Lewes Lavater's Of Ghosts and Spirits




Ludwig (Lewes) Lavater (1527-1586) was the Chief Pastor of the Calvinist Church of Zürich, which was, after Geneva, the most important redoubt of the new reformed church and home to Zwingli and Bullinger before Lavater. He wrote his treatise, first published in Latin in 1569 as De spectris, lemuribus et magnis atque insolitis fragoribus, variisque praesagitionibus, quae plerunque obitum hominum, magnas clades, mutationesque imperiorum praecedunt, liber unus, to prove that ghosts were "not the souls of dead men, as some men have thought, but either good or evil Angels, or else some secret and hid operations of God." Lavater's work drew an immediate and spirited [no pun] response from Catholics. In the preface to the second edition (1605) of his work III Livres des Spectres, first published in 1586, Pierre Le Loyer, an Angevin lawyer, wrote: "I have so well proved by the Doctors of the Church, that whatever thing that Lavater and his may say to the contrary, nevertheless the truth is that there are Spectres of Souls as well as Spectres of Angels and Demons."