ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on an in-depth case study using the anthropologist's own experience gained through years of anthropological fieldwork with British practitioners of magic. To illustrate the power of an alchemical transmutation of understanding, the essence of the chapter concerns the deep shifts in meaning that can occur deep within the psyche during an initiatory experience. The chapter examines author's own particular ethnography of mind, as he was not surprised to intuitively discover that dragon could transmute into Freyja, a shape-shifting goddess of the northern European tradition. The dragon gold was a synchronous mythological link to the Freyja goddess and her gold necklace referred to in Beowulf as the Brisings' Necklace, a magical talisman forged by four dvergr or dwarfs: air, water, fire, and earth, which lived and worked deep in the earth. Freyja had helped the author experience a form of recapitulation, a magical process of gathering in the golden energy from his memories of the elements.
