By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
When worldly ambition fails to validate us, we often turn to romantic love. We rely on another person to lend our life weight and meaning. First, we ask the crowd; then, we ask one person.
The Greeks had several words for love: eros, philia, storge, and agape. Eros is passionate love, philia friendship, storge familial love, and agape universal love. But we reduce all these types of love into just one word, which we associate with romantic love.
The Rise of Romantic Love
What we don’t realise is that romantic love, unlike passionate love, is a fairly modern concept. If you think about it, romantic love barely features in the 73 books of the Bible. The Bible’s greatest love stories are David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, and, above all the love of man for God. In the ancient world, passionate love was not seen as ennobling but as a dangerous affliction: think only of Helen and Paris, Dido and Aeneas, Antony and Cleopatra.
How, then, did this dangerous affliction become our highest ideal? As religion retreated, our need for religion remained. We still longed for meaning and transcendence. Gradually, the sacred seeped out of God and into romantic love. We stopped loving God and began loving love.
That’s why love speaks the language of religion: adoration, devotion, eternal union… We expect one person to provide us with everything: intimacy, friendship, intellectual stimulation—until death do us part.
What Love Really Is
But once a person is given the role of God, disappointment becomes inevitable. When things go wrong, we conclude that we chose the wrong person, or that love has died—not that we are asking far too much.
This brings us back to the original question: what is love? Beneath all its forms—philia, eros, storge, agape—love is a reaching out beyond ourselves towards someone or something that lends weight and meaning to our life. It is the force that enables us to cross the boundary between ourselves and the world—to shed our shell, like a lobster, and grow beyond it. That’s why people of little love are so small.
This definition of love is useful, in that it gives us a litmus test by which to distinguish love from mere dependency. We can ask: Is this person enlarging my world, or am I merely asking them to save me from myself? Are we growing together, or merely leaning against one another?
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Why orgies are no longer what they were.
Civilisation depends upon restraint. We are expected to play our allotted roles, respect boundaries, control our appetites, and maintain a coherent sense of self. Yet, across cultures and throughout history, people have sought occasions on which to let it all go: to drink, dance, disguise themselves, and disappear into the crowd. The Ancient Greeks personified this tendency towards dissolution in Dionysus, and in the nineteenth century Nietzsche referred to it as the Dionysian. But the impulse is older even than Dionysus—and, of course, far from dead.
Ancient Egypt
The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Heavenly Cow contains the Myth of the Destruction of Mankind. Displeased with the mounting rebelliousness of mankind, the ageing Sun God Ra sends his daughter Hathor to wreak revenge. Hathor takes the form of the bloodthirsty lioness Sekhmet and rampages up and down the Valley of the Nile, killing every man, woman, and child in sight. With mankind on the brink of extinction, Ra takes pity, and floods the fields with beer dyed red with ochre. Mistaking the beer for blood, Sekhmet drinks to intoxication and falls asleep—to arise once again in the benign form of Hathor, goddess of joy, love, and fertility.
To commemorate this episode, the Egyptians held communal Festivals of Drunkenness in mid-August, to coincide with the swelling of the Nile. Revellers drank to the point of passing out, only to be awoken by the beating of drums—mirroring the transformation of Sekhmet into Hathor. The revels, which had an important religious dimension and took place in and around temples and shrines, also included dancing and public sex, in part to imitate and propitiate the flood and fertility to come.
Ancient Greece
The word ‘orgy’, which derives, ultimately, from the Greek orgion (‘sacred rite’), entered the English language in the 1560s to mean ‘a licentious revelry’. Today, people think of an orgy as a party involving open and unrestrained sex between multiple people. But originally, orgia referred to the secret rites of Ancient Greek mystery cults such as the Dionysian Mysteries and the Cult of Cybele, which aimed, above all, at ecstatic union with the divine. The modern sense of ‘orgy’ retains only the licence, without the transcendence.
Dionysus, who, like Jesus, died and was reborn, was the god of wine, regeneration, fertility, ritual madness, ecstasy, theatre, and pleasure, among others. In certain times and places, or among certain people, he was the most important god—more important, even, than Zeus—and most fervently venerated around the time of the vernal equinox.
Let me paint you a picture of a Dionysian orgy. The procession begins at sunset, led by torchbearers followed by wine and fruit bearers, musicians, and a throng of revellers wearing masks and… well, not much else. Closing the rear is a giant phallus representing the resurrection of the twice-born god. Everyone is pushing and shoving, singing and dancing, and shouting the name of the god stirred in with ribaldry and obscenity.
Arriving at a clearing in the woods, the crowd goes wild with drinking, dancing, and every manner of sex. The god is in the wine, and to imbibe it is to be possessed by his spirit—although in the bull’s horn the booze has been interlaced with other entheogens (substances that ‘generate the divine from within’). Animals, standing in for the god, are hunted down, torn apart with bare hands, and eaten raw with the blood still warm and dripping.
This ‘Dionysian’ impulse for irrationality and chaos can be understood as a natural inversion of, and release from, the habitual ‘Apollonian’ order and restraint imposed by the state and state religion. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche recognises it as a primal and universal force:
Either through the influence of narcotic drink, of which all primitive men and peoples speak, or through the powerful coming on of spring, which drives joyfully through all of nature, that Dionysian excitement arises. As its power increases, the subjective fades into complete forgetfulness of self. In the German Middle Ages under the same power of Dionysus constantly growing hordes waltzed from place to place, singing and dancing. In that St. John’s and St. Vitus’s dancing we recognize the Bacchic chorus of the Greeks once again, and its precursors in Asia Minor, right back to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea.
By diverting the Dionysian impulse into special rites, the orgy kept it in check, preventing it from surfacing in more insidious and perfidious ways. More than that, it sublimed it into an invigorating and liberating—and, in that much, profoundly religious—celebration of life and the life force.
The orgy permitted people to escape from their artificial and restricted social roles and regress into a more authentic state of nature which modern psychologists have come to associate with the Freudian id or unconscious. It appealed most to marginal groups, since it set aside the usual hierarchies of man over woman, master over slave, patrician over commoner, rich over poor, and citizen over foreigner. In short, it gave people a much-needed break: like modern holidays, but cheaper and more effective.
Ancient Rome
The Dionysian cult spread through the Greek colonies to Rome and beyond. In 186 BCE, the Senate severely restricted it through the Senatorial Decree concerning the Bacchanalia (Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus). According to the historian Livy, the decree led to more executions than imprisonments, with many choosing instead to commit suicide.
Illicit Bacchanalia persisted but gradually morphed into the tamer Liberalia in honour of Liber Pater (‘Free Father’), the Roman god of wine and fertility who so resembled Bacchus/Dionysus as to fold into him. As with the Dionysian cult, the Liberalia featured a giant phallus, carted through the countryside to fertilise the fields and safeguard crops—after which a virtuous matron would crown the phallus with a garland or wreath. This sort of ‘depravity’ also featured in other religious festivals such as the Lupercalia, which included naked noblemen coursing through the streets and whipping willing noblewomen with strips of goatskin.
The reign of Constantius II (337–361 CE) marked the beginning of the formal persecution of paganism by the now Christian Roman Empire. But the springtime fertility orgy survived through the tumult of the centuries, albeit in attenuated forms. At last, unable to do away with it, the Church integrated it into its calendar as Carnival—which, to this day, involves reversal of social norms and roles, licentiousness, and feasting ahead of the deprivations of Lent.
But one doesn’t have to wait for Carnival to have an orgy. In the summer of 2017, as reported in the Italian press, the police broke up a drug-fuelled gay orgy at the Vatican—the problem from the police’s perspective being more with the drugs than with the sex.
Mediaeval Europe
May Day celebrations across Europe and North America have their origins in the Roman Floralia and corresponding Celtic traditions. In mediaeval times, people danced around the gigantic phallic symbol of the Maypole before descending into the fields for wanton sex, avowedly to ‘fertilise the land’.
In the Anatomie of Abuses (1583), the puritan Philip Stubbs inveighed against these practices:
What clipping, what culling, what kissing and bussing, what smooching and slobbering one of another, what filthy groping and unclean handling is not practised in the dances … I have heard it creditably reported (and that viva voce) by men of great gravitie and reputation, that of fortie, threescore, or a hundred maides going to the wood over night, there have scaresly the third part of them returned home againe undefiled.
In 1644, the Puritans outlawed Maypoles in England, with the Long Parliament’s ordinance damning them as ‘a Heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness’.
Ecstasy
‘Ecstasy’ [ex stasis] literally means ‘to be or stand outside oneself’. It is a trance-like state in which consciousness of an object is so heightened that the subject dissolves or merges into the object. Einstein himself called it the ‘mystic emotion’ and spoke of it as ‘the finest emotion of which we are capable’, ‘the germ of all art and all true science’, and ‘the core of the true religious sentiment’.
More than ever before, modern society emphasises the sovereign supremacy of the ego and the ultimate separateness and responsibility of each and every one of us. From a young age, we are taught to remain in tight control of our ego or persona with the aim of projecting it as far out as possible. As a result, we have lost the art of letting go—and, indeed, may no longer even recognise the possibility—leading to a poverty or monotony of conscious experience.
Letting go can threaten the life that we have built and even the person that we have become, but it can also free us from our modern narrowness and neediness, and deliver, or re-deliver, us into a bigger and brighter world.
Man, said Balzac, dies in despair, while the spirit dies in ecstasy.
Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus, by John William Waterhouse (1891).
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Many years ago, I went through a phase at cocktail parties. Whenever someone asked me, ‘So, what do you do?’, I would reply, ‘I’m a magician.’ I kept a straight face, but was laughing inside.
The word ‘magic’ derives from the Latin, the Greek, the Old Persian, and, ultimately, the Proto-Indo-European magh, ‘to help, to be able, to be powerful’, from which also derive the words ‘almighty’, ‘maharaja’, ‘main’, ‘may’, and… ‘machine’. We come full circle with Clarke’s Third Law, which states: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’
Magic, like religion, is deeply embedded in the human psyche. Though it has, effectively, been banished from the land, still it surfaces in thought and language, in phrases such as ‘I must be cursed’ and ‘He’s under your spell’; in children’s stories and other fiction; and in psychological processes such as undoing, which involves thinking a thought or carrying out an act in an attempt to negate a previous uncomfortable thought or act.
Examples of undoing include the absent father who periodically returns to spoil and smother his children, and the angry wife who throws a plate at her husband and then tries to ‘make it up’ by smothering him in kisses. The absent father and angry wife are not merely trying to make amends for their behaviour, but also, as if by magic, to ‘erase it from the record’.
Another example of undoing is the man who damages a friend’s prospects and then, a few days later, turns up at his door bearing a small gift. Rituals such as confession and penitence are, at least on some level, socially condoned and codified forms of undoing.
Even if the world doesn’t work by magic, our mind often does—and projects its thinking back onto the world.
What Magic Is
‘Magic’ is difficult to define, and its definition remains a matter of debate and controversy. One way of understanding it is by comparing and contrasting it to religion on the one hand and to science on the other.
On the assumption that certain entities can exert a hidden influence on one another, magic is a method of acting in the world through sheer power of will. The notion that the universe is pregnant with subtle connexions is supported by, of all things, the study of mathematics, and it can sometimes seem, when a hidden number or relationship suddenly becomes apparent, that maths is at only one remove from magic.
Magic is often considered a gift, such that some people have it to a high degree and others, the muggles, barely at all, perhaps because their will is weak, unsettled, or untrained, or because magic does not run in their family—for like madness, or kingship, magic is often hereditary. Whatever the case, people without magic are usually portrayed as lacking in cognitive faculties such as insight, intuition, and imagination, and would not see possibility or irony or poetry even if it slapped them in the face.
Kinds of Magic: White and Black, High and Low
Magic is sometimes divided into white and black, and high and low. Black magic is selfish and does not consider other people, whereas white magic is altruistic or selfless, and seeks in general to maintain or restore the equilibrium of the universe. The magician’s psychological makeup determines what kind of magic, white or black, he or she is able or likely to wield.
Speaking of equilibrium, deflecting objects and especially people from their natural or pre-ordained course is likely to have significant repercussions, which is why, aside from the mental effort and exhaustion, the use of magic is often said to come at a price, either to the magician, his or her client (for want of a better term), or a third party. The equilibrium must, ultimately, be maintained. Drinking wine, I often say, is like using magic: there’s always a price to pay—if only the price of the bottle.
The magician is, in effect, a mediator of energies. Low magic involves drawing up energies from the earth, from plants and minerals and so on, and is more the province of common folk. High magic involves drawing down raw, unprocessed energies from the sun and sky, which requires complex ritual and is more the province of an educated or trained elite. Both high magic and low magic can be either white or black.
In the popular imagination, low magic has often been associated with women—the witch, wise woman, or herbalist—while high magic has more often been associated with men: the mage, wizard, sorcerer, or alchemist. This distinction may owe less to magic than to history: learned magic required literacy, education, and access to books and institutions, privileges that were overwhelmingly reserved for men. Notable exceptions include Circe and her niece Medea, two of the most powerful sorceresses in Greek mythology—but Circe was a goddess, and Medea a granddaughter of the sun god Helios.
The magician cultivates his or her will through concentration—acquiring charisma in the process—and focuses it through ritual such as ceremony, chant, or spell. Ritual also helps to create the right atmosphere and attitude for magic to take hold. Words, in particular, can exert a power all of their own. In the language of Ancient Egypt, the sound of a word had a magical power which complemented its meaning, a view of language which we still retain when we talk of ‘spelling’ a word, or visit a psychotherapist. And while words can change the world, getting them wrong, that is, misspelling, can have disastrous consequences. If they had told us at school that we were learning magic, we would have paid a lot more attention.
When Magicians Were Priests, Doctors, and Philosophers
Historically, the priest, the physician, the magician, and the scholar might have been one and the same person: the shaman, the sorcerer.
In the West, pre-Socratics such as Pythagoras and Empedocles moonlighted as mystics and miracle workers—or perhaps, since the term ‘philosophy’ is held to have been invented by Pythagoras, moonlighted as philosophers. Pythagoras claimed to have lived four lives and to remember them all in great detail, and once recognised the cry of his dead friend in the yelping of a puppy. After his death, the Pythagoreans deified him, and attributed him with a golden thigh and the gift of bilocation.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates argues that there are, in fact, two kinds of madness: one resulting from human illness, but the other arising from a divinely inspired release from normally accepted behaviour. This divine form of madness, says Socrates, has four parts: love, poetry, inspiration, and mysticism, which is the particular gift of Dionysus.
While Socrates, in some sense the father of logic, seldom claimed to have any real knowledge, he did claim to have a daimonion or ‘divine something’, an inner voice or intuition that prevented him from making grave mistakes such as getting involved in politics, or fleeing Athens after being sentenced to death: ‘This is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic…’
Far from being a thing of the distant past, this trope of the philosopher-sorcerer outlived the sack of Athens and the fall of Rome, and perdured well into the Enlightenment. The economist John Maynard Keynes, upon buying a trove of Isaac Newton’s papers, observed that Newton and the physicists of his time were ‘not the first of the scientists, but the last of the sorcerers’. Other notable later occultists include Giordano Bruno, Nostradamus, Paracelsus, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Arthur Conan Doyle, father of the hyper-rational Sherlock Holmes.
Magic vs Religion
Yet since antiquity, the West has had an uncomfortable relationship with magic, usually regarding it as something foreign and ‘Eastern’. In Plato’s Meno, Meno compares Socrates to the flat torpedo fish, which torpifies or numbs all those who come near it: ‘And I think that you are very wise in not [leaving Athens], for if you did in other places as you do in Athens, you would be cast into prison as a magician.’
For the Greeks as for the Romans, magic represented an improper and potentially subversive expression of religion. After centuries of contra-legislation, in 357 CE, the Christian Roman emperor Constantius II finally banned it outright:
No one shall consult a haruspex, a diviner, or a soothsayer, and wicked confessions made to augurs and prophets must cease. Chaldeans, magicians, and others who are commonly called malefactors on account of the enormity of their crimes shall no longer practice their infamous arts.
The Bible, too, inveighs against magic, in more than a hundred places, for example, picked almost at random:
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. —Exodus 22:18 (KJV)
Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God. —Leviticus 19:31
But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death. —Revelation 21:8
Early Christians associated magic with mythopoeic thought, in which all of nature is full of gods and spirits, and therefore with paganism and, by extension, with demons. During the Reformation, Protestants accused the Church of Rome, with its superstitions, relics, and exorcisms, of being ‘more magic than religion’—a charge that transferred all the more to non-Christian peoples, and that, notoriously, served as a justification for large-scale persecution, colonisation, and Christianisation.
So, what exactly is the difference between magic and religion? It is often held that magic is older than religion, or that religion was born out of magic, but it may be that they co-existed, and were not distinguished.
Both magic and religion pertain to the sacred sphere, to things removed from everyday life. But, compared to religion, magic does not split so sharply between the natural and the supernatural, the earthly and the divine, the fallen and the blessed. And whereas magic involves harnessing the world to the will, religion involves subjugating the will to the world. In the words of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘religion consists in a humanisation of natural laws, and magic in a naturalisation of human actions’.
Hence, magic tends to be about specific problems, and to involve private rites and rituals. Religion, in contrast, tends towards the bigger picture, and to involve communal worship and belonging. ‘Magic’, said the sociologist Émile Durkheim, ‘does not result in binding together those who adhere to it, nor in uniting them into a group leading a common life. There is no Church of magic.’
So, one hypothesis is that, as man gained increasing control over nature, magic, as it came to be called, lost ground to religion, which, being communal and centralised, evolved a hierarchy that sought to suppress those practices that threatened its dogma and dominance.
Magic vs Science
But now religion is, in its turn, on the decline—in favour of science. What is science? Within academia, there are, in fact, no clear or reliable criteria for distinguishing a science from a non-science. For example, is ‘political science’ really a science? What might be said is that all sciences share certain assumptions which underpin the scientific method—in particular, that there is an objective reality governed by uniform laws, and that this reality can be discovered by systematic observation.
But, as I argue in my book, Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking, every scientific paradigm that has come and gone is now deemed to have been false, inaccurate, or incomplete, and it would be ignorant or arrogant to assume that our current ones might amount to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
The philosopher Paul Feyerabend went so far as to claim that there is no such thing as ‘a’ or ‘the’ scientific method: behind the façade, ‘anything goes’, and, as a form of knowledge, science is no more privileged than magic or religion.
More than that, science has come to occupy the same place in the human psyche as religion once did. Although science began as a liberating movement, it grew dogmatic and repressive, more of an ideology than a rational method that leads to ineluctable progress.
To quote Feyerabend:
Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges toward an ideal view; it is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness.
Whatever one makes of Feyerabend’s provocation, science differs from magic in its method. Magic begins with hidden sympathies; science with verifiable hypotheses. Yet, once the human mind gets involved, the boundary between the two becomes less clear, and Newton spent more of himself on his secret alchemy than on his public science.
So, Does Magic Work?
So far, I’ve been talking as if magic works. But does it work, and, if so, how?
Unless one broadens the definition of magic to include cognitive faculties such as insight, intuition, and imagination, or simply peak performance, magic does not work, or, at least, not in an immediate, instrumental sense. But magic might work indirectly, by focussing the mind and energies on a particular problem, or through a mechanism akin to the placebo effect or psychoneuroimmunology.
The term ‘placebo effect’ derives from the Latin placere (‘to please’) and refers to the tendency for a remedy to ‘work’ simply because it is expected to do so. In essence, people who associate taking a remedy with improvement may come to expect improvement if they take a remedy, even if the ‘remedy’ in question is no more than an inert substance, or a substance that has no therapeutic effect but only adverse effects that can be interpreted as indicative of a therapeutic effect. It may be that the expectation alone suffices to mimic the effect of the remedy, and brain imaging studies indicate that, in some cases, remedies and their placebos activate the very same mechanisms in the nervous system.
Remedies that are perceived to be more potent have a stronger placebo effect. Perceptions of potency are influenced by factors such as the remedy’s size, shape, colour, route of administration, and general availability. A brightly coloured injection administered by a silver-haired professor of medicine can be expected to have a much stronger placebo effect, and therefore a much stronger overall effect, than the unremarkable over-the-counter tablet recommended by the teenager next door. When doctors in England lost their white coat, they lost much more than a coat.
This highlights the importance of the psychological, social, and cultural context in which a treatment or intervention is administered, and, more particularly, the significance of the therapeutic act or ritual. If the practitioner, the patient, and their society believe in the magic, then the magic is real by the very force of that shared belief.
No wonder the magician, the priest, and the healer used to be one and the same person—and, in many societies, still is. Like religion, magic may represent a response to anxiety, distress, and a feeling of inadequacy or impotence, especially in the face of natural disaster. And like religion, it may represent a spiritual path, akin, perhaps, to a martial art, which also involves concentrating the mind, channelling instinctual drives, and leveraging forces.
So, does magic work? Yes and no.
Magic as a Mirror of the Mind
Whether it works or not, magic is an external projection of the human psyche, an external projection of our internal or psychological truth, which is why it features so prominently in fiction. Fairy tales often begin with a formulation such as, ‘Once upon a time in dreamland’, and magic is that dreamland. Like dreams, magic makes use of condensed symbols, and like dreams, it is a kind of wish fulfilment.
In the same vein, magic might be compared with mental states such as psychosis and neurosis, which, like dreams, can also involve condensed symbols and wish fulfilment. Sigmund Freud linked magical rituals and spells with neurotic and obsessional thought processes, and there are some parallels with compulsive acts, which are a response to obsessional thoughts or rules that must be rigidly applied.
Magic is, arguably, on a spectrum with madness, and magical thinking is especially prominent in schizotypy, or schizotypal personality disorder, which predisposes to schizophrenia—and, indeed, to shamanism. As I’ve said, Plato distinguished between madness resulting from human illness and madness arising from a divinely inspired release from normally accepted behaviour. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates says that this divinely inspired madness has four forms: mysticism, inspiration, poetry, and love. Love, according to Socrates, is not a god, as most people think, but a great spirit (daimon) that intermediates between gods and men.
Similarly, in The Sorcerer and His Magic (1963), the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss argues that magic is a mediator between normal thought processes (common sense, reason, science…), which suffer from a marked deficit of meaning, and pathological thought processes, which abound with meaning:
From any non-scientific perspective (and here we can exclude no society), pathological and normal thought processes are complementary rather than opposed. In a universe which it strives to understand but whose dynamics it cannot fully control, normal thought continually seeks the meaning of things which refuse to reveal their significance. So-called pathological thought, on the other hand, overflows with emotional interpretations and overtones, in order to supplement an otherwise deficient reality… We might borrow from linguistics and say that so-called normal thought always suffers from a deficit of meaning, whereas so-called pathological thought (in at least some of its manifestations) disposes of a plethora of meaning. Through collective participation in shamanistic curing, a balance is established between these two complementary situations.
The function of magic may not be to explain the world or act upon it so much as to imbue it with meaning. Science can tell us why an eclipse occurs; magic can tell us what the eclipse might mean. The first is a question of cause, the second of significance—and man, uniquely, is an animal in search of meaning. Which is why animals may have pointed ears, but never pointed hats.
Why We Miss Magic
Today, magic, like mythopoeic thought, is seen as ‘primitive’, and has largely been relegated to fiction and illusionism. But as a result, people have come to associate magic with delight and wonder; and with the retreat of Christianity, at least from Europe, a growing number are returning to some form of paganism as a path to personal and spiritual development.
A common trope in fantasy fiction is the ‘thinning’ of magic: magic is fading or has been banished from the land, which is caught in a perpetual winter or otherwise in deathly or depressive decline, and the hero is called upon to rescue and restore the life-giving forces of old.
It is easy to draw the parallel with our own world, in which magic has been progressively driven out, first by religion, which over the centuries became increasingly repressive of magic, and latterly by science with its zero-tolerance.
The sociologist Max Weber referred to it as the ‘disenchantment of the world’. The more completely the world can be calculated, predicted, and explained, the less room it leaves for mystery, correspondence, and intrinsic meaning. Although we have gained enormously in knowledge and control, something may have been lost in the exchange—and by gaining control, we have, ironically, lost control of the planet.
Some of my regular readers may have wondered why I turned my pen to so apparently frivolous a subject as magic. But we now know that magic is much more profound than it may at first seem. Aside from its links with madness and with healing, it is a mirror of the mind, and even, like love or beauty, and science and religion, a mode of belonging to the world.
Perhaps this is why magic has survived every attempt to banish it. Though we may no longer believe in sorcerers and spells, we continue to fall under charms, break curses, tempt fate, thank our lucky stars, and search for signs. We still speak the language of magic because that is the oldest and truest part of us.
That is why, when we read fantasy fiction, it is always for the side of the old magic that we root, for a time when everything shone brightly and we didn’t have to go around begging for meaning.
William Blake, The Ancient of Days (1794). Is Urizen what Blake meant by God?
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
In February 2012, three of the world’s most distinguished intellectuals gathered in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre to discuss the origins of human beings and, tied with that, the existence of God. There was Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and celebrated atheist; Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury; and the philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny, a former Catholic priest who professed to be ‘ignorant’—that is, an agnostic. Kenny, who died in August 2026 at the age of 95, was a philosopher of exceptional range and clarity, and perhaps the ideal person to sit between the other two.
Here, apparently, were the three great positions in the God debate: belief, disbelief, and quiet uncertainty. But there was a problem. What did each man mean by ‘God’?
This is no minor philosophical quibble. Before asking whether something exists, we need, surely, to establish what that something is. Yet people routinely declare themselves theists, atheists, or agnostics without first defining the object of their belief, disbelief, or doubt. You cannot meaningfully ask whether something exists until you have some idea of what you are looking for. And ‘God’ can mean radically different things to different people.
Which God?
At one end of the spectrum is the God that Dawkins principally attacks: a supernatural intelligence who created the universe, designed living things, listens to prayers, judges our actions, performs miracles, and otherwise intervenes in human affairs. Millions of people believe in some version of this God, so it is perfectly reasonable for Dawkins to argue that such a being does not exist.
But it is far from the only conception of God. Aristotle’s God, for example, is the unmoved mover: the ultimate cause of change in the universe, itself unchanging. Aristotle’s God did not create the universe, which Aristotle believed to be eternal, and certainly does not sit in heaven listening to our prayers. Instead, he is the ultimate introvert, described by Aristotle as noesis noeseos, ‘thought thinking itself’.
Spinoza went even further in collapsing God. For him, God and Nature are one and the same: Deus sive Natura, ‘God or Nature’. Everything that exists is in God, because God is the single infinite substance of which everything else is a mode—a recognised position also in Indian philosophy.
Now ask the atheist: ‘Do you believe in Spinoza’s God?’ What would it mean to say no? That he does not believe in the rock that he is kicking? Unless the atheist wishes to deny the existence of Nature, the disagreement is no longer about whether something exists. It is about whether we ought to call that something ‘God’.
What Does an Atheist Not Believe In
When someone says, ‘I don’t believe in God’, what they really mean is, ‘I don’t believe in a particular idea of God.’
This becomes increasingly apparent as soon as we begin stripping attributes from God. Suppose we start with a personal creator who designed the universe, answers prayers, performs miracles, rewards virtue, punishes sin, and promises an afterlife. There is plenty here to believe or disbelieve. Now progressively remove the afterlife, divine intervention, answered prayers, God’s personality, and even the act of creation. With each subtraction, there is less for the atheist to reject. Eventually, we might arrive at God as the order of nature, the ground of being, Nature itself, or some such.
The less we say about God, the harder God becomes to disbelieve in.
At the limit, the atheist and the believer may agree completely about what exists. The disagreement is only about whether to call it ‘God’. Indeed, the atheist who tells Spinoza, ‘I don’t believe in your God’, may really be saying, ‘I believe in exactly the same thing as you, but I don’t think you should call it God.’ More commonly, Spinoza was himself accused of atheism, on the grounds that identifying God with everything amounted to believing in nothing.
The Problem with Agnosticism
The same problem applies to agnosticism. An agnostic typically says, ‘I don’t know whether God exists.’ But again: which God?
It makes perfect sense to be agnostic about a supernatural creator. Perhaps such a being exists; perhaps not; perhaps we cannot know. But what would it mean to be agnostic about Spinoza’s God? ‘I don’t know whether Nature exists’ is hardly a coherent position.
Like atheism and theism, agnosticism depends upon some prior conception of God. Until that conception has been supplied, saying, ‘I am an agnostic’ tells us surprisingly little. The familiar spectrum—theist, agnostic, atheist—is not really a spectrum of attitudes towards God. It is a spectrum of attitudes towards a particular—some might say quasi-mythological—conception of God. Change the conception and you may change your position without having altered a single belief about reality.
Is Dawkins Attacking a Straw Man?
This helps explain something peculiar about the modern God debate. Dawkins is not attacking a straw man when he attacks the supernatural, interventionist God. Millions of people believe in precisely such a God.
But difficulties arise when an argument against that concept of God is treated as an argument against God tout court.
The God of philosophy and theology can be much more elusive. God may be described not as a being but as Being itself; not as one cause among others but as the ground of causation; not as something within the universe but as that upon which the universe ultimately depends. Dawkins’s arguments against a supernatural designer may have considerable force without touching these concepts at all.
The atheist can reasonably reply, ‘You have defined God into existence.’ The theologian can equally reasonably reply, ‘You have been attacking a God I don’t believe in.’ And there, in miniature, lies the problem.
The more concrete and anthropomorphic God becomes, the easier God is to attack. But the more abstract and deflationary God becomes, the less obvious it is what atheism could mean—and, eventually, why we need the word ‘God’ at all.
Why Does the God Debate Persist?
If the problem is so simple, why do some of our most distinguished intellectuals sit there arguing about God without first agreeing what they mean by the word?
One reason may be that belief and disbelief are about far more, and far less, than metaphysics. For many people, religion is bound up with family, community, culture, morality, and personal identity. When someone starts questioning their idea of God, they are also questioning their idea of who they are.
Atheism can function in much the same way. For some, especially since the rise of the New Atheism, it can signify reason, science, intellectual independence, or emancipation from religious tradition. People on both sides may therefore be defending not merely propositions, but identities and the ego defences that buttress them. This may account for the extraordinary heat surrounding the debate. Once people start agitating, it is no longer simply about the facts.
Another reason is that the God debate has acquired the status of the ultimate intellectual question. It seems to encompass the origins of the universe, the meaning of life, morality, death, and our place in the cosmos. To call oneself a theist, atheist, or agnostic is not only to take a position in the debate but to take a position on reality itself—even if said position happens to be incoherent.
The ambiguity that makes the question philosophically troublesome may be precisely what makes it so attractive. Everyone thinks they understand the question, and even ‘I have no clue’ counts as a valid answer. All in all, the God debate makes for excellent theatre—hence the Sheldonian for the venue, while virtue ethics is for the basement.
A more rigorous debating approach would begin by defining God, fragment into more precise questions, and attract smaller audiences.
Three Clever Men in the Sheldonian
Which brings us back to Dawkins, Williams, and Kenny. Perhaps the most striking thing about their discussion is not that three exceptionally intelligent men could disagree about God, but they could appear to disagree before establishing whether they were talking about the same thing.
Dawkins was principally rejecting a supernatural creator. Williams resisted treating God as another object or explanatory cause within the universe. Kenny, sitting between them, professed uncertainty. All three positions are perfectly intelligible in themselves. The difficulty arises when we treat them as answers to the same under-defined question—as though Dawkins were saying no, Williams yes, and Kenny maybe.
Perhaps, then, there is no single God debate. There are only debates about particular conceptions of God, some more substantial than others. Once those conceptions are made explicit, apparent disagreements may sharpen into real ones—or disappear altogether. As things stand, everyone can leave feeling that they have won. In a properly defined debate, some people might have to accept that they are wrong.
Of course, none of this says whether God exists, or does not exist. It makes a simpler point: neither statement means very much until we know what ‘God’ means.
So before you tell me that you are a believer, an atheist, or an agnostic—or worse, ask me whether I am one of those—there is something else I need to know.
What do you mean by God? —And, do you know your Aristotle and your Advaita Vedanta?
What I mean is that the familiar God debate is culturally provincial. It tends to assume a conception of God shaped by Christianity: a personal creator, separate from the world, who takes an interest in human affairs. But Aristotle’s unmoved mover already unsettles that picture, while Advaita Vedanta can dissolve the distinction between God, ultimate reality, and the deepest self.
Once we step outside the familiar Christian frame, the apparently simple opposition between belief and disbelief begins to break down.
The History and Psychology of Love—and What It Reveals About Love Itself
The Sacrifice of Isaac, by Caravaggio. Before romantic love, the highest form of love was directed not to another person, but to God.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Many of us expect romantic love to make us whole, tell us who we are, and even give our lives meaning. But these expectations are surprisingly recent—and may help explain why modern love so often disappoints us.
The meaning of love has changed over the centuries. Today, we tend to think about love primarily in terms of romantic love. But, if you consider it, the concept of romantic love barely features among the 66 books of the Bible. The two greatest ‘love’ stories in the Bible are not of husband and wife, nor even of man and woman, but of man and man, and woman and woman: David and Jonathan, and Ruth and Naomi.
When Love Belonged to God
Instead, all love in the Bible is directed at God, and the love for the spouse, and more generally for the other, is subsumed under the love of God, of which it is an expression. Thus, in the Sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham’s love for God trumps his love for his own longed-for son Isaac, whom he is willing to sacrifice for no other reason than that God commanded it.
In ancient times, people did sometimes fall in love, but they did not believe that their love might in some sense save them, as we tend to today.
When, in the Iliad, Helen eloped with Paris, sparking the Trojan War, neither she nor he (nor anyone else) conceived of their attraction as pure or ennobling or exalting. When, in the Aeneid, Dido fell in love with Aeneas, Virgil portrays her love as a kind of divine affliction that distracts both lovers from their duties and ends in ruin and death. One might also think of Phaedra and Hippolytus, Medea and Jason, and Antony and Cleopatra.
The Rise of Romantic Love
But over the centuries, the sacred seeped out of God and into romantic love, which came to take the place of the retreating religion in lending purpose, weight, and meaning to our lives. People had once loved God, but now they loved love: more than with their beloved, they fell in love with love itself.
Abraham had surrendered himself and Isaac out of love for God. But in the Romantic era, around the time of the French Revolution, love grew into quite the opposite: a means of finding and validating oneself, of lending texture, substance, and solidity to one’s life—as encapsulated by Sylvester’s 1978 hit, You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), the final kissing scene in Cinema Paradiso, the ‘You complete me’ scene in Jerry Maguire, and countless other popular songs and films.
In the time of God, ‘finding oneself’—or, more accurately, losing oneself in God—had demanded years of patient spiritual practice. But after the French Revolution, romantic love could come to the rescue of anyone, with very little effort or sacrifice on their part. Being saved became a simple matter of luck.
If love is a word with a meaning that has changed over time, it is also a word with multiple meanings, one that points at a diversity of distinct concepts with only a family resemblance between them.
What Is Love?
Unlike us, the Greeks had several words for love, enabling them to distinguish more clearly between the different types. For example, eros referred to sexual or passionate love; philia to friendship; storge to familial love; and agape to universal love, such as the love for strangers, nature, or God.
Having many more words for ‘love’ enables us to think and talk about love in new and different ways. For example, we might say that people in the early stages of a romantic relationship often expect unconditional storge, but find only the hunger and dependency of eros, and, if they are lucky, the maturity and fertility of philia. Or, like Plato, we might say that the best kind of philia is one that is born of eros, and that in turn feeds back into eros to strengthen and develop it, transforming it from a lust for possession into an impulse for philosophy.
But if we are to understand the deep meaning of the word ‘love’, then we need to uncover what all these different types of love have in common. In other words, what is it that unites eros, philia, storge, and agape? What is the common element that makes them all types of love?
What all these instances of love have in common, I think, is a reaching out beyond our own being to things that are able to lend purpose, weight, and meaning to our lives, even to the point of ingesting or incorporating those things into our inner being—whence the hug, the love bite, and the sacramental bread and wine of the Eucharist.
Love is the force of nature that enables us to cross the boundary between ourselves and the world, like the lobster, to shed our shell and grow beyond it—which is why people with little love are so small.
Romantic love can do this. But it can also do the opposite. If we ask it merely to complete us, validate us, or save us, it closes us in upon ourselves instead of opening us to the world. In that case, romantic love works against the very meaning of love.
The question each of us must ask is this: Am I loving another person—or am I asking them to save me?
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
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