ATS2371 Chap.6 Witches Among Us: the New Age and Re-enchantment
Witches Among Us: the New Age and Re-enchantment
Week 6 asks whether the modern West is really disenchanted. Weber described rationalisation as modernity's iron cage, built from ends and means analysis, rules and procedures, classification, linear time, the division of labour and bureaucracy, and disenchantment as the historical process by which explanation stopped resting on supernatural forces.
Crucially, on this account rationality did not defeat religion; religious modernity carried it, eradicating magical efficacies from within. Against that background the week reads contemporary witchcraft.
Ezzy treats the New Age as a grouping of tendencies rather than a movement, defined by a self-ethic in which the self becomes the site of authentic spirituality, and reads popular spell books as technologies of the self supplied by a consumerist infrastructure.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Weber on rationalisation: ends and means, rules, classification, linear time, division of labour, bureaucracy
- 02
Disenchantment defined, and the twist that religious modernity was its vehicle rather than its casualty
- 03
The New Age as tendencies rather than a movement, and the transfer of authority from church structure to the individual
- 04
The self-ethic, holism and the psychologisation of religion, with self-interest as the standard of judgement
- 05
Spell books read as technologies of the self, and the consumerist infrastructure that supplies the bricolage
- 06
Two critiques to hold at once: the limited sense of broader social obligation, and the methodological limits of studying practice through published books
Locate contiguity and homeopathy inside a published spell
- 1The ring is contiguity, the contagious principle: an object in prior contact with the person is held to keep acting on them.
- 1The written wish is homeopathic: an image of the desired outcome stands in for the outcome.
- 1The colour choice is homeopathic too, working by resemblance within a conventional colour code rather than by contact.
- 1The repetition over seven evenings supplies formality and rigidity, which is ritual form rather than either Frazer principle.
- 1Name the limit: a book records prescription, not practice. You cannot infer from it how many readers performed the spell, in what circumstances, or what they took it to accomplish.
Key terms
- Disenchantment
- Weber's name for the historical process in which knowledge of the universe came to rest on rational science and empirical method instead of supernatural forces and salvation doctrines.
- Rationalisation
- The spread of ends and means calculation, rules, procedures, classification and bureaucratic organisation through modern life, which Weber described as an iron cage.
- Re-enchantment
- The claim that practices such as contemporary witchcraft return magical possibility to everyday life within a society that describes itself as disenchanted.
- Self-ethic
- The New Age principle in which the self becomes both the site of authentic spirituality and the standard against which questions are judged.
- Holism
- The valuing of connections across boundaries that would otherwise separate phenomena, set here against a conception that acts inwardly on the individual alone.
- Bricolage
- The assembling of a personal practice from elements selected out of established traditions, typically without regard to the contexts those elements came from.
- Wicca
- A religion anyone may enter, addressed to the goddess, or to a god and goddess figured as the Horned God and the Triple Goddess, recent in form and drawing on a long history in England and the wider West.
- Technologies of the self
- Practices a person applies to themselves in order to work on their own conduct or state, which is how the lecture reads what the spell books make available.
Witches Among Us: the New Age and Re-enchantment FAQ
What is the required reading for Week 6?
Ezzy's 2003 article in Culture and Religion, which reads mass-market spell books as a re-enchantment of ordinary life. The week also asks you to read and look at Titania Hardie's Hocus Pocus book of spells, which is available on the unit's Week 6 page.
Is the New Age the same thing as Wicca?
No. Wicca is a specific religion with named deities and organised covens. The New Age, on Ezzy's account, is better described as a grouping of tendencies that share family resemblances, and it covers crystals, eco-religion, neo-paganism and neo-shamanism, yoga, and reworkings of eastern religions.
What is the criticism the week wants me to weigh?
That the self-ethic leaves obligation at the level of community, society and globe largely unaddressed, and that the bricolage of selecting symbols without their contexts raises questions of cultural appropriation. The consumerist and hedonist readings both belong to this debate.
How does this week connect back to Weeks 2 and 4?
It is a deliberate return. Ezzy's spell books are analysed with the Frazer vocabulary of contiguity and homeopathy from Week 2, while the Gmelch and Malinowski account from Week 4 supplies the alternative reading of the same practices as responses to uncertainty.
Are there essay questions on this material?
Several of the fourteen. One puts up for evaluation the claim that magic and witchcraft belong to the modern West's past. Another asks how New Age witchcraft inverts hierarchies of body and spirituality. A third asks what actually links witchcraft to the New Age.
Assessment move
Keep a single page with two headings, disenchantment evidence and re-enchantment evidence, and file each week's cases under one of them. Several essay questions are direct invitations to argue that contrast, and a pre-sorted page is the difference between an argument and a summary.
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