The Trickster

The trickster is a figure found in the mythologies of most of the world: a boundary-crosser who deceives, steals, transgresses, is frequently ridiculous and frequently punished, and who nonetheless brings about things the community depends on.

The best-documented traditions are West African and Native American. Yoruba Eshu, Elegba, and Elegua in the diaspora, stands at the crossroads, opens and closes the way, must be addressed first in any ritual, and brings both confusion and communication. The widely told story in which he walks between two friends wearing a hat that is one colour on one side and another on the other, provoking a quarrel over what each of them plainly saw, is a compressed statement of exactly what he does. Ananse the spider in Akan tradition, whose stories travelled with the slave trade to the Caribbean and the American South. Coyote across much of western North America and Raven in the Northwest, both culture heroes and fools by turns. Hermes in Greece, a thief on the day of his birth and the messenger who moves between the worlds. Loki in Norse material, whose relation to the gods deteriorates across the sources until he becomes the agent of Ragnarok. Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, in Chinese tradition.

The overlap with the culture hero is systematic rather than accidental. Fire, light, food and skills are very frequently obtained by theft or by trick, and the qualities required for that are exactly the trickster's. So is the ambivalence, what is brought is beneficial and the manner of its bringing is not admirable.

Interpretations have varied. Jung read the trickster as a psychological archetype of the undifferentiated shadow. Paul Radin's study of the Winnebago trickster cycle (1956) treated the sequence developmentally. Anthropologists influenced by Victor Turner have read the trickster as a personification of liminality, the figure belonging to no category and therefore able to move between all of them, and this remains the most widely used approach. Robert Pelton's study of West African tricksters argued specifically against reading them as merely amoral or comic and insisted on their sacred seriousness, a corrective that has been broadly accepted, since the earlier literature frequently condescended to the material it described.

The category is genuinely useful and among the more robust results of comparative mythology. The standard caution nonetheless applies: Eshu is not Coyote and neither is Loki, the figures do very different work within their own traditions, and Eshu in particular has been persistently identified with the Christian devil, a conflation that began with missionary translation, that materially distorts a deity who is not evil and is not opposed to God, and that Yoruba practitioners have objected to continuously ever since.

Article one surveys the figures the category covers; the category itself has a history worth telling separately. "Trickster" as a technical term in comparative mythology is generally traced to Daniel Brinton's writing on Native American myth in the 1860s, and it was Franz Boas's rigorous ethnographic fieldwork, followed by his student Paul Radin's full-length study of the Winnebago cycle, that gave the term the scholarly weight it still carries.

The category has also been criticised for lumping together figures that do rather different work. Some, Coyote and Raven prominently, are primarily culture heroes who happen to blunder; others, Loki above all, drift over time from mischief toward genuine malice; and treating all of them as one psychological type, as Jung's archetype reading tends to, can flatten those differences rather than explain them.

The term's most consequential modern afterlife is literary rather than anthropological. Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s The Signifying Monkey (1988) built a theory of African American literary tradition directly on the West African trickster Esu-Elegbara, carried into diaspora vernacular as the Signifying Monkey, arguing that a specific rhetorical practice of indirection and double meaning in Black literature descends from Esu's own function as the interpreter who stands between fixed meanings. That argument moved the trickster concept out of comparative religion and into literary theory as a working critical tool, which is a considerably further journey than most categories in this collection have made.