The Trickster and Anomalous Phenomena
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In the late 19th century, western scholars noted the prevalence of a certain character archetype in Indigenous American mythology that ethnologist Daniel Brinton called the Trickster. Various thinkers have since expanded on the concept, identifying tricksters in nearly every ancient and indigenous culture on Earth. Since then, some have also noted the trickster’s connections to the supernatural, or the paranormal. While the meaning of trickster tales remains hotly debated, some scholarship suggests that the trickster may, in part, be a coded representation of anomalous phenomena.
Trickster in Mythology
The tricksters of mythology are almost always male. Though they are often depicted in the form of certain animals, or animal-human hybrids, they are shapeshifters, and frequently inhabit other forms as needed. Tricksters possess great supernatural powers, and often serve important roles in creation myths and other origin stories, while also mediating between different realms. They can play heroes, villains, or agents of chaos. One thing common to nearly all of the world’s tricksters is their cunning, and their use of wit and wiles to compensate for lack of status, or braun.
Tricksters exhibit a range of behaviors that violate social norms and moral codes. They lie, cheat, and manipulate, and they engage in a lot of impulsive behaviors. Tricksters are often glutinous and have a high sexual libido, leading them to engage in promiscuous, and even predatory sexual behavior. They can also be foolish buffoons, and many tales involve comical, grotesque, and scatological elements.(1)
The ancient Greek God, Hermes, or Mercury in Roman mythology, is considered an archetypal trickster god. On the day he was born, he stole cattle from his brother, Apollo, then concealed his tracks and lied about it.(2) He was stealthy, and used both wiles and magic to operate unnoticed.(3) Hermes was also the messenger between realms, tasked with accompanying humans’ souls down to Hades, guiding them across the primordial boundary between life and death. He was also described as being an aggressive seducer of women.(4)
In Native American tradition, the Trickster most often takes the form of a Coyote, or a Raven. One of the more common trickster stories in Native American traditions has to do with the origin of fire. In the Ute tradition, Coyote steals fire from a foreign people who were guarding it for themselves, and shows his own people how to keep it in their tipis.(5) In many creation stories too, Coyote teaches humans how to catch salmon, and builds the first weir, a dam for trapping fish.(6) These stories illustrate trickster’s role as a culture hero, or one who changes human life for the better.(7)
But Coyote and other tricksters could also be adversarial, and cruel, even in their roles as creators. A myth of the Maidu people in modern-day California holds that Coyote helped create the world with a primal being called the Earth-Maker, only to sabotage many of his creations. For example, while Earth-Maker wanted to give humans the ability to revive their dead, Coyote intervened to make death permanent. Though Earth Maker tried to destroy Coyote with the help of his human creations, Coyote outwits them all, thus displaying his comparable powers.(8)
Tricksters also engage in many sociopathic and often murderous actions. In the Winnebego tradition, the trickster god, Wakdjunkaga, tricks two mother raccoons into abandoning their children, then cooks and eats the youngsters before placing one’s head on the end of a stick and setting it at the door for its mother to find. Later, he kills the mothers, too, to eat their flesh.(9)
Anansi, the trickster god of the Akan people of West Africa, often took the form of a spider, and used his cunning to manipulate others to his personal advantage.(10) The Krache people of Ghana say that Anansi promised the supreme sky-god, Wulbari, that he’d bring him a hundred slaves if granted a single cob of corn. After destroying the cob and lying about it, Anansi emotionally blackmails some villagers into giving him their own sacks of corn. He then repeats the process, manipulating people and trading the rewards until he returns to Wulbari with a hundred slaves, and is appointed Chief of His Host.(11)
One of the most popular African trickster tales involves the Yoruba god, Èṣù, mediator between humans, gods, and evil spirits.(12) Èṣù makes himself a hat that is white on one side and black on the other, then rides his horse directly between two good friends who were working on opposite ends of a field. Having seen different sides, the friends get into a fight over the color of the hat, and nearly come to blows when Èṣù intervenes. He tells the men that they were both right in their interpretation, and advises them to “reckon with Èṣù” in their dealings with one another, or to accept that there are multiple interpretations to all human interactions.(13)
In Japan, the Kitsune is a fox spirit who plays tricks on people, often to humiliate the selfish or the boastful. Many Kitsune stories involve a young man being seduced by a fox in the form of a human woman. The earliest extant Fox-wife story, contained in the 9th-century Nihon ryōiki, involves a man marrying a fox-wife and having a child with her. At the same time, the family dog has a puppy who sees through her disguise, and frightens her into changing back into a fox and running away, leaving the father and child forever.(14)
While the motives and behaviors of trickster figures vary greatly around the world, they overlap in their “in-between” and boundary-crossing nature; their subversion of social norms; and their manipulative use of cunning and deceit.(15) Tricksters disrupt peoples’ experiences of normal life and help to forge a new social reality, if only temporarily.
Western Scholarship
The abstracted concept of the trickster was a creation of western scholars. The term was introduced in an 1885 article by the American historian and ethnologist, Daniel Brinton.(16) Brinton observed that many indigenous American gods were morally ambivalent, and were described as creators and heroes while simultaneously being described as cheaters, liars, and fools.(17) Attempting to rationalize the apparent contradiction, Brinton hypothesized that the devious, buffoonish dimension of the trickster in Algonquian mythology was a corruption of earlier tales of a noble deity of light.(18)
The German American anthropologist, Franz Boas, adopted Brinton’s term in the preface to a book in 1898. Boas disagreed with Brinton’s thesis that the buffoonish elements of trickster tales were late corruptions. Instead, he theorized that these tales evolved over time from stories of glutinous, impulsive fools to stories of culture heroes who consciously acted in humanity’s best interests.(19)
In 1956, the American anthropologist and folklorist, Paul Radin, published The Trickster, a book that explored the trickster tales told by the Winnebago people of the midwest. Radin believed that the trickster represented humanity’s collective memory of an earlier, more primitive psychic state still in the process of differentiation, a psychological term for defining a sense of self apart from the outside world. In Radin’s words, trickster represented “not only the undifferentiated and distant past, but likewise the undifferentiated present within every individual.”(20)
Radin’s book included an essay by the psychiatrist and philosopher, Carl Jung. Jung noted the animalistic quality of tricksters, and viewed these figures as amalgam’s of our lowest-consciousness behaviors. He wrote that the trickster is “a collective shadow figure, a summation of all the inferior traits of character in individuals,” that he described as having been “solidified into a mythological personage.” The figure is “split off” from the observer’s consciousness and thus behaves like a distinct, autonomous being. To Jung, trickster tales are a way of creating a conscious relationship to this unconscious state, and thus, reducing its power over the psyche.(21)
Since the middle of the 20th century, scholars have generally abandoned attempts to reconcile the contradictory elements of trickster tales, instead embracing paradox as a fundamental part of the stories. In the 1970s, American Folklorist, Barbara Babcock-Abrahams, argued that the trickster “embodies the fundamental contradiction of our existence: the contradiction between the individual and society, between freedom and constraint.”(22) Using the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s concept of the peripheral, Babcock-Abrahams argued that the trickster represented, in part, the collective “dirt” of a society, or all of the rejected, negative elements of character that a society defines itself against.(23)
The Chippewa professor of Native American Studies, Gerald Vizenor, commented on the trickster in the late 1980s. Drawing insights from semiotics, postcolonialism, and deconstructuralism, Vizenor argued that we should view the trickster as a “comic discourse.”(24) Through the recitation of trickster tales, readers and listeners were able to engage their imaginations in a “language game” steeped in paradox and contradiction. Doing so allowed both listeners and readers to “imagine their liberation,” and to question the very realities that govern their existence. In Vizenor’s words, “the trickster is a sign and the world is ‘deconstructed’ in a discourse.”(25)
In 1988, Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor of African American Studies at Harvard University, devised a method of literary analysis informed by African trickster tales. Gates explored tales of Èṣù, or Esu-Elegbara, and their survival in African-American tales of the Signifying Monkey, and argues that they were symbolic of the creative potential and the indeterminacy of interpretation of African-American oral and literary traditions.(26)
Many more have commented on the trickster since, including Lewis Hyde and Emily Zobel Marshall.(27) Western scholarship is still exploring the many meanings within the world’s trickster tales, and what effect they might have on those who tell them.
Trickster and the Paranormal
One of the first western scholars to acknowledge the connection between the trickster and anomalous phenomena was the German psychologist, Lutz Müller.(28) In a 1981 article, Müller noted the fact that both psi phenomena and the trickster defied boundaries, and shared many other characteristics, including self-contradiction, incomprehensibility, and spontaneity. He argued that one could only move towards an understanding of psi phenomena if one approached them with a trickster consciousness.
Allan Combs and Mark Holland published a book in 1990 that explored the connection between the trickster archetype and Jung’s concept of synchronicity. Jung defined synchronicity as a coincidence between one’s inner, subjective experience with events in the outside world, where a causal connection appears to be lacking, but a meaningful one exists. Nearly all ancient societies had a holistic view of the world that made sense of such coincidences, and it was most clearly expressed when personified in the trickster.(29)
In his 2001 book, The Trickster and the Paranormal, the American parapsychologist, George Hansen, provided the first comprehensive exploration of all the connections between trickster tales and anomalous phenomena - or the paranormal, to use his preferred term. Hansen developed a theoretical framework for understanding these connections that drew heavily from the French-German ethnographer and folklorist, Arnold van Gennep, and his concept of liminality. Gennep observed that people in tribal societies are often required to move through a transitory, in-between stage in order to take on a new social status. He called this stage liminality, for the latin līmen, or threshold. The passage through liminality is often performed in ritual, requiring the individual to endure disorienting, and often painful experiences. Importantly, many liminal rituals involve attempts to commune with supernatural beings.
The British cultural anthropologist, Victor Turner, coined the term “anti-structural” to refer to anything that sought to invert or undermine the social hierarchies of the time. Turner saw liminality as a period for scrutinizing the structures and values of a society, and for becoming viscerally conscious of the inequalities that existed within it. Liminal phases - and liminal people, such as shamans, prophets, and mystics - were anti-structural, and they also helped societies to revitalize themselves, and to evolve through self-reflection.
Hansen argued that mythological tricksters were both liminal and anti-structural, and that all paranormal phenomena shared the same characteristics. All mediate a binary opposite, or bridge two worlds; legends of Bigfoot occupy the liminal space between primitive apes and modern humans, exhibiting signs of higher intelligence while embodying a crude, animalistic form; UFOs cross the boundary between sky and land, or heaven and earth; ghosts exist between life and death; and psi phenomena manifest between one’s subjective experience and the objective, physical world.
Hansen also observed that paranormal phenomena were “boundless” in the sense that they tend to manifest in unpredictable ways, eluding scientific investigation. UFO sightings are often brief and distant, and leave no trace of their appearance. Likewise, cryptids don’t leave a lot of tracks, and rarely do we find bones or pelts that could verifiably be attributed to an undiscovered species. Psi phenomena are notoriously difficult to measure in a laboratory setting: even in successful experiments, effect sizes are small, and skeptics often fail to replicate them. All of these things prevent rationalist, scientific investigators from proving their existence, thus maintaining their liminal status.
Hansen was also the first to argue that the examples of fraud and deceit so prevalent in most paranormal fields, including alternative healing and mediumship, were actually fundamental to the phenomena in question, just as they were fundamental to the trickster. Instances of fraud helped to delegitimize the paranormal in the eyes of western rationalists, thus relegating these phenomena to the margins of acceptable discourse, and keeping them squarely within the realm of fiction. In other words, fraud helps to maintain the liminal status of paranormal phenomena, while preventing any institutional efforts to investigate them. Like the trickster, the paranormal is inscrutable to the rational mind, and remains beyond the grasp of all established power structures.
These kinds of epistemological challenges open up a rift between the liminal figures who champion the paranormal, and the establishment thinkers who keep them at the fringes of intellectual discourse. Thus, paranormal phenomena generate subcultures that reject the authorities of the dominant system, and form new belief systems where authority is grounded in direct, anomalous experiences. Is this the trickster bringing disorder to the world?
New Perspectives
Adopting the trickster consciousness gives us fresh perspective on all manner of anomalous phenomena. For example, Charles Fort, the founder of anomalistics, compiled dozens of 19th-century accounts of frogs, fish, and other organic materials raining from the sky. Looking through the lens of the trickster, we see the contradiction and liminality inherent in creatures of the sea falling from the sky to earth, crossing the boundaries between different realms of creation. There is also something comically absurd about a rain of frogs or fish that would naturally lead one to question the sharp distinction that they had made between heaven and earth, or land and sea. In short, these kinds of rain anomalies lead us to question the boundaries or our world.
Other phenomena exhibit playful, taunting behaviors that evoke the spirit of the trickster. Victims of hauntings repeatedly report being baited by some sight or sound - such as a knock at the door - only to investigate and find that there’s no one there. AntônioVilas-Boas said that the UFO he saw over his farm darted back and forth to opposite ends of the field every time he tried approaching it. The fighter pilots scrambled to intercept a moving light over Tehran in 1976 said that it flew several miles away from them every time they closed in on it. Investigators who try to capture technical evidence of these phenomena, for example with audio and video recording equipment, often have their devices fail in the presence of anomalous activity. The phenomena invite their witnesses to approach, only to evade a close inspection. Like tales of tricksters, they disrupt our reality, forcing us to wrestle with their meaning, only to leave us with more questions than answers.
Beginning in the late 1960s, ufologists and anomalists, Jacques Vallée and John Keel, argued that UFOs, and even their supposedly “alien” pilots, were not what they seemed. Whether by technological means, or by exercising direct control over our consciousness, UFOnauts are able to make themselves and their craft appear in different forms. The visitors use this power to make their appearance conform, somewhat, to the social and metaphysical expectations of their witnesses, so that they appear vaguely plausible to the local culture, while still distinctly alien. In cases where the visitors speak with witnesses, they frequently make claims about themselves, their technologies, and their intentions that are obviously absurd, or self contradicting. In other words, the UFOnauts and other anomalous entities are shape-shifters, liars, and manipulators, just like the trickster.(32)
DMT researcher, Rick Strassman, noted that many participants in a study he did reported encounters with jovial beings that they referred to as “jesters,” “jokers,” or “imps.” Terrence McKenna referred to these beings as “machine elves.” The freelance writer, Sam Woolfe, noted how these jester entities exhibit all the behaviors of the trickster, shifting forms while confounding the experiencer by deconstructing their experience of time and space in a carnival-like environment.(33) As the Russian philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin, noted, carnival was an important medieval tradition that helped people critique the social order through subversive humor.(34) Woolfe argued that these beings helped people to confront their Jungian shadow through similar subversive humor. People on DMT and other psychedelic substances also tend to report therianthropes, or animal-human hybrids, that resemble tricksters.(35)
If we accept that anomalous phenomena are manifestations of the trickster spirit, then we can assume that they would have a similar influence on humankind.(36) The American philosopher and theologian, Carl Raschke, claimed that mythological trickster tales “perform the service of cognitive deconstruction,” by making us question our thinking. UFOs performed a similar function in deconstructing culture by making us question metaphysical assumptions, and leading us to re-examine our place in the universe. The American ufologist, Martin Kottmeyer, argued that UFO sightings in the US were more common in times when there was a loss of national pride: for example, after the launch of Sputnik in 1957, or after the Watergate scandal in 1973.(37) Whatever the direction of causation, the phenomenon may be the most active when people lose faith in the political and ideological systems by which they’re governed. Like the trickster, the UFO phenomenon antagonizes power, and nudges towards disorder.
Raschke speculated that the ultimate function of the UFO phenomenon was to drive the evolution of consciousness through a constant regeneration of information structures.(38) Hansen argued that the paranormal acts as a sort of counter-balance to the forces of rationalization and bureaucratization described by the German sociologist, Max Weber.(39) Following Raschke, Hansen believed that this had a regenerative, revitalizing function. Like the trickster, anomalous phenomena both accompany and stimulate change, helping us to forge a new reality outside of the structures imposed on us by the dominant institutions of our time. In other words, while these phenomena serve to disrupt and destroy the order we have made of the world, the ultimate goal is to help us rebuild a new, better order, by freeing our minds to new possibilities.
Summary
The trickster is an archetype for a wide array of liminal, paradoxical, and anti-structural characteristics that also appear in most anomalous phenomena, and in the lives and social relations of those who try to harness or scrutinize their powers. Like the trickster, anomalous experiences deconstruct our perceptions of the world and provoke the imagination, leading us to wrestle with the boundaries of our existence.
The trickster is not just a figure in mythology; he is a force that continues to disrupt our reality and change our ways of thinking. Looking at anomalous phenomena through the lens of the trickster may help us to understand why these phenomena occur, and what effect they might have on human society, and the continued evolution of our consciousness.
In the late 19th century, western scholars noted the prevalence of a certain character archetype in Indigenous American mythology that ethnologist Daniel Brinton called the Trickster. Various thinkers have since expanded on the concept, identifying tricksters in nearly every ancient and indigenous culture on Earth. Since then, some have also noted the trickster’s connections to the supernatural, or the paranormal. While the meaning of trickster tales remains hotly debated, some scholarship suggests that the trickster may, in part, be a coded representation of anomalous phenomena.
Trickster in Mythology
The tricksters of mythology are almost always male. Though they are often depicted in the form of certain animals, or animal-human hybrids, they are shapeshifters, and frequently inhabit other forms as needed. Tricksters possess great supernatural powers, and often serve important roles in creation myths and other origin stories, while also mediating between different realms. They can play heroes, villains, or agents of chaos. One thing common to nearly all of the world’s tricksters is their cunning, and their use of wit and wiles to compensate for lack of status, or braun.
Tricksters exhibit a range of behaviors that violate social norms and moral codes. They lie, cheat, and manipulate, and they engage in a lot of impulsive behaviors. Tricksters are often glutinous and have a high sexual libido, leading them to engage in promiscuous, and even predatory sexual behavior. They can also be foolish buffoons, and many tales involve comical, grotesque, and scatological elements.(1)
The ancient Greek God, Hermes, or Mercury in Roman mythology, is considered an archetypal trickster god. On the day he was born, he stole cattle from his brother, Apollo, then concealed his tracks and lied about it.(2) He was stealthy, and used both wiles and magic to operate unnoticed.(3) Hermes was also the messenger between realms, tasked with accompanying humans’ souls down to Hades, guiding them across the primordial boundary between life and death. He was also described as being an aggressive seducer of women.(4)
In Native American tradition, the Trickster most often takes the form of a Coyote, or a Raven. One of the more common trickster stories in Native American traditions has to do with the origin of fire. In the Ute tradition, Coyote steals fire from a foreign people who were guarding it for themselves, and shows his own people how to keep it in their tipis.(5) In many creation stories too, Coyote teaches humans how to catch salmon, and builds the first weir, a dam for trapping fish.(6) These stories illustrate trickster’s role as a culture hero, or one who changes human life for the better.(7)
But Coyote and other tricksters could also be adversarial, and cruel, even in their roles as creators. A myth of the Maidu people in modern-day California holds that Coyote helped create the world with a primal being called the Earth-Maker, only to sabotage many of his creations. For example, while Earth-Maker wanted to give humans the ability to revive their dead, Coyote intervened to make death permanent. Though Earth Maker tried to destroy Coyote with the help of his human creations, Coyote outwits them all, thus displaying his comparable powers.(8)
Tricksters also engage in many sociopathic and often murderous actions. In the Winnebego tradition, the trickster god, Wakdjunkaga, tricks two mother raccoons into abandoning their children, then cooks and eats the youngsters before placing one’s head on the end of a stick and setting it at the door for its mother to find. Later, he kills the mothers, too, to eat their flesh.(9)
Anansi, the trickster god of the Akan people of West Africa, often took the form of a spider, and used his cunning to manipulate others to his personal advantage.(10) The Krache people of Ghana say that Anansi promised the supreme sky-god, Wulbari, that he’d bring him a hundred slaves if granted a single cob of corn. After destroying the cob and lying about it, Anansi emotionally blackmails some villagers into giving him their own sacks of corn. He then repeats the process, manipulating people and trading the rewards until he returns to Wulbari with a hundred slaves, and is appointed Chief of His Host.(11)
One of the most popular African trickster tales involves the Yoruba god, Èṣù, mediator between humans, gods, and evil spirits.(12) Èṣù makes himself a hat that is white on one side and black on the other, then rides his horse directly between two good friends who were working on opposite ends of a field. Having seen different sides, the friends get into a fight over the color of the hat, and nearly come to blows when Èṣù intervenes. He tells the men that they were both right in their interpretation, and advises them to “reckon with Èṣù” in their dealings with one another, or to accept that there are multiple interpretations to all human interactions.(13)
In Japan, the Kitsune is a fox spirit who plays tricks on people, often to humiliate the selfish or the boastful. Many Kitsune stories involve a young man being seduced by a fox in the form of a human woman. The earliest extant Fox-wife story, contained in the 9th-century Nihon ryōiki, involves a man marrying a fox-wife and having a child with her. At the same time, the family dog has a puppy who sees through her disguise, and frightens her into changing back into a fox and running away, leaving the father and child forever.(14)
While the motives and behaviors of trickster figures vary greatly around the world, they overlap in their “in-between” and boundary-crossing nature; their subversion of social norms; and their manipulative use of cunning and deceit.(15) Tricksters disrupt peoples’ experiences of normal life and help to forge a new social reality, if only temporarily.
Western Scholarship
The abstracted concept of the trickster was a creation of western scholars. The term was introduced in an 1885 article by the American historian and ethnologist, Daniel Brinton.(16) Brinton observed that many indigenous American gods were morally ambivalent, and were described as creators and heroes while simultaneously being described as cheaters, liars, and fools.(17) Attempting to rationalize the apparent contradiction, Brinton hypothesized that the devious, buffoonish dimension of the trickster in Algonquian mythology was a corruption of earlier tales of a noble deity of light.(18)
The German American anthropologist, Franz Boas, adopted Brinton’s term in the preface to a book in 1898. Boas disagreed with Brinton’s thesis that the buffoonish elements of trickster tales were late corruptions. Instead, he theorized that these tales evolved over time from stories of glutinous, impulsive fools to stories of culture heroes who consciously acted in humanity’s best interests.(19)
In 1956, the American anthropologist and folklorist, Paul Radin, published The Trickster, a book that explored the trickster tales told by the Winnebago people of the midwest. Radin believed that the trickster represented humanity’s collective memory of an earlier, more primitive psychic state still in the process of differentiation, a psychological term for defining a sense of self apart from the outside world. In Radin’s words, trickster represented “not only the undifferentiated and distant past, but likewise the undifferentiated present within every individual.”(20)
Radin’s book included an essay by the psychiatrist and philosopher, Carl Jung. Jung noted the animalistic quality of tricksters, and viewed these figures as amalgam’s of our lowest-consciousness behaviors. He wrote that the trickster is “a collective shadow figure, a summation of all the inferior traits of character in individuals,” that he described as having been “solidified into a mythological personage.” The figure is “split off” from the observer’s consciousness and thus behaves like a distinct, autonomous being. To Jung, trickster tales are a way of creating a conscious relationship to this unconscious state, and thus, reducing its power over the psyche.(21)
Since the middle of the 20th century, scholars have generally abandoned attempts to reconcile the contradictory elements of trickster tales, instead embracing paradox as a fundamental part of the stories. In the 1970s, American Folklorist, Barbara Babcock-Abrahams, argued that the trickster “embodies the fundamental contradiction of our existence: the contradiction between the individual and society, between freedom and constraint.”(22) Using the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s concept of the peripheral, Babcock-Abrahams argued that the trickster represented, in part, the collective “dirt” of a society, or all of the rejected, negative elements of character that a society defines itself against.(23)
The Chippewa professor of Native American Studies, Gerald Vizenor, commented on the trickster in the late 1980s. Drawing insights from semiotics, postcolonialism, and deconstructuralism, Vizenor argued that we should view the trickster as a “comic discourse.”(24) Through the recitation of trickster tales, readers and listeners were able to engage their imaginations in a “language game” steeped in paradox and contradiction. Doing so allowed both listeners and readers to “imagine their liberation,” and to question the very realities that govern their existence. In Vizenor’s words, “the trickster is a sign and the world is ‘deconstructed’ in a discourse.”(25)
In 1988, Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor of African American Studies at Harvard University, devised a method of literary analysis informed by African trickster tales. Gates explored tales of Èṣù, or Esu-Elegbara, and their survival in African-American tales of the Signifying Monkey, and argues that they were symbolic of the creative potential and the indeterminacy of interpretation of African-American oral and literary traditions.(26)
Many more have commented on the trickster since, including Lewis Hyde and Emily Zobel Marshall.(27) Western scholarship is still exploring the many meanings within the world’s trickster tales, and what effect they might have on those who tell them.
Trickster and the Paranormal
One of the first western scholars to acknowledge the connection between the trickster and anomalous phenomena was the German psychologist, Lutz Müller.(28) In a 1981 article, Müller noted the fact that both psi phenomena and the trickster defied boundaries, and shared many other characteristics, including self-contradiction, incomprehensibility, and spontaneity. He argued that one could only move towards an understanding of psi phenomena if one approached them with a trickster consciousness.
Allan Combs and Mark Holland published a book in 1990 that explored the connection between the trickster archetype and Jung’s concept of synchronicity. Jung defined synchronicity as a coincidence between one’s inner, subjective experience with events in the outside world, where a causal connection appears to be lacking, but a meaningful one exists. Nearly all ancient societies had a holistic view of the world that made sense of such coincidences, and it was most clearly expressed when personified in the trickster.(29)
In his 2001 book, The Trickster and the Paranormal, the American parapsychologist, George Hansen, provided the first comprehensive exploration of all the connections between trickster tales and anomalous phenomena - or the paranormal, to use his preferred term. Hansen developed a theoretical framework for understanding these connections that drew heavily from the French-German ethnographer and folklorist, Arnold van Gennep, and his concept of liminality. Gennep observed that people in tribal societies are often required to move through a transitory, in-between stage in order to take on a new social status. He called this stage liminality, for the latin līmen, or threshold. The passage through liminality is often performed in ritual, requiring the individual to endure disorienting, and often painful experiences. Importantly, many liminal rituals involve attempts to commune with supernatural beings.
The British cultural anthropologist, Victor Turner, coined the term “anti-structural” to refer to anything that sought to invert or undermine the social hierarchies of the time. Turner saw liminality as a period for scrutinizing the structures and values of a society, and for becoming viscerally conscious of the inequalities that existed within it. Liminal phases - and liminal people, such as shamans, prophets, and mystics - were anti-structural, and they also helped societies to revitalize themselves, and to evolve through self-reflection.
Hansen argued that mythological tricksters were both liminal and anti-structural, and that all paranormal phenomena shared the same characteristics. All mediate a binary opposite, or bridge two worlds; legends of Bigfoot occupy the liminal space between primitive apes and modern humans, exhibiting signs of higher intelligence while embodying a crude, animalistic form; UFOs cross the boundary between sky and land, or heaven and earth; ghosts exist between life and death; and psi phenomena manifest between one’s subjective experience and the objective, physical world.
Hansen also observed that paranormal phenomena were “boundless” in the sense that they tend to manifest in unpredictable ways, eluding scientific investigation. UFO sightings are often brief and distant, and leave no trace of their appearance. Likewise, cryptids don’t leave a lot of tracks, and rarely do we find bones or pelts that could verifiably be attributed to an undiscovered species. Psi phenomena are notoriously difficult to measure in a laboratory setting: even in successful experiments, effect sizes are small, and skeptics often fail to replicate them. All of these things prevent rationalist, scientific investigators from proving their existence, thus maintaining their liminal status.
Hansen was also the first to argue that the examples of fraud and deceit so prevalent in most paranormal fields, including alternative healing and mediumship, were actually fundamental to the phenomena in question, just as they were fundamental to the trickster. Instances of fraud helped to delegitimize the paranormal in the eyes of western rationalists, thus relegating these phenomena to the margins of acceptable discourse, and keeping them squarely within the realm of fiction. In other words, fraud helps to maintain the liminal status of paranormal phenomena, while preventing any institutional efforts to investigate them. Like the trickster, the paranormal is inscrutable to the rational mind, and remains beyond the grasp of all established power structures.
These kinds of epistemological challenges open up a rift between the liminal figures who champion the paranormal, and the establishment thinkers who keep them at the fringes of intellectual discourse. Thus, paranormal phenomena generate subcultures that reject the authorities of the dominant system, and form new belief systems where authority is grounded in direct, anomalous experiences. Is this the trickster bringing disorder to the world?
New Perspectives
Adopting the trickster consciousness gives us fresh perspective on all manner of anomalous phenomena. For example, Charles Fort, the founder of anomalistics, compiled dozens of 19th-century accounts of frogs, fish, and other organic materials raining from the sky. Looking through the lens of the trickster, we see the contradiction and liminality inherent in creatures of the sea falling from the sky to earth, crossing the boundaries between different realms of creation. There is also something comically absurd about a rain of frogs or fish that would naturally lead one to question the sharp distinction that they had made between heaven and earth, or land and sea. In short, these kinds of rain anomalies lead us to question the boundaries or our world.
Other phenomena exhibit playful, taunting behaviors that evoke the spirit of the trickster. Victims of hauntings repeatedly report being baited by some sight or sound - such as a knock at the door - only to investigate and find that there’s no one there. AntônioVilas-Boas said that the UFO he saw over his farm darted back and forth to opposite ends of the field every time he tried approaching it. The fighter pilots scrambled to intercept a moving light over Tehran in 1976 said that it flew several miles away from them every time they closed in on it. Investigators who try to capture technical evidence of these phenomena, for example with audio and video recording equipment, often have their devices fail in the presence of anomalous activity. The phenomena invite their witnesses to approach, only to evade a close inspection. Like tales of tricksters, they disrupt our reality, forcing us to wrestle with their meaning, only to leave us with more questions than answers.
Beginning in the late 1960s, ufologists and anomalists, Jacques Vallée and John Keel, argued that UFOs, and even their supposedly “alien” pilots, were not what they seemed. Whether by technological means, or by exercising direct control over our consciousness, UFOnauts are able to make themselves and their craft appear in different forms. The visitors use this power to make their appearance conform, somewhat, to the social and metaphysical expectations of their witnesses, so that they appear vaguely plausible to the local culture, while still distinctly alien. In cases where the visitors speak with witnesses, they frequently make claims about themselves, their technologies, and their intentions that are obviously absurd, or self contradicting. In other words, the UFOnauts and other anomalous entities are shape-shifters, liars, and manipulators, just like the trickster.(32)
DMT researcher, Rick Strassman, noted that many participants in a study he did reported encounters with jovial beings that they referred to as “jesters,” “jokers,” or “imps.” Terrence McKenna referred to these beings as “machine elves.” The freelance writer, Sam Woolfe, noted how these jester entities exhibit all the behaviors of the trickster, shifting forms while confounding the experiencer by deconstructing their experience of time and space in a carnival-like environment.(33) As the Russian philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin, noted, carnival was an important medieval tradition that helped people critique the social order through subversive humor.(34) Woolfe argued that these beings helped people to confront their Jungian shadow through similar subversive humor. People on DMT and other psychedelic substances also tend to report therianthropes, or animal-human hybrids, that resemble tricksters.(35)
If we accept that anomalous phenomena are manifestations of the trickster spirit, then we can assume that they would have a similar influence on humankind.(36) The American philosopher and theologian, Carl Raschke, claimed that mythological trickster tales “perform the service of cognitive deconstruction,” by making us question our thinking. UFOs performed a similar function in deconstructing culture by making us question metaphysical assumptions, and leading us to re-examine our place in the universe. The American ufologist, Martin Kottmeyer, argued that UFO sightings in the US were more common in times when there was a loss of national pride: for example, after the launch of Sputnik in 1957, or after the Watergate scandal in 1973.(37) Whatever the direction of causation, the phenomenon may be the most active when people lose faith in the political and ideological systems by which they’re governed. Like the trickster, the UFO phenomenon antagonizes power, and nudges towards disorder.
Raschke speculated that the ultimate function of the UFO phenomenon was to drive the evolution of consciousness through a constant regeneration of information structures.(38) Hansen argued that the paranormal acts as a sort of counter-balance to the forces of rationalization and bureaucratization described by the German sociologist, Max Weber.(39) Following Raschke, Hansen believed that this had a regenerative, revitalizing function. Like the trickster, anomalous phenomena both accompany and stimulate change, helping us to forge a new reality outside of the structures imposed on us by the dominant institutions of our time. In other words, while these phenomena serve to disrupt and destroy the order we have made of the world, the ultimate goal is to help us rebuild a new, better order, by freeing our minds to new possibilities.
Summary
The trickster is an archetype for a wide array of liminal, paradoxical, and anti-structural characteristics that also appear in most anomalous phenomena, and in the lives and social relations of those who try to harness or scrutinize their powers. Like the trickster, anomalous experiences deconstruct our perceptions of the world and provoke the imagination, leading us to wrestle with the boundaries of our existence.
The trickster is not just a figure in mythology; he is a force that continues to disrupt our reality and change our ways of thinking. Looking at anomalous phenomena through the lens of the trickster may help us to understand why these phenomena occur, and what effect they might have on human society, and the continued evolution of our consciousness.
Notes:
1) For example, in the Winnebego tradition, the trickster god Wakdjunkaga separates his anus from his body then burns it with a flaming stick. This causes his intestines to fall out of his body, which he picks up and eats, not realizing that he’s eating his own flesh. Lewis Hyde noted this recurring theme of “eating the organs of appetite,” and its relationship to the desire to escape the trap of appetite, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, (1998) 2010), 23 - 38.
2) Norman Brown, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Press, (1947) 1990), 66 - 68.
3) Brown, Hermes the Thief, 3 - 11.
4) Brown, Hermes the Thief, 8 - 10.
5) A. L. Kroeber, “Ute Tales,” Journal of American Folk-lore 14, no. 52 (January - March, 1901), 252 - 60, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.30000099904900&seq=9; A derivative retelling of this story is found in “The Theft of Fire” in Native American Myths: Collected 1636–1919, edited by Rosalind Kerven (Morpeth: Talking Stone, 2018); a similar tale has Coyote seal tobacco from the Sun, only to have it stolen by humans. American Indian Myths and Legends. Selected and Edited by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 377 - 79.
6) Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, 18.
7) In shasta tradition, a Coyote spirit saves the world from ten evil moons keeping it battered by storms in an eternal winter. Editor Kerven, “The Ten Moons” in Native American Myths, 248 - 52.
8) Roland B. Dixon, Maidu Texts, Publications of the American Ethnological Society IV, editor Franz Boas (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1912), 4 - 69, https://archive.org/details/rosettaproject_nmu_vertxt-1/page/n105/mode/2up; “Coyote and Earth Maker” in Native American Myths, editor Kerven, 233 - 41.
9) Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York, USA: Schocken Books, (1956) 1972), 17 - 18, 30 - 31.
10) Anansi trickster tales migrated with the Atlantic Slave Trade, and survived amongst African Americans in the figure of Br’er, or Brother Rabbit, who frequently outsmarted figures of authority with cunning and wit, bending social mores to suit his ends. For a survey of the debate on the origins of the Brer Rabbit Stories, see Emily Zobel Marshall, American Trickster: Trauma, Tradition and Brer Rabbit (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 18 - 36.
11) African Myths and Legends, edited by O. B. Duane (London, UK: Brockhampton Press, 1998), 53 - 57.
12) Tales of Esu survived in the Afro-American world through stories of spirits and deities known collectively as the Signifying Monkey. For a wide-ranging discussion of Esu and his influence on the Signifying Monkey, see Henry Louis-Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 13 - 20.
13) Louis-Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey, 32 - 35.
14) Janet Goff, “Foxes in Japanese Culture: Beautiful or Beastly?” Japan Quarterly 44, no. 2 (April/ June, 1997), 67; Michael Bathgate, The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Culture: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities (New York, USA: Routledge, 2004), 38 - 46.
15) For a list of typical trickster attributes, see Barbara Babcock-Abrahams, ””A Tolerated Margin of Mess”: Trickster Tales Reconsidered,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 11, no. 3 (March, 1975), 159 - 160; George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal (Xlibris, 2001), 28 - 32.
16) Daniel Brinton, “The Chief God of the Algonkins, in His Characters as a Chief and Liar,” American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal 7, (May 1885): 137 - 139; Hansen, The Trickster, 433.
17) Andrzej Szyjewski, “In the Shadow of Trickster. Research Fields and Controversies in the Discourse on the Trickster Complex in the Studies of Myth,” Studio Religiologica 53, no, 3 (2020), 165.
18) Daniel Brinton, The Myths of the New World: A Treatise on the Symbolism and Methodology of the Red Race of America (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1896) 164, 198. See also Barbara Babcock-Abrahams, “‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess:’ Trickster Tales Reconsidered,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 11, no. 3 (March, 1975), 162.
19) F. Boas, Introduction, in J. Teit, Traditions of the Thompson Indians of British Columbia (Boston–New York, 1898), 4, 10; See also Szyjewski, “In the Shadow,” 165.
20) Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York, USA: Shocken Books, (1956) 1972), 198. For a concise summary of Radin’s views on the trickster, see Babcock-Abrahams, “‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess,’” 163.
21) Sam Woolfe, “Why Do Jesters and Tricksters Appear in the DMT Experience?”, SamWoolfe.com, February 4, 2019, https://samwoolfe.com/2019/02/jesters-tricksters-dmt-experience.html.
22) Babcock-Abrahams also postulated that all trickster tales are part of an “ideal” syntagmatic arrangement that corresponded to Arnold van Gennep’s concept of the rite of passage. Babcock-Abrahams, “‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess,’” 161.
23) Babcock-Abrahams also postulated that all trickster tales are part of an “ideal” syntagmatic arrangement that corresponded to Arnold van Gennep’s concept of the rite of passage. Babcock-Abrahams, “‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess,’” 152, 168 - 181.
24) Gerald Vizenor, The Trickster of Liberty: Native Heirs to a Wild Baronage (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, (1988) 2005), x - xi.
25) Gerald Vizenor, “Trickster Discourse: Comic Holotropes and Language Games,” in Narrative Chance, Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1989), 194.
26) For a wide-ranging discussion of Esu, or Esu-Elegbara, see Louis-Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey, 5 - 43.
27) Notable examples include Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes the World, and Emily Zobel Marshall’s exploration of African-American Brer Rabbit tales, American Trickster.
28) Lutz Müller, “Psi und der Archetyp des Tricksters,” Zeitschrift für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie 23, no. 3/4 (1981), 165 - 81. https://opus-magnum.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/mueller_psi_und_der_archetyp_des_tricksters.pdf.
29) Allan Combs and Mark Holland, Synchronicity: Science, Myth, and the Trickster (New York, USA: Paragon House, 1990), xxxi, 145.
30) For more on Vilas-Boas see our coverage of his case at https://thinkanomalous.com/vilas-boas-abduction.html.
31) See our coverage of the Tehran 1976 UFO sighting case at https://thinkanomalous.com/tehran-ufo.html.
32) Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia (H. Regnery Company, 1969); John Keel, Operation Trojan Horse (USA: Putnam, 1970).
33) Sam Woofle, “Why Do Jesters”; Terence McKenna discusses DMT and the “elves” in writing and talks such as this one given in December 1982: “Podcast 270 – “Tryptamine Consciousness,’” Psychedelic Salon, June 10, 2011, https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-270-tryptamine-consciousness.
34) Sam Woofle, “Why Do Jesters.”
35) David Wyndham Lawrence et al., “Phenomenology and Content of the Inhaled N, N-Dimethyltryptamine (N, N-DMT) Experience,” Preprint. Submitted in April 2022, 10. https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-1559063/v1/a9a8a7fe-c1b3-46ce-936a-e932db9d3b6a.pdf?c=1651162488.
36) Hansen, The Trickster, 110 - 14.
37) Hansen, The Trickster, 114.
38) Carl Raschke, "UFOs - Ultraterrestrial Agents of Culutral Deconstruction," in Cyberbiological Studies of the Imaginal Component in the UFO Contact Experience, editor Dennis Stillings (Arhceus 5, 1989), 30 - 31.
39) Hansen, The Trickster, 97 - 115. Similarly, Jeffrey Bennett argues that the miracles at Fatima inspired a religious revitalization movement that countered the rational, scientific atheism of the new Republic. Jeffrey Bennett, When the Sun Danced (London, UK: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 165 - 99.
Sources:
Babcock-Abrahams, Barbara. ”’A Tolerated Margin of Mess:’ Trickster Tales Reconsidered.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 11, no. 3 (March, 1975), 147-186.
Bathgate, Michael. The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Culture: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities. New York, USA: Routledge, 2004.
Bennett, Jeffrey. When the Sun Danced. London, UK: University of Virginia Press, 2012.
Boas, Franz. “Introduction,” in J. Teit, Traditions of the Thompson Indians of British Columbia. Boston–New York, 1898.
Brinton, Daniel. “The Chief God of the Algonkins, in His Characters as a Chief and Liar,” American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal 7, (May 1885): 137 – 139.
Brinton, Daniel. The Myths of the New World: A Treatise on the Symbolism and Methodology of the Red Race of America (Philadelphia, USA: David McKay, 1896).
Brown, Norman. Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Press, (1947) 1990.
Combs, Allan, and Mark Holland. Synchronicity: Science, Myth, and the Trickster. New York, USA: Paragon House, 1990. https://archive.org/details/synchronicitysci00comb/page/n31/mode/2up.
Dixon, Roland B. “Maidu Texts.” Publications of the American Ethnological Society IV. Editor, Franz Boas. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1912.
https://archive.org/details/rosettaproject_nmu_vertxt-1/page/n105/mode/2up.
Duane, O. B., editor. African Myths and Legends. London, UK: Brockhampton Press, 1998.
Goff, Janet. “Foxes in Japanese Culture: Beautiful or Beastly?” Japan Quarterly 44, no. 2 (April/ June, 1997).
Hansen, George P. The Trickster and the Paranormal (Xlibris, 2001).
Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. New York, USA: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, (1998) 2010.
Keel, John. Operation Trojan Horse. USA: Putnam, 1970.
Kerven, Rosalind, editor. Native American Myths: Collected 1636–1919. Morpeth: Talking Stone, 2018.
Kroeber, A. L. “Ute Tales.” Journal of American Folk-lore 14, no. 52 (January - March, 1901), 252-260. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.30000099904900&seq=9.
Lawrence et al., David Wyndham. “Phenomenology and Content of the Inhaled N, N-Dimethyltryptamine (N, N-DMT) Experience,” Preprint. Submitted in April 2022. https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-1559063/v1/a9a8a7fe-c1b3-46ce-936a-e932db9d3b6a.pdf?c=1651162488.
Louis-Gates Jr., Henry. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York, USA: Oxford University Press, 1988.
McKenna, Terence. December 1982, “Podcast 270 – “Tryptamine Consciousness,’” Psychedelic Salon, June 10, 2011, https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-270-tryptamine-consciousness.
Müller, Lutz. “Psi und der Archetyp des Tricksters.” Zeitschrift für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie 23, no. 3/4 (1981), 165-181. https://opus-magnum.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/mueller_psi_und_der_archetyp_des_tricksters.pdf.
Radin, Paul. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. New York, USA: Schocken Books, (1956) 1972.
Raschke, Carl. "UFOs - Ultraterrestrial Agents of Culutral Deconstruction," in Cyberbiological Studies of the Imaginal Component in the UFO Contact Experience, editor Dennis Stillings (Arhceus 5, 1989), 30 – 31.
Szyjewski, Andrzej. “In the Shadow of Trickster. Research Fields and Controversies in the Discourse on the Trickster Complex in the Studies of Myth.” Studio Religiologica 53, no, 3 (2020).
Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. H. Regnery Company, 1969. https://archive.org/details/passporttomagoni0000vall_m8g5.
Vizenor, Gerald. The Trickster of Liberty: Native Heirs to a Wild Baronage. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, (1988) 2005.
Vizenor, Gerald. “Trickster Discourse: Comic Holotropes and Language Games,” in Narrative Chance, Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1989.
Woofle, Sam. “Why Do Jesters and Tricksters Appear in the DMT Experience?” SamWoolfe.com. February 4, 2019. https://samwoolfe.com/2019/02/jesters-tricksters-dmt-experience.html.
Zobel Marshall, Emily. American Trickster: Trauma, Tradition and Brer Rabbit. London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.
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1) For example, in the Winnebego tradition, the trickster god Wakdjunkaga separates his anus from his body then burns it with a flaming stick. This causes his intestines to fall out of his body, which he picks up and eats, not realizing that he’s eating his own flesh. Lewis Hyde noted this recurring theme of “eating the organs of appetite,” and its relationship to the desire to escape the trap of appetite, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, (1998) 2010), 23 - 38.
2) Norman Brown, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Press, (1947) 1990), 66 - 68.
3) Brown, Hermes the Thief, 3 - 11.
4) Brown, Hermes the Thief, 8 - 10.
5) A. L. Kroeber, “Ute Tales,” Journal of American Folk-lore 14, no. 52 (January - March, 1901), 252 - 60, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.30000099904900&seq=9; A derivative retelling of this story is found in “The Theft of Fire” in Native American Myths: Collected 1636–1919, edited by Rosalind Kerven (Morpeth: Talking Stone, 2018); a similar tale has Coyote seal tobacco from the Sun, only to have it stolen by humans. American Indian Myths and Legends. Selected and Edited by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 377 - 79.
6) Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, 18.
7) In shasta tradition, a Coyote spirit saves the world from ten evil moons keeping it battered by storms in an eternal winter. Editor Kerven, “The Ten Moons” in Native American Myths, 248 - 52.
8) Roland B. Dixon, Maidu Texts, Publications of the American Ethnological Society IV, editor Franz Boas (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1912), 4 - 69, https://archive.org/details/rosettaproject_nmu_vertxt-1/page/n105/mode/2up; “Coyote and Earth Maker” in Native American Myths, editor Kerven, 233 - 41.
9) Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York, USA: Schocken Books, (1956) 1972), 17 - 18, 30 - 31.
10) Anansi trickster tales migrated with the Atlantic Slave Trade, and survived amongst African Americans in the figure of Br’er, or Brother Rabbit, who frequently outsmarted figures of authority with cunning and wit, bending social mores to suit his ends. For a survey of the debate on the origins of the Brer Rabbit Stories, see Emily Zobel Marshall, American Trickster: Trauma, Tradition and Brer Rabbit (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 18 - 36.
11) African Myths and Legends, edited by O. B. Duane (London, UK: Brockhampton Press, 1998), 53 - 57.
12) Tales of Esu survived in the Afro-American world through stories of spirits and deities known collectively as the Signifying Monkey. For a wide-ranging discussion of Esu and his influence on the Signifying Monkey, see Henry Louis-Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 13 - 20.
13) Louis-Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey, 32 - 35.
14) Janet Goff, “Foxes in Japanese Culture: Beautiful or Beastly?” Japan Quarterly 44, no. 2 (April/ June, 1997), 67; Michael Bathgate, The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Culture: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities (New York, USA: Routledge, 2004), 38 - 46.
15) For a list of typical trickster attributes, see Barbara Babcock-Abrahams, ””A Tolerated Margin of Mess”: Trickster Tales Reconsidered,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 11, no. 3 (March, 1975), 159 - 160; George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal (Xlibris, 2001), 28 - 32.
16) Daniel Brinton, “The Chief God of the Algonkins, in His Characters as a Chief and Liar,” American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal 7, (May 1885): 137 - 139; Hansen, The Trickster, 433.
17) Andrzej Szyjewski, “In the Shadow of Trickster. Research Fields and Controversies in the Discourse on the Trickster Complex in the Studies of Myth,” Studio Religiologica 53, no, 3 (2020), 165.
18) Daniel Brinton, The Myths of the New World: A Treatise on the Symbolism and Methodology of the Red Race of America (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1896) 164, 198. See also Barbara Babcock-Abrahams, “‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess:’ Trickster Tales Reconsidered,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 11, no. 3 (March, 1975), 162.
19) F. Boas, Introduction, in J. Teit, Traditions of the Thompson Indians of British Columbia (Boston–New York, 1898), 4, 10; See also Szyjewski, “In the Shadow,” 165.
20) Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York, USA: Shocken Books, (1956) 1972), 198. For a concise summary of Radin’s views on the trickster, see Babcock-Abrahams, “‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess,’” 163.
21) Sam Woolfe, “Why Do Jesters and Tricksters Appear in the DMT Experience?”, SamWoolfe.com, February 4, 2019, https://samwoolfe.com/2019/02/jesters-tricksters-dmt-experience.html.
22) Babcock-Abrahams also postulated that all trickster tales are part of an “ideal” syntagmatic arrangement that corresponded to Arnold van Gennep’s concept of the rite of passage. Babcock-Abrahams, “‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess,’” 161.
23) Babcock-Abrahams also postulated that all trickster tales are part of an “ideal” syntagmatic arrangement that corresponded to Arnold van Gennep’s concept of the rite of passage. Babcock-Abrahams, “‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess,’” 152, 168 - 181.
24) Gerald Vizenor, The Trickster of Liberty: Native Heirs to a Wild Baronage (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, (1988) 2005), x - xi.
25) Gerald Vizenor, “Trickster Discourse: Comic Holotropes and Language Games,” in Narrative Chance, Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1989), 194.
26) For a wide-ranging discussion of Esu, or Esu-Elegbara, see Louis-Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey, 5 - 43.
27) Notable examples include Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes the World, and Emily Zobel Marshall’s exploration of African-American Brer Rabbit tales, American Trickster.
28) Lutz Müller, “Psi und der Archetyp des Tricksters,” Zeitschrift für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie 23, no. 3/4 (1981), 165 - 81. https://opus-magnum.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/mueller_psi_und_der_archetyp_des_tricksters.pdf.
29) Allan Combs and Mark Holland, Synchronicity: Science, Myth, and the Trickster (New York, USA: Paragon House, 1990), xxxi, 145.
30) For more on Vilas-Boas see our coverage of his case at https://thinkanomalous.com/vilas-boas-abduction.html.
31) See our coverage of the Tehran 1976 UFO sighting case at https://thinkanomalous.com/tehran-ufo.html.
32) Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia (H. Regnery Company, 1969); John Keel, Operation Trojan Horse (USA: Putnam, 1970).
33) Sam Woofle, “Why Do Jesters”; Terence McKenna discusses DMT and the “elves” in writing and talks such as this one given in December 1982: “Podcast 270 – “Tryptamine Consciousness,’” Psychedelic Salon, June 10, 2011, https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-270-tryptamine-consciousness.
34) Sam Woofle, “Why Do Jesters.”
35) David Wyndham Lawrence et al., “Phenomenology and Content of the Inhaled N, N-Dimethyltryptamine (N, N-DMT) Experience,” Preprint. Submitted in April 2022, 10. https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-1559063/v1/a9a8a7fe-c1b3-46ce-936a-e932db9d3b6a.pdf?c=1651162488.
36) Hansen, The Trickster, 110 - 14.
37) Hansen, The Trickster, 114.
38) Carl Raschke, "UFOs - Ultraterrestrial Agents of Culutral Deconstruction," in Cyberbiological Studies of the Imaginal Component in the UFO Contact Experience, editor Dennis Stillings (Arhceus 5, 1989), 30 - 31.
39) Hansen, The Trickster, 97 - 115. Similarly, Jeffrey Bennett argues that the miracles at Fatima inspired a religious revitalization movement that countered the rational, scientific atheism of the new Republic. Jeffrey Bennett, When the Sun Danced (London, UK: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 165 - 99.
Sources:
Babcock-Abrahams, Barbara. ”’A Tolerated Margin of Mess:’ Trickster Tales Reconsidered.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 11, no. 3 (March, 1975), 147-186.
Bathgate, Michael. The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Culture: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities. New York, USA: Routledge, 2004.
Bennett, Jeffrey. When the Sun Danced. London, UK: University of Virginia Press, 2012.
Boas, Franz. “Introduction,” in J. Teit, Traditions of the Thompson Indians of British Columbia. Boston–New York, 1898.
Brinton, Daniel. “The Chief God of the Algonkins, in His Characters as a Chief and Liar,” American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal 7, (May 1885): 137 – 139.
Brinton, Daniel. The Myths of the New World: A Treatise on the Symbolism and Methodology of the Red Race of America (Philadelphia, USA: David McKay, 1896).
Brown, Norman. Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Press, (1947) 1990.
Combs, Allan, and Mark Holland. Synchronicity: Science, Myth, and the Trickster. New York, USA: Paragon House, 1990. https://archive.org/details/synchronicitysci00comb/page/n31/mode/2up.
Dixon, Roland B. “Maidu Texts.” Publications of the American Ethnological Society IV. Editor, Franz Boas. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1912.
https://archive.org/details/rosettaproject_nmu_vertxt-1/page/n105/mode/2up.
Duane, O. B., editor. African Myths and Legends. London, UK: Brockhampton Press, 1998.
Goff, Janet. “Foxes in Japanese Culture: Beautiful or Beastly?” Japan Quarterly 44, no. 2 (April/ June, 1997).
Hansen, George P. The Trickster and the Paranormal (Xlibris, 2001).
Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. New York, USA: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, (1998) 2010.
Keel, John. Operation Trojan Horse. USA: Putnam, 1970.
Kerven, Rosalind, editor. Native American Myths: Collected 1636–1919. Morpeth: Talking Stone, 2018.
Kroeber, A. L. “Ute Tales.” Journal of American Folk-lore 14, no. 52 (January - March, 1901), 252-260. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.30000099904900&seq=9.
Lawrence et al., David Wyndham. “Phenomenology and Content of the Inhaled N, N-Dimethyltryptamine (N, N-DMT) Experience,” Preprint. Submitted in April 2022. https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-1559063/v1/a9a8a7fe-c1b3-46ce-936a-e932db9d3b6a.pdf?c=1651162488.
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Think Anomalous is created by Jason Charbonneau. Research by Jason Charbonneau. Illustrations by V. R. Laurence. Some illustrations from earlier videos by Colin Campbell. Music by Josh Chamberland. Animation by Brendan Barr. Sound design by Will Mountain and Josh Chamberland.