Blavatsky on Spirit Photographs

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 7 pages

From The Theosophist of April 1882, and notable for how little it concedes to a phenomenon it is often assumed to endorse. Spirit photographs, the opening line says, allow a large margin for criticism: they leave everything unexplained and the figures are by no means satisfactory. The physical framework offered is the one this section uses throughout — an infinite ocean of ether in which all material substance floats, and through which all the forces of the physical universe are transmitted.

The occult explanation is that such photographs are objective copies of subjective images already impressed upon the ether of space, and constantly thrown out by our thoughts, words and deeds — which makes them records of the photographer's own mental output rather than visitations, and connects the file directly to Psychometry elsewhere in this batch, where the same imprinted record is what the psychometer reads. The closing judgement is aimed at the movement rather than the plates: so long as spirit photography is presented to the public as a new revelation from the God of Israel and Jacob, instead of being treated as a science, the jury will go on deliberating for much longer.

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