The Trickster and the Paranormal

by George P. Hansen

  Low status is vested upon those who conduct parapsychological research. Conversely, organized opposition to investigation (i.e., CSICOP) has attracted the endorsements of many elite scientists, including Nobel laureates—people with little knowledge of the paranormal.

  The paranormal does not lack large institutions to promote it. In fact, enormous industries are devoted to it—but portraying it as fiction. Those businesses gross hundreds of millions of dollars annually (at least).

  In short, marginality and anti-structure (particularly the anti-institutional aspect) are associated with attempts to explicitly engage psi. This has been the case for thousands of years. Michael Winkelman confirmed the pattern in his cross-cultural study of magico-religious practitioners.

  Properties of Psi

  Laboratory research shows that it is extremely difficult to specify the limits of psi. There are limits, (after all, psi manifests rather rarely) but specifying them is problematical. Both parapsychologists and their critics acknowledge this. ESP scores show little or no decline as distance between agent and percipient is increased, and research demon

  strates that telepathy does not act like some kind of mental radio.1 The definition of psi also poses problems. It is defined by what it is not. Further, one cannot substantively differentiate telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and micro-PK. The terms are only labels. They do not designate mechanisms.

  Precognition and retroactive PK suggest that an effect can precede its cause. This poses additional problems in specifying limits of psi. Further, psi seems to be unrestricted by the complexity of a task. It is goal-oriented, and the number of intermediate, mechanical-like steps needed to accomplish a job appears irrelevant.

  In laboratory studies, it is often difficult to ascertain who caused any psi effect. The experimenters, putative subjects, and even data checkers may contribute some psi influence. Because psi appears to act backward in time, future readers of a journal article might also conceivably contribute (according to some plausible theories). The effects from these future observers are inherently uncontrollable. These are deeply problematical issues, and they are almost sufficient to discredit the field.

  Psi accompanies processes of change, transition, flux, and disorder. William Braud’s work on lability and inertia showed that physical processes that readily fluctuate are more susceptible to psychic influence than are more stable systems. The pattern extends to individuals and to higher levels of organization including groups and entire cultures. Times of personal change are associated with psychic functioning. Poltergeist phenomena often focus around someone in puberty. Apparitional experiences may occur near the time of a death. Altered (destructured) states of consciousness, labile physical systems, and novelty (as opposed to routine), all facilitate psi. Groups that engage the phenomena are typically unstable and rarely institutionalize successfully. During cultural transitions paranormal phenomena gain greater public prominence. Anthropologists have documented hundreds of instances. The pattern is seen in our own culture. For example, the late 1960s and early 1970s in the U.S. were times of accelerated social change, and they had a surge of popular interest in the paranormal. The dissolution of the U.S.S.R. saw a similar burst.

  Above I have outlined two encompassing themes—marginality and transition. The examples range from social, to psychological, to physical processes. Those categories are too scattered for most scientific theories to give much purchase. Structuralist ideas, however, are broad enough to accommodate the diversity. The concept of binary opposition is especially useful.

  Binary Oppositions and Boundaries

  Binary oppositions and boundaries are two of the key themes of this book, and they are intimately related. Binary oppositions require distinctions, barriers to separate one element from the other. Thus the notion of binary opposition inherently includes the concept of boundary.

  Discussions of binary opposition are found in analyses of primitive classification systems, in mystical theology, in Jung’s work on medieval alchemy, in structuralist and post-structuralist theories of anthropology and literary criticism, and in the foundations of logic. They are also commonly encountered in analyses of the trickster.

  Major binary oppositions found in all cultures include: life-death, heaven-earth, God-human, male-female. Considerable effort is made to demarcate the boundaries between the elements, and that task is a collective endeavor. Funerals mark the division between life and death. Most academics believe the distinction to be clear, but phenomena exist that blur it. Spirit mediumship, reincarnation, near-death experiences, and ghosts all suggest that the boundary is not sharp. Heaven and earth are usually quite separate. Heaven is up, and beyond the reach of ordinary living humans. The expanse between the heavens and the earth is traveled by angels and extraterrestrial aliens—supernatural or paranormal creatures. Trickster deities are also of that realm. The God-human distinction is emphasized in exoteric religious doctrines. Priests mediate between gods and humans, and they are ritually protected when doing so. On the other hand, esoteric religion challenges the dichotomy. Mystics attempt to become one with the divine, and paranormal phenomena frequently accompany mystical practice. The male-female opposition is demarcated by dress and differing roles. Persons who switch, and adopt those of the opposite sex, are often associated with supernatural power (e.g., the berdache of American Indians).

  Today scientists and philosophers give little attention to the above oppositions. They assume them to be clear, distinct and unproblematical. Other oppositions now absorb their efforts. These include self-other, mind-matter, subjective-objective. Psi subverts these distinctions. Telepathy and psychic healing suggest that the dividing line between self and other is not sharp. Psychokinesis challenges the mind-matter demarcation. Psi has the properties of the betwixt and between, of transitional spaces, of the liminal and interstitial.

  Binary oppositions involve relationships. One thing is related to another. In a typical binary opposition, one element has greater power, prestige, or privilege than the other. Status differences are involved. Status is one of the central issues in this book. Social roles and positions designate statuses. They establish the structure of society; they tell us who we are as individuals; they help us differentiate ourselves from others. The human condition decrees that there is always some amount of “distance” between people. When examining any pair of persons, groups, or nations, one member typically has a higher status, and the other, a lower.

  Liminality involves an equalizing (or even an inversion) of status, a blurring of distinctions. One of the trickster’s duties is to lower or invert status and to induce marginality. Margins refer to positions at or near boundaries.

  Boundaries are established in countless ways—in our minds, in marking territory, in establishing personal relationships, in building homes with walls, in denoting time, in festivals celebrating change of seasons, in making rules for morality, in military insignia designating rank, in giving names, in religious prohibitions that demarcate one religion from another, in making laws that specify what is and is not permissible, in dress and adornment that indicate social status. These all involve bringing order and structure to the world. They entail collective effort and collective representations. It is through them that we communicate and organize life.

  In broad terms, structuralism addressed the order, stability, and logic of how society is maintained. Classification was a major issue. Liminality concerns the opposite, and it is best expressed with Turner’s term anti-structure. Its theories deal with change, transition, instability, transformation, and revitalization.

  The Trickster

  The trickster is a personification of many of the ideas above. He is a collection of abstract properties that tend to occur together. He has no fixed shape, form, or image. Some of his primary characteristics include disruption, deception, lowered sexual inhibitions, psi phenomena, and marginality. I must admit that I sometimes still find it difficult to think about how all these logically relate t
o each other. Personification provides a way of organizing this melange that otherwise seems incoherent.

  The trickster is found worldwide. Superficially, his tales seem little more than entertaining stories for children, but they encode important truths. The trickster is central to many religious beliefs, and some of the tales are sacred. In fact, a number of cultures permit only a few persons to tell the stories and restrict when they can be told, because they have a power of their own.

  The trickster has innumerable internal contradictions, and those are what have made him so difficult for scholars. He seems irrational, and he is. The usual scientific concepts are inadequate to fully explain him. He has many meanings and cannot be reduced to a single interpretation. He resists being placed in any single category. That’s why this book covered such a range of topics—from ritual clowns who eat excrement, to experiments with random number generators, to literary criticism. This diversity is the reason so few people have any comprehension of the scope of his relevance, including his pertinence to psi.

  Earlier cultures celebrated the trickster, but now he is only a shallow remnant of his previous glory. He is considered merely amusing, entertaining, but of little serious importance. This reflects a deep but subtle change in culture and civilization.

  Western Rationality and Rationalization

  The dominant cultural myth now is that the world can be entirely grasped by rational means; any exceptions are considered trivial. This goes almost completely unquestioned, particularly within science. The myth generates an aversion to the irrational and supernatural. Those are not only neglected, but society discourages serious consideration of them. Our culture has a variety of mechanisms that lead one to think that the supernatural doesn’t really exist and to equate it with the fictional.

  How did this come about? After all, the supernatural was recognized for millennia. Were all our ancestors deluded, superstitious, dim-witted, and irrational human beings? A broad view of history, theology, and philosophy is needed to recognize what happened.

  Sociologist Max Weber provided a grand vista with his theories of rationalization and disenchantment. They have enormous implications. The terms rationalization and disenchantment hint at the tension between rationalism and mysticism. Weber explicitly stated that rationalization requires the elimination of magic from the world. He understood that the process slowly progressed through time. During some periods, it stagnated and even reversed, but the overall trend is undeniable. (In reality, it is not the elimination of magic that is accomplished, but rather the elimination of cultural elites’ conscious awareness of magic.)

  Hunter-gatherer societies had shamans who became entranced, commanded spirits, and directly engaged supernatural forces. As societies became more complex, the shaman gave way to the priest. Priests propitiated gods and did not use altered states of consciousness for magical ends. The rise of the priest, in conjunction with the growing societal complexity, was accompanied by a loss of status for those who continued to practice magic, particularly magic that made use of altered states of consciousness. This trend extended over thousands of years. The emergence of Protestant Christianity was a step in rationalization; it moved away from mysticism, monastic orders, and rejected transubstantiation. The trend accelerated in the twentieth century, particularly in Western elite culture, and notably with the growth of the universities.

  Weber’s theory was intimately tied to issues of authority and power. He identified three types of authority: bureaucratic, traditional, and charismatic. The primordial source of authority accrued from charisma, and pure charisma involved the working of miracles, a point Weber made explicit. It is altogether astounding that academics now completely ignore this. They seem puzzled by charisma, and they avoid talk of miracles. This is a consequent of the rationalization process; for academe is both a product of, and an agent for, the disenchantment of the world.

  Aristotelian logic is central to Western rational thought. It requires clear demarcation. This logic posits the law of the excluded middle; something is either A or not-A; no betwixt and between is allowed. This produces a strong type of binary opposition. Discrete objects and sharp boundaries are compulsory.

  Rationalization promotes discreteness and separateness in a huge variety of ways—e.g., in selves and persons, as in rugged individualism, in the binary digits (bits) of modern electronics. Time is divided into hours, minutes, and seconds to allow routinization and scheduling. Another manifestation is the growing regimentation and credentialing in modern life.

  Rationalization theory helps explain the paranormal’s position in our society today. Bureaucracies and large organizations are major forces for ordering our civilization. We rarely notice just how pervasively they influence us. Bureaucratic authority is far removed from, and almost antithetical to, charisma. Large organizations rarely tolerate attempts to consciously and intentionally utilize psi.

  The bureaucratic antagonism to psi is not something planned and organized by those in power. It is not a conscious conspiracy. Those who act in concert with the prejudice are not aware of the factors influencing them. This unconscious antipathy is a pervasive social phenomenon found in numerous cultures; thus it is not to be explained by the psychology of individuals. It demonstrates that social forces have an independent existence and that those forces can operate through individuals without them being aware of it.

  All this is nothing new. Psychic phenomena have played crucial roles in religion; they emerge in conjunction with esoteric religious practices, but exoteric religions have prohibitions against dabbling with them. Primitive religions had elaborate rituals, restrictions, and taboos surrounding the supernatural. These existed through recorded history and undoubtedly long before. The reasons for the strictures have been forgotten; today scientists denounce them as silly, superstitious, and irrational.

  In actuality, the denunciations serve to enforce the ancient taboos. They are only a variant of earlier religious strictures. Both exoteric religion and establishment science try to hedge off or repress contact with the supernatural and limit conscious awareness of it. There are reasons for that, and by now those reasons should be clearer. Psi both accompanies and stimulates change and disorder. Change carries risk, and we should remember that in biology, most mutations are dysfunctional; relatively few are beneficial. Restrictions, prohibitions, boundaries, and structure confer many advantages; they are fundamental not only to culture but to our very beings.

  Some may think that I paint an ominous picture of psychic phenomena. Given all the problems, they might suggest that parapsychology be abandoned, forgotten, that it is useless to pursue investigation of this realm.

  That is not my position. The supernatural is irrational, but it is also real. It holds enormous power. We ignore it at our peril. It operates not only on the individual psyche, but at a collective level, influencing entire cultures. The witchcraft persecutions and the demagoguery of charismatic leaders are only two of many dangers.

  If we fail to recognize the limits of our “rational” way of thinking, we can become victims of it. Parapsychology demonstrates that our thoughts, including our unconscious thoughts, are not limited to our brains. They move of their own accord and influence the physical world.

  NOTES

  Epigraphs

  1 Derived from a conversation reported in Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1974, p. 238.

  2 King James Version

  Chapter 1—Introduction

  1Catechism of the Catholic Church, Liguori, MO: Ligouri Publications, 1994. See p. 513, paragraphs 2115-2117.

  Chapter 2—Overview of Tricksters

  1Ricketts (1987, p. 50) states that Daniel Brinton coined the term trickster in his 1868 book Myths of the New World. However, Lewis Hyde (1998, p. 355) reports finding no mention of the word in any of the three editions of that book. Gill and Sullivan (1992, p. 308) state that in 1885 Brinton publishe
d an article “The Hero-God of the Algonkins as a Cheat and Liar.” They assert that “Brinton cited an entry from Father Albert Lacombe’s Dictionaire de la Langue des Cris (1878)” saying that “This is probably the first time the term was used to suggest a general category.” Unfortunately, Gill and Sullivan do not indicate where Brinton published that article. In the May 1885 issue of The American Antiquarian Brin-ton published a 3-page paper titled “The Chief God of the Algonkins, in His Character as a Cheat and Liar” and did use the word “trickster.” He also used the word in his The Lenape and Their Legends; With the Complete Text and Symbols of the Walam Olum, A New Translation, and an Inquiry Into Its Authenticity (p. 130). The original publication date of that book appears to be 1885. Some reprints state that the book was originally published in 1884, but neither the Library of Congress catalog nor the National Union Catalog lists an 1884 edition.

  2There are many available references on tricksters, and an extensive bibliography appears in Mythical Trickster Figures (1993) edited by William J. Hynes and William G. Doty. Some sources that I have found useful include the following—Wakdjunkaga: (Radin, 1956/1972); Eshu-Elegba: (Pelton, 1980; Wescott, 1962);

  Ananse: (Pelton, 1980; Vecsey, 1981); Taugi: (Basso, 1987); Kantjil: (McKean, 1971); Monkey King: (Hyde, 1998); Nanabozho: (Messer, 1982, 1983); Ture: (Evans-Pritchard, 1967); Hermes: (Bolen, 1989; Brown, 1947; Lopez-Pedraza, 1977/1989; Stassinopoulos & Beny, 1983); Loki: (Rooth, 1961); and the Spirit Mercurius: (Jung, 1943/1967).

  3 A variety of conflicting and confusing definitions have been given for archetype. It serves no purpose to review them here. The definition I use is frequently

  accepted.

  4 Radin 1956/1972, p. xxiv.

  5 Bolen, 1989, p. 166.

  6 Bolen, 1989, p. 170.

  7 Bolen, 1989, p. 169.