Hello! Thank you for visiting my website.
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. 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
After a long wait, my new book Magical Mind is finally going to be published with Palgrave Macmillan – starting with an ebook coming out April 2026 and then a hardback in September 2026, followed by a paperback in September 2027.
Magical Mind has 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. The blurb for the book is as follows:
This magical narrative aims to take you on a journey following a golden string first written about by the eighteenth-century poet, artist and shaman William Blake. Focused on my experience of such a journey as an anthropologist researching magic, it details the effects of my own shamanic soul loss and eventual soul retrieval. Both personal and universal, it combines multiple forms of knowledge encountered through more-than-human realms of the inspirited imagination that have resonance with how we live today.
In the meantime, here’s a review of my previous 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).
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: