God is a Trickster

Sometime in the early 90s my Mom attended a religious retreat. During that retreat, everyone gathered in a circle and answered the question, "Who is God to you?" My Mom, coming from a writing background, simply replied, "God is a trickster," to the bewilderment of everyone around her. Thirty years later, she recounted this story to me as we were discussing Carl Jung's explanation on the archetype of the trickster.

Jung compares the trickster to the poltergeists, whose"ability to change his shape seems also to be one of his characteristics" (Jung 252). He also goes on to describe: "There is something of the trickster in the character of the shaman and medicine-man, for he, too, often plays malicious jokes on people, only to fall victim in his turn to the vengeance of those whom he has injured. For this reason, his profession sometimes puts him in peril of his life" (Ibid). The trickster is the wounded wounder, an unpredictable actor in the journey towards goodness. Yet, the archetype of the trickster must be integrated into the human psyche in order to avoid the very jokes and follies he creates. According to Jung, the Judeo-Christian God's transformation from the desert-raiding storm god Yahweh to the savior of Christ parallels the trickster:

"If we consider, for example, the daemonic features exhibited by Yahweh in the Old Testament, we shall find in them not a few reminders of the unpredictable behaviour of the trickster, of his senseless orgies of destruction and his self-imposed sufferings, together with the same gradual development into a saviour and his simultaneous humanization. It is just this transformation of the meaningless into the meaningful that reveal the trickster's compensatory relation to the 'saint'" (Jung 256).

The trickster plays an integral part in forming the saint. It is similar to the integration of the shadow, and of the unconscious as a whole. Jung explains:

"If, at the end of the trickster myth, the saviour is hinted at, this comforting premonition or hope means that some calamity or other has happened and been consciously understood. Only out of disaster can the longing for the saviour arise--in other words, the recognition and unavoidable integration of the shadow create such a harrowing situation that nobody but a saviour can undo" (Jung 271). 

Integrating the trickster was done in the past in the Christian tradition. For example, Jung describes numerous Middle Age Christian customs including the festum asinorum, where the congregation chanted "'Y-ya' like a donkey" (Jung 258), and the celebration of Jesus' birthday (the dawn of the transformation from trickster to saviour). However, Jung warns against the European ego seeking to overtake the unconscious--which, among its chaotic contents, are the shadow and the trickster. For this reason, Jung labels Europeans as inwardly primitive, despite external prowess (Jung 269). Jung draws the line between a lack of integration and the appearance of Europe's most men--Hitler and Stalin, to be specific. This is why Jung so often pointed to eastern philosophy to help with the integration of the shadow and trickster. 

Yahweh has been mentioned as a trickster, to the shock of traditional Jews and Christians (and Muslims, I might add). Yet, the discovery of the historical Yahweh has blocked many people's path to Western religion as a whole. Atheists today, particularly in the online discourse, continuously press for answers from theists, to no avail. Theists often relegate their responses to the very library of scripture (the Bible) and the very Being in question as evidence, refusing to acknowledge the academic material. To my knowledge, only Unificationism, originating from the Christian and Confucian traditions of the East, address the atheists' concerns. If true, Jung's prediction of the East containing the clues to integrating the unconscious and its archetypes, may also true.

In Unificationism, God is a Parent. Parents themselves are tricksters towards their children. My Mom admitted to being a trickster to my sister and I during our childhood. A simple example: tricking us to eat vegetables. My Mom did not employ the classic airplane manuver or the threat of no dessert. She gave herself the biggest plate of vegetables, the biggest plate of filth, possible. She would stare at us and eat her vegetables, knowing that kids always want what the other person has. Eventually, we would ask for my Mom's vegetables, only to point to our own plate. Apparently, this was one of many yet unknown tricks she pulled on us. 

A Unificationist lecturer once said, "The Bible is a family affair." The perfect Parent God is stuck with parenting misbehaving, petulant, complaining, dastardly children, and must act accordingly. God's children (remember: family affair) continuously fight as disagreeable, angry, resentful siblings, engaging in major and minor scrums at the societal and national level as a result. The Bible is clear: God cannot correct the children's behavior in one fell swoop. 

When a fourth grade child continuously talks out in class and cannot stay on task, the child does not and cannot stop all such behavior in one day. Rather, the teacher, having received proper training, implements strategies such as allowing the child to draw during class and using fidgets in some cases. I, this fourth grade child, had a drawing notepad in fourth grade that slowly, over the course of the school year, led to a decrease in misbehavior and higher conduct grades on my report card. On the surface, drawing may have seemed like a distraction from class, thus leading to lower grades. The opposite occurred.

God is the same way. Manifesting as the desert raiding god Yahweh to the Israelites was another sort of parental trick. To appear to the wandering desert dwelling Israelites (who some historians believe to be the raiding Shamu, a splinter group of Canaanites), the Parent God has no choice but to take up their god Yahweh as a manifestation. Otherwise, the children will not even pay attention to the Parent. From there, the Israelites can begin to be tricked into following higher moral teachings. The tricks Yahweh employed involved using seemingly random acts of violence and punishment to promote adherence to the Law. The trick was using commonplace actions, such as violent raids, to elevate Israelite (or Shamu) morality. Yahweh used the raids and conquests as increasing reminders of Yahweh's power and the benefits of following the Law, the next step in the progress of morality for human civilization.

God has no choice but to raise children from where they are at up to the maximum level they can handle at the time. For me, it was trying to talk out only a few times a day. Then once a day. Then go weeks and months at a time without doing so. All with the aid of an opposing tool towards learning. God used the tools of violence and punishment to trick the Israelites into progressing, whether it was Yahweh's own punishments, or the commands to kill men, women, children, and cattle to defeat the Israelites' enemies. Finally, the savior of Christ emerged amongst the chaos of the trickster, and a higher moral teaching began to spread throughout the world. The savior, as Christ Himself alludes to, comes again to further the maturity of human beings. If we believe Carl Jung, perhaps the next step in transformation, and the integrating and resolving our shadow, lies in the East.

Source: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious--the Collected Works of Carl Jung, Volume IX