Enemy of Boundaries

Kerényi’s formula for the trickster — “the spirit of disorder, the enemy of boundaries” (Kerényi 1956, p. 185) — names a structural function the depth tradition had approached from several sides without gathering under a single term. The trickster is the figure whose sexuality “knows no bounds” to the point that “he does not even observe the boundaries of sex” (Kerényi 1956, p. 188); whose body is literally disarticulated, his phallus carried in a box, his arms fighting each other, his intestines filling the landscape. He is the negation of the archaic social order precisely because the archaic order is “exceedingly strict”: “nothing demonstrates the meaning of the all-controlling social order more impressively than the religious recognition of that which evades this order” (Kerényi 1956, p. 185).

The concept unlocks the functional reading of the trickster myth. “His function in an archaic society, or rather the function of his mythology, of the tales told about him, is to add disorder to order and so make a whole, to render possible, within the fixed bounds of what is permitted, an experience of what is not permitted” (Kerényi 1956). The carnival, the saturnalia, the Feast of Fools, the transgressive rites in which priests burn shoe-leather incense on the altar — each is the community’s ritual importation of disorder as a condition of wholeness.

The concept connects the trickster to liminality as Victor Turner later developed the term, and to the Hermetic between Hillman names in Senex & Puer: “Hermes thrives in this between-world” (Hillman, Senex & Puer). The boundary-crosser and the boundary-transgressor are adjacent. The difference is where the figure stops: Hermes, the psychopomp, transgresses only as far as his guiding function demands; Wakdjunkaga transgresses without limit. The spirit-of-disorder is one pole of a continuum the depth tradition reads between hermes and the Winnebago trickster.

Relationships

Primary sources

radin-trickster-study-american (Kerényi 1956, pp. 185–188)