Because of the antagonisms, mentalists formed a group of their own, the Psychic Entertainers Association. It has several hundred members and holds an annual convention. The original name of their bulletin, Psychic Entertainers News & Information Service, was selected for its acronym, which is appropriately tricksterish.
In playing the role of “psychic,” many mentalists come to wonder whether they might, in fact, possess genuine abilities. Even vocal de-bunker Ray Hyman has admitted that he once believed himself to be gifted in reading palms, though he eventually rejected the notion. Yet Hyman has come to devote much of his professional career to attacking the paranormal, which, in its way, attests to its influence over him. A number of con artists have commented in their autobiographies that it is helpful for them to believe their own story line; such beliefs allow them to be more sincere and thus more effective. Similar beliefs may assist mentalists.
Understandably, many magicians are cynical of performers who claim real psychic abilities; they are dismissed as frauds or, more charitably, as those who unfortunately came to believe their own publicity material. Mentalists’ statements to the general public can rarely be trusted; however, a number have written works circulated only among insiders in which they state their belief in the efficacy of psychic practices, though they do not rely on them for performing. The demarcation between trickery and genuine psychic sensitivity is not always clear, even to mentalists. An example is contact mind reading, a technique in which the performer holds on to a person who knows the location of a hidden object. By noting the person’s unintentional bodily cues, the mentalist is able to locate the object. In these performances, the distinction between psi and sensory acuity is blurred, and such an exercise has been recommended as training for genuine telepathy by both George Newmann,22 an eminent mentalist, and psychical researcher Hereward Carrington.23
In a 1978 article in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Richard Reichbart suggested that the act of simulating psi may stimulate the real. If he is correct, psi is extremely subversive. The distinctions between true and false, reality and fantasy, are undermined. understandably this suggestion provokes furious reactions, or contempt, especially from those who despise ambiguity and wish their world to be well structured. Strong protective beliefs are needed. The mentalist-magician antagonism is a symptom of one of the subversive manifestations of the trickster—the blurring of imagination and reality.
Hypnosis
Hypnosis is a liminal and trickster phenomenon in a host of ways. It deserves a section for itself, but it makes sense to include it in this chapter; after all, magicians and mentalists have undoubtedly publicized the phenomenon far more than have psychologists. In fact, the
Amazing Kreskin is probably one of the most famous hypnotists, and some psychologists even consider him an eminent authority.24
Hypnosis highlights the confusing interrelationships among conjuring, liminality, and the paranormal. Hypnotism has been known for thousands of years under a variety of names (e.g., animal magnetism, mesmerism, suggestion), but it is ambiguous, and even its definition is problematical. Psychologists continue to debate whether hypnosis involves a special state or if it is essentially indistinguishable from ordinary consciousness. Some attribute hypnotic effects to mere “suggestion,” doubting that a hypnotic trance exists. The disputes have been intense, and in one form or another, they have continued for over 200 years, but they are not resolved.25 All this has resulted in a somewhat marginal position for hypnosis within psychology. Its public image also suffers from some ambiguous and even unsavory affiliations.
Authorities today credit Franz Anton Mesmer as beginning the first sustained investigation of the phenomenon. In his time hypnotism was associated with traveling clairvoyance. That association continued, and from the earliest days of the Society for Psychical Research in the 1880s to the laboratory-based parapsychology of the 1960s and 1970s, hypnosis was used to facilitate ESP in experiments.
The relationship between hypnotism and psychical research is far too extensive to cover here. But to give just a glimpse of the links, I call attention to the book Hypnosis (1972) by Erika Fromm and Ronald Shor, a book that gives no coverage to the paranormal. Yet on the first page of Chapter one, 23 historically important persons are listed who made significant contributions to hypnosis. Among those were Vladimir Bechterev, Pierre Janet, Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, Frederic Myers, Charles Richet, William James, and William McDougall. All of these people (more than a third of those listed) also contributed to psychical research. Additionally, psychical researchers have published important chronicles of the history, and here again we encounter the scholarship of Eric Dingwall, who edited a four-volume series titled Abnormal Hypnotic Phenomena (1967—1968). Alan Gauld, a president of the Society for Psychical Research, wrote the 738-page A History of Hypnotism (1992).
In the popular mind also, hypnosis is connected with the paranormal. During the 1950s there was an explosion of interest with the Bridey Murphy reincarnation case. Businessman Morey Bernstein hypnotized Virginia Tighe, a Colorado housewife who recalled details of a life in Ireland during the first part of the nineteenth century. Bernstein’s book The Search for Bridey Murphy (1956) raised a storm of controversy. A few decades later, hypnosis was used to retrieve “memories” of UFO abductions, suggesting the dubious reliability of the practice.
Hypnosis blurs a variety of psychological boundaries. It calls into question who is in control—hypnotist or subject?—thereby blurring the distinction between self and other. Hypnosis challenges the division between mind and body with its startling cures of warts and skin diseases. It is sometimes used as analgesia for surgery, eliminating the need for drugs. The line between the conscious and unconscious is blurred when subjects are hypnotized to regain repressed memories, but hypnotists can implant false ones, thereby blurring the distinction between fantasy and reality. The “memories” of abductions by extraterrestrial aliens is but one instance. These few examples are only a smattering, and there is a vast literature on all these matters. The concept of liminality can be fruitfully applied to them.
Hypnosis and illicit sex have long been associated. Men’s magazines sometimes carry advertisements for books teaching how to hypnotize and seduce women. This unsavory association is nothing new. During Mesmer’s heyday in Paris, the King of France appointed a commission to investigate the so-called animal magnetism. The committee included Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier, Joseph Ignace Guillotin and others, and in 1784 they issued a report that was made public. They disparaged Mesmer’s idea of a magnetic fluid, and they asserted that imitation and imagination could explain the phenomenon. The commission also produced a secret report, meant only for the eyes of the king. It warned that mesmerism could lead to sexual
immorality.27
Another trickster quality of hypnosis is seen in stage demonstrations, which, like spirit mediumship, sometimes involved deception. Subjects occasionally performed amazing feats, but other times the effects were more mundane. The phenomenon is not reliable, and performers could not count on producing some of the more spectacular demonstrations, and they resorted to using confederates who faked being hypnotized.28 The deceptions enhanced audience appeal, but they also helped marginalize hypnotism in the eyes of establishment psychologists. In fact Wesley Wells in an article in The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (1946) opened with the statement: “Public exhibitions of hypnosis on the stage and over the radio are an affront to science.” Hypnotism’s affiliation with the paranormal in the popular press additionally contributed to its scientific marginality, and
Wells also decried “the association of hypnosis with magic, witchcraft, and telepathy.”29
Magicians have plenty of connections with hypnosis, and I will mention a few for illustrative purposes. Will Goldston, a prolific magic writer, published a magazine titled The Magician. For its first five volumes (1904-1909), it was subtitled A Monthly Journal Devoted To Magic, Spiritu
alism, Hypnotism & Human Progress. Another striking example of the same nexus is seen in the person of ormond McGill. He authored The Encyclopedia of Stage Hypnotism (1947) a manual used by numerous stage performers. He was also involved in debates on psychic phenomena. Beginning in January 1937, he wrote a monthly series entitled “The Psychic Circle” for The Tops, the magazine of Abbott’s Magic Novelty Company. McGill not only held a positive view on the reality of psi, but he even gave advice on how to develop psychic abilities. He also wrote books on how to fake them. In the 1940s he toured as Doctor Zomb. His performances often commenced with a hypnosis demonstration; after that was over, lights were turned out, and a ghost show began. Glowing monsters appeared on stage and spirit forms flew over the audience. In the 1970s he published several popular books describing his travels and encounters with supernatural phenomena. McGill exemplifies the combination of the genuine and fake, in both hypnosis and the paranormal. He is but one of many similar individuals in the magic field. These people cross boundaries and deal in both the authentic and the spurious; they do not fit into the usual categories. Parapsychologists don’t trust them; debunkers can’t label them as gullible without looking foolish themselves. Consequently academics, parapsychologists, and debunkers largely ignore them.
In short, the trickster constellation is strikingly obvious in the phenomenon of hypnosis. It is associated with deception, lowered sexual inhibitions, psychological boundary blurring, paranormal manifestations, and marginality—all trickster attributes.
Exemplar Magician-Tricksters
Magicians heavily involved in paranormal controversies often manifest strong trickster qualities, and their biographies can be particularly illuminating. A number of such persons could be examined, but three exemplars are James Randi, Tony ‘Doc’ Shiels, and Eric J. Dingwall—the debunker, the hoaxer, and the investigator, respectively. All are extreme types, and all have had an intense, almost life
long involvement with the paranormal. The three are exceedingly bright, creative, and controversial, and each has published a number of books. Each displays a trickster constellation in almost archetypal form. The all-too-brief sketches that follow emphasize trickster qualities to the exclusion of others.
James Randi
James (The Amazing) Randi (born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge, 1928) is the individual most widely associated with the modern-day skeptical movement, and he has made countless public appearances, the world over, as a debunker. Randi has many fans among high status scientists. In 1986 the MacArthur Foundation bestowed upon him a “genius” award along with $286,000, and in 1989 he was given an award by the American Physical Society for “Promoting Public Understanding of the Relation of Physics to Society.” Randi has been involved with the paranormal almost his entire life, and his entry in Current Biography Yearbook 1987 tells how he publicly confronted phoney spiritualists when he was still a teenager. In his early days he produced a newspaper astrology column and pretended to be a psychic. He abandoned that and eventually achieved fame with his attacks on Uri Geller.32 In 1976 the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) was formed, and Randi quickly became one of its most visible members.
In the early 1980s Randi began his Project Alpha. He recruited two teenage magicians, Steve Shaw and Michael Edwards, who posed as psychics and visited a number of researchers, demonstrating their purported abilities of psychically bending spoons, producing psychic photographs, and moving small objects. They were able to convince a few nonprofessional investigators of their talents, but many professionals remained unconvinced by the boys, some vocally so. Nevertheless, in January 1983 Randi called a well-attended press conference and claimed that he had fooled the parapsychologists. This garnered wide coverage by television, newspapers, and magazines, and the Project helped to ridicule and marginalize parapsychology.33
Like many tricksters, some of Randi’s antics have caused problems for himself. He was forced to resign from CSICOP because his accusations provoked lawsuits against the Committee. One of the most publicized involved physicist Eldon Byrd, a friend of Uri Geller. On May 10, 1988 Randi made a presentation for the New York Area Skeptics in Manhattan. After his lecture, during the question and answer period, a member of the audience confronted him with a tape recording, which allegedly had Randi speaking in explicit sexual terms with young men (the recording was not played during the public meeting). I was present and watched as pandemonium almost broke out. Randi did not completely regain his composure. He accused Byrd of distributing the tape and went on to claim that Byrd was a child molester and that he was in prison. He made the same assertion in an interview with Twilight Zone Magazine.3 This was untrue, and in a jury trial he was found guilty of defaming Byrd.
Randi has never been married, but his sex life has received published comment regarding rumors of pederasty, including from a longtime friend James Moseley. Randi threatened lawsuits over them, but he never carried through.
Randi has written a number of books on the paranormal, and they are not known for their accuracy. I documented some of his errors in my overview article on CSICOP.38 He was infuriated by that and wrote me an unpleasant letter demanding a correction. I asked him to explain any mistakes I made, but he was unable to do so, and I didn’t hear from him again.
He has allied himself with atheistic causes, and much of his life has been devoted to battles against supernatural ideas, at considerable personal sacrifice. The fights left their mark, and Carl Sagan’s (sympathetic) introduction to Randi’s book The Faith Healers (1987) described Randi as an angry man and labeled his book a “tirade.” All in all, Randi is more a Promethean figure than a Hermetic one.
Tony “Doc” Shiels
Tony “Doc” Shiels (b. 1938), is an artist and musician and also a mentalist and magician who has authored a column for British magazine Fortean Times. He presents himself as “investigator” but is actually a marvelous hoaxer, and Issue No. 8 of Strange Magazine (Fall 1991) exposed some of his hoaxes of aquatic monsters. Because of his expertise at hoaxing, it is perhaps fortunate that he is less known than my other two exemplars.
Shiels was one of the originators of bizarre magic,39 and his performances and writings are noted for the unusual. Shiels describes himself as a surrealist and has written: “Performing, writing, and thinking about trickery, illusion, legerdemain, hocus-pocus, and all such stuff, actually seems to make the genuine thing happen … To perform a ‘trick’ is, in effect, to act out a piece of sympathetic magic.”40 While this may indeed be true, in view of his archetypal tricksterhood, it is difficult to know whether Shiels actually believes this or uses it only as a magician’s patter line. I suspect that he believes it. I’ve had some correspondence with him, and he demonstrated an exceptional understanding of the trickster. He incorporated it into his surrealist worldview.
In the Introduction to Shiels’ book Monstrum! (1990), Colin Wilson noted that some of Shiels’ “writing seems suffused with a touch of alcoholic euphoria,” and Shiels acknowledges that “A mixture of Scottish and Irish blood, plus regular lashings of Guinness and whiskey, pursues its eccentric course through my constantly hardening arteries.” We may assume that altered states of consciousness play a part in his life. Sexuality is also a prominent feature; Shiels’ artwork contains erotic imagery, as do his books on magic, which carry pictures of voluptuous nude women. He has taken photographs of his nude daughters, and that sparked rumors with veiled hints of incest.
Colin Wilson comments on Shiels’ charm and accords him “an immense natural goodness and amiability.” Shiels’ writings are indeed charming and friendly; they display none of the anger and bitterness found in those of Randi. Shiels shows more of a Hermes personality rather than the Promethean demeanor of Randi.
Eric J. Dingwall
Anthropologist Eric Dingwall (1890-1986) was one of the brightest and most knowledgeable characters in the history of psychical research, and also one having a decided taste for the bizarre. He wrot
e a book on chastity belts (1931), one titled Male Infibulation (1925), and edited another (illustrated) on female sexuality; his book The American Woman (1956) primarily focused on the sexual life of middle and upper class American women. He cataloged erotica at the British Library, and he also investigated black magic, sexuality, and transvestism in Haiti. 45 His explicit interest in the relationship between psi and sexuality was so discomfiting to his colleagues that criminologist and Society for Psychical Research (SPR) president D. J. West felt compelled to comment on it in the obituary he wrote of Dingwall.
Dingwall held both Ph.D. and D.Sc. degrees, but he considered himself to be an unsophisticated person. He described his ability to communicate with the primitive and the insane, a talent he found lacking in most highly educated people.47 This is a subtle trickster attribute. The trickster has the ability to communicate effectively across markedly different cultures. Dingwall’s comment indicates an awareness of the issue, though he did not relate it to the trickster.
Dingwall was a conjuror of long standing, and Milbourne Christopher, an eminent magic historian, dedicated his Mediums, Mystics & the Occult (1975) to Ding. At the time of his death Dingwall was the oldest member of the Magic Circle, the prestigious London magic society. He investigated and wrote extensively on psychical research and especially on physical mediumship, where trickery is an especially severe problem. Although he was often highly critical, he made positive statements regarding the existence of psi.
The Trickster and the Paranormal Page 16
