Ernest Hartmann, a psychiatrist at Tufts University School of Medicine presented an innovative approach in his book Boundaries in the Mind (1991). Hartmann’s thinking about boundaries has some remarkable parallels with Jean Shinoda Bolen’s interpretation of the Greek trickster, Hermes.

Everyone knows that universities have departments devoted to the sciences, but those outside academe often are unaware that many state-supported schools have long-established departments of religion. Despite the much-acclaimed warfare between science and religion, both have been incorporated into the academy. Science and religion are clearly

Mysticism is a confusing word. It refers to the belief in, and experience of, a direct, sublime union with the divine. But it also means secret or occult knowledge, or vague and confused speculation.

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

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

Academe does not totally neglect the paranormal. Sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and folklorists are allowed to study beliefs about paranormal events, but there is a taboo against attempting to verify their reality. In academe today, serious consideration of the supernatural is almost exclusively limited to the arts and humanities. Yet

I know of no psychics more prominent than those listed in Table 3, and serious allegations of deception follow them all. There are few of comparable public visibility without such taint (e.g., Edgar Cayce, Jeane Dixon, Eileen Garrett, Ingo Swann). Even if one wishes to disregard the relatively weaker testimony, the overwhelming majority of the most

When an investigator studies something that can be intentionally deceitful, and has intelligence-gathering capabilities of its own, the usual paradigms of science are inadequate. New frameworks and perspectives are needed.

In anthropology, Michael Winkelman studied statuses of magico-religious practitioners in conjunction with societal complexity. He demonstrated that as cultures become more complex, there is a decline in status of those who directly engage the supernatural. Sociologist James McClenon surveyed scientists’ opinions of psychic phenomena, and he found