When the Masks Come Out: Mardi Gras and the Sacred Grammar of Release

Sunday Feb 22, 5:00-6:00 pm

What if excess isn’t a failure of discipline—but a ritual necessity?
What if societies need moments of sanctioned disorder in order to remain whole?

Mardi Gras is often dismissed as spectacle—beads, parades, noise, indulgence. But beneath its public color lies something far older and far more purposeful: a ritual technology that human cultures have used for centuries to manage power, desire, restraint, and renewal.

This session explores Mardi Gras as a threshold rite—a moment suspended between abundance and discipline, winter and spring, flesh and fasting. Long before Christianity placed it on the calendar as the final day before Lent, European and Mediterranean cultures marked this same seasonal crossing with festivals of inversion, masking, satire, and collective release. Christianity did not erase these practices; it absorbed them, bounded them, and gave them ritual limits.

Focusing especially on New Orleans, we trace how Mardi Gras became a civic and spiritual grammar—expressed through masks, parades, krewes, street processions, and deeply rooted Black and Indigenous traditions. From elite carnival societies to the originally outlawed Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club, from women-led krewes to the fierce beauty of the Mardi Gras Indians, Mardi Gras reveals how communities negotiate belonging, resistance, memory, and joy.

This session invites us to approach Mardi Gras not as entertainment but as an ecology of the human—a system that allows societies to release pressure, honor the body, parody authority, and return to moral order without collapse. In a time when restraint often feels punitive and excess feels unmoored, Mardi Gras offers an ancient lesson: release must be ritualized, and discipline must be humane.

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