Editors Note: Our friend Martha Kirby Capo was visiting New Orleans during Mardi Gras and we asked her to send her thoughts on the experience. It was an opportunity to have a break from the other news around us for just a moment.
Do you know what it means to miss New OrleansAnd miss it each night and day …
The Mardi Gras memories
Of Creole tunes that filled the air …
I’m wishing that I was there. (Eddie Delange/Louis Alter)
My husband’s family has deep roots in New Orleans and a long history of participation in Mardi Gras as members of the Krewe of Bacchus, founded in 1968. The Bacchus parade, held on the Sunday night before Fat Tuesday, is known for its “super floats” including Bacchagator, Bacchasaurus, and Baccha-Whoppa. The 32-float parade ends in a black-tie Rendevous party at the Convention Center with somewhere around 9,000 attendees dressed in evening gowns and tuxedos scrabbling for beads and trinkets as their (male) family members throw from their double-decker floats during their triumphant return from the parade route. It’s tradition. It’s surreal. And really, really loud.
I love this beautiful, complex, heart-achingly raw, and vibrant city. For Pagans and Witches, especially if your practice includes relationships with Greek and/or Roman deities, there’s a lot to love about several Mardi Gras floats. The Hermes night parade, for example, features Hermes as Psychopomp, Pan, Medusa, and other much-loved deities. I can’t deny having felt a thrill as thousands of people of varying degrees of sobriety and various spiritual persuasions screamed and danced as one for Pan.
And yet it’s complicated. A Mardi Gras night parade tradition includes the Flambeaux, a contingent of Black men who carry torches to light the parade route. The first official flambeaux debuted with the Mistick Krewe of Comus in 1857. The first Keepers of the Flame were slaves and free men of color (Creoles). From the beginning, the flambeaux would twirl and dance with their torches while people along the route threw them quarters or 50-cent pieces. While the torches have been modernized to be safer and lighter (even though the illumination they provide is really no longer needed), and the tips are now measured in terms of paper currency placed in tip jars, the visual impact of Black men dancing with torches at night followed by several masked and hooded White men on horses is deeply disturbing.
In “Keepers of the Light”: The Flambeaux Strike of 1946 on the National WWII Museum website, Louisiana-born writer Rien Fertel reports:
It’s easy to view the flambeaux as a quaint and outmoded vestige of another era (much, if not all, of Mardi Gras could be deemed long overdue for disposal in history’s trash heap). The tradition might be seen as reinforcing racist stereotypes, specifically that of the content and faithful Black man performing for the entertainment of whites.
Yet, Fertel writes, the flambeaux he’s interviewed see themselves as a vital part of Carnival culture. “They inherit their crosses from a father or uncle, older brother or cousin. They speak of family lineages, of inheriting the stick, of teaching the younger generation how to dance in time with the music and the flame: a literal passing of the torch.”
I’ve spent the last several days grappling with societal racism past and present. As Trimiko Melancon writes in The Complicated History of Race and Mardi Gras on the African American Intellectual History Society website, “The performative and celebratory laissez faire culture cannot completely camouflage the latent and, at times, conspicuously radicalized and racial dynamics of Mardi Gras.”
Thus, there’s no making sense of some of what I’ve seen around me—like the street vendor selling LGBTQ+ flags alongside Let’s Go Brandon banners and American flags with the Second Amendment written across the white stripes. Or the fellow letting the good times roll in his AK-47 Hawaiian shirt. Or the moderately drunk good ole boys sharing table space with us at the crowded hotel bar who, having figured out we were quite possibly a little more to the left of center than they were, threw out some verbal bait about how they had been lovers since childhood in hopes of catching themselves a “lib’ruhl” (spoiler alert: they were disappointed; we refused to be lured). And yet, despite it all, I still do love this messy and complicated city and her Mardi Gras celebrations. I love this city where a little Black girl is handed beads and throws by a sea of White people wanting her to have a magical parade experience.
I can’t change a city’s culture, but I can choose to be the change I seek in the world, acting locally while thinking globally. I can choose to manifest my relationship with Brigid through the ways I choose to heal racial divides person by person and the ways I choose to battle overall systemic racism. In particular, I can choose to lean into the juxtaposition represented by Brigid as a water and fire deity, and the tension that exists therein. A tension from which a new amalgam, a new social order that truly respects the worth and dignity of all people, might be crafted. Hand to hand, that’s a Circle I can choose to cast.
Martha )O(
Martha Kirby Capo (@CornerCrone on Twitter and @CroneofKendall on Instagram ) works with Brigid, Cernunnos, Hekate, and Pan. She has been extensively anthologized through Skinner House Books, and is currently under contract with Llewellyn Publishing. She is a writer at Patheos Pagan and can be heard on Moments for Meditation.
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” — Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
THE VIEWS AND OPINIONS EXPRESSED BY OUR DIVERSE PANEL OF COLUMNISTS AND GUEST WRITERS REPRESENT THE MANY DIVERGING PERSPECTIVES HELD WITHIN THE GLOBAL PAGAN, HEATHEN, AND POLYTHEIST COMMUNITIES, BUT DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE WILD HUNT INC. OR ITS MANAGEMENT.
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