Transformative Tools

Fool

Just as the shaman can be viewed as a certain type of magician-figure, the fool can in turn be viewed as a certain type of trickster-figure. The fool and the trickster are not always distinguished, of course. (So, for example, the entry for “Fool” in A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis simply reads “See Trickster.”)

In his now-classic work The Fool and His Scepter,50 William Willeford mentions two main tendencies in our attitudes towards fools: the naive view that fools are just silly and the more refined view that fools show a kind of wisdom. Each is a partial truth, of course: on the surface the actions and speech of the fool are silly, but, as Willeford writes, “the surface of folly sometimes breaks open to reveal surprising depths ….”51

Like all tricksters, the fool somehow stands outside of the normal social order. In the form of the jester, the fool can say to the king what no one else would dare. As “outsiders,” the fool, the trickster, the magician can all show us things that we otherwise avoid.

While the trickster is more likely to deceive, cheat, or shock us, the fool (as related to the clown) is more likely to make us laugh at his antics.

We may laugh at the outrageous behavior of a trickster, the pathos of a sad clown, or the surprising happenings in a magician’s show. There is also, however, as Willeford points out, a connection between horror and humor.

… [H]oriole things may also be laughable. When we laugh at them, we often do so partly because we do not know what else to do, because we do not find our way to another and more appropriate reaction. Through laughter we achieve a provisional stance, outside belief and disbelief, in the face of the horrible. We also laugh as part of an automatic recoil into life.52 So the fool, too, through the function of laughter, helps us find our way back and forth between worlds. This, of course, was also one of the functions of the shaman. And, in a certain way, it is a function of the analyst as well.

source, via Kathleen Jenks:Mything Links, John Gransrose: The Archetype of the Magician