Oprah Winfrey (above), the High Priest of the Postmodern Sacrament of Absolution through Televised Confession, was born in Mississippi today in 1954. Her career as an interviewer started when she was a small child, with her dolls, and crows on a fence, as her first interviewees.
John Wesley caught his first sight of land on returning to England today in 1738, after his disastrous efforts as missionary priest to the American settlement of Georgia. Five weeks at sea, he saw the Lizard Point in Cornwall. A few days earlier, he wrote in his diary, ‘I went to America to convert the Indians; but oh! who shall convert me?’
Sergius III was crowned Pope today in the year 904. He ruled his bishops with terror tactics, had the two previous Popes killed, and reduced the church to chaos by cancelling most ordinations and appointments in the previous 13 years. It is also claimed that he fathered the future Pope John XI. His mistress, Marozia, was 15 at the time.
Today in 1845, ‘The Raven’, a poem by Edgar Allen Poe which turns from grief into horror and madness, was published in the New York Evening Mirror. It created a sensation, and made Poe’s name.
‘Prophet!’ said I, ‘thing of evil! – prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us – by that God we both adore –
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore –
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.’
Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore.’
Edgar Allen Poe
Photo: Bill Ebbesen under CC BY 3.0