5 Divine Pranks Pulled By Gods

5 Hermes’ Looney Tunes Cattle Heist

Cattle rustling is a dangerous business even when they’re regular heifers. When they’re the sacred cattle of the god Apollo? You’re playing with real fire. 

Not that it stopped Hermes, who stole away a hundred of Apollo’s cattle with a scheme straight out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. He reversed the hooves on all the cattle's feet before leading them away, which is very fun even if not particularly effective, given that somebody who just lost 100 cattle is probably going to follow any large set of tracks no matter where the hooves are facing. 

To be fair to Hermes, he had just been born hours earlier. So not a bad plan for a baby.

4 Maui Uses the Old ‘Log Shaped Like Me’ Trick

Maui, the trickster demigod responsible for a huge amount of human essentials like sun and land to Polynesians, is also given credit for learning how to make fire. 

The tale goes that Maui wanted to learn firemaking, so he followed a plume of smoke only to see a hen with a fire. He decided to camp out and figure out how she made it, but the hen saw a Maui-less canoe and figured out he must be sneaking around. Thus, he pulled the HOV lane classic and propped up a log that looked like him in the boat, tricking the hen into thinking he was floating far away. Then, Maui just straight up choked her out until she told him how to make fire, which, to be honest, feels like it could have been plan A.

3 Prometheus Tricks Zeus Out of a Quality Meal

Prometheus is another noted fire stealer, but he also bamboozled Zeus out of a sacrifice by splitting it into two piles. One was all the best bits of the animal, but hidden under guts and other unpleasantries. The other was just bones, but covered in fat. Asking Zeus which he wanted, Zeus chose the fat-covered bones, only to see that he'd given up all the choice cuts. 

Some variants of this legend say that Zeus knew all along, and only let Prometheus “fool” him so that he could harshly punish Prometheus and the humans for it, which is exactly what you’d say if you were so easily duped.

2 Eshu Sows Hat-Based Chaos

The Yoruba trickster god Eshu has one story that’s the absolute best kind of prank — harmless and incredibly dumb. His plan was simple: He would walk between two groups of people wearing a special hat that was black on one side and red on the other. Then, the seeds planted, he would wait for somebody to mention the color of the hat he’d just been wearing, and watch these two groups become mentally shattered because they saw things so differently. That’s when he would step in and dispense the very middle-school level wisdom that “things look different from different perspectives.” 

1 Loki Has Sex With A Horse

Loki is a master trickster, a titan (not literally) in the field. That said, this wasn’t his finest work. The Norse gods recruited Loki for his trademark trickery when they found themselves in a pinch: They’d agreed to give the sun, the moon and the goddess Freya to a giant and his stallion who promised to build a wall around Asgard, as long as he finished before summer. They assumed this was an impossible task, but as is so often true when a weirdo walks up to the gods and makes a deal, the giant was secretly capable of it. 

The gods needed a delay, and so, they sent Loki, who turned into a mare, did kissy eyes at the giant’s stallion and decimated their work schedule by replacing it with passionate horse-on-god-pretending-to-be-horse sex. Sex that Loki became pregnant from, and gave birth to the eight-legged horse Sleipnir. 

Got him good… I guess?