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

The average rating for The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-12-15 00:00:00 Jeff Martin Magisterial (mostly). Read it as a companion piece to Janet Oppenheim's "The Other World." Owen takes on a similar (though shorter) time period, the same place--England--a similar set of issues--though her subjects are not the SPR but the occultists and modern magicians mostly associated with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (with a few glances at the SPR and the Theosophical Society.) Her book benefits from being more recent, and so more theoretically nimble--but also suffers from its recency, with its rather clunky introduction and conclusions (in addition to a less than graceful final narrative chapter). Still, this is a great book, well written once it gets going, thoughtful, wide-ranging, incisive. After a galumphing introduction, Owen gets down to business in the first chapter, setting the stage for what she refers to--borrowing a term from the period in question==as the "mystical revival." She dates this mostly to the late 1880s through about 1910, and as such it is part of a larger movement of responding to the rise of science and disenchantment with attempts to reconcile the knew forms of knowledge with non-materialist, non-positivist ways of knowing. One of the key points that comes out of the book--at least to me--is that what Max Weber called disenchantment and others have referred to as the Victorian "crisis of faith" was a genuinely felt experienced. That doesn't mean that "disenchantment" was objectively true--in the sense that there was never a period when the world was drained of all wonder, all enchantment. Just as faith continued--indeed, religious variety exploded during this time period--so historians need to understand that the people of the time understood these processes as happening, even if from our perspective they don't seem exactly right. In the second chapter she moves on to consider the formation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the way that it created its history by reaching back to older practices--thus, a revival in a very real sense. Occultism was a more hierarchical, elitist practice than spiritualism, which was more allied with democracy, Yet occultism was also progressive, allied with some of the same liberalizing movements, such as socialism and such. And it drew from a professional middle class, much as the SPR did. She spends a lot of time on the various occult practices (though she acknowledges in her introduction she is less interested in mapping all of occultism than she is in understanding its ends.) This reading of the Golden Dawn's magical practices make them seem much more cohesive, less arbitrary than they were portrayed in Wouter Hanegraaff's important--and earlier--article, "How Magic Survived the Disenchantment of the World." Chapter three builds on Owen's earlier work, "The Darkened Room," in which she considered the role of women in the spiritualist movement. Here she argues that occultism offered new vistas and arenas of power for women, even if there was some push back from the men involved in the movement. Spiritualism fit better with Victorian ideas about gender: mediums and mystics gave themselves over to the power of others, seemingly right for weak-minded women, then. The occult, though, emphasized the power of the will to create--which went against Victorian ideas about women's strengths. Thus, the occult drew women with reformist tendencies--tendencies that were both temporal and spiritual. The chapter also deals with the ambiguous role of homosexuality in the occult movement--the occult could be welcoming to homosexuals, but there were plenty of occultists uncomfortable with so-called inverts. Given the presence of homosexuals and more liberated "new women," the occult was especially vulnerable to sexual scandal. Owen argues that many occultists--in contrast to others who discussed the new women--downplayed sexual liberty and stressed the purity of the female. But there were still a couple of scandals that harmed the movement. Chapters four and five lay out the core of Owen's argument, and make clear the geographical sense of the title. Occultism, she argues, was concerned primarily with the powers of the interior self--there was a direct connection, in her interpretation between occult practices, modern psychological ideas, and later developments of what we now call "self-realization." (In the American context, for example, which she doesn't discuss, similar crises of faith and turns toward occultism evolved into what was called "New Thought," which still underlies a lot of -self-help writing--another path to "self-realization".) Occultists separated the spiritual self from the temporal self, thereby leaving a place for spirit in the modern fragmented sense of self. And it was through this spiritual space in their mind that they could travel--astral project, as the phrase went--to other realms, even other worlds. Owen herself compares this to the idea of the Anima Mundi--a NeoPlatonic idea--but it also seems connected to the idea of the imagination in pre-modern philosophies, a realm that existed between the mundane and spiritual worlds. This was the _place- of Enlightenment. And while it was an exploration of the interior self, it was also a place beyond that self, too. The support for these ideas came not only from occult practices, but philosophers, too, such as Henri Bergson and William James, who saw they key to a deeper understanding of nature in understanding individual experiences. This was a way of knowing that--while acknowledging the power of scientific materialism--was not as locked into rationality as even the SPR was--knowledge was acquired in ways beyond the normal empirical studies. (Occultists were interested in spiritualism, but saw its practices as limited.) Unsurprisingly, drugs were one of these routes, and the occultists experimented with various drugs--mescaline, hashish--in the 1890s. Occult ideas filtered out into the broader culture. There was a great deal of connection between occultism and the avant garde, for example, particularly in the form of A. R. Osage's magazine "The New Age," which published Bergson and Nietzsche, Yeats and Pounds. French Symbolism was influenced by occultism--with symbols as gateways to another world--which in turn influenced Ezra Pound. It also fed into psychological ideas. Many occultists--especially Yeats--believed, in the modern fashion, that the mind was fragmented and shifting. And, indeed, the midn and memories could shift such that they could overlap in different people; or such that the mind could, through appropriate symbols, access a "Great Mind." This Great Mind became, in the hands of Jung, the collective unconscious. Frederick Myers also had ideas akin to those of Freudian psychologists, with dreams mixing the normal, supernormal, and imagination in potent ways. (He thought the subconscious was integrative, though, not dangerous, as the Freudians did.) In her reading, the key to occultism was the conscious, willful control of imaginative processes: that allowed one to explore occult places, and one's own mind. Owen follows these chapters with a bravura set-piece: interpreting a sexual-magical experience Aleister Crowley had in the deserts of North Africa. (There's some more of her geographical thought, here, too, with North Africa being a very important place.) She argues that Crowley's experience--which was transformative for him--was experienced by him as an occult exploration of an occult place--that Anima Mundi. Against his own interpretation, though, she reads his experience as the exploration of the unconscious--not an occult place, but the occluded parts of his own mind, where his strong will and masculinity was matched against feminine qualities. By a little after the turn of the century, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was itself breaking down, and by 1910, the mystical revival itself was fragmenting, Chapter seven deals with some of this fragmentation, but it's an odd chapter, short and not quite cohesive. She mentions the darkening mood--the march toward World War I made the optimism of the mystical revival seem out of place--as well as the rising of new representatives of mysticism, Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. By this point, though, her conclusion is well made: modern magicians created and inhabited an enchanted landscape in which personal self and impersonal design conjoined. Through subjectivity they reconciled the crisis of their age. And its good that the conclusion is clear by here, because the conclusion heads off in a different direction, concerning itself with historiographical matters that seem badly grafted onto the rest of the book. She traces the fate of Weber's worry about disenchantment--and science becoming a new religion--into the thought of the Marxist philosophers Adorno and Horkheimer, and then switches to historical opinion of the mystical revival in the years just after World War II. It's all interesting enough, but felt as though it belonged in a different book. Owen argues that the occultists, Freud, and Weber shared a number of assumptions that marked them as modernists. All of them, in their own ways, recognized the ironies of the Enlightenment, and the limits of rationality--the unconscious, the failures of reason to solve the world's problems, science itself becoming a religion--but they also still had faith in reason to sort through these problems--that's what the occultists were trying to do, unify instrumental reality with subjective experience to create a better world. These understandings stood in direct contrast to postmodernist perspectives, in which reason is no longer the ultimate arbiter, and in which grand narratives about the true truth are suspect. Adorno and Horkheimer picked up on Weber, and offered a solution to the problem of the Enlightenment that was similar to the occultists: the only way forward was for reason itself to critique reason. (Habermas later picked up this argument, too.) Otherwise, the Enlightenment would lead to horrors like the gas chambers--the ultimate expression of instrumental rationality. Later historians, those working just after World War II, were also caught up in the same dynamic, recognizing that the Enlightenment could bring disaster as well as relief, that reason could lead to wonders and the bomb. But they were on the other side of World War II and the gas chambers from the occultists. They worried, therefore, that irrationality, that attacks on reason were too dangerous--and so they downplayed the role of the occultists in shaping pre-War culture. They cut them out of the story of how the modern consciousness was created, of the constellation of factors that brought into being the modern self. Owen wants her book to be a remedy to this tradition. She wants to recover the occultists practices and thoughts, and show that they were engaged with central issues of their day--just as Oppenheim wanted to do with spiritualists--but go further than Oppenheim, arguing not only that they were involved in these debates, but that their ideas helped to create the very world we inhabit, our very sense of our selves. And, in this she succeeds brilliantly.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-05-29 00:00:00 Robyn Liddell The Place of Enchantment deals with the period between 1880 and 1914; the crucial years during which Britain emerged as an identifiable modern nation. On the background of the political, social, cultural and economical changes, this book explores the "disenchantment" of the world along with the emergence of the new occultism also known as new spirituality at the fin-de-siècle. However, apart from giving a broad description of the esoteric practices and arising spiritualities of the period, it helps in getting a deep glance into the modernisation of the occultism as an articulation of the diverse and ambiguous processes through the prospering cultural modernity in Britain. The detailed information about the activities of the occult institutions like The Theosophical Society, Society of Psychical Research, Hermetic Order, Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, etc., establishes the preview of the period's main mystery and hierarchical organisations dealing with occult. The members of these institutions were the influential trendsetters of the spiritual movement in the society and able to attract not only intellectuals but also feminists and working class and thus accommodating their realisation as individuals. The mystical revival is also being reviewed as a period's response to the ongoing crisis in the socio-political life of the society.