Phantasmagoria

"Marina Warner’s Phantasmagoria, which explores what happened in the age of science to everything that might be related to the immaterial, the numinous, the irrational. It’s in some ways a history of the unknown – which has gone through several phases, hasn’t it? The spirit world, the divine, the unconscious. No, she’s a cultural historian. She looks at everything from table turning to Ouija boards, spirit photographs, the irrational in the modern age, ghosts, and monsters. She says wonderfully suggestive things, and she has an excellent chapter on the Rorschach Test. Well, there have been inkblot tests around for ages, but in the 19th century they took over from silhouettes as the parlour game, partly due to a German doctor and poet called Justinus Koerner, who was a friend of the German Romantics and was interested in the nascent science of psychology and such things. He’d write endless letters, and he doodled in them, and started playing around with inkblots. He was the one who worked out that you could make inkblots symmetrical by folding them over. Of the symmetricality? I think it just makes them more suggestive, more organic, more physical. They can look like MRI scans, or pelvises, or bugs. It makes them look more biological. Anyhow, what he’d do was make these inkblots in his letters and then embellish them – turn them into imps and monsters and devils, all sorts of little creatures. But they’re also slightly self-portrait-y. And then he’d write poems about them. Yes, he published a collection of inkblots and related poems called Klecksographien. It started a huge craze. Everybody started making their own inkblots, as aesthetic pieces, or as the basis of stories, or as a way of discovering themselves. Koerner started thinking of them in mythological terms, or about their mythologizing effect: whether there might be something hard-wired in the brain, a collective memory or thinking."