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For the Trickster, Everything Is Identity The creation myths have to do with origins, the world of the myth, the Age of Beginnings. Tales also treat transitions, not on a mythic scale but an earthly individual scale. All is physical and concrete movement, all is spatial movement. These movements are accomplished by means of performance, and one of the things performance does is to link its various discrete elements into an aesthetic and social unity. That unity may be fictitious, but not during performance. On the cosmological level, there is change in myth; on the individual level, there is change in tale; on the cultural and national level, there is change in epic. All is change, crisis, transition, a move toward regained equilibrium. But that is not really true. It is not a “regained equilibrium”; that can never occur. It is a new equilibrium. That is why rites of passage are integral parts of the oral tradition. We move from one state of being to another, whether cosmologically, individually , or culturally. We stop being one kind of person or world or society, and we begin life as another person or world or society. This means a regular casting off of one form and a taking on of another. This change occurs ritually and aesthetically in a performance. What was the norm becomes the past. While we were insiders in the old dispensation , we are outsiders in the new. We are constantly in this state of flux, moving from the old to the new, so that we are simultaneously insider and outsider . And that is one of the challenges of life, that is what makes our various life crises so difficult to endure. The child is an insider to his home, an outsider to his new responsibilities as an adult. During the period of the rite of passage, Part One The Trickster, Preparation for the Hero   Part One: The Trickster, Preparation for the Hero therefore, he is both insider and outsider, a difficult thing to be. It creates confusion and psychological torment. How can one be both simultaneously? The old is henceforth antisocial; before, it was perfectly acceptable. Now the new, which was asocial to a person in his or her old role, becomes properly social. The trickster through performance binds present and past. The tale is the moment in which past and present are blended in a performance. We are forever reliving, re-experiencing the perfection of the past at the same time that we experience the realities of the present, through performance. The trickster, like gods and heroes and helpers and all others in this fantasy world of the tale, exists both in our time and in myth-time. In the tale, we are merging the two times through the trickster character. In myth time, animals are humans, humans are animals . . . there is no distinction . Yes, we see the animal characteristics emerging at the end of the tales, a constant reminder to us that the blending is in force, that the ancient Age of Mythology is giving way to the world that we know, when animals have animal characteristics, when humans have human characteristics, when we move into the differentiated world that we know. The tales are simultaneously depictions of the immediate present, of real dif- ficulties and genuine human emotions, at the same time that they point to the infinite; the human emotions and the problems of the hearth become generalized into cosmological infinitude. This is the power of the performance; it is the potency of the tale. Trickster would have no existence, would have no meaning, would make no sense whatsoever if we did not understand the frame in which he operates. He is forever theatrical. He creates theater in the world that we know, the real world. Without that frame, Trickster’s antics are merely obscene and silly. But within that frame, he becomes significant and eternal. Trickster makes the flawed moment eternal. He ties us to our ancestral past. But within the tradition of the people, he is destroying one part of us and creating another part; he is recreating us, reshaping us, but always within the tradition of the people. We have to differentiate between our own history and the tradition within which that history unfolds. So it is that Trickster recreates our world, but he must first destroy it. He is constantly in the process of taking us back to our origins, destroying what we have...

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