The church moved decisively, confining festivities to Sundays, whereupon, "in a classic catch-22", as Ehrenreich says, it prohibited all recreations and sports on the Sabbath.Ĭapitalism and its handmaiden, Puritanism, were on the rise. Carnival, in Goethe's words, was "a festival that is not really given to the people, but one that the people give themselves". Great festivities were planned, dreamed of, reminisced about: costumes were made, floats built, routines rehearsed. Both carnival and the Feast of Fools, in which social roles were reversed and wild behaviour briefly allowed free rein, had initially been endorsed by church and state as being useful safety valves the endorsement was soon enough rescinded, but not before the people had taken over. It became the great creative outlet of the people. Ehrenreich traces the sudden explosion of carnivals and popular festivals in the 15th century to the suppression in the churches of the more exuberant forms of worship, and makes a very striking point: the separation of the divine connection from carnival made it a merely hedonistic exercise, essentially devoid of meaning.
The church dissociated itself from its own former joyous demeanour, offering instead ritual, solemnity, high aesthetics. Dance manias erupted at various points in the 13th and 14th centuries and dance itself was deemed the devil's work. Free expression was discouraged pews were installed to compel worshippers to control themselves, and their possessed brethren were duly evicted on to the streets. Ehrenreich chronicles the early church's systematic attempts to remove the Dionysian elements from their services - dancing, singing, speaking in tongues, the tossing of freely flowing hair. Priests and monarchs have ever been the foes of genuine popular celebrations. The revellers' gods - Dionysos, Krishna and Pau - especially attracted women and working people to them their joyful rituals were essentially demotic, and inevitably drew down on themselves the disapproval of the clerical and civic establishment. The ecstatic emotion engendered was perceived by its participants as a direct experience of god, unmediated by priests or interpreters. But this defensive activity quickly proved to have a striking side-effect: the exhilaration of the group moving and singing as one produced an experience of collective joy that was both pleasurable and therapeutic and different in kind from verbal communication. No one quite knows how those first recorded festive processions, so vividly recorded on pottery and in cave drawings, came about, though it has been plausibly surmised that they may have been designed to scare marauding animals.
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