Hello! Thank you for visiting my website.
Here, I hope to outline and share my passion for working as an anthropologist studying alternative modes of consciousness. It’s passion that drives me, hoping for a better world more in touch with nature, ourselves and the other beings that share our planet.
STOP PRESS
I have some very exciting news! My new book Magical Mind is going to be published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2025 and I’m delighted. It’s taken a long time to write and it’s a very personal account of what happened after I got sepsis in 2019 and had a life-changing dream vision that changed how I viewed magic. Magical Mind is a partly autobiographical narrative that I started sharing as a story blog here, but it has since developed, I hope to be able to share more news soon. I’ve been trying to write about magical mind in a different format to the more academic to allow a fuller expression of its embodied and sensory qualities.The blurb for the book is as follows:
During a life and death battle with sepsis just before the Covid 19 lockdown, anthropologist Susan Greenwood had a dream vision that would come to change how she studied magic. Using her extensive experience of fieldwork research with magicians, witches, and shamans, Greenwood creates a narrative of discovery into soul retrieval as an expanded perception of magical mind. Seeking to rebalance reason with emotion, academic logic with subjective experience of the imagination, this work tells a story of engagement with the world of spirit. Here the historical past is woven into the present and alternative perspectives come into focus. This book invites the reader deep into the experience of magic as an alternative worldview. In a time of general planetary crisis, Magical Mind offers a way to re-engage with the living being of nature and the essence of soul. Relevant for everyone interested in magic as a sensory mode of being, it will undoubtedly challenge, confront, and excite as well as give inspiration with its message of the possibility of transformation of the future.
When I have more news about Magical Mind’s publication, I’ll post it here.
In the meantime, here’s a review of my previous latest book Developing Magical Consciousness (see publication list) https://readingreligion.org/9781138078697/developing-magical-consciousness/ by Ian Alexander Cuthbertson , Humanities Department, Dawson College iMontréal, Quebec.
On a related topic, you might also like to check out my article for the Journal of Consciousness Studies that you’ll find in the publications section here under Journal Articles. In the other work that you will find here there are some of my explorations. I hope there’s something that catches your attention or maybe even inspires you to find out more.
On a topical note, post American election 2024, you might like to take a look at my article in Anthropology Today on conspiracy theories and the storming of the US Capitol in 2021 (in articles here).
I’m a past Lecturer and Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, where I completed my PhD on British magic in 1997. I’ve also been a Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, where I taught courses and workshops on Shamanic Consciousness and Altered States of Consciousness for many years.
My anthropological fieldwork with British witches, druids, and shamanic practitioners resulted in many articles and publications including Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld and The Nature of Magic.
Perhaps I’m best known for my writing on consciousness and magic, including The Anthropology of Magic, which I wrote as an academic introduction to understanding the experience of magic, and my collaborative work with neuroscientist Erik Goodwyn, Magical Consciousness (both in publications list here).
For my personal journey in academia and magic please see The Owl, the Dragon, and the Magician: reflections on being an Anthropologist studying Magic, originally written for a seminar on the Paranormal at Esalen, California and published in the Pomegranate 2015: