Aura

The Greek αὔρα means breath, cool breeze, moving air. Latin took it over as aura for breeze, wind and the upper layer of air. Behind it, linguists suspect the Indo-European root *wer-, “to lift, to hold suspended”: the same family that gave us aorta and artery.

Even in antiquity the word was used figuratively: for changeable events and for the favour of the people, the aura popularis, which turns like the wind. It reached English in the 14th century still meaning “gentle breeze”. Today’s meanings, a radiance or atmosphere that surrounds someone, only take shape from the 18th century onwards.

Hellenistic and Roman art showed the sun god Helios, and later emperors, with a radiate crown. Because the motif was pagan, early Christian art avoided it at first. Christian emperors used the plain nimbus for their official portraits; from the middle of the 4th century Christ too received this imperial sign, and in the 5th century sometimes angels. Only in the 6th century did the halo become usual for Mary and the saints.

The typical image is called a scintillating scotoma or, because its jagged edges recall the walls of a fortress, a fortification spectrum. It starts small near the point of fixation and grows into a C-shaped arc that travels towards the edge of the visual field. Besides visual disturbances there can also be tingling and numbness spreading from the hand to the face, or problems with speech.

According to current understanding, the cause is not a narrowing of the blood vessels, as was long believed, but spreading depolarisation (cortical spreading depression): a wave in which nerve and glial cells depolarise almost completely, moving across the visual cortex at 2 to 5 mm per minute.

The medical word “aura” is almost 1,900 years old, and it came from the mouth of a patient.

The Roman physician Galen records that a patient of his teacher Pelops described the onset of his seizures as a cold breath rising from his leg up to his head. Ever since, what some people feel before an epileptic seizure has been called an aura.

Since 2017 the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) has made it clear: an aura is not a warning sign, it is already a seizure, a focal aware seizure. It can stay as it is or spread into a larger seizure. In seizures from the temporal lobe, around 80% of patients experience such auras.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, himself epileptic, described an ecstatic aura in The Idiot: seconds of supreme clarity and bliss for which one might “give one’s whole life”. Such blissful auras are rare, but well documented.

The idea is less old than it seems. Most of what is said today about the “human aura” goes back to two sources around 1900: Theosophy and a London physician.

Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater, leading figures of the Theosophical Society, published Thought-Forms in 1905: thoughts and feelings, they claimed, create colours and shapes in the aura, visible only to clairvoyants. The book’s colour plates influenced Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint, and with them abstract art.

In 1911, in The Human Atmosphere, the physician Walter J. Kilner believed he could make the aura visible with glass screens filled with dicyanin dye. He borrowed the term “etheric body” from Theosophy.

His example is still the most beautiful: resting on a summer afternoon, following a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the one at rest, “that is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch”. So Benjamin, too, reaches back to the original sense: aura is breathed in.

In his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, written in 1935 in exile in Paris, he carries the concept over to art. An original has a here and now, a history, an authenticity. Photography and film multiply it and bring it close. His conclusion: “That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”

The word sits, as nss magazine put it, “halfway between mysticism and video game”: aura as charisma, counted like experience points. According to the Wall Street Journal, content tagged #aurapoints on TikTok rose by 378% from May to June 2024 alone. In October 2024 young people aged 11 to 20 voted “Aura” Germany’s Youth Word of the Year (Jugendwort des Jahres), just ahead of “Talahon” and “Schere”.

2025 brought aura farming: deliberately collecting aura through a relaxed, seemingly effortless presence, with farming borrowed from the gaming term for collecting points over and over. It was made world-famous by eleven-year-old Rayyan Arkan Dikha, who danced on the bow of a longboat at the Pacu Jalur boat race in Riau, Indonesia, to spur on the rowers. His dance was copied around the world, from football teams to police officers in Mumbai. He himself says the dance was spontaneous.