The supernatural is a keystone of the early Gothic, from the demons of Matthew Lewis to the phantasmal shadows of Radcliffe, the prophetic dreams of Clara Reeve, and the vampiric predator of John Polidori.It has, however, become a critical commonplace that the Gothic was a reflection of wider secularisation, that the supernatural became increasingly untethered from a ‘traditional religious framework’ (Geary 1992, 16), and that its use became tied almost exclusively to the aesthetic production of fear and a theologically empty experience of the numinous. However, contemporary theological discourse and the potential for belief should not be dismissed when reviewing the Gothic deployment of the supernatural. Christianity, in many forms, continued to dominate cultural discourse in the period and, as Glen Cavaliero notes, ‘for a religious person spirit is no mere ‘aspect’; it is the primary reality, and any discussion of the supernatural which does not allow for such belief and take it seriously is self-stultifying from the start’ (1995, 15).

An increasingly common thread in Gothic criticism is the appeal to philosopher Charles Taylor's conception of secularisation not as ‘the separation of Church and state and the decline of religion’ (Miles 2014, 123), but as ‘an unheard pluralism of outlooks, religious and non- and anti-religious’ (Taylor 2007, 437). Taylor's ‘secular’ is not the absence of theological discourse but rather the awareness that there are ‘a number of construals, views which intelligent, reasonably undeluded people, of good will, can and do disagree on’ (2007, 11). In other words, secularisation is a process in which belief is broken up with multiple discourses existing simultaneously. However, Taylor's model continues to focus on a growing diminution of belief, an idea echoed in Hoeveler's claim that:

While acknowledging a variety of co-existent conceptions of the potentially supernatural, this suggests an ultimately rationalising bent, a ‘disenchantment’.