The importance of tricksters

You may know someone like this in your life:

~Someone who gets into a lot of trouble but seems to get away with it because of his or her charm.
~Someone who is not a fan of authority, may know the rules but may decide when to break them.
~Someone whose life is full of extremes: Difficult (sometimes dangerous) situations but also very lucky events
~Sometimes who still maintains a great sense of optimism and sometimes a bit of unrealism
~Someone who never seems to age in appearance or in spirit

In ancient times, there were names for “characters” like these: Loki, among the Norse gods, Hermes among the Olympians, and Anansi among the African tribes and Coyote among the Native Americans. But they also exist in modern times as well, such as Captain Jack Harkness of the BBC TV series “Torchwood” or Zack Morris from the TV series “Saved by the Bell” who manages to get himself into all sorts of trouble from his schemes but still manages to get away most of the time with a winsome smile.

Tricksters are an archetype that the world seems to admire because they have the boldness to do things that most of us would not do. Sometimes what they do is foolish and can serve as a warning to others. What an average person considers to be a large risk is considered an ordinary circumstance to a trickster; tricksters just approach it differently than everyone else.

Tricksters are a legendary archetype in the world of mythology and often play roles in explaining how things came to be in various cultures. With the trickster, Coyote, there is a tale where Coyote's job was to take a bag of stars and place them in the sky. He had been doing a good job placing them one by one in neat little rows until he got bored. He got so impatient that he threw the bag of stars into the air to be done quickly and that was how the stars were scattered in the sky.

Because tricksters operate outside the boundaries of normal logic and authority, they are not bound by social conventions, especially when expressed through in their sexuality. In ancient Greece, pedestals in honor of Hermes were often big phalluses and those items were considered good luck. The Native American stories of Coyote infamously known for their ribaldry.

One big misconception about a trickster is that they are amoral and are therefore unreliable and untrustworthy. On the contrary, tricksters are very moral; they just have a personal set of standards and their own ethics. Also they are quite logical even though it seems that they have their own sense of logic. If someone tells a trickster why he cannot do something and the answer is, “Because I said so,” that is not an acceptable answer at all. Sometimes the answer “Because I don't feel comfortable” is not regarded as a valid answer either. So a trickster can end up pushing buttons on people who do not want to have to explain things nor would he or she accept the answer “because this is how it is always done.” A trickster does not respect decisions based on tradition or authority but on soundness of reasoning. Most tricksters would treat the President and a pauper the same because there is no innate difference between them.

One of the biggest tricksters throughout history that people may not even realize is Jesus Christ. His thinking and his actions were well outside what was the standard of the society to the point of defying an entire religion. Mary Magdalene washed his feet when she was often heralded as an outcast. Jesus overthrew merchant's tables at temples. He was thought to be more of a rebel and a troublemaker rather than a spiritual leader in his own lifetime. A long time ago, there was a statement that “Jesus was a holy fool” but fool did not mean the same thing as it does today. “Fool” did not mean “stupid,” it meant “someone who saw things differently” as is the same of any trickster. Because one person saw things so differently and was unafraid to speak about it and be himself, we now have an entire religion based on him.