The gate of the year

Figures above and below:

Illustrations from a French manuscript of the Romance of Alexander (1338-1344), now in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. The characters shown wear animal masks and are similar to many masquerades of contemporary Carnival traditions.
The historical sources on the first centuries of Christianity relate above all evidence of animal masquerades during the Calends of January, in which several individuals wore deer masks (“cervulum facientes”), others wore sheep or goat skins, and still others put on their heads animal masks (“alii vestiuntur pellibus pecudum, alii assumunt capita bestiarum”). These masquerades produced a particular emotional state, an ecitation, through which the masked individuals appeared as no more human (“gaudente set exultantes, si taliter se in ferinas species transformaverint, ut homines non esse videantur”) (Caesarius of Arles, VI century).
“In these animal disguises, we propose to see a ritual correlative of the metamorphoses into animals which were experienced in ecstasy, or of the ecstatic rides on animals, which were a variant of it. If this hypothesis is accepted, the most part of the rituals practiced, in the West as well as in East, during the Calends of January arrange themselves in a coherent framework. Children questing, desks set for the nocturnal divinities, and animal disguises stood for different ways to enter into relationship with the dead, ambiguous dispenser of prosperity, in the crucial period in which the old year ends and the new year begins” (Ginzburg 1989, p. 165).

[Image: http://bodley30.bodley.ox.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet/detail/ODLodl~1~1~33928~ 105855:Romance-of-Alexander;
www.neh.gov]




Human-Animal Transformation

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Figures above and below: Illustrations from a French manuscript of the Romance of Alexander (1338-1344), now in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. The characters shown wear animal masks and are similar to many masquerades of contemporary Carnival traditions. The historical sources on the first centuries of Christianity relate above all evidence of animal masquerades during the Calends of January, in which several individuals wore deer masks (“cervulum facientes”), others wore sheep or goat skins, and still others put on their heads animal masks (“alii vestiuntur pellibus pecudum, alii assumunt capita bestiarum”). These masquerades produced a particular emotional state, an ecitation, through which the masked individuals appeared as no more human (“gaudente set exultantes, si taliter se in ferinas species transformaverint, ut homines non esse videantur”) (Caesarius of Arles, VI century). “In these animal disguises, we propose to see a ritual correlative of the metamorphoses into animals which were experienced in ecstasy, or of the ecstatic rides on animals, which were a variant of it. If this hypothesis is accepted, the most part of the rituals practiced, in the West as well as in East, during the Calends of January arrange themselves in a coherent framework. Children questing, desks set for the nocturnal divinities, and animal disguises stood for different ways to enter into relationship with the dead, ambiguous dispenser of prosperity, in the crucial period in which the old year ends and the new year begins” (Ginzburg 1989, p. 165). [Image: http://bodley30.bodley.ox.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet/detail/ODLodl~1~1~33928~ 105855:Romance-of-Alexander; www.neh.gov]