About This Blog
An alternative "On This Day", On This Deity aims to bring light to and celebrate Culture Heroes, Outsider Icons, Beloved Immortals and Revolutionary Events in history.
Julian Cope
24th February 1942 the Death of the Joint Fuehrer
Today we consider the curious case of Anton Drexler, the artist-mentor of Adolf Hitler and temporary Joint Führer, who died seventy years ago. Joint Führer? Surely not! Why, even the possibility of a world solipsist such as Hitler sharing the … Continue reading
Posted in Curiosities 2 Comments
20th July 1923 the Murder of Pancho Villa
Today we make note of the splendidly awful murder of that outrageous Mexican Revolutionary Pancho Villa eighty-eight years ago, whose bulging-eyed corpse – exploded by nine fatal bullets – was left upside down hanging out of his trashed Dodge automobile, … Continue reading
Posted in Curiosities 2 Comments
17th July 1946 the Execution of Draza Mihailovic
Today, we make brief note of the execution sixty-five years ago of the notorious Serbian Chetnik leader – General Dragoljub ‘Draža’ Mihailović – for war crimes and collaboration with the Nazis and Italians during the Second World War. Rejected at the end … Continue reading
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3rd July 1971 the Fortieth Anniversary of the Death of Jim Morrison
Today we honour that great poet and masterful singer, Jim Morrison, whose life was taken from him forty years ago today as he lay sleeping in his bath. He packed the life of an adventurous seventy-year-old into his twenty-seven short … Continue reading
Posted in Heroes, World Events 1 Comment
29th June 1975 the Mysterious Tragedy of Tim Buckley
Today we lament the tragic and untimely passing of rock’n’roll’s most revolutionary vocal stylist – the beautiful Tim Buckley – wrenched away from this planetary existence thirty-six years ago aged just twenty-eight. Had he survived his tragic fate, who knows … Continue reading
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6th June 1961 A 50th Anniversary Tribute on the Death of C.G. Jung
Today we pay tribute to Switzerland’s Carl Gustav Jung, the analytical psychologist who – like the artist William Blake and the civil rights leader Malcolm X – has risen to become a modern day World Prophet of the West not … Continue reading
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5th June 2002 the Death of Dee Dee Ramone
Today we pay tribute to the great rock’n’roll hero Dee Dee Ramone, who died nine years ago aged fifty. What can we do but kneel at the grave of this hoodlum culture hero and give thanks to him for stealing … Continue reading
Posted in Heroes 3 Comments
22nd May 1927 Charles Lindbergh’s Solo Atlantic Flight
Today we celebrate, rejoicing with arms outstretched at the audacious and heroic actions of America’s Charles Lindbergh, whose 30-hour flight from America’s east coast to Paris eighty-four years ago in a single-engine monoplane even shorter than a Spitfire turned him … Continue reading
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15th May 1940 the First McDonald’s
Today we recall with epic sadness that dreadful disastrous day seventy-two years ago when the first McDonald’s hamburger restaurant opened for service in San Bernadino, California. The extraordinary trajectory of McDonald’s flight to world infamy these past seven decades embodies … Continue reading
Posted in Atrocities, World Events 5 Comments
30th April 1945 the Suicide of Adolf Hitler
Today we celebrate with arms outstretched in utterly ecstatic glee the bizarre Berlin suicide sixty-seven years ago of that Cosmic Herostratus, World Garbage Mouth and Nihilistic Ruiner of All Things Adolf Hitler, who took his own life with poison even … Continue reading
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24th April 1915 the Armenian Genocide
Today we lament the beginning of the infamous Armenian Genocide in which 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of Turkey’s Ottoman regime. Force-marched to their deaths across stifling tundra, countless thousands driven en masse into subterranean caves at the … Continue reading
Posted in Atrocities 2 Comments
10th April 1919 the Death of Emiliano Zapata
Today we lament the death of the great Mexican revolutionary, natural anarchist and prophet – Emiliano Zapata – tragically betrayed and ambushed ninety-three years ago by federal forces after an heroic 9-year struggle to bring self-reliance and autonomy to his … Continue reading
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8th April 2010 the Death of Malcolm McLaren
Today we pay tribute to that uproarious lord of mischief, Malcolm McLaren, who popped his clogs two years ago today. What more can be said of this tiresome entrepreneurial maverick haberdasher who practiced his trade in the dying embers of … Continue reading
Posted in Anarchists, Heroes 1 Comment
31st March 1970 The Yodo-Go Hijack
Forty-two years ago today occurred the all-time single-most revolutionary political act in rock’n’roll, when Moriaki Wakabayashi – bass player of Tokyo’s notorious underground legends Les Rallizes Denudés – accompanied several other members of the Japanese Red Army Faction in the armed hijack … Continue reading
Posted in Revolution, World Events 1 Comment
29th March 1772 the Death of Emanuel Swedenborg
Today we celebrate the extraordinary scholar, philosopher, mystic and prophet, Emanuel Swedenborg, who left this world – just as he had predicted – two hundred and forty years ago today. Prophecy it was that brought greatest fame to Swedenborg, probably his … Continue reading
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27th March 1968 the Death of Yuri Gagarin
Today we acknowledge the anniversary of the death of Russia’s Yuri Gagarin, the first hero in space, the first human in space. How ironic then it was that such a hero could be dispatched not on a space flight but … Continue reading
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21st March 1991 the Death of Leo Fender
Today we pay tribute to the sustained visionary genius of Leo Fender, whose extraordinary deployment of Edisonian technology catapulted the previously minstrels-only 6-string guitar to the forefront of the post-war rock ‘n’ roll revolution. Yes, it must be understood that … Continue reading
11th March 1941 The Commencement of Lend-Lease
Today marks the 71st anniversary of the commencement of Lend-Lease, the controversial programme through which America gave aid to Great Britain’s war effort as she struggled alone against Hitler’s Nazi Germany in those dark days after the fall of France. Cajoled, … Continue reading
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5th March 1953 the Death of Joseph Stalin
Fifty-nine years ago today, the people of the Soviet Union were finally shown cosmic mercy for their long sufferance, freedom at last from their quarter-century endurance test at the hands of a peripheral mad man. Peripheral? J. Stalin hailed from … Continue reading
Posted in Tyrants 4 Comments
21st February 1965 Assassination of Malcolm X
Today we pay tribute to America’s extraordinary 1960s ‘Black Muslim’ leader and future World Prophet Malcolm X – murdered forty-seven years ago – whose audacious and inflammatory words, infamous autobiography and extraordinary TV appearances as the Nation of Islam’s spokesman … Continue reading
Posted in Heroes, World Events 1 Comment
13th February 1970 The Release of “BLACK SABBATH”
Today we celebrate the release, nay, escape of Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut LP, forty-two years ago, with which the initial re-paganising of late-50s Whitey – with its fuse lit by Afro-American rock’n’rollers – was crystallised forever by four psychedelicized Anglo-Saxon … Continue reading
Posted in World Events 3 Comments
27th January 1967 the Apollo 1 Sacrifice
Today we pay tribute to the three American astronauts of Apollo 1, who died forty-five years ago when their command module cabin caught fire during a pre-launch test at Cape Kennedy. The flight had already caused controversy when, just days … Continue reading
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25th January 1971 Charles Manson Convicted
It was forty-one years ago on this day that Charles Manson and three of his female accomplices were finally convicted of those horrendously violent murders which have come to many to represent the symbolic termination of the Swinging Sixties. Undoubtedly, … Continue reading
Posted in World Events 1 Comment
24th January 1965 the Death of Winston Churchill
Today we are duty bound to remember that dreadful old scoundrel, Winston Churchill, who died exactly forty-seven years ago. Racist, royalist, aristocrat, misogynist, opposer of women’s rights, deployer of army weapons against striking miners even; who knows the scores of ways … Continue reading
Posted in World Events 4 Comments
16th January 1968 the Release of Blue Cheer’s VINCEBUS ERUPTUM
Let us today pay tribute to Blue Cheer’s astounding debut LP VINCEBUS ERUPTUM, their teenage master class in colossally loud avant-garde guitar dynamics released exactly forty-three years ago and arguably the first rock album genuinely deserving of the description ‘Heavy … Continue reading
Posted in Heroes, Revolution, World Events 5 Comments
7th January 1649 The Re-Discovery of Avebury
Today, we must celebrate John Aubrey’s dramatic rediscovery of Avebury – the world’s largest prehistoric stone circle – whilst out hunting with fellow royalists during the English Civil War, exactly three hundred and sixty-two years ago. For Aubrey’s heroic retrieval … Continue reading
Posted in World Events 3 Comments
25th December 2006 the Death of James Brown
Today we pay tribute to James Brown – the legendary Godfather of Soul and self-proclaimed ‘Hardest Working man in Showbusiness’ – whose death exactly five years ago robbed us of a true World Artist and Culture Hero of the highest order, … Continue reading
Posted in Heroes 5 Comments
13th December 1937 The Rape of Nanking
Today we lament the tragic Rape of Nanking exactly seventy-three years ago, in which the recently Westernized & ‘modernized’ Japanese army – themselves less than a century out of their fiercely backward-looking Samurai past, and each soldier reeling from the … Continue reading
Posted in Atrocities 5 Comments
8th December 1980 the Murder of John Lennon
Today we pay tribute to Beatle John Lennon, who was thirty-one years ago shot to death outside his New York City apartment building. It is not the role of this On This Deity entry to heap upon Lennon’s tragically early … Continue reading
Posted in Heroes 2 Comments
5th December 1931 The Suicide of Vachel Lindsay
Today we lament the tragic suicide eighty years ago of Vachel Lindsay, the Visionary Illinois poet whose intriguingly itinerant ‘Johnny Appleseed’ lifestyle, visionary essays and paintings, slew of gritty epic, para-religious poems, and the extravagant and declamatory public manner in which … Continue reading
Posted in Heroes 3 Comments
30th November 1718 the Death of Charles XII of Sweden
We today commemorate – with wonder, awe and several mega-caveats – the brief bizarre life and equally bizarre death, of Sweden’s controversial King Charles XII, who met death exactly 299 years ago, during his second invasion of Norway. That Charles’ skull … Continue reading
Posted in Heroes 3 Comments
26th November 1976 ‘Anarchy In the UK’ Released
Today we celebrate the release of the Sex Pistols’ debut 7” single ‘Anarchy in the UK’ which caused a public outcry when it first appeared thirty-five years ago, and heralded the entire regeneration of ‘70s rock’n’roll. A riotous wake-up call … Continue reading
Posted in Revolution, World Events 2 Comments
11th November 1918 Armistice Day
Ninety-three years ago today, the signing of the Armistice in a railway carriage in France’s Compiegne Forest, by the Allied Commander-in-Chief Marshall Foch and Germany’s representative Matthias Erzberger, signaled the end of World War One and the complete defeat of … Continue reading
Posted in World Events 5 Comments
8th November 1923 Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch
Eighty-eight years ago today, Adolf Hitler – a full decade before actually seizing power – led his young Munich-based Nazi Party in an audacious yet disastrous attempt to force armed revolution upon chaotic post-WW1 Germany, when 600 Nazi stormtroopers gate-crashed … Continue reading
Posted in Atrocities, World Events 1 Comment
29th October 1949 the Death of George Gurdjieff
Today we commemorate the death of the prophet and gnostic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who died sixty-two years ago in Neuilly, near Paris, surrounded by a large group of sobbing followers. Somewhat like William Blake’s notion of having been a ‘sent … Continue reading
Posted in Heroes 2 Comments
21st October 1966 The Aberfan Disaster
Forty-five years ago today, 116 children from the South Wales village of Aberfan were suffocated in their classrooms, buried alive – just yards from their parents’ homes – by a forty-feet-high avalanche of liquefied coal waste that swept down the … Continue reading
Posted in Atrocities 1 Comment
18th October 1977 the Revolutionary Suicides of Baader and Ensslin
Today we celebrate the twin revolutionary suicides of Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin – co-leaders of Germany’s nihilistic Baader-Meinhof Gang – whose bloody and murderous exploits throughout the 1970s – made as part of Europe and Asia’s larger unhomogenised terrorist … Continue reading
Posted in Revolution 2 Comments
17th October 1961 The ’61 Paris Pogrom
On the 17th of October 1961, just seventeen years after he had expelled nearly 1,600 French Jews to concentration camps to the East, the former Nazi collaborator, Maurice Papon – obscenely and most bizarrely placed as Prefect of the Paris … Continue reading
Posted in Atrocities 1 Comment
11th October 1649 the Sack of Wexford
Today we pay tribute to the 1,500 Irish civilians murdered by rampaging English Parliamentarian forces, during Oliver Cromwell’s controversial siege of the Irish port of Wexford, on this day 352 years ago. Many drowned whilst attempting to escape across the … Continue reading
Posted in Atrocities 3 Comments
9th October 1967 The Martyrdom of Che Guevara
Forty-four years ago today, the CIA had Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara murdered in the jungles of Bolivia – the heroic exploits of this Latin American Warrior Poet and future World Prophet having, again & again, rendered the US Government’s many undercover … Continue reading
Posted in Heroes, Revolution 2 Comments
30th September 1971 the Death of T.C. Lethbridge
Today we honour the great British adventurer, author and hero, T.C. Lethbridge, the Cambridge University academic whose Timothy Leary-style volte-face midway through his illustrious archaeology career saw him newly transformed into a visionary of Blakean proportions. Out went the … Continue reading
Posted in Heroes 2 Comments
21st September 1942 Maiden Flight of the B-29
Sixty-nine years ago today saw the maiden flight of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, that huge American warplane whose atomic load would, with the bombing of Hiroshima, bring World War 2 to a sudden and dreadful conclusion. Faster, vaster, and with … Continue reading
Posted in World Events 1 Comment
10th September 1676 the Death of Gerrard Winstanley
Three hundred and thirty-five years ago today, the most Visionary and Prophetic reformer of the entire English Civil War period died at the age of sixty-seven. Thrust into the revolutionary times surrounding Oliver Cromwell’s execution of King Charles I, Gerrard … Continue reading
Posted in Heroes 2 Comments
25th August 2010 “A Thorny Problem”
Friedrich Nietzsche died one hundred and eleven years ago today. But who dares to celebrate the death in an insane asylum of this radical thinker, whose works – admittedly violated, even in places re-written, by his self-serving sister – contributed … Continue reading
Posted in Curiosities, Heroes 4 Comments