The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences

by Jason A. Josephson-Storm

Overview

This study of the early human sciences and their deep connections to spiritualism dispenses with the myth that separates magic and modernity.

Many theorists contend that the defining feature of modernity is our collective loss of faith in spirits, myths, and magic. But in The Myth of Disenchantment, Jason A. Josephson-Storm argues against this narrative, showing that attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than not. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted?

Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. He demonstrates that the founding figures of these “mythless” disciplines were in fact profoundly enmeshed in the occult and spiritualist revivals of Britain, France, and Germany. It was in response to this milieu that they produced notions of a disenchanted world.

By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226403533
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	12/22/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	430
Sales rank:	640,648
File size:	13 MB
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About the Author

Jason A. Josephson-Storm is associate professor in and chair of the Department of Religion at Williams College. He is the author of The Invention of Religion in Japan, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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The Myth of Disenchantment

Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences

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By Jason A. Josephson-Storm

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-40336-6

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CHAPTER 1

Enchanted (Post) Modernity

This book began as an attempt to make sense of some of the systems of belief which were current in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, but which no longer enjoy much recognition today. Astrology, witchcraft, magical healing, divination, ancient prophecies, ghosts and fairies, are now all rightly disdained by intelligent persons.

KEITH THOMAS, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 1971

The postmodern condition is nevertheless foreign to disenchantment.

JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD, La condition postmoderne, 1979

If you were to travel to the small town of Kotohira on the Japanese island of Shikoku, you might, after strolling past one of the country's oldest Kabuki theaters and partaking of the region's famous udon noodles, find yourself at a famous shrine, the town's central attraction for tourists and pilgrims. There, on the grounds of this ancient site, you would find a dedicatory plaque sporting a very modern image, that of Japan's first cosmonaut, AKIYAMA Toyohiro, clad in a spacesuit standing next to his craft. Despite its space-age content, however, the plaque gives thanks to Konpira, the so-called god of sailors, for Akiyama's safe voyage through interplanetary space. This confluence of technology and public religiosity is by no means unique to the Konpira Shrine. Analogous examples dot the Japanese cultural landscape. As I have argued elsewhere, generally speaking, recent Japanese history meant changes in the locus of enchantment, in ways unanticipated by classical theorists of modernity. In one of the most technologically and scientifically advanced nations today, one finds — in addition to old-fashioned faith healers and spirit mediums — flash drives that double as magical charms, funeral rituals for old photographs and discarded electronics, iPhone apps for automatic exorcisms or traditional fortune-telling, and Buddhist stupas dedicated to Thomas Edison and Heinrich Hertz as the "Divine Patriarchs of Electricity and Electro-Magnetic Waves."

Despite the Orientalist cliché of a mystical Asia, Japan does not have a monopoly on contemporary enchantments. In study after study, scholars of the Global South have charted not only traditional but modern forms of magic, including: Internet-based virtual Haitian Vodou; epidemics of spirit possession among Malaysian factory workers; clairvoyant Brazilian spirit surgeons; modern witchcraft persecutions in South Africa and Indonesia; Vietnamese divinities that are appeased with cans of Coke and Pepsi; aerosol sprays to evoke the protection of Santísima Muerte in Mexico; gun-toting spirit mediums in Uganda; an Indian guru supposedly capable of magical materializations, faith healing, and even bringing people back from the dead; and a notorious pair of demonically possessed underpants in Ghana. It would seem that Latin America, Africa, and indeed most of Asia are inhabited by sorcerers and alive with spirits.

While lingering enchantments used to be taken as a rationale for the backwardness of non-European others, today they are often regarded as evidence that the disenchantment model is an uncomfortable fit outside the land of its birth. Hence contemporary scholars like Denis Byrne explicitly reject "the common assumption that post-Reformation disenchantment encompasses the non-European world." While I agree with Byrne's sentiment as far as it goes, in this short chapter I want to challenge the idea that disenchantment is the order of the day even in the so-called heartland of modernity.

WEIRD AMERICA

There is a constant war between the messengers of God and ghosts and demons, dancers and drinkers, and, for all anyone knows, between God's messengers and God himself — no one has ever seen him, but then no one has ever seen a cuckoo either. ... Here is a mystical body of the republic, a kind of public secret: a declaration of what sort of wishes and fears lie behind any public act, a declaration of a weird but clearly recognizable America.

GREIL MARCUS, The Old, Weird America, 2011

It is hard not to be skeptical of claims to disenchantment as I write these words in a café adorned with flyers advertising "crystal healing," "energy balancing," "chakra yoga," and "tarot" readings. Undeniably, what Catherine Albanese and Courtney Bender refer to as American "metaphysical religion" would seem to be on display in coffee shops, co-ops, and bookstores throughout the country. Moreover, in Europe and America, films, novels, and television series continue to overflow with magic, providing symbolic resources — what Christopher Partridge and Jeffrey Kripal refer to as "occulture" — that are often recouped by this religious counterculture (e.g., rituals appearing first in Buffy the Vampire Slayer are adopted by contemporary Wiccan covens). It would seem that many of the stories we tell ourselves in the modern West are about superheroes and magicians, ghosts and monsters, and that these creatures often spill over into other parts of the culture. As Kripal observes in regard to the seeming ubiquity of such cultural materials: "The paranormal is our secret in plain sight."

Even setting aside the abundance of explicitly fictional forms of enchantment, studies of American reading habits similarly suggest that "New Age" print culture has "expanded exponentially in the past thirty years" with "non-fiction books" about magic, guardian angels, and near-death experiences appearing in the upper echelons of Amazon's best-seller lists. Moreover, the last ten years have seen a proliferation of "reality" television series that claim to report evidence for ghosts, psychics, extraterrestrials, monsters, curses, and even miracles. In both the United Kingdom and the United States, it is also easy to turn on the television and encounter the prognostications of celebrity psychic mediums. It might seem that contemporary audiences are at least willing to flirt with the existence of spirits and the supernatural.

A variety of sociological evidence would seem to support this intuition. In 2005, Gallup conducted a telephone survey with 1,002 American adults asking them if they believed in things like ESP, ghosts, telepathy, and witches (see figure 1). Not only did a surprising number of the American respondents reportedly believe in each of these (e.g., almost a third believe in ghosts), but also other polling firms, while not covering identical beliefs, have produced similar numbers. For a recent example, a YouGov 2015 survey of 1,171 Americans showed that 48 percent of those sampled agreed with the claim "Some people can possess one or more types of psychic ability (e.g., precognition, telepathy, etc.)," while 43 percent agreed with the statement "Ghosts exist." Even slight differences in the wording produce different responses, but taken together it appears the majority of Americans are at least open to the idea of ghosts and psychic powers, while a not-insignificant number believe in necromancy.

Remarkably, if one takes a closer look at the Gallup 2005 polling data, it shows something even more interesting: belief in different forms of the "paranormal" (see note for terminology) are not confined to a single subculture. For example, believers in telepathy and witchcraft are likely only semi-overlapping sets because, as the survey indicated, 73 percent of those responding believe in at least one of the poll's ten paranormal categories (see figure 2). Although it might sound shocking, this percentage is nearly identical to earlier iterations of the Gallup poll from 2001 and 1990. The implications of these statistics are worth underscoring because, if this data is accurate, it means that only approximately a quarter of Americans are not believers in the paranormal. We live in a land of wonders in which most people are believers and skeptics are the clear minority.

It might be tempting to discount these polls as mere journalistic sensationalism, but sociologists have found similar results. In 2005 and 2007, sociologists at Baylor University conducted a fairly robust set of phone interviews (sample size of 3,369) from across the United States. Their main focus was a complete picture of American religious beliefs, but a similar pattern emerges (see figure 3). Again we see evidence that about half of the American population believes in ghosts, while a clear majority believes in demonic possession. This latter claim accords with the fieldwork of the American sociologist Michael Cuneo, who in 2001 suggested that belief in demonic possession was not only widespread, but also on the increase such that "exorcism is more readily available today in the United States than perhaps ever before." Moreover, in a section of the 2007 survey not depicted in figure 3, 55 percent of those polled claimed they had personally experienced being "protected from harm by a guardian angel." In sum, the picture painted by the Baylor study is one of an America enthusiastically engaged with angels, demons, and other invisible spirits.

Sociologists Christopher D. Bader, F. Carson Mencken, and Joseph O. O. Baker published an analysis of relevant portions of the Baylor data in Paranormal America (2010), which they combined with fieldwork interviewing self-described psychics and Bigfoot hunters. Bader, Mencken, and Baker ultimately summarize their findings in strong terms:

The paranormal is normal. ... Statistically, those who report a paranormal belief are not the oddballs; it is those who have no beliefs that are in the significant minority. Exactly which paranormal beliefs a person finds convincing varies, but whether it is UFOs and ghosts or astrology and telekinesis, most of us believe more than one. If we further consider strong beliefs in active supernatural entities and intense religious experiences the numbers are even larger.

In sum, Bader, Mencken, and Baker also estimate that more than two-thirds of Americans believe in the paranormal.

Demographic trends can also be extracted from the data as specific paranormal beliefs can be identified with different populations. For example, African American women were the most likely to believe in ghosts and the possibility of communication with the dead, while Caucasians were more likely to believe that they have been abducted by extraterrestrials. But believing in at least one form of the paranormal is not confined to a particular counterculture and is evidently the norm throughout the country.

Nor has it vanished with compulsory mass education. While there is a connection between education and specific paranormal beliefs, there is little correlation between level of education and having paranormal beliefs as such. For instance, Bader, Mencken, and Baker conclude that college graduates are less likely to believe in UFOs but more likely to believe in psychics. Other surveys targeting the issue specifically have also suggested that "higher education fuels [a] stronger belief in ghosts." At the very least, college seniors are more likely to be open to the possibility of ghosts and psychical powers than their less educated peers. A related point worth underscoring is that sociological evidence suggests that self-identified magicians and witches are generally better educated than average and more likely to hold a college degree. Hence, it would be a mistake to assume that education necessarily leads toward disenchantment.

An important corollary of these surveys more broadly is that paranormal belief can be found on both sides of the political aisle, albeit in different typical forms. This is significant because in the popular culture, the occult is often associated with reactionary right-wing politics, especially fascism (e.g., the occult Nazis in Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark). This argument has a scholarly pedigree in sources such as Theodor Adorno, "Theses against Occultism" (Thesen gegen den Okkultismus), the German context for which will be explored in chapters 8 and 9. In contrast, one can also find the reverse association between "New Age hippies" and left-wing politics. Yet, one of the most straightforward implications of the wide diffusion of paranormal belief is that there is no particular political affiliation that is more "irrational" or more magical than the other (at least, according to this axis).

History bears this out insofar as one can find enchantment across the political spectrum (e.g., both pro- and anticolonialist Theosophists). But this evidence does not neutralize political readings of magic. Specific beliefs do correlate with demographic backgrounds and ideological commitments. Different paranormal beliefs have elective affinities with different political movements. One could go some length to explore the progressive political coordinates of, say, spiritualism in nineteenth-century America. But we should resist too quickly assuming a clear political bifurcation between believers in magic and skeptics.

On a related note, as the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe reminds us, belief in witchcraft is often taken as paradigmatic of cultural backwardness and is sometimes supposed to be the very thing that makes Africa, for example, difficult to modernize. But the historian Owen Davies has demonstrated that despite the common claim that Salem was the last great witchcraft persecution in this country, "we now know of more people killed as witches in America after 1692 than before it," with extrajudicial murders of suspected witches continuing at least until the 1950s. Although Davies does not explicitly draw this conclusion, he provides a lot of evidence that it was the rise of Wicca that began to shift the discourse around witches post-1954. Additionally, the commercialization of Halloween combined with the popular Bewitched television series popularized a more harmless image of the witch. But, in the same period, some Evangelical communities have if anything amplified their so-called war against witches. Indeed, even today, Pat Robertson, the controversial chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network, cautions his viewers against the dangers of witches and their curses on a seemingly regular basis. All told, it should not be surprising that surveys suggest that more than a quarter of Americans believe in witches.

There has been some excellent scholarship on the decline of belief in miracles over the course of European history. Indeed, the loss of faith in divinely inspired wonders is often taken to be a hallmark of the grand trajectory of disenchantment. But as useful as historians have been for recovering the context and politics of natural philosophy, as a broad trajectory, notions of a post-miraculous age run into trouble in the face of contemporary sociological evidence. For instance, a large survey of more than 35,000 Americans conducted by the Pew Research Forum in 2007 reported that 79 percent of those polled believed that "miracles still occur today as in ancient times." Less than a fifth of all those surveys rejected the existence of contemporary miracles as a whole. It is worth remarking that some of those who reject the idea that miracles occur today must include a significant number of Protestants committed to the cessation of miraculous gifts at the end of the apostolic age (discussed in chapters 2 and 5). So one might imagine that many of those denying the currency of contemporary divine wonders are doing so on religious grounds. At the very least, it would seem that many Americans still live in "worlds of wonder."

By looking at Bader, Mencken, and Baker's American demographic information in greater depth, it is striking that the groups least likely to believe in the paranormal generally define themselves in religious and not secular terms. For instance, Evangelical Christians are particularly skeptical about the "paranormal." But rather than stripping the world of animating forces, Evangelicals are more likely to believe that ghosts, aliens, and psychic powers are caused by demons or witches. It is hard to read this as a straightforward sign of disenchantment.

This is an important clue to the mechanisms of occult disavowal, as Evangelicals are not alone in exchanging one sort of enchantment for another. Instead of a single amorphous New Age, different metaphysical communities are often dismissive of one another. Self-identified magical practitioners often discount spiritualists as frauds and vice versa; while psychics are often anti-ritualists, suggesting that mental powers explain what people think of as magic. Taken together, this indicates that supernatural beliefs often destabilize one another. By way of shorthand, I will refer to this pattern as "an interchange of enchantments," as a gesture toward the way that supernatural beliefs can actively function in the service of disenchantment.

Finally, although social science predictions should be taken with a grain of salt, Bader, Mencken, and Baker — extrapolating survey trend lines combined with predicted demographic shifts — suggest that by 2050 it is likely there will be a further "14 percent increase in the mean number of reported paranormal beliefs in the United States." If they are right, instead of further disenchantment, America will get more magic in the coming decades.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Myth of Disenchantment by Jason A. Josephson-Storm. Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
A Note on Texts and Translations

Introduction
A Philosophical Archaeology of the Disenchantment of the World
Reflexive Religious Studies: The Entangled Formation of Religion, Science, and Magic
Overview of the Work: Europe Is Not Europe

1          Enchanted (Post) Modernity
Weird America
Haunted Europe
Conclusion: New Age (Post) Modernists?

Part 1: God’s Shadow

2          Revenge of the Magicians
Francis Bacon and the Science of Magic
The Philosophes and the Science of Good and Evil Spirits
Conclusion: The Myth of Enlightenment

3          The Myth of Absence
Nihilism, Revolution, and the Death of God: F. H. Jacobi and G. W. F. Hegel
The Eclipse of the Gods: Friedrich Schiller
The Romantic Spiral: Friedrich Hölderlin
A Myth in Search of History: Jacob Burckhardt
Conclusion: The Myth of the Modern Loss of Myth

4          The Shadow of God
Spirits of a Vanishing God
The Haunted Anthropologist: E. B. Tylor
The Magician and the Philologist: Éliphas Lévi and Max Müller
Theosophical Disenchantment: Helena Blavatsky
Conclusion: Specters of the Transcendent

5          The Decline of Magic: J. G. Frazer
The Cultural Ruins of Paganism
The Golden Bough before Disenchantment
The Departure of the Fairies
The Dreams of Magic
The Lost Theory: Despiritualizing the Universe
Conclusion: A Devil’s Advocate

6          The Revival of Magick: Aleister Crowley
The Great Beast: A Biographical Sketch
The God-Eater and the Golden Bough
Disenchanted Magic
Conclusion: From The Golden Bough to the Golden Dawn

Part 2: The Horrors of Metaphysics

7          The Black Tide: Mysticism, Rationality, and the German Occult Revival
Degeneration and Mysticism: Max Nordau
Kant the Necromancer: Carl du Prel and Arthur Schopenhauer
Hidden Depths: Sigmund Freud
Conclusion: The Cosmic Night

8          Dialectic of Darkness: The Magical Foundations of Critical Theory
The Cosmic Circle
Magical Philosophy and Disenchantment: Ludwig Klages
The Esoteric Constellations of Critical Theory: Walter Benjamin
Conclusion: The Magic of Theory

9          The Ghosts of Metaphysics: Logical Positivism and Disenchantment
Philosophical Technocracy: Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
Revolutionary Antimetaphysics: Positivist Disenchantment and Re-enchantment; Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath
Positivists in Paranormal Vienna: Rudolf Carnap and Hans Hahn
Conclusion: The Magic of Disenchantment

10        The World of Enchantment; or, Max Weber at the End of History
The Disenchantment of the World
Weber the Mystic and the Return from the God Eclipse
Conclusion: Disenchantment Disenchanted

Conclusion: The Myth of Modernity
The Myths of (Post) Modernity
The Myth of Disenchantment as Regulative Ideal
Against the Tide of Disenchantment
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"As he traces the story, Josephson-Storm brilliantly pulls open the curtain on one of our oft-told and rarely questioned modern myths, helping us better to see to see the motley crew responsible for its production. . . .Josephson-Storm’s real gift is in making visible that a deanimated material world is not simply ‘the way things are,’ but an accomplishment of shared human understanding."

The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society

With its insightful analysis into the magical and occult inclinations of influential figures in the social sciences and study of religion, this book is undoubtedly a fascinating and important read. . . . It is a significant contribution to the fields of religious studies and philosophy, and it forces scholars to reconsider the connection between secularization and the narrative of disenchantment.”
 

Japanese Journal of Religious Studies

"This is an ambitious, diligent, imaginative, irreverent work that is as illuminating as it is unsettling. Its courageous author unveils the public face of modernity, looks at its hidden features, but is neither blinded by its science, nor awed by its rationality...That the myth of western modernity still shapes the intellectual, cultural and political landscape of our times, even tarnishing the self-images of other civilizations, its legitimacy and veracity cannot be decided only within an intra-Western debating forum. Josephson-Storm’s radical bid to de-mythologize the disenchantment fable ought to be of supreme interest to Muslim readers as well."

The Muslim World Book Review - S Parvez Manzoor

"Jason A. Josephson-Storm's The Myth of Disenchantment is a dazzling work of erudition. It sets out to dispel the myth that we live in a mythless society; to refute the assumption that the modern West is a disenchanted world. lnstead, it documents what has been hiding in plain sight—the fact that magic has never gone away. . . . A work of immense research on a large canvas.

Fides et Historia - Timothy Larsen

The Myth of Disenchantment is an important book.

Harvard Theological Review - Russell McCutcheon

The Myth of Disenchantment offers a valuable lesson to self-consciously modern, Western analysts of international affairs. It reminds us that the concepts by which we define and justify our intellectual pursuits are myths. This is not to say that they lack any bearing on the real world, but rather to note that they function more to regulate our intellectual conduct than they do to describe a collection of historical facts. That being the case, Josephson-Storm gives us the chance to pause and ask what other myths we might take for granted in our analysis; he reminds us that many of the tools by which we study global affairs first developed to divide the west from the rest, and therefore enjoins us to ask whether how much our intellectual labor is really describing conditions as they are elsewhere in the world, and how much is simply repeating a story about who we’ve come to believe we ought to be.”
 

The Metropolitan Society for International Affairs

Josephson-Storm reveals the intentions that led him to write the book—a critique of the idea that magic and loss of magic are opposites, and that the former led to a superstitious society and the latter to a secularized and modern society. Starting from these considerations, the author’s overriding objective is to demystify both Weberian disenchantment and the criticisms of modernity of Adorno, Horkheimer, and the postmodernists. The book shows, conversely, that magic and secularism are not opposites but have coexisted and contributed to building contemporaneity, intertwining in various ways.

History of Psychology

This is a significant book. The Myth of Disenchantment is ambitious and well written, horizon broadening and provocative. . . . The book is definitely worthy of recommendation. It draws on modern esotericism research, engaging in a tradition where it demonstrates the importance of network thinking and circulation between domains. It is interesting as research history, and it is a breath of fresh air to the puritanical idealism that puts Western thinking on a pedestal undefiled by the muddiness of reality. It forces the sociologist to reconsider whether secularization and disenchantment are necessarily causally linked, and it vexes the science of religion’s self-understanding as a disciplinary tradition with a safe distance from the object it interprets and explains. In other words, the book is definitely recommended for critical reading.

Religionsvidenskabeligt Tidsskrift Jørn Borup

The Myth of Disenchantment is a model monograph: a work that condenses a dizzying array of information into a tightly woven and significant argument and then relays it in easily understandable and enjoyable prose. Its impact on the field at large is sure to be felt.”
 

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

"This is an important historical book. It reflects a broader development in the study of religion and secularization that concerns a reorientation of our historical understanding of modernity, in particular with regard to the various religious dimensions of the secular. . . it is essential reading not only in terms of historicizing the humanities, but also with regard to approaching some of the religious layers which have contributed to the formation of what we conceive of as the secular."

Religious Studies Review

In his bravura debunking of this myth, Josephson-Storm stresses that it is a keystone of the broader narrative of Western modernity as a ‘rupture’ with its own past and non-Western cultures, facilitating imperialist projects and hierarchical distinctions. . . . What truly distinguishes this cultural history is its genealogical account of the myth through the early decades of the twentieth century, alongside the deeply researched case studies [Josephson-Storm] provides, replete with arresting details and broad-ranging insights.

Victorian Studies

"An exemplary study that explores one of the central ideas that has informed modernity (as well as postmodernism and later developments). . . . The author writes in a lively style, interspersing explications of philosophical works with plenty of anecdotes, sometimes amusing, that exemplify the occult interests of often-unexpected thinkers. . . . Folklorists will benefit particularly from its demonstration not only of how their discipline's forebears contributed to continuing interest in magic but also of the paranormal among modernists."
 

Journal of American Folklore

I know of no other study that offers such an ambitious reassessment of the genealogy of the notion of disenchantment. Building on impressive historical research, Josephson-Storm offers innovative readings of foundational social scientific and theoretical texts. This book is a major addition to the critical literature exploring the origins and nature of modernity.

Randall Styers

"As he traces the story, Josephson-Storm brilliantly pulls open the curtain on one of our oft-told and rarely questioned modern myths, helping us better to see to see the motley crew responsible for its production. . . .Josephson-Storm’s real gift is in making visible that a deanimated material world is not simply ‘the way things are,’ but an accomplishment of shared human understanding."

The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society

Extraordinary in its scope . . . The Myth of Disenchantment will yield new layers with repeat readings . . . . With its theoretical rigor and command of global religious literature, The Myth of Disenchantment is a valuable contribution to the theories of religion.”
 

Bulletin for the British Association for the Study of Religions

"Brilliant, extensive, well-documented."

Journal of Scientific Exploration

"Jason A. Josephson-Storm is a brilliant, seemingly omnicompetent scholar, and The Myth of Disenchantment is a dazzling, dizzying, demanding work. It is also well worth reading as it offers not only a trenchant questioning of the very notion of modernity and a panoramic tour of theorists and interpreters of that idea but also numerous close readings of primary sources in eight languages, scattering pithy statements and thought-provoking insights along the way."

Church History

Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment is an ambitious and impressive work of philosophical anthropology and cultural history. . . . He masterfully traces the myth of a mythless modernity back to its initial formulation by a small group of Romantic German philosophers and poets.”
 

Journal of Contemporary Religion

The implications of this book are vast and potentially revolutionary for the humanities. Josephson-Storm’s mastery over the history of western philosophy, his sharp eye for the magical lives of the intellectuals, and his expertise in Japanese religion render his voice uniquely multidimensional, utterly original, and eerily persuasive. I am deeply excited about The Myth of Disenchantment and what it portends for both our academic fields and our human futures.

Jeffrey J. Kripal

"As a factual matter, 'magic never truly vanished.' We’re told that the Reformation disenchanted Western Europe, but Luther threw his inkpot at the devil and Puritans put witches on trial. The rise of science has been blamed for destroying magic, but Newton dabbled in alchemy and spent his free evenings puzzling over the Book of Daniel. Modernity’s elites have always included more than a few spiritualists, theosophists, occultists, and magicians. . . .Josephson-Storm asks the key question: How did this factual myth become one of the myths that defines the modern age. . . .In Josephson-Storm’s telling, the cultural trajectory of the past two centuries has not been 'disenchantment' so much as 'de-Christianization.' . . .We need to get the story right to understand the world we live in. Our choice isn’t between “enchanted” religion and 'disenchanted' modernity. We’ll be more clear-sighted when we recognize that the choice is more typically among rival enchantments."

First Things

Everything is different, but nothing has changed. Apparently, the adage applies to magic and modernity as well. Josephson-Storm's foray is much like the Latourian 'we've never been modern' saga, but focused more specifically upon the status of myth-making as it pertains to faith, spiritual practices and the philosophy of religion over the last century or so.

Kritikos

The Myth of Disenchantment is a work of considerable clarity and directness. . .notable for its lucidity. . . . The Myth of Disenchantment is essential reading for those interested in the history of the modern humanities. It is directly engaged in this emerging field, investigating the figures and practices that constitute the history of the study of religion, critical theory, and other ‘human sciences.’ It features insightful syntheses of previous work, as well as original research into both obscure and well-worn areas of inquiry. . . offers a strong basis for future work.

History of Humanities

The author displays impressive erudition in tackling what is, by any standards, a massive undertaking. . . Josephson-Storm exhaustively traces the development of Western thought on this subject through history to the present time, and convincingly argues that the magic never really went away after all. . . .While the underlying theme is eminently simple and understandable, some of the philosophical arguments become immensely complex. This book is a serious academic work. . .yet he reveals a capacity for lightness of touch. . . The Myth of Disenchantment is a most stimulating and informative book.

Magonia Review of Books

"The primary source base and the scale of analyzed material are impressive. It’s a very intriguing book to read, detective non-fiction, where we learn that there is no killer as there was no murder. We've never been disenchanted, we've never been objective, as we've never been truly modern.

Vestnik of St Tikhon's University

"The Myth of Disenchantment still stands head and shoulders above recent historical monographs on the modern Western occult. With its focus on continuities of magic in unexpected places, and demonstrations of how enchantment has often undermined itself through competing modes, a major distinguishing feature of the study is a complete lack of timidity, delving as it does straight into the heart of fiercely contested issues. Drawing on an impressive wealth of primary sources in various languages, Josephson-Storm shows a sure instinct for hidden treasures, and recovers significant associations of canonical figures with important, but now obscure, actors and ideas…. the overall level of rigour and balance displayed by Josephson-Storm is so rare that I just might try my luck at sorcery, if that’s what it takes to make him continue this line of research."

History of the Human Sciences - Andreas Sommer

"In his pioneering work, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, Jason A. Josephson-Storm, exposes the multivalent, deeply fascinating narrative of disenchantment—a variable and changing narrative that can nonetheless be widely conceived as an interpretation of history that sees the 'modern' world as having lost a sense of wonder, enchantment, and magic—as a pervasive myth that has come to structure historical and contemporary conceptions of modernity and European culture. . . . Displaying an encyclopedic knowledge of European intellectual and cultural history, in his work, Josephson-Storm pushes the reader to question not only the grand narratives of disenchantment, modernity, enlightenment, and the 'Death of God,' but also to radically challenge these very categories. . . .  Josephson-Storm succeeds by crafting a work that is as broad in scope as it is keenly attentive to the complex nuances and details of each text and thinker explored. It is a work that inspires one to radically reevaluate inherited narratives about the past and present, while also opening the reader up to the multiplicity of possibilities presented by the myths and movements of enchantment and disenchantment."

Magic

Historical evidence is easily neglected, Josephson-Storm argues, when it crosses the grain of what we ought to believe. Disenchantment is a foundational myth of the new human sciences that emerged during the nineteenth century. By treating magic and religion as anachronisms, anthropology and sociology reinforced the myth of disenchantment, while promoting their own claim to scientific status. A taboo invites its own subversion. So, too, with disenchantment. The disavowal of the occult typically involved the public rejection and the private embrace of various enchantments…. This, Josephson-Storm suggests, is the very mechanism of occult disavowal. His book is a treasure trove of examples.”
 

Inference: International Review of Science - Egil Asprem

"A superb book. The kind that turns your brain upside down and gives it a good shake."

author of Gratitude: An Intellectual History Peter J. Leithart

Storm proposes an interesting and acute analysis. His intriguing conclusion is ‘an attempt to undo the myth that there is no myth.’ It suggests a new interpretation of an important issue of social and cultural history as well as a broader framework. We need to historicize the myth of modernity and its various incarnations in European social theory and Storm helps us to do so.

Journal of Ecclesiastical History

Simply said, this is a splendid book. It is erudite as very few other works, and very well and clearly written. It should be read by everybody who is interested in the coming about of our intellectual modern world.”
 

Philosophy in Review

"A number of recent scholars have demonstrated the ways in which the modern world is. . . often saturated with occultism, mysticism, and magic in various interesting ways. Few authors, however, have done so in quite as much detail or with such an original argument as has Jason Josephson-Storm. . . . The Myth of Disenchantment is a powerful book that forces us to rethink many of our basic assumptions in the modern history of ideas. As such, it should be of serious interest to scholars and students of religion, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, history, and critical theory.

History of Religions - Hugh B. Urban

"It's a bold argument that Josephson-Storm makes in The Myth of Disenchantment ? that the 'disenchantment' thesis, which underpins so much of what we take for granted in the way we think about religion and its place in human life and culture, is false. . . . And it is on this topic? the different modes and ways in which enchantment and disenchantment take place over time? that I believe Josephson-Storm's key contribution can be seen, because he traces how those that believe modernity necessarily means a total disenchantment arrived at that claim, and how they understood it. It is fascinating to see how many of the modern theorists who have claimed the 'disenchantment' succeeded were themselves engaged in many types of spiritually-related pursuits."
 

Australian Broadcasting Corporation - H.A. Hellyer