HPAVC/HPAVC CD-ROM.iso/pc/HUGETXT.ZIP/RIDLTRIK.TXT

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This article is excerpted from the Rocky Mountain Pagan Journal.
Each issue of the Rocky Mountain Pagan Journal is published by
High Plains Arts and Sciences; P.O. Box 620604, Littleton Co.,
80123, a Colorado Non-Profit Corporation, under a Public Domain
Copyright, which entitles any person or group of persons to
reproduce, in any form whatsoever, any material contained therein
without restriction, so long as articles are not condensed or
abbreviated in any fashion, and credit is given the original
author.!

                     THE RIDDLE OF THE TRICKSTER
                      a cross-cultural overview
                                  by
                     Thunderspud of Dragonfhain

    Who is this trickster archetype, the one who inspires such
mixed feelings and brouhaha?  Trickster has been with us from the
beginning.  Trickster will be there at the ending. (If there is
an ending, Trickster will probably trigger it).  Trickster is a
creator, a transformer, a joker, a truth teller, a destroyer.

    Whoever has created a dance, a song, written a ritual,
tailor-made a job, birthed a child or invented a game has
partaken of a controlled Trickster energy.  After all, in
Northwest Native and Inuit tradition, Raven created the world;
Loki is known to the Norse as a co creator (and the bringer of
Ragnarok); Anansi the spider-trickster among the Ashanti of Ghana
and Nareau the spider in Micronesia; Coyote among the Southwest
Natives --these are the creator aspects of this wild and
uncontrolled energy.  Trickster often begins in the void,
desiring to bring Order out of Chaos; once Order is imposed,
however, Trickster represents the breaking free of negative power
from the Universal Order of things.

    As a shape-shifter, Trickster is all things to all people,
at one time or another, and often simultaneously.  Of course
Trickster is a creator and a destroyer.  Sure he's a family man
and a vagabond.  Naturally he gives fire to humans and then
steals their food before they can cook it.  This is his style;
when he acts out of selfishness, everyone benefits -- Maui of the
Thousand Tricks might snare the Sun to slow it down, making life
easier for humans, but he did it so his mother would have more
time to cook for him.  When he acts out of altruism, there's most
always a negative effect --Marawa, a Lou Costello prototype from
Banks Island carved human figures from wood and put them in the
ground so they would grow and be strong; however, they merely
rotted and death came into the world of humans.  This shape-
shifter not only moves from shape to shape, but from world to
world.  Number Eleven suffered at the hands of death to free his
brothers; his brothers then took his lifeless body away and
revived him.  In the Winnebago cycle, Trickster dies three times
and returns to life three times.  In just one collection of
Coyote stories, Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping With His
Daughter, Coyote dies of a snake bite, a gunshot, an arrow wound,
a broken heart, a rock-fall and a drowning; this resembles
nothing so much as a Roadrunner cartoon.

    Trickster fuzzes the lines between Male and Female, between
cunning and stupidity (in one story Coyote steals a horse, in
another he almost drowns trying to eat some berries reflected in
a stream), between wisdom and stupidity.  Trickster tells us the
truth about our selves, showing us with truth and wit the sides
of our nature that we may be more comfortable not acknowledging;
he's the one who points at the Emperor's nakedness, he's Lenny
Bruce and Ashleigh Brilliant, Ken Kesey and Uncle Remus, Opus,
Geech, Tom Robbins, Abbie Hoffman, Don Becker, Weird Al Yankovich
and David Letterman, holding up a skewed mirror of reality for us
to look into.  Among the Aztecs, as serious a culture as this
continent has ever seen, Ueuecoyotl, a funny and outrageously
unacceptable clown figure; in the Southwest, at serious rituals,
he's the Koshare speeding around the circle with tickling
feathers and rattle, being ignored completely by the priest.

    Trickster shines on as a culture bringer: Prometheus steals
fire for his poor stunted creations, and pays a terrible and
eternal price for his philanthropy.  Loki also steals fire for
humans, as do Anansi, Raven, Coyote, Maui; so far I have found no
less than seventeen stories from different cultures on this
theme.  Anansi tricked Nyankopon the Sky-God out of his stories
and gave them to the humans.  Clat, from Banks Island, taught
humans how to sleep.

    In the stories of the Ashanti, Anansi invented the tar-baby
as a ruse to trap an elemental spirit, but in the Native American
stories, Coyote is trapped by a tar-baby set up by a farmer.
Actually the farmer had caught a rabbit with his tar-baby, but
Coyote happened along and asked Rabbit what he was doing there.
"The farmer who owns this field got mad at me because I wouldn't
eat his melons, so he stuck me here and said he'd come back and
make me eat chicken." Rabbit replies, "But I told him I wouldn't
do it."  Of course, greedy Coyote extricates Rabbit and wraps
himself around the tar-baby where he still his when the farmer
comes out and shoots him.

    So this is the Trickster, the energy that  allows us to
break out of our stereotypes, whether they've been imposed by
ourselves, our families, our culture.  This is the energy that
opens the world of limitless possibilities and it behooves us all
to work with it before it destroys us, to touch the Trickster as
he touches us.
............from RMPJ, Oct.'86