Most of the world’s mythologies include a trickster figure. They may act with deliberate volition and guile or without thinking. They may plan their actions in detail or respond on the spur of the moment. They may have a child’s innocence or a grown man’s intelligence and deliberate deceitfulness. Their actions may be harmless, dangerous, or may even backfire on themselves.

What all tricksters have in common is that they are unpredictable by mere mortal standards. They break the rules of the social order and sometimes even of the natural world simply by being who they are. Some tricksters seem to be aware of the rules and break them deliberately. For others, the rules are a language they do not speak and perhaps could not speak if they tried.

Shape-changer

Many tricksters are shape-changers. They may be human or an anthropomorphic animal, or somehow both simultaneously. In African and Caribbean folklore, Anansi can be either a physical spider or a human male, as the story requires. The same goes for Old Man Coyote, the quintessential trickster of native North American legend.

Even the gender of a trickster is not necessarily fixed. They may be male, female, or of ambiguous gender. Even those tricksters who are male need not stay so. The Scandinavian half-god Loki is clearly male, complete with a wife and several children: yet he once turned himself into a female mare to lure away a giant’s hard-working magical horse, so that the giant could not complete his contract with the gods in the required seven days. Loki even became pregnant by the horse and gave birth to the eight-legged horse Sleipnir, which later became Odin’s steed.

Societal balance

Disenfranchisement, poverty, and tricky ways of getting around them are common themes among tricksters, especially where the mythology belongs to a slave or otherwise downtrodden people. In this aspect, the trickster serves as a culture hero, and the trickery has the effect of balancing the scales a little: but not always altogether successfully.

One time when Anansi was particularly poor, all he could bring his large family to eat was a few plantains. There were not quite enough for each person to have a plantain: one person would have to go without. Anansi knew his duty, but could not help but look on mournfully as all the other members of his family cut open their plantain. They, in turn, could not stand to see him go hungry. First one, then another, and then all of them cut their plantains in half to give the other half to Anansi. So, from having nothing, Anansi ended up with much more than anyone else.

Teacher

The only time a trickster figure is ever seen in an ongoing position of power or authority is when the trickery itself is of a teaching nature. This aspect is separate and distinct from using stories about the trickster as morality teaching tales.

Loki has a special talent for getting out of a contract by sticking to the letter of the law while completely breaking its spirit. A typical example is that after losing a wager for his head to a dwarf, he gets out of it with his life by pointing out that the wager did not include a single piece of his neck.

In Wagner’s Ring cycle, however, Loki’s ability to bend, spindle, and mutilate the spirit of a contract takes on distinct teaching aspects when he offers Wotan, the guardian of oaths and contracts, a way out of an unwanted contract that Wotan should never have accepted in the first place. Loki, or Loge as he is known in Germanic mythology, is only doing what is in his nature: but by accepting the temptation, Wotan has undermined all contracts, all oaths, and ultimately all the gods.

The Turkish Nasruddin stories work both as teaching tales and with Nasruddin himself as teacher. Once when Nasruddin was asked to deliver a sermon and really did not want to, he went up to the pulpit and asked his audience, “Do you know what I am going to say?” When the audience replied, “No,” Nasruddin announced that he had no interest in speaking to people who did not even know what he was talking about. But he was not going to get out of it that easily. They called him back the next day: and when he asked the same question, this time they answered, “Yes.” So Nasruddin shrugged and said, “Well, if you already know, then I won’t waste any more of your time.” Perplexed, they asked him back one more time, certain that they could catch him out this time. When he asked the same question, he was told that some of them did and some of them did not. Nasruddin told them that those who knew should explain it to those who did not - and left for the final time.

Creator - and destroyer

The trickster is always the bringer of change. When the world does not yet exist, he may trick a god or some of his fellow animals into bringing it into being. If the world lacks light, the trickster steals the sun or the secret of fire: making him the friend and benefactor of mankind. In one story, Coyote even goes so far as to steal water from the Frog People, because it was not right that one people should have all the water.

In the popular Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon, both the coyote and the roadrunner share elements of the trickster: with the coyote’s tricks constantly backfiring on himself and the roadrunner always managing to act the innocent, even when the very laws of nature seem to bend and even break in his favour. A portable hole always seems to work when the roadrunner can benefit, fail when the coyote wants it to work, and to work in unexpected ways when the coyote has forgotten all about it.

In the 1980 episode “Soup or Sonic”, Wile E. chases the roadrunner into a pipe, which contracts according to the laws of perspective. On the other side of the pipe, both coyote and roadrunner were just a few inches high. When Wile E. chases the roadrunner back through the pipe, the roadrunner returns to his normal size: but of course the coyote does not. The roadrunner just stands there while Wile E. catches him - and has all he can manage just to cling to the roadrunner’s leg. The episode ends with Wile E. holding up a sign: “Okay wise guys, you’ve always wanted me to catch him.” And then, a moment later: “Now what do I do?”

In some cultures, tricksters have a sacred duty to upend a world that has become too stagnant: whatever the cost to themselves. If the society is still salvageable, actions taken in this context may amount to nothing more than questioning the established order of things. In extreme cases, the world itself may need to be destroyed to bring the creative spark back into a new world.

Morality

Tricksters, by their nature, are morally ambiguous. They may be beneficent, malicious, or even both, sometimes in the space of a single breath and sometimes acting differently in different stories. Most times, a trickster seems to be out only for himself, and may or may not get away with it. Other times he means well, but things may twist in his hands anyway.

The more rigid the morality of a given mythology, the more likely it is to constrain its trickster figures, or even to omit them entirely. Yet occasionally, the mystic traditions of a mythology restore the trickster element to a moralistic figure not generally known for them, or to his representatives.

In the story of Elijah’s cup, the rabbis could not decide whether to count a specific Torah verse as part of the Passover celebration, and thus requiring a fifth cup of wine. Since Elijah was the traditional solver of particularly knotty legal problems, the rabbis decided to set aside the decision - and another cup of wine - for Elijah’s eventual arrival to solve the dilemma.