“This iconography was obtained after a prayer to the spirit of intelligence and of light to reveal itself by a form. A shower of lights and of intelligences. Luminous olives with trails and bent stem. Projected rays. These falls of lights, intelligences, understandings, according to the degree of their virtue, will constitute the spirits of varied hierarchy and the beings which will reach carnal incorporation.”
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.