---
title: A Jaime de Angulo Reader
description: "Bob Callahan's 1979 one-volume gateway to Jaime de Angulo — Indians in Overalls, The Lariat, Don Bartolomeo, and the Coyote poems — the alcoholic trickster-ethnographer who joined Jung's consulting room to the sagebrush religion of Native California."
author: Jaime de Angulo
year: 1979
shelf: myth-and-religion
purchase_url: https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=A+Jaime+de+Angulo+Reader+Jaime+de+Angulo
content_type: book-commentary
related:
  - de-angulo-old-time-stories
  - angulo-coyotes-bones
  - peterson-shadow-figure-light
collections: []
key_takeaways:
  - "De Angulo is the living case behind spiritus contra spiritum: a physician trained in Jungian psychiatry whose alcoholism and shamanic fieldwork show spirit-thirst and spirit-drink contending over a single life."
  - "The Pit River doctrine of wandering — losing your shadow and going wild until a power adopts you — maps the descent recovery must complete or die inside; addiction reads here as initiation interrupted."
  - "Indians in Overalls testifies that religion can precede symbol, priesthood, and ceremony entirely: a continuous religious experience of power in ordinary things, which is what recovery slowly rebuilds one day at a time."
references:
  - "A Jaime de Angulo Reader, edited by Bob Callahan. Berkeley: Turtle Island, for the Netzahaulcoyotl Historical Society, 1979. ISBN 0-913666-30-0. LCCN 78-59741."
  - "First paperback edition, designed by George Mattingly, set in Matthew Carter's Galliard type by Graham Mackintosh, Autumn 1979."
glossary_terms:
  - trickster
  - shamanism
  - addiction
  - ethnography
  - oral-tradition
scholar_prompts:
  - "How does Bob Callahan's selection construct the figure later remembered as Jaime de Angulo?"
  - "Where does de Angulo's identification with the outsider illuminate his material, and where might it distort the communities he describes?"
  - "How do the volume's changes of genre complicate the distinction between life history, ethnography, fiction, and myth?"
seo_title: "A Jaime de Angulo Reader | Trickster, Shamanism, Recovery"
seo_description: "The one-volume gateway to Jaime de Angulo: Indians in Overalls, The Lariat, Coyote tales — the trickster-ethnographer who links Jung to Native California."
---

**The One-Volume Portrait of American Anthropology's Great Wanderer**

*A Jaime de Angulo Reader* is the single best door into the strangest figure the Golden Age of American anthropology produced. Bob Callahan edited it for Turtle Island in 1979, working out of the Berkeley house Jaime and Nancy de Angulo once built, with de Angulo's daughter Guiomar living next door — an editorial situation closer to family stewardship than academic anthologizing. The selection runs the full arc: the early elegy *Five Thousand Years*, written as a steam shovel ate a Saklan shell mound on the Bay shore; the wounded 1922 first novel *Don Bartolomeo*; *La Costa del Sur* and *Don Gregorio*; the late poems of *Coyote's Bones*; and the two works Callahan names American masterpieces, *The Lariat* and *Indians in Overalls*; then a chronology that reads like picaresque. The life it frames beggars fiction: son of a Spanish don, arrived in America at eighteen to cowboy through Wyoming and Colorado, medical degree from Johns Hopkins in 1912, a cattle ranch among the Pit River people of Alturas in 1913, a 1920 Berkeley lectureship teaching one course on Jungian psychiatry and another on the mind of primitive man, seventeen Native languages mastered, a son killed beside him in a 1936 car wreck, hermit decades in Big Sur, cancer, and a final KPFA broadcast of *Indian Tales* the year before his death in 1950.

**Wandering Is the Book's Frame — and Its Author's Self-Diagnosis**

Callahan builds his introduction around de Angulo's own account of a Pit River phenomenon the Indians called, in English, wandering. A man under unbearable mental stress leaves camp without explanation, goes morose and uncommunicative, haunts mountaintops and canyon bottoms, throws rocks at the relatives who come looking. "People will probably say of such a man: 'He has lost his shadow.'" The cure is not consolation but completion: become wilder still, act the madman, climb the awful mountains, jump into cold crater lakes at night, until one of the whimsical tinihowi powers — indifferent to human suffering, susceptible only to liking your looks — adopts you. "When this happens, the wandering is over, and the Indian becomes a shaman." This is precisely the initiatory sickness Eliade's *Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy* catalogs from Siberia to the Americas: the election that presents as madness and resolves only in vocation. But Callahan will not let it remain ethnography. The ostracisms, the drinking, the tragic accident, the late years living in San Francisco's Chinatown — the introduction closes on the old people's verdict that all white men are wanderers, and that de Angulo, at the end, was trying to get home. The doctrine is the book's table of contents and its author's chart in one.

**Indians in Overalls Records Religion Before Symbol**

The memoir of the 1921 Achumawi field seasons, published months before de Angulo died, is the volume's spiritual center. He poses the paradox himself: a people with no ceremonies, no priesthood, no ritual, not the slightest conception of Godhead — and answers that, on the contrary, "the life of these Indians is nothing but a continuous religious experience," a spirit of wonder recognizing life as power loose in the world and condensed in every object. The text embodies the claim rather than arguing it: Blind Hall doctoring himself after an automobile knocked his shadow onto the road, calling his damaagomes — Raven, Bullsnake, Crablouse, the lying Jim Lizard — like a farmer calling cows home; Jack Folsom explaining luck in the sagebrush: "Must be a damn poor Indian without a dinihowi." Radin's *The Trickster* is the scholarly monument to this world, and Paul Radin was literally present — one of the two professors whose rented cabin beside de Angulo's Big Sur homestead in 1919 pulled him into anthropology. But where Radin systematizes the trickster cycle, de Angulo lets Coyote remain a person, told about beside winter fires among beings who all used to be people, long, long ago. For a depth library concerned with the psyche's animist substrate — what Jung called the objective psyche before it is domesticated into symbol systems — there is no better field report in American letters.

**The Jung and Pound Connections Make Him the Missing Link**

The Reader's apparatus quietly documents an extraordinary hinge between analytic Zurich and modernist America. *Don Bartolomeo* was written in the winter of 1922 after de Angulo's first wife, Cary Fink, left him for a Jungian analyst named Baynes and the Jungian community in Switzerland; as Cary F. Baynes she would translate the Wilhelm *I Ching*. It was Jung himself, Callahan reports, who placed *Don Bartolomeo* with a Boston editor for its 1925 serialization. The chronology goes further, recording de Angulo employed as Jung's translator among the Pueblo and crediting him with the conversations that surface in *Memories, Dreams, Reflections* — the Taos passages where an old priest tells Jung the whites are restless and mad. At the other end of the life stands Pound, corresponding from St. Elizabeths, strong-arming the *Hudson Review* into publishing *Indians in Overalls*, dispatching *Indian Tales* toward New York through Allen Ginsberg. Robert Duncan, the family typist in the final year, remembered the correspondence as two brilliant old cranks contemplating their absurd fates. The edition carries Pound's verdict as its cover blurb: "Jaime de Angulo is the American Ovid" — the poet of metamorphosis, of the porous boundary where men and animals exchange shapes.

**The Drunkard in the Ditch Is Why This Book Belongs in a Recovery Library**

De Angulo footnotes the university's refusal to preserve his wax-cylinder recordings with one acid sentence: "Decent anthropologists don't associate with drunkards who go rolling in ditches with shamans." It is his epitaph and his credential at once. He names himself the drunkard — boon companion to the shaman Sukmit, drunk together time and again — and his pages record what drink was already doing to the world he loved: at one healing, three drunken young men sing against the rhythm and the doctoring fails outright. Zoja's *Drugs, Addiction and Initiation* argues that addiction is the unconscious persistence of initiatory hunger in a culture that abolished initiation; de Angulo is that thesis walking around in chaps — a psychiatrically trained physician adopted deep enough into Achumawi life to be taught about dinihowi and wandering, who still wandered, still drank, still lost his shadow more than once, and completed his becoming only while dying. Jung would later tell Bill Wilson that the craving for alcohol is a low-level thirst for wholeness, spirits against Spirit; this Reader is the fullest portrait we have of a life stretched on exactly that rack. A depth psychology of recovery needs its diagnostic myths, but it also needs case histories, and de Angulo is the great American one: the trickster-ethnographer who carried the sagebrush religion to the threshold of the consulting room, and whose wandering shows what is being asked of anyone who must go wild enough to be found.