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.
2 days ago
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.
2 days ago
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.
2 days ago
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.
3 days ago
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.
3 days ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
[/tangent]