The Place of Enchantment

[Dave Monroe]

Owen, Alex.  The Place of Enchantment:
   British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern.
   Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Victorians were seeking 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 role 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 the intellectual avant-garde.
Carefully placing a serious engagement with esotericism squarely
alongside revolutionary understandings of rationality and
consciousness, Owen demonstrates how a newly psychologized magic
operated in conjunction with the developing patterns of modern life.
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 moves far beyond a
consideration of occultists and their world. Bearing directly on our
understanding of modernity, her conclusions will force us to rethink
the place of the irrational in modern culture.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=3629191
http://books.google.com/books?id=AR1Q4279lUAC

Aleister Crowley in the Desert
An excerpt from
The Place of Enchantment
British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern
by Alex Owen

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/642011.html