Dismantling the primacy of shamanism: Mac Linscott Ricketts
Mac Linscott Ricketts (1930-), former Methodist pastor, professor first at the Department of Religion at Duke University (1964-1969), and later at Louisburg College, North Carolina (1971-1994), is the author of what is generally considered the most complete biography concerning the Romanian years of Eliade (Ricketts 2004).
Ricketts also translated many non-s cholarly works of the historian of religions into English (i.e. Eliade’s autobiographies, diaries, novels, short stories). Ricketts completed his PhD research at the University of Chicago in 1964, under the formal supervision of Eliade, although, not unlike his fellow students, he probably worked most with Eliade’s colleagues Charles H. Long (1926-) and Kitagawa (Ricketts, pers. comm., e-mail, 25 May 2015).The subject of Ricketts' dissertation was the mythical figure of the trickster, chosen in the wake of an interest spurred after attending Eliade's 1961 class about ‘The Problem of the High Gods', focused on Schmidt and Pettazzoni's works (Ricketts 2007: 212). As defined by Ricketts, the trickster is the ‘creative transformer of the world and heroic bringer of culture' who combines and embodies in just one character (a ‘trickster-fixer') a plethora of different, and sometimes opposite, social roles and moral codes (Ricketts 1966: 327). More specifically, the Native North American trickster, a zoomorphic figure with anthropomorphic behavioural features (e.g. coyote, raven, rabbit, etc.), is someone who cunningly steals and brings knowledge or technology to humankind as the unintended by-product of ludicrous, tragicomic tricks and swashbuckling adventures (cf. Grottanelli 1983). Now, following the phenomenological and morphological classification of the HoR, Ricketts claims that the trickster is also a ‘“type” with a recognizable form wherever he is found, regardless of innumerable variations in history' (Ricketts 1970: 3).
Examples of tricksters as recovered by the HoR are the German god Loki, the Latin Mercury, the Greek god Hermes and the titan Prometheus, and the anthropomorphic Coyote in California (e.g. Bianchi 1958; Ricketts 1970: Chapter 20). In his PhD dissertation, Ricketts posited the ‘trickster and the shaman as rivals', with the shamans explicitly downplaying the religious role of the trickster and the storytellers that narrate trickster tales joyfully desecrating shamanic ideology (Ricketts 1970: Chapters 15, 17). By pointing out this dichotomy, Ricketts undermined the archaic, absolute value of homo religiosus, deconstructing the Eliadean link between the archetypal religiosity and current ‘primitive' religions. Ricketts achieved this result by interpreting the trickster as theembodiment of a certain mythic apprehension of the nature of man and his place in the cosmos. In [the] myths of theft we see the trickster as man fighting alone against a universe of hostile, spiritual powers and winning by virtue of his cleverness. The trickster is man, according to an archaic intuition, struggling by himself to become what he feels he must become - master of his universe.
Ricketts 1966: 336
Resorting to a phenomenological morphology, Ricketts reframed the trickster narrative as an agnostic, cunningly camouflaged religious critique embedded in a religious discourse, locating it at the dawn of human culture and religiosity. He associated the religious philosophy of the trickster with two of the things that Eliade disliked, ignored or minimized throughout his entire scholarly production, i.e. fun and laughter (as a way to live fully and desecrate ignorant precepts which impede a fuller, free life) and science (as a way to obtain knowledge about the natural world instead of explaining it away with obscurantist theological dogma; Ricketts 1966: 336; Ambasciano 2014: 324-7). Finally, as anticipated above, Ricketts explicitly contrasted the mythologies built around the trickster as the opposite pole of shamanic mysticism, futile reverence and arrogant superstition (Ricketts 1966: 338).
The myths of the North American trickster, Ricketts concluded, were about human beings celebrating themselves as clever conquerors of knowledge, while parodying shamanism as backward.The binary reconstruction of dogmatic religion vs. progressive agnosticism discredited the Eliadean autonomy and primacy of religiosity over other domains of human knowledge. By doing this, Ricketts also single-handedly deconstructed the Eliadean interpretation of shamanism, which represented, as we saw in the previous chapter, the keystone of the Eliadean research programme. Eliade dealt with Rickett's thesis in a chapter included in his volume The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion, published in 1969 (Eliade 1984; originally published in French with the title La nostalgie des origines). Drawing heavily on Rickett's own work, Eliade attempted with difficulty to undo Ricketts' criticism, refusing to engage in any discussion, stating explicitly that ‘it is not a question of an image of man in a humanistic, rationalistic or voluntaristic sense', and simply reframing the trickster myths as religious expression of a hubristic ‘mythology of the human condition' which resulted in a degraded religious condition (Eliade 1984: 157). Unfortunately, apart from some scattered contributions, Ricketts' entire dissertation circulated only as an unpublished manuscript among historians of religions, and Ricketts continued nonetheless to work as editor and translator of Eliade's books refraining from criticizing further Eliade's methods and defending his persona and work (e.g. Culianu 2003; see Ricketts' letter to Culianu, 21 May 1986, in Bordas 2012: 102-5).