Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

For the Romans, a porta fenestella was a special opening that allowed Fortune to enter.

The Devil is an agent of evil, but trickster is amoral, not immoral.

In Yoruba mythology, Eshu is understood to have gotten one of the creator gods drunk at the beginning of time, and that is why there are cripples, albinos, and all other sorts of anomaly in the world. When geneticists breed fruit flies, a fly sometimes appears with legs growing from the sockets where its antennae ought to be. Clearly Eshu, who deli

in spite of all their disruptive behavior, tricksters are regularly honored as the creators of culture.

trickster belongs to polytheism or, lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people and institutions and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that their boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly disturbed.

way to describe trickster is to say simply that the boundary is where he will be found—sometimes drawing the line, sometimes crossing it, sometimes erasing or moving it, but always there, the god of the threshold in all its forms.

In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish—right and wrong, sacred and profan

Trickster, then, is a pore-seeker. He keeps a sharp eye out for naturally occurring opportunities and creates them ad hoc when they do not occur by themselves.

I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: 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.