January’s Notable People

1/1/1854

Birth of Sir James George Frazer- Author of The Golden Bough.

British anthropologist, scholar, and folklorist Sir James George Frazer was born on January 1st in 1854, in Glasgow, Scotland. He is most well known for his work “The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion”, which really defined his name in anthropology upon its publication in 1890. In it, he discussed the evolutions of thought methods including magical, religious and, of course, scientific. In his work, he established an important distinction between magic and religion; magic as an attempt to control events by technical acts based upon faulty reasoning, religion as an appeal for help to spiritual beings. This opinion is outdated, of course, but he has done more work on the subject than any other single anthropologist.

“The Golden Bough” discussed ‘divine kingship’ as used by colonies in Africa and other nations with such beliefs. According to Frazer, the institution of divine kingship derived from the belief that the well-being of the social and natural orders depended upon the vitality of the king, who must therefore be slain when his powers begin to fail him and be replaced by a vigorous successor.

Sir James Frazer passed away on May 7, 1941.

1/19/1980

Birthday of Dorothy Clutterbuck- initiated Gerald Gardner (Founder of Wicca), into New Forest Coven

Clutterbuck was born January 19, 1880, in Bengal, to Thomas St. Quintin Clutterbuck, a captain (later major) in the Indian Local Forces, and Ellen Anne Clutterbuck.At some point, she went to live in England, where she enjoyed an affluent life. Gardner said he became acquainted with her through the Fellowship of Crotona, a group that opened “The First Rosicrucian Theatre in England” in 1938 in the New Forest region, and performed plays with occult themes. Some of the members of the Fellowship revealed themselves to Gardner as Witches. In 1939, just after the start of World War II, Gardner said Clutterbuck initiated him into the New Forest Coven in her home.

She was considered “a lady of note in the district” and had a large house, and a pearl necklace valued at 5,000 pounds, which she liked to wear often. Clutterbuck died in 1951, leaving a considerable estate of more than 60,000 pounds.

1/19/1809

Birthday of Edgar Allan Poe

Poe’s life began with tragedy with both parents dying within the first three years of his like. A wealthy merchant named John Allan. He was later taken to Scotland and England (1815–20), where he was given a classical education that was continued in Richmond. For 11 months in 1826 he attended the University of Virginia, but his gambling losses at the university so incensed his guardian that he refused to let him continue, and Poe returned to Richmond to find his sweetheart, (Sarah) Elmira Royster, engaged.

He began publications in 1827 with a pamphlet of youthful Byronic poems, Tamerlane, and Other Poems. Poverty forced him to join the army under the name of Edgar A. Perry, but, on the death of Poe’s foster mother, John Allan purchased his release from the army and helped him get an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Before going, Poe published a new volume at Baltimore, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829). He successfully sought expulsion from the academy, where he was absent from all drills and classes for a week. He proceeded to New York City and brought out a volume of Poems, containing several masterpieces.

He then returned to Baltimore, where he began to write stories. In 1833 his “MS. Found in a Bottle” won $50 from a Baltimore weekly, and by 1835 he was in Richmond as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. There he made a name as a critical reviewer and married his young cousin Virginia Clemm, who was only 13. Poe seems to have been an affectionate husband and son-in-law.

Poe was dismissed from his job in Richmond, apparently for drinking, and went to New York City. Drinking was in fact to be the bane of his life. To talk well in a large company he needed a slight stimulant, but a glass of sherry might start him on a spree; and, although he rarely succumbed to intoxication, he was often seen in public when he did. This gave rise to the conjecture that Poe was a drug addict, but according to medical testimony he had a brain lesion. While in New York City in 1838 he published a long prose narrative, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, combining (as so often in his tales) much factual material with the wildest fancies. It is considered one inspiration of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. In 1839 he became coeditor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in Philadelphia. There a contract for a monthly feature stimulated him to write “William Wilson” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” stories of supernatural horror. The latter contains a study of a neurotic now known to have been an acquaintance of Poe, not Poe himself.

Poe’s wife, Virginia, died in January 1847. In 1848 he also published the lecture “Eureka,” a transcendental “explanation” of the universe, which has been hailed as a masterpiece by some critics and as nonsense by others. In 1849 he went south, had a wild spree in Philadelphia, but got safely to Richmond, where he finally became engaged to Elmira Royster, by then the widowed Mrs. Shelton, and spent a happy summer with only one or two relapses. He enjoyed the companionship of childhood friends and an unromantic friendship with a young poet, Susan Archer Talley.

Poe had some forebodings of death when he left Richmond for Baltimore late in September. There he died, although whether from drinking, heart failure, or other causes was still uncertain in the 21st century. He was buried in Westminster Presbyterian churchyard in Baltimore.

Here is a link to a list of Poe’s most memorable works as a timeline to his life.

1/25/1759

Birthday of Robert Burns, poet.

Robert Burns was the first of William and Agnes Burnes’ seven children. His father, a tenant farmer, educated his children at home. Burns also attended one year of mathematics schooling and, between 1765 and 1768, he attended an “adventure” school established by his father and John Murdock. His father died in bankruptcy in 1784, and Burns and his brother Gilbert took over the farm. This hard labor later contributed to the heart trouble that Burns’ suffered as an adult.

At the age of fifteen, he fell in love and shortly thereafter he wrote his first poem. As a young man, Burns pursued both love and poetry with uncommon zeal. In 1785, he fathered the first of his fourteen children. His biographer, DeLancey Ferguson, had said, “it was not so much that he was conspicuously sinful as that he sinned conspicuously.” Between 1784 and 1785, Burns also wrote many of the poems collected in his first book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, which was printed in 1786 and paid for by subscriptions. This collection was an immediate success and Burns was celebrated throughout England and Scotland as a great “peasant-poet.”

In 1788, he and his wife, Jean Armour, settled in Ellisland, where Burns was given a commission as an excise officer. He also began to assist James Johnson in collecting folk songs for an anthology entitled The Scots Musical Museum. Burns’ spent the final twelve years of his life editing and imitating traditional folk songs for this volume and for Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs. These volumes were essential in preserving parts of Scotland’s cultural heritage and include such well-known songs as “My Luve is Like a Red Red Rose” and “Auld Land Syne.” Robert Burns died from heart disease at the age of thirty-seven. On the day of his death, Jean Armour gave birth to his last son, Maxwell.

Most of Burns’ poems were written in Scots. They document and celebrate traditional Scottish culture, expressions of farm life, and class and religious distinctions. Burns wrote in a variety of forms: epistles to friends, ballads, and songs. His best-known poem is the mock-heroic Tam o’ Shanter. He is also well known for the over three hundred songs he wrote which celebrate love, friendship, work, and drink with often hilarious and tender sympathy. 

Burns died on July 21, 1796, at the age of 37. Even today, he is often referred to as the National Bard of Scotland.

Fine here a list of Robert Burns’ most famous works.

1/30/1940: 

Birthday of Z Budapest, founder of Dianic Wicca

Zsuzsanna Budapest (often known as simply “Z”), was born Zsuzsanna Emese Mokcsay on 30 January 1940 in Budapest, Hungary (she later adopted Zsuzsanna Budapest as her craft name). Her mother was a medium and a practising witch who supported herself and her daughter by her work as a sculptress, and Zsuzsanna grew up respecting and appreciating Mother Nature as a goddess. In one of her later books, she claimed that her mother was born by virgin birth, and that her grandmother had become pregnant through magical forces. She also claimed that her family kept an Ancestor Book dating back to the year 1270. Certainly, many of her family appear to have been healers, and her grandmother was a herbalist and naturalist healer.

Under the Russian occupation in Hungary, she also developed a fierce political consciousness, so, when the Hungarian Revolution broke out in 1956, she became one of the sixty-five thousand political refugees who left the country. She settled in Austria, where she finished high school in Innsbruck, graduated from a bilingual gymnasium and won a scholarship to the University of Vienna where she studied languages.

In 1959, she emigrated to the United States, where she studied at the University of Chicago and at Second City (an improvisational theatrical school). She married a man called Tom soon after arriving in America, and gave birth to two sons, Laszlo and Gabor. They moved to Port Washington, Long Island, New York, in 1964, but her marriage to Tom did not last long, especially when she began to identify as a lesbian (choosing to avoid the “duality” between man and woman) and they divorced in 1970.

At the age of thirty, she moved to California and became involved with the burgeoning women’s liberation movement in Los Angeles, becoming an activist and staffing the Women’s Center there for many years. She also recognized a need for a spiritual dimension within the feminist movement, and founded the Susan B. Anthony Coven Number l in Venice, California in 1971. This was the first feminist witches’ coven (named after the 19th Century women’s rights campaigner), and it became the role model for many other spiritual groups across the nation. As the coven grew, her home could no longer accommodate their expanding membership, and they began to celebrate openly on the beach and then later on a mountaintop in Malibu.

Her first book, “The Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows” (first published in 1975 and then re-published in 1989 as “The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries”) was the first hands-on book designed to lead women into their own spiritual/Goddess heritage, and is the basic text of what came to be known as Dianic Wicca. The coven also started a regular newsletter called “Themis” (now “Thesmorphoria”). One of her early pupils was Starhawk, who later became prominent as a woman’s leader and author in her own right.

Her circles were exclusive to women only, although she preferred an equal mix of heterosexual and lesbian women, which she believed provided balance in her rituals. Some of her ceremonies were essentially recreations of the shamanistic rituals of old Europe, and some of them have been quite contentious: she has conducted ceremonies where aborted foetuses were offered to the Goddess (which she argued was a way of reclaiming abortion from patriarchy), and she has occasionally used menstrual blood or animal blood obtained from butchers in her magical ceremonies. She and her coven have also, from time to time, called upon the Goddess to aid in the capture of serial killers and serial rapists.

She has published 10 books, one play and two CDs, and she continues to teach, give workshops and lectures, and to star in her own cable TV show called “13th Heaven”. She is the director of the Women’s Spirituality Forum, a nonprofit organization in the San Francisco Bay area where she lives, and she founded, and sponsors, the Dianic University Online, an online school for Dianic Wicca and Goddess studies for women.