“In Christianity it is death that laughs, the devil laughs, and mermaids laugh; the Christian God never laughs. ‘Christ never laughed,’ the artist A.A. Ivanov remarked to Turgenev, while painting his Christ….” (from Theory and History of Folklore, by the great Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp, 1984, p. 137).
I
mean, we all could be rock ‘n rolling with deities who understand that laughter rules:
“...In life, [according to ancient Pagan religion], we observe the command to laugh…. The thought goes still further: laughter is endowed not only with the power to accompany life but also with the power to call it forth” (Propp, p. 131).
Case in
point: the earth blooms in spring only because someone coaxed the Great
Goddess Demeter into hanging up her troubles and laughing again!
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