Coyote may put you in his spell
and take you to a brier patch.
It will be a painful lesson
if you follow him.
In Donald Trump,
the world has been given a crash course
in the Trickster archetype. Jerome Bernstein
“Trump’s ascendance is a call for the nation to take a long, hard look at what he is mirroring for us. He was diagnosed as narcissistic at an earlier meeting, and there had been good-humored acknowledgement among analysts that their clients are typically not the narcissists but the individuals trying to cope with them. Now we have the entire nation trying to cope with one. An important characteristic of Coyote in native lore is that he is the “master trickster who tricks himself.” He has unwittingly perfected the art of self-sabotage… So why did he run if he didn’t really think he could or would win? What was his plan? Was he just improvising as he went? If so, this would track with the Coyote archetype. According to native lore, Coyote is impulsive: He catches his tail on fire playing with matches, then nearly drowns when leaping into a fish pond to save himself. He seduces a concrete statue. He mistakes a rattlesnake for a bone. Things go wrong again, again, and again.
He is also a master of illusion, and we are warned: “Coyote may put you in his spell and take you to a brier patch to pick berries. It will be a painful lesson for you if you follow him.” Trump’s most avid followers come to mind, those who will inevitably learn that all he promised is just not possible. Trump will experience the consequences of ongoing impulsiveness, but so will the entire nation. However, there does seem to be hope, which Bernstein shared at the end of his paper. He pointed out that the President of the United States is also an archetype, and he posed a question: Is it possible that Donald Trump will be transformed by that archetype? His answer: “Yes.”
One wonders how this could happen, since it seems to require relinquishing one identity to assume another. Maybe Trump needs to add a Jungian analyst to his staff to help him work through this. But is it possible that transformation could begin with the simple act of moving into the White House? For one thing, it will mean the radically altered perspective of living at street level rather than gilded heights.
The White House is loaded with so much historical significance, so much symbolism. Forty-three men have served as President, and John Adams was the first to inhabit the White House in 1800. Is there within an energetic residue of important events and of the minds, emotions, and striving of the men–some of them wise and humane leaders–who resided there? Can one be infected, even reluctantly, by a sense of responsibility to the entire nation, the world, and Earth herself?
It would be interesting to ask Carl Jung that question, assuming that he agreed with Trump’s Trickster label. Jung wrote that it applied to a person who is not yet fully conscious, “corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level.” That sounds a little harsh, and I’m sharing it only as information.
It does seem that an awakening is due and that it will probably be painful for us as well as Donald Trump. As I mentioned earlier, he serves as a mirror of our country in some ways. What we see in that mirror differs, but we all seem to be gearing up to improve the imagined image. Chaos looms in the moment. Over the long run, however, increased participation could be very good medicine for our democracy. Perhaps Medicine Dog will, in the end, bring us a healing.”
~ Ellen Heath lives and writes in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her career in communications has included experience as a congressional aide, corporate speechwriter, government relations and public affairs specialist, and freelance writer. She is the author of Lizard Diary, a memoir of an experience with shamanism, and The Inheritance, a novel that was published in 2012. She has a B.A. degree in English from Stanford University
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