Four years after Anton Mesmer was run out of France, Baron Karl von Reichenbach (1788-1869) was born in Wurttemberg, not far from Lake Constance near which Mesmer had been born. In 1788, Wurttemberg was a city in the autonomous state of Wurttemberg having its capital at Stuttgart, the whole of which was later incorporated into modern Germany.
Reichenbach appears to have been something of a political activist during his student days. By the time he was sixteen, Wurttemberg was under the military control of Napoleon, and the young Reichenbach had formed a secret society with the goal of setting up a Germanic state in the South Sea Islands.
For this visionary effort he was duly arrested by the Napoleonic police and for some months held in detention as a political prisoner—after which he continued his education in natural science, political economy, and law, ultimately receiving his Ph.D.
REICHENBACH—INVENTOR-INDUSTRIALIST
Reichenbach proved to be of scientific and industrial substance. After his education, he traveled in Germany and France investigating the operations of ironworks, and in 1815 (when he was twenty-seven) he built and operated his own plant at Villigen in Baden.
He also diversified and built a beet-sugar factory, several blast furnaces and steelworks, and a large charcoal furnace.
He discovered kerosene, paraffin, and creosote. Kerosene, a coal-tar product earlier known as coal oil, quickly became of enormous importance throughout the world because of its wide use, before commercial electricity, in kerosene lamps.
Today, kerosene is mostly used as a carrier in insecticide spray and as a fuel in jet engines. Paraffin and creosote were to have equal importance in other areas.
By 1835, Reichenbach had accumulated considerable wealth and a widely respected scientific reputation as a brilliant chemist, inventor and industrialist, as well as a noted authority on meteorites and magnets.
He had also taken a deep interest in “physico-physiological research on the dynamics of magnetism, electricity, heat, light, crystallization, and chemicals in their relation to emanations of vital force.”
Reichenbach’s name would be erased from most modern histories because of this particular interest. So it is difficult to ascertain when the interest began or under what circumstances it did.
Almost certainly he would have been familiar with mesmeric research. But it also seems quite likely that he had independently encountered magnetic phenomena both inorganic and organic of a type which, in his mind, did not exactly equate with the so-called animal magnetism of the Mesmerists.
In any event, Reichenbach detached his work from animal magnetism by designating the “emanations of vital force” as OD.
He derived this strange term from Odin (or Woden), the chief Norse god who established the laws that governed the universe and controlled the destiny of man. Odin also was kept busy as the god of war, learning, and magic.
As a word, Od seems to have presented verbal difficulties, so it was later elaborated more clearly as Odic force, or Odyle energy. However, since the “magnetic force” of Mesmer and the “Odic force” of Reichenbach both refer to “a force which permeates the whole of nature,” it is difficult to discern differences, if any, between them.
REICHENBACH’S EXPERIMENTS IN ODIC SENSITIVITY
A major characteristic of Reichenbach’s work illuminates the scope of his interest in what sensitive humans are actually sensitive to. With regard to this, it is quite possible that Reichenbach was attracted to magnetic sensitivity by examples of water-witching (water dowsing), the successes of which he had observed on many occasions.
An impressive line-up of experiments along the lines of sensitivity became visible at about 1839 when Reichenbach was fifty-one, and had achieved the status of a matured and respected scientist.
Between 1839 and 1850, Reichenbach designed and conducted experiments involving some two-hundred “ordinary people drawn from all walks of life” who had demonstrated some kind of sensitivity.
Some of these experienced “specific reactions to the proximity of other people” in the form of “feelings of pleasant coolness” or drowsiness, or disagreeable, or numbing, or “exciting feelings.”
Most of the individuals also “manifested a special right-hand/left-hand polarity” which affected their reactions to other people standing, sitting or sleeping near to their right of left sides.
A disproportionate number of the sensitives demonstrated sympathy with the color blue, an antipathy with yellow, particular food fetishes, and sensitivity to certain metals, and were unpleasantly affected by mirrors.
Quite a number of such sensitives could “see” emanations from crystals and magnets in total darkness, and detect alternations in electric current. They could also perceive an aura (energy field) emanating from and surrounding the physical body.
With empirical precision still acceptable today, Reichenbach conducted hundreds of experiments involving crystals, magnets and the human body. His principle goal seems to have consisted of examining his Odic force with regard (1) to its relationship to electricity, magnetism, and chemistry; and (2) to what extent the force was perceptible to sensitives.
ODIC LIGHTS
The Od, Odyle or Odic force was perceptible to sensitives. Reichenbach’s experimental sensitives usually sat in totally dark rooms in which he also placed another completely silent individual, a type of crystal, metal or chemical. These experimental procedures resulted in both quantitative and qualitative data such as enumerated below.
1. Various substances radiating the Odic force were perceived via vague or strong feelings of heat or cold.
2. Sensitives possessing more refined or greater sensing/perceiving capabilities might perceive “the odic light,” described as a clear flame of definite color issuing from metals, crystals and chemicals and poles of magnets.
3. The Odic force could also be seen issuing from the main parts of the human body, the fingertips, mouth, hands, forehead, feet, and BLEEP! The Odic force could also be seen surrounding the body entire as a colored “mist” or “smoke.”
4. The Odic force could also be seen over new graves.
5. The force could be conducted to distances by all solid and liquid bodies.
6. Bodies, however, could be “charged” with greater or lesser amounts of Od at given times, but the Od was apparently transferred from one body to another by contact with inorganic, crystalline and metallic substances, and physical touching of organic bodies. However, mere proximity, without contact, was sufficient to produce influencing charges between bodies.
7. Reichenbach noted that the “odic tension” (charge, as in a battery), varied during the day, diminished with hunger, increased after a meal, diminished at sunset, and increased before and during daybreak.
Reichenbach worked with colleagues who ensured the designs and controls of the experiments, and with sensitives who were also “persons in perfect health.”
In one such case, the sensitive Prof. D. Endlicher of Vienna saw “unsteady flames forty inches high” on the poles of an electromagnet, the flames exhibiting numerous colors, and ending in a luminous smoke, which rose to the ceiling and illuminated it.
Reichenbach, a chemist, attempted to evolve a nomenclature for the odic force regarding which source the energy radiated or flowed from—”crystalod, electrod, photod, thermod,” and so on.
He also insisted that the “odic flame” was a material something, and that it could be affected by breath or a current of air.
Some sensitives perceived more complex odic phenomena regarding the human body, including rays, beams and undulating lights. Some of Reichenbach’s sensitives could tell whether a female was premenstrual, menstrual, or pregnant, and how the mother’s odic forces were interacting with the unborn child.
As one description along these lines, “the mother’s pores are open,” and from them exude an odic emanation.
The emanations develop themselves into “electricity” upon their exit from the body. Objects or events making “violent impression” on the mother’s mind are incorporated in the mother’s outgoing Odyle force. The mother’s Odyle force now contained an “odic image” of the object or event.
If Reichenbach’s terminology is understood correctly, the odic image is somehow reverse-projected into the developing Odyle of the fetus.
In any event, some of Reichenbach’s sensitives quite easily could distinguish between the Odyles of the mother and the fetus.
One of the situations Reichenbach occasionally had to deal with involved increases of erotic manifestations in the presence of “strong Odyle force.” Such manifestations brought “disturbing” physical effects to some of his sensitives, some of his witnesses to the experiments, and apparently sometimes to himself.
Indeed, it seemed not uncommon that others besides the sensitives felt “odic electricity” became “disturbingly aroused,” and some of his sensitives fell into “temporary convulsions” and “were depleted” afterward. Some also lost weight.
Some male and female sensitives could tell whether males were horny by special features of their odic energies and magnetic auras. However, the nature of the special features was either left undescribed or has been bleeped.
Reichenbach’s records, however, indicate in delicate terms that some female sensitives refused to work within the proximity of a horny male because of the “disturbing nature of their odic energies.” Male sensitives were apparently not bothered with active female odic energies, and seemed to enjoy their presence.