Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm is a brilliant, seemingly omnicompetent scholar, and The Myth of Disenchantment is a dazzling, dizzying, demanding work. It is also well worth reading as it offers not only a trenchant questioning of the very notion of modernity and a panoramic tour of theorists and interpreters of that idea but also numerous close readings of primary sources in eight languages, scattering pithy statements and thought-provoking insights along the way. Josephson-Storm's clever turns of phrase upend common knowledge about modernity and the canonical modernizers. He delights in plucky paradoxes—so, for example, he writes of “God's absent presence extending over the whole of modernity” (67) and asserts that “secularization enchants” (35).

This book is nothing if not ambitious. Josephson-Storm challenges the modernization thesis, the secularization thesis, and the conflict thesis (science versus religion). He questions classic arguments in Peter Berger's The Sacred Canopy of Meaning (Doubleday, 1967), Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), and, especially and ambivalently, Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; trans. ed. Stanford University Press, 2002)—with which, he says, he has been “shadowboxing” throughout the book (242). These all share a notion of modernization as “the rise of instrumental reason, the gradual alienation of humanity from nature, and the production of a bureaucratic and technological life world stripped of mystery and wonder” (4)—stripped of belief in God and, even more so, of belief in magic and spirits. But this notion of disenchanted modernity, he says, is a myth in both senses of the word: empirically false, yet exercising culture-shaping, ideological power. His purpose in this book is to overturn the myth—in other words, it is a demythologizing project, ironic in its affinity to the very notion of modernity he is seeking to overturn (316).

The work begins by arguing that we do not find anywhere a disenchanted world, not even in allegedly secularized Europe and America. Ghosts and spirits often fill the place left void by the supposed death of God. From there we take a diachronic tour of the many ways in which science and enchantment have intertwined. He takes notice of the magical projects of Giordano Bruno and Francis Bacon and shows how even the philosophes of Diderot's Encyclopédie were hoping to find a “divine science.” He identifies early nineteenth-century Germany as the birthplace of the “myth-of-the-end-of-myth,” especially in the work of Friedrich Schiller. Jacob Burckhardt then applied this notion in his portrayal of “the Renaissance,” as did others later in inventing “the Enlightenment.” But this specter of a despiritualized European culture troubled many, giving rise to spiritualism and occult movements at the same time as the birth of religious studies, and involving social connections among practitioners on all sides.

Thus far the story traces many of the great names in the history of modern Western thought. But this book is particularly important for revealing relatively obscure thinkers whose work influenced the more famous ones, sometimes in ways astonishingly unintended by them. A key figure is J. G. Frazer. In the second edition of The Golden Bough, Frazer offered “a new master narrative, what we might call a canonical version of the disenchantment thesis; namely, history as an evolutionary progression from magic through religion and on to science” (140). Despite its secularist appearance, Frazer's theory actually rehabilitated magic as a kind of early scientific attitude, the manipulation of forces to achieve one's purposes. Here the argument recalls the work of Frances Yates's Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1964). But Josephson-Storm goes further. Frazer turns out not to have conceived disenchantment as an ever-upward story, for religion actually represented a step backward, and modern science was a recovery of the original magical attitude. Religion, for Frazer, “was a momentary aberration in the grand trajectory of human thought”; and science, far from arising out of religion, presented “the perfection of magic” (145). Frazer's “project of de-Christianization could be seen as either secularizing or paganizing,” with Frazer himself wavering between those outcomes (147).

Aleister Crowley, “the Wickedest Man in the World,” who influenced the founders of Wicca, Scientology, and the Church of Satan, clinches the case for the paganizing potential of Frazer's project. Crowley repurposed Frazer's work, lifting text from The Golden Bough to perform “a Magical Operation to banish the ‘Dying God’” of Christianity (160).

Josephson-Storm relies heavily on Freudian notions, especially “the return of the repressed.” He writes of “occult disavowal” or “occult repression,” that is, modern scholars’ suppression of their own interest in spirits and/or occult phenomena. He undertakes a Freudian analysis of Freud's own theorizing, suggesting “clues as to the mechanism of occult disavowal.” Afraid of “dangers lurking outside the boundaries of reason,” scientists and philosophers “ascribe their hidden self to primitives while projecting occult prohibitions onto a similarly imaginary scientific hegemon to justify conformity or rebellion” (207). Here, then, the myth of disenchantment serves both individual psychological needs and the justification of colonialism.

The book culminates in an exploration of the connections to esoterism traceable even in the Frankfurt School, the Vienna School, and Max Weber's famous deployment of the idea of disenchantment. These are areas that shape Josephson-Storm's own work as a practitioner of critical theory in the field of religious studies. By critically examining the genesis of critical theory, challenging its myths about itself, he hopes “to formulate a reflexive religious studies” that would trace the ways its guiding concepts “seep into the cultures that it purports to study” (12).

For all its postmodern theoretical sophistication, The Myth of Disenchantment is in some ways an old-fashioned exercise in highbrow intellectual history. Though it situates influential texts in the lived circumstances of their authors, it focuses unwaveringly on cultural leaders rather than cultures. In the sections on the nineteenth century, one looks in vain for any treatment of conventionally religious people, who, after all, had to deal with the intellectual stresses of the era and made up the majority of the population.

A work of this quality surely should have received more careful copy editing. There are far too many typos. And it should have included a proper bibliography. The endnotes are rich and extensive, but their sheer volume renders a bibliography all the more needful. That being said, The Myth of Disenchantment remains a brilliant and provocative book that rewards close reading.