by Erik Davis
But for all its practicality, the behavior of electricity itself is rather bizarre. Most of the dynamic nonbioiogical phenomena we encounter on a regular basis—paper airplanes, rush-hour fender benders, speeding tennis balls—can be dissected with the tools of classical physics, and classical physics does not make too many outrageous claims on the contemporary imagination. But electricity is an altogether different kettle of fish—to say nothing of the counterintuitive shenanigans that go down in the invisible world of electromagnetic fields and frequencies, which even now are saturating your body with traffic reports, pop songs, and other incorporeal communiqués.
Let’s just take your nearest working household appliance, which is, presumably, plugged into an enormous decentralized electric grid. The current for this Internet of power alternates its positive and negative poles sixty times a second (fifty if you’re reading in Europe). That’s pretty quick, but more remarkable still is the Superman pace that the current itself keeps as it hurtles along the line, which happens to be nothing less than the speed of light. Now, you may wonder what exactly this “current” is that could enable it to hustle along at such a healthy clip. Your high school science teacher would tell you that this flow consists of little specks of energetic charge called electrons, which are actually moving relatively slowly as they alternate back and forth across the copper atoms that make up your wire. But just as water molecules can move relatively slowly beneath fast-moving ocean waves, these electrons are also communicating their energy, and it is this “energy”—a pattern of current and voltage—that trucks along at the universal speed limit.
As if that isn’t odd enough, any gadget actually sucking energy from the electric grid—say, a toaster—also generates an electromagnetic field (actually a combination of electric and magnetic fields). This field will induce a mild current flow in any nearby conductor, including your body, even if no physical contact is involved. The field itself, they tell us, is composed of “lines of force,” which have nothing to do with acupuncture meridians or the layout of Stonehenge but are nonetheless more than passing strange. Technically speaking, the lines of force emanating from your toaster actually tweak stellar nebulae at the farthest ends of God’s great universe. And lest you believe that such remote control represents the kind of spooky action at a distance that science abhors, a quantum physicist would calmly explain that electromagnetic fields are no less real than light, and that they simply transmit their force through particles, like bosons and such, that pop in and out of “virtual existence.”
You may take all this as a matter of course, but such curiosities cannot help but stimulate some people’s cosmological imaginations. Perhaps it is our fate as moderns to exploit the sublime for the banal, but the fact that we use the electromagnetic dimensions for heating up Pop-Tarts and transmitting golf tournaments should not blind us to the sorts of profundities they can sound. Like the moon’s tidal tug, or the luminous aurora of northern climes, or a sunbeam fractured into rainbow, these arresting forces cannot help but generate cosmic meditations along with intellectual curiosity and utilitarian plots. Vibrating in the gap between life and physics, between matter and the unseen ether, electricity inhabits a liminal zone that calls down spirits and sublimities out of thin air.
“Do we really know what electricity is?” asks Lama Anagarika Govinda, a German scholar who became one of the earliest Western converts to Tibetan Buddhism. “By knowing the laws according to which it acts and by making use of them we still do not know the origin or the real nature of this force, which ultimately may be the very source of life, light, and consciousness, the divine power and mover of all that exists.”1 Maybe yes, maybe no; what’s important is that electricity’s uncanny play leads us to ask not how it works or how it can be captured in jargon, but what it is. This is the kind of natural philosophy that can set one wondering about the whole enchilada of space and time, mind and bodies. For electricity does not just catapult your imagination into the metaphysical empyrean, it also grounds you on the earth. Govinda compares its curious properties to the animistic myths of traditional societies, myths “which only express what the poets of all times have felt: that nature is not a dead mechanism, but vibrant with life, with the same life that becomes vocal in our thoughts and emotions.”2
As we’ll see, the romance of electricity and animism is an old one in the Western imagination. Govinda’s vitalist interpretation of electric current, which loosely links it to the “life force” of the body and nature, is only one of a number of archetypes and intuitions that make up what I’ll call, ignoring the technical differences between the forces involved, the “electromagnetic imaginary.” Since the seventeenth century, the electromagnetic imaginary has seeped into religion, medicine, and technology, and over that time has probably led to more metaphysical speculations, heretical claims, and wacky gizmos than any other natural force. Much of this chapter traces the electromagnetic imaginary through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when electricity catalyzed the kind of heady enthusiasms that data devices do today. In fact, the transformation of electrical current into a communicating medium, which took place in the mid-nineteenth century, represents perhaps its most remarkable mutation: from energy into information.
From the outset, I urge you to resist the temptation to write off the electromagnetic imaginary as pseudoscientific dreck or the manipulative lies of quacks. For one thing, even the nuttiest notions about material reality emerge from our need to stitch together, however provisionally, the world we feel with the world we know. Moreover, we make the historical determination between “real” science and wild-eyed speculations in the rearview mirror, and even then, only selectively. For all its skeptical rigor, science and its truth-claims can never be completely distilled from the cultural and mythic murk that characterizes all human societies. Latour’s Great Divide is full of secret passageways and cosmological cracks; scientists too are shadowed by dreams, and stake their claims alongside pregnant intuitions and metaphysical imaginings. As the French historian of science Michel Serres puts it, “The only pure myth is the idea of a science devoid of all myth.”3
The word electricity entered the English tongue in a 1650 translation of a treatise on the healing properties of magnets by Jan Baptist van Helmont, a Flemish physician and Rosicrucian who worked on the borderline between natural magic and modern chemistry. Though Helmont abandoned the hoary doctrines of the four elements, he remained spiritually committed to the alchemy of “pyrotechnia,” the Paracelsan labor of the forge. As an incorporeal force coaxed out of matter, the quicksilver spunk of electricity signified for many of Helmont’s ilk the spiritual energies pregnant in the physical universe, the elixir of the World Soul, the spark of Creation. Many of the earliest books on electricity described the force in distinctly alchemical terms, dubbing it the “ethereal fire,” the “quintessential fire,” or the “desideratum,” the long-sought universal panacea. Now that electronics, electric power, radio waves, and microwaves form the energetic matrix of the information age, the patterns of the electromagnetic imaginary have in many cases just slipped right into the technological unconscious. As the historian Dennis Stillings argues, “Material science could not pull itself clear from the psychological residuum that adhered to electrical theorizing, thus permitting the symbols carried by electricity to drive modern science toward accomplishments that strongly echo the goals of alchemy.”4 Electricity, in particular, would carry three different aspects of the alchemical imagination into the modern world: the fascination with the vitality of bodies, the desire to spiritualize material form, and the millennarian drive to transmute the energies of earth into the divine realization of human dreams.
The Body Electric
For the natural philosophers and the tinkerers of the eighteenth century, electrical experimentation was a calling worthy of the most hackerish obsessions. One such electrogeek was the young Benjamin Franklin, who built a name for himself by knocking together electrostatic machines and writing int
elligent articles on the mysterious force. Franklin was the first to recognize that the “electrical fluid” was polarized into what he described as “positively” and “negatively” charged states. Franklin also reasoned that when differently charged bodies came into contact with one another, the fluid equalized itself—which is exactly what happened when the young fellow launched his famous kite from a Maryland tobacco field in 1752. Grasping the soaking kite string, Franklin felt a “very evident electric spark” blast through his hearty frame to loose itself in the earth. Not only did Franklin prove that lightning was a form of electricity, but he also came up with the practical idea for the lightning rod—having, for an instant, actually become one.
Besides inspiring a lifesaving invention, Franklin’s kite trick resonated on the archetypal plane. The thunderbolt has been an active symbol of the wrath of the gods since time immemorial, and Franklin forced that crackling shaft of judgment to run aground. The fact that it was a future framer of the U.S. Constitution who both tamed and demystified heaven’s numinous bolts only underscored the Prometheanism of the act. Franklin’s lightning rod was another declaration of independence—from needless death, from a wrathful sky-god, from an enchanted earth. As the epigram on a French bust of Franklin put it, “He wrested the flash of lightning from heaven, and the scepter from the tyrants.”5
But Franklin was not the first electrofreak to catch thunderbolts. A Moravian monk named Prokop Diviš actually invented the lightning rod a few years before Franklin, though Diviš’s instrument met with considerably less success on the tradition-bound Continent. The monk’s absence from the annals of popular science is also emblematic of the different faces of electricity. Where Franklin stands as a visible monument to the secular conquest of electricity in the pursuit of natural dominion, Diviš and his theosophical speculations open up the esoteric dimension of the electrical imaginary, one that finds in the “balsam of nature” an incandescent symbol of spiritual power.
In his book The Theology of Electricity, the German scholar Ernst Benz explains how Diviš’s work was taken up by Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, the Protestant dean of Württemberg and the founder of a deeply theosophical strain of German Pietism. Oetinger and the other “electrical theologians” in his circle were the Fritjof Capras of their day—spiritual thinkers who attempted to integrate their understanding of science into a mystical view of the universe. While English Deists like John Toland and Thomas Woolston pounced on magnetic or electrical forces as demystifying explanations for Christ’s miracles (loaves and fishes—z-z-zap!), Oetinger’s crew of natural philosophers went the other direction. They electrified theology, revising the image of man and earth in the process.
They began, as you might guess, at the beginning of things. The Book of Genesis claims that on the first day of creation, God turns on the cosmic light switch and calls it good. But Oetinger noticed that, according to the text, the Lord doesn’t get around to creating the sun, the moon, and the stars for another couple of days. So what exactly was this first “light,” and where did it go once Sol rose over Eden? Oetinger believed that the first light was actually the “electrical fire,” which penetrated and stimulated the primeval chaos, giving it form and energy. After the sun and moon hit the scene, this essential light disappeared into the fabric of things, popping up only during special occasions, like thunderstorms or the manipulation of electrostatic machines by curious monks.
Far from simply absorbing electricity into existing Christian cosmology, Oetinger’s electrical imagination opened up a rather radical and animistic vision of nature. In his view, the world was not a lump of blind clay whose life force directly depended on a transcendent God, nor were its physical forms solely derived from the divine cookie cutters that the Lord used during the first week of creation. Instead, the weird sparks collected by Diviš’s lightning-catchers furnished Oetinger with proof of the anima mundi, the living World Soul. In this notion, matter is endowed from the beginning with spirit, life, and intelligence, and it constantly strives to manifest new forms and new comminglings. This deeply evolutionary idea anticipates the “Creation Spirituality” discussed by the contemporary Green Christian Matthew Fox, another theosophical Christian who displaces the top-down control of the transcendent Creator by embracing the immanent bloom of nature.
At a time when philosophers and scientists were dividing human beings into mind and body, reason and mechanical matter, Oetinger and friends insisted on the Neoplatonic view of humanity as a threefold creature of body, soul, and spirit. Oetinger agreed with his fellow theologians that when God scraped up the clay to create Adam, he exhaled a rational spirit into his body. But for Oetinger, that dust was already animated by the electrical fire, the “balsam of nature” that allowed the body to heal and constantly renew itself. Along with our rational souls, we also lug around a natural or animal soul, an electric body responsible for sensory and physical functions, for order and motion, growth and healing. We share this soul with animals, as the mad-hatter poet Christopher Smart claims in “Jubilate Agno,” his 1760 ode to his cat Jeoffrey:
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.
For the electrical fire is the spiritual substance which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast6
Oetinger thus used the new scientific object of electricity to “emphasize the rootedness of man’s spiritual life in the organic structures and physico-chemical processes of his bodily existence.”7 Like other natural philosophers and mystics of his era, Oetinger recharged the ancient image of the animal soul in a bath of electrical fluid.
In scientific terms, the notion that bodies possess an independent life force is known as vitalism, a doctrine that stands in heretical opposition to the dominant mechanistic picture of organic bodies as juicy biological automata devoid of any magic spark. When Luigi Galvani hooked up frog legs to various metals and electrostatic machines in the 1790s, he believed that the flow of current he discovered was evidence for such an élan vital. Count Alessandro Volta soon proved that while animal tissues did carry an electrical charge, Galvani had actually stumbled onto the principle of the battery—only one in a long series of victories by the mechanists over the vitalist camp. But that triumph didn’t keep a nephew of Galvani’s from hooking up Volta’s batteries to the decapitated bodies of criminals—a gory attempt to engender life that echoes down to us in Mary Shelley’s Gothic science-fiction story Frankenstein. This archetypal tale of electro-Prometheanism, which casts electricity as the bridge between science and creation, may be fiction, but it lurks in the shadows of laboratories even today—the embryo of Dolly, the adult sheep cloned in 1997 by Scottish researchers, was kicked into action with a few drops of the electrical fluid.
Frankenstein was a cautionary tale, part of the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment hubris. But the electromagnetic imaginary would also become a positive pole of the Romantic imagination. The idealist philosopher Schelling, the deep ecologist of his day, embraced the juice as a sign of the World Soul, while the literary master and freelance scientist Goethe would speak of an electric life that dynamically bound things together through sympathetic powers of attraction and repulsion. Electricity also became an image of the Romantic spirit itself. “I am electrical by nature,” wrote Ludwig van Beethoven. “Music is the electric soil in which the spirit lives, thinks, and invents.”8
As electricity seized the Romantic imagination, alchemically minded natural philosophers like J. W. Ritter also insisted upon the magnetic pole of the World Soul. Though the exact relationship between electricity and magnetism would not be fleshed out for many decades, Ritter’s polarized view made symbolic sense. Magnetism is the hypnotic yin to electricity’s sparky yang, a dark moon-tug rather than a jolt of solar fire, and its attractive magic has been associated with animist powers for millennia. To ward off demonic diseases, the Sumerians inscribed healing sigils on magnetic amulets dedicated t
o Marduk—He Who Causes Action at a Distance. Paracelsus used magnets to balance the vital energies of the body, while Oetinger held that charged chunks of iron would amplify the electrical fire in the body.
Without a doubt, the supreme wizard of magnetic healing was Franz Anton Mesmer, known today either as the king of charlatans or the man who inadvertently spawned psychoanalysis. Born in 1732, Mesmer earned his doctor’s degree from the University of Vienna, where he wrote his dissertation about the influence of the planets on the mundane world. To explain how astrological forces could produce action at a distance, Mesmer posited a subtle fluid that he called the “fluidium,” a diaphanous medium that communicated moon vibes to the ocean tides as surely as it allowed Venus and Jupiter to tweak human fate. The fluidium took shape against the Newtonian concept of the ether, an invisible fluid that permeated space and that served as the static medium for gravitation and magnetism, as well as sensations and nervous stimuli. For Newton, the ether served to explain how the solar system’s distant bodies communicated with one another, while also topping off a universe that abhorred a vacuum. But as Mesmer’s own work shows, the ether also served as a halfway house for all sorts of animist intuitions and spooky forces that refused to accept the gears and levers of mechanistic cosmology. Given Newton’s own alchemical side, this should not be surprising; Newton himself imagined that the ether was flush with a vital spirit, and even his language of gravitational “attraction” carried a trace of Eros, the spiritual glue that Neoplatonists believed held the cosmos together.
When Mesmer came to name the property of the human body that was plugged into the fluidium, he wavered between magnetism and electricity, but settled on “animal magnetism,” a term he took from the esoteric Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. Mesmer wrote that “all bodies [are], like the magnet, capable of communicating this magnetic principle; that this fluid penetrates everything and can be stored up and concentrated, like the electric fluid; [and] that it [acts] at a distance.”9 Mesmer never strictly identified animal magnetism with mineral magnetism, but the “occult” behavior of the latter enabled him to carve out room for notions and practices that tapped the old dreams of sympathetic magic. Though Mesmer’s wild science allowed these dreams to surf into the modern world on magnetic waves, the man’s ultimate goal was to restore balance and “perfect harmony” to the body’s polarized energies. His vision of healing was basically indistinguishable from Chinese medicine, which also holds that a vital spirit infuses the body, and that disease results from blockages in this dynamically balanced network of polarized energetic flows.