The Trickster and the Paranormal

by George P. Hansen

  The Trickster

  and the Paranormal

  George P. Hansen

  Copyright 2001 by George P. Hansen.

  Library of Congress Number:

  2001116933

  ISBN#:

  Hardcover

  1-4010-0081-9

  Softcover

  1-4010-0082-7

  eBook

  978-1-4628-1289-9

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  Permission to use material from the following sources is gratefully acknowledged:

  Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves by Jean Shinoda Bolen, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989.

  Reprinted with permission from Victor Turner. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. (New York: Aldine de Gruyter) Copyright © 1969 by Victor W. Turner, Renewed 1997 by Edith Turner.”

  This book was printed in the United States of America.

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  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER 1

  Part 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  Part 2

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  Part 3

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  Part 4

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  Part 5

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  Part 6

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  NOTES

  REFERENCES

  To the Memory

  of

  W. E. Cox

  The coyote is the most aware creature there is … because he

  is completely paranoid.

  Charles Manson, circa 19691

  It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

  Hebrews 10:312

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many people are due thanks for influencing me through their lives, writings, or both. Most of them have had long and direct involvement in the paranormal. Its personalities, concepts, experiences, and controversies form an integral part of their lives.

  Dennis Stillings pointed out many aspects of psi that everyone else wanted to ignore, and our discussion of the trickster and Jungian psychology was the single most important factor that lead me to prepare this book. The Reverend Canon William V. Rauscher allowed me frequent use of his library on magic and psychical research; without his help in numerous ways, this volume would not have been written. Magician-sociologist Marcello Truzzi has been a most valuable source of information on magic and the paranormal for me for over 20 years, continuously and longer than anyone else.

  John Keel, premier Fortean author, investigator, and organizer of the New York Fortean Society arranged many meetings with a rich variety of perspectives. Participants included: writers Rosemary Guiley, Patrick Huyghe, and Antonio Huneeus; professors Michael Grosso, Kenneth Ring, and Peter Rojcewicz; James W. Moseley editor of the renowned Saucer Smear, psychic Ingo Swann who trained remote viewers for U.S. intelligence agencies, Ben Robinson, Andrei Apostol, Ronald Rosenblatt, Michael Lindner, Doug Skinner, William P. La-Parl, Lois Horowitz, Clarence Robbins, Sharon Jarvis, and Sandra Martin. John Keel and Ben Robinson are magicians as well as Forteans, and the examples of their lives, and many discussions with them, have provided much insight.

  For years Pat Marcattilio has run a wonderfully diverse UFO study group that has welcomed everyone from rabid secular humanist debunkers, witchcraft high priestesses, those who have had sex with ET aliens in the presence of voyeuristic seven-foot tall praying man-tises, to those who regularly report their activities to the CIA. Contributors to the gatherings have included Joseph Stefula, Richard Butler, Vincent Creevy, Art Wagner, Mindy Gerber, Scott Forrest, Hank and Mary Ann Brown, Marge and Roger Testrake, Chelsea Flor, Bob and Frances Eure, Graham Bethune, Pat Stein, John and Paul Nahay, Brian Loomis, Shelby Shellenberger, CIA asset (or liability) Dan T. Smith, Robert Durant, Michael Scott Smith, Alice Haggerty, George Wolkind, Paula Fahsbenner, Maurice Hathaway, Curtis Co-operman, Art Sielicki, Eva Palfalvi, William Muravsky, George Filer, Frank Chille, Richard Benstead, John Pawson, David Lessner, Tom Briggs, George Reynolds, Anna Hayes, Pat Blackwell, Robert Oliveri, Riley Martin, and Alex Fedorov. Tom Benson deserves special mention for many discussions and my use of his extensive UFO library. Mindy Gerber’s hospitality provided many occasions for discussions relevant to this book.

  David Hufford conducted a discussion group at the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania and provided an early opportunity to present some of my ideas. The comments of Xan Griswold in that group were especially helpful.

  I have also benefited from insightful comments of mentalists Max Maven and Ford Kross. Sociologist James McClenon has engaged me in extended discussions on psi in groups. Skeptics Philip J. Klass and Martin Gardner have provided important information.

  A number of friends and colleagues have graciously commented on drafts of chapters. These include Ben Robinson, David Ray Griffin, An Trotter, Paul Hansen, Robert Durant, Joanne D. S. McMahon, William P. LaParl, James McClenon, Scott Forrest, Nelson Pacheco, Marcello Truzzi, Wayne Hardy, Simon Pettet, Elliott Madison, Michael Scott Smith, Art Wagner, Maureen Gibbons, and Martin Ebon.

  Thanks also go to Joanne D. S. McMahon, William P. LaParl, Martin Kottmeyer, T. Scott Crain, Larry Bryant, Tommy Blann, Nelson Pacheco, Ed Komarek, Bill Ellis, William Clements, Richard Trott, Martin Ebon, and Rhea White for providing materials. The staffs of the Hickory Corner Library and the interlibrary loan department of the Mercer County Library system deserve special thanks for their rapid processing of innumerable interlibrary loan requests over a period of years.

  Martin Ebon helped support publication of this book. The efforts of C.G., George Livanos, Maurine Christopher, and David Vine also contributed. The Parapsychology Foundation granted me the D. Scott Rogo award. Karl Petry deserves thanks for providing photographs and Joanne D. S. McMahon for helping with the cover.

  In the dark world of government activity in the paranormal, three investigators merit commendation: Martin Cannon, researcher on mind control, and Armen Victorian and W. Todd Zechel, who have made superb use of the Freedom of Information Act.

  In their own unique ways, Linda Napolitano, James Randi, Richard C. Doty, and John Thomas Richards have contributed to my understanding of the trickster.

  Countless intellectual predecessors have influenced my thinking. The most immediately important are William Braud, Barbara Bab-cock, and Edmund Leach. Their works deserve greater notice.

  Of course none of the above bears any responsibility for my errors, omissions, or misrepresentations. I expect that all of them will grit their teeth at something or other I say in these pages. In fact, I will be disappointed if they don’t.

  PREFACE

  This book was begun with the idea of addressing some fundamental problems in parapsycho
logy, but the scope quickly grew beyond that. Nevertheless, psychic phenomena and parapsychology are central, and because the findings of that field are not well known beyond a small number of researchers it seems wise to include a brief orientation, explain my background, and give some guidance to the reader. The issues covered in this volume are much broader than those typically discussed by parapsychologists, and even readers familiar with their work may find this preface helpful.

  Parapsychology is the study of two phenomena, extrasensory perception (ESP) and psychokinesis (PK). ESP is simply the obtaining of information about the external world without the use of any known physical process; correspondingly, PK is the influencing of the external world without using any known physical method.

  The term psychical research is an older name for parapsychology, and essentially the two are synonymous. Some people prefer to use parapsychology to designate only laboratory research and use psychical research to refer to work outside the lab. General usage does not make that distinction, and neither will I.

  For conceptual purposes, ESP is sometimes divided into telepathy (mind to mind communication), clairvoyance (mind’s direct perception of an object or event) and precognition (foreseeing the future). PK is divided into micro and macro. Micro-PK refers to events that require statistics to determine whether PK occurred (for instance, someone trying to influence the fall of dice). Poltergeist effects are examples of macro-PK; statistics are not used to determine if such events happen. Collectively, ESP and PK are referred to as psychic phenomena or psi. The subdivisions have been useful for labeling phenomena, but they are not explanations, and it is not clear if the apparently different types of psi involve fundamentally different processes.

  Branches of parapsychology address the issue of survival of bodily death by investigating mediumship, near-death experiences, reincarnation, and ghosts. Those phenomena can involve ESP. For instance, mediums have accurately described deceased relatives of clients, even though the mediums knew nothing of the relatives. Someone visiting a home may see a ghost, describe it, and the hosts may recognize the description as fitting a previous occupant. Apparitions are occasionally accompanied by the movement of objects or temperature changes; these are physical effects. Such phenomena are often attributed to deceased entities, but they can be subsumed under the categories of ESP and PK.

  Two chapters in this book focus on parapsychology. “AntiStructure and the History of Psychical Research” gives a sociological and historical overview of the field. “Laboratory Research on Psi” discusses a number of technical matters and theories. The best recent popular book summarizing psi research is Parapsychology: The Controversial Science (1991) by Richard Broughton, an active researcher and former Director of the Institute for Parapsychology in Durham, North Carolina.

  Parapsychology is a tiny field; in the U.S. fewer than 50 people could be said to be professionally conversant with the scientific findings. Only two laboratories in the U.S. employ more than two fulltime researchers, and there are probably no more than 10 full-time professional parapsychologists in the U.S. who conduct research and report it in refereed journals. In addition, a few professors and independent scholars conduct research. Despite the small size, there has been more than a century of continuous, professional, published research on these topics. Two journals have been in publication for more than 60 years, and one for more than a hundred. The highest quality journal is the Journal of Parapsychology. Research and theories are summarized in the technical series Advances in Parapsychological Research edited by Stanley Krippner (the latest is Volume 8, 1997). Another useful, and superbly documented, book is The Future of the Body (1992) by Michael Murphy.

  Psi appears to violate conventional scientific expectations of what is possible, and that makes it controversial. Further, it sometimes manifests dramatically in seemingly bizarre circumstances such as with spirit mediums in trance, healers engaging in odd rituals, and saints enduring ascetic practices. Yet according to a number of surveys, over 50% of adults in the U.S. have reported paranormal experiences. Psi is surprisingly common.

  Several issues are addressed in this book. One is the ongoing controversy over psi’s existence—despite extensive research and a massive amount of published data, the scientific debate has continued for over a hundred years. Another issue concerns the unexpected consequences of direct attempts to elicit psi; these are rarely recognized. A third issue is the paranormal’s relationship with institutions.

  As for my own background, I was employed full-time in laboratory-based parapsychology for eight years, three at the Institute for Parapsychology in Durham, North Carolina and five at Psychophysi-cal Research Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey. I have been personally involved with a number of psychic, UFO, and occult subcultures, and I helped start a skeptics group. Compared with other laboratory researchers, I have been relatively active with such groups. Friends of mine practice ritual magic; others are professional mediums; a number tell me that aliens have abducted them, and still others admit to me privately that they are phony psychics.

  I hope that there will be diverse readers of this book, including many from non-academic backgrounds. Some may need to be warned that it is not necessary to read from front to back, and the order of presentation certainly does not reflect the origin and development of my ideas. I encourage readers to skip around, perhaps starting with a topic of personal interest.

  The peculiarities of psychical research led me to read in anthropology, folklore, sociology, and literary criticism, and I drew upon them in order to understand parapsychological phenomena. Those disciplines have almost completely ignored the reality of the paranormal, and I will explain why.

  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.

  There are six major sections and I will give a brief idea of their coverage.

  Part 1 is introductory. The third chapter of Part 1, on Victor Turner’s ideas, defines terms that will probably be unfamiliar to those outside anthropology (i.e., anti-structure, liminality, and communitas). It is only necessary to read the first few pages of that chapter to get an initial grasp of the basic ideas.

  Part 2 covers shamans and mystics, characters who had strong contact with the supernatural realm but in times that largely pre-date our modern world. Some of these people are truly exotic, and they are striking examples of important, but often neglected, aspects of human existence.

  Part 3 discusses the supernatural’s relation to culture. Theories from sociology and anthropology explain how recurrent historical patterns continue to manifest in the modern world. The paranormal is frequently marginalized, and this is an important clue to the nature of psi.

  Part 4 discusses the material with which I am most familiar; some of it is based on my years of professional work in parapsychology. It presents the data that long puzzled me. The bulk of the material concerns the last few decades, and most of the rest comes from the twentieth century. The modern world is the focus. This section is likely to be the most relevant to readers currently involved with the paranormal.

  Part 5 is by far the most theoretical and abstract. Primary topics include reflexivity, parapsychology, totemism and the primitive mind, and literary theory. This Part grapples with paradox, the irrational, and limits of logic. French structuralism and deconstructionism help explain the links among these diverse topics.

  Part 6 deals with the imagination, deception, and paranoia, and how they are illuminated by the trickster.

  CHAPTER 1

  Introduction

  This book is about foretelling the future, the occult, magic, telepathy, mind over matter, miracles, power of prayer, UFOs, Bigfoot, clairvoyance, angels, demons, psychokinesis, and spirits of the dead. These all interact
with the physical world. This book explains why they are problematical for science.

  These topics provoke ambivalent feelings. They hold a strange place in our culture.

  Some examples—

  Fortune-telling is often associated with carnivals, gypsies, and fraud. Yet many saints have had the gifts of prophecy and of knowing hearts. Do fraud and sainthood have something in common?

  Why did the teacher of the U.S. government’s psychic spies become interested in sightings of the Blessed Virgin Mary?

  The terms “magic” and “conjuring” have two meanings—use of occult powers, and the performance of tricks. The same words are used for both. Why?

  The supernatural features in the world’s greatest literature. All major religions have stories of miracles. Over half of the U.S. adult population has had paranormal experiences. Despite all this, there are no university departments of parapsychology. In fact as I write, I can identify only two laboratories in the U.S. devoted to parapsychology that employ two or more full-time scientists who publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Why so little research?

  Mediums of dubious reputation have been reported to levitate, but so have religious mystics. What is the connection?

  Innumerable movies have been made about extraterrestrial aliens, some grossing hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), the largest U.S. organization focused on UFO research, was still headquartered in the home of its founder, 30 years after it began. Why?

  The elite media give the paranormal little serious coverage. The tabloids often put it on the front page. Why?

  In universities one can study literature of the supernatural. Academic psychologists and sociologists willingly investigate belief in the paranormal. However, to attempt direct encounter with the supernatural, or to try eliciting paranormal phenomena in order to observe them directly, brings opposition and hostility. In this scientific age, why isn’t such rational inquiry welcomed?