The Lost Word with Dr. Tara Isabella Burton (Part 5 of Symposium on Spiritual Yearning in a Disenchanted Age)

The Lost Word: Magic, Reality-Creation, and the Pursuit of God’s Language

This is the fifth presentation from our international symposium on Spiritual Yearning in a Disenchanted Age, held at McGill University in November 2024.

Dr. Tara Isabella Burton is the author of the novels Social Creature, The World Cannot Give, and Here in Avalon, as well as the nonfiction books Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. She is currently working on a history of magic and modernity, to be published by Convergent in 2026. 

​Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, ​Granta, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and more. She also co-writes the Substack newsletter "Line of Beauty" with her husband, Dhananjay Jagannathan.

Tara received a doctorate in theology from Oxford in 2017. She is a Visiting Fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center and a Visiting Research Fellow at Catholic University of America's Institutional Flourishing Lab.

In her talk, Tara explores:

1. Magic’s influence on modernity, from Hermeticism to transhumanism
2. The pursuit of a divine language offering truth and creative power
3. Art as relational creation, distinct from manipulative magical thinking
4. The Divine Liturgy as model for creative practices rooted in connection and participation

To learn more about Tara, you can find her at:
Website: http://www.taraisabellaburton.com/
Email: taraisabellaburton@gmail.com
X: https://x.com/NotoriousTIB  

Books
Social Creature: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/564730/social-creature-by-tara-isabella-burton/
The World Cannot Give: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-World-Cannot-Give/Tara-Isabella-Burton/9781982170073
Here in Avalon: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Here-in-Avalon/Tara-Isabella-Burton/9781982170097
Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World: https://a.co/d/gOwySUy
Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/tara-isabella-burton/self-made/9781541789012/ 

This episode is sponsored by:
John Templeton Foundation (https://www.templeton.org/)
Templeton Religion Trust (https://templetonreligiontrust.org/)

Transcript

Brandon: I'm Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work — the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty, what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust.

Hi, everyone. This is the fifth episode from our International Symposium on Spiritual Yearning in a Disenchanted Age, held in Montreal in November 2024. Our speaker is Dr. Tara Isabella Burton. Tara is the author of the novels Social Creature, The World Cannot Give, and Here in Avalon, as well as the nonfiction books Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. She is currently working on a history of magic and modernity. She holds a doctorate in theology from Oxford University. Let's get started.

Dr. Tara: I want to start with a little bit of background about what I'm working on and why I want to talk about magic so badly. So my current research project is a trade book about essentially the intertwined histories of magic and what we might loosely, problematically, debatably call modernity, looking in particular at the social and intellectual mage around learned magic, what the scholar Francis Yates famously termed the "Hermetic tradition." I have my own quibbles with that, but we only have 10 minutes.

Roughly, from the revival of the Hermetic tradition and the wider Neoplatonic revival in 15th century Florence through its influence with scientific tradition, through alchemy in particular, on the proliferation of liberal democracy in terms of the spread of secret societies and affinity networks, including Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, and particularly in the post-Enlightenment era, its role in 19th century reactionary and anti-modern aesthetics, on poetry and the arts, we find sort of Hermetic influence in Blake, in Yeats, in Eliot, and so many others. And finally, via union psychology and the '60s counterculture on the developments of religious sensibilities surrounding the development first of the personal computer and then of the networked internet and into the age of social media. So that long or that argument, as you might have gathered, is too long to get into here. But roughly speaking, what I'm trying to do is trace an intellectual genealogy of what I kind of inelegantly call 'magical transhumanism' from roughly the Corpus Hermeticum of late antique Alexandria, heavily influenced in turn by Neoplatonic thought, which envisions humanity's ultimate destiny as kind of bypassing a demiurgic creator in order to become a more truly divine and ascend to a non-personal Godhead. I want to sort of trace this magical transhumanism all the way into the '70s and beyond to a world in which, as the futurist Stewart Brand famously said, "We are as gods, and we might as well get good at it."

But today, I actually want to hone in on one particular part of this magical tradition, the magical transhumanist tradition, whatever you want to call it, something that fascinates me as an academic, as a theologian, but also fascinates me in my other life as a novelist. And that is the search, this magical search, for the positive lost language of Eden. The idea that the practicing magician, if he could only access or rediscover the language of Adam — the Adamic language originally spoken between God and man before the fall — that somehow this mage will have access to not only an unfettered, unmediated portrait of the truth but also to the creative power of becoming God-like himself, of having a kind of wisdom that allows him to use the true language. Not just to describe the world, describe reality, but to shape it. So we find this, for example, in the tradition of Solomonic magic, which is associated with the desire and attempt to wield power by correctly utilizing the many names of God. We find this in slightly different form in the Kabbalah, the tradition of Jewish mysticism, including. There's a slightly different version we find in the Zohar where Moses first writes the Ten Commandments on sapphire tablets, which he destroys and then they get imperfectly rendered into stone. So it was a sort of sense of a, again, lost word. Perhaps, one of the most explicit examples, for those of you who are into Elizabethan astrology, you find this in the magical efforts of John Dee, who's the court astrologer at various times both to Elizabeth I and the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II — who, after his attempts at alchemy and natural magic fail, believed he discovers the language of the angels through these mediated, scrying sessions during which he believes that it has been revealed to him the language of Enochian angelic language. Dee explicitly conceives of this language and access to this language as a kind of analogue to the philosopher's stone. He talks about the angelic stone, which is invisible. It's not a physical substance but gives him access to this linguistic wisdom and through it to a knowledge of God and through it to magic.

So I'm wary of getting too into the Neoplatonic background here. My notes say it's because it would only take 10 minutes, but also now it's because there's a bunch of Neoplatonic scholars in the room. But a really simple or reductionist way of framing it would be to say that the magical tradition, particularly in this Hermetic incarnation, is indebted to this problem that comes up in so much sort of late, antique, Alexandrian thought in particular, how do you syncretically marry very simplistically a Greek philosophical thought and revealed religion, particularly ancient Near Eastern religion, particularly in the interests or from a Christian perspective, Judaism. One of the solutions that we find, or one of the avenues that sort of new platonic thought provides, which later comes to shape the hermetic view of things, is the sense that, well, we can distinguish between the one, the Godhead, and the creator of the material realm. You can think of him as Plato does the Timaeus, as a craftsman or a demiurge, a word that doesn't necessarily have the connotation it has for the Gnostics. The negative connotation, I should say. But there's this sort of wider sense as well within the Hermetic tradition. That because there is a hierarchy of reality, this emanationist picture of the great train of being coming down from the one into the material realm, magic basically works on correctly knowing these correspondences. And being able to manipulate a stone, or a plant, or an object, or sort of somewhat more complicatedly a talisman or a word in order to draw down certain celestial, non-material realities that exist between the material and the Godhead. Central to the sort of magical Hermetic understanding of this and post-Hermetic understanding of this is this idea that, in some sense, the non-material realm, the realm of views, the realm of magic, is realer than the realm of the merely material. There's some kind of priority that happens on the level of language. Such that when we have access to certain kinds of spiritual knowledge, material reality simply becomes something we can shape. All reality becomes something we can shape.

Again, I won't get into the sort of long, long history of this tradition here. But it is something that has particularly appealed to artists and writers and poets. And as a writer, I can understand why. There's something very appealing and sexy, certainly, about the idea of the artist as a magician who can shape reality. But I think that there's something that's not just about the quest for power there. And again, I'm speaking personally now as a novelist. That we do have a felt sense when dealing with great art. Great novels, in my case, that's what I love to read. Also, great poetry. That we are entering into a realm of reality, that what is being said both on the level of language or on the level of narrative is not merely like an imperfect reflection of the truth to the extent that we're looking at a bad fact where we can't make out everything to a photorealistic level. But that there's some kind of reality there that we're entering into, that we're creating, or co-creating, or experiencing that matters. And I would venture to say that I think one of the appeals that this Hermetic tradition has, particularly after the Enlightenment, when it becomes something that writers and artists tend to love more than alchemists who were less of a factor in the 19th century, precisely because it offers an affirmation. That there is a reality that is being spoken to.

So I am not a Hermetic magician. I am in fact coming from this from a Christian perspective. One of the things that I'm wrestling with, again, as a writer, as well as in my nonfiction work is, how do we hold onto or how do we preserve the reality of poetic language while avoiding what I think and I'm increasingly coming to think as I work on this history is something that's implicit in the Hermetic, the magical transhumanist worldview? Which is, if you at some point equate the human capacity for language or the human intellect or desire — I think it's ultimately desire that becomes the engine of reality and the magical tradition — with the ability to manipulate or call down or otherwise control these energies that exist between you and the Godhead, and perhaps even transcend the authority and power of the God who created the material realm, it's not so implausible to take it to the next step as indeed sort of the 19th century magicians like Aleister Crowley do. That, in fact, what we desire is the closest thing to divinity in the universe. That we are gods precisely because the stuff of divinity lies in human desire. I think an example of where we might see this in everyday life now actually is the popularity of something like manifesting, this idea that you can manifest what you want into existence. Which one poll says 50% of Americans now say they believe them. 20% say that they've tried it. So this is, I think, something that is very much an example of where this tendency is headed.

So I'm curious to sort of ideally have someone help me out of this problem as a novelist but more broadly to discuss, what does an anti-magical yet realist philosophy or theology of creation look like? How can we think about the reality of the created word without thinking about ourselves as near appropriators of the Divine Act? Certainly, there's this sort of rich tradition. My background is in 19th century French decadence of the creator being kind of diabolical, and sexily diabolical for this precise reason. So how do we get around that? I don't have a complete answer. I wish I did. But I think that something that constantly brings me back or gives me a sense of purpose as a novelist is in actually thinking about my own creative work as a kind of wager on meaning. That what I am doing when I am writing is not attempting to kind of emanate parts of myself into the new sphere or create a kind of reality but to enter into by virtue of what I'm doing, as well as what I'm actually saying or what I'm writing. A kind of relationship with both other people and the divine, a sense in which I'm entering a field of conversation where I am both shaping language — language that is in turn being shaped by the stories around me, that is being shaped by language available to me, which is in turn the product of cultural flow, grander storytelling, and the sort of sheer biological reality of how sounds sound in my mouth when I make them. That this intersection point of, let's say, biological necessity, imaginative freedom, and the cultural realm by which language is shaped is the kind of site of how we can as human beings, social and I think linguistic creatures, approach reality.

And so I find it most useful to think of art or my own artistic creation as not just a kind of prayer. Maybe liturgy is too strong a word, especially if it's private. But as an entering into a meditation on the fact of that realm. Actually, Cosmic Connections has been hugely helpful to me in my own work at getting at the sense that they're of aesthetic realism, that there is something even if we don't know what it is in the process of participation. There's an image I want to leave you all with that helps me. It's from the sort of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. There's a moment in the Divine Liturgy where basically angels are welcomed into the space. It's a sense of let angels participate with us as we sing the glories of the Lord. It's not theurgy in the magical sense. You're not calling down angels. But it is a recognition that this place and this time, not exactly through human creation but as a result of a kind of collective agreement to worship together, the reality of time and place and space take on new significance. It's, you might say, not a one-to-one correspondence. But everything means everything else and refers to everything else. There's a vision there of a lattice of connections. I don't yet have, let's say, a programmatic analysis of why the Divine Liturgy can help me personally as a novelist. But I do think it provides us a starting point to start thinking about what anti-magical realist creation might look like. So I'll leave it there.

(outro)

Brandon: Alright, folks. That's a wrap for this episode. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with someone who would find it of interest. Also, please subscribe and leave us a review if you haven't already. Thanks, and see you next time.