The Seba library treats Buffoon in 5 passages, across 3 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Jung, C.G., Radin, Paul).
No, I cannot leave the battlefield defeated. I want to seize you, crush you, monkey, buffoon. Woe if the struggle is unequal, my hands grab at air.
Jung addresses the soul's demonic mask directly as 'monkey, buffoon,' making the Buffoon a name for the banal, mediocre, trickster-devil aspect of the unconscious that the ego must confront and wrestle in the underworld of active imagination.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
the rope-dancer was the mind or intellect of Nietzsche insofar as Nietzsche is identified with it, and the buffoon would be the shadow who jumps over him.
Mrs. Jung proposes — and Jung endorses — that the Buffoon in Zarathustra is the shadow-figure whose leap over the rope-dancer prophesies Nietzsche's mental collapse, making the Buffoon the destructive inferior function that overcomes the overreaching intellect.
, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, 1988thesis
the European analogy of the carnival in the medieval Church, with its reversal of the hierarchic order … the medieval description of the devil as simia dei (the ape of God), and in his characterization in folklore as the 'simpleton' who is 'fooled' or 'cheated.'
Jung situates the Buffoon-adjacent figures — the carnival fool, the devil-as-ape, the cheated simpleton — within the broader trickster archetype, showing that the Buffoon's structural role is to invert hierarchy and expose the shadow beneath order.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
his fondness for sly jokes and malicious pranks, his powers as a shape-shifter, his dual nature, half animal, half divine, his exposure to all kinds of tortures, and — last but not least — his approximation to the figure of a saviour.
Radin's trickster commentary, paralleling Jung's, establishes the archetypal continuum from buffoon to saviour, demonstrating that the clownish, self-degrading figure carries latent redemptive potential within American Indian mythological cycles.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
Picasso changes shape and reappears in the underworld form of the tragic Harlequin — a motif that runs through numerous paintings. It may be remarked in passing that Harlequin is an ancient chthonic god.
Jung identifies the Harlequin — the comedic, buffoon-adjacent figure — as a chthonic archetype through which the artist descends into the unconscious underworld, linking the clown-mask to the nekyia and to psychic transformation.
, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 1966supporting