pantryslut

At a certain pagan sex party I help run, it is traditional to have a ritual near the end of the night, where we call the quarters and invoke the divine. In recent years, it's become something of a tradition, when invoking the God, to call down the Trickster. I think that originally, he who calls the Trickster intended said entity to be invited *in addition* to the God and Goddess, but that's not how it works these days.

The invoker in question is amused by this, but doesn't seem to mind. After all, there are a lot of tricksterish God figures that seem appropriate to invite to a sex party -- Pan leaps to mind, for example. But I admitted, a day later, that it's always struck me as odd, and that I tend to think of the Trickster as a transgender figure.

But then I thought about it some more and decided I was wrong. Of course many tricksters have transgender elements to their character, but it seems to me that most tricksters start out as male, then move incompletely toward the female.

I have a theory.

I think that the trickster represents the distance between the penis and the phallus.

The phallus, the symbolic penis, is always hard, always unquestionably masculine. The actual fleshly penis, however, as anyone intimately acquainted with one knows, is way more problematic than that. Sometimes it doesn't work when you want it to; sometimes it works when you really *don't* want it to. Sometimes it seems to have a mind of its own. Sometimes it seems like it might as well not be there at all.

And so the trickster is always losing his penis, or watching it go off and make mischief while he wasn't paying attention. He tucks it inside himself and suddenly gets pregnant. And so on.

I expect that someone has already had this thought; if so, I'd be interested in references.