“Because of its nature, Symbolist literature was intensely interested in fantastic material, and a good deal of Symbolist fiction is explicitly supernatural. The fact that the Symbolist writers were operating in an age when supernatural notions had all-but-lost the warrant of belief, however, meant that such motifs were very rarely represented as simple matters of fact; indeed, the whole point was that they were symbols, ideas essentially representative of something else, and not mere accidents of happenstance. For the Symbolists, the apparently-supernatural was really the psychological, reflective of internal emotions and obsessions.”

Brian Stableford, 2016