Metis as Trickster: Cunning Intervention

Transformer may be the most salient aspect of the Trickster. If a "were-" manifestation is poetically metaphoric for a cultural category, as teacher, Trickster illustrates that even seemingly rigid categories can be transcended. As destroyer, it illustrates one need not keep what one "wins" or opens:

Metis, in its transformative action that undermines power relations and does not keep what it wins, cannot be used in the service of notions of possession, ownership, legitimacy and sovereignty. It is an action without origin – no single subject is its cause or reason – rather its movement emerges from the multiple and the heterogeneous. Metis transforms the constellation of power but crucially never comes from or acts from one place. In this way, metis produces an action or an intervention that does not depend upon a unitary subject or intent. Its transforming capacity is precisely in its multiplicity and simultaneous movement in divergent directions. Without this crucial characteristic of not keeping what it wins, it would inevitably become another potential form of domination and or mastery.
 

– Amber Jacobs, The Life of Metis: Cunning Maternal Interventions

In Jacobs' interpretation, the Greek "deity", Metis, is clearly a Trickster. And she tries to synonymize metis itself (the aspect or "adjective") with motherhood, that is, 'motherly'. Trickster is not an identity. It cannot be identified. It is a principle or a way. If Tao (or Chao) is a way of being, Trickster (or Metis, Coyote, fox, hare, bear or Raven) is a way of doing which is sort of like spinning, sort of meandering, sort of creation. And in so-called "goddess" mythology, Tao itself lines up well with 'Mother', Feuerbach's "essence" or "matrix", the "aether", not "other" except in its indeterminacy. And who mothered the goddess, even in Greek Myth-time? Chaos, the big cosmic egg, a three-dimensional ellipse in descartean or objective linguistics (that is predicate-free). Otherwise infinity, more butterfly than hourglass – 'in point of fact', not just ungendered, it's timeless.

Outside of power relations and cultural 'style', gender has little significance, even where sex abounds (it could be vice versa), and that just means a kind of symbiosis, kind as the kindness of kindred spirits and kids – in some parts as children are known ('kinder' should you speak German). Every box should be opened, particularly Pandora's (the word means 'all giving'). It was originally deemed everything a person could desire (bricolage), but with this note attached: "Be carefull what you wish for". That is a mother's gift. Prometheus (like Coyote) only added what was missing or withheld due to oversight or exclusion, illustrating even further that, once contents are "liberated", some boxes themselves can be destroyed, leaving the formerly contained to re-arrange, quite with their own accord or devices. Hence, everything is provisional, even parasitosis. Only one's sense of aesthetics, not just taste but smell can tell there's difference which may or may not bode well, that will be decided by experiment or experience. Then choice iteration is less teleologic but more 'patamimetic.