Modern Magie: Sites of the Occult and the Epistemology of the Supernatural, 1880-1930

Abstract

This article serves as a thematic, conceptual and historiographical introduction to the entire volume. A brief presentation of its three central questions (the representation of the supernatural in the medja, the contingent boundary between the sensuous and the extrasensory, and the spatial conditions of the occult in an urban context) is followed by an epistemological examination of four heuristical concepts (occultism and science, spiritism and belief, mysticism and experience, esotericism and knowledge) and a discussion of the volume's four leitmotifs (religion versus science, personae versus networks, this world versus the next, metropole versus province). Rather than insisting on an analysis of the occult and its urban sites in the context of modernity, a more productive approach explores questions of the epistemology of the occult.