May Day was a holiday long before Labour activists, Illegal Aliens and Euro-Commies seized on it. The ancient Pagan fertility holiday is a "Cross Quarter Day" marking the period between the Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice... Also, there is a broken-up comet on the way in May that may make for interesting skygazing...
THE NEW STAR HUSTLER REVEALS: The Reasons For Tha Seasons: May Day THE APRIL FOOLS; SHOW ME THE 'INTELLIGENT DESIGN'?! by Kevin J. Walker, The New Star Hustler
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Milwaukee, WI USA 53201 STAR HUSTLER NEWS ALERT: The month of May will be an exciting one for we Star Gazers. A well-known comet has come apart at the seams as it swings around Sol, exposing its fresh frozen innards. Scientists are interested in having a peek inside, possibly shifting one of several probes by the Japanese, The European Space Agency, or NASA to make a flyby of this rare opportunity. But for the rest of us it just means the exposed pieces will have fresh surfaces to make a brilliant display, and we all can be star gazers, with no equipment needed. There will be more news here in a couple of weeks as the comet approaches Terra, which has received no end of discussion among the Art Bell/George Noori/Ian Punnett listeners to their Coast To Coast AM syndicated radio showgram, with frequent guest Richard C. Hoagland, the former NASA contractor and CBS science news frontman with Walter Cronkite during the Apollo missions. More news and pictures by large telescopes of the breakup can be seen at
http://Stardate.org website, and at
http://CNN.com/scitech Of course, be sure to log in the Star Hustler sites to keep you abreast of the approaching fractured comet which may flare up this May, providing nighttime viewing comparable to the two comets of 1997. For now however, we have another of our periodic Reasons For The Seasons as we do double duty this week concerning the May 1ro Cross Quarter Day, and upcoming Mother's day. We have the custom of celebrating many things of which we have lost the knowledge of their ancient origins. These rituals, seasonal celebrations and other calendar conundrums will be explored in this latest of occasional articles on things astronomical and historical. The topic this time out: CROSS QUARTER DAYS Most of the observations of Cross Quarter days have vanished, except for Groundhog Day on February 2, the midpoint between the Winter Solstice of Dec. 21-22 and the Spring Equinox of March 21-22. Groundhog Day is a minor holiday with astronomical connections. You surely notice now how the days are staying brighter and for longer in the evening, perhaps you even feel more energetic and invigorated. Ancient peoples who lived and died at the whim of a cruel Nature certainly noticed, and made rituals based on their observations. We still celebrate their origins, but its good to know why we do so. A Cross Quarter celebration that is still hanging on is the annual May Day celebrations that are mostly big in Europe, after being softened from the ancient practice of having the village maidens parade butte-naked around a giant phallus, hoping to be made a fertile wife for the young men of the nearby villages in a sort of erotic debutante exposition. MAY DAY WAS A GAY DAY It was also hoped that the sexual power of Creation would be transmuted into the land, so that it too would give birth in the form of a mighty harvest. This was also seen in some African tribal rituals. Young women walk around with their breasts open to be seen and judged National Geographic style, but after marriage the no-longer Maidens must cover them up. Children were substituted in our prudish times, and would gather ‘round the Maypole with streams of ribbons leading back to the now G-rated pole. Quite lost are the origins of the Pagan fertility holiday, which was the whole point of a successful suppression. The once big-time pagan holiday of May Day has since been appropriated by workers groups and Socialists in Europe such as the Green Party to agitate for whatever, with their fellow travelers having antigovernment celebrations on this side of the Atlantic. This time it is for Illegal Mexican border-hoppers to flex their muscles, trying to force America to capitulate to their demands, much like France. Boy, are they ever in for a big surprise! But I digress. This is a direct link to the just completed Equinox, based on the life-giving Sun's return to the Northern hemisphere, and the hopeful breaking of winter's icy grip and lengthening warmer days and inauguration of a bountiful growing season. There are four astronomical CROSS QUARTER DAY days, although two aren't celebrated much. There is May Day, our New Star Hustler topic this week ;and Groundhog Day which we discussed in February. The one between the September Equinox and the Winter Solstice is celebrated for a different reason, and is the basis for the old Pagan European New Year. WALPURGIS NIGHT is Oct. 31, All Hallow's Eve, or now corrupted to Hallowe'en. That continued Pagan holiday received an article of its own, at Black Web Portal Wire Services
Click on "Kevin J. Walker" for the articles list. The most forgotten of the four Cross Quarter Days is Midsummer, between June 22 and September 22. Maybe its because in the middle of long days and good weather there is no foreboding, or memory of the harsh winter or the loss of its grip. The memory of "MIDSUMMER'S NIGHTS EVE" much like Brotha playwright William Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" about the days after the Solstice / Christmas holiday that lead to January 6 and MICHAELMAS, or the EPIPHANY as the Catholics call it, would be even more distant except for the popularity of his plays of the 1600s. The subtleties of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets are even better enjoyed in their original Swahili. The four Equinoxes and Solstices that chart the Sun’s progress and determine the seasons on our sorta rounded globe were further divided, with May 1st the marker between March 21 and the Summer Solstice on June 21. The peasants were all for that too, as they had more time off from tilling and hoeing the land. It is known that the early Church tried in vain to get the populace to stop celebrating these old Pagan holidays and ways with little success. When they instituted their own competing holidays it only doubled the off days for the peasants, and that was all good! Then, they hit upon the one idea that worked, but it would take centuries: the Catholic church just put the holidays right on top of the old Pagan ones, patiently knowing that they would in time whither away and the original meanings become lost to the hearts and minds of humanity. This is the reason there are so many different symbols for the Easter and Christmas holidays, from the patchwork of nations and Pagan societies from the lands that were converted from the British Isles to the Middle East. There is a connection to Easter of the May Pole celebration. Remember as kids during Easter when you thought it was odd for the mixture of rabbits and eggs? Rabbits didn't lay eggs; we were only kids but we were pretty sure of that. Then we dismissed it, grew up, taught our own kids about the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas, that Lee Harvey Oswald Killed President John F. Kennedy, and moved on with our lives. GROUNDHOG DAY German immigrants in the Pennsylvania Dutch ("Deutsche") region imported the celebration with them. Since everybody likes a party we American mutts -- mixed with everybody and everything and darn proud of it -- clasped it to our bosom, much like what's happening to Kwanzaa, St. Patrick's Day and Cinco De Mayo, which has been adopted by the fun-loving Irish in Dublin it has been reported, who don't need to search overmuch for any reason to throw a party. TV stations gather without fail every year to see if the various large rodents such as Pennsylvania's Punxatawney Phil see their shadows, without even delving into the real reasons why the Sun’s angle and the shadows are such a big deal in the first place! I actually had a family of groundhogs near the south-facing some property I rented for a few years, which was a stroke of luck for a Star Hustler. I only had to look out of my south-facing kitchen window on Feb. 2 to see if the scampering squirrels on steroids noticed their shadows, which is only of passing interest to an amateur astronomer/Stargazer. I also know from direct experience that most groundhogs have such bad eyesight -- and hearing -- that whatever it is that people think groundhogs see doesn’t count for very much. The “six weeks more of Winter” doesn’t mean much to us here in Wisconsin, where we’d be only too happy to have only six more weeks of below-freezing temperatures and snowstorms that aren’t unknown in early May! APRIL FOOLS GET DISSED BIG TIME The beginning of the year was originally set by custom after the date when the days started being longer than the nights. This is just past the Spring Equinox, when the day and night are now of equal length. It took a while for this to be apparent in the Northern Hemisphere, so the custom became April First, about 7 or 8 days or so after the Equinox of what we now call March 22. (This is also why the Winter Solstice celebration is December 25 and not the 21st or 22nd). The Roman Empire fell from within and after continued southern attacks from CARTHAGE, or northern Africa, near about where lies modern day Tunisia and Libya; as well as northern Barbarian attacks from the Germanic tribes of Saxony. The Germanic Saxons invaded the old Angle-land, or England, and became the ANGLO-SAXONS, but that’s another article for the big pile. But one thing the Romans left of abiding usefulness is a fairly cohesive calendar, which only needs a bit of tweaking every four years or so. When the new calendar was instituted by the Holy Roman Church a couple of new months were kept that were added at the beginning of the year and the middle for a couple of emperors, which threw off the neat Ten Month calendar. But it worked out better this way anyway, unlike trying to squeeze in 365 days for 360 degrees, which already was tried by the BABYLONIANS who had a thing about circles, and Even Numbers. Twelve months can be divided by 2,3,4,5,6,8,10, and 12. Not so for a Ten Month Calendar, which had to have many holidays to make the weeks come out straight, and a strong central authority to enforce universal compliance, which the Romans were and could. Until their final fall in 476 CE, when they tired of the ceaseless barbarian onslaughts and relocated the Roman empire's capital east to CONSTANTINOPLE, on the opening of the Bosporus Sea, now Istanbul near the Caspian Sea in present day Turkey. This also meant the establishment of another competing church, the EASTERN ORTHODOX CHURCH, but that's another article. We're up to about a book's worth now I think. This now meant that the date of the New Year had to be moved from the Spring Equinox time. It was relocated to the month of JANUS, who was a Greco-Roman god who had two faces. This was apropos, because he could look forward and backward, as his month of January does, back to the end of the year and forward to the beginning of the new one. But there were holdovers who refused to give up their old ways, and they continued to celebrate the Old New Year of April First. They were ridiculed by the more modern people, and so they were called “APRIL FOOLS.” So now you know. SHOW HOW ME THE 'INTELLIGENT DESIGN'?! As an aside, and a foreshadowing of an upcoming article, this calls into question the idea that there is INTELLIGENT DESIGN. A super-powered Designer could have easily made planets have circular rather than elliptical orbits, and a 25 hour day, and a bunch of other nice things to have, like knees and backs that don't give us problems, and seedless watermelons, or avocado pits that aren't quite so large. But that article will confront this wrong-headed bass ackwards idea head-on. But with a particular caveat, and one that came from scientists themselves, together with the Quantum physicists. NEXT: More articles on Fear of a Black Planet: ¿Where Do White People Come From?; the Ancient origins of different races; true history versus His Story, and the build-up to a genocidal Final Solution.
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Our Partner:Kevin Walker
Mr. Walker is a print journalist who often includes Science and Travel articles among his forays on political and societal observations. A past professor of Journalism at his Alma Mater of Marquette University, Walker has written extensively for several newspapers on urban issues, and is presently compiling his essays on the phenomenon of intractable trans-generational familial poverty into the book in progress "The Culture of Poverty," based on his observations on the effects of Welfare Reform in his hometown in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He often writes from an Undisclosed Location in the Hidden Valleys retreat inland from the Mississippi River in western Wisconsin, where he indulges in his first intellectual love, amateur Astronomy and stargazing.
Milwaukee, WI, 53202
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