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 level 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.
— Paul Radin
Radin's image of the old river-bed is doing something a purely historical argument cannot do: it refuses to separate the channel from the current. The bed is not a fossil. Water still moves through it, which means the form that shaped that passage remains active in shaping the flow — unseen, underfoot, structuring everything that appears on the surface as fresh and spontaneous.
The trickster survives because he names something the civilized apparatus keeps needing to manage: the part of the psyche that will not cooperate with the projects of ascent. His stupidity is not incidental — it is the precise inversion of the claim that more knowledge, more refinement, more spirit will eventually resolve the mess. He keeps arriving at the feast in the wrong clothes, eating the wrong food, sleeping with the wrong person, and none of the disaster can be pinned on ignorance alone. He knows. He does it anyway. That is the embarrassment he embodies for any psychology organized around development, progress, or the higher self.
What persists in Radin's image is not nostalgia for pre-civilized thought but something more uncomfortable: the recognition that the old bed was cut for a reason, and the water did not agree to find another route when the banks were formalized.
Paul Radin·The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology·1956