Legba Crosses the Boundaries
God may be a divine trickster, both noble and outrageously debased, a spirit of order and a spirit of disorder, by turns creative and destructive. The divine trickster is a symbol of the transformation period that characterizes the age of creation. As he moves from the one stage of creation to the next, he embodies the changes. The move is from the perfection of God (the creative side of the divine trickster) to the flawed human (the destructive side of the trickster). The trickster can take on heroic dimensions, both hero and trickster being on the boundaries. But the trickster is forever liminal, the hero only for a time. As the creative characteristics of the trickster move to the ascendancy, that character journeys into the aura of the hero, but even as the hero takes center stage, accepting the applause of all, the trickster remains dancing grotesquely in the background, ever present, ever prepared to unleash new forms of mischief and destruction.
(Fon/Benin) Legba, the seventh and youngest offspring of Mawu, the creator god, is a major figure in the Fon pantheon of gods. He is the linguist, the Fon divine trickster. He is a guardian of entrances, and has much to do with a human's personal destiny, or Fa, who had sixteen eyes, the nuts of divination. He lives on a palm tree in the sky. From this height, Fa can see all that goes on in the world. Every morning, Legba climbs the palm tree to open Fa's eyes. Like most tricksters, Legba is mischievous, a boundary character who ignores social restrictions. His trickery knows no limits, and even God can become the target of his antics. He is amoral, his behavior lacking restraint: his activities are usually meant to fulfill his own desires and satisfy his gargantuan appetites. But when it comes to a choice, he favors humans against the gods. Often, when he has indulged in trickery, he seeks to find solutions to reestablish equilibrium. Because of this trickster's antic nature, Mawu informs him that he cannot give him a kingdom to govern, nor can he be made subject to the great energies of the universe. He is given the task of visiting the kingdoms ruled by his brothers, then to give his account of the gods: he thus becomes Mawu's linguist, his spokesman, intermediary between men and gods, between gods and the creator. But there are always questions about his moral judgment, about his sense of responsibility. He is forever unpredictable, untamed.
When God and Legba lived near the earth, Legba was always being reprimanded for his mischief. He did not like this and persuaded an old woman to throw her dirty water into the sky after washing. God was annoyed at the water being constantly thrown into his face, and he gradually moved away to his present distance. But Legba was left behind, and that is why he has a shrine in every house and village, to report on human doings to God.
In another myth, Legba, with Minona and Aovi, his siblings, makes up a funeral band, to earn cowries. They fight over the division of a single cowrie, asking three passing women to adjudicate their dispute. When they disagree with the judgments of the women, they kill them, and Legba has sex with the corpses. By means of trickery, Legba ends the pattern of dispute. In the process of their work, they encounter the King of Adja, whose son is impotent. The son asks Fa for a powder to make him virile; Legba switches the medicines, rendering all men of the kingdom impotent. Legba flees, and has sex with his mother-in-law. Three cases are therefore brought against Legba in court: in the case having to do with the murder of and sex with the three women, Legba argues that by breaking the pattern he arrested further deaths; in the case of his mother-in-law, he insists that he thought that she was his wife. And in the third case, he himself takes the powder that he gave to the men, but he has again tricked them and switched the medicine. Then, flamboyantly, he has sexual relations with the king's daughter. Legba has crossed normal social boundaries. He has removed the potential for sexual relations from the human community; then, by restoring it, he re-creates it, ritualizing it, rendering sexual activities not an animal but a human activity, a social activity. He links sexual relations to ritual. When he restores sexual potency to the men, it is no longer the unchecked sexual activities that he has engaged in throughout the story, but a domesticated, acceptable form of sexual activity, an activity given sanction through ritual. The danger of chaos is checked, extra-social activities reined in, social institutions given their form. Legba is thus the material that is pre-order and post-order. He is the raw data that represents all of humanity, and humans experience him in the process of becoming ordered and socially acceptable. See also: Esu, Fa, Ifa, Mawu, Sagbata.
