The Cat's Whiskers
Thinking back to my grandparents’ time, their world was like another country. It was a pre-wireless world, one of books and close-knit community, of horses and carts. It was a world of work, the clatter of looms, and religion. It was Sunday walks to chapel, sermons, hymns, and hard pews. But there was also an underlying folk superstition that lent a quiet glamour to the times.
My grandmother read tea leaves and dreamed vividly of the dead. Her stories came to me through my mother, and we grew up on those second-hand superstitions, which by then had softened into something more tongue-in-cheek. Crossed knives foretold an argument. A dropped glove meant a surprise. I didn’t wholly believe in good luck charms, but carried them anyway – pebbles, fancy marbles, and coins, all were attractive to me. And I had a cat who would occasionally shed a whisker. These were particularly charged with a sense of home and security. That cat was a great pal of mine. Before school or college exams, I’d thread a whisker into the lapel of my tweed jacket. There it would stay, invisible to the outer world, to the profane, known only to me.
I suppose I caught the tail end of those times. Now, at a different stage of life, I look back from the vantage point of smart-phones and social media. Things move on, and though I’m not much given to nostalgia, I do regret how the world today feels far less enchanted than it once did, and certainly the way it was in my grandparent’s day.
A group of women gathered in a kitchen in a mill village in the north of England, reading tea leaves – there was a social aspect to it, of course, but also an openness to something “other.” There was a lack of distraction, a lack of noise, that made space for superstition, and for imagination. Nowadays, we spend on average two and a half hours a day simply staring at our phones, caught up in news cycles, algorithmic feeds, and doom loops. What are we missing? Could we ever get back to that way of thinking? Why would we want to? What would it mean to re-enchant the world?
It might help to understand what all that superstition was pointing toward. The priests and parsons of the day hardly approved of it, yet for all the Sunday-best devoutness of their flocks, they couldn’t stamp it out. It was a secret conduit to something deeper, a sense of inner knowing. It felt important and meaningful. Today, steeped as we are in a purely materialist tradition, a raven tapping on a window means nothing. But to my grandparents’ generation, it foretold a death. Waking in the night to see a ghostly figure at the foot of the bed might now prompt a trip to the doctor. Back then, it was a revered anecdote to be passed down the generations, a puzzle piece of the ineffable.
Traditional, so-called pre-rational cultures wouldn’t find this strange at all. They’d find it entirely normal. And what’s also unsurprising is how those sensibilities collapsed under colonial rule. When Carl Jung spoke to tribes in British-administered Africa, they told him they no longer needed to dream – the British, they said, now knew everything. Their imaginal faculties had been displaced by rational certainties. And while this added a layer of material order to their lives, the price was the loss of intrinsic meaning.
We downplay it now, perhaps out of embarrassment, but I can’t bring myself to dismiss what we called “superstition” as mere nonsense. I see it more as a folk metaphysics, an instinctive grammar shared across cultures. It was a sixth sense for feeling our way into the field of meaning in which we’re all embedded. My grandmother’s generation might not have spoken of synchronicity, or archetypes or daemons, but she knew a sign when she saw one. She intuited the way the inner and outer worlds rhyme.
I’ve come to think of the universe as possessing an informational field that underlies our experience – a kind of matrix of mind that precedes matter. In earlier times, people connected with it through dreams, signs, omens, and rituals. There were guides too, though we didn’t call them that. They were spirits, saints, ancestors, or angels – personifications of something subtler, what the Greeks called daimones.
These were not demons in the modern, corrupted sense, but intermediaries -messengers between the human and the divine. I’ve long been willing to at least reckon with the possibility that we each have a personal daemon: an inner companion or sixth-sense guidance system. It’s not of the ego, but close to it and perhaps rests somewhere between the conscious, waking mind and the unconscious world of sleep and dreams . It is neither our servant, nor our master. It moves through dreams, images, and hunches, it knows things we do not, and it will tell them to us if we’re quiet and receptive.
When the world was more enchanted, the ways of listening were many. Now, surrounded by noise, such subtleties have been bleached out of us by too much sunlight, by too many screens, by the capture of our imaginations through algorithmic seduction, and by click-bait culture.
The daemonic do not shout. They speak in images, metaphors, and strange coincidences. Their language is more like poetry than prose, more like dreams than demonstrable facts. To catch their drift requires a softer kind of attention – not the analytic scrutiny of the rational mind, but something much looser. Like catching a shadow in the corner of your eye, the daemonic moves in the periphery and the half-glimpsed.
I think the old world knew how to give that kind of attention. It emerged in quiet moments, in repetitive work, in walking, in lamp-lit winter evenings. It was the kind of attention that made space for wonder and for mystery, unlike now, when we merely scroll, click, and scan. The daemons are still here – but they won’t fight for airtime. We must sense their presence, or at least be willing to suspend disbelief, and be prepared to meet them halfway.
Our grandparents’ daemons came in dreams, in tea leaves, in signs in nature. Their world was rich in symbolism and openings – not because they were naïve or ignorant, but because they lived closer to the thresholds of the liminal, where meaning and matter meet. They didn’t need to speculate about the universe as pure consciousness, as an informational field structured by archetypes. They just listened. They were receptive.
We, on the other hand, are born into noise. We have no sacred rituals. Our symbols are corrupted by marketing. Our sense of meaning is flimsy, teased this way and that by the algorithms which always leave us empty handed. Yet the field is still there, as are the daemons. Only now, they must come to us through new forms.
We don’t dream so clearly as we once did, but dreaming can be taught. We can write, walk, meditate. We can spend time with the noise turned off. And then the imagination – long dismissed as belonging to children, and a thing to be grown out of – begins to reassert its ancient purpose: not merely as a fantasy machine, but as an interface to the Other. The old tea leaves become symbols in film, poetry, even in AI dialogue. The oracles we once found in birds, or bones now arise in synchronicities, in subtle alignments between inner thought and outer world. Myth is not dead. It waits to be renewed.
To re-enchant the world is not to regress, but to honour the intuitions of our ancestors while seizing the opportunities of our own times. The informational field – whether we call it psyche or soul – responds to intent. We mythologise not just to remember, but to shape the field of becoming. The daemon doesn’t guide us backwards. It leads us forward.
But what does that mean, really?
Some time ago, all the spirit seemed to collapse out of my writing. The world felt too much with us, as Wordsworth said. Global events stream daily from our devices, a storm flattening the soul, leaving us fearful of the future. Although the current crescendo feels intense, I see it more as part of a long wave of perma-crises stretching back as far as I can remember. It’s a function of our broken times: our imaginations atrophied, led around like helpless marionettes, left at the end of the day with our strings cut, collapsed in a corner of our disenchanted lives.
And then I had a dream.
I was exploring tunnels deep underground. I heard dripping water and smelled the deep earth. Fellow explorers said the tunnels opened in a place I’d never heard of. On waking, I looked it up, and found it existed. The dream also featured my old art teacher, whose presence stirred me to grab my pencils and paper again. I visited that place, found a symbol there on the moors, drew it, copied it onto a pebble, and left it in a location suggested by another dream.
I have no idea what it means. I only know my fingers haven’t stopped tapping on the keyboard since. The words are pouring out. I offer it here as an example of a modern opening to the daemonic, and how it might respond. My world had gone flat, crushed under the weight of a chaotic news cycle. That hasn’t changed. New calamities arrive daily. But to live mythically, poetically, re-enchants the world, even if you don’t believe in magic or daemons.
This isn’t escapism. It’s not a return to pre-rational times. Living mytho-poetically means holding multiple layers of meaning at once, both the rational and the daemonic. Our grandparents understood this. We need both ways of being. But we have sacrificed the magical for the promise of the rational, and in doing so, we’ve cut ourselves off from the source of meaning.
I don’t live with a cat now, more’s the pity. But if I did, I think I’d still be tucking those lucky whiskers into the lapel of my jacket on occasion. To live magically is to dwell in the world as if it were alive with meaning, and to do so is to remember, actually, contrary to the doom cycles pouring from our devices, it still is.