Aura
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Aura is the distinctive atmosphere or quality associated with someone or something, an invisible force surrounding a living creature.
It can also refer to the perceptual disturbance experienced by some migraine sufferers before a migraine headache or the telltale sensation experienced by some people with epilepsy before a seizure.
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Etymology
From Latin aura (“a breeze, a breath of air, the air”), from Ancient Greek αὔρα (aura, “breeze, soft wind”), from ἀήρ (aēr, “air”).
Figurative meaning
Figuratively, an aura refers to the character of concepts, issues or phenomena surrounding a particular topic; for example, "The discussion had an aura of casualness."
Walter Benjamin
The Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin also used the term "aura" to refer to the feeling of awe created by unique or remarkable objects such as works of art or relics of the past. According to Benjamin older cultures can generate auras around particular objects of veneration, while capitalist culture has the opposite effect, causing the decay of the aura due to the proliferation of mass-production and reproduction technologies.
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