ove Tuesday and the previous Sunday
constituted a Christian Bacchanalian festival in which all classes joined.
The greatest freedom and activity of physical movement was encouraged;
"some go about naked without shame, some crawl on all fours, some on
stilts, some imitate animals."[108] As time went on the Carnival lost its
most strongly marked Bacchanalian features, but it still retains its
essential character as a permitted and temporary relaxation of the tension
of customary restraints and conventions. The Mediaeval Feast of Fools--a
New Year's Revel well established by the twelfth century, mainly in
France--presented an expressive picture of a Christian orgy in its extreme
form, for here the most sacred ceremonies of the Church became the subject
of fantastic parody. The Church, according to Nietzsche's saying, like all
wise legislators, recognized that where great impulses and habits have to
be cultivated, intercalary days must be appointed in which these impulses
and habits may be denied, and so learn to hunger anew.[109] The clergy
took the leading part in these folk-festivals, for to the men of that age,
as Meray remarks, "the temple offered the complete notes of the human
gamut; they found there the teaching of all duties, the consolation of all
sorrows, the satisfaction of all joys. The sacred festivals of mediaeval
Christianity were not a survival from Roman times; they leapt from the
very heart of Christian society."[110] But, as Meray admits, all great and
vigorous peoples, of the East and the West, have found it necessary
sometimes to play with their sacred things.

Among the Greeks and Romans this need is everywhere visible, not only in
their comedy and their literature generally, but in everyday life. As
Nietzsche truly remarks (in his _Geburt der Tragoedie_) the Greeks
recognized all natural impulses, even those that are seemingly unworthy,
and safeguarded them from working mischief by providing channels into
which, on special days and in special rites, the surplus of wild energy
might harmlessly flow. Plutarch, the last and most influential of the
Greek moralists, well says, when advocating festivals (in his essay "On
the Training of Children"), that "even in bows and harps we loosen their
strings that we may bend and wind them up again." Seneca, perhaps the most
influential of Roman if not of European moralists, even recommended
occasional drunkenness. "Sometimes," he wrote in his _De Tranquillilate_,
"