Carnival

Of special interest are two works of the 16th century Netherlands artist Peter Bruegel the elder. The artist's famous painting of the battle of Carnival and Lent contains a scene better displayed in his woodcut "The Dirty Bride" or the "Marriage of Mopsus and Nisa." In the engraving, the coarse, bedraggled bride being led from a shabby nuptial tent is Nisa, while the prancing groom who leads her out is Mopsus. At Carnival, for a moment, people felt a world turned upside down. This gave the regular world the chance to stand right side up. In the print shown here as an inset, which was engraved by Pieter van der Heyden and published by Hieronymus Cock in 1570, a Latin inscription was added below the image that translates "Mopsus marries Nisa, what may not we lovers hope for"—i.e., anything can happen. 

The modern secular Zeitgeist has lost appreciation for the power and work of the Carnival. Carnival witnessed to the reality of spiritual and archetypal forces at work in the world, and it collected and contained negative forces in a boundaried and limited experience. Texts such as Ezekiel 16 describe the sins of God's people by making recourse to carnivalesque archetypal images. Ezekiel may even picture the perverse breaking down of Carnival boundaries, with negative forces spilling out into common ordinary time. In any case, just as the modernist PC world cannot appreciate the excesses of the premodern carnival, it finds itself helpless to do anything but condemn the carnivalesque images of Ezek 16.  But Bakhtin  understood the creative energy, the space for  new voices, for new cosmic openness and malleability of Carnival. Carnival witnesses that the defeat of evil might become definitive, that  God's people might be reborn as a beautiful bride both pure and wild.