Beyond the Fields We Know: Our Fascination With Ghost Stories
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We have recourse to magic and belief in the supernatural when what exists isn’t what we want. Human desires being limitless, it is thus likely that a vestigial tropism for magic and the supernatural are likely to be with us always. Our twenty-first-century minds no longer grant credence to love charms or prophecies or spells, yet our hearts still thrill to fairy tales, ghost stories, and the wonders of the Arabian Nights entertainments. While science fiction, the literature of extrapolation, answers the question “if this goes on,” stories of the supernatural build on “what if,” or even the hushed unspoken wish “if only.” They are tales of transcendence, whether of incontrovertible facts like death or of the horrors of modern life or of the burden of our own personalities.
The fantastic pervades the world’s literatures of every time and place; our much vaunted realism is the sport, the mutant. The epic hero Gilgamesh pursues the secret of immortality, the wandering Odysseus encounters witches and monsters, Arthurian knights and Celtic bards return, transformed, to tell of the wonders of Faery. Are these interruptions in what the Greeks called the Heimarmene, the natural order of things, the accepted succession of cause and effect? Maybe, maybe not. As Hamlet reminds his friend, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Up through the seventeenth century, at least, the very air surrounding us buzzed with both angels and spirits from the vasty deep. While Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus sold his soul to the devil in return for knowledge and power and beautiful women, in “real life,” Dr. John Dee, possessor of the largest private library in Elizabethan England, spoke with astral beings through a scrying stone. Paracelsus and his fellow alchemists soberly researched the elixir of life as well as the means of turning base metals into gold. Even Issac Newton, the very icon of mathematical science, studied what one might call the dark arts. One recent biography calls him “The Last Sorcerer.” When asked if she believed in ghosts, the Marquise du Deffand—the beloved correspondent of Horace Walpole, who initiated the Gothic novel with The Castle of Otranto—answered, no, but that she was afraid of them nonetheless.