The Way of the Trickster
January 6, 2008 — by Rev. Lisa R. Schwartz
What do Bugs Bunny, Prometheus, and George Carlin have in common? They are all examples of the trickster. Deep winter is the traditional time for Native people to tell tales of the ancient trickster God, the sacred clown with a bag full of chaos that both upsets human apple carts and holds amazing creative potential. The trickster is open to the puzzles and paradoxes of life, he/she breaks all the rules of the gods and humans. Ancient tradition holds that the trickster is essential to new beginnings, and to any human contact with the sacred, since the trickster brings laughter and opens us up and frees us from rigid preconceptions.
Listen to: The Way of the Trickster
The Way of the Trickster
By Rev. Lisa Romantum Schwartz
January 6th, 2008
The story for all ages was “The Great Spirit Chief Names the Animals,” featuring Coyote as a main character. And the reading that immediately preceded the sermon was “Modern Man” by George Carlin, read by a worship associate whose name is also George.
Thank you, George, for demonstrating so effectively that we are a highly studious group with a serious religious message to offer. No frivolity here, just a bunch of “medium range ballistic missionaries.” But all kidding aside, it’s time to get down to some serious foolishness. I’m talking about the foolishness of the trickster, the archetypal mischief maker, the deadly serious clown that’s been part of human consciousness for untold thousands of years.
You heard a story of the ancient meddler Coyote this morning, and a reading from one modern personification of the trickster, George Carlin, Illustrations and examples of the holy fool are abundant. In Africa there are tales of Anansi, Celtic mythology brings us Puck, Islam offers stories of the great Hodja Nasreddin. And the sacred clown is called other names, too– Loki, Herschele, Reynard, Kalulu, and Prometheus, to name a few. And as for modern examples, George Carlin is only one of many. Contemporary tricksters include Bart Simpson, Captain Jack Sparrow, Br’er Rabbit and his more famous brother, Bugs Bunny.
Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, who’ve edited a recent book of trickster tales called The Coyote Road, say
Of all modern Tricksters…Bugs Bunny is surely the best known and best loved. Bugs fits the archetype perfectly: he’s a sly, anarchic, troublemaking clown, a hero and delinquent at the same time. He violates the usual social rules (he steals, he cheats, he dresses in drag, he bonks people over the head with hammers) and yet it’s Bugs we root for and not his human nemesis, the plodding Elmer Fudd.
Like Bugs, Tricksters usually use their shrewd wit to confuse and outsmart the other, more powerful players in whatever drama they appear. Sometimes they appear as harmless buffoons like coyote from the “road runner” cartoons. But when we dismiss trickster tales as just harmless children’s stories or fodder for Saturday morning cartoons we miss out on a treasure, a rich vein of potential for transformation.
The trickster can also play the role of a culture hero, the one who appears to be powerless and clownish enough to be written off as no threat to those in power, but whose “crazy like a fox” antics end up changing the world, upsetting the status quo.
Dr. Joseph Lowery, one of the founders and leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, gave a brief sermon last year in Selma, Alabama in which he talked about the crazy things that are going on in our country. He’d recently been to the doctor for a check up and he was initially disturbed when he was told that his cholesterol was high. But then the doctor went on to explain that Lowery’s “good cholesterol” was also very high, which was an indicator of health. He says,
I’m glad he reminded me that there’s good cholesterol and there’s bad cholesterol…[And I remind you that] everybody in the [civil rights] movement was a little crazy. But like cholesterol, there’s a good crazy, and there’s a bad crazy…
He named Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King as being “good crazy,” and he said,
We need more folks in this country who [are] good crazy. You can’t tell what will happen when you have some good crazy folks [workin’ on things]…
The trickster subverts the dominant paradigm, often in such a sly way that we’re left wondering what just happened. Whenever you feel the rug’s been pulled out from under you and you’re tush over teakettle, you’re in the wake of that meddlesome clown.
An historical example of the trickster is the tradition of court jesters. Jesters are often portrayed as trivial characters, comedians who provided light entertainment for the wealthy and powerful. But court jesters were actually members of the royal staff, with the rank and privilege that went along with being close confidants of kings and queens.
Like the fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear, the jester could often see the larger picture and offer wise council to the ruler. Court jesters also had the unique freedom to question the decisions and the authority of their royal patrons, and even to make fun of them in public.
It was a dangerous life, kind of a tight rope act, and some jesters leaned too far over the line and were killed. But Jesters by cloaking social criticism in humor, they were also catalysts for social change. In her book, Fools Are Everywhere, Beatrice K. Otto says,
[The Court Jester] may have disappeared from the courts and corridors of power, but he still has a powerful hold on the collective imagination.
Read Doonesbury, or listen to Steven Colbert or Jon Stewart and you’ll realize that cartoonists and comedians still perform some of the same jester function in the political arena.
But what about religious life? Coyote, after all, is a mythic figure from the sacred history of several Native tribes. And the trickster may function for our own psyches the way the court jester functioned for royalty. That is, by puncturing the pretensions of our egos the trickster may erode the elaborate defenses most humans construct to protect ourselves against the overturning of our rigid preconceptions.
Most stories of humans encountering the sacred require that we let go of our expectations, and of our desire to be in control. Think about Moses’ encountering the bush that burned yet was not consumed, or of the scene where the stammering, stuttering Moses is called to be a spokesman for his oppressed people. Hollywood’s insistence on the action-figure Moses played by Charlton Heston may have poisoned our view of that mythic figure, who was described in the Hebrew Bible as an unimposing man with a speech impediment, sneaky and sly enough to have killed a man, then hidden the body in a shallow grave and eluded the law.
Encounters with the holy are often subversions of the dominant paradigm. In his book, The Trickster in West Africa, Robert Pelton says
Tricksters are beings of the beginning, working in some complex relationship with the High God; transformers, helping to bring the present human world into being; performers of heroic acts on behalf of [humanity…they are]…foolish…laughable, yet indomitable.
Some tricksters are even shockingly sexual. In Japanese mythology, when the princess/goddess Amaterasu retreats to a dark cave causing winter to come and crops to die, it is the trickster goddess Uzume, who performs a comic/erotic dance with exposed and flopping breasts, moving the other gods and goddesses to hilarious laughter, which in turn lures Amaterasu forth and brings springtime back to the land.
Carl Jung saw the trickster archetype as part of the shadow, a representation of all that is repressed and denied, the lusty glutton that lurks beneath the surface of the socially acceptable persona we show the world. But peeking under the veneer and releasing some of the wild, nurturing, transformational energy might be just the kind of shake up, or wake up that we all need periodically, just to keep our juices flowing.
And anyway, who could love a cosmic creator who doesn’t love a story, even a joke, a God or Goddess who doesn’t include a bit of the trickster? Rob Brezny says,
In an age when God has been co-opted by intolerant fundamentalists and mirthless sentimentalists, I appreciate [anyone] who suggests there’s more to the Infinite Spirit than the one-dimensional prig described [by traditional religion.]
It’s hard to communicate with a Supreme Being who doesn’t laugh, or at least chuckle. And maybe any encounter with the divine ought to turn our lives a bit topsy-turvy.
Said the Buddhist monk to the hot dog vendor, “Make me one with everything.” The vendor prepared a frank with mustard, ketchup, relish, and onions, and the monk paid for it with a $20 bill. The vendor stashed the cash in his apron and turned to the next customer. The monk asked, “But where’s my change?” And the vendor replied, “Ah, change must come from within, my friend.”
Change, whether personal or cultural, will not come from the self-satisfied keeper of the status quo. Change must always come from the one willing to shake things up, the one unafraid to cause mischief, the one who greets each answer with a new and more puzzling question.
So in this season of beginnings, this first Sunday of a new year, this time of transformation when crazy things are happening in our society, It’s time to invite the trickster into our lives, to acknowledge the necessity of her/his mischievous power in even our most sacred journeys. It may be as simple as asking yourself the question, “what’s the difference between what my ego needs, and what my soul needs?”
And maybe your inner trickster is attracted to more complex riddles, more global questions. But until we start asking the questions, it’s difficult to gather the resources necessary to find the answer. In any case, the raw materials we need to fuel our breakthroughs are often found in the darkness, disguised treasure we need to mine and refine. It is, after all, Coyote’s job to remind us that good can come from bad, and bad from good, and that sometimes we need to shake things up to realize that good and bad are not always very far apart.
So, in the spirit of the trickster, I invite you into our time of shared dialogue by asking you a few questions: What do you need to turn upside down in order to create something fabulously, awesomely new? What worn-out shackles are binding you to a narrow vision for what the world could be? What if there were more “good craziness” bubbling up like yeast in the world? When the trickster trips you up, what burden do you need to drop?