is an anthropologist based in Brighton, Sussex,
working as a writer and lecturer on magical consciousness. When she
first started her doctoral research in the 1990s on British practitioners
of magic she decided to study magic from the inside, as a practitioner
herself. Thus she explored various approaches to magic and
participated in many witchcraft rituals, was trained as a high magician
and worked with shamans. Greenwood then linked her practical
experience to a scholarly approach aiming to build bridges between
magical practice and academic discourse. Having gained her PhD in
anthropology in 1997, she has lectured at Goldsmiths, University of
London, and the University of Sussex, and has taught courses on the
anthropology of religion, shamanic consciousness and altered states
of consciousness. In 2014, Greenwood was invited as a researcher to
contribute to a seminar on the paranormal at the Esalen Center for Theory
& Research in California. Her publications include Magic, Witchcraft
and the Otherworld (2000), The Nature of Magic
(2005), The Anthropology of Magic (2009),
Magical Consciousness: an anthropological and neurobiological approach
(with Erik Goodwyn, 2015), Developing Magical
Consciousness (2019) and Astral Magic, Consciousness
and the Imagination in Astral Bodies (2017). She lectures internationally, and recently gave a keynote
to the Danish Ethnographic and Anthropologist Societies at the University
of Copenhagen and a lecture on the subject of exploring magic
in art at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.