December
Dharmacakra, the Wheel of Law.
DECEMBER 2023
Motto:
Slav, Teuton, Kelt, I count them all, my friends and brother souls, With all the peoples, great and small, that wheel between the poles. You Canadian, Indian Australasian, African, All your hearts be in harmony! - Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Phenomena
DECEMBER
3 Venus square Pluto
5 Venus trine Saturn, Moon’s last quarter
8 Mercury trine Jupiter
12 New Moon
17 Sun square Neptune
18 Mercury trine Jupiter
19 Moon’s first quarter
21 Venus opposition Uranus
22 Sun conjunction Mercury, Sun enters Capricorn, Winter solstice
25 Venus trine Neptune
27 Sun trine Jupiter, Mercury square Neptune, Full Moon
28 Mercury conjunction Mars, Mars square Neptune
Many Years Ago
December 1
- Woody Allen: This day in 1935 was born Woody Allen, an American screenwriter, director, actor, and musician whose career spans over half a century. Allen often stars in his own films, typically in the persona he developed as a standup. Some of the best-known of his over 40 films are Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters and Midnight in Paris.
- Antarctic: This day is the opening day for signature the Antarctic Treaty which was signed in 1959 by 12 countries, making the Antarctic continent a demilitarized zone to be preserved for scientific research. For the purposes of the treaty system, Antarctica is defined as all of the land and ice shelves south of 60o S Latitude. The treaty, entering into force in 1961 and currently having 50 signatory nations, sets aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve, establishes freedom of scientific investigation and bans military activity on that continent.
December 2
- Maria Callas: Maria Callas (born December 2, 1923) was a Greek soprano and one of the most renowned opera singers of the 20th century. An extremely versatile singer, her repertoire ranged from classical opera seria to the bel-canto operas of Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini; further, to the works of Verdi and Puccini. Her remarkable musical and dramatic talents led to her being hailed as La Divina.
December 4
- Kandinsky: Artist Wassily Kandinsky, born this day in 1866 in Moscow, was one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting and confounded the influential Munich group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider).
- Rainer Maria Rilke: René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, born in 4 December 1875, was a Boemian-Austrian poet and novelist. Rilke is widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets. From 1892 to 1895 he was tutored for the university entrance exam, which he passed in 1895. In 1895 and 1896, he studied literature, art history, and philosophy in Prague and Munich. His most famous works are the Duino Elegies and the poem cycle Sonnets to Orpheus containing 55 entire sonnets. Both works together have often been taken as constituting the high points of Rilke's work.
December 5
- Walt Disney: Walt Disney, born in Chicago this day in 1901, pioneered animated cartoon films, created such beloved characters as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and founded what is now one of the world's largest entertainment conglomerates. Walt Disney was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, and philanthropist, well known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century.
- Heisenberg: Werner Karl Heisenberg (b. December 5 1901) was a German theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1932 "for the creation of quantum mechanics". In 1927 he published his uncertainty principle, upon which he built his philosophy and for which he is best known.
December 6
- Max Müller: Friedrich Max Müller (b. December 6) was a German Orientalist, one of the founders of the western academic field of Indian studies and the discipline of comparative religion. Müller wrote both scholarly and popular works on the subject of Indology, a discipline he introduced to the British reading public, and the Sacred Books of the East, a massive, 50-volume set of English translations prepared under his direction, stands as an enduring monument to Victorian scholarship.
- Underhill: Evelyn Underhill was an English writer and pacifist known for her numerous works on Christian mysticism. Underhill was born this day in 1875 in Wolverhampton. She was a poet and novelist as well as mystic. An only child, she described her early mystical insights as "abrupt experiences of the peaceful, undifferentiated plane of reality—like the "still desert" of the mystic—in which there was no multiplicity nor need of explanation."
December 11
- Berlioz: Hector Berlioz (b. 11 December 1803) was a French composer, best known for his compositions Symphonic fantastique and Grand Messe des Morts (Requiem).
- Naguib Mahfouz: Nagīb Maḥfūẓ, born this day in December 1911, was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. He published 34 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts, and five plays over a 70-year career. Many of his works have been made into Egyptian and foreign films.
December 14
- Nostradamus: Michel de Nostredame (born 14 December 1503), was a French apothecary and reputed seer who published collections of prophecies that have since become famous worldwide. He is best known for his book Les Propheties (The Prophecies), the first edition of which appeared in 1555.
- Tycho Brahe: Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, born this day in 1546, developed astronomical instruments and measured and fixed the positions of stars in an era before the invention of the telescope, paving the way for future discoveries. As an astronomer, Tycho worked to combine what he saw as the geometrical benefits of the Copernican system with the philosophical benefits of the Ptolemaic system into his own model of the universe, the Tychonic system. Furthermore, he was the last of the major naked eye astronomers, working without Telescopes for his observations.
December 16
- Arthur Clarke: Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, (1917–2008) was a British science fiction author and inventor, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space odyssey (1968), and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World.
December 17
- Beethoven: Ludwig van Beethoven, born in Bonn, then the capital of the Cologne in 17 December 1770, was a German composer and pianist. He is one of the most famous and influential of all composers.
December 18
- Paul Klee: Born this day in 1879, Swiss painter Paul Klee, one of the foremost artists of the 20th century.
December 22
- Giacomo Puccini: One of the greatest exponents of operatic realism, Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, born this day in 1858, imbued each of his works with a distinctive ambiance, including the classics La Bohème, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly.
December 23
- Champollion: Jean-François Champollion (b. 23 December 1790) was a French classical scholar and orientalist, decipherer of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Champollion published the first translation of the Rosetta Stone hieroglyphs in 1822, showing that the Egyptian writing system was a combination of phonetic and ideographic signs.
December 25
- Newton: Sir Isaac Newton, born in 25 December 1642 was an English physicist, astronomer, alchemist and philosopher, who has been considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived.
- Castaneda: Carlos Arana Castaneda, born this day in 1925, was a Peruvian-American author and student of anthropology. Starting with The Teachings of Don Juan in 1968, Castaneda wrote a series of books that describe his training in shamanism. His books relate his experiences under the tutelage of a Yaqui "Man of Knowledge" named Don Juan Matus. His 12 books have sold more than 8 million copies in 17 languages.
December 27
- Kepler: Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was a German astronomer and astrologer. He is best known for his eponymous laws of planetary rotation.
December 30
- Kipling: Born this day in 1865, Rudyard Kipling, winner of the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature, was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist remembered for his celebration of British imperialism and his stories for children. Kipling is best known for his works of fiction, including The Jungle Book, Kim, and his poem "If".
- Ramana Maharshi: He was born in December 30 1879 in Tamil Nadu, South India. After experiencing at age 16 what he later described as liberation, he left home for the sacred mountain Arunachala. He lived at the mountain for the rest of his life. Although born a Brahmin, he declared himself an "atiasrami" a state of non-attachment to anything in life and beyond all caste restrictions. The ashram that grew around him, Sri Ramana Ashram, is situated at the foothill of Arunchala, to the west to the pilgrimage town of Tiruvannamalai.
DECEMBER
1 The most precious gift received by man on earth is desire for wisdom.
2 In health and wealth man is never in want of friends. True friends, however, are those who remain when they are needed.
3 Of all the animals on earth, man alone has the faculty of causing moral trouble.
4 Man contains three kinds of evil: the evil caused by his (lower) nature; the evil done by man to man; and the evil caused by man to himself.
5 A great man is he who is proof against flattery, vanity, injustice, and the love of pomp and power.
6 The wise man is he who can either take or leave those so-called necessities of life with which other people are intemperate.
7 To hold on with fortitude in one condition, and sobriety in the other, is a proof of a great soul and an impregnable virtue.
8 Let every action be done with perfect gravity, humanity, freedom, and justice, and perform it as though that action were your last.
9 A man can rarely be unhappy by being ignorant of another's thoughts; but he that does not attend to the motions of his own is certainly unhappy.
10 Do not let accidents disturb, or outward objects engross your thoughts; but keep your mind quiet and disengaged, to be ready to learn something good.
11 Manage all your actions, words, and thoughts accordingly, since you can at any moment quit life.
12 What matters dying? If the gods are in being, you can suffer nothing, for they will do you no harm.
13 And if the gods are not, or take no care of mortals — why, then, a world without gods is not worth a man's while to live in.
14 The being of the gods, and their concern in human affairs, is beyond dispute.
15 Remember that life is wearing off, and a smaller part of it is left daily.
16 Depend not upon external supports, nor beg your tranquillity of another. In a word, never throw away your legs to stand upon crutches.
17 If you examine a man that has been well-disciplined and purified by philosophy, you will find nothing that is unsound, false, or foul in him.
18 Life moves in a very narrow compass; yes, and men live in a small corner of the world too.
19 Poor transitory mortals know little even of themselves, much less of those who died long before their time.
20 Death and generation are both mysteries of nature, and resemble each other; the first does but dissolve those elements the latter had combined.
21 Do not suppose you are hurt, and your complaint ceases. Cease your complaint, and you are not hurt.
22 That which does not make man worse, does not make his life worse; as a result, he hath no harm either within or without.
23 At present your nature is distinct; but ere long you will vanish into the whole: you will be returned into that universal reason which gave you your being.
24 Do but return to the principles of wisdom, and those who take you now for a monkey or a wild beast will make a god of you.
25 Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to throw away. Death stands at your elbow. Be good for something, while you live, and it is in your power.
26 He that is so anxious about being talked of when he is dead, does not consider that all who knew him will quickly be gone.
27 If you depend too servilely upon the good word of other people, you will be unworthy of your own nature.
28 Whatever is good has that quality from itself; it is finished by its own nature, and commendation is no part of it.
29 Do not run riot; keep your intentions honest, and your convictions sure.
30 He that does a memorable action, and those who report it, are all but short-lived things.
31 Put yourself frankly into the hands of Fate, and let her spin you out what fortune she pleases.
