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Who is this trickster archetype, the one who inspires such mixed feelings and brouhaha? Trickster has been with us from the beginning. Trickster will be there at the ending. (If there is an ending, Trickster will probably trigger it). Trickster is a creator, a transformer, a joker, a truth teller, a destroyer. Whoever has created a dance, a song, written a ritual, tailor-made a job, birthed a child or invented a game has partaken of a controlled Trickster energy. After all, in Northwest Native and Inuit tradition, Raven created the world; Loki is known to the Norse as a co creator (and the bringer of Ragnarok); Anansi the spider-trickster among the Ashanti of Ghana and Nareau the spider in Micronesia; Coyote among the Southwest Natives --these are the creator aspects of this wild and uncontrolled energy. Trickster often begins in the void, desiring to bring Order out of Chaos; once Order is imposed, however, Trickster represents the breaking free of negative power from the Universal Order of things. As a shape-shifter, Trickster is all things to all people, at one time or another, and often simultaneously. Of course Trickster is a creator and a destroyer. Sure he's a family man and a vagabond. Naturally he gives fire to humans and then steals their food before they can cook it. This is his style; when he acts out of selfishness, everyone benefits -- Maui of the Thousand Tricks might snare the Sun to slow it down, making life easier for humans, but he did it so his mother would have more time to cook for him. When he acts out of altruism, there's most always a negative effect --Marawa, a Lou Costello prototype from Banks Island carved human figures from wood and put them in the ground so they would grow and be strong; however, they merely rotted and death came into the world of humans. This shape- shifter not only moves from shape to shape, but from world to world. Number Eleven suffered at the hands of death to free his brothers; his brothers then took his lifeless body away and revived him. In the Winnebago cycle, Trickster dies three times and returns to life three times. In just one collection of Coyote stories, Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping With His Daughter, Coyote dies of a snake bite, a gunshot, an arrow wound, a broken heart, a rock-fall and a drowning; this resembles nothing so much as a Roadrunner cartoon. Trickster fuzzes
the lines between Male and Female, between cunning
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