sequence of events describes trickster learning something, it is right, I think, to say that the story portrays a character living on the cusp of reflective consciousness. Trickster embodies reflection coming into being; in him we see both the need for reflective consciousness (without it he suffers) and the rewards of that consciousness (with it he exploits the world). In addition, we have a narrative in which mental experience (trickster playing with an image) replaces physical experience (trickster actually jumping in the water, hitting his head). We see trickster waking to symbolic life or becoming aware of his own imagination and its powers.
How, in the history of an individual consciousness, does such an awakening come about? More perplexing, how, in the history of the race, did imagination itself emerge? How did mind first acquire the ability to make images and how then did it come to reflect on its images? In trickster’s case, how did mental fakery come to replace incarnate fakery? What happened between the witless straight man who takes reflected plums literally and the double-talker who says “red sky” to mean “I’m about to eat your kids”?
We cannot take on such questions without pausing to differentiate some things that I have been mixing up. In describing the marks of trickster’s cunning, I have been conflating natural history with mental and cultural phenomena. It is one thing for trypanosomes to change their skins; another for Raven to become a leaf floating in spring water; another still for storytellers to have imagined Raven in the first place, or for one of us to reimagine him. Before picking these strands apart, however, we should remember that the mythology itself asks us to confuse them. Coyote stories point to coyotes to teach about the mind; the stories themselves look to predator-prey relationships for the birth of cunning. These myths suggest that blending natural history and mental phenomena is not an unthinking conflation but, on the contrary, an accurate description of the way things are. To learn about intelligence from the meat-thief Coyote is to know that we are embodied thinkers. If the brain has cunning, it has it as a consequence of appetite; the blood that lights the mind gets its sugars from the gut.
Nevertheless, the cunning of animals is not the cunning of Alcibiades. The octopus, the flounder, the trypanosome—each of these creatures has its tricks, but none reflects upon its own devices. The alligator snapping turtle has that clever tongue, but it’s a one-trick turtle, never able to fashion new lures for new suckers. As we’ve seen, even when these creatures lie, their deceptions lack the plasticity of human deceit. The octopus has no choice in the matter; if for some strange reason it would be useful to turn scarlet on a gray rock, it couldn’t do it. It is bound to its own reflexes in which gray rocks evoke gray skins. And the feedback system that produced those reflexes is not located in the octopus’s mind but in evolution’s slow, dimwitted carnage.
That said, let us ask again how, in the history of cunning, the lure tongue gives way to the mind that imagines lures.
As with inquiries into the origin of language, there may be no good way to answer such questions. In earlier drafts of this chapter, I rehearsed some of the ways that evolutionary biologists have tried to respond, but I always had the feeling that mysteries were being shunted from one area to another, rather than resolved. The strangeness and wonder of reflective imagination seems still to elude the grasp of biological narrative. I suspect it still eludes all narrative. And yet, with humility beforehand, it’s hard to resist speculation.
Several places in the trickster mythology itself seem to me to suggest a creation story for the imagination. “The Reflected Plums,” as we’ve seen, implies that the pain of trickster’s witlessness moves him toward reflection. To this, let’s add a thought-provoking sequence of events from the Hymn to Hermes. Remember what happens as Hermes finishes his sacrifice:
Then glorious Hermes longed to eat the sacrificial meat. The sweet odor weakened him, immortal though he was; and yet, much as his mouth watered, his proud heart would not let him eat. Later he stowed the meat and fat away in the high-roofed barn, setting them high up as a token [sêma] of his youthful theft.
Hermes, that is, takes some of the sacrificial flesh and hangs it up in the barn to show what he’s done. The Hymn calls this meat a sêma, which in Homeric Greek means a marker, sign, or token. To reflect a little on what’s going on in this scene, we might first decide who is meant to see this sign. For what audience has Hermes posted it? One likely answer is Apollo. After all, later Hermes seems to provoke a confrontation with Apollo, and perhaps, now that his theft has been carried out, he’s beginning to advertise.
This makes some sense, but in fact Apollo never does notice the token, and when Hermes leaves it in the barn he is still wrapping himself in secrecy (in the same scene he dumps his trick shoes in the river and hides the traces of his fire). It seems more likely, then, that Hermes is presenting this sêma to himself. This is the child, after all, who makes a sacrifice in complete solitude so as to direct a crucial part of it to himself. There is a strong self-reflective strain in this Hymn; the god is making a world for himself. Like the writing we do in our journals, some tokens are addressed first and foremost to their maker. Hermes in this case may be creating an image for his own reflection. I’ll come back to this point in a moment, but to give it its full weight let’s turn to the question of what the token stands for.
The Hymn itself tells us the first way to understand it: it’s a sign of Hermes’ “youthful theft.” It has something to do with childhood and with cunning appropriation. Moreover, if this scene describes the invention of sacrifice, if sacrifice is ritual apportionment, and if Hermes’ invention is rightly read as a change in apportionment, a change in the rules—then the meat in the barn betokens all of that as well. It is a sign of a shift in the order of things, a new wrinkle in the code by which the portions are to be distributed.
Finally, let’s not forget that the immediate context of this sêma is the pivotal moment in which Hermes desires but does not eat the sacrificial meat. This seems crucial: there could be no meat from which to make a token if Hermes had eaten; therefore, the token must carry with it the meaning “meat-not-eaten” and with that the memory of appetite restrained, the belly denied in favor of something else. In this line it is useful to know that in Homeric Greek the word sêma belongs to a group of related words, a semantic cluster that includes the word for “mind” (nóos) and verbs that have to do with noticing, recognizing, interpreting, encoding, and decoding. Nóos and sêma go together; you don’t get the one without the other. You don’t get a sign without the mental faculty to encode and decode its meanings.
My suggestion, then, is that this “sêma of his youthful theft” marks the move from incarnate life (meat one actually eats) to symbolic or mental life (meat made to stand for something else). It marks that transition and stands for that transition. Furthermore, marking the move from belly-meat to mental-meat, it marks as well the awakening of the nóos, the mind that creates and reflects upon signs. This nóos is no flounder-brain with its hard-wired reflexes, but the mind of a mammal without a “way”—one that can step back from the objects of its desire and imagine them. The scene is a little nóos creation story in which Hermes, getting wise to the bait, imagines but does not eat the mortal portion.
This trickster tale also tells us several things about how that encording (imagining, signifying) mind comes into being. First, it implies that nóos awakes with restraint of appetite. We do not get a sêma until we have the “not” of meat-not-eaten. It should be pointed out that this restraining “not” comes from Hermes himself, rather than any external authority. This is not the psychoanalytic narrative in which a child’s acquisition of language coincides with his or her growing sense of parental constraint. Here we get the link between mastery of symbols and a prohibitory “no,” but when Hermes’ heart says that “no” to his salivating mouth, the constraint is self-made and the mood is one of bright-eyed duplicity rather than loss and guilt.
Such bright-eyed duplicity, in fact, is the second thing
