The Reënchantment Project

Copyright 2012 () Freeman Presson, all rights reserved

I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language. (Werner Heisenberg, as quoted in The New York Times Book Review of 8 March 1992)

In the introduction to his Druid Magic Handbook, John Michael Greer cites Max Weber’s concept of the disenchantment of the Western world, and goes on to deliver a simultaneously stern and entertaining rebuttal of it. This led me to think of the many evidences I have seen of how deeply-embedded a certain kind of 19th-century thinking has become (to show only a few):

• Richard Hinckley Allen’s Star names, their Lore and Meaning has been criticized on many grounds, but I have not seen anyone call out the obvious fact that it tries to explain old star lore with almost no reference to astrology; and without this, I contend that the lore has no meaning.
• Look at the Wikipedia article, or other mainstream references, on Thabit ibn Qurra. They discuss his contributions to mathematics and astronomy at length; they completely fail to mention that he was the last of the truly great Sabian astrological mages, the author of De Imaginibus.
• Similarly for Newton: some sources will mention his esoteric interests in passing now, since they have become so abundantly obvious, but few make it clear that this founder of the Enlightenment, one of the first “modern” scientists, was also very much a Hermetic natural philosopher, who spent about half his waking hours pursuing alchemy and theology. Kepler and Copernicus? Astrologers.
• Pagans tend to love the movie Agora, since it has a strong Pagan heroine (Hypatia of Alexandria) trying to resist the ineluctable tide of Christianity. The historical Hypatia was known to be a Neoplatonist, and so would have been very spiritual and pious. The Hypatia in the film is a materialist-atheist and a scientist with a completely modern outlook. Basically, the filmmaker ripped us off, and we cheered about it.

It is easy enough to understand how people in the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century could be captivated by the vision of a predictable, rational clockwork Cosmos, especially when the science that drove this vision was showering the citizens of the developed world with the products of ever-evolving technology and the promise of unending progress and economic expansion. It is less easy to understand how people are still operating under these premises:

1. Even in the infancy of the Newtonian paradise, there was a worm in the apple¹, in the form of the lack of a closed solution to the three-body problem. One wonders what good it is to theorize that given enough information and enough computing power, one could accurately simulate the entire history of the Cosmos, if it is that easy to show that the computation requires more matter and energy than the Cosmos itself contains? Ah, well … there are always approximate methods, yes? But see §7 below.
2. In 1905 – 1915, Einstein showed that not only is the Newtonian-mechanical Universe a special case, for a certain range of masses and velocities, and that there are some fundamental limits  that Newton could not have seen, but that it isn’t even a Euclidean space.
3. Based on the work of Boltzmann, Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, Heisenberg, and others, the various branches of quantum physics simultaneously explained and obscured the subatomic world. Heisenberg uncertainty and quantum indeterminacy definitively destroyed the vision of the computable Universe, while the various results showing quantum entanglement and non-locality re-introduced “spooky action at a distance.”.
4. As if that weren’t enough, Kurt Gödel‘s famous 1931 Incompleteness Theorem exposed cracks in the foundations of axiomatic mathematics itself.
5. Current cosmologists, in an effort to encompass both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, have been forced to go all-in in the strangeness game, with parallel worlds and multiverses becoming perfectly normal models to discuss.
6. The confidently-expected “Theory of Everything,” the quest for which occupied most of Einstein’s later career, looks further and further away the more patches and workarounds are applied to strings, superstrings, p-branes, and whatever other imponderables occupy the theorists.
7. At the dawn of the computer age, some of the mysteries of non-linear dynamical systems were explored, producing what we now call “Chaos Theory,” leading to a better understanding of the nature and limits of stability in systems like our solar system and the Cosmos itself, and also demonstrating that long-term prediction of such systems is inherently impossible, not just computationally difficult. So much for the 1950′s vision of global weather control!

So the Enlightenment vision of a predictable clockwork cosmos fails, not just in one way, but in every possible dimension. The real world is vastly stranger and richer than that.

Many of the people who rejoice in this fact also jump to the conclusion that the spooky quantum Multiverse neatly explains Magic and the paranormal. It does nothing of the sort: it leaves room for it if you squint just right, but that’s the strongest statement we can confidently make. Most attempts to fit the Mysteries back into Physics appear to work, to the extent they do, on the strength of analogical thinking that isn’t actually backed up by the science. Frankly, quite a few of these attempts don’t show an expert working knowledge of mysticism, either.

One of the toughest problems in explaining Magic, Mystery, Psi, etc., is the need to explain why the para-Cosmos seems to take imprints. Philosophical metaphysics, at least since Plato, has offered abstract models of this, but scientific proof of anything of the sort is just not there yet: not for lack of anomalies, but for lack of hypotheses and widely-accepted replication of the occasional suggestive experiments. The answer is probably hiding in some of those extra spatial dimensions that cosmologists throw around like candy, or in some as-yet-undiscovered quantum state vector shenanigans, but I don’t know how to do an experiment to show this. I suppose we’re fortunate that that’s not my job.

Philosophical idealism has actually made a resurgence among the more advanced sort of working scientist; today it is primarily among the “merely educated” that 19th-century mechanistic thinking still prevails. There is currently no scientific ground upon which one can stand to propound materialistic principles.

This means that our world is ripe for reënchantment, and not only in a direct, child-like, starry-eyed way, but philosophically as well. We are fully justified in bringing back Hermes Trismegistus, and re-Paganizing him while we’re at it. Saint Giordano Bruno? In my “church,” yes. However, we’re not holding our breath on scientific validation; I may not see that in the longest scientifically-enhanced life span I can currently imagine.

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1. Apple. Newton. Come ON, are y’all paying no attention whatever?

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