Ah, That Trickster!

Tricksters come in many guises – think Smeagol from Lord of the Rings. Or Loki,  of Norwegian mythology. Or Jim Carey in The Mask. Or coyote in Native American mythology. The Trickster archetype is one of the 7 secrets of synchronicity that we wrote about in our book of the same name. We define it as a synchronicity that can reveal  itself with a twist of humor or wry irony so startling it stops us in our tracks.The trickster is invariably intriguing even when it sort of plays with us, making us look silly or naive or ill informed. It makes us laugh at ourselves. These synchros sometimes make you feel like you’re the brunt of the universe’s joke. The trick with the trickster is to dig beneath the joke to find out what’s really going on. What’s the message for you?

Some years ago, we met a woman, Rita, who seemed to be haunted by the trickster. She didn’t call it that, but when she related some of her experiences, it was apparent that she’d had a long relationship with this archetype.

In Memory, Dreams, and Reflections, Jung wrote about how at times in our lives, certain archetypes become active in our psyches. Once we recognize the archetype and integrate it fully into who we are, we liberate ourselves from it. This woman had seen herself as a victim since she was kid. You know, the kid who is picked on or made fun of because of looks, behavior, lack of social skills, physical prowess, whatever. Even when this woman was in her late forties, she perceived herself as the oops child! Her parents’s mistake. The trickster personified that perception.

When Rita saw the movie Home Alone, which came out in 1990, she identified with a certain part of the story. Macauley Culkin played bratty 8-year-old Kevin McCallister. He misbehaved on the night before a family trip to Paris, so his mother made him sleep in the attic. After the McCallisters mistakenly left for the airport without Kevin, he awakenewd to an empty house and assumed his wish to have no family had come true. But his excitement soured when he realized that two con men plan to rob the McCallister residence, and that it was up to him to protect the family home. To him. Alone.

Rita didn’t have to deal with con men. But she also got left behind on a family foreign trip foreign trip and it bolstered her sense of being the accidental – oops! – child. This is where the trickster stepped in. She often was a postscript for invitations – the person chosen to even up the basketball team, the double dates, the research, the teachers on a faculty. Usually when this happened, some lone bird would appear in the vicinity – a woodpecker, crow, egret, and once, a raven.

That raven appeared the day she and her husband of 20 years had a terrible argument about money and she was questioning just about everything she knew to be true. She was driving home from the grocery store and felt compelled to take a different route. Rita lived in the Florida keys and eventually got lost in a neighborhood on one of the middle keys. And there, she spotted her husband’s car parked in front of a house. She didn’t know who lived there, but took note of the address and tracked down the owner online.

The place belonged to a woman who worked at the the same law firm Rita’s husband did. When she confronted him, it turned out he’d been having an affair with the woman. Rita divorced him.

And that divorce, which she initiated, freed her from that oops! child archetype. The raven had been the outer manifestation of her isolation, a bird she associated with Edgar Alan Poe because of his book by that name.

In the novel, she interpreted the bird to be Poe’s symbol of the mournful, endless remembrance, the profound sorrow about Lenore, the lost love of his life. For Rita, that raven became symbolic of the loss of her idea as the oops child. Synchronicity had led her to the right house, at the right time in her life.

After that divorce, she went on to pursue a successful career as an entrepreneur. Any trickster synchros she experienced were fun and adventurous.

So what about you? Do you experience repeated trickster synchronicities? Open a computer file and keep track of these experiences. Include details about what you were doing before the experience happened and how you interpreted the synchro.