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.

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.

The hunter is always slightly smarter, but the prey is always wising up. In evolutionary theory, the tension between predator and prey is one of the great engines that has driven the creation of intelligence itself, each side successively and ceaselessly responding to the other.

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

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

In the invention of traps, trickster is a technician of appetite and a technician of instinct.

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 is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.