The Nature of Magic

An Anthropology of Consciousness

Susan Greenwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000189827
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines how and why practitioners of nature religion - Western witches, druids, shamans - seek to relate spiritually with nature through 'magical consciousness'. 'Magic' and 'consciousness' are concepts that are often fraught with prejudice and ambiguity respectively. Greenwood develops a new theory of magical consciousness by arguing that magic ultimately has more to do with the workings of the human mind in terms of an expanded awareness than with socio-cultural explanations. She combines her own subjective insights gained from magical practice with practitioners' in-depth accounts and sustained academic theory on the process of magic. She also tracks magical consciousness in philosophy, myth, folklore, story-telling, and the hi-tech discourse of postmodernity, and asks important questions concerning nature religion's environmental credentials, such as whether it as inherently ecological as many of its practitioners claim.

—1— Introduction

On one occasion at Beltane (1 May) on Old Winchester Hill, an Iron Age hill fort on the South Downs in Southern England, a gathering of ten New Age practitioners attuned to the natural energies of the earth. Using a combination of chanting, walking, singing, dowsing, and dancing around a maypole, the aim was to bring healing and balance to each person as well as to the environment by the alignment of inner energies with the ley lines and chakras¹ of the earth. Up and down the country assorted groups of witches celebrated the coming of summer in various ways, some as the rebirth of the young King of the Greenwood and his union with the Goddess as the embodiment of nature; while other Pagans were encamped in a wood in Kent to prevent it being turned into a leisure centre. During the same period in the same county, a group of local school children, guided by shaman environmental educators, created an imaginative world of animals, plants and fairies in a bluebell wood for a May Fair. What motivates and connects these events is a spiritual revaluing of the natural world and the regaining of a sense of unity with nature. One well-known Pagan said to me: ‘For modern people the world has been intentionally deprived of significance, and so you have to reconnect.’ Connection with the natural world is thus the basis of nature spiritualities.

How is it that the human mind comes to ‘disconnect’, to ‘renounce its sensuous bearings isolating itself from the other animals and the animate earth’ (Abram, 1997: 261)? Historian Catherine Albanese, in her study of nature religion in America, observes that historically religious reflection in Western cultures, which has been primarily conducted through the ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’, has been preoccupied with three symbolic centres: God, humanity, and nature. God has been paramount, and humans and nature, as creatures of God, have shone – but only in reflected light, leaving nature as a symbolic centre largely unnoticed. By contrast, what she terms ‘nature religion’ focuses on nature as source of the sacred (1991:7–9). Disconnection is largely due to the fact that in Western history there has been a progressive withdrawal of divinity from the natural world accompanied by a devaluation of human experience. This started in the period of Late Antiquity between the accession of Marcus Aurelius and the conversion of Constantine to Christianity (Dodds, 1990:37). Aided by Copernicus’s transferral, in 1543, of many astronomical functions previously attributed to the earth to the sun, a fundamental change was made regarding human relationships to the universe and to God, creating the transition from a medieval to a modern Western view (Kuhn, [1957] 1974:1–2). The Copernican revolution facilitated the seventeenth – century mechanistic conception of nature developed by philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) who separated the thinking mind from the material world and thus laid the ground for an objective science; this contributed to the view that human relationships to the world were in opposition to nature.

It has been suggested that the notion of nature as a mechanical inanimate system may be comforting for some, giving the idea that human beings are in control of nature and confirming the belief that science has risen above primitive animistic beliefs (Sheldrake, 1990:3). However, this view comes at a cost. A superior sphere of reason was constructed over a sphere of inferiority; the former was a privileged domain of the master, while the latter, which formed a category of nature, comprised a field of multiple exclusions created by racism, colonialism and sexism. Racial, ethnic and sexual difference were cast as closer to the animal and the body, a lesser form of humanity lacking full rationality or culture (Plumwood, 1993:4). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries discourses on the animality of negroes, American Indians, the Irish, infants, women, the poor, the ignorant, the irreligious and the mad prevailed (Thomas, 1984: 42–44).

The mechanistic conception of the world was combined by some philosophers with a particular Protestant rationalized belief system that viewed God as an omnipotent clockmaker standing outside and apart from his creation. The element of design in mechanistic philosophy did not arise from ‘the “natures” of things but from the properties with which God endowed them’ (Hooykaas, 1977:14). A divine creator implies a dependence of the created on a creator, and also a differentiation between creator and created. Human beings had a special role to play due to being made in God’s image; this further emphasized their separation from the rest of creation. The development of capitalism promulgated the view that nature was a commodity or a resource to be used (Merchant, [1980] 1990:51–56; Morris, 1996:20). Although mechanistic theories did not go unchallenged, particularly by Vitalism, a radical analysis by Paracelsus of the activity in nature whereby matter and spirit were unified into an single, active, vital substance (Merchant, [1980] 1990:117), and also by the academic disciplines of botany and zoology (Sheldrake, 1990:41), Descartes’ views have been influential. Historian Keith Thomas notes that Descartes’ explicit aim was to make men lords and possessors of nature; other species were inert and lacking any spiritual dimension and this created an absolute break between man and the rest of nature, a ‘transcendent God, outside his creation, symbolized the separation between spirit and nature’. Indeed, Thomas goes further by saying that ‘Man stood to animal as did heaven to earth, soul to body, culture to nature’ (Thomas, 1984:34–35). The result has been described as a spiritual alienation from the natural world. This work is not a history of this alienation, rather it seeks to examine nature religion as a spirituality that seeks to find a unity in Nature; it has emerged as a ‘backlash’ to the general historical and philosophical context that has separated mind from nature. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz has noted, our brains are in the world, ‘And as for the world, it is not in our brains, our bodies, or our minds: they are, along with gods, verbs, rocks, and politics, in it’ (Geertz, 2000:205).

Not surprisingly, the term ‘nature’ has a history. In early Greek philosophy, nature was the essence of a thing that made it behave the way it did (Morris, 1996:27). This oldest meaning of the term was dominant into the thirteenth century when it denoted an essential quality, an innate character. A century later it came to mean a vital or inherent force that directed the world of human beings. At the time of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nature was viewed as a physical power causing phenomena of the material world. The changing meaning of nature reflected the changing structure of society, and in the seventeenth century nature was observed and studied as the work of God. By the eighteenth century, with the establishment of a scientific world-view, nature was seen to be governed by laws; nature became increasingly synonymous with the material world and science was involved in interpreting its universal laws. At this time, nature was a clear authority: the laws of nature were the laws of reason. Nature had become rationalized (Marshall, 1995:222–223). Inevitably, there was a reaction to scientific rationalism and it took the form of the Romanticism movement with its view of nature as pastoral landscape and immanent mysticism. More recently, four contemporary discourses on nature have been outlined: the first is as a science where nature is seen in objective and abstract terms; the second is as an economic resource – nature is a source of productive wealth; the third views nature as a source of emotional identification, relationship and tradition; and the fourth is through nature mysticism whereby nature has spirit and is worthy of reverence and awe (Ivakhiv, 2001:37). Nature spiritualities draw on the last two discourses: nature is viewed as a source of emotional identification and spirituality; practitioners immerse themselves in nature.

Catherine Albanese calls the immersion in nature a ‘quantum dance of religious syncretism’ in which the different movements ‘move freely together, mixing and matching, bowing to new partners’. The centrality of nature, Albanese observes, provides a language to express cosmology and belief; it forms the basis of understanding and practising a way of life; supplies material for ritual symbolism, as well as drawing a community together (Albanese, 1991:154–156). Nature religion does not exist as a definite and identifiable religious tradition such as Buddhism or Christianity, but, as Peter Beyer notes in his sociological analysis, the term refers to a range of religious and quasi-religious movements, groups and social networks in which practitioners consider nature to be the embodiment of divinity, sacredness, transcendence, or spiritual power (Beyer, 1998:11). Beyer, who analyses nature religion in terms of globalization, points out that nature religion comprises a counter-cultural strategy – a religious critique of institutionalized social structures and normal consciousness. He is concerned to show how nature religion fits into a global context through the use of ‘nature’ as a powerful counter-structural symbol representing resistance to dominant instrumental systems. Using anthropologist Victor Turner’s ([1969] 1974) analysis of the anti-structural components of religious ritual, Beyer argues that nature religion is counter-structural – stressing oppositional aspects – rather than being anti-structural (1998:18). He notes certain critical features that characterize nature religion: a comparative resistance to institutionalization and legitimization in terms of identifiable socio-religious authorities and organization; a distrust of politically oriented power; a faith in charismatic and individual authority; a strong emphasis on individual path; a valorization of physical place; a this-worldly emphasis with a search for healing, personal vitality, and transformation of self; a strong experiential basis; a valuing of non-hierarchical community; a stress on holistic conceptions of reality; and a conditional optimism regarding human capacity and the future. This is certainly the case in radical Pagan protest against the destruction of nature for road development etc. However, magical consciousness is not necessarily counter-structural. Some movements within nature religion – such as the New Age – are alternatives to Christianity, incorporating many mystical elements of Christianity, and may be said to be supportive of mainstream social structure, particularly regarding capitalistic enterprise.

Also viewing nature religion in terms of globalization, anthropologist Piers Vitebsky, in a comparison of Sora shamanism in tribal India and ethnic revival shamanism in Arctic Siberia, claims that indigenous knowledge loses its holistic world-view when appropriated by New Age neo-shamanists; when transplanted it becomes global rather than local cosmological knowledge (2003:295–296). An alternative approach is to see nature religion not as a counter-cultural movement, or as an expression of a form of global knowledge, but as an expanded form of consciousness that is common to all humans. I shall argue that if nature religion is studied in terms of magical consciousness then holism, a central defining feature of indigenous knowledge, is not lost but just expressed in a different cultural and physical context.

Magical Consciousness

So, a connection with nature concerns less a form of counter-cultural resistance – although this may be the case in more radical forms of Pagan protest – and more a development of magical consciousness. Using the term ‘magical consciousness’ creates a definition that is doubly ideologically loaded – both ‘magic’ and ‘consciousness’ are broad concepts that are notoriously difficult to define. Facing a similar dilemma over a definition of ‘globalization’, the historian A.G. Hopkins notes that holistic concepts may be a source of confusion as they invariably carry conflicting ideological messages, but abolishing them would not remove the difficulty. He recommends that when using general terms to describe broad issues, definitions should be explicitly stated and framed to match the purpose in hand. With this in mind I shall define magical consciousness as a specific perception of the world common to practitioners of nature religion. Before that, however, it will be necessary briefly to consider both consciousness and magic.

Although consciousness has been of modern philosophical concern since Descartes’ cogito ‘I think therefore I am’ shifted the focus from the cosmos to the individual human being (Rapport and Overing, 2000:65), a single definition of consciousness is evasive. The study of consciousness is problematic, not only for neuroscience and psychology due to its subjective and constantly changing character (Edelman, 1992:111), but also for anthropology, which has only belatedly come to find consciousness relevant, having taken it ‘largely for granted, neglecting – even, perhaps, denying – its significance and relevance’ (Cohen and Rapport, 1995:1). As John and Jean Comaroff have pointed out, anthropologists usually study consciousness and its transformations by examining its effects or expressions; its social and symbolic manifestations as conscience collective. Rarely is the nature of consciousness in the making, or its historicity examined. Consciousness itself is seldom scrutinized:

Sometimes it is regarded as the mere reflection of a reality beyond human awareness, sometimes as the site of creativity and agency. But, almost invariably, ‘consciousness’ is treated as a substantive ‘mode of’or ‘for’ the world, as so much narrative content without form. (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992:236–237).

The classic work of psychologist William James (1890 [1950]) indicates why consciousness has been seen to be so formless and so difficult to pin down. James’s notion of mind as a ‘theatre of simultaneous possibilities’ views consciousness as a process that compares, selects and suppresses data, much as a sculptor works on a block of stone, extricating one interpretation from the rest. He writes that ‘[m]y world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish, or crab!’ (ibid.:288–289). Consciousness, says James, is also like a stream or river (ibid.:239); it is a continuous and always changing process. The work of neuroscientist Gerald Edelman, in Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, draws on and develops James’s ideas: consciousness depends on unique history and embodiment, it is constructed through social interaction, and meaning takes shape in terms of concepts that depend on categorizations (1992:170). The picture that emerges from these views is that there is a multiplicity of consciousnesses, or aspects of consciousness, rather than a single state.² The notion of consciousness as a stream of possibilities both overcomes the Cartesian emphasis on mind and reflective reasoning aspects, and opens up possibilities for alternative views of consciousness as process that is inclusive of body, as well as being more expansive to include other beings in nature, and even perhaps being an intrinsic quality of a wider universe.

Notwithstanding, anthropologist Michael Harner, who explored South American Indian shamanism and developed ‘Core Shamanism’ as a method that synthesized shamanic techniques for Westerners, differentiates between what he terms an ‘ordinary state of consciousness’ (OSC) and a ‘shamanic state of consciousness’ (SSC), referring to ‘ordinary’ and ‘nonordinary’ reality respectively. The shaman can move between states of consciousness at will (Harner, [1980] 1990: xix). Harner’s distinction of OSC and SSC for Westerners belies the complexities of consciousness – such as aspects arising from imagination, emotion, cognition, and perception – and that people, whether shamans or not, are constantly shifting effortlessly from awareness to awareness or aspect to aspect; it is not always so easy to categorize consciousness in this manner.³ This is not to deny that a shaman is nonetheless a specialist in one part of this process as a mediator of different realities.

Turning to magic we will see that it means many different things to different people. Magic, as anthropologist Ariel Glucklich points out, can refer to a moon-swept landscape, love, music, the occult, the extraordinary that defies the laws of nature, and gross superstition among many other things. It is, he claims, a ‘decadent hodge podge of ideas from many sources’. We use the term so much, Glucklich argues, that it means too much and therefore hardly anything at all; we need a clear and definite understanding (1997:vii, 4–9). Historically, magic had a negative association in Roman times being viewed as a system that utilized powerful forces to control nature. Seen to be outside the ordinary course of nature in the fifth century (Flint 1993:3), it was rehabilitated in an exalted sense in the Hermetic tradition of the Renaissance when it was seen as a way to contact higher powers or God and was associated with neoplatonism (Solomon and Higgins, 1996:122). Magic, under this guise, was ‘natural magic’ or ‘sympathetic magic’ and involved the secret virtues of plants, stones and talismans for drawing down the powers of stars (Yates, [1964] 1991:2, 22). This was a form of esotericism based on the view that there were correspondences between the natural and celestial worlds, both seen and unseen (Faivre 1994:10–13; see p.29). During the Reformation, demonic magic, which was seen to rely on supernatural intelligences, was sharply demarcated from ‘true’ religion and science. The aspect of control – using preternatural or supernatural means...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Nature Religion and Underlying Influences
• 3 Connection with Nature
• 4 'Calling to be Remembered': place, ancestors, and tradition
• 5 Magical Consciousness
• 6 The Wild Hunt: a mythological language of magic
• 7 Learning to be Indigenous
• 8 A Tangled Web: paradoxical elements
• 9 Nature in the City: a globalizing postmodern world?
• Bibliography
• Index