Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

by Katherine May

Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory. It relies on small doses of awe, almost homeopathic: those quiet traces of fascination that are found only when we look for them. It is the sense that we are joined together in one continuous thread of existence with the elements constituting this earth, and that there is a potency trapped in this

interconnection, a tingle on the border of our perception. It is the forgotten seam in our geology, the elusive particle that binds our unstable matter: the ability to sense magic in the everyday, to channel it through our minds and bodies, to be sustained by it.

Mircea Eliade coined the term hierophany to describe the way that the divine reveals itself to us, transforming the objects through which it

If I carry on walking, eventually that fades, too. Perhaps it is low blood sugar, or perhaps the popcorn brain burns itself out eventually, but at some point I reach a very different state of mind, a place beyond words in which I feel quiet and empty. This is my favourite phase of all, an open space in which I am nothing for a while, just an existence with moving parts and a map in my hand, whose feet know the route and do not need my interference. Nothing happens here, or so it seems. But in its aftermath, I find my most profound insights, whole shifts in the meanings and understandings that underpin who I am. In this state, I am an open door.

saeculum,

This can be understood as living memory, the extent of contact we have with each passing era. “Every event has its saeculum,” says Solnit, “and then its sunset.”

hierophanies,

But the idea of taking off my shoes while sitting still for half an hour was not terribly appealing. Sometimes I managed it in thick socks, but even then my feet were like blocks of ice by the end of the session. As the months warmed up, I got used to the idea. It was such a small demand, a gesture that marked a shift in my day. It seemed like the least I could do. Shoes are the business of the outside world, part of the artifice we all adopt when we close the front door behind us. They are more than a protection from pebbles and dirt and broken glass. You take off your shoes when you come home. You do it to keep the floors clean, but also to show how you trust this space to treat you kindly. You do it to spread your toes. When you take off your shoes, you show a little of your interior, your holey socks and your rough heels. You remove your worldly effects in deference to the comfort of the house. You bring this same deference—this same disclosure of imperfection—when you meditate.

somatic,

Slowly and slyly it had crept into me, this conviction of . . . what? That something is there, something vast and wise and beautiful that pervades all of life. Something that is present, attentive, behind the everyday. A frequency of consciousness at the low end of the dial, amid the static. A stratum of experience waiting to be uncovered. It is the “oceanic feeling” that puzzled Freud, “a feeling of something limitless, unbounded” that existed in some people, but not in the father of psychoanalysis. Freud thought it was likely to be a function of the evolved mind, certainly not a perception of the numinous. I share his discomfort, but I can’t agree. I have been trying to suppress the feeling for years. I kept telling myself that I was seeking a humanistic delight in the natural world, but that never felt quite like the truth. Slowly it expanded to become an uprising in me: fervent, persistent, seditious. It massed outside my walls, shouting and waving banners. I couldn’t put it down.

In this moment, it seems to me that talking to God does not require faith, but practice. It is a doing rather than a believing, an act of devotion reciprocated in the same way it is made: mutely, through the hands and the feet, the myriad attentions of the body.

I’m also wary of stealing from traditions that don’t speak to my own time and place, bending them out of shape and only partially understanding them. I’ve noticed how often we do that, cherry-picking the comforting parts of complex religious traditions—usually the aspects that tell us everything’s okay—and ignoring the counterbalancing obligations, particularly those that involve careful introspection.

behaviour. I often see internet memes that tell us we are just as we are meant to be, God-made, and that leaves me deeply uneasy. I may not have a divine voice whispering in my ear to render it all clear, but I’m fairly certain that God—however you conceive of them—didn’t plan for any of us to be racist.

I do not swim to travel through the water, to merely accumulate metres and miles. I swim to enter into the midst of something that joins me to everything, everywhere, in all time.

It would take several decades—and the slow unfolding of a thirty-three-year cycle—for astronomers to understand the true nature of the Leonid meteor showers that happen each November. But whether this starfall brought about a sudden awareness of the grand scale of the universe, an urgent call to the rigorous pursuit of the scientific method, or a renewed respect for the wrathful might of God, here was enchantment, falling like rain on expectant rooftops, demanding attention and making the humans below wonder about the relatedness of all things, the strange machinations of the universe.

We think we’ve advanced since then, but instead we’ve jettisoned our capacity to accommodate the complex interplay of symbolic and rational thought, the scientific and the enchanted.

“My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars.”

In medieval philosophy, the earth was made of four elements—earth, water, fire, and air—but the vast universe beyond it was composed of a different substance entirely. This was aether, a particularly refined material that transcended the states we recognise. Known as the quintessence, it was neither hot nor cold, neither wet nor dry, and was capable of changing its density. It was the stuff

Hierophany—that revelation of the sacred—is something that we bring to everyday things, rather than something that is given to us.