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The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology
The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology
The 1956 volume gathers three voices around a single primary text: Paul Radin’s translation of the Winnebago trickster cycle (dictated in 1912 by Sam Blowsnake), Karl Kerényi’s essay “The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology,” and C.G. Jung’s commentary “On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure” (later collected in the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious). The format is anomalous in the depth-tradition library: nowhere else does an ethnographic primary source sit directly beside its Jungian and classical-philological readings in one binding.
The book’s work is twofold. It publishes a complete trickster cycle — the wanderings of wakdjunkaga, “the foolish one” — as a text from a living tradition, with named informants and preserved orality. And it demonstrates, by the adjacency of the three commentaries, that a figure recovered by fieldwork on the Mississippi and a figure recovered from Homeric hymnody can be read as structural cousins without being collapsed into each other. Wakdjunkaga is phallic, voracious, sly, and stupid — “the spirit of disorder, the enemy of boundaries” (Radin 1956). hermes is phallic, playful, and self-interested. They are not the same god. They participate in the same genus.
The volume is the single place where Radin is indispensable to the depth tradition, and where Jung’s archetypal hypothesis meets its furthest empirical test.