Prior to 1582, most of Europe marked the start of the year on March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, with the celebrations running out to April 1. When Pope Gregory XIII pushed the calendar forward and January 1 became the official New Year, the people who kept observing the old date got a new name: April Fools. The joke was on anyone who still knew what the season was actually for.
What the season was for, among other things, was the Feast of Fools.
The Feast of Fools began as a January observance in northern French cathedrals sometime in the twelfth century, a liturgical curiosity in which the lower clergy temporarily displaced the higher. Sub-deacons ran the mass. A Bishop of Fools was elected. The powerless, for one week, held the chair. By the time it migrated to the streets, it had accumulated everything the institution originally designed it to release: cross-dressing, lewd parades, public nudity, mock sermons, gambling at the altar, and general behavior that the rest of the year would get you flogged. The Church banned it formally in 1431. It kept happening anyway, in various forms, for another two hundred years.
That's the part worth sitting with. The institution that banned it was the same institution that created it. The Feast of Fools was not a peasant uprising or a pagan holdout. It was invented by clergy, practiced in cathedrals, and tolerated because everyone understood, without quite saying so, that the body needs an outlet or it finds one on its own terms. Marcus Aurelius wrote that what is contrary to nature cannot endure. He meant it as consolation about hardship, but it applies equally well to institutions that declare war on the body's nature and then spend two centuries losing. You can read centuries of condemnation as moral seriousness. You can also read it as the sound of people trying to put a lid back on something they opened themselves.
Erotic art lives in that same space. It has always been produced by the same cultures that suppress it, patronized by the same classes that publicly condemn it, and tolerated precisely because total suppression turns out to be impossible and everyone with any sense knows it. The Pompeii frescoes were locked in a private cabinet for over a century after their excavation. The cabinet had a waiting list.
The Feast of Fools understood something that tends to get lost in more earnest arguments about art and freedom: that transgression is not an accident of expression but often its entire point. The inversion was the ceremony. The lewdness was the liturgy. The annual, temporary collapse of the hierarchy was how the hierarchy survived the rest of the year intact. Whether that's a feature or a bug depends on what you're trying to build, and P.A.G.A.N. has a clear position on that question.
We are not a safety valve. We are not the week that makes the other fifty-one bearable. We are the argument that the week should be longer.
Happy New Year, by the old calendar. Act accordingly.