Semyon Kirlian was a Soviet engineer who laid down the principles of aura photography, or if you like, invented the method to visualize the aura. In 1939 Kirlian, who worked as an electrical engineer, accidentally put his hands too close to a high voltage electrode, and next to this electrode – again by accident - there was a photographic plate. The closeness of the objects caused an electrical discharge, and as a result a photo which was Kirlian’s hand and its energy field appeared on the photographic plate. In practical terms this was the beginning of the use of aura photography.
This accidental discovery was followed by forty years of research. The sceptics still believe that this phenomenon is an ordinary type of magnetic, electrical or gravitational energy field. One of the main arguments of the sceptics is that you cannot create the same photo twice. Because even if there is a small time difference between taking two photos of the same body or body part, the sizes and the colours of the auras are different. The answer of the followers of the Kirlian method is really simple: “like our body, our energy field is a living thing and is therefore constantly changing”.
The other frequently mentioned argument is that you can take an aura photograph of non-living objects (e.g. coins and stones), this is why they call the followers ‘Magicians’. While the first argument can be easily answered the second one cannot be answered so easily. Because in the second argument we are touching on a basic principle, namely that everything around us, including ourselves, are integral, organic parts of the living Universe. The ‘organic’ adjective here must be interpreted as meaning a complex whole, and not in a biological sense. In this analogy the sceptics would not accept that a stone or a coin are integral parts of the universe as living beings.
The followers of Kirlian are not giving up. In contrast, the followers of Kirlian argue with the unusual outcome of an engineering experiment, the mutilat