The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern

Alex Owen is a historian of modern Britain, and this University of Chicago Press book is her academic study of British occultism, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its associated figures, read as a genuine expression of the culture of modernity rather than a superstitious holdover from an earlier age. Its strength is that argument itself, situating occult practice alongside contemporary developments in psychology, feminism and the arts rather than treating it as a separate, backward-looking curiosity, grounded in close archival work on the Golden Dawn generation. Its limit is that it is an intellectual and cultural history focused on this specific British milieu and period, so a claim about occultism in a different country or era needs a source with that particular focus rather than being generalized from this one.