萬聖節前夜快樂 鬼魂們又回來啦

IN 1628, a young woman in the town of Dole, in what is now eastern France, believed she was visited by a ghost. The young woman was ill in bed. At first she saw an ordinary woman who had tidied up and taken care of her. She began to think that her nurse might be a spirit after the kind woman appeared at her side without opening the locked door. The spirit, she believed, was the ghost of her aunt, who came to help her out as a form of penance to lessen the aunt’s time in purgatory.

1628年，在今天法國東部的多勒，一名年輕女性相信她遇見了鬼魂。她當時臥病在牀，起初以爲看到的是一個清潔並照顧她的普通女人。她之所以開始覺得這名看護或許是鬼魂，是因爲這位善良的女人無需打開上鎖的門就來到了她的身邊。她相信，這是姑母的鬼魂，爲了減少在煉獄煎熬的時間而前來幫助她，作爲一種贖罪。

We think of ghosts as wispy and translucent — a vaporous woman, perhaps, who floats down the stairs, her dress trailing in the languid air behind her. But in early modern Europe, ghosts were often perceived as solid persons. The viewer discovered that they weren’t when they did something that ordinary humans could not, like bypassing a locked door to enter a room.

我們如今覺得，鬼魂輕盈飄渺——也許是個朦朧的女鬼，從臺階上飄然而下，衣裙悠悠地在身後搖曳。然而，在近代的歐洲，鬼魂常常被認爲帶有具象的人形。只有當他們做了普通人沒法實現的事情時，比如穿門而入，纔會被旁觀者發現不是真人。

By the 19th century, people had begun to think of ghosts predominantly as spectral forms — ephemeral, elusive, evanescent. When the ghost of Marley appeared to Scrooge in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” (1843), and Scrooge looked his transparent body “through and through,” he illustrated a shift in the ways ghosts became real to people, how ghosts were seen and remembered.

到了19世紀，人們開始大體認爲鬼魂是抽象的——偶爾出現、虛無縹緲、來去匆匆。在狄更斯1843年出版的《聖誕頌歌》(A Christmas Carol)中，馬利(Marley)的鬼魂來到斯克魯奇(Scrooge)面前，而斯克魯奇能夠“看穿”那個透明的軀體。這說明鬼魂顯靈的方式——如何被看到與記憶——發生了轉變。

In “Spectres of the Self,” the cultural historian Shane McCorristine points to two reasons for this transmutation. The first was skepticism about the supernatural, generated by the new developments in science. The concept of hallucination emerged to explain experiences like seeing an apparition. As the seeing of ghosts became a psychological phenomenon, it also became a pathological one. In 1848, the British skeptic Charles Ollier spoke for many when he wrote that “anyone who thinks he has seen a ghost, may take the vision as a symptom that his bodily health is deranged.” As a result, Dr. McCorristine writes, the ghost was gradually relocated “from the external, objective and theological structured world to the internal, subjective and psychological haunted world of personal experience.”

在《自我的幽靈》(Spectres of the Self)一書中，文化史學者沙恩·麥克里斯廷(Shane McCorristine)指出這種演變有兩個原因。首先是由科學的新進步帶來的對超自然現象的質疑。“幻覺”的概念越來越多地被用來解釋看到幽靈之類的經歷。伴隨着見到鬼魂成爲一種心理現象，它也開始成爲一種病理現象。1848年，持懷疑態度的英國作家查爾斯·奧利爾(Charles Ollier)道出了許多人的心聲。他寫道，“任何覺得自己見過鬼魂的人，都可以將這種幻象當成他的身體健康失常的表徵。”因此，麥克里斯廷寫道，鬼魂“從外在、客觀且由神學構造的世界”逐漸遷移到“個人體驗的內在、主觀且與心理密切相關的世界”。

The other reason was the development of new technologies, including photography in the early decades of the 19th century. Those who wanted to hang on to their belief in the supernatural despite the apparent threat posed by science found in the idea of the hallucination a kind of scientific evidence that the dead came back to life. By the 1860s “spirit photography” presented astonishing images of people alongside dead relatives, using double exposure and other manipulations to portray a gauzy form alongside living flesh. It was the transparency that marked the dead as dead — and of course, it was technology that allowed some photographers to fake the ghost.

另一個原因是新技術的發展，包括19世紀頭一二十年攝影技術的進步。不顧科學帶來的顯著威脅而希望繼續相信超自然現象的那些人認爲，幻覺的概念反而是死者顯靈的一種科學證據。19世紀60年代，“幽靈攝影”貢獻了活人與死去的親屬共存的驚人畫面，但卻是利用雙重曝光等把戲炮製出的飄渺的輪廓與活生生的人相伴的景象。其透明的樣子表明死者已逝——毫無疑問，是技術讓某些攝影師得以僞造鬼魂。

By the late 19th century, séances had become wildly popular. Historians have argued that spiritualism and psychical research became a kind of surrogate religion that demonstrated the truth of an otherworldly reality as faith in ordinary Christianity declined. Then, through the 20th century, their appeal receded.

到了19世紀末，降神會已變得非常流行。歷史學者提出，通靈術和對此的研究成爲了一種替代宗教，在傳統基督教信仰式微之際展示了超自然現實的真切性。後來在20世紀，這種吸引力逐漸消退。

Pop culture is richly peopled with vampires, zombies, the living dead: the Harry Potter books, the “Twilight” series, the television show “Grimm.” The Syfy network has produced 16 paranormal reality shows since 2004. A 2013 Harris Poll found that 42 percent of Americans believed in ghosts — but only 24 percent of respondents 68 and older.

今天的流行文化中充斥着吸血鬼和殭屍這樣的活死人：《哈利·波特》(Harry Potter)叢書、《暮光之城》(Twilight)系列，以及電視劇《童話鎮》(Grimm)。2004年以來，Syfy電視臺製作了16個超自然真人秀。2013年的哈里斯民調(Harris Poll)顯示，42%的美國人相信鬼魂存在——但這個數字在68歲及更年長的調查對象中僅爲24%。

Scholars sometimes talk about this supernaturalization as a kind of “re-enchantment” of the world — as a growing awareness that the modern world is not stripped of the magical, as the German sociologist Max Weber and so many others once thought, but is in some ways more fascinated than ever with the idea that there is more than material reality around us. In part, I think, this is because skepticism has made the supernatural safe, even fun. It turns out that while many Americans may think that there are ghosts, they often don’t believe that ghosts can harm them.

學者們有時會將這種超自然現象的流行概括爲世界的某種“重新魔幻化”——正如德國社會學家馬克斯·韋伯(Max Weber)等衆多學者曾經認爲的，人們越來越多地意識到當代世界並非沒有了魔幻色彩，而是在一定程度上比以往更爲癡迷於我們周遭的物質現實之外還有更多東西的概念。我想，部分原因在於，質疑反而讓超自然現象變得安全，甚至有趣了。事實表明，儘管許多美國人或許認爲存在鬼魂，但他們往往並不相信會被它們傷害。

There is, however, a deeper reason. Just as spiritualism became a means to hold on to the supernatural claims of religion in the face of science in the 19th century, the supernaturalism of our own time may enable something similar. The God that has emerged in the post-1960s “renewalist” Christianity practiced by nearly a quarter of all Americans is vividly supernatural — a Jesus who walks by your side just as Jesus walked with his disciples. This assertion that the supernatural is natural helps to make the case for God in a secular age, because it promises people that they will know by experience that God is real.

不過，還有一個更深層次的原因。正如通靈術成爲了19世紀人們面對科學時的一種對宗教超自然力的堅持，我們這個時代的超自然主義也可能激起類似的東西。上世紀60年代以後近四分之一的美國人受神恩“復興”運動影響，其中上帝呈現的是種生動的超自然形象——耶穌就在你身邊，正如耶穌在他的使徒身邊。在一個世俗化的時代，這種“超自然即自然”的論斷有助於爲上帝正名，因爲它向人們保證，他們可以親身感受到上帝的真實存在。

Perhaps technology plays a role as well. Our world is animated in ways that can seem almost uncanny — lights that snap on as you approach, cars that fire into life without keys, websites that know what you like to read and suggest more books like those. The Internet is not material in the ordinary way. It feels somehow different. Maybe this, too, stokes our imagination.

或許科技也起到了一些作用。我們的世界在以看似超凡的方式運轉——人靠近時燈會自動點亮，無需鑰匙車就能點火，網站知道你想讀些什麼，還能推薦更多類似的書籍。互聯網不是一種尋常的有形物質。它給人的感覺是不太一樣的。這一點，大概也激發了我們的想象力。

This suggests there may be even more supernaturalism in years to come.

這意味着，未來的超自然色彩也許會更爲濃烈。

Happy Halloween.

萬聖節前夜快樂！