Explanation XXVII. — Iconography produced in April 1894 in the dark, both hands stretched towards the plate without photographic apparatus. Animistic state very thoughtful. The doctor wished to know if prayer is a force having a special signature. He obtained a small flange of thin pearls with a single ray; the pearl is the act of exterioration of the spirit which has left its covering to reascend to its psychical source.
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.