Tricksters

“What happened, Rescue Puppy?” Cal asked. “Someone steal your bone?”

Avery glanced up and smiled slightly.

“You ever feel like maybe the gods are laughing at you?” he asked, ignoring the “Rescue Puppy” gibe.

“No.” Cal grimaced. “I think they’re fucking with me.”

A brief smile played with Avery’s mobile mouth. “Yeah—I’d have to agree with that.” He sat up and the smile deepened. “So my problems are still not that big. What’s our pie?”

 

The Deep of the Sound

By Amy Lane

 

I had fun looking up some of the gods of the Pacific Northwest as I was researching The Deep of the Sound—but I was not surprised to see they had Bluejay, the Trickster, in their pantheon.

 

Everybody has a trickster hero.

 

The Roman’s had Cupid, the Celts had Puck, the Midwest tribes had Coyote, and the Norse had Loki.  Even the Christians got into the act—nobody tricks a body into selling his soul like Lucifer in a suit.

 

We like the trickster gods. In fact, we worship them.

 

The hallmarks of the trickster god are the hallmarks of our favorite heroes from heist movies and shows about conmen–titles such as The Italian Job, Oceans 11, Leverage, and Person of Interest.  They are smart—ninety percent of the time they are smarter than everybody else.  They like to mess with mankind, because they can, and because men are often petty, selfish, and obsessed with the most trivial of things.  Trickster gods are smart enough to see above and beyond all of that, and they enjoy laughing when men fail.

 

But we wouldn’t laugh at a god who was just blatantly unkind, or who preyed on the weak, so trickster gods (and our heroes from heist movies!)  tend to have a moral code. It’s that morality that makes them our gods—and on a human level, it makes a lot of sense. Let’s face it—if you’re smart enough to steal anything you want, and amoral enough to do just that, you’re going to want to work within a moral code just to keep yourself from being bored. The trickster gods don’t con the innocent, they don’t bilk the weak, and very often, they use their trickster powers to be generous to just those people. (One of my favorite bits from Ocean’s 11 is that Danny and company frequently pay the little guy lots and lots of money to help them in their adventures—it’s very trickster god of them 😉

 

And we really wouldn’t love the trickster god so much if he wasn’t on the receiving end of the god’s whims just as often as we are.  Coyote is at the whim of Buffalo, Loki is imprisoned in the body of a mare by Odin, and Lucifer is cast out of heaven by the Almighty. The trickster isn’t immune to the anger and authority of the bigger, stronger gods—in fact, he wins our support by wiggling his way out of the trap. He’s wily, and fallible, and his moral code is his own and not the moral code of the bigger, stronger gods.

 

He’s us.

 

And interestingly enough, very often the trickster god is the one who saves us all.

 

Coyote is the god who is told how to find The People after they have disappeared from the earth. Puck is the one who puts everything right at the end of Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. All of the Roman pantheon faded from power, but Cupid and Psyche remain, and once a year that naked kid manages to fuck with us and our hearts again and again and again—and usually he saves our hearts and souls in the process.

 

Every time you watch a heist movie, every time you root for the smalltime criminal who hurts nobody but the rich, every time you watch a Robin Hood knockoff, remember what you’re really doing.

 

You’re worshiping at the altar of the Trickster God, one of the oldest and most important of the deities, the one that tells us to keep to our moral code when the world is in chaos, the one who tells us that generosity is more important than rules.  This is the god who informs us that the big guys do not always know what they’re doing, and the one who teaches us humility when the big guys get their way and fuck us over in the extreme.  This is the god who tells us that it’s okay to be human, and that humans, every so often get to be gods.

 

So when you’re reading Deep of the Sound and Cal blithely references Bluejay the Trickster, and talks about the gods in the same conversation that references fanfiction and archetypes and Coyote, now you know what he’s talking about.

 

He’s talking about us, and how sometimes, even when the gods are out to get us, we get to be the trickster, and the trickster wins.