Nostos, the art of enchantment, and the cultivation of the mythic imagination
‘At a time when many feel spiritually unanchored, disconnected both from organised religion and surface-level wellness culture, the Nostos Institute provides something rare: a rooted, intellectually rigorous and deeply imaginative path to personal and collective re-enchantment. We’ve developed a unique and alchemical blend of philosophy and depth psychology – story, archetypal languages and the mythic imagination – to deepen our spiritual intelligence, introduce us to wider patterns of meaning – and above all, to ground and firmly root us in this beautiful animate earth to which we belong.’
Dear friends
Recently, a friend expressed his surprise to me that I’d founded the Nostos Institute, suggesting that it represents a big departure from my previous work. Which surprised me in turn, because it seems to me that it follows on from that previous work in a fairly seamless fashion! So I wanted to take a little time to explain why that’s the case, and in the process to write a wee bit about the mythic imagination, about enchantment, and about the ways in which the ideas I’ve been working with for two decades are more important than ever today – and are encapsulated in what I’m hoping to achieve at Nostos.
Take this quote from my 2018 book, The Enchanted Life:
‘We imagine we’re thriving, but we’re not. We have allowed ourselves, as the price we pay for so vigorously enrolling in the prevailing Western cult of progress and growth, to become disenchanted with ourselves and each other, and with our lives. But as modern life becomes ever more mechanised, and the social, economic and political systems we once considered to be robust become increasingly fragile, we find ourselves thirsting for something more to hold on to, for new stories to tell about who we are and what our place in the world might be. We’re yearning for meaning, for ways to feel at home in the world. ... We have to change. We have to change the way we approach our lives, and to reconstruct our way of being in the world from the bottom up. We have to turn ourselves inside out.’
That’s still the case today – maybe, with all that’s going on in the world, even more so – and it’s the starting point for Nostos. Or take this quote from my forthcoming book, Ripening:
‘These are the times we’re in; these are the times in which we belong – whether we relish the fact or not. We need somehow to let their energies enter into us, and then find a way to alchemise them. Stories show us how. The idea of catastrophic collapse is fast becoming the dominant cultural myth of our times, and doomsayers everywhere are tolling the bell that heralds the end of days. But to find our way out of the dark woods that are closing in around us, we need a trail of breadcrumbs: stories which can lift us out of despair and powerlessness, and propel us onto a path of wise action and deeply rooted hope. When all our old certainties are crumbling, and in a world in which all bets seem currently to be off, fairy tales show us how to recognise the creative possibilities that bubble up to the surface when broken systems are cracked open. Difficult times can draw out our deepest and most exquisite creativities, and to be alive in this world at this time is to stand on the threshold of that great adventure.’
Reclaiming our old stories and mythologies is hugely important, but it isn’t the only way to guide ourselves through catastrophic times. We need to go deeper still: to rediscover a sense of meaning, belonging and connectedness. To figure out what it means now to live a good life, and how we might live well in a fractured and still-fracturing world. We need to reimagine our relationship with our places and the other-than-humans who inhabit them; we need to find better ways of living in community with each other, celebrating both our oneness and our uniqueness, our kinship and our otherness. And we need above all to learn how to cultivate an everyday spiritual depth and aliveness, and a deeper conception of what on earth we might be supposed to be doing here.
An adventure of the mythic imagination
It’s easy enough to define the problem and talk in comfortable generalities about the nature of the solution – but how do we actually go about doing all that? As a psychologist right from the very beginning of my adult life, I always like to bring into such questions the insights of the visionary soul that was Carl Jung. He believed that there’s a dimension of the psyche which is the source of spiritual experiences, and he called this the ‘Self’: an archetype of wholeness and meaning, the imago dei, or image of God within us. Manifestations of the archetype of the Self are encountered in our myths, our dreams, in experiences of synchronicity, in the sudden burst of illumination and revelation we feel after listening to a story, or reading a poem, or losing ourselves in a piece of art … it’s an inner force which is expressed through the mythic imagination and the cultivation of a symbolic life which connects us with the numinous – in other words, with whatever it is that we imagine to be beyond us. Whatever we might consider the Divine to be, then, working with myth and archetype through exercising the imagination is a natural way to approach it.
That’s a foundational part of what Nostos is about: this practice of the mythic imagination that I’ve been developing for so many years now. And it draws, like all of my work – and books, from 2016’s If Women Rose Rooted onwards – from old Western mythologies, philosophies and wisdom traditions. It’s about being open to, and about actively contemplating, the images which arise unbidden in our dreams, in stories, poems and art. It’s about exploring the symbolic languages of the imagination – the archetypal languages, for example, of tarot and astrology. It’s imagining which allows us to penetrate the veil, to see beyond the everyday, and to begin to perceive the ‘Forms’ or ‘Ideas’ which Plato suggested were the underlying structures of the cosmos: the thought patterns of the Divine. To engage in the practice of imagining, then, and to work with the mythic imagination, is about moving beyond the arbitrary limits we’ve set for ourselves and to understand the ways in which we’re uniquely entangled with the psyche of the cosmos itself.
At its heart, Nostos is focused on the fine art of ‘soul-making’: helping individuals find their personal calling and make sense of their lives from within a relational cosmos that’s on its own complex journey of transformation and becoming. It’s an invitation to rediscover the imagination as a critical source of knowledge, and so to reconnect with the sacred that permeates the everyday. And really, that’s what I’ve always considered enchantment to be. As I wrote in The Enchanted Life, ‘enchantment, by my definition, has nothing to do with fantasy, or escapism, or magical thinking: it is founded on a vivid sense of belongingness to a rich and many-layered world; a profound and whole-hearted participation in the adventure of life.’ It’s about waking up to who we are – and quite where we are, and why – and that’s precisely why I describe Nostos as ‘an act of personal and collective re-enchantment’.
But what’s this Neoplatonist malarkey all about?
That nature of the soul’s journey through life is a core element of Neoplatonism, a philosophical tradition which began to take hold around the third century AD and which underpins our work at Nostos – just as it has underpinned forward-looking, open-minded thought in the West (and beyond) for more than two millennia. It has profoundly influenced the development of Christianity, Sufism, Judaism and more – but in itself it’s quite free of doctrine and dogma. It provides the foundations, then, for a beautiful but discerning spiritual path with a long, long lineage in our own Western culture. It invites us to learn how to lean into the sacred without at the same time abandoning critical reason, and it stresses the importance of gnosis: each individual’s direct understanding and experience of the Divine, quite devoid of the need for institutional intermediaries – in other words, for priests, bishops and popes.
Neoplatonism provides the West’s most intricate and fascinating synthesis of metaphysics and psychology. It proposes a path of interior transformation in which the key – just as in modern depth psychology – is the power of symbolic vision, mediated through the faculty of the imagination. This, the Neoplatonists suggested, is the primary way of waking up the human soul to a recognition of its innate divinity. Our key to understanding the divine consciousness at the heart of the cosmos is through experiencing a mysterious, intermediary ‘other’ layer of soul-filled reality which penetrates into the realm of physical existence in a variety different ways. As my academic research a few years back delineated, this intermediary reality is, in many ways, reminiscent of the ‘Otherworld’ that’s such an intrinsic feature of the mythology of Britain, Ireland and other Celtic countries – and the mundus imaginalis (imaginal world) threaded through ancient Sufi mysticism, as outlined by French theologian Henry Corbin during the last century.
Philosophy as a way of life
These ideas are central to Nostos, then – but we also need to remember that, back in the day, philosophy was meant to be a way of life, and not just an academic discipline or an intellectual exercise. Platonists, for example, followed a path modelled on Plato’s account of the life of Socrates, which was centred not on worldly success but the quest for wisdom. This emphasis on the pursuit of wisdom and the importance of self-reflection and self-examination encourages us to think very carefully about our values and aspirations – to think about how we think, and how we form judgements. By doing this deep inner work and searching for the truths that lie beyond our surface concerns, we can cultivate what ancient philosophers called eudaimonia: the art of flourishing through fulfilling our deepest potential. Through becoming who we were always meant to be.
So Nostos offers a unique combination of depth psychology, philosophy and spirituality. My aim in conceiving of this project is to develop and evolve practices that can connect us with the world of myth, symbol and archetype, and so help us to cultivate our mythic imagination; to explore the art of the examined life; to illuminate the nature of our soul’s journey through this lifetime – and ultimately to connect us to a sense of the sacred in the grounded, embodied everyday. It’s a bold enough vision, and I’m grateful for the collaboration of psychotherapist and philosopher Mark Vernon, and spiritual director and theologist Vanessa Chamberlin, to contribute to its ultimate manifestation. I’m also grateful to the amazing custodians of Broughton Sanctuary for providing me with a physical home base for Nostos retreats and events. Broughton’s thousand-year history, its longstanding spiritual identity and its focus on all the ways that our inner journey coincides with and reflects our outer journey through nature, has been a real inspiration.
How can you get involved?
At the heart of Nostos is our online community of the curious – the Nostos Network – and in our first month we’ve already taken a couple of good deep dives into our subject matter. We’ve been talking about calling and the soul’s journey, and the concept of the Axial Age and the shift from around 800 – 200 BC in the way we perceived what it is to be human – is this radical shift happening again today? We’re soon moving onto depth psychology-derived practices for engaging directly with the imaginal world, and – in the context of Plato and Socrates’ dialogues – thinking about how we think and how we form our values, and how we meet each other in the process. All of our conversations are recorded and available in our rapidly growing archive, so there’s already plenty to keep new members happy.
So if these things interest you, and if you’re interested in dipping into this lively and engaged community, please do come and test our waters! You can join for a month or for a year – it’s entirely up to you.
Until next time,
Sharon
