Brazil Carnival

The Brazilian Carnival (Portuguese: Carnaval) is an annual festival in Brazil held 40 days before Easter and marks the beginning of Lent. During Lent, Roman Catholics are supposed to abstain from all bodily pleasures, including the consumption of meat. The carnival, celebrated as a profane event and believed to have its origins in the pagan Saturnalia, can thus be considered an act of farewell to the pleasures of the flesh.

Brazilian Carnival as a whole exhibits some differences with its counterparts in Europe and other parts of the world, and within Brazil it has distinct regional manifestations.

Because it precedes Lent, Carnival long ago was conceived as the last chance for 40 days to eat meat, to make love and to live joyously, all forbidden activities during the season when one is supposed to do penance in preparation

- for a spiritual resurrection at Easter. Thus it was not too hard to see how the Carnival period, from one or two days to several weeks, came to be in the specific time when one purposely set out to break the mold, to determine to do all the things normally impossible or forbidden in everyday life, and perhaps even to fulfill oneself by trying out one or more alternative roles or lifestyles to be for a short time what one could never be in ordinary life. This is the reversal phenomenon so often noted in Carnivals everywhere, wherein regular behavior is reversed, and people choose to do the very opposite of their normal behavior.

Carnival is truly profane since it seeks specifically NOT to be sacred, and indeed to do violence to propriety and respectability by irreverence and even contempt, often made all the more effective through the use of indirection, humor, and irony. Such profanation is the specialty of European Carnivals, elements of which are specifically designed to be sacrilegious, as shocking as possible to the conservative and the religious




Perhaps this is the place to proclaim “Crowley’s Law”: The lower the class (and darker the skin), the more serious the carnavalesco. Bahians and African-nationalist Cariocas (natives of Rio) often compare their increasingly race-conscious Afoxe and Bloco Afro parading organizations with Catholic religious street procession at Corpus Christi and other holy days. “This is our chance to display our culture and religious beliefs, just like the (white) Catholics do during their festivals.
More and more, Afro- Brazilian mythology derived from Yoruba sources is featured as the subject of Carnival. For instance, Iemanja (Yemoja in Yorubaland), the Goddess of the Sea syncretized with the Virgin Mary, was the chose subject of the Bahian Carnival of 1984, with an immense picture made of multicolor strands of light bulbs suspended across the line of march in the Praca Castro Alves, and the sacred symbols of the other gods and goddesses of the pantheon in giant lighted form displayed on lampposts throughout town and around the harbor.