We have lived, to borrow a phrase from Carl Sagan, in a ghost-haunted world since at least the first caveman said, ‘there’s something bigger than Phil…’ But the ghost as we know it – the misty, translucent figure haunting castles and mansions – is a relatively recent arrival. Even in Shakespeare’s time, ghosts were the sheeted dead who did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets. The spectres synonymous today with ‘ghost’ are a distinct product of the 19th-century Gothic tradition.
Yet, while the exotic ghosts of Mayan or Egyptian antiquity might strike the modern observer as foreign, they are no less indicative of the specific pressures that birthed them than our own haunts are of ours.
Like all memes, or mimetic information packets, the concept of the ghost tells us often as much about us as it does about any of the metaphysical properties of the disembodied dead, assuming that is what ghosts are. In the end, our conception of ghosts has evolved and mutated under very concrete social and especially religious pressures, such that the ghosts we take to be timeless only appear timeless because they are in fact the result of the very same pressures that produced us: beings of the present, most often blissfully ignorant of the very processes of which we too are the result.
To peer into the evolution of these phantoms is to glimpse the oblique, esoteric dimensions of our own spiritual history. The Latin West’s relationship with the restless dead was fundamentally reshaped by St Augustine, whose metaphysical surgery sought to excise any Roman pagan influence from Christian thought. For the early Christians, the dead were effectively dormant, awaiting the final judgement of the Almighty. They were beyond the reach of the living, encased in a divine jurisdictional stasis. Augustine, in De cura pro mortuis gerenda (c. 421–422), codified this separation, dismissing reports of returning spirits as either angelic deception, miraculous hallucination or, more likely, the meddling of demons – those tiresome, malevolent entities that form the backbone of the Augustinian explanation for all supernatural disturbances. By reframing the spectral world, Augustine effectively banished the restless dead to secure the theological boundaries of the faith.
However, the church found itself in a rather different position as it pushed into the wild, Germanic north. The strategic strength of Christendom has always resided in its capacity for syncretism, the patient art of absorbing foreign myths while acclimating the populace to the Roman orthodoxy. The Germanic peoples, rich in folklore regarding the restless dead, did not simply abandon their ghosts at the church door. As the year 1000 approached, a period fraught with millenarian anxiety and portents of the apocalypse, the line between the living and the dead blurred once more.
The theological linchpin that would allow such visitations of the dead, over and against the theology of St Augustine, would be the development of one of the most important ideas in Catholic theology: purgatory. In this theological position, the sins accumulated in life must be purged, and thus purified, in death before admittance into heaven. Thus, even for the sinning righteous meant for heaven, they would still need to undergo post-mortem purification, often through the punishing fires, and hence the purgation of those sins in, well, purgatory.
With the conceptual arrival of purgatory, the ghosts returned with a vengeance. Pope Gregory the Great’s Dialogues (593) and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (c. 731) offer early glimpses of this return, where the righteous dead appear not as demonic threats, but as guides or warnings. By the 11th century, the appearance of vast wraith armies, sinners suffering in their heated armours, suggests a typical if audacious Christian syncretism: a fusion of the pagan ‘Wild Hunt’ with the purgatorial framework of the church. It was a marvellous, if terrifying, synthesis.
The Renaissance introduced a new layer of complexity, as the recovery of ancient pagan wisdom populated the intellectual landscape with a new array of celestial and elemental entities. Yet, this occult flourish was soon overshadowed by the convulsions of the Reformation. The Protestants, in their zealous attempt to strip the faith to its primitive core, discarded purgatory as an unbiblical, pagan innovation. This left them in a rather precarious position: if purgatory did not exist, what were these ghosts that kept appearing?
Ludwig Lavater’s De spectris (1569) became the definitive manual for the confused Protestant mind. Lavater’s genius was to look in two directions simultaneously. He remained rooted in the Augustinian suspicion that most spectral appearances were demonic, yet he introduced a strikingly modern, psychological layer to the phenomenon. He catalogued how grief, insomnia and even physiological disorders could trick the mind into perceiving ghosts. He essentially began the psychologising of the spectral world, a development that would culminate in modern explorations of the paranormal, where the haunting is as much a matter of interior states as it is of external spirits.
He is also an important early witness, in the pages of this book, to the reality of night terrors. In such a state, people often experience paralysis and yet are keenly, horrifyingly aware of nearby malevolent entities. Such entities may simply malinger around, but can also seem to oppress their victim, sometimes sexually, and such night terrors, Lavater argues, form the basis for the mythology around incubi and succubi tales.
The Counter-Reformation, naturally, was not to be outdone. Peter Thyraeus, in his Loca infesta (1598), countered the Protestant reductionism by asserting the reality of spiritual infestation. He argued that God occasionally permitted souls to undergo their purgation in the very places where their sins were committed: a sobering thought for the inhabitant of a haunted property. Thyraeus’s classification of these entities, ranging from the repentant dead to the mischievous, unattached spirits like brownies and kobolds, betrays the early stages of a secular demonology. These spirits were beginning to act as independent agents, free from the traditional ecclesiastical ecosystem.
Finally, we arrive at the Enlightenment, an age that prides itself on having banished superstition through the cool light of reason. Antoine Augustin Calmet, a Benedictine abbot with a penchant for the scientific method, represents the pinnacle of this transitional period. His treatise on apparitions and vampires, Dissertation sur les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Bohême, de Moravie et de Silésie (1746), serves as a survey of the field, yet it is coloured by a cautious, empirical scepticism. Calmet utilised the emerging tools of source criticism and medical observation to weigh the veracity of supernatural accounts. He was a child of his time, attempting to shepherd the ghost through the perils of naturalism, unwittingly becoming the grandfather of the contemporary paranormal researcher who stalks abandoned ruins with a video camera and an electromagnetic field meter in hand.
While he might conclude that denial of all apparitions is tantamount to a denial of Christianity itself – it was just a bridge too far for him to say there are no such things as apparitions – he was also skeptical enough that Voltaire, yes, Voltaire, the cheerleader of the Enlightenment, would rely on Calmet for his encyclopedia entry on the subject of vampires.
Ultimately, the ghost possesses a double history. There is the history of the ghost as a cultural participant and then the history of the concept itself: a mirror reflecting our shifting religious, scientific and social anxieties.
