It may be easiest to begin with a common assumption: that being modern means being rational. The modern person has a scientific mindset, a pragmatic attitude, and trusts technology to solve our every problem. “Rationality,” in this common view, is the antithesis of being superstitious, believing in magic and spirits, or relying on quackery and pseudoscience. Rational moderns have left all that behind. Let's take a closer look at those assumptions.

That modern civilisation is a disenchanted one can seem intuitive. If we look at our major institutions, evidence of it is not hard to find. The guiding principles of economic life are efficiency, productivity, and profit. Healthcare and medicine are, for the most part, held to strict scientific standards of evidence. The legal system is built on a presumption of innocence according to which a prosecutor must make rational arguments based on evidence, credible testimony, and sound interpretation of law. In everyday life, we trust our engineers to create better smartphones, safer cars, and more efficient public transportation through advances in technology. Faced with global crises such as climate change, most of us now rely on the evidence of scientists and hope that new technologies can give us cleaner and more efficient sources of energy. In short, rational principles are key to how modern society is structured. There is little room for petitioning the spirits or consulting horoscopes to solve society's challenges.

No doubt: modern society is built primarily on science and technology rather than “magic,” broadly conceived. Nevertheless, something crucial is missing from this description: namely, the individuals who inhabit modern societies. Polls consistently show that a significant share of the population (usually around 40-50%) in putatively modern, post-industrial societies such as the United States or the United Kingdom, believe in “supernatural” phenomena such as ghosts and haunted houses, or “occult” powers such as telepathy and clairvoyance. In popular culture, filmmakers, TV scriptwriters, and authors of bestselling fiction cater to a huge audience hungry for storylines with occult themes – so much so that some speak of a “popular occulture” at the heart of modern society. Books that teach you how to attain success through positive thinking or “the law of attraction,” such as Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (2006), become international bestsellers. It seems that the modern attitude to enchantments is one of fascination rather than outright rejection.