Festival of Love, Iranian Thanksgiving or Mehregan
You know how it is. Some one asks a question. Then you look up in Google for an answer. Then you come across your own work. Oh dear.
A friend from my elementary school wanted to know about Jashne Mehregan food. I did not know there was any particular food arrangement as in Knowrooz (Nowruz).
This is what I had written earlier:
http://alimostofi8.blogspot.co.uk/2005/09/happy-jashne-mehregan.html
But it leaves me unsatisfied. So I am going to write a bit more. A lot more actually. You know me. Big heart!
This year the Autumn/Spring Equinox is on Tuesday 02:28 GMT 23 Sept 2014 or 1st Mehr Iranian Calendar.
This is the last week of Summer. It is perhaps the oldest human ritual on Earth. It also has many significant real implications. That is why the ritual became the official Roman religion and the precursor to Christianity.
Walk up to a Christian and tell them any of this and they will not be amused. But then we Iranians have had our ancient history completely formatted.
Formatted. What a term to use you say? Well, that is exactly what Salman Parsi did, just like the Christians did to the documents in the Library of Alexandria few hundred years before him.
The history of Iran was preserved for millennia in the hearts of Iranians. As it is there are Magi who still hold the whole truth. They and the Guardian Angels of Iran preserve the truth even nowadays under such awful conditions.
Thanks to the makers and preservers of the internet some of this can come out. I will do my best to tell you some of it.
Iran by virtue of its geography had the four seasons. Morever we had the mountains and the clear skies to observe and measure the cosmos.
Humans in the Iranian plateau began settling down some 20,000 years ago. One thing they noticed that was different from Africa, was that it was cooler but that it was darker.
If you dwell into the ancient myths you will read stories that the Ancients tilted the Earth so that the human spirit can be part of an interplay of forces.
If the Earth was not tilted, we would never have the seasons and we would not have the opportunity to change and evolve. The human spirit needs to make decisions that can be right and wrong. It needs to then learn.
Being able to cope with change, is what makes us more than an individual. You learn to understand cooperation. You will learn the hard way if need be, that you are part of the society and there are protocols or culture or laws.
All of this change and law is managed by our ability to love, care and relate. Heck why would I need to love, if I could manage on my own. But there are feelings and thoughts, that come to mind even when you are asleep and you need to speak to someone about it.
The sharing of your thoughts is Mehr. The thoughts that you share are mostly related to what you can't do on your own. As you participate in the society for your help, so others ask you for help in return. There is then a culture that we all follow.
In the ancient times the most important point upon which people went to war on, was on resources. And 20,000 years later today, we are still doing it.
Most humans lived in the Northern Hemisphere. They realised that the days were shorter from a particular time of the year. Some of the people had a good harvest some had not.
Mehregan was based on the concept that all of the farmers would bring their harvest in the middle of the town square and split it up evenly.
So the concept of "evenly" or equality or fair play came into existence. It happened at the beginning of Autumn when the Sun was aligned with the constellation Libra or Mehr. Stone circles like Stonehenge or The Throne of Solomon in Iran were constructed to measure this occasion.
As such then the whole concept of law and order was realised and a human being became a social being. That is the fundemental root of civilization as you know it now.
Be proud to be an Iranian.
Now to some technicalities. The Iranian calendar puts Mehregan on the 10th of Mehr or 10 degrees into the sign of Libra. Why? Well the answer lies elsewhere. A bit of a convoluted story. But here it goes.
The Zoroastrian calendar was originally astrological. We had just 30 days and each day was special for some reason. There are particular symbolisms associated with each of the 30 degrees for each constellation in the path of the Moon in the sky.
But as we know the Earth takes a little more than 360 days to go around the Sun. The ancient Iranians would add the last extra days in Esfand and that is why Esfand is well known, as the moment for reconcilliation when logic fails. Later this concept crept into western calendar systems as leap years in February.
Spring was always the first day of even the Gregorian calendar until the English changed January from Spring to the 10th of Day in the winter. The year began with the harvest and taxes had to be paid in the second month of Spring. That is why we all still pay our taxes in April.
Anyway I am drifting off course. Let's go back to the Iranian Calendar. Later, when the Iranian calendar was revised by Khayyam, he decided to add the five days onto the first five months equally. So today we have Farvardin with 31 days.
So what happens to the 30 special days. Well with this alteration Khayyam messed up the naming of the days. Mehr is the 16th day of Farvardin or the 16th most important energy under the Zoroastrian Cosmology. Khayyam could not go around talking about Zoroastrian concepts.
Khayyam had been commissioned by his dearest friend, who had become King, to make sure Iranians always knew when to harvest, and also to be more orderly according to univesal divine laws. Now that he had become King, he asked Khayyam to sort out a new calendar.
Khayyam being the genius he was, was inspired via the divine entities (Sourosh) to produce the most accurate calendar in the world.
The Iranian calendar adds one day every four years like the Gregorian. But it adds an extra day once every 27 years. That makes Iranian calendar, lose just one day, every 15000 years or so, compared the Gregorian one, that loses one day every 5000 years or so.
I keep drifting from the core track. So any way, by the time the third month Khordad comes around, the month starts on the second of the 30 days. So by the time Mehr comes, we have the 16th on the 10th of Mehr.
This is what happens when you have people who know nothing about Astrology messing around with our calendar. Mehregan, like the other three great celebrations begins at the beginning of the season.
Wow that did take a long time to explain. I am now satisfied.
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