Saturday Goddess Blogging

Coyote


I always think of Coyote as a Goddess, primarily because my introduction to her was the stories of Ursula Le Guin, who writes about Coyote as a Goddess. Le Guin discussed Coyote in a 1994 interview and said:

INTERVIEWER: Speaking of Coyote, she wanders in and out of much of your recent work. How did you meet up with her?

URSULA LE GUIN: She trotted through a project of mine in 1982. It was an essay on utopia called "A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be," and when the tracks of utopia and Coyote crossed, I thought, "Yes,now I'm getting somewhere!" The idea of utopia has been stuck in a blueprint phase for too long now. Most of the writing you see is similar to Callenbach's Ecotopia, which is another "wouldn't the future be great if we did this or that?" Or, in science fiction, it's been dystopia: utopia gone sour. These blueprints aren't working anymore.

Coyote is an anarchist. She can confuse all civilized ideas simply by trotting through. And she always fools the pompous. Just when your ideas begin to get all nicely arranged and squared off, she messes them up. Things are never going to be neat, that's one thing you can count on.

Coyote walks through all our minds. Obviously, we need a trickster, a creator who made the world all wrong. We need the idea of a God who makes mistakes, gets into trouble, and who is identified with a scruffy little animal.

But, as this Wikipedia article shows, many people consider Coyote to be a God, instead. Either way, Coyote is a Trickster Deity, one of the least appreciated, IMHO, types of deities.

Coyote often gets her way through tricking others, often by telling them a different version of the truth than that to which they subscribe. Wikipedia says that Coyote's personality strengths are humor and sometimes cleverness and that Coyote's personality weaknesses are usually greed or desire, recklessness, impulsiveness and jealousy. . . . Traits commonly described in pop culture appearances include inventiveness, mischievousness, and evasiveness.

As a trickster, Coyote fuzzes the lines between Male and Female, between cunning and stupidity (in one story Coyote steals a horse, in another [s]he almost drowns trying to eat some berries reflected in a stream), between wisdom and stupidity. Trickster tells us the truth about our selves, showing us with truth and wit the sides of our nature that we may be more comfortable not acknowledging; he's the one who points at the Emperor's nakedness, [s]he's Lenny Bruce and Ashleigh Brilliant, Ken Kesey and Uncle Remus, Opus, Geech, Tom Robbins, Abbie Hoffman, Don Becker, Weird Al Yankovich[,] and David Letterman, holding up a skewed mirror of reality for us to look into. Among the Aztecs, as serious a culture as this continent has ever seen, [the trickster manifests as] Ueuecoyotl, a funny and outrageously unacceptable clown figure; in the Southwest, at serious rituals, [s]he's the Koshare[,] speeding around the circle with tickling feathers and rattle, being ignored completely by the priest.


Some say that: There are thousands of myths and stories about Coyote, the Great Trickster. Many Native cultures call Coyote "Medicine Dog." Whatever the medicine is, good or bad, you can be sure it will make you laugh, maybe even painfully. You can be sure Coyote will teach you a lesson about yourself. Coyote is sacred. In the folly of [her] acts, we can see our own foolishness. Contained within trickster medicine is the humor of the ages. The cosmic joke. If you can't laugh at yourself and your crazy antics, you have lost the game of Life. Coyote always comes calling when things get too serious. The medicine is in laughter and joking so that new viewpoints can be assumed. Coyote LOVES food, and [s]he [often] get in lots of trouble trying to get it. You can buy chocolates that depict Coyote here.

I pray to Coyote when I am trying to get away with something, to skirt the rules and norms that traditional society lays down for women. She can create enough chaos and confusion for me to slip through, unnoticed. We old women, usually invisible in this culture, can sometimes get away with things that others couldn't. Coyote doesn't care so much about how she looks; she'll roll her stockings down to mid-calf and wear her house slippers out in public, if that's what feels comfortable. She takes the last cookie on the plate and gets others to do lots of the difficult work. Like Granny Weatherwax, Coyote does not do housework, although she is often the cause of housework for othrs. I'm thinking of Coyote types such as the Raging Grannies, Grandmothers Against the War, the grandmothers who keep showing up at enlistment offices and trying to enlist, the Grey Panthers, and, to some extent, Cindy Sheehan. Being a trickster Goddess, sometimes Coyote helps out and other times, she won't. That's her nature.

Because she's so fickle, Coyote can be difficult to appease. When she does you a favor, she IS going to get something in exchange, and you can never be sure what she'll want. But food and good liquor are often a offerings.

Image found here.