Etheric Technologies 8: Wilhelm Reich and Orgone, Part Two

[ecosophia]

We ended last week's post in this sequence with Wilhelm Reich safely ensconced in the United States, constructing his first orgone accumulators using alternating layers of conductive and insulative materials.  He was by this time certain that he'd broken through into an entirely new field of scientific research, and that orgone was a reality -- an energy closely related to biological life and health, which bridged the gap between psychology and physiology.  It was a busy time for him; he was teaching classes at Manhattan's New School for Social Research, training physicians in the techniques he'd already devised, getting his books translated into English, and pursuing further researches into orgone. 

Unfortunately for him, he began looking into the possibility that orgone treatment could be used to benefit cancer patients. When he first began this research in the late 1930s, that wasn't a problem, but it became a massive problem for him once the Second World War ended. 

I'm not sure how many of my readers realize that today's sky-high rates of cancer are a very recent phenomenon.  In the 19th century, cancer was an uncommon disease, mostly found in old people -- childhood cancers were so rare that individual cases were written up in medical journals. That started to change between the two world wars, but it was after the end of the Second World War that cancer rates soared and cancer became the #2 cause of death in the United States. Readers of my generation and older will recall the flurry of books and movies in the 1960s about young adults dying of cancer -- Love Story, Brian's Song, Sunshine, and so on through a very long list.  Those made such a splash because young adults dying of cancer was a new and shocking thing at that time. 

That made cancer an immense challenge for the medical and pharmaceutical industries.  They had just succeeded in getting a stranglehold over health care in the United States, and all of a sudden they were faced with a widespread health crisis for which they had no effective treatments. Nor could they address the cause, because it was recognized quite early that the major causes of cancer were environmental, resulting from the explosive growth of the chemical industry and the saturation of the environment with an ever-expanding list of toxic compounds. (There's a reason, in other words, why the American Cancer Society gets most of its funding and many of its board members from the chemical industry.)

What made all this a potential disaster for the medical-industrial complex was that some alternative treatments seemed to work against cancer in at least some cases. That was why, from the 1950s on, anyone outside the medical industry who claimed to be able to treat cancer could count on facing an all-out attack by the medical industry and its lawyers and media flacks. 

Reich was completely unaware of this. He was caught up in his research, trying to push the boundaries of his new science of orgonomics. He experimented with the effects of orgone accumulators on radioactive material and nearly ended up with a disaster on his hands -- the result was a devitalized form of orgone that Reich named DOR, "deadly orgone radiation."  He found by accident that orgone directed from an accumulator toward the sky appeared to cause changes in weather, and developed a device -- the "Cloudbuster" -- which was tested successfully in drought conditions in Arizona and Maine.  He built a new home and laboratory in Rangeley, Maine, where he pursued his work.

Meanwhile the medical industry followed its usual game plan. Mass media denunciations came first. Next was an investigation by the FDA -- then as now controlled by the pharmaceutical industry via the "revolving door" policy, by which FDA officials retired into well-paid corporate positions as a reward for decisions that benefited the industry they were supposed to regulate. In 1954 the FDA got a compliant judge to issue an injunction forbidding Reich to ship orgone accumulators across state lines and banning his books -- this latter under the pretext that the books in question were "labeling" for the accumulators. 

Reich made the mistake of trying to fight this by proving that his methods actually worked. Under American law, once the injunction was issued, all that mattered was whether Reich obeyed it, and once one of Reich's subordinates transported several accumulators from Maine to New York City, the FDA had what it wanted and set the legal machinery in motion. Reich was thrown into prison, where he died.  By court order, all his laboratory notes, manuscripts, and unsold books -- three tons of them -- were burnt, and all his equipment was destroyed. Only the fact that many copies of his books had already been published and some orgone accumulators were in other hands kept his life's work from being completely erased. 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Jaw. On. Floor.

[ecosophia]

Welcome to the real world. It gets cold and bleak out here sometimes.

[(Anonymous)]

I remember finding some figures on the historical growth of cancer rates, and how the lifetime chance of developing it is currently around 40-45%, but recent searches on the subject lead to a bunch of smoke and mirrors.

Search for cancer rates, and I find headlines about the cancer death rate declining (well, that's not what I asked for). Try to find historical data, and the graphs only go back to 1999:

https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/DataViz.html

Another claim is that the reason cancer rates are rising is because people are living so much longer these days. Well, maybe, but it seems dubious at best.

It's intensely frustrating. It feels like Reich's manuscripts weren't the only thing to be fed into the fire - so much inconvenient history followed it.

-Cliff

[ecosophia]

Exactly. There's a lot of misinformation and even more non-information going around these days.

James DeMeo continues his work somehow

[(Anonymous)]

James DeMeo continues his work somehow, has this book Saharasia which:

"Saharasia presents the first cross-cultural, anthropological, archaeological and historical survey of human family and social institutions, tracing human violence back in time to specific times and places of first-origin.
[...]
An early period of generally peaceful social conditions is documented in prehistory, but with a major shift towards patriarchal-authoritarian and decidedly violent social conditions across the Saharasian region after a major climate-shift from wet grassland-forest conditions towards harsh desert conditions at c.5000-4000 BC.

Which when I was younger I read the other way that the violent authoritarian condition caused the desertification.


Maybe unrelated but there is another genius that got his work and life lost in America, Ioan Petru Culianu, this is from my research:

Culianu was supposed to spend the following academic year, 1991-1992, as a Senior Fellow at Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions, at the invitation of the Center's Director, professor Lawrence E. Sullivan. For the years 1991 and 1992 he had planned the following books, which were already contracted:
• A History of Magic;
• The Oxford Encyclopedic History of Magic (under his
general editorship);
• A History of Mind. Vol. 1: Religion;
• Memories of the Future: The Combinatory Art of
Raymundus Lullus;
• The Birth of Infinity (The Nominalist Revolution).
He had prepared articles for a «Trattato di antropologia del sacro», initiated by Jaca Book; for a «Dizionario delle religioni», edited by Giovanni Filoramo; and for many other volumes and periodicals. All this prodigious activity was abruptly ended."

Re: James DeMeo continues his work somehow

[ecosophia]

DeMeo's doing some very interesting work, and he's not the only one. Reich had the very helpful habit of publishing his experimental results and technical discoveries in book form, and after he was dead and the FDA couldn't keep on claiming that his books were "labeling," all of them got back into print. So there's a vast amount of orgonomic research in process these days, some of it first-rate.

As for Couliano, he was an amazing figure -- one of the few people in his time to master the disciplines of Renaissance magic. I would have loved to have a look at his work on Lull's combinatorial art.

[violetcabra]

Thanks for this! If I may, it seems to me like European culture and the European diaspora is somehow extremely hostile to effective and operative synthesis of thought. What happened to Reich isn't that different from what happened to the Cathars. That is, hegemonic powers came on down and crushed heterodoxy that seemed more effective in its aims than said orthodoxy. While it's tempting to blame the advent of Christianity for this, it seems to me that within the Greek tradition there is also an interesting lack of synthesis say between Hesiod and Homer and between Plato and the two, especially given what Plato wrote regarding poets in _The Republic_. While the early Christian Church did take some of the Neoplatonic philosophy effectively --- here I think especially of Origen --- the prominence of some of the Church Fathers, here St. Augustine comes to mind, prevented a thoroughgoing synthesis of the two heritages. With the reformation, too, there seems like a remarkable lack of effective synthesis between the Catholic and Protestant traditions. As more years have passed new innovations come, and when they attain hegemonic status equally they utterly fail to synthesis the legacy of their own heritage. Frankly this strikes me as extremely odd.

It seems to me that what happened to Reich, then, was a part of a basic pattern in European culture in which orthodox forces destroy heterodox ideas with great dispatch. Obviously, though, studying other cultures this sort of attitude proves far from universal among people. Do you have a sense of the deeper pattern at work here? The self-fragmenting nature of the European tradition frankly strikes me as very odd, all things considered. My apologies if this question is too broad, but it seems to me that the basic shape of what happened to Reich belongs in a somewhat unique way to the heritage of Europe and her diaspora, and I'm curious on your thoughts on the matter as they relate to Reich and, of course, more generally.

[ecosophia]

That's a very interesting speculation and one that I'm going to have to think about. The habit of suppressing synthesis is not quite exclusive to Europe, though -- have a look at the Sunni-Shi'a schism in Islam sometime.

[(Anonymous)]

" the major causes of cancer were environmental, resulting from the explosive growth of the chemical industry and the saturation of the environment with an ever-expanding list of toxic compounds."

I suspect given how weird people get when the topic of pollution and cancer comes up that a lot of people know this, and also that it drives a lot of the "TOBACCO IS EVIL BECAUSE IT CAUSES CANCER! OMLG SOMEONE NEEDS TO DO SOMETHING!"

After all, if your way of life depends on industrial society, and this is the source of most of the cancer causing chemicals, then finding something to address it would help a lot to alleviate the guilt. Since most middle class folks do not smoke tobacco, freaking out over that is a good alternative to action to reduce the pollution which causes it.

Also, if someone were interested in looking into the history of cancer, do you have any good sources? I'm trying to find good sources, but I keep running into propaganda; my personal favourite form is that doctors in the past were too stupid to see that people dying of cancer were dying of cancer, and that all of the increase in cancer is caused by better diagnostic techniques. It's just so obviously ridiculous....

[ecosophia]

I haven't gotten the kind of background in health care research I'd need to know where to look for the history of cancer. Used book stores might be helpful -- in the few fields I've researched, it's astonishing how much you learn by comparing the official accounts in books from different decades...

[readoldthings]

Ain't that America.

When I was in college in the early 2000s, I had a student job at the newly formed Center for Environmental Oncology at my university. At one time, my job was to help edit a book being written by the head of the Center which documented the ways that the Chemical and Tobacco industries had spent decades in a secret war, trying to pin the blame for cancer on one another. Tobacco eventually lost, probably because it's less necessary to the economy and more associated with Southerners, the working class and other deplorables. But both were responsible. The book was published more than a decade ago, claiming that a million excess cancer deaths had been caused by the chemical industry-- and I've never heard anyone make any mention of it anywhere since.

[ecosophia]

Let me know the title and author and I'll give it a signal boost.

[grandswamperman]

I wasn’t aware that all of Reich’s published books survived long enough to get back into print! That’s heartening, at least.

I’ve heard that it’s fairly cheap and easy to make a small cloudbuster (or very small orgone accumulator) over a weekend; might be a nice science project one of these days.

[ecosophia]

You can make a small orgone accumulator with a nested series of tomato sauce cans separated by layers of cardboard, so yes, "cheap and easy" is a good description. I'd encourage you to give it a try!

[tamanous2020]

I dont know if its particular ironic, but cancer sure is an appropriate disease for faustian civilization to contend with, especially if its prevalence is increased by the very progress it so adheres to. If there's one hope within the decline of industrial civilization, it will be the potential for effective and pragmatic heterodox treatments to take precedence over geriatric orthodox institutions.

[ecosophia]

No question, it's a fine irony that a society obsessed with dreams of unlimited growth should be haunted by a disease that consists of unlimited growth. As for the hope you've suggested, agreed -- and the sooner those heterodoxies get widespread, the better.

Two Things

[(Anonymous)]

1) Reich
I remember reading about him years ago, found his ideas interesting, but everything was sharply divided down two lines:
- People who supported Reich were wholeheartedly believers in his work and treated it with religious certainty. All the supporters I could find were also completely subsumed in the New Age spirituality.
- People who decided that, while his ideas on emotional body rigidity were valid, he was a kook who then went off the rails.
Neither had any interest in testing his work or finishing his work.

2) Binary options
As I mentioned above, a classic binary option. I found a place in the park with multiple pathways diverging and, since you occasionally use such imagery, I'd like to see if I can offer them to you. gratis. For your use as needed.
I don't know if these links will work, but here goes:
https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/672866000579847380/
https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/672866000579847432/
(if not, let me know how I can get them to you)

Bruce

Re: Two Things

[ecosophia]

1) I've noticed the same thing; fortunately there are now plenty of people busy replicating Reich's work, so the binary is breaking down.

2) Got 'em and thank you!

[mollari]

When I very briefly was training for a career in the medical industry, I saw someone handling the chemicals used in chemotherapy. Everyone gave her very wide berth, and when I asked why they were so freaked out by them, I was told in hushed terms that these are among the most toxic chemicals known to exist, and that among the many other dangers, exposure to them causes cancer. This was the point that all remaining doubt I had vanished: the modern medical industry is corrupt and toxic to the very core.

[ecosophia]

I'd heard that chemotherapy compounds were toxic, but I didn't know they were that toxis. Thanks for this.

[(Anonymous)]

One of the lessons I've taken from these last few posts in the series is that, strategically speaking, one must remain sufficiently situationally-aware, knowing when one can fight a set-piece battle and when one should go underground to survive.

--David BTL

[ecosophia]

It's a very useful lesson.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, this sounds like something the Radiance would do... Plus I'm sure that this sort of thing still happens today

[ecosophia]

Well, as it happens, I had things like that in mind when I was writing the series...

[ecosophian]

Government agents acting like thugs and burning books? I guess some things never change.
That's one of the reasons why the fourth magical maxim is To Be Silent.

[ecosophia]

Bingo. To know, to will, to dare, and to keep your frackin' mouth shut!

[mollari]

This is relevant to the series, but not this post. Three things have me wondering if TV is also an example of etheric technology, albeit one poorly understood. The first is that putting sharp iron near the TV seems to reduce appeal for some people; the second is that an awful lot of sensitive people find TV utterly unbearable, and banishing tends to make people lose interest in it altogether; and the third is that a friend who has contacts in the industry told me that over the air TV is still offered in lots of places where they know no one watches it because back in the 80s it was discovered that in areas without OTA signals people watch less TV. Not just in the sense some people won't get TV, but in the sense that people will watch less cable TV as well.

So I'm now wondering if part of what makes TV so addictive for a lot of people is some kind of interaction between the TV set and the OTA signals (broadcast on electromagnetic waves); the iron disrupts the patterns on the etheric; while sensitives dislike it because it's an unpleasant etheric pattern. I plan to investigate further, but for now I lack the skills needed.

[ecosophia]

That's a fascinating hypothesis and worth exploring.

French statistics on cancer death rates

[(Anonymous)]

Hello!

A few years back I came across a french environmental magazine that published french statistics on death rates in France from all types of cancers from 1900 (yes!) to 2002 and by age group too! And guess what! Death rates for all age groups was low and stable from 1900 to 1950. Of course the death rates was higher for older groups. However as from 1950, for ALL age groups death rates climbed steadily upwards by a factor of 10 from 1950 to 2002 if I remember correctly. It was astounding.

The inference that toxic chemicals pumped into the environment after WW 2 had something to do with this phenomenon is unavoidable.

I was surprised to note that even medical doctors dont seem to know such relevant medical historical statistics (I have many medical doctors in my extended family, circle of friends and acquaintances...)

Regards

Re: French statistics on cancer death rates

[ecosophia]

Hmm! Do you happen to remember which magazine? I'd love to have those numbers in a source I can cite.

Radionics that survived

[(Anonymous)]

I’m guessing that one of the main reasons why Hieronymus and other radionics pioneers managed to get by unscathed was because they didn’t make any overt medical claims in their marketing?

Although they might have discreetly mentioned possible medical uses in the supplied machines?

Re: Radionics that survived

[ecosophia]

They didn't talk about cancer, and they used every legal trick in the book to avoid making explicit health claims. The handbook of Hieronymus' treatment rates I have has, stamped all through it, THIS IS EXPERIMENTAL AND NOT TO BE USED IN PLACE OF A PROVEN MODALITY.

Reich Resources

[(Anonymous)]

Possible Resources on Wilhelm Reich:

“Man in the Trap,” by Elsworth F. Baker
Baker was a psychiatrist who worked with Reich and founded the American College of Orgonomy. I read Man in the Trap a long time ago, and found it a useful systematic discussion of blockages in different parts of the body and their effects on personality.

Baker also wrote My Eleven Years with Reich (Kindle only) which I haven’t read, just ordered.

Has anyone read?
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee
600+ pages, published in 2010.


Later:
I searched a bit longer online, and found that the American College of Orgonomy has an active program:
https://www.orgonomy.org/college.html
publishes a journal twice a year, samples available for download:
https://orgonomy.org/media_journal/media_journal.html
“The College responds to requests for information on all aspects of orgonomy”
& supports this podcast:
https://adifferentkindofpsychiatry.blubrry.net/

from EllenZ

Re: Reich Resources

[ecosophia]

Thanks for all of these. I'm considering a book on this subject, and the ACO will be very much worth contacting.

DOR

[(Anonymous)]

I knew about a lot of this, particularly the "Cloudbuster" side of things, after falling down a rabbit hole in my teens when my mother, who is a Kate Bush fan, was playing the song and I got curious.

However, I had not heard of the 'deadly orgone radiation' - are we talking something which could be justifiably described as a Death Ray here?!? Never mind the pharmaceutical industry, how was this never picked up for military applications?

Re: DOR

[ecosophia]

It's possible that it has been. I don't claim to know everything that the US military has tested...

[(Anonymous)]

Brilliant concise and powerful summary, JMG, thank you again for this series!

" bridged the gap between psychology and physiology"

That's the central heresy right there, for which Deplatforming Unto Death is the standard punishment.

The religion of material scientism says that prophet Descartes told us all that the body is a machine, the apparent soul an unrelated mystery.

Reich said the inner terror we don't face is physically locked in our muscles and connective tissues. Can't have a heresy like that running around loose!

- Mr. New-Writer

Pat Ormsby here

[(Anonymous)]

My goodness! The things that went on back then that I didn't have a clue about, not even a cluelet, nor did my intellectual family, for whom I had such respect. It wasn't until 1996 when I pulled on a loose thread (figuratively) and found the whole dam curtain unravelling. I became an instant pariah at the same time, an embarrassment to my father, as well, until he too started noticing the occasional scientific study on the blood-brain barrier or other areas affected by radiofrequency radiation making it into prestigious journals. It was the kind of thing that at his age, it was just too late, so he ignored it.
I think the first time I encountered the term "autoimmunity" was in 1992, but my father had been one of the first four known cases of Reiter's syndrome in roughly 1950. I once asked him how long he had been working with high-power radio antennas when he came down with symptoms (which were a lot like clap), and he said "five years." That's the sort of timing the Soviets were reporting as well for a spectrum of serious ailments, including hypertension and heart disease.

Thank you, John for writing about this!

Re: Pat Ormsby here

[ecosophia]

You're most welcome. Thanks for the heads up about Reiter's syndrome -- I'll look into it.

[syfen]

Archdruid,

You know I just realized that etheric technology could probably get institutional support in India. Are Dr. Reich's books available to the public?

[ecosophia]

They are indeed.

I think this is a great idea, by the way. Orgone = prana, so it shouldn't be at all hard for the various healing professions in India to adapt Reich's techniques to mesh with their own well-tested modalities.

What is the story here?

[scotlyn]

This makes me think of a rumination I have been chewing on for a few weeks. It started with a phone conversation with a friend I had not spoken to for a while, who astounded me with the hope that they will speed up the administration of experimental vaccines to people so we can get out of lockdown. As we spoke, I realised that I was in the presence of a specific narrative, that, since it is not my narrative, was sounding a bit like a fairy tale to me. So then I had to work out what my own narrative was.

My first run through this question produced the recognition that she was working within a narrative of (say) the dragon assailing the village. Every now and again the dragon takes a victim and everyone is desperately hoping for a hero to come on the scene. And so, here on cue, come the pharmaceutical heroes in white coats coming up with, if not a promise to slay the dragon, at least a magical potion fit to keep the dragon at a distance. Meanwhile, as she was telling me her story, I was locating myself in the story of the king wearing no clothes, and no one having the courage to say so. In my story the pharmaceutical companies play the role of the fancy tailors who pull the wool over everyone's eyes with the promise that all the "smart" people are the ones who "know" that the medical research proving safety is sound. Even though we can all see this research does not even exist yet. So our conversation was a bit of a dud, due to competing stories.

My second run through the problem was aimed at figuring out how things would be if we ever succeeded in casting the pharma and chemical industries in the role of villains (cancer causers and etc), and simply asked them to step back and stop trying to "fix" everything that has gone wrong due to what they've done so far. It would certainly demand different actions from us all to the story which we are apparently in (at least coming from all mainstream quarters, but also apparently widely believed), which casts the pharmaceutical and chemical industries in the roles of heroes (cancer fixers and etc).

My upcoming runs through this problem will try to focus on what are the points of stress in the story where small "script changes" might have big effects. Wish me luck.

Re: What is the story here?

[scotlyn]

PS - I realise that my comment was only tangentially relevant to the post - and that tangent is long and tangled and mostly apparent to me. But I am following this series with great interest, as (I do suspect) the type of healthcare I practice (acupuncture) consists of interventions in the etheric plane (although their effects may manifest in others).

In any case, many apologies for posting this snapshot of landscape from a point far distant from here, taken while taking a personal meander away from the point. But, I will be purchasing whatever book comes out of this series - for sure. :)

[(Anonymous)]

Things may be breaking down - I found this peer reviewed article from 2015 on "biofield" devices for healing, listed on a US government website amongst all things.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4654784/

[ecosophia]

Good heavens. I'm going to see if it's a blue moon tonight. ;-)

[(Anonymous)]

If I add on this, and then all the noetic work that Radin and others have one (I think those guys were sensible to stay far far away from medicine) we are approaching a time of a new synthesis and science of mind and matter. It's opening up rapidly - but we've seen false openings before, followed by crackdowns.

[tolkienguy]

Honestly, I wonder if news outlets read you sometimes. You had a couple posts about Wilhelm Reich, and today, BBC has this:

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210426-the-man-who-thought-orgasms-could-save-the-world

(And its by and large not negative, though they do throw in a couple obligatory genuflections to the Great God Science.)