A WEBERIAN ANALYSIS of WICCAN CHARISMA Robert Puckett The
RE-ENCHANTING THE WORLD: A WEBERIAN ANALYSIS OF WICCAN CHARISMA Robert Puckett The rise of Wicca is largely a reaction to the modern disenchant- ment of the world. Sabina Magliocco (2004: 120) argues that Wicca is a form of creative resistance against the dominant ontology of the Enlightenment, which marginalizes imagination and ecstasy. The soci- ologist Max Weber (borrowing from Friedrich Schiller) described this phenomenon as Entzauberung der Welt, literally, the de-magifi cation of the world, which he regarded as the immediate result of the rise of Protestant ascetic rationalism, modern science, and modern capitalism. Weber’s most forceful statement of this idea was in his 1918 address at Munich University entitled “Science as a Vocation.” Speaking of the “meaning of science,” Weber said: It means principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means (Weber 1968: 228). The ascension of the “formal rationality” of science, which legitimates a “means-end rational calculation by reference back to universally applied rules, laws, or regulations” (Kalberg 1980: 1158), obviates the need for the common-sense “practical rationality,” which “judges worldly activity in relation to the individual’s purely pragmatic and egoistic interests” (ibid.: 1151), and ideological “substantive rational- ity,” which “directly orders action into patterns .
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