The world cannot be re-enchanted because it is and always was enchanted, it is merely that human beings gradually lost the ability to see and feel it. We are desensitized, and in this era in particular, our desensitization has become a severe handicap. We are spiritually retarded, nearly completely severed from the perception of our own spirits and the spirits around us.

In 1883, the American magazine Chatauqua asked a variation of the philosophical question “If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. Humans only evolved to have working ears relatively recently. The entirety of human existence represents a drop in the bucket where those 4.5 billion years are concerned. Our species is hideously dependent upon petroleum, which represents the debris of trees, pond scum, and animal remains from anywhere from 70 to 250 million years ago, and someday the next dominant species may siphon our remains to fuel the conveniences of their lives. Viewed from a wider lens, it is quite obvious that the answer to the philosophical quandary “If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody to hear it, does it make a sound?” is Yes. It made a sound, which after all is simply the reverberation that arises from action on the physical plane, duh. The question itself is boneheaded and stupid and reveals more about the philosophers who ask it than the phenomenon it questions.  Hello and welcome to modern science.

The bum rush toward re-enchantment

Right now, a bunch of spiritual retards, myself among them, are desperately trying to reclaim what has been stolen and siphoned away over the last five hundred or so years. We all know something is missing from our lives that has left miserable and terrifying wounds. Though these wounds cannot be seen, we all feel like amputees from which parts have been lopped off or gouged out. In my upcoming book, Sacred Homemaking: A Magical Approach to Tidying, I call this condition spiritual leprosy. I also make the bold claim that spiritual leprosy, along with its twin condition etheric starvation, is the most common set of maladies of our time.

Before the advent of prosthetic everything — the replacement of human tasks and pursuit of knowledge with machines and machine labor — humans were more in touch with the subtle planes. The key to understanding the subtle planes is that they are not separate places. They are superimposed upon us and co-exist with everything we know and perceive. The subtle planes graduate in subtlety from the etheric level all the way to the spiritual level, a.k.a. the Creator or God. The etheric plane, also known as the energy plane, prana, ch’i, ki, vibes, and the Force, is the easiest for us to perceive because it is one dimension more subtle than smell. The astral plane is the next level of subtlety and can be understood as the personal and collective dimension of images and imagination. This level is perceived by animals and plants as well as many others. Even more subtle and therefore expansive, wide, and difficult to grok for a meatbrain stuck on Meatworld is the mental plane, which is the plane of concepts, causes, and effects. Ancient Christians used to have a working knowledge of all of this stuff, whether it was instinctive or from the halls of elite learning. The medieval garden was symmetrical and intentional, full of calculated angles and patterns that acted as demon traps and herbs and vegetables that provided physical medicine and nourishment. Their cathedrals utilized sacred geometry both outside and inside, amplifying the cleansing power of the Missas performed every day, month, and year at the appropriate planetary times. Medieval people were not ignorant about astrology, nor did they dismiss it as demonic like a starving idiot would reject lifesaving food because the texture was “off”. Magic was not exotic to them; it was as plain as the nose on your face. In Eros in Magic and the Renaissance, Ioan Couliano explores the common belief among medieval peoples that individuals and groups could be manipulated via their eros using psychology and the art of memory. Couliano paints a detailed portrait of people who lived deeply and wholly in an enchanted world to the point where they were aware and wary of those who would seek to enchant them. Another aspect of spiritual awareness was the veneration of saints, who are formerly human helpers who have chosen to help humanity despite having the option to do other things. Buddhists call these beings bodhisattvas. You can reject their help, but it is not a good idea as they are going to be the first ones to come to your assistance when you are in metaphysical trouble, and I would argue we are all constantly in metaphysical trouble at the moment.

The evangelical Christian is the pigeon who craps all over the chess board, knocking the pieces off and strutting about as if she has won. She returns to her ignorance like a dog to his vomit. If her medieval ancestors could see her now, they would hang their heads in shame. It is not entirely her fault she lives in a spiritual Idiocracy where any meaningful information from the past has been bulldozed by materialist elephants rampaging in the proverbial china shop. She cannot help that she was raised in an environment where every bit of paradise on Earth was paved to put up a parking lot. She is a materialist because that is all she has ever known. Her food has always been devitalized and from the store instead of the yard and the forest. Her poor brain has always been manipulated by mass media and propaganda. There has not been a moment when she could escape the astral cacophony of other tortured souls and now she is old enough where it has begun to make her a bit crazy. She has been injected with all manner of vaccines that carry the nasty side effect of segregating the subtle bodies from each other. Like her world, she is full of small bits of plastic. Her body’s processes are chronically disrupted from petrochemicals gone wild in the form of phthalates and dioxin. The very air she breathes is inundated with miasmic radiation from cell towers. Yet the worst of her problems and that which lays her bare to whatever demons would like to set up shop in her fragile subconscious is her profound lack of gratitude. Existential fatigue and the exhaustion of living in this incarnation in the early twenty-first century is a recipe for ungratefulness. The medieval peasant had gratitude to God; her modern equivalent does not, despite the lip service she is mandated to provide.

How do we re-enchant ourselves?

We may not be able to re-enchant the world as it is already in a state of enchantment and never left, but we can re-enchant ourselves, and that means removing the malefic enchantments of our materialistic, deadened era and returning to a healthy, balanced state of autonomy that excludes the influence of roving demons and psychological parasites.

The first things I would suggest in the work of re-enchantment is to pick up the three practices of spiritual hygiene aside from prayer that can give us a working tool set with which to combat the grime of our era. These three daily practices take up about a half hour every day. I have written about them in the linked articles and I personally do them, otherwise I would not recommend them:

1. Discursive meditation
2. A daily banishing ritual or its weekly traditional mass equivalent
3. Daily divination

Once you have established a tiny chunk of your day to the practice of spiritual and mental hygiene, it is time to modestly approach a god. In approaching a god, your earnestness and humility will be what determines whether or not you get a demon instead. I believe the arrogant religious end up with demons as reliably as their Satanist or atheist counterparts, as you tend to attract the same frequency to which you vibrate. Continue down the materialist, arrogant, greedy path and you will attract throwaway junk, runaway pride, and insatiable appetites for what you think you need to own. In other words, you will continue to dwell in the heavy, Ahrimanic world of MOAR STUFF and blind obeisance.

If you are humble and forthright, however, you will likely attract a bodhisattva or a saint before you get a god, and that is perfectly fine. You should very much want that to happen, because it will soon lead you to a relationship with a god and eventually God. You have to go at it with the persistence of a small trickle of water that eventually becomes the Grand Canyon. This will not be an easy ride and you are going to need all the help you can get.

In the meantime, and there is a great deal of meantime, you can start where you are by giving thanks for the tiny, good things about your world instead of fixating on the bad. Think gratitude, not worry. Nothing reaches the ear of God faster than gratitude. The reason I suggest taking up the three practices of traditional Western magic before praying or being compulsively grateful is because it can be hard to perceive one’s own gratitude as anything other than fake or gay before the subtle bodies have been at least partially washed of the astral sepsis of our peculiar era. That said, you can cultivate gratitude for little things right now and nothing is stopping you. You can give thanks to your door for stopping the bugs, rain, wind, and human predators who would otherwise get to you and make your daily doings uncomfortable, inconvenient, and deadly. You can thank your shower for making you clean and sweet-smelling and praise indoor plumbing, especially the indoor toilet. When you humble yourself and consider the reality that many do their business outside without the benefit of a flushing commode, you realize how good you have it. You can thank your bed by making it, also setting a rubric that says you are thankful for a safe place to sleep. Yes, you are still going to be assailed by problems, EMFs, people who are jerks, and propaganda but it does not have to be your focus in life.

My upcoming book Sacred Homemaking: A Magical Approach to Tidying, due out from Aeon books in the temperate seasons of 2026, attempts to explain how anyone can connect to the enchanted world and re-enchant themselves by appreciating and maintaining their own living space. Whether you live in a cardboard box or a magnificent chateau, it is daily acts of ritualized gratitude that will provide the key to true satiety of the sort money cannot buy. Enchantment has always been right in front of you and all around you; you were simply trained not to see it and that training comes from a set of generational handicaps. You do not have to go out and find enchantment in the forest or in the exotic fantasy of a book or video game. The whole world is enchanted and waiting for you to escape the evil spell you’ve been under so you may fully participate and begin to truly live.

The Druids knew I was going to get to this one, having covered the other two legs of the Revival Druidry tripod: discursive meditation and a daily banishing ritual (or weekly traditional mass that serves the same spiritual cleansing function). For those who do not already know me, I was raised casually Protestant and became atheist in my late twenties. I began studying Druidry when I was approximately forty five, taking up the standard daily practices of discursive meditation, banishing, and divination about seven years ago. I now believe in many gods, read Ogham for other people, and talk to so-called inanimate objects and spaces as easily as I converse with other human beings. I talk to trees and I talk to my toilet when I clean it every night, and I believe I am far less crazy than when I was an atheist. My book about connecting with the spirits of place, Sacred Homemaking: A Magical Approach to Tidying is coming out in Summer of 2026 from Aeon Books.

Anyways, back to the subject at hand. Divination is something we all do whether we admit it or not, and that is why religious edicts against divination are so silly. The hyper-monotheists for whom divination is strictly verboten tend to be the most superstitious of all, endlessly hoping to stumble upon synchronicities that can be interpreted as direct messages from their remote and distant God. If I had a twenty for every religious fanatic who grasped for predictions of the future in the random events of any given week, I would have no shortage of pocket money. In fact, most of what constitutes “prayer” in modern religions (Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, etc.) is begging God for a sign that everything is going to work out to the supplicant’s advantage. This is also known as casting God in the role of Santa Claus. It is an attempt at gaining control over the uncontrollable, or at least a facsimile of control via imagining that one is favored by those in control.

Why watch the weather?

There are religious people who eschew divination to the point where they refuse to read their horoscopes for fear of being infected with the Satanism of astrology. They freak out if their kids have a Tarot deck. They seem to be in denial about the commonness of divination in early America, when young women marked apples and young men would bob for them at the annual Halloween party to casually predict who would pair off. Another regular, wholesome method of old timey love divination was to pluck a daisy’s petals while asking “He loves me, he loves me not” until the daisy had no more petals. You cannot tell me this is Satanic, and anyone who needs to project such a weird shadow on flowers ought to have their head checked.

So if you are one of the unfortunate many who thinks Tarot cards and palm reading is Satanic, you need to stop watching weather forecasts immediately. Delete the weather app from your mobile phone — actually, burn your phone and toss its gloppy plastic-lithium carcass in the deepest ocean because mobile phones are the Mark of the Beast. You never should have owned one to begin with. Weather predictions are straight up divination, my sanctimonious friend. They involve wanting to know the future via signs provided in the present. The weather app is a divination tool. It is the prognostication of a cabal of so-called experts who take photos and pressure readings of Earth from low orbit. They do this with flying machines made of metals pulled from the innards of caves and pits. If you watch the weatherman or look at the weather app, you clearly trust those mortal experts and the devices that carry their advice more than your God, you apostate freak. Idolater! Satan!

In my own case, I have no religious concerns about meteorology, so I am free to keep my weather app which came pre-installed on the phone and is correct most of the time. There are, however, bad divination tolls that I would suggest all avoid. One of these is Ouija boards.

Hell is a place on Earth

Ouija boards, although cool-looking, should never be used for divination, whether alone or in a group. Ouija was a natural outgrowth of the Spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century, and as its origins imply, it is a way of bringing Spiritualist seances into your living room or children’s sleepover. To my mind, Madame Blatavatsky and the Spiritualist movement were a double-edged sword: though both helped to remediate the state of general spiritual ignorance that plagues modern Christianity and our current demonic age, on the other end, she and they introduced the mass practice of opening the floodgates of the lower astral plane and unleashing demons who used to be kept in check by now-nearly extinct religious banishing rituals and offerings. The Spiritualist urge to communicate with the dead unleashed a flotsam of depravity, sickness, and horror from the lower astral that continues unabated to this day.

The lower astral is not a different place than our own — instead, it is superimposed upon this reality as a vibration that runs through all. In other words, the only way you can escape it is to vibrate much differently than it, and that is easier said than done. To use a Ouija board is to tune your radio to the lower astral station. Once you do this, you open the invisible door to infection. Negative hauntings act like opportunistic pathogens, seeping out of their own confines in order to assail new and juicy targets. Their mission and objective is to reproduce: as above, so below. The subtle planes act like the dense ones and vice a versa; the analogy of fractals is always relevant.

For whatever reason, little lettered boards with planchettes attract lower astral plane vibes. The most common lower astral critter invoked by Ouija board is the mimic or impersonator spirit. Just as certain pathetic human scumbags compulsively posture as larger-than-life — for instance the young man I once knew who claimed his father was secret CIA and/or one degree of separation away from a famous celebrity or world leader — loser spirits like to impersonate important people. They will prey upon your wishful thinking and attempt to manipulate you via your ego and naivete. They will choose people who were close to you in life: your beloved grandmother, your cousin who died tragically, your dead spouse. If they sense you are especially naive, they will impersonate a famous person. Reliably you won’t be talking to Marilyn Monroe or your deceased uncle. No, you’ll be talking to the non-embodied equivalent of the junkie selling illegal substances out of his dilapidated ground floor apartment. He will be under control of a more powerful dealer-pimp, and that dealer-pimp is probably a demon.

Most negative hauntings do not escalate to full demonic possession. Full demonic possession is certainly the goal of most demons but it seldom happens. At any rate, the beings who love Ouija boards have full demonic takeover of persons and places as their ideal. Be glad they seldom get their way. The energy of Ouija is nearly identical to seances, and seances should also be avoided. I plan on discussing Ouija, seances, and the trouble with Spiritualism in a future essay.

All of these dire warnings about Ouija and seances are not meant to dissuade you from taking up a daily divination practice. Ouija boards and seances tend to be the exception to the rule. Divination is a way of talking to the Divine, hence the root of the word.

Refine and sift

There are many ways to divine. The oldest methods involve reading what is already there: clouds in the sky, numbers of leaves or petals on a plant, the lines and creases on the palm of the hand. For instance, I recently had to make a decision about working on Saturdays and I did not bring my usual divination tool, the Ogham, with me. I was in my car en route to work, so I asked the powers to help me decide. There are rose bushes blooming in front of the building where I work at the moment. I asked the spirit to provide an answer in the number of blooms on the bush closest to the door. If they were an even number, I was to work on Saturdays for approximately the next two years. If they were odd, then I would say nothing and continue to enjoy my Saturdays off. They were even and I am now working on Saturdays.

In this particular example, I did not want to work Saturdays. Though I love my job, I am now working seven days a week. As most middle class and lower middle class people understand, it is not easy to mentally or physically handle working every day of the week because the rest of life so easily gets in the way. Also, it is healthy to have a rest day and Saturday was it for me. That said, I am trying to get out of credit card debt once and for all, and in my current circumstances, if I want to be credit debt free, it means working Saturdays for the foreseeable future.

It is important not to vacillate in these matters or interpret signs they way we would like them to be. There were spent blooms on the rose bush that could have counted as five and not four, but I knew if I stretched the answer in such a way, I would suffer the karma of not accurately reading the writing on the wall. Why should the powers give me messages if I am only going to ignore them for what I want to hear? Also, had flowers not been in bloom, I would have found another natural phenomenon to determine my path: perhaps the number of students who cancelled that week or the number of cars in the adjacent parking lot when I arrived besides my own. Numbers are everywhere, waiting to give us a clue even if we have no formal divination method. The moral of the story is you can’t just give up and if you want an answer, you must accept it as it is given.

If I had not fine-tuned my powers of discernment, divination would be useless as it is for most people, even so-called holy people and self-labeled “sensitives”. For instance, there is a Youtube influencer who claims to divine spirit messages from trees, and these messages are always generic, New Age pablum that paints humanity on the verge of a great awakening. In other words, she tells people what she believes they want to hear for prestige, clicks, and clout. In my opinion, she is full of crap and though it is possible she does not know herself to be lying, it is also entirely possible she does.

The only two ways I know of improving discernment are regular discursive meditation and banishing rituals or their traditional mass equivalent, and that is why I recommend having both of those in place before diving into divination. The results of any divination should always be examined in discursive meditation. As far as banishing, it is the equivalent of bathing or of a surgeon scrubbing up before he goes into the surgical theater. Divination is serious stuff. It sure isn’t a party game, despite the protests of Hasbro. Divination takes practice and work. It is something you will get better at with time and experience.

There are three aspects you must bring out of yourself for divination to be effective:

1. You must honestly admit you could be wrong and your divination inaccurate
2. You must honestly consider your results in discursive meditation and not game them to say what you want to hear or fear (more on this later)
3. You must follow up with honest intention of becoming a better person than you were yesterday, if only by the slightest bit

Admitting “I could be wrong”

Too many people think they could not possibly be wrong. They come in all spiritual and non-spiritual persuasions. New Age cornucopians love “fake it until you make it” false transcendence. They pretend they know the Secret and that pretending hard enough will bring them oodles of consequence-free unearned wealth. LOL I think Rhonda Byrne and her devotees are going to be highly surprised about their outcomes in future lives, but then I could be wrong. Atheists insist there is no God because Meatworld sucks and a just God would not sign off on such a sucky world. Never mind they are looking for proof on a stage set of illusions designed to train the soul and not inform it. Whatever… lost cause. Moving on. Monotheists who mislabel and misinterpret the Divine in attempts to get its attention are bludgeons, shutting down their own subtle senses with a far more addictive set of knee jerk reactions. Since the Bible/Koran/whatever could not possibly be wrong, it provides a nice dopamine rush of titillation and self-righteousness to condemn any experience outside the narrow confines of one holy book and demonic and Satanic. If and when they do contemplate the Bible, it is usually in a group setting where they are told what to make of the Bible’s lessons by another garden variety sinner. The blind are leading the blind. The lessons never quite seem real, and the attempts to relate a bunch of Middle Eastern Bronze Age shepherds to modern life are nearly always a reach. If divination comes with help from God and the gods, which I believe it does, the puny human with her six inch meat brain needs to take a back seat and let Jesus take the wheel. This means not putting words into His mouth, earnestly contemplating His words, and accepting His truth over her own.

Meditating on the results

Divination is absolutely worthless without contemplation of its results. Before I began reading Ogham, I did at least three sessions of discursive meditation on each tree card (there are twenty five in the system I use) and I made a project of going outside and finding every tree I could. Because the Ogham and its trees is northern European in origin, I ended up devising my own Prairie Ogham based on my local tree and plant life. Once I started doing readings, I was able to get fairly accurate divinations because I had already laid the groundwork and gained the knowledge the old fashioned, hard way. This is what I believe is meant by “spiritual work” — from my experience, it is similar to effective musical practice. It must happen every day and it must put the ego aside for the slow drip-drip of accumulation that is replete with setbacks. Meditating on a reading involves a great deal of sifting to understand what lessons were being imparted on any given day. As you continue to do daily readings, overarching patterns will emerge and these too will require discursive meditation. Discursive meditation is truly an endless rabbit hole that eventually turns you into Gandalf the White. Not that I am Gandalf the White, but that is the direction it seems I am supposed to go and meditation is slowly and painstakingly helping me to get there.

Intention

As I have said in essays and in Sacred Homemaking, there is but one way drops of water become the Grand Canyon: persistence. Remember that the mighty Grand Canyon was once a pathetic dribble of a stream on a patch of rock. Over great expanses of time that no incarnated human can reasonably contemplate, those drops of water carved a river and eventually became huge. One of the reasons the Grand Canyon is so beautiful is that it represents so many forces aligning for vast, incomprehensible stretches of time. It is larger than life, or at least it is larger than our puny human existences. You are that drop of water and your intention is what will one day make a spectacular natural wonder, if not on this plane and this time, on other planes at other times. You have got to keep going and continue the alchemical process. This is not going to happen overnight.