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>The catholic church had to suffer most during carnaval. All kinds of sacred traditions and rules were ridiculed during the feast. A donkey would be put on the altar during the ezelsmis (donkey's mass) after which a civilian dressed as a priest staged a mass. During all the prayers, the "amen" would be replaced by "ia, ia, ia"
>A dance called the polonaise was done during which people did not follow the pastor with the hand on the shoulder, but with the nose at the bottom. Also celebrated on 28 December is the now forgotten feast of the massacre of the innocents, commemorating the infanticide in Bethlehem. On this day the children were given the power for one day and turned it against the church. The choirboys put the clergy on a cart full of manure, and then let them pass through the village. Often this gave the mass the opportunity to pelt the church ministers with shit, a phenomenon in slightly modified version to be found now in the spreading confetti from the carnaval floats
Guénon writes in Symbols of Sacred Science:
>"The 'festival of the ass' wherein this animal, of which the properly satanic symbolism is well known in all traditions into the very chancel of the church, where it occupied the place of honor and received the most extraordinary tokens of veneration; and also the 'festival of fools', where in the lesser clergy indulged in the worst improprieties, parodying both the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the liturgy itself. (These 'fools' moreover wore a headdress with long ears, obviously meant to evoke the idea of an ass's head, and this feature is not the least significant from our point of view)
>We will also mention the Saturnalia of the Ancient Romans, from which the modern carnival seems to have been directly derived, although it is in truth no longer anything but a very diminished vestige of it: during these festival, the slaves ordered the masters about, and the masters served the slaves