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By Root 1230 0

those of their grandparents, and the energy of traditionalism falls away. In this case, in the 1700s, Voltaire and the rest threw a big public fit, telling the churches and governments that people aren’t going to put up with this mono-maniacal brutality anymore. As the Enlightenment took hold, carnival disappeared as a major force in European lives. It is too simple to say that when the tension relaxed, the wildness relaxed, for there were new tensions, of course, and new wildness. But a certain level of brutality was no longer condoned in the public eye, and celebratory bliss was becoming more private, too. Gone was the time of publicly turning the world inside out and upside down.

At the center of both Greek festival and medieval carnival were reenactments, and in both cases these reenactments were the birth of theater in their respective millennia. What an amazing thing. And when theater arises, general-population reenactments and costuming wane. Maybe as a civilization takes on age it gives up its exuberance and sets it onstage so we can rest our tired bodies and be entertained.

Today we watch an unprecedented number of people dressed up in costume and pretending to be other people. There used to be a lot of occasions for the general population to get into costumes; to take one more example, Jewish communities used to go topsy-turvy at the holiday Purim, where you dress up as the handful of members of the Purim story, and all the girls are the natural beauty and Hebrew lobbyist, Queen Esther. But nowadays we do not dress up in costume very much at all. What does it mean for us that we have replaced being in costume with watching people in costume? What happens to the populace when this shift takes place?

Well, what happened to the Greeks? As Greek civilization aged, theater developed and a certain kind of generalized revelry lessened, and as a response the mystery religions arose, creating new kinds of in-club revelry. The wild Middle Ages also saw general revelry cede its energies to theater, and by the end of the 1500s people were writing plays that we have not stopped talking about since. All this puts our television and movie watching in a different light. Screen games and Web surfing are perhaps halfway between watching and doing. As interesting as this makes all the entertainment, it is even more interesting to consider what we are missing by no longer actually putting on costumes. We are missing a lot. The power of costume is astounding.

We can glimpse this power by watching any makeover show on television. Someone is summoned because, according to their friends, they dress poorly. Often they clearly have issues: they don’t like to be seen as sexual, or they walk around half naked and festooned with sexualized accessories. They wear very youthful clothes to telegraph to people that they are not part of the world of authority; they are unkempt to make sure no one depends too much upon them. We might guess that such a huge symptom would have to be addressed charily, through the emotions that created it, but, wonder of wonders, if you just force the person to put on more appropriate clothing, they look in the mirror and believe what they see. The twenty-eight-year-old who wore flip-flops to the office and carried a backpack as a bag cannot be verbally convinced that she is sabotaging her career, but the makeover people tear her down like an army recruit, and then put her in new clothes, cut her hair, get her cute shoes and a fabulous bag, hold her in front of a mirror, and compliment her until she starts twirling like a runway model. The whole therapy needn’t take more than a day or two. It seems to stick, too, because it wasn’t laziness or thriftiness; it was not being able to imagine themselves as a grown-up. Once they see it, they believe it. It can have an amazing consequence in people’s lives. If you dress like a pirate you will feel a bit like a pirate. One indication of how much we lost with the loss of occasions for costume is how many of us want to be actors. It also helps to account for the oddly high