--- slug: jung-trickster-bbfd9e03 title: "Jung on Trickster" author: "Carl Gustav Jung" work: "The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious" section: "" year: "1959" tradition: jungian-core themes: - trickster fragment: | He is a forerunner of the saviour, and, like him, God, man, and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness. Because of it he is deserted by his (evidently human) companions, which seems to indicate that he has fallen below their level of consciousness. He is so unconscious of himself that his body is not a unity, and his two hands fight each other. He takes his anus off and entrusts it with a special task. Even his sex is optional despite its phallic qualities: he can turn himself into a woman and bear children. From his penis he makes all kinds of useful plants. This is a reference to his original nature as a Creator, for the world is made from the body of a god. lead_in: "" reflection: | Jung is describing the trickster, and the phrase that carries the most weight is the one easiest to pass over: "his chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness." Not his shape-shifting, not his phallic creativity, not the grotesque detachable anus — all of that is symptom. The alarming thing is that he does not know what he is doing. His hands fight each other because no governing center has claimed them. He becomes a woman not out of wisdom or even desire but because the boundaries of his body are not yet settled into a self. This is what precedes the hero, precedes the saviour, precedes individuation in any register you want to use — a state before the ego has assembled itself from the field of competing impulses. The trickster does not suffer this consciously; he simply enacts it. And yet from his body the world is made. Jung is pointing at something the later tradition tends to recoil from: that creative act and undifferentiated chaos are not opposites here, they are the same event. The maker does not stand apart from the material in sovereign clarity. He is the material, still erupting, still unorganized, and the plants grow from his sex because he has not yet divided himself from the ground he fertilizes. reflection_v0_3: | The sentence worth pausing on is the one about unconsciousness as the Trickster's "chief and most alarming characteristic" — alarming is an unusual word for Jung to use without irony, and he means it. The Trickster is not unconscious the way a stone is unconscious; he is unconscious the way a power that once created the world is unconscious of what it is still doing. His body fails to cohere — hands at war, organs delegated, sex provisional — not from weakness but because differentiation has not yet occurred. Edinger reads this structure as the primordial ego before the ego-Self axis has formed: everything is potential, nothing is yet itself. What makes the Trickster genuinely alarming, though, is that this stage never fully passes. It goes underground. The question the passage leaves is whether the creative penis that becomes useful plants and the anus entrusted with its special task are figures of embarrassment or of instruction about where generativity actually hides. parent_id: Jung_1959_The_Archetypes_and_the_Collective__par0107 source: oracle-v3-retrieve generated: 2026-04-17 regenerated: 2026-04-18 prompt_version: v2.7 status: draft --- Jung writes: > He is a forerunner of the saviour, and, like him, God, man, and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness. Because of it he is deserted by his (evidently human) companions, which seems to indicate that he has fallen below their level of consciousness. He is so unconscious of himself that his body is not a unity, and his two hands fight each other. He takes his anus off and entrusts it with a special task. Even his sex is optional despite its phallic qualities: he can turn himself into a woman and bear children. From his penis he makes all kinds of useful plants. This is a reference to his original nature as a Creator, for the world is made from the body of a god. — Carl Gustav Jung Jung is describing the trickster, and the phrase that carries the most weight is the one easiest to pass over: "his chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness." Not his shape-shifting, not his phallic creativity, not the grotesque detachable anus — all of that is symptom. The alarming thing is that he does not know what he is doing. His hands fight each other because no governing center has claimed them. He becomes a woman not out of wisdom or even desire but because the boundaries of his body are not yet settled into a self. This is what precedes the hero, precedes the saviour, precedes individuation in any register you want to use — a state before the ego has assembled itself from the field of competing impulses. The trickster does not suffer this consciously; he simply enacts it. And yet from his body the world is made. Jung is pointing at something the later tradition tends to recoil from: that creative act and undifferentiated chaos are not opposites here, they are the same event. The maker does not stand apart from the material in sovereign clarity. He is the material, still erupting, still unorganized, and the plants grow from his sex because he has not yet divided himself from the ground he fertilizes. --- Carl Gustav Jung · *The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious* · 1959