Trickster

Definition

The trickster, in Jung’s usage, is the figure in myth and folk tale who lives by appetite and cunning, breaks every rule including the rules of his own body, is fooled as often as he fools, and still leaves the world changed behind him: fire stolen, a river made, a custom founded by accident. Jung did not invent the figure or the word; both came from American ethnology through Paul Radin’s edition of the Winnebago cycle, on which Jung’s essay is a commentary. What Jung added was a reading. He took the trickster to be a collective shadow: an image of a cruder, barely human stage of consciousness that a group has partly outgrown and still carries, and which it keeps in circulation, laughing at it, because remembering the condition is safer than forgetting it. On that reading the figure is not a type of person but a relation between a culture’s consciousness and what it has left behind.

Two cautions belong in the definition. “Trickster” is a scholars’ category applied after the fact to very different figures, each of which had its own place in a living religion before anyone compared them. And Jung’s reading is one of several, and the one most disputed by those who study the figures where they live.

History

The English word, in this sense, comes from nineteenth-century American ethnology; Hynes and Doty (1993) trace it to Daniel Brinton in 1868, naming the culture-hero of North American narrative who was at once creator, dupe and buffoon. Paul Radin published the Winnebago cycle of Wakdjunkaga in English in 1956 as The Trickster, with commentaries by Karl Kerényi and Jung. The German edition, Der göttliche Schelm, had appeared in Zürich in 1954 with Jung’s essay as “Zur Psychologie der Schelmenfigur”, which is why the Collected Works date it to that year (CW 9i). Jung had used the word before: a footnote in Aion (1951) inclines to “the alchemical view that Mercurius ... is a ‘trickster’”, referring back to “The Spirit Mercurius” (1943, revised 1948, CW 13), and Answer to Job (1952) calls Satan “a trickster and spoilsport” (CW 11 ¶619). The 1954 essay is where the figure becomes an archetype in its own right. Radin’s own position was anthropological: the figure is among the oldest expressions of mankind, found in simple and complex societies alike, and its defining mark is an absence of values.

[He] knows neither good nor evil, yet is responsible for both. — Paul Radin, The Trickster (1956), p. xxiii, as quoted in Taylor (1998)

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Jung’s commentary moves between the Winnebago cycle, the Church’s licensed disorder (the Feast of Fools) and the alchemical Mercurius, called a trickster in his 1950 study of a patient’s mandalas (CW 9i ¶689, as quoted in Samuels 1985). The essay describes the figure as a shape-shifter of divine-animal nature:

The trickster is a primitive ‘cosmic’ being of divine-animal nature, on the one hand superior to man because of his superhuman qualities, and on the other hand inferior to him because of his unreason and unconsciousness. — C. G. Jung, “On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure” (1954), CW 9i ¶473, as quoted in E. Jung and M.-L. von Franz, The Grail Legend (1960)

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From there Jung makes his central claim. The trickster is a collective shadow figure, a summation of the inferior traits of character in individuals, and the cycle, in which the figure grows gradually more civilised and even useful (CW 9i ¶477, as quoted in Samuels 1985), is the myth’s way of preserving the memory of an earlier state of consciousness while the group moves beyond it. The essay also calls him “a forerunner of the saviour”, at once subhuman and superhuman (¶472), and says that so-called civilised man has forgotten him (¶478), both as given in Sharp (1991); a forerunner of the saviour is not simply an archetype of evil. The phrase “collective shadow” was Jung’s own, used again in his own voice three years later:

None of us stands outside humanity’s black collective shadow. — C. G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (1957), CW 10; Princeton edition (2010), section 5, p. 52

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The reading was carried on by Jung’s circle. Joseph Henderson, in his contribution to Man and His Symbols (1964), read Radin’s four Winnebago hero cycles (Trickster, Hare, Red Horn, the Twins) as stages in the development of the ego, the trickster first and least conscious. In Thresholds of Initiation (1967) he called the trickster’s “divinely sanctioned lawlessness” one of the hardest problems education has to solve (as quoted in Stevens 2003). Marie-Louise von Franz, who worked through the fairy-tale material, kept a “hero-trickster” type among the hero figures of the tales, half devil and half saviour, and with Emma Jung read Merlin as the trickster who holds open the approach to the animal substratum of the psyche when a culture is stiffening into one-sidedness (The Grail Legend, 1960).

The debate

Within analytical psychology the trickster is read in three ways. The classical and developmental reading follows Jung and Henderson: the trickster is what the ego was before it was an ego, and in Stevens’s account the puer aeternus who will not grow up resembles the Winnebago trickster at the start of the cycle, with the transition from trickster to hero expected at adolescence and supported, in traditional societies, by initiation (Stevens 2003). Donald Kalsched (1996) gives the figure a clinical form: in the dreams of early trauma a diabolical trickster appears inside the psyche’s self-care system, seducing the ego into addiction and altered states rather than letting it face reality. Andrew Samuels (1985) resists the reduction of the Winnebago trickster to an omnipotent infant and proposes instead that the figure represents psyche itself; in The Political Psyche (1993) he makes the trickster a figure for political transformation and asks where the female trickster is.

Outside the consulting room the figure has a second life in which Jung is largely set aside. Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World (1998) reads Hermes, Coyote, Eshu, Loki, Krishna and Raven as culture-makers: hungry boundary-crossers whose lies, thefts and lucky finds open the gaps through which new meaning enters, and whose modern descendants are artists rather than patients; the trickster stays in the social world and in art, not the psyche.

The anthropologists go further. T. O. Beidelman (1980), writing on the Kaguru of Tanzania, made the category critique in its sharpest form: before “trickster” can serve comparative analysis it raises a problem of translation, since the figures grouped under it belong to particular moral imaginations. The volume edited by William Hynes and William Doty, Mythical Trickster Figures (1993), opens with a history of the category and the objections to it, and offers only a heuristic list of recurring traits because the figures compared under the name do not share an essence. Robert Pelton’s The Trickster in West Africa (1980), on Ananse, Legba, Eshu and Ogo-Yurugu, insists that each is a sacred mediator within its own religious order, and treats the move from Radin to Jung, in which specific figures become stages of a universal psyche, as a loss of what makes them intelligible. On this view “trickster” is a Western frame, useful for comparison and dangerous when it is mistaken for the thing compared; Szyjewski (2020) surveys the controversy.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Jung’s trickster as a psychological construct, and no instrument measures it. The nearest thing is du Toit and Coetzee (2012), a cross-sectional study of 207 science and engineering staff using a commercial inventory built on Pearson’s twelve-type system, which includes a Jester subscale; it measures a later, separately defined type, not the collective shadow of Jung’s essay. The adjacent scholarship is the folklore and anthropology of the figures, interpretive rather than experimental, and the psychology of humour and deception, which does not use Jung’s framework.

Appearances

Wakdjunkaga, the Winnebago trickster of Radin’s cycle, is the figure Jung actually wrote about: a wanderer whose right and left hands fight each other, and who by the end of the cycle has become something like a man. Hermes, in the Homeric Hymn, steals Apollo’s cattle on the day he is born and talks his way out of it; Kerényi’s essay in Radin’s volume made him the Greek representative of the type, Rafael Lopez-Pedraza (1977) read him as the god of psychotherapy, and Hyde (1998) begins with him. Loki, in the Prose Edda, contrives the death of Baldr and is bound for it; Hyde treats him as the trickster whose mischief turns catastrophic. Coyote runs through the narrative traditions of the North American West, and much of Hyde’s material is his. Ananse the spider of the Ashanti and Eshu of the Yoruba are the figures through which Pelton (1980) argues the category should be rebuilt from the inside. Pearson’s Fool, later Jester (1991; Mark and Pearson 2001), and Vogler’s Trickster (1992) are labels in later systems, not readings of these figures.

In every case “trickster” is a reading, and in most of them one made in English by an outsider.

Sources

• Jung, C. G. (1954). On the psychology of the trickster-figure. CW 9i. First published as “Zur Psychologie der Schelmenfigur” in P. Radin, K. Kerényi and C. G. Jung, Der göttliche Schelm (Rhein-Verlag, 1954), pp. 185–207; English in Radin (1956). ¶473 as quoted in Jung and von Franz (1960); ¶477 as quoted in Samuels (1985); ¶472 and ¶478 as given in Sharp (1991).
• Jung, C. G. (1943/1948). The spirit Mercurius. CW 13.
• Jung, C. G. (1950). A study in the process of individuation. CW 9i ¶689 (Mercurius as trickster), as quoted in Samuels (1985).
• Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. CW 9ii, chapter on Gnostic symbols of the self, n. 62. Princeton University Press.
• Jung, C. G. (1952). Answer to Job. CW 11 ¶619. Princeton University Press.
• Jung, C. G. (1957). The Undiscovered Self. CW 10. Princeton University Press reissue (2010), with a foreword by S. Shamdasani. ISBN 978-0-691-15051-2. Section 5, p. 52.
• Radin, P. (1956). The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, with commentaries by K. Kerényi and C. G. Jung. Routledge & Kegan Paul; Schocken reprint, ISBN 978-0-8052-0351-6.
• Jung, E., and von Franz, M.-L. (1960). The Grail Legend (A. Dykes, Trans., 1970). Princeton University Press edition, ISBN 978-0-691-00237-8. Chapter on Merlin.
• Henderson, J. L. (1964). Ancient myths and modern man. In C. G. Jung (Ed.), Man and His Symbols. Dell edition, ISBN 978-0-440-35183-2.
• Henderson, J. L. (1967). Thresholds of Initiation. Wesleyan University Press; Chiron reprint, ISBN 978-1-888602-32-6. p. 36, as quoted in Stevens (2003).
• von Franz, M.-L. (1970). The Interpretation of Fairy Tales (rev. ed., 1996). Shambhala. ISBN 978-0-87773-526-7. Lecture IV, on hero types.
• Lopez-Pedraza, R. (1977). Hermes and His Children. Daimon Verlag edition (1989), ISBN 978-3-85630-518-5.
• Pelton, R. D. (1980). The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-03477-8.
• Beidelman, T. O. (1980). The moral imagination of the Kaguru: some thoughts on tricksters, translation and comparative analysis. American Ethnologist, 7(1), 27–42. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1980.7.1.02a00020
• Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 978-0-415-05904-6. Closing chapter, on Hermes and the Winnebago trickster.
• Samuels, A. (1993). The Political Psyche. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-08102-3. Chapter 4, “The lion and the fox: morality, Trickster and political transformation”.
• Hynes, W. J., and Doty, W. G. (Eds.) (1993). Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. University of Alabama Press. ISBN 978-0-8173-0599-4.
• Kalsched, D. (1996). The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-12329-7.
• Sharp, D. (1991). Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-48-9. Entry “Trickster”. https://www.jungpage.org/learn/jung-lexicon
• Pearson, C. S. (1991). Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World. HarperSanFrancisco. ISBN 978-0-06-250678-8.
• Vogler, C. (1992). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters. Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN 978-0-941188-13-5.
• Hyde, L. (1998). Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-27928-8.
• Taylor, J. (1998). The Living Labyrinth: Exploring Universal Themes in Myths, Dreams, and the Symbolism of Waking Life. Paulist Press. ISBN 978-0-8091-3766-4. Chapter 8 and its notes, for the Radin quotation.
• Mark, M., and Pearson, C. S. (2001). The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-136415-7.
• Stevens, A. (2003). Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-109-9. Discussion of the puer aeternus and the Winnebago cycle.
• du Toit, D.-M., and Coetzee, M. (2012). Archetypal values of science and engineering staff in relation to their career orientations. SA Journal of Industrial Psychology, 38(1), art. 955. https://doi.org/10.4102/sajip.v38i1.955
• Szyjewski, A. (2020). In the shadow of Trickster: research fields and controversies in the discourse on the trickster complex in the studies of myth. Studia Religiologica, 53(3), 163–179. https://doi.org/10.4467/20844077SR.20.012.12752