 The festival of the April Fool (April 1st) is celebrated throughout most of Europe and the former colonial outposts of European (but not Spanish) rule. This is an ancient festival, deriving from pre-historic times. The Kalends of April in ancient Rome, were sacred to Venus (as was the entire month) and this day was called the Veneralia. Public games, ludi, would be held in her honour.
This day was also known as All Fools Day to the Romans, and they would spend the entire day celebrating with comic hilarity, doing things backwards, wearing women's clothes, dancing in the streets, and generally carrying on in the most in the most foolish and congenial manner. This is one of the few Roman holidays that has preserved some of its original character, under the modern name April Fools' Day.
The Fool stands in contrast to the King as the lowest and highest in hierarchical powers. The fool, jester or clown occupies the humblest place in the court and symbolizes the forces of chaos and license, while the king represents those of law and order.
The fool often took the place of the king, as a scapegoat, in ritual sacrifice and later became ruler as the Lord of Misrule at Saturnalia-type festivals and at the Kalends and all festivals associated with intercalary periods of chaos. He was carried over into Christianity in the Festival of Fools, or the Feast of Asses, as the Prince or Pope of Fools, or the Cardinal of Numbskulls, the Abbot of Unreason, or the Boy Bishop.
In convents an elected nun could be dressed as a man and called the Little Abbess. The revelries caricatured Baalam's Ass and the Flight into Egypt; there were processions in the streets with asses, or men dressed as asses, and asses were taken into the churches. There were coarse representations of Christian events and responses in the mock services were made by braying. The lower clergy were of the peasantry or petty bourgeois and more in touch with popular pagan beliefs and rites from the Roman, Celtic and Teutonic festivals than with the superimposed Christianity.
It was a time of reversal of the normal, chaos before rebirth, buffoonery and license, and therefore of fertility. The Boy Bishop conducted mock services and gave a sermon and sub-deacons took over the celebrations with riotous and crude conduct. The customs were abolished at the Reformation in England but revived in Mary Tudor's reign, to be revoked again under Cromwell; in France they lingered on until the eighteenth century. The early edict abolishing them said they were 'rather the unlawful superstition of gentilite (paganism) than the pure and sincere religion of Christe'. Most traditional festivals had, and some still have, a fool or clown, often a 'natural' kept for the occasions; at other times it could be some citizen who dressed up as such and blackened his face.
Tn earlier times the possessed and lunatics were regarded with reverence as being possessed by a divine power and having the gift of prophecy. In most places the fool was given considerable license and could mock and caricature the secret scandals and failings of local people, or he mocked and mimicked the performers of festival plays and dances. With the license of such occasions he was also taken as the putative father of any bastards born "in forty weeks time . . . for if anything happens in forty weeks time the blame will be laid on the Clown". The clown was garishly painted and disguised; this made him impersonal, so he could break conventions and taboos in the freedom of the return to primordial chaos, which is also the return to the paradisal state of childish innocence before laws were imposed.
The fool often symbolizes the evils of winter, the time of cold and want which is killed by the coming of spring. This happens in Mummers' plays, sword, horn and Morris dances in which the fool is killed then revived to represent the resurrection of nature; he then greets the bride and dances with her to recommence the fertility cycle. He can also play the part of Beelzebub in such dramatizations. The fool's bladder or whip, with which he "whiffles", takes the place of the fertility-whipping of the Lupercalia (see Valentine's Day) and other such ancient festivals with flagellation rites. The death of the fool probably originated in human sacrifice. The Ship of Fools at camivals was originally the Ship of Nerthus, the Teutonic Earth Mother, at her spring festival. In Egypt, this day was celebrated as the Birthday of the god Hathor.
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