"The allegorical is related in this way to the fragmentary, untidy, and disordered character of magician's dens or alchemists' laboratories familiar above all to the baroque." (Benjamin)
The magician's lair is the privilaged object-world of the allegorical imagination. Conjuration, an arbitrary command in a realm of dead objects, the surcharging of these inert remants with subjective significance.
"The earlier culture will become a heap of rubbish & finally a heap of ashes; but spirits will hover over the ashes." (Wittgenstein)
Allegorical fragments are signs that have dropped outside the Symbolic Order and solicit 'redemption'. They are survivals, to be recharged with another significance at the hand of the allegorist. The Christian allegorists, recharging the remaindered Pagan symbols, hope to exorcise the residual energies of the pagan world. They recode the daemonic potencies of the old gods, over-write them. But these weak and redundant powers, never entirely extinguished, return as the occult, as an acid mist of ghosts and spectres. The old gods never entirely are banished.
The initial meaning, exiled, returns to haunt or question the present; or rather, what haunts the present is the nagging suggestion that some 'X' has escaped the confident recoding of the old forms, some lost object, which can never be exorcised and which infiltrates into the significances of the Present a ceaseless rumour of the restless undead.