**3. Enchantment: what it is and what it does**

One of the memorable moments of my life was an afternoon spent, after hours of trekking into the Matopos mountains of Zimbabwe, in a cave ([1], p. 67). My wife and I were treated to a panoramic display of layers and layers of art on the face of the cave wall cut by nature in the form of a horizontal wedge into a mountain side. The cave was about 10 meters across, 5 meters deep, and 4 meters high, and the main wall was completely covered with the most exquisite depictions of animal, insect, and human life. I did not need to be an expert in rock art to realize that the people who painted these images were not only extraordinarily gifted from a technical and artistic point of view, but that they understood the world around them in a way quite different from the way I understood the world. I had the distinct impression that what I was witnessing was not simply art but cosmology. The cave wall became a membrane upon which appeared the significations of a world experienced through senses that clearly did not perceive things in terms of the dichotomies of subject and object, time and space, material, and spiritual (see **Figure 1**). The inclusion of the artist in the picture, running, jumping, being with, the animals, birds, and insects, suggested intimate participation between painter and painted, self and not self, world and being in the world. Figures resembling human beings looming in the background suggested that the entire scene was presenced with spiritual beings that could not be seen but were clearly there; in other words, the blurring of boundaries between the seen and the unseen. I was reminded of J.V. Taylor's extraordinary description of what he called the "primal" worldview:

*Not only is there less separation between subject and object, between self and not-self, but fundamentally all things share the same nature and the same interaction one upon another - rocks and forest trees, beasts and serpents, the power of the wind and waves upon a ship, the power of a drum over a dancers body, the power in the mysterious caves of Kokola, the living, the dead and the first ancestors, from the stone to the divinities an hierarchy of power but not of being, for all are one, all are here, all are now ([2], p. 56) (***Figure 1***).*

These existential descriptions from those of us living outside of the primal world and looking in are tinged with a kind of romantic Thoreauian magicalism and need to be described in more precise philosophical terms. Harold Turner helps us by identifying six distinct features: first, a sense of kinship with nature in which animals and plants have their own spiritual existence and place in the universe; second, a deep sense that humankind is weak and vulnerable and in need of a power greater than itself; third, that humankind is not alone in the universe but lives in a spiritual

**Figure 1.** *Bushman art in a cave in the Matopos Mountains Zimbabwe.*

universe that consists of beings greater than itself; fourth, that humankind can enter into a relationship with these beings; fifth, that there is an acute sense of the afterlife and therefore an important place is given to ancestors; and sixth, that the universe is sacramental—that is, there is no sharp distinction between the spiritual and the physical ([3], p. 93).
