Enchantment
Spellbound, magical delight. The world sparkles.
Enchantment is spellbound, magical delight. The world briefly becomes more than ordinary and things sparkle. Wonder fills the body with joy mixed in. Modern adult life rarely produces the conditions for it, which makes it rare.
Let the world be larger than your understanding of it
Enchantment is what we feel when the world refuses to be flat. The forest at dusk. The candlelit room. The story that opens up something you did not know was closed. The disenchanted view of life is currently fashionable. Everything is made of atoms. Everything is explainable. This view is technically true and emotionally insufficient. Allow yourself to be enchanted occasionally. Stand in front of the painting longer than feels reasonable. Stay out under the stars. Read the story to the child as if you also believe in it. Enchantment is a sense organ for meaning. Use it. The world is more than its components.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
— William Shakespeare
Enchantment has a distinctive body signature combining wonder with pleasure. The chest fills with warm fullness. The face often shows a particular soft smile that has eyes-wide quality to it. The body feels lighter, sometimes almost floating. Time slows or becomes less salient. There is a quality of the ordinary world having become slightly more vivid, more saturated with significance. The body has registered something that exceeds ordinary explanation.
Research on enchantment as a distinct emotion is limited but it overlaps with research on wonder, awe, and what Jane Bennett has called the experience of vital materiality (Bennett, 2001). Studies on positive surprise and on what some researchers call positive transcendent emotions have shown that these states are associated with increased openness, expanded thinking, and prosocial behaviour (Stellar et al., 2017). The body response includes vagal activation, dopamine release, and reduced activity in self-focused brain regions, similar to other transcendent positive emotions.
Enchantment arises in specific conditions, almost always involving sufficient attention to something that has wonder-producing qualities. Common patterns include:
Enchantment cannot be produced on demand but the conditions for it can be cultivated. The following practices help make enchantment more available.
Reduce explanation and analysis briefly
Modern habits of immediately explaining or analysing experiences often prevent enchantment by reducing things to their functional descriptions before the body has fully registered them. Allowing some experiences to be encountered without immediate interpretation gives space for enchantment to arise. The explaining can happen later.
Spend unhurried time in environments that retain some magic
Wild places, old buildings, gardens, libraries, museums, the homes of people who have made spaces well. Environments that have not been fully optimised or commercialised often retain qualities that produce enchantment. Visiting them without rushing, without the camera always out, often makes enchantment available.
Let yourself believe what your body is registering
Many adults dismiss enchantment when it arises by mentally explaining it away. The body has registered something genuine. Letting the experience be what it is, without insisting that it must be reducible to ordinary terms, often deepens and sustains it. The discount that adults apply to enchantment usually comes from culture rather than from wisdom.
Spend time with children or animals being themselves
Observing small life going about its business often produces enchantment in adults because it returns access to a kind of seeing that adult life has often dulled. This is one of the more reliable doorways into the state for people who have lost easy access to it.
If enchantment feels permanently unavailable
Persistent inability to feel enchantment, even in conditions that should support it, may signal burnout, depression, chronic over-stimulation, or what some researchers call the disenchantment of modernity working at the individual level. The capacity can be restored, often through significant reduction in stimulation and through deliberate exposure to environments and experiences that retain wonder-producing qualities.
"Enchantment is the ordinary world briefly revealing more than ordinary explanation captures. The body knows when this is happening. The challenge is letting yourself believe what your body is telling you."
— A theme that recurs in research on transcendent positive emotions
What is enchantment?
Enchantment is spellbound, magical delight: the world briefly becoming something more than ordinary. The body fills with wonder that has joy mixed into it. Things sparkle. There is a felt sense that ordinary explanation does not fully capture what is happening. Enchantment is one of the most pleasurable positive emotions humans can experience and one of the rarest in modern adult life because the conditions that produce it have largely been engineered out of daily existence.
Where do people feel enchantment in the body?
Enchantment has a distinctive signature combining wonder with pleasure. The chest fills with warm fullness. The face often shows a particular soft smile with an eyes-wide quality. The body feels lighter, sometimes almost floating. Time slows or becomes less salient. There is a quality of the ordinary world having become slightly more vivid, more saturated with significance. The body has registered something that exceeds ordinary explanation.
Why do adults experience enchantment less than children?
Children's brains are still building their models of how the world works, which means more of what they encounter is genuinely unexpected and capable of producing wonder. Adults have settled models and tend to fit new experiences into existing categories quickly. This is partly developmental but partly habitual. Many adults have lost the capacity for enchantment not because of maturity but because they have stopped allowing themselves the conditions that produce it: unhurried time, encounters without explanation, places that retain mystery, sufficient attention to ordinary beauty.
Can enchantment be cultivated?
Not directly, because enchantment requires genuine encounter with something that has wonder-producing qualities. But the conditions for enchantment can be cultivated: reducing immediate analysis of experiences, spending unhurried time in environments that retain magic, letting yourself believe what your body is registering rather than discounting it, and spending time with children or animals being themselves. The enchantment itself cannot be forced. The soil for it can be tended carefully.
Why doesn't anything enchant me anymore?
Loss of capacity for enchantment is common in modern adult life and has several causes: chronic over-stimulation that has dulled the senses, the habit of explaining everything immediately rather than encountering it fresh, fragmented attention from devices, depression that has flattened positive responses, or what some researchers call the disenchantment of modernity working at the individual level. The capacity is rarely permanently lost. Significant reduction in stimulation, alongside deliberate exposure to environments and experiences that retain wonder-producing qualities, usually restores it over months.
- Bennett, J. (2001). The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton University Press.
- Stellar, J. E., Gordon, A. M., Piff, P. K., Cordaro, D., Anderson, C. L., Bai, Y., Maruskin, L. A., & Keltner, D. (2017). Self-transcendent emotions and their social functions: Compassion, gratitude, and awe bind us to others through prosociality. Emotion Review, 9(3), 200–207. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1754073916684557
- Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02699930302297
Enchantment sits in the joy family but reaches into the existential family through its transcendent quality. It overlaps with wonder when the focus is on the captivating object, with awe when the scale is larger, and with what some traditions call the numinous when the experience has spiritual quality.
See where enchantment sits among the other 402 emotions.
Open Enchantment on the wheel