This is the Age of Tricksters, Not Monsters

Warning: This is a long one, and a nerdy one, because as anyone who read ‘Wolf of the Sands’ knows, I love me a trickster, and today is the day the thoughts all came out.

TLDR: it’s the winter solstice, it’s Hermes’s month, the world feels like it’s full of monsters right now, but it isn’t. It’s full of potential trickster gods, and trickster medicine is the way through the dark.

Hey Everyone,

It’s the winter solstice here in Australia today. The longest night of the year, the bottom of the wheel, the dark turning point before the light starts crawling back. It’s also Gemini season, which makes it Hermes’s month (Mercury runs Gemini, and Mercury is just Hermes wearing a Roman toga).

For those that might not know, last year took both my parents, who were also my best friends, and I’ve been walking around the underworld of grief ever since — that particular dark where the world keeps reshuffling itself like a deck that’s made up of mostly Joker cards, Pick up Four’s, and no Get out of Jail Free cards.

I have a lot of Gemini in my astrological chart, I’m obsessed with Hermes, and I’m sitting right now in the middle of the crossroads in my own seasonal underworld, so today is the perfect day to finally write this post that has been rattling around my skull for actual years.

The longest night. Hermes’s month. Because Hermes isn’t just the messenger and the trickster and the patron of thieves and liars and storytellers. He is the psychopomp — the guide of souls and god of the crossroads. The one god who can walk down into the dark, put you back on your feet, and take you with him.

This is the big thing I have learned, down here in my crossroads dirt: trickster stories are not just a distraction from the dark, they are instructions for moving through it.

Think about Dante’s Comedy. Canto 9 of the ‘Inferno’, the gates of the city of Dis are slammed shut in his face, the Furies shrieking up on the walls, calling for Medusa to come and turn him to stone forever. Virgil — reason itself, the great guide — can’t open the gate. Reason has hit a wall. And then what happens? A messenger arrives with a flap of wings, crossing the filthy Styx like it’s a Sunday stroll, wand in hand, opens the locked gate with a single touch, ignores our hero, and barely looks at the demons while he does it. Scholars have been arguing for 700 years over whether this messenger is Hermes/Mercury. Of course, he is (please don’t get me started on this rant. I just finished a legit certified course on Dante – I have a license to rant and I will use it). When the way is barred and even reason is stuck, it’s the trickster-messenger who opens the door. That’s the comfort I’ve been living on.

So let me actually talk about tricksters, because I think they’re the most important archetype for the exact moment we’re all standing in.

What a trickster actually is (and why he’s not the villain)

My readers know I am obsessed with Lewis Hyde’s ‘Trickster Makes This World’ — if I could install its wit and wisdom into everyone’s brain, I would. Hyde’s whole argument is that the trickster is the one who makes culture move. Not by being good, but by being disruptive. By crossing the lines everyone thinks are taboo, springing the traps, and finding the loopholes in the locked doors of the world. The trickster is the disruptive imagination that drags a stuck civilization (or, say, this writer’s brain) into its next shape, usually while cackling.

There are a handful of things that make a trickster a trickster, and they all braid together, so bear with me while I pull the threads.

They show up when things get too rigid

That’s the job. When a system or a person has calcified — too many rules, too much taboo, too much “this is just how it’s done” — the trickster arrives like a crowbar. He breaks the rules precisely because they’ve stopped serving anyone, and the breaking is what lets new growth in. He’s an agent of disruption, but disruption in the service of life.

They’re chaos and creation in the same gesture

This is the bit that gets me every time. Tricksters destroy and create at the same time. Usually using the bits of destruction they have created. Look at baby Hermes. Day one. Literally a newborn, and he sneaks out of the cave, steals Apollo’s sacred cattle, and drives them backward so the hoofprints lie about which way they went (the world’s first toddler committing fraud). But on the way home, he finds a tortoise, and instead of just having lunch, he scoops out the shell, strings it, and invents the lyre. Theft and art. Crime and the birth of music. The same afternoon. The same small godling. (I also blame a tortoise for why I have an entire shrine of Hermes statues. More on that at the end.)

Or look at Loki, my beloved Norse agent of chaos, who is the patron saint of “I have made everything worse, but also somehow better.” He cuts off Sif’s golden hair for a laugh (pure pointless mischief ), and Thor nearly murders him for it. Loki scrambles down to the dwarves to fix it, and in the wager that follows, the gods don’t just get Sif new hair. They walk away with Odin’s spear, Freyr’s ship, the golden boar, the ring Draupnir, and Mjölnir. THE hammer. The single most important weapon defending all of Asgard exists because Loki was a little shit and had to clean up his own mess. That’s the trickster pattern in one myth: drags the gods into the soup, drags them back out, and everyone’s richer for the trouble. He gets them into it, but he always gets them out again.

They live beyond society’s agreed constructs of good and evil.

This is what unsettles people about them, and it’s also why we need them. The trickster isn’t moral or immoral — he’s amoral, running on appetite and instinct and curiosity and the sheer joy of seeing what happens if he pulls this lever. He’s not the devil. He’s not a saint. He’s alive in a way that the rule-followers and the rule-enforcers are not, and that aliveness is the whole point.

They live in the in-between, and they cross every border as if it weren’t there.

Hermes is the god of roads, doorways, crossroads, boundary-stones, thresholds — the hinge-god, the lord of liminal space. Kerényi’s gorgeous little book ‘Hermes: Guide of Souls’ frames him as basically the spirit of the way itself — not a destination, but the movement between, the one who makes crossing possible. He’s the only Olympian equally at home at a dinner party, on a trade route, and in the land of the dead. The borders that stop everyone else are, for him, just doors. And doors are for opening.

They shape-shift, and their identity is fluid as water.

Form, voice, gender — all negotiable, all tools. Loki turns himself into a mare and literally gives birth to Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged horse (and that’s not even the weirdest thing he does). When the giant Thrym steals Thor’s hammer and demands the goddess Freyja as a bride in ransom, it’s Loki who cooks up the plan: dress Thor as the blushing bride, veil and all, with Loki as the bridesmaid, smuggle them both into the wedding, and grab the hammer back the second it’s brought out. Trickster identity isn’t a cage. It’s a costume rack. Pick an identity like a paddle to help you get to shore when you are stuck up shit’s creek.

And they are wise fools who weaponize humour.

This is the paradox at the center of every trickster: they can be brilliant and idiotic at once, three moves ahead and also tripping over their own scheme, cunning enough to fool gods and dumb enough to be victims of their appetites and fall for their own tricks. They use wit, mockery, and frankly quite a lot of bawdy jokes to puncture anything that’s gotten too pompous and self-serious. Which is the perfect excuse to bring in my favorite pop-culture trickster: Captain Jack Sparrow.

Jack looks like a drunk idiot lurching around a deck. Jack is, in fact, always three steps ahead, and his genius is that he never picks a side. He stays in the wobble, finds the third option nobody else can see, and walks out with the prize while both sides are still arguing. He looks at whatever’s lying around — a rope, a rumor, two enemies who hate each other more than they hate him — and improvises an exit. He is the wise fool in eyeliner, and I adore him. I have another essay blog planned about him too, so consider this your warning.

The third path (a.k.a thanks, Nietzsche, but you stopped one short).

Here’s a thing I think about constantly. Nietzsche gave us two great forces in ‘The Birth of Tragedy’: the Apollonian (order, form, structure, control, the clean marble line) and the Dionysian (chaos, ecstasy, dissolution, the wine and the howl in the dark). And most of us walk around believing those are the only two options on the menu. White-knuckle everything into rigid control, OR burn it all down and dissolve into the chaos. Discipline or oblivion. The desk at 7 am sharp, and the void by tea time. As a society built around stupid fucking ideas of perfectionism, we also see one as virtuous and the other as having no value and something to be ashamed of. We end up see-sawing between the two because neither state is sustainable.

But there’s a third path, and it’s Hermes’s path. He looks at the see-saw and says, ‘Well, that’s fucking dumb,’ and sits in the middle. When he finds himself in a dark forest, for the straightforward pathway had been lost, he bushwhacks straight down the middle — flexible, improvisational, in motion, tipping neither way. The path of the guide, the messenger, the boundary-walker. Not order, not chaos. Movement between them. That’s the one I want. That’s the one I think most of us are actually built for, if we’d let ourselves believe it was allowed.

Trickster medicine, or how I haven’t lost my mind when I probably should have by now.

Now it gets personal, because this isn’t just an academic crush or some big ideal to strive towards, it’s my life.

My brain is, by its nature, a trickster brain. Check out this blog on Crow Brain Creativity if you want to read all about it.

I’m AuDHD, and I have to trick myself constantly just to function. I trick myself into a schedule with rituals and bribes and stupid little games, because asking my brain to simply Follow A Routine like ‘a normal person’ is a fast track to nothing getting done. I trick myself around executive dysfunction, sneaking up on tasks sideways because the front door is always locked. I trick myself into untangling my own knot of emotions, because they don’t come labeled and they never arrive one at a time.

For years, I tricked myself into masking convincingly enough to survive corporate rooms full of people who’d have run me out of town if they’d seen the actual chaos gremlin operating the controls. In fact, I once let someone I had worked with for years see the game of ‘make believe’ I played to deal with work when I was about to move to another job, and they wrote in my goodbye card, ‘You are a wolf in sheep’s clothing’ with their name. That’s it. Best message ever, in my opinion.

Honestly? Thinking like a trickster is the only reason I didn’t go completely insane in those corporate years. It was survival. A way to slip between the rigid expectations and still get out the other side intact-ish.

And now it’s not just survival, it’s the whole engine of my creative work and life. Trickster thinking is how I write. It’s how I smuggle 4,000-year-old history into a romance novel and make it feel like seduction instead of homework. It’s how I connect things that have no business being connected — a Byzantine footnote, an Alcibiades nod, and a really good tea recipe — and find the secret door between them. The same brain that makes managing my life a daily heist is the brain that makes the stories. They’re the same gift. I just had to stop apologizing for it and give myself the permission to throw my hands up and say, ‘Well, fuck it, I’m tired of doing things the neurotypical way, now I’m going to do shit my way.’

The actual point, on the longest night of my year.

Here’s what I actually want to hand you, today, at the bottom of the year.

Look around. An upheaval the size of the Industrial Revolution is happening in fast-forward. Every institution wobbling, every certainty up for grabs, the whole doomscroll firehose of social media constantly smashing you in the face and making it worse while also trying to profit off your distress. It is so, so easy to look at all this flux and say, ‘we are fucked.’  

So, my dears, I want to offer you the trickster’s reframe on these interesting times, because I believe it all the way down to my boots: this is not the age of monsters. It’s the age of tricksters. And that’s a different story entirely.

When everything is in flux, the rigid structures lose their grip — and that means the gatekeepers are paper men now. The gates they’re guarding are already falling off the hinges. You don’t have to stand politely in a queue waiting for permission from people whose authority is dissolving in real time. You don’t need validation from strangers on the Internet who will happily cheer you on one day and pour fuel on you while you burn the next. The barriers all around us are shifting, which means they can be crossed. So for the love of Hermes, cross them.

Be the hinge-god. Be flexible. Pivot. Be the magician who looks at the strange assortment of tools already in your hands and, instead of mourning the tools you don’t have, build something nobody’s seen before. Make your own ecosystem. Make your own job. Make your own way of being a writer, an artist, a person, that no gatekeeper ever offered you a form for. Find the niche in the gap nobody’s bothered to guard yet, set up your tent there, and thrive.

This isn’t toxic positivity — I have zero patience for that shit, you know this. I’m not telling you it’s fine, or that the dark isn’t dark. I’m telling you the oldest survival strategy our species ever invented is adaptation through flexibility and cunning, and the trickster is that strategy wearing a grin. When the rules break, the people who win aren’t the ones clutching the old rulebook. They’re the ones who learned to dance through the falling rubble. To bushwhack the third path. To open the locked door with a touch and keep walking into the dark, because they know the way out is always there if you’re flexible enough to find it.

That’s what Hermes has been teaching me, down here in my underworld. The way is never truly barred. There’s always a third path. And there is always, always a door.

I’m following the crooked path back to the page myself — the cross over novella, the new Order of Anubis (shock horror Hermes plays a big role), all of it, smuggled out of the dark one chapter at a time with every trick and tool I have.

Speaking of stories…years ago in Athens, I rescued a tortoise that was making a doomed bid for freedom at the Acropolis. It was stuck on a stair, so I picked it up, carried it off the stair and into the shade, and gave it some water. It was hot. I was in leather pants. We were both suffering, trust me. I swear this single small act flipped a switch in the universe, because I now own SIX different Hermes statues (my guy has been syncretized by a lot of cultures) and I see his fingerprints on everything in my life, from first jobs to favorite books to stories I’m writing to research rabbit holes I’m exploring. The god invented the lyre from a tortoise shell. I save one damn tortoise, and suddenly I’m his unpaid PR rep for life. Don’t even ask about the time I ended up on a Santorini cliff riding a fucking donkey because of Hermes either. All you need to know is that it was his fault.

Tricksters have a sense of humor about who they recruit, is all I’m saying.

Here is the tortoise as proof I’m not making shit up for fun (but to be fair that is my job).  

In Greek mythology and Jungian psychology, the word for the descent into the underworld is Katabasis. Anabasis is the grueling process of rebuilding yourself after hitting rock bottom and walking your ass out of the underworld again.

On this winter solstice, I’m giving you all (and myself) the reminder to take a good dose of trickster medicine, and wish you a hopeful and happy Anabasis.

Ames x

Additional book recommendation: This book is brilliant and full of excellent wisdom. It deserves its own post, but I highly recommend to anyone who feels in a state of freeze right right now – Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change by April Rinne.