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A review by bittersweet_symphony
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art by Lewis Hyde
5.0
I've added Trickster Makes This World to my cherished toolkit for cultural criticism, alongside works by Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, Margaret Atwood--and of course, David Foster Wallace. Trickster is a figure vastly misunderstood and undervalued in society, but that's the point of Trickster, now isn't it?
Trickster is an archetypal figure, most prominent in polytheistic religions, mythologies, and epic literature, who stirs the imagination and injects vitality into stagnant societies, small towns, and even households. He is known by many names: Coyote, Hermes, Mercury, Loki, Rumplestiltskin, Susano-o, Legba, Eshu, Prometheus, Kokopelli, and Raven. He lives on the road. He has no homeland, wandering from town to town, bringing fortune and misfortune, disrupting social structures, pushing boundaries, a thief and a gift-giver, a messenger between the gods and humans, a boundary-crosser, sometimes cunning and other times conned, a cross-dresser, and figure who thrives on the fringe. He is amoral, rather than moral or immoral, occupying the realm of ambiguity, ambivalence, contradiction, and paradox. Simply, he is the ultimate culture-transforming hero, an antagonist.
I use the pronoun “he” because trickster tales almost universally, regardless of whether the culture is matriarchal or patriarchal, it features a male character, or rather, a figure who usually manifests themselves as male.
Lewis Hyde asserts that “trickster the culture hero is always present; his seemingly asocial actions continue to keep our world lively and give it the flexibility to endure…that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be a space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on...When he lies or steals, it isn’t so much to get away from something or get rich as to disturb the established categories of truth and property and, by so doing, open the road to possible new worlds...He is the character of myth who threatens to take the myth apart.”
Trickster is not a devil or adversary as understood by monotheistic religions; when Christian missionaries came in contact with polytheistic religions they often translated the local trickster God, taking him to be a manifestation of Satan, Lucifer, the Son of the Morning. As Hyde points out, “Trickster only comes to life in the complex terrain of polytheism. If the spiritual world is dominated by a single high god opposed by a single embodiment of evil, then the ancient trickster disappears...The Devil is an agent of evil, but trickster is amoral, not immoral.”
Hyde gives us a fresh way to look at historical figures like John Cabe, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duschamp, Allen Ginsberg, and my personal favorite, Frederick Douglass, to articulate an important player in the remaking of culture and social institutions.
If you think Trickster is a devil at worst or a playful entertainer at best, reserved for fables and myths, then you are ignoring one of the most essential forces in society and community. One can't talk about any revolution (political, cultural, moral) without finding Trickster at the heart, the lone chaos-maker, playful and dangerous: you'll find him dressed in drag, joining all sorts of lovers in decadent orgies, giving gifts and misfortune to society, reversing roles, making the exceptions which define the rules, the key figure of each epoch, destined to be taken for granted.
Hyde gifts us a foundational implement to dissect and understand society, a dynamic map from which we can inspire other trickster behaviors, for this archetype is just one of the many we contain inside ourselves. We each show it now and again. Despite the damage occasionally unleashed, we ought to never forget the beauty that is found by embracing the God of the Doorway, the Cattle Thief charmer, who reminds us that nothing is static or certain, no rule can remain unbroken or unchanged. Everything has a season.
Embrace it and don't forget to laugh about it.
Trickster is an archetypal figure, most prominent in polytheistic religions, mythologies, and epic literature, who stirs the imagination and injects vitality into stagnant societies, small towns, and even households. He is known by many names: Coyote, Hermes, Mercury, Loki, Rumplestiltskin, Susano-o, Legba, Eshu, Prometheus, Kokopelli, and Raven. He lives on the road. He has no homeland, wandering from town to town, bringing fortune and misfortune, disrupting social structures, pushing boundaries, a thief and a gift-giver, a messenger between the gods and humans, a boundary-crosser, sometimes cunning and other times conned, a cross-dresser, and figure who thrives on the fringe. He is amoral, rather than moral or immoral, occupying the realm of ambiguity, ambivalence, contradiction, and paradox. Simply, he is the ultimate culture-transforming hero, an antagonist.
I use the pronoun “he” because trickster tales almost universally, regardless of whether the culture is matriarchal or patriarchal, it features a male character, or rather, a figure who usually manifests themselves as male.
Lewis Hyde asserts that “trickster the culture hero is always present; his seemingly asocial actions continue to keep our world lively and give it the flexibility to endure…that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be a space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on...When he lies or steals, it isn’t so much to get away from something or get rich as to disturb the established categories of truth and property and, by so doing, open the road to possible new worlds...He is the character of myth who threatens to take the myth apart.”
Trickster is not a devil or adversary as understood by monotheistic religions; when Christian missionaries came in contact with polytheistic religions they often translated the local trickster God, taking him to be a manifestation of Satan, Lucifer, the Son of the Morning. As Hyde points out, “Trickster only comes to life in the complex terrain of polytheism. If the spiritual world is dominated by a single high god opposed by a single embodiment of evil, then the ancient trickster disappears...The Devil is an agent of evil, but trickster is amoral, not immoral.”
Hyde gives us a fresh way to look at historical figures like John Cabe, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duschamp, Allen Ginsberg, and my personal favorite, Frederick Douglass, to articulate an important player in the remaking of culture and social institutions.
If you think Trickster is a devil at worst or a playful entertainer at best, reserved for fables and myths, then you are ignoring one of the most essential forces in society and community. One can't talk about any revolution (political, cultural, moral) without finding Trickster at the heart, the lone chaos-maker, playful and dangerous: you'll find him dressed in drag, joining all sorts of lovers in decadent orgies, giving gifts and misfortune to society, reversing roles, making the exceptions which define the rules, the key figure of each epoch, destined to be taken for granted.
Hyde gifts us a foundational implement to dissect and understand society, a dynamic map from which we can inspire other trickster behaviors, for this archetype is just one of the many we contain inside ourselves. We each show it now and again. Despite the damage occasionally unleashed, we ought to never forget the beauty that is found by embracing the God of the Doorway, the Cattle Thief charmer, who reminds us that nothing is static or certain, no rule can remain unbroken or unchanged. Everything has a season.
Embrace it and don't forget to laugh about it.