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Monday, February 27, 2012

Trickster Mythology

                                                 THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE TRICKSTER
                                                                 by Joseph Campbell



                For those of you who did not know I originally went down to Argentina and Patagonia with the hopes, intentions and connections to volunteer in Parque de Ibera (similar to Florida Everglades, owned by Doug Tompkins, ex-owner of North Face Co.)  I was going down there to study giant anteaters and/or deer there and had this volunteer gig lined up after I purchased tickets to go down.  While I was back in Illinois before I left the coordinator of the Endangered Species Program decided that they no longer needed me at this time, later in the year would be better and that the people I would be staying with were tired of sharing their space and quarters with volunteers for the time being.  Needless to say, I did not end up doing what I intended, perhaps the trickster was at play.
           I called up a few friends back in Montana that I knew who had connections and I got in touch with this guy named Jim something or another from Montana's Fish and Game that studied and did his doctorate thesis in Chilean and Argentina's Patagonia studying mountain lions.  Jim gave me a bunch of contacts of emails and phone numbers of biologists down there doing different projects and I thought great something else will work out.
           Needless to say,  while I was traveling around some spam infected by email account and caused it to go hay-wire and now two months later I still cannot login to my old account.  They changed the password on me and I lost all my contacts.  I guess I wasn't meant to meet Martin M. the head biologist for the Argentina's government as I was planning.  I am still curious what job he could have lined up for me like a jaguar, puma or Andean short-nosed bear study.
          Also during the first month of traveling I had my cell phone stolen or more probable mis-placed (during the wine tour via bicycle) and lost all my contacts.
          Finally, at the end of my trip I was going to volunteer on an organic Farm northwest of Buenos Aires near Parque Ibera (also owned by Doug Tompkins), but I lost that contact as well.  The trickster has been very active in my life these last few years all the way back since my application was put on hold for the peacecorps to go serve in Morocco two years ago.
          Well, trickster I do not know what you have up your sleeve but I welcome whatever tricks you have.  The trickster is the omnipotent god-like clown of the universe who when you think your life is going one direction he or she likes to throw a wrench or a banana peel into the scenario and change your plans.
          In conclusion,  I am back in MT and have been back now from the southern hemisphere for over two weeks.  I am house-sitting for my friends for the next five weeks.  For those of you that are interested I decided to include some informational trickster information found in nearly every religion that ever walked the face of the earth.  Read if you have the time.




Tricksters
            Tricksters are archetypal, almost always male, characters who appear in the myths of many different cultures. As their name suggests, tricksters love to play tricks on other gods (and sometimes on humans and animals). But perhaps the best definition of a trickster is the one given by Lewis Hyde: "trickster is a boundary-crosser" (7). By that, he means that the trickster crosses both physical and social boundaries-- the trickster is often a traveller, and he often breaks societal rules. Tricksters cross lines, breaking or blurring connections and distinctions between "right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead" (Hyde 7). The trickster often changes shape (turning into an animal, for example) to cross between worlds. In his role as boundary-crosser, the trickster sometimes becomes the messenger of the gods.
       
            Lewis Hyde notes that in addition to crossing boundaries, trickster also creates them: "In several mythologies, for example, the gods lived on earth until something trickster did caused them to rise to heaven" (7). Since they are so clever, tricksters often invent new cultural goods or tools (e.g., making fire, musical instruments). Sometimes they are depicted as creators or makers of the world. Often, the deeds of tricksters end up being responsible for the way the world is now.
 
            But there is another side to the trickster. As David Leeming notes, "he is sexually over-active, irresponsible, and amoral. But it is that very phallicism that signifies his essential creativity" (God 24). Tricksters are also creative liars. They lie in order to obtain sex or food, or the means to cook or procure food. Many of their tricks originate in this quest for food or sex. Lewis Hyde writes, "Trickster lies because he has a belly, the stories say; expect truth only from those whose belly is full or those who have escaped the belly altogether" (77).

           Although he is clever, trickster's desires sometimes land him in a lot of trouble. Leeming notes that "he is often the butt of his own tricks, and even in his creative acts he is often crude and 'immature'" (God 24). In hunting cultures, the trickster is often depicted as a clever but foolish animal, led by his appetites. For example, in American Indian cultures, the trickster is often called "coyote" or "raven." Paul Radin writes:

. . . as found among the North American Indians, Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others, and who is always duped himself. He wills nothing consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which he has no control. He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being. But not only he, so our myth tells us, possesses these traits. (xxii)Not all mythologists would agree that tricksters "will nothing consciously" and have "no control." But it is true that the trickster is often the wise fool.
         Trickster tales have different functions in various societies. Certainly the stories are told because they are funny and entertaining; but they are also in some sense sacred. Radin reports that the reaction to trickster stories "is prevailingly one of laughter tempered by awe" (xxiv). Hyde notes that tricksters always function within some sort of "sacred context" (13). But in addition, as John Lame Deer said, tricksters "are sacred [because] we Indians also need their laughter to survive" (quoted in Erdoes and Ortiz xxi). Tricksters need the more serious gods to bounce off from and create their mischief. However, Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz point out that even supposedly serious chief gods can share some of the trickster's traits: for example, Zeus is both an philanderer and a shape-shifter--he changed into a swan in order to make love to Leda and into a shower of gold in order to impregnate Danae (xiv-xv). Zeus is also known for his ability to trick and outwit his rivals--remember the stories about Kronos and Metis?

          Certainly, trickster stories are told for fun and laughs, and a trickster like Bart Simpson is a great character to get a plot started and entangled. But trickster stories also have something to say about how culture gets created, and about the nature of intelligence. Trickster represents a certain flexibility of mind and spirit, a willingness to defy authority and invent clever solutions that keeps cultures (and stories) from becoming too stagnant.



Works Cited

  • Erdoes, Richard, and Alfonso Ortiz, eds. American Indian Trickster Tales. New York: Penguin, 1998.
  • Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
  • Leeming, David Adams. The World of Myth: An Anthology. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.
  • Leeming, David Adams and Jake Page. God: Myths of the Male Divine. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
  • Radin, Paul. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. 2nd ed. New York: Schocken, 1972.
Back to ENG 204 World Mythology Course Index


Mythology

The trickster deity breaks the rules of the gods or nature, sometimes maliciously (for example, Loki) but usually, albeit unintentionally, with ultimately positive effects. Often, the bending/breaking of rules takes the form of tricks (e.g. Eris) or thievery. Tricksters can be cunning or foolish or both; they are often funny even when considered sacred or performing important cultural tasks. An example of this is the sacred Iktomi, whose role is to play tricks and games and by doing so raises awareness and acts as an equalizer.[citation needed]
In many cultures, (as may be seen in Greek, Norse, or Slavic folktales, along with Native American/First Nations lore), the trickster and theculture hero are often combined. To illustrate: Prometheus, in Greek mythology, stole fire from the gods to give to humans. He is more of a culture hero than a trickster. In many Native American and First Nations mythologies, the coyote (Southwestern United States) or raven(Pacific Northwest, coastal British Columbia, Alaska and Russian Far East) stole fire from the gods (stars, moon, and/or sun) and are more tricksters than culture heroes. This is primarily because of other stories involving these spirits: Prometheus was a Titan, whereas the Coyote spirit and Raven spirit are usually seen as jokesters and pranksters. Examples of Tricksters in the world mythologies are given by Hansen (2001), who lists Mercurius in Roman mythology, Hermes in Greek mythology, Eshu in Yoruba mythology and Wakdjunga in Winnebagomythology as examples of the Trickster archetype. Hansen makes the interesting observation that the Trickster is nearly always a male figure.
Frequently the Trickster figure exhibits gender and form variability, changing gender roles and even occasionally engaging in same-sex practices. Such figures appear in Native American and First Nations mythologies, where they are said to have a two-spirit nature. Loki, the Norse trickster, also exhibits gender variability, in one case even becoming pregnant; interestingly, he shares the ability to change genders with Odin, the chief Norse deity who also possesses many characteristics of the Trickster. In the case of Loki's pregnancy, he was forced by the Gods to stop a giant from erecting a wall for them before 7 days passed; he solved the problem by transforming into a mare and drawing the giant's magical horse away from its work. He returned some time later with a child he had given birth to—the eight-legged horse Sleipnir, who served as Odin's steed.
In some cultures, there are dualistic myths, featuring two demiurges creating the world, or two culture heroes arranging the world — in a complementary manner. Dualistic cosmologies are present in all inhabited continents[1] and show great diversity: they may feature culture heroes, but also demiurges (exemplifying a dualistic creation myth in the latter case), or other beings; the two heroes may compete or collaborate; they may be conceived as neutral or contrasted as good versus evil; be of the same importance or distinguished as powerful versus weak; be brothers (even twins) or be not relatives at all.[2]

[edit]Coyote

See also: Coyote (mythology)

Coyote often has the role of trickster as well as a clown in traditional stories.
The Coyote mythos is one of the most popular western Native American cultures, especially among indigenous peoples of California and Great Basin. Coyote can be categorized in many types. In creation myths, Coyote appears as the Creator himself; but he may at the same time be the messenger, the culture hero, the trickster, the fool, the clown. He has also the ability of the transformer: in some stories he is a handsome young man; in others he is an animal; yet others present him as just a power, a sacred one. According to Crow (and other Plains) tradition, Old Man Coyote impersonates the Creator, "Old Man Coyote took up a handful of mud and out of it made people".[3] His creative power is also spread onto words, "Old Man Coyote named buffalo, deer, elk, antelopes, and bear. And all these came into being". In such myths Coyote-Creator is never mentioned as an animal; more, he can meet his animal counterpart, the coyote: they address each other as "elder brother" and "younger brother", and walk and talk together. According to A. Hultkranz, the impersonation of Coyote as Creator is a result of a taboo, a mythic substitute to the religious notion of the Great Spirit whose name was too dangerous and/or sacred to use apart from at special ceremonies.
In other stories, the Coyote is purely a clown that entertains; however, he usually ends up tricking people and stealing.
In Chelan myths, Coyote belongs to the animal people but he is at the same time "a power just like the Creator, the head of all the creatures". Yet his being 'just like the Creator' does not really mean being 'the Creator': it is not seldom that Coyote-Just-Like-Creator is subject to the Creator, Great Chief Above, who can punish him, send him away, take powers away from him, etc. In the Pacific Northwest tradition, Coyote is mostly mentioned as a messenger, or minor power, "Coyote was sent to the camp of the chief of the Cold Wind tribe to deliver a challenge; Coyote traveled around to tell all the people in both tribes about the contest." As such, Coyote "was cruelly treated, and his work was never done."
As the culture hero, Coyote appears in various mythic traditions, but generally with the same magical powers of transformation, resurrection, and then Coyote's "medicine". He is engaged in changing the ways of rivers, standing of mountains, creating new landscapes and getting sacred things for people. Of mention is the tradition of Coyote fighting against monsters. According to Wasco tradition, Coyote was the hero to fight and kill Thunderbird, the killer of people, but he could do that not because of his personal power, but due to the help of the Spirit Chief; Coyote was trying his best, he was fighting hard, and he had to have fasted ten days before the fight, so advised by Spirit Chief. In many Wasco myths, Coyote rivals the Raven (Crow) about the same ordeal: in some stories, Multnomah Falls came to be by Coyote's efforts; in others, it is done by Raven.
More often than not Coyote is a trickster, but he is always different. In some stories, he is a noble trickster, "Coyote takes water from the Frog people... because it is not right that one people have all the water." In others, he is mean, "Coyote determined to bring harm to Duck. He took Duck's wife and children, whom he treated badly."

[edit]Archetype

Further information: List of fictional tricksters
The Trickster or Clown, is an example of a Jungian archetype. In modern literature the trickster survives as a character archetype, not necessarily supernatural or divine, sometimes no more than a stock character. Often too, the Trickster is distinct in a story by his acting as a sort of catalyst, in that his antics are the cause of other characters' discomfiture, but he himself is left untouched. A once-famous example of this was the character "Froggie the Gremlin" on the early children's TV show "Andy's Gang." A cigar-puffing puppet, Froggie induced the adult humans around him to engage in ridiculous and self-destructive hijinks.[4] At possibly the opposite end of the literary spectrum can be found the mysterious character of Uncle Drosselmeyer in The Nutcracker. Drosslemeyer appears to be a magician of some sort, and is the source of the evening's magical adventure.
In later folklore, the trickster/clown is incarnated as a clever, mischievous man or creature, who tries to survive the dangers and challenges of the world using trickery and deceit as a defense. He also is known for entertaining people as a clown does. For example many typical fairy tales have the King who wants to find the best groom for his daughter by ordering several trials. No brave and valiant prince or knight manages to win them, until a poor and simple peasant comes. With the help of his wits and cleverness, instead of fighting, he evades or fools monsters and villains and dangers with unorthodox manners. Therefore the most unlikely candidate passes the trials and receives the reward. More modern and obvious examples of that type are Bugs Bunny, The Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) and Pippi Longstocking. (See list).
The trickster is an enduring archetype that crosses many cultures and appears in a wide variety of popular media.

[edit]The trickster's literary role

Modern African American literary criticism has turned the trickster figure into one example of how it is possible to overcome a system of oppression from within. For years, African American literature was discounted by the greater community of American literary criticism while its authors were still obligated to use the language and the rhetoric of the very system that relegated African Americans and other minorities to the ostracized position of the cultural “other.” The central question became one of how to overcome this system when the only words available were created and defined by the oppressors. As Audre Lorde explained, the problem was that “the master’s tools [would] never dismantle the master’s house.”[5]
In his writings of the late 1980s, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presents the concept of Signifyin(g). Wound up in this theory is the idea that the “master’s house” can be “dismantled” using his “tools” if the tools are used in a new or unconventional way. To demonstrate this process, Gates cites the interactions found in African American narrative poetry between the trickster, the Signifying Monkey, and his oppressor, the Lion.[6] According to Gates, the “Signifying Monkey” is the “New World figuration” and “functional equivalent” of the Eshu trickster figure of African Yoruba mythology.[7] The Lion functions as the authoritative figure in his classical role of “King of the Jungle.”[8] He is the one who commands the Signifying Monkey’s movements. Yet the Monkey is able to outwit the Lion continually in these narratives through his usage of figurative language. According to Gates, “[T]he Signifying Monkey is able to signify upon the Lion because the Lion does not understand the Monkey’s discourse…The monkey speaks figuratively, in a symbolic code; the lion interprets or reads literally and suffers the consequences of his folly…”[8] In this way, the Monkey uses the same language as the Lion, but he uses it on a level that the Lion cannot comprehend. This usually leads to the Lion’s “trounc[ing]” at the hands of a third-party, the Elephant.[9] The net effect of all of this is “the reversal of [the Lion’s] status as the King of the Jungle.”[8] In this way, the “master’s house” is dismantled when his own tools are turned against him by the trickster Monkey.

Br'er Rabbit is a trickster character who succeeds through his wits rather than through strength.
Following in this tradition, critics since Gates have come to assert that another popular African American folk trickster, Brer Rabbit, uses clever language to perform the same kind of rebellious societal deconstruction as the Signifying Monkey. Brer Rabbit is the “creative way that the slave community responded to the oppressor’s failure to address them as human beings created in the image of God.”[10] The figurative representative of this slave community, Brer Rabbit is the hero with a “fragile body but a deceptively strong mind” that allows him to “create [his] own symbols in defiance of the perverted logic of the oppressor.”[10] By twisting language to create these symbols, Brer Rabbit not only was the “personification of the ethic of self-preservation” for the slave community, but also “an alternative response to their oppressor’s false doctrine of anthropology.”[11] Through his language of trickery, Brer Rabbit outwits his oppressors, deconstructing, in small ways, the hierarchy of subjugation to which his weak body forces him to physically conform.
Before Gates, there was some precedent for the analysis of African American folk heroes as destructive agents of an oppressive hierarchical system. In the 1920s and 1930s, T. S. Eliot andEzra Pound engaged in an epistolary correspondence.[12] Both writers signed the letters with pseudonyms adopted from the Uncle Remus tales; Eliot was “Possum;” Pound was “Tar Baby.” Pound and Eliot wrote in the same “African slave” dialect of the tales. Pound, writing later of the series of letters, distinguished the language from “the Queen’s English, the language of public propriety.”[12] This rebellion against proper language came as part of “collaboration” between Pound and Eliot “against the London literary establishment and the language that it used.”[12] Although Pound and Eliot were not attempting to overthrow an establishment as expansive as the one oppressing the African American slave community, they were actively trying to establish for themselves a new kind of literary freedom. In their usage of the Uncle Remus trickster figures’ names and dialects, they display an early understanding of the way in which cleverly manipulated language can dismantle a restrictive hierarchy.
African American literary criticism and folktales are not the only place in the American literary tradition that tricksters are to be found combating subjugation from within an oppressive system. In When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote, the argument is posited that the Brer Rabbit stories were derived from a mixture of African and Native American mythology, thus attributing part of the credit for the formation of the tales and wiles of Brer Rabbit to “Indian captivity narratives” and the rabbit trickster found in Cherokee mythology.[13] In arguing for a merged “African-Native American folklore,” the idea is forwarded that certain shared “cultural affinities” between African Americans and Native Americans allowed both groups “through the trickster tales…survive[d] European American cultural and political domination.”[14]

[edit]Tricksters in native traditions

While the trickster crosses various cultural traditions, there are significant differences between tricksters in the traditions of many indigenous peoples and those in the European tradition:
"Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred. People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies for fear that they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise. The trickster in most native traditions is essential to creation, to birth".[15]
Native American tricksters should not be confused with the European fictional picaro. One of the most important distinctions is that "we can see in the Native American trickster an openness to life's multiplicity and paradoxes largely missing in the modern Euro-American moral tradition".[16] In some stories the Native American trickster is foolish and other times wise. He can be a hero in one tale and a villain in the next. In June 2010, a collection of Native American trickster tales were retold in comic form in a graphic novel anthology titled: Trickster: Native American Tales: A Graphic Collection, edited by Matt Dembicki. The diverse tales in this collection depict the trickster in various forms including a raccoon, raven, coyote, rabbit, and man.

[edit]Tricksters as villain characters

In some fiction, villains come in the form of physically unintimidating characters who seek to defeat the protagonist using cerebral, yet whimsical methods. They are typically non-deadly in their intents and may only seek to humiliate or outwit the protagonist. Often such villains lean towards comedy, and conflicts with them are generally resolved non-violently. They may be recurring characters, such as members of the Q Continuum in several Star Trek series. In comics, The Riddler is often presented as one of the less violent members of Batman's rogue's gallery. Others, like The Joker and Loki, can qualify as trickster villains, but can also lean more towards malice than clever whimsy.
There is also a trickster in The Sarah Jane Adventures, a spin-off of Doctor Who, where the trickster and his brigade try to change time-lines in order to create chaos.

[edit]Tricksters in various cultures' oral stories

[edit]See also

[edit]Notes

  1. ^ Zolotarjov 1980: 54
  2. ^ Zolotarjov 180: 40–43
  3. ^ California on the Eve - California Indians
  4. ^ Smith, R.L. Remembering Andy Devine.
  5. ^ Lorde, Audre, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex,” Literary Theory: An Anthology, Eds. Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 859.
  6. ^ (Gates 2004, p. 990)
  7. ^ (Gates 2004, pp. 988-989)
  8. ^ a b c (Gates 2004, p. 991)
  9. ^ (Gates 2004, p. 990)
  10. ^ a b (Earl, Jr. 1993, p. 131)
  11. ^ (Earl, Jr. 1993, p. 158)
  12. ^ a b c North, Michael, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 77.
  13. ^ Brennan, Jonathan, “Introduction: Recognition of the African-Native American Literary Tradition,” When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 73; Baringer, Sandra K., “Brer Rabbit and His Cherokee Cousin: Moving Beyond the Appropriation Paradigm,” When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 116.
  14. ^ Brennan, “Introduction…,” 72-73.
  15. ^ Byrd Gibbens, Professor of English at University of Arkansas at Little Rock; quoted epigraph in Napalm and Silly Putty by George Carlin, 2001
  16. ^ Ballinger 1992, p.21

[edit]References

[edit]External links

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