[Stephen Gerringer]

theBuddyOTE,

Sorry for the delayed response to your post. Conversations unfold somewhat more leisurely here than on social media, where conversations tend to be lost in the ether once they scroll offscreen; what we lose in immediacy is, I hope, more than made up by the ability to explore a subject in depth.

I too love Q, the seemingly omnipotent trouble-maker from “the Continuum” who poses unsolvable riddles and plays sometimes deadly tricks on humans in episodes of Star Trek franchises – a character both fun and frustrating (at least for the humans who encounter him). This Q is wonderful representation of the Trickster in modern fiction. I also appreciate the role your anima plays in the understanding of the Trickster. I would agree the Trickster may carry a message, but rarely understands it, at least, as expressed through mythic figures like Coyote (Hermes, on the other hand, would seem to understand the messages he carries – but then, though Hermes exhibits several traits of the Trickster, that seems but one aspect of his role).

Astute observation as well about trickster energies seeming the default setting of western civilization (kudos to your anima for that as well!). If we see with a mythic eye, Trickster is everywhere we look: in the entertainment media, from the aforementioned Bugs Bunny, to the Daily Show and other irreverent comedy news programs, to Star Trek:TNG‘s “Q”; in science, in the central role random, spontaneous chance plays in everything from evolution to chaos theory to quantum physics; in politics (especially politics); in paranormal phenomena, from UFO sightings to poltergeists; in art (“The telling of untrue things is the proper aim of art” — Oscar Wilde); in our dreams, in our psyches, and, always, in the Unexpected.