Insubstantial Pageants: Spirit Visions, Soul Traces
Marina Warner
Excerpt
1:The Eye of the Imagination
In the early seventeenth century, Robert Fludd, an Oxford-educated
physician of wide-ranging and esoteric learning, pictured the
interior of the brain containing several interlinked souls, including
the imaginative soul: “fantasy or imagination itself,”
writes Fludd, “since it beholds not the true pictures of
corporeal or sensory things, but their likenesses and as it were,
their shadows.”1 A later illustration shows an eye in the
same position of the imaginative soul, labeled the “oculus
imaginationis.” This “eye of the imagination”
radiates a tableau of images: thought-pictures or phantasmata,
as Aristotle called them, envisioned by human consciousness. This
inner eye, as figured by Fludd, does not receive images: it projects
them onto a screen that lies beyond the back of the head, floating
in a space that does not exist except in fantasy.
The notion of an inner eye persisted, with both Descartes and
John Locke offering different models for this human faculty of
visualization and its relation to thinking itself. Locke conceived
of “the human mind as an inner space in which both pains
and clear and distinct ideas passed in review before an Inner
Eye. . . . The novelty was the notion of a single inner space
in which bodily and perceptual sensations . . . were objects of
quasi-observation. . . . ”2 Since the novelty of this conception,
communications media have made possible the material projections
of these ideas into the public arena: the various dark chambers
of modern experience, from the photographic apparatus itself to
the cinema. The history of phantoms today is indissolubly entangled
with the history of optics, the understanding of perception, and
theories of imagination and consciousness.
Early models of our interior cinema have impinged with different
force: Fludd hardly at all since he was a mystic and an eccentric,
Descartes and Locke far more durably. Today, we are chiefly the
inheritors of Romantic and Victorian adaptations of the metaphor:
Wordsworth’s famous poem “Daffodils” evokes
“That inward eye, /That is the bliss of solitude. . . .”
In l824, Dr. Samuel Hibbert published a book about visions, which
included an elaborate foldout chart about dream states, on which
he set out a “Formula of the various comparative Degrees
of Faintness, Vividness, or Intensity, supposed to subsist between
Sensations and Ideas. . . .” He tabulated eight transitions
in his full cycle, ranging from Perfect Sleep to Somnambulism
by way of “the common state of Watchfulness” to “the
tranquil state” to “extreme mental excitement,”
and graded no less than fifteen different phases in each of them.
They start from “Degree of vividness at which consciousness
begins,” where it is still possible to impose the will on
vision, to “Intense excitements of the mind necessary for
the production of spectres.”3
Dr. Hibbert (1782–1848) was not a singular man of his time;
his efforts reflect a pervasive interest in the mind’s workings,
with numerous counterparts in the literature of psychology, biology,
medicine, and literature. Although he is himself pretty much forgotten
today, his book created a stir because he went on to argue that
stomach disorders were a chief source of hallucination, visions,
déjà-vu, nightmares, and even mental distress, and
that this physical organ could overbear the mind to the point
of altering a person’s identity. In a still-Christian age,
such radical materialism was extreme, and there was a flurry of
counter-arguments.4
Contemporary artists have persevered, ever more intensely as
the twenty-first century begins, in exploring the workings of
fantasia; they have also transformed the character of modern media
to suit this enterprise, pressing photography, video, film, sound
recording, and other scientific technologies previously linked
with indexical objectivity and documentary use to the expression
of subjective vision and increasingly hallucinatory and spectral
suggestion. These phantasmata need vehicles to take form, however.
John Donne wrote:
. . . as an angel face and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
So thy love may be my love’s sphere . . .5
Correspondingly, the eye of the imagination today also needs
to clothe the uncanny and its emanations in metaphor—in
air, light, and other qualities traditionally evoking the presence
of the incorporeal. Paradoxically, consciousness of the immaterial
has to cast its objects in elements borrowed from the physical
and material world: it is impossible to imagine outside the frame
of reference in which natural phenomena enclose us. Yet matter
itself has been changing its nature, bodies dissolving and phenomena
dematerializing with the discoveries of science, from the presence
of virtually imperceptible gases, numerous waves, and the quanta
of particle physics. Alongside the physiological mechanisms that
produce phantasmata, the ethereal vesture that the mind has traditionally
adapted to express the invisible presents a possible response
to the question that arises: What does the inner eye think with?
2: The Logic of the Imaginary
At the beginning of his remarkable study Thinking with Demons,
the historian Stuart Clark writes, “To make any kind of
sense of the witchcraft beliefs of the past, we need to begin
with language. By this I mean not only the terms in which they
were expressed, and the general systems of meanings they presupposed,
but the question of how language authorizes any kind of belief
at all.”6 To understand how scientific pioneers combined
innovations and inventions that have shaped modern culture and
mapping human consciousness according to new compass points, with
their experiments in time travel, raising specters, talking to
dead, and revisiting multiple past lives and past selves, we too
need to look at language, in the wider sense of metaphor, visual
and verbal, for this provides the material with which the inward
eye clothes its visions.
Just as the “gospels of the poor” materialized on
the walls of churches’ divine mysteries, such as the Last
Judgment and the punishments awaiting the damned, so modern languages
of spirit phenomena—the iconotexts of the modern uncanny—project
their existence into our minds: everyone pretty much knows what
a ghost looks like, in the same way as a seventeenth-century witch
finder could identify the signs of a devil’s presence. The
psychic experiments of the Victorian age, for all their use of
the latest media, adapted an ancient syntax, grammar, and vocabulary
of spirit communications. The very intelligibility of séance
phenomena and ghost photography depends on handed-down expressions,
on habitual ways
of envisioning, on codes known, assembled, and disassembled in
cognitive patterns that have been learned and passed on. But in
their blur and fumble, they also show how these traces grasp at
shared characters and figures in the effort to communicate. The
apprehension of mysteries, within the natural and outside it,
is as rooted in the mind’s freight of empirically acquired
patterns of data and thought as is the mastery of a new skill.
Unseen phenomena—spirits like angels and cherubs, shades
of the dead, ethereal or astral bodies, subtle matter—have
been visualized and communicated so effectively that the conventions
they rely on and adapt have themselves become invisible. The metaphors
that enflesh them introduce them into reality. But that reality
can only be expressed through metaphor. Metaphor acts as the structuring
principle for approaching these obstinate and wonderful mysteries.
Poetry, poetic language, the imagery of art and literature give
us the necessary tools in this impossible quest. As Mary Carruthers
points out in her study of memory, “[philosophical] questions
. . . proceed from assumptions embedded deeply within a culture’s
habits of mind, those presuppositions about human and cosmic nature
that are absorbed in earliest education and often survive to colour
all subsequent experience. . . .”7
Nobody, except perhaps a child seeing a baroque angel for the
first time, finds it strange that a naked boy could hurl himself
sotto-in-sù from heaven’s ceiling on swan’s
white pinions, or that lost loved ones should return with arms
stiffly held by their sides and wrapped head to foot in the shroud
in which they were buried. Yet these are conventions that govern
“the logic of the imaginary”8; they authorize belief,
and the story of their development can be told.
1:Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi . . . historia
(The History . . . of this World and the Other), Oppenheim, 1617–21.
2:Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, l979, pp. 49–50, quoted in J.
Crary, Techniques of the Observer on Vision and Modernity in the
l9th Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993, p. 43.
3:Samuel Hibbert, Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions, Edinburgh
and London, second edition l825; New York: Arno Press, 1975.
4: See Simon Wilson, “Gastric Fantastic,“ Fortean
Times 180, February 2004.
5: John Donne, Poems of John Donne, ed. E.K. Chambers, London,
l896, Vol. 1, pp. 21–22. See E.M.W.Tillyard, The Elizabethan
World Picture, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1943, pp. 45–60.
6: Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1997, p. 3.
7: Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory, Cambridge,
1990; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 48.
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