Trickster Connects Multiple Realities

The existence of the trickster is foreign to most Westerners.

It takes time to grasp this crucial human experience which is an important ingredient for Indigenous Peoples to create and maintain their family and community continuity.

Paul Radin was the first anthropologist who studied ‘first-hand’ what the trickster is and does (Trickster conceptions 1957).

A more recent deepening book is from George P. Hansen (The Trickster and the Paranormal 2001).

Every existing culture in the world has some conceptions of ‘other’ invisible and intangible worlds.

Heaven, Hell and the world of the Dead are western conceptions. Most Indigenous peoples believe that staying in contact with other realities like the world of the ancestors and the unborn is important to survive as a community and a family.

Most Chinese and Japanese families have shrines in their homes to stay in contact with their close and distant ancestors.

All humans but in particular Western people have fears for these ‘other realities’. In many aboriginal communities in North and South America tricksters ‘trick’ people into connecting with these multiple worlds.

In our societies we emerge ourselves into comedian shows, in hallucinogens, in religious ceremonies, and in carnival rituals to be ‘tricked’ into non-ordinary realities.