“Vital Force, cosmic od, obtained by the pole of a magnet directed northwards, on a photographic plate with neither apparatus nor electricity. Glass side placed against the rectangular extremity of the magnet. Length of experiment, 12 night hours, without red light. The experiment is very important, as it was done by itself, instinctively, apart from man.”
Featured on PDR in the collection Imaging Inscape: The Human Soul (1913)
In The Human Soul: Its Movements, Its Lights, and the Iconography of the Fluidic Invisible, originally published in French in 1896, Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc (1850–1909) postulates the existence of “the fluidic invisible” — a “vital cosmic force”, which he calls Odic liquid, that extends across the universe and “saturates the organism of living beings and constitutes our fluidic body”. Instead of all things being composed of one elementary substance, as in philosophical accounts of the monad, in this cosmic vision, we all live in a sea that we cannot see, which Baraduc names Somod.
Also appearing in the collection…
“Vital Force, cosmic od, obtained by the pole of a magnet directed northwards.”
Artist
Date
1913
From
The Human Soul
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