Confusing usage of "as ... as" in this context

Question

Finland was a very sparsely populated, extensive area, and the peasantry succeeded in retaining many of the ancient traditions, exactly as in Europe generally, by giving them Christian interpretations.

...

This is what happened in the productive village of Ritvala in Tavastland, for instance, where an ancient heathen fertility rite was given Catholic garb in the early fourteenth century, but otherwise continued into the eighteenth century in as bacchanalian a guise as it always had.

(bolds are mine)

• A history of Finland by Henrik Meinander

My concern is sencond sentence above.

My first question: What does otherwise mean in this sentence? Does it mean that they gave their fertility rite a catholic garb and in the backstage the were continuing their own tradition?

Second question: Where does "as bacchanalian a guise as" belong to in this sentence? I am getting confused about this particular usage of "as ... as" in this sentence. Can someone please put a simplified version of this sentence? Because I want to translate this sentence into my native language.

Answer 1

The use of otherwise here means "in other respects" or "in a different manner". In the context of your quote, it is being used to say that the religious rites in this village only have very superficial Christian elements, and are pagan in other respects. The phrase "Catholic garb" can refer literally to Catholic vestments worn by priests and other clergy, or it can serve as a metaphor for only the outward trappings of Catholicism. He is stating that the people in this village might dress up like Catholics, but they don't behave like Catholics.

I think this also helps shed some light on the second part you're confused with, the "as bacchanalian a guise as" part. The "as...as" part is actually pretty straight forward. It's used for similes, that is, likening two different things as being the same through a linking adjective. All he's done is extended the form a little into as [adjective] a [noun] as instead of the more simple as [adjective] as. There's an English stackexchange post the [adjective] a [noun] formation here.

The second part of this that makes it tricky is that he's actually comparing the ongoing rites of the village against its historical practices. The sentence is just very long and compounded, so I think it will help if I split it up visually like so:

This is what happened in the productive village of Ritvala in Tavastland, for instance, where an ancient heathen fertility rite was given Catholic garb in the early fourteenth century, but otherwise continued into the eighteenth century in

as bacchanalian a guise as

it always had been

We can simplify this into

[the village's new, seemingly Christian rites were] as bacchanalian as [they always had been].

And further down to the simplest level:

the new rites were as bacchanalian as the old rites

This simplification does not have all of the nuance of the original text, but I think it clearly gets across the gist of what he's saying.

Answer 2

I can see two possible intents behind "otherwise", and would need more context to know which was the correct one.

The first possibility is that "otherwise" means "in other ways", and contrasts the outward appearance of the festival to everything else about it. So, it would mean the festival perhaps acquired some Catholic iconography, but was the same ancient pagan festival in all other ways.

The second possibility I see is that "otherwise" is a synonym for "elsewhere", and contrasts the way the festival in Ritvala in Tavastland gained Catholic imagery, but in other places, the festival continued as it had before.