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In ancient Rome, there were more slaves than slave-owners and more paupers than patricians. One of the techniques used to distract the wretched souls at the bottom of Roman society and keep them from doing the math and overturning the structure was the Feast of Saturn. It was a government-sponsored festival that took place in the cities and was calculated to release the tensions between the "rich and famous" and "the never-to-be-rich and famous."

View Wines to Encourage Pious Devotion

Cities are artificial, gridlike and designed to be structured and orderly. Many people living in them feel they require regular infusions of new life. Mythically speaking, that new life can only come from outside the city, from "Out There." The Feast of Saturn was essentially a strategy for letting the Wild Otherness into the city.

It did this by stressing Nature (the opposite of the paved city), vegetation, animals and the past. The god of the procession was Bacchus, the god of new life, rising sap, spring, wine and ecstasy. Had it been around, he would have been the god of Viagra. Bacchus was the god of the theater; he encouraged his followers to dress up and pretend they were somebody else. He could manifest himself as androgynous and promoted cross-dressing. He was the god of masks.

Bacchus was always a foreigner -- he came from Out There, with his wildness and sexual license. He was experienced as an invasion of the psyche. He represented the outside both physically and mentally, as in being "outside yourself" in the way an intoxicated person might be. He invaded the city with disorder; he was chaos personified. He disrupted the city and made its residents drop their normal activities to attend to him, drink with him, dance with him, make love with him.

When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Feast of Saturn was converted into Carnival, the last opportunity to live it up before the 40 days of Lent, the most serious period of fasting and abstinence in the church's calendar. Next week dozens of carnivals will take place in Catholic communities throughout the world.

In its true form Carnival is a feast that sets out to invert the normal reality of life. It is always grossly indecent and openly obsessed with sex. It demands excess of all kinds: overeating, overdrinking, noise, expense, size and sexual outrageousness. It displays the inventiveness of ordinary citizens, especially people who have little chance to be creative in their everyday lives. It satirizes famous people, symbols and events. Look carefully at a Carnival and you will see the limitations that chafe at people.

Next page | Mardi Gras madness in New Orleans