The popular Festival of the Ass took place today in medieval times, especially in France, celebrating the biblical flight to Egypt by Mary, Joseph and Jesus. The festival included a mock religious procession, a wooden ass with an actor inside to speak its lines, and a mass, at the end of which the priest brayed three times.
Today in 1989, 1,000 British Muslims in Bradford marched through the streets and burned Salman Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses, in protest at what they saw as its blasphemous portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad.
It is the feast day of St Felix of Nola, a 3rd century Christian who owed his life to a devout spider during the Roman persecution of the year 250. According to the story, he hid in a ruined building, and the soldiers looking for him decided not to search it because of a spider’s web across the entrance.
Lewis Carroll, the children’s writer, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Oxford maths researcher, photographer and clergyman, died today in 1898.
‘There’s glory for you!’
‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said.
‘I meant, “There’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’
‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument”,’ Alice objected.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
Image: Lawrence OP