#tricksters

Beyond the challenges to transcendence and uniqueness, tricksters reinforce the notion that becoming persons takes place in the process of making the world at least a little more habitable for oneself and one's community. Tricksters may be more powerful than humans, but their stories encourage human creativity in ways far outstretching the limits set in more theistic traditions. The world is a bricolage in which even contradictions can be reconciled or can play roles that may be seen... as more creative than destructive. Certainly tricksters encourage people not to bow to fate or seemingly insurmountable problems, but to struggle, twist, and find a means of survivance and overcoming. At any rate, among the 'spirits' known to animists are many tricksters (from Coyote in various parts of North America to the Sidhe in Ireland) who may be amusing to talk about but uncomfortable to encounter. The world and its various powers are neither good nor bad (and perhaps neither sacred nor profane) in and of themselves, but open, efficacious, and above all, relational. The chief lessons taught by the presence and knowledge of tricksters is that appearances can be deceptive and that the character of people is most easily recognizable in their actions.

However, tricksters seem archetypally and profoundly suitable to animist cosmologies and especially cosmogonies. In many indigenous cultures globally, the world... originates not solely in the careful and thoughtful labor of tidy and decent deities, but in the ambiguous encounter between order and chaos. Tricksters do anti-social and dangerous things, often harming themselves as well as others, but thereby making the world more like it is in lived experience. They test and transgress the boundaries that more orderly deities attempt to establish. They make new spaces available in which possibilities - ones neither intended nor imagined even by themselves - may occur. By all these means, they refuse or limit the authority of high gods, ultimate powers, orderly creators. They challenge transcendence and insist that everyone is involved in the evolution of life. Similarly, in an opposing direction, tricksters refuse the notion that humans are unlike animals in that only humans lie - demonstrating freewill by challenging communal virtues and establishing the necessity of ritual, religion, covenants, politics, and other modes of constraining the lying tendency.

They have many names.