A is for Anus (Body Folktales)

This year, my A to Z Challenge theme is Body Folktales. Enjoy!

Yeah, I went there.

NSFW bodily functions ahead, ahoy! Although nothing sexual.

Here is the thing: Way more folktales feature anuses than you'd think. And many of them are very amusing.

(Let's not think about what this post will do to my search statistics.)

How the birds got their colors (Mocoví)

This story... keeps on giving. It begins with Fox getting into some sort of a fight, and accidentally landing butt-first on a tree branch. Because of this his anus becomes too big, and anything he swallows falls right out. To fix the issue, Fox asks the bees to plug up the hole with clay - a fix that is a little too successful, because now nothing comes out at all. When Fox begins to bloat, he asks Woodpecker to break the clay seal, and all the birds gather to watch the operation. The moment Woodpecker breaks through, things make an... explosive exit - splattering all the birds with the colors and patterns they wear to this day.

The parts of the body have an argument (Portugal)

Some of you may be familiar with the story of the argument between different parts of the body (also known in folktale terms as ATU 293: Debate of the Belly and the Members). It appears among Aesop's fables. In the well-known version, body parts all argue for their own supreme usefulness, and dismiss the stomach as lazy. But when the stomach stops digesting, all the other body parts start failing, until they admit the stomach is, indeed, useful. Moral A: Don't dismiss any member of a team without knowing their hidden talents. Moral B: Don't be angry at the ruling classes for being seemingly useless? Depends on what century the story was told in.
Anyway, there is another variant of this folktale type from Portugal where, instead of the stomach, the outlier body part everyone makes fun of is the anus. Everyone claims its useless. To teach them a lesson, anus decides to pucker up. With disastrous consequences, known to anyone struggling with severe constipation. Eventually, the body parts beg forgiveness and decide to vote anus MVP. Moral A: One a**hole can effectively ruin things for everyone. Moral B (worded by the folk tellers themselves): "In order to be a leader, it's not enough to think, you also need to be able to take a decent s**t."

The monster that devoured people (Kota people, India)

You thought man-eating monsters were bad? Meet Ponac, a terrifying creature from the stories of the Kota people. In the olden days, people didn't only have snakes, tigers, and elephants to worry about, they also had Ponac, who hunted humans, and devoured them whole - through his anus. He devoured ten to fifteen of them before a hero heard about what was going on, and set out to fight the creature with a sickle and a knife. When Ponac made an appearance, the hero held the sickle over his head and the knife pointing down to his feet, and thus he was crammed (their words, not mine) whole through the monster's anus. Once inside, he cut everything to pieces, and thus destroyed the creature. The village headman rewarded him with two wives.
Talk about true heroism.

Tafakula and the thieves (Tonga)

Tafakula is a deity in Tongan mythology with a very special... feature. In one story, some gods from Samoa visit an island under Tafakula's protection at night, with the intention of stealing one of the smaller islands from the lake on the larger island (islands within islands, people). As they are carrying the island away towards the east, Tafakula is notified by a subordinate deity of the theft. He stops the thieves in a spectacular fashion: he bends over and turns his anus towards them. Because his anus is "bright like the sun", the Samoans think they are seeing the sunrise, and drop their loot as they flee from the radiance. The discarded island can still be seen today.

Welcome to this year's A to Z Challenge! 

Don't forget to leave links to your blogs in the comments so I can visit ;)