Activation of the Divine Fool Archetype
Imbued throughout my work-in-progress, The Killing Joke, is the Trickster archetype. Aside from where it is explicitly confronted, throughout the work itself and my practice of thinking and feeling it through, the Trickster’s gamboling shadow looms: specifically in the shape of the Evil Clown, or Joker, or - at best (as in least ominous) - the Jester. The Killing Joke is an archetypal work.
In the course of our strivings, archetypes flip through the Tarot deck of our psyches. Self-understanding is world-understanding: and vice versa. The concept of the “Killing Joke” - the joke that kills by inducing laughter unto death which is, of course, accompanied by whatever perpetrator’s cackling malice, stand-in for the universe’s cold indifference (if not ridicule), and in concurrence with age-old evil’s glee in getting the better of good, whether for an era or an instant - is part of this Trickster category, an action of the archetype. In/towards despair of the world or of the times, when bad is on the rise (such as when long-held fundamental rights and protections get stripped away), when ill will kills: we hear the underbreath, the sigh of a hidden wind, of wickededness - something diabolical - laughing at us.
My current work refuses to plug up ears for this. Admittedly, its despair has to laugh too. In hearing the snigger, in yielding to (or forcing) laughter in response, perhaps in trance, there is fusion with the Trickster’s inhospitable intent - turned against oneself, and one’s own world. In lament. Perhaps. Or, perhaps, in letting go. You resist, but the laughter catches - fatally. It takes over everything. It looms. Within the sounds of this cachinnation, in reverb of its hahaha, there’s divination, flashing of images and symbols in the cards; or, think of rolled coins or dropped sticks and the generated lines of I Ching hexagrams (no joke that Jung offered his entry into its system of thought and practice early in its Western interpretations); for through the Book of Changes one learns, by demonstration, the more full the times are with one thing - the more looming the lament or Killing Joke - the more the seeds of change are already quickening. The more dominant and overarching the trend, the more it is ready to pass. The next, and the new, await. “This too shall pass.” Yet, while it’s here, the fatal laughter drowns out everything. There is no future - and the past has been in vain. Onslaught of the void, the abyss, nothingness; nihilism of the Killing Joke becomes and is the All: we can only laugh, and laugh-weep. Maybe we can realize or remember, as the All, intrinsically, even a jeering engulfing malevolence is - it isn’t nothing. However nihilistic its intent.
That’s my intensity, engrossed in the Killing Joke. A while back, I asked for readers’ own offerings of Trickster stories and images meaningful to them as a supplement to my thinking: My Work-in-Progress: the Killing Joke. I’ll pass along a couple, for now.
Douglas Mowbray from Havre de Grace, Maryland uplifts the hare “as a traveler between worlds, and as a shapeshifter or trickster.”
He had this Celtic Hare Octagon redesigned as a back tattoo. Personal, totemic.
Cultural traditions of the hare are versatile and celebrate the animal’s versatility itself, its congenial rapscallion nature and the nature of its congeniality - if ruffian, lovable, lucky rabbit’s foot, enviable escape artist from danger or consequence, a harbinger more of good fortune than bad omen in the global mind.
(I believe I’ll develop this further in a month or two when I go into another response from that same call for input, which basically has given me an alternative - and radical - curriculum for film, television, and comedy; the trickster hare or rabbit - Bugs Bunny no less, and nothwithstanding cereal commercials - exhibits antic action and consciousness for free-spirited revolt).
Dana Brotman from Falls Church, Virginia takes us from the playful rabbit to the malevolent raven - specifically, Kutikha from the Russian tradition.
She told me of a trickster raven who stole the song right from a bird’s beak: “pulled it from him like a long flowing ribbon - silenced the little bird.”
I’m not sure if this cover was for the same storybook she used to read to her children, but I’ll bet it’s the same character in question.
I remember just one line from the story: “That Kutkha was laughing at his own joke!” (To me, that line told us just how cruel and evil he was). - Dana Brotman email
I’ve always loved Northwest Coast Tlingit raven imagery with its formlines and stylized shapes and the character’s trickster nature interpreted as hungry, hearty, and life-embracing in his erratic, willful mischief - after all, as a prank, he spread light through the world. Kutikha seems scarier in his readiness to pull the song out of the songbird.
The Tlingit designs, like the Celtic, are conducive for tattoos - also stamps. Years ago I started an as-yet-unfinished (and long-unworked-on) novel inspired by their form.
Thus, the Trickster has its mitigations and intensifications, as Trickster. In my book, the Killing Joke is played without stint in its malignancy, no antidote.1 Indeed, there is peril: becoming the abyss we’re looking into, gaping at what’s agape, getting lost in the guffaw.
So, aside from the book - and exclusively for my Substack (free) subscribers - here I’m setting forth an as-yet-unmentioned, unexamined subset of the archetype, one that can very well prove antidotal to nihilistic despair:
The Divine Fool
Unlike Joker or Evil Clown, there is no trace of malice in the Divine, or Holy, Fool. Earthy and connected with the Jester, the King’s Fool, but elevated even over royal proximity and truth-telling indulgence; closer, maybe, to the sun-serving raven or the whimsical hare (and its fantastical rabbit hole), but less ambiguous, untwisted: the divine simpleton’s simplicity is straightforwardness, verticalized. Open crown, open heart. Without defenses, he misses dangers right beneath his feet, but sees what society doesn’t see - or doesn’t permit us to see. A way of perceiving not understood by the crowd. My early childhood imagination, from the Beatles’ classic tune, spun a cartoonish day in the life of the “Fool on the Hill.”
Every artist, writer, creative person needs to embrace the Divine Fool for at least a crucial inspiration-sustaining moment, as must every idealist and activist, every inventor, and every lover (as distinct from seducer or ravisher, or stalker). To keep the faith, to believe in the dream. To sacrifice for the goal. To honor the Beloved.
How did the vision that drives you originally take form? - it was given from above. Lift your smile to it, raise your beaming face to sun or moon. Save practicalities for later.
Gift yourself a free and cheerful few minutes, few hours, few days in the ecstasy of a reality imagined altogether for wildest possibility fulfilled. Be that giver.
You’ll hear, as if from the mountaintop, another order of laughter then; nothing dreadful or hellacious about it - joyous, heavenly chimes. Innocence.
In preparation for a Divine Fool Archetype Activation (below), take a moment to consider for yourself what embedded imagery and archetypal imaginings impinge upon your understanding of simple and liberating unworldly openness.
That is, draw yourself a clear mental picture of what the Divine Fool embodies, incarnates - for you.
Now, another reader who answered my call for input regarding other modes of the Trickster archetype is a dark frolicsome sidestep from the Divine Fool; their concept - and here’s where it gets tricky - involves a Fool’s Journey through hell, and both character and pathway are anything but simple, linear.
Jon Lee in Portland, Oregon brings news of a performance piece titled Very Poorly Indeed: A Donner Party Faerie Tale.2 In play, “an experiential narrative expedition” - prankish, unnerving.
As Lee describes, it was
…created in 2018 as part of a devising process that combined the history of the Donner Party with Russian Cinderella story plus some of my musings on the Fool’s Journey into the underworld as passed on to me by some queer pagan elders of mine.
Lee as “Narrator” takes or leads the existential journey in bowtie and bowler hat, with mock operatic voice when necessary. Or with proclamation: “There’s no romance in hardship,” “Paradise is not painless.” Their vaudevillian hilarity cuts and leaps into a grim lyrical staging of passages from a Donner Party diary.
…there’s a trickster aspect to the demons of the underworld as I was taught. The Fool journeys into its depths to find demons that pull them (my Fool is non-binary) into an encounter with a demon or demons who pull them apart limb by limb both physically and metaphorically. They are then in a new state of despair. And eventually, that state leads them to a new encounter with the same demon or demons who eventually put them back together.
Prologue: gifts come from death
A performer in white wears antlers on her head.
stage direction: “THE DEER begins to die, pulling a string from its body.” (I’m swiftly back to Kutikha the raven pulling a ribbon of song from its poor victim's throat - the living thread tugged on to unravelling).
rancid deer meat rations. Lee sent a script, a highlights reel, later a video recording of the whole. hot hells and cold hells whatever horrifies. A performer trails a great white sheet as a train of snow and ice, “as if our mouths are full of flowers or fish.” waiting for God or a search party to deliver us. They, the “Narrator,” deliver supernatural insertions, other planes and dimensions for movement, panacea, snake oil hawking Success! and the availability of heroic destiny without effort or suffering. “That was all the food we had left.” Rescue. what is more more apparent than scarcity? the horrors, the harrows are what’s real. Escape plan, escape plane.
stage direction: crying baby storm
starvation hallucination and aftermath. How can you forgive yourself? How did you set your monstrous table?
“And finally, I will skew your trickster icon from the old world and raise you systemic oppression as itself a trickster figure.” - Jon Lee
To that last, this Tricky clip, in light of the Judicial Coup unfolding this year and next: where January 6th failed, SCOTUS is set not only to set up success of a similar attempt next election, but in itself and as drastically it has bashed to chunks the legal principles that undergird our democracy’s functioning and rule of law.
“I stand firm for our soil.”
Spiritual Operation
Activation of the Divine Fool Archetype
Make a ceremony of Clearing. Then: expand Image into totality. It doesn’t matter if your eyes are opened or closed, your sensate vision of the Divine Fool incarnate takes over, fills the room, fills your space, curves with the more than half-dome of your peripheral sight, bends with the fused sonar doubled dome of hearing around your ears; let it become one with the orb of your somatic sensation however far it extends, and then extend it further into feeling through/thinking through the torus of micro and macro - you and the cosmos inside-out and Won: the Image of the Divine Fool is All, energy and motion-wave-emotion, the way it feels to be consummately refreshed. Next: Gesture, Position. Your body embodies the pose of the Image - empty yourself of all guile. Rise through the planes to the proper elevation of regained beginner’s trust, above all that is base and corrupt. Precipitously say, “Yes!” to the edge of the cliff… your True Will, celestial Will, at the brink.
“Laughter isn’t so much an antidote to our increasingly unanchored, deranged, chaotic times as it is a looming, cackling, echoing, funhouse mirror, non sequitur non-answer.” Please check out my Part One response in poetry mini interviews, conducted by Thomas Whyte, for a quick additional take on The Killing Joke project.
Devised by Clifton Holznagel, Myia Johnson, Jonathan PARADOX Lee, Myriel Meissner, and Rose Proctor, Very Poorly Indeed was a production of the Institute for Contemporary Performance in conjunction with Portland Experimental Theater Ensemble and Coho Productions.