Pa Padir is a Malaysian Trickster myth, a compilation of anecdotes about a man who repeatedly acts without thinking. He takes the least amount of information to complete a task and often finds himself in varying degrees of peril. A wonderful definition of the purpose of a Trickster Myth was written by Samuel M Wilson in "Natural History" in 1991:Like most myths and folk tales, the trickster tales encode varying values and ideas, and some of these are specific to particular cultures. Yet the same themes are played out in strikingly similar ways throughout the world because the trickster tales deal with issues of universal human experience-family interactions, competition, struggles against authority, love, and death. The many sides to the trickster's personality make him especially useful to the storyteller: some tales emphasize the trickster's spiritual side and others his material side; some his role as creator and some as mean-spirited destroyer. The psychologist Carl Jung saw in the trickster a primordial figure who transcends humankind's conceptual boundaries between gods and mortals; who moves freely between the worlds of gods and humans and plays tricks on both.
I love this definition of a Trickster Myth because it clarifies that a trickster is usually immortal and bound to repeat his eccentricity again and again to show various examples of mistakes and misfortunes due to our actions.
