(Peyote has never been a drug for thrill seekers. The smal...)
Peyote has never been a drug for thrill seekers. The small, hard cactus is difficult to obtain. It tastes vile, ingestion normally leads to painful vomiting, and the effects are more subtle than other psychedelics.
The Native American Peyote ceremony emerged at the turn of the 20th century, like the Ghost Dance, at a time when Native American culture was under much stress. It blended Christian and traditional beliefs, and used Peyote as a sacrament. The Peyote ceremony spread from the Southwest into the Plains and other culture regions. Participants reported a spiritual cleansing, and experienced healing effects, which may be the result of powerful natural antibiotics in Peyote.
This is one of the first ethnographic accounts of the Peyote ceremony. Paul Radin wrote this monograph, mostly consisting of first-hand accounts, as part of his 1925 ethnography of the Winnebago tribe, who live in Wisconsin. The Peyote 'Cult' did not die out as Radin thought it might, but grew into the Native American Church, which is still going strong today. This group fought the US legal system to get an exemption to use the cactus, which is a controlled substance, in their ceremonies. (Quote from sacred-texts.com)
About the Author
Paul Radin (1883 - 1959)
Paul Radin (April 2, 1883 - February 21, 1959) was a widely-read American anthropologist of the early twentieth century. A student of Franz Boas at Columbia, the Lodz-born Radin counted Edward Sapir and Robert Lowie among his classmates. He began years of productive fieldwork among the Winnebago Indians (now properly the Ho-Chunk Nation) in 1908. His books are several, but his most enduring publication to date is The Trickster (1956), which includes essays by pioneering Greek-myth scholar Karl Kerenyi and psychoanalys
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Classic of anthropology explores belief systems of Winn...)
Classic of anthropology explores belief systems of Winnebago, Oglala Sioux, Maori, Banda, Batak, Tahitian and Hawaiian, Zuni, and Ewe. Fascinating topics include purpose of life, marriage, freedom of thought, death, nature of reality, and other concepts. The author allows his subjects to speak for themselves by quoting extensively from interviews.
The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology
(The myth of the Trickster—ambiguous creator and destroyer...)
The myth of the Trickster—ambiguous creator and destroyer, cheater and cheated, subhuman and superhuman—is one of the earliest and most universal expressions of mankind. Nowhere does it survive in more starkly archaic form than in the voraciously uninhibited episodes of the Winnebago Trickster Cycle, recorded here is full. Anthropological and psychological analyses by Radin, Kerényi, and Jung reveal with Trickster as filling a twofold role: on the one hand he is "an archetypal psychic structure" that harks back to "an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level" (Jung); on the other hand, his myth is a present-day outlet for the most unashamed and liberating satire of the onerous obligation of social order, religion, and ritual.
With commentaries by Karl Kerényi and C. G. Jung
Introduction by Stanley Diamond
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This classic work on the Winnebago Indian tribe remains...)
This classic work on the Winnebago Indian tribe remains the single best authority on the subject. Based on Paul Radin's field work in 1908–13, The Winnebago Tribe was originally published as an annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1923. It is distinguished by a number of first-person accounts by Winnebago informants and by the thoroughness with which Radin discusses Winnebago history, archaeology, material culture, social customs, education, funeral and burial rites, warfare, and shamanistic and medical practices. Included are Winnebago tales and legends and the first complete account of the peyote religion, now known as the Native American Church.
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In this transcription of the Medicine Rite, the most sa...)
In this transcription of the Medicine Rite, the most sacred ritual of the Winnebago Indians, anthropologist Paul Radin captured a poetic source of profound importance to the understanding of mystical experience. Performed by medicine men upon the initiation of a member to their cult, this secret rite recapitulated the mythic origins and heroes of the Winnebago while integrating those present with the ancestral forces.
The Trickster, a Study in American Indian Mythology. With Commentaries By Karl Kerenyi and C. G. Jung
(This is not a Print-on-Demand or facsimile book. It is a ...)
This is not a Print-on-Demand or facsimile book. It is a hardcover published in 1956 by the Philosophical Library, 15 E. 40 St, NY. The myth of the Trickster-ambiguous creator and destroyer, cheater and cheated, subhuman and superhuman-is one of the earliest and most universal expressions of mankind. Nowhere does it survive in more starkly archaic form than in the voraciously uninhibited episodes of the Winnebago Trickster Cycle, recorded here in full. Anthropological and psychological analyses by Radin, Kerényi, and Jung reveal the Trickster as filling a twofold role: on the one hand he is "an archetypal psychic structure" that harks back to "an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level" (Jung); on the other hand, his myth is a present-day outlet for the most unashamed and liberating satire of the onerous obligations of social order, religion, and ritual.
Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of an American Indian (Ann Arbor Paperbacks)
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Paul Radin, one of America's first and most reputable p...)
Paul Radin, one of America's first and most reputable professional anthropologists, lived among the Winnebago Indians for years, and for years he tried without success to interview the notorious younger son of the Blow Snake family, the Crashing Thunder of this book. At last Crashing Thunder agreed to tell Radin his life story, one that Radin calls "a true rake's progress."
Speaking through Radin, Crashing Thunder told of his childhood, stories of Winnebago gods, his appetite for women and beer, and his extraordinary friends and relatives, including his brother-in-law, Thunder Cloud, then in his third incarnation. Crashing Thunder also told of his redemption through his new religion, peyote.
To enhance understanding of the autobiography and its place in anthropology and literature, a new foreword, appendix, and index have been prepared by eminent Native American scholar, Arnold Krupat.
Paul Radin (1883-1959) was an American anthropologist who was considered an authority on the culture of primitive societies, especially the tribal societies of native North Americans. Among his many works are the books The Winnebago Tribe, The Road of Life and Death: A Ritual Drama of the American Indians, and The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. Arnold Krupat is Professor of English, Sarah Lawrence College.
(Anthropology is a science whose most significant discover...)
Anthropology is a science whose most significant discoveries have come when it has taken its bearings from literature, and what makes Paul Radin’s Primitive Man as Philosopher a seminal piece of anthropological inquiry is that it is also a book of enduring wonder. Writing in the 1920s, when anthropology was still young, Radin set out to show that “primitive” cultures are as intellectually sophisticated and venturesome as any of their “civilized” counterparts. The basic questions about the structure of the natural world, the nature of right and wrong, and the meaning of life and death, as well as basic methods of considering the truth or falsehood of the answers those questions give rise to, are, Radin argues, recognizably consistent across the whole range of human societies. He rejects both the romantic myth of the noble savage and the rationalist dismissal of the primitive mind as essentially undeveloped, averring that the anthropologist and the anthropologist’s subject meet on the same philosophical ground, and only when that is acknowledged can anthropology begin in earnest. The argument is clearly and forcibly made in pages that also contain an extraordinary collection of poems, proverbs, myths, and tales from a host of different cultures, making Primitive Man as Philosopher not only a lasting contribution to the discipline of anthropology but a unique, rich, and fascinating anthology, one that both illuminates and enlarges our imagination of the human.
Paul Radin was an American cultural anthropologist and folklorist of the early twentieth century specializing in Native American languages and cultures.
Background
Paul Radin was born on April 2, 1883 in Lodz, Poland, the son of Adolph M. Radin, a rabbi and Hebrew scholar skilled in modern and ancient languages, and Johanna Theodor. In 1884 the family migrated to Elmira, New York Radin acquired his father's skeptical liberalism and linguistic skills, learning Greek and Latin as well as Hebrew.
Education
He entered City College of New York at fourteen and, after graduation in 1902, enrolled at Columbia University to study zoology. But influenced by James H. Robinson, he turned to history. Between 1905 and 1907 Radin studied at Munich, substituting physical anthropology for zoology while continuing his historical interests, and at Berlin, where he concentrated on anthropology. In 1907 he returned to Columbia, where he worked under Franz Boas as well as Robinson. He finished Ph. D. work in 1911. As a student of Boas, Radin got to know anthropology's elder statesmen: A. L. Kroeber, Clark Wissler, Edward Sapir, Robert Lowie, Frank G. Speck, and Alexander Goldenweiser.
Career
To finance his education after his father's death in 1910, Radin did translations and tutored in German at City College.
In 1911 he worked at the Bureau of American Ethnology. After spending 1912-1913 on a Columbia-Harvard fellowship, analyzing Zapotec linguistics, he joined Sapir at the Geological Survey of Canada, where he began publishing on the Ojibwa.
Between 1908 and 1913 he also did fieldwork among the Winnebago. Radin's varied interests can be seen in The Sources and Authenticity of the History of the Ancient Mexicians, published in 1920, the same year as his Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian. The intellectual atmosphere for this work came from Mills College and the University of California, where Radin worked with Kroeber and renewed a friendship with Lowie.
Radin spent 1920 to 1924 in Europe, lecturing under W. H. R. Rivers at Cambridge but being attracted to Zurich and C. G. Jung. While The Winnebago Tribe (1923) appeared at this time, it seems primarily a seminal period for Primitive Man as Philosopher (1927), one of his best-known works. In 1925 and 1926 Radin held fellowships for Ottawa Indian fieldwork and a final revision of Crashing Thunder (1926), which was first published as the first part of The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian. In 1927 he went to Fiske for four years, finding time to collect life histories of former slaves.
In 1931 he returned to the University of California, where his interests ranged from the Penutian language through minorities of San Francisco, especially the Italians, to original sources on Mexican history. His catalog for Spanish publications in the Sutro Library in San Francisco consisted of more than 1, 000 pages. He also published a text, Social Anthropology (1932); a general review of the field, Method and Theory of Ethnology (1933); a revised edition of his 1927 overview of Middle and North America, The Story of the American Indian (1934); and a personal view of comparative religion, Primitive Religion (1937).
In 1941 Radin left Berkeley for a position at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. The experimental and unstructured nature of the college appealed to him, but he was basically urban.
In 1945, through support of Mary Mellon and the Bollingen Foundation, and later the Andrew Mellon Foundation, he was freed to write and edit, with occasional teaching at Kenyon College.
In 1949 he lectured at four Swedish universities and at the Eranos Conferences in Ascona, Switzerland. These intermittent engagements led to four years of residence at Lugano, Switzerland, convenient for work and stimulation at the C. G. Jung Institute (Zurich) and for travel to lecture at Oxford and Cambridge. Bollingen support facilitated a series of papers on Winnebago folklore and religion, making Radin a major liaison between European and American ethnographers.
Radin disliked the formalities of the classroom, preferring to invite students into his home for broad-ranging give and take of ideas.
Radin's range of linguistic and geographic interests was matched by his methods. He often argued that the task of the ethnographer was to record in detail what primitive peoples said of themselves while providing a minimum of critical evaluation. The Winnebago and Italian biographies illustrate the approach, as does African Folk Tales (1952); yet in reconstructing history Radin proposed grand waves of diffusion based on limited evidence, as in The Story of the American Indian and Indians of South America (1942). His reconstruction of culture in these two books exceeds much of what Kroeber did in North America, yet Radin frequently chided his colleague, claiming anthropology must never lose sight of the individual. Likewise, Radin explicitly rejected psychological interpretation and particularly Freudian theory, but some of his most insightful interpretations implicitly rest on psychoanalytic thought. Similarly, Radin advocated a purely historical method and would have rejected a Marxist label, but he stressed economics as basic for religion and in Primitive Religion and The World of Primitive Man (1953) Radin presented an evolutionary, rather than historical, framework.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
One student, Cora DuBois, described the result of his work: "For a man who entertained a fine impatience for the drudgery of schoolteaching, he has today a singularly wide and grateful circle of students whom he chose to instruct in his own informal and often caustic fashion. "
Connections
On May 26, 1910, he married Rose Robinson. His second wife was Doris Woodward.