The Trickster and the Paranormal

by George P. Hansen

  Turner and van Gennep were anthropologists, and I emphasize that discipline for a reason. Anthropologists examine a wide range of cultures, and they observe more of the extremes of the human condition than do practitioners in other fields. Consequently their theories often provide insights unavailable from others. Van Gennep and Turner studied relatively simple societies, but their ideas can be applied to more complex ones, including our own. The complexity of our society makes their relevance a bit difficult to initially perceive, but the ideas directly apply to changes and transitions in our culture.

  Van Gennep and Turner had a wide knowledge of many societies. They did not base their ideas on abstract philosophical notions, but rather on concrete examples. They used comparative methods to examine a diversity of phenomena across disciplinary boundaries, and they discovered patterns that others had missed. Comparative methods are a bit alien to other sciences, which tend to emphasize logical cause-effect relationships, narrow focus, and reductionistic thinking. In contrast, the humanities frequently use comparative techniques, and they provide great breadth of insight. Comparative methods encourage interdisciplinary efforts, and they accentuate data rather than imposing spurious cause-effect relationships.

  Structure and Status

  Through this book we will return repeatedly to the issues of social status and social structure. Social structure has a variety of definitions. Turner adopted the one used by most British anthropologists; that is, society is a system of social positions, and “the units of social structure are relationships between statuses, roles, and offices.” Organized culture and civilization require differentiation, roles, and structure. Some hunt, others cook, some must raise children. Roles give definition and continuity to a person’s life; they designate positions and statuses in the structure of society. By its nature, structure produces social distance and inequality, which often leads to exploitation of people. Some alienation results from all structure; this is part of the human condition.

  Social structure and social status are not directly observable. One can see a tree, a forest, a rock, or person. But social structures and statuses are not like that. They are “invisible.” In this sense, they are like “spirits” (this comparison is further elaborated in the chapter on totemism). Social structures are very real, and they pervasively influence us, so much so that we typically choose not to acknowledge their effects. We tend to see individuals as having a discrete existence. We think of groups as simply collections of individuals, and assume that the properties of the group can be derived from those of the individuals. This is wrong fundamentally, and to understand why requires a sociological way of thinking.

  Liminality

  Three concepts are crucial to the work of van Gennep and Turner: liminality, communitas, and anti-structure. The three terms are closely related and are, in some contexts, interchangeable. Van Gennep introduced the term liminality (from “limen”, i.e., threshold) in The Rites of Passage (1909). In many cultures, elaborate rituals mark important transitions, such as puberty, marriage, change in leadership, and death. These passages involve revisions in roles and statuses, i.e., shifts in structural position; thus the entire group is involved, not just one person. Van Gennep identified three stages of these rites as separation, transition (limen), and incorporation. During the liminal phase of initiatory rites the ritual subjects are often physically separated from the rest of the populace. They may spend long periods in the bush, apart from the tribe. During such transitions, rituals assist the psychological changes of individuals and the group and serve to solidify the new structure. In many societies, these processes are much more intense than in our own.

  Describing initiations, van Gennep notes that: “During the entire novitiate, the usual economic and legal ties are modified, sometimes broken altogether. The novices are outside society, and society has no power over them, especially since they are actually sacred and holy, and therefore untouchable and dangerous, just as gods would be.” He reports that “although taboos, as negative rites, erect a barrier between the novices and society, the society is defenseless against the novices’ undertakings … During the novitiate, the young people can steal and pillage at will or feed and adorn themselves at the expense of the community.” This is a superb example of anti-structure and chaos, and this passage also connects liminality with the sacred and the gods.

  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 similar capacity. He further clarified the ideas in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969).

  The characteristics of liminality can be seen in a welter of contexts involving transitions. Van Gennep’s theoretical formulation included matters such as initiations, vision quests, travelers and strangers, retreats into deserts by hermits, sacred contexts, and territorial passage. Turner expanded the realm to include: “subjugated autochthones, small nations, court jesters, holy mendicants, good Samaritans, millenarian movements, ‘dharma bums,’ … and monastic orders” explaining that “all have this common characteristic: they are persons or principles that (1) fall in the interstices of social structure, (2) are on its margins, or (3) occupy its lowest rungs.” Such a jumble may seem dissonant for many readers and can be problematic because, by their nature, the above items are largely antithetical to structure. This makes them easy to overlook. Yet there are common patterns across them, and this abstract formulation allows us to understand some of the queer aspects of ritual initiation and how they are pertinent to the paranormal and its place in the social order.

  Turner reports that: “Ritual symbols of this phase, though some represent inversion of normal reality, characteristically fall into two types: those of effacement and those of ambiguity or paradox … They [the initiands] are associated with such general oppositions as life and death, male and female, food and excrement, simultaneously, since they are at once dying from or dead to their former status and life, and being born and growing into new ones. Sharp symbolic inversion of social attributes may characterize separation; blurring and merging of distinctions may characterize liminality.”9 He also notes that “liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the

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  sun or moon.”

  Turner later comments: “The novices are, in fact, temporarily undefined, beyond the normative social structure. This weakens them, since they have no rights over others. But it also liberates them from structural obligations. It places them too in a close connection with non-social or asocial powers of life and death. Hence the frequent comparison of novices with, on the one hand, ghosts, gods, or ancestors, and, on the other, with animals or birds … In liminality … former rights and obligations are suspended, the social order may seem to have been turned upside down, but by way of compensation cosmological systems (as objects of serious study) may become of central importance for the novices.” The ritual processes can have great psychological impact, and he goes on to note that “the factors or elements of culture may be recombined in numerous, often grotesque ways, grotesque because they are arrayed in terms of possible or fantasied rather than experienced combinations—thus a monster disguise may combine human, animal, and vegetable features in an ‘unnatural’ way, while the same features may be differently, but equally ‘unnaturally’ combined in a painting or described in a tale. In other words, in liminality people ‘play’ with the elements of the familiar and defamiliarize them. Novelty emerges from unprecedented combinations of familiar objects.”12

  This recombination of elements is a quality also found in altered (i.e., destructured) states of consciousness. Odd assortments of items appear in dreams and in productions of visionary artists. Thi
s is perhaps the essence of creativity—producing new patterns, new ways of seeing the world. Turner makes it explicit in relation to liminality: “it is the analysis of culture into factors and their free or ‘ludic’ recombination in any and every possible pattern, however weird, that is of the essence of liminality, liminality par excellence.”

  Periods of liminality can provoke marked psychological changes. For instance anthropologist Colin Turnbull experienced synesthesia during a liminal period with an African tribe, which he described in his article “Liminality: A Synthesis of Subjective and Objective Experience” (1990). As mentioned in the last chapter, synesthesia is typically associated with thin-boundary personality types. With Turnbull, it manifested during a breakdown of societal boundaries.

  The idea of liminality has been adopted in a variety of areas, and it is not possible to review even a representative portion, but a few examples here might help illustrate how the ideas apply. Many more will be presented in forthcoming chapters.

  Larry Peters, an anthropologist with an interest in psychotherapy, used the concepts. He pointed out that when shamans are called to their vocation they often undergo a crisis. They may roam forests, fast, see visions, and act in ways that westerners perceive as crazy. Yet by the end of the crisis, the person has new abilities and can become an important member of society.

  Peters recognized that the idea of creative illness, advanced by Henri Ellenberger in 1964, can be understood as a liminal process. A number of extraordinarily creative persons underwent a period of withdrawal, marginality, and sometimes even psychosis (e.g., Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Kurt Godel). Several biographies of these figures have lamented the periods of withdrawal and sickness. But they failed to realize that these ultimately led to growth, transformation, intellectual power and leadership. Peters also explored borderline personality disorder. He pointed out that some of the symptoms (e.g., self-mutilation, anorexia) have parallels with shamanistic crisis experiences. The word “borderline” emphasizes the issue of boundaries. He suggested that the prevalence of the disorder today is partly due to lack of effective rites of passage. Our society devalues marginality and withdrawal and stigmatizes them, even though they can be sources of rejuvenation and creativity.15

  Communitas

  “Communitas” is a Latin term meaning feeling of fellowship. Turner adopted it in order to distinguish his concept from that of “community.” In communitas, persons drop their normal roles and statuses, and a social leveling occurs. Turner explains that “at certain life crises, such as adolescence, the attainment of elderhood, and death … the passage from one structural status to another may be accompanied by a strong sentiment of ‘humankindness,’ a sense of the generic social bond between all members of society … regardless of their subgroup affiliations or incumbency of structural positions.”16 He notes that “The bonds of communitas are anti-structural in the sense that they are undifferentiated, equalitarian, direct.” Such situations can occur spontaneously but can also be organized as in initiations and rites of passage. As an example of spontaneous communitas, Turner mentioned the hippies of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the 1960s. They had strong feelings of equality and sharing, and previous status differences were eliminated. The hippies dressed oddly, signalling their rejection of their prior roles; the work-a-day world was disdained, and any jobs they took were typically temporary and marginal. Drugs facilitated destructuring of consciousness.

  Organized communitas occurs in some rites of passage, in which “It is as though they [the initiates] are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new station in life.

  Among themselves, neophytes tend to develop an intense comradeship and egalitarianism.” In our culture, Marine Corps basic training (boot camp) is an example. The recruits are put in special quarters and are kept separate from other Marines. Their heads are shaved, and all markings of their former lives are removed. They have the lowest status in the military and are treated as such. They participate in rituals of singing and marching in formation. They become strongly bonded with their buddies and with the Corps generally. If they survive, they emerge transformed, with self-confidence, new abilities, and a new identity.

  Communitas is linked with humility and at least interim loss of status; it forces one to realize that one is part of humanity and shares in the human condition. Rituals sometimes incorporate a temporary reversal of status; paupers become kings, and kings paupers. In some rites, a king may be reviled and spat upon—serving to remind him of his humanity, and cautioning him against the abuse of power. Turner likewise notes that “it is the marginal or ‘inferior’ person or the ‘outsider’ who often comes to symbolize what David Hume has called ‘the sentiment for humanity,’ which in its turn relates to the model we have termed ‘communitas’.”

  Turner also comments: “Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginal-ity; and from beneath structure, in inferiority. It is almost everywhere held to be sacred or ‘holy,’ … Instinctual energies are surely liberated by these processes, but I am now inclined to think that communitas is not solely the product of biologically inherited drives released from cultural constraints.”

  Communitas cannot last for long periods without some containing structure. Love-ins may descend into orgies, and parties into brawls; Dionysian elements can emerge. The great fluidity and chaos can eventually result in a totalitarian structure being rapidly imposed, as with cults and dictatorial regimes. With the potential for disorder, it is not surprising that established structures may be hostile to unregulated communitas. Despite the risks, Turner and van Gennep saw antistructural processes as often positive and crucial for rebirth and regeneration. Turner noted that “man is both a structural and an antistructural entity, who grows through anti-structure and conserves through structure.”

  Trickster and Anti-structure

  Periods of liminality and communitas disrupt ordinary, everyday activities and at times can completely overwhelm them. Thus the term anti-structure is another appropriate label for those conditions. The term liminality is better known in anthropology and literary studies than is anti-structure, but the word does more to obscure the concept than to explain it. The term anti-structure has distinct advantages. It evokes the idea of disruption, of the border between chaos and order, of being anti-establishment, as well as suggesting a connection with French structuralism and deconstructionism. The term liminal has none of those benefits, and I suspect that the use of that word has delayed the wider application of Turner’s ideas. Turner understood the importance of anti-structure, and he used the term in the subtitle of his The Ritual Process. He later explicitly stated that “Roughly, the

  concepts of liminality and communitas define what I mean by anti-

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  structure.

  The trickster has essentially the same properties as liminality, antistructure, and communitas. Just on the face of it, anti-structure evokes ideas of disruption, a primary trickster quality, but there are other commonalities as well. Van Gennep’s formulations dealt with, among other things, travelers, territorial passages, and boundary crossing. Hermes is a god of travelers and of boundaries. Liminality involves blurring of distinctions and oppositions such as life-death, malefemale, and food-excrement. These are also associated with the trickster, and as explained below, the trickster is a mediator between binary oppositions. In relation to liminality, Turner specifically mentioned bisexuality, yet another trickster characteristic. In conjunction with anti-structure, he cited court jesters, and they are a subclass of tricksters. Turner discussed the trickster in his 1968 article „Myth and Symbol,“ but his later works gave it little or no attention.

  Barbara Babcock, a literary theorist (now at the University of Arizona) and former student of Turner, has done more than anyone to explicate the connections between t
he trickster and liminality. She is the single most insightful commentator on the trickster, but to a large extent, scholars have not appreciated the full depth of her understanding. Her essay „A Tolerated Margin of Mess“ was published in 1975 in the Journal of the Folklore Institute. In it Babcock identified 16 characteristics of tricksters and explained six functions that trickster tales play in society. Drawing on Turner’s ideas of liminality, she suggested that the most important was the reflective-creative function. Trickster tales help us become conscious of aspects of life and culture that might otherwise be neglected. By becoming aware of them, we can rearrange them or see why it is best to leave them as they are.

  She addressed the trickster’s relevance to creativity, specifically mentioning Arthur Koestler’s book The Act of Creation, saying: “In contrast to routine thinking, the creative act of thought is always ‘double-minded, i.e., a transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed’ [quoting Koestler] … In his famous essay on laughter, Henri Bergson similarly defined a situation as creative and comic if it belongs simultaneously to two independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time.”

  Babcock’s essay has several tangential connections with parapsychology, although she was probably unaware of them. The title came from a quote of Aldous Huxley, a British writer who had taken part in telepathy experiments with classicist Gilbert Murray and who had also written about J. B. Rhine. In addition to discussing Bergson and Koestler, she also mentioned William James. Bergson, a Nobel laureate, served as president of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR); James also served as SPR president and helped found the American Society for Psychical Research. Arthur Koestler endowed a chair of parapsychology at the University of Edinburgh.