Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology by Paul Radin

This was the last book I've read. I wasn't particularly interested in american Indian mythology, but I was as I still am very interested about the Trickster figure. This is an archetype that continuously appears under different forms in my dreams and because of that I decided to study it more deeply. And to be fair I think this is also a figure which is very present and unconsciously admired in the current Brazilian culture (or should I say in the Brazilian soul to give it a more mystic touch?). Anyway, the trickster is one of the archetypes that appears a lot in the Jungian texts. Its main characteristic is its extreme contradiction between its divine essence and its animal destructive unconscious. This antagonism between destruction and creation is always present in the Trickster image. It is very interesting to see how very old american Indian cultures have tales in which the hero behaves exactly as a Trickster showing all its life cycle and the transformations that happen during his life. The book tells some of these myths and after that the author makes some comments about these cultures and how they related to the myths, where he tries to explain the nature and the meaning of the stories. There are also two extra chapters in the end, one from Karl Kerényi about the Trickster in the Greek mythology, and other from Jung himself about the psychology of the Trickster figure. I quite like books like this one that shows a nice historical account of an psychological pattern (or an archetype) that is still very alive, although many times unconsciously alive, showing indeed that our behavior today is still very much guided by forces which are much older than what we can imagine. I don't know. I simply like to deconstruct the idea that nowadays we do things differently, that we are "modern innovative people creating the future". Well, obviously there are differences, but I don't know exactly to what extend the are just different variations of old patterns or whether they are indeed some new elements that came into life. Anyway, this is a talk for other time. That's all for now.