Submitted by Jester on
In mythology and folklore, a trickster is a character in a story who exhibits a great degree of intellect or secret knowledge and uses it to play tricks or disobey normal rules and defy conventional behavior. Tricksters, as archetypal characters, appear in the myths of many different cultures. Lewis Hyde describes the trickster as a "boundary-crosser".
The trickster crosses and often breaks both physical and societal rules: Tricksters "violate principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then re-establishing it on a new basis.” This is why tricksters are honored for the creation and regeneration of culture. One of the ways trickster myths can be viewed is as a story of meaning. Carl Jung believed that they are a story of an earlier state of consciousness.