Myth in Human Culture - 02 - Introduction to Trickster Heroes

Summary

In this engaging lecture, Allan Di Donato dives into the world of trickster heroes, essential figures in mythological narratives and creation myths. They set the stage for hero myths by initiating themes of transformation, struggle, and the dichotomy of chaos vs. order. The lecture navigates the multifaceted role of tricksters, who often straddle the line between heroism and villainy, challenging cultural norms and authority while promoting change. Di Donato examines prominent examples from popular culture, shedding light on how these archetypes remain relevant today.

Highlights

• Tricksters mark the beginning of hero narratives by prompting transformation and change. 🎭
• They embody duality, showing both wisdom and folly in their antics. 📚
• Tricksters challenge societal norms, often through humor, as seen in comedians and entertainers. 🤹
• These characters reveal the need for personal and societal evolution through their unconventional methods. 🔄
• Known tricksters like The Joker highlight the chaotic influence on structured societies. 🃏

Key Takeaways

• Trickster heroes pave the way for deeper narratives in mythology, embodying the beginning of transformation and the challenge against chaos. 🌪️
• These figures often represent both sides of intellect - brilliance and folly - influencing their impact on society. 🌟
• Tricksters can manifest as agents of change in contemporary culture, like comedians and political commentators humorously pushing boundaries. 🎭
• The lecture ties the role of trickster heroes to popular culture and historical narratives, making them relevant across time. 📚
• Tricksters, while seen as antagonistic figures, play crucial roles in challenging the order, evoking social change and personal transformation. 🌀

Overview

Trickster heroes are integral to the realm of mythology, lighting the path for classic hero narratives. They are known for their cleverness, and often, their mischief marks the beginning of transformative stories. Through an intriguing blend of foolhardiness and wisdom, tricksters play a vital role in challenging societal norms and authority, setting the stage for both personal and cultural evolution. Their presence in myths reminds us that change often starts with questioning conventional patterns.

The lecture emphasizes key heroic themes such as transformation and struggle, woven into the stories of tricksters. These figures thrive under the guise of foolery, yet their antics are instrumental in addressing larger philosophical questions. From understanding intellectual growth through chaos versus order, to exploring the dynamics of nature versus culture, the complexity of these archetypes unveils the multi-dimensional purpose they serve in both ancient and modern stories.

By bridging past and present, Allan Di Donato showcases how tricksters like the Egyptian god Set or the Norse Loki continue to influence modern narratives. Their recurring appearances in literature and media underline the universal appeal and necessity of this archetype. Tricksters reflect society’s intrinsic contradictions, prompting audiences to question and, potentially, learn from the chaos they instigate. As they laugh in the face of danger, tricksters highlight the importance of bravery in the quest for truth and understanding.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Trickster Heroes and Creation Myths The focus of this chapter is an introduction to trickster heroes within mythological studies. It briefly touches on creation myths as well. The trickster figure serves as a precursor to the study of hero myths. The chapter aims to spark interest and understanding of the trickster role, setting the stage for further exploration of hero myths throughout the semester.
• 00:30 - 02:30: Why Trickster is Precursors to Heroes and Villains The chapter discusses the dual role of tricksters as precursors to both heroes and villains in mythology and modern culture. It explores the parallels and differences between these archetypes, offering insights into how tricksters have influenced cultural narratives. The introduction also mentions the relevance of trickster figures in creation myths.
• 02:30 - 05:30: Hero Myths: Themes and Transformation The chapter starts by mentioning that it focuses on hero myths, separate from creation myths which are covered in another course section. There will be a focus on trickster heroes, examining different archetypes associated with them.
• 05:30 - 11:30: The Duality of Chaos vs. Order In this chapter titled 'The Duality of Chaos vs. Order', the focus is on exploring various archetypes, key symbols and characters used in storytelling and psychology. The lecture emphasizes the importance of understanding these archetypes, including the Trickster, sometimes called the Jester or Fool, and other fundamental archetypes like The Father and The Mother, which play significant roles in narratives. The instructor encourages students to revisit prior lectures where these archetypes were introduced and promises to delve deeper into unpacking their roles and implications in different contexts throughout the semester.
• 11:30 - 20:00: Trickster Archetype: Positive and Negative Aspects The chapter titled 'Trickster Archetype: Positive and Negative Aspects' begins with a discussion on creation myths, emphasizing the roles of the father and mother archetypes, which will be explored in more detail in subsequent lectures. The focus shifts towards hero myths, setting the stage for an exploration of the trickster archetype. The narrative suggests that understanding hero myths is a precursor to fully appreciating the nuances of the trickster archetype.
• 20:00 - 30:00: Transformation of Self and Society The focus of hero mythology and the hero narrative is on transformation or initiation. Initiation is defined as the beginning of something new, marking a transition between different stages in a person's life, often highlighted through rites and rituals in human religion and culture. This chapter explores the concept of transformation, both of the self and of society, through these narratives and cultural practices.
• 30:00 - 42:00: Tricksters Challenging Culture and Authority This chapter delves into the concepts of initiation and transformation, emphasizing how they are closely linked. It explores how hero stories embody these ideas, illustrating a dynamic character that proceeds through struggles, leading to an anticipated evolution. The process of transformation is highlighted as challenging and often painful, suggesting that struggle is a necessary component of gaining personal growth. The chapter underscores the notion that transformation is a complex journey, filled with both difficulty and potential growth.
• 42:00 - 54:00: Tricksters in Modern Pop Culture The chapter titled 'Tricksters in Modern Pop Culture' explores the concept of growth, both physical and intellectual. It discusses 'growing pains,' which are not only physical pain experienced during growth spurts but also intellectual and psychological challenges faced as individuals mature. A central theme in the chapter is the idea of nature versus culture, which recurs in various stories, including creation myths.
• 54:00 - 69:00: The Joker as a Modern Trickster Archetype This chapter focuses on the Joker as a representation of the modern trickster archetype. It discusses themes of chaos versus order, and nature versus culture, emphasizing the clash between the wild and civilized. The text mentions that similar themes will be explored in relation to other mythological heroes such as Gilgamesh, Heracles, and Achilles throughout the semester, highlighting the duality prevalent in mythology.
• 69:00 - 81:00: The Role of Comedy and Comedians as Modern Tricksters The chapter titled 'The Role of Comedy and Comedians as Modern Tricksters' explores the connection between hero stories and creation stories. It suggests that these narratives often depict the transition of culture emerging from nature or the establishment of order. This parallel insight serves as an introduction to understanding how creation stories function.
• 81:00 - 90:00: Monty Python and the Critical Role of Humor The chapter titled 'Monty Python and the Critical Role of Humor' discusses the transition from chaos to order, referred to as moving from a disorderly beginning to an ordered universe. This theme is explored through ancient myths, particularly focusing on the Enuma Elish, an ancient Mesopotamian creation story. It introduces the god Marduk, a central figure in the story, who battles Tiamat, the dragon of chaos, to create order. The narrative explores the symbolic role of humor and chaos in understanding these ancient narratives.
• 90:00 - 96:00: Conclusion and Next Steps The chapter concludes with an exploration of the combat motif found in hero stories, specifically the hero versus dragon theme. This is recognized as a representation of the dragon slayer narrative, one of the most ancient in world literature, exemplified by the story of Marduk. The discussion highlights the dual nature of this narrative theme: it serves as both a hero's journey and a creation myth. Although the story of Zeus battling his father Chronos is also mentioned, it is noted that this generational battle, a frequent element in hero stories, will not be explored in detail.

Myth in Human Culture - 02 - Introduction to Trickster Heroes Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 okay so today in the myth class we are going to focus on trickster heroes we're going to do a little bit of an introduction to creation myths but the trickster is going to be kind of our precursor to the heroes as we're going to be studying hero myths throughout the semester i thought it was a good place to start with the trickster hero or just the trickster figure as is commonly known it's kind of an interesting figure and i'm going to hopefully point out to you as we go through this lecture
• 00:30 - 01:00 why the trickster is a precursor to the hero where they have parallels also where they have divergences because the trickster is also a precursor to the villain in a certain way so we're going to look at a number of things and talk also about how the trickster archetype is still with us in modern culture okay so let's dive in and take a look at this idea of trickster heroes so this is officially the introduction to creation myths and trickster heroes and in a previous semester if i wasn't
• 01:00 - 01:30 focusing just on hero myths i would spend a whole section in the beginning of the course dealing with creation myths so i don't want to go through all of the issues that arise in creation myths like the big cosmological questions and the way different cultures handle you know the creation of the universe and the early gods but i am going to have to touch on some of the things as we get into you know directly the trickster heroes which is going to be the focus of the presentation so let's start by looking at a couple of the archetypes that we're going to deal with
• 01:30 - 02:00 and i think i mentioned in the course of this semester we're going to be looking at archetypes at a number of different points i basically defined archetype in the intro lecture last time and as we go through i'm going to unpack these archetypes today but the archetypes that you guys are going to see in the presentation of course the trickster sometimes referred to as the jester the fool manifests in a few different ways the father and the mother figures uh which are very important especially in
• 02:00 - 02:30 creation myths as we're gonna see and i'm gonna probably talk more about the father figure often the king could be another representation of the father archetype but i'm going to deal with those a little bit later the mother archetype we're probably going to handle more in a different lecture as it becomes important but i will mention it um you know on the side today so let's talk about hero myths before we get into the trickster in general now we're going to have an entire lecture just on hero myth it's actually one of
• 02:30 - 03:00 the longer lectures of the semester but to get things started i want you to understand that the focus of hero mythology and the focus of the hero narrative is going to be on transformation or initiation right initiation meaning the beginning of something and when we think about initiation rights and rituals in human religion and culture we're talking about rights that mark out a transition between one stage of a person's life and another stage so
• 03:00 - 03:30 the whole idea of initiation and transformation are intimately entwined okay and the hero stories are about that it's about the dynamic character that is going to hopefully evolve in the proper way in the course of his adventures other themes that are mixed in which actually go hand in hand with this idea of transformation are the themes of struggle because it's through struggle that we actually begin the transformation transformation is never an easy process right there's pain
• 03:30 - 04:00 involved in growth right you guys have all grown you know you've heard the idea of growing pains literally you know physical pain in your body as you're going through these growth spurts when you're younger but there's also a type of growth pain that we go through as we mature you know intellectually psychologically not just physically so you've got this idea of nature versus culture that's going to manifest over and over again in these stories as well as in creation stories the wild
• 04:00 - 04:30 versus the civilized that's one of the themes i really want to focus on when we get to some of the really big heroes we're going to look at that theme you know big time when we get to gilgamesh when we get to heracles when we get to achilles and various other places throughout the semester so that will become more understandable as we do that and also this idea of chaos versus order these are all related right on the on the one side nature the wild chaos on the other side culture which is civilized and orderly right there's this duality lots of mythology deals with contrasts and
• 04:30 - 05:00 contradictions and mediation between these extremes okay so these stories are no different now the hero stories are also paralleled interestingly in creation stories which is why i want to do a little bit of an introduction to what creation stories are about so in a general way we could say creation stories are almost always dealing with the development of culture out of nature or better the beginning of order
• 05:00 - 05:30 out of disorder right moving from cosmos i'm sorry got that backwards moving from chaos which is this disorderly beginning to a state of cosmos which is an ordered universe so we're going to be talking about the anuma elish early on in the semester in the enum elish you're going to meet marduk who is the god and creator figure who takes on the dragon of chaos of tmf all right it's a creation story but the
• 05:30 - 06:00 combat between the two is characterized like kind of a hero versus dragon all right this is a very common motif in hero story it's the dragon slayer all right marduk is one of the earliest dragon slayers that we have in world literature so we're going to look at that so it's both in the form of a hero story but it's also a creation myth we are probably not going to look at the story of zeus versus father chronos it's a battle between the generations which is very common to hero stories but zeus
• 06:00 - 06:30 again is going to be the one who overthrows chronos and sets up a new order okay horus and osiris versus set we will take a look at when we do the egyptian mythology that's going to be you know pretty close when we deal with the inuit leash again you've got chaos versus order you know horus and osiris representing order set representing chaos we will not do the creation story of the norse but we will be dealing with norse mythology particularly in both the story of the death of balder
• 06:30 - 07:00 which will be coming up and later in the volsunga saga so we'll see odin at a number of places but you know odin is the creator in his myth where he destroys the great uh frost giant of emir okay and then from the corpse this is the same with marduk and tiana from the corpse of the slain um force of nature whether it's the dragon or the frost giant the god is then going to shape and create the world okay so literally taking chaos ripping it apart and organizing it into
• 07:00 - 07:30 an orderly universe same thing happens in aztec myth when you get to tesco lapoca who happens to actually be kind of a trickster character in the creation story you've got tescat lapoca along with the god quetzalcoatl who do battle with the monstrous goddess in the water and they tear apart her and then fashion the earth from her corpse so over and over again you've got this contest chaos versus order and then a world emerges from that um every once in a while i forget probably to point out some of the visuals that you guys see on the screen
• 07:30 - 08:00 but um here basically is a figure representing zeus on the left and um a much later painting of kronos devouring his children if you don't know the story of zeus and kronos kronos who's trying to avoid being overthrown right there's always a prophecy in these stories about the potential overthrow by a child and every time that he has a child or his wife gives birth to a child he goes into this stage of absolute um insanity and blindness and he
• 08:00 - 08:30 devours his children the story is whole um some of the graphic depictions later on show him actually ripping them apart and eating them but it's kind of a happy ending that they don't die they actually emerge later as he vomits them up zeus being the one child that he does not swallow which is why he's the one who initiates the rebellion and overthrow of his dad how many of you guys are familiar with the story of zeus and the titans or the gods and titans zeus and chronos anybody okay good good yeah that's a pretty
• 08:30 - 09:00 familiar story all right let's take a look at this kai uh chaos versus cosmos let me unpack it just a little bit further if you're looking at the screen i probably should have animated it so you could know exactly which box you're supposed to read first but you could follow that line around so chaos like i said is this orderlessness it's an undifferentiated formless in incomprehensible state of things and when i say incomprehensible that simply means you can't wrap your mind around chaos
• 09:00 - 09:30 that's the whole idea of chaos it's beyond comprehension right whereas cosmos right is the formed and comprehensible it's the ordered world and like i said creation myths are about order coming out of disorder now if you think about how we know things how we learn things how we grow as we go through life right go to the fourth box there you know it says personal chaos we've all got a particular world view i
• 09:30 - 10:00 know we've talked about this before and we're going to talk about this a lot throughout the semester so you have a particular way that you approach the world you have particular presuppositions and understandings that you bring to everyday experience as things happen as you experience new phenomena as you're presented with new pieces of information what we try to do is plug them into our world view so that we can make sense of the world that we can understand the world now the problem is every once in a while we're going to come across a piece of data or an experience that
• 10:00 - 10:30 kind of throws chaos into our own world view it throws our lives off balance um there are things that don't seem to make sense to us we can't wrap our minds around it right and it's a painful thing that causes us to grow and struggle i mean anytime you've taken a course in college where you're presented with some really challenging information it could be as simple as a math class if you're not like really geared towards um thinking mathematically you might have you know struggle with math so
• 10:30 - 11:00 the process of learning the material is going to be much more of a struggle than somebody that you know is kind of geared already towards that kind of thinking it's going to be very easy for them okay but you know through the pain and struggle you can get a hold of the philosophy concepts always a great example no i went through you know my own training philosophy as i told you guys i think in the beginning of the semester you know one of my degrees is in philosophy and you know very often in the early stages of studying philosophy you get very very frustrated
• 11:00 - 11:30 i spent a lot of times in class listening to lectures and trying to follow a conversation that was just definitely going over my head and very often i was tempted to just throw in the towel right give it up forget about it this is going to be too difficult and it got emotional at times when i thought you know maybe i'm majoring in the wrong thing altogether and you know maybe i really don't have any place doing it but one of the lessons that we'll see later on in the semester is you know lesson that we get in the mythology of perseverance and sometimes as we
• 11:30 - 12:00 stick with something long enough we start to be able to force some order on that material and it starts to to shape in a certain sense and we start to understand it and then it starts to fit together one of the good things about growing through that process is we all have world views that have problems right our world view doesn't necessarily always line up with reality so when we're presented with pieces that don't fit we either will judge those pieces of information as just false and
• 12:00 - 12:30 kind of dismiss them or if we can't do that it's going to force us to maybe modify our world view right come to a different approach to reality and that's the process where you grow and emerge more mature right so that's the idea here and if you think about the idea of organizing and ordering things as necessary for knowledge um think back to maybe something like a biology class if you took biology you know in high school or in middle school you learn about the
• 12:30 - 13:00 classification of um biological organisms right into kingdoms and phyla class order genus family species all that kind of stuff and that's really about taking different things and classifying them so that we can understand relationships we kind of structure knowledge in that way now according to certain schools of philosophy particularly the aristotelian tradition which i'm going to bring in over and over again throughout the semester the view of the intellect is
• 13:00 - 13:30 that it has a natural end meaning a natural goal or a natural tendency which it's seeking and that end of the intellect is to know and understand things i mean that's what the intellect is for for for grasping things so chaos is fundamentally beyond understanding as we said so the whole idea of chaos um causes at least an intellectual pain an intellectual growth process so if i wanted to throw more aristotelian terminology into there to unpack it just slightly further
• 13:30 - 14:00 we could talk about this idea of matter and form this is something that we're going to talk about probably later this semester because it's useful for certain things but if you take my uh ancient medieval humanities class or my you know humanities one course i will spend time on the ancient greek philosophers and we'll spend time with aristotle but for now let me just give you a very simple understanding of what we mean by matter and form matter as or aristotle puts it forth is kind of this potential
• 14:00 - 14:30 it's a potential to be formed a potential to receive form and form is more of the determinant aspect of a thing once it's attached to matter will produce a substance or a thing right so form determines the thing's nature all right so if you move again according to the boxes where it says prime matter if you think of prime matter as just being raw indeterminate matter it's really nothing in particular
• 14:30 - 15:00 but when you unite it with a form it produces a thing something that we'll call a substance and it's only the substance or thing that you can understand and to give an analogy that i think is useful think of a lump of clay how many of you have taken an art class as a little kid where you're playing with clay or even if it's not an art class maybe you had play-doh right growing up play-doh reminds me of play-doh so it fits with philosophy really well anyways play-doh um is just indeterminate it's just you know this basically represents matter in his raw
• 15:00 - 15:30 form or chaos and what we do is we then take it we start to roll it we start to press it we start to put it into some kind of form and now i've got something that i could talk about right i maybe made a little uh dog or maybe made a little model of a tree out of the clay or if it's clay you know you can make it into a vase when i was in kindergarten believe it or not in school we got to make ashtrays i don't think they ever do that in school today with kids but back then we did so once i've made it you know that formless
• 15:30 - 16:00 clay into something by imposing a form on it then i've got a thing that i can talk about and that's the way we know the world we understand things because they have form and one way the aristotelian or rather the scholastic tradition of philosophy has understood knowledge is by describing knowledge as the taking in of a new form right at least cognitionally you're actually taking the form into yourself you're becoming something
• 16:00 - 16:30 new as you take those concepts away from particular objects and it gets a little bit more abstract and i know i'm probably going off in a direction that i don't need to but i want you to understand this in light of again cosmos out of chaos um imposing form on the formless order on the orderless and how this actually applies to our personal growth and development so that's kind of the picture i'm hopefully getting across does that make sense to you guys i'll take a sip of my coffee if you guys just give me you know a thumbs up or a
• 16:30 - 17:00 thumbs down if you have a question feel free to you know type it out but i see agreement so we're probably good to go on all right let's move on to the tricksters finally trickster heroes the trickster like i said is a precursor to the hero proper now why is this the case the trickster we could also call the fool and if we think about hero stories as being about initiation and transformation the fool is the one who begins something
• 17:00 - 17:30 that's brand new because it actually takes somewhat of a fool to go ahead and go down a path that is dark you don't know where it's going to lead i mean the whole idea of it being new is nobody's been there before we don't have any knowledge of what lies down that road so it doesn't just require foolishness it also requires bravery right the willingness to be a fool and of course bravery is a response to fear
• 17:30 - 18:00 we'll talk a lot about fear um in a couple weeks right so fear would be maybe an unwillingness to go down this road and of course if you're too afraid if you don't have the characteristic of bravery to overcome that fear then there's not going to be any transformation there's not going to be any development okay it's like this idea well i'll unpack that later i think there's another slide that talks about that so that's why the trickster is an important figure in the whole transformation process now the primary characteristic of the
• 18:00 - 18:30 trickster archetype is going to be the intellect just talked about the intellect a second ago now the intellect in the trickster character can have positive or negative connotations that's one of the things you're going to notice about all the different archetypes they're very often not only groupings of opposite archetypes and this duality that we said comes into myth but a lot of times the same archetype can have a negative or a positive side to it so on the positive side you know the trickster is going to be crafty smart innovative
• 18:30 - 19:00 right intelligent but on the negative side you could use that intelligence in in really what is literally a foolish way um to be deceitful and by the way when i talk about foolish that's not the opposite of having an intellect maybe i should explain that a different way right because i just called the trickster a fool but then i also said the primary characteristic is their intellect what i mean is they could be very smart
• 19:00 - 19:30 but at the same time lack wisdom okay because wisdom is a virtue of the intellect right where you use your intellect the right way but not everybody does that you can be very smart and at the same time foolish when you misuse that ability and sometimes the tricksters do this okay so that's hopefully clear enough that's what i was trying to get at all right now let's go and take a look at the whole idea of transformation in light of the trickster
• 19:30 - 20:00 you've got transformation both of the character himself and of society those are the two things that we can transform we can transform ourselves we can transform the world around us now the self will look at first right the fool is in a unique position because they're the only ones that are able to change themselves you said the fool lacks something definitely wisdom and can definitely grow in a particular direction but let's just say they lack a certain degree of knowledge
• 20:00 - 20:30 i think it's the case that only somebody who knows they lack knowledge is going to be in a position to pursue the knowledge that they lack right this is kind of the the quest of socrates if you ever study you know socrates in school he was told that he's the wisest of all individuals okay by the the delphic oracle he hears this and he doubts it because he knows that he doesn't know anything or at least believes that he doesn't know anything and he wanted to then go out and see if
• 20:30 - 21:00 there's anybody else that's wiser than he and of course as he goes around and interviews people talks to people and really bothers people with his constant questioning he started to realize that yeah everybody lacks knowledge everybody is ultimately a fool and long story short he realized he's got one leg up on everybody else and he actually understands that he's a fool where most people are completely oblivious to that fact okay but i had a martial arts instructor years and years ago that used to say as soon as you think
• 21:00 - 21:30 you know you know something you know of course within the context of martial arts as soon as you think you know how to do something well you stop being teachable right you're not able to somebody can't come along and correct you or help you get better we kind of shut ourselves off to our growth as soon as we think we know everything that's kind of the idea of knowledge is is we don't have something that's why we go and pursue it but you have to first understand that you don't know something so if you're not willing to be seen as a fool
• 21:30 - 22:00 then you're never going to be in a position to learn and that's where the bravery comes in i want you to think about your greatest fears okay how many of you have heard you know the greatest fear what what is the greatest fear somebody give me some suggestions when people are polled very often they're going to come out and say that spiders all right that's a that's a big fear fear of heights what else spiders wasn't the first thing that
• 22:00 - 22:30 jumped into my mind the unknown failure very good failure would be up at the top of that list i usually expect people to say death and some of these are related death it depends on how we talk about the unknown failure think of us as against self-conscious beings we know about ourselves and i have a temptation to say when we know about ourselves we also know all of our shortcomings all of our weaknesses all of our lack public speaking that's
• 22:30 - 23:00 the one i figured you guys would say very good getting up in front of a group and public speaking of course the old joke is since you know public speaking is our greatest fear when you go to a funeral you'd rather be the person in the coffin than the person giving the eulogy but it's it's true so let me go back to that idea like i was saying you are self-conscious and you're aware of your shortcomings and failings and you may see yourself as you know not um that good at something and you try to in our lives this is normal
• 23:00 - 23:30 put on a particular mask or a persona put on a particular face that we show to the public now i'm not saying we don't deceive ourselves because we also have this other side of ourselves that often thinks of us maybe as more capable than we actually are more confident than we should be but at a different level we also have these insecurities so when you get up in front of a crowd and you're going to do some public speaking you're actually feeling their eyes kind of penetrating you right you think that they're going to see sides of you that you've been trying
• 23:30 - 24:00 to keep hidden like they're looking right through your soul and you're afraid that they're going to see something about you that you don't want them to see and i think that's in the background of our fear of public speaking coming across as foolish coming across as ignorant and we try to shut down and and avoid that and believe it or not even though i do this now you know i've been teaching for gosh since the late 90s when i was in middle school high school
• 24:00 - 24:30 even when i got up into college in grad school i had a absolute terror of speaking in front of people this was one of the last things i ever thought i would be doing is talking to groups of people for a living my father used to make a comment that actually actually after i started teaching he said i don't know how you got into teaching as a profession um partly because i'm not just afraid of it but i'm also kind of an introvert in my regular life so i tend to be kind of quiet you know in my personal life and i don't have a
• 24:30 - 25:00 lot of things to say in gatherings but anyways basically the point is you can get past those kinds of insecurities by putting yourself into uncomfortable situations and even though in the beginning when i taught every semester first class i'd have the butterflies i'd get sometimes even nauseous i'd be shaking and that happened for literally years um doesn't happen so much anymore so there's growth right this is that transformation that we're after kind of the transformation of the self okay so that's why bravery is required
• 25:00 - 25:30 let's talk now about transformation of society and that's going to involve not just being foolish but also playing the fool so when we impact society there's a certain role that the trickster has in these stories to play a fool in other words to present themselves in a certain light in order to challenge the status quo in order to stand against culture right one of the things we think of with the trickster type of motif
• 25:30 - 26:00 even today is we think of the person who pushes the boundaries right they're going to be the class clown they're going to be the ones that are pulling pranks or they're gonna be the ones that question the rules that are set up right to see how far they can go and um that's kind of you know makes very apparent to other people where our cultural boundaries are actually set up we don't often think about them consciously until we've got somebody
• 26:00 - 26:30 that comes along and does something and all of a sudden everybody gets a little bit uncomfortable right it's kind of the idea of the comedian they they often are offensive they often make us uncomfortable with some of the things we say but that's partly to challenge the culture and that's what the trickster is designed to do they prompt awareness they prompt change sometimes there are things we have in our culture that need to be changed okay and there's a certain power that goes along with them they've got an ability to do something that other people don't have to do and that comes from the idea of playing
• 26:30 - 27:00 the fool appearing foolish it's an advantage when you challenge the culture because if you can appear foolish you appear kind of in a non-threatening mode right i like to think of the court jester right in the days of kings and queens as somebody that could approach the king and queen and challenge the king and queen they could actually speak truth directly to the person in charge but if you do it the right way
• 27:00 - 27:30 right where the noble or you know other people might be able to or try to speak to the king and challenge what they say you know you could be risking a lot including death but if the fool you know does it in a joking manner then they can get away with it because the king doesn't see them as a threat and they can keep them around they can laugh at them they can mock them even though there's still truth coming out the same thing that we have today with the comedians right some of the best comedians are also the people that are doing political commentary right they're saying things that you
• 27:30 - 28:00 know not everybody feels safe saying because you're definitely challenging people who are in a position of power now i've got a little clip here that i'm going to play from one of my favorite shows i don't know if any of you guys are game of thrones fans but this is um an interesting scene i'll let it play and then i will talk a little bit about it in a second so just watch this hopefully the audio will be good for you
• 28:00 - 28:30 sir don't toss here i am here i am sorry though grace my deepest apologies are you drunk no no no your grace oh i had two cups of wine two cups that's not much at all please have another cup you sure you're right
• 28:30 - 29:00 yes to celebrate my name day have two have as much as you like i'll be honored you're great simone help sedonto celebrate my name day see that he drinks his food
• 29:00 - 29:30 you can't what did you say did you say i can't i only meant it would be bad luck to kill a man on your name day what kind of stupid peasant superstition the girl is right when a man serves on his name day he reaps all year take him away i'll have him kill tomorrow the fool
• 29:30 - 30:00 he is a fool you're so clever to see it he'll make a much better fool than a knight he doesn't deserve the mercy of a quick death did you hear my lady sir dancers from this day you'll be my new fool thanks for your grace okay you get the point i think where he offends the king in the early
• 30:00 - 30:30 part of the scene and almost resulting in his death um because you've got really this horrible tyrant figure in joffrey um the thing that saves him is again being recast into a different role right he's recast as the fool all of a sudden it's not that big a deal you could take him lightly he's you know nothing truly offensive and the interesting thing if you how many of you guys you could just make a comment if you're familiar with the with the show and what happens but you know cerdantos ends up being in a key pivotal position in order to you know
• 30:30 - 31:00 ultimately deal with this king and save you know the the princess sansa and stuff like that um actually doesn't become a princess yet but you get the point okay so um by the way those of you that are familiar with this story who's the real trickster who is the real trickster at the court at king's landing who is really manipulating things and and moving he's kind of moving the chess pieces around the board because cerdantos really is kind of a fool he
• 31:00 - 31:30 doesn't just play one he's easily manipulated one of the downsides of really being a fool and not merely playing the fool anybody know who the big figure is that actually is very shrewd conniving maybe there's nobody in this class that knows the show very very sad if that's the case but it's very possible anyways um littlefinger i don't know if you guys remember him but he's the real you know trickster character so you've got again
• 31:30 - 32:00 this archetype that shows up in all kinds of different stories and you know sometimes in multiple forms so anyways that's the idea and how dangerous it is why it requires bravery there's a risk involved the risk is um being exiled from your culture when you challenge your culture when you stand up to authority you risk being exiled you risk being marginalized or worse you could be killed as almost happened to serdantos in the clip right
• 32:00 - 32:30 and what you have in front of you is really an impossible task the idea of challenging the order that exists now the term impossible task we're going to see that as another serious motif in hero stories okay and i'll explain what that is a little bit later when we actually see some of these impossible tasks in stories like you know gilgamesh or heracles or etc okay but this is another hero heroic narrative architect anyways there's that your
• 32:30 - 33:00 failure is something that is obviously the thing that you're risking you know it's one thing to be marginalized and to be killed but there are other ways to fail it might not always be that serious but sometimes it is and one of the interesting things about the development that we go through in life the person that we're trying to grow into becoming and the various tasks that we undertake in the process failure is more likely the case than not
• 33:00 - 33:30 you know very often people fail to become the types of people they ought to be okay especially if you're looking at a particular model that you're trying to emulate there are an infinite number of ways to fail in different endeavors and surprisingly few ways to actually succeed it's kind of like doing math um i use this analogy when we talk about logic and stuff like that my logic or critical thinking classes but you know when you're doing a math problem you know two plus two
• 33:30 - 34:00 the answer you know the answer right it's four and it's only four there's no other option even though there's an potential infinite set of numbers out there okay now it's not that there are literally that many different ways actually possible to fail but um the idea is it's more likely that you're going to fail in your pursuits and succeed now it's a rare individual that is actually going to succeed more often
• 34:00 - 34:30 than they fail but at some point everybody is going to meet failure and the majority of people are going to meet failure much more than they're going to meet success so keep that in mind as you you know make your choices throughout life as you try to grow into the person that you want to develop into and partly being aware of that is going to maybe make it easier to deal with than when it actually happens right so don't be afraid of failing you know it's kind of cliche advice at this point but you know if you never try then of course you're never going to succeed in that
• 34:30 - 35:00 case you've already failed so again the transformation town the trickster all right so that's the risk involved now the trickster in challenging the culture stands up against the archetype of the father and i didn't really talk about what the father represented too much in the beginning i said we're going to talk about the father archetype but the father archetype is the one that stands for culture order and authority the mother archetype by contrast usually stands for nature or chaos or something along those lines
• 35:00 - 35:30 the wild as opposed to the father this is an interesting thing that happens in mythological symbolism but the father figure sometimes is the king now the trickster when he stands up against culture and order ends up obviously being a chaos figure and can therefore emerge as somewhat of a villain okay so let's take a look at a particular image of the trickster in modern pop culture that i think is one of the greatest examples of the
• 35:30 - 36:00 trickster figure and this particular clip i'm about to show you guys definitely brings out that whole aspect of the trickster as a figure of chaos if you haven't seen the movie um definitely worth watching we'll be talking a lot about batman this semester so here's a scene from the second movie in the trilogy the dark knight
• 36:00 - 36:30 hi you know i don't want there to be any hard feelings between us harvey when you and uh rachel were being abducted i was sitting in gordon's cage no i didn't rig those charges you're man your plan do i really look like a guy with a plan
• 36:30 - 37:00 you know what i am i'm a dog chasing cars i wouldn't know what to do with one if i caught it you know i just do things the mob has plans the cops have plans gordon's got plans you know they're schemers schemers trying to control their little worlds i'm not a schemer i try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control
• 37:00 - 37:30 things really are so when i say when i say that you and your girlfriend was nothing personal you know that i'm telling the truth i'm gonna need schemers that put you where you are you were a schemer you had plans and uh look where that got you did what i do best i took your little
• 37:30 - 38:00 plan i turned it on itself look what i did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets hmm you know what i noticed nobody panics when things go according to plan even if the plan is horrifying if tomorrow i tell the press that like a gangbanger will get shot or a truckload of soldiers will be blowing up nobody panics because it's all
• 38:00 - 38:30 part of the plan but when i say that one the little old mare will die well then everyone loses their minds introduce a little anarchy upset the established order and everything becomes chaos i'm an agent of chaos
• 38:30 - 39:00 oh and you know the thing about chaos it's bare okay i didn't edit that exactly the way i wanted to but it's good enough to get the point across right the trickster here of course the joker i mean the joker by name right is the the card on the deck that represents the um the court jester right the trickster figure uh is an agent of chaos right this whole discussion about whether he's a schemer
• 39:00 - 39:30 and no he's not a schemer obviously he's a schemer i mean if you watch the movie you understand that um he's got some kind of complicated plan going on in the background so there's the the trickster intellect being used in a certain way to question things right he's challenging the structure of society okay and i think heath ledger does probably one of the greatest jobs with this role i love joaquin phoenix's take on the character if you guys have seen it i recommend the movie the joker but i
• 39:30 - 40:00 still prefer the way they depict him in this movie obviously the joaquin how many of you saw the joaquin phoenix movie joker anybody because i think one of the things i didn't like about the movie okay good i figured some of you did the thing i didn't like about the movie was just that the joker figure is not um you know psychologically it's a very compelling movie but he's not this smart
• 40:00 - 40:30 um manipulative character he's kind of going along gotta get swept up in the circumstances of his life whereas you know the heath led your role he's definitely the one kind of pulling string he's much more of the trickster figure as an archetypal figure okay so let me just go on a little bit further with this whole idea of the trickster versus the father figure oops i started playing again like i said the father represents culture and order which can be both positive and negative as well right so the positive side of culture and order is that it protects us
• 40:30 - 41:00 right the order that we have in society protects us from the chaos of nature out there human thriving somehow deter dependent upon some kind of order a community right it's structured but on the negative side the father figure the king can become a potential tyrant become blind you know willingly blind or just blind in general that's one of the things about cultures you know we have these things set up way in the past whether it's a constitution or certain laws and they are made for a
• 41:00 - 41:30 reason and sometimes there's a really good design in mind and a good order that is supposed to emerge from that but over time people tend to forget about these things we kind of go along with the culture not realizing why it's the way it is and we literally become blind to certain things we forget and that can be a dangerous point which is why people continually rise up within a society and kind of challenge and poke and prod and try to bring about change and transformation that's a continual process throughout all human history okay so the father figure sometimes
• 41:30 - 42:00 needs to be challenged culture and order needs to be challenged other times it's a good thing and whether the trickster is good or bad depends on what they're challenging right so the trickster when they challenge the order and the order is good they're going to come across as the villain right now they're bad of course when they challenge a good order they could also be bad when they use the wrong methods they could be bad when they make errors in their judgment they could be bad when
• 42:00 - 42:30 they have the wrong motivation okay so that's why i say the trickster depending on how they're used depending on the story unfolds is a precursor to the hero but they're also a precursor to the adversary or to the villain now one of the great motivators like i said sometimes the motivation is wrong and one of the common motivations as you see when we read some of these early stories is going to be the motivation of jealousy this is going to come into play when we read the story of osiris isis and horus it's going to come in when we see the story of the death
• 42:30 - 43:00 of balder right the very common motive that usually is going to be a bad motive but i don't want to say it's universally bad because jealousy is actually not always a bad thing here you see a little clip from the lion king right this is scar um you know basically killing his brother mufasa how many of you guys have seen the lion king be a great movie to do if you're doing your you know your term paper on movie analysis of heroes of course yeah good um so again common motivator and jealousy you want to think of it like this if you never thought about what a definition of jealousy would be
• 43:00 - 43:30 it's an emotion that's related to anger but it really involves desiring something or covetousness of something in relation to a perceived rival or competitor it's not just desiring something that you don't have but desiring it usually at the expense of somebody else that has it or you start to view that person as a rival that needs to be you know you need to take it from them now anger also by the way is not necessarily a bad thing
• 43:30 - 44:00 anger could be good there are times when it's actually appropriate to be angry i don't know if anybody's ever thought of that so there are also times when it's appropriate to be jealous right so there's a negative or positive it really comes down to whether or not you have the right to something so for instance if somebody harmed one of my children i would not only have the right to be angry i would have the right possibly to um punish that person or defend that child and i could talk about um jealously even guarding you know my
• 44:00 - 44:30 family and protecting my family so we could use the term in a very positive way it becomes destructive and problematic when we try to take something that doesn't belong to us right so whether it's good or bad depends literally on the rights to whatever it is that we're talking about and it's different from a drive to emulate right we could see somebody else that has you know the car we want to drive or the house we want to live in or the career we want or we see them being successful in whatever field maybe skills on the
• 44:30 - 45:00 basketball court whatever it is and we could be actually motivated and we might desire to want that as well but as long as we don't want to strip them of it in our own pursuit of it then that's not jealousy okay that's kind of maybe the role model idea being motivated is is a good thing but when we decide i want to take that from them or i want that um to the degree that if i can't have it then i don't want them to have it either
• 45:00 - 45:30 that's when jealousy becomes an improper motivation and that's where you have the villain manifest okay so sometimes these trickster characters in particular like set and loki are going to give rise to this evil characteristic they're going to become you know symbols of evil and villainy all right that's the dangerous part of the trickster motif now let's just talk a little bit about tricksters in our own culture i'm going to give you some examples uh throw through in a few more video clips just to look at kind of how for instance
• 45:30 - 46:00 the comedian functions in our society and i'm going to apologize if some of the stuff that i'm going to show you is offensive again that's probably um actually i do think that really much very very often is exactly what comedy needs to be but um it's not i'm not intending to offend you intentionally but again you know just bear with me keep an open mind i'm going to play a couple different comedians and i'm going to play a comedian who i'm a great fan of
• 46:00 - 46:30 talking about the idea of comedy as offensive okay again so this is all the role of the trickster so let's take a look at first george carlin i thought it would play automatically i'm gonna have to hit the play button here we go now there's one thing you might have noticed i don't complain about politicians oops sorry everybody complains about politicians everybody says they suck yeah well where do people think these politicians come from they don't fall out of the sky they
• 46:30 - 47:00 don't pass through a membrane from another reality they come from american parents and american families american homes american schools american churches american businesses and american universities and they're elected by american citizens this is the best we can do folks this is what we have to offer it's what our system produces garbage in garbage out if you have selfish ignorant citizens if you have selfish ignorant citizens you're going to get
• 47:00 - 47:30 selfish ignorant leaders the term limits ain't going to be any good you're just going to wind up with a brand new bunch of selfish ignorant americans so maybe maybe maybe it's not the politicians who suck maybe something else sucks around here like the public okay i don't know if you guys are familiar with george carlin um he was pretty controversial in his day but you could tell that the whole gist of his comedy routine is geared towards challenging the culture right he's kind
• 47:30 - 48:00 of pushing the envelopes he's kind of trying to wake people up and bring about some type of awareness and he does it of course in a humorous way so even if you might disagree with his politics you still can laugh at the way he presents it um i think that's the mark of a good comedian is even when you disagree and you can still appreciate the humor um but again the whole idea is you know maybe causing some type of awareness so let's look at the next one dennis miller he's also a fairly political um this one's not super
• 48:00 - 48:30 political but it does have to do with global warming let's see if this plays automatically there we go global warming well listen this sounded legit to me so i thought i best do some research i don't want to piss away on this one until i know what's up i've got kids there's a lot of differing data but as far as i can gather the crux of it is over the last hundred years the temperature of this planet has gone up 1.8 degrees am i the only one who finds that
• 48:30 - 49:00 amazingly stable 1.8 are you kidding me i could go back to my hotel room tonight and futz with a thermostat for the next three or four hours i could not detect that difference yeah i'm kind of glad it went up i'm always a little chilly anyway [Applause] but environmentalists they don't want to hear it they get really cranky they'll give you that guilt card well what about your kids
• 49:00 - 49:30 of course i love my kids i hope they live to be a hundred it's another 1.8 [Applause] and they give you what about your kids kids three six i i'll just tell them we moved to phoenix or something then they get really crazy on you well what about your kids kids kids kids kids kids kids you know i'm never going to meet them i'd like to tell you they matter but they know you get okay all right obviously a
• 49:30 - 50:00 different take than carlin but still the same type of thing i don't know how many of you guys watch any of the late night talk show hosts you know they're generally comedians and very often they're engaged in this kind of political humor i mean more often than not to tell you the truth but anybody i know not everybody watches tv the way they used to know that we've got all the streaming services anybody anyways let me give you one final clip
• 50:00 - 50:30 and then we'll be wrapping up but um this next one is john cleese i don't know if anybody is a monty python fan i love monty python fell in love with it when are them when i was in high school so here's john cleese actually talking about um usually asleep late at night that's a good good habit to be into i unfortunately sometimes stay up way past my bedtime um anyways klis you know he's been around forever um
• 50:30 - 51:00 british comedy which i just adore um he's talking here about this whole idea of the offensive aspect of comedy you know how comedy is supposed to push the boundaries and and sometimes do that to make you uncomfortable just listen to what he says this is not a comedy routine but he's you know talking about it in a very interesting way this is fairly recent by the way and the whole point about humor the whole point about comedy and believe you me i've thought about this is that all comedy is critical even if you make a very inclusive joke
• 51:00 - 51:30 like um how do you make god laugh and sir tell him your plans now that's about the human condition it's not excluding anyone it's saying we all have all these plans which probably won't come and isn't it funny how we still believe they're going to happen so that's a very inclusive joke it's still critical all humor is critical if you start saying we mustn't we mustn't criticize or offend them then humor's gone with humor gives a sense of proportion
• 51:30 - 52:00 and then as far as i'm concerned you're living in 1984. oops okay i kind of like what he says about humor being critical right when you when you aren't willing to go there anymore we've kind of lost that archetype we've lost the trickster we've lost the ability to challenge our culture in a healthy way it's not that you can't still challenge your culture
• 52:00 - 52:30 right all throughout history there have been different ways to change one's culture sometimes it's through revolution sometimes it's through violence it's more effective when the change comes through peaceful means i mean hopefully that's what everybody prefers but that's kind of the role of the trickster here and the role of the comedian in in these things so cleese is very uh sci-fi i noticed somebody put the comment about the life of brian um that is probably one of the two best monty python movies so not to
• 52:30 - 53:00 go to far off topic but if you're interested in monty python comedy the two best movies that they have life of brian and monty python and the holy grail by far life of brian now i don't know how many of you come from kind of a religious background let me give you kind of the setup for the film it's basically during the time life and times of jesus and you've got this figure brian who's actually born in like the the stable next door to where jesus is being born
• 53:00 - 53:30 and he's mistaken for the messiah and then throughout the whole movie you've got this growing band of followers so it's kind of set in the context of you know first century judaism and palestine and ultimately you know you end up with an interesting crucifixion scene where it's kind of a musical number which is possibly offensive to some but it's brilliant comedy and it is trying to prompt awareness about culture and religion and probably more a culture than religion as as far as i know the the python guys
• 53:30 - 54:00 kind of explain what they're trying to do with it but um thing that i love about python is these are really intelligent guys writing comedy that comes across as incredibly silly at times but often has a real profound um meaning behind it so you know i can't recommend that stuff enough you guys might not like it because it's a little bit dated we're talking you know back in the you know 60s and 70s i forget when their tv show came out the flying circus but if you like comedy you need to at least give it a try so anybody have any questions that's my
• 54:00 - 54:30 introduction to heroes so i will take some questions after i wrap up the video but next time we're going to move on and we're going to actually look at some trickster stories and we're going to begin with the creation story of the numa elish we're going to look at marduk and tiamat but we're also going to do the story of the fall of man in the book of genesis we're going to be looking at the character of the serpent who is probably the most famous of all archetypal tricksters okay so until then that's it for trickster heroes