Almost all non-literate mythology has a trickster-hero of some kind… . And there’s a very special property in the trickster: he always breaks in, just as the unconscious does, to trip up the rational situation. He’s both a fool and someone who’s beyond the system. And the trickster represents all those possibilities of life that your mind hasn’t decided it wants to deal with. The mind structures a lifestyle, and the fool or trickster represents another whole range of possibilities. He doesn’t respect the values that you’ve set up for yourself, and smashes them… . The fool is the breakthrough of the absolute into the field of controlled social orders.

Joseph Campbell (interviewed by Michael Toms), An Open Life, p.39 (via theantidote)