The Homeric Hymns are a group of poems, each to a specific god (Demeter, Dionysus, Apollo, etc.), written in the style of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Hymn to Hermes was probably written down around 420 B.C., though the material it contains is of great antiquity. My own translation of this hymn appears in the first appendix at the end of the book.
† There is a bit of a joke here. There are twelve Olympian gods and Hermes is one of them, or rather he’d like to be. Here he includes himself in the sacrifice so as to stake his claim. He’s like a politician nominating himself for high office, seconding the nomination, and counting the votes—all in secret.
* Jean-Pierre Vernant in The Cuisine of Sacrifice : “He establishes the first sacrifice.” T. W. Allen in The Homeric Hymns : Hermes “ordained the ritual of sacrifice.” Walter Otto in The Homeric Gods: “He is … regarded as the prototype for offering sacrifice.” Walter Burkert in Greek Religion : “He invents fire, fire-sticks, and sacrifice.” (And see Burkert’s essay “Sacrificio-sacrilegio: il trickster fondatore.”) For two who disagree, see the first chapter of Kahn’s Hermès Passe and the chapter on Hermes in Clay’s The Politics of Olympus.
* I realize that there can’t be a change if we’re talking of beginnings, but we are in mythic time here, and in mythic time first things needn’t come first.
“THAT’S MY WAY, COYOTE, NOT YOUR WAY”
THE BUNGLING HOST
To say simply that trickster lives on the road doesn’t give the full nuance of the case, for the impression one often gets is that trickster travels around aimlessly, and roads lead from one place to another. Here’s how the Chinese Monkey King is described at one point: “Today he toured the east; and tomorrow he wandered west … He had no definite itinerary.” Moments of transition in Native American stories typically read: “As he continued his aimless wandering …” Maybe the point of saying that trickster is on the road is to say that he has “the context of no context,” in George W.S. Trow’s wonderful phrase. To be in a particular town or city is to be situated; to be on the road is to be between situations and not, therefore, oriented in the ways that situations orient us.
In any event, trickster sometimes loses his bearings completely, and that is where we see most clearly the aimless portion of his traveling. In a story known widely in North America, Coyote has put his head into the empty skull of an elk and can’t get it out.
Coyote began to cry because he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t see where he was going. He yelled … and tried to pull the skull off but it was no use. Finally he wandered off.
Coyote bumped into something with his foot. “Who are you?” he asked.
“I am a cherry tree.”
“Good. I must be near the river.”
Coyote went on slowly like that, feeling ahead with his feet. If he could find the river he would know which way to go.
He bumped into something again. “Who are you?”
“I am a cottonwood,” the tree said to him.
“I must be very near the river now.”
Again he felt something with his foot. “Who are you?”
“I am a willow.”
“Indeed! I must be right at the river.”
Coyote was stepping very carefully now but still he was falling over things. Finally he tripped and fell in the river and the current took him away.
The motif of wandering blindly is repeated in the Winnebago trickster cycle. Here trickster has committed a series of wildly antisocial acts, ending in the accidental killing of a group of children during a fit of hunger. The father of these children chases trickster all over; he finally escapes only by running to “the place where the sun rises, the end of the world,” and leaping into the ocean. “As he did not … know where to find the shore, he swam along aimlessly.” Soon he bumps into some fish. Several species are named, the last of which—the white fish—is able to orient him and he finds the shore. Then, “again he wandered aimlessly about the world.”
Before long, he comes upon a plant that says to him: “He who chews me will shit!” Trickster does not believe it, eats the plant, and ends up producing such a pile of feces that he has to climb a tree. Then he falls from the tree and is blinded by his own filth.
He started to run. He could not see anything. As he ran he knocked against a tree. [He] cried out in pain. He reached out and felt the tree and sang:
“Tree, what kind of a tree are you? Tell me something about yourself!”
And the tree answered, “What kind of a tree do you think I am? I am an oak tree. I am the forked oak tree that used to stand in the middle of the valley.”
As in the earlier story, trickster bumps into one tree after another until he is led to water where he is able to wash himself.
The trees and fish in these stories have what I’d like to call “species knowledge.” They are the opposite of the aimless wanderer. They are placed in space the way a species is placed by its needs. Some species of fish swim near the shore, others don’t; there are trees like the willow that grow only at the water’s edge and trees that can grow at greater and greater distances from water. These stories, then, seem deliberately to set trickster’s aimless wandering against beings that are anything but aimless, beings that are situated in space by their nature.
Now let us set these tales alongside one of the most famous Native American stories, “The Bungling Host,” in which trickster, hungry as ever, drops in on some animal friend—bear or kingfisher or muskrat or snipe—who catches and prepares food in his own special way. Here is an episode from the Okanagon version (in which, by the way, Mole is Coyote’s wife):
One time there was no food at Coyote’s lodge. He … went to visit his brother Kingfisher.
“Kingfisher, what have you got to eat,” asked Coyote. “I am very hungry.”
Kingfisher did not like this rude way of talking, but he sent for his son and told him to go get three willow sticks.
Boy Kingfisher went out and got the sticks and came back. Kingfisher heated them over the fire until they were strong. Then he took them out, twisted them up and tied them to his belt.
He flew up onto the top of his lodge and from there he flew to the river and down through a hole in the ice. When he came up there was a fish hanging on each willow stick.
Coyote ate until his belly was round, but he saved
