Trickster Lore: Six Gods, Baubo and the Dirty Joke That Saves Your Life
The Gloss 02 for 'Trickster Technology and the Case for Cunning' essay is here. Shadow archive, marginalia, and my personal syllabus on the Trickster archetype.
About The Gloss
You’re in The Gloss for Trickster Technology and the Case for Cunning, the second meditation in NEW LORE ORDER, a series on mythology, folklore and the afterlives of archetypes as they move through fashion, art and culture.
The Gloss is the essay’s shadow archive. Research that shaped the argument but didn’t make the final cut, visual references with full context, methodology notes on how the thinking evolved. It’s where sources get their full story and the work shows its seams.
If you live in both realms, the material and the mythic, and want to go deeper than the essay allows, this room is built for you. Your research rabbit hole. Marginalia and syllabus in one.
Welcome. Let’s open the archive.
MAKING THE ESSAY
I’ve been doom-scrolling for three months straight and calling it research. This essay was about chaos, which means it had to be perfectly structured. Everyone should know that the Trickster’s greatest trick is making you think they’re improvising when they’ve been seventeen steps ahead the entire time.
As usual, I tried somewhere between three and thirty-three different structures. Every version felt too obvious. Too tidy. I could practically hear the eye roll from… well, I couldn’t tell you, because I write these essays alone at my desk in the dead of night.
But I was impatient. The ideas were arriving faster than I could hold them. I needed them on paper, or at least in a voice note, before they evaporated and turned into that low-grade creative itch that never quite goes away. I know better than this. Writing and editing are different brain functions and creation and correction do not share a desk politely. But instead of respecting that, I tried to do both at once. Everything. Everywhere. All at once.
The Crone allowed me to circle her slowly. Research and annotate, build a case, even from a distance. The Trickster had no interest in that arrangement. I was naive to think they would sit still long enough to be studied. So without much choice, I followed the footprints in the mud instead of the marked path.
Back in this realm, under the glow of my monitor, and in the other one with mud up to my knees, I knew I was going the right way because the Trickster kept deleting my drafts. I’m not talking metaphorically. I’d save the file, close my laptop, make a cuppa, come back, and whole paragraphs would be gone. Now I’m not saying the archetype gained sentience and started editing my Google Doc. But I’m not not saying that either.
Anyways… somewhere between meme archaeology and Thai folk theatre analysis, I realised the obvious: the Trickster does not need to be explained into submission. They’re already everywhere. In brand Twitter accounts performing self-awareness. In Fleabag breaking the fourth wall. In every ‘this you?’ DM with a screenshot from a 2012 Facebook memory I’d rather forget. Every time I sat down to write about disruption, the algorithm served me twelve perfect examples and dragged me down another rabbit hole.
The only logical thing to do was give up on a linear argument and accept that this needed to be structured like a meme thread: related ideas, contradictory evidence, sudden pivots, and at least one moment where you’re not sure if I’m joking.
The Trickster won before I started, so what I’m offering here isn’t mastery, carefully constructed annotations, and neat non-joined-up handwriting. It’s field notes from someone who finally stopped resisting and just documented the glitch.
Below, a goddess with a vulva for a mouth, nipples for eyes, no head, just a body speaking directly, and her lineage. The Trickster Lore, and looking at why Art, (with a capital A) inherently trolls. My take on all of this without the spoiler is this - the Trickster does not build reasonable arguments, they plant landmines.
Unlike The Crone is Couture, this wasn’t the folder I kept open for nine weeks. This is the folder that kept itself open while I was trying to work on other things.
If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you take internet culture seriously as mythology, the marginalia and syllabus are below.
Fair warning, it’s organised like the Trickster would organise it. Which is to say, barely.
TRICKSTER LORE
Some of these appear in the essay. Some don’t. All of them are operational. Consider this a cheat sheet to the lineage, for those who want to know who they’re dealing with.
Hermes - Greek
Roman equivalent - Mercury. Yes, like the planet. Yes, like the element. Yes, like the ruling planet of Gemini and Virgo. Make of that what you will.
Originally a boundary god from Arcadia before being promoted to Olympus. This is an important note because he didn’t start at the top, but crossed into it.
Role: Messenger of the gods. Patron of travellers, thieves, merchants, translators and the dead. The only Olympian with full access to heaven, earth and the underworld. No gate kept him out.
Lore: On the day he was born, he stole Apollo’s sacred cattle. Apollo was his half-brother, which is the kind of detail that becomes important when you realise the Trickster’s first move was a family heist. He talked his way out of punishment by inventing the lyre and gifting it back. The theft was decoy, the real move was making the victim grateful.
The cattle story is surface myth, because his real power was access. He went where others couldn’t because every side needed him intact. He is quick enough to outrun consequence, and certainly fluent enough to negotiate it. Untouchable because both (all) sides needed him alive. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’ exists because of him, because the system collapses when the messenger stops showing up.
Modern lineage: Diplomacy, translation, mediation, PR, every industry built on moving between worlds that refuse to speak directly. The founder who pivots scandal into a rebrand. The apology that reads like a strategy deck.
Eshu - Yoruba
Known as Eleggua in Cuban Santería, Exu in Brazilian Quimbanda, Papa Legba in Haitian Vodou. The name changed with every coast the diaspora reached, which is fitting for a god of crossroads.
One of the primary Orishas in the Yoruba pantheon. Every day of the traditional four-day Yoruba week belongs to him, no other deity gets that.
Role: Guardian of the crossroads, divine messenger, enforcer of cosmic balance. Nothing reaches the gods without passing through him first. He carries sacrifices upward and consequences back down. Not good, not evil. He stands at the junction and makes sure you live with what you chose.
Lore: Stole yams from Obatala’s garden and framed him using his own slippers. Made two friends go to war by wearing a hat red on one side, black on the other. Each swore the other was lying. Eshu reveals what was already broken, and he didn't have to invent the conflict, because it was already there.
Western Christianity rebranded him as the devil. Make of that what you will, but I think the translation says more about the missionaries than the deity.
Modern lineage: The algorithm thinks it invented what Eshu has been doing for centuries, feed you a choice, amplify your bias, hand you the consequence and call it personalisation.
Hanuman - Hindu
From the Ramayana. Also central to Thailand’s Ramakien, Cambodia’s Reamker, and Indonesia’s Wayang Kulit. Son of the wind god Vayu and the celestial nymph Anjana. Born with the shape of a monkey, the appetite of a god, and the attention span of neither.
Role: Devotee of Rama, commander of the monkey army, divine scout and shapeshifter. Performed in Khon classical dance-drama and echoed through shadow theatre traditions.
Lore: As a child, he mistook the sun for a mango and leapt to eat it. Indra struck him down with a thunderbolt, breaking his jaw, hence the name Hanuman, ‘one with the broken jaw.’ The gods, feeling guilty, granted him every power imaginable, but the sages, exhausted by his pranks, cursed him to forget them. He would only remember his strength when someone else reminded him. The most powerful being in the epic didn’t know what he was until the moment required it. He is the only figure who could leap across the ocean to Lanka, and when the enemy set his tail on fire, he used it to burn their entire city down. When asked to fetch a specific healing herb, he brought back the entire mountain. All this is to say, he does not solve problems elegantly, he solves them completely.
In Thailand’s Ramakien, Hanuman leans harder into the Trickster archetype, charismatic and cunning, both a lover and a fighter. Devotion remains the constant, but here the mischief gets amplified.
Modern lineage: The intern sent to gather intel who returns having detonated the competition. The person who was asked for one solution, then turns up with the entire infrastructure. Every overqualified lieutenant the room would collapse without.
Loki - Norse
Shapeshifter, agent of Ragnarök, and father to the three monsters who end the world, the wolf Fenrir, the world-serpent Jörmungandr, and Hel, ruler of the dead. The god invited to the table because he was useful, but who later burned the table down because he could.
Blood brother to Odin, not born Aesir but accepted among them, which matters because like Hermes, he didn’t start at the top, but was tolerated (tolerated being the emphasis word here friends) because they needed him.
Role: Chaos agent, boundary crosser, shapeshifter who also gave birth to Odin’s eight-legged horse after taking the form of a mare. He wasn’t doing gender in any default sense. The goal was disruption, and the form was whatever the moment needed.
Lore: Engineered the death of Baldr, the most beloved of the gods, by tricking the blind Höðr into throwing mistletoe, the only thing capable of killing him. For this, the gods bound Loki beneath a serpent dripping venom onto his face. His wife Sigyn catches the poison in a bowl. When she turns to empty it, the venom falls, he convulses, and the earth shakes.
The punishment was supposed to neutralise him, but it did the opposite. At Ragnarök, he breaks free and leads the dead against the gods who chained him.
Modern lineage: The whistleblower, the insider who knows exactly where the bodies are buried because they helped bury them.
Puck - English
Also known as Robin Goodfellow, though they weren’t originally the same figure. ‘Puck’ was a generic Old English word for any malicious fairy or demon, while Robin Goodfellow was a specific named hobgoblin in English folk tradition, a household spirit who’d clean your kitchen if you left offerings of milk or cream, and sour the milk and lead you off the path at night if you didn’t. Shakespeare fused them into one character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but both had been doing the job for centuries already, with cousins across the British Isles: the Welsh Pwca, the Irish púca, the Cornish Bucca.
Role: He serves as Oberon’s lieutenant in the play, rearranging lovers, humiliating the proud, turning a man’s head into a donkey’s. What makes him different from other Tricksters is that his motivations are much smaller. There is no cosmic balance to enforce, no grievance to settle, and when he does act on someone else’s agenda, it’s usually because Oberon told him to and it sounded fun. Mostly he just wants to be entertained, and his chaos serves the plot even when it torments the characters inside it. He’s unserious, sincerely.
Lore: His most quoted line, ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be,’ is both his punchline and his job description. He is the only character in the play who sees the full picture and finds it hilarious, the only one watching the dream rather than living inside it.
Modern lineage: The family’s chaos agent, so the uncle who screenshots your auntie’s gossipy DMs and sends them to the family WhatsApp group on purpose just to watch what happens. The friend who orchestrates the night out and disappears before the bill arrives, common user of the Irish goodbye.
Kitsune - Japanese
Fox spirit and shapeshifter, appearing in Japanese folklore more often than any other yōkai. Yōkai being the broad category of supernatural creatures and spirits, which is a generous spread, considering Japan has spirits for almost everything including individual umbrellas (they’re called kasa-obake, if you want to do your own deep dive).
The fox grows a new tail every hundred years, which is a slow promotion ladder, but the rewards are good. Once she has enough tails, she gains the ability to take human form, usually that of a beautiful young woman. Nine tails is the ceiling, at which point she is essentially indistinguishable from a god.
Role: Whether she ends up as the divine messenger of Inari or as a malicious trickster depends entirely on her disposition and the company she keeps.
Lore: The most famous kitsune, Tamamo-no-Mae, disguised herself as a beautiful consort and infiltrated the emperor’s court, nearly bringing down a dynasty before being exposed. The fox-wife stories are older though, kitsune who marry human men, bear their children, love them genuinely, and vanish the moment their true nature is discovered. The tail always gives them away in the end, because the disguise is never quite complete.
Modern lineage: The catfish, the burner account, the anonymous influencer whose real identity would ruin the mystique, or the one friend who seems very well-travelled and genuinely successful but has a mysterious source of income.
That’s six, and yes, only one of them is feminine-coded, which says far more about whose stories historically got written down than about who was actually doing the work. The Case for Cunning section of the main essay handles the rest. Baubo gets her own deep dive below.
MARGINALIA
Baubo’s Big Reveal
I found Baubo the way you find most good things, sideways and while looking for something else. I was deep in a research spiral on Persephone and Demeter and kept hitting the sanitised version of the myth. Daughter taken. Mother grieves. Seasons stop. Daughter returns. Seasons resume. But there was a scene missing from nearly every retelling I’d been handed, and when I found it, I understood why.
Baubo is an old woman, a nursemaid, a crone if you want to borrow that term, who encounters Demeter at Eleusis (modern-day Elefsina, Greece) during the worst of her grief. Demeter has refused all food, drink, and comfort. She is beyond language and far past reason. Baubo’s response is to lift her skirt and expose her vulva. Demeter laughs. For the first time since Persephone was taken (by Hades to the underworld, with Zeus’s help…allegedly), she laughs, she eats, she drinks, and the earth begins to recover.
The clay figurines from the Sanctuary of Demeter at Priene are from the third to second century BCE and they are exactly as strange as the myth deserves. No head. A face where the abdomen should be. The chin merging into the vulva. Nipples for eyes. Some hold lyres or torches. Some were designed to be hung, possibly as protective amulets. Her mouth was her vulva, which is to say her speech and her sexuality were the same organ. Far from a metaphor, that’s what the terracotta figurines actually look like.
This gesture was not random vulgarity, as modern Western eyes might assume. It had a name: anasyrma, Ancient Greek for ‘to lift one’s skirts.’ It was recognised as a sacred protective act, a charm against death, sterility, and despair. Which, even without the linguistic footnote, speaks for itself. It’s funny. If I were submerged in grief and Baubo herself showed up and did this in front of me, I would probably laugh against my will.
That is precisely the point.
As Persephone was pulled back from the underworld, Baubo pulled Demeter from her mourning. The same gesture appears in rites of Bastet and in legends of Hathor, where exposure provokes laughter and, through laughter, healing. Baubo’s obscenity was sacred technology, a Trickster intervention disguised as indecency.
She holds both the Crone and the Trickster at once, which is why she remains one of my favourites, a sacred sleight of hand hiding in plain sight.
What’s interesting, though, is what happened to her afterwards. Baubo was once worshipped alongside Demeter and Persephone at Paros, where she had dedicated priestesses and inscriptions confirming her cult status. Then Christianity arrived and reclassified her as a demon, and suddenly the sacred clown became the obscene woman, the healer became the grotesque. Clement of Alexandria cited her story as evidence of Greek religion’s corruption, and her figurines, once votive offerings, became evidence of pagan depravity in their eyes. What had once been sacred laughter was reframed as moral decay.
The gesture isn’t just Greek. Baubo has cousins across cultures who did the same move under different names. In Japan, the dawn goddess Ame-no-Uzume danced naked in front of a cave to coax the sun goddess Amaterasu out of hiding, and the gods’ laughter at the dance was what drew her out… curious about what could possibly be funnier than her absence. In Egypt, the goddess Hathor exposed herself to the sun god Ra when he was sunk in depression, and his laughter at the gesture pulled him back into ruling. In medieval Europe, Sheela Na Gig figures were carved into the walls of churches and castles across Ireland and Britain showing women holding open their vulvas as protective charms, that no Christina theology has ever quite been able to explained.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes about Baubo in Women Who Run with the Wolves as ‘the little belly Goddess.’ She argues ‘a little obscenity can help to break a depression,’ which I’ve always thought of as the dirty joke that saves your life. That phrase stayed with me while I was writing this essay. My take on the Trickster archetype and its essence is that the Trickster isn’t doing chaos for the sake of chaos. They show up exactly where grief, and sometimes truth, has sealed the room shut.
The Devil’s Wound
To understand how a sacred ritual becomes a psychological prank, you have to look at the mechanics of anasyrma. The gesture is deceptively simple: you lift your skirt, you wave it about, and you use a burst of pure obscenity to shatter the illusion of danger (or grief). By the seventeenth century, sacred exposure had migrated from temple walls into secular satire, but it lost none of its bite.
In Jean de La Fontaine’s ‘The Devil of Pope-Fig Island,’ a tale borrowed from François Rabelais, the lore goes that a lowly but clever farmer named Phil makes a deal with the devil and outwits him through a series of bad agricultural crop choices and trickery. First, Phil offers the devil everything that grows above the soil, then harvests carrots and turnips. The next year, the devil demands the opposite, so Phil plants wheat, leaving the fiend with useless roots.
Furious at being out-farmed, the devil demands a final scratching match to the death. Enter Perretta, the farmer’s cunning wife. While her husband hides in holy water, she greets the devil at the door with dishevelled hair and a beautifully staged lie, claiming her husband has gone absolutely mad (in Adele’s voice) with bloodlust.
To prove it, she lifts her skirt. ‘Look what he did to me with his claws,’ she screams.
The devil, somehow in this story entirely ignorant of the female anatomy, mistakes her vulva for a gruesome, gaping wound inflicted by the farmer’s bare hands. Terrified of a man strong enough to rip a human body open like that, the devil panics and flees the scene forever… of course, until he returns as Tom Ellis in Lucifer, by which time he has had a few centuries of anatomical catch-up, and picked up a few tricks of his own in the art of subversion (and seduction).
It is a masterpiece of misdirection. Baubo lifted her skirt to break a goddess’s grief. Perretta lifts hers to defeat a literal devil. Same gesture, opposite stakes. The devil tried to terrify a world he didn’t quite understand, and Perretta outwitted him completely by turning her own body into the punchline that saved her (and her husband’s) life. All she needed was a good story.
The Permanent Disappearing Act of Cindy Sherman
For over 40 years, Cindy Sherman has photographed only herself, yet she has never once allowed her actual face to anchor the frame. Every single image is a persona: 1950s housewife, horror movie victim, Renaissance portrait, fashion magazine spread, clown, society matron…corpse. The photographer becomes the photograph becomes the fiction becomes the critique.
Sherman’s face is one of the most recognisable in contemporary art, and I first saw it in my Year 6 art project. I have studied her face extensively, but I’ve never actually seen her outside the borders of her work, and neither have you. Every ‘self-portrait’ is a mask made of latex, cosmetics, and studio lighting. The artist disappears into infinite characters while remaining the only visual constant. This is shapeshifting as a 40-year documentation project.
Maybe to us, there is no ‘real Cindy’ beneath the costumes, no source figure to be questioned or evaluated. Or if there is, she’s been so thoroughly hidden that the personas become more real than the person. She took the Trickster’s central question of, ‘Who are you when no one’s watching?’ and answered, ‘There is no watching. There’s only performing.’
What the essay didn’t explicitly unpack was Sherman’s massive, predictive influence on Instagram and the filtered selfie. She was mapping out digital-age identity thirty years before instagram existed. The multiply-selfied self, the face treated as an infinite costume change. Every ring-light setup and ‘face the window for natural light’ tip used by modern influencers descends directly from her studio techniques. She is the Trickster who showed us, in retrospect, that we are all shapeshifters.
Her recent work from 2023 takes this prophetic trickery to its logical and digital endpoint. In her latest series of untitled works, she abandons traditional prosthetics to manipulate her own features using editing apps, creating horrifyingly fractured, multi-layered digital face-mashes where her features bleed into one another. It is the ultimate evolution of her vanishing act. She is no longer just hiding behind a physical costume, she is letting the algorithm distort her face into a literal, pixelated glitch.
Forty years. Thousands of personas. Zero appearances as herself inside the frame. The artist as a permanent disappearing act.
ADDITIONAL NOTES + VISUAL REFERENCES
Confidant or Alibi?
Phoebe Waller-Bridge turned direct address into an intimacy weapon. Fleabag treats the lens like a confessional booth where she performs dysfunction with just enough charisma to keep you complicit. You watch her lie to everyone else in real time while she looks you in the eye to tell you the truth… or does she?
The trap is elegant: you think you’re her confidant, but you’re actually just her alibi. This is why fourth-wall breaking has become the digital native’s natural language. We are all performing sincerity with one eye on the camera now - in Instagram stories, TikTok duets, reaction videos. Fleabag just made it sexy. She is the Trickster who admits the con while running it, exposing the performance and emotionally seducing at the same time, making you an accomplice to the performance of her own deep tragedy.
Prince vs. Warner Bros. (1993–2000)
Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol in 1993 to escape Warner Bros., who owned his masters and the commercial rights to ‘Prince.’ By becoming a symbol no one could pronounce, he ended Prince-as-product without ending himself as a working musician. He appeared in public with ‘SLAVE’ written on his cheek, and flooded the label with cheap albums to burn through his contract as fast as legally possible.
The Trickster move was turning his own name into the escape hatch, then using the sheer absurdity of the situation to make the industry look ridiculous for trying to enforce it. He eventually got his masters back in 2014, but the symbol still has no pronunciation, which was exactly the point because he was never trying to be called something else, but was simply proving a point.
Why Art Inherently Trolls
Three works in contemporary art that all prove the same thing: the object is just the trigger, and the system’s reaction is the work. Which is why one of the the Trickster’s natural habitat is anywhere a market thinks it’s in control.
Take Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917). He submitted a standard urinal signed ‘R. Mutt’ to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition because they had promised to accept absolutely any submission as long as you paid the fee. Of course, they panicked and rejected it. Duchamp completely exposed them, proving the system had hidden rules simply by daring it to follow its own stated ones. What’s brilliant is that the original object was lost, and the version the world knows today is just a 1960s replica. The Trickster move is so good it outlived the actual porcelain.
Then there’s Banksy, Love is in the Bin (2018). His Girl with Balloon canvas literally shredded itself the exact moment the gavel fell at Sotheby’s for a million pounds. The beautiful irony is that the artwork instantly doubled in value because of it, eventually selling again in 2021 for a staggering £18.6M. The destruction became the appreciation event, and Banksy accidentally (or not) turned vandalism into massive capital gains for the exact establishment he was supposedly mocking. The market won by losing.
Finally, there’s Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019). It started as a simple, duct-taped banana that somehow sold for $120,000 at Art Basel Miami, before another performance artist just walked up and casually ate it. Then, in late 2024, the exact same concept (but presumably a different banana) went up for auction at Sotheby’s and sold for a completely absurd $6.2 million to a crypto investor, who, in a perfect loop, also hosted a press conference and ate it.
The work is the comedy of watching the global art market defend a piece of fruit with a straight face, twice, while the evidence literally gets consumed.
All three of these Tricksters were basically playing the exact same card game. They showed us that the value is never actually inside the object, it’s in the institutional wiring the object exposes. Duchamp laid out the entire Artist Trickster manual back in 1917, and a hundred years later, Cattelan and Banksy proved the exact same rules still apply.
FURTHER READING
Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (1998) The definitive text. Hyde traces Trickster figures across cultures and proves creativity requires boundary-crossing. The essential text for understanding disruption as sacred function.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988) The definitive text on the Black trickster tradition. Gates traces Esu-Elegbara from Yoruba mythology through the African diaspora to contemporary Black literature, and builds an entire theory of literary signification out of a single trickster god.
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (1967) The devil and his entourage (including a giant talking cat called Behemoth) descend on Soviet Moscow and unmask its bureaucratic absurdity through chaos, theatre, and a magic show that strips Party officials naked on stage. The Trickster novel of the twentieth century. Read it for the method. The theory is elsewhere on this list.
The audiobook is exquisite. Within the first three minutes the narrator moves effortlessly from polished English gentleman to Cockney barmaid to the local drunk. In Moscow, yes. Call it artistic licence. The sentiment carries, and it’s the kind of performance that convinces you within moments that you’re in capable hands.
The one you want is the off-white cover with the pencil-style illustration and red lettering, narrated by Julian Rhind-Tutt, running time 16 hours and 52 minutes. Worth specifying, since several versions exist with different narrators, plus a considerably shorter recording also read by Rhind-Tutt.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves (1992) Already recommended in The Crone Gloss for the Wild Woman material, but the Baubo chapter (Heat: Retrieving a Sacred Sexuality) is the essential feminine Trickster text. Skip to it, then come back for the La Loba/Bone Woman opening, which is its own shapeshifter gospel.
Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (2014) Academic but accessible. Maps how memes function as contemporary folklore: repetition, mutation, cultural transmission. Proof that oral tradition just got Wi-Fi. Read online (PDF)
Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1978) Not explicitly about Tricksters, but maps how marginalised people weaponise pleasure and refusal. Trickster feminism before the term existed.
WATCH + LISTEN
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1979): Lucy meets Mr. Tumnus (Part 2) Mr. Tumnus is the faun who was sent to kidnap Lucy, decides not to, and confesses mid-tea-party. He’s the Trickster as host, which means the scene is doing the Trickster move and the un-Trickster move at the same time. The warm welcome leads to the flute, which leads to the lullaby, which leads to a betrayal he aborts at the last possible second. The 1979 animation gets the queasy seduction of it in a way no later adaptation has touched. Watch his eyes while he plays the flute- they keep switching from big doe-eyed innocence to something closer to sinister, with the occasional flicker of regret. It works because it stays uncomfortable instead of trying to be cute. His closest folkloric cousin sits in the above Codex: Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow. Half-creature, forest-dwelling, host of unwitting travellers, with the same fluid loyalty Tumnus is busy trying to break.
Rosalía, CUUUUuuuuuute (Motomami, 2022) She sampled a Vietnamese TikTok meme creator (Soytiet, of the famous deadpan food reviews) and credited him as a co-writer. That’s the Trickster move, treating internet folklore as serious musical material, which happens to be the whole thesis of this essay in three minutes.
Molam and Luk Thung (Thai folk genres) Molam and Luk Thung are oral history disguised as music, which is to say they meander, don’t quite land, and laugh at themselves on the way past. There’s one Luk Thung song about a traveller from central Thailand who meets a young woman from the south with the distinct southern accent and dialect, and she lies cheerfully through the entire encounter while her uncle keeps cutting in to call her out. That’s the Trickster as folk genre, fully embedded. Full treatment in Sound as Archive: A Personal Memory on Music, Story and Disappearing Sound, which I’m posting next (at some point lol).
Kendrick Lamar He’s the Trickster who looks like a prophet, which is why the 2024 Drake exchange landed as hard as it did. The whole exchange was a rap battle dressed up as moral reckoning, and the dressing-up was itself the Trickster move. By the time the Super Bowl came around, the joke already had the entire culture singing along. Start with Not Like Us if you haven’t yet, then go back through the full sequence (Euphoria, Meet the Grahams, Not Like Us) for the actual masterclass in ridicule as ritual. The NFL has blocked the Super Bowl performance from being embedded outside their own properties, so search on YouTube for ‘Kendrick Lamar’s Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show.’
That one was a big one. The Trickster kept handing me more material every time I tried to close the document. I edited, re-edited, cut a section, added two, and at some point well past my deadline I accepted that this version was it… for now. The Trickster always wins on timing, so I am fairly certain I will revisit. There will probably be a part two. There will definitely be a moment in six months when I find another four examples and resent the version you just read.
Thank you for being inside my brain for a while. Come back whenever you need to. There is a lot in here, and the door stays open.
Tx
About The Gloss
Each NEW LORE ORDER essay comes with The Gloss: the essay’s shadow archive. Research that shaped the argument but didn’t make the final cut, visual references with full context, methodology notes on how the thinking evolved. It’s where sources get their full story and the work shows its seams.
If you live in both realms, the material and the mythic, and want to go deeper than the essay allows, this room is built for you. This is your weekly rabbit hole, marginalia and syllabus in one.
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