“Iconography of a hand obtained by bringing the hand near the sensitive side of a plate fastened to the pole of a Wimhurst machine. One can remark the formation of electro-vital particles coming from an odic cloud showing the thumb and the fingers as well as small life-animules, white points.”
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…
“Iconography of a hand obtained by ... a Wimhurst machine.”
Artist
Date
1913
From
The Human Soul
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