art by deb komitor
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I’ve been reading a book called The Trickster and the Paranormal by George Hansen, published in 2001. The book is dense, often academically dry, packed with mythological references, theories about what the paranormal is – or isn’t. There’s even stuff about UFOs and encounters. But all of it relates back to the trickster, the vehicle Hanses uses to explore psychic phenomena.
Hansen regards the trickster as deception, a perpetrator of hoaxes, a liar and a cheat – in other words, the person you hope your son or daughter won’t marry! Hansen talks about Jung’s archetypes, but defines it, for the purpose of his book, as “a pattern that can manifest at multiple levels.” He believes the trickster is an archetype, as Jung said, but defined it as an “abstract constellation of characteristics” that includes:
- Loss of status
- Disruption
- Boundary crossing
- Deception
- Violation of sexual mores
- Supernatural manifestations
Hansen isn’t a debunker. He isn’t exactly a skeptic, either. He worked in lab-based parapsychology for eight years, three at the Institute for Parapsychology in Durham, North Carolina, and five years at Psychophysical Research Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey. By his own admission, he has been personally involved with a number of psychic, UFO, and occult subcultures, and also helped start a skeptic group. “Friends of mine practice ritual magic; others are professional mediums; a number tell me that aliens have abducted them; and still others admit to me privately that they are phony psychics.”
Obviously, this guy isn’t your ordinary researcher. His central thesis is that psychic phenomena are “associated with processes of destructuring.” From what I can gather from what I’ve read so far, “destructuring” seems to be the point where monumental shifts occur in society’s mass beliefs, where we reach a tipping point. Hansen cites the sixties rise of the hippie subculture, for instance, as a period of destructuring. Well, yeah, it was. And the Vietnam war was the pivot on which that destructuring spun. I would venture to say that Occupy Wall Street belonged in this “destructuring” category.
He takes on debunker James Randi, Israeli psychic Uri Geller, UFOs, abductions, shamanism, Houdini, hypnosis, CSICOPS, reincarnation, near-death experiences. In Hansen’s cosmology, all these areas are subject to and often subsumed by the trickster. The biggest problem I have with Hansen’s book, other than the fact that the book is twelve years old and much has surfaced since then, is his definition of the trickster.
The trickster isn’t just about deception. It’s often an in-your-face sort of thing, where we are confronted with our shadow selves. It can manifest itself globally, politically, within organized religion. A politician ior pundit who is against gay marriage, for instance, suddenly changes his stance because his son or daughter comes out as gay. Or he himself turns out to be gay. Hours after Pope Benedict announced his resignation, lightning struck the Vatican. Very Biblical, right? It’s the Cosmic Clown in action.
Yes, the trickster archetype – that clown – can be – and often is – everything in Hansen’s handy list. But it’s also much more. The trickster is sometimes playfully mischievous, as it was when Rob experienced two successive Zen license plates. It can also goof on you, poke fun at you, as it did during this word game. It can hint at a creative path. It can relate to extreme weather phenomenon that seems to be tailored to seize our attention about climate change. And yes, the trickster can be dark, as it was for Heath Ledger and David Carradine. Or global.
The trickster archetype, the clown synchro, has many masks, many manifestations, and they don’t all have negative connotations. The trickster can be an alchemist that teaches us how to mix different elements in our lives to create what we desire. It can be the object or animal (coyote in Native American mythology) that relays a message or brings a communication from the dead (owl, raven). It can be a poltergeist, an ally, a Smeagol in disguise that teaches us something vital about ourselves. It can be wrapped up in something as exotic as an alien encounter and in something as prosaic as a marriage, a friendship, or in something as significant as death.
When my father was dying, he was in an assisted living facility in Georgia where my sister was the head nurse. We had spent all day in his room, organizing his stuff, making sure his favorite classical music played. We talked about him and our mom, about what great parents they were, what wonderful childhoods we had. In short, we verbalized our tribute to them. Around 10:30 that night, Mary and I headed back to her townhouse. We were exhausted, but too wired to sleep. She suggested we split an Ambien, which she normally used to go to sleep.
I was hesitant. Although I’d experimented with my share of drugs in the Sixties, I’ve stayed away from prescription drugs. But I knew I desperately needed to sleep. “I’ll take a quarter.”
Half an hour later, the night nurse at the facility called and said we’d better get there, fast. Dad was failing. At this point, the Ambien had kicked in. When I walked into the dimly building, I felt as though I were walking into a Neptunian world, where nothing is what it seems, where it’s all illusion, a Matrix sort of world, where the veil between the living and the dead is nearly non-existent. He lay there, my dad did, bathed in a surreal light, unmoving, and I felt my mother around, caught the scent of her favorite perfume. In my mind, I saw them dancing.
It’s the Ambien, I thought. But I knew it was the trickster, the Cosmic Clown, enabling me to see his transition, to feel my mother’s presence, enabling me to push through the resistance I had to his death. In astrology, Neptune symbolizes the netherword, the afterworld, so it seemed appropriate that two people from the Neptune Society arrived to take his body away. He wanted to be cremated, his ashes scattered at sea, and that’s what the Neptune Society does.
After they took his body away, I sat outside in the dark courtyard, and talked to him in my head. I thanked him for being the father he was. I called a friend and told her what I was feeling. And off to my right, I saw the Cosmic Clown – not a Stephen King horror, but a kinder version who opened his arms, and whispered, “He’s here, always here, as close as your focus and need.”
And ever since, that has been my experience. The Cosmic Clown may laugh at us, but he/she always laughs with us as well, delighting in our discoveries.
This is the trickster I know, the Cosmic Clown I acknowledge. Teacher, muse, buddy, ally.
I’ve never understood the meaning of “trickster” either until I read this post. Thanks! That said, my perception of the Trickster has always been similar to the one you describe in connection with your father’s death. A few weeks ago, though, I had an encounter with the version of Trickster that isn’t so comforting… I had to go to an out-of-state funeral on a Saturday which required renting a car with unlimited mileage. What the heck, I said. I have to keep the car all weekend, might as well take advatage of those unlimited miles and make a roadtrip out of it. My first stop was a 2-day visit with an 87-yr-old legally-blind friend I only knew online and through phone calls. I was to drive her to church Sunday morning, and she wanted to be there early, so I set my trusty travel alarm for the crack of dawn. As soon as I got out of bed, I turned it off and clearly remember placing it in a side pocket of my soft-side vanity case, which I then zippered shut. I don’t wear a watch and the legally-blind have no reason to keep regular clocks on the bedside table, so I opened the vanity case to look at the travel alarm, but it wasn’t there! Or anywhere else in the room! My friend’s response: “Mizz Fisher”, whom I would later learn was the previous tenant who’d lived in the apartment for 17 years before she died, but apparently had never left. Weird things had happened while her son had been packing up her things. My friend felt cold spots in the kitchen. She’d find a cabinet door, that she couldn’t possibly reach without standing on a chair, wide open of a morning. Being blind, she naturally put certain things in certain places, but a special rosary went missing for several days until a sighted friend found it in a dish at the other end of the occasional table where my friend kept it. All Mizz Fisher’s doing, they decided. I suspect she was attracted to my travel alarm because it had a colorful dragon sticker on a silver background on the cover. After church and brunch, I turned the room upside down again and emptied my luggage on the bed, and the clock was still missing. Then my friend and I left to visit a couple of area cemeteries and were gone several hours. On our return, I sat on the side of the bed farthest from my friend’s treadmill machine. Something shiny on the treadmill caught my eye. Yep, it was the travel clock, but sitting topside up, perfectly aligned with the edge of the rubber tread! Definitely placed there, not even close to where it would’ve landed had it slipped out of the vanity case or I’d dropped it without noticing. I’m usually quite comforable in residences with a “leftover” occupant, but the idea that an invisible entity was present that could remove an object from the inside pocket of a closed piece of luggage totally freaked me out, and that night I barely slept! At one point I heard a kitchen faucet handle turn and water hit the stainless steel sink. An hour or so later, it was the squeak of a cabinet door opening. Both times my friend was snoring away in a room across the hall. Trickster? Oh, yes! A playful trickster? Not MY definition of “playful”!
Wow, this is a great trickster story…and definitely unnerving! I’m going to bring this comment forward as a post. Thanks for sharing!
Well,talk about the Trickster,I just wrote a long comment and it disappeared when I tried to post it 🙁
Shorter version then.
I just wrote a post about Frank Joseph,author of the book
“Synchronicity & You: Understanding the Role of Meaningful Coincidence in Your Life”
https://brizdazz.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/synchronicity-with-frank-joseph.html
Who you guys also wrote about here –
https://www.synchrosecrets.com/synchrosecrets/?p=15541
Thanks to Mike Perry with a comment he left this morning on my post,I find out
Frank Joesph is AKA Frank Collin –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Collin
a Jewish anti-Semite Nazi pedophile !?!
And me being of Jewish descent was endorsing his book at Amazon for years
(not any more,I’ve pulled the review)
So thanks to Mike Perry the Trickster’s game has been exposed.
Such a shame though,because it is a good book,but I can no longer support it under those circumstances.
It is a shame. And weird. How can someone who writes well about synchros be so perverted?
Re:
” It can manifest itself globally, politically, within organized religion. A politician ior pundit who is against gay marriage, for instance, suddenly changes his stance because his son or daughter comes out as gay. Or he himself turns out to be gay”.
Well,here’s a Trickster example similar to the above,and I only found out about this today thanks to a comment by Mike Perry left on my latest post about author Frank Joseph –
https://brizdazz.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/synchronicity-with-frank-joseph.html
Turns out Frank Joesph is none other than Frank Collin –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Collin
“Born Francis Joseph Cohen to a Jewish family, he grew up in Chicago. His father changed the family name to Collin when the boy was young. He went to local schools.
As a young man in his 20s, Frank Collin joined George Lincoln Rockwell’s National Socialist White People’s Party in the 1960s. He broke with the NSWPP due to a disagreement with Rockwell’s successor, Matt Koehl. He was elected as the party leader by popular vote after Rockwell’s August 25, 1967 assassination by a disgruntled member, John Patsalos, who had used the name “John Patler” during his tenure in the NSWPP.
Collin set up another organization, the National Socialist Party of America. It was relatively obscure until 1977, when it announced plans to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois, which was predominately Jewish. The City of Chicago had denied the NSPA permission to parade in the city and have NSPA speakers in Marquette Park.
Its proposed march prompted a landmark legal battle and court challenge that went to the United States Supreme Court. The ACLU defended the Party’s right to march as an expression of its First Amendment rights to free speech. At the time, Skokie had the largest Jewish population per-capita in the United States, and many residents were Holocaust survivors. Ultimately, the NSPA won the right to march.But, when the city of Chicago decided to allow Collin to speak in the city, the NSPA called off its plan to march in Skokie.
While president of the NSPA, Frank Collin was arrested by Michigan police while having sex with a pair of 10-year-old boys. These revelations led to his dismissal from the neo-Nazi movement. A psychiatrist who interviewed Collin declared that he was “consumed by hatred for his father”; it was argued that Collin rejected his father by becoming a neo-Nazi and adopting and publicly espousing antisemitic beliefs. Collin was convicted of child molestation and sent to Pontiac Correctional Center in 1979.
He served three years of a seven-year sentence. ”
I had endorsed his book
“Synchronicity & You: Understanding the Role of Meaningful Coincidence in Your Life”
https://www.synchrosecrets.com/synchrosecrets/?p=15541
in an Amazon book review for years,not to mention my latest post about him.
I thought the book was one of the best I had read on the subject…and it’s still a pretty good book on the subject,from what I can remember.
But being of Jewish origin myself and to find out this guy was a Jewish anti-Semite Nazi pedophile and I had endorsed his book (not any longer,I pulled the review)
was a cruel in your face Trickster play to me.
Thanks to Mike Perry the Trickster’s game has been revealed.
I found it! In spam! I don’t know why WordPress arbitrarily does this. Grr
yes, thanks for sharing this beautiful story of you/your father – i agree with your perspective on the trickster – at least, that’s been closest to my own experiences – and i’ve been known to say aloud to myself “are you KIDding me!” at those times like mike mentions – funny ending to the high school friend/girl thing!
Are you kidding me: to the trickster! Love it.
I’ve never totally understood the Trickster – reading this post has helped. Thank you for sharing the personal story of your father’s last night, Trish. I think you were given a gift, and you certainly gave your father one by talking about how wonderful he was as a father and how happy you and your sister were in childhood. I can’t think of anything better to hear on your last day on earth than to know you were a success at the most important job of your life – being a parent.
The trickster always baffles me! That last night was difficult, but I knew he could still hear us and I wanted him to know just how terrific he and my mother were.
In my own experience I don’t find the trickster to be as Hansen claims. To me it’s something perhaps mischievous, but still good natured. Often when things happen like this I tend to lift my eyes upwards, smile and say something like, ‘message understood.’
Message understood: I like that. Simple, direct!
I think that the small amount of Ambien helped you relax and release your resistance.
When I read for someone, if I try too hard I often don’t get much. I have to relax to let info in.
In fact ill often get chatting to relax the other person and then it is often like “whoosh” here we go!!
You’re probably right! I’ve heard other psychics say the same thing, about relaxing into the reading.
There was also a trickster element at play in the final years for Trish’s father. A woman moved into a room nearby him at the assisted living facility who became interested in Tony. Astonishingly, they had gone to high school together in a small town in Oklahoma. Now they were back together. However, and here’s the trickster element, Tony was annoyed by the woman. “I didn’t like her in high school, and I don’t like her any better now.” Go figure.