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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 three commentaries are themselves a commentary on the diversity of the material and the great number of associations to which it readily gives rise, as well as to its deep psychological import. All three agree as to the archaic down-to-earth nature of the myths. Radin concentrates primarily on this, taking the sex symbolism (which, together with faecal symbolism, is so prominent in it) more or less at its face value as representing the gradual abandonment of fantasies in favour of a more realistic view of the human body and its functions. Kerényi is more concerned with the Trickster as a go-between between the archetypal and the personal and concentrates chiefly on classical examples of ithyphallic drama and on ‘herms’ and Hermes as intermediaries between nature and nurture on the one hand, and on the other between divine beings and the world of men. As might be expected, Jung goes more deeply into the psychology of the Trickster as representing the ‘shadow’ side of human nature, with its terrifying unconsciousness and at the same time emphasizes the integrating effect of making it to some extent more conscious by the telling of such myths.…
… Trickster is represented as an oaf of unbelievable stupidity, tricking and being tricked, attempting the impossible, humiliated but never downcast, trying this scheme and that, consorting with animals more than with humans, and above all with an imagination that stops at nothing at all. He has a penis of huge length coiled up in a box which he carries on his back