And to keep the blog in a quick read, I usually go for one or the other. Today, it was hard, on one side, on July 28 in 1794, we have Maximilien Roberspierre, a compulsively neat guy, righteous, and not one to drink alcohol or chase woman, and the most feared man in France as head of the Committee for Public Safety where he became the executioner during the French Revolution for sending men and woman to the guillotine like drops of wax from a candle. He called himself "a slave of freedom," in fact he was a mean and vindictive tyrant, who sent his political enemies to the guillotine more often than enemies of the state.
On the morning of July 28 he was seized by French troops and shot in the lower jaw. Later that day he was sentenced to death, and around 8pm that evening he was taken to the guillotine where the wrap was pulled off his face and his lower jaw fell open and blood poured from the gaping wound. A witness said he "let out a groan like a dying tiger." The blade severed his head from his body, and in a case of instant karma, justice was served.
A few years later on July 28 in 1835, again in France, Giuseppe Marco Fieschi had an idea to assassinate King Louis Philippe. He bound 20 guns together and fired the contraption at the king from an upper-story window. One of the bullets killed the king's horse, another grazed the king's forehead, but the king and his family were unscathed. Fieschi wasn't so lucky, one of the guns backfired and nearly killed him, but didn't, the doctors saved his life so he could experience the same guillotine that Roberspierre had knelt for forty-one years earlier.
So, that's the very masculine "Yang" of a July 28, then here are my "Yin" findings for this day:
First, on a hot July 28 in the year 1278, my favorite Buddhist reformist priest, Nichiren Daishonin, writes a letter to a lay nun which informs her that all the previous Buddhist teachings that said a woman had to reincarnate as a man before she could attain enlightenment, were bullshit (my words, not his), and that in fact, woman and men both were equal in attaining enlightenment.
Nichiren's letter seems to have set a very mystic finding for a July 28 for in 1893 on a not-so-hot July 28 in New Zealand, a massive women's suffrage petition with over 30,000 signatures was delivered to parliament demanding a woman's right to vote; of course, this would result in New Zealand being the fist developed country to allow woman to vote in September of that same year!
Speaking of Empowering Woman, on a hot July 28, in the year 1903, Mary Harris Jones leads a protest march to the home of President Theodore Roosevelt to call attention to the abusive corporate practice of using children as laborers: "Hear the wail of the children..." she yelled from her bullhorn, "...children who never have a chance to go to school, but work ten to eleven hours a day in a textile mill!"
The woman of whom I speak is none other than Mother Jones, who went on fighting for the working class and changing the practices of Corporate Profiteers who still cringe when they hear her name.
On another hot July 28, in 2016, Hilary Clinton becomes the first woman to accept the nomination for president of a major political party -- unfortunately, I might add, this feat brought out the worse case of "Yang" energy the world has seen in years in the form of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Donald Trump, but let's not go there, I promised my heavenly messengers I wouldn't discuss politics today.
Talking about July 28, let's not forget that it was on a pleasant July 28th, in 1929, in Southampton New York, that Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born. The most gracious wife of a world leader to date in the 20th century.
Finally, remember to relax on this hot July 28, for if you are reading this post in 2023, you might be experiencing a little more mental fatigue than normal, for Jupiter stations retrograde in Aries today; which means Jupiter appears to be moving backwards in its orbit. This will make things fuzzy for few days, but then you'll adjust. This happens every nine months. It's no big deal. It's just a time to confront those parts of ourselves we have been neglecting, like, oh, I don't know,
~~ Eso Terry
