Momo (mythology)

Details of Hippolyte Berteaux's painting on the roof of the Graslin Theatre, Nantes Opera Room: the God Momo.

Momo (in ancient Greek Μωμος Mômos, 'mockery', 'blame'; in Latin momus) was, in Greek mythology, the personification of sarcasm, mockery and ironic wit. He was the god of writers and poets, a spirit of malicious blame and unfair criticism.

Hesiod recounted that Momo was a son of Nix, the night Lucian of Samosata recalled (in the extended dialogue Hermotimus, 20) that he mocked Hephaestus for having made men without doors in her breasts through which it could be known if her thoughts and feelings were true. He even made fun of Aphrodite, though all he could find was that she was talkative and she wore squeaky sandals (Filostratus, Epistles ). Due to his constant criticism, he was exiled from Mount Olympus.

He was represented with a mask that he raised so that his face could be seen, and with a doll or a scepter ending in a grotesque head in his hand, a symbol of madness.

He appears occasionally as a character in the work of Luciano de Samosata, and in the XV century in the Momus sive de principe (1450), a widely read and influential picaresque and political satire by the humanist León Battista Alberti, sometimes attributed to Luciano; The Spanish translation of this satire was published in 1553 by Agustín de Almazán in Alcalá de Henares under the title La moral y muy graciosa historia del Momo, of which a moralizing recast was made in 1666 under the title from the Moral history of the god Momo: teaching of princes and subjects and books of chivalry, published in Madrid by Father Benito Remigio Noydens (1630-1685). In the Viage de Sannio (1585) by the poet Juan de la Cueva he appears as Jupiter's interlocutor. The mathematician and mythographer Juan Pérez de Moya says of him in his Philosophia secreta:

The Momo pretended the poets to be a very lazy god, who used not to understand anything else but to rebuke other works and works, as well as men and gods.

Baltasar Gracián presents it in the second part of his Criticón in his chapter "The glass roof and Momo throwing stones". The nature of the character made him a frequent artistic and allegorical motif in emblematic literature. When Sir Francis Bacon wrote an essay entitled Of Building (XLV), he stated in it that "He who builds a good house on a bad seat condemns himself to prison... It is not only It is not the bad air that makes the seat bad, but the bad roads, the bad markets and, if Momo is consulted, the bad neighbors.” Laurence Sterne ruminated on the possibilities of Momo's window to the soul in a typical incoherent excursion into Tristram Shandy.

In the Carnival festivities of several Spanish-speaking cities, homage is paid to the god Momo with various acts. Specifically, in the cities of Barranquilla (Colombia), Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Montevideo (Uruguay), during Carnival allusion is made to the god Momo. The figure of the god Momo also appears in the Carnival of Malaga and in the Carnival of Cádiz (Spain) where it acquires great prominence on Carnival days and even its burning during this festival.