In 1581, he began with the establishing of contacts with the "angelic beings." At first he relied to a certain extent on equipment, such as wax tablets, a skrying table, a gold lamen and several shewstones of obsidian and rock crystal. This eventually evolved into a sophisticated system which involved setting the skrying stone, of which several were used including a crystal ball and a black obsidian mirror, upon an elaborately engraved sigil called the "Sigillum Aemeth." This Sigillum Aemeth in turn was placed upon a special table that was inscribed with a hexagram, enclosed within a frame of Enochian letters, supporting seven specially designed talismans. The whole was insulated from the floor by a further four wax tablets, which were miniature versions of the Sigillum Aemeth.15 The results obtained through this method, and what would become Dee's legacy, was a strange language called the Enochian language which would be studied by countless esoteric and occult societies, among them the Golden Dawn.
Another striking example of strange, occult technology is found in a rare 18th century hermetico-alchemical book, which is worth a lengthy quotation. In it a friend of Benjamin Jesse (1642-1730) who was a cabalist and Rosicrucian from Hamburg, writes of the wonders that befell him while inspecting Jesse's workshop. Jesse died a year before, and the author states that he writes the account "so that one may imagine a bit what sort of physics of the ancients in the golden age will come to light."
The wonders were all to be found in Jesse's "prayer room in which never before a living human had entered or knocked on its door." This "prayer room" had a highly unusual safeguard to begin with: ".. .he took me to this prayer room and coated the joints and seams of the door with a translucent crystal substance, which he used as if it had been wax. After this he pressed his seal upon it, which was crafted out of gold, so that in this substance the seal of his signetring was imprinted, that immediately hardened, so that the seal would have been broken in two if the door would have been moved just slightly." The key to the prayer room was inserted in a little box that was treated with the same translucent crystal substance and his signetring. After Jesse did this, he threw his signetring in the crystal substance which then "dissolved like a piece of ice in hot water, and it fell to the bottom of the glass as a white powder, and the crystal substance colored red. After this he also melted the glass with the crystal substance and he gave me such a glass with the keys."
Jesse died, and as he requested, the writer gave the keys and the box to his relatives. With the help of the crystal substance, also termed "crystal water," the seals on the box melted away, the key to the prayer room was taken and the seal on the door of the prayer room was also melted. We now only have the detailed account of the writer of the strange devices that he saw in the room, which must have been extraordinary indeed: "In the middle of this prayer room a table of ebony stood, its plate was round, its rim coated with pure gold. For this table was a small chair for kneeling down. In the middle of this table stood an instrument of wonderful design. Its lower part, or the base, was round and made out of pure gold. Its middle part was made out of translucent, shining crystal, in which the everlasting fire was enclosed that emitted shining rays: its upper part was made out of pure gold and in the shape of a bowl. Immediately above this instrument hung a crystal on a gold chain, fashioned in the shape of an egg, so that the everlasting fire was enclosed if it emitted its rays. At the right side of this table I saw a golden box and a small spoon, in the box was a balm of reddish color. At the left of this table was a small chair made out of pure gold, on which a book lay with twelve pages, also made out of pure hammered gold which were so flexible, as if it were paper."
A bit of the reddish balm was placed in the bowl of the strange instrument on the table, and "immediately a pleasant smoke went up that refreshed the senses, and, what was even more miraculous, in its ascend the smoke touched the fire that hung over it in the crystal egg in such a way that it emitted terrible rays like the thunder and the stars."
The writer witnessed more strange wonders; they also found a "small box, made out of ebony but coated on the inside with pure gold. In it were twelve instruments made out of pure gold, wonderfully wound and crafted, around them engraved with symbols and letters. We went to the next box, which was larger. In it were twelve mirrors, not made out of glass, but out of an unknown substance, very neat and clean; in the center of these mirrors were odd symbols: their rims were fastened in golden frames. ... Then we proceeded to a larger room; in it was a very large mirror that was called 'Salomon's mirror' by Jesse and the wonder of the world, in which mirror he could join all images, every one of the entire world. Lastly I saw an ebony cabinet in which a globe was made out of a very odd substance. Jesse said that in it the fire and the soul of this world were also enclosed, and because of that it moved all by itself, in the same way as our world. I also saw, hanging above this cabinet, another cabinet. It was a cabinet with a special instrument, in the way as a timepiece, that had a roadmark or a pointer, but instead of the indications of the hours it had letters. Jesse said that this instrument moved in the same manner as the one he had in Switzerland. ...At that time in that prayer room I witnessed incredibly wonderful things through the movements and the use of these wisdom instruments, things that I can impossibly write down, nor am I allowed to, but this I would like to share with you... more I cannot do."16
Obviously Bulwer-Lytton studied these strange accounts well or perhaps he drew upon his own experiences, as he describes similar strange techno-magical devices in his haunting tale The House and the Brain: "... our main discovery was in a kind of iron safe fixed to the wall. ... In this safe were three shelves and two small drawers. Ranged on the shelves were several small bottles of crystal, hermetically stopped. They contained colorless volatile essences, of what nature I shall say no more than that they were not poisons — phosphor and ammonia entered into some of them. There were also some very curious glass tubes, and a small pointed rod of iron, with a large lump of rock-crystal, and another of amber also a lodestone of great power. ... We found a very singular apparatus in the nicest order. Upon a small thin book, or rather tablet, was placed a saucer of crystal; this saucer was filled with a clear liquid — on that liquid floated a kind of compass, with a needle shifting rapidly round, but instead of the usual points of a compass were seven strange characters, not unlike those used by astrologers to denote the planets. A very peculiar, but not strong nor displeasing odor came from this drawer."17
Then there was the sidereal pendulum which hung in a glass encasing. With a conventional code, one obtained messages through the striking of the pendulum against the glass encasing. These sidereal pendulums were found all over Europe in the 18th century and as late as the 19th century.18 And indeed, in a letter to Edison, Olcott remarks that, "you told me that you were making some experiments with a pendulum, to test the dynamism of the will: since then I have seen many such tests successfully made."19
Not only the original and in many aspects legendary Rosicrucians were allegedly involved in technological endeavors. These were to be found across the whole occult spectrum. One of the very first recorded instances, in which we find no occult influence at the surface, was the invention of Johan Ernest Elias Bessler (1680-1745). In Germany, he began to be known around 1712 as the constructor of various self-moving wheels. These he exhibited freely, but always with their mechanism concealed by casings forming part of the wheel and revolving with it. He exhibited his largest wheel at Hesse-Cassel in 1717. Gould writes that Orffyreus' wheel is "the only instance on record of a machine, capable of doing external work and yet apparently independent of any external or known source of power, having been exhibited in public and subjected to official tests."20
While there is no occult influence at the surface, the way Bessler obtained his pseudonym gives food for thought. Bessler constructed his pseudonym "Orffyreus" by placing the letters of his name in a circle. By choosing the opposite letters he obtained his pseudonym. This not only brings the countless revolving wheels in Trithemius' boo
k Polygraphia to mind, it could very well be that here we have an atrophied account of a device not dissimilar as Magnus' or Jesse's apparatus or one that Bulwer-Lytton described.
In a pamphlet written by Bessler and published in 1715, he gives an outline and principles of the machine, "but that explanation is at variance with all modern ideas of mechanics. If, as he claimed, he had discovered a new source of power, he was either unable or unwilling to give a correct description of it," remarks Gould.21 Bessler, or Orffyreus as he chose to name himself, destroyed his wheel in a fit of rage, without ever disclosing how it worked. When he died, he took the secret of his invention with him to dissolve forever in the mist of history.
In order to preserve another secret, towards the end of the 18th century, avant-garde science mingled for a while with freemasonry. Around 1780, Franz Anton Mesmer (ca. 1734-1815), who was to become a source of inspiration for Bulwer-Lytton, swept Europe with his mesmerism. Mesmerism was a curious fusion of avant-garde science and occult preconception, and in the process Mesmer would coin the term "animal magnetism," which he saw as the soul of all that breathes, not unlike the ideas that Keely gravitated towards while describing the source of his discovered force more than a century later. Conveniently, at Mesmer's times French High-Grade masonry was at its peak, and it is sometimes alleged that it was freemasonry that introduced Mesmer in the better-situated Parisian circles.22
Mesmer directed fluids by the movement of his hands and directed these through tubes and bathtubs or in a glass of water. By means of his animal magnetism he obtained strange results. It is said that people thus treated were often given to weep or to sleepwalk, and he cured many persons afflicted with fits of all kinds. No wonder then, that many freemasons were trying to obtain Mesmer's secret. However, it was established that only "sensitized" persons could procure the same results, and from this sprang the notion that an order was needed, to "sensitize" those persons.23
Since Mesmer was a French High-Grade mason himself, a grade was established to promote and preserve the art and the secrets of animal magnetism. This little-known chapter in the complex history of freemasonry has become known as "magnetic masonry." The plan led to the founding of the Order of Universal Harmony in Paris in 1782. The purpose of these magnetic masons was also to create a healing center, which might radiate over the vast circle of initiates. For this, the initiates had to be ritually purified before they could conduct the process of magnetic healing themselves, somehow an occult forerunner of the process in which Keely had to teach certain persons to sensitize his equipment.
In 1784, lodges of this magnetic masonry were established in several French cities, including Versailles, Lyons, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Nancy and Marseilles. When the French revolution broke out in 1789, the order either dissolved or went underground. When Mesmer died, he died almost forgotten.24 His influence on freemasonry is to be found in a direction that is also called "Mesmerian Masonry," in which this spiritual current of the 18th century was connected to freemasonry.25
Perhaps this Mesmerian current influenced a German group that is surrounded by mystery; the Free-Masonic Order of the Golden Centurion. This order supposedly was founded in Munich in 1840 by a number of rich German industrialists and well-to-do citizens26 and is described as "One of the most important, and certainly the most diabolically mysterious." Around the 1840s, this order used a strange device called the Tepaphone. But contrary to Mesmer's endeavors decades before, the Tepaphone was used for an infinitely more sinister purpose. Allegedly the Tepaphone was a "machine which, when coupled with the will of a magician, could kill anyone no matter were they were."27
While various theories abounded upon its exact working, it was believed that the device could load or unload a person with the vital odic force. The Tepaphone was being described in one instance as made out of "multiple optic lenses and a copper spiral consisting of twenty-four coils in the center of which was a copper plate." An image of a person could be placed beneath the lenses and in the stream of electrical current that ran through the instrument. In this manner the person of the image would be affected positively or negatively. The spirals were tools for engaging the concentrated mental force of the operator or operators of the instrument, in order to guide its effects.28
Of John Murray Spear (1804-1887), the American spiritualist preacher and founder of the forgotten "new motive power movement," it too can be said that he had one foot in the territories of the occult, while at the same time his restless mind created other wonders. Like Mesmer, it was to benefit mankind. In 1854 he constructed a motor at High Rock in Lynn in Massachusetts, which he called the New Motor. He intended it to be self-generative. The same year and across the ocean a strange book titled Der Organismus des Weltalls, or The Organism of the Universe, by German occult philosopher U. Milankowitsch was published.
In it he remarked that, "When I want to build a machine.. .that wants to move and that shall root in the earth, I at first think of that machine. ... I design a blueprint. This blueprint, this idea originated in my mind, according to which... this machine should be built, and when this machine... is built, the idea that was located in my mind, proceeded in objective reality, is realized in nature, and has become one with... the machine. Thus the idea was the primal image, its form and law according to its rules...the machine is built. When we go from the workshop of the mechanic into nature, we will find an immense, boundless and endless building, the house of God, consisting of countless parts, or a moving, living, immense World Machine, consisting of a countless number of revolving and revolvable wheels. Now, the blueprint of this building of nature, this living World Machine, is the idea itself that is objectified and melted together with the same. The blueprint of the whole of this building of nature is therefore the primal idea, the absolute idea, the idea of ideas."29
It is doubtful if, with his enigmatic statements, the German occultist somehow foresaw what Spear was constructing at the same time. It is equally doubtful if Spear read the philosophies of the German occultist and his musings on the nature of the World Machine, but it provides a partial insight into the motives of a priest and spiritualist to construct a curious machine-like device. It also reflects the exalted spirit of the times, as experienced by the esoterically inclined.
Spear, much like Newbrough — who was also a spiritualist — claimed that he did so at the instigation of one of the groups of spirits by whom he was controlled. He had been active in the antislavery, peace and temperance movements, and became a medium in March, 1852. He claimed that his book Messages from the Superior State was dictated by the spirit of John Murray, the founder of the sect of Universalism. Whatever its causes or literary origins, it heralded his first public appearance as a medium. Spear was also in the habit of journeying all over the country as the spirit moved him, "at the command or direction of spirits to whom he professed himself willing a childlike and unquestioning obedience."30
A year later, Spear confided to a Boston newspaper that his spirits made "important declarations" to him as he visited Niagara Falls. Forty years later, this place would see a very different kind of magic, but this time in the form of one of Tesla's visionary ideas. Spear's spirits declared that they had formed various associations. One of these was the "Association of Electricizers."31
Before the construction of his New Motor that led to a whole movement, "the new motive power movement," Spear experimented with mineral and vital electricity as a means of developing the latent powers of mediumship. He also sought to promote the influence and control of spirits through the aid of copper and zinc batteries, "so arranged about the person as to form an armor, from which he expected the most phenomenal results." However, an experiment tried in St. Louis "proved, so far as external effects were concerned, a complete failure."32
In the fashion of Levi's symbolical explanations and of Albertus Magnus' construction of an android, Spear too had other things on his mind; he "had long indulged the idea of embodying in some tangible form the crude conceptions of cer
tain minds (not limited to the earth spheres alone), who have labored to discover and scientifically control the mystery of the life principle." Eventually Spear and his array of invisible spirit counselors thought that they had made this discovery, and a Boston spiritual periodical, the New Era, declared that "the association of Electricizers in the spheres were preparing to reveal to mankind a 'new motive power,' God's last, best gift to man," a work that was "destined to revolutionize the whole world" and "infuse new life and vitality into all things, animate and inanimate." From time to time, the Boston periodical would drop mysterious hints concerning Spear's discovery, which was "to awaken the world to wonder," but finally it announced in its pages that "high spiritual intelligences, through the organism of Mr. John M. Spear, had given directions for the construction of a living machine," termed "a new motor."
Consequently, strange reports began to circulate in spiritualist circles. In one of these, a Boston woman, also a spiritualist, was named as "the mother of the new motor," and "absurd and impossible stories were bruited about concerning the practices by which 'the life principle' had been infused into its organism."33
Nevertheless, the New Era soon printed an article headlined, "The New Motive Power, or Electrical Motor, otherwise called 'Perpetual Motion' — The Great Spiritual Revelation of the Age." In it, its editor who was Spear's friend but not a spiritualist himself, proudly announced that "after about nine months of almost incessant labor, oftentimes under the greatest difficulties, we are prepared to announce to the world, first that spirits have revealed a wholly new motive power to take the place of all other motive powers. And second, that this revelation has been embodied in a model machine by human cooperation with the powers above." The last statement was the vague utterance that the results thus far obtained, were "satisfactory to its warmest friends."34
Free Energy Pioneer- John Worrell Keely Page 37
