Professor Sténégry’s Metempsychosis: Ladies turned to stone! Skeletons! Flowers!

Manuals by late nineteenth-century illusionists and lighting technicians describe the illusion in detail. It appears to be the result of images reflecting off mirrors and morphing into one another. Behind the scenes, an ingenious game was played with light projected from different angles. To the viewer, it seemed as if the head itself was changing shape.

The interplay of alternating lighting on mirrors was a refined variation on the classic Pepper's Ghost by ‘Professor’ John Henry Pepper from 1862. The Brit was one of the first to conjure up a moving hologram in the theatre with the use of a magic lantern. A person under the stage – usually wrapped in a bright white sheet – was overexposed so that their reflection became visible via a slanted glass surface on the stage. The actors then interacted with that reflection, making it appear to the audience as if they were duelling with a ghost.

The Pepper’s Ghost act was hugely successful in the more famous theatres of Paris and London. Since the scenography consisted of large glass panels, it made the illusion both expensive and difficult to transport. Fairground operators succeeded in presenting a much more practical version with metempsychosis. Not only could they transport it over long distances, but they could also set it up at a fairground booth without much effort.

The metempsychosis illusion was in high demand. Technicians, producers, and artists competed for its performance and usage rights. A lawsuit between the well-known fairground illusionist Adrien Delille and Emile Voisin, a Parisian seller of magic tricks, made international headlines in 1887. Both parties accused the other of plagiarism. This shows that illusion was big business and an important source of income for many self-proclaimed fairground ‘professors’.

The prominence of metempsychosis is also evident from fairground photographers’ preference to capture this attraction. At the Ghent Mid-Lent fair, we see Professor Berbuto’s ‘Triomphe des Dieux de l'Olympe’ booth in the background of a Salvation Army event. On the booth’s painted panels, the visitors can recognize Galatea with Pygmalion in the studio, and, on the other side, a skeleton with a scythe poised to strike a female figure. At the Paris Foire des Invalides, it was Professor Sténégry’s booth that was captured by Belgian photographer and artist Henri Evenepoel. Passers-by are eyeing the attraction, hesitant to climb the steps. A lady in a black dress with a bare neck greets the paying customers. In elegant lettering, the professor’s name is emblazoned on the mirror at the booth’s entrance.

Famous Parisian art photographer Eugène Atget also captured Sténégry’s Parisian fairground booth on camera. His photo shows a lady ready to give the opening signal for the show with a flourish. A motionless figure in a white dress and with her head obscured stands at the booth’s entrance. A lady in black appears to be inspecting the figure. Two boys look expectantly at the photographer. The spectacle is about to begin! Outside, Sténégry's beautiful poster announces the metamorphosis that awaits the audience inside.

French author and journalist Hugues Le Roux provides us with a vibrant peek into the appeal of Professor Sténégry. In his book Les Jeux du Cirque et la vie Forain (1889), he writes:

The beautiful head of Madame Lutèce was transformed into a skull before the eyes of the audience. Then, from this young skull, polished like ivory, sprang a rose bush. This contrast was highly philosophical and inspired Mr. Sténégry to create astonishing variations. I highly recommend his “Program of Visible and Mystical Apparitions” to aficionados of amusing curiosities.

The renowned French theatre critic Jules Lemaître also noted the philosophical dimension to which Le Roux alludes. He visited the attraction and emphasized its symbolic dimension. This required little explanation towards his readers: Summoning spirits was a common practice in the nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth century. Spiritist séances formed the backdrop against which many people contemplated life after death and reincarnation. Was it possible that humans lived on in other people or even in stones, plants, animals, or minerals? And could that new life reveal itself to us again?

These and other fundamental questions found affirmative answers in popular books such as Allen Kardec’s Livre des Esprits (1857), which sparked a veritable European movement of spiritualism. At the fairground, people could now witness the transmigration of souls for themselves. Spectators probably knew that it was an illusion created with technical devices, mirrors, and a magic lantern. But it did help them to imagine the supernatural world that their contemporaries were raving about.

There may have been another reason to buy a ticket to the metempsychosis performance. The press drew attention to the attractive beauty of the woman who turned into a skeleton remarkably often. Did this allude to the danger that many ‘seductive’ women posed? Not coincidentally, the association between femininity and sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis was omnipresent at the fairground. From this perspective, metempsychosis was an appealing variation on the wax figures that were equally spectacular when it came to both attraction and repulsion. Visiting a metempsychosis booth was not only a supernatural occurrence, it may also have served as a moral lesson.

Eventually, the popular illusion with its supernatural connotations would also appear outside the fairground. From 1892 onwards, the technique appeared in Paris in the popular artistic Cabaret du Néant. This theatre bar was dedicated to the spectacle of death. Visitors could enter a narrow space where a coffin stood upright at the end. The person who stepped inside was transformed into a skeleton before the eyes of the astonished audience, and then changed back into a human being. At the end of the nineteenth century, this so-called Spectacle scientifici-magnético-spirite was also presented as an X-ray illusion and catered to the audience’s hunger for experiences that were a cross between spectacle, (pseudo)science, and the supernatural.

In Bohemian Paris of To-Day (1899), American art student W.C. Morrow wrote about his experience with the attraction at the Cabaret du Néant. Once again, the seductive woman in particular left the greatest impression:

“Power is given to those who deserve it, not only to return to life, but to return in whatever shape and condition, preferably a better one than before. Return if you deserve it and wish it.” After these words were uttered, the skeleton’s bones became covered once more with flesh and cloth in the coffin at the back of the room. There was the smiling young woman again.

Although the classical metempsychosis as an entertaining novelty disappeared from the fairgrounds after 1900, its magic lives on in modern forms of entertainment. Special effects pioneers such as Georges Méliès and Segundo de Chomón revived the attraction in their early cinema. Even today, visitors at amusement parks such as Efteling are immersed in a world where illusions of life and death are created by advanced lighting, projections, and ancient mirror techniques. Traditional haunted houses, where floating ghosts and vanishing figures materialize, continue to rely on the same principles that once made metempsychosis so popular. Even in contemporary live performances of digital holograms – where deceased artists such as Tupac Shakur, Maria Callas, or Roy Orbison are ‘brought back to life’ on stage – the echo of this nineteenth-century fairground attraction can be seen. The combination of mirrors and modern digital projection shows that, despite all technological advances, the fascination with the boundary between life and death, and reality and illusion, remains an unabated spectacle.