Cheese Day
5 World Environment Day
6 Applesauce Cake Day
6 D-Day Anniversary
7 Boone Day
8 Best Friends Day
8 Ice Cream Day
8 World Ocean Day
9 Cuddle Up Day
9 Profess Your Love Day
10 Iced Tea Day
10 Great Turtle Races Day
10 Strawberry Festival (West Virginia, USA)
10 Tomato Festival (Louisiana, USA)
10 Mourn For Your Money Day
10 Tomato Festival (Texas, USA)
11 Red Rose Festival
11 King Kamehameha Day (Hawaii)
12 Diary Day
13 Kitchen Klutzes Of America Day
13