Meet the Trickster

 

Trickster, in your life, is that power that makes sure your path will never go straight and you will never lose your soul in your plans. Trickster challenges the established order, and in so doing renews it. He tricks in order to transform.

There is a close connection between the Gatekeeper and the Trickster. In mythology, they are often one and the same. Trickster is the mode the Gatekeeper — that power that opens doors in your life — adopts when you need to change and adapt and recover your sense of humor. If you are set in your ways and wedded to a linear agenda, the Trickster can be your devil. If you are open to the unexpected, and willing to turn on a dime (or something smaller), the Trickster can be a very good friend.

Trickster will find ways to correct unbalanced and overcontrolling or ego-driven agendas, just as spontaneous night dreams can explode waking fantasies and delusions. Our thoughts shape our realities, but sometimes they produce a boomerang effect. Trickster wears animal guise in folklore and mythology, appearing as the fox or the squirrel, as spider or coyote or raven.

To make friends with Trickster, we want to be ready to make a story out of whatever happens in life and to recognize the bigger, never-ending story that may be playing through our everyday dramas. If nothing goes wrong, it has been said, you do not have much of a story. Trickster knows all about that.

We are most likely to meet Trickster at liminal times and in liminal places, because his preferred realm is the borderlands between the tame and the wild. He invites us to live a little more on the wild side. He approves when we make a game or a story out of it when our plans get upset, our certainties scrambled.

Trickster insists on a sense of humor. Trickster is

A boundary-crosser

He shakes things up

He is a humorist who doesn't respect piety or correctness.

He gets you out of tight places

I’d rather be a Trickster than a martyr, as Elizabeth Gilbert declares in a paean to Trickster: “The trickster (represented forever in world mythology as the fox, the crow, the coyote, the monkey) sees through our delusions of seriousness and exposes the play underneath all our drama… The trickster understands that all this world is temporary, all of it is shifting, all of it is nonsense, all of it is fair game for delight. The trickster just keeps on playing. The trickster is slippery and sly, wry and wise, always looking for the secret door, the hidden stairway, the funhouse mirror, the sideways way of looking at things — and the trickster always endures.    I choose the path of the trickster, not the path of the martyr." [1]

 Trickster figures are liminal lords, barons of in-between. Trickster is the spirit of the doorway and the crossroads and the edge of town. The name Hermes once meant “he of the stone heap” and evoked the little cairns of stones, placed as offerings more than markers, along roads between settlements. Trickster is most active where borders are porous and perilous and offers wit and cunning to navigate these edgy spaces. Hitchhikers in the galaxy must walk close to the Trickster if they are going to make it.

Hermes is one of the great mythic Tricksters and Gatekeepers and World Bridgers. Through him, every house opens into the Otherworld. One of his names, sotheos, means The Socket, as in the socket of a hinge that enables the pin to turn and the door to open and close. So we can think of him as a Hinge guy – as in “hinge of fate” – or a Pivot. As he swings, so do our fortunes.

Trickster is lord of the road, of spirit roads as well as earthly ones. He can guide traveling souls between the worlds, and open passages when none seem to exist. He can escort the dead to the Underworld or raise them from their graves to walk among the living.

He may be a thief, but he is the kind of thief who steals fire from heaven for the benefit of humans.

Trickster breaks down the wall between time and eternity, between mortals and immortals. When he steals Idunn and the apples of immortality, as Loki, he gives mortals (Giants) a taste of eternity and immortals (Aesir) a taste of the ravages of time.

He doesn’t allow a static order.

Trickster is Lord of Loopholes. An old Norse kenning of the name Loki is “a loop in a thread” - a loophole. 

Among the many animal forms of the Trickster - Raven, Coyote, Spider, Monkey - I have special affection for Fox.

Sympathy with Fox

You live on the edges of my life
           at the margin between the tame land and the wild
           and your appearances are always edgy for me.

You know when to hide and when to hunt.
           Men chase you on horseback, with dogs,
           yet turn chicken when you turn up unannounced.

You are tricky. I doubt I’ll ever be at ease with you.
           But you are a determined messenger
           and a necessary link to old and sacred things

You call women I care for to reclaim lost soul
           and become foxy girls, immune to glass ceilings,
           setting their own boundaries, living unbounded life. [2]

I refer to Trickster as “he” because he is depicted as male in most mythologies, and often ithyphallic and lustful to boot – with the significant exception of Fox spirit, who may be Monsieur Renard or Mr. Fox in the West, but is more often Fox Woman, Kitsune (a name that means Come and Sleep) in Japan.

Lewis Hyde reminds us that “in spite of all their disruptive behavior, trickster are regularly honored as the creators of culture.” [3] When Hermes steals cattle from the gods, he presents humans with a domesticated supply of meat on the hoof.

Trickster keeps things lively, in an individual life or the life of a people. The intriguing paradox in the myth is that “the origins, liveliness and durability of cultures require that there be space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on.” 

Trickster breaks down hard-and-fast distinctions between good and bad, black and white, order and chaos. When you are blocked because you have put yourself in a box, in the surface of you mind, he comes to remind you that (as Paul Valéry wrote) “the bottom of the mind is paved with crossroads” and you have plenty of other options. 

References

1. Elizabeth Gilbert blog July 7, 2014 http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/its-better-to-be-a-trickster-than-a-martyr-i-recently-did-a-radio-interview-o/

2. "Brushes with the Red Fox" in Robert Moss, Here, Everything is Dreaming: Poems and Stories. (Albany NY: Excelsior, 2013)

3. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes this World. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) 8,9.

Please read my book Sidewalk Oracles for guidance on how to navigate life in the play of Trickster.

Journal drawings by Robert Moss

 

The complete guide to Loki

Once again, my dreams are setting me research assignments.
   Last night I dreamed I was shown a series of images of Loki, the Norse trickster god. A voice-over explained his many attributes and gave a fresh version of his role in the affairs of the Aesir and their rivals, and the perennial contest between order and chaos. My tutorial seemed to be taking place in Ireland, which confused me a little when I woke until I reflected on the Viking history of that island, and started researching symbol stones.
   In the dream, I was fascinated by the images. They looked nothing like the Loki portrayed in the movie Thor. They were abstract in style, only vaguely humanoid. The figures seemed composed of oblong segments that could move separately. The images were essentially two-dimensional, yet through their portals it seemed possible to see into a stir of action taking place within a larger reality, beyond 4D. I was reminded of how other 2D images - like mandalas - can also give access to multidimensional reality, sometimes more easily than 3D representations.
   I did not retain much of the commentary on Loki in the dream, but I know that it presented a Loki who is much more complex and less dark than the "devil god" versions. I suspect there is also interweaving of Norse and Celtic traditions, given the Irish setting.
   I am prompted now to press forward with an assignment given to me many years ago by Tolkien, no less. I was leading a group shamanic journey to a locale in the imaginal realm that I sometimes call the Magic Library. I met C.S. Lewis and Tolkien - or their semblances - and they offered me some advice on writing. Tolkien said, "You must study Scandinavian mythology."
    A few years later, while I was working on The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, C.S. Lewis turned up again, in a spontaneous night vision in the liminal space between sleep and awake. I asked him, "Where's Tolkien?" He replied, "Tolkien isn't talking to you because you didn't do what he told you to do."
   So: this morning I found relief carvings of a being that is believed to be Loki on symbol stones from both Ireland and Scotland. The one above is Pictish. It is from the Meigle museum of sculpted stone in eastern Scotland and shows a horned god in chains. The abstract style somewhat resembles the figures in my dream, who are less clearly humanoid. The stone below is at Carndonagh in Donegal, a guardian pillar with a monastic figure on the left and a possible Loki on the right.
    I shall try to draw the series of Loki images that were shown to me in the dream. I shall continue my researches, which have already turned up an interesting possible meaning for Loki's name. In Geirr Bassi Haraldsson's The Old Norse Name, "Loki" is a "loop in a thread", in other words, a loophole. One aspect of the Trickster leaps out; he can find or make loopholes in the weave of fate.
    For now, my catch phrase is: I got Loki.