Whatever has to do with thought, purpose, human meanings, has to be in the mind, rather than in the world. We make a sharp distinction between inner and outer, what is in the “mind” and what is out there in the world. But one thing that seems clear is that the whole situation of the self in experience is subtly but importantly different in these worlds and in ours. We have great trouble getting our minds around this, and we rapidly reach for intra-psychic explanations, in terms of delusions, projections, and the like. But the man accompanying her was just something that happened to her, a fact of her world. In Celestine’s world, perhaps the identification of the man with this spirit might be called a “belief,” in that it came after the experience in an attempt to explain what it was all about. He turned out to be the Akan spirit Sowlui, and Celestine was pressed into his service. So it must have been for the Celestine, in Birgit Meyer’s Translating the Devil, who “walked home from Aventile with her mother, accompanied by a stranger dressed in a white northern gown.” When asked afterwards, her mother denied having seen the man. It is clear that for our forbears, and many people in the world today who live in a similar religious world, the presence of spirits, and of different forms of possession, is no more a matter of (optional, voluntarily embraced) belief than is for me the presence of this computer and its keyboard at the tips of my fingers. So we tend to think of our differences from our remote forbears in terms of different beliefs, whereas there is something much more puzzling involved here.
And “secular” people have inherited this emphasis, and often propound an “ethics of belief,” where it can be seen as a sin against science or epistemic decency to believe in God. Latin Christendom has tended more and more to privilege belief, as against unthinking practice. Indeed, “enchantment” is something that we have special trouble understanding. It is also one which draws on an ontology that is highly undetermined, and must remain so. The experience it evokes is more fragile, often evanescent, subject to doubt.
Think of Novalis’s “magic realism ” think of the depiction of the Newtonian universe as a dead one, shorn of the life it used to have (as in Schiller’s “ The Gods of Greece“).īut it is clear that the poetry of Wordsworth, or of Novalis, or that of Rilke, can’t come close to the original experience of porous selves. In a sense, the Romantic movement can be seen as engaged in such a project. And there have been frequent attempts to “re-enchant” the world, or at least admonitions and invitations to do so. The process of disenchantment, involving a change in us, can be seen as a loss of a certain sensibility that is really an impoverishment (as against simply the shedding of irrational feelings). The category “magic” was constituted through this rejection, and this distinction was then handed on to post-Enlightenment anthropology, as with Frazer’s distinction between “magic” and “religion.” But in the more exigent modes of Reform, the distinction between white and black magic tended to disappear, and all independent recourse to forces independent of God was seen as culpable. The worst examples were things like saying a black mass for the dead to kill off your enemy or using the host as a love charm. Carried out first under Reforming Christian auspices, the condemned practices all involved using spiritual force against or at least independently of our relation to God. In a sense, moderns constructed their own concept of magic from and through the process of disenchantment. One has lost a way in which people used to experience the world.ĭisenchantment in my use (and partly in Weber’s) really translates Weber’s term “Entzauberung,” where the key kernel concept is “Zauber,” magic. Looked at my way, the process of disenchantment involves a change in sensibility one is open to different things. With the subtraction story, there can be no epistemic loss involved in the transition we have just shucked off some false beliefs, some fears of imagined objects. This is not a mere “subtraction” story, for it thinks not only of loss but of remaking. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world.