Subsequent to Reichenbach’s work, a full part of the saga of energies, magnetic or otherwise, then commenced in Boston, Mass.
Therein resided one William H. Mumler, who, in 1861, was head engraver at Bigelow, Kennard & Co., a firm dealing in jewelry. Like many designers of the time, he had become interested in photography.
One day, in a friend’s studio, he tried to take a photograph of himself by focusing the camera on an empty chair and then leaping into the chair after uncapping the lens.
When the plate was developed, an extraneous figure was discovered sitting in the chair—a young, transparent girl with her lower parts fading into a dim mist. Mumler recognized the transparent figure as a young cousin who had died twelve years earlier.
SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY
The experiment was repeated several times. A number of Extras could be discerned—faces, transparent figures or parts of them, and other luminous “lights” appearing in many but not all of the photographs.
Mumler and several others became satisfied that the extras on the plates were spiritual in origin. This gave birth to the concept of “spirit photography,” and which quickly became a hot and emotional fashion, eagerly joined in by this or that scam artist.
A great hubbub immediately followed. Many professional photographers made the most scrupulous examination of the materials Mumler had used.
As it turned out, it didn’t matter if Mumler used his own materials or those of others, or even if fresh materials were introduced at the last moment before the photographs were taken.
Good spirit photos were achieved in the presence of professionals quite prepared to doubt their authenticity. But it seems that the spirits were themselves prepared to be photographed, some of whom were recognized by some of the doubters.
With no identifiable fraud detected, Mummer’s authenticity was established—immediately after which he became vogue and did tremendous business.
Eventually, an unproved accusation of fakery was brought against him. A scandal developed, and Mumler transferred his activities to New York City where he prospered until another accusation of fraud was raised by a newspaper.
This time Mumler was arrested—by order of the Mayor of New York. However, at the trial a number of professional photographers testified on his behalf and Mumler was acquitted. Even so, he died in poverty in 1884.
Mumler’s photographs had created a sensation that many wished to duplicate or get in on. Many professional and unprofessional photographers set about experimenting—and some, of course, set about creating wildly ersatz fabrications.
Even if not provided by newspersons themselves (as some were), fake photos exposed as such made for good mainstream news copy declaiming against the authenticity of all such photographs.
BIO-ENERGY PHOTOGRAPHS?
Even so, many enthusiastic photographers obtained nothing unusual for their efforts. Others not obtaining recognizable spirits had to settle for the unexpected appearance of weird lights, illuminations and emanations streaming from sitters fingers, heads, or other body parts, or “auras” wavering around their bodies, and etc.
Some photographs revealed swoops of lights that had no apparent connection to the sitters being photographed, and seemed to originate from a source outside the photographic frame. Sometimes there were mists” or “fogs” wandering to and fro.
When such phenomena, appearing on the photographic plates, could not be accounted for by fraud or trickery, they were interpreted as representing such things as magnetism, radiations, subtle fluid, digital effluvium, ectoplasmic flow, auric light, astral body, thought waves, and N-rays—and lastly, lights in areas not mentionable in print.
N-rays (now forgotten about) were a type of ray thought by some to be unceasingly emanating, whether strongly or weakly, from the physical body, which could interact and interpenetrate both inorganic and organic matter.
It was also somewhat determined that the person of the photographer was somehow involved as having special kind of “energy” that permitted the strange luminous phenomena. Indeed, something like this had occasionally been noted throughout history in the cases of people that attracted or convenienced energetic events.
As an aside, in the early twentieth century there was the case of the famous Austrian-American physicist, Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), who in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for enunciating the Exclusion Principle, and who in 1931 was the first to postulate the existence of the neutrino.
Pauli, however, hardly ever worked in or near a laboratory—because his mere presence, even if 200 feet distant, caused equipment to act up and not perform as expected. Then there are those individuals never permitted in an X-ray lab because something about them exposes the X-ray film.
Although the pro and con polemics of spirit photography grew heated, both sides generally agreed (albeit for different motives) that the photographed phenomena were emanations unknown to physical science.
With science to back them up, critics ponderously declaimed that since the emanations were not known to physical science, they obviously “could not exist” and were thus unscientific.
To this, proponents of the emanations indicated that science had not yet discovered everything.
But in the light of mainstream cohesion, this was considered a weak argument, since a fairly large proportion of scientists and their sycophants held to the view that at any given time science HAD discovered everything that was important.
This, of course, was merely a fallacy within the social aspects of science—and, however empty of substance, social aspects can always be smoothed over and made to look okay.
As it was, photographs of emanations, etc., began to pile up in the United States. The exciting vogue for such photos reached England, the first on record there being produced in 1872 by one Frederick A. Hudson. The photographic excitement swiftly reached France, Germany, Italy, and even Russia.
While all this sensational, and now international, hubbub was cascading around Europe, in England PSYCHIC FORCE was identified and named at about 1869—as we will review in the next chapter. But if the world did not yet comprehend what psychic force was (it was a new term), the world DID know what photographs were.
THOUGHT PHOTOGRAPHY
At some point in all this photographic furor, and to further complicate the already complicated issues involved, it began to be observed that images of individuals STILL LIVING sometimes appeared in photos taken miles away.
Indeed, a short report provided by the Comte de Bullet, dated December 10, 1874, was published in the periodical entitled HUMAN NATURE—to the effect that the Comte had obtained on a plate in Paris the double of his sister who lived across the Atlantic Ocean in Baltimore, Maryland.
After more of the living appeared in spirit photographs far and wide, the concept of “thought photography” came into existence. But it was not at all understood how the “spirit” of the living could translate across distances as great as oceans.
So it seemed most sensible (to some anyway) to assume that the images came from the thoughts of the photographer—although no one had any idea how or why they should translate to the photographic plates in the photographer’s proximity.
With this development, a situational crisis subtly arose that was rather frightening within the larger contexts of the societal status quo.
That spirit photography might have relevance to the actual existence of spirits was bad enough. However, the emergence of thought photography was far worse. It created a crisis that has never been given the attention it deserves.
It could be reasoned, and it was, that if the thoughts of a person could actually affect the chemical molecules on a photographic plate, then, from an easily recognized scientific principle, there was little standing in the way of a person’s thoughts affecting the chemical molecules in the brains of other people.
In other words, here was direct physical evidence that thoughts, via some as yet scientifically unknown energetic activity, could be transmitted, at least to photographic plates.
But the implications beyond this were clear enough, and they once again cracked open the tightly shut doors of what we today might call mind-influencing.
Indeed, such a prospect had been of modernist societal concern ever since Paracelsus.
That Renaissance luminary had indicated that: “By the magic power of the will, a person on this side of the ocean may make a person on the other side hear what is said on this side…the ethereal body of a man may know what another man thinks at a distance of 100 miles or more.”
Since the time of Paracelsus the mechanism of this transmission, whether oceanic or merely 100 miles, was thought to be a magnetic fluid that interacted with “sympathetic systems” of consciousness, and which fluid had the power to “conquer time and space.”
In this sense, then, one could bet one’s bottom dollar that the modern societal mainstreams, very much maintained on ensuring the privacy of thoughts, wanted nothing along such lines to be demonstrated or proven by any form of veridical evidence. And, as but one preventive measure, mainstream funding was, by common unspoken mainstream consensus, to be withheld from any who proposed to proceed gathering such evidence.
Thus, even though scads of photos were tested again and again by photographic experts, ultimately including those of Kodak, etc., any veridical evidence the photos conclusively demonstrated was simply ignored.
Even so, various daring researchers set about making even more remarkable escapades regarding the energies photographic.
Most notable (for a while, at least) among these was one Hyppolite Baraduc (1850-?), described as a “psychic” researcher who made “interesting experiments in thought photography.”
However, he made excursions beyond mere thought photography by constructing Baraduc’s biometer, an instrument that indicated the action of “a nervous force and other unknown vibrations outside the human body.”
In 1895, Baraduc addressed a communication on these subjects to the French Academy of Medicine, although the Academy had not at all changed its view of magnetic fluids, etc., since the time of Anton Mesmer’s expulsion from Paris about a hundred years earlier.
Undaunted, Baraduc then published, in 1896, announcements of his work, observations, and photos in a book entitled IMAGES OF THE COSMIC OD VITAL FORCE.
He quickly followed this, in 1897, with PHOTOGRAPHS OF HYPERVIBRATORY STATES OF HUMAN VITALITY—and in the same year yet another astonishing publication entitled HUMAN RADIOGRAPHIC SYSTEM. (In French, the term RADIOGRAPHIE refers to X-rays, and so it is probable that N-rays are actually implied here.)
Apparently, Baraduc had earlier trekked into a project yielding photographic evidence he claimed proved that “something misty and vaporous leaves the human body at the moment of death.”
This evidence was provided in yet a THIRD 1897 book rather daringly entitled: THE HUMAN SOUL: ITS INVISIBLE FLUIDIC MOVEMENTS, ILLUMINATIONS, AND IMAGES. (An updated version of this was later published in English in 1913.)
With little to suggest much in the way of catching his breath, Baraduc’s photographic enthusiasms seemed to have escalated.
He soon went on, in 1904, to publish fresh photographic evidence in a book entitled: VIBRATIONS OF HUMAN VITALITY.
This was immediately followed, in 1905, with THE VITAL FORCE: OUR VITAL FLUIDIC BODY, A BAROMETRIC MODEL.
When Baraduc’s young son, Andre, died in 1907, he apparently was able to transcend at least some of his grief. When the young body was laid out in its coffin, Baraduc successively photographed it—with the result that “radiations of a formless mist” were shown extending outward from the coffin.
Then, when some six months later Baraduc’s wife lay dying, he set up his cameras at her deathbed and photographed her as she died. The photos revealed “three luminous spheres emitting thin fingers of light” just above her body.
Another photograph taken fifteen minutes later showed the three globes united and “concealing the corpse’s head.” Further, “luminous cords” could be seen around them.
Three and a half hours later, the united globes while emitting “cold breezes” then separated from the body and eventually floated away from it and finally disappeared.
The photographic plates of these two sad events were examined and reexamined with the certitude they would be debunked. No professional was ever able to do so, and so they remain among the most dramatic photographs ever taken.
Meanwhile, at about 1908, experiments with thought photography were taking place elsewhere—and as far away as Japan.
Dr. T. Fukurai, Professor of Kohyassan University, and formerly Professor at the Imperial University of Tokyo, was conducting thought-photography experiments with Mrs. Nagao, Miss Tetsuko Moritake, Mrs. Sadako Takahashi, Mrs. Tenshin Takeuchi, and a Mr. Kohichi Mita—all of whom had demonstrated “mediumistic” capabilities.
Dr. Fukurai published a report showing photographic evidence of emanations, and then went so far as to declare that “clairvoyance is a fact.”
He was thereupon forced to resign from the University in 1913. Eventually his reports were translated into English in 1921 under the title CLAIRVOYANCE AND THOUGHTOGRAPHY. Thereafter, this early Japanese effort passed unnoticed into historical obscurity.
SEXUAL ENERGY PHOTOGRAPHS?
This author has it on very substantial authority that many sexual energy photographs were acquired, and ultimately found their way into private collections especially in Europe—and which, alas, have not been viewed by me. But it is easy enough to accept their most probable existence.
For one thing, researchers wishing to capture energies on photographic plates could not have been completely unaware that sexual activity produced ecstatic energy states and that these might be suitable for their photographic attempts.
For another thing, even though polite decorum was superficially maintained on social surfaces between 1875 and 1914, Paris, Berlin and London were noted for their fabulously vivid pornographic activities behind and beneath the prim social surfaces.
In Baraduc’s case, anyone who had the equanimity to photograph his dead son and his dying wife clearly could have faced up to the rigors of photographing all types of erotic situations, including copulation and orgasm—this, of course, in the hope that some kind of invisible energies would become photographically apparent.
In any event, several knowledgeable researchers claimed that such photographs were achieved by Baraduc, and there seems little reason to doubt it.