Does the slow shutter of a camera capture a person's essence suspended in time for real? Yes we know its all about light capture but even so, I'm sure there is a bit more to this question.
Its like the famous parapsychologist visionaries of old. Many of them went off and wrote one book, or two books, three books four books etc. and these books were acclaimed as brilliant at the time of writing as many of them still are today.
On closer inspection however, these famous persons often used someone else's ideas and put these ideas in to a format which was up to date in their lifetime and so on and so forth.
If you study this subject carefully you will see that the same ideas have been re-packaged and trotted out for hundreds of years and several 'great men or women' have taken credit in modern history for a foundation of ideas and systems that was not in fact originally developed by them, but was actually developed hundreds of years previously.
Every so often someone has come along, read some old books and re-packaged the concept as their own work. I have recently found that many of the works attributed to a 'golden handful' of very famous 19th and 20th century parapsychologists are merely re-packaged copies of very much older material and it is not the work or even the idea of the 'golden handful' at all yet even today, they take all the credit for apparently mainly working out these systems themselves.
Another thing that may make people in awe is that these scholars of old have a fondness for latin language. Now there is nothing particularly clever about using latin. In the UK today you can read a bit of latin on the back of your shampoo bottle.
Learning latin was part of the national curriculum in the UK right up to the end of the 1960's and many private schools continue to teach latin today. The Catholic church used latin in it's mass. It was reasonably normal to use latin back in those days, it didn't mean anyone was exceptionally bright or clever just because they used a bit of latin. Latin sounds more pompous than using English, that's all, but its not really, but people think it makes them sound posh.
My late brother could read both latin and ancient Greek fluently, but that's because he learned it at school. He had books like Virgil's Aenid in latin and one day my hamster found a piece of chocolate on top of this book, ate it and dribbled all over the book's cover and that about sums up my view of stuff written in latin!
