Dicyanin Aura Experiments and the Scientific Search for the Soul
- Jul 3
- 8 min read
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This historical article discusses Dr Patrick O'Donnell' of Chicago and his use of the Kilner Dicyanin Method for his dicyanin aura experiments at the time of death of a patient.
Original Source: “The Search For The Soul,” By H. I. McMahon, The Alma Signal Newspaper , September 28, 1911.
The Mystery of Life: Will Science Rediscover the Human Soul?
The mystery of life! Will science ever solve that riddle? Will it heed “The Sphinx” in Emerson’s famous poem, who bade the eager questioner behold himself, the answer, and the question too?
Incredible as it may seem, scientists are even now doing that very thing. In the near future, you and I should be prepared to hear them announce, most learnedly and sententiously, the rediscovery of the human soul.
Here and there, in hospital laboratories widely scattered, men of science are groping into the mystery. Like the medieval scientists who lived in dread of the ban of Mother Church, they are mostly working secretly and are not telling half they know.
For science, that marvelous machine of modern progress, has its church too, as it were: its orthodoxy and its heterodoxy; its hierarchy of established rulers who excommunicate and set autos-da-fé for expounders of heresies.
So far, the evidence these bold investigators have unearthed is chiefly negative, yet nevertheless highly significant. In the first place, one of them found that physical death is accompanied by a sudden loss of bodily weight varying from three-quarters of an ounce to nearly an ounce and a quarter.
Some curious experiments of this kind were made by Dr. Duncan MacDougall, of Haverhill, Mass. His first subject was a man dying of tuberculosis. He selected a patient dying from this disease because so great an exhaustion characterizes its final stages that death occurs with little or no muscular movement. With a patient quiet, the beam of the scales can be kept true, and any loss occurring will be evidenced.
In this experiment, the patient was lying on a bed arranged on a light framework, which was built on very delicately balanced platform scales. He was under observation three hours and forty minutes before death. He lost weight slowly at the rate of an ounce an hour, due to the evaporation of breath moisture and perspiration.
Keenly the physician watched the fading hours and minutes of the almost-spent life. And then—suddenly, coincident with death—the beam end of the scales dropped with an audible stroke, hitting against the lower bar and remaining there with no rebound. The scales registered an instant loss of three-quarters of an ounce.
What had gone?
It could not have been evaporation of sweat, he decided, for that had slowly left the body at the rate of a tiny fraction of an ounce a minute, whereas the sudden loss at death had been many times as great. It could not have been, further tests satisfied the doctor, the air in the lungs.
Dr. MacDougall was startled at the weird phenomenon. Something immaterial, yet evidently forceful and of weight, had departed with the life.
What in the world was it?
The physician repeated his experiments in the last hours of various other tuberculosis patients. Always, at the supreme moment, the stroke of the beam came down with an audible report, and each time the scales told the loss of about an ounce.
Could this thing that so suddenly departed possibly be viewed in its upward flight?
Seized with a new hope, the experimenter devised a clear white light to test along the body of the subject in the dying hour. In other cases, he covered the bodies with the rainbow hues of the spectrum, trusting that some change in the distribution of the bands might mark the passage of the unknown, mysterious factor from the frame of the dying man.
What color the soul might assume, what space it covered in relation to the body, whether it emanated from the lips or from the head alone—these were some of the momentous questions he thought to settle forever.
But neither the pure white light nor the spectrum bands told aught of the body’s departing guest. That it showed no refraction to light was not, after all, surprising. There is one substance or force in the universe that is totally devoid of light refraction, and that is the interstellar ether: the wonderful, perfectly transparent medium in which light itself moves unchecked and unbent.
What if the soul were ether?
Dr. Kilner’s Human Aura Experiments
While the revolutionary theory of the soul as an actual existence of ether, or ether-like substance, was setting tongues wagging in Boston, a pupil of the famous Dr. Walter J. Kilner of London was performing experiments just as marvelous in Chicago.
Dr. Kilner is a believer in the human aura. He holds that every human being is surrounded by an envelope of a peculiar kind of light, which follows and encloses every contour of the form.
Thus another imagined myth—the halo and encircling glory that the superstitious ages attributed to the saints—may be demonstrated, by a queer scientific reversal, as a solid reality.
Kilner’s pupil in Chicago is Dr. Patrick S. O’Donnell. He had from his master a set of slides specially designed to make auras visible. These are merely bits of glass glued together with a solution, more or less concentrated, of a dark violet dye termed dicyanin.
The observer first looks at his subject through a stronger glass, and then, when he has identified the aura as a nebulous haze surrounding the subject, he transfers to a weaker glass with less violet pigment, which shows him the aura as “a distinct bluish-gray ring extending completely around the body.”
After the eye has thus been accommodated to the extreme limit of its vision, the lenses can be dispensed with altogether, and the unaided naked sight will discern by itself the aura’s glow.
Dr. O’Donnell’s first demonstration was merely to establish the fact of the aura to doubting Thomases. Twelve prominent Chicago physicians and six Sisters of the Mercy Hospital witnessed the trials. Most of them said the demonstration was a complete success and that they saw distinctly the bands of light encircling the bodies of the girl art models who had consented to pose.
Each aura was visible in three parts. First, next to the body, a dark band a quarter of an inch wide, which is known as the etheric double; secondly, the inner aura, or band of light; and finally the outer aura.
When one of the physicians drew his hand along the undraped figure of the subject, the aura followed it. Sister Lourdes noticed there were distinct bands of light between the doctor’s fingertips and the body of the model under observation.
Withdrawal of the hand seemed to pull the color like putty away from the body, causing a decided change of shape in the aura, which, however, soon resumed its original position.
Dicyanin Aura Experiments at the Moment of Death
Curious as all this is, it forms but a prelude to the truly extraordinary experiment Dr. O’Donnell made a little later. This offers a strange parallel to Dr. MacDougall’s Haverhill experiments, and suggests once more, with awesome effect, that death may not be merely a cessation of bodily forces, but that it involves the departure from this house of clay of a mysterious visitor.
Like MacDougall, the Chicago physician watched the last moments of a dying man. To his practiced eye, the aura of the sufferer, a patient in Mercy Hospital, was plainly outlined with its dark etheric double and its inner and outer bands of light.
For half an hour or so, O’Donnell kept his vigil. The intern in charge of the case finally announced that the patient was sinking.
“I kept my eyes fastened on the patient,” says O’Donnell, in his account of the weird experience. “Suddenly the aura began to spread away from the body, then it disappeared! At that instant the house physician announced that the patient was dead. What force produces the aura we cannot say just yet. Every living person has one. It is gone the instant death comes.”
This inquisitive Chicago doctor has no mind to be made a scientific martyr by announcing soul-heresies, but he is firm in stating his belief that the aura, so evident in life and vanishing so ghostlike in death, is not the resultant of mere bodily magnetism or electrical force.
He believes he has discovered the visible effect of some as-yet unknown human force, differing widely from the play of electricity or magnetism, and separated as if by a gulf from the chemical and mechanical reactions of the body.
In a word, it is inseparable from life, for when life goes, the aura goes also. As to whether it be the physical side or aspect of the soul, he refuses to express his private view for publication.
Dr. Baraduc and the Photography of Death
Over in France, they are more outspoken, and they are telling of marvels the photographic camera has witnessed and recorded which as yet have been denied to the direct vision of the unaided eye.
Consider the experiments of Dr. Baraduc, a well-known savant, concerning the light phenomena above and around the bodies of the dead.
Dr. Baraduc is a psychic as well as a scientist of repute. Between himself and his son André, a strong bond of affection existed. Frequently, each had remarkable telepathic experiences with the other, and both were interested in the study of the soul.
When, in 1907, André died, his father took a photograph of the coffin after the boy had been dead nine hours.
When the plate was developed, it was discovered that emanating from the body in the coffin was a formless, misty, wave-like mass, radiating in all directions with considerable force, touching the bodies of those who came in close proximity to the coffin, as if attracted to them by some magnetic force.
On one occasion, the force of contact with this mass was so great that Dr. Baraduc received an electric shock from head to foot, which produced a temporary dizziness.
The savant’s interest was so aroused after this photograph was taken that he attempted more conclusive experiments immediately upon the death of his wife, who died six months after her son.
He set the camera at the bedside, and at the moment of her death he photographed the body and shortly after developed the plate. On it were found three luminous globes resting a few inches above the body by fine luminous threads.
Ensuing photographs showed that these gradually condensed and became more brilliant. Streaks of light, like fine threads, were also seen darting hither and thither. A photograph taken sixteen minutes after the death of his wife showed Dr. Baraduc that fluid cords had developed, partly encircling the globes of light.
An hour after her death, a photograph then taken showed the recondensed globe, which obscured the head of Mme. Baraduc. Cords appeared in the shape of a figure eight, closed at the top and opened at the point nearest the body.
Finally, three hours and a half after death, a well-formed globe rested above the body, apparently held together by the encircling luminous cords, which seemed to guide and control it. At last, the cords snapped one by one, and the globe floated away and vanished.
The Unanswered Question
Are these weird and gruesome luminous phenomena connected with the departure of the aura?
And can the aura be the physical manifestation of the soul?
These are two questions that need to be authoritatively answered one way or the other, and the experimenters will not rest until the answers are found.
