Tricksters and Small Shapeshifters

What a trickster is

Folklorists use the word trickster for a figure found almost everywhere: clever, greedy, restless, funny, often in trouble, and never quite on one side or the other. Tricksters lie, steal, boast and play pranks. They also bring useful things into the world, sometimes by accident, and they show up the pompous and the powerful. Very often they change shape, because a trickster's whole nature is to slip out of whatever box he has been put in.

The best-known trickster of East Asia, the fox spirit, has a page of its own. This page gathers some of the others, beginning with the fox's rounder, merrier neighbor.

The tanuki

The tanuki is a real animal, the raccoon dog of Japan and East Asia. It is not a raccoon but a wild member of the dog family, with a dark mask and a stout, shaggy body, and it is the only member of that family known to sleep through the coldest part of the winter. When startled it may fall still as though dead, and in Japanese, to pretend to be asleep is called "tanuki sleep."

In folklore the tanuki is a shapeshifter, and like the fox it changes by setting a leaf on its head. But where the fox is elegant and dangerous, the tanuki is round, jolly and a little foolish. It turns leaves into money that becomes leaves again by morning, disguises itself as a monk or a traveling peddler, drums on its belly on moonlit nights, and plays tricks on travelers that are more embarrassing than harmful. An old saying gives the fox seven transformations and the tanuki eight. In one famous tale a tanuki turns itself into a teakettle, is set on the fire by an unsuspecting priest, sprouts legs and a tail in alarm, and ends by making the fortune of a poor man as a performing kettle that walks a tightrope.

Not every tanuki tale is gentle. But it is the cheerful tanuki who stands today outside restaurants and shops across Japan as a glazed pottery statue, a fashion of the twentieth century: straw hat on his head, a flask of rice wine in one paw, an account book in the other, a broad grin and a great round belly, inviting good business and good luck.

The pooka

The pooka, in Irish puca, is a spirit of the Irish countryside with no fixed shape at all. It is most often a sleek black horse with burning eyes, but it may also be a goat, a hare, a great dog, an eagle or a small dark goblin. Its favorite trick is to slip between the legs of some late traveler and carry him off on a wild ride over hills and rivers before dropping him in a ditch or a bog at dawn. Places all over Ireland bear its name, and it shares some habits with the water horses, though it is far less deadly.

The pooka belongs especially to the turning of the year at the beginning of November. After that night, people said, the pooka had spoiled whatever blackberries were left on the bushes, and no one should eat them. But it could be kind as well. In one tale a pooka in the shape of a shaggy donkey does the kitchen work of a great house every night while the servants sleep, until the household, meaning to thank it, gives it a fine coat, and it is never seen again.

The English puck, the Welsh pwca and the Irish pooka are related in name, and probably in nature. Which language gave the word to which is still uncertain.

Loki

In Norse myth the great trickster is Loki, a figure of giant birth who lives among the gods, sometimes their best friend and sometimes their worst. His shapes are many. When a giant offered to build a wall around the gods' stronghold in a single winter, for a terrible price, Loki saved them from paying by turning himself into a mare and luring away the builder's stallion, and so in time gave birth to Odin's eight-legged horse. While dwarf smiths forged the gods' treasures, he became a fly and bit the dwarf working the bellows on the eyelid, so that the handle of Thor's hammer came out short. He flew in a borrowed falcon cloak, as the page of feathered shapes tells, and in one old poem he fought Heimdall, the watchman of the gods, when both had taken the shape of seals.

His last shape was a salmon. After he brought about the death of the beloved god Baldr, he hid in a waterfall in fish form. He had himself invented the fishing net, and burned it when the gods came near; but they read its pattern in the ashes, made one of their own, and caught him. The trickster who had helped the gods so often ends bound beneath the earth until the end of the world.

The Monkey King

The most spectacular shapeshifter in Chinese literature is Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, hero of a classic novel of the sixteenth century usually known in English as Journey to the West. Born from a stone egg on a mountain, he becomes king of the monkeys, then seeks out a master who teaches him the seventy-two transformations and a cloud somersault that carries him thousands of miles in a single leap. He takes his iron staff, which can shrink to the size of a needle, from the undersea palace of the dragon king of the Eastern Sea, and he can turn the hairs of his body into whole troops of little monkeys.

When he storms heaven, the gods send a divine general against him, and the two fight a famous battle of transformations. Monkey becomes a sparrow and the general a hawk; Monkey a fish and the general a fish hawk; Monkey a water snake and the general a crane. At last Monkey turns himself into a little temple by the roadside, with his mouth for the door and his eyes for the windows. But he cannot hide his tail, so he makes it into a flagpole standing behind the temple, and that is what gives him away, since no temple has its flagpole at the back. As with the fox, the true shape always shows somewhere.

Not even seventy-two shapes can carry him out of the Buddha's open hand, and he is imprisoned under a mountain for five hundred years before he is released to guard a pilgrim monk on the long road to India. The novel is a comedy, an adventure and a book of spiritual teaching all at once. Sun Wukong is also honored in some temples in China and Southeast Asia as the Great Sage Equal to Heaven.

Anansi the spider

In the storytelling of the Akan peoples of Ghana the great trickster is Anansi, or Kwaku Ananse, a spider who often behaves very much like a man. He is small, greedy, lazy and endlessly clever, and in one of his best-known tales he wins all the stories in the world from the sky god by capturing creatures that seemed impossible to catch, a python, a leopard and a swarm of hornets among them. That is why, the tellers say, stories are called spider stories.

Carried across the Atlantic by enslaved Africans, Anansi went on being told in the Caribbean, especially in Jamaica, and elsewhere in the Americas, where he is still much loved. He belongs to a living tradition with its own tellers, and the library leaves the telling of his tales to them.

Others on the road

Tricksters turn up wherever stories are told. The Greek god Hermes, on the day he was born, stole his brother Apollo's cattle and then slipped back to his cradle through the keyhole like a breath of mist. The clever hare of African storytelling has a place on the page of hares, cats and witches. Among many Native North American peoples, Coyote, Raven and other tricksters are central to living traditions of story, some of which are told only in certain seasons and by certain people. Those stories belong to their tellers, and they are not retold here.

Shape is not destiny

Tricksters are boundary-crossers. Loki is a giant's son among the gods, the pooka a beast that talks like a man, Sun Wukong a monkey who demands a seat in heaven, Anansi a small spider who bargains with the sky. They cross between the wild and the tame, the sacred and the comic, and they refuse to stay where their birth has placed them. Their changes of shape say what their stories say: that what a creature looks like does not settle what it can do or who it may become. The small can outwit the great, and the lowly can talk back to heaven.

The stories are honest about the cost. The tail shows behind the temple, the net is read in the ashes, the leaves turn back into leaves. Freedom of shape comes with the risk of being found out, and with the loneliness of never quite belonging anywhere.

That double message is part of why these figures are loved by people who feel themselves to sit between categories, including some in the otherkin and therian communities. The tricksters are stories, not models, and nobody changes shape as they do. But a story that says the outward form is not the whole truth of someone has comforted a great many listeners.