The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology

I'd been vaguely aware of this book for a long time and finally put the details together, authors' names, and so was delighted to be able to download it here so easily. The comments by Jung are in vol. 9i of the collected works but those of Kerenyi are nowhere else to be found and quite nice to have. The text itself is mindbogglingly interesting and strange. The analysis by the author is good though I disagree with some of the conclusions of he and Kerenyi, I was very pleased with the overall product.

I really enjoyed this book, which is actually recommended by Donald Westlake in one of his early trickster books. I can't remember which one, but if you are interested in tricksters you should go ahead and read everything by Westlake, starting with Smoke and the entire Dortmunder series. This Paul Radin book shows the classic tricksters and I've used it to tell stories to children.

Some of the stories in here are quite loopy, but strangely entertaining. Not to mention you get a douse of the kind of myths and stories they shared at this time amongst their tribes and nations. I needed this for my Native American Cultures class, and it came in handy greatly. Fascinating read and great stories.

Thanks!

Good book, but not sure I understand everything I read. I guess that's the way the "trickster" intended it.

Read this in college many years ago and wanted to read it again.

A fantastic book by one of the worlds greatest ethnographers. This should be mandatory reading for all!

I had to purchase this for class but decided to keep it after the class was complete. It is a fun story to read if you are interested in Native American culture/Myth.

Anyone interested in studying American Indian Mythologies will enjoy this book. It's perfect for the budding academic or the general lay person looking to educate themselves on the indigenous cultures of America.

Paul Radin is an authority in American Indian mythology, today rather referred to as Native American. But an authority from the first half of the 20th century. In this particular book he analyzes the Trickster myth in parallel with the Hare myth, both from the Winnebago Indians. He refers to other versions from other tribal traditions but he centers on this particular Winnebago heritage. This is a good point because there is then some real unity in the approach. But it is also a bad point because it does not put this tradition in any kind of real perspective.He gives the full two cycles concerned and summaries of a couple others from other tribes. It is easy to work on the original language if we want, the linear translation (both freely available on the Internet) and then the proposed translation. This is not really needed at this point of the enquiry. The full cycles are essential to understand the strategy of the story telling. He actually uses at least the collections of two storytellers, two brothers and he states how the younger brother is more creative, more personal, whereas the elder brother is more respective of the myth the way both of them received it from their father who was an authorized myth teller, raconteur as he calls him. He made sure the story was gotten from the older man in full agreement with the tradition about the circumstances of the story telling and the payment for it.He does mention the importance of that element because in this oral civilization everything is kept in memory by some people who are actually certified, appointed and trained to the job of being the collective memory of the tribe. He does point out that there are some instances of judgment from the raconteur on what he is telling, but Radin probably does not go far enough, does not disentangle the story from the recent circumstances when it was collected. It is necessary to determine with great precision what the oldest form of the story could have been. He does get to the question now and then but does not go to the bottom of it. He is satisfied with saying the versions he considers are late primitive whereas those he does not consider are earlier in their primitiveness, hence more primitive. He actually should have used these older ones.His retrospective imposition is most visible when he uses the word “primitive”. This is today outdated. We could say primeval but primitive is definitely derogatory and is judging not from a structural point of view, that of the pattern and architecture of the stories, but from a “developed” not to say “civilized” modern point of view. That is strange because Radin published a book with the title “Primitive Man as Philosopher” which is at least oxymoronic, and yet he goes on considering that the Winnebago are late primitive just like the oldest ancient Greek period. With that in mind he does not take off in his approach and remains the servant if not the slave of what he studies. He does not rise to a global anthropological approach, certainly not a sociological approach, absolutely not a psychoanalytical approach and his linguistic considerations in his analysis are extremely limited.The Trickster cycle is typically repetitive as for the main character, Wakdjunkaga, being well named and described when called the Foolish one, etc. He sees the contradictory nature of the character who could represent the emergence of man from animality, the learning of what makes a human being human and at the same time a character totally possessed by three drives: his hunger, his uncontrollable urge to wander and his sexuality. This trickster is not bringing anything to the world really, to humanity, at least not in his intention. He is at most a border breaker, a person who is breaking all rules and expectations. That this should be turned into satire, entertainment and ridicule, implying the great imbecility of the character is nothing but a story telling strategy. If we go deeper it is quite clear the Trickster is a reflection of the emergence of humanity, maybe not so much before the last ice age but definitely after when the water started coming back and we cannot be surprised there is a direct allusion to the flood when he is lost in the ocean and cannot find the coast.Basically Homo Sapiens had to solve the problem of his survival as an Individual, or even a collective group by finding enough food for everyone in the group. That is hunger. Then Homo Sapiens had to survive as a species by bringing to life enough adults (13 years of age) to renew and expand the group. That is insatiable sexuality. A woman had to be pregnant at least eight times, rather ten or even twelve times, from 13 to 29, that is to say before dying, to have some three surviving children reaching procreating age. A woman had to breast feed a child twenty or twenty-four months. Hence a woman as soon as she reached the age of 13 is always carrying a child, either in her arms and on her back, or in her womb, and for the last nine wombs of every twenty month period both at the same time. The sexual obsession is definitely quite crucial for the human species. The need to wander only comes third and not second as Radin says (p. 165) and that again is a fundamental dimension of Homo Sapiens who became a long distance bipedal runner as soon as he got out of the African forest where he appeared into the savannah. The urge to wander is just this simple human fact that Homo Sapiens is a migrating species.Radin misses all that though he sees that the Hare cycle is of a different tone and Hare is more a culture hero, a hero that brings culture to humanity whereas the Trickster is only interested in his own satisfaction. Yet the basic cultural facts are mentioned in The Trickster cycle but as the way for the character to satisfy his three impulses. A real culture hero gets the same knowledge to give it to humanity. Hare is closer to that second archetype, the emergence of human culture. In Radin’s own words we have: “the securing of fire, of flint, of tobacco, of food in general and of the main cultivated plants; the regulation of the seasons and the weather; the assignment of their proper and non-destructive functions of the forces of nature; the freeing of the world from monsters, ogres and giants; the origin of death; the gradual education of the hero’s female guardian, generally pictured as inimical at first, and the gradual freeing of the hero from her tutelage. This freeing is symbolized by his being swallowed by a sea-monster, killing it and escaping from it and, finally, by his cohabiting with his guardian.” Trickster is not a culture hero because he does not do that for humanity but for himself but everything is there.Yet one thing is bluntly and blatantly missing: the securing of language which is present in the Trickster cycle in the fact that he gets a name at a certain moment in the cycle, he is called something by others, language being then a naming tool and a communicational tool. The only point with Trickster is that the tone, the style, the story-telling plan is not to tell this experience of a culture hero but to make fun of that particular character. The real question then is why.This satirical and humoristic tone all along against the Trickster shows clearly that it is not a mythology that is being built but an entertainment because the respectful or awe-inspiring version of the mythological events and stories are safe enough, accepted enough for people to be able to inject a ridiculous character into it to make fun of him and also to criticize some basic rules and even taboos. The comparison, by Karl Kerényi, with the profane comedies of Roman times, the plyakes (p. 178), is interesting. Same thing with Greek plays like “Frogs” by Aristophanes centered on Dionysus. But then Kerényi jumps to Goethe and later literature and does not use the vast European and Asian use of the character of “Polichinelle” in his French identity, Pulcinella, Petrushka, Punch and many other identities, as a fundamental trickster who goes back to origins we cannot even identify, and probably not in Europe, who does not speak naturally but uses a whistle to cover the real voice of the actor since we are dealing here with puppets and puppet-theater. We could also think of the Flemish Tyll Eulenspiegel who is very similar.The great difference between the American Indian stories and these is that they look more primordial and hence have a mythological dimension that the European equivalent forms do not have. The Trickster cycle is thus the birth and emergence of mythical story telling as an entertainment that gets the mickey out of the main character and conveys a satire of fundamental social and cultural rules.The last point is how Paul Radin, and definitely Karl Kerényi miss the essential sexual point. The safe keeping of his penis and testicles by Trickster in a box he carries on his back, the procedure to set these organs in place, the use of his penis as a probing weapon by Trickster and the progressive reduction of this enormous penis to a “normal size” by the munching of a chipmunk on it discarding pieces and bits of it away, and then the transformation of these wasted pieces into edible food for humanity, it all has a meaning that goes beyond the simple idiocy of the tale. We are there at the crossroads of the necessary survival of the species with procreative sex on one hand and the sublimation of the sex drive and sexual organ into some nourishing and profitable activity for humanity (creative on the side of the sublimating person and communicational with the people around him) as soon as the procreative need is no longer as urgent as it probably was for a long time at the beginning. Imagine the situation at the end of the glaciation when the ice started to move back and the human groups that had survived by retreating south and adapting to a completely new situation when they saw vast expanses of land progressively taken over by vegetation and animals and they had to multiply to re-conquer these territories, while vast territories around the coasts of the continents were flooded by rising water. The story telling is funny and even ridiculous but the meaning is a lot deeper than what Paul Radin says.There is a lot more to say but no one has mentioned the fact that the stories are repetitive: one situation, one event is repeated over and over again but there is a pattern in that story telling: generally the event is repeated three times and on the fourth time it changes, a solution appears. These triple and quadruple patterns must have a meaning but I found no answer about them in this book.The last remark is in fact a side remark because it is not the main concern of this book. There is an allusion in the borrowing of two brothers by Trickster from a younger man and his letting them die because he did not do what was proper.Now and then the book mentions other cycles that are essential: The Twins cycle, the Two brothers cycle, and the Redhorn cycle (who has two sons and carries two shrunken human heads as pendants on his ears.) Without entering details here let’s say we have here a universal patterns of two brothers running around the world and having adventures, most of them dealing with the initiation of the boys and with the solving of problems in the world. This double pattern is present in so many cultures that it cannot be considered as innocent. But this pattern brings up the ternary pattern again since most divine pantheons in many cultures and civilizations are triple. What’s more the bisexual dimension of Trickster in his desire to be a woman to marry the son of a chief and give birth to his children is common in many religious and mythological systems in the world. The quadruple pattern is also very important, the tetragrammaton being one of the best known examples.Jung’s answer on the sexual dimension of three and four being feminine or masculine does not solve the problem since he asserts it and does not prove it with any extensive demonstration, not to mention the contradiction about it he carries in his Four Archetypes.This book is a good first step into American Indian mythology but a lot can be added today on the subject that Paul Radin and the people of his generation did not really take into account.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU