Culture Hero

The culture hero is the ethnographic category Radin names for the mythic figure who establishes the conditions of ordered life — who brings fire, teaches agriculture, institutes marriage, defeats the monsters that made the land uninhabitable. In the Winnebago materials the role is carried partly by the Hare cycle and partly, more ambiguously, by wakdjunkaga himself: “Trickster is represented as the creator of the world and the establisher of culture” (Radin 1956), while remaining the figure who steals, defecates, dismembers himself, and undoes every boundary.

Kerényi sharpens the distinction against the Greek material. Prometheus is the culture-hero proper — “the benefactor of mankind” — while Hermes is the trickster who “has both [self-interest and playfulness], when he discovers fire and sacrifice before Prometheus did — without, however, bothering about mankind” (Kerényi 1956, p. 181). The Winnebago cycle collapses the two functions into one figure: Wakdjunkaga is “a combination of Hermes and Heracles even more than of Prometheus and Epimetheus” (Kerényi 1956). The collapse is itself data. It shows that the culture-hero and the trickster are functions before they are persons — roles the archaic imagination distributes now across separate figures (Prometheus vs. Hermes), now concentrated in one (Wakdjunkaga).

For the depth reading, the culture-hero is the shadow already moralized into benefactor. The trickster is the culture-hero before moralization. The two stand at either end of a single developmental axis along which the same energy — disorder, cunning, metamorphic will — is either bound into service of the community or released as pure disruption.

Relationships

Primary sources

radin-trickster-study-american (Radin 1956; Kerényi 1956 commentary, pp. 181–185)
the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious (Jung 1959, §§456–488)