PAUL RADINA WHITE COLONIALIZED MIND

orTHREE BOOKS AND ONE IDEOLOGY

AT THE CROSSROADS BETWEEN OLD COLONIALISMAND MODERN POST-COLONIALISM

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

This is only one little section of my work and research on anthropological thinking and with

Paul Radin you have a man who thought in depth but was entirely possessed by some concepts

coming from the dominant colonial ideology.

I here study three books, The World of the primitive Man, 1953, the very famous book The

Trickster, A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956, and Primitive Man as Philosopher, 1957.

I added a review of C.G. Jung’s book Four Archetypes Mother Rebirth Spirit Trickster, 1953

because it is a reference in the later books by Paul Radin and in his own way Jung’s theory of

archetypes is colonial in essence, generalizing an extremely European observation and theory to

the whole world. We will note Paul Radin is critical except on one point: archetypes are universal

but not produced from and by concrete events. They seem to be hanging in mid-air in the psyche

of the “primitive peoples” he studies.

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PAUL RADIN – THE WORLD OF PRIMITIVE MAN – 1953

This book is extremely representative of his period in the way the author looks at what he calls

“primitive peoples,” “aboriginals,” “pre-literate peoples” or some other terms of the same type. He considers

the communities in the world that are still living on a basic “food-gathering,” “fishing-hunting” and ‘agricultural’

economy, the “pastoral” communities being on the side, in a way marginal to the first three but the people

have remained what he calls “preliterate” which means they do not have any writing system. What’s more he

considers communities that are basically built on a “clan” pattern, some of them not even reaching that level

ans being organized on a large family basis, and some of them going slightly further with castes or class

stratification. This is a hierarchy to which he constantly refers. The term “primitive” is today considered as

derogative and the term “aboriginal” is attached to some communities in the world, like those in Australia who

are the original Homo Sapiens residents of this island. He has a hierarchy here too: “primodial,” “primitive,”

“Olympian” and “Promethean.”

PAUL RADIN AND LANGUAGEThe strange element that jumps to one’s attention from the very start is that he considers

communities that are “pre-literate” hence functioning entirely and only with oral language, but he does not

consider language itself and hardly communication. This is strange because all human languages, even

those of these communities are constructed on the same architecture: three articulations

1- vowel-consonants giving the basic semantic unit;

2- spatial-temporal categorization giving nominal and verbal elements and the basic syncretic

syntax;

3- and syntactic functions giving the nominal phrase and the verbal phrase and the one-clause

sentence) and the operation of embedding or iteration that enables any speaker to embed a

phrase into another phrase and a sentence into another sentence.

In fact Radin takes linguistic productions without analyzing them, hence only oral discourse, in fact

modern-time transcribed oral discourse, and not the mental and conceptual operations behind language

itself. In other words he is never able to reach the level of the intellectual power of these peoples. Note he

would be embarrassed if he did study language in its abstract potential because all languages require

abstraction, conceptualization and the basic neo-cortex parallel procedure in three steps after plain sensorial

impacts:

1- discriminate elements (patterns);

2- identify these elements (names)

3- and classify them (concepts).

Homo Sapiens devised this architecture from practice: using his neo-cortex that functions that way,

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accepted to be confronted to the outside world and to take all necessary measures to be able to survive in a

particularly hostile environment with children that were so immature at birth that they had to be taken care of

fro four years or more.

PAUL RADIN AND HUMAN EMERGENCEAs we are going to see Paul Radin did not come to such ideas and approaches. He thus locked up

peoples in development states all posterior to the ice-age, dated by him as going back to 5,000 years ago

(page 235) whereas we know Homo Sapiens emerged at least something like 300,000 years ago and

migrated out of Africa between 150,000 and 45,000 years ago, a long time before the ice-age whose peak

was around 21,000 years ago. If he had considered that time scale he would have at once understood that

what he was studying as a fully given situation at 3,000 BCE was in fact the product of a long history from

the emergence of Homo Sapiens due to some mutations that made Homo Sapiens physically very weak in

front of nature but intellectually very strong by his inventiveness. More so than Neanderthals who had not

even invented fishing that comes by the way after hunting because Neanderthals like Homo Sapiens is a

land-runner, though apparently limited to land as opposed to Homo Sapiens who developed skills concerning

water. Note Neanderthals migrated over land from the Middle East where they emerged to REirope and to

Mongolia-Siberia and did not cross any important water body whereas Homo Sapiens systematically had to

cross water bodies out of Africa, except to the Levant, through the Sinai but that was only for a short while

and they came back before going again. It was not a real and important migration out of Africa.

PAUL RADIN AND EUROPEAN COLONIALISMThat explains also why Paul Radin considers these peoples are blocked if not frozen in a state that

does not develop any more. He knows all these people were confronted to vast intruding movements of more

advanced peoples in civilization that in a way or another either made them develop in a different way from

what their potential was (for example the Mandigo Empire in Timbuctu under the influence of advancing

Muslims from Northern Africa, a case he does not even mention) or destroyed their civilizations and here the

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case of European slave-trade and colonialism is typical. They blocked Africa in their building vast empires

that were then not able to historically reach any further state of development and were forced back into

tribalism. They destroyed the highly sophisticated civilizations of the Aztecs, the Mayas and the Incas by

pure extermination. They destroyed the Northern American Indian civilizations, and the vast alliances that

were being built when they arrived with violence, looting, enslavement, deportation and sporadic

extermination to finally lock them up in reservations. He even gives the example of the Fijians.

“The European conquest . . . destroyed the whole social structure and Weltanschauung of

the Fijians without really imposing its own upon them. The result was complete

demoralization and disorientation.” (page 281)

He accepts as normal or banal the choice of the Fijians: either to be imposed a European political

and social order that would have nothing to do with Fijian traditions, or to feel completely demoralized and

disoriented. This is known today as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or Syndrome and this PTSD or PTSS is

to be found at various levels of malignancy and we could call it in our present case the Post Traumatic

Colonial Syndrome or Disorder. Paul Radin could not come to such ideas because he is from the first part of

the 20th century and this book written at the end of his life does not open new doors, particularly post-colonial

doors.

Yet I am going to insist on some points that justify the reading of this author and this book. It

contains a lot and it can be used as a key to open many doors.

WHO IS HOMO SAPIENS?We consider Homo Sapiens emerged when Homo Faber became able to develop activities that

required a certain level of abstraction making discrimination of objects and animals and plants, hence

observation too, possible. That proves the existence of the neo-cortex.

Then a certain level of conceptualization that enables the construction of projects and strategies

visible in the making of tools and weapons, then the elaborated processing of gathered food, the hunting of

animals and the fishing of river and sea animals, fish and shell fish. That proves the construction of a mind in

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the brain of these Homo Sapiens.

This is also the evidence of the existence of communication, social organization and as we are going

to see the first division of labor. This level of development requires the existence of an articulated language

that has nothing to do with the most evolved animal and hominid (including Neanderthals) communication

systems.

We must also consider the fragility, frailty and dependence of children required a division of labor

between women who were the only ones able to feed the children for one year and then to take care of

them for two or three years, carrying them, looking after them, protecting them. Some infant bones have

been found in some archaeological eagle nests in Southern Africa showing how dangerous this life in Africa

was when Homo Sapiens emerged.

We have to keep in mind delivering and raising children was essential for the survival of the species

(at least two children per woman able to survive till procreating age) and to develop in order to migrate (at

least three children per woman brought to procreating age). It is easy to see a woman had then to deliver at

least 6 or 8 children. Life expectancy being around 30, procreating age for women being about 13,

pregnancy plus one year or part of that year when the mother is feeding the baby and infant coming to

something around 18 months. 6 pregnancies meant 9 years, bringing the woman to the age of 22 at least

when she would have satisfied the needs of the species and the community, and that’s an average as for the

age and the number of pregnancies. That means the woman from age 13 to age 22 or even more was either

carrying a child in her womb or on her back and most often probably both at the same time.

Only a very strict social organization could free some women from such an imperative with religious

considerations protecting women from pregnancy, and collective childcare by women enabling some to do

things without their kids on their backs. This is the first division of labor and it is purely natural though the

consequences are enormously cultural, social and political. Paul Radin knows about what he calls “the child

as a liability” (page 152) but he does not draw the necessary conclusions and anyone who has been in Africa

for instance, now life expectancy is over 50 or even 60, if not more, has seen a woman carrying a heavy

basket of goods on her head, a child on her back or hip and at times another in her womb. How come he

missed the point in 1953?

We could call this situation a Post Traumatic Emergence Disorder or syndrome, and it has to be

assumed to enable survival. It requires imagination, invention, creativity and flexibility. Paul Radin gives a

vision of these “primitive communities” as frozen or nearly frozen. That should have brought him to the

question of why they look frozen (Post Traumatic Colonial Syndrome) and how could such supposedly

“frozen” communities have conquered the whole world (Post Traumatic Emergence Syndrome)?

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PAUL RADIN AND CHILDRENHe is not concerned by the education, training and raising of children in these “frozen” communities.

He never takes into account pre-puberty boys or girls (particularly girls) in any way, or hardly. So he is not

concerned with the trauma birth is for the fetus suddenly turned into a baby. This trauma, change, rift, shift

from protected, continuous, floating in liquid life to autonomous, breathing, feeding, passing water and feces,

unprotected cold life: from a very noisy world in the womb with distant human voices that the fetus could

neither really discriminate, except from the organic noises of the mother, nor identify, to another noisy world

but this time dominated by human voices or clear music and all kinds of sounds that the child will have to

learn to discriminate, identify and classify in order to enter communication through language if it wants to

survive one minute.

This is also a Post Traumatic Birth Syndrome that is in many ways identical to the Post Traumatic

Emergence Syndrome and has occurred very soon in the process of emergence of Homo Sapiens and it had

and still has to be assumed. It is strange how heavily Paul Radin insists on the initiation rituals for boys that

aim at separating these boys from the circle of women and older girls (page 158-162) and yet does not see

that division of labor between women and men, a division of labor that is dramatized by these rituals in order

for a pubescent boy and later adult to completely abandon any attachment to women that would not be

sexual, hence procreative.

PAUL RADIN: MAN OF ACTION VERSUS THINKERThe other great idea is his distinction between the “man of action” and the “thinker.”

Strangely enough he jumps from Homo Faber, considered today as the ancestor of Homo

Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens in two different geographical areas, to two terms that did not take at all:

Homo Economicus-politicus and Homo Religiosus. He approaches here the concept of Homo Sapiens who

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needed communication to develop, language to communicate, abstraction and conceptualization to develop

and expand, and of course a vision of the world that explained it based on observation by this man of action

and technology.

But beyond this man of action, Homo Sapiens needed a vision that enabled him to develop an

existential explanation and a predictive capture of this world. That vision is carried and invented by the

thinker with philosophy, science, religion, arts. All that is based on the necessity to devise social

organization: division of labor, education for the young, social hierarchy often based on experience and age

(the elders, hardly over fifty as Paul Radin may say, but rather over thirty, even in these colonized tribes

before the advent of penicillin and modern medicine). If we approach these problems along this line of

ideological elaboration and generation, and if we consider human evolution as a natural procedure mediated

from the very start by a mental construct known as the mind based on and produced by the intelligent

processing of sensorial elements by the neo-cortex, many problematic elements become natural.

The “thinker” then can be many things but it is wrong to separate the various sides of this character:

the creative or ritual use of language; contact with the supernatural, the other world, deities, etc.; the

knowledge about nature, its cycles, the routes in and out of the place where you are, travelling, etc. You can

be truly religious and in this case either be neurotic-epileptic, hence a seer, a prophet, or just have a

temperamental predisposition that makes you a priest, a philosopher. On the other hand you can be

intermittently religious, and in this last case either have little interest in religion but accept it passively, or be

fully skeptical and ready to deny the existence of deities, ghosts, and other supernatural beings. The vast

majority of people is the passive intermittently religious group. This is well seen by Paul Radin and, as he

says, it is typical of “all societies” (page 94). This should have led him to get these “primitive peoples” out of

their frozen ghetto which is essentially mental in the head of the observer, though rooted in the Post

Traumatic Colonial Syndrome.

ELDERS AND STATUSThe importance of elders in these communities is simple to understand. Their experience gives them

a great value for the young they can train and the adults they can counsel.

The question of “status” comes rather easily too. The status of a person has to be attached to his/her

fertility which is slightly more than just menstrual flow for women. Note in these societies infertility is always

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that of the woman since fertility is measured with pregnancy. Paul Radin gives examples but does not draw

the conclusion that this is division of labor. The woman is held responsible for being fertile, delivering,

feeding and raising children.

Status is attached to a certain level of skills (practical, linguistic, mental, intellectual, spiritual) that

can only come from education and training, and that process of acquisition from others and life takes a

certain time, requiring autonomy, strength, determination, etc.

That explains why children under the age of twelve (before initiation rituals) have no status and why

older people who are losing their physical and intellectual means also lose value, both non-valuation and

devaluation occurring in such communities. Paul Radin seems to believe this is typical of Africans,

Polynesians, Melanesians, Aborigines, American Indians, Eskimos, etc. Paul Radin gives some fictional

cases without taking into account the necessary distance between fiction and reality, and without seeing that

at most fiction is the more or less distorted recollection of some distant past. He seems to imply this non-

valuation of the young and devaluation of the old is a fact today in these “primitive” tribes. The best example

showing this lack of distance and intellectual caution is the Bushman tale from South Africa, entitled The

Young Man who was carried off by a Lion. To bring the Lion, who is running after a young man, to terms the

villagers provide this Lion with “food”:

“The people now threw children for the Lion to eat, but the lion merely looked at them and

left them alone. . . ‘Give the lion a girl. Perhaps he will eat her and then go away.’ The lion,

however, did not touch the girl. It wanted the young man it had carried away, none other. . .

[T]he people. . . gave [the young man] to the lion. The lion immediately seized him and bit

him to death, but as he was thus biting him to death, the people shot and stabbed the lion. . .

And so the lion died.”

Paul Radin does not see the hierarchy in status: children (under 12), girls (over 12 but still

unmarried) and the young man (over 12 and unmarried). Myriads of tales of that type exists in Africa but they

are not myths or mythological stories. They are only tales. They may reveal something about the way the

people who enjoy these stories may think or may have thought. Nostalgia is an important element in the

pleasure we experience in traditional forms of imagination. But they cannot in any way be compared to the

story of the origin of the world, what’s more the same story validated by being part of a religious corpus

recognized as such by the community at stake.

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PAUL RADIN AND MARRIAGEPaul Radin discusses in length the marriage rituals that are the loss of a status and the gain of

another for both the bride and the bridegroom. The bride becomes a mother and sexual procreation is part of

the ritual, at times even before the official marriage. The bridegroom becomes a husband and a father, and

he receives rights and duties going along with it.

But Paul Radin also considers things from the economic point of view. In this case the family of the

bride loses a producer and has to be compensated for their loss: this is the discussion of “lobola” in South

East Africa, and other dowry systems ,that state the bridegroom or his family has to pay this compensation to

the bride’s family. Systems that are common among the peoples Paul Radin considers. He considers these

practices once again as frozen in their ancestral forms and that “lobola” is paid with cattle, which is of course

not true any more: money has replaced this cattle and the amount can vary tremendously from one woman

to the next. He ignores of course the present debate in Zimbabwe, particularly in the Christian churches that

are confronted to a vast agreement among the people who are confronted to the system though it is in

contradiction with their Christian assumptions. Brendan Smith for instance summarizes the shortcomings of

the system as follows:

“Lobola is a significantly popular practice that is steeped in cultural identity. However, there

is little doubt the negative consequences of Lobola outweigh the positive rationales for the

practice. It breaks down family structures, it puts enormous financial pressure on husbands

and newlyweds, it reduces women to the state of commodities, children are “owned” by the

husband’s family, it results in couples sleeping together before marriage and it has been

proven to have a causal effect on the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Even the Zimbabwean

government is considering whether or not it should be made illegal. There also appears to

be much residual traditional religious symbolism and rituals associated with the practice.

Despite this the practice remains accepted, if not placidly endorsed, by the African Church in

Southern African and Zimbabwe in particular. Any discussions on the negative aspects of

the practice of Lobola within the church seem to be mainly Western led. Many of these

arguments call for churches to ban the practice within Christian communities. However, it is

not as simple as calling for an abolishment of the Lobola within the Church, especially if the

call is made by Westerners. Even arguments against the practice of Lobola by African

Christians are extremely unpopular and are met with hostility, even outrage.” (If the Practice

of Lobola has such negative social and economic consequences to individuals, families and

communities why does the Church in Zimbabwe continue to placidly endorse it? June 2011,

available at http://tabor.academia.edu/BrendanSmith)

Paul Radin could not know present debates and developments of course but his not seeing that any

situation is the result of an evolution and is always evolving, no matter how frozen it may look leads to a

complete withdrawal from reality. Paul Radin represents the last tip of an iceberg that was already melting

very fast in his days. Ten years after the publication of this book the French and British colonial empires were

down. He did not see the turning point of 1962 for Algeria. He had not seen the Suez Canal Crisis that was

to happen in 1956, nor the defeat of the French in Dien Bien Phu that was to happen in 1954. But he had

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seen the liberation of the Indian subcontinent, the liberation of China and quite a few more falls of colonial

territories.

His approach cannot explain such facts and events. He was living and writing in a time when all

“everlasting truths” of the colonial period was falling down, like London Bridge, and he did not see it. That

was of course easy since then he did not have to explain it.

PAUL RADIN, ECONOMICS AND POLITICSHe tries though to explain the situation he sees among these “primitive” tribes.

For him the economy is the basic and central element that governs and commands the destiny and

history of the human species. He brings everything down (and down in its basic meaning) to the economy.

Politics itself, religion and rituals, customs and beliefs are always explained in economic terms. He never

understands the ideological and spiritual dimension necessary for any economic project, political

organization or other social infrastructure or superstructure. “To speak of an economic structure basic to all

primitive peoples. . . those basic human and economic elements to be found, without exception, among all

aboriginal tribes.” (page 105) This is pure and simple Stalinist Marxism which is surprising for an American

anthropologist writing in the midst of the emerging Cold War. Another ideology emerging in the same period

of the 1950s, dianetics and scientology had the same Stalinist approach: to reduce everything to one basic

principles. Stalinism reduced the whole world to the antagonistic struggle of two classes. Ron Hubbard’s

system reduced life in the whole world to the survival instinct. Here Paul Radin reduces the whole “primitive”

world (and we must not forget we must have descended from such a primitive world in the distant past) to

one principle: the economy and the satisfaction of the basic needs of the community. Note it does not take

into account the development and expansion of this community. We are living here within an autarkic and

stable community that has very clear and limited needs, at least not growing in any way. And then we are

back to Ron Hubbard’s principle: the survival instinct.

He spends a tremendous amount of time explaining that for him any religious power, any priest of

any religious practice in such tribes is only moved and motivated to capture some material advantage

(wealth) or prestige that will justify the wealth. He shows how political leaders are using the priests who are

using them in their turn to capture some material advantage (wealth, no working at all), the hereditary

transmission of wealth, power and position, in one word status, etc., via their alliance with the religious

people.

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This has little to do with what we can know of what for example the Powhatan alliance of tribes was

when the English led by John Smith arrived in Virginia and started looting, abducting women and children,

raping and killing Indians. The Powhatans were engaged in a process of bringing together a great number of

tribes of one language family (this linguistic fact shows that these tribes developed from an original common

source implying a natural unity: think of the German unification or the unification of Italy, or think of the

disbanding of Yugoslavia on a linguistic basis reinforced by religious and historical elements) and no one can

say what it might have produced if they had not been disturbed by the Spaniards first and the English

second, not to speak of the French. It would certainly not have produced their elimination in a way or another

(extermination, deportation, locking up in reservations), not to speak of the shameless recuperation of

Pocahontas. We are dealing here with other elements than the economy.

He himself gives a perfect example. The fact that all members of the communities are supposed to

see their basic needs satisfied:

“All aboriginal peoples accept the theory that every human being has the inalienable right to

an irreducible minimum, consisting of adequate food, shelter and clothing” (page 106)

This principle has economic consequences but is not moved by an economic consideration. It is

quite clear it is moved by the morel consciousness that the community is a unified body, that every individual

is a member of it and cannot be neglected. This is ethical and is probably deeply rooted in some vast

ideological if not religious belief: the sense that a community has to be unified, that in a community the

community is more important than the members but that the community cannot exist if the members cannot

benefit from it in the satisfaction of its needs. It also implies that all members are supposed to take part in the

providing of food and other resources, in the defense of the settlement and community and in the various

rituals that stabilize the community. Note the necessary dialectical approach, that Paul radin most of the time

does not use.

That’s what Jean Jacques Rousseau used to call “social contract” and this reference of mine implies

that Paul Radin has locked himself in a frozen “primitive” world that deprives him of all necessary dialectics

and of the understanding that what he says could apply to the whole world, provided things are set in

temporal and spatial perspective.

PAUL RADIN AND ARCHETYPESStarting with Freud and Jung, he moves very fast to the naturalistic school of mythology that he

considers as very positive, and then expounds his own approach. For him archetypes are universal and they

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have a life of their own. They are “residing within our psyche.” (page 310) And his theory “does not deny the

importance of external events and their power to stimulate, animate and evoke archetypes” (page 310) but it

“does deny to external events any creative function.” (page 310) For him these archetypes present in “myths,

fairy tales, religious traditions and mysteries” (page 309) embody in a way or another the libido without any

precision whether it is the libido of an individual (which is the Freudian meaning) or some collective libido

which might be supported by Jung – or even Wilhelm Reich he does not quote – though Jung only spoke of

collective unconscious.

This approach enables him to differentiate four stages in the mythological construction of the

emergence of man. He takes the example of the Winnebago mythology that he summarizes as follows.

1- the first. . . Trickster. . . the undifferentiated libido. . . the primordial period

2- the second. . . Hare. . . the partially and imperfectly differentiated libido. . . the primitive period

3- the third. . . Red Horn. . . the well differentiated libido. . . the Olympian period

4- the fourth. . . The Twins. . . the integrated libido. . . the Promethean period (page 310-311)

Without entering more detail, and a lot should be discussed, we can see he has lost his economic or

political approach for a completely libido-oriented approach and interpretation. But he considers the

universality of some myths. He rejects “a common origin” as “extremely unlikely” (page 313) He might be

right if he means a common geographical origin. But he is wrong when he reduces the universality of these

archetypes to a libidinal origin that is in his interpretation, hence in the interpretation of the reader of the

transcription in the modern world. That is a reduction of the real process by which these archetypes were

produced and later reproduced.

These archetypes embody the collective vision a community may have at a certain time of their

history of the process that brought them where they are and this process is dominated by two PTSS: the

Post Traumatic Emergence Syndrome and the Post Traumatic Birth syndrome. Both set man in a strict and

difficult situation they have to endorse and assume to survive and develop. All mythologies express this

situation with characters and events some one or some people imagined. These creations survive when they

are endorsed by the community that considers them as representing their real experience.

The child in his psychogenesis relives the phylogeny of the species and one crucial moment in the

child’s growth is what Jacques Lacan calls the “mirror stage” in which the child recognizes his image in a

mirror and realizes that he is that other and is not all others. He has become a subject conscious of himself.

We could say this corresponds to the moment when Homo Sapiens invented a name for himself and a name

for the others, probably at the very originating time of the invention of language. The pronoun “I” in a way or

another is one of the most ancient common concepts in all languages, based on the frequency lists of Morris

Swadesh built from intuition we find at the top:

1. I (Pers.Pron.1.Sg.)

2. You (2.sg! 1952 thou & ye)

3. we (1955: inclusive)

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The more scientific list comes from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, published in its Digital

Library, the Leipzig Jakarta list 2009 that gives the 100 concepts that were found in most languages and

were most resistant to borrowing. It is ordered alphabetically and contains:

· he/she/it/him/her (singular only and all three genders)

· I/me

· you (singular)

At this moment Homo Sapiens asserted himself as a different and independent species in the world

just like the child asserts himself as a different and autonomous being in the world.

In other words, and to conclude, Paul Radin is essential provided we read him with an open post-

colonial mind.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

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PAUL RADIN – PRIMITIVE MAN AS PHILOSOPHER - 1957This book is both essential and at the same time representative of its time, which means limited on

some important points.

It is essential because it refuses the easy but race-minded not to say openly racist or racialist

dominant ideas of his time, the 1920s and 1930s, in anthropology, for instance those of Lucien Lévy Bruhl.

According to these thinkers “primitive” man is limited in intellectual means and does not think logically. Yet

these anthropologists had accumulated a lot of knowledge, stories, mythological tales or constructions,

descriptions of languages, beliefs and religious ideas or concepts. But they only accumulated this knowledge

and never really stepped back to consider things with the necessary distance to make them objective. I will

not insist on that point. It is not the object of this book or its review.

THE MISTAKES NOT TO MAKEPaul Radin is careful not to make the same mistakes as the people he criticizes and these are

essentially first of all pure speculation on material collected without any critical distance, and second a

systematic questioning but without discriminating the people who are questioned. Paul Radin considers the

first mistake leads to pure subjectivity entirely under the control of western ideology, hence a vision that is

not in phase with the real thinking of these “primitive” people. Strangely enough Paul Radin keeps the word

“primitive” which is pejorative. I by far would prefer speaking of primeval civilizations. Most of them do not

practice writing, though this is more and more obsolete because colonization has widely spread writing

among all peoples in the world, and some of the old civilizations like the Mayas, the Incas, the Aztecs and

some others in America had writing systems of their own. This leads to the simple question: what does

primitive mean? Today such peoples are practically inexistent as such. There are probably some pockets in

Amazonia and some in New Guinea, maybe Africa, but most people now are reached by civilization and the

problem is for them not to be destroyed physically, linguistically or even, and especially, culturally. Some

ancient cultures can be recaptured and reconstructed but the culture of Australian Aborigines today may

have the proper forms but does not have any more the proper meaning and utility, purpose as before the

arrival of Europeans, because these depend on the context, and that one has changed tremendously over

the last century, let alone the last fifty years.

The second mistake has two levels. For one, questioning is always leading. There is no absolutely

unobtrusive and neutral questioning, but that can be reduced to as little as possible and be set under control.

But the second level is a lot more important: you cannot consider everyone equal or identical by principle in

such questioning procedures. Paul Radin has an important point here: these people are all different but

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some categories can be seen such as those Radin puts forward: men of action on one hand and thinkers on

the other hand. I am not sure those two categories are enough, but these two categories are essential. Paul

Radin describes and qualifies both very carefully. The thinkers for him are the few people (and there are only

a few in all societies even western societies) who try to understand and explain the reality of the world in

which they live. Most of them will come to and suggest constructions that are mythical or mythological in the

form of stories about the gods, the spirits, the creation of the world, the acquisition of language and

knowledge, etc. They often officiate as priests of sorts responsible for the various religious or spiritual rituals;

as doctors and scientists responsible for the welfare and healing of the members of the community and also

for the spreading of traditional and accumulated knowledge necessary for the survival of the community and

its members; or as poets, bards, story-tellers who develop their memory in order to keep the collective

knowledge of the past and the cultural elements of the community.

NO PHYLOGENIC THINKINGPaul Radin though makes a mistake of his own here. He does not consider these categories with

which he deals in any phylogenic way. The stories he analyzes are taken as first of all rather stable in their

content, second as having always existed like that, and third as not having been influenced by colonization.

He even considers that stability as one trait or distinctive feature of the thinkers of these societies. He quotes

North American Indians a lot, the Winnebagos very often, but he works with the stories he collected in the

1920s mostly, still remembered at the time by the surviving Winnebago Indians, after four centuries of brutal

genocidal colonization and at least two or three if not more centuries of compulsory Christianization. Many of

the formal characteristics of these stories are strikingly similar to some of the Hebrew-based religions,

particularly Christianity. That’s part of the phylogenic approach I think should be implemented in this case in

two directions: can we in anyway understand how these stories developed before the arrival of Europeans;

and can we actually pinpoint the impact of the brutal colonization and Christianization of the concerned

Indian population? Maybe the answer is no, but we cannot neglect these questions and draw the conclusion

that what we see is what we should see. What we can get from the Maya inscriptions in their stone temples

is at least absolutely free of any Christian and Western influence. What these inscriptions are telling us, if we

can decipher them, is then authentic, whereas what we can get from the memory of some living descendants

cannot in any way be said and guaranteed as authentic. Too much time, too much violence, too much

damage done by western colonization. What you get is not what you should see.

Apart from that we can consider some of the ideas put forward by Paul Radin who always tried to get

the philosophical constructions or reconstructions of the philosophy of these people from their thinkers and

thus what he says represents what he has understood from and in what these thinkers told him. In what

language by the way? Their original language or English or another European language? If it was collected

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in English or Spanish or French that means the informers have translated their own culture into these

European languages and we should wonder about their ability at translating and their command of the

European language they used. And if it was collected in their original languages, it has been translated by

some European translator, and there I am afraid translation is necessarily high treason. He never gives the

stories in bilingual presentation and hardly gives any information about how the poems or rituals he

comments upon sound or look in their original languages. From what I know about the native languages of

Polynesia or Northern America and Africa, the least we can say is that many of these languages are NOT

easily translatable into French, English, Spanish or German, if any translation from one language to another

can in any way be 100% faithful, and I doubt that very much.

NO CAUSE-EFFECTPaul Radin particularly criticizes western influence in what is being said and propagated about these

civilizations. First of all he considers there is no real cause-effect thinking in these cultures. He is right but

does not argue the point enough. There is no cause-effect thinking because the world is not cut up into small

elements and the world is not thought as a necessarily causal chain of action or evolution. These civilizations

understand the world and daily experience as being a tremendous amount of simultaneous elements that

have to be captured in one single vision, and from these elements when they are fulfilled or when they reach

a certain level of fulfillment some new phenomenon or element will emerge, not caused by anything but

rather let free to emerge, or not emerge eventually. That’s where the original languages would be important.

In Prakrit languages for example they have a special verbal form, the preterit participle, that expresses

exactly that phenomenon: now this element has been fulfilled, now this second element has also been

fulfilled, a certain action can eventually be performed, or a certain phenomenon can appear, or even may

appear, and develop, not caused by it though it can or may develop only when these actions have been

fulfilled.

This is the basic way of thinking of Buddhism: now I have finally learned what I had to learn, now I

have assimilated this learning, now I have made up my mind, I may decide to start doing some more

advanced action like entering some meditative state to move towards enlightenment. It is not learning the

Dhammapada by heart and reciting it every day that will enlighten me. In fact I may get on the way to

enlightenment even if I have not read the Dhammapada and even if I can’t recite one single verse. But I will

have to have reached a certain level of knowledge and resolve in a way or another to be able to decide to

get on that way. And what I did not learn before I will learn along the way. That way of thinking and behaving

is contained in the very syntax of Prakrit languages, and Sanskrit even, and that goes back to the

development of these languages some ten thousand years ago, if not even more. Strangely enough we can

even follow such syntactic forms in the other branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, the Indo European

branch and see how these syntactic forms have been dropped (they were common to the two Indo-European

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and Indo-Aryan branches because they must have been in the common basis on the Iranian plateau before

the two branches migrated down west or east), or rather transformed, shifted in meaning in the Indo-

European languages of today.

That’s what I mean by a phylogenic approach and that is absent from Paul Radin.

WESTERN INDIVIDUALISTIC VISIONAnother example is the way he considers the West has centered its philosophical and social

development on an individualistic approach thus neglecting the group, or even at times rejecting any group

approach. On the other side the civilizations Paul Radin is studying are capturing the individual as

necessarily part of the community. The individual does not determine what he or she is going to do by

himself or herself but what they decide to do is largely dependant on the way they articulate themselves onto

that community that is identifying for them. The West has even invented a word for that: it is called

“communitarianism,” meaning the individual can only develop within the closed limits of his or her

community, but the western approach as carried by this word is critical if not hostile. In fact this approach in

these communities means that the individual, when he has reached the full sense of belonging to his

community, when he has fully concentrated his intellectual and ethical means onto the fulfilling of the

common objectives of himself or herself and of their community, hence when the individual has fully

integrated in his or her stance the vision and perspective of his or her community, then he or she will

“naturally” come to doing what he or she has to do. Integration in the identifying community of the individual

is the condition for the individual to be successful, for the individual to reach prestige and a heightened

sense of existence. But this is fundamentally conveyed in ALL languages in the world by the personal

pronoun systems. And Paul Radin once again does not consider language.

COMMUNITARIANISM IN LANGUAGEThese personal pronouns may change in many ways but they are basically founded on a three-tiered

distance hierarchy.

First “I” necessarily and from the very start captured simultaneously as twinned to “YOU” and this

couple “I-YOU” is simultaneously captured as differentiated from the third level “OTHER” that will lead to the

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third person. We have to understand that “I-YOU” is basically captured as “WE.” That’s the first community,

the nurturing family. Even that community is questioned by the West. But the various civilizations of the world

vary a lot as for their understanding of the “OTHER.” There is the first “OTHER” that provides the “WE” with

some identity. It is the “OTHER” the “WE” belongs to. In some languages and their societies the pronouns

change according to the sex of the person speaking, implying the male or female community is the identity of

the male or female individual. In some other languages and civilizations the pronouns vary according to the

social class or social caste the individual belongs to: when an individual from a lower class speaks to a

person of a higher class, or vice versa, the pronouns vary and become specific. We thus have complex

networks of communities and memberships according to how a civilization defines the “OTHER.” But we

must be clear here it is never seen as homogeneous. Yet recent events have shown that even in some

advanced and developed western countries there exist some referential groups defining the identity of their

members and the way they are supposed to behave. The French are probably the clearest community

defining the French community as having to be republican and to adopt and defend what they call

“republican values” which include the rejection of any religious reference as identifying and imply any

member of this French republican community has the right in the whole world to debunk any religious beliefs,

except – of course, would hey say – the Jews. Hence it boils down to the Christians (in fact only the

Catholics) and the Muslims. Some people are being brought to court, tried, convicted and sentenced even to

prison terms for questioning such “values”: they are accused of advocating terrorism.

That’s where Paul Radin is wrong. He is right to insist on such communitariasnism but he is wrong to

consider they are typical of “primitive” civilizations.

EVOLUTION OR NOTIn the same way he accuses the West of making it compulsory to think in evolutionistic terms. He

considers “primitive” civilizations are refusing to see the world in such evolutionistic terms. He is right as long

as he considers what he is studying is frozen into some stability. But he is wrong because it is the collecting

of what he is studying that is freezing these materials into some kind of stable unchanging essence. These

stories have been produced in multiple versions in oral societies over millennia. Since colonization started

(without colonization we would never have been interested in these civilizations) they have been under

heavy influence from the West and Christianity. Furthermore when we deal with Africa we don’t consider that

another influence was felt some ten centuries before colonization: Islam. What was the impact of Islam on

African cultures? And we find the same blocking attitude in Europe concerning the Christianization of the old

Indo-European cultures that existed before the arrival of Christianity. It took six to eight centuries for that

Christianization to be completed. Luckily we can now start following that process in some basic myths or

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legends of Europe like Tristan and Isolde.

THE ROLE OF LANGUAGEAnother important element is the role of language in his approach. He is very keen on insisting on

the role of the “word” and particularly the “written word” in the stabilizing of cultures and civilizations. He

seems to attribute this fact to the West again. Here it is quite acceptable to say that writing has had a very

strict impact on the stabilizing of culture and thinking. But he should question language and not reduce it to

words.

The linguistic ability is the constructed result of the implementation of another capability of the brain,

the capability to discriminate patterns in what the senses capture and then to conceptualize these patterns in

order to recognize them. Homo Sapiens by giving names to these patterns developed their linguistic

capability. Keep in mind this phenomenological chain:

DISCRIMINATE PATTERNS – IDENTIFY / RECOGNIZE THEM – NAME THEM

And you may understand what conceptualization is. Any human group or individual who has a language at

their disposal has that capability. Paul Radin should have met Vygotsky to see that since conceptualization

has a psychogenetic development in children, it must have had a phylogenic development in Homo Sapiens.

What was the role of the phylogeny of language in the emergence of Homo Sapiens? And what was the role

of conceptualization in that phylogeny? That would have led him to a hierarchy of the human conceptualizing

capability. Any human who speaks a human language has developed a certain level of conceptualization.

We can then wonder if these languages and their communities have developed more or less abstract

conceptualization.

Then the “conditions to success” that he lists page 82, with an addition page 95, show how powerful

conceptualizing is. To succeed an individual within a community has to demonstrate:

1- a definite inward purification

2- a reverend and a humble spirit

3- persistent effort

4- strength of character

5- the saving grace of the sense of life’s realities

6- a knowledge of oneself

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7- restraint

This is not primitive at all: it implies a tremendous level of education, training and conceptualized

understanding on one hand; then it could be said of any person in any world and civilization. The specificity

in the civilizations he studies is the fact that this cannot be understood and grasped without the full

articulation of an individual on his or her community. But as I have said before that is not typical of these

“primitive” societies. Communitarianism is extremely present in western societies and can be seen as a force

that can question and even challenge the national communitarianism of some countries who refuse to

recognize and acknowledge the existence of such communities within what they call the national community.

WORD – SYNTAX – DISCOURSEOne example of this linguistic conceptualizing power working in association with the connection

between the individual and the community is given as a sign of abstract thought. Right but Paul Radin

doesn’t exploit his own idea enough: he does not consider the language itself.

Words first conceptualize identified and isolated items, static or dynamic, spatial (nouns) or temporal

(verbs). Paul Radin has probably understood this. Then the syntax of the language (and there are several

different types). The syntax is based on the conceptualization of relations between items. Ergative and non-

ergative languages both conceptualize the relation between the agent, the patient and the verbal connection

between them, but they do it differently with a direct impact on the way people think, even at the lowest

imaginable level of abstraction. The third level of conceptualization is the discourse in which the language is

used meaning the relation between the speaker, the interlocutor, their community and the language itself.

Every single element in that complex network of relations has to be conceptualized through education,

training and experience to be dealt with properly. If we consider the following aphorism “Stones will rot but

words never rot,” we have to understand the words, then the syntax, but then consider the discursive context

without which the aphorism has no meaning. The meaning provided by Paul Radin, “Anything may be

forgiven but offensive words,” is one possible meaning in one possible discursive situation, maybe the

common meaning, but definitely not the only one. For aphorisms to really work as general statements they

have to be in the third person otherwise they are projected into the discursive context of the speaker and/or

interlocutor.

That’s where we come to a fundamental remark when Paul Radin speaks of “simulacra.”

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“The parts of the body, the physiological functions of the organs, like the material form taken

by objects in nature, are mere symbols, simulacra, of the essential psychical-spiritual entity

that lies behind them.” (274)

Paul Radin could not know that Jean Baudrillard was going to develop a whole theory of simulacra in

modern society. For Baudrillard carrots have the only value our appetite, our need to eat to survive, give

them. That’s for him their real natural value. By setting a price on this value when entering market economy,

the market value is a simulacrum of the “natural” value. If we pay with metal money (gold, silver, copper) this

money is a simulacrum of the market value. Using paper money, it is a simulacrum of metal money and of

market value. If we pay with a check or a credit card or a telephone, each time we go up one rung on the

ladder of simulacra, one rung away from the only real natural value of the carrots, i.e. my hunger and my

desire to eat in order to survive.

PAUL RADIN AND SIMULACRAPaul Radin is on a completely different line. He explains that the real material items are the

simulacra of the psychical-spiritual entities. We must expand the quotation:

“It is clearly manifest that the dynamic principle is here fundamental. The static principle is

definitely only the temporary shell, the body, doomed to early extinction and decay. Also,

there is the inability to express the psychical in terms of the body; the psychical must be

projected upon the external world. The Ego, in other words, cannot contain within itself both

subject and object, although the object is definitely conditioned by and exists within the

perceiving self. Thus we have an Ego consisting of subject-object, with the object only

intelligible in terms of the external world and of other Egos. This does not in any sense, of

course, interfere with the essential dualism of primitive thought but it does imply a tie

between the Ego and the phenomenal world foreign to that which we assume. And this

connection is very important, for it takes the form of an attraction, a compulsion. Nature

cannot resist man, man cannot resist nature. A purely mechanistic conception of life is thus

unthinkable. The parts of the body, the physiological functions of the organs, like the

material form taken by objects in nature, are mere symbols, simulacra, for the essential

psychical-spiritual entity that lies behind them.” (273-274)

A body condemned to get extinct and decay cannot be seen as anything static. It is by essence non-

static since it is born, grows, withers, dies and decays. What he is trying to say is that the conceptualized

world we reach by getting over the ever changing material world is dynamic but that has nothing to do with

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ever-changing. It is dynamic because it can make us go beyond appearances, because it builds and

activates our mental powers. He is right to say we cannot model the psychical reality of our Ego in terms of

the body, but he is wrong to say that the body is there for nothing. He might be following some of the

formulations he found in the cultures he studies and his remark might be right within these limits but he is

wrong because he does not capture the mental level of the individual, a construct that realizes, expands and

develops the capabilities contained in the very structure and architecture of our central nervous system.

Then he is right to say that the world cannot exist in our consciousness without being captured, analyzed,

modeled and virtualized by this central nervous system into the model we will retain in our mind. The world

will be in our consciousness only through this mental model that can be modified but that is the indispensible

filter for us to capture the world and even act onto it. That leads him to a very mysterious sentence: “Nature

cannot resist man, man cannot resist nature.” In our mental line it is clear, but the words do not express that

mental approach. Nature cannot resist man because the mental model man has in his mind is only man’s

own creation, yet nature can defeat actions based on this model if the model is unrealistic. In the same way

man cannot resist nature because in the end nature will have the last word, except if man is able to change

nature. But will nature accept to be changed? That’s a question that is not asked.

THE PSYCHICAL-SPIRITUALThen we understand why he speaks of the “psychical spiritual’ though it is not entirely clear in the

word used. Psychical refers to the functioning of the central nervous system at the level of the behavior of

the individual and its motivations. But spiritual refers to a cultural element entirely mentally built by man on

the basis of what the individual captures in the world. It has little to do with psychical. Psychical remains at

the level of the functioning of the central nervous system. Spiritual is at the level of the functioning of the

mind, that virtual construct of man confronting his central nervous system to the world and his desire to

capture it and survive. Psychical is connected to the body. Spiritual is entirely disconnected from the body.

The mind manages the psychical dimension of man’s behavior. The mind conceptualizes all its managed

experience into the virtual cultural spiritual model of the individual’s existential and circumstantial experience.

Strangely enough that is in phase with what Marshall McLuhan is developing in the 1950s and 1960s

but Paul Radin did not know about it.

For Marshall McLuhan the body is the basis of all further development of man. You can identify his

various organs and functions and every invention is the expansion and extension of one particular organ or

function. Take the examples of “feet” as a real experiential organ that enables us to walk or run. Then

conceptualize this walking-running capability. Then you can manage that walking and running: adapt it to the

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terrain or the objective, to a road or a forest, an uphill slope or a downhill slope. You have to conceptualize

(more or less according to the people) this capability to be effective. Go one step further and “surrogate” the

capability with some machine or device, surrogate foot-walking or foot-running with a device enabling us to

transport ourselves without using our feet. Then invent the wheel and the cart, the car, the bicycle, etc. The

wheel is the surrogate of our feet. It expands and extends our feet in their walking-running capability. This

shows the real material natural world when we conceptualize some functions can be surrogated as for these

functions with artificial devices pre-conceptualized in a design, realized in the material device itself that

surrogates the initial function conceptualized from the real material natural world. The first conceptualization

is virtual and is constructed in our mind by our central nervous system (in connection with the real world

outside and inside our own body). Then the second conceptualization designing a device that will surrogate

the function we have previously conceptualized is also constructed in our mind. It can then eventually be

materialized as a drawing, or a model. Then the device is produced and we reach the third conceptualization

of its function. We have the following chain:

FEET – WALKING-RUNNING – WHEEL – CART-CAR-ETC

REAL MATERIAL WORLD –

– 1ST VIRTUAL MENTAL CONCEPTUALIZATION – “walking/running” capability

– 2ND VIRTUAL MENTAL CONCEPTUALIZATION – “wheel”

– 3RD VIRTUAL MENTAL CONCEPTUALIZATION – “(means of) transportation”

SURROGATES ARE POSITIVEMarshall McLuhan cannot consider that the virtual surrogates have in any way the negative

dimension Jean Baudrillard would give them. At the same time Marshall McLuhan is perfectly in phase with

Paul Radin. The very projection of the virtual conceptualizations onto the body enables us to expand-extend

that body into surrogate devices. These devices are real material man-made surrogates of the basic real

material physical capabilities of our body. We can consider the conceptualizations themselves and their

concepts are surrogates and then they would be virtual and in many ways immaterial, though materiality

should not mean touchable.

We could conclude with a short note on, what Paul Radin says on monotheism. He seems to refuse

any evolutionary approach of monotheism but at the same time he takes for granted that monotheism was

basically invented by the three Hebraic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). In fact he is mistaken

about these three religions.

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Judaism has a binary vision: check Genesis and look for “God and his spirit.”

Christianity has a ternary vision: the Trinity, the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Islam has a binary vision: unitary as for God but binary as for the Quran, God and His Prophet.

We could of course think of all the “primitive” mythologies in which God is never alone, be he the

main one or the only one because he has a Transformer, a Trickster of a type or another to bring to man the

divine knowledge man is stated as not able to produce. Without in anyway wishing to be blasphemous, we

could wonder if that Transformer, or that Trickster, or whatever other intermediary used by God to enlighten

man is not similar to the Spirit of God or Archangel Gabriel, Jesus, and Mahomet. God in these three

monotheistic religions always has a helper somewhere and somehow. In fact the only one of these three

religions that does not take such a helper among men is Judaism, though we could discuss Moses as the

deliverer of the Covenant.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

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PAUL RADIN – THE TRICKSTER, A STUDY IN AMERICAN INDIAN MYTHOLOGY

Paul Radin is an authority in American Indian mythology, today rather referred to as Native

American. But an authority from the first half of the 20th century. In this particular book he analyzes the

Trickster myth in parallel with the Hare myth, both from the Winnebago Indians. He refers to other versions

from other tribal traditions but he centers on this particular Winnebago heritage. This is a good point because

there is then some real unity in the approach. But it is also a bad point because it does not put this tradition

in any kind of real perspective.

He gives the full two cycles concerned and summaries of a couple others from other tribes. It is easy

to work on the original language if we want, the linear translation (both freely available on the Internet) and

then the proposed translation. This is not really needed at this point of the enquiry. The full cycles are

essential to understand the strategy of the story telling. He actually uses at least the collections of two

storytellers, two brothers and he states how the younger brother is more creative, more personal, whereas

the elder brother is more respective of the myth the way both of them received it from their father who was

an authorized myth teller, raconteur as he calls him. He made sure the story was gotten from the older man

in full agreement with the tradition about the circumstances of the story telling and the payment for it.

He does mention the importance of that element because in this oral civilization everything is kept in

memory by some people who are actually certified, appointed and trained to the job of being the collective

memory of the tribe. He does point out that there are some instances of judgment from the raconteur on what

he is telling, but Radin probably does not go far enough, does not disentangle the story from the recent

circumstances when it was collected. It is necessary to determine with great precision what the oldest form of

the story could have been. He does get to the question now and then but does not go to the bottom of it. He

is satisfied with saying the versions he considers are late primitive whereas those he does not consider are

earlier in their primitiveness, hence more primitive. He actually should have used these older ones.

His retrospective imposition is most visible when he uses the word “primitive”. This is today outdated.

We could say primeval but primitive is definitely derogatory and is judging not from a structural point of view,

that of the pattern and architecture of the stories, but from a “developed” not to say “civilized” modern point of

view. That is strange because Radin published a book with the title “Primitive Man as Philosopher” which is

at least oxymoronic, and yet he goes on considering that the Winnebago are late primitive just like the oldest

ancient Greek period. With that in mind he does not take off in his approach and remains the servant if not

the slave of what he studies. He does not rise to a global anthropological approach, certainly not a

sociological approach, absolutely not a psychoanalytical approach and his linguistic considerations in his

analysis are extremely limited.

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The Trickster cycle is typically repetitive as for the main character, Wakdjunkaga, being well named

and described when called the Foolish one, etc. He sees the contradictory nature of the character who could

represent the emergence of man from animality, the learning of what makes a human being human and at

the same time a character totally possessed by three drives: his hunger, his uncontrollable urge to wander

and his sexuality. This trickster is not bringing anything to the world really, to humanity, at least not in his

intention. He is at most a border breaker, a person who is breaking all rules and expectations. That this

should be turned into satire, entertainment and ridicule, implying the great imbecility of the character is

nothing but a story telling strategy. If we go deeper it is quite clear the Trickster is a reflection of the

emergence of humanity, maybe not so much before the last ice age but definitely after when the water

started coming back and we cannot be surprised there is a direct allusion to the flood when he is lost in the

ocean and cannot find the coast.

Basically Homo Sapiens had to solve the problem of his survival as an Individual, or even a

collective group by finding enough food for everyone in the group. That is hunger. Then Homo Sapiens had

to survive as a species by bringing to life enough adults (13 years of age) to renew and expand the group.

That is insatiable sexuality. A woman had to be pregnant at least eight times, rather ten or even twelve times,

from 13 to 29, that is to say before dying, to have some three surviving children reaching procreating age. A

woman had to breast feed a child twenty or twenty-four months. Hence a woman as soon as she reached the

age of 13 is always carrying a child, either in her arms and on her back, or in her womb, and for the last nine

wombs of every twenty month period both at the same time. The sexual obsession is definitely quite crucial

for the human species. The need to wander only comes third and not second as Radin says (p. 165) and that

again is a fundamental dimension of Homo Sapiens who became a long distance bipedal runner as soon as

he got out of the African forest where he appeared into the savannah. The urge to wander is just this simple

human fact that Homo Sapiens is a migrating species.

Radin misses all that though he sees that the Hare cycle is of a different tone and Hare is more a

culture hero, a hero that brings culture to humanity whereas the Trickster is only interested in his own

satisfaction. Yet the basic cultural facts are mentioned in The Trickster cycle but as the way for the character

to satisfy his three impulses. A real culture hero gets the same knowledge to give it to humanity. Hare is

closer to that second archetype, the emergence of human culture. In Radin’s own words we have: “the

securing of fire, of flint, of tobacco, of food in general and of the main cultivated plants; the regulation of the

seasons and the weather; the assignment of their proper and non-destructive functions of the forces of

nature; the freeing of the world from monsters, ogres and giants; the origin of death; the gradual education of

the hero’s female guardian, generally pictured as inimical at first, and the gradual freeing of the hero from her

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tutelage. This freeing is symbolized by his being swallowed by a sea-monster, killing it and escaping from it

and, finally, by his cohabiting with his guardian.” Trickster is not a culture hero because he does not do that

for humanity but for himself but everything is there.

Yet one thing is bluntly and blatantly missing: the securing of language which is present in the

Trickster cycle in the fact that he gets a name at a certain moment in the cycle, he is called something by

others, language being then a naming tool and a communicational tool. The only point with Trickster is that

the tone, the style, the story-telling plan is not to tell this experience of a culture hero but to make fun of that

particular character. The real question then is why.

This satirical and humoristic tone all along against the Trickster shows clearly that it is not a

mythology that is being built but an entertainment because the respectful or awe-inspiring version of the

mythological events and stories are safe enough, accepted enough for people to be able to inject a ridiculous

character into it to make fun of him and also to criticize some basic rules and even taboos. The comparison,

by Karl Kerényi, with the profane comedies of Roman times, the plyakes (p. 178), is interesting. Same thing

with Greek plays like “Frogs” by Aristophanes centered on Dionysus. But then Kerényi jumps to Goethe and

later literature and does not use the vast European and Asian use of the character of “Polichinelle” in his

French identity, Pulcinella, Petrushka, Punch and many other identities, as a fundamental trickster who goes

back to origins we cannot even identify, and probably not in Europe, who does not speak naturally but uses a

whistle to cover the real voice of the actor since we are dealing here with puppets and puppet-theater. We

could also think of the Flemish Tyll Eulenspiegel who is very similar.

The great difference between the American Indian stories and these is that they look more primordial

and hence have a mythological dimension that the European equivalent forms do not have. The Trickster

cycle is thus the birth and emergence of mythical story telling as an entertainment that gets the mickey out of

the main character and conveys a satire of fundamental social and cultural rules.

The last point is how Paul Radin, and definitely Karl Kerényi miss the essential sexual point. The

safe keeping of his penis and testicles by Trickster in a box he carries on his back, the procedure to set

these organs in place, the use of his penis as a probing weapon by Trickster and the progressive reduction

of this enormous penis to a “normal size” by the munching of a chipmunk on it discarding pieces and bits of it

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away, and then the transformation of these wasted pieces into edible food for humanity, it all has a meaning

that goes beyond the simple idiocy of the tale. We are there at the crossroads of the necessary survival of

the species with procreative sex on one hand and the sublimation of the sex drive and sexual organ into

some nourishing and profitable activity for humanity (creative on the side of the sublimating person and

communicational with the people around him) as soon as the procreative need is no longer as urgent as it

probably was for a long time at the beginning. Imagine the situation at the end of the ice-age when the ice

started to move back and the human groups that had survived by retreating south and adapting to a

completely new situation when they saw vast expanses of land progressively taken over by vegetation and

animals and they had to multiply to re-conquer these territories, while vast territories around the coasts of the

continents were flooded by rising water. The story telling is funny and even ridiculous but the meaning is a lot

deeper than what Paul Radin says.

There is a lot more to say but no one has mentioned the fact that the stories are repetitive: one

situation, one event is repeated over and over again but there is a pattern in that story telling: generally the

event is repeated three times and on the fourth time it changes, a solution appears. These triple and

quadruple patterns must have a meaning but I found no answer about them in this book.

The last remark is in fact a side remark because it is not the main concern of this book. There is an

allusion in the borrowing of two brothers by Trickster from a younger man and his letting them die because

he did not do what was proper.

Now and then the book mentions other cycles that are essential: The Twins cycle, the Two brothers

cycle, and the Redhorn cycle (who has two sons and carries two shrunken human heads as pendants on his

ears.) Without entering details here let’s say we have here a universal patterns of two brothers running

around the world and having adventures, most of them dealing with the initiation of the boys and with the

solving of problems in the world. This double pattern is present in so many cultures that it cannot be

considered as innocent. But this pattern brings up the ternary pattern again since most divine pantheons in

many cultures and civilizations are triple. What’s more the bisexual dimension of Trickster in his desire to be

a woman to marry the son of a chief and give birth to his children is common in many religious and

mythological systems in the world. The quadruple pattern is also very important, the tetragrammaton being

one of the best known examples.

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Jung’s answer on the sexual dimension of three and four being feminine or masculine does not solve

the problem since he asserts it and does not prove it with any extensive demonstration, not to mention the

contradiction about it he carries in his Four Archetypes.

This book is a good first step into American Indian mythology but a lot can be added today on the

subject that Paul Radin and the people of his generation did not really take into account.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

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C. G. JUNG – FOUR ARCHETYPES MOTHER REBIRTH SPIRIT TRICKSTER – © 1959

This book has become a classic but before considering the most important theoretical and practical

elements in the book, I would like to make three remarks, to get them out of the way.

The first one is the few mentions of Hitler and Nazism, often direct but unnamed and in an off-

handed way that makes these remarks disagreeable because they seem to explain and excuse Hitler and

the Nazi party because of the impossibility to contain the masses when the hero archetype hits them. There

is a lot to say about mass fascination and mass psychology but it cannot be used to excuse the crimes

committed by some in a way or another.

The second remark is about his reference to Lévy Bruhl and his concept of “primitive manr and also

to Paul Radin and the same concept. It is true he uses a couple of times the word “primeval” which is a lot

better but he overuses “primitive” applied to man, society, or whatever human aspect and the reference is

strong following Radin to apply that qualification to Native Americans. They only look primitive to the

fundamentalist Protestants in particular and Christians in general who conquered them, exterminated them

and forced them into reservations. Once again this is an easy way to excuse the crimes of history, the crimes

western men have committed. And the book having been partly revised in the 1950s, the author should have

known better.

The last thing here which is highly unacceptable because it is a stereotypical absurdity is the clear-

cut and absolutely not fuzzy at all connection of homosexuality with the mother complex. What he calls the

mother complex should be called the mother attachment, maybe excessive attachment. That may produce

some cases of homosexuality but it produces quite a few other derangements among heterosexual and

clearly straight people, particularly extreme anti-gay attitudes in the name of purity and procreation. Look at

Ron Hubbard for one example and his clear rejection of homosexuality and at the same time his excessive

attachment to the definition of women as mothers and the reduction of sex to procreative objectives. Ron

Hubbard speaks exactly like the proponents of Proposition 8 in California, even if forty years before: the only

objective of human sexuality is procreation, hence the only dimension a woman has to have is to be a

mother. If that is not over-attachment to the “concept” of the mother, then what is?

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By the way, there are many other ways and paths leading to the gay choice or life style and among

others love, and don’t tell me love is a motherly dimension. Love is a vast universe connected to the mirror

neurons and the feeling of empathy which are in all human beings (even in some apes) and can be

perverted in a way or another to reject some behaviors in others and to refuse empathy for some categories

of people and replace this human empathy with hatred and the desire to exterminate. What was I saying

about Indians, Native Americans? They are primitive and We are then justified in feeling no empathy for

them and getting them our of the way of civilization, in the singular of course since civilization is OUR

WESTERN civilization, racist wrapping and all.

Of course Jung wrote before and just after 1950, but how could he ignore that much, in the later part

of his life, the Holocaust, the Shoah, the industrial extermination of tens of millions of people, and the gulag

was to follow later on (1956 with Khrushchev), not to speak of Jacques Lacan and Levy Strauss.

This being said, I can now turn to the more important questions, some of them of course, not all of

them.

The general idea is that each one of us carries in our psyche a collective unconscious made of

archetypes and that this is inborn. This idea is old fashioned and completely off the track even in Jung’s time.

He does not take into account any psychogenetic elements and how children, before birth and after birth, are

confronted to a general situation that is practically the same for all human newborns and has been the same

since mutations made Homo Sapiens so premature and dependent at birth. The trauma of birth and hunger

is not taken into account. Language is not taken into account before birth. True enough the first recordings of

what a baby could hear inside his mother’s womb were only made in the 1980s, but since we knew a long

time before that the child could hear around the 20th or 24th week of his/her mother’s pregnancy, Jung could

have had the inkling of thinking that the child might have heard things before birth. But there is no excuse for

the total negligence of language in the way the new-born is going to start having and building relations with

his/her environment. At the time the mother was more or less dominant, but after 1945 the evolution went

fast about the education and professional life of women. He could then have brought the father back into the

picture.

True enough he only considers the mother archetype. True enough he does not consider the father

archetype, except casually, on the side and offhandedly. He does consider the feminine side of each man,

what he calls the anima, and he quotes the masculine side of each woman, the animus, but he only studies

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the anima of the male characters of his fairy tales, which makes the male characters definitely dominant,

heroes, with a dark shadow that retains the man down trapped into overused and repetitive ruts, and with a

feminine anima that may lead him to all kinds of horrible things, actions, reactions. But the best part seems to

be the statement that the mother archetype is part of the collective unconscious that is inborn in a child along

with the non-study of the real psychogenesis of the relation with the mother and the psychogenetic effects of

that relation on the child, not to speak of course of the same two dimensions of the relation with the father

during the pregnancy and after birth. In other words this approach is disembodied, dematerialized and it

naturally leads to considering these vast archetypes are the fruits of some natural process that makes them

inborn in the child, as if the relation with the mother that is mostly exclusive for nine months was not an

acquired environmental unavoidable construction.

But in that line when he studies what he says is a German version of a fairy tale collected by the

Grimm brothers, “The Princess in the Tree,” a title that does not exist in the collections of the Brothers

Grimm’s tales, he is mostly superimposing his own vision onto the tale without really studying in detail some

patterns that are not and cannot be accidental. His approach of threeness for example is ambiguous and

difficult to follow because it does not take all the elements, and each one of them within its semiotic cluster of

elements, into account and what’s more his assertion that three is a feminine number and four a masculine

number is at least questionable, greatly questionable including in the tale he considers. (We will see he

states the reverse in another context.) The fact that the three-legged horse is a mare is counterbalanced by

the fact it is the property of a witch at first then the stolen property of a hunter, he claims is a representation

of the “pagan” god Wotan (what does pagan has to do in this context, I don’t know: Wotan is a Nordic and

hence partly Germanic god vastly Christianized by other fairy and folk tales like Sigmund and Siegfried), and

he forgets to really exploit the fact that this three-legged horse was a four-legged horse at first when the

property of the witch, and it lost a leg because that leg was maimed by twelve wolves to whom the hunter

had not brought an offering to cross their forest. And he does not exploit the number 12 which is magic and

deeply Christian, though not only, and is the multiplication of three by four, or the reverse. That should have

made him think of castration indeed.

At this moment, and all along in the book, the reference to alchemy is naïve because alchemy is the

result of millennia of human culture, accumulation and cogitation, and not something existing magically in the

middle of the Middle Ages. His reference to Alchemy is very defective because it does not take into account

older representations from which it borrowed or inherited a lot of symbolical representations.

One example is quite obvious when he studies the double triad. He says that the two “opposed”

triangles are the result of the cutting up of a square along one of its diagonals. True enough but he misses,

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neglects, does not even allude to the quite famous, and infamous under Nazism, star of David composed of

two opposed triangles representing two cups, the cup of god pouring divine truth into the cup of man

receiving that divine truth. This negligence, ignorance or rejection is in many ways absurd because it is a

fundamental human symbolism that comes from even farther back and is in many ways universal, and it is

one starting point for the freemason tradition that is also connected to alchemy later on.

In the same way when he speaks of the Dioscuri, the famous couples of male characters, Castor and

Pollux for one, and many others, including one he lengthily studies in the Quran, Moses and Khidr in Sura

18, the Cave, he does not mention the famous couple Jachin and Boaz in David and Solomon’s temple. He

does speak of the old grey man as opposed to the young man or boy in many fairy tales, but he does not

speak of this Jewish couple that is mythical and that is the very basis of the alchemical couple of the master

and the apprentice and that we find in many Romanesque churches, including on the outside porch of some

(Beurrières in Puy de Dôme, France, for one), in inverted order since Jachin is the south pillar, on the right

when going out of Solomon’s temple, on the left when going in, and Boaz is the north pillar on the left when

going out of Solomon’s temple and on the right when going in. Hebrew is a Semitic language read from right

to left and Jachin and Boaz is right when going out of the temple, but it is Boaz and Jachin when going in. In

Beurrières it is Jachin and Boaz from left to right when going into the church (hence the reverse order from

the Hebraic order.) I cannot understand why he missed that fundamental couple, fundamental in our culture,

but with roots so deep in the Middle East, the Levant, Asia Minor and of course in many other human

civilizations (even if according to the French Left we are not supposed to use this word “civilization” in the

plural) that all have gone through this vast region stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to what is today

Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, where all Homo Sapiens coming out of Africa met with the two

Neanderthals branches, those who populated Europe and those who went up and whose DNA has just been

identified in Central Asia and Siberia. All Homo Sapiens went there since all Homo Sapiens have a genetic

heritage from one or the other Neanderthals branches. All of them, except those Homo Sapiens who did not

migrate out of Africa.

I have mentioned two essential cultural Jewish heritages neglected, ignored or rejected (who will

ever know?) by Jung. He had a difficult relation with Sigmund Freud early in his life but that cecity cannot be

explained by that relationship and anyway it is scientifically wrong and unacceptable. So was Jung an anti-

Semite? The way he tries to cover up and excuse Hitler and German Nazism may lead me to think he was at

least voluntarily ignorant of Jewish culture and heritage, along with its old and deep roots, in human culture.

When dealing with archetypes it is difficult to “ignore” that heritage.

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But I would like to insist on one other archetype. That of the mother.

He tries by all means to reduce the mother to a triple, threefold or triadic form. The three gunas in the

parkrti (Hinduism and Vedic tradition) is false because the three basic gods of Hinduism in this culture and

religion are both male and female, Brahma is the less bisexual, but Shiva and Vishnu are well-known for their

hermaphrodite bisexuality. He should have then studied the male fatherly creator and the female creator, life-

enhancer and destroyer. He would have then been able to understand Buddhism that is notably absent from

his approach, including when he speaks of the rebirth archetype, though the dukkha cycle of birth-(waxing-

and-waning-life)-death-rebirth and the possible escape from it via meditation and positive kamma (which he

calls “karma”, a Sanskrit word, though Sanskrit was never used by the Buddhists in those distant centuries:

they even invented the language Pali to transcribe Buddha’s canonical preaching. And of course he misses

the concept of nibbana (nirvana in Sanskrit) when the mind gets totally free from all material attachments and

can merge into cosmic universal energy. This absence, once again, is a serious shortcoming.

He often approaches the triple nature of the goddess but never speaks of the triple goddess, though

he does mention Hecate, Demeter and a few other names she may have in Greek. The triple goddess is a lot

vaster and deeper, and older than that. The goddess of life, the goddess of love and growth, the goddess of

death. Diana, who some associate with Athena, is the goddess of birth, life, growth, young animals and

humans, pregnant women and childbirth. Selene is the moon goddess and represents natural darkness, love

and all these private acts you may associate with the night. Hecate is the goddess of the underworld, of the

dead and death. He quotes Demeter several times, her daughter Persiphone, the goddess of the underworld

like Hecate, and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Demeter is in one name that triple goddess. He alludes with these

Eleusinian Mysteries to Semele and her son Dionysus, also known as Bacchus or Iacchus. But once again

he mostly neglects and does not consider the father. In Semele’s case, the father is Zeus and he will finish

carrying the foetus in his own thigh when Heras his wife kills Demeter out of jealousy, hence Dionysus is the

twice-born son of Zeus, carried both by his mother Semele and his father Zeus. He will later go down into

Hades to bring his mother back and bring her to Mount Olympus for her to be made divine. Even that triple

goddess is not cut off from the male, the father, the masculine god. The absence of this Triple Goddess and

the ternarity of the oldest deepest human concept of the divinity is frustrating. In the same way he speaks of

Isis and Horus, but Osiris, the father is pushed aside into the margin, and the procreation of Horus is not

specified, and the dismembering of Osiris is not explained and explored, neither his reconstruction and

rebirth. That would explain then the Christian Trinity which is found in two forms: the Father, the Son and the

Holy Spirit on one hand, and the Father, the Son and the Mother of God on the other hand.

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His assertion that three is feminine is at least disquieting and questionable. In the same way his

assertion that four is masculine remains to be proved or at least demonstrated (not to mention the

contradiction we can find on that element in this book: three being also asserted as being masculine and four

as being feminine, though three is an incomplete number and four the sign of wholeness.) In our tradition

four is the crucifixion but traditionally, and that seems to be corroborated by historians, with only three nails,

at least three nails in the Christian tradition (there are very few Romanesque or Gothic Christs crucified with

four nails. I can think of one but there might be some more.) But he misses another essential point. Old

“pagan” traditions state the divinity as being triple. The Old Testament states the divinity as being twofold;

God and his spirit in the first chapter and second verse of Genesis, and God creates everything two by two.

Then the Christians, in fact under whose influence, James the elder brother of Jesus and first bishop of

Jerusalem, or Paul, ex-Saul, the self appointed apostle of the Gentiles, made the divinity triple again,

whereas in the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition, Islam is going to develop an absolutely unified and unitary divinity.

If there is something triple in the Dead Sea Scrolls, considered by some as representing James’ point of

view, it is the networks of evil: fornication, riches (greed) and desecrating the temple.

Once again his feminine threeness is questionable. But what about his masculine fourness? The

pyramids are built on a square pattern. Crucifixion was only for men. Only men could get into the inner

sanctum of Solomon’s Temple, the Holy of Holies, which was square. If we speak of archetypes we can see

the masculinity of this fourness. But that does not make threeness feminine. He alludes to Goethe and his

Faust, and he ignores the end of the second Faust. The last scene starts with three father figures: Pater

Ecstaticus, Pater Profundus and Pater Seraphicus (note the triple goddess behind them: the first one is life,

pleasure, etc, the second the deep underworld, the third the sky and heaven, Diana, Hecate and Selene.)

But they are masculine and what’s more fatherly. Then the mother comes in, Mater Gloriosa, and three

sinners are going to plead Faust’s cause, three women, two directly from the New testament, one from the

Acts of the Saints, Magna Peccatrix from Luke 7:36, Mulier Samaritana from John 4, and Maria Aegyptica

from Acta Sanctorum. And these three who both speak separately and together are joined by the fourth

sinner, Una Poenitentum, formerly known as Gretchen. And a certain Doctor Marianus comes to conclude

the second Faust the way the manager of the theatre had opened the first Faust. Jung says this Doctor

Marianus is the re-embodiment of Faust himself. I won’t commit myself on that interpretation. This Doctor

Marianus is said by some to be an allusion to Anselm of Canterbury (circa 1033–1109), Benedictine monk,

theologian, philosopher, Archbishop of Canterbury and Doctor of the Church, or to Duns Scotus (circa

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1265–1308), Blessed, Franciscan friar, theologian and philosopher, nicknamed Doctor Subtilis. But this

character will become famous by being used by various composers, particularly Gustav Mahler in his 8th

symphony.

All that is ignored by Carl Jung and his allusion to Goethe’ Faust II the Cabiri scene (Act II, Scene V

and VI) is just that, an allusion. This Cabiri scene shows how Thales is taking the Homunculus to Nereus first

and Proteus second to make him a full human. Thales is a savant, a scientist, a wise man leading an

incomplete human to Nereus, the father of the Nereides in the ocean and then to Proteus, that divine person

who can change forms and identities, a trickster in other words. Three older, wise men, two of them of divine

nature, the three of them male, are leading the Homunculus to human existence. The master and the

apprentice, the old grey wise man and the boy, etc, but three is male and divine. But we are surprised at this

moment because Jung asserts three is masculine and four feminine, going against what he said in his

commentary of “The Princess in the Tree” about the three-legged horse that was a mare ridden by Princess

A, and the four-legged horse that was a stallion ridden by the swineherd, and even worse when he says

“whereas fourness is a symbol of wholeness, threeness is not.” This should lead him to the idea that three is

castrated, hence a castrated four, and no female is a castrated male, except in a very sexist approach of

sexes. Such contradictions go against reason.

Goethe had it a lot better than that in the final Chorus Mysticus of the Second Faust:

Alles Vergängliche

Ist nur ein Gleichnis;

Das Unzulängliche

Hier wird’s Ereignis ;

Das Unbeschreibliche

Hier ist es getan;

Das Ewig-Weibliche

Zieht uns hinan.

[All of the transient, Is parable, only: The insufficient, Here, grows to reality: The indescribable, Here,

is done: Woman, eternal, Beckons us on.]

The translation of course does not reflect Goethe’s irony which sets femininity and womanhood as

the future of the world, and yet evokes it entirely in the neutral gender, that is to say neither masculine nor

feminine, or this opposition neutralized, hence both at the same time as Goethe said so well in the same

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Faust Part II, Act II, Scene V:

Proteus: You are a true virgin’s son,

Before you should be, you’re already one!

Thales (Whispering.): From another point of view, it’s critical:

I think it makes him hermaphroditical.

Proteus: All the easier to achieve success:

Whatever he gets will suit him best.

The virgin’s son is a religious allusion of course, slightly mocked here, but it is also the fact that this

son is the son of no real mother and he is because of that hermaphroditical and that is amplified by Proteus

the trickster‘s opportunistic remark that implies that sexual neutrality is quite an advantage in life, provided

you only think of your satisfaction.

A lot more could be said and should be said about this book. Though it is necessary to read this

classic. Yet it is very dangerous to follow what the author says, and it is necessary for you to be able to make

out the various contradictions in his approach.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

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