Spells

Imagine for a moment that you were born 15,000 years ago in prehistory. You are a child living amongst the trees, rocks, and earth in a community of family, friends, and elders. You look up to these older folk, who have an assured and stable presence. They carry an air of centred contentment, with a sparkling glint in their eyes that tells you they are grounded in some kind of unseen knowledge. You can sense they are in tune with something—something deep and mysterious. They seem to understand the secrets of this world. Sometimes you see them appreciatively stare up at the sky as the wind ruffles their hair, as if they are communing with the clouds that sail across it.

Some nights, you sit huddled beside the comforting warmth of a crackling fire. An elder is the focus of attention as he tells you stories. His shadowy face flickers in the firelight as you listen, enchanted and mesmerised. These stories are as ancient as the land itself. They tell of the origin of this world—how the stars came to glisten, where the sun goes at night, and why the birds chirp in the morning. The elder speaks of the great mother that luminously courses and rhythmically flows through all of creation, pulsating as she animates the wind, the greenery, and all creatures, great and small. As the world breathes, a vibrant light of aliveness shines forth through all things. All sounds, sights, and smells are imbued with this vital, interpenetrative essence that you feel and sense but cannot name. You are included in this and are at ease within this seamless web, where boundaries are blurred and unspoken meaning pervades. This is just how it is, and you cannot conceive of it any other way.

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The stories we are told as children imperceptibly mould and shape our worlds from the inside out. They are the lens through which we perceive and comprehend.

We are born into most stories, much like a fish is born into water. These stories have gathered strength over hundreds or thousands of years, and we have become so infused with them that they need not be spoken aloud. They exist in the atmospheric ethos of our age. In some sense, we are all unwittingly hypnotised, under the spell of these stories. And the origin of the word spell, you will find, is ‘story, tale, narrative, or discourse’[1]. Stories are spells.

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The early Christians brought new spells. They brought us the “Good-spells,” or Gospels—the good story. They also brought us a new story of our creation that resonates to this day, out of sight, subliminally influencing us from behind the scenes.

In the book of Genesis, after the initial creation, the world begins in chaos. God then brings order to the chaotic, formless void. He goes on to separate light from dark, day from night, and the sea from the earth. Without the ordering and sorting of God, there is no life, no process, and no constructive dynamics. The implication is that disorder and chaos are evil, whilst order and control are godly.

This notion—that control is good whilst chaos is bad—is imperceptibly ingrained into the background fabric of the Western psyche. Children are taught to ‘control yourself’ when angry or upset. At school, we are taught to be ‘well behaved’, to mould us into societal and cultural norms. Containment is valued over impulsivity.

We absorb this message of control by believing we should have mastery over our internal environment. We should be able to preside over our emotions, thoughts, and feelings, as if they are somehow secondary to us. This inwardly takes root in our core, creating an architecture of mind that is unbalanced and prone to collapse. The adoption of defensive psychological mechanisms in the service of control means there will always be fearsome enemies at the boundary gates, threatening to invade. However, the inescapable reality is that these emotions and feelings are intrinsic to who we are. Our problem lies in the fact that they are wild, unruly, and untamed, and obtrusively resistant to domestication. They seem to have an agency of their own, which becomes adversarial if we disrespect, neglect, or resist them.

Ultimately, we cannot help what we feel. We are not in charge—we just think we are. Thus, the spell of control is antithetical to the natural situation; it is a mind-made spectre inhibiting the flow of our being by instigating anxiety and tension. We fear relaxing and letting go, yet maybe this is exactly what we need to do.

If we simply sit, be still, pay attention, and relax into what is going on, then—as random images and obscure thoughts bubble up from the depths, or we are seized by the unpleasant intrusion of unwanted feelings—we will come to the realisation that the idea that we can control our inner landscape is not what it is cracked up to be. And, contrary to what we thought, the more we attempt to control, the more anxious and disorderly we become. By going against the grain of our nature, we create ever more tension. This is reflected by Jung when he writes:

“Inner motives spring from a deep source that is not made by consciousness and is not under its control. In the mythology of earlier times these forces were called mana, spirits or gods… The one thing we refuse to admit is that we are dependent upon these powers that are beyond our control.”[2]

It may be disconcerting to realise we are not in the driver’s seat, but this is only because we have been spellbound by the illusion of control. The real story—the one that aligns with truth—is that our sense of self, who we think we are in our essence, is like a cork bobbing upon a sea of natural energetic forces that, as Jung points out, are beyond our control. These forces live themselves through us. In the words of the poet W. H. Auden, “we are lived by forces we pretend to understand.”[3]

From this viewpoint, seeing our interior world as populated by unseen gods, angels, and demons seems understandable. After all, if we are not in charge, then what is? Maybe there is more truth to the ancient stories than we would care to admit.

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The scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries brought new spells that have profoundly shaped how we construct our experience—how we perceive ourselves and the world around us. The consensus is that, with this new set of stories, we have somehow grown up. We have ostracised the gods to the fringes and now see the ‘real’ world as it really is.

As our realities realigned with this rational, scientific paradigm, our language changed to reflect this. Words, just like stories, have a magical, creative faculty. They bring things into existence rather than simply describe what is already there. It is no coincidence that we ‘spell’ words from letters. The use of language is a magical act. This is reflected by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who wrote:

“Words, like the chisel of the carver, can create what never existed rather than describe what already exists. As a man speaks, not only is the thing which he is declaring coming into existence, but also the man himself.”[4]

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A word I would like to explore is ‘fact’. Prior to the scientific revolution, there were no facts in the sense we now understand them. Fact originally meant ‘a thing done’[5]. In a court of law, a fact came to mean a deed. When someone was in court, the ‘fact’ as to whether they were guilty needed to be ascertained—did they commit the crime? If they were guilty, their deed became a fact: a truth that could not be challenged.

Science co-opted this meaning of the word fact to mean individual data points—objective truths about the world that are irrefutable. This sets up a static binary between truth and non-truth. Therefore, seeing the world in a factual way is conceived as seeing reality as it really is. If it is not a fact, then it is not real. This is an incredibly powerful spell because it calls into question anything that cannot be proven or demonstrated.

At school, we were incessantly taught facts—little pockets of truth that make up reality. The effect of this is to concretise our experience into a solid, literal space. Everything becomes unitised into stand-alone mechanical objects, and to dare to question these units of individual truth becomes a rebellious act.

We have internalised this spell of solidification. We see ourselves as a solid, individual self—a static, monolithic thing called ‘me’. This way of constructing our world encourages disconnection. We are a ‘thing’ amongst other ‘things’ in the world. We feel alone, estranged, exiled, and apart from everything else.

Perceiving the world through a solid, quantifiable lens banishes us to the surface level of literal appearances. If we contemplate and examine the world, and peek below this crust of consensus reality, we will find a world not made up of solid facts, but rather one that is relational. This is the deeper truth.

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Take the example of a tree. When we see a tree, we creatively solidify it into an objectifiable thing to which we give a name—in this case, a ‘tree’. To simply leave it at that is our usual factual way of seeing: a tree is just a tree, nothing more. But seeing this way is a product of how we have been spellbound.

The tree is itself alive in energetic interconnectivity. It is made up of the effulgent rays of the sun; it soaks up the rain, which then courses through its veins, it metabolises the nutrient-rich earth and it breathes through cellular respiration. It gives as well as receives: its fruit sustains insects and birds, its leaves decompose, and it gives us the gift of oxygen through photosynthesis. It is not an isolated object, it is a fulcrum in a web of interpenetration that we have concretised through words and language.

We are like the tree, and in a similar way, we have concretised ourselves. Our conditioning means we feel we are separate, static, and solid—but we are not. We are in continual inter-being with our environment, both human and non-human. We too are intimately interconnected with the sun, the air, the earth, and other creatures. If we can relinquish control and relax into this, the world becomes alive, we disappear, boundaries blur, outer and inner become indistinguishable, and the world becomes our body.

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In this blog, I have tried to demonstrate how our lived experience is an imaginal process. We create our realities through unconscious concepts and narratives that shape our experience like spells. Although I have used notions of control, solidity, and separateness to illustrate this, there are innumerable ways in which this can happen. We all live under these spells, which prevent us from seeing ourselves as we truly are. We live in a dream of our own making.

Psychotherapy should be an antidote to these dreams, helping clients become more awake and aligned with the truth of their being. This necessitates the therapist being somewhat aligned with truth within the stream of their own experience—having a recognition and acquaintance with the mystery that resides in the depths of the heart.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/spell

[2] Jung, C.G. (1995). Memories, Dreams, Reflections: An Autobiography. London: William Collins.

[3] Auden, W.H. (1940). Another Time. London: Faber and Faber.

[4] Heidegger, M. (2006). On the Way to Language. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Cited in: Walker, M.T. (2006) The Social Construction of Mental Illness and the implications for the Recovery Model. International Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation. 10 (1), 71-87.

[5] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=fact