The celebration of Mardi Gras came to North America from France where it had been celebrated since the Middle Ages. French explorer Iberville and his men stopped to rest for a day beside a small bayou about twelve miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River, On Shrove Tuesday, 1699. Knowing that the day, March 3, was being celebrated as a major holiday in Paris, they christened the site Point du Mardi Gras, as the weary, homesick men must have recalled that back home in France maskers were filling the streets. The tradition of the New Orleans Mardi Gras is undoubtedly French, as during the first years of existence, it heavily resembled the one held in Paris more than it did any other.
However, outside of New Orleans, Mardi Gras's roots predate that of the French. There is a striking similarity between the ancient tribal rituals of fertility that welcomed the arrival of Spring. A possible ancestor of the celebration was the "Lupercalia", a circus-like orgy held in mid-February in Rome. In this ancient fertility festival, the worship of Lupercus involved cross-dressing and masquerading, promoting sexual orgies among the Romans. Steeped in Egyptian, Grecian and Roman fertility rites, half of the parades celebrate and honor ancient pagan gods.
Ancient Greeks would sacrifice a goat, cut its hide into strips, and run naked through the fields while their pagan priests lashed them with with the goat-hide strips. This was a symbolic part of their Spring fertility rite to ensure a productive harvest for their fields and increase the fertility of their flocks and women. The custom was degenerate even by pagan standards, being a time of sacrifice, lewdness, immortality, drunkenness and revelry, and was associated with the worship of the Greek god "Pan".
Pan originates with the Ancient Greek language, from the word paein, meaning "to pasture." Besides being the Greek god of fields and pastures, he was even more closely associated with cattle, flocks, and herds, than with agriculture. He was a fertility god and therefore was always represented as crude, wanton, and lustful. He took the form of a half-goat and half-man, having the legs, ears, and horns of a goat, in the same manner as a faun or satyr (the goat is the ancient symbol of Satan), but the torso, arms, and face of a man. Being a rustic god, Pan was not worshipped in temples or other built edifices, but in natural settings. The playful and lecherous Pan is also the Greek god of lust and the masculine generative power. According to Thelemic standards, "Pan is both the giver and the taker of life, and his Night is that time of symbolic death where the adept experiences unification with the All through the ecstatic destruction of the ego-self. In a more general sense, it is the state where one transcends all limitations and experiences oneness with the universe.
Pagan priests accompanied by the idol, showered the crowds with Spring flowers, herbs, grains and coins. Good fortunes, spells and curses were shouted, including calls to the idol god to grant favor and blessing. The early Church fathers, realizing that it was impossible to break away from pagan customs, decided instead to direct their new converts into Christian channels. Thus Carnival was created as a period of merriment that would serve as a prelude to the penitential season of Lent, providing a balance between the Christian Church and its early pagan celebrations.
By 1766, when Don Antonio de Ulloa took possession of the colony of Louisiana for Spain, Mardi Gras, though sketchy and crude, was an established custom. The Spanish permitted it to continue for a time, with pre-Lenten balls and fetes commonly held in New Orleans during the late 1700s, but within a few years street masking and masked balls were banned. Even before the Spanish had taken control many travelers had written home of the wickedness and the general licentiousness of the young city, reporting a number of gambling houses, rough ballrooms of a sort, and loose women in numbers out of all proportion to the settlement's population. All of this, together with an increasing number of free people of color, had made Mardi Gras masking a rowdy, even murderous, affair.
The balls continued, and the character of these has been much debated. There were already some private affairs, to which none but a certain circle and a few distinguished visitors were admitted. This all helped to give New Orleans a reputation as a city as evil and as dangerous as Marseille, a city which was in time to earn the denomination of "hell on earth."
It is true that New Orleans was then a wicked place, a haven of much human scum from the brothels and prisons and slums of Europe. Every sort of vice was rampant and murder was so common that it has been said that the natives would step over a corpse on the way to a ball or the opera and think nothing of it.
The prohibition of masked affairs continued when New Orleans became an American city in 1803, as street masking was revived in New Orleans in the years between Spanish suppression and the American acquisition of the colony, when the French ruled again, and the American authorities permitted it to continue until 1806. This time Mardi Gras almost died, and for years it existed only in the memory of the Creole population. By 1823, the Creole populace prevailed upon the American governor, and balls were allowed once again, and in 1827 street masking was once more permitted and officially made legal.
The balls were soon more numerous and more brilliant than they ever had been before. Orleanians of every race and social stratum donned costumes and masked and gathered to dance all night long, and on Mardi Gras they marched through the streets in costume, rowdy and happy as they had ever been, despite the wrinkled noses of the city's fathers-- wrinkled most perhaps at the number of Americans who now joined in the frivolity, but disapproving heartily of it all. "What crimes, what sins might be committed under a mask," reflected these Anglo-Saxons. And Ash Wednesday always proved them right, for the jails were always filled, and more than one corpse, still dressed in a ridiculous costume, lay in a gutter or sprawled across a banquette. No lady ever masked in the streets, or if she did she took the utmost precaution never to be recognized.
It was the Americans who gave Mardi Gras its present pattern. It was they who, at least to some extant, took it away from the people and changed what had been an unorganized and informal street revel into an entire social season, a highly stylized program of balls and pageants. The Americans kept alive and increased the whole concept of imitation aristocracy and the present-day snobbery that still characterizes some of the Mardi Gras krewes. Only street masking remained a delightful custom as ever, although many people, both Creole and American, considered it bad taste to mingle in the streets in a costume.
The first formal parade took place in 1838. Until then maskers had formed lines and chains and walked and run through the streets on Mardi Gras to the amusement or disgust of the spectators, but without real organization or plan. They romped and shouted and behaved as foolishly as possible, but those taking part were usually considered wild men at best. As time went on more and more persons took part in the street pageants. During the 1840s the throwing of flour or pellets of flour, which broke and dissolved, became popular, as it has long been in European carnivals. In 1843 a newspaper writer said that so much flour was thrown on Mardi Gras that on Ash Wednesday the streets looked as if they had been covered in snow.
In the early 19th century, the public celebration of Mardi Gras consisted mainly of maskers on foot, in carriages, and on horseback. In 1837, a costumed group of revelers walked in the first documented "parade," but the violent behavior of maskers during the next two decades caused the press to call for an end to Mardi Gras. The festivities were becoming more and more rowdy, as there was much drunkenness and fighting and subsequent filling of jails. Most of the newspapers began to campaign for a complete abandonment of the custom, citing two major reasons. One was the constant brawling between white men and boys and Negroes. The other was the vast amount of prostitutes that poured into the streets and into the best neighborhoods on that day, some with their men, sometimes in groups wearing the most daring costumes, and behaving in the most brazen fashions. Some would dress as men, particularly as sailors, as this was considered shocking. They would shout gay and obscene remarks from their carriages, or stroll along the streets, mocking the ladies, as Mardi Gras was a paradise for whores.
These things, together with a continued throwing of lime and bricks, were threatening to bring about the end of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Fortunately, six New Orleanians saved the New Orleans Mardi Gras by forming the Comus organization in 1857. Rumors spread during the day that a new Mardi Gras organization intended to parade that night, and after dark the streets began to fill with Orleanians who stood waiting; and at nine o'clock, Comus arrived, for this was a pageant such as the city had never seen before. Comus coined the word "krewe" and established several Mardi Gras traditions by forming a secret Carnival society, choosing a mythological namesake, presenting a themed parade with floats and costumed maskers, and staging a tableau ball following its parade. Comus is the son of the necromancer Circeand reveler Bacchus.
Mardi Gras organizations are non-profit clubs, in the fashion of secret society's, called krewes. Many are named after mythological figures such as Aphrodite, Eros, Hermes, Pegasus and Thor. Each krewe is completely autonomous and there is no overall coordinator of Carnival activities. The secrecy which some of the older krewes cloak themselves is part of the "mystique" of Mardi Gras. Several do not reveal the name of the parade until the night of the event, and the identity of their royalty is never publicized.
After the Civil War, Comus returned to the parade scene in 1866. Four years later, the Twelfth Night Revelers debuted. This unique group made Carnival history at its 1871 ball when a young woman was presented with a golden bean hidden inside a giant cake, thus becoming Mardi Gras's first queen and starting the "king cake" tradition. In New Orleans, popular custom holds that whoever receives the slice that contains the baby must purchase the next cake and throw a party. A visit by Russian Grand Duke Alexis Romanoff was the partial inspiration for the first appearance of Rex in 1872. The King of the Carnival immediately became the international symbol of Mardi Gras. Rex presented Mardi Gras's first organized daytime parade, selecting Carnival's colors-- green, purple, and yellow, producing its flag, and introduced its anthem, "If Ever I Cease To Love."
The popular Krewe of Proteus debuted in 1882 with a glittering parade that saluted Egyptian mythology. The first black Mardi Gras organization, the Original Louisiana Club, was launched in 1894. Two years later, Les Mysterieuses, Carnival's first female group, was founded and presented a spectacular Leap Year ball. One of the first and most beloved krewes to make its appearance in the 20th century was Zulu.
The 20th century brought with it some difficult years. World War I cancelled Carnival in 1918-1919, but Mardi Gras survived this struggle, along with the Prohibition of the Twenties and the Great Depression of the Thirties. As New Orleans entered the new century its population was approaching 300,000, and every year at least 100,000 visitors came to see a Mardi Gras that was both the same in all its fundamentals yet vastly different from the Mardi Gras of earlier decades, and like New Orleans, seemed very old, but was also very young. The city was prosperous, with no more yellow fever epidemics or cholera to wipe out half its population.
Girls Playing Cards, Storyville, circa 1911-13
There was still vice, but even it was more civilized, and the regulated red-light district known as Storyville was considered more of an asset than anything else. On Mardi Gras the women of Storyville did not often mingle with the maskers but remained in their own neighborhood, which now was spreading into the French Quarter, as they took over the houses left by the vanishing Creoles, who once had also possessed Mardi Gras. Now, on that day, visitors would wander through Storyville in the hours between parades, to gasp at the luxury of the gaudy apartments. They could peep through shutters into the cheap cribs, where naked girls sat around awaiting patrons. They heard remarkable stories, such as the one about the new kind of music being played in Storyville called "jass," which was being introduced in other parts of the city but was considered rather indecent.
Mardi Gras masking underwent much change. Formerly great papier-mâché giants had been everywhere on Mardi Gras, monsters with huge and grotesque heads wobbling about their necks. After 1900 they began to vanish, unfortunately, and no longer did two or three men appear in the street as a gigantic, realistic elephant, or a dozen forming a writhing serpent half a city block long. The interests of the day are always reflected in Mardi Gras costumes. Now minstrels in blackface, straw hats, and loud suits and ties became popular. (By World War I bitterness had returned and effigies of the Kaiser were carried through the streets suspended from a gallows. A generation later his piece was replaced by Adolf Hitler.)
Throughout its years, masks have always symbolized a way of being anonymous, and by wearing a mask, you "take on a different persona." Among the early tribes, men who wore masks were considered crueler towards their enemies than those who did not. Like the masquerade balls of the 17th and 18th centuries, the wearing of masks was sometimes set as a game among the guests. The masked guests were dressed as to be unidentifiable, adding a humorous effect, enabling a more enjoyable version of typical balls. Less formal "costume parties" may be a descendant of this tradition. The earliest mention of a Carnival celebration is recorded in the 12th century Roman account of the pope and upper-class Roman citizens watching a parade through the city, followed by the killing of steers and other animals. The purpose was to play and eat meat before Ash Wednesday, which marked the beginning of Catholic Lent-- the forty-day fast leading up to Easter. The Latin term carnem-levare is to remove oneself from flesh or meat-- was used to refer to the festival.
Marching clubs were numerous in the 1900s, some of which, such as the Jefferson City Buzzards and the Garden District Club, will probably live as long as there is Mardi Gras. Then there were others-- the Broadway Swells, the Jasey kids, the St. Roch Carnival Club, the Jan Jans, the Sons of Rest, the Vampy Vamps, and the Chrysantheum Social Club. But it was the stately and the elegant krewes that endured, and with so little change in the types of floats used and the styles of costumes that to-day they are almost exactly as they were a half-century ago.
Beads and other trinkets, known as "throws," have been tossed from floats since at least 1910-- transforming parades into a participatory experience, as spectators beg and scramble for treasure. Beads became part of an exchange ritual involving flashes of bare flesh-- a phenomenon that stoked the market for more eye-catching, fancily designed necklaces. Contrary to popular belief, "flashes" are rarely experienced myths, derived from mass-marketing soft-core pornography, and is not a tradition of New Orleans Mardi Gras. The flashing for beads or primary ritual paradigm or worship of the gods is a form of "ceremonial exchange" that is not simply unstructured hedonism, but rather a "ritualized enactment."
No comments:
Post a Comment