“We said earlier that the trickster simultaneously represents the animal and the divine in humanity. In societies like those of the Western world in which sexuality is given high priority and organized religion depreciated, entry into no other sphere of activity than sex is so much desired. No other channel for desire offers so many people the gratifying illusion of power. They seem to sense that though its ecstasies sex might let them breach the limits of the body to touch immortality. Power seems even to many of the powerless to be within reach here.
Of course the search for power tends to corrupt no matter where it is found; and for every sexual relationship that empowers its partners, delivering them to ecstasy, there are others dogged by misery. Far from being a romantic, lyric or even comfortable figure, the trickster invariably presents us with an awkward uncomfortable personality as well as a persuasive and amusing prankster and sexual polymorph.” ~ John Izod
“Significantly, he cannot be tied down: he is a shape shifter, appearing at one moment in one form, only to transmute and make his next entrance in quite another. Such versatility matches his function in running counter to the orientation of the individual’s conscious mind.” – John Izod
