MARDI GRAS GREW FROM CHRISTIAN, NOT PAGAN, ROOTS

"The Wisdom of Chief Slacabamorinico"

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Mardi Gras - that period of madness just prior to the austere period of Lent - had its American beginnings in Mobile. And while the term Mardi Gras is actually French for only Shrove or Fat Tuesday itself, the climatic day, Mobilians have come to loosely use it to refer to the entire period of frivolity and festivity. Although this quaint festival was brought to the shores of our country by the French in 1703, almost 300 years ago, this is a relatively recent occurrence.

According to Samuel Kinser, then professor at the University of Chicago, writing in the introduction to his book, Carnival American Style: Mardi Gras at New Orleans and Mobile notes "Carnival is a specifically Christian festival in its historical origins and it is specifically Western in its psychology."

He begins Chapter 1 which is entitled "What Is Carnival?" in this way:

"Carnival in America speech outside the Gulf Coast has no seasonal or Christian connotation. It refers to a traveling collection of amusements which include games of chance, sideshows, and thrilling rides. The word also carries the more general connotation of gaudy fun; we say that such-and-such an occasion was 'a regular carnival' in its extravaganza. Department stores and northern college campuses may advertise a 'winter carnival'; the city of Saint Paul, Minnesota, sponsors one in late January."

Unlike these modern usages of the word, Carnival along the Gulf Coast retains the old Latin ecclesiastical meaning which refers to pre-Lenten meat eating.

In my earlier writing, I, like the evolutionist who saw similarities in the bodies and make-up of various animals and drew an erroneous conclusion that one "evolved" from another, attempted to make a direct connection between ancient fertility rites and other pagan rituals and our modern day pre-Lenten Mardi Gras Carnivals ass celebrated in Mobile, New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities.

Further research and study of the existing material has convinced me I was wrong to make any such connections.

It wasn't until after 1140 that humanists and churchmen alike began associating Carnival customs with those of the ancient Bacchanalia and Saturnalia. This association, we have found, was a mistake - a grave mistake. Five centuries separate the last mention in antiquity of popular festivities that included customs similar to those of Carnival - the 494 A.D. Lupercalia - from the first medieval European mention of the word Carnelevare, literally "to lift up" or relieve from "flesh" or "meat", in 965 A.D. Performances of the Lupercalia are last noted in the late fifth century by Pope Gelasius. Other ancient pagan festivals, thought by some, and previously by me, to be direct ancestors of Carnival are last documented even earlier.

A Roman text written around 1140 documents public killings of steers and other animals before the Pope and other Roman notables after a parade through the city. To date, this is the earliest document reporting festive customs associated with the custom of a meatless Lent.

Thus the Roman and other European Carnivals, all of which begin to be reported with frequency only in the fourteenth century, have no documental connection with ancient pagan festivities.

Carnival developed initial as a reaction to the church's rules concerning Lent. Along with the prohibition of meat the church prohibited marriage during Lent and also discouraged sexual intercourse. Thus it became easy enough for 15th and 16th century church reformers to associate with pagan materialism and sensuality, although erroneously, the boisterous games and bodily self-indulgence that developed in these early Carnivals. From the 16th century forward city and state authorities in both Catholic and Protestant areas sometimes found it politically useful to support the notion of pagan origins in their efforts to suppress the festivals disorderliness as the Pharisees attempted to associate evil influences as working many of Christ's miracles. (Matt: 9:34; Luke 9:15) ⁴

Perhaps because of these festivals, the word Carnival broadened its meaning to acquire the current American sense of gaudy and somewhat disreputable pleasure. This modern meaning developed in Protestant England and passed easily into American semantics.

The term Carnival along the Gulf Coast while referring almost exclusively to the pre-Lenten event has been almost entirely replaced in popular usage by the French term Mardi Gras - literally "Fat Tuesday" or "Tuesday of the Fatted Calf".

Even though literally the word Mardi Gras means only the final day before Lent, the Gulf Coast's two to three week Carnival period is usually referred to as Mardi Gras. We, too, shall use this term to refer to the festival being examined.

As previously noted the Bacchanalia, Saturnalia, Lupercalia and others, no mater how frequently they may be involved in themes of or within Mardi Gras parades and balls, or in the many newspaper explanations of the festival's origins, I have come to the same conclusion as has Samuel Kinser, that they have nothing to do with the historical origin of Mardi Gras of with the origins of its origin in European Carnivals. To sat the record straight it is therefore important to disentangle Mardi Gras as celebrated along the Gulf Coast and other pre-Lenten Mardi Gras Carnival origins from its pre-Christian analogues.

Mardi Gras's cradle was the Christian feudal Middle Ages between 1000 and 1300. Its greatest development took place in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. It is from the 15th and 16th centuries many of the popular symbols come which are used by the "societies" along the gulf Coast. It was during this time that Renaissance humanists with their enthusiasm for classical culture were active in promoting the supposed, although as we have pointed out erroneous, connection of Carnival with Greek Bacchanals and Roman Saturnalia. thus more than half of the "krewes" in New Orleans have names of figures from Greek, Roman and Egyptian mythology, partly due to local tradition as the first societies in that city in the 1850s - 1870s named themselves so, but also due to the humanist influence of the aforementioned period. Mobile, on the other hand, has far fewer "mystic societies" so named, many of its symbols and names coming from local experiences or from the Middle Ages period itself, i.e. "Folly", cotton bales, cowbells, convict suits, Ft. Conde, etc.

Renaissance monarchs and their countries carried out Carnival in glittering style, thus New Orleans' Rex looks more like Henry VIII than Richard the Lionhearted or a twentieth -century king. Mobile's Felix and Elexis formerly also were similarly robed, but in more recent decades have created royal attire from various periods of history or to feature personal family heritages.

For example King Elexis I in 1996, Joseph Hollaway's robes and train featured a variety of Christian symbols as his grandfather was a member of the clergy. A recent Felix III was robed as a Scottish monarch to highlight his Scot background.

Humanism and naturalism enriched the meanings of pre-Lenten Carnivals as a special realm of folly without submerging its Christian character. From the 16th century Carnival would be rationalized as an expression of the occasional need for carefree silliness rather than seen only as a concession to sinful flesh. It is this Renaissance ethos of folly which has inspired Gulf Coast Mardi Gras more than medieval feast and famine.

The first models for Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Mobile was the Parisian Carnival during the late 18th and first half of the 19th century. Lasting 7 days, it consisted of private masked balls, banquets as well as the famous ball at the Paris Opera. Artisans' gilds, most prominently that of the butchers, marched in procession. The butchers parade of a fax ox, or boeuf gras, took place almost uninterrupted from the 1730s to 1870 except fro the ten years at the height of the French Revolution, 1790-1800. The fame and popularity of the Parisian Carnival, however, came as a result of the public masked balls. Crowds filled the streets the final four days of Carnival and abundant street masking was often performed by informally organized groups.

Carnivals were also held in many cities across Spain. The Fastnachtsspiel was given in Germany on Shrove Tuesday.

Mobile was founded in 1702 at Twenty-Seven Mile Bluff by Jean Baptiste Le Moyne Sieur de Bienville and the very next year, 1703, the tiny settlement of Fort Louis de la Mobile celebrated the very first Mardi Gras in the New World. When flooding at the original site up river caused the city to move to its present site at the mouth of the river in 1711, the Boeuf Gras Society was formed and a procession was staged each Fat Tuesday. Lead by a huge bull's head pushed alone on wheels by 16 men, the procession was reminiscent of those of the Butcher's Gild in Paris. The Boeuf Gras procession on Mardi Gras was to continue until 1861 when it ceased due to the outbreak of the War Between the States - never to be seen again.

The Spanish took rule of Mobile in 1780 and in 1793 the Spanish Mystic Society, attired in costumes of white and pushing a cart on which a statue of the Blessed Virgin sat, began its torch-lit procession on Twelfth Night.

The form of Mardi Gras celebrated in the city today, with its "mystic" societies, came about as the result of the 1830 New Year's Eve antics of one Michael Krafft, a one-eyed cotton broker from Pennsylvania. Leaving the Old Southern Hotel with some of his friends after ringing in the New Year, this merry band came upon Partridge's Hardware Store, scooped up hoes, rakes, cowbells, and gongs and proceeded to wander the streets making a fantastic amount of noise. Arriving at the home of the Mayor, they were invited in for refreshments. Their "Escapade" was met with such success, after a few years as the "Midnight Revelers", elected to call themselves the "Cowbellion de Rakin Society" after the instruments of their first revel. In 1840, they staged the very first display of its kind in the United States when they rolled forth a parade with a title and subject. Six horse drawn flats (floats) carried out the theme, "Heathen Gods and Goddesses".

The "Cows" no longer exists, although the name has been honored by a relatively new organization, the "Resurrected Cowbellion de Rakin Society" formed in 1989. The legacy of the original Cowbellions continues to live within that society and through the many mystic societies active in the city today. The "granddaddy" of all these "mystics" is the "Strikers Independent Society", formed in 1841. The Strikers is the oldest mystic society in the world and, insofar as organizations of any kind are concerned, is surpassed age-wise in this country only by the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Boston, the St. Cecilia Society of Charleston, Fayetteville (North Carolina) Independent Light Infantry and perhaps one other.

All festivities ceased with the outbreak of War in 1861. Following the end of the conflict fate chose one Joseph Stillwell Cain or old Joe Cain, the town clerk, to relight the flame of festivities in the city. Attired as Slacabamorinico, Chief of the Chickasaws from Wragg Swamp, on Shrove Tuesday of 1866, Cain drove through the Union occupied city in a decorated charcoal wagon, accompanied by six fellow veterans. This singular act, one of hidden defiance for the Chickasaws had never surrendered, picked the citizens of Mobile up from the depths of defeat and revived their natural exuberance and spirit, thus insuring Mobile's Mardi Gras for all future generations. Cain's Lost Cause Minstrels continued to parade each Mardi Gras until 1879. Today, the Joe Cain Procession "people's parade" which honors the revelry reviver on the Sunday prior to Mardi Gras is the largest of the season.

Wayne Dean, Sr.