ABSTRACT
This chapter brings about a reconciliation of magic and science in a new attitude that recognizes all the characteristics of magical participation and causality, analogic and logic, as well as the subjective and the objective, emotion and reason, and mythos and logos, as patterns of relationships that include mind and body, individual and society, within a wider scientific framework. The web metaphor forms an ideal for multiple ways of knowing, but above all, it fosters a new attitude to knowledge, one that helps us understand the experience of magic in much more depth. A new attitude is required, and the chapter turns to English anthropologist Geoffrey Samuel’s multimodal framework. It makes no sense whatsoever to examine the unknown with theories that obscure the focus of study. Samuel views such a shamanic approach (as in the author's experience of transforming into an owl) as a pattern potentially present in all societies.
