Trickster as Shadow and Savior

A load-bearing ambivalence runs through the Lineage’s reading of the trickster: the figure is both the collective shadow and the “faint adumbration of the savior” (carl-jung, in the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious, CW 9i, para. 472). He is destroyer and creator at once, and the tradition refuses to resolve the tension.

paul-radin‘s Winnebago text presents wakdjunkaga beginning as undifferentiated body — phallic, voracious, disorderly — and ending as incipient culture-hero. Radin himself reads the ascent skeptically, calling it “a purely secondary addition” to an older, wilder figure (Radin 1956). He refuses to let the trickster be redeemed too quickly. carl-jung makes the refusal productive. The trickster is not the savior, but he contains the savior’s trace: “a higher level of consciousness has covered up a lower one, and that the latter, having been overlaid, remained a strange kind of deposit, a living relic” (Jung 1954, para. 475). The savior emerges from the shadow without dissolving it. The shadow remains.

karl-kerenyi traces the same structure in the Greek materials: hermes is both thief and benefactor, rogue and guide of souls. The Homeric Hymn does not apologize for the god’s cruelties on the tortoise; it celebrates them as the originary sacrifice (Kerényi 1956). The figure is what he is.

Sources

• paul-radin: Wakdjunkaga’s arc refuses sentimentalization; the ascent is a late graft on an older body.
• carl-jung: The trickster is a shadow-figure of the collective, preserved by repression, and carrying a “faint adumbration of the savior” (CW 9i, para. 472).
• karl-kerenyi: Hermes is rogue and psychopomp in the same figure; the ambivalence is constitutive.