Thursday, March 28, 2024

Katherine Lee Bates’s Vision of America from a Mountain Top

 

                        Katherine Lee Bates as a young academic and writer.

America the Beautiful with lyrics from a poem by college professor and writer Katherine Lee Bates in 1893 is one of the songs often mentioned as a possible replacement for the Star Spangled Banner as the Untied States national anthem.  The flag worshiping anthem although popular with traditionalists is considered too hard to sing by many and a glorification of war by some.  Others in contention for substitution include the grade school ditty My Country ‘tis of Thee which has the disadvantage of sharing a tune with God Save the Queen, the anthem of the nation our fledgling country spent years in bloody rebellion against; Irving Berlins God Bless America which is a favorite of many Christians but makes defenders of the separation of church and state cringe; and Woody Guthries This Land is My Land which is disrespectful of authority and written by an actual Red.  Bates’s mountain top pean might hold an edge for at least being made a second national song.  Australia and a handful of other nations have more than one official song depending on level of formality and state ritual.

Bates was on a summer trip to Colorado when she rode up Pikes Peak in a mule-drawn wagon and hiked the final climb to the summit.  She was so awed by vista below her that she quickly jotted down a verse when she returned to her resort hotel and mailed it to The Congregationalist, a magazine which had often published her work.  It appeared in the Fourth of July 1895 edition of the church periodical.  Originally titled simply America the poem immediately attracted attention.

Bates was born on August 12, 1859 in Falmouth, Massachusetts to the Congregational minister William Bates and his wife, the former Cornelia Frances Lee.  It was a solid New England family with deep roots.  Unfortunately, her father died a few weeks after she was born, and she was primarily raised by her mother and an aunt with a literary bent, both of whom had graduated from the all-woman Mount Holyoke Seminary.  She was raised from the beginning in an environment of books, a broad liberal faith, reverence for academia, and the nurturing influence of strong, independent women. 

She attended Needham High School, now known as Wellesley High School, in 1872 and then Newton High School until graduation in the Centennial Year, 1876 when patriotic fervor was sweeping the nation.  Bates stayed close to home to enroll at women’s Wellesley College as part of its second class the same year. She graduated with a B.A. in 1880.  She almost naturally became a teacher first at Natick High School in 1880–81 and then at Dana Hall School from 1881 until 1885.  She had no interest in finding a husband and raising a family which would confine here to the near cloister of a late 19th Century middle class home.

She also began to write and submitted pieces to Congregational denominational journals.  In In 1889 Bates’s young adult novel Rose and Thorn won a prize awarded by the Congregational Sunday School and Publishing Society. It incorporated poor and working class women as characters to teach readers about the reform movements inspired by the Social Gospel in which she was passionately engaged.

Bates invented the character Mrs. Santa Clause in her poem Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride which was also a feminist declaration.

Also, in 1889 Bates invented Mrs. Santa Claus, an audacious introduction to the polar household of a bishop and saint.  In her poem Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride from the collection Sunshine and other Verses for Children Santa’s wife has grown tired of working year round to sustain and organize his Christmas Eve journey while the old man grows fat on her cookies.  She demands to accompany him on the trip around the world and chides him for his selfishness in not wanting to share the pleasure of gift giving and for ignoring tattered poor children and orphans.

With the prize money from Rose and Thorn, Bates was able to afford to travel to England and study at Oxford University in 1890–91.  Upon her return she became an associate professor at Wellesley in 1891, while she earned her masters degree.  Soon after she was named a full professor.

This monument was erected in 1993, 100 years after Bates ascended the peak, as a donation from Colorado Springs' businessman Costas Rombocos.  Note the addition of all of the patriotic iconography surrounding the verse.  Bates was not a "my country right or wrong " kind.  She would not have approved. 

Shortly after her return Bates took the opportunity of a summer teaching position at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.  Duties were not taxing and allowed plenty of time for her to explore the grandeur of the Rockies.  She would later recall:

One day some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to 14,000-foot Pikes Peak. We hired a prairie wagon. Near the top we had to leave the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse.

Bates had personally experienced sexist prejudice and discrimination, had witnessed the ravages of the industrial revolution in both America and Britain, had seen firsthand urban poverty and misery, and keenly wished for equality. Her dream of an all-inclusive egalitarian American community also reflected the severe economic depression of 1893.

After first appearing in The Congregationalist The poem reached a wider audience when her revised version was printed in the Boston Evening Transcript on November 19, 1904. Her final expanded version appeared in her collection America the Beautiful, and Other Poems in 1912).

                                     Bates's poem was finally married to the melody written years earlier by Samuel A. Ward.

The poem was set to various melodies until Samuel A. Ward, an Episcopal church organist and choir master married Bate’s slightly adapted words to a hymn he had composed in 1883, O Mother Dear, Jerusalem, which was published ten years later.  He adapted his old hymn to the new lyrics and together they were published in 1910 under the new title America the Beautiful.  It became an instant hit not only for church choirs but on the vaudeville stage and in early recordings.  It has since been recorded hundreds of times and has made it to the record charts often.  It is now frequently paired with the Star Spangled Banner at many American sports events.

Bates's happy academic home, Wellesley College.

Meanwhile, Bates returned to her happy and fulfilling life at Wellesley while continuing to publish widely and advocate for social reforms.  As professor she revised and expanded the study of literature from the Greek and Latin classics plus Chaucer and Shakespeare to include more contemporary British and American work including poetry and popular novels.  She was one of the first to teach and study the social context of her selections.

Bates especially reveled in the supportive atmosphere of the all-women’s school and inspired by several deep and abiding relationships between faculty members she found there.  She met Katharine Coman while still an undergraduate and engaged her in passionate correspondence in surviving letters while studying in Oxford.  Coman taught history, economics, and statistics eventually becoming Dean.  She was enormously influential for framing sociological insights with social justice. She escorted her students on field trips to Bostons tenement houses, labor union meetings, factories, and sweatshops.  In 1885, at the age of 28, she became professor of history and economics.  She inspired Bates on a personal and professional level and as a public advocate.

                                Fellow Wellesley professor Katherine Corman was Bates's life partner.

Most historians agree that the pair were in a long-term lesbian relationship.  Others believe that it was a “Boston Marriage”—a household arrangement of two single women living respectably together.  Such arrangements were common at Wellesley and among educated and wealthy women in New England.  These relationships may or may not have been sexual.

In 1906 Bates and her brother built a new home in Falmouth to accommodate her surviving family and tenants.  Corman officially moved into an attic apartment later moving to a downstairs bedroom.  The pair remained together until Cormans death in 1915 at the age of 57.

 

Bates's Fallmouth home Scarab House--named for the Egyptian beetle--which she shared with Corman is now a historical landmark.

As a writer, Bates continued to be active and moderately well known.  Near the end of the Spanish American War, she became a special correspondent for The New York Times and, always a champion of the underdog, tried to reduce widely-circulating negative stereotypes about Spaniards. She contributed regularly to periodicals, sometimes under the nom de plume James Lincoln, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Congregationalist, Boston Evening Transcript, Christian Century, Contemporary Verse, Lippincotts, and The Delineator.

Bates was also a social activist interested in the struggles of women, workers, people of color, tenement residents, immigrants, and poor people.  She helped organize the Denison House, a settlement house, with other women friends and colleagues in 1892.  She wrote and spoke extensively about the need for social reform and was an avid advocate for the global peace movement that emerged after World War I, especially to establish the League of Nations.  Long an active Republican, Bates broke with the party to endorse Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis in 1924 because of Republican opposition to American participation in the League.  She declared herself a global citizen and decried the American policy of isolationism.

This statue of Bates stand before the Falmouth Public Library.

Bates died in Wellesley on March 28, 1929, while listening to a friend read poetry to her.  She is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery at Falmouth.  Most of her papers are housed at the Wellesley College Archives.

 

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

The Clouded Birthday and Origin of Zoroaster—Avatar of Proto-Monotheism

 

A contemporary Zoroastrian print depicting the sect's founder, prophet, and avatar.

Yesterday, March 26, was Khordad Sal celebrated as the birthday of Zoroaster also known as the Greater Noruz and which is marked six days after Noruz, the vernal equinox.  

All founders of great religions need a feast day to be celebrated by their followers.  Most often the feast is identified with the birthday, death date, transformation to godhood, or ascension to immortality.  In the case of Zoroaster, the founder of an ancient proto-monotheistic religion which blossomed in Persia (Iran) and became the state religion of vast empires, the feast is a traditional birthday.  But not only is his real birthday not known, scholars have trouble identifying the era in which he lived by margins of hundreds of years.  At least modern ones do better than the Greek historian of philosophy Diogenes and the Roman Plutarch who misdated him by several millennia at around 6,000 BCE

The Fravashi are spirit angels whose traditional depictions  are often considered a major symbol of Zoroasterism.  History Channel pseudo science bunk peddlers would have you that they are representations of aliens in their space craft.
 

The problem with dating Zoroaster is largely a problem of jibing linguistic development with known historical events.  All stories agree that Zoroaster was a priest of an already ancient and long established polytheistic religion who developed new ideas elevating the deity Ahura Mazda of wisdom, truth, and pure goodness to the status of Supreme Being and Creator, while demoting various other deities to Fravashi, roughly analogous to angels or spirit saints and demons under a Satan-like Angra Mainy who introduces the destructive mentality of the lie into the world.   Works of Holy Scriptures are attributed to him—Gathas, Yasna, Vendidad, Visperad, Yashts—which are included in an overarching Scripture that includes ritual practices, prayers, and fragments of other texts not attributed to him. 

The problem is that the oldest of his texts are in an early form of an Aryan tongue known as Avestan of which the texts are the only surviving documentation.  That would seem to date these writings, 17 poems of the Gathas, to sometime before 2,000 BCE.  But later writings, including supposed autobiographical accounts of his life were written in Persian dialects from around 600 BCE.    The great age of the Gathas is what convinced the Greeks and Romans that Zororaster’s origins were very early.

Scholars now date the historic Zoroaster to somewhere in a 200 to 300 year range centering on 600 BCE.  That would indicate that he adapted as his own far more ancient teachings and popularized them.

Then there is the problem of just where the hell Zoroaster was from.  A lot of claimants for this honor.  The earliest texts identify him as coming from Airyanem Vaejah meaning roughly the Expanse of the Aryans a/k/a the Iranians.  It may reference a fast flowing river and valley, perhaps in the southern central Asian plateau or in the north of modern Afghanistan.  These same texts fail to mention any of the well-known tribes of western Iran—the Medes, Persians, and Parthians.

Like Buddhism and Christianity a miracle birth story developed around Zoroaster/Zarathustra as illustrated in this children's book.  

Later texts, however, place him in western Iran and identify his priestly cast was the Magi of the Medes and Persians.  Modern scholars tend to dismiss the possibility of him being from western Iran and argue between themselves over points of origin from central and eastern Iran, Afghanistan, Baluchistan in western modern Pakistan, Bactria on the plateau north of the Hindu-Kush Mountains, Turkmenistan, and the vast steppes west of the Volga.  Put your money down and take your pick.

Although Zoroaster’s original autobiographical writings were thought destroyed in when Alexander the Greats Army captured Persepolis, capital of the Achaemenid Empire centered in Persia and burned the royal library there.  Or not.  Some scholars dismiss this and say that the original texts, if they existed were lost long before.  At any rate later summaries of the lost texts provide a fairly detailed biography.

Zoroaster was born into a Bronze Age Aryan culture in a priestly line, the Spitamids.  His father and mother were identified by namePoroschasp and Dughdova.  He followed the family trade but was increasingly dissatisfied with ritual practices that included animal sacrifice and the corrupt use of religion by a governing caste of princelings and soldiers to oppress the mass of common people.  He took a wife, Huvovi and together they had three sons and three daughters.

At age 30 Zoroaster was illuminated by Ahura Mazda and began preaching his revised worship of the elevated deity and his philosophy of a struggle between the forces of pure truth and goodness and those of lies and evil.  He eliminated animal sacrifice, simplified ritual, and argued against excessive religious taxes diverted to the caste of worldly rulers.  He developed a system which, for its time and place, was relatively light on miracles and magic and developed an advanced ethical philosophy.

Huvovi and his children were his first converts and his sons became his priests.  At least one daughter was said to have made a strategic marriage to a local ruler that helped spread adoption of the new religion.  Zoroaster faced many obstacles in his preaching, including the fierce opposition of traditional priests and of the nobility who felt undermined.  He was shunned and outcast in his own mother’s hometown.  Yet eventually truth and goodness—aÅ¡atriumphed over druj—the lie and much of Zoroaster’s homeland, wherever it was, was brought to the faith.

Zoroaster preaches to legendary Vishtaspa--Hystaspes to the Greeks--a king and/or Mag sage who became one of his earliest supporters and a major figure in scripture.

No mention was made of how the Master died, but later traditions have him murdered at his altar in Balkh located in Afghanistan during a Holy War between Turans—an Iranian tribe—and the Persian Empire in 583 BCE.  This tale undoubtedly owes more to politico/religious struggles for legitimacy within the Persian Empire and its successors than any historical truth.

We do know that by reign of Cyrus the Great, about 560-530 BCE, Zoroastrianism was wide-spread in his newly unified Persian Achaemenid Empire, although not yet a state religion. Through their enemies the Persians, the Greeks learned about Zoroaster and his teachings, which later became influential in their emerging philosophy though the work of Plato and others.  Likewise the empire brought it to the Jews who were also influenced, especially by Zoroastrian duality which shows up in the concepts of the struggle between light and darkness of the Essenes as evidenced in the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Through both the Greeks and the Jews it influenced Christianity and later Islam, which conquered the Zoroastrian heartland.

Zoroaster influenced Greek philosophers as well religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,  In his famous painting The School of Athens Renaissance master Raphael depicted Zoroaster--the bearded figure holding the crystal globe--among the sages in the agora.

The name Zoroaster is, in fact, the Greek form of the name which has become generally used in the West.  In Persian the name is Zarathustra, which Friedrich Nietzsche adopted for his philosophical novel, Also sprach ZarathustraThus Spoke Zarathustra—in which he put his own thoughts on the death of God and the Ãœbermensch into the old prophets mouth.


Darius the Great of the Persian Achaemenid Empire was a personal devotee of Zoroaster and after his death Zoroasterism became the State religion of the empire.

When Darius I came to the Achaemenid throne in 522 BCE he was known to be a personal devotee of Ahura Mazda, but at the time that did not necessarily mean he was a Zoroastrian.  He could still have recognized the ancient pantheon but simply dedicated himself to that divinity.  On the other hand, he may have been.  Not long after Darius died, after extending the empire from Egypt and the Levant to Trace and Macedonia in the Balkans—after failing to conquer Sparta, Athens, and the Greeks—east into India, Zoroastrianism became the state religion, although other cults were generally permitted. 

The Achaemenids fell to Alexander, but when his heirs could not maintain his eastern empire, the Parthians arose and established an Empire from eastern Asia Minor down through both sides of the Persian Gulf and east through Afghanistan.  This empire lasted from 247 BCE to 224 AD when it disintegrated after a long series of wars with the Roman Empire and the rise of the Sasanians.  This empire would also make Zoroastrianism a state religion alongside the ancient gods of the Babylonians.

The Zoroastrians had a last, long run as an imperial religion with the Sasanian Empire, which was the chief rival of the Byzantines to the east, between 224 and 651 when it finally fell to the Islamic invasion.

The Islamic Caliphate not only absorbed the entire Sasanian Empire, it quickly expanded to cover roughly the same territory as the old Achaemenid Empire and then some. 

Despite the conquest, under the Umayyad Caliphate there was little pressure put upon the local populations to abandon their traditional religions so long as they were monotheistic, their activities did not disrupt or insult Islam, and adherents paid a taxjizya which was leveled on non-Muslims living in the realm.  Over time, however, the tax grew repressive and barriers to advancement in the Caliphate encouraged many, especially among the elite and in the major cities, to convert.  After the beginning of the Crusades there was a general backlash against all religious minorities and more oppressive steps were taken, including local rioting and massacres were allowed to transpire by authorities.

During the Caliphate the Zoroastrians had adopted a stance of non-prostilazation to convince their overloads that unlike Christians they would not try to covert Muslims.  Only those born into the religion were accepted as members.  In the long run, as pressure continued on their populations, this custom, along with a traditionally low birth rate, and continued abandonment of the faith for Islam, contributed to a steady decline in numbers over the ages until only a tiny minority remained in the old Iranian and Afghan strongholds.

After a period of particularly brutal repression many adherents fled to India where they established communities on the southern west coast beginning in the 9th Century.  That community today represents the largest concentration of Zoroastrians in the world.  Known locally as the Parsis, less than 70,000 were counted in the 2001 Indian census, mostly concentrated around Mumbai.  

Modern Zoroastrian priests perform the Afrinagar ceremony.  They wear masks so that their sputum will not accidentally corrupt the pure flame of sacred fire in it's chalice-like cauldron. 

Their long isolation from their ancestral roots has resulted in customs that are sometimes at variance with traditional Zoroastrianism and mirror the Hindu communities in which they dwell.  This includes a modification of the ban on accepting those not born into the religion by accepting the children of marriages to non-Zoroastrians.  That has not, however, prevented a general population decline, hastened by emigration to the United States and Canada where there are now small communities.

Pressure in the traditional heartland has only gotten worse. The Shi’a in Iran and the Taliban Sunni in Afghanistan, as well as Islamists in the southern Caucuses have been equally zealous in their persecutions making many refugees who have to disguise their identities.  Hard numbers in these circumstances are hard to come by.  Less than 200,000 are thought to be scattered over a broad region overlapping several borders.

Today, probably fewer than one million Zoroastrians are left world-wide to celebrate their Master’s birthday.