What are Auras?

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume XXIV, Issue 4248, 19 February 1921, Page 3

What are Auras?

LATEST SCIENTIFIC

DISCOVERY.

(Specially written for the

Guardian).

The cables announced on Thursday last, as the latest discovery of science, the existence of a luminous zone emanating from the human body and capable of being made visible to"ordinary eyesight. This is the lineal descendant of , the ancient "halo," with which the medieval artists delighted to adorn the portraits of the saints.! In "some cases the portraits of very ' holy persons have also been represented with _ a luminosity surrounding the whole body. ' ] Now, it has been supposed that such haloes were purely eompli-' mentary. The astonishing thing is ' that such things are now proved to be facts and not the imagina-! tion of visionaries, nor the pictur-1 esque fancies of hero-saint wor-! ship, with the difference that they j are not the peculiar property of j the holy, nor confined to the head ; alone. Modern science is becoming convinced that each person—perhaps each animal—projects from the body an "emanation" .' which is continuous around the body, but is not visiyle to the eyes of everyone. But it can be made visible to ordinary eyes. At least one medical man, Dr. Kilner, of London., has made the aura his special problem, and has devoted a good portion of his life to its study. He uses his knowledge constantly iii the diagnosis and treatment of disease, and not only he, but other medical men who 'utilise in their practice the growing mass of that knowledge of the mind which is called psychology. Many of such experts seem to have an hereditary gift by which they can see the "aura ... in colours. These colours are 'found to correspond with the character of the person, and to those who can see them are an infallible index to that character. But the faculty is apparently not limited to the medical profession., The laity, and especially some women, have the faculty. Even young children may possess it. One writer records that a Scottish lady who has it, and whose mother had it before her, was. rather distressed to find it developing-in her six-year-old son. "I don't like that 'brow Tn' man," he said when a visitor left, and at another time he expressed approval of the'*blue' lady. It sounds rather mad, but sceptics may ■ be assured that these" are*''facts Well established among students all over the world. The French International Metaphysical Institute has taken them very seriously. The abundance of proof left hardly any doubt as to the fact. They may play a big part in the medical treatment of the future. HOW TO SEE THE AURA. Though non-sensitive persons cannot see the aura with ordinary sight, they can be enabled to see it by means of a chemical preparation that was on sale before the war. No means of artificially seeing, the aura in colours has been discovered, but by the use of the chemical it can be seen as a mist or halation quite distinctly. The preparation is a blue solution of a salt called di-cyanin (a compound of opium with cyanic or hydrocyanic acid). It.is placed between two flat sheets of glass six'inches long and about half an inch apart, forming a screen, through which the subject looks for at least five minutes at a bright, sky. It is then laid aside and the result is to produce abnormal acuteness of vision for an hour or so. Print unreadable before becomes quite clear to the naked eye. The blind being pulled down to darken the room, the experimenter stands with his back to the window and gazes steadily at;the patient standing in front of a' black velvet curtain. After a time a striated mist is seen allround the patient's body. This is the aura. It is motionless, not ascending like heat exhalations or the odours of the French theorist. It is no sort of vapour, for it is the same whether the patient be hot or cold. It never rises. It extends about six inches from the body, standing straight out and following the lines of the body—or rather, it stands straight out in health and droops like a withered plant in ill-health. It does not begin to be visible for the first half-inch from the body. A woman's aura is almost twice the length of a man's.

The writer, whose experience I am quoting (Dr. A. T. Schofield) says: " I put my two hands in front of me and there, streaming from my fingers, was the aura. When the tips of the fingers were ten inches apart their auras touched. The aura from the finger-tips can be.lengthened by will power, from five inches to over a foot, as I have seen by actual experiment.''

"WHAT IS IT?" Well, that is the unsolved problem. There is evidence that in. all ages some .men and women have been able to see these invisible rays, for the aura is drawn on the walls of ruins in India, Egypt, Peru and Yucaton. In the South Kensington museum are figures showing an aura, and they date from 324 B.C. For want of a bet-

ter name, the aura is described as an emanation of '' nerve-force,'' "natural electricity,'' ''psychic energy and so on. But really we know no more of them than the an cients who drew them on the walls of their^temples. Dr. Becquerel has described them as "N" rays, a sort of cousin to the X-rays. They have been shown to be rays of light a good deal more rapid in their vibrations than the highest that can be seen with the normal e eye—those at the violet end of the spectrum. The rays of the aura are not the only ones invisible to the material sight. Heat rays of less rapidity than 250 billion vibrations per second are all invisible? The hot iron is giving them off all the time, but they are invisible as colour until they reach the relatively slow vibration of red.

VIBRATIONS. Some amazing figures were wormed out of Sir William Crookes .in regard to the vibrations, of the ether. From 16 to 36,000 per second these vibrations are known to us as sound. They are all imperceptible to the senses from that figure to 1,000 millions per second, when they become known to us again as electricity. But from 2,000 millions to 250' billions per second they again disappear to the senses, emerging between the latter figure to 1,000 billions per second as light and colour in the spectrum from infrared to ultra-violet. They disappear again for a further huge gap, re-appearing at 250 billions ant up to 5 trillions as the X-rays. A billion is in English measurement a million millions (French and American a thousand millions), and a trillion is a million billions —numbers wholly inconceivable. For sceptics these huge gaps in the capacity of the human senses respond to the stimulation of the vibrations which are continually hammering at our doors, are very humilitating. But they show again that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.