Exploring Magical Consciousness with Dr. Susan Greenwood

Dr. Susan Greenwood is a renowned author, lecturer and shamanic practitioner in the fields of magic, anthropology and consciousness. She specializes in magic as an altered mode of awareness, well-known for her fieldwork with British witches, druids, and shamanic practitioners. A past lecturer and Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, she completed her PhD on British magic in 1997. We discuss how she defines magical consciousness, the importance of the experiential in relation to the theoretical, and academia’s response to subjectivity. Susan talks with us about working with altered states of consciousness, shamanic extraction versus journeying, the imagination as a doorway to other realities and the art of walking the dimensions. We talk about shamanism as humanity’s first type of spiritual experience and the importance of the concept of a ‘whole soul’ to our health, healing and well-being. She discusses the danger of Western arrogance and the limitations of what is currently seen as knowledge. She places emphasis on the wisdom of indigenous cultures and how critical it is for us to integrate this knowledge in order to re-envision our world. Susan is perhaps best known for her writing on consciousness and magic, The Anthropology of Magic (Berg, 2009; Routledge, 2020) and her collaborative work with neuroscientist Erik Goodwyn, Magical Consciousness: An Anthropological and Neurobiological Approach (Routledge, 2017), and Developing Magical Consciousness: A Theoretical and Practical Guide for the Expansion of Perception (Routledge, 2020). She was previously a lecturer and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, where she taught courses and workshops on shamanic consciousness and altered states of consciousness for many years. Susan’s research focus is now on exploring alternative modes of knowledge through storytelling, and in particular the work of William Blake.