BOOK REVIEW: "The Myth of Disenchantment" by Jason Ananda Josephson Storm

An eye-opening hidden gem

Jason Ananda Josephson Storm. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. University of Chicago Press (May 16, 2017).

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While I am writing this review as a standalone so that it can be appreciated on its own terms, it must be confessed that one of the main reasons I am writing the review now is because of the unbelievable experiences I had while trying to finish the book. Yes; trying to finish a book. It took me over two years to do it. As it happens, the story supports the narrative promoted by the book in some fascinating ways.

For starters, the book was released in 2017, the same year as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, about which there is an entire category of posts at my blog, Dark Twins…and one of the very reasons I wrote that series was to contribute to the re-enchantment of the world. My only other book review published outside the blog (at Paralibrum) made reference to the Hylian Banishing Ritual I developed as a result.

The main thesis of the book is that the narrative of disenchantment—in a nutshell, the fading away of magic and spirits into a world of materialism—is simply false. As Storm skillfully elucidates over the course of 11 intellectually dense chapters in what manages to be a rather moving story arc, the truth behind the world’s apparent default ontological assumptions is more complicated than it seems. As I learned, the myth of disenchantment is so pervasive that a world full of magical practitioners and spiritualists decry the state of affairs even as witchcraft and the occult continue to mushroom into an industry to which the term “cottage” would be insulting.

Really, the point of the book could be made effectively simply by pointing out that contradiction in trends. Nonetheless, it all needs to be said because I am positive that almost every magical practitioner who read the above comparison would have been hit with a moment of realization about it. At the very least, I know I was, and then my appetite for the details was whetted.

I first obtained a copy of the book in early 2023. After reading the introduction and the first chapter, it was already very clear how aligned this work was with everything I was doing at Dark Twins. Around that same time, I was enduring the spiritual crisis known as Crossing the Abyss, tormented by nightmarish synchronistic confirmations, as if from the universe itself, of all of my deepest fears. These included fears about my partner at the time cheating on me.

It all got so bad that, in desperation, I performed a ritual with the Goddess Hekate to secure “justice” (in other words, I was hexing her). In a chilling moment of alignment, I confirmed the hex with the draw of a tarot card, and then received a text from my partner informing me that her father had flipped his Jeep and was being airlifted to a hospital downstate. The message attached to this was that if anything untoward were happening, the abuse of her father would be to blame, and he would be the appropriate target in the name of actual justice. There was a lesson here. It would appear that the world itself was, in some way, acting with intention.

How could that be?

While I had hoped that this curse would shock my partner and win her “respect” (fear), the opposite held true; she rushed to his side and hit the ground running, holding her entire family together. She brought me with her to the hospital.

I still remember sitting in the waiting room, opening the book to Chapter Two (entitled “Revenge of the Magicians”), and reading the following quote as tears of terror welled up in my eyes:

Do not trust those who analyze magic. They are usually magicians in search of revenge.

Bruno Latour, Les microbes, guerre et paix, 1984

Considering this situation was really part of a larger behavioral pattern for me (that is, hexing exes), this was quite the slice of humble pie.

I would not pick up the book again until November 6th, 2024—the day after the U.S. Presidential election—in the airport as I was leaving my partner. Since it had been so long, I decided to start the book over.

My review of the book will follow a narrative format wherein I discuss a given chapter and then relate the strange events in my life (and the life of another love interest, with whom I was already getting involved by the time the above events took place) to show how they aligned. For the sake of brevity, I won’t cover every chapter.

Chapter One: Enchanted (Post) Modernity and Chapter Two: Revenge of the Magicians

I am lumping these two chapters together, despite the fact that the latter chapter opens its own section of the book (Part I: God’s Shadow), because Chapter One is very brief and mainly serves the purpose of transitioning between the Introduction and Part I.

I began re-reading the book at Hobby airport in Houston, TX, leaving my then-partner (the “Introduction,” in terms of the narrative of my life as it is documented at Dark Twins) and flying home to Chicago. I made it through Chapter Two by the time I landed.

It is 3:33am as I type this sentence.

The title of Chapter Two is apropos, as it is here where Storm first really gets his hands dirty with the business of surgically separating the myth of disenchantment from the truth at its very root: It will be reiterated throughout the rest of the work, but it turns out that the people most known as disenchanters who championed skepticism have frequently been men (almost invariably so) grappling with the obvious magic playing out before their very eyes.

The unsettling suggestion made by this pattern, which the author never says directly out loud, is that the entire “project” of disenchantment is, at least in part, likely a deficient coping strategy in the mind of a budding magician or mystic who can’t handle the implications of a universe that is always listening to and responding to their every action. It is a suppression of observations about the world at large that is mainly driven by denial. I know this because I have lived it my entire life up until this reading of the book, and that life has been filled to the brim with magic. Even today, I feel the temptation to explain away much of the magic I see in rational, materialistic terms. Why?

Because the overwhelming message is: “You are not in control; even when you seem to be, it’s because nature is allowing it.”

The chapter opens with a paragraph listing some of the more prominent thinkers on the subject of our universe and its ontological status. One of the most recognizable is one who makes for one of the best examples of the strange pattern Jason Storm unearths for us with this book: Isaac Newton, the father of modern physics, who literally wrote the rulebook that put the worldview of determinism on the map: Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. As many modern magicians know and love to point out to skeptics, the same man studied the Kabbalah and Hermetics on the side. His case was one of the exceptions to the rule of thumb Storm establishes here, as he was a man who saw God in the math.

From here, Storm proceeds to showcase the esoteric and very magical interests of such leading lights as Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon, and even René Descartes, who was a Kabbalist and Rosicrucian. According to Storm, that’s a well-established fact of his biography, but it’s one I never learned about. Even The History Channel pays lip service to the spiritual influences on Newton, but I’ve never seen a documentary mention this about Descartes. Of course, my Millenial ass hasn’t read his biography, either.

Chapter Three: The Myth of Absence and Chapter 4: The Shadow of God

I departed Houston on November 6th, 2024, and on New Year’s Day of 2025, I got back in touch with “the other woman,” a Facebook page creator with whom I had forged a strange connection; I had honestly been flirting with her the entire time I was obsessed with the idea that my partner was cheating on me. They do say that’s how it happens, don’t they?

We engaged in a lively correspondence, soon moving things to telephone, spending most of the day talking. My next attempt to read this chapter occurred in late January. I was out of money, and made the decision for the first time in my life to sell blood plasma to make ends meet.

As with my previous reading, this reading began in an uncomfortable waiting room, amid extremely disconcerting synchronicity. It was the kind of situation some friends of mine had mentioned having themselves, similar to the phenomenon of “gang stalking,” where people believe they are being followed and harassed by strangers. From my point of view, everything said by everyone around me held some reference to events in my personal life, and the tone of the speakers was often one of mockery, so that it felt like I was being mercilessly roasted about my deepest insecurities. When this occurred, the speaker would also raise their voice conspicuously and there would be a somewhat contrived tone to their voice, almost as if to make it very clear: “Yes, we are very much messing with you.”

For example, I had to step into an examination room, whereupon a plus-sized nurse with blue hair and a nose ring (she was actually pretty attractive) asked me routine questions that all seemed to reference my early courtship with Veronica. For example, my height was taken, whereupon I learned I am shorter than I had told Veronica (I was 5’4”, and had told her I was 5’10”), and the nurse seemed to be suppressing the urge to laugh at me as she measured me. The entire vibe was like being on an episode of Candid Camera.

Returning to the waiting room, Tanya (“the other woman, who deserves a name just as much as Veronica does) started sending texts that almost seemed to be taunting me about the situation, such as a link to the song, "Is It Too Deep For You?” by Porcelain Raft.

I made a comment referencing lightning, which in my mind, was an allusion to Zeus, because all of this had me suddenly suspicious of Tanya. It recalled the harrowing experience I had in the waiting room of the hospital, when I had first tried reading this book.

Immediately after that, she blocked me and cut contact abruptly, and she maintained this for days.

I was devastated, but I began Chapter 3, “The Myth of Absence,” which lays a foundation for the dialectical approach Storm will take for the rest of our journey. In short, this chapter is all about explicating the philosophical foundations of modernity.

Friedrich Nietzche is widely credited with officially making the statement that God is dead, which seems to have served as an essentially performative declaration which “made it so” in the eyes of the public. As Storm explains, however, there was plenty of debate leading up to that point, including “The Pantheism Controversy,” a conflict between two contemporary philosophers who took opposing views on the opinions of a deceased colleague about Spinoza. This ended up setting the stage for a wider debate among German philosophers regarding the relationship between science and religion. The commonly-repeated myth is that the Enlightenment heralded the emergence of rationalism and science, which paved the way for the secularization of the world and God’s departure therefrom. Storm edifies the reader on this point, revealing that the true story is much more messy. The connection between the two is really more of a “situationship.” In Chapter Four, “The Shadow of God,” Storm shows us how the more immediate consequence of this turn of events was a blooming of spiritual and philosophical thought in the form of the Occult Revival, whose history Storm fills out.

Nonetheless, it would inevitably come to pass that the world would be thrust into a de-divinization that would eventually enable the wholesale exploitation of nature, now seen mainly as an inert resource to be plundered.

As I lay, shivering, in the chair where my blood was siphoned out of me, I reflected mournfully on Tanya’s departure and how, in an esoteric sense, if I were the God and she were the Goddess, it meant that she must be suffering terribly. Was she being similarly exploited? Was her body being plundered?

I began to suspect that I was entering into marriage with The Goddess in a sense more final and tangible than I had ever imagined…

…and she wouldn’t even acknowledge my existence.

Chapter Four, “The Decline of Magic: J.G. Frazer” and Chapter Five, “The Revival of Magick: Aleister Crowley”

Tanya and I would, of course, eventually patch things up, though this initial “breakup” took its toll on our relationship. Trust was harder for me to come by after that. We went through a couple more rounds of separations, which we took to euphemistically calling “taking a breather.” Nonetheless, by March, we were planning to meet in person.

To complicate matters, we were “taking a breather” the very day I flew out to Delaware to meet her. Her last words to me, in fact, were a command not to show up there, or there would be trouble. Maybe cops. I did tell her afterward that I would be coming, but that if she really didn’t want me to come, she should just say the word and I would stay put. She said nothing, maintaining her silence.

Just as I was walking out of the TSA checkpoint, she texted me asking if I was really coming. When she called me as I sat in the terminal at Midway airport, she was happy I persevered, and excited to meet me. She had been planning to send an Uber for me, but she changed her plans to pick me up personally.

They say anyone who will pick you up at the airport loves you.

On the airplane, I began reading Chapter Four: “The Decline of Magic: J.G. Frazer.” The entire chapter is centered on Frazer’s seminal treatise, The Golden Bough, and its relationship with fairy lore. There is a whole section of the chapter labeled, “The Departure of the Fairies.” This was fascinating to me because Tanya’s mother had literally named her after Titania, the Queen of the Fae. I soon set the book down when the passenger next to me struck up a conversation with me and I decided to lean into it. It was a weird conversation. He himself was headed to the same town I was, and would be there for the same amount of time I would, departing the same day to return to Chicago. Despite the fact that he was originally from Delaware, he mentioned to me that he had once lived in the same suburban area, on the South Side of Chicago, where I had lived as a teenager.

We had three days to enjoy and to get to know one another better. Being in her presence is…impossible to describe. It was as though I had been seeking her my entire life (and indeed, I had), and had finally found her. A lifetime of toil had led me to her comforting arms. Likewise, I was so very glad to be able to put my hand on her back reassuringly, or kiss her on the crown of her head as she sat at the kitchen table of our Airbnb.

We rang in the Blood Moon Eclipse in Aries in the bedroom.

There were a couple of times during our visit that the topic of Aleister Crowley came up. In one conversation at the kitchen table, we discussed the Abyss, and how she with her quadruple Scorpio natal chart had died many deaths throughout her life. I humored her with an acknowledgement that, yes, this process of killing the ego was pretty over-dramatized by the likes of Crowley in a way that does seem to kind of miss the point of the exercise entirely.

One night, sitting on “our” bench (bench #3) in a park on the shore of the Delaware River, I was telling her about my Word as a Magus, and how it was (ironically) meant to dismantle the kinds of edifices (in the form of magical orders) that form the lion’s share of his legacy. Just then, she interrupted me to ask me if I could see the being moving right in front of us. I could not. However, disturbed somewhat by it, she felt we should leave, so we stood up to return to our room.

Eventually, I brought the conversation back to what I had been saying earlier, at which point Tanya mentioned to me (as if to break to me that I was mansplaining to her), “I’ve read Diary of a Drug Fiend,” which also came with an unspoken acknowledgement regarding the Abyss, causing me to reflect that despite our earlier conversation, she still has yet to cross it herself.

We really hadn’t been on the subject long before an SUV full of drunken men stopped just near us, and they seemed to be calling out to us, attempting to intimidate us. She told me to stop, then to kiss her, and just hang back a while, but the men didn’t move. I glanced, and the driver, hanging his head out the window, definitely seemed to be looking at me as he shouted.

I eventually told Tanya, “Let’s go,” and we kept moving back toward our room. I reasoned that if we could make it to the open bar just up the block, they wouldn’t try anything in front of all those people. I kept walking, and as we passed the vehicle (which had now circled back to face our direction, snugly parallel to the curb), it was rolling backwards along with us as if to keep pace. That was okay, because I walked right past a parked Jeep and they couldn’t follow us anymore.

Later, at the room, our consensus was that whatever it was Tanya had sensed by that shore, it had probably gone into that car, following us back toward downtown New Castle.

Our visit was entirely too short, in my opinion, but I was blessed to have even that time with Tanya. We take what we can get sometimes.

It was when it came time for me to fly home that things got really weird. My flight was set to depart around 7:50pm, but by 11:00pm, we were still waiting due to rain delays. I thought about this book and my duty to read it owing to how it would inform my own ongoing work, but didn’t take it out of my backpack for two solid hours at least. Eventually, I knuckled under and decided to finish the chapter.

We began boarding soon after I picked up the book. We sat at the gate for an inordinate amount of time. We departed the gate and sat at the runway waiting to take off. We sat there so long, we had to go back to the gate to drop off the First Officer and get a new one. Notably, that occurred as soon as I finished reading the chapter.

I texted Tanya about this, intimating, half-jokingly, that she must be trying to detain me until I did what I was supposed to do.

She took credit.

Soon, we were back on the tarmac, waiting. I decided to begin the next chapter, “The Revival of Magic: Aleister Crowley.” I was finishing the chapter as we took off.

This brought me to the beginning of Part II: “The Horrors of Metaphysics.”

Chapter Seven: “The Black Tide: Mysticism, Rationality, and the German Occult Revival” and Chapter Eight: “Dialectic of Darkness: The Magical Foundations of Critical Theory.”

The title of Chapter 7 (one kind of bankruptcy in the United States, I notice), “The Black Tide,” makes me think of the game, WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness. It also makes me think of the post I wrote—published on Transgender Day of Visibility 2024—"The Rising Tide.” This is most notable because my last day in Delaware fell on Transgender Day of Visibility 2025, and that became a bit of a problem.

The reason it was a problem is because it essentially became the cause of our most recent fight…and she hasn’t spoken to me ever since. It’s now been well over a month of silence.

Tanya wasn’t sure if we should meet now, and one reason is because we’ve already been fighting a lot, and one of the issues has been the tug-of-war for my attention that carries on between my work here and her. She was also concerned about growing too attached, upon meeting, to be able to weather a long-distance relationship.

I feel her.

Because my Word—Hermekate—takes something of a special interest in the transgender community (just take a second to think about it and let it sink in…ahh, there you go), it was important to me to write a post for Transgender Day of Visibility. I actually got started on the post on the day-of, in a cafe downstairs while Tanya met with a lawyer upstairs—but I did spend most of the following day writing that post, and then I was distant from her the next day. The post is called "V" is for "Visible".

To be blunt, Tanya and I both suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder, so issues like attachment, jealousy, rage, and abandonment anxiety are struggles we share. As I would learn, she was soon to begin an intensive program of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy—and honestly, her therapist didn’t want her distracted by her relationship with me.

So those last few days were…most precious, and I am honestly only realizing that just now as I type this sentence. A semi truck just made a very loud “THUD” outside my open window.

I’m so sorry, Tanya.

Another big component of my Word, Hermekate, is my work involving the intersection of video gaming with esoteric Initiation. Specifically, I have identified the games The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom as viable vehicles for esoteric Initiation. Much of my work as a Magus is involving fleshing out the intriguing details. Some of the earliest inspirations for this go back to games like WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness.

On April 4th, I performed a ceremony in-game in Breath of the Wild (BoTW) that involved completing the quest to free Divine Beast Vah Ruta. I then emailed her about it since she wasn’t speaking to me, and I even wove in insights about the DBT lesson we had discussed just before our final fight, relating the concepts of Rational Mind, Emotional Mind, and Wise Mind to the concepts of Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis, as well as to the Triforce. It was a stroke of genius, in my humble opinion.

Interestingly, Chapter Seven: “The Black Tide: Mysticism, Rationality, and the German Occult Revival” puts the highlight on the field of psychology—namely, on the figure of Sigmund Freud, who is constantly contrasted with his colleague and friend Carl Jung in terms of Freud’s being cast as the atheist and skeptic to Jung’s mystic. This chapter is basically all about dispelling that notion, highlighting Freud’s own seldom-discussed speculative relationship with mysticism.

In Chapter Eight: “Dialectic of Darkness: The Magical Foundations of Critical Theory,” Storm breaks ground discussing Ludwig Klages, a man whose ideas regarding politics and the occult played a formative role in what would eventually become the Nazi regime in Germany.

The elephant in the room is that, as I read this chapter, all I could think of was just how similar the ideas I relate to my Word, Hermekate, are to his philosophy. Even more striking is the fact that Klages was a vicious antisemite as well, and my Word is associated with my personal sigil from a self-Initiation ceremony I performed—and that sigil resembles a swastika, largely on purpose.

And yet, my Word is staunchly rooted in the principles of inclusivity and the protection of society’s most vulnerable by its strongest, best, and brightest.

Yes, and it’s even more elegant that I say my Word is meant to end the very paradigm of Words, because this means Klages may already have laid out the essential blueprints for my Word, meaning my Word is nothing special at all. Precisely the point.

Chapter Nine: “The Ghosts of Metaphysics: Logical Positivism and Disenchantment” and Chapter Ten: “The World of Enchantment; or, Max Weber at the End of History”

At some point, I read deeply enough into some of the “synchronicity” I was experiencing to realize that while Tanya wasn’t speaking to me anymore, she was nonetheless communicating with me through hidden messages in various Facebook pages either under her management or somehow connected with her. It would appear I have been embedded all along in a larger movement—one with many sympathizers to my Word, far more numerous than I would have dared to dream—and we collaborated to ring in May Day this year in style. This included pages aligned with the political left as well as witchcraft pages. My contribution was my most recent post here, my Mayday Livestream.

Chapter Nine is all about the movement of Logical Positivism, the philosophical theory that is most-often blamed these days for the spreading sentiment of scientism, a worldview so firmly committed to disallowing anything even resembling a spiritual reality that most people seem to assume that worldview is the dominant one in the world today. Not only does this entire book lay that view to waste, this chapter reveals that the actual roots and motives of logical positivism had plenty of overlap with the occult world—and may even have ultimately had the leveraging of strict scientific procedures to prove the existence of spirit as one of its earliest goals. This would be ironic because it would mean every magical practitioner who carries the burden of a sense of struggle against the “dominant” material paradigm is doing so needlessly.

Chapter Ten, focusing on Max Weber, drives the thesis of the book home by taking a look at one of the forefathers of Modern Psychology—also widely thought to be a physicalist/rationalist himself—was, in fact, something of a mystic. There are even hints, owing to the two Springs he spent at a neopagan free-loving nudist colony, that he may have been something of a sex magician, but this is pure speculation on my part.

I think that’s a bit funny because some of my earliest posts at Dark Twins (along with several of my recent YouTube videos and livestreams here at Substack) have referenced the ways in which the story of Tanya and I reaches all the way back into early childhood if you take into account some of the spiritual beliefs I have held throughout the years. It reminds me of the school where I first attended Kindergarten—Weber Elementary in Arvada, CO—where, on my very first day of school, I was “reported” by a fascist hall monitor for being curious and walking over to stand in line for the wrong classroom.

Conclusion

Jason Storm concludes this wonderful and important tome by reiterating the thesis and summarizing the broad strokes of his own narrative: That disenchantment is, indeed, only a myth, as is any perception that it holds some kind of choke hold on public opinion. As we can reassure ourselves easily enough just by looking around us, we can rest assured that on the streets, spirit is still very much alive in the world.

This doesn’t mean magical people the world over don’t need to “press the attack” and continue prosecuting our varied efforts to re-enchant the world; while magic is still alive and well, we must reckon with the fact that the reason we perceive its absence is because very powerful forces such as those in control of centralized media channels and academia have ensured that most of the messaging coming from such sources does promote that worldview. Despite the evidence of our very own senses, this manages to take root in our minds to the point that we don’t feel secure in our position in the world as workers of wonder and magic.

If we don’t keep being magical AF, those forces will make the narrative a reality.