The Nature of Magic
Susan Greenwood’s new book on the anthropology of magic, The Nature of Magic, has been released by Berg. She previously wrote Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld: An Anthropology (Berg, 2000).
It’s on my purchase list–although I still have not read all the books that I bought at last November’s AAR-SBL annual meeting.
The publisher says, “This book examines how and why practitioners of nature religion–Western witches, druids, shamans–seek to relate spiritually with nature through ‘magical consciousness’. ‘Magic’ and ‘consciousness’ are concepts that are often fraught with prejudice and ambiguity respectively. Greenwood develops a new theory of magical consciousness by arguing that magic ultimately has more to do with the workings of the human mind in terms of an expanded awareness than with socio-cultural explanations. “