Developing Magical Consciousness: A Theoretical and Practical Guide for the Expansion of Perception

Abstract

In Developing Magical Consciousness: A Theoretical and Practical Guide for the Expansion of Perception, Susan Greenwood aims to bridge the gulf between Indigenous worldviews and the scientific worldview of the West to offer “an alternative mythological framework for developing Western magical perception” (1) and to exemplify how to develop magical perception. She argues that such perception is a rejected or marginalized form of knowledge in post-Enlightenment Western cultures that individuals can reactivate by learning to orient their consciousness differently. She posits that Australian Aboriginal peoples have an embodied magical worldview rooted in the material environment, which their ancestors shaped in the Dreaming. Her “Prologue: A New Template for Magic” is personal, emotional, and idiosyncratic and signals that Greenwood is writing “anthropology from the heart rather than the head . . . for those inside and outside academic institutions” (1). Among other things, Greenwood discusses Jungian analyst Craig San Roque on the Central Desert peoples, the value of shamanism, and her own experiences at concerts by veteran Aboriginal singer Archie Roach and Pink Floyd, loosely conflating all the mystical and experiential aspects of Abrahamic religions under the rubric of “magic.” She draws on English poet William Blake, to whom she refers as a “shaman,” as a figure who connects Western and non-Western views via “imagination, magical analogies, and metaphor” (13). Greenwood notes Brian Bates’s The Way of Wyrd (1983), a novel about Anglo-Saxon magic, favorably and describes Blake with reference to the Ranters and counter-Enlightenment tendencies. She ends the prologue by offering a summary of the book’s three parts. Section 1, “A Bridge of Communication,” explores how Western magical consciousness might be brought into conversation with Indigenous Australian consciousness, with a focus on relationships with the land and nature. Section 2, “Lifting ‘mind forg’d manacles’,” examines William Blake as a prophet against the Enlightenment and a practitioner of magical consciousness. Section 3, “Working with Magical Consciousness,” shifts attention to magic as healing and includes Greenwood’s reflection on giving a paper on shamanic healing at the Healing Power conference in Leiden in 2017.Chapter 1, “On the Trail of the Rainbow Serpent,” opens Section 1 by chronicling Greenwood’s encounter with Aboriginal Australia during her 2016 research trip. She retells stories of the Rainbow Serpent, a pan-Aboriginal ancestor figure who is sometimes hailed as creator and who has strong links to ecology and fertility, especially through water. She describes art exhibitions she visited and records impressions of the relationship between the ancient Indigenous Australian culture and that of White Australians. The tone is conversational, the references show almost no familiarity with any of the academic literature on Aboriginal culture, and the impression gained from the Prologue—that the author would prefer to refer to popular Jungian authors in the therapeutic and wellness space and novels rather than scholarly research—is thoroughly reinforced. Chapter 2, “Towards a Place of Connection,” opens with Greenwood forming “an inter-species relationship” with a magpie by the shores of Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra (49). After a brief reflection on Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s ideas about participation and non-duality, she composes a poem about the magpie, then discusses the West Arnhem Land “clever man” Paddy Compass Namadbara, who had a shamanic-type initiation while ill and acquired extensive ritual knowledge and a reputation as a healer. Greenwood engages somewhat with earlier authors such as Levy-Bruhl (1857–1939), E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973), and Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) and repeats her assertion of the value of magical consciousness. The chapter concludes with an illustrated account of participatory perception, which for Greenwood means magical consciousness as a panhuman state, here experienced on the unpopulated island of Copinsay in the Orkneys.The third chapter, “Moving Out of the Hall of Mirrors: The Practice of Magic,” covers shamanism, “pan-psychic indigeneity” (71), the difference between I-thinking and It-thinking, and an extended discussion of a banyan tree in Kolkata Botanic Gardens as well as a medicine bowl from Big Sur, California. Greenwood references several more anthropologists (for example, Franz Boas, Clifford Geertz, Stanley Tambiah) in the chapter’s conclusion on magical analogies. Chapter 4, “Liberating Magical Imagination,” opens with Greenwood passing through an installation, “The Naked Magician,” in the Migros Museum in Zurich and experiencing it as a magical environment. She notes that decentering the mind incubates magical consciousness and that the “imagination,” in cognitive terms, is that through which we experience the world. The chapter concludes with a description of her participation in a 2013 conference at Esalen at Big Sur, California, together with a lengthy section on shamanic healing from different cultures.Section 2 starts with the fifth chapter, “Healing Western Cultural Amnesia,” focusing on Blake’s idea that “everything that lives is holy” (103), which Greenwood believes has been lost in the West. She commences the chapter with an engraving of the Gadigal people of the Sydney region, which William Blake made from a drawing by Governor King; as she believes that Blake worked “to bring about a reintegration of healing of body and spirit” (103), it is both serendipitous and apposite that Blake made this image. Greenwood moves on to Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (ca. 1790–1793), the possibility of training in creative perception, which could make all people capable of visions such as those of Blake, and the idea of transformation through contraries, which is closely related to the notion of coincidentia oppositorum: that opposites form a whole if properly perceived. Greenwood’s account of her visit to Blake’s cottage is accompanied by some thoughts on the reconciliation of reason and emotion, Blake as a perennial thinker, and the ideas of sex and gender in his work. Chapter 6, “‘Opposition is True Friendship’: Integrating the Psyche,” returns to Jungian analysis of Blake’s corpus and considers Satan, trickster figures, and the reading of Blake’s “Jerusalem” hosted by the Blake Society to celebrate “William Blake’s 260th birthday in 2017” (125). Greenwood then analyzes Blake’s The Four Zoas (an incomplete work begun in 1797) and examines the reconciliation of Blake’s and Jung’s perspectives, concluding with reflections on humankind’s connection with nature.Section 3 begins with chapter 7, “Re-dreaming a Common Language of Communication,” which discusses the difficult social condition of Australian Aboriginals and focuses on a group of Jungians’ attempts to reflect on and assist with the healing of troubled Indigenous people, which employ the myth of Dionysus as god of intoxication and altered states of consciousness. Greenwood then discusses Blake’s last set of engravings, comprising The Book of Job, and returns to the texts of The Four Zoas and the importance of the symbol of the dragon. In chapter 8, “All Knowing is Personal: Participating with Spirit Worlds,” Greenwood reveals that she has been engaged in becoming a healer herself and discusses her time with the Servants of the Light (SoL), an esoteric fraternity, where she participated in shamanic healing. She reflects on her journey from academic anthropologist to healer and on shifting modes from the rational to something quite different, with extended accounts of two participants she calls “David” and “Lily.” The final chapter, “Working between Two Worlds: Interactions of Culture and Environment,” continues with Greenwood’s account of her intense work with others to develop magical consciousness. Indigenous traditions about ayahuasca, the wolf, environmental concerns (e.g., organic farming), and stones are explored in the context of “Susan” (Greenwood) as the healer, a kind of shaman, with a student, Jack, an apprentice-figure central to this part of the story; he was also juggling the academic with the experiential, completing a Master’s degree and commencing a PhD thesis during this phase of his life. A two-page epilogue concludes the book.It is very difficult to assess a work such as this. There is no doubt that Greenwood is well-intentioned and sincere in her writing, yet the complexities of relations between Whites and Indigenous peoples, the issues of cultural appropriation and romanticization of the exotic, and the questionable nature of much of her approach give me pause. The Jungian therapeutic texts Greenwood consults are thoroughly esoteric and “unacademic,” while many of the “academic” texts she cites are dated. Moreover, there is almost no reputable research on Australian Aboriginal cultures and peoples in her bibliography. Greenwood mentions the colonization of Australia only in passing, and the book reads as strangely old-fashioned, with a definite New Age slant, blind to the pressing issues of scholarship at almost the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. “Decolonization,” a key term in current Humanities disciplines, never appears in the entire text.Greenwood clearly enjoys traveling and experiencing different cultures, is aware of the transformative power of art and music, takes pleasure in encounters with animals and plants, and thinks interesting thoughts about her life—including all of the above and the writings and art of William Blake, which she clearly admires. But it is impossible to work out her intended readership, though field anthropologists may find something of value, and students with a “seeker” orientation, pursuing enlightenment of some kind, may be affected by Greenwood’s own spiritual journey. It may be that I am the wrong reader for Developing Magical Consciousness rather than the book itself being fatally flawed; readers must decide for themselves.