The Trickster: Breaking the Rule, Changing the World

Summary

The trickster in myth is a clever figure who breaks a rule or deceives someone stronger, after which the world is different: someone condemned to die survives, a sacrifice is divided in a way that lasts, a treasure enters the gods' house that was not there before, or the most beloved of them dies. The trickster is often also the one who brought people something useful, so his story meets those of the culture heroes.

The oldest complete trickster story is the Old Babylonian poem Atrahasis, and the one who tricks is Enki. Humans were made to carry the gods' digging work; they multiplied and their noise grew until it disturbed Enlil, who sent a plague, carried by Namtar. Enki told his servant Atrahasis, the man the epic of Gilgamesh calls Utnapishtim: have the heralds proclaim in the land, "Do not revere your gods, do not pray to your goddess, seek the gate of Namtar and set a baked loaf before it", so that he will feel obliged, literally "ashamed", by the gift and pass his hand over it. The plague ended; when the gods sent drought he did the same, turning all the offerings to Adad. When the gods decided on the flood, Enki did not tell the man in so many words; he spoke to the wall: "Wall, listen to me carefully! Reed wall, observe all my words!" Atrahasis built the boat and survived. Seeing the boat, Enlil was enraged, and Anu asked, "Who but Enki could do this?" Enki answered, "I did it, in front of you!" In Tablet XI of the Gilgamesh epic Ea tells Enlil: "It was not I who revealed the secret of the great gods; I only made a dream appear to Atrahasis, and so he heard our secret." Atrahasis I 352–384, II, III, columns i and vi; Gilgamesh XI 21 and 196.

Among the Greeks Prometheus divides the sacrifice of an ox at Mecone between gods and men: he puts the meat and fat-rich entrails in the hide, covered with the ox's paunch, and arranges the white bones "with crafty art" under shining fat, then tells Zeus to choose. Zeus sees the trick and chooses the fat, and ever since people burn white bones for the gods. Theogony 535–557. Hermes is born at dawn, and by evening steals fifty cows from his brother Apollo and drives them backwards so that their tracks point the wrong way; then he swears before his father that he did not take them, and Zeus laughs at his son. Hymn 4. In the North Loki holds both sides: his trick saves the gods from paying the sun and moon as wages to the builder of their wall, and his trick kills Baldr. Gylfaginning 42 and 49.

Tricksters share three things: wit that works where force is not enough; a rule that is broken, whether a decision of the gods, the division of a sacrifice, a brother's property, or a bargain and an oath; and a world changed by the breaking, which does not go back: people stay alive, eat the meat and burn the bones, Hermes gains a share among the gods, Baldr dies. They part in what follows: Enki admits it and is not punished, Hermes's father laughs, Prometheus is chained, Loki is bound with his son's entrails. The idea the stories turn on is that trickery is the weapon of those who do not hold the decision: Enki against Enlil's decree, the infant against his elder brother, Prometheus against Zeus, lame Hephaestus against swift Ares.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Arabic calls the trickster muḥtāl, from ḥīlah, and ḥīlah is from the root ḥ-w-l. In Lane, ḥāla is said of a thing that became altered or changed from its state, and of a year that passed over something; ḥīlah is "art, artifice, cunning, ingenuity, or skill, in the management of affairs"; the muḥtāl is "one who exercises art, artifice, cunning"; and ḥawwalahu is to shift a thing from one place to another. The muḥtāl in Arabic is the one who turns a matter from its state by skill, which is what the stories do: Enki turns a sentence of death into survival, Prometheus turns a sacrifice into a share for men, Hermes turns cattle from his brother's herd into his own. The Arabic word joins craft and cunning as Greek does in τέχνη: Hesiod calls the division at Mecone "crafty art", and the same word names every art Prometheus gave mankind.

Attestations by Culture

Sumer and Babylon: Enki as trickster and as dupe

In Tablet XI of the Gilgamesh epic, Ea calls out, "Reed house, reed house! Wall, wall!", tells Utnapishtim to tear down his house and build a boat, and then teaches him what to say to his city: that Enlil rejects him, so he cannot stay among them, and that Enlil will rain loaves of bread on them in the morning and a shower of wheat in the evening. The man leaves the city with words that promise its people plenty.

In Enki and Ninhursanga, Enki comes to Uttu's house as a gardener bringing cucumbers, apples and grapes, and she joyfully opens the door. Later he eats, one after another, the eight plants that Ninhursag grew, deciding their destinies; she curses him and withdraws, and he falls ill. Neither Enki nor Enlil brings her back; the fox does: he asks Enlil what his reward will be if he brings her, then anoints his body, shakes out his fur, puts kohl on his eyes and sets off.

In Inanna and Enki, Enki is the one deceived. He drinks with Inanna until he gives her the me, among them deceit itself; when he sobers and sends after her, she answers that his word cannot be revoked, and carries the me to Uruk. Inanna and Enki, segments C–H. Enki is a trickster in Atrahasis, in the Gilgamesh epic and in the Dilmun poem, and the dupe in the story of the me.

Greece: Prometheus, Hermes and Hephaestus

Prometheus is a trickster in Hesiod. He sets out the two portions "trying to deceive the mind of Zeus" and dresses up the bones "with crafty art", and Zeus says, "how unfairly you have divided the portions!" Zeus then sees the trick and chooses, and in anger withholds fire; Prometheus steals it in a hollow fennel stalk, and Hesiod ends the story by saying that it is not possible to deceive or go beyond the will of Zeus. Theogony 535–616; Greek text, 535–544. In Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound he is not a trickster: he says openly that he gave humans fire and the arts, endures his chains, and refuses to tell a secret that touches Zeus's rule. In the play he is a knower who holds his ground, not a deceiver.

The Homeric Hymn calls Hermes "of many shifts, blandly cunning, a robber, a cattle-driver". He steals the cattle and reverses their hoof-marks, making the front behind and the hind before, and weaves himself sandals of wicker so that his own tracks cannot be read; then he invents fire-sticks and kindles a fire, slaughters two cows and divides the meat into twelve portions by lot, and does not eat it though he longs to. When Apollo comes he denies everything and offers to swear a great oath by his father's head that he is innocent, and Zeus laughs to see his son deny it so well. Then Hermes gives his brother the lyre and receives the care of the herds and a golden staff. Hymn 4.13–15, 68–141, 254–396, 416–502. In the Iliad Hermes is no trickster: Zeus sends him to escort Priam to the tent of Achilles, and he puts the guards to sleep, opens the gates and brings the old king out safely; there he is the trusted guide.

In the Odyssey Hephaestus becomes a trickster through his craft. He forges fine bonds that cannot be broken or loosed, spreads them over his bed and pretends to leave for Lemnos, and Ares and Aphrodite are caught in them. The gods laugh and say: the slow catches the swift. Apollo asks Hermes whether he would take Ares's place in the bonds, and Hermes answers that he would accept three times as many.

The North: Loki and Odin

Loki advised the gods to promise a builder Freyja, the sun and the moon if he finished their wall in one winter; when the work was nearly done he turned into a mare and lured away the builder's stallion, so the work stopped, and Loki later bore Sleipnir. Gylfaginning 42. He cut off Sif's hair, and Thor threatened him until he swore to bring her hair of gold; he brought from the dwarfs the hair, the ship Skíðblaðnir and the spear Gungnir, then wagered his head that another dwarf could not make their equal. A fly harried the brother working the bellows, the hammer Mjölnir came out with a short handle, and the gods judged for the dwarf. Loki ran; when he was caught he said the dwarf had the head but not the neck, so his head could not be cut off, and the dwarf sewed up his lips instead.

Then he took a woman's likeness and asked Frigg whether all things had sworn not to harm Baldr; she said the mistletoe seemed too young to ask the oath of. He pulled it up, put it in the hand of blind Höðr, guided his throw, and Baldr fell dead. When messengers went through the world asking everything to weep Baldr out of Hel, they found a giantess in a cave who called herself Þökk and would not weep, and men guess that she was Loki. Gylfaginning 49. In Lokasenna he enters the gods' feast at Ægir's hall and insults them one by one until Thor drives him out. Lokasenna. Then he fled in the shape of a salmon; he had knotted linen thread into meshes, the first net, and burned it, but the gods recognised the device from its pattern in the ash, caught him with it and bound him with his son's entrails over three stones.

Odin himself is a trickster in the story of the mead of poetry. He sees nine thralls mowing, sharpens their scythes with a whetstone, and when all of them want it he throws it among them so that they cut each other's throats; then he works under the name Bölverkr, "evil-doer", for the giant Suttungr's brother for the wage of one drink, bores into the mountain and enters as a serpent, spends three nights with Gunnlöð and flies off with the mead. Skáldskaparmál 6. Hávamál says that Odin broke his oath to Baugi, so how should one trust his pledges? He cheated Suttungr and left Gunnlöð weeping.

Egypt: Isis before Set

In the papyrus of the Contendings of Horus and Set the trickster is Isis and the dupe is Set. The council has moved to the Island-in-the-Midst, and the ferryman Anti has been told to ferry no woman across to it. She offers him a loaf, which he refuses, then a gold ring, which he takes, and he ferries her over. She turns herself into a beautiful girl and complains to Set that she is the widow of a herdsman and that a stranger wants to take her son's father's cattle and throw him out. Set answers: shall the cattle be given to the stranger while the son of the goodman is alive? She turns into a kite on a tree and tells him: weep for yourself; it is your own mouth that has said it, your own cleverness that has judged you. The ferryman is punished by having the soles of his feet removed, forswears gold, and gold becomes an abomination in his city. Contendings, pp. 17–19. When Set tries to subdue Horus, Isis turns the act against him through the lettuce he eats; when the two race ships of stone, Horus builds a ship of cedar plastered with gypsum, Set takes it for stone, cuts the top off a mountain to make a stone ship, and it sinks. pp. 21–23. In another text Isis makes a snake from earth and the spittle of Re; it bites him, and she will not cure him until he gives her his hidden name.

Set becomes a schemer only in the Greek writer Plutarch, in the Roman period: he secretly measures the body of Osiris, has a chest made to fit it, and at a banquet promises it to whoever fits inside; when Osiris lies down in it, the conspirators shut it. Plutarch, chapter 13. Thoth uses no trick in the papyrus: he writes the letter to Osiris and reads the answer, and the dispute ends on what is written.

Japan: Susanoo

In heaven Susanoo used no trick; he broke the rules by force. After the pledge in which he and his sister Amaterasu produced children, he declared, "I have undoubtedly gained the victory", then broke down the divisions between her rice fields, filled up the ditches, and strewed excrement in the hall where she ate the food of the first harvest. His sister excused him, saying that what looked like excrement must be her brother's drunken vomit, and did not reproach him. Then he broke a hole in the roof of the weaving hall and dropped in a piebald horse flayed backwards; the weaving women died, and the sun hid in the cave. Kojiki, section 15. In accounts in the Nihon shoki he sows seed over seed already sown, sets up combs in the fields and makes horses lie down in them.

The trick comes after his expulsion. In Izumo he tells the girl's parents to brew strong liquor and set a vat at each of the eight gates of a fence; the eight heads of Yamata no Orochi drink and fall asleep, he cuts the serpent to pieces, and finds the sword Kusanagi in its tail. Kojiki, section 18. In his last story he is the one deceived. The god who will become Ōkuninushi, Master of the Great Land, comes to him in the Nether-Distant-Land; Susanoo tests him with a house of snakes, a house of centipedes and wasps and a fire set around a moor, then falls asleep, and the guest ties his hair to the rafters, blocks the house with a huge rock, and flees with his sword, his bow, his lute and his daughter. The lute brushes a tree and the earth resounds; Susanoo wakes and pursues him, and at the pass at the edge of the underworld he shouts to him to pursue his brothers with that sword and bow and become master of the land.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In these stories trickery is the weapon of the younger, the weaker, or the one without the decision: the infant Hermes against his elder brother, lame Hephaestus against swift Ares, Isis, a woman barred from the island, against Set's strength, Enki against a decree of Enlil agreed by all the gods. The one who holds power has no need of tricks: Set pleads his strength and is deceived, Zeus sees the trick and chooses.

Often someone other than the trickster pays. Humans receive the woman with whom evils came because of Prometheus's trick, the ferryman loses the soles of his feet because of Isis's, Baldr dies, Gunnlöð weeps, the weaving women die in Amaterasu's hall. The trickster himself is punished in some stories and not in others: Prometheus and Loki are bound and Susanoo expelled, while Enki, Hermes, Odin and Isis go free.

The trick leaves behind a custom or a thing that lasts. Mecone gives the burning of bones for the gods; Isis's trick makes gold abhorrent in the ferryman's city; Loki's net teaches the gods to make nets, his shuddering under the venom makes earthquakes, his head-wager produces Mjölnir; Hermes's theft makes the cattle his and the lyre Apollo's. This is why the same tricksters recur among the culture heroes: Prometheus with fire, Hermes as inventor of fire-sticks, Odin with the mead of poetry, Loki as maker of the first net.

Most of these tricks happen around food and drink: the sacrifice at Mecone, Enki's beer, the loaf set before Namtar's gate, Ninhursag's plants, the meat of Hermes's cows divided into twelve portions, Ægir's feast in Lokasenna, the mead of poetry, Isis's loaf for the ferryman and the lettuce Set eats, the hall of the first harvest that Susanoo fouled and the liquor with which he made the serpent drunk. The meal is where shares are fixed, and there the one who controls the sharing is deceived.

The name of trickster does not fit everyone it has been joined to. Thoth writes and does not deceive, though the Hindu essay lists him with Enki and Hermes among gods of wisdom and cunning. Kothar-wa-Khasis is a craftsman whose work is open; the texts of Ugarit tell no trick of his, and his advice about the window is sound advice that Baal accepts. Set in the Egyptian papyrus is strength that is outwitted, and only in Plutarch's account does he plot. Prometheus is a trickster in Hesiod and a steadfast sufferer in Aeschylus. Hermes is a trickster in the Hymn and a trusted guide in the Iliad. Krishna in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa changes a custom openly: he turns the herders' offering away from Indra to their cows and the hill where they graze, then lifts the hill over them when Indra sends the storm; he breaks the rule without deceiving anyone.

The tricksters' names, as their pages read them, fit what they do. Loki is the lukaʿ, who joins cunning to baseness; Prometheus the mubrim, who twists a firm trick before Zeus chooses; Hermes the ḥaramī, the inviolable one, who steals and is not punished. Set is al-sāṭī, the man of assailing force, a name of strength rather than of cunning, which is what he is in the papyrus. Susanoo is read from sāsa, to govern, and sūs, the weevil: he was given the sea to govern, then did to the rice fields what the weevil does to grain.

Symbolic Reading

The Norse essay reads Loki as the principle of change and adaptation: neither wholly evil nor wholly good, he helps the gods at one time and harms them at another, and every change is opportunity and danger together. It reads his turning into a mare, a salmon and a fly as the ability to adapt to the harsh northern environment, and his binding as society's attempt to put off catastrophe, adding that the binding is always temporary, since nature breaks loose in the end at Ragnarök. The second Norse essay compares Loki with Hermes in his deceptions, with the West African trickster Èṣù, and with Iblis, who was among the angels and then rebelled: Loki was among the gods, was bound under the earth, and leads the forces of chaos at the end.

The Greek essay reads Hermes as the system of trade and communication, and says that his being god of thieves means that trade and theft were two sides of one coin, since in the ancient world the trader and the pirate were often the same man. The Sumerian essay reads Enki's warning to the flood survivor as knowledge saving people from disaster, those who understood nature's signs preparing for the flood, and Inanna's taking the me by cunning as the movement of civilization from Eridu to Uruk. The Hindu essay groups Krishna, the Phoenician Horon, Enki, Thoth and Hermes as gods of wisdom and cunning. The Japanese essay reads Susanoo as the storms, the liquor that made the serpent drunk as dams that slow the flow of water, and the sword found in its tail as iron sand in the riverbed.

The texts support a second reading in social life. What the trickster breaks are mostly boundaries people live by: the division of food between those who eat and those to whom it is offered, the ownership of a herd and its inheritance from father to son, the oath and the bargain with a hired worker, the sanctity of hospitality at a feast, the boundaries and channels of a field. That is why the tricks happen at the table, in the field and at the crossing, and why they usually end in a ruling or a custom: the burning of bones, the abhorrence of gold in the ferryman's city, Hermes's share among the gods. The story explains a rule by telling how it was first broken.