Skip to main content

New Orleans 2020 (Part One)




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.

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 )

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Apparently, Liberals Are The Illuminati

posted 10/5/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Greetings, sheeple, from my stronghold high atop the Wells Fargo Building in downtown Salt City, where I type this before a massive, glowing bank of monitors that display the ongoing progress of my 23-point plan for complete social control. Whether you want to demonize me as a "liberal," or prefer the Glenn Beck update "progressive," we all know the truth, and it's time to pull the curtain aside: like all left-leaning persons, I am actually a member of the Illuminati. How else to explain how much power my side of the aisle wields in U.S. American politics? According to conservatives, liberals/the Illuminati control the media * , science * , academia in general * , public schools * , public radio * , pretty much anything "public," the courts * , and Hollywood * . Hell, we pretty much control everything except for scrappy, underdog operations like WND and Fox News, or quiet, marginalized voices like

The Garden Is Dead, Long Live The Garden

posted on 8/30/2015 by the Salt City Sinner  The last two times that I wrote about gardening, the tone was uncharacteristically less “playful whimsy” than “agonized demon howl.” This is with good reason. The cockroach-hearted fauxhemian Whole Foods crowd at Wasatch Community Gardens, you see, did a terrible thing to me and many other people – they decided that agreements are for suckers and that what the world really needs is another blighted patch of asphalt rather than a large and vibrant community garden, and so they killed my garden (and the gardens of many others) dead, dead, dead. Forgive my bitterness: there is something about loving a patch of actual soil, about nurturing life from tiny green shoots to a luxurious canopy of flowers and vegetables that brings out a protective streak in a human being, and also a ferocious loyalty. The destruction of Sugar House Community Garden did not, however, end my gardening career – heavens, no! Instead, I and a handful of

Cult Books: One Good, One Terrible

  I’ve finished writing a new novel (stay tuned for details) in which the massacre at Jonestown in November 1978 plays a pivotal role. Both to research it and because the phenomenon interests me, I’ve read more than a few books on cults and cultic ideology over the last year.