Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Tricksters gathers eight figures from eight unrelated religious traditions who share a narrative role rather than an origin, each disrupting order through wit, transgression or sacred inversion.

Hermes, born in a cave on Mount Cyllene, stole his half brother Apollo's cattle on his first day of life and invented the lyre along the way. Loki, blood brother to Odin despite his giant parentage, alternately helps and betrays the Aesir before fathering the monsters fated to end the world at Ragnarok, where he is fated to kill and be killed by Heimdall. Susanoo, expelled from heaven for his rampages against Amaterasu, redeems himself in Izumo by getting an eight headed serpent drunk and cutting it apart, finding in its tail the sword that becomes one of Japan's three imperial regalia. Legba, youngest child of Mawu-Lisa in Fon myth, was left no fixed domain of his own and so demanded the right to carry every other vodun's messages, meaning no god, not even his mother, can be reached except through him first. Sun Wukong, born from a boulder, storms Heaven itself before the Buddha traps him under a mountain for five hundred years and releases him to escort a monk to India.

Nasruddin, the wise fool of the wider Islamic and Sufi world, carries teachings of spiritual paradox inside stories of ordinary folly. Heyoka, a sacred clown of Lakota religious life, takes up the role only after a specific vision and lives it by acting backward. Pueblo Clown Societies across the Southwest, including the Hopi Koyemshi and the Tewa Kossa, perform during ceremonial dances with license to mock and a mandate to enforce communal correction through humor.