The Pagan Origins of Carnival – Essay by Pastor Dale Morgan

This essay is so good, I just had to share it.

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From Rio to Berlin, from Turin to Trinidad, from Cologne to New Orleans, crowds filled the city streets in the annual bacchanal that precedes the Catholic holiday known as Ash Wednesday. Increasingly, these celebrations are being taken on by the British and American people as annual celebrations in a vein once foreign to the English-speaking peoples.

What does all this annual expression of unbridled hedonism have to do with the practice of pure religion?

Well, to understand that, we need to go back in history to the beginning of religion as recorded in both secular and biblical history.

The common view is that Carnival, or Mardi Gras, is, at its origin, a Christian festival that precedes the season of Lent, itself also assumed to be of Christian origin. Carnival traditionally has been seen as the last opportunity to let off steam and indulge the flesh before the denial that is supposed to accompany Lent, the 40-day period that precedes Easter, another annual festival that is assumed to have Christian origins.

But what are the facts?

We assume so much as we grow up, acculturated into an already established society that educates us into the common view of the day. Too often we accept the customs and practices of our parents—and their parents, as well as the generations that preceded them—without question. Yet honest seekers of truth will be led at some point to question the basis of society’s beliefs.

Take Carnival for instance. Its etymology suggests two sources. One suggests carne vale, from the Latin “farewell meat,” as the source. This would appear to be quite a legitimate meaning of the term, given that the onset of Carnival signals the last debauch prior to the fasting at Lent. However, there is another more ancient derivation for Carnival suggested in some sources, the Latin carnous navilus, being a term describing the naval vessel that bore the Teutonic god of the North from his northern home southward to join in the annual pagan winter festivities.

Mardi Gras, synonymous with the Carnival preceding Lent, translated from the French, literally means “fat Tuesday.” This is the final day prior to Ash Wednesday on the Roman Catholic calendar (Shrove Tuesday on the Anglican calendar), the Tuesday before Lent begins. Lent is a tradition in the Roman, Anglican and Orthodox versions of the Christian religion.

Ancient history teaches us that this religion began at Babylon, developed in Egypt, and passed its traditions down to the Greeks and Romans. These civilizations had one thing in common. The highlights of the year on the religious calendar tended to revolve around the winter, signifying the cessation of agrarian productivity and the anticipation of spring, celebrating the renewal of fertility. The pagans created annual rites and festivals around these seasons. Rome adopted and promoted the most widely practiced of these pagan festivals and spread their practice throughout its empire under its own names. Thus the celebrations around the winter solstice became the Saturnalia and Brumalia festivals of winter, celebrated in December. The pre-spring festivals at the onset of the final lean month of winter led into the spring festival of Ishtar in Babylon, or Osiris in Egypt, signaling new birth. In between was the “love-fest” of Lupercalia.

When the Roman Catholic Church began to spread its influence throughout the world, it found that, wherever it went, the natives hung on tenaciously to these annual pagan festivals. So the church simply compromised. Rather than force Catholic dogma on the local populations, it simply “Christianised” the pagan festivals enjoyed by the masses. Thus Saturnalia and Brumalia became Christmas, merging with the Catholic teaching of the nativity. The spring festivals, retaining the name “Easter” after the pagan fertility goddess Ishtar, merged with the Roman church’s interpretation of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In between was Carnival, leading into Mardi Gras, out of which the Vatican created the season of Lent, leading to Easter, by imposing its own interpretation of Christ’s 40-days’ total fast in the wilderness by setting a time for the denial of meat in the 40 days leading up to its Easter celebration. In between Carnival and Easter, Lupercalia became catholicised into St. Valentine’s Day.

Following the Protestant Reformation, the various Protestant denominations that broke away from governance by Rome simply carried on celebrating the same seasons as the Roman church. One of the surprising things about all this is that those who say they base their religion on the Bible, the fundamentalists, can find no proof as to the endorsement of the pagan seasons that they still observe in the very Bible that they claim to follow, least of all in the life they claim to emulate, that of Jesus Christ Himself!

This essay is attributed to Pastor Dale Morgan – for once, a Pastor who is really and truly in touch with history as it is, and not as he wants it to be!

The Legend of the Mermaid Melusina – Men who break their word, and women who continue to love them

Some people say that women often find partners whose character resembles that of their father. Such, indeed is the story of Melusina.

Melusina was the eldest daughter of a mermaid who had married a human man for love. The mermaid relinquished the freedom of the seas, gave up her scales and gained two normal legs, gave up her whole life, to become a mortal woman and live with the man she loved.

She diminished, from sea-goddess of bream and wave, to mere woman of hearth and home. In return, she asked her husband for one thing only, that he not gaze upon her or his newborn child, whenever she gave birth, and that he give her one day in which to be alone with the child on that day. He consented, dazzled with her beauty and drunk with her love. They lived many happy years together, and were blessed with two daughters. One day, the man’s brothers and father asked him why his wife wanted this time alone and what sorcery she was performing on their children. The man became suspicious and fearful, distrustful of his wife, he broke his word, and hid in their chamber, while his wife was giving birth in another one. After the birth, his wife came back into the room with the child and started bathing her while giving her all the ocean-wide magic of the water.

The man gasped, and she turned with tears in her eyes, knowing that their life together had ended. For he had betrayed her. He had broke his word and put others before his own true love.

The mermaid kissed her husband one last time, donned her scaly tail and went back to her watery home, leaving with her three daughters forever.

Time passed and her youngest daughter, Melusina, began to question her parentage. Melusina was a half-goddess, mermaid while in the water, human maiden when she was dry. She was 15 years old, curious and bold, with a hundred questions. Pestering her mother until she told her the story of her father’s betrayal. Enraged at the falsity of this beast called man, whom she had never seen in her life, Melusina went to find her father. She spied him napping beneath a tree, bound and gagged him and took him prisoner. She wanted to make him pay for betraying her mother, for making her so lonely and sad throughout the last years, and for being a human man, and so different from his own daughters. She took him to a sea-cave, tied him to a stalagmite, and left him there while the tide came in, and the sea swirled angry and foamy around him.

After the deed was done, she went  back to her mother and told her that the man who had betrayed her, the man who had left her broken-hearted and alone, had been punished. Melusina expected her mother to be pleased, what she did not expect was that her mother still loved her father. The ocean goddess’s wrath was indomitably, her anger unstoppable. In her sorrow and rage, she punished Melusina casting her out of the sea. With flashing eyes, she cursed her:

‘As I was betrayed by the thing I loved most, so shall you be. Your scales and power will diminish and you will try to escape from your human skin in vain. Only on moonless nights will you be able to be your true self. But beware, should anyone born of mortal woman see you in this guise, your body shall be ripped from you forever, and you will see only Death’.

Alone and afraid, Melusina wandered around the wild forest, weak with hunger. Her face full of tears, her white feet bleeding and hurting, she finally found a lake where she rested and bathed in the light of the stars. The Duke of Poitou, who was riding home with his men, had stopped by the lake to drink, and saw the beautiful girl, naked and singing, glorious in her beauty, lounging amidst the fireflies.

Entranced, he asked her to go back home with him and become his wife. Alone in a strange world, Melusina accepted, knowing she would need someone’s protection and a place to sleep, even though she distrusted all men. Like her mother before her, she asked the human Lord for one thing only, that once every month, on the dark of the moon, he would leave her alone to bathe and be in solitude, and like her father had done, he also accepted.

The years passed, as years will, and Melusina gave her Duke many sons. Unfortunately, all her sons had scales, fish eyes, or gills. They were all deformed, and thus the Duke was never really happy. He could not understand his wife, who walked slowly and stared off into the distance as though at another world. He could not hear what she heard, or see what she saw. Her eyes were beautiful and enigmatic, full of mystery and pain he could not comprehend. In time, he became obsessed with the idea that his wife had a secret lover, whom she met at the dark of the moon. One night, when the moon was hidden, he hid behind a tapestry and saw his wife in her bath, her long irridescent tail glistening in the candle light, while she combed her long luxurious hair. Aghast, disgusted and horrified, he did not make a sound, until he could get away. A day later, news came that his youngest brother had been killed. While he was grieving, his wife went to comfort him and in anger and pain, he blamed her, shouting in front of everyone ‘It is your fault you demon! You serpent! You corrupted my sons with your blood and now even my brother is lost to me’. Melusina, deathly white, fell in a cold faint.

When she came to her senses, her husband was sorry he had said those words. Sorry he had betrayed his love and been so cruel. Sorry he had said anything at all – but by then it was too late. Melusina’s raging watery nature broke forth from its cage until it consumed her. Her scales took over her whole body, the colors so blinding, that no one could look directly at her, until finally her body was consumed in agony. Her lamentations and screams could be heard all over the kingdom, and her husband qualied then, knowing that her blood would forever flow in the veins of his descendants.

When, on his deathbed, he anointed Melusina’s first son, the son with the mismatched eyes and webbed fingers, as his heir, the whole castle heard the mysterious disembodied wailing of Melusina, cursing and crying out, testament of the betrayal and fickleness of men. When, years later, the son died, leaving everything to his son after him, the same wailing could be heard. Throughout the years, each time a son of Melusina’s was about to die, the whole of Lusignan, whom in his youth its Duke had named after his beloved wife, rang with the agony and loss of the mother of the line. As it still does. As it always will.

Such is the curse which comes from betrayal.