#revels

[ghw-archive]

Model Ina Balke photographed by Ted Russell, 1964

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Revels, magazine, Number 2, Art Enterprises, 1960

[newyorkthegoldenage]

These revelers got off to an early start at the Hotel Lexington's Hawaiian Room to ring in the New Year, December 31, 1939. Atop the table is Lorraine Bates, pouring champagne into her slipper for Robert Tuton.

Photo: Tom Sande for the AP

[centuriespast]

Night Masquerades (The Revels of the Ungodly) Joos van Winghe (1544–1603) The Schorr Collection

[fairylandblog]

Faerie Revels

Faerie revels are depicted in folklore as midnight gatherings where music, dance, feasting, and overwhelming beauty blur the boundary between the human world and the Otherworld. These events are not casual celebrations but ritual moments in which normal rules falter—time stretches or collapses, memory becomes unreliable, and consent is altered by enchantment. What feels like a single night of joy may carry consequences far beyond the revel itself.

Music is central to these gatherings: fiddles, pipes, bells, and wordless singing draw listeners into trancelike movement, often compelling dancers to circle endlessly until dawn—or long past when dawn should arrive. Folk warnings consistently advise against following unexplained music in the woods, as revels are sites of dangerous delight rather than harmless merriment. One of their most feared traits is time distortion: those who escape may return to find decades passed, loved ones gone, or their own names forgotten. Across traditions, the message is clear—the longer the joy lasts, the higher the price, and not every invitation is meant to be survived.

[gothicseverance]

A masque was a spectacle performed at court or at the manor of a member of the nobility; its purpose was to glorify the court or the particular aristocrat. The masque included various elements at different stages in its development but invariably included choreographed dances by masqued performers (…). These choreographed dances ended in the masqued dancers' "taking out" of audience members, making concrete the glorification of the court by meshing the symbolic overtones of the masque's praise with the reality of the attending court's presence.

—History of the Masque Genre

[roughridingrednecks]

Revels in Florida