The previous chapter detailed how ghost narratives are inherently intertwined with discourses surrounding the soul's immortality. Ghosts represent a form of ‘disembodied’ immortality understood in relation to the broadly Christian concept of human ‘mortal immortality’, in which ‘the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life’ (Romans 6:23), meaning both bodily death and soul immortality are integral to the human experience. In the form of immortal wanderers, created immortal creatures, vampires and successful alchemists, we find an early Gothic obsession with another form of mortal immortality: embodied immortality. These accounts feature supernatural figures understood to be real within the fictional world of the text, but with no suggestion of their extra-fictional reality. These ‘mortal immortals’ rely for their meaning on (or are used to critique) an underlying theological framework invested in a Christian conception of a body/soul distinction.

The dynamics of the inter-relation of body and soul were the focus of debate throughout the eighteenth century. A Hobbesian materialist denial of the difference between body and soul was taken up in different ways by atheist and deist thinkers, sceptics and Socinian Unitarians like Joseph Priestley. The popular conception of the human condition, however, continued to emphasise the distinction between body and soul. While opinions differed as to the mechanics of their interaction, this concept of body/soul relations was rooted doctrinally in the connected but not synonymous differentiation between flesh and spirit. It is worth delineating this distinction to fully understand the theological undercurrents connected to embodied mortalimmortal figures. I will not be tracing one specific theological denomination’s view but rather looking at a broad overview of these distinctions as they are frequently found in contemporary Anglican and much Dissenting thought, along Calvinist, Lutheran and Arminian lines.

The spirit and the flesh are imagined as two antagonistic and ultimately incompatible elements: ‘The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and they are contrary the one to the other.