“This iconography of the light life of the Word was obtained in the dark, with red light, by the electro-negative method, called appeal, by N.P. and myself, our three hands joined in front of the plate without photographic instruments. Demand, desire of having a sign of our animistic trinity, re-united by a single feeling of pure affection. On developing, three whirlwinds of fine vitalo-psychic force, of universal psychod being amalgamated, owing to the intermediary whirlwind causing a node. The whole forms a complete trinity, our unity united and re-made: such is the phenomenon comprehensible by a few human spirits, others too absorbed in the first material plane.”
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.