In the 1880s, the physician Antoine Baréty performed experiments to show that the bodies of hysterics were lit up by the spasm
odic 
consumption of energy and gave off an astonishing ‘radiating neural force’, a luminous fluid that flooded out particularly from the eyes, the fingers and the mouth, swathing the body in an aura of light.
What already in the 1840s Karl von Reichenbach had dubbed the ‘
odic force’ came to be known as the hysterical aura, as we can see in two striking cases of the ‘twist’ between pathology and the occult. The first concerns Charles Richet, Professor of Physiology in the Medicine Faculty in Paris and member of the SPR, who passed from enquiries into the hypnosis of hysterics to mediumistic experiments and ended up coining the word ‘
ectoplasm’. Perhaps less well-known today, though more intriguing in its upshot, is the case of Albert Rochas, an engineer who was administrator in the élite École Polytechnique, who studied the ghost of sensibility in hysterics, conceiving of the luminous energy given off by their bodies as a sort of extroflected inner double, as the garment of the senses that abandons the flesh and takes on the spectrality. In describing the phenomenon of the ectoplasms, Lombroso himself cites Rochas’ study of the processes described in Extériorisation de la sensibilité (1895), reading the phantasm as precisely a garment that duplicates and exteriorises the bodily inside:
the patient’s sensibility is carried, like the clothes on a mannequin, on a sort of phantasm that, under the orders of the
magnetiser, can move off on its own and pass through material obstacles while preserving its sensibility intact . . . . . . . . . . . . .
as Lombroso wrote in his New Studies on Genius:
we are like an electric wire that transmits a signal, but that is not aware of what the signal means, nor what it adds up to in combination with other signs. We transmit a sensation to the brain and this is elaborated and transformed into thought. Man, in short, is a sort of medium for the brain.This theoretical background, shared by physiology, physics and chemistry, allows contact and action at a distance to be thought of as phenomena intrinsic to matter, rather than as occult events. In The Unseen Universe (1875),
the physicists Balfour Stewart and P.G. Tait interpreted the ether as ‘a way in which the universe conserves a memory of the past’: every event, every experience and every sensation endures as if recorded, impressed on the light waves of matter, because, as they say, ‘photographs are continually produced and conserved of every event’.
In 1884, the mathematician Charles Howard Hinton takes up this image of the conservation of energy in his A Picture of our Universe, this time comparing the ether to a cosmic phonograph, which serves as an interface between the third and the fourth dimension.
The ether is thus the enormous archive of invisible traces, a crypt in which the sensible imprints of the past are preserved like ghosts ready to show themselves anew, intimate but distant: telepathy is just this, a tele-pathos, an intimacy that is reproduced at a distance in time and space through the mere contact of energy waves, as Frederic Myers (the inventor of the term) confirms in placing spectral communication firmly among the scientific ‘laws’ of nature:
today science is able to penetrate certain cosmic facts that it hitherto had not grasped. The first of these is man’s survival of death. The second is the registration in the universe of every scene and thought of the past.There are some interesting old photos at the link -
http://www.pd.org/Perforations/perf29/viol...of_positive.htm
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