Magical Consciousness: A Legitimate Form of Knowledge PDF

MAGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS: A LEGITIMATE FORM OF KNOWLEDGE An old photograph shows a seven-year-old child standing on a beach, her bare toes wrig- gling in the sand and her fingers sti8 with excitement.1 I recall the moment well for this 1. Parts of this chapter have been adapted from my theoretical stu...

MAGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS: A LEGITIMATE FORM OF KNOWLEDGE An old photograph shows a seven-year-old child standing on a beach, her bare toes wrig- gling in the sand and her fingers sti8 with excitement.1 I recall the moment well for this 1. Parts of this chapter have been adapted from my theoretical study of magic The Anthropology of Magic (2009) and also from my chapter “Toward an epistemology of imaginal reality: Fieldwork with the dragon”, in Espirito Santo and Llera Blanes 2012. 197 PART IV: CONTEMPORARY VOICES is a photograph of me. The thrill of arriving at the seaside after a long car journey from London to the south coast of England is still fresh in my memory after many years. Once on the beach, I was fascinated with the rock pools with their dark purple frond-waving anemones, scuttling crabs and small, darting, semi-transparent shrimps. I felt that I was entering other worlds within these pools of otherness. My awareness expanded and I imagined that I became a sea dragon. Of course, I did not materially transform into a reptilian fire-breathing water monster; but later as an anthropologist studying British practitioners of magic2 I revisited such childhood memories of the dragon as part of my fieldwork. In fact, early on in my research I had come to the conclusion that I would have to go beyond more usual methodological conventions and include myself as an inform- ant in order to explore the depths of magic as a mode of consciousness.3 In this sense, the anthropologist had to turn native.4 My experience of magic, indeed, did make me a native;5 but I propose that we are all natives of this type of thought – in a multiplicity of ways and to di8erent degrees. In order to further examine the experience of magic, I developed the concept of magical consciousness to refer to an imaginal aspect of awareness that can potentially be experi- enced by anyone, to varying extents. Having many historical and cross-cultural shapes and forms, magical consciousness can be expressed in a myriad of situations and contexts – ranging from the serendipity of childhood imaginative play to the more developed instrumental practice of witch doctors, medicine healers, spirit mediums and shamans, amongst many others. Magical consciousness is a specific and intrinsic mode of mind, one that might go back to humanity’s earliest beginnings.6 However, many social scientific theories have implicit assumptions about the inferiority of magic as a mode of thought when compared to science, or they explain magic solely in terms of its social or psycho- logical e8ects. In this chapter, I focus on the imaginal experience of magic and o8er an integrative conceptual model for understanding magical consciousness as a legitimate source of knowledge. MAGIC AND THE IMAGINATION My approach to examining the experience of magic starts with the premise that magical consciousness is a type of imaginative associative thinking di8erent from more abstract, analytical modes of thought. Magic has been actively explored by social scientists in the 2. IstartedmyfieldworkonBritishpractitionersofmagic,focusingonissuesofidentity,gend erandmorality, in the 1990s and my PhD was published as Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld (2000), later followed by more research on magicians’ attitudes to nature published as The Nature of Magic (2005). 3. At the time it was a big step to take, but I deemed it necessary to address the somewhat problematic concept of magic in the social sciences. 4. See, in particular, Kovach 2009. 5. Patric V. Giesler, a reviewer of Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld for the American Ethnologist 2002: 208, wrote that I gave a “native’s account” and that this contributed a “unique twist” to experiential ethnography. 6. Lewis-Williams 2004: 45–47. 198 SUSAN GREENWOOD: “MAGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS” past as o8ering explanation for beliefs (Frazer and Tylor); in opposition to the social cohesion of religion (Durkheim and Mauss); as a cathartic release of emotional tension in the absence of reason and practical knowledge (Malinowski); forming a logically coher- ent set of beliefs and practices (Evans-Pritchard); and more recently magic has been seen as an analytical counterpoint to modernity’s rational progress (Meyer and Pels).7 Notwithstanding, as my earlier childhood example of the sea dragon shows, the imagina- tion is intrinsic to the conception of magic as a mode of thought. Magic has been defined by some contemporary Western practitioners as a “convenient word for a whole collec- tion of techniques, all of which involve the mind” and includes emotion and the use of imaginative faculties, particularly the ability to visualize.8 The first record of the English word imagination dates from the fourteenth century as a “faculty of the mind that forms and manipulates images”. It comes initially from the Latin imaginary (to form a mental picture), and imago (image) and imaginare (to form an image of or represent something creatively).9 Imaginal is a term coined, or at least appearing initially, in 1647 as relating to imagination, images or imagery.10 Returning to my opening example, as a child on the beach I imagined that I saw a sea dragon within the rock pools. As an anthropologist studying magic I remember the feeling of being a child at the seaside and having a magical experience, although I did not recognize it as such at the time. The memory of the dragon now encapsulates a feeling of encompassing wholeness; it is a symbol or metaphor of a state of being where anything can happen in the imagination. As children, perhaps we all use the imaginal mind in such ways, until we learn to grow out of it, keep quiet or give preference to other forms of cognition. But needless to say the imagination is not just the preserve of children, or those who refuse to grow up; it is a mytho-poetic terrain most obviously, but not exclusively, utilized by artists, poets and musicians. Magical thinking is creative thinking that goes beyond the immediately apparent. If a wide perspective is taken, it is possible to investigate what lies beyond the horizon of the here and now by venturing into the imaginal mind. The imagination creates out of “no- thing”, as described by William Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream V. i: And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination.11 7. See Greenwood 2009: 4–5; Meyer and Pels 2003: 1–3. 8. ThisiswhatMargotAdler(1986:8)discoveredfromherresearchonAmericanPagansinDr awingDown the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today. 9. This definition comes from the Online Etymology Dictionary: http://www.etymonline.com/index. php?term=imagination, accessed 1 November 2011. 10. Defined in Merriam-Webster Dictionary, http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/imaginal, accessed 1 November 2011. 11. Quoted in Nettle 2001: 3. 199 PART IV: CONTEMPORARY VOICES The imagination can trick the mind and turn perception inside out; it gives shape and place to what was nothing, creating the tangible from the intangible. Nevertheless, the imagina- tion is an inherent aspect of human thinking and a source of creativity.12 The imagination can combine and recombine an assortment of ideas in a creative manner described by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio as a “diversity generating mechanism”: The first requirement here is the strong generation of representational diversity. What I mean by this is the ability to generate – to bring to your conscious mind – a variety of novel combinations of entities and parts of entities as images. These “images” are prompted by a stimulus that comes either from the world outside or from the inside world (one that you generate and recall) [...] Many of these representations have to be discarded because they are not relevant; but the images are there to choose from [...] The lay term “a very good imagination” really is an e8ective description of this diversity generating mechanism.13 “A very good imagination” can be a catalyst for synthesizing di8erent types of knowledge. For Immanuel Kant the imagination was a faculty of consciousness, an element of all human apprehension. The imagination was a capacity involved in everything from the basic perception of objects to an engagement with an entirely immaterial knowledge. Trying to construct an overall picture of human knowing in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant saw the imagination functioning to mediate between cognition and experience as di8erent orientations towards the world. He thought that it was possible to work the material of experience from its diverse elements into something known. It was a function of the imagination to mediate between concepts and intuition, subject and object, thought and sensibility.14 Kant’s insight allowed for a syn- thetic formation of knowledge – a bringing together of diverse forms and appearances, as well as an ability to relate to them. Such a dynamic framing of the imagination had a clear and compelling articulation of how various essential elements of the imagination could relate dynamically one to one another, thus facilitating a much richer understanding of consciousness. Kant’s views raised in my mind the question of how could magical consciousness articu- late within such a synthetic conception of knowledge? In order to address this question it is necessary to backtrack a little to consider methodological, theoretical and historical issues. A BRIDGE OF COMMUNICATION An essential feature of my fieldwork has been to create a “bridge of communication” between practitioners of various forms of magic and academic discourse on magic in the belief that such a bridge could deepen knowledge of this complex subject and enrich our 12. Ibid. 13. Damasio 2001: 65. 14. Gibbons 1994: 1–2. 200 SUSAN GREENWOOD: “MAGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS” understanding. When I first started fieldwork with British magicians my aim was to create a bridge between the two very di8erent worlds of scholarly critical analysis, on the one hand, and the magical panorama of my informants, on the other. I wanted to make one explicable to the other, and vice versa. Social scientists have described magic in various derogatory ways. For example, Edward Tylor in Primitive Culture (1871) saw magic as “the most pernicious delusion that ever vexed mankind”. James Frazer thought that magic was a “pseudo-science”; it tried to do what science did, but failed because it was based on false premises. Sigmund Freud thought there was a parallel between primitive magical beliefs and neurotic and infantile delusions, and Émile Durkheim viewed magic as a negative and private activity opposed to public religion. By contrast to these earlier views, my aim was to open up a di8erent dimension of scholarly examinations of magic. I wrote an encyclo- paedia on magic and witchcraft, a book that attempted to make anthropological ideas on this subject more accessible for contemporary Western practitioners of magic, as well as for a general audience.15 My bridging work continues in a forthcoming book on Magical Consciousness as an explication of the fundamental conceptual and experiential aspects of thinking magically, guided by the spirit of anthropology as a “sustained and disciplined inquiry into the conditions and potentials of human life”.16 In this work I found it possible to imagine an interactive space of magical consciousness where communication with imaginal entities might occur through my own research experience. In order to fully understand what I was experiencing, I searched for theories that could help me to explain magical consciousness as an aspect of the imaginal mind in which meanings were felt rather than reasoned. But I had to apprehend the meanings first; this is why I started analysing my own childhood experiences of magic. In other words, I had to return to being a native. From this perspective it seemed that the dragon was speaking to me of another mode of being, one that was individual as well as connecting with what felt like a universal energy. At one and the same time, the dragon is specific to each life experi- ence, as well as having significance to wider social, cultural and cosmological contexts. The dragon appears in all sorts of places, cross-culturally and through time. In China the creature is called lung; Hawaii, kelekona or mo’o; Croatia and Serbia, zmaj; Finland, lohikaarme; Poland, smok; Turkey, ejderha; Hungary, sarkany; Japan, tatsu; Wales draig; Germany, lindwurm; Holland, draak; for the Maori of New Zealand, tarakona; the Lakota Sioux, unhcegila; and for the Cherokee Indians, unktena.17 The word for dragon in Anglo- Saxon or Old English is wyrm, in Old High German it is wurm, whereas in Old Norse it is ormr. Frequently the meaning of the term dragon relates to serpents, worms and snakes and these creatures appear to be interchangeable with one another. A winged serpent, the dragon generally lives underground in a cave and it is seen to be symbolic of the elements earth, air, fire and water, as well as spirit. Essentially an elemental force of nature, the dragon appears in di8erent shapes and forms. The dragon is both a universal and a highly specific symbol, a condensation of 15. Greenwood 2011. 16. Ingold 2011: 3. 17. Jones 2000: 2–3. 201 PART IV: CONTEMPORARY VOICES varied human experiences with the natural world. In Australasia rainbow serpents are often considered to be spirits protecting the land and appear frequently in creation myths. Likewise, the lizard-like mo’o of Hawaii are guardians of lakes and rivers, while the Apep, is an Egyptian serpent of darkness, thunderstorms, lightning and whirlwinds. A changeable being, the dragon is often portrayed with a horse’s head and a snake’s tail; alternatively, it has a camel’s head, stag’s horns, eyes of a demon, neck of a snake, belly of a clam, carp scales, eagle claws, soles of a tiger, and the ears of a cow.18 Chameleon-like, the dragon seems to change from creature to creature, transmuting into many things. Dragons are mythical beasts – they are the mainstay of many fantastic encounters in popular culture through the ages: in stories, legends, folktales, film, fiction and theatre. In Western cultures, dragons have come to be seen as evil, representing adversity, the senses and sexuality. Conversely, in Chinese traditions they represent the creativity and destruction of life. Chinese philosopher Hwai Nan Tsze, who died in 122 bce, called the dragon the origin of all creatures. The dragon has been described as “the animating principle of every place – the genius loci of trees and rocks, of pools, rivers, mountains and seas, of bridges and buildings, of men, women and children”.19 The Chinese cultural understanding of dragons is more in tune with how I came to understand my experience of the dragon as a metaphor or symbol of an elemental feeling about nature, such as my childhood experience with the rock pools on the beach. Having explored my own relationship with magical consciousness through the dragon, I started my anthropological examination with Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of participation, a social psychological perception of the world based on a mystical mentality, “the emotional association between persons and things in contact with a non-ordinary spirit reality”.20 This definition seemed to address the emotion and imagination of my childhood dragon encounter. Everyone’s experience of the dragon is varied: the creature’s very mutability (its ability to change and shift its very being) lends itself to many interpretations. My intuitive feelings were that the dragon was about changing perception from everyday common sense to participatory magical consciousness. An example of my own participa- tory experience that I recall was an occasion when a friend and I were talking about magic as we walked by a flowing stream close to her cottage in the Brecon Beacons, one of the sources of the River Ta8 in Wales. As we reached a few trees by the side of the stream, I stopped to look at the beautiful reflection that the tree branches and the sky made in the water – at that moment the depths of the water, with its little rushing eddies over the stones of the river bed, combined with the sun and the white clouds in the blue summer sky. All formed part of a pattern of participation – the sky was mirrored in the water and they intermingled in my imagination. My friend threw a stick into the stream for her dog to fetch and instantly the pattern broke into a myriad of shimmering fragments. Ripples formed from the point where the stick hit the water and gradually spread out, forming another pattern, until the waters regained their own momentum and the reflections of the 18. de Visser 2008 : 70. 19. Huxley 1989: 5–6. 20. Cited in Tambiah 1990: 91. 202 SUSAN GREENWOOD: “MAGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS” clouds reappeared in the river. Watching the movement of the ripples on water, I realized that seemingly ordinary moments like these could take me into magical consciousness through participation with the tree, sky, water, river bed, sun, the ripples, my friend, the dog, the stick and all the feelings and connections with this myriad of kaleidoscopic imaginal associations in time. I can sum up this experience as the dragon; it was similar to the feeling that I had as a child looking into the rock pool on the beach when I felt my awareness expanding many years ago. First I had the participatory experience of being connected to the moment in time when my friend threw the stick for her dog, or the recollection of a child looking into the rock pool watching the sea anemones on the beach; and then that feeling was associ- ated with an awareness of the dragon, almost as a form of shorthand for a multiplicity of feelings, most of which seemed inexpressible through words. I came to understand magical consciousness as a faculty of human awareness that could connect with spirit through the imagination. This occurred primarily through emotion and intuition, and then secondarily through symbols and metaphor as a condensation of relevant meanings and associations. Such participatory associations between the individual and an inspirited cosmos can also be understood psychologically though Jung’s notion of synchronicity whereby relation- ships are based on causally unrelated events of spirit coming together in a meaningful way.21 The notion of synchronicity does not challenge anthropological analysis or causality, but reveals the di8erent modus operandi of magical consciousness. A WIDENING ORIENTATION If magical consciousness is a human faculty understood anthropologically and psychologi- cally, it also seemed that the perspective of human physiology might o8er an illuminating biological insight. In physiological terms, magical consciousness, as a participatory aware- ness, equates with the workings of the right hemisphere of the human brain. The right hemisphere has a wide take on the world, compared to the narrow categorizing focus of the left hemisphere. Both hemispheres are involved with all the brain’s functions, such as emotion, reasoning, visual imagery and mathematical thinking, but they have di8erent orientations.22 This process has come to be seen as more flexible than earlier formulations,23 where the left and right hemispheres were seen to function more independently of one another. The right hemisphere is dominant in shape-shifting – for example, when a sha- manic practitioner “becomes” her spirit guide in her imagination. Practitioners of magic – whether shamans, spirit mediums, medicine people, witch doctors or Western druids – develop the right hemisphere as a mode of consciousness for the instrumental practice  21. Jung 1960: 417–519. 22. McGilchrist 2011: 1068–1069; see McGilchrist 2009. See also “Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight”, TED talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html, posted March 2008, accessed 21 August 2011. 23. Ornstein 1977. 203 PART IV: CONTEMPORARY VOICES of magic to e8ect change. The two orientations arising from the two hemispheres function interchangeably, and with experience the move from one to the other can become fluid.24 Recently, I was walking along the beach, near the same beach where I experienced the sea dragon in a rock pool as a small child, and I was drawn to a strangely shaped stone that looked like a dragon’s head. The stone took my attention. I picked it up, looked at it, and then put it back without further reference. Sitting down to look at the sea, my hand rested on the beach and my fingers touched a stone. Lifting it up, I saw to my surprise that I had picked up the same stone. This time I noticed that there was a segmented pattern that threaded around one half of the dragon’s head, covering one eye and reaching around half of the pebble. Perhaps it was a fossilized prehistoric sea creature – a sea dragon. Yet again, I put it back among the millions of other stones in that particular area of beach and admired the lapping of the waves as they glinted in the sun. Eventually, as I got up to leave, something drew me back again to the dragon stone. Taking it up yet again, I exam- ined its shape and looked at its two halves. I realised that the stone seemed to represent di8erent orientations of the two hemispheres of the brain in my imagination: one of the wide, participatory dragon of magical consciousness, understood primarily through the brain’s right hemisphere; and the other the more focused and analytical thinking of the left hemisphere. As I turned the stone in my hand, I found that I could move between the two dimensions in my awareness. I was struck by the thought that if I could learn to utilize this fluidity of thinking more generally, then it might lead me to other dimensions of experience that went beyond my everyday thinking. One conclusion from the above experience is that my childhood relationship with the dragon can be seen as communication with an imaginal spirit entity. This raised the anthropological dilemma of a belief in spirits – they might exist in the imagination, but not in reality. I found that developing the concept of magical consciousness could over- come the di8iculty: When a person is “in” that part of their awareness [magical consciousness] it makes no di8erence whatsoever if they believe in spirits, or if spirit communications are labelled as psychological – if they are explained as a part of their own internal thought processes – or whether they think the entities with which they are com- municating are independent of them and have a being of their own. Whilst par- ticipating in a magical aspect of consciousness the question of belief is irrelevant: “belief ” is not a necessary condition to communicate with an inspirited world.25 Questions of belief or the reality or non-reality of spirits, while interesting in principle, can be a straitjacket for an alternative perception a8orded by communication with non- material entities. The issue is one of a di8erent perception a8orded by magical conscious- ness. Western cultural history has made an examination of magical experience rather problematic, and it is necessary to consider some historical implications that have impeded such an approach. 24. Greenwood 2009: 139–41. 25. Ibid.: 140. 204 SUSAN GREENWOOD: “MAGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS” THE SPLIT BETWEEN SPIRIT AND MATTER As we have seen, magical consciousness has a holistic engagement with material and non- material realities; but historically the splitting of spirit and matter, and the corre- sponding separation between mind and body, has largely precluded further exegesis of a part of human experience. In general scientific terms, we tend to see consciousness as a product of the brain; but magical consciousness is concerned with a widening rather than a narrow orientation. Historically, since Descartes associated mind with individual human reasoning, mind has been located in the brain. Descartes claimed that the human body (as opposed to the human mind), acted from mechanical instinct like animals. Putting an emphasis on reason as the basis of analytic knowledge, he argued that truth was derived from rational reflection rather than from the untrustworthy senses. By contrast, the body was material and part of the mechanistic universe; it had no soul and no consciousness, being under the control of its emotions and external stimuli. A soul without a body would have consciousness, but only of innate ideas lacking sensory impressions of the world.26 Descartes’s philosophy was highly influential and it was forged out of his attempts to understand the world upon certainties of geometrical reasoning. Descartes’s work contrib- uted to the mathematization of the world picture, and his mechanical philosophy marked a definite break with the past and set the seal upon how science would come to be seen.27 Descartes’s legacy was the separation of spirit (mind) from matter, and this notion has had an abiding influence on Western culture – it is thought, rather than experience of the senses, that is valued. The valuing of reason over experience has hampered an under- standing of the experience of magic. The Cartesian legacy has shaped Western notions of science; its rationalism is still evident in anthropological thinking today. Magic is now contrasted with the Western style of thought that firmly locates knowledge of the world in science. In the seventeenth century, during what has come to be termed the Scientific Revolution, the practical experimental aspects of magic were absorbed into science, while spiritual features of magic were denounced as irrational. The shift from a magical view, in which there was no division between spirit and matter, to the rational pursuit of science largely instigated by the adoption of a Cartesian worldview entailed the material and immaterial aspects of natural philosophy becoming separated. Prior to the rise of the Cartesian perspective, the prevailing natural philosophy had been a complete system that incorporated spirit and matter – with disciplinary traditions ranging from astronomy, mechanics, anatomy, medicine, metaphysics, pharmacology, cartography, mining and metallurgy to optics, music and physiology, amongst others – that aimed to describe the entire system of the world.28 The scientific worldview developed partly out of a wedding of a rationalizing natural philosophy and the pragmatic and empirical tradition of sympathetic magic. Natural phil- osophy, as defined by Galilei Galileo (b. 1564; d. 1642), an Italian physicist, astronomer 26. Morris 1991: 6–14. 27. Henry 1997: 4. 28. Ibid.: 43–44, 172. 205 PART IV: CONTEMPORARY VOICES and philosopher, Auguste Comte (b. 1798; d. 1857), a French philosopher, and the English naturalist Charles Darwin (b. 1809; d. 1882), concerned a pursuit of objective knowledge of phenomena.29 Magic, on the other hand, was chiefly concerned with exploiting the sympathies and antipathies between corresponding things. Based on an assumption that certain things had hidden or occult powers to a8ect other things, sympathetic magic was dependent upon a profound knowledge of how to use these powers to achieve a desired outcome. A reforming rationalizing natural philosophy denounced magic and at the same time took what was useful. Francis Bacon was one of the first natural philosophers to advocate the experimental method as the most reliable way of acquiring knowledge of the natural world. Rationalist and speculative natural philosophy and experimental natural magic had once been completely separate traditions; but Bacon advocated the use of the experimental method of the magician in a reformed natural philosophy. The supposedly good ideas in magic were incorporated within the reformed natural knowledge, while the “bad” ideas were used to denounce magic as “a sink of false and ludicrous beliefs”.30 Yet, magical traditions played an important part in the major shift from scholastic natural philosophy to the new more practically useful empirical natural philosophy of the Scientific Revolution. As historian John Henry notes: “The history of magic since the eighteenth century has been the history of what was left of that tradition after major elements of natural magic had been absorbed into natural philosophy.”31 Natural magic disappeared from the Western conception of magic due to its most fundamental aspects having been co-opted. This eventually had a major impact upon how magic is now conven- tionally viewed in academia. During this period the course was set for the advancement of causal logic over magical thinking, and these ideas reached their full expression during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a time when occult phenomena were no longer significant as a form of explanation and were deemed mere superstition, a relic of a dark and primitive past. As the term suggests, during the period an attempt was made to shed greater light on the conduct of human a8airs: the perceived dark mysteries of traditional attitudes in religion and political life were pushed back, and in their place a new outlook grew up, informed by reason and the power of scientific research and discovery.32 God was seen as having created the world as a perfect rational machine. Humans could become part of rationality through the knowledge of the self-perfection of God’s design; if God’s laws of nature were rational, then it was through reason that people could discover them. The global e8ort of the Enlightenment was to explain other religions as false, and the beliefs of other societies were seen as primitive, backward and unenlightened. In some respects, these attitudes still linger and they are reflected in a general distrust of the experience of magic. A focus of my work has been on reconciling the historical split that has reduced magic to only its material e8ects. For social scientists to fully address the question of “what is magic?”, it is necessary to go beyond the rationalizing tendency of 29. Faivre 1989: 24. 30. Henry 2002: 5, 64, 79. 31. Henry 1997: 42. 32. Ibid.: 19–20. 206 SUSAN GREENWOOD: “MAGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS” some perspectives. It is vital that we do not limit our understanding of magic to observ- able material or cultural manifestations – such as, for example, the e8ect that beliefs in magic have on psychological and social life. Including an experiential perspective allows the possibility for a non-material imaginal dimension to be considered as part of a wider discussion of magic, and this helps to heal the historical split between spirit and matter. A TOTAL FIELD OF RELATIONS Returning to the issue of magical consciousness, I sought a more inclusive approach for the examination of imaginal experience. As we have seen, social scientific views of indi- vidual consciousness tend to be limited in their scope to brain activity; but if the concept of “mind” is extended to body–mind, it overcomes the Cartesian division between body and mind. Further, if body–mind is defined as the personal aspects of individual process, and “consciousness” as an intrinsic quality of the wider universe of which individual body–mind is but one part, then body–mind and consciousness are linked. If conscious- ness is more broadly defined as wider than the individual human body–mind, then that body–mind might be shared with other beings. If we understand these other beings as spirits that have a di8erent order of existence than the material dimension of reality, or are invisible but nonetheless real dimensions of material reality, then it is possible to take the view that these beings also have body–mind when they “inhabit” a physical being. If we entertain the proposition that during an experience of magical consciousness spirits share a degree of corporeal materiality and possess mind, then the minds of enti- ties – in whatever form – and ours can meet in a wider consciousness.33 This was a view common before Descartes, and one that the eighteenth-century poet and artist William Blake tried to re-invoke. The view that all of life is infused with spirit, soul and conscious- ness was common in the ancient world prior to the dawning development of the rational- izing scientific worldview of Blake’s time. Aristotle (384–322 bce), for example, thought the soul was equivalent to psyche – it was the “principle of life” that animates. It is only relatively lately that psychology has developed as a discipline to study psyche in the human head, for originally psyche was considered much more widely as inherent in all things. Blake, for example, envisioned a world in which every creature was an inspirited person living within the total freedom of its Imagination.34 Taking a similarly synthetic view, Gregory Bateson, in his characteristically bold way, saw such an interactive space in nature. He argued that the body, the mind and the whole ecosystem was linked within a meta-pattern or a “dance of interacting parts (only second- arily pegged down by physical limits)”.35 Bateson, a holistic thinker, saw the mind as being a part of nature. In Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (1985), he tried to understand an integrated world and sought to find a language of relationship with which to communicate. 33. Bateson 2000: 467; see also Greenwood 2005: 97. 34. Raine 1991: 11–12. 35. Bateson 1985: 22. 207 PART IV: CONTEMPORARY VOICES Thinking that logic was not suitable for the description of biological patterns, he turned to metaphor as the language of nature. Seeking an “ecological epistemology” in Angel’s Fear (1987) and “A sacred unity” (1991), he tried to build a bridge of communication between all branches of the world of experience – intellectual, emotional, observational, theoretical, verbal and wordless.36 Bateson was interested in cybernetics, the science of communication in machines and living beings. He looked at the nature of mental pro- cesses and the relationship of communication between thought and the material world in terms of interconnection and interdependence of ecosystems. My work on contemporary Western pagans’ notions of nature has been shaped by Bateson’s theory of consciousness and its challenge to the Enlightenment’s separation of mind from nature.37 Tim Ingold also takes his cue from Bateson when he discusses a worldview envisaged from within a “total field of relations whose unfolding is tantamount to the process of life itself ”.38 Both Bateson and Ingold see the mind as immanent in the whole system of the organism–environment,39 and continuing in this vein, my aim is to try to analyse mind, as “body–mind”, through a process of interconnection with nature and the inspirited imagination of magical consciousness as a legitimate source of knowledge. A LEGITIMATE SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE Using my childhood experience with the sea dragon may seem a far stretch to some who might still be concerned with the subjective encroaching into theoretical and methodo- logical social scientific discourse. But it is a highly pertinent example as my aim is to show how magical consciousness is an intrinsic human experience. Magic is at the heart of anthropology in terms of the issues it raises in relation to people’s lived realities and the meaning of science. However, for any change of anthropological understanding to occur, magical consciousness needs to be recognized as a universal mode of perception. Although there have been academic approaches, such as phenomenology, that seek to ameliorate the problem, the separation of spirit from matter has left a world that is largely de-spirited, and this has corresponded with the development of science as a rationalistic pursuit that largely renders invisible magical consciousness. In order to examine magical consciousness, I sought a broader and more inclusive scientific framework, one that not only could include an in-depth analysis of the process of magical experience, but also allow for a fresh and experientially based exploration of the reality of spirits. Essentially, what was required was a model that would recombine the disparate elements of knowledge, thus overcoming the historical fragmentation that had started during the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution. To this end, I employed Geo8rey Samuel’s multimodal framework, a descriptive model that features the metaphor of a web as an integrated conceptual space for all knowledges, including magical, each bringing a nuanced and enriching perspective.40 Space prevents an explication here; but I have discussed the use of this framework more fully elsewhere.41 Within the integrative approach put forward by Samuel, I sought to articulate the concept of multiple conceptions of reality. I adopted and developed Gregory Bateson’s two pivotal notions of ideation and abduction to further explore magical consciousness. Ideation is a concept for constructing mental patterns, the term coming from “ideate”, to imagine and conceive ideas in the mind. Abduction, on the other hand, is the intuitive process of reasoning through metaphors, of recognizing patterns in dreams, parable, allegory, poetry, even the whole of science and the whole of religion.42 In this way we can see knowledge as patterns of understanding, and as patterns for understanding in complex global situations where many varieties of magical, religious, political, developmental and institutional ideologies come into play. Applying the above notions of multiple conceptions of reality to the subject of spirits, it is possible to see how a rationalistic orientation, in which spirits do not exist, can be examined alongside a magical consciousness orientation with its inspirited worldview. The purpose is to consider how we might understand and apply these di8erent perspectives in a new way. The analytical focus and the magical focus in this framework are presented as two patterns of knowledge that need not be seen as mutually exclusive systems of under- standing separated by belief or non-belief in spirits. The table in this chapter shows how magical consciousness can become one aspect of mul- tiple orderings of reality and thus have a place as a legitimate form of knowledge within a synthetic view of science. It demonstrates how we can hold both perspectives if we shift between the analytical mode and the focus that acknowledges our native experience. We do not necessarily have to choose one or the other. It is possible to accommodate both aspects and then apply whichever is the most appropriate at any given point in time, or for any specific situation. Thus, a rationalistic orientation, in which spirits do not exist, can be examined alongside a magical orientation with its inspirited worldview. The purpose is to consider how we might understand and apply these di8erent approaches in a new manner. This model might help to explain how people can come to hold together and at the same time what might appear to be conflicting beliefs in both “science” and “magic”. CONCLUSION Magical consciousness is experienced in varying ways and to di8erent degrees; it is shaped and developed cross-culturally through varying philosophies, worldviews, life-worlds and cosmologies. The lived experience of magic is formalized into a variety of expressions, but underlying all the diversity is the common human propensity to think magically – to participate in an imaginal consciousness. Magic is as personal as it is universal. Magic is deep rooted in the human mind, and experiences such as my encounter with the sea dragon are just one example of how the imagination comes to shape magical conscious- ness. What is required is a corresponding attitude towards the study of magic, one that breaches the historical divide between magic and science, enabling magic to be viewed within an integrative conception of science. The model that I am proposing explains how magical consciousness, as one aspect of human experience, is neither rendered invisible, nor does it threaten canons of reason, rationality and analysis. The use of this model not only validates an important area of study that cannot otherwise be readily examined, but it also helps to explain how changing, diverse and contradictory beliefs can be held at the same time in increasingly complex global contexts.