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Aura
The name given to a subtle envelope of vital
energy which apparently radiates around natural objects, including human
beings, animals and plants. It is described as a cloud of light suffused
with various colors and, in human beings, it chiefly surrounds the head. The colors and form of each aura are believed to
be characteristic of the person, animal or thing it surrounds and to change
according to a particular state of mind or emotion.
The aura is invisible to physical
sight, but is seen by
clairvoyants as a halo of light, although not all
of them describe the auras of
similar objects or people in the same way.
Although the body does have a magnetic field —
a bio-field — it is far too weak to account for a light-emitting halo of energy and,
aside from the accounts of clairvoyants, there is no scientific evidence that the
phenomenon exists.
Belief in the emanation of vital energy
from the body was present in ancient Egypt, India,
Greece
and Rome. Some
authorities trace the existence of the aura in such scriptural instances as
the bright light shining about Moses, which the children of Israel were
unable to look upon, when he descended from the mountain bearing the stone
tablets engraved with the Ten Commandments. In many of the sacred books of
the East, representations of the great teachers and holy men are given with
a halo of light extending round the whole of the body. In the sixteenth century
Paracelsus discoursed on the
astral body and its 'fiery' aura
— "the vital force is not enclosed in man, but radiates round him like a
luminous sphere, and it may be made to act at a distance;" the theory
of animal magnetism advanced in the
late eighteenth century by Franz Anton Mesmer
provoked a variety of scientific experiments to try to isolate and identify the phenomena.
In the years before World War I, Dr.
Walter Kilner at St. Thomas's Hospital in London developed a method of
viewing auras, which he declared could be seen as a faint haze around the body, using an apparatus which
rendered ultraviolet light visible. He developed a theory of auric diagnosis of illness,
from his observations of the correspondence between the appearance of the aura and patient
health. Kilner's work was greeted with skepticism by the medical profession, and his work
was interrupted by the onset of World War I. In 1939 Semyon Davidovich Kirlian,
a Russian electrician, developed a technique which he claimed recorded the
aura on film, but this technique remains controversial.
See
Out-of-body
Experience,
Kirlian
Photography,
Astral Plane,
Casting Black Magic Spells,
Commanding Spirits,
The Tarot Store and
Divination & Scrying Tools and
Supplies.
Sources: (1) Spence, Lewis,
An Encyclopedia of
Occultism, Carol Publishing Group; (2)
Dictionary of the
Occult, Caxton
Publishing.
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