The Myth of Disenchantment: An Introduction

posted by Jason . Josephson-Storm

A great many theorists have argued that precisely what makes the modern world modern is
that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Even theorists who have challenged
grand narratives of secularization often assume that modernity produces a disenchanted
world. The age of myth is allegedly over, the spirits have vanished, and vibrant nature has
been subjugated.

In The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, I
argue that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong. Our era is far from mythless,
belief in spirits continues to be widespread, vitalized nature has been a persistent
philosophical counter-current, and even attempts to suppress magic have failed more often
than they have succeeded. Hence, I contend that the whole notion of modernity as rupture
that undergirds a host of disciplines is itself a myth.
In the first substantive chapter of the book, I focus on contemporary sociological and
anthropological evidence. While scholars have learned to be cautious about assuming that
belief in sorcery and spirits vanished everywhere, it is widely supposed that at the very least
the contemporary, industrial, capitalist societies of Western Europe and North America have
lost their magic. But if one looks at America and Europe through the eyes of an outsider
with the same sort of gaze often leveled at non-Europeans, it seems hard to assert that we live
in a straightforwardly disenchanted world.

Comparing several large-scale sociological surveys suggests that roughly three-in-four

Americans believe in ghosts, telepathy, witches, demonic possession, or something
comparable. Skeptics are in the minority. Moreover, despite being less-religious (e.g. much
lower church attendance and reported belief in god), an analogous percentage of believers in
the supernatural can be found in Western European countries as well. This is not all. At the
very least, the equivalent forms of evidence anthropologists have been bringing back from the
far reaches of the globe regarding indigenous belief in spirits, witchcraft, folktales, and
popular depictions of the supernatural can be found in the West.

Despite its self-conception, it is easy to show that European culture has been enchanted all
along. The question becomes: how did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever
convince itself that it was disenchanted? The answer becomes even more interesting once you
realize that the notion of a disenchanted modernity formed in the very period in which Britain,
France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Furthermore, as I
discovered through archival research and reading letters and diaries, an engagement with
spirits and magic can be found in the lives of the least likely people: the very theorists of
modernity as disenchantment themselves.

Accordingly, in the remaining nine chapters of the book (See the table of contents), I trace the
genealogy of the notion of modernity as disenchantment alongside the birth of the academic
disciplines (philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious
studies). The book shows that a number of influential figuresincluding Theodor Adorno,
Francis Bacon, Walter Benjamin, Rudolf Carnap, Marie Curie, Denis Diderot, Sigmund
Freud, G. W. F. Hegel, Max Mller, Friedrich Schiller, Arthur Schopenhauer, E. B. Tylor,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Max Weber, and otherswere not only aware of, but profoundly
enmeshed in the occult milieu, such that the very objects of inquiry, methods, and even the
self-definition of many disciplines still bear the marks of this important early encounter with
esotericism. Contemporary scholars of all these thinkers will want to see them read afresh
often alongside archival evidence and translations of lesser known works; and many scholars
will be surprised to learn that their disciplines founders were in dialogue with occultists,
such as Cornelius Agrippa, Helena Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, Stefan George, Ludwig
Klages, and liphas Lvi.
For those readers who have already suspected the persistence of magic in modernity, I trace
the genealogy of the myth of disenchantment and how it came to function as a regulative
ideal, the myth itself producing both enchantment and disenchantment. Indeed, I show that it
was specifically in relation to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that European
intellectuals gave birth to the myth of a myth-less societya claim that was simultaneously
celebrated as progress and lamentedoften while being described in terms of rationalization,
divine death, and fading magic.
All told, The Myth of Disenchantment challenges the most widely held account of modernity
and its break from the premodern past. It reveals the paradoxical origins of the modernization
thesis in the shared terrain between spiritualists, sorcerers, and scholars.
Tags: anthropology, Europe, human sciences, mythology, sociology, United States

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