“This iconography was obtained in 1894, in experiments on the hereafter, without apparatus, with red light. State of soul: restless desire to have phenomena of the hereafter. One observes: The electric signature of positive fluid. Above, a wave or veil of light, permitting numerous forms to be seen. Below, masses of Od in dappled clouds, in luminous peas, taking angular aspects, appearances, vague forms.”
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.