Trickster Makes This World. Lewis Hyde
upon him. I am thinking in particular of the trickster cycle told by the Winnebago Indians in Wisconsin, several episodes of which amount to a sort of “Raven Becomes Voracious” in reverse.* At the beginning of the Winnebago cycle, trickster is pictured as having a long penis coiled in a box on his back, and his intestines wrapped around his body, an apt image of someone ridden by appetite. In the course of the story, however, these bizarre organs are reduced and rearranged until trickster looks more or less like a human being.
In the episode concerning his intestines, trickster has caught some ducks and set them roasting. He plans to nap while they cook, but before settling down he addresses his anus: “Now, you, my younger brother, must keep watch for me while I go to sleep. If you notice any people, drive them off.” As soon as trickster falls asleep, some small foxes, having scented the meat, come to steal it; the anus farts at them, but they pay it no mind and eat their fill. When trickster awakes he discovers the meat is gone and cries out:
“Alas! Alas! They have caused my appetite to be disappointed, those covetous fellows! And you, too [he says to his anus], you despicable object, what about your behavior? Did I not tell you to watch this fire? You shall remember this! As a punishment for your remissness, I will burn your mouth so that you will not be able to use it!”
Thereupon he took a burning piece of wood and burnt the mouth of his anus. He was, of course, burning himself and, as he applied the fire, he exclaimed, “Ouch! Ouch! This is too much! I have made my skin smart. Is it not for such things that they call me Trickster? …”
Then he went away. As he walked along the road he felt certain that someone must have passed along it before, for he was on what appeared to be a trail. Indeed, suddenly, he came upon a piece of fat that must have come from someone’s body. “Someone has been packing an animal he had killed,” he thought to himself. Then he picked up a piece of fat and ate it. It had a delicious taste. “My, my, how delicious it is to eat this!”
As he proceeded however, much to his surprise, he discovered that it was part of himself, part of his own intestines, that he was eating. After burning his anus, his intestines had contracted and fallen off, piece by piece, and these pieces were the things he was picking up. “My, my! Correctly, indeed, am I named Foolish One, Trickster! …” Then he tied his intestines together. A large part, however, had been lost.
In this way, trickster’s intestines become normal.* As for his penis, it is also a little oversized at the beginning of the story. He has trouble with it lifting his blanket up like a tent pole, and he can send it like a snake under the water to copulate with a chief’s daughter bathing in the river. But late in the cycle he hears a voice teasing him about how strange his penis looks. He becomes self-conscious about the weird shape of his body, and begins to rearrange himself, placing his penis and testicles where they belong on the human body. At the same time, he is angered by the teasing voice, which turns out to come from a chipmunk. When the chipmunk runs into a hollow tree, trickster sends his penis in after it.
So he took out his penis and probed the hollow tree with it. He could not, however, reach the end of the hole. So he took some more of his penis and probed again, but again he was unable to reach the end of the hole. So he unwound more and more of his penis and probed still deeper, yet all to no avail. Finally he took what still remained, emptying the entire box, and probed and probed but still he could not reach the end of the hole. At last he sat up on a log and probed as far as he could, but still he was unable to reach the end. “Ho!” said he impatiently, and suddenly withdrew his penis. Much to his horror, only a small piece of it was left. “My, what a great injury he has done me! You contemptible thing I will repay you for this!”
Then he kicked the log to pieces. There he found the chipmunk and flattened him out, and there, too, to his horror he discovered his penis all gnawed up. “Oh, my, of what a wonderful organ he has deprived me! But why do I speak thus? I will make objects out of the pieces for human beings to use.”*
Trickster transforms the pieces of his penis into edible plants—potatoes, artichokes, rice, ground beans, and so on. In many tales when trickster loses his intestines they, too, become plants that humans can eat. That is, when trickster’s organs of appetite are diminished they are turned into foodstuffs, the objects of human appetite. Such foods are a mixed blessing, giving rise to hunger even as they satisfy it. To end our craving we must eat the organs of craving, and craving then returns. If the foods that nourish us are trickster’s gifts, to eat them is to become like trickster, like that Raven who can never be satisfied and who would devour all the provisions of his native village were he not banished to this world.
The general point here is that a trickster will be less ridden by lust and hunger if his organs of appetite have been whittled away. In this case, trickster simply suffers the loss; it happens to him. He may benefit from it, but the benefit is accidental, not a fruit of his own cunning or design. But perhaps the accident leads to the cunning. That is to say, just as trickster may acquire his trapping wits as a consequence of having been trapped, so the suffering that trickster endures from his unrestrained appetites may lead to some consciousness in regard to those appetites. I say this because, however one might imagine the connection, there are trickster tales in which a limit to appetite is intended rather than accidental. In fact, we have already seen such a moment: when the father in the Raven story has his son’s intestines burned, he consciously attempts to effect the change that the Winnebago trickster suffers witlessly.
If we turn to the Homeric Greek tradition, we will find a similar pattern, though somewhat differently elaborated. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes tells about the days immediately following Hermes’ birth.* He is the illegitimate child of Zeus and a nymph named Maia. At the beginning of the story, the newborn babe wanders from his mother’s cave, stumbles upon a turtle, and, from its shell, makes the first lyre. After singing a song about himself on this instrument, Hermes lays it aside. “His mind wandered to other matters. For Hermes longed to eat meat.” He sets off to steal cattle from the herd of his half brother, Apollo.
In many a Coyote story the phrase “he longed to eat meat” would lead willy-nilly to some sort of disaster. And the frank declaration of carnivorous desire in the Homeric Hymn makes it clear that this Greek trickster is a cousin to Coyote, as does a later remark that Apollo makes when he finally catches his thieving brother. “You’re going to be a great nuisance to lonely herdsmen in the mountain woods when you get to hankering after meat and come upon their cows or fleecy sheep.”
So the Hymn itself lets us know that Hermes is a meat thief like Coyote, and given his transgressive nature, we will not be surprised if he breaks the rules and eats the cow he steals. But the plot of this particular story differs in one significant detail. The crucial scene occurs after Hermes has led the stolen cattle to a barn near the river Alpheus. Having kindled a fire in a trench, Hermes drags two of the cows from the barn and butchers them.
He cut up the richly marbled flesh and skewered it on wooden spits; he roasted all of it—the muscle and the prized sirloin and the dark-blooded belly—and laid the spits out on the ground …
Next he gladly drew the dripping chunks of meat from the spits, spread them on a stone, and divided them into twelve portions distributed by lot, making each one exactly right.†
And glorious Hermes longed to eat that sacrificial meat. The sweet smell weakened him, god though he was; and yet, much as his mouth watered, his proud heart would not let him eat. Later he took the fat and all the flesh and stored them in that ample barn, setting them high up as a token of his youthful theft. That done, he gathered dry sticks and let the fire devour, absolutely, the hooves of the cattle, and their heads.
And when the god had finished, he threw his sandals into the deep pooling Alpheus. He quenched the embers and spread sand over the black ashes. And so the night