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There is a story that circulates in spiritual communities about a deep blue glass that could pierce the veil. Look through it, the story goes, and the invisible energy field surrounding every living being becomes visible to ordinary eyes. No clairvoyant gifts required, no years of meditation, just a sheet of glass stained with a strange coal-tar dye called dicyanin. And then, the story continues, the substance was banned, and the window closed.
Like most stories that survive a century of retelling, this one contains a real mystery wrapped in layers of embellishment. The glass existed. The doctor who created it was a genuine physician at one of London’s great hospitals. And the question he was trying to answer, whether the human energy field can be made visible to anyone, is one that seekers are still asking today. What actually happened is stranger and more instructive than the legend.
A Doctor at St Thomas’ Hospital Goes Looking for the Aura
Walter John Kilner was not a mystic. He was a Cambridge-educated physician who worked as a medical electrician at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, running the department responsible for early electrotherapy. He belonged to that fascinating generation of Edwardian scientists who had just watched X-rays, radio waves, and radioactivity reveal invisible worlds that had been present all along. If unseen radiations were real, why not an unseen emanation from the living body?
Around 1908 Kilner began experimenting with glass screens containing a solution of dicyanin, a deep blue dye from the cyanine family. His method was simple. A subject stood against a dark background in dim light. The observer first gazed through the dicyanin screen at diffuse daylight, which Kilner believed sensitized the eye, then looked at the subject directly. What he reported seeing was a faint luminous haze extending outward from the body.
In 1911 he published his findings in a book with a wonderfully understated title, The Human Atmosphere, and you can still read the original scanned edition today. In it he describes three distinct layers: the etheric double, a narrow dark band hugging the skin, then an inner aura, and finally a diffuse outer aura fading into the surrounding air. He claimed these layers changed with health, fatigue, and emotional state, and he devoted whole chapters to using the aura as a diagnostic tool, reading illness in its dimming and distortion before physical symptoms appeared.
[Also See: Your Aura Is a Diagnostic]
What makes Kilner worth taking seriously, whatever we conclude about his results, is his intent. He was not selling mystery. He was trying to drag the aura out of the seance room and into the clinic, to make a claim that anyone could test with the right equipment. That is a rare and honorable impulse in this territory.
The Older Lineage of the Luminous Body
Kilner did not invent the idea he was chasing. Nearly every tradition that has looked carefully at the human being has described some form of radiant field. The ancient Egyptians spoke of the ka, a vital double that accompanied the person through life and beyond it. The yogic traditions describe prana, the Chinese describe qi, and the Christian iconographers painted halos around the saints for over a thousand years.
The specific modern picture of the aura, a colored egg of light with layered subtle bodies, owes most to the Theosophists. Charles Webster Leadbeater, a Church of England priest turned occultist, published detailed color plates of auras in his 1902 book Man Visible and Invisible, mapping emotional states to hues with almost bureaucratic precision. A few decades later Edgar Cayce, the so-called sleeping prophet, wrote his only book in his own hand on this exact subject, Auras: An Essay on the Meaning of Colors, in which he described seeing colors around people all his life and matched each hue to a temperament, a musical note, and a planet.
Kilner’s contribution was different in kind. Leadbeater and Cayce claimed special sight. Kilner claimed a device. And a device, unlike a gift, can be tested.
What Dicyanin Actually Is
Here the chemistry becomes genuinely interesting. Dicyanin is not some occult preparation. It belongs to the cyanine dyes, a family of synthetic molecules first created in the 1850s that turned out to have a remarkable talent: they extend the sensitivity of photographic emulsions into parts of the spectrum that film could not otherwise record. The history of these quinoline-based dyes runs straight through the development of modern photography, and their descendants are used today in fluorescence imaging and medical diagnostics.
Dicyanin in particular was known as a sensitizer for red and near-infrared photography. This is the kernel of truth inside the legend. The dye really was associated with seeing beyond the visible spectrum, just on film rather than in the eye. Kilner appears to have reasoned that a dye which extended the range of photographic plates might also nudge the range of human vision. It was a creative leap, and not an absurd one for 1908.
So was dicyanin banned to keep the veil intact? The sober answer is that no formal prohibition has ever been documented. Cyanine dyes of that era were genuinely nasty substances, toxic coal-tar chemicals that could burn skin and poison through inhalation, and dicyanin simply faded from commerce as safer, more effective sensitizers replaced it. Wartime restrictions on German chemical exports made it scarce in exactly the years Kilner’s followers were seeking it, which likely seeded the rumor of suppression. Scarcity has a way of ripening into conspiracy. The honest position is that the trail goes cold, not that a hand reached out and closed the window.
What the Screens Were Probably Showing
The scientific community never replicated Kilner’s findings, and there are good reasons to think the screens produced a real visual effect that was not an aura. Staring through an intensely colored filter fatigues the color receptors of the eye and produces vivid afterimages and contrast fringes around any high-contrast edge, such as a pale body against a dark cloth in dim light. Kilner was also working in the shadow of the N-ray affair, in which dozens of trained French scientists sincerely reported seeing a radiation that turned out not to exist, a cautionary tale about how expectation shapes perception at the threshold of visibility.
The same lesson runs through the later history of aura imaging. Kirlian photography, discovered by the Soviet inventor Semyon Kirlian in 1939, produces genuinely beautiful glowing images, but careful work published in Science in 1976 showed that the variations in those images are largely explained by skin moisture and other ordinary physical factors. The modern aura cameras used at expos do not photograph any field at all. They measure skin conductance through hand sensors and generate a colored overlay by algorithm. The picture is an interpretation, not a detection.
And yet the experiences of aura seers themselves deserve better than dismissal. A research team at the University of Granada compared aura readers with people who have emotional synaesthesia, a well-documented condition in which the brain genuinely produces colored halos around human figures and faces. For these perceivers the colors are real perceptions, generated by cross-wiring between emotional and visual processing rather than by an external field. That finding does not settle the metaphysics, but it does suggest that when someone says they see your colors, they may be telling the exact truth about their experience.
Discernment at the Edge of the Visible
So where does this leave the seeker? I think it leaves us in a familiar and valuable place, holding two truths at once.
The first truth is that the specific claims around dicyanin glass do not survive scrutiny. The screens almost certainly produced optical artifacts, the ban is a legend, and no instrument yet built has captured the aura as an objective field. Anyone selling you modern “dicyanin glasses” is selling tinted plastic and a story.
The second truth is that the intuition Kilner was chasing has never died, because it points at something real about how consciousness meets the world. Traditions separated by oceans and millennia keep describing the human being as radiant, layered, extended beyond the skin. Sensitive perceivers keep seeing colors around people, and neuroscience now confirms that at least some of them genuinely do. Whether the field is out there in space or in here in the deep structure of perception may matter less than we assume, especially if, as many wisdom traditions suggest, that distinction is itself part of the veil.
Kilner spent his final years refining screens that the world had already dismissed, convinced he had glimpsed the human atmosphere. Perhaps he saw an afterimage. Perhaps he saw what the Egyptians called the ka through a crack that chemistry briefly opened. Either way, his blue glass earned its place in the long human project of trying to see what we sense is there. The instruments keep changing. The looking does not stop.
