I’ve written a bit about Enchantment here. I’d like to propose a definition: [which I’m still playing with] The state of having awareness of the unseen world.
We can’t see/hear/feel what we don’t pay attention to and the modern world has trained us to tune out all manner of input and not only from the unseen world. My massage clients dully ignore the myriad signals from our bodies that something’s not right. That persistent pain in the neck or low back is a signal to get up and move, and fer-gods-sakes-fix-your-posture. The nagging indigestion that says ‘stop eating that!’ and the slow weight gain that says both.
If we’re having trouble just paying attention to our bodies, it’s no wonder holding onto enchantment is a problem.
This is [of course it is] an oversimplification. The unseen world stretches from land spirits and the elements, through the ancestors, and up through the daemons and gods. That’s a whole range of different etheric, enchanted experiences. John Beckett over at Patheos has written suggestions on how to re-enchant the world. His first step is to embrace animism, the concept that the world around us is alive.
Many people I meet in my daily life have no interest in this concept. They are purely humans-doing and being run by immediate needs or the next crisis. Embracing animism requires looking past the demands of physical living, but then so does any religious practice. Enchantment can certainly be found in the deep communion with a monotheistic deity. It’s just that animism is easier. As a practice, this looks like deep observation..
Another of Beckett’s suggestions is prayer. While one communes with land spirits [ie, stones, trees, plants] one prays to the gods. This has been my primary path to enchantment for a few years now. He describes it as a conversation, and that’s often my experience. However, since I started doing a Neoplatonic practice, I begin the conversation with honor and appreciation for their blessings. Gratitude brings our attention to the good things in our lives. Whatever we focus on grows. Neoplatonic practice makes a distinction between veneration of the gods - theurgy, and the practice of magic - thaumaturgy.
Doing magic, aka witchcraft, is also on Beckett’s list. Certainly, doing a spell, the intentional aligning of one’s will with the unseen world in order to create change, and seeing that change manifest is a blast of enchantment.
I have caveats about doing magic. [For those reading who think magic is nonsense, in the words of The Critical Drinker, “Go away now.”] For magic to work, we have to align ourselves with what we want. Just doing the spell isn’t enough to create that alignment if it isn’t there.
I had an acquaintance who wanted to date various men. [Of course, she wanted nothing to do with the ones who wanted her.] She routinely performed love spells and got many readings on whether or not the aforementioned men were coming around to her POV. [You may know someone like this.] They didn’t want her and for very good reasons. She tended to take over people’s lives. She tried to do this to me which was why she was an acquaintance rather than a friend.
The spells never worked. But that was because she had no insight on how to align herself with another person. For magic to work, something in us has to change. We offer that change to the gods - a sacrifice. Change, any change, requires that we give something up. It might be something we hold dear, like my acquaintance’s belief that she knew best how other people should be living their lives.
A second caveat is that we’re also perfectly capable of wanting something that’s not good for us. That’s not necessarily a personality flaw but can be how we were raised. If our parents think something is very important, we may have taken that in without questioning it, especially if supported by the surrounding culture. I was brought up to think that a career would make me happy. In hindsight, I would have been better off marrying a good man and having kids before thinking about other ways to contribute to society. [My inability to choose a good partner didn’t help.] There are also emotions that can lead us down unpleasant paths: Envy, jealousy, resentment, and anger can make a spell do terrible things. This is why practitioners of Wicca cite the law of three-fold return. Whatever you send out will come back to you tripled.
I haven’t done magic in a long time. Maybe 20 years. I stopped even before I picked up my current practice. My concern was that I didn’t know the will of the gods and they had to know what was better for me - and everyone else -than I did. Maybe I should just let that play out and trust that they had all of our best interests at heart. That involved faith that they wouldn’t give me anything I couldn’t handle.
The joke was on me. I learned to handle what they threw at me and became a better person because of it. [They’re funny. So very funny. Rolling my eyes.] Eventually, I learned to ask for the right kind of help. Not ‘make it go away,’ but ‘what skill or information do I need in order to make this more tolerable or maybe even better?’ That’s when the real enchantment started to happen.
Insights and ideas popped into my head. Not just creative ideas, but practical ones. Ideas, that with a lot of work, made me better at household management, communication, and making money for us. That wasn’t all. I was gifted with a hard, painful clarity about the right thing to do in a very difficult situation. That clarity saved my marriage and the gods were there with me, helping me hold that line.
Magic wouldn’t have fixed that.
Now I pray daily. It’s not often formal, although I have a lovely altar that I built and maintain. The prayer is gratitude for the path they’ve set for me and asking for guidance on how to do it better. That’s my enchantment.
Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. She has direct communication with her gods and they’ve always given her answers when she asks. Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. Be warned.