THE TRICKSTER

 

The trickster (“cheater”, “rascal”) is a mythical character which is found in the traditions of most Native peoples of the Americas. Though its name and characteristics are diversified from one culture to the other, a set of distinctive elements are common to all the different versions of these personage. The trickster stories show a peculiar blending of humorous, joking, paradoxical, sometimes even crude and abusive traits, mixed with culturally relevant elements, permeated with holiness, like the origin of the world and of some features of the landscape, the foundation of important institutions, of ceremonial practices or of religious instructions. Such stories move the listeners to laugh, show the weaknesses and worthlessness of humans, but they are also an access to a different, alternative viewpoint on reality,  revealing the conventional and arbitrary nature of many social and cognitive practices and envisage the possibility to look at what usually is not seen or remains outside of ordinary experience.
This personage presents himself often as devoid of control and discipline, unable to curb the most impellent drives, the food as well as the sexual impulse. His voracity is immeasurable, and so is his sexual incontinence. However, often both are drastically frustrated and the character remains high and dry or he himself is duped by some partner cleverer than him. Such uncontrollable sexual appetite is represented in many narratives which show the trickster as an individual with a sexual organ of huge size, so that it constitutes a serious impediment for him in travelling or conducting his daily activities. To abide to his desire to have intercourse, in some tales, he sends his very long penis across a river, to copulate with a woman who is on the other shore. Elsewhere, he tries to have intercourse with his own daughter, feigning to be dead and returning in disguise as suitor.

 

 

View of the site of British Block Cairn, Alberta, Canada, showing in the foreground a big human figure realized with the alignment of boulders and interpreted as the representation of Old Man, the Blackfoot Trickster. Archaeologists repute this monument as datable to around 1400 A.D.

 

 

Among the North-East Algonquian peoples, the trickster takes on the aspect of the rabbit, an animal characterized by his quickness and cunning, but also by his fecundity. A rabbit female has three or four litters per year, with an annual productivity as high as 35 young in one year.

 

Rock painting showing a therianthropic image, with human body and head and ears of a rabbit. It can be identified with Nanabush, the Ojibwa Trickster (Mazinaw Rock, Ontario, Canada)

 

According to anthropologist Paul Radin, who was one of the first scholars who gave wide renown to this character, “It 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. For this period Trickster is the symbol. His hunger, his sex, his wandering, these appertain neither to the gods nor to man. They belong to another realm, materially and spiritually, and that is why neither the gods nor man known precisely what to do with them” (Radin 1956: p. 168). Form a logical point of view, the trickster figure is a patchwork of contradictions and incongruities, but is this very nature that renders him so important for Native cultures. “Unseen realities, creation, transformation, transgression, and compassion are subjects that all great religious traditions explore. Native tricksters stand in the middle of all these noble abstractions, arousing the laughter that reminds everyone that humor is a sacred thing” (Meland 2005: p. 1124-25).