Wakdjunkaga

Wakdjunkaga — “the foolish one” — is the trickster of the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) people, and the protagonist of the cycle paul-radin recorded in 1912 from the raconteur Sam Blowsnake and published, with commentaries by carl-jung and karl-kerenyi, as radin-trickster-study-american (1956). He is the single most extensively documented trickster figure available to the depth tradition in primary-source form.

Radin’s text introduces him as “an inchoate being of undetermined proportions, a figure foreshadowing the shape of man” — not yet a human being, not yet not one. In the earliest episodes his body is barely his own: he wears his intestines wrapped around his torso and a penis equally long and equally wrapped (Radin 1956). He has no fixed animal form; he can appear as raven, coyote, hare, or spider, but these are secondary. His constitutive traits are phallic, voracious, sly, and stupid — “the spirit of disorder, the enemy of boundaries” (Radin 1956).

His arc is a slow desocialization and a slower re-entry into the human world. He is eventually “deserted by everyone and alone; alone, that is, as far as human beings and society are concerned. With the world of nature he is still in close contact. He calls all objects… younger brothers” (Radin 1956). The cycle ends with his ascent, though Radin reads this tail as secondary — a later graft of culture-hero piety onto an older, wilder figure. What survives beneath the graft is the pre-human: the condition out of which the human emerges.

Relationships

Primary sources

radin-trickster-study-american (Radin 1956)