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Key points
- Purple, green, and gold have been the official colors of New Orleans' Mardi Gras since 1872.
- Among Mardi Gras masks are death masks representing the ever-real presence of death in life.
- The power of the Mardi Gras spirit is its joyfully defiant celebration of life even in the face of death.
Three strands of Mardi Gras beads hang on my car’s rearview mirror. I jokingly describe them as my own version of the rosary beads I saw as I was growing up Catholic. I don’t ascribe to them magical power or special access to the divine. But they do represent something significant for me. Let me explain.
The purple, green, and gold beads are known as “throws” in New Orleans—because float riders in the city’s famous Mardi Gras parades throw them to spectators. Purple, green, and gold have been the official colors of the pre-Lenten festival since they were chosen by the Krewe of the Rex parade in 1872. Krewes are the elite social groups that host New Orleans’ Mardi Gras events. Purple stands for justice. Green represents faith. And gold is for power.
Besides the famous beads, Mardi Gras—February 13 this year—is best known for the colorful masks that revelers wear. Mask-wearing dates back to the earliest carnivals in 13th-century Venice. Masks allowed people to hide their identity and to remove their social differences. “To mask” permitted full-on transformation, allowing one to assume an alternate identity.
Among the masks are so-called death masks. On the Mexican Day of the Dead, masks are worn to ward off fear or honor the dead. Among the masks seen at Mardi Gras, one of the creepiest is the long-beaked plague-doctor mask. The mask was first worn by plague doctors during outbreaks of bubonic plague in Europe, its goal being to protect them against airborne pathogens. It’s often seen as a symbol of death and disease.
So what are death masks doing in the festivities of Mardi Gras? To answer that question I draw your attention to what in long-ago times were known as memento mori: the skulls and other oddities that some, such as Christian ministers or scholars, kept on hand to make them “remember death.”
The presence of these representations of death amid the raucous bacchanal of Mardi Gras is a sobering reminder that even when there is joy and revelry, death can claim any of us at any time.
But the beauty and marvelousness of the Mardi Gras spirit is its joyful and defiant celebration of life, even in the face of death.
I last visited the Big Easy in late 2006, slightly more than a year after Hurricane Katrina had devastated the city. There was evidence everywhere of how high the water had been during the flooding from the storm. There were still “X” marks on the outside front of houses that had indicated no one was found to be inside when rescuers searched them.
It had seemed to me then that the best way I could contribute to New Orleans’ recovery was to support some of its businesses by spending money there. That’s how I came to buy nearly $ 200 worth of Mardi Gras beads and masks in one of the souvenir shops.
Those beads came to symbolize for me the resilience of New Orleans.
I decorated my Christmas tree that year, and often since, with dozens of strands of Mardi Gras beads, and even a few masks. Turns out purple, gold, and green are fine Christmas colors too.
I called the tree my “tree of life” because I loved to sit at night and simply look at it. Its lights and color reminded me during what was a dark time in my life—so soon after my HIV diagnosis—that life goes on in spite of medical diagnoses and even potential death from a life-threatening disease. It helped to inspire me to keep moving forward and not stay stuck in fear and uncertainty.
That is why I have the Mardi Gras beads in my car.
“Live while you are alive!” they tell me, just as my late college advisor “Doc” Covey used to say to me.
That is the real message of Mardi Gras: Celebrate life because death lurks, waiting for his opportunity. Live while you are alive!
