The Place of Enchantment: British occultism and the culture of the modern by Alex Owen, University of Chicago Press, $30, ISBN 0226642011 Reviewed by Simon Ings
AS alchemy birthed physics at the end of the 17th century, so occultism birthed psychology at the end of the 19th century. This, anyway, is the implication of Alex Owen鈥檚 The Place of Enchantment, a study of occult practices and groupings during the fin de si猫cle. Owen鈥檚 raw material seems worryingly trivial at first. When, early on in the book, the black magician Aleister Crowley, wearing ritual mask and full highland regalia, scares officials of the Golden Dawn out of their offices, you may smile but, oh, your heart will sink.
While working-class aspirations grew towards the end of the 19th century, occultism was one among many obscurantist havens for middle-class intellectuals 鈥� a sort of Bloomsbury Group of the transmigratory soul. Owen barely dents this traditional interpretation. But what she does do 鈥� and does well, even in the teeth of this reader鈥檚 extreme scepticism 鈥� is show how the occult societies of the day systematically explored the unconscious. That modern-day shamans walked the streets of London鈥檚 Fitzrovia seems unarguable.
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Owen鈥檚 conclusions are modest. Surrealism, occultism and psychoanalysis 鈥渞epresented different points on a spectrum broadly dedicated to understanding the full implications of a transformed human consciousness鈥�. (I do wonder what being 鈥渟omewhere on a spectrum鈥� really signifies.) Had she looked forward 20 years, Owen might have claimed more for her own argument. Central to the psychological landscape of the mid-1920s, the introspectionist movement, personified in the UK by psychologist Raymond Wheeler, was exploring the psyche using mental gymnastics not dissimilar to those of Crowley and his contemporaries.
But Owen is too good a historian to stretch her dates to fit her thesis. Instead, and to her credit, she makes it possible for occultism, taken seriously and on its own terms, to speak for itself.