Trickster Makes This World. Lewis Hyde
and his hunger. In the parts of the cycle that follow, Raven creates the world as we know it: he places the fish in the rivers and scatters the fruit over the land. When he arrives in this world he finds it has no light but, remembering that there was light in the heaven from which he came, he returns and steals it so that this world will not be in darkness.
To reflect on the story of Raven’s hunger, note first that the shining prince in this tale is not exactly the chief’s son (the corpse, after all, remains); he is some sort of emissary from heaven, come in the youth’s stead as an antidote to grief. The island on which the boy’s parents live lies between heaven and earth; Raven travels from heaven to the world of the animal tribe, and then he travels from that world to this one, where appetite has no end and where the berries and fish have no end. In short, as in many trickster tales, the Tsimshian Raven is a go-between, a mediator. There are three spheres of being in the story, and Raven moves among them.
From the point of view of Raven’s final home—this world of hunger and food—the father who loves his son is bound to fail in his attempt to keep the boy from all harm. In this world, people die; animals die. To desire the contrary is to desire a changeless perfection, a heaven, an ideal. Seeing that, perhaps we can now link three enigmas in the story: Why does the father have his son’s intestines burnt? Why are the slaves called Mouth at Each End? What are those shin scabs?
To begin with, eating and death are part of the world of change (just as their suppression would be part of changeless perfection), so let us say that the intestines are a sign of our mutable world, and that their name is Mouth at Both Ends. The slaves are therefore the alimentary canal, that servant of the body who brings all kinds of food into our home every day. The story is built around the question of whether or not the intestines will own the boy. The father hopes they won’t, and so he has his attendants remove and burn them when the boy dies, a nice image for getting rid of appetite. If he could live, a boy without intestines might be freed from hunger, freed from attachments, freed from sickness and death. In any event, the parents’ grief and sacrifice summon up a weird “ideal” being who shines like fire and does not eat, as if he had been gutted.
The shin scabs seem the most mysterious image here. In the far north, Raven is sometimes called “the trickster with the scaly legs”; perhaps to native eyes when a raven rubs its beak against its legs it appears to be self-eating, the Hungry One tasting its own scabs. To read the image more figuratively, let’s first remember how scabs come to be, and what their function is. Scabs bespeak some kind of rough contact with the world. They follow wounds, and are the healing of wounds. As we heal, we slough them off; as such, they are a kind of bodily excrement. They are also a kind of fruiting, flesh producing flesh out of itself, a strange fruit to be sure, but one that is actually eaten in this case.
If we begin with the idea of “rough contact,” perhaps the shin scabs in the story, like calluses on the hands, represent work, the labor by which humankind must get its keep (these are food-getting slaves, after all, whose shins are scabbed). It is a widespread motif in this mythology that once upon a time we humans did not have to work for our food (every morning there was a bowl of hot acorn mush outside the lodge), but then trickster came along, did something foolish, and now we must labor. So perhaps “to eat shin scabs” is to enter the world of scarcity and work.
Because scabs are linked with wounds, they may also indicate that Raven is born of woundedness. But what wound is there in this tale? Remember that the father here hopes to keep his son from all harm, and that his hopes are twice defeated, once when the boy dies and once again when the scabs turn his spirit into a shamefully hungry creature. I suspect the second defeat arises from the father’s response to the first. He had his people cut out the boy’s intestines, and then the slaves—who are in some way like intestines—appear, wounded and scabbing. Raven is not the father’s hoped-for ideal youth who has escaped this world; he is, rather, a restless, hungry beast who is in this world precisely because his father’s idealism wounded him, and he has tasted the fruit of that wound.
Finally, if scabs are a kind of excrement, perhaps the story means that Raven comes to life where the body sheds its wastes. (Ravens, in fact, will eat excrement, and the mythology is full of scatological episodes.) But “excrement” may be too precise a word here, for in this case what the body sheds becomes food. Perhaps Raven comes to life where waste turns into fruit, or better, where one’s own waste becomes one’s food (it is their own scabs that the slaves eat). There is a circularity to eating here which suggests that, at some level, eating is self-eating, or that all who eat in this world must eventually themselves be eaten. In this world, everything that feeds will someday be food for other mouths; that is the law of appetite, or—as we’d now say—of ecological interdependence. If I’m right to imagine that the removed intestines reappear as the slaves, then in this story, at the “beginning of things,” we find Raven tasting the fruit of his own wounded guts and by that self-eating setting in motion this world of endless hunger.
Here it should be noted that there is some natural history woven into this story. When hunters kill an animal in the woods they typically gut it on the spot, then carry the carcass home; later, ravens will come to eat the guts (and coyotes and wolves will follow, drawn by the ravens). Raven is said to have told the Athabascan Indians that they would be able to catch deer if they would leave the guts for him to feed on each time the game is killed; elsewhere, the entrails of the kill are left as a gift to Coyote. Each case presents an image of appetite eating the organs of appetite.
One thing draws together these various readings: in each, Raven comes down to this world. “Raven Becomes Voracious” is a story of descent. In heaven there are beings who do not eat; in this lower world of stomachs and fish there are mortals who eat constantly. The trickster Raven is a mixture, the shining boy plus appetite, a being of considerable power who is unable to satiate his hunger. Trickster makes the world, gives it sunlight, fish, and berries, but he makes it “as it is,” a world of constant need, work, limitation, and death.
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As I said at the outset, there are not many stories like this one in which we learn something about the genesis of appetite, but trickster tales in most traditions are filled with examples of trickster’s hunger and its consequences. To take a case in point, in a Native American (Colville) story Coyote has made a new pair of horns for Old Buffalo Bull and in gratitude Buffalo gives Coyote a magic cow and a little advice:
“Never kill this cow, Coyote. When you are hungry, cut off a little of her fat with your flint knife. Rub ashes on the wound. The cut will heal. This way, you will have meat forever.”
Coyote promised this is what he would do. He took the buffalo cow with him back over the mountains. Whenever he was hungry he would cut away a little fat and then heal the wound with ashes as Buffalo Bull had said. But after a while he got tired of the fat. He wanted to taste the bone marrow and some fresh liver. By this time he had crossed the plains and was back in his own country.
“What Buffalo Bull said is only good over in his country,” Coyote said to himself. “I am chief here. Buffalo Bull’s words mean nothing. He will never know.”
Coyote took the young cow down to the edge of the creek. “You look a little sore-footed,” he told her. “Stay here and rest and feed for a while.”
Coyote killed her suddenly while she was feeding. When he pulled off her hide crows and magpies came. When Coyote tried to chase them off, more came. Even more came, until they had eaten all the meat …
Coyote ends up empty-handed and of course his magic cow is dead and there’s nothing he can do about it. The plot is typical: the trickster is given something valuable with a condition set on its use, time passes, and before too long trickster’s hunger leads him to violate the condition. As a consequence, the plenitude of things is inexorably diminished. Hunger devours the ideal, and trickster suffers. There seem to be only two options: limited food or limited appetite. Coyote, unable to choose the latter, has the former forced upon him. Such is one common plot in the mythology of tricksters.
But this mythology always seems to go in two directions at once, and so at times we