20

Trickster Was Wandering

And precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings and more weights than human beings, nothing does us as much good as the fool’s cap: we need it against ourselves—we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish and blissful art lest we lose that freedom over things that our ideal demands of us.

—Nietzsche

Looking at the few primal people left in the world, and looking at the records of those native peoples who have been studied by anthropologists and ethnographers over the last century, it’s clear that humans everywhere have recognized contradiction as an essential part of human life. While some cultural groups, like the Puritans, have tried to reimagine human behavior in black and white terms, eliminating shades of gray (the shade where most of us live), the trickster tradition is one of embracing all human experience, recognizing that our conflicting desires (born from the klutzy construction of our physical brains) are also essential to making us who we are.

This philosophy of inclusion was put well by the Sioux/Lakota holy man Lame Deer, who I happened to meet at a Sundance in Green Grass, South Dakota in the early seventies, along with the equally fascinating medicine man, Pete Catches. At that time, a number of us white college-age students had been captivated by philosophies of American Indian cultures, and at NIU, where I was attending college, we had set up a drive to bring food and clothing to the Pine Ridge reservation during the onslaught at Wounded Knee (that second one where Nixon was in charge, right after the Vietnam War). One day, we were invited by Selo Black Crow, another Sioux holy man, to go up to Green Grass, where the original sacred pipe, brought from the White Buffalo Calf Maiden, was housed. Since the world seemed to be in a particular state of crisis, the sacred pipe was being brought out, for the first time in decades, as an act of healing. We young white kids were driving up to the sacred Sundance grounds, when someone in the car accidentally (in Trickster fashion) hit the horn, so we introduced ourselves in a less than sacred way; yet, we were given the honor of feeding the people by cutting up the cow and buffalo someone had brought in, and putting it into the individual pots of the women who came forward to receive the food. Shortly after, the camp was full of meat drying on tent-poles (to make pemmican) in the summer sun with flies buzzing ferociously all around.

Lame Deer’s story had already been published by this time in his and Erdoes’s book Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, so to us he was quite a celebrity. On the grounds of the Sundance he certainly seemed one of the most important medicine men to the other Indian people gathered there. Speaking of being a medicine man, Lame Deer said:

A medicine man shouldn’t be a saint. He should experience and feel all the ups and downs, the despair and joy, the magic, and the reality, the courage and the fear, of his people. He should be able to sink as low as a bug, or soar as high as an eagle. Unless he can experience both, he is no good as a medicine man. . . . You can’t get so stuck up, so inhuman that you want to be pure, your soul wrapped up in a plastic bag, all the time. You have to be God and the devil, both of them. Being a good medicine man means being right in the midst of turmoil, not shielding yourself from it. It means experiencing life in all its phases. It means not being afraid of cutting up and playing the fool now and then. That’s sacred too. Nature, the Great Spirit—they are not perfect. The world couldn’t stand that perfection. The spirit has a good side and a bad side. Sometimes the bad side gives me more knowledge than the good side.1

This is, in essence, the story of Trickster: the recognition and acceptance of our internal conflicts. Primal people often saw humor as the tool with which to address our disparate selves. Mark Twain said, “Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.” What makes us pathetic, conflicted, contrary, depressed, and elated, are the very brains we carry, which came from the long process of evolution. Humor is one way the brain tricks itself into handling internal conflict and releasing tension. Humor, which probably started as another courtship art also became our way of handling the absurdities of life.

Like people today, our ancient ancestors must have seen life as both comic and tragic, for early humans with large brains had to have recognized that there is great wonderment in living: communing with family, having sexual relations, having children, experiencing love, experiencing consciousness, creating tools, music, art, ritual; enjoying the deep satisfaction that comes from maintaining one’s existence through daily activity—the gathering of plants, hunting, and everything that goes along with successful survival; blossoming cultural development, and the beauty of the natural world. In other words—the joy of life. Likewise, they also must have recognized that as magnificent as life can be, our existence is, and always has been, precarious. For our world is perilous, and not just from the wild animals, parasites, and difficult environmental conditions our species has had to face. Rules, like avoidance procedures, were created long before written law because we humans can drive each other crazy. Religious traditions developed as well, in part, as another mechanism to keep things in check, while from the biological perspective the conscience evolved as part of the mind to regulate impulses that could lead to social disruption.

In a world where death can strike at any moment—where suffering can become one’s lot in an instant, where infection can creep in through something as simple as a thorn piercing the foot, or a mangled code in the DNA, or a neighbor hitting you over the head because they think you’re a witch—people have tried what they could to gain control. For eons, this meant trying to establish cause and effect explanations and pinning most of the blame on very human gods or on ourselves for not obeying them. Hence, we received such notions as Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, which states that human beings, and nature itself, are corrupt because of Adam. Through such rationalizations humans have tried to explain the existence of evil. In Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, Elaine Pagels speaks of the cross-cultural ubiquity of attaching such blame:

interpretations of suffering as the result of sin are by no means limited to Christianity. . . . Jewish tradition has interpreted personal tragedy similarly, attributing, for example, the sudden death of an infant to the demon Lilith, to whose malevolence the child’s parents had made themselves susceptible either through the husband’s infidelity or the wife’s insubordination. Some rabbis of ancient times would explain, too, to a young widow that she herself caused her husband’s sudden heart attack by neglecting ritual regulations concerning the timing of intercourse. . . . A Hopi child is bitten by a poisonous spider while playing near its hole. As the boy hovers between life and death, the medicine man learns that the boy’s father has neglected to prepare ritual ornaments for Spider Woman, the tribe’s protector, which, he proclaims, has brought on his son’s illness.2

Everything from tsunamis to disease have been ascribed to human-like agency—such as witchcraft, or failure to follow societal precepts. Only science has allowed us to see past such ways of thinking.

Nature is not perfect and evolution never has a goal. The process is messy and often leaves us with unwanted vestiges, such as tailbones, wisdom teeth, appendixes, bad backs, fallen arches, the tendency to choke, and the propensity for female death resulting from impossibly small birth canals due to our walking upright. We have numerous mental vestiges as well. We come by our conflicted selves honestly. But whereas much religious orthodoxy would have us whipped and sent to the stocks for breaking codes of conduct—for even thinking of mischief—the trickster tradition, which is also religious, laughs at the realization that we are animals who live with animalistic desires. Regardless of our forks and spoons, we still must masticate our food, digest it, and expel waste in the end. Trickster doesn’t let us hide from such facts. Trickster forces us to admit our “lower” origins, and thereby serves a central function: awakening us to our own pomposity by exposing us as sophisticated frauds. Trickster reveals our selfish genes, the most primitive parts of the brain; our contradictory brain modules, our obsession with hierarchy and status, our constant desire for food and sex. Yet, Trickster also allows us a way out by revealing the truth, bringing the totality of ourselves into the light of day. For we, like Trickster, also have protean abilities—we can do the unexpected. For even though we are biological creatures, we are not automatons. Trickster also shows that our sense of ethics is deep, and while we are capable of the most base behaviors we are also capable of intelligence, empathy, and love.