The term AURA is taken from the Greek word meaning “breeze or air.” Thus, breeze-air is a basic metaphor for those kinds of energies that constitute the aura.
Implicit in the breeze-air concept are the factors of invisibility and motion but which are tangible. The basic concept for the aura, then, is of invisible, air-like energies that are in motion and are tangible.
This motional aspect must deliberately be carried in mind, because artistic and photographic representations of auras tend to show them as static and motionless.
In English, AURA is defined as:
1. A subtle sensory stimulus, or a distinctive atmosphere surrounding a given source;
2. A luminous radiation; a subjective sensation (as of lights) experienced because of unidentified mental constituents, or before or during various kinds of altered states of consciousness.”
Sources other than dictionaries also stipulate that AURA can consist of “a subjective sensation (as of lights) that frequently precedes creativity and visionary experiencing,” while “lights” also go off in peoples’ heads regarding sexualizing stimuli.
Even though the use of the term aura has become commonplace, the phenomenon the term signifies is actually composed of a number of subsidiary phenomena, each having different characteristics.
The all-encompassing term perhaps should be the one utilized in antiquity: AUREOLE. This denoted “radiant lights around the head or body.” Within the aureole are aural lights and different kinds of transparent “air or breezes” usually seen and pictured as undulating colors.
SUBTLE EMANATIONS OF ANY SUBSTANCE
AURA was first used about 1398 in its ancient context as denoting a breeze or a zephyr.
It was shortly thereafter used to denote a subtle emanation or exhalation of any substance, such as the smell of blood or the color and odor of flowers, but especially regarding “the volatile essence of the soul, that ethereal aura.”
ELECTRICAL ATMOSPHERES AND FLUIDIC PLASMA
By 1732, the term was being used, by Benjamin Franklin among others, in the contexts of “electrical atmospheres,” not only of the physical kind, but of more subtle kinds.
This, perhaps, could be likened to later concepts of “plasma”—sometimes defined as “a fluidic part” of something as distinguished from suspended part of solid materials. There is a connection here to plastics (after they were invented) in their sense of solid materials that are pliable, bendable, capable of adapting, and can return to their original formative shape.
MUSCLE JUICES AND AURAS OF THE SEMINAL FLUID
By 1836, aura was also sometimes used in an anatomical sense, apparently with some scientific foresight, in the contexts of “a juice that can be expressed from muscles;” and “the patterns of growth-fecundation are attributable to the agency of an aura from the seminal fluid.”
Give or take a little, this, in 1836, is particularly impressive—because advanced genetic research only today is beginning to understand that our genetic materials may in fact be more made up of bio-electromagnetic patterns (or bio-blueprints) which are “carried” by the physical molecular DNA proteins. These are the patterns which are transferred to the next generations.
THE TANGIBLE AND EMOTIONAL AURA
By 1863, AURA was being used in the context of: “On approaching the hand to the whirl in motion, a slight draught is felt due to the movement of the electrified air [in addition to air motion itself.] This draught or wind is known as the electric aura, and which might tingle the skin.”
This concept is quite akin to F. W. H. Myers 1882 concept of telesthesia, which was discussed earlier. Telesthesia consists of the transference of emotions and motor impulses that elicit similar responses in those that receive the transference. The electric aura seemingly would elicit such responses.
RODS, UNDULATING BEAMS, AND TRANSPARENT EMANATIONS
As strange as it seems, and even though it is quite an old term, AURA seems NOT to have been vigorously applied to descriptions of the phenomena dealt with by Mesmer, Reichenbach, or applied to the Psychic Force, or to Reich’s Orgone energy.
Rather, the phenomena of these, when perceived, were described NOT as auras but as emanations usually transparent, further consisting of lights, rods, undulating beams, fogs, mists, and subtle energies, etc., always in motion.
Here is an interesting clue to something that is difficult to articulate. If one clairvoyantly focuses on trying to perceive an aura, the chances are that it will not be seen.
But if one focuses on trying to perceive energies, lights, rods, mists, etc., the chances of clairvoyant perceptions seem to increase.
WHAT THE AURA SHOULD LOOK LIKE
Perceptions of aureoles during the modern times have undergone several phases, the nature of the phases being determined by influential persons who wrote about the phenomena in ways distinctive to them.
The distinctions as set forth often acted to condition the followers of influential persons—and thus arguments have arisen in various occult and visionary camps as to WHAT the aura really should look like.
Many hearsay descriptions, although not altogether inaccurate, were given something of a jolt with the emergence into the energetics scene of one Walter J. Kilner.
THE HUMAN ATMOSPHERE
Modern descriptions of auras go back to the early nineteenth century. But the first individual to really electrify modern consciousness during the twentieth century was Dr. Walter J. Kilner (1847-1920).
Kilner, a medical doctor, became a member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1883, conducting a private medical practice in London, and at St. Thomas’s Hospital where he consulted in electro-therapy.
He was familiar with the work of Baron von Reichenbach, and seems to have worked, behind the medical scenes, with clairvoyants in attempts to distinguish the differences and changes in the auras in sickness and health—and, somewhat to reprise Hyppolite Baraduc, at death.
Around 1908, just as the manuscript of OCCULT CHEMISTRY was being prepared for print in India, Kilner got the idea that the human aura, hitherto usually visible only by clairvoyant means, might be made visible if “viewed through a suitable filter.”
After a number of experiments to identify what such a filter might consist of, he found that the substance dicyanin, a coal-tar derivative (a fall-out discovery of Reichenbach), was effective for his purposes of revealing the aura.
Unfortunately, the EXACT nature of his “dicyanin screen” seems to have been lost to posterity.
In any event, his “screen” consisted of a solution of dicyanin coal-tar dye between two hermetically sealed pieces of glass, and which solution gave the color green to the filter.
Looking through it first in daylight, either to desensitize or hyper-sensitize the eye, and then turning the eye on a naked man in dim light before a dark background, “three distinct radiations, all laying in the ultra-violet end of the spectrum, became visible.”
The first was dark and colorless, and it surrounded the body to a depth of a quarter to a half inch. Kilner called this the “etheric double.”
The second, the inner aura (to distinguish it from the third outer aura), extended about three inches beyond the etheric double, while the third, the outer aura, fell a little short of a foot in depth.
Kilner tried various other experiments. He found that the depth of the aura is influenced by a magnet, that it is sensitive to electric currents to the extent of “completely vanishing under a negative charge from a Wilmhurst machine and increasing to an additional 50 percent after the charge dissipates.”
The overall auras were “also affected by the vapors of various chemicals, and to loss of brilliance in hypnosis. Illness affects both the aura’s size and color. Impairment of the mental powers causes a diminution in size and distinctness. Nervous diseases result in well observable changes in all three of the auras.”
From all this, Dr. Kilner concluded that “the higher brain centers” are intimately concerned in the “nerve-aura” and the “nerve atmospheres.” He also indicated that “with the approach of death the aura gradually shrinks, and no trace of it is later discovered around the corpse.”
He also laid claim to the discovery that the aura may be affected by an effort of will, and that it may “be projected to a longer distance from the body and change its shape and colors.” This claim, however, is not original to Kilner, since it was understood in China, India, and Mesopotamia as early as 2,500 B.C.
From the differences in the aura, Kilner also drew numerous medical conclusions having to do with defining illness and healing cures.
He also found that the auras of different people may show “attraction,” that they may “be blended and become more intense by doing so.”
His experiments along these lines are not described in detail, but we sense that we are on somewhat familiar and recognizable ground here at least as regards sexuality attracting because of intensification via becoming “blended.”
Although not reported in his subsequent books, it was known that his findings also included observations that “sexual arousal expanded the auras, causing them to intensify, and sometimes filling the room.”
The logical assumption here is that Kilner and others actually viewed sexual arousal via the dicyanin screen.
Kilner first published a not very large, but quite momentous book entitled THE HUMAN ATMOSPHERE (1911).
This reported on the experiments he had undertaken enabling him and others to see, with their eyes, that “atmosphere.” This book turned scientific and popular society on their heads at the time.
And for the next three decades, the human atmosphere revelations of Kilner’s books acted like a blast furnace.
Very many undertook to experiment along similar lines, but Kilner and his immediate colleagues seem to have been the best to perceive the aura, indicating that perhaps he had a little true clairvoyant boost in addition to his screens.
Because Kilner had reported that the aura “may be PROJECTED,” and that auras could attract, mix, and become more intense by doing so, numerous experiments by others were designed to follow up on these particular aspects.
The seminal reason here was that people might, by “auric will,” influence each other’s auras, and the advantages of this seemed obvious enough.
But this aspect of Kilner’s work approached dangerously close to what was feared the most in modernist mainstream enclaves—INFLUENCE from or at a distance.
Thus, the now predicable troubles began. The “exteriorization of nerve-energy” was objectionable to modern scientific thinking, as we have earlier seen, since such was entirely redolent of the empowerment of direct mind-influencing concepts.
Although Kilner did achieve many medical endorsements, science in general remained dismissive of his findings.
SCIENCE DISCOVERS THE THERMAL AURA
Scientific resistance to Kilner’s aura findings was maintained until the first “thermal auras” near the surface of the skin were photographed with infrared methods during the 1970s.
These auras proved to be about a quarter to a half inch in depth, as reported in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and other mainstream sources.
The thermal auras, infrared in nature, and thus darkly shadowed, had been seen by clairvoyants, including C. W. Leadbeater, as the “dark” etheric double.
The revelations of thermal photography more or less matched the perceptions of clairvoyants, although THAT comparison was not pointed up in mainstream media reporting on thermal auras.
However, the “thermal auras” provided a new mystery. Whereas if only heat were being produced, then it would bleed off into the air around. But the thermal auras had a distinct edge to them, through which body-heat emissions were nowhere seen to escape. Since body-heat emissions do escape, the implication was that some other kind of energy was perhaps involved.
AURAS AS ENERGY FIELDS
Because the early modernist mainstream sciences had unequivocally denounced any possible existence of auras of ANY kind, something of an embarrassing situation arose as various kinds of technical electromagnetic detecting equipment became available.
One way to disarm the increasingly embarrassing situation was simply to adopt terminology that had never been utilized by the clairvoyant contingents.
Thus, the new detecting equipment revealed not aura pulsations, but electromagnetic fields that pulsated.
By 1971, the equipment had detected magnetic (used now in its scientific sense) pulsations regarding crystals, plants, animals, water, air, clouds, storms, wells, springs, various places on the surface of the planet, and the whole human body AND various different parts of it, including the genitalia.
Clairvoyants would, of course, continue to refer to these pulsations as different kinds of auras.
But in their now scientific aspect, the equipment-confirmed pulsations could generically be referred to as “energy fields”—thus neatly separating science jargon from the objectionable aura jargon.
Since 1971, science in large part has maintained that the energy fields can be detected only by equipment—and not by clairvoyant or telesthesia detection.
This scientific insistence rather crudely, but clearly, downsizes numerous kinds of “human potentials” well-attested to elsewhere in human history.
What is so far true, however, is that the equipment detects only electromagnetic energies—not vital, animating life forces.
And as of this writing the cutting edges of the advancing sciences are more or less agreed, behind the scenes, that the electromagnetic energies alone do not account for animate life forms, much less life entities.