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Fuck you Fraser, pancakes are awesome. I ate so many pancakes today I nearly exploded and I wouldn’t swap them for trombones or drag queens. Pancakes trump trombones and drag queens any day and Ash Wednesday is my annual ‘syrup shitting’ day; out of the pong came forth sweetness.
In that book about time I mentioned ages ago there was a chapter all about festivals and in it Jay Griffiths explored how the Church did its very best to stop people celebrating them, what with all the fun and debauchery and people getting above their station and whatnot. And their being pagan in origin, of course. What Christianity has always done is slowly adopt the pagan festivals as their own, attaching something Jewish Christian to the date, such as pasting over the winter solstice with the birth of a Jewish teacher Christian God and hoping people wouldn’t notice.
It still happens to this day. If you’ve been watching Around the World in 80 Faiths you’ll have seen Peter Owen Jones at a festival in the Philippines (18mins). The Catholic Carabao festival had, he said, ‘suspiciously pagan undertones’:
The Carabao takes centre stage. It was once worshipped as a God but missionaries gradually incorporated the bull into the feast of St Isidore, the patron saint of farmers; a shrewd move to help spread the Christian message. The crowd shout for the Carabou to kneel. It’s an act of submission by the pagan god to Catholicism.
And that’s what happened here, centuries ago. That’s why we only eat pancakes instead of getting off our tits and letting it all hang out (I’m not complaining, just saying). All festivals have suspiciously pagan undertones if you look carefully enough, because they’re all pagan festivals hijacked by culturally imperialistic Christian killjoys. When Peter Owen Jones goes on to declare enthusiastically that it’s a vibrantly heaving festival organised by the Church, he’s missing the point. The vibrancy comes from paganism, the Church is just trying to take the credit.
Giles Fraser stands at the end of that long line of killjoys. He suggests that it’s naive to think that carnivals are a kind of anti-authoritarian resistance to the establishment. The fact that the Church always tries to make them their own refutes that, as they provide a sense of civil solidarity and communal identity that comes from the bottom-up, not the top-down. They’re inherently subversive, or they were. Many of the ones that haven’t been hijacked by the Church have now become part of some money-making machine or other.
So, pancakes are good fucking awesome enough for me.