The Sinister Origins of Carnival

What is it that keeps drawing us to carnival—the clatter of drums, the surge of color, the way a mask can make a stranger feel like a messenger from another world? Maybe it’s the promise of mischief before order returns, or the feeling that, for a heartbeat, life turns inside out and speaks the truth behind the painted façade. In a conversation on Things Visible and Invisible, writer and cultural provocateur Al—whose work ranges from dark folklore to underground performance—pulls back the curtain on a world most English speakers only know in fragments. His latest book, A Season of Madness: Fools, Monsters, and Marvels of the Old World Carnival, traces a lineage that’s far older and stranger than tilt-a-whirls and cotton candy. This is not the fairground. This is the old world carnival: flesh and spirit in a long, uneasy dance.

What we find there is more than a party. It’s a ritual of reversal, a leveling of ranks, a roaring chorus that both mocks and mirrors the order it briefly suspends. To understand it, you have to follow its roots back through time—to Rome’s New Year streets, to medieval Europe’s Feast of Fools, to the towns where devils and jesters run side by side, and to the church seasons that shape the revels even as they contain them. Carnival is not just a night of excess; it is the eve of restraint. It is release engineered by tradition, a celebration of the body that clears a path for the soul.

What We Really Mean by “Carnival”

If you live in the U.S. or the U.K., “carnival” may conjure New Orleans parades or a traveling midway with freak shows. Al’s project tackles something more expansive and older. Yes, the party-before-Lent is part of it—but the old world carnival isn’t about bearded ladies in tents. It’s about a seasonal threshold bound to the Christian calendar, especially Catholic and, in Eastern Europe, Orthodox practice. The very word carnival is often linked to Latin phrases like carne levare—“to lift away meat”—pointing straight at the fast to come.

That framing matters. Carnival isn’t a free-floating festival; it’s tethered to Lent, the forty days of fasting, reflection, and restraint. For centuries, people lived within that rhythm: a burst of indulgence followed by a long season of denial. In places that kept the old liturgical cycles—think Italy, Germany before the Reformation, and swathes of Eastern Europe—the fabric of carnival is stitched with theology, folklore, and the human body’s own unruly energies.

Rome, Kalends, and the First Echoes

The story doesn’t start where you might expect. While Victorian writers loved to point toward Saturnalia or Lupercalia as the naughty ancestors of carnival, Al argues that the Roman Kalends of January—the New Year—looks like the truer prototype. Imagine riotous street gatherings, mocking songs, costumes that invert social roles, and pointed jabs at the powerful. You can feel the modern carnival there: a temporary leveling, a chance to laugh at those who keep order the rest of the year.

From those New Year impulses, Europe’s medieval Feast of Fools emerges, carrying the same DNA of inversion and irreverence. Choirboys play at bishops, the sacred is parodied, and laughter does what it always does in rigid systems—it finds the edges and tests them. The celebration didn’t stand apart from religion; it orbited it, needled it, and, in a perverse way, served it.

Flesh, Spirit, and the Logic of Lent

Carnival’s power sits in a paradox: it lets the body run wild precisely because the calendar is about to rein it in. In Catholic lands (and many Orthodox ones), the season before Lent became a sanctioned time to indulge in everything that would soon be forbidden—meat, drink, sex, spectacle. The very structure of the year asks for an effusive out-breath before the long, measuring inhale.

This wasn’t an illustrated sermon so much as a lived lesson. People didn’t just see images of excess; they felt it. They stayed out too late, ate too much, sang too loudly, and woke up the next morning half-giddy, half-spent—ready, in a very practical sense, to embrace forty days of quiet. As Al puts it, carnival is a celebration of the body, and the body teaches you quickly where its limits are. The theology didn’t need to be read; it was experienced.

Masks, Fools, and Devils: Germany’s Imprint

While Venice gets plenty of attention for its masks and misty canals, the geography of carnival shaped its soul in different ways. Venice dazzled but offered little civic space for mass revels. The German lands, on the other hand—before the spread of Protestantism—gave Europe many of the enduring images: the fool (often called a jester today), the rowdy parade, the license to mock authority.

The fool became the emblem of carnival, and he rarely ran alone. In countless processions, fools and devils sprinted shoulder to shoulder, embodying the season’s gleeful opposition to respectable order. Medieval thinkers even wrestled with a kind of theology of the fool; Church Fathers like Augustine could call this world “the devil’s,” and carnival played up that inversion. Spend your vice now, the season seemed to say, and Lent will be easier to bear.

One famous example comes from Nuremberg, where late medieval parades featured elaborate wheeled floats called “hells,” sometimes crafted as ships—the proverbial Ship of Fools. On deck, devils and jesters made merry, and satire cut close to the bone. When a prominent Protestant preacher (historically remembered as Andreas Osiander) became a rising force in the city, he was mocked during carnival as the ship’s captain, delivering nonsense from a pulpit—or even a gambling board. The scene was thrilling, dangerous, and all too effective: authorities were dispatched, scuffles broke out, and that grand tradition faded under the pressure of Reformation politics. What was tolerable in a Catholic framework became combustible in a Protestant one.

Eastward and Elsewhere: Folklore That Refused to Vanish

Part of what makes Al’s exploration so compelling is its map. He doesn’t stop at Paris or Venice; he looks east, where old forms survived longer. In Catholic and Orthodox communities across Eastern Europe, Lent still shapes the year, and carnival retains a raw connection to local folklore. Characters like the Krampus—yes, the horned Christmas terror Al explored in his previous work—cross over as seasonal figures at the edge of respectability. Masks aren’t just costumes; they’re personae rooted in village stories and pagan remnants reframed by Christian calendars.

This is a crucial point: carnival isn’t a fossilized ritual. It’s a living negotiation between the church’s seasons and the people’s instincts, between doctrine and the village square. It borrows the calendar to stage something the community needs—a ritualized moment of disobedience that keeps wider obedience possible.

The Safety Valve Theory—and Its Limits

Sociologists have long called carnival a “safety valve,” and the phrase is hard to resist. Let people mock the mighty for a day, the thinking goes, and they’ll submit more quietly for the next forty. Let them eat, drink, and tumble into bed on Shrove Tuesday, and Ash Wednesday’s ashes will feel right on the forehead.

There’s truth here. Carnival clearly provided release, and many clergy understood its usefulness. But “safety valve” risks flattening the mystery. Carnival wasn’t designed in a boardroom to keep peasants passive; it sprang from the gut, from the human need to mark thresholds with noise and masks and bodies in motion. It was never really top-down. It was the people using the church’s own calendar to wrestle with appetites that every priest also knew first-hand.

Why Carnival Struggled in Protestant Lands

The interview makes a tough reality plain: old world carnival thrives where Catholic and Orthodox frameworks endure. In lands reshaped by the Reformation—England under Cromwell, German cities preaching new austerities—many of the ancient festivals were suppressed or sanitized. The idea that carnival might mock preachers, play with devils, and flood the square with satire was a poor fit for reforming regimes that prized sober piety and moral discipline.

That’s one reason Americans often see only fragments: a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans here, a neighborhood party there. The deeper, season-shaped carnival—with devils taunting bishops, with fools in theological drag, with entire towns colluding in the ritual of reversal—needs the scaffolding of the old calendar to make sense.

What Carnival Still Has to Teach Us

So why should any of this matter now, when our calendars are more commercial than liturgical and most of us don’t fast from meat at all, much less for forty days? Because the human realities haven’t changed. We’re still bodies and souls trying to live together without making each other miserable. We still need moments of licensed misrule and communal play, and we still need seasons to pull us back toward reflection.

Carnival reminds us that joy and discipline are not enemies. They can be partners if you give each its place. It’s not just that the feast makes the fast tolerable; the fast makes the feast meaningful. To rediscover carnival is to remember that culture can hold opposites without splitting apart—that a community can joke about the powers above and even the faith that guides it, and then return to that faith with clearer eyes.

Want to Go Deeper?

If this glimpse behind the masks intrigued you, Al’s new book—A Season of Madness: Fools, Monsters, and Marvels of the Old World Carnival—dives further into the history, the geography, and the unforgettable characters that haunt the season. You’ll find it at most bookstores and online retailers, including Amazon. You can also hear more of his folklore explorations on the Bone and Sickle podcast at boneandsickle.com.

And if you enjoyed this conversation on Things Visible and Invisible, consider supporting the work that brings these stories to light. Subscribe to the channel, explore the episodes that dig into ancient enigmas, paranormal encounters, scientific anomalies, and forgotten histories, and, if you can, become a supporter for early releases and behind-the-scenes discussions. Mystery thrives where curious minds gather.

The Takeaway

Carnival is not a quaint costume party or a mobile fair. It’s a centuries-old choreography of madness and meaning—a season when fools and devils escort us to the edge of ourselves so that, afterward, we can walk back more whole. The old world knew what it was doing. It allowed a ritual burst of heat so the long cool of Lent could do its work. It trusted the body enough to let it lead for a moment and trusted the soul enough to know it would return.

Maybe the best way to honor that wisdom today is simple: mark a season. Feast, then fast—however you define it. Make room for laughter that bites and rituals that bind. And when the masks come off, notice what you’ve learned about who you are without them.

📕 Guest: Al Ridenour

Al is a Los Angeles-based writer, folklorist, and artist known for exploring dark folklore, subversive traditions, and underground performance art. He authored The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas and A Season of Madness, and hosts the folklore podcast Bone and Sickle.

🌍 Website: https://www.alridenour.com/

🎧 Podcast: https://www.boneandsickle.com/

🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/al-ridenour-93676129/