From the Vault: The Halo, Part 2

Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our talk about Halos and the Nimbus and the aureol, the glory that glows behind the figure, whether that's a Christian saying to or who wah wah the Terrible Or did we end up last week actually talking about Lucadors at all? I think we did very briefly, partially because we were in the process of putting together a weird

house cinema episode on a El Santo film. But yeah, the question came up, are there any halos used with luchador designs, with the idea being that, yeah, they're a number of different Catholicism themed Lucia doors. So after we recorded, I did look into it a little bit. I looked at some of the usual suspects, and looked on Luca

Wiki and looked at some photos. I didn't notice any halo motifs in the mass for the most part, like nothing, nothing like like actually physically emerging and positioned above the head. You know, you see a lot of crosses, etc. The best example I did find though, was a luchador named Angel Azul, one of at least four different lujadors who's

used that name. And this particular mass depicts an entire angel, like a like a Christmas top or angel on the front of the mask, and that angel has a halo, so it's positioned so that that the angel's head in halo appear more or less in the center of the forehead. So I assume this is a technico, not a ruto, I guess. So I don't know anything about this guy, but it looks like a technico mask. You know, if you have an angel like that. Uh, you know, it's

it's got to be. But then again, he could easily turn Ruto and become a fallen angel, especially if he loses that mask. Oh yeah, I mean a bad angel can be really bad. You get angels of death, You've got You've got a remember a particularly haunting mickloshred Nodi poem called The Terrifying Angel, where he an angel appears to him and advises him to remove his own skin. Yeah, there's a There are a number of different and Lucia, there have been a few different angels of death, Angel

de la Monte. There's one I remember seeing on TV that did not really have any any kind of angelic themes in his out fit. But I did run across on Lucawiki an old photo from a magazine that had showed a guy with a halo motif again on the forehead, almost like a third eye. But that's the only thing I could really find in terms of dudes like this with halos. Now another thing that comes to mind, though, you know, we're talking a little bit about a halo's

and angels and certainly an art. But I started thinking more and more about films, and I can't think of a single example of an angelic being presented in say a horror film or some sort of supernatural film in which they have a halo. Like I was thinking, like, what are some of the angel visitation scenes that come to mind? And I thought of, well, the I thought of Bill Paxton's film Frailty, which has a great angel visitation scene, like a you know, hallucination that emerges in

his mind, but there's no halo. Now I might be remembering that wrong. I thought that the angel in that it doesn't have like a ring halo around the head or anything specifically concentrated on the head. But I did recall a kind of like full body glow. Am I wrong? But definitely definitely has a glow to it, and there is there's a lot of like heavenly architecture going on above it, But in terms of something more instantly recognizable as a halo, not so much. Likewise, I was thinking

back to the Prophecy films with Christopher Walkin. Uh, you know, a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of angels in that, a lot of angel wings. And you can think of various things that were clearly influenced by that you know, we have angels and fallen angels popping up and filmmakers will go nuts given them big, big feathery wings, but I don't think they ever really

include the halo. And it's kind of interesting because I guess it comes down to the fact that it's easy to think of it as such a cliche thing, but at the same time it is so weird and and there's so many ways to depict it. You'd think you would you would see more of it. I don't know. I'd love to hear it from folks out there who have encountered really cool halos and genre pictures, because I'd

love to I'd love to see it now. In the last episode, did you bring up the idea of a cinobyte from like the Clive Barker verse with the with a Halo? I can't remember if we if we did, but I started looking into it after the podcast, and I think there's an a comic hell Raiser comic book. There's a there's a Cinabyte named Halo, but he doesn't

really have a halo. Now, there was a Clive Barker action figure for the Todd McFarlane toys for the Tortured souls line, and this guy, uh, this particular guy agnistis has kind of a has like a surgical halo around his head, like a halo, and then he also has what I think is like a human face maybe his own human face position behind him that also seems to mimic halo iconography. So it's a very Cinobyte asked character.

So I'm this seems to come close. And certainly Clive Barker loves toying around with religious imagery, so it makes sense that we would find an example of this and something he designed. Yeah. Fun fact, those those figures that came out, turns out they each had a portion of a novella in them that I think for a long time you could only get if you bought all the figures.

But it's subsequently been put out sometimes in the last five years or so titled Tortured Souls the Legend of Primordium, and I read it over the weekend enjoined some time out in the Hammock, and it was pretty fun. You know. It's it's like there's not a relatable human character in the whole thing. It's just like a bunch of like sort of monsters and and so forth. It's in a kind of a dark fantasy setting, kind of hell razory at times for sure, but but not entirely like it felt.

It was really good. It's one of the I haven't read a lot of Clive Barker recently, but this one was new to me and I enjoyed it. So a novella that comes serially within the Action figures that you would buy at Spencer's Gifts in the nineties, Yeah, it was, and to my shock it was like it was. It was actually really enjoyable, So there you go. I wonder if the Insane Clown Posse action figures had a novella

that came with them. I doubt it. I think this was the only I think there was actually another Clive Barker line, who is some sort of like Carnival kind of a theme, where he did another one like this where he had different different chapters in a novella that all came together if you bought all the figures. But but and that one and that one is also available

to read now, but I haven't read it. It's interesting though, with the Action figures though, because the whole thing, right is that you don't take them out of the box. If you're collecting them. And if that was the case, you wouldn't get to read the cool little novella chapters that are hidden within there. Well, you wouldn't get to play with them either. I mean, what are you supposed to do with these things? I don't know. They don't look tremendously fun to play with. They kind of they're

very grizzly. Have a little tea party with your barbie and your cinebites. Yeah, But like I say, the novella was fun. So in the last episode we ended up talking about a lot of the different ways that the halo or the nimbus has been represented or characterized in history. You know, sometimes as a glowing disc behind the head, or even a solid looking kind of gold disc, sometimes even as a square or as a ring around the head.

Other times as a kind of just general emanation of light, like a glow coming from behind the head, almost as if there's bioluminescent hair or a light bulb behind the head or behind the whole body. A full body glow is sometimes characterized as a halo or aureole or nimbus. And when it comes to the kind that's just like a glow or an emanation of divine light from around the body. I started to wonder about the idea of

the aura. Now, I guess there's a general concept of an aura that you could just think of as like, this is any emanation of color or light from a body, like in the in the ancient Mesopotamian mythology, where we talked about Humbaba or Hubaba having the seven terrors or the radiance, the terrifying radiance that emanated from his body. Those things could be viewed as an aura. But there's also a more specific definition of an aura, which is a sort of standard claim in the modern world of

psychics and New Age spirituality and parapsychology. People often claim to be able to see some kind of aura around human bodies and sometimes around other objects. So I wonder, could this modern belief in auras in any way be related to the origins of the religious belief in the halo, the glory, the melom, the sun, disc crown, etc. And this sounds perfectly reasonable, right, I mean, a lot of it is getting it would seem on the surface at least to get to the same ideas, the idea that

there's something either emanating out of you or through you? Right, Yeah, totally. And the secondary question if people do really sometimes see a glow of color or a cloud of blazing light around someone, what would cause that? So I'm going to transition into this subject for a bit and look at it a few different ways. The first thing I wanted to know was, wait a second, is it actually possible, in just a straightforward scientific physical sense that humans do

actually sometimes glow? I don't know. I've come across weirder facts on this show before, so I started looking into this. The first thing I thought of was, I wonder if there's ever been a case where somebody was made to glow by exposure to I don't know, something in the environment. And the thing that popped in my mind was in The Simpsons when characters who work at the nuclear power plant acquire what mister Burns would call a healthy green glow.

So I was wondering, does exposure to radiation actually have the potential to make people glow? Unfortunately, it seems the answer is no. Ionizing radiation is generally invisible itself, and being exposed to it can of course wreck your body, but it won't make you glow. This myth actually probably comes from a combination of facts, the first of which would be about radio luminescence. So there are some materials

that do glow in the presence of ionizing radiation. For example, the paint that was once commonly used for radium dials on clock faces and is sometimes still used for like instruments that are made to be viewed in the dark, for example in spacecraft. You know, so you want a dial or an instrument that will glow in the dark without having to have any kind of power supply to it, or a you know, or an led inside it or

anything like that. This radioluminescent paint actually had to have a combination of two major elements in order to make it glow. In the old school kind that was used by like the company Undark or you know that was tragically the cause of the death and sickening of the Radium girls. This was a paint that was made with radium, which is the radioactive element that's applied the ionizing radiation.

But then it also had to have an element that is known as a phosphour, which is a chemical that glows when it's stimulated by alpha and beta particles and gamma rays from the radioactive element, and in the case of the radio luminescent paint that was used by undark in companies like that in the first half of the twentieth century, the phosphour was usually zinc sulfide that was then laced with a metal like copper to give it

a green color. And so because of the specific nature of this material, this phosphour, when the atoms in it are struck by ionizing radiation, they get excited, their electrons jump up to a higher energy level, and then they fall back down to their ground state. And when they fall back down to their ground state, they emit a photon of light. As they do that, they release the energy back out and this is the glow we see. And of course the color of the glow can be

determined by what kind of metal it's laced with. Again, copper tends to give a green color. So I think this is the source of the belief that radiation will cause something to have a green glow. Won't call is anything to have a green glow, It will specifically give a green glow. To paint with a phosphour in it, and something to make that glow the color green, like copper Okay, So, long story short, exposure to ionizing radiation can absolutely kill you, but it will not make you glow,

I guess, unless you coat yourself in a phosphour. Okay, so that one episode of The Simpsons where mister Burns has been found to be wandering through the woods, Yeah, no, no, no no, and unless yeah, maybe he somehow paints his body in zinc sulfide or something zinc sulfide and copper and then just get some plutonium in there. Maybe. Okay.

I don't know how long he would survive that though, well, As we I think was explained on the show, mister Burns is imperil from so many different causes of death that they are they're stuck in the door right right, three Stooges syndrome. Yeah, so even the ionizing radiation is

going whoa. So anyway, you know you're not going to have a situation where I don't know, an ancient a person in the ancient world came across a stash of uranium or and then somehow ended up glowing green, so everybody would see him and think, wow, you know, that

guy's a god or something. That just wouldn't happen. But I came across another fact that is pretty weird, which is that, in a qualified sense, the human body actually does just naturally glow, meaning it doesn't only reflect light from external sources, but the body actually does emit electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum. Visible light comes out of your body. Huh. But before you get too excited, the amount of light that our bodies put out on average

is really really tiny. It's roughly a thousand times too dim to see with the naked eye. You need special scientific instruments in a very dark room to pick it up. But you should know that this is different from the heat that we emit as infrared radiation. If this light were bright enough, it would be light. They would actually have a color that you could see with your eyes. It is that kind of light. And of course it's not just us, most or maybe all other animals would

also emit a similar kind of light. Nevertheless, this glow is kind of interesting. I was wondering, so what makes this glow happen. It appears to be chemical reactions involving free radicals within the body. There was a two thousand nine study that tried to measure this photon emission from the human body using special equipment. So this was by Misaki Kobayashi, Daisuke Kikuchi, and Hitoshi Okamura, published in PLS one in two thousand and nine called Imaging of ultraweek

spontaneous photon emission from human body displaying diurnal rhythm. And so what the researchers did here was they used a cryogenic CCD camera to image five healthy male subjects in their twenties at different times throughout the day. So the subjects would come in, they'd sit in a chair I think they were partially naked or at least bare chested in the chair in a dark room for at least

twenty minutes. I think there was a period of adjustment to the darkness, and then after that they'd be photographed for twenty minutes with the special camera. And they do this every day for every three hours from ten am to ten pm. And the researchers actually found that the amount of light emitted from the body varied significantly over the day, so people glowed the most at about four

pm and the least at ten am. And they hypothesized that this probably has something to do with how energy metabolism changes throughout the day according to our circadian rhythms. But also interesting, or at least I thought this was interesting, Rob, I've attached a picture for you to look at down here. The body did not glow equally everywhere. In fact, faces tended to glow more than the rest of the body,

it seems like. And there were other kinds of different It says like upper shoulders seemed to glow a little bit more than down lower around like the chest or the stomach, And different parts of the face glowed more than other parts. So it looks like the area around the mouth in particular, was usually glowing more than say, like the forehead or around the eyes or the sides

of the face. This thing about the mouth especially makes me imagine an alternate history of halo imagery where the glow is not just surrounding the crown of the head, but emanating from the mouth and jaw a kind of glory beard okay, also kind of a low Pan effect, right, oh, yes, when we first encountered low Pan and he has light coming out of his eyes and then out of his mouth. One of my favorite line deliveries there is the incredulous way that Kurt Russell says that he had light coming

out of his mouth. Yes, it's big Trouble and little China for anyone who's not familiar. But anyway, so I was reading an NBC News report about this study from two thousand and nine by Charles Q. Choi, and he wrote that one reason that the face might glow more than the rest of the body is that is that usually faces are more tanned than the rest of the body,

since they get it more exposure to sunlight. And that he said that the pigment behind that tanning in the skin, melanin, has fluorescent compounds that might might help the skin produce even more light than other skin on the body does. Okay, but since this glow is not detectable with the naked eye, none of this is going to have anything to do with the origins of halo or nimbus or arial imagery.

Though it is a nice thing to know, nonetheless, But to come back to the place we started, people do, of course, sometimes make various paranormal claims that they can see a glow of colored light emanating from human beings. Again, this is sometimes called like an aura or an energy field. So I have to be kind of circumspect here, the belief in auras is I have discovered an exceedingly complicated

subject with a weird and interesting history. Maybe one will have to come back to and explore more in the future, since this is one of those subjects. I'm sure you've had this experience on the show before, Rob where it like I was trying to read into it so I could give a brief overview, but it was kind of like you go down into a basement and you open an old chest to just like get the things out

and see what's inside it. But then something in there starts moving and and I'm like, ah, okay, so I cannot I cannot get my brain fully around this subject. I think I can only mention some aspects of it. From what I can tell, the New Age belief in seeing auras seems to stem from a kind of reinterpretation of the medieval Tantric belief in chakras. So chakras would have been a belief original to esoteric Hindu It's all.

So it's kind of hard to succinctly describe even what these are, but I think you can think of them as sort of a collection of nodes or channels that are positioned at different points inside the body and correspond to elements of an imagined subtle body, a second non material energy based body, and the images of these channels or nodes throughout the body would be used in some

kinds of tantric meditations. So you might focus mental imagery on one of these nodes at various points positioned, often along the sort of vertical axis through the middle of the body, but also at a few other points. So, Rob, I think you probably know more about this world. Is that basically your understanding? Yeah? Yeah, I think that's a

good basic summary of it. And I've engaged in yoga and meditation that uses chakras as well, and I find that I guess one way that I like to think of it is it is not it is not the way the body actually works, but it is a way that the body can be interpreted, uh to aid in meditation or yoga, like thinking about you know, like this energy point moving from chakra to chakra, focusing on say,

like breathing through your third eye. You know, obviously you're not really breathing through a hole in your your skull, but somehow like focusing on that can be very helpful. It gives you like a different physical focus to get out of your thoughts and uh and even you know, sort of focus on the on the physicality of that

part of your body. Uh So, yeah, I find it very helpful though though again I do not engage with it in a way where I think of this is like the actual way that the energy in my body is working. Right, It might not correspond to like physical anatomical realities, but can serve as a focal point for mental imagery and in the way of directing the thoughts. Yeah, but so that's that's chakras. I think like within the

the esoteric and do tradition. Then in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it seems this idea somehow got sort of picked up and reinterpreted by various people associated with new religious movements like Theosophy, and a lot of the twentieth century New Age belief in auras as an emanation from the body seems to trace back to a British spiritualist and Theosophist writer named Charles Webster Ledbetter who

lived from eighteen fifty four to nineteen thirty four. I was just again, I can only give the briefest glance into this world because it seems very It's like looking at gnosticism or something. It's just like you cannot really understand it from the outside. But I was trying to peek in and get some kind of characterization here. So I found a couple of quotes from a writing by Ledbetter called this was a book called Man Visible and Invisible.

I think this was actually a reproduction of an earlier pamphlet or essay he had done about the leaf in Auras, and he writes the following, All members of our society will be familiar with the idea that every human being is surrounded by a sort of luminous cloud, which we

have agreed to call the aura. And we have heard from those who have succeeded in developing the special sense by which it is cognized, that it has various beautiful colors, and that from a study of it much may be learnt as to the disposition, the thoughts, and even the past life of its possessor. And then later he comes to a physical description of what this aura is, what it looks like. He writes, we find that it is

exceedingly complex in structure. At the first glance, it is seen as a luminous cloud, extending to a distance of about eighteen inches or two feet from the body in all directions, and therefore approximately oval in shape. Whence it is sometimes spoken of in occult writings as the auric egg. In most cases it has no well defined outline, but

its edges fade into invisibility very gradually. And I think this is interesting because this really does sound like he's describing the halo glow that we see in a lot of religious artwork, or here described in a lot of religious poetry, a sort of oval shaped framing or emanation of light from the body that sort of gradually dissipates as it gets farther away. Yeah, it also kind of feels like my holy personal space. Ye shout, not intrude upon, right,

don't put anything in my auric egg. And then he goes on to explain a bunch more stuff like that these are actually composed of a number of layers of underlying auras, one that he calls the health aura, which there's one that has something to do with the Hindu

concept of prana or life force. There's one that has something to do with desire and the ability to see These alleged auras in this context is usually ascribed to people either with special powers of sight, some kind of psychic perception, or even more often, it seems, with special training who have worked to harness their ability to see

the auras of others. Now, as with many other psychic and paranormal phenomena, people who claim to be able to see auras as an objective physical phenomenon have repeatedly been put to the test in parapsychology research, which, from what I read, usually finds no evidence for any consistency in the perception of ouras. It seems to me like it is more likely an internal, subjective interpreted experience, not a perception of an objectively verifiable external reality, and these tests

can include lots of different things. Like some of them, you might look at the auras of different people who are obscured by a screen, and then later try to identify the same people again when the screen is removed. Okay, so you saw their auras, which person was standing where behind the screen? And usually people who claim to have

aura perception abilities cannot perform better than chance at this. Nevertheless, there does seem to be a real perception of the ability to view a glow emanating from people, and so that does make you wonder like, okay, well, even if this is not an externally verifiable physical reality, people are for some reason believing that they see something. They look at somebody and they think they see a luminous clouds surrounding them. So could that have anything to do with

the halo or nimbus tradition? One interesting coincidence that this might just be a total coincidence actually not have anything to not have any causal link. But one interesting thing I come across while I was poking around it, or a perception on the internet, is that there is often

a belief that there are seven layers of auras. There are actually different systems where people say there are different numbers of layers, but a common one is seven layers, which takes me back to the ancient Mesopotamian ogre Huawa or Humbaba, who is said to have seven terrors or seven auras that he could take off one at a time. Oh no, that is that. It's a very good, very

good point. Yeah, I wonder if there's an actual connection there or because I mean, we also we also have to think again back to the chakra tradition in which they're you know, you're generally dealing with the seven chakra systems, so that might be the way it's connected as well, right, But I think it's also worth noting that there are some major differences as far as I can see, between how these different religious concepts like the halo versus the

aura are described. For example, in a New Age mysticism, the aura is usually said to emanate from every living being. Again, I think there's probably some variation there, but it's a common claim that like even insects and plants and even sometimes inanimate objects would have their own aura, whereas the halo, both in Christian iconography and in its predecessors from ancient religion,

this would be reserved for special beings. It's the divine spotlight like you said last time, or it's the emanation of terrifying God power. I mean, he doesn't even think about just the idea of beholding somebody and that person being say particularly beautiful or charismatic, you know, and you know, interpreting that is kind of a holy glow, and in a way it does get back to the actual way that we would behold someone, you know, in terms of how light or reflecting off of off of people or things,

U you know, light entering our eyes, et cetera. Well, I think I'm going to get to this in a minute, but I think there could well be something to the idea that beliefs about things like halos or auras could very well be quite literally in the eye of the beholder. Okay, So I came across a study that asks an interesting question. Again,

you remember I was trying to think. Okay, So if people do sometimes look at other people, or at figures or even statues of gods or something and believe they see an emanation of light around them, believe they see a nimbus or a holy glow, could people's perceptions of these auras or halos sometimes be blamed by cases of synesthesia. This was explored in a paper I was looking at that was published in Consciousness and Cognition in the year twenty twelve by Milan at All called auras in mysticism

and synesthesia a comparison. So the authors here write that synesthesia quote is a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when hearing a sound leads to the perception of mental colors or photisms. Photisms, that's a standard term in the synesthesia literature. It's a type of visual stimulation that associates something that is not originally visual in nature or is a different kind of stimulus.

So one common example in synesthesia is grapheme color synesthesia, where certain letters of the alphabet or numerals are consistently associated with a color sensation. So imagine, like, if you don't experience synesthesia personally, try to imagine if some reason in your mind, the letter G was purple and the letter H was yellow, Okay. And there are a bunch of different kinds of this. There are people for whom

I remember reading that. One classic attribution of synesthesia was that there was an account of a man, I think maybe reported by John Locke, who said that every time he heard the sound of a trumpet or a French horn or something, he saw the color red. But there are also some less common types of synaesthesia that have specifically to do with the idea or image of individual people.

So the authors here right quote. One of the relatively infrequent varieties is the one where photisms are triggered by emotion affect laden stimulis such as emotional words, photographs, human figures, and the faces of familiar people. For instance, for are a synisthete who participated in this study, the side of a familiar person automatically triggers a mental image of a

human silhouette filled with color. Different people are typically associated with different color hues depending on our's affective relationship with the person in question. Eg. He claims that he has always associated his mother with the color blue. And I looked this up, and I found people online in forums sure enough talking about this exact experience today. Like I recall just one example, I came across one person saying that with their person color synesthesia, both of their parents

were blue, but different shades of blue. But so anyway, The authors here wanted to tie this to the mystical concept of aura reading or aura perception and ask is it possible that the neurological phenomenon of person color synesthesia could be responsible for some of the claims of aura

vision in these New age religious experiences? And they tried to figure this out by comparing the first person reports of four test subjects with person color synesthesia against the perform moments of aura readers, and the reports of auras

from the literature. Now, long story short, the authors here actually conclude that these phenomena are described in usually very different ways with different characteristics, and that experiences of person color synesthesia are probably not a major cause of belief in auras. And they put up a table in their conclusion comparing a lot of the differences between these things just to mention what I thought were a couple of the most relevant takeaways, and this one seemed maybe the

most significant to me. They say that people with person color synesthesia usually report seeing the photism quote in the mind's eye, so there would be like a strong mental association between a person and a color, But most synaesthetes do not believe that they are literally seeing the color radiating from the person's body directly in and mingled with

their actual vision. It's a mental association, whereas the aura that the clairvoyant reports is usually said to be a direct visual stimulus, like it's a literal cloud or halo around the body that can be directly observed as you observe things with your eyes. Now, again, there's a lot of variation in this tradition, so I'm sure there are some counter examples to that, but that seems to be

the dominant way that it's reported. A couple of other things they report synesthesia is usually a lifelong condition which is probably congenital, whereas the reported clairvoyant ability to perceive auras is said to be a learned skill. More often. They also say that person color synesthesia is triggered automatically and requires no effort. It's just a natural association, as naturally triggered as if I said, like, hey, you know, what's the color of a banana? Like, you can't help

but think it. It just comes automatically to your brain upon hearing the words that they say. Counter to that, aura reading usually is said to be something that requires concentration and special condition. Now it does make me wonder if now, obviously you would not have to be a synaesthisic person to engage in aura reading. You know, you could easily take on the trappings and the you know,

the the dramatic aspects of this kind of performance. But if you were a person with synaesthesia, you would be uniquely outfitted to do this kind of work. You know, oh yeah, sure, you know, you know, to not just say oh yeah, you're you're blue you're light blue with that, right you know, you know, to pause and to concentrate and to put on the show that people need to see.

But then you would have an actual color to refer to, right, oh, because you'd have an automatic association in your mind that sort of comes naturally there, like you wouldn't have to be straining for something, right. But I guess then you're probably getting into a question. Okay, in the field of aura reading, are there certain color you know? I'm sure

there are certain colors associated with different things. There's probably a system, there's a color code, and that color code might not match up with the way that the synesthesia brain is is coding the world right exactly. That's another major difference is that that and they talk about this

in the paper. For people with person color synesthesia, they generally understand their individual pairings of certain colors with certain people to be to be idiopathic, like to come from their own personal associations, whereas usually people who believe that they can read auras say that they're like they're referring to some kind of like objectively external thing that other or readers would supposedly see the same thing, and it

would have a specific meaning. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you want to feel like you're tapping into some sort of cosmic, overarching order when you have your r reat as opposed to just like what this guy thinks in his head when he remembers you. Sure, But one thing I did want to say is so a couple of things. First of all, I did think it was worth noting before

relying too heavily on the study I just mentioned. I did find a pretty scathing criticism published in the same journal and Consciousness and Cognition the same year by Cardenia at All that basically like, while lauding the general thrust of this study, it also criticized the authors for allegedly being sloppy with a couple of things about like how

they represented or presented parapsychology and the aura literature. I don't know that this would necessarily change the main findings, but there was some criticism there, so if you're looking into this, look up the critical review as well. But also I wanted to hand over my nothing to see here award to the authors on this one, because it's always nice to see a full write up of a hypothesis that does not pan out. Yeah, but the authors in their conclusion do refer to something else that I

thought was interesting. They say, Okay, it doesn't look like there's all that strong of a link between the phenomenology of synesthesia and the phenomenology reported by people who do aura readings. It looks like they're reporting different kinds of experiences,

so there's probably not a strong causal link. But they also say quote claims made by people claiming to be psychic or aura readers can be alternatively explained by proven science, And they refer to a paper by Durdan from two thousand and four which they say, quote shows how phenomena which arise as a consequence of the normal functioning of the human visual system can explain the purported direct experience

of the aura. For instance, the complementary color effect, which results from a temporary exhaustion of the color sensitive cells in the retina, could account for the presence of auric colors seen by a sensitive viewer when staring at a person. And they also say staring at a darker object a human figure against a bright background may induce the perception

of a bright halo around the object. This is due to a contrast amplification mechanism built into the human visual system which allows for an efficient detection of edges, and so I thought this was interesting that, Okay, maybe this would apply even more directly to the halo or the nimbus than it would to the aura perception, because you can imagine a certain number of optical effects, one of which,

of course, is is the afterimage. You know, so if you do you ever do that thing when you're a kid, where like you look at a picture, a certain sort of like negative image of a face on a page, and then they say, Okay, stare at this for twenty seconds, and then close your eyes and turn your head up, and you'll see a face staring at you from behind your eyelids. That's a natural optical effect, the afterimage effect, that has to do with the latent activation of retinal

cells when you've been concentrating on an image. I think it's quite easy to see how something like that could create optical effects that seem quite mystical in nature, and could allow you to believe you're perceiving either an aura of color in the shape of a person or surrounding a person, or imagining that you're seeing light emanating from a person yeah, absolutely. I mean they're a whole host

of of optical effects like that. Oftentimes you'll see them utilized at like a hands on science center where you'll you'll have a number of them you can do where it's like stare at this spinning thing and then look over here, or you know, look at these lines and then look at these lines, and it's it's all really

quite interesting. I mean, so sometimes something you do when you're a kid maybe forget how how interesting it can be, but you know, it goes to show just how how how our visual system, how it can be tricked into seeing things that are not quite there or enhanced to degrees that that you know, don't seem to line up with our normal day to day sensory world. One of my favorite things actually about our visual systems is that, like you can prove to people through direct experience that

their visual perception of reality is an illusion. Now, it's not an illusion as in it's like a totally imagined hallucination. It's obviously based on real objects and light coming in around you, but the perception that you see an unbroken visual field of full color all around you, it really

feels like you might see that but you don't. And a couple of great examples for that that you can show people are if you hold up like colored flags at the very periphery of somebody's vision, you can immediately people immediately realize like, oh, I think I perceive color in every direction, but I'm colorblind in my peripheral vision.

That's like to try it sometime if you never have before, get like different colored markers or flags or something, hold them up at the very edge of where you can see. You can't tell the difference in the colors. Another one is, if you ever want to look up how to do this, there's a way where you can find the blind spot caused by your optic nerve as it routes information away

from the retina in the back of your eye. There is a blind spot just right in the middle of your vision wherever you're looking stuff, where you can't see anything. And you can actually do experiments to bring this out, but it's totally invisible to you. You can't see the

fact that you can't see this area. I think we uh, I think we talked about something like this one time with our Scott Baker about the fact that he had like an injury to his eye or something that caused him to have an illusion of this kind where in fact he had a large blind spot in the center of his vision, but it didn't register as a blind spot as in what you might imagine like a like a field of black or white or something where there

was no vision. Instead, the brain just tricked him into thinking he had total vision, but there were just places where he actually couldn't see anything. Right, So he would look at his dog and the dog would just have no face, right's that recall. But still the brains saying like, no, you're seeing fine, Yeah, this is a this is every dog. Yeah, everything's fine. Well, I want to go from here to talk to talk about halo's as a as a purely

optical phenomenon. So these there are examples of halos that cannot not only are visible to the naked eye, but they can be they can be captured via photography and frequently are you know I've mentioned in the previous episode there are at least a couple of solar and lunar optical phenomena, you know, broad categories of them that are worth singling out. And these phenomena have been observed for

thousands of years. Yeah, this is a really good point, and we sort of alluded to this in the last episode, but I just want to emphasize again that I wouldn't suggest that a person needed to have a direct vision of light emanating from another person's body at some point in order to imagine something like a halo or nimbus.

It could be it could be just pure imagination that brings out this imagery, or it could well be basic associative thinking mapping the properties of celestial objects or interesting optical phenomena in the skies or on the Earth, and then associating that with a person, you know, with with godhood or transcending power, and then putting that on the body of somebody who is feared or revered. Right, And in the previous episode we mentioned some Roman and Greek

examples of these being observed and recorded. But I do want to drive home that, you know, the sun has always been of importance to cultures throughout time and around the world. So anyone looking around looking up at the sun or the moon, we're likely to encounter these things. We just have, you know, certain recorded records that are

that stand out, that are a little older. I was looking around and I found a paper titled the Sun Recorded Throughout History by M. Vasquez from two thousand and nine, and they point to bone inscriptions from the Shang dynasty in ancient China, where we where they recorded solar phenomena

during the second millennium BC. They reported at least four phenomena, including a dark and gloomy sun, solar eclipses, and the solar halo, which I believe was a reyun Interestingly enough, there's another one that there's no translation of, so it does make me wonder what that particular solar phenomenon might have been. Oh boy, but people have a lot of

fun with that one. Yeah, that's when the Sun turns inside out and becomes the black hole Sun. I mean, I'm sure it's just another, you know, commonly scene occurrence with the sun. But anyway, broadly speaking, a halo can occur anytime the Sun or the Moon shines through thin clouds composed of ice crystals, and the effect can be caused by one of two or a combination of refraction

and or reflection via these crystals. So the refractions are going to cause color separations, meaning the final results may be colored while reflected light remains uncolored. The twenty two degree halo is the most common form of this, consisting of either a series of colored arcs or even complete circles of twenty two degree angular radiuses around the Sun

or the moon and the coloration. If there's coloration, it SEMs to be red on the on the on the inside and a blur on the outside with the moon. These are sometimes called lunar halos or winter halos. And I was lucky enough to see one of these the

last time I was at the beach. I was out walking on a beach at night, and you know, looking up at the moon and everything was, you know, beautiful but normal, and then all of a sudden, Uh, there's this tremendous halo effect, which if you don't know what you're you're looking at, it can look like a portal has opened up, like a great circular portal has opened up around the moon between you and the moon, like there's some sort of a connection or a cylindrical highway

between you and the lunar surface. It's pretty pretty interesting. Yeah. It makes me think about images and the paradiso of like rings or wheels of angels running about in concentric circles around the heavenly bodies. Yeah, and I you know again, people throughout time would have witnessed these, and so you can you can imagine this having an impact on our

our perception of the worlds beyond and of the higher cosmos. Now, these are just the most common halo effects, these twenty two degrees, but there are many others, including the forty six degree halo. It's similar, but at twice the distance, roughly sometimes occurring in conjunction with twenty two degree halos, and even other optical effects. So you might encounter, say, a sun dog with a double halo. Now, what are sun dogs. That's a different optical phenomenon caused by the sunlight. Yeah,

a sun dog, also known as a mock sun. This is caused by refraction of sunlight in atmospheric ice crystals. These are generally colored patches of light to either side of the Sun at the same altitude as the Sun itself, So to a certain extent, it can look like three suns dawning over the Earth, or at least like one major sun and like two sort of weirdly shaped mini

suns out on either side the Sun's two sons. Yeah, and of course this instantly brings to mind the Chinese myth of the ten surplus suns that Ho Yee had to shoot down out of the sky, and I've not actually seen a connection. I couldn't find a connection drawn between those two, though it wouldn't surprise me if there was. But there does seem to be a connection in Norse mythology the two wolves hunting the sun in the moon, so these would be Fineer's Sun's skull and Haiti horor Vintinson.

I'm not sure if I got that second one wolf's name right, So cosmic wolves go easy on me. But there's obviously an eclipse connection as well here, because these are supposed to be like sun and moon consumers. But I did run across direct connections between the sun dogs that are sometimes seen to either side of the Sun

and these these supernatural beasts. Well, coming back to the version of the halo that is either a ring around the head or an emanation of light as if from behind the head, I mean, obviously, if you have never witnessed a solar eclipse before and seen the corona of the Sun around the moon, I mean that that is a probably the most awe inspiring physical real thing I've ever witnessed like it. Yeah, well, it is a life changing thing to see with your eyes, and but be

very careful of your eyes when when observing one. Oh yeah, and that will come back to that in a second. So their whole host of rare optical effects related to these examples I've shared that produce various halos, and these have again been observed throughout time and depicted in art.

Two of the earlier Western examples of their recording are off cited are Aristotle's writings on them, as well as the fifteen thirty five SunDog painting, often held up as the oldest example of a clear atmospheric halo in art. To quote Aristotle, though in Meteorology from three fifty BC this is the Webster translation quote. The halo often appears as a complete circle. It is seen around the sun and the moon and bright stars by night as well as by day and at midday or even in the afternoon,

more rarely about sunrise or sunset. Now, it's obvious that seeing things like this in the sky can be awe inspiring, but is there a reason to suspect connections naturally in history between seeing things like this and religious concepts. Yeah, absolutely,

it seems to be the case. And I think one of the best examples of this is to look at the Miracle of the Sun or the Miracle of Fatima on October thirteenth, nineteen seventeen and Fatima, Portugal the number if you've probably run across this before you read an article about it. It involved a variety of reports of colored lights in the daytime sky, of a dancing sun that seemed to move around in the sky, and even

angelic apparitions. And there are various interpretations of this, none of which, or you can be held up as the definite of ants. There's some have pointed to the possibility of mass hallucination or mass hysteria. You know, you would have been dealing with a you know, a pretty religious bunch observing this, and in some cases you're dealing with

the observations and you know, and recollections of children. But it does sound increasingly likely that it's more a matter of their having been first of all, a variety of alleged reports, you know, different stories people seeing different things in the sky and some seeing nothing at all out of the ordinary. So it's not like everybody looked up and saw something interesting. Some people looked up and didn't see what anybody was talking about. But it's the most outrageous,

the most extreme accounts. They're the ones that survive and then evolve in retellings and in recordings. So again, skeptics of ovor a host of possible explanations for this particular incident, but it's it has been proposed that the whole thing might have started with some manner of a halo or sun dog sighting, or some sort of unique combination of these, you know, like the sun dogs with a couple of

halos around the Sun. And then here's the thing. As various folks start staring at the sun in all of these phenomena or trying to see what the in person next to them is looking at, they end up staring at the Sun too long and they experience temporary retinal distortion due to prolonged solar staring. Don't stare at the sun, folks, Yeah, I mean, remember when we had that solar eclipse in

the last few years. You know, that was everybody had to drive that home, like even though the Sun is doing something really interesting or and it is even being you know, is even darkening do not stare at it, because you can you can seriously damage your eyes and in the short term, yeah, you could experience temporary retinal distortion, which could have just just add to these interpretations of

like crazy things going on in the sky. Well, if you pair this with what I was saying earlier about the possible like the known effects of vision and optical effects within the eye and within the brain that are caused by, say, staring for a long time I'm at a bright light source, Like, you could get effects that wouldn't even necessarily have to be something in the sky, but would also not just be people using their imaginations.

They'd be real perceptions for the people, but they could be based on things like retinal effects afterimage things, or over perceiving the edges of outlines due to intense strain

on the eyes. Yeah. And then once something like this is observed and thought about, and then once you've had a chance to ask other people about it, then you can often turn to pre existing scripts to explain what that might have been, such as, uh, you know, angelic beings such as aliens and unidentified flying objects, that sort of thing. I just thought of a really great opening for a movie Okay, so it's it's Fatima Portugal. Everybody's

staring at the sun. They think they see angelic beings or a vision of the Virgin Mary or something like that, apparitions in the sky, and then it slowly resolves and it's coming in and it's coming in and what is it? And it's the predators drop ship and this is Predator Portugal, and so all of the yacht ja hop out and they begin they begin their hunt. Is that in bad

taste enough to be a Predator movie? Maybe? I just don't know that they'd get a lot of good sport, Like, you know, they're they're they're drawn to the really rough parts of the world, right. Oh, I guess there's not enough conflict here. There's got to be like a war going on or something. Yeah, like futuristic la And what ninety seven was that one of I'm supposed to take place Danny Glover one? Yeah, yeah, what if they arrived the Predators were to arrive and they're like, okay, we

have detected there's a lot of conflict right now. And then they get to their location and then they find out all the conflict is online, like in social media streams and they're like, ah, we brought all these weapons and now we just have to get we have to get Twitter accounts instead and learn English. Oh no, no no. So they show up because they're like, okay, the heat signature is we've detected on this place and the surface of the earth indicate ongoing thermonuclear warfare. But then when

they arrive, it's just a bitcoin mining facility. Uh. They're like, well, we got to go all in on bitcoin. Now, I guess we can travel all the way here. But then they get to launch the new predator cryptocurrency, right, assuming there's not already one. I'm sure there's already one. Is that there? There's probably there's already like a Garfield cryptocurrency, isn't there? And I don't know, but I would not remembering that they could day, I wouldn't. I wouldn't put

money against you od coin. Well, I guess we'll close this one out right here. But you know we're gonna keep going with this, this line of thinking though, this idea of optical effects that then get interpreted in various ways unless plans change. I think the next episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind will continue on a similar topic. Yeah, I'm very excited about that. We're going to be sort of moving on from Halo's mostly I don't know, it might come back up, but but but yeah, it's gonna

be a lot of fun. Yeah, all right. Well, in the meantime, if you want to catch up on episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you know where to find them. They're in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind Fee. These are our core episodes, you know, mostly science and culture and so forth. They published on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we throw out our short form artifact episodes.

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