TricksteranSacredClowns4

Trickster and the Paradoxes of Play

The Archetype of the trickster and the performances of the sacred clown present a challenge to any notion of myth as a grammar that determines the relations of agents, actions, and objects in the genesis of self and society. The clown is after all a “Lord of Misrule” who makes of things a mess. The trickster rabbit-man or spider-man, the bug-bunny, dissolves back into the world even as he defecates, urinates, and ejaculates its distinctive features. The performances of sacred clowns are likewise founded on scatological flows where the envelope of what Niebuhr called “the particularity of the body” is punctured (like the bladder on the scepter of the fool), to channel the jets of self back to the odorous ground of creation., as bare-handed predation, as phallic-aggressive copulation, and
as grinning, self-satisfied coprophagy.( Belmonte)

      Maltilda Coxe Stevenson describes a ritual of the Zuni clown society, the Koyemci :

               .. the acme of the depravity is reached after the chief takes his final
              departure from the plaza. The performances are now intended solely
              for amusement. The one who swallows the largest amount of filfth
              with the greatest gusto is the most commended by the fraterity and
              onlookers. A large bowl of urine is handed to a man of the frater-
              nity, who, after drinking the portion, pours the remainder over his
              head. Each man endeavers to exceed his fellows in buffoonery and
              in eating repulsive things, such as bits of old blankets or splinters
              of wood. They bite off the heads of living mice and chew them,
              tear live dogs apart, eat the intestines and fight over the liver like
              hungry wolves.

Such performances have been interpreted as providing comic relief at the long and tedious maize ceremonies of which they form a part, as Freudian representations of male anxieties concerning female blood-knowledge or life knowledge, and as creators of a ritual anti-structure that can correct for hierarchical trends in unstable egalitarian clan systems. (Belmonte)

Jung believes that the clown is not simply a reflection of local color, not even a rectifier of local wrongs. Rather he expresses what Bateson once referred to (recalling Pascal) as “the algorithms of the heart.”The trickster’s savage pantomime displays at the deepest level possible—the courage of conviction. (Belmonte)

Primitive societies, as oral knowledge economies, have high levels of tolerance for inclusive levels of paradox. Oral cultures may be more playful than high literate cultures where play, in effect, becomes the reserve of children and philosophers. (Belmonte 90)

Ritual inversion has been viewed as a form of reaffirmation and release from traditional moral imperatives. "That the clown himself might be a metaphysician in Whitehead’s terms, who lays the foundation of his culture’s forward movement into an uncertain future, is only rarely conceded."
(Belmonte)

"Arden King has suggested that Native American peoples with vital and ongoing clown performance did not initiate revitalization movements, (Ghost Dance) since the ritual humorists were able to build conceptual bridges between past and future. Thus the clown’s performance clarifies the epistemological possibilities of his people’s cosmology. (Belmonte 1990)

"The use of reversal and the use of analogic coding are fundamental to the mythic mentality and to the sensorium for which it is the axis. The clown can only personify death by 'hanging upside down' and by, in effect, turning up the volume of his performance so that the song becomes scream, converting information back into noise. As such, he is a figure of great, even ultimate power—a Superman, or better, who can swirl all the rolling energies of the psyche into a single bolt of existential lightning." (Belmonte,)

"If we choose to think of the cluster of symbols surrounding the trickster as archetypes, we are then compelled to recognize the psychocultural themes as the boundary-crossing, the ego’s inflationary greed, and the denial and acceptance of death. Here we see how the logic of play, paradox, and reversal operates at a number of levels to unite the sacred and profane aspects of the trickster myth and the clowns performance". ( Belmonte)

In summation, the trickster reveals himself to us as a composite symbolic figure of high density and energy, a psychological battery of sorts, that fuels the life of the mind by coding out its elementary polarities.

These polarities are inclusive and paradoxical, expressive of identity and difference between the animal and the human being, between ego and the self, and between the self and the body. The trickster is both troublemaker and sorcerer whose gestures can either sicken or heal. The outcome will depend on the individual's ability to receive and decode the meaning of the magician's "hocus

pocus” in terms that make cultural sense. Jung was perhaps too optimistic when he declared that the spiritual impoverishment of modern (Protestant) men and women would lead to a more genuine experience of individuation.

As Jung’s lesser known contemporary and peer Coomaraswamy wrote: “To have lost the art of thinking in images is precisely to have lost the proper linguistic of metaphysics and to have descended to the verbal logic of ‘philosophy.’(Belmonte)

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