#75: The Death of Magic: Modernity, Myth, and the Disenchanted World | Sharon Blackie

The world was once alive — every river, tree, and threshold humming with meaning. Then, somewhere between Descartes and the Scientific Revolution, the West performed an exorcism on its own imagination. We call it progress. Psychologist and mythologist Dr Sharon Blackie calls it disenchantment — and in this conversation, we ask whether it was ever truly inevitable, and whether it can be undone. Dr Blackie — a former neuroscientist turned mythologist, and bestselling author of The Enchanted Life and If Women Rose Rooted — joins The Prometheans to trace how the West traded a participatory, storied cosmos for a measurable, mechanical one. We talk about Max Weber's "disenchantment of the world," the epistemic cost of privileging pure rationality, myth as a technology of meaning rather than primitive superstition, and her concept of the "Post-Heroic Journey" as an alternative to conquest-driven myths of the self. This is not a conversation about magical thinking — it's a conversation about what got lost when the West decided only one way of knowing counted, and what it might mean to recover the rest.

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🔮 Guest: Dr Sharon Blackie — psychologist, mythologist, founder of the Nostos Institute, author of seven books including The Enchanted Life, If Women Rose Rooted, and Ripening. Timestamps: [add once episode is cut] Guest links: [Substack — The Art of Enchantment / Nostos Institute / latest book] The Prometheans is a podcast on interfaith dialogue, philosophy of religion, and cross-civilizational intellectual history.