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The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern
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.
“An intelligent, well-argued and richly detailed work of cultural history that offers a substantial contribution to our understanding of Britain.”—Nick Freeman, Washington Times
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.
“An intelligent, well-argued and richly detailed work of cultural history that offers a substantial contribution to our understanding of Britain.”—Nick Freeman, Washington Times
384 pages, Hardcover
First published April 14, 2004
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December 18, 2015
Magisterial (mostly).
Read it as a companion piece to Janet Oppenheim's "The Other World." Owen takes on a similar (though shorter) time period, the same place--England--a similar set of issues--though her subjects are not the SPR but the occultists and modern magicians mostly associated with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (with a few glances at the SPR and the Theosophical Society.) Her book benefits from being more recent, and so more theoretically nimble--but also suffers from its recency, with its rather clunky introduction and conclusions (in addition to a less than graceful final narrative chapter). Still, this is a great book, well written once it gets going, thoughtful, wide-ranging, incisive.
After a galumphing introduction, Owen gets down to business in the first chapter, setting the stage for what she refers to--borrowing a term from the period in question==as the "mystical revival." She dates this mostly to the late 1880s through about 1910, and as such it is part of a larger movement of responding to the rise of science and disenchantment with attempts to reconcile the knew forms of knowledge with non-materialist, non-positivist ways of knowing.
One of the key points that comes out of the book--at least to me--is that what Max Weber called disenchantment and others have referred to as the Victorian "crisis of faith" was a genuinely felt experienced. That doesn't mean that "disenchantment" was objectively true--in the sense that there was never a period when the world was drained of all wonder, all enchantment. Just as faith continued--indeed, religious variety exploded during this time period--so historians need to understand that the people of the time understood these processes as happening, even if from our perspective they don't seem exactly right.
In the second chapter she moves on to consider the formation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the way that it created its history by reaching back to older practices--thus, a revival in a very real sense. Occultism was a more hierarchical, elitist practice than spiritualism, which was more allied with democracy, Yet occultism was also progressive, allied with some of the same liberalizing movements, such as socialism and such. And it drew from a professional middle class, much as the SPR did. She spends a lot of time on the various occult practices (though she acknowledges in her introduction she is less interested in mapping all of occultism than she is in understanding its ends.) This reading of the Golden Dawn's magical practices make them seem much more cohesive, less arbitrary than they were portrayed in Wouter Hanegraaff's important--and earlier--article, "How Magic Survived the Disenchantment of the World."
Chapter three builds on Owen's earlier work, "The Darkened Room," in which she considered the role of women in the spiritualist movement. Here she argues that occultism offered new vistas and arenas of power for women, even if there was some push back from the men involved in the movement. Spiritualism fit better with Victorian ideas about gender: mediums and mystics gave themselves over to the power of others, seemingly right for weak-minded women, then. The occult, though, emphasized the power of the will to create--which went against Victorian ideas about women's strengths. Thus, the occult drew women with reformist tendencies--tendencies that were both temporal and spiritual. The chapter also deals with the ambiguous role of homosexuality in the occult movement--the occult could be welcoming to homosexuals, but there were plenty of occultists uncomfortable with so-called inverts. Given the presence of homosexuals and more liberated "new women," the occult was especially vulnerable to sexual scandal. Owen argues that many occultists--in contrast to others who discussed the new women--downplayed sexual liberty and stressed the purity of the female. But there were still a couple of scandals that harmed the movement.
Chapters four and five lay out the core of Owen's argument, and make clear the geographical sense of the title. Occultism, she argues, was concerned primarily with the powers of the interior self--there was a direct connection, in her interpretation between occult practices, modern psychological ideas, and later developments of what we now call "self-realization." (In the American context, for example, which she doesn't discuss, similar crises of faith and turns toward occultism evolved into what was called "New Thought," which still underlies a lot of -self-help writing--another path to "self-realization".) Occultists separated the spiritual self from the temporal self, thereby leaving a place for spirit in the modern fragmented sense of self. And it was through this spiritual space in their mind that they could travel--astral project, as the phrase went--to other realms, even other worlds.
Owen herself compares this to the idea of the Anima Mundi--a NeoPlatonic idea--but it also seems connected to the idea of the imagination in pre-modern philosophies, a realm that existed between the mundane and spiritual worlds. This was the _place- of Enlightenment. And while it was an exploration of the interior self, it was also a place beyond that self, too. The support for these ideas came not only from occult practices, but philosophers, too, such as Henri Bergson and William James, who saw they key to a deeper understanding of nature in understanding individual experiences. This was a way of knowing that--while acknowledging the power of scientific materialism--was not as locked into rationality as even the SPR was--knowledge was acquired in ways beyond the normal empirical studies. (Occultists were interested in spiritualism, but saw its practices as limited.) Unsurprisingly, drugs were one of these routes, and the occultists experimented with various drugs--mescaline, hashish--in the 1890s.
Occult ideas filtered out into the broader culture. There was a great deal of connection between occultism and the avant garde, for example, particularly in the form of A. R. Osage's magazine "The New Age," which published Bergson and Nietzsche, Yeats and Pounds. French Symbolism was influenced by occultism--with symbols as gateways to another world--which in turn influenced Ezra Pound. It also fed into psychological ideas. Many occultists--especially Yeats--believed, in the modern fashion, that the mind was fragmented and shifting. And, indeed, the midn and memories could shift such that they could overlap in different people; or such that the mind could, through appropriate symbols, access a "Great Mind." This Great Mind became, in the hands of Jung, the collective unconscious. Frederick Myers also had ideas akin to those of Freudian psychologists, with dreams mixing the normal, supernormal, and imagination in potent ways. (He thought the subconscious was integrative, though, not dangerous, as the Freudians did.) In her reading, the key to occultism was the conscious, willful control of imaginative processes: that allowed one to explore occult places, and one's own mind.
Owen follows these chapters with a bravura set-piece: interpreting a sexual-magical experience Aleister Crowley had in the deserts of North Africa. (There's some more of her geographical thought, here, too, with North Africa being a very important place.) She argues that Crowley's experience--which was transformative for him--was experienced by him as an occult exploration of an occult place--that Anima Mundi. Against his own interpretation, though, she reads his experience as the exploration of the unconscious--not an occult place, but the occluded parts of his own mind, where his strong will and masculinity was matched against feminine qualities.
By a little after the turn of the century, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was itself breaking down, and by 1910, the mystical revival itself was fragmenting, Chapter seven deals with some of this fragmentation, but it's an odd chapter, short and not quite cohesive. She mentions the darkening mood--the march toward World War I made the optimism of the mystical revival seem out of place--as well as the rising of new representatives of mysticism, Ouspensky and Gurdjieff.
By this point, though, her conclusion is well made: modern magicians created and inhabited an enchanted landscape in which personal self and impersonal design conjoined. Through subjectivity they reconciled the crisis of their age.
And its good that the conclusion is clear by here, because the conclusion heads off in a different direction, concerning itself with historiographical matters that seem badly grafted onto the rest of the book. She traces the fate of Weber's worry about disenchantment--and science becoming a new religion--into the thought of the Marxist philosophers Adorno and Horkheimer, and then switches to historical opinion of the mystical revival in the years just after World War II. It's all interesting enough, but felt as though it belonged in a different book.
Owen argues that the occultists, Freud, and Weber shared a number of assumptions that marked them as modernists. All of them, in their own ways, recognized the ironies of the Enlightenment, and the limits of rationality--the unconscious, the failures of reason to solve the world's problems, science itself becoming a religion--but they also still had faith in reason to sort through these problems--that's what the occultists were trying to do, unify instrumental reality with subjective experience to create a better world. These understandings stood in direct contrast to postmodernist perspectives, in which reason is no longer the ultimate arbiter, and in which grand narratives about the true truth are suspect.
Adorno and Horkheimer picked up on Weber, and offered a solution to the problem of the Enlightenment that was similar to the occultists: the only way forward was for reason itself to critique reason. (Habermas later picked up this argument, too.) Otherwise, the Enlightenment would lead to horrors like the gas chambers--the ultimate expression of instrumental rationality.
Later historians, those working just after World War II, were also caught up in the same dynamic, recognizing that the Enlightenment could bring disaster as well as relief, that reason could lead to wonders and the bomb. But they were on the other side of World War II and the gas chambers from the occultists. They worried, therefore, that irrationality, that attacks on reason were too dangerous--and so they downplayed the role of the occultists in shaping pre-War culture. They cut them out of the story of how the modern consciousness was created, of the constellation of factors that brought into being the modern self.
Owen wants her book to be a remedy to this tradition. She wants to recover the occultists practices and thoughts, and show that they were engaged with central issues of their day--just as Oppenheim wanted to do with spiritualists--but go further than Oppenheim, arguing not only that they were involved in these debates, but that their ideas helped to create the very world we inhabit, our very sense of our selves.
And, in this she succeeds brilliantly.
Read it as a companion piece to Janet Oppenheim's "The Other World." Owen takes on a similar (though shorter) time period, the same place--England--a similar set of issues--though her subjects are not the SPR but the occultists and modern magicians mostly associated with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (with a few glances at the SPR and the Theosophical Society.) Her book benefits from being more recent, and so more theoretically nimble--but also suffers from its recency, with its rather clunky introduction and conclusions (in addition to a less than graceful final narrative chapter). Still, this is a great book, well written once it gets going, thoughtful, wide-ranging, incisive.
After a galumphing introduction, Owen gets down to business in the first chapter, setting the stage for what she refers to--borrowing a term from the period in question==as the "mystical revival." She dates this mostly to the late 1880s through about 1910, and as such it is part of a larger movement of responding to the rise of science and disenchantment with attempts to reconcile the knew forms of knowledge with non-materialist, non-positivist ways of knowing.
One of the key points that comes out of the book--at least to me--is that what Max Weber called disenchantment and others have referred to as the Victorian "crisis of faith" was a genuinely felt experienced. That doesn't mean that "disenchantment" was objectively true--in the sense that there was never a period when the world was drained of all wonder, all enchantment. Just as faith continued--indeed, religious variety exploded during this time period--so historians need to understand that the people of the time understood these processes as happening, even if from our perspective they don't seem exactly right.
In the second chapter she moves on to consider the formation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the way that it created its history by reaching back to older practices--thus, a revival in a very real sense. Occultism was a more hierarchical, elitist practice than spiritualism, which was more allied with democracy, Yet occultism was also progressive, allied with some of the same liberalizing movements, such as socialism and such. And it drew from a professional middle class, much as the SPR did. She spends a lot of time on the various occult practices (though she acknowledges in her introduction she is less interested in mapping all of occultism than she is in understanding its ends.) This reading of the Golden Dawn's magical practices make them seem much more cohesive, less arbitrary than they were portrayed in Wouter Hanegraaff's important--and earlier--article, "How Magic Survived the Disenchantment of the World."
Chapter three builds on Owen's earlier work, "The Darkened Room," in which she considered the role of women in the spiritualist movement. Here she argues that occultism offered new vistas and arenas of power for women, even if there was some push back from the men involved in the movement. Spiritualism fit better with Victorian ideas about gender: mediums and mystics gave themselves over to the power of others, seemingly right for weak-minded women, then. The occult, though, emphasized the power of the will to create--which went against Victorian ideas about women's strengths. Thus, the occult drew women with reformist tendencies--tendencies that were both temporal and spiritual. The chapter also deals with the ambiguous role of homosexuality in the occult movement--the occult could be welcoming to homosexuals, but there were plenty of occultists uncomfortable with so-called inverts. Given the presence of homosexuals and more liberated "new women," the occult was especially vulnerable to sexual scandal. Owen argues that many occultists--in contrast to others who discussed the new women--downplayed sexual liberty and stressed the purity of the female. But there were still a couple of scandals that harmed the movement.
Chapters four and five lay out the core of Owen's argument, and make clear the geographical sense of the title. Occultism, she argues, was concerned primarily with the powers of the interior self--there was a direct connection, in her interpretation between occult practices, modern psychological ideas, and later developments of what we now call "self-realization." (In the American context, for example, which she doesn't discuss, similar crises of faith and turns toward occultism evolved into what was called "New Thought," which still underlies a lot of -self-help writing--another path to "self-realization".) Occultists separated the spiritual self from the temporal self, thereby leaving a place for spirit in the modern fragmented sense of self. And it was through this spiritual space in their mind that they could travel--astral project, as the phrase went--to other realms, even other worlds.
Owen herself compares this to the idea of the Anima Mundi--a NeoPlatonic idea--but it also seems connected to the idea of the imagination in pre-modern philosophies, a realm that existed between the mundane and spiritual worlds. This was the _place- of Enlightenment. And while it was an exploration of the interior self, it was also a place beyond that self, too. The support for these ideas came not only from occult practices, but philosophers, too, such as Henri Bergson and William James, who saw they key to a deeper understanding of nature in understanding individual experiences. This was a way of knowing that--while acknowledging the power of scientific materialism--was not as locked into rationality as even the SPR was--knowledge was acquired in ways beyond the normal empirical studies. (Occultists were interested in spiritualism, but saw its practices as limited.) Unsurprisingly, drugs were one of these routes, and the occultists experimented with various drugs--mescaline, hashish--in the 1890s.
Occult ideas filtered out into the broader culture. There was a great deal of connection between occultism and the avant garde, for example, particularly in the form of A. R. Osage's magazine "The New Age," which published Bergson and Nietzsche, Yeats and Pounds. French Symbolism was influenced by occultism--with symbols as gateways to another world--which in turn influenced Ezra Pound. It also fed into psychological ideas. Many occultists--especially Yeats--believed, in the modern fashion, that the mind was fragmented and shifting. And, indeed, the midn and memories could shift such that they could overlap in different people; or such that the mind could, through appropriate symbols, access a "Great Mind." This Great Mind became, in the hands of Jung, the collective unconscious. Frederick Myers also had ideas akin to those of Freudian psychologists, with dreams mixing the normal, supernormal, and imagination in potent ways. (He thought the subconscious was integrative, though, not dangerous, as the Freudians did.) In her reading, the key to occultism was the conscious, willful control of imaginative processes: that allowed one to explore occult places, and one's own mind.
Owen follows these chapters with a bravura set-piece: interpreting a sexual-magical experience Aleister Crowley had in the deserts of North Africa. (There's some more of her geographical thought, here, too, with North Africa being a very important place.) She argues that Crowley's experience--which was transformative for him--was experienced by him as an occult exploration of an occult place--that Anima Mundi. Against his own interpretation, though, she reads his experience as the exploration of the unconscious--not an occult place, but the occluded parts of his own mind, where his strong will and masculinity was matched against feminine qualities.
By a little after the turn of the century, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was itself breaking down, and by 1910, the mystical revival itself was fragmenting, Chapter seven deals with some of this fragmentation, but it's an odd chapter, short and not quite cohesive. She mentions the darkening mood--the march toward World War I made the optimism of the mystical revival seem out of place--as well as the rising of new representatives of mysticism, Ouspensky and Gurdjieff.
By this point, though, her conclusion is well made: modern magicians created and inhabited an enchanted landscape in which personal self and impersonal design conjoined. Through subjectivity they reconciled the crisis of their age.
And its good that the conclusion is clear by here, because the conclusion heads off in a different direction, concerning itself with historiographical matters that seem badly grafted onto the rest of the book. She traces the fate of Weber's worry about disenchantment--and science becoming a new religion--into the thought of the Marxist philosophers Adorno and Horkheimer, and then switches to historical opinion of the mystical revival in the years just after World War II. It's all interesting enough, but felt as though it belonged in a different book.
Owen argues that the occultists, Freud, and Weber shared a number of assumptions that marked them as modernists. All of them, in their own ways, recognized the ironies of the Enlightenment, and the limits of rationality--the unconscious, the failures of reason to solve the world's problems, science itself becoming a religion--but they also still had faith in reason to sort through these problems--that's what the occultists were trying to do, unify instrumental reality with subjective experience to create a better world. These understandings stood in direct contrast to postmodernist perspectives, in which reason is no longer the ultimate arbiter, and in which grand narratives about the true truth are suspect.
Adorno and Horkheimer picked up on Weber, and offered a solution to the problem of the Enlightenment that was similar to the occultists: the only way forward was for reason itself to critique reason. (Habermas later picked up this argument, too.) Otherwise, the Enlightenment would lead to horrors like the gas chambers--the ultimate expression of instrumental rationality.
Later historians, those working just after World War II, were also caught up in the same dynamic, recognizing that the Enlightenment could bring disaster as well as relief, that reason could lead to wonders and the bomb. But they were on the other side of World War II and the gas chambers from the occultists. They worried, therefore, that irrationality, that attacks on reason were too dangerous--and so they downplayed the role of the occultists in shaping pre-War culture. They cut them out of the story of how the modern consciousness was created, of the constellation of factors that brought into being the modern self.
Owen wants her book to be a remedy to this tradition. She wants to recover the occultists practices and thoughts, and show that they were engaged with central issues of their day--just as Oppenheim wanted to do with spiritualists--but go further than Oppenheim, arguing not only that they were involved in these debates, but that their ideas helped to create the very world we inhabit, our very sense of our selves.
And, in this she succeeds brilliantly.
November 18, 2015
Good book for this topic. More academic then your average read. Some chapters require some knowledge of sociology. Overall good read and sheds light on an otherwise fairly ignored topic of British history.
May 29, 2020
The Place of Enchantment deals with the period between 1880 and 1914; the crucial years during which Britain emerged as an identifiable modern nation. On the background of the political, social, cultural and economical changes, this book explores the “disenchantment" of the world along with the emergence of the new occultism also known as new spirituality at the fin-de-siècle. However, apart from giving a broad description of the esoteric practices and arising spiritualities of the period, it helps in getting a deep glance into the modernisation of the occultism as an articulation of the diverse and ambiguous processes through the prospering cultural modernity in Britain. The detailed information about the activities of the occult institutions like The Theosophical Society, Society of Psychical Research, Hermetic Order, Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, etc., establishes the preview of the period’s main mystery and hierarchical organisations dealing with occult. The members of these institutions were the influential trendsetters of the spiritual movement in the society and able to attract not only intellectuals but also feminists and working class and thus accommodating their realisation as individuals. The mystical revival is also being reviewed as a period’s response to the ongoing crisis in the socio-political life of the society.
May 18, 2015
Alex Owen's The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern "explores what has been disregarded, marginalized, or forgotten. It is concerned with the emergence towards the end of the nineteenth century of a widespread engagement with occultism, mysticism, and...magic, and deals with the parameters and significance of this engagement."
For all of this, the work is engaging, mercifully free of specialized, post-structural terminology which has been known to alienate the general or non-specialist reader.
In the text proper, Dr. Owen places the occult, during the fin de siècle, "at the heart of a contemporary preoccupation with the riddle of human identity and consciousness as manifested in competing ideas of the self". The author's main purpose in the book is to "locate the emergence of a new kind of spirituality at the fin de siècle".
What the reader gets is a general, and thoughtful, history of the occult in Britain from about 1880-1914. There are many mini-biographies and analyses about individuals and groups of the time and these are often enlightening.
The occult, as sub-zeitgeist, has not long been the provenance of academics but over the last decade or so this has been changing. The result is more and more popular scholarly works, as well as books directed at a specialized audience, have been emerging over this period of time. Of these works, a few are average, some are terrible, others are impenetrable, and few, such as The Place of Enchantment, are informative and a pleasure to read.
This book is recommended for readers interested in the occult in general and the British history of this in particular. Thankfully, the author does not take an aggressively secular/materialist perspective but does adopt a gentle, scholarly pose that allows for an interesting and enlightening read.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.
Important Note: Please stick to the print edition as the eBook edition, on Amazon at least, is very poorly formatted and based on an older format type, HTMLZ, over which has been placed the Amazon file type. What this does is to make the book an unpleasant experience on a tablet.
For all of this, the work is engaging, mercifully free of specialized, post-structural terminology which has been known to alienate the general or non-specialist reader.
In the text proper, Dr. Owen places the occult, during the fin de siècle, "at the heart of a contemporary preoccupation with the riddle of human identity and consciousness as manifested in competing ideas of the self". The author's main purpose in the book is to "locate the emergence of a new kind of spirituality at the fin de siècle".
What the reader gets is a general, and thoughtful, history of the occult in Britain from about 1880-1914. There are many mini-biographies and analyses about individuals and groups of the time and these are often enlightening.
The occult, as sub-zeitgeist, has not long been the provenance of academics but over the last decade or so this has been changing. The result is more and more popular scholarly works, as well as books directed at a specialized audience, have been emerging over this period of time. Of these works, a few are average, some are terrible, others are impenetrable, and few, such as The Place of Enchantment, are informative and a pleasure to read.
This book is recommended for readers interested in the occult in general and the British history of this in particular. Thankfully, the author does not take an aggressively secular/materialist perspective but does adopt a gentle, scholarly pose that allows for an interesting and enlightening read.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.
Important Note: Please stick to the print edition as the eBook edition, on Amazon at least, is very poorly formatted and based on an older format type, HTMLZ, over which has been placed the Amazon file type. What this does is to make the book an unpleasant experience on a tablet.
April 21, 2019
"Fin-de-siècle occultism was like a shadow play of synchronicity. It mirrored broader cultural trends and preoccupations but in key respects magnified and outstripped them"
May 15, 2016
A book that really explains to us outsiders what the Golden Dawn magicians actually wanted to achieve and why. For example, compared to the Crowley biography by Gary Lachman, this manages to get more inside the head of Perdurabo (You will still think that he was a not very nice person, to put it mildly). Some parts are rather heavy if you are not familiar with recent theorizing in Humanities, but they are still worth the effort. / Tykkäsin kovasti. Nuorena skeptikkona ihmettelin miten ihmiset jaksavat touhuta näitä asioita, vaikka mitään ei “tapahdu”. Mutta tässä olin väärässä, kyllä jumalat vastaavat kun tarpeeksi niitä kutsuu, ongelmaksi tulee päätellä onko niistä ja niiden sanomasta mitään hyötyä. Kirjassa on kuvauksia Kultaisen aamunkoiton maagien yhteisistä matkoista eri planeetoille, vähän niin kuin fantasiaroolipelissä nykyään (erilaisten huumaavien aineiden osuus toiminnassa on hiukan epäselvä). Maagit toki ymmärsivät, että matkat tapahtuivat kokonaan heidän päänsä sisällä ja siinä onkin koko homman juju, astraalivillakoiran ydin: vaikka kaikki tapahtuu pään sisällä, niin se ei ole pelkkää subjektiivista harhaa, vaan asialla on merkitystä. Millä tavalla ja miten, onkin sitten monimutkaisempi juttu. Kirjassa selitetään kuinka tämä kaikki liittyy pettymykseen modernin maailma(nkuva)an ja kuinka valituksen rationaalisuutta ei hylätty, vaan yritettiin nähdä se uudesta kuvakulmasta. Pian Kultainen aamunkoitto hajosi mm. kinasteluun, oliko järjestö oikeasti satoja vai muutamia vuosia vanha, eli ihan kaikkeen ei vielä suhtauduttu postmodernin kepeästi. Puolessa välissä kirjaa olin valmis lähtemään astraalimatkailun peruskurssille, jos joku olisi sellaista minulle ehdottanut, mutta kirjan lopetettuani en ole enää yhtä varma.Tarkoitus oli tulla paremmaksi ihmiseksi, mutta kuinka moni loppujen lopuksi onnistui? Historiallisten tapahtumien kuvaukset ovat aika lennokkaasti kuvattu, mutta välillä teorisoidaan aika raskaalla kädellä. Nekin kohdat on hyödyllistä lukea, mutta voivat aiheuttaa asiaan perehtymättömälle harmaita hiuksia.
March 17, 2012
In this book, Owen provides one of the richest scholarly accounts of fin-de-siècle occultism available in print today. She begins by charting the movement’s history in the spiritualism that was so prevalent in the late nineteenth century, and then proceeds to examine in turn the various Rosicrucian and Theosophical organisations that laid the groundwork for the central object of Owen’s investigation: the Golden Dawn. As a study of the Golden Dawn, Owen’s work breaks new ground by delving deeply into the social environment within which the order emerged. Particular attention is paid to the influential female members of the order — Florence Farr in particular — and the Golden Dawn’s revolutionary inclusion of women as full members is explored against the overarching backdrop of feminism during the fin-de-siècle. In terms of my research, Owen’s study was particularly valuable in that it contextualised the Golden Dawn as being a particular manifestation of a much larger social current in a way that Ellic Howe’s documentary study, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn, did not. Granted, Owen does not go into nearly as much detail regarding the minutiae of the order’s life as did Howe, making the two volumes quite complementary.
November 30, 2012
In this amazing book, Alex Owen argues that enchantment has a place within modernity, and that the occultism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, far from rejecting or hiding from the modern, "not only addressed some of the central dillemas of modernity but itself was constitutive or symptomatic of key elements of modern culture." It combines a serious academic exploration of how occultists intersected with fin de siecle British culture, and also an incredibly fascinating look at some of history's greatest weirdos, including a drugged-up sex-magic romp in the desert with Aleister Crowley. I really appreciate her objective view of a subject that so often draws strong opinions.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews