The Way of the Kami

On the road to re-enchantment

This article was originally published in Dutch on Reactionair.nl

In his work Wissenschaft als Beruf, sociologist Max Weber used the term ‘disenchantment of the world’ to point to the cultural rationalisation and devaluation of religion that arose in the modernised, secularised West.

Weber say a world come into existence where the scientific understanding of the world became the dominant view. Events were to be explained by calculable processes and no longer subjected to erratic forces. Choices were to be made on rational motives.

The worldview within an enchanted society would envision the world as a great, enchanted garden, where phenomenons had a purpose in and of themselves or were steered by a higher power. Choices were made from within a metaphysical framework. The disenchanted world values the scientific and rational propositions above our own experience and world of ideas.

Much has been written about the disenchantment, even before Weber - who in turn borrowed the term from Friedrich Schiller - used it in his work. Similarly, Burke already reflected in his Reflections on the Revolution in France:

“The Age of Chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.”

Also former environmental activist Paul Kingsnorth frames the problem perfectly in my opinion, when he is asked on the Dutch television show Tegenlicht what he sees as the core problem in our society that lead us to this point:

“I don’t think it’s a technological problem. I think it’s a cultural problem, even a spiritual problem that we’ve got in our relationship with the rest of life, in our relationship with our own desire and our own greed, and our notion of what we mean by progress – which is usually very narrowly defined. To me, there’s a kind of spiritual emptiness at the heart of it. We don’t really know what relationship we want to have with the earth. Okay, maybe you can fuel your capitalist growth society on solar power instead of oil. But you’ve still got the same problems in terms of the world that you’re eating, the amount that you’re consuming, the values that you have, the individualism, the kind of digital narcissism that we have as a culture. It’s not a healthy culture we live in.”
- Paul Kingsnorth

The disenchantment of the world leads to a spiritual emptiness. We know the price of everything, but the value of nothing, as Oscar Wilde once remarked.

The inherent enchantment of the human experience

The disenchantment of the world leads to an existential alienation of our own experience. The human experience is inherently enchanted.

We experience our Being through Time. We attribute meaning and purpose to events that within a disenchanted world are stripped of their meaning and purpose. We can not overcome this process, because it is deeply entrenched in our sense of Self, and our experience of the world around us.

You have a sense of Self because, through meaning, purpose and narration, you weave a past Self to your current Self. You develop yourself, because you can envision a future state of Self, and can plot out a course to achieve and manifest that envisioned Self in the future.

Man is an auto-poetic system: it shapes itself. The Greek word ποίησις (poiesis) is the philosophical concept that is used for activity whereby a human brings something into existence that wasn’t there before. We are capable of bringing our Self into Being.

Without these possibilities you would experience yourself as a random shape. But it is exactly this feeling of randomness that is induced by the disenchantment. Roger Scruton once said (in another documentary on Dutch television):

I think one of the saddest things about the modern world is that people live in a tiny time slice of the present moment, which they carry forward with them, but nothing remains and there’s nothing in their experience which reverberates down the centuries, because the centuries to them are completely dark, just un-illumined corridors from which they stagger into the single little sliver of light.
- Roger Scruton

This perfectly encapsulates the disenchanted worldview. We no longer perceive the large and small patterns in the world, but only behold our own atomised Self, detached from its surroundings, both in space as well as time.

All the pattern recognition and storytelling traits of humans have become introspective. We no longer know where else to build narratives upon. We behold the world outside ourselves less and less, because we no longer recognise ourselves in the cosmology¹ that we have created within the disenchanted world.

The Cartesian schism between the mental and the physical has become so entrenched in our view of the world, that we no longer recognise the physical as part of our Self. Many among us now venture on an introspective journey to try and discern their Authentic Self - the secular soul - that lays hidden somewhere in the layers of physical Cartesian clay in order to build upon it their sense of Self.

Within the disenchanted world, our existence became arbitrair. There is no teleological component in our culture’s cosmology. We know, through scientific insight, that the universe is made out of dead matter, which is subjected to law-like forces of nature. Our worldview reduces the human experience down to an interplay of hormones, substances and electrical impulses in the brain.

The stars that watch over us in the night’s sky - and where we, in enchanted times, projected entire mythologies onto - now are known to be little more than large scale nuclear explosions taking place at inhumane distances from us.
The shapes we saw them make onto the firmament nothing more than an interplay of our human ability to see patterns, and how the stars appears to be placed in the havens, when looked upon them from our position in the galaxy.
If we look beyond our own human experience (since humans live on average 70-80 years at best), even these shapes within the firmament are shown to not even be stable and stars move across the sky, independently of each other. We’re not even looking at the same sky that our ancestors when they first started naming the patterns.

Within this universe of dead matter, predictable natural forces and billions of years of development without purpose, there seems to be no place for a human being. The problem is: nothing I’ve written above is factually incorrect. So where does the human, and its sense of Self fit within this worldview?

How the disenchantment cuts off our relation with the world

The alienation from our surroundings has lead us to an image of ourselves that has turned inwards. Those who can no longer relate to their world, will withdraw from it. The disenchantment and scientific worldview leads us to a cosmological model that has us accept quantifiable propositions we can not deny, but that we can not assess as truth from our own lived experience.

The love one feels for one’s partner or child can not be contained as ‘an evolutionary process that benefits the survival of the species, which is unlocked by pheromones and substances in the body’, and whoever fully and solely adheres to that view as the truth, rejecting their lived experience as illusionary will probably not experience much success in love.

The modern human seeks constantly for a compromise between the inner lived experience and the propositions that we know are not (yet) falsified by the light of ever expanding science.
Where this compromis is unattainable, the propositional knowledge of the scientific cosmology undermines our Being. The realisation that what man experiences within has no relation to the quantified scientific truth, thus making these experiences illusionary and untrue, leads to a deep nihilism; a cosmology where there is no longer any value in human experience, as they can no longer build these experiences on the cosmology.

The disenchanted worldview is a worldview of propositional epistemology; our knowledge of the world largely consists of propositions we take as truth. We have deemed our own lived experience and our own perspective as untrustworthy in the search for truth.

The disenchantment as a process has been going for a long time. Even before Weber or Burke posited their observations. Modernity characterises itself by the abundance of methods to cope with the disenchantment and integrating Man back into the cosmology. These methods range from the radical rejection of the scientific worldview (for example: creationisme, certain protestant denominations and several new religion movements), a conscious re-enchantment (Theosophy, de Romantic period, New Age and even certain schools within Islam like Salafism, start off as a reaction to Western disenchantment), to the radical embrace of the disappearance of the human scale (technocracy, trans-humanism or a cosmic nihilism). At this point in time, our societies appear to go through a theological conflict between these three paths.

On one side of this conflict, we find the fully automated luxury gnosticism, with its end goal a technocratic world beyond all boundaries and shapes, freed from all constraints that prevent you to be whatever you want to be.

The worldview of this faction has taken the turning in on oneself to the point that it believes that deep inside everyone there hides an Authentic Self, that has to be freed out of the constraints of the physical body and the physical world by means of the progress of science. This progress unlocked for us the control of our reproduction cycle, our emotions and feelings and now ventures into procedures and interventions on the body to make the outer self reflect the authentic inner self. The next step will be metaverses and trans-humanism to manifest and express this Authentic Self fully within a (controlled) simulated environment.

At this side, Rousseau’s Authentic Self is the last bulwark against the torrents of nihilism washing over us and the ensuing meaning crisis. In order to maintain this bulwark and prevent a peep in the abyss, the world has to affirm and reflect back this Authentic Self.

This is of course an impossibility, for it is precisely because of the restrictions of the physical world that we are able to substantially Be or Become. It’s by constraints and limits that we have a language, which without them would fall into haphazard noise, no longer viable to convey meaning.

On the other side of the ring reigns an equally Faustian and utopian nostalgia, spurred by the wish to return to a better moment in time² where people strive towards an ideal state of Being. Ideas of homogenous societies (which in reality will never turn out as homogenous as they are envisioned to be), benevolent philosopher kings (a strong leader or a metaphysical ideal) that receive unconditional loyalty, or the 'expulsion' of all the inconvenient elements characterises these nostalgic movements.

On this side people are looking for a moment when the world was still experienced as sensibly ordered and try to restore that former order. They walk the path of the character Cypher from the movie The Matrix: they wish to forget and go back to slumber in a comfortable illusion. Back into Plato’s cave, for they wish to trade in the bright light of the sun for darkness and a world of shadows from a foregone period.

Again, an impossibility. The wish to do so makes this nostalgia Faustian, because it opens the gates for human suffering to enforce upon the world a totalitarian ideal image of the world. It would create a hell on earth, for the short-lasting experience of happiness. A deal with the devil.

The former systems that people long for have fallen out of grace for a reason. They had their time and when the world changed, they changed with it or where doomed to go extinct. Our world now is different, offering other challenges. We need to find the right tools for today.

Don’t get me wrong. We can and should learn from foregone periods and the systems they created - and the disappearance of many of them is not all due to natural processes - but we will not find the solutions in a nostalgic longing to emulate these systems from past times in our own time. We shall need to find systems that integrate human experience ánd the advancing understanding of our physical world and bring them together into a framework for meaning.
This is easier said than done and I won’t be able to articulate answers to all the problems that arise from it. Nor is my interpretation of the disenchantment and the meaning crisis complete. This is only an aspect of the challenge before us.

I do endorse Kingsnorth’s thesis that a fundamental part of the problem of the disenchantment is within our relationship with our surrounding. The Western over-valuation of the propositional at the expense of other forms of knowledge makes that we do not longer relate properly with out environment and our own Being, but have become lost in a labyrinth of propositions, dogmas, word games and plays on definitions.

Often we’ve only strayed deeper into the maze because we didn’t realise which initial a priori assumptions about the world we clung to while looking for the exit. Questioning many of these assumptions by the post-modern thinkers was a necessity, but only lead us further estrangement of our frames of thinking. These days, we’re no longer even convinced there was an exit out of this maze in the first place.
“And what do we actually mean by ‘maze’?”

Different Ways of Knowing

I mentioned there are different ways of knowing. We have several models for defining them. For this article I want to focus myself on the 4P-model of the cognitive scientists Vervaeke and Ferraro. I won’t dive too deep in the work and study behind this model, but I find it a strong frame to expand upon the problem. The model is inspired by the different forms of knowing Aristoteles worked out in his Ethica Nicomachae.

The model defines four different ways of knowing (the 4 P’s):

• Participatory Knowing

  Knowing how to act within the relation between agent (you) and arena (your surrounding). It’s a fundamental and deep form of knowing. Participatory knowing is the difference between being in a state of aporia or confusion, and the so-called flow-state; the experience that you take part in a natural ‘dance’ with your surrounding.

• Perspectival Knowing

  Knowing through the embodied perspective. Seeing the world and your place within the world, from a certain viewpoint, and understanding the most important aspects of the situation you find yourself in.

• Procedural Knowing

  Knowing how to do something. This contains both complex knowledge (making jewellery or surgery) and simple knowledge (hammering a nail or tying your shoe laces).

• Propositional Knowing

  Knowing whether something is true. Propositional knowing is strongly related to language. Within language, this knowing enters the domain of implications, context, semantic meaning, relation between different propositions. This is a complex domein and it will quickly dawn on you that you can not know anything propositionally without already having formed an extensive corpus of programmatic knowledge to be able to express at all in language what is true.

To make it more relatable for you: let’s look at football (American or soccer, it doesn’t matter).
Knowing the rules of the game (propositional) doesn’t make you a good football player. Knowing how to kick the ball (procedural), but not understanding the rules, doesn’t make you a good player. If you know the rules and have ball control, you don’t automatically have insight where you fit within the team (perspectival) and how you should play with the other players on the field (participatory).
A good player has mastered all four types of Knowing in regards to football.

As Wittgenstein already expanded upon in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Propositional Knowing builds on Procedural Knowing. A linguistic statement reflects a process or a symbol, and requires foreknowledge of the world and the categories within it.
Procedural knowing requires in turn an environmental awareness. You must know where you are and what you want to achieve in order to evaluate the processes and procedures. This environmental awareness in turn requires perspectival knowing. To create this awareness, you have to form a proper agent-arena relationship. The environmental awareness builds on how you have mapped your environment.

The relationship between the 4 P’s works in both ways, because in order to map your environment properly, you first have differentiate between true and false, so that you won’t map your environment wrong.

The problem of valuing propositions and orthodoxy

The West was shaped for centuries by a monistic cosmology. There is one truth. The Western mind has difficulty coping with a pluralism of truths. Even the rejection of God leads us eventually to a mono-atheism: it replaces the singular truth with one other singular truth, as the rigid arguments espoused by the New Atheists frequently show.

This view of the world where there can only be one truth leads to orthodoxy. Orthodoxy comes from the Greek ὀρθοδοξία (orthodoxía), which roughly translates to ‘right belief’ or ‘right opinion’. Orthodoxy points towards this taking certain propositions (of faith) as true, which makes orthodoxy a term in the domain of the Propositional Knowing.

The West values ‘right belief’ - propositional knowledge - above all other forms of knowing. Our frame of thought finds it difficult to fathom that truth can change, depending on the perspective through which you look at it. That this perspective in turn reverberates through the entire agent-arena relationship, and that mapping the environment from a different perspective leads to an entire different ‘truth’, is something Western thought has difficulty with.

In my opinion this caused the West to take a wrong turn to cope with the spiritual emptiness and disenchantment.

Against the ever encroaching scientific view, Western thought has little tradition to think in terms of decentralised networks, nodes, processes and patterns that generate a pluralism of viewpoints and truths. Only by their success or their failure will these truths be weighed on whether they were able to create a functional agent-arena relationship.
Western thought is strongly set in (hierarchical) system thinking, and that no longer leads to a functional agent-arena relationship on the collective level with science and globalism shaping the modern paradigm.

It is through this paradigm that Western thought demands people and society to select one truth and to elevate this truth above all other truths as the ‘singular correct universal truth’. This is reflected in earlier attempts or re-enchantment: people sought for a new singular system that would be able to contain the totality of the entire world, or it rejected the emergent scientific view for a different (usually strong dogmatic ideological) model.

Due to the Western urge for orthodoxy every reaction on the disenchantment is characterised by forming new collections of propositions that people had to accept as true. The problem is that when eventually one of these propositions becomes overtaken by time, science, cultural shifts or something else, the entire framework comes apart as a house of cards. What remains are disillusioned people clinging to some remnants of their former worldview, that serves purpose as a piece of driftwood in the immeasurably deep ocean of nihilism and meaninglessness.

When we look upon the East, or look back onto the Hellenic Greek and Romans, we see an entirely different approach. It wasn’t so much the right faith or the right opinion that was considered important, but whether one did the right actions and followed the right procedures. These cultures valued orthopraxy above orthodoxy.

It was important to participate in the rituals, and to not forego the rites. It was important to recite hymns the correct way. It was important to take part in the praxis. What the singular truth was exactly, or whether you would uphold that in its totality, was considered far less important. This appears inherent to polytheistic systems, where people don’t (only) worship a singular chief deity, where cults that value different gods as the most high, dependent on caste, social position, profession or location, interweave and co-exist.

Orthopraxy above orthodoxy

What happens with the 4P-model if we would value orthopraxy? The weight would shift from the propositional to the participatory and the agent-arena relationship.

First the model checks whether you as acting agent properly relate to the environment. Your environment isn’t a global, world-spanning playground, but the immediate relations with other people, the interaction with your direct surroundings (household, school, office, local bar, social standing, etc.).

The truth becomes plural; no longer are you searching for the universal proposition that contains all relations between people in the entire world. You only look for what you can say for your relation with your world. If you stumble upon an answer that differs substantially from other’s, that doesn’t mean one of you is right and all the others are wrong. The agent, the arena and the perspectival are all variable and so the procedures downstream of that will all differ, and this in turn will make all the propositions coming out of it different.

A relation with your direct surrounding demands an attentive agent-arena relationship. You can no longer lose yourself in models, utopian vistas and universal theories about economy, morality, metaphysics and what is true or false.

You can try out new ideas immediately in practice, and you can retrieve insights and data directly to fine-tune and calibrate your agent-arena relation. There is no world where you, as singular agent, can fathom the totality of all the different arenas on earth, to then come up with a universal map that would apply to all the arenas.

Shinto and the re-enchantment

We now approach the punch line that I already hinted at in the title of this piece. Shinto, which translates to way of the kami.

For those not in the know about Japanese culture, a short introduction: Shinto is a system of animistic nature worship native to Japan. To put it very bluntly: it is a form of land spirit (kami) worship.

While Japan is a strongly secularised country - only 36% of the Japanese identifies themselves as religious, of which the majority is Buddhist (only 3% identify as Shinto) - more than 70% of the Japanese actively participate in Shinto-praxis in one way or another.

Why do I focus on Shinto, and not on a generalised animism? I find Shinto a strong example because as a system it’s fully operational within a hyper-modernised society. The Japanese society requires far less conversion to our own society than other animistic systems do. Shinto proves in its existence and success that it can integrate perfectly fine with modernity.

Kami

Kami has no direct European counterpart. It is often translated as spirit or god, but the connotations these words conjure up for modern Europeans aren’t really covering it.

Kami are often a kind of landspirit that live in forests, mountains, rivers, trees and rocks. But they also are present in phenomenon and forces of nature, like wind, rain, thunderstorms, sun, moon, fire (either the hearth/kitchen, or an open fire) and fertility (reproductive and crops) are reigned by kami. Social and societal elements like fishing, war, provocations, gratitude, prosperity, poetry, sport, food and the toilet have their kami. Some ancestors, hero’s and other important people are elevated to kami and receive workshop. There is even a kami of body hair, that people worship in the hopes of the kami helping them with their receding hair line.

The kami come in different shapes and forms. Sometimes they are literally the water in a spring or rivier, and you enter the kami’s body when you bathe in these waters. Other times they have a presence that lingers in a building, or they come in the shape of a human being (former emperors are a representation of a kami), animals and even dragons. Households have their own kami and for these kami, many households have a small shrine: the kamidana. This is a small house-like structure where the kami resides.

The relationship between man and kami is one of mutual benefit and transaction. People ask the kami for favours and blessings by means of a small offering (money or burning incence) and by maintaining the space where the kami resides.

In many ways, the Shinto praxis represents old folk practises that were present in Europa and that had their roots in the pre-christian polytheistic cosmology. The kami remind us very much of the nymphs, dryads and nereids from ancient Greece. The ancient Europan cultures also personified phenomenons like the northern wind and the herald of winter (Boreas) and the western wind and the herald of spring (Zephyrus). They also had deities for social concepts like borders (Terminus) and liminal beings that crossed these borders (Hermes). The European traditions also had gods of the hearth (among them Hestia) and household spirits (of which the kobold, nisse, tomte, brownie and kabouters are representatives). Even in Christian times, many of these practises lingered for a long time, but got a slight re-theme and shaped them into angels and saints.

For the people now saying: “Say, Elvengast, why would you look to the East for inspiration? Sounds like Europe has enough of its own!” I’d say: “Europe had a lot of its own!”.
I am not arguing to import Shinto. But I want to reflect on the praxis that is still there, and what has been lost here. We should allow ourselves to be inspired by the living form of an ancient cosmology that used to be very much alive here, and use that inspiration the breathe new life into our own roots and revive an ancient cosmology that brought a spirit into the world.

The power of the Shinto cosmology, is that kami are present in the entire world. Many Western attempts to re-enchant created a strong distinction between the enchanted natural world and the disenchanted modern society. The kabouters and fairies aren’t present in the cities, only in the forests.
But if you are unable to meet these spirits in your everyday life and you only experience them when you go out into nature, then what does this enchanted cosmology offer you in the everyday? It becomes escapism, and isn’t a continuous cosmological model.

Shinto enchants the everyday life, in the midst of modernity.

Jinja

This is best examplified in the Shinto sanctuary: Jinja. This is the public place where a kami resides.

Jinja are recognised by their Torii arches. These gates function as a boundary marker. Whoever walks underneath the arch, enters into the domain of the kami. Just like when you enter a house where you are a guest, you follow strict rules of etiquette and a certain reverence for the host is expected of the visitor. Often a person makes a slight bow before walking underneath the Torii, as a sign of respect.

What immediately strikes me about Jinjas, and where it strongly contrasts with Western places of worship, is that the torii arch can be found everywhere. The profane and the sacred mesh together. There are jinja where a play ground is present in the middle of the kami’s house. coastal areas where a torii arch rises high above the water amidst bathers and water sport enthusiasts. Some jinja act as small parks where office personnel meets for lunch during the sunny days of summer.

Jinja are open to the public. Only when people want to enter the heart of the jinja (the place where the kami really lives), where people can bring a small sacrifice for the kami for blessings or benefits, the etiquette requires you to follow a short cleansing ritual. It’s often sufficient to wash the hands and rinse the mouth.

Shinto, a solution for the spiritual emptiness that haunts the West?

Shinto is a framework that sacralises the world. Kami are everywhere. They’re experienced as water, trees, wind, the grain in the fields and the provocations of friends and enemies. The kami are interwoven in everyday human experience. The sacred isn’t secluded for the dirty profane world, hidden and protected by the walls of a place of worship, but manifests itself unapologetic in public space.

City parks, beaches, backdoor alleys or hiking trials. Even in the fields of farmers, places are designated for the kami to reside. Wrath of Gnon once did a perfect Twitter thread on the so called Chinju no Mori (guardian forests). And especially watch how the torii is present everywhere to mark the domain of the kami.

The sacred is everywhere and during daily life, people are confronted with the presence of the transcendent. Attention is demanded by the structure of the world surrounding them.

Shinto is focused on orthopraxy. Following the etiquette is important, not what you believe about it. Shinto doesn’t teach an ethic of morality. Her priests are often even reluctant to designate Shinto as a belief system. For many Japanese, Shinto praxis is just part of Japanese culture, surrounded by habits and customs that you participate in because it’s just part of their culture.
In a sense, Shinto can be compared to secular festivities like the Fourth of July, or New Year’s Eve and religious-rooted holidays like Easter or Christmas. Even without Christian faith, the average Westerner partakes at least in some of the customs surrounding those holidays.

The difference with the Shinto system is that is reminds you everyday of the fact that something like Easter or Christmas is present in the cycle of the year. It’s a daily reminder of a liturgical system that sacralises the world.
You don’t wake up on a cold December day, thinking “oh, right! Tomorrow is Christmas. That was a thing!”, because the Shinto system circumvents this broken relation between the sacred and the everyday, and brings forward the patterns in the world around you.

Orthopraxy: you do things because you are suppossed to, and you partake in them with a reverence and your full attention. The act itself is important, and requires your attentive presence, but it isn’t religious per se. Of course, Shinto checks all kinds of boxes that we would associate with a religion, even in the Western mind. But taking part in the Shinto praxis, doesn’t make someone a Shintoist. It’s in your actions, not in your identity. Many Shinto priests even identify themselves as religiously Buddhist, but not religiously Shintoist.

For the Western (and perhaps even broader Abrahamitic) paradigm, this takes some getting used to. We identify ourselves with our religious actions. This is also why many non-religious people also reject the actions, if they find they can not accept the propositions within the religious system. It became a whole package deal.
I can understand an christian or a muslim having a hard time visiting a Jinja, paying respects to the kami and even bringing the kami a small sacrifice, since it conflicts with a couple of core beliefs within their own teachings. They might even find it hard to believe you do not tie yourself religiously with the kami by participating in these practises.

Yet the numbers in Japan show that there is little problem mixing Shinto into other religious systems. And that is where the power lies in Shinto: there is no teaching, ethics or morality. It leaves that to other systems.

Be buddhist, christian or muslim and live these teachings with piety. The Shinto framework only draws your attention to the here and now. It demands reverence for the direct environment where you reside. The fullest attention on the activities you now do, whether it is cooking, office work, participating in your hobby or sport or listening to the sounds of playing children and bird in the trees at the Jinja square. And know that all these experiences are personified in some kami.

It’s a degree of Dasein in the everyday. Dasein being Heidegger’s term for the fully conscious Being, to become one with the activity. Bringing together the Four Types of Knowing in this moment. The fusion between subject and object. Completely Being-There.

This demands contemplation and to be focused on your direct environment, what you want to Be within that environment and work towards that. Shinto offers no heavenly abode in the after life, but draws the attention to the present. Amidst your community, the phenomenons surrounding you, actively participating and resigned observing. It forces you to be mentally present in your own life.

It’s not without reason that the Japanese philosophers of the 20th century recognised in Heideggers work a point of contact between Eastern and Western philosophy and tried to bridge and bring them together. This so called Kyoto school recognised in Heidegger’s Dasein the strong similarity between the concscious Being that Zen strives for.

By cultivating Dasein, Shinto trains a new relation with the forms of knowing that we in the West lost contact with. The way of the kami leads us out of the disenchantment. But thinking you can just import and implement a direct copy of Shinto in the West, will lead to failure. A system like that can only grow organically from a continuing dialogue between individual, community and the surrounding. Only by mapping the arena properly can you determine from which perspective you are observing it. Test and find the right procedures to be within that Arena and achieve success. Experience which propositions are of true value for the West.

Of course, I can expand this argument for many more pages on some of the topics I brought up, but this is getting long. For now I want to thank you for your attention and I hope you want to participate in this journey of re-enchantment.

1. I use ‘cosmology’ here not as a reference to the scientific school of cosmology, that studies the general structure of the universe, but to the old meaning of the word: a metaphysical model of the cosmos; a explanation of how things came to be, where humans belong within that model, what their role is and how they are to relate to other beings and their environment.
There have been several models of cosmology in this sense, and many still operate parallel to each other. The cosmological models of a Hindu, a muslim and an atheist will differ significantly, even if all of these people uphold the scientific cosmological structure as truth. The scientific school does not provide us with a moral framework, nor is it able to positively tell us what is True, Good or Beautiful. It can only disprove ideas, until they encounter something that can not be disproved or denounced.

2. The question arises: whereto should we return? Back to the time before the revolution of 1968? Or rather back to before the First World War? Perhaps the French Revolution? Why not the Reformation? Or did it all turn south with the Renaissance? Perhaps the Axial Revolution was a mistake and should be turned back? Why not immediately embrace the Bronze Age and restart civilisation from scratch?