1: Books of the Week

Jung's life turned on 4/4/44, and this Tuesday belonged to the Holy Week from Apr 2, 1944, Palm Sunday, to Apr 9, Easter Sunday (red letter day on this calendar).

This Holy Week could be a very special one, as Jewish Easter (Pessah, Passover) fell this year 1944 on 4/8, a Saturday, as it seems to have been the case in the original Passion. This peculiarity helped to date the Crucifixion on April 7, 30, a date which was long granted for good. It seems now English sources like better April 3, 33, while French sources still prefer April 7, 30.

The important thing might not be reality, if there is any, but what people knew about it in their time, and April 7, 30 was for example the date given in Jesus in his time by Daniel-Rops (1945). I came to find that 1944 is the first Gregorian year when Good Friday falls on April 7 and Pessah on 8, as in 30 CE, and this will not come back before 2479. There might have been Julian years (from 326 to 1582) that would fit, but Julian calendar was wrong as soon as the 2nd century.

I discovered this while enquiring on a very strange novel, And on the Eighth Day..., written in 1964 by Ellery Queen (aka Fred Dannay), which is a parody of the Passion, set in 8 chapters titled from Sunday 2 April to Sunday 9 April, happening in 1944 in a kind of Essenian community somewhere in the Californian desert. The Teacher is killed by his people on 7th at sunset, i.e. on Christian Good Friday as well as on the very beginning of Jewish Pessah.
I've been for long interested in Easter dates in literature, notably in crime books. Two months before I found the pattern around 4/4/44 in Jung's life, I came to distinguish a special category that covers exactly a Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, because I found in July 2008 a new text following such a pattern.
I already knew of two other ones, discovered both in April 1997, in strange conditions. In even stranger conditions I came to find two more books offering the same pattern in Oct 2008, a month after my 4/4/44 discovery.

I'll give details in the next posts, now I'll try to study the set of the five texts together, and here they are, following the chronology of Easter weeks:
1889 - The Decorator by Boris Akunin (1999)
1895 - The Perfume Of The Lady In Black by Gaston Leroux (1909)
1944 - And on the Eighth Day... by Ellery Queen (1964)
1996 - Four Corners of Night by Craig Holden (1999)
2001 - 5 (2001) That's a French collection of short stories about the 5 senses, and the short Little Green Apples by Sébastien Fevry is in 8 sections from Sunday, April 8 to Sunday, April 15 (the 2001 Holy Week).

I found these five books by chance, and each finding was so incredible that I won't be surprised if these five books were the only one, at least the only ones easily available in France. Three of them are by best-selling authors (French, American and Russian), but from so different times that it's unlikely many people read them all.
Then American Craig Holden is not very known, he has no wikipedia file yet, and I don't think his work was translated in many languages. Happily it was in French.
The last book from 2001 was only published in French, in 2000 copies, and I would probably never have known of it if I didn't publish a book with the same editor.

Now these five texts show quite amazing features, notably following the pattern of their discovery, 2-1-2, 2 together in April 1997, then 1 in July 08, and 2 together in October 08.

They repeat this pattern in different ways:
- there are 2 French books, 1 Russian, 2 American.
- 2 texts (Queen and Holden) are whole independant novels, so published; Fevry's was published in a collection of short stories and Akunin's is a short novel always published with another one in Special Assignments; the other novel, by Leroux, was published either as a complete book, either as the second part of a volume including Rouletabille's first investigation, The Mystery of the Yellow Room.
- 2 (Holden and Akunin) clearly state the action is during the Holy Week, ending on Easter Sunday; 1 (Leroux) gives an allusion to Easter time, the 2 others don't give any allusion.
- 2 (Holden and Fevry) have an action contemporary with their writing, 2 (Leroux and Queen) are written slightly after the events (14 and 20 years), and 1 is written 110 years later.
- The Holy Weeks draw a kind of perfect pattern with 1944 in the middle (actually the exact average date is 1945, 1889+1895+1944+1996+2001 = 9725 = 5 x 1945 and the two extreme dates give 1889+2001 = 3890 = 2 x 1945.)

1944 and 1945 make me recall the 4-1 pattern I saw in WWII, starting from Sep 1, 1939 and ending with Aug 15, 1945, 2175 days of which 4/5ths fall exactly on D-Day.

At last the most astonishing thing is that 'my' 4th and 5th Books of the Week have 4 and 5 in their titles. I have nothing to add to this as I didn't choose anything. Of course I might have known of hundred of such 'Books of the Week', then have chosen among them five items in order to show striking patterns, but all I can say is that I only know of these five books, and that I would be grateful to anyone that could indicate me any other book.
Simple reason shouts it loud that there should be many such books, as I have only read a very low percentage of the millions of books published all over this world, yet I have a strong feeling that my case is quite against the odds.
Next posts will try to justify this feeling.