The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. By Jason A. Josephson-Storm

Abstract

The people of Western Europe and North America live in a world deprived of magic, one that is strikingly different from the world that was experienced by their ancestors mere centuries ago. This breach occurred through the rise of a new paradigm of modern science, a paradigm that no longer required animating spirits or mysterious powers to explain the action of the universe but rather relied on impersonal, mechanistic forces. It was this process that led to the disenchantment of the world and the death of magic. Although this concept of disenchantment has thoroughly embedded itself within the culture of the contemporary “West,” scholars have long noted that magic/parapsychological phenomena/the supernatural appear to be alive and well within the same cultural formation (see for instance the work of Egil Asprem, Olav Hammer, Wouter Hanegraaff, Jeffrey Kripal, Alex Owen, Christopher Partridge, Michael Saler, and Randall Styers, to name a few). While theories of “reenchantment” have been proposed to account for this disparity, Josephson-Storm elegantly wields Occam’s razor in The Myth of Disenchantment to develop a new explanation: we have never really been disenchanted.