1/28/2024 0 Comments Paranormal hk publishers![]() Meanwhile, the invention of photography in the 1830s led to “spirit” photographs, a phenomenon influenced by the rise of Spiritualism in the United States and England, whose practitioners believed that spirits were all around us and ready to communicate. ![]() In the 19th century, William Blake depicted visions of imposing ghosts that reflected intense psychological states of exuberance or despair while in the mid-20th century, artist Paul Nash illustrated ghosts and “mansions of the dead” in moodily hued paintings that evoked the “ghost-personages” of the British landscape. Owens continues by examining the undyed linen used as grave clothes that inspired the image of a ghost in a white sheet, dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as the 18th and 19th centuries when ghosts in gothic novels and Romantic painting achieved a renewed popularity. While the “graveyard school” in the mid-18th century had hauntings in its literature that asked the reader to remember death, Romantics considered them as reminders of a hidden part of our souls. Pre-Raphaelites such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti later used the phantasmagoric for heightened drama in their paintings and writing. “King,” “Father,” “royal Dane.” O, answer me! Hamlet calls out to it:īe thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,īring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, Shakespeare’s post-Reformation Hamlet with its wraith of the titular character’s father could either be interpreted in the old soul belief, or in a newer one that it was a spirit, perhaps an evil one. “They became subject to a new degree of scrutiny - or, to put it another way, because ghosts did not officially exist, they had to be invented,” Owens writes. Yet, as just about every old creaky home or atmospheric graveyard has its tales of returning souls, it’s fair to say that Protestantism in England did not eliminate ghosts. Still English ghosts could not, under the new doctrine, be the purgatorial dead. Clergyman Robert Wisdom in 1543 affirmed the new stance by stating: “sowles departed do not come again and play boo peape with us.” Susanna Duncombe (née Highmore), “The Ghost Scene” from The Castle of Otranto (1764–83), graphite, ink and watercolor (courtesy Tate) The English Reformation had a radical influence on ghosts, as it eliminated the concept of purgatory, and instated an idea of souls immediately going to heaven or hell. Before this decision, ghosts were often believed to be wandering souls from purgatory. While a modern ghost might materialise, drift gently towards a door and disperse, in the medieval period it was more likely to break the door down and beat you to death with the broken planks. They were, most definitely, not always the insubstantial presences we tend to think of today. They reflect our preoccupations, moving with the tide of cultural trends and matching the mood of each age. As Owens found, “ghosts are mirrors of the time.” She writes: For instance, a 1310 psalter she discovered in the British Library illustrated a fable where a party of three kings encounter three decomposing corpses the dead warn that their grotesque state will be the future of the kings, no matter their royal state. Although these memento mori figures are not ghosts in the way we now imagine them, they’re examples of the departed manifesting to convey a message to the living. Owens is formerly a curator of paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and she explains that as she began to research ghosts in art and literature, she found written records dating back to the eighth century. The Ghost is a chronological exploration of such developments in phantoms, centered on British culture.
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