Most of Hunting Magic Eels is concerned with the challenge of disenchantment and our need to re-enchant our faith. Thomas Merton describes this situation well in a quote I share early on in the book:
Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God manifests Himself everywhere, in everything—in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that He is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him. You cannot be without God. It’s impossible. It’s simply impossible. The only thing is that we don’t see it.
God is everywhere, but we don't see it. Recovering this vision is the goal of re-enchantment.
And yet, disenchantment isn't our only problem in this post-Christian culture. Some have described this as "the myth of disenchantment." As Charles Taylor describes in A Secular Age, secularity doesn't produce widespread unbelief and atheism. Rather, secularity produces what Taylor calls "the nova effect," an explosion of beliefs and a proliferation of enchantments on offer in a "spiritual but not religious" culture. Atheism is just one option among many in this metaphysical marketplace. Most of us, though, remain very much enchanted.
I describe all this in Part 4 of Hunting Magic Eels in the chapter "Enchantment Shifting." Following the work of Steven Smith in his book Pagans and Christians in the City, I describe how paganism is now on the rise as people are turning away from Christianity. Since the publication Hunting Magic Eels many others have been making this same observation. See, for instance, Louise Perry's essay "We are Repaganizing" in First Things.
In light of this repaganization, we need more than re-enchantment. We also need to discern the spirits among the various enchantments on offer in the world. For example, how is the Christian enchantment different from a pagan enchantment and why might those differences matter?
To help with this work of discernment, in the new chapter of Hunting Magic Eels I take a closer look at witchcraft. The title "Hexing the Taliban" comes from a debate that broke out on WitchTok, which I recount at the start of the chapter:
In August of 2021, as American military forces were evacuating Afghanistan, a controversy broke out on WitchTok. WitchTok, if you didn’t know, is the witchcraft community on the social media platform TikTok. Over the last few years, social media has witnessed the rapid growth of spaces devoted to paganism, the occult, magic, and witchcraft. Documenting this rise, in 2020 The Atlantic ran an article “Why Witchcraft is on the Rise.” That same year Wired declared “TikTok Has Become the Home of Modern Witchcraft.” A year later, the The New York Times asked “When Did Everyone Become a Witch?”
Like I said, paganism is back.
The controversy on WitchTok the summer of 2021 concerned the movement “Hex the Taliban.” Concerns about the Taliban were understandable. As Taliban forces retook Afghanistan everyone in the world grew concerned about the plight of women in that country. Would women be forced into marriages with Taliban fighters? Would girls be able to go to school under Taliban rule?
Taking action, the witchcraft community on social media gathered forces for a mass hexing of the Taliban. That mass hexing caught a lot of attention, but controversies broke out when some “baby witches” (“baby witches” are new, novice, and inexperienced witches) attempted to escalate the confrontation. Some baby witches were skipping the Taliban, wanting to go right to the top. Some baby witches wanted to hex Allah.
As I go on to recount in the chapter, a debate broke out among the witchcraft community about the safety of hexing Allah. The concern was that Allah was too powerful for a baby witch to confront on her own. The debate was about dangerousness. But as I go on to discuss, this debate about safety within the witchcraft community revealed a metaphysical confusion, a confusion between transcendent and immanent enchantments. Stipulating that Christians, Muslims, and Jews are all describing the Creator God, the one who created the universe ex nihilo ("from nothing"), the debate within the witchcraft community shouldn't have been about the safety of hexing Allah but about its possibility. That the witchcraft community couldn't distinguish immanent from transcendent enchantments in their debate revealed that they didn't properly understand God. And as I describe in the chapter, this is also a common mistake among atheists.
But again, why would getting clear about all this make any difference? What are the problems with the immanent enchantments of paganism? The new chapter "Hexing the Taliban" answers those questions, recognizing some good things at work in paganism, but ultimately concluding that paganism fails to deliver the goods that only God can provide.
