The paper connects the concept of “enchanted meaning” with religion, myth, and symbol, conceived as the hybrid matrix from which the form of human life emerged. The first section confronts Wittgenstein’s original thought about seeing–as, aspect perception, physiognomy, and bodily expressivity and associates them with the religious perspective — rooted in Christianity — that, in the philosopher’s own opinion, characterizes his philosophical gesture. It also shows how, in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein proposes a regressive approach to philosophical inquiry that, by rejecting the myth of progress, returns to primitive genetic scenarios conceived as language games. This framework is then brought into dialogue with Vico’s doctrine of the origin of language, which interprets religious enchantment as coinciding with the birth of the religion of the fathers — a religion rooted in fear of the imagined wrath of the first deity, Zeus. A comparison is also drawn between Vico’s idea of the loss of religious enchantment — with its sentimental and imaginative qualities — during the third, “human” phase of rationality, which he considers as a particular kind of “enchantment” named barbarism of reflection that traps us in a rationalizing vision of reality, thereby requiring a transformative therapy, which assumes the form of the coming back to a historical condition with analogous features as the first human one. Bachofen’s hypothesis of a gynecocratic origin of humanity is then compared with Vico’s. The enchanted gaze from which gynecocratic myths arise and the one from which the humanity of the patres originates in Vico’s view are conceived as a bistable figure whose aspects refer to mutually incompatible forms of life. As a result, each gaze distorts the features of the other form of life in strongly negative terms. Finally, the Wittgensteinian perspective is resumed, suggesting that the philosopher’s original therapeutic interventions through narrative may include a gynecocratic regression embodied by female figures experiencing a primitive pre–confessional forms of Christianity, associable with the contemporary (mostly female) figure in the educational field: that of support teacher, charged of the task of school inclusion, following particularly students with special didactic needs.
Keywords: Origin of language; Religion; Myth; Wittgenstein; Vico; Bachofen