People have celebrated religion and the new spring in several forms for thousands of years. One way is Mardi Gras, and no one really knows the exact transition from its beginnings in a Greek sheep herd to the wild party in New Orleans.
Today the Mardi Gras season begins 12 days after Christmas on Jan. 6, also known as the feast of Epiphany, King’s Day or Twelfth Night, which, according to the Catholic religion, was the day the Magi visited baby Jesus with gifts.
Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras in French, falls 47 days before Easter. It is the day before Ash Wednesday, which begins the Lenten season of fasting.
“It seems to me that the church realizes people’s humanity,” said Charlotte Hornstein, a mass communication alumna. “We need that revelry before the time of sacrifice during Lent.”
Rebecca East, campus minister of Christ the King Catholic church, said traditionally Fat Tuesday was the last day the household would be able to eat rich food, which was forbidden during Lent.
On Ash Wednesday, priests bless palm branches and mark worshipers’ foreheads with the ashes of burned branches. This custom reminds people they are mere mortals and “what we’re about is something more than being mortals, that through the death of Jesus Christ we have everlasting life,” said East. “Oddly enough people think it’s a day of Holy Obligation. We get more people in church on Ash Wednesday than any other day,” East said.
According to the Roman poet Ovid in “Fasti,” every year on the fifteenth day before the Kalends of March (fifteen days from the first of March — Feb. 15 — in Roman dating system), the Arcadians, a shepherd tribe from the central, mountainous part of the Greek peninsula Peloponnesus, celebrated the coming of spring.
Arcadian priests sacrificed a goat in the name of Pan (the god of flocks and fields), ate it and cut its hide in long strips, called februa. Then the priests splattered themselves with goat’s blood and flogged naked, willing and joyous community members with the februae. They thought the whipping would improve the soil and cattle as well as absolve personal sin.
According to Jay Guren, author of “Carnival Panorama,” new brides were the first to line up for the februa’s wrath, as it would ensure fertility.
Guren said the Romans combined elements from the Arcadian celebration and Phrygian (modern-day Turkey) festival to create a spring holiday called Lupercalia, which is the predecessor to modern-day Mardi Gras. In 1911 Sir James Frazer wrote in his book, “The Golden Bough,” that the Phrygians celebrated Mother Goddess Cybele, who symbolizes fertility.
Most myths say Cybele was passionately in love with Attis, a beautiful young sheepherder whom she drives insane. Some myths say Attis was driven to castrate himself and bled to death under a pine tree. Cybele, still in love, brought Attis back to life three days later in the springtime.
Guren said emasculated Roman priests dripped blood from self-inflicted arm wounds over an altar to symbolize the death of Attis.
Then the resurrection of Attis was celebrated in the streets of Rome. Guren said mobs of februa-wielding men roamed the streets whipping women they encountered.
Robert Tallant writes in his book “Mardi Gras” that through the centuries the Roman celebration of Lupercalia degenerated from a spiritual holiday into an “orgy of lust and pain.”
According to Guren, the Roman celebration of Lupercalia officially included games and gladiatorial shows at the Circus Maximus, the large arena located between the Palatine and Aventine hills in Rome. However, Guren also said the festival “had become the victim of a complete perversion of meaning,” and “was marked by wild orgies among the rich and more public misbehavior among the lower classes.”
Guren said Emperor Claudius, who reigned from 41 to 54 A.D., is credited with bringing the fertility festival to Rome.
No one seems able to agree how, when or if at all the Catholic church adopted the Roman’s pagan festival as Mardi Gras.
Tallant said the transition occurred while the Catholic church was trying to convince the Romans that “feasting, fornication and fun” were detrimental to their salvation. According to Tallant, by the fifth century the Church resorted to compromise and many pagan customs and festivals were fortified with Christian significance.
Tallant said since Lupercalia refused to disappear it “was permitted existence in a modified form as a concession to the needs of the flesh and was placed roughly just before a period of fasting and penance, Lent, in the spring.”
While most sources agree Mardi Gras has its roots in this Roman celebration, carnival and festival historian Samuel Kinser says in his book, “Carnival, American Style” that Lupercalia and other Roman holidays commonly associated with Mardi Gras, such as festivals Bacchanalia and Saturnalia, have nothing to do with the origins of Mardi Gras.
Kinser said from the sixteenth century onward, Catholic and Protestant authorities told people that Lupercalia had its roots in “pagan materialism and sensuality, boisterous games and bodily self-indulgence” to help suppress the festival’s sinful chaos.