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

[pynchonoid]

Owen, Alex The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism
and the Culture of the Modern. 384 p. (est.), 14
halftones. 2004

Cloth $30.00 0-226-64201-1 Spring 2004

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

[...]

<http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/15872.ctl>


	
		
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