Once upon a time, there lived a man on a mountainside – a visionary who burned to warn the world of imminent danger. So he wrote factual books disguised as fiction, aimed at a broad audience. Yet the dangers he feared grew with each passing year, while publishers ignored him. Then cancer struck. And the treatment didn’t inspire him (nor could he afford it) so he declined it, made peace with his past, forgave his foes, then wrote and self-published a book distilling seven decades of wisdom gained through staying creative. At last, the magical thinking that had made him a misfit paid off. His book sold so well (inspiring readers to think magically too) that he could afford state-of-the-art cancer therapy – which cured him.
The moral of the story? Society conditions us to dismiss mind over matter as myth. Submit to the biomedical model of healthcare, it warns, or prepare to drop dead. I once heard a self-styled shaman speak about how she’d healed herself of cancer through shamanic practices while receiving chemo. But bona fide shamanism drew power from the fact that no other option existed: hard to believe if we feel entitled to have our cake and eat it. Capitalism invites us to choose our own paradigm. Pick an era, any era, then take the best and leave the rest (and fuck integrity). This layer of largely wishful thinking, a faint echo of our collective past, on top of science-based conditioning isn’t delusional, but nor does our culture support it. To set up small, remote, self-sufficient communities, as many dared do when fascistic vax mandates divided wider society, might make a true alternative more viable – because, today, so-called alternatives are too often defanged by regulatory bodies. Witch hunts persist, as pandemic edicts made clear. While the guise of the church has changed, it still condemns heretics.
Speaking of which, the story above isn’t true; that writer, a friend of mine, died at 70, riddled with tumours. But he was a true visionary, and since his death six years ago, humanity (such as it is) has been busy fulfilling his worst fears. Mine too. Yet he really believed he could save the world if he just tried hard enough. Call it magical thinking or a God complex… Because for all his brilliance – he’d made millions in the tech sphere – he couldn’t even save himself.
Meanwhile, in the vast outer space created by God’s reputed death, science searches for extraterrestrial life. A tad narrow-minded: ‘life’ – vs. consciousness – presumes a biological find. Yet speculation re its nature often involves technology so far in advance of our own – teleportation, time travel, shape-shifting, invisibility – that it evokes myths of ancient gods.
But what if this ‘life’ never came from outer space? Would we see it coming, or know if it bit us on the bum? Could it seem familiar due to simple proximity, indulging our whims yet taken for granted? What if the modern ego ID’d by Freud a mere hundred years ago emerged as an unconscious defence against its burgeoning presence? And what if this overlooked Other ruled us in ways akin to our dominion of nature? What if we never invented technology, but just hosted its development, believing we were gaining power as it gathered momentum?
I lack the patience to tackle The Decline of the West (1918) by the German philosopher of history Oswald Spengler (fun fact: Beat icon William Burroughs turned Jack Kerouac on to him). But I’ve read scads, on a few blogs, about Spengler’s model. Civilisations follow a cycle: after a cultural peak, the initial religion undergoes reformation, which segues into rationalism that then begets a second religiousness – mass reaction to decadence favouring dictatorial government. If Spengler was right, we’ve already entered that final stage of decline. But what might a second religiosity look like?
Would-be contenders include the re-enchantment project, a narrative shared by it’s-all-gooders as disparate as psych professors, New Agers and old hippies. Take cultural historian Richard Tarnas, whose rigorously researched seminal Cosmos and Psyche (2006) does more to bridge the chasm between astrological knowledge and scholarly method than any 20th-century text. And yet he belongs to a tiny and uncommonly learned minority:
It’s as if, for all his erudition, Tarnas has a blind spot re a topic on which he’s often written. What do the re-enchantment boffins not understand about where this magic for which they wax nostalgic has gone? The world has haemorrhaged meaning as we’ve fallen under technology’s spell; the loss of one and the rise of the other are parallel developments advancing in lockstep, not separately. We know the trope from fairytales: cursed by a devil’s bargain or evil ambition, we wait for true love to save us.
In his post ‘The Nature of Enchantment’, seasoned mage John Michael Greer dismisses the idea that we live in a disenchanted world (as Max Weber famously claimed in 1904) and proceeds to cite evidence of modern enchantment, e.g.: ‘the number of people who make their living from astronomy is a small fraction of the number who make their living from astrology’. Yet even the inclination to summon numbers as proof seems symptomatic of digital-age disenchantment.
When I made my living from astrology, I learned that self-marketing boosts business more than in-depth knowledge. That’s why it’s wholly possible to practise and even teach astrology while believing that the Earth is flat. But good luck keeping a full-time astronomy job. The relative dearth of professional astronomers attests to the fact that their training is far more exacting, requiring familiarity with physics and maths. Indeed, most of the data astrologers use to ply their trade relies on calculations enabled by precision technology, the efficiency of which negates the need for more astronomers. Since the invention of the telescope, astronomy’s accelerated development has been instrumental in disenchanting astrology to the extent that it went underground for two centuries. That it’s now returned with a vengeance points less to rampant magic than to an unhinged craving for answers. And the numbers compulsively consulting Google etc. leave the numbers who credit astrology for dead.
Yet this astrological excess in the US (or cyberspace) matches that of self-published authors and bloggers who add nothing new to the sum of human consciousness but just advance the lucrative cult of personality. Nor do astrology clients worship planets as divine, but trust astronomy to define them: masses of rock, gas or ice circling the Sun in an endless night sky. They see astrology through a sciencey lens despite its mystic image. So its popularity doesn’t spell enchantment; it reflects how many Western lives lack purpose and direction. It can’t convey meaning the way it once did if clients pay for a reading, reject any details that threaten their ego, then run to yet another astrologer… And the more input they absorb, the less each subsequent reading counts. All these opinions blur together, cancelling each other out.
And so, confined to towers, alone yet constantly monitored, or comatose inside our glass coffins, we dream on, waiting for a prince called AI to find us and upload our minds to a virtual happily ever after.
observer of times 