But electrographs did not go away. They were resurrected in the 1950s by a Russian couple named Semyon and Valentina Kirlian. Kirlian photography eventually became known as aura photography and to this day maintains a presence at psychic fairs. Interestingly, the Kirlians—despite sounding like a robe-wearing doomsday cult—never claimed that they’d found a way to photograph the soul or the astral body or what have you. Both the Kirlians and subsequent Kirlian-inspired parapsychologists—including a pair at UCLA—noticed a lot of variation in people’s “auras,” both from subject to subject and from hour to hour with the same subject. For this reason, they surmised that the photographs might prove a useful diagnostic tool. To figure out what it was they were diagnosing, the UCLA team hooked subjects up to induction machines and exposed them to all manner of physical and emotional stimuli. They were given drugs, plied with alcohol, asked to meditate, pissed off, frightened, and hypnotized. Although differences were observed from photo to photo, no useful patterns were found. Science stepped away from aura-reading, and the New Age—aided by the invention of color photography—stepped in.
The most famous Kirlian photograph is of a leaf with a missing tip, taken by Russian parapsychologists circa 1970 and presented as evidence of a sort of astral body made up of “bioplasma substance.” A glowing outline of the entire leaf, including missing tip, appears in the photo. I’m too undone by the concept of trees having astral bodies to register much of an opinion on the Russians’ work, though I can tell you that at the time Krauss’s book went to press, no one claimed to have reliably reproduced the phenomenon.
You will not be surprised to learn that Hereward Carrington did some aura research of his own. (This was the 1920s, long before the Kirlians had brought photography to bear on the subject.) In The Story of Psychic Science, he mentions that his “experiments with Negroes” seemed to suggest that the aura was either a subjective impression or an optical effect. I could find no details of Carrington’s aura experiments, and that is probably for the best.
And then came ectoplasm—Macdougall’s soul substance at last revealed. Ectoplasm debuted in 1914, in a series of bizarre photographs in an equally bizarre but briskly selling book called Phenomena of Materialization. By 1922, it was the stuff of major newspaper headlines. I can say with the steely confidence of someone who has reported on Vienna sausage emanations that no stranger episode ever beset the march of science.
5. HARD TO SWALLOW
The Giddy, Revolting Heyday of Ectoplasm
THE LIBRARY AT Cambridge University has its very own admissions office. This is where you are sent should you be so daft as to try to walk in without a Cambridge ID. I’m waiting in the hallway outside, to apply for one-day admittance. Specifically, I’m trying to get into the hallowed Cambridge Manuscripts Reading Room, overseen by the Keeper of Manuscripts and University Archives, whom I picture standing guard at the door in ankle-length robes with a massive key on a chain around his neck. I’m actually nervous about getting in.
While I wait, I read about the sacred texts on exhibit in the lobby. Amongst the many Buddhist works in the Cambridge University Library is this very important Sanskrit palm leaf manuscript, about 1,000 years old…. Cambridge University has one of the most important collections of Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts in the world.
Meanwhile, yours truly is here for archive item SPR 197.1.6: Alleged Ectoplasm.
Ectoplasm lived during the table-tipping, spirit-communing, strange-goings-on-in-the-dark heyday of spiritualism. It was claimed to be a physical manifestation of spirit energy, something that certain mediums—called “materializing” mediums—exuded in a state of trance. “This stuff seems to diffuse through the tissues of the [medium] like a gas, and emerges through the orifices because it passes more freely through the mucus membrane than through the skin,” wrote Arthur Findlay, founder of the Arthur Findlay College for mediumship and other spiritualist pursuits. The spiritualists described ectoplasm as a link between life and afterlife, a mixture of matter and ether, physical and yet spiritual, a “swirling, shining substance” that unfortunately photographed very much like cheesecloth.
The original ectoplasmic medium was Eva C., whose emanations drew the attentions of French surgeon and medical researcher Charles Richet. Richet was the discoverer of human thermoregulation and cutaneous transpiration, a pioneer in the treatment of tuberculosis, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for his work on anaphylactic shock, and the author of Gastric Juice in Man and Animals (can’t have a slam dunk every time). That a man of his stature spoke for the authenticity of ectoplasm made it difficult to dismiss. As did spiritualism’s roster of scientists, statesmen, and literary luminaries: William James, William Butler Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, chemist Sir William Crookes (inventor of the vacuum tube and sufferer of ridicule for his pronouncement that the luminous green gas inside his invention was ectoplasm), two prime ministers, and Queen Victoria.
Spiritualism, in a nutshell, is a religious movement devoted to communicating (via mediums) with those who have died and to proving to others, via séances and other mediumistic demonstrations, that it is possible to do so. Death is viewed not as an end to life, but merely a different phase, a changing of address and scenery. Heaven—or Summerland, as the spiritualists used to call it—was no longer an abstract but a place you could put a call in to. Spiritualism was founded in 1848, by the elder sister of two bored preteens, Margaret and Kate Fox, who took to soliciting mysterious spirit “rappings” at their farmhouse in Hydesville, New York. The noises stirred the imaginations of local townsfolk and the entrepreneurial spirit of their sister, who was soon inviting strangers to the house to observe the proceedings for a modest fee. Within months the three sisters were on a nationwide tour, and spiritualism was off and running. It spread steadily and traveled overseas, peaking in the aftermath of World War I, which left millions of American and European families grieving for lost sons and sadly vulnerable to the promise of contacting them in the afterlife. Though spiritualism’s ranks have dwindled since, it retains a presence in the United States and, more prominently, England.
In 1989, possibly to its great embarrassment, Cambridge University acquired the archives of the Society for Psychical Research,[20] the preeminent investigators of the early mediums’ claims and feats. Should you wish to view, say, the file labeled “Merton, Mrs.: Investigation of ‘The Flying Armchair’” or “Gramophone Records—Alleged Trance Speech of Banta,” a young, madonna-skinned Manuscripts Room page will find it and place it in front of you with the same reverence and respect he accords items of the Royal Greenwich Observatory Archives or the seed specimens of Sir Charles Darwin.
20
I am an unabashed fan of the SPR (which has been around since 1882) and in particular its quarterly journal. Here are peer-reviewed articles addressing in all seriousness the likes of wart-charming and talking mongooses. Here are time-domain analyses of table rappings and field studies of healers’ effects on lettuce seed germination (“Figure 2: the healer ‘enhances’ the seeds, mimicked by the control healer”). I take it as nothing beyond happy coincidence that the SPR membership roster has at one time or another included a Mrs. H. G. Nutter, a Harry Wack, and a Mrs. Roy Batty.