Today, on the anniversary of his death in 1650, we remember the life and work of French philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes. Although not overtly political, the work of Descartes succeeded in redefining much of philosophical thought, to the extent … Continue reading →

The Bible, Genesis 2:20, states: “And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field”. But actually it wasn’t Adam. It was a Swedish botanist: Carl Linnaeus. My dad … Continue reading →

As befits such a momentous world-shifting event, On This Deity proudly presents two overviews to mark the occasion of the death of Johannes Gutenberg and the Printing Revolution he begat.  These days we are constantly told that the Internet is the … Continue reading →

On the evening of November 30th 1994, in the remote French village of Champot, revolutionary and avant-gardist Guy Debord enacted his final spectacle of deconstruction when he shot himself through the heart. He was 62. For the prime mover of … Continue reading →

It happened in a quarry behind a prison camp on the outskirts of Châteaubriand. In three groups of nine, twenty-seven men were lined up. Behind them a pit to fall into. Before them a row of German guns. It was … Continue reading →

Today we recall the social theorist and world-changer – Friedrich Engels – who died 116 years ago on this day. Chiefly known as the lifelong friend, literary executor and “junior partner” of Karl Marx, their collaborative relationship is among the … Continue reading →

Today we honour Arthur Lee – the African American protest singer, metaphysical poet and leader of LA’s pioneering psychedelic refuseniks Love – who quit this planet five years ago after an arduous battle with cancer. Like Lou Reed, Arthur’s work … Continue reading →

On 27 July 1890, Vincent van Gogh, an unkempt, unknown 37-year-old Dutchman, walked out of his lodgings in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, just north of Paris, where he had been living and working since May. That day instead of his … Continue reading →

Today we lament the tragically early death of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who drowned when his schooner sank in a sudden violent storm in the Gulf of Spezia. He was twenty-nine years old. His body washed ashore ten days later and, … Continue reading →

Today we pay tribute to the legendary Syd Barrett, erstwhile leader of the Pink Floyd and Psychedelic Frontiersman # 1, who quit this planet five years ago after decades of reclusive living and battles with mental illness.

There is no shortage of events to remember on July 4th. So I’m extremely pleased that On This Deity finds room today to celebrate the life and commemorate the death of Gregory Bateson. The first time I encountered Gregory Bateson’s … Continue reading →

  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 →

Forty-eight years ago today, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in the driveway of his home; his wife and young children, who’d been waiting up for him, watched in horror as he bled to death on the doorstep. Lynchings … Continue reading →

  Today we pay tribute to Thomas Paine, Forgotten Founding Father of the United States, who died two hundred and two years ago today on 8th June 1809. Revolutionary, pamphleteer, writer, agitator, radical, propagandist, deist – by the time of … Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

At 12:44am on the 31st of May 1996, Dr. Timothy Leary sat bolt upright in bed startling the small group of friends and family who had gathered to keep him company during his final days. He had been diagnosed with … Continue reading →

Today we raise a fist in tribute to folk singer, anarchist, activist, historian and storyteller extraordinaire, Utah Phillips, who died three years ago on this day at the age of seventy-three. A Mark Twain-meets-Howard Zinn with a guitar, Phillips dedicated … Continue reading →

Today we pay our respects to that towering giant of French letters – the visionary poet, epic novelist, revolutionary playwright, Romantic, mystic, activist and politician, Victor Hugo. An unqualified hero to his countrymen, when he died on this day one … Continue reading →

It was a bright morning in Dublin on May 12th 1916, and a great crowd had gathered outside of Kilmainham Jail. As spring was turning to summer, a city still coming to terms with the death and destruction of the … Continue reading →

  “In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of ‘revolutionary’; and it is they alone who are masters.” – Paul Gauguin When artist Paul Gauguin’s 54-year-old dead body was lowered swiftly into his … Continue reading →

Today we pay tribute to the author, naturalist, poet-prophet, mystic, abolitionist and unrepentant individual – Henry David Thoreau. When he died on this day in 1862 from tuberculosis at the age of 44, this giant in the American pantheon was … Continue reading →

He’s been called the “prophet of his generation,” “America’s Plato,” “the Sage of Concord” and “the single most influential figure in American literary history”. Today we celebrate a true colossus – Ralph Waldo Emerson – who died one hundred and twenty-nine … Continue reading →

  Two hundred and nineteen years ago today, Joaquim Jose da Silva Xavier – better known as Tiradentes – was hanged in Rio de Janeiro. His body was then chopped into pieces, which were displayed along the road between Rio and … Continue reading →

Yes, he was “mad, bad and dangerous to know” – flamboyant, dynamic and notorious for his scandalous love affairs and aristocratic excesses. A proto-rock star, he was the most famous literary figure of his day – capturing the imagination of Europe … Continue reading →

On the 18th of April 1955 Albert Einstein died in Princeton Hospital, New Jersey. He was 76 years old. One of the chief architects of the modern era, there are few other individuals whose impact on human culture has been … Continue reading →

Today we pay tribute to Terence McKenna, the psychedelic voyager and Mesoamerican paladin, who died eleven years ago on this day. Unfortunately, this must for the moment remain a holding entry as our preferred author is currently unavailable – and … Continue reading →

Today we celebrate the extraordinary scholar, philosopher, mystic and prophet, Emanuel Swedenborg, who left this world – just as he had predicted – two hundred and thirty-nine years ago today. Prophecy it was that brought greatest fame to Swedenborg, probably his … Continue reading →

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 →

  In the middle of the 19th century, the barely-United States of America was in grave trouble. Stymied by its inability to reconcile a mandate for economic growth that depended largely on that “peculiar institution” of slavery, the so-called “Land … Continue reading →

  We in the West tend to recall only the great Mahatma Gandhi when we think of India’s long and gruelling fight for freedom from the British Raj. But today we are paying tribute to another great Indian Independence revolutionary … Continue reading →

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 →

  Henry David Thoreau declared him: “A true friend of man; almost the only friend of human progress.” In his idealistic quest for human ascendency, he was more Emersonian than Ralph Waldo Emerson himself. Today we recall one of the … Continue reading →

  Due to unforeseen circumstances, today’s guest writor was unable to deliver their tribute to D.H. Lawrence. This piece will be appear at a later date.

Do you remember where you were when you heard the news that Bill Hicks was dead? I was at the corner of Kentish Town Road and Hawley Road, on my way to a pub in Camden Town. My friend Justin … Continue reading →

Today we reflect on the brief but luminous life of John Keats – struck down by tuberculosis one hundred and ninety-one years ago at the age of 25. Little known and lowly regarded in his lifetime, the dying poet – … Continue reading →

Today we pay tribute to a true colossus – the abolitionist, writer, orator and America’s first black leader of national stature, the inimitable Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery, separated in infancy from his mother and shunted from one pitiless Maryland … Continue reading →

Today marks the 412th anniversary of the death of the Italian Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno. Most of us associate the initiation of modern cosmology with Nicolaus Copernicus (the first to convincingly place the Sun instead of the Earth at the … Continue reading →

Today we pay tribute to the man known as Mexico’s George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He was one of the leading revolutionary generals in Mexico’s 11-year war of independence and, as the republic’s second president, abolished slavery in 1829 – … Continue reading →

Today, we commemorate the indefatigable, controversial and visionary Scottish historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle, a literary giant of his time whose biography of Frederick the Great so a-flamed the German imagination that it was even studied as part of the … Continue reading →

On the 2nd of February 1970, after a long life in which he travelled far and wide, Bertrand Russell died less than a hundred miles from his Welsh birthplace. To some he was the most important philosopher of the 20th … Continue reading →

  Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to mourn the death and celebrate the life of William Butler Yeats. Poet and politician, mystic and modernist, revolutionary and traditionalist, WB Yeats lived a life filled with glorious contradiction. A man … Continue reading →

Today we pay our respects to the great singer, actor, scholar, All-American athlete and human rights activist, Paul Robeson. In the 1930s and 40s, this son of an escaped slave was the most famous and widely respected Afro-American man in … Continue reading →

George Eliot called him “a prophet for his generation.” In a letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle wrote: “No other man in England that I meet has in him the divine rage against iniquity, falsity, and baseness that Ruskin … Continue reading →

Today we pay tribute to Pierre-Sylvain Maréchal, the visionary French revolutionary, militant Atheist and proto-anarchist whose iconoclastic and blasphemous new calendar – the “Honest Man’s Almanac” – so outraged pre-Revolutionary France that he was, in 1788, sentenced to jail for … Continue reading →

Sixty-seven years ago today, Raoul Wallenberg was summoned to Red Army headquarters in Budapest, Hungary. Before setting off, he confided to one of his closest associates: “I do not know whether I am a guest of the Soviets or their … Continue reading →

Henry Miller called him “the living symbol of protest.” In 1957, Kenneth Rexroth wrote that he was the only remaining poetic voice of America’s early twentieth-century revolutionary conscience. Today we are commemorating American poet and novelist, Kenneth Patchen – who … Continue reading →

  Due to unforeseen circumstances, today’s guest contributor was unable to deliver their tribute to Albert Camus. This piece will be appear at a later date.

One hundred and fifteen years ago today, José Rizal – the “George Washington of the Philippines” – was executed by the Spanish Army following a false conviction for rebellion, sedition and conspiracy. Rizal had devoted all of his brief adult life … Continue reading →

Today we pay tribute to the brilliant poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, who died of leukaemia eighty-four years ago at the age of fifty-one. In the age of disillusionment, Rilke was a mystic who pondered the Big Questions – life, love, … Continue reading →

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 →

On this day in 1888 in Arles in southern France, Vincent van Gogh performed the most infamous act of self-mutilation in art history. He cut off part of his left ear lobe. From that point on, the world pointed, laughed … Continue reading →

The cover of Phil Ochs 1969 album, Rehearsals For Retirement, is one of the most powerful images of any 60s album. Ochs is pictured in front of the flag with a Revolutionary War rifle slung over his shoulder. Beneath him … Continue reading →

A tribute to Czech revolutionary hero Václav Havel will appear here shortly.

“I swear before you, I swear before the God of my fathers, I swear by my fathers, I swear by my honour, I swear by my country that I will not rest, body or soul, until I have broken the … Continue reading →

Today we lament the death of Sitting Bull, the legendary Hunkpapa Sioux chief and arguably the most famous-ever Native American, murdered by Indian “police” one hundred and twenty-one years ago today during a bungled effort to arrest the 59-year-old spiritual … Continue reading →

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 →

Today we pay tribute to the extraordinary English poet, novelist, translator and scholar, Robert Graves  – a literary giant, who died twenty-six years ago on this day. Seemingly effortlessly, Robert Graves’ career straddled vast tracts of time, his biography featuring … Continue reading →

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 →

When is a cause so just that the means justify the end? Today we honour a man who, in response to that conundrum, became a World Martyr. A man so fervently opposed to racism that he was willing to die … Continue reading →

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 →

Today we pay tribute to the legendary labour organiser, protest songwriter and folk hero, Joe Hill, executed ninety-six years ago in Utah following a notorious and highly controversial murder trial. A prominent and much-loved member of radical trade unionists the … Continue reading →

Today we honour the civil rights leader, revolutionary and firebrand, Stokely Carmichael, who died from cancer thirteen years ago on this day at the age of 57. Carmichael was catapulted to worldwide fame overnight in June 1966 when, at a … Continue reading →

Today we recall the nineteenth-century visionary outsider poet, Arthur Rimbaud – whose brilliant but slender volume of work produced in a mere handful of years is often overshadowed by his magnificently adventurous and lawless life. The legend of Rimbaud centres … Continue reading →

How and why do species change? Why do some occur in some places, but not in others? Why do they die out? These big questions didn’t scare intrepid British explorer, biologist and geographer Alfred Russel Wallace, who died ninety-seven years … Continue reading →

Today we pay homage to Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, rhythm guitarist and songwriter with the revolutionary ‘60s Detroit band MC5: a Visionary Motherfucker who died of ill health at the age of just forty-five. More tragically, Sonic’s MC5 career (and role … Continue reading →