Structure, status, and hierarchy are now central to science, and to bureaucracies generally. In the classic, The Sociological Imagination (1959), C. Wright Mills devoted an entire chapter to science’s “bureaucratic ethos.” Many years of training are required before one becomes a practicing scientist, and there are many levels of status after becomi

In post-structuralist literary theory, meaning is a central concern. By meaning, I am not referring to some grand purpose for an individual or for humanity, but rather the simpler and more prosaic concept discussed by linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. The connection between a signifier and its signified, between a word and its referent, is the issue.

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.

Classical scholar E. R. Dodds in his The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) noted the role of birds in Greek magical practices.12 Birds can be seen as living between the heavens and the earth and as messengers between the realms. Thus birds have a betwixt and between quality.13

Carl Jung in his commentary in Radin’s The Trickster specifically said that “There is something of the trickster in the character of the shaman.”4 Joseph Campbell in The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (1959) declared that the trickster “is a super-shaman,”5 and Weston La Barre in The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion (1970) commented that the tri

Half a century after van Gennep published his book, Turner began to extend the ideas, and in 1964 he presented a paper titled “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” The phrase “betwixt and between” helped emphasize the liminal period or position as between two stable conditions, and he also used the term “margin” in a simila

Wallace explains that the prophet generally “shows evidence of a radical inner change in personality soon after the vision experience: a remission of old and chronic physical complaints, a more active and purposeful way of life, greater confidence in interpersonal relations.”9 Such a person often develops charisma.

Hermes means “he of the stone heap.” In Greece, mounds of stones served as landmarks and property boundaries. Somewhat paradoxically, Hermes is also a boundary-crosser. The themes of boundaries and boundary-crossing arise again and again in interpretations of Hermes, and tricksters generally.

The histories of psychical research societies and parapsychology laboratories are stories of promising beginnings, rapid initial growth, encounters with tricksters, internal conflict, stagnation and decline.