Trickster Times – seeing through the archetypal eye
Or: mostly, we get the Trickster we deserve
‘Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox. … [H]e is the archetype who attacks all archetypes. He is the character in myth who threatens to take the myth apart.’
Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World
A couple of weeks ago, a reader of this Substack who I also happen to know personally asked me if I would write about a question or two that she was grappling with. How can we see these times we’re living in through a mythic or archetypal lens, she said – and while it all seems to be going to hell in a handbasket out there, how do you stay sane?
My friend also mentioned in passing that she had read an article recently (I haven’t read the piece she was talking about, don’t know who wrote it and so might have got the wrong end of the stick) which declared something like: Donald Trump isn’t a Trickster at all, because Trickster is always in service to the world or the gods whereas Trump is only in service to himself. Such a statement seems likely to be based on a misunderstanding of the Trickster archetype. And so, because I’m an archetypal psychologist and because it gets to the heart of her question, I’m going to spend some time explaining why I think Donald Trump absolutely is a Trickster, and why this matters profoundly for the way we approach the madness that we perceive in the world today, and instead of falling into despair, respond to the opportunities it provides.
‘You don’t always get the Trickster you think you want. Though mostly, you get the Trickster you deserve.’
Back in 2016, on my then-blog – also called The Art of Enchantment – I wrote an article called ‘Trickster Times’ (some elements of which I reprised in Hagitude). It was after Donald Trump had been elected for the first time, and Boris Johnson’s ‘Leave’ campaign had succeeded in persuading the population of the UK to vote for Brexit. We are mythic animals, I wrote, and so in some sense we’re always living in mythic times – but sometimes those underlying patterns really start to stand out and become impossible to ignore. The dominant archetypal patterns today are decidedly Tricksterish; we’re firmly living in what I call Trickster Times. Because when civilisations start to become moribund; when social, economic and political systems stagnate, and empires become degenerate and unresponsive to the needs of the people, in walks Trickster to shake it all up.
Trickster is the catalyst, the disruptor who sparks off the tearing down of the old order. Trickster is the archetypal disruptive intelligence which all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible, and open to change. But that change is always an alarming process, and one in which there are no guarantees: what follows might not be better. What follows depends on many things – among them, the specific qualities of the Trickster who happens along in the story you’re living through right now. Because here’s the problem, I wrote back in 2016 – and I would firmly say again now – you don’t always get the Trickster you think you want. Though mostly, you get the Trickster you deserve.
To understand why, let’s think a little more about the nature of Trickster. But before we do that, we’re going to need to step back even further and remind ourselves what an archetype is.