New Orleans and Mardi Gras from the Goddess Point of View

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The essence of the Goddess, as a celebration of life, holds sway in New Orleans at the very core of the people. Life here moves at a slower pace and New Orleanians see no reason to catch up. It is a city proud of its diverse cultural and ethnic heritage, where people look for just about any excuse to indulge in the pleasures of food, drink, and partying. There is a sense of life being a bit more in-sync with the natural rhythms and life’s simple pleasures. Despite the influence of the Catholic Church, the lifestyle in New Orleans is hardly dogmatic or puritanical. In the Big Easy, as the city is often called, the spirit of the Feminine is also reflected in the Old World charm of the architecture in the Vieux Carre, in celebrations such as Mardi Gras with its Pagan roots dating back to the Roman rituals of the Lupercalia, Cybele and Attis, and in the worship of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and various goddesses in the Yoruban pantheon.



Goddess lives in the steamy heat of the city whose motto is “let the good times roll,” and where Stella’s raw sexuality in the story A Streetcar Named Desire exploded onto the screen. Goddess is alive in the women who gather at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church on the fringe of the Vieux Carre (or French Quarter) to say their rosary and pray the novena for their families. Her spirit lives in the flora and fauna of the dense bayous, the groves of oak trees with their spanish moss, and in the luscious and heady scent of the exquisite flowers of the magnolia tree. It might even be said she lives in the strength and determination at the core of the Southern Woman who might sit ladylike in her finery on the verandah sipping a Mint Julep one day and be found pulling up crab traps wearing her old blue jeans the next.



Goddess lives in the rituals of the Catholic Church which assimilated what it could not stamp out. She is an embodiment of life’s earthy pleasures, and nowhere in the United States does she manifest her robust essence with such fun and flair as in her many faces that peak from behind her carnival masque in the Vieux Carre of New Orleans. Author Samuel Kinser cites carnival origins starting in an urban and country reaction to strict Lenten rules and a groundswell of interest in a variety of social and agricultural practices in pre-Christian Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and Roman sun, wind, and water worship. On the other hand, Henri Schindler, a local author in New Orleans and an expert on Mardi Gras, believes the carnival season in New Orleans has its origins in spring rites of the Greek and Latin world, namely the two celebrations of the Lupercalia and those of the Goddess Cybele and her consort Attis.

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