The Trickster's Handbook explores one of humanity's oldest and most unsettling figures: the trickster.
Found in myth and folklore across the world, the trickster appears as Coyote, Anansi, Loki, the fool, the jester, and countless other shapes. Sometimes animal, sometimes god, sometimes human, the trickster lies, disrupts, mocks authority, and breaks rules not out of malice, but necessity. Through chaos, humor, and deception, these figures reveal hidden truths about power, survival, and human nature.
This book traces the trickster across cultures and eras, examining how these figures function as boundary breakers, storytellers, sacred deceivers, and survivors within unequal systems. It explores why societies tolerate and even depend on figures who disturb order, and what happens when cleverness crosses into destruction. Moving from ancient mythology to psychology and modern life, the book reveals the trickster as both a tool for adaptation and a warning about excess.
Rather than celebrating chaos for its own sake, The Trickster's Handbook offers a thoughtful examination of disruption as intelligence. It asks when bending rules preserves life, when deception teaches wisdom, and where the line lies between necessary disruption and harm. The final chapters bring these lessons together, revealing how trickster intelligence matures into discernment, restraint, and ethical awareness.
This is a book about survival in uncertain worlds, about intelligence that moves sideways when direct paths fail, and about the uneasy balance between order and change that defines human history.
About the Author
Kye Blair is a writer with a long standing interest in myth, folklore, and the enduring patterns that shape human behavior across cultures.
