Toward Ecosophy

One of the things that makes the history of modern etheric technologies complex is that there isn't a nice straightforward sequence of researchers, each of whom picks up where the previous one left off.  More precisely, such a sequence exists -- the development of radionics from Albert Abrams through Ruth Drown to George and Marjorie de la Warr, T. Galen Hieronymus, and David Tansley, among others -- but other researchers such as Leon Eeman and Walter Kilner have stumbled across the same realm of etheric energy and explored it in their own unique ways, coming up with their own terminology and techniques. The subject of this week's post is far and away the most colorful and controversial of these figures: that astonishing force of nature, Wilhelm Reich. 

The whole sweep of Reich's career requires a book, not a journal post, and Myron Sharaf's biography Fury on Earth is a good option if you're interested. Even his work in the realm of etheric technologies is complex and important enough that it will require two posts, of which this is the first. 

To summarize a complex biography very quickly, Reich was one of Sigmund Freud's students in Vienna immediately after the First World War, and unlike most Freudians, came to the conclusion that the best solution to the psychological ills caused by sexual repression was, ahem, less sexual repression. He's the man who invented the phrase "the sexual revolution."  He was involved with Marxism in the giddy early days after the Russian Revolution, but ditched it (like many other intellectuals of the time) once Stalin showed conclusively just now nightmarish Marx's theories were when put into practice.

Over time, his research led him deeper and deeper into the complicated territory of sex, where biology meets psychology. He figured out that dysfunctional emotional habits are reflected in specific patterns of body tension, which he called "character armor."  He also focused much of his research on the role of orgasm as a release of tension -- a kind of reset button for the body.  All this while he was being thrown out of one country after another, because the Communists, the Fascists, the mainstream Freudians, and the churches all found him a convenient punching bag and made as much trouble for him as they could. 

He was living in Norway with his second wife when he began to stray across the border into the nonphysical realms. He was researching cancer, which seemed to be associated with certain patterns of character armor and emotional dysfunction, and claimed to find microbes of an unknown type in tissue cultures taken from cancers. Some of these, he noted, appeared through a microscope to be surrounded by little haloes of blue light. Some other people could see those, others couldn't; a close reading of Reichenbach's books could have clued Reich in to what was going on, but I haven't encountered any evidence yet that he read Reichenbach.  So he continued his researches, convinced that what he was studying was a physical reality rather than an etheric one. 

In 1939, just before war broke out, he relocated to the United States and continued his researches on the mechanism of the orgasm. His theory while he was in Norway was that the orgasm was an electrochemical release of energy, but around the time he arrived in the United States his experiments convinced him that he had discovered an energy unknown to science, which behaved a little like electricity but was closely linked to biological life. (Sound familiar?)  He called this energy "orgone."

Experiments with Faraday cages, which are used to shut out electromagnetic radiation, led him to the discovery that certain material structures appear to concentrate orgone. If you make a box of alternating layers of conductive and insulating materials, orgone appears to concentrate within it. Remember Mesmer's baquets, with their layers of conductive metal or water separated by glass and other insulative materials?)  That led him to construct boxes large enough to sit in, like the one above, as orgone accumulators. This is where we'll leave him for this week, recruiting volunteers to sit in orgone accumulators and testing the effects on their physical and mental well-being.  In next week's installment we'll talk about the strange places Reich's researches led him, and the savage response of the American medical industry to his discoveries. 

I don't know if this is true for other people, but whenever I work on a research project involving occultism, I start fielding those odd bursts of improbable coincidence that Carl Jung called "synchronicities." One of those landed the other day, courtesy of the IAPSOP archive of old occult texts. 

For years now one of my core research projects has been tracking down the traces of a lost tradition which surfaces in certain surprising places -- the writings of earth-mysteries doyen John Michell, the teachings of certain branches of the Druid Revival tradition, a handful of old books on animal magnetism, and more. The tradition, if I understand it correctly, works with two sources of energy:  one assoclated with terrestrial magnetism, the other associated with solar radiation. It might best be understood as a form of energetic alchemy, because these two currents are fused in a variety of vessels -- especially but not only in the human organism -- to create a third force that can be used in various ways. Created in the human organism, it gives rise to wisdom, revelation, and enlightenment; created in the land, by way of certain structures of stone and earth, it gives rise to agricultural fertility; it has other uses, not all of which I'm prepared to discuss. 

There were exercises meant to connect with those energies. I've found references to some of them, and included them in certain books of mine; I've also adapted other workings to do the same thing. But I wasn't expecting one of the exercises to show up in a pamphlet by a Spiritualist medium. 

Abby A. Judson was once a tolerably well-known figure in the Spiritualist circuit. In 1888, she learned a certain simple set of exercises from one Dr. H.W. Abbott, whom I haven't yet been able to trace.  Abbott claimed he'd been taught them by the spirit of a king of Atlantis named Osseweago; given the role of upstate New York as a hotbed of early American occultism, I suspect that the good doctor was having fun at Ms. Judson's expense. The exercises, as Judson notes in her book The Bridge Between Two Worlds, is primarily meant to bring the practitioner into contact with benevolent spiritual currents and chase off negative energies; she recommends it to mediums because it keeps noxious entities at bay.

I've done some experimenting with the exercises and modified them slightly; you can find Judson's original version via the two links above. Here's my current version: 

1. Stand facing north. Turn counterclockwise three and a half times, arms extended out to the sides, palms down, concentrating on the idea that unwanted energies are being thrown off as you turn. End facing south. 

2. Bring your heels together, shift your weight onto the balls of your feet, extend your arms to the south, spread your fingers slightly, bow your head and close your eyes. Imagine that you are being permeated with the magnetic energies of the earth. 

3. Turn clockwise to face the north. Then raise your arms up and out above your head and look up. Turn very slowly clockwise once around, while imagining life and blessing descending to you from the sun. You can say a prayer or spoken invocation as you do this. 

4. Extend your arms to your sides, palms down, and turn clockwise four and a half times, concentrating on the idea that you are wrapping yourself and your aura in the positive energies you have invoked. End facing south,. 

5. Sweep your "positive hand" -- this is usually the hand you write with -- palm down a few inches above  the palm and forearm of your negative hand, which is held palm up. Do this three times, sweeping the hand from wrist to fingertips. Then reverse, and sweep off the positive hand with the negative hand. 

These stages are, respectively: (1) throwing off inharmonious magnetism; (2) blending with the magnetism of the earth; (3) calling down beneficent influences from above; (4) gathering up and charging the aura; (5) sealing the aura. Yes, by the way, the possibility that these exercises might fit somewhere into the prehistory of Peter Kelder's Five Rites has occurred to me.

Note 1: Judson, like many writers of her time, uses the word "magnetism" to refer to what Mesmer called "animal magnetism," Reichenbach called "od," etc., etc., etc.  It's not the force that comes from physical magnets. 

Note 2: To make sense of "clockwise" and "counterclockwise," by the way, imagine yourself looking down at a giant clock face on the ground just beneath your feet. The way the hands move on that clock face is "clockwise" in terms of this exercise. 

My experiments with this exercise suggest that it functions as a banishing ritual, but it works primarily on the etheric level, where most banishing rituals work primarily on the astral. Judson suggests doing it first thing in the morning and then again at night; I've tried this with good results, and it does not seem to conflict in any way with the Sphere of Protection. 

If anyone else feels inspired to give this a try, I'd welcome feedback. It seems to be a very simple and effective way of cleansing the aura of etheric gunk and charging it with cleaner energies; if it also does this for other people, I plan on getting it into wider circulation. Thank you in advance for your help!

It's getting on for midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. (Any question received after then will not get an answer, and will likely just be deleted.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. 

I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and I have a new answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain other gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I now have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online. 

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

The first third of the twentieth century, when Albert Abrams was perfecting his machines and Leon Eeman was experimenting with biocircuits, was in many ways the golden age of etheric technology. The culture of independent scientific research was still in full flower, old-fashioned occult philosophy was still a major cultural force, and there were plenty of researchers in and out of the scientific community who were willing to buck the materalist dogma of the time and explore the Unseen using the tools of scientific research. One of the most prestigious figures in that movement was Dr. Walter Kilner. 

Born in 1847, Kilner entered the medical profession and specialized in electrotherapy, one of the cutting-edge medical specialties of the late nineteenth century. Like many physicians in his time, he carried out medical research alongside his duties caring for patients, and published a great many papers in the medical journals of the time. Around the turn of the last century, he became interested in the question of the human aura -- the field of force that many people see or feel around human bodies. Where most research into the subject focused on the aura itself, Kilner wanted to understand why some people can see it while others cannot. This led him to experiment with filters of various kinds. 

The standard optical filter in his time consisted of alcohol and dye held between two disks of glass, surrounded by a metal frame. That allowed Kilner to experiment with a wide range of dyes, and that led him in turn to an unexpected discovery.  If someone spent several minutes looking through a filter that used dicyanin, a common dark blue dye, and then went into a dim room, that person's eyes would be temporarily sensitized to the aura. Repeat the same experience several times and the sensitization became permanent. The technology that resulted from this was simple: a set of goggles that had dicyanin filters in place of lenses, and could be used quite easily by experimenters to sensitize their own eyes and those of experimental subjects. 

Kilner published a book on the subject, The Human Atmosphere, in 1911, which you can download for free here. (It was later reprinted in a revised and expanded edition in 1920 as The Human Aura.)  His experiments sorted out the aura into three layers -- the health aura or etheric body, which extended only a very short distance from the skin; the inner aura; and the outer aura. The diagram in the upper left of this post shows approximately what he and his experimental subjects saw, though the colors varied from person to person and with other factors as well. It was all classic experimental science, and the response of the scientific community...

No, they didn't actually pull a Randi -- there was plenty of ad hominem language thrown around, and there still is, but as far as I know none of the skeptics did the usual gimmick of repeating the experiment with crucial details changed and then loudly reporting a failure to replicate. My guess?  Like the church officials who refused to look through Galileo's telescope, they were afraid of what they might see. So Kilner's work was relegated to the dustbin of so-called "pseudoscience" by the scientific community. Occultists picked it up with enthusiasm -- most early twentieth century occult writers of any stature in the English-speaking world cite Kilner, because what he saw after sensitizing his vision with dicyanin goggles was what they saw after developing clairvoyance in more traditional ways, but their enthusiasm probably caused the scientific community to shun him all the more. 

Replicating Kilner's work would seem tolerably easy, not least because his book gives instructions for building and using the goggles.  The one difficulty is that dicyanin A, the dye he used, is apparently unavailable in the US. (There are claims in the alternative-science scene that it has actually been outlawed, but I have been unable to confirm this.) More recent researchers have experimented with other coal tar dyes, and also with cobalt blue and purple glass, and some successes have been reported using these methods. It remains one of the branches of etheric science in which a little systematic work might lead to considerable discoveries. 

In the wake of the passing of John Gilbert, one of my teachers in occultism, I've been tasked with helping to see to it that his work doesn't get lost. That's involved making sure I have a good set of his papers and passing them onto the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), the one organization he was active in that's thriving these days; it's also involved going back over the work in those of his other involvements I shared; and since in occultism, any study program worth doing is worth doing more than once, it's got me doing a second pass through the training program and degree system of what he called the Magickal Golden Dawn. 

It's not the name I would have given that system, for what it's worth, and that's not just because I dislike the Crowleyite habit of flinging a half-random "k" into a perfectly fine English word. According to the story I was told, Juliet Ashley -- third Grand Archdruid of AODA, friend of Manly P. Hall and Edgar Cayce, and all-around early 20th century American occultist -- stopped in Britain in 1939 on her way back from Zurich, where she'd been studying Jungian psychology. She somehow talked Arthur Edward Waite into giving her some kind of authorization to found an American branch of the Fellowship of the Rose Cross, Waite's offshoot of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and duly founded the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn using Waite's rituals in Philadelphia in 1941. The order evolved, as orders do, and had modified its rituals considerably by the time John Gilbert was initiated into it. After Ashley's death, Gilbert then launched his own organization, working his own version of the rituals. Magic per se had no role in Waite's order, and not much more in Ashley's and Gilbert's order; the Sphere of Protection ritual, the rituals of consecrating the elemental working tools, and the rituals of initiation were the only ceremonial workings in the system when I learned it. 

Instead, the student was expected to learn and practice meditation, to do an extensive series of elemental scryings and pathworkings, and to learn and practice three systems of divination. According to the rules when I joined, there were seven options -- astrology, tarot, geomancy, runes, numerology, palmistry, and "oracles" (this last was a catchall for the whole range of divination systems not covered by the first six categories). You could learn three from scratch, or work on developing more skill in three of them, or do some combination of those. My first time through, I took up astrology and worked on developing my skill with geomancy and the ogham, but I decided this time to do three systems I haven't studied before -- and one of those is numerology. 

Numerology has a bad rap in serious occult circles. Everyone's cool about magical number theory -- you can't get far in traditional Western occultism without getting into numbers -- but the kind of numerology that involves adding up your birth date, the letters of your name, and so on? Most serious occultists roll their eyes at that. Since I've been writing at length about American popular occultism, however, I decided to give it a try. 

Ahem. 

Just as a helpful example, let's consider the year 2020. If you add up the digits -- that's standard practice -- you get a year number of 4. A 4 year is supposed to be a difficult year in which nothing goes right and steady plodding is about the best you can do. Sound familiar? 

So I'm having a lot of fun just now learning my way around numerology, and am considering other branches of folk occultism that haven't had the good press that astrology, tarot, and other recherché systems have had. It promises to be entertaining, if nothing else. The moral to this story, if there is one, is that class prejudice may be just as useless in occultism as it is elsewhere...

The transition from the investigations of Mesmer and Reichenbach to contemporary radionics began with Dr. Albert Abrams, the gentleman on the left. Born in San Francisco in 1863, he began his medical studies at a local college, got his M.D., then -- in the usual fashion in those days -- went abroad to get a second degree, which he received from the prestigious Heidelberg University medical school in Germany in 1882. After further study at medical schools in London, Berlin, Vienna, and Paris, he returned to San Francisco and hung out his shingle. He became one of the most respected neurologists on the west coast, taught for fourteen years at the Cooper College medical school, and was elected vice-president of the California State Medical Society in 1889. 

You need to know three things about medicine at the end of the nineteenth century to understand what followed. The first is that the pharmaceutical industry didn't yet have the deathgrip over medicine that it has since achieved, and physicians were open to using things other than drugs and surgery to treat illness. The second is that medical experimentation wasn't yet restricted to big laboratories funded and controlled by big corporations; many physicians experimented in their own spare time. The third is that medicine in those days was still a hands-on practice, and palpation and percussion of the abdomen -- that is to say, probing and tapping the patient's belly with the fingers -- was a standard diagnostic method. 

So the learned and respected Dr. Abrams pursued a series of research projects in his spare time, like many of his colleagues. He was very interested in percussion of the abdomen as a diagnostic tool, and found that under certain very specific conditions -- the patient had to be standing, and facing a particular direction -- percussion would accurately diagnose a range of diseases.  The one problem was that patients who were very sick couldn't stand up for the prolonged session of percussion Abrams used. So, drawing on the theory that nerve impulses were electrical in nature -- standard medical opinion in his time -- Abrams decided to see if he could hook up a patient with a healthy volunteer using copper headbands, a copper plate under the feet, and wires connecting them. He did, and he found he could get the same diagnostic reactions in the volunteer. 

This was fascinating, and it became even more so when he hooked up rheostats (variable resistors) into the wires in an attempt to fine-tune the reaction. He found quite reliably that certain rheostat settings made the percussive response much louder, but only if the patient had some specific illness.  He proceeded to run more tests and build more machines, and got stranger and stranger results.  He found, for example, that he could take a blood sample from a patient, hook it up to his machines, and get a diagnostic reading from the volunteer's abdomen.  

He also started looking into possibilities for treatment using the same principle. The idea of using low-power radio waves for healing was common in the medical scene in those days -- one such method, short-wave diathermy, had already shown considerable promise -- and so he set out to build machines that would use his resistance settings to beam healing radio waves into patients. The sort of giddy mad-scientist hardware shown above soon gave way to elegant Victorian devices like the one on the right -- the first radionics machines, though the term hadn't been invented yet. 

So did other physicians and the scientific community in general respond to this by saying, "Good heavens, Abrams is a respected physician with a good track record, so we ought to investigate this ourselves"?  No, of course not. He got the same response from them that Mesmer and Reichenbach did. They pulled a Randi -- ad hominem attacks followed by strenuous efforts not to replicate his results, which got lots of publicity in the press and the medical journals. They recognized, as Abrams apparently never did, that the results he was getting could not be the product of ordinary electricity, but had to derive from something else -- the same "something else" that Mesmer and Reichenbach had been investigating, a "something else" that mainstream science insisted did not, could not, and must not exist. 

The medical industry was all but unregulated in his time, however, for reasons that today's physicians don't like to talk about.  Medicine had been heavily regulated in the US at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but that resulted in a very low quality of care at sky-high prices, and state legislatures responded by throwing out most legal restrictions on medical practice and allowing the market to do its job. That enabled Abrams to continue his work unhindered, and publish several detailed books on his methods until his death in 1934.  Later investigators weren't so lucky. 

Buy physical books now. Great ones, good ones, bad ones, ones you happen to like. Store them safely as you would treasures. They are. Some will become unavailable soon, I suspect, for reasons that may not be stated candidly. If I’m wrong, what have you lost?

We, the library

— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) February 12, 2021

This seems uncomfortably appropriate to me just now...

I admit this one came as a bit of a surprise to me, though it shouldn't have...

Statues like the one on the left are selling like hotcakes all over China; you can get them up to 14 feet tall, though little 6" tall items suitable for a home or business shrine are much more popular. Yes, that's Donald Trump in lotus posture, dressed in Buddist robes, his hands in the dhyana mudra. You put one in a shrine and burn joss sticks to it to make your home or business great again. 

So far, the only version I've found for sale in this country costs $200, which is a little much for the budget of most ordinary deplorable Americans, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to see less expensive versions popping up shortly, along with the more brightly colored sort of image that's used in Hindu spiritual practice. 

We live in strange times, and I think they're likely to get even stranger soon...

It's just past midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything ***about occultism*** (ahem) and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. (Any question received after then will not get an answer, and will likely just be deleted.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.

I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and I have a new answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain other gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I now have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online. 

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***