Owen Barfield on the Enchanted Landscape of Ancient Consciousness
Contextual Quote
"Words now having a purely immaterial significance once also referred to sensible phenomena, and words now purely sensible or material in reference once also referred to interior experience. Taken together, these two groups of words testify to the primeval experience of nature as a material/immaterial, outer/inner unity before the dualization of this unity in the modern sense was even conceivable. The cognitive experience of the ancients was given by nature. Its inner, expressive content was not added by a reflective or theorizing perceiver, but was already experienced in perception. Things meant something on their face. Our ancestors were, you might say, participant-observers entranced by an ensouled drama staged within their own consciousness by the world’s phenomena. What the historical record shows is that those ancestors recognized, in whatever was expressed through natural phenomena, a speaking agency akin to themselves. “Whether it is called ‘mana’”, wrote Barfield, “or by the names of many gods and demons, or God the Father, or the spirit world, it is of the same nature as the perceiving self, inasmuch as it is not mechanical or accidental, but psychic and voluntary” (Barfield 1965, p. 42).
- Stephen Talbott [1]
Discussion
Stephen Talbott:
"The fact (is) that when we look further and further back through history, we see an ever richer language, not an increasingly material and “de-meaned” language reflecting our supposedly brutish origins. As the nineteenth-century English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley observed, “In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry” (Shelley 1840).
We do not, that is, discover ancient literature to be impoverished relative to modern literature. It is more like the reverse of this: we still debate today whether, for example, the Homeric epics — composed orally before the development of writing in ancient Greece — have ever been surpassed for psychological depth, dramatic power, poetic subtlety, and human interest.
We will take the philologist and historian, Owen Barfield, as our primary guide, first, to the evolution of language, and then to the evolution of consciousness more generally. Barfield devoted a long life spanning the entire twentieth century to the study of these two topics, and about the former he wrote:
“The farther back language as a whole is traced, the more poetical and animated do its sources appear, until it seems at last to dissolve into a kind of mist of myth. The beneficence or malignance — what may be called the soul-qualities — of natural phenomena, such as clouds or plants or animals, make a more vivid impression at this time than their outer shapes and appearances. Words themselves are felt to be alive and to exert a magical influence” (Barfield 1967, pp. 87-88). The “enchanted” landscape of ancient consciousness, as Barfield sketches it for example in Poetic Diction, could not have been one of conscious invention, unrestrained metaphor, or causal speculation. The earliest historical evidence shows us that humans were not yet possessed of the sort of selves, or the resources of language, conducing to such invention and hypothesis. They simply observed nature as it was given to them. Their meanings did not arise from anything like modern reflection or theorizing, but were encountered directly, as if spoken by the earth itself.
This truth has been disguised from us by what Barfield referred to as “logomorphism” — the projection of modern thought processes onto “that luckless dustbin” of the primitive mind. “The remoter ancestors of Homer, we are given to understand, observing that it was darker in winter than in summer, immediately decided that there must be some ‘cause’ for this ‘phenomenon’, and had no difficulty in tossing off the ‘theory’ of, say, Demeter and Persephone, to account for it” (Barfield 1973, pp. 74, 90).
But we are given no evidence that the mythic mind had any concern with such explanations, if only because the conditions for them did not yet exist. Our modern ideas of cause and effect lay far in the future. The ancient fact of the matter was more like this: “In the myth of Demeter the ideas of waking and sleeping, of summer and winter, of life and death, of mortality and immortality are all lost in one pervasive meaning” (Barfield 1973, pp. 90-91).
Think for a moment about what we mean today by “explaining the world”. Such explanation requires two distinct awarenesses: that of something “out there” posing a puzzle for us, and an understanding “in here” that clarifies the puzzle. But our ancestors did not possess these separate awarenesses. Unlike us, they were not in a position to dualize the world into outer material fact and interior explanatory idea. They lacked the requisite psychological distance from the world, and therefore did not experience the otherness of “things” as we do. The mythically enchanted landscape was, for them, an unanalyzed interfusion of outer and inner, of sense perceptions and soul content.
For example, the story of the Greek sun-god “Helios” could hardly have originated as an animistic effort to account for a material sun, given that neither the history of language nor what we can surmise of mythic consciousness affords any evidence that a purely material sun had yet been conceived. The sun’s glory, its light and warmth, were directly and non-reflectively experienced as ensouled realities.
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So the direction of the evolution of language and meaning is, so far as we can discern from the historical record, the opposite of an “ascent from brute materiality”. Before humans could speak in their individuated voices, or could even conceive of devising theories about nature, the natural world spoke to and through them — meaningfully and poetically. The rhythm and meter we find, for example, in the epic Homeric hexameters with their “thundering epithets” were, Barfield wrote, relics of a time “when men were conscious, not merely in their heads, but in the beating of their hearts and the pulsing of their blood — when thinking was not merely of Nature, but was Nature herself” (Barfield 1973, pp. 146-47)."