Myths of Disenchantment
You know the story: once upon a time, the world was full of magic, then the Enlightenment and Darwin banished superstition, and though there was much scientific progress, the world no longer had a sense of wonder and mystery — the world had become modern and disenchanted.
A moment’s reflection on history and culture will poke holes in this story, but it continues to hold power as a belief (particularly for people in North America and Europe) about who we are and how we got to here and now. Every idea of Modernity as a social and historical concept relies on the idea of the disenchanted modern against the enchanted primitive. (My own book on modernism explores the idea of crisis, and certainly enchantment/disenchantment fits into that topic.) Arguments about disenchantment tend to be about its extent and its positive and/or negative effects. The idea of disenchantment holds appeal because it fits so easily alongside other ideas that structure stories of where we are going and where we have been — not least of which is the imperial story of the powerful, rational West that brings its enlightened knowledge to the benighted peoples of the world. But the idea is appealing even to anti-imperialists, an idea of rationalism, of sober thinking, of evidence-based practices, of progress.
In 1991, Christopher Lasch was able to begin his book The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by asking, “How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might be expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?” Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm’s* 2017 book The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences implies a similar question, one that could simply replace the word “progress” in Lasch’s question with “disenchantment”. (This is no coincidence. Ideas of disenchantment often accompany ideas of progress, and vice versa.) Or, as Storm himself says, alluding to We Have Never Been Modern, “I will argue à la Bruno Latour that we have never been disenchanted.”
Storm is not the first writer to say that the case for disenchantment has been overstated — virtually everyone who makes the case for disenchantment must admit that it is incomplete — but his argument has more complexity than many others because he is able to draw from a range of ideas, archives, and references most other writers do not. He is a professor in the Department of Religion and chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College. The Myth of Disenchantment is his second book; his first was The Invention of Religion in Japan. His Williams bio says he “has held visiting positions at Princeton University, École Française d’Extrême-Orient in France and Ruhr-Universität and Universität Leipzig in Germany.” He has an interest in and knowledge of queer studies and postcolonial studies, as well as personal experience with Buddhism. The Myth of Disenchantment draws on work in a number of European archives alongside significant knowledge of the history and details of European esotericism. The preface to the book begins, “This monograph was born at Harizanmai, ‘Absorption in Needles,’ a Tantric Buddhist tattoo parlor in Kyoto” and later states that “this manuscript has been significantly trimmed from its initial draft. Rough chapters on French social theory, American philosophy, Japanese accounts of Western esotericism, and German Monist Leagues were cut as orthogonal to the main narrative.” Storm himself made translations in the book from Danish, French, German, Japanese, Latin, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish.
This impressively — intimidatingly! — wide range of knowledge allows Storm to bring ideas together than most other scholars are unaware of, moving from the French philosophes to Schiller to James Frazer to Aleister Crowley to Max Weber to Ludwig Klages to Walter Benjamin with ease. (Personally, I could have done with less Schiller if it would have allowed him to keep the chapter on Japanese perceptions of Western esotericism, but I understand why he chose otherwise, and it does make sense for the book’s unity … but still…) What’s most important for this book is Storm’s expertise in comparative religion and his interest in esotericism, because those areas of knowledge allow him to propose a unique approach to the question of disenchantment, moving beyond Frazer’s separation of magic, religion, and science to see the function of the idea of superstition as a shared force for constituting ideas of both religion and science. First, religion gained hegemonic force by opposing itself to anything religious leaders dubbed “superstition”; later, science performed the same move. “It is no coincidence,” Storm writes, “that the previous legacies of superstition — divination, magic, myth, and spirits — continued to be the foil of even scientific tracts that provided new rationales for old targets.” This notion allows Storm to question the idea of a chasmic break between enchantment (magic, religion) and disenchantment (rationalism, science) because even if disenchantment were more real and less mythic, the concept of superstition, shared between religion and science, serves as a continuity. If there is disenchantment, then it is not a break between irreconcilable paradigms, but a changing of the guards between one governing authority and another regarding superstition.
But disenchantment is mythic because there is no clear historical break. The most popular idea of a break between enchantment and disenchantment is the Enlightenment, but Storm’s views align with the last few decades of Enlightenment studies that question the notion of the Enlightenment being a time of dominant rationalism. As Henry Martyn Lloyd has written, “to say that the Enlightenment was a movement of rationalism against passion, of science against superstition, of progressive politics against conservative tribalism is to be deeply mistaken. These claims don’t reflect the rich texture of the Enlightenment itself…” Similarly, Jeffrey D. Burson, in an overview of Enlightenment scholarship, offered a key question about that period: “if [as scholarship shows] religious Enlightenments could give birth to both pro- and anti-Enlightenment outcomes, what does one make of the supposedly sacrosanct correlation of ‘secularization’ or ‘modernization’ with the impact of the Enlightenment?”
The other break between enchantment/disenchantment that is often cited (or assumed) is that of late 19th century/early 20th century Modernity. It’s the discovery of x-rays and quantum physics, the spread of secularism and amoral rationalism, the decline of religious institutions. This is the era that gives us Weber’s famous idea of disenchantment.
Storm did research in Weber’s archives, bringing interesting background to the exploration of enchantment and disenchantment, but I don’t want to get into the weeds of all that. First, I am not a scholar of Weber, nor am I a philosopher or sociologist, so the argument about whether disenchantment is a myth is intellectually interesting to follow, but not something about which I feel much passion or hold any expertise. (I pointedly avoided the question of Modernity in my book, focusing instead on a narrow idea of Modernism. Interestingly, a key concept of my book, metamodernism, is the title of Storm’s latest book, though he uses it for very different purposes. I hope to write about that book in the coming months.)
What interests me in The Myth of Disenchantment is all it has to say about disciplinary desires and what intellectual history ignores, sidesteps, is oblivious to, erases.
After I read the introduction to The Myth of Disenchantment a year or so ago, I put the book aside, filled with curiosity and inspiration about my beloved world of literary and artistic modernism, especially in the early 20th century. It was around this time that I had become fascinated by Hilma af Klint after watching the documentary Beyond the Visible: The Art of Hilma af Klint and began to think about the various implications of spiritualism and mysticism for modernism — Yeats and the Golden Dawn, or the many writers and artists interested in Theosophy and Anthroposophy. I read Alex Owens’ wonderful book The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern and got a bit frustrated with myself for not seeing a bunch of connections before that are right there out in the open. Eventually, I returned to The Myth of Disenchantment and discovered that seeing the connections we ought to notice but don’t is something Storm’s book explores with great insight. Regardless of whether we agree with his thesis about disenchantment, I think it’s easy to agree that the idea of the disenchanted modern has had a City and the City effect, rendering invisible what is all around us, turning rationalism and scientism into weapons of occultation.
Storm doesn’t belabor the point, but he shows how the invisibility of the irrational, paranormal, and occult within conceptions of modernism and modernity is a disciplinary choice with disciplinary effects. If anything has been disenchanted, it is academia. Or, to put it another way, if the myth of disenchantment holds totalizing power anywhere, it is in our ivy-covered halls. It is not that those of us who work in universities are any less superstitious than people elsewhere. Drawing on various studies (especially the eye-opening book Paranormal America), Storm shows that while education does reduce belief in some types of paranormality and occultism, there is a correlation between more education and a stronger likelihood that a person believes in psychics and/or ghosts, and that self-identified witches and magicians (of the actual-magick kind, not admitted prestidigitators and illusionists) are more likely to be college graduates than not. The discourse of academia is one that is fiercely disenchanted.
Myself, I think the disenchantment of academia is a good thing. I like empiricism in scholarship. However, in the field of literary study at least, we have often been so empirical, so committed to rationalism, that we have neglected to look at our subjects’ nonrational beliefs with the seriousness they deserve — for fear that someone might think we share those beliefs, which would remove us from the disenchanted realm of scholarship. In my essay on “The Horror of Belief”, I wrote about Caitlin R. Kiernan’s story “Houses Under the Sea” and its portrait of an accomplished scientist who becomes a believer in paranormality, destroying her career; a portrait that feels realistic. (Although, who knows. Mark Crispin Miller continues to have a job at NYU, despite being a raving whackdoodle. Miller, though, like QAnon delusionists, dresses his murderous ideas in the rationalist garb of conspiracy theories. There is much to say about conspiracy theories as a kind of metastasized rationalism, or as the enchantment of disenchantment, but that will need to wait for another time.)
If we were to take irrational beliefs seriously as beliefs — regardless of our own personal ideas of how the universe works — we would be led to see figures like Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley as having the kind of cultural and intellectual effect on the world that academics have long claimed for Marx and Freud. The comparison seems to me a productive one, too, in that we do not have to be die-hard Marxists to explore and understand the effect of Marx on, for instance, American fiction in the 20th century. Nor do we need to accept the idea of the Oedipus Complex to recognize how powerful a concept it is for mid-20th century writers. But we must not fall into the trap, either, of righteous disavowal. You are not going to understand literature and culture that has been influenced by Marx and Freud, never mind the attractions and affordances of Marxist ideology or Freudian psychology themselves, if every time you encounter a writer for whom Marx or Freud was important you immediately start to look for how they — the writer, Marx, or Freud — was wrong, wrong, wrong. Similarly, given how many artists and writers were at one point or another interested in Theosophy, what do we gain by focusing our energies on proving Madame Blavatsky to have been a charlatan instead of on exploring the meaning Theosophy provided for its adherents, as we would for any religious or political belief?
Nonetheless, until recently if you were to tell colleagues you intended to explore the Theosophical resonances within the work of Writer X or Artist Y, you would likely have had a hard time getting anyone to take you seriously, because no matter how much Writer X or Artist Y might have been Theosophical, to raise the subject was to bring in the spectre of superstition, and superstition (the opposite of both religion and science) is unserious.
What The Myth of Disenchantment shows is the disciplinary work that the myth does. Disciplines require border controls, and the concept of superstition has remained a powerful enforcer within disciplines that otherwise might start blending into each other in ways that would be intellectually productive but not welcome by people who benefit from the rewards of closed systems. This is not to argue for an undifferentiated mass of knowledge, but rather to say that while there are good reasons to take care of differences between disciplines in objects of study, methodologies, and epistemologies … sometimes, now and then, here and there, perhaps we are not attending to those differences but rather are clinging to familiar assumptions about our objects of study, comfortable moves in our methodologies, and rickety supports for our theories of knowledge.
That’s all well and good (useful! unsettling! provocative!) but for me the greatest effect of Storm’s book had little to do with the myth of disenchantment itself. The connections I was inspired to notice within my own field of modernist studies spread out in every direction. I began to think about the ways spiritualism and feminism were linked (an idea I think I first encountered in Barbara Goldsmith’s magnificent book Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull, which I read quite a while ago and really ought to revisit; my memory is that it is a book of richly detailed, compelling stories and ideas I chewed on for a long time, but I have lost the fine grains to the erosions of time). I thought about Shirley Jackson’s tarot cards and Sylvia Plath’s tarot cards (Plath’s having recently astounded auction-watchers by selling for $200,000), both of them the classic Marseilles deck from B.P. Grimaud, though there’s plenty of evidence in their writings that Jackson and Plath also both knew the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. I considered how science, philosophy, and religion so often mingled and intermingled, sometimes comfortably and sometimes not, but how they never could quite quit each other.
One factoid after another in Storm’s book spun my imagination: Kurt Gödel filled notebooks with “research into demonology”; Freud considered telepathy a “fact”; Benjamin Lee Whorf (of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis) was a practicing Theosophist; right around the time he was coming up with his ideas of enchantment and disenchantment, Max Weber spent time at a Swiss community that Storm calls “an early prototype for a hippie commune, full of nature people (Naturmenschen), and complete with nudity, free love, and vegetarianism” (275) where many people were interested in Asian religions and philosophies, as well as various forms of occultism.
Storm has great fun showing just how deeply enchanted the study of the world may be. For instance, he proposes that many of the greatest minds in critical theory of the 20th century drew from occult themes and thinkers, pointing to
Ferdinand de Saussure’s attendance at spiritualist séances and writing about theosophy in the very moment he was giving his famous lectures. Gilles Deleuze’s first publication, which was the introduction to a work of occult magic. Giorgio Agamben’s interest in Paracelsus as a solution to the semiotic rupture. Peter Sloterdijk’s investment in Osho as a spiritual and philosophical precursor. Roy Bhaskar’s debt to theosophy. Luce Irigaray’s interest in yoga and mysticism. Even Derrida expressed an interest in telepathy and attempted to ally the pharmakeus (magician), writing, and magic against speech and logos. Not to mention thinkers like Michel de Certeau and Ernst Bloch, whose connections to mysticism are well known. I could go on. (238)
Some of these were just passing moments in these thinkers’ lives — for instance, Deleuze was in his early 20s when he wrote his article; he later disavowed it — but the trace is in some ways even more important than if all of these figures were initiated members of the Ordo Templii Orientis. The language and general concepts of spiritualism, occultism, and paranormality suffuse so many cultures that disenchantment may not simply be difficult but utterly impossible. Enchantment adheres to so many concepts and expressions that disenchantment can never be completed.
Storm is also good on the impossibility of aligning either enchantment or disenchantment with one political tendency or another. Too many people have cherry-picked their way to saying that occultism or rationalism leads to Nazism, that belief in ghosts is conservative or liberal, that materialism or esotericism is the hallmark of utopian or dystopian belief. It’s all just a variety of “My god is an awesome god!” and has just as much intellectual value as that bumpersticker. Storm knows what matters: “Power — both liberating and dominating, potentia and potestas — can be actualized by way of enchantment or disenchantment. Ideologies cloak themselves in both.” He also knows that ideologies and beliefs are impure, that most people do not favor disenchantment or enchantment, but rather both and neither. “Magic and secularism are not opposites. Even disenchantment and enchantment can be found in the same text” (315). Storm is being a good deconstructionist here (and a good Buddhist), undoing the assumed binary, suspending the terms, revealing interconnected reality.
There is no need to re-enchant a world that was never disenchanted in the first place. But it’s not (just) that Storm shows we were never disenchanted; rather, he reveals disenchantment and enchantment less to be realities than they are desires. We yearn for one against the other, both opposed and alongside, but in different moments, in different ways, in different contexts. The why and how of this yearning is not his core subject, so Storm does not delve deeply into it. It’s not the sort of thing anyone could easily delve into, anyway, at least not with most of the tools of academic analysis. The dance of our enchanted-disenchanted desires requires art and intuition, stories and dreams. It is a dance that dissipates in analysis but invigorates in impression. There is much that rational, empirical analysis can show us, but it can’t show us the
lineaments of gratified and ungratified desire, nor how to escape desire into enlightenment.
For that, we need myth.
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*I am using the byline on Storm’s most recent book and I am referring to him by his last name only (as opposed to “Josephson Storm”), as per his bio page at Williams.
