Trickster Shenanigans

Mythology, Genetics and Big Luck

I grew up in a house full of books. My favorites were collections of legends, myths, and fairytales from around the world. As a kid in a small town, magical stories took me out of my provincial New Jersey suburb and into lands of wonder and possibility. They also gave me historic backstories to construct a personal ancestral heritage. You see, I never knew my birth dad, or his family, and yearned to know about my hidden half.

My mother’s family were Scandinavian on her mother’s side, and Scots Irish on her father’s. My great-grandmother (Danish) and great-grandfather (Swedish) met on the boat from the old country, eventually settling in Wisconsin, a place which probably felt a lot like home.

Her father’s family arrived in this country much earlier. I don’t have records for them, but my grandad was a cowboy. He worked on ranches in Idaho, Nevada, and Utah back in the late 1800s, and reportedly was a trick rider in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. My grandmother was teaching in a one room schoolhouse near Provo. They had a meet-cute, resulting in my Celtic/Viking genetic blend.

That half of my family tree provided lots of mythic golden apples to harvest. I read the Norse myths, and Celtic lore about Selkies, Kelpies and Fairies. From there I branched out to Greek mythology, and later into traditional stories from many other countries.

Though I asked about my birth father, my mother was reluctant to discuss him and only had a few shreds of personal information to give me. She thought he was Russian because his original surname, before he Americanized it, was “Svet.” She knew he was a civil engineer, and before she met him he had lived in Pittsburgh. The clues I had to work with were sparse, but I immediately latched on to the idea that I was (likely) a lost Romanov heir.

I used folklore and fairy tales from Russia to help me fashion the missing half of my cultural history. Slavic mythology is very rich and colorful filled with magical bears, hags in chicken footed houses and good-hearted peasant girls who become tsarinas. I knew I belonged in there somewhere.

As I soon discovered, many of folk tales from around the world have characters that intersect. One of these is Trickster. Trickster is known by many names but is always a mischievous trouble-maker, sometimes for evil purposes, but also to expose human shortcomings like vanity and deceit. Trickster can appear to be an animal, like Anansi the Spider, Bouki the Hyaena, Brer Rabbit and Bugs Bunny, and Reynard the Fox, or a human, like Papa Legba, Hermes or Loki.

Tricksters can be messengers between the living and the dead, or between humans and Gods, making them handy beings to call upon when special channels need opening. But, if you’re not careful, Tricksters can also make your journey much more difficult.

As an artist I am drawn to Trickster characters because they represent forces that tip the balance between chaos and order. While chaos can be unsettling, it can also lead to change, and in art, change is always good.

After moving to the West Coast, I started a more organized search for my birth father. I had a friend with access to an extensive computer database through his law office. This type of thing was not yet available to the average home user, I don’t think I even had my first Amiga computer yet. My friend entered every data point I could offer using name, birthdate, known addresses, whatever scraps of information I had about my father. We found a few possible subjects, I sent letters of inquiry, but got no replies. Trickster wasn’t going to make this easy for me, so I let the matter drop.

In 2018 I got inspired to try one of the new DNA testing sites. I didn’t expect much from it, but by then I had two daughters, so I thought at least I could find out some cool stuff about our genetic history that would be fun to know about.  

If you’ve never been on one of these sites* you fill out a bunch of information, send in a saliva sample, and within a few weeks you get a database of people related to you in varying degrees of genetic distance. Through this database I found a 2^nd cousin in Canada with a Slavic surname. Bingo. I contacted her through the app, asking if she had any relatives named “Svet,” and waited for a reply. And waited.

(((crickets)))

 Then, after about 2 months, she contacted me.

This cousin unpacked all the information I had been searching for. My dad wasn’t Russian, he was Ukrainian. His family emigrated to Canada from Khotyn. She then introduced me to another cousin who knew my birth father and had attended his funeral. That was a blow, but he also told me about siblings, nieces, nephews, and other extended family I never knew I had.

And, there was more. These cousins told me my father’s family carried a genetic mutation known as Lynch Syndrome. This mutation causes certain cancers to develop. As several of their (our) close family members had died from cancers associated with this mutation, they mentioned I “might” want to get tested for that.

I did get a genetic test, which revealed that I did have the Lynch Syndrome mutation, plus, fun bonus, I had stage 3B cancer. However, because of getting this warning in time, I was able to get treatment and survive.

This news also helped my (new) brother and sister (they had no idea Lynch Syndrome was even a thing) so they and their adult children got tested, pre-cancer, and now they are all taking precautions to stay cancer-free. So much winning!

Though I was frustrated by my failed attempts to learn about my father over the years, if I had gotten the information earlier I would not have been motivated to use the online genetic database which ultimately unlocked more mysteries than I knew I had.

The tricksters who played with my journey along the way led me through worlds of mythology and folklore, provided the basis for much of my artwork, introduced me to new family members, filled in the missing half of my personal history and, just in time, pulled me away from the edge of a cliff.

👉 The moral of the story is, when you think nothing is working, it might actually be working, just in different ways than you expect.

👉 1 in 279 people has Lynch Syndrome. Learn more here.

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