The trickster is completely unpredictable--heroic one moment, cowardly the next, divine today, profane tomorrow, cosmically wise in this village, impossibly stupid in that. Within a single culture's narrative inventory, sometimes even within one story, the trickster is a human being, a spirit, and an animal. What sort of entity is this that displays such confusion and contradiction? How could anything or anyone be so absurd, so completely mad?
The answer is all too obvious. The trickster is too often thought to be something completely alien to us, when the truth is we are the trickster. Mark Twain, as usual, said it best: "When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."
The most delightful of the trickster's contradictions is that while we are the trickster, the trickster is only now and then us. That is, the character of the trickster is a folkloric uncloaking of our most jarring incongruities, while the person of the trickster is us, re-concealed. Thus, we can from a slight distance see our deepest, most mysterious, most insane actions. Foisted off on this bizarre, even sorry Coyote, Spider, spirit, or Rabbit, our own behavior is not simply mad, but laughably mad.
We would lose that distance if the mythic trickster were consistently human. So the nature of the trickster is ours but this being is not. Thus, we arrived at the problem examined in George Feuerstein's Holy Madness: human beings who display some of the character of the trickster, often through a profound understanding of the trickster's methods, occasionally through a particularly acute understand of the trickster's nature.
If we accept that thesis, that the mythic figure of the trickster allows us to examine ourselves with less trauma, then the problem of the human being in the clothes of the trickster (who is now and then in the clothes of a human being) becomes very complex. And much more interesting! The trickster of the oral narrative (or of popular culture, in the guise of Ninja Turtles, Bugs Bunny, or Woody Allen) is harmless, even amusing, to those who hear of him; the human trickster, on the other hand, is threatening, frustrating, infuriating--even mad--to all who meet him, including eager disciples who want to understand.
Indeed, the mythic trickster has no disciples and seeks none, while most human tricksters--Feuerstein examines the cases of Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley, Bhagwan Rajneesh, Chogyam Trungpa. Lee Lozowick,
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