by Terri Windling

Now listen, I'm going to tell you a story.

This was back when all the animals were people, before the Human People came. Creator called all them Animal People together and said, "There's going to be a change. New people comin', and you old people got to have new names. You come 'round tomorrow morning, and you can pick your own new names, first ones first until they're gone. And then he goes home to bed. 

Well that Coyote, he goes back to Mole, his wife, and he's all frettin' now, he's scratchin' and he's thinking hard, and Mole, she's lookin' nervous 'cause there's always trouble close behind when Coyote starts to think. "Mole," he says, "build up that fire, I'm going to stay awake all night. I'm going to be the first in line tomorrow at Creator's door. I'm going to get a strong new name. A better name. A power name. Maybe I'll be Bear," he says. "Or maybe I'll be Salmon. Or maybe I'll be Eagle, and then they'll treat me with respect."

So Coyote, he sits down beside that fire and tries to stay awake, but just a little while later he's fast asleep and snoring. Mole lets him sleep. She's thinking if Coyote gets a better name then maybe he'll just up and leave, that mangy, sneaky thing. Mole waits until the sun is high, and then she wakes her husband up.

Coyote runs right over to Creator, but he's much too late. All the power names are gone. All the little names are gone. The only name that's left now is Coyote -- which nobody wants.

Coyote sits down by Creator's fire, quiet now, and sad. It makes Creator start to feel real bad to see him sit like that. He says, "Coyote, my old friend, it's good you have the name you have. That's why I made you sleep so late. I've got important work for you. The Human People are comin' and you've got to go and help them out. They won't know anything, those ones, not how to hunt, or fish, or dress, or sing, or dance, or anything. It's your job now to show them how to do it all and do it right." 

Coyote, he jumps up and he's all smilin' now, with all them teeth. "So I'll be the Big Chief of these new people!" Coyote says. 

Creator laughs. "Yeah, somethin' like that. But you're still Old Coyote, you know. You're still a fool; that's what you are. But I'll make things easier for you. From now on you'll have these special powers: to change your shape, to hear anything talk except the water, and if you die you can come back to life. Now go and do your work."

Coyote left that tipi very happy. He went to find them Human People and to do his work. He went to make things right, and that's when all the humans' troubles began....

It is winter now as I sit in the Sonoran desert of Arizona, contemplating Coyote and his sack full of Trickster tales. In a number of Native American cultures, it is considered inappropriate, even dangerous, to tell Coyote tales at any other time of year; it is disrespectful to Coyote and unlucky to attract his attention by telling his stories out of season. Wild coyotes, cousin to the Trickster of legend, often appear in the dry stream bed just beyond my office window. They are beautiful creatures, untamable, sensibly wary of humankind. It is not at all unusual to see coyotes here in the desert outskirts of Tucson, but there seem to be more and more of them lately -- drawn here by my interest in their stories, the traditionalists would say. It is one thing to read Coyote tales as I first did years ago in New York City, far from the creature's natural haunts; quite another thing to read them here, where coyotes roam the yard at night, making an eerie noise that sounds remarkably like laughter.

It is in the desert that I've begun to truly understand how myths are drawn from the bones of each land's geography -- and how very different oral stories become when they are committed to the printed page, divorced from the land which birthed them. Too often printed versions of Coyote tales read (to urban and suburban readers) like simple children's fables: This is why the beaver's tail is flat, this is why the sky is filled with stars. In the oral tradition, Coyote stories are marked by their combination of outrageous (sometimes X-rated) humor and elements of great profundity; they are stories in which the sacred and profane are tied ineluctably together. "They are funny stories," a Diné (Navajo) friend tells me, "but they are also sacred and serious. Trickster reminds us not to be too simplistically dualistic in our thinking; that good can come out of bad and vice versa; and that right and wrong are not always poles apart."

Although Coyote may be the best known mythic Trickster in North America, other popular Tricksters can be found in myths and legends all around the world, from the woodlands of northern Canada to the rain forests of the Amazon, from the fairy glens of the British Isles to the haunted shrines of the Orient. Tricksters are contradictory creatures: they are liars, knaves, rascals, fools, clowns, con men, lechers, and thieves -- but they are also culture heroes whose tricks can do great good as well as great harm, and whose stories serve to uphold the very traditions mocked by their antics. As folklorist Christopher Vecsey notes, regarding Trickster in West Africa: "By breaking patterns of culture the Trickster helps define those patterns. By acting irresponsibly, he helps define responsibility." (1) Trickster's role to shake things up, to ignore established conventions and to transgress traditional boundaries, thereby initiating acts of change and transformation, for good or for ill.

Trickster can be an agent of creation or destruction, a cunning hero or a predatory villain; most often he is an ambivalent figure, shifting back and forth from one mode to the other. In some tales, his tricks allow humankind to obtain fire, language, laughter, song, sacred rituals, hunting, and love-making skills, while other tales show how his tricks gone awry have resulted in death, disease, sorrow, and strife entering the world. He is often portrayed as a creature at the mercy of overweening vanity and prodigious appetites (for food, for sex, for social power and recognition), perpetually undermined by these things and yet also perpetually undaunted by failure. As Robert D. Pelton comments in The Trickster in West Africa, 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 men, yet in their original form, and in some later forms, foolish, obscene, laughable, yet indomitable." (2)

The word "trickster" first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in the eighteenth century, where it was defined as "one who cheats or deceives." The term was adopted by scholars of literature and folklore from the nineteenth century onward, used to designate a wide range of rascals from the "wise fools" in Shakespeare's plays to the prankster "phookas" of Irish legends. In the early years of folklore studies, scholars collecting stories in Africa, Asia, and the Americas often toned down the bawdy, scatological humor recounted in traditional Trickster stories, or they omitted these tales from study altogether, considering them too rude, crude, or frivolous for publication.

Likewise, some indigenous storytellers refrained from telling Trickster tales to folklorists and anthropologists -- either to spare them embarrassment or because they failed to comprehend the serious intent behind such earthy stories. "It was hard," a Diné storyteller recalled, "for the belagana [white man] to understand how funny stories could also be sacred stories. Coyote shows what will happen if you fail to live in harmony and to take care of your relatives. Coyote is always hungry, he's always lazy, he's always chasing after someone else's wife. He doesn't think about anybody but himself. He does everything wrong, he messes everything up. It's funny, but it's a warning too."

Three influential books in the 20th century helped to establish and define Trickster as a specific kind of mythic archetype (although scholars to this day still argue about the parameters of the definition): Norman O. Brown's Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth (1947), Paul Radin's The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, and E.E. Evans-Pritchard's The Zande Trickster (1967). With these works, and publications inspired by them, folklorists began to understand just how widespread the Trickster archetype was, and to gain a better appreciation of the cultural importance of Trickster stories.

Robert D. Pelton notes that when he first heard the Trickster described during an introductory course to the history of religions at the University of Chicago, he was fascinated. "To be sure, I knew of medieval fools, Hasidic rabbis, Zen masters, and the intensity of contemporary religious communities; they all suggested that comedy was an essential aspect of seriously lived religion. Among those engaged in the sacred, laughter kept breaking out. Yet until I met the Trickster, I had not realized that many so-called primitive peoples delighted in celebrating this disruptive power instead of squelching it or using it to launch some dull theory about institutional stress, comic absurdity, or the psychological value of playing around. Moreover, while these people were discovering laughter at the heart of the sacred, they, like so many Flannery O'Connor prophets and profiteers, were insisting that this discovery of laughter revealed the true being of daily life." (3)

Some Trickster tales are shockingly sexual and scatological, reveling in the very things least welcome in polite society: dirt, feces, flatulence, vomit, prodigious appetites and out-sized body organs, along with the kind of slap-stick violence epitomized by The Three Stooges. Karl Kerényi, in his classic essay of the archetype, calls Trickster "the personification of the life of the body." (4) Trickster gleefully punctures all pretensions of gentility, all attempts to live in the mind and not the flesh; he is a creature of the body, of impulse and desire; he contains all the flaws of humankind writ large -- as well as our boundless optimism, picking himself up after each disaster, irrepressible as ever. Psychologist Carl Jung viewed Trickster as an expression of the shadow side of a culture, the embodiment of all that is repressed and disowned -- the greedy, needy rascal that lives somewhere inside every one of us. In recognition of the Trickster within, we delight in his outrageous escapades -- and then, being ethical creatures too, we also savor Trickster's come-uppance when his tricks have failed, his ego has been deflated, and chaos has been restored to order.

Novelist and folklorist Midori Snyder notes: "We enjoy Trickster's boundless energy, his refusal to observe the normal taboos, his gigantic appetites, because they reflect our own appetites in their most unvarnished, unsocialized state. Look at Uncle Tompa, the Tibetan Trickster, who poses as a woman in order to seduce a wealthy man into marriage. As the wedding gifts are packed on Uncle Tompa's horse, and the crowd assembles to wish the 'bride' farewell, Uncle Tompa raises his skirts and reveals his true anatomy, much to the merriment of the crowd and the utter shame of the bridegroom. There's more to Trickster than meets the eye, however -- we can't just write him off as a prankster and a fool. In the Winnebago Trickster cycle, the Trickster spends most of the epic engaged in bawdy, gluttonous activities, creating disaster wherever he goes -- yet in the closing episodes of the epic, he also travels through the land as a culture creator, carving out a place for humans to live in the world of nature. Among the Khoi-san of South Africa, Mantis does the same, creating, organizing, shaping the world which man will inhabit. Even Prometheus in European myth is both Trickster (when he steals fire from the gods) and culture hero (when he lifts the darkness for mankind)."

It is interesting, even puzzling to note that the vast majority of Trickster figures are male, even though trickery and duplicity is hardly limited to one gender. There are a few female Tricksters -- such as the seductive, deceptive fox maidens (kitsuné) of Korea and Japan, wise-cracking Baubo in Greek Eleusinian myth, clever Aunt Nancy in African-American tales, and a female Coyote in stories told by the Hopi and Tewa Indian tribes. Such wily women are rare, however, and seldom do they enjoy the cultural status of their masculine counterparts. (The majority of Hopi and Tewa stories, for example, feature the usual male Coyote.) In "Trickster and Gender," Lewis Hyde posits three reasons why male Tricksters are the norm: "First, these Tricksters may belong to patriarchal mythologies, ones in which the prime actors, even the oppositional actors are male. Second, there may be a problem with the standard itself; there may be female Trickster figures who have simply been ignored. Finally, it may be that the Trickster stories articulate some distinction between men and women, so that even in a matriarchal setting this figure would be male." (5)

Trickster is a consummate shape-shifter, turning up in many different forms in myths and legends around the world. Sometimes he's a god, an animal, a mischievous fairy or other supernatural creature. Sometimes he's a human simpleton, a Zen master, a Muslim mullah, or the devil waiting at the crossroads. But "not just any rogue or anti-hero can properly be termed a Trickster," notes literary scholar Helen Lock. "The true Trickster's trickery calls into question fundamental assumptions about the way the world is organized, and reveals the possibility of transforming them (even if often for ignoble ends)." (6)

The Greek god Hermes, known to the Romans as Mercury, is one of the classic Tricksters of Western myth. Hermes is the god of messengers, of merchants, and of financial transactions -- but he's also, in his dark aspect, the god of liars, gamblers, and thieves. The illegitimate son of Zeus by a nymph named Maia, Hermes was not born to divinity but had to win his place among the Immortals, using charm, cleverness, and duplicity to achieve this aim. His very first act, as a babe in arms, was to steal the sacred cattle of Apollo, covering up the deed with clever tricks and a packet of lies. The adult Hermes is portrayed as wily, lusty, and unpredictable, with a soft spot for pranksters, fraudsters, and con artists of all stripes. Hermes is also the god of thresholds, of open doorways and travelers on the road. He is the psychopomp who guides the dead from the lands of the living to the Underworld, and is one of the few capable of moving safely between these realms. He is, in Lewis Hyde's evocative phrase, "the lord of in-between" -- the god who guides or thwarts men as they pass from place to place or from one state of being to another. (7)

Eshu-Elegba, the Trickster god of the Yoruba people of West Africa, is one of the four warrior deities known collectively as the Orisha. He is the god of the threshold and of the roads, as well as the god of communication, charged with the task of carrying human prayers to the other Orisha. He is a complex, multi-dimensional Trickster with a central role in Yoruban cosmology, a mediator between the human realm and the sacred, numinous world. Eshu can be benevolent or malign -- and is usually both these things at once, delighting in playing tricks on human beings and the other gods. He is related to Legba, the wily, unpredictable Trickster of the Fon people in West Africa and Haiti, who is also associated with thresholds, gateways, roads, travelers, and dogs. Legba is "the opener of the way" in Voodoo ceremonies; he is the facilitator of communication between the human and spirit worlds, between men and women, between different generations, and between the living and the dead. Depicted as an old, old man in tattered clothes, Legba can be both kind and cruel and is never to be entirely trusted.

Loki in Norse mythology is another classic Trickster figure: full of clever pranks that both undermine and benefit the gods of Asgard. Loki's parentage is in dispute, for in some accounts he is the child of giants and in others he's nephew to Odin himself. He is an irrepressible liar, schemer, thief, and lover of practical jokes; he is also a shape-shifter, with the rare ability to shift between genders. In the early Norse tales, Loki is portrayed as an exuberantly amoral character, virtues and faults all mixed together. His actions are alternately helpful and harmful as his various schemes bring trouble upon the gods or, conversely, bail them out of trouble. In later tales, however (under the influence of Christianity), he becomes an almost Satanic figure. His last trick is an evil one, for it causes the death of Baldr, Odin's son. The gods imprison Loki in a cave; and there he's destined to remain until the battle of Ragnarök, when he'll emerge to lead an army of the wicked against Asgard.

Maui, the great Polynesian Trickster, is at home in both New Zealand and Hawaii, where he's known as both a world creator and a meddlesome troublemaker. Half-divine and half-mortal, Maui is the abandoned son of a goddess, rejected by his mother because of his human patrimony. Small and ugly, but possessed of physical strength and crafty intelligence, Maui survives, thrives, and demands his place among the other gods. In the tales of Maui's preposterous exploits he is credited with creating the land from the sea, lifting up the sky above it, forcing the sun to move more slowly, and bringing fire to humankind. Yet all of these good things come about, in the proper slant-wise Trickster fashion, as the result of Maui's avid pursuit of his own desires. He eventually causes such trouble for the gods that they conspire to destroy the half–mortal upstart, and Maui is killed while trying to gain immortality for human beings. As he dies, his blood makes shrimp turn red and forms the colors of the rainbow.

A large number of Trickster figures come in the form of animals and birds, sometimes interacting with human beings and sometimes only with other animals. Coyote, who is both man and animal, falls into this category. His tales are told by indigenous cultures from the Arctic down to Mexico -- particularly by tribal peoples of the American Southwest and Western Plains. (The female version of Coyote is found in New Mexico and Arizona.)

As folklorists Richard Erdoes & Alfonso Ortiz note, Coyote "combines in his nature the sacredness and sinfulness, grand gestures and pettiness, strength and weakness, joy and misery, heroism and cowardice that form the human character....As a culture hero, Old Man Coyote makes the earth, animals, and humans. He is the Indian Prometheus, bringing fire and daylight to the people. He positions the sun, moon, and stars in their proper places. He teaches humans how to live. As Trickster, he is greedy, gluttonous, and thieving."(8) Many of Coyote's exploits end in failure, often culminating in his death. Yet like the irrepressible Wile E. Coyote in the old Road Runner cartoons, he's always on his feet again in time for the next tale, as cocky as ever.

Hare is the primary Trickster figure of other Native American tribes, particularly among the Algonquin-speaking peoples of the central and eastern woodlands. The Great Hare known as Nanabozho (or Manabozho, or Nanabush) is a powerful, complex character. In some tales, he's a culture hero -- the creator of the earth and of humankind, the bringer of light and fire, the founder of various arts and crafts, and teacher of sacred rituals. In other tales he's a clown, a thief, a lecher, and a cunning predator -- an ambivalent, amoral creature who dances on the line between right and wrong.

We also find Trickster rabbits and hares in stories ranging from Asia and Africa to the hedgerows of Great Britain. In the Panchatantra  tales of India, for instance, hare's cleverness and cunning is tested by the wiles of the elephant and lion, while in Tibetan tales, hare must outwit the ruses of the predatory tiger. In Nigeria, Benin, and Senegal there are stories of a cunning, deceitful hare who is equal parts rascal, lecher, buffoon, and culture hero. African hare stories traveled to North America on the slavers' ships, where they mixed with Native American tales (such as rabbit stories of the Cherokee), evolving into the famous "Brer Rabbit" tales of African-American lore, and into the "Compair Lapin" stories told by French Creoles in Louisiana. In the British Isles, the hare is a wily Trickster associated with fairies, barrows, hedgerow witches, and Eostre: the Anglo-Saxon goddess of the Spring. She's a shape-shifter and messenger between the realms of the goddess, the dead, and humankind.

Anansi the Spider is a Trickster whose tales are known in many parts of Africa, the West Indies, and far beyond. His tales are generally humorous ones, with Anansi in the role of anti-hero: he breaks the rules, violates taboos, makes mockery of sacred things; he gets what he wants by plotting, scheming, lying and cheating. Anansi is famously lazy, greedy, pompous, vain, and ignorant -- but he's also very, very clever, usually outwitting everyone around him. Another Trickster spider can be found in tales of the Lakota and Dakota Sioux tribes of the American Midwest. Iktomi is a small but powerful creature, devious and mischievous. It was Iktomi who created time, space, and language, and gave all the animals their names, but he's also a thief, a glutton, a letch, and "the grandfather of lies." Like Coyote, Iktomi is a shape-shifter who can appear in the form of a handsome young man; his "love medicine" is powerful and has caused the downfall of many young girls. In this respect, Iktomi also resembles Kokopelli, a Trickster figure found in the American Southwest. Kokopelli is a hunch-backed flute player who wanders the canyons carrying a magical sack; he's famous for playing tricks on those he meets and seducing young women. (These seductions tend to backfire, however -- often on Trickster himself.)

Raven is the central Trickster figure for many of the First Nations on the North Pacific Coast -- a creature born, according to some old tales, from primordial darkness. Raven is revered as a world creator, feared as a source of chaos and strife, and laughed at as a clown and fool. His tales can be dreamlike and phantasmagorical, tinged with sorcery. Fox, Mink, Blue Jay, and Crow are some of the other Trickster characters in the tales of the many tribal groups of North America, in addition to Tricksters who are supernatural beings rather than animals: such as the Blackfoot's Old Man Napi, the Hopi's Skeleton Man, the Northern Cheyenne's Veeho, and the Métis' Whiskey Jack.

Other animal Tricksters around the world include the famous Monkey King of China. He's a magician, a shape-shifter, an incorrigible prankster, and an inveterate creator of chaos, exasperating even the Buddha, who kept him trapped under a mountain after one of his pranks. Lord Hanuman, the Monkey God of India, is sometimes considered a Trickster because of his animal shape and mischievous spirit, yet he doesn't exhibit the amorality usually associated with the Trickster archetype; he is a brave and noble character, a hero, and a devotee of Lord Rama.

The fox Tricksters found in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese tales are intelligent, devious shape-shifters, generally dangerous to encounter. Fox Tricksters can be male or female, young or old, beautiful or frightening in appearance. They begin their lives as ordinary foxes, obtaining their magical powers in one of two ways: by long years of arduous study (after which they are rewarded with the power to become human), or by posing as a human man or woman, seducing a member of the opposite sex, then stealing his or her life-force. Fox maidens (kitsuné) take human guise to marry unsuspecting mortal men, using elaborate tricks, lies, and illusion to conceal the truth. Such tales usually end in tragedy with the wife or husband's death -- but in some stories the passage between the mortal and magic realms is successfully negotiated, in which case the marriage prospers and produces half-mortal children.

Fox is often a rather nasty Trickster in the European folk tradition, where he's known as Renard, Renardine, or Mr. Fox. Appearing in the form of a man with fox-red hair, he's a handsome and smooth-talking knave who tricks girls into marrying him, and then murders them and eats them. In The Tales of Renard the Fox, a European epic of the Middle Ages, the fox is a more satirical figure: a greedy, wily rascal who dupes peasants and the nobility alike.

Fox also appears as a Trickster in Aesop' Fables, and the fairy tales of Eastern and Western Europe, where he uses cleverness and guile to aid young heroes and outwit their foes. A similar figure is Puss-in-Boots, one of the best loved Tricksters in fairy tales: a vain and silly creature, yet clever enough to win a castle and a princess for his master.

When we turn our sights to the fairies themselves, as portrayed in European fairy lore, we find there's more than a touch of the Trickster archetype in their make-up. Fairies come in many guises, but a number of them can fairly be described as mischievous, crafty, canny, clever, amoral, and unpredictable, fond of tricks, illusions, deceptions, and outwitting mortals. Puck is a classic fairy of this type: charming and highly duplicitous, best known for the chaos he sows in Shakespeare's fairy play, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Puck also goes by the name Robin Goodfellow, and is related to the  Pwca in Wales, Pukje in Norway, Puke in Sweden, and Pukis in Lithuania -- all impulsive, volatile creatures whose tricks are alternately delightful and cruel.