dark enchantment

Lately I’ve been reading my old friend William Blake — about whom more in due course — and I am struck by the simple fact that in his vast and strange mythology the primeval giant Albion is asleep. As, by and large, are we, his children. Blake perceives our frivolous attachment to merely “corporeal” existence, our materialism, our domestication of God — all the things that make us pray thus:

Our Father Augustus Caesar who art in these thy Substantial Astronomical Telescopic Heavens, Holiness to thy Name or Title & reverence to thy Shadow. Thy Kingship come upon Earth first & thence in Heaven. Give us day by day our Real Taxed Substantial Money bought Bread & deliver from the Holy Ghost (so we call Nature) whatever cannot be Taxed, for all is debts & Taxes between Caesar & us & one another. Lead us not to read the Bible but let our Bible be Virgil & Shakspeare & deliver us from Poverty in Jesus that Evil one. For thine is the Kingship (or Allegoric Godship) & the Power or War & the Glory or Law Ages after Ages in thy Descendents, for God is only an Allegory of Kings & nothing Else. Amen.

— are the consequence of our being asleep. A spell has been cast upon us and we cannot awaken to the depth and richness and strangeness and beauty of what is truly Real.

C. S. Lewis says something similar in his famous sermon “The Weight of Glory”:

Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.

And Leon Kass, in his marvelous commentary on Genesis, notes that

Numerous peoples of the ancient Near East — and elsewhere — regarded the heavenly bodies as divine. In the course of Genesis, we shall meet — as alternative and rejected ways of life — the Babylonians, who looked up to the heavens, and the Egyptians, who worshiped the sun and other nature gods. Because every people (and also every person) is defined ultimately by what it (or he or she) admires and reveres, the Bible wastes no time in denying the standing of other peoples’ candidates for the divine.

What is “striking” about Genesis 1, from the perspective of the cultures that surrounded Israel, is the “demotion of the sun” from divine status to, effectively, a big light in the sky — just another of the things created by YHWH. That is, the primary dialectical strategy of Genesis 1 is disenchantment.

Even Max Weber, the man to whom we owe the phrase “disenchantment of the world,” spoke of the resident of disenchanted modernity as being trapped in an “iron cage of rationality” — which sounds rather like the condition of someone under a dark enchantment. I think of “the man in the iron cage” in Pilgrim’s Progress — did Weber know that scene?

Over the last fifteen years I have often written and taught about the idea of disenchantment, and while I have sometimes notes these points, I do not think I have paid sufficient attention to them.

Jesus breaks the chains of the captives — even (especially?) when those chains are what Blake called “mind-forg’d manacles.” Our primary need is release from dark enchantments, so that we may see ourselves as we really are and the world as it really is. “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern” — that is, through the bars of his iron cage. Those bars encircle us in spiritual sleep. We need a Great Awakening.

In futurity
I prophetic see
That the earth from sleep
(Grave the sentence deep)

Shall arise and seek
For her Maker meek;
And the desert wild
Become a garden mild.

P.S. This post was written and queued up several days before posting, so it is not a response to the new edition of L. M. Sacasas’s outstanding newsletter.