For most of recorded history until recently; many human institutions (organizations, formal groupings) were magical * - to some degree.
The further back we go, the more magical they could be. The earlier in our life we go, the more likely that we would ourselves experience this magic.
However, there were also not-magical groupings; and, no matter how magical the institution - there have always been those people who do not participate in it; being either immune to that magic, or susceptible but reject it.
Furthermore, the innate magic of pre-adolescent childhood; means that - even now - groupings of such children often have a strongly magical ambience.
The big difference across the generations relates to adult institutions - which used often to have a significant magical quality - but now are likely to be (almost entirely) soulless, dead, mechanical - and indeed purposively anti-magical... Zealous in their active destruction of any such qualities - typically by means of abstract and generic systems of bureaucracy and computerization.
For instance; many educational institutions used to be strongly magical in their nature. This applied especially to small and localized institutions, or those with a mutually-selective character (i.e. both selected and selecting).
Through my adult life I experienced educational institutions with considerable variations in the magical qualities; although I was also aware that most people were not consciously aware of such differences even when they spontaneously responded to them.
Most people would speak against the reality and significance of such institutional aspects; and would cheerfully erode or eliminate magical aspects whenever this seemed expedient, from abstract ideology; or sometimes from sheer resentment-driven spite.
Looking back; I could see that this institutional magic had, overall, been both more pervasive and common, and stronger (at least potentially stronger), the further back one went.
Yet institutional enchantment was never complete. Human life was always and for everybody to some degree - marred by the "mundane" - this being the nature of our mortal state.
The magic of institutions was therefore at its height (as I understand it) probably the major source of enchantment in human existence; while at the same time the very nature of institutions (plus the human beings who constitute them) meant that this magical quality was always both incomplete and contradicted.
And, through may adult life (from the 1980s) I could also see that this magic was innately ebbing - while also being purposively-expunged - from the educational institutions of which I knew.
The difference across the decades was extreme. In my childhood and early adulthood the magical quality of (for instance) universities was (to me) palpable. By the time I retired from academia, the magic had been very-completely destroyed.
Perhaps most evident when a soul-less, and indeed actively soul-destroying - institution, would attempt to cloak itself in the enchanted mantle of earlier generations.
This would dishonestly be attempted using the mind-manipulating procedures of modern advertising and public relations; and would therefore fail to attain magic, but reduce enchantment to ideology, false promises of hedonism, fashion, and covert-appeals to status snobbery.
While I devoted considerable energy to fighting this anti-magical trend, I now believe that a decline of that kind of spontaneous, largely unconscious, institutional magic was inevitable - due to the innate developments of human consciousness.
When the human beings of an institution themselves come to lack spontaneous and unconscious magic; then enchantment is bound to wane from all institutions.
The analogy with adolescence (nowadays) is close. Many children are spontaneously and unconsciously susceptible to enchantment; but the innate process of adolescence will abolish this; after which the capacity to know and live magically, must be the consequence of a conscious choice.
In the later twentieth century, Western adults reached an "adolescence" of consciousness, so that spontaneous and unconscious magic receded - and if we were to continue to live any kind of enchanted life in our institutions; magic would need explicitly to be acknowledged as good, and purposively pursued.
In sum: as we approached the millennium, magic needed to become self-conscious and consciously valued; or else there would soon be no magic.
We know by now which of these happened! So complete has become the disenchantment of institutions, that (it seems) most people deny that things ever were otherwise! Most people assume that all institutions were always as they are now: spiritually-dead, exploitatively manipulative, habitually dishonest...
But such retrospective denigration is projection of our evil onto others; as can be seen if historical sources are experienced sympathetically.
From where we actually-are; I find it hard even to imagine how institutions can be re-enchanted; because there is neither recognition of the problem, nor will to solve it.
Furthermore; I am pretty sure that (from here, from now) institutional re-enchantment can happen only on the basis of Jesus Christ.
Yet this needs to happen in a context where the churches are themselves very-thoroughly disenchanted - including by assimilation into the ideological materialism of totalitarian bureaucracy.
This means that any future source of enchantment must primarily (i.e. as a first step) be sought outwith the Christian church institutions - and Christianity (plus/ minus specific churches) regenerated from that basis.
From the spiritual place we now inhabit and the people we actually are; I cannot see any way that a Christianity rooted primarily in institutional affiliation (to any kind of institution, no matter how idealized) can succeed in doing what needs to be done.
On the other side; the attempt to do without enchantment; to construct a religion that operates at the level of institutional power, rooted in the mundane, rational, functional (e.g. a religion designed to implement a particular kind of society) - well, this will surely fail.
Fail because it will inevitably assimilate to the existing mundane, pseudo-rational, quasi-functionality of that system of totalitarianism that characterizes our civilization. With Men as we are; any possible church-based, institutionally-rooted Christianity will be secular and materialistic, totalitarian and political, and spiritually dead.
The only path ahead, is the right path ahead.
**
*"Magic" does not mean Good - since there is black magic (intended to manipulate people and creation), as well as white (in harmony with God and creation). But magic is, of itself, good; in the sense that it recognizes the reality of our participation in creation; and by enchantment we are aware of this participation. Whereas the exclusion or elimination of magic is intrinsically an evil because rooted in falsehood, and the intent to cause spiritual harm.