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.
My aim recently has been to try to create a bridge of communication between western and indigenous or small scale people’s worldviews in my article for the Journal of Consciousness Studies that you’ll find in the publications section under Journal Articles. I think we can learn much about other cultures by removing our ‘mind forged manacles’, as western shaman William Blake (1757-1827) would say. Other work that has been preoccupying me is a partly autobiographical narrative that I started sharing as a story blog here, but 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.
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.
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 Magical-Consciousness, 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.
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: