Toward Ecosophy

The first third of the twentieth century, when Albert Abrams was perfecting his machines and Leon Eeman was experimenting with biocircuits, was in many ways the golden age of etheric technology. The culture of independent scientific research was still in full flower, old-fashioned occult philosophy was still a major cultural force, and there were plenty of researchers in and out of the scientific community who were willing to buck the materalist dogma of the time and explore the Unseen using the tools of scientific research. One of the most prestigious figures in that movement was Dr. Walter Kilner. 

Born in 1847, Kilner entered the medical profession and specialized in electrotherapy, one of the cutting-edge medical specialties of the late nineteenth century. Like many physicians in his time, he carried out medical research alongside his duties caring for patients, and published a great many papers in the medical journals of the time. Around the turn of the last century, he became interested in the question of the human aura -- the field of force that many people see or feel around human bodies. Where most research into the subject focused on the aura itself, Kilner wanted to understand why some people can see it while others cannot. This led him to experiment with filters of various kinds. 

The standard optical filter in his time consisted of alcohol and dye held between two disks of glass, surrounded by a metal frame. That allowed Kilner to experiment with a wide range of dyes, and that led him in turn to an unexpected discovery.  If someone spent several minutes looking through a filter that used dicyanin, a common dark blue dye, and then went into a dim room, that person's eyes would be temporarily sensitized to the aura. Repeat the same experience several times and the sensitization became permanent. The technology that resulted from this was simple: a set of goggles that had dicyanin filters in place of lenses, and could be used quite easily by experimenters to sensitize their own eyes and those of experimental subjects. 

Kilner published a book on the subject, The Human Atmosphere, in 1911, which you can download for free here. (It was later reprinted in a revised and expanded edition in 1920 as The Human Aura.)  His experiments sorted out the aura into three layers -- the health aura or etheric body, which extended only a very short distance from the skin; the inner aura; and the outer aura. The diagram in the upper left of this post shows approximately what he and his experimental subjects saw, though the colors varied from person to person and with other factors as well. It was all classic experimental science, and the response of the scientific community...

No, they didn't actually pull a Randi -- there was plenty of ad hominem language thrown around, and there still is, but as far as I know none of the skeptics did the usual gimmick of repeating the experiment with crucial details changed and then loudly reporting a failure to replicate. My guess?  Like the church officials who refused to look through Galileo's telescope, they were afraid of what they might see. So Kilner's work was relegated to the dustbin of so-called "pseudoscience" by the scientific community. Occultists picked it up with enthusiasm -- most early twentieth century occult writers of any stature in the English-speaking world cite Kilner, because what he saw after sensitizing his vision with dicyanin goggles was what they saw after developing clairvoyance in more traditional ways, but their enthusiasm probably caused the scientific community to shun him all the more. 

Replicating Kilner's work would seem tolerably easy, not least because his book gives instructions for building and using the goggles.  The one difficulty is that dicyanin A, the dye he used, is apparently unavailable in the US. (There are claims in the alternative-science scene that it has actually been outlawed, but I have been unable to confirm this.) More recent researchers have experimented with other coal tar dyes, and also with cobalt blue and purple glass, and some successes have been reported using these methods. It remains one of the branches of etheric science in which a little systematic work might lead to considerable discoveries.