Original Spin (Trickster Makes this World)

Trickster is a boundary-crosser.

Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out,
and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city
and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce.

Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and
ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity,  contradiction
and paradox.

God of the threshold in all forms

I WANT TO ARGUE A PARADOX,

that the (trickster) myth asserts: that
the origins,  liveliness, and durability of cultures
require  that there be space for figures whose function
is to uncover and disrupt the very  things that  cultures

are based on

What tricksters quiet regularly do is  create lively talk w

here there has been silence, or where speech has been prohibited. Trickster speaks freshly where language has been blocked, gone

dead, or lost it’s charm. Here again Plato’s intuition—that deceit

and inventive speech are linked—holds, for usually language goes dead because cultural practice has hedged it in, and some  shameless double-dealer is needed to get outside the rules and set tongues
wagging again. (76)

(Sampling from Lewis Hyde: Trickster Makes This World. text)