• • •

An alternative account, however, is associated with the great German scholar of archaic cults, Walter Burkert, and his masterwork Homo Necans (i.e., “Man the Killer”). Reconstructing the ritual choreography of primitive sacrifice, Burkert drew attention to the widespread gesture of throwing plant material (often seeds or kernels of grain) on a victim—lamb, calf, bird, luckless captive—just before the knife fell. A gift? Perhaps not. Rather, Burkert saw sublated violence, much closer to the warm-up for a stoning: “The act of throwing together as a group is an aggressive gesture, like beginning a fight, even if the most harmless projectiles are chosen.” Why, in his view, had such ambivalent stuff-sprinkling rites arisen among so many primitive tribes? Because group killing—both warfare and hunting—was the sine qua non of survival, and Burkert thought it took some doing to goad Homo sapiens to the pitch necessary for such work. (He seems to have believed that protohumans were mellow vegetarians.) Throwing together was thus a good place to start the requisite crescendo of collective aggression that constellated human communities, guaranteed their continuity, and permitted some of them (and not others) to leave the marks called history. By these lights, phyllobolia always also said, “We are thinking about killing you.”

• • •

In the 1980s, professional athletes in the United States initiated a charivari tradition of “coach dunking” (a.k.a. “the Gatorade Shower”), in which team captains or respected players would, on the expiration of the clock in an important win, douse their leader with the contents of a large cooler. This saturnalian “baptism” now consistently marks the start of the victory celebrations at the close of a big game. Watching the tape of exuberant defensive tackle Jim Burt drenching Bill Parcells at the two-minute warning of the New York Giants’ 37–13 win over the Washington Redskins in late October of 1984 (arguably the origin of the modern practice), it is difficult not to think of the other key aspect of sacrificial ritual upon which Burkert expended his interpretive energies: namely, the sudden shower of water visited on the head of a beast about to be slain for the gods. The reflexive recoil occasioned by this splash—the glimpse up (to see what’s coming), and then the ducking down (to avert the face and eyes)—signified richly in Burkert’s account: “The animal’s movement here is taken to signify a ‘willing nod,’ a ‘yes’ to the sacrificial act,” he explained, an assertion he buttressed with citations to Aristophanes, Plutarch, and similarly significant classical sources. Sometimes, it turns out, flinching is a kind of assent.

• • •

On 27 November 2010, the Michigan State Spartans football team carefully prepared a cooler full of green and white confetti (the team’s colors) with which they anointed coach Mark Dantonio at the conclusion of their Big-Ten-clinching 28-22 victory over Penn State at Happy Valley. This striking convergence of the traditionally distinctive phases of sacrificial ritual—baptismós and phyllobolia—was occasioned by collective concern about Dantonio’s health (he had been hospitalized for a heart attack and complications in the months preceding the game). A few weeks later, the Spartans were crushed 49-7 by Alabama’s “Crimson Tide” in the Capital One Bowl on New Year’s Day, but Dantonio emerged unharmed. The team did not kill him, eat his heart and thighs, and then immolate his other remains on a towering altar erected at midfield.

• • •

Still, it is by no means clear that structural-functional psycho-mythographies of ancient chaff hurling do much to advance a proper history of modern confetti. Sure, one can easily shiver in a wedding chapel, sensing—as rice rains on ducking tenderness and gravels the nuptial path—that the ghost of phyllobolia haunts the proceedings. Palm Sunday too, can bring a twinge. And yes, the learned ethnographer, pelted with powdered pigments in the streets of Jaisalmer during the festival of Holi (the bright dusts were once prepared from ground turmeric seeds, and the pulverized leaves of neem and dhak trees), may muse on the funeral pyre that consumed the evil demon demigodess Holika, after whom the occasion is named. And true, true, a sensitive poet can certainly feel, as the glitter descends on New Year’s Eve, that there is more than a little of Jupiter’s encounter with Danaë in the dropping sparkle-dust. But the disciplined historical thinker, the true historicist, will always be impatient with nebulous invocations of nebulous atavisms. We should try to be precise—even about the showers of polychrome chad we toss in glee.

• • •

Throwing confetti is not an exact science, and neither is philology. But the latter comes closer. Confetti hails from the Latin past participle of conficere, meaning “to prepare or make ready.” Passed through Old French, the root word took on the sense of “preserving”—hence the French confit and confiture, meaning, respectively, “preserved meat” and “preserved fruit,” i.e., jam. In the wake of the discovery of the New World and the intensive cultivation of sugar cane on slave plantations in the tropical Americas, the dominant meaning of confit and its pan-European cognates came to be candying—cooking in sugar. Confetti, in eighteenth-century Italian, thus meant “little sweets,” the kind of thing an Englishman might call a “sugarplum,” which is to say, small balls of confect-ionary. Sometimes these consisted of a mince of candied fruit (often encased in a sugar shell—powdered, granulated, panned), and sometimes they were built like a jawbreaker around a kernel of seed (anise, coriander, etc.) or a nut (like what we now call a “Jordan almond”). These were things that could be thrown.

• • •

Here is a young Englishwoman, Anna Brownell Jameson, describing an extravagant afternoon on Naples’s Strada di Toledo in her Diary of an Ennuyée (1826):

Among our most potent and malignant adversaries, was a troop of elegant masks in a long open carriage, the form of which was totally concealed by the boughs of laurel, and wreaths of artificial flowers with which it was covered. … They were armed with small painted targets and tin tubes, from which they shot vollies of confetti in such quantities and with such dexterous aim, that we were almost overwhelmed whenever we passed them. It was in vain we returned the compliment; our small shot rattled on their masks, or bounded from their shields, producing only shouts of laughter at our expense.

The occasion? Carnevale, the madcap street festivals that traditionally precede Ash Wednesday and the forty-day fasting season called Lent—the preparation for the paschal sacrifice known as Easter.