The Trickster and the Paranormal

by George P. Hansen

  them. Fortunately Hillman is much easier to understand than Lacan.11

  Hillman’s book Re-Visioning Psychology (1975) is probably his most important work. Its first chapter is entitled: “Personifying or Imaging Things.” There he demonstrated his grasp of the broad psychological trends in history, and he addressed the devaluation of personified and anthropomorphic thinking. He explained that this is not something recent. The trend extends over centuries, and it is especially pervasive in academe. He noted that “psychologists in general denigrate personifying, labelling it a defensive mode of perception, a projection, a ‘pathetic fallacy,’ a regression to delusional, hallucinatory or illusory modes of adaptation.” Psychologists are active agents for marginalizing personification. Their activity indicates a deep antagonism, and that signals the importance of the topic.

  Hillman did not cite Max Weber, but the trend he identified is clearly part of the rationalization and disenchantment of the world. Personification does not fit with the Western worldview. It is not just marginalized but pathologized.

  The general attitude is seen in literary areas as well, even though personification is common in literature. Academic discussions of metaphor and allegory emphasize that they are only analogs. Hillman comments that “allegory is a defensive reaction of the rational mind against the full power of the soul’s irrational personifying propensity. Gods and demons become mere poetic allusions” (Hillman’s emphasis).13

  Hillman would suggest that the imagination perceives in a wholistic, autonomous, personified manner. He says: “Where imagination reigns, personifying happens … Just as we do not create our dreams, but they happen to us, so we do not invent the persons of myth and religion; they, too, happen to us. The persons present themselves as existing prior to any effort of ours to personify.” The realm appears to have an independence, and it is not fully subject to conscious rational control. This is essentially confirmed by anthropologist Michele Stephen, who studied religion in New Guinea and advanced some ideas about religious imagination. She proposed the idea of the “autonomous imagination,” which functions outside of conscious awareness and is “experienced as an external, independent reality, but it displays a much greater freedom and richness of imaginative inventiveness, and a different access to memory.” She recognized that the forces perceived seem to have a life of their own. Her formulation is consistent with, but developed seemingly independently of, Hillman.

  Hillman explains that “anthropomorphism, animism, personification—contain one basic idea: there exists a ‘mode of thought’ which takes an inside event and puts it outside, at the same time making this content alive, personal, and even divine.” This is a blurring of the internal-external binary opposition. All this typifies the primitive mentality, but imagery-based perception has not been eliminated from Western culture, and Hillman recognized the importance of images for “Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, and Swedenborg.” These are not from primitive cultures but from our own. They are still alive and practiced today, but they have virtually no presence in the academy. They are viewed as marginal by science and by establishment religion.

  The above formulations of the imagination are still rudimentary. They were developed by people in diverse disciplines, and apparently in relative isolation. They are a hodgepodge collection, but commonalities are found. A number of facts cohere: the devaluation of personification in Western elite culture, the prevalence of fantasy in marginal groups, a deficiency in imagery ability among high status professional males, and the rise of the sociological imagination in periods of cultural stress. In view of these factors, we can conclude that the imagination is anti-structural. The widespread, subtly negative attitude toward fantasy, imagery, and the imagination indirectly acknowledges its power and the need to keep it constrained. (The trickster demonstrates the power of personified thinking. He is a personified concept, and it is through him that common patterns in so many diverse areas can be recognized.)

  The Imagination, Psi, and the Imaginal Realm

  The imagination, imagery, and the paranormal go hand in hand. They are found together in mystical traditions stretching back millennia, in long occult traditions, and in scientific parapsychology. Ghosts, demons, angels, spirits, visionary experience, and altered states of consciousness all involve imagery. Mediums go into trance to see and talk with spirits of the dead. Mystics cultivate altered states of consciousness, and occultists induce them in order to cast magical spells. Hypnosis can produce hallucinations and has also been used to facilitate ESP. Parapsychologists have demonstrated that dreams, ganzfeld, and other methods that alter consciousness and stimulate imagery also enhance ESP receptiveness. In short, imagination and imagery are important in many psi events. 18

  Questions about many paranormal experiences have typically focussed on whether they were “real” or occurred “only in the imagination.” People on both sides of the psi controversy have expended tremendous energy in defining and maintaining this boundary. In fact, that is the purpose of laboratory-based parapsychology. In laboratories, much effort is taken to assure that psi really happens and that results are not due to fraud, error, or delusion.

  The existence of psi suggests that imagination and reality are not clearly separable. This is a disconcerting idea, but it must be explored if one wishes to understand the paranormal. The binary oppositions of internal-external, subjective-objective, fantasy-reality are fundamental to the Western worldview, and anything that proposes a blurring of them is dismissed as irrational. Yet psi engages both the mental and physical worlds, both the imagination and reality; there is an interface, an interaction.

  There is one formulation that begins to recognize that the paranormal has a quality of being “betwixt and between” reality and imagination. This is referred to as the imaginal realm. It is based upon the work of Henry Corbin, a French Islamic scholar who wrote on mysticism. In 1972 he published a paper, entitled “Mundus Imaginalis” (Latin for imaginal world). Those who have adopted his idea typically now refer to it as the imaginal realm, rather than using the Latin term.

  Corbin’s “world” is not precisely defined (despite his claim) and perhaps cannot be. Its description is couched in mystical and mythological terms, in language almost impenetrable to a rationalistic mind. It is accessed through the imagination and mystical visionary states.

  Corbin drew primarily from the Islamic mystical tradition, but his concept is quite compatible with others, and he cited Emanuel Swedenborg as an example of someone who accessed the imaginal realm.

  A few researchers have utilized Corbin’s ideas. Kenneth Ring, a University of Connecticut psychologist and one of the foremost investigators of near-death experiences (NDEs), explored the imaginal realm in relation to UFO experiences and NDEs.19 Folklorist Peter Rojcewicz, a professor at the Juilliard School, incorporated it into his thinking and discussed what he calls “crack” phenomena, i.e., those that fall into the crack at the borders of reality. Rojcewicz briefly cited Victor Turner’s notions of betwixt and between and the liminal in support of his thesis. He also discussed Jung’s idea of the psychoid, which somehow combines the mental and physical. Like the imaginal realm, the psychoid is ambiguously defined. Dennis Stillings also explored the concept and helped promote it by editing an anthology entitled Cyberbiological Studies of the Imaginal Component of the UFO Contact Experience (1989). Fred Alan Wolf, who is both a physicist

  and a performing magician as well as a writer, provided an extensive

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  discussion of the imaginal in his The Dreaming Universe (1994).

  The social position of these theorists merits note. None of them have published much in professional parapsychology journals, though they all have some familiarity with psychic research. All acknowledge the existence of psi, but unlike most parapsychologists, they are also familiar with ufology. They are marginal figures in a marginal discipline. They have a broader perspective than most, and they do not neglect some of the more biza
rre phenomena that many others wish to ignore. These people established needed groundwork, but yet have only scratched the surface.22

  Corbin’s work, by itself, is of very limited usefulness because his writings are vague, grounded in mysticism, and lack substantial links to scientific theories or empirical evidence. There are additional problems; for instance, he insisted that the imaginal is distinctly separate from fantasy, but he seemed unable to describe just how. He was wrong. Reality, the imaginal, and fantasy blur into one another. Fantasy and reality are perhaps carved out of the imaginal. Another problem is that the term imaginal can be easily misinterpreted. For instance, a number of people misunderstood Kenneth Ring as saying that UFO experiences occur only in the imagination, something he clearly did not say or imply. But the terminology, almost intentionally, invites confusion.

  Despite the problems, the vagueness of Corbin’s concept has benefits; it easily accepts extensions, refinements, and borrowings. It can accommodate a wide range of phenomena that do not fit into most other classification schemes. The idea of the imaginal realm provides flexibility; fluidity is easily included, and ambiguity is explicitly recognized. The grounding is from a base that is sympathetic to paranormal phenomena and does not view them as hallucination or fantasy.

  High-Strangeness Cases

  The term imaginal has been applied to near-death and UFO experiences, especially those with bizarre elements. Some of those can be described as highly strange; they have odd aspects that don’t seem to fit together. In 1990 I presented a short paper at a parapsychology conference entitled “Demons, ETs, Bigfoot, and Elvis.” I pointed out that the usually assumed classes of paranormal phenomena are not distinct. NDEs can occur in conjunction with UFO experiences; Big-foot has been sighted during UFO flaps; there are accounts of Bigfoot making bedroom visitations. Fairies and uniformed military personnel have been encountered in ET abduction experiences. Poltergeist phenomena are found in the lives of crop circle investigators and UFO witnesses. Shamans in primitive societies claimed to have sexual encounters with spirits that produced babies who were brought to them at night when others were not around to observe. Similarly, many UFO abductees report having parented hybrid ET-human children, undoubtedly unaware of similar accounts from other cultures hundreds or thousands of years ago.

  The melange of experiences described above will undoubtedly strike most readers as bizarre. Those who have not immersed themselves in investigations of such cases can be tempted to dismiss the events as “not firmly established” or “only imagination.” They are often quickly and cheerfully explained as hallucination, caused by stress, and occurring only in the brain of those reporting them. This attitude is psychologically protective for the inquirer, but it leads to serious misunderstanding of the nature of the occurrences.

  The experiences have low status, and that is subtly reinforced in several ways. Though there is a fair amount of written material about such events, it is often relegated to obscure magazines and books by writers of dubious integrity, printed on low quality paper by slightly

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  disreputable publishers, or published by the authors themselves.

  Crude drawings or blurred photographs sometimes accompany the articles. Few libraries collect such material. All this signals that there is “something wrong,” and it is easy to dismiss the reports, yet when one meets experiencers, they tell stories very similar to the “disreputable” accounts.

  In academic circles, serious, or even casual, consideration of such things evokes murmurs of disapproval. This is even true within the “orthodox” paranormal fields. Many researchers avoid high-strangeness cases, because they legitimately worry about respectability. Indeed, loss of status typically accompanies direct engagement of, or even serious attention given to, this kind of phenomena. Few academics really get to know such experiencers. Those few who do, typically have one, and only one, narrowly defined area of study (e.g., NDEs, OOBEs, apparitions, or UFO sightings). As a result, experiencers are often reluctant to tell of their more bizarre encounters, especially those falling outside a researcher’s category of interest.

  Further, the few scientists who do investigate often try to maintain a stance of a detached, impartial observer, and they naively expect to gain people’s trust by doing so. Researchers who are more astute realize the need to become part of a subculture, and participate in it, in order to understand the phenomena, but this is frowned upon by academe. One’s position as a respectable academic would be undermined by too close an association with the objects of study.

  Kenneth Ring is one who dared to investigate mixed categories of the imaginal and paranormal. He carried out extensive psychological tests on near-death experiencers and UFO abductees. He found that the experiences often had profound transformative effects on peoples’ lives. He also discussed the strong parallels that both NDEs and UFO abductions had with shamanic initiations. Ring is a psychologist and was apparently unfamiliar with the anthropological work on liminality. Yet it was encouraging to see that he recognized commonalities among NDEs, UFO abductions, and shamanic initiations, all of which are liminal phenomena.

  In the last chapter of his book The Omega Project (1992), Ring speculated about the meaning of his research and the implications of NDEs and UFO abduction experiences for the wider society. He went so far to say that they may “presage the shamanizing of modern humanity’ (Ring’s emphasis). The shaman is a liminal being, and in effect, Ring suggested that humanity is undergoing some transformative process. It is easy to lapse into apocalyptic rhetoric when discussing this, and some saw his comments as rather florid. Even so, Ring recognized an important pattern. Anthony F. C. Wallace’s paper on cultural revitalization mentioned that in times of transition, a number of people are likely to have visionary experiences.

  While Ring was conducting his research during the late 1980s and early 1990s, other scholars made some parallel speculations regarding cultural transition. That time period saw publication of a number of books on postmodernism, but most made little impact outside the academy. The works were generally abstract, drawing on deconstructionism and other philosophical ideas, but the thrust was nearly identical to Ring’s point. They too discussed social and psychological transformation.

  The concept of the imaginal is not far advanced, and it needs to be buttressed with other work, particularly theories of the trickster, liminality, and anti-structure. The concept explicity merges (and blurs) imagination and reality. Thus the imaginal realm is a liminal area, and it is governed by the trickster. The implications need to be recognized because the trickster poses risks, and the imaginal realm is not immune from them. It is easy to lose one’s grip on reality; critical judgement can dissolve. Imaginal experiences can cause one to mistake fantasy for reality, and can lure one into becoming a victim of hoaxes or into paranoia. The phenomena seep into the lives of investigators, as discussed in the chapter on unbounded conditions. Researchers in academia face a loss of status if they have substantial contact with imaginal events. These are some of the reasons that this area has been so little explored, and any further theorizing needs to recognize that.

  Fiction

  Academics can more safely study paranormal and imaginal events through literature, fiction, and folklore. That keeps the phenomena constrained and restricts them to “stories” and “text.” As discussed in the chapter on institutions, massive industries are devoted to portraying them in and as fiction. Emphasizing that they are fiction reduces anxiety about them, and reinforces the boundary between imagination and reality.

  Fiction helps constrain liminal and imaginal phenomena, but fiction retains a power to influence. It is not as innocuous and inconsequential as it might first appear. Some of it has been politically and religiously suppressed. Scientists’ tendency to ignore fiction deserves

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  examination.

  Horror fiction is particularly germane to our concerns. Horror supports a sizeable industry, and there has been considerabl
e scholarship devoted to it. Monsters of horror are often interstitial; i.e., they lie between accepted categories. They display properties considered mutually exclusive. Some are sexually ambiguous with both male and female characteristics; others blur the boundary between the living and dead, such as ghosts or walking corpses; Bigfoot exists between ape and man; others combine plant and animal qualities with some plants demonstrating cunning intelligence. All these merge properties in ways not found within our usual classification systems. The same can be said of imaginal creatures. William Clements, a professor of English at Arkansas State University published a valuable essay titled “The Interstitial Ogre” (1987) in which he discussed fictional monsters, and he pointed out that they violate human categories. He explained that “For while they may also represent psychic repressions, sexual tension, the threat of nuclear destruction, or emotional catharsis, their essence is their interstitiality. They articulate ultimate defiance to humanity by challenging, merely through the nature of their being, the founding constructs upon which all of culture rests.”

  Clements understood that subversion of categories is the fundamental quality of horror monsters, but he was also aware that fiction can reflect cultural anxieties and stresses that can result from changes in structure (e.g., in times of economic recession, some people lose their jobs and status). Stephen King confirms this message in his Danse Macabre (1981) where he comments that while “Horror movies and horror novels have always been popular … they seem to enjoy a cycle of increased popularity … [in times that] almost always seem to coincide with periods of fairly serious economic and/or political strain, and the books and films seem to reflect those free-floating anxieties … which accompany such serious but not mortal dislocations.” Such strains occur during periods of anti-structure. The popularity of interstitial characters in movies resonates with liminality and anti-structure in the culture.