trickster

Thinking deeply about TV, movies, and music doesn’t make you a “complete idiot.” In fact, it might make you a philosopher, someone who believes the unexamined life is not worth living and the unexamined cartoon is not worth watching.

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

Carl Jung’s idea of archetypes is also helpful in understanding the trickster. The term archetype is often confusing, and there has been much debate over its definition. For purposes of this volume, “archetype” means only a pattern that can manifest at multiple levels. No more is implied, and nothing paranormal is necessarily required to explain

Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann provided a detailed commentary on magical practices in her Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft (1989). That book was based on a study of witchcraft practitioners in England. During her investigation, she took courses on ritual magic, practiced assigned exercises, participated in rituals, and came to have anomalous

We could say that the Joker’s nature isn’t psychological, it’s metaphysical. He isn’t merely a broken psyche or a monster. Those two aspects are certainly present, but that's not all there is to him. Most importantly, the Joker embodies unreason, chaos, disorder, and meaninglessness. He arouses the icy suspicion that everything we build will

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

The wild‐card Joker instead suggests a way of moving through the world without gritting your teeth and clinging to categories, without trying to win. That is not a doctrinal statement of what’s right or wrong—it’s a therapeutic approach to life. Daoism tells us that we humans have forgotten that we are part of the natural world, something deeper

Postmodernist theories suggest that the world can be understood as though one was reading a book or text. This metaphor (i.e., the world is text), allows one to ask new questions that would not be generated by traditional scientific paradigms. Reading requires interpretation, and postmodernist and post-structuralist theories emphasize the variety

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