Open Question: Divine Laughter


Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan by Joachim Anthonisz. Wtewael (Dutch, 1566–1638)

Reading Jung's Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Volume 9, Part I), I have been thinking about Greek mythology and how the Olympian gods had a sense of humor. They played pranks on each other and overall enjoyed funny situations with full display of laughter. Just think about the laughing gods that gathered when Hephaestus's trapped Ares and Aphrodite in bed together. I also think about the Native-American tradition of the Trickster (for example, Navajo and Winnebago lore), the pranks of Loki is the Norse tradition, and other "trickster" deities in Hinduism, and so on.


So my question is, where is the Trickster aspect in the Judeo-Christian tradition? 


The amputation of an aspect of the divinity should have, as far as I understand, momentous consequences for culture and individual psyche. I keep thinking about how Jung pointed out how the Christian religion has pretty much expelled Evil from the figure of God. The consequence of that was that Evil became a human matter, with Hell becoming a definite place on earth. 

Jung also pointed out how, among the various Christian denominations, only the Catholic Church admitted the feminine in the godhead by elevating Mary alongside the Holy Trinity. This meant that in Catholicism at least the "positive" aspect of the feminine was reintegrated in the divine, although the chthonic feminine was forced in the unconscious. For post-reformed Christians, however, the whole feminine disappeared in the depths of the collective unconscious.

If we don't have a Trickster in our culture, if our Christian god doesn't laugh, what are the effects? What does our psyche miss? Did we perhaps stop valuing moral flexibility, or acknowledging that truth comes in many, surprising forms? Did we lose a crucial reminder that dogma and institutions should be challenged in their very foundations? Did we stop appreciating the energy of Nature in attempting all evolutionary quirks to survive? 

Laughter and humor are certainly intoxicatingly alive and creative. At the moment, they're earthy, all-human activities, but I'd love to know the possibilities of elevating them into the divine.

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