CHAPTER 1

The Ways of the Life Force

Max Weber, in his famous 1904 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit ofCapitalism, gave a startling name to one of the realities of modern life: "thedisenchantment of the world." Weber was a sociologist who studied the impact ofindustrial society on human thought. Before scientific materialism seized theimagination of Western culture, he pointed out, people saw the world around themas a place full of magic, where trees and stones could speak, birds traced outthe shape of the future in their flight, and those who knew the secret couldsense and shape the flow of enchantment in the world around them. This living,breathing, magical world was one of the first casualties of the IndustrialRevolution. As materialist beliefs spread, magic trickled out of the world,transforming it—at least in most people's minds—into a mass of lifeless matterrelevant only as a source of raw materials or a place to dump waste.

Like most educated people of his time, Weber did not believe in magic. He meantthe word disenchantment as a metaphor, and he saw the banishing of magic andmeaning from the world as a necessary part of progress and the end of an ancientillusion. Still, he recognized that the psychological and spiritual price ofprogress weighed heavily on the modern world—heavily enough, perhaps, tooutweigh its material benefits. In a disenchanted world, he showed, even themost basic human values lose their anchor, and the only things left are themechanical values of profit and efficiency, the basis for what passes forrational thought in a modern industrial society.

The irony of the phrase is that Weber spoke more truth than he realized. Neitherhe nor most of his readers saw disenchantment as anything but a metaphor. Still,those who know the living power of magic know that Weber's phrase points to acrucial reality. Our world is literally disenchanted. It suffers from a shortageof enchantment that cuts people off from magical realities and makes their livesless meaningful and magical than they could be.

Enchantment is the art of awakening spiritual presences in material things. Theword literally means "putting a song in something"—en-chant-ment—a turn ofphrase that reflects the living experience of a world in which every part of thelandscape and every turn of the seasonal cycle sings its meaning to the awakenedmind. In traditional societies around the world and throughout history,enchantment has had a vital role in bringing people into harmony with theirgods, their environment, and their communities. Magic provided the toolkit forcreating and maintaining enchantment. Using magic, the priestesses and wizardsof the past wove nature and humanity into a single fabric that kept bothbalanced and whole.

As far as anyone knows, the Industrial Revolution marks the first time in humanhistory that a civilization tried to banish enchantment from the world. WhenWeber assessed the results of this experiment in 1904, cracks were alreadyshowing in the bright facade of progress. Now, more than a century later, thecollapse of communities and collective spiritual life across the Western worldhas been joined by the specter of catastrophic environmental change. Dwindlingfossil fuel reserves, massive ecological changes, and wild swings in the world'sclimate announce the coming of an age of payback in which the survival ofindustrial civilization itself stands at risk.

A little more than forty years have passed now since the environmental crisisfirst forced itself onto newspaper headlines around the world. During that time,a great many historians have traced the roots of our civilization'sdysfunctional relationship with nature, and an even larger number of activistshave proposed solutions. Magic has rarely seen mention in either context. Ahandful of perceptive writers have followed Weber's lead and traced out theconnections between a way of thinking about the Earth that strips it ofenchantment and a way of acting toward it that strips it of everything else. InThe Reenchantment of the World, one of the best books of this kind, MorrisBerman comments:

For more than 99 percent of human history, the world was enchanted and man sawhimself as an integral part of it. The complete reversal of this perception in amere four hundred years or so has destroyed the continuity of the humanexperience and the integrity of the human psyche. It has very nearly wrecked theplanet as well. The only hope, or so it seems to me, lies in a reenchantment ofthe world. (Berman, 1981, p. 10)

Yet neither Berman nor the handful of other writers who have pursued thesethemes have considered the possibility that the best way to reenchant the worldis to use the same magical methods that enchanted it in the first place. Bermanhimself claims that "we cannot go back to alchemy or animism" (ibid.). Behindthis argument stands the immense emotional force of the modern faith inprogress, with its conviction that "going back" is the one unforgivable sin. Yetif a traveler on unfamiliar roads finds that he has gone down a blind alley, theonly option that will get him out of it is to go back the way he came.

From the perspective of Druidry, a return to magic is simple common sense.Modern Druidry itself was born alongside the Industrial Revolution, crafted by ahandful of British visionaries in the early eighteenth century, who saw thefirst stirrings of today's ecological crises and recognized that the gap betweenhumanity and nature opened by industrial society had to be healed if Westerncivilization were to survive. The founders of the Druid Revival took the radicalstep of embracing the name and legacy of the ancient Celtic Druids at a timewhen "going back" in religious matters was as unthinkable as doing the samething scientifically and technologically is today. They recognized that whatmatters about ideas is not how new they are, or for that matter how old theyare, but whether they reflect truth in a way that meets the needs of humanityand nature in a particular age.

The revival of magic in recent decades thus speaks to one of the most criticalneeds of our time. While magic cannot solve today's ecological crisis by itself,it offers crucial tools for healing the gap between humanity and nature. Tounderstand how magic can accomplish this, and to begin making sense of magicitself, we need to pay attention to a part of human experience that has droppedentirely out...