1. April Extra/ Special Edition – The Trickster
I was “losing my mind” this morning during the Ashtanga Yoga practice: losing track of my speedy thoughts and getting mad about my mind spinning tricks on me. Whilst ruminating about my mind’s trickery, an interesting insight hit me: There is an intrinsic and paradoxical connection between the trickster figure and the mind.
The trickster is represented through many names all over the world. They are a cross-culturally overarching archetype, known as the Yoruba trickster God Eshu, the Egypt Goddess Isis, the Akan Anansi, Loki of the Norse mythology, the Japanese Kitsune, the Heyoka of the Sioux, the Greek Hermes, the Roman Mercury, the Fool in the Tarot, the snake and Eve in the bible story, etc.
The trickster is known for their brilliant mind, their cunning, their creativity, their wit, their ability to see opportunities in seemingly futile situations, and the agility to transform their apparent weaknesses into virtues. They are associated with crossroads, communication, travel, magic and shapeshifting. They outsmart the most powerful gods, adapt easily, and shape their form according to the circumstances. They hold the power of transformation, and they know about the nature of no-thingness. The trickster is neither this nor that, but all of it and none of it. These qualities make them a wonderful candidate for queer folx to draw on. They are the example of a culturally non-binary gender-non-confirming archetype.
The Connection between the Mind and the Trickster
In Astrology, Mercury is the planet that is associated with the mind and thought. It is the only planet that has no attributed gender in traditional Hellenistic Astrology. In the Tarot, the Fool is the number Zero. That big 0, that includes everything and contains nothing, the infinite potentiality from which all the numbers emerge. In the bible, the snake tricks Eve, who in turn seduces Adam to eat from the fruit of knowledge. In Egypt mythology, Goddess Isis tricks the Sun God Re to learn His utterly powerful secret name, and on and on it goes like this.
We can look at the trickster as someone who wears the qualities of intelligence. But we can also understand this character as an archetype of the mind. From this angle, the mind becomes the trickster. And isn’t the mind really the shape-shifter par excellence? It has no matter and therefore no physical limitations, it can form, adapt, create, break, and mend thoughts, it can define an object and redefine it, it can reach faraway lands, it can fathom known and unknown, and it can trick us.
The Mind as a Trickster
If we refer to the mind as the Zero of the Fool, as the gender-neutral Mercury, we see its non-binary quality. Interestingly enough, though, it is at the same time the very force that created the binaries. In gender and queer discourses, we speak about sex and gender fluidity and about the binary of male and female as a conceptual product of the mind. As Judith Butler marked it, gender has been created through iterations – repetitive cultural enactments over and over again throughout history – so often that it manifested in shape and form.
If we follow the argument and see the mind as the causation of binary and duality, we come to a paradox. It seems that the very thing that is non-dual is the cause of duality. I am every time mind blown by the paradoxicallity of the universe. I love it. Universe, you are hands down the biggest trickster.
Conclusion: We have good news! If the mind creates duality and is at the same time a sneaky shape-shifting trickster, it seems, that it withholds the cure for the very thing that it created.
Take care of each other and enjoy your shapeshifting fluidity,
Love
<3