Trickster as Collective Shadow

The figure of the trickster — Wakdjunkaga of the Winnebago, Hermes of the Greeks, Loki of the Norse, Coyote of the Plains — is the collective shadow in mythic personification. carl-jung, commenting on paul-radin‘s The Trickster (1956), formulates the relation with precision: “the split-off personality is not just a random one, but stands in a complementary or compensatory relationship to the ego personality. It is a personification of traits of character which are sometimes worse and sometimes better than those the ego personality possesses. A collective personification like the trickster is the product of a totality of individuals and is welcomed by the individual as something known to him” (Radin 1956, Jung’s commentary).

The trickster is the shadow before it has been moralized. He is greedy, foolish, obscene, cruel — and simultaneously creative, life-giving, the bringer of culture and fire. The mythic imagination refuses to resolve him into saint or devil. This refusal is itself load-bearing for the depth-psychological reading: the shadow, as Jung and marie-louise-von-franz elaborate it, is not simply evil that must be conquered but complex material that must be recognized.

karl-kerenyi‘s commentary in the same volume situates the figure within the Greek pantheon: hermes, the god of thieves and travelers and guides of souls, is the Greek face of the same pattern. The psychopompos and the trickster are the same figure read at different pitches. The god who leads the dead to the underworld is the same god who steals Apollo’s cattle on the day of his birth.

The thread demonstrates that the mythic tradition had already performed what the depth-psychological vocabulary would later theorize: the collective shadow is welcomed in personified form, given ritual place, and thereby held within the community rather than projected into the enemy. The modern refusal of the trickster — his demotion to children’s literature, his moralization into simple villainy — tracks the modern inability to hold the collective shadow at all.

Sources

• carl-jung: the trickster as compensatory split-off personality (Radin 1956, Jung’s commentary).
• karl-kerenyi: Hermes as the Greek trickster and the psychopomp (Radin 1956, Kerényi’s commentary).
• paul-radin: the Winnebago trickster cycle as pre-theoretical psychology (Radin 1956).