MULTIPLE LEVELS OF RELIGIOUS MEANING IN CULTURE:

A NEW LOOK AT WINNEBAGO SACRED TEXTS

LAWRENCE E. SULLIVAN
Department of Religious Studies,
University of Missouri,
Columbia, Missouri,
USA, 65211.

ABSTRACT/RESUME

Paul Radin wrote prolifically of Winnebago culture over a period of nearly fifty
years. He made a distinction between magico-religious practice and systematic
reflection, but provided such a wealth of detail on Winnebago beliefs that
analysis has generally been limited by the precise, narrowly-defined boundaries
of rigid academic disciplines. The author attempts a much broader, "humanist"
approach to the subject, using the Winnebago Trickster as a vehicle.

Au cours d'une période de pros de 50 ans, Paul Radin a beaucoup écrit sur la
culture winnebago. Il l'a fair en établissant la distinction entre les pratiques de
magie religieuse et la réflexion systématique chez ce peuple, mais il a apporté
un tel luxe de détails à propos de leurs croyances que l'analyse q u ' o n en a
faite, a, en général. é t é réduite par les limites étroites de rigides disciplines
académiques. L'auteur de cette étude a tenté d'aborder le sujet sur u n plan
humaniste beaucoup plus large, utilisant comme véhicule le "décepteur" winne-
bago, le médium entre le monde des esprits et celui des hommes.

THE CANADIAN JOURNAL OF NATIVE STUDIES II, 2 (1982): 221-247

222 LAWRENCE E. SULLIVAN

"The fact is that every writer

creates his own precursors.
His work modifies our conception
of the past, as it will modify
the future."
Borges, Labyrinths

PAUL RADIN

We know so much about Winnebago life and thought through the writings
of Paul Radin. 1 Without sorting out the details of his much-travelled intellectual
life, it behooves us to know something about him even in this brief treatment
of portions of Winnebago epic cycles. He creates the Winnebago world which
preceded him and is, to date, its main interpreter. Four points are of particular
interest. 2
First, the influence of James Harvey Robinson of Columbia University on
Radin's attitude toward history. Culture, for this school of New History, reveals
itself as a fabric woven of personal histories and through the eyes of its individu-
als; nor are the lives of the 'Great Men' more culturally significant than those
of the lesser known. Radin records myths and descriptions of rituals given by
several principal informants whose detailed autobiographies are also published
(1913; 1920; 1922; 1926; 1950b). Furthermore, Robinson's notion of history
paved the way for the conception underlying Radin's theory of religion: psycho-
logical types. If culture and history are composed of individuals' various
perceptions of the world, then one can understand them by gathering these
individual experiences and descriptions into a typology distinguished by the
features of those individuals' psychology (Bidney, 1960:366-367).
Secondly, Radin was a student of Franz Boas at Columbia. Like Boas, Radin
never thought of anthropology as merely a specialized discipline. In fact, he
regarded intellectuals of the academy as t o o bound by convention and incapable
of pursuing interests other than their own. It was Boas who encouraged Radin
to develop his linguistic talents and shaped his field research methods: spend
extended time with people under study, transcribe full texts and even encourage
local people to write texts in syllabary. It was also by way of reaction to Boas
that Radin so forcefully pursued what he called the "great, recurring, troubling
themes in history" (Diamond, 1960:xviii) as opposed to examinations of
cultural items shared over relatively contained areas.
It was Radin's conviction that the universal human issues are central to the
social and ritual lives of primitive and civilized peoples. Although there is a
variety of cultural forms involved, the responses of primitive peoples to the most
important crises of life are "sophisticated, profound and - to a civilized person
endowed with self-knowledge - understandable ways" (Diamond, 1968:301).
Thirdly, Carl Jung exercised great influence over Radin. It is clear that
Radin was not a Jungian himself. 3 Nonetheless, his contact with Jung from 1920
on reached its peak during his four year stay in Switzerland from 1952 to 1956.
Since Radin had spent much of his life committed to the purpose of demon-
WINNEBAGOSACREDTEXTS 223

strating man's universal rationality, one might ask why, to the disdain of his
colleagues, he developed a theory of psychologicaltypes as a basis for his theory
of religion and culture. In an extended apologia, Radin himself supplies an
answer:

"Modern ethnologists, particularly American ethnologists, have

always been justly sceptical of the method of demonstration
employed by all the comparative mythologists, past and present,
and have found their combination of erudition and subjectivism
somewhat disconcerting; Yet when themselves confronted by the
manifold and complex problems presented by the contents of so
many myths and maerchen, they seem to be able to do little more
than shrug their shoulders and forget t h e m . . . The case has been
quite different with the psychoanalysts. Their theories and their
approach impels them to make the origin of the contents of the
myths the very center of their i n v e s t i g a t i o n s . . . Now whether they
recognized it or not the vast majority of anthropological theorists
and ethnologists . . . actually did begin with the assumption that
the apparent sameness of the forms of thought found in widely
separated r e g i o n s . . , could best be explained by what they vaguely
called the psychic unity of mankind . . . . [These theorists], by
implicitly postulating ultimate unknowables, have placed them-
selves in an unfortunate and vulnerable position from which they
must somehow try to extricate t h e m s e l v e s . . . They owe it to
their subject to a t t e m p t to utilize as many as possible of the
suggestions of Freud, Jung and their followers have thrown out
and the new lines of inquiry they have initiated, this, despite the
fact that they may, as I personally do, disagree fundamentally
with the viewpoint, the methods and the conclusions of the latter"
(1948:4-7)

Radin's basic theory of psychological types results, then, from an intellec-

tually honest search for first premises coupled with the conviction that human-
kind is one, though its manifestations in culture are many.
Lastly, Radin's theory of religion is important to us. Unfortunately this is
not the place to consider it in detail. Radin himself devoted a major work (1937)
and many articles to the subject. Attend, however, to one unfortunate conse-
quence of Radin's views of primitive religion: the sharp distinction between
systems o f religious specialists, whether priest-thinkers or shaman-thinkers,
and the active layperson. The result is that "primitive religion is in fact an
incoherent synthesis of magic and religion derived from the animistic philosophy
of some shamans and the pragmatic magic of the layman" (ibid:199; cf. Bidney:
378).
Bidney tries to isolate the source of this split.

"I find in Radin's writings an ambivalent attitude towards the

224 LAWRENCEE. SULLIVAN

position of the thinker in primitive culture. On the one hand, he

is said to be a fixed type and an essentially religious type of man
who is responsible for the formulation of religious beliefs in all
forms of culture. That is why Radin speaks of man as from the
beginning homo religiosus (cf. The World of Primitive Man p.
69). On the other hand, to the extent that Radin follows Frazer's
scheme of evolution and assumes the primacy of magic in the
evolution of religion, he tends to separate the religious man and the
philosopher. The unbalanced shaman becomes the type of the
religious man and the philosopher, whether he believes in animism
or monotheism, tends to be separated from the mass of religious
believers" (579).

Radin consequently places systematic reflection and magico-religious

practice in separate categories. He was never able to effect a synthesis between
the two. The result is that we risk being shortchanged in Radin's presentation
and interpretation: not provided with an adequate sense of the reaches of the
Winnebago religious imagination.

WINNEBAGO AND PRIMITIVE RELIGION

We are confronted with an embarassment of religious wealth in Radin's

material. How is one to understand it? Radin himself, for fifty years, brought
out the socio-economic and conventional correlations in rites and symbols
(1923;1937). In addition, because of his extraordinary interest in Amerindian
history, he highlighted the significance of culture history in the formation of
myth and ritual. 4 Furthermore, his own interpretations, as well as those of
Jung and Kerényi brought into relief salient psychological motifs in the epic
cycle. 5 More recently, Levi-Strauss has underscored the complexity of the
logical relations embedded in several Winnebago myths. 6 One could say that
the Winnebago symbols of rite and myth are so saturated with meaning that
they serve as fertile ground for any set of 'well-formed' humanist questions
whether economic, socio-functional, psychological or logico-conceptual.
Isn't it remarkable that all these distinct sciences find 'meanings' pertinent to
their particular horizons? "Periodically our science must refresh itself by dipping
into the ethnographic data" (Goldman:9). Needless to say, all these sciences
are interesting and helpful in beginning to understand various aspects of Winne-
bago life and thought.
The question remains, however, whether there may not be yet another
frame of reference besides these empirical and utilitarian sets of mind - one
which would accomodate itself to the breadth and depth of a people's religious
conceptions of their spiritual and sacred realities (Eliade, 1969:13). This is a
difficult, risky but worthwhile goal. The long-range view of the history of
religions indicates that religious world-views are seldom 'dead and gone' but
surface again and again in new creative formulations in art, literature and
management of political, economic, astronomic and ecological meanings, if not
WINNEBAGO SACRED TEXTS 225

in overtly religious systems. This quest for a discipline which is flexible towards
its material should n o t seem outlandish; contemporary philosophers of science
are reminding the 'hard' and 'behavioral' social sciences just how interpretive
empirical sciences must needs be. Indeed, their questions and instruments of
inquiry often preside over the facts they set out to explain. 7
Radin himself seemed tempted to go this route of flexible interpretation.
Early in his career, in the midst of hot anthropological debate over the nature
of orenda, manitou and wakan, he wrote a shrewd description of the notion of
spirit among North American Indians, with great respect for their own terms,
and claimed that sciences would have to live with it.

"What has the shaman to say upon the nature of spirits? Are they
anthropomorphic, theriomorphic, dream-phantasms, or indefinite
entities in general? Can we divide them into personal, impersonal,
or unpersonal spirits? Right here, it seems to me, we are apt to
make an unjustifiable assumption. Our ordinary division into
personal and impersonal is made on the possession of corporeal
characteristics, which in turn are dependent upon our sense-
perceptions, - sight, hearing, touch, etc. Ordinarily, too, the
presence or absence of corporeality is the test of its reality or
unreality. What fight have we, however, to assume that the Indian
either makes the same classification or equates corporeality with
reality, with existence? To judge from specific inquiries made
among the Winnebago and Ojibwa, and from much of our data in
general, reality does not depend necessarily upon sense-impres-
sions. Among the Winnebago shamans, what is thought of, what is
felt, what is spoken, is as real as what is seen or heard. It is, I
believe, a fact that future investigations will thoroughly confirm,
that the Indian does not make the separation into personal as
contrasted with impersonal, corporeal with impersonal, in our
sense at all. What he seems to be interested in is the question of
existence, of reality; and everything that is perceived by the sense,
thought of, felt and dreamt of, exists. It follows, consequently,
that most of the problems connected with the nature of spirit
as personal or impersonal do not exist" (1915:351-352).

I would extend Radin's insight even further by razing the wall that he
builds between priest-shaman and layman, between religion-philosophy and
magic. Religion, insofar as it is the systematic thought of a people on issues of
major importance to their existence, serves as the integrative model for their
culture. "In the primitive world, generally, religion and culture are identical at
their core, if not at their edges" (Goldman :8).
Irving Goldman, in a stimulating rewrite of Kwakiutl religion, makes the
point even clearer. The religious world-view of a people should have the highest
value for understanding them because, first of all, "it is real." Secondly, it is
tangible in words and images. Thirdly, the religious perspective is close to total,
226 LAWRENCE E. SULLIVAN

embracing the whole of society. ("No one who had never known it as part of
a whole body could understand an eyeball.") Finally, religion identifies all
fundamental concepts. Goldman carries forward Radin's insight about spirit
into the study of a whole religious system:

"In tribal societies religion has no competitors. It is in full com-

mand of the whole range of philosophic synthesis. It engages at
the same time in the most determined empirical observations
of nature and in the imaginary reconstruction of reality. All
variety of intellectual endeavor contribute to the formulation of
religious systems. There is no school from within to draw lines,
saying, 'This is science, that is religion!' Tribal societies have
terms for the sacred, but not for religion. They have terms for
special powers, but no demarcation between the natural and the
supernatural. Our difficulty in defining religion for tribal societies
is that we have an oppositional vocabulary to separate religious
from nonreligious, natural from supernatural; they do not. The
Kwakiutl distinguish oppositions that we may translate as 'sacred-
secular'. Their concept of sacred does not, however, encompass
their religion. It refers only to the presence of powers and spirits
that require appropriate human response . . . Nor can primitive
religions, which inevitably draw upon the entire natural order,
be dismissed as illusion, or as metaphor for sociological reality.
Religious thought has grown around serious reflection and around
acute observation on conditions of existence. We are not asked to
agree with its formulations only to take it seriously, to become
accustomed to its strange imagery" (ibid :8-9).

These important considerations risk sweeping us off course. In a fuller

treatment of these myths one would have to sketch in more of the lines of
Winnebago culture and draw out the invaluable autobiographies of Winnebago
individuals. Most pertinent would be descriptions of several significant rituals:
the fast for the guardian spirit, the Four Nights' Wake, the Medicine Rite, the
Herucka society rituals and the Peyote cult as well as important seasonal feasts
like the Winter Feast and the annual clan feast. More attention would be given
an interpretation of the epic cycles in toto. All of these symbolic configurations
are important in understanding the ways in which the sacred manifests itself
to the Winnebago. Exposition of this material is not possible here.

THE FOUR CYCLES

This study will make some general remarks about the epic cycles under
examination, delineate some themes pertinent to one cycle (Wakdjunkaga)
and then interpret several episodes to see how this kind of hermeneutic may
help us understand features which have remained anomalous in other analyses.
"These four cycles, within limits, lend themselves to a definite temporal
WINNEBAGO SACRED TEXTS 227

sequence" (1948:8). Radin calls these four epic epochs: Primordial, Primitive,
Olympean and Promethean. According to Radin, these portray periods of
psychological individuation: the Trickster of the primordial age represents
the undifferentiated libido, the Hare of the primitive stage is the imperfectly
but partially differentiated libido, the character Red Horn is the well differenti-
ated libido and the Promethean heroes, the Twins, illustrate the integrated
libido. It is unlikely that this exhausts the meaning.
I would prefer to say that the four cycles act themselves out on different
cosmic stages. They are distinguished less by time - for they are real and actual;
i.e. present - than by the quality of relations that exists within them. They are
also distinguished by the perch or perspective from which the religious imagina-
tion contemplates the reality of the world. 9 Each hero struts different stuff.
Indeed, each world in which the hero "is" reveals a mode of existence strikingly
different from that of the other heroes. Each hero becomes the measure of
meaning in his respective world. Each one, at once more and less than human, is
the point of orientation to which all other realities relate for meaning and the
fixed point b y which the mode, permanence and authority of their existence
in that world may be assessed.
They are thus four alternative imaginary universes, ways of "seeing" reality,
systems of being and meaning, characterized and caricatured by the quality of
relationships obtaining between the dramatis personae and their environment.
These main characters are ontically full and their very presence has an imposing
effect on other beings in their presence. They cue one in to the meaning of
actions in the rest of their universe. They are signatures which indicate the key
in which the score is played (Radin, 1956:173,175,185).
Even more powerfully, they are not separate alternatives but threads woven
into a synthesis which made of life a meaningful existence and of the world a
sacred place for the Winnebago of the first decade of this century.

The cosmogonic epoch. Not included in the cycle of myths but important
for our purposes are the myths concerning the creation of the world. 10 This
waicq, or sacred story, is the mythic frame within which the epic cycle is set.
It accounts for the dramatic tension which unfolds in the world that resulted
from Earthmaker's thoughtful creation. The following is a summary of the
creation account.

"What it was our father, Earthmaker, lay upon as he came to

consciousness, we do not know. Tears flowed from his eyes and
fell below him. He lay there motionless. He saw nothing. Nothing
existed in the world. Now he began to move, his right arm first,
then his left, then his right foot and then his left. His eyes were
open and he turned on his side and looked below him, far down
from where he lay. There, far below him, he noticed something
bright and shining. Those were his tears and they had formed the
waters of the earth. As he lay there stretched out, he kept thinking
and thinking. 'Unbeknown to me, without my intention, my
228 LAWRENCE E. SULLIVAN

tears as they fell below, formed bodies of water. Perhaps now, if I

really wish something, it will come into existence just as the
waters were formed from my tears, by themselves.' " First he
seized some of that on which he was lying and sent it hurtling.
It looked something like the earth but it was without coveting and
kept spinning around, unquiet. To make it quiet and stop he
made a covering of hair from weeds that came to the form of
grass. The earth still spun around and was not quiet. He threw a
tree to earth. Still spinning. Next he sent "four male-beings,
brothers, and placed one in the east, one in the north, one in the
south and one in the west. Still the earth was spinning. Then he
made, with his own hands, what are now called waterspirits and
placed them under the earth. "Finally he scattered a female being
over the whole earth. By female being we mean stones and rocks."
The earth became quiet. He made the rocks go right through the
earth, from one end to the other but their tops remained un-
covered. All the birds, animals and sea animals were placed in
lodges specially provided for each kind. "And then, at the very
end of his thoughts, he made us, m a n . . . When he was finished
Earthmaker looked at all the things he had created and he liked
what he had done and lay there, filled with happy thoughts. But
alas! not equal in strength to any other beings that lived on the
earth had he made us and we were on the point of being destroyed
by evil ones." So he formed a being with the same parts as our-
selves and when he had finished him, he called him Trickster,
Foolish-One. "Go to the earth and put things aright." Yet when
he came to the earth he did not do as he had been told. He just
roamed around and accomplished absolutely nothing. In fact he
injured some of the creations of Earthmaker. So the story con-
tinues touching on each of the heroes in turn: Turtle, Bladder,
Red Horn and Hare (1945:17ff).

Some interpretive remarks on creation. Many important conceptions about the

world come to light in this summary of the myth. Several will figure in my
subsequent analysis. We are dealing with the time that begins at the very
awakening of Earthmaker's consciousness: spiritual powers of memory,
concentration of thought and intention. 11 All has been quiet, as best one can
surmise. Before existence there was quiet. Water, from Earthmaker's substantial
body fluid, his tears, is formless, having flowed before Earthmaker came to
consciousness. It is without his intention, he imposed no form on it. The earth,
in a sense, is a curiosity piece. Earthmaker intends something but is not sure
precisely what. "Let's see what will happen if . . ." and he hurls something
below him that comes to resemble the earth. The humorous tone in this myth
pervades the waicq (sacred myths).
The earth is spinning and Earthmaker doesn't like this. The nostalgia for
quiet and motionlessness motivatives each successive creative act. Four male
WINNEBAGO SACRED TEXTS 229

beings (not human) are set at the four points of the world. Sexuality becomes a
part of creation, a restorative a t t e m p t at reinstating harmony and unitive quiet.
Sexuality is literally peripheral to Earthmaker's intention. His main idea is
quiet, rest.
A female being is scattered over the earth. The sexuality of creation is now
polarized but there is not suggestion of sexual tension or union or fertility or
prodigy. Instead, all the sexualized elements are set off from one another in an
attempt to restore equilibrium through separation, to suppress motion through
equilibrium and reinstate stasis through suppression of motion. Even the animals
are herded i n t o separate lodges: birds do not fly through the skies, fish do not
swim through the sea, land animals do not roam the earth.
The added weight of the four earth anchors, the water-spirits, achieves the
goal: absolute quiet and motionlessness. Stasis reigns. The whirlwind of Earth-
maker's creative thought is over. It is into this static world of isolated parts
that Wakdjunkaga comes.

THE TRICKSTER CYCLE

I comment on this cycle for several reasons. There is a history of scholarly

comment. 12 Secondly, the Winnebago trickster is uniquely distinct from the
Creator Earthmaker and from the culture Hero Hare. Commentators offer
different explanations for this 'pure Trickster' type. Radin contended that it
is a very ancient tradition which was preserved because of the unique circum-
stances of Winnebago history; Piper counters it may be free from these creator-
culture-hero elements because it is the work of more recent literary artists who
expunged these other traits. Thirdly, Trickster is a dominant figure in Winnebago
religious thought and imagination. Fourthly, he occupies a rather interesting
slot in the religious scheme of things. Finally, Wakdjunkaga is entertaining.

General interpretive over-view. Trickster is transformation and metamorphosis.

He creates unity, though it be confused and negative, out of multiplicity; chaos
out of order; relatedness of isolation; possibility of meaning out of a state of
static quiet. He makes the world one kind of place, though it seems ludicrous
because there are still many kinds of things, and he thereby creates a mode of
being and meaning which may be called universal - literally " t u r n e d toward
one". He brings on the cross-fertilization of distinct existents by "dis-lodging"
the animals, sky, trees, water, earth which coexisted apart from one another.
He pitches them together by virtue of his own metamorphic being, so replete
with passages, penis and song. From their formal and intentional purpose of
stasis he draws beings into motion and meaning around him. Eventually every-
thing is 'akin' to him and related through him.
He is Foolish One because he inverts and perverts the separateness of all
things. He "univerts" them within himself. He juggles ordered arrangements
together. His exploits are a language of irony in which semantics "kalaid" to
reveal deeper understanding. The result can only be ludicrous, for Trickster
visits a semantic wasteland and leaves it a wake of semantic overlap, contrariety
230 LAWRENCEE. SULLIVAN

and confusion which Hare will have to sort out. Temporal sequence is skewed.
There is no distinction between identity and multiplicity (as when Trickster's
left side attacks his right side). He even ends up following himself down a trail
and eats himself. Meaning is awry.
The c o m m o n meeting ground of the coincidence of logics and separated
beings of Earthmaker's formal arrangement of creation is Trickster himself.
"Correctly, indeed, am I named the Foolish One, Trickster! By calling me thus,
they have at last actually turned me into a Foolish One" (Radin, 1948:67).
In this primordial world 'tis folly to be wise. We cannot always discern which
Trickster is. F r o m the point of view o f his peers Trickster lives up to his name;
but from the point of view of the c o n t e m p o r a r y Winnebago, Trickster is a
cunning hero for he snatches living defeat from the jaws of static victory;
salvages creativity and dynamism from the inertia of Earthmaker's creation.

TURNING TRICKSTER

In his wanderings, Trickster 'embodies' a number of transformativeinstru-

ments. In keeping with Trickster's foolish and cunning character, these are all
double-entendus; carry positive and negative valences.
Food. Hunger drives Trickster to consume other worlds and to contact
different modes of being by devouring them. His appetite drives different worlds
onto a common footing: they are eaten. However, there is a catch. If all worlds
are eaten worlds, they must at the same time be eating worlds. Since Trickster
is the symbolic language and locus of these relational events he ends up eating
his own intestines. Trickster wonderfully expresses a theme c o m m o n in North
American religions (and elsewhere as well): that all things are transformed,
related and commune in being by passing through the same passage: the mouth.
The world feeds on itself in an endless chain of consumption.
Waste. The anus is another passage which relates all existents. 13 In episode
23 Trickster eats a laxative bulb that causes him to pass gas. Very violently.
In an attempt to keep him from being blown away "people t o o k down their
lodge, piled it on Trickster and then got on it themselves. They likewise placed
all the little dogs they had on t o p of Trickster. Just then he began to break wind
again and the force of the expulsion scattered the t h i n e on t o p of him in all
directions. They fell far apart from one another. There stood Trickster laughing
at them till he ached" (Radin, 1956:26).
The result of this big-bang creation is quite different from the quiet of
Earthmaker's world: Trickster farting and laughing, dogs yapping, people blown
all over creation shouting to one another.
In episode 34, Trickster, in the guise of a dead buck-deer, traps a hawk in
his rectum. The Bear finds this plumage stunning. "Trickster loosened his hold
and there was an odor of foul air." Trickster then offers to prepare the bear's
rectum so that he, too, could wear such a tail. He cuts out the bear's anus,
pulls out the intestines and devours the bear. The hying world not only
consumes the universe but, ironically, discharges life to others in the form of
carrion, waste and decay. All worlds, then, are open to consumption " f r o m the
WINNEBAGOSACREDTEXTS 231

b o t t o m up."
In the Trickster story these themes are reflectedu p o n on a cosmic scale: the
cycle of consumption of food provides access to the outside through the mouth
and the cycle of waste and decay, associated with the anus, equally produces
transformations to and from other worlds of being: the plant, the animal, the
mineral and the sacredness of metamorphosisitself.
Once again, Trickster runs the risk of over-univertingthings. The contrary
processes and the b o d y parts associated with them are brought into ironic con-
junction and seem to belong to one process: Trickster consumes himself. In
episode 14 he burns his anus with a piece of wood, "then he picked up a piece
of fat and ate it. It had a delicious t a s t e . . . He discovered that it was part of
himself, part of his own i n t e s t i n e s . . . Then he tied his intestines t o g e t h e r . . .
That is why the anus of human beings has its present shape" (ibid:18). In the
trade for life brought on by c o o k e d food and consumption of other beings,
Trickster initiates another cycle in the same dialectic: the rottenness and decay
of death and consumption. There are limits to the transformative unity that
meaning will tolerate. The contemplationof such limits can be explored through
the use of ludicrous irony b u t even this approaches dangerous absurdity and
non-sense.
Song, music and dance. This theme is entirely ignored in the analyses of
Radin, Jung and Kerenyi. A glimpse at the text confirms how powerful are
Trickster's 'musical arts.' His qualities as magical minstrel would not so easily
escape the Winnebago who sing the songs during the performance of the waicq.
Furthermore, the Winnebago considered songs an inheritance passed down as
powerful gifts within clans and religious societies and associated song with
intense moments of spiritual awakening and conversion. 14 Songs are associated
with spiritual powers, not idle melodies. The notion of Trickster's powerful
singing is more important when we consider the quiet state in which Earthmaker
left things after he created them. Song integrates the world, the human voice
brings things into contact with one another when the imagination composes
itself in musical artistry.
Trickster is portrayed as a wandering singer. He is the first. One day he
walked along a lake shore ostentatiously carrying a big pack on his back. Ducks
asked him what it was. "Why, I am carrying songs. My stomach is full of bad
songs. Some of these m y stomach could not hold and that is why I am carrying
them on m y back. It is a long time since I sang any of them. Just now there are
a large number in me. I have met no people on my journey who would dance
for me and let me sing some for t h e m . . . So they spoke to Trickster, 'Older
brother, yes if you will sing to us we will dance. We have been yearning to dance
for some time but could not do so because we had no songs' " (ibid:15).
In episode 16 an old woman extracts Trickster's penis by singing and in
episode 18 Trickster saves himself, is extricated from the hollow of a tree, and
gains possession of female raccoon dresses by singing a raccoon song. Song
figures importantly in the episodes I'll interpret in detail below (episode 21).
Wakdjunkaga's songs, often with accompanying dance, contribute in their way
to change the nature of things. They are stored on his back where the 'medicine
 232 LAWRENCEE. SULLIVAN

chest' of shamans is k e p t and where he also keeps his enormous coiled penis.
These 'items' allow one to enter worlds which are ordinarily impenetrable.
Sex. Radin designates the three signs of Trickster as food, buttocks and
testicles. This is imprecise, although the intent is good. Trickster has no
describable form at any point in the narrative. It is only in the last part of the
last episode that he is referred to, indirectly, as having testicles. This last episode,
as Radin himself remarks, is not part of the waicq but an ending supplied in the
language and style of the worak or novella. If the male penis is Trickster's
emblem (as the lodge-pole is the emblem of the village chief), it is not because
it represents Trickster's exclusively male sexuality but rather because
Wakdjunkaga is the 'lord of passages.' In fact, Trickster maintains, in terms of
medieval spirituality, a remarkable "spirit of detachment" toward his penis.
He carries it in a box on his back, sends it across a river, stuffs it in a tree where
parts are chewed up by chipmunks; other pieces are tossed into water where
plants consume them and pass their potency on to men as food.
The approximate signs o f Trickster may be food, buttocks and sexual
parts, both male and female for he performs also as a woman - not simply in
transvestite disguise but actually conceiving and giving birth. More precisely,
Trickster's signs are mouth, anus, vulva, nostrils, holes in hills, burrows, forked
branches and all those things that penetrate these passages: food, excrement,
gases, penis. In short, Trickster's sign is the body and that which can be likened
to it, passages of bodies and bodies of passage.
Trickster's penis. In episode 16, Trickster's penis is the central protagonist.
Wakdjunkaga descends to a lake and espies women swimming on the far side.
Between him and the women lies a huge body of water. We know that waters
are the unintentional tears of Earthmaker. This formless substance separates
the beings in Earthmaker's world; e.g., those that are male from the stone and
rock being which is female. Trickster removes his coiled penis from the box on
his back and sends it across the lake, urging it not to make waves; finally ties
a stone on it to keep it submerged. "When he dispatched it, this time it went
directly to the designated place . . . The penis lodged squarely in her." In
Arthurian fashion, her friends tried to pull it out; so did a number of men
known for their strength. Only an old woman can discern what is happening.
"Why, this is First-Born Trickster. The chief's daughter is having intercourse
and you are just annoying her."
It is important not to limit the significance of this passage to physical
sexual behavior, or even the exclusively sexual conditions of humans. True to
his transformative self, Trickster's penis penetrates a great divide; this time
between sexual beings. Until now the four male beings set at the points of the
earth and the female being scattered through the earth are unrelated - not
simply in a physical-technical way but as beings set apart by their kind, un-
related by a c o m m o n meaning.
Radin inadequately reduces the m y t h to the scale of individual psychology.
He also takes the linear arrangement of episodes in his text as a fixed-form order
of progressive development. Consequently he views this exploit as another
episode in the story of individuation through differentiation. However, on the
WINNEBAGO SACRED TEXTS 233

religious level, in this episode the differentiations are taken for granted. What is
asked is how one can unite these male beings and the one female being - two
planes that intersect at no point - into one meaningful and related whole. How
does one create a single social universe out of cosmically different elements?
Trickster's penis is grossly out of context. It gives one pause; causes one to
stop and think. William James referred to this process of monstrous symbolism
as consecutive discordances - a process of imaginative abstraction. By means of
this penis carried around so cavalierly, a connection is made across an irreconcil-
able divide of male and female being between which existed a formless and
unrelated gulf. The penis portrays the very process of the religious imagination
which has no business poking its way into places that are not its own. It
composes new meanings by conjoining discordant forms and transcending the
formless gulfs between them.

THE CRUCIAL EPISODE: TRICKSTER AS WOMAN

The episode that Radin calls "crucial" highlights the transformative traits
of Trickster treated above. No variant of the cycle omits it. It is the nemesis
of Radin's interpretation. 15 Here is a summary.

In episode 19 Trickster meets a fox, a jay-bird and a nit, each in

their turn. They all decide to live together as companions "because
the world is soon going to be a difficult place in which to live."
They build themselves a lodge in a beautiful place where two rivers
come together. Winter comes, snow falls and they have nothing
to eat. There is a village nearby which obtains many blessings for
the chief's son, who is not yet married, kills many animals. "I
will disguise myself as a woman and marry him. Thus we can live
in peace until spring comes. 'Good!' they ejaculated. All were
willing and delighted to participate." In episode 20 Trickster
fashions himself a vulva from an elk's liver, breasts from elk's
kidneys. He puts on the woman's dress taken from the raccoon in
a previous episode. "He now stood there transformed into a very
pretty woman indeed." Then he let the fox have intercourse with
him and make him pregnant, then the jaybird and, finally, the nit.
Upon Trickster's arrival in the village, an old woman announces
that she (Trickster) has come to marry the chief's son. After the
chief's son approves of her for "she certainly was a very handsome
woman", a bridal meal of dried corn and slit bear-fibs is prepared.
("That is why Trickster is getting married, of course.") Trickster
soon becomes pregnant, to the delight of the chief's son. She gives
birth to a boy. Pregnant twice more, she gives birth to two more
boys. In episode twenty-one, a "last child" is born (it is not clear
whether this is the third son or the fourth, which I believe is more
likely). This last child cries without ceasing and demands to play
With a piece of white cloud. He expresses this demand in song.
234 LAWRENCE E. SULLIVAN

To this end a shaman is summoned who makes it snow and stops the child's
crying. Singing again, the child demands to play with a piece of blue sky. In the
spring they give him some blue grass to content him. The child cries and sings
again for some blue or green leaves. A fourth time he demands roasting ears.
They give him the husks and roasting ears of corn and he stops crying. "One
day later, as they were steaming corn, the chief's wife teased her sister-in-law.
She chased her around the pit where they were steaming corn. Finally, the
chief's son's wife (Trickster) jumped over the pit and she dropped something
very rotten." People shouted, " I t is Trickster!" They were ashamed, especially
the chief's son. The fox, jaybird and nit now ran away. (1956:22-25).

The roads not taken: possible directions o f analysis. Radin notes all the signifi-
cant Winnebago customs parodied in the myth. They are legion. Then he goes on
to interpret the episode in a psychological vein.

"Wakdjunkaga changes his sex and marries the chief's son. The
overt reason given for his doing this is that he and his companions
have been overtaken by winter and are starving and that the chief
and his son have p l e n t y . . . The change in sex is a trick played on
an oversexed individual in order to show to what lengths such a
person will go, what sacred things he will give up and sacrifice to
satisfy his d e s i r e s . . . Taken in conjunction with the sex episodes
which have preceded and the two incidents that follow, its meaning
becomes clear. It is part of Wakdjunkaga's sex education" (ibid:
137).

At stake for Radin are, on the psychological level, the appetites of hunger
and sex which threaten the process of psychic individualization and, on the
level of social custom, the chief's son indulging in homosexual relations and a
mother-in-law publicly breaking taboo by openly associating with a potential
son-in-law. Even from Radin's own view of primitive religion, his interpretation
is a travesty of the sacred dimension of the waicq text. He squeezes meanings,
which for the Winnebago are sacred, culture-wide and even cosmic, into the
straight-jacket of an individual psychology built on examinations of dreams of
neurotics from Vienna and Zurich.
Kerényi and Jung, in their commentaries on the Trickster, 16 offer wide and
stimulating psychological settings for interpretation but do not deal specifically
with this incident.
A cognitive structural analysis might outline the remarkable sets of binary
oppositions that inhere between these episodes and the episode where Trickster
sends his penis across the water. There Trickster had just eaten and was over-
full, here she is hungry; there he is a sexually aggressive penetrator, here she is
a sexual receptacle; there he is furtive and unseen, here she is received in public
ceremony; there the action takes place in formless water outside of any village,
here it unfolds in a structured residence with patterned authority; there he
attacks the chief's daughter, here she seduces the chief's son; there the old
 WINNEBAGO SACRED TEXTS 235

woman recognizes him immediately and pries his penis out with an awl and
magic song, here she ignorantly invites her in, shouting like a town crier and
later breaking taboo by talking with her; there she laughs when she recognizes
him, here she is angry; there a stone-like vagina holds his penis fast, here her
fleshy vulva falls b y virtue of its own decay. No doubt further analysis of this
kind would bring to light more oppositions and arrange them into a symphony
of paradigmatic bundles that might elucidate the sets of formal relations that
obtain in the myth. No doubt modes of life and modes of death are being
mediated.
My frame of reference, however is of a different sort. It was my purpose
to try and understand the myth in the context of Winnebago religious imagina-
tion: to try to understand what it is they are contemplating and what their
sacred symbols reveal to them; 17 not to explain the permutation of logical
patterns used to exhibit these objects for contemplation, however useful such a
set of questions are for the study of the human mind. 18

AN INTERPRETATION
Previously, Trickster performed as a male. He carries his penis, his emblem
or double, in a box reminiscent of the medicine-chests of shamans. The contents
of this chest, in the Winnebago view, offer one access to realms of reality other
than the one assigned in the scheme of Earthmaker's creation. In these episodes,
Trickster quite intentionally fashions himself in female form, in parody of
Earthmaker's intentional fashioning of the world and in contradistinction to
the unintentional way in which Trickster's own penis appeared. She is, none-
theless, still Trickster.
As Radin points out, Wakdjunkaga's character is not dependent on the
form Trickster assumes but on the nature of his/her exploits: the quality of
dynamism. Trickster is a set of events which have a patterned quality about
them. They relate things which have no business being together and transform
that "being together" into increasingly larger meanings by progressively reducing
the importance of boundary and form. This way of describing the dynamic
quality of Trickster's exploits stresses the actio of the sacred drama. Alternately,
one could say that Trickster is a locus, in primordial space-time (i.e. in mythic
imagination), where separated worlds interpenetrate one another. He/she is the
place where things not only come together but pass through one another. This
way of looking at Trickster brings out the passio of the waicq.
The events that characterize Wakdjunkaga occur through the medium of
human parts, both male and female, that he possesses. 19 Transformation,
interpenetration of worlds and metamorphosis in the cosmos are linked with
the imagery of the human body. The body is the symbolic template which
reveals the meaning of sacred events.
The fox, the jaybird and the nit are beings that live separately in the
creation of Earthmaker. They stay quiet and comparatively motionless in
their lodges.
"Again and again he looked at what he had created and he saw
236 LAWRENCE E. SULLIVAN

that the earth had indeed become q u i e t . . . Even the shimmering

of light that one always sees in the daytime, even these had ceased
. . . All the birds that were destined to roam over the skies, all the
four-footed animals who were to wander over the earth and all the
animals who were to live in the sea and below the surface of the
waters, all these he placed in lodges specially provided for them.
After that, he made the various insects that were to live on the
earth" (Radin, 1945:19).

Radin is correct in isolating hunger as the appetite that motivates these

beings to conspire for food. He is wrong in treating this appetite in an exclusive-
ly physiological way. He betrays his own insight that the notion of sacred
admits of no distinction between corporeal and spiritual (1915:352). In this
sacred waicq hunger has an existential and sacred bearing. I have dealt with this
theme above. Here remember that one hungers not simply for corporal nourish-
ment but also for modes of being other than one's own: animal, plant and
powerful. Hunger is a drive to devour which is shared by spirits and humans.
Trickster fashions female parts from a living animal; the vulva from an
elk's liver and the breasts from elk's kidneys. This creative act is in stark contrast
to Earthmaker's fashioning of a 'female being' of rock and stone. It is from the
female that life comes. The stone, immortally durable but not productive of
new life, betokens the kind of world Earthmaker produced: quiet and inert.
The vulva typifies Trickster's 'creative' exploits: locus of passage to hidden
worlds of new meaning, interactional and generative of life which is subject to
rottenness and decay.
Whereas in other incidents Trickster's mouth, anus, nose, the holes in hills
and in trees are the significant penetrated passages, in these episodes Trickster's
vulva is explored. The fox, representing the critters that will eventually roam the
surface of the earth, the jaybird, standing up for those birds that will come to
fly through the skies, the nit, porte-penis for insects that will crawl all over, and
the chief's son, all penetrate Trickster's female passage.
For several reasons they have no place being there. Firstly, the 'place',
the vulva, is not 'real' but an illusory setting for fantastic events. Secondly,
even granting this ridiculous frame of events, the four creatures are different
species of being, with no possibility in formal thought of being in one place
for it is not Earthmaker's creative intent. Thirdly Trickster is not 'really' a
female of any of these species so the drama is farce raised to the order of the
absurd. Fourthly, on the level of Winnebago social context, the text is full of
non-sequitur: women never visit alone, never initiate betrothal processes etc.
Radin notes the parody of custom. For all these reasons and more, the coming
together of all realms of living beings in Trickster's passage on account of shared
appetites of food and sex is a ludicrous event loaded with meaning: Trickster.
The births of the four offspring of these unions assure us that the related-
ness achieved in Trickster's female form is fruitful and irrevocable in the history
of world events, as befits mythic events which are genetic, exemplary or paradig-
matic. What has been done in these first times, is done. Henceforth, because of
WINNEBAGO SACRED TEXTS 237

this collision of semantic universes of existence, there is danger that meaning and
the sacred may exhaust themselves in certain manifestations of a disequilibrated
world. They therefore stand in need of periodic renewal. On the other hand, if
meanings generate themselves into confusion, the sacred may devour everything
in a frenzy of ecstatic consumption. The various feasts, fasts and offerings of
Winnebago religious life find their meanings in the events of these sacred waicq.
The "last child", presumably born of the chief's son, cries and sings
demands impossible of normal human response. His noise is symptomatic both
of the new condition of the world after Trickster's coming and of the tragic
plight of man that becomes the theme of Winnebago worak or novellas as
opposed to the obligatory optimistic tone of the waicq, the sacred myths that
ten of the pre-human world as it is known today. These tragic tears are not
univocally negative but serve as an emotional affirmation of spiritual presence
and awakening of spiritual consciousness. They are part of a religious oratory
used in other myths and the description of personal religious experience. 11
The child's combination of ignorance and creative hubris foreshadow their
treatment as a main theme in the Twin Cycle. The child's demands take the form
of song-riddles. By singing for snow, green leaves, dry corn and the like, he is
asking in a powerful way for items associated with and symbolic of the passage
of time. But Earthmaker's creation is motionless. "No clouds were visible any-
where." The passage of time and season, the obtaining of objects symbolic of
them, are anomalous and impossible. The child is asking for the fruit of motion
from a world of stasis.
Here is a coincidentia oppositorum which is not simply complementary but
contradictory. Only the shaman, with his spiritual powers of transformation,
can transcend the contradiction and obtain the desired objects from some mode
of being in which life and motion have fruitful meaning. Earthmaker's world
is now sent spinning again, this time through the cycle of seasons punctuated
not only by the fruits generated from the earth (corn, leaves) and generated
from the sky (snow, rain) but punctuated by the feasts of Winters Wake, corn
and clan that mark human culture's passage through the penetrable boundaries
of a sacred cosmos.
At the end of the episode, when Trickster drops her rotting vulva, it
becomes clear that she has paid a price for living food and meaningful spirit in
the cosmos. In fashioning the female parts of living flesh he trades the durable
like of the stone for the passing life of decay and death.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: theory, waste and tired blood.

I chose to do a hermeneutic rather than a demystification or demytho-

logization of several episodes of the sacred myth of Trickster. The choice was
fortuitous for Wakdjunkaga's exploits are themselves a language of conjunction
rather than opposition. A number of points emerge which have critical value for
contemporary theories of myth, ritual and symbol. 20 These theoretical con-
siderations merit a separate study. Nonetheless, it will be interesting to close by
making some minimal comments about the ways of approaching religion.
2S8 LAWRENCE E. SULLIVAN

Tropes are for kids. The structural study of myth, notably in Lévi-Strauss
and bricoleurs who pick up his pieces, recognize sets of formal relations in the
structure of myth. Wandering around the battle over discourse and meaning, on
the one hand, and skirting debate on the nature of genetic structure, trans-
formation, and hierarchy on the other hand, Trickster helpfully confuses the
linguistic structural schema. Far from respecting the axial world of metaphor
and metanym, his language and character revel in another important linguistic
trope ignored by structuralists: irony.
Irony is itself a "distinctive paradigm or patterning of facts, a re-composing
in which the fact (e.g., 'having nothing') is seen within the creative presence of
a contrary ('and possessing all things')" (Lynch:14). Irony binds widely
separated opposites into a single figure so that contraries appear to belong
together. In Trickster chaos and order, sacred and profane, farce and meaning,
silence and song, food and waste, word and event, pretended ignorance and
pretended cunning, stone-life and flesh life, male and female, play and reality,
compose n o t only an ironic symbol but a symbol of irony.
Trickster's character and exploits e m b o d y the process of ironic imagination.
His dynamism of composition mocks, shatters and re-forms the overly clear
structures of the world and the overly-smooth images of the mind. Trickster
subverts both the inescapable structure of Earthmaker's reality and the imperial-
ism of Earthmaker's thought over reality. He is all passage and penis whose
dialectic mode of existence devours antagonisms, explores passages and offers
access in excess through one opposite to another. In him the double-sidedness
of reality reveals itself.
In both imagining and imaging the meeting of all contraries, Trickster's
(and language's) ironic character articulate the dialectic imagination which
makes social life and meaning possible. Irony pushes forward the enterprise of
religious imagination's experiment with the sacred in the very act of social
communication. In limiting itself to the linguistic tropes of metaphor and
metanym, structuralist analyses block a passage-way to the meaning of waicq
and sacred texts in general.

Mockery and Manifesto. Radin notes in the texts how ubiquitous is social
parody and inversion. Dialectical theories of culture that begin with political-
economic analyses of social relations and construct hierarchies of dominance
and subordination so that they may study their inversions in the symbolic
currency of ritual and m y t h have a lot to gain in a trade with the Trickster.
True, Trickster inverts infrastructures of biology and ecology and superstructural
relations developed around the consciousness of social roles and hierarchies of
power associated with human, social and material reproduction. Nonetheless,
the Winnebago religious imagination doesn't buy a hard-bargain exchange
theory of social and cosmic reality.
If Wakdjunkaga shams the shaman, chides chiefly privilege and satirizes
social and religious custom (even the fast for the guardian spirit) in gross and
absurd ways, he also perverts his own inversions. If he is negation, he also
negates the negation. He "wows" us with a penetrating burlesque of all struc-
WINNEBAGO SACRED TEXTS 259

tures and forms, including his own, which parade as permanent, important or
impermeable. He parodies his own parody until one gives up figuring out which
'act' is 'for real' and contemplates what Trickster's play reveals: how ludicrous
is every vision of life constructed of hierarchies without ironic wholeness or
formal arrangements without communication between one form and another.
He reveals how static is the vision of life built on earthy corporeality without
passage to sacred spirit of metamorphosis so imaginable in the heroes of the
waicq.
Trickster uses death through decay to put an end to the death through the
durable structure of stone, stasis and separate category. His beginnings are all
ends; his mouth devours his anus. But his exchanges are not reflections of
"relations on the ground" or surface features which embed consciousnesses of
values that inhere between hierarchical levels of progressively deeper structure.
Rather he mocks the sham of separation between surface and depth and
collapses them into a unity of being. He offers hope that in these moments of
structural collapse, when one contemplates in a playful way what is, sacred
events offer creative possibilities that penetrate every boundary of structure and
transform them.
The Winnebago myths suggest that there are other modes of dialectic than
those which underpin many contemporary Western cultural theories. In a
hermeneutic of the waicq sacred myths, one might understand more by first
attempting to comprehend the process of religious imagination which is tangibly
portrayed in myth, rite and symbol than by over-determining one's analysis
with dialectics proclaimed in the history of Western religio-philosophic imagina-
tion.
The body beautiful: Mr./Ms. Universe. Trickster's bodily parts are the props,
setting, stage and main characters of this drama. This is a main theme of this
sacred story: human space is the locus of all life and the passage of interpene-
tration of beings and meanings. The symbol of Wakdjunkaga reveals that man/
woman is a symbol. The body comes to correspond to every sort of penetration,
every sort of space and every sort of resultant transformation.
From his own point of view, Victor Turner has wrestled with Durkheim
on this very point. Tumer's insights help our interpretive task. Turner tips
Durkheim "on his head" by contending that symbols of normative order in
social taxonomies and classificatory systems of nature derive from body pro-
cesses, especially eating, feeding at the breast, copulating, giving birth, bleeding,
passing waste and so on. This helps us understand many of the wanton and
reckless features that disorder the world through medium of the body: biology
is amoral, its processes are a must which transcend everything else possible, if
it is to survive (1968).
Furthermore, contra Levi-Strauss, Turner points out that myth and ritual
evoke emotion. They are not cold sets of complex algorithmic permutations.
The emotions they evoke, claims Turner, are precisely those generalized ones
associated with the experiences linked to fundamental biological processes of
the human body. We have seen that the symbols of Trickster, his body parts,
dramatize the tension between the normative and the orectic.
240 LAWRENCE E. SULLIVAN

Finally, Turner's notion addresses itself also to the cosmic dimension of

symbol. Here his work begins to approach the morphological kind of study in
the history of religions. The body serves as a template for symbols that reveal
the meaning of the world to us and motivate us to be meaningful actors in its
social dramas, says Turner. It is a source of contemplation which is total; that is,
not only thoughtful but sentient, intuitive, and evocative of mobility, action,
penetration, passage and passion. Symbolic dimensions associated with body-
processes enable man to make imaginative statements about being itself.

"What we may call symbolic thought makes it possible for man to

move freely from one level of reality to another . . . Symbols,
as we have seen, identify, assimilate, and unify diverse levels and
realities that are to all appearances incompatible. Further still:
magico-religious experience makes it possible for man himself to
be transformed into a symbol. And only in so far as man himself
becomes a symbol, are all systems and all anthropocosmic experi-
ences possible, and indeed in this case his own life is considerably
enriched and enlarged. Man no longer feels himself to be an "air-
tight" fragment, but a living cosmos open to all the other living
cosmoses by which he is surrounded. The experiences of the world
at large are no longer something outside him and therefore ulti-
mately 'foreign' and 'objective'; they do not alienate him from
himself but, on the contrary, lead him towards himself, and reveal
to him his own existence and his own destiny" (Eliade, 1963:455).

Game and reality. Trickster reminds us that a head-on logical analysis of Winne-
bago waicq, particularly analyses with utilitarian goals of their own, may not
help one understand what they are nor what they mean to say about our world.
This is not to say that the task is impossible nor even excruciatingly difficult
or bizarre. Far from creating insoluble absurdities which social sciences must
dutifully face and 'solve', Trickster opens up passages to his own meaning:
he is already a resolution or rather a recomposition of meaning. Trickster is
play, travesty, untruthfulness and that game which reality plays at the heart of
existence.
The 'rules' of Trickster's game demand that he play Foolish One, who does
not know, or at least pretends, for the sake of the game and the drama of the
religious imagination, that he is ignorant. The truth is that we cannot always
distinguish whether Trickster is 'really' stupid or just pretending to be. By thus
making permeable the boundaries between these two epistemological categories
he heightens the co-presence of cunning and stupidity, illusion and reality,
consumed and consuming and even the 'irreducibly' bounded categories of male
and female, coming and going, passage and penetration. He makes us feel the
fullness of life by presenting all its ironic contraries. Trickster's untruthfulness,
stupidity and pretension-not-to-know are a nonsense frame generative of every
possible sense.
Social scientists, philosophers of science, logicians, physicists, artists,
 WINNEBAGO SACRED TEXTS 241

musicians etc. explore the notions of frame that define their own discipline,
justifying its separate existence as a bounded field. Further, the utilitarian
frames of reference we manipulate within our endeavours generate theories that
allow for questions and answers which we hope make sense. We began by saying
that Paul Radin viewed the academy as a tired collection of bounded categories
whose divisions were arbitrary, without meaning and uncreative. In fact, we
often jealously guard the 'real' boundaries between psychology, anthropology,
literature, linguistics, history, history of religions, law, medicine and the 'hard'
sciences.
Trickster reminds us that we take our study of our world most seriously
when we take the definitions of ourselves more lightly. He would 'entertain'
the possibility that our fields are penetrable illusions when pushed through the
wider frame of the human religious imagination. The play of the religious
imagination with symbols of a particularly sacred sort initiates dynamism and
transforms unrelated modes of existence into "univerts." Thus meaning
embraces the whole, though knowledge of it be not greater than some of its
parts.
In his lusty, voracious, burping, flatulent way, he offers us a human frame
of meaning and passage through it to the sacred. In the waicq, the Winnebago
contemplate the reaches of a sacred symbol who passes all existence through the
being of passages who is in passage: man/woman. The Winnebago set us a good
example of humanist query.

NOTES

1. For extensive critical comments on previous versions of this article I am

indebted to Mircea Eliade (Chicago), Paul Friederich (Chicago), Ake Hult-
krantz (Stockholm), and Cristiano Grottanelli (Rome).

2. For a complete bibliography of Radin's published works see Werbner 1960.

For a brief account of Paul Radin see du Bois 1960.

3. Cora Du Bois 1960:xiii. See also Radin's own treatment (1927).

4. See, for example, Radin 1911; 1914b; 1918; 1950a; 1959.

5. See especially Radin's interpretive remarks, 1948; 1954; 1955; 1956a.

Jung and Kerenyi's comments on the Winnebago Trickster are found in
Radin 1956b.

6. Levi-Strauss 1960. In this connection, Levi-Strauss also does an interesting

analysis of Winnebago social structure, 1963:132-166. He barely treats the
Trickster figure in his work, but of course in the study of mediator figures
242 LAWRENCE E. SULLIVAN

(e.g. Ash-boy and Cinderella) his insights are thoughtful. For specific
reference to Amerindian Trickster figures see Levi-Strauss 1963:224-227;
1969.

7. cf. the works of Thomas Kuhn, Max Black, Stephen Toulmin, Karl Popper,
Ian Barbour, and Imre Lakatos; see Gregory Bateson's treatment of Russell's
Theory of Logical Types in Bateson 1972.

8. cf. Geertz 1966; the Introduction in Goldman 1975, and several of Turner's
works, especially 1970:93-112, the Introduction to 1974, and 1969.

9. Regarding the notion of contemplation in the arts, particularly those

connected with the senses of audition and vision, see Macquet 1971. He
makes an important distinction between contemplation and cognition.
Cognition is a "discursive process through which the intellect actively and
critically build a mental image of the object" (ibid:6), whereas contempla-
tion is linked to aesthetic awareness in which the "subject does not analyse
and reconstruct, be simply attends to the object" (ibid.) Radin himself
says "whatever functions or has functioned is real and whatever is real is
outside of the category of time; is always present." (1948:12).

10. For the variant of the myth that I am using see 1945:17ff. Another version
is recorded in 1923:212-213.

11. cf. the parallel mention of tears in describing the coming to consciousness
and the awakening of spiritual powers in other contexts; for example, Radin
1920:3 et passim in regard to the experience of fasting, the awakening of
consciousness and conversion to the Peyote Cult; 1923:421 ; 261-262; 236.

12. The best summary of scholarship on the North American Trickster is

Piper 1975:121-194. For a thorough collection of materials on the subject
see Ricketts 1964. Also of great interest to the historian of religions in
this connection is an excellent work by Pelton 1980. This work by an
historian of religions will interest theologians and psychologists.

13. This theme of double penetration is common. See Goldman's description

of the double-headed serpent totem of the Kwakiutl (1975).

14. See the spiritual importance of song, for example, in 1923:192; 317; 322;
336.

15. 1956:137. For a very interesting remark in the manner of Jung, see Layard
1957.

16. Kerényi sets the Trickster within the context of burlesque folk humor
which preserves in the modern day an imagery of archaic primitive times
WINNEBAGO SACRED TEXTS 243

which has not passed through a flowering of the classic theatre and litera-
ture. Jung, working from ethnographic references to medieval Feasts of
Fools, considers the Trickster to be an archtype of relatedness emerging
from behind the shadow in the early stages of psychic individualization.
Jungs views the Trickster as a foreshadowing of the notion of saviour.

17. The frame of my interpretation is the general history of religions and, in

particular, the history of North American Indian religions, cf. Hultkrantz
1966-67; see also an over-view and bibliography of North American Indian
religions in Werner Muller's article in Krickeberg 1961, as well as the works
of Piper 1975 and Ricketts 1964.

18. Dell Hymes makes an interesting case for the kinds of analyses that may go
beyond the logico-cognitive (1974:3-66). An interesting application of this
approach to the study of religion is found in Fabian 1968. My own ap-
proach is less analytical of discourse than interpretive of imagination.

19. cf. the Creation Myth: "So he formed a being, just like ourselves, and when
he had finished him he called him Trickster, Foolish-One" (1945:19).
Radin notes "in the sense that he had the same parts of the body that we
have, not that he looked like us" (ibid:352).

20. This last section owes a debt to Robert Pelton. For a fuller and more
pointed discussion of the following themes see Pelton 1980:223-284.

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