Susan Greenwood

Building Bridges
of Communication
Seeking Conversation between
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Indigenous and Western Cultures

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through Magical Consciousness

Abstract: My aim in this article is to further work on building bridges

of communication between Indigenous and Western worldviews
through ‘magical consciousness’, a pan-human participatory and
analogical orientation of mind. In a bid to overcome the many cultural
differences that have justified the discrimination and genocide of
Indigenous peoples worldwide, and the near hegemony of a science
based solely on logical knowledge, I seek by comparison a common
ground for mutual understanding. Searching out similarities and
differences between the world of the Dreaming of Paddy Compass
Namadbara, an Australian ‘clever man’ of north-west Arnhem Land,
and the prophetic mythologies of English eighteenth-century artist and
poet William Blake, I suggest that it might be possible to find points of
conversation and acceptance through stories and mythologies that
could aid the healing of differences.

Correspondence:
Email: sejgreenwood80@hotmail.com

1 Past Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Sussex, UK.
Website: susangreenwood.org.

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 30, No. 5–6, 2023, pp. 218–31

DOI: 10.53765/20512201.30.5.218
 BUILDING BRIDGES OF COMMUNICATION 219

1. Introduction
Since the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, a large chasm,
created by the growth of the view that we can only know anything
through logical rationalized knowledge (Greenwood and Goodwyn,
2016) together with colonialism and capitalism, has created social
divides that have justified many forms of discrimination, oppression,
and genocide of Indigenous peoples worldwide (Kovach, 2010, pp.
76–8). Only relatively recently is it coming to be recognized that we
must investigate this chasm of deep differences, to understand the past
and find an alternative vision, not only for human societies in general,
and ourselves as individuals, but also for the future of planet Earth.
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The resurgence of interest in Indigenous cultures is a wake-up call

to dominant Western perspectives to finally come to respect difference
and diversity. At the heart of this change are issues of connection and
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reconnection, alternative forms of knowledge held deep within

Indigenous and magical worldviews. These previously marginalized
states of being strike at the heart of an historical scientific perspective,
which has tried so hard to erase them in ‘a triumphant march of the
modern analytical spirit’ (Cassirer, 1951, p. 9). An effect of this
analytic perspective has had disastrous consequences for Indigenous
as well as Western cultures (Greenwood and Goodwyn, 2016).
In this article I seek to further work on building bridges of
communication between Indigenous and Western cultures through
‘magical consciousness’ — a potentially pan-human participatory and
analogical mode of being. I will explore case studies of two ‘clever
men’ or shamans. The first is Paddy Compass Namadbara (c. 1891–
1978), who was born on Cooper’s Creek in north-west Arnhem Land,
Australia, and helped his community by healing and foretelling future
events (White, 2020); and the second is London born poet and artist
William Blake (1757–1827), who created mythologies to counter the
growing industrialization and mechanization of his time. Namadbara
came from a specifically located hunting and gathering culture at least
50,000 years old, but now marginalized, while Blake lived amid huge
social upheaval due to nineteenth-century revolutionary turmoil. The
life-worlds of Namadbara and Blake by their very contrast offer an
opportunity to examine some of the issues and dilemmas that confront
a conversation between cultures that could hardly be more different,
but which have vital points of similarity if we view them through a
lens of magical consciousness.
 220 S. GREENWOOD

While Western neuroscience can teach us about the commonalities

of how human brains and bodies work and what they present to con-
sciousness, we also need a theoretical concept, such as magical con-
sciousness (Greenwood and Goodwyn, 2016, p. 9), to understand the
complexities of the life-worlds of Namadbara and Blake. In this
regard, stories and mythologies form a language for magical con-
sciousness offering ‘a geographical framework’ of meaning (ibid., p.
169; Greenwood, 2022) that primarily engages the analogical right
hemisphere of the brain rather than the logical left. Understanding
biological aspects of magical consciousness through the hemispheric
specialization of perception between left- and right-brain can shine
light on our understanding of the spirit perception involved in stories
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and mythologies, not in a reductive sense, but rather by showing how

logical and analogical thought process information in different ways,
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but ultimately come to work together (San Roque, 2017; Greenwood,

2020, p. 147).
Stories are based in a non-linear temporality, which is more likely to
be experienced through relationships rather than single events
(Kovach, 2010, pp. 94–7). With this perspective the human brain is
not viewed as the location of mind or consciousness, as frequently
claimed from a logical point of view, rather it is more of a transmitter
of analogical embodied awareness expressed through mythologies and
stories. Thus, Western analytical notions of ‘mind’, ‘consciousness’,
and ‘soul’, the territory of logical classification, have less relevance to
magical understandings, which are more likely elaborated through
metaphor and patterns of experience (Greenwood and Goodwyn,
2016, p. 82 passim.). There is a point of synchrony in magical
analogical thinking that unites the hugely different life-worlds of
Namadbara and Blake. The conceptual patterns embedded in Euro-
pean languages follow tracks and mazes of their own making in a
similar way to Indigenous thinking, and magical thinking is a part of
human history (San Roque, 2017). In addition, Kovach points out that
Indigenous context story is methodologically congruent with tribal
knowledges (Kovach, 2010, p. 35) and so this direction of research
seems appropriate.

2. Positioning Perspective
‘Research’ is a dirty word for many Indigenous peoples, who are still
often viewed as a ‘barrier to development’ and seen to lack what is
defined as ‘knowledge’ (Smith, 2013/2021). Current Indigenous
 BUILDING BRIDGES OF COMMUNICATION 221

methodological guidelines advocate a decentring of knowledge from

the Western academic canon, and a relational positioning perspective
that breaks down traditional research frameworks. According to
Margaret Kovach, who is a Nêhiýaw and Saulteaux First Nations
scholar, Indigenous ways of knowing are internal, personal, experi-
ential, related to the land, and without one standardized framework. A
tribal-centred Indigenous methodology can be used alongside a
Western framework in a mixed-method approach, but the Indigenous
must not be subsumed under the Western, nor must it be customized
to fit (Kovach, 2010, pp. 35, 43). I position myself as a non-
Indigenous British anthropologist researching magic as a form of con-
sciousness sensitive to these considerations.
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It was during my initial doctoral fieldwork that I first thought that

the otherworld might be a pan-human form of consciousness, one that
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was nevertheless highly socially and culturally influenced in terms of

contextualization, symbols, ritual, mythologies, etc. This led me to
develop my research on magical consciousness through various pub-
lications (Greenwood, 2005/2020; 2009/2020). My rationale for using
the concept ‘magic’ was to reclaim this word; it has a Western history
and is therefore understandable in that sense. My focus shifted to the
more universal elements of magical consciousness by developing a
subjective and affective ethnography of my own mind with neuro-
scientist Erik Goodwyn (Greenwood and Goodwyn, 2016). Extending
this research, I continued my attempt to build a bridge of communica-
tion with Indigenous cultures (Greenwood, 2020). I felt highly moti-
vated to elaborate on what I thought to be a pan-human experience of
a participatory mode of being, experienced in differing degrees and
shaped through a multitude of cultural expressions. Moving on, we
can now look at the first example of Paddy Compass Namadbara, as
recorded by Ian White.

3. Paddy Compass Namadbara

An anthropologist employed by the Aboriginal Northern Land Council
(NLC) and working in the Murgenella region of north-west Arnhem
Land, White, a non-Aboriginal Westerner, started his compilation of
accounts of recollections of Paddy Compass Namadbara in 1988 from
several west Arnhem people who knew him, and for whom he had
been a major figure in their lives. White first heard stories about ‘Old
Paddy’ in relation to a dispute among Aboriginals concerning the
NLC’s requirement to pay royalty money to Aboriginal clan members
 222 S. GREENWOOD

arising from a government campaign to cull the wild buffalo popula-

tion to eradicate brucellosis and tuberculosis. According to Jim
Wauchope, one of White’s informants, the buffalo-culling plan had
made one of Old Paddy’s 1950s visions of the future come true:
Aborigines would gain wealth, own land and cars, and this would
bring divisions within the clan groups. Given their low economic and
social status at the time, these predictions were considered astonishing
within Paddy’s community (White, 2020, p. xi).
A member of the Alarrdju clan, Paddy Compass Namadbara had
acquired marrngkidj or mankordang, a special power meaning to be in
possession of knowledge in west Arnhem Kunwinjku language. He
had also earned his nickname ‘Compass’ due to his exceptional bush-
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craft (ibid., p. 4). With this power he was known as a marrkidjbu,

someone who could heal and see into the future. His considerable
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psychic powers were considered of the highest rank, and he used them
to incorporate outside influences to ride times of social change by
devising rituals to help the whole community. The life-world of
Namadbara was situated within a specific area of western Arnhem
Land facing a ‘flood of change’. Now the legal owners of the former
Aboriginal reserve, the Indigenous leaders had to incorporate outside
influences of Kakadu National Park with hundreds of thousands of
visitors each year, a uranium mine, and accommodate missionaries
and government authorities (White and Nayinggul, 2012).
Aboriginal culture is a complex knowledge system that is difficult to
generalize due to the wide variety of local groups, moieties, clans,
clan aggregates, dialects, and traditional networks through marriage
ties that all define a complex skein of related groups and categories,
with many variations in language and tradition (Shore, 1998, pp. 9–
10). Each person is part of a personal totem determined by the place
that the mother was impregnated by spirit, the resulting child being
released by a particular ancestor of that place. Increased ceremonies at
the site of totem enable the life force to be released, helping the great
spirit maintain the source of life (Broome, 2002, p. 19). In western
Arnhem Land, the Kunwinjku recognize this living force through the
interconnectedness of the complex kin relationship system with the
natural environment and call it Mankabo, the ‘river of life’. According
to Kunwinjku elder Reverend Peterson Nganjmirra, referring to
Barkibong, a waterhole at the outstation of Kudjekbinj, Makabo
represents everything about that environment — plants, animals,
water, air, rocks and soil, and ‘the spirits of everything that had ever
been there or ever would be’ (Goodfellow, 2020).
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A mythological foundation of Aboriginal cultures is the Dreaming, a

participatory sense of being, which had no abstract concepts of ‘time’
or ‘history’ as the past is still part of the present (Stanner, 2009, p. 57).
As part of this rich mythological corpus, the Rainbow Serpent inhabits
deep permanent waterholes and is a Creator Spirit who gave birth to
the first people (Radcliffe-Brown, 1926). In western Arnhem Land
these beings are the Djang’kawu, two sisters and a brother, who
created all life on Earth (Laklak, 2008). The Rainbow Serpent, or
nygalyod as it is known in Arnhem Land, is both the fundamental
creative expression of continuing life, and its original initiator, the
‘First Mother’ (Berndt and Berndt, 1970).
Namadbara’s special power came through a tree and was embodied
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in his uncut fingernails and two objects located in his body: one at the
back of his neck and upper back, and the other in his stomach area.
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White records one of Namadbara’s spirit initiations based on the

transcripts of two interviews with Bill Neidjie, an eminent storyteller
of the region, the first in 1988 and the second, almost seven years
later, in August 1995, as follows:
Namadbara was walking alone in the bush, a young stringybark tree
took his attention and he sat down by the tree. Bill talks in the first
person as if he was Namadbara:
And this leaf [of the tree] he was working, like that [Bill demonstrates,
rapidly shaking his hand] and now — my feeling he was changing with
that tree. I think he [the tree] teach me. […]
I never speak, only that tree he was moving, but I feel it myself, he
was changing [my] body. (White, 2020, pp. 12–3)
Immediately following this story, Bill told how Namadbara cured his
own brother Dick Wilambilam nabulanj of a sickness by extracting the
object causing the sickness from inside his body. Namadbara
explained to Bill that he did not get this power directly through his
own efforts nor did he get it directly from another clever man, ‘no one
bin make me this power’, but that the tree was the source (ibid.).
Namadbara’s first encounter with his special knowledge occurred,
probably in his 30s, when he was out hunting near a rockhole known
as kurrambalkwarrewong. Although he had previously been through
specialized ceremonial and ritual knowledge, including Ubarr initia-
tion, which involved spending four years in ceremonial seclusion,
followed by another four years, it was the encounter below that led to
him being considered a clever man by his community. Namadbara
came across a termite mound and, sticking the end of his spear into the
mound to see if there were termites within, he was accosted by
 224 S. GREENWOOD

sugarbag flies, which swarmed and bit him leaving lumps all over his
body (ibid., pp. 8–11). After lying unconscious all night and finally
regaining awareness the following afternoon, he found himself by a
waterhole a half-day’s walk away. When he wandered back to camp,
he went to sleep for five days, and the lumps developed into weeping
sores. At some point, the spirits of previous clever people appeared to
him. On this first encounter with Namadbara they spoke a language
peculiar to the spirit world. White notes that another account included
the arrival of marrwakani or ‘cheeky’ yam spirits that came singing
their songs belonging to Namadbara’s Alarrdju clan group to wake
him up. Namadbara went on to express the spirits he worked with
through bark paintings (ibid., p. 4).
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After what appears as Namadbara’s initiation into the world of

spirits, he was now, White was told, possessed with clever abilities.
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The power of a clever man might be categorized by healing, sorcery,

and kumula or ‘giving purpose to that job’ (ibid., p. 16). Namadbara’s
power as a clever man can be illustrated by his harnessing of
nygalyod, the power of the Rainbow Serpent, which can be sent out of
the body for magical healing or harming purposes and can be drawn
out of bodies of water where they usually reside to be used for the
purposes of the clever person (ibid., 93). According to White, Jacob
Nayinggul, a prominent Aboriginal elder and leader within the
Gunbalanya community, gave an account of Namadbara giving him
kumula, or power to achieve desired skills, while he was a teenager
being looked after by Namadbara. When they were out hunting
together looking for crocodile eggs, their dogs put a feral cat up a tree.
Namadbara told Jacob to spear it. He did so and, according to
Namadbara’s instructions, cut open the side of the cat and took out
some fat, but leaving the cat, now apparently dead, lying by the side of
the river. Namadbara instructed Jacob to stand back, watch the cat,
and protect himself:
The Old Man then went forwards and backwards, forwards and back-
wards, several times — heavy footed, bent kneed — from the river bank
towards the cat and back again. From out of the river and up from
behind the Old Man’s back came a willy-willy [little whirlwind]. It
went straight to the cat — ‘phht!’ — and then continued on past Jacob.
The Old Man now told him to go up to the cat. When he did so, the cat
got up, groggy, groggy, and then suddenly [to Jacob’s astonishment]
jumped up and climbed back up the tree just like a wild cat again. (ibid.,
pp. 16–7)
 BUILDING BRIDGES OF COMMUNICATION 225

White notes that here the ‘willy-willy’ was a manifestation of ngalyod

(ibid., p. 17).
On another occasion Bluey and Susan IIikgirr told of how
Namadbara demonstrated his power with the ngalyod in front of a
large group of people at Gunbalanya. He attempted to transfer the
power to his wife Ngalkangila through the manki manki, a sharp
object usually used for sorcery. He ‘killed’ Ngalkangila, making her
unconscious before reviving her again, which much impressed his
audience. Later White went back to question Bluey and Susan again to
clarify events. Bluey explained that the ngalyod had licked
Ngalkangila and that there were red ants belonging to the ngalyod
crawling all over her body, and that the snake swallowed her and then
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vomited her out (ibid., pp. 48–51; Elkin, 1945/1977, pp. 20–2).
From the above account it is possible to glimpse into the Dreaming
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life-world of Paddy Compass Namadbara. We can see that he was

deeply embedded within a community, and that he was foremost in
helping to empower that community to ride change by using his
special magical power expressed, among other ways, by his control of
the ngalyod. I suggest power becomes more visible through the con-
cept of magical consciousness.

4. William Blake
Turning to my second example of William Blake, we can also view
his life-world through a magical consciousness lens to see that he, like
Namadbara, lived in a society on the brink of change, but in Blake’s
case a community with a belief in an inspirited world was breaking
down due to the increasing dominance of industrialization and an
Enlightenment focus on logical reason. While Namadbara was born
into the Dreaming culture, Blake’s world had already become more
individualized and dominated by religious orthodoxies that he
despised as hypocritical, hence his need to create his own mythol-
ogical symbolic system for direct spiritual vision. Namadbara was
highly valued in his community, whereas Blake was largely a
‘neglected and isolated figure, obeying his own genius in defiance of
an indifferent and occasionally hostile society’ (Frye, 1947/1990, p.
4). However, like Namadbara, Blake can also be considered a healer
by his development of an analogia visionis allowing a direct human
response to revelation (ibid.). In other words, he carved out a path of
soul reintegration through his mythologies that bypassed what he saw
as controlling religious doctrines.
 226 S. GREENWOOD

Experiencing the tumultuous times of the political unrest of the

American and French Revolutions, Blake sought to unite an
increasingly disunited society. Being an outspoken critic of the
Enlightenment narrative that distrusted emotion and valorized reason,
he attempted to unite all the disparate aspects of human existence by
bringing them back into balance. Thus, Blake’s work forms part of a
counter-Enlightenment impulse, an explosion of anti-rationalism in
London in the 1780s that took the form of masonic rituals, animal
magnetism, astrology, Swedenborgian circles, and other obscure
traditions of London Dissent (Thompson, 1994, pp. xviii–xix). Seeing
the spiritual condition of humanity as that of a metaphorical chimney
sweep sold by parents and labouring in the dark satanic mills, Blake
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was a healer of the rift between self and a society that was losing
touch with its soul, as expressed in his poem London:
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In every cry of every Man,

In every infants cry of fear,
In every voice; in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
By speaking out against all forms of injustice, including slavery,
Blake saw the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ problem as cultural amnesia
whereby reason, a valued quality nonetheless, had come to dominate
other aspects of human perception and had thereby manacled per-
ception. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1789–1790) he wrote
that, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would
appear to man as it is, Infinite’, and that ‘every thing that lives is holy’
(Blake, 1790/1975).
Above all, the message in Blake’s poetic visions concerning the
opening of perception is about a journey of transformation and whole-
ness. In his poetry, paintings, and engravings, Blake used alchemical
symbolism to show an inner transformation that could not be known
by slavishly following a religious doctrine but demanded an opening
to spirit and soul. Reading Blake’s ‘To see a World in a Grain of
Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold infinity in the palm of
your hand and Eternity in an Hour’ from his Auguries of Innocence, it
is possible to glimpse his Divine Vision of the whole soul, the under-
standing of which does not come from logical thought, but rather the
body, intuition, emotion, the realm of magical consciousness. Within a
grain of sand lies a world, heaven is located in the simple but complex
wildflower, while infinity is as close as your hand, and can be found
in the ever-present eternal moment.
 BUILDING BRIDGES OF COMMUNICATION 227

The harmony of the whole soul is represented by Albion and his

feminine spiritual counterpart or ‘emanation’ Jerusalem, who is the
essence of liberty and perfect freedom. Together Albion and
Jerusalem form a central part of Blake’s mythological corpus. In The
Four Zoas, Blake’s last work, Albion falls asleep while the various
parts of his soul (or psyche) go on a rampaging journey in nine Nights.
Wandering in his sleep, Albion undergoes various disintegrations of
his being, which split into the four ‘zoas’ with their emanations:
Urizen (reason) with emanation Ahania (pleasure); Luvah (passion)
plus emanation Vala (nature); Urthona (imagination) with emanation
Enitharmon (Great Mother); and Tharmas (body) and emanation
Enion (instinct). Blake saw these as the four fundamental aspects of
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human beings.
At the beginning of The Four Zoas Blake writes about the ‘Song of
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the Aged Mother’, the Muse, the ancestral feminine, whereby the
struggle of the poetic mind is born. These first lines represent a primal
state of consciousness, a centring of intuition and of human unity from
which the fall begins (Wilkie and Johnson,1978, p. 14):
The Song of the Aged Mother which shook
the heavens with wrath
Hearing the march of long resounding
strong heroic Verse
Marshalld in order for the day of Intellectual Battle
This song creates order, and sets the tone and structure for the whole
piece; the major theme of Blake’s philosophy — the integration and
transcending of the four zoas (ibid.):
Four Mighty Ones are in every Man;
a Perfect Unity
Cannot Exist but from the Universal
Brotherhood of Eden.
The transformation of perception is key. Reason, in the form of
Urizen, seeks dominion over everything and in the process explores
his self-made hell and becomes a dragon, but the moment he
renounces his ambition he returns to his original glory. Albion’s loss
of the Divine Vision has terrible consequences whereby Luvah, his
emotions, and Urizen, his reason, fight over his sleeping body.
Albion’s loss and finding of his emotions are described by his
emanation Vala, who transforms first into a worm, then a serpent, and
then a dragon, before finally being born as an infant in the second
Night:
 228 S. GREENWOOD

…A scaled Serpent, yet I fed her tho’ she hated me

Day after day she fed upon the mountains in Luvahs sight
I brought her thro’ the Wilderness, a dry & thirsty land
And I commanded springs to rise for her in the black desart Till she
became a Dragon winged bright & poisonous
I opend all the floodgates of the heavens to quench her thirst
And I commanded the Great deep to hide her in his hand Till she
became a little weeping Infant a span long
I carried her in my bosom as a man carries a lamb
I loved her I gave her all my soul & my delight.
Albion and Jerusalem are humanity’s original state in balance through
transformation, as portrayed by Blake in Albion’s dance, often called
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‘Glad Day’, his coloured engraving of a radiant naked youth with

arms outspread rising above a storm of black clouds in the back-
ground. Between this joyous figure’s feet, a moth flies free of its
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chrysalis, signifying new birth (Damon, 2013, p. 13), and a transcend-

ing of chronological time through the cyclical time/space of infinite
expansiveness which Mircea Eliade called an ‘eternal return’ (Eliade,
1971).
Rather than rejecting logical scientific reason, Blake’s analogical
dreamlike narrative sought to curtail the dominance of the Enlighten-
ment inspired notion of reason to bring it into balance within a whole
soul through the body and emotions. The last line of the Zoas
describes the final emancipation: ‘The dark Religions are departed &
sweet Science reigns.’ A fierce and anguished transformation results
in a harmony of compassion for all things. In summary, Blake’s work
teaches that, above all, everything is connected and everything is holy;
there is no radical division between heaven and hell, inside and out-
side, reason and emotion, science and a spirituality of the soul.

5. Re-dreaming:
Finding a Place of Acceptance
Turning finally to the insights that might be gleaned from glimpsing
into the life-worlds of Paddy Compass Namadbara and William Blake,
we can see that both were facing social change and injustice due to the
rationalization of European culture and both were active in engaging
with ‘magic’ to empower individual and community. Namadbara
sought to explain the changing Aboriginal world of relationship with
the land to fit in, adapt, and survive due to the British incursion of
Australia; whereas Blake’s main emphasis was on changing the
political world in which he was born through soul healing. Each
 BUILDING BRIDGES OF COMMUNICATION 229

expressed their worldviews through art as a medium that speaks more

directly with the emotions, and each were specialists in communica-
ting with spirits for the purposes of healing, albeit in varying ways —
Namadbara within the context of a small community located in a
specific country, and Blake in terms of the task of healing an alienated
Western psyche. Both used mythologies as a language of magical con-
sciousness: in Namadbara’s case the mythology of the Dreaming and
the Rainbow Serpent was deeply embedded in all aspects of his life,
whereas Blake had to invent his own mythologies, as in the sleep and
awakening of Albion.
Re-dreaming involves finding again stories of connectedness, and
this applies to disaffected Aboriginal as well as members of Western
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cultures, although of course there can be no direct comparison

regarding political and social equivalence. Jungian psychotherapist
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Craig San Roque, with Leon Petchkovsky and Manita Beskow, found
that Indigenous healers working with alienated Aboriginal communi-
ties on the problems of petrol sniffing and alcoholism had no
reference points in the Dreaming. They sought a re-dreaming through
dramatic re-enactments of the Greek myth of Dionysus as a
therapeutic model for Indigenous people (Petchkovsky, San Roque
and Beskow, 2003). Petchkovsky and San Roque were involved with
the first Aboriginal-run health education programme for remote
communities in Central Australia from 1993 to 1997. Walpiri/Pintupi
elder Andrew Japaljari Spencer, the director of Healthy Aboriginal
Lifestyles Team (HALT), became their principal mentor and sponsor
on a dream-exchange process, which led to both analysts being invited
to engage with the Wana Tjukurpa under the guidance of ngankari,
native healer mentors, on a petrol-sniffing prevention project based in
Alice Springs (San Roque, 2006). The introduction of a Western
mythological narrative to reframe the Aboriginal story as a technique
for overcoming substance abuse shows a benefit that can arise from
such an intercultural exchange.
Despite huge differences of time, place, and culture, if we are to
find a place of intercultural communication we need to ‘listen, think
and understand’ each other (ibid., pp. 155–66) to address a common
sense of anomie and loss of meaning in our human points of con-
vergence. Underlying the mythologies discussed in this article is the
ability to engage with a world of spirit, be it located in a specific
billabong or discovered deep within the soul of a once fragmented
self. In theoretical terms, we can describe this as magical conscious-
ness, but it cannot be totally analysed through words — it is felt in the
 230 S. GREENWOOD

body, both individual and social — and more completely understood

through metaphor and patterns of experience. All concepts that we
use, ‘soul’, ‘mind’, and indeed ‘magical consciousness’, equally come
from the language of classification and analytical thought rather than
the magical language of stories that inhabit our individual and
collective embodied dreamscapes. Notwithstanding, the notion of
‘magical consciousness’ describes another way of knowing that is
more in tune with Indigenous knowledges. It is this magical aspect of
all cultures that has the capacity to unite, fostering a sense of common
humanity rather than separation, and forming a foundation for a
shared place of acceptance. In essence, stories can heal.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Ian White and the two anonymous referees for comments
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on an earlier draft of this article.

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