---
slug: radin-trickster-8fdb580e
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 so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams. As soon as people get together in masses and submerge the individual, the shadow is mobilized, and, as history shows, may even be personified and incarnated.
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  Radin is describing a forgetting that looks like progress. The trickster gets retired as civilization advances — filed under folklore, under superstition, under the embarrassing past — and what replaces him is the fiction of a self that has outgrown such figures. This is not innocence. It is a specific achievement, costly, and the cost is precisely what Radin names: the shadow, left unacknowledged, does not dissolve. It migrates. It waits for the conditions under which individual accountability dissolves too, and those conditions are crowds, movements, ideologies, any formation large enough to absorb a person into something that feels like more than a person.
  
  What makes this observation still uncomfortable is that the mobilization Radin describes does not require malice. It requires only the ordinary human relief of not being singular anymore — of belonging, of the burden of selfhood temporarily lifted. The trickster, when he was still visible, made that relief impossible; he kept disrupting the story of the coherent, responsible self. His disappearance did not make the shadow smaller. It made the shadow patient.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The claim worth pressing here is the one Jung makes without pausing to defend it: that forgetting produces danger, not safety. The civilized man assumes the trickster has simply been outgrown, that irony and metaphor are signs of mastery over the old chaos. Jung's counter-move is to show that metaphor is not distance — it is the last membrane between consciousness and a force it no longer recognizes as its own. The mobilization of the shadow in masses is not an eruption of something alien; it is the return of exactly what was dismissed as harmless. Hillman would push this further and say the trickster was never meant to be integrated — that he serves the psyche best when he remains ungoverned, a permanent irritant to every settled meaning. But Jung's urgency here is political as much as psychological: the century he had lived through was itself the evidence. Something you thought you had ironized past can still find a body to wear.
parent_id: Radin_1956_The_Trickster_A_Study_in__par0092
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Radin writes:

> The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams. As soon as people get together in masses and submerge the individual, the shadow is mobilized, and, as history shows, may even be personified and incarnated.

— Paul Radin

Radin is describing a forgetting that looks like progress. The trickster gets retired as civilization advances — filed under folklore, under superstition, under the embarrassing past — and what replaces him is the fiction of a self that has outgrown such figures. This is not innocence. It is a specific achievement, costly, and the cost is precisely what Radin names: the shadow, left unacknowledged, does not dissolve. It migrates. It waits for the conditions under which individual accountability dissolves too, and those conditions are crowds, movements, ideologies, any formation large enough to absorb a person into something that feels like more than a person.

What makes this observation still uncomfortable is that the mobilization Radin describes does not require malice. It requires only the ordinary human relief of not being singular anymore — of belonging, of the burden of selfhood temporarily lifted. The trickster, when he was still visible, made that relief impossible; he kept disrupting the story of the coherent, responsible self. His disappearance did not make the shadow smaller. It made the shadow patient.

---

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