Today in 1947, the life-long revolutionary Victor Serge collapsed and died in Mexico City at the age of 57. His health had broken down after many years spent in prison and imposed exile under regimes of various nationalities and political … Continue reading
Today we honour revolutionary civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael, who died from cancer on this day aged 57. In June 1966, Carmichael was catapulted to worldwide fame overnight when, at a high-profile rally organised by Martin Luther King, Jr., he … Continue reading
Today we salute 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 audacious life. The legend of Rimbaud centres around five … 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 101 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
On 30th October 1968, the revolutionary Detroit commune Trans-Love Energies proclaimed a new era, ringing in the dawn of their Zenta new age at the Grande Ballroom, wherein the MC5 – the commune’s house band – pummelled over two thousand … Continue reading
Today we commemorate the death of the prophet and gnostic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who died on this day in 1949 in Neuilly, near Paris, surrounded by a large group of sobbing followers. Somewhat like William Blake’s notion of having been … Continue reading
Today we pay tribute to Camilo Cienfuegos – one of the most important revolutionaries in Fidel Castro’s 26th July Movement, whose popularity amongst Cubans rivalled even that of his close friend and comrade, Che Guevara – tragically killed at the … Continue reading
On this day in 1944 the Nazi occupation of Serbia ended. And although fighting would continue for several weeks as the retreating axis forces were driven from Croatia and Slovenia, it was on October 27th 1944 that Germany’s “Army Section … Continue reading
Today we pay tribute to Eugene Victor Debs – the most prominent proponent of socialism ever to emerge from the United States. A candidate for president five times under the banner of the Socialist Party of America, under Debs’s leadership socialism … Continue reading
The execution of Catalan anarchist and educator Francisco Ferrer, on this day in 1909, was not punishment for the crime of which he had been accused. That the charges against him were fabricated is not in any doubt. Rather, his … Continue reading
Today we go back 180 years to pay tribute to Charles Fourier – the French utopian socialist, radical philosopher and eccentric visionary. First, we need to thank him for his proto-feminist contributions. Fourier originated the word féminisme in 1827, and … Continue reading
On this day in 1967, 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 … Continue reading
Today we remember the Native American chief of the Modoc tribe, Kintpuash – known by his foes as “Captain Jack” – hanged by the United States army on this day in 1873 in retribution for killing an American general. But … Continue reading
Today we pay our respects to the Russian philosopher, teacher and esotericist, P.D. Ouspensky, who died on this day in 1947. Indisputably brilliant in his own right, Ouspensky is nevertheless best remembered because of another man’s brilliance. For despite his … Continue reading
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 excellent … Continue reading
Today we pay tribute to Herman Melville, who died on this day 1891. At the time of his death at the age of 72, the author of Moby-Dick had abandoned his professional literary ambitions some twenty-five years previously; a victim … Continue reading
Today we recall the Irish Republican revolutionary and martyr, Thomas Ashe, who suffered a brutal death at the hands of his British oppressors at the age of thirty-two. As a freedom fighter, Ashe had led his greatly outflanked battalion to … Continue reading
Today we commemorate Pablo Neruda – genius poet and political activist hero – who died forty-four years ago aged 69. As one of the leading voices in his native Chile during its long and turbulent era of instability, Neruda was at … Continue reading
On this day in 1991, Rob Tyner took leave of this planet at the age of 47 after suffering a heart attack behind the wheel of his parked car in the family driveway. He left behind not only his longtime wife Becky and … Continue reading
In his life, the Chilean folksinger Victor Jara was the voice of his country’s dispossessed. As one of the founders of Nueva Canción – the socially committed movement of ‘new song’ that played such a powerful role throughout Latin America … Continue reading
Today we celebrate one of the world’s most beloved poets, Dante Alighieri, who died on this day in 1321. Despite the passage of nearly seven centuries, and the seismic political and religious shifts that have occurred since the medieval struggles … Continue reading
On this day in 1676, 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 Winstanley was … Continue reading
Today we recall and venerate Crazy Horse – the visionary, legendary, almost mythical Native American warrior leader of the Oglala Lakota Sioux – who was betrayed by friends then assassinated in custody on this day in 1877. Fucked over by … Continue reading
Today we recall the heroic escape to freedom of the great Frederick Douglass, America’s first black leader of a truly national stature, whose struggle from his slave roots in Maryland to successful published author just seven years later captivated the … Continue reading
Today we recall the long, eventful and totally full-on life of W.E.B. Du Bois, the foremost champion of equal rights for blacks in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, who died on this day in 1963 … Continue reading
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 so much of demerit to the vile Nazi war machine of … Continue reading
Today we recall the brief, peculiar and tragic life of Thomas Chatterton – English poet, forger of medieval poetry and proto-Romantic – who, aged just seventeen years and nine months old, poisoned himself with arsenic rather than die of starvation … Continue reading
On this day in 1989, revolutionary leader and co-founder of the Black Panther Party Huey P. Newton was shot and killed when a drug deal went wrong. He was forty-seven years old. After his glory years in the 1960s during which time Newton … Continue reading
Throughout his all too short but trailblazing life, death had been his central artistic theme – and on this day in 1936, at the age of thirty-eight, the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca met the violent fate he … Continue reading
Today we remember the extraordinary and explosive life of Dambudzo Marechera, the Zimbabwean ‘enfant terrible of African literature’ who on this day in 1987 died homeless, penniless and sick from AIDS on the streets of Harare at the age of … Continue reading
Today we celebrate the social reformer, prophet and science fiction writer, H. G. Wells, who died on this day aged 79. Probably best remembered for his visionary novels The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds, and for his … Continue reading
On this day in 1827, William Blake died as he had lived, in poverty and obscurity. What can be said about this visionary, mystic, prophet, poet, painter, engraver, and World Artist? The neglect that one of the Greatest-Evers suffered in his … Continue reading
It can be surprising to discover that so thoroughly indoctrinated were the Germans under Hitler’s Nazis that their cruelty towards non-Nazis did not halt abruptly in May 1945, as Prussians, Bavarians, Saxons, Hohernzollerns alike awoke from their collective psychosis. Instead … Continue reading
At 3.05am on this day in 1917, in Butte, Montana, six masked men burst into the boarding house room of labour leader Frank Little, pulled him out of his bed, beat him, tied him to the bumper of a car, … Continue reading
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.
Disclaimer: These are spirited and informed opinion pieces. Photos have been credited wherever possible, which hasn’t often been the case. Please contact me (via Comments) if you are the photographer of any pictures used by On This Deity and would like your photo to be credited or removed.
