Despite uncertainty or maybe even because of it, cities around the world prepare for Mardi Gras.
RNU.com – (Raiders News Update) - The Associated Press reported this week that Louisiana's battered residents are putting their "months of heartache, frustration and anger on parade, in effigies, blue-tarp trailers and themes like 'Fridge Over Troubled Water,'" and giving themselves the first of many desperately needed Mardi Gras laughs.
Mardi Gras has long been an occasion for the city to laugh at tragedy and aim barbs at authorities, the AP said, "and given all the pain New Orleans has suffered in the past year the irreverence should reach new heights this season."
This year there is a particular edge in the Big Easy as clubs that historically staged Mardi Gras parades "are targeting Hurricane Katrina and the politicians they blame for the chaotic response to the catastrophe."
Does this mean, perverts beware!? Are the topless muses and nude dancers giving way to more political caricatures as masked revelers stumble home following dusk-to-dawn parties?
Never fear, the mood is different across the world in Rio de Janeiro, where organizers have started parades they plan will lead up to the four-day, pre-Lenten festival, opening Feb. 25. The over-the-top, anything-goes celebration of feathers and bare flesh promises that, unlike Louisiana's battered citizens, sun, fun and samba -- not politics -- will remain the messages of Rio de Janeiro's famed Carnival, despite socialist President Hugo Chavez's sponsorship of one of the top dance groups.
The Brazilian government even plans to distribute 25 million free condoms to promote sex during the country's Carnival, but the city's seamy underbelly may provide darker moments that some people are prepared for. Angry Brazilian police officers demanding higher pay are warning tourists not to rely on the crime-ridden city's cops to save them.
In Australia, the rainbow remains bright as the 2006 Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Party races toward Saturday, March 4, where at the Moore Park Entertainment Precinct (formerly Fox Studios) the world's "biggest queer gathering" is already selling out some of the planned events. Past Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras have seen attendance as high as 700,000 participants.
Some may be wondering, with so much uncertainty in the world today, why do we continue the need to cast off inhibition and to party? Is the deep compulsion purely psychological, or is another, unseen force pulling at us, compelling us to don 'the mask'?
PUTTING THE MASK IN MASQUERADE
Errol Laborde investigated the masquerade tradition in his book, Mardi Gras! (Picayune Press). He wrote "Roman aristocracy of the time preferred debauchery and licentiousness to legality and morality. Men donned women's clothing, the better to abandon themselves to orgy; thus the masquerade tradition began."
Professor Fred Koening of Tulane University supported conclusions of Laborde, saying, "Masks are a way of being anonymous, and if you wear a mask, you take on a different persona. You can be a little drunker, a little wilder, a little more primitive. Furthermore, at Carnival people will be more tolerant of you. Normal rules are gone. Traditional routines are put on hold."
In ancient times, the Greek god Dionysus was depicted as the inventor of such revelry. Followers of Dionysus believed that he was the presence that is otherwise defined as the craving within man that longs to "let itself go" and to "give itself over" to base desires. What Christians might resist as the lustful wants of the carnal man, the followers of Dionysus embraced as the incarnate power that would, in the next life, liberate the souls of mankind from the constraints of this present world and from the customs which sought to define respectability through a person’s obedience to moral law. Until then, worshippers of Dionysus attempted to bring themselves into union with the god through a ritual casting off of the bonds of sexual denial and primal constraint by seeking to attain a higher state of ecstasy.
The uninhibited rituals of ecstasy (Greek for "outside the body") employed wine, abandon, and perversion to bring the followers of Dionysus into a supernatural condition which enabled them to escape the temporary limitations of the body and mind and to achieve a state of enthousiasmos -- outside the body and "inside the god."
In this sense Dionysus represented a dichotomy within the Greek religion, as the primary maxim of the Greek culture was one of moderation, or, "nothing too extreme." But Dionysus embodied the absolute extreme in that he sought to inflame the forbidden passions of human desire.
As college students returning from Carnival will understand, this gave Dionysus a stronger allure among Greeks who otherwise tried in so many ways to suppress and control the secret lusts of the human heart. Dionysus resisted every such effort and, according to myth, visited a terrible madness on those who tried to deny him free expression. Interestingly, the Dionystic idea of mental disease resulting from suppression of secret inner desires, especially aberrant sexual desires, was later reflected in the teachings of Sigmund Freud. Thus Freudianism might be called the grandchild of the cult of Dionysus.
Conversely, the person who gave himself over to the will of Dionysus was promised unlimited psychological and physical delights.
THE POWER OF CARNIVAL!
Such mythical systems of mental punishments and physical rewards based on resistance and/or submission to Dionysus, were both symbolically and literally illustrated in the cult rituals of the Bacchae, as the Bacchae women (married and unmarried Greek women had the "right" to participate in the mysteries of Dionysus) migrated in frenzied hillside groups, dressed transvestite in fawn skins and accompanied by mask-wearing, screaming, music, dancing, and licentious behavior.
When, for instance, a baby animal was too young and lacking in instinct to sense the danger and run away from the revelers, it was picked up and suckled by bare-breasted women who participated in the hillside rituals. Yet when older animals sought to escape the marauding Bacchae, they were considered "resistant" to the will of Dionysus and were torn apart and eaten alive as a part of the fevered ritual.
Human participants were sometimes subjected to the same orgiastic cruelty, as the rule of the cult was "anything goes," including lesbianism, bestiality, etc. Later versions of the ritual (Bacchanalia) expanded to include pedophilia and male revelers, and perversions of sexual behavior were often worse between men than they were between men and women.
THE DEVIL AND CARNIVAL
The Hebrew people considered Hades (the Greek god of the underworld) to be equal with Hell and/or the Devil, and many ancient writers likewise saw no difference between Hades (in this sense the Devil) and Dionysus. Euripedes echoed this sentiment in the Hecuba, and referred to the followers of Dionysus as the "Bacchants of Hades."
In Syracuse, Dionysus was known as Dionysus Morychos ("the dark one") a fiendish creature; roughly equivalent to the biblical Satan, who wore goatskins and dwelt in the regions of the underworld.
In the scholarly book, Dionysus Myth And Cult, Walter F. Otto connected Dionysus with the prince of the underworld. He wrote: "The similarity and relationship which Dionysus has with the prince of the underworld (and this is revealed by a large number of comparisons) is not only confirmed by an authority of the first rank, but he says the two deities are actually the same. Heraclitus says, 'Hades and Dionysus, for whom they go mad and rage, are one and the same.'"
The Hebrews considered the magic (witchcraft) of the Bacchae (the female followers of Dionysus) to be the best evidence of Dionysus' Satanic connection, and, while most of the details are no longer available due to the fact Dionysus was a mystery god and his rituals were revealed to the initiated only, the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel described the "magic bands" (kesatot) of the Bacchae, which, as in the omophagia, were used to capture (magically imprison) the souls of men.
We read, "Therefore, thus says the Lord GOD, "Behold I am against your magic bands [kesatot] by which you hunt lives [souls] there as birds, and I will tear them off your arms; and I will let them go, even those lives [souls] whom you hunt as birds" (Ez. 13:20 NAS).
In Acts 17:34 we read of a soul liberated from the control of Dionysus: "Howbeit certain men clave unto [Paul], and believed: among the which was Dionysius the Areopagite..." To carry the name of Dionysus usually meant: 1) the parents were devotees of Dionysus and thus the child was "predestined" to be a follower of the god; or 2) the individual was under the spell of the kesatot.
The kesatot was a magic arm band used in connection with a container called the kiste. Wherever the kiste is inscribed on sarcophagi and on Bacchic scenes, it is depicted as a sacred vessel (a soul prison?) with a snake peering through an open lid. How the magic worked and in what way a soul was imprisoned is still a mystery. Pan, the half-man/half-goat god (later relegated to devildom) is sometimes pictured as kicking the lid open and letting the snake (soul?) out. Such loose snakes were then depicted as being enslaved around the limbs, and bound in the hair, of the Bacchae women.
The demon Pan, the serpents, the imprisoned souls, and the magic Kesatot and Kiste, were evidently perceived by the prophet Ezekiel as an effort of the Bacchae to mystically imprison the souls of men through magic and sensuality. Yet Pan was also beloved of Dionysus for his pandemonium ("all the devils") which struck panic and/or pleasure in the hearts of men and beasts. Does the same spirit reside over New Orleans's Mardi Gras, Rio's Carnival, and Sydney's Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras?
Warning! A tenacious effort on the part of modern Bacchae to embrace the will of evil supernaturalism may be at work!
On the other hand, modern governments may be providing people with reasons to cast of inhibitions and to party like there's no tomorrow.