Foundations of Re-Enchantment

In The Foundations of Re-Enchantment, Dr Christopher Coome explores the mystical and occult organizations that blossomed from the late 19th to the early 20th century. The four most influential of these movements were the Theosophical Society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Ordo Templi Orientis, and the Anthroposophical Society.

These organizations were engaged in the most pressing cultural, religious, and scientific questions of the day, and the occultists applied their insights to fields as diverse as gender norms, interfaith relations, and epistemology. Scholars often view this occult moment as highly innovative—which it certainly was—but it was also deeply in debt to another movement: Freemasonry. Examining why that was the case, and why the occultists were so dependent on Freemasonry reveals a long running current of religious innovation and experimentation that has yet to receive significant scholarly attention.

Dr Christopher Coome is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University in North Carolina. He holds a PhD from Queen’s University and a Master’s Degree from Yale Divinity School. Trained as an intellectual and religious historian, Chris is fascinated by issues of the mind and spirit, and how such issues often prove determinative in shaping human history. Among friends, he happily describes himself as ‘intrinsically Neo-Platonic.’

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