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The Quest for Re-enchantment: On Ancient and Modern Magic with Tara Isabella Burton

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Oct 31, 2026

Guest

Tara Isabella Burton

Tara Isabella Burton, an essayist and novelist exploring religion, culture, and belief, traces magic’s journey from Renaissance Hermeticism to manifesting and transhumanism. She examines why technocrats embrace occult ideas, how magic shaped propaganda, and what charisma has in common with enchantment. Burton also discusses Anglo-Catholicism, chatbot possession, demons, and why human creativity still matters in the age of AI.

37:16

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ANECDOTE

Ficino Used Music As Medicine

Renaissance Hermeticism revived humanist confidence that people could become godlike through mental powers.
Ficino used musical correspondences practically, playing jovial chords to counter his depression.

insights

INSIGHT

Occultism Turned Inward After Science

After science displaced alchemy’s practical ambitions, occultism redirected its symbols toward consciousness and psychology.
Jung treated alchemy as a language for psychoanalysis rather than literal chemical transformation.

insights

INSIGHT

Magic Survives Through Literary Rabbit Holes

The magical tradition survives as a literary “brain worm,” passed through libraries, texts, artists, and intellectual subcultures.
Before modern science it attracted proto-scientists; afterward it increasingly attracted artists and cultural outsiders.

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Magic as Hidden Correspondence

01:06 • 4min

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Magic as Active Culture

04:41 • 41sec

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Renaissance Humanism and Hermetic Power

05:22 • 6min

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From Alchemy to Occult Literature

11:13 • 6min

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Why Technocrats Embrace Magic

16:59 • 5min

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Manifesting and American New Thought

21:33 • 4min

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From Beauty Seeking to Anglo-Catholicism

25:32 • 4min

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Vanity, Goodness, and Creative Inspiration

29:54 • 1min

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Chatbots, Ideas, and Demonic Possession

30:59 • 49sec

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Charisma as Interpersonal Magic

31:48 • 2min

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Hidden Places and Human Creativity

33:40 • 43sec

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Why Humans Still Make Art

The Refiner’s Fire examines the religious culture from which Joseph Smith and the early Latter-day Saint movement emerged. John L. Brooke situates Mormon origins within the intellectual and social landscape of early nineteenth-century America. The book explores folk magic, alchemy, Hermetic traditions, biblical interpretation, and apocalyptic expectation. It argues that these currents helped shape the movement’s distinctive religious imagination. Burton cites it for its detailed scholarly treatment of Joseph Smith’s family connections to magical and Hermetic practices.

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Social creature

Tara Isabella Burton

Tara Isabella Burton’s Social Creature follows Louise, an intelligent but socially adrift young woman who becomes fascinated by the glamorous and charismatic Lavinia. Their friendship draws Louise into a world of privilege, parties, performance, and escalating moral compromise. The novel explores how envy and desire can transform admiration into imitation and obsession. It examines identity as something socially constructed, performed, and appropriated from others. Burton combines psychological suspense with a sharp critique of elite social worlds and the seductive power of belonging.

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Here in Avalon

Tara Isabella Burton

Here in Avalon follows a young woman drawn into New York’s underground ballroom and drag scene, where performance, beauty, and chosen identity create an alternative world. The novel explores the longing to escape ordinary life through art and belonging. Its characters pursue transformation while confronting exploitation, rivalry, and the costs of self-invention. Burton uses the mythology of Avalon to frame a contemporary story about enchantment and desire. The book asks whether an imagined world can provide genuine salvation or merely another form of captivity.

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• Mentioned in 12 episodes

Corpus hermeticum

[Asclepius]

Hermes Trismegistus

The Corpus Hermeticum is a series of sacred texts presented mostly as dialogues in which a teacher enlightens a disciple. These texts discuss various aspects of Hermetic philosophy, including the divine, the cosmos, mind, and nature. They also touch upon alchemy, astrology, and related concepts. The collection includes fifteen tractates, such as the 'Poemandres' and the 'General Sermons', which cover basic and mystical aspects of Hermeticism.

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What the World Cannot Give

Tara Isabella Burton

What the World Cannot Give considers the ways modern people pursue fulfillment through politics, ideology, lifestyle, and personal aspiration. Tara Isabella Burton examines how these pursuits can function as substitutes for religious faith and transcendence. The book argues that human beings retain deep desires for meaning, belonging, and worship even when they reject traditional religion. It places contemporary cultural movements in conversation with older theological and spiritual questions. Burton’s analysis emphasizes that worldly institutions cannot fully satisfy the human hunger for ultimate significance.

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Self Made

Tara Isabella Burton

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Chaldean Oracles

G. R. S. Meade

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Frankenstein

Mary Shelley

Written in epistolary form, the novel tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant and ambitious scientist who, driven by Enlightenment-era ideas of progress and science, creates a living being from dead body parts. However, upon seeing the creature come to life, Frankenstein is horrified and abandons it. The creature, shunned by society due to its appearance, seeks revenge against its creator, leading to a series of tragic events. The novel explores themes of guilt, loss, and the emotional and moral consequences of scientific hubris, blending elements of Gothic and Romantic literature.

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That Hideous Strength

C. S. Lewis

Published in 1945, 'That Hideous Strength' is the final book in C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy. The story takes place on Earth and follows the character Mark Studdock, a young sociology faculty member at Bracton College, as he becomes entangled with the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N. I. C. E. ), a sinister organization with totalitarian ambitions. The novel delves into themes of faith, doubt, and the struggle between good and evil, featuring characters from the previous books in the trilogy, including Elwin Ransom. It critiques the dangers of logical positivism and the erosion of moral values, drawing parallels with other dystopian works like George Orwell's '1984'.

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Strange Rites

Tara Isabella Burton

What is magic, and why does it keep returning in new disguises? For a special Halloween episode, host Ryan Shinkel is joined by essayist and novelist Tara Isabella Burton, author of Social Creature, Here in Avalon, Strange Rites, and Self-Made, to trace the Western esoteric tradition from the Renaissance to the present. Burton describes learned magic as the search for hidden correspondences between things, a humanist project that promised not union with God but the chance to become godlike through secret knowledge.

The conversation follows that promise through Ficino’s Hermetic translations at the Medici court, the 19th-century occult revival and its turn from proto-science toward art, reaction, and the unstable self, and the American arrival of New Thought, which gave us manifesting. Along the way: why the technocratic class keeps finding itself at the center of the magical worldview, what the tradition’s two-tier esotericism has in common with the noble lie, and how occult imagery shaped modern propaganda. Burton also discusses how her own search for beauty led her to Anglo-Catholicism, whether demons can possess a chatbot, the nature of charisma, and what a human writer can offer that a large language model cannot.

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