Auras

What it is

A field of coloured light said to surround the body, varying with health, emotion and spiritual condition, and readable by those with the sensitivity to see it.

The standard colour vocabulary — red for anger or vitality, blue for calm, yellow for intellect, murky grey or brown for illness — is remarkably consistent across modern sources, for a reason this article will get to.

Where it came from

Radiant light around holy figures is old in religious art: the Buddhist prabhāmaṇḍala, the Christian halo and mandorla, the Egyptian and Persian solar disc. But these are iconography — conventions for depicting sanctity — not records of people claiming to see coloured fields around their neighbours.

The modern aura is Theosophical and datable. Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant published Thought-Forms in 1901 and Man Visible and Invisible in 1902, with colour plates showing the aura in various emotional and spiritual states and a key assigning meanings to colours. That key is the direct ancestor of every aura chart in circulation. The consistency of the modern vocabulary is not independent corroboration by many seers; it is one source, copied.

Walter Kilner, a physician at St Thomas's Hospital, published The Human Atmosphere in 1911, claiming that a screen stained with dicyanin dye made the aura visible to ordinary observers. The effect was not replicated, and the likeliest explanation is that staring through a coloured filter produces afterimages.

Kirlian photography is often offered as proof and is not. Discovered by Semyon Kirlian in 1939, it places an object on a photographic plate in a high-voltage field and records the resulting corona discharge — a real, well-understood electrical phenomenon. The image varies with moisture, pressure, voltage, humidity and the gas present. A wet fingertip glows differently from a dry one. The famous "phantom leaf" effect, where a cut leaf supposedly shows its missing portion, has not reliably replicated and is attributable to residue and moisture on the plate.

How it is used

Aura reading, aura photography as a commercial service, and diagnostic claims in energy-healing practice, where a disturbance in the field is said to indicate illness or emotional blockage.

What we can and cannot say

We can say no one has demonstrated aura perception under controlled conditions. The test design is trivial: place people behind screens or not, at random, and ask the reader which positions are occupied. Attempts of this kind, including under the various sceptical challenge prizes, have produced chance results. Aura photography services use the corona-discharge or biofeedback devices described above, which respond to skin moisture and temperature.

We can say the Theosophical origin explains the uniformity of the colour meanings better than shared perception does.

And we can say something more generous and more interesting than "they are making it up", because there is evidence for it.

Several ordinary perceptual mechanisms produce genuine experiences of coloured light around people:

• Afterimages. Looking steadily at a figure and then at a plain background produces a complementary-coloured outline. A person in a red shirt leaves a green halo.
• Troxler fading, the same effect underlying scrying: steady fixation causes peripheral detail to fade and edges to become unstable and glowing.
• Synaesthesia. This is the striking one. Some people have genuine emotion-colour or person-colour synaesthesia, in which colours are automatically and involuntarily experienced in association with individuals. A 2012 study by Milán and colleagues examined a self-described healer who reported seeing auras and found he met the criteria for synaesthesia — suggesting that at least some sincere aura reports come from people whose perceptual experience genuinely includes colours attached to persons.

If that is right, some aura readers are neither lying nor deluded. They are accurately describing what they see. The colour is generated in their own perceptual system rather than around the person, which is why nobody else can check it — and why the readings, tested against outcomes, carry no information about the person being looked at.

We cannot say that covers every case. What can be said is that "seeing something" and "the thing being there" have come apart repeatedly in this section, and this is the clearest instance.

A different phenomenon shares the name: a migraine aura is a well-characterised neurological event — visual disturbance, zigzag lines, blind spots — preceding some migraines. It is unrelated to anything on this page and is worth mentioning to a doctor rather than to a reader.

Further reading

• Milán et al., "Auras in mysticism and synaesthesia: a comparison" (Consciousness and Cognition, 2012).
• Besant and Leadbeater, Thought-Forms (1901) — the source of the colour key, and beautiful as an artefact.