The Trickster occupies a privileged and contested position in the depth-psychological corpus, functioning simultaneously as mythological datum, anthropological specimen, and analytic concept. Paul Radin's foundational 1956 study, augmented by commentaries from Karl Kerényi and C. G. Jung, established the essential terms of debate: the Trickster is an 'inchoate being of undetermined proportions,' pre-moral and pre-social, whose mythic cycle traces a trajectory from undifferentiated appetite toward something approaching cultural consciousness. Kerényi reads the figure as the 'spirit of disorder,' cosmologically necessary for the completeness of order itself; Jung locates him within the structure of the collective psyche, aligning him with the alchemical Mercurius and with a residue of archaic shadow that survives into modernity through carnival, folklore, and the figure of the devil as 'simia dei.' The major tension in the corpus runs between anthropological particularity — the Winnebago Wakdjunkaga with his detachable penis, his quarreling arms, his serial humiliations — and psychological universalism, which abstracts the figure into an archetype of unindividuated libido. A secondary tension concerns the Trickster's moral valence: he bestows culture-gifts only inadvertently, is duped as readily as he dupes, and resists reduction to either devil or hero. His significance for depth psychology lies precisely in this irreducibility: he marks the limit of ego-controlled meaning.
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13 substantive passages
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.
Jung's commentary identifies the alchemical Mercurius as the European analogue of the Trickster, cataloguing defining traits — shape-shifting, dual nature, suffering, and paradoxical salvific potential — that constitute the archetype's psychological profile.
Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956thesis
Disorder belongs to the totality of life, and the spirit of this disorder is the trickster. His function in an archaic society, or rather the function of his mythology, of the tales told about him, is to add disorder to order and so make a whole.
Kerényi argues that the Trickster's mythological function is constitutive rather than merely transgressive: disorder is not the opposite of cosmic order but its necessary complement, and the Trickster is its personification and ritual vehicle.
Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956thesis
he is primarily an inchoate being of undetermined proportions, a figure foreshadowing the shape of man. Laughter, humour and irony permeate everything Trickster does. The reaction of the audience in aboriginal societies to both him and his exploits is prevailingly one of laughter tempered by awe.
Radin's prefatory characterization establishes the Trickster's defining ontological ambiguity — neither animal nor fully human, neither comic nor simply sacred — and the affective double register of laughter and awe that his myths consistently produce.
Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956thesis
It is not true that mythological beings, when they fail to fit the concept of gods made to our own theological measure, must necessarily be dethroned antagonists—in other words, 'devils'. They are neither devilish nor ar[chaic gods].
Kerényi rejects the reductive theological interpretation that would assimilate the Trickster to a fallen deity or devil, insisting on the figure's sui generis status outside normative theological binaries.
Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956thesis
Suddenly he must have sprung forth, the trickster behind all tricksters, and have been there so compellingly that all who heard tell of him recognized him at once as the figure whom the story-teller had in mind.
Kerényi advances a hypothesis of spontaneous archetypal emergence, positing a primordial Trickster behind all cultural variants whose immediate recognizability attests to a universal psychic substrate.
Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956thesis
In the playful cruelties which the little god practised on the tortoise and sacrificial cows at his first theft, and which conferred no benefit on mankind (at least for a long time to come), we see the sly face of the trickster grinning at us.
Kerényi's comparative analysis connects the Winnebago Trickster to the Homeric Hermes, arguing that the trickster face precedes and partially underlies even the beneficent Promethean figure in Greek mythology.
Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
Wakdjunkaga has as yet developed no sense of true sex differentiation is made still clearer by the episode where he transforms himself into a woman. Penis, cohabitation are only symbols here; no sense of concrete reality is attached to them.
Radin interprets the Trickster's sexual escapades as expressions of undifferentiated, pre-symbolic libido rather than genuine eroticism, positioning the cycle as a narrative of gradual psychic differentiation.
Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
Where he is a full trickster he does not, except secondarily and unconsciously, bestow benefaction upon mankind. Among the Ponca he is called Ishtinike, and he is in appearance like the Winnebago trickster Wakdjunkaga.
Radin distinguishes the 'full' Trickster, who confers cultural benefits only incidentally and unconsciously, from partial trickster figures who are more deliberately beneficent, establishing a typological spectrum within the category.
Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
In the midst of these operations suddenly his left arm grabbed the buffalo. 'Give that back to me, it is mine! Stop that or I will use my knife on you!' So spoke the right arm.
The episode of the Trickster's warring arms dramatizes the mythological motif of radical inner incoherence: the figure lacks integrated selfhood to the degree that his own body parts act as autonomous antagonists.
Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
the myth opens with a description of the death of a much beloved son, for whom his parents mourn ceaselessly under the scaffold-bed upon which the body of the dead youth has been deposited.
Radin's Tsimshian parallel illustrates the process by which Trickster figures are elevated toward divine status, absorbing resurrection and messianic motifs that sit uneasily alongside their characteristic amorality.
Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
it may be that the publishers were right in thinking that the sensibility of one who finds himself in daily contact with the mythological material that lies closest to us—the Greek—might be able to offer something of more general interest.
Kerényi situates his commentary as a comparative mythologist's reading across traditions, using Greek mythology as a lens that both illuminates and is itself reframed by the Winnebago Trickster material.
Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
'To get frightened,' implies the beginning of awareness of wrong, a vague conscience. That is, the east. The Winnebago conceive our world to be an oval-shaped island.
Radin's annotations to the myth text identify nascent moral awareness in the Trickster's occasional fright as a significant developmental marker within the cycle's implicit teleology.
Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956aside
Sam Blowsnake was facile of speech, sociable, superficial, self-important, possessed of very little religious feeling and with little interest in the past. He had, however, great literary gifts and a fluent style.
Radin's account of his Winnebago informants' contrasting temperaments contextualizes textual variation in the Trickster cycle as a function of individual narrator personality, raising questions about authorship and transmission.
Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956aside