The battle between enchantment and glamour (with reference to Tolkien)

We all need to escape - with a psychological need that gets more urgent and compelling as the bars of the Iron Prison close-in upon the whole world. 

But the psychological need is mostly assuaged by glamour - as constructed and disseminated by the mass media. From adolescence onward, typical modern Man absolutely relies-upon glamour fantasies (and, maybe, a bit of our own - secondhand - glamorous reality at evenings, weekends and on holiday). 

In daydreams, in fantasy, modern Man sees himself, watches-himself and his life, as if he was in a photo-shoot or movie - cool, stylish, attractive, charming, dominant, impulsive, blissed-out... whatever it may be - as if he lived 'inside' the world of the media. 

The hedonic life... And of course it does not work; even on its own terms. It is not gratifying - except negatively (scratching an itch of dependence), it is merely addictive. 

People have 'fun' and 'enjoy' themselves, and (essentially) discuss this online (and sometimes in person...) - and people are depressed, miserable, afraid and despairing... As who would not be with a life divided between expanding-crushing bureaucracy and totalitarian regulation on the one hand; and the shallow, jaded triviality of glamour on the other. 

We need enchantment (not glamour) - and the re-enchantment of The World, of Life, must not be an attempt to apply enchantment like paint on a surface; but instead a rebuilding of life from new (or rather) old assumptions.

Building from assumptions that are first Christian (so that our faith brings hope) and secondly (but vitally) Romantic - so that we know our own personal everyday world (properly understood) is alive, conscious, purposive - and that we are personally involved in the reality of this world by the relation of love.

This spiritual life of excitement and enchantment is not 'private' - because the spiritual realm is objectively real; but enchantment is hidden from the world of politics, bureaucracy, the media and public discourse generally. 

We really are actors in an unfolding drama of enchantment - but this is not a public drama to be observed on screen and in media; instead our life is a spiritual drama that we know in our own heart-thinking; and shared with God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost - also with spiritual beings such as angels and demons, who have vital roles to play in the drama. 

And re-enchantment must come from within - it is not a consequence of external stimuli.

Not even Tolkien's work will supply enchantment - obviously, because most of his fans have extracted merely distracting glamour from Lord of the Rings: they see it as 'sword and sorcery', not as an enchanted world.

Tolkien rightly defended escapism as a valid goal of reading fairy stories - but he meant the escape to be into the enchantment of faery; not escape into merely mundane glamour, excitement and hyper-stimulus. 

For Tolkien it was only partly a matter of 'escape-from' - but mostly a matter of what the reader 'escapes-to'. 

If the reader escapes-to a fantasy world that is merely not-true, a world into-which the reader imports the (inverted) values of modernity - a focus on cool, style, charm, sex and sexual transgression, ultra-violence fear and despair; then glamour has displaced enchantment, and escapism has become merely therapeutic

To regard Tolkien's world as implicitly one of mere 'glamour', of psychology - as do most of Tolkien's modern 'fans' and 'scholars' - is an inevitable consequence of carrying mainstream leftist-materialist atheism into that world - thereby annihilating enchantment. 

Enchantment is (as of 2021, when things have come to a point) open only to Christians - and only effective in their lives when that Christianity is Romantic. 

Enchantment then brings both hope and optimism - because Christian hope points beyond this mundane and transient world of corruption; and  optimism comes from the revelation that our actual life can be - when properly regarded - an heroic daily adventure, a war of good and evil: exactly like the Lord of the Rings truly is, for those with hearts to know it.    

Can anything effective be done to reverse disenchantment?

We all probably experience personal disenchantment as a process through our childhood - a transformation of the world from being a magic place of hidden motives and meanings (often sinister and malign) - to the mundane materialism of adult and mainstream life. 

There is also a slower, social trend towards societal disenchantment - that I have both read-about and also experienced in my own life. in the 1970s and 80s, even such mundane materialistic bureaucratic "systems" as schools, universities, hospitals - and many cities - were still touched by a kind of residual-enchantment that was spontaneous, often unconscious. 

And there were then still many people who remembered them as even more magical - and treated them as such - and added to the enchantment thereby. 

As a romantic by nature; I felt these receding of enchantment in my life, and the world around me, very keenly at the time - and did my best to fight against it by holding-onto the residuum, and trying to build from it: but with little and lessening success.  

I did this because it seemed then, and it seems now, that a mundane world and life - without enchantment, depth, spiritual resonance, in a dead and unconscious universe - is simply not worth living. 

If life is nothing more than comfort, convenience, amusement, and excitement for the (temporarily) "fortunate" - and pain, disability, disease, degeneration, and death for the rest (and everybody, sooner or later) -- then such a life is a matter of indifference to the mass of mankind; as evidenced by the reluctance to have children, or indeed lift a finger, to defend it.  

And it seems that (on the whole) the rest-of-the-world agrees with me on the worthless futility of a mundane life; because most people are actively-planning or diligently-implementing the end of civilization (thus themselves and their loved-ones); or are going-along-with-it in a state of denial and idle-incomprehension - having no better ideas or ideals. 

But if clinging to the residuum of enchantment does not work; and since this disenchanted world cannot motivate us to sustain it; then it seems we must seek something else if we are not to fall inevitably into despair. 

It seems that a viable re-enchantment of the world, to be attempted in some new kind of spirit, from some new kind of understanding, is actually the most important thing in the world? 

I personally cannot let this subject alone; and when I am not brooding on it in a would-be constructive fashion, I feel as if I am neglecting my most fundamental duty. 

I have encountered quite a few good ideas about what we ought to be doing towards a genuine and effective re-enchantment - for examples I have often referenced the likes of Steiner, Barfield, Arkle - but none of their practical ideas to encourage or create re-enchantment seem to work nowadays; and some seem counter-productive (although they probably did work, to an extent, in their eras). 

My current conclusion is that the task has now devolved from the group to the individual; so that general plans and schemes, and recommendations of a generalized kind, have apparently ceased to be useful. 

Since the necessity remains; this may imply that re-enchantment has become the work of the present day, or even hour. 

We each must start afresh start from here-and-now and from our current personal state of being - whenever we become conscious of the need.  

Very vague, I realize; and maybe yet another ineffective suggestion? But maybe not. Maybe there is little alternative; and maybe that is the way God has made it. 

We can only do what we ought to do - if we are to do anything at all in the necessary direction.

And since God is the creator, and God loves each of us; we can assume that any small positive good we accomplish (in thought or action) and that is worth it; shall be noticed and amplified by God to ramify throughout his creation. 

 

2020 Synchronicity Magic, following after the leaching of enchantment from life

One of the most painful - although, it turns-out necessary - trends through my life, has been the leaching of magic, of enchantment, from all institutions, and almost all places. 

This is the familiar 'public world' of materialist assumptions: that the world is made of 'things'; that subjective mind (consciousness) is separate and thoughts are epiphenomenal; that Beings are ultimately mere artefacts of the 'laws' of physics and statistical chance...

Although the theme of modern life becoming disenchanted goes back a long way, to the first Romantics around 1800; and the sociologist Max Weber defined it as characteristic of modernity more than a century ago. And it was also Weber who also named the Iron Cage of bureaucracy, which has been the primary mechanism by which enchantment has been destroyed. 

For me, the disenchantment of universities was probably the most painful of these trends; since I had grown-up the son of a 'professor' (consultant/ senior lecturer in dentistry) and known from an early age that this was a known world I felt organically a part-of. I was an insider. 

Right into the 1990s, there was a residuum of magic about academia - albeit a thin and dwindling stream compared with the height of the middle ages. 

But it was evident - here and there, again and again; and I valued that magic despite that hardly any of my colleagues noticed it, and even fewer liked it. Indeed, as an atheist, I depended on that enchantment at a deep level; for a sense of meaning and purpose in life, larger than myself.

The process of diminishing enchantment was partly driven by the evil destructiveness of bureaucracy (whose 'reforms' were always based upon lies and denied, unexamined false assumptions) - but also, underlying, by the long-term trend that Men were progressively less and less susceptible to enchantment. 

Magic, gradually, ceased to work. 

 

This can be seen everywhere - indeed, even in the world of magic itself: I mean the 'esoteric' societies of ritual magic that grew up from the late 19th century. 

In the late 19th century people were claiming all kind of magical manifestations; the rituals seemed objectively effective, indeed potentially dangerous - hence they were kept secret. But by the 1980s or 90s nobody was even claiming this, thus there seemed no need for secrecy; and the activities of magical societies were hard to distinguish from group psychotherapy, artsy 'happenings', or ritual pageantry. 

For most people, nearly all the time; Magic just doesn't work anymore. 

 

The old systems and symbolisms (alchemy, astrology, numerology, ritual objects and actions...) - are left looking more like bureaucratic flow-charts. People can still learn about the history of magical stuff, and intended correlations; but it is clear that objects and actions no longer animate people. 

The objectivity that linked magical things and doings with predictable real world effects has gone. Such correlations have become merely theoretical - or else reduced to (transient) feelings.  

The human mind seems to have become more and more resistant to magic. 

And not only among Westerners. The 19th century Amerindians 'needed' to introduce peyote in order to attain the mystical states that had previously arisen spontaneously. However, peyote is a mild, slow-acting psychedelic; requiring additional supportive group immersion and ritual actions. 

But among Westerners the psychedelic drugs of the 1960s were relatively a 'necessary' chemical sledgehammer of ultra-potent, or mega-dose, brain impairment agents; such extreme measure needed in order to create some warped simulacrum of the 'larger consciousness' that most people could experience naturally earlier in human history. 

Psychedelics are a last gasp of the idea that spiritual experience should come from outside, be objective and irresistible, should overwhelm the mind... and, of course, psychedelics have overall proved to be not merely a failure as 'entheogens', but actively counter-productive.

Cause and effect have worked together - and by now I find that the disenchantment of public life and my compelled withdrawal of reliance upon it has been an advantage - a necessity; as the whole organisational world moves ever deeper into more explicit evil. 

Anyone now mentally-dependent on any kind of institution is drawn into supporting the agenda of Satanic evil which has swept the world in 2020. 

Enchantment of our social world is now an illusion rather than an insight - albeit a flimsy and ineffectual illusion in a world where all institutions are permanently convulsed by externally-bureaucratic-media-imposed transformations, driven by global Establishment priorities (birdemic, climate change, antiracism, sexual revolution...). 

 

Here and now any magic must come from within - and modern institutions have no 'within'; they are permeable and hollow; the imperatives of The System sweep through them unopposed and uncontradicted - they are mere subsections of The One System.

This is related to an increased awareness of synchronicity as a 'mechanism' of enchantment. Synchronicity as the basis of a way of life was the core message of the 1993 bestselling New Age 'novel' The Celestine Prophecy; and this is indirect evidence that there are no longer effective magical 'systems'.

Magic is now something that unpredictably happens-to us - our job being to recognise and understand it when it happens. 

 

But mainly; our 'job' is to create the frame of mind (frame of Being) in which synchronicities happen more often, more powerfully and meaningfully; become 'normal', and link-together towards Good ends. 

Because - although this is seldom recognised - synchronicity entails a loving creator God. Acknowledgment and understanding of synchronicity takes us most of the way to Christianity!

Thus a modern Christian - at his most Christian - would experience life as a continuous-web of synchronicity. Quite naturally so - because a life of meaning and purpose would be full of positive and striking 'coincidental' happenings; one leading onto another. 

Our mortal life is sustained because of our need to learn - to learn for the resurrected life to come; and sychronicity is a kind of learning-opportunity. 

Thus synchronicity is not a code - not a system of objective correlatives, like the old magical system; but a natural aspect of a Christian life in this 2020 world where all meaning must come from God and from the divine within; because pretty much all of external life has become evil, meaningless and purposeless. 

2020 Magic just is Christian; not institutional. 

Note: moderated commenting has returned...

Christianity and the re-enchantment of the world

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The modern world, the world of modernity, is dis-enchanted - which is that it lacks unity, depth, meaning and purpose; we have no relationship with it: we are alienated.

I regard alienation as the primary self-perceived psychopathology of modernity (modern people are unaware of sin).

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And Christianity re-enchants the world.

Indeed only Christianity truly (hence robustly) re-enchants the modern world.

But for Christianity to re-enchant the world entails the fullness of Christianity.

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Much of Christianity is indeed dis-enchanted because much of Christianity is legalistic rule-following and is almost purely virtue-based.

For much of Christianity, pursuit of The Good is all-but equated-with and limited-to the Morally-Good - Virtue conceptualized as moral laws - and only somewhat underpinned by a belief in the objectivity of Truth; and hardly-at-all concerned by Beauty or hostile to it.

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Even more narrowly, much of Christianity perceives Virtue in legal terms; a Virtue in which the Laws, the rules, are primary and comprehensive.

Christianity, then, merely as Virtue: Christian Virtue conceptualized as primarily rule-knowing and rule-following...

Such a Christianity will not re-enchant the world.

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But this is a partial and incomplete vision of The Good (the Christian Good); and insufficient for human needs. Such a Christianity may be salvific - hence of infinite value yet alienating. 

Such a Christianity will not (in this world) heal those afflicted by alienation, except in so far as it displaces that pathology.

People may do it, it may be enough; but it does not attract, it does not inspire.

The human spirit finds abstract purely-moral legalism repulsive, even when it is correct.

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The fullness of Christianity ought (surely?) to conceptualize The Good as a unity - aspects of which are (non-comprehensively) summarized by the Virtuous, the True and the Beautiful.

In The Good, VT&B cannot be dissociated nor opposed.

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The fullness of Christianity perceives the world as alive, purposive, where all has meaning (if we could but discern it, which we mostly cannot), and where reality is an unimaginably intricate web of relations and influences.

We move-through this hidden world of meanings - observing, understanding, choosing, doing or not-doing; pursuing our path as best we can.

This is a world of mingled virtue and vice, truth and lies, beauty and ugliness, horror and wonder - a world (in these respects) like the best and most convincing depictions of fairyland.

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To attain this perspective and experience the world in this way is a recovery . It is a recovery from the shallow and ill-considered, nihilistic and intrinsically-alienating world view of modernity.

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It is a world, therefore, where free will and true reason and accurate experience are all possible; and where benign forces of Good are active and available;

but also a world in which - as well as errors and incompleteness - there are powerful, deliberate evil manipulations, influences on emotions, pernicious images - influencing us, influencing other people, animals, plants, landscape and things.

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A world where we need to discern between virtue and vice, also truth and dishonesty, also beauty and and ugliness - and (above these) between unity and fragmentation.

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It is in many respects a terrifying world. But whatever else this re-enchanted world is, it is not a world where real alienation is the nature of things. Existence is significant in all and every respect: a heavy and dense world to which we are attached, and in which we are rooted, and through which our branches ramify.

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Revised 20 July 2011.

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Crossing the threshold at the millennium into a New Age

In the years approaching 2000 there was a great deal of expectation in New Age circles that this time was to be a spiritual threshold crossing; and I myself first became interested in such matters at this time - initially focused on hunter gatherer beliefs. 

Yet, the first impression as we went into the early 2000s was that 'nothing had happened' - certainly there was no significant spiritual revival: there was no clear raising of human consciousness to a higher level. The New Age movement continued - but as an increasingly commercial, psychological, 'self-help' activity. 

Meanwhile, materialism began to take-off with an accelerating expansion of bureaucracy and managerialism - and the solid domination of increasing-leftism through the entirety of mainstream politics, law, churches, the media, academia, arts, science, health services - and then into the police and military. 

There was not the expected re-enchantment of life; but instead more and more dis-enchantment.  

So - did anything happen? Was a threshold of human consciousness crossed?

I now think that yes, something happened: something Big; and yes there was a change in human consciousness. And that change was (approximately): more and more people began to live in a world of their own creation. 

This was, in its form, exactly the consciousness transition that had been foreseen several decades earlier by Rudolf Steiner and then Owen Barfield. They foresaw that Men were going to become so detached from 'nature' that they would 'make their own reality'. 

But, the reality that Men chose to make was not the one hoped for by 'spiritual people' - it was instead the made-reality of the mass media and the pervasive, extensive, unifying bureaucracy (which was  linked-up globally by early 2020 - as was first evident from the birdemic-response). 

From 2000; Men came to inhabit a willed world (a virtual world) - yet this was not the 'spiritual' world of high consciousness that had been hoped-for, nor was it a world that individual Men had personally discerned and chosen. It was instead a matter of millennial New Man passively-absorbing a dominant, mainstream 'official world' - devised and propagated by those with the greatest power and influence.  

The millennial change in consciousness was 'about' Men having a new capacity to create their own reality; in other words to 'choose what was true'. It was hoped by some that Men would use this new power to choose to live in a world of meaning, purpose and personal involvement with nature and the divine spirit world - and that Men would therefore create such a reality. 

Because Men could now choose what to believe, and could make these beliefs real; they might have chosen to acknowledge the reality of God, creation and Heaven. Of course, as a Christian, I know these to be really-real - but since the millennial transition the really-real needs to be chosen and self-created in the same way as the false and evil.

Since the millennium; Men have overwhelmingly chosen to co-create a reality without meaning, purpose or humanity; a reality based on fear, resentment and despair; a reality which denies their own capacity (and right!) to choose. 

In effect men have chosen a world of alienation, futility, and inescapable death; and then chosen to deny that they have chosen!

And they have chosen to regard their choice as inevitable, the only possibility that ever-was real. 

Why have so many Men made this choice? A choice which had led directly to the current (and unprecedented) world government of evil and systematic destruction based on fear, resentment and despair?  

Why, to put it differently, have so very few Men chosen to co-create (as they could have) a world of faith, hope and love? 

...Rejecting the chance of a world where reality really-was enchanted. 

The reasons are many - but I focus on two. 

The first was leftism - which by 2000 had infected and become established in almost everyone; and leftism is intrinsically evil; being anti-Christian and metaphysically materialist, built-on and incorporating many Big Lies. 

The entire spectrum of mainstream opinion was, by 2000, merely variations on leftism. All significant political parties and movements - left and 'right' were leftist. All New Agers were leftist, in one or other respect - and many were very leftist. 

Leftism was assumed to be the bottom line of any 'good' morality - anything else than leftism was rejected as abhorrent. Reality was fitted-into leftism...

The second was passivity. New Age expectations of the millennium were that something would happen-to people. There would be some kind of shift - which was conceptualized in terms of raised frequency, vibration, energies or the like - and this external change would would raise humanity. 

Humanity, consciousness, would be lifted by external forces; and the primary act of choice was consenting to be thus raised. 

Yet, the truth was that Men needed to make an active choice to benefit from the millennial transformation. All the good options (God, Creation, Jesus Christ, a living conscious and personal universe...) required positive, active choice. 

By remaining passive, and by regarding leftism as the fundamental truth; when the millennial threshold was crossed; Men made the world that was all around them, the world that was easiest. The world that was everywhere, powerful, persuasive, fun, socially-high-status. The world view that brought in money and led to most pleasure - that is, the world of the media, or leftist socio-politics, of materialism...

So Man did cross the threshold at the millennium, and with new powers of consciousness to create his own reality...

And then Man chose to use these new powers to make the whole world a locked-down, hope-less, dead prison - for himself and everybody else. 

Destroying "enchantment" in the arts

Ever since I became self-aware in my mid teens, I have valued "enchantment" - that magical quality of what I might now call "participation" - which is depth and breadth, significance and beauty. Enchantment is the same thing that CS Lewis called Joy, and Novalis called Sehnsucht - and was something of an obsession for the Romantic Movement.  

I found it first in Tolkien - and realized quickly how rare it was, and how it was altogether absent from most of what most people valued and praised. Furthermore, there didn't seem to be anybody else who valued it as I did - rather, more exactly, there were differences of opinion as to where it might be found, even among those who did value it. 

Finding it was therefore something of a personal quest; and I began to realize that even when I located a source of enchantment, the trend of our times was working against it. 

I found enchantment in the work of the electric folk group Steeleye Span, especially in their supernatural and magical ballads. But after seven LPs of reliably enchanting music - I noticed that in 1975 "All around my hat" was a considerable step down in this respect. It was something to do with a feeling of "overproduction" in the music - which was apparently intended to make it more "commercial", more instantly appealing to a mass audience; and this being achieved by what seemed like excessive messing around with sound and arrangements and (presumably) performance; excessive production-control - such that the delicate bloom of the songs was somewhat rubbed-off. The following album - Rocket Cottage - was poor, and then the band broke up. 

The thing about enchantment is that it isn't usually a conscious goal, but happens as a by-product, as a part of a larger and spontaneously integrated activity. Indeed, it is not possible to get enchantment by making it primary - as CS Lewis describes and explain in Surprised by Joy.

But enchantment can be prevented or destroyed by any focus on almost any specific - it can be pulled-down, but also killed by breaking-up.

So, whereas I quite often found an almost accidental enchantment in many amateur plays and music; I only seldom found it in the work of professionals - especially when they were required to repeat performances, and these became routine. I have never seen a play with enchantment in the West End London theatre, for instance - where actors do long runs of the same play. 

Routine is a killer of enchantment; as is management, "mugging" (exaggeration for effect, as when performers show-off); more generally a striving for entertainment, shocks, horror, laughs. 

A political agenda dominating is maybe the commonest cause of deadly disenchantment. Politics is one of the most disenchanted of all domains. 

Any priority, that is, which arises from outside, and imposes onto the creative process and interaction.

The death of enchantment is a product of separation... Modernity takes an original unity, analyses it into components, treats it as a collection of attributes - and then pursues these singly, perhaps in sequence - or emphasizes on or a few at the expense of the whole.

I have even come across modern attempts - some genuine, others probably insincere - to make enchantment itself an externally imposed priority, to layer it onto works or an intrinsically anti-enchantment aspect of life (such as politics, bureaucracy, mass media, or corporate life) - as if it was some kind of sauce! This never works, but achieves the opposite. 

Enchantment is either integral to the creative process, to Life; or else it is absent   

Now, although enchantment is still discerned and valued by a few people, and can still be found and still arises (but almost exclusively outwith professional and official sources); our civilization lies on the far side from it - the nature and trend of our whole world is systematically and pervasively hostile to enchantment.  

This is apparently what I sensed fifty years ago, back in 1975; although I didn't realize how far the process had yet to go. 

And, as usual, we can't go back. The future of enchantment in the arts, or anywhere, must be something essentially unprecedented; because it can only arise from the large perspective of a lived enchanted life - more exactly from that part or aspect of a Man's life which is enchanted. 

Note: Exactly the same problem of disenchantment happens in churches, and over much the same timescale. There is near zero enchantment in church services, or in any aspect of church life - even when the Christianity is sincere, the atmosphere is as mundane as an office. And probably a majority of serious modern Christians have set their face against many of the manifestations of enchantment - which they reject vehemently as demonic. The truth his the opposite: enchantment is a manifestation of the divine, is indeed Heavenly, and the hope of resurrection. Whatever its intent; mundane Christianity does the work of Satan, quite literally.  

Converting modern Man. Which comes first: Christianity or re-enchantment? (Or, the synergistic twin evils of nihilism and alienation)

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Owen Barfield (slightly edited from an interview with Schenkel):

My book Saving the Appearances (1957) was intended as a contribution to the healing, in the general mind, of the universally presumed Cartesian split between matter and mind - a paradigm-shift which I feel must precede the restoration of any spiritual dimension to the social structures of the West.

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The two great problems of modern Western Man are nihilism and alienation.

Nihilism comes from the death of God, specifically the loss of Christian faith - so that life has lost objective reality, and has no purpose - therefore his life lacks direction and adds-up to nothing; the whole thing feels meaningless.

Alienation comes from the abstraction and literalism of modern thought; so that each Man feels solipsistically-isolated inside his own head - detached from public discourse, detached even from his own thoughts and feelings; which seems arbitrary, distant and irrelevant from the objective public world. Alienated modern Man does not participate; he is cut-off from the world; the world is lifeless, mechanical, deeply boring.

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The Nihilism stands in the path of re-enchantment of the world; prevents a restoration of child-like participation in reality - because all meanings seem like arbitrary fantasies, and any healing seems as if based on make-believe. When nothing is really real, then modern Man cannot re-establish contact with reality. The death of God means that we cannot cure alienation.

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And alienation blocks the path to Christian renewal - because when Christianity is conceptualized in the modern, alienated mode of thinking; Christianity becomes meaningless. To modern Man, even if Christianity is true, it seems irrelevant to the alienated soul. When the world is regarded as dead clockwork, the Gospels are just another story, just another set of rules, just another bunch of threats and promises.

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This is the predicament of modern Man - he is caught in a pincer-grip: he cannot be saved by Christianity, because he is doomed by alienation; he cannot be saved from alienation because he is in despair from lack of Christianity.

So which comes first: the objective reality of Christianity or restored animism and re-enchantment?

Barfield says the first priority - even before Christianity - should be healing our state of alienation (or, the Cartesian split, as he calls it) - and I believe he is correct, for the following reasons...

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Christianity comes from a pre-modern world, which simply takes for granted aliveness and the meaningfulness of the non-human. But Christianity in a world of scientism, a world of bureaucratic and legalistic discourse, cannot feed our starving souls in the way that it should.

To the typical modern Man, Christianity is perceived as the same kind of thing as the legal system, or a state office, or an NGO. It is a structure, a system, an establishment, a rulebook and a code of conduct. If modern man simply becomes a normal Christian, he will find that the moment-by-moment experience, the texture of his living, has not changed.

He will be the same-old alienated self, leading the same-old dull, un-engaged, life-at-a-distance.

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The answer is that the healing of alienation should come first, but must be regarded as only a means to the end of a proper Christianity.

From the Romantic and Transcendentalist poets and essayists, through Jung, through neo-paganism, through Joseph Campbell, to some of today's Positive Psychologists; there has been no shortage of non-Christians who offer to cure alienation and re-enchant the world. But even if they delivered everything they claim, the fundamental problems of modern life - its nihilism - would be unaffected.

We might feel alive; but we would regard this feeling as arbitrary, merely subjective, a delusion - a temporary psychological state soon to be terminated by circumstances, disease, age or death.

However, if (instead of being the program of non- or anti-Christians) this re-enchantment was embarked-upon explicitly and purposively as a seamless preliminary leading directly into Christianity; then the synergy of mutual destructiveness between nihilism and alienation would be thwarted.

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If this analysis is correct, then it highlights the futility - or at least extreme difficultly - of attempting to convert a typical modern Man directly to Christianity; because a single step conversion process cannot overcome the dual-blockage of alienation and nihilism.

What is needed is a double-stage conversion process, which addresses both aspects of the problem.

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The re-enchantment of the world - a matter of direct spiritual contacts

Since the emergence of Romanticism in the late 1700s, the "disenchantment" of our modern world has been a constant cultural theme; and there have been may analyses of its cause; and suggestions concerning the possibilities for re-enchantment. 

I have, over the past half century, read many books and essays on this theme; and I observe that more continue to be published. 

In recent years I have expanded my explorations to include the tradition of Christian ceremonial magic, in particular the works of Dion Fortune and Gareth Knight. Knight, in particular, confronts this issue head-on, especially in his autobiography "I called it magic" (2011) - which describes the (almost) life-long quest for re-enchantment of his life. 

What follows derives from such considerations; and takes the form of notes-to-myself, as a kind of aide memoire concerning a partial crystallization of ideas. 

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In our world, here and now, the proper aim of magical activity is to establish the greatest possible range of loving contacts. 

By which I mean, in particular, direct inter-Being contacts of a spiritual kind. 

By "direct" contacts I mean mind-to-mind - therefore unmediated; not-perceptual, not symbolic nor linguistic.  

By "Beings" I mean any of the primary units of reality - because I regard reality as consisting of eternally existing and developing, Beings: that are alive, purposive, and (to some extent) conscious.

Therefore; re-enchantment is not about abstractions or atmospheres; nor particular qualities of consciousness or thinking. 

Re-enchantment is concrete and specific - like the interpersonal relationships with those we love.  

Re-enchantment is about an expanded awareness-of and interaction-with many Beings of many kinds; and especially awareness of those entities that are (by mainstream modern ideas and ideologies) considered to be imaginary, not to exist, to be unalive/ dead, or not-to-be-Beings/ never-alive.  

Re-enchantment is piecemeal and quantitative; because expanded awareness could include so many contacts with so many Beings of so many kinds. 

Here is an incomplete list of the kind of contacts that constitute re-enchantment.:

Telepathy with living human beings.

So-called dead people - resurrected Men

Pre-mortal spirit humans

Animals, plants, and mineral-beings

Nature spirits

Fairies

Divine beings (including the Holy Ghost)

Planets and stars

The scope of "magical" contacts, is as wide as the nature of Beings. 

To simplify somewhat; these contacts are what is missing from the alienated, materialistic and mundane life of Modern men; and a person who lived in continuous contact with all these kinds of Beings (and other Beings) would be living the "enchanted" life.  

But more needs to be said, and that includes that the contacts be of the right quality; which is to say loving. 

The point is Not (as so often has been sought) to make contact with Beings in order to "use" them to seek power/ wealth/ sex/ status; nor to get information from them; nor to be healed by them; nor to get guidance from them...

If other Beings are regarded as means to an end, any relationship will be dis-enchanted. 

An enchanted relationship cannot be instrumental. 

The "point" of these contacts is the value of loving relationships in and of themselves.

The point of these contacts is expanded awareness.  

However, contacts are not static nor merely contemplative; because contacts are two-way, they are dynamic, developmental. 

Beings in a loving relationship therefore aspire to a active relationship. 

The interaction of Beings - their mutual influencing - is the context of creativity. 

Creation (for an individual) is actively participating in the "web" of his relationships - by this activity he "makes a difference" to divine creation. 

In sum: Contemplation is a passive participation in relationships on one side; however, Creativity is active participation on both sides. 

Re-enchanting the world is thus about restoring and gaining the fullest range of contacts. 

And, for the seeking of loving-contacts to be a meaningful activity in our actual lives (not to be regarded as trivial, nor explained-away in materialistic terms); we need to be able to explain to ourselves how this really happens, and why it is really significant in terms of eternal creation. 

All Souls day, Art and our connection with the (so-called) dead

Edited from The Forming of Destiny by Rudolf Steiner GA 157a - Lecture Berlin, 7th December, 1915

Man is confronted with the outer occurrences of nature, the external beings, and events of nature. These run their course and expire. But beyond all this man seeks something which really has nothing to do with the immediate necessities of the world. 

If nature and history were merely concerned with the satisfaction of human needs, life would become barren and desolate. Man creates here in physical existence something above and beyond the course of nature and necessity. We can think of the whole realm of Art as something that man creates here which is higher reality than the ordinary reality pertaining to nature and history. 

Just think what the world would miss if there were no Art, if Art did not add that which she can produce from her own sources to that which is self-existing. Art creates something which, one may say, need not of necessity exist. If she were not there, all the necessities of nature might still go on. One may suppose that even if no single copy of nature had been made and no artistic representation, life would still pursue its course, from the beginning to the end of the earth. 

We have in Art something extending beyond life. Think of all that Art has created in the world, and also of the progress of man through the world; there you have in a sense two parallel progressive processes: the necessities of nature and history, and the stream of Art which is inserted in them.

Just as Art, in a sense, brings as by enchantment a spiritual world into the world of physical reality, so another world conjures up into the world of those who have gone through the gates of death: these memories which fill our souls here. 

As far as the dead are concerned the world here might run its course without any memories living in the souls here, memories born of love and all our human relationships. But then the world of the dead would be to them as a world without Art would be to us — a world in which we could find nothing transcending ordinary reality. 

Here in the physical world a man must bring forth artistic creation out of his own soul, must contribute something out of his own being; similarly, to those 'dead' who are now in the spiritual world. What we in this world gain from Art, must be brought to the dead from their our world. If we had no memories of the dead, the life of the dead would be like our life would be without any Art.

Why has a value always been laid by human communities on the celebration of All Souls Day, and days for the dead? Because in the depths of man's subconsciousness there lives what may be called a dim knowledge of what takes place in the world by keeping alive the memory of the dead. 

When the receptive soul of the seer celebrates All Souls Day, or a Sunday devoted to the dead, or some similar day when many people come together full of the memories of their dead, he sees the dead participate in the ceremony. For the dead, such events are the same as when the living truly hear a great symphony. 

Comment: I find several points here very telling.

First the comparison between Art for the living; and the living-memories of the dead, for the dead. In other words, this is not a matter of survival, but of meaningfulness - but the comparison shows how important meaningfulness can be (because a life utterly without Art of any kind would be, for most Men, a very poor quality existence indeed.)

So this is a matter of what we, the living, can and should be doing for the dead.

The second point is to note the importance of some kind of day of the dead for traditional, agrarian societies - so that at least once a year the dead will be remembered by ritual celebrations and observances.

(This annual and communial event can, itself, be regarded as already a considerable retreat from the kind of taken-for-granted inclusion of the the dead in ordinary everyday living by every single family and clan, which is reported for most tribal societies.)

We moderns have left behind this kind of practice, but have not replaced it - except in a partial and ad hoc fashion (such as the observance of anniversaries of the death of prematurely dead - children and young people). The usual secular modern preference is for a short and intense grief; then (as soon as possible) to 'move-on' form the death of a loved-one - in particular it is regarded as pathetic if someone continues too long, or pays too much everyday attention, to the dead.

And if the bereaved indicate by word or action that they consider the deceased to be - in any active fashion - alive and involved in this world... well that is generally regarded as a form of mental illness. So, apparently, human culture has swung around something like 180 degrees - from the beloved dead being a part of life, to a situation when this behaviour would be regarded as stupid or sick. 

My conclusion is that Steiner was onto something important here, a very significant aspect of life that all modern people, including Christians, ought to reconsider - since even Christians (especially Protestants) have developed attitudes hostile to the idea of any kind of real and important communication, any genuine link between the living and the dead.

An attitude of ignoring the dead (or regarding the matter of relations between the dead and alive as not-significant) is certainly unnatural to humans - and that fact should give us pause; since what is unnatural (and so by a wide consensus of historical societies) is likely to be objectively wrong in some way.

My conclusion is that we are probably meant to consider the beloved dead as a part of our lives, to remember them, and to in some way remain in contact with them. That 'in some way' should be the focus of our investigative efforts.

Our yearning for a life of continual enchantment

The "romantic" search for an escape from the mundane nature of life in this-world - that is, for enchantment - takes many, many forms; and is pursued by different people in widely varying ways. 

A very incomplete list of the themes would include by religions/ spiritualties/ ideologies; through reading, TV and movies; by personal relationships such as intense friendships and sexual relationships; through the appreciation and making of crafts and arts; by meditative, paranormal and supernatural encounters and experiences; via drink and drugs and other derangements; by holidays and travel; pursuit of personal or formal education; from performing drama and music... 

And so on - fully considered, there are only a few people who are not implicitly pursuing the enchanted life. 

All of these methods and others are at-least somewhat effective and may lead to enchantment: for some people, to some extent, and temporarily...

Because with time and the changes in our-selves, all methods and pursuits always lose effect: 

The once-enchanted becomes mundane. 

In other words, in our  failure to become and to stay enchanted; we are here dealing with the ultimate fact of entropy. 

We are up-against the inescapability of entropy in this-world we all inhabit. 

We are up-against this primary creation where all changes, loss is inevitable, and every-thing ends in its death. 

But this-world and primary creation is not all; because (by Jesus Christ) we all have the the opportunity to undergo the transformation of resurrection after death through following Jesus, and move on to the Second Creation that is Heaven: where the state of enchantment is everlasting. 

It is the state of everlasting enchantment in Heaven that Jesus is describing in the Fourth Gospel - when he uses "metaphorical" examples such as water, food and meat - and compared the inevitabilities of their incomplete, temporary, entropic nature in this-life-now; with the eternally present and gratifying fulfilment in the life-to-come:

Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.

Our fathers did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat... but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven... I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever... I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst. 

Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you... 

When Jesus says that he brings "life", life-everlasting, eternal-life; people nowadays wrongly interpret this as meaning an offer of (merely) continuing mundane life: the (mere) persistence-forever of life-as-we-now-know-it...

Merely the continuance of this entropic life...

But Heaven comes after resurrection, and resurrection is a transformation by-which not only evil, but also entropy, is eliminated...

Or, to put matters positively; when all the denizens of Heaven have made a permanent commitment to live forever wholly by love of God and divine creation and their fellow resurrected humans (and other resurrected Beings)...

Then this is a situation both of eternal goodness, and also of everlasting enchantment. 

Just as we can now, in this mortal life, know the desire for a wholly good world (without evil); but we cannot attain it. And Christians know that full goodness can only be attained after death and by resurrection...

So also we can know that our yearning for a life of continual and complete enchantment (without entropic change, decline, annihilation) - while impossible to achieve here and now - is attainable.

And/but attainable after our death - and by resurrection. 

Three kinds of magic in stories

When magic occurs in stories it has various flavours: here are three of them. 

One is the low magic of "sword and sorcery" stories, and indeed most stories that feature magic - in which magic functions as a technology of power. This ranges widely across spells, and conjurations, summoning of powerful beings, seeing the future, controlling others etc. 

But this is not a very "magical" use of magic - indeed it reduces the magical to the mundane. 

Indeed, such stories are often cynical, reductionist, intended to dis-enchant. 

There are also stories in which magical elements function to indicate a hidden world - the magic enables perception of what would otherwise be imperceptible or hidden: this is the "occult revealing" function of magic. 

Such magic may reveal a world of spirits behind the material world, that "the dead" are alive and can be communicated with, that there are invisible manifestations (such as auras), that telepathy is real - and such like. 

The general impression is that there is more to life than commonly acknowledged, and this can impart an enchanted atmosphere.

The third kind of magic is pure enchantment - and this is (pretty much) how the magic of elves is depicted in The Lord of the Rings. 

There is very little use of magic as a technology - although there is some (the Mirror of Galadriel; and elven swords, cloaks, and ropes for instance). There is also the occult trope, in the hobbits often comment that the world turns-out to contains much more and strange phenomena and entities than the commonplace experiences of the Shire would suggest.   

But the main use of elf magic is related to an atmosphere of enchantment; a different quality of attitude, experience, motivation among elves; a feeling that is both joyous and sad, supremely good and perilous - here-and-now and yet backward looking across vast expanses of time.

 As implied - these uses of magic have somewhat different narrative functions in stories, and presumably different intent. When magic is used as a technology, there may be an element of intending to induce wishful thinking in the reader; but on the whole the magic is just a narrative device, among many. 

When magic is used to indicate occult realities, this may have the intent of indirectly encouraging the reader to take the same attitude to his ordinary life - the story may be encouraging the reader to assume that behind the mundane world is another reality... if only a different attitude were adopted to perceiving it, or particular abilities were available.   

The purpose of pure enchantment in a story is - I take it - religious - in the sense of a whole-world view.

The magic of enchantment in a story carries - to some degree - the implication that "reality" - our life, nature - really is a more wonder-full and inspiring thing than we generally assume. 

Stamp on the fire...

Excerpt from The Silver Chair (from the Chronicles of Narnia), by C.S. Lewis, 1953:


The Witch shook her head.

"I see," she said, (...) "You have seen lamps, and so you imagined a bigger and better lamp and called it the sun. You've seen cats, and now you want a bigger and better cat, and it's to be called a lion.

"Well, 'tis a pretty makebelieve, though, to say truth, it would suit you all better if you were younger. And look how you can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world.(...)"

Come, all of you. Put away these childish tricks. I have work for you all in the real world. There is no Narnia, no Overworld, no sky, no sun, no Aslan.

"And now, to bed all. And let us begin a wiser life tomorrow. But, first, to bed; to sleep; deep sleep, soft pillows, sleep without foolish dreams."

The Prince and the two children were standing with their heads hung down, their cheeks flushed, their eyes half closed; the strength all gone from them; the enchantment almost complete.

But Puddleglum, desperately gathering all his strength, walked over to the fire. Then he did a very brave thing.(...) With his bare foot he stamped on the fire, grinding a large part of it into ashes on the flat hearth.

And three things happened at once.

First, the sweet heavy smell grew very much less.(...) This instantly made everyone's brain far clearer. The Prince and the children held up their heads again and opened their eyes.

Secondly, the Witch, in a loud, terrible voice, utterly different from all the sweet tones she had been using up till now, called out, "What are you doing? Dare to touch my fire again, mud-filth, and I'll turn the blood to fire inside your veins."

Thirdly, the pain itself made Puddleglum's head for a moment perfectly clear and he knew exactly what he really thought. There is nothing like a good shock of pain for dissolving certain kinds of magic.

"One word, Ma'am," he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so.

"Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.

"Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one.

"And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a playworld which licks your real world hollow.

"That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.

"So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland.

"Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's a small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say."

http://www.mylibrarybook.com/books/677/C.S-Lewis/The-Silver-Chair-9.html

Comment:

Just to clarify: this wonderful passage is (also) an allegory of the human condition and the choice confronting modern Man: viz. the choice between the nihilism of secular materialism and Christianity.

To break the spell of the witch (the intoxicating distractions of the modern world) requires not a great intellectual nor a warrior but a simple and stubborn character like Puddleglum.

Acting on gut-instinct; by stamping on the fire (despite the short term pain) Puddleglum weakens the glamour, clears his head of induced delusions, and saves the world of Narnia (for a while).


Argument has no effect, the Narnians cannot escape the webs of illusion, until after the fire has been quenched.


But what is the fire?

Roughly speaking: the mass media.

So long as we are engaged with the mass media, so long will the delusion continue.


We hopelessly-entranced intellectuals must hope and pray for a Puddleglum!

The unexamined Christmas is not worth living...

Christmas is the great 'romantic' season of the year - at least potentially. It is the season when enchantment is nearest the surface, strongest, most likely to cast its spell across the mundane. 

And, of course, Christmas is a Christian celebration. Therefore it ought to be a fine time for the Romantic Christian...

That, at any rate, is the challenge. Because the 'traditional' romanticism of Christmas is generally immersive, un-conscious and passive: Christmas is too-often a time when we try to devise situations where we become overwhelmed by pleasure-inducing situations and stimuli; with an apparent intent to eliminate thinking and live only emotionally, instinctually - in a happy and comfortable present.

Yet this is only truly possible for young children - which is why childhood Christmases are regarded as the best, and why they cannot be recreated later*. 

To know oneself to be un-consciously happy is an impossible paradox; so to the limited extent someone succeeds in achieving immersive Christmas goals (for example with the use of alcohol) then (by definition) he also abolishes his own awareness and memory of having done so. 

To distort Socrates's phrase somewhat, the experience of most adults in these times is that "the unexamined Christmas is not worth living" - yet to 'examine' Christmas while living it is also to ruin it! 

Thus, at best, adult Christmases become little more than shallow self-indulgence; unless a further and different attitude can be achieved.  

What Socrates meant by the 'examined' life was not what the 2021 Romantic Christian means. For Socrates, living at the dawn of the era when the human soul became self-conscious, first able to detach itself from immersion-in the world; Socrates was asserting that it was Man's proper destiny to become more conscious - to step-back and examine life philosophically. 

Socrates could advise this without fear of inducing alienation and despair in his pupils, because in Ancient Greek times it was not possible for a Man to detach himself fully from participation in the world. In other words, Socrates was such a natural romantic (he was a man who experienced living in an alive world, populated by real gods, and conversing regularly with a 'daemon' who guided him) that he could advise Men to be less romantic without disenchantment becoming a problem.  

But we, in these times, find ourselves already detached from the world - the world has lost its sense of reality, seems relativistic, socially-constructed... For us, the mainstream, publicly enforced unromantic life is meaningless; and any 'purpose' applied to life is arbitrary and does not 'involve' us personally. 

Thus to advise a modern Man to step out-from life and 'analyze' it philosophically, is to make an already-bad situations worse! 

A modern Man who looked upon Christmas 'philosophically, or analytically, would miss all the good that the season had to offer. Certainly he would not be a Romantic Christian. 

So, the examined life in 2021 is unavoidable; but if it is to be a good life (i.e. a life of meaning, purpose and one that we personally have a relationship with the world), then 'examined' must have a different meaning from the usage by Socrates. 

That is, the modern era rules-out both unthinking 'pre-Socratic' immersion and 'Socratic' thinking detachment; and implies that we need a third and qualitatively different thing. 

Christmas therefore can be regarded as a test case, an exemplar of life for the Romantic Christian. We want a romantic, a magical Christmas - and we want this romanticism to be real, honest and personal; not a failed pretense at reverting to childhood. 

What should it mean to have an 'examined' Christmas, and an examined Life? What would it mean for any romanticism (of Christmas, or anything else) to be real - for adults, here-and-now? 

This needs to be conscious (not unconscious), actively-chosen (not passively-absorbed); it needs to be thought (else it cannot be willed) - but thought with a kind of inwardly-originating and inwardly-driven thinking (i.e. intuition, heart-thinking, direct-knowing) that also consciously knows itself to be real. 

In other words; for Christmas to be really-real - starting from a position of the actual alienation of modern adult man; we need to reconstruct our thinking on the basis of different and true metaphysical assumptions. 

Instead of having passively absorbed the incoherent assumptions of modernity that thought is an epiphenomenon of the brain with no direct connection with anything outside the body; we need to recognize the truth that our thinking is an essential participant in all possible knowledge of the world and of our-selves. 

There is, indeed, no reality without thinking; and no real reality unless this thinking is 'from' our real and divine selves - rather than merely being absorbed from the materialistic and demonically-dominated world of media, officialdom, law, 'science', etc. 

In the end we come around to agree with Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living; because for modern Man the unexamined life is... whatever incoherent value inversions and distortions have been put-into us by the Global Totalitarian Establishment.  

But if we examine our fundamental assumptions and discover coherent and true assumptions - we will reach the Christian reality of romanticism. 

And from this root, we can appreciate the worth of Christmas. 

I am Not suggesting that you start wishing people a "consciously-participative romantic Christmas" or anything similar! 

But we may be helped immediately and materially by awareness that the truths of Christmas are romantic truths; truths in which we are personally-involved, truths which we personally participate in creating. 

And these truths are really-real - even when not as the literalistic summaries forced-upon us by language and the need for brevity; even when, to the world, these truths are 'nothing more' than manipulative cultural fabrications. 

The really-real is wordless, direct knowing - and can be known only for-ourselves, from our-selves. 

The knowing-heart is wiser than (either or both) mind and instinct.  

*Parents of young children may - with the right attitude, and if they come to recognize what they are doing - be re-experiencing the joys of childhood Christmases; and in exactly the Romantic Christian way. For example; a parent can become the real spirit of the real Father Christmas; and also empathically identify with the child's immersive awareness of Father Christmas. But it is vital that this be regarded seriously, un-ironically, known as a deep truth of the real-situation. Mainstream modern cynicism about Christmas is fatal both to enchantment and insight; because cynical materialism is dishonest, hence un-real - thus demonic.   

A recipe for Christian revival - God the Father and Extra-Sensory Communication

Christian revival has proved impossible for many decades. This is understandable since Christianity alone is not enough to answer the most urgent spiritual needs of modern man.

Christianity is true, purposive, meaningful - but it is, in general, alienated.

The Christian typically lives in a world not much different from his atheist neighbours, in the sense that he communicates by the same channels - the difference is that in God he has someone significant to communcate with (creator of the universe, and also specifically concerned with him as an individual, and loving of him as a child).

The modern Christian metaphysics has become located within the Positivist, materialist, scientistic framework that assumes the only valid sources of information are those known to physics and apprehended through the senses. Physical communications.

(All other claimed communications are framed, a priori, as psychopathic, psychotic or due to feeble mindedness.)

In modernity, physical communications boil down to The Mass Media (mostly) - and this is intrinsically anti-Christian as a medium, as well as anti-Christian in nearly all of its specific content.

Living almost exclusively in this secular world of communications, regarding all other communications as either unreal or spiritually-hazardous - modern Christians usually feels just as alienated as everybody else.

(Even their view of Heaven seems alienated - hence unconvincing as a heaven.)

Modern Christians are typically trapped by the same subjective versus objective dichotomy as everybody else. Their world lacks magic, enchantment, awe and wonder - their surroundings are as cut-off, remote, impersonal, dull, mundane, dead, purposeless and insentient as the world is perceived by everyone else.

And indeed the surrounding world may be experienced as deader for Christians than it is for New Agers, Neopagans, and those 'seekers' explicitly involved in spiritual and occult movements.

Therefore Christianity on its own does not seem like an answer to the despair of modern man.

Conversion is blocked.

*

What Christianity requires is first acknowledgement, then emphasis, then training in habitual attention to the reality of extra-sensory communcations.  

There needs to be a Christian discourse which focuses on, then eventually regards as common sensical, a life of frequent and significant communications with the invisible spiritual world (that world imperceptible to the usual senses, undetectable by physical instruments); there needs to be an expectation and reality of daily miracles, prophecies, synchronicities, messages and revelations from the divine.

Christians need to acknowledge the significance - and become more aware of the high frequency - of non-physical, extra-sensory channels of communication in the likes of personal revelations from the divine, healing, visions, dreams, spiritual impressions, telepathy, ghosts, dowsing, divination, 'speaking in tongues', near death phenomena, and many kinds of 'paranormal' and magical experiences.

Such communications, which affect primarily 'the imagination', with or without detectable external sensory input, ought to become the daily discourse, the way of thinking, of Christians (as they used to be in ancient times) - in contrast with and detachment from the dead, detached, despairing discourse adopted from secularism.

Thus Christianity will be not only true as an objective, but alive as an experience. Conversion will solve not just the lack of purpose and meaning of modern life - but also the alienation and spiritual deadness which is even more powerfully and urgently experienced.

*

Such Christianity will not merely be true as secularism defines truth, but also true in a direct, personal and experiential way. the Christian will not just be aiming in a new direction, but also immersed in a new discourse.  

This is not easy, because it goes against the ingrained habits of thought, inculcated and sustained by mainstream culture.

A bad ingrained habit can only be defeated by replacement with a good habit. And such habits can be attained by individual agency - indeed all such social changes must begin with the summation of individual changes.

*

What is stopping this? Christian suspicion (or hatred) of magical, occult, paranormal things (sometimes, a belief in the end of revelations) - which have (chicken or egg?) also long been anti-Christian.

So we (mostly) have on the one side Christians offering the true goal of religion but no new communications (religion but not subjective transformation), and on the other side spiritually-seeking New Agers offering the appropriate communications but no transcendent goal (the goal of personal transformation gets reduced to merely 'therapy') - each is ineffectual against the tsunami of secularism; and each at war with the other. 

But insofar as Christianity has Incorporated extra-sensory communications - such types of Christianity tend to have been the growth areas during the modern era  - Charismatic denominations, Pentecostal Churches, Mormonism - it is clear that the combination of Christianity and non-physical communications retains the power to convert and inspire even in the most modern and alienated societies.


On the other hand, Christians are also among the most zealous and vigorous of the anti-extra-sensory communications groups - as the campaign against the Harry Potter novels demonstrated to the world. This will not change unless Christians understand that their effectiveness in gaining conversions is being blocked by what is, in fact, residual secularism.

A Christianity which does not address the necessity for re-connecting modern Man with the invisible spiritual world via direct non-physical communications is going to be a merely a distorted and incomplete semi-religion: true, but only minimally so.

Therefore I recoemmend a two-pronged evangelical strategy - neithere minimal Christianity, nor godless New Ageism - but both, presented together, mutally reinforcing, mutually interdependent, synergistic.

Both true and enchanting.

  

What is Romanticism? How should the relations of men and women be understood? The key to our destiny

Romanticism is the future, even after more than 200 years of its incompleteness, its failure; because Romanticism is the only movement of honest men's minds that is a third path: not the past of institutionally-based religious traditionalism; not the present of secular Leftist materialist individuality; but a future of individually-based religiousness.


Romanticism is based on the texture of life itself, and the discernment of the heart. It is the antithesis of the bureaucratic, office life and of the shallow, atomised, emotional manipulations of modern mass media and leisure; it also rejects the ideals of obedience, submission and group-conformity that traditionalism put at the centre of its moral systems.

Romanticism takes its measure from the texture of life and finds what it seeks in the best moments of actual life, and in a more sustained fashion in the romantic arts.

For example in what-it-is that makes the world of Lord of the Rings so deeply appealing to some modern minds, or (to go back to its beginning) the worlds of Blake, Wordsworth, Goethe, Novalis... It is that quality of enchantment, of being-enchanted - but being-enchanted not deceptively, not as a false day-dream; but the kind of enchantment that is a disenchantment, a clarification and revealing of beauty, truth and reality.

(A matter almost of dramatising life, and knowing it is dramatised, and living-in this drama.)


Romanticism is what makes us look around with such profound dissatisfaction at culture; at mass culture, official culture, high culture, at the culture of existing churches and their services; at the people who speak out in the public realms and what they say and - even more - how they say it. They are all talking heads or dancing puppets, they are all disengaged and lost, they are never serious about the realities of mortal life!

What we need, and need is the word for it; is the element represented by elves in Lord of the Rings - indeed we need that and more. But we do need a sense of life as continuing creation, meaning and purpose and of us each as engaged in this living, conscious activity. We need to be within this aliveness and consciousness - and at the same time to know that we are within it - so we may rest and work in this state without evasion or blindness: the maximum of consciousness.

Enchantment, magic - these are terms we use. Children - young children - experience life this way; but they are inside the stream of life, and hardly conscious of themselves; whereas we are all overwhelming conscious of our-selves except when we (our selves) deliberately self-obliterate with the mass media, with drugs, with numbing frenzy or despair.


Only God can produce and sustain the enchantment we seek - there is no secular magic: it cannot even be simulated.

...Think of the most wonderful of godless utopias: William Morris's News From Nowhere (1890) - a great creative genius pulls-out the stops to depict the best world he can imagine, and it is utterly dead! So much more the ideal societies of now - those vile politically-correct utopias of micro-managed abstract symbolism, made by what people 'ought' to enjoy but actually can't; and yet enjoyment is their only bottom-line. Utopias of guilt and despair made worse by faked morality and manufactured appreciation - like the depicted worlds of propaganda and public relations emanating from committees of the managerial drones and psychopaths who run modern institutions, here and now...

Enchantment comes only from a group that is made of individuals affectively-affiliated - that is from families and marriages, and from real friendships (which are precious but exceedingly rare, especially nowadays; modern friendships are nearly-all mutual emotional exploitation and tactical alliances). All this needs a totally different conception than exists of what life is about, and how life needs to be arranged: around-what life needs to be arranged.

At present we can barely even speak about this - especially not in the public arena. And of course nobody can be persuaded - the need to be persuaded and resistance to persuasion are the depth of the problem and why it has resisted solution for 200-plus years...

No that is wrong, it is not 'the problem' but we ourselves who have been and are resisting solution for 200-plus years; trapped by our fear of awareness, our desire for pleasure, our lust for power; trapped by the forces of darkness which offer short term gratifications of many kinds, and promise protection from horror and despair, and the misery of those we most resent. We are being willingly led by the nose into our doom - and that is why we are damned: I mean the willingness, expressed by the stubborn, deep-rooted resistance to embarking on the proper life we used-to know we ought-to be doing.

If we are experts in anything, it is in self-blinding; failing to see the obvious - stridently-denying the almost-overwhelming in our-selves; which is the radical, profound, incurable unsatisfactoriness of present and past living - and the different and only-yet-imagined nature of that which we are destined to strive-for.


As a concrete example - that vital subject of the relations between men and women. 

How can anybody (I mean from our hearts, here and now) be happy with how this matter has been approached; how it has been enforced at any point in history up to the present, and with the public ideas proposed for the future?

The current state of sexual politics is evil; but the past state was also wrong, distorted, crudely-simplistic... And the problem was the nature of past past societies in which the individual was forced to conform to group ideals - it was the group which was dominant; and since each human is unique, every possible, every imaginable group ideal represents a harsh distortion and a mental tyranny.

The only future our hearts endorse is one in which men and women are complementary individuals; that is both known to be different and complementary (the two complements making one) and individuals (each different from every other in the past, present and the future).

(If our deepest understanding of the relationship between a man and a woman can be captured in a rule, law, bureacratic regulation; then we know for sure it is wrong. I mean we - each of us - know for sure. In our hearts we know it. And don't tell me that we 'have to' have this, that or some-other principle - I am not interested in expediency, indeed expediency is precisely what is paralysing our thought. We must first think - indeed imagine, fully - with absolute clarity, about what should-be; expediency is entirely a different matter.)

This is a situation that cannot be captured, and ought not be controlled, by any form of groupish social organisation, any law or generalisation. It requires an entirely different basic understanding, a different logic.

And that goes back to the beginnings of Romanticism. The necessary logic was defined, albeit abstractly and in a way that is very difficult to understand, by Coleridge; in the concept of polarity or polar logic. But the answer was given, and we can make it clearer and simpler now that the pioneering and heavy-lifting has been done by a genius.


Let that be a guide... Until we have each reached a position from-which we can explain how the relations of men and women can be conceptualised such as to satisfy the deepest desires of our hearts - until such a time, we shall remain lost and despairing, and doomed to self-damnation.

Residual spontaneous enchantment that can be elicited by religion, and its dwindling

One conceptualization (derived from Barfield and Steiner) that I have found helpful; is that modern Man is emerging from a situation in which we had a significant (and powerful) residuum of spontaneous enchantment, by which our experience was of participation in the world around us - and when this spontaneous tendency lay dormant until triggered by symbols, rituals, and various "spiritual systems". 

This was the situation of Men in Classical and Medieval times - the times when institutional and formal religions emerged and dominated spiritual life.

But since around the advent of modernity - perhaps starting some 5000 years ago, but becoming dominant something like 2000 years ago in the Industrial Revolution era; we have been incrementally coming-into a situation when the spiritual systems with their symbols, rituals, texts etc are no longer able to evoke that latent enchantment (hence mass atheism) - or only weakly so (hence the feebleness of current religions - see 2020 for confirmation of this feebleness). 

Because formal religions and spiritual systems really did work in the past; then it is usually assumed that they are the only and proper way of evoking enchantment here-and-now...

And then it turns out that they actually don't release our latent capacity for enchantment because that latent capacity to become enchanted by symbol and ritual has dwindled, often to the point of disappearance... 

And Here We Are. 

The usual inferences are:

1. Give up on religion because it doesn't work. 

2. Hold fast to religion, even-though it doesn't work. 

But my inference is that religion - no matter how effective it really was at eliciting the experience of enchantment, in some places and times - was itself only ever a spiritual system, and religion never-was the spirit itself. 

Our task is to go behind religion and seek the spirit directly - with the expectation that strong, convincing, and motivating enchantment - shall reliably arise from such an encounter.

And this requires faith that personal seeking of direct spiritual experience is indeed what God wants from each of us, here-and-now. 

 

Review of Elidor by Alan Garner (1965)

The cover of my teenage copy of Elidor

I have always been disappointed by Alan Garner's Elidor (1965); coming as it does between two of my very favourite children's fantasy books The Moon of Gomrath (1963) and The Owl Service (1967). Indeed, I simply did not enjoy Elidor when first I read it (aged 14 0r 15), or at subsequent attempts. 

Yet, Elidor has been the most well-known of Garner's four children's fantasies; being often taught in schools, and leading to a BBC TV series. So I thought I would give the book another try - this time in the audio version read by Jonathan Keeble. 

I can see why I was not much taken by the book, since it is structured more like a thriller than a fantasy. The fantasy elements are swamped by the detailed, realistic descriptions of physical and social life in Manchester and its suburbs - which are often grimy; replete with arguments, angst and stresses; and containing implied 'social commentary' (which are very likely the exact reasons why British school teachers appreciated this book above Garner's true fantasies).  

Furthermore the book starts slowly and with a miserable tone. Following a deal of childish bickering, the fantasy land of Elidor is briefly glimpsed and seems almost-wholly unpleasant and hazardous. Malbron - the only Elidorian man the children talk-with - is a callous and unsympathetic character, and we know hardly anything about him - or indeed Elidor. 

The early chapters set up the main interest of the book which is that four siblings have been given (against their will) the task of guarding four treasures of Elidor, needed to stop the land being destroyed. 

However; I felt that I did not know enough about Malebron to be confident that he was honest, or to care whether Elidor was a place worth saving at great risk to the children. 

The siblings return to modern Manchester with the treasures disguised as modern objects - and the best part of the book is the exciting middle section during which the children gradually realize that the treasures are hazardous (giving-off a strong and disruptive electromagnetic field).

The treasures are also attracting sinister warriors from Elidor - who are repeatedly trying to break-through to the modern world, and getting closer and closer... 

After the slow pace and detailed descriptions of the main book; the ending is abrupt, feels incomplete, and is emotionally unsatisfying. 

Furthermore - it is so complete a plot re-set, as to leave the children in their modern world without any record or residue of their experiences: apparently the modern world is completely unchanged by its period communication with Elidor. 

So, the retrospective reframing of the Elidor narrative - looking back from its ending - is that its only purpose was to save a land we barely know; and that the process has been futile from a modern perspective.

Everything that happened 'might as well' have been a dream or a delusion (as some of the siblings tend to believe, about halfway through the story)...

And this was, unfortunately, Garner's own retrospective reframing (in Boneland some half century later) of his first two novels (Weirdstone of Brinsigamen and Moon of Gomrath) - as nothing more than dream-delusions of one of the child protagonists. As I remarked in my review - this is anti-fantasy, being subversive of fantasy - as evidenced by its rejection of eucatastrophe. 

The actual ending of Elidor comes across as cynical, pretentious, and indeed aggressive. 

This is very interesting to me in contrast with Garner's previous Moon of Gomrath; which ends with the liberation of the Old Magic into the modern world, and the implication that things will never be the same again - that, indeed, the modern world is just about to be transformed (for the better, it is implied) by a resurgence of enchantment and a renewed contact between Man, nature and the spiritual powers. 

My best guess would be that Garner underwent some kind of profound disillusionment between the writing of Gomrath and Elidor - which left him increasingly bitter and resentful (which is how he generally strikes me, as a person). 

But this is speculation; what is clear from the texts is that Garner lost his youthful optimism and decided to explore and evoke downbeat pessimism and despair in his later fiction, lectures and essays. 

My evaluation of Elidor is that overall it fails structurally as a novel and as a fantasy; and fails to establish credible characters and motivations in relation to Elidor. On the plus side, it is genuinely tense and exciting through the middle section and until near the end - which section, after all, includes most of the book.  

 

Magical places, magical people?

Magic is primarily perspectival - in that if you can't see it, you won't see it. Many people go through life and almost-never notice magic.

But even if or when you can perceive magic, it is not everywhere. Young children, tribespeople, all discriminate - they recognise some places and people as magic, and others not.

There is no magic in bureaucracy (in a spiritual sense, this is the main point about bureaucracy); and that is why there is less and less magic in the world.

As the world is integrated into The System - so magic is suppressed and destroyed, so attention is focused on the world regarded as dead things to be manipulated. So fewer and fewer places are magical - not in the solid and dependable ways that some places used to be magical. 

And this applies to people, too. In my life there have never been many magical people in any environment, they were always a small minority; but now they are fewer, and probably for the same reason that there are fewer magical places. People who were magic, or would have been, are now substantially assimilated into The System (by the extension of mass and social media, by omni-surveillance and micro-management); and they are System-assimilated by their own choice.

If this was something that people resisted, seriously by deep conviction - their magic would up-well from the deep source of the true self...

But people do not resist, and on the contrary they have identified-with The System at a deep motivational level, at the level of primary assumptions and convictions; and thereby have joined-in with crushing their own source of magic. Hence the focus upon appearances, impressions, and manipulation of perceptions - the modern Self is become merely a Public Relations executive for the Modern Man.

Lacking the help of magical places, people, institutions... we are, as usual, thrown-back on our own resources; and must find for ourselves (from ourselves) much that used to be absorbed passively from outside.

If we value a magical world; we ourselves must become more than magic detectors; more than mobile connoisseurs of enchantment -- we must become, if only for our-selves, geniuses of magical creativity.   
  

Why can't our life have a "magical" or transcendent quality at all times?

It seems like, even when life is going well, we cannot experience it at the best and highest level "on demand". 

We sometimes experience the "romance" of this-life, a magical moment, or even magical hours and days; but this state does not become continuous - nor can we have this magic whenever we want it, nor even when we may feel we most need it. 

There are always mundane periods, and these may be normal; there is of course suffering, illness, ageing, and the prospect of death all around and about. But even when we are not immediately affected by such things, life may be experienced as mundane; that is dull, everyday, trivial, niggling... just stuff that happens. 

And sometimes, oft-times, we cannot snap ourselves out of this, nor can we do anything that genuinely works in attaining that magical and romantic state we may desire or even crave. 

The question is whether this inability of ours is something that might in principle be overcome. The question is whether or not it is theoretically possible that "life at its best" could become everyday life? Whether and/or when we feel most trapped in everyday life, or most in need of elevation and enchantment - we could learn how to rise from that dull situation to live life at its best, again?

I think we tend to go one way or another, and end-up claiming something that is untrue or impossible. 

Mainstream secular materialism has it that this life is really mundane; and that the romantic and magical is illusory, a temporary subjective aberration merely - and this is also the view of "oneness" spiritualties such as Western Buddhism. 

On the other side are claims that the romantic, magical, enchanted life of "higher consciousness" can (and should) become either permanent, or else available on demand - perhaps by some kind of spiritual self-improvement, or by practice of some kind of technique, method, skill - or maybe by adoption of a right attitude. 

But the basic idea is that this-life in this-world could and should become a paradise. 

For me, neither of these one-sided extremes are valid. It is an evil form of despair to assume that the bad things in life are real and the good experiences are illusory. Yet, there is nothing solid (just wishful thinking and unsubstantiated claims and rumours) to indicate that it is possible to live a magical life at all times or on demand - nobody ever seems to have done it. 

Christianity is the only form of understanding that I know, which takes both sides into account - both the reality of the romantic, and the inevitability of the mundane; and which goes beyond them.

Jesus Christ knew that paradise is real but temporary, and never available "on demand" because of the nature of this life and world (which is both entropic and evil); therefore the only really-real and actually possible paradise is by resurrection to life in Heaven, which lies outside this world, beyond our "biological" death. (And which, of its nature, can only occur by personal choice.) 

Only Heaven is "romantic" on-demand and eternally; and that only because Heaven has left-behind both death (entropic change) and evil, which are intrinsic aspects of this-world. 

It is exactly because Heaven on earth is real, that Jesus was able to create Heaven and make it possible for us to want and choose Heaven; and it is exactly because we cannot have a permanent or on-demand Heaven in mortal life and on this earth, that Jesus enabled resurrection and created the sustained and everlasting romantic-reality of Heaven.