The Ouija Board: A Postmodern Trickster Archetype for the Paranormal World

Everything's foreseeable. Everything has already been foreseen. What has been fated cannot be avoided. Even this boiled potato, this fork. This chunk of dark bread. This thought too....
My grandmother sweeping the sidewalk knows that. She says there's no God, only an eye here and there that sees clearly. The neighbors are too busy watching TV to burn her as a witch.
--Charles Simic, from his Pulitzer Prize winning book of poetry, The World Doesn't End

A trickster is an omnipresent mythological and Jungian archetypal character defined as a clever, crafty mischief-maker, whose aim it is to survive in a threatening environment by use of non-traditional, mundane or magical means and pranks.

Easily recognizable traditional, cultural, and classical literary tricksters include court jesters and harlequins, Rasputin, the kokopelli, Brer Rabbit, fairies, Parsifal, Pan, skinwalkers, witches, St. Germaine, and Count Cagliostro. Modern incarnations of the trickster continuum include: Amelia Bedelia, Bugs Bunny, Bart Simpson, Star Trek's enigmatic Q, the Borg, Dr. House, Wile E. Coyote, evil clowns, Pink Panther, Aleister Crowley, Andy Kaufmann, Elvis, Gilligan, Lucy Ricardo, John McEnroe, Harry Potter, Britney Spears, and perhaps the Grand Poobah of modern day tricksters, Michael Jackson.

Contemporarily, the trickster persona, as it is perceived and created within both our media and develops culturally within our 'real lives', retains its traditional qualities, but also seems to have taken on almost a happy martyr, sin-eater type of tone, as the trickster becomes an outlet of expression by proxy with permission (although this may be veiled or superficially negated) for the pent-up dysfunctions, negativities, evils, and frustrations of his/her/its immediate 'good' and functional close populations and society.