In my work in the USA I became aware of and interested in archetypal ‘Trickster Stories’ of Coyote, Rabbit and particularly Raven and used them in my Adventure Therapy work. Tricksters are seen as wise fools who can both cause trouble and be foolish but also bring great wisdom and change. They do this by being clever, not strong. In my dramatherapy training, we often used myths, and the oxymoronic power of the trickster was seen as an important aspect of dramatherapy practice, in that seemingly simple or even foolish actions can be very therapeutic. I also found that my work could be undermined by being too clever.

Recursion is taken to be a sign of high intelligence, particularly in relation to being able to have mindsight, the ability to perceive in your mind, some thing in another persons mind. This is an extension of the idea of embedding one thing in another. It struck me that this is a quality of the trickster. Raven is a trickster in North America, in Australia, Crow is a trickster. Another trickster in America is Coyote. I have a great memory of a story by Mark Twain in … about coyote, (or cayote as Swift writes) about his trickster qualities. It goes thus…

‘But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it ever so much—especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed. The cayote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his neck further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick his tail out straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet wilder frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher and denser cloud of desert sand smoking behind, and marking his long wake across the level plain! And all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the cayote, and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why it is that he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the cayote glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot is; and next he notices that he is getting fagged, and that the cayote actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from running away from him—and then that town-dog is mad in earnest, and he begins to strain and weep and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach for the cayote with concentrated and desperate energy. This “spurt” finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles from his friends. And then, in the instant that a wild new hope is lighting up his face, the cayote turns and smiles blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it which seems to say: “Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, bub – business is business, and it will not do for me to be fooling along this way all day” — and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude!’

In this act I think coyote shows mindsight. He can con the dog. To get the dog alone and humiliated in his domain, coyote has to know how the dog will think. He embeds himself in the dogs head, thus coyotes could be seen to display the power of recursive thinking, with no language in sight. What’s more, is the domain of this Trickster is the wild outdoors, the land uninhabitable by man and dog, dog being a domesticated beast. Same as rabbit and raven. Trickster is an experiential learner. Mark Twain also said, on being asked to reflect on things in his long life he was grateful for replied “I am glad my schoolin’ never got in the way of my learnin’.” Twain is suggesting experience was his teacher, that school teaching may be an impediment.

But the Trickster appears in many places. The wise fool appears the fool to learned or people who think themselves clever but the Trickster uses this to trick them. Even as I write this I am watching Colombo the cop casually con an oh-so-clever murderer (in this case an ambitious politician) into making a mistake that will have him show himself as a fool, by himself appearing to be a fool. Columbo is even scruffy and scrawny and dishevelled like coyote. Columbo is the wise fool, he is coyote transposed into contemporary culture. In the UK this could be Reynardine the Fox.

In Mind of the Raven here Bernd Heinrich talks about how in any bit of forest or mountain there live ravens who have a pecking order and an established network of intimate, kinship and social relationships. But when young ravens fledge, they do not understand them, or more specifically tend not to adhere to them. Young ravens are trouble. They meet fledglings from other family groups and form gangs. In an established settled feeding site, the gang of young tearaways will turn up, steal the food and take off with it. Our local rooks work as a small group to turn over the turf on traffic islands, leaving all the moss pulled out, often over periods of days. Rooks are very well organised which means unorganised or uncooperative birds are disruptive.

I see this too locally, after fledging, when our young rooks are kicked out of the family nest we have found them sitting in disconsolate gangs at the bottom of our garden, looking sorry for themselves in the rain. Literally, they are teenagers hanging at the bus stop. Troubled teens. Tricksters all. The band Elbow also observe this trickster. In their song ‘Lippy Kids’ Guy Garvey writes in his wonderful poetic way about lippy kids settling like crows. Watch the keyboard player do the trickster thing and use insulation tape to make the old keyboard arpeggiate without an arpeggiator latch.

Lippy Kids on the corner again
Lippy Kids on the corner begin
Settling like crows
Though I never perfected the simian stroll
The cigarette scent it was everything then

Do they know those days are golden?
Build a rocket boys
Build a rocket boys!

One long June
I came down from the trees
And kerbstone cool
You were a freshly painted angel
Walking on walls
Stealing booze and hour-long hungry kisses
And nobody knew me at home anymore

Bernd Heinrich talks about he is unable to categorically say what happens to these young birds in the long term. For our local rooks who have a much larger social set, they form crowns in the move from spring to summer. A tower of circulating birds will appear over the roost. Clearly, there are more birds that inhabit the roost. My belief is that this is a way of rooks from different roosts, particularly fledglings, mixing and meeting birds from other roosts. The gangs at the bus stop seem to dissipate around this time. Given a need for the mixing of the gene pool, this would make sense. Also if older birds move over to a new social set, then it could be knowledge and culture is transferred, but this is pure speculation and wishful thinking.

If the trickster does display recursive features, even down to the circulating crown of rooks, then the trickster and thus recursion at a social level may have the following archetypal qualities. The trickster is young, it is an outsider, a thing of the wild, it is a troublemaker but a source of new ideas and new life, it brings risk but in the long term diversity, in the short term it appears elusive and contrary, but in the long term it settles into a perceptible pattern. If Columbo is the trickster archetype coyote then he is also socially inept, scruffy, impoverished, appears inept and a bit of a clown, but fully ten steps ahead of everybody all the time, he is a bit of a con man, he leads you on to your own demise, in the short term his actions seem strange, foolish, incomprehensible, but in the long term the pattern emerges and he gets his man, or rather he facilitates the means by which his man get himself. Tricksters are facilitators. As con artist the trickster facilitates their own interests, and as the hero, they facilitate the interests of other people. Either way the Trickster is never neutral, always brings change, for good or bad.