Posted on 3/8/2020 by Charles R. Bernard
Opinions are highly subjective things when it comes to what
is “best,” and so it is with cities. What is America’s “best” city? Well, it’s
probably not Pleasant Grove (nothing against
Pleasant Grove), but when it comes to what is truly “best,” does one
prefer New York? Boston? Los Angeles? It depends on what one is in search of, I
suppose. Music? Food? What is “best,” in my case, is a city of crumbling red
brick that slouches, spicy, drunk, and full of crazy stories, into the
Mississippi River that spawned and sustained it, a place that is a powerhouse
of culture, darkness, and beauty.
Leaving aside Salt Lake, New Orleans is my favorite city.
Now, if one is relatively uninitiated and knows only one
thing about NOLA, it’s usually that they host a massive celebration each year
called Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras, literally translated from zee Franch, means “Fat
Tuesday.” For you non-Catholics, a few words of explanation here may prove
helpful. Mardi Gras is a tradition that isn’t specific to New Orleans – it is,
in fact, much older than the city of NOLA. Its roots may, in fact, predate
Christianity and have some tangled overlap with the
Roman festival of Saturnalia, but in its current form, it is as
least as old as the Shrovetide
season and associated festivals, and is best understood as a
regional variation on the ancient grandmamma of Christian festivals, Carnival.
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| Rome's ancient Carnival is one root of Mardi Gras |
Catholicism has traditionally been – and, in many parts of
the world, continues to be – a festival
religion. Services are held on a
regular liturgical schedule, during which certain holidays are
regularly observed. There are the holidays that are familiar to most
Protestants; Christmas, some version of Easter. I say “some version” because in
the festival faith of Catholicism, Easter Sunday – the resurrection of the
figure that Catholics revere as the immortal, living son of God – is the
triumphant culmination of a
period of fasting and repentance. This time, known as Lent,
stretches from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday. Many Catholics observe Lent by
renouncing some pleasure, be it physical or otherwise, for the 40-day period
the tradition spans. At the end of Lent, Catholics rejoice at the resurrection
of their ever-elusive Lord.
What’s interesting (and what brings us to Mardi Gras) is the
period just before Lent.
Catholicism as I described it does not sound like a festival religion so much
as a renunciation religion, correct? Well, Catholics – being Catholic – like
to cut loose before they abstain, and that has brought us the
holiday known as Fat Tuesday. The entire purpose of Mardi Gras is indulgence; liquor, sex, drugs,
(naturally) music, public tomfoolery, and pageantry of all kinds. It is, in
short, every single thing that humans could want or need in a holiday (except
for shriven absolution, I suppose). Thus, the celebration’s infamous repute,
especially when it takes place in the
fine, Catholic festival city of New Orleans.
I love New Orleans. I love Fat Tuesday as well, although
semi-formalized rituals of public drunkenness like Saint Patrick’s Day and
Mardi Gras have never appealed to me. I like to observe, I love live music and
consider myself a guy who likes food; there’s plenty, in short, to keep me on
board other than drunken mobs roaming Bourbon Street. However – a word about
those drunken mobs. There’s another, less pedestrian reason that I have begun
to enjoy festivals of all kinds (carnivals, circuses, you name it).
I was recently re-reading good old Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible when I came upon this
aphorism. It didn’t take long – it’s literally the first one of the “Nine
Satanic Statements” in the book:
“Satan represents
indulgence instead of abstinence!”
First off, I am not endorsing The Satanic Bible here, although I think it did codify and even in
some cases push forward philosophical arguments important to my beliefs. LaVey
and his small group of publically “out” Satanists were trailblazing, courageous,
and highly imperfect people. I am a member of the Satanic Temple,
not
the Church of Satan, and I have little patience for the half-baked social
Darwinism, coded misogyny, and toxic privilege that make up big chunks of
LaVey’s gospel (which was, in fairness, pretty advanced stuff for 1969 by most
reasonable measures). With all of that said, LaVey’s thoughts regarding
indulgence being a Satanic practice are spot-on.
I grew up Catholic (as I may
have mentioned a time or two here). When one grows up in the Catholic Church,
if one is observant in one’s faith (let alone devout) one is subject to a very
high degree of self-abnegation and restrictions on pleasures both physical and
mental. Certain knowledge is considered a poisonous indulgence, as are certain
behaviors that in all right conscience should be solely between a human person
and their own body. The Catholic Church is a vast edifice built on suffering,
its bricks molded from self-denial, seasoned with self-hate, and fired in the
forge of a merciless, all-seeing, all-judging God. This laces celebrations
staged by religious communities – whether we’re talking about a Knights of
Columbus spaghetti dinner or a man blowing bourbon-soaked chunks off of a
balcony in New Orleans – with a special, seldom-acknowledged double meaning.
Catholics sacrifice forty days to their Lord, true. But in their wild
indulgence – their Church-sanctioned Carnival – they give between one and seven
days to Satan. Frankly, I think we can get that ratio ratcheted further in
favor of the Prince of Darkness without much effort.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, New Orleans is a big town for Satan,
but not in the way casual observers might think. New Orleans is, first and foremost,
a
voodoo town, although
there’s a pretty good-sized
Santeria community and assorted other syncretic faiths represented
as well. But to link voodoo and Satan is to radically misunderstand both
concepts. Voodoo is a very
specific fusion of Catholic iconography and African loa-based polytheism, one that isn’t
boxed in by the same binary dark-light good-evil distinctions that
Christianity pretends to adhere to. There is no “Satan” figure in voodoo, nor
does the
pact as understood in
histories of Western Satanism (written by googly-eyed
witch hunters) bear any real
relationship to the transactional, intercession-based magick systems of voodoo.
Witchcraft, as distinct from diabolism, is probably much closer to the mark if
one is looking for a European analog.
No, New Orleans has become a big town for Satan in the form
of the Louisiana
chapter of the Satanic Temple (the Satanic religion of which I am a
member). Louisiana is home to over one thousand Satanists, many of them located
in or around New Orleans. TST-LA has raised money for our Religious
Reproductive Rights Campaign, hosted regular
meetups, and held rituals (all activities, by the way, that Utah
Friends of the Satanic Temple have also engaged in, if you were
curious). While I didn’t get a chance to hang out with any Louisiana Satanists
on this trip, I hope to when I’m next in NOLA. It seems like New Orleans would
be a rough town in which to be a Satanist, in some ways – there’s a lot of
niche occult competition there.
NOLA’s Mardi Gras celebration was over by the time I got to
the outskirts of the city this year; actually, the way I would have preferred
it this time around. The streets were remarkably clean and empty of beads and
other assorted debris, the result of vigorous trash collection and scrubbing
following the festivities and prior to the coming madness of St. Patrick’s Day
(another anarchic New Orleans eruption that I managed to miss through a trick
of timing). There were few visible uniformed police, a fact that gave me the
creeps. Cops are a little like spiders in that I prefer to be able to keep an
eye on them whenever they’re present, and knowing that they’re probably there
without being able to see them is not necessarily a great situation.
So: what occasioned my trip to NOLA in 2020? In part, it was
simply that I had the opportunity to go, and I would have to have a damn good
reason to turn down such a chance. Also, the timing is perfect in terms of the
development of my personal interests. Indulgence – particularly, the indulgence
of our senses – is on my mind of late. What does it mean to truly love one’s
self without guilt? Would it be possible to live life as a sort of permanent
Carnival, sans the guilt imbued by some cosmic scold? And in the absence of
said cosmic scold – when we acknowledge that we are sovereign over our reality,
free to live deliciously – what does our celebration say about us? What foolish
masques do we put on (or remove), what music makes us lose control of our
grinning jaws and twitching limbs?
I had no interest in building from a triumphant feast, a day
whose name drips with the sizzling grease of human delight, to a day of ashes;
no, if anything, I’d come to do the opposite. I’d had ashes aplenty – I’d come
looking for the fat. In a town given to both sack cloth and satin, celebration
and funeral alike, I would find ample quantities of both.
( CONTINUED IN PART TWO )
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