shap EDUCATION AND CELEBRATION Calendar of Religious Festivals July 2019 – December 2020 Loy Kratong at the Buddhapadipa Temple in Richmond Park, South London Shap Calendar of Religious Festivals 2019 - 2020 EDITORIAL 2019 – 2020 THE SHAP WORKING PARTY IS NO MORE!!! We informed you last year that it would happen, and it did! The Working Party celebrated its 50th Jubilee with a conference at the Shap Wells Hotel, where our Shappery first began in April 1969. And now the Working Party no longer exists as such. We leave the work it undertook in the hands of others, and give our individual support in a multitude of different forms to all who work for the cause of World Religions in Education. The Calendar will however continue, on line and by post, along with the Shap website and the Shap Audio-Glossary, available on the Shap website, and the Shap Archive in the Bodleian Library in the centre of Oxford ([email protected]). The Calendar is in the hands of a group of twelve members of Shap, led by a team of four of us, Paul Hopkins, David Rose, Roger Butler and myself as Editor. It has developed steadily over its 50 years of its life and we intend that it will continue to grow and change steadily in the future. In particular we have simplified its name, which will now be ‘The Shap Calendar of Religious Festivals’; and ‘Shap Calendar Group’ will be the new name of our bank account, as shown on any invoices we send you in the future. We are still debating other changes and hope our 2020-2021 edition will include news of additions or amendments to the text we provide, the pictures we send and the development of a Shap App. For the moment we plan to distribute our eCalendar, our Wallchart, our Photographs and some form of New Year Freebie, all at the same prices, though this may change in 2020 – our prices have been the same for some eight years now! Our updating of description of festivals in the eBooklet has been slow this year while we have been preparing a host of data about Shap that will now appear on our website, but have a look at the text for the four Jain festivals we cover, which has been extensively modified. There have also been changes to the Baha’i festival dates that follow attempts to unify the Islamic and Gregorian Baha’i calendars. Please note that these all commence at sundown on the evening before the date shown. We also hear of uncertainty among the international Sikh bodies that determine which annual calendars shall operate. The tension between the earlier Bikrami traditional lunar calendar and the more recent Nanakshahi 2 Shap Calendar of Religious Festivals 2019 - 2020 calendar has resurfaced, and we are advised that ‘the safest thing is to go with the latest Akal Takht/SGPC directive’. Some gurdwaras in the UK operate the Bikrami calendar, others the Nanakshahi calendar, depending on the views of those managing the Gurdwara. The birthday of Guru Nanak is fixed across both calendars as on Monday, November 30th in 2020. We show both dates for the birthday in January of Guru Gobind Singh. As always my thanks go to each of the following for their input into what is genuinely a team effort: to David Rose (Pictorial Calendar) and Paul Hopkins (Wallchart and everything else) especially, but also to Anne (Krisnan), Brian (Gates), Clive (Lawton), Gill (Rose), Jasjit (Singh), Kim (Knott) (whom we warmly welcome to our ranks), Malcolm (Deboo), Roger (Butler) and Wendy (Dossett). Peter (Woodward) Editor 3 Shap Calendar of Religious Festivals 2019 - 2020 Shap Calendar of Religious Festivals 2019–2020 CONTENTS 1. Title Page 1 2. Editorial 2 3. Contents 4 4. Origins of the Shap Calendar of Religious Festivals 5 5. Current Officers of the Shap Calendar 5 6. NBs – Things to Note 6 7. CALENDAR OF DATES AND DESCRIPTIONS 2019 7 8. CALENDAR OF DATES AND DESCRIPTIONS 2020 100 9. Index 297 10. Acknowledgements 303 11. The Shap Website and the Shap Archive 304 12. Back Numbers of the Shap Journal 305 4 Shap Calendar of Religious Festivals 2019 - 2020 Origins of the Shap Calendar The Calendar was first published in the autumn of 1969, consisting of two A4 pages sent by post to subscribers, costing 30 pence! This also included bibliographies and schemes of work. By 1972 it consisted of six pages, produced and distributed by the Community Relations Commission, and later by the Commission for Racial Equality. It grew under the Editorship of Desmond Brennan and then Clive Lawton to include a separate Mailing/Journal, a colourful wallchart, and then a printed Pictorial Calendar, using photographs supplied mainly by David Rose. Around 2012 it became an eCalendar with a dozen additional ePhotographs, alas well as a separate Wallchart, created and distributed by Paul Hopkins. Costs still set at £4 (eCalendar) and £6 (Wallchart)! CALENDAR EDITOR Peter Woodward Paul Hopkins [email protected] for orders and enquiries WEBMEISTER Paul Hopkins [email protected] The Shap Calendar of Religious Festivals is a registered educational charity. Its registered address is: The Religious Education Council of England and Wales, Can Mezzanine, 49-51 East Road, London, N1 6AH Our postal address for general post and payments is: The Shap Calendar, 7 Garners Walk, Madeley. Crewe. CW3 9HG Our Web site address : www.shapcalendar.org.uk Contact address – by email please: [email protected] Calendar contact address: [email protected] © Copyright 2019-2020 The Shap Calendar of Religious Festivals All rights reserved. Purchase of this product allows permission for its use by the purchaser only. Multi-site use is available on request. Apart from this no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, printed, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise. The contents of this calendar are compiled and published in good faith and the Shap Calendar Group accepts no liability for any claim arising from them whether the loss is direct or indirect. 5 Shap Calendar of Religious Festivals 2019 - 2020 SHAP CALENDAR OF RELIGIOUS FESTIVALS July 2019 – December 2020 Please Note 1. The page number references given at the end of each entry relate to: a) the first edition of the book, Festivals in World Religions, published for the Shap Working Party by Longman in 1986; b) the new edition of the same book published by RMEP in 1998. 2. Orthodox Christians celebrate their festivals using either the ‘Old’ (the Julian) or the ‘New’ (Gregorian) calendar. The Orthodox choice of calendar tends to reflect local conditions and is NOT a matter of church doctrine. The formula for calculating the date of Easter differs for the Orthodox from that used in the Christian West. However, the Orthodox Easter Cycle is celebrated on the same dates throughout all Orthodox communities. In 2020 Orthodox dates will fall a week later than Western ones. 3. Jewish festivals commence, like Shabbat, at sunset on the evening of the day prior to the dates shown below. 4. Muslim festivals begin in the evening before the Gregorian dates we show in this Calendar. Since they are lunar, each Muslim Festival’s date recedes by 10 or 11 days each Gregorian year. 5. All Baha’i and several Pagan festivals also commence at sundown/sunset on the day before the dates shown here. 6. Zoroastrian dates vary according to the three different ‘Calendars’ currently in use. The dates of several Zoroastrian festivals (notably in the Shahenshai and the Kadmi / Qadimi Calendars) recede by one day each Gregorian Leap Year. Elsewhere, in the Iranian Zorostrian communities, they remain constant. 7. *month indicates uncertainty as to the exact date of the festival 8. We now use the Name of the Festival to show in BOLD if its date remains the same in each (Gregorian) year; in ITALICS if it changes by just one or two days from year to year; and in ITALICS but UNDERLINED if it varies considerably, as is the case with most lunar dates. 9. There are now five download websites following the text for each Festival and these mostly follow a regular pattern: i) Description, often from within the appropriate tradition; ii) An alternative description, usually from a different type of source; iii) Educational material, for school, college or research; iv) Audio visual materials of an evocative nature; v) Something creatively different. 10. The bottom row of the new Wallchart gives the names of twelve eminent individuals who have made a significant contribution that is noteworthy to Science, Ethics, Humanism, Atheism, Agnosticism or Theistic belief. Information on their achievements and their lives features at the start of each Calendar Month in the Booklet, along with informative download websites, prepared and selected by Professor Brian Gates of the University of Cumbria. 6 Shap Calendar of Religious Festivals 2019 - 2020 7. CALENDAR OF DATES AND DESCRIPTIONS 2019 2019 2019 2019 2019 2019 JULY 2019 Nana Asma’u Here is the seventh of twelve people, one for each month, who have been chosen because a) they exemplify how our deepest beliefs affect the pattern of our lives; and b) because of the variety and the strength of their beliefs. Each person chosen is markedly different in what they believe; but it is the very nature of these beliefs that has shaped their lives and their achievements; and it is in large part the depth of their commitment to what they believe that makes them of interest to us today. Nana Asma’u died in 1864 at the age of 71 in Northern Nigeria.