Myth, disenchantment and the loss of sacred place

Abstract

The connection between the sacred and place is fundamental in the history of myth and religion. Today, it remains fundamental in New Age spiritualities, contemporary religions (churches, mosques, synagogues) and certain political and ecological ideologies (sacred earth), to the whole re-enchantment project in its various forms. My contention, nevertheless, is that disenchantment, the rupture between myth and place, far from being soulless, as often asserted, is actually the soul's work: its dialectical labour of negation and self-relation: namely, an alchemical opus contra naturam; the distillation of the mercurial logos from the stone: the stone that is no stone.

Keywords:

• disenchantment
• place/Earth
• soul
• logos
• myth

Notes

1. In this paper, I follow Giegerich in using Hegelian terms to describe the dialectical movement of the psyche. Space does not permit a full explication of each term. I refer the interested reader to Giegerich's The Soul's Logical Life (Giegerich, 2008) and Dialectics and Analytical Psychology (Giegerich, Miller, & Mogenson, 2005).