Baubo, a minor crone figure in a major Greek myth, has a counterpart in Uzume (Ama-No Uzume) a Japanese goddess with a prominent role in the most important myth of ancient Japan. Each brought healing laughter to a dire situation. While humorous remarks were made in one myth, and there was dance and drumming in the other, the specific act that was responsible for the laughter in both was the same: Baubo and Uzume lifted their skirts and exposed their vulvas. This gesture and the laughter it provoked restored a mother goddess’s ability to nurture and brought sunlight back to the world; it could not have been the hostile laughter of ridicule nor the snickering laughter at an obscenity. Something deeper and more significant was revealed.
Women who are comfortable being themselves laugh a lot together, especially crone-aged women. In The Metamorphosis of Baubo, Winfred Milius Lubel observed that “references to Baubo usually carry a special quality of laughter. It is a chuckling, wry sort of humor, compounded of irony, compassion, and shared experience between women…it is Baubo’s sacred belly laugh.” Baubo (also called Iambe) was only a maidservant with a bit role in the myth of Demeter and Persephone and yet she captured a crone spirit in women that is earthy, funny, compassionate and, ultimately, wise. She was described by Marija Gimbutas, the noted archaeologist, as an embodiment of an “important but little-known deity, who has touched the human psyche for millennia.”1
Bawdy Baubo
Once the goddess Demeter learned that her daughter Persephone had been abducted by Hades with Zeus’s permission, the pain of her loss was even sharper. She left Olympus and withdrew from the company of the gods, and wandered on earth, hiding her divine beauty disguised as a woman beyond childbearing. One day she appeared in Eleusis and sat by the well where the daughters of Celeus, the ruler of Eleusis, came to draw water. Curious about the stranger in their midst, they talked with her and found that she sought employment as a nursemaid. They led her home to meet their mother Metanira who had given birth to a baby boy. When the goddess put her foot on the threshold and touched her head on the ceiling, momentarily the doorway filled with divine light. Awed, Metanira, who had been seated with her infant son in her lap, immediately offered Demeter her own splendid couch and finest wine, which the goddess declined. The sight of a mother and child must have stirred memories and longing for her missing daughter because Demeter became mute and stood with her eyes downcast, until the servant Baubo brought her a simple chair. She then sat in grief-stricken silence from which no one could draw her out, until Baubo cheered the goddess with her bawdy humor. Her jests brought a smile, and then, when she lifted her skirt and exposed herself, Demeter laughed and was restored. Then she accepted a simple drink of barley water and mint, and agreed to become the baby’s nursemaid (a temporary solace in the midportion of the myth).2
Baubo’s jokes have not been retained through the ages, but what she represents even now is something women intuitively understand: the notion that in the midst of loss and betrayal, a woman might cry, sob, swear, even throw up, or feel benumbed in her grief and outrage, but if “Baubo” is present, someone can say something that can bring tears of laughter to the situation. It is often in laughter that we share our courage and know that we are survivors. In being able to laugh together, we affirm each other’s strength. Baubo’s jokes and gestures are a bawdy and belly-laughter humor that can arise among women in the midst of a disaster. A good friend can say something that evokes laughter at a very bad time, and healing begins.
When Baubo lifted her skirt in jest, as recounted in the classical Greek myth, it was an exposure of her vulva, an act called ana-suro-mai (literally meaning to lift one’s skirt) in Greek religious writing. The gesture was bawdy and evoked laughter but it was much more. Lubell traces this gesture from its prepatriarchal roots as a faint reminder of an earlier matriarchal time when the pubic area of the goddess was the holy gate through which all life came, and the inverted triangle was a sacred symbol. Baubo’s skirt-raising, vulva-exposing gesture can be found in artifacts and art from the paleolithic through the middle ages, and from old Europe and Egypt through Siberia to the Americas.
Some of the small clay “Baubo” figurines that have been found by archaeologists invite us to smile. They are women who have their clothes raised above a full belly and are mostly legs and abdomen. Sometimes a smiling face was actually represented on the belly. The cleft in the vee-shaped smooth chin is the vertical vulvar slit between her legs. While Baubo and these statuettes are minor images amidst the Olympian divinities and marble statues of ancient Greece, when her origins are traced back to prepatriarchal times, we understand that she is a faint and depreciated reminder that images of women’s sexuality and fertility were sacred, not prurient. Once the vulva was the entrance to the body of the goddess, and cleftlike cave entrances were painted earth-red in reverence.
Rufus C. Camphausen in The Yoni: Sacred Symbol of Female Creative Power also focused on artifactual evidence, widening the geographic range from which these images originated and widening the time span from paleolithic to contemporary time. Yoni is a Sanskrit word for female genitals that translates as “vulva,” “womb,” “origin,” and “source.” Camphausen chose to use this term because it had neither a clinical nor a pornographic connotation and derived from a culture and religious tradition in which female genitals are seen as the sacred symbol of the Great Goddess.
Representations of female genitals, breasts, and pregnant women from carvings, cave paintings, and other artifacts, provide circumstantial archaeological evidence that paleolithic and neolithic peoples worshiped goddesses. With the rise of patriarchy, the vulva went from being a place of reverence to a puritanical, unmentionable and “dirty” part of a woman. It went from a symbol of the goddess to one of the most demeaning and hostile words (“cunt”) a woman can be called.
In seeking the meaning of Baubo, Lubell made connections between women’s laughter, sexuality, and restoration of balance. “The spontaneity of Baubo’s laughter flashes out like graffiti across the ruins of the past. Her jests have vanished, but her wry and startling gesture and the record of her comic wit remain. Many have suggested that laughter among women is the hidden side of women’s sexuality. That kind of laughter—often associated with the trickster figure and with fertility—was often used in sacred and joyful rituals to ease a stressful situation, to set painful matters in perspective, to restore balance…She is irreverent and she is sacred.”3
Baubo apparently played a part in the Mysteries that were celebrated in Eleusis, northwest of Athens, for two thousand years until the shrine was destroyed in 395 C.E. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter says that after Persephone’s return from the underworld, Demeter gave the Mysteries to humankind. There were public portions, which we know about, and the Mysteries known only to initiates who were forbidden to reveal the secrets. Men and women participated in the Eleusinian Mysteries. The little we know about them is through the writings of Christian bishops who were hostile to these rites. According to Clement of Alexandria (150–215 C.E.), sometime during the Eleusinian Mysteries, Baubo “hoisted up her robes and displayed all of her body in a most unseemly manner.”4
Instead of being present in these solemn rites in Eleusis, it is more likely that Baubo was a presence at the Mysteries of Thesmorphia, a women-only, three-day festival held at Eleusis in October at the time of the autumn sowing of the grain. Women gathered together to mourn with the goddess and to console her for the loss of her daughter (reenacting the original abduction, which would be cathartic for them in the shared grief). After the solemn rites and communal mourning, there was hilarity, with jokes, gestures, foul language, and song.5
UZUME, THE JAPANESE GODDESS OF DANCE AND MIRTH
The irreverent and the sacred, healing laughter and lifting one’s skirts are found together in another myth across the world from Greece. This is a major myth of Japan, in which the grieving goddess is Amaterasu, the goddess of the sun and the ancestress of the emperors. When she withdrew into a cave, endless night resulted, and none could draw her out until Ama-no-Uzume, the goddess of dance and mirth, told jokes and lifted her skirt. This myth was recorded in the Kojiki (“Records of Ancient Matters”) and again in the Nihongi (“The Chronicles of Japan”) which were written in the eighth century C.E. from much earlier oral versions. Lubell6 and Merlin Stone in Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood7 have longer versions of the myth, which I retell as follows:
The Myth of Amaterasu
Amaterasu Omikami, called the Heavenly Shining She, the Great Woman Who Possesses Noon, and She Who Reigns Over the Plain of High Heaven, watched over the earth and its fields of growing rice (a similarity to Demeter, the Greek goddess of grain). Amaterasu also presided over her weaving women in the great Weaving Hall of Heaven. Her brother Susanowo (referred to as the Outrageous Male), the god of the sea and storms, was resentful that she had the greater power. One day, he announced that he intended to visit their mother and gained the right to approach Amaterasu’s heavenly realm to tell her of his plans. Instead, he came and trampled his sister’s newly planted heavenly rice fields. Then he defecated inside Amat-erasu’s sacred temple. Next he took and killed a colt of heaven, broke into her weaving hall, and flung the bloody carcass among the sacred silk looms, which caused a great uproar among the weaving priestesses.
(In the differing versions of this myth, either a priestess was killed by a shuttle, or Amaterasu herself was wounded in the vagina by a shuttle or was raped by her brother.)
Filled with anger and fear, Amaterasu then fled into the cave of heaven, fastened the great door tight behind her, and withdrew her light and warmth from the world. There was now only endless night. Without Amaterasu, nothing would grow on earth. Eight hundred divinities gathered before the cave and many tried to lure her out, with no success.
Finally, Ama-no Uzume, the goddess of mirth and dance, came forward with a plan. Uzume climbed upon a large upturned tub that resonated like a drum, and began her dance. Her feet drumming, her dancing ecstatic, she removed her undergarments and then, once she had the undivided attention of the eight hundred divinities, she lifted her kimono and exposed her vulva. They laughed, clapped their hands, and shouted; roosters crowed, and the sounds of hilarity reached Amaterasu in her cave. Curious, she looked out of the cave to see what was happening and faced the bronze mirror that had been placed outside the cave entrance. Her reflected light was so great that she could not see and so Amaterasu ventured out of the cave. When she did, those that watched closed the door behind her. Once Amaterasu came out of the cave, sunlight once again shone upon the earth, the pattern of day and night returned, and the earth was fertile once more.
This myth of the return of the light and life to the world was annually celebrated in Japan in a Shinto ritual, in which Uzume’s Kagura, a laughter-provoking, obscene (a Western characterization) dance was performed in temples. The Ise Shrine of Amaterasu, the holiest Shinto shrine in Japan, houses the Most Sacred Mirror. In nonwestern and unpuritanical Japan, Uzume is an esteemed goddess. Her drumming dance steps, jokes, and the exposure of her vulva are essential elements in this major myth of Japan.
In When the Drummers Were Women, Layne Redmond traced the drum as a sacred ritual instrument used by women as far back as the sixth millennium B.C.E., where it appears painted on a shrine room in ancient Anatolia (Turkey). The drum was a tool for many spiritual experiences. Different rhythms altered consciousness, facilitated childbirth, induced ecstatic and prophetic states. From sacred caves of old Europe through the mystery cults of Rome, women danced and drummed until they were forbidden to do so by the early church fathers.8 She speculates that drumming probably began as an echo of the human pulse, the rhythm we heard in the womb, and that the brain-wave state that it induces is the basic rhythm of nature. In teaching other women to drum and by being in a women’s drumming circle, Redmond became convinced that women have been dispossessed of a heritage, tradition, and sense of identity that was uniquely their own.
HEALING LAUGHTER
Healing laughter is a relief from tension and an expression of joy and hilarity. Bawdy humor is juicy humor that is also an earthy and sexual commentary about human nature, appetites, and foibles. At its most nurturing—which humor can be—there is an afterglow of good feeling. In the shared laughter, there is a sense of commonality about vulnerabilities and strengths. In making ribald comments or responding to them with laughter, women are acknowledging their sexuality and sexual experience and also revealing the sexual vanities or habits or proclivities of men, which is what men fear most.
To be Baubo/Uzume, a postmenopausal woman has to live in her aging body comfortably and unself-consciously. Her sexual energy is a component of her zest and vitality. With Baubo as an inspiration, she refuses to stop being herself just because she is older: she is a sensual, sexy woman who laughs and dances. Good humor and experience become enhancements to earthy sex. It would be in the tradition of Baubo to take up belly dancing after fifty. In fact, many celebrated belly dancers are postmenopausal women.
It may seem a stretch to appreciate Baubo as an archetype of wisdom, but she is. Hers may be a wisdom that only women can appreciate because she grows out of the numerous inelegant though profoundly important body experiences we have had from the onset of menstruation through pregnancy and menopause. In laughing or joking about what women go through biologically, we can be bawdy Bau-bos. This sharing often leads to more sensitive and serious talk about sexual experiences, miscarriages, abortions, infertility, and loss. In the telling, we are metaphorically lifting our skirts and revealing our vulnerable underside and our source of strength. Each woman’s story becomes a mirror for another woman to see herself and her resiliency. In sharing the pain and laughter, we go through these transitions and experience the healing power of humor, wisely coming to the conclusion that “such is life.”
Baubo is all that remained in Greek mythology of this bawdy aspect of the Great Goddess. When Baubo lifted her skirts and revealed her naked body to Demeter, she revealed a body that once had been a nubile maiden, and then was a full-breasted woman, and now, with her thinning pubic hair and sagging breasts, was the body of a crone. Each phase is part of a cycle, an expression of the dance of life. When we remember our divinity and not just our mortality, we know that everything that happens is part of life, and we are part of a divine dance. The danger of being a mortal is forgetting this. Demeter, in her identity as a human woman, was alone with her sorrow until Baubo raised her skirt and made her laugh. Maybe it helped Demeter put her loss in perspective, or perhaps she was reminded of the creative and sexual power that she had as a woman and a goddess of fertility. Baubo had lost her youth, her looks, and was past her childbearing years, but she was a juicy, bawdy woman, whose mirthful compassion for Demeter’s grief drew laughter out of the goddess. Only when sexuality is natural and pleasurable, can sex and mirth mix.
When I thought about contemporary embodiments of this archetype, Bette Midler—“The Divine Miss M,” a “goddess of mirth”—came to mind. This juicy and bawdy comedienne first became a star in the gay bathhouse culture of pre-AIDS New York, and continues to be earthy, sexual, and funny. Then there is the ana-suromai gesture of lifting one’s skirt, which seems so instinctual that little girls have to be trained out of doing it. Put a little girl of two or three in a skirt, and she will impulsively lift it up and down, “flashing” her underpants; from her delighted expression, she may know she’s being naughty and definitely is not ashamed (this has to be taught). It is also not unheard of for a group of grown women to “get away” for a weekend and become bawdy together.
The healing humor that women bring out in each other is spontaneous and natural. It suffers in the retelling because “you had to be there” to appreciate the in-the-moment, unself-conscious provocation for whoops of infectious laughter. In its full-blown splendor, it’s uproarious and raucous, emotionally juicy and wet, as in “I laughed so hard, I cried,” and “I laughed so hard, I wet my pants.” Especially when the humor is bawdy, but even when it is not, this kind of laughter resembles an orgasm; the laughter is uncontrolled and pleasurable, there is a physiological release, followed by well-being, and a sense of being spent. It’s good for the immune system and releases endorphins, which are healing elements physically, but what I see most healing is the instantaneous sharing that dissolves isolation and celebrates life. Green and juicy crones know this archetype well. It is a humor that is wise about the nature of life and has compassion for the foolishness and pain of it.
Men accuse women of not having a sense of humor or not getting the point of certain jokes that women do not think are funny. But women do get the point. Freud’s contention was that humor is disguised hostility, which is very evident in mother-in-law, dumb blonde, and male-bashing jokes. Laughing at the butt of the joke releases hostility, temporarily allies those that laugh together and feel superior, and has a sadistic edge. There is a world of difference between this kind of wounding humor and the healing humor of Baubo and Uzume. Like Amaterasu’s sunshine and Demeter’s laughter, this humor brings hope and renewal.