The Nature of Magic.pdf

The Nature of Magic: an anthropology of

consciousness

by Dr. Susan Greenwood, Book launch at Treadwells,

Covent Garden, May 2005

Questions, questions, questions…

I wrote The Nature of Magic to answer some questions that I wanted answering (those of

you who know me know I'm one for asking questions…!).

I was one of those awful children that were always asking questions. I remember saying

to an RE teacher at school, who had just carefully explained that God made the world,

'Well, if God made the world, who made God'. She gave me an exasperated look and just

told me not to ask stupid questions.

On another occasion, when I was much younger (about 5), I asked a question of my

primary school teacher. I can't remember what the question was but I do remember the

ans wer: it was 'Susan, are you up the pole?' It would be very romantic to interpret this as

her seeing some sort of shamanic vocation in my eager, young face - that her response

referred to a sign of a shamanic cosmological central axis - but unfortunately I think she

just wanted to shut me up. Probably just as well!

So as a celebration I'm going to Start this talk with a question.

- this is my own question but it's one that anthropologist, biologist and psychologist

Gregory Bateson would understand:

What links boggart (nature spirit) stories, a ghostly cavalcade led by a goddess or

god, cyborgs, and Covent Garden?

We'll come back to that question… or rather we'll go on a roundabout tour, using other

questions and looking at problems, by way of answering it.

I'm going to talk about magical consciousness, the main theme of The Nature of Magic

What is Magical consciousness?

I probably don't have to explain too much about what magical consciousness is to this

audience. Perhaps it's something that many of us think we know about but when we sit

down and try and explain it - perhaps the words don't come. It's something that's difficult

to put into words; concerns what 19th century psychologist William James called 'the

ineffable'.

- magical consciousness is difficult to describe - it's an experience, maybe of

… a spiritual feeling of connection - seeing a sunset over the sea, the moon (full moon

tonight…) being in love or emotionally engaged;

Mystery, of profound connection, spiritual insight, deep understanding, communion with

other beings or Being, a feeling of expansion, being in touch with something greater, loss

of ego-self…. the list continues….

Magical consciousness is developed through magical practice - which might involve

meditation, rituals, or going on a vision quest, amongst a hundred other examples - you

all know what I mean.

'Magic' and 'consciousness' are both difficult terms academically:

a) Magic has meant different things at different times - during the Renaissance it was

considered to be a way of contacting God; later during the Reformation is came to be

seen as false religion; it has been seen by some as a form of pre-science (before we really

knew what was going on). Not going to talk more about that here - like teaching

Grandmother how to suck eggs…

There's a prejudice against magic in the social sciences - seen as irrational, superstition;

okay in small-scale, non-western, tribal peoples but not in educated westerners; certainly

not in academia - it's not taken seriously. Magic isn't examined on its own terms - its

reduced to sociological, cultural, or psychological explanations.

b) Consciousness can't be pinned down or measured - it's ambiguous. Science doesn't

deal well with ambiguity. Reduces explanations for consciousness to the individual

human brain, in many cases; it was left to philosophy to explain.

Is consciousness located solely within the human brain or the human mind, or is it

something wider - does it expand outwards in nature; do other beings experience

consciousness as part of a wider universe? This is the view being developed by those

interested in what's called 'the new physics' - Bohm, Capra and others.

My answer to this question is 'yes' - consciousness is wider than the individual human

mind, wider than the human brain; here we can go back to Gregory Bateson ( Mind and

Nature: a necessary unity ) who said that mind is in nature: not only in the head (we are

nature) but also out there in our environment; and we share minds with trees and sea-

anemones (for example) through stories.

Stories create links between personal mind and the wider consciousness or

consciousnesses.

So, our brains are not the originators of consciousness but merely the transmitters of it (a

view taken by transpersonal psychologist Stanilav Grof - see his book The Holotropic

Mind ).

And if you don't believe that it doesn't matter - just suspend disbelief and imagine that it's

true (we're talking about worldviews here not absolute truths) so we can explore magical

consciousness.

So what is 'magical consciousness'?

Magical consciousness, as I've defined it:

- above all it's an experience

- an aspect, dimension, strand of consciousness that allows for creative participation -

through the imagination - between human beings and spirit - of deities, ancestors, and all

manner of other-than-human people - from hedgehogs to prawns.

Magical consciousness works through connections. How? Through seeing things in terms

of patterns of communication (and this is an important clue to the question I asked at the

beginning…).

If we see 'consciousness' as something wider than just our own minds; as something that

enables us to connect with other beings through our imaginations - there are no limits: we

can change shape, shape-shift, with all manner of beings - and thereby gain knowledge.

We can experience what it's like to be an owl, for example. We can feel what it's like to

have feathers and to feel the air moving through our feathers when we fly. Magical

consciousness is a source of knowledge that has been devalued and trivialized in Western

societies.

Connections are made through our personal minds linking with other minds in a wider

consciousness or consciousnesses.

- through participation, an ancient concept in philosophy which means that things 'take

part' in something bigger…

The term was developed by philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl to refer to mystical thinking -

a unity of thinking that made associations between things based on the idea that energy

suffuses everything. Levy-Bruhl initially said that this was how non-western peoples

thought.

This started something of an aggravated debate in anthropology in the early 20th century

with various celebrated anthropologists claiming that Levy-Bruhl made native peoples

more mystical than they really were. Levy-Bruhl then modified his position but what he

said about participation still remains relevant.

Anthropologist Stanley Tambiah developed Levy-Bruhl's notion of participation to argue

that people everywhere have two co-existing orientations to the world:

a. causality (logical thinking: abstract, separated, focused)

b. participation (analogical, holistic thinking: works with patterns and connection,

though myths, ritual, and symbols) - basis of magical consciousness.

Causality and participation do not form a dualism but rather an 'entwining' - we use both,

probably slipping in and out of each with ease without really realizing.

We're looking at magical consciousnesss so we're interested in participation rather than

causality. How to examine participation? Lots of examples in the book, but I'll talk about

one:

The trance-dance of Gordon the Toad It's hard to write about this kind of experience

because writing is the wrong code (in Bateson's terminology) of expression. The written

language, and the spoken language are the wrong codes for expression - it's

incommunicable in words.

What is the message of the dance? Bateson would say that it's about communication. The

dance is a participatory communication between shaman and spirits whereby Gordon

invokes the spirits he works with; he moves over and lets them in and in the process both

Gordon and the spirits are set free (Gordon's words). Gordon says that he feels a world

that thinks and its presence humbles him and sets him free'.

- he is 'bringing through' and giving corporeal expression to the non-corporeal. The dance

is an expression of magical consciousness; an experience. And this is why it is so difficult

to write about.

- but the communication with spirits enable Gordon to do the work that he does in

environmental education; it enables him to be a shaman in a practical sense as performing

a social role.

I'm going to backtrack a bit here:

How did I come to write The Nature of Magic?

I was a bit of an odd child! But apart from that, I thought animistically - perhaps all

children think animistically. Certainly we're encouraged to think in this way - up to a

certain age that is, and then we're expected to grow out of it. Trouble is - I didn't, and I

expect most people in this room didn't either (and we just kept quiet about it…!).

What is animism? It's the view that sees all things in the world as alive and possessing

spirit and/or soul. For Aristotle, soul was equivalent to psyche - the 'principle of life' that

animates a living creature (it's only lately that psychology has developed as a discipline

to study psyche in the human head as if that was all it was…).

- we can easily see ourselves as being alive as having the 'principle of life', and the dog,

the cat, but stones, and mountains that might be a little more difficult; and this table and

the chairs is even more difficult (the more processed things are the less alive they seem).

I remember asking a student on my altered states of consciousness course at the

University of Sussex to imagine that a stone was alive. She could just about imagine that,

with a great deal of effort; and when I asked her what she thought about the stone now

that she had imagined it was alive, she could handle that - just. But when I asked her what

she thought the stone thought of her, well that finished her! She thought I was mad (and

perhaps I am, but that's another story!).

Back to me being a weird child - I played with worms in my sandpit; I grew saplings

from apple seeds and whitebeam seeds; apricot and peach trees from stones. I loved

watching young horse chestnut leaves unfurling from a tightly closed sticky buds and I

imagined things…. Like most children I used to talk to things - the worms as well as my

toys…

But I digress. How do we come to lose this animistic world?

Our Western culture encourages us to separate ourselves off from the natural world;

nature and the earth have been devalued. Culturally, we've valued other approaches that

control and dominate nature - for economic and political reasons.

And we've valued rationality and disengaged reflection on the world above intuition and

sense experience of engaging with the world. Culturally we've lost our sense of soul. But

maybe if we're into magic we haven't.

- certainly the people I've worked with as an anthropologist haven't lost their sense of an

animated, connected, magical world.

So, what's the Problem?

As an anthropologist: how to explain my experience and those I was conducting

'participant observation' with - shamans, pagans, druids, witches, magicians - within a

social scientific framework that doubts, doesn't accept, the existence of magic on its own

terms (that is, not reduced to sociological or psychological (in the sense of relating only

to the individual) explanations)?

We don't have a scientific framework that incorporates magic - as an expanded animistic

awareness - as a form of knowledge.

This was a problem that I came up against in my PhD research. I wanted to explain the

world of magic to the world of academia and vice versa. I saw myself as a communicator

between two, largely separate, worlds

I ended up in an academic court having to fight for the views contained in my PhD

because my examiners thought I wasn't a 'proper anthropologist'; I'd 'gone native'. I won

the case (the spirits were with me that day, as were a number of amazing friends), the

PhD was eventually awarded, and the result was published as Magic, Witchcraft and the

Otherworld (published by Berg in 2000).

That book led to more questions and eventually The Nature of Magic. What was 'nature

religion'? How did practitioners relate to nature? Was it how I related to nature? The

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