---
slug: radin-trickster-3e15d5fe
title: "Radin on Trickster"
author: "Paul Radin"
work: "The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology"
section: ""
year: "1956"
tradition: jungian-core
themes:
  - trickster
fragment: |
  The trickster is a collective shadow figure, an epitome of all the inferior traits of character in individuals. And since the individual shadow is never absent as a component of personality, the collective figure can construct itself out of it continually.
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  Radin's trickster is not a figure you encounter in myth and then leave there. The collective shadow is built from personal shadows the way a river is built from tributaries — each one small, each one real, and the current far more powerful than any single source. What the passage forces you to reckon with is the word "continually." The trickster doesn't arise once, at an origin, and persist as a cultural inheritance. It reconstructs itself, here, now, from what you are carrying today. The inferior traits don't accumulate in some communal archive; they feed the figure actively, which means the figure is never merely historical and never merely external.
  
  Jung's note — included in the same volume — resists the temptation to redeem the trickster by making him a symbol of development, even as he acknowledges that trajectory is possible. The more uncomfortable reading is simpler: the trickster is what happens when the shadow goes unacknowledged at scale. A community that refuses its inferior traits doesn't dissolve the figure — it inflates it, gives it more material to work with, makes it more autonomous and less visible at once. You do not escape the trickster by becoming more conscious. You change your relationship to what feeds him.
reflection_v0_3: |
  Jung assumes, without arguing it, that the collective and the individual shadow share the same substance — that myth builds itself upward from personal psychology rather than arriving from elsewhere and pressing down into it. It's worth pausing on that direction of travel. Hillman would resist it: for him, the figures of myth are not assembled from human leftovers but have their own autonomous reality, and treating them as collective composites risks flattening the image into a symptom. Yet what Jung earns with his model is explanatory staying power — the Trickster persists not because he is ancient but because the raw material is replenished from below, in every generation, by every person who has not yet met the worst of themselves. The figure cannot be exhausted because the supply is inexhaustible.
parent_id: Radin_1956_The_Trickster_A_Study_in__par0094
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Radin writes:

> The trickster is a collective shadow figure, an epitome of all the inferior traits of character in individuals. And since the individual shadow is never absent as a component of personality, the collective figure can construct itself out of it continually.

— Paul Radin

Radin's trickster is not a figure you encounter in myth and then leave there. The collective shadow is built from personal shadows the way a river is built from tributaries — each one small, each one real, and the current far more powerful than any single source. What the passage forces you to reckon with is the word "continually." The trickster doesn't arise once, at an origin, and persist as a cultural inheritance. It reconstructs itself, here, now, from what you are carrying today. The inferior traits don't accumulate in some communal archive; they feed the figure actively, which means the figure is never merely historical and never merely external.

Jung's note — included in the same volume — resists the temptation to redeem the trickster by making him a symbol of development, even as he acknowledges that trajectory is possible. The more uncomfortable reading is simpler: the trickster is what happens when the shadow goes unacknowledged at scale. A community that refuses its inferior traits doesn't dissolve the figure — it inflates it, gives it more material to work with, makes it more autonomous and less visible at once. You do not escape the trickster by becoming more conscious. You change your relationship to what feeds him.

---

Paul Radin · *The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology* · 1956