The Trickster and the Paranormal

Like other reviewers here, if I could, I would give this book SIX stars. I am both a Native American, familiar with our Trickster stories, and an anthropologist, familiar with Levi-Strauss, Victor Turner, and structural anthropology. The synthesis of anthropology and folklore achieved in this book by Mr. Hansen is amazing and wonderful!The chapter topics include:-An Overview of Tricksters from Mythology, Folklore, and Elsewhere-Ernest Hartmann's Mental Boundaries-Victor Turner's Concept of Anti-structure-Mysticism, Holy Madness, and Fools for God-Shamanism and its Sham-Michael Winkelman on Magico-religious Practitioners-Max Weber, Charisma, and the Disenchantment of the World-Cultural Change and the Paranormal-Prominent "Psychics"-Conjurors and the Paranormal-CSICOP and the Debunkers-Small Groups and the Paranormal-Alternative Religions and Psi-Institutions and the Paranormal-Anti-structure and the History of Psychical Research-Unbounded Conditions-Government Disinformation-Hoaxes and the Paranormal-Reflexivity and the Trickster-Laboratory Research on Psi-Totemism and the Primitive Mind-Literary Criticism, Meaning, and the Trickster-The Imagination-ParanoiaBy its very nature, the paranormal is the area "betwixt-and-between", the grey places, the "neither fish nor fowl"...as the essence of antistructure, it is the place of dreams and frauds, and as soon as you name it, it retreats...it defines boundaries of the acceptable by being unacceptable, of the known by remaining unknown...and try to trap it, it slithers away through the door you forgot to close. If you want to know more about this wonderful book, visit the website for it at [...] ...or better yet BUY IT! Your world will never be the same ;-))

Despite more than a hundred years of the highest quality scientific research which, to any genuinely rational mind, demonstrates the existence of several kinds of paranormal phenomena (telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis being the major ones), parapsychology research remains marginalized, rejected and actively persecuted. As a psychologist that tells me there are powerful, irrational forces involved. Hansen's excellent book surveys many of these and is must reading for anyone who really wants to understand this area.Personally the data in the book depressed me in many ways, for I am one of those who attempts to make scientific sense of this area (even though I know there's much more to the world than that) and it's not cheering to be reminded of these difficulties. But we don't solve problems by pretending they are not there, so I am grateful to Hansen for this authoritative reminder.

If you want to know the truth.. read this book..

I came across this book after reading  Randi's Prize: What sceptics say about the paranormal, why they are wrong and why it matters  by Robert McLuhan. The sample chapter seemed to promise a whole new look at the paranormal and I was hoping it could be another well-sourced, lucid labor of love like McLuhan's work. The title was especially intriguing: could paranormal activity be tied to the ancient concept of a trickster spirit, like Loki?The book has a decent mission, to make sense of the tendency towards fraud, trickery and pranks in the Western paranormal world, and it indeed is broaching new theoretical territory for both skeptics and believers. But it fails to really accomplish this mission to the satisfaction of a critical reader. The writing style is uneven, full of rambling asides and typos, and leaves much to be desired. Hansen's ability to make sense of the world seems to be stuck at the undergraduate level, and this tome indeed reads like an undergraduate thesis for a low-quality state college. It does contain a lot of new information for someone like me who is new to this field, but I would not recommend this book as a solid introduction for skeptical people trying to get a parapsychologist's take on the problem of hoaxes.Hansen often acts like a crank, belittling social scientists who were unable to pierce the paranormal mystery as deeply as he has done. The phrase "white man" which Hansen uses over and over to describe academics who come to different conclusions than him gets tired really fast, because Hansen is himself a white man, and many of the supporting researchers he cites like Max Weber and Carl Jung were also white men. He also mentions brilliant people who don't fall into his racial-sexual category like Henry Louis Gates, Jr. but does not discuss them as much as Jung or Weber, which is entirely appropriate, because Jung and Weber were more universal in outlook, and Hansen is trying to prove a universal anthropological constant. Hansen needs to get over his self-hating hang-up and acknowledge that white men have always done a disproportionate amount of thoughtful and careful sociological research, and that balancing this with the voices of the subaltern requires equally careful thought to avoid confusing anecdotes with real data. But this would require him to be more honest with himself.As I said, Hansen is aiming for a "universal anthropological constant", and I do not think such a thing exists in the world of tradition. If it does exist Hansen does not prove it to anyone's satisfaction, and I think that this is his fundamental dishonesty. For example, his trickster motif is a bachelor god, and he claims (essentially based on myth and anecdote) that paranormal research often leads to the breakup of marriages or is caused by/causes the death of a spouse. It all "feels" so right and accurate, until I actually relate it to my own experience as a parapsychologist in Japan. All the researchers I have met in this country are married. Many Japanese charismatics historically were also married throughout their lives: Miki Nakayama, Sayo Kitamura, Nao Deguchi, Onisaburo Deguchi, Mokichi Okada, Tenmei Okamoto, etc. I have no doubt that Western charismatics often transgress social boundaries, as Hansen describes at length, and become segregated from their communities. But Japanese charismatics scarcely ever do so. Even in the case of Sayo Kitamura, who made every effort to destroy traditions and social boundaries, she continued to love her family and her spiritual movement was managed and continued after her death by her relatives. Many of the other people I mention regarded themselves as inheriting a true tradition which was not separate from answering the needs of their family and friends. Do they simply not live up to the "universal motif", or do they have their own, Japanese motif?Hansen does not seem to understand his own methodology and the book suffers deeply for it. If the paranormal really is about harnessing a trickster motive, then it is irrelevant to that end whether or not paranormal effects are actually real! Yet Hansen is stuck in the muddled, materialist world, calling Castaneda's work a "hoax" and "fiction" rather than an accomplishment of a successful trickster, and sympathetic researchers "gullible" rather than swayed from materialism into the world of tricksters. Often it seems like he is taking up a rationalist position himself, without realizing that parapsychology is just as opposed to the trickster worldview as debunker-style skepticism. He does not think hard enough to make his trickster motif a truly beneficial one which can be worked seamlessly into his historical research to build a basis for counteracting the modern world.

An excellent exploration and commentary on the many aspects of paranormal phenomena.I recommend it to those who are still curious and unsatisified with mainstream explanations. I also predict that recognition of this work's true value won't be for a long time - such is western civilisation's current situation.

A must read for anyone interested in the paranormal.

Paranormal occurrences, flying saucers, ghosts, psi, messages from beyond or the presence of spirit guides, have never been conclusively demonstrated. Hansen writes: “Both parapsychologists and their critics acknowledge that psi experiments are not fully repeatable. Psi is detected only intermittently, and the effects are usually weak. Some researchers succeed; others don’t. If the results were strong and robust and anyone could easily replicate them, there would be no controversy, and this book would not have been written”.Hansen shows, almost clearly, that the majority of examples of paranormal activity unfortunately (or fortunately!) can be explained by human gullibility, trickery and hoaxes. Yet something mysterious remains. Hansen’s proposition is that the force that inspires all paranormal manifestation, especially the real fakes, is itself a trickster, a fraud and a charlatan. This intimation is all that there is of “The Trickster”. We are foolish to think in terms of proof. When we feel puzzled and faced with the enormity and sheer silence of eternity; we must be aware, once our gullibility has been exposed, that whenever we feel this way we are in the presence of The Trickster. Wallace Stevens described it better than Hansen could ever hope to do in his poem “The Snowman”. It is the “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”.On his back cover, George Hansen is pictured in the cold, against a snowy hillside, in a frisson of black and white, the “binary extremes” that feature in his book. The sight of the photographer might have suggested something paranormal to his subject because the warmth of a smile is captured as it begins to cross his features.“I came in from the cold” intones Iggy Pop on the track “Stray Dog” from the September 2015 New Order album “Complete Music”. The sense of a wild animal from the steppes, a familiar of “grimpen mires” who chose to leave them, plays out loud, far from trackless wastes, in the safety of my own perchery. In one snarl the dog inveighs against those that declare “the secret of happiness is unconditional love”; and suggests that it might be more realistic to rely upon a more down to earth version of love as: “I just wanted to make you smile”. Is this wild dog “The Trickster”? Is this feeling of awe at the novelty of a new creation associated with the power of “psi”? Is this Wordsworth’s “intimation of immortality”? Are these dubious insights an acknowledgement of something REAL? Is this proof of the Apostle Paul’s “faith” which “is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”? What IS magic and the paranormal if it is not the realisation of dreams we did not even know that we were dreaming?A main argument of this book is that the paranormal “manifests” at times of duress and change or cultural transition. Hansen chooses “the sixties” for example when there was a rise in UFO sightings and heightened experiences that have been called paranormal. There was a greater interest then than now in telepathy, UFOs, mediums and ghosts. Few are interested in researching the subject now; even though Hansen never ceases to be amazed that the entertainment industry has invested heavily in ensuring that it might yet frighten us again. Hansen despairs on page 321: “ The driving topics included psi-mediated experimenter effects, retroactive PK, the goal-oriented nature of psi, divergence, task-complexity independence, conformance behavior, and the source of psi problem. Probably only a few dozen people in the world have a working knowledge of these terms”.Hansen says, in many places, that his concepts are difficult to grasp. This is true; but what makes this such a sad book; is that it is the meandering formlessness of the work (which Hansen remarks upon at several junctures) that makes them so. Towards the end of the book we read, “By now the reader may have lost the threads of my exposition”. A little further on page 310: “I will focus on correspondences, correlations, and patterns – instead of causes. This way of thinking is unusual, and readers should not become alarmed if they do not immediately grasp it”.Hansen writes again and again of “liminality” and of “the betwixt and between”; of ambiguity and other things; when he means that there is a window between the known and the unknown and through this window we see confusion, which is itself a glimpse of enlightenment. This is the wintry landscape of The Trickster. “Prophets and artists tend to be liminal and marginal people, “edge-men”, who strive with a passionate sincerity to rid themselves of the clichés associated with status incumbency and role-playing and to enter into vital relations with other men in fact or imagination”.The interests of the reader are served badly by the use of the word “The Trickster”. A person or spirit or devil is not meant at all. Hansen can be seen interviewed on YouTube saying that the trickster is no jester but just a concept.The self-confessed author obfuscates what he has to impart, in so many ways, that Hansen’s intention appears to have been no more than to collate arcane reading with footnotes and a bibliography to make his labours look “peer-reviewed”.The pages read like the turgid ruminations of one institutionalised for so long that he has had time to fashion and reformulate madness until it bears a semblance of reason.“This association between mysticism and deception is long-standing, and many times it is difficult to tell the difference between a holy man and con artist, or even if it is meaningful to speak of any such distinction”.“The supernatural is irrational, but it is also real. It holds enormous power. We ignore it at our peril. It operates not only on the individual psyche, but at a collective level, influencing entire cultures”.“Parapsychology demonstrates that our thoughts, including our unconscious thoughts,, are not limited to our brains. They move of their own accord and influence the physical world”.

This book is absolutely fascinating. I bought it to increase my knowledge on the paranormal and this book sent me down various anthropology and sociology rabbit holes. It is a bit hard going to begin with for the layman but if you stick with it, it is worth it. The subject is very well researched and the author takes you through it. There are many more books and essays on the liminal I want to read after reading this book. Makes you really think.

I've read a lot of books on all varieties of subject matter related to that of this book - a LOT. After a certain point, ennui can set in and the vast majority of books can sometimes appear to be much of a muchness, nothing much new is learned, and the most one can usually hope for is a sense of mild interest, or tidbits of new information.This book is different - for me it intoduced a whole new paradigm I wasn't entirely familiar with, and I found it utterly fascinating from start to finish. I found this book to be mind expanding, thought provoking, riveting & actually one of those rare books I personally consider a work of art. It is a deep shame this book is not destined to be more popular, but that kind of is the (or a) point of Hansen's book - that such views are by neccesity of fringe interest.Excellent - highly recommended (Also, thanks to another review here, I am now reading The Daemonic Reality by Patrick Harpur, half way through and that also is exceptionally interesting so far).Now, having said 5 out of 5, here's a few critical comments:1) The book cover is one of those dreadfully cheap ones. For such a wonderful book, a better cover was warranted imo.2) As others have mentioned, spelling & grammer is occassionaly incorrect. I personally didn't mind that, as it isn't too frequent. And I'm a forgiving kind of chap :)3) Hansen has a meandering, vague way of writing *some may not enjoy*. Personally, I loved it.4) I don't personally believe or buy everything Hansen has to say, especially not literally. If that's how you look at life (literally & linearly), you may not enjoy this book. It is more subtle, and circular, and as Hansen may say, reflexive than that. It is about opening your mind to think in different ways - not about being TOLD what is true or real!Anyways, all that said, this is the sort of book you will either absolutely love (if you "get" it), or probably hate (if you don't "get" it). It is worth the risk to purchase this book (actually, you can read the intoduction online somewhere, which gives a great flavour of the book - I did, then I bought it) in case you fit into the first category.Thanks George P Hansen. :)

I borrowed a copy of this book before buying it myself. I'd heard such great things about it that I was intrigued. It's not the easiest read, by any means, but it's compelling and it's important. Take time over it - it can't be skimmed - sometimes I'd have to read paragraphs twice or even three times to make them sink in. But it's a life-changing book.

Fascinating book written by an equally fascinating man . Really excellent book for anyone interested in Parapsychology & the Paranormal . I found it an easier read by just choosing the chapters that resonated first . Historically informative & brilliantly written . The trickster is alive & well in modern day society , I personally know a few !