Reenchantment: The Re-Emergence of the Sacred

Beneath the pace and noise of the modern world, I believe something ancient is stirring. If you look across disciplines and cultures, neuroscience and ritual arts, the ecological movement and contemplative practices – those who are attuned can sense it too. A subtle return. The best word that describes it for me is reenchantment. There is movement towards remembering our natural capacity to experience the world as alive, interconnected, and sacred.

This feels less like learning something new and more like recovering a way of seeing. A restoration of perception. A widening of awareness that allows us to touch what our ancestors once knew intuitively: that the world itself participates in our consciousness, and that we are never truly separate from it.

What is re-emerging is the sacred as lived experience, not as doctrine or belief. Mythic imagination awakens as a language of the soul. Reenchantment invites us to shift from standing outside the world, observing it, to stepping back into participation.

I also find it a call to embrace relationship: with the Earth beneath our feet, with those who came before us, and with dimensions of experience that modern life often trains us to ignore. At the heart of this return lies something profoundly simple – presence. Here the boundary between inner and outer, seen and unseen, begins to soften.

Over the past few centuries, Western culture moved steadily toward rationalism and mechanistic thinking. This shift brought extraordinary advances in science and technology – advances I deeply respect. And yet, something essential was left behind along the way: the everyday experience of the sacred.

Where earlier cultures encountered a world alive with spirit, modern society learned to see inert matter.

Where ancestors turned to ritual, symbol, and trance for guidance, abstraction took their place.

Myth became “just a story.”

Trance became pathology.

The unseen became irrelevant.

When we dismiss the sacred, life itself can feel thinner. Many people sense this loss as a feeling that something essential is missing, even if we can’t quite name it.

And yet, the story of disenchantment is no longer holding in the same way.

I see this in the growing curiosity around altered states of consciousness.

Across cultures, contemplative practices are flourishing. Breath, presence, and inner experience are being reclaimed as legitimate ways of knowing. Even science, at its edges, encounters mysteries that echo ancient understandings of interconnectedness.

What I find most striking is that reenchantment does not ask us to abandon reason. It asks us to expand it.

Reenchantment, as I’ve come to understand it, is about awakening a deeper mode of perception. It rests on a simple but radical recognition: the sacred is not distant or abstract – it is sensed. It arises through the body, through presence, through listening.

This is why embodied practices, such as our work with Ritual Body Postures and ecstatic trance, can open powerful doorways. They do not require belief. They invite experience. By gently bypassing the analytical mind, they allow consciousness to shift, making room for mythic imagination and the felt presence of the unseen to emerge naturally.

In these embodied states, something else often awakens: ancestral memory. Not as literal recall, but as a deep orientation. A sense of standing within a much larger story – one shaped by lineage, land, and ancient patterns of human knowing. Trance traditions across cultures have always opened this doorway, reminding us that the personal and the ancestral are never truly separate.

For me, reenchantment is a return to its depth. It restores vibrancy, meaning, and a felt sense of belonging. In a world saturated with information yet hungry for wisdom, reenchantment offers not dogma, but presence – not certainty, but participation.

It invites us into a world where the sacred is not gone, only waiting to be noticed again.

Through embodiment, we remember something older than language:

the world is alive – and it is in relationship with us.