In keeping with the announced subject of this session, I have modified my paper to consider how the Sacred might impact on that most Profane of festivals, the utterly secular Carnival of the Christian liturgical calendar which celebrates earthly vitality and defiance of restraint just before the long penitential period of Lent. Carnival has deep roots in the European Middle Ages and even in the Classical Mediterranean, but has now spread to all the continents except Antarctica, and even there may be celebrated by individual researchers. The Christian minority of Goa in India has preserved its Portuguese-derived Carnival, and Goan migrants in Melbourne are said to continue the festival there in their homes and clubs. Whether the populous communities of Spaniards, Italians, or other Europeans have also kept Carnival going in Australia is not yet known, but Mumbwa is local Carnival-like fete. In Africa, Carnivals exist in ex-Portuguese Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and the Cape Verde Islands, in the Spanish-administered Canary Islands, and evidently in Cotonou, Republic of Benin; Maputo, Mozambique; the island of Sao Tome; and Ziguinchor in the Senegalese Casamance. In keeping with the subject of this Symposium, I am limiting my investigation to African and African-derived Carnivals, which include those of Brazil, the Caribbean, Louisiana, and other New World areas where Blacks play significant role in the festival. CARNIVAL AS PROFANATION Because it precedes Lent, Carnival long ago was conceived as the last chance for 40 days to eat meat, to make love to your wife (and/or others), and to live joyously, all forbidden activities during the season when one is supposed to do penance in preparation for spiritual resurrection at Easter. Of course this also included giving up partying, dancing, drinking, and every type of carousing which, while not specifically sinful, are considered occasions of sin because they provide temptations or at least opportunities to break the Ten Commandments and other rules of the Church. Thus it was not too hard to see how the Carnival period, from one or two days to several weeks, came to be the specific time when one purposely set out to break the mold, to determine to do all the things normally impossible or forbidden in everyday life, and perhaps even to fulfill oneself by trying out one or more alternative roles or lifestyles, to be for short time what one could never be in ordinary life. This is the reversal phenomenon so often noted in Carnivals everywhere, wherein regular behavior is reversed, and people choose to do the very opposite of their normal behavior. In the dictionary, profane, from Latin pro, before, and fan=4 temple, means not only secular, but also unsanctified, and even irreverent, while means desecration, or even sacrilege, in the sense of a loss of sacred character, possibly by irreverence or contempt as shown by vulgar intrusion or vandalism, or a loss of sacred character as through defilement or reduction to secular (Webster 1970: 679 ). Certainly then, Carnival is truly profane since it seeks specifically NOT to be sacred, and indeed to do violence to propriety and respectability by irreverence and even contempt, often made all the more effective through the use of indirection, humor, and irony. Such profanation is the specialty of European Carnivals, elements of which are specifically designed to be sacrilegious, as shocking as possible to the conservative and the religious. But in the New World Carnivals, such specific sacrilege is rather rare, and where it occurs, the specialty of the upper classes who are usually relatively lighter-skinned than their lower-class countrymen. An example might be Trinidadian ol' mas' bands, with their pregnant male transvestites, shabby hand-me-down clothes, and double entendre placards (Chitty Council) satirizing politics and politicians. Another is the Banda do Lim or Garbage Band of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, which plays garbage men carrying political placards; or the Mudanca or Moving Day bands riding in ancient donkey carts overloaded with the pathetic possessions of the poor migrants from the Northeastern secas or droughts-a savage commentary on local conditions all the more effective because it is played for humor. …