Poet and etymologist John Ciardi used to do word rambles, where he would take a word, trace its origins, and show direct and indirect connections to other words and phrases. I’d like to extend Ciardi’s approach with a look at the word enchantment to show why it is so important and disenchantment so devastating.

The Enchanted World

Enchantment is the noun form of the verb enchant, which means to make something magical. It literally means to sing into. Thus, in fairy tales and fantasy, enchantments are sometimes produced by a magician or group of magicians chanting, in other words, by singing. This connects enchantment to music.

In the Middle Ages, there were three categories of music. Musica instrumentalis refers to the kind of music that we hear, including chants. Musica humana is the music that regulates our bodies and souls—the rhythm of our heartbeat and respiration, our diurnal cycle of sleeping and waking, and the harmonious, well-ordered relationship between body and soul and between the parts of body and soul. Musica mundane, the music of the spheres, is the music that regulates the rhythms and motions of the stars and planets, that holds the cosmos together in harmony. We’ll be back with the cosmos shortly.

Returning to its basic meaning of making things magical, we use the word enchant metaphorically as well, so an enchanted evening is one that seems magical. We can also talk about an enchanting young woman, whom we might describe as charming—a charm being a kind of magical spell. Enchanté, the French response to an introduction, or the older English “charmed, I’m sure” points to the same thing: the charming young woman has cast her spell on you—more on that in a bit.

Of course, the charming young woman might use cosmetics—a word related to the word cosmos which was understood by the Greeks as a system of ordered beauty. So the cosmetics put the young woman’s face in order and beautify it.

Charming young women might move up to the next level and become glamourous—a glamour being a kind of magic, specifically an illusion. I’ll leave it to you to consider what that says about glamour and glamourous people. The word glamour comes from grammarye, a word that meant scholarship or learning, and specifically occult learning. It is, of course, the root word for grammar as well as glamour.

In the classical liberal arts, grammar referred to all basic language skills, including not simply how to construct a proper sentence as we usually use the term, but also the definition of words. Words name things, and names were traditionally held to have power over the things named.

The Greek word for “word” is logos. This means more than just “word.” It is the root word for the English word logic, and to the Greeks it was the creative principle and reason underpinning the cosmos. (There it is again.) It was also fundamentally the source of meaning for the world and for human beings.

If you’re using words, especially in this medium, it’s important to know how to spell them. Our word spell comes via Anglo-French from the Proto-Germanic *spellam, meaning to tell, speak, or recite. So gospel comes from Old English godspel, meaning a good story. But another form of recitation could involve magic, which is where we get the other meaning of spell, a word or formula that has magical power.

A common means of casting a spell is through an incantation, which is Latin for “to sing into,” and so we’ve now gone full circle back to enchantment.

The Consequences of Disenchantment

So what happens when the world is disenchanted? In a disenchanted world, the magic is gone both literally and metaphorically. And that means that all of the other related ideas I just went through disappear as well.

Let’s start with the three categories of music. Musica instrumentalis degenerates into intentional randomness, polytonality and atonality, “noise music” (yes, that’s a thing; think Yoko Ono), or John Cage’s “4:33” (which is just 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence). Beauty, order, and logos are gone from music.

Musica humana also disappears, most obviously in transgenderism. Body and soul are no longer seen as operating in harmony, the body itself is reduced to a biochemical machine, and the existence of the soul is denied or chalked up to hormones, psychological conditioning, or brain chemistry.

Musica mundi is replaced by cold physics and math. Rather than seeing the cosmos in a great dance moved by the love of God, it is reduced to impersonal forces. All we are left with is a meaningless universe heading toward heat death.

Charming is not a word regularly used of anyone today; it’s been replaced by “hot.” Hook-up culture has largely destroyed the idea of charm and with it, romance. I will get myself in trouble here, but purple hair, exaggerated fake eyelashes, tats, and piercings work against being charming and certainly do not fit the idea of ordered beauty. As for glamour, it does continue culturally on, say, the red carpet in Hollywood, but notice how the focus tends to be on how revealing or provocative the dresses are. And don’t get me started on some of the clothes on display at the runways of fashion week.

Words have lost their meaning as well. Where once they were considered at the very least as the link between mind and reality, now they are considered simply sounds that have only an arbitrary and malleable connection to reality. Just consider the sentence, “men can get pregnant” and you can see the disconnect between words and reality. This feeds into the idea that we can redefine words according to our political or personal purposes.

And this means logos is rejected as well. Logic is rejected as oppressive and replaced by subjectivity. Behind this is a rejection of the idea of objective truth. And if there is no real truth, then language is reduced to a tool manipulated by those in power to preserve their position and to keep others in their place.

And with the loss of logos comes the loss of meaning in both the universe and our personal lives. Disenchantment is thus at the root of our crisis of meaning.

Is it any wonder that there is an epidemic of mental illness and deaths of despair among those growing up in a disenchanted world?

Where Do We Go from Here?

The good news is that the world doesn’t need reenchanting because it was never truly disenchanted to begin with. The problem is that we’ve turned our backs on the world’s enchantment and so have lost our ability to perceive it. We need to have our vision cleared so that we can recognize again the meaning and metaphorical magic in the world. And that involves learning to delight in beauty, recapturing a sense of wonder, rediscovering myth, fairytale, and story, recovering a sacramental vision of the world, and finding our meaning in God and His purposes for us. These are all themes I will continue to explore here.