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.