The Myth of Disenchantment
In this talk, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm will present key arguments from his book The Myth of Disenchantment, which challenges the widespread narrative that modernity is defined by a loss of belief in magic, spirits, and myth. Storm contends that this story is historically inaccurate: attempts to eradicate enchantment often failed, and even the human sciences were shaped by esoteric influences. Tracing the origins of the “myth of disenchantment” through philosophy, anthropology, and related disciplines, he reveals how modern notions of a disenchanted world emerged alongside, not apart from, occult revivals in Europe’s supposed age of reason.
Speaker Bio
Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is an historian and philosopher of the Human Sciences. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University, and Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Religion and Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College in the United States. Storm received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, his MA from Harvard University, and has held visiting positions at Princeton University, Harvard University, École Française d’Extrême-Orient, and Universität Leipzig. He is the author of award-winning The Invention of Religion in Japan (2012), The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences (2017), as well as the award-winning Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (2021), all published by University of Chicago Press. A fourth monograph, The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, & the Coils of Critical History is forthcoming from the same press in 2026.
Curated & Hosted by
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.
