Sacred Clowns & the Corn Mother

In her rich narrative description of the Corn Mother mural, Pola Lopez writes:

On either side of the mural are placed two Heyoka, or Koshari, Sacred clowns, who are watching this all unfold and are Medicine Men who teach us that we are all mirrors of each other, that we take ourselves too seriously as in our egos, and that we need to practice more respect. 

In close association with the clowns, we find images of the key regional foods:

Wrapped around the curved lines at either end are members of the Three Sisters, our main substance, the squash, the beans and of course corn in the center.

There is not much to add, or perhaps too much to say about clowns and the stories of past, present and future. When I first started to act seriously, in college, my first role was playing the title clown in J.M. Barrie's PANTALOON, an homage to the dwindling Pantomimes in the early 20th C. 

 

Charles Dickens loved clowns, fairy tales and the 1001 tales of the Arabian Nights. He was a devoted fan of the great 19th C. clown, Joseph Grimaldi, and often wrote about the power of his performances. In A Christmas Carol, he makes clear his debt to fairy tales as a tool for focusing on the terrible ways we treat children. His original assignment was to write a parliamentary pamphlet on the Plight of the Poor Man's Child.  That project merged with a 5 year long obsession with mesmerism (originally a medical movement to heal the patient by loosening the bonds of Past, Present and Future), and a close friend had a very sick young son. That political pamphlet turned into a timeless ghost story about what happens when money grows more important than the care and education children.

One of my favorite movies is Fellini's I Clowns.  You can watch it by clicking that link. Another favorite is Charlie Chaplin's Limelight. Here is an article about the difficulties in making that movie. It took 20 years to get it released in the USA. That's how terrified USA was of Chaplin's clowning during the McCarthy era.

Clowns can arouse laughter, fear and anger, but in the sacred traditions of the Pueblo Clowns, all of those possibilities have a shamanistic function. They are a full frontal assault on your ego, a signal to pay attention to something bigger than your little worries and fears. Pola says that a common feeling that they arouse can be, "If you see a Clown, RUN!"