Now if the myth were nothing but an historical remnant, one would have to ask why it has not long since vanished into the great rubbish-heap of the past, and why it continues to make its influence felt on the highest levels of civilization, even where, on account of his stupidity and grotesque scurrility, the trickster no longer plays the role of a "delight-maker." In many cultures his figure seems like an old river-bed in which the water still flows. One can see this best of all from the fact that the trickster motif does not crop up only in its mythical form but appears just as naïvely and authentically in the unsuspecting modern man-whenever, in fact, he feels himself at the mercy of annoying "accidents" which thwart his will and his actions with apparently malicious intent. He then speaks of "hoodoos" and "jinxes" or of the "mischievousness of the object." Here the trickster is represented by counter-tendencies in the unconscious, and in certain cases by a sort of second personality, of a puerile and inferior character, not unlike the personalities who announce themselves at spiritualistic séances and cause all those ineffably childish phenomena so typical of poltergeists. I have, I think, found a suitable designation for this character-component when I called it the shadow.
— Carl Gustav Jung
Jung's river-bed image is doing something precise here: the trickster persists not because cultures preserve it deliberately but because something in the psyche keeps generating it from below, the way water finds old channels. The figure doesn't need curators. It resurfaces wherever a person finds their plans mysteriously sabotaged, their objects perversely uncooperative, their best intentions somehow arriving at the worst possible moment. The folk-speech is telling — "jinxes," "hoodoos," "the mischievousness of the object" — because it locates agency outside the self, in a world gone slightly hostile. That misattribution is precisely the trickster's mode of operation.
What Jung is tracking in this passage is the specific way the shadow announces itself before anyone knows it is the shadow. The accidents are not accidents; the obstruction is interior, a second personality running counter-purposes. The puerile, inferior character he names here is not incidental — inferiority is structurally necessary, because what the ego has refused to be tends to reconstitute itself in diminished, sideways, embarrassing forms. The trickster is what the well-constructed self leaks. You encounter it most purely not in mythology seminars but in the moment you catch yourself having done, again, the thing you were absolutely certain you would not do.
Carl Gustav Jung·The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious·1959