Dis/enchantment: Locating Modernity Between Secularism and "The Sacred"

Abstract

����� ��� In her 2004 The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, Alex Owen notes that “the evocative term enchantment neatly captures the sense of the magical, the numinous, and a state of mind seemingly at odds with the modern outlook” (12; emphasis added). Owen attempts to unsettle the implied antagonism between magic and moder nity in this rich contribution to modern British intellectual historiography. Indeed, The Place of Enchantment insists that fin de siecle occultism was a constitutive element—or at least symptomatic—of modern British culture (8). Owen offers a nuanced account of occultism from 1880 until 1914, in which she centralizes ritual magic and magicians in historical accounts of British modernity. She observes that late Victorian and Edwardian England’s “occult preoccupation” constituted “one of the most remarked trends” of the period, as many educated, middle-class white women and men “became absorbed by metaphysical quests, heterodox spiritual encounters, and occult experimentation” (4, 7). Marked interest in medieval and Renaissance Christian mysticism, “heterodox inspirational neo-Christianity,” and nondenominational and/or non-Christian esoteric philosophy characterized this new “spiritual movement of the age” (4). The Place of Enchantment addresses a scholarly lacuna and what Owens terms an “almost willful” scholarly amnesia regarding “the hugely popular occult movement of the turn of the century” (5). But Owen’s contribution does more than merely correct the occlusion