Original Participation

Definition

Original participation is Owen Barfield's term — introduced in Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (1957) — for the mode of consciousness that characterized human experience in the pre-modern period: a mode in which the human being experienced themselves as genuinely continuous with and participating in the phenomena they perceived. In original participation, the sharp boundary between the perceiving self and the perceived world — which the modern subject takes as a datum of common sense — was not felt. The world was experienced from within, as a living whole of which the human being was an expressive part, not an outside observer of dead mechanism.

Barfield is careful to distinguish original participation from naivety, from wish-fulfillment, and from psychopathology. He is not saying that ancient peoples confused fantasy and reality, or that they were cognitively inferior to modern people. He is making a specific epistemological claim: the cognitive structure of original participation — in which the self did not experience itself as sharply bounded from the phenomena — was a genuine mode of being in relation to reality, not a deficiency of critical thinking. The animism of archaic cultures, the felt sense of a living and responsive world, the experienced relationship between human mood and natural weather — these are not errors about an independently-existing mechanical world but expressions of a genuinely different cognitive structure.

The concept of "participation" is central to Barfield's broader philosophy of language and consciousness. In Poetic Diction (1928), he argues that the earliest human language was participatory in structure: words did not represent objects from outside but expressed the speaker's felt participation in a charged reality. The root meanings of ancient words — pneuma, spirit and breath and wind, not three separate concepts but one complex experienced reality — reflect a consciousness that had not yet drawn the distinctions that modern analytical thinking requires. The loss of this participatory dimension of language is, for Barfield, both a necessary development (consciousness must become capable of standing back and analyzing) and a loss that must eventually be consciously recovered in a new form.

Barfield develops the historical trajectory in terms of three stages: original participation (the pre-modern participatory mode), the Great Transition (what the project calls the Hardening — the withdrawal from participation into the spectator stance that makes modern science possible), and final participation (CON-0040) — the deliberate, conscious recovery of participation at a higher level through imagination and spiritual discipline. The mystery traditions, in Barfield's reading, are technologies for maintaining original participation in its most intense form — and for beginning to develop the transition toward what final participation will be.

Tradition by Tradition

Anthroposophy (Steiner and Barfield)

Barfield was deeply influenced by Rudolf Steiner's account of the evolution of human consciousness in works like Cosmic Memory (1904) and The Philosophy of Freedom (1894). Steiner's spiritual science describes the pre-modern human being as embedded in a group or folk soul, experiencing their individual consciousness as an aspect of a larger spiritual whole — the opposite of the modern experience of radical individual isolation. Barfield translates Steiner's spiritual-scientific account into a more philosophically rigorous epistemological framework, making it accessible to readers who cannot or will not accept Steiner's more explicitly clairvoyant claims.

Philosophy of Language (Barfield's Own Development)

Barfield's argument for original participation rests substantially on the history of language. In History in English Words (1926) and Poetic Diction (1928), he traces how the earliest recoverable meanings of words show a unity of what later became distinct concepts: the Greek word menos meant both "force" and "awareness"; the Latin spiritus meant both "breath" and "spirit"; the Sanskrit dyaus meant both "sky" and "God." These are not metaphors — Barfield argues that they reflect a consciousness in which these distinctions had not yet been made, because the experienced reality was participatory: the divine was experienced as genuinely present in the wind, the breath, the sky, not merely symbolically represented by them.

Ancient Greek and Pre-Socratic

The Pre-Socratic philosophers, in Barfield's reading, stand at the transition point between original participation and the spectator consciousness that Socratic dialectic would accelerate. Thales' "all things are full of gods" (reported by Aristotle) is not proto-theology but the expression of original participation — a consciousness in which the divine was experienced as genuinely present throughout the phenomenal world. Heraclitus's logos — the rational principle that gives order to the flux of all things — represents an early stage of the withdrawal from pure participation: the logos can only be identified as a principle by a consciousness beginning to stand back and observe.

Romantic Philosophy (Goethe, Schelling)

Goethe's participatory science — his Theory of Colors (Farbenlehre, 1810) and The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) — represents the most sustained attempt by a major modern thinker to practice a science of original participation. Goethe did not observe nature as an external observer but attended to it as a participant, seeking the archetypal forms (Urphänomene) that organized natural phenomena from within. His method was derided by Newton's followers as unscientific, but it has had a persistent influence in phenomenological biology, Gestalt psychology, and what David Abram calls "the more-than-human world." Schelling's Naturphilosophie is another expression of the same impulse: the attempt to think nature from within, as the self-expression of a living principle.

Depth Psychology (Jung's Participation Mystique)

Jung borrowed the term "participation mystique" from Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's anthropology to describe the pre-personal, boundary-dissolving dimension of psychic life that persists even in modern individuals in certain contexts — particularly in falling in love, in crowds, in art, in the analytic transference. Lévy-Bruhl's original use of the term carried condescending implications (participation mystique was "primitive thinking" that modern civilization had transcended); Jung revalued it as a genuine dimension of psychic life that modern consciousness had repressed but not eliminated. Barfield's original participation is the more philosophically rigorous version of the same basic observation.

Project Role

Original participation is the project's concept for naming what the ancient mystery traditions presupposed and cultivated. The Eleusinian initiates, the Neoplatonic theurgists, the Hermetic practitioners — all were operating within a participatory mode of consciousness in which the world was experienced as alive, responsive, and charged with divine presence. Their practices made sense within this consciousness; the practices are not merely instruments for achieving participation, they are also expressions of a consciousness that already participates.

The concept is also essential for understanding the Hardening's full significance. The Hardening is not merely a change in beliefs (from "the world is ensouled" to "the world is mechanical") but a change in the cognitive structure of perception itself: from participatory to spectator consciousness. This means that the recovery of the mystery traditions cannot be achieved merely by adopting their beliefs intellectually — it requires a transformation of the cognitive structure, a recovery of participatory consciousness at the level of perception, not merely of doctrine.

Distinctions

Original participation vs. Animism: Animism is the belief that natural objects have spirits. Original participation is a mode of consciousness — a way of experiencing the world — that is expressed in animistic beliefs but is not identical with them. One can hold animistic beliefs from within a spectator consciousness (as an intellectual commitment) without having the participatory experience that generated those beliefs.

Original participation vs. Childhood experience: Barfield is sometimes read as claiming that children experience original participation (and that adults lose it). This is partially correct — Barfield does think that early childhood involves a more participatory mode — but his historical claim is about entire civilizations, not individual developmental stages. The participatory consciousness of archaic cultures is different in kind from individual childhood experience.

Original participation vs. Mystical experience: Mystical experience can involve the dissolution of the subject-object boundary, which superficially resembles original participation. But mystical experience typically occurs against the background of spectator consciousness (the mystic experiences the dissolution as unusual, significant, and transient); original participation is the unreflective background of ordinary everyday experience. The mystical experience is a glimpse of what was once the ordinary condition.

Primary Sources

• Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (1957): The primary source for the original participation concept, with the full historical analysis and its relationship to final participation.
• Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1928): The linguistic and aesthetic foundation for the participation concept, tracing the history of meaning and the participatory dimension of archaic language.
• Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom (1894) and Cosmic Memory (1904): The Anthroposophical background to Barfield's development of the participation concept.
• C.S. Lewis, "Preface" to Saving the Appearances (1957): Lewis's brief but important endorsement, which helped introduce Barfield to a wider readership and situates the concept in relation to Lewis's own work on the pre-modern worldview.
• David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (1996): A phenomenological and ecological development of the participation concept, drawing on Merleau-Ponty and indigenous oral traditions.

Agent Research Notes

[AGENT: perplexity | DATE: 2026-03-22] Barfield remains underappreciated in mainstream academic philosophy and religious studies, despite the consistent advocacy of C.S. Lewis, Walter Hooper, and more recently John Milbank and various figures in the theologically inflected philosophy of science. The project should note that Barfield's work rewards careful reading beyond its popular reception — his analysis of the history of language as a record of consciousness evolution is genuinely original and empirically well-grounded. The connection to contemporary cognitive linguistics (Mark Johnson's work on embodied metaphor, George Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory) is worth drawing: both Barfield and the cognitive linguists show that abstract thought is structured by embodied, participatory experience, though they draw different conclusions from this.