“Life-animules, fragments of Od in movement. This iconography was spontaneously produced whilst wishing to inverse a plate for the most part positive, on which was an image representing a heart. The sign of love and of charity is drawing the electro-vital particles. (With neither electricity nor apparatus.)”
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.