Both are usually seen as jokesters and pranksters. In many Native American and First Nations mythologies, the Coyote spirit ( Southwestern United States) or Raven spirit ( Pacific Northwest) stole fire from the gods ( stars, moon, and/or sun). He can be a hero in one tale and a villain in the next. In some stories the Native American trickster is foolish and other times wise. One of the most important distinctions is that 'we can see in the Native American trickster an openness to life's multiplicity and paradoxes largely missing in the modern Euro-American moral tradition'. Native American tricksters should not be confused with the European fictional picaro. The trickster in most native traditions is essential to creation, to birth. Humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies for fear that they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise. People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred. While the trickster crosses various cultural traditions, there are significant differences between tricksters in the traditions of different parts of the world: The clown on the other hand is a persona of a performer who intentionally displays their actions in public for an audience. They are internal to the character or person. The trickster is a term used for a non performing 'trick maker' they may have many motives behind their intention but those motives are not largely in public view.

In West Africa (and thence into the Caribbean via the slave trade), the spider (see Anansi) is often the trickster. In a wide variety of African-language communities, the rabbit, or hare, is the trickster (see Brer Rabbit). He becomes a mare who later gives birth to Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir. Loki also exhibits sex variability, in one case even becoming pregnant.

In Norse mythology the mischief-maker is Loki, who is also a shapeshifter. įrequently the trickster figure exhibits gender and form variability. In Slavic folktales, the trickster and the culture hero are often combined. He is the patron of thieves and the inventor of lying, a gift he passed on to Autolycus, who in turn passed it on to Odysseus. In some Greek myths Hermes plays the trickster. Many cultures have tales of the trickster, a crafty being who uses tricks to get food, steal precious possessions, or simply cause mischief. The trickster openly questions, disrupts or mocks authority. Tricksters can be cunning or foolish or both. Often, this bending or breaking of rules takes the form of tricks or thievery. 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.' Lewis Hyde describes the trickster as a 'boundary-crosser'. Tricksters, as archetypal characters, appear in the myths of many different cultures. In mythology and the study of folklore and religion, a trickster is a character in a story ( god, goddess, spirit, human or anthropomorphisation) who exhibits a great degree of intellect or secret knowledge and uses it to play tricks or otherwise disobey normal rules and defy conventional behavior.

The trickster figure Reynard the Fox as depicted in an 1869 children's book by Michel Rodange

Trickster mythic path