Trickster

Humanity, with the words of Wim Kayser, is a ‘Glorious Accident‘ (1997) in evolution and cosmos. We humans are mammals being on an exodus from animal paradise.

Before we left the animal kingdom we did not suffer from man-made afflictions.

We still were in the Eternal Now taking pains/splendours of the world as it was.

Ways we, Westerners, can regain paradise in our life time is following the advice of Gregory Bateson: let us learn to think how nature works.

Many non-European indigenous cultures still think/act how nature works. Let’s learn from them.

Indigenous communities (indigenous peoples) created concepts of the ‘Coyote’, ‘Raven’, ‘Katchina’ and ‘Trickster’ (like our Jester).

See Anansi in Pan-African communities

In Greek/Roman and European mythology remnants of the Trickster can be detected like: Hermes, Mercurius, Loki,  Jester, Harlequin, Reinhard the Fox, Till Eulenspiegel, The Good Soldier Švejk,

These figures can seduce/deceive, ‘trick’, us into extra-ordinary states of reality which we, humans in our daily-ordinary lives, are very reluctant to enter.

If we lower our rationality and ego we can temporarily re-enter our animal paradise states without losing our humanity.

In contemporary urbanized/secularized Europe these figures  rarely have value and existence anymore. Exceptions are emotions/figures in ‘transitional events’, mostly in the south of Europe, like: Semana Santa, Carnaval, Swabian-Alemannic Figures.

Mikail Bakhtin wrote a beautifull analysis of carnaval in his Rabelais and his World (1940/1965)

Numerous manifestations of carnival celebrations in the south of The Netherlands, and elsewhere, bring about these kinds of transitional/sacred spaces with collective experiences of ‘communitas‘.

see abstract paper presentation on transtional spaces: 2015 Van Bekkum Abstract Family and Community Continuity Permanence and Transition