“The signature of the spiritual soul has been produced on a plate, by the glass side, with the north pole of a magnet, with this formula: ‘prayer to the superior, command to the inferior to obtain the graphy, the sign of my spiritual soul.’ The following morning at 7 o'clock I develop and find, corresponding to the centre of the magnet surrounded by an atmosphere of odic cloud, a very clear circumference of animo-fluidic force circumscribing a point, a very regular ring, formed by the subtilised gelatinous substance. From this pearl-like form appeared 4 luminous rays going to each of the cardinal points. This sign was produced by my overheated will. Thus the prayer acted directly on the plate by a spark of my spirit, which has given the sign of the spiritual soul, the four-rayed pearl. The spiritual soul elevated by prayer is not a ring, like the soul intelligence germ; it is a circle in communication with the four winds of the spirit.”
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.