Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences
    Unavailable
    The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences
    Unavailable
    The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences
    Ebook742 pages12 hours

    The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences

    By Jason Ananda Josephson Storm

    5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted?

    Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world.  

    By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateMay 18, 2017
    ISBN9780226403533

    Related to The Myth of Disenchantment

    Related ebooks

    Religion & Spirituality For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Who Said Science and Art Were Two Cultures?

      Nov 17, 2021

      On a May evening in 1959, C.P. Snow, a popular novelist and former research scientist, gave a lecture before a gathering of dons and students at the University of Cambridge, his alma mater. He called his talk “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revo

      8 min read

    • Article

      Thomas Kuhn Threw an Ashtray at Me

      Aug 23, 2018

      Errol Morris feels that Thomas Kuhn saved him from a career he was not suited for—by having him thrown out of Princeton. In 1972, Kuhn was a professor of philosophy and the history of science at Princeton, and author of The Structure of Scientific Re

      11 min read

    • Article

      What’s the Story?

      Mar 27, 2018

      OF THE MORE THAN one dozen books I have researched and written, the project that made the biggest impact on me, personally, took place over a six-year period beginning in the mid-1980s, during which I immersed myself in the world’s largest organ tran

      4 min read

    • Article

      Harnessing Ancient Sensitivity

      Dec 1, 2022

      Adventures in 40,000 Years of Consciousness Charles Foster Profile Books 2022 Pb, 400pp, £10.99, ISBN 9781788167185 Charles Foster’s first best-seller – Being a Beast (2016), widely praised as a “strange masterpiece” – had a premise that was hard to

      11 min read

    • Article

      Challenging Orthodox Science

      Jul 15, 2021

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Imants Barušs Imprint Academic 2021 Pb, 228pp, £14.95, ISBN 9781788360418 The late William Corliss was very fond of a particular quotation from the 19th-century psyc

      11 min read

    • Article

      Intriguing And Diverse

      Jun 16, 2022

      Genius of the Fern Loved Gully Amy Hale Strange Attractor Press 2020 Pb, 336pp, £20, ISBN 9781907222863 Ithell Colquhoun’s star is in the ascendant. Born in India in 1906, she lived a life amongst the Surrealists in the Thirties and early Forties, ha

      9 min read

    • Article

      Why Do So Many Scientists Want to be Filmmakers?

      Mar 22, 2018

      For the past five years, Nautilus has asked scientists what they would be if they weren’t a scientist. I can now report what, above all, they want to be. “Film director,” says physicist David Deutsch. “A filmmaker,” says neuroscientist Antonio Damasi

      9 min read

    • Article

      Lives Of The Great Occultists

      Sep 10, 2020

      Personally, I blame that Aleister Crowley. If my memory serves me well (which, these days, it seldom does), Hunt Emerson and I more or less drifted into creating ‘Lives of the Great Occultists’ after I told him a couple of my favourite yarns about th

      7 min read

    • Article

      Five Short Stories About the Life and Times of Ideas: A complexity theorist explores how science and culture co-evolve.

      Apr 30, 2015

      In the following five short chapters, David Krakauer, an evolutionary theorist, and president elect of the Santa Fe Institute, haven of complex systems research, examines five facets of chain reactions, each typifying how ideas spread through science

      10 min read

    • Article

      Hitler’s Forgotten Victims

      May 11, 2023

      Hitler’s Forgotten Victims
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Classical Werewolf

      Nov 4, 2021

      Daniel Ogden Oxford University Press 2021 Hb, 280pp, £25, ISBN 9780198854319 Daniel Ogden has established himself as the go-to academic for scholarly, text-based surveys of supernatural motifs in the Ancient World, into which context this book fits a

      8 min read

    • Article

      Varieties of Experience

      Sep 1, 2020

      THERE IS A PUZZLE at the heart of my academic work. I am an anthropologist, and among other things, I study the voices (or auditory hallucinations) of people in different countries who have schizophrenia. Their voices are clearly shaped by local cult

      4 min read

    • Article

      Why Science Should Stay Clear of Metaphysics: Meet the philosopher who revived anti-realism.

      Sep 8, 2016

      Philosophers of science are not known for agreeing with each other—contrariness is part of the job description. But for thousands of years, from Aristotle to Thomas Kuhn, those who study what science is have roughly categorized themselves into two ba

      11 min read

    • Article

      Ghosts From The 1970s

      Jan 4, 2021

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Ghosts of Futures Past Merlin Coverley Oldcastle Books 2020 Pb, 320pp, £12.99, ISBN 9780857304216 Divided into three sections – ‘Hauntings’, ‘Experiments with Time’

      11 min read

    • Article

      Who Said Nobody Read Isaac Newton?

      Jan 20, 2021

      The central university library at Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, is an imposing, towered building known affectionately for being called a “magnificent erection” by, before he became prime minister, Neville Chamberlain.1 When I was a graduate stude

      7 min read

    • Article

      Mind-altering Exploration

      Jul 13, 2023

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Mike Jay Yale University Press 2023 Hb, 359pp, £20, ISBN 9780300257946 In the 21st century we take drugs, prescribed and controlled, for granted. Geographical, polit

      11 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Oct 10, 2022

      Books
      6 min read

    • Article

      Mental Music

      Sep 1, 2021

      Mental Music
      7 min read

    • Article

      We’re Naturally Supernatural

      Jan 5, 2023

      Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities Jeffrey J Kripal University of Chicago Press 2022 Hb, 256p, £28, ISBN 9780226820248 As a young Catholic, Jeffrey Kripal visited some Protestant churches in his American Mid-West town. He was baff

      11 min read

    Reviews for The Myth of Disenchantment

    5/5

    4 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words