![]() Among insect tricksters, the Asante (West African) trickster Anansi was commonly depicted as a spider. Paul Radin’s classic 1956 study introduced the Winnebago trickster Wakdjunkaga (“the tricky one”), a legendary fool and rule-breaker driven by his passions and appetites, and Native American narratives were full of tricksters in the guise of animals like coyotes, birds, snakes, and insects. The Norse god Loki epitomizes the malicious trickster. The Yoruba god Eshu or Eshu-Elegba, who also appears in Afro-Brazilian Umbanda, was, like Hermes, a deity of the threshold, including marketplaces, doorways, and crossroads, and was renowned as capricious, deceptive, and dangerous. Prometheus tricked the gods to steal fire and gift it to humans, while Proteus was a shapeshifter (hence the English word “protean”). Greek mythology contained several trickster gods, most prominently Hermes, the god of the boundary-stone ( herm or stone-heap placed at doorways, crossroads, and markets), a divine emissary and culture-bringer but also a thief and patron of travelers. Harold Scheub called him the disruptor of harmony but the founder of a new order, which “is according to his own whim, his own sense of order,” or sometimes an unintentional result of his selfish and foolish behavior. His is an undisciplined, even wild sort of creativity, a creative destructiveness. We might consider him a “second creator,” a modifier or finisher, whose antics gave the natural and social world much of its current shape. He is usually not a creator-god, but he completes-and sometimes challenges-the creator’s work. He is most associated with liminal sites and times, like the market, the threshold, and the crossroads he is frequently the inventor or bringer of key elements of civilization, such as fire, language, agriculture, or iron-working. Although he (for most instantiations of the trickster are male-at least initially, since he can often shift or blend genders) varies across cultures, he is commonly a divine messenger, deceiver, immoralist, shapeshifter (mutable in physiology and personality), scatological jester, and blasphemer of all that is sacred and taboo. The trickster is a ubiquitous mythical figure, a person, animal, or deity (or all of the above) of change, ambiguity, paradox, defiance, laughter, buffoonery, and even cruelty. That being is the trickster, whose traits, according to Agnes Horvath and Arpad Szakolczai, “capture with a striking completeness the main features of modernity…so much so that the trickster could be outright considered as the deity of modernity.” In his seminal treatise on political theology, Carl Schmitt counseled that the “metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political structure.” So, what if the biblical god, or any god, is no longer an appropriate metaphysical image of political or social reality? This short essay does not address whether the biblical god exists or not-that is a debate for another day-but whether a different being better represents and reflects contemporary social experience. These latter figures might not quite qualify as “theological” according to conventional Judeo-Christian frameworks, but then theology long ago expanded beyond its original meaning of god-study. Different societies naturally do or would do political theology in terms of their own local god(s) or, lacking god-concepts, other religious beings or powers, such as animistic spirits, dead ancestors, or animatistic forces. Political theology in Western/Christian societies has conventionally been conducted in terms of the Judeo-Christian god, which is understandable and forgivable since that was the dominant religious belief. ![]()
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