Supernatural

We also cali a living person uncanny, usually when we ascribe evil intentions to him. But that is not ali; we must not only credit him with bad intenti­ons but must attribute to these intentions capa­city to achieve their aim in virtue of certain special powers. A good in-stance of this is the "Gettatore," that uncanny figure of Roman superstition which Schaeffer, with intuitive poetic feeling and profound psychoanalytic knowledge, has transfor­med into a sympathetic figure in his Josef Mont­fort (1918). But the question of these secret powers brings us back again to the realm of animism. it was the pious Gretchen's intuition that Mephi-stopheles possessed secret power of this kind that made him so uncanny to her.