#coyote deity

[smarmykemetic]

"...in spite of all their disruptive behavior, tricksters are regularly honored as the creators of culture. They are imagined not only to have stolen certain essential goods from heaven and given them to the race but to have gone on and helped shape this world so as to make it a hospitable place for human life. In one Native American creation story, the Great Spirit speaks to Coyote about the coming of human beings: “The New People will not know anything when they come, not how to dress, how to sing, how to shoot an arrow. You will show them how to do all these things. And put the buffalo out for them and show them how to catch salmon.” In the Greek tradition, Hermes doesn’t simply acquire fire, he invents and spreads a method, a techne, for making fire, and when he steals cattle from the gods he is simultaneously presenting the human race with the domestic beasts whose meat that fire will cook. A whole complex of cultural institutions around killing and eating cattle are derived from the liar and thief, Hermes."

-Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde

[smarmykemetic]

"In all these stories, trickster must do more than feed his belly; he must do so without himself getting eaten. Trickster’s intelligence springs from appetite in two ways; it simultaneously seeks to satiate hunger and to subvert all hunger not its own. This last is an important theme. In the Okanagon creation story, the Great Spirit, having told Coyote that he must show the New People how to catch salmon, goes on to say: “I have important work for you to do … There are many bad creatures on earth. You will have to kill them, otherwise they will eat the New People. When you do this, the New People will honor you … They will honor you for killing the People-devouring monsters and for teaching … all the ways of living.” In North America, trickster stepped in to defeat the monsters who used to feed on humans.

The myth says, then, that there are large, devouring forces in this world, and that trickster’s intelligence arose not just to feed himself but to outwit these other eaters. Typically, this meeting is oppositional—the prey outwitting the predator. The bait thief suggests a different, non-oppositional strategy. Here trickster feeds himself where predator and prey meet, but rather than entering the game on their terms he plays with its rules. Perhaps, then, another force behind trickster’s cunning is the desire to remove himself from the eating game altogether, or at least see how far out he can get and still feed his belly (for if he were to stop eating entirely he would no longer be trickster)."

-Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde

[smarmykemetic]

"Trickster stories, even when they clearly have much more complicated cultural meanings, preserve a set of images from the days when what mattered above all else was hunting. At one point in the old Norse tales, the mischief-maker Loki has made the other gods so angry that he has to flee and go into hiding. In the mountains, he builds himself a house with doors on all sides so he can watch the four horizons. To amuse himself by day, he changes into a salmon, swimming the mountain streams, leaping the waterfalls. Sitting by the fire one morning, trying to imagine how the others might possibly capture him, he takes linen string and twists it into a mesh in the way that fishnets have been made ever since. Just at that moment, the others approach. Loki throws the net into the fire, changes into a salmon, and swims away. But the gods find the ashes of his net and from their pattern deduce the shape of the device they need to make. In this way, Loki is finally captured.

It makes a nice emblem of trickster’s ambiguous talents, Loki imagining that first fishnet and then getting caught in it. Moreover, the device in question is a central trickster invention. In Native American creation stories, when Coyote teaches humans how to catch salmon, he makes the first fish weir out of logs and branches. On the North Pacific coast, the trickster Raven made the first fishhook; he taught the spider how to make her web and human beings how to make nets. The history of trickery in Greece goes back to similar origins. “Trick” is dólos in Homeric Greek, and the oldest known use of the term refers to a quite specific trick: baiting a hook to catch a fish."

-Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde

[smarmykemetic]

"Such in fact was the diagnosis of many Native Americans when white Europeans first appeared on the scene. Here was a race and a way of life that took as central many things which aboriginally belonged at the periphery. Surely trickster was at hand. In pre-contact Cheyenne, the word for “trickster” also meant “white man” (I think because trickster is sometimes “old man” and the old are white-haired), a linguistic coincidence that seemed to be no accident at all after the Europeans arrived. In fact, as I was researching this book I found a Cheyenne Coyote tale recorded in 1899 that begins “White man was going along …” and then goes on to tell the eye-juggler story, the one I heard all those years ago in the Arizona dusk, substituting “white man” for “Coyote” throughout. Suddenly I was more convinced than ever that the story had been directed at me; it was I, after all, who was hitchhiking aimlessly around the countryside, playing by my own rules, burning up other men’s gasoline. I was being offered a little advice. . .

All this makes it clear that there are limits to the idea that trickster is everywhere in the modern world. It is true that such has occasionally been the aboriginal diagnosis of whites who take such pride in having created a mobile, individualistic, acquisitive civilization. But once one has a sense of the complex uses of Coyote tales one can see that most modern thieves and wanderers lack an important element of trickster’s world, his sacred context. If the ritual setting is missing, trickster is missing. If his companions—all the other spiritual forces within whose fixed domains he carries on his mischief—are no longer with us, then he is no longer with us. Hermes cannot be rightly imagined without the more serious Apollo whose cattle he steals, or the grieving Demeter whose daughter he retrieves from the underworld. The god of the roads needs the more settled territories before his traveling means very much. If everyone travels, the result is not the apotheosis of trickster but another form of his demise. Here we have come back in a roundabout way to the earlier point: trickster belongs to polytheism or, lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people and institutions and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that their boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly disturbed."

-Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde

[smarmykemetic]

"The Interior Salish in Idaho tell this story: “‘I will be the Sun-god,’ declared Coyote, and the people allowed him to try. He took the Sun-lodge across the sky. But he watched everything that the people did. Seeing people in secret love, he yelled down to them, much to their embarrassment. He told on those who were hiding. The people were glad when that day was over. They lost no time taking Coyote from the Sun-lodge.”

You and I know when to speak and when to hold the tongue, but Old Man Coyote doesn’t. He has no tact. They’re all the same, these tricksters; they have no shame and so they have no silence. Hermes should bite his tongue when he’s hauled before the assembly of the gods, but instead he wiggles his ears and tells a boldface lie, wearing—his mother says—“the cloak of shamelessness.” Loki once had his lips sewn shut by an irritated dwarf, but Loki ripped the thongs out and went right on talking.

It’s the same with Old Monkey in China. We know that Tripitaka, the venerable Buddhist monk who takes Monkey with him on “the journey to the west,” is a good man, because he’s regularly “struck dumb by his shame.” That’s as it should be; shame should steal your voice. Even if you want to speak, shame should bind your tongue. Some villagers once offered Tripitaka a woman. “When he heard these words, he bowed his head and fell into complete silence.” No such paralysis ever strikes Monkey’s loose and apish tongue. In fact, his constant fluency in situations that would silence more sensitive creatures is an ironic boon to Tripitaka on his journey, for it is hard to travel in this fallen world if you lose the power of speech every time evil meets you on the path. Tripitaka is so kindly that when monsters mask themselves as virtuous men he never sees through the disguise. “Master, please put away your compassion just for today!” Monkey begs. “When we have crossed this mountain, you can be compassionate then.” Monkey, never blinded by compassion, and certainly never “struck dumb,” keeps the pilgrims moving smartly along."

-Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde

[smarmykemetic]

"Having no way, trickster can have many ways. Having no way, he is dependent on others whose manner he exploits, but he is not confined to their manner and therefore in another sense he is more independent. Having no way, he is free of the trap of instinct, both “stupider than the animals” and more versatile than any. He stumbles around covered in his own filth, but by the same token he feeds in the house of the Kingfisher, and the house of Bear, the house of Muskrat, the house of Bee. Moreover, if someone tries to trap him to bring him home for dinner, trickster can counter with a series of deceptions and slip from the trap. Bee and Bear, who cannot tell a lie, are easier to trap than Grouse, who has her single famous fib. But Grouse is easier to trap than trickster, whose fabulations never end.

In fact, we must now add creative lying to our list of trickster’s inventions. Trickster discovers creative fabulation, feigning, and fibbing, the playful construction of fictive worlds. It is trickster who invents the gratuitous untruth. In Northern California, the Maidu creation myth has several creators who collaborate to make the world, including a beneficent Earth-Initiate and a bungling Coyote. At one point Coyote laughs just when Earth-Initiate has warned him not to. Called to account, Coyote says, “Oh no, that wasn’t me who laughed.” This was the first lie."

-Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde

[smarmykemetic]

"Kingfisher, Snipe, Polecat, Bear, Muskrat—each of these animals has a way of being in the world; each has his nature. Specifically, each of them has his own way of hunting and, in these stories at least, he is never hungry, because he has that way. Coyote, on the other hand, seems to have no way, no nature, no knowledge. He has the ability to copy the others, but no ability of his own. This lack has several consequences. For one thing it means, as Carl Jung put it, that trickster is “stupider than the animals.” Animals at least have inborn knowledge, a way of being, and trickster doesn’t. The animals know not to eat that plant that causes them to defecate mountains; the animals know which way the river is; the animals know how to hunt for their particular foods. Trickster knows none of this, and so ends up hungry, stumbling around covered in his own mess.

It seems a dangerous position for an animal to be in, stripped of instinct. What possible use could there be in having lost the mother wit to be in the world? What conceivable advantage might lie in a way of being that has no way?

A first answer might be that whoever has no way but is a successful imitator will have, in the end, a repertoire of ways. If we can imitate the spider and make a net, imitate the beaver and make a lake, imitate the heron’s beak and make a spear, imitate the armadillo and wear armor, imitate the leopard and wear camouflage, imitate poison ivy and produce chemical weapons, imitate the fox and hunt downwind, then we become more versatile hunters, greater hunters. And although in “The Bungling Host” trickster fails as an imitator, elsewhere imitation is part of his power. Perhaps having no way also means that a creature can adapt itself to a changing world. Species well situated in a natural habitat are always at risk if that habitat changes. One reason native observers may have chosen coyote the animal to be Coyote the Trickster is that the former in fact does exhibit a great plasticity of behavior and is, therefore, a consummate survivor in a shifting world. For one thing, coyote young, like human young, remain dependent on their parents for a long time. One naturalist writes that such neoteny, as it is called, “is a characteristic of all species that have not inherited a fixed repertory of behavior, but must learn how to survive … . The neotenal coyote … meets change by learning new responses and is therefore capable of developing a whole new lifestyle.”

-Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde

[smarmykemetic]

". . . Trickster tales in most traditions are filled with examples of trickster’s hunger and its consequences. To take a case in point, in a Native American (Colville) story Coyote has made a new pair of horns for Old Buffalo Bull and in gratitude Buffalo gives Coyote a magic cow and a little advice: “Never kill this cow, Coyote. When you are hungry, cut off a little of her fat with your flint knife. Rub ashes on the wound. The cut will heal. This way, you will have meat forever.”

Coyote promised this is what he would do. He took the buffalo cow with him back over the mountains. Whenever he was hungry he would cut away a little fat and then heal the wound with ashes as Buffalo Bull had said. But after a while he got tired of the fat. He wanted to taste the bone marrow and some fresh liver. By this time he had crossed the plains and was back in his own country.

“What Buffalo Bull said is only good over in his country,” Coyote said to himself. “I am chief here. Buffalo Bull’s words mean nothing. He will never know.”

Coyote took the young cow down to the edge of the creek. “You look a little sore-footed,” he told her. “Stay here and rest and feed for a while.” Coyote killed her suddenly while she was feeding. When he pulled off her hide crows and magpies came. When Coyote tried to chase them off, more came. Even more came, until they had eaten all the meat … .

Coyote ends up empty-handed and of course his magic cow is dead and there’s nothing he can do about it. The plot is typical: the trickster is given something valuable with a condition set on its use, time passes, and before too long trickster’s hunger leads him to violate the condition. As a consequence, the plenitude of things is inexorably diminished. Hunger devours the ideal, and trickster suffers. There seem to be only two options: limited food or limited appetite. Coyote, unable to choose the latter, has the former forced upon him. Such is one common plot in the mythology of tricksters."

-Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde