“The plate is covered with badger grease on the underneath face. It is placed on a table with glass legs. Appeal to the invisible: ‘that something may come.’ Positive plate of the hereafter. The icone represents on the right side, the image, the shadow of M.D. concierge, dead from an open abscess in the peritoneum. I was able to have a sketched portrait of M.D. and verify de visu that my memory had served me well. This form is the shadow, the spectre of M.D. magnetised by me.”

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.