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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，在今天法国东部的多勒，一名年轻女性相信她遇见了鬼魂。她当时卧病在床，起初以为看到的是一个清洁并照顾她的普通女人。她之所以开始觉得这名看护或许是鬼魂，是因为这位善良的女人无需打开上锁的门就来到了她的身边。她相信，这是姑母的鬼魂，为了减少在炼狱煎熬的时间而前来帮助她，作为一种赎罪。
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.
我们如今觉得，鬼魂轻盈飘渺——也许是个朦胧的女鬼，从台阶上飘然而下，衣裙悠悠地在身后摇曳。然而，在近代的欧洲，鬼魂常常被认为带有具象的人形。只有当他们做了普通人没法实现的事情时，比如穿门而入，才会被旁观者发现不是真人。
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世纪，人们开始大体认为鬼魂是抽象的——偶尔出现、虚无缥缈、来去匆匆。在狄更斯1843年出版的《圣诞颂歌》(A Christmas Carol)中，马利(Marley)的鬼魂来到斯克鲁奇(Scrooge)面前，而斯克鲁奇能够“看穿”那个透明的躯体。这说明鬼魂显灵的方式——如何被看到与记忆——发生了转变。
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《自我的幽灵》(Spectres of the Self)一书中，文化史学者沙恩·麦克里斯廷(Shane McCorristine)指出这种演变有两个原因。首先是由科学的新进步带来的对超自然现象的质疑。“幻觉”的概念越来越多地被用来解释看到幽灵之类的经历。伴随着见到鬼魂成为一种心理现象，它也开始成为一种病理现象。1848年，持怀疑态度的英国作家查尔斯·奥利尔(Charles Ollier)道出了许多人的心声。他写道，“任何觉得自己见过鬼魂的人，都可以将这种幻象当成他的身体健康失常的表征。”因此，麦克里斯廷写道，鬼魂“从外在、客观且由神学构造的世界”逐渐迁移到“个人体验的内在、主观且与心理密切相关的世界”。
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.
另一个原因是新技术的发展，包括19世纪头一二十年摄影技术的进步。不顾科学带来的显著威胁而希望继续相信超自然现象的那些人认为，幻觉的概念反而是死者显灵的一种科学证据。19世纪60年代，“幽灵摄影”贡献了活人与死去的亲属共存的惊人画面，但却是利用双重曝光等把戏炮制出的飘渺的轮廓与活生生的人相伴的景象。其透明的样子表明死者已逝——毫无疑问，是技术让某些摄影师得以伪造鬼魂。
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世纪末，降神会已变得非常流行。历史学者提出，通灵术和对此的研究成为了一种替代宗教，在传统基督教信仰式微之际展示了超自然现实的真切性。后来在20世纪，这种吸引力逐渐消退。
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僵尸这样的活死人：《哈利·波特》(Harry Potter)丛书、《暮光之城》(Twilight)系列，以及电视剧《童话镇》(Grimm)。2004年以来，Syfy电视台制作了16个超自然真人秀。2013年的哈里斯民调(Harris Poll)显示，42%的美国人相信鬼魂存在——但这个数字在68岁及更年长的调查对象中仅为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.
学者们有时会将这种超自然现象的流行概括为世界的某种“重新魔幻化”——正如德国社会学家马克斯·韦伯(Max Weber)等众多学者曾经认为的，人们越来越多地意识到当代世界并非没有了魔幻色彩，而是在一定程度上比以往更为痴迷于我们周遭的物质现实之外还有更多东西的概念。我想，部分原因在于，质疑反而让超自然现象变得安全，甚至有趣了。事实表明，尽管许多美国人或许认为存在鬼魂，但他们往往并不相信会被它们伤害。
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.
不过，还有一个更深层次的原因。正如通灵术成为了19世纪人们面对科学时的一种对宗教超自然力的坚持，我们这个时代的超自然主义也可能激起类似的东西。上世纪60年代以后近四分之一的美国人受神恩“复兴”运动影响，其中上帝呈现的是种生动的超自然形象——耶稣就在你身边，正如耶稣在他的使徒身边。在一个世俗化的时代，这种“超自然即自然”的论断有助于为上帝正名，因为它向人们保证，他们可以亲身感受到上帝的真实存在。
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.
或许科技也起到了一些作用。我们的世界在以看似超凡的方式运转——人靠近时灯会自动点亮，无需钥匙车就能点火，网站知道你想读些什么，还能推荐更多类似的书籍。互联网不是一种寻常的有形物质。它给人的感觉是不太一样的。这一点，大概也激发了我们的想象力。
This suggests there may be even more supernaturalism in years to come.
这意味着，未来的超自然色彩也许会更为浓烈。
Happy Halloween.
万圣节前夜快乐！
