Everyone is a Wizard: Piranesi, Perception, and Participation

Everyone is a wizard.

This is one of my wilder thoughts. I’ve wanted to write about it for a long time, but haven't found a way to talk about it here. Fortunately, I went to a Q & A with Susanna Clarke a couple of weeks ago and she introduced me to just the thinker for talking about my wizard theory: Owen Barfield. She was discussing her book Piranesi (which I’ve now officially decided that I love) with one of the journalists at Vox. In the interview, Clarke brought up Owen Barfield’s idea of ‘Original Participation’. According to Clarke, the character Piranesi sees the world in a form of Original Perception, where objects are objects but they’re also symbols and omens that have direct bearing on the character. I’d never heard of Barfield before, but he’s a friend and collaborator of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Most importantly, he’s exactly my kind of crazy. 

Barfield is obsessed with perception and how consciousness, perception, and the physical world interact. I was thrilled to read his book Saving the Appearances: a study in idolatry because I’ve also been kind of obsessed with perception for the last couple of years. It’s a theme I’ve been working into a couple of my more recent articles. According to Barfield, Original Participation is the way that people interacted with the world until the arrival of the scientific revolution (with some exceptions). Where we, post scientific revolution, see the objects in the physical world as being totally independent of us (i.e. the physical world is fixed and it’s appearance does not depend on consciousness of them), Original Participation is, “a kind of consciousness for which it was impossible to perceive unfiguratively.” Essentially, when we see a tree, it is a tree. Our consciousness is completely literal. When someone in Original Participation sees a tree, it is a tree, and it is also an omen of the future and a symbol of fertility or death and rebirth.

Barfield argues that we, modern people, have lost sight of the fact that perception is an interplay of the world and consciousness. What we perceive is not merely the world as it is, it depends on our consciousness, what we think, and what we believe. Cognitive science now basically agrees with this view, but talks about our consciousness in terms of expectations. What we perceive is a mix of what is ‘real’ and what we expect to perceive. Original Participation knows that our consciousness is mixed into perception and is active in having their consciousness participate with reality. This is why nothing can be perceived unfiguratively. What we perceive is inextricably linked with who we are and how we think about the world. For a long time we’ve taken things exclusively literally. But I think we’ve entered a new era of symbolism. This brings me to wizards.

Expectations affect our perception. What we see literally depends on what we believe about the world. For example, I often lose my glasses. When I’m looking for them, sometimes I’ll look right over where they really are because I don’t expect them to be there. It takes several times walking back and forth before seeing becomes perceiving. Perception, specifically our expectations, often overcomes our actual sensations. This is true for everyone. Changing our expectations, or changing someone else's expectations, literally changes how the world ‘is’. This is what I talked about when I became a birder. Now that I was expecting birds to be in my field of vision, I saw birds where I didn’t see them before. I’d love to convince everyone to pick up a pair of binoculars, hit the trails, and look for birds, and if I could convince everyone, suddenly there would be a lot more birds ‘in’ the world than there were before. We can change people’s expectations, therefore we can change their perceptions, and as perception is the gateway to experiential reality, changing perception leads to a new reality. With our words we change reality, and, in effect, we are all wizards.

Now, this is all well and good, and it would be essentially just an observation about the nature of perception if wizardry didn’t have a lot of explanatory power. I’ll use Saruman, the corrupt wizard from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, as an example. After winning victory over his armies, Théoden and Gandalf approach Saruman who is locked in his tower. Gandalf, the White Wizard, doesn’t want Théoden, the King of Rohan, to speak with Saruman. Saruman may not have his forces but he still has his Voice. The Voice of Saruman is the real threat. Gandalf does not want to risk Théoden coming into contact with the Voice, fearing that Saruman’s speech will overcome and corrupt Théoden. Later in the Shire, Saruman is without his staff, but he is still a threat to the hobbits because is Voice has the power to change and corrupt. Gandalf only wants to approach Saruman with a power that is greater than his, and eventually Saruman is overcome only by sudden violence. Wizards cannot be allowed to speak. They must be overcome by a greater Voice or by force. 

Typically we don’t think about people or political figures as wizards, but we treat them in the same way. Giving people a voice (or a platform) is what gives them power and what makes them potentially dangerous. The best example as person as a wizard is former president Trump. After his inauguration, he repeatedly insisted that the crowd was larger than it really way. The repeated insistence made that ‘true’ for millions of people in America. When shown evidence to the contrary, they aren’t really lying when they say it’s not real, because their perception is being controlled by their expectations and beliefs. And After the insurrection at the Capital, it was imperative that Trump lose his platform and his voice. And without his voice (in this case Twitter), Trump completely faded from national news for a time. Wizards cannot be allowed to speak. 

And as I said, I think we’re in a new symbolic era. Mostly called ‘post-truth,’ people are coming to realize the power of the figurative over the literal. No longer are objects just objects. They are simultaneously literal and figurative. Guns are guns, but they’re also symbolic of a culture and way of life. ‘Taking our guns’ is, yes, about guns, but it is also about the larger symbolic power imbued in guns. Or take voter ID laws. Having to show ID at polls doesn’t have a significant (if any) impact on voting, and pundits know this (as seen when Joe Manchin supported voter ID laws).  However, voter ID laws are not merely voter ID laws. They are symbols of reaction and disenfranchisement. Voter ID law, guns, crowd sizes, masks, vaccines, basically everything is or is becoming both simultaneously literal and symbolic. ‘Post-truth’ recognizes that the symbolic meaning often has more power than the literal meaning. 

This is not Barfield’s vision. He wanted to awaken us to the fact that perception depends upon our thinking and beliefs, but he wanted that to open doors to imagination. He loves changing how we see the world and reshaping reality. He did not want us returning to the wizardry of Original Participation. I’m planning to talk more about Barfield in the future, but I will end with this. While I think we are all wizards, I don’t think the only way to defeat wizards is power or violence. Neither does Tolkien. When Théoden confronts Saruman, he hears the Voice, but he is not swayed.

You are a liar, Saruman, and a corrupter of men’s hearts...So much for the house of Eorl. A lesser son of greater sires am I, but I do not need to lick your fingers. Turn elsewhere. But I fear your voice has lost its charm.

It is possible to change someone else's perception and thus their reality. But it is also possible to stand firm, as Théoden did, in what we know is right and what we know is true.