The Mormons have been faithfully visiting my house every month for a while. I grew up Mormon, and they have me on a list. I asked the missionaries once about their strangest door-to-door experiences. One of them told me that a resident once proclaimed a belief in electricity as a pantheological force. I went inside and grabbed a book I had picked up serendipitously at the library called
The Theology of Electricity by the German Ernst Benz. We all had an uneasy laugh.
The book traces the history of the discovery of electricity and how it was integrated into Christian and cabbalist theology. For example, in Genesis, before the creation of light, "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" - 1:2. An 18th Century Moravian theologian and scientist Prokop Divisch suspected that the Spirit of God was indeed an electrical force moving upon the electrolytes of the salty oceans. The history of the lightning rod was also great. Preachers had long used the striking of buildings (churches, especially) as evidence that God was angry and people should shape up. The lightning rod was therefore seen as "playing God" in the eighteenth-century mind.
Apart from Divisch, the book details accounts by Benjamin Franklin around the time of his kite trick, Franz Mesmer, and an earlier Jesuit figure named Athanasius Kircher, all of whom had a profound interest in magnetism and electricity. What is most striking is that these three figures had a simultaneous and obsessive interest in the resonance of glass. Mesmer would accompany his mystical healing ceremonies by stroking variously tuned wine glasses. Kircher, too, in his theories of "musical magnetism" had a set of experimental glass goblets. Franklin eventually invented the
glass harmonica, quite apart from any knowledge of these other two.
Benz documents this seeming coincidence but does not draw any real conclusions by it. In the cybernetic age, this affinity seems prophetic. Silicon, indeed, has come to be the electrical medium. The Spirit of God is now making some transition from carbon-based life to silicon-based life.
A year or so ago, Kate and I visited a friend at Indiana University. Strolling through Bloomington, we were eventually drawn into a little shop that sold incense and bells and books on Eastern mysticism. More of an elegant little curiosity shop than a head shop. It was run by a blind man who deftly flitted around the place. While we looked around the sky outside the big bank of windows got very dark and still. The radio, between sharp blasts of static, said there was a tornado warning and to take shelter. The air became charged with the kind of potential energy that gives everything a sharp edge. The sun lit the empty street a pale yellow that glittered like stage lighting against a pitch black thunderhead. We tried to bide our time inside, carefully picking through every last piece of display merchandise: shawls, finger cymbals, twinkling Chinese balls.
I noticed that a large steel reinforced door was cracked open in the back. The shop owner told me that the place used to be a bank and that was the vault. I couldn't think of a better shelter for a tornado, so we asked him if we could stick around. He showed us the vault. Inside were a number of large glass bowls on a shelf. The man picked up a rubber mallet and a suede wand and started to play them - both by striking them and caressing them with the wand as one would play a wine glass. The bowls were various sizes and all harmonized in a deafening chord that resonated through every bone in my skeleton. At the end of it all, not one of us could or wanted to speak. I had the profound feeling of harmonization and that a word would break the harmony. We had forgotten about the tornado, even.
I bought one of the large (18")
bowls and it now sits on a pedestal in my house. This one is supposedly tuned to a low C, a note, by some system or other, that corresponds to the base chakra. By itself, it is quite a powerful thing. With the slightest pressure, the suede wand can bring the bowl to a tone so singular and penetrating that I wonder if it will shatter the windows. I later found out that one cannot play two bowls at high amplitude next to one another because one of them could shatter. I often ponder the bowl as metaphor. It is fashioned after the Buddhist singing bowls that are usually smaller, made of brass, and played with a wooden wand. The singing bowls are meant to focus the mind and are often found in zendos. The bowl is a wonderful metaphor for the union of the sexes - wand and vessel. Beyond this, the glass bowl is a cyborgian metaphor of the union of flesh (suede) and silicon in vibratory bliss. Without exception, everyone who has tried to play it is transfixed by it.
But back to electricity. My original motivation for writing today was to draw attention to this fellow Athanasius Kircher, the seventeenth-century Jesuit. I have been pulled into his world in a big way lately. He was, by all accounts, the "last polymath," the last Aristotle, before Western Civilization split into its million specializations. Kircher existed at all kinds of epistemological crisis points - between alchemy and new science, Christianity and humanism. He attempted to compose an encyclopedia of human knowledge - everything from natural science, to astrology and alchemy, to literature, to theology, to even a nascent notion of evolution. He was all over the intellectual and global map. I've been reading sections of Derrida's
Of Grammatology lately, and he refers to "Father Kircher" in a discussion of Kircher's attempts to linguistically systematize Chinese script, one of Kircher's better-known projects. Kircher's main interest was magnetism and the idea that the universe was magnetically sympathetic, which is an inheritance from alchemy. Walking through his world is like wandering through a curiosity shop - a shop that he erected in Rome. You can read more, but I'll excerpt from
this biographical site.
As a youngster Kircher had three near-death experiences. While swimming in a forbidden pond he was swept under a mill wheel; later inadvertently he was pushed from an onlooking crowd into the path of race horses; and finally he suffered a gangrenous leg from a skating accident. The last cured suddenly after he prayed to the Blessed Virgin and it occurred to young Athanasius that he was receiving a great deal of divine protection and he did not forget these signs. In 1661 he found the remains of an ancient Marian church built by Constantine on the spot of St. Eustace's vision. He restored the place as a shrine and visited it often. Then when he died his heart was taken and buried there according to his last request. It is rather remarkable that this brilliant geometer and encyclopedist, called the "Father of Geology" and of Egyptology, founder of the first public museum and skilled in so many other branches of knowledge should reveal such simple piety.
His Kircher Museum was considered one of the best science museums in the world. Among his inventions are listed the megaphone, the pantometrum for solving geometrical problems, and a counting machine. His discoveries include sea phosphorescence as well as microscopically small organisms (germs) which transmit epidemic diseases. It was by facilitating a wide diffusion of knowledge, by stimulating thought and discussion by his vast collections of scientific information, that Kircher earned a place among the fathers of modern science and the titles of "universal genius" and "master of a hundred arts".
Unfortunately, due to some of Kircher's more outlandish ideas, he was largely written out of scientific history. One of his ideas stuck with me. Kircher noticed that the face of the sunflower always followed the sun. As such, he built a "
sunflower clock" that acted like a sundial. He placed a floating pot in a pool of water and surrounded it with a circular dial. Apparently it works (though I don't really see how). Kircher claimed that the functioning of the clock was proof of his theory of "universal magnetism," a force present in the universe that renders all matter sympathetic. For Kircher, this universal magnetism was also related to the electricity that pervades all matter.
Having recently run across Kircher, I remembered that I had seen a
display of his work in the Stanford University library a few years back during a teaching gig. Take a look. The collection simultaneously curious and hilarious - an enlightenment en-lightning.
