Bacchus and Mardi Gras

[stevekenson]

Anyone know any good reading and research material on the connections between Bacchus and Mardi Gras in New Orleans (presumably extending back to Carnival in Europe)? I’ve already worked through what Google, Wikipedia, and the Krewe of Bacchus website have to offer (which isn’t all that much).

Comments

[wudawasa.livejournal.com]

I wrote to my friend JoLynne, who did some research concerning Carnival about 15 years ago, and she replied:

I doubt there’s a direct link between Bacchus and Mardi Gras. I have done a little research into authentic pagan survivals that made it through the Renaissance era into modern Europe, and from what I can tell they are few and far between. I’m thinking any resemblance between bacchanals and Mardi Gras is not due to cause and effect.

You can take that however you like. I will say, though, that this woman is neither gullible nor overly skeptical. I tend to give her words a lot of weight.

[zoatebix.livejournal.com]

Russian literary critic and philosopher M.M. Bakhtin writes a lot about Carnival in Rabelais and His World. I don't think he compares Carnival to pre-Christian forms of revelry, but it's still a neat read. At least check out his wikipedia page.

[schlafmanko.livejournal.com]

Hi, I'm with the internet hive mind. This question piqued my curiosity because part of my dissertation deals with the use of religious imagery in Las Vegas tourism, and I'm always interested in comparative material. So last time I was in the library and needed a break, I looked into it. I'll be surprised if any of this is helpful to you, but I figured now that I know it, there's really no reason not to pass it on, other than feeling like a dork.

The following quotation is from Hennig Cohen, "The Terminology of Mardi Gras," American Speech Vol. 26, No. 2 (May 1951): 112. (via a pdf on JSTOR)

"The selection of names derived from classical mythology and literature by the older krewes exerted a strong influence upon dozens of subsequent carnival organizations. Thus in a compilation of the names of these groups, those derived from Greek and Latin sources form the largest single category. Another factor which seems to have reinforced the trend toward the use of names from classical sources was the themes of the early parades. In 1858 'Comus' presented a parade entitled 'Mythology.' It was followed by 'Homer's Iliad' in 1872 and 'The Metamorphoses of Ovid' in 1878. 'Rex' depicted 'The Gods of Greece' in 1878, 'Momus' gave 'Popular Myths' in 1881, and 'Proteus' presented 'The Aeneid' in 1884. It is difficult to explain why the classics rather than some other source provided names for carnival organizations and themes for parades, but it is not surprising that they did in a city which named streets for the nine Muses and has a suburb known as 'Elysian Fields.'

"The largest group of krewes with names of Greek origin are those named after individual mythological figures. Examples are Adonis, Apollo, Eros, Hera, Hermes, Iris, Nereus, and Prometheus. Another group was named after Grecian cities, races, and geographical areas. Examples include the Achaeans, Athenians, Corinthians, and Dorians. Krewes were also named after Orpheus and Eurydice, and Naiads, and the Argonauts. Only one personage from Greek history, Pericles, provided the name for a krewe. Among the figures from Latin mythology who provided names for krewes are Consus, Diana, Fortuna, Janus, Jupiter, and Venus.

"A second category of carnival clubs chose names of actual or apparent Arabic or Near Eastern origin. This choice can also be traced to influences in the early history of the krewes. The first appearance of 'Rex' was heralded by a series of 'edicts' and 'proclamations' colored by pseudo-Arabic terms and titles, and ostensibly emanating from Arabia. They caught the popular fancy, and the custom of issuing 'edicts' couched in simulated Arabic terms has persisted to the present day."

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Bacchus showed up in at least one of those parades, but I haven't found a list of scenes anywhere, since the New York Times didn't start carrying that information until the 1880s. I was surprised by how diverse the themes of the parades were then, though -- you get themes based on the Old Testament, the history of the world, Egyptian theology, Ivanhoe, the Ramayana, the rise and fall of the Aztecs, Chinese mythology, Irish history, and Proteus journeying through the solar system. Each of these themes would have a good fifteen or so floats illustrating it. Now I want to know more about how the themes were chosen and how spectators would've understood them.

The use of classical names here strikes me as a late-ish example of a broader trend in American culture. Leigh Eric Schmidt writes about how the rise of commercial culture in the nineteenth century contributed to the transformation of American holidays into safe, respectable, civic-minded and women-friendly versions of events that had previously been rowdy, masculine, and subversive in their popular forms. Mardi Gras was a hold-out of what had been a broader style of celebration, and I suspect that krewes would've used Classical names and themes in part because it let them frame drunken revelry in a respectable way.

[schlafmanko.livejournal.com]

According to J. Mark Souther's New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City (Louisiana State University Press, 2006) the Krewe of Bacchus was founded in 1968 by Owen Brennan Jr. and some of New Orleans' other newer civic leaders, who wanted to make the holiday more tourist-friendly and profitable by having a major parade the weekend before Mardi Gras. Although people outside of the old-line elites had founded the Hermes, Babylon, NOR, and Mid-City krewes in the thirties and forties, the elite krewes still held sway over the week before Fat Tuesday until Bacchus decided to intrude on their calendar space and traditional parade route. The krewe's subsequent popularity was also based in part on their non-elite stance, since they chose figures from popular culture to play Bacchus, and they let in businessmen from other cities and members of ethnic groups that old krewes wouldn't admit. All that sounds very Bacchus to me. And apparently, "even the choice of Bacchus as the krewe's name suggested its founders' sense of superseding old-line traditions, for in Greek mythology Bacchus was Comus's father," and Comus was one of the elite crews. (146, citing James Gill's Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans)

But that wasn't Bacchus' first incarnation as a krewe in New Orleans, because according to Souther, Owen Brennan, Sr. had a krewe with the same name that went defunct in the fifties when he died. They had a ball for tourists in 1950, but I don't know if they did anything else.