The World Cannot be Re-enchanted

The world cannot be re-enchanted because it is and always was enchanted, it is merely that human beings gradually lost the ability to see and feel it. We are desensitized, and in this era in particular, our desensitization has become a severe handicap. We are spiritually retarded, nearly completely severed from the perception of our own spirits and the spirits around us.

In 1883, the American magazine Chatauqua asked a variation of the philosophical question “If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. Humans only evolved to have working ears relatively recently. The entirety of human existence represents a drop in the bucket where those 4.5 billion years are concerned. Our species is hideously dependent upon petroleum, which represents the debris of trees, pond scum, and animal remains from anywhere from 70 to 250 million years ago, and someday the next dominant species may siphon our remains to fuel the conveniences of their lives. Viewed from a wider lens, it is quite obvious that the answer to the philosophical quandary “If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody to hear it, does it make a sound?” is Yes. It made a sound, which after all is simply the reverberation that arises from action on the physical plane, duh. The question itself is boneheaded and stupid and reveals more about the philosophers who ask it than the phenomenon it questions. Hello and welcome to modern science.

The bum rush toward re-enchantment

Right now, a bunch of spiritual retards, myself among them, are desperately trying to reclaim what has been stolen and siphoned away over the last five hundred or so years. We all know something is missing from our lives that has left miserable and terrifying wounds. Though these wounds cannot be seen, we all feel like amputees from which parts have been lopped off or gouged out. In my upcoming book, Sacred Homemaking: A Magical Approach to Tidying, I call this condition spiritual leprosy. I also make the bold claim that spiritual leprosy, along with its twin condition etheric starvation, is the most common set of maladies of our time.

Before the advent of prosthetic everything — the replacement of human tasks and pursuit of knowledge with machines and machine labor — humans were more in touch with the subtle planes. The key to understanding the subtle planes is that they are not separate places. They are superimposed upon us and co-exist with everything we know and perceive. The subtle planes graduate in subtlety from the etheric level all the way to the spiritual level, a.k.a. the Creator or God. The etheric plane, also known as the energy plane, prana, ch’i, ki, vibes, and the Force, is the easiest for us to perceive because it is one dimension more subtle than smell. The astral plane is the next level of subtlety and can be understood as the personal and collective dimension of images and imagination. This level is perceived by animals and plants as well as many others. Even more subtle and therefore expansive, wide, and difficult to grok for a meatbrain stuck on Meatworld is the mental plane, which is the plane of concepts, causes, and effects. Ancient Christians used to have a working knowledge of all of this stuff, whether it was instinctive or from the halls of elite learning. The medieval garden was symmetrical and intentional, full of calculated angles and patterns that acted as demon traps and herbs and vegetables that provided physical medicine and nourishment. Their cathedrals utilized sacred geometry both outside and inside, amplifying the cleansing power of the Missas performed every day, month, and year at the appropriate planetary times. Medieval people were not ignorant about astrology, nor did they dismiss it as demonic like a starving idiot would reject lifesaving food because the texture was “off”. Magic was not exotic to them; it was as plain as the nose on your face. In Eros in Magic and the Renaissance, Ioan Couliano explores the common belief among medieval peoples that individuals and groups could be manipulated via their eros using psychology and the art of memory. Couliano paints a detailed portrait of people who lived deeply and wholly in an enchanted world to the point where they were aware and wary of those who would seek to enchant them. Another aspect of spiritual awareness was the veneration of saints, who are formerly human helpers who have chosen to help humanity despite having the option to do other things. Buddhists call these beings bodhisattvas. You can reject their help, but it is not a good idea as they are going to be the first ones to come to your assistance when you are in metaphysical trouble, and I would argue we are all constantly in metaphysical trouble at the moment.

The evangelical Christian is the pigeon who craps all over the chess board, knocking the pieces off and strutting about as if she has won. She returns to her ignorance like a dog to his vomit. If her medieval ancestors could see her now, they would hang their heads in shame. It is not entirely her fault she lives in a spiritual Idiocracy where any meaningful information from the past has been bulldozed by materialist elephants rampaging in the proverbial china shop. She cannot help that she was raised in an environment where every bit of paradise on Earth was paved to put up a parking lot. She is a materialist because that is all she has ever known. Her food has always been devitalized and from the store instead of the yard and the forest. Her poor brain has always been manipulated by mass media and propaganda. There has not been a moment when she could escape the astral cacophony of other tortured souls and now she is old enough where it has begun to make her a bit crazy. She has been injected with all manner of vaccines that carry the nasty side effect of segregating the subtle bodies from each other. Like her world, she is full of small bits of plastic. Her body’s processes are chronically disrupted from petrochemicals gone wild in the form of phthalates and dioxin. The very air she breathes is inundated with miasmic radiation from cell towers. Yet the worst of her problems and that which lays her bare to whatever demons would like to set up shop in her fragile subconscious is her profound lack of gratitude. Existential fatigue and the exhaustion of living in this incarnation in the early twenty-first century is a recipe for ungratefulness. The medieval peasant had gratitude to God; her modern equivalent does not, despite the lip service she is mandated to provide.

How do we re-enchant ourselves?

We may not be able to re-enchant the world as it is already in a state of enchantment and never left, but we can re-enchant ourselves, and that means removing the malefic enchantments of our materialistic, deadened era and returning to a healthy, balanced state of autonomy that excludes the influence of roving demons and psychological parasites.

The first things I would suggest in the work of re-enchantment is to pick up the three practices of spiritual hygiene aside from prayer that can give us a working tool set with which to combat the grime of our era. These three daily practices take up about a half hour every day. I have written about them in the linked articles and I personally do them, otherwise I would not recommend them:

1. Discursive meditation
2. A daily banishing ritual or its weekly traditional mass equivalent
3. Daily divination

Once you have established a tiny chunk of your day to the practice of spiritual and mental hygiene, it is time to modestly approach a god. In approaching a god, your earnestness and humility will be what determines whether or not you get a demon instead. I believe the arrogant religious end up with demons as reliably as their Satanist or atheist counterparts, as you tend to attract the same frequency to which you vibrate. Continue down the materialist, arrogant, greedy path and you will attract throwaway junk, runaway pride, and insatiable appetites for what you think you need to own. In other words, you will continue to dwell in the heavy, Ahrimanic world of MOAR STUFF and blind obeisance.

If you are humble and forthright, however, you will likely attract a bodhisattva or a saint before you get a god, and that is perfectly fine. You should very much want that to happen, because it will soon lead you to a relationship with a god and eventually God. You have to go at it with the persistence of a small trickle of water that eventually becomes the Grand Canyon. This will not be an easy ride and you are going to need all the help you can get.

In the meantime, and there is a great deal of meantime, you can start where you are by giving thanks for the tiny, good things about your world instead of fixating on the bad. Think gratitude, not worry. Nothing reaches the ear of God faster than gratitude. The reason I suggest taking up the three practices of traditional Western magic before praying or being compulsively grateful is because it can be hard to perceive one’s own gratitude as anything other than fake or gay before the subtle bodies have been at least partially washed of the astral sepsis of our peculiar era. That said, you can cultivate gratitude for little things right now and nothing is stopping you. You can give thanks to your door for stopping the bugs, rain, wind, and human predators who would otherwise get to you and make your daily doings uncomfortable, inconvenient, and deadly. You can thank your shower for making you clean and sweet-smelling and praise indoor plumbing, especially the indoor toilet. When you humble yourself and consider the reality that many do their business outside without the benefit of a flushing commode, you realize how good you have it. You can thank your bed by making it, also setting a rubric that says you are thankful for a safe place to sleep. Yes, you are still going to be assailed by problems, EMFs, people who are jerks, and propaganda but it does not have to be your focus in life.

My upcoming book Sacred Homemaking: A Magical Approach to Tidying, due out from Aeon books in the temperate seasons of 2026, attempts to explain how anyone can connect to the enchanted world and re-enchant themselves by appreciating and maintaining their own living space. Whether you live in a cardboard box or a magnificent chateau, it is daily acts of ritualized gratitude that will provide the key to true satiety of the sort money cannot buy. Enchantment has always been right in front of you and all around you; you were simply trained not to see it and that training comes from a set of generational handicaps. You do not have to go out and find enchantment in the forest or in the exotic fantasy of a book or video game. The whole world is enchanted and waiting for you to escape the evil spell you’ve been under so you may fully participate and begin to truly live.