Tara Isabella Burton is an American novelist, essayist, and theologian whose work explores religion, enchantment, and self-creation. Her books include the nonfiction works Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, and a forthcoming study of magic and modernity. She has a great substack - The Lost Word.
So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story. It's a big, beautiful question—which is why I use it. But because it's big and beautiful, I overexplain it the way that I'm doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control, and you can answer or not answer in any way that you want to.
I'm very excited. Only a little afraid.
The question is: where do you come from?
Ah, I will choose to answer that question—a sort of semi-combination of ideologically and personally. I am a 19th-century Anglo-Catholic Christian existentialist who loves T.S. Eliot too much, ex-theater kid, New Yorker, holocaustically Jewish—but a convert, as are so many. And I think how I approach both the theology side of my work and the fiction side of my work, and increasingly with The Lost Word and other projects, is an attempt to find an intersection or a kind of dialogue that bridges both, or doesn’t segment both.
I will say that in the middle of that answer, "theater kid" popped out. That’s the real answer. Can you tell me a story about being a theater kid in New York City?
Absolutely. So when I was 13 years old, I transferred into a school—or tested into a school—called Hunter, Hunter College High School, which is this test-only, weird, gifted-kid public school, but not part of the public school system. As you might imagine from a bunch of smart, weird New Yorkers, it was a kind of revelation for me coming in.
And I was 13 years old the first year, and I immediately found my people—or who I hoped would be my people—in the Shakespeare Club. There was a production of Much Ado About Nothing, and I was the messenger. I was very excited to be cast, so being the messenger was a big deal. Of course, I absolutely idolized everybody else in the production.
People kept dropping out, or getting injured, or getting sick, as tends to be the case in high school productions. So I kept sort of ascending through the ranks. By the time we performed, I ended up playing Borachio, the villain’s right-hand man.
And I just remember the cast party that we had, which was actually in my— I lived near to the school, so it was in my house. The sense of all these people who were so much cooler than I was, and so much more interesting. And because they were sort of smart and weird teenagers, they were incredibly well-read, but none of us knew how to make sense of what we read except by applying it specifically to our lives.
I think there was someone reading Frank O’Hara at the table, and someone told me that I was Jack Kerouac. Someone else told me that I was Isabel Archer. I think that’s what we were all reading at the time.
And I think it was like two in the morning, and it was the first time I ever drank alcohol. And I thought: this is what I want. This kind of conversation, this obsession with beauty, this feeling of what I did not at the time think of as collective effervescence. But we have created this beautiful thing. We have created this production, and we are celebrating it in this way—where the ideas, and the people, and obviously all of the implicit crushes that were going on, were just beneath the surface.
And somehow—I don’t know how this happened—we ended up in the East Village at 5 in the morning. I think we gave my poor mother a heart attack. She’d gone to bed. We all just snuck out. Veselka was 24 hours back then. I think it is now. Yeah.
And I basically decided I was just going to chase that forever. And that’s basically what I’ve been doing ever since.
Oh wow. That’s so beautiful. There’s a question I ask, which is always like: do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up? And I feel like you just gave that answer. But how would you respond to that?
I wanted to be a writer, actually. On my desk, which is in my office—to my left—there is a little note. I think I wrote “I will be a writer when I grow up” when I was 10, on some stationery. I framed it, and I just keep it on my desk because I’m very sentimental.
I think I actually found it among my grandmother’s things after she died. And yeah, I always knew I wanted to be a writer. I always knew I was weirdly obsessed with the God stuff for a relatively secularly raised child.
I think I once joked to a friend that I was like a horse girl for God. That was my thing—saints, theology, go to the library. I was like, I have to figure out what religion to be. I’ll learn about all of them. There was a time I really liked the Jains because they liked animals, and I liked animals. My theological sense was not super developed at that time.
But yeah, it’s basically been like—I read Oscar Wilde when I was 13. I was interested in decadence and dandyism and theology. I did my doctoral dissertation on decadence and dandyism and theology. I wrote a book on self-creation involving decadence and dandyism and theology.
And I’m now working on a book on magic, which deals heavily with 19th-century French occultists and decadence and dandyism and theology. So really, I think what we’re learning from this conversation is that I should be more open to new interests than I am.
I don’t know. That’s maybe not the conclusion I might have drawn. I’m curious—at 10 years old, what was a writer to you? What did you think of?
I very much thought of myself as a fiction writer first—as a novelist first. I still do, even as so much of my work is not just that. But I got lost in novels. And I thought—and I no longer think this necessarily—that they had the key to real life, where they felt realer than real life. I think that’s a very common way for a sort of smart, awkward kid to be. I think now the relationship is less obvious.
I think if you're not engaged in your real life, you're doing something wrong. But there is something about the intensity of encountering a text. And I think, when I was younger, that meant something beautiful—something that made you aware of an enchanted register in which you could experience the world in a different way.
I still haven't worked out how that all led me to Christianity. And I think something I still think about—and don't really have a satisfactory answer for—as a novelist, or as someone who thinks about novels, is: what happens after the aesthetic stage? What happens after you fall in love with books because they make you realize something, and then you have a sense of reality, or a sense of this grander story and an enchanted world? What role does reading novels serve then? And I think that's what I'm wrestling with now.
I'm reading The Way We Live Now by Trollope, which I haven't read since I was sixteen or seventeen. It's interesting to read with an eye toward: I know I love this book, but why do I love it? So, you know, in a week or two, I'll have an answer. But by then the podcast will be over.
So catch us up—tell me, where are you now, and how do you talk about what you do?
I usually start by saying I wear many hats, which—whether or not I'm actually wearing a hat—is great. It's great that I am a novelist. I usually call myself a theologian-slash-culture critic-slash-historian. The nonfiction work doesn't have as easy a title as novelist.
But basically, I think about art, God, language, magic, eros, and enchantment for a living.
I'm working on my fourth novel now. I'm working on an intellectual history of modernity and magic—that’s the one with the deadline, so that’s the one I should really finish first. I'm a lecturer at the Catholic University of America. As of a couple weeks ago, I just started work on a Templeton grant to research the relationship between beauty and spiritual transcendence, particularly among the spiritual-but-not-religious.
I'll be working on a book on beauty and transcendence as a result of that. I teach at Catholic—I teach creative writing. Last term, I taught basically theological aesthetics for creative writers: what is the purpose of fiction? Now go write some.
And I just launched a new Substack, The Lost Word, to try and work out some of these questions in public with my friends. I think that basically everything I do is, in some way, connected to trying to work out the same set of questions that have obsessed me since I was very small. Hopefully, it will also make me a better writer of fiction to think about these questions.
Although often, it feels like thinking about these questions makes me over-intellectualize things—makes it harder to write fiction. So we'll see.
How clear are these questions to you? Do you have them with you all the time? Or—what are they?
How clear are the answers, or how clear are the questions?
How clear? I'm just curious—the way you referenced them, they felt very concrete.
I mean, I don't have them written down. But basically, the sort of vague sense I have is: what do we do with human creativity vis-à-vis God's creativity? Because I've spent too much time going down the esoteric rabbit hole: what do we do with the noetic realm? Or what is the reality of that realm vis-à-vis the material realm?
Are we doing magic when we write fiction? Are we hijacking people's imaginations? Am I accidentally committing an act of sorcery every time I write a novel? If not, why not? Jesus is the incarnate Word—does that, in some way, stabilize our sense of language?
I'm really influenced by George Steiner, who writes about this in Real Presences, from a slightly different perspective, of course. But this idea—that there is a God, that the concept of God guarantees a kind of fundamental relationship between word and meaning.
And actually, Charles Taylor's recent Cosmic Connections has also really shaped my thinking on this—this idea that perhaps these connections aren't just the relationship of language to meaning, but also that language can be understood non-verbally, or as correspondences between things that aren't just about the spoken word in a particular language.
So I'd say I don't have a list of questions written down. But I wrote about this in my first Substack piece—I really like Confessions, the way Augustine opens it...And one of the things that he does is—it feels like he’s taking an idea as far as it can go. He’s like, well, if this and this… but if this is true, then is that also true? And we see him think—it’s, you know, I don’t have it to hand—but it’s something like, well, if I’m making space for you in my soul, then does that mean you’re not there already? And if you’re really big, then do you feel everything?
It feels like a lot of these questions I’m working through in a way where it’s not so much that I have answers, but I go in one direction and go, okay, there’s a problem there. How is Christ the incarnate word? And what does that mean for language? And also, is spoken language, in some way, creating reality or not?
It’s really just in my head all the time—which is, you know, sometimes really fun and rewarding. And sometimes it makes me less fun at parties.
When would you say you realized that you could make a living doing this?
Oh gosh—can I make a living doing this?
My career is kind of a big accident. I was living in Tbilisi in college part-time because my mother, who was in international development, had a job at the now-defunct USAID. I was doing a doctoral program at Oxford on dandyism and self-creation in the theology department. I was funded, so I had this three-year window where I actually had what seemed to me like a huge income—for a grad student.
And I thought, well, if I want to be a freelance writer, and I want to be a writer, this is a good time to pitch and get started, and do things where one does not often have a decent income. And I kind of totally randomly won a writing contest—a travel writing contest run by The Spectator. It was called the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, for a piece about Tbilisi.
And suddenly, I had this thing people would pay me to do, which was be a travel writer. And I started there because that’s what people wanted. Georgia was, at the time, a cool place—not a lot of people had been—so there was a lot of demand for on-the-ground reporting about Tbilisi bars or what have you.
And I was able to—once editors listened to me a little—start doing some Caucasus religion stories. I think I wrote for Al Jazeera on the Sufi mystics in the Pankisi Gorge, which is a sort of ethnically Chechen region within Georgia. And suddenly… suddenly I was writing.
I ended up selling my first novel in my last year of grad school. And about a month later, I got a job as the religion reporter at Vox.com. That’s V Vox, not F Fox—I always have to clarify that on podcasts.
I moved back to New York with my very, very new degree in hand and left academia, and became a beat journalist at a very interesting time. It was 2017–2018, early in the Trump administration—lots of stories about white evangelicals and Trump, and what was then known as the alt-right. But also, resistance witches and the witches hexing Trump.
It was a very Ruth Bader Ginsburg votive-candle sort of era.
Because Vox catered to what one might uncharitably refer to as the coastal liberal elite, the stories they were interested in—and this was online journalism, so click-driven—shaped my coverage. I was encouraged to do more stories about astrology and witches hexing Trump.
Somewhere in there, as is so often the case, an article I’d written for Aeon about cults led to a request to submit a book proposal for an academic book about cults, which somehow turned into a book proposal for a general publisher instead—because they paid more money. That became Strange Rites—a book that was not at all about cults.
Because I had this Strange Rites project going on while I was at Vox, it became much less about cults as a phenomenon, and more about religious sensibilities among the spiritual-but-not-religious. So it became this sort of complete accident of a career—I started out as a travel writer in Tbilisi and ended up writing Strange Rites based on my work at Vox.
It’s been kind of unconventional. About 18 months in, I left Vox to work full-time on book projects. I’ve been writing books ever since and have not been gainfully, full-time employed until two weeks ago.
And I now, once again, have a 401(k). It’s exciting.
You got a job.
Oh yeah. I’m full-time. I’m now a lecturer at Catholic University of America, as a result of the Templeton grant. So I am now no longer a freelancer.
What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you?
Oh man—I just get to think about the coolest things all the time. And I get to talk to people about them.
I love writing fiction, but it is lonely. It is lonely, and it makes me miserable. And so much of the fiction I write—I mean, I would say this about any writer—is bad. Your drafts are bad until they get good. Even if you’re the best writer in the world, probably most of what you write is bad.
Unless I’m in a very particular mental place—I have a particular setting, which usually involves not having internet for several months and being in total isolation—I can do that, and it’s great. Otherwise, it’s lonely.
What I found, kind of unexpectedly, about the nonfiction writing world is that it's less lonely. I can have conversations like this one with you on a podcast. There are Subs. Having been off social media for ages, I'm kind of bullish on Substack. It's fun. I'm making friends.
And I think there is—it feels like a cast party. I love not only being able to think about the stuff, write about the stuff, but to be able to do it in conversation with other people. I think that balance of being able to go away—I was on my roof this morning, where there is no internet, reading a book and reviewing it, with no contact with the outside world—and then coming down and talking to you feels like a really good balance.
Yeah. Well, again, I’m so appreciative of you being here. My first encounter with you, I guess, was Strange Rites, which felt like this beautiful book, talking about things in a way that you don’t always see. I felt like I hadn’t seen something like it in a while. What was it like writing that? How did it come to be?
Yeah, it's a bit of a surprise. I had this book deal to write a book about cults. I had this job at Vox. The book was very overdue, because a full-time job does not leave a lot of time to write a book. So I finally left Vox. I said, I’ve got to get serious. And suddenly, the book came together.
I think the writing of it was relatively quick, because so much of the research ended up being what I'd been doing at Vox for the previous 18 months. Whether it was contacts I'd made in the rationalist community, among the witches, or in Harry Potter fandom—suddenly, the book came together.
And of all the books I’ve written, it’s the one I re-encounter the most. If someone’s reaching out to me to give a talk or a lecture, it’s probably because of Strange Rites. I think it’s on a lot of college curriculums, because it is—hopefully—very accessible. It was not written as an academic book.
But at the same time, I’m enough of an ex-academic to try to be as academic as I can be while still being readable. And I really loved writing it. I think my next two nonfiction books—The Self-Made, which is out now, and the one I’m working on now, on magic—are a little more academic. Or at least a little more historical in scope.
There’s something kind of fun about being able to, as I did in Strange Rites, include historical context. There are chapters on New Thought and spiritualism. But being able to just do cultural analysis was rewarding. It’s something I’m hoping to get back to a little more in this magic book.
What did you take away from Strange Rites? Where do you end up? That was five or six years ago now?
Yeah, it came out in 2020. I wrote it in 2019.
How would you describe where we are now, compared to 2020?
I still joke someone should pay me to write Too Strange Rites. Occasionally I think about doing a Tumblr—just picking out “Strange Rites–coded” things I see in the world.
Not to be like “I was right,” but I do think the things I saw in 2020 are so much more extreme now, post-pandemic—particularly in wellness culture. Although a certain kind of wellness culture feels like we’ve hit peak saturation. I don’t think SoulCycle has the cultural capital it once did.
In 2020, you still had these different camps. You had SoulCycle wellness. You had what I called the atavistic right—Jordan Peterson was more of an edge case then, although he’s gotten more extreme. There were the techno-utopians in the tech world. There were the resistance witches.
And what it seems to me now is that we’ve seen a lot more bleed among those tribes. For whatever reason, my sense is that the left-coded—what was then called social justice warriors, and later called “woke”—that sacralized version of that has lost its mimetic power, as well as its political power.
Even in the run-up to the 2024 election, you didn’t see that many Kamala Harris votive candles. I’m sure there were witches for Kamala, but it didn’t have the same kind of trendy, popular appeal as the anti-Trump witches did. Maybe it was overexposure, or it had already become a marketing slogan and felt disingenuous. I’m not entirely sure.
Whereas it feels like that kind of inchoate enchantment—the tech right, the atavistic right, actually traditionalist Christian—Make America Healthy Again—coalition is really coalescing into a coalition.
That is absolutely not my natural political home at all. But I do find it very, very interesting. That slightly more—reluctantly put—right-coded weird stuff, or just the anti-establishment weird stuff, or maybe the anti–quote unquote–rational…
“Anti-woke” seems too simplistic, and “anti-rational” isn’t quite right either. But I think there’s a privileging of a certain idea of vibes that seems to be linked in some way with sex and sexuality. Particularly traditional, gender-essentialist sex roles, and the erotic creative—the celebration of erotic creative power, or the power of the ingenious technical engineer—as opposed to what they would code as…
And this is really interesting because I think it's analogous to a lot of 19th-century reactionary language. This idea that democracy made everyone the same, and democracy got rid of natural hierarchies, and liberalism and equality just made us—there's a fundamental human power not being tapped because we’ve stamped it out.
That’s very much the language Nietzsche uses about ressentiment. It’s the language that a lot of 19th-century dandies used about the death of aristocracy. And it is a language that's used, I think, here too—against what they call “the woke.” And for whatever reason—and I'm happy to tease it out, but I don't have a clear diagnosis—the reaction against what they see as a kind of flattening is strong enough to make very, very strange bedfellows out of tech titans and traditionalist Catholics.
I'm thinking of relationships between, I don’t know, Jordan Peterson and Bishop Robert Barron, who has Jordan Peterson on his podcast. Or the relationship between Peter Thiel and large sections of the Catholic intellectual universe.
I haven’t read—well, I always read just enough to be dangerous—but I feel like I’ve read... is it Reno, and his idea of the strong gods?
Yeah. Strong Gods: The Return of the Strong Gods, Rusty Reno.
I’m very curious because, as someone who likes things like beauty and goodness and truth—I think those are generally good things—I think perhaps returning to a model of belief in objective... not to say objective beauty, that’s a little too far, but that there are some transcendent goods that human action reaches, that not everything is relative—I’m probably broadly in agreement with that.
And yet—big caveat—I don’t really see, as a practicing Christian, how you can fund it. There’s so much that is fundamentally anti-hierarchical about Christianity. It was carnivalesque. Your God died. Your king came in on a donkey. There’s a real moral, ethical, theological, cosmic demand that you do not think of, I don’t know, beautiful statue-like Greek bodies as the ideal of what beauty is.
At the same time, yes, beauty seems to be something—or the ability to find the beautiful does seem to lead people to a sense of transcendence. But there does seem to be a return to a generalized desire for a kind of hierarchical, authoritarian, truth—ostensibly truth-based—model of existence, rather than a pure personal, relativistic, “all truths are equal.”
And yet—and I make this case much more in the magic book—I think the way it has manifested itself is actually quite nihilistic and quite anti-truth. It ends up being about what you can convince people of, or what attention—as a kind of currency—you can wield, or an energy you can harness.
But it does seem to me to be profoundly anti-Christian.
We’ve got a little bit of time left—I want to hear more about the book you’re working on: the magic one.
Oh yes. So it doesn’t have a title yet. I think the working title is Old Gods, although I like The Lost Word now that I’m doing the Substack on it. I don’t know what my editor will think at the end of it.
But basically, it’s an intellectual history of modernity and magic.
And by magic, I mean specifically the learned—what you might call the learned magic tradition. Other sources call it the Western esoteric tradition. So: Hermetic magic, Solomonic magic, Kabbalah, leading into the Rosicrucians, the Theosophists a little bit, all the way through Crowley, through the transhumanists of the 20th century.
I’m trying to draw a historical lineage of the belief in human self-transcendence and self-divinization through a gnosis that is both internal and personal, but also about speaking the language of the cosmos—knowing how things fit together, how things work, what the correspondences are.
The sort of paradigmatic figures—excuse me a second, there’s a fly—the paradigmatic figures here are the technologist, the artist, and the user of words. I’m interested in how, pretty consistently from the Renaissance to the present day, historical and political movements are intertwined with the history of Freemasonry or Rosicrucianism.
I'm thinking about the development of the Royal Society in London in the 17th and 18th centuries. I'm thinking about the rise of nationalism in Europe, and its association with Freemasonry—from Washington to Garibaldi, both arguably Masons—to the development of the internet specifically.
And there is a vague connection I’m trying to identify—more substantive, documented connections—between what you might consider the broad “esoteric idea” umbrella and these ideas about the networked noetic realm on which the contemporary internet is built.
The place I want to end up—where I think I’m ending up, hopefully—is that the internet is a space where the laws of magic are real. On the internet, magic exists. You can shape reality with your mind. You can get inside other people’s heads and transform their attention, transform their desires—their desires, their energies, their erotic capacities get channeled in a particular direction. And they vote in certain ways, and they spend money in certain ways, and suddenly material reality does shift.
This is something—this is Ioan Couliano here, not me—but something he identified. And this was long before the internet. He identified Giordano Bruno, the 16th-century magician, as the inventor of mass media, precisely because of Bruno’s work on the magic of binding—of binding and chaining people.
Giordano Bruno’s writings on magic tend to be about—not purely psychological, that would reduce it too much—but about getting inside that part of people. Because we’re working with Renaissance views of the human body and soul, it’s often not clear or consistent what that intermediary thing is. It’s not the immortal soul. It’s not the physical body.
It’s spirit. It’s fantasy. It's phantasy—the place where sense impressions get turned into ideas. And again, not everyone has the same model of what that is, but that intermediary realm seems to be the realm where magic operates.
And now we get to dial into or connect with that realm all the time.
Well, that’s—I mean, that’s just thrilling. And I feel like so much of what you’re sharing speaks to the excitement of... I don’t know that you run into a lot of cultural critics who are exploring things through a mystical or theological lens. I appreciate that so much.
It reminds me of what you were just talking about—I think it’s Kreipel? Jeffrey Kripal—when he points out, and I mention this a lot, that telepathy—reading—is a form of telepathy, right? It’s a kind of magic. I don’t know how you feel about that, but the idea of telepathy as feeling from afar, and the idea that you can use words to elicit an emotional reaction from someone you've never met—that’s itself kind of magical. How does that correspond with your own explorations?
I buy it. I agree with it. It freaks me out when I think about it too much. Christians aren’t supposed to do magic.
But I think—and there’s that Arthur C. Clarke quote, the famous one—that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It seems that’s the case for language as the ultimate technology.
But then I think it challenges us to think: if we think of language as a technology—and I think especially in the era of AI, so to speak—we have to think about what technology actually is, and what that is vis-à-vis who we are as human beings. We are, and always have been—and I say this as someone with a flip phone—a technological species. Part of being human is to be technological, to be linguistic in some way.
And that doesn’t even necessarily need to mean—or exclusively mean—verbal language.
I’m reviewing a book for The Wall Street Journal now. It’s a reissue of Roger Shattuck’s The Forbidden Experiment, about this wild boy found in early 19th-century France, and trying to teach him language. It’s something that’s been on my mind.
I guess the question is: is there a language of the universe? Is there a fundamental set of correspondences or meanings already there? And is our language an imitation of that, an appropriation of that, a co-creation of that? What is the relationship between our human language—and any other technological ways we engage with the world—and the purely natural, purely given world?
And I think that’s a question about who we are.
One way of putting it is that magic deals with the theological character of human creativity—or the cosmic... I’ve referred to it as a sacralization of human imagination. And depending on what your wider theological commitments are, that could be a good thing, a bad thing, a dangerous thing.
What interests me as a Christian is that—we don’t want you to do divination. We don’t want you to do magic. Like, don’t summon demons. Some of that stuff is pretty clear cut.
But we do have: God becomes man so that man might become God. We do have traditions of theosis, of divinization. We do have a Word that is made flesh. And that’s important. There is a promise that death will be defeated—albeit in a resurrection way, not in a never-dying way.
And I think it’s important to think about—and I get into this in the book too—that whatever orthodox Christianity is now (lowercase “o” orthodox, not like Eastern Orthodox), it comes out of the same discursive, intellectual miasma as a lot of the so-called magical tradition—which is to say, late antique Alexandria.
That’s where the Gnostics are working stuff out. That’s where—depending on how you historicize it—the Hermetic tradition is working itself out. Where Neoplatonists, who are kind of... we haven’t talked about them yet, but they’re very important in the story, are working themselves out.
And where early Christianity and all these different groups of people are figuring out the same question. One way of putting it is: What is the relationship between Jewish history and classical Greek conceptions of God—God as being something beyond space and time—versus a conception of God acting in history?
There’s the question of what parts of humanity are immortal, and what parts are not. And while, you know, I think we’re right—I think the whole “Jesus dying and coming back” thing is pretty important here—I do think it makes sense that all these different groups of people are coming up with different answers to the same questions, informed by each other.
Even Augustine—I want to say this carefully—he started out, I believe, as a Neoplatonist. And you have a lot of back-and-forth: Christian Gnostics, Gnostic Christians. Because, you know, they’re all hanging out in the same city, in Alexandria.
So I think one way I like to frame the question, historically, is: it’s not magic vs. Christianity, or esotericism vs. Christianity—so much as this is a kind of stepchild or stepbrother. These are cousins—working with enough similarities that, when the magical worldview becomes more ascendant, you see it. And I think right now, I’d even venture to say it’s a kind of implicit civil religion in America in 2025. Like, people who don’t think about Solomonic magic—or Christianity, for that matter—are probably thinking about vibes, and manifesting, and creating your own reality.
You’re calling that the implicit civil religion?
Yes. I’ll defend that if I have to.
We’ve got two minutes left. I quite like it. But I’m curious—maybe this is a “so what” question—but what are we talking about when we talk about meaning? I feel like that’s at the center of all your work. And maybe it’s an obtuse, annoying question, but I’d love to hear how you approach it.
We talk about being in a meaning crisis, right? We talk about sense-making—and I feel like all of these things kind of overlap. How would you respond to that idea? What are we talking about when we talk about meaning?
I think the way I’d put it—because I’ve been thinking a lot about language at the moment—is: is there (and I think this is from George Steiner’s Real Presences)... is there anything to what we say? Is there a relationship that is more than conventional or pragmatic between the signs of the world and that which they signify?
And I don’t mean something simple like: I say “dog” in English and it means “dog,” but in French it’s chien—that’s just convention. I don’t think it can be as simple as saying there’s one true language in which all things make sense.
Although the quest for the Adamic language was absolutely a part of the magical tradition—whether it was Hebrew or Enochian—the idea that if you just got the language right, you’d get to the heart of things.
But I think maybe the way I’d put it is: the cosmos has a language, and human language is in dialogue with it. I’m looking at some trees out my window. Is a tree just a tree? Does it say anything? How is it related to wood? To stories about the changing seasons? To the purpose of trees? To books and paper? There’s something more than just humans telling convenient stories to feel better about death when we look at them.
I don’t know what that language is—and I don’t think it’s just the Hermetic idea of correspondences, like: this tree is associated with this planet, so use this tree on a Thursday for this kind of magic. I see why that’s appealing. But the part of me that’s Christian and doesn’t want to do magic feels like something is missing there.
Although, also, the allegorical Christian tradition does say things like: rosemary is Mary’s drying herb; we’ve got the Feast of the Assumption this week; we associate this plant with this part of the theological story.
So I think there are different ways to approach it. And obviously, I don’t think you have to be a Christian to think the universe has a language.
But this idea—a structure between things and other things, where the relationship is more than merely conventional—to me, that’s the heart of meaning. And that’s why it grounds human language: because human language is a response to—what I would call—God’s language. Though perhaps one could find a more secular-friendly term for it.
And one final question: what do you make of the idea that we’re in a meaning crisis?
I believe we are. I absolutely believe we are. Maybe less than we were a couple years ago. When I started writing on this topic, it seemed like everyone felt we were in a crisis. Everyone felt a loss of meaning. There was curiosity about religion. There was curiosity about meaning-making—because it seemed like we didn’t have it, or it felt very absent.
Whereas now—this could just be because I’m in particular circles—it feels like everyone around me is actively invested in this question. In a way, the sheer act of working through it makes it feel more like a creative crisis than a desiccated one. But again, that could just be because I got so into this topic that I get to talk about it all the time—which is a great way not to feel meaningless.
Awesome. Again, thank you so much for accepting my invitation. It’s been a blast.
Thank you so much.
