The Human Soul by Hippolyte-Andre-Ponthion Ba...

“Every transaction with a text, a musical score, a painting, or a sculpture, is a personal seance.” Baraduc was attempting to perform this “seance” in real time, accessing those aspects of other people - their internal spiritual lives - that we can only normally experience through translation. For the scholar Jed Rasula, Baraduc’s occultism was merely an intensification of that encrypted presence of other life that we feel when viewing any media form.

Some plates evoke a night sky, showered with comets (“Large sized pearls of voluntary psychob”) and another contains a handprint in the negative, with caterpillar-like bristles frizzing outward from all fingers (what he elsewhere calls “soul germ”). They constitute zones of human stability as well as meeting grounds or. In one image, Baraduc used a Nadar photograph, which he subsequently overlaid with “psychicon” - Baraduc’s thoughts made visible. Beginnings of the: Kingdom of France 67 hart 11 THE SPIRIT OF MEDIEVAL FRANCE I. Other plates look like shimmering refractions of light on mica or quartz, which are explained as the Od “individualising itself to repair the deficient sensitive soul” and “Life-animules”. It is captioned: “the Od attracted by the state of soul of a child lamenting over a recently killed pheasant”. Country of Publication: France Publisher: Paris, Bailliere, 1872. The lead image shows an underexposed figure surrounded by a web-like aura, which has sprouted something resembling a wing. Author (s): Baraduc,Hippolyte Andre Ponthion,1814- Title (s): De l'ulceration des cicatrices recentes symptomatique de la nymphomanie ou de l'onanisme. Unfortunately - and rather beautifully - Baraduc’s printed plates are less remarkably pure, but almost remarkable for their impurity.

The Human Soul by Hippolyte-Andre-Ponthion Ba...