(n.) An optical effect produced by a magic lantern. The figures are painted in transparent colors, and all the rest of the glass is opaque black. The screen is between the spectators and the instrument, and the figures are often made to appear as in motion, or to merge into one another.
(n.) The apparatus by which such an effect is produced.
(n.) Fig.: A medley of figures; illusive images.
Example Sentences:
(1) Dell'Utri managed the 1994 campaign – a dazzling phantasmagoria of dancing girls under the lights, while he saw to the shadows.
(2) Behind Scott's gothic phantasmagoria - a building "too good for its purpose", said the architect - passengers found themselves beneath the roof of what remains one of the wonders of the railway world.
(3) It works because, beneath all the flummery and phantasmagoria, the tentacular vines and the drooping purple "gems", "M de l'Aubépine", as usual, has uncovered something dark in the nature of human relations - in this case the instinct for parents, and perhaps especially fathers, to wish to grow their daughters in their own image and according to their own design, and, worse, to make sure that once grown those daughters are never capable of true biological (or in the Rappaccini case, horticultural) separation.
Phantasmal
Definition:
(a.) Pertaining to, of the nature of, or resembling, a phantasm; spectral; illusive.
Example Sentences:
(1) We’d acknowledge that what we see on the proverbial “street” is just a phantasm, just a trick of the eye.
(2) b) Concepts related to the most elementary level of intervention in occupational therapy termed as "objective relationship", in other words the construction of the external objective world as opposed to the world of phantasms or magical thought.
(3) Our psychopedagogical work with teenagers having serious problems in the school setting led us to set up a clinical approach giving back to thought the ability to link affects and their representations whereas the thought process had seemed exhausted by a never-ending fight to avoid being swallowed up by the primary processes or through representing unbearable phantasms.
(4) Psychologically speaking, the phantasm of the "nation" provides scope for the realization of the desire for pre-ambivalent fusion with an object that has rid itself of everything heterogeneous, alien and autonomous.
(5) Sebald could have been writing about his own astonishing and enigmatic books: haunted by phantasms who might be archetypes, polymorphous in their form, piebald in their appearance, travelling widely in time if not broadly in space, and inspired by an avidity for the undiscovered.
(6) While from a psychoanalytic viewpoint xenophobia and anti-Semitism have been extensively examined, the same can by no means be said of the phantasm of the "nation".
(7) Heim's intention in this is to show that (present-day) xenophobia and racism are the products of a phantasm centering around the division of the world into pure and impure.
(8) CERVANTES describes in his novel, without the noxa alcohol playing any part though, a state of affairs which is similar to the symptoms of the chronic jealousy-phantasm of the alcoholic who only has in his mind's eye the sheer wish to possess his partner.
(9) Inspired by a kind of avidity for the undiscovered, they move along a line where the points of demarcation are those strange manifestations and objects of which one cannot say whether they are among the phantasms generated in our minds from time immemorial.
(10) We’ve got used to seeing ads featuring these phantasmically awful, beautiful people sold to us as ideals of living over the decades.
(11) The preposterous, patholplastic forms of this jealousy-phantasm make the main figure of the short novel, the old man Carrizales, his absurd, fantastie plans of a hermetical isolation of his wife from the outside-world a reality.