Alex Owen. e Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern.
Chicago: e University of
Chicago Press, 2004. xiv + 355 pp.
Alex Owen. e Place of Enchantment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 355 pp. $30 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-226-64201-7; $22.50 (paper), ISBN 978-0-226-64204-8.
Reviewed by Peter Stansky (Department of History, Stanford University)
Published on H-Albion (February, 2008)
Occultism Reclaimed
Alex Owen has wrien two important books in
British intellectual history: the first, e Darkened Room:
Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England
(1989), and the present text, recently issued in paperback.
As with the pioneering work of Janet Oppenheim, e
Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in Eng-
land (1985), Owen is quite rightly taking seriously the
interests and activities of various individuals who might
too easily be dismissed as faddists who have lile to tell
us about the making of the modern world. Indeed, her ar-
gument is quite the contrary. She contends that these fig-
ures fit into the modern definitions of consciousness and
unconsciousness, rationality and irrationality, enchant-
ment and disenchantment, and Max Weber and Sigmund
Freud, as firmly as the canonical figures discussed by H.
Stuart Hughes in his Consciousness and Society (1958).
Her concluding chapter, in fact, outlines her argument
with Hughes, by means of her disagreement with his dis-
paragement of Carl Jung. In effect, she wishes to broaden
considerably what one might consider the standard ratio-
nal approach to irrationality. Owen argues powerfully in
favor of taking seriously the developments in occultism
in Britain from the period 1880-1914.
What is deeply impressive is her presentation of mul-
tiple aspects of occultism in a totally straightforward
way. She begins the book, one might think to a degree
provocatively, with a discussion of two Victorians trav-
eling to a planet. In the course of this study, there is a
fair amount of “astral travel.” At a later point, she states
that these travelers may not believe that such travel is
literarily true, but in a sense, she is admirably agnostic
about such events. It is quite fascinating, and somewhat
confusing, to be told so much about the different levels of
the various occult organizations of the time as well as the
exotic names taken by the major figures involved. To a
1
degree, but not as much as one might have wished, Owen
describes what these figures were actually up to. More
frustrating, it is not totally clear what these members of
the British middle classes wished to achieve through their
occult practices. As Jose Harris has pointed out in Private
Live, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain 1870-1914
(1993), contrary to the common assumption that the late
nineteenth century was a growing age of secularism, it
was, in fact, a period of intense religiosity, characterized
by many seekers aer faith who were frequently sym-
pathetic to non-orthodox approaches. e beliefs of oc-
cultism are, aer all, not that different from those held
by many religions, but what Owen does not make suffi-
ciently apparent is what all this occult activity (the ritu-
als, examinations, gatherings, and so forth) actually aids–
salvation, enlightenment, happiness, or a beer under-
standing of this world or the next?
Present in this book are a wonderfully rich cast of
characters. It is splendid to have them rescued from the
past. But unfortunately, with the exception of the al-
ready well-known W. B. Yeats, they remain rather mi-
nor figures. It is not clear that their contributions to the
course of modern thought have been illegitimately ne-
glected. Owen does not provide a very good sense of
how many were actually involved, or how large were
the various groups, of which the most important is the
Hermatic Order of the Golden Dawn. More familiar,
and discussed with intelligence, is the eosophical So-
ciety and Madame Blavatsky’s and Annie Besant’s in-
volvement in it. Both men and women are important
in the story, but more compelling are the roles played
by women, most particularly, the actress Florence Farr,
Anna Kingsford, Annie Horniman, and Henri Bergson’s
sister, Moina MacGregor Mathers, who with her hus-
band took an almost dictatorial role in the British occult
 H-Net Reviews

movement from their base in Paris. (One wishes Owen
had provided more information about Horniman’s father,
the great collector and builder of the Horniman Museum,
with wonderful collections and a magnificent building,
which is, along with the Whitechapel gallery, the finest
art nouveau structure in London. But he is not part of the
occult story, beyond providing his daughter with funds.)
Owen could have discussed more thoroughly the
“Britishness” of this movement, its perhaps improba-
ble combination of the intense respectability of British
middle-class life with the exoticism of the occult organi-
zation, its various levels, the fanciful names people took
to represent their occult beings, and the rituals. Having
branches of the Hermatic Order in such places as Brad-
ford and Weston-super-Mare almost seems to be a con-
tradiction in terms as does the fact that astral journeys
took place at addresses so plebian as 36 Blythe Road in
London. Respectability could happily coexist with pro-
found eccentricity, in the British style. Owen brings
the story beyond 1914 in her discussion of the “great
beast 666,” Aleister Crowley, raised in an extremely strict
Protestant sect, rich because his father was a brewer, and
then a devotee of black magic and sexual excess. Individ-
uals, most notably Victor Neuburg, his “chela,” (p. 186)
the name for a novice initiate of the Magical Order of the
Silver Star, would submit to his punishing rules and regu-
lations. For the post-1914 period, there is some consider-
ation of the activities of P. D. Ouspensky and G. I. Gurdji-
eff, also stern taskmasters, who had limited involvement
with the British scene.
is is a fascinating study, although at times its prose,
fully employing current fashionable terms of intellectual
discourse, is somewhat hard going. On the whole, it suc-
ceeds in making its point that British occultism is a sig-
nificant part of the intellectual history of modernity.

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Citation: Peter Stansky. Review of Alex Owen, e Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the
Modern and Owen, Alex, e Place of Enchantment. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. February, 2008.
URL: hp://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14144

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