Magical Mind

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).