… the difficulty in recording this state is this, that it is so rare an experience that no set language to express it is in existence. A shadow of its raptures and ecstasies is found in the highest poetry; there are phrases in ancient books telling of the Celtic saints that dimly hint at it; some of the old Italian masters of painting had known it, for the light of it shines in their skies and about the battlements of their cities that are founded on magic hills. But these are but broken hints.
-Arthur Machen, The Great Return
Despite the best efforts of society and those in charge to depress us, January still retains a great deal of magic—which is only fitting, given that the Twelve Days last until the Epiphany, and Tolkien’s birthday sits in the middle of them on January 3. Indeed, traditionally the season lasts until Candlemas Eve on February 1. Moreover, there are quite a few feasts of varying types to be celebrated during this time. In late January, Scotsmen around the world celebrate Burns Night, honouring their national bard. Following a more or less set format, this observance features bagpipes, toasts, candles, and, of course, whiskey, to say nothing of haggis, the ‘chieftain of the pudding race.’ Across France, and in select places in Belgium, Italy, and elsewhere, there shall be Requiem Masses for Louis XVI around the anniversary of his murder on January 21. Aachen and Frankfurt give themselves up to celebrating—liturgically and otherwise—the great Emperor, Charlemagne, around his feast day on January 28, and two days later, Charles I of England, Scotland, and Ireland sees the anniversary of his murder marked in various parts of the Anglosphere. Not least of these is his statue at Trafalgar Square, close to where he was murdered at Whitehall. In all of these observances, an ancient magic seems to live again.
Since the 1960s at least, pundits have written about the ‘disenchantment’ of modern life, by which they mean its reduction to dull, machine-like ‘modernity.’ Back then, books like Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter-Culture and Charles Reich’s The Greening of America spoke of the youth movements of that time as efforts in breaking a soulless technocracy, and returning the country or the planet to some fancied state of bliss. This was the era when Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings became popular. Although bemused by much of what the young of that era did, the Professor also pointed out “the behavior of modern youth, part of which is inspired by admirable motives such as anti-regimentation, and anti-drabness, a sort of lurking romantic longing for ‘cavaliers’, and is not necessarily allied to the drugs or the cults of faineance and filth.” Alongside such stirrings came such organisations as Cambridge’s Christmas Revels, the Renaissance Faires, and the Society for Creative Anachronism. But enjoyable as such activities may be for the participants, they don’t do much for the rest of us and—as with the Christmas season—they pass by eventually.
Moreover, recognition of this issue far predates the 1960s. Max Weber was the first to become very excited about the concept. Much of Carl Jung’s work is animated by a desire to ‘resacralise’ reality through the use of symbols. Guenon and the Perennialists go on and on about the same thing. But, to be sure, the issue predates all of them. It might well be said to date back to the Romantic revolt against the ideals of the Enlightenment, which resulted in the horrors of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. That having been said, as the 19th century wore on with the growth of Scientism and Social Darwinism, there were any number of imaginative responses, ranging from the Occult Revival to the birth of fantasy literature. Obviously, none of these reactions had worked by the dawn of the 21st century.
Yet the ongoing call for some kind of “re-enchantment” has hit something of a crescendo. During the depths of the COVID lockdown, in The Los Angeles Review of Books of 7 September 2020, Union University English Professor Jason Crawford penned a very perceptive piece titled “The Trouble with Re-Enchantment.” He opened it with the question, “HAVE YOU HEARD the good news? The re-enchantment of the world is at hand.” He then goes on to survey the flood of books on the topic:
The first two decades of this new millennium have seen the publication of Bernard Stiegler’s The Re-Enchantment of the World, Gordon Graham’s The Re-enchantment of the World, Silvia Federici’s Re-enchanting the World, and Joshua Landy and Michael Saler’s The Re-Enchantment of the World. There’s George Levine’s Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World and James K. A. Smith’s After Modernity?: Secularity, Globalization, and the Re-Enchantment of the World. And there’s much more, because you can re-enchant much more than just the world. Other book titles from the past two decades or so include The Reenchantment of Art, The Re-Enchantment of Nature, The Re-Enchantment of Morality, The Re-Enchantment of Political Science, The Reenchantment of Nineteenth Century Fiction, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life. David Morgan and James Elkins’s essay collection about religion in contemporary art is called simply, Re-Enchantment. So is Jeffery Paine’s book about Tibetan Buddhism in the West. You get the idea. For contemporary readers, re-enchantment speaks. Presumably it sells. Just possibly it’s happening, or is about to happen, or ought to happen.
It is a fascinating article, and deserves to be read in its entirety. But Crawford makes two very important points. The first is that the various sorts of ‘re-enchantment’ on offer tend to be varying kinds of illusions, intended to veil the unpleasant realities of our situation, while allowing us to continue to embrace whatever elements we like. In a word, internal withdrawal or exile is what is on offer there, rather than any real improvement in the external world.
There is a good reason why these delusional strategies are popular: to a greater or lesser degree, for all of its current pains, the system we live under has bought us all off. On a personal level, we may do almost anything we choose, against the backdrop of a society that works hard and constantly to remove any notion of personal morality—especially as regards sexuality. Of course, the small voice of conscience cannot be stilled, save to outrage it further, whether publicly or in our own hearts; but oh, how we try, abetted by those who misrule us. In return for this, and also for a measly amount of security, we are willing to take anything—as the COVID lockdown showed so clearly. Indeed, authentic re-enchantment would come with a huge price, and one that—at this stage, in any case—most of us are not willing to pay.
The second point that Crawford makes is that the war against Enchantment predates the Enlightenment. Indeed, he traces it back to the propaganda against Catholicism that arose during the Protestant Revolt. Here is where we come to the root of the matter. For, in varying ways and degrees, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Cranmer, and the rest were revolting against an entire World View—one in which the God Who made Heaven and Earth descended daily upon all the altars of Christendom, and quite literally applied His Precious Blood to those who would escape the Fall of Man via the Waters of Baptism. From those central miracles stemmed innumerable others: Bleeding Hosts, apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Angels, and the Saints, and much else besides.
From this realm, grace descended upon the Emperors and Kings via their anointing and crowning by the same ecclesiastical figures who mediated the Sacraments as part of their God-given authority. Such folk were mixed figures, at once partaking of lay and clerical status, as their various ceremonial roles revealed. These, in turn, saw justice as something given from above to which we on earth must attempt to submit ourselves.
Under them were their subjects—churchmen and knights, artisans and peasants—who in their various roles kept the whole of society moving. Each province and each town had its own laws and its own customs, which the sovereign had sworn to keep inviolate before God and the Church when he was crowned. Crime there was, and oppression, as there must always be in this fallen world of sin and shadow. But for a while, society aspired toward something better—something beyond reach in this life, but nevertheless worth reaching up and out for.
The year was measured out according to the Church’s feasts and fasts, each with their own customs—some universal, many more varying from place to place. Beyond the fields and forests lay the outriders of Faerie, and unanswerable realities and popular imagination gave rise to an amazing and sometimes bizarre folklore. Here was the magic of song and story, an added layer of enchantment upon a world that was already very much a matter of wonder.
This was the Enchantment upon which the rebels of the 16th century made war, and at which every upheaval since has chipped away—without, even now, completely effacing it. Traditional Liturgy continues to tug at the hearts of the Faithful, despite the best efforts of Church hierarchs to drown it in their own effluvia. As the popular reaction to King Charles III’s coronation shows, Monarchy still grabs the imagination in a way that fish-faced politicos are incapable of doing. There is still any amount of local, national, and even European pride, despite our constantly being told that such pride is fascist. The ever-popular interest in UFOs, ghosts, cryptids, and weirdness of every variety—despite the materialism of modern education—shows the deep-seated suspicion that there is more to the world than what they see. So too with the popular appetite for fantasy, science fiction, horror, and the like in printed and recorded media—and the popularity of the innumerable varieties of ‘Re-Enchantment’ that Crawford cites, as well as the various ‘living histories’ and other sorts of re-enactment.
But there is something especially significant about the Enchanted World against which we have been rebelling: it is real. Where Luther set the very tone of the revolt by creating, through the notion of ‘private judgement,’ a Deity who would tell one what one wanted to hear (or at least, would tell Luther what he wanted to hear), the God against Whom he revolted set down very particular rules. These rules, upon which we have touched, often are not pleasing to Man in our fallen state. Even if they do not limit what we can do, they are sometimes difficult to understand. To regain that state—even as individuals—means doing violence to our nature; it can even mean self-denial, which is something our leaders on every hand tell us to avoid. To stop rebelling, to accept what our Fathers knew to be real, cannot but be painful.
Still, it is liberating. When one reads of a modern eucharistic miracle, or steps into a Gothic Cathedral, it is a coming home. Wandering in the woods and feeling the tug of their beauty; sampling a local specialty dish or wine; taking part in a village saint’s day—all of these cease to be merely pleasant pastimes and become a receiving of part of one’s own birthright. Anger at what has been lost is supplemented by gratitude for what remains—and a desire to protect it.
It is impossible to sketch out a coherent political programme on this basis. But if a sufficient number of people develop such a sensibility, such a programme will follow on its own. The Sleeping Beauty’s Castle that is Europe shall come to life once more. Until and unless such a time comes, however, those who have accepted the realities of Enchantment shall be able to lead productive, content lives—until they move on to that great Enchantment which lies beyond the circles of this World, with all their pain and sorrow.
