Graphic courtesy Robert Diners
"It was believed among the Lakota and other tribes that if you had a dream or vision of birds, you were destined to be a medicine man; but if you had a vision of the
Thunderbird, it was your destiny to become something else; heyoka, or sacred clown, the Trickster. Like the Thunderbird, the heyoka were at once both feared and held in reverence." (source)
The Trickster is a well-known and beloved figure in many myths over much of the world, but he is best known from two continents, North America and Africa. In North America he is characteristically portrayed as a being from the early mythological times when the animals appeared as human beings - human in mentality and thinking, animals in form — and the trickster himself was often zoomorphic and behaved as an impostor and cheater. No wonder therefore that the trickster is a central person in North American mythology. Indeed, in most tribal myth collections most narratives circle around this remarkable joker. At the same time he is often a serious figure, a transformer of the world, or a culture hero.
It should be noted that the denomination "trickster" has been invented, as Sam Gill reminds us, by scholars in America in order to characterize a certain type of aboriginal mythical and folkloristic being (Gill & Sullivan 1992:308). Indians have in their own languages no particular term for the same figure, although Daniel Brinton's calling the Algonkin representative "cheat and liar" (Brinton 1890:130 ff) is taken from the Catholic missionary Father Albert Lacombe's translation of the Cree buffoon (Wisakejak) as "trickster" and "deceiver" (Lacombe 1874). It should however be pointed out that the Cree name probably "was unanalyzeable even three thousand years ago" (Brown & Brightman 1988:125).
It is thus obvious that the trickster is a most enigmatic character. So many questions confront the listener of these tales. Why is he referred to mythology — outside of America myths in general are dignified and have a serious intent. Is he some kind of semi-divinity? What is his true function in ethnic folklore? Is he an object of entertainment, or a bewildered spirit? What are the relations between the trickster and culture hero traits?
The Trickster is an older, deeper archetype than the hero, warrior, or king. In that the Trickster carries with it a pejorative in connotation, I like to emphasize not just the Trickster, but the Shaman/Trickster...the Shaman being much more positive. So I link the two together. And certainly you can see that the Shaman/Trickster appears in the cave paintings of the
Early European Tribes, about 18,000 about years ago. Warriors don't appear until about 9,000 years ago. Kings appeared even later. It appears historically that the Shaman/Trickster came a lot earlier, perhaps even before the cave painters appeared. The Shaman/Trickster is closely tied to hunting, and hunting and gathering were the origin of human society, maybe 50,000 years ago. The warrior and the king are possible only after the development of cities.
From an interview with Allan Chinen
THE SHAMAN IN THE CAVE
Les Trois Freres, France
(please click)
Interested scholars, anthropologists, mythologists, folklorists, literary critics and students of religion such as Allan Chinen, above, have from time to time tried to tackle this problem. A survey of some representatives of the scholarly world and their opinions will give us a fascinating study of two notable facts: the division of promulgated theories according to the scholars' academic background, and the role of the scientific traditions for the interpretations of the trickster.
The first notes on the trickster emanate from the early white intruders. We find them for instance among the Jesuit Fathers. One of them, the famous Paul le Jeune, tells us in his Relation of What Occurred in New France in the Year 1634, how after the great deluge in the beginning of the world, according to the Montagnais Indians of Labrador, there was a certain Messou who restored the world. However, le Jeune says, "they have burdened this truth [about the flood] with a great many irrelevant fables." Thus, we find here the story of Pandora's box as a package given to "a certain Savage" by Messou. The man's inquisitive wife opened it so that its immortal essence flew away, and since then mankind has been subject to death (Kenton 1954:52f).
Obviously then the first white man who listened to the stories of the marvellous being from early mythic days had to try to combine the two difficult facets. No wonder that some of the missionaries made a direct connection between the trickster and the Christian devil (Hultkrantz 1977:412f, 443 note 11, 428f). Not unexpectedly, the later scholarly discussion was most confused.
The Early North American Scholarly Interpretations
In America where, to some extent, most sources on Indian folklore and religion were available early on there were some general notices on the trickster at the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, there was little or no discussion of how this contradictory character should be understood. A good example is Schoolcraft's notes on the concept in his pioneering work on American Indian tribes (1851-1857).
Thus, Schoolcraft mentions that there are two gods in Indian theology which strongly remind us of the old Persian dualism between Ormuzd and Ahriman, representatives of the good and evil powers in the existence (vol. I:636, vol. V:407). Schoolcraft arranged all the lesser spirits under these two main gods, imitating the Persian pattern. We shall return to this matter.
Schoolcraft had a great influence on the American intellectual public through his publications on the Ojibway culture hero, Manabozho (Schoolcraft 1851-1857, vol. I:317-319, 1839:135-171). Certainly the information was rather confusing, but, as Schoolcraft himself admitted, no informant agreed with another on the chain of events (cf. Vecsey 1983:88).
Schoolcraft may be accused of having played around with the identity of his tricksters and culture heroes. When Henry W. Longfellow wrote his famous poem The Song of Hiawatha he adorned this historical hero of the Iroquois with the legends and myths surrounding the Ojibway Manabozho. This was certainly a licentia poetica that Longfellow was able to utilize. Immediately after Longfellow's publication Schoolcraft issued a new edition of his Algic researches which he called — The Myth of Hiawatha (School-craft 1856)! In this work he light-heartedly transferred the Ojibway myths to the Iroquois (cf. Williams 1956:xviii, xix, xxi, 300 note).
Although the records made by Schoolcraft ought to have inspired a folkloristic approach to the trickster tales Schoolcraft stuck to his religious interpretations (perhaps because he was known to be a very religious man). To the educated scholar the trickster theme obviously reminded him of mythological themes in the Old World.
Another older author who was interested in the trickster theme was the learned Philadelphia scholar, Daniel G. Brinton. In his Myths of the New World (1868), the first comprehensive treatise on American Indian mythology, he particularly dwells on the Algonkin and Iroquois Indians (ibid:173-190). Like Schoolcraft before him he saw in the trickster a mainly religious figure:
In many of the tales which the whites have preserved of Michabo he seems half a wizard, half a simpleton. He is full of pranks and wiles, but often at a loss for a meal of victuals; ever itching to try his arts magic on great beasts and often meeting ludicrous failures therein; envious of the powers of others, and constantly striving to outdo them in what they do best; in short, little more than a malicious buffoon delighting in practical jokes, and abusing his superhuman powers for selfish and ignoble ends. But this is a low, modern, and corrupt version of the character of Michabo, bearing no more resemblance to his real and ancient one than the language and acts of our Saviour and the apostles in the coarse Mystery Plays of the Middle Ages do to those recorded by the Evangelists (ibid:175f).
Here is then, shortly before the theory of evolution breaks through in anthropology and religion, a conscious idea of degeneration. Brinton proclaims that Michabo, "the Great Hare who created the Earth, was originally the highest divinity" (ibid:176). The degeneration idea would continue with the Catholic Vienna school (Father Schmidt and his disciples), but these scholars would not accept the identity between the culture hero and the Supreme Being. Nevertheless, Brinton's idea of an original unity of the two concepts — which, as we shall see, may not be far from the probability - seems to have been accepted in wide circles, also in Europe.
During the last decades of the nineteenth century several collections of trickster myths were published. Charles Leland's work on the Coast Algonkin mythology, with an inclusion of important manuscript material supplied by Silas T. Rand (on the Micmac) and Mrs. W. Wallace Brown (on the Passamaquoddy) is rich in stories on the trickster (Leland 1884). While Leland is primarily interested in the possible connections between New England myths and spiritual traditions from Siberia and Scandinavia, the reader is perhaps more inclined to note the presentation of the main personage, the divine hero, Glooskap. Leland states that he is portrayed as the good actor of twin gods, and thus arranges the myth about him as belonging to the Iroquoian pattern. In contrast, there are among the Micmac and Passamaquoddy what Leland calls "merry tales" about a real trickster, "commonly known as the Indian devil." One receives the impression that two folkloristic mythological patterns have met here, one dualistic, one more jocular.
It was in these days that the breadth of the trickster and culture hero concept was determined. The trickster is to a large extent formed by the stories about him. Although Stith Thompson, a non-anthropological folklorist, has stated that we cannot "with any strictness" speak of a trickster cycle it is apparent that in most areas of North America there is a tendency to group the same series of narratives around the trickster (Thompson 1946:319, 1966:294). Most stories evidently portray him as both a clever deceiver and a numbskull. The question is, where does the benevolent culture hero come in?
This is the problem that scholars have either steered past — so mostly in America — or, as particularly in Europe, tried to solve. It offers an interesting difference between American pragmatism and European speculation.
The Trickster according to the Boas Tradition
In the Northwestern tribes there is a popular trickster figure, mostly known as Raven, Blue Jay or Mink. He is not only a buffoon but also a "transformer," that is, a person who modelled the earth after its creation. Of course this brings in the religious aspect. However, the pioneer of anthropological work among the North Pacific groups, Franz Boas, while acknowledging the features of a culture hero, prefers to see the Raven etc. as a joker and caricature of man with a strong libido. He writes:
I find that in most tales of the transformer, or of the culture hero, the prime motive is... a purely egotistical one, and that the changes which actually benefit mankind are only incidentally beneficial. They are primarily designed by the transformer to reach his own selfish ends (Boas 1898:6).
This has been the style-forming motto for practically all later anthropological and folkloristic interpretations in North America. It represents a break with all preceding research on the trickster phenomenon. The trickster is entirely taken out of a religious context. The study of the innumerable funny stories of the irresponsible buffoon, a beloved entertainment in the winter evenings, has practically ousted the more theoretical plodding with the few religio-centric tales. This is the legacy of a scholar who was from the beginning a naturalist and little understood religion as such.
One thing should however be admitted, Boas managed through his conception to unite the two seemingly incompatible sides of the trickster — culture hero figure. He dethrones the Plateau Indian hero (mostly Coyote) from his divine heights by denying him all altruistic motives. Thus, Coyote fashioned the world to its present appearance in the course of his personal adventures, often with the direct aim of harming his enemies. He is not what we ordinarily understand by the term 'culture hero,' a benevolent being of great power whose object it is to advance the interests of mankind, but he is simply one of many more or less powerful beings who gave the world its present shape. With this conception of the so-called culture hero the difficulty disappears of uniting in one person the benevolent being and the trickster. He helps man only incidentally by advancing his own interests (ibid:7).
So far so good, although one wonders why the two ideas were joined together. Furthermore, the argument does not seem satisfactory when Boas couples the trickster with the devil concept: "We have a condition correspon-ding almost exactly to the attitude of mediaeval Christendom to the devil" (loc. cit.). The connection had been made by Leland (cf. above), and it is significative (cf. below), but what does Boas mean — that the devil is a folkloristic concept rather than religion? Boas also admits that among certain tribes, such as the Kwakiutl, there is "a gradual transition from the purely egotistical transformer legends, if I may use this term, to the clearly altruistic series" (ibid:9, 145). Here, in other words, Boas cancels, much of what he has already said.
Boas's many talented disciples, the great generation of American anthropologists — who also were the leading American folklorists - shared in the main his general conclusions about the nature of the trickster. This meant that the religions nature of the trickster was played down whilst the folkloristic qualities were eminently taken care of. To the matter-of-fact American this was a correct approach: the wealth of trickster tales spoke in its favour. Basing his research on the enormous mass of trickster tales collected by the "Boasians," Thompson created a thesaurus of American Indian mythology in which of course he also included the trickster tales (Thompson 1966, first published 1929). His main interest was to classify the material into tales and motifs. Trickster stories dealing with creation, transformation and connections with supernatural astral powers were classified as "mythological stories." It is for instance characteristic that Glooskap who is only to a small extent a trickster belongs here to mythology, together with such beings as Manabozho and Raven. Thompson also emphasizes that tricksters transcend the cycle of "trickster tales," and some personages who are not normally tricksters operate as tricksters in certain tales. He also observes that "most of the culture heroes are also tricksters and... even in their most dignified moments they are prone to show something of their dual nature" (ibid:xviii).
Attention should be paid to Thompson's points of view since his works represent a wider reading than other trickster scholars and he is not, like most others, affected by some tribal preference.
One of Boas's disciples who was known to be an original thinker and very independent was Paul Radin. His thinking was chiefly based on his field experiences among the Winnebago, and his book The Trickster (1956) is mainly a presentation of the Winnebago trickster cycle and is an analysis of the myths and their actors. Two other well-known authors, Karl Kerényi and Carl Gustav Jung, complement Radin's writings with some comparative and psychological points of view.
Like Boas, Radin thinks that the trickster's divinity is a secondary trait and a construction from the "shaman's" or "priest-thinker's" side (Radin 1915:269, 280, 283; 1956:164). This thinker is a basic figure in Radin's idea of the growth of cultural sophistication (cf. Radin 1957:229ff). It is interesting to find that the name of the Winnebago trickster, Wakdjunkaga, means "the tricking one" (Radin 1956:132). This etymology seems to support Radin's theory. However, as Radin points out, the name appears to be secondary. The situation is complicated: there is also a parallel trickster cycle, grouped around the Hare who is a more chastised concept than the Algonkin Great Hare. (This Winnebago Hare was obviously a loan from the Algonkin tribes.)
According to Radin the trickster "embodies the vague memories of an archaic and primordial past, where there as yet existed no clear-cut differentiation between the divine and the non-divine" (ibid:168). C.G. Jung who was taken in by Radin's interpretation echoes, "he [the trickster] is a forerunner of the saviour, and, like him, God, man, and animal at once" (ibid:203). According to Radin Wakdjunkaga was meant as "the glorified image of man," but failed (ibid:150). Hare is, in comparison, more faithful to Earthmaker's — the Creator's — moral principles. To Radin's understanding the ambiguous figure of the main trickster shows that he is a true model of man, placed between good and bad intentions.
This understanding of the trickster has inspired another American scholar, Mac Linscott Ricketts, to consider the trickster in his character of a prototype of man (Ricketts 1966). Thus, Ricketts finds the trickster reducible to the idea of a being who lives by his wits and his wit, who represents a mythical perception of man making his cosmos and finding a place within it (Ricketts 1987:50).
Ricketts underlines the trickster's uninhibited urges but also his ability to perform deeds which serve mankind: the liberation of the wild game, the theft of fire or light, the victory over evil monsters. However, like Boas Ricketts emphasizes that "the significant element in all these deeds is trickery" (ibid: 49). It is remarkable, says the same author that the trickster is particularly bent on scoffing at the medicine men (Ricketts 1966:336f, 338).
To Ricketts, the trickster is "a myth being, a person of the mythical age, the primordial era" (ibid:343). The myth combines his two main roles, trickster and culture hero. He finds that this combination of appearances is most manifest in most distant times and lives on among the traditional hunting peoples, whilst the one-sided tricky part tends to dominate among agricultural peoples (ibid:328f, 334). At the same time Ricketts denies that this hero could be considered a spirit or a god in the remote old days (ibid:329); as Radin had stated he never received any prayers. "Only exceptionally and aberrantly is the trickster held to be a spirit or a god" (ibid:344). We may wonder, is not this a play on words? The main thing is that the culture-hero-trickster is a supernatural, a member of the extra-mundane beings of the normative times.
However, Ricketts chooses another path. The trickster, he argues, is Man Himself, his myths "disclose man transcending himself" - a transcendence which is a compulsion to know (loc. cit.). This is, he claims, "the way of the trickster-hero... the way of worldly religion and science," "man being religious in 'the other way,' the godless way of humanism" (loc. cit.). Frankly, it seems to this author that Ricketts has created a sort of religion for himself, and other academics.
Another scholar who has arrived at conclusions similar to Radin's and Ricketts' is Lawrence Sullivan. He points out that "the trickster affirms a sacrality different from that of divine immortals... he [is] a symbol of the human condition" (1987:45). Sullivan adds:
Wherever he appears, the trickster enacts the human comedy as a sacred drama, displaying the ironic condition of a limited mind served by limited senses but with an unlimited desire to relate to the realms of meaning around it (ibid:46).
Personally I think that the use of Mircea Eliade's, concept of sacrality may create difficulties in the interpretation of the trickster concept.
Radin had vaguely discussed a possible link between shamanistic thinking and the development of the culture-hero concept. The mythologist Joseph Campbell found a deep relationship between the trickster-culture hero and the shaman. He writes:
It is hardly proper to call such a figure [the trickster] a god, or even to think of him as supernatural. He is a super-shaman. And we find his counterparts in myth and legend throughout the world, wherever shamanism has left its mark (Campbell 1959:275).
It seems questionable if the trickster could be called a shaman, but there is also another scholar who has thought along these lines.
Basing his argument on the theories of Radin and Ricketts, but arranging the material in a psychoanalytic direction, the American anthropologist Weston La Barre added a new dimension to our understanding of the trickster (cf. La Barre 1970:224 note 4). He simply omits the boundary between shaman and spiritual being. He proclaims that the trickster-transformer Coyote-Raven-Manabush figure of Indian legend is plainly a shaman, with a shaman's skill and failures, and not a 'high-god' Creator, for all the trickster's shamanistic arrogance (ibid:136f).
How could the two, trickster and shaman, be identical? La Barre offers the following explanation:
[the trickster] is in all accounts specifically a living man. He is not a high god. He is a primitive shaman... Given the animistic ideology or spirit-substance or soul, all that is needed to make a 'god' is for a man-god (or power-laden man) to die and his cult to continue. These were the only 'gods' that the aboriginal New World knew — shamans, 'owners' of animals, 'transformer' demiurges and magicians, culture heroes and tricksters (ibid:199).
This is an evolutionary scheme in the old Spencerian manistic tradition, and it is difficult to take it seriously. The only possible "proof" La Barre supplies is his reference to the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa who, after he had predicted an eclipse of the sun in 1806, claimed that he was the trickster and culture hero Manabozho (ibid:212). It is understandable that La Barre has no patience for European scholars who debate about the religious character of the culture hero:
The whole picayune argument over subjective taxonomies is concerned with a bogus problem: for all these figures [of the culture hero, master of animals etc.] derive simply from the human shaman who is all of them, and the 'problem' arises from our separating and over-categorizing his traits (ibid:187 note 4).
As we nevertheless see, of all American trickster students after Brinton, La Barre is the most outspoken one about the trickster's religious dimensions, and he is also the scholar who took up the European contributions to the culture hero for further discussion. These contributions will be our next subject.
To conclude our survey of the American authors on the trickster, we notice that the folkloristic interpretations widely overshadow all others. American students since Boas have on the whole disengaged themselves from European research and followed their leader's culture-relativistic and folkloristic evaluations. How this could have become so is indeed a problem.
European Scholarship on the Trickster
There is thus a remarkable difference between Americans and Europeans in their interpretations of the North American trickster. European theorists (with some few exceptions) have proceeded from the culture hero rather than the trickster, but they have had the same difficulties as their American colleagues to bring together the two seemingly incompatible sides of their study object.
The culture hero appears in the very first study of American religions, the famous survey by JG Müller (1855). He is, however, not clearly perceived as a being of a particular order. Müller's sources were of course ancient, although he managed to include the information in Schoolcraft's Algic Researches. The culture hero is sometimes described as an anthropomorphic manifestation of the Supreme Being, and other times as an incarnation of the first man (ibid:126ff, 133ff). His pranks and jokes are duly referred to.
Some early comments in European anthropological literature evince obvious misunderstandings, such as Andrew Lang's insistence that North American tricksters are totem beings (Lang 1894 vol. II:78ff). Some obscure statements in Brinton's works have apparently misguided the author.
In this connection the thoughts presented by the Archbishop of Sweden, Nathan Söderblom, should also be mentioned. In his search for the idea of God among i.a. North American Indians he formulated the idea of the "originator," a divine being which corresponded to man's cosmic causal needs. As I have tried to show in an earlier article Söderblom combined the Supreme Being and the culture hero in one divinity (Söderblom 1914:110, 128ff; Hultkrantz 1979:19, 25, 1984a:26; see also above, note 1). There is little discussion of trickster traits in Söderblom's work.
The most interesting contribution to the trickster and culture hero problem was no doubt Kurt Breysig's monograph on the Heilbringer (Breysig 1905). This book which was quickly observed in European history of religions — but not paid any attention to in the New World — integrated the belief in the culture hero with fashionable (although somewhat aged) evolutionism. The center of the discussion was a being, the Heilbringer, who appears as man or animal with supernatural powers. This is what Americans call the culture hero, who is a middle being in the series of religious evolution, between the pale animal spirit concept and the concept of God. In time he develops into God. Breysig tries to demonstrate this process (ibid:5ff).
Thus, according to Breysig the Great Spirit of the Lenape Indians has without doubt grown forth from the Heilbringer idea. He has dropped his earlier animal guise which — according to Breysig - he adopted when a Heilbringer (ibid:30). The Heilbringer is not the soul of a dead person, like the supernatural animals, but a higher being who is part man, part animal, or altogether man. As Heilbringer he is on the way to acquire the qualities of a higher spirit and he finally becomes God. Raven and other culture heroes are still close to the animals whose names they carry, Glooskap is more human and thus represents the road to God (and is as we know almost devoid of a tricky character). The source of the divine belief is thus "the personality of earthy beings" (ibid:176ff).
Here, then, the religious importance of the culture hero was put forward. There were certainly scholars who refused to accept the evolution of the concept of God, a question to which we cannot attend to here. It should be mentioned however that the theories of a connection between Heilbringer and God were not accepted by the South Americanist Paul Ehrenreich (1906) and the well-known culture historian and linguist Wilhelm Schmidt (1930). To Ehrenreich, the Heilbringer was a person who had been created by the high god, and not a step in theistic evolution. Schmidt on the other hand defined the culture hero originally as an ancestor and, in younger cultures, a moon god or (in so-called totemistic cultures) a mediator between the high god and mankind. Other scholars who were less acquainted with North American mythology did not quite realise the nature of the Heilbringer (see e.g. van der Leeuw 1956, chapter 11).
Breysig gave the impetus to several works on the Heilbringer figure, all of them in Europe; the Americans simply did not pay attention to the Heilbringer concept. It is characteristic that the most comprehensive, "biggest" book that has been written on the American culture hero and Heilbringer, the Dutchman Arie van Deursen's DerHeilbringer (1931), has passed unnoticed in the new standard encyclopaedia of religion. Indeed, there is no reference to van Deursen or the Heilbringer in the articles on "culture heroes" or "tricksters" in this reference work. This convincingly shows how far distant from each other North American and European research in mythological figures has been in the past. At the same time it should be admitted that the European scholars of religion, in distinction to European folklorists, have seldom been interested in bringing out the genuine trickster traits.
In the first place, van Deursen's book is a more systematic survey of the North American culture hero-trickster variations, seen from the general ideas that Breysig had presented. The Heilbringer phenomenology is mapped in the order that is suggested through the extension of different linguistic groups; the culture-area division is only partly observed. Due to the situation at the time of writing some groups like the Numic (Shoshoneans) and Canadian Athapascans are only slightly mentioned since there was little known about their mythologies. The trickster character of most culture heroes was noted, but not specifically dwelt upon. According to van Deursen it is the needs of the raconteur to catch his public with dramatic power and humour that have brought forth the trickster side in the Heilbringer: "The cunning and the shrewdness which are so admired [by the Indians] are a hero's obvious qualities in the narratives at the campfire" (ibid:370f). However what primarily caught van Deursen's attention was the Heilbringer's position as a being between God and humanity, a mediator whose role resembled that of Christ, — something that the Indians themselves pointed out to Edward Sapir and Paul Radin (ibid:379f). To the theologian van Deursen this was a very important aspect.
It is just this supposed theological criterion that was rejected in the Swedish scholar Gösta Kock's sharp attack on van Deursen's treatise (Kock 1943). To Kock, the Heilbringer was a god among other gods, and not a messenger of a Supreme Being. In a later publication he associated himself with the Italian scholar Raffaele Pettazzoni who had seen a possible origin of the culture hero in the master of the animals (Kock 1956:120, 126; Pettazzoni 1956, chapter XXII). However, Pettazzoni thought that the master of the animals, for instance Coyote was the first Supreme Being of the oldest hunting cultures, later superseded by a heavenly Supreme Being (Pettazzoni 1956:369f, 375f, 439ff, 454f). All these theories are merely suggestions, and do not take up the trickster problem.
A German scholar, Werner Müller, tried to catch a holistic view of the Eastern Woodland Indians in the 1950's. Müller was no field researcher (nor were most European Americanists), but possessed a remarkable insight into North American religions. He defined the Eastern Woodlands as an area where the concepts of the high god and the culture hero had attained a clear and logical position. There is certainly the tendency from both divinities to exclude each other, writes the author, but both of them express the two basic structures of North American Indian religiosity: the high god stands for the cosmic dimensions, the world as a unity, whereas the culture hero acts for the individual human beings, smooths out the earth, introduces the religious and secular institutions that help mankind to live on (Müller 1956, 1989; Breivik 1988). The ideas of a creative mythological analysis used in the German Frankfurt school is clearly visible in Müller's holistic approach. In fact, the stress on the co-operation and counteraction of the two leading mythical beings is a key to the understanding of the trickster complex. On the other hand, there is little said about the trickster problem which is, as Breivik notes (1988:4), a real crux interpretationis. As an historian of religion Müller was less interested in fictional folkloristic tales.
French anthropologists have occasionally approached the trickster theme and then interpreted it in characteristic French terms. In his pioneering article on the structural study of myth, (first published in 1955), Claude Lévi-Strauss tries to "perceive some basic logical processes which are at the root of mythical thought." Thus he tries to bring order out of chaos and he places the trickster, until now a problematic figure, in "mythical thought" which according to him always progresses from oppositions to their resolution. He refers for instance to Coyote, which he characterises as a carrion-eater (for Lévi-Strauss does not make a difference between the biological animal and the folkloristic hero), as intermediary in binary oppositions between herbivorous and carnivorous animals (Lévi-Strauss 1963:224f). It is difficult to understand how such a theory could "explain" the trickster. Is not the dominant opposition the one between culture hero and destructive trickster? Can we in this case trust a thought model which does not include religious belief?
Another French scholar, Laura Makarius, works in the same structuralist tradition. She associates Coyote with impurity and qualifies him as "symbolical of incest" (Makarius 1973a:173). The culture hero of the Menominee, Manabozo, accepts his brother being killed in order to institute the Midewiwin ceremony for the good of humanity, a breach of blood taboo, performed for magical purposes. Makarius comments, "The contradiction between the individual and asocial character of the violation of taboo, and its perpetration by the trickster for the benefit of society as a whole, is the essence of the trickster myth" (Makarius 1973b:668). Perhaps, but only in this myth spread among Central Algonquin peoples.
Whence the Trickster?
Any effort to investigate why a trickster appears in folklore or religion, or how the relations are between the trickster and the culture hero-transformer, has to widen the discussion to also include the appearances of the trickster in other parts of the world. There is no possibility to do this here, but some points can be made.
There are good investigations that have been undertaken among, for instance, inhabitants in Africa and the South Seas which to some extent differ from North American and European research on North America. Harry Tegnaeus points out that in Africa the steppe hunters mostly have theriomorphic heroes, whereas in other cultures ancestors, smiths and dead kings (in Kingdoms of course) play the role of culture heroes (Tegnaeus 1950). In comparison in North America only Californian and Southwestern Indians know ancestors and chiefs (Montezuma) who appear as culture heroes. It seems that the strength of the hunting cultures in aboriginal North America has contributed to the zoomorphic culture heroes in North America. African divinities often have trickster qualities, whether they are human or animal-like. They are noted for their playfulness in words which may upset the cosmic order. They are, says Robert Pelton, "juggling with meaning and absurdity" which is "a sophisticated African form of religious thought" (Pelton 1987:47).
If we turn to the Molucca Islands in Indonesia we find there a sort of culture hero who have become known as dema. They are obviously marked by the ways of life of the root-crop cultivating inhabitants of these islands. The culture heroes are the main figures in myths which describe how they were murdered in primeval times and then transformed into crops, whereafter they became chief spirits of the dead. There is no mirth attached to these divinities, and they may — in contradistinction to American tricksters — appear in masked cult dances at fertility rites (cf. Jensen 1963, part II). We can observe here how the culture hero has been absorbed by the agricultural ritual.
These examples show that the culture hero aspect is more dominant and meaningful than the trickster aspect — that in other words the religious frame is more important than the jocular folkloristic. It seems there is something in the culture hero personage which drives it in a comic direction.
Let us see how some scholars have tried to solve this problem. The reference is here, again, to the North American Indian tricksters.
As was pointed out above, Brinton interpreted the lecherous trickster as a later and corrupt version of an originally divine being (Brinton 1868:175f). This was a natural inference in pre-evolutionistic days. Of course evolutionists like Breysig took the opposite standpoint, a development from animal-like beings to culture heroes and finally divinities. Boas made an effort to join the transformer-trickster figures by grading them in several categories, some positive, some negative. With reference to the Kwakiutl Indians in the Northwest Boas suggested that the coarse motives of the primitive transformer changed with "the progress of society." Ethical aspects came to the fore, which caused a friction with the earlier frivolous myths. "The personage of the transformer is split in two or more parts; the one representing the true culture hero, the other retaining the features of the trickster" (Boas 1898:10).
Similar ideas were expressed by, for instance, Lowie and Radin. Pettazzoni, followed by Ricketts (1966:340), saw in the trickster a kind of creator before the real high god appeared. Radin tells us that the Winnebago high god, Earthmaker, proclaimed that Wakdjunkaga, the oldest of his created beings, was made good-natured, "a sacred person." He was supposed to inform and guide the human beings in the art of securing happy lives. "This was the purpose for which you were created." However, through his own doing he had incurred bad luck and behaviour. People now call him the Foolish One. "I did not create you to injure my creation" (Radin 1956:150f).
This sounds like a fallen angel doctrine. Boas, when speaking about the Tlingit Raven cycle, said he was told by an informant that the mischievous incidents in the creation tales were told "only to offset the serious parts of the tale, in order to entertain the listeners" (Boas 1916:582 note). The trickster elements thus ease a tense situation, just as the clown pranks in Southwestern ritual processions do. Both Radin and Ricketts refer to the dualistic tensions between the Supreme Being and the buffoon.
Several authors have referred to the trickster as a kind of devil. We have seen how Schoolcraft and Leland, and even Boas, compare the trickster to the devil. Of course, such points of view cannot be generalized for all tricksters, but they open vistas for a fruitful discussion about the tendencies of trickster conceptions.
I want to finish this survey with some reflections which I have partly introduced in earlier papers (Hultkrantz 1977:425-430, 1980:32-42, 1984b, 1994). The following account is primarily concentrated upon the main problems in this paper, the rifts between American and European views on the trickster, and the possible dualism that lies behind this disagreement.
It seems necessary to understand the trickster myths from both folkloristic and religio-historical points of view. There is the aspect of the buffoon — and the most experienced of the bunch at that — which fulfils the need for jocular entertainment and relaxation in difficult situations (such as serious, boring and exhausting ritual occasions). There is, furthermore, the transformer and culture hero who is more or less successful in his tasks. If we call him trickster we must not forget this part of his sphere of action.
If we acknowledge this we must at the same time recognize that the being behind the trickster mask has also a religious function — although it is restricted. As even Breysig had to admit, he is not a deity receiving cult, he is a mythic being, a supernatural figure who belongs exclusively to mythology. On the other hand, the Supreme Being is mostly excluded from mytholo-gical stories. Only in those few cases where the Supreme Being is at the same time the trickster, as among the Arapaho, is he also a central figure in mytho-logical tales (cf. Dorsey and Kroeber 1903:6 note; van Deursen 1931:132ff). The situation seems to be the same among some Californian tribes. In most cases the tension between high god and trickster is very pronounced; they seem to compete with each other — in mythology, where the Supreme Being is less outstanding. From this writer's point of view it seems reasonable to conclude that the culture hero is a double of the Supreme Being in mythology, but a less successful double. In the oral folklore tradition the culture hero has become degraded through this competition, and simply turned into an immoral trickster of the same class as other folkloristic frauds mentioned in the narrative traditions. His failures make him ridiculous, a trickster.
What we probably have to reckon with is that this process of the depreciation of the culture hero took place on a world scale, and was not confined to North America. This polarization of the two great cosmic beings was, as Radin, Earl Count and I have pointed out, deepened by a wave of dualistic ideas emanating from the Old World. The scene was set for a development into God and devil. However, though there were some cosmic inclinations in this direction, the practical ethical consequences were never drawn, except when Christian teaching changed the picture.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: THE SHAMAN AND THE POWER OF THE OMEN
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MEDITATION
ALONG
METEOR CRATER
RIM
SEE
SHE SHAMAN: The Woman Shaman and Shamanism
DREAM
CATCHER
SITE
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The above article by /Åke Hultkrantz, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Comparative Religion, Stockholm University. Originally appearing in Vol 5, No 2 1997 issue of ACTA AMERICAN
