Tricksters: The Ones Who Break the Rules

Mycale

Thessalian Witch / Moon-Drawer Greek and Roman myth; the witches of Thessaly. Named in Ovid's Metamorphoses

Mycale is a Thessalian witch from Greek myth, named in Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book 12) as the mother of the Lapiths Broteas and Orios and as a woman known to have often drawn the horned moon down from the sky by her incantations. She is a named example of the single most famous power ascribed to the witches of Thessaly in Greek and Roman literature, the drawing-down of the moon, a commonplace found in Aristophanes, Plato, Horace, and Lucan. Behind the folklore lies a documented figure, Aglaonice of Thessaly, an astronomer of the second or first century BC who could predict lunar eclipses and, by Plutarch's account, timed her 'drawing down' to coincide with them, letting other women believe she commanded the moon.

The Grabancijaš

Black-Magic Scholar / Storm Sorcerer Croatian, Slovenian, and Hungarian folklore

The dark scholar of Croatian and Slovenian folklore who supposedly studied twelve years of theology and a thirteenth year of black magic. He roams from village to village riding clouds and commanding dragons, threatening hailstorms if he is refused his customary demand of fresh milk.

Baba Yaga

Forest Witch / Threshold Guardian East Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian)

Baba Yaga is the forest witch of East Slavic folktale, an old woman with bony legs and iron teeth who lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs and turns to face whoever speaks the right words to it. She travels in an iron mortar, using the pestle as a rudder and a broom to sweep away her tracks. Around her hut runs a fence built from human bones with a row of skulls along the top whose eyes glow at night. The first attested mention in print is in Mikhail Lomonosov's Russian Grammar of 1755; the first sustained narrative use is in Vasily Levshin's Russian Tales of 1780-1783; the iconography is codified for European readers by Alexander Afanasyev's eight-volume Russian Folk Tales of 1855-1863. Her canonical tale is Vasilisa the Beautiful, in which she gives the heroine a skull-lantern that burns her tormentors to ash. The standard modern study is Andreas Johns's 2004 Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale, which classifies her structural roles as donor, villain, and donor-villain often within a single story. The simple evil-witch reading is a later flattening.

Sirdon

Trickster / Culture Hero Caucasian / Indo-Iranian (Ossetian)

Sirdon is the trickster of the Nart Sagas of the Caucasus, the Caucasian datum point on the deep Indo-European trickster line that runs through Prometheus, Loki, and Coyote. Half-Nart and half-something-else (his mother in different Ossetian variants is a daughter of the river-god Donbettyr, a witch, or a demon's daughter), he is mocked by warriors who could break him in half but none of whom can do without him. His most famous act is the worst and the most generative: after the Narts killed his sons in revenge for one of his thefts and served the boys to him boiled at a feast, he gathered the bones, stretched the dried sinews across a frame, and played the first song ever heard in the world. The Ossetian fændyr (twelve-stringed harp) is in the saga's own etiology his invention. He also engineered the death of the great hero Soslan by extracting the secret of his vulnerable knees, in a structural parallel to Loki engineering Baldr's death by extracting the secret of the mistletoe.

Coniraya

God / Trickster Inca / Quechua

Andean trickster deity documented in the Huarochiri Manuscript. He hid his semen in a lucuma fruit eaten by the goddess Cavillaca, who fled to the coast with their child rather than accept him as the father. He chased her to the sea, blessing animals that told him she was close and cursing those that said she had gone ahead. The myth explains the relative fortunes of Andean animals. He also appropriated the name and authority of Viracocha when it suited him.

Tanuki

Shapeshifting Trickster Japan

The Japanese raccoon dog (Nyctereutes procyonoides), a real animal elevated to a shapeshifting trickster in folklore. The tanuki places a leaf on its head and transforms into anything: a human, a teakettle, a temple. It is famous for its enormous scrotum, which in folktales it stretches to use as a drum, a blanket, a fishing net, or a parasol. Ceramic tanuki statues with straw hats, sake bottles, and oversized testicles stand outside restaurants and bars across Japan.

Baron Samedi

Death Spirit / Lwa Haitian Vodou

The lwa (spirit) of death in Haitian Vodou. He dresses in a black top hat, black tuxedo, and dark glasses. He smokes cigars, drinks rum infused with hot peppers, and tells obscene jokes. He stands at the crossroads between life and death. No one can die unless Baron Samedi digs their grave. If he refuses, they cannot die. He is terrifying and hilarious at the same time.

Eshu

Trickster / Messenger Orisha Yoruba (Nigeria, Benin)

The Yoruba orisha of crossroads, communication, and chance. He carries messages between the human world and the orishas. No ritual can begin without feeding Eshu first, because he controls the path between the living and the divine. He is trickster, guardian, and messenger. Christian missionaries identified him with the Devil, a misreading that persists. In the African diaspora, he became Exu in Brazilian Candomblé, Papa Legba in Haitian Vodou, and Elegguá in Cuban Santería.

Agwu

Trickster Spirit / Patron of Divination Igbo, Southeastern Nigeria

Agwu is the Igbo spirit of divination and madness, and those are not two separate domains. They are the same force expressed in different volumes. The person who answers Agwu's call becomes a dibia, a healer-diviner. The person who refuses goes mad. Created by the supreme god Chukwu, Agwu comes in four types, each with its own animal and its own temperament. Jude Aguwa's monograph remains the definitive source.

/Kaggen

Trickster-Creator / Deity San / Bushmen (Southern Africa)

The praying mantis who dreamed the world into existence. /Kaggen is the trickster-creator of San mythology, a being who shifts between mantis, eland, hartebeest, snake, and small man. He created the eland from shoe leather and honey. He stole fire. He brought death through carelessness. He dies and comes back constantly, usually after getting beaten up. His image appears in rock art spanning thousands of years across southern Africa.

Saci-Pererê

Trickster Spirit Tupi-Guarani / Afro-Brazilian syncretic

A young Black boy with one leg, a red cap, and a clay pipe who travels inside dust devils and creates domestic chaos wherever he goes. He tangles horses' manes, sours milk, burns popcorn, scatters livestock, and hides things you need. His red cap is the source of his power. Catch it and you control him. Trap him in a dark bottle with a rosary and he is yours. Brazil's supreme trickster began as a Tupi-Guarani one-legged forest spirit, absorbed African characteristics during the colonial period, and became a national symbol. October 31 is Dia do Saci, Brazil's answer to Halloween.

Coyote

Trickster / Creator Figure Pan-western Native American (40+ nations)

He stole fire for humans. He created death by insisting it should be permanent, then watched his own child die first and wept the first tears in the world. He flung the remaining stars from a blanket and created the Milky Way. He got his penis stuck in a log. He is not a god or a demon. He is both creator and buffoon, and the duality is not a contradiction. It is the point. His real animal, Canis latrans, is the only large North American predator whose range expanded after European colonization. Wolves contracted. Bears contracted. Coyote spread to every state. The trickster survives.

Egbere

Forest Spirit / Trickster Yoruba (Nigeria)

A small, ugly, weeping creature that wanders the deep forest at night carrying a woven mat. Steal the mat and endure six or seven days of the creature's wailing and your own madness, and you become fabulously wealthy. But you can never tell anyone how. Reveal the source, and you lose everything: your wealth, your sanity, or your life. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a formerly enslaved Yoruba man who became the first African Anglican bishop, defined egbere in his 1852 vocabulary as 'fairy or goblin.' In modern Nigeria, the question behind sudden, unexplained wealth remains: did they take the mat?

Anansi

Trickster God / Folk Hero Ashanti / Akan (Ghana)

All the stories in the world once belonged to the sky god Nyame. Anansi the spider bought them by capturing four creatures no one else could catch: a python, a leopard, a fairy, and a swarm of hornets. His wife devised half the plans. Every folktale became an Anansesem, a spider story. When enslaved Ashanti people crossed the Atlantic, they carried the spider with them. In Jamaica, his tales became survival manuals for plantation life: the weak outwitting the strong. He is still told in Ghana, still invoked in the Caribbean, and his web is an Adinkra symbol meaning that life has no simple answers.