Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving's earliest roots most likely lie in Mihragan, which is one of the most ancient festivals known, dating back at least as far as the earliest Indo-Europeans. It is in all likelihood the survivor of an earlier Aryo-Iranian New Year festival, dating from some prehistoric phase of the Aryo-Iranian [Indo-Iranian] calendar, when the year began at the autumnal equinox. This became a pre-Zoroastrian and old Aryan harvest feast dedicated to the sun god. According to the Hindu tradition, Zoroaster would have lived long before 4000BCE; however, Aristotle wrote that the Persians of his time dated Zoroaster even further back to around 6000BCE. The festival predates this, most likely by some thousands of years. The short version is that the practice of a late Autumn Thanksgiving feast of some kind is old - damn old!

Mihragan was connected with the worship of one of the oldest Aryan deities (Baga-Mithra). According to Zoroastrian angelology, Mithra is the greatest of the angels and is an angel of light, associated with the sun, but distinct from it. He has a thousand ears and ten thousand eyes. Hmmmn - no wings? The feast of Mihragan is still practiced today among Zoroastrians, and is a community celebration in which prayers of thanksgiving and blessings of the community figure prominently in the observances.

Of course here, in the good old US of A, simple thanks and blessings are not nearly enough. Our Thanksgiving celebration would not be complete without a large screen (1080p preferably) viewing of giant, grotesque, inflatable characters being mercilessly dragged down Broadway to West 34th Street, followed by gorging ourselves on cholesterol-laden foods to the point of regurgitation, followed by viewing steroid-enhanced behemoths bashing each other senseless on a 100 yard rectangular lawn, then finally, waking up early the next morning for the obligatory battle with the hordes of cursing, nasty, bargain-seeking consumers all wrestling over that last Nintendo Wii. What would Mithra play? Where would Mithra shop?

I suppose it is fitting, as the sad reality is that our Thanksgiving is actually a celebration of genocide. In 1617, just before the Pilgrims landed, the process started in southern New England. For decades, British and French fishermen had fished off the Massachusetts coast, and after filling their hulls with cod, they would go ashore to lay in firewood and fresh water and perhaps capture a few Indians to sell into slavery in Europe – why not? It is almost certain that these fishermen transmitted illness to the people they met. The plague that ensued made the Black Death pale by comparison. Some historians think the disease was the bubonic plague; others suggest that it was viral hepatitis, smallpox, chicken pox, or influenza – perhaps a witches’ brew of all of them.

Within three years the plague wiped out between 90 percent and 96 percent of the inhabitants of coastal New England. The Indian societies lay devastated. Only "the twentieth person is scarce left alive," wrote Robert Cushman, a British eyewitness, recording a death rate unknown in all previous human experience. Unable to cope with so many corpses, the survivors abandoned their villages and fled, often to a neighboring tribe. Because they carried the infection with them, Indians died who had never encountered a white person. Howard Simpson describes what the Pilgrims saw: "Villages lay in ruins because there was no one to tend them. The ground was strewn with the skulls and the bones of thousands of Indians who had died and none was left to bury them."

During the next fifteen years additional epidemics, most of which we know to have been smallpox, struck repeatedly. European Americans also contracted smallpox and the other maladies, to be sure, but they usually recovered, including, in a later century, the "heavily pockmarked George Washington." Native Americans usually died. The impact of the epidemics on the two cultures was profound. The English Separatists, already seeing their lives as part of a divinely inspired morality play, found it easy to infer that God was on their side. John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the plague "miraculous." In 1634 he wrote to a friend in England: "But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection." God the Original Real Estate Agent – hooray for God! Hooray for us!

These epidemics probably constituted the most important geopolitical event of the early seventeenth century. Their net result was that the British, for their first fifty years in New England, would face no real Indian challenge. This is why we refer to the colonists as “settlers” not “conquerors” – there were no people left alive to conquer, just empty villages and nice, cleared land ready for planting. Squanto’s behavior, when seen through this lens takes on a different light entirely. Being virtually alone as a survivor of the plagues, he threw his lot in with the pilgrims out of desperation not benevolence or altruism.

It is amazing to me that in a mere 10,000 years we have moved from simple Neolithic gratitude for the bounty of Earth and the miracle of the ever-renewing seasons, to a celebration of violence, conquest, commercialism, consumerism and over-indulgence. Perhaps this is what people mean when they say to me, “progress, not perfection” – perhaps not. Whatever the case may be, I am "celebrating" this Thanksgiving working on a locked psych-ward at Maimonides Medical Center, in Brooklyn. Zach and Miranda are with their mother and I am far away from my family. Things will quiet down later after the patients get their medication and I will have some quiet time to have my Mihragan - to give sincere and humble thanks for all that is, and all that is not.

Peaceandlove.