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