Waiting for the Royal Family at Entrance to the Palace c. 1887

Henry Hamilton Bennett captured this stereograph, "Waiting for the Royal Family at Entrance to the Palace", an image of a winter festival. Here, the iconography of royalty, normally set in stone, meets the ephemeral, performative, and carnivalesque. The figures swathed in furs evoke ancient rites of disguise and transformation, resonating with the "ἄρκτος" rituals of ancient Greece, where young girls dressed as bears, blurring the lines between human and animal. This potent visual motif of transformation is seen across cultures, from shamanic traditions to medieval mummery. The presence of camels, symbols of the exotic and the regal, further complicates the scene. The image evokes the powerful psychological tension between the desire for social order and the release of instinctual drives during festivals. The winter festival is a cyclical return, not just of seasons, but of deeply embedded cultural expressions. The past reverberates, shapes, and informs the present in the theatre of human existence, transforming the cold of winter to the warmth of community celebration.