Trickster Consciousness and Meeting Our Edge

At the advent of Gemini season, it felt appropriate to greet this time with an ode to the trickster – a mythic figure often maligned in our present society, but one essential to our growth and development as human beings, and with whom I have always had an affinity. Examples of this archetype abound in storytelling cultures around the world, from Coyote in many Indigenous American spiritual traditions to Enki in Sumerian mythology to characters like Robin Hood and Puck in English literature, delighting in taking many different forms across time and space. I’ve often thought of the cosmic twins (and the planet who rules them, Mercury/Hermes) as embodying a trickster aspect: both here and there, facing two directions at the same time, constantly shifting and moving. Sluicing through rigid binaries and strictures with a playful mischievousness, the trickster has a unique capacity to move between worlds, to acknowledge many things to be true at once – even if they conflict or are in tension with each other, as is often the case.

This slipperiness, this capaciousness that allows for multiplicity, movement, and transformation, is often read as duplicitous or dishonest. Which it can be, of course. But how might we open up, learn, and grow if we approached the trickster with curiosity and a sense of humor, a joy in discovering the unknown or unexpected? How might engaging this figure thoughtfully allow us an alternative perspective on our situation, enable us to see our lives from an unorthodox angle and begin to see possibilities outside our current frameworks? Scholar of ethnobiology Dr. Enrique Salmon, in a course on Trickster Consciousness and Plants I had the pleasure of taking last year, defines the role of the archetypal trickster as the court jester, the fool, one who disturbs and throws a wrench in things – and in that disturbance, creates space for new life, vantage points, ways of doing things. Trickster consciousness thus involves continuously looking for new ways to understand reality, being open to different avenues to access alternate dimensions. Tricksters open up a liminal plane of reality that lies between and beyond polarity (black or white, dark or light, male or female); they remind us that despite our innate tendency to sort reality into discrete categories, we actually experience most of life in this world in the grey, in-between areas.

This came to the forefront of my mind recently as I was reading tarotist Jessica Dore’s excellent book on the subject, Tarot for Change, and one passage that particularly struck me was her assertion that one of the tarot’s key themes – echoed in myths and old stories the world over – is that wisdom and salvation do not come from the center; but rather, from the margins. In her words, “At the center, much is certain, a lot is fixed. On the edges, though, you ca see territories beyond your own… it’s out there that you can start to see the center – the stuff you think you know for sure – in a new way.” The savior, the medicine, the key, does not emerge from the established channels and institutions, the dominant order, the center, but rather from the edges of society, what is cast out or held at a fearful distance. I think the trickster, too, comes to us from that place, inviting us to venture beyond the known, familiar, and accepted and open ourselves to the gifts, wisdom, and perspective that live there. Tricksters pull a sleight of hand that shakes the kaleidoscope and transforms the familiar picture of our existence into something wholly new and strange, unrecognizable. They awaken our awareness of what lies on the edge; like the corona of a star, they draw our attention to that electrified sphere on the periphery.

So what is the ‘edge’? Edge play means something different to everyone who practices it; like the trickster itself, it evades easy definition or categorization. Exploring the trickster archetype, though, has gotten me thinking about the connections between turning our attention to the margins and our willingness, in kink or otherwise, to venture into the strange and unfamiliar, be someone or something that feels alien. To upend our dominant understandings of ourselves and the world to see what lies out there at the edge. I feel the sly, effervescent, playful energy of the trickster in the room with us when I, say, transform a grown adult into an eager pig or puppy, a bouncy cheerleader, an inanimate footstool. When I shed my day clothes and shapeshift into a glistening, impenetrable latex robot, a bejeweled Goddess, a strict headmistress with my cane at the ready. A core, recurring feature of the trickster’s court jester expression is their unique ability to speak truth to power, to make fun of authority and reveal its inherent weaknesses, contradictions. There’s a way in which femdom does just that; it inverts the dominant social power structure, flips the script we’ve all learned by heart about gender roles and feminine dominance, and in so doing, creates space for new visions of power and ways of being to emerge. In my own practice, it’s through embracing the trickster’s mischievous joy and irreverence that I have been able to soften rigid archetypes of the dominatrix I felt both drawn to and hemmed in by early in my explorations of BDSM, approach dynamics as a place to play around the edges, experiment, be open to the unexpected.

Perhaps the ‘edge’ is a state of mind, or coordinates on the space-time continuum where everyday reality begins to bend and take new shape. Or both – that is, after all, the challenge and promise of the trickster. I think it’s this invitation that draws me in most when working with this energy: to bring what we learn and experience at the edge into the center, somehow. To resist the urge to compartmentalize, seal the adventurer part of us off completely from the rest of our lives, and have the courage to bring the wisdom we gain from this place into our lived everyday.

Descent of Inanna: Underworld Journeys

From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below.

My Lady abandoned heaven and earth to descend to the underworld.

Inanna abandoned heaven and earth to descend to the underworld.[1]

The underworld journey appears again and again in human mythologies. These narratives vary widely across time and place, but have in common a reckoning – with death, with unknowing, with what we fear most – from which their protagonists emerge forever changed. Of these stories, the descent of Inanna, ancient Sumerian goddess of love, sexuality, and feminine power, to meet her sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, has been at the front of my mind as the planet Venus has embarked on her retrograde journey for the past few weeks. Venus’ retrograde cycle was historically connected to this story in ancient Mesopotamia, as she was known here as Inanna; every eighteen months, she brightens in the night sky, slows, and then descends out of view for 40 days, re-emerging in the same slice of sky as a morning star.

In the myth[2], Inanna is called to the land of the dead from her throne in the heavens, passing through the seven gates of the underworld, compelled at each to shed an article of adornment until she arrives at the nadir completely naked. Coming face to face with Ereshkigal, stripped of her riches and glory, Inanna is forced to confront her sister’s anguish. Forced to bear, for a moment, the weight of her sister’s solemn role as judge of the dead, witness to their pain and wrongdoings and suffering as they release their earthly existence. She occupies “the lowest point in the heavens, the Imum Coeli, the private place, the underworld, where history is stored, where the dead go, where pain and wisdom collects.”[3] Here, at this deepest point in the cosmos, Inanna is condemned by Ereshkigal, her body strung up on a meat hook and left for dead. At this bleakest moment, two celestial intersex beings come to Inanna’s aid. Upon reaching the underworld, these beings offer a sympathetic ear to Ereshkigal, listening to and acknowledging her pain and sorrow in full and holding it with her.[4] In return for their gift of compassionate relationship, she releases Inanna’s body to pass into the Above once again. Inanna thus returns initiated, humbled and made more whole through her struggle.

This story has struck me deeply ever since I first heard it years ago. I interpret Inanna’s descent as an act of submission, of stripping herself of her (other)wordly splendor and going willingly into the unknown, the feared, the shadowy depths. Of ceding control to another goddess, allowing herself to be subjected to a painful ordeal to gain access to the wisdom of the underworld. Which is, itself, about surrender. Accepting pain and grief and sorrow as an inevitable part of existence; sitting with it, witnessing it, not shying away from it. To be with what Ereshkigal sees, with our own shadow. I think something powerful can happen when we consciously choose to submit, to receive pain, to let go of the trappings of our worldly lives and seek contact with what scares us. There are some truths we can only understand by allowing ourselves to be suspended on the meat hook, so to speak, naked and prone. And there is some pain that we can only move through, be released from, through bringing it into the open and allowing ourselves to witness it. Inanna returns to heaven, but she is not the same goddess she once was, forever changed by her journey.  

This necessity, I believe, is part of why the underworld sojourn repeats across so many traditions, and why cultures the world over have created rituals to facilitate this kind of reckoning in our own lives. Ritual, like a scene, session, or dynamic, creates a container for this kind of intense excavation, for making contact with that which we fear. One thing I love about working with astrology is the centrality of cycles to its practice: unlike the archetypal hero’s journey, this experience is not singular, but one we return to again and again, changed each time we approach and emerge from its gates. Venus will soon be reborn, visible to us again as she glitters in the early morning sky. What has she learned on this journey? What have we?

Sources:

[1] http://people.uncw.edu/deagona/myth/Descent%20Of%20Inanna.pdf

[2] http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/amgg/listofdeities/inanaitar/

[3] https://austincoppock.com/scorpio-2018-oct-23-nov-21-ordeal-and-ascent/

[4] https://chaninicholas.com/venus-retrograde-october-2018/