This one goes out to all the Clowns…
I likened the roll of commedians in current society to the Native American “clowns”.
Native American Clowns were often vulgar, scary to children, tormented people (for instance, by throwing hot coals on them) and being overtly sexual in a society that was typically very reserved in that regard.
These clowns, also known as “thunder beings” were considered to be more powerful than shamans. Their roll was considered extremely important to in society.
The clowns reminded society that all things were sacred. By acting totally absurd, like throwing hot coals on people, kicking them, eating excrement, being perversely sexual… nothing was outside their capacity because nothing was outside all that is, which is sacred. Indigenous people believe that if something exists, it is of the Great Creator, and so a flower is as sacred as a piece of shit. Clowns were there to remind them of that.
So if a person got hit by a hot coal and felt pain, that pain is sacred because it is of equal worth in this world as pleasure. Great Creator created it, and so it is as important as everything else.
There is a book that does it much better than I’m doing now and it’s called Teachings From The American Earth (edited by Dennis Tedlock and Barbara Tedlock)
Here’s a couple of quotes:
“’Fooling around, the clown is really performing a spiritual ceremony’. Indeed, these actions are a translation, as it were, of the knowledge of another reality: a non-objective, shapeless, unnatural world of pure power or energy symbolized by lightning.”
“The clown’s mystical liberation from ultimate cosmic fears brings with it a liberation from conventional notions of what is dangerous or sacred in the religious ceremonies of men.”
“Although the clown, by causing people to laugh at shamans and other religious authorities, might appear to weaken the fabric of his society’s religion, he may actually revitalize it by revealing it’s higher truths. For example, the Navajo clown who reveals sleight-of-hand tricks is in effect reminding the people that these tricks are not in themselves the power which cures them, but are instead a symbolic demonstration of power which is itself invisible.“
