Shaman and the Trickster

Shaman as Trickster           If the Shaman can be considered a kind of hero, there is a negative side to the heroic pattern exemplified in the archetypal figure of the shaman as trickster figure. The typical antics of the trickster include the tendency to accomplish things through trickiness, pranks, and buffoonery, what others can only accomplish, if at all, with a concentrated and methodical effort. Jung observed that the trickster holds a compensatory (counterbalance-offset) relationship to ego-consciousness, and to rational order, often upsetting the rational order.(Smith 97) Jung catalogued the attributes of the trickster as a shapeshifter, akin to the alchemical Mercurius, to para-psychological phenomena, and to the tradition of the medieval carnival with periodic reversal of the social-hierarchical, ecclesiastical, and political orderings. As a shadow figure the trickster plays a compensatory role in relation to the dominant attitude of consciousness or of society. As a jester the trickster is often portrayed as a comical and ignorant figure, who can sometime get himself or herself into trouble by his or her own foolishness.(Smith 97) In its highest expression the trickster serves the creative and life-enhancing tendencies of self and society. In the lowest expression, the trickster has a self-serving sociopathic aspect that entails tricking and hustling for the sheer heck of it. Individuals in whom the trickster is strongly activated can be socially useful if they are guided by social and spiritual values. Jung believed the traditional shaman and medicine man to have some of both the constructive and destructive characteristics of the trickster archetype.(Smith 97) Jung commented upon the danger of the negative characteristics:               His (the trickster’s) universality is co-extensive with shamanism, to which, as               we know, the whole phenomenology of spiritualism belongs. There is something               of the trickster character of the shaman and the medicine man, for he too plays               malicious jokes on people, only to fall victim in his turn to the vengeance of those               whom he has injured. For this reason his profession sometimes puts him in peril of               his life.

What is the difference between a shaman and a priest?       Shamans are specialists in ecstacy, a state of grace that allows them to move freely beyond the ordinary world--beyond death itself-- to deal directly with gods, demons, ancestors, and other potent beings. A shaman's authority comes out of a psychological experience.       (David Friedel)            Priests are  a functionaries of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry out the ritual. A priest's authority comes through social ordination    ( Joseph Campbell)

How are Shamans and Tricksters different?

Mac Linscott Ricketts contends that the shaman and the trickster in North America Indian culture represent two diametrically opposite poles of spirituality. The shaman represents the religious experience of humility and awe before spirit. While the trickster, the myth figure most popular in the mythologies of the great majority of Native American tribes, embodies another experience of Reality: “one in which humans feel themselves to be self-sufficient beings for whom the supernatural spirits are not to be worshiped, but ignored, to be overcome, or in the last analysis mocked.”(Ricketts 1964)          The Trickster provides man a model by which humankind is enabled to transcend existence and conquer for itself a unique place in the Cosmos. The trickster, then, is the symbol of the self-transcending mind of humankind and of the human quest for knowledge and the power that power brings. Unlike the shaman or priest, the shaman looks to no “power” outside himself, but sets out to subdue the world by wits and his wit. Ricketts sees the trickster as the symbolic embodiment of the attitude today representedby the humanist. Ricketts was led to his conclusion, that the trickster of the Native North American discloses a “primitive humanism,” by his doctoral studies nearly three decades ago. Subsequent study and critiques have not altered his hypothesis( Ricketts 1964, 1966)                       I remain convinced that the North American Indian trickster, if indeed all              tricksters, stands in opposition to the shaman and supernaturalism; that              he represents a different apprehension of humankind, the Cosmos, and              ones place in the Cosmos; and that he symbolizes an alternative “way              of being religious.

Shamanism

The Shaman has experienced another realm lying parallel to our own, a spiritual realm, into which he himself has been inducted. Adolf Jensen suggests that it is very probably, to the shaman's ecstacy that we should look for the origin of the idea that man is a duality of body and spirit. (Jensen 1963: 228-29, 284-85)       In his initiation into the spirit world the shaman has realized that for which  humans, or some of them at least, have become aware of their limitations as limitations: the transcending of the human condition and the attainment of "spirit". As Miricea Eliade interprets it, the shaman has found

the absolute freedom sought by mortals: "the desire for absolute freedom, that is, the desire to break the bonds that keep him tied to earth and to free himself from his limitations, is one of man's essential nostalgias..... In the archaic religions, the shaman and the medicine man.... constitute an exemplary model for the rest of the community precisely because they have realized transcendence and freedom.and have,by that fact, become like spirits and Supernatural Beings"(Eliade 1958: 101)

To My Favorite  Shamans and Tricksters