Transcription
According to a recent poll, nearly half of Americans believe in ghosts, testifying to the enduring power of spiritual beliefs. And I suspect that number is even a bit higher among viewers of this channel.
And to be sure, this is a completely reasonable belief. Stories of the restless dead appear in virtually every civilization and people group, with such tales going back to the earliest times of writing and with remarkable similarity through time. I suspect they go well back into prehistory.
But under closer inspection, the concept of the ghost isn't quite as timeless or as cross-cultural as it may first appear. Indeed, the ghost has evolved, we might say, under the culture and religious pressures of history. What ghost very often became was precisely what ghost needed to be for those pretending to spiritual authority. And this is on no clearer display than in the transformation of the ghosts in some of the very distinct periods of Latin western European history.
What do we learn from the evolutionary mutation of the ghosts in some of these great tectonic historical shifts? Just how did ghosts evolve? If you're interested in magic, hermetic philosophy, alchemy, cababala, or the history of the occult, make sure to subscribe here and check out my other content on topics in esotericism. If you want a reliable lay of the land for the study of esotericism, make sure to check out my study guide. And if you want to support work like this of providing accessible, scholarly, and free content on topics in esotericism here on YouTube, I'd hope you consider taking a look at my Patreon. Maybe consider a onetime donation with a super thanks or PayPal or whatever. Just click like and subscribe, whatever.
But let's explore some moments in the history of the evolution of the European ghosts and how those evolutionary processes still informed our conceptions of the restless dead. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
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The concept of the ghost does seem timeless. The misty spectral being hovering translucently in the glooming corridors of some forlorn derelict and liinal space. And yet that image of the ghost is anything other than timeless. It's very much a conception of the ghost that primarily emerges from the 19th century northern European Gothic movement. While a ghost in a jungle or a windswept desert tomb may seem maybe perhaps a bit foreign to us, I suspect that those would be the ghosts of the Mayans, and they were indeed the ghosts of the Egyptians.
Like all memes or mimemetic information packets, the concept of the ghost tells us often as much about us as it does about any of the metaphysical properties of the disembodied dead, assuming that's what ghosts are. In the end, our conception of ghosts has evolved and mutated given very concrete social and especially religious pressures such that the ghosts that we take to be timeless only appear timeless because they are in fact the result of the very same pressures that produced us. beings of the present, most often blissfully ignorant of the very processes of which we are too the result.
But ghosts are fascinating because by studying their evolution, we're given perhaps a surprisingly nuanced glimpse into our very history, or at least some relatively oblique and admittedly esoteric dimensions of it. Of course, there's no way this video could pretend to be a comprehensive history of Western European ghosts, but let's take a look at a few vignettes of the development of the ghost. The ghosts of Christianization, the resurrection of ghosts in contact with Germanic paganism, the war over ghosts between Protestants and Catholics, and the ghosts that continue to haunt the enlightenment, much to the degr of the rationalists and the empiricists to again get a glimpse of the history of just how ghost evolved and how we evolved with them.
Late anti-Christians had a let's call it complicated relationship with the romanization of their religion. On the one hand, Christianity had become thoroughly romanized, at least in a social sense, very early on, decoupling themselves from their Judeian origins before being adopted out of the official religion of an empire that once sought their eradication. It's a fantastic success story. And yet Christian theologians were at pains to divorce themselves from the Roman religion that they viewed as well pagan. Of course, the various gods and goddesses were transformed, demoted into demons, promoted into angels, and variously erased, rehabilitated, detorred, and remixed.
But the Romans also held to a wide belief in the idea of specific household deities, but also specifically deities of the deceased such as restless lies or malevolent spirits and the more beneficent ancestral manace or the lores spirits of a specific home. And indeed, if you've ever seen a Roman tombstone, you probably see it blazing with the abbreviation DMS, dismanibus sacrum, meaning something like sacred to the ghost gods or the ancestor spirits. And of course, the culture of the ancestor spirits was an important aspect of Roman religion, such that the living had to retain right relationship with the dead, a largely cross-cultural phenomena. In fact, failing this or if a person were to die violently or unjustly or with something undone in their life, they may return as a liore or a larva seeking out justice or vengeance or just to be buried.
Indeed, the prototypical haunted house story for the Romans was to be found in the first century tale recorded by Plenny the Younger where Athenodoris, a stoic philosopher, no less, pacifies a ghost in an Athenian home that he's renting. In fact, I've done a whole episode on this fantastic Roman ghost story if you want to check that out. I even copied out the entire story in a period hand on papyrus because well, it is esoterica after all.
But the Roman understanding of the restless dead returning in any form was just anathema to the early Christians. God alone was worthy of worship and any adoration paid to the dead was just absolutely forbidden by the legislation of God given to Moses. Further, the dead were thought by the early Christians to be set into a kind of spiritual hibernation, sleeping as it were while a waiting for the final judgment of God. Then and only then would they be brought back to life. Physically brought back to life and then subject to divine justice. Then allowed to enter into the heavenly kingdom of God or cast down into predition where the worm never dies and the fire is not quenched. Simply put, the dead were just under the unique jurisdiction of the one God. They were causally inert and thus they could not be much aided or interact with the living.
And of course, the principal architect of this line of early western Christian understanding of the role of God, the living, and the dead was St. Augustine. It's always going to be St. Augustine. But addressing the nature of the proper Christian relationship to the departed, Augustine in texts like the 421 on the care to be taken for the dead, Deura Promuis Garrena lays out the position that will become normative for hundreds of years into the development of Christianity. Relying on the New Testament tale of the rich man and Lazarus, St. Augustine held that there is no transit between the realms of the post-mortem punishment and reward, but also no transit from the realm of the post-mortem punishment to the world of the living. Recall that the suffering rich man in that story wanted to return to warn his sons of his torture following death, but just isn't allowed to do so. Thus, Augustine holds that an insuperable gulf divides the living and the dead. And thus tales of Manise and Leores and other spirits of the dead, they're simply false and thus theologically suspect to say the least.
But what to do with all the visions that people seem to have of just such entities? Indeed, there are so many cases that seem genuinely to puzzle Augustine, such as when ghosts convey secret information or actually even bring the living to change their life into a life of Christian repentance. Thus, Augustine speculates that perhaps some of these visions are actually just angels or divine heralds which appear in the form of spirits of the deceased to convey some solace of the living as he has it or for the need of redemption through repentance. So, the first theory is it's angels appearing as if they were deceased people. Further, in rare cases, it may be that saints at least are allowed to appear in some form, such as Moses and Elijah at the transfiguration. But for Augustine, these cases are very, very unusual and limited to the saints alone. But do recall that in the story of the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man is told that he can't return. But it never says that the righteous dead can't return in that story. So that kind of leaves that door open.
Other encounters with such ghosts may be spiritual visions given through the grace of God for the edification of the believer or penitent and may occur while sleeping and while awake. However, Augustine contends such a vision is not not a manifestation of the spirit of a dead person but a kind of miraculous hallucination. Indeed, he argues that if the dead could visit their loved ones with news of the other side or just out of love, then why doesn't his uh loving mother Monica visit him daily or any of these people? Finally, August must deal with the heaps of tales of the malevolent spirits of the dead whose groaning, wrapping on walls, casting stones, and otherwise vexing the living needs to be accounted for. And of course, thieves aren't the spirits of the dead either, but they're just, you guessed it, they're just demons who seek everything from tormenting the believers to the damnation of the human soul as an outrage of God. Basically, when any malevolent supernatural thing happens for Augustine, it's always going to be demons.
Thus, the earliest systematic analysis of ghosts in the Latin West was in the service of driving a metaphysical wedge between Christian attitudes and those they took to be decadent Roman paganism, either in their spiritual taxonomies of the dead, but also in what Augustine and similar other Christians took to be their lavish and equally superstitious useless, frankly,erary customs. Again, customs that the Romans themselves took to be properly honoring the dead to prevent them from coming back, whereas Christians held that such honors were just idolatrously misplaced, preferring simpler internment and hope for the resurrection. You just pray for them that they'll come back and be judged rightly by God.
Thus, in effect, Augustine had exercised Christian metaphysics of all such spectral beings with the rare exception again of the appearance of the saints. And thus it would seem that ghosts as such should have just vanished altogether in the Latin West, replaced with angels, visions, and most of all demonic intrusions and illusions. But that simply wasn't the case. And when Christianity came into contact with Germanic pagans now to the north, along with the inevitable insistence of continued popular beliefs and manifestations of the dead, new theological developments paved the way for the return of the spirits of the dead. In some sense, the ghosts got ghosts despite St. Augustine. And also, I just believe the Christian folk beliefs and ghosts continue just fine as usual, regardless of the scribbles of theologians. Theologians and philosophers often think they have a much bigger impact than they in fact do.
But as Christianity moved north into Europe, it encountered the Germanic peoples whose mythology, like most mythology, is rich in tales of interactions with the breastless dead. And these people converted and influenced Christian mythology. The great strategic strength of Christianity to my mind has always been its ability to at first synretatize all the while drawing converts nearer and nearer all the same to Roman orthodoxy playing the long game version of acclimating them to Christianity. But these ghostly elements made their way into written Christian narratives.
Further, these encounters were primarily occurring in the period of time leading up to the year 1000, the millennium widely held by Christians to be the season for the return of Christ. In fact, an Islamic scholar said that they threw a huge party for the return of Christ in the year 1000 and Christ failed to show up. This period, however, will be witnessed to all kinds of natural marvels, including the appearance of comets, earthly convulsions, the failures of crops, and the general painful messianic births of the apocalypse. This period would also blur the line between the living and the dead with specters appearing in mass. Indeed, the literature of this period would just be chalk full of accounts of encounters with the restless dead.
But the theological lynch pin that would allow such visitations of the dead over and against the theology of St. Augustine would be the development of one of the most important ideas in Catholic theology, purgatory. In this theological position, the sins accumulated in life must be purged and thus purified in death before the admittance into heaven. Thus, even for the sinning righteous meant for heaven, that would still need that they would undergo postmortem purification, often through the punishing fires and hence the pgation of those sins in well, purgatory. This notion would be under a profound development around the turn of the millennium ultimately reaching its maturity between around 1170 and 1200. But around these three developments, the millennium changing, the Germanic mythology injection, the pre-apocalyptic manifestations, and the development of purgatory would result in a ghostly revolution. Ghosts were back on the agenda again.
But as early as Pope Gregory the Great in the 7th century, we have tales of ghostly bath house attendants who were serving out penance for their sins committed while alive. Here, the prayers of the living are allowed to allow the spirits to go onward in their afterlife journey. Of course, these lessons are meant to be a type of circumspection of the restless dead, and as such, they're lessons for pious living. But in a significant manner, we have in St. Gregory's dialogues and early reappearance of ghosts after them being banished by Augustine.
In Bead's 8th century ecclesiastical history, we see some transitional ghost stories there as well. Here, the righteous dead, though not necessarily saints. Again, an important distinction visav Augustine. They appear to monks and nuns either to assist them into death or to warn them against a dangerous missionary journey. Here, the ghosts of the abbotess Ethelberga. I told you we were in Germanic lands. Ethelberga guides the nun Togith to the day of her death after a terrible illness. And the ghostly monk Boyil leads Eggert. Eggert, again, we're real Germanic now, to Ireland and away from a mission in Germany. In both cases, interestingly enough, the ghostly visitor was once the supervised of the visited.
The 11th century Saxon bishop Fatimar of Merberg used the appearance of various ghosts. One warning a man of his imminent doom. In many cases, appearances of ghosts meant that you were going to die. So if you were to see a ghost, you would soon become one. Another involves a priest being burned alive by a ghost. So in a church, no less. Others still make great groaning noises like the falling of trees. These ghost narratives were also set in theological pymics with the local Slavs who thart held that apparently they believe that everything finishes at the point of death. Though the local Slavs never really tell us what they believed.
Perhaps the most outstanding of all of these accounts are those involving not the appearance of singular ghosts who require the prayers of the living or warnings for the living, but the vast appearance of revenant congregations and even wraith armies. Yes, wraith armies around a thousand and shortly thereafter Raldufus Glaver Otlo of St. Emiran, Peter the venerable, Odlick Vitalis, Geraldis Corencensus among numerous other tales involving great armies of ghosts or congregations of ghosts. And in many of these tales, those very ghosts are tormented by the various implements of war that they dawned in life. They are roasting inside their red heart armor. They grab the monk and it burns their throat. The spears and their hands torment them and they bear the wounds of the serumful rampages they once undertook sometimes against monasteries.
Thus, here we have a most fascinating combination. On the one hand, such appearances of vast wraith armies are very likely an expression of the older pagan wild hunt idea led variously by Woden and in some cases by Diana with Diana a stride of beast forming the core of the journey of the witch's sabbath some centuries later on in its enshrinement of that tale in the canan episcopy. So here we have a jaunt off into witchcraft territory. But combined with these Christian elements, this pagan story combined with Christian elements, specifically purgatorial punishments after death. Thus, we have both pagan and Christian elements both in the service of the resurrection of the central and northern European warrior ghost narratives. It's just breathtaking synretatism.
Such historical, cultural, and religious shifts would open the doors to dozens, if not hundreds of such medieval ghostly narratives, and the survival of otherwise pagan ghost narratives from Viking sagas, atheran legends, and tales of haunted monasteries and castles, originating primarily to inspire earthly repentance and redemption among the faithful. But those very stories would eventually go on to form the nucleus of what would become the Gothic that we all know and love. Once banished by St. Augustine, it would be paganism and Christian synretatism which would utter in a litany of monastic and warrior ghost visitations from their purgatorial tortures. And I have to tell you, these medieval ghost stories are just fantastic to read. even if we're probably reading them for the wrong reasons now.
But by the Renaissance, not only had ghosts seen a fullblown resurgence, but the recovery of ancient pagan wisdom had opened the door to a range of new supernatural entities aside from angels, demons, and the souls of the dead. Well, new to them. They were old pagan ideas. Various celestial and elemental spirits along with other such entities would now populate the occult works of Ficino, Agrippa, Pariselus, Bruno, and Dr. John D among many others. And in the midst of this occult revolution, Western Christianity was simply tearing itself aunder. Storming out of Germany, the Protestant movement sought a return to a more primitive and thus pure form of Christianity and breaking decisively with Catholicism on a number of theological issues. One of those to be rejected by the Protestants was, of course, the concept of purgatory. Simply put, the Protestants rejected this conception as unbiblical and thus uncchristian. It was an innovation on the part of the Catholic Church that was tantamount to paganism.
But this rejection of purgatory created a problem for the Protestants. If ghosts aren't souls on vacation from the realm of purgatory, I guess they're not exactly vacation, but at any rate, if they're not away from purgatory because there isn't simply a purgatory in the first place, then what explains the commonplace appearance of ghosts? What are they exactly? And how do they fit into the emergent purgatory free Protestant religious cosmology? And it's this kind of question and the ensuing other theological and metaphysical issues around ghosts that so vexes Ludvig lavator into composing what became probably I would suspect the most important and most influential textbook on ghosts in European history. His book despectric on ghosts first published in German in 1569 before being translated into Latin, French, English, Dutch and Italian and then going into about 20 editions. 20 editions makes it without doubt one of the most popular and the most influential books on ghosts in European history. It's fantastic to read and you can even read it in an early modern English edition.
A Swiss reformed theologian Lavator's despect is divided into three sections. The first is where he establishes the reality of spiritual or spectral manifestation. The second where he presents arguments about exactly what these beings are. And the third of course about the correct and proper means by which a Christian, a Protestant, can be rid of these spectral bothers. The third part is the most boring. You just pray and fast. That's it. For Lavender, these beings are almost just always demons tormenting people. And in this way, he's actually really close to back to August. In rare cases, they might be angels, but God very rarely sends angels anymore because since the coming of Christ and the reformed church, of course, God has basically communicated all that we need to know. So, you don't need to have an angel show up and tell you anything new. Finally, in some rare cases, God might send the spirit of a dead person from some very specific task, but Laviter is slow to admit that this happens much at all. Why John just send an angel or something else? Thus, we come back full circle to Augustine in the form of a Swiss Protestant. Didn't see that coming.
But the first part of Lavender's book is especially interesting. There he writes at length about what we might call pseudo ghosts. That is to say, a range of physical and psychological psychological disorders that may cause one to experience something like a ghost or a haunting. There he discusses at length how insomnia through sickness, but especially through grief can induce hallucinations. This point about grief induced ghost hallucinations is now well attested by psychologists. In fact, one study by the researcher Agetta Grimba at the University of Gabborg found that over 80% of elderly people 80% of elderly people experience hallucinations associated with their dead partner one month or so after bereiement. Thus, such grief hallucinations aren't the exception. They appear to be the rule or they're not hallucinations. dead of spirits of the dead that hang around a bit before moving on. Either way, Lavar is an important early witness to just this phenomenon. He's also an important early witness in the both in the pages of this book to the reality of night terrors. In such a state, people often experience paralysis and yet are keenly horrifyingly aware of nearby malevolent entities. Such entities may simply malinger around, but can also seem to oppress their victim, sometimes sexually, and such night terror, Lavator argues, form the basis for the mythology around incubi and succubi tales. In fact, such narratives go back to our earliest literature on ghosts in Mesopotamia.
Of course, mental illness, cowardice, drunkenness, and even hallucination induced by psychoactive drugs can cause us to perceive that we're seeing ghosts. He even makes mentions of certain suffications which can cause people around a table to appear to have no heads or the heads of donkeys or strange vines growing all over the se. This is getting creepy. Yeah, vines growing up around the ceiling. And he even makes mentions of books about just such drugs. And I suspect that he's actually making a sideways reference to Giovanni Delaporta's book on natural magic which contains just such recipes. And you don't want to look them up and you definitely don't want to try them because they are poisonous with like henbane and stuff. Yes, you don't need to be ingesting Belladon god.
But I want to notice here something that Lavender is introducing that is a fundamentally modern element into this conversation around ghosts that such experiences can be the result of physiological especially psychological factors. And we're now opening onto the vista of ghosts and hauntings being manifestation of not only supernatural phenomena or theological phenomena but interior states of our own body even of consciousness itself. And this psychologizing of the spectral world sets the stage of everything from a similar move in theories of magic by people like the early Alistister Crowley or Israel Rearda to psychoanalytic theories of both ghosts and hauntings but also demonic possession. And in many ways if you think about a classic about hauntings in the modern era Shirley Jackson's the haunting of Hill House is exactly interested in just this question. Thus Laviter looks in two directions at once. theologically back into the past, back to the primitive Christianity of St. Augustine, but also forward to us to the ghosts as kinds of psychological pathology in some ways. And I think this idea has had a tremendous impact on ghosts in modernity and in contemporary times.
Of course, the Catholics weren't going to go down without a fight on this whole ghost business, and the Counterreformation would answer such claims, especially in texts like Peter Theoras's 1598 book, Loca and Festa, along with other theological works of his. In fact, Theas is just one of the most important demonologists of this period, and his works remain decisively important and sadly lacking contemporary translations and additions. It's a common problem we have here in esoterica land. But like Lavender, Theasis surveys the vast amount of literature on hauntings and concludes reasonably that the existence overwhelmingly suggests the existence of ghosts and supernatural infestation. In fact, that language of infestation, loca and fesa stems from warfare. It's literally demonic and ghostly sieges of Christendom, which you also imagine he thinks of the Protestants as laying siege to Christendom, too. And what follows is a detailed analysis of just how supernatural beings do things like create sounds and manifest in divisions, taught things around, or even if they know that they're dead. He's inclined to believe that most of them are aware of their condition of being deceased. For the spirits do have some limited ability to affect the physical world, which is interesting considering that they're made of a spiritual substance, not a physical one that presents some toistic issues. But most of them operate primarily through inducing hallucinations in their victims, which is somehow even more terrifying than just being able to see them. I would just rather see a ghost in my house than them somehow be able to manipulate my mind into hallucinating them.
At any rate, he further distinguishes between three types of haunters. Haunters who are ghosts of the dead, haunters who are, of course, demons, or what he calls spirits unattached. Demons should be relatively straightforward. But the first category are largely those out of purgatory, as we might expect, but he does allow for a really strange exception in all this. Theus actually argues that God can and often does allow people to undergo purggation of sins in the local in which that sin occurred. You kind of have to live with it. Thus, places on earth, especially where sins occur, like homes of course, become sight of purgatorial torture. And thus, the groans, cries, and angry manifestations of the dead that we hear are actually them suffering in purgatory in our house. Now, how this is fair to the living who were living in their purgatorial torture isn't clear, but perhaps such hauntings are again reminders to us that we should avoid a similar fate through being good Catholics.
Finally, Theus admits of a third set of entities known as unattached spirits. But these are mostly quasi demonic, but some of them just bothersome. A bit like the classic poltergeist or noisy ghosts. These entities seem to haunt various spaces from homes, ruins, and especially places like mines, and mostly just bother and scare people mostly with strange sounds wrapping on walls and moving things about. They're just bothersome spirits like brownies for instance. The Reyes doesn't exactly detail these beings. He gives examples such as lace, brownies as specific examples that haunt homes. But Lavender has a similar minor demonic category which he denotes as cobalts. Goblins. Goblins. And also, it's worth mentioning that both accept to varying degrees a scenario where demonic infestation can be induced through sorcery and witchcraft. Yes, sorcerers and witches can curse your home and invite demons and ghosts into your house. So, don't make them angry. So, we have ghosts, demons, witches, and and goblins. We're getting real close to a D and D adventure here, folks. You need to roll for initiative. Thanks, Early Modernity.
Honestly, Theora's Opera Omnia would just be a fantastic project for a graduate student to translate. Wink wink, nudge nudge, or at least his demonological work specifically. But again, what's key about these developments is that we're beginning to see some sense of a freelance ghost, freelance demons, as a kind of spirit not especially contained within the traditional Christian spiritual ecosystem. These unattached spirits or goblins are kind of becoming their own hustlers doing their side gigs. And as such, this all sets the stage for a kind of secular demonology or theory of ghosts and hauntings as we transition into the modern and contemporary world of spirits. We're getting something like secular ghosts for the first time.
But finally, let's turn to the Enlightenment. That period where rationalism and empiricism allegedly beat back superstition, religion, and magic, resulting in the disenchanted world that we all live in now. Another mythology widely indulged in and not true. But from one Augustine to another, we conclude with the French historian, theologian, and vampirologist Antoine Augustine KT, whose 1746 then greatly expanded 1751 dissertation, then treaties on apparitions and vampires, was probably the most influential textbook on those subjects, especially the vampire part at that time and a great deal afterwards. Now, I've done a whole episode on the vampire part of that book if you're interested in that topic because of course you are. Everyone's interested in vampires.
But like all of the literature before, Kamet's text is basically a giant survey of ghost stories. And that's part of the reason why this literature is just perennially interesting. Everyone loves ghost stories. But these reach back all the way into antiquity through the Middle Ages and do his current research. But despite being a Benedicting Abbott, Kamet's methodology, skeptical even, and being a child of the Enlightenment, he's as scientific as one could be in his many words. He seeks out to understand such specters using advances in physics, chemistry, biology, and even the same source of the kind of criticism being developed at that time for biblical studies. He uses source criticism to analyze ghost stories to see whether or not they actually make sense. For instance, when he analyzes the reports of vampires rising from their graves and devouring the blood of their victims, he primarily wishes to rely on the reports of medical doctors rather than just folklore stories. He tends to think the medical doctors are giving him a more scientific approach. Indeed, he puzzles with those doctors over how such beings could stalk their victims nocturnally and yet the earth over their graves goes undisturbed.
His position visav ghost and apparition is actually very similar. While he accepts that many of these accounts may be true, his position is one of relative likelihood rather than dogmatic acceptance or theological appropriation. He says this one tends to sounds a bit more likely to be true than all of these more fantastical ones. And while he might conclude that denial of all apparitions is tantamount to a denial of Christianity itself. It was just a bridge too far for him to say there are no such things as apparitions. He was also skeptical enough that Voltaare, yes, Voltaare, the cheerleader of the Enlightenment, would rely on KT for his encyclopedia entry on the subject of vampires.
Thus, KT like the other figures we've explored, looked in two directions at once. back into the theological world of premodernity and yet also into the future of rationalism, empiricism, and scientific naturalism. One might even say that it was Kamet that shepherded ghosts through the perils of the Enlightenment. Indeed, he's the grandfather of all contemporary paranormal researchers skullking through ruins attempting to bring science to bear on the ancient world of the restless dead.
Ghosts therefore have had a kind of double history. Their own personal history before their transformation into apparitions, but also ghosts as such have a history. one very much subject to the es and flows of cultural, religious, scientific, and social transformations. And in this sense, the seemingly timeless ghosts all turn out to be profoundly historically mediated entities. And by studying ghosts as at least in part a product of that historical change, we learn about that process and we learn about us and about how seemingly timeless religious, philosophical or metaphysical conceptions are anything other than timeless. They are, as Hegel reminds us, an expression of history.
Of course, the literature on ghosts is just staggeringly vast, but I'm going to include some useful resources in the description if you want a reading list on ghosts because of course you do. I'm sure I'm not done with the topic, so definitely more on ghosts here in the future. Till then, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane and history, philosophy, and religion.
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