This book, like all Trickster myths, conceals as much as it reveals. Or rather, what it reveals is revealed only to the Trickster mind able to think two opposite thoughts at once and to combine them into a synthesis such as the child lives and the old man achieves who has himself lived through enough reverses, and has survived and integrated them sufficiently to recognize the kind of game that the autonomous psyche plays with the personality, and can agree with it.

The book itself has suffered an odd fate, a period of incubation let us say, not unlike that of the Trickster mythology with which it deals. Its main content, The Winnebago Trickster Cycle, was first recorded in 1912 by one of Radin's informants with the ex