The Mysteria, part 8: Ghosts In the Machine

Vitalism, intermediary spirits, and the problem of disenchantment

Earlier this week, I finished reading The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. That title is one of a rather intimidating list of books I’ve accumulated for research on a manuscript-in-progress, but it wasn’t one I’d even originally thought to add. Instead, it was a gift sent to me by

Melinda Reidinger

with a brief note explaining she knew I’d find it helpful.

She was right. It’s a rather fascinating, albeit perplexing, book, purporting to show how disenchantment functions as a societal and conceptual myth, rather than a state of actually-existing things. It proposes that modernity isn’t really disenchanted (and is anyway not even modern), yet we’ve been trying to convince ourselves for the last 400 years that it actually is. Thus, the “myth” of disenchantment.

The author, Jason A. Josephson-Storm, is never quite convincing, and it’s difficult to tell whether or not he even believes his own thesis. Despite this, the book is an addictive read because of all the evidence he marshals to try to prove his point. We learn, for example, that Freud attended many seances and had become completely convinced of telepathy, and that Kurt Friedrich Gödel (the founder of modern mathematical logic) scrawled notes about demons alongside his formulae. Even more fascinating is the relationship that many of the Frankfurt School theorists had to occult theorists, especially to Ludwig Klages. Walter Benjamin, for example, wrote approvingly of Klages’ ideas and had even intended to study under him.

The question that Josephson-Storm never seems to answer is why we keep wrongly believing that science has won out over religion and magic. This seems to be because he keeps trying to hold a neutral position regarding naturalistic (“scientific”) versus vitalist explanations for magic. That’s a much larger debate, and a much more interesting question, but Josephson-Storm constantly tries to avoid the matter even when writing directly about it.

Which Vitalism?

Perhaps you were already a bit confused by my use of the word “vitalist,” which is a term currently associated with the writing of the author known as Bronze Age Pervert.

I’ll admit my own initial confusion, as well. What’s being described as vitalism, especially negatively in the host of criticisms (primarily conservative Christian) of Bronze Age Pervert’s ideas, isn’t in any way what was once thought of as vitalism.

Vitalism, traditionally understood, is the belief that there is some force, essence, or organizing principle within living things. It proposes a kind of “divine spark” or “energy” inherent to organic matter that cannot be explained only through physical or chemical mechanisms.

The first thing to say about this understanding is that most people probably see the world this way now, without ever really thinking much about the matter. In fact, I think all but the most strict materialist atheists might concede a sense that there is something about life which cannot be reduced to mechanical explanation. Even if one believes that consciousness is an illusion caused by complex synaptic firings in the brain, there still seems to us something which distinguishes living things (including things which once lived) from inert matter.

Secondly, vitalism is the primary framework of many “traditional” healing traditions and medicines, which start from the idea that there is a life force (qi, prana, biofields, or other energy) which flows through and gives vitality to a person. Disruptions in that force, energy, or field can cause physical or mental illness or prevent the body from healing itself from such illnesses.

This second point is where most of the scientific-materialist arguments against vitalism tend to focus. Despite the countless attestations that vitalist healing methods (for instance, Traditional Chinese Medicine) work, the model itself is seen as so heretical to dominant medical narratives that any evidence of its efficacy is immediately seen as fraudulent or delusional. Thus, vitalism is dismissed as “new age” (despite being quite ancient) or “primitive” (despite the prevalence of these ideas in contemporary thinkers).

What’s meant by vitalism in the works of Bronze Age Pervert is something quite different. While starting from the same premise that there is an irreducible “spark” of life, his vitalism then proposes that there is everywhere an attempt to crush our vital essence by civilization, socialism, Christianity, and feminizing assaults on difference and greatness.

Much of this borrows from the philosophical legacy of Nietzsche and the “will to power,” which is why you often hear Christian critics of Bronze Age Pervert label his ideas “Nietzschean vitalism.” However, the vitalism apparent in Nietzsche’s writing is much closer to the older conception of vitalism, rather than this newer one, because what is missing in the supposedly “pagan” writing of Bronze Age Pervert is the recognition that the vital spark exists not just in humans, but in all of life. For older vitalists, a tree, a compost pile, a pig, and a human each possess an organizing life principle or vital force.

This doesn’t appear to be what Bronze Age Pervert is on about, as his “paganism” is really just human-centric narcissism. Yet, to read his Christian critics, it’s hard not to get the impression they fear the entire right is in danger of falling back into pagan belief. Also, they seem desperate to prove, in the face of BAP’s popularity, that there is still some worth in Christian civilization and Christian values.

What’s particularly amusing in these essays, however, is that the authors seem quite ignorant of the earlier meaning of vitalism, and how Christianity itself was for a long time one of the greatest defenders of its proposition. Consider how, in the very creation story of the Bible, God breathes into inert matter, infusing it with the spark of life. The Christian concept of the soul is also a vitalist framework, as the soul is that irreducible aspect of life which cannot be explained by material or mechanistic processes.

So, to reject this newer version of vitalism without clarifying a position on the earlier understanding is to undermine one of the core beliefs of the very religion they’re trying to protect from BAP’s “Nietzschean vitalism.”

I don’t think this omission is only accidental on their part, however, because the matter of vitalism touches on a very uncomfortable relationship between Christianity and modern disenchantment. To explain this, though, we need to look directly at the same problem which the author of The Myth of Disenchantment had trouble with: the matter of natural magic.

“Natural Philosophy” and the role of demons

To paint the problem broadly, there have always been several competing understandings of magic and its relationship to nature or “natural laws,” even within Christianity. While it might seem a bit odd to think of Christians debating the nature of magic, even the briefest survey of the earliest writing from the church fathers is enough to show that the question was with them from the very beginning.

In fact, Christians seemed almost unified in their belief that magic existed, all the way from the first dissemination of the gospel up to at least the Reformation period in Europe. What wasn’t a matter of unity, however, was the how and the why of magic. Here, the most common division was on the question of whether or not demons were always behind every act of magic, or if there was also some other mechanism at play.

The debates regarding this question never resulted in any real schisms or religious strife until the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th. This period saw the height of the witch trials in Europe and also the greatest sectarian violence between new Christian formations (Protestantisms) and the Catholic Church. During that time, one of the most common charges levied against the old church by the reformers was that Pope and his bishops performed “demonic” magic.

In reality, most clerics and other monastics, along with many priests and bishops, were in possession of grimoires and other magical texts. Whether or not many of them actually cast any spells or tried to contact demons cannot be determined, but what’s important to understand is that such works were at that time considered important knowledge.

What we call “science” now was once called “natural philosophy,” and natural philosophers wrote just as often about magical phenomena as they did anything else. Religious authorities read these works because they were part of what we could call the “scientific literature” of the day. The influence of the stars and the subtle magical properties of plants were matters of scientific inquiry, as were also the effects of demonic and other invisible agencies on human behavior.

Over time, however, magical phenomena was increasingly divided between “natural” and “demonic,” with the former being considered acceptable to study and manipulate, and the latter ultimately dangerous to approach.

Again, up to the later part of the 15th century, the intellectual class of Europe (most of them clerics, since they were the only ones trained to read Latin) read books on demons and magic. It’s quite likely that the vast majority reading these books fully accepted that demons and magic existed, but this didn’t also mean they’d then set off to contact infernal beings or cast spells on each other. They just accepted this all as fact without necessity for action, just as we might accept nuclear physics at fact without feeling the need to refine uranium in our bathrooms to test the theories for ourselves.

But while it was generally accepted by Christian theologians and laity alike that magic and demons existed, what role demons actually had in the performance and manifestation of magic was never settled. Many theologians tried to divide magic into several categories, placing some forms within a category of “natural” magic and others into “demonic” or “malefic” magic. For instance, magic involving crystals, rocks, and some herbs was generally seen as being governed by natural laws that God himself had put into place, and so there was therefore little need to worry about the influence of demons there. However, categories of magic such as divination were much more complicated, since the accurate knowledge derived from divination could quite possibly have come from demons. Making this all the more complicated, it was equally possible that a magician might be fooled into thinking a natural law was in play when it was actually a demon causing the effects.

The Medieval Christian Ecology of Spirits

There’s one other problem that made all this quite complicated. There was never any consensus as to what precisely a demon actually was.

The concept of demons predates Christianity. The word itself comes from Greek, and it was used to describe all manner of spirits, including helpful ones (eudaemon) and malevolent ones (kakodaemon). For Greek and later Roman pagans, demons were “intermediary” spirits, often associated with the invisible forces of nature. They were part of nature, somewhat similar to the Shinto concept of the kami — spirits arising concurrent with and as a part of a tree, a well, the wind, or other parts of nature.

Early Christianity inherited this pagan worldview, since it was born within this cosmology. The demons the early apostles were commanding and exorcising from people weren’t yet understood as fallen angels, but rather just malevolent spirits wreaking havoc on humans. In this way, the Christians were doing exactly the same thing that pagan exorcists were doing, but they did it in the name of a new power (the Holy Spirit) and a new religion.

It took quite some time for the Jewish belief in demons as fallen angels to displace the pagan belief in demons as spirits of nature. In fact, thus far in my readings of medieval Christian theology, I’ve yet to find definitive proof that the Jewish idea ever fully supplanted the pagan idea before the Reformation. Instead, what seemed to be the case is that both ideas co-existed at the same time, and this meant there was an extra tier of demons in medieval Christian cosmology.

In this cosmology, fallen angels — what Christians now think of as demons — were seen as a more powerful class of demons who purposefully led humans astray. They were quite often considered the “deception” behind the pagan gods, having set themselves up to be worshiped instead of the Christian god. The rest of the spirits, however, were mostly seen as neutral: they were the “intermediary spirits,” created by god to govern or empower forces of nature.

In fact, the Christian cosmology of Europe before the Reformation was quite different from anything we are generally taught to believe about it now. They saw themselves as living in a world teeming with spirits, all of whom had been created by God to “govern” the world. Spirits were behind everything that we might call a natural force or process, all the way down to everyday human activities.

We can see what this looked like by remembering an older name for the result of fermentation: “spirit.” A spirit got into the brew, transforming it into an alcohol, and this was just how God created the world to work.

Natural philosophy, which later became science, was the study of how these spirits (again, created by God) acted within nature to make certain things happen. There was absolutely no contradiction between the belief in these natural spirits and the belief of an all-powerful creator, since it followed quite logically for them that if God had created nature, he had also created the forces of nature. Magic, then, was just one of the ways that humans could interact with these forces (that God created) in order to create things with them.

“Demon-mania” and the witches

Of course, one had to be careful to deal only with the spirits aligned with God, rather than the malevolent fallen angels who delighted in tempting the faithful away from the Church. Figuring out which ones were which, however, wasn’t an easy task, and was made much more complicated by the challenge of the Reformers and the concurrent witch hysteria. Both of these historical forces or moments added a great uncertainty in the earlier confidence of natural philosophers (who were also theologians) about whether or not they’d been getting things right.

Especially in the witchcraft trials, this uncertainty seems to have been rather overwhelming for many. Witches seemed to possess powers which couldn’t easily be explained by natural philosophy. If the acts attributed to witches were really caused by demons, then there were many more active demons in the world than the church had gotten around to categorizing. In fact, European Christendom seemed suddenly to be plagued by a resurgence of demons thought generally subdued and silenced in earlier centuries, and each new witch trial seemed to suggest the Church was losing its power against this tide.

All this was happening at a time in which Protestant reformers pushed their challenge to the authority of the Church, especially in accusations that the Church had been too lax in its fight against paganism. Some reformers directly accused Church figures and even the pope of practicing demonic magic, while others cast doubt on whether or not demons were actually involved in many of the witchcraft trials. In fact, it’s around this time that we see the birth of the “psychological” model of witchcraft, pushed by German reformers who were disinclined to believe that witches were actually able to do the things they — and their accusers — claimed they could do.

This new explanation will probably sound quite familiar, as it’s what is generally thought of much magic now. People were being deluded into thinking they possessed certain powers, could shape-change into animals or fly at night to faraway heaths for their sabbaths. Because of the power of these delusions, though, they would claim these powers and events to have really happened, and would report very clear memories of them as if recounting actual experience.

At the beginning, there was still a demonic agent to this explanation, as it was thought that demons or Satan were responsible for deluding the hapless witch or witnesses. But it didn’t take long for the demonic agency to fall away, so that the delusions took on the form of personal mental illness rather than anything spiritual.

This explanation was much easier to countenance for the “scientific" mind of the new Protestant urban classes, since it didn’t require recourse to a larger ecology of spirits. But there was another factor here, which is that the Church itself was changing its view about spirits and demons in response to the accusations from the reformers that the Catholic church had allowed too many pagan ideas into its teachings.

The reformers were not entirely wrong in their accusations, of course, since the belief in intermediary spirits was inherited from paganism. However, the Christian turn on this belief was that those intermediary spirits acted in the world at the behest of God, who’d created them specifically for that purpose.

Under this pressure from the Reformation, the Church abandoned this older teaching and instead began to teach that the spirit world consisted exclusively of angels and their fallen counterparts, demons. There were now only good and bad spirits, with no neutral intermediaries acting in the world. A consequence of this new framework was that new explanations for natural processes (the “magic” in natural philosophy) needed to be found, since there could be no such thing as a neutral spirit whose task was merely to make the world happen. Every natural process therefore needed to be explained without any reference to spirits.

To not put too fine a point on it, this is the root of disenchantment: an entire category of beings, which fifteen centuries’ worth of European Christians (and many more centuries of pagans before them) had believed existed, was suddenly written out of the world.

Though this wasn’t an immediate process, it was still quite swift. Between the end of the 15th century up to the early part of the 1600’s, intermediary spirits disappeared in natural philosophy, replaced by mechanistic explanations for the processes they had once been thought created to enact.

What this really meant was the stripping of conscious agency from everything in the natural world. Consider again the matter of brewing. Before, it was believed that a spirit of fermentation entered into the liquid. Now, we say that it is yeast which causes the fermentation, but these ideas aren’t actually mutually exclusive. Yeast is the agent which initiates the fermentation, but it was the fermentation itself where the medieval Christian mind located the spirit involved in the process. In other words, the spirit was the process itself, not any of the ingredients. A vital force — fermentation — entered into the liquid once all the necessary ingredients were included and the necessary conditions were meant.

That’s ultimately what spirits were really seen to be: vital forces. There was always some extra dimension of a natural process that could not be explained with recourse to the material or chemical mechanisms of the process, just as there was always some extra dimension to human life that could not be reduced to its constituent parts. Separate a human into his constituent parts and no matter what how well you put him back together, it won’t be him any longer. That’s because there’s some irreducible element to a human — his vital essence, his life — that flees from him the moment you’ve hacked him into bits.

It was this apparently very subtle shift that initiated our “modern” era of disenchantment. What really happened is that we stopped including a reverence or even mention of natural processes as vital (living) forces. Everything in the world could only be explained only through inert, mindless mechanisms (the machine), and there was no longer some irreducible vital force, presence, or spirit involved in the world.

There was also another consequence to this turn for the Christian conception of God himself. Before, the belief was that God had created countless active agents to enact his will in the world, populating all of nature with spirits who reflected some aspect of his being. It was through them, his servants, that the world existed and was in a state of constant creation. Now that they were gone, however, God seemed even more distant and abstract, more an engineer or clock maker who’d wound up the whole machine and then just left it alone.

In other words, by depopulating God’s creation of intermediary spirits, the Christians disenchanted God himself. That’s how, centuries later, we can read essays by Christians warning of the threat of “pagan” vitalism while forgetting that Christianity itself was once a vitalist religion. In fact, if there is anything still truly powerful in Christianity, it’s precisely its insistence that there is always something about life that cannot be reduced to mere mechanistic explanations.

Returning to the book with which I began this essay, it’s quite clear that supposedly secular scientists themselves are never fully convinced there are no ghosts in the machine. Neither, do I think, are most everyday people convinced, either. But those “ghosts” (geist in German: “spirit”) cannot be spoken of any longer except in whispers or metaphor. We lament that the world has become disenchanted, that there is no longer any magic or meaning to be found, but we’ve done this to ourselves.

Removing external agency, first the intermediary spirits, then the angels and demons, and then God(s) from our explanations eventually got us to the place where we are now, where only inert mechanical or chemical processes can be used to explain the world. It took several centuries, but this is how “the machine” became our dominant cosmology: we’re now all just bits of meat organized according to chemical codes, shambling about on an inert rock covered in meaningless organic matter while under the illusion we are “conscious.”

And since we are mere bits of meat, trees are mere bits of wood, mountains are mere bits of minerals, and earth is mere bits of dirt. Everything can be taken apart, reduced to its mere use value, bought, sold, and consumed in the spiritless machine logic of Capital.