Offshoring the invisible world? American ghosts, witches, and demons in the early enlightenment

Abstract

The fierce debate about the reality of spirits and the “Invisible World” which flared up in the 1690’s helped define the early Enlightenment. All sides in this debate—from Spinoza and Balthasar Bekker to John Beaumont and Cotton Mather—refashioned familiar metaphors of light and darkness and connected them with the world beyond Europe in surprising new ways. This article shows how this key controversy of the early Enlightenment was built upon references to darkness, light, and the benighted pagan peoples of the world. As new street lighting and improved domestic lighting nocturnalized daily life in the Netherlands, London, and Paris, the old denizens of the night - ghosts, spirits, and witches—were increasingly relegated to the extra-European world and used to articulate new categories of human difference based on civility, reason, and skin color. These new categories of human difference—new ways of seeing and ordering the world—were essential to the formation of early modern whiteness and the Enlightenment.

Enlightening religion: Light and darkness in religious knowledge and knowledge about religion

“…In the history of Western metaphysics, culminating in so-called Enlightenment philosophy, ‘clear’ light serves as a common metaphor for the mind’s capacity for orderly thought, true perception, and self-awareness, and ‘transparency’ provides the metaphorical ground for identifying that which can be known and shared, and thus a fundamental condition for the possibility of democratic deliberation. Embedded in Enlightenment critiques of religion, metaphors of light and darkness have also been employed to relegate the forces that populate the unseen—spirits, witches, demons, and other “old denizens of the night” (Koslofsky 2021, 127)—to the category of superstition. As Craig Koslofsky (127) shows, in his contribution to this issue, early Enlightenment philosophers developed their notions of civility and reason against the backdrop of a new racial economy of ‘darkness and light,’ in which non-white, non-European persons and the colonial frontier spaces inhabited by “the benighted pagan peoples of the world” were understood as sources and places of superstition.…”