GODS AND GODDESSES OF CALENDAR ART : AN IMAGE TO WORSHIP, MODERN & COMMERCIAL ART

Gods and Goddesses of Calendar Art: An Image to Worship, Modern & Commercial Art

A calendar is a system of organizing days for social, religious, commercial or administrative purposes.  This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months and years.  A date is the designation of single, specific day within such a system.  A calendar is also a physical record of such a system.

The Chinese, Hebrew, Hindu, and Julian calendars are widely used for religious and/or social purposes.

A calendar can also mean a list of planned events, such as a court calendar or a partly or fully chronological list of documents, such as a calendar of wills.

A date is of prime significance starting with a person’s birth date and other important anecdotes. A calendar, diary, desk calendar, planners and digital calendars are of great value in daily life.  In the modern world time has great value.  It is noted that the day passed cannot be bought back and thus every single moment is precious.

       

                                    

A good number of calendars are prevalent in the modern world.  The date calendar, the wall calendar, the desk calendar with the images of gods, scenery, flowers etc.  The wall calendar is slowly replaced by digital and online calendars in the present world. 

The calendar art made it available an image to worship our deity in the past few centuries.  The Jesus Christ and Madonna have occupied a place in the calendar art in the 15^th century.  Raja Ravi Varma is well known for the introduction of Calendar Art of Hindu Gods and Goddesses in the 19^th century.

 

 
















 














    






The various commercial organizations started shooting photos to promote their goods through calendar art.  In the beginning of New Year they come out with a number of themes according to the nature of products they manufacture and sells.   There is soap, automobile and liquor brand which comes out with wall calendars every year.  Though hanging calendars are slowly and steadily becoming out of fashion, even today they are popular with a section of the society.

The Sports Illustrated, Kingfisher, Pirelli and other liquor, automobile and sports brand calendars shot with sizzling pin-up girls  - normally the top rated models in the world - are available to promote such products.

                       American model GIGI HADID on the Sports Illustrated Calendar

The paintings and art calendars often on canvass or paper portrays images.  The Gods whom we worship in the form of a portrait is the imagination of an artist.  The worldwide recognized calendar today is the Gregorian calendar or English calendar.  The international events make a notation based on the English Calendar in the modern world.

                  
 







History of Calendar:

Periods in a calendar (such as years and months) are usually, though not necessarily, synchronized with the cycle of the sun or the moon.  The most common type of pre-modern calendar was the lunisolar calendar, a lunar calendar that occasionally adds one intercalary month to remain synchronized with the solar year over the long term.

      

The calendar in most widespread use today is the Gregorian calendar, introduced in the 16^th century as a modification of the Julian calendar, which was itself a modification of the ancient Roman calendar.  The term calendar itself is taken from calendae, the term for the first day of the month in the Roman calendar, related to the verb calare “to call out”, referring to the “calling” of the new moon  when it was first seen.  Latin calendarium meant “account book, register” (as accounts were settled and debts were collected on the calends of each month).  The Latin term was adopted in Old French as calendier and from there in Middle English as calendar by the 13^th century (the spelling calendar is early modern).

 

A number of prehistoric structures have been proposed as having had the purpose of timekeeping (typically keeping track of the course of the solar year).  This includes many megalithic structures, and reconstructed arrangements going back far into the Neolithic period.

A Mesolithic arrangement of twelve pits and an arc found in Warren Field, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, dated rougly 10,000 years ago, has been described as a lunar calendar and dubbed the “world’s oldest known calendar in 2013.

Methods of timekeeping can be reconstructed for the prehistoric period from at least the Neolithic.   The natural units for timekeeping used by most historical societies are the day, the solar year and the lunation.  Calendars are explicit schemes used for timekeeping.  The first recorded calendars date to the Bronze Age, dependent on the development of writing in the Ancient Near East, the Egyptian and Sumerian calendars.  A larger number of calendar systems of the Ancient Near East become accessible in the Iron Age, based on the Babylonian calendar.  This includes the calendar of the Persian Empire, which in turn gave rise of the Zoroastrian calendar as well as the Hebrew calendar.


A great number of Hellenic calendars develop in Classical Greece, and with the Hellenistic period also influence calendars outside of the immediate sphere of Greek influence, giving rise to the various Hindu calendars as well as to the ancient Roman calendar.

  

                     







Calendars in antiquity were usually lunisolar, depending on the introduction of intercalary months to align the solar and the lunar years.  This was mostly based on observation, but there may have been early attempts to model the pattern of intercalation algorithmically, as evidenced in the fragmentary 2^nd-century Coligny calendar.  Nevertheless, the Roman calendar contained very ancient remnants of a pre-Etruscan 10-month solar year.

The Roman calendar was reformed by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE.  The Julian calendar was no longer dependent on the observation of the new moon but simply followed an algorithm of  introducing a leap day every four years.  This created a dissociation of the calendar month from the lunation.  The Gregorian calendar was introduced as a refinement of the Julian calendar in 1582 and is today in worldwide use as the de facto calendar for secular purposes.

For the calendar of religious holidays and periods, see Liturgical year.  For this year’s Gregorian calendar, see Leap year starting on Friday.

The Gregorian calendar, also called the Western calendar and the Christian calendar, in internationally the most widely used civil calendar.  It is named after Pope Gregory XIII, who introduced it in October 1582.

The calendar was a refinement to the Julian calendar amounting to a 0.002% correction in the length of the year.  The motivation for the reform was to bring the date for the celebration of  Easter to the time of the year in which it was celebrated when it was introduced by the early Church.  Because the celebration of Easter was tied to the spring equinox, the Roman Catholic Church considered the steady drift in the date of Easter caused by the year being slightly too long to be undesirable.  The reform was adopted initially by the Catholic countries of Europe.  Protestants and Eastern Orthodox countries continued to use the traditional Julian calendar and adopted the Gregorian reform after a time, for the sake of convenience in international trade.  The last European country to adopt the reform was Greece, in 1923.

The Gregorian reform contained two parts: a reform of the Julian calendar as used prior to Pope Gregory XIII’s time and a reform of the lunar cycle used by the Church, with the Julian calendar, to calculate the date of Easter.  The reform was a modification of a proposal made by Aloysius Lilius.  His proposal included reducing the number of leap years in four centuries from 100 to 97, by making 3 out of 4 centurial years common instead of leap years.  Lilius also produced an original and practical scheme for adjusting the epact of the moon when calculating the annual date of Easter, solving a long-standing obstacle to calendar reform.

The Gregorian reform modified the Julian calendar’s scheme of leap years as follows:

Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100, but these centurial years are leap years if they are exactly divisible by 400.  For example, the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 are not leap years, but the year 2000 is.

In addition to the change in the mean length of the calendar year from 365.25 days (365 days 6 hours) to 365.2425 days (365 days 5 hours 49 minutes 12 seconds), a reduction of 10 minutes 48 seconds per year, the Gregorian calendar reform also dealt with the accumulated difference between these lengths. The canonical Easter tables were devised at the end of the third century, when the vernal equinox fell either on 20 March or 21 March depending on the year's position in the leap year cycle. As the rule was that the full moon preceding Easter was not to precede the equinox the equinox was fixed at 21 March for computational purposes and the earliest date for Easter was fixed at 22 March. The Gregorian calendar reproduced these conditions by removing ten days.

To unambiguously specify the date, dual dating or Old Style (O.S.) and New Style (N.S.) are sometimes used with dates. Dual dating uses two consecutive years because of differences in the starting date of the year, or includes both the Julian and Gregorian dates. Old Style and New Style (N.S.) indicate either whether the start of the Julian year has been adjusted to start on 1 January (N.S.) even though documents written at the time use a different start of year (O.S.), or whether a date conforms to the Julian calendar (O.S.) rather than the Gregorian (N.S.).

The Gregorian calendar continued to use the previous calendar era (year-numbering system), which counts years from the traditional date of the nativity (Anno Domini), originally calculated in the 6th century by Dionysius Exiguus.  This year-numbering system, also known as Dionysian era or Common Era, is the predominant international standard today.

The calendar art changed from devotional to commercial use such as in liquor, automobile, soft drink beverages, sports brand etc.

The Pirelli Calendar, Kingfisher Calendar, A utomobile Calendar etc. are publishing calendars year after year and they are the most popular among general public.  Various liquor companies and sports goods calendar such as Sports Illustrated are also a regular in the Calendar scenario.

Sports Illustrated Calendar

Sports Illustrated is an American sports media franchise owned by Time Inc. Its self-titled magazine has over 3 million subscribers and is read by 23 million people each week, including over 18 million men. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the National Magazine Award for General Excellence twice. Its swimsuit issue, which has been published since 1964, is now an annual publishing event that generates its own television shows, videos and calendars.

Pirelli Calendar

The Pirelli Calendar is a trade calendar published by Pirelli company’s UK subsidiary.  It has become an annual publication that dates to 1963.  The calendar is known for its limited availability, as it is only given as a corporate gift to a restricted number of Pirelli customers and celebrities.

Over the years, the models and celebrities who have appeared in Pirelli Calendar include Adriana Lima,   Kate Moss, Cindy Crawford, Sophia Loren, Naomi Campbell, Penelope Cruz, Alessandra Ambrosio and Lakshmi Menon.

Kingfisher Calendar


India’s answer to the Pirelli Calendar is United Breweries Group of India’s  Kingfisher Calendar.  Since 2003 every year Kingfisher Calendar is published.   The glamorous and prestigious Kingfisher Calendar features India’s top models and Bollywood actresses.  Photographer Atul Kasbekar has been associated with the Calendar since its inception.  Kasbekar along with Liquor baron Dr. Vijay Mallya who is the owner of United Breweries are credited with creating the idea of the annual Kingfisher Calendar.   
 

Angela Jonsson, Katrina Kaif, Deepika Padukone, Lisa Haydon, Nargis Fakhri, Shobhita Dulipala and Ujwala Rawat are the noteworthy models and actresses featured in Kingfisher Calendar.

Dabboo Ratnani Calendar


Dabboo Ratnani is a leading Indian fashion photographer, known for his annual calendar which has become a highly notable showbiz event in India since its first publication in 1999.  The start of the year wouldn’t be complete without the release of the iconic Dabboo Ratnani Calendar.

The celebrities who rocked the Dabboo Ratnani Calendar includes John Abraham, Priyanka Chopra, Hrithik Roshan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, Deepika Padukone, Katrina Kaif, Kriti Sanon and Parineeti Chopra.

Dabboo Ratnani is a leading Indian fashion photographer, known for his annual calendar which has become a highly notable showbiz event in India since its first publication in 1999.  The start of the year wouldn’t be complete without the release of the iconic Dabboo Ratnani Calendar.

The celebrities who rocked the Dabboo Ratnani Calendar includes John Abraham, Priyanka Chopra, Hrithik Roshan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, Deepika Padukone, Katrina Kaif, Kriti Sanon and Parineeti Chopra.

                                 

The gods have got an image from calendar artists and devotees worship the deity as gifted by some artists.

The date and calendar is an integral part of daily life and the time has more significance than anything else in the world history as well as in the present day.

I am happy to present the Calendar Art that produced the images of gods as my 100^th – centenary BLOG Post in JOHNNY’S BLOG.

                     

DON JUAN Vs CASANOVA - AN ELIXIR OF FREE LOVE FOR FLOWER CHILD

Don Juan Vs Casanova - An Elixir of Free Love for Flower Child                       

                                                          Johnny Depp as Don Juan

Don Juan, Don Giovanni is a legendary, fictional libertine. The first written version of the Don Juan legend was written by the Spanish dramatist Tirso de Molina.  

Giacomo Girolamo Casanova was an Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice. His autobiography, Histoire de ma vie, is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of the customs and norms of European social life during the Eighteenth century.  Among other things he has narrated many a love escapade by him in this book.  Casanova is the world’s most famous lover.

     

 Heath Ledger as “Casanova”                                                                         



                                                                                                              Mohanlal as “Casanova”

        

To Sir with love,

I would like to present here a case study from one of the famous Psychologist about Don Juan Vs Casanova which is interesting and amusing at the same time.

Psychology is often not the best source of wisdom concerning the passions of life. Probably better to turn to great literature and real life itself. This is especially true when discussing love and sex, those two perennials of the consultation room.

It was not so many years ago that female patients who were sexually active were labeled 'nymphomaniacs' by traditional psychologists. As an antidote to that prejudice, a more liberated practitioner once stated: "A nymphomaniac is a woman who is having a more active sex life than her analyst."

Let's look at some characters on the male side of the fence. Both Don Juan and Casanova are terms applied to male predators who are sexually active. But the two are radically different. Looking closer, the Don Juan is a man who seduces many women, then discards them and moves on to the next. He is more interested in the conquest than the woman. In the opera, he gets his comeuppance, as we all know.

The term Casanova comes from the name of a real person, Giovanni Jacopo Casanova (1725-1798), a great Italian adventurer who wrote a historical memoir in 12 volumes, discussing among other things, his many love affairs. Casanova was born into a family of actors, and was known for his great wit. At the tender age of 12, it is said, he established himself at a party by giving a clever answer to a difficult question. A noblewoman asked the young lad, who was somewhat of a linguist, why it is that in many languages the male sex organ is classified as 'feminine', while the female variant takes the 'masculine' case (referring here to the sphere of grammar). The budding seducer answered wisely: "Because the servant takes the name of his master."

The Casanova, as a type, is not as cold-hearted as the Don Juan; instead, he loves women, adores their charms, and just cannot get enough of them. He cannot limit himself to any one woman, but needs to express his love to many. He does not drop one lover to go on to the next conquest, as is the case with the Don Juan, but prefers to retain his lovers.

The distinction, so often blurred in everyday usage, could not be more clear. The Don Juan is primarily interested in the chase, the lure of the hunt. He prides himself in being a skilled hunter, and the woman is simply the prey, the hunted. He is not so terribly interested in the women themselves. This is the picture we get from the literature on the Don Juan, and in the real world, there are certainly many men who fit this description.

The Casanova is more concerned with having a love story, albeit often a short one. But he is in search of love, or at least is able to delude himself that this is his main goal.

As an example of a modern-day Casanova, let's take Jamie, an acquaintance of mine from university. He's a tall, slender, dark gentleman who devotes most of his time to seducing women and loving them. For he truly adores women, that's how he spends most of his time.

He has dabbled in philosophy, and even a few odd jobs, but his main interest in life is pursuing the eternal feminine. It's not that he has any special power with women, he explained to me one day, but his success is due to his persistence. He simply spends more time on the pursuit of female beauty than other men. The rule seems to be, if at first you don't succeed, try with another one.

So he exerts himself day after day, picking up women, and eventually will find one who falls for his line. Other men give up too easily, or don't have the time to devote to this endeavor, but for Jamie it's the major portion of his life. A rather thin life, many would say, but for him, it's the great play of passion.

According to the classical Freudian theory, he is doing all this in order to prove his manhood, i.e., there is an element of latent homosexuality behind all this effort. A normal man, according to psychoanalysis, would not need to go so far to prove to himself that he is virile.

Moreover, Freud believed that the constant chase after women is in reality an attempt to discover one that has the male sexual elements. That is, he is driven compulsively to undress women in a fruitless search after a penis.

Well, that's the theory, and one may or may not believe it. And one is not compelled to accept every theory; I prefer to judge each case on its own merits – look at the quality of the activities involved. Does Jamie appear driven by some irrational inner compulsion? Or does he take genuine pleasure in the search? Only by a closer examination of the details can one come close to understanding what is actually going on. I have known men similar to Jamie who one day meet a special woman and then give up their quest, settling down into a 'normal' family life style.

    

                                                





I was discussing this topic over lunch not long ago with a colleague, who recommended I see the Hollywood film 'Don Juan Demarco'. A good film, with Johnny Depp playing the lead, a romantic young man who adores women; actually the character is more of a Casanova type than a Don Juan, since he loves women and throughout the film does all he can to make women happy. But that´s Hollywood; they probably thought the label 'Don Juan' would sell more tickets. Marlon Brando plays a psychiatrist who learns something from his patient. All in all, an entertaining and moving story.

My colleague who appreciated this film also told me of one of his recent cases, who perhaps represents a sub-group of the Don Juan type – maybe you could label him the 'Don Juan teaser'. Roy is a very handsome young man who likes to have women run after him, but has no interest in returning their lust. When Roy sits on the underground, women stamp on his feet to attract his attention – so appealing is he to the average woman. But he apparently gets his pleasure from arousing their desire, only to return their eager look with a disdainful shrug.

Flower Child:

“Happiness held is the seed;

Happiness shared is the flower.”  -   John Harrigan.

Flowerchild originated as a synonym for Hippie.  Flowerchild is a young person, especially a hippie, rejecting conventional society and advocating love, peace and simple idealistic values.  The Flowerchild is someone “born happy-go-lucky” pretty, a hippie, environmentalist, a person who love peace and happiness.  A Flowerchild as a custom carrying or wearing flowers to symbolize peace and love.  The flowerchild is especially among the idealistic those who gathered in San Francisco and environs during the Summer of Love in 1967.

A famous quote about flower –

“A Flower cannot blossom without sunshine,

And man cannot live without love.”

                            -            Max Mueller

I would like to share an excerpt from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem here –

 “A damsel with a dulcimer,

In a vision once I saw :

It was an Abyssinian maid

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,

That such music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! Those caves of Ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of paradise.”

 Another interesting lyric about Flower Child by Lenny Kravtiz –

Dressed in purple velvets
With a flower in her hair
Feel her gentle spirit
As the champa fills the air
She wears rubys on her fingers
Tiny bells upon her toes
She's the finest thing
I've ever seen
Love that ring inside her nose

Flower child yeah, flower child
Flower child oh yeah

She's a psychedelic princess
On a magic carpet ride
And where her trip will carry you
Is somewhere you can't find
She's on a plane of higher consciousness
Meditation is the key
She's got her shit together
'Cause her soul and mind are free
Free

Flower child, free yeah yeah yeah yeah,
Flower child that is
Flower child, oh yeah
Flower child yeah
My little flower child
Flower child yeah

She's a child of Martin Luther
As a freedom fighter she
Speaks of liberation on the land
And on the sea
Her eyes are made of sunshine
And her lips are jelly sweet

Flower child yeah
My little flower child
Flower child oh yeah
Flower child yeah
My little flower child
Flower child oh yeah

You gonna free me
You gonna free me
You gonna free free free free free yeah.

Now, let me share the experience of a flower child laid bare to my acquaintance about one of her loony moony nights -

Dolce Far Niente (Pleasant idleness):

There is amazing beauty in the feeling of nothing to do, nowhere to go and no pressing matter to attend to.  I was out to enjoy and experience the joy of commune living and in search of ‘Utopian concepts’, like freedom and inner peace.

Living in a commune means where love is available freely, and in abundance.  In a habitat where the focus is on feeling rather than thinking, it takes on a form that’s both fluid and all-encompassing.   Conversations are heart-warming, and contact is natural extension of the interaction.  On the flip side love adheres to no set rules and refuses to co-exist with emotions such as hostility, jealousy, rivalry or ambition. 

I felt like an onlooker with rose-tinted vision. Here, I felt like I was stripped down to the basics.  The joy of being completely in touch with every breath and rhythm of my body was overwhelming at first, and then it became something I wanted to celebrate.  Though it sounds like something out of ‘Hippiedom or Dummies,’ it’s absolutely true.

Thus, when I met Krishna (not real name) for the first time, I took his loving embrace as nothing more than an effort to integrate with me with the clan.  The girl outside the commune would have resisted this sort of contact, as excessive and unnecessary, especially coming from a man possibly thrice her age, and someone in a position of authority.  The girl inside, though, reveled in the fact that passages to her heart were finally wide open to let in some of that free-flowing love  and anybody who wished to enter therewith.  So I let myself become one with it, as I did with the rest of my surroundings, but not without noticing his impish smile and the grandeur of his sultry salt and pepper strands. 

I am not entirely sure when the emotions turned primal, but I won’t say I was surprised.  This time around, he kissed me ever so slightly on my cheeks and let the gaze and the embrace linger longer than they were supposed to.  My inhibitions dropped to ground level instantly.  That’s when the game of seduction really started – slow, but steady with an intensity that could have only come with years and years of practice.  When our lips met for the first time under the moonlight, I knew no force in the world could have extinguished the fire our bodies ignited.

It was in this moment of catharsis that the magic of meditation dawned upon me.  We were so in the moment that everything else faded into oblivion -  the years that separated us, his role as one of the authorities, the women who had been here before me, or the woman who was bound to him by law  - all these were realizations that in the outside world, had the potential to shred me into pieces.  At the same time neither of us lingered in the possibility of a shared future – not that it could not exist, but the burden of expectation was too much.  What did remain constant was the vulnerability in his eyes, something that I had seen in all the lovers before him.

It’s hard to tell whether he made a concerted effort to woo me, or if we acted out of an electrifying connect, but I am now a firm believer in the heat of the moment.  It has left me with a taste so intoxicating that I can’t wait to get my hands on the elixir of free love.

 Humans various conquests for forbidden fruits are illustrious in the history of mankind.

      

 

Similarly, a sexually liberated commune in Pune, Maharashtra, India’s OSHO Ashram, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh used to drive his disciples into dizzying heights through his hermitage in-house programs.  Bhagwan Rajneesh was an Indian mystic guru, and spiritual leader.   Rajneesh Ashram is located in Koregaon Park, Pune and now known as OSHO International Meditation Resort. Through meditation and sexually liberated views he attracted millions of devotees to his OSHO Rajneesh Ashram in Pune. 

His syncretic teachings emphasize the importance of meditation, awareness, love, celebration, courage, creativity and humor, the qualities which he viewed as suppressed by adherence to static belief systems, religious tradition and socialization.  Rajneesh’s teachings had a notable influence on Western spirituality and New Age thought.   Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh said that Religion is an art that shows how to enjoy life.  Bhagwan means in English “Blessed One”. Indian cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh created the Spiritual practice of dynamic meditation. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh also known as Aacharya Rajneesh and later on  as OSHO. His unusual form of Indian spirituality, especially known for its encouragement of free sexual activity attracted many followers as well as considerable controversy.

Bhagwan Rajneesh advocated a more open attitude towards sexuality, a stance which earned him a sobriquet as “Sex Guru” in the Indian and International press.  Bhagwan Rajneesh had base in Antelope, the central Oregon, in the United States.

OSHO died in 1990 aged 58 years at his Pune Ashram. His epitaph or tomb inscription reads “OSHO Never Born, Never Died. Only visited this Planet Earth between Dec 11, 1931 - January 19, 1990.”

Don Juan and Casanova on the one side and the Flower Child on the other side are both sides of  the same coin.

In my quest for writing interesting and amusing Blog posts in JOHNNY’S BLOG, I ended up writing a post about the different love interests in the history of human race.