The Trickster and the Paranormal

by George P. Hansen

  Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), co-founder of the The-osophical Society, still retains her notoriety for her paranormal manifestations. Born a granddaughter of a Russian princess, Blavatsky began traveling the world at age 17, later claiming to have spent time in Tibet, though that has been questioned. Her life was frequently in turmoil. She deserted two husbands; several of her devoted disciples became bitter enemies, and at times she lived near poverty. Her sex life still provokes wild speculation. She claimed to be a virgin,8 though many say that she had given birth to a son.9 There were rumors that she was wildly promiscuous, a lesbian, a transvestite, and a hermaphrodite. The sexual scandals around her and her close followers are very amusing, and Marion Meade recounted some of them in her Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (1980). Whatever the truth, there is no question that this part of her life was marked by ambiguity. Blavatsky’s psychic phenomena were exotic. Materializations and levitations were frequently reported. Her followers received apported letters, purportedly from “ascended masters,” though many suspect that HPB wrote them herself. The Society for Psychical Research sent Richard Hodgson to India to investigate, and he found so much trickery that he concluded that she should be considered one of the world’s greatest practical jokers. His report continues to be debated, even a century after it was written.

  Though it is easy to dismiss HPB as a charlatan, she was far too fascinating for that. Her life story is amazing, and religion professor Robert Ellwood writes that she can be regarded as “a fraud and confidence artist, or a sage of sages, or a compulsive liar, or a rare psychic and intimate of supernormal entities, or a gluttonous and overbearing old tartar with a fishwife’s tongue.” HPB continues to be the subject of biographies, and at least two more appeared in the early 1990s.

  HPB should not be considered a mere opportunist, capitalizing on the gullibility of those surrounding her. she sometimes privately admitted that she used tricks. Vselovod S. Solovyoff published a letter of hers (with her permission!) in which she admitted that she would lie about her mahatmas, though the interpretation is ambiguous, as she succeeded in muddying the issue. Her anti-structural characteristics can be seen in other ways. Political intrigue followed Blavatsky, and in India she was suspected of being a Russian agent, fomenting unrest. Whether this was true or not, among her successors in the Theosophical Society were Annie Besant, a central figure in the Indian independence movement, and C. W. Leadbeater, a sex pervert. HPB and her immediate followers were disruptive of the social order, and paranormal phenomena were an impetus in establishing the Theosophical Society.15

  Robert S. Ellwood, Jr. provided an extended analysis of HPB in his book Alternative Altars: Unconventional and Eastern Spirituality in America (1979). He was an Episcopal clergyman, a member of the Theosophical Society of America, and professor in the department of religion at the University of Southern California (his wife, Gracia Fay Ellwood, has written on the paranormal). Drawing on the work of Victor Turner, Ellwood pointed out that Blavatsky was a liminal character and that her life identified with archetypal forms, particularly the trickster and shaman. His analysis is particularly valuable because it explicitly discussed liminality in conjunction with deception and the paranormal. Both HPB and her colleague Henry Steel Olcott assumed a voluntary loss of social status and became wanderers; in fact her entire life was marked by travel. Though she was the catalyst for founding the Theosophical Society in 1875, HPB and her teachings were not its sole focus. She lacked administrative ability and never held the top position in the society.

  Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918), an Italian peasant woman, was one of the most celebrated physical mediums in the history of psychical research.16 She levitated tables, produced paranormal breezes and rapping sounds, and materialized spirit hands, among many other phenomena, and she submitted to extensive testing over a period of years. Palladino was impulsive and had little self-control, especially when in trance, and she warned researchers that she would cheat if given a chance. Despite her warnings, some investigators intentionally loosened controls, allowed her to cheat, and then dismissed her, proclaiming her a fraud. The British Victorian researchers considered her a coarse character and were often shocked by her overt eroticism and sexual remarks. She attracted wide attention, and the New York Times published a number of articles about Palladino during her visit to the U.S. for testing. Magicians were involved in that endeavor, and Howard Thurston, the most eminent conjuror of his day, endorsed her phenomena as genuine.17 Nevertheless, because of the allegations of fraud and attendant publicity, the case of Eusapia Palladino helped discredit psychical research in the eyes of many. Yet the controversy over Palladino continues still, and in the early 1990s the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research carried an extended debate on her.

  Mina Crandon (1889-1941), also known as “Margery,” was the most famous physical medium of the 1920s. The wife of Boston surgeon Le Roi Crandon, 16 years her senior, she held séances that captured enormous public attention. Scientific American magazine had offered prizes totaling $5000 for demonstrations of certain psychic phenomena. Margery applied to be tested, and a prominent committee was appointed to assess her claims. She produced innumerable dramatic materializations, levitations, and movements of objects for the committee. Ectoplasm appeared to emerge from her bodily orifices, including her vagina, but subsequent examination of the photographs indicated that some of it was actually tissue cut from animal lung, and there was other evidence of fraud as well. Rumors circulated that some investigators were sexually involved with her, thus providing a motive for complicity in deception.

  One of the members of the Scientific American committee was Harry Houdini, another trickster figure of archetypal proportions, and one who was obsessed with spiritualism. His assistant, James Collins, later admitted that under Houdini’s orders, he hid a folding ruler inside a testing cabinet, leading others to suspect that Margery had smuggled it in. Collins’ actions allowed Houdini to “honestly” deny planting it himself. The trickster is seen on both sides of the Margery affair.

  The Margery case was the most divisive in the history of U.S. psychical research. Leaders of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) became her partisans, but the most capable ASPR investigators, including Walter Franklin Prince and Harvard professor William McDougall, left and founded a rival society in Boston. As a young man J. B. Rhine attended one of Margery’s séances and was so disgusted by what he witnessed that he published an exposé describing the deceptions he saw. This was a turning point in his career, and the Margery affair led Rhine to chart a new course for parapsychology by restricting his work to the laboratory, using statistics and testing ordinary people. Thus Margery had a major, albeit indirect, impact on the course of psychical research for over half a century.

  Arthur Ford (1897-1971) was a renowned medium, who in 1929 gained notoriety for cracking a secret code that Houdini had left with his wife Bess. According to Houdini’s plan, if a medium was able to ascertain the code’s meaning, it would indicate that Houdini was speaking from beyond the grave. In a dramatic séance, Ford communicated the meaning, and the case received enormous publicity. But there were cries of fraud, and magicians and spiritualists long debated whether Ford was truly successful.25 Almost 40 years later, he came to international attention again, when he conducted a televised séance with the prominent maverick Episcopal bishop, James Pike. He provided Pike with ostensible communication from his son who had committed suicide. After Ford’s death, William Rauscher, Ford’s literary legatee, and writer Allen Spraggett reviewed his private papers and found many old obituaries clipped from newspapers. These contained numerous small details that Ford had given in séances. After he made that discovery public, Rauscher received a letter from a Jay Abbott, who had been closely acquainted with both Ford and Bess Houdini. Abbott provided evidence of a romantic link between the two and indicated that the cracking of the Houdini code was deceitful. Rauscher is an Episcopal priest and a magician with a wid
e knowledge of fraudulent mediumship, and he was the driving force behind M. Lamar Keene’s exposé The Psychic Mafia (1977). Yet Rauscher remains convinced that Ford demonstrated genuine psychic ability in some instances.

  In addition to deception, there were other trickster and antistructural aspects to Ford’s character. He had a long personal battle with alcoholism. His sex life raised speculation, and his biographers noted that “people were always falling in love with him, men as well as women.”26 Ford was the motivating factor for establishing Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship (SFF) in 1956, which grew to be a large organization of clergy and lay people that worked to bring respectability to psychic areas. Despite his influence, Ford always remained in the background, and the SFF never was focused on him.

  Mentalists Joseph Dunninger (1892-1975) and Kreskin (b. 1935) are conjurors, yet many people believe them to be genuinely psychic, a belief they both encouraged. Among magicians, the two are known for their publicity skills. Dunninger was the foremost mentalist of his day, and he had a real knack for associating with people who enhanced his credibility. For instance, along with Houdini he published exposés of spiritualism, and later he was appointed Chairman of the Scientific

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  American Committee for the Investigation of Psychic Phenomena. Berthold E. Schwarz, a kindly but gullible psychiatrist and writer of books on the paranormal, frequently lauded Dunninger’s psychic abilities. His association with Houdini, Scientific American, and the praise from a psychiatrist undoubtedly convinced many that Dunninger’s act was based on psychic ability rather than trickery. His personal life was filled with ambiguity. He lived with Chrystal Spencer for many years, but during that time he promised to marry a Betty Devery. In 1944 Chrystal won a lawsuit and was declared his common-law wife. But she admitted that there were weeks when she did not know where he was or what he was doing, and she had to compete with his mother for his affection. Many other oddities of Dunninger’s life were revealed in Maurice Zolotow’s entertaining It Takes All Kinds (1952).

  After Dunninger’s heyday, Kreskin (George Kresge, Jr.) became an internationally known mentalist, and his winning and persuasive manner is now widely acknowledged. He was so charming that even Prometheus Books, the publishing house of the debunking movement, published one of his books (though many skeptics were outraged by it). Kreskin is a somewhat solitary man. He has never married, keeps his distance from other conjurors, and is not seen at magicians’ conventions; however, he is rumored to furtively visit magic shops late at night, by special appointment. Both Dunninger and Kreskin fostered the belief that they are actually psychic. Their press material and the writings of Walter Gibson, who ghosted books for them, promoted their reputations as psychics. I’ve spoken to magicians who knew

  Dunninger and Kreskin, and the general, though not universal, impression is that they both believed themselves to actually be psychic.

  Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui sorcerer with supernatural powers, was introduced to the reading public by Carlos Castaneda in his The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. The University of California Press published that work in 1968 with a foreword by Walter Goldschmidt, chairman of the anthropology department of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), who had also served as president of the American Anthropological Association. In 1973, Castaneda was granted a Ph.D. from that department, with a dissertation essentially identical to his popular book Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan (1972). This was the beginning of a lucrative literary career, and Castaneda continued to produce a steady stream of books well into the 1990s. Some were bestsellers, and Publishers Weekly reported that by 1977 nearly four million copies of his books

  had been sold.30

  Don Juan Matus, Castaneda’s “teacher,” had telepathic and PK powers, and Castaneda described them along with amazing feats of other sorcerers. With the seal of approval of the UCLA anthropology department, many assumed the books to be factual accounts. But Castaneda largely invented them! Primarily through the efforts of psychologist Richard de Mille, overwhelming evidence was marshalled that Castaneda did much of his “fieldwork” in the UCLA library, and there is no good evidence don Juan ever existed. As such, he is the only fictional character listed in Table 3. Nevertheless, he may well be the most influential, and many people were introduced to paranormal ideas through Castaneda’s writings.

  De Mille’s books, Castaneda’s Journey (1976) and The Don Juan Papers (1980), are nicely crafted and enormously entertaining, and they show a true sympathy for both the trickster and the paranormal.33 In fact the first chapter of his Castaneda’s Journey is titled “The Day of the Coyote,” and it opens with an epigraph from a poltergeist report from the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. Even though Castaneda tried to erase his personal history, de Mille was able to reconstruct some of it, and his biographical analysis is useful and witty. Both of de Mille’s books have extended discussions of Castaneda as trickster, with intriguing insights into his personality. Castaneda never responded, and his mystique continues to this day.

  This landmark hoax severely embarrassed the UCLA anthropology department, and it made it difficult for anthropology students everywhere to investigate paranormal topics because their professors feared being similarly tainted. This helped shield the paranormal from scientific investigation, and de Mille even commented that “I can’t help wondering how many prospective readers of serious psi literature may have been shunted off in another direction” by Castaneda.

  Uri Geller (b. 1946) burst upon the psychic scene in the 1970s with his seeming power to bend keys and spoons with PK and also for his ESP. He was born in Israel, and when he was about 10 his parents divorced; after that he lived in a kibbutz and later went to Cyprus with his mother and stepfather. He returned to Israel and began performing on stage displaying his paranormal abilities, which even he admits were augmented by tricks. He came to the attention of paranormal researcher Andrija Puharich, who helped arrange for tests of his psychic abilities at Stanford Research Institute by Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ. Those results were reported in Nature and the Proceedings of the IEEE, major scientific journals of international standing (IEEE stands for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers). Those papers sparked enormous controversy, and the fallout persists. Books have been written attacking and defending Geller, and there have been direct allegations of cheating. He has acquired enormous wealth, reputedly through mineral prospecting, and he now lives in a mansion that has a helicopter landing pad. A fictionalized movie has been made of his life.

  Geller drew the attention and spite of magician James Randi, who in the last quarter of the twentieth century was the most prominent spokesman for the debunking movement. Both Geller and Randi have appeared on numerous TV shows, and Randi even wrote a book denouncing Geller. The conflict has continued for over 25 years, becoming so intense that the two battled in lawsuits around the world. Randi was forced out of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (which he helped found), because of the legal suits provoked by his statements.37

  Sathya Sai Baba (b. 1926), a Hindu holy man with millions of followers around the world, is one of today’s best known miracle workers. He reputedly materializes precious metals and gems, is clairvoyant, has turned water into gasoline, and even raised the dead. But he has not allowed controlled tests of his abilities, and there is much evidence indicating trickery. Many of his materializations of small objects have been recorded on video, and magicians confirm that they certainly look like magic tricks, though the resolution and video quality were insufficient for definitive proof. A number of devotees have lived in close proximity with Sai Baba and later became disillusioned, some bitterly so. One was Meenakshi Srikanth who posted an article on the Internet in 1993 entitled “Sri Sathya Sai Baba: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” He reported that Sai Baba had sodomized a number of his students and that some were familiar with the magic tricks he used. Tal Brooke, another former
devotee, also recounted Sai Baba’s homosexual advances on himself and others. Elements of the trickster constellation appear in the person of Sai Baba.

  Summary

  I know of no psychics more prominent than those listed in Table 3, and serious allegations of deception follow them all. There are few of comparable public visibility without such taint (e.g., Edgar Cayce, Jeane Dixon, Eileen Garrett, Ingo Swann). Even if one wishes to disregard the relatively weaker testimony, the overwhelming majority of the most widely known psychic performers have a reputation for trickery. This is simply a cultural fact.

  These characters exemplify the patterns of liminality, antistructure, and the trickster. Deception and psi are not the only trickster qualities to manifest in these personalities. None were long-term employees in large bureaucratic institutions; they didn’t fit into the normal work-a-day world. They had odd life-styles; marital situations were nonstandard; they did not hold regular jobs; unusual sexuality was common, and several had problems with alcohol. Many were charismatic. These are liminal, anti-structural people.

  These people have been exceptionally effective in drawing attention to themselves and stimulating discussion about their phenomena. At the same time, their antics and deceptions serve as an excuse for status-conscious scientists to ignore them and to marginalize their phenomena. This presents a paradox—for the paranormal, publicity fends off detailed examination.