Yet ultimately he has satisfied their expectations by letting them down twice – the chief will not go on the warpath.Īfter repeating this episode four times, he does set out on the warpath, but he shuns all those who follow him to this point and goes alone. He leaves the feast and sleeps with a woman, which is strictly forbidden before going on the warpath, so anyone who did believe he was going to go is quickly disappointed. Everyone knows that the chief is not allowed to go on the warpath, but they cannot refuse to go to the feast because he is their chief. He is the chief, who is never allowed to go on a warpath, yet he says that he will go on the warpath and invites the whole village to come to a feast at his house. To begin, Trickster shrouds tradition in contradiction. The Winnebago Trickster Cycle (Radin, 3-62) Instead, they fall prey to the misinterpretation of “western” mythology and argue that ideas of pure good and pure evil represent a higher form of psychology and culture than exists anywhere in Trickster mythology. If they would have acknowledged this, they could have discovered in Trickster a reminder of many of the missteps our culture has taken, that have created great injustices and destroyed balance in the natural world.

With the exception of Jung, they do not even note that European culture has misinterpreted its own founding mythology by creating categories of pure good and pure evil, that Yahweh is neither pure good nor pure evil, that Yahweh is, in fact, a Trickster.

Stanley Diamond presents an interesting structure of western thought with the Book of Job as one pillar and Republic as the other, Radin lends interesting insight into some aspects of Trickster mythology and Winnebago culture, and Jung's short essays draws important parallels between western traditions and that of Trickster, but all of these essays, and especially Kerenyi's which has no redeeming qualities, suffer from a disappointing cultural bias – disappointing because each of these authors note a fundamental difference between Trickster mythology and European ideals of good and evil, but fail to see how Trickster mythology addresses many of the cultural problems that have arisen because of European ideals of good and evil. Feel free to write if you'd like to see more. Also unfortunately, my entire review will not fit on Goodreads, so here I have limited my review to an introduction and explication of the myths. Unfortunately, the essays that precede and follow are subpar. 5 stars because the myths herein are the finest in the world.

The Trickster by Paul Radin