Participation

Definition

Participation (from Latin participare, to share in or take part) designates, in its philosophical and anthropological deployment, a mode of consciousness and world-relation in which the boundary between experiencing subject and experienced object is not sharp, fixed, or presupposed. Rather than the world being a collection of independent objects confronting a detached observer, participation describes a condition in which subject and world mutually constitute each other, sharing in a common life.

The concept entered modern intellectual discourse through the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939), who coined the phrase participation mystique to describe what he took to be a characteristic feature of "primitive" thought: the tendency to identify with or feel oneself merged with external objects, animals, ancestors, or totemic entities. Lévy-Bruhl did not intend this as pejorative but as descriptive; he was trying to account for the fact that in many traditional societies, the boundary between self and world, human and animal, living and dead, was experienced as permeable rather than absolute.

Owen Barfield (1898–1997), the Oxford philosopher and the thinker most important to the Mystery Schools project on this concept, transformed Lévy-Bruhl's insight into a full-blown philosophical and historical argument. In Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (1957), Barfield distinguished three phases of consciousness: original participation (the undifferentiated, pre-individual consciousness of archaic humanity, in which self and world are not yet separated); the withdrawal of participation (the long process, accelerating from the Greek Axial period through the Scientific Revolution, in which consciousness increasingly abstracts itself from the world, producing the Cartesian split between subject and object, mind and matter); and final participation (the possible future re-integration of self and world at a higher level — not a regression to archaic immersion but a conscious, reflective recovery of the participatory bond).

Barfield's argument is not that modern consciousness should regress to original participation, which would be a kind of nostalgia for a childhood we cannot and should not re-enter. Rather, the trajectory from original through withdrawn to final participation is the very movement of human consciousness through history, and the mystery traditions belong to the pivotal transitional period in which original participation was beginning to give way and the first glimpses of what might lie beyond withdrawal were becoming available.

Tradition by Tradition

Archaic / Indigenous

In traditional, primal, and indigenous worldviews, participation is not a philosophical theory but the lived structure of experience. Animals, plants, rivers, and stars are not merely physical objects but presences with which the human being is in ongoing reciprocal relation. The shaman's ability to move between human and animal form, the animist understanding of the world as inhabited by spirits, the oral poet's experience of the Muse as a real presence: all of these are expressions of participatory consciousness rather than "superstition." Barfield reads these not as cognitive errors to be corrected but as genuine perceptions of a world that genuinely was, for these consciousnesses, participatory.

Ancient Greek / Eleusinian

The Eleusinian Mysteries can be read as a structured participation in the myth of Persephone: the initiate does not merely hear the story but enacts it, suffers it, and thereby enters into the death-and-return cycle that Demeter and Persephone embody. The Homeric Hymn's language of pathos (suffering, experience, passion) is the language of participatory knowing; one comes to know by going through, not by observing. The gradual withdrawal of participatory consciousness in classical Athens is the context within which the Mysteries' persistence makes sense: they preserved and transmitted a participatory encounter with sacred reality at precisely the moment when ordinary Greek public religion was becoming more formal and less experiential.

Hermetic / Neoplatonic

Neoplatonism offers a sophisticated philosophical account of participation (methexis in Greek — itself the word Plato uses for the relationship between particular things and the Forms). For Plotinus, the material world participates in the Intellect (nous) which participates in the One. All being is constituted by this chain of participatory dependency. Barfield's analysis connects this metaphysical structure to his epistemological concern: Neoplatonic henōsis (union with the One) is, in Barfield's framework, the philosophical articulation of the final participation that lies beyond the withdrawal.

Romantic and Idealist

The Romantic poets and German Idealist philosophers (Schelling, Hegel, Goethe) represent, in Barfield's reading, a critical moment of attempted recovery of participation after the full withdrawal of the Scientific Revolution. Goethe's Naturphilosophie, his participatory mode of scientific observation (delicate empiricism), and Coleridge's concept of the imagination as a living faculty that participates in nature's creativity: all of these are, for Barfield, premonitions of final participation. Barfield himself was deeply influenced by Rudolf Steiner, whose anthroposophy represents the most systematic modern attempt to develop a science grounded in participatory consciousness.

Project Role

Participation is the theoretical lens through which the Mystery Schools project reads the mystery traditions. Without this concept, the traditions appear to be collections of colorful ritual and mythology. With it, they become sophisticated structures for the cultivation and communication of a particular mode of knowing, one that the modern world has largely lost but whose loss is not permanent.

The project is careful to use Barfield's analysis rather than Lévy-Bruhl's original framing: Lévy-Bruhl's "participation mystique" carries problematic evolutionary and colonialist connotations (primitive vs. civilized), while Barfield's development frames participation not as a primitive stage to be overcome but as the ground of all experience, whose history is the history of consciousness itself. The project explicitly distances itself from any romantic primitivism or "noble savage" framing.

Distinctions

Participation vs. Panpsychism: Panpsychism is the metaphysical doctrine that mind or experience is a fundamental feature of reality. Participation is an epistemological and phenomenological claim about the structure of experience (how consciousness relates to its world), not primarily a claim about the ultimate nature of matter.

Original Participation vs. Final Participation: Barfield's crucial distinction. Original participation is pre-reflective, pre-individual, archaic: the consciousness that does not yet know itself as separate from the world. Final participation is post-reflective, consciously achieved: the consciousness that has gone through the withdrawal and consciously re-integrates itself with the world. The goal is not regression but a dialectical synthesis at a higher level.

Participation vs. Mystical Union: Mystical union (henōsis, unio mystica) is a specific experience of boundary-dissolution in contemplative practice. Participation, in Barfield's sense, is a broader structural feature of consciousness: the background orientation within which mystical experience occurs. One can cultivate participation without full mystical union.

Primary Sources

• Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry: The central text; Barfield's full historical and philosophical account of participation, original participation, and final participation.
• Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning: An earlier, more focused treatment through the lens of language and metaphor, arguing that the history of words reveals the history of participatory consciousness.
• Owen Barfield, History in English Words: The etymological investigation underlying Barfield's broader argument: words as fossils of participatory consciousness.
• Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin: A parallel and complementary account of consciousness structures; Gebser's "archaic" and "magical" structures correspond roughly to original participation, his "integral" structure to final participation.

Agent Research Notes

[AGENT: perplexity | DATE: 2026-03-20] The relationship between Barfield and Lévy-Bruhl is important to get right. Barfield acknowledges Lévy-Bruhl's participation mystique as pointing toward the same phenomenon, but Barfield's philosophical framework is significantly different: for Barfield, participation is not a cognitive deficiency but an ontological reality — the world really was differently constituted for participatory consciousness, not merely perceived differently. This is the "idealist" commitment in Barfield's thought that makes him controversial but also philosophically serious. Richard Tarnas (The Passion of the Western Mind, LIB-0330) and Jorge Ferrer (Revisioning Transpersonal Theory) are important secondary figures who develop the concept of participation in directions relevant to the project.