Miracles of the Gods: A New Look at the Supernatural (481 page)

brewed in their cauldrons.

In the phantom-ridden night of the Samhuin (a phenomenon from the ancient Indian Vedas), even the boundaries between this world and the next are supposed to have fallen. Spooky figures of all kinds are supposed to have materialized from the void.

The 'astral body' plays a great part in the occult literature of all ages. This remarkable phenomenon is supposed to be a 'delicate envelope' for the body and soul. The gnostic religion, which makes man's salvation dependent on his knowledge of the secrets of the world, asserts that the astral body penetrates the human body and forms something like a connecting link between the earthly and the 'higher' body.

One cannot mention astral bodies without mentioning auras. Aura means air or breath in Greek. Not only has it been a topic of conversation since ancient times, but it is reputed to have existed always.

And precisely today this generally invisible envelope which surrounds human beings is the subject of para-psychological research. (Indeed we say that such-and-such a poet, scholar and even politician has a 'certain aura' in the sense of charisma!)

I do not intend to quote all the periods in which the undefined aura is supposed to have been definitively discovered. But as a proof that serious scholars were interested in this problem, I must mention the scientist and chemist Carl-Ludwig Freiherr von Reichenbach (1788-1869), who discovered paraffin-wax and creosote in wood-tar. Reichenbach was convinced of the existence of this invisible original force (which could be made visible), which he called 'Od force' (from the Germanic

'od' = original) - so convinced that he devoted two whole decades of his working life to its discovery.

Like Franz Anton Mesmer, Reichenbach believed that the Od force could be transferred from one person to another. Yet this remarkable phenomenon, astral body, aura or Od force, was first confirmed technically by chance in our own day.

In the second half of the forties, the Russian engineer Semyonov Davidovich Kirlian from Krasnodar on the Kuban noticed that discharges appeared between the body of a patient and the electrodes in the high frequency range of an apparatus for electrotherapeutic treatment. Kirlian was keen to know whether this state, which was visible to the eye, could also be photographed. He and his wife Valentina undertook the difficult job of developing these photographs.

Kirlian photography, which is used everywhere today, exhibits the so-called Kirlian effect. In high frequency alternating current fields which are harmless to man, animals and plants, bodies acquire a luminescence that can be photographed, but are not caused by high temperature. It is also known as

'cold luminescence'.

As a passing example of the phenomenon which Kirlian photography can make visible, I should mention photos that show a fresh flower with many blossoms and the same flower with some blossoms cut off. In the place where the blossoms were their outline still showed up in a photograph taken seconds after the cut was made and they were no longer there. Countless exposures have been taken all over the world using the Kirlian effect. They show radiations around men's bodies that are not visible to the naked eye.