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28 THE GREAT GOD PAN
and the Boogermen as strange survivals of some antique creed. They fulfill sacerdotal functions; we are not accustomed to see priests mocking the sacraments, and if we did we would call the priests insane or we would summon the police. Our priests are modest; they are in love with decorum; they are on the right side of the law. It was not always so. In the Middle Ages there were great feasts which the priests attended where the utmost license prevailed. They wore masks and monstrous faces at the hours of office. They danced in the choir dressed as women, panders and minstrels. They sang bawdy songs from the altar, and ate black pudding at the horn of the altar while the celebrant was saying mass. They played dice on the altar steps, and censed the church with puddings, sausages and old shoes, and thought little of running and leaping about the church naked or with slit breeches or following some naked, drunken carouser in procession through the town, and they would make the most indecent gestures and sing the most obscene songs. For five hundred years they did this. There were complaints from high authorities, but the Feast of Fools was celebrated at the New Year in a thousand churches of Christendom, and a mad missal, where all the accepted canons of taste were solemnly reversed, was employed on this feast-day, which celebrated the New Year, the Circumcision and the happy folly of men. The Feast of Fools possessed a respectable ancestry. It can be traced back to the Roman Saturnalia and far beyond, and it represented a deep and desperate need: the need to mock the things one loves best only in order to reverence them the more, the need to see the world in the light of laughter. The Feast provided a release from the conventions of worship; and the celebrant who attended mass on a day after a drinking bout below the high altar was not to be regarded as a man who had sold his soul to the devil. Indeed, his piety was all the greater now that he had seen the Christ through the eyes of laughter.
Forbidden, the festum follorum was continually revived,