black_robin's Journal

"How to account for this uncanny movement from mental image to spectral reality? To answer this we need to gain some historical distance—to relate the ambiguous metaphor of the phantasmagoria to the larger problem of ghost belief in post-Enlightenment Western culture. In particular we need to look at the powerful modern theme of demystification and the highly paradoxical arguments by which scientists and philosophers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries attempted to do away with the old theological world of apparitions and gave voice to a new and explicitly psychological theory of supernatural phenomena. What we find, it seems to me, is that the demystifying project was peculiarly compromised from the start. The rationalists did not so much negate the traditional spirit world as displace it into the realm of psychology. Ghosts were not exorcized—only internalized and reinterpreted as hallucinatory thoughts. Yet this internalization of apparitions introduced a latent irrationalism into the realm of mental experience. If ghosts were thoughts, then thoughts themselves took on—at least notionally—the haunting reality of ghosts. The mind became subject to spectral presences. The epistemologically unstable, potentially fantastic metaphor of the phantasmagoria simply condensed the historical paradox: by relocating the world of ghosts in the closed space of the imagination, one ended up supernaturalizing the mind itself."