Toward Ecosophy

While George and Marjorie de la Warr were putting radionics on a sound footing in Britain, and Meade Layne was beginning the process of synthesizing the work of earlier etheric researchers into a general theory, more developments were under way in the United States. One of the most influential figures in that process was the American electronics engineer Dr. Thomas Galen Hieronymus, the inventor of the Hieronymus machine and several other significant advances in radionics technology. Yes, that's him on the left. 

Hieronymus reached radionics by way of a successful career in the electronics field.  Born in 1895, he received his amateur radio license in 1913, served as a radio operator with the American army in the First World War, and went to work after the war with pioneering radio station KDKA, where he helped run the first commercial radio broadcast in history on November 2, 1920. He later spent thirty years working for the Kansas City Power and Light Co., where he pioneered many of the techniques that are now standard practice for electricity distribution. He was a fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.  Think of him with a slide rule in one hand, a voltmeter in the other, and a pocket protector full of pens in his breast pocket, and you've got the right idea. 

He had a lifelong interest in new electronic discoveries, and that was what got him involved in radionics. By 1930 he was working with J.W. Wigelsworth, one of the many radionics practitioners active in that era, on a version of Albert Abrams' machine that made use of the dramatic advances in electronic technology in that era.  The Pathoclast, the machine developed by Hieronymus and Wigelsworth, came to be widely used all over the United States, and was adopted by some mainstream doctors as well as by homeopathic physicians, who found it especially well suited ot their needs.

Hieronymus pursued further work along the same lines, experimenting extensively with the machine and upgrading it to fit new advances in electronics. He became convinced that it worked by means of a previously unrecognized form of energy, which he termed "eloptic" energy (from "electric" and "optic," because it had some characteristics in common with electricity and others in common with light). 1949, he received U.S. Patent #2,482,773, "Detection of Emanations from Materials and Measurement of the Volumes Thereof," for the firs version of his own radionics device, the Hieronymus machine. 

That, in turn, was what brought it to the attention of John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, one of the iconic SF magazines of the era. Many science fiction fans these days like to pretend that their genre has always been obsessed with the same sort of crackpot rationalism that so often infests it these days, but that's an act of revisionist history that would have made Stalin drool with envy. Go read 1940s and 1950s science fiction magazines -- there are plenty of them online these days -- and you'll find that the stories in them are chockfull of psychic phenomena, mysterious powers, lost civilizations, mystical notions: you know, all the stuff that today's rationalists hate most. The classified ads in back were usually well stocked with mail order occultism courses and books on weird phenomena.

Campbell, mind you, was toward the rationalist end of the science fiction spectrum; his great rival Ray Palmer, the man who invented the New Age movement, was much further into high strangeness (and sold a lot more magazine copies than Campbell ever did). He rejected the wilder end of the paranormal boom that took off in American culture after the Second World War. Convinced by the writings of Dr. J.B. Rhine and other pioneering parapsychologists, however, he accepted the reality of psychic phenomena and used to pen editorials for Astounding discussing the latest advances in parapsychological research. That was how the Hieronymus machine found its way to a wider public. 

Campbell discussed the Hieronymus machine in several editorials, and also carried out experiments with several machines of his own.  He was convinced that the machine was simply a vehicle for the operator's own psychic abilities, and in an attempt to prove it, made a Hieronymus machine in which the circuitry was replaced by a sheet of paper with the circult diagram on it. This, he found, also yielded results. That led to a falling out between Campbell and Hieronymus, because the latter insisted that whatever Campbell was doing with the symbolic machine, he was not working with eloptic energy. 

(Any competent occultist, as it happens, could have told them that they were both right. You can get results by using a symbolic pattern to focus and concentrate the mind -- half of ceremonial magic works that way -- but there is also another factor, distinct from consciousness but closely related to biological life, which has different effects. Still, such distinctions were not always drawn in those days.)

Campbell's editorials and a flurry of other pieces pro and con attracted a fair amount of attention in various corners of American society, but soon other things caught the public interest.  Other than that brief brush with notoriety, Hieronymus continued his researches until just before his death in 1988.  Having learned from the dismal fates of Ruth Drown and Wilhelm Reich, he was exquisitely careful not to do anything to draw down the wrath of the medical industry; he never publicly claimed to cure anything, and his publications on radionics present it as an experimental technology and earnestly warn readers not to use it in place of an established treatment. Of course everyone involved recognized that as the legal dodge it was, and radionics treatment thrived as an underground healing modality all through the second half of the twentiety century.

Hieronymus also pioneered the use of radionics in agriculture, creating "earth pipes" that worked with the eloptic energy of the soil, and left a very substantial body of technical literature on that subject under the title "cosmiculture." His methods are still very much in use today. The machine on the right is one of many Hieronymus machines currently available. 

As the previous episodes in this series discussed, the middle years of the twentieth century saw medical authorites in the United States use every available legal gimmick to try to force alternative medical practitioners out of business. Wilhelm Reich, whose fate we discussed last week, was far from the only healer to land in prison on trumped-up charges, nor were his the only books to be burnt by the FDA -- longtime herbalists in the US recall the time that Nature's Herbs, San Francisco's one herbal store in the 1940s, had FDA goons come crashing in to haul the books for sale there out into the street to be burnt in public. it was a very difficult time here. 

Across the Atlantic in Great Britain, by contrast, medical researchers interested in pursuing radionics and other alternative health care modalities didn't have to face the same sort of persecution. Thus the next stages in the development of radionics took place there. The trailblazer in the British radionics scene was Dr. Guyon Richards, a respected physician, who was inspired by Albert Abrams' work to begin his own series of experiments. He published a book, The Chain of Life, in 1934. (It's long out of print and difficult to find;  since Richards died in 1946 and his book is now out of copyright, it would be a good candidate for republishing.) His book and his experiments inspired other British researchers to turn their attention to radionics. 

The most influential of the second generation of British radionics researchers was the husband-and-wife team of Marjorie and George de la Warr. (That's Marjorie on the right, working with one of their radionics machines.) George was an engineer who became fascinated with radionics between the two world wars. At that time nearly all radionics gear was manufactured in the United States, and getting the necessary equipment overseas was expensive. De la Warr's response was to contact Ruth Drown and get a license to build machines using her design in Britain. De La Warr Laboratories soon became a major supplier of radionics equipment to British and European researchers and physicians. 

The de la Warrs -- that's George on the left -- also went to work with the strangest of Ruth Drown's inventions, a camera that apparently took pictures at a distance through radionics. They scored some eerie hits: for example, using a drop of blood from a cancer patient, they produced a photo showing a tumor in his brain. When the patient died and was autopsied, the location and size of the tumor turned out to be correct. (This was long before CAT and MRI scans, remember.) 

The tide of repression on the far side of the Atlantic didn't leave them entirley unscathed. In 1969 the de la Warrs were sued for fraud by a woman who bought one of their machines and claimed that it did nothing. The suit was thrown out of court, fortunately for the radionics community, but not before the de la Warrs were deep in debt.  Even so, they escaped the fate of Drown, Reich, and too many other alternative health care pioneers in the US. 

The de la Warrs inspired many other British radionics practitioners, and helped launch a wave of innovation in the field. Among the leading figures in the movement were Malcolm Rae and Darrell Butcher, who devised radionics machines of their own designs and did extensive experimental work with them. Perhaps the most revolutionary work in the field, however, was done by Dr. David Tansley, a chiropractor who became interested in radionics in the 1960s. Tansley -- that's him on the right -- had an encyclopedic knowledge of esoteric philosophy and Asian mystical traditions, and he seems to have been the first person to explore the interface between radionics and these older ways of understanding and working with the life force. His many books on radionics helped guide other researchers and practitioners into a broader sense of what they were working with. 

Today? Radionics is a thriving field in Britain, one of the recognized branches of alternative health care, with its own professional organization, the Radionic Association. Training courses and radionics therapy are freely available, and there are several manufacturers of radionics machines doing a steady business. Somehow, despite the claims of the medical industry and its government enablers on this side of the pond, people aren't dropping like flies as a result of using radionics -- quite the contrary, in fact -- and in general, the open British approach to alternative healing has proven itself, Maybe someday we can get equally sane policies in place over here.  

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. 

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. 

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. 

A post I made here a little while back on the subject of radionics got quite a bit of interest, so it occurred to me that a few other historical tidbits on etheric technologies might be worth sharing here. The device to the left is a classic etheric device, and it's also a good beginning place for our story. It's the only surviving example of Franz Anton Mesmer's baquet -- his device for storing and transmitting animal magnetism. 

Mesmer was a medical doctor from Austria -- that's him on the right. Like a lot of physicians with scientific interests in his day, he experimented with the medical applications of magnetism, but his experiments convinced him that there was a different force -- like magnetism in some ways, like electricity in others -- that was generated by living things. It obeyed straightforward physical laws, comparable to those that govern the behavior of electricity and light; it could be stored, directed, and made to flow along conductive materials -- and it could heal. He called it "animal magnetism."  His experiments in Vienna were successful enough to win him a very substantial clientele and make him enough money that he could hire a talented kid named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to write a one-act operetta for a garden party. (Bastian und Bastienne, the operetta, was Mozart's first operatic work, written when he was twelve.)

Mesmer ended up moving to Paris, the center of European culture in the years before the French Revolution, where he set up shop, cured a great many people of various illnesses, and became the target of frenzied denunciations by rationalists. A panel was duly convened, including Benjamin Franklin (then in residence in Paris), which proceeded to write its report without ever getting around to talking to Mesmer, and proceeded to insist that he was a fraud. (The spirit of James Randi was already well entrenched in mainstream science by then). Mesmer eventually left Paris in time to escape the political convulsions that overwhelmed it, and settled in Switzerland, where he spent the rest of his life. 
The baquet shown above is a very straightforward device, and the diagram to the left shows how it worked. The heart of it was a large Leyden jar. Leyden jar?  That's called a capacitor nowadays; it's a glass jar with a layer of foil inside and outside, which was used in electrical research in Mesmer's time as a way to store electric charges. In the baquet, the Leyden jar was surrounded by a thick layer of insulation -- Mesmer used straw -- with bottles of water interspersed with the insulation. At intervals, metal rods descended through the insulation well away from the outside of the Leyden jar, and to the top of each of the rods was fixed a jointed rod that patients held when they were being treated.  The baquet was charged by Mesmer himself -- I have not been able to track down the exact method, but it probably involved breathing and concentration, while Mesmer put one hand on the central "double bell" and the other on the ring of metal to which the rods were connected. The baquet may also have gathered animal magnetism on its own account -- as we'll see when we get to Wilhelm Reich, there were fascinating parallels between his technology and Mesmer's. 

It would be quite easy to build a small baquet these days -- there are commercial capacitors with the level of capacitance found in a large Leyden jar, and you can also make the latter with a canning jar, aluminum foil, and rubber cement, and you can also make a sufficiently robust capacitor using sheets of metal and insulation. That I know of, nobody in the current renaissance of etheric technologies has yet done so, but here's hoping. 

I'm delighted to report that The UFO Chronicles, the updated, revised, and considerably expanded new edition of my book on the UFO phenomenon, will be released Monday from Aeon Books. This is not your ordinary UFO book. Since 1947, with embarrassingly few exceptions, the entire subject has been frozen in a false dichotomy between "UFO believers" (meaning people whose default opinion about any unknown object in the sky is that it must be an alien spacecraft) and "UFO skeptics" (meaning people whose default opinion about any unknown object in the sky is that was never there in the first place). 

That false dichotomy, more than any other factor, is what has made it impossible to get past the contending parties and see what's actually been going on since Kenneth Arnold first spotted something strange in the skies near Mount Rainier. I've been fascinated by the whole subject since childhood; I figured out a long time ago, with substantial help from books by Jacques Vallee and John Keel, that neither of the two loudly publicized sets of claims made any sense of the phenomenon -- and The UFO Chronicles: How Science Fiction, Shamanic Experiences, and Secret Air Force Projects Created the UFO Myth is the result. 

I'm very pleased to say that the publisher is also offering a 20% discount for my readers.  The discount code is UF20, it's good until December 30, and you can use it at these two places online: 

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In the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world:  https://www.aeonbooks.co.uk/product/the-ufo-chronicles-how-science-fiction-shamanic-experiences-and-secret-air-force-projects-created-the-ufo-myth/94552/ ***There was a temporary problem with the discount code on this site, but I've been informed that it has been fixed.***

The space brothers aren't coming and neither is the glorious future of progress, but if you look past the paired mirages held up by the two dogmatic sides in this quarrel, you can get a fascinating glimpse into the secret history of the 20th century and the role played by altered states of consciousness in the creation of our supposedly prosaic reality. Check it out.