By George P. Hansen
Ghosts are odd. Are they alive? Or are they dead? Are they fact? Or are they fiction? Are they natural? or supernatural? hallucinations? or real?
These questions are not new. They?ve been asked for thousands of years, yet they remain unresolved. Ghosts are inherently ambiguous. So how can we understand them?
Anthropologists? concept of liminality may help because it addresses phenomena that are ambiguous and paradoxical. The word liminal comes from limen, meaning threshold, and liminality refers to the condition of being betwixt and between. This concept is not well known, and it?s likely to be foreign to nearly all persons involved with parapsychology or ghost research. Nevertheless, this anthropological theory has innumerable implications for paranormal fields.1
Liminality applies to change, transition, and transformation--conditions that are conducive to psi phenomena. For instance, poltergeist effects tend to occur around someone in puberty. A person at that stage in life is neither a child nor an adult, but rather is betwixt and between those roles. Death is another transition, and people are more likely to experience psychic phenomena near the death of someone they know than during more normal periods. Every culture has rituals surrounding death; it is a major rite of passage. In fact, analyses of rites of passage led to the concept of liminality.
Ancient peoples recognized, and respected, the reality of ghosts, and they had a deeper understanding of them than we do now. Those peoples used rituals to summon and channel supernatural power, but they also knew that the power was dangerous, and they had taboos surrounding it. We can benefit by studying their ways of thought.
Anthropologists report that in earlier cultures, novices in ritual initiations were frequently likened to ?ghosts, gods, or ancestors.?2 But how in the world are ghosts like initiates? That just doesn?t seem logical to us. But the connection has proven to be illuminating, and other societies? ideas will help us understand ghosts.
Classification, Boundaries, and Binary Oppositions
Structural anthropologists have shown that so-called ?primitive? cultures often classified things in terms of binary oppositions. The Figure below shows some of the major binary oppositions recognized by many societies.
Usually one element in an opposition has greater power, prestige, or privilege. Those in the top line have the higher status. But it?s the area betwixt and between the binary oppositions that?s especially interesting. It?s a region of ambiguity and uncertainty. It?s also a realm of taboo, and for earlier cultures, contact with that domain sometimes required protective rituals.
Notice that all of the betwixt-and-between items in the Figure are paranormal or supernatural phenomena, or are persons associated with such phenomena.
Spirits, ghosts, and near-death experiences (NDEs) challenge the all-too-simple distinction between life and death. Mediums serve as mediators between the living and the dead.
Mystics strive to unite with god; thus they blur the boundary between the human and the divine. They engage in extended periods of prayer and meditation, and mystics have produced some of the most dramatic paranormal phenomena ever reported (e.g., levitation, miraculous healings, multiplication of food).
Berdache were persons in American Indian tribes who took the role of the opposite sex. Many of them became shamans, but even those who didn?t were looked upon as having supernatural power.
Angels and UFOs travel between the heavens and the earth. Angels relay religious messages, and UFO occupants sometimes do too. Bigfoot lies between human and beast, and so do vampires and werewolves. Some North American Indian tribes knew that Bigfoot was not an ordinary animal. If a member of the tribe wanted to pursue such a creature, the individual had to be ritually purified.3 There was a contagious, unclean aspect to encountering Bigfoot.
Paranormal phenomena have a betwixt-and-between aspect; as such, they are liminal occurrences, and they display the properties associated with liminality. Liminal persons, phenomena, and events tend to blur boundaries, upset classification schemes, and foster ambivalence and ambiguity. Such conditions are dangerous, but they can also be a source of supernatural power
http://theparanormalreport.com/ghosts-a ... ion-2.html
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