Treasure Hunts in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

The religious dimension of the treasure hunt declined as the nineteenth century progressed. The belief in ghosts lost ground or transformed into spiritualism and an interest in the more or less vulgarized forms of what would become known as ‘parapsychology’.1 Without the ghosts who needed to be redeemed, the religious overtones of treasure hunting disappeared. Even news about treasure in an ecclesiastical context was void of spiritual meaning.