Illustration @ Kaitlynn Copithorne
Three years after our Re-enchantment issue, the term Re-enchantment is a buzzword. Every week we’re seeing articles, books, events, and festivals using the word as if it were synonymous with self-improvement through nature, and connecting with childhood wonder. Often, at its most diluted, the term seems quite self-focused. A reminder: if re-enchantment is not about facing the darkness as well as the wonder, it’s not re-enchantment but a dubious self-improvement trend – and something that can be readily packaged, bought and sold. Like so many concepts that have become commodities, we need to tread carefully here.
Lockdown offered many of us the hope the world could be forged anew. Shops closed. For a time even banks. Office work was put on hold. Could this be the end of office work, people asked? Wildlife returned to natural spaces, and, in a climate of food shortages, people took to the fields and parks to forage for nettles, mugwort, yarrow, blackberries, wild garlic, and all manner of seasonal herbs, and roots. People sought self-sufficiency, baking their own bread and learning the old ways of fermenting and pickling foods. Others questioned why they lived in big cities when their prime function – consumerism – was paused. What, they asked, was keeping them there?
There was the idea we could transfigure the bleak world of enforced wage labour, car fumes, and capitalism into something better. For some time before lockdown, having my taste of the London grind, and encountering a variety of the problems many of us encounter on the path of life, I had been thinking about how this something better was something I dreamed of as an idealistic child, growing up in a retreat centre in the rural West Country. When we are young, arguably, we are more deeply connected to our principles. The world then was a living, breathing entity, and all its inhabitants were worthy of our protection. Children are deeply sensitive and perceptive in ways few adults are. In the words of JM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello: "It takes but one glance into a slaughterhouse to turn a child into a lifelong vegetarian."
Max Weber held the view that modernity is “characterised by a progressive disenchantment of the world”. This, in short, refers to the devaluation of religion and spirituality. I think growing up follows this pattern too. Once our ancestors believed in fairies, spirits, spirits of place, and gods. They asked trees for permission before plucking their fruits. They built temples on sights where they encountered good omens. Now we consume and develop with little consideration for Feng shui or appeasing the local deities. As children, we brewed potions from flowers and spoke with animals, and saw faces in trees. We might have believed in fairies – or at least the tooth fairy. Some of us believed that each December, a bearded generous man rode through the sky in a reindeer-driven sleigh.
Scholars still debate the meaning and validity of Re-enchantment. In The Re-enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, for instance, authors Joshua Landy and Michael Saler argue that there has always been a counter-tendency towards magic, challenging the view that modernity is “disenchanted.” Yet Weber’s words still spark resonance with those of us who have seen the loss of the commons, which Silvia Federici writes about both in Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons and in her seminal Caliban and the Witch. Even today people resist the loss of rights to roam or to wild camp – just this year Dartmoor banned wild camping, the last place to allow it in England. Re-enchantment also strikes a chord with those of us who have lost freedom and bodily autonomy to an ever more oppressive state. Disenchantment is by this definition a violent severance from our knowledge of the natural world. Real or imagined, gone are the days of King Arthur and Odysseus, when heroes set out into the wilderness and encountered mythical beasts, witches, and strange places with distinct spirits.
Of course, we ought not glamorise the magic of the past without remembering the darkness. Among the fairies of the past dwelled darker entities, who weren’t to be messed with. As a child, I was terrified of the darkness, of what dwelled in the secret room that lay through my wardrobe in that dusty old house, of the shadows that moved between the trees. Magic is a wondrous and terrifying thing. To believe in enchantment means to believe in the power of will, the miraculous, and a world of spirits, spectres, fairies, or otherworldly entities; it can entail the sense of wonder one feels standing upon a mountaintop at dawn or dusk, watching a sunset or encountering synchronicities. But it also means confronting the bone-shaking fear that others have cursed us, the evil eye, the inevitability of death, and our limited understanding of the world even with our miraculous science. It’s also in the chaos of pandemonium, meeting Pan, god of the wilds, in the forest; spotting ill omens such as a chance encounter with the Wild Hunt in the most treacherous forests, whose apparition foretold of war, plague, or no good thing. We cannot have light without dark. Re-enchantment requires negotiation and respect for the sacred. We cannot take everything without giving back.
Can you sell re-enchantment? You can sell anything. We’d do well to remember what happened to mindfulness, and how the Ancient Indian practice of yoga has been appropriated to make workers more productive and resilient. Mindfulness in truth was much more than McMindfulness. It was about slowing down, paying attention, and tuning into the atman – the universal self. In turn, the practitioner could find relief in the longevity of nature, up against the brevity of our own lives.
Capitalism is a shapeshifting entity that does its best to make us feel safe and cared for. We have seen the same dilution of other traditions or practices over the years. High street shops sell spell and ritual kits, often featuring the precious herbs of indigenous people, with no acknowledgment. And the market has recognised the brand potential of certain practices like walking in the woods and swimming in the sea or river, with forest bathing and wild swimming becoming the terms du jour. You may have heard of Bhastrika pranayama – a type of rapid and forceful breathing that exists within the yogic tradition and creates heat. Or the tradition of immersing oneself in ice-cold water – common in Finnish, Russian, and Kazakh cultures – among others. Such practices have been combined into the Wim Hof technique, which people pay thousands for. Even “the life-changing art of tidying up” has become a commodity.
We have to keep paying attention to the beauty of the world. But opening our wallets for expensive spiritual or self-help workshops will only take us so far. You don’t need to pay for a fancy course – independent makers such as ourselves are grateful when you support our work by attending – and many skills require expertise, such as the craft of writing, herbalism, and meditation. But you needn’t spend hundreds of pounds when many of these things can be learned from reading, spiritual practice, and more humble practitioners who don’t position themselves as gurus or charge the world. Honestly, for re-enchantment, you don’t need a book, course or manual. As The Book of Molfars concludes: “you are the book.” We do need to pay attention to what exists in the world around us. Only then will we know what is at stake.
For real self-care, we also need world care. Our mental health hinges upon things like personal freedom, reliable shelter, good quality food, offline community, and access to nature. This can be simulated in a monetised course, but we need these things long-term. Perhaps we need now an apocalyptic type of witchcraft, the type Peter Grey calls for in his urgent manifesto:
“Witchcraft is the recourse of the dispossessed,
the powerless, the hungry and the abused.
It gives heart and tongue to stones and trees.
It wears the rough skin of beasts.
It turns on a civilisation that knows the
price of everything and the value of nothing.”
We don’t need the market standing in for our very basic fundamental human rights. We need to take back the rights to our lives. In Revolutionary Road, author Richard Yates asked, “Are artists and writers the only people entitled to their own lives?” I think so – alongside the ultra-rich – though this isn’t right. I wish we too had the right to lead lives like cats, moving with the sun, sleeping, eating, and roaming free. When I was little, I use to climb down cliffs and scramble through the wild forest and swim in the sea. I didn’t think of it as wild swimming. I was swimming, walking, climbing, and exploring. I was living.
Rather than re-enchantment, I think we’re now going through a period of intense disenchantment. Not necessarily in the sense of religion. There has been a rise, in recent years, of Neo-Paganism, and other new religions. There has been a decline in Christianity but a rise in Islam. But we have returned again to incessant self-focus and we commodify everything, from places and fruits of the earth to intangible ideas. We’ve returned to nihilistic consumerism and, many of us, to the obligatory 9 - 5; while a gift for some, not all are well-suited to those hours or that rigidity. Many of us hold collective trauma.
What’s more, we’re in the midst of an intense cost of living crisis. Many are struggling to eat or heat their homes. There has been a return to a Dickensian kind of philanthropy, when most developed countries are rich enough to provide welfare to those in need, here and elsewhere. Every week people in my community come forward and share they haven’t enough to eat, and have to rely on the kindness of strangers – despite living in a rich country with the resources to provide. War is drawing nearer. Peace seems far-off. The threat of nuclear war renders the bleakest and most apocalyptic visions of the future feasible. Faced with war and all the problems that have emerged since we’ve left our homes, re-enchantment seems at best a pipe dream – at its worst, privileged.
The idea still has room to grow, but should never exclude activism, taking responsibility for our part in the problem, and seeking to make it right – and never for the cultural capital that comes from performative activism but a real collective desire to change the world.
Re-enchantment is not a commodity. Nor a short-lived soothing balm for the soul. Re-enchantment is not something that can be affixed to “I” but “we”. Re-enchantment is not sitting in a field and covering our ears with our hands. To cite the Hookland Guide, “Re-enchantment is Resistance.” If re-enchantment is not resistance, it’s at risk of fuelling delusion and complacency, the very things that got us where we are now. Resistance requires facing up to our own responsibility, doing shadow work, and self-sacrifice. It requires us to look inwards and outward. What would make the world better? I think this is as important as thinking about what would make us feel better.
Diane Purkiss is a professor of English Literature at Oxford University, the author of numerous books on witchcraft and feminism, and a regular contributor to Cunning Folk. “I'm really interested in the idea of re-enchantment,” she tells me, “but I strongly agree that it can easily be turned into a way to brush darkness under the rug. It seems to me especially relevant at the moment to ponder the ongoing cultural raids on Indigenous cultures as examples of Western subjects turning everything into an opportunity for self-development (the majestic words of Bo Burnham) – and I also agree that with that goes to risk of paying no attention to war, or to the way that the mental health crisis we continue to face is connected with the ugliest aspects of late capitalism. An alternative way to think about re-enchantment might be to see it as a way for deracinated Western people to reconnect not just with the natural world that they are otherwise blind to destroying, but also perhaps with one another.”
On the topic of how we might go about re-enchanting ourselves, Purkiss says: “it seems to me very important for [re-enchantment] not to be a marketing opportunity to do with buying candles … It seems to me that the best way is through stories, and through above all listening to stories that connect with place. Recognising ourselves through stories without seeking to appropriate them is challenging, but I think it's what we must do.”
Activism, changing our lifestyles, and connecting with stories and the spirits of time and place will ultimately provide tools for wrestling against capitalism. We need to listen without claiming, and learn to appreciate while resisting the temptation to rewrite or possess. The rough beast of capitalism tries hard to remodel itself so that it looks like it has our best interests at heart – but we’d do well to remember it does not. Re-enchantment is as political as it is spiritual; it means finding meaning again in a world we’ve reduced to nothing. When we believe in something we fight for it. In turn, we might collectively veer away from the terrifying alternative endpoint to which we seem to be headed.