The Nature of Enchantment

John Michael Greer

Back in the autumn of 2020, as the Covid virus and the US presidential election monopolized headlines across the corporate media, I made a post here talking about Max Weber’s famous claim that “the disenchantment of the world” was among the core features of modernity, and the then-recent challenge leveled against that claim by Jason Josephson-Storm in his book The Myth of Disenchantment. That post and the theme it began to explore opened quite a rabbit hole into the deep places of culture and the human psyche, and I didn’t pretend to be able to wrap things up in a single essay of modest length.  I finished up the post, in fact, by noting that my work on the theme was still in its early stages, and promised to post more when I’d gone further.

Two years later—why, here we are.

For the benefit of those readers who weren’t following this blog two years ago, and who don’t have the spare time right now to go back and read the earlier post, the basic issue can be summed up readily enough. In his 1904 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber argued that the disenchantment of the world—that is, a change in attitudes toward the world that stripped it of its spiritual and magical dimensions—was central to the rise of modern capitalist society, and was prefigured by certain important trends in Protestant Christianity. The idea of disenchantment as a basic theme of modernity became very popular in Weber’s time and remains popular today, because it reflects one of the common prejudices of our time:  people in the past ignorantly believed in magic and religion, the claim goes, but we’re enlightened nowadays and know better.

What Josephson-Storm pointed out is that Weber’s claim only works out literally if you ignore the fact that a very large percentage of people in today’s industrial nations still believe in gods, practice magic, consult horoscopes, and engage in all those other supposedly outworn practices of the allegedly superstitious past.  For a disenchanted world, there sure is a lot of enchantment going on! What’s more, as Josephson-Storm also pointed out, Weber himself knew better; while he was writing his vivid discussion of the disenchantment of the world in 1904, quite a few of his friends and associates were practicing magic, consulting horoscopes, and so on.  When he claimed that the modern world was disenchanted, in other words, Weber was in a very real sense talking about how he thought things ought to be, not discussing how things actually are.

It’s an intriguing situation. What’s even more intriguing is the way that Weber’s claim, and the basic popular attitude behind it, remains riveted in place in flat contradiction to the facts. It happens to be the case, for example, that in the United States today, the number of people who make their living from astronomy is a small fraction of the number who make their living from astrology. Compare any other measure of activity—the number of books and periodicals being published in the two fields, the number of attendees at major conferences, or what have you—and the result comes out the same. A good case can be made, in fact, that it’s astrology that plays a significant role in the modern, up-to-date, cutting-edge life of the American people, while astronomy is a fringe activity pursued by an eccentric minority.

Most people in today’s America, of course, perceive things the other way around—and that’s exactly the point that needs to be explored here.  Interestingly, that view of things is just as common among people in the busy, bustling, innovative, and prosperous astrological sector of the economy as it is in that small, esoteric, and rather spooky subculture where astronomers practice their ancient craft. If current trends continue, and magic and traditional religion keep gaining converts while scientific research suffers the death of a thousand budget cuts, it’s not at all hard to imagine a future in which everybody in the United States worships gods, practices magic, or both, and scientific progress has ground to a halt, yet everyone in this future America still reflexively thinks of science as a central concern of the mainstream culture while religion and magic are still seen as the purview of embattled subcultures on the fringe.

So there’s a point to Weber’s claim about disenchantment. Even though people in the modern industrial world haven’t given up religion, magic, and other practices and beliefs supposedly ruled out by modernity, it is nonetheless true that most people in the modern industrial world believe that this is the case, and act accordingly. That vast and echoing chasm between observable facts and popular beliefs deserves more attention than it’s been given.

To begin making sense of it, however, it’s necessary to deal with some basic questions that neither Weber nor Josephson-Storm really confronted in adequate depth. When we talk about enchantment, what exactly do we mean by that term?

You can very often learn a great deal about a term by looking at the way it’s been misunderstood. With that in mind, it’s worth taking a look at an anonymous comment on last week’s open post. It so happens that I mentioned the imminence of this sequence of posts in a discussion on my Dreamwidth journal a little before then, and the author of the comment in question decided to beat the rush by telling me, in an open post here, all about what I should talk about. The result was a somewhat lengthy lecture on parapsychology, focusing on the work of one particular researcher in that field.  My response was to point out that what the commenter had posted had nothing to do with the themes I was going to discuss.  That was a little more curt than it should have been. It’s true that parapsychology is not enchantment in the sense I have in mind, but the contrast between the two subjects is stark enough that it may help cast light on what will inevitably be a challenging topic for many people.

Parapsychology, for those readers who don’t keep up with scientific controversies, is a branch of scientific research that studies psychic phenomena.  It came into being in the early twentieth century, when practitioners of the older field of psychical research decided that their studies were best pursued in the laboratory, rather than in seance rooms or haunted houses. From the 1920s  until the early 1980s, it was considered a legitimate field of research, but the hardening of the  orthodoxies that gripped the sciences thereafter saw it driven to the fringes.  James McClenon’s incisive sociological study Deviant Science: The Case of Parapsychology and Robert Anton Wilson’s bitterly funny essay “The Persecution and Assassination of the Parapsychologists as Performed by the Inmates of the American Association for the Advancement of Science under the Direction of the Amazing Randi” are worth reading in this context.

Parapsychology is an experimental science. It uses the same tools of controlled and double-blind experiments and statistical analyses that other sciences use, and it routinely gets results that would be accepted automatically if they occurred in any more acceptable field of science.  The reason its findings aren’t accepted as science is that other scientists insist, without evidence, that the parapsychologists have to be wrong. (If you ever want a cure for blind faith in scientific objectivity, compare the careful experimental designs and strict statistical tests that are standard in parapsychology with the sloppy designs and rigged statistics that have been standard in pharmaceutical research for decades now, and then reflect on the fact that parapsychology is considered pseudoscience and pharmaceutical research is not.)

As an experimental science, however, parapsychology is worlds apart from enchantment. It deals with replicable, quantitative, statistically significant events, and it relates these events to the same disenchanted world of dead matter and empty space that the other sciences study. When it postulates forces or information transfers not yet discovered by other sciences, it’s doing nothing more exotic than physicists do when they predict the existence of a previously unknown subatomic particle.  If parapsychology were to be accepted as scientifically valid, the result wouldn’t be an enchanted world:  it would simply be a slightly more complex disenchanted world in which, let’s say, certain quantum effects can have interesting but intermittent entanglements with human nervous systems.

What, then, is an enchanted world?  If you want a glimpse into that, pick up a good collection of fairy tales, medieval legends, or ancient myths. Read them, and imagine yourself living in a world where these stories seem as obviously true as the comparable stories of scientific materialism seems to us. Imagine watching the sun rise in the morning, knowing—in the same casual way that you now know the sun is a ball of incandescent hydrogen millions of miles away in the hard vacuum of deep space—that the sun is a person who gazes down on the world as he or she travels from east to west through the sky. Imagine looking out at the forest and knowing that the trees have a guardian spirit who must be placated if you want to harvest some wood. Imagine standing on a riverbank and knowing—again, casually, without putting any particular stress on the fact—that the flowing water in front of you is quite literally the physical body of a goddess or a god.

Enchantment goes further than that. Imagine knowing, in the same well-of-course fashion just discussed, that how well you can complete some task—plowing a field, nursing a child, forging iron into a tool, healing an illness, building a structure, and the list goes on—doesn’t depend on the kind of objective measures of efficiency we’re used to using. Imagine that your success depends instead on whether you can, in the process of doing that task, identify yourself with the god or spirit or culture hero that first did the same task back in the beginning of time, and make your act one with that original deed.

How do you do that?  Maybe you sing a magic song while you do the task, the way folk healers do in so many cultures, so that the herbs you use are still in some enchanted sense resting in the hands of the legendary being who first used them. Maybe you take part in a magic dance before you start, the way people in the north of England used to celebrate the beginning of plowing with sword dances in which a central figure suffers a mock-beheading and is then brought back to life—it requires no particular background in comparative religion to recognize in these proceedings an enchanted vision of the life cycle of grain, which is decapitated at harvest and rises again with the green shoots of spring.

On the other hand, if you practice some especially magical craft in an enchanted society, you can expect to pass through a long process of training, followed by an initiation ceremony that takes you back to the primal example of the craft. I wonder how many Freemasons realize that their initiation ceremonies have exactly that function.  You can’t build a church, in the enchanted mindset of the medieval master builder, unless you personally labored on the construction of King Solomon’s temple, the archetype of every Christian holy place.  Thus medieval masons, in the course of their journey from apprentice to fellow of the craft to master stonemason, did exactly that in the lodge ceremonies that advanced them from stage to stage of their career.

Nowadays we like to use words like “symbolically” and “ritually” for such acts of identification. That helps us make sense of the process from within the disenchanted modern mindset, but it’s not the way people see things in the very different mindset of an enchanted age. As any good collection of fairy tales will demonstrate readily enough, space and time are irrelevant to a proper enchantment.  Today’s Freemasons, gamely repeating archaic rituals because that’s what you do if you’re a Mason, think of themselves as symbolically and ritually laboring on King Solomon’s temple; medieval masons didn’t. The power of enchantment swept aside the miles and the years and placed them right there on the threshing floor King David bought from Ornan the Jebusite, hauling blocks of stone to build a temple to the God of Israel.

In an age of enchantment, what we call the “symbolic” is as real as a rock.  That’s a lesson that most people in today’s disenchanted societies have a very hard time grasping. More generally, it seems to be very hard these days for most of us to grasp that people in different ages and cultures really did experience the world in a radically different way. They weren’t simply playing make-believe. They really did look east toward the rising sun and see a vast, golden, radiant person gazing back at them.  They really did feel the hands of a saint, a spirit, or a god guiding their own hands as they recited a charm over the herbs they were brewing into a healing potion.

The reason I can say this so confidently, of course, is that that same state of mind and that same kind of experience are essential elements of the practice of the kind of old-fashioned occultism that I do. To practice classic occult disciplines is to enter into an enchanted world, even if that world is only as large as the space traced out by a ritual circle and its entire existence unfolds in however much time elapses from the beginning of a ceremony to its end. Within those limits of space and time, stars and planets become persons, times and places far distant from the ritual and from one another fuse into a single moment, angels and spirits take on a body made of incense smoke and speak to the mage. Disenchantment dissolves like mist and the old enchantments surge back to fill their accustomed place. That’s the point of magic.

(Well, to be fair, that’s the point of traditional magic. Every generation or so since Eliphas Lévi launched the modern magical revival, there’s been a movement to scrap all that fusty, illogical, impossible stuff and come up with a magical system that’s modern, relevant, and stripped of outdated notions—that is to say, a disenchanted form of enchantment. Every one of those methods, since it catered to the conventional wisdom of our time, was wildly popular for a few decades and then quietly fizzled and dropped out of common use.  Mumble mumble internal contradictions mumble mumble, and if that makes me sound too much like an old-fashioned Marxist, them’s the breaks.)

Getting to that state of consciousness in the modern disenchanted world is not easy.  You can’t simply recite a magic song, watch a traditional dance, or take part in a ritual of initiation; you have to learn, in Dion Fortune’s phrase, how to cause changes in consciousness in accordance with will.  Then you have to make the relevant changes in your own consciousness. Some changes are only necessary when you’re actually doing a working.  Other changes require you to shift the state of consciousness you experience in every waking minute.  One way or another, it’s a lot of work. That’s one way we can measure the difference between our present disenchanted world and the enchanted world that most human beings, through most of history, have inhabited.

So what happened? What was it that broke the enchantments that made the world what it was to our ancestors, and brought in the very different consciousness that most people nowadays think of as normal and natural? That’s going to be a central theme of the posts to come.

Of course the conventional wisdom of our time has a pat answer to that question. That answer, baldly put, is that the modern disenchanted state of consciousness is right and the enchanted state of consciousness is wrong. Central to the entire worldview of modern industrial culture is the belief that “we” (meaning here the minority of human beings during the last four centuries or so who have embraced the disenchanted state as truth, and believed devoutly in the ideology of scientific materialism) are the only human beings in all of history who have ever understood the world accurately, and everyone else down through the ages was just plain wrong. If that answer sounds arrogant to you, dear reader, let’s just say you’re not alone.

Yet there are other problems with the easy modern assumption that true believers in the modern ideologies of disenchantment are right and everyone else who ever lived was too stupid to notice how wrong they were. One of those problems is the simple fact that the entire edifice of modern materialist science rests on assumptions about the nature of human knowledge that were disproved once and for all more than two hundred years ago. Another is the equally simple but far more brutal fact that the disenchanted world praised by today’s pundits in such triumphant terms has turned out to be unfit for human habitation. If we’re so much smarter than our ancestors, and thus presumably so much better at understanding and meeting human needs with our omniscient science and almighty technology, how come so many of us are blowing our brains out or drinking and drugging ourselves to death because of the sheer misery of life in the world that reason has made?

With those points among others in mind, it’s worth going deeper into the origins of today’s disenchanted world and the attitudes that shape it, the nature of the enchanted world and the experiences that define it, and the process—a historical process, as we’ll see—by which these two replace one another over time. We’ll proceed with that exploration in a couple of weeks.

Source: Ecosophia