Trickster

There's a wonderful story in some African tradition of the god who's walking down the road wearing a hat that is colored red on one side and blue on the other side. When the farmers in the field go into the village in the evening, they say, "Did you see that god with the blue hat?" And the others say, "No, no, he had a red hat on." And they get into a fight.
 CAMPBELL: Yes, that's the Nigerian trickster god, Eshu. He makes it even worse by first walking in one direction and then turning around and turning his hat around, too, so that again it will be red or blue. Then when these two chaps get into a fight and are brought before the king for judgment, this trickster god appears, and he says, "It's my fault, I did it, and I meant to do it. Spreading strife is my greatest joy."

A trickster does not live near the hearth; he does not live in the halls of justice, the soldier’s tent, the shaman’s hut, the monastery. He passes through each of these when there is a moment of silence, and he enlivens each with mischief, but he is not their guiding spirit. He is the spirit of the doorway leading out (wejście prowadzące na zewnątrz), and of the crossroad at the edge of town (the one where a little market springs up). He is the spirit of the road at dusk, the one that runs from one town to another and belongs to neither.

Trickster is the boundary- crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish- right and wrong , sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead- and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction.

Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again.  Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.

Trickster Is a boundary-crosser, but there are also cases in which trickster creates a boundary, or brings to the surface a distinction previously hidden from sight. The god of the threshold in all its forms.

Trickster makes this world