Strange Powers by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

they all seemed to possess a field of force. He called this force 'odile'; it became notorious as 'odic force'. He said that human beings possess odic force to an unusual degree, and it can be seen in the dark, streaming from the finger ends in the form of a light emanation.
    For a decade and a half, scientists busily discussed and tested odic force. Then Darwin published The Origin of Species (1859). For a while, everything else was forgotten. And as scientists had to defend themselves against attacks from the Church, they laid more and more emphasis on the scientific attitude—i.e. only believing what can be proved by observation. Reichenbach and his odic force was one of the earliest victims of this new attitude; twenty years after the publication of his book, his name—and ideas—had become a joke. Perhaps it was partly his own fault for choosing a term like odic force; if he had called it 'biomagnetic vibrations' or something of the sort, scientists might havecontinued to believe in it.
    Almost a century later, in the late 1930s, a cranky and slightly paranoid man of genius, Wilhelm Reich, concluded that the universe is permeated by a kind of vital energy called orgone energy. At first, Reich was inclined to believe that this energy—which gave him conjunctivitis when he had been examining sea-sand culture under a microscope—was emitted by 'bions', pulsating living cells, which he had observed some years earlier. One night, looking at the night sky through an improvised tube, he observed a flickering in the dark spaces between the stars, and concluded that the atmosphere is full of 'orgone energy'. His theory, roughly, is that this vital energy is present throughout the universe, and that it can actually create living cells even in a sterile fluid. Reich constructed a kind of greenhouse for concentrating this orgone energy—a box made of alternate layers of steel and asbestos (i.e. metal and organic material). I myself have sat in one of these boxes in the study of Reich's brother-in-law, the late Robert Ollendorff, and experienced a distinct feeling of warmth—although the walls were cold—and noted that my temperature rose by three degrees in a few minutes.
    With ideas like this, it was inevitable that Reich should be ridiculed by the scientific establishment. He was; not only ridiculed, but attacked and persecuted. When he died in prison in 1957, he had become distinctly paranoid and was suffering from delusions. The general view was that it was good riddance; he was a crank with messianic delusions, and was probably better dead.
    Now, nearly two decades after Reich's death, there is reason to wonder whether both he and Reichenbach had stumbled on something that orthodox science had overlooked—something as fundamental as Newton's discovery of the laws of gravity.
    In 1935, before Reich discovered orgone energy, two respectable American scientists, Dr Harold Saxton Burr and F. S. C. Northrop, both of Yale, published a paper called 'Electro-dynamic Theory of Life,' suggesting, quite simply, that living things produce electrical fields that can be measured. And for the next three decades, Burr and his colleagues continued to investigate these 'life fields' (or L-fields, as Edward Russell has proposed we call them). The first problem was to develop a voltmeter sensitive enough to measure very small fields; but once this was done, it was plain sailing. The voltmeters were connected up to a couple of large trees for years, and they showed that the electrical field of the trees varied between day and night, and with electrical storms and sunspots. Animals were more problematic, since they cannot be made to stand still for years; but Burr soon discovered that there are variations in the body's magnetic field when we are ill, when wounds are healing, when women ovulate. (This latter discovery apparently provides a more or less infallible guide for parents who want children. And the discovery of body variations in