Trickster Makes This World. Lewis Hyde
of a slave. In the case of Prometheus, the trick backfires (humans get the meat and their lot in life becomes more grim); in the case of Hermes, the trick works (he refuses the meat and his lot improves). In both cases, though, there is a change of apportionment and a form of sacrifice emerges that memorializes both the trick and its consequences, the new order of things.
We can now give a general shape to this material on the sacrifice of appetite, and link it to the earlier discussion of traps. A trickster is often imagined as a sort of “hungry god.” The image can be read from two sides: tricksters are either gods who have become voracious eaters, smothered in intestines; or they are beings full of appetite who become a little more god-like through some trimming of the organs of appetite. The stories we’ve seen have a hierarchy: at the lower levels, trickster is bound by appetite (Coyote must eat his entire cow); at the higher levels, he is either freed from appetite (that anorexic shining prince) or given an appetite for more ethereal foods (the smoke of sacrifice). Moreover, trickster walks the path between high and low (descending into hunger at the end of the Raven and Prometheus stories; ascending and restraining hunger in the Hymn to Hermes and the opening of the Raven story). On this path between high and low we also find sacrifice. At its simplest, it seems unintended (the devoured penis, the lost intestines of many Coyote stories); at other times, there is conscious action (the burned intestines in the Raven story, Hermes’ restraining pride).
Now let us return to the idea that trickster intelligence arises from the tension between predators and prey. Behind trickster’s tricks lies the desire to eat and not be eaten, to satisfy appetite without being its object. If trickster is initially ridden by his appetites, and if such compulsion leads him into traps, then we might read intentional sacrifice as an attempt to alter appetite—to eat without the compulsion or its consequences. In the Greek case, the foods identified with heaven satisfy an appetite shed of its usual, odious baggage: old age, sickness, and death. These stories imagine a final escape from the eating game in which, beyond the edge of predator-prey relationships, immortal eaters feast on heavenly foods and never themselves become a meal for worms or for time.
As I have been suggesting, in these tales of sacrifice a hook is hidden in the meat portion: mortality itself. Prometheus doesn’t see it, and the Golden Age ends with humans hooked on meat, and mortal. Hermes avoids it. He changes the eating game by inventing a sacrificial rite in which he forgoes the meat and, more important, his own desire for meat. Figuratively, to slip the trap of appetite he sacrifices the organ of that appetite, his odious belly. So, although the Hymn contains no direct declaration in this regard, I think it is correct to say that Hermes invents the art of sacrifice and that he does so out of a struggle over appetite.
Moreover, when he refrains from eating he is not only sacrificing appetite, he has also gotten “wise to the bait.” Coyotes who avoid poisoned carcasses restrain their hunger and do not get killed. Hermes does the same thing, if eating the meat means becoming mortal. But for those with actual bellies, such restraint is only a partial solution. No one imagines that coyotes avoiding strychnine give up eating, and even Hermes makes it clear that he doesn’t eat the cattle because he hopes later to enjoy the fruits of sacrifice and prayer. (Those are more ethereal foods, but they are foods nonetheless; when Hermes imagines heaven he doesn’t imagine an absence of hunger, he imagines gods who eat.) Let us say, then, that wise-to-the-bait Hermes is a bait thief as well. Raven, remember, figures out how to eat the fat and avoid the hook. Hermes steals the cattle and, dedicating the smoke of sacrifice to himself, consumes only the portion that will not harm him. To say that Hermes will enjoy “the fruit of sacrifice and prayer” is an elevated way of saying we’ve met another trickster who eats the fat and leaves an empty hook behind.
* This cycle of tales was first printed in the key early work on trickster figures, Paul Radin’s The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (1956). Radin was an anthropologist with a 1910 doctorate from Columbia University. He lived and worked with the Winnebago in Wisconsin for many years, and his commentary places their trickster cycle in its cultural contest with great finesse.
* Trickster eats his own intestines. He does not do this intentionally, but nonetheless it is a kind of self-sacrifice. When Carl Jung said that the trickster “is a forerunner of the savior,” he had in mind this motif of unconscious agony.
* This could be read as a strange version of the vagina-dentata motif (which does occasionally appear in trickster stories). If so, rather than understanding the toothed vagina as an image of horrific castration, we could take it as an image for the conversion of crippling desire into appropriate desire. These teeth don’t devour the sexual organ, they shape it.
* The Homeric Hymns are a group of poems, each to a specific god (Demeter, Dionysus, Apollo, etc.), written in the style of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Hymn to Hermes was probably written down around 420 B.C., though the material it contains is of great antiquity. My own translation of this hymn appears in the first appendix at the end of the book.
† There is a bit of a joke here. There are twelve Olympian gods and Hermes is one of them, or rather he’d like to be. Here he includes himself in the sacrifice so as to stake his claim. He’s like a politician nominating himself for high office, seconding the nomination, and counting the votes—all in secret.
* Jean-Pierre Vernant in The Cuisine of Sacrifice : “He establishes the first sacrifice.” T. W. Allen in The Homeric Hymns : Hermes “ordained the ritual of sacrifice.” Walter Otto in The Homeric Gods: “He is … regarded as the prototype for offering sacrifice.” Walter Burkert in Greek Religion : “He invents fire, fire-sticks, and sacrifice.” (And see Burkert’s essay “Sacrificio-sacrilegio: il trickster fondatore.”) For two who disagree, see the first chapter of Kahn’s Hermès Passe and the chapter on Hermes in Clay’s The Politics of Olympus.
* I realize that there can’t be a change if we’re talking of beginnings, but we are in mythic time here, and in mythic time first things needn’t come first.
“THAT’S MY WAY, COYOTE, NOT YOUR WAY”
THE BUNGLING HOST
To say simply that trickster lives on the road doesn’t give the full nuance of the case, for the impression one often gets is that trickster travels around aimlessly, and roads lead from one place to another. Here’s how the Chinese Monkey King is described at one point: “Today he toured the east; and tomorrow he wandered west … He had no definite itinerary.” Moments of transition in Native American stories typically read: “As he continued his aimless wandering …” Maybe the point of saying that trickster is on the road is to say that he has “the context of no context,” in George W.S. Trow’s wonderful phrase. To be in a particular town or city is to be situated; to be on the road is to be between situations and not, therefore, oriented in the ways that situations orient us.
In any event, trickster sometimes loses his bearings completely, and that is where we see most clearly the aimless portion of his traveling. In a story known widely in North America, Coyote has put his head into the empty skull of an elk and can’t get it out.
Coyote began