---
title: "Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms"
description: "The 1993 collection that put Radin's trickster on trial — six shared characteristics, essays across a dozen cultures, and the criticisms that keep the archetype honest."
author: "William J. Hynes & William G. Doty (eds.)"
year: 1993
shelf: myth-and-religion
purchase_url: https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Mythical+Trickster+Figures+Contours+Contexts+and+Criticisms+Hynes+Doty
content_type: book-commentary
related:
  - radin-trickster-study-american
  - angulo-coyotes-bones
  - lopez-pedraza-hermes
collections: []
key_takeaways:
  - "The trickster is a diagnostic cluster, not a universal archetype: six observable marks whose profanations reverse-map what a psyche or a culture actually holds sacred — including the addicted psyche."
  - "The book demotes Jung's trickster-as-shadow from master key to working hypothesis, modeling how a recovery library should hold every archetypal claim: as a heuristic forever revisable by the particulars of a single life."
  - "Ricketts's shaman/trickster polarity — surrender to Spirit versus self-sufficient wit — is the mythological blueprint of the recovery choice between submission and self-will."
references:
  - "Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms, edited by William J. Hynes and William G. Doty. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1993. ISBN 0-8173-0857-1."
  - "Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: GR524.M96 1993. First paperbound printing 1997."
glossary_terms:
  - trickster
  - archetype
  - liminality
  - hermes
  - shadow
scholar_prompts:
  - "When does a cross-cultural trickster comparison disclose a useful pattern, and when does it erase historical and cultural difference?"
  - "How do Hynes's six characteristics function differently from a claim that the trickster is a universal archetype?"
  - "What does the opposition between shamanic surrender and trickster self-sufficiency contribute to a psychology of self-will?"
seo_title: "Mythical Trickster Figures: Hynes & Doty Review"
seo_description: "Hynes and Doty's 1993 collection audits Radin and Jung: six trickster characteristics, cross-cultural essays, and why the archetype survives only as heuristic."
---

**This Is the Volume Where Trickster Scholarship Audits Itself**

Every library that shelves Paul Radin's The Trickster eventually needs the book that talked back to it. This 1993 collection is that book: thirteen essays grown out of five years of collaboration among more than forty scholars in the American Academy of Religion's Trickster Myth Group, taking Radin's Winnebago portrait as both foundation and problem. The editors steer deliberately between two failure modes — the universalist who hears one archetypal voice in every culture's trickster and the particularist who forbids comparison altogether — and their sharpest break is with Radin's own famous appendices. Where the 1955 volume gave Carl Jung and Karl Kerényi the closing word, Hynes and Doty announce that "we do not argue for archetypal roots in a transcendental human psyche," shifting the question from origins in the psyche to manifestations in culture. What follows is a field-wide self-audit conducted in public: Ananse among the Akan, Eshu and Legba in West Africa, Hermes in Greece, Susa-no-o in Japan, Coyote across Native North America, Saint Peter refigured as trickster in Yaqui and medieval folklore, the Hasidic jester Herschel — each examined inside its own belief system before any general claim is allowed to stand.

**Six Marks Offered as a Map, Never a Definition**

The collection's most durable export is Hynes's third chapter, the heuristic typology that trickster studies still cites. He begins by naming the paradox of the whole enterprise: "to define (de-finis) is to draw borders around phenomena, and tricksters seem amazingly resistant to such capture; they are notorious border breakers." What he offers instead of a definition is a cluster of six recurring marks: the fundamentally ambiguous and anomalous personality; the deceiver and trick-player; the shape-shifter; the situation-invertor; the messenger and imitator of the gods; and the sacred and lewd bricoleur, the improviser who turns obscenity into holiness and back again. No single figure need show all six — a preponderance signals the type. Along the way Hynes formulates the collection's most clinically useful principle, a law of proportionality: "the more sacred a belief, the more likely is the trickster to be found profaning it." Profanation is therefore a reversed map of the sacred, a camera obscura in which a culture's — or a psyche's — deepest commitments appear upside down but in exact outline. Read this way, the trickster stops being a character and becomes a diagnostic instrument: find what is being mocked, inverted, and defiled, and you have found what the system actually worships.

**The Jungian Archetype Is Put on Trial and Survives Only as a Heuristic**

For a depth-psychology library the decisive material is the frame-audit of the final chapter, "Inconclusive Conclusions: Tricksters — Metaplayers and Revealers." Hynes runs the figure through six interpretive lenses — entertainment, ritual vent for social frustration, reaffirmation of belief, psychic explorer, agent of creativity, metaplayer — and treats the Jungian reading as one lens among several rather than the master key. He renders Jung's account of the trickster as shadow and as vestige of an earlier state of consciousness fairly, then lets the particularists strike. T. O. Beidelman's reprinted critique lands the hardest blow: "this term is clearly the product of the analysts' ethnocentric evaluations of deviance and disorder." Yet even Beidelman, Hynes observes, cannot do without the word, and the chapter settles on middle terms — a shorthand, a heuristic — under which one may still speak carefully of a trickster figure so long as every generalization remains revisable by the next ethnography. Readers of the trickster essay in Jung's Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious should treat this chapter as the loyal opposition: it does not abolish the archetype, it demotes it to a working hypothesis, which is precisely the posture a working clinician needs.

**Shaman and Trickster Stand at Opposite Poles of the Religious Life**

Mac Linscott Ricketts's essay gives the collection its deepest thesis for a psychology of recovery. Building the shamanic side of his contrast explicitly on Eliade — the chapter leans on Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy for its morphology of ecstatic initiation — Ricketts argues that shaman and trickster represent two diametrically opposed spiritualities cohabiting the same cultures. The shaman surrenders: called, dismembered, remade by the spirits, thereafter a mediator of powers acknowledged as greater than himself. The trickster refuses the entire vertical arrangement: "the trickster looks to no 'power' outside himself, but sets out to subdue the world by his wits and his wit." When the trickster imitates shamanic flight he crashes to earth; when he performs the healing songs the patient worsens or dies. For a recovery library this polarity reads as clinical allegory. The predicament the Twelve-Step tradition names self-will — the attempt to engineer transcendence without surrender — is the trickster's predicament exactly, and Ricketts supplies the comparative evidence that mockery and awe, self-sufficiency and submission, are not modern inventions but the two primordial religious options between which every addict still oscillates.

**The Methodological Conscience of This Library's Trickster Shelf**

This estate already holds the texts this volume audits: Radin's The Trickster with its Jung and Kerényi commentaries, and, downstream of it, Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World, which carried the cross-cultural generalization into the literary mainstream. Mythical Trickster Figures belongs between them as the shelf's conscience — the book that tests, mark by mark and culture by culture, what the other two assert. Its warrant for a depth-psychology-of-recovery library is stated in Hynes's own conclusion: "the trickster reminds us that every construct is constructed." Recovery is, among other things, the collapse and rebuilding of a lived construct — a drinking self dismantled, a sober self improvised from whatever lies at hand, bricolage in the strictest sense. The trickster names the energy on both sides of that hinge: the con-artistry of active addiction, with its shape-shifting, its situation-inverting, its profanation of exactly what the addict holds most sacred, and the improvisational genius of early sobriety. But the language stays honest only when held the way this book holds it — as a cluster of observable marks, proportional to the sacredness it profanes, forever revisable, never inflated into cosmic necessity. This is the volume that grants the library scholarly permission to speak of the trickster of addiction, and that names the price of the permission: particularity first, archetype last.