Enchantment's Odds & Ends

By Ken Evans

To be Enchanted, at one time, meant to be ‘carried away,’ from one’s hum-drum existence, to something or somewhere magical, perhaps even spiritual, at least, always more than merely physically pleasant! Of course, this depended on one’s beliefs in human souls. Take that away, and enchantment would be as mundane as everything else in modern daily life. No Soul means no possibility of Enchantment.

Ken Evans.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jul 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665591744

Ken Evans

Ken Evans has taught and applied ORM in English and French for 10 years. His know-how in data and process modeling and complex systems management comes from over 30 years in industry, including international jobs with IBM, EDS, Honeywell Controls, and Plessy and clients among the Fortune 500.

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2021 Ken Evans. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 07/26/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-9175-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-9174-4 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

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CONTENTS

Prologue

Magic

Some enchanted evening, You may see a stranger,

You may see a stranger Across a crowded room.

And somehow you know, You know even then,

That somewhere you’ll see her

Again and again . . .

Who can explain it? Who can tell you why?

Fools give you reasons; Wise men never try.

PROLOGUE

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In normal circumstances, the following should be a Footnote, but I discovered towards the end of my university teaching, that new undergraduate students had little understanding of history, especially if it included ‘Churchy Stuff’, hence they failed to understand what Max Weber was on about when I mentioned his ‘Disenchantment Thesis’! To make my undergraduates lives even easier, I’ve condensed the Reformation and Enlightenment to a Fairy Story, in keeping with the general feelings of the matter.

There was a time long before the Reformation, when the Catholic Church was the moral basis of sovereignty, and Kings were crowned by Bishops, with the Pope, the ultimate spiritual authority, and God’s representative on Earth, with his Bishops, titled-Princes of the Church. In 1095, Pope Urban 11’s brilliant idea to raise more cash for his personal projects, by turning his vast business empire into a Franchise. His Bishops and Priests were persuaded to sell ‘Indulgencies’ to the Peasant populations throughout Europe. The idea being that people would be able to buy ‘canonical penance’, in other words the Indulgence would considerably reduce the amount of time their deceased relatives spent in Purgatory, (purgatory was a kind of waiting room for dead Souls before admission into heaven) This racket eventually led to the Reformation; ensuring Protestantism and Secularism, and the invention of the Church of England. The gradual decline of ecclesiastical power eventually led to the idea of Disenchantment, which was associated with the general diminution of interests in a spiritual world, only to be partly regained in the nineteenth century, at the start of the so-called Modern era, when the nature of ‘Enchantment’ had been re-defined in more Secular terms; basically to a Materialistic enchantment, dependent on money, wealth, high social status, fame or power, as advised by Dire Straights; ‘That’s the way to do it, you play the guitar on MTV. That’s not working, that’s the way to do it, money for nothin’ and chicks for free!’

MAGIC

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"The meadows mourn for the old hallowing life;

Vainly we search the earth of gods bereft;

Where once the warm and living shapes were rife,

Shadows alone are left!"

Schiller’s Poem.

The sound! Indeed, the very smell of the sound of the word Enchantment, hangs in the air of my upstairs empty room, I sense it whenever I go there, as if it has a life of its own! Of course, this is only in my imagination, or remnants of long forgotten beliefs.’

That is one version of the story; another is my interest in Max Weber’s ideas of Disenchantment, stemming from a hazy introduction to his central ideas, many years ago. Since then I have been trying to lay his ghost, hoping to get to the heart of the matter. In short, my current view is that our world is far from being (completely) disenchanted, and we ‘moderns’ continue to actively seek enchantment of one kind or another, perhaps as a counter-balance to the banal routinisation of modern life!

I take it for granted that a simple idea of enchantment (although the word is rarely used today), is a simplistic belief in good and bad luck, curses, magic, spells, and a spirit world; also the means of communicating with the dead through seances. I rarely think about this, except for my occasional memories. One recent example, a distant one, a television advertisement from the 1980s, in which a family group, huddled together around their dinner table, amusing themselves, playing at conducting a Seance. A dim chilling light casting an atmospheric shadow across the scene; someone asks in a shaky voice, Are you with us, Uncle Sebastian? To which the whole family shouts in unison; "No! We’re with the Woolwich", followed by loud mirthful laughter. I concluded that serious public interest in spiritualism had waned and shifted to the margins of serious social interests!

By the beginning of the twentieth century, spiritualism, mysticism and the occult were back in fashion and made a brief return, becoming all the rage in1928, with Madam Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society’s 45,000 adherents in over forty countries, spreading like wildfire, influencing the general public’s response to their men folk’s slaughter in the trenches of the First World War. Also, soldiers at the battle-front, were carrying lucky charms and talismans for protection, holding seances in the Trenches, and telling each other’s fortunes, as did their women back home, all of this becoming common practice, on both sides of the war. Besides this, other occult practices among the professional classes took other forms and