• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1179 0

as being a survival of the ancient women’s festivals and the later mystery religions. It was not true. At least, it was not true in the way they thought it was; the carnivals that grew up in the Middle Ages were not a continuation of ancient rites. A breach of more than half a millennium separated them; for centuries upon centuries, one was already destroyed and the other had not come into being. Yet once this homegrown European holiday of abandon got under way, it became a new site for the year-round pagan rituals that had happily continued through the years, despite the prohibitions of the bishops. The only way the church ever got control of much ancient magic was by co-opting it into Christianity, and that is part of the energy of carnival. The rites that survived were, not surprisingly, about fertility: grain and babies. Demeter stuff. But, again, carnival was not a continuation of ancient rites; these just started to be carried out on Europe’s festival of abandon.

By this time, theater included jokes about the central texts of the religion—the Nicene Creed, the Hail Mary, and the Our Father. There were parodies of the liturgy, and many have survived: the “Liturgy of the Drunkards,” “Liturgy of the Gamblers,” “Money Liturgy”; and parodies of last testaments: “The Pig’s Will” and “The Will of the Ass.” There was much tolerance for mixing comedy and fable with Biblical texts. People believed there had been a Pope Joan. As the story went, a smart girl in boy’s clothing had worked her way up the Church hierarchy and was eventually elected pope, Pope John, all by her own merits. One day while traveling with her entourage, Pope John had to get down out of her carriage and give birth. Everyone was pretty shocked and angry. How angry? One version of the story is that they tied her legs with rope and dragged her around while stoning her to death. But in another version she went off to live in a convent and repent her sins, while her son grew up and became a bishop! She was never reverentially called Pope Joan, but got the name after she was defrocked. Today most historians say none of it ever happened, but it was a common motif of the period. A German play, Frau Jutten (1480), by a cleric named Theoderich Schernberg, tells of her as “an ambitious woman,” and capable. Schernberg’s Pope Joan submits to a rigorous penance and is ultimately saved through Mary’s intercession. Acting out such fantastic tales, or at least seeing them, was expected of a good Christian, notwithstanding that they used the papacy for a melodrama and treated the mother of God as a soap-opera heroine.

That all changed with modernity. In the century beginning in 1500, a Roman Catholic split established Protestantism. With the arrival of Protestantism, Catholic religious theater suddenly looked more like tomfoolery than religion. The Protestants criticized and rejected these fanciful plays, and then some Catholics started to worry about them, too. In 1548 the Parliament of Paris stepped in and banned the Passion plays. It was similar all over Europe. The plays stopped except carnival, where they expanded. As the new mood squeezed the rest of life, carnival got crazier. Carnival was not just a response to change. It was also a response to the repression that had followed in the wake of change. It was a hard time to live. You did not have to be terribly outspoken or extreme to find yourself in trouble and waiting to be tortured, burned alive, or beheaded. This time of change—let’s say 1500 to 1700—saw the height of witch burning and the rise of a shockingly severe Inquisition. These barbarities took place in both Catholic and Protestant lands. Put in other words, the Middle Ages themselves were not as repressive and barbaric as was the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity (a period we call early modern). The same period hosted the most riotous carnival. The carnivals had mock courts and mock trials, mock torture and mock executions. In Spain they put pigs on trial and then put them through an “ordeal” and execution. An ordeal was the torture generally