The Long History of Magical Fluids
Subtle, quasi-physical secretions as portals to the spirit worlds
In a recent video, esoteric YouTuber Gigi Young argues that “women actually produce a substrate, a quasi physical-etheric substrate that forms a kind of ether, a kind of veil… which entities can use to pass through into this world.” This substrate, she says, is what spiritualists in the late 19th century called ectoplasm. She links ectoplasm to gender—and sexual magic—by treating it as a subtle byproduct of specifically female generative power.
I wanted to reflect more on this elusive substance, and other, similar magical fluids described in other traditions: Is there a “there” there? And if so, what is it?
Ectoplasm is generally defined as a viscous, seemingly lifelike substance—repulsive to skeptics, fascinating for believers—that allegedly exudes from the medium’s body to materialize limbs, faces, or entire spirits. It can be vaporous or solid, is often milky white in color and, according to some accounts, smells like ozone.
Ectoplasm relates, at least metaphorically, to plasma, the fourth state of matter, neither solid, liquid, or gas, which is actually the most abundant form of matter found in the universe. Plasma, itself, is often given a spiritual or esoteric meaning that is semi-metaphorical. While distinct from the ionized gas of physics, the biological fluid of blood plasma has also been linked to concepts like life-force or pneuma. As a dynamic and relational medium, it has been described as a bridge between spirit and matter, a medium of consciousness, or an aspect of the divine or universal energy. In certain modern interpretations of Kabbalah, blood plasma is specifically linked to the concept of Ruach (“spirit”, “breath”, or “wind”), one of the veils of the soul.
Ectoplasm, as mysterious proto-substance, also plays a role in the early history of Feminism. Historians see the spiritualist movement of the 19th Century as an early form of female empowerment: An arena where female power was acknowledged and intensified, with women leading the movement. Spiritualism foreshadowed further developments toward gender equality. One bridge figure between spiritualism and early feminism was Annie Besant, who took over the Theosophy movement after Madame Blavatsky’s death. Besant was a celebrated women’s rights activist, Left Wing journalist, and suffragette in England, before Blavatsky converted her to occultism.
It is true that we lack empirical evidence for the existence of anything like ectoplasm. Investigators repeatedly found that the medium’s ectoplasm—on stage or when captured in photographs—was constructed from gauze, muslin, or chewed paper soaked in egg white, then introduced through dramatic stagecraft. Helen Duncan’s “ectoplasm” was made of cheesecloth and toilet paper. Mina Crandon’s famous “ectoplasmic hand” turned out to be carved out of animal entrails or molded from wax. By the mid-twentieth century, ectoplasm had become, for skeptics, an object lesson in how spiritual yearning, erotic frisson, and theatrical spectacle can make even highly educated people— authors, scientists, and so on—credulous and child-like.
According to Young, ectoplasm, as a “quasi physical etheric substance,” arises from the woman’s womb and sacral center, from the same sexual/creative energy that produces children. A “good female psychic,” in her account, can build the etheric field in a room so that entities “can enter into the space, they can speak, they can appear.” This is possible because “the way that women are physically set up allows this to happen… it’s through the womb and also their etheric body and it’s really through that sacral center where the sexual energy is.” Ectoplasm, for Young, exists as something real: A subtle substrate, between the physical and the psychic, formed from feminine sexual vitality.
Because of this evanescent ectoplasm, Young proposes that women play a particular role in ritual magic and sex magic practices: “in ceremonial magic, it is the female, it is the woman who is the bridge to the spiritual world, not the man… the woman opens the portal, brings it through,” while the male, as phallic, “then attempts to wield and sort of control what is occurring there.” Whether it is Anton LaVey’s nude altar-women, Cecil Williamson’s prone female ritual set-ups, Crowley’s Scarlet Woman, or Marina Abramović’s performance featuring a honey-covered naked body, she finds dramatizations of this logic in magical practices: the female body, with its capacity for ectoplasmic generation, becomes the altar. For Young, sexual energy, especially female sexual energy, creates the “life-substrate” to attract demons and egregores. She theorizes OnlyFans and Internet pornography as a type of techno-industrial sex magic: Women “pour their sexual energy out into the world in a constant stream,” unconsciously producing the same kind of bridge-substance for entities that ritual magicians once tried to cultivate in a controlled setting, with intention.
Historical figures fascinated with ectoplasm included Sherlock Holmes creator and paranormal researcher Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle described ectoplasm as “a viscous, gelatinous substance which appeared to differ from every known form of matter in that it could solidify and be used for material purposes.” In The Edge of the Unknown (1930), Doyle noted, “this substance was actually touched by some enterprising investigators, who reported that it was elastic and appeared to be sensitive, as though it was really an organic extrusion from the medium’s body.”
The term itself was coined in the 1890s by French physiologist and psychic researcher Charles Richet in 1895, to describe physical manifestations observed with the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino. In practice, ectoplasm came to mean, as Sera-Shriar writes, “most kinds of materialized spiritual energy discharged from a medium’s body.” The French psychical researcher Gustav Geley described ectoplasm as “sometimes vaporous, sometimes a plastic paste, sometimes a bundle of fine threads, or a membrane with swellings or fringes, or a fine fabric-like tissue.” Similar phenomena are often reported in alien abduction accounts.
