Transcendent Society

With the Thanksgiving holiday we are “turning the corner” on the year and heading – increasingly, it seems, with vertiginous fury – toward the winter holiday season. But if we rein in the urge to go racing off down the slopes toward the new year, maybe we can learn something of use: something of gratitude and something of peace.

I am endebted to Prof. Aubrey Williams at the University of Maryland, who brought some interesting information about the Thanksgiving holiday to light :

• An epidemic had wiped out thousands of American Indians along the North Atlantic coast three years before the Mayflower landed. The Plymouth Company knew of this. Far from breaking new ground, the newcomers took over cleared fields and a harbor that had belonged to the Patuxet tribe.

• Scurvy and pneumonia killed more than half the Pilgrims during the first year, leaving 50 survivors, including just 5 of 18 wives.

• Plymouth colony governor William Bradford ordered the first thanksgiving feast, following established English traditions of harvest celebrations. The Indians also had a traditional harvest feast, the Green Corn Dance. The 50 colonists were joined by 90 Indians (only men are mentioned). The Indians brought 5 deer. There were also turkeys, wild geese, ducks, lobsters, eels, clams, oysters, and fish; also dried berries and fruits, biscuits, and English wheat bread as well as various corn dishes which the Indian guide Squanto had instructed the colonists to make. There was no pumpkin pie. That came later.

• It’s likely that the five surviving women and a handful of children and young girls prepared the food to serve 140 people for three days.

• The feast was not repeated the following year because the harvest was too meagre. George Washington set aside a national day of Thanksgiving on November 26, 1789, but it was not regularly observed by later presidents. Our modern celebration dates to 1863 when Abraham Lincoln set aside the 4th Thursday in November as a national holiday to muster Union patriotism. The Pilgrims wre not part of this national holiday until the 1890s, and the term “pilgrim” was not used until the 1870s.

Sources include James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995), Ralph and Adelin Linton's We Gather Together : The Story of Thanksgiving (1949), and Laurie Weinstein Farson's The Wampanoag (1989).

Bill Moyers has begun a new series of television interviews entitled Faith & Reason, airing Friday nights. The time in the Washington DC market is 9:30 p.m. The show currently (1 July 2006) appears at the top of the listings on the PBS home page, which may indicate that the criticisms leveled against Moyers by certain Corporation for Public Broadcasting executives have not succeeded in marginalizing him. Moyers has been on the offensive in recent years, decrying the hegemony of corporate power and the undue influence of religion on public policy in public addresses from commencement ceremonies to the annual meeting of the Public Broadcasting Service. In an address to that meeting on 31 May 2006, Moyers countered allegations that PBS coverage is “unbalanced” by calling for a commitment to balance the reporting spun by corporate and political elites with reporting on life as it is lived by the ordinary person. His new series seems to want to find a balance between religious faith and rational secularism, but the first segment, aired 23 June 2006 and featuring Salman Rushdie, may not have done the best job of setting the tone.

The Transcendent Society is a term coined by Thane Walker, one of the great spiritual teachers of the 20th century and the founder, in 1956, of The Prosperos, a school dedicated to revealing the true nature of man as consciousness. It was also the title of a series of lectures that Thane presented to the public in the late 60s and early 70s to explore the changes being wrought in public life by the enormous spiritual outburst that characterized the mid-century period.

In this space I will try to create a focal point, and a discussion point, to track current events and place them into the larger perspective of a planet that is in the throws of enormous transformation.