Mardi Gras in New Orleans has deep roots in pagan and Christian cultures. In the Christian calendar, the Mardi Gras season begins on Epiphany or 12th Night (12 days after Christmas) and ends at midnight when Ash Wednesday begins. Mardi Gras is a last hurrah before the Christian Lenten Season begins. For many it is a time for excess, for indulging in rich foods, drinking, dancing, costuming and releasing inhibitions.
Mardi Gras falls close to the ancient Gaelic festival of Imbolc, also known as Brigid’s Day, marking the midpoint between the Equinox and Summer Solstice. Numerous other cultures have for millennia celebrated rites of spring and pre-spring, like the Greco-Roman Dionysian and Bacchanalian rites. The celebrations occurred around March 16 and 17, a pre-spring time of year.
Many of these festivals occur just prior to the full onset and bloom of true Spring. I suggest that the timing of Mardi Gras in the cycle of seasons is significant.
If you would, take a little journey of the imagination with me and consider the following speculation on the Earth’s energetics as they relate to Mardi Gras and costuming.
Mardi Gras comes specifically in the time of pre-Spring in the Northern Hemisphere. Could it be that there’s a psychic build-up from inside the Earth of pressurized energy, color and life force that seeks expression?
I imagine the Earth letting out a big exhale filled with shining, spicy, intelligent life energies that have been alchemically cooked and seasoned in the Earth’s interior all during the he prior year.
When the Earth’s invisible pressure valves open, out stream ethers filled with active ingredients that flow into and through the collective unconscious. These bright energies from the belly of the Earth may then move through the human psyche and be given form by some as costume.
There’s an exchange. People give flesh and bone embodiment to the inchoate energies of the Earth. These alchemically cooked energies give us connection to the realm of the archetypes, to something universal.
As described by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, archetypes are images, characters or themes from the collective unconscious that have universal meanings. They may show up in dreams, literature, art, religion or, I suggest, through costume and masking. I picture archetypes as emerging from this hearty soup and attaching to particular persons, through whom they can embody.
You will see archetypes, old and new, moving among the crowds on Mardi Gras day. They may carry ancestral energies. They may host in new paradigms or revisit old ones.
One may be ensnared by an archetype; it may pick you as its’ best vehicle for a day of erotic physicality while holding you in its thrall. Or one may choose a particular archetypal character and personify that character for a day. The exchange often proves fruitful and even transformative.
At Mardi Gras one sees all manner of personifications. There are processions of glittering nature spirits, queens, kings, jesters, and the elements. Angels, demons, shadow aspects, role reversals and the spectrum of gender expressions, all show up for this rite of pre-spring. Groups may mask together with a common theme.
To witness a tribe of black masking Mardi Gras Indians is to be transported into a realm of intense and powerful beauty. Their magnificent intricately hand-beaded and feathered suits inspire awe and reverence. Masking like this taps sacred sources and functions to preserve a tradition, a culture central to the soul of New Orleans.
Surely the ancestors draw near in celebration and support.
Ash Wednesday invariably comes around, a sad loss for some while it’s a relief for others. Costumes are put away. Do the archetypes slip away, returning to their sources to be reheated in the Earth’s cauldron?
After Mardi Gras one again becomes a unique yet ordinary human. And yet… the cool breath of the Mystery lingers on one’s skin. The bones and blood, the cells and the soul remember. Traces of the archetypes echo in the neurons long after Mardi Gras day has passed.
The costume that was more than a costume gets folded up and put away or recycled. Now with the pre-Spring rites completed, Nature begins to bloom in earnest as Earth’s true Spring comes around.