A lot of people are afraid of a lot of things, but one of the more interesting fears or phobias is Ompalophobia — the fear of belly buttons. I’m not making this up. This would seem to be a particularly bad phobia to have since people suffering from Omphalophobia are terrified of belly buttons — sometimes those of others, but usually their own. How do you get away from your own belly button?
Belly buttons are kind of interesting — we all have them and they are located on the belly but they don’t do anything if you push them. Why are they called a button? Turns out that the belly button also goes by the term “navel.” The Romans call the belly button the umbilcus. The Greeks called it the omphalos. So if you add the greek word tome that means cutting, you get omphalotomy. That word means “cutting of the umbilical cord.” So maybe we use the term belly button because it’s a euphemistic title that sounds more attractive than the remains of your umbilical cord cut at birth.
Your belly button is your very first scar. It’s scar tissue left over from the cutting of the umbilical cord when you were born. All mammals have belly buttons. However, in some dogs and cats, they’re a little hard to see because they’ve healed well and they are covered with hair.
One of the most interesting questions about belly buttons and one that I’ve pondered about for a number of years is — Did Adam and Eve have belly buttons? I’ve often wondered about this. I’m not a big reader of the Bible but I’m pretty sure that in Genesis it says that God formed man (Adam) from the dust of the ground and later caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and while he was sleeping, took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh. Then with the rib, God made a woman (Eve.) OK — if Adam was made from dust and Eve was made from Adams rib, then neither one came from human parents. If they didn’t come from a mother, there would be no umbilical cord and therefore, no belly button (?)
From what I’ve read, theologians disagree on the existence of belly buttons for Adam and Eve. Painters over the years have also been divided on the subject — some have taken the easy way out and covered the belly button area with a strategically placed fig leaf or tree branch or an arm or something else. But some painted the pair without navels — some painted them with navels. It’s interesting that when Michelangelo painted Adam on the roof of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican he gave him a belly button.
One story I ran across during my extensive research for this blog occurred in 1944 in, where else, Congress. The US House Military Committee (chaired by Congressman Durham of North Carolina) refused to authorize a 30-page booklet, Races of Man, that was to be handed out to American soldiers fighting in World War II. The booklet had an illustration that showed Adam and Eve each with a belly button. The subcommittee ruled that showing Adam’s and Eve’s belly buttons would be “misleading to gullible American soldiers.”
There’s an old phrase that you don’t hear as much any more, contemplating one’s belly button. Literally it means to think about your belly button. But figuratively it is often used to refer to people who are thinking about relatively unimportant things or engaged in thinking about subjects that another person considers to be trivial. (Like maybe the subject of this blog….)
There’s an old joke that goes something like this… A boy was born with a golden screw in his navel. He couldn’t remove it no matter how hard he tried. It caused him a lot of embarrassment over the years and finally, after he grew up, he traveled to Tibet because he heard that there was a wise man there that might be able to help him. After climbing up a mountain, the wise man told him to sit down. He began to unscrew the golden screw and turned the screw for many hours. Finally — the screw came off. Very excited, the man stood up, and his butt fell off.
I suppose all stories (and even blogs) should have a moral and I guess the moral here is that we can contemplate our belly buttons as much as we want, but some things should just be left alone. Sometimes if we act, or speak, or write when we shouldn’t bad things can happen….
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