Within the depth-psychology corpus, and most fully in Paul Radin’s 1956 study of American Indian mythology, the Hare occupies a liminal position between two archetypal registers: the trickster and the culture-hero. Radin’s extended analysis of the Winnebago Hare cycle demonstrates that this figure cannot be neatly resolved into either category. As a partial trickster, Hare retains the impulsiveness, sexual transgression, and comic incompetence associated with the Wakdjunkaga type, yet his overarching mission — subduing dangerous animals, stealing fire and tobacco, instituting the Medicine Rite, and seeking immortality for humankind — aligns him with the redemptive culture-hero tradition. Radin argues that among the Winnebago and Iowa, the Hare figure has been deliberately ‘purged’ of his more anarchic qualities to make him conform to the culture-hero ideal, suggesting a conscious mythological reformation. The Hare’s persistent relational dyad with his Grandmother provides a structuring tension in the cycle: she scolds, corrects, and ultimately validates his exploits, functioning as a figure of cultural wisdom against which Hare’s unruly energy is measured. For depth psychology more broadly, the Hare stands as evidence that the trickster archetype exists on a developmental continuum, capable of progressive moral and social differentiation — a point Jung’s commentary on Radin’s volume amplifies in its reflections on the shadow and the emergence of ego-consciousness from instinctual chaos.
after we have definitely made up our mind that Hare is a true deity we have only to look at the exploits interpolated into his saga proper… to realize that he is a typical trickster.
Radin identifies the central interpretive paradox: Hare functions simultaneously as deity and trickster, and the question of which identity is primary or whether both are co-original is the governing problem of the cycle’s analysis.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956thesis
among the Winnebago and Iowa the character of Hare has been purged in order to make him conform more perfectly to the picture of a true culture-hero.
Radin concludes that the Winnebago and Iowa cycles represent a deliberate mythological reformation in which Hare’s trickster elements were suppressed to elevate him into an unambiguous culture-hero.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956thesis
The most important of these myth-cycles were those connected with Trickster, Hare, Red Horn, the Twins and the Two Boys.
Radin situates the Hare cycle within the broader taxonomy of Winnebago mythological cycles, establishing its status as one of the primary organizing narrative structures of the tradition.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
Hare asked the elk first, ‘How do you wish to live?’ and the elk answered, ‘I wish to live by eating human beings.’ So Hare asked him to show his teeth.
This episode illustrates Hare’s culture-hero function — subduing dangerous animals and rendering them available as human food — through cunning rather than brute force.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
Then Hare thought to himself, ‘Now the people will live peacefully and forever.’ But the old woman, his grandmother, said, ‘Grandson, your talk makes me sad.’
Hare’s aspiration to grant immortality to humankind is immediately checked by his grandmother’s invocation of mortality as cosmological necessity, illustrating the limit of the culture-hero’s transformative power.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
‘Grandmother, the arrow would not obey me and so I could not kill an elk. I pleaded with it repeatedly but still it would not go.’
Hare’s ignorance of the bow demonstrates his original incompetence and dependence on his grandmother’s instruction, a trickster trait that coexists with his heroic mission.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
Hare cried, ‘Hiyi! Hiyi!’ and chased the old man all over the earth. As he ran, he scattered his tobacco all over the ground. Finally Hare caught up with him and killed him.
The theft of tobacco episode combines comic pursuit with a genuine benefactive act — securing a cultural resource for humankind — exemplifying Hare’s hybrid trickster-hero nature.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
‘I believe you could get it for you are a smart and clever fellow. If you get it for me I will give you the power to order things about as I do and you will then be able to pass on that power to your uncles and aunts.’
Hare is commissioned as a heroic agent to recover a stolen scalp, with the promise that success will extend magical power to the human community — a classically culture-hero narrative structure.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
Thereupon Hare went home and told his grandmother about it. The old woman scolded him and he threatened her but, at the end, as usual, she thanked him.
The recurrent grandmother-Hare dynamic — scolding followed by gratitude — functions as a structural formula marking the ambivalent social validation of Hare’s transgressive heroism.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
‘You tried to abuse people. From now on the people will call you fast-fish and when they step into the water you will nibble at their ankles.’
Hare defeats monstrous bodiless heads and transforms them into harmless fish, an etiological act that merges trickster cleverness with the culture-hero’s mission of making the world safe for human habitation.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
Hare took out one of his eyes and leaving it outside entered the lodge and stayed with his grandmother all night.
Hare’s self-disguise as a one-eyed suitor for his own grandmother is a classic trickster transgression — a violation of kinship taboo enacted through grotesque bodily manipulation.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
He had been told not to call for anything four times in succession and yet he had done it.
Hare’s compulsive violation of the specific injunction against calling four times reflects the trickster’s constitutive inability to observe limits, even when granted divine powers.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
Hare struck him dead. He skinned him and put the skin over himself and thus he was exactly like the Jung chief in appearance.
Hare’s killing and impersonation of the Jung chief through donning his skin is a trickster motif of lethal shape-shifting employed in service of a heroic infiltration mission.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
‘Oh, you evil old woman, I will shoot you and burn you up also,’ he answered. ‘Ah, grandson, I only said that in fun. I am really glad.’
The comedic exchange of threats and retractions between Hare and his grandmother illustrates the conventional formulaic register in which the cycle negotiates between transgression and social reintegration.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956aside
Hare gives her the hind end, which she really wishes but which she is afraid to ask for because it contains Bear’s penis.
This annotation reveals the latent sexual symbolism within the Hare-grandmother-Bear triangle, pointing to suppressed erotic content that the cycle narratively displaces.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956aside
‘Hare, come and untie me; Hare come untie me! Hare, what will the people do?’
The singing captive’s appeal to Hare implicitly frames him as the designated liberator of the world, reinforcing his culture-hero identity even within an episodic trickster context.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956aside