TRICKSTER MAKES AND UNMAKES THE WORLD:
HERMES, SYNCHRONICITY, AND IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY
Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
Wendell Berry (1971, p. 14)
The short film and accompanying web page Trickster Makes This World are an homage to that god of traders and thieves, merchants and travelers, Hermes. No oxen or lamb were harmed in this ritual, although libations were made. Hermes, messenger of the gods and conduit between consciousness and the unconscious, recently presented me with a gift, a synchronicity in curious guise.
Explaining the nature of this gift requires a small amount of back story. Two years ago, I was walking along a trail near my house while relating to a friend a dream I had had the night before. The dream had involved a black bear, and while discussing the dream, I came across fresh bear scat (a not uncommon sight during the autumn months in my village). Bending down to examine it, I saw a large, strikingly beautiful black and white beetle lying motionless in the grass. I had never seen an insect quite like it, but I experienced a jolt of recognition. Days earlier, I had returned from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and while there I had read with great interest about the Koshare, the sacred, black and white painted clowns of the Pueblo peoples. A side by side comparison of the two is sufficient evidence to assert that there is no more convincing Koshare doppelganger in the natural world than the alder borer beetle. I did not know how or why or what it might mean, but I knew that I had received a tiny message from trickster.
Recently, I returned to this particular trail as I do two or three times every month (always keeping an eye out for a second sighting of the diminutive trickster beetle). I was lost in thought regarding the creative project component of The Complex Nature of Inspiration course and beginning to gravitate toward the idea of writing a short piece of music to accompany a video with images suggesting the creative/destructive cycles of nature. An idea ¾ nay, an inspiration ¾ arrived: to flash images of Hermes/Mercury throughout the piece to suggest the archetypal trickster energy present in the natural world both in periods of creative development as well as upheaval and disintegration. At that moment, I saw something struggling in the grass in front of me. It was, of course, the sacred clown of the insect world: the banded alder beetle.
In this short paper, I will explore the relationship between C.G. Jung's concept of synchronicity and the archetype of the trickster. I will also suggest that developing a greater openness and sensitivity toward synchronistic experience, as well as an increased capacity to relate to our own innate trickster potentialities, could prove integral for individuals and humankind as whole as we navigate ever more turbulent and unpredictable times.
Jung's concept of synchronicity, which he defined as a "meaningful coincidence" between inner and outer events, remains one of his most controversial and visionary ideas. (1948/1975) Although Jung's thoughts on the subject date back to the first decade of the 20th century after speaking about relativity on several occasions with Albert Einstein, he hesitated to put forth his ideas on synchronicity for decades, and even then rather quietly and after the encouragement of another imminent physicist, Wolfgang Pauli. Jung knew that his suggestion that an "acausal connecting principle" might meaningfully link inner and outer events was Copernican in its implications and that he ran the risk of being labeled as a crank and a mystic by the scientific community. (1948/1975) Expanding on his ideas, Jung pressed his readers to be open-minded:
"The causality principle asserts that the connection between cause and effect is a necessary one. The synchronicity principle asserts that the terms of a meaningful coincidence are connected by simultaneity and meaning... We must remember that the rationalistic attitude of the West is not the only possible one and is not all-embracing, but is in many ways a prejudice and a bias that ought perhaps to be corrected." (1948/1975, p. 69)
Jung refrained from speculating on universal laws governing synchronicity, he simply felt that it was important to acknowledge that such events do occur with enough frequency to be taken seriously and not dismissed simply as aberrations or outliers. He felt that exploring the plumbing that may underlie synchronicity was the work of future generations of scientists and psychologists. One such scientist, the English biologist Rupert Sheldrake, has developed the theory of morphic fields to explain seemingly acausally related occurrences. (1981/2009)
Jung saw that one of the principle effects of a synchronistic experience on the modern psyche is to prompt a reconsideration of the often unquestioned dominance of rationalism. He relates the story of a patient who came to him with a dream of a scarab beetle, which Jung knew to be a symbol of rebirth and transformation dating back to Egyptian times. Up to that time, little therapeutic progress had been made with the patient who was rigidly "steeped in Cartesian philosophy." When she had finished relating the dream, however, Jung heard a sound at the window and found that a scarab-like beetle was trying to enter the room. Jung writes:
"Evidently something quite irrational was needed which was beyond my powers to produce. The dream alone was enough to disturb ever so slightly the rationalistic attitude of my patient. But when the "scarab" came flying in through the window in actual fact, her natural being could burst through the armor of her animus possession and the process of transformation could at last begin to move." (1948/1975, p. 23)
Jung observed that this highly developed rationality of the western psyche has come at a price, namely a corresponding lack of development of other psychological capacities such as intuition and emotional fluency. Jung stressed that the psyche has an inherent need to move toward balance and wholeness and warned of the dangers of becoming psychologically lopsided. Because the rational mind cannot account for anything that does not reinforce the ordered, logical lens through which it perceives the world, much of the full spectrum of human experience and awareness is filtered out and falls into the unconscious.
Synchronicity, therefore, acts something like a "glitch in the Matrix," to use a phrase recently introduced into the zeitgeist. A synchronistic experience, such as my encounters with the alder borer beetles or Jung's patient's experience with the scarab, suggests that reality may be much more multifaceted and indeterminable than we moderns tend to think. Synchronicity, in other words, bears the hallmark of the archetypal trickster, an upender of convention and established norms.
The archetype of the trickster takes on endless forms and variations throughout the religions and mythologies of the world. Amongst the indigenous peoples of the Americas, trickster figures include crow, coyote, as well as the aforementioned sacred clowns of the Pueblo. The shapeshifting god Loki is the god of the Nordic pantheon who most exhibits trickster characteristics, while the Greeks recognized Hermes in this capacity. Trickster figures exist on the margins of the culture, poking, prodding, and crossing its boundaries and often sharply but playfully calling into question the collective's norms and conventions as they inevitably become rigidified and unconscious. The trickster is a transgressive, mischievous, and often deeply uncomfortable force, but his or her disruptions serve the overall health and sustainability of the society at large. As literary scholar Randy Fertel writes of the trickster figure most familiar to the western psyche, "Hermes is a world maker... He is, above all, a life bringer." (2015, p. 209) Trickster recognizes that in the psyche, as in the natural world, stagnation is death; it is his role, by hook or by crook, to keep things moving.
Trickster in the guise of a black dog is central to the creation myth of the Lakota Souix as told by the mythologist Michael Meade. (2008) In the myth, an old woman in a cave weaves a beautiful tapestry made of porcupine quills. Every so often, she shuffles to the back of the cave to stir a large pot that contains all the seeds of the world. One day as she is walking to the back of the cave, a black dog comes in and tears the tapestry to shreds. The old woman returns to her seat and calmly begins weaving a new tapestry, even more beautiful than the previous one.
Meade explains that the old woman and the black dog have played out this scenario countless times, and that if the old woman were ever to finish her tapestry the world would effectively end. If creation ceases, life ceases. (2008) By unraveling form, the black dog keeps things moving and ensures that new forms can arise. This, in fact, is precisely how life functions. An organism will create order and form molecules, proteins, cells, tissues that serve that organism for a time until these forms are either sloughed off or consumed by another organism and begin to "unravel" back into simpler, component parts that can be repurposed by life. Having developed self-reflective consciousness and therefor an awareness (and fear) of death, humans are unique in our resistance to the natural process of entropy in life. Trickster emerges to remind us of our mortality, that we are tapestries that can and must unravel in order for life to renew itself.
To the psyche overly attached to stability and security, the presence of the trickster is, at a minimum, deeply uncomfortable. As Fertel illustrates, however, when we are not as bound to or invested in the status quo, Hermes offers invaluable gifts of creativity and resourcefulness. Fertel points to two human figures, separated by three millennia, who exemplify Hermes' improvisational ingenuity: the Homeric hero Odysseus and Louis Armstrong. "Homer's Odyssey," Fertell writes, "can be read as an imaginative answer to the question, what would Hermes be like if he were human, in the flesh, anthropomorphized, transubstantiated?" (2015, p. 214) The spirit of Hermes is expressed by those who make use of anything and everything at their disposal to create new form and who perceive possibilities where most people would see nothing but dead ends. It is the skilled, crafty, outside-the-box thinker Odysseus who navigates the innumerable challenges thrown in his way upon returning home from the Trojan war. Of the prodigiously inventive and resourceful Armstrong, Fertell writes "It is not a matter of Louis finding the nugget of gold hidden within the manure of popular songs, opera, blues, or hymns, but of his realizing that all manure is gold." (2015, p. 232)
As human civilizations grow in size and complexity, people tend to draw upon the archetypal energies of order, clarity, proportion, and hierarchy embodied by the Greeks in such figures as Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. In periods of breakdown and uncertainty, there is an understandable, reflexive, yet often ill-serving tendency to double down on these energies and attempt to maintain the existing order at all costs. Hermes, Odysseus, Louis Armstrong, and the Lakota black dog are there to remind us that there is another, more contextually appropriate way to respond when cracks appear in the foundation; they recognize that a certain amount of breakdown is not only inevitable, it is essential for freeing up the energy and material to create anew. Fertel puts it this way: "Improvisers in whatever era come to release us from the bonds of whatever formal systems the system-mongers would shackle us with." (2015, p. 28)
My film Trickster Makes this World (the title of which was inspired by Lewis Hyde's book of the same name) concludes with a scrolling image of the Mandelbrot set, so named for the mathematician and pioneer of fractal geometry, Benoit Mandelbrot. The complexity and variation of the Mandelbrot set is literally infinite, and yet the graph is an expression of a seemingly "simple" equation: zn+1 = zn2 + c.
One of the great strengths of the rational mind has been its capacity to perceive an order and regularity underlying the endless variation of the universe and articulate laws to which all matter is theoretically subject. Yet in our desire to bring order out of chaos, we peddle in abstraction, and in so doing we unintentionally limit and deaden our cosmology. The western mind has been entranced by the powers of understanding unlocked by Newton and Descartes so deeply and for so long that it has yet to absorb the radical implications of quantum mechanics even a century after Einstein's Annus mirabilis upended physics. Right down to the subatomic level, it turns out, the universe is inherently creative and inherently unpredictable. Trickster is ubiquitous even at the level of the quark. "Nature is a creative process," writes physicist David Bohm, "in which not merely new structures, but also new orders of structure are always emerging." (1996/2004)
From their vantage point high atop Mt. Olympus, perhaps it is natural and even appropriate for Zeus and Apollo to simplify what is inherently complex: that is part of their archetypal nature. Hermes, by contrast, is a god on the ground and on the move, familiar with life and death on an unvarnished, granular level. What, to an Apollonian eye, appears to be a smooth surface, Hermes knows to be as endlessly textured as one of Mandelbrot's fractals. And if one were to focus a powerful microscope on the stately columns of the Parthenon or the temple at Delphi, one would find trillions of fungi and lichen at work on just such an endlessly textured surface, dissolving and breaking down stone, liberating minerals long locked in crystalline structure and making them available for the irrepressible experimentation of life. Trickster makes and unmakes this world, again and again and again.
References
Bohm, D. (2004) On creativity. New York, NY: Rutledge Classics. (Original work published 1996)
Berry, W. (2013) Manifesto: the mad farmer liberation front. The country of marriage. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint. (Original work published 1971)
Fertel, R. (2015). A taste for chaos: the art of literary improvisation. New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal, Inc.
Jung, C.G. (1975). Synchronicity: an acausal connecting principle (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) The collected works of C.G. Jung (vol. 8). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1948)
Meade, M. (Speaker) (2008). Why the world doesn't fall apart: recreation myths of nature and culture. (2008 Bioneers Conference, https://bioneers.org/tag/michael-meade/). Novato, CA.
Sheldrake, R. (2009). A new science of life: the hypothesis of formative causation. London, UK: Icon Books. (Original work published 1981)