FOR MATTHEW
WHO SNEAKED HOME AT DAWN
And at his mother’s home, Hermes … slipped sideways through the keyhole, like fog on an autumn breeze.
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Introduction
PART ONE: TRAP OF NATURE
1: Slipping the Trap of Appetite
2: “That’s My Way, Coyote, Not Your Way”
3: The First Lie
INTERLUDE
The Land of the Dead
PART TWO: TWO-ROAD CHANCE
4: An Attack of Accidents
5: The God of the Crossroads
6: The Lucky Find
PART THREE: DIRT WORK
7: Speechless Shame and Shameless Speech
8: Matter Out of Place
PART FOUR: TRAP OF CULTURE
9: Hermes Slips the Trap
10: Frederick Douglass and Eshu’s Hat
11: Trickster Arts and Works of Artus
CONCLUSION
12: Prophecy
Envoi
APPENDIX I. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes
APPENDIX II. Trickster and Gender
APPENDIX III. Monkey and the Peaches of Immortality
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Art credits
Index
Hermes running with the lyre. From a red-figure kylix by Makron, c. 500–475 B.C.
“Coyote and Bird” petroglyph from Painted Desert—Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona. Late Anasazi, c. A.D. 1100–1300. Detail of photograph by Linda Connor.
Divination tray with Eshu’s face at the top and a set of the sixteen palm nuts used in divination.
Tlingit Raven Helmet from Sitka, Alaska. In his beak, Raven holds the box of sunlight that he stole from heaven.
The baby Hermes in his cradle with his mother, Maia, and the cattle of Apollo. Hermes, only a day old, is wearing the petasos, the traveler’s hat. Exterior of a red-figure kylix by the Brygos painter, c. 480 B.C.
Danish forge stone showing Loki with his lips sewn shut.
The baby Krishna, tied to a mortar by his mother and the gopis, after having broken into the hanging butter pots in the background. Miniature by Kangra, c. 1790.
Bronze head of a caduceus (Hermes’ staff). Early fifth century B.C.
Baubo, the nurse in the Eleusinian Mysteries. Fifth-century B.C. terracotta figurine from the city of Priene in Asia Minor.
Monkey, from an early-nineteenth-century Japanese edition of The Journey to the West.
TRICKSTER MAKES THIS WORLD
Every generation occupies itself with interpreting Trickster anew.… —Paul Radin
We interpret always as transients. —Frank Kermode
Once during the winter after I got out of college I was hitchhiking north of Winslow, Arizona. Just after sundown three Navajo men in an old green Chevy picked me up. The driver I remember distinctly as his hair was as long as mine, and he had lost the top of his right ear. He and his friends had been working a construction site near the New Mexico border and were headed home to Tuba City for the weekend. Two or three times in the fading light we came upon coyotes crossing the road or slinking along in the nearby brush, and there began a somewhat reverent and somewhat joking discussion of coyotes and their ability to see in the dark, which led in turn to my hearing what I only later understood to be a very old story.
Long ago, the driver said, Coyote was going along and as he came over the brow of a hill he saw a man taking his eyes out of his head and throwing them up into a cottonwood tree. There they would hang until he cried out, “Eyes come back!” Then his eyes would return to his head. Coyote wanted very much to learn this trick and begged and begged until the man taught it to him. “But be careful. Coyote,” the man said. “Don’t do this more than four times in one day.” “Of course not. Why would I do that?” said Coyote. (The others in the car laughed at this, but not the driver.)
When the man left, Coyote took his eyes out and threw them into the cottonwood tree. He could see for miles then, see over the low hills, see where the stream went, see the shape of things. When he had done this four times, he thought, “That man’s rule is made for his country. I don’t think it applies here. This is my country.” For a fifth time he threw his eyes into the tree and for a fifth time he cried “Eyes come back!” But they didn’t come back. Poor Coyote stumbled about the grove, bumping into trees and crying. He couldn’t think what to do, and lay down to sleep. Before too long, some mice came by and, thinking Coyote was dead, began to clip his hair to make a nest. Feeling the mice at work, Coyote let his mouth hang open until he caught one by the tail.
“Look up in that
