Tricksters love playing with boundaries and one of their favorites is the line that separates the sacred from the profane. By highlighting them here I hope not only to make their status as tricksters clearer, but to demonstrate why that status is what makes their role in their stories and our imaginations so vital. Below I’ve called out three of my favorite examples, some of which might not be obvious instances of the archetype. As is their custom, these shapeshifters tend to hide in plain sight. As is their custom, these shapeshifters tend to hide in plain sight.īut Western literature isn’t devoid of tricksters. Satan is also commonly mislabeled as a trickster, though he fails the same important test since he tricks mankind out of hatred. Based on that criterion, one might suggest Robin Hood as a possibility, since robbing from the rich to give to the poor is an obvious assault on the established order, but an important element of that myth is that he believes his actions are just, and so he fails the test of ambivalence, one of the trickster’s defining features. But when thieves strive for riches or even just the pleasure of getting away with something, they fall short of the trickster who steals to reorder the world and keep it flexible. After all, tricksters are fixated on crossing and altering boundaries and thieves are known to violate the established boundaries of the law. Our favorite fictional thieves initially seem promising. There are many characters in contemporary stories that share some characteristics with tricksters, but most end up lacking in crucial ways. “We may well hope our actions carry no moral ambiguity,” Lewis Hyde writes in his book Trickster Makes This World, “but pretending it’s the case when it isn’t does not lead to greater clarity about right or wrong it more likely leads to unconscious cruelty masked by inflated righteousness.” This push toward an inflexible moral binary in many contemporary cultures has resulted in just the sort of problems that trickster characters can help address. However, tricksters are more common in polytheistic traditions, whose moralities tend to reflect the ambiguities of lived life more than monotheism’s prescriptive notions of right and wrong. Based on those qualities alone, one could see how well the presence of tricksters in our stories could help address much of the toxicity that exists in our culture. They’re clever, their lack of reverence for the status quo makes them dangerous to those empowered by societal norms, and their shamelessness is often a clarifying antidote to internalized oppression. In literature and myth, tricksters are powerful figures.
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