The Trickster, The Temple, The Mount
Donald Slouches Towards The White House (Again)
We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.
W.H. Auden
A Trickster?
The Orange Man is slouching back to the Big White House. I must admit, I did not see that coming. I’m not a fan, but that’s a level of comeback that’s almost unheard-of-mythic. I thought he was about to go to prison! Strewth. This must have every pundit in the land scribbling in a Neo-Jungian frenzy about the psychological underpinnings of quite how this all happened. I could make some informed guesses but maybe another day. It’s jaw dropping though. He makes Berlusconi look circumspect and sincerely groping for truth. Everything seems mad and volatile. Interesting Times, the Chinese used to call it.
The truth is, I wouldn’t have wanted to vote for any of the options on the table, so this is most definitely not a political broadcast. What I am responding to is the question I’ve been asked repeatedly in the last few days: is Donald Trump a Trickster figure?
Whilst on a rough-house, secular level you could make a few comparisons, I can’t seriously go along with that. It seems an easy fit, but as a mythologist I don’t think so.
I can’t call The Donald a Trickster in the folkloric sense of the word, mythically, because the Trickster in folklore is a regenerative, taboo-busting energy that is still – in the end in service, somehow – to a sacred outcome. I wouldn’t dream of bestowing that kind of generativity on The Donald. His Tourette level fabrications are mesmerically troubling, and yet his story won. A sizeable amount of the American public is not-yet-done with his tale. Sure, here he comes to ‘fix’ Gaza and the Ukraine, he just needs even more power than last time.
I want to be careful here to ensure I’m not tidying Trickster up for polite consumption; Paul Radin writes: he possesses no values, moral or social…yet through his actions all values come into being. As my old friend Lewis Hyde states:
Most of the travellers, liars, thieves and shameless personalities of the twentieth century (now 21st) are not tricksters at all, then. Their disruptions are not subtle enough, or pitched at a high enough level… when he lies and steals, it isn’t so much to get away with something or get rich as to disturb the established categories of truth and property and, by doing so, open the road to possible new worlds. When Pablo Picasso says that “art is a lie that tells the truth,” we are closer to the old Trickster spirit.
Lewis Hyde and myself on the Trickster, back in 2017
Whilst outrageous fibbing, astonishing revivals of fortune and showy displays can be part of the Trickster’s arsenal, what in myth they ultimately serve is something that refreshes the culture. They say in every lie is a little bit of truth, and maybe that tiny bit – the mythic need to shake, rattle and roll the centre – is what some folks sensed was needed. This isn’t an endorsement.
What I do know from folktales is this: never, ever make Trickster the boss. Especially not some feral derivative like this one. In their most esteemed function they are marginal figures, sacred outliers designed to shake things up when needed. The best of them freeze when assembled at the centre of the room. A real Trickster’s power lies in their nose and tail, not anything too centralised. You put a real sacred Trickster in the centre and they implode. They need authority to bounce off, to react to, not to be it.
So here we go, another four years on the merry-go-round of what will he do next? I turn to the Teacher and ask:
What shall we do Yeshua?
Don’t freak out, says Jesus. He said this two thousand years ago for just this kind of moment.
And Auden pipes up:
Don’t die in your dread.
It’s a liminal moment, as the anthropologists liked to call it. It’s not business as usual. That’s got to make us curious at the very least.
Here’s a little story. Around the time this Substack goes out I will be exploring it in the gorgeous confines of Firle church, just a few miles outside Brighton.