Magical Re-Enchantment: Part 3

Spiritual Secularity and the Occulturing of Society

By Carl Teichrib

Note: Part three of this series is adapted from chapter 7 in my book, Game of Gods: The Temple of Man in the Age of Re-Enchantment.

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French theologian and social thinker, Jacques Ellul, said the following on the heels of the Cultural Revolution in the West: “Secularization is always an intermediate stage between a religious society on the way out and the appearance of a new religious structuring.”¹

If the 1960s and 1970s represented the revolutionary seedbed for a new spiritual outlook (see chapter 6 in Game of Gods), the 1980s and 1990s were the decades of blossoming. In my view, this 40-year window was a critical time for the Christian church in the West. Alas, the year 2000 and onward would see both a harvest and re-seeding of spiritual alternatives; fresh shoots are flourishing in the soil that had been tilled during those key decades.

We have entered the Age of Re-enchantment.

What is Re-enchantment? The assembly of meaning and purpose within a matrix of wonder and mystery, aesthetic expressions, symbolism and sentiment, all pointing to a paradigm of holism. Whereas disenchantment produced an I-it relationship – with the person as I, and the Earth and cosmos as it – re-enchantment emphasizes an I-thou perspective. Everything is in community. Humanity is sublimely connected to a wider sense of being.

That nuances and interpretations exist regarding Re-enchantment is evident in the literature. How could this not be? The term itself is vague.

Professor Morris Berman’s 1984 book, The Reenchantment of the World, was an early, contemporary call to an enchanted worldview. Scientific certainty, he outlined, had been the “integrating mythology of industrial society.” This one-sided reality had produced a dysfunction in our structures of knowledge, values, and relationships. Our hope was to be found in “a very different sort of integrating mythology.”² We needed a magical reunion with the cosmos, with nature, and ourselves.

Finding our new foundation would thus necessitate a realignment of knowledge. Science was not superior, nor was the occult worldview inferior.³ The same mental universe holds both; therefore, science and participatory consciousness would need to find an alchemical synthesis. In this context, holism is both the present reality and destiny. Re-enchantment would be a return to the mystery made manifest in shamanism – the animistic bonding to Nature – specifically, “the God within, and the ecosystem that reflects it.”⁴

Twenty years after Berman’s book was released, Christopher Partridge, a professor of Contemporary Religion, published the first of his two-volume series, The Re-Enchantment of the West.⁵ When both volumes were made available, they painted a remarkable picture of a new situation.

In Europe, the historic and traditional Christian base for culture had collapsed. North America’s foundational Christian ethos was fading. Secularism was rising, yet it could not claim ascendancy: “Another religio-cultural milieu has taken its place.”⁶

Partridge cataloged the West’s transforming inner environment, showing that Eastern philosophies and New Age concepts are increasingly accepted as spiritual-cultural norms. Popular literature, movies, and music continuously reinforce this already occurring shift. The messaging is inescapable: out with the preceding Christian ethos and the authority structures of Modernity, in with spiritual alternatives and personal values aligned with the felt-needs of previously fringe subgroups. The change is vast, even otherworldly. Cyberspace has animated techno-paganism, and archaic spirituality flows from a renewed interest in psychedelics, goddess veneration, and esoteric themes. Paranormal subjects have mass appeal, and public interest in the UFO phenomena is undeniable; society is enchanted by extraterrestrials. Interestingly, the channeled messages received from apparent aliens – and much of the associated literature on the subject of UFOs – delivers an unmistakable, New Age worldview.

Who knew that extraterrestrials are really Theosophists from outer space?⁷