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Four festivals from three unconnected traditions briefly turn the world upside down on a fixed date each year, and the record links them as one recurring idea rather than four separate ones.

Kings for a Day

The medieval Feast of Fools let lower clergy elect a mock bishop and stage a burlesque of the liturgy inside the cathedral itself, before church authorities campaigned it out of existence. Carnival, kept in Catholic and some Orthodox cultures in the run up to Lent, is recorded as belonging to the same current of sanctioned yearly inversion. So is Purim, the Jewish festival of reversal and disguise that keeps the story of a plot undone.

A Caution Built Into the Record

The chain reaches further, to Saturnalia, the Roman midwinter festival of masters serving slaves and ordinary rules loosened for a week in December. Carnival's link to Saturnalia carries its own caution built right into the record: the comparison is functional, made by anthropologists studying the shape of the custom, and no direct historical line connects the two. The resemblance is kept without claiming an ancestry nobody can prove.

Where To Read More

• PurimJewish FestivalsA day of reversal and disguise, kept since ancient Persia
• Feast of FoolsChristian FestivalsThe medieval mock bishop, staged inside the cathedral itself
• CarnivalChristian FestivalsThe last days before Lent, when the ordinary order gives way
• SaturnaliaRoman FestivalsThe Roman festival the chain reaches back to, with its own caution attached