He spent the early 1980s traveling as an itinerant sleight-of-hand magician through Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and eventually studying with Indigenous magical practitioners, including shamans, in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Nepal. These magicians, he found, were also healers and often the primary carers in their communities, but they occupied a strange position: not fully accepted and, in fact, often actively distrusted by their neighbours. They tended to live on the edge of or at a distance from their communities, in communication with, and interceding on behalf of, the non-human community which surrounded them:

‘For the magician’s intelligence is not encompassed

within

the society; its place is at the edge of the community, mediating

between

the human community and the larger community of beings upon which the village depends for its nourishment and sustenance. This larger community includes, along with the humans, the multiple nonhuman entities that constitute the local landscape, from the diverse plants and the myriad animals—birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, insects—that inhabit or migrate through the region, to the particular winds and weather patterns that inform the local geography, as well as the various landforms—forests, rivers, caves, mountains—that lend their specific character to the surrounding earth.’

14

14

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous.New York: Vintage, 1997, 14.

Spending time in and around these communities, Abram wrote in

The Spell of the Sensuous

, published in 1996, brought him closer not only to the other humans in them, but the non-humans which surrounded them. And this closeness was

embodied

: watching a heron fishing, he did not merely admire ‘its careful, high-stepping walk and the sudden dart of its beak into the water’, but felt ‘its tense yet poised alertness with my own muscles’.

15

On Being Inside Gaia - Future Observatory Journal