Enchantment: Reawakening Wonder in an Exhausted Age

by Katherine May

If there were a spirit of this age, it would look a lot like fear.

That is what I am searching for: the chance to merge into the wild drift of the world,

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, really. It’s nothing, but it’s also all-encompassing. I feel strangely empty, devoid of thought and energy. I am not sure where my days go, but they go. Every single thing I must do – any hint of a demand – grinds against me. I resent it all. I want to be left, quietly, alone.

Groups of upright stones scatter the British Isles and Brittany, often arranged in circles or lines. Known as menhirs, they were chiselled in the Neolithic period, between four and seven thousand years ago, and their exact purpose is lost to the ages.

How do we worship now? How do we get past the blunt knowing of our disenchanted age and tap back into the magic that we used to perceive everywhere?

the ones in Virginia Woolf’s pockets as she waded into the River Ouse,

Imagine moving through a place where each landmark unpacks its own mythology, grand stories unfolding around you as you go about your daily business, transcendence happening in real time.

Childhood used to have dirt under its fingernails. Now it has hand sanitiser.

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.

The problem is walking through life as a soft being whose skin is permeable. The problem is that you will need to take care of yourself if you live that way. The other problem is that wounds can heal and cracks can fill in. And that life, quite often, is too painful already. Sometimes there is nothing we can do but close up again, draw in, protect ourselves. Mostly we don’t even notice as this happens.

I’m ashamed now that I didn’t see it: the patriarchal way that we frame spiritual development, the way that men get enlightenment and women get to look after them while they do so, all the while being mocked for the compromised practices they create in the scraps of time that remain.

groyne,

The Black Prince Well

I often think that ritual gives us something to do with our hands rather than our heads, performing a set of actions that root us into our being again. Ritual is different from worship: a matter of instinct rather than construction, a gesture that lets us weave significance in the moment. It is so undemanding, so simple, almost passive. You follow the steps, and they take you down to find what you need.

I just need to make contact with a place that holds a residue of hierophany, to feel the connection between myself and the many other lost souls who have come here, not knowing quite what to say. Rather than to say any prayer, I needed to take care of this place, to make a gesture towards an invisible continuity of yearning. The mysteries it holds are not revelations or miracles, but the flow of unknowing across the centuries, the connection of wanting to understand.

That only makes the imperative greater. We have a duty to witness the broad spectrum of humanity, rather than to defend our own corner of it.

In the early hours of 13 November 1833, those who were awake shared an extraordinary sight. According to the New York Evening Post, it seemed that ‘the cape of heaven was raining down a shower of fire’ over the eastern states of America.

Is that how nostalgia is made: a yearning for somewhere you no longer want to be, but which seems, in an instant, perfect? Or perhaps perfectible is a better word, a place that you could restore to the glories you still see in it, if only it would let you.

‘Have you read them all?’ ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘No use just owning them.’

What I have instead is two issues of Story Teller, a children’s magazine with fairy tales that are read aloud on an accompanying tape. It has full-colour illustrations, and celebrity narrators whose status is entirely lost on me. This does not stop it from being my heart’s desire. It seems to me that everyone else has the whole set, including the binders and the plastic suitcase for the tapes,

Harriet Powers, the folk artist who depicted the meteor shower on a quilt that now forms part of the Smithsonian’s collection. ‘God’s hand staid the stars.’

Flying feels like an intermission in the real business of living.

These acoustic mirrors were positioned all over the Kent coast in the late 1920s, offering an early warning system for incoming planes. The two huge dishes at Dungeness – twenty and thirty feet respectively – could catch and concentrate the sound waves emitted by incoming aircraft, which were then relayed back through a microphone to an operator. A third sound mirror, a two-hundred-foot curved wall, was built shortly after.

Prospect Cottage, the black tarred shack where Derek Jarman retreated in his final years.

Sublime landscapes are liminal spaces that divorce us from the comfortable everyday and take us to the edge of understanding.

I learned that there is a place in Yorkshire that has gained a reputation for Brocken spectres. On the boundary between Burley Moor and Ilkley Moor, there is apparently the perfect spot: a fog gathers on cold mornings, and a low sun can send your silhouette slanting across it.

The natural world never stops giving you detail to observe.

I don’t have to believe in God as a person. I can believe in this instead: the entire mesh of existence binding us together in ways we perceive only if we listen. Each of us is a particle of this greater entity. Each one of us contains it all.

I think I’m beginning to understand that the quest is the point. Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things; the sublime is not hiding in distant landscapes. The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It is transformed by our deliberate attention. It becomes valuable when we value it. It becomes meaningful when we invest it with meaning. The magic is of our own conjuring. Hierophany – that revelation of the sacred – is something that we bring to everyday things, rather than something that is given to us.