The Trickster Types and Cultures

The world of tares contribute be divided into unproblematic and secondary trickster characters. Kweku Ananse is an archetypal primary trickster practice, in a sense a escort whose entire raison d'Otre is to promote sufficient discord in parliamentary procedure that he himself can create opportunities that allow him in ecumenical to receive surface on top. Prometheus is, in the context of the effigy created for this paper, a secondary practical joker figure, integrity whose primary duties be not those of a Trickster but who either chooses to bobble in Trickster activities either to assist himself (or herself) in carrying out his (or her) primary activities or simply because such activities have a personal appeal.

A number of possible explanatory models can be brought to bear to inform the commonality of the Trickster figure in so m some(prenominal) different cultures and religious/ honorable systems. This paper examines two of them - superstar that seems the most appropriate for delimitate and explaining the primary Trickster character and one that seems to define and explain the secondary Trickster character.

A Jungian explanation posits the Trickster as both a creative and a cataclysmic force, one corresponding to childhood (a time of both intellect and learning, of cruelty and naivetT, of an inability to distinguish between good and flagitious (Rigal-Cellard in Krupat 318). This model helps explain the fact that while the Trickster is very much

Donoghue, Denis. Thieves of Fire. New York: Oxofrd UP, 1974.

It was noted higher up that part of the appeal of the Trickster is that this character quite often helps create a sense of resolution that is often missing in ordinary life - ensuring that the good are rewarded and the wrong punished. But the Trickster also serves another, related function that is to a greater extent sophisticated than this - although less psychologically satisfying. Usually in Trickster tales things work out well, but sometimes they do not, yet when the Trickster tries his hardest. And sometimes things turn out differently than one hoped for but still satisfactorily. In reality, life is unpredictable and indeterminate and therefore both potentially frightening and disappointing.

The Trickster helps alleviate human problems some of the time, and the rest of the time helps globe come to terms with these ambiguities (Welsch 19). The gods are rarely so helpful.

Branston, Brian. Gods of the North. New York: Vanguard,

conflicting Kweku Ananse, whose shape and story shifts so dramatically (in part because he is a primary Trickster, in part because he is the point of intersection of an oral rather than a written tradition), Prometheus is easier to define. He was one of the Titans, who, along with his brother Epimetheus was given the task of creating humanity and providing humans and all the animals on earth with the endowments they would need to survive. Epimetheus ("Afterthought") bestowed on the various animals gifts of courage, strength, swiftness, and feathers, fur, and other protective coverings.

In addition to steal fire for humanity, Prometheus tricked the gods so that they should get the worst parts of any animal sacrificed to them, and human beings the best. In one pile, Prometheus arranged the parve parts of an ox in a hide and disguised them with a covering of entrails. In the other, he placed the bones, which he covered with fat. Zeus, asked to choose between the two, took the fat and was very savage when he d
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