Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century

Contemporary Review, Autumn, 2007

Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century. Marina Warner. Oxford University Press. [pounds sterling]18.99. xx 469 pages. ISBN 0-19-929994-3. Marina Warner, who rejects the thesis of a 'God-given soul', is concerned in this book (originating with O.U.P. New York) with the relationship among soul, spirit and body, with our understanding of those terms, and with our use of them.

Why is it, she asks, that as orthodox Christian belief recedes, man's obsession with 'the quest for spirit and the desire to explain its mystery' increases. There is a certain strain of earnest Victorian searching in the text, concerned as it is with the wilder shores of man's search for life after death. There is much learning and wide reading here. There is also a point to all this speculation, but sometimes the author's highly intellectualised writing--'writers who are grasping the imaginary fabric that swathes and freights our consciousness today' is just part of a sentence--can obscure as well as elucidate. One minor correction: St Francis was a lay-friar, not a monk. (J.T.D.R.)