This magical narrative aims to take you on a journey following a golden string first written about by the eighteenth-century poet, artist and shaman William Blake. Focused on my experience of such a journey as an anthropologist researching magic, it details the effects of my own shamanic soul loss and eventual soul retrieval. Both personal and universal, it combines multiple forms of knowledge encountered through more-than-human realms of the inspirited imagination that have resonance with how we live today. ****

Communicates the individual relevance of a magical mind, an example of personal shamanic soul-retrieval narrative Re-integration of the psyche based on William Blake's mythology of the imagination to re-balancing the Western psyche A model to include reason and emotion, magic and science as different, essential, complementary forms of knowledge

Autorentext

Susan Greenwood is a former Lecturer and Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a past Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, UK. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Goldsmiths, where she taught courses on the anthropology of religion and the anthropology of the body. She has also lectured for many years at the University of Sussex on Shamanic Consciousness and Altered States of Consciousness. Since her doctoral fieldwork on British practitioners of magic, published as Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld by Berg in 2000 (republished by Routledge in 2020) she has developed her research on magical consciousness as a potentially panhuman mode of mind that is expressed in a multitude of forms cross-culturally. Through developing a subjective and affective ethnography of mind with neuroscientist Erik Goodwyn in Magical Consciousness: an anthropological and neurobiological approach (Routledge, 2016), she examined the process of working with magical consciousness. This was expanded in her Developing Magical Consciousness: a theoretical and practical guide for the expansion of perception (Routledge, 2020). As well as lecturing internationally, Susan Greenwood has written numerous articles, the latest being ' A Spectrum of Magical Consciousness: conspiracy theories and the stories we tell ourselves' , Anthropology Today 38.1,2022; ' Building Bridges of Communication: seeking conversation between Indigenous and Western cultures through magical consciousness' Journal of Consciousness Studies special Indigenous Edition 2023 Vol.30, No.5-6; ' Science and Magic Need Each Other': making a case for an analogical perspective on magic' Journal of Magic, Witchcraft and Ritual (forthcoming) .

Inhalt

Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. The crisis.- Chapter 3. The Golden String.- Chapter 4. Dreams are Scribes of the Soul.- Chapter 5. Free Spirit.- Chapter 6. A Twisted Knot.- Chapter 7. Releasing the Shackles.- Chapter 8. Resistance.- Chapter 9. The Spiral of Time.- Chapter 10. Universal Energy.- Chapter 11. Everything is Holy.- Chapter 12. A Release of Spirit.- Chapter 13. Bone on Bone.- Chapter 14. The Hall of the Moon.- Chapter 15. A Mission.- Chapter 16. Dancing Star.- Chapter 17. Cosmic Womb.- Chapter 18. Initiation.- Chapter 19. Heaven's Gate.- Chapter 20. Glad Day.- Chapter 21. Epilogue.