Mediumnic Lights, X Rays, and The Spirit Who Photographed Herself

Mediumnic Lights, Xx Rays, and the Spirit Who
Photographed Herself
Jeremy Stolow
In Paris, starting in March 1909, Julien Ochorowicz, codirector of the

Institut Général Psychologique de Paris, organized a series of séances to
be conducted with Stanislava Tomczyk, a medium whom Ochorowicz
had “discovered” in Poland and had brought to Paris for further study.
Tomczyk had already gained a reputation for her telekinetic abilities to
levitate small objects, to stop the movement of clocks, and to influence
the outcome of a spinning roulette wheel, among other powers. The me-
dium’s abilities were attributed to Little Stasia, a control spirit who com-
municated with and through Tomczyk by means of alphabetic rapping,
automatic writing, and direct speech during the medium’s somnambu-
lant states. Tomczyk was hardly the first spirit medium to attract both
scientific attention and public curiosity; by the time of Tomczyk’s arrival
in France, psychic and occult phenomena had been firmly established as
objects of legitimate scientific investigation, endorsed by such luminaries
as the astronomer Camille Flammarion, the Nobel Prize-winning physiol-
ogist Charles Richet, and his fellow Nobel laureates Marie and Paul Curie.1
Research for this paper was conducted with the financial support of the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada. I also wish to thank Linda Henderson, Robert Brain,
Ghislain Thibault, Maria José de Abreu, and especially Bernard Geoghegan for their incisive
comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Unless otherwise noted, all translations into English
are my own.
1. Even better known than Tomczyk were the spirit mediums Eusapia Palladino, Eva
Carrière, and Mme. D’Esperance (née Elizabeth Hope), each the subject of extended study in
France and elsewhere during this formative period of psychic research. On the development
of psychic research and its relationship with spiritualism and the occult, see Ian Hacking,
Critical Inquiry 42 (Summer 2016)

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924 Jeremy Stolow / The Spirit Who Photographed Herself
Ochorowicz’s study of Tomczyk would have merited little more than a
few lines in the annals of psychic research had it not been for a dramatic
turning point occurring on 29 March. On that evening, after a series of
unsuccessful séances that had led Ochorowicz to despair of convincing
his scientific peers of the authenticity of Tomczyk’s powers, the medium
announced to Ochorowicz that Little Stasia wished to speak to him. As
she communicated by rapping the alphabet, the following conversation
ensued: “ ‘I wish to photograph myself,’ Little Stasia announced. ‘Prepare the
instruments.’ Both of us [Ochorowicz and Tomcyzk] laughed, believing
this to be another of Little Stasia’s farces. ‘Should we also set up a magne-
sium lamp?’ ‘I don’t need any magnesium.’ ‘And where should the medium
be placed?’ ‘I don’t need her either.’ ” Little Stasia further explained how
the photographic session should be organized: “ ‘Place a camera using a
9x12cm plate on the table near the window. Fix the focus at a half-meter
distance and place a chair at that point. And give me something to cover my-
self. ’ ” Ochorowicz followed Little Stasia’s instructions, and then inquired,
“ ‘What next needs to be done?’ ‘Nothing,’ replied Little Stasia. ‘Please leave
now and close the door.’ ” Having ensured that the room was completely
obscured from external light sources, Ochorowicz opened the shutter of
the camera, and both he and the medium departed. After roughly one
hour, Little Stasia announced through the medium: “ ‘It’s done. You can
develop the plate.’ ” 2
This is the photograph Ochorowicz developed, after what he describes
as an inordinately long immersion in the developing bath (fig. 1). The
“Telepathy: Origins of Randomization in Experimental Design,” Isis 79 (Sept. 1988): 427–51;

Sophie Lachapelle, Investigating the Supernatural: From Spiritism and Occultism to Psychical
Research and Metaphysics in France, 1853–1931 (Baltimore, 2011); Roger Luckhurst, The Invention
of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford, 2002); John Warne Monroe, Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism,
Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France (Ithaca, N.Y., 2008); and Janet Oppenheim, The
Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1985).
2. Julien Ochorowicz, “Les Phénomènes lumineux et la photographie de l’invisible,”
Annales des Sciences Psychiques 19 (July 1909): 194–95; hereafter abbreviated “PL.” This article
ran from July through November.
J eremy S tolow is an associate professor in communication studies at

Concordia University (Montreal). His principal area of research is religion
and technology. His current project, “Picturing Aura,” investigates the history
of efforts to photograph the human aura and the lives of such images among
psychic researchers, occultists, artists, and New Age health practitioners. Among
his publications are Orthodox by Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the ArtScroll
Revolution (2010) and Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in
Between (2013).

FIGURE 1 . Self-Portrait of Little Stasia. Reproduction courtesy of Harvard University
Library.

picture was submitted to the Annales des Sciences Psychiques, the leading
French-language periodical for psychic research, where it was published
in July 1909 alongside Ochorowicz’s report.3 Its publication caused quite
a sensation among psychic researchers, generating heated debate about
the authenticity of the photograph, the plausibility of Ochorowicz’s ac-
count of its provenance, and, more broadly, the limits of possibility for
photographic instruments when it came to the visualization of normally
invisible entities, such as spirits.4 Spirit photography was itself nothing
new to psychic researchers and their reading publics; its practice dated
back to the mid-nineteenth century, pioneered by studio photographers
such as William Mumler (in the US) and Edouard Isidore Buguet (in
France).5 But this spiritual self-portrait seemed quite novel and pointed
3. See ibid., pp. 193–201. On the role of the Annales as a key forum of reportage and
debate over the science of psychic research, see Lachapelle, Investigating the Supernatural,
pp. 86–91, and Carlos Alvarado and Renaud Evrard, “The Psychic Sciences in France: Historical
Notes on the Annales des Sciences Psychiques,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 26, no. 1 (2012):
117–40. France was not the only country where psychic research was reported and discussed,
both in professional journals and in nonexpert fora, including the many fin-de-siècle occult
publications in which news about advances in psychic research was frequently reproduced. See,
for instance, the insightful discussion of the history and influence of the German periodical
Psychische Studien on Adrian Sommer’s blog “Forbidden Histories,” forbiddenhistories
.wordpress.com/2013/12/17/spirits-science-and-the-mind-the-journal-psychische-studien-1874
-1925/. For an instructive study of the role of occult periodicals within the English-speaking
world, see Mark S. Morrisson, “The Periodical Culture of the Occult Revival: Esoteric Wisdom,
Modernity, and Counter-Public Spheres,” Journal of Modern Literature 31 (Winter 2008): 1–22.
4. One of Ochorowicz’s sharpest critics was Guillaume de Fontenay, a photographic
authority otherwise known to be sympathetic to psychic research. See Guillaume de Fontenay,
“Le Portrait de Stasia: Quelques reflexions photographiques,” Annales des Sciences Psychiques 19
(Sept. 1909): 267–75. For Ochorowicz’s reply, see Ochorowicz, “Une Réponse du Dr. Ochorowicz
aux critiques de M. de Fontenay sur la photographie de la petite Stasia,” Annales des Sciences
Psychiques 19 (Nov. 1909): 339–41. A detailed account of the public debate between Fontenay and
Ochorowicz as regards the meaning and authenticity of Ochorowicz’s photographs is found
in Rolf H. Krauss, Beyond Light and Shadow: The Role of Photography in Certain Paranormal
Phenomena—An Historical Survey (Munich, 1995), pp. 74–90.
5. On spirit photography in the nineteenth century, see The Perfect Medium: Photography
and the Occult, ed. Clément Chéroux et al. (exhibition catalog, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
N.Y., 26 Sept.–31 Dec. 2005); Tom Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations:
Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny,” in Fugitive Images:
From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington, Ind., 1995), pp. 42–71 and “Uncanny
Reflections, Modern Illusions: Sighting the Modern Optical Uncanny,” in Uncanny Modernity:
Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties, ed. Jo Collins and John Jervis (London, 2008), pp. 68–90;
John Harvey, Photography and Spirit (London, 2007); Louis Kaplan, The Strange Case of William
Mumler, Spirit Photographer (Minneapolis, 2008); John Warne Monroe, “Cartes de visite from
the Other World: Spiritism and the Discourse of Laïcisme in the Early Third Republic,” French
Historical Studies 26 (Winter 2003): 119–53; and Sarah Willburn, “Viewing History and Fantasy
through Victorian Spirit Photography,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-
Century Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (Surrey, 2012),
pp. 359–81.

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2016 927
to an entirely distinct order of things—one at odds with many reigning
assumptions about agency, materiality, and visual representation. Indeed,
how, precisely, could Little Stasia, an immaterial creature, interact with
the camera in order to photograph herself ? What was the source of energy
that had opened and shut the camera’s shutter without the aid of a human
hand? And what could have been the source of light that had enabled the
image to be registered on the photosensitive plate? Were all these forces
somehow connected with one another?
Such questions were at the heart of debates surrounding Little Stasia’s
photograph and the subsequent investigations Ochorowicz conducted.
But these questions also signal the relevance of this episode for much larger
and ongoing concerns about visual representation, the mediating power
of instruments, and the “reality” we ascribe to phenomena that exceed
both ordinary perception and ordained scientific postulates. As I hope to
demonstrate in the coming pages using the example of Ochorowicz’s pho-
tography, psychic research in the early twentieth century is not easily rel-
egated to the margins of what we might presume to call proper scientific
work, as if it were merely an embarrassing flight of fancy that the scien-
tific community has thankfully repudiated in favor of other topics more
clearly deserving of serious investigation. On the contrary, Ochorowicz’s
published reports of his work with Tomczyk and her control spirit pro-
vide us with an opportunity to revisit this very history of rejection and re
pression of psychic research. In particular, they invite us to ask, What do
we suppose lies on the far side of any visualization and recording in-
strument, and on what basis do we distinguish among such “occulted”
phenomena, granting some entities entry into the order of the real and
declaring others to be mere figments of the imagination or products of
fraudulence, equipment failure, or tainted powers of observation?
For quite some time, thanks to the tremendous powers of instrumented
observation at its disposal, modern scientific reasoning has concerned it-
self with the business of searching for, describing, and thereby according
ontological status to a wide range of phenomena that are normally invis-
ible or nonvisual or that can only be postulated or inferred from other
sources of knowledge, whether these be atomic particles, distant stars, elec
tromagnetic currents, sound waves, black holes, or events that are so eva-
nescent or slow moving they elude ordinary perception. However, psychic
research in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided a
context in which other candidates for scientific scrutiny—spirits, ghosts,
miraculous powers of perception and action—could be presented on a
level playing field and in which claims about evidence of such things could
be taken seriously among even some of the most established authorities.

Most remarkable, in Ochorowicz’s case, was the scientist’s ability to enter
into sustained discussion with his peers about evidence that he claimed
could only have been generated by Little Stasia herself. Whereas we today
might be tempted to assume there could only have been three actors pres-
ent at the scene of this photographic event—Ochorowicz, Tomczyk, and
the camera—Ochorowicz (and many others who granted him the benefit
of the doubt) could find no justifiable grounds for excluding the presence
of a fourth actor: Little Stasia, an impish, normally invisible creature of
the spirit world.
If we are willing, at least temporarily, to accept, as Ochorowicz did, the
possibility that Little Stasia was both the progenitor and the subject of this
seemingly incredible photographic document, we might find ourselves in
a rather unsettling situation. The cosmic order of things that has long
been familiar to clairvoyants, spiritual healers, and other adepts steeped
in traditions of esoteric vision is now proclaimed to fall within the remit
of instruments of visualization and representation that serve as the very
hallmark of scientific standards of observation and evidence gathering.
Indeed, for Ochorowicz and his supporters, the evidence produced during
his séances with Tomczyk was not so different from that pertaining to any
other nonvisible object of science. The only added condition was that the
particular realities in question could only be observed in the presence of a
spirit medium, since it was only in the circuit conjoining photographic ap-
paratus and spirit, and scientist and medium, that these mysterious forces
could manifest and make themselves available for visual detection and
inscription. By adopting a stance that some call ontologically pluralist, we
would have to suspend here our rush to judgment that there cannot exist
such things as spirits or other occult forces that defy available explanatory
frameworks. We would equally require ourselves to leave open the possi-
bility for certain uniquely endowed (or carefully trained) individuals to
perceive and conjure such entities and forces and thereby make them visi-
ble (if only ephemerally) in our mundane world, such as in the work per-
formed by photographic and other instruments of scientific observation.
I suggest we have good reasons to hold in check our most instinctive as-
sumptions about the authenticity of Ochorowicz’s photographic evidence
of the spirit world; among other things this episode throws into relief some
troubling questions about indexicality and realism that lie at the heart of
all practices of observing and knowing the world through the mediation
of instruments. What indeed is the reality to which a visual medium such
as photography points? What are the assumptions about indexical refer-
ence that lie behind efforts to render the invisible world visible, and on

what terms can judgment about such matters be pronounced? These are
the key questions I shall take up at the end of this essay.
For Ochorowicz, as we shall see in more detail presently, new answers
to these very questions emerged in a program of research dedicated to
documenting and explaining the mysterious powers that had enabled
Little Stasia’s self-portrait to emerge. His experimental procedure began
from an initial observation that the very figure of Little Stasia seemed to be
composed of even subtler distributions of an unknown energy source, and
it thus became his task to break down those patterns into their elemen-
tal forms. Part navigating instrument, part inscription machine, Ochoro-
wicz’s photographic apparatus plumbed the depths of this occulted reality,
documenting hitherto invisible sources of latent energy that, under pro-
pitious conditions, could take visible form as streaks or flashes of light,
dull glowing orbs, or even the shape of human body parts, as intimated
by the inaugural event of Little Stasia’s self-portrait and later confirmed,
to Ochorowicz’s great satisfaction, in a startling series of images of astrally
projected human hands. This mise en abyme of hidden forces within hid-
den forces demanded of Ochorowicz the coining of a new vocabulary,
including mediumnic lights (lumières mediumniques), rigid rays (rayons
rigides), and Xx-Rays (rayons Xx). Their study, Ochorowicz was convinced,
promised to help unlock some deep secrets of a radiant universe that was
only beginning to be documented, let alone understood. But even more
important, for our purposes here, was the very manner of Ochorowicz’s
investigative procedure by virtue of which the spirit world became instru-
mentally detectable, navigable, and visible in new ways.
To appreciate how a document such as Little Stasia’s self-portrait could

have served as the basis of a scientific research program we must attend to
the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century metropolitan
fascinations with psychic and occult phenomena. It was a period in which
the frontiers demarcating mind, body, and environment were far from
fixed, and objects readily moved among the discursive registers of energy
physics, psychology, biology, medicine, spiritualist performance, esoteric
philosophy, and mystical practice. Such permeabilities were present in the
voluminous outpouring of reported experiments, theoretical speculations,
and notes from the field detailing the existence of invisible emanations, vi-
tal energies, mental projections, and other radiant forces that defied both
commonsense experience and accepted scientific explanation. As a focal
point of debate among professional scientists and also a subject of interest
to esoteric writers and audiences, Ochorowicz’s submissions to the An-

nales typified what was in fact a widespread fin-de-siècle preoccupation
with the detection and visualization of phenomena that one might best
call occult in the most literal sense of that word, meaning “hidden from
view” or “not manifest to direct observation.”6
Efforts to define, detect, depict, and intervene into occult objects—in-
cluding radiant energies, subtle vibrations, and vital forces—are of course
nothing new; they belong to a much longer history in which physicists,
mystics, folk healers, doctors, artists, and philosophers encountered one
another at different moments in and across diverse regions of the world.
The genealogy of such phenomena is thus complexly overlaid by diverse
vocabularies and frames of interpretation, from theories of magnetism
and electrostatic energy familiar to ancient Greek and Persian philoso-
phers to notions of an all-encompassing, life-giving force said to bind
body with spirit and the heavens above with the earth below, such as ‘qi in
classical Chinese medicine, prana in the Vedic tradition, and the principle
of archaeus in the cosmology of the Renaissance alchemist Paracelsus. 7
Representations of such occult phenomena enjoyed wide circulation in
nineteenth-century metropolitan society in large measure thanks to the
growth of popular science writing and public demonstrations but also
on account of the work of esotericists such as Eliphas Lévi and Helena
Petrovna Blavatsky (the founder of the Theosophical Society). Lévi and
Blavatsky were only two members of a growing cohort of commentators
from an occult perspective on advances in medicine, biology, psychology,
and energy physics, treating each scientific discovery as a modern-day
confirmation of cosmological knowledge and wisdom derived from an-
cient Greek, Hebrew, Indian, and Chinese sources.8 Indeed, according to a
6. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “occult.” For a history of the term occult, from the
qualitates occultae of mediaeval Scholasticism to the modern definition that emphasizes
secrecy, see Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western
Culture (Cambridge, 2012), p. 179; Keith Hutchison, “What Happened to Occult Qualities in
the Scientific Revolution?” Isis 73 (June 1982): 233–53; and Florian Sprenger, “Insensible and
Inexplicable: On the Two Meanings of Occult,” Communication+1 4 (2015): scholarworks.umass
.edu/cpo/vol4/iss1/2.
7. On Indian and Chinese medical systems, and their (quite long) history of connections
with the development of Western allopathic medicine, see Roberta Bivins, Alternative Medicine?
A History (Oxford, 2007). On Paracelsus, see Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to
Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (Basel, 1982). Compare Alvarado, “Human
Radiations: Concepts of Force in Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Psychical Research,” Journal of
the Society for Psychical Research 70 (July 2006): 138–62.
8. See Eliphas Lévi, Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (Paris, 1861); Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky, Science, vol. 1 of Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern
Science and Theology (New York, 1877). On Lévi’s influence on Theosophy and connections with
late nineteenth-century energy physics, see Egil Asprem, “Pondering Imponderables: Occultism
in the Mirror of Late Classical Physics,” Aries 11, no. 2 (2011): 129–65. On the close alliance

recurring theme in occult literature of the late nineteenth century, mod-
ern scientific paradigms—such as the luminiferous ether theory of Victo-
rian physics or theories of vitalism and neo-Lamarkism in biology—were
merely latecomers to a long-standing esoteric tradition that understood the
universe to be composed of a complex of overlapping energies and forces
joining the material world with higher, more subtle, or life-sustaining
planes of existence.9
Nevertheless, by the closing of the nineteenth century, esoteric writers
found themselves in a context quite unlike that of their forebears and in
the company of a new generation of interlocutors dedicated to the en-
terprise of psychical science research. This terrain of exchange between
esotericism and psychic science had been developing for a couple decades,
but it was dramatically reshaped in the aftermath of Wilhelm Röntgen’s
discovery of X-rays in 1895, Antoine Becquerel’s discovery of spontaneous
radioactivity in 1896, and the Curies’ discovery of radium and polonium
in 1898. That rapid succession of breakthroughs was decisive for the gen-
eration of entirely unprecedented scientific as well as cultural representa-
tions of an invisible universe beyond the reach of ordinary perception but
that now seemed to fall within the grasp of rapidly evolving instruments
and procedures of technologically mediated observation. New methods of
scientific visualization involving the use of equipment such as Crookes tubes,
fluorescent screens, precision-timed electrical charges, and cutting-edge
photographic apparatuses thus stood at the heart of an emerging epistemo
logical and cultural framework that Linda Henderson incisively labeled
“vibratory modernism”—a term that highlights the period’s intense pre-
occupation and imaginative engagement with new forms of radiant energy
located beyond the spectrum of visible light, the precise nature of which
remained a subject of considerable debate as different methods of inves-
tigation produced apparently contradictory observations and pointed to-
ward divergent theoretical conclusions.10 Ochorowicz’s engagements with
between occultism and modernism in fin-de-siècle Britain, not least as demonstrated by the
relationship by Theosophy and science, see especially Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment:
British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago, 2004).
9. A related history, beyond the scope of this article, would trace the influence of
mesmerism; on that topic, see both Emily Ogden and John Tresch, this issue.
10. See Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “Vibratory Modernism: Boccioni, Kupka, and the
Ether of Space,” in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science, Technology, Art,
and Literature, ed. Bruce Clarke and Henderson (Stanford, Calif., 2002), pp. 126–49. See also
Henderson, “X-Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of Kupka, Duchamp, and
the Cubists,” Art Journal 47 (Winter 1988): 323–40. On the cultural impact of the discovery of
X-rays, see also Allen W. Grove, “Röntgen’s Ghosts: Photography, X-Rays, and the Victorian
Imagination,” Literature and Medicine 16 (Fall 1997): 141–73, and Simone Natale, “The Invisible
Made Visible: X-Rays as Attraction and Visual Medium at the End of the Nineteenth Century,”

Tomczyk and Little Stasia took place in the midst of this proliferation of
investigations, claims of discovery, and theoretical accounts of hitherto
undocumented sources of radiant energy, alongside Prosper-René Blond-
lot’s N-rays, Gustave Le Bon’s lumière noire (“black light”), and other rays
of mysterious provenance that vied for the attention and consecration of
established scientific bodies such as the Académie de Sciences.11
As far as the French occultist reading public was concerned, the discov-
ery of X-radiation and related research seemed to confirm a long-standing
esoteric claim that the universe was composed of a plethora of subtle
vibrations and hidden energies and forces. So, for instance, the newly
discovered powers of radioactive substances to change the chemical com-
position of objects that fell within their range of emission readily called to
mind the long-familiar notion of alchemical transmutation. But the visual
culture of radiography also opened up new frontiers of possibility for the
occultist imagination. Among other things, X-rays could now be aligned
with paranormal phenomena such as telekinesis or clairvoyant percep
tion insofar as they all referenced a common level of reality located be-
yond the visible light spectrum but capable of being pictured—provided
that one had access to the right instruments or special powers. So it was
possible to phrase new versions of old questions, as did French fin-de-
siècle occultist Henri Antoine Jules-Bois: “Couldn’t there also exist X-gazes,
just as there exist X-rays?”12 That question was answered in the affirmative
by a succession of esoteric writers and psychic researchers who shared
the hypothesis that clairvoyants and spirit mediums were distinguished
by their peculiarly enhanced faculties of perception. Such humans, it was
proposed, possessed unique biological equipment comparable to that of
advanced scientific visualization equipment, such as Crookes tubes, high-
speed camera shutters, and orthochromatic photographic plates that were
insensitive to visible light.13 Second-generation Theosophists Charles
Media History 17, no. 4 (2011): 345–58. On the impact of radiography on the history of medicine,
see Monika Dommann, Durchsicht, Einsicht, Vorsicht: Eine Geschichte der Röntgenstrahlen,
1896–1963 (Zürich, 2003).
11. See, among others, Mary Jo Nye, “N-Rays: An Episode in the History and Psychology of
Science,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 11, no. 1 (1980): 125–56 and “Gustave Le Bon’s
Black Light: A Study in Physics and Philosophy in France at the Turn of the Century,” Historical
Studies in the Physical Sciences 4 (Jan. 1974): 163–95.
12. Henri Antoine Jules-Bois, “L’Âme scientifique,” La Revue Spirite 39 (June 1896): 355;
quoted in Sabine Flach, “Thinking about/on Thinking: Observations on the Thought
Photography of the Early Twentieth Century,” Configurations 18 (Fall 2010): 451.
13. See, for instance, P. Bloche, “Les Rayons cathodiques et la lumière astrale,” La Revue
Spirite 4 (Nov. 1897): 669. Speculation about the difference between the optical capacities
of spirit mediums and those of “ordinary” eyes was a recurring topic in both psychical and
occultist literature of the period. See, for instance, M. F-J Pillet, “Les Erreurs de l’œil,” Annales

Leadbeater and Annie Besant (whose work was widely familiar to early
twentieth-century French occultists) similarly took advantage of the con-
ceptual resources of new wave and ray discoveries to buttress their own ef-
forts to visualize and record information about “the subtle forces by which
the soul . . . expresses itself,” although, they hastened to add, the work of
their scientific contemporaries was “necessarily imperfect . . ., a physical
photographic camera and sensitive plates not being ideal instruments for
astral research.”14
With these words, Leadbeater and Besant gave voice to what was in fact
a widespread ambivalence among occultists regarding scientific evidence
and especially the instrumental mediation of invisible dimensions of the
universe. In agreement with “mainstream” science researchers, esoteric
writers understood X-radiation to point to a new frontier of visualiza-
tion—one defined by what Kelley Wilder has called the power of “pene-
trative observation”15—that raised serious ontological questions about the
relationship between instrumentation and the occult. Among both psy-
chic researchers and esoteric occultists the photographic medium in par-
ticular seemed key to this emerging terrain of possibility for rendering
visible the invisible. If some, like Leadbeater and Besant, were hesitant to
endorse photography as a viable tool of esoteric revelation, preferring in-
stead to trust only their native powers of clairvoyant perception, others
saw an important opportunity to produce visible evidence that would
confirm long-held understandings of occult phenomena. “Occultism de-
mands photographs!” cried one article published in a 1908 edition of the
spiritist journal La Paix Universelle.16
From their very beginnings, it should be recalled, photographic instru-
ments performed a range of functions: to represent, to detect, to measure,
to archive, and to extend the range of the visible in order to produce new
types of observables. These hybrid functions informed the use of pho-
tography in a wide range of social and cultural domains, not least in the
des Sciences Psychiques 11 (May–June 1901): 129–47, and anon., “Les Yeux des mediums,” Annales
des Sciences Psychiques 15 (Jan. 1905): 46–47.
14. Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater, Thought-Forms (London, 1901), pp. 2–3.
Compare Leadbeater, Man Visible and Invisible: Examples of Different Types of Men as Seen by
Means of Trained Clairvoyance (London, 1902). On the connection between Leadbeater and
Besant and French psychical research, see Flach, “Thinking about/on Thinking,” pp. 449–51.
15. Kelley Wilder, Photography and Science (London, 2009), p. 50.
16. A. Bouvier, “L’Occultisme demande des photographes,” La Paix Universelle, 15–31
Mar. 1908, pp. 1–4. Occult endorsements of photography had already been in circulation for some
time. See, for instance, the extensive discussion of the merits of photography for manifesting
pictorially occult phenomena by the influential fin-de-siècle French occultist, Papus [Gérard
Encausse], Les Rayons invisibles et les dernières expériences d’Eusapia devant l’occultisme (Tours,
1896).

incorporation of the photographic apparatus into the work of scientific
visualization. Historians of science have established in detail how, from
its inception in the mid-nineteenth century, the photographic camera was
hailed as a medium uniquely suited to free scientifically minded observers
from artistic contamination, replacing the subjective vision of the human
eye with a mechanical means of documenting visible and even normally
invisible things.17 In William Henry Fox Talbot’s prescient formulation,
“the eye of the camera would see plainly where the human eye would find
nothing but darkness.”18 This propensity for seeing plainly would place the
photographic camera among a larger class of inscription instruments that
appeared to speak “nature’s own language” and thereby served as guaran-
tors of objective truth.19
As the century progressed the assumption that the photographic ap-
paratus constituted an ideal observer and that its medium of inscription,
the photosensitive plate, could provide a direct index of external reality
became ever more firmly tied to a growing appreciation that the reality
to which photography pointed was inaccessible to even the most highly
trained observers. Thanks to improvements in photosensitive plates (such
as the innovation of the gelatin silver bromide process), ever-faster shutter
speeds, and magnesium-based flash lighting, it had become possible to
photographically capture an expanding universe of phenomena that radi-
cally transcended the visual terrain of “ordinary” perception: the minutiae
of a pedestrian’s gait; the bodily agitations of a hysterical patient in a state
of crisis; a sequence of solar protuberances; the precise moment when
a lightning bolt strikes; the invisibly slow movement of certain physical
bodies over extended periods of time; and so on.20 New precision instru-
17. See, for instance, Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science, ed. Ann Thomas
(New Haven, Conn., 1997), and Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in
Victorian Science (Baltimore, 2005).
18. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London, 1844), p. 30; quoted in Wilder,
Photography and Science, p. 19.
19. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations, no. 40
(Fall 1992): 116.
20. See Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation
of Connective Phases of Animal Movements (Philadelphia, 1887); Iconographie photographique
de la Salpêtrière, ed. Paul Regnard Bourneville and Jean Martin Charcot (Paris, 1878); and
Étienne-Jules Marey, La Machine animale: Locomotion terrestre et sérienne (Paris, 1878). A rich
secondary literature has explored this topic. See especially Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention
de l’hystérie: Charcot et l’iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (Paris, 1982); Marta Braun
and Elizabeth Whitcombe, “Marey, Muybridge, and Londe: The Photography of Pathological
Locomotion,” History of Photography 23, no. 3 (1999): 218–24; Braun, Picturing Time: The Work
of Étienne-Jules Marey, 1830–1904 (Chicago, 1994); Joel Snyder, “Visualization and Visibility,” in
Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Galison (New York, 1998), pp. 379–97;
Ulrich Baer, “Photography and Hysteria: Toward a Poetics of the Flash,” Spectral Evidence:

ments were thus capable of generating visualizations of operations that
occurred outside the sensory realm in the form of photographs, curvilin-
ear transcriptions, and other graphic representations that did not simply
extend or improve upon what could otherwise be seen by trained observ-
ers. Rather, they manifested pictorially a reality that was otherwise impos-
sible to perceive.21 As Joel Snyder has put it, the reliability of mechanically
generated visualizations could no longer be established with recourse to
“a human arbitrator, no matter how exquisitely sensitive or impartial. Ques
tions about the accuracy of these data [could] be resolved only by ap-
pealing to other, perhaps even more refined mechanical instruments.”22
Scientific photographs thus increasingly came to be understood not as
documents of things already available to (trained) observers but rather as
technologically mediated conditions of vision itself—images that cannot
be detached from the apparatus that generates them.
The promise of instruments to register a reality that could not other-
wise be known was central to the enterprise of psychic research in this
period. In fact, Ochorowicz’s study of Little Stasia’s self-portrait and the
subsequent experiments he designed in order to document and explain
the conditions of possibility for spirits to interact with the world known
to ordinary perception rested on what by the second decade of the twen-
tieth century had already developed into a vibrant tradition of psychical
research incorporating all the latest available technical instruments and
procedures for registering the insensible world of spirits and their atten-
dant sources of mysterious energy. Alongside innovations in photographic
apparatus, psychic researchers developed and came to depend on a wide
range of graphing and recording instruments, such as the biomètre, first
introduced in the mid-1890s by Hippolyte Baraduc, a medical specialist in
The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), pp. 25–60; Jimena Canales, A Tenth
of a Second: A History (Chicago, 2009); Phillip Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the
Instantaneous Photography Movement (Oxford, 2003); Peter Geimer, “Picturing the Black Box:
On Blanks in Nineteenth-Century Paintings and Photographs,” Science in Context 17 (Dec. 2004):
467–501; and Wilder, “Visualizing Radiation: The Photographs of Henri Becquerel,” in Histories
of Scientific Observation, ed. Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Chicago, 2011), pp. 349–68. On
advances in photographic chemistry during this period, which were equally crucial for the
development of “instantaneous photography,” see Wilder, Photography and Science, p. 53.
21. On the scientific visualization of normally invisible or nonvisual phenomena,
see, among others, Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited, ed. Catelijne Coopmans
(Cambridge, Mass., 2014), and Visual Cultures of Science: Rethinking Representational Practices
in Knowledge Building and Science Communication, ed. Luc Pauwels (Hanover, N.H., 2006). On
the relationship between instrumented observation and psychic research in the early twentieth
century, see also Richard Noakes, “The ‘World of the Infinitely Little’: Connecting Physical
and Psychical Realities Circa 1900,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 39 (Sept. 2008):
323–34.
22. Snyder, “Visualization and Visibility,” p. 380.

nervous disorders at Salpêtrière hospital in Paris and a key figure strad-
dling the worlds of occultism and psychic science in France. The biomètre
was a relatively simple device consisting of a needle suspended by a thread
within a glass jar, the movements of which, Baraduc contended, indexed
a subject’s “vital state”; as the subject’s hands approached the region of
the jar, the needle was noted to react to the atmospheric redistribution of
“primordial fluidic perturbations of the vital body.”23 Baraduc’s biomètre
was in fact only one of several measuring devices proclaimed to be ca-
pable of detecting hitherto unknown subtle energy forces. For his part,
long before his experiments with Tomczyk, Ochorowicz had invented the
hypnoscope, an instrument consisting of a tubular magnet that could be
placed around the finger of a person in order to detect varying degrees of
susceptibility to hypnosis; in his view, the hypnoscope registered effects
that could not be accounted for by the work of hypnotic suggestion itself,
thereby pointing to the existence of “the substratum of another action,
which is so weak . . . that it hides itself from our instruments, and exhib-
its itself only through the intermedium of exceptionally sensitive nervous
systems.”24
But for Ochorowicz, Baraduc, and many other researchers of this pe-
riod, the most promising technologies for detecting and recording fluid
energies were photographic and photoemulsive in nature. The photo-
graphic apparatus seemed uniquely capable of generating both an iconic
and an indexical relationship with its referent and thus offered a source
of reliable visual information with a richness of detail unparalleled by
other instruments and procedures of scientific observation (this is a mat
ter to which I shall return at the end of the essay). Baraduc himself was
widely celebrated for having photographically captured a range of in-
visible radiations surrounding botanical specimens, human fingertips,
and other materials. Experimental photographic techniques (such as the
application of electrical discharges directly onto photosensitive plates)
were developed and incorporated into the work of a number of research-
ers devoted to the study of psychic and occult phenomena, including
Albert de Rochas, Louis Darget, Jules Bernard Luys, Émile David, Ja-
kob von Narkiewicz-Jodko, Fernand Girod, and Emmanuel-Napoléon
23. Hippolyte Baraduc, La Force vitale: Notre Corps vital fluidique et sa formule biomètrique
(Paris, 1893), p. 162. See also Baraduc, Les Vibrations de la vitalité humaine: Méthode biométrique
appliquée aux sensitifs et aux névrosés (Paris, 1904).
24. Ochorowicz, “A New Hypnoscope,” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 1
(Feb. 1885): 281. For discussion of Ochorowicz’s use of this apparatus, see Alvarado, “Modern
Animal Magnetism: The Work of Alexandre Baréty, Émile Boirac, and Julien Ochorowicz,”
Australian Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis 37 (Nov. 2009): 75–89.

Santini; collectively, they were responsible for producing a genre of
photographically mediated visualizations that came to be known as ef-
fluviographie, or photographie de la pensée, which purported to reveal
the radiant exteriorizations of diverse vital energies, dreams, conscious
thoughts, fluctuations in emotional and nervous states, and even—as Ba
raduc proclaimed to have achieved—photographic evidence of the flight
of the soul from the body at the precise moment of death.25 By the early
twentieth century, such efforts to document photographically extraor-
dinary psychic phenomena reached one significant apogee with the pro-
duction of widely reported pictures of ectoplasms: remarkable and, to
many observers, shocking and outlandish excretions discharged from
the orifices of mediums during moments of spirit possession. Ecto-
plasms were said to take various shapes and could even bear the imprint
of human faces, but their materialization was so evanescent they could
only be properly witnessed, examined, and preserved photographically,
as Charles Richet had proclaimed to have achieved in his pioneering
1905 study of the ectoplasmic projections of the medium Eva Carrière
and as Albert von Schrenck-Notzing further developed in his magnum
opus on the topic, Phenomena of Materialization (1914).26 As all these
25. See, among others, Baraduc, Méthode de radiographie humaine: La Courbe cosmique:
Photographie des vibrations de l’éther (Paris, 1897) and L’Âme Humaine: Ses Mouvements, ses
lumières, et l’iconographie de l’invisible fluidique, nouvelle édition (Paris, 1911); Jules Bernard
Luys and Émile David, “Photographie des étincelles électriques dérivant soit de l’électricité
dynamique (bobine de Ruhmkorff), soit de l’électricité statique (machine de Wimshurst),”
Société de Biologie, 8 May 1897, pp. 449–53; Jules Bernard Luys and Émile David, “Note sur
l’enregistrement photographique des effluves qui se dégagent des extrémités des doigts et du
fond de l’oeil de l’être vivant, à l’état physiologique et à l’état pathologique,” Société de Biologie,
29 May 1897, pp. 515–19; Albert de Rochas, L’Extériorisation de la sensibilité: Étude expérimentale
et historique (Paris, 1895); Emmanuel-Napoléon Santini, Photographie des effluves humains:
historique, discussion, etc. (Paris, 1898); and Fernand Girod, Pour photographier les rayons
humains: Exposé historique et pratique de toutes les méthodes concourant à la mise en valeur du
rayonnement fluidique humain (Paris, 1912). A vibrant secondary literature has documented
the development of effluviography in fin-de-siècle France. See Flach, “Thinking about/on
Thinking,” pp. 441–58, and Chéroux, “Photographs of Fluids: An Alphabet of Invisible Rays,” in
The Perfect Medium, pp. 114–25. On Narkiewicz-Jodko’s photographic experiments, see Krauss,
Beyond Light and Shadow, pp. 31–34.
26. See Charles Richet, Les Phénomènes dits de matérialisation (Paris, 1906); Charles Richet
Traité de métapsychique (Paris, 1922), p. 581; and Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Materialisations-
Phaenomene: Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der mediumistischen Teleplastie (Munich, 1914).
Another key figure in the study of ectoplasm was Gustave Geley, who participated in many
of the early séances with Eva C. and who went on to found the Institut Métaphysique
International, the key French organization for psychic research in the 1920s. See Gustave Geley,
L’Ectoplasmie et la clairvoyance (Paris, 1924). For a brilliant analysis of ectoplasm research and
its connections with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century biology and art, see Robert
Michael Brain, “Materialising the Medium: Ectoplasm and the Quest for Supra-Normal Biology
in Fin-de-Siècle Science and Art,” in Vibratory Modernism, ed. Anthony Enns and Shelley

examples indicate, as an instrument of documentation, visualization,
and pictorial manifestation of occult forces, the photographic apparatus
stood at the very heart of psychic sciences and their exchanges with es-
oteric thought and practice, making it seem impossible in this historical
moment to encounter the occult without instrumentation. The inverse,
it seems, is also true; it was impossible to conceive of instrumental me-
diation without reference to the occult.
Let us return to the research Ochorowicz conducted in the aftermath

of Little Stasia’s momentous, if controversial, photographic self-portrait.
As Little Satia had explained to the doctor, “ ‘I photographed myself . . .
in order to give you proof that I am not just some sort of “force” ema-
nating from the medium, but indeed that I am an independent entity’ ”
(“PL,” p. 198). But what sort of entity was she? Ochorowicz’s first step
consisted of inspecting the photograph with a magnifying glass, upon
which he made a curious discovery. He noticed that the figure of Lit-
tle Stasia was bordered by “a series of tiny, corpuscular spheres of light,
juxtaposed to one another, some brighter than others, some seemingly
glowing by their own light or by reflection of another light source. . . .
What could these be?” he asked (“PL,” p. 198). Upon questioning Little
Stasia, he learned that the spirit was herself a medium in and through
which other, even subtler distributions of energy might come into view.
“ ‘What is this bright border surrounding your figure?’ ” Ochorowicz
asked. “ ‘I don’t know how to explain that,’ ” Little Stasia replied. “ ‘They
are like small balls, without which I cannot take form. I am composed of a
sort of vapor, which is condensed in my form and which also surrounds
me; the more rarefied the vapor, the more I remain invisible, the more
condensed, the more my figure takes shape, and also the more I can in-
teract with material objects.’ ” “ ‘So you are also the source of the light
that enabled this photograph? Was this light simply an act of your own
willpower?’ ” “ ‘Yes, in a way, by a willpower that produces a sort of phos-
phorescence in the air’ ” (“PL,” p. 199). Ochorowicz pressed Little Stasia
for further details about this mysterious light source, to which the spirit
responded, “ ‘I cannot explain it according to your wishes, but I could
demonstrate this light for you. Would you like me to?’ ” “ ‘I couldn’t ask
for more!’ ” (“PL,” p. 235).
Trower (New York, 2013), pp. 115–44. On the relationship between ectoplasms and the history
of photography, see also Karl Schoonover, “Ectoplasms, Evanescence, and Photography,” Art
Journal 62 (Autumn 2003): 30–43.

Thus began a research program that would preoccupy Ochorowicz for
nearly two years, reports of which dominated the pages of the Annales and
were discussed more widely among nonexpert followers of psychic re-
search, including many commentators and readers of esoteric and occult
journals in which news of scientific discoveries was frequently reported
and debated. During this time, Ochorowicz reported having borne wit-
ness to a number of luminescent spectacles orchestrated by Little Stasia,
including bright flashes of light, tiny threads of energy emanating from
the medium’s fingertips, and dull glowing orbs of a mysterious energy
that floated gently around the room during séances. Some of these phe-
nomena were witnessed directly by Ochorowicz, while others came to be
known only when registered as actinic effects on photographic plates. In
one experiment conducted on 9 April 1909,
three cameras were set up in the middle of the room, near where
we were seated, without a table, in a circle forming a chain with the
medium. Given the position of the cameras and the poor lighting,
I did not believe that it would be possible to find any traces on the
photo plates. But when I developed them, a strange result obtained:
on all three plates, the effect of a flash of light is more or less visible.
In particular, what was unexpected was a bright curved line of light,
accompanied by a large irregularly shaped light and two smaller
points. But this line and these points, so brightly illuminated on the
plate, we did not see! None of those present remarked observing any
points or lines of light while we sat in the presence of Mlle Tomczyk.
[“PL,” p. 301]
A series of efforts ensued to capture these lights photographically, to

classify them, and to assign them meaning and purpose (fig. 2). Each ex-
periment seemed to evince new elemental properties, suggesting the need
for further investigation of a phenomenon that had initially seemed indi-
visible. One category of forces seemed to relate to Tomczyk’s telekinetic
powers, which seemed to involve the emanation of mysterious bands of
energy in straight lines that the medium could leverage in order to levitate
objects. Ochorowicz labeled these “rigid rays.” Albert von Schrenck Not-
zing, one of the witnesses to Ochorowicz’s experimental work, describes
these rigid rays as:
thread-like connections, which are formed between the fingers of the
medium when she brings her hands together. These may remain invis-
ible, and yet exert mechanical effects, as, for instance, by the motion
and raising of small objects without contact. When condensed, they

FIGURE 2 . Mediumnic lights. Reproduction courtesy of Harvard University Library.
are visible and can be photographed. The author was present in Paris
at such a sitting and can vouch for the accuracy of this observation.
Besides, it was successfully tested by several Commissions, composed
of photographic experts and savants.27
27. Albert von Schrenck Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the

Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics, trans. Edmund Edward Fournier D’Albe (London,
1923), p. 32. Schrenck Notzing was not the only enthusiastic supporter of Ochorowicz’s
photographic work; the Annales des Sciences Psychiques served as a forum for numerous letters
to the editor claiming to reproduce similar results utilizing techniques outlined in Ochorowicz’s
articles. See, for instance, Fernand Girod, Pour photographier les rayons humains, pp. 128–32, and

Tomczyk’s ability to transform this mysterious energy source from
a state of latent invisibility to one of active, visible force became one of
the central preoccupations of Ochorowicz’s research agenda. “What was
especially interesting for us,” he writes, “is the fact that [Tomczyk’s per-
formance of] levitation is accompanied by certain, absolutely novel lu-
minescent phenomena, which remain completely invisible to the eye but
which are perfectly capable of being registered photographically” (“PL,”
p. 305).28 Moreover, once they had been enlarged, the photographs revealed
swellings and nodes along the threads, like the waves of a vibrating cord,
further convincing Ochorowicz that he had truly discovered an entirely
new and as yet undocumented source of energy in the form of “a light
which we have given the name ‘mediumnic’ although we have no knowl-
edge of it and cannot place it in any category of known light sources.”29
In another experiment, conducted on 14 April 1909, Ochorowicz re-
ports having “obtained one of the most important photographs, long de-
sired on my part, showing a ‘current’ of light between the thumbs of the
medium” (“PL,” p. 337). The opportunity to photograph this evasive phe-
nomenon occurred without warning in the midst of another experiment.
As Ochorowicz recounts, “I had prepared a 13 X 18 cm plate, and placed on
top of it a metal grill, which I supposed would allow us to see more clearly
the rigid rays emanating from the medium’s hand.” But at the moment
when the medium placed her hands on either side of the plate, Little Sta-
sia interjected: “ ‘I can’t guarantee any current will appear, because there
is not enough force present at this moment. However, I could show you
anon., “Les Dernières Experiences avec Mlle Stanislawa Tomczyk,” Annales des Sciences Psychiques
19 (Sept. 1909): 287–88.
28. The existence of invisible lines of force was also widely familiar to psychic researchers
and séance attendees long before Ochorowicz began his experiments with Tomczyk. Numerous
reports were made of mediums, including (but not only) Eusapia Palladino, who, like Tomczyk,
was capable of producing near invisible, spiderlike threads that could reach distant objects in
the room and set them in motion. Explanations had been offered to account for the ability of
such mediums to “exteriorize motricity” and thus perform their remarkable acts of telekinesis;
see Rochas, L’Extériorisation de la motricité (Paris, 1906). As early as 1875, Francis Gerry Fairfield
had proposed the theory that spirit mediums were uniquely empowered to harness what he
called a “nerve-aura” that surrounds all organic structures, through which they could receive
otherwise inaccessible sensory impressions and which they were able to manipulate into desired
shapes (Francis Gerry Fairfield, Ten Years with Spiritual Mediums: An Inquiry Concerning
the Etiology of Certain Phenomena Called Spiritual [New York, 1875], p. 120). Also similar to
Ochorowicz’s study of Tomczyk was the report of Karl Blacher of Riga, who had studied the
medium, Frau Ideler, who was likewise capable of spinning threads in order to accomplish
her telekinetic feats, pulling on these nearly invisible lines of force from the inner side of her
hand with her fingertips; see Nandor Fodor, These Mysterious People (London, 1934), p. 238.
For comparison, see Michael Faraday’s engagement with spiritual phenomena, as discussed by
Bernard Geoghegan in this issue.
29. Quoted in Rolf H. Krauss, Beyond Light and Shadow (Munich, 1995), p. 78.

FIGURE 3 . Photograph of the mediumnic field, revealing a metal grill and the fingertips of
the medium Stanislava Tomczyk. Reproduction courtesy of Harvard University Library.
something else quite pretty.’ ” “ ‘What, then?’ ” “ ‘An invisible flash. Maybe
it will also reveal some traces of the current you seek, but I can’t be sure’ ”
(“PL,” p. 338). Ochorowicz took up Little Stasia’s invitation and conducted
an extended photographic session, setting up his instruments according
to the spirit’s instruction. Upon developing the plates after the session was
concluded, Ochorowicz bore witness to the trace of a current whose ra-
diant pattern set into relief the outlines of figures representing the medi-
um’s fingertips, as well as the metal grill that had been placed between her
hands (fig. 3).
Further investigations were devoted to breaking down these various
rays, chains, and gaseous masses of energy in order to isolate their com-
ponent elements. The avenue Ochorowicz most energetically pursued was
related to Tomoczyk’s apparent ability, in cooperation with her control
spirit, to produce dull glowing orbs of light—presumably similar in na-
ture to those tiny spheres that Ochorowicz had first observed in Little Sta-
sia’s photograph, which by 1910 he had designated by the name Xx-rays.
As Ochorowicz explained, these rays possessed unique properties; in con-
trast with the rigid rays, Xx-rays seemed to “have no mechanical effect, but
a very strong chemical, actinic one, and a power of penetration exceed-
ing not only that of Röntgen’s X-rays but also that of gamma rays from

F I G U R E 4 . Variously sized spherical formations produced by Xx-rays. Reproduction

Courtesy of Harvard University Library.
radioactive substances. They are always invisible, though they emerge

clearly on photographic plates in the form of geometric spheres”(fig. 4).30
Over the course of the following year and a half, Ochorowicz conducted
a great number of experiments designed to confirm the existence of these
manifestations and to continue to document their characteristics. Some of
these involved the use of a gold-leaf electroscope to determine whether any
of the medium’s currents were capable of traveling through diverse media,
including ones known to be poor conductors, such as rubber, hard wood,
and resin. Such tests, Ochorowicz was convinced, confirmed that the me-
dium’s powers could not be explained in terms of what was then known
about the properties of electromagnetic radiation.31 In other experiments,
he compared the effects of placing the medium’s hands directly on the
photographic plates or holding them at varying distances. He placed the
plates in boxes composed of different materials, including black or white
cardboard, wood, and even lead, a material already well established to be
of sufficient density to fully shield the plates from radioactive effects. But
Tomczyk’s rays seemed able to penetrate even the lead shield in order to
produce actinic effects on the photosensitive plates.32
Over the course of 1911, Ochorowicz produced a series of photographs
that he considered among his crowning achievements. They purported
to register the medium’s astral double, an ethereal force that could leave
30. Ochorowicz, “Les Rayons rigides et les rayons Xx: Etudes expérimentales,” Annales des
Sciences Psychiques 20 (Apr. 1910): 98.
31. See ibid., p. 339.
32. See ibid., pp. 338, 358–62.

FIGURE 5 . A “fluidic hand” of the medium Stanislava Tomczyk ‘s double. Reproduction

Courtesy of Harvard University Library.
the medium’s body and materialize itself sufficiently to leave its image
on a photographic plate. Such a partial materialization, in the form of a
“fluidic hand,” first took place during a séance held on 4 April 1911 (fig. 5).33
33. Ochorowicz, “Radiographie des mains,” Annales des Sciences Psychiques 21 (Oct. 1911): 296.

It happened unexpectedly during an attempt to capture Xx-rays when the
somnambulant had suggested that a plate be held in front of her. “ ‘What
fun,’ ” Little Stasia interjected in the middle of this experiment. “ ‘I see a
shadow of my hand there.’ ”34 To Ochorowicz’s amazement, the developed
plate showed a misshapen hand with a blurred shadow. Through suc-
cessive attempts, a series of well-materialized, visible hands were photo-
graphed by these astral projections directly onto the photographic plates.
Whether these astral projections were a product of Tomczyk’s native
willpower or emerged with the added help of Little Stasia remained un-
clear to Ochorowicz. But the photo documentation of this ethereal phe-
nomenon did provide what he considered to be incontestable evidence
that the material world as we normally see it constitutes only a pale surface
covering a vast universe of invisible fluids and forces that defied mechan-
ical conceptions of location, movement, and interactivity. Indeed, despite
the distance between Tomczyk and the photographic plate, the manifes-
tation of an astrally projected hand was treated by Ochorowicz as the
making of a photogram: an image produced through direct contact be-
tween the object represented and the sensitive emulsions lying on the sur-
face of the plate. Ochorowicz had thus produced in a single picture a visual
manifestation of the mysterious Xx-rays and at the same time rendered an
image through this same radiant medium. Formed without the work of
human eyes or even their mechanical corollary, a camera lens, this picture
was treated by Ochorowicz not as a representation of Tomczyk’s hand but
rather as an indexical sign: a chemical reaction produced directly on the
surface of a photoemulsive plate that bore the traces of a hidden universe
of fluid energies defying the known mechanical laws governing of the lo-
cation, movement, and interactivity of material objects.
Not unlike Becquerel’s famous photographs of radioactive emissions
from uranium salts that had been produced to much fanfare in the late
1890s, Ochorowicz’s photographs seemed to manifest themselves spon-
taneously—hidden powers that appeared suddenly out of the dark.35 But
unlike Bequerel’s images and many other scientific documents of nor-
mally invisible phenomena, Ochorowicz’s photographs seemed far from
spontaneous; their manifestation depended on the copresence and col-
laborative work of a spirit agent, photographic (and other) instruments,
and conditions of controlled observation managed by the scientist him-
self. For Ochorowicz, the most compelling grounds for accepting Little
Stasia’s role in the making of these images may very well have been the
34. Ibid., p. 301.

35. On Becquerel’s photography, see Wilder, “Visualizing Radiation,” pp. 355–61.

inclusion of photographs that depicted a human form. Indeed, as already
evident in Little Stasia’s self-portrait, the most dramatic confirmations
of the existence of a hidden universe of occult energies seemed to come
in human form, if not as a full frontal portrait, then at least in the form
of a hand. If nothing else, the image of a hand served as a token for Little
Stasia’s indispensable guiding presence in the production of many if not
all the visual effects that Ochorowicz managed to register with his photo-
graphic apparatus. In this sense, Ochorowicz’s explorations of the occult
come full circle. Their photographic manifestations begin and end with
the mediating presence of a spirit agent, a figure whose unpredictable and
ungovernable interventions provided the very occasion for Ochorowicz’s
“discoveries” and without whom Tomczyk, the medium, would have
nothing to mediate.
The reproduction of Tomczyk’s astrally projected hand serves as a

fitting bookend to Little Stasia’s self-portrait, which had first instigated
Ochorowicz’s photographic experiments involving Tomczyk and her con-
trol spirit. Indeed, 1911–12 appears to mark the end of Ochorowicz’s re-
search involving Tomczyk, and, to my knowledge, from that point until
his death in 1917 the Polish scientist wrote nothing more on this topic.
Why this was the case is not clear, but one possible explanation may be
related to efforts around this same time to publicly expose Tomczyk as
a fraud. Already in 1910, the British magician William S. Marriott had
demonstrated his ability to replicate one of Tomczyk’s best-known feats,
the levitation of a glass beaker with the use of a nearly invisible thread.36
Such “exposures” were enough to satisfy many of Tomczyk’s critics that the
medium was likely a fraud. By association, one might surmise, many were
encouraged to reject Ochorowicz’s findings as the poisoned fruit of such
deception, and his reports could now be dismissed as pseudoscientific
speculations based on poor powers of observation, shoddy experimental
design, and perhaps even gullibility.
Accusations of fraud in the spiritualist séance chamber were of course
nothing new, but their gathering weight had a significant impact on the
evolution of psychic research over the course of the twentieth century.
In Ochorowicz’s time, the gamble of psychic research was to consider it
legitimate to postulate the existence of spirits and other immaterial forces
at work in the universe and to produce evidence of such phenomena
through the controlled observation of spirit mediums, often with the help
of specialized instruments, not least photographic ones. But in the years
36. See William S. Marriott, Pearson’s Magazine (London) (June 1910): 615.

following Ochorowicz’s work the precarious intersection between pro-
fessional psychology, energy physics, and psychic research would break
apart. Under the sway of a new generation of practitioners of experimen-
tal parapsychology—most notably, Joseph Banks Rhine at Duke Univer-
sity—faith in the project to produce visible evidence of spirit phenomena
ran out of steam, and the underlying fluid- and aura-based theories of
the connections among mind, body, and environment were repudiated as
unlikely explanations of paranormal occurrences such as telekinesis or
extrasensory perception. In Rhine’s view, the mind was the unambiguous
causative agent underlying all such phenomena: an axiom that rendered
efforts to document subtle fluids and electromagnetic forces unneces-
sary, if not wrong-headed.37 On the other side of the equation, over the
course of the first half of the twentieth century, the discipline of pro-
fessional psychology progressively distanced itself from what was retro-
actively perceived as an embarrassing dalliance with fluid and radiant
models of psychic force understood to be based on outdated theoreti-
cal postulates, such as those of telepathy or luminiferous ether, or, even
worse, on an indulgence in mysticism and occult metaphysics. Having
banished occult phenomena from the “real world” and having restricted
the experience of encountering them to the prison house of the individual
psyche, professional psychologists could now interpret phenomena of the
sort documented by Ochorowicz and his contemporaries as products of
misperception, faulty inference, or psychotic projection.
But what remains to be said about the photographs that Ochorowicz
produced? Are they simply to be taken as artifacts of a bygone, primitive
form of scientific reasoning based on unreliable tools of data gathering?
Such a conclusion, however tempting, slides too quickly over the ambigu-
ous notion of indexical signification in which the realism of photographic
images is supposedly implicated.38 As opposed to iconic or symbolic
meaning, indexicality, we should recall, has always carried with it an un-
clear ontological status. Is an index simply something that points toward
its referent, as in the case of a whistle blowing to indicate a departing
train? Or is it a material vestige, a trace of direct physical contact, as in the
37. Rhine’s experimental work during the 1930s is summarized in Joseph Banks Rhine and
Joseph G. Pratt, Parapsychology, Frontier Science of the Mind: A Survey of the Field, the Methods,
and the Facts of ESP and PK Research (Springfield, Ill., 1957).
38. On photographic indexicality, see Mary Ann Doane, “Indexicality: Trace and Sign” and
“The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” Differences 18, no. 1 (2006): 1–6, 128–52;
Geimer, “Image as Trace: Speculations about an Undead Paradigm,” Differences 18, no. 1 (2006):
7–28; and Gunning, “What’s the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs,” in Still/Moving:
Between Cinema and Photography, ed. Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (Durham, N.C., 2008),
pp. 23–40.

case of a footprint left in the sand or a weathervane rotating at the mo-
ment of a gust of wind? To what extent must the index partake in the real-
ity of its referent in order to perform the work of pointing towards? As far
as photographic images are concerned, claims of indexical reference rest
on assumptions about the physical relationship between the object pho-
tographed and the image rendered on a photographic plate, whether this
is achieved through direct contact or through the reflection of light from
distant bodies that reaches the plate through the filters of a camera lens and
diaphragm. Sensu stricto, therefore, the indexicality of a photograph in-
heres in the generation of a chemical effect, not in the iconic form of the
image produced. As Peter Geimer has pointed out, however, the gap be-
tween image and object is not closed by describing photographic pictures
as products of the interaction of silver salts with a source of light; doing
so merely transfers the problem of pictorial manifestation to another level
of technical mediation, embedded in another family of metaphors, in this
case, ones of chemical transmutation.39
Of course, the apparently indexical status of photographs is further
complicated by the fact that such images need to be legible in order for
viewers to be able to perform the work of linking them to the objects to
which they are understood to refer. By transferring the power of percep-
tion to visualization instruments, human observers are thus invariably
confronted with an epistemological dilemma. There is always a risk that
the objects we encounter might turn out to be nothing more than artifacts
of the instrumentation process itself—effects that do not refer to the phe-
nomenon presumed to be under scrutiny and perhaps existing nowhere
outside the instruments. In this regard, making photographs legible de-
pends on a host of decisions and interventions at the level of production
but also at the level of interpretation as carried out by trained observers
who must know how to weed out meaningless noise in order to retain
the good data: the images that confirm the consistency of any given in-
dexical claim. In this sense, photographs are always manipulated, and it
is only through their manipulation that the stratum of indexical signifi-
cation can be reached. Rearrangements in the photographic setup—the
chemical composition of different light-sensitive emulsions, the location
of objects to be photographed, or the insertion of screens or other mate-
rials between object and plate—demonstrate that photography is never
spontaneous but rather emerges as a product of interaction of multiple
39. See Geimer, “Image as Trace,” p. 17. Compare Gunning, “What’s the Point of an Index?”
p. 40.

forms of work, including those of registration, illustration, observation,
and experimentation.40
Such claims, well ensconced in the history and theory of photography
in particular and scientific visualization more generally, might lead us to
conclude that Ochorowicz’s photographs are indexical not in the sense that
they point to a reality outside the apparatus of photographic visualization
but rather to a reality that emerges only within the photographic setup
itself. From this it would seem to follow that the photographs Ochorowicz
produced are best treated as testaments to the technological precondi-
tions for observation or to the ideas in the minds of Ochorowicz and his
credulous peers rather than to a hitherto occulted external reality that has
reached its startling moment of revelation.
But there remains another aspect of indexicality that needs to be ad-
dressed here, namely, what Mary Ann Doane has described as the “dis-
concerting closeness” of the index to its object—a closeness that lends
indexical signification an “eeriness and uncanniness” surpassing the ide-
ology of realism in which claims about indexically referenced objects are
customarily embedded.41 Ochorowicz’s photographs, I propose, epitomize
this sense of uncanniness precisely because of their ambiguous location
in between technologically mediated observation and pictorial manifes-
tation. As typical of most other objects of knowledge produced by and
for psychic research, these images greatly trouble established relationships
between what is scientifically agreed upon as known and what occulted
realities have yet to be revealed. Those relationships, we might further con
cede, persist over time in no small measure because they are enforced by
institutional fiat and by ideological domination of particular modes of
scientific reasoning over the cosmos as a whole.
In a provocative project to rethink the position of scientific knowledge
with respect to the reality of the cosmos, Bruno Latour has recently chal-
lenged the assumption that occult beings cannot be found in the “real
world,” a claim predicated on having first “strip[ped] invisible beings of
all external existence . . . locating them only in the twists and turns of the
self, the unconscious, or the neurons.”42 For Latour, occult entities can
never be fully accounted for by scientific investigation and theorization
because they are made present to us via more than one mode of existence,
a term he uses to refer to the diverse conditions of veridiction and felicity
40. This point is wonderfully made by Wilder with regard to Becquerel’s efforts to
photograph spontaneous radiation; see Wilder, “Visualizing Radiation,” p. 364.
41. Doane, “Indexicality,” p. 2.
42. Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns,
trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 2013), p. 185; hereafter abbreviated I.

that shape the cosmos as a whole (see I, pp. 17–18). Rather than assuming
that modern science has successfully monopolized access to the reality
of the external world (or, in the case of psychology, the interior world of
the mind), Latour calls for a radical revision of the terms on which di-
verse external as well internal beings might be understood. Of particular
importance for this project to map and understand these diverse modes
of existence are the nodal points Latour calls “crossings,” in which two or
more discrete modes intersect, and, as a result, the beings in question are
to be judged according to one or another of what might otherwise seem
to be incommensurable criteria of specification (I, p. 63). In this scheme,
the occult beings that Ochorowicz had encountered, documented, and
classified over the course of his research with Tomczyk and her control
spirit, Little Stasia—invisible threads, mysterious glowing orbs, astrally
projected hands, and remarkable photographs, beginning with Little Sta-
sia’s self-portrait—might best be thought of as entities occupying pre-
cisely such a crossing among a much larger, more labile, and anarchic class
of phenomena that can only be observed through the mediation of special
techniques and instruments charged with the task of transforming things
from their hidden, invisible, or nonvisual state into visual representations.
Such images do not reflect reality but rather construct that reality, which
is not to say that, as constructions, they are purely imaginary. On the con-
trary, we ought to bear in mind, all representational processes are based
on translations, conversions, fabrications, conceptual abstractions, and
classificatory techniques that intervene into the observation of objects,
subjecting them to long chains of preparatory and data-gathering proce-
dures, material constraints, and frameworks of interpretation.
Rather than assuming a priori that Ochorowicz’s encounter with occult
entities could have been nothing other than phantasmatic, and that the
evidence he produced could show us nothing other than the operating
characteristics of the instruments he incorporated into his (presumably
poorly designed) experimental practice, we might arrive at different con-
clusions if we considered adopting here a position of ontological plural-
ism. Such a pluralism may sound to some like a position of (hopelessly
naïve) relativism, but that indictment fails to understand the nature of
Latour’s more modest plea to temper the arrogant conviction on the part
of the moderns that we have already succeeded in adjudicating the reality
of the world and that all accounts that do not fit into that mold can be ex-
plained away as the problematic beliefs of others. Instead, ontological plu-
ralism “implies only that the sorting out [among all versions of existence,
good and bad, factitious and true] will have to take place, from now on, on
a level playing field . . . and we shall no longer be able to endow ourselves

with the astonishing facility of asserting that these particular beings exist
for sure while those others are, at best, mere ‘ways of speaking’ ” (I, p. 143).
In the spirit of such a leveling of the playing field, I propose that it is
in our collective interest to try to rescue Ochorowicz’s research and his
photographic discoveries from the retroactive gaze of a purified techno-
scientific practice that imagines itself as having been liberated from the
shackles of metaphysical speculation and pseudoscientific practice. Taken
on its own terms, Ochorowicz’s visual language of Xx-rays and medium-
nic lights points to a startling and unsettling intersection of competing
assumptions about experimental procedure and diverging conceptions of
what counts as evidence regarding the invisible and the terms on which it
can be made visible. On the one hand, we have the extraordinary powers
of reception and perception attributed to the medium Tomczyk and to the
supernatural presence of Little Stasia. On the other, we have the photo-
sensitive plates that registered phenomena only fleetingly available, if not
entirely invisible, to the naked eye. In Ochorowicz’s writings and in the
broader public culture of his day that conjunction of mediumnistic clair-
voyance and photography allowed each source of evidence to be inter-
preted by analogy with the other. That entanglement of (in)visible objects
and ways of seeing poses a deeper historiographic concern about how we
today might best understand the relationship between instrumentation
and the occult, a concern that first prompted the agenda of this present
collection of essays but that remains an unfinished task.


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Mediumnic Lights, Xx Rays, and the Spirit Who

In Paris, starting in March 1909, Julien Ochorowicz, codirector of the

Critical Inquiry 42 (Summer 2016)

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“Telepathy: Origins of Randomization in Experimental Design,” Isis 79 (Sept. 1988): 427–51;

J eremy S tolow is an associate professor in communication studies at

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To appreciate how a document such as Little Stasia’s self-portrait could

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Let us return to the research Ochorowicz conducted in the aftermath

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A series of efforts ensued to capture these lights photographically, to

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FIGURE 2 . Mediumnic lights. Reproduction courtesy of Harvard University Library.

27. Albert von Schrenck Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the

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F I G U R E 4 . Variously sized spherical formations produced by Xx-rays. Reproduction

radioactive substances. They are always invisible, though they emerge

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FIGURE 5 . A “fluidic hand” of the medium Stanislava Tomczyk ‘s double. Reproduction

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34. Ibid., p. 301.

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The reproduction of Tomczyk’s astrally projected hand serves as a

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