Trickster Mythology
I always get a little bit more crazed that usual (shut up, Sam), when I'm reading pretty much anything Umberto Eco writes. And for Foucault's Pendulum that goes double. In the course of re-absorbing the Diabolicals, et al, the Rosicrucians, hermeneutic Hermetics, I was reminded of yet another book that made me crazy (no, no, no, no, lil bit), Trickster Makes This World, by Lewis Hyde. It talks about trickster figures in mythology, including Hermes, Prometheus, Coyote and Raven.
I pulled out the book, setting it nearby, ready for the moment I finish reading the Eco book. It's likely the most significant book I have read, insofar as impacting my worldview goes. I remember buying it at a new & used bookstore on Church St here in San Francisco. I remember it was an impulse turn into the store, and I remember specifically deciding to apply an orthogonal function (geek) to book-buying, to perhaps introduce me to topics I would never have set out to buy.
I grabbed books based on the colors on their covers. I chose Trickster for the red, out of at least a half-dozen chromatically-named Fairy books, I chose The Orange Fairy Book. I also chose a green one, but its name escapes me at the moment.
So here's where the crazy comes in. And mind you, it's the type of crazy that I was suffering from when I was knee-deep in writing the novel (see A Strong Sense of Place in the left column of this page). It's that syncretic-crazy, where you see connections in EVERYTHING.
Nothing stands apart, and even the most mundane facts, when place next to other completely mundane facts, suddenly come alive with prophetic or mystic meaning. That's what I experienced this morning when I read this.
So Amazon must love me by now, and soon my site will be turning up on all the Templars' Google searches.
And if a coyote shows up at my door, I'll know that he's a Rosicrucian.