PHANTASMAGORIA: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media
by Marina Warner
Oxford University Press ₤18.99, 400 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤15.19

In the summer of 1668, Robert Hooke, curator of experiments at the recently established Royal Society “for improving natural knowledge” in London, gave a demonstration of “a contrivance to make a Picture of any thing appear on a Wall in the midst of a Light room in the Day-time; or in the Night-time in any room that is inlightened with a considerable number of Candles”. The device, with its lenses and apertures, could be explained, he said, in terms of the latest scientific understanding of optics. But it could easily be used to astonish and alarm a more gullible audience.

“Spectators not well versed in Opticks, that should see the various Apparitions and Disappearances, the Motions, Changes, and Actions that may this way be represented, would readily believe them to be super-natural and miraculous, and would as easily be affected with all those passions of Love, Fear, Reverence, Honour, and Astonishment that are the natural consequences of such belief.”

Marina Warner has made herself mistress of the uncanny and the supernatural as they interweave with European culture. In her latest book she explores the paradox that the Enlightenment and modernity did not put an end to the peculiar attraction to the human mind of “the super-natural and miraculous”, and the desire to explain its mystery. “Curiosity about spirits of every sort and the ideas and imagery which communicate their nature have flourished more vigorously than ever since the 17th century,” she writes.

Liaisons between scrupulous rationality and vivid imagination of the kind Hooke identifies provide Warner with fertile ground for exploring the on-going relationship between our perceptions of material and immaterial worlds. She has a remarkable capacity for sifting and arranging her work so that even an unreconstructedly rationalist reader such as myself is drawn irresistibly into a web of allusions and emotions, offering a kind of connective tissue to the material phenomena we feel we can grasp.

In Phantasmagoria, Warner unpicks and explores two separate strands in the long history of attempts at understanding the connections and fractures between the material and immaterial, body and soul - the ways we try to take hold of and make sense of the two spirit worlds. She assembles a wealth of varied and fascinating historical material - textual and visual - to show that there are clear limits to the supposed rationality of our 21st century understanding. The bizarre, disturbing and fantastic continue to inhabit our mental landscape and shape our experience, via a longstanding array of recognisable means: wax, air, cloud, light, mirror reflection, ectoplasm and (most recently) film.

As original sources of seductive wonderment, several of these evanescent, bewitching forms may have lost their thrill. The wax effigy that once filled visitors to Madame Tussaud’s with a kind of delightful dread now seems to us oddly empty and tame. Yet the perfect simulacrum of the human body, meticulously recreated with all the loving detail of Tussaud, in the artist Ron Mueck’s works (”Dead Dad”, “Ghost”) hold us with a compelling curiosity that has its roots in that earlier tradition. As ever, Warner covers an extraordinary range in her examples. Her shrewd juxtapositions of materials from widely separated historical moments create a fertile context within which to account for the impact of contemporary art forms, from painting and poetry to installation and video.

Warner argues that a fascination with spiritual forms of communication - ghosts, seances, telepathy - was fed by contemporary advances in their scientific counterparts. Photography and telegraphy drew even the scientifically inclined into the world of alternative types of invisible transmission, and encouraged surprisingly prominent and highly educated Victorians to experiment with conjuring up spirits and communicating with the dead.

If science could enable us to act across great distances by means of undetectable, invisible rays, it became more plausible to imagine that other-worldly forces might be communicated in the same kinds of ways. “The wireless, the telegraph, the telephone, television and the movies began to move voices and images through the air and to displace them in time as well as space. In seances, spirits made themselves heard as well as seen, and they also began to impinge on the material world, leaving palpable traces.”

Warner concludes that the apocalyptic tendencies in culture today could be fuelled by the possibilities offered by modern film, video and computer games of creating all-too-believable illusions of Armageddon. As real human catastrophe (terrorist atrocity, mass murder, earthquake and tsunami) spills over into its imaginary on-screen equivalent, might our capacity to imagine the destruction of humanity overwhelm our long-standing rational urge to persist? It is a question which, Warner persuades us, requires our serious consideration.

Lisa Jardine is Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London.