On Non-fatal Surprises and The Art of Getting Unstuck

This week, I happened to open the book, Painting Your Way Out of a Corner, The Art of Getting Unstuck, to find the following story and picture, which seemed fitting given all that goes on around here, including recent attention paid to Hermish penectomies and recent mention made of the humor-pain release connect, with laughter described as our response to a non-fatal surprise:

 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the River Styx.

Once upon a time, when winter was as yet unknown to humans, two goddesses, Demeter and Persephone, watched over the crops.  Although plants followed a natural life-death cycle, no field had ever lay barren. 

One day, as Persephone roamed the field picking flowers, the earth suddenly opened up, and the dark god Hades appeared in his golden chariot.  Ignoring Persephone’s pleas for help, Hades carried her off to his kingdom below and made her queen of the underworld, home of the dead.  Meanwhile, Persephone’s mother, Demeter, having heard her daughter’s desperate cries, searched for her everywhere for nine days and nights. Beside herself with grief, Demeter could no longer eat nor drink.  In her sorrow, all the crops withered and the fields lay barren, as she no longer took care of the life around her.

As she wandered lost and despondent, not knowing which way to turn, Demeter came at last to a well.  While she sat there, inconsolable, unable to figure out what to do next, people from the village came forward to comfort her.  All was for naught until a strange little creature appeared before the great goddess.   Old Baubo, herself a goddess, was small and headless.  As she began to dance about, she lifted her skirts to reveal her naked body underneath.  Her nipples were her eyes and her vulva was her mouth.  In that moment of bizarre revelation, Demeter laughed aloud and her laughter broke the spell of grief that held her immobile.  She “awakened” to a course of action--she would go to the sun god Helios, who sees everything.  From him she learned where Persephone was and that Zeus had been involved in the plot.  Only then was she able to negotiate a compromise with Zeus and Hades.  Her daughter would spend three months of the year with Hades and the remaining nine with her. 

The author and artist, Barbara Diane Barry, who included this story* in her book goes on to say, “Baubo is an ancient goddess of obscenity, and her dance serves an important function.  The sight of Baubo’s lewd movements catches Demeter unaware and presents an unlooked-for point of view. This view is so out of the ordinary that before Demeter can think about it , she reacts with laughter, which spontaneously releases grief’s paralyzing grip. I love this motif and hold it as a model for when I take myself too seriously.  We, too, can move through emotional blocks via some unforeseen and amusing image.” 

And when I turned the page to find her drawing of Baubo, I too laughed at the sight she presented.

Not that Trooper York needs any more encouragement. More laughter, however, may be what's needed to help us through the coming months. 

From the Philosophy of Humor:
 A century ago, when psychologists still talked like philosophers, an editorial in the American Journal of Psychology (October 1907) said of humor that “Perhaps its largest function is to detach us from our world of good and evil, of loss and gain, and to enable us to see it in proper perspective. It frees us from vanity, on the one hand, and from pessimism, on the other, by keeping us larger than what we do, and greater than what can happen to us".
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*This particular version of the Greek myth was discovered by Barry in the works of mythologist and lecturer Joseph Campbell, Transformations of Myths through Time,  and Jungian author and storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes, The Creative Fire.