Now make it less frightening and more colorful: it's ka_opic. So, imagine a dream or a movie scene that's phantasmagorical, full of quickly shifting shapes. Robertson might have chosen it because it sounds cool, or it might be based on the Greek agora, "assembly," in which case a phantasmagoria would be, literally, an assembly of ghosts. You can see why, then, the "phanta-" in our word phantasmagoria definitely comes from the Greek phantasma, "a ghost or an apparition," as in phantom, phantasm, and phantasmal.Īs for the "-agora" part, we're not sure. ![]() ![]() ![]() Sources conflict, but as best I can tell, in 1798 the inventor Étienne-Gaspard Robertson first presented his fantasmagorie, a lantern that threw on the walls a series of quickly-changing, quickly-moving shapes, which he used to entertain the crowd as he told stories, often spooky ones.
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