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While the number of people involved in new religious movements (NRMs) is small, the attention they have received in the popular media and academic discourse suggest a greater significance. In the popular media, NRMs are most often seen as a social problem. In academic studies, they are more often associated with processes of social change and the critique of modernity. In the literature, there are four interpretive frameworks for understanding the significance of NRMs when viewed as a response to the social conditions of modernity. The first sees them as part of the protest against modernity. The second sees them as forums for modern social experimentation. The third identifies them with the re-enchantment of the modern world. The fourth suggests they are born of attempts to adapt to the social and psychological tensions created by a dialectic of trust and risk in late modern societies.

Te may be culturally conservative, but it is by no means impervious to change. While the mechanisms for dealing with limited change have been discussed in previous chapters, the Conclusion examines the more substantial developments that are likely to come about as a consequence of “radical transcendence.” The resulting disenchantment—to use Weber's term—entails the irrevocable retreat of “sublime values” from a rational and secularised world. Evidence for this process in Te is found by re‐examining its laws and identifying the disappearance of some of the most complex institutions that were seen to be central to its civil religion. However, using analogies from Indo‐European linguistics and the status of transcendence in European religion, it is suggested that the conspicuous phenomenon of disenchantment is constantly balanced by a less visible process of re‐enchantment, and evidence for the latter can be found in the case of Te.

Max Weber was half right: modernity is indeed characterized most centrally by the “disenchantment of the world.” At the same time, however, modernity is also characterized by the re-enchantment of the world, an enchantment, this time, on strictly secular terms. In their different ways, stage magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin and Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé both sought new, secular sources of wonder, order, and value; both came to see self-deception as indispensable to that end; and both, finally, understood that in order to maintain our necessary illusions—in order to preserve them, though we recognize them for what they are—we have to become skilled at adopting a rather peculiar state of mind. It is precisely this state of mind, a state of quasi-simultaneous conviction and distrust, that Robert-Houdin’s tricks and Mallarmé’s poems, with their paradigmatically proto-modernist reflexivity, require for their appreciation. Aesthetic modernism is not just a game, a marketing ploy, a “statement,” or a symptom; it is, instead, a literary training-ground. To become skilled at handling modernist fictions is, in the end, to strengthen our capacity to re-enchant the world.

Theconcluding chapter draws the many strands of theresearch together around ‘the art of re-enchantment’. Early Music is explained as a processof re-enchanting classical music, and in so doing further clues as to why the movement took off when it did are revealed. Reflecting on (doing) art more generally, attention is drawn to the need for re-connection - with nature, knowledge, cultural entrepreneurship, capitalism, and authenticity. Only through developing our transformational capability to reconcile the apparently contradictory (whether this is old vs. new; head vs. heart; amateur vs. professional), will we trulydiscover authenticity. Our challenge as artful and authentic human beings is to allow space for (doing) art in our lives in order to become fully (authentically) ourselves, whilst also being prepared to act with authenticity so as to bring art more fully into our lives. Learning to live this unfolding dialectic is the art of re-enchantment.

This introductory chapter begins with a sketch of postmodern re-enchantment in order to explain one aspect of this book’s enterprise — namely, a scholarly concern not only with Derridean spectres but also with what Mary Shelley describes as ‘the true old-fashioned, foretelling, flitting, gliding ghost’. It then explains what this has got to do with Romanticism in general and Byron in particular. It asks why his poetry, of all the Romantics, is especially relevant to debates about postmodern enchantment? And why might the re-enchantment narrative be a fruitful context in which to reconsider his work? An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter explores the evolution of the rural Gothic following the First World War, noting how the legacy of the conflict is evident in an emphasis, for example, upon violence and trauma within domestic space (E.F. Benson). For some authors of the period, there is a sense of rebirth following the war, linked to a re-enchantment of the British landscape that contains Gothic elements in its focus upon narratives of pagan sacrifice (Mary Butts, Algernon Blackwood) or witchcraft (Sylvia Townsend Warner). Many of these developments come together in depictions of Cornwall, particularly in the novels of Daphne du Maurier or in D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo, as a space that is simultaneously English and non-English, liminal, and connected to ancient civilizations and mythologies.

This chapter examines the role of the Protocols as part of an ominous new phenomenon: secular “political religions.” The Protocols is a remarkable case study in the way that, under the secular pressures of modernity's skepticism, scientific rigor, and drive to separate church and state, religious beliefs reemerged in a new and different idiom. The Protocols appeared in the middle of the “1900 moment” (1880–1910), when “the general worldview was affected by the fall in influence of the great religions” and when that collapse of traditional religion created a devastating psychological void. In this sense, the Protocols as a mythical narrative participated in the “re-enchantment” of the world—acting not as a regression from modernity but as a response to it.

This chapter argues that there is a variety of secular and conscious strategies for re-enchantment, held together by a common aim of filling a God-shaped void. The discussion also introduces three approaches to affirm the claim and offer a more nuanced understanding of the nature of modernity. The first is to reject the notion that any lingering enchantment within Western culture must of necessity be a relic (the binary approach). The second is to reject the notion that modernity is itself enchanted, unbeknown to its subjects, in a deceptive and dangerous way (the dialectical approach). It is to accept, instead, the fact that modernity embraces seeming contraries, such as rationality and wonder, secularism and faith (antinomial). The third type of enchantment is the modern enchantment par excellence: one which simultaneously enchants and disenchants.

This chapter examines the homeless who have a more direct, literal, and pressing acquaintance with the modern predicament than anyone else. Their response is to construct “gardens” amid desolate spaces, gardens made sometimes of flowers, or piles of leaves, but sometimes just of stuffed animals, milk cartons, or recycled refuse. This chapter argues that the homeless garden provides a corner of order, a “still point of the turning world,” and thus a point of contact between uprooted individuals and the world in which they live: a re-enchantment of space. It claims that to understand this is to refuse the equal injustice, the equal projective reduction, of seeing only distress.

This chapter argues that modern space may be re-enchanted architecturally. This was the explicit goal of Josep Puig i Cadafalch, a prominent Catalan politician and architect. Like his romantic predecessors, Puig turned to the imagination in order to redress the rational and commercial excesses of the modern world. Puig recovered medieval motifs. In his hands, however, these were consciously used to connote the forward-looking and industrial traditions of the Catalan region. Puig deliberately mobilized an “imagination of place” against the “abstract space” of modern architecture, melding tradition and modernity, imagination and reality, and showing that the romantic imagination could re-enchant the world without being either escapist or reactionary.

This chapter claims that Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch—and a large number of less self-reflective moderns—found a new locus, within the material world, for the mystical revelation. It examines gnosticism and asymmetrical dualism. There are, in each case, two worlds, the imperfect and the perfect. The asymmetry lies in the fact that crossworld transit is in one direction only. One can't force his way into the mystery, but only hope for catching esoteric wisdom from the other side. An example is that of the self. If certain strains of psychology are right, the deepest parts of the mind are inaccessible to conscious scrutiny yet indirectly palpable and, when disclosed, redemptive.

This chapter notes that re-enchantment takes place through language in a strikingly different way. It provides an account of a genuine, non-fanciful, potentially epistemology-generating access to the earliest period of human existence on earth. It is well known that when people seek to make genuine contact with another individual, he attends to the style of his utterances, not merely to the paraphrasable content. The same thing holds at a higher level. Just as the music of an individual conveys his essence, the music of a language also conveys its essence. And if one listens carefully enough, one may retrace his steps all the way back to the source of language in general.

This chapter explains the significance of reflexive spirituality in the context of four stories: (1) The disenchantment of society and the modern loss of meaning. In this story, reflexive spirituality is part of an effort to re-enchant modernity. (2) The discipline of sociology defined modernity as a movement away from religious tradition and toward reason. In this context, reflexive spirituality is a surprising combination of reason and religion that shows how religion can contribute to the project of modernity. (3) As modernity progressed, liberal religion lost a sense of its own mythology as it tried to accommodate the demand for reasonable religion. In this story, reflexive spirituality is part of a theological revitalization movement among religious liberals. (4) More and more Americans identify as “spiritual, but not religious” but don’t realize that they are part of a long tradition of unchurched spirituality in the United States. In the context of this history, reflexive spirituality offers a way of engaging religious traditions without making them totally authoritative.

The reprise of La Source at the Paris Opera Ballet, following the adoption of legislation banning the veil in public spaces, has the potential to speak of gender and climate justice, but misses the contemporary cosmopolitics of the Arab spring.

Music reworks modernity, in part, by constructing imaginary journeys to alternative places (heterotopia). A sense of transport is built into tonality which delimits borders in order to cross them and juxtaposes dynamic linear motion with static spatial fields. The rigid lines of the new transport (railways, steamships) were countered by music’s evocation of water voyages. The construction of musical landscapes paralleled the cultivation of the garden, park, and picturesque landscape as alternative aesthetic spaces, the counterweight to the metaphysical restlessness of modernity, embodied in the figure of Faust. Music’s re-enchantment of the world detunes its own rationalized order, as in Bartók’s ‘night music’, or the reversion of the French horn to its natural tuning in Britten and Ligeti. In the later twentieth century, electronic music reworks the Baroque idea of the echo as a transformation of the visual world in the elsewhere of the auditory.

This chapter defines wonder, sketches out how its operation shifts over the course of the eighteenth century, and indicates wonder’s role in the re-enchantment of the Enlightenment much discussed by critics, as well as in a cognitive state of “enchanted enlightenment” associated with reading fiction. The Introduction then introduces the textual strategies that, in engaging wonder, make pleasurable a prevailing historical mood of cognitive uncertainty. The Introduction concludes by describing the book’s aims, methods, and organization, and provides an overview of the book’s remaining chapters that indicate the relationship between the book’s historical trajectory and its attention to textual strategies that engage wonder.