The Trickster

But this distinction between humans as inconstant and fallible and gods and their minions as trustworthy, always good and perfectly honest is a certainly not a universal aspect of human pantheons. In fact, it may exist in a minority of human cultures, for many of the worldÆs religions contain a figure who straddles these descriptive categories. This being, who is in the classificatory system of the folklorist known as a Trickster, may be either semi-divine or mortal but in either case serves as an intermediary between the world of the gods and the world of mortals. This paper examines two different Trickster types drawn from two very different cultures, Kweku Ananse, the spider-man of Ghana and a figure drawn from classical Greek myth, Prometheus.

At first these characters seem to have little to do with each other. Some of these differences are simply reflections of broader historical and cultural factors, but it is also true that these characters are not perfectly analogous, and the discrepancy between the two goes to

. . .
Tricksters exist simply because they have to, because they help to mitigate the many ways in which the world is unfair. In this sense, a character Like Kweku Ananse is not analogous to any being or type of being in the Christian pantheon. Rather, he is analogous to an entire concept û the whole afterlife of heaven and hell. Christian doctrine tells people that the good shall be rewarded and the evil punished in the next world. A primary Trickster like Ananse makes sure that most of the time people they get what they deserve in this world. This merging of a divine entity and a human one seems to be a useful explanatory model for Trickster figures like that of Prometheus. The story of Prometheus is, of course, primarily a story about theft, and this is interesting, for thievery is almost synonymous with trickery in religious traditions as diverse as the Norse -- for example the god LokiÆs involvement in stealing magic apples (Branston 209) and the Navajo û as seen in all of the Coyote stories of the Navajo tradition. Unlike Kweku Ananse, whose shape and story shifts so dramatically (in part because he is a primary Trickster, in part because he is the product of an oral rather than a written tradition), Prometheus is easier to defi
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Kweku Ananse, Titans Epimetheus, Hermes Trickster, Moreover Judeo-Christian, Trickster Ananse, Usually Trickster, Rigal-Cellard Krupat, , Jungian Jungian-esque, kweku ananse, trickster figure, secondary trickster, trickster character, Measureö Bennett, primary trickster, trickster tales, secondary trickster character, trickster sometimes, primary secondary, story prometheus, paper examines, rewarded evil punished, primary secondary trickster, secondary trickster figure,
Approximate Word count = 1787
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

More Essays on The Trickster