The Nature of Enchantment 
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-nature-of-enchantment/ 
January 4, 2023
John Michael Greer

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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.

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?