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.