Mary Poppins’s friend Bert also possesses trickster qualities. Like the Greek trickster god Hermes, Bert is a bricoleur, a jack-of-all-trades. Bert has a very mercurial, entrepreneurial spirit, constantly switching jobs as the situation arises. At the beginning of the movie, at the entrance to the park, as evening descends. Bert is a one-man band and street performer, after which he acts as a tour guide to the audience directing us to Number 17 Cherry Tree Lane. Later Bert is a pavement artist, creating various different chalk worlds and scenes. When it begins to rain and the drawings get ruined, he decides to switch to selling hot chestnuts, and the next time we bump into Bert, he is a chimney sweep. At the end of the movie, inside the entrance to the park, Bert is an entrepreneur selling kites. Now that we have some background on Bert and Hermes, let us see how Bert might just be Hermes in disguise.

Doty (1993) sees Hermes as a divine connector, creator-restorer-healer, and a shameless comedian and wit. Hermes's domain is vast indeed, and Doty demonstrates that one of the main functions of Hermes was that of connection. Hermes connects all kinds of things: he is the messenger of the gods, the psychopomp who guides souls into the underworld, the god of the threshold and the crossroads. As a traveler between realms, mediator, and messenger, Hermes seeks to understand, integrate, and communicate between realms and relationships (Hansen, 2001). Here, Bert acts a subtle guide for us, the audience, as we take this liminal journey, for he brings us to Cherry Tree Lane in the first place. Bert is often found in liminal places, the entrance to the park, the chimney sweeps world, or dancing with Uncle Albert in mid-air. Bert also spends time acting as a psychopomp to George in front of the fireplace at a pivotal moment, as well as a ccompnying Mary and the children on liminal outings. Jurich (1998) points out that Hermes seeks to find new meanings in things and is an interpreter and peacemaker, a translator and facilitator. Bert gets children to see their father’s point of view, as well as getting George to realize the importance of his own children. Bert, is like Hermes, in that he is “the medium which allows for beneficial occurrences and is also the healer” (Jurich, 1998, p. 213).

While Hermes is a peacemaker, he also stirs up and initiates things. He fosters relationships between people, in areas as diverse as commerce, athletics and education. Doty (1993) notes that “Hermes’s association with Eros, the personified principle of connectedness,” is in its nurturing dimension, and Hermes fosters relationships, “he facilitates but does not force connections” (p. 53). Hermes as god of the marketplace connects the known with the unknown across borders, “bringing unexpected to the commonplace” (Combs and Holland, 2001, p. 93). Hermes also blurs the boundaries between reality and imagination. He is agreeable and good-natured, too, and was “a deity who is imagined to be especially close to ordinary human lives” (p. 61). “Hermes is the playful Greek god” (p. 58), and often appears unexpectedly.

We see all of these Hermes qualities in Bert, who creates the artwork in which the “Jolly Holiday” occurs. In hermeneutics, the art of interpretation, the work opens up a world, and in Mary Poppins, we see that this is true: “it do indeed” as Bert would say. Bert then instigates the adventure by telling the children that Mary is no ordinary nanny and “What she’s probably got in mind is a jolly holiday somewhere,” as he invitingly describes some possible destinations. Mary Poppins is not the only one who can put ideas into someone’s head! Bert can, too, as he inveighs Mary Poppins to take them on an adventure. Through the power of suggestion, Bert sets things up for Mary’s magic, much as Hermes does things on behalf of other gods.

Hermes is the god of travelers and thieves, of lucky finds, and of bricolage—after all, he did invent the lyre, and he is also the god of the unexpected, and coincidence. Bert in his role as chimney sweep is lucky indeed. Bert trickily engineers a trip up the chimney, and when the foursome "accidentally" arrive on the roof, Bert exclaims "This 'ere is what you might call a fortuitous circumstance.”

Hermes is also connected with underworld, the unconscious, a place of riches for the psyche. Hermes is the god that brings the contents of this underworld out in the open by his synchronistic tricks (Hansen, 2001, p. 116). Bert’s liminal overworld of the chimney sweeps, too, is akin to the underworld of the unconscious.

Hermes’s tricks usually end up being helpful, and he is not often tricked by them. Hermes is also the rescuer of children and occasionally acts as a midwife. He works out interconnections between people:

what seems more typically more tricksterish than his creations or inventions are Hermes’ corrections and restorations, often performed at the behest of another deity, in which he enables humans to reunite or to move to a higher level of awareness or insight.” [emphasis added] (Doty, 1993, p. 55)

Bert rescues the Banks children and along with Mary Poppins helps the whole family move to more wholeness.

Stein (1983) calls Hermes the "God of Significant Passage," and observes that Hermes is always present during transitions, especially midlife transitions. Bert’s discussion with George at the hearth while packing up his brooms alludes to this attribute of Hermes. George is definitely in transition at the time, and Bert cleverly leads George in the conversation. Like Hermes, Bert is clever and charming.

Now that we have learned lots about tricksters and seen the tricky natures of both Mary and Bert, let us go on to the next excursion and learn how they do what they do, as we explore the "Tricks of the Trade."

The Tricks Of The Trade— Mary’s Nonordinary Magic

P.L. Travers has Mary Poppins lead by example and indirect suggestion. As we go along, we will see how Mary and Bert work their magic in the individual instances during the scene-by-scene-play, but here we will just briefly overview this non-ordinary magic, and point out places where Mary and Bert use this trance-formational wizardry. First we will briefly explore Ericksonian hypnosis and then we will see where and how Mary and Bert do their magic, because much of their most transformational magic is done through reframing, confusion, utilization, pacing and leading, embedded commands, and trance.

Welcome to Trance: The Nonordinary State

Milton Erickson was the father of “medical hypnosis” and he brought hypnosis back to be a reputable modality for treating people with many different kinds of problems. Erickson was born on the same day as Walt Disney on December 5. 1901. Also fittingly, quantum physicist, Werner Heisenberg, of the uncertainty principle fame, was born on that same day, too. Erickson pioneered a method of hypnosis based on utilizing whatever was presented by the client to aid in the transformation and trance-formation process, this is known as utilization.

Hypnosis is a state of consciousness where a person is receptive to ideas, a state of focused attention, similar to reverie, where one’s attention is directed inward, and from which new and different realities are allowed to develop. In states of hypnosis, one is susceptible to ideas and accepting them, but suggestions need to be presented in an appropriate manner and need to be meaningful and useful to the individual. Erickson found that when people are in a deep trance, their minds becomes childlike and literal. Trance is a common experience; it is merely a state of one-pointed attention where other stimuli are not attended to. Anyone who has been engrossed in a book or television show and has not heard another person speaking to them has experienced trance. Once attention is turned inward, internal realities are created by vivification, giving liveliness or vividness to them.

Trance is used in Mary Poppins in the “Feed the Birds” scene. First Mary focuses the children’s attention on the snowglobe and swirls it around, and the birds circle the cathedral. As she does this Mary talks to the children in such a way that they need to go inside, or focus internally, in order to make mental pictures of what she is saying. Mary’s tone of voice is also conducive to trance. She gets them to focus their attention on the snow globe and to make sense of what she is saying they construct the scene in their minds.

Erickson’s work was based on carefully observing others, and he often used confusion and indirect suggestion to help clients form trances so that they would be more easily able to transform. Erickson achieved such amazing results because he met his client or patient in their model of the world.

Welcome to My World—Rapport and Pacing

We each create our own model of the world, which helps to guide us. Because no two people have exactly the same experiences, everyone’s model of the world will be different, since our models of the world are based in part on our experiences. Although we share the same outer physical environment, our inner maps of this environment will be somewhat different, and we will thus come to live in a somewhat different reality.

Bandler and Grinder, who created Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), studied the work of Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir, and Fritz Perls. In discussing Erickson’s work, they make the valuable distinction about people’s models of the world:

There is an irreducible difference between the world and our experience of it. We, as human beings, do not operate directly upon the world, but, rather, we operate upon the world through our representations of it. Each of us creates a representation of the world we live in—that is we create a map or model, which we use to generate our behavior. The map or model which we create serves us as a representation of what is possible, what is available, what the structure of our world is. Our representation of the world determines to a large degree what our experience of the world is, how we perceive the world, what choices we see available to us as we live in the world. (Bandler & Grinder, 1975, pp. 180-181)

This idea is similar to the idea of horizon in hermeneutics, or Cushman’s (1995) notion of the cultural clearing. In Mary Poppins, we see that Mary, through her magical ways, enables George to broaden and change his world. She helps George to change his map, but in order to do this, she must first accept where he is "coming from," his model of the world. ∆RC[mp15]

Erickson would first go into the client’s reality, acknowledge and accept it, this is known as pacing. He would gain and keep rapport by “pacing” their model of the world, and then he would be able to lead the client into new territory. By pacing them, Erickson's clients unconsciously perceived that Erickson respected their state, “where they were.” They would then be more apt and willing to follow him, if where he wanted to lead them is where they wanted to go. Erickson could appreciate what his clients had to say without necessarily agreeing with it, and thus Erickson would use their desires, expectations, and language, matching their syntax and words, and their nonverbal behavior, too.

By being “in sync” with the client, instead of forcing a client to do something, or to deny something that the client believed, the client would be less apt to be resistant, because there was nothing to resist against. However, at times Erickson would even use a client’s resistance, all in the service of transformation, and trance-formation, too! Through creating rapport in this way, Erickson would build a bridge, a point of understanding and contact, and then he was able to alter the client's frame or perspective, in order to help the client to change more easily.

In creating rapport or pacing, Erickson would use truisms as a basic form of hypnotic suggestion, saying things that he knew would be inevitable behavior, such as breathing, or things that Erickson knew were true for the person, and these direct suggestions would then be linked together, in what he called a “yes set.” For example, he would say “as you are sitting there, breathing in and breathing out, noticing the noises in the environment around you,” each of these different phrases can be agreed with, yes “you” are reading, and breathing in and out, and now that I mention it, you can notice the noises in the environment. Erickson's art was in being vague enough, so that the other person could agree with what Erickson was saying. By suggesting inevitable behavior, he could then lead into some suggestion, like “you can easily understand what you have read here and apply what you have learned in your life.”

Both Mary and Bert were masters at pacing and leading George Banks. In the song, “A British Bank,” when George attempts to fire Mary, she uses pacing effectively to lead George to take the children on an outing to the bank. Bert does the same with George in the song “A Man has Dreams.” Both Mary and Bert enter George's model of the world and at times adopt his tune. Ironically, George's signature tune, "The Life I Lead" is the tune that they use to lead George, and also how they eventually get him to "change his tune" to something less Saturnian.

In “Stay Awake,” Mary uses a combination of pacing and leading, along with embedded commands, and her tone of voice to convey to the children what she really wants them to do. We will get to these things in a while, but first let us explore the power of confusion and surprise.

The Power of Confusion

Although Erickson would evoke visual images and use his clients' own thoughts to help them go into trance more easily, Erickson found that boredom and surprise were also excellent ways of inducing trance states. Surprise loosens one’s mental set, and a state of confusion produces an internal search for meaning. Confusion or a lack of understanding leaves the mind open and searching for the missing meaning, whereas nonsense and wrong understanding cause the mind to shut down, because there is no meaning or a wrong meaning. Erickson often used irrelevant stories and nonsequitur remarks to induce confusion.

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