Ecology of Magic #1

Ecology: the study of relationships in nature. Magic: a quality of attention that opens you to awe.

Ecology: the study of relationships in nature.

Magic: a quality of attention that opens you to awe.

Human beings have a lineage that reaches through our animal ancestors, right back to the proto-life forms and the oceans they emerged in, and back still further to the chemical elements and the stars that forged them. Awareness of the ancestral lines between animals and stars opens the door to an ecology of magic, where knowledge of cosmological transformations gives weight to the idea that we are the cosmos in human form.

This is good because it begins to dissolve the false story that we are separate from nature, isolated and adrift in a meaningless universe (more on that later). Instead, there is a hidden in the West, a golden chain that reaches back through history, across continents, and includes some of the most inspiring figures to have walked the earth.

What’s common to this living tradition is the idea that we are part of the fabric of cosmos; an ancient ongoing story that includes us as one of its threads. Through human beings, the cosmos gains an organ of appreciation through which to know itself, become itself, wrestle with the violence and beauty of its own being, and fall more deeply into love.

‘We are enfolded into the great communion of existence by the curvature of space.’

— Thomas Berry

As you can probably tell, I’m excited about this idea of an ecology of magic. To say why in a sentence is not possible. What we’re talking about is an entirely different worldview from the one that most of us have been simmered in since birth.

‘We are now at the beginning of such a fundamental change of worldview in science and society, a change of paradigms as radical as the Copernican revolution.’

Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life

I remember reading those words about twenty years ago at a cafe in my hometown of Hebden Bridge. I was only eighteen, and had no intellectual defence against the kind of worldview that makes ecological crisis possible, and that can turn human life into a spiritual desert (that’s desert, not dessert. Dessert is the pudding).

All I had at that time was a vague sense that something was wrong. Do Schools Kill Creativity? and The Master and His Emissary didn’t exist yet, and their equivalents were too dull for the teenage me.

But thanks to books like The Web of Life, Animate Earth, The Spell of the Sensuous, Re-Visioning Psychology, The Philosopher’s Secret Fire, The Matter With Things, Hospicing Modernity and a bunch of others, a more enlivened way of seeing began to shape my awareness.

‘By providing a new way of viewing our planet – one which connects with some of our oldest and most primordial intuitions regarding the animate Earth – Gaia theory ultimately alters our understanding of ourselves, transforming our sense of what it means to be human.’

— David Abram, In the Depths of a Breathing Planet

David Abram has done an awful for what we might call an ‘ecology of magic’. (I think he may have even come up with the phrase). In that same essay, In the Depths of a Breathing Planet, Abram writes:

‘By showing that Earth’s organisms collectively influence their environment so thoroughly that the planet’s oceans, atmosphere, soils, and surface geology together exhibit behavior more proper to a living physiology than an abiotic system, Gaia theory suggests that the biosphere has at least a rudimentary kind of agency. It suggests that like any living entity, the biosphere is not just an object but also, in some curious sense, a subject.ⁱ

To the extent that we take seriously the ongoing disclosures of Gaian science, we cannot help but feel a transformation in our own relation to the planet. If agency is an attribute of the biosphere as a whole, then the felt sense of our own agency need not isolate us from the material world that surrounds us. Just as our life is now recognized as part of a vast, planetary metabolism, so human sentience can now be felt as an extension, an elaboration, even an internal expression of the organic sentience of the biosphere itself.^ii’

This essay, together with The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air, transforms one’s intellectual understanding of the atmosphere into an awareness that we are immersed within an ancient, life-sustaining substance co-created every moment through the respiration of all life; an invisible plenum that carries every song, story, and word ever spoken.

From there, it takes only a small leap to imagine our home planet as an elaboration of the creative force and enfolding agency of the wider cosmos. But since this world, our home planet, is the vessel in which all thoughts, intuitions, and senses emerge from and die back into, it should hold special significance in an ecology of magic, no matter how powerful our telescopes nor how far our mathematics can reach.

‘The world we inhabit… is a sensitive sphere suspended in the solar wind, a round field of sentience sustained by the relationships between the myriad lives and sensibilities that compose it. We come to know more of this sphere not by detaching ourselves from our felt experience, but by inhabiting our bodily experience all the more richly and wakefully, feeling our way into deeper contact with other experiencing bodies, and hence with the wild, intercorporeal life of the Earth itself.’

— David Abram, In the Depths of a Breathing Planet

Photograph and body art by Vilija Vitkute

Magic - some more definitions

1. Encounters that pull us into direct experience with the wildness of existence

2. Science x Religion ÷ Quality of Attention

3. The Art of Metamorphosis

Dung beetles navigate by the light of our galaxy. Mycelium can feel your footsteps as you walk. Salmon and bears help transform oceanic nutrients into old growth forests. An Ecology of Magic should explore these kind of vivid embodiments of metamorphosis and relationship. Without them we drift into abstract terrain and philosophies devoid of the sensuous fantastic. At the same time, some kind of vibrant philosophy is also required, otherwise magic gets stuck in materialism, and the eye gets dazzled by the ten thousand things.

‘The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things.’

— Laozi, Toa Te Ching

The ten thousand things constitute the sensuous world, like this buffalo enjoying the water.

I love the ten thousand things - the animals, forests, mountains and cities, the people, the fireworks, the food and the music. They are gifts of Aphrodite, who makes the world available to the joy of the senses. She would have us revel in them from one end of the year to the next, but an ecology of magic should not be hypnotised by a single goddess, no matter how charming. Instead, we should hold the tension between the different gods, and between the One and the Many, illuminating nature’s transformations and interdependencies in a way that restores a sense of the sacred.

Does this make any sense to you?

I want to dive into the ten thousand things, write whole essays on ravens, octopus, and the metamorphosis of stars into animals over great spans of time. But if we only do that then we might never escape the mechanistic worldview.

The view that nature is one giant clockwork emerged in force in the 1600s, gathered pace in the late Enlightenment and cemented its presence in cultural gene pool during the Industrial Revolution and the systems of schooling that came out of it. Before that, human beings inhabited a living cosmos where all things were permeated with a kind of sentience that made everything more alive to the senses, to imagination, and to the emotions that moved us to care about the world.

Ecological crisis is far less possible if you assume, like the Native Americans (or any indigenous people) that the world is in some sense alive and permeated with intrinsic value.

‘The Earth does not belong to us: we belong to the Earth. There is no death, only a change of worlds. Humankind has not woven the web of life.’

— Chief Seattle

Without some awareness shift in the flawed philosophy that permeates the culture, the awe-inspiring quality of nature’s ‘ten thousand things’ run the risk of remaining nothing more than a fascinating set of mechanisms in a Universe composed of mechanical processes where the only locus of meaning is what human beings fabricate for themselves. The story of how we came to see the world this way is essential if we want to liberate ourselves from it.

‘Western man enacted an extraordinary dialectic in the course of the modern era - moving from a near boundless confidence in his own powers, his spiritual potential, his capacity for certain knowledge, his mastery over nature, and his progressive destiny, to what often appeared to be a sharply opposite condition: a debilitating sense of metaphysical insignificance and personal futility, spiritual loss of faith, uncertainty in knowledge, a mutually destructive relationship with nature, and an intense insecurity concerning the human future.’

Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View

Do you feel an insecurity concerning the human future? What about personal futility or spiritual loss of faith? Somehow, we live in a world where a great many people have no one to even raise these questions, let alone help them explore the beginnings of potential answers. In all our years moving through the school system, most of us hear next to nothing about civilisation’s mutually destructive relationship with nature, and very little about alternative ways that we might live. The priority of those who form the curriculum is to generate a workforce to help boost the economy, not create a more deeply satisfying, life-sustaining culture.

‘Our civilization has never been more vast, complicated, and fragile. This systemic fragility is exacerbated by new technologies, geopolitical instability, an ecological crisis and a reliance on global economic supply chains. These interlocking, interrelated problems are known collectively as the metacrisis.’

— The Consilience Project

What relevance does an ecology of magic have in a world that’s falling apart, and could rapidly get a lot worse? Some would say that we should focus all our energies on practical solutions and policy change. Whilst those things are valuable, they are not the whole picture. Something deeper is required.

‘A problem cannot be solved with the same kind of thinking that brought it about.’

— Albert Einstein

‘There are solutions to the major problems of our time, some of them even simple. But they require a radical shift in our perceptions, our thinking, our values.’

— Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life

‘I think something more is needed than the idea of sustainability. It’s got to be something much more profound that touches the heart… you realise that our job on the earth is to fall in love with it, and you only fall in love with it if you’re aesthetically alive to it.’

— James Hillman

If today we are under a spell that keeps us from being aesthetically alive to the world, then an ecology of magic must try to break it. It can do this by helping us see with fresh eyes the outrageous creativity and interdependence of nature, by reminding us that we are enmeshed within it, and that the depth and quality of appreciation transforms the field of possibilities and the worlds we bring worth.

People are engaged in this kind of work all over the world in very different ways, from individual living lives of quiet magic to organisations dedicated to helping foster the kind of cultural transformations that are life-sustaining, not only for the rich, and not only for humans.

Yet without some kind of grounding philosophy powerful enough to restore a sense of the sacred that is intrinsic to the cosmos, then we are likely to remain trapped in the same kind of thinking that brought the metacrisis about. Whatever shape this grounding philosophy takes, it must also be able reflect on itself critically, drawing on the full range of human capabilities to see through its blind-spots and correct for them. The increase of cults and gurus is an indication of our inability to do this. It’s a difficult job.

So who’s doing this work? How far have we come?

Deep Ecology made a bold attempt and still has value. Object Oriented Ontology, though much more technical in approach, also attempts to catalyse a sense of wonder and respect for the non-human world. The Kyoto School, has a promising overlap of Animism, Zen Buddhism and Neoplatonism. Depth psychology and archetypal psychology hold a huge body of work, much of which aims to restore an appreciation for the anima mundi - the soul of the world.

Here are two two more recent attempts to providing a philosophical ground out of which genuine solutions for the meta-crisis might eventually grow. The first is cosmo-erotic humanism.

‘Cosmo-erotic humanism is a philosophical movement aimed at reconstructing the collapse of value at the core of global culture… A new story of eternal yet evolving value that can serve as a context for our diversity, finally allowing us to speak of humanity as part of a shared story of evolving cosmic value.’

David J. Temple, First Principles and First Values

The second is work of Dr Iain McGilchrist, whose books The Master and His Emmissary and The Matter With Things appear to have much overlap with Cosmo-erotic Humanism.

‘This book offers a way of looking at the world quite different from the one that has largely dominated the West for at least three hundred and fifty years - some would say as long as two thousand years. I believe we have systematically misunderstood the nature of reality, and chosen to ignore, or silence, the minority of voices that have intuited as much and consistently maintained that this is the case.’

— Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things

All this barely scratches the surface, but the shift in worldview embodied by these works could be taken as part of an ecology of magic, together with vivid examples of nature’s interconnectedness, and direct encounters with the wildness of existence, from comets to caterpillars, egrets to electrons, to the trees in their quietness, swaying outside your window.

Future posts in the Ecology of Magic thread might be more focused on inspiring examples of metamorphosis and interdependence, but I’ll be linking them back to this broader context, since that gives them more relevance and power for your life.

A Spell For Creation

Within the flower there lies a seed,
Within the seed there springs a tree,
Within the tree there spreads a wood.

In the wood there burns a fire,
And in the fire there melts a stone,
Within the stone a ring of iron.

Within the ring there lies an O,
Within the O there looks an eye,
In the eye there swims a sea,

And in the sea reflected sky,
And in the sky there shines the sun,
Within the sun a bird of gold.

Within the bird there beats a heart,
And from the heart there flows a song,
And in the song there sings a word.

In the word there speaks a world,
A world of joy, a world of grief,
From joy and grief there springs my love.

Oh love, my love, there springs a world,
And on the world there shines a sun,
And in the sun there burns a fire,

Within the fire consumes my heart,
And in my heart there beats a bird,
And in the bird there wakes an eye,

Within the eye, earth, sea and sky,
Earth, sky and sea within an O
Lie like the seed within the flower.

— Kathleen Raine

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