In the middle of the crowd, unfamiliar bodies press against one another as they follow the parade float with the carnival band, whose drums and tambourines make the windows of the houses along the street tremble. The music seeps through the pores, through the feet, and it becomes impossible not to dance, not to move the body or jump in some way. And there, within that same euphoric vibration of intense celebration, were tall and short bodies, thin and fat, beautiful and “ugly,” children and elders—all part of something far greater than each person’s daily life, their struggles, their suffering. Together, pain was suspended, and they surrendered to an alchemical rite of immense joy, dancing half-naked under the sun. There was no tyranny of the ideal. There was sweat, shine, glitter, imperfection, and an almost ritualistic freedom. Brazilian Carnival is not merely a party; it is a moment when the body ceases to be an object of judgment and becomes a territory of celebration. There, for a few days, the weight of the social gaze dissolves into the music. As the lyrics of a famous samba composed by Gonzaguinha (spontaneous translation) say:

(…) And what is life?
Tell me, my brother—
Is it the beating of a heart?
Is it a sweet illusion?

Is it wonder or is it suffering?
Is it joy or lament?
What is it, what is it, my brother?

There are those who say that our life
Is nothing in this world,
A drop, a fleeting moment
That doesn’t even last a second.

There are those who say it is a divine
And profound mystery,
The Creator’s breath
In an act overflowing with love.

You say it is struggle and pleasure.
He says that life is living.
She says the best is to die,
For she is unloved, and her verb is to suffer.

I only know that I trust the young girl,
And in her I place the strength of my faith.
It is we who make life
As we can, as we are able, as we choose.

Always desired—
However flawed it may be,
No one longs for death,
Only for health and good fortune.

The question keeps circling,
The mind keeps spinning,
But I side with the purity
Of the children’s answer:

Life—it is beautiful, and it is beautiful.

To live—and not be ashamed to be happy,
To sing and sing and sing
The beauty of being an eternal apprentice.

Ah, my God, I know …
That life should be much better—and it will be.
But that does not keep me from repeating:
It is beautiful, it is beautiful, and it is beautiful.

It truly is remarkable how the entire country seems to pause for almost a week to celebrate in the streets, where every kind of person—all races, social classes, rich and poor—meet on the same horizontal plane: the stage of democracy, the street, the place we all pass through every single day. Many walk it in suffering, others parade through it with smiles, but during Carnival everyone moves through it dancing with whatever face they choose to wear. It is the openly permitted moment for a man to dress as a woman and vice versa, or to dress as an animal, or as anything at all, really. People kiss those who are willing to share in the celebration of the present moment, even strangers. Many have their first experience of getting drunk and learn (or don’t) how to measure their limits. We sing until we are hoarse and dance until our feet crack.

Of course, Carnival is like fire: it can warm you, but it can burn you. And that, in fact, is what dance is about: the balance we must practice between freedom and discipline, between lines and curves, work and leisure, mind and body. This formula of equilibrium that human beings have created and developed through rites—shaped and reshaped over millennia—cannot be underestimated; they also shape us in return. As the samba suggests, it is deeply characteristic of Brazilians to transform pain into joy. At one point, as I was jumping in the street with my closest friends, a heavy rain suddenly began to fall and everyone reveled in the unexpected drops. Another time, a speaker broke and a group gathered around it to sing louder, imitating the music themselves—everyone laughing. Why stress? We were there to celebrate!

The origin of Carnival, in its symbolic essence, was never an invitation to degradation, but a recognition of life’s cyclical nature. The problem is not excess—it is the loss of meaning. When ritual loses consciousness, it turns into consumption. The great traditional festivals were pedagogies of the soul. Carnival would teach that matter is transient.

This suspension is not accidental. It is ancestral … and I am fascinated by observing where this very peculiar human capacity comes from. Brazil is a melting pot of races and beliefs: the Portuguese brought European customs, followed by enslaved Africans, who carried their music and dance, all of it unfolding on land inhabited by native peoples deeply intimate with abundant nature. But let us look at the beginning.

Rite of celebration

Long before the word “carnival” existed, human beings lived in intimate dependence on the cycles of nature. Survival was tied to the fertility of the soil, the coming of the rains, the return of the sun after winter. Ancient peoples celebrated harvests, gave thanks for abundance, feared scarcity, and marked the transitions between seasons with intense festivities. These rituals were not mere entertainment; they were acts of alignment with the cosmos. To celebrate the harvest was to acknowledge that life depended on forces greater than the individual; to dance at the end of winter was to invoke the return of fertility and hope. Excess, music, wine, and collective communion were part of a symbolic gesture of renewal.

In Greco-Roman cultures, festivals dedicated to agrarian deities and ecstasy, such as Dionysus and Saturn, embodied this cyclical dimension. There were moments when social order was relaxed, hierarchies were temporarily suspended, and the community surrendered to the celebration of abundance and vitality. These periods of inversion and expansion functioned as symbolic valves and as rites of passage between one phase of the year and the next. Ritualized chaos preceded reorganization; overflow came before the return to discipline.

With the expansion of Christianity throughout Europe, these ancient festivities did not disappear. As the church consolidated the liturgical calendar, it absorbed many of these customs, reinterpreting them in light of its theology. The period of celebration preceding Lent —which would later be called Carnival—was incorporated as the final days of abundance before a time of fasting and introspection. Thus, ancient agrarian and pagan festivals found new meaning within the Christian cycle culminating in Easter. What once directly celebrated the fertility of the earth came to symbolically prepare the spirit for inner renewal.

From this encounter between nature, pagan rite, and the Christian calendar emerged Carnival as we know it: a festival that carries, beneath its colorful surface, the ancestral memory of a time when we lived attuned to the seasons, when celebration was also a way of surviving, and when body, earth, and the sacred were not yet separated.

The right to ecstasy

One of Carnival’s most intriguing symbolic figures is King Momo, whose origin can be traced to Momus in Greek mythology—the spirit of satire and irreverence who dared to criticize even Zeus. In Carnival, he becomes the embodiment of laughter that temporarily suspends order. In Brazil, when he symbolically receives the key to the city, he enacts the ancient archetype of the “king for a day” found in many cultures, in which power is granted only to be returned the next day—a reminder that all authority is transient. More than a folkloric character, King Momo represents the collective need to release tensions, invert hierarchies, and celebrate excess within a ritualized time, where chaos does not destroy order but renews it.

This impulse toward celebration at a level that allows people, even if only briefly, to see themselves as equals—or to reverse roles—long predates samba. In Europe, there were rites dedicated to Dionysus, the god of ecstasy, wine, and the breaking of the boundaries of the self. The Dionysian does not represent mere loss of control; it expresses the human need to rupture the rigidity of social identity; to be overtaken by something greater than the limiting ego. Without this space for expansion, culture becomes arid.

Robert A. Johnson, a disciple of the Jungian tradition, often spoke about the loss of the Dionysian element in modern Western culture. For him, Dionysus was not merely the god of wine, but the archetype of vital energy, passion, emotional intensity, and the capacity for ecstasy. Yet this energy, when repressed, does not disappear; it becomes distorted. Johnson observed that Western culture excessively elevated the Apollonian principle—order, reason, control, structure—and in doing so lost the ability to experience ecstasy in a symbolic and ritualized way. The result? Unintegrated ecstasy returns as addiction, compulsion, violence, collective hysteria, or dependency.

In the Jungian reading Johnson developed, Dionysus represents the living body, intense emotion, erotic impulse (not merely sexual, but vital), and the capacity to be seized by something greater than oneself. When this archetype is denied, the individual becomes dry, rigid, overly mental. Johnson argued that the West lost its safe rituals of ecstasy. Unlike ancient cultures, which created bounded festivals, we have relegated ecstasy to individual consumption—alcohol, drugs, mass entertainment—without symbolic structure. The problem is not ecstasy itself; it is the lack of a container for it and the loss of the symbol.

Through tantra, long before it became associated with Buddhist practice, the Indian subcontinent was already home to a remarkably diverse and experimental spiritual landscape. Alongside the ritual orthodoxy of the Vedic religion—which emphasized sacrifice, priestly authority, and strict social hierarchies—there emerged parallel movements that questioned whether liberation depended on ritual purity or social status. Around the same time that spiritual traditions such as Buddhism and Jainism appeared, numerous wandering ascetics, forest yogis, and inner experimenters began exploring alternative paths to awakening outside the authority of Brahmanical institutions. Many of these practitioners lived on the margins of society; not necessarily “untouchables,” but individuals less bound by caste rules governing purity and behavior. Some gathered in liminal places such as cremation grounds or remote forests, where they practiced intense forms of meditation, ritual, and ecstatic states. 

Another important current shaping the emergence of tantra was the growing importance of goddess-centered traditions that celebrated the dynamic creative power of the universe, later expressed through the concept of Shakti. In these traditions, the divine was not imagined only as a distant transcendence but as the living force that animates nature, fertility, sexuality, and the rhythms of the body itself. Agricultural societies were deeply aware that life constantly renews itself through cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration, and this awareness became embedded in religious symbolism. Fertility, birth, blood, and the generative capacities of the body were therefore not considered impure or obstacles to spiritual life; they were manifestations of the same cosmic energy that moves the seasons, the earth, and the stars.

Within this worldview, the human body was understood as a microcosm of the universe. Rather than rejecting physical existence in order to reach the sacred, practitioners explored ways to recognize the sacred within embodied life. Sensation, breath, desire, and emotional intensity were seen as expressions of the same vital power flowing through all forms. Later tantric traditions would refine this insight into sophisticated yogic systems, teaching that awakening does not require escaping the forces of life but learning to recognize and consciously direct them. 

In this sense, the philosophy surrounding Shakti helped establish one of tantra’s most distinctive principles: the energies of the body are not enemies of the spirit, but gateways through which the deeper reality of existence can be realized.

Centuries later, these methods were gradually integrated into Buddhist practice and evolved into the path now known as Vajrayana. Within this tradition, the principle remained the same: the energies that bind the mind can also free it, if they are met with awareness and guided within a sacred framework.

From a Buddhist perspective, the challenge is not the presence of powerful energies themselves, but the way consciousness meets them. The Buddha described a path that avoids extremes—neither indulgence in sense pleasures nor rigid self-denial. In this middle space, experience is neither suppressed nor blindly followed; it is met with awareness—flowing, unfolding, and leading to insight. Seen in this light, ritual spaces that are open to intensity and collective expression can guide these energies to become vehicles of insight rather than sources of confusion.

Cycles of death and rebirth

Considering our observation of life’s cycles—the rhythms of nature and the cosmos that human beings everywhere have contemplated—it is not surprising that different cultures translated these patterns into symbolic languages we now call religions. Christianity offers one such expression: Easter celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ, yet beyond its historical narrative it also reflects a universal symbol—the passage through death toward renewal. Its date, determined by the first full moon after the spring equinox, preserves an ancient cosmological root linking spiritual meaning to the seasonal movement from winter toward fertility and increasing light. Within this rhythm, the sequence of Carnival, Lent, and Easter forms an initiatory arc: expansion, purification, and rebirth. Carnival releases vitality; Lent gathers and refines it; Easter proclaims the possibility of renewal. Seen in this way, Carnival is not simply excess, but the first movement in a deeper cycle of transformation — a reminder that renewal often begins by encountering the raw energies of life before they can be clarified and integrated.

Wisdom lies in rhythm. Inhaling and exhaling are not merely physiological movements; they are metaphors for existence itself. Life pulses through alternations: day and night, high tide and low tide, sleeping and awakening. To expand and to contract is the grammar of the cosmos inscribed within the human body. When we try to live only in expansion—in excess, constant productivity, relentless stimulation—we break the natural cycle. When we try to live only in contraction—in repression, rigidity, fear of desire—we also move away from balance. Health is flow.

What finds no form of expression does not disappear; it accumulates. Silenced emotions do not dissolve through moral obedience. Denied desires do not become virtuous through repression. They condense. The body then becomes the stage for what consciousness refused to receive. Chronic tension, diffuse anxiety, exhaustion—often these are alternative languages for what was never spoken, danced, wept, or celebrated. Life seeks passage. When prevented from circulating, it turns into symptom.

To live fully may be to accept this alternation without guilt: to allow yourself to celebrate without losing your center; to withdraw without denying your vitality. The body needs expression so it does not fall ill. The spirit needs interiority so it does not dissipate. Between the drum and the silence, between laughter and contemplation, there is an invisible tempo holding everything together. When we honor this tempo, life ceases to be a struggle against excess or against desire and becomes a conscious dance—a complete breath, in which nothing needs to be denied, but everything must be passed through with presence.

I would like to close with a poem by one of my favorite contemporary philosophers, Viviane Mosé, which I have also taken the liberty of translating into English. It is an essential poem, one that expresses why I am drawn to speak of Carnival as a spirit that can seize us from time to time, even on smaller scales: as a pause to go out with friends and celebrate, as preparing a beautiful banquet just for yourself—why not? As reading a poem and breathing and crying and laughing at the same time —why not? At every moment, you can. You can celebrate the sorrows and the joys that arrive together in this fleeting precious life.

Now, read carefully:

Most of the illnesses people carry are poems held captive
Abscesses, tumors, nodules, stones . . .
They are words gone calcified, poems with no passage.
Even blackheads, pimples, ingrown hairs, constipation . . .
Might once have been poems—but were not allowed to be.

People grow sick from reason, from loving words kept locked inside.
A good word is a liquid word, slipping free in the form of a tear.
A tear is melted pain; pain hardened becomes a tumor.
A tear is melted anger; anger hardened becomes a tumor.
A tear is melted joy; joy hardened becomes a tumor.
A tear is a melted person; a person hardened becomes a tumor.

Time hardened is a tumor; melted time is a poem.

And you can draw the hardened poems out of your body
With plant sponges, medicinal oils, with your fingertips, with your nails.
You can pull a poem out with cuticle nippers, with a comb, with a needle.
You can pull a poem out with basil balm, with massage, with moisture.

But use a scalpel almost never.
In the case of stubborn poems, use dance.
Dance is a way of softening the body’s hardened poems,
A way of loosening them from its folds, from the toes, from the nails.

They are the cut-poems, the chest-poems, the eye-poems,
The sex-poems, the eyelash-poems . . .

Lately, I have grown fond of ground-poems.
Ground-poem is grass—it sprouts from the foot.
It is a poem with feet on the earth,
A poem of ordinary people, of simple people,
People from Espírito Santo [a state in Brazil].

I come from Espírito Santo.
I am from Espírito Santo —I carry the Vitória of Espírito Santo.
A saint is a spirit capable of performing a miracle upon itself.

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Tiffani Gyatso
Yangchenma Arts & Music

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