A new trend for ‘aura parties’ sees groups hiring specially equipped photographers to create images of party-goers’ spiritual selves. Feel-good fun, New Age nonsense – or both?
HAVING YOUR aura photographed feels alarmingly akin to laying bare your soul. Even if you approach it, as I did, with more than a little scepticism, you still feel wary of exposing your own personal energy field to the public gaze. Essentially, it’s a form of psychic nudism, and indulging in it exposes all the fears and hang-ups you never knew you had. What if my aura is all dark and murky? What if my chakras have stretchmarks? Worse still, what if the picture shows I’m pulsing with evil kinetic force on a scale to rival Lord Voldemort?
According to aura photographer Fiona Steele, fear of having a “bad” aura is the main concern that people have when they come to have their images recorded and interpreted. But there’s no need to worry. Steele won’t be showing or telling you anything you don’t want to hear.
Steele mainly practises her paranormal portraiture at fairs or at private gatherings. Aura parties, she says, are very much in vogue at the moment: groups of friends bring in an aura photographer and then compare results. Today, Steele has a stall at a New Age fair. Surrounded by tarot and angel card readers – including one burly practitioner who has tastefully draped the partially-unwrapped effigy of an Egyptian mummy over the chair beside him, where it lolls menacingly – Steele’s set-up, by comparison, looks refreshingly straightforward and business-like.
It’s not an invasive procedure; there are no wires or monitors strapped to your body. Instead, Steele seats me in front of a black screen, facing a specially adapted camera. My left hand rests on a device called a “biofeedback sensor”, a rather low-tech-
looking small blue box with raised silver buttons in the shape of a hand. These buttons, says Steele, correspond to reflexology points in the body, and can measure the electromagnetic field of the user, their spiritual energy, as well as the temperature, humidity and static electricity around them.
The box is wired up to Steele’s computer, where she can display the information as a radiant, colourful glow around the head and body, providing deep personal insights into one’s emotional, mental and spiritual state. This image purports to be “an electronic interpretation of the aura” rather than a picture of the pulsating energy itself, which apparently can only be seen by psychics.
Luckily, my aura emerges as a tasteful halo of luminous blues and greens. It looks good. It turns out that, despite my Voldemort fantasies, I am a lovely person, brimming with healing energy. According to my print-out, I even have a turquoise third eye, which apparently means I have “a compassionate, sensitive yet practical nature . . . helping, encouraging and nurturing others with equal amounts of firmness and affection”. My “green” heart means I desire only the best for everyone, and I do so “with a quiet, patient strength”, while my aquamarine solar plexus indicates “a mysterious ‘oneness’ or connection with all other living beings”.
Unfortunately, though, my mind/body/spirit balance isn’t all that it could be. Ideally, it should be cut into nice, even sections, indicating open-mindedness and the ability to hang loose. But my pie-chart shows that I approach the world predominantly with my mind – 73.13 per cent mind to be exact – as opposed to through my spirit and my body, which come in at a measly 13.21 per cent and 13.66 per cent respectively. Apparently I am happiest when I can use logic to substantiate my ideas – which would at least explain where my lingering scepticism comes from. A nice, relaxing holiday is in order, it seems.
The software Steele uses was designed in California, and the language, she admits, can be a “a bit cheesy”. Her own interpretation of my colours is more down-to-earth, less influenced by generic new-age speak. “You’re a sensitive soul,” says Steele, “and you need to watch you don’t over-do and forget about your own needs. You’re a bit inclined to over- analyse and worry. Try to concentrate on one thing at a time, to stop your mind going haywire.”
Good advice, and a fairly accurate diagnosis – although I’m still not convinced it has much to do with the power of the biofeedback sensor. But Steele insists that “nine out of 10 people say that the reading is accurate . . . they often say it’s something they knew already, but they just needed to confirm it.”
Fiona Steele herself is surprisingly un-mystical. “I’m a scientist at heart,” she says. “I like proof. But I believe that science and spirituality can meet.” Although she sees it as fate that she fell into aura photography (she trained in the United States two years ago), Steele is adamant that the whole thing is “a bit of craic”, not to be taken especially seriously.
“People sometimes want me to predict what will happen to them in six months’ time, and other things like that. I would never do that. I’m upfront, I just tell them that’s out of my jurisdiction. People can be vulnerable, and you get into dangerous territory when you take it all too seriously.”
In common with several other New Age practices, aura photography seems to offer a warm, nurturing blanket of unchallenging diagnosis and gentle advice. There’s nothing harsh or difficult involved, no unpleasant home truths to swallow. Everyone is a lovely person, and there’s no such thing as a sludge-coloured aura. But Fiona Steele believes that’s the strength of it. “If people leave me feeling good about themselves, then my job is done.”
AURA YOU FOR REAL?
THE CONTROVERSIAL practice of aura photography is broadly based on the work of Russian inventor Semyon Kirlian, who in 1939 discovered that if an object on a photographic plate is connected to a source of high voltage, the resulting “air glow” or “aura” that is created can be recorded directly on to film or paper. Such Kirlian images show fuzzy glows around fingers, leaves, and other objects.
Today, most aura photographers use an AuraCam 6000, a Kirlian-inspired camera invented by Guy Coggins, a Californian entrepreneur with a background in electronic engineering. Coggins’s company, Aura Imaging, claims it has worked with psychics to ensure that the colours produced by the camera match those seen by aura-reading psychics.
According to Aura Imaging, “the biofeedback apparatus measures the electral potential along the meridian points of the palm of the hand, then converts that information into an electrical frequency and displays this as colors and pattern which are shown directly over the portrait to represent the Aura.”
But sceptics remain unconvinced. Joe Nickell, of the Skeptical Inquirer journal, describes it as a “torturous process” involving “dubious electrically stimulated data from the hands, extrapolating it . . . to the entire body, translating the electrical frequencies into alleged colour equivalents, and then substituting for them simple flashes of coloured lights. [It]can scarcely be called photographing the aura.”
Irish aura photographers include Fiona Steele (auradiscovery.co.uk), Dublin-based Keith Kavanagh (www.keithkavanagh.com), who claims to be the Republic’s first aura photographer; Fiona Stewart-Williams, (www.psychicfiona.com) who says she can see auras as well as photograph them; and Stress Busters Ireland (stressbustersireland.com), which also offers reflexology and massage.
