, morality and immorality, social and antisocial and other ôbalancedö qualities. The definition offer by Paul Radin of the North American Native American trickster is as follows:
Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself. He will nothing consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which he has no control. He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being.
The polarity of the trickster defined above is common to all archetypes of the trickster, many of which posit the trickster as creator of good and evil as well as perpetrator of good versus evil. The trickster in Native American culture embodies a variety of forms from the coyote to the hare, while at some points he is considered a deity while at others he is associated with deities. Trickster tales originated as part of oral tradition, passed from one tribe or generation to another with valuable lessons. According to one historian, the large majority of trickster myths in North American Native American culture provide a telling of creation of the earth and ôhave a hero who is always wandering, who is always hungry, who is not guided by normal conceptions of good and evil, who is either playing tricks on people or having them played on him and who is highly sexedö (Trickster 2 2004, 1).
The coyote is one of the most common incarnations of the trickster in North American Native American culture. Known as coyote, coyote man, or old man coyote, the coyote is illustrated in a number of different ways. In some Native American cultures he is viewed as the Creator who fashions human beings from mud and brings animal life forms like the deer, elk, antelope and bear into being. While he is no...