ABSTRACT

This chapter aims to argue that the techniques manipulate a bodily capacity in a manner familiar to us from religious practices the world over and suggests newly familiar to us from the psychiatric trauma disorders. There are two main techniques in magical practice: meditation and visualization. Meditation entered Western popular culture with love beads in the 1960s. The second and more important magical technique is visualization. Visualization is the ability to ‘see’ mental images. When the trauma is repeated and the dissociative response becomes habituated, the dissociative state is thought to automatize behaviour, compartmentalize information and affect, and estrange identity from body. In situations that give rise to traumatic dissociation as it is modelled in the psychiatric literature, the person feels helpless. Often there is a time lag. The anthropological data suggest that when the dissociative capacity is trained, it can make the imaginative or religious domain real to people.