Enfilade

This book from Paul Monod (like John Fleming’s The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists, and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason, featured in the previous posting) appeared last year, but since I failed to note it and since we’ve just highlighted the Gothic Imagination and Witches, it seemed like a good time to backtrack.

And, I would note, after so many events to mark the Hanoverian anniversary, Coronation Day is finally here: George I was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 20 October 1714. –CH

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From Yale UP:

Paul Kléber Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 440 pages, ISBN: 978-0300123586, $50.

The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are known as the Age of Enlightenment, a time of science and reason. But in this illuminating book, Paul Monod reveals the surprising extent to which Newton, Boyle, Locke, and other giants of rational thought and empiricism also embraced the spiritual, the magical, and the occult. Although public acceptance of occult and magical practices waxed and waned during this period they survived underground, experiencing a considerable revival in the mid-eighteenth century with the rise of new anti-establishment religious denominations. The occult spilled over into politics with the radicalism of the French Revolution and into literature in early Romanticism. Even when official disapproval was at its strongest, the evidence points to a growing audience for occult publications as well as to subversive popular enthusiasm. Ultimately, finds Monod, the occult was not discarded in favor of ‘reason’ but was incorporated into new forms of learning. In that sense, the occult is part of the modern world, not simply a relic of an unenlightened past, and is still with us today.

Paul Monod is A. Barton Hepburn Professor of History at Middlebury College. He lives in Weybridge, Vermont.