The Trickster and the Paranormal

In times of great cultural change, trickster and anti-structural manifestations are particularly apparent, and the supernatural is an important part of them. In 1956 University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace published his classic paper “Revitalization Movements.” It is one of the most illuminating works on cultural transformat

Another useful, and superbly documented, book is The Future of the Body (1992) by Michael Murphy.

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,” “

My central thesis is that psychic phenomena are associated with processes of destructuring. If one keeps this rather abstract formulation in mind, the assortment of seemingly disjointed examples will make a bit more sense. I have included a variety of specific instances in order to demonstrate the generality and consequences of the central idea.

Boundaries must be blurred for the trickster to be seen.

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.

Ghosts are liminal (interstitial) creatures. They exist in the netherworld between life and death, and they challenge the idea that there is a clear separation of the two. The dread evoked by such beings can be profoundly disturbing. Surprisingly, parapsycholo-gists have largely neglected this, but folklorists have drawn attention to it.

When the supernatural and irrational are banished from consciousness, they are not destroyed, rather, they become exceedingly dangerous.

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