The Fall from Myth into Materialism – The disenchantment of the world after the Scientific Revolution.
Entzauberung der Welt (disenchantment of the world)
Max Weber’s concept of Entzauberung der Welt (disenchantment of the world) describes the historical process by which modern society replaces magical, religious, and mystical explanations of reality with rationalization, calculation, and scientific understanding.
Introduced prominently in his 1917 lecture Science as a Vocation, the term signifies the belief that there are no mysterious, incalculable forces at play, but rather that all phenomena can be mastered through technical means and intellectual calculation.
- Rationalization: The shift from traditional, mythic worldviews to a worldview dominated by instrumental rationality and bureaucratic efficiency.
- Loss of Mystery: The world transitions from a "great enchanted garden" filled with spirits and divine will to a transparent, demystified system governed by causal laws.
- Cultural Critique: Weber viewed this process with ambivalence; while it enabled technological progress and intellectual clarity, it also led to a loss of meaning and the "iron cage" of bureaucratic constraint.
- Distinction from Atheism: Entzauberung is not merely the rejection of God but the intellectualization of the world, where science becomes the primary method for understanding existence.
- Modern Consequences: The disenchantment creates a nihilistic vacuum because science can explain how things work but cannot answer why we live or what values we should uphold, leading to a "battle of gods" among competing value spheres.
In Science as a profession says Weber:
"The increasing intellectualization and rationalization therefore does not signify an increasing general knowledge of the living conditions under which one stands. Rather, it signifies something else: the knowledge of or the belief in the fact that, if one only wished to do so, one could at any time learn it; that, in principle, there are no mysterious, incalculable powers at work in it; and that, rather, one could in principle master all things through calculation. This, however, means: the disenchantment of the world. No longer, like the savage for whom such powers existed, does one need to resort to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits. Instead, technical means and calculation perform the task. This, above all, is what intellectualization as such signifies.”
Materialism: Dogmatic belief in only this physical world
And ignorance of the reality of our mind, of our dreams, of a deeper non-physical spiritual reality…
Re-enchantment
The Return of Enchantment – How do we reawaken the mythic perception in a modern, rationalist culture?
Library of Light Edition 1.0 — Last revised: April 2026