For ancient civilizations, the navel was not only an object of desire associated with beauty, but it was also a part of the body to which powers were attributed such as healing and giving a person a sense of belonging to a place.
In memoriam. Gutierre Tibón (1905-1999).
Rober Diaz. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P].
Part of an ancient tradition, the navel of newborns is buried by some indigenous peoples. Like the inhabitants of San Pedro Cholula, who buried the women's navel in the kitchen bracero so that the women would stay judiciously in their homes, or else they were smeared with honey so that, when they grew up, they would be sweet and tender. The men's stump was buried in the backyard if the father was a farmer, but if the father was a warrior, then he had to be taken to the battlefield, for they thought that the stump was part of the body and that the fate of the body would directly influence the child.
The Cholutecas soaked the navel in water; then, they poured a few drops of the water into the eyes of the infants to also cure the "evil eye". The burial meant, according to anthropologist Miguel Leon Portilla, the search for "a path for the destiny of the children". The Popolocas and the Nahuas carefully cut the navel to a "fourth", taking care not to leave it any bigger or smaller, since the sexual life of the infants would depend on this.
This rite was intended to give children, under the influence of the stump, a sense of belonging to the place where they were born. In other cultures -as for the traditional Korean culture- the navel is wrapped in paper or straw and kept in the room where the person was born; that is, in the space where the goddess of births is also found for them: Samsin. Then, it had to be slowly burned, and a family member had to watch over it; for there was also the belief that some woman who could not conceive could steal it from her to cure her infertility.
The navel is mentioned from the Song of SongsThe song is attributed to King Solomon, where he glorifies him as a place of beauty, a vessel of the moon, a point of reference and desire to praise his beloved: the Shulammite. In the A Thousand and One NightsSherezada also refers to it as a place where desires are contained and elixirs are carried. In China and Japan, women perfume their bellybuttons. In the Kama Sutra, it is seen as a point that shows the depth of the joints where the osculi (kisses) should adorn with their caresses.
Omphale was the wife of Tmolo, king of Lydia (a city in what is now Smyrna and Manisa, in Turkey); she, the one whose name means "the one with the beautiful navel", bought the demigod Hercules from the God Hermes after Hercules killed Iphite, the holder of Apollo's bow. Being a slave of Omphale, also called by the Romans "Heracles", he enjoyed putting on the clothes of his beloved, while she wore the skin of the Lion of Nemea and her Olive Tree maso.
In one night, the God Pan entered her room and believing that Omphale was the one lying in her lap tried to possess her. His surprise was to find a choleric Hercules who gave him his due. This allegory also served as a guideline for transvestism, and the navel as a form of parity, as men and women enjoyed the desire for clothes and tools and exchanged their roles, confusing the gods.
Given its proximity to the solar plexus - the most important chakra in the human body - the Third Chakra is where emotional energies are concentrated, it is the point where movement, pleasure, desire, sexuality and orgasm meet. Its color is orange and it has spread in the religions of New Age that plugging the navel interrupts the flow of bad energy.
In the myth of the androgynous, Socrates tells a highly fantastic story that denotes the importance of the navel: at first there were three types of sexes. The men, who were from the Sun, the women who were ruled by the Earth and the androgynous ones who belonged to the Moon. The latter had two heads, four arms and four feet; there were male androgynous androgynous women. While men and women were wasting their time suffering for each other, the androgynous ones were almost perfect beings who moved around and did everything with enormous efficiency, and in an act of pride they tried to go up to Olympus to defeat the Gods. When they tried to perform the felony, Zeus defeated them and split them in half, leaving the navel as the mark of their punishment and threatened that, if they tried again, he would divide them again, leaving them on one foot and with one hand. The androgynous people who remained on earth were not looking for their opposite sex, the counterpart to love it, but they loved beings of the same sex. The navel is the memory of their punishment.
There is a last recipe that is made on the coasts of Colombia as a witchcraft rite and that was spread as a sacrilegious act in which the father of the daughter or son was given a chocolate, where he also put the navel of the newborn baby that was first toasted and then ground and stirred when the liquid was beaten to make it foam so that the father had a love for the child that would not allow him or her to become detached in life.
Finally, the importance of our navel has been diluted in a sea of stereotypes, although our civilization really grants it little, its place will be there, with the rites that, by fashion or rediscovery, in the future give it a new validity, a new opportunity to remind us that, as part of the body, it has always been revered as a watery cavity that emulates the moon, the night, our dark side, which attracts mysteries, which insinuates another sexual cavity of connection with the environment because we were life through it and it is a place of our intimacy that we have been forgetting.
EEJ
