The Trickster and the Paranormal

Turner noted that “man is both a structural and an anti-structural entity, who grows through anti-structure and conserves through structure.”

Any comprehensive theory of the paranormal must explain its role in cultural transitions.

An enormous number of people have influenced my thinking, but three were particularly important: William Braud, Barbara Babcock, and Edmund Leach. Parapsychologist William Braud integrated an enormous range of findings with his model of lability and inertia in psi processes. Barbara Babcock is the most significant interpreter of the trickster figur

Mentalism is the branch of conjuring devoted to simulating psychic phenomena. Mentalists perform mind-reading feats, predict newspaper headlines, and demonstrate telepathy. These performers are some of the most trickster-like within the magic fraternity.

There is a pattern, and generally the phenomena either provoke or accompany some kind of destructuring—a concept discussed at length in this book. For instance, the phenomena do not flourish within stable institutions, and endless examples illustrate this. Fortunately, two theoretical perspectives are already developed that connect the supernatural

Thick-boundary people strike one as solid, well organized, well defended, and even rigid and armored. Thin-boundary types tend to be open, unguarded, and undefended in several psychological senses. Women tend to have thinner boundaries than men, and children thinner than adults. People with thin boundaries tend to have higher hypnotic ability, grea

The connections between liminality and shamanism are pervasive, and a useful starting point is Mircea Eliade’s classic Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951). Though he did not use the term “liminal,” a quick glance at the headings in his table of contents reveals the links. Some of the examples include “Shamanism and Mystical Vocation,” “

Revitalization occurs in periods of cultural liminality. The trickster constellation manifests during such times, as is clear from Wallace’s descriptions. The disregard of sexual mores, general disruption, and a highly visible role of the supernatural, including the sometimes unconscionably bad advice of the spirits, are all trickster characteristi

Van Gennep’s book The Rites of Passage is a classic; it was first published in 1909 but was not translated into English until 1960.2 Turner’s The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969) substantially extended van Gennep’s ideas. As those titles indicate, their primary emphasis was on rites and ritual, but the theories have much wider ap

We are told that Hermes “is the god of the unexpected, of luck, of coincidences, of synchronicity.”9 Bolen elaborates: “Hermes opens up moments of discovery and synchronistic events—those ‘coincidences’ that turn out to be meaningful, unforeseen ‘accidental’ happenings that lead us somewhere we couldn’t have known we would go and that yet turn out