Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm (Twitter: @Ghost_Image_) is Chair & Associate Professor of Religion at Williams College. Josephson-Storm received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Stanford University in 2006 and has held visiting positions at Princeton University, École Française d’Extrême-Orient, Paris, and Ruhr Universität, Germany. He is the author of The Invention of Religion in Japan (2012, winner of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion Book of the Year Award), The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences (2017), and Absolute Disruption (forthcoming).

From indescribable transformation hails

such creations—Feel! and believe!

We suffer often: flames become ash; but, in art: flames come from dust.

Here is magic. In the realm of enchantment (das Bereich des Zaubers).

-Rainer Maria Rilke, “Magie” (1924).

Having found your way to Forbidden Histories you already know that science does not inexorably lead to disenchantment, and you may have seen posts about Isaac Newton’s fascination with alchemy, Girolamo Cardano’s prophetic visions, Alfred Russel Wallace’s commitment to spiritualism, William James’s studies of telepathy and trance, and so on. In this respect, this blog documents a larger conceptual shift in the history of science: While it was once held that few oppositions were more fundamental than the one between science and magic, recent cohorts of historians of science have been providing counterevidence. In study after study, individual scientists’ and philosophers’ alchemical experiments, magical preoccupations, mystic visions, or grandiose senses of prophetic missions, have been trotted out to stunning effect. In sum, history shows that for generations of scientists—from Robert Boyle to Robert Oppenheimer—scientific and magical worlds were often intertwined.

So if magic and science have been entwined all along, how did we get the notion that a central, if not defining, feature of modern science was that it dispelled magic and expunged animism?

When looking for an influential source of this notion, scholars often pointed to the writings of the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) and his famous 1917 lecture “Science as Vocation” (Wissenschaft als Beruf). Perhaps the most quoted line from this speech is Weber’s pronouncement: “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’ (die Entzauberung der Welt, literally ‘the de-magic-ing of the world’).” Weber’s authority is thus often marshaled to assert that science is ‘disenchantment crystallized.’

Moreover, most scholars take the ‘disenchantment of the world’ at face value and assume that Weber believed that modern European culture had absolutely no magic in it. This reading of Weber is often grounded in classical biographies, which portray him as a secular observer of culture with next to no personal faith or knowledge of the occult.

But as I discovered in the process of researching my recent book, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity and the Human Sciences (henceforth TMD), the archival evidence shows that the conventional portraits of Weber and thus his most famous theory are wrong.

Weber’s letters and interviews with his contemporaries show that he had an intense fascination with “mysticism” and that he yearned for mystical experiences (for example, see MWG, II/6, 70, Baumgarten 1964, Honigsheim 1963). But even more importantly, his letters show that Weber had a connection to members of an occult group known as the ‘Munich Cosmic Circle’ (Kosmikerkreis or Kosmische Runde; see TMD, esp. 210-221, 269-278).

Originally led by the visionary and neo-pagan mystic Alfred Schuler (1865-1923), the Cosmic Circle included the German-Jewish poet and translator Karl Wolfskehl (1869-1948), the neo-pagan philosopher Ludwig Klages (1872-1956), and for a time the famous mystical poet Stefan George (1868-1933). In the briefest summary the Cosmic Circle resembled many other fin-de-siècle occult movements. One thing that made them distinctive—but not unique— was that they shared an intense reverence for Friedrich Nietzsche, whom they described as one of the great “pagan martyrs: whose soul fought and died for the ardor of Life” (TMD, 210).

Like many of their contemporaries, the Cosmic Circle also believed in magic. Their particular philosophy of magic was described by the German author and translator Franziska zu Reventlow (1871-1918), who had a relationship with Klages and who was for a time an unofficial member of the group. In her account:

They claim to have discovered secrets of immeasurable importance and thereby have gone so far as to achieve mastery of certain inner powers. Hence sooner or later they will be in a position to work magic (zaubern). . . . They explained it to me like this: one succeeds by means of a mystical procedure—I believe by absolute self-absorption in the primordial cosmic principle. . . . When this is successful, one’s essence is completely permeated by the primordial cosmic substance, which is in itself all-powerful. Then one is made just as powerful, and those who are all-powerful can work magic (Reventlow 1913, 142-143).

Based on his letters, we know that Weber read this paragraph describing the Cosmic Circle’s magical beliefs, and we know that he read it in 1913 while he was vacationing at the Monte Verità neo-pagan commune in Switzerland. The dating is significant because this is before Weber began publishing about disenchantment, and there is some reason to think that he came to his notion of ‘disenchantment’ after visiting with neo-pagans and reading Reventlow’s account of the group (TMD, 275). But Weber didn’t just read about the Cosmic Circle.

While it is unclear if Max Weber ever met Schuler, Weber definitely knew Wolfskehl, George, and Klages (e.g. MWG, II/8, 115). Wolfskehl’s contact with Weber was fairly limited, but Weber met with George on multiple occasions and there is evidence that George had a significant impact on Weber’s notion of mysticism and his sense of how the history of religion centered on charismatic leadership (see TMD, 287-296).

He also exchanged letters with Klages and had even Klages analyze his handwriting. Weber references Klages’ work in published writings (e.g. Weber 1992, 130, note 10) while Klages himself even adopted Weber’s famous phrase “the disenchantment of the world” to describe the gradual distancing of humanity from the “cosmic Eros” (Klages 3:482). There were also plenty of contemporaries, like the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke (quoted in epigraph above), who were mutual acquaintances of both Weber and the Cosmic Circle. So perhaps they were in some respect in the same “realm of enchantment” to use Rilke’s phrase.

All this is to say, Max Weber must have known that many of his contemporaries believed in magic. But even if he had never encountered the Munich Circle, read Reventlow’s account of them, or visited a neo-pagan commune, Weber would have only to open a German newspaper to see evidence for belief in witches, magic, spiritualism, and angels (see TMD, 298). Thus, it seems implausible that Weber would have thought that belief in enchantment had vanished completely in his own era.

If we turn to Weber’s writings with this in mind, they look very different. In brief, even though Weber argued that the Hebrew prophets’ demonization of magic culminated in the Protestant, and especially Puritan, disenchantment of the world, he also asserted that Puritans and Jews did not doubt “the reality of magic,” and repeatedly reminded his readers that “Witches were also burned in [Puritan] New England” (e.g. MWG I/19, 349, 450.) Moreover, Protestants continued to believe in angels and demons (Weber 1992, 57). As Weber emphasized: “Nowhere, not even during the Reformation was the existence of spirits and demons permanently eliminated; rather, they were simply subordinated unconditionally to the one god, at least in theory” (MWG I/22). Moreover, he observed that “Magic, for example, has been just as systematically ‘rationalized’ as physics” (Weber 1922, 488).

To conclude, Weber is not the actual source of the notion of science as anti-magic. He also did not argue for the movement of thought from magic to religion to science often mistakenly attributed to him. Finally, “the disenchantment of the world” does not mean the complete extirpation of belief in magic or spirits.

For a fuller explication of what he did mean with his enigmatic phrase, I humbly hope you’ll read my book.

© Jason Josephson-Storm

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References

Eduard Baumgarten, Max Weber: Werk und Person (Tübingen: Mohr, 1964), 658-59.

Paul Honigsheim, “Erinnerungen an Max Weber,” in Max Weber zum Gedächtnis: Materialien und Dokumente zur Bewertung von Werk und Persönlichkeit, ed. René König and Johannes Winckelmann (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1963), 270.

Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Ludwig Klages, Sämtliche Werke (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1964-1992).

Franziska Reventlow, Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen, oder, Begebenheiten aus einem merkwürdigen Stadtteil (Munich: Langen, 1913)

Max Weber Gesamtausgabe (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1984-2012; cited as MWG).

Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: Mohr, 1922).

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons (New York: Routledge, 1992).

Max Weber, “Science as Vocation” (Wissenschaft als Beruf), translated in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).

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