The Tricksters

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  Let us lay out a new concept for what paranormal phenomena really are, and basically all the kaleidoscope of unusual reports over the years. First, you are dealing with a personal bias when you talk to someone who has has a reality changing event happen to them. You have to factor out that personal bias. The Southwestern United States has a plethora of of the most unusual events that occur. It is steeped in American Indian tradition and folklore. It is the very spot of the earliest incursions into North America by Europeans. You have a very interesting melding of religions and Indian folklore, a sub-cultural cauldron that has been gurgling for centuries. When you start to encounter very credible witnesses reporting aliens, fairies, thunder birds or the type of phenomenal events that the North would not equate with the Southwest, the knee-jerk reaction is to think these things are the work of aliens. I do not believe this washes.

  There is something much more complex and much more involved going on, over the years of alien reports, the birthplace of mutilated livestock in 1957 and Native American traditions. You put all these things together and the extra-terrestrial hypothesis does not cut it. What is the cause for creating these events? We are dealing with what you might call a meta-terrestrial. I think we are seeing a movement forward in terms of looking at these phenomenal events, progressing to a new level of understanding and gaining insight into these mysteries.

  I believe the word trickster best defines these entities, non-entities and all other phenomena. Tricksters have probably been playing with humankind for thousands of years. The cattle mutilation on a ranch in Utah is a good example. The rancher and his family were in a pasture and walked past some livestock, coming back around a few minutes later, they found a freshly mutilated calf laying in the field. That is certainly the doings of a trickster. They were in the same field in broad daylight and had no idea that with them in such close proximity was the mutilation, having happened so quickly.

  I really believe the alien hypothesis is inadequate when we are looking at some of these types of phenomenal events. Unfortunately, the culture has been force feeding everybody with this idea, that this is all stuff done by aliens. I believe it is information followed by dis-information followed by information and so on, to keep the public confused.

  The fool is the classic trickster term, the joker in the card deck, the fool in the tarot is the trickster. The trickster has made itself a personification in our sub-conscious, such as wearing masks at a masquerade ball or wearing costumes at Halloween. What do kids say? Trick or treat is a deep-rooted archetypal presence in humanity that is the eight hundred pound elephant in the room that no one realizes is there. We are not aware by design. The trickster is simple in so many ways, yet so complicated in most ways and the two cancel each other out.

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  We look for explanations such as we think we are important enough for aliens to come and abduct us to ask questions or take bodily samples, or have sightings in giant airships, or abduct cattle or fly down as a giant thunder bird to scoop up a child. There are hundreds upon hundreds of trickster type activities that just do not make sense. Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud’s star pupil, took the idea of unconsciousness to the next step, the collective unconscious that we all share on some level. Within the collective unconscious we have primal symbols that we all share. It does not matter if you are in Africa, Australia or Europe, we all have the same basic symbols and they are very simple. The shadow would be the most basic. I am sure cavemen were afraid of shadows for thousands of years. The next archetype within the collective unconscious is the trickster, which is the most ancient primordial archetype within the collective unconscious which has a face. The shadow has no face. The trickster is found world-wide in it’s anthropological sense. The trickster is a re-occurring theme in all cultures. The other archetypal forms are the hero, goddesses, the animus, the actual process of transformation, but the trickster is the one we are focusing on here.

  Tricksters are very slippery. The best way to describe them is, they are like a three-year old child who hits his sister on the head, then wonders why everyone is upset with him, because he he does not realize that it is bad to do such a thing. Tricksters, in the traditional academic definition are amoral, they are neither right or wrong, good or bad and they tend to be extremely foolish or accidentally wise. One of the main functions is to break down a structure, in other words, if the status qua gets too entrenched in a particular structure, the trickster’s job is to come along and gather that and also in the process of shattering anti-structure. In the process of doing that, the trickster introduces novelty and change into a static system. Youare looking at a casual agent that doesn’t appear to have an agenda that is shattering structure and creating novelty and change in that static system.

What puzzles me is academics seem to agree the trickster is unconscious and that it is not self-aware as a force or as a personification and does not involve change. Knowing a little bit about quantum physics and science in general, nothing really is static. Everything is evolving and everything is changing. The trickster does evolve and the trickster is conscious or is becoming conscious. This flies in the face of traditional anthropology. The trickster is divided into categories, the most primal trickster form is anthropological animals, like coyotes, ravens, the spider and various animal forms that are equated in sub-cultural conditions where the trickster performs. Basically, that is the primal type trickster. It brings technology down from God, usually stealing it, and gives it to mankind. Usually he is punished for doing this by God. For instance, Prometheus, famous for getting fire from the gods and being punished by being chained to a rock and Zeus sends evil down to pick out his liver every day and it heals and just repeats for eternity.  I find it intriguing that you hear a similar story type all over the world. You can go anywhere and find a trickster form who is defined either changing Gaia for the betterment of mankind or actually providing technology.

  The next trickster form is the tragic hero, which is in human form as opposed to an animal form. Generally, they defy God and do something for the betterment of mankind. The third and most prevalent trickster form in today’s world would be the Shamanic human trickster. His job is to carry on sacred oral traditions of a given culture by making sure the stories are memorized and rituals are memorized properly. They are also very profane. Most of your Native American traditions have a clown society. The clown society is the trickster, but it is a human form of the trickster that uses antics, whether they are sexual jokes, innuendos or some other type of ridiculous behavior. These things are done at crucial times during very somber rituals. He will come out and do insane and sexually related things. He will beg for food at inappropriate times during a somber occasion. The court jester of the Middle Ages is a classic example of a trickster form, or the harlequin is another way of disguising him. These are the three basic forms of the trickster.

  What element ties all these various trickster’s together? One seems to be consistent all around the world, and that is shape shifting. Paranormal stories, forms and legends all feature shape shifting and this opens up a huge list of trickster forms; vampires, werewolves, Bigfoot, wind-egos, gnomes, elves, fairies, dwarfs, ;leprechauns and so on. Once you open up the definition and include shape shifting, the sense is that we are dealing with an energy or force that is manifested in the collective unconscious in various guises, depending on what the needs are within a given sub-culture. It is a very powerful energy or force that personifies traits to it and put features on it, whether they be animal, hero or Shamanic features and then culture comes up with their version of the trickster. It all springs from the collective unconscious, this force, this energy that is within all of us. It is a constellation of elements that arise within a given sub-culture.

  Whenever the powers that be become too strong, when ever the status quo becomes too entrenched, there seems to be this evolving force that comes through using anti-structure and the whole idea of a subliminal force which is neither black or white, positive or negative, it stands at the threshold between binary opposites. That subliminal nature then manifests to provide the novelty and the change that then becomes anti-structural and breaks down the status quo and creates motion in the culture. We are dealing with the trickster who comes from outside the closed system.