ABSTRACT
The phenomenological analysis of the ethnographic data on ‘becoming the magician’ is expanded on in this chapter, with a focus on how becoming the magician correlates with the production of the phenomenal field of the ritual. In emic testimony, this production surfaces as the process of ritualisation in designated space and time to arouse an alternative sense of embodiment required to communicate with ‘metaexperiential’ phenomena. How this event manifests is examined by implementing Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body as the spatial-temporal source of existence and how consciousness is embodied, which in turn generates the phenomenal field. To understand how being-in-the-world as the magician is construed as the subject’s spatio-temporal acquaintance and development of consciousness of one’s body in the phenomenal field, analysis draws on Gallagher’s theory of the pragmatic integration of a body image and a body schema, creating a holistic model of embodiment. This illustrates how the ritual body may come to shape consciousness in the liminal situation of magical ritual by altering and then receiving properties of the phenomenal field of the ritual to form the ‘natural attitude’ of the magician, thereby defining how the magicians of each ethnographic case study come to experience their participatory magical worldview.
