lj - Hmmm, I think the first part is right, but the second part is problematic. Certainly, no culture, with the possible exception of the Sentinelese, exists in a vacuum, so you are moving from cultural relativism to ethical relativism. It seems like the second statement could be used to justify anything. Cultural relativism is an analytical framework, but it shouldn’t become a moral compass.
I think part of wj's framing comes from it being an undergraduate major. A lot of the instruction and reading would be aimed at preparing the students to engage in ethnographic fieldwork, be ready to record observations with thick description, and keep an open mind about what they were observing with no preconceptions or biases. From that perspective, of course one doesn't want to import any judgments that might get in the way of listening and understanding.
I remember early on in grad school having my MA advisor tell me that my first paper written for her class would be a fantastic undergrad lecture, but it had not established a critical perspective from which to make a scholarly intervention in the discourse. That was a really important transitional moment for me, prodding me to stop writing as a student trying to display my understanding of the subject to a teacher, and start writing as an early career authority with something worthwhile to say to a more experienced community of academics. I'm sure wj experienced something like this as he moved into his eventual field of expertise, and his undergrad work helped to prepare him for that.
I think wj's explanation works fine as a set of guiding principles for the initial cultural engagement and gathering of data. At some point, though, I agree that one has to start making some judgments, and figure out how to engage more critically, and start to try to negotiate a shared understanding that bridges the worldviews in a way that is fair and accurate for the culture being observed without giving up the value that can be added by bringing an outside perspective.
That transition is the trickiest bit, and requires so much epistemic humility to be done well.
Since lj is mentioning Radin, I’ll drop this in the discussion, which represents my attempt to sort out the origin of the concept of the trickster as a mythological type (not the origin of stories that feature what we would now call a trickster figure, but the origin of the taxonomy), all in response to Michael Caine’s request for more on the topic.
So to start off, I do what every modern student does and head straightaway to find out what Wikipedia has to say about the topic as a springboard to a deeper dive. And what I get is this...
Tricksters, as archetypal characters, appear in the myths of many different cultures. Lewis Hyde describes the trickster as a "boundary-crosser". The trickster crosses and often breaks both physical and societal rules: Tricksters "violate principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then re-establishing it on a new basis."
To which the first year writing professor in me immediately responds with “Wonderful, it’s a ‘Since the beginning of time…’ introduction, and starts skimming for some moment of actual engagement or analysis with the concept beyond summarizing concepts and making lists. Alas, to no avail. There is nothing like a genealogy of the idea, or any indication of why it is that this particular concept has wormed its way so firmly into general usage to become a foundational concept. Sometimes a Wiki article manages to transcend this tendency and go somewhere useful. This one does not.
I’m inherently suspicious of concepts that have shed their contexts and genealogies to become timeless and monlithic.
So begins my archaeological dig into the concept.
Two names that frequently get associated with the concept of the trickster are the Brothers Grimm and Vladimir Propp (who assembled a grand typology of Russian fairy tales), who are often mentioned as collectors of many tales featuring classic trickster figures, but neither of these ever seem to have used the concept thematically, nor used their own equivalent of the term to describe these figures. From what I can tell, the concept of a class of mythological entities that can be typified as “tricksters” dates back to the latter half of the nineteenth century with American antiquarian Daniel G. Brinton writing about Native American tribal mythologies in his essay “The Hero-God of the Algonkins as a Cheat and Liar” in 1885. From there the term gets adopted by other folklorists of Native American mythology, like Franz Boas who studied the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, and on to Paul Radin, who worked to systematize the various sources starting in the 1920s and culminating in 1957 in his book The Trickster : A Study In American Indian Mythology. We’ll return to it in a moment. But first...
In the mean time, another figure enters the chat – Joseph Campbell – whose grand mythological bouillabaisse so fascinates Bill Moyers and pretty much anyone else not inclined to actually do the reading (I’m looking at you, George Lucas). Campbell takes mythology assembled from everywhere with the serial numbers filed off of it à la Frazier’s Golden Bough, throws it in a pot with a heaping serving of Jungian psychology, then plates it all with an eye towards James Joyce’s Ulysses. Somewhere in the cooking he adds a dash of the trickster concept to the descent-and-return motif, and the ground has been prepared for the trickster archetype to bloom in every garden. He publishes The Hero With a Thousand Faces in 1949.
And that brings us back to Radin’s The Trickster…. When Radin is writing his magnum opus, he enlists the input of Jung and of Karl Kerenyi to add some heft to the underlying ideas and give the concept more universality. Jung ties the Trickster to the shadow side of humanity’s collective unconscious and the trickster takes on the role of the mediator between two irreconcilable concepts.
Yep, the mythologizing of the dialectic. Thesis/antithesis/synthesis as a modern day god for anyone who is brave enough to confront their shadow side. And all just in time for the explosion of the counterculture. Just a few years later, Levi-Strauss also gets on the bandwagon with his Structural Anthropology, but it’s really the mixture of Campbell and Jung that kicks things into high gear and makes it all spill over into popular culture.
I haven’t worked out yet quite how Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Discordianism manages to exert outsized influence in the neopagan ciricles that grew out of this counterculture, but I know it’s there alongside Stranger in a Strange Land so feel free to speculate there if you wish.
cleek - interesting possible connection between the figure of Satan and of Loki in scholarly debate...
Milton scholars are divided over what inspired Milton's characterization of Satan in Paradise Lost. Some scholars posit influence from the apocryphal Book of Enoch. Another group points to the possibility of Milton having had access to the Junius II manuscript, which contains the Anglo-Saxon account of Genesis and, in particular, an imaginative addition referred to as "Genesis B," in which Satan expresses sentiments and grievances surprisingly like those in Paradise Lost.
The reason why this has drawn parallels to Loki is because in "Genesis B" Satan has not just been cast into hell, but has been bound there by chains meant to keep him there so that he cannot wage war against The Almighty. Given that the language here is Anglo Saxon, medievalists have pointed out the parallels between Satan here and Loki, bound in Hel, and between the description of the angelic rebellion and of Ragnarök.
No proof of a connection, or of Milton having actually read the manuscript, but this sort of thing is catnip to academics.
Meanwhile, Elaine Pagels also posits in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent that Satan started out as a tricksterish figure in Abrahamic myth before developing into a sort of anti-god.
lj - So would you say the story of Loki and Baldr, which seems like typical trickster shit, is like a retcon?
The version of the Death of Baldur that you somewhat recount comes from Snorri Sturluson, recorded about 300 years after the Icelandic conversion to Christianity. The story of Baldur's death itself is very old - it appears on gold bracteates dating to the Migration Era - but not much is known about the details of the myth outside of Sturluson's Eddas and Saxo's Gestae Danorum, which gives a different version of the story (Balderus and Høderus fight over a woman, Balderus wins, Høderus kills Balderus with a sword made of mistletoe). I'm glossing Simek's Dictionary of Northern Mythology here. He's the most thorough source I have for documenting the archive.
In the eddic poem Lokasena, Loki does brag that he is the one who made it so that Baldur will never ride home again, but neither that nor the other eddic poems confirm the details of the story as told by Sturluson in the Prose Edda.
The Danish version ties Baldur to the royal family of Denmark, don't know if that lends more weight to the Danish version as given by Saxo or not.
Give all this, the story itself is a bit of a mystery, and I would not put any bearing weight on Sturluson's account of it. Sadly, it's one of our only extant versions.
Also, Simek confirms that there are no known Scandinavian place names dedicated to Loki, nor are there any known religious sites for him, and the bits of folklore we do have that survived are mostly the sort of little things done to try to avoid the "god's" notice.
One further note about Odin as trickster - in the Lokasena, Loki insults Odin by saying that he is treacherous as a god of victory, often leading the stronger side to lose. That would fit with the idea of Odin being wholly concerned with staving off Ragnarök, taking the strongest of the slain to fight with him at the last battle.
Hey look, another chance at a long [tangent] from me...
I understand how Loki got shoehorned into the role of a "trickster god" by Joseph Campbell and other comparative mythologists, and I especially understand how that characterization has been picked up and built upon by a lot of pop culture. As someone who has spent a lot of time with the Old Norse archive, though, I think this version of Loki really misses the role he actually played in Norse Literature.
The real trickster among the Aesir is not Loki, it's Odin. Odin is the one who defies propriety and gender roles to learn women's magic (seidh - learned from Freya in exchange for her receiving half of the battle-slain) so that he could gain insight into the future. He's also the one who associates with those outside of the kin group in order to protect that group by using dodgy means.
Loki is a part of that. He is, by blood (giantish) and character, an enemy of the Aesir/Vanir. He is an utangardr (one from outside the walls), where Odin is inangardr. The only reason he is allowed into the homes of the Aesir/Vanir is through his blood bond with Odin. Odin keeps him around because he has to accomplish dodgy shit in his mission to keep Ragnarök at bay, and none of the other Aesir/Vanir is willing to bend from law and custom. Odin is willing to violate taboos and cultural norms to get stuff done, but he can only go so far. He cannot risk putting himself outside of the law, so he keeps Loki around to do the things that would get someone outlawed.
And sure enough, Loki does get himself outlawed after he violates hospitality laws and hurls deadly insults at his hosts.
It's only after the comparativists come in and start trying to map Norse myth onto Greek/Roman pantheons, and then try to further schematize things to fit an idea of Proto-Indo-European origins, that Loki gets turned into a trickster figure and eventual edgelord hero. The Old Norse wanted nothing to do with him.
With a couple of decades of teaching experience under my belt, my experience tells me that every prompt or set of instructions is going to cause confusion for some set of readers, and that revising them can minimize that number, but won't eliminate it completely. At some point it always becomes a game of musical chairs.
I watched a bunch of WNBA game recaps while checking my work for the Caitlin Clark stuff, and mostly came away impressed by the play of Minnesota Lynx rookie guard Olivia Miles. I see from The Guardian's coverage that she's broken out and gone viral in the mainstream - with good reason:
We are back to fighting the battles of the Gilded Age in America, and federal law enforcement is acting as the KKK and the Pinkertons, but with official sanction.
The male/male sexual relations in Greece, Rome, and Old Norse cultures were not considered unmanly so long as the male involved was not sexually penetrated. I believe this was likely a sympathetic magic taboo. In all three cultures service in arms to their social group was the marker of a free man, and allowing oneself to be penetrated invited similar violations to happen in battle. A warrior could not afford such vulnerabilities.
This taboo quite likely goes back to Pan-Indo-European times.
It's also an anxiety that seems to be floating under the surface in a lot of the manosphere fixation on the warrior ethos. I've seen a lot of dudes afraid of playing the part of the victim/loser in sparring drills because that "trains failure into your mindset." It's a weirdly paranoid, Green Lantern-esque version of the power of positive thinking.
You can see it at work 100% of the time in every moment of Hegseth's insecure posturing and in the Orange Menace's handshake-fu and inability to ever compromise or back down from a claim.
How would the LA mayor primary have looked any different if it were fraudulent?
If the Democratic Party were putting their thumb on the scale for the LA mayoral primary, they would have been sure to throw second place to Spencer Pratt, who would have lost in a landslide to Bass in the general. The result that they actually got is going to be a bigger challenge for Bass and the party.
With my Christian Korean students (or Christian Korean-American students who split time between Korea/North America and/or Korean/English) the cultural mix for genders seems like a foundation of Confucianism with an overlay of Promise Keepers style evangelicalism with a capitalist dimension that equates material success with spiritual favor.
GftNC - I had certainly thought about the parallel that your NYT op-ed piece draws between the US Christian Nationalists and the Francoists, but I hadn't known enough about the Vichy to see the parallels there, and those are pretty strong. I think they are on to something.
My wife has long been referring to the Christian nationalist tradwives as "Vichy women" because of how they collaborate with patriarchy to oppress other women, but now I sense that the analogy goes a lot deeper than just the collaborator aspect.
I think it's important to question the degree to which online and media conversations about Caitlin Clark (and the WNBA as a whole) are representative of women's WNBA fan culture. There's a whole world of anti-WNBA negging content that gets gathered up and aggregated by the algorithms in a way that makes it hard to escape. I don't know the fandom well enough to know if there are any online communities that are primarily women talking to other women about the WNBA without having to deal with all that added noise and misogyny.
The other thing to consider is that a big portion of both the WNBA's and the PWHL's fanbase is LGBTQ+ aligned, which is going to shape fan culture in its own way compared to female fan communities for professiona men's sports.
Both these things make it hard to generalize just by doing searches and chasing links. I think you have to do some ethnography before you can start to get a sense of the way these things overlay. I'd love to see some ethnography coming from within either of these communities that could help sort some of these things out a bit better.
Re: Caitlin Clark - again, WNBA fandom is not something I am a part of, but I do think I have some literacy with fan cultures and can pick out some of the warring dynamics that end up driving the Caitlin Clark narratives.
1 - there's the annoyance among long-time WNBA fans that no one cared about their league until the magic white girl from Iowa showed up.
2 - then she goes to Indiana to start her pro career, which feeds into the whole Hoosiers vibe of white basketball nostalgia and playing the game the right way.
3 - ...and since the WNBA is a more physical game, and the established players are annoyed at all of the media hype following her, she's given just a little bit more spice than the next rookie by way of a welcome, which frustrates her and gets her to react, which then gets read by the older fans as her being a bit of an entitled drama llama.
4 - All this is compounded by the online media environment, where algorithms are driven by outrage and controversy and hot takes. So every new piece of content is going to be picking a side and amping up every slight bit of controversy to wring clicks out of it.
5 - Meanwhile, she's playing like any other early-career star player, putting in mostly great performances, but struggling and learning to adapt to the spotlight. She would be just like any other early-career star were it not for 1-4.
As a rhetorician and media studies person, though, the story that I think is most indicative of the social dynamic of women's sports fandom specifically is the Caitlin/Taylor Conjunction:
...whereby a defense of Clark's performance gets combined with excitement over her wearing shoes that pay homage to one of Taylor Swift's costumes from her Eras tour, thus multiplying the pleasure of fandom by combining two threads and doubling the feeling of fellowship and belonging to a special sorority. It's that urge to combine and compound fandoms in an inclusive way that I think makes female sports fan culture feel different from male sports fan culture. You can intensify your connection to the rest of the fandom by bringing in other parts of your life. Sure, you can buy a WNBA or PWHL jersey to wear to a game, but that's not going to get you the same level of admiration as would wearing a jersey that you crocheted yourself, or that you spent two weeks bedazzling, or that you have customized with a special K-Pop Demon Hunters theme. Those sorts of things marginalize you in male sports fan cultures, but draw you further into the fandom in women's sports.
At least that's how I see things from my ethnographic perspective. I'm happy to hear and be instructed by the perspective of an insider.
I'm going to come at this from a different direction, with obvious crossover.
I've been a fan of several professional sports over the years, and my wife and I have both been fans of the Colorado Avalanche since their inaugural season. Currently I'm not following many pro sports leagues, largely because I think that the money and the media narratives are unhealthy for them. I stopped with the NFL two decades ago, and with the Bundesliga and the UEFA Champions League in 2013, after watching most of Bayern Munich's matches for the season and seeing them win the Treble. The following season the team sacked the manager to bring in Pep Guardiola, and I started to sour on all the elitism and sportswashing. We've stuck with the NHL, but it's been harder to follow since we left Colorado for So Cal in 2004.
Now the crossover.
In 2024 I ran across some news about the Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL) and saw that they were streaming all of their games in the US on YouTube. I figured that my wife would really love watching women's hockey, so I convinced her to watch the first match of their second season. She was hooked. We ended up watching most of the matches for the season, and for this last season.
The PWHL is founded on an agreement between the Professional Women's Hockey Players Association (PWHPA) - the player union - and The Walter Group (owned by Mark Walter, who also owns the LA Dodgers). The PWHL also has Billie Jean King and her wife, Ilana Kloss on the board, and Ilana Kloss serves as an advisor for the PWHPA.
After two years of being a fan of the PWHL, I can say that the fan culture in the PWHL is very different from that of the NHL. NHL teams do have their fan favorite players, and personality does play a role in that, but the ebb and flow of that favor is more fleeting and transactional. On the women's side, the fan attachment is much more personal, with supporter groups often forming strong bonds with players who are closer to the bottom of the roster, but who have some quality or narrative that the fans find engaging. I've seen this go so far as to cause supporter groups to advocate for their team protecting one of the role-players from the league expansion draft at the expense of players who were far more pivotal to the team's success. There's also a strong community element in this. The PWHL fandom has a strong LGBTQ+ contingent, and a strong commitment to developing more opportunities for young girls to play the sport. As such, the league fan-favorites are mostly players known for their commitment to inclusivity and to growing the women's game, and the fan-villain is the one player who has been most active in anti-trans women's sports activism.
It's much more intimate and personal. It's also a lot less toxic than men's sports culture with the endless hazing and dominance rituals. I do not miss any of that.
If anyone really wants to dig into women's sports-fan culture, then the big-three women's team sports leagues (WNBA, NWSL, WSL, PWHL) are all good places to start.
Meanwhile, I'm sad that I have to wait until November to watch my next PWHL game. And quite anxious to see what will become of the teams now that the league is expanding from eight to twelve teams. There's going to be a lot of upheaval in team rosters and that's really going to test these fan loyalties both to players and to teams. Every season is a learning experience.
hsh - I'm slow-burn furious over what's been done to my students' futures without their knowledge or consent. I would love to put together a class that combines reading of some utopian SF with some critiques of our current, unsustainable path, and then set them all loose to write some solarpunk utopias and imagine a better future for themselves.
The problem with this is that most of them come in with far too little reading and writing in their education patched together and propped up with an overreliance on AI, struggling to collaborate because social media and the pandemic have sapped their social skills, and stressed to the max by how much debt they have taken on trying to future proof themselves from a world where all their jobs have been automated away.
It would take a couple years of careful buildup to get them ready to handle the reading list, and to engage in undirected critical thinking.
Not their fault. They are as capable as past students. We have not given them the conditions or the institutions that would allow them to prosper as we did. We have hobbled them.
GftNC - nous: speaking (as we were) about Those Who Walk Away from Omelas, I wonder whether you have read or know about Blood Over Bright Haven? I’ve just this minute finished it. It’s a worthy development, I think.
I have not, and neither has my wife (who is the one most likely to be reading new SFF - especially dark academia). I've put it on her radar. She's got more reading time opening up now that the Nebula reading and voting is done.
My current reading is divided between Utopianism for a Dying Planet (608 pgs.) and - relatedly - a 780 pg. William Morris bio, so it's going to be a bit before I can get to anything else. (I've also got The Left Hand of Darkness on my bedstand, but that's not going to bog me down.) Feels like I have the start of a research project building here, but no idea yet where it is heading. It's all in the heavy lifting and brainstorming phase still.
In the process of finishing my final grading for two courses, then the unpaid labor for the summer will be putting together my materials for a performance review and fleshing out a new syllabus for next school year. It'll be a research writing class centered on bicycle activism, which sounds quite niche at the outset, but blossoms into a dozen or so potential research paths with diverse disciplinary homes and methodologies - something for all majors and interests. Most importantly for my purposes, it's framed as public outreach, which will force the students to synthesize what they are reading, apply it to real world contexts, and address it to diverse, real-world communities. Gotta make the writing feel real or else they will never treat writing like it IS real.
wj- To be precise, the first Latino to be elected since California became part if the United States.
That is why I included the qualifier "in state history." There was also a Latino lieutenant governor who became governor after the elected governor was removed over corruption, which is why I put in the qualifier "first elected latino governor."
CA governor primary has less than 10% of the ballots remaining to be counted. AP is now projecting Becerra as the winner, and Hilton in second place, around three points ahead of Steyer.
If that projection holds (and the result is likely to do so, even if the margins shift) that would mean that Becerra will be the governor, and the first latino elected governor in state history.
GftNC - I don't have a lot of familiarity with Ossoff's record and platform, but from what I have seen and read, I'd rather him than Newsom or Shapiro, and I think that Harris has lost her shot, so I'd put Ossoff ahead of any of them in my ranking. He's not big on experience, but that doesn't really seem to be much of a hindrance these days, and might actually boost him among independents.
I haven't done a full count, but there are in excess of 1m votes still to be counted. The majority of those votes are in Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Sacramento, and Riverside counties. Hilton's share is shrinking and the other three's shares are still increasing, but Bianco is unlikely to catch up to whoever ends up in third. It does seem possible, however, that Steyer might catch Hilton. San Diego is still holding strong for him, but the others are either majority D, or in Riverside's case, the home of Bianco and eating into Hilton's share from the other direction.
At this point I am more concerned with the professional women's hockey expansion rosters than I am with the CA governor's race. We are holding off the atrocity exhibit.
Don't put more thought into Crusader Pete's speech than he put into it himself. It's the stream-of-consciousness dialogue of a scared and insecure chauvinist. You will never find consistency, just an endless collage of compensatory fragments and bizarro world militant Christianity, held together with a too-small suit intended to make him appear swole.
He's Patrick Bateman, had Brett Easton Ellis chosen a manosphere influencer instead of an investment banker to be his protagonist in American Psycho.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Monkey business”
lj - Hmmm, I think the first part is right, but the second part is problematic. Certainly, no culture, with the possible exception of the Sentinelese, exists in a vacuum, so you are moving from cultural relativism to ethical relativism. It seems like the second statement could be used to justify anything. Cultural relativism is an analytical framework, but it shouldn’t become a moral compass.
I think part of wj's framing comes from it being an undergraduate major. A lot of the instruction and reading would be aimed at preparing the students to engage in ethnographic fieldwork, be ready to record observations with thick description, and keep an open mind about what they were observing with no preconceptions or biases. From that perspective, of course one doesn't want to import any judgments that might get in the way of listening and understanding.
I remember early on in grad school having my MA advisor tell me that my first paper written for her class would be a fantastic undergrad lecture, but it had not established a critical perspective from which to make a scholarly intervention in the discourse. That was a really important transitional moment for me, prodding me to stop writing as a student trying to display my understanding of the subject to a teacher, and start writing as an early career authority with something worthwhile to say to a more experienced community of academics. I'm sure wj experienced something like this as he moved into his eventual field of expertise, and his undergrad work helped to prepare him for that.
I think wj's explanation works fine as a set of guiding principles for the initial cultural engagement and gathering of data. At some point, though, I agree that one has to start making some judgments, and figure out how to engage more critically, and start to try to negotiate a shared understanding that bridges the worldviews in a way that is fair and accurate for the culture being observed without giving up the value that can be added by bringing an outside perspective.
That transition is the trickiest bit, and requires so much epistemic humility to be done well.
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For my part, I was surprised to find how very recent the concept of a trickster god was, and how beholden to Jungian psychology it was.
"
Since lj is mentioning Radin, I’ll drop this in the discussion, which represents my attempt to sort out the origin of the concept of the trickster as a mythological type (not the origin of stories that feature what we would now call a trickster figure, but the origin of the taxonomy), all in response to Michael Caine’s request for more on the topic.
So to start off, I do what every modern student does and head straightaway to find out what Wikipedia has to say about the topic as a springboard to a deeper dive. And what I get is this...
To which the first year writing professor in me immediately responds with “Wonderful, it’s a ‘Since the beginning of time…’ introduction, and starts skimming for some moment of actual engagement or analysis with the concept beyond summarizing concepts and making lists. Alas, to no avail. There is nothing like a genealogy of the idea, or any indication of why it is that this particular concept has wormed its way so firmly into general usage to become a foundational concept. Sometimes a Wiki article manages to transcend this tendency and go somewhere useful. This one does not.
I’m inherently suspicious of concepts that have shed their contexts and genealogies to become timeless and monlithic.
So begins my archaeological dig into the concept.
Two names that frequently get associated with the concept of the trickster are the Brothers Grimm and Vladimir Propp (who assembled a grand typology of Russian fairy tales), who are often mentioned as collectors of many tales featuring classic trickster figures, but neither of these ever seem to have used the concept thematically, nor used their own equivalent of the term to describe these figures. From what I can tell, the concept of a class of mythological entities that can be typified as “tricksters” dates back to the latter half of the nineteenth century with American antiquarian Daniel G. Brinton writing about Native American tribal mythologies in his essay “The Hero-God of the Algonkins as a Cheat and Liar” in 1885. From there the term gets adopted by other folklorists of Native American mythology, like Franz Boas who studied the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, and on to Paul Radin, who worked to systematize the various sources starting in the 1920s and culminating in 1957 in his book The Trickster : A Study In American Indian Mythology. We’ll return to it in a moment. But first...
In the mean time, another figure enters the chat – Joseph Campbell – whose grand mythological bouillabaisse so fascinates Bill Moyers and pretty much anyone else not inclined to actually do the reading (I’m looking at you, George Lucas). Campbell takes mythology assembled from everywhere with the serial numbers filed off of it à la Frazier’s Golden Bough, throws it in a pot with a heaping serving of Jungian psychology, then plates it all with an eye towards James Joyce’s Ulysses. Somewhere in the cooking he adds a dash of the trickster concept to the descent-and-return motif, and the ground has been prepared for the trickster archetype to bloom in every garden. He publishes The Hero With a Thousand Faces in 1949.
And that brings us back to Radin’s The Trickster…. When Radin is writing his magnum opus, he enlists the input of Jung and of Karl Kerenyi to add some heft to the underlying ideas and give the concept more universality. Jung ties the Trickster to the shadow side of humanity’s collective unconscious and the trickster takes on the role of the mediator between two irreconcilable concepts.
Yep, the mythologizing of the dialectic. Thesis/antithesis/synthesis as a modern day god for anyone who is brave enough to confront their shadow side. And all just in time for the explosion of the counterculture. Just a few years later, Levi-Strauss also gets on the bandwagon with his Structural Anthropology, but it’s really the mixture of Campbell and Jung that kicks things into high gear and makes it all spill over into popular culture.
I haven’t worked out yet quite how Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Discordianism manages to exert outsized influence in the neopagan ciricles that grew out of this counterculture, but I know it’s there alongside Stranger in a Strange Land so feel free to speculate there if you wish.
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cleek - interesting possible connection between the figure of Satan and of Loki in scholarly debate...
Milton scholars are divided over what inspired Milton's characterization of Satan in Paradise Lost. Some scholars posit influence from the apocryphal Book of Enoch. Another group points to the possibility of Milton having had access to the Junius II manuscript, which contains the Anglo-Saxon account of Genesis and, in particular, an imaginative addition referred to as "Genesis B," in which Satan expresses sentiments and grievances surprisingly like those in Paradise Lost.
The reason why this has drawn parallels to Loki is because in "Genesis B" Satan has not just been cast into hell, but has been bound there by chains meant to keep him there so that he cannot wage war against The Almighty. Given that the language here is Anglo Saxon, medievalists have pointed out the parallels between Satan here and Loki, bound in Hel, and between the description of the angelic rebellion and of Ragnarök.
No proof of a connection, or of Milton having actually read the manuscript, but this sort of thing is catnip to academics.
Meanwhile, Elaine Pagels also posits in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent that Satan started out as a tricksterish figure in Abrahamic myth before developing into a sort of anti-god.
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lj - So would you say the story of Loki and Baldr, which seems like typical trickster shit, is like a retcon?
The version of the Death of Baldur that you somewhat recount comes from Snorri Sturluson, recorded about 300 years after the Icelandic conversion to Christianity. The story of Baldur's death itself is very old - it appears on gold bracteates dating to the Migration Era - but not much is known about the details of the myth outside of Sturluson's Eddas and Saxo's Gestae Danorum, which gives a different version of the story (Balderus and Høderus fight over a woman, Balderus wins, Høderus kills Balderus with a sword made of mistletoe). I'm glossing Simek's Dictionary of Northern Mythology here. He's the most thorough source I have for documenting the archive.
In the eddic poem Lokasena, Loki does brag that he is the one who made it so that Baldur will never ride home again, but neither that nor the other eddic poems confirm the details of the story as told by Sturluson in the Prose Edda.
The Danish version ties Baldur to the royal family of Denmark, don't know if that lends more weight to the Danish version as given by Saxo or not.
Give all this, the story itself is a bit of a mystery, and I would not put any bearing weight on Sturluson's account of it. Sadly, it's one of our only extant versions.
Also, Simek confirms that there are no known Scandinavian place names dedicated to Loki, nor are there any known religious sites for him, and the bits of folklore we do have that survived are mostly the sort of little things done to try to avoid the "god's" notice.
One further note about Odin as trickster - in the Lokasena, Loki insults Odin by saying that he is treacherous as a god of victory, often leading the stronger side to lose. That would fit with the idea of Odin being wholly concerned with staving off Ragnarök, taking the strongest of the slain to fight with him at the last battle.
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Hey look, another chance at a long [tangent] from me...
I understand how Loki got shoehorned into the role of a "trickster god" by Joseph Campbell and other comparative mythologists, and I especially understand how that characterization has been picked up and built upon by a lot of pop culture. As someone who has spent a lot of time with the Old Norse archive, though, I think this version of Loki really misses the role he actually played in Norse Literature.
The real trickster among the Aesir is not Loki, it's Odin. Odin is the one who defies propriety and gender roles to learn women's magic (seidh - learned from Freya in exchange for her receiving half of the battle-slain) so that he could gain insight into the future. He's also the one who associates with those outside of the kin group in order to protect that group by using dodgy means.
Loki is a part of that. He is, by blood (giantish) and character, an enemy of the Aesir/Vanir. He is an utangardr (one from outside the walls), where Odin is inangardr. The only reason he is allowed into the homes of the Aesir/Vanir is through his blood bond with Odin. Odin keeps him around because he has to accomplish dodgy shit in his mission to keep Ragnarök at bay, and none of the other Aesir/Vanir is willing to bend from law and custom. Odin is willing to violate taboos and cultural norms to get stuff done, but he can only go so far. He cannot risk putting himself outside of the law, so he keeps Loki around to do the things that would get someone outlawed.
And sure enough, Loki does get himself outlawed after he violates hospitality laws and hurls deadly insults at his hosts.
It's only after the comparativists come in and start trying to map Norse myth onto Greek/Roman pantheons, and then try to further schematize things to fit an idea of Proto-Indo-European origins, that Loki gets turned into a trickster figure and eventual edgelord hero. The Old Norse wanted nothing to do with him.
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On “Open Thread”
With a couple of decades of teaching experience under my belt, my experience tells me that every prompt or set of instructions is going to cause confusion for some set of readers, and that revising them can minimize that number, but won't eliminate it completely. At some point it always becomes a game of musical chairs.
On “Sports fandom”
I watched a bunch of WNBA game recaps while checking my work for the Caitlin Clark stuff, and mostly came away impressed by the play of Minnesota Lynx rookie guard Olivia Miles. I see from The Guardian's coverage that she's broken out and gone viral in the mainstream - with good reason:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynIrSJTJPP0
She's looking legit.
On “Open Thread”
Labor UK appears to be living in interesting times at the moment after the most recent by-election result.
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Don't know if this is making its way into y'all's news feeds or not...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/16/minnesota-immigration-enforcement-conspiracy-charges
We are back to fighting the battles of the Gilded Age in America, and federal law enforcement is acting as the KKK and the Pinkertons, but with official sanction.
On “A future so bright”
One further addendum on Hartmut's explanation...
The male/male sexual relations in Greece, Rome, and Old Norse cultures were not considered unmanly so long as the male involved was not sexually penetrated. I believe this was likely a sympathetic magic taboo. In all three cultures service in arms to their social group was the marker of a free man, and allowing oneself to be penetrated invited similar violations to happen in battle. A warrior could not afford such vulnerabilities.
This taboo quite likely goes back to Pan-Indo-European times.
It's also an anxiety that seems to be floating under the surface in a lot of the manosphere fixation on the warrior ethos. I've seen a lot of dudes afraid of playing the part of the victim/loser in sparring drills because that "trains failure into your mindset." It's a weirdly paranoid, Green Lantern-esque version of the power of positive thinking.
You can see it at work 100% of the time in every moment of Hegseth's insecure posturing and in the Orange Menace's handshake-fu and inability to ever compromise or back down from a claim.
So much fear.
On “Open Thread”
How would the LA mayor primary have looked any different if it were fraudulent?
If the Democratic Party were putting their thumb on the scale for the LA mayoral primary, they would have been sure to throw second place to Spencer Pratt, who would have lost in a landslide to Bass in the general. The result that they actually got is going to be a bigger challenge for Bass and the party.
On “A future so bright”
With my Christian Korean students (or Christian Korean-American students who split time between Korea/North America and/or Korean/English) the cultural mix for genders seems like a foundation of Confucianism with an overlay of Promise Keepers style evangelicalism with a capitalist dimension that equates material success with spiritual favor.
On “Open Thread”
GftNC - I had certainly thought about the parallel that your NYT op-ed piece draws between the US Christian Nationalists and the Francoists, but I hadn't known enough about the Vichy to see the parallels there, and those are pretty strong. I think they are on to something.
My wife has long been referring to the Christian nationalist tradwives as "Vichy women" because of how they collaborate with patriarchy to oppress other women, but now I sense that the analogy goes a lot deeper than just the collaborator aspect.
On “Sports fandom”
I think it's important to question the degree to which online and media conversations about Caitlin Clark (and the WNBA as a whole) are representative of women's WNBA fan culture. There's a whole world of anti-WNBA negging content that gets gathered up and aggregated by the algorithms in a way that makes it hard to escape. I don't know the fandom well enough to know if there are any online communities that are primarily women talking to other women about the WNBA without having to deal with all that added noise and misogyny.
The other thing to consider is that a big portion of both the WNBA's and the PWHL's fanbase is LGBTQ+ aligned, which is going to shape fan culture in its own way compared to female fan communities for professiona men's sports.
Both these things make it hard to generalize just by doing searches and chasing links. I think you have to do some ethnography before you can start to get a sense of the way these things overlay. I'd love to see some ethnography coming from within either of these communities that could help sort some of these things out a bit better.
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Re: Caitlin Clark - again, WNBA fandom is not something I am a part of, but I do think I have some literacy with fan cultures and can pick out some of the warring dynamics that end up driving the Caitlin Clark narratives.
1 - there's the annoyance among long-time WNBA fans that no one cared about their league until the magic white girl from Iowa showed up.
2 - then she goes to Indiana to start her pro career, which feeds into the whole Hoosiers vibe of white basketball nostalgia and playing the game the right way.
3 - ...and since the WNBA is a more physical game, and the established players are annoyed at all of the media hype following her, she's given just a little bit more spice than the next rookie by way of a welcome, which frustrates her and gets her to react, which then gets read by the older fans as her being a bit of an entitled drama llama.
4 - All this is compounded by the online media environment, where algorithms are driven by outrage and controversy and hot takes. So every new piece of content is going to be picking a side and amping up every slight bit of controversy to wring clicks out of it.
5 - Meanwhile, she's playing like any other early-career star player, putting in mostly great performances, but struggling and learning to adapt to the spotlight. She would be just like any other early-career star were it not for 1-4.
As a rhetorician and media studies person, though, the story that I think is most indicative of the social dynamic of women's sports fandom specifically is the Caitlin/Taylor Conjunction:
https://www.barstoolsports.com/blog/3571309/caitlin-clark-makes-wnba-history-again-along-with-32-points-in-an-overtime
...whereby a defense of Clark's performance gets combined with excitement over her wearing shoes that pay homage to one of Taylor Swift's costumes from her Eras tour, thus multiplying the pleasure of fandom by combining two threads and doubling the feeling of fellowship and belonging to a special sorority. It's that urge to combine and compound fandoms in an inclusive way that I think makes female sports fan culture feel different from male sports fan culture. You can intensify your connection to the rest of the fandom by bringing in other parts of your life. Sure, you can buy a WNBA or PWHL jersey to wear to a game, but that's not going to get you the same level of admiration as would wearing a jersey that you crocheted yourself, or that you spent two weeks bedazzling, or that you have customized with a special K-Pop Demon Hunters theme. Those sorts of things marginalize you in male sports fan cultures, but draw you further into the fandom in women's sports.
At least that's how I see things from my ethnographic perspective. I'm happy to hear and be instructed by the perspective of an insider.
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In the US and Canada, "hockey" is almost always "ice hockey," and "field hockey" is almost always marked as such.
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I'm going to come at this from a different direction, with obvious crossover.
I've been a fan of several professional sports over the years, and my wife and I have both been fans of the Colorado Avalanche since their inaugural season. Currently I'm not following many pro sports leagues, largely because I think that the money and the media narratives are unhealthy for them. I stopped with the NFL two decades ago, and with the Bundesliga and the UEFA Champions League in 2013, after watching most of Bayern Munich's matches for the season and seeing them win the Treble. The following season the team sacked the manager to bring in Pep Guardiola, and I started to sour on all the elitism and sportswashing. We've stuck with the NHL, but it's been harder to follow since we left Colorado for So Cal in 2004.
Now the crossover.
In 2024 I ran across some news about the Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL) and saw that they were streaming all of their games in the US on YouTube. I figured that my wife would really love watching women's hockey, so I convinced her to watch the first match of their second season. She was hooked. We ended up watching most of the matches for the season, and for this last season.
The PWHL is founded on an agreement between the Professional Women's Hockey Players Association (PWHPA) - the player union - and The Walter Group (owned by Mark Walter, who also owns the LA Dodgers). The PWHL also has Billie Jean King and her wife, Ilana Kloss on the board, and Ilana Kloss serves as an advisor for the PWHPA.
After two years of being a fan of the PWHL, I can say that the fan culture in the PWHL is very different from that of the NHL. NHL teams do have their fan favorite players, and personality does play a role in that, but the ebb and flow of that favor is more fleeting and transactional. On the women's side, the fan attachment is much more personal, with supporter groups often forming strong bonds with players who are closer to the bottom of the roster, but who have some quality or narrative that the fans find engaging. I've seen this go so far as to cause supporter groups to advocate for their team protecting one of the role-players from the league expansion draft at the expense of players who were far more pivotal to the team's success. There's also a strong community element in this. The PWHL fandom has a strong LGBTQ+ contingent, and a strong commitment to developing more opportunities for young girls to play the sport. As such, the league fan-favorites are mostly players known for their commitment to inclusivity and to growing the women's game, and the fan-villain is the one player who has been most active in anti-trans women's sports activism.
It's much more intimate and personal. It's also a lot less toxic than men's sports culture with the endless hazing and dominance rituals. I do not miss any of that.
If anyone really wants to dig into women's sports-fan culture, then the big-three women's team sports leagues (WNBA, NWSL, WSL, PWHL) are all good places to start.
Meanwhile, I'm sad that I have to wait until November to watch my next PWHL game. And quite anxious to see what will become of the teams now that the league is expanding from eight to twelve teams. There's going to be a lot of upheaval in team rosters and that's really going to test these fan loyalties both to players and to teams. Every season is a learning experience.
On “Open Thread”
hsh - I'm slow-burn furious over what's been done to my students' futures without their knowledge or consent. I would love to put together a class that combines reading of some utopian SF with some critiques of our current, unsustainable path, and then set them all loose to write some solarpunk utopias and imagine a better future for themselves.
The problem with this is that most of them come in with far too little reading and writing in their education patched together and propped up with an overreliance on AI, struggling to collaborate because social media and the pandemic have sapped their social skills, and stressed to the max by how much debt they have taken on trying to future proof themselves from a world where all their jobs have been automated away.
It would take a couple years of careful buildup to get them ready to handle the reading list, and to engage in undirected critical thinking.
Not their fault. They are as capable as past students. We have not given them the conditions or the institutions that would allow them to prosper as we did. We have hobbled them.
It's kinda heartbreaking.
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GftNC - nous: speaking (as we were) about Those Who Walk Away from Omelas, I wonder whether you have read or know about Blood Over Bright Haven? I’ve just this minute finished it. It’s a worthy development, I think.
I have not, and neither has my wife (who is the one most likely to be reading new SFF - especially dark academia). I've put it on her radar. She's got more reading time opening up now that the Nebula reading and voting is done.
My current reading is divided between Utopianism for a Dying Planet (608 pgs.) and - relatedly - a 780 pg. William Morris bio, so it's going to be a bit before I can get to anything else. (I've also got The Left Hand of Darkness on my bedstand, but that's not going to bog me down.) Feels like I have the start of a research project building here, but no idea yet where it is heading. It's all in the heavy lifting and brainstorming phase still.
In the process of finishing my final grading for two courses, then the unpaid labor for the summer will be putting together my materials for a performance review and fleshing out a new syllabus for next school year. It'll be a research writing class centered on bicycle activism, which sounds quite niche at the outset, but blossoms into a dozen or so potential research paths with diverse disciplinary homes and methodologies - something for all majors and interests. Most importantly for my purposes, it's framed as public outreach, which will force the students to synthesize what they are reading, apply it to real world contexts, and address it to diverse, real-world communities. Gotta make the writing feel real or else they will never treat writing like it IS real.
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wj- To be precise, the first Latino to be elected since California became part if the United States.
That is why I included the qualifier "in state history." There was also a Latino lieutenant governor who became governor after the elected governor was removed over corruption, which is why I put in the qualifier "first elected latino governor."
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CA governor primary has less than 10% of the ballots remaining to be counted. AP is now projecting Becerra as the winner, and Hilton in second place, around three points ahead of Steyer.
If that projection holds (and the result is likely to do so, even if the margins shift) that would mean that Becerra will be the governor, and the first latino elected governor in state history.
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GftNC - I don't have a lot of familiarity with Ossoff's record and platform, but from what I have seen and read, I'd rather him than Newsom or Shapiro, and I think that Harris has lost her shot, so I'd put Ossoff ahead of any of them in my ranking. He's not big on experience, but that doesn't really seem to be much of a hindrance these days, and might actually boost him among independents.
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Update for the CA Governor primary...
81% of the votes counted.
Becerra (D) 27.7%
Hilton (R) 25.1%
Steyer (D) 22.4%
Bianco (R) 10.2%
I haven't done a full count, but there are in excess of 1m votes still to be counted. The majority of those votes are in Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Sacramento, and Riverside counties. Hilton's share is shrinking and the other three's shares are still increasing, but Bianco is unlikely to catch up to whoever ends up in third. It does seem possible, however, that Steyer might catch Hilton. San Diego is still holding strong for him, but the others are either majority D, or in Riverside's case, the home of Bianco and eating into Hilton's share from the other direction.
At this point I am more concerned with the professional women's hockey expansion rosters than I am with the CA governor's race. We are holding off the atrocity exhibit.
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Don't put more thought into Crusader Pete's speech than he put into it himself. It's the stream-of-consciousness dialogue of a scared and insecure chauvinist. You will never find consistency, just an endless collage of compensatory fragments and bizarro world militant Christianity, held together with a too-small suit intended to make him appear swole.
He's Patrick Bateman, had Brett Easton Ellis chosen a manosphere influencer instead of an investment banker to be his protagonist in American Psycho.
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