🎙️#17 Dr. Sharon Blackie: Can We Re-enchant a Disenchanted World?

The Living Philosophy

Dr. Sharon Blackie discusses her transition from behavioral neuroscience to depth psychology and mythology, focusing on the concept of 'ench

Key takeaways

• Dr. Blackie transitioned from neuroscience to Jungian depth psychology to reintegrate imagination into scientific understanding.
• Neoplatonism offers a cosmology (The One, Nous, World Soul) that avoids the dualism found in many monotheistic religions.

Main topics

• Depth Psychology
• Neoplatonism

Notable quotes

Enchantment to me is actually waking up and it's a feeling of being fully alive.

Conclusion

The episode provides a profound look at how ancient wisdom and myth ca

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) So Dr. Sharon Blackie is an award-winning writer, psychologist, and mythologist whose work sits at the junction of depth psychology, mythology, and ecology, which is interesting because she comes from a background more in behavioral psychology and neuroscience, so bringing a rich and holistic perspective to the field. She's the author of If Women Rose Rooted, a word-of-mouth bestseller. for Haggitude, which reframed midlife and elderhood as alchemical rather than diminishing. And she recently published her seventh book, Ripening, Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now, in May 2026. And as if she didn't have enough on her plate with the book and her sub stack, The Art of Enchantment, Sharon has founded the Nostos Institute, which is an attempt to bring, to build a living Western spiritual path out of ancient philosophy and depth psychology for people who are spiritually hungry and might have no appetite for institutions. constitutional religion. Sharon, thank you so much for coming on. Speaker 1 (0:56) Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure. That sounds like a lot of ologies, doesn't it? Speaker 2 (1:01) Yeah, it's interesting. I could listen to a couple of podcasts you've been on and kind of hearing that journey you've gone through of like a very meandering kind of path, like a lot of rich life experience. Interesting coming from even just within the psychological field, coming from a more, was it your PhD that was in more behavioral psychology? No, Speaker 1 (1:21) I ended up, I actually went into psychology with an all arts background. And you couldn't do that in very many places in the UK because it really is kind of pitched as a science. And I ended up bizarrely at the University of Liverpool who did it as a BA rather than a BSc. And it was the most behaviorist department probably in the country. I mean, we could not say mind. We could say brain because you could see it and cut it open, but you couldn't cut open a mind and therefore it didn't entirely exist. And so we weren't really encouraged to talk about it. And then I went and did a PhD in neuroscience, actually, behavioral neuroscience, looking at brain mechanisms, underlying anxiety and panic and all of that kind of malarkey. Then I went off into a completely different kind of world, corporate world for a while. When I came back, it was really kind of depth psychology and specifically Jungian and post-Jungian depth psychology that was attracting my attention. rather than the old stuff, which I have now happily laid behind me. Speaker 2 (2:14) Oh, it's been a really interesting theme on this podcast. Like I've chatted to a few, like Jörg Northoff, Eric Goodwin, Gary Clark, Aldrich Chan, like people who are at this intersection of neuroscience and depth psychology, which I find really fascinating. Like these things, like the default mode network and the midline cortical structures and kind of finding this neuroscience. Because I kind of had that split of like, Yeah, the neuroscience being over there in that camp with the more hard-headed folks, we'll call them. Whereas, yeah, it seems like the soft touch is kind of coming from this more systemic kind of perspective and seeing like an ecology of brain. And ecological neuroscience, I guess, is one way of framing it rather than as the kind Speaker 1 (3:00) of hard-headed kind of thing. So it's been interesting Speaker 2 (3:02) to see that. I wonder, have you had any, or have you kind of gone, eh? You've kind of left that behind you. I Speaker 1 (3:08) don't want to go there again. No, it is. I mean, you know, I'm vaguely aware of it in the background. It is very interesting. But for me, what excites me and always has excited me about depth psychology is the more imaginal aspects and the mythic aspects and the ways in which we are able to move from this very scientific, rationalistic, empirical way of knowing, which has been so dominant in the past, you know, two, three. maybe even four centuries, to kind of reinstate the imagination and intuition as a way of knowing. So that's really been my focus over the past, certainly, 20 plus years. Speaker 2 (3:45) And is that what brought you to, so I've seen you talk about Neoplatonism, is that, where did that come in? Was that kind of come on the deep end of Hillman, like on the imaginal kind of thing, or where did that kind of ancient philosophical theme end up winding its way in? Speaker 1 (4:00) Kind of, yeah. I mean, obviously, Hillman was greatly influenced by, you know, both the old Neoplatonists, if we can call them that, and the Renaissance Neoplatonists. And so I was always very much aware of them. I was also very much aware from having kind of delved into kind of Sufi mysticism at one point in my life, or Henri Corbin, his concept of the imaginary world, which also greatly influenced James Hillman. So there was that kind of intellectual interest as someone who works. predominantly with image and with mythology, that was always going to fascinate me. It's like, you know, what are we doing here? Where do the images come from? What are they trying to say to us, if anything? But it was also, particularly more recently, it was also from a more spiritual perspective in the sense that we seem to have had, particularly over the last couple of years, this whole kind of phenomenon of men and young men, particularly turning suddenly to more traditional forms of Christianity, like Orthodox Christianity and what have you. And they don't leave much room for women. And also they are very dogmatic and very doctrinal, very institutionalized, which not just as a woman, but... As someone who likes to more freely range in ways of thinking and ways of being, I found that a bit distressing. So I started to think to myself, well, what is there as a kind of Western form of spirituality that isn't institutionalized, that isn't dogmatic, but that isn't completely woo-woo either? And Neoplatonism, as you will very well know, was... the precursor to a lot of these religions, hugely influential in Christianity, hugely influential in Islamic mysticism. And I just began to wonder if we went back to the place before the institutions started to mangle that way of looking at the world, what might we make of it? Because it's very beautiful, very simple, you know, in many ways. Speaker 2 (5:53) So give me a rundown. My plotinus is not particularly strong. Can you give me a crash course on Neoplatonism for what we're talking about here? Speaker 1 (6:03) Well, I'm not a philosopher, so I should say that. I mean, obviously, I've studied bits of philosophy at various points during my life. We're all philosophers, Speaker 2 (6:09) aren't we? They can't claim it in the ivory tower. We're all philosophers. Speaker 1 (6:15) But what I love about Neoplatonism is its basic cosmology, which... begins with this concept of what they call the one, which is a kind of universal ground of being. It's just what everything springs from. So this Speaker 2 (6:27) matter and mind, everything is springing from this one? Everything is springing Speaker 1 (6:32) from the one, exactly. It literally is a ground of being. And the first thing, if you like, I'm just putting this simplistically for people who aren't steeped in this stuff. The first thing that springs from the one is what's called the noose. N-O-U-S, which is kind of the divine mind, the kind of intellect, if you like. And from the noose then springs the world soul. And this is where it gets interesting for me and where it ties directly into Hillman and the imaginal world. But the world soul then animates everything, creates the physical world, animates it, including us. And so the physical world and we, through the world soul, through the noose, all the way back to the one, are all connected. So everything, there's no dualism as there is in so much, so many forms of Christianity and other kind of monotheistic religions. It's all, everything is steeped in the divine, everything is sacred. And we find our way to, it's a very, Neoplatonism is about the power of symbolic vision to kind of... connect us to remind us who we are to connect us back to this universal ground of being so uh that's that's one of the things that really interests me about it you know this so where does Speaker 2 (7:44) the news fit because i can kind of like world soul i can see what that's doing that's the the animating of the world that's the yeah the the animating soul of it all but what is what is news doing between the one and the world soul Speaker 1 (7:57) Well, the one is just the ground of being. So it's unknowable by definition. So, you know, nobody writes very much about it. It's just like where everything springs from. It's kind of like the original stuff of the universe, if I can put it in that way. And the nous is the mind that springs from it. So it's the kind of organizing principle, the forming principle. So Plato, for example, Plato's forms or ideas, he would be thought of as the kind of thoughts. of this divine mind. Speaker 2 (8:28) Right. It's kind of the prototypical forms rather than the actual embodied thing. Exactly. The good is this separate abstract thing and then the embodiment of the good has been the actual world soul element. Kind of. So Speaker 1 (8:40) I suppose the noose more than the one is probably closest to, say, Christian concepts of God. But it varies according to interpretations, obviously. Speaker 2 (8:50) Yeah, a line from Nietzsche comes to mind that Christianity is Platonism for the masses. Speaker 1 (8:56) Yeah, I like that. Speaker 2 (8:58) Because there is very much a Platonic flavor to Christianity in many ways. I wonder what your attitude towards institutions, like when you look at early Christianity, was it once it got institutionalized by Constantine, like that once it kind of ossified into this structural form? I know Paul very much had these. this desire for the hierarchical structure. Maybe I'm projecting a troubled relationship with Christianity there, or maybe it's just the institutionalized form of it. But does that go back to early Christianity, or is it more the institutions that you have the problem with? Speaker 1 (9:39) I think. I mean, I'm not a proper historian of Christianity, so I could be talking Speaker 1 (9:47) nonsense here but from my perspective is certainly yes when they started to decide which doctrines were okay and which you know books and ideas could be put into the bible and they left a lot of the really beautiful stuff behind particularly the stuff that recognized women as just as capable of kind of developing a relationship with the divine as men. I think that's where it started to get problematic for me. And particularly when it started to get very patriarchal, it didn't allow women in. And when it became very much more about a set of rules, like things you must eat on Fridays and Sundays, rather than a way of teaching people to kind of experience the divine for themselves, and where we had to have this intermediary because we couldn't possibly, you know. go looking for the divine ourselves. And that's the kind of thing that I find objectionable. So, you know, the mystical schools, in contrast to that, were very much about individual experience of the divine. Speaker 2 (10:44) And I guess as well, like the imaginal, right, doesn't... Speaker 2 (10:48) I'm trying to think of the role or the space for the imaginal within my Catholic upbringing. I guess there's like stuff with the saints and stuff, but not really. It does not really. I mean, reading Hillman, I was like this, the imaginal stuff was kind of wild. I was like, oh, yeah, this is this makes so much sense. This other space of, you know, having studied in other philosophical schools of like, well, there are these concepts like. like dragon that don't exist in the world, but we have words for them and they kind of do exist or like money is an example of our borders. They don't exist in the world, but there is a sort of a shared memetic existence. And then the imaginal kind of seems to run along that like there's this, but then it has its own sort of a. Speaker 2 (11:34) It's this weird invisible realm that doesn't really fit in the modern metaphysical, ontological view of the world, like of modernity is more the scientific hardhead. The kind of people that would say we don't talk about mind, we talk about brain, the imaginal is the furthest thing from that. Speaker 1 (11:52) I know, but everybody knows that it exists, right? I mean, it might not fit into the kind of academy with a capital A, but everybody knows that there are things that we can't explain through purely empirical ways of viewing the world. And, you know, so if we go back to the Neoplatonic concept, if the anima mundi, the world soul, is what animates the world and makes everything, everything, literally everything alive. then this concept of the imaginal world, it's kind of like the dimension where it's directly experienced. And what the Neoplatonists did, particularly the later Neoplatonists, is they wanted us to find our way into the world soul. They wanted us to kind of be able to experience the world soul in order to find our way back to an understanding of our place. as part of the divine. So there was an interesting Neoplatonist quite late called Iamblichus, who's a Syrian, and he introduced this concept of theurgy into Neoplatonism, which was a way of calling on the gods, the kind of intermediaries who would live in what we think of as the imaginal world, through rituals and other symbolic processes that we would find our way to the world of soul. And through that, we would come to understand the divine. So it's very much, again, this concept of the world of soul, the imaginal world, as a kind of intermediary world between the physical world of our senses and the kind of the world of the divine. And I see depth psychology as being a kind of a theurgy for the times. You know, and Hillman particularly would resonate with that, the idea that it's through image, it's through the act of imagination that we find our way into the imaginary world and that we kind of, you know, we find a way to this other layer of reality, which modernity has taught us either is unreal or is a bit bonkers if you do encounter it. Speaker 2 (13:54) And what, like, so... What is going on? Is the imaginal world just tied into our individual? Or is there something there that we're kind of more of a ground of being? Like, what's your perspective on the, I guess, yeah, that deeper reality of the imaginal? Speaker 1 (14:15) Well, Henri Corbin, who was a French theologian who first translated a lot of Islamic, ancient Islamic, or pre-Islamic in some cases, mystical texts. talking about the imaginary world, it was absolutely, it was as real as the world of your senses. It just exists in a different layer of reality. You can't see it or touch it, but it doesn't make it any less real. And it really was an intermediary world to them between the physical world and the, let's call it the divine, you know, the grand being, the kind of spiritual world, if you like. And it was the place in Sufi traditions, it was the place where the gods lived, the minor gods who might kind of connect us with the greater god. It was the place where angels lived or spirit guides or diamonds, as the Platonists would have called them. From a Jungian perspective, it would be the place where synchronicities come from. It's not a causal world in the way that we normally think of it. It's the place where dreams come from. It's the place where images live and come from and happen to us if we're lucky. in order to draw us in and create transformation. So this whole idea of Jung's and Hillman's that the world of the soul is the world of the image, we grow as souls and we encounter soul in its biggest sense through image and symbol, because that's where all the image stuff lives in the imaginal world. Does that make sense? Speaker 2 (15:44) No, it makes perfect sense. Speaker 2 (15:49) Well, it's really the soul was almost this missing piece. I think growing up, I thought soul and spirit were kind of synonymous, but actually these are two very different spaces and I guess phenomenologically very different spaces. There's a sort of an ecstasis, I guess, when it comes to spirit, a sort of a rising, a sort of a... But whereas soul feels more... like the labyrinth kind of thing that's more mystery i guess fairy tales would be very much a soulful kind of realm yeah Speaker 1 (16:21) and myth you know it's where the myths come from um it's it's where all of that kind of stuff bubbles up um and um and it's our way in yeah Speaker 2 (16:31) and can you talk to me about fairy tales so you were looking at that in the most recent book has this been a theme for you throughout have you always had a deep resonance with the the medium of fairy tales Speaker 1 (16:44) Ever since I was a kid, really, both myth and fairy tales. So I grew up really with a lot of Irish and Scottish mythology because that was my family background, as well as Greek mythology and as well as the Grimm's fairy tales. It was just like we lived in the house and didn't have a telly, but we had lots of books. And I was actually really weirdly perhaps encouraged to read fairy tales. So it was something that I loved as a child. But when I came back out of kind of corporate life and retrained as a psychologist, as a psychotherapist, I specialised in narrative psychology. But narrative psychology to me was using fairy tales and myths because What they do in a way that practices like cognitive behavioral therapy most certainly do not is they captured the imagination. You know, I never had anybody sit in front of me in my office saying, I know I don't want a story. No, I don't like stories. You've got them, right? As soon as you start to work with story, you've got their attention. And the beauty of fairy tales, particularly, and especially for women. Although it's also true in some of the fairy tales where the protagonists are male. They all start off with the world completely ruined. You know, they've been thrown out of home. Their father's cut their hands off. You know, their mother has died. Whatever might happen, everything is in ruins. Catastrophe is snapping at their heels. And they go out into the world because what else are they going to do? And through a process of really mostly building relationship, not just with other humans, but with... the animate world, you know, with a frog or a bunch of hungry mice or a tree or a rock or a stream that warns them when they're going through the dark woods of what dangers are ahead. You know, it's all about participation in an animate world. And through that kind of participation and not seeing themselves as separate or above and through building community, they find their way out. They kind of re-emerge in their own stories and they end up in their kind of archetypical happily ever after, which is just, as you know, you know, it's just a phrase. It's just a second. Speaker 2 (18:53) We have to end the story somewhere. This is the sign of. Yeah. So that's what Speaker 1 (18:58) I Speaker 2 (18:58) loved Speaker 1 (18:58) about them, that kind of sense of real genuine participation, which to me is what enchantment is. You know, it's just that's what it is. Speaker 2 (19:05) Yeah. So I wanted to lead in there because this