Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017; xiv + 411 pp. $96.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-40322-9; $32.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-226-40336-6.

by Andreas Sommer

If recent surveys of belief in magic are accurate, there is a good chance that you either hold some variant of these beliefs yourself, or that you may be puzzled by some otherwise secular-minded colleague, friend, or family member who does. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm might not be a believer in spirits himself, but reveals toward the end of this remarkable book a significant factor in his choice of becoming a religious scholar: his grandmother Felicitas Goodman, the noted anthropologist who caused quite a stir when she openly confessed her commitments to shamanism. An expert of East Asian religions, Josephson-Storm’s previous cross-cultural studies have certainly prepared him well to tackle vexing questions regarding the Western occult. But it is perhaps especially owing to a deep respect for his heretical ancestor that The Myth of Disenchantment is marked by a refreshingly even-handed approach which neither mocks nor advocates unorthodox beliefs. Instead, Josephson-Storm makes a bold and sincere effort to come to grips with hidden continuities of magic in often surprising places, and the persistence of Western normative assertions of the disenchantment of the world as the flip-side of that puzzle.

Regarding the latter issue, the book can be considered a historical test of the actual adherence to basic naturalistic proscriptions in the humanities and human sciences. After all, as Josephson-Storm reminds us, Max Weber’s famous verdict of disenchantment is often misunderstood as motivated by a normative agenda itself. The introduction to the book formulates a fruitful principal method and rationale: to “investigate the least likely people – the very theorists of modernity as disenchantment – and show how they worked out various insights inside an occult context, in a social world overflowing with spirits and magic, and how the weirdness of that world generated so much normativity” (p. 6). While the focus of the book is on what Josephson-Storm calls the human sciences (a term which is perhaps somewhat problematically equated with the German Geisteswissenschaften, ibid.), the significance of older popular histories assuming the inherent opposition between magic and the natural sciences is also acknowledged. Among the refuting instances enlisted by the author are the familiar occult preoccupations of figureheads of the scientific revolution such as Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, as well as more original observations on mediumistic experiments by icons of modern ‘naturalistic’ science like Marie Curie and Pierre Curie.

Chapter 1, “Enchanted (Post) Modernity”, sets the stage by taking stock of sociological findings which document the current prevalence of occult beliefs in secular Western societies. The upshot again upsets popular assumptions and categories, including the habit of using occult beliefs as a shorthand for religion, and the view that ‘occultism’ always springs from the same politically reactionary sources which have brought about what some have diagnosed as a ‘post-truth’ society: traditional Christianity continues to decline while belief in magic is on the rise, and political affiliation appears to be as poor a predictor of occultist sympathies as education. An historiographically crucial point is that suppressions of magic do not self-evidently express anti-spiritual motifs. On the contrary, once we check the concrete means by which magic has been concealed in plain sight, it turns out that more often than not it has cancelled itself out through its own competing modes. Puritan prohibitions of magic, for instance, were not due to scepticism but naked fears of devils. (Or to use a recent example, think of pro-Trump evangelists responding with protective prayers to public appeals by self-identifying witches to bring down the President through sorcery.)

The remaining nine chapters sketch continuities of magic in major thinkers since the sixteenth century, and bear out these insights and arguments by reconstructing previously understudied currents in the formation of modern Western intellectual traditions. Drawing on personal correspondence and overlooked passages in often canonical writings of architects of ‘naturalistic’ modernity, Josephson-Storm re-enchants parts of critical theory and Freudian psychoanalysis in due course. He convincingly argues that to understand the origins of modern disciplines ranging from religious studies and sociology to linguistics and anthropology, we need to acknowledge that foundational scholars such as Max Müller, Ferdinand de Saussure, Edward B. Tylor, James Frazer and Max Weber systematically grappled with revivals of magical traditions and large-scale occult movements such as spiritualism and Indian Theosophy. This they did not as prophets of ‘scientific materialism’, but often on the basis of sustained reflection on the kinship of magic with science, and a genuine reverence for mystical and pantheistic traditions.

Josephson-Storm’s ingenious method – to search for magic in the most unlikely places – is also brought to fruition in his reconstruction of parapsychological studies by members of the Vienna Circle of logical positivism. In apparent contradiction with standard portrayals of Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap and Hans Hahn as undertakers of metaphysics in science, they in fact shared a sustained curiosity in medium-istic and poltergeist-related phenomena. By no means the first to reveal this perplexing side of the Vienna Circle’s history, Josephson-Storm provides the most comprehensive account currently available in English.

Regarding the links between occultism and politics, Josephson-Storm in no way downplays the occult entanglements of Nazism. By recovering the significance of magic and mysticism in a wide range of left-leaning and Jewish thinkers, however, he puts another hefty nail in the coffin of outdated but still fashionable notions of ‘occultism’ as a necessary condition of fascism. Not least, by reminding us of the racist origins of anthropological theories which explained widespread interest in spiritualism and other ‘vulgar’ forms of magic as morbid relapses into ‘savage’ evolutionary stages, the author confronts us with some previously obscured unsavoury aspects of the suppression of magic.

In the face of the vast materials covered, some problems of detail might be inevitable. While I was glad to see the philosopher Carl du Prel being rescued from oblivion, I would disagree with Josephson-Storm’s assumption that The Philosophy of Mysticism, or indeed any of his works, were actually concerned with mysticism in the commonly accepted meaning of the term. Du Prel was not really interested in the unio mystica as a defining feature of mystical experience, and his rather loose deployment of Mystik as a synonym for spiritualism, occultism, and what would later be known as parapsychology, provoked criticisms even from some of his supporters. Du Prel’s explicit goal was to enlist supposed transcendental functions of the mind such as telepathy and clairvoyance for his model of the self, which was supposed to guarantee personal survival as a precondition for spiritualism. The statement that “philosophers and theologians like Karl Joel and Otto Pfleiderer followed du Prel in discussing the union of mysticism and philosophical thought” (p. 191) therefore needs to be qualified, as neither Joel nor Pfleiderer were known to have maintained sympathies for investigations of occult phenomena, let alone for spiritualism. A closer look at oppositions to spiritualism could have introduced an additional layer of analysis and a more vivid illustration of the important argument that the apparent decline of magic was often a result of the suppression of its ‘vulgar’ forms by protagonists adhering to ‘higher’ notions such as mysticism proper.

A related issue that Josephson-Storm touches upon but which also may have deserved further discussion is the conceptual and pragmatic ambivalence of modern continuities of Renaissance natural magic like telepathy. After all, while spiritualist authors like du Prel marshalled telepathy as supposed evidence for the mind’s dual citizenship in a co-existing physical and spirit world, materialist and positivist psychical researchers like Charles Richet, Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, and Julian Ochorowicz rejected spiritualism on the basis of the view that its phenomena could be explained by telepathy, clairvoyance and telekinesis of the living. Moreover, they doubted that these psychic phenomena had inherently spiritual implications at all.

Josephson-Storm is to be commended for his reconstruction of Sigmund Freud’s growing belief in telepathy, and for trying to make sense of his reading of du Prel. Yet while it is technically correct to state that, in embracing telepathy, du Prel and Freud “shared more than the classical narrative would admit” (p. 181), their juxtaposition again misses an opportunity to illustrate that telepathy was not always interpreted as an inherently spiritual let alone ‘magical’ phenomenon. Josephson-Storm concedes that “it seems unlikely Freud ever came to believe in spirits” (p. 203), but I would also highly doubt that Freud seriously considered non-physicalist interpretations of telepathy that imbued it with spiritual meaning. Similar reservations apply to remarks about the assumed openness to belief in spirits by members of the Vienna Circle (p. 258, but see the qualification on p. 268), whose interpretation of the weird phenomena some of them came to believe in were, I think, dictated by sentiments akin to Theodor Adorno’s notion of spiritualism as the supposed ‘metaphysics of the dunces’. Moreover, while William James is occasionally mentioned, a short discussion of James’s experiments with various mediums throughout his career could have further illustrated the point that even psychical researchers sympathetic to spiritualism struggled to interpret its reported phenomena as evidence of the ‘spirit hypothesis’.

And here I have to admit I found the omission of psychology before Freud and Jung unfortunate. James is cited as a scholar of religion, but he was also the instigator of the American psychological profession, who also happened to be a psychical researcher. Together with another ‘professionalizer’ of psychology, Théodore Flournoy in Switzerland, James was heavily indebted to the inventor of the term telepathy, Frederic W. H. Myers. The latter doesn’t appear in the book at all, while Flournoy is mentioned in passing only in regard to Ferdinand de Saussure’s involvement in Flournoy’s psychological studies of mediumistic trance productions. Moreover, the dismissal of both spiritualism and psychical research by Wilhelm Wundt as the ‘father’ of professionalized psychology in Germany could have nicely illustrated a psychological ‘standard mode’ in the war against magic discussed in Josephson-Storm’s treatment of Tylor and Frazer: like other border-guards of professionalized psychology, Wundt relied on these anthropological frameworks to discredit uncritical spiritualism along with serious attempts to test and interpret its alleged phenomena. Moreover, Wundt’s anti-occultist polemics, in light of his assertions that his own psychological project was indebted to a quasi-mystical experience as well as the writings of mystics like Jakob Böhme, is another important example that would have served to support a main thesis of the book.

An appreciation of the significance of the occult during psychology’s professionalization might also have prevented the problematic statement that “for all the polemical attacks against superstition and magic, disenchanting efforts were only sporadically enforced within the disciplines” (p. 16). The ‘psychology of paranormal belief’, which I would describe as an industry with the sole intent of policing metaphysical deviance, is a direct outgrowth of polemical strategies by psychologists like Wundt and Joseph Jastrow. Historical contexts and debunkers’ own metaphysical commitments may have changed drastically, but orthodox psychology’s axiomatic dismissals of belief in magic and spirits still serve to shield the profession’s public image from ongoing associations with the occult in marginalized disciplines such as parapsychology.

Such quibbles aside, in my view The Myth of Disenchantment still stands head and shoulders above recent historical monographs on the modern Western occult. With its focus on continuities of magic in unexpected places, and demonstrations of how enchantment has often undermined itself through competing modes, a major distinguishing feature of the study is a complete lack of timidity, delving as it does straight into the heart of fiercely contested issues. Drawing on an impressive wealth of primary sources in various languages, Josephson-Storm shows a sure instinct for hidden treasures, and recovers significant associations of canonical figures with important, but now obscure, actors and ideas. Not all of his insights are fully unpacked, but the overall level of rigour and balance displayed by Josephson-Storm is so rare that I just might try my luck at sorcery, if that’s what it takes to make him continue this line of research.

Andreas Sommer is an independent scholar working on the history of the sciences and their cross-links with magic. His Wellcome Trust-funded doctoral thesis (UCL, 2013) reconstructed the formation of modern psychology in response to psychical research in Europe and the US, and won a Young Scholar Award from the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. He held research posts at Cambridge University and has published various journal articles and chapters in edited books. He is currently working on a monograph expanding his earlier findings while running Forbidden Histories, a website distilling academic work in the history of science and magic to a broad, educated audience.