ABSTRACT
The chapter acts as a context setting for the chapters to follow and provides a foundation for the subsequent chapters that focus on the clinical and theoretical material to which it relates. As Hutton suggests, there is an important human relationship between the supernatural, fate, and (mis)fortune. Given the fear and sense of powerlessness associated with the possibility of becoming harmed through supernatural means, over time individuals have resorted to magical and cursing practises as a source of regaining that power and seeking revenge.
Along with the fear of supernatural entities, there has been a concomitant anxiety around those who are believed to use magic for uncanny means, such as the Persian magi and the ‘witches’ of medieval and early modern Europe. As will become clear throughout this chapter, magic and the supernatural have been successively othered, in the name of either religion or scientific progress, for millennia. Moreover, in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, numinous, intuitive, and uncanny states of mind have become all too easily be conflated with ‘magical thinking’ and associated with psychopathology, ‘primitive’ cultures, and omnipotent thought. These divisive factors have contributed to a collectively split mind where magic and supernatural experiences are either idealised or experienced as persecutory. I therefore propose that numinous, uncanny, and intuitive phenomenology fall under the term ‘magical consciousness’.
This chapter also explores movements throughout history which have sought to reintegrate this magical consciousness into its societies such as the Renaissance, the ‘Magical Revival’ of the fin de siècle and contemporary ‘occulture’. Despite the unavoidably complicated relationship between magic and trauma – an important theme for this book – these examples of synthesis also become significant factors in terms of potentially healing the splits that have formed in the archaic unconscious.
