Opus Diaboli Review: Trickster Makes This World
A Satan-Shaped hole – does Trickster Makes This World have a missing chapter?
Trickster figures feature in mythologies and religions around the world: Hermes (Greece); Coyote, Raven (North America); Ananse (Africa); Monkey (China) and Loki (Northern European). These figures represent the anarchic and chaotic aspect of nature.
Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World is an analysis of these characters and what they tell us about creativity and culture. However, missing from his pantheon of Trickster characters is Satan, who is relegated to a couple of brief mentions. Hyde explains why: “The Devil is an agent of evil, but Trickster is amoral, not immoral… one does not usually hear said of the Christian devil what the anthropologist Paul Rachel says of the North American Trickster: Trickster is at one and the same time creator…he who dupes others and who is always duped himself…”
Despite growing up in England, Hyde is apparently not aware of folk tales in Europe where the Devil come to earth to steal a soul, but gets duped by some wily peasant. Or does Hyde in some way think that these familiar European Trickster stories about Satan are in some way less important than ‘ethnic’ myths from North America, Africa or even ancient Greece?
What Hyde also fails to take account of, is that before the later forms of Christianity turned all of creation into a Manichean struggle between light and dark, the relationship between Satan and Jehovah was much more ambiguous – witness hapless Job’s torment to settle a wager between God and Satan. That is to say, Satan was not always as evil as he has been painted lately.
There are other parallels – Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods and the Serpent stealing the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge to give to man. Also, Coyote being credited with the creation of the first lie, and the name ‘Father of Lies’ sometimes given to Satan. Hyde does not see the Satan figure as being part of the tradition of these characters which represent to us the disruptive force in nature.
When Hyde describes Trickster’s behaviour: “when someone’s sense of honourable behaviour has left him unable to act, Trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox” – does this not sound like the spirit that many modern Satanists would recognise as Satanic?
Maybe Trickster has been at work here and stole a chapter, leaving a Satan-shaped hole in Mr Hyde’s work. While the omission of Satan as Trickster makes this a flawed book, it is still a worthwhile for those interested Trickster characters and “how disruptive imagination creates culture”. Hyde links the urge in nature we call Trickster to the world of art and poetry, using figures such as Ginsburg, Picasso and Duchamp, who used Trickster methods to change the way we looked at the world. What raises this book out of the ordinary survey of different myths is that this is not a dry anthropological catalogue of stories, but a deep meditation on the creative urge and our ambivalent relationship with it.
Trickster Makes This World – How disruptive imagination creates culture, By Lewis Hyde, is published by Canongate.
