The Trickster
The Trickster character has been extensively
documented over the years by anthropologists, social
scientists and occult writers, amongst others.
Tricksters are generally associated with de-structuring,
boundary crossing and the blurring of distinctions.
Shape-shifting, unruly and contradictory, the Trickster
is an adept at paradox. He dwells in the liminal realms
– betwixt and between the conscious and unconsciousness
mind, the rational and irrational, and haunts our dreams
between sleep and waking. In his most exulted form he
becomes the ‘messenger’ - Creator's helper, Trickster to
Transformer.
Paul Radin writes, in his book
"The Trickster," “Trickster is at one and the same
time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who
dupes others and who is always duped himself . . .
He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy
of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions
all values come into being”. [a]
Carl Jung, in an appendix in Radin’s volume,
writes, “Trickster is both subhuman and superhuman, a
bestial and divine being, whose most alarming
characteristic is his unconsciousness. . . . He is so
unconscious of himself that his body is not a unity, and
his two hands fight each other.”
An Inner Drama
“Primitive man impresses us so strongly with
his subjectivity that we should really have guessed long ago that
myths refer to something psychic. His knowledge of nature is
essentially the language and outer dress of an unconscious psychic
process. But the very fact that this process is unconscious gives us
the reason why man has thought of everything except the psyche in
his attempts to explain myths. He simply didn’t know that the psyche
contains all images that have ever given rise to myths, and that our
unconscious is an acting and suffering subject with an inner drama
which primitive man rediscovers, by means of analogy, in the
processes of nature both great and small.”
Archetypes of The Collective Unconscious by C.G.Jung.p6
My Favorite Martians
"The UFO is an enigmatic current in the fabric of the 20th
century, and all our explanations are signals shot into the
heavens—they either fade into the stellar maw or bounce back, echoes
of our own descriptions. By remaining beyond reach, by remaining
absurd, the UFO attracts our hiddenmost obsessions with scientific
authority, state power, and spiritual futurism—and it demarcates
these obsessions far more viscerally than more normal forms of
popular culture.
UFO literature, by drawing curious readers into bizarre
worldviews shored up with the language of evidence, shows how our
attitudes toward information structure our reality and identity.
Even if the UFO is bunk, it has become modernity's great mythic
mirror. The first "flying saucers" were sighted in 1947 by Kenneth
Arnold, in the year that gave us the CIA and information theory, in
the decade that gave us TV, the Bomb, digital computers, and LSD.
The UFO is part of a package deal—a rumor of god stitched into the
dark web of our military-industrial-media complex.
Though habitually keeping a low profile, the visitors have been
pretty busy since '47. The UFO and its trickster crew have
crash-landed, pulled fly-bys, delivered messages of doom and gnostic
salvation, sucked bovine blood, conspired with the Air Force, stolen
embryos from Middle American housewives, fucked Brazilian farmers
silly, and rammed anal probes into horror fiction writers. But
though millions believe, and many more are cautiously credulous, the
aliens remain beyond reach, in a netherworld of bad films,
paperbacks, and late-night testimonies. Sightings haven't really
made news since the '70s and, though Whitley Streiber's 1987
Communion ruled the charts, the UFO seems almost quaint in our
cyberpunk world, a cosmic VW bug in the weedy back yard of
modernity.
But the UFO has not waned so much as gone within, into the body,
into the mind, into the dream of identity. Thousands of abductees,
seeking to ease the psychic trauma of being dragged onto spaceships
and physically abused by aliens, have solidified a sub-culture
that's far more 12 Step than Star Trek. Conspiracy theorists weave
UFOs into their insidious webs of government plots, while channeled
ET info has evolved into the New Age's most speculative edge. And
after years of cranky pursuits for the "nuts and bolts" that will
prove the existence of material extraterrestrial spacecraft, some
ufologists are turning towards a subtler engagement of the alien as
radical mythic enigma."
Erik Davis, My Favorite Martians [b]
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