Pronoia Pt. 1 - The Art of Sacred Clowning
Molly Hankins June 5, 2025
Pronoia is paranoia’s positive counterpart and describes a worldview rooted in the idea that the universe is conspiring in our favor. Author Rob Brezney describes the concept in his 2005 book Pronoia, a modern-day, illustrated manual to life akin to Be Here Now by Ram Dass, and introduces two aspects of the sacred clown that can guide us towards pronoia. The first is a tummler, which is a Yiddish term that refers to someone who “makes a racket”, stirring up a commotion to heighten self-awareness. The second is the Iroquois word ondinnonk, meaning a secret wish of the soul that longs to do good deeds. Brezsny recommends that we allow our ondinnonk to lead our pronoaic mission as a tummler, so that we may elevate the consciousness of ourselves and our community.
Clowning is a primary expression of any tummler, whose sacred duty is to affectionately incite agitation that promotes self-reflection and positive action. The Native Amrican Hopi tribe ritualized the art of sacred clowning in an annual summer performance. Known as Kachina Ceremonies, these displays would last from the Winter to Summer Solstice with a six month build-up to the climax of the summer ritual, taking place in July because heat causes expansion drawing out impurities. Clowns, Princeton University Art and Archaeology Professor Hal Foster explained, played the essential role of clearing corruption out of the community by , “Tracing fractures that already exist in the given order to pressure them.” Existing areas of corruption were pressured to a breaking point by the affectionate agitation of the sacred clowns, and community members became strengthened by this release of impurities.
Brezsny believes that in order to see where corruption has accumulated within ourselves, our leaders and our communities, we must trigger each other. He writes in Pronoia, “We can inspire each other to perpetrate healing mischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks, blasphemous reverence, holy pranks and crazy wisdom.” This is the role of the sacred clown or tummler, guided by the good-natured principle of ondinnonk. Within a traditional social hierarchy, only the court jester can safely speak truth to power, and it can only be successfully communicated through play. The Hopi regarded corruption as an inevitability of being human, building in a social purification ceremony aligned with natural cycles to ensure that a corrupted people did not become the dominant force in the tribe.
In Pronoia, fundamentalism is the primary corruptive force of modernity, and Brezsny believes the fundamentalist attitude demands everything be taken too seriously, personally and literally. “Correct belief is the only virtue. Every fundamentalist is committed to waging war against the imagination unless the imagination is enslaved to his or her belief system,” he writes. “And here’s the bad news: like almost everyone in the world, each of us has our own share of the fundamentalist virus.” The next page of the book is blank except for an invitation to confess in writing where we harbor fundamentalism in our own worldviews, challenging us to realise how easy it is to see in others and ignore it in ourselves.
“Healing mischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks, blasphemous reverence, holy pranks and crazy wisdom”
If we endeavor to put pressure on the fractured places within our own psyche, we can uncover where fundamentalism has corrupted us and open ourselves up to otherwise unavailable opportunities. These are opportunities for both transcendent self-awareness and society-evolving consciousness expansion. Like the famous Leonard Cohen lyric from “Anthem” says, the cracks are where the light gets in. Though living by a pronaic philosophy in 2025 feels outlandish, it is a radica to consider the possibility that we are currently experiencing an increase of pressure on existing fractures that will ultimately lead us to trade corruption for lightness. The fear of facing our own corrupted nature as individuals and a collective lightens when we approach it with a sense of humor.
Pronoia serves as an invitation to become tummlers unto ourselves, powered by the purity of our innate ondinnonk spirit that inherently wants to perpetuate goodness. As we do so, lightness spreads to the people around us and we all become more suited to administer the sort of, “...healing mischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks, blasphemous reverence, holy pranks and crazy wisdom,” that pressures the fractures of our own corruption and gives way to goodness.
Perhaps the secret of how to speed up this process in the collective lies in the blank page Breszny put in Pronoia. In the book’s forward he recommends we act as pronaic co-authors, knowing that the underlying axiom of “as above, so below” applies to both the macro and the microcosm. Breszny knows that to reflect upon and root out our own corruption is to become co-conspirators with the universe, scheming to generate more favor for ourselves and all of life. Embodying sacred clown energy as we undertake the process ensures success.
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
