Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins

Laughter in the History of Religion

Ingvild Saelid Gilhus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134717675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins analyses how laughter has been used as a symbol in myths, rituals and festivals of Western religions, and has thus been inscribed in religious discourse. The Mesopotamian Anu, the Israelite Jahweh, the Greek Dionysos, the Gnostic Christ and the late modern Jesus were all laughing gods. Through their laughter, gods prove both their superiority and their proximity to humans.
In this comprehensive study, Professor Gilhus examines the relationship between corporeal human laughter and spiritual divine laughter from c`ussical antiquity, to the Christian West and the modern era. She combines the study of the history of religion with social-scientific approaches, to provide an original and pertinent exploration of a universal human phenomenon, and its significance for the development of religions.

1 The Ancient Near East

Laughter of derision and laughter of regeneration

Nobody knows when humans began to laugh, nor does anybody know when a concept of ‘laughter’ originated. It is possible to discern early religions in prehistoric tombs, burials and remains of buildings, but the sound of laughter has died away. Laughter is not preserved in artifacts, so we are forced to focus on symbols of laughter and narratives of laughter, acknowledging that they are different from the laughter of the living. The most ancient laughter in our world is found in myths. As narratives about the connection between gods, humans and the world, the best myths are universal and entertain people across cultures and through the centuries, at the same time as they are intimately intertwined with the culture in which they originated and the people that used them. Their transmittal to us is dependent on writing. How textual laughter stands in relation to actual laughter in ancient cultures is unknown. It is, however, reasonable to regard the ancient texts as indicative of what these societies regarded as significant contexts of laughter (Foster 1974, Römer 1978, Kraus 1960).

Laughter and Trickery

The earliest recorded laughter exists in the context of divine male power. The laughter of the Mesopotamian head of the gods, Anu, cunningly keeps humans in their place and the laughter of the Hittite deity Kumarbi strives for supremacy in the divine world. Anu’s laughter is found in the myth about Adapa, written in Akkadian on a tablet of clay from the fifteenth or fourteenth century BC.¹

The wise Adapa, a priest in Eridu, was out fishing to provide offerings for the altar of Ea, the god of the life-giving fresh waters. Ea was known for his wisdom and magical knowledge. He had introduced humans to the benefits of civilization and was by and large the friend of humankind. like the other Mesopotamian gods, he received daily attendance in the temple and had food served at his altar (Kramer and Maier 1989). Ea had given wisdom to Adapa, but not eternal life. As Adapa was out on the sea, the South Wind went for his boat and overturned it. Adapa cursed the South Wind. The curse was immediately effective; the wing of the South Wind broke, and for seven days no wind blew over the sea. When Anu, the enigmatic god of heaven, learned that Adapa had stopped the Wind, he became furious and summoned Adapa before his throne. Before Adapa went, Ea advised him to let his hair be unkempt and to clothe himself in mourning. Ea informed Adapa that when he arrived at the gates of heaven he would be asked by its two keepers, Dumuzi and Gizzida, why he was in mourning. To this Adapa should answer that it was because Dumuzi and Gizzida had disappeared from the land. The two flattered gods would look at each other and laugh a lot, and they would put in a plea for Adapa before Anu. Standing before the throne of Anu, Adapa would be offered the Bread of Death and the Water of Death. Ea advised Adapa not to eat or drink, but to accept a garment and anoint himself with the oil they would also offer him.

Adapa did as he was advised, and everything happened as Ea had said, except for one thing: the food which Adapa was offered was not what Ea had said it would be. On the contrary, he was offered the Bread and the Water of Life. However, he acted according to the advice that Ea had given and refused to eat, whereupon the god of heaven laughed at Adapa and mocked him:

Anu watched him and laughed at him,

‘Come, Adapa, why didn’t you eat? Why didn’t you drink?

Didn’t you wish to be immortal?’

(Dalley 1989:187)

In his defence, Adapa said that Ea had bidden him not to eat or drink, and Anu ordered Adapa to be sent back to earth. Ironically, the rest of the tablet is broken, and the end is missing.

People in Mesopotamia had no belief in a blessed hereafter; on the contrary, they believed that the gods did not wish them to be immortal, any more than Jahweh in the Old Testament wanted Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Life and live forever. Human beings were created to serve the gods, as Adapa served Ea by providing the god with food. When they were dead, they led a miserable shadowy existence beneath the earth, sitting in darkness and eating dust. The Mesopotamian myths thus comment upon the themes of life, death and immortality. In the myth of Adapa, death loomed large after the wing of the South Wind broke. Death is represented in the shape of Dumuzi and Gizzida, gods who usually stayed in the underworld; it is present in the clothes of mourning and the unkempt hair of Adapa; and in Ea’s references to the Water and Bread of Death. Life is symbolized by the gown and the oil Anu gave Adapa. Immortality is present by being absent: Ea had not made Adapa immortal, and Adapa was cheated out of the Water and Bread of Life.

Trickery is obviously at the core of the narrative; there are at least two frauds in the myth, and both are due to Ea. The first fraud occurs when Adapa tells Dumuzi and Gizzida that it was for their sake that he was dressed in mourning. We know that the clothes of mourning were no true expression of grief, but a trick to make Dumuzi and Gizzida intercede for Adapa with Anu. Their laughter is an answer to Adapa’s attempts to flatter them. The second and vital fraud is the food Adapa was offered; either it carried death as Ea said, or it was life-giving, as Anu said. In both cases, Adapa was tricked.

Most probably, Adapa was cheated out of immortality because his master, the cunning Ea, tricked him. Apparently Ea did not want Adapa to become immortal, either because he had not the power to make him so himself or because he would then lose Adapa’s service. In that case Anu’s laughter was a twofold mockery: it mocked Adapa who had wrongly distrusted Anu and confused immortality with mortality; and it mocked the petty Ea who did not wish his favourite to become immortal:² Why Anu bothered to offer Adapa immortality in the first place is an open question. Perhaps he wished to make fools out of Adapa and Ea, or wanted to keep Adapa in heaven because he had become too clever to stay on earth. If this was the case, Anu’s laughter was in anger (Bing 1984). In any case, the laughter gave vent to the tension which had built up after the wing of the South Wind was broken, causing death, life and immortality to be played out against each other. Adapa was made the pawn in a divine game where divine power showed its superiority at the expense of a human victim.

The divine laughter was hardly a nice laughter.³ The verb ‘laugh’ (sahu) in Akkadian texts is on the whole used mostly in connection with others’ misfortunes. When Anu laughed and thus showed his superiority, this agrees with other occurrences of laughter in Akkadian texts. For example, when the god Nergal courts the goddess of the underworld, Ereskhigal, his lust and flirtation have a strong touch of this superiority when he laughs, seizes her by her hair and draws her to bed (Dalley 1989:176).

In the myth of Adapa, Anu’s laughter is contrasted with Adapa’s curse at the South Wind. Through his curse, Adapa upset the order of the world; Anu’s ridicule and laughter bring the scales again into balance. The laughter of the myth supports the hierarchy of power: when Adapa flatters the two gods of the underworld to make them laugh, he seeks the co-operation of gods who are more powerful than he. The most powerful in the world of gods and humans is Anu. His laughter precipitates Adapa’s return from the realm of the divine to his normal place in the world. Anu’s laughter is derisive, but not destructive: the result is that Adapa returns to life. That the Assyrian version of the myth is adapted to a magical ritual, with the purpose of curing illness in a shoulder, indicates that the end of the myth was regarded as a happy one (Burkert 1992). As the wing of the South Wind apparently healed, the shoulder would also heal. In both cases, things went back to normal.

The laughter of the two flattered subordinate gods and the laughter of Anu are all part of a game of power whose effect is to uphold the hierarchy and ensure stability. Mesopotamian societies were hierarchic, as was the world of the gods, with Anu watching over the dignity of the kingdom and the king acting as the head of the state. The difference between gods and men was enormous, as was the difference between king and servant. Divine order ruled the world, and the fate of each person was determined in advance. Even if this fate could be discovered through divination, and modified through prayer to the guardian spirits, the basic laws of existence, for instance that man was mortal and gods immortal, could not be changed. The mocking laughter of Anu was conservative. That it was also laughter at the expense of humans comes as no surprise, nor does the fact that Adapa returned to earth and mortality.

Not all divine laughter in the Ancient Near East reflected superior gods stable in their hierarchical positions. In a Hittite translation of a Hurrian myth, we encounter the laughter of Kumarbi, the son of Anu, and it occurs in a myth about the succession of gods.⁴ In the myth, Kumarbi attacks his father, Anu, the king of heaven. Anu flies towards the sky, but Kumarbi rushes after him, drags him down, bites off his genitals and swallows them: ‘When Kumarbi had swallowed the “manhood” of Anu, he rejoiced and laughed out loud’ (Hoffner 1990:40).

The acts of utter degradation, dethroning and castration, are accompanied by Kumarbi’s triumphant laughter. His triumph turns sour, however, when Anu tells Kumarbi that by swallowing his genitals, he has been made pregnant from Anu’s seed and will bear new gods (Leick 1991:106–7). Kumarbi immediately spits out some of Anu’s ‘manhood’, and thereby gods are born from earth. But he still has to give birth to the Weather-god, through the ‘good place’, probably his phallus (Kirk 1970:213–20). Eventually Anu and the Weather-god overthrow Kumarbi.

In this myth, Kumarbi obviously overreached himself and suffered defeat. His laughter, like that of Anu in the Adapa myth, reflects the importance of hierarchy and power in the division of gods and men in the Mesopotamian and Human worlds. But in contrast to Anu’s laughter in the Mesopotamian myth, Kumarbi’s laughter in the end reveals itself to have been a mistake. In both the Adapa and the Kumarbi myth, laughter is connected with power. By combining laughter with the biting off of genitals, the Kumarbi myth gives divine laughter a truly aggressive edge. Curiously, through the pregnancy of Kumarbi, this myth also reveals other aspects of ancient laughter, of regeneration, fertility and growth.

Creation, Change and Control

In Egyptian texts, laughter (zbt) is rare, and seldom connected with humour (Gugliemi 1979, 1980, van de Walle 1969). When it does occur, Egyptian laughter is often derisive and is an expression of superiority, though it may also be regenerative and creative.

In one Egyptian myth laughter is clearly erotic and represents a turning point in the narrative.⁵

The gods Horus and Seth had fought over who should inherit the throne of Egypt. The high council of the gods, the holy Ennead, tried to negotiate a peace, but the gods of the council came to blows and the audacious god Baba even mocked the sun god Re, saying, ‘Your shrine is empty!’ When no one served in the temples of the gods, it meant that the gods were no longer taken seriously. Baba could not have said anything more injurious; Re promptly lay down on his back, and his heart was sore (Sørensen 1991:3–9). The Ennead was angry with Baba and rebuked him, ‘Go away: you have committed a very great crime’, and everyone went to their tents. Re remained on his back, sulking in solitude. Then Hathor, the goddess of sexuality and birth, went up to Re. She stood before him and uncovered her nakedness: Re burst out in laughter, rose and returned to the council.

In this myth, the exposure of the female body makes the god laugh. Like the hierarchic laughter of superiority and derision, such erotic laughter is a repeated motif. It is often triggered by an unexpected display of the naked female body, accompanying and often causing a dramatic turning point in a divine or/and human drama. Erotic laughter fights on the side of life against death, and initiates a new beginning.⁶

The combination of sexuality and laughter was not restricted to myths; it was also found in rituals. Herodotus mentions that when women worshipped Artemis in Egypt, mockery and indecent exposure were part of the ceremonies (Historiae, II, 59–60). In many parts of the world, professional jokers have participated in funerals to cheer up the mourners and counteract the rule of death, and their activity often involved obscene behaviour. Indecent joking and embarrassing words and gestures were believed to stimulate the forces of life, promote fertility and avert evil spirits. In the Egyptian myth of Re and Hathor, when the goddess removed her clothes, showed her body and paraded her sexuality, her behaviour violated cultural norms and kindled a sexual response expressed as laughter. Laughter symbolized the god’s opening up to life and regeneration.

The regenerative aspect of laughter makes it a useful symbol in myths of creation as well. Through centuries and millennia, the Egyptians developed and refined their different myths about the creation of the world (Sauneron and Voyotte 1959:2–91, Lesko 1991:87–122). Creation could, for instance, take place through pre-existent matter, through the creative word or by the creator bringing forth primeval matter from his own body. In the old Heliopolitan cosmogony, alluded to in texts from different periods, the god Atum impregnated himself and ejaculated Shu and Tefnut from his mouth. They were the first gods, and from them and their children other gods were born. But if gods could be sneezed out or spat out, they could just as well be laughed out. According to a late version of this myth, the gods were born from laughter, while humans came into beings from the tears of the god of creation.⁷ The parallel between spitting and sneezing, and tears, suggests that laughter is conceived of as a sort of primeval matter. Since laughter is a dynamic power, it can also be linked with the creative word.

Creation by means of words can be viewed as a creation by the mind at the expense of the body. If the words are precise, they show the creator god’s sovereign control. Jahweh created in this way when he did his six days’ work and said, ‘“Let there be light”; and there was light’. The rationality of the god is emphasized at the cost of divine emotions or body. But words do not need to be rational, they can also be mere sounds, powerful nonsense with magical effects, a point on a sliding scale between laughter and speech. Both nonsense and laughter are sounds, both lack precise meanings, but both may have an eruptive force which can create the world. In Egypt, creative laughter was paralleled by creation through words. The motif of the creative laughter and the motif of the creative word have a similar function. According to a late myth, the Egyptian goddess Mehetweret created the world by means of seven words which went out of her mouth (Sauneron and Voyotte 1959:31, Kákosy 1982:3–4); while in one of the magical texts from Roman times, ‘A sacred book called “Unique”, or “Eighth Book of Moses”’, seven gods were created from seven bursts of laughter ejaculated by a superior god (Betz 1986:172–89, Smith 1984). This superior god is nameless. It is never said what the cause of his laughter was. Anyhow, from his ‘CHA CHA CHA CHA CHA CHA CHA’, seven gods were born. They were the gods of light, water, mind, generative power, fate, time and soul.

When a god laughs seven times and the seven bursts of laughter create seven new gods, the creative power of laughter is not only exploited but also kept in check. This is in conformity with the ancient wisdom teaching in Egypt that warned against exaggerated laughter and Schadenfreude; but if one’s superiors laughed, it was important to laugh with them. It was not laughter in itself that the teachers of wisdom wanted to quench—in a time of upheaval and social unrest, the sages complained that man had lost the ability to laugh—but they wanted laughter to be kept under control. The Egyptians preferred to live in an orderly world where everything had its right place and its right time; nothing should be too much and nothing too little. They had controlled the flooding of the Nile and used it for their purpose for centuries. Thus they knew a great deal about the relationship between untamed power on the one hand and systematic order on the other. Uncontrolled bursts of divine laughter might bring forth a disorderly world.

Interestingly, the myth of laughter creating seven gods comes in the middle of a magical ritual. The magician had great ambitions; his purpose was to conjure up the highest god of the universe to be his helper. The ritual was elaborate with long preparations and many ingredients. The magician had to purify himself for forty-one days. The spell had to be said in Aries, when the moon was dark, in a house on ground level where no one had died during the past year, and with a door facing west, where the god would enter. On the floor, the magician was to build an earthen altar. He had to have wood of cypress, ten pine cones full of seed, two white roosters and two lamps, each holding an eighth of a pint of good oil. There were to be seven types of incense, seven types of flowers, figures made of flour, magical sounds, and drawings. The conjurings were many and the names of gods were invoked as the ritual proceeded.

This lengthy procedure illustrates that Egyptian magic had a recipe that had to be followed in every detail, otherwise the magic would not work or the result would ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Ancient Near East: Laughter of derision and laughter of regeneration
• 2. Greece: When laughter touches the unthought
• 3. Rome: Critic of laughter and critical laughter
• 4. Early Christianity: Laughter between body and spirit
• 5. Medieval Christianity: Carnival, Corpus Christi and bodily laughter
• 6. Modernity and the Remythologization of Laughter: Churchly boredom and therapeutic laughter
• 7. Religion of Jokes: Flirtation with the East
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index