Most of us have been raised in a culture that devalues the spiritual at the expense of the physical, to the extent that the spiritual is deemed to be nonexistent or is given a grudging nod as something completely personal. It is as if it has no place in helping form our understanding of the world. Culturally, over the last few hundred years of intellectual history, this has been a necessary corrective to the overvaluation of the spiritual during the Middle Ages and the early modern period.
However, times have changed, and humanity is now facing a crisis. We have to change our way of thinking and feeling about the cosmos in order to reclaim our position as caretakers of creation, before we destroy the very Earth from which we draw our nourishment and every part of our material needs. I intend to briefly lay the intellectual foundations necessary for a magical understanding of the cosmos, or, in other words, an enchanted world. This will not be an exhaustive treatment of these topics, but rather an introduction to new ideas for those who might be unfamiliar and a suggestion of resources for those wishing to study in greater depth.
I have always been fascinated by the idea of a hidden reality, a world of spirits behind the apparent solid physical world we inhabit. Could there be more to our world than meets the eye? Many traditional or Indigenous cultures around the world have never lost their sense of enchantment, and now many modern “civilized” people all over the world are reclaiming the enchanted world of spirits and an animated, ensouled world. And not a moment too soon, for our world is teetering on the brink of ecological collapse and societal breakdown. It is imperative that we as humans reclaim our ancient role as caretakers and mediators between the gods and the earth.
The mysteries of creation are lost in the distant past, in mythic time, or in the massive numerical abstractions of science. Science has as its goal the description of the physical cosmos and describes the Earth as four billion years old and the universe as fourteen billion years old, more or less. But what do these unimaginably large numbers really mean? We, as spiritual beings, don’t live in a cosmos that is only physical. Equally untenable because of its literalism is the biblical age of the cosmos, which is supposed to be about six thousand years old. We live in the present, in our own experience, within a living cosmos. I propose that we look on creation as having happened in a time out of time, the dreamtime, if you will, the time of the gods and ancestors, the creators who shaped our cosmos. Mythographer Mircea Eliade loved the phrase in illo tempore”from the Vulgate Bible, meaning “in those days,” to refer to this time. This mythic creation is eternally present, creating and recreating the world every minute, renewing its being, as if by the very breath of the creator, inhaling and exhaling being into our cosmos.
I further suggest that we posit the idea of a spiritual realm, an archetypal realm beyond time and space, which contains the myths and sacred stories, the gods and angels, the pure mathematical forms. From this realm proceeds the logos, the living information that shapes and underlies our experience of the material world, which lives and breathes and occasionally erupts into our own world. This is the realm of the world soul of the ancients, the great dreaming mind of god from which all emerges. We humble humans draw our meaning and our inspiration from this place. It shapes our myths, religions, dreams, art, and all of our creative endeavors, for better or worse.
This concept is close to what Henry Corbin, the gifted exponent of Sufi philosophy, referred to as the mundus imaginalis (the imaginal realm), “a world that is [as] ontologically real as the world of the senses and that of the intellect. This world requires its own faculty of perception, namely, imaginative power, a faculty with a cognitive function, a noetic value that is as real as sense perception or intellectual intuition. We must be careful not to confuse it with the imagination identified by so-called modern man with ‘fantasy,’ and which, according to him, is nothing but an outpouring of ‘imaginings.’”
According to Corbin, this is an intermediary realm between the realms of the senses and the archetypes, and it mediates between the two. “Ontologically, it ranks higher than the senses and lower than the purely intelligible world; it is more immaterial than the former and less immaterial than the latter. This approach to imagination [provides] a basis for demonstrating the validity of dreams and of visionary reports describing and relating ‘events in heaven’ as well as the validity of symbolic rites,” he writes.
I propose that spiritual forces are responsible for much of the phenomena that occur in our world on many levels. This bold statement will require, perhaps, a bit of unpacking. First, what do we mean by spirit? The ancient Greeks used the word pneuma, and the Latin equivalent is spiritus, both of which have the additional meaning of breath or wind, and from which our English word spirit derives. Ancient people often used the word spirit to refer to a principle that linked the soul, wholly nonmaterial, to the material body. It was considered to be the fifth element, a subtle form of matter similar to air but more rarified.
In a sense, spirit is like Corbin’s imaginal realm, a mediator between the physical and the soul that the ancients used to explain how the non-physical acted on the body. In accordance with the Hermetic maxim, “As above, so below,” what is true of the individual is true on a cosmic scale; the cosmic spirit joins the anima mundi, or the world soul, to physical matter, enlivening and animating the whole cosmos.
by Todd Elliot
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