Uncommon Prayer-Books

(Also: The Crack Down the Spine, Part 2)

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In the last essay, I remarked upon a paradox: M.R. James is thought of as ‘the father of the modern British ghost story’ (etc. etc.) and yet rarely wrote about ghosts as such.  This is not a particularly original observation but it is one that remains, perhaps, under-theorised – something I hope to address.  As also intimated last time, James is a fanatically material writer.  His ghosts are not ghosts but – as we will see in the next essay – cats and carvings, monks and stair carpets, and many other material things besides.

This is not actually as puzzling as it might seem at first glance. In fact, the ‘ghost story’ as we know it does not restrict itself to stories about spectral figures of the dead.  While we separate the uncanny story into various subsections based on content and/or tone – the vampire story, the Weird tale, etc – we also use the term ‘ghost story’ as an umbrella term.  And this is a paradox which goes back to the start of the modern ghost story, itself an inherently modern category as we have already seen in the previous ‘Crack Down the Spine’ essay.

A story about a ghost is simply that: a story with a ghost in it.  A Ghost Story is an example of a particular literary form, which may encompass many more kinds of entities than simple spectres of dead souls.

In the anthologies I read as a young child in my grandparents’ spare room at night, anthologies entitled as collections of Ghost Stories, I found stories featuring not just ghosts but also vampires and werewolves and curses, incomprehensible creatures, inkblots on the fabric of reality, predatory feelings and impressions…  The Ghost Story is a form tending into a genre.  It is a particular kind of expression of a particular class of social feelings, generated by the anxiety, alienation, and vertigo of the modern world.  There is a crack down the spine of the history of the ghost story.  It is a crack which separates the modern Ghost Story from the perennial story about the ghost, to the point of making it debatable whether we are actually talking about one continuous phenomena.  The crack is, of course, modernity.

Just as capitalism adapted phenomena which pre-dated its triumph – such as the nation state – to its own purposes, and in so doing altered it qualitatively as well as quantitatively, to the point where the phenomena are linked by little more than a continuity of terminology, so too did it do this to the story of the supernatural irruption and the uncanny presence.

Long before the Ghost Story there were stories about ghosts.  Pliny tells of a stoic philosopher who moves into a house haunted by a proper chain-rattling spectre which can only be laid (i.e. put to rest) when the phantom’s corpse is discovered and properly buried.  And such stories go back all the way through antiquity, and further back still.  Indeed, there have never not been stories about ghosts for as long as there have been stories.

But a multiplicity of phenomena falling under the general heading of the spectral is to be found at the opening of modern discourse on this subject.  We need look no further than the very first major ‘ghost book’ of modern Europe.

Here we should restate a definition.  To quote Christopher Caudwell in Illusion and Reality, A Study of the Sources of Modern Poetry:

[w]hen we use the word “modern” in a general sense, we use it to describe a whole complex of culture which developed in Europe and spread beyond it from the fifteenth century to the present day.

…

This complex rests on an economic foundation. The complex itself is changeful – no epoch of human history has been so variegated and dynamic as that from the Elizabethan age to ours. But then, the economic foundations too have changed, from feudal to “industrial.” This culture complex is the superstructure of the bourgeois revolution in production…

In his 1569 book Of Ghostes and Spirites, Walking by Night, And of straunge Noyses, Crackes, and sundrie forewarnings, which commonly happen before the death of men: Great slaughters, and alterations of Kingdomes – also known as the Gespensterbuch (the book of ghosts), but which we shall henceforth refer to by its shortened Latin title De Spectris, the Swiss Reformed theologian and priest Ludwig Lavater (1527-86) included various types of supernatural creatures – from ghosts, omens, and shapeshifting doppelgangers to kobolds, household sprites, and mountain trolls – under the same general theoretical umbrella.

Lavater’s book is a compilation of stories about apparitions, premonitions, monsters, and strange creatures.  Lavater – himself an Archdeacon at the Grossmünster in Zurich, and briefly head of the Zurich Reformed Curch after Gwalther and Zwingli – claims to get a story about a churchyard infested with candle-bearing crabs from fellow humanist, the famous Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Lavater engages in a perhaps surprising degree of scepticism.  He is quite well aware that the mind can play tricks on people, that one can be unnerved by an innocuous sound in the night, and that it is normal for depressed people to become paranoid, or for the bereaved to see false glimpses of their lost loved ones.  He talks at length about hallucinations brought on by insomnia, grief, drunkenness or drugs, and about what we now call night terrors.  On the other hand, according to Lavater, there definitely are supernatural spirits which haunt the world, harm or help people, cause nuisance, foretell or presage disasters, etc.  According to Lavater, evil spirits cannot abide the presence of true Christianity and holiness, and so they are becoming less common in the Europe of rising Protestantism than in Catholic areas.  They are also far more common in the New World, where Christianity is only just starting to find a foothold among the pagan natives.  (We shall be returning to this subject when we discuss 1999’s The Blair Witch Project and Robert Eggars’ 2015 film The VVitch in later essays.)

The point here is the way in which the spectral is an umbrella term for a range of manifestations.

In the above account, I am drawing heavily on this video by the brilliant Dr. Justin Sledge over at the Esoterica YouTube channel, and as Dr Sledge points out, this use of the spectral as a ‘wide net’ is a fundamental aspect of Lavater’s analysis.  For Lavatar, you see, despite their seeming variation, such beings as he describes are generally all demons.  Angels are rarely dispatched to Earth anymore since the true light of Protestantism and the Reformed Church has rendered their role as messengers unnecessary.  Catholic responses to such visitations are, of course, worthless.  Protestant prayer and endurance is the key in almost all cases.

Lavater’s book was a huge success and was reprinted many times, making it the original best-selling textbook on the supernatural.  It was considerably more popular than, for instance, the later and far more sceptical attitude of Reginald Scot, author of The Discouerie of Witchcraft (1584), who argued – essentially – that there was no such thing as the occult supernatural, on the grounds that God no longer permits miracles on Earth.  (As Philip C. Almond argues, Scot paradoxically and unintentionally created a sourcebook for subsequent generations of English magicians and demonologists.)

Part of Lavater’s success is undoubtedly due to the fact that his book is a compendium of fun ghost stories.  It is not illegitimate to see it as the first version of what will become the multivolume Fontana books of ghost stories, the Penguin Classics editions of gothic short stories, the Amicus anthology movies, R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series, the Hammer House of Horror or Supernatural or Dead of Night television shows… or, indeed, the Ghost Stories of an Antiquary of M.R. James and the A Ghost Story for Christmas TV series.

As Dr Sledge says,

while obscure now, Lavater’s De Spectris is just fundamental to how ghost narratives developed in modernity… especially via English Romantic literature via its influence on Reginald Scot and the modern ghost story, from Shakespeare and Hamlet to Shirley Jackson and… The Amityville Horror.  They’re all somehow downstream of Lavater.

Despite its descent from a much older phenomenon (even a trans-historically human phenomenon, namely the experience of the supernatural), the Ghost Story as we know it is – as I keep stressing – an inherently modern phenomenon.

Relatedly, it is also inherently a Protestant phenomenon – at least in its literary form.  This is quite a claim.  But it does not, of course, mean, that every instance of the genre will be Protestant in ideology or content.  What it does mean is that the genre is inherently conditioned by Protestantism – even in negation or contradiction – via its origins in modernity.  And the form is also inherently a kind of umbrella category (as, indeed, is the term ‘Protestant’).  It is categorically capacious.  This, however, does not lead to a lack of classification of supernatural phenomena or genre.  Indeed, the existence of the theoretical/generic umbrella is precisely what allows for the taxonomy and accountancy of the uncanny, monstrous, and spectral which – as in modern science and in commodification and marketisation – is such a basic impulse of modernity.  The impulse to classify, taxonomize, and ‘accountantise’ (if I may be permitted a nonce word) is related to the rise of commodification, to the rise of international and internal markets.  But it is important to stress that the rise of the category in socio-cultural life did not entail a new certainty.  On the contrary, the more you categorise, the more you problematise experience.  The more you try to describe reality using categories, the more you raise the problem of reality’s blurry boundaries.  This is only exacerbated by the chaos caused in human experience by the great shift from one mode of production to another.  One of the quintessential features of the literature from the period of primitive accumulation and the replacement of feudalism by capitalism is the experience of simultaneous categorical insistence and instability, the attempt to order the world using categories and the subsequent failure of that attempt in a morass of uncertainty and transgression.  (Remember Shakespeare’s reality-and-structure-defying ghosts and witches.)

What could be more an expression of the age than Lavater’s book?  It was an internationally successful commodity, a product of the epoch-shifting invention that was the printing press.  A work of Protestant Reformation theology, it subjected the ancient human experience of the supernatural to modern scepticism and simultaneously showcased the equally-modern understanding of the world as demon-haunted and devil-ridden.  It is a crucial nodal point in the replacement of the feudal idea of a world soaked in the divine and diabolical by the modern idea of the uncanny as a paradoxically omnipresent departure which is simultaneously deeply threatening to life and property and also subject to conquest by the proper bourgeois virtues.   At one and the same time, it describes a world in a chaos of haunting and in the process of being subjected to rational understanding.  It connects such rational understanding to the ideology of Protestantism, and thus inherently to the rising classes of the bourgeois era.  It invokes the burgeoning imperialism and colonialism which will be fundamental to the conquest of the globe by capitalism, and by capitalist Europe.  And it combines an expression of the instability of life in the era of primitive accumulation and Reformation with a deep impulse to categorise.  Even as it describes the various kinds of uncanny intrusion one might encounter, it is almost listing them like items of merchandise to choose from on a market.

We described Lavater’s hugely influential theory that manifold supernatural intrusions are generally demons rather than spirits of the dead.

Here is Pierre Kapitaniak, Professor of Early Modern British Civilisation at the University of Montpellier, in ‘The English Reformation and Ghosts’, trans. Arby Gharibian:

In Europe during the Middle Ages, the living maintained close and reciprocal bonds with the dead. In the early sixteenth century, one of the effects of the Reformation led by Luther (1483-1546) and later Calvin (1509-1564) was to break this relation. Rejecting the existence of purgatory pushed the spirits of the dead beyond the reach of the world of the living. Protestants did not believe that blissful souls would leave heaven, or that damned souls could escape from hell. In the absence of an intermediate place to purge sins between heaven and hell, only angels or demons could appear to the living bearing the resemblance of the deceased they had once known. Yet given that Protestants believed that the time of miracles had passed, the only probable candidates were demons. The appearances of such spirits were therefore simply diabolical impostures designed to lead good Christians away from the right path.

Remember the discussion of Shakespeare’s ghosts in previous essays, particularly the ghost of Hamlet’s father.  The ghost seems to come from Catholic Purgatory, yet Hamlet – educated at Protestant Wittenburg – is torn between believing this and believing that “the devil hath a power to assume a pleasing shape”.  As argued previously, Shakespeare is dramatizing the experience of living in the world of primitive accumulation, of the earliest modernity, of the intermingled Catholic and Protestant epochs, or feudalism overlaid with capitalism.

Of Britain, Kapitaniak writes:

Even more so than in other Protestant countries on the continent, practice remained very distant from scholarly theories. Accounts of appearances of the dead continued to spread in England throughout the seventeenth century. There was even a change in the relations between theology and beliefs beginning in the 1650s…

…in the place and time of the first bourgeois revolution, in other words; a revolution the ideological logic of which was Protestant at every level, except at the apex where it was a conflictual mix of Protestantism and Catholicism.  (We shall be returning to the peculiar religious ideology of the English ruling classes through modern history in subsequent essays.)

Instead of seeing scholarly theories—affirming that ghosts were necessarily a diabolical illusion—establish themselves after nearly a century of preaching, the opposite took place. Preachers began to defend the existence of ghosts, under pressure from what were deemed to be atheist attacks. In the middle of the century, freethinkers and Socinian skeptics, along with nonconformists and Diggers, took advantage of the loosening of the civil and religious authority that came with the first English Revolution (1642-1660) to attack Christian dogma. Puritans themselves, who ordinarily advocated a Protestantism closer to Calvinism, were not markedly different on the subject than the Anglicans of the Church of England.

…

This new debate began during the English Revolution, as the greatest witch-hunt in the British Isles was unleashed by Matthew Hopkins (c. 1620-1647). This dispute reached its apex during the second half of the seventeenth century with the Restoration. The scholars who defended the existence of ghosts and witches in addition to the Devil were no longer just theologians, but also followers of the new “natural philosophy” (physical science) that had been flourishing since the sixteenth century.

…

It was within this context that the first anthologies of ghost stories appeared, with some of them being part of more general collections on all kinds of supernatural phenomena, and others exclusively focusing on ghosts. Still, it was long believed that the first anthology of this type came from the pen of a certain Thomas Bromhall, who in 1658 published a long collection entitled A Treatise of Specters, which in reality was no more than the English translation of a German collection by Henning Grosse, published in Latin in the late sixteenth century. This first work was nevertheless followed by many other collections, whose argumentative framework gradually transitioned from accumulations aiming to establish proof toward collections more clearly oriented toward entertainment.

My italics.

I hope the reader will pardon the long quotation, but this concise summation allows us to begin to see not only that the Ghost Story develops inherently in the context of not only the dawning modern (as defined above) and the attendant Protestant Reformation, and not only in the context of printing and commodification (entertainment), but also in the context of the England and its revolutionary and counter-revolutionary era.  It arises inherently within the context of a struggle over material property, wealth, and power between classes.

Remember also, I don’t claim that the Ghost Story – or, by extension, the Gothic or Horror – is necessarily Protestant in outlook or ideology.  That would be a bizarre claim indeed.  I claim, rather, that the Ghost Story is inherently conditioned by Protestantism because it develops in and from European, particularly English, early modernity.  As one of the quintessentially modern genres, it then adapts itself to changing modernity, and finds itself particularly well placed to express modernity, modernity being inherently capitalist and thus, to coin a phrase, inherently haunted by spectres, spectres political and thus economic in basis.

As it turns out, conservative and even reactionary as he may have been, M.R. James is a particularly good lens through which to see this.  Indeed, he may even have been a particularly good lens through which to see it – in a glass darkly, one might even say – because he was conservative and reactionary.