Blithe Spirits (A History of the Poltergeist)

The Trickster-god is a strange and wonderful mythological figure who is found in folklore and legend right across the world, from the Norse Loki to the Greek Hermes to the Raven and Coyote of the Native American peoples. The ultimate "cunning fool," he and the many subversive tales told about him have been studied down the years by anthropologists, historians, literary theorists, and psychologists from Ted Hughes to C. G. Jung. But in the 21st century should the Trickster also now be being studied by parapsychologists and ghost-hunters, too? Nobody believes in gods like Hermes or Loki any more, but that does not mean that people do not still tell one another tales about such Tricksters and their mischievous ways. They do, but in disguised form—the poltergeist. Belief in Trickster-gods, this book argues, has today been transformed into popular belief in Trickster-ghosts, with those noisy, disruptive, roguish spirits known as poltergeists fulfilling largely the same imaginative function as more traditional Trickster-figures like Robin Goodfellow once did. By playing childish tricks upon us, poltergeists reveal our current worldview to be in some way incomplete, breaking the accepted circles of "official" materialistic, scientific logic and provoking laughter at their irreverent audacity in doing so. Rather than being intended to frighten, perhaps the true purpose of certain ghost stories is in fact to amuse, perplex, and provoke? Whether true or not, such ghost stories still function as genuine Trickster-myths, providing those who read them with access to a hidden realm lurking somewhere just beyond the rational, in which the usual rules of science, logic, and reality simply do not apply. Perhaps in doing so they act as a kind of "emotional safety-valve," intended to allow mankind temporary respite from the sometimes oppressive social forces surrounding us. Covering a wide global selection of reported poltergeist phenomena from ancient times right up to the present-day, and then subjecting them to a process of literary, historical, and sociological analysis, Blithe Spirits is one of the most unusual, original, and wide-ranging books about the subject ever to be written.