Till there was only beer...

Having been banished from the churches between 400AD and the middle ages, 'rituals' became 'festivities' and went to the streets. From the 17th century onwards, then, festivities were banished from the streets.

"In the long-term history from the 17th to the 20th century ... there were literally thousands of acts of legislation introduced which attempted to eliminate carnival and popular festivity from European life." (9)

"A Buckinghamshire resident described the emptying of the commons after the suppression of Sunday recreations as a depressing loss. While formerly the common 'presented a lively and pleasing aspect, dotted with parties of cheerful lookers-on,' it was now 'left lonely and empty of loungers,' leaving the men and boys with nothing to do but hang out in the pubs and drink.(11)"

Quoted in Dancing in the Streets, Barbara Ehrenreich, p99-100

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Good old fashioned fun

"People once danced, drank, feasted, and performed dramas and burlesques within their churches; now [in the middle ages] they did so outside those churches in the festivities that still clung to, and surrounded, each holy day...

"[This] created a world of regularly scheduled festivity that is almost beyond our imagining today. The Church calendar featured dozens of holy days - including Epiphany, Ascension, Pentecost, and Corpus Christi, as well as the more familiar Easter and Christmas - on which all work was forbidden, and on most of which various celebration was tolerated. In fifteenth century France, for example, one out of every four days of the year was an official holiday of some sort, usually dedicated to a mix of religious ceremonies and more or less unsanctioned carryings-on. ... Despite the reputation of what are commonly called "the Middle Ages" as a time of misery and fear, the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century can be seen - at least in comparison to the puritanical times that followed - as one long outdoor party, punctuated by bouts of hard labour.

"... Great passion and energy went into the planning of festivities, with special organizations, like the French confraternities of young men, dedicated entirely to preparations year-round." Dancing in the Streets, p91-4

pic from turningwheel

Dionysus

"Lillian Lawler, writing in the 1960s, leaves no doubt that ecstatic dancing was indigenous to the mainstream Greek tradition... Within the ancient Western world, many deities served as the objects of ecstatic worship... But there was one Greek god for whom ecstatic worship was not simply an option; it was a requirement. To ignore his call was to risk a fate worse than death or even physical torture; those who resisted him would be driven mad and forced to destroy their own children. This god, source of both ecstasy and terror, was Dionysus or, as he was known to the Romans, Bacchus.

"His mundane jurisdiction covered vinyards and wine, but his more spiritual responsibility was to preside over the orgeia (literally, rites performed in the forest at night, from which we derive the word orgy), where his devotees danced themselves into a state of trance.

"The fact that the Greeks felt the need for such a deity tells us something about the importance of ecstatic experience in their world; just as their pantheon included gods for love, for war, for agriculture, metalworking, and hunting, they needed a god to give the experience of ecstasy a human form and face."

- Dancing in the Streets, Barbara Ehrenreich p 32-33

The Maenads

"The most notorious feminine form of Dionysian worship, the oreibaia, or winter dance, looks to modern eyes like a crude pantomime of feminist revolt. In mythical accounts, women "called by the god to participate drop their spinning and abandon their children to run outdoors and into the mountains, where they dress in fawn skins and engage in a 'frenzied dance.' These maenads, as Dionysus's female cult members were called, run through the woods calling out the name of the god, or uttering the characteristic bacchic cry 'euoi' they toss their hair and brandish their thyrsos - sticks to which pinecones have been attached. Finally, they achieve a state of mind the Greeks called enthousiasmos - literally, having the god within oneself - or what many cultures in our own time would call a "possession trance." These were not solely mythical events; in some times and places, the oreibasia was officially condoned and scheduled for every other year, in the dead of winter. Pausanias, who wrote in the second century CE, tells of a party of maenads who reached the eight-thousand foot summit of Mt Parnassus - an impressive athletic achievement, especially if performed in the winter - and Plutarch wrote of an occasion when a group of female worshippers were cut off by a snowstorm and had to be rescued."

- Dancing the streets, p34-5

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Dance Mania

"The most flamboyant form of what might be called 'ecstatic dissent'," writes Barbara, "was the dance manias that rocked parts of northern Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and Italy a century later. The first outbreak sounds like another cautionary tale about the perils of dancing: in Utrecht in the summer of 1278, two hundred people started dancing on the bridge over the Mosel and would not stop until it collapsed, at which point all the dancers drowned. A hundred years later, in the wake of the Black Death, a much larger outbreak of dance mania again struck Germany and spilled out into Belgium: "Peasants left their plows, mechanics their workshops, house-wives their domestic duties, to join the wild revels." Arriving in Aix-la-Chapelle (now the German town of Aachen), "they formed circles hand in hand, and appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the by-standers, for hours together in wild delirium, until they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion."(13) . We have, unfortunately, no testimonies from the dancers themselves, but contemporary observers saw them in a condition ethnographers would now describe as a possession trance.


"While dancing they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to external impressions [with the exception, one might guess, of the music they danced to] .... but were haunted by visions, their fancies conjuring up spirits whose names they shrieked out... Others, during the paroxysm, saw the heavens open and the Saviour enthroned with the Virgin Mary."(14)

"Hence the Church authorities' worry that the "manias" represented a new form or heresy: Nothing is more threatening to a hierarchical religion than the possibility of ordinary laypeople finding their own way into the presence of the gods."

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See also Wikipedia. I particularly like the descriptions of Strasbourg's Dancing Plague of 1518, where local authorities hired musicians to play alongside the dancers and keep them dancing until the dance was danced out of them. The less fun parts are the reports of dancers dancing themselves to exhaustion and death.

In a similar vein, there are some reports of epidemics of laughter.

After the Death of Carnival and Merrie England: An Epidemic of Melancholy

“Beginning in England in the late seventeenth century, the European world was stricken by what looks, in today's terms, like an epidemic of depression,” writes Barbara.

“In 1733 Dr. George Cheyne lamented 'the late frequency and daily increase of wanton and uncommon self-murders, produced mostly by this distemper,' and speculated that the English climate, combined with sedentary lifestyles and urbanization, 'have brought forth a class of distemper with atrocious and frightful symptoms, scarce known to our ancestors, and never rising to such fatal heights, and afflicting such numbers in any known nation.' … A hundred years later, little had changed: '[Nervous complaints] prevail at the present day', claimed a contemporary, 'to an extent unknown at any former period, or in any other nation.'” p129-130.

“The disease grew increasingly prevalent over the course of the twentieth century, when relatively sound statistics first became available, and this increase cannot be accounted for by a greater willingness on the part of physicians and patients to report it. Rates of schizophrenia, panic disorders, and phobias did not rise at the same time, for example, as they would be expected to if only changes in the reporting of mental illness were at work.” p131.

Barbara cannot ignore the overlapping timing of the suggested beginning of the epidemic of depression, and the end of widespread festivities in Britain, over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She poses the question:

“Could this apparent decline in the ability to experience pleasure be in any way connected with the decline in opportunities for pleasure, such as carnival and other traditional festivities?” p132

The rest of the chapter is a fascinating exploration of possible answers to this question, concluding:

 “There is no evidence, though, of an innate human need for communal pleasure, which, if thwarted, leads to depression or other mental diseases. Obviously, millions of people forgo such pleasures without developing clinically recognised disorders...” p148

 “There is, however, an abundance of evidence that communal pleasures – ranging from simple festivities to ecstatic rituals – have served, in a variety of cultures, as a way of alleviating and even curing depression.” p150

“The immense tragedy for Europeans, I have argued, and most acutely for the northern Protestants among them, was that the same social forces that disposed them to depression also swept away a traditional cure. They could congratulate themselves for brilliant achievements in the areas of science, exploration, and industry, and even convince themselves that they had not, like Faust, had to sell their souls to the devil in exchange for these accomplishments. But with the suppression of festivities that acommpanied modern european “progress,” they had done something perhaps far more damaging: they had completed the demonisation of Dionysus begun by Christians centuries ago, and thereby rejected one of the most ancient sources of help – the mind preserving, lifesaving techniques of ecstasy.” 

- Dancing in the streets, p152-3

The killing of carnival

Earlier I posted about the creation of Carnival.

Now, more from Queen Barbara

“At some point, in town after town throughout the northern Christian world, the music stops. Carnival costumes are put away or sold; dramas that once engaged a town's entire population are canceled; festive rituals are forgotten or preserved only in tame and truncated form. The ecstatic possibility, which had first been driven from the sacred precincts of the church, was now harried from the streets and public squares."

“The suppression of traditional festivities, occurring largely in the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, took many forms. Sometimes it came swiftly and absolutely, when, for example, a town council suddenly broke with tradition by refusing to grant a permit for the celebrations or a church denied the use of its churchyard. Or the change might come slowly, with authorities first limiting festivities to Sundays, then, in a classic catch-22, prohibiting all recreations and sports on the Sabbath. In other places the festivities were attacked in a piecemeal fashion: some German towns banned masking in the late fifteenth century; in mid sixteenth-century Bearn, the queen issued ordinances outlawing singing and feasting. Dancing, masking, revelling in the streets – the ingredients of carnival, or festivities in general, could be outlawed one by one.

"The wave of repression.. extended from Scotland south to parts of Italy and eastwards to Russia and Ukraine, [targeted] almost every opportunity for revelry and play.” (p97-8)

“The explanation offered by Max Weber in the late nineteenth century and richly expanded on by the historians E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill in the late twentieth is that the repression of festivities was, in a sense, a by-product of the emergence of capitalism. The middle classes had to learn to calculate, save, and 'defer gratification'; the lower classes had to be transformed into a disciplined, factory-ready, working class – meaning far fewer holidays and the new necessity of showing up for work sober and on time, six days a week. Peasants had worked hard too, of course, but in seasonally determined bursts; the new industrialism required ceaseless labour, all year round.” p100

Was this changed forced upon people, or were they compliant?

A mixture of both, Barbara suggests. “Protestantism – especially in its ascetic, Calvinist form – played a major role in convincing large numbers of people not only that unremitting, disciplined labour was good for their souls, but that festivities were positively sinful, along with mere idleness... Protestantism, serving as the ideological handmaiden of the new capitalism, “descended like a frost on the life of 'Merrie old England'” as Weber put it, destroying in its icy grip the usual Christmas festivites, the maypole, the games, and all traditional forms of group pleasure.” (p101)

There was more.

As tensions rose between different wealth groups, festivities where all came together became the cooking pot for that friction, which increasingly boiled over into violence.

Until the 15th century, knights and noblemen and women revelled, according to Barbara, along with the peasants. By the turn of the 16th Century, retreat behind masks became retreat altogether and the establishment of totally separate festivities.

Upper class festivities started out as raucous as the community revelries, but gradually became restrained and solemn so that by the late 18th century, according to historian Robert Darnton, the poor and working class "had all the fun" while the elite could only “parade about solemnly in processions generales.” (quoted by Barbara, p113).

"Has our culture lost something?" asks Stuart Brown.

Yes, I think so. But fear not! The Fun Fed is here! :)

And Hide and Seek. And Come out and Play. And even, though slightly different, the
Celebration Activists. And the Nomadic Academy of Fools. And everything in this blog and much, much more besides.

Something in our culture is twisting and turning. New (old) things are being born again.

The Origin of Carnival (circus priests 2)

This is a wonderful book.

Ehrenreich argues that the Christian church created carnival in the late middle ages by kicking ecstatic and wild dancing, singing, games and feasting out of Church. Where were they to go, then, but to the streets?

"In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Catholic leaders finally purged the churches of unruly and ecstatic behaviour. ... In its battle with the ecstatic strain within Christianity, the Church, no doubt inadvertently, created carnival." p77-8

She says that prior to the arrival of Christianity, ecstatic ritual involving entire communities was more common. The first third of the book is a fascinating delve into the histories of this across ancient Greece, Rome and Northern Europe.

For about the first 400 years of Christianity, planted as it was on a bed formerly home to pagan folk religions, the Church encorporated pagan dancing, singing and ecstatic rituals into it's own rituals.

As Christianity formalised as a religion, that became problematic. It was disruptive for a start: "when Church authorities in Wells, in England, banned dances and games from their Cathedral in 1338, they cited the damage to church property..." (p84)

But it was deeper than that. 

"The Church was determined to maintain its monopoly over human access to the divine. If religious dancing became ecstatic dancing - and the stories of dancers being "possessed" by the devil suggested that it sometimes may have - then ordinary people might get the idea that they could approach the deity on their own (as did, for example, the ancient worshippers of Dionysus) without the mediation of Catholic officialdom. Certainly the Church has a long history of suppressing enthusiasm, in the ancient Greek sense of being filled with, or possessed by, the deity. " (p84)

"The gradual expulsion of dancing, sports, drama and comedy from the churches created a world of regularly scheduled festivity that is almost beyond our imagining today."


But this was perhaps the beginning of our culture's separation of spirituality from our entertainment.

"The result of the Church's distancing itself from the festivities that marked its own holidays was a certain "secularization" of communal pleasure."

"Inevitably, something was lost in the transition from ecstatic ritual to secularized festivities - something we might call meaning or transcendent insight. In ancient Dionysian forms of workshop the moment of maximum "madness" and revelry was also the sacred climax of the rite, at which the individual achieved communion with the divinity... Medieval Christianity, in contrast, offered "communion" in the form of a morsel of bread and sip of wine soberly consumed at the altar - and usually saw only devilry in the festivities that followed.

"...this relative secularisation may help account for the uglier side of European carnival tradition. Without a built-in religious climax to the celebrations - the achievement, for example, of a trance-like state of union with the divinity - they readily spilled over into brawling and insensate drunkenness." p93

...

In the middle of the fourth century, Basileios, the bishop of Caesarea, is reported to have said this:

"Casting aside the yoke of service under Christ and the veil of virtue from their heads, despising God and His Angles, they [the women] shamelessly attract the attention of every man. With unkempt hair, clothed in bodices and hopping about, they dance with lustful eyes and loud laughter; as if seized by a kind of frenzy they excite the lust of the youths. They execute ring dances in the churches of the Martyrs and at their graves ... With harlots' songs they pollute the air and sully the degraded earth with their feet in shameful postures." (quoted on p73)

Around the same time, Gregory of Nazianzus pleaded:

"Let us sing hymns instead of striking drums, have psalms instead of frivolous music and song ... modesty instead of laughter, wise contemplation instead of intoxication, seriousness instead of delirium. But even if you wish to dance in devotion at this happy cermony and festival, then dance, but not the shameless dance of the daughter of Herod." (quoted on p74)

For it is the Devil who plays - and resembles none more than Dionysus, "who, like his manifestation as Pan, was sometimes portrayed with horns and tail, and his companion satyrs."

"Like the Satyr, the Devil is a rakishly handsome man with at least one cloven hoof, a long tail, horns or goat's ears. Both are master musicians - the satyr plays the lyre or pipes, the Devil the violin. Both scamper in dance-like movements of the goat, performing caprioles... The Devil... performed wild antics, pantomimes and dances akin to those enacted by the chorus in the Greek satyr play. The dramatic effect was one and the same." - Steven Lonsdale quoted on p81.