Hit by the Inspiration Brick

An inspiring brick. Photo by Celie.

I’ve been hit by the Brick of Inspiration, the one that hits you with the thought “I wonder if…?” while you’re supposed to be doing something else. The trigger was the forthcoming Post-grad seminars. You’re supposed to give one a year. I’m completing my second full-time-equivalent year and I’ve given five or six. By my count that exempts me from any seminars for the remainder this PhD and all of the next one. However the department might have a different view so I thought I’d have a bit more of a proactive attitude rather than wait to have a seminar sprung on me.

I try not to talk about the PhD, because it’s a mixed ancient history and archaeology audience. So I end up explaining the basic historical and archaeological context of the PhD and then basic astronomy which, with a 20 minute talk, leaves just enough time to say it’s all going swimmingly. Astronomy’s not rocket science, it just needs time to explain what the basics are, but time is at a premium in just 20 minutes. So I try and pick something that’s small but similar to my PhD, or just something I find interesting.

What I thought I’d do was something purely as something interesting. Fortunately while it’s not exactly my PhD, it’s next door. It’s about how people made sense of the world. Usually you might think of this as either religion or science. I’m not sure how much sense it makes to divide between the two in ancient times and this talk will illustrate that. I thought to talk about ghost stories as a means of making sense of the world. When we look back at the past we tend to act as if people are perfectly rational. I wonder how unintentionally anachronistic this is. I’m ignoring the reasonable objection that people in modern times aren’t perfectly rational either.

I’d like to pretend what I think is actually a fruitful source of serious enquiry arrived in my mind as the result of careful and meticulous thinking. In fact it came from thinking about how I could get explosions into my talk. Despite my disbelief in it, the supernatural interests me. Why do people believe in the supernatural and how can it be faked, or if you want to be less judgemental, simulated?

It probably started when I worked in a frozen food shop. I used to have a trick I could sometimes do. The cold store had a door was at least six inches thick. Nevertheless on several occasions I was observed walking through the door like it wasn’t there. How? You’re not supposed to give away how you do tricks, but in this case the answer is obvious. I opened the door. From the perspective of the viewer they couldn’t initially see the door move. They could hear the door opening, but you couldn’t hear it till it had already moved a foot. People associated the sound of the door opening with the moment of opening. If you rushed through then you appeared on the other side of the door, at the same time as the door appeared to open, accompanied by wreaths of vapour from the cold store. There were additional things you could do to make the effect more impressive, but like many tricks it relied on misdirection and incomplete information to work.

What has this got to do with Ancient History? In my notes I have:

To some extent we have tamed the night. That’s why when people go on a camping holiday in Romania, their car has to break down as they drive through the Transylvanian forest. It’s rare that the car breaks down in a arable part of Transylvania, or fails to start in the morning due to a flat battery. The by placing modern people on foot in forest you remove them from safety and place them in the wilds. Even in early-modern times night-time travel was a more arduous affair and not something undertaken lightly. Science has to a large extent banished the night.

I think that shock and awe might be a useful tool in trying to emphasise the capricious nature of spirits. Our modern perspective might show that these spirits didn’t exist, but as historians we study social interaction and for these people the spirits were very real.

Fair enough, so how do you create a mildly unnerving academically sound horror show? I don’t know.

I wanted to get some dry ice. It would have a two fold effect, possibly even three effects. It is cold and so would chill the room which is good for a spiritual experience. Secondly it sublimates, it goes straight from solid to gas. Being heavier than air and colder it would form a mystic mist around people’s feet, if you get it right. Unfortunately it doesn’t form a uniform blanket. I don’t know how wisps of CO2 would interact with the smoke detectors in the room. For similar reasons any eerie effects with candles are also out. A shame because you could hint at the terror a vicious storm could induce with a gust of wind that blows out all the illumination apart from bolts of electricity coming from my hands. I can’t do that either. The speaking area in the room I’d give it in is quite cramped. I’d be far too close to the laptop or the projection screen to want to throw thunderbolts. Using Flash Powder also probably falls foul of a rule forbidding arson in the lecture theatres.

It sounds gimmicky, and if the purpose of the talk was to introduce these effects it would be. If the effects are slaved to the talk, then I’d say that they’d do the same function as slides, only more effectively. There are effects that are still plausible like Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Kentonism, but they are verbal which would mean twisting the talk to get them in. I don’t think they’re viable, so it’s back to words and images. Since writing this sentence I’ve attended a committee meeting with Chemistry bods who have some possible ideas.

Why bother?

The stories we tell are often reflections of the society we live in. We’re happy that myths carry information about the social world and perhaps the physical world. I think that approaching ghost stories as local myths, usually tied to specific locations can reveal much about the societies that tell them. In Herodotus the Corinthians tell a ghost story about the tyrant Periander. It tells us in part how they thought the world worked, how the dead should be treated, but also what they thought of Periander. The temple of Hera was then a geographical landmark tied to an association of the evil ways of a lawless ruler.

It’s not just that they make sense of how the world works, but this locality of the story that makes it interesting. Are buildings or locations becoming monuments to social concepts like justice? My opinion may change radically by the time I finish it, but it’s an interesting problem. It’s also the sort of thing which you can do with history that you can’t with archaeology. There is the joke that anything an archaeologist can’t explain is ‘ritual’ but when I read this kind of account it’s often a very rational ritual that I read about. A ritual to promote social cohesion rather than a ritual to defend the village from onslaught by inhuman creatures. In prehistory such explanations are speculative, but in classical times there is the possibility of reaching a bit closer into perceptions of the world.

The talk will probably appear here in some form or another in October. —–