Magical Consciousness

An Anthropological and Neurobiological Approach

Susan Greenwood, Erik D. Goodwyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138850361
• eBook ISBN: 9781317517207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

How does a mind think magically? The research documented in this book is one answer that allows the disciplines of anthropology and neurobiology to come together to reveal a largely hidden dynamic of magic. Magic gets to the very heart of some theoretical and methodological difficulties encountered in the social and natural sciences, especially to do with issues of rationality. This book examines magic head-on, not through its instrumental aspects but as an orientation of consciousness. Magical consciousness is affective, associative and synchronistic, shaped through individual experience within a particular environment. This work focuses on an in-depth case study using the anthropologist's own experience gained through years of anthropological fieldwork with British practitioners of magic. As an ethnographic view, it is an intimate study of the way in which the cognitive architecture of a mind engages the emotions and imagination in a pattern of meanings related to childhood experiences, spiritual communications and the environment. Although the detail of the involvement in magical consciousness presented here is necessarily specific, the central tenets of modus operandi is common to magical thought in general, and can be applied to cross-cultural analyses to increase understanding of this ubiquitous human phenomenon.

Part One A Dialogue Between Anthropology and Neurobiology

1 The Analogical Reasoning of Magic

DOI: 10.4324/9781315719849-2

More than 20,000 years ago, prehistoric humans in southern Africa painted lines on cave walls, bringing them to life with images of humans and animals. Neuropsychological studies of altered states of consciousness suggest that these marks might be indications or recordings of certain kinds of brain activity,¹ but when asked for an explanation, some contemporary Kalahari San people explain them as “threads of light” from the sky to take shamans (n/omkxaosi) climbing or gliding upwards while in trance to visit god and his vast herd of animals.² One explanation of the cave art is based on materialistic neurobiology, whereas the other relies on indigenous “magical” meanings, such as those studied by anthropologists.³ If each explanation for the prehistoric painted lines is seen as plausible, then we need some form of incorporating these very different interpretations. The issue is to find a basis for a common ground. The nineteenth-century German ethnologist Adolf Bastian first coined the term “psychic unity” to express the conviction that all human beings shared the same basic mental framework; this indicated a species-wide similarity in mental reasoning capabilities.⁴ Indeed, mitochondrial DNA evidence suggests that for 200,000 years, all humans have essentially shared the same bloodline, and many scholars are “beginning to concede the existence of a core human psyche,”⁵ so this perspective seems valid. However, the thorny issue of psychic unity confronts us. An emphasis on one particular type of reason has sidelined “the reasoning of magic.” Too long viewed as irrational, magic in the form of an aspect of consciousness needs to be brought back into focus to show the character of analogical thinking and its foundation as a mode of human thought. A study of the concept of psychic unity will reveal some of the historical and deeply rooted challenges that we face in our interdisciplinary study of magical consciousness.

This chapter will outline the contours of the problem of psychic unity in anthropology and its consequences for a study of magic. Here, we criticise the particular brand of “reason” espoused by eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, which was irrational because it was incomplete and too narrowly focused, but not “reason” in principle. The ancients felt it was entirely rational to follow the advice of a god experienced in a dream because they knew magical consciousness was a valid kind of experience that contained real-world applicable and useful information. To criticise magical thinking because it has diffuse categories and looks for correspondences rather than causality, etc., is just as unreasonable as critcising analytical thinking because it is overly reductive. Both are rational and reasonable, in their own ways. We argue for a balance between holism and reductionism, between shape-shifting boundaries and clear, sharp categories of magical and analytical thinking. In Chapter 4, we will examine the analogical process of reasoning through metaphors in the work of Gregory Bateson, but for the present, we need to understand the historical background to the valorisation of analytical reasoning and its influence on science. Rather than an Enlightenment belief in a psychic unity based on human analytical reasoning as something separate from or superior to nature, the issue would be one of “perceptual diversity” encompassing psychic unity within diversity, one that included the reasoning of mystical mentality. Perceptual diversity is a complex, synergistic system that evolves and changes, and is created by an interaction of human biology, physical environment, individual development, and culture.⁶

The Valorisation of Analytical Reason

The current dominant scientific notions of psychic unity are founded on logical, analytical reasoning, rather than the analogical and intuitive thought of magical consciousness. The origins of the valorisation of analytical reasoning as a mode of thought lie in the Enlightenment. When philosopher René Descartes associated the mind with individual human reasoning in the seventeenth century, this form of reason became the basis of the analytical knowledge of the Enlightenment. Truth in the Cartesian sense was derived from rational reflection rather than from the untrustworthy senses of a body that was associated with an animal-like, mechanical instinct.⁷ Descartes’s work contributed to a mechanical philosophy that not only marked a definite break with the past, but also set the seal upon how science would come to be seen. God was seen as having created the world as a perfect, rational machine. Humans could become part of that 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 Enlightenment derived its concrete, self-evident proof from scientific thinking and the analytical spirit, as philosopher Ernst Cassirer puts it, “In the progress of natural science. .. the philosophy of the Enlightenment believes it . .. can follow step by step the triumphant march of the modern analytical spirit.”⁸ This analytical spirit conquered all reality; it reduced natural phenomena to a single universal rule, a cosmological formula not found by accident, nor a result of sporadic experimentation, but the rigorous application of the scientific method.⁹

As the term suggests, during this period, an attempt was made to shed greater light on the conduct of human affairs: the perceived dark mysteries of the traditional attitudes in religion and political life were pushed back, and in their place, a new outlook informed by reason and the power of scientific research and discovery arose.¹⁰ The Enlightenment would come to shape the rationalistic foundations of what came to be seen as “science” in the nineteenth century,¹¹ as well as the benchmark for how anthropology and other social sciences would conduct fieldwork and produce theoretical analyses based on ethnographies of different and very varied cultures around the world. Of course, analytical reasoning is valuable and essential for the gathering of objective information, but it still forms the basis of the current scientific enterprise and tends to exclude other forms of knowledge, specifically magic. The problem concerns the manner in which the focus on one type of reason has influenced the development of the scientific method, and the way that this has become an ideological, theoretical benchmark in the natural and social sciences. To understand exactly why the pull of this form of reason was so strong in Western cultures, making the experience of magic at worst an unbelievable superstition, or at best, misguided and non-scientific, it is important to see its context within Enlightenment culture and thinking.

Comprising a “loose, informal, wholly unorganised coalition of cultural critics, religious sceptics, and political reformers from Edinburgh to Naples, Paris to Berlin, Boston to Philadelphia,” the Enlightenment made up a “clamorous chorus” that was, nevertheless, united on a programme of secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom from arbitrary power, freedom of speech, and of “moral man to make his own way in the world;” it was a momentous event in the history of the Western mind¹² and it was formed on the basis of analytical reason. Influenced by Greek rationalist thinking and making a decisive mark on the history of Western thought in the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment developed into an age of intellectual exploration and the expansion of objective reality. As Ernst Cassirer notes, for this age, knowledge of its own activity, intellectual self-examination, and foresight were the “proper function and essential task of thought” that led to the knowledge of objective reality:

Thought not only seeks new, hitherto unknown goals but it wants to know where it is going and to determine for itself the direction of its journey . .. Yet its thirst for knowledge and intellectual curiosity are directed not only toward the external world; the thought of this age is even more passionately impelled by that other question of the nature and potentiality of thought itself. Time and again thought returns to its point of departure from its various journeys of exploration intended to broaden the horizon of objective reality.¹³

All the diversity, breadth, and various energies of the mind were held together in a common centre of force, an essentially homogeneous, formative power.¹⁴ Consequently, the period of the Enlightenment came to be “completely permeated by the idea of intellectual progress,” and this conception of reason became the unifying and central point of the century: “all thinking subjects from all nations, all epochs, and all cultures” were freed from the “changeability of religious creeds, of moral maxims and convictions, of theoretical opinions and judgements.”¹⁵ There was a steady vanquishing of magical worldviews by critical thinking and the development of a particular view of science that came to dominate understandings of psychic unity.

As it stands, the biological answer to the psychic unity problem will necessarily be different from the anthropological and cognitive answers because all three have varying assumptions regarding how the issue is to be handled,¹⁶ each coming with its own associated subsequent problems. The biological and some proposed cognitive solutions typically involve a variant of materialism, a very prominent and normally (but not always) unspoken framework, in the neurosciences in particular. Materialist “solutions” to the psychic unity problem come with the subsequent additional problem of explaining exactly how brains “create” the mind. Philosopher David Chalmers labelled this issue the “hard problem of consciousness.”¹⁷ This problem dates back to the earliest materialist explanations of mind, going as far back as Anaxagoras, the fifth-century BCE Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher, and no solution is anywhere in sight—it appears that we do not even know how to approach this problem. This is because of a number of philosophical issues—stemming from Cartesianist mind-body dualism and developed during the Enlightenment valorisation of analytical reason—are embedded in the central concern of the psychic unity problem, as we will discuss in the next chapter. For the present, it is to anthropology that we turn to see the biggest separation between the brain/mind and culture.

Anthropology's Oldest and Most Vexing Question

While Enlightenment notions of a psychic unity of humankind are the theoretical bedrock of modern anthropology, rather paradoxically, an entrenched debate on a unity/diversity dichotomy between the natural and social sciences has prevailed. As the example of the prehistoric cave markings at the beginning of this chapter suggests, the natural sciences approach magic as “altered states of consciousness,” a by-product of brain activity and couch explanations in Western discourse, whereas anthropologists more usually offer cross-cultural explanations that emphasise meaning. However, it can be suggested also that anthropologists find themselves in a tricky position between the magical and analytical modalities of thought. Coming from an objectively based discipline, they also paradoxically support the notion of a psychic unity based on universal, analytical reasoning. This has resulted in “a wedge being driven between ideas about culture and mind,”¹ and has led to a hiatus between disciplines. By linking psychic unity with cultural heterogeneity, cultural differences can only be linked superficially with the mind; however, the notion of psychic unity tended to remain an unexamined “doctrine of faith.”¹ Thus, the notion of psychic unity has proved to be contradictory and theoretically troublesome within anthropology, due to a deeply held emphasis on cultural diversity.¹⁸ Whereas the belief in psychic unity expresses an anti-racist ideal, that all human beings share the same mental capabilities for reason, it does not account for the psychic differences embodied in cultural variation, the traditional anthropological field of study. A general effect of the psychic unity debate in anthropology has thus been twofold: firstly, it has created something of a culture/mind dualism, making a dialogue between, for example, anthropology and neuroscience more difficult; and secondly, its focus on analytical reason as the basis for psychic unity has excluded magical thinking, thus branding it irrational, despite the fact that there is essentially no basis for this judgement.

The potentially rather contradictory position of holding t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Introduction: Magic in Consciousness
• PART ONE A Dialogue Between Anthropology and Neurobiology
• PART TWO An Ethnography of Mind
• PART THREE Conclusions
• Index