Will the Carnival ever end?

The Contest between Carnival and Lent

by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (source)

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Today is Shrove Tuesday, a moveable date which is reckoned as forty days before Palm Sunday.

Not long ago it was Candlemas, a fixed date – 2nd February – which is reckoned as forty days after Christmas.

(Candlemas, of course, has a special place on this blog.)

The gap between these dates is really a bridge between midwinter and the coming of spring.

It appears that the earliest possible date for Shrove Tuesday is 3rd February. The last time it was that early was in 1818. It seems the next time will be in 2285.

And so the two forty day periods reckoned respectively by Christmas and Easter can never actually overlap.

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This blog has previously noted that the political culture of the United States – and to an extent in other places including the United Kingdom – is akin to the Carnival before Lent:

There are signs of push-back in the United States: with grand juries and state governments, and even in Congress and federal courts.

But the agents of misrule still are generally in power.

Many watching are waiting for the mid-term elections this November to see whether the current chaos can be paused; some are even actively seeking to avoid such an outcome.

But even if the mid-terms bring some relief from the carnival of cruelty in the United States, it will take far more than forty days to reverse the mess that has been created.

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This is not a religious blog (I happen to be a non-militant atheist) but it is one concerned with lore as well as law, and a great deal of lore is to do with the passage of time and/or with the competing states of order and disorder.

Once the mid-terms come and go – whatever their outcome – what is happening now will be seen as having the inevitable consequence of what happens then.

Hindsight is perhaps the greatest and trickiest of hobgoblins.

As it stands, however, the outcome of what is now happening is uncertain.

We do not know who will win this contest between Carnival and Lent; we do not even know if it currently amounts to much of a contest.

But disorder, like order, is never bound to last forever.

Carnivals can and do eventually come to an end, even if not promptly forty days before an arbitrary date.

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