Cemeteries and the Decline of the Occult: From Ghosts to Memory in the Modern Age

Abstract

New places for the dead - cemeteries - were from the start understood as places of memory in which the undead and sleepless dead, ghosts and spirits did not abide. Anxieties about the public health problems of old burial grounds were born of a new interest to separate the dead from the living; memory replaced the corpse as the placeholder for the deceased; a secular geography replaced a sacred one. The essay ends with the speculation that the popularity of the occult in late nineteenth century Europe might have been a response to the novel segregation of the dead.