Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century [Hardcover]

In a spoof of a college curriculum brochure, Woody Allen listed the following course description: "Metaphysics: What happens to the soul after death? How does it manage?" Nearly as funny, but unintentionally so, was the query on a questionnaire sent all over the British Empire by the Victorian anthropologist James Frazer, who was making an inquiry into "the Customs, Beliefs, and Languages of Savages". The question was, "Does [the soul] resemble a shadow, a reflection, a breath, or what?" Presumably the savages all had different ideas, but that doesn't mean that academics and divines all had a uniform and agreed-upon concept of what a soul is (or how it manages). How soul or spirit has been visualized or otherwise manifest in modern history is the theme of _Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century_ (Oxford University Press) by Marina Warner. As a professor of literature, Warner has written an academic work, large and weighty and ballasted with plenty of footnotes. It is wide-ranging and often scattershot, taking in vampires, zombies, magic lanterns, Rorschach inkblots, Peter Pan, psychic photography, time travel, automata, ether, purgatory, transubstantiation, and much more. Warner is astonishingly well-read and knowledgeable, and consistently if the erudition gets too thick for the reader in one chapter, there will be agreeable surprises in the next.

Souls are important things, even if many of us don't have the same beliefs in God or gods that we used to. Warner writes, "Even when we profess agnosticism if not unbelief in a supernatural order, we are the inheritors of much classical cosmology and medieval philosophy about spirit and soul - in unconscious ways and in common parlance." If the soul cannot be completely described, that doesn't bother the author; she has given a broad examination of western attempts to do so. The book takes a more-or-less chronological tour of soul-stuffs, starting, surprisingly enough, with wax, and the lack of souls in waxworks. Souls have also long been connected with breath or with air. Aristotle believed that the "spirit which is contained in the foamy body of the semen" was conveyed by the father. The air in the sky was sometimes thought to be full of souls, and everyone in a cold climate could see that exhaled breath was a little cloud. From souls as material objects we pass into souls as manifestations of light or shadow. We have delighted for a couple of centuries in devices that project forms of light and shadow for us. The original phantasmagoria meant "an assembly of phantoms" and was applied to magic lantern shows, such as those of the notorious Etienne Gaspard Robertson, who found that projecting pictures in a darkened crypt got the best effect if the pictures were scary, like a Medusa's head or the ghost of Banquo. He thus set us up "... for the coming of the horror video, its ghouls, ghosts, and vampire-infested suburbs." Snapping pix of souls was all in a day's work for the spiritualists, with the new art of photography growing along with the new "science" of the séance. The scientists and objective observers never did find a good explanation of how immaterial souls or spirits interact with the material world to let us hear, see, or photograph them.

Warner writes, "The brain balks at non-meaning; meaninglessness, like formlessness, becomes the dominant scandal against reason, and reason, seeking to abolish it, generates fantasies ..." Her book is full of strange wonders, like divine portents in the sky such as "rains of frogs or of fish (and sometimes saucepans)", or the persistent story of the Angels of Mons supporting the good guys in World War One (acclaimed as a true vision against the protests of the man who had written it as a fictional story). _Phantasmagoria_ is a report on centuries of figments of the imagination, and reflects the understanding that ghosts and demons were present in the olden days of any period in the past, and will be with us in newer forms revealed by newer technologies and story-telling powers.