The God of Trickery is an icon of civilization. Genesis tells us that “God created mankind in his own image.” A little thought should make you realize that the inverse is the way it actually happened. Mankind created God, or “gods”, in his own image. And the essential core of what mankind is, more than speech, tool-making, or even self-awareness, is a trickster.

Thomas Suddendorf, a professor of psychology in Australia writing in Scientific American, summarized the indispensable difference between mankind and animals as “nested scenario building” combined with a primal urge to communicate with others. We can imagine anything and we have an urge to tell, and listen, to others about what we imagine.

That sounds right, but incomplete. The part left out is what we do with this all-powerful difference.

I will never know what another person thinks. And that other person will never know what I think. So valuable is the ability to become the trickster that examples exist throughout the whole empire of living things. From spiders masquerading as moths to Greeks building giant wooden horses for Trojans, trickery is part of being alive. But only our species does it using Suddendorf’s differences. The spider does not imagine a plan to trick moths. The spider doesn’t learn how to trick moths from another spider. But the Greeks planned a way to trick the Trojans. Homer felt an all powerful compulsion to tell the whole world about it.

So, let us celebrate the trickster – the master of all the gods, past, present, and future – and the essence of what it means to be human.