Let’s start off on the right foot. The name of the feast is Mardi Gras NOT Fat Tuesday! Yeah, I know, the literal translation is so but Mardi Gras is a proper noun, a name. Take the French name LeBlanc. Mr. LeBlanc would lilkely not know to whom you are speaking if you called out “Mr. The White”! It is the same with Mardi Gras. When you hear someone misuse the name it tags him with a virtual sign that says: “I’m trying to sound cool but really I’m showing you I’m a pretender.”
Like many ancient feasts it inherits many old traditions, some very practical, some political, some good marketing at the time. Some cite the Roman celebration of Lupercalia that was celebrated mid-February from about the 2nd century AD. The god Lupercus (derived from the word meaning wolf). It hearkened to ancient Roman origins and was a rite of purification and fertility. It was eventually adopted by the Church as the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary. Another theory is that the Feast of St. Valentine substituted for Lupercali because part of the celebration involved a lottery of available maidens to a pair of chosen youths.
The occasion was happy and festive. The youths then donned loincloths made from the skin of the sacrificed goat and led a procession and around the base of the hills of Rome. They ran about the city, the lightly striking women along the way with strips of the goat hide or februa providing purification from curses, bad luck, and infertility. February gets its name from this celebration.
I doubt Mardi Gras has its direct origins in Lupercalia.There were many Spring rituals celebrating the rebirth of nature and the Church was very adept at adopting pagan festivals and rites to its own teachings. More likely to my mind is the Carnival season, most likely begun by the common folk as a way to avoid wasting meat already butchered before the Lenten fast. As villages and towns feasted on the meat there was a last hoo-rah that would naturally include good drink, music and dance. This celebration became, in French, Mardi Gras!
Mardi Gras was brought to the Americas by the French explorers seeking a foothold in the New World. In 1699 Pierre LeMoyne Sieur d’Iberville was exploring the northern Coast of the Gulf of Mexico near what we today call Mobile Bay. After a gruesome discovery of a burial grounds that had been opened by a hurricane, they were disturbed and put again to sea. On March 3, 1699 they camped on a bank of the Mississippi River about 60 miles south of where New Orleans would be built and named the tributary there Bayou Mardi Gras and the point Point du Mardi Gras.
There is much interesting about Mardi Gras but so little room here to put it. The genesis of the float parades are entwined with the creation of Rex and Comus the two oldest Krewes of the New Orleans’ celebration. The themes of the parades at the outset were particularly prickly lampoons of public figures. The first Rex parade poked fun at the Russian Grand Duke Alexix Romanoff who was a bit of a stage-door Johnny who had been smitten by Lydia Thompson of the Bluebeard Burlesque that was in town but had by then his eye had wandered to Lotta Crabtree to whom he bestowed diamonds and jewelry as gifts. She starred in the play The Little Detective.
Tradition has it (incorrectly) that the (unofficial) official theme song of Mardi Gras “If Ever I Cease to Love” was part of that play but it was not and was already a popular tune by George Laybourne. Likewise the traditional source of the Mardi Gras colors, purple for justice, green for faith and gold for power were not the colors of the Romanov family. Their meanings are derived from heraldic tradition and some suggest they were chosen by the Duke. Most of the rest can be easily researched and do one degree or another vetted by the reader.
There’s beads & doubloons, Pete Fountain’s Half-Fast Marching Club, second lines and Zulo, Dr. John and Mardi Gras Indians. Bals Masque and truck parades and so, so much more … In any case …