This page needs to be careful, because a genuine physical phenomenon has been attached to a claim it cannot support.
A luminous field around the body appears across many traditions — prana and the koshas in India, halos in Christian, Buddhist and Islamic art, qi in China. The seven chakras with their assigned colours are described on the meditation page.
As a description of inner experience, this is a good and enduring map. The tightness in the throat when something cannot be said, the weight in the chest under grief, the sense of a person's presence in a room — these are real and the tradition names them well.
In 1939 Semyon Kirlian, an electrician in Krasnodar, photographed objects placed on a plate carrying a high-voltage, high-frequency current. The images show a coloured glow around the object's edge. The technique became famous in the 1970s as apparent proof of a life energy field.
The physics is well understood. It is corona discharge: the electric field ionises the air at the boundary of the object, and the ionised gas emits light. Photographic film records it.
Crucially, the glow varies with things that have nothing to do with vitality — principally the moisture on the surface, and also the pressure on the plate, the voltage, the exposure, the humidity of the room and the temperature. A wet coin glows. A wet leaf glows more than a dry one, which is the entire explanation of the “dying leaf” images: as the leaf dries, the corona fades.
When the object is a fingertip, sweat is doing most of the work. That is why a nervous person's reading differs from a calm person's — not because the aura has changed, but because the hand is damper.
Machines sold as aura cameras or biofield scanners generally measure skin resistance, temperature or galvanic response and then render the result as a coloured image around a photograph. The colours are assigned by the software, not observed.
These devices cannot detect disease, and they cannot tell you which organ is affected. No such device has been validated for diagnosis.
The harm is not the photograph. It is a person being told their liver or their heart shows up badly, and either being frightened without cause or — far worse — being reassured while something real goes uninvestigated.
If you have a symptom, please have it looked at properly. In India, advertising a device as diagnosing disease is also a regulatory matter.
I have kept this page because Kirlian photography is a real and interesting piece of scientific history, and because people will encounter aura scanning and deserve to know what it is measuring.
This site is a personal account and a record of traditional practice, shared for information. It is not medical advice, not a diagnosis, and not a treatment for any disease. I am not a doctor.
If you are unwell — and especially if you have a serious illness such as cancer, diabetes or heart disease — please stay under the care of a qualified physician. Nothing here should replace or delay that care.