Marina Warner Spirit Visions PDF

Spirit Visions
MARINA WARNER
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
Delivered at
Yale University
October 20 and 21, 1999
Marina Warner is a historian, novelist, and critic who lives in Lon-
don. She has been a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute and is
the recipient of honorary doctorates from the University of St. Andrews,
Scotland, and the University of York, among others. She is currently a
visiting professor at Birkbeck College, London, and at Stanford Univer-
sity. Her scholarly and critical works include Alone of All Her Sex: The
Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976); Joan of Arc: The Image of Female
Heroism (1981); Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form
(1985), which was awarded the Fawcett Prize; From the Beast to the
Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994); and No Go the Bogeyman:
On Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock (1998). Her Reith Lectures on
BBC radio were published as Six Myths of Our Time: Little Angels, Little
Monsters, Beautiful Beasts, and More (1995). She also writes Šction, in-
cluding short stories and two opera libretti. Her novels include The Lost
Father (1988), which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and which
won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; Indigo (1992); and The Leto
Bundle (forthcoming).
I. THE INNER EYE: FIGURING THE INVISIBLE
Socrates: Didst thou never espy a Cloud in the sky,

which a centaur or leopard might be?
Or a wolf or a cow?
Strepsiades: Very often, I vow:
And show me the cause, I entreat.
Socrates: Why, I tell you that these become just what they please…
Aristophanes, The Clouds1 ca. 420 b.c.
1. Fata Morgana
Over the straits of Messina between Sicily and Calabria, the enchantress
Morgan Le Fay, or, in Italian, Fata Morgana (Šgure 1), occasionally con-
jures castles in the air. When the Normans became rulers of southern
Italy, they carried with them their cycle of Celtic legends in which Mor-
gan Le Fay Šgures as a seawitch who ensnares mortals into her palace un-
der the sea.2 In a later, Italian, legend, she falls in love with a mortal
youth and gives him the gift of eternal life in return for her love; when
he becomes restless and bored with captivity, she summons up fairy
spectacles for his entertainment.3
Professor Peter Brooks of the Humanities Research Institute at Yale was a most consid-
erate host for the Tanner Lectures, and I would like to thank him and his staff very much in-
deed for their support and cheerfulness throughout. I would also like to express my
gratitude to Professor Terry Castle, of Stanford University, who responded to this lecture, for
her inspired rešections on the topic.
1 Trans. Benjamin Bickley Rogers (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1960), lines
345–47.
2 Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology (London, 1910), p. 433; see “Mor-Rioghain,”
in Daithi O’Hogain, Myth, Legend, and Romance (New York, 1991), pp. 307–10; Barbara
Walker, Women’s Encyclopaedia of Myths and Secrets (London, 1983), pp. 674–75.
3 See Domenico Giardina, “‘Discorso sopra la Fata Morgana di Messina,’ con alcune note
dell’eruditissimo Sig. Andrea Gallo,” in Opuscoli di autori siciliani (Catania, 1758); Antonio
Minasi, “Dissertazione sopra un Fenomeno volgarmente detto Fata Morgana…,” in Anto-
nio Minasi, Dissertazioni (Rome, 1773); Ippolito Pindemonte, “La Fata Morgana,” in Po-
emetti Italiani (Turin, 1797), pp. 144–67.
[67]
68 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
Figure 1. Fata Morgana, Sicily, engraved by Guglielmo Fortuyn, 1773.

(British Library, London)
The Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher reports a vision of Fata

Morgana in the second part of his magnum opus, The Great Art of Light
and Shadow, published in 1646, where he reprints a letter from a fellow
Jesuit in Sicily, raptly describing a manifestation, on August 15, 1643,
of the spectacular enchantments of Fata Morgana:
On the morning of the feast of the Assumption of the Most Blessed

Virgin, standing alone at my window, I saw so many things, and so
many novelties that I shall never be sated or tired to think on them
again. It seems to me that the most holy Madonna made appear…a
trace of Paradise that day† The sea that bathes Sicily swelled up
and became ten miles in length all round, like the crests of a black
mountain, and the [sea] of Calabria šattened out and appeared in a
moment the clearest crystal, transparent as a mirror…and in this
mirror there suddenly appeared, in chiaroscuro, a line of more than
10,000 columns of equal width and height, all equidistant from one
another…then a moment later, the columns halved their height
and arched over like certain aqueducts in Rome, or the somersaults
of Salome.4
Kircher was above all a scientist; he turned his back deliberately on

Fata Morgana as magic or miracle and sternly reminded his colleague
4 Athanasius Kircher, The Great Art of Light and Shadow (Rome, 1646), book X, pars II,
p. 704.
[Warner] Spirit Visions 69
that, feast of the Assumption or not, the glimpse of paradise he had seen
was a trick of the light. Kircher went on to denounce “necromancers”
who are quick to seize “such marvels, produced without any work, as the
mockery of demons.” Following in the steps of the Italian humanists, he
would have no other miracle outside scripture, except the natural, cre-
ated world. Leon Battista Alberti had personiŠed Nature as the supreme
artist (“Natura pictrix”) who takes pleasure in making pictures in her
own works: on a large scale—faces in rocks, in clouds—and, on a small
scale, the skull in the death’s head hawkmoth was a favorite example.
Kircher himself collected, for his private museum in Rome, stones
and fossils that bore the marks of letters until he had completed the al-
phabet, as well as adventitious images of the Madonna and child, the
cruciŠxion, and so forth5—when the name of Allah is found inscribed in
the heart of an aubergine, as happened in Bradford, England, recently,
or a tomato, as has also been found, we Šnd ourselves back on highly re-
spectable, hermetic territory.
More than a hundred years later, in 1758, yet another member of the
Society of Jesus in Sicily was investigating the illusion of Fata Morgana,
and he was still exercised by popular superstition:
Until now, in a century of so little culture, the spectacle was a matter
of great horror to the common people†6
Father Domenico Giardina’s evocation of the Fata Morgana is both
more analytical than his predecessor’s and far more extravagantly ro-
coco: “Nature unveils these ‘grandi e maravigliosi treatri [sic]’ [great
and marvellous entertainments] without the enormous defects with
which art is Šlled,” he writes.7 Nature here is not only a supreme artist,
but knows how to combine Albertian laws of architectural harmony and
proportion with a Raphaelesque playfulness in capricious decoration.
5 Kircher’s eclectic accumulation of God’s wonders in his private museum was recorded
in a magniŠcent illustrated catalogue: Francisco Mariae Ruspolo, Musaeum Kircheranium
(Rome, 1709).
6 “Fin quì lo spettacolo fu alla bassa gente, ed in un secolo sì poco colto, una gran mate-
ria d’orrore…”: Giardina, Discorso, p. 122.
7 The vision includes “a city all šoating in the air, and so measureless and so splendid, so
adorned with magniŠcent buildings, all of which was found on a base of a luminous crystal,
never beheld before…”; this then transformed itself into a forest, and a garden, where the
“most capricious Šgures in the world” were arranged, followed by enormous armies in full
battle array, mounted men, prospects of šocks, mountains, half-ruined towns, all disposed
“according to the canons of a perfect perspective”: Giardina, Discorso, pp. 118–34.
Some ascribe the wonder to enchantments, others to a divine miracle, he

goes on, but he himself offers a chemical analysis of the minerals and
salts in the region—talc, selenite, antimony, glass—which rise up in
hot weather in vapors from the sea to form clouds, which then condense
in the cooler upper air to become a mobile specchio, a moving, polyhedri-
cal mirror.8 He emphasizes the effects of Šre and brimstone, which cre-
ate the illusion of columns, arches, pyramids, and pinnacles in inŠnite
recession and distinguishes these from what he calls l’iride fregiata, the
festooned rainbow. Giardina relates the spectacle to the aurora borealis,
or Northern Lights. But the rainbow also offers an orthodox metaphor
for insubstantial presence that inspires, for example, Dante’s ingenious
invocation of the aethereal nature of ghosts. In Purgatorio 25, Virgil
carefully expounds the Thomist view of the immortal soul, and to de-
scribe the condition of the shades of the departed, he draws on meta-
phors of elements in play, of rays refracted through vapors and imbuing
them with color, and then of šames forming shapes as they move:
e come l’aere, quand’è ben pïorno,

per l’altrui raggio che ‘n se si rešette,
di diversi color diventa adorno;
così l’aere vicin quivi si mette
in quella forma che in lui suggella
virtualmente l’alma che ristette;
e simigliante poi alla Šammella
che segue il foco la ‘vunque si muta,
segue lo spirto sua forma novella.
Però che quindi ha poscia sua paruta
è chiamata ombra†9
Ingeniously conjured from effects of light, insubstantial and incor-

poreal, yet endowed with presence and sense, Dante’s prismatic wraiths
approximate to the enchantments of the Fata Morgana. And this condi-
tion of the soul that Dante describes eerily foreshadows the insubstan-
tial state of a photograph, or, more particularly, of a slide projection as in
the magic lantern show: light and color hanging in the air, šames danc-
ing, without body, but visible—Fata Morgana.
8 Ibid., pp. 133–34.
9 Purgatorio 25, lines 94–101. Translated by John D. Sinclair, The Divine Comedy of
Dante Alighieri (London, 1958), p. 329: “and as the air, when it is full of rain, becomes
adorned with various colors through another’s beams that are rešected in it, so the neigh-
boring air sets itself into that form which the soul that stopped there stamps upon it by its
power, and then like the šame that follows the Šre wherever it shifts, its new form follows
the spirit. Since it has by this its semblance henceforth, it is called a shade….”
2. Signs and Wonders
The visionary tendency of Judaeo-Christianity probes the heavens to

discern therein the workings of divine providence, and Fata Morgana
can be connected to other signs and wonders of a meteorological nature
in the Bible—the rainbow after the šood, the pillar of cloud through
the desert, the shekinah hovering over the Ark of the Covenant, the
writing on the wall at Balshazzar’s Feast, the darkness at noon, the cloud
enveloping Christ’s body at his ascension.
More particularly, in the Second Book of Maccabees, for example, in
the midst of the heroic resistance of the Jews to Roman oppression, dur-
ing the battle that took place in 164 b.c.:
As the Šghting grew hot, the enemy saw in the sky Šve magniŠcent
Šgures riding horses with golden bridles, who placed themselves at
the head of the Jews, formed a circle around Maccabaeus, and kept
him invulnerable under the protection of their armour. They
launched arrows and thunderbolts at the enemy, who, confused and
blinded, broke up in complete disorder.10
The Šeld where Judas Maccabaeus triumphed against the odds was
famously echoed in crusader history, when visions of Saints George,
Demetrios, and Mercury appeared to the besieged at Antioch during the
First Crusade. Many later episodes include a phantom army seen Šght-
ing in the sky above Verviers in Belgium in June 1815, a little before
the Battle of Waterloo took place nearby, and, most famously of all,
“The Angels of Mons,” who mustered in the clouds overhead to support
the Tommies in the trenches in World War I, wrapped them in cloud to
give them shelter, and even inšicted inexplicable arrow wounds on the
Germans. The stories spread rapidly, by word of mouth, and thereafter
through press reports, psychic journals, purported eyewitness memoirs,
and Šlms, including Cecil B. de Mille’s Joan the Woman, which opens
with a scene set in the Šelds of Flanders, with angelic warriors, includ-
ing Joan of Arc, overhead.11 Legends of celestial apparitions persist to
this day: in one of the most recent instances, the Virgin Mary was found
10 II Maccabees 10: 29–31. Later in the campaign, during the subsequent bitter siege,
another divine horseman appears in the sky, “arrayed in white, brandishing his golden
weapons,” and again, this heavenly ally leads the Jews to victory, against the host of the en-
emy with his thousands of warriors, some of them mounted on elephants: II Maccabees 11:
8–12.
11 The legends were sparked by a short story written by the popular occultist Arthur
Machen in the London Evening News in August 1914. He followed this, the same year, with a
in a “spontaneous photograph” taken circa 1985 of the sky above the

Monte Gargano, the shrine of Padre Pio.
The term “Fata Morgana” came to be applied to spectral illusions
more generally, to hallucinations and eidetic images, fantasies formed in
and by the mind’s eye. Thomas Carlyle said of the poet Samuel Taylor
Coleridge that he “preferred to create lyrical fatamorganes for himself
on his hither side.”12 Later, the word is used again with the explicit
sense of ominous portent in the original, faery metaphor, the artist and
writer Alfred Kubin, for example, even using it for the horror of the
Nazi era.13
In this Šrst lecture, I explore how a mirage (Fata Morgana) casts
clouds as veils or gauzes—as “airy Šlms”14—on which phantom won-
ders appear, and how the pursuit of fantasy, in meditating on šuid,
evanescent, arbitrary forms, presents an important strand in the story of
the Imagination. The interaction between the signs and wonders of
scripture and mythology and technical processes and contrivances,
from the magic lantern to the phantasmagorias of late-eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century entertainment, to today’s cinematic special effects
and virtual reality, is highly dynamic, and certainly cannot be assumed
to be altogether fortuitous. But the very word “Šlm” builds on the phys-
ical similarities of vapor and the medium of the movies.
Clouds are interfused with anagogic ideas of the highest heaven, the
aether; they mark out the space of the world above, creating pontoons
and bridges between the two spheres, human and divine; they are vec-
tors of otherworldly beings from heavenly realms; they pun, with dream
wordplay, on the nature of spirits. Clouds, vapor, smoke, foam, steam,
and their spirituous, sublimed counterparts among airy, misty, gaseous
substances have served to make manifest the invisible, supernatural, im-
ponderable, and ineffable according to the promptings of belief and fan-
tasy. Clouds and cloudiness offer a magical passkey to the labyrinth of
unknowable mysteries, outer and inner. And they operate all uncon-
sciously, sometimes at the most patent levels, as a perennial visual and
verbal expression for inner space.
volume called The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (London, 1915): see his introduction,
followed by the story itself, ibid., pp. 1–38.
12 Thomas Carlyle, Sterling 1.viii.78; Oxford English Dictionary.
13 Alfred Kubin, The Other Side, trans. Denver Lindley (London, 1969).
14 [Attrib. C. Taylor] Landscape Magazine (1793): 84–87; I am grateful to Anne Lyles of
the Tate Gallery, London, for bringing this description to my attention.
For example, even in a popular form, the comic strip, the British car-
toonist Posy (Simmonds) uses various frames to indicate different inner
visions of her heroine Gemma Bovery: internal cursing (“uuh…
Patrick… bastard!…”) and insomniac phantoms; fantasies of domes-
tic bliss (hiding with a baby in a rural idyll); or dreams of romantic rav-
ishings by her lost love. SigniŠcantly, these last are contained within a
thought bubble, a šeecy cloud shape with scattered šakes. This cartoon-
ist’s device remains the most direct, conventional way of conveying to
the reader that these are the products of the heroine’s inner eye.
Whiteness, vaporousness, Šlminess, insubstantiality: spirits are lit-
erally a cloudy matter. The imagery of the “animula vagula blandula…
pallidula…nudula [Dear little šeeting pleasing little soul…pale
little. . .naked little thing],” in the Emperor Hadrian’s image, endures
with variations, through Thomist theology to fairy legends.15 Corpus sed
non caro (body but not šesh): so did Saint Augustine deŠne the substance
of angels, and this impossible conjunction can be extended to convey de-
parted souls and spirits. In representations, light, as both radiance and
weightlessness, buoys the spiritual or aetheric body, incorporated but
not enšeshed, and renders it at once palpable and insubstantial.
Nebulousness has served to meet a need for expressing the bourne
beyond which matter still materializes, but not as body, or, if within its
bourne, the forms and shapes it takes. In his last, despairing entreaty,
Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus turns from one power to another
to escape the Šres of hell. When he begs his birth stars to come to his
aid, he stirs a strange brew of cloudy vapors to describe how his soul
might be hidden and saved:
Now draw up Faustus, like a foggy mist,

Into the entrails of yon lab’ring clouds,
That, when you vomit forth into the air,
My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths,
So that my soul may but ascend to heaven!16
This compacted meteorological vision casts dying Faustus as a vapor,

drawn up by the heat of the stars to be swallowed up by clouds Šgured
as women’s wombs. These stars are also endowed with mouths that can
15 The Penguin Book of Latin Verse, trans. Frederick Brittain (Harmondsworth, 1962),
p. 61.
16 Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus, ed. A. H. Sleight (Cambridge, 1961), Sc. 14, lines
92–96 (emphasis added).
both breathe and spew; Faustus seems to be begging to be turned into a

Šne rain that might issue from the clouds, but be too misty, too light, to
fall to earth so might rather rise, like high cirrus to the upper heaven.
The contortions of the image sequence rešect dramatically the agoniz-
ing of the doomed magus only half an hour before his death.
In a lighter vein, John Dryden and William Davenant’s intriguing
and much performed revision of The Tempest, The Enchanted Island, writ-
ten in 1669, also evokes the soul through metaphors of breath and con-
densation, as in this exchange between two of its beguiling ingénus:
Dorinda: But I much wonder what it is to dye.

Hippolito: Sure ’tis to dream, a kind of breathless sleep.
When once the Soul’s gone out.
Dorinda: What is the Soul?
Hippolito: A small blew thing that runs about within us.
Dorinda: Then I have seen it in a frosty morning run
Smoaking from my mouth.
Hippolito: But if my soul had gone, it should have walk’d upon
A Cloud just over you, and peep’d…17
It is not only Christian souls or the angels of orthodoxy whose nature

lends itself to nebulous metaphor. The Reverend Robert Kirk, a Scot-
tish antiquarian and divine, described the nature of Fairies, in his inti-
mate guide to the supernatural, The Secret Common-Wealth of Elves, Fauns
and Fairies, of around 1692. They were
intelligent Studious Spirits, and light changable bodies (lyke those
called Astrall) somewhat of the nature of a condens’d cloud, and best
seen in twilight. These bodies be so plyable thorough the subtilty of
the spirits, that agitate them, that they can make them appear and
disappear at pleasure. Some have bodies or vehicles so spungious,
thin…that they are fed by only sucking into some Šne spirituous
liquors†18
In the seventeenth century, clouds are widely accepted, in both visual
and poetic works, as the departed soul’s appropriate vehicle.
17 John Dryden with William Davenant, The Enchanted Island, in The Works of John Dry-
den (Berkeley and London, 1970), vol. 10, Act V, Sc. ii, lines 16–25.
18 R. Kirk, The Secret Common-Wealth & A Short Treatise of Charms & Spells, ed. Stewart
Sanderson (London, 1976), pp. 49–50. Kirk was stolen by the fairies, or so it was widely re-
ported and later recorded by Sir Walter Scott.
The story I am going to tell in these two lectures will proceed along
two complementary paths: Šrst, oracular cloud effects such as Fata Mor-
gana are dynamically related to the development of optical instruments,
from the magic lantern, called camera obscura, to the movie camera, and
they have inšuenced the scope and character of visual media. As I hope
to show, the wonders of the rainbow, mirages, and other cosmic effects
of weather and climate provide the vehicles for communicating spectral
nature and presence and have interacted with innovatory, technical
means of expression and inšuenced their development.
Joel Snyder has argued, in an important essay,19 that optical devices
were invented and modiŠed in order to deliver images that Štted Al-
bertian and Vitruvian ideals; this quest culminated in the photographic
camera, which did not and does not function as a trusty replicator of hu-
man visual experience or beheld, experiential reality. Extending Sny-
der’s view into the realm of fantasy, I am going to propose here that
optical and other technical means were also developed to reproduce
mental or eidetic images, that these came arrayed in metaphorical ves-
ture that served to communicate the conditions of supernatural other
worlds and their creatures. They succeeded by obeying axioms embed-
ded in religious iconography, in mythological visual narratives, and in
speculation about the function and character of the Imagination and of
the senses, especially the visualizing faculties. Models of mind, as pro-
posed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by a range of philoso-
phers and mystics, drew the terrain for picturing visions that did not
present themselves to the eyes of the body.
My second principal line of argument focuses on the historical char-
acter of signs: even something as cloudy as a cloud has a changing story
to tell within the history of signs and of the language of value, so I will
be trying to convey how wonder and the sublime themselves have
shape-shifted. Clouds have acted as a predominant metaphoric vehicle
for spirit, but, like all Šgures in a semiotic vocabulary, they are inter-
twined with temporal context, with epistemologic, scientiŠc, and social
developments, which can extend, or narrow, their meaning. Thus a Co-
leridgean commitment to the powers of Imagination will lead, along
one line of psychological development, to the Rorschach test,20 while
19 Joel Snyder, “Picturing Vision,” Critical Quarterly 6 (1980): 499–526.
20 In the mid-nineteenth century, Justinus Kerner proposed that ink blots could be used
to prompt psychological revelations; Herman Rorschach then developed the theme with a
series of ten test cards to serve as stimuli: the Rorschach test entails precisely Šnding mean-
analysis of the aether will precipitate, in turn of the century seances, the
phenomenon of ectoplasm.
3. “Very like a whale…”
The game of descrying shapes in the skies, faces in the clouds, and im-
ages in stones, according to the complementary vagaries of individual
reverie, should be distinguished from the effects of weather, the causes
of rainbows, the so-called Brocken spectre, St. Elmo’s Šre, will-o’-the-
wisps, foxŠre, ignis fatuus, and other Fata Morganas. But their very
names, endowing phenomena with supernatural origins, reveal how it is
in practice difŠcult to keep the experiences distinct, how subjective
dreaming alters the experience of the natural event. As Nature abhors a
vacuum, so does the mind resist meaninglessness, accord stories to hap-
hazard incident, invent reasons and origins, mythical etiologies; the
amorphous, the inchoate, the formless have beckoned irresistibly to the
shaping powers of thought and fantasy.
Rešecting on “the image made by chance,” H. W. Janson distin-
guished between two ways of seeing: the Šrst, as famously invoked by
Alberti, describes the artist discovering, within the stone or other mate-
rial, the body inscribed there by nature—a procedure Michelangelo’s
Slaves most powerfully and eloquently embody.21 Janson associates this
approach with mimesis, because the sculptor is trying to deliver some-
thing believed to be already there: the Šgure in the marble, the faces in
the rock. Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, would
study rocks for days and nights, sleeping in the mountains until the im-
age formed; he also borrowed Native American interpretations of land-
marks, peaks, and other features. It could be said that his mammoth
monuments represent the terminus and the nadir of this method.22 But
ings where there is nothing except random marks, and it applied the results for medical
diagnosis of character. See Bruno Klopfer and Douglas McGlashan Kelley, The Rorschach Tech-
nique: A Manual for a Projective Method of Personality Diagnosis (Yonkers-on-Hudson, 1942).
21 “The ‘Image Made by Chance’ in Renaissance Thought,” in De Artibus Opuscula, vol.
40, Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed. Millard Meiss (New York, 1961), pp. 254–68.
22 Cf. Robert J. Dean, Living Granite: The Story of Borglum and the Mount Rushmore Memo-
rial (New York, 1949), p. 32: Borglum’s abortive sculpture of General Lee was inspired by
“studying the formation of the rocks, watching the effects of light and shadow on the face of
the cliff at various times of day. And on the third day, toward evening, when there was a pale
young moon in the sky, he seemed to see the shades of a gray Confederate host, with Robert
E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, stealing across the great expanse of rock in
gigantic proportions†” This memorial was never Šnished, but Borglum carried the idea
on with him to Mount Rushmore.
a book of photographs, recently published in England, continues this

primitivist and esoteric tradition, discerning secret faces in the ancient
megalithic circles and avenues of stones at Avebury in Wiltshire.23 The
author and photographer Terence Meaden does not rule out the possi-
bility that these might be among the very earliest intentional Šgurative
carvings.
The second way of making images organizes them through the
power of fantasia: seeing shapes in clouds, on rocks, that Nature has not
put there. The most patent and most ancient evidence of this arbitrary
and mythopoeic faculty lies far beyond the province of art, in the endur-
ing and wonderful ancient fantasies of starmaps, which link up the ran-
dom scattering of the skies into pictures and stories—the constellations,
the Zodiac.
Janson concludes that today “we have [thus] at last resolved the an-
cient Greek dichotomy of mimesis and fantasia by assigning each of them
to its own separate domain.” I would like to modulate this stark con-
trast, by exploring how mimetic picturing itself depends on a language
of signs that is rooted in the work of the imagination with analogy,
metaphor, and associations. In the struggle to represent the unseen, to
Šgure spirit, men and women considered they were mimetists, turning
the lens of empiricism on hidden forms, deciphering existing and inher-
ent secrets and codes; however, as I hope to show, their fantasia led
them, and it in turn was shaped by diverse, buried codes as well.
Reading what the contemporary American poet Charles Edward
Eaton has called the sky’s “secret album of nephographs”24 has a very an-
cient history indeed: on the one hand, Aristophanes mocks it gleefully
and mercilessly in The Clouds, a satire on philosophy’s arbitrariness and
vagueness. But on the other, taking a cue from Lucretius, Leonardo da
Vinci Šnds in the contemplation of formlessness a crucial stimulus. In
two entries in his Notebooks (later appearing in the edited Treatise on
Painting in around 1550) Leonardo advocated the scrying of stains on
walls, or the ashes of a Šre, or mottled and grainy stones, or mud, or
clouds—the list drifts through “like things” that are formless and, he
writes later, “confused,” inscrutable in themselves for they are intrinsi-
cally meaningless. They will, however, offer the subjective fantasy “una
nuova invenzione di speculazione [a new invention of speculation]” by
23 Terence Meaden, The Secrets of the Avebury Stones, Britain’s Greatest Megalithic Temple
(London, 1999).
24 Charles Edward Eaton, “Cloud Pictures,” Sewanee Review 92, no. 4 (1984): 534.
which “if you consider them well, you will Šnd really marvellous
ideas.”25 Elsewhere, Leonardo cites Sandro Botticelli as an advocate of
following the prompts and biddings of fantasia: “Our Botticelli said,
that such study [of landscape] was vain, because by merely throwing a
sponge full of diverse colors at a wall, it left a stain on that wall, where a
Šne landscape was seen.”26 The Paduan philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi
(1462–1524) openly yoked the power of dreaming with meteorological
and optical illusions: “If one admits that apparitions can be produced in
dreams, one must give credence to the possibility that they can also be
produced in the atmosphere.”27
Shakespeare invokes this type of daydreaming both in Anthony and
Cleopatra (“Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish…”) and in Ham-
let when Hamlet ribs Polonius, exposing the old courtier’s slipperiness
and duplicity:
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

Polonius: By th’mass, and ’tis like a camel indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is back’d like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale?
Polonius: Very like a whale.28
In The Tempest, Prospero’s art—his “insubstantial pageant”—not only

harks back to Faustus’s conjurings, but also hints at Fata Morganatic ef-
fects that may rešect contemporary stagecraft.29 It is worth noting that
Shakespeare, who was sparing with stage directions, twice speciŠes the
pixilating paradox that Ariel, that airy spirit, “enters, invisible.”
Ideas of conjuration and magical illusion were intertwined with
conceptions of mental or eidetic images, produced in the mind’s eye by
fantasy.
25 Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, ed. and trans. Philip McMahon (Princeton,
1956), vol. 1, pp. 50–51.
26 Ibid., p. 59.
27 Pietro Pomponazzi, “Des causes des merveilles de la Nature ou des Enchantements,”
quoted in Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Le Miroir, essai sur une légende scientiŠque; révélations, science-Šction
et fallacies (Paris, 1978), p. 63.
28 Hamlet, Act III, Sc. 2.
29 and, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself…
4. The Eye of the Imagination
Robert Fludd was an Oxford esoteric philosopher and one of the leading
Rosicrucians; he published his thoughts about human consciousness
and its relationship to the macrocosm of divine creation in his spell-
binding book Utriusque Cosmi (Of the Other World) in 1617–21, a
decade after The Tempest. The magniŠcent illustrations (Šgure 2) were
probably devised by the author in collaboration with the great engraver-
printer Theodore de Bry.
In the beautiful plate entitled “Vision of the Triple Soul in the
Body,” Fludd has disposed the faculties in haloes around the proŠle of a
man with suitably enlarged and sensitive external organs: a luminous
single eye, a prominent ear, a hand raised to display the Šngertips,
swollen sensual lips. The senses radiate into a series of concentric circles,
and these are hyphenated to a constellation of animae, or souls, inside the
cranium: on the left is the sensitive soul, of which the circumference is
interlaced with the imaginative soul. Another bridge or hyphen leads
upward from this to another planetary system, the world of the Imagi-
nation (Mundus imaginabilis), where, in good Neoplatonist fashion, all is
shadow—the rings of this system, the Umbra Terrae, or shadow of the
World, are all shadows of the elements. Fludd writes, “[This] soul [is]
called the imaginative soul, or fantasy or imagination itself; since it be-
holds not the true pictures of corporeal or sensory things, but their like-
nesses and as it were, their shadows.”30
One of the most remarkable illustrations places an eye over the exact
position of the imaginative soul in the earlier diagram. The oculus imag-
inationis, or eye of the Imagination (Šgure 3), radiates a tableau of im-
ages: a tower (of Babel?), a guardian angel showing the way, an obelisk,
a two-masted ship on a high sea, and the Last Judgment with Christ in
glory on a rainbow among trumpeting angels while the dead rise with
supplicating hands.
These images belong to various orders of representation, based on
memory or Imagination, but it is clear that the inner eye in Fludd’s
Neoplatonist conception does not receive images: it projects them onto
Shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
(The Tempest, Act IV, Sc. 1)
30 Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), vol. 2, p. 218.
Figure 2. “Vision of the Triple Soul in the Body,” from Robert Fludd,
Utriusque Cosmi, 1617–21. (London Library, London)
Figure 3. “The Eye of the Imagination,” from Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi.
(London Library, London)
Figure 4. A magic lantern, called camera obscura, from Athanasius Kircher,

Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (Rome, 1646). (Bill Douglas Centre, University of
Exeter)
a screen that lies beyond the back of the head, šoating in a space that
does not exist except in fantasy.
Athanasius Kircher, a generation younger than Fludd, knew his
work, and its direct inšuence can be felt in The Great Art of Light and
Shadow (Rome, 1646). The illustrations of the magic lantern are the ear-
liest extant of this device, and for a long time Kircher was credited with
inventing it. He does not claim to have done so, but he describes his pi-
oneering experiments, when he prepared glass slides with salts and
chemicals for the shows he gave in the Jesuit College in Rome.31 The
engraving in Ars Magna (Šgure 4) contains certain elementary errors
that make it certain that Kircher himself did not oversee the artist at
work: for example, the painted slides would need to be upside down in
the projector in order to appear right side up on the wall, as illustrated
clearly elsewhere in the book, in one of the Šrst edition’s many optical
diagrams.
31 The initial invention of the instrument is now attributed to a contemporary of his,
the brilliant Dutch horologist and astronomer Christian Huygens.
But illustrations of the magic lantern’s prototypes have a signiŠcant

feature in common: the subjects in the images projected cannot be seen
with the eye of the body, except in representations by artists. The sub-
jects in these examples of visual phenomena are fantastic, and they give
that certain frisson of the grotesque, designed to excite fear as well as
pleasure. These are images that ipso facto connote the visions of the mind’s
eye, and in order to do so they draw on a supernatural lexicon. They de-
pict hallucinations. It is hardly an accident that a naked soul in the
šames of hell or purgatory appeared burning on the slide projected onto
the wall or that Death was shown as an animated skeleton with the
scythe of the reaper and the hourglass of Father Time. An engraving pub-
lished in Leiden in 1720–21 also included an illustration of an early slide
projector, and, despite the learned and scientiŠc title of the mathemati-
cal treatise in which it appears, it showed a huge, magniŠcent devil leer-
ing on the wall. The device was thought to reproduce the mind’s capacity
to fabricate what the eyes of the body cannot see.
Athanasius Kircher’s seances were attended, in the Jesuit College in
Rome, by cardinals and grandees who gathered to witness “what was
known, in jest,” writes his fellow Jesuit Giardina later, “as the enchant-
ments of the reverend father†”32 But the later Jesuit’s uneasiness is
well grounded, for Kircher signiŠcantly chose to project supernatural
images, and in this he comes perilously close to the goety, or black
magic, denounced by the Inquisition in his own day. One Inquisitor,
writing in 1641 (i.e., during Kircher’s heyday), gives a full inventory of
the disruption and mayhem that the rebel angels create. In the midst of
a terrifying and overheated litany of evil and catastrophe, the Inquisitor
instances metamorphoses of animal and human bodies. But these are
not changed in their substance, “sed aliam ex vaporibus extrinsecus cir-
cumponendo…[but only by investing them in another aspect, composed of
extrinsic vapors…].”33
Cloudy vapors Šgure strongly in his account of the phantasmic pow-
ers of Imagination. Kircher explores the dominant metaphor of a screen
and then two dependent metaphors: Šrst, the blackened surface of a
mirror, and, second, the smoky and boiling vapors in the brain of a per-
son afšicted with melancholy. He borrowed the image of the mirror
32 Giardina, Discorso, p. 140.

33 Cesare Carena, Tractatus De OfŠcio Sanctissimae Inquisitionis (Cremona, 1641),
pp. 217–18, quoted in Maurice Slawinski, “Marino, le streghe, il cardinale,” kindly lent by
the author, forthcoming in Italian Studies.
from optics and the image of the inchoate and turbulent spirits from ex-
planations of cosmic origin in hermetic physics, as represented in
Fludd’s work; it is not clear how metaphorically he intends their appli-
cation to the mind.
These means of the imaginative soul (the play of shadows, the
opaque surface of a mirror, and vaporous swirling clouds—for produc-
ing and rendering fantasy) return as palpable, physical instruments of
projection in the Šrst cinematic public entertainment, the phantas-
magoria. Its subject matter was spectral illusion, morbid, frequently
macabre, supernatural, Št to inspire terror and dread, those qualities of
the sublime, and it enjoyed terriŠc popularity from the end of the eigh-
teenth century, in Paris just after the Terror, until the invention of true
moving cinema displaced it. The association between diabolical phan-
toms and spectral phenomena inšuenced the content and material of
optical illusions and shaped the characteristic uses and development of
those varied and wonderful technological devices that have been used to
represent the supernatural, to make present what eludes the senses and
to make visible the invisible.
Etienne-Gaspard Robertson was the brilliant innovator in this
proto-cinema: he thought of blacking out the background, and coating
the gauze with wax to give it greater translucency, and putting the
projector on rollers (Šgure 5). Audiences accepted an unspoken, unex-
amined equivalence between the ghosts, skeletons, bleeding nuns, and
ghouls that a burning lamp, šickering smoke, a series of mirrors and
lenses, and a painted transparency can project and the invisible screen
on which the mind casts its own envisionings, be they fantasized or
recalled through memory. This equivalence recurs in the development
of optical languages that culminate in the conventions of contemporary
media from cinematic voice-overs, šashbacks, and dream sequences.34
Robertson also projected onto smoke. In one slide, for example, the
eerie head of Danton, recently guillotined, rose šickeringly, like his
shade.
As Terry Castle points out so inspiringly in The Female Thermometer,
the uncanny took a turn away from external, supernatural, and mysteri-
34 Early cinema drifted, as if naturally, to depicting the inner world of Imagination.

Think of the pioneer Georges Méliès, who Šlmed a journey to the moon as well as the frolics
of fairies, or great silent movies such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)
and F. W. Murnau’s vampire Šlm Nosferatu (1921).
Figure 5. The phantasmagoria of Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, Paris, 1790s,

in a contemporary engraving. From John Barnes, “The History of the Magic
Lantern,” New Magic Lantern Journal 1/1, no. 3/2 (1984): 29. It also appears in
Laurent Mannoni’s Le Grand Art de la lumière et de l’ombre (Paris, 1994). (Bill
Douglas Centre, University of Exeter)
ous causes of dread and terror, earthed to a common religious faith, and
began to inhabit instead unstable, internal hallucinations, seething with
personal, idiosyncratic monsters extruded from the overheated brain by
the force of vehement Imagination, or, as Goya would write on the open-
ing Capricho, with monsters generated by the dream of reason. Even sup-
posedly natural wonders, which became a favorite theme with magic
lanternists, take on a fantastic appearance. Icy vistas, with heaped snow-
banks and aurora borealis (Šgure 6), as painted by a London Šrm in the
second half of the nineteenth century, partake, I think, of the character of
Fata Morgana.35
The sublime spectral cinema of meteorology, evoked in different
works of early Romanticism, disquietingly and even thrillingly dis-
turbs the grounds on which the question of a phenomenon’s internal or
external nature can be decided. The undecided, debatable relationship
of the visionary to the vision, of witness to portent, of the scryer to the
encrypted message or the scrying mirror, still vexes arguments about
35 “Icebergs,” ca. 1860, and “Aurora Borealis,” ca. 1900, Carpenter and Wesley, Lon-
don, in the Whipple Museum, University of Cambridge.
Figure 6. Icebergs, from magic lantern slides, made by Carpenter & Wesley,
London, mid-nineteenth century. (Whipple Museum, University of Cam-
bridge)
memory and fantasy, with regard to phantasmagoric revelations of

childhood ordeals, for example. This unsettled problem is grounded in
the anxiety about diabolical origins and gained extension, depths, and
strength from images of doubles, shadow selves, spirit enchantments,
summonings, and hallucinations in early Romantic writings of the cel-
ebrated, heroic, and haunted poets, Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset, but also, very markedly, in the
work of lesser-known writers like Thomas Lovell Beddoes and James
Hogg. The book I am going to concentrate on here is James Hogg’s The
Private Memoirs and Confessions of a JustiŠed Sinner, written in 1824.
5. Haloes of Glory
James Hogg communicates a metaphysical thriller of a plot in a lan-

guage wrought from the stinging rhythms and rhetoric of Low Church
liturgy, compounded by the ghastly, eerie fairy lore of the Highlands
and a Coleridgean intensity of fantasy. His hectic and macabre novel
splits and doubles itself, its themes, and its characters. Two texts, one
following the other, are written from two different points of view;
narrating the same terrible story, they contradict each other here and
there, forming an asymmetrical diptych, all the more compelling for its
discordancy and conšicts. These two versions stage the fatal enmity of
two brothers, George, who is fair of face and sanguine of temper, and
Robert, saturnine, fanatical, and malignant, brought up in a blazing,
antinomian extreme conviction that the “justiŠed sinner” who has been
saved can do no wrong. In his pride, Robert acquires—attracts? gener-
ates?—a mysterious mentor and benefactor who encourages him to
believe in his irrecusable salvation and goads him and cajoles him into
an ever deeper and more violent hatred of his brother. Hogg bores deep
into the theme of paired opposites, who, while distinct as well as repel-
lent to each other, may be at the same time symbiotically interdepen-
dent (like north and south, black and white). George Šnds himself
continually accompanied by his brother:
Yet he had never sat or stood many minutes till there was the self-
same being, always in the same position with regard to himself, as
regularly as the shadow is cast from the substance, or the ray of light
from the opposing denser medium.36
The optics in these similes will recur. Meanwhile Robert, too, is being
shadowed, by his Mephistophelean mentor.
Hogg stages one of the novel’s climactic struggles between the two
brothers in the open, elevated ground of Arthur’s Seat, near Edinburgh,
on a radiant morning. The scene, with its phantasmagoric epiphanies,
its violent, near fatal encounter, and its hallucinatory multiplication of
the doppelgänger Šgure, fuses modern dilemmas about the stability of
the self with visual metaphors of meteorological wonders and optical
36 James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a JustiŠed Sinner, ed. John Carey
(Oxford, 1999), p. 36.
illusion. An analogous wonder to the Fata Morgana here unfolds as nat-

ural prodigy and spectral fantasy at once, an objective epiphany of the
sublime and an interior nightmare wrought by personal devils.
George has ascended onto the brilliant illuminated summit partly to
evade the constant unwelcome attendance of his brother:
As he approached the swire at the head of the dell, —…he beheld,
to his astonishment, a bright halo in the cloud of haze, that rose in a
semi-circle over his head like a pale rainbow. He was struck motion-
less at the view of the lovely vision; for it so chanced that he had
never seen the same appearance before, though common at early
morn. But he soon perceived the cause of the phenomenon, and that
it proceeded from the rays of the sun from a pure unclouded morning
sky striking upon this dense vapour which refracted them.37
He continues to draw nearer, and the delicious morning vision changes:
Gracious Heaven! What an apparition was there presented to his

view! He saw, delineated in the cloud, the shoulders, arms, and fea-
tures of a human being of the most dreadful aspect. The face was the
face of his brother, but dilated to twenty times the natural size. Its
dark eyes gleamed on him through the mist†
George conceived it to be a spirit. He could conceive it to be noth-
ing else; and he took it for some horrid demon by which he was
haunted, that had assumed the features of his brother in every linea-
ment, but in taking on itself human form, had miscalculated dread-
fully on the size, and presented itself thus to him in a blown-up,
dilated frame of embodied air, exhaled from the caverns of death or
the regions of devouring Šre.38
When it comes nearer, George šings himself upon it, only to Šnd
that it is “a real body of šesh and blood,” his fearsome brother Robert,
who cries “Murder.” Then, “…being confounded between the shadow
and the substance, [George] knew not what he was doing or what he had
done†” He assaults the demon shape—an act that will land him
with a charge of attempted murder and precipitate the tortuous and ter-
rible sequence of events that leads to his death.39
37 Ibid., pp. 39–40.
38 Ibid., pp. 41–42.
39 In the second half of the novel, Robert’s Šrst-person account of his misdeeds, he also
describes the violent encounter in the clouds: he goes there, at the urging of his evil genius,
to kill his brother. He too there suffers visions: a woman in white appears to him out of the
mist and upbraids him for his evil intentions, but Robert’s “prince” and “counselor” rema-
terializes on the instant and, in archaic, lofty tones, orders his minion not to be so faint-
hearted, but to throw his wretch of a brother from the pinnacle into “the foldings of the
cloud.”
James Hogg footnotes his protagonist’s vision on the mountain, say-

ing that “this terrestrial phenomenon of the early morn cannot be better
delineated than by the name given of it by the shepherd boys, ‘The little
wee ghost of the rainbow.’” But Hogg was very likely familiar with
magic lantern spectacles that were popularly touring the country then:
Phillip de Philipstahl, known as Philidor, staged his phantasmagorias
in Edinburgh in 1802, raising many ghosts, spectres, bleeding nuns,
and the like to the terror of his audiences.40 He had also sought out a so-
called Brocken spectre, as a certain mountain phenomenon was known:
it “appeared to my affrighted imagination as the enemy of mankind.”41
But The Confessions does not share the rationalist stance of the galanty
men, who liked to claim that they spooked the public merely to show
how vain such fears were. Hogg’s vision occurs early in the novel and
embodies the character of the book, for it is not possible to know what
George experienced exactly, what he sees, who is possessed, who is
haunted.
Hogg knew Coleridge’s work well, and his halo of glory interest-
ingly reclaims the phenomenon for a more profound psychological un-
canny than the older poet’s use of it. Coleridge, on a walking tour of
Germany with some friends in 1799, made a pilgrimage to the Harz
Mountains to catch a glimpse of this famed conjunction between
clouds, sky, and shadow that casts a huge phantom Šgure across the
cloudšoor. Coleridge and his friends were twice disappointed in their
quest to see the spectre, though at the second attempt they were “re-
payed by the sight of a Wild Boar with an immense Cluster of Glow-
worms round his Tail & Rump.”42
Robert goes, but at the crucial moment fails to push George over the edge; we have his
word for it that his soul rebelled. Throughout his account, he portrays himself as the puppet
of his princely counselor, his understanding clouded, his nature distorted by the unceasing
shadowing and possession of his “adviser.” It is a fervid, intemperate, memorable rendition
of the idea of an inner voice at odds with the self, speaking the unutterable.
His evil genius has the necromantic capacity to change his shape: either he takes on the
semblance of his victims, impersonating Robert in the execution of numerous further
crimes, or he propels Robert to commit evil in a somnambulist state:
Either I had a second self, who transacted business in my likeness, or else my body was
at times possessed by a spirit over which it had no controul [sic], and of whose actions
my own soul was wholly unconscious. This was an anomaly not to be accounted for by
any philosophy of mine† To be in a state of consciousness and unconsciousness, at
the same time, in the same body and same spirit, was impossible. (ibid., p. 182)
40 Valentina Bold, The Magic Lantern: Hogg and Science, in Studies in Hogg and His World,
no. 7 (Stirling, 1996), pp. 5–17.
41 Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, September 28, 1833, pp. 273–74 (quoted by John
Carey, “Introduction,” in Hogg, Confessions, p. xviii).
42 Richard Holmes, Early Visions (London, 1989), pp. 229–31, 236.
In spite of this disappointment, Coleridge later explored the phe-

nomenon in a love poem, “Constancy to an Ideal Object.” The diaboli-
cal phantom of medieval German legend reappears here completely
transformed into an image for the split consciousness of the yearning
lover, who transŠgures the “image with a glory round its head,” into an
extended metaphor for a lover’s vivid fantasy, in his mind’s eye, of his
beloved’s presence.
The poet addresses his own thought, which is all so taken up with
his love object in her absence and questions its status: can a mental image
have material presence? “And art thou nothing?” he asks. And then an-
swers himself:
Such thou art, as when

The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, where o’er the sheep-track’s maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist’ning haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a glory round its head;
The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows he makes the shadow, he pursues!43
In this Orphic key, Coleridge summons a phantom Eurydice from

the Fata Morgana illusion. “Constancy to an Ideal Object” ironizes, in
its very title, the contrast between the persistent obsessive attachment
of the mind to its fantasies and the insubstantial character of their ob-
jects, and dramatizes, with rapt poignancy, the split consciousness of the
lover who knows he himself creates the presence of the love object he
pursues. Unlike Hogg, who leaves in doubt the source of his two pro-
tagonists’ supernatural visions, Coleridge explicitly invokes the explic-
able, meteorological wonder in order to communicate the happier state
of the rustic who does not know that the vision has no substance, except
as the shadow side of his own state; the doppelgänger seals the loneliness
of the Romantic lovelorn poet, then pining for his beloved Sara
Hutchinson, too self-aware not to acknowledge that the boons her im-
age summoned for him—security and home, warmth and love—exist
only as longings projected in air, as rainbows that have indeed been un-
woven.
43 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems, ed. John Beer (London, 1993), pp. 311–12 (empha-
sis added); footnoted “This Phenomenon which the Author has himself experienced, and of
which the reader may Šnd a description on one of the earlier volumes of the Manchester
Philosophical Transactions, is applied Šguratively in† Aids to Rešection (1825).”
The conšict between a meaningful uncanny portent, as in James

Hogg’s great novel, and desolate Coleridgean subjective perception ex-
pands and takes in a new direction the earlier quarrel between Biblical
divine design and natural artistry and chance; the oscillating nuances of
the difference continue to vibrate in the nineteenth century, in the spir-
itualists’ efforts, and stir uncomfortably in the struggles of Victorians
over the question of the paranormal.44
It is a commonplace to point out that inquiry paradoxically took a
positivist bent in the era of high Romanticism; that Nature was then be-
ing laid out on the operating table and the dissecting block and parceled
up into the specimen case. What is pertinent here is the desire to make
the sky legible as well, to interpret the iconotexts of the clouds, to mar-
shal even the vaporous, inchoate chaos of cloudscapes into reasonable or-
der. This desire burgeons into two principal endeavors in the Romantic
period: Šrst, the early scientiŠc and analytical voyages into the upper air,
through the clouds and beyond, were accompanied by ground-breaking
inquiries into the nature of clouds; second, these explorings were them-
selves accompanied by different, subjective trials to uncover meaning
within inchoate and indeterminate mutability through the faculty of
Imagination. This last attempt is nevertheless braided with the Šrst,
characteristic Enlightenment quest, and does not proceed in opposition
to it.
6. Cloud Studies
The variety and structure of clouds Šrst came under scientiŠc scrutiny
almost at the same time as Coleridge was seeking the Brocken spectre.
While Benjamin Franklin was probing the powers of lightning and
electricity, other scientists—biologists, astronomers, physicists—sailed
up up up into the new territories of the upper air in MontgolŠer bal-
loons and wondered at the sublime view of cloudscapes. Luke Howard
named the varieties of cloud, for the very Šrst time, in an article in
1802–3; Goethe was inspired by this work to hymn the heavens in sci-
entiŠc mode.
44 Henry Sidgwick extended the argument’s reach into theology, particularly in relation
to a theory of miracles. “As for spirit-rapping,” wrote Sidgwick in 1873, “I am in exactly the
same mind towards it as towards religion. I believe there is something in it, don’t know
what, have tried hard to discover, and Šnd that I always paralyse the phenomena. My taste is
strongly affected by the obvious humbug mixed with it, which at the same time my reason
does not overestimate.” Quoted in C. D. Broad, “Henry Sidgwick and Psychical Research,”
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, part 156: 136.
Of an earlier generation, and in a quieter mood, the Russian-born

English watercolor artist and draughtsman Alexander Cozens, born in
1717, painted from observation, en plein air, the particularities of cu-
mulus and stormclouds and of moonlight and the sun’s rays on their
volumes.
Clouds were signiŠcant elements in the šuid incoherence of natural
forms and Cozens, in the mid-1770s and 1780s, was struggling to trap
them into a system, numbered, annotated, and set out in a grid for the
beneŠt of his pupils.45 But Cozens took his study of mutability and
formlessness in a remarkable direction: he adapted the ancient scrutiny
of clouds and other random patternings, as in Leonardo’s precept, to
form what he called A New Method for Assisting the Invention of Drawing
Original Compositions of Landscape (1784–85).46
Very meticulously, Cozens outlined the use of “blots” (Šgure 7) as a
way of enhancing Imagination and memory, and he made an instinctive
identiŠcation of this practice with Šnding shapes in clouds, quoting on
the title page Shakespeare’s passage from Anthony and Cleopatra. He ad-
vised: “Possess your mind strongly with a subject,” and then “with the
swiftest hand make all possible variety of shapes & strokes upon your
paper,” letting the hand move unpremeditated and unguided and un-
conscious. He furthermore suggested crumpling the paper, in order to
create more accidental marks.
Cozens writes that he stumbled across this odd, Zen-like practice
when he pulled an old, “soiled” scrap of paper from a pile to demon-
strate something for a student and found that the marks it bore helped
to crystalize his ideas. When reminded of Leonardo, Cozens said he had
not known of his comments but was delighted with this corroboration,
for his ideas aroused a great deal of ridicule, Aristophanes-style.47 “This
theory is in fact,” he wrote, “the art of seeing properly†”48
Alexander Cozens advocated combining objective reproduction of
the observed natural randomness, aethereal šux, and the adventitious
45 Cozens had private pupils, including William Beckford, and was drawing master at
Eton College.
46 See A. P. Oppé, Alexander and John Robert Cozens inc. A. Cozens, A New Method for As-
sisting the Invention of Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (1784–85) (London, 1952);
Hubert Damisch, La Théorie du nuage (Paris, 1972), pp. 255–56.
47 It does not seem possible that Cozens had somehow come across Chinese watercolor
theory of cloud paintings and dream stones, though his new Method resembles it in many
respects; see Damisch, Théorie, pp. 277–311; Roger Caillois, Roger Caillois, The Writing of
Stones, trans. Barbara Bray, introduction by Marguerite Yourcenar [L’Ecriture des pierres,
1970] (Charlottesville, 1985).
48 Oppé, Cozens, p. 173.
Figure 7. Alexander Cozens, blot painting, from A New Method (London,

1784–85). (Tate Gallery, London)
camoušage mottling of light and shade with an extraordinary attempt

to probe such forms’ potential for personal expression. The Platonic
predicament of mortals in the cave, receiving experience in partial, frag-
mentary, and deceptive form of šickering shadows was already resisted
by both Botticelli and Leonardo when they placed heroic humanist
conŠdence in the powers of Imagination to winkle meaning from the
most inauspicious hiding places. Cozens, with his quasi-scientiŠc
tables—William Beckford, who was his friend, patron, and pupil, com-
mented that Cozens was “almost as full of Systems as the Universe”49—
attempts to šatten this work of fantasia into a simple tool, a kind of
spinning jenny or Davy lamp of landscape painting.
The opening page of an album of his sketches shows two pages of
proposed schemata for “Principles of Landskip” that make no concession
to the picturesque;50 they are diagrammatic, understated, spontaneous,
and spare. Yet these abstract squiggles, tending ever more intensely to
condensation and simplicity, have a simple provisional esthetic that is
startlingly gripping for a contemporary viewer, uncannily proleptic of
49 Ibid., p. 44.
50 “Sundry Studies of Landscape Composition by Cozens the Elder,” British Museum
198.a.2.
modern composition. In Cozens’s tiny drawings—each one about half

an inch square—we can feel the urgency of “seeing properly”: he was ob-
serving empirically, training fantasy not to be deluded, using the scry-
ing faculty for scientiŠcally and esthetically harmonious purposes, so
that rather than perceive castles in the air and phantom armies in the
clouds as heavenly portents, fairy enchantments, or mental delusions,
the artist becomes a master of vision and the disposer of its incoherent
offerings, like drifts and assemblies of the clouds. Cozens, while travel-
ing further than any of his contemporaries into methods of mental pic-
turing, was also set against—even defending himself against—the
unruly procession of images in phantasmagorias and other optical ef-
fects, such as the Hogg halo of glory.
7. “The Domain of Arnheim”
The human eye’s dilemma, in front of nature’s incoherence, provoked

Edgar Allan Poe to one of his most lingeringly peculiar fancies: his tale
of 1847, “The Domain of Arnheim,”51 features a certain Mr. Ellison, a
vastly wealthy esthete who then inherits an even more fabulous fortune.
This American progenitor of Charles Baudelaire’s dandy and J.-K.
Huysmans’s Des Esseintes deplores the šaws that spoil every view from
whatever vantage point the spectator takes before Nature’s pictures. But
as he and the narrator expand on the errors and infelicities of “Natura
pictrix,” Ellison reverses the point of view, and with a breathtaking,
Borgesian leap suggests that the world might be disposed, composed,
and pleasingly beheld by others beside humans; that Nature itself, as we
experience it, might itself be a Fata Morgana of hidden patterns and har-
monious order for some other, higher gaze. He suggests:
“There may be a class of beings, human once, but now invisible to

humanity, to whom, from afar, our disorder may seem order—our
unpicturesqueness picturesque; in a word, the earth-angels, for
whose scrutiny more especially than our own, and for whose death-
reŠned appreciation of the beautiful, may have been set in array by
God the wide landscape-gardens of the hemispheres.”52
Ellison’s idea of earth-angels who have been reŠned by death projects

51 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Domain of Arnheim,” in The Complete EAP Tales, ed. Alix
Perry (New York, 1981), pp. 546–56.
52 Ibid., p. 550.
the signifying faculty beyond the human altogether and in so doing

proposes a relationship between Art and Nature that differs entirely
from Albertian mimesis or Leonardoesque fantasia.
Poe’s omnipotent hero will not accept human limitations, however,
and he dedicates himself to reorganizing Nature’s scenery in order to
adapt it for the human gaze, to please “the eyes which were to behold
it on earth,”53 and so he embarks on a Faustian performance of the
picturesque.
The eerily still, enthralling tale sets out the possibility of gaining
happiness through estheticism and willpower—it is not surprising that
Baudelaire, who brilliantly translated Poe into French, exclaimed when
he came across him that here was his very own semblable, his own double
casting a mimick shadow across his writing from an America twenty
years before. For “The Domain of Arnheim” ends with a dream voyage
to an artiŠcial paradise of Ellison’s devising: a canoe takes the voyager
gliding down a river and through a gorge, and the tale then climaxes in
a truly entrancing Šnale:
Meantime the whole Paradise of Arnheim bursts upon the view.

There is a gush of entrancing melody; there is an oppressive sense of
strange sweet odor; —here is a dream-like intermingling to the eye
of tall slender Eastern trees—bosky shrubberies—šocks of golden
and crimson birds—lily-fringed lakes—meadows of violets, tulips,
poppies, hyacinths and tuberoses—long intertangled lines of silver
streamlets—and, upspringing confusedly from amid all, a mass of
semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic architecture, sustaining itself as if by a
miracle in mid-air, glittering in the red sunlight with a hundred
oriels, minarets, and pinnacles; and seeming the phantom handi-
work, conjointly, of the Sylphs, of the Fairies, of the Genii, and of the
Gnomes.54
This is a Fata Morgana of a city, a castle in the air, for, signiŠcantly,

Poe’s poetry carries him beyond Mr. Ellison, the supreme landscape gar-
dener, on to more aethereal makers—those genii and gnomes. The “Do-
main” was inspired, it is thought, by reports of Fonthill, Beckford’s
summer retreat, where Alexander Cozens had studied the shapes of
clouds and reconŠgured blots in more harmonious arrangements than
he found in observation.
Edgar Allan Poe was the favorite writer of René Magritte, who knew
53 Ibid., p. 549.
54 Ibid., p. 556.
him in the intense, jeweled translation by Baudelaire.55 One of Poe’s

“histoires sérieuses,” “The Domain of Arnheim” inspired, a hundred
years after it was written, the title of three of the Belgian Surrealist’s
many paintings that densely conjugate clouds, mirrors, rešections, and
optical illusions: Magritte refused explication, and it is beside the point
to make sense of his puzzles, though not entirely redundant to unpick
the many knots he ties in the eyestrings of ordinary perception. His
clusters of images will not parse or come out with a solution, however,
and I will come back to this intrinsic condition of enigma, for it repre-
sents the last condition of cloudiness I want to put to you.
What is it that we, the earthling spectators, see in Magritte’s 1949
version of this picture, The Domain of Arnheim (Šgure 8)? Beyond the
shattered windowpane, appears—perhaps—one of the anges terrestres or
earth-angels, from Poe’s class of invisible beings who hold the unseen
pattern of Nature in their gaze. Here it takes the form of a metamorphic
eagle-mountain, and its non-reversed image appears in the shattered
pieces of the windowpane as if the pane were a two-way mirror. “The out-
side is brought inside in a devastating way,” writes David Sylvester, the
painting giving the impression of that claustrophobic moment of terror
when a bird hurtles into a window.56 But this impact cannot quite have
happened in this manner, as the artist contrives his favorite confusion be-
tween reality and image, and the stone bird remains in and of the moun-
tain. So it is Magritte who conŠgures the mountain as a bird, in the same
way as plains- or valley-dwellers give anthropomorphic or zoomorphic
names to landmarks and peaks. Looking at the picture, we follow his
lead. Adding to the puzzlement, these broken shards of mirror, as in
other pictures by Magritte, retain the image that had appeared through
the window to be an insubstantial rešection and give it painted materi-
ality, a kind of actuality that establishes its illusory condition as belong-
ing to a different perceptual universe, one that could exist from another,
unseen category of perceptive beings. The brainteaser itself belongs to
the Domain of Arnheim because it is not possible for us to know, or even
to imagine, what might be the harmonious arrangements devised
by Nature to please the earth-angels. Magritte responds to the Paris
55 Edgar Allan Poe, Histoires grotesques et sérieuses, trans. Charles Baudelaire (Paris, 1966),
pp. 151–71.
56 David Sylvester, Magritte, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery (London, 1969),
pp. 52–53, 87, 100; and idem, Magritte (London, 1992), p. 302.
Figure 8. René Magritte, The Domain of Arnheim (1949). (Private Collection)

Surrealists’ doctrinal trust in the unconscious’s powers to pattern vision,

writing, life, and destiny, by offering a dead end to interpretation.57
Typical Magritte clouds šoat above this vision; šeecy white trooping
cushions, against an uninšected azure sky, such conventionally idyllic
aetheric heavens, bland and placid vehicles bringing calme and volupté,
provide the signature motif in the music of the Magrittean uncanny.
These “intrusive skies,” in David Sylvester’s phrase, appear nearly
twenty years before the Domain of Arnheim, in an early picture (ca. 1929),
which is tellingly entitled The False Mirror, showing a huge Cyclopean
eye with the iris swimming with clouds around the disturbingly blind
spot of the pupil. The clouds sail into view in such pictures as ciphers
that encipher nothing: no phantom images lurk in their šuffy pillows,
no Fata Morganas or haloes of glory Šll their vacuity.
8. Conclusion
A seer who recomposes the languages of sign and vision that obtain at
the human level postulates another form of subjectivity, a subject who is
indeed outside our frame of reference. This seer or earth-angel is a cy-
borg avant la lettre—occupying an instrumental space analogous to
that of the proliferating processes and instruments that were invented
to probe the mysteries of the invisible, hidden worlds, both inner and
outer.58
Many devices of intricate ingenuity were developed in order to see
further, to see more, to see into and through. The eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries were the prodigious era of inventions, when media
were developed that could magnify, eavesdrop, register, and record all
kinds of signals that are imperceptible to ordinary faculties of human
sense. The catalogue of sensory prostheses, including the earlier tele-
scope and the microscope, Šnds its Šrst recording angels in photography
and phonography, and it includes methods still very much in use—
57 Magritte painted other versions with the same title in 1938 and 1962, and a variation
on the image, L’Appel des cimes (1943), with a painting of the bird-mountain on an easel in
front of the window. See Sylvester, Magritte (1992), p. 298.
58 As Carol Mavor has written, “We [also] try to imagine that we can see ourselves see-
ing (that we can see inside), in order to defeat the fact that vision is always outside of us and
that we could never know how the other perceives us† This unproblematized (and myth-
ical) approach to looking is sustained in order to carry the all-seeingness of the vision we de-
sire—so that we can see what we want to see.” Carol Mavor, Pleasures Taken, Performances of
Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photography (Durham and London, 1995), p. 82.
X-rays, ultrasound, computer-aided tomography (CAT scans), mag-

netic resonance imaging. Unseen forces that are not anchored in any in-
dividual human consciousness or applied idiosyncratically by any
Leonardoesque master or author, but belong as it were to the objective
stratosphere, became the means of detecting the hitherto incomprehen-
sible and hidden order and meaning of the invisible in the universe.
Some of these forces have stood the scientiŠc test: radio waves, gamma
rays. But others that were ardently advocated and exploited—and
wholly believed—have disappeared to the echoes of embarrassed titters:
animal spirits, Odic (magnetic) light, “radiant matter,” and the Aether
itself, with its emanation, ectoplasm.
The process is complex, two-way, and tightly raveled. First, the new
methods of detection are intertwined with models of mind, including
ideas of the subject and the subject’s agency, and the newly understood
limits of individual vision and fantasy. The camera obscura, or magic
lantern, mirrored the melancholic mind, and early magic lanternists
projected through their novel media a refraction of imagined interior
processes and their characteristic products. The technical means intro-
duced to create mental pictures were not determined by them, nor did
they shape them; their interaction depends rather on the necessary lim-
its of Imagination itself, which cannot imagine itself outside its own
boundaries. The Rorschach test, for example, invented in the late nine-
teenth century and introduced in 1921, adapted Leonardo’s ideas of
Imagination and even Cozens’s blots to psychological purposes. Numer-
ous techniques of unraveling Nature’s riddles and reconstituting its se-
cret patterns to become intelligible show a riotous Imagination in play
with curiosity, desire, and the longing for consolation. They are inter-
twined with a freshly imagined, Other subjectivity or Other conscious-
ness, not divine, not perhaps omnipotent, but endowed with the
aethereal intelligence of earth-angels and capable of discovering coher-
ence and cogency where they appear to be missing.
Second, just as Kircher and later phantasmagorists evoked the invis-
ible and hidden worlds of the supernatural and ghostly within fan-
tasy—“invented the uncanny”—so Victorian scientists, followed by
some eminent moderns, endeavored to apply their innovatory tech-
niques to probing interior mysteries, to making legible the invisible.
They wanted to bring out the unseen in an effort at rationality, and
their efforts could be seen as a struggle to subdue the uncanny. If
instrumentalized, the beyond-the-human faculties postulated in the
stratosphere would make available to our limited, fallible human senses

those hitherto tough, recalcitrant mysteries of inner landscape, of soul
and spirit; if understood and properly applied, they would at last descry
the Šgure in the rock, the face in the cloud; they would decipher the
aether, and materialize the impalpable. The enterprise, which would
culminate in spiritualism’s bizarre ectoplasmic phenomena, reveals
the irreducible primacy of fantasia over mimesis, of Imagination over
Empiricism.
II. ECTOPLASM: MATERIALIZING THE IMPALPABLE
1. Captured Ectoplasm
Under “Duncan Helen, Mrs.” in the catalogue of the archives of the So-
ciety for Psychical Research, now kept in the Manuscript Reading
Room of the University Library, Cambridge, there is this entry:
Sample of Ectoplasm. Material alleged to have been captured from
Mrs Helen Duncan, materialising medium, at a seance in 1939.
I asked to see the “sample of ectoplasm.” The librarian looked at me

strangely; he said, “Are you sure? It’s very nasty.” My response was,
“Would you prefer me to look at it somewhere else?” I thought there
might be a desk of shame, where I could be supervised and other readers
would not be disturbed. He said, “No, but be discreet.”
There was nothing corporeal about the sample when it arrived, in
the strict sense of human or animal tissue. Instead, inside the box, there
was a folded heap of dressmakers’ lining satin, the cheapest cloth, a syn-
thetic Šbre, and a yellowing white in hue. About four yards had been
cut straight from the bolt, with no hems at either end and the selvedge
left plain. It had been washed and ironed, but the creases where it had
been crumpled were still marked; the pattern of these showed it had
I would like to thank the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, and espe-
cially the staff of the Wren Library for their help and support during the research for this lec-
ture. I am also grateful to the Society for Psychical Research for permission to use their
archive in the University Library, Cambridge.
I would also like to thank Esther da Costa Meyer, of Princeton University, for her rich
and thoughtful response to these lectures. I hope to be able to develop some of the ideas that
emerged the following day in the seminar with her and Terry Castle in my future book on
this theme.
been tightly wadded. There were traces of old blood that the laundry
had not erased. The volume of it was astonishing to me: I went over to
the librarian and asked him if he had any scales.
Pliny experimented to discover whether bodies weighed more dead
than alive and claimed to have found that corpses were heavier, once the
light part—the spirit—had šed. Thomas Browne, continuing the long
inquiry into the weight of the body after death, could not agree. He
found that lesser animals rather became lighter when dead:
for exactly weighing and strangling a chicken in the Scales, upon an

immediate ponderation, we could discover no sensible difference in
weight, but suffering it to lye eight or ten howres, untill it grew per-
fectly cold, it weighed most sensibly lighter; the like we attempted,
and veriŠed in mice†1
But Browne’s curiosity was not satisŠed:
Now whereas some alledge that spirits are lighter substances, and
naturally ascending do elevate and waft the body upward, whereof
dead bodies being destitute contract a greater gravity; although we
concede that spirits are light, comparatively unto the body, yet that
they are absolutely so, or have no weight at all, wee cannot readily
allow†2
He then makes a distinction between spirit and soul that is important in

the context of spiritualism and other nineteenth-century quests for in-
visible forces: “for since Philosophy afŠrmeth that spirits are middle
substances between the soule and body, they must admit of some cor-
poreity which supposeth weight or gravity.”3
The librarian agreed that it would be a good idea to weigh the
sample; he suggested the postroom, where there would be scales. We
put it on the tray; Mrs. Duncan’s material weighed 236 grams (about
8 ounces)—less than I thought it would, for the satin felt slumpy and
heavy to the touch. I had expected lighter, diaphanous stuff—muslin
and cheesecloth were said to be mediums’ preferred fabrics.
Helen Duncan was a Scottish medium (born in 1898, died in 1956)
who specialized in materialization, the word used in Spiritualist circles
1 “Of the Popular and received tenets concerning Man, which examined, prove true or
false,” in Thomas Browne, Pseudoxia Epidemica, ed. Robin Robbins (Oxford, 1981), p. 315.
2 Ibid., p. 316.
3 Ibid.
to describe a phenomenon that became common in seances from the

1870s onward: the appearance of objects and of bodies, or traces of ob-
jects—touches to the cheek or hands of the sitters, slaps or caresses or
breezes as of something passing, sometimes Šngerprints or other traces,
sounds of bells ringing or aethereal music, apported šowers and other
gifts from the spirits, and, above all, ectoplasmic manifestations. These
took two predominant forms: luminous, veiled, phantom-like beings,
or nameless, amorphous parts of such beings, called pseudo-pods—
which issued from the mouth or the head or other entrance and exit
points of the medium’s body.4
Helen Duncan was often photographed with her spirit control,
known as “Peggy,” an ectoplasmic manifestation who regularly ap-
peared during this medium’s seances (Šgure 1).
The move from a visual illusion, as in Fata Morgana or in spectral
apparitions, from dematerialized bodies into a haptic experience of pal-
pable matter, as in Helen Duncan’s sheet, will be sought and endlessly
repeated in the Spiritualist seance. How the imponderable and aethereal
could be made palpable, weighed and veriŠed, by touch above all, but
also by smell and hearing, occupied some of the best minds of the last
century, as they postulated the possibility of paranormal phenomena.
Aristotle singled out the sense of touch in De Anima as the supreme
mark of human intelligence:
in the other senses he [man] is behind many kinds of animal, but in

touch he is much more discriminating than the other animals. This
is why he is of all living creatures the most intelligent. Proof of this
lies in the fact that among the human race men are well or poorly en-
dowed with intelligence in proportion to their sense of touch, and no
other sense†5
This is a startling endorsement from a philosopher more usually associ-

ated with the sovereignty of vision, and it throws light on the primacy
of touch in the verifying methods of the nineteenth century. Numerous
scientiŠc experimenters, including Spiritualists, were not to be satisŠed
4 Franek Kluski, one of the rare male materializing mediums, specialized in ectoplasmic
gloves and socks. See Gustave Geley, L’Ectoplasmie et la clairvoyance: observations et expériences
personelles (Paris, 1924), pp. 240–41, plates XXI, XXX.
5 Aristotle, De Anima II, ix, 20–25, trans. W. S. Hett (Cambridge, Mass., and London,
1995; Šrst published 1936), pp. 120–21.
Figure 1. Helen Duncan and “Peggy,” her spirit control, England, ca. 1935.
(Harry Price Library, University of London)
with the risen Christ’s injunction to Mary Magdalene, “Noli me tan-

gere”; they were Doubting Thomases one and all, and wanted to push
their Šngers into the wounds in the spirit body’s side, to palpate the
stuff of the other side, to feel its temperature and texture. Touch be-
comes the guarantor of the paradoxical presence of spirit, as we shall see.
2. Divinity in a Cloud
When Correggio painted Io around 1532 in his sequence of The Loves of

Jupiter, he showed her clasped close by the god in the form of a cloud
(Šgure 2). The artist took his cue from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which
the poet writes that Jupiter wrapped the earth in darkness in order to
conceal his actions, but that the ever vigilant Juno’s suspicions were
aroused, for she “wondered that šoating clouds should give the appear-
ance of night mists,” and so glided down to earth and chased them away.
But by then Jupiter had changed Io into a white heifer, the nymph’s far
more common appearance in paintings.6
Correggio’s divine ravisher emerges from the soft indigo-grey
massed mist as if he is consubstantial with cloud. His pointed, almost
elŠn face shimmers out of the miasma to kiss the nymph, and his right
hand appears through a semi-transparent cocoon of cloud to embrace
her; this Io does not šee a rapist, as she does in terror in Ovid’s poem,
but surrenders raptly to the enveloping fog, embracing its soft solidity
with her left arm and curling toes. Correggio wonderfully communi-
cates the haptic sense of Io’s šesh brushed all over with some feather-
light, shivery, close caresses.7
Jupiter was a god of all severe weathers: in the Io, he is clearly
wrapped in a kind of storm cloud, and it is suggestive that Ovid associ-
ates rain, in the same Šrst book of the Metamorphoses, with human gene-
sis itself. At the time of creation, the sky is divided from the earth, with
“the Šery aether” in the highest heaven, and the air where storms blow
below it. When Prometheus creates the Šrst human being, he takes
earth, which
being such a new precipitate
Of the etheric heaven
Cradled in its dust unearthly crystals8
and mixes it with rainwater. In the light of these preceding verses in

Ovid, Correggio’s picture clearly casts the cloud’s embrace as a dynamic
fecundating principle; in this it rhymes with the painter’s Danae, from
the same sequence of mythological paintings of The Loves of Jupiter,
which depicts the nymph receiving the god in her lap from another
6 Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 1, lines 599–606.
7 David Ekserdjian, Correggio (Norwich and London, 1997), p. 284.
8 Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid (London, 1997), p. 7.
Figure 2. Correggio, The Loves of Jupiter: Io.

(Kunsthistorischemuseum, Vienna)
cloud, in this case amber-gold, more solid and compact, an itinerant

rain cloud, just beginning to emit a few gold drops from the shower that
will inseminate her.
In Greek sources, the child of Jupiter and Io was called Epaphus, a
name related to the word for touch, because Io conceived at the touch of
the god.9 But this association of Io with tactility, to which Correggio

may have responded, suggests several further variations on clouds and
their meaning that I am going to explore. For while Fata Morgana casts
clouds as Šlms or screens on which the invisible and the spectral are cap-
tured, and this provides a metaphor for eidetic dream images, a comple-
mentary but divergent tradition Šnds clouds to be a vehicle of spirit and
a metaphor for the paradisical state, and deploys it, generously, extrava-
gantly, and often unconsciously, as the most satisfying and convenient
embodiment of an impossible conundrum: aethereal materiality. Bil-
lowing cumulus, šeecy altocumulus or louring thunderheads, and the
more solid-seeming manifestations are presented through inadequate
metaphors, visual and verbal, as apprehensible by other senses besides
sight.
Ectoplasm’s appearance borrows features from this tradition of mak-
ing visible the invisible, of rendering material the immaterial. Ecto-
plasm also bodies forth the aetheric or astral body, an idea about the
spiritual dimension of human personality that was expounded in Theo-
sophical thought and twists and turns through the history of the occult.
The French art historian Henri Focillon, in his book La Vie des formes,
Šrst published in 1934, proposed a radical view: forms have a life of
their own, and forms in art both derive from and generate other forms
autonomously, according to their own internal principles, both organic
and abstract. He argues that no amount of explanation of the historical,
social, economic, or personal circumstances in which the Gothic devel-
ops will ever give you the particular shape of the Gothic arch. “The time
that gives support to a work of art does not give deŠnition either to its
principle or to its speciŠc form.”10 He also insists that forms exist inde-
pendently of signiŠcation, so that while the Gothic arch might symbol-
ize aspiration, divinity, aethereal lightness, it does not intrinsically do
so, and could attract other meanings. Focillon’s argument strikingly of-
fers a path out of a certain impasse in the study of signs and symbols; it
frees them from the Šxity inšicted by ideas of the collective uncon-
scious, on the one hand, and, on the other, from the relativism of his-
toricism that denies any intrinsic properties to bodies of any form.
“[Form] prolongs and diffuses itself,” he writes, “throughout our dreams
and fancies: we regard it, as it were, as a kind of Šssure through which
9 See P. M. L. Forbes-Irving, Metamorphosis in Greek Myths (Oxford, 1990), pp. 212–15.
10 Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles B. Hogan and George Kubler
(New York, 1989), p. 15.
crowds of images aspiring to birth may be introduced into some in-

deŠnite realm—a realm which is neither that of physical extent nor that
of pure thought.”11 Expressions of the subtle body—the form of
spirit—pour through this Šssure. Mixed in with the cluster of amor-
phous forms—with blots and smudges, clouds and vapors—the larval
ghost, who takes its place worldwide in the conventional language of
the supernatural, carries the weight of transhistorical associations. But
such a ghost also arrives at deŠnition and differences according to tem-
poral circumstances—individual quests, mass fads. I shall unfold some
of the work performed by clouds in this sphere, both as an enduring
metaphorical form of disembodiment and as a sign forged and altered by
external circumstances.
Renaissance nebulae appear as solid bodies; pillows, cushions, divans
of cloud Šll paradise. Correggio created exuberant, candyšoss seraglios
in the Assumption of the Virgin in the dome of Parma cathedral, where an-
gels and saints swim, frolick, recline and perch on reefs and banks of cu-
mulus as if they were as buoyant as surf, and as docile as featherbeds.
Cloudiness has palpable substance here; it is tactile, ductile, plastic—
Aristotelian attributes of matter—in a strict sense; a variety of volumi-
nous foam with its own dependable organic structure, it persuades us of
the character of aethereality. Heaven tumesces with froth turned solid.
Embodied in sensuous paint strong enough to support its emanations,
amoretti gambol in and out of the šossy šeece, and are, like the painter’s
Jupiter, apparently consubstantial with air and airiness.12 In a study af-
ter Raphael, attributed to Parmigianino (Šgure 3), a knot of drapery is
doing duty for cloud support for an angelic foot; it is possible to see the
riddle of disembodied substance that artists were attempting to encom-
pass. Experientially, the viewer is able to understand the angels’ and
saints’ aethereal state precisely because they can recline so conŠdently
on banks of mist; nor do they disappear into it, as humans do when fog
envelops them.
11 Ibid., pp. 34–35.
12 I am aware here that I diverge from Hubert Damisch, who explicitly theorizes Cor-
reggio as a pioneer painter of optical subjectivity, on account of his use of perspective, which
posits a viewer’s vantage point below the tumultuous scene in the heavens. Damisch is tak-
ing his cue from Alois Riegl, who considered these frescoes by Correggio as a fulcrum in the
movement effected by the baroque from the tactile or objective mode to the optical or sub-
jective mode. But I feel that Riegl’s argument entails associating the tactile with the close-
up, with the painting of surfaces (e.g., Giotto), rather than empathizing with the imagined
substances of the bodies as rendered in paint. See Hubert Damisch, La Théorie du nuage: Pour
une histoire de la peinture (Paris, 1972), pp. 20–21.
Figure 3. Study of a Left Foot, after Raphael (attributed to Parmigianino). (The

Governing Body, Christ Church, Oxford)
Although Correggio takes clouds to extremes of blissful presence

that they had hardly enjoyed before, he is painting in a recognizable di-
alect of Christian iconography, not coining a new language.
Invisibility and cloudiness form a pun or perhaps a rhyme: they both
convey the condition of ineffability that the unknown and the supernat-
ural inhabit. In the Bible, God hides in a mist on the summit of Mount
Sinai. In Christian iconography, his disembodied nature takes the form
of synecdoche: as a hand in glory—the glory expressed by a little white
puff of cloud such as sails sometimes into view on a perfect summer’s
day, as in a mosaic from a conch in the portal of St. Mark’s, Venice
(1545), or as a šoating torso, legless, with trunkless heads of putti sur-
rounding him, in the stratosphere, as depicted by Giovanni Bellini in
the Baptism of Christ in S. Corona, Vicenza.
Figure 4. Bartolomeo Schedoni, Coronation of the Virgin. (Denis Mahon Collec-

tion, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)
In Bartolomeo Schedoni’s delicious Coronation of the Virgin (Šgure 4),

the amoretti hug the giant whipped cream clouds and appear to bob and
swim through their incandescent puffs, but do their bodies begin and
end as bodies, or as this froth, this foam? Cherubim also emerge from
and dissolve back into the glowing nimbus around Bartolomé Murillo’s
Virgin and the Child in Glory, as if consubstantial—or perhaps one should

say conaethereal—with light, air, and holy Šre.
In such pneumatic extravaganzas—which point forward to the Silver
Clouds of Andy Warhol as well as to the wobbly castles of children’s play-
grounds—clouds pun on the association of spirit and breath, pneuma;
they also mark ascensions, providing saints with uplift. When Pier
Francesco Mola painted St. Bruno in ecstasy, he communicated the
saint’s state by raising him off the ground on a small cloud; more lav-
ishly, Nicolas Poussin caught up to a much higher stratum an enrap-
tured Santa Rita of Cascia as she was swept by supernatural means to the
convent her father had forbidden her to enter.
The Virgin Mary, when she appears to contemporary seers in Fatima,
or in present day Croatia, still favors this mode of transport (Šgure 5).
But it is worth noting that, as the twentieth century progressed, the
nebulous spiritual sphere was washed whiter than white: for reasons I
shall be coming to later, no religious image-maker today would paint
the murky turmoil that buoys some ascending saints, or wraps inky
Jupiter, or wreathes smoky haloes round the sphere of divinity in high
Renaissance baroque art.
3. The Smoke of Sacrifice
Metonymic afŠnities between aether and clouds, between disembodied

spirits and smoke, infuse the symbolism of sacriŠce: in the Bible, and
Judaic ritual, the offerings are accompanied by the burning of incense;
the symbolic reenactment of Christ’s death in the Catholic mass also
takes place in a smoky atmosphere. Mary Douglas, the anthropologist,
commenting on the regulations of sacriŠces in the Temple detailed in
Leviticus, has demonstrated that the barrier of cloud screening God
from Moses’s view on Sinai returns by design in the smokescreen of in-
cense that conceals the Holy of Holies from view in the temple.13 How-
ever, incense itself only replicates symbolically the actual combustion of
sacriŠce: it was when God snuffed up the “sweet savour” of Noah’s burnt
offerings that he decided to leave off cursing and smiting humankind
(Genesis 8:21). The holocaust of animals and cereals in the temple ritual
13 Mary Douglas, The Eucharist, Its Continuity with the Bread SacriŠce of Leviticus
(Durham, N.C., 1998). My thanks go to Professor Mary Douglas, of University College
London, for lending me unpublished chapters from her book Leviticus as Literature (Oxford,
2000), pp. 66–86.
Figure 5. Our Lady of Fatima, shrine souvenir, purchased in Pittsburgh,

ca. 1990. (Author’s collection)
dematerializes their material bodies: they are turned to smoke, which

then ascends to heaven, joining matter and aether through the medium
of cloud. This language still underpins the iconography of Christian
saints’ translation to an unearthly state: the swelling clouds that carry
up an Ignatius or Aloysius or Teresa, in paintings of apotheosis, annex
the vocabulary of clouds to express a process of aetherealization. The
clouds that wrap the holy and translated beings rise up like smoke from
the altar, like incense from the thurible, communicating their ascension
into heaven, their mutation from this element to another. They function
as part of a sacred syntax, making visible within the limits of Šguration
a noncorporeal body that has become vaporized through salvation, sub-
limed from matter to air.
You can see this crucial and magical enterprise of linking this world
to the world above, the corporeal to the incorporeal, in Poussin’s As-
sumption (Šgure 6), a perfectly achieved expression of its theme even
though the doctrine of the Virgin’s incorruptible body, which was trans-
lated to heaven intact, contradicts the principles of puriŠcation and im-
molation by Šre that sacriŠce implies. The Virgin rises with dark smoke
spiraling around her ascending body as if the sarcophagus were an altar
and she were ascending wrapped in the smoke of sacriŠce; putti support
her airy šight in her swelling mantle, frolic in and out of the clouds, and
direct her aloft through the gap opening up above her head.
In Cinders, an essay of 1984, Jacques Derrida develops eloquently the
metaphorical division between ashes and smoke, those symbiotic dou-
bles of sacriŠce that are both emblematic of transitoriness, of the fugi-
tive, and of mortality, but are also packed with oppositional distinctions
from each other:
I have the impression now that the best paradigm of the trace [for
him] is not, as certain people have believed…[he himself too,
perhaps], the hunter’s tracks, the furrow, the line in the sand, the
wake in the sea, the love of the footstep for the footprint, but ash
(that which remains without remaining from the holocaust, from
the burned offering [brûle-tout], the incense of the Šre [de l’incendie
l’encens]).14
Derrida’s focus rests on the ash that stays behind—the terrestrial and
material residue, and he sends his readers to a sonnet by Stéphane
14 Jacques Derrida, Cinders, trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln, Neb., 1984), p. 43.
Figure 6. Nicolas Poussin, The Assumption of the Virgin. (Louvre, Paris)

Mallarmé, in which the poet plays on the ancient twinning of breath

and soul in a thoroughly contemporary conceit—the smoking of a
cigar (!). The poem opens with the lines
Toute l’âme résumée

Quand lente nous l’expirons
Dans plusieurs ronds de fumée…
[All the soul summed up,

When slowly we breathe it out
In several rings of smoke…]
Mallarmé elaborates: the soul leaves the body as the ash falls from the
glowing end:
La cendre se sépare
De son clair baiser de feu.
[The ash parts

From its bright kiss of Šre.]15
These doubles—soul/body, smoke/ash—are not in tension, but part

of a process that hyphenates body and soul through the metamorphosis
of substances, as in smoking, or, one could add, as in sacriŠce. Derrida
later exclaims, “What a difference between ash and smoke: smoke
seems to lose itself, and better, without leaving a sensory residue, rises,
takes the air, becomes subtle and sublimates itself. Ash falls, weary,
heavy†”16 At the end of the poem, Mallarmé takes sides with smoke
against ash, which he identiŠes with “le réel” (the real), and further-
more, which is, he writes, simply vil, that is, base, and the poem closes
with a symbolist afŠrmation of nebulousness:
Le sens trop précis rature

Ta vague littérature.
[Too precise a meaning erases

Your mysterious literature.]17
15 “Toute l’âme resumée,” from “Hommages et tombeaux,” in Mallarmé, ed. and trans.
Anthony Hartley (Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 96.
16 Derrida, Cinders, p. 73.
17 Hartley, Mallarmé, p. 96.
4. The Aether
It is worth noticing that Mallarmé’s smoke, as it aetherealizes its source,

is necessarily heated, even Šery, chemically and physically distinct from
breath. This difference was even more clearly marked in pre-modern
physics than it is understood today in the age of passive smoking, and,
counterintuitively perhaps, it informs the history of aether, with conse-
quences that can help us to understand the imagery of spiritual spheres,
its intrinsic limitations and its historical contingency.
In his Ecstatic Journey of 1656, for example, Athanasius Kircher de-
scribes his alter ego, one Theodidactus (Taught by God), being trans-
ported through the Šrmament by the angel Cosmiel. When they reach
the upper air or aether, Theodidactus can no longer breathe, it is so
rareŠed—“subtle”—and when they reach Jupiter a powerful, fragrance
wafts toward him, “sweeter than all amber and musk.” It revives him
wonderfully. The angel explains, “That is the healthy breath and out-
pouring of that sphere of Jove, a clear sign that we are now near its at-
mosphere.”18 It resembled, perhaps, the atmosphere in the Holy of
Holies, or in the chancel of a Catholic church.
Ten years later, the Jesuit wizard published his most beautifully il-
lustrated volume of all, the Mundus Subterraneus (1665), a fantastical
work about volcanoes and underground water courses and caverns
(Šgure 7). There, the all-encompassing airy space beyond the earth,
where he and the angel were transported, is designated Etherium
Spatium—aetheric space. SigniŠcantly, though the verbal accounts de-
scribe emptiness, the engraver working for Kircher Šlled the space with
charcoal-grey puffballs of clouds, for otherwise, in visual terms it might
have looked blank, inert, and meaningless.
The theory of the aether is far too complicated and multifarious to
review or sum up here, so I shall follow one strand, present in Kircher’s
writings, which perceived the aether as light-bearing, Šery. This con-
junction of elements departs from the vaporous and moist rainmaking
nature more normally ascribed to the stratosphere and its demarcating
clouds. The greys and indigos and purples of metaphysical space, as-
sumed by artists, adumbrate this character, suggesting that the aethe-
real element is Šre, not water, and shifting its vapors toward smoke, not
18 Athanasius Kircher, Itinerarium Exstaticum quo Mundo OpiŠcium (Rome, 1656), part 1,
p. 205.
Figure 7. The hydraulic system of the earth, from Athanasius Kircher, Mundus
Subterraneus (Amsterdam, 1665). (Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge)
mist. This will prove a step with potent consequences for the language
of signs. The smoky afŠnities of the aether were inspired by a strand of
classical physics, from Democritus, Heraclitus, Lucretius, through to
the widely known Ovid: the last actually calls the upper air simply “ig-
nis” or Šre, a word that many translators expand to “Šery aether,” since
otherwise the lines from the Metamorphoses become almost incompre-
hensible to present-day readers.19
It seems contrary to us now that any part of the air should be inter-
preted as Šre, however radiant, however bright; that volcanoes, the
earthly image of hell, should belong somehow in this discussion of the
aether at all seems even odder, but Kircher’s cosmology, later in the cen-
tury, links the principles in an intricate hydraulic and combustive cycle.
His truly wonderful hypotheses were translated into English, in an
19 “Over all these regions hangs the air, as much heavier than the Šery aether as it is
lighter than earth or water.” Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 1, lines 52–53, trans. Mary M. Innes
(Harmondsworth, 1973; Šrst published 1955), p. 30.
abridged version, in 1669. The author quotes Ovid to support Kircher’s

cosmological equivalence of air and Šre:
The Earth resolv’d is turned into streams;

Water to Air; the purer Air to šames.
From whence they back return; The Šery šakes
Are turn’d to Air; The Air thickened takes
The Liquid form of Water; that Earth makes.20
“The luminiferous aether” was thought to be formed of invisible,

imponderable, šimsy, springy, Šery light vapors. As such, it inspired
persistent theorizing, including differing views from both Isaac New-
ton and René Descartes; for Newton, the aether was composed of
“aetherial spirits, or vapours,” and he proposed that it constituted the
original protoplasm of the physical world, shaped by Nature.21 The
legacy of exquisitely imaginative aetheric theories about subtle matter,
the elements of the universe, and the nature of light and Šre underlies
the phenomena of the spiritualist experiments, as I hope to show when
we come back to ectoplasm.
The Šery aether does not fade after the seventeenth century: New-
ton’s rešection of 1675 was only published in 1744, with important re-
verberations.22 The artist Cornelius Varley imagined, as did many of his
scientiŠc peers, that clouds were formed by “atmospheric electricity.”
After observing rain gather over Snowdon, he wrote, “Here I believe I
20 Athanasius Kircher, The Vulcano’s or, Burning and Fire-Vomiting Mountains, Famous in
the World: With their Remarkables, Collected for the most part out of Kircher’s Subterraneous World
(London, 1669), p. 55 (emphasis added). The writer clearly has some difŠculty with
Kircher’s plan, viz his tracking back and forth over the material:
But how the said matters should conceive Šre was above-said. As how indeed; scarcely
from the Sun; not from the Thunder and Lightnings; not from any other efŠcient: but
from the very subterraneous Šre it self [sic], making its way unto them through hidden
passages of the Rocks, which it burns. Or, if they be not immediately touched by actual
Fire; then certainly from the Marine waves and billows, intruded by the force and im-
petuousness of the Winds, through the submarine gutters and chinks at the bottom of
the Sea. For that it cannot be that from the vehement dashing of the billows in strait &
narrow places, and the agitation of the spirits of combustible matter thereby, and the at-
trition & striking of the fat and Sulphureous Air, that they should not presently con-
ceive Fire. (Ibid., p. 60)
21 G. N. Cantor, “The Theological SigniŠcance of Ethers,” in Conceptions of Ether Studies
in the History of Ether Theories, 1740–1900, ed. G. N. Cantor and M. J. S. Hodge (Cam-
bridge, 1981), pp. 135–55.
22 As the historian Logie Barrow remarks, “Beginning in 1745…all signiŠcant British
electricians [i.e., physicists] postulated a special electrical matter identical with, or similar
saw and understood the gradual progress from a cloudless morning to

universal rain here was a silent invisable [sic] šow of electricity to the
mountains.”23 William Blake’s Song of Experience, when the baby enters
the world,
Helpless, naked, piping loud;

Like a Šend hid in a cloud24
echoes contemporary meteorology and natural sciences.25
Even the pioneering watcher of the skies, Luke Howard, the Šrst me-
teorologist to devise a taxonomy for clouds, speculated that they were
formed by electromagnetic attraction, as well as condensation, and that
“rain is in almost every instance the result of the electrical action of
clouds upon each other†”26 Howard Šrst gave the names that still
endure: cumulus, stratus, and cirrus (after the Latin for a curl of hair),
and he scrutinized their mutations like a physiognomist, invoking “the
countenance of the sky” and stating that “they are commonly as good
visible indications of the operation of these causes [of the atmosphere] as
is the countenance of the state of a person’s mind or body.”27 The skies
could be grasped; the formless itself could not elude the grasp of en-
lightenment science, itself the handmaiden to divine revelation.28
Howard’s work reached Goethe in Germany the following year, and the
old poet was moved to write a sequence of cloud poems as well as a paean
to Howard and his work.29 Howard himself was a devout Christian (a
Methodist) and Goethe, the scientist-poet, accordingly exults in his
demonstration that God’s handiwork and intelligibility can be woven
to, the springy, subtle, universal Newtonian aether.” Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits, Spiri-
tualism and English Plebeians, 1850–1910 (London, 1986), p. 73.
23 Quoted by Anne Lyles, “‘That Immense Canopy’: Studies of Sky and Cloud by British
Artists c. 1770–1860,” MS kindly lent by the author, to be published in Constable’s Clouds,
exhibition catalogue, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, April–July 2000.
24 William Blake, “Infant Sorrow,” in Songs of Experience (London, 1794), in The Complete
Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York, 1988), p. 28.
25 See Erasmus Darwin’s personiŠcation of clouds, in “The Botanic Garden,” The Loves of
the Plants (Oxford and New York, 1991; Šrst published 1789).
26 Luke Howard, “On the ModiŠcations of Clouds, and on the Principles of Their Pro-
duction, Suspension, and Destruction…” Philosophical Magazine 16 (1802): 97–107; 17
(1803): 5–11.
27 Ibid., 16 (1802), p. 97.
28 “[A]s a rule, they [clouds] show the effects of these causes with the same truth and
clarity with which the physiognomy and the whole being of a person betray the feelings of
his soul and the state of his health”: Gilberts Annalen, 1805, quoted by John Gage, “Clouds
over Europe,” in Constable’s Clouds. I am most grateful to John Gage, University of Cam-
bridge, for kindly lending me the article before publication.
29 See Karl Badt, John Constable’s Clouds (London, 1950), pp. 15–21.
together with Enlightenment system, scientiŠc nomenclature, and

analysis. In the poems, he plays the game of Šnding faces, animals,
shapes in the clouds. “A ghost seems forming ghosts,” he writes in
“Stratus.”30
The Šery aether crackles and šares in one of the most dazzling and
distilled of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s hymns to divine creation: “That
Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection,”
written in 1888. A letter of that year gives the poet’s sources in “early
Greek philosophical thought,” but stresses how “the liquor of the distil-
lation did not taste very Greek, did it?”; and, indeed, Hopkins’s imagi-
nation conjures its own cosmology from nineteenth-century hypotheses
as well as Pre-Socratic theories. Again, the spectacle of the cloud layer
delimits the space of the aether and offers in the opening lines the most
eloquent metaphor for the dynamics of Nature’s vital force:
Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows šaunt forth, then chevy

on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs they throng;
they glitter in marches.
The fantastic word picture of the glittering cloudwrack swept by gusts

continues, and of its effects on the earth, parching it, and marking it,
until a short, spondaic, Šnite sentence interrupts the fugue:
Million-fuelèd, nature’s bonŠre burns on.
Hopkins then laments how the aethereal spark in man has died,
drowned, blacked out, blotted out, and so forth; he turns to God, and to
salvation, and this reprieve is conveyed through an explicit contrast in
metaphors of combustion: the “world’s wildŠre” consumes its objects
and “leave[s] but ash,” but the great conšagration at the end of world
will precipitate the poet into a new form, in an alchemical process of
transubstantiation:
In a šash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal
diamond,
Is immortal diamond.31
30 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Stratus,” in ibid.

31 See Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose, ed. W. H. Gardner (Harmondsworth,
1985), pp. 65–66, 244–55.
At the end of the nineteenth century, when Mallarmé offers us his

combustible soul as a smoke ring, and Hopkins his alchemical precipi-
tate of dust, they were writing against a background of unprecedented
ferment about exploring the invisible, and they reached, as it were nat-
urally at that time, for metaphors taken from combustion, condensa-
tion, and other physical aetherealizing processes.
5. Plumbing the Heights
The air was growing ever more crowded, yielding up all manner of mys-
teries to new instruments devised to detect and inventory its compo-
nents. But these Šndings continually interplayed with metaphysics and
were brought to bear on psychic forces as well as physical forces. Mes-
meric theories were woven into concepts of electricity; similarly, the
discovery of X-rays in 1895, the identiŠcation of radio waves and the
subsequent invention of the wireless, of telegraphy, of the telephone,
produced a fevered—and delighted—search to penetrate the unseen:
the channels of communication through the aether presented them-
selves in potentia as deliriously numberless; they became intertwined
with the physical possibility of moving objects at a distance by Šnding
some vehicle analogous to radio waves.32 It is difŠcult from our inured
vantage point today to imagine how exciting, fascinating, and extreme
seemed the possibilities that the new instruments opened up for their
Šrst users. The new media left the trace of their passage: indeed their ac-
tivity became legible only through such traces through contact. Radio
waves could not be grasped by the human senses, only the effects of the
new methods of transmission: i.e., the marks of a needle quivering on a
drum as the taps came through, the translated and disincarnate voices
from the radio set. Visible veriŠcation surrendered its hegemony to
other warranties of presence—acoustic and haptic.33 Material impres-
sions of the new media’s work were in high demand. In the absence of
32 See Michael Roth, “Hysterical Remembering,” Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 2 (1996):
1–30; Lawrence Rainey, “Taking Dictation: Collage Poetics, Pathology, and Politics,”
Modernism/Modernity 5, no. 2 (1998): 123–53; Roger Luckhurst, “(Touching on) Tele-
Technology,” in Applying: To Derrida, ed. John Brannigan, Ruth Robbins, and Julian Wol-
freys (London, 1996), pp. 171–83; Steven Connor, “The Machine in the Ghost: Spirit-
ualism, Technology, and the ‘Direct Voice,’” in Ghosts, ed. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott
(London, 1999), pp. 203–25.
33 Steven Connor emphasizes the aural desires, arguing that “an observational, calcula-
tive scientiŠc culture organized around these questering powers of the eye began in the last
natural sensory means to verify the principle at work, a dependence on

second-order technological proof of hidden energy arose, translating
touch into sight, as in the photograph or the X-ray plate. The extension
of the word “medium” itself, in the early 1850s, to someone with para-
normal powers reveals the parallelism perceived between the vehicle—
the aether—and its products. The new technologies offered a model for
understanding that was extended to phenomena as yet beyond the reach
of scientiŠc empiricism. William James put his Šnger on the similarity
of the scientiŠc and spiritualist experiments, as perceived at the time,
when he wrote that phenomena like automatic writing were “instru-
ments of research, reagents like litmus paper or the galvanometer for re-
vealing what would otherwise be hidden.”34
The unseen was teeming, and not only with waves. Several different
gases were detected in this period of scientiŠc excitement. Gas, a word
related to “chaos” and to the group that gives “ghost,” “ghastly,” and
“geist,” or breath, as well, blows gustily through the metaphor of the
sublime, with its passion for eruptions and turbulence. Hydrogen had
been analyzed in 1700, oxygen in the mid-1800s; in 1810, Humphry
Davy had isolated the deadly and suffocating gas chlorine and made his
famous experiments with laughing gas. But in the 1890s, there came an
astonishing šurry of new, invisible and virtually imperceptible inert
gases: Sir William Ramsay and Lord Rayleigh discovered argon (1894),
helium (1895)—lighter than air—and neon, xenon, and krypton in
1898.35 Furthermore, these inert gases, termed “noble,” were placed at
the top of the Periodic Table of the Elements above the volatile or com-
bustible gases. They were thus aligned with the perceived eternity and
quarter of the nineteenth century to produce new forms of technology, especially commu-
nicative technology, which themselves promoted a reconŠguring of the sensorium in terms
of the ear rather than the eye.” I am very grateful to Steven Connor for letting me see his un-
published paper “Voice, Technology and the Victorian Ear,” from the conference “Science
and Culture 1780–1900,” Birkbeck College, London, September 1997, to be published in
A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (forthcoming).
34 William James, “Frederic Myers’s Service to Psychology” (1911), in Essays in Psychi-
cal Research (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), p. 196; quoted by Rhodri Hayward, “Popular Mysti-
cism and the Origins of the New Psychology, 1880–1910,” Ph.D. thesis (University of
Lancaster, 1995–96), p. 133.
35 The names Ramsay gave these gases are themselves revealing of the symbolic value
attached to properties of air; argon is named after Argos, the many-eyed custodian ap-
pointed by Jupiter to watch over Io after he has changed her into a heifer. Does Ramsay’s
train of thought suggest that this pervasive substance (1 percent of the atmosphere) wraps us
in its unseen gaze? Helium, whose existence had been guessed at by Joseph Lockyer in 1868,
is the lightest gas of all and was named after the Greek god of the sun, Helios. Xenon means
strange, neon new, krypton secret.
unchangingness of divinity, as against base matter, with its propensity

for transformation or decay (the Mallarméan combustion of tobacco and
its ashy residue, “le réel…vil”).
From the 1840s onward, the visual illusions of Fata Morgana did not
meet the standards of the new positivists in Spiritualist circles: tangible
proofs were needed—real objects, actual matter. In Manchester, for ex-
ample, a medium who called herself Mlle. E. d’Espérance materialized
“apports”—the most exquisite plants, ferns, and fruits: a golden lily
lasted a week, then “dissolved and disappeared.”36
The medium Mrs. Guppy ate her productions—which one of her
Spiritualist colleagues considered a mistake (“a great weakness”).37 But
it was photographs of course that became the most popular documen-
tary proof of spirits’ real presence. Psychic images, in which spiritual
bodies manifested themselves as ectoplasmic smudges, haloes, and
phantoms, appeared to guarantee the truth-telling of seances.
It is no mere coincidence then, but an effect of a dynamic conver-
gence of ideas, that the Society for Psychical Research was founded in
1888, in England, mainly by men associated with Trinity College,
Cambridge, and its American counterpart was established in Boston,
Massachusetts, a few years later. One of the tasks the members set them-
selves, with all the assiduity of high-minded Victorians, was to investi-
gate the truth of the myriad paranormal and psychical phenomena that
were literally making an impression in the world of material reality.
Frederic Myers, poet, classicist, and one of the founders of the Society for
Psychical Research, coined the word “telepathy” in 1882; the preŠx was
being used to form any number of compounds, some now incontrovert-
ibly physical and others challenged by doubt: telephone, telegraph,
telekinesis, teleportation. Television followed in 1925.
This enterprise—to weigh the imponderable, to measure the im-
measurable—caught imaginations all over the world in the last decades
of the nineteenth century. Their theories proved as inviting, as con-
tested, and as ambiguously persuasive in their time as alchemy before
them, and they have become as haloed in doubt today (a lesson in a cer-
tain necessary heuristic humility for our time, too). One of Franz Mes-
mer’s followers, Karl von Reichenbach in Germany, in 1844 proposed
an analogous invisible and imponderable force to Mesmer’s earlier ani-
mal magnetism. He called it the Od, and declared it to be a different
36 E. d’Espérance, Shadow Land or Light from the Other Side (London, 1897).
37 Georgiana Houghton, Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings…Invisible to the
Material Eye (London, 1882), quoted by Connor, “The Machine in the Ghost,” p. 208.
form of light, one transmitted by magnetic force. By means of subjects

he called “sensitives,” Reichenbach saw—and took photographs of—
Odic lights and Odic smoke in darkened rooms, as they radiated from
magnets that his collaborators held and energized. Their touch pro-
vided the crucial contact between the empirical realm and the aethereal.
Interestingly, from the point of view of the Fata Morgana, he theorized
that the Od was the principle that produced the aurora borealis, and he
built a model of the earth—a terrelle—which demonstrated that the col-
ored lights grew far more intense at the poles while “Odic smoke rose in
abundance from the globe above the polar šames.”38 Dancing balls of
radiance and šaring haloes around gifted mediums became a feature of
early spiritualism.39
In Geneva, another “sensitive,”the somnambulist and trance medium
known as Hélène Smith, was collaborating with the eminent psychiatric
doctor Théodore Flournoy to summon several spirit controls, through
whom she rediscovered manifold curious previous existences, one as
Marie-Antoinette no less, and another as the daughter of an Arab sheik,
who subsequently married a Hindu prince, who himself was reincar-
nated as a Martian overlord, Astané. His 1899 account of their seances
and her prodigious feats went through edition after edition—it is a pio-
neer of New Age publishing—under the title Des Indes à la planète
Mars†40 Hélène Smith is probably the Šrst amply recorded case of
multiple personality; in trance, she was able to communicate in the Mar-
tian tongue, write Martian script, and sketch the scenery and the people
she had known there. “Aucune verdure [no greenery],” commented
Flournoy, as if relieved that there was no mistaking Mars. “Everything
brick-red, purple and violet,” he appended to the black-and-white
reproduction of the Mars countryside. Astané, who had a yellow com-
plexion to match his native planet, traveled by means of šying-machine,
a handheld šame-thrower something like a combination between a loud
hailer and a child’s toy girouette or windmill; he merely held it in his
right hand as he šew.41
38 Baron Charles (Karl) von Reichenbach, Physico-Physiological Researches on the Dynamics
of Magnetism, Electricity, Heat, Light Crystallization, and Chemism [sic] in Their Relations to the
Vital Force, trans. John Ashburner, 2 vols. (London, 1850–), vol. 2, p. 573. Reichenbach also
discovered parafŠn and creosote.
39 See Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, 7.565–68; also Browning, A Lovers’
Quarrel, stanza 7. I am most grateful to Margaret Reynolds for pointing out these references.
40 Théodore Flournoy, Des Indes à la planète Mars: Etude sur un cas de Somnambulisme
(Geneva, 1899), ed. and trans. Sonu Shamdasani (Princeton, N.J., 1996); see Terry Castle,
“Flournoy’s Complaint,” in London Review of Books, May 23, 1996, pp. 6–7.
41 Flournoy, Des Indes, p. 155.
In Paris, in the 1890s, Reichenbach’s investigation of the Od or vital

force inspired another enraptured experimenter, the doctor Hippolyte
Baraduc, to tap psychic energies and record them in an exquisite series
of Epreuves or Proofs (in the double sense of trial and conŠrmation).
His Šrst book, published in Paris in 1896, appeared in 1913 in an
English version, The Human Soul: Its Movements, Its Lights, and the Iconog-
raphy of the Fluidic Invisible. It included an album of his remarkable pho-
tographs, which were taken, he wrote, without apparatus, by direct
application of the sensitized plate to the electrically emitting sensitive
mediums. It was this special force, the intelligent mode of the aether,
that caused the emanations that were recorded in his photographs. “The
vital force is intelligence in movement,” he wrote, “rendering matter
concrete.”42 By infra-red light he made exposures of a young boy—in
mourning for a dead pheasant (!)—and showed the Odic light of his sor-
row lifting the curtain behind him; he laid the plate to the forehead or
hand of his living patients to draw out, by electrical magnetism, the
“nuée šuidique” (the šuidic mist); he also grasped the “Ame-Germe et
son Corps šuidique” (The Seed-Soul and its šuidic body) of dead friends.
He meticulously categorized the images under different rubrics, calling
some “Psychicônes” (Physicons) and others “Nuées odiques” (Odic
mists). He was certain he had captured, for the material world, the So-
mods, or Odic bodies of his subjects. The images are tiny, sometimes
half an inch square, and several show only tiny streams of bubbles, like
spray, or a pale wispy blur, or a starburst or cloud of light. It is interest-
ing to compare these images with the astronomer Camille Flammarion’s
prints of astronomical nebulae, in his work Astronomie populaire, pub-
lished in 1900.
In L’Ame humaine, Baraduc quotes from Zoroaster and Jacob
Boehme, and he seems to have been in touch with Parisian occultists
such as Eliphas-Lévi. By the time his second book appeared in 1904,
Baraduc was openly interested in hermetic mysticism. But Les Vibrations
de la vitalité humaine also focuses on images of states of mind, and in-
cludes an image of a meteor shower, the Odic impression of anger, as
well as a magniŠcent mare’s tail portraying “the aetheric vortex,” which
was taken, he tells us, by holding his right hand motionless over the
photographic plate, in the dark one night “à la suite de tristesse [follow-
ing (a time of) sorrow]” at 10 p.m., in February 1895. At a macro scale,
42 Hippolyte Baraduc, The Human Soul: Its Movements, Its Lights, and the Iconography of the
Fluidic Invisible (London, 1913).
and a micro scale, the imagery of the luminiferous effects exercises its
tenacious inšuence.
I have not enumerated these Faustian spells of the past to mock
them; nor simply to entertain you, but to try to show how widespread—
Western worldwide—was the quest to materialize the unseen and cap-
ture a hitherto imperceptible supernatural stratum to existence.
The suggestive emptiness of the upper sky continued to beckon into
this century. Oliver Lodge, a physicist who made a major contribution
to the understanding of radiotelegraphy with his experiments in wave-
lengths in 1888–98, thereby paving the way to Albert Einstein’s theory
of relativity, published a book called Ether & Reality as late as 1925. One
of the most staunch supporters of the Society for Psychical Research, Sir
Oliver, as he became, gamely persevered in the Einsteinian world, with
his theory of the Ether, a word that he always capitalizes. It was “the ter-
tium quid, the essential intermediary” between mind and matter. Ether
itself was not “what we ordinarily speak of as matter,” but nevertheless
it was “a very substantial substance, far more substantial than any form
of matter† [A] physical thing…the vehicle of both matter and
spirit…it is manifestly the vehicle or substratum underlying electric-
ity and magnetism and light and gravitation and cohesion†” He con-
cluded, rapturously, “It is the primary instrument of Mind, the vehicle
of Soul, the habitation of Spirit. Truly, it may be called the living gar-
ment of God.”43
Oliver Lodge afŠrmed that one of the Ether’s functions was “to trans-
mit vibrations from one piece of matter to another,” and he argued that
because the Ether vibrated at a frequency different from that of matter it
would reveal itself in certain, very carefully constructed experiments—
šeetingly, aethereally—in the form of ectoplasm.
6. The Society for Psychical Research
In 1891 Oliver Lodge joined Henry Sidgwick, the Cambridge philoso-

pher, and his wife Eleanor at the house of Charles Richet, future winner
of the Nobel Prize for Medicine (1913), to investigate the truth of
Eusapia Paladino, a middle-aged, illiterate southern Italian materializ-
ing medium who had won the approval of no less a forensic champion
43 Oliver Lodge, Ether & Reality (London, 1925), p. 179.
than Cesare Lombroso. Paladino was one of the most accomplished pro-
ducers of ectoplasm at the turn of the century, but her specialities also
included table-turning, guitars playing by themselves and šoating
through the air, and “the conveyance of a vase full of jonquils…the
highly increased perfume of the šowers’ bells ringing by themselves.”44
The company was assembled to witness her powers.
The word “ectoplasm,” from the Greek ektos (outside) and plasma
(something that can be formed or molded, as in “plastic”), enters the
discourse of spiritualism in Germany and France in the 1880s.45 Ecto-
plasm is shapeless, it is “informe,” a kind of primordial paste—and to
show itself as this it annexes semiotic markers that designate intermedi-
ate spirit worlds.
The Critical Dictionary, edited and written by Georges Bataille and
others in the late 1920s, included an entry on ectoplasm with character-
istically mischievous mock learning: it deŠned it as
part of the human body, external to it, unstable, sometimes soft, oc-
casionally hard, from time to time vaporous, variable in volume, vis-
ible only in semi-darkness, making an impression on photographic
emulsion, presents to the sense of touch a humid and slippery sensa-
tion, leaving in the hand a residue which, when dry, has under mi-
croscopic examination the appearance of epithelial cells, without
odour or deŠnite taste, in other respects šeeting and transient,
whether projected or otherwise, of uncertain temperature, fond of
music.
It adds, knowingly, “Fish- and game-birds’ intestines, even inšated

with a bicycle-pump, are not ectoplasms.”46 It is cosmic goo: the joke
shops of the New Age, picking up on the tradition, now sell “Space Mu-
cus” in “Slime Eggs” that glow in the dark.
44 “Hesperus,” “Eusapia Paladino,” in Light, May 23, 1896, pp. 243–44.
45 It is worth noting that, in the late 1850s, when Robert Browning was composing his
long dramatic monologue “‘Mr Sludge,’ the Medium,” he may have wanted his fraud’s name
to hint at ectoplasmic sludge, but he does not introduce such phenomena speciŠcally into
his plausible villain’s weaselly rigmarole of self-justiŠcation, grievance, and malice. D. D.
Home, who, after the Brownings attended a seance in Ealing in 1855, inspired the character
of Mr. Sludge, did not produce ectoplasmic structures, but focused his energies on other
prodigies: his most celebrated being his ability to levitate. He once šew out of one window
and came in feet Šrst and horizontal from another; Harry Houdini, who made a habit of ex-
posing supernatural claims by reproducing them as conjuring tricks, countered with a
promise to repeat the feat, but called off the event—to the delight, of course, of D. D.
Home’s supporters. See Robert Browning, The Complete Works, ed. John C. Berkey, Allan C.
Dooley, and Susan Dooley (Waco, Tex., and Athens, Ohio, 1996), vol. 6, pp. 285–351.
46 Jacques Brunius, “Ectoplasm,” in Critical Dictionary, ed. Georges Bataille, published
as the Encyclopaedia Da Costa (1948), Encyclopaedia Acephalica, ed. Robert Lebel and Isabelle
Waldberg (London, 1995), pp. 110–11.
Darkness was essential for the phenomena to appear: light, almost

everyone agreed, was highly destructive to their organism. The great
chemist William Crookes preferred moonlight, and reported excellent
results by this pale illumination; the French doctor Gustave Geley han-
kered after the light emitted by certain animals, vegetables, and mi-
crobes, reporting wistfully that highly successful seances had been held
in Brazil by the light of glow-worms, but that this was very difŠcult to
realize in practice.47 But, given a darkened room, and willing, support-
ive sitters, the “substance” might appear.
Paladino was not photographed in action as exhaustively as her
contemporary, the medium Eva Carrière (Šgure 8). Eva C., as she was
known, began extruding ectoplasms during seances conducted under
the auspices of Juliette Bisson, a wealthy woman who promoted the
seer’s powers through her friendship with a Bavarian doctor and minor
aristocrat, Baron von Schrenk-Notzing. In 1890, in Germany, he pub-
lished exhaustive minutes of the seances and the phenomena in a
bizarre, alarming volume Šlled with photographs of the medium in
trance, sufferings spasms as she produced a wide range of materializa-
tions. The book was translated into English in 1920 under the title Phe-
nomena of Materialisation, and it made the type of seances featured
internationally famous.
The word “ectoplasm” was borrowed across from biological usage:
the Oxford English Dictionary gives as its Šrst citation a quotation from
1883 that discloses vividly the operating metaphor: “Its [amoeba’s]
jelly-like body becomes faintly parcelled out into an outer form (ecto-
plasm) and an inner soft (endoplasm) layer.”48 It is “the substance from
which spirits make themselves visible forms…alive, sensitive to touch
and light…cold to the touch, slightly luminous and having a charac-
teristic smell†”
In the 1920s, Dr. Gustave Geley asserts: “The colour white is the
most frequent† On touch…it can seem soft and a bit elastic when it
spreads; hard, knotty or Šbrous when it forms strings. The substance is
mobile. At one moment it evolves slowly, rises, falls, wanders over the
medium, her shoulders, her breast, her knees, with a creeping motion
that recalls that of a reptile†”49 Sometimes faces and even bodies of
the departed appeared, like Fata Morganas, in its webs.
After making its appearance, ectoplasm was reabsorbed into the
47 Gustave Geley, Ectoplasme, p. 15.
48 J. E. Ady, Knowledge, June 15, 1883, 355/2.
49 Geley, Ectoplasme, p. 199.
Figure 8. Photo of Eva C.[arrière], from Baron von Schrenk-Notzing, Phenom-

ena of Materialisation (London, 1920). (Wren Library, Trinity College, Cam-
bridge)
medium’s body—unless it was rudely captured, as in the case of Helen

Duncan.
When looking at these unformed forms, it is worth recalling that
the word “larva,” used in English for the early stage of a caterpillar,
meant “ghost” or “spectre” in Latin, but is also used by Horace to desig-
nate a mask, such as might frighten an observer, while the Latin verb
larvere meant to bewitch or enchant. Ectoplasmic masks and limbs are
indeed larval: they promise the emergence of forms, but do not deliver
them. The term “pseudo-pods,” used for some of the “structures,”
catches this relationship with the embryonic—and indeed with the
abortion.
Henry Sidgwick was an unlikely subject for voyeurism or tomfool-
ery: with his wife Eleanor he was a pioneer campaigner for female higher
education and co-founder of Newnham College, Cambridge. They were
high-principled, liberal-minded, progressive, scrupulous and kindly
Victorians. Yet Sidgwick, in the desolation after Darwin, left holy or-
ders, and became the Šrst president of the Society for Psychical Research
in 1882.
Sidgwick and his close friend and former student F. W. H. Myers,
from the 1850s onward, visited numerous mediums, with inconclusive
results; rooted scepticism and unappeasable curiosity writhed in Sidg-
wick’s energetic mind for four decades. Questers like Myers and the
Sidgwicks were feeling out a scientiŠc position toward some of the basic
tenets of Christian theology, such as the existence of the individual soul
and its immortality. In the course of his life’s work, The Survival of Hu-
man Personality after Bodily Death (1915), Myers developed a secular,
psychological theory of the subliminal self. This self enjoys continuity
over time and place, unconsciously carrying memories that preserve its
integrity over eternity; these can be awakened or recalled through
mediums and other supernatural means. As Rhodri Hayward puts it:
“Myers’s subliminal self…operated as a kind of Šlter for the sacred,
combining the extracarnate communication with the fragmentary
memories and desires of the individual’s own past† The sacred was
relocated within the Šeld of memory.”50
The two philosophers evinced no self-consciousness about their own
motives. Astonishingly naive letters pass between them about whether
the kisses they received in seances were given by materialized lips, for
50 Hayward, “Popular Mysticism,” pp. 157, 186.
example. Nor does any of the surviving correspondence in the archives

illuminate the interior life and thinking of the mediums themselves—
women such as Eva Carrière, Eusapia Paladino, or, later, the Bostonian
Margery Crandon—from their point of view.
The women did not write memoirs—unlike the sitters. Paladino
could not read or write; Margery left one exchange of letters (with E. J.
Dingwall) in the archives, where she complains about pains in her
nose—hardly surprising when she was expelling so much stuff from her
nostrils during the seances. Yet again, nobody connects her physical dis-
tress, which caused her to cancel quite often, with her ectoplasmic pro-
duction. Her spirit control Walter once commented, it is recalled, “Pay
no attention to her. Let her groan. She hasn’t any pain. Blow your nose,
Kid. I’m like an octopus, I can attach myself anywhere and then put life
into it. She must sit very tight. Don’t ask her how she feels.”51
The travelers into the unknown were precisely attracted by the
mediums’ near-death states, in which they lost their self-possession.
The trances, Šts, numbness, and transports that the mediums experi-
enced opened them up as channels for others. This psycho-sexual story,
about unconscious gratiŠcations, can be explored more fully; this ap-
proach can be woven, as Alex Owen has done in her Šne study The Dark-
ened Room (1989), into a historicist analysis of the conšict of power, of
class and gender, between men and women, the learned and the un-
educated, and, often, the native and the foreigner.
After exciting but ambiguous seances at Richet’s, the Sidgwicks
invited Paladino to stay with them in Cambridge to continue the ex-
periments.
Here are some examples of the minutes, now in the archives, written
up the day after one of the seances by the scrupulous Alice Johnson, the
secretary of the Society for Psychical Research.
Th. Aug 1/95

With Mr and Mrs M[yers] Prof. and Mrs. S.[idgwick] Mrs Verrall
Dr. Rogers, Mr. E. T. Dixon. A. J.[ohnson].
†
7.30 Mr Myers lay down on the šoor again so that he could see her
knees.
51 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, part 98, vol. 36 (November 1925): 44.
7.40 Eusapia begins to laugh; indicating the arrival of John King.

[John King was her spirit guide] then moans & becomes quiet again.
Dr Rogers remarks that her eyeballs are turned up.
8.14 Medium comes out of trance asks who is holding her legs & is
told. Prof. Sidgwick comes out from under table.
8.20 trance returning: Prof Sidgwick goes in again.
†
8.30 Mrs Myers said she saw something white. Mrs. Verrall also saw it.
[This has been crossed out; emphasis added.]
†
9.10…Eusapia says she wishes her feet to be left alone, & Prof Sidg-
wick comes out from under the table. Mr Myers says ‘my chair is be-
ing dragged from under me & I am being gently dug in the ribs’
Here Prof. Sidgwick goes under the table again & holds Eusapia’s
feet†
9.12 Mr Myers says ‘her head is on my shoulder.’ Mrs Verrall says ‘I
saw a great white thing appear behind Mr Myers, perhaps the cush-
ion.’… Mr Dixon grabbed at it & touched it; then it drew back. He
said it felt like a hand or at all events something more solid than a
cushion.52
The Sidgwicks remained hopeful that Paladino was not a humbug,

one of their favorite words, but unconvinced; Oliver Lodge stayed a be-
liever—in Paladino, in life after death, in ectoplasmic apparitions, in
psychic photographs—especially after losing a son and several friends’
sons in World War I.
The craze for such experiences did not abate after numerous exposés
of the mediums’ claims. In the 1920s, Margery Crandon caused a furore
in Boston, where she was married to a society gynecologist from Beacon
Hill, Boston; he was more than twenty-Šve years her elder. Margery’s
brother Walter had died in a railway accident in 1911, and he became
her “spirit control,” the character who appeared at her seances, often
whistling loudly, ribbing the participants and even taunting them.
Among her most admired phenomena (Šgure 9) were Walter’s thumb-
prints, which appeared in the course of a seance, imprinted onto dental
wax: the spirit from the other side being substantial and heavy enough
to leave his unique seal. But Margery/Psyche surpassed even this
52 MSS, notes, Society for Psychical Research archives, University Library, Cambridge.
Figure 9. Margery Crandon producing ectoplasmic phenomena, London,

ca. 1925. (Harry Price Library, University of London)
remarkable spirit signature, when Walter began to form teleplasmic

hands and heads, and even, most signiŠcantly, promised to deliver an
ectoplasmic fetus.
Lady (Florence) Barrett, who did the examination of Margery Cran-
don before the sitting, explained afterward that she considered that the
ectoplasmic rods had been “formed by a kind of birth process.”53 It has
to be said as well that the notes to these “birth processes” make sordid
and dismaying reading.
The symbolic range of ectoplasm as spirit made matter stretches
from aethereal, phantasmic whiteness, exempliŠed by Helen Duncan’s
53 Letter from Mowbray, to London Spiritualist Alliance, June 13, 1947. Society for
Psychical Research archives, University Library, Cambridge.
yards of white satin, to a state of emergent being, typiŠed by the cold,

formless lumps of some sort of tissue, as produced by Eva Carrière and
Margery Crandon. These two poles correspond to two classes of phe-
nomena that were conšated under the term: Myers deŠned them as Šrst
projections of the double—namely the spirit of a person—and secondly,
precipitations of the akas—akas being a Hindu term borrowed by the
Theosophists and designating the invisible energy that šows through
and unites creation. However, once these two forms are distinguished, it
is clear that ectoplasm uneasily converts two contradictory concepts of
person and spirit’s relation to person: the phantom makes manifest an
individual who has died, as does the ectoplasmic mask. But the ecto-
plasmic efšuvia and pseudo-pods that Carrière and Crandon also spewed
do not body forth the mediums’ own vital spirits, or even the spirit of
their spirit controls; they are phantasmic templates on which the con-
jured spirit—the IPA or “incorporeal personal agent”—makes his or her
mark, using touch to guarantee presence.
The very subject of ectoplasm now tends to provoke involuntary
laughter, shivers, and, on closer look, real horror; the documentary im-
ages strike us now as foolish, crazy, embarrassing, prurient, repellent.
That anyone could have believed that such phantoms, vomitings, and
excreta were manifestations of spirit Šlls the contemporary observer
with revulsion. That anyone could have participated in good faith at
their performance and production seems highly unlikely. It seems to us
now a highly peculiar and shameful chapter in the history of intellectual
and spiritual inquiry.
7. Profitable Waste
Making spirits present through this nebulous stuff reproduces some of

the characteristic features of sacriŠcial ritual. Some are obvious: the sit-
ters forming the ring are vital to the event, and to the success of the
event; they gather as a solemn, ritual congregation, bonded together to
follow prescribed steps in making contact with spiritual powers. But
other similarities are more confusing. The medium’s role is multi-
layered—it might appear that Paladino, Carrière, and Crandon take the
place of the sibyl, priestess, or priest, since they act as conductors of
spirit. However, this position in the seance is complicated by the lack of
identiŠcation between them and the spirit control or IPA who appears
and then, sometimes, forms ectoplasmic phenomena that attest the

coming of another being, a relation of one of the sitters or a famous
Šgure from history. Mediums are habitually treated as mere instru-
ments, through whom the participants access the supernatural: they
themselves have the power to contact the uncanny, but this uncanny
then is transmitted to the others. On account of this necessary, sibylline,
but somehow disparaged, position of the medium, she seems to me to
approach the place of the sacriŠcial victim, with the sitters as the hiero-
phants, who, through a contact “high,” become mediums themselves.
But the ordeal, the self-abnegation and exposure of a medium such
as Margery Crandon when producing ectoplasm, reverses the process of
ritual sacriŠce in one respect: animal tissue is not oblated, offered to the
powers above, destroyed by Šre in order to be metamorphosed into the
rising smoke of the holocaust on an altar, but is produced from insub-
stantial lights and breezes and wispy vapors to take form down below as
living matter—temporarily. The medium is desecrated in an act of psy-
chological abjection in order to recuperate from the other side lost šesh,
consumed creatures, and offer proof of the existence of life after death:
she turns smoke into live cinders, to borrow—and reverse—Mallarmé’s
startling metaphor. She transforms the lost dead into the living. It be-
comes less surprising that so many classicists were involved in the quest
for spirit. This perspective can help us to understand, I suggest, why
wise, philanthropic, digniŠed thinkers—men and women of the calibre
of the Sidgwicks and F. W. H. Myers, Margaret Verrall (who was a
classicist) and her daughter Helen Salter, and Lady Barrett—were pre-
pared to take part, day after day, in experiments that transgressed their
society’s codes of social intercourse, gendered behavior, dignity and
decorum.
The spiritualist seance does not replicate a blood offering to the
gods—but it recasts sacriŠce in the context of an industrial and scien-
tiŠc age, just as the medium, uttering messages from spirit controls, or
marking gnomic phrases at the promptings of voices, harks back to the
sibyl and Delphic oracles of which Myers had written, while also repro-
ducing the action of modern, technical media. One can take this mod-
ernizing tendency further: a materializing medium like Eusapia Pal-
adino or Margery Crandon acts as a producer; the forms she makes,
sometimes nebulous, sometimes shapeless, convert the combustion of
the sacriŠcial victim—the smoke from the altar—into a force of pro-
duction, in mimicry of the steam engine and the steamhammer and the
factory chimney and the gas-Šred boiler, where vapors no longer signify
clouds of divine glory, but the energy of industrial output.
SacriŠce entails surrender of something valued in order to gain
something even more strongly desired. Abraham is prepared to kill his
only son, Isaac. The medium’s physical self-abandonment and psycho-
logical self-effacement could have fulŠlled this necessary condition
for the success of the ritual. But a sacriŠce can also involve a mere
chicken—or some other lowly, less valued thing; then it takes on the
primary role of transformation, of sublimating the humble vehicle into
heaven-climbing fragrance and vapor. The selection of victim hallows
it, however low, according to the symbolic axiom that transŠgures the
profane, base, vile, and real, into the sacred, into “immortal diamond.”
The imagination operates in response to “the elementary subjective
identity between types of excrement (sperm, menstrual blood, urine, fe-
cal matter [and one might add here, ectoplasm]) and everything that
can be seen as sacred, divine or marvellous.”54 The grim and sordid pro-
ceedings of a seance summoned unseen forces and made them materially
present—if temporarily—in the nebulous wraiths and Šgures of ecto-
plasm. It converted the medium’s energy into something palpable by
combining Šgures, like clouds and smoke, from the traditional lan-
guage of the divine, by applying new instruments, such as the camera,
to their interpretation, and by inserting them into the schedule of an in-
dustrial economy, which served to make of ectoplasm the valued residue
of the sitters’ joint labor. The inexplicable emptiness of space was re-
fused, the dead were not consigned to waste, a new, paranormal form of
excreta was transŠgured, and the epitome of nebulousness was attrib-
uted to intricate, objective meaning: the production of ectoplasm con-
stituted a proŠtable struggle with conditions of labor, and a triumph of
knowledge.
What connects this enterprise with visions or illusory images, as dis-
cussed in my Šrst lecture, is three-fold: Šrst, the visual lexicon of neph-
ography is instrumentalized by innovatory media; second, order and
pattern are imposed on non-sense in order to avoid the unbearable scan-
dal—for Christian humanism—of meaninglessness; third, and cru-
cially, the conception of subject or self to which the idea of mediumship
contributed is shown to be apt for occupation by another. Subjectivity is
54 Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan
Stoekl (Minneapolis, 1985), p. 94, quoted in Formless: A User’s Guide, ed. Yve-Alain Bois
and Rosalind E. Krauss (New York, 1997), p. 51.
diffused, decentered, dislocated, and the long, Thomist, unbreakable

pact between soul and body cracked—with immense consequences for
psychology, for writing, and for visual modes of story telling. While
Myers is almost forgotten and widely dismissed, his theory of the sub-
liminal self has spread, appropriately, through other channels besides
himself (including Sigmund Freud) to permeate popular ideas of the
personality. The voice-over, stream of consciousness, collage, and cut-
ups are only some of the methods practiced to capture this paranormal
model of spirit, which imagines the individual dispersed in space, the
uniŠed viewpoint shattered, linear temporality confused, memories and
fantasies intermingled, selves scattered through time and place, but
united by an inextinguishable subliminal subjectivity.55 Both cine-
matic and acoustic media convey and contribute to this new writing of
the subject. As proclaimed in The X-Files, the truth is no longer within,
but out there.
However, it is a profound paradox that, while Myers’s metaphysics
shadow forth the late psychological turn of this century, the astral lan-
guage of spirit that he and his peers deployed has been denatured by the
same decades’ deepest experiences. Myers’s and the Sidgwicks’ yearn-
ings for an immortal and metaphysical dimension to human life—not
survival in others’ memories, but survival itself, as a wraith, as a spirit—
present us with the Šnal, doomed twist in the religious wager that Dar-
win and Freud had closed down. As Adam Phillips writes in his book
Darwin’s Worms, “Darwin and Freud, in their quite different ways, are
persuading us to become good losers† It is as though, they suggest,
we have added to the ordinary suffering of biological life the extraordi-
nary suffering of our immortal longings, of our will to permanence.”56
These late Victorians and their faithful remnant among Edwardians
were not prepared to be losers. One of the recurrent events in the lives of
all the members of the Society for Psychical Research is prize-winning:
these men were stars at school, in college, and expected to master a
world that would not offer them the kind of contest they had antici-
pated. They did indeed suffer from immortal longings, from a will to
permanence. It is almost too apt, though it shows the punning agility of
dreams, that for a time they even tried to turn spirit solid, to grasp a
cloud, to capture the aether as ectoplasm.
55 See Connor, “The Machine in the Ghost,” p. 208, where he quotes Walter Ong’s The
Presence of the Word: “Sound situates man in the middle of actuality and in simultaneity,
whereas vision situates man in front of things and in sequentiality.” “Sound” here could be
expanded to include touching—especially in the dark.
56 Adam Phillips, Darwin’s Worms (London, 1999), p. 127.
8. Envoi
Helen Duncan’s sample of cheap satin embodies the bankruptcy of a

long chapter of spiritual questing. But it also reveals how far signs, un-
der pressure from history, can move. As white cloth, her ectoplasm dis-
closes the anxiety that surrounds murkiness and smoke: visions of the
Virgin Mary today invariably depict her in unadulterated cotton wool.
Titian or Tintoretto’s swirling and laden clouds have been banished
from the supernatural lexicon. Combustion announces only the Šres of
hell, warns of danger, of pollution and poison.
It is industrial progress that would eventually abolish for us, in
the present, the baroque meanings of the gamboling cloud-babies, the
underlit vortices of the empyrean, the radiant nimbuses that sheathe
angels in rainbow vapors.57 For the Victorian artist, smoke and steam
could represent a secular and glorious combustion, energy harnessed in
the here and now for mercantile and colonial purposes of the greatest
power of the times.
But again, photography—that medium of contact, sensible to impres-
sion—makes a crucial difference to the cloud family of symbols to which
ectoplasm belongs. Whereas in psychic images the camera obeyed the
traditional tropes of the supernatural, in this case its contribution can-
celed the old order. The Crimean War was the Šrst to be documented by
photography, but Roger Fenton’s famous images show a hushed and still
desolation, for the camera speeds then were simply too slow to capture
action or explosions as they were happening.
The Šrst images of shellbursts, bomb-blasts, and billowing gusts of
smoke (Šgure 10) in warfare seem to have been taken in World War I.
They are military records, made in a spirit of discovery of new weapons,
presented in the archive of the Imperial War Museum as evidence, his-
torical and scientiŠc. Black-and-white photographs show the effect of
mines exploding, of shells’ impact, of gas canisters spewing out their
57 There were earlier rumblings: at the end of an Entertainment at Rutland House, per-
formed in 1656, Sir William Davenant wrote a Song:
London is smother’d with sulph’rous Šres;
Still she wears a black hood and cloak,
Of sea-coal smoke,
As if she mourned for brewers and dyers.
Chorus:
But she is cool’d and cleans’d by streams
Of šowing and of ebbing Thames.
(The Dramatic Works of Sir William D’Avenant [Edinburgh and London, 1873], vol. 3,
pp. 228–29.)
Figure 10. The bursting of a Livens bomb (containing poison gas), ca. 1917.
(Imperial War Museum, London)
poisons, of riše Šre igniting: sometimes, roiling plumes of grey smog,

or solid walls of smoke and debris, sometimes soft, miasmic bodies of
cloud šoating above the ground, apparently the purest shade of white,
all innocence and aethereality.
Poison gas Šlled the landscape of the trenches with light, spiraling
heads of cumulus; infantry smokescreens raised tall, impenetrable barri-
ers of cloud. The new horrors of chemical warfare proved parts of the in-
visible air materially present and undeniably tangible. The contamina-
tion of industrial emissions added to the new experience of air, to the
newly identiŠed, malignant character of smoke of the Šery aether.
Once upon a time Raphael painted the Madonna of Foligno up-
wafted by curling surf of blue-grey angel-clouds, Correggio depicted
the ravishing approach of a god as a mass of blue-grey smoke, Titian in-
vited us to believe in the Assumption of the Virgin taking place within
and upon a roiling mass of shadowy cumulus, and Poussin caught Mary
up to heaven on a roll and blast of thundercloud. Now we live as succes-
sors to the splitting of the atom and the nuclear-powered ascension of
the mushroom cloud at the end of World War II and during the hydro-
gen bomb tests in the South PaciŠc.
Photographs of artillery and nuclear explosions produce a twisted ef-
fect on me as a spectator: the undeniable power and terror of the event
delivers a hit, a rush; the images impact viscerally, inspiring the wonder
and awe that has been coupled with beauty in that psychological and es-
thetic zone diagnosed so eloquently by Edmund Burke. But morally it
is hard—impossible—to admire this phantom of death, this foreshad-
owing of the megaweapons of our century. Yet this very complexity of
response encapsulates a pervasive cultural dilemma, about the relations
of pleasure and representation. These images open up another huge zone
of questions, which must await another day. But assaying the pleasur-
able weights of different signs, such as clouds and cloudiness, learning
their history and modiŠcations over time, can at least help us to analyze
the effect that such images of bombs and bombing have on us now. For
as signs of possibility, clouds still šoat through our world: as the default
setting of the computer screensaver, and in innumerable advertisements
for future investments, insurances, fortunes. Clouds are still buoyed by
ancient exhalations of aethereal paradises, divine power, immortal long-
ings, futurity.
However, alongside the billowing plumes of cooling towers, the
smog of car-choked cities, the oil-clogged plumage of seabirds, the
growing asthmatic problems of children and older people, and the re-
fusal to sign the test ban treaty, we need another constellation of meta-
phor to convey the unpolluted, uncontaminated zone of spirit. The
language of the aether opened casements onto the realm of the unseen,
but it depended on conditions and on aspirations that have since been
stišed in a new kind of cloud: we breathe a different air now.

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Spirit Visions

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

Socrates: Didst thou never espy a Cloud in the sky,

Figure 1. Fata Morgana, Sicily, engraved by Guglielmo Fortuyn, 1773.

The Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher reports a vision of Fata

On the morning of the feast of the Assumption of the Most Blessed

Kircher was above all a scientist; he turned his back deliberately on

Some ascribe the wonder to enchantments, others to a divine miracle, he

e come l’aere, quand’è ben pïorno,

Ingeniously conjured from effects of light, insubstantial and incor-

2. Signs and Wonders

The visionary tendency of Judaeo-Christianity probes the heavens to

in a “spontaneous photograph” taken circa 1985 of the sky above the

Now draw up Faustus, like a foggy mist,

This compacted meteorological vision casts dying Faustus as a vapor,

both breathe and spew; Faustus seems to be begging to be turned into a

Dorinda: But I much wonder what it is to dye.

It is not only Christian souls or the angels of orthodoxy whose nature

3. “Very like a whale…”

a book of photographs, recently published in England, continues this

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

In The Tempest, Prospero’s art—his “insubstantial pageant”—not only

4. The Eye of the Imagination

Figure 4. A magic lantern, called camera obscura, from Athanasius Kircher,

But illustrations of the magic lantern’s prototypes have a signiŠcant

32 Giardina, Discorso, p. 140.

34 Early cinema drifted, as if naturally, to depicting the inner world of Imagination.

Figure 5. The phantasmagoria of Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, Paris, 1790s,

memory and fantasy, with regard to phantasmagoric revelations of

James Hogg communicates a metaphysical thriller of a plot in a lan-

illusion. An analogous wonder to the Fata Morgana here unfolds as nat-

Gracious Heaven! What an apparition was there presented to his

James Hogg footnotes his protagonist’s vision on the mountain, say-

In spite of this disappointment, Coleridge later explored the phe-

Such thou art, as when

In this Orphic key, Coleridge summons a phantom Eurydice from

The conšict between a meaningful uncanny portent, as in James

Of an earlier generation, and in a quieter mood, the Russian-born

Figure 7. Alexander Cozens, blot painting, from A New Method (London,

camoušage mottling of light and shade with an extraordinary attempt

modern composition. In Cozens’s tiny drawings—each one about half

7. “The Domain of Arnheim”

The human eye’s dilemma, in front of nature’s incoherence, provoked

“There may be a class of beings, human once, but now invisible to

Ellison’s idea of earth-angels who have been reŠned by death projects

the signifying faculty beyond the human altogether and in so doing

Meantime the whole Paradise of Arnheim bursts upon the view.

This is a Fata Morgana of a city, a castle in the air, for, signiŠcantly,

him in the intense, jeweled translation by Baudelaire.55 One of Poe’s

Figure 8. René Magritte, The Domain of Arnheim (1949). (Private Collection)

Surrealists’ doctrinal trust in the unconscious’s powers to pattern vision,

X-rays, ultrasound, computer-aided tomography (CAT scans), mag-

stratosphere would make available to our limited, fallible human senses

II. ECTOPLASM: MATERIALIZING THE IMPALPABLE

I asked to see the “sample of ectoplasm.” The librarian looked at me

for exactly weighing and strangling a chicken in the Scales, upon an

But Browne’s curiosity was not satisŠed:

He then makes a distinction between spirit and soul that is important in

to describe a phenomenon that became common in seances from the