Lately there has been much discussion over how do we find ways to enchant ourselves again. To look at the world perhaps not with despair, or at the very least solve the problem of faith that there is opportunity for brighter tomorrows. Numerous conversations have been held as of late by both colleagues as well as mainstream pundits like Jonathan Pageau about this overarching feeling of dread towards the present age. For many, it is as if we are all in the waiting room for a surgery that’s necessary or a doctor's appointment where we all dread the sight of our own blood. Despite our squeamishness, we know what is to come is necessary for this era. A feeling as if the dark ages are around the corner, but there is no spirituality that’s analogous to the religiosity of Medieval Europe or their Eastern counterparts.
There seems to be this overall malaise of looking towards both the physical, material, and spiritual challenges of our time. So many people are looking for answers as to how to endure and survive the current age. I have written and discussed the idea that we are in a civilizational as well as a genetic bottleneck, where the most important issues of our time are the survival of our ideas, cultures, peoples, and the causes and solutions to our cratering birthrates. That these are the dark times where some individuals may not live to see their ideas, their family names, or even their works survive the coming generations and such replacement is sponsored by the State.
We are a in the position to see just the entrance of this bottleneck, reconciling with the cultural, political, and technological changes that have kickstarted this great challenge and crisis to the West.
This crisis is only just beginning, now as the world faces an ongoing fertility crisis, the great replacement and the celebration parallax move into overdrive. We're seeing cultures, accents, languages and religions disappear alongside their histories and great canons of work in the name of some kind of progressive, chiliastic multiculturalism that comes with the its subsequent erasure of what came before. There has been much discussion over political solutions, from remigration to deconstruction of political mythologies everyday people are ruled over. There is also the spiritual lens which many are looking towards to find the will to carry on. To make a terrible reference and to date myself, I am reminded of Revenge of the Sith, wherein the droid tells Obi-Wan Kenobi that Padme is simply losing the will to live. People do give up, or are complacent because they have the material comforts they need, and try not to think about what lies ahead. In general most people know that things are bad, but like so many men I know it boils down to a shrug of “well what can you do?” That’s certainly fair, not much one can do on a grand political scale, but that doesn’t discount what we can do with ourselves or our local communities. Even online in the ethereal “discourse” the fight and discussion over belief and faith remains perennial because despite what many descendants of the New Atheists have to say, man is a religious animal. Everyone is struggling to find it, what gives them the motivation or the transcendent belief in the good, the true, and the beautiful to endure.
But we’ve heard all this before, seen all this before, and sometimes a break from the world is necessary to recalibrate our approach. All this talk of enchantment and somewhat childlike wonder comes back to the question and battle over belief. Oftentimes we say to ourselves that it is indeed a war of belief, which is true, you can believe in the antithesis of civilization (leftism) or something more theologically grounded in truth. As Dr. Henry Hopwood Phillips recently wrote, bad theology makes for bad realities. A theological course correction, one that answers the question of life and will - is necessary.
Things are about belief, as they point to and try to answer questions that we don't really have immediate answers to, questions of the eternal, questions of our life and our livelihoods. This of course has led to three paths of sorts that I've seen many on the right try and find answers to be re-enchanted in the world around us. There are some similarities, but of course vast differences in conclusion, practices, and appearances. The three concepts, of course, of Vitalism, Neo-paganism, and Christianity. In fact to even say that are three pathways is generalizing, as there are some syncretism be the three, and each possess their own factions or niche interests in pursuing one of these respective paths. All three of the listed pathways have seen their own ways of trying to navigate and understand the world around us and in turn, they've all tried to answer and respond to the various questions and existential challenges of our time. I can already sense some of you reading this and thinking that I am making the claim that they are similar, or that I am trying to universalize in some sort of Campbell-esque monomyth. Quite the opposite, they are all three very uniquely different paths, with very clear boundaries and differences where they would potentially be foes or in an uneasy alliance with clear points of friction at best and outright incapable of surviving together in the long run. However such battles seem far off, and despite their incommunicable differences, they arise in this moment to stand to the call of their beliefs and convictions, to answer the challenges of our time.
Now, this isn't to say that I have the answers, Lord knows that I don't at least not in full. I do want to talk about some of the things I've recently experienced that has allowed me to put my thoughts to paper and express the ideas of how we ourselves can be re-enchanted. At the core of this crisis, much like the hero’s journey, we must accept the call to be re-enchanted, we must accept the challenge. We have our adversaries, we have seen the enemy and he is the bugman, the last man, the Judas Iscariot who had sold his soul and his salvation for thirty pieces of OnlyFans and Ozempic.
So many people on the political left, for instance, have decried the idea that we will return to a point in time of strong nations, strong people, and strong gods. Despite their lamentations over the political reactions to our current age, they're the ones that are still very much in power. The anti-establishment formula so easily manufactured and sold to their adherents, all while embracing what is to come as the consequences of it, hell or high octane airline crashes.
They are the individuals that look at the world and see the materialistic needs and ways in which they can make things better, that we can build more houses, that our nations are not yet full and that we will somehow be happier in the midst of going against every single trend of what made civilization actually functional to begin with. For as much as these types scream about “ontological evil” or better yet, on how we need to have the newest and latest form of cuisine that is now going to be dotted along every major metropolitan center. This of course is said as they turn a blind eye to supposedly “flourishing” neighborhoods, and even when they try and speak out in the name of their own ideals, they find themselves on the wrong end of a knife. This is their acceptance of the challenge, to just sit by an idly be and let it wash over them. Such a state of mind, whether they acknowledge it or not, is the loss of the will to live.
Our current age as with so many ages that come before us have asked for more than what the average man can do. It has produced great men, but also possessed men, and those who were happy to sit idly by. Enchantment comes with answering the call of the age, what the Lord has put before you, to acquire the peaceful spirit and to take up the challenge that lies before you. The crown may not be lying in the mud for you to pick up, but there are other ways to shake off the shackles of the spirit of the age. Most of the men and women I've spoken to in these spaces are healthy with their lives, but the crisis over masculinity and manhood are still being asked and addressed. While this may have been something that brought someone like Jordan Peterson into prominence some eight or nine years ago, the questions that were being raised then are still being asked and discussed today. As Soren Kierkegaard wrote in The Present Age, “As an age without passion it has no assets of feeling in the erotic, no assets of enthusiasm and inwardness in politics and religion, no assets of domesticity, piety, and appreciation in daily life and social life.”
Which brings us back to the three paths that have tried to and have taken up the call to adventure. I use this term in the archetypal sense, as the “adventure” or “challenge” shouldn’t be misconstrued as something trivial, it is indeed civilizational. These paths saw a real shot in the arm, an overdrive, a shot of adrenaline brought to them in the midst of the COVID crisis, a crisis however manufactured or opportunistic saw some of the biggest changes and overhauls in power since September 11th, 2001. The complete restructuring of the economy, the amount of state power and control, and the absolute anarcho-tyranny that we live under. Indeed, the COVID crisis did bring about a resurgence of religious traditions and ideas and brought them back to the forefront as we saw a mainly death-avoidant West meet the idea of “dying” in more than regular numbers, but also the riots, state control, and the manifestations of evil that came from the Regime and its apparatchiks. Perhaps this is broad, and some of you might be asking where technology plays a role in this, and I will get to it later on.
Starting with Vitalism, (and I will caveat that this is my understanding of it) taking this more Nietzschean approach, is one that I do have a lot of respect for even if I find its sincerity and kayfabe with Christianity online tiresome or sometimes overplayed - but perhaps the similar walls it runs into illustrate where the fault lines are between those two camps.
Trying to understand that we are in a time where strength is required, where health is paramount, that we live in an age where the old, the ugly, and the worst of our passions are public virtues so that the fat, and the degenerate excesses of our time have enabled the worst attitudes in our society.
We should be fit.
We should be strong.
We should be seen as beautiful, charismatic leaders that can successfully win the day, get the girl, and have a home to raise children in and be willing to defend it. This also means that we have to reject the shackles of old political orthodoxy. No more of this William F. Buckley National Review nonsense, where they're striving and whining about what is to come from these online radicals who have garnered so much public attention over the last few years.
Most of the people I've met who believe in these things are actually very successful and talented people that strengthen themselves, not just in the physical sense, but also have a keen business and political instinct that has allowed them to survive even doxing and to create organizations, events, and conferences on how to survive and build and thrive. Creators are necessary, the builders, the people who preserve knowledge and functional ways to make something work after collapse, or emerge from the wreckage of competency crises as the ones who can be the leaders of a new age. It’s exciting, tantalizing for the old and the young, and there are things to learn from it.
Paganism too of course has seen a popular resurgence and has been there much longer to some extent the political right than most people acknowledge. I will tread lightly here for obvious reasons, as this I do know the least on but it is there in its own way. Whether for actual belief, or even reinvigorating historiographies and mythologies to reclaim them from the modern lenses of progressivism it reorients back to a people and place.
The shaking off the shackles of Liberalism and Universalism or agreeing with Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, they have returned to something older, hoping to enable them to have the clannish and tribality tendencies that will enable them and their identity in people to survive. While I disagree with them in their moral and theological paradigms, I certainly can't fault them for trying, returning to traditions that have been left well, well behind for some millennia if not more.
It is perhaps the most “return to roots” or “return to the land” of the three of them. Physical beauty of the land and religion, of course, are some ways to do so, but it also comes down to the fact that how can we be enchanted by the world if we are just by ourselves? There is certainly more to a land, there is also its people and ways of thinking that for many are beyond conceptualizing due to the passage of time and for its visible antithesis to the existing Christian and Post-Christian ages and nations.
All three certainly have a love for the land, an understanding that this age has fallen away into something that isn’t sustainable for living other than to simply just float on by while the worst washes all of them over, and all three have decidedly said no to such entropic nonsense and accept the call to defend what they believe in.
This brings us to the third pathway, the path that I am on, which is Christianity. 2020 on has seen a keen into high church traditions, particularly Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, and to some extent high church Anglicanism and Lutheranism as well. There have been ongoing battles inside all three major denominations of the United States, Protestantism, Orthodoxy, and Roman Catholicism, about how to fight back against not just the regime, but also the decrepit liberalism of our age inside their own institutions. While yes, there has been criticism that this right-ward branch of faith and belief has been labeled as “late to the party” by the previous two and perhaps that it is the case in the rampancy of the largest religion of the West being turned into a progressive leviathan by both outsiders and heretics.
Whether it's the Wolfe Brothers, William and Stephen, talking about the issues ranging from Presbyterianism to, of course, the Southern Baptist Convention, Ryan Turnipseed's own fight with inside the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, but also the FBI targeting Catholics and academic “Terror Experts” looking into all three major forms of Christianity.
I had written earlier that to be re-enchanted is to take the first step and accept the call to adventure. As for us Christians, we’re given some daunting challenges by Christ, to be Holy, to deny ourselves, pick up our cross, and follow him as we die daily. Even the call to “Be Holy” seems like an immense cavern to cross, centuries into the enlightenment, the scientific revolutions, and the crises of confidence in some of our most advanced fields of physics or even just textual deconstructions of scripture have rendered faith and mystery to be relatively lifeless even if its still within the cultural consciousness. After all, we live in an age of decadence where we can have anything at the click of a button. As Jonathan Bowden would say, who was certainly not a Christian, that an Albanian on a small motorbike can deliver it to you at 2am with a pizza if you so want. The same thing can be said about all of the temptations, vices, and sins of the world. The Prince of the Earth, Satan, can deliver it to you via Amazon, Pornhub, or whatever you so choose to invest your time and money in. On this ladder of divine ascent, it is so easy for demons to pick us up, pull us away, and make us fall down into the pit where we will be burned and swallowed alive. This means that we also have to be willing to defend ourselves and our faith amongst those that are okay with the spirit of the age and the prince of the world ruling over them rather than the King of kings. We have our God, his saints, and tools of spiritual warfare necessary to do it.
After all, there’s a lot of bullshit out there to filter you.
The call to adventure or inspiration can reignite by taking those single steps, to reconnect to the wild, or to appreciate the hallowed ground you walk on. Patriotism for example, while so twistable to suit regime interests is incredibly powerful. For Americans, you can feel it when walking through the rows of gravestones at Arlington, or the aura of history that is almost overwhelming when walking through Independence Hall in Philadelphia. It is something that you can feel, it is almost tangible, you can grasp it in your hands and in your heart knowing that you are connected to something much greater than yourself and it is certainly worth pursuing and going out of your way to see it. This has been something that must be sought after within the lens of faith or belief, a path to recapture what you belong to. A recent (even if temporary) change to my window’s view certainly helped spark that re-enchantment for myself.
I recently went on a vacation. This was the first time I had actually taken the time to travel and see a part of the country that I haven’t seen before, and was off to see old friends. I used to travel quite often when I was in college, both for academic purposes, but as well as for extracurriculars. Yet this was the first time in years I had done something other than plan out a trip to see some friends and make the decision to drive rather than to fly. Not so much out of recent news about the airline industry, it just happened to be cheaper that way. So from Texas to North Carolina, I couldn't have been more happy to drive on my own as I was already used to long distance driving. Texas, as is the United States a whole, is a pretty damn big place. The adage about 100 years being a long time to Americans but nothing to Europeans is true, but so is 100 miles being nothing to Americans but seemingly vast to our European friends. An insane thing to think about in terms of comparison as I remember my father and my family driving when we grew up overseas and we could be on the road for four hours or so, and I could have passed through three, maybe four countries, depending on where you were on the map. A 12 hour drive for instance can get you from El Paso to the other side of the state if you include stops and traffic, and you still haven’t left Texas.
I took the time to get to where I was going, I had the time off thanks to use-it-or-lose-it vacation time. I split my drive into two days to get there when I could have probably made it in one sitting. However, I couldn't have been more happy to just tweet about where I was going, taking pictures of various gas stations and stops where I was at in order to secure advice from other individuals about where to go. I took scenic routes and tried roads other than the interstate and main roads, and I was rewarded with views most don’t see thanks to the convenience of the highway. I had driven through Arkansas and Tennessee, and eventually had found myself near Oak Ridge, where the Manhattan Project has some of its fame. I couldn't help but feel the strange aura of being there, as if almost as if I was in a location where witchcraft had taken place, not the old rituals of druids or others of old. This feeling was instead something far more technologically thaumaturgic, something more modern, something in which told me that the things that were being messed with around here were not necessarily of this earth, but not necessarily from the kingdom of heaven either.
I somewhat regret that none of you actually know what I saw as I didn’t think to snap photos at all leaving my phone in my car. Then again I'm also really glad I didn't take any pictures to begin with, by not taking any photos, leaving my phone in my car I was for once disconnected again from this entire world that I access daily as my online self. There were long stretches of my drives, both on highways and scenic country and gravel roads, that where I had no phone connection at all.
It was me, and just me alone.
No YouTube video playing, no audiobook, no podcast, no text messages or phone calls.
Just me, the open road, and the sights around me.
I actually took the time to stop at various historical sites along my drive to take a look at what constituted as history in my country. Something that I don't think too many people actually do when they say historical marker two miles on your right. I would actually stop and see what the historical marker was, events both local and national that would tell you that there was much more to the land you were driving through. Whether it was about early frontiersmen or the legends and stories of Daniel Boone, all of a sudden you were reminded that this country has its own culture, its own history, something that was once taught all the time in public schools and in private education that has now been thoroughly eradicated. Even Disney, one of the biggest propagandists for a progressive monoculture once animated the legends and histories of American folk tales like Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed. For most people, outside of those who take the time to study their own history such tales are nothing more than just a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sign on the highway.
A history…your history, of course, if you were to look it up, you would have the opportunity to learn about the lives and histories of settlers, minor celebrities, writers, soldiers, local poets and criminals that we have no idea what their story is unless we took the time to stop on the side of the road and look them up. I had fallen in love again with my country once more.
I've driven quite some distances before in the United States, all across the West, the Pacific North West and all through the South. I've been to the Pacific Coast and now over in the East Coast and put my feet in the Atlantic Ocean, something I had done once on the other side in Europe, but never here in my home country. I couldn't help but find myself bewildered seeing small diner chains and the people who worked there. To see these small towns and their small stores just like my own and to talk to those willing to strike up conversation and ask where you're from, who you are, and what do you do, and why are you passing through these parts, was something that you just don't see anymore.
Surely the American Interstate Highway System is somewhat responsible for this, or is it something that I just don't see anymore? In the back of my mind I know America has become less homogenous, but accounting for geography I was still in the region that I identify with. After all I'm not a trucker, I don't travel very often, and my job is 100% remote minus some hour and a half travel to the main office. In the midst of all my rhetoric about growing up without roots, I could feel them however vestigial or real on the road and seeing the beauty of the land. All the while reaffirming my beliefs as well, I don't love my government or the people that run it, in part because they are so hostile and antithetical to what this nation was, but there’s certainly still a part of that old country inside, especially in the South.
You could say that it is in “flyover country” and the people therein, and their small 2,000 center population towns that are one roads that all work at the lumber mill, cut down trees in Arkansas. These one road towns, with each kind of Protestant church imaginable on different blocks, with family owned businesses that have been around for 100, if not 200 years. You could almost call these people the old believers of the United States. You can’t escape who you are to some degree. Growing up I had seen parts of Eastern Poland, but most of my experiences were uniquely Western European.
It’s in the same way that I've lived all over America, I've lived close to Washington, D.C, I've lived close to the outskirts of San Diego, I've lived in the border towns of El Paso and Las Cruces, and now I live conveniently somewhere undisclosed and far away. Despite the fact that I have no real relations to these people, let alone my own extended family, it was easy to strike up conversation, visit parish churches all across America in worship and fellowship and feel as if I could settle down in any of these places.
I don't really really dive into the urban-rural divide debate all that much, despite having very urban tendencies. I was at heart and roots raised very country, and despite these tendencies it shows in my love for hunting and fishing. Being so close to the outdoors where I live now, one of the things I tend to do is to just take my books and to go out into the woods and read. I suppose that’ll change if I get married, but for now, it’s a nice part of my leisure time outside of work. The parks, the farmlands, the forest, all of it proves as a natural respite from the world that currently faces us all, even if it is just a temporary retreat. I suppose this brings us back to the discussion over where can we be enchanted again. Not like I was going to just make this a bait-and-switch style of vacation talk like Cliff Clavin from Cheers. There is a point to this discussion, if anything like the Hero’s Journey perhaps the wisdom from a wizened old frog can aid you in your own path.
Inspiration is good, but not everyone can just drop everything and take a vacation or do the stereotypical “backpacking through Europe.” The pause away from the online world was certainly a pleasure, but like with any break one must return to their labors. After all the writing and the YouTube money does certainly keep things cheap in terms of transplant medication expenses (I’m thankful for your ongoing support!) However being away from the online and the chats and the discourse for some time I could feel what was left of my neuroplasticity returning to me. In my previous writings and YouTube videos I have spent time discussing how our perception of the passage of time has been fundamentally warped by our social media presence or the speed of said discourse. That discursive speed, or even just hyper-awareness of what’s going on is also an incredibly powerful tool outside the digital spheres as well if you’re one who is looking to prepare for those hard times that lie ahead. Yet in these discussions over digital deracination, wherein we have autoamputated ourselves from the land and neighbors around us for an extradimensional digital space, leaving us disconnected from history, people, and nation. This is where outside world of our neighbors or local affairs disappear towards the latest bit of e-drama or cringe of the week. There should be a healthy balance between the two, and perhaps you can say that I am projecting, although I think I see enough of it online to know that there is a great disconnect from ourselves and the land that we live in. This isn’t an advocacy for the terrible catchphrase “touch grass” but rather that enchantment must exist outside of purely digital spaces. If there has been a vibe shift, where one can feel the energy shifting in the room wouldn’t you want to take that energy into something more tangible than just ratio’ing Bill Kristol? The scrying mirror that is your phone can do more than just that.
Sometimes it is good to be disconnected from the digital world, but it is essential we not lose sight of where connections and the discourse exists. I'm not a complete techno-pessimist, but I'm not a techno-optimist either, as so much of our social technology and great feats of engineering have been nothing more but powerful forms of odors and myrrh that has been poured over the rotting corpse of our social and moral order. However I can understand the techno-optimist position, and all three pathways of answering the call to adventure have their camps of skeptics and optimists. But it isn't just physical beauty of a landscape that can help re-entrench our enchantment and our love for nation and place, for home and hearth. To know that there is places that we can go, even if on a slight vacation or a day trip, that allows us to appreciate the beauty around us and to see that there are things worth fighting for and to understand who you might be related to that’s buried beneath your feet.
About once a week, or if not at least once a month, I go out to a small diner that has been locally owned for quite some time, that was built off of the ruins of a Denny's that did not survive, and back some time ago they turned it into their own restaurant. I go there quite often and I know the staff quite well. Every Wednesday when I'm there, there's always a Bible group of Gen X’ers about my parent’s age or older, of men, professionals, and their lifelong friends, discussing scripture and how to survive current times and the economic hardships that they're dealing with, both on a personal front, but as well as a business sense. They've invited me before, which I find kind although they all go to the same church and I’m not sure how well I’d fit in with them so I’ve politely declined.
Even as the American frontier closed, numerous songs, paintings, and hymns were talked about this place of great beauty, of purple mountains' majesty, and of amber waves of grain. This country, and its physical beauty, still astounds me. And for as much critique there is about America's car culture, or the death of the small town via the interstate highway system that was brought to us after the Second World War under President Eisenhower, there is still always the opportunity of the scenic route, to see these old historical markers, and to know, despite the fact that America is a young place, even in its young age, it still has a rich, beautiful, and sometimes bloody history that is well worth remembering, that is well worth stopping for on the historical marker on the side of the road.
And I don't mean this in a derogatory or even moralizing sense as if I am nagging, but I find it important that so much of our efforts nowadays in these spaces have been focusing on forming chapters, say with the Old Glory Club, or networking via basket weaving and doing what is necessary in order to meet like-minded friends and groups across the country and across the globe. Much to be built and much to be done for our own sakes and for the sake others. Whether you think collapse is happening sooner rather than later, we cannot all be meteorologists for the Eschaton. The Master wants to see us working.
As I say this as I've been blessed with somewhat of a large international audience. Sure, about half of my audience is from the Anglosphere, but the other half is from all over the world, as well as my patrons on Subscribestar are from places like Japan, Poland, South Africa, and even Egypt have supported my work or informed me of what it’s like in their neck of the woods. I've been blessed by that to hear their perspectives, and despite differences in religions, lifestyles, and ideas, we're all struggling with very similar problems.
Atomization, the erasure of local culture, language, and accent, and the idea that somehow this global village means one kind of Americanized Valley Esperanto English that we can all understand and enjoy as people on TikTok consume with their wide-eyed cartoony mannerisms and faces. This brings us back to the three paths I had mentioned earlier, as all three look to escape the universal solvent that has emerged from our post-war and post-revolutionary (1789) era that comes with the power of an Empire that deterritorializes cultures and ideas faster abroad than it does at home. All three of these pathways look toward their forefathers, and where success had reigned before. Just as the call to adventure is the first step in the hero’s journey, we must also look to our elders and see what sage advice they can bring to us. Whether that’s the wise old monk in the hermitage, or calling upon the traditions of your fathers for wisdom in the preservation of your culture and ideals. Sometimes we need to look towards the past and those who are older than us to find answers that can help us in our current time and the future.
Recently, I had saw someone tweet out that it is the individuals who are usually white guys in their mid-fifties that are looking around and shaking their heads saying, “Can you believe this shit?”
As they look at the world around them and their industry fall into incompetency and far beyond normalcy. They just like many of us had inherited a world gone mad, but the frog has finally noticed the boiling.
It is important to ask our fathers.
It is important to ask our grandfathers.
How do they work?
What skills do they know?
We have witnessed academia and vocational training continue to degrade, leaving room for DEI incompetency but also the disciplines to falter in general in terms of quality, competency, and general know-how. Enchantment can come by knowing the ins-and-outs of technical manual, or learning from the mistakes of the previous owner to know what must be done to avoid such an expensive set of repairs. While boomer hate is all the rage, and to some point understandably so that doesn’t mean that there aren’t those in ranks of seniority or even within our own families that could teach us about ourselves and the skills of the trade.
We can be enchanted by stories of old, enchanted by our own family and local traditions and how to carry them over to our world and age. Not too long ago, an older woman at church had brought together a family photo album of her husband and her husband's family. She had married someone who had escaped Russia during the revolution and then came to America from Germany after the Second World War. They were Orthodox but they were part of a circus troupe in order to get around during the pre-war era to escape Russia and would eventually be interred inside Germany until the end of the war. They would then come to America and start a new life, leaving their old fame behind. He would later meet and marry the woman that was showing me these photos. It was fascinating to see that during this time of his parents' marriage had stories in the newspaper next to their wedding photos like that of the coronation of the King of England, the Hindenburg, and the rise of National Socialism all at the same time photographed away in an old Austrian newspaper.
I never had the opportunity to meet her late husband, but she was telling these stories about how their marriage was, their family, who he was as a man and individual, and I couldn't help but feel enchanted to see photographs from over a century ago. To see things in languages I could barely understand or read, particularly German which I have studied and once spoke, but now I merely struggle to maintain basic grammar or reading comprehension. I was enchanted by a glance of the past, and the life she and her husband had lived together, not to mention what pre-war Europe looked like even if just by glimpses of nearly century old newspaper clippings.
Something that we take for granted these days by having photo rolls on our phone, albums put together on Facebook and other social media or even on our computers, but none of it is tangible or physical right in front of us. Tangibility that is the thing that would allow us to have the third place again to re-enchant ourselves is to create physically and not just digitally, the physical media and the rituals that came with the photo albums and maintenance of keepsakes and records of the family line. Sure, we can build followings online or create podcasts and essays and Substacks. But at the end of the day, if we are in real life and we have no real ability to have social skills to communicate or anything material to show in front of us and to our colleagues, what kind of life are we living? It seems particularly dreary, depressing, and outright sad for some, while others are happy to trade their identity for a consumable facsimile of one. Just has handwriting in a classroom can foster deeper brain connections than that of typing out on a keyboard, tactile physicality goes a long way in preservation of what we do - rituals must return.
We will need to create our own photo albums. Physical legacies that we can pass on to our children and our grandchildren. Proof that we were here on this earth and that our values and ideas are more than just something to swipe through. Proof that we aren't leaving behind just a hard drive or an SSD full of forbidden books and literature although we should pass that along as well. We should also print them out, or start the businesses like so many have in preserving and spreading these ideas and of our cultures. It is different when we read a book with the pages literally in front of our faces than on a Kindle or a PDF reader on our computers.
The re-enchantment of the world will come when we read stories to our children, reading Beowulf to our kids, or reading the Iliad, the Odyssey, or even the Aeneid to our children. Same with the lives of the saints, same with stories of our parents and our grandparents, as we tell them about a world that once was, and a world that we will indeed one day, create. I'm enchanted every time I go to church to hear the words that the holy things are for the holy, or that there is something greater than this earth waiting for us on the other side. I am enchanted when I walk around, or at night I hear the frogs croak at the pond, or when I look up and I see the actual Milky Way where I live because there's no real light pollution. We will be the wizened old mage or priest that will be there to help our children on their own journeys. These paths, whether through techno-optimistic vitalism or the Royal Path, is taking on the call and the challenge of this era. It is daunting whether we engage in the path of creating our businesses or tomes, or taking up the armor of God in spiritual warfare, but that is the call of our age.
This means, of course, we will have to work together as communities, both locally and online, to facilitate things like marriage, friendships, job opportunities, and partnerships for people who know what they're doing, and for those who have an idea on how to survive the coming troubles ahead. However this doesn’t mean all of us will be family men, any sort of group or guild of people working together to build and create doesn’t mean they’ll be trying to get wife’d up, a balance must be maintained. This year is only just beginning, but we already know what tasks lie before our feet. I don't know what lies in store, I would recommend that in the midst of our personal recognizance of the dark age that has just begun, a we must be the light that carries our way forward. Many have begun to forge that path, setting out into the vast unknowns and bringing ritual and experience to a world of slovenly and slothful meaninglessness.
Perhaps now the call to adventure rings true to you now, and perhaps you will take up the call and find your place in this world and do what you think is right. Faith, above all things is required to be enchanted once more, the faith that somehow you will endure, the strength to answer the call that has been laid before this period of our history.
The Faith and strength to know that no matter what happens, or no matter what you read, at the end of it all, God gets the last word.
Great article Prude.
It is done.