The Carnival is an annual festival in Brazil held 4 days before Ash Wednesday. The Monday and Tuesday are holidays. The festival marks the start of Lent.
Lent
During the 40 days before Easter, Roman Catholics are supposed to abstain from all bodily pleasures, including the consumption of meat.
This is intended to remember the fasting of Jesus, who spent 40 days in the desert before beginning his ministry.
The carnival can hardly be described as a solemn affair, and it shares it’s excessive nature with similar European celebrations and Mardi Gras, where the festivals are a opportunity for final indulgence before lent itself.
It is likely that these celebrations can be traced back to older pagan feasts celebrating the arrival of spring.
Almost all of the music played during Rio Carnival is samba. It is a uniquely Brazilian music originating from Rio, a dance form that was invented by the poor Afro-Brazilians.
The word samba comes from the Angolan world semba referring to a type of ritual music. The word had a variety of meanings to the African slaves brought to Brazil during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. It meant to pray or invoke the spirits of the ancestors and the gods of the African Pantheon. As a noun, it could mean a complaint, a cry, or something like “the blues”.
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