The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern

Rating:
Summary: Rational Spirit and the Modern
Review: An exceptionally fine piece of work. Owen's use of sources is excellent - published and unpublished accounts of magickal workings and the documents of occult orders. Her understanding of magickal subjectivity and the reflexivity of modernism is very insightful. Her argument that occultism was central to the formation of modernity is brilliant - in opposition to the usual idea that modernism was opposed to spirituality.I'd reccommend reading Joy Dixon's fine "Divine Feminine", Judith Walkowitz' "City of Dreadful Delights" and Leon Surette's "Birth of Modernism" as well.

Rating:
Summary: The Place of Enchantment
Review: Publisher's info

Exploratory sex magic. Experimentation with mind-altering drugs. Astral travel. Alchemy. Alex Owen's new book, The Place of Enchantment, places these seemingly anachronistic practices squarely alongside revolutionary understandings of rationality in a compelling demonstration of how a newly psychologized magic operated in conjunction with the developing patterns of modern life.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Victorians sought rational explanations for the world in which they lived. The radical ideas of Charles Darwin had shaken traditional religious beliefs. Sigmund Freud was developing his innovative models of the conscious and unconscious mind. And anthropologist James George Frazer was subjecting magic, myth, and ritual to systematic inquiry. Why, then, in this quintessentially modern moment, did late-Victorian and Edwardian men and women become absorbed by metaphysical quests, heterodox spiritual encounters, and occult experimentation?

In answering this question for the first time, The Place of Enchantment breaks new ground in its consideration of the place of occultism in British culture prior to World War I. Rescuing occultism from its status as an "irrational indulgence" and situating it at the center of British intellectual life, Owen argues that an involvement with the occult was a leitmotif of an intellectual avant-garde. She details such fascinating examples of occult practice as the sex magic of Aleister Crowley, the pharmacological experimentation of W. B. Yeats, and complex forms of astral clairvoyance as taught in secret and hierarchical magical societies like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Through a remarkable blend of theoretical discussion and intellectual history, Owen has produced a work that is far more than a social history of occultism. Her conclusions bear directly on understandings of modernity and force us to rethink the place of the irrational in modern culture.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Enchantment à la Mode
1. Culture and the Occult at the Fin de Siècle
2. Magicians of the New Dawn
3. Sexual Politics
4. Modern Enchantment and the Consciousness of the Self
5. Occult Reality and the Fictionalizing Mind
6. Aleister Crowley in the Desert
7. After Armageddon
8. Occultism and the Ambiguities of the Modern
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Subjects:

* Culture Studies
* History: British History
* History of Science
* Religion: Comparative Studies and History of Religion

Rating:
Summary: Post-modernist Reading of the fin-de-siecle Occult Movements
Review: While some further elaboration on his theoretical background and how it is applied to his analysis would be welcome, I can't say I've found a better reading of this period in Occultism. The highlight is certainly the chapter on Aleister Crowley in the Desert which gives the reader the most succinct treatment of The Beast's career that one could ask for in 35 pages. Structurally, the book is divided well between chapters, enabling the scholar looking for a particular tidbit to access without having to read the other parts for context, although anyone interested in one of the chapters would be well rewarded to read all (if not simply for pleasure in Owen's excellent narrative and careful consideration of his subject).

Dave