"During the celebration, some, dressed as buffoons or as women, danced in the middle of the choir and there sang droll or obscene songs. Others came to eat sausages and boudins on the altar, and to play cards or dice before the officiating priest. They perfumed the latter with a censer in which old shoes were burning, and made him breathe the smoke. After mass there were renewed acts of extravagance and impiety. The priests, mixed with the inhabitants of both sexes, ran about, danced in the church, and excited each other to the most licentious act which an unbridled imagination could suggest. No longer any shame or modesty; no dam arrested the flood of folly and passion. In the midst of the tumult, blasphemies, and dissolute songs, some were seen to strip themselves entirely of their clothing, others abandoning themselves to the most shameful libertinage. The scene of action then moved out of the church, into the street. Less sacrilegious, it was no more decent. The actors, mounted on carts full of dung, amused themselves by throwing it at the people who followed them, and marched triumphantly in the squares and streets wide enough to allow a cartload to pass."
Extract from Gods of Generation: History of Phallic Cults Among Ancients and Moderns by Jacques-Antoine Dulaure, 1854
