The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology

The myth of the Trickster--ambiguous creator and destroyer, cheater and cheated, subhuman and superhuman--is one of the earliest and most universal expressions of mankind. Nowhere does it survive in more starkly archaic form than in the voraciously uninhibited episodes of the Winnebago Trickster Cycle, recorded here is full. Anthropological and psychological analyses by Radin, Kerényi, and Jung reveal with Trickster as filling a twofold role: on the one hand he is "an archetypal psychic structure" that harks back to "an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level" (Jung); on the other hand, his myth is a present-day outlet for the most unashamed and liberating satire of the onerous obligation of social order, religion, and ritual. With commentaries by Karl Kerényi and C. G. Jung Introduction by Stanley Diamond… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member blake.rosser

This was a pretty dry summary of a few of the most common Trickster myths in Native-American folklore. It was interesting but a little more specific than I had been hoping for (I forget how this got added to my list, but in subsequent research it seems like my interest in the Trickster figure might

have been better fulfilled with the farther-reaching Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

My main disappointment with the book is that Radin is concerned almost exclusively with the Winnebago tradition, although he appears quite capable of considering further implications of the Trickster archetype. For example, late in the book he says: The symbol which Trickster embodies is not a static one. It contains within itself the promise of differentiation, the promise of god and man. For this reason every generation occupies itself with interpreting Trickster anew. No generation understands him fully but no generation can do without him. Each had to include him in all its theologies, in all its cosmogonies, despite the fact that it realized that he did not fit properly into any of them, for he represents not only the undifferentiated and distant past, but likewise the undifferentiated present within every individual. This constitutes his universal and persistent attraction. 168

How much better of a book this would have been if this were the first paragraph instead of the very last!

That said, I can understand how people interested exclusively in the Native-American Trickster myth could be very satisfied with this book. It is a quick read, yet very thorough, and he did what he sets out to do very professionally. I would recommend jumping straight to his analysis and skipping the actual telling of the story, which starts the book off and didn't make much sense to me isolated from Radin's interpretative notes. Two essays finish off the book, the first by a Greek scholar that is everything I hate about academia: pedantic, self-satisfied and totally aloof from anything that matters. The second, luckily, is everything I wish the book had been: an exploration by Carl Jung of the Trickster archetype and what it means for us psychologically. I would totally buy a Trickster book by Jung.

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LibraryThing member JayLivernois

I cannot think of another book where you have Jung and Kerenyi together commenting on a work, except as they appear together in different editions of the Eranos Yearbooks, and in those, they are writing around each year's subject of a conference. Radin's compilation of the Winnebagos' myths are

somewhat tiring but information of a previous culture's entertainment and psychology. But what makes this book unique is you have Kerenyi and Jung at their best.

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LibraryThing member Hebephrene

I was surprised to learn that this is an important book. Surprised only because I came upon it haphazardly not by dint of its reputation. But it was significant enough that Carl Jung contributed an essay along with Karl Kerenyi. With the Trickster, and this book is based upon the Winnebago tribe's

Trickster cycle we are looking at one of the most primitive narratives known to mankind. The Trickster, whether he is part creator part jokester, represents man before he is able to differentiate before he can see himself for himself. The Trickster, for instance, has no use for societal rules, he follows his appetites, he can't distinguish his sexuality (he disguises himself as a woman and get pregnant), keeps his sexual organs in a box and both tricks and is tricked by nature. In other words, this is mankind before he understood society or how to act or why things were as they were. It's a fascinating concept and one I applied to Trump as a kind of sociopathic primitive, a man guided by his emotions and appetites with very little ability to distinguish good from bad, with no concept of honesty integrity, scruples or principals. Radin however also gives us other cycles like the Raven cycle where over the arc of the story the Raven helps mankind, functioning more as a creator of society than a destroyer. The book is weakened by the essay by the expert in Greek myth, who like most academics, enters the story without creating a context that would be useful to help us integrate. Jung's is not much better though his point is that this myth has been around for so long because we carry this primitive man around in us as a shadow. It is not repressed but still lingers in the unconscious. The whole story here is about our gradual emergence from the animal level, the Trickster being one of the earlier representations thereof.

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