The Re-Enchantment of the West: Volume 1 Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture

276 Pages·2005·17.22 MB·English

by  Christopher Partridge

The Re-Enchantment of the West
Volume I
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The Re-Enchantment of the West
Volume I
Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization,
Popular Culture, and Occulture
Christopher Partridge
T8.T CLARK INTERNATIONAL
A Continuum imprint
LONDON • NEW YORK
Copyright © 2004 T&T Clark International
A Continuum imprint
Published by T&T Clark International
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
15 East 26th Street, Suite 1703, New York, NY 10010
www.tandtclark.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 0-567-08408-6 (paperback)
Typeset by CA Typesetting, www.shefrieldtypesetting.com
Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by CPI Bath
For Sarah
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
Parti
THE DISENCHANTMENT AND THE RE-ENCHANTMENT OF THE WEST
Chapter 1
THE DISENCHANTMENT OF THE WEST 8
Types of Secularization 8
Max Weber and the Disenchantment of the World 8
What Secularization Is Not 11
Rationalization and Pluralism 13
Concluding Comments 16
Chapter 2
UNDERSTANDING NEW RELIGIONS AND ALTERNATIVE SPIRITUALITIES 17
Max Weber on Sectarianism and Charisma 17
Ernst Troeltsch on Churches, Sects and Mysticism 19
H. Richard Niebuhr on Sectarianism 22
Bryan Wilson on Sectarianism 23
Towards a Typology of the New Religious Life 24
Secularization and New Age Spiritualities 29
Chapter 3
THE RE-ENCHANTMENT OF THE WEST 38
Disenchantment as the Precursor to Re-Enchantment 38
Spiritual, But Not Religious: Non-Traditional Religious Vitality 46
De-Exotification and Contextualization 50
Concluding Comments 57
Part II
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF OCCULTURE
Chapter 4
OCCULTURE 62
The Cultic Milieu and Mystical Religion 62
Occulture 66
The Occult 68
viii Contents
The Significance of the Self 71
The Priority of Experience and a Hermeneutic of Suspicion 75
Romanticizing the Premodern 77
Pagan Occulture 78
Concluding Comments 84
Chapter 5
EASTERNIZATION? 87
Turning East 87
East Meets West 89
The Significance of the 1893 World Parliament of Religions 92
A Revolution of Consciousness: The Sacralizing Significance
of the 1960s 96
Western Teachers in Eastern Traditions 105
Easternization? Problems and Proposals 106
Quasi-Religion, Instrumental Activism, and Syncretism 112
Concluding Comments 117
Chapter 6
POPULAR OCCULTURE: LITERATURE AND FILM 119
Popular Culture as Religious Text? 120
The Dilution Thesis 121
The Significance of Popular Culture 123
Supernatural Horror: Vampire Fiction 126
Cool Occulture 131
Popular Sacred Narratives 136
Concluding Comments 141
Chapter 7
POPULAR OCCULTURE: Music 143
Adorno and Popular Music 143
The Occultural Significance of Popular Music 147
The Easternization of Popular Music 151
Festival Culture 156
Psychedelic Trance Culture 166
Chilling Out with Ambient and Dub 175
The Sacred Art of Dub 178
Concluding Comments 183
CONCLUDING COMMENTS: PREDICTING RELIGION 185
Notes 189
Bibliography 224
Discography 247
Filmography 249
Index 250
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I began writing this book several years ago. In fact, to be honest, I began writing
another book several years ago. The book I initially began writing was about
contemporary Western Paganism. For encouraging me to write this abandoned
book I am enormously grateful to Janet Joyce, who was then with Cassell. By the
time Cassell became an imprint of Continuum my research had broadened. It had
done so for several reasons. First, it became increasingly apparent that some
fundamental sociological and cultural questions about the emergence and growth
of contemporary Paganism in the West needed to be addressed. Secondly, I was
also aware of literature which claimed that Paganism was a manifestation of a
fairly superficial contemporary religious phenomenon and, indeed, may even be
interpreted as part of the secularization process. Although initially persuaded by
such arguments, it became increasingly clear to me that they needed to be chal-
lenged and that this could only be done satisfactorily by broadening the scope of
my research to examine the milieu to which Paganism belonged. Finally, several
excellent studies of Paganism were quickly filling the gap I had initially identi-
fied when I began thinking about the book in the mid-1990s. Although I had
already read some superb treatments such as Tanya Luhrmann's Persuasions of
the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England(1989), in 1997 two
significant textbooks were published: Graham Harvey's Listening People, Speak-
ing Earth and Lynne Hume's Witchcraft and Paganism in Australia. However,
the book that finally settled the matter for me and led me to apply my efforts else-
where was Ronald Hutton's seminal historical study, The Triumph of the Moon:
A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (1999). That year also saw Helen Berger's
fine sociological study, A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism
and Witchcraft in the United States. Since then the flow of worthwhile mono-
graphs, such as Sarah Pike's Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary
Pagans and the Search for Community (2001) and Jone Salomonsen's Enchanted
Feminism: The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco (2002), as well as several
important collections of essays, has increased. Although there is still much inter-
esting work to be done in the area (such as the growing phenomenon of teen
witchcraft - to which I know scholars, particularly Hannah Sanders, have turned
their attention), and although I would like, at some point, to look at Paganism
from a theological and philosophical perspective (particularly with reference to
pantheism, panentheism and Pagan ethics), I am glad that I left that particular
area of study when I did - and have since enjoyed reading the work of those
with more specialist expertise than I. When I discussed this shift of focus with
Janet Joyce she was, as ever, very encouraging and urged me to follow my inter-