The Festival of Laughter: Children’s Role in the Formation of Ritual Laughter

Thanks to the research of Lloyd deMause and other psychohistorians it is perfectly clear not only that child sacrifice was a regular part of premodern society in almost all parts of the world but also that we can now begin to understand the social, emotional, and historical reasons for this form of mass psychosis. Evidence appears constantly of individual children’s bodies placed in key parts of monumental construction, groups of infant skeletons (whole or, more usually, partial) in relation to sacred areas of living quarters, and of large-scale burial grounds filled

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with the remains of infants all showing marks of violent death rather than disease or malnutrition. The reasons for such behavior lie in complex psychic disorders which manifest also in the social structures of such communities, insofar as they are available to us, and the consequences can be seen in the distorted role of gender relations and other social inequalities that are the heritage of our race.

In a recent study of Stonehenge, Rodney Castleden relates the finding of adult and children’s bodies patterned around the essential structures of this Iron Age monument to other evidence of ecological and political crises in the region. For example, he reports:

In a pit almost at the center of Woodhenge, the builders buried the body of a 5-year-old girl. She had been brutally killed with a blow on the head that split her skull in two. It is direct evidence of a child sacrifice, and the little girl may have been killed as a foundation offering at the time when the monument was built. A small cairn of cemented flints marks the site of this sad little grave pit.¹

But the designation of this girl’s grave as a “sad little grave pit” is to project modern sensibilities into the past. It is not to understand the nature of societies that carry on child sacrifice.

In recent investigations, I have started to see coming into focus in the ancient world, both among the Hebrew peoples of biblical times and among the Greeks and Romans of classical times, evidence of some kind of sacrificial rite that seems to go by the name of the Festival of Laughter. While the evidence available at this stage is mainly literary and propagandistic, and it is clear that the authors wish to distance themselves and their cultures from these barbaric practices, nevertheless there is both a fascination and, in some ways, a nostalgia for these rituals. There is little doubt that much of the violence that is part and parcel of comedy and satire can be traced back to such festivals, at least in the sense of fantasized memories.

In a scholium [note] to Plato’s Republic 337A, Kleitarchos speaks of the sacrificial rites of the Carthaginians. They seek to honor Kronos whenever there is any great enterprise to be started by offering up one of their children. Their defeat during the Punic Wars gave bad press to this North African civilization, and they perhaps also became the screen upon which Greek, Roman, Christian, and other peoples could project their unwanted memories and obsessive desires. In many ways this Hellenistic commentary repeats the accounts given in Philo of Byblos, as cited by the Christian bishop and historian Eusibius in his Preparation for the Evangelists, and in Diodorus Siculus, but Kleitarchos is more detailed and graphic about the fate of the child being killed. He says:

…the Carthaginians who honored Kronos, whenever they wished to succeed in any great enterprise, would vow by one of their children if they achieved the things they longed for, to sacrifice him to the god. A bronze image of Kronos was set among them, stretching out its cupped hands above a bronze cauldron, which would burn the child. As the flame of the burning child surrounded the body, the limbs would shrivel up and the mouth would appear to grin as if laughing, until it was shrunk enough to slip into the cauldron.

In several other accounts, many of which seem to be Roman, if not later Christian propaganda against the Carthaginians, these same sacrificial rites also include a form of laughter, but it is a laughter displaced from the child victim to his or her parents. Even when it is reported that noble families avoided putting their own children to death by purchasing children from poor families or unwed mothers, the same ritual avoidance of grieving is shown to include enforced laughter. Plutarch, in De Superstitione, speaks of how children were bought from poor mothers, who were required to watch the sacrifice without a tear coming to their eyes or they would forfeit the money given to them, though the child would be still killed.³ Tertullian claims that parents “were glad to respond” to the needs of the god for human victims but also “fondled their children that they might not be sacrificed in tears,”⁴ a point made by another Christian apologist, Minucius Felix:

Not without reason in some parts of Africa infants were sacrificed by their parents, and their cries smothered by endearments and their cries for fear of a victim being sacrificed in tears.⁵

There are thus two points to be made about how the sacrifice was performed. The first is that the victims themselves were sometimes seen to die with horrible grins on their faces as the searing

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heat distorted their looks, and this kind of grotesque appearance fits with the term “sardonic laughter.” The second point is that the rites to be effective had to be performed without tears or grieving by the parents, and while this could be done in several ways, such as fondling the children, as Minucius Felix claims, or by drowning out the screams of the children and the wailing of their parents with loud music, in the description offered by Plutarch.

This music of fifes and drums gives not just a festive air to the sacrifice, which is what the whole occasion generally is, but something more specific that approaches a Festival of Laughter such as may be found in such events as Samson’s appearance among the Phoenicians in The Book of Judges or Lucius’s mock trial in Apuleius’ Golden Ass. The Festival of Laughter becomes more insidiously ambiguous in this new light since there are three components to the laughter.

The first is the sardonic laughter itself. The term derives from two ancient explanations. In one, a certain plant that grows in Sardinia is poisonous and causes the person who eats it to die through contraction of the face muscles, something like lock-jaw. The second account speaks of how the Sardinian people gleefully watched as Greek prisoners were tortured to death. The sardonic laugh thus refers either to the contorted look of the victim or the grotesque chortles of spectators to horrible and cruel acts.

Secondly, the sardonic grin on the face of the child victims of sacrifice to Kronos becomes, in this way, a necessary mark of acceptability to the god, since it is only when the children have been burned sufficiently that they fall through to the cauldron. The laughter of the carnival derives from the children themselves, and this removes the guilt of the perpetrators and the grief of the unwilling parents.

Finally, the effort by parents to control their tears and wailing, either by stoically holding inside their grief, or by fondling and kissing their children to prevent them from being frightened and crying out, puts the onus of the incongruously lighthearted atmosphere onto the mothers and fathers. The public sacrifice would lack religious or sacrificial meaning if it were spoiled by tears, and so parents are forced to give some point to this violent ritual by pretending to be joyful in the midst of the horror. The audience to the murder take their cue from the behavior of the parents and surround the event with a Festival of Laughter.

But just in case the children or the parents break down into screams of pain and grief, the organizers of the festival prepare loud music to mask the unwanted sounds from the audience, who would then look on from an objective distance and laugh at the spectacle of mimed agony. It is then perhaps that spectators and organizers could fool themselves into believing, not just that there is no real pain or loss involved in the ceremony (as happens when Lucius is taken to the point of dying from fear at the arena in Apuleius’ Greek romance), or that the victim joyfully and meaningfully accepts and colludes in his own death (as when Samson brings down the Temple of Dagon on the heads of Israel’s enemies), but that there is no victim at all (what is sacrificed is an animal surrogate or a straw dummy) or that the consequence of the actions are not death but something else (corrective punishment and reformation of manners in satire or release of social and emotional tensions in comedy). But when there is a real death — or many! — the sad little grave of a child victim is much more: it is the site of an archaic Festival of Laughter, and hence a grotesque reminder of how our ancestors rationalized their cruel behavior.

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Endnotes

Apology, cited by Day, Molech, in the Loeb trans, by T.R. Glover, 91.

Cited by Day, Molech, in the Loeb translation by F.C. Babbitt, 89.

Octavius, cited by Day, Molech, in the Loeb trans, by G.H. Rendall, 91.

Rodney Castleden, The Making of Stonehenge (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 85.

Translated and cited by John Day, Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 87. Day’s book gives extensive data on the phenomenon of child sacrifice in the Ancient Near and Middle East.