Trickster

The trickster is the archaic figure who is simultaneously destroyer and maker, buffoon and savior, phallic rogue and first culture-hero. He is ambivalent by structure, not by accident. In carl-jung‘s reading, the trickster is “a faithful copy of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level” (Jung 1954, para. 465; in the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious); he is a shadow-figure of the collective, a relic of an earlier stratum of mind preserved by the secret fascination the primitive state exerts upon civilized consciousness.

His signature is survival-by-repression. “Repressed contents are the very ones that have the best chance of survival,” Jung writes, “as we know from experience that nothing is corrected in the unconscious” (Jung 1954, para. 475). The trickster outlasts civilization precisely because civilization refuses him. He reappears as carnival, as the medieval devil simia dei (the ape of God), as the Feast of the Ass, as the student-society burlesque.

His arc is the Lineage’s pre-history of consciousness. In paul-radin‘s Winnebago text, wakdjunkaga begins undifferentiated — intestines and phallus wrapped around his body — and ends as an incipient culture-hero, though Radin refuses the sentimental reading and calls the ascent “a purely secondary addition” to an older figure (Radin 1956). What Jung reads behind this arc is a “faint adumbration of the savior” — the shadow that, when suffered and held, begins to point toward the self. The trickster is the figure in whom the ground of becoming first shows itself as an image.

Relationships

• shadow
• wakdjunkaga
• hermes
• culture-hero
• self

Primary sources

• radin-trickster-study-american (Radin 1956)
• the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious (Jung 1954)
• kernyi-hermes-guide-souls (Kerényi 1944)