A little post about the trickster spirit

I’m going to share about my relationship with one of my favorite spirits– Exu (pronounced eh-shoo).  I encountered him first in my capoeira training and later on in my trips to Brazil to study candomblé.  I haven't discussed him in my public writings because of the complications of me being a white man talking about my relationship with the spirit of a black spiritual tradition.  Many people think I don’t belong here, that even being in this space is an act of colonization and oppression.  Maybe they’re right.  But I also feel that in discussing him and his importance in my life I am honoring and feeding him, and feeding the gods is an important part of my spiritual practice.

In our culture, we tend to see things as black and white.  Liberal/conservative, pro-vax/ anti-vax, pro-choice/pro-life… the list is endless and most people know where they are within their respective group identity.  But in talking about Exu I will talk about how an act of oppression can also be an act of honoring and respect.  

The ability to hold multiple conflicting truths is one of the most important characteristics of Exu. He is the trickster spirit that is a part of all old folk tales and old spiritual traditions, and even though our ancestors tried to eliminate his presence through organized religion and then scientific rationalism, we can never fully get rid of him.  He’s a part of human nature.  

You are undoubtedly familiar with some of his aspects from modern spirituality or psychology.  His roles encompass what is described in spiritual circles as the ego.  Defense mechanisms, emotional suppression, the ability to hide traumas from our conscious brain, compartmentalization… these are parts of what I consider aspects of a superficial relationship to Exu.  At Spirit House, we call these “Exu contracts.”  When we have a superficial relationship with Exu, we create a contract with him whereby he “tricks” us into not embodying our suppressed parts.  The contracts come in the form of “If I do (x), I won’t have to feel bad”.  They usually have an origin in childhood trauma, and they are beautifully constructed defense mechanisms that actually help us survive to some extent.  The problem is that Exu never fully holds up his end of the bargain.  Eventually the contracts fail and whatever is hidden beneath the surface rises up.

To the person coming from a psychological perspective, this is all an internal process.  Psychologists have a much better explanation than me for all the ways in which this process works inside our heads.  But the psychological system fails in explaining how our internal processes are recreated externally.  

Relating to Exu as a spiritual force is important because it allows us to understand how our internal state is recreated in the outer world.  Exu becomes the bridge between the internal “me” and the world.  In my last blog post I talked about the concept of our self being more than just our internal processes– that the “self” as we know it is actually a part of other people and the world.  Exu forms a part of that structure and connection.

When we deepen our relationship with Exu by consciously relating to him as a spiritual force, we can also begin to see him and hear him speak through other people.   In candomblé this is called the manifestação da orixá (manifestation of the orixá), when a spiritual force momentarily takes over a person to deliver a message.    In a culture that is connected to the spirit world, the presence of spirits is a felt phenomenon, and one that is sorely lacking in our “advanced” culture.  The biggest trick Exu has played on us is the way in which he’s hidden the spirit world from our conscious awareness. 

If we consider Exu’s tricks to be his teachings, then another of his teachings is what I discussed earlier– the ability to hold contradictory truths.  I grew up a fundamentalist Christian, and to Christians, Exu is the devil.   When we have a healthy relationship with the trickster spirit, we are able to see the nuance in things.  We are aware of our capacity for self-deception.  We tend not to take ourselves too seriously.  When the monotheistic religions took this primal force of nature and turned it into the devil, it made people much easier to control.  Life became black and white.  Our minds became rigid and we became susceptible to fundamentalisms that sought to alleviate our fears by presenting an overly simplified view of the world and our place in it.  We gave up knowledge of the deeper recesses of our beings in exchange for a self-satisfied sense of moral/spiritual/scientific superiority, while at the same time suppressing a hunger arising from a deeper corner of our being.

If you’ve seen me in the clinic then you know that understanding and re-negotiating our relationship with Exu is the primary focus initially.  He is the builder and maintainer of the walls we use to disconnect from both our trauma and spirit through the force of the contracts or agreements we make with him. These contracts help us maintain our “great forgetting”, the powerful dissociative tendencies that maintain the walls between our suppressed trauma and everyday life. As long as we enlist his help in this process, he will forever be our antagonist.  

This is because if our relationship with him is based on forgetting, dissociating or suppressing, he will never hold up his end of the bargain.  It’ll work temporarily, which is why his magic is so enchanting.  But those suppressed traumas and feelings are still there.  The trickster part of him reveals itself when our wounds and traumas get triggered and he shows that he hasn’t held up his end of the bargain– at these times we have the ability to instead choose to embody and integrate them.  Exu stands there, showing us how we've engaged in self-deception and again offers us a deal– more self deception or the dive off the cliff into spiritual work.

The embodiment, or mediumship, of Exu becomes a moment by moment game of awareness that leads to playfulness and mischief.  We develop a fluidity in our movements and in life.  In capoeira, this is represented by the concept of malandragem– trapping or tricking our opponent into losing their balance or flow in the roda, while at the same time keeping our own flow intact.  When we lose our flow, when life or our opponent “catches” us, we are able to adapt quickly because we have worked through our sense of how things “are supposed to be” and are able to react to things as they are.

I’ve come to believe that bringing this relationship with Exu up to the surface is one of the most important things we can do to help heal our society.  And again, I’m aware that being a white spokesman for Exu brings a lot of baggage.  All I can point to in that regard is my own relationship with him and point people to my Brazilian mentors for people with deeper questions.