Wilhelm Reich and the Orgone Rabbit Hole

Sometimes when you burn a man’s books and reputation it just makes him more interesting

Like most people, I am fascinated by eccentric geniuses.

Especially the ones that were targeted and character assassinated by mainstream science as quacks or charlatans. It often seems that, the more aggressively they were targeted by the Scientific Citadel, the more interesting their work and story.

One of my all time favourites is Wilhelm Reich.

My introduction to Reich came in my early twenties through the writings of William S Burroughs. Burroughs was not only a wildly imaginative and provocative fiction writer, but he wrote a great deal about the wide range of interests he had. One of those interests was the orgone accumulators of Wilhelm Reich.  These were boxes consisting of several layers of organic materials intended to attract what Reich had termed “orgone energy” and radiate it towards the center of the box. Patients would sit in the box for a prescribed time and absorb this energy through their skin and lungs. This would have a healthy effect on blood and body tissue improving the flow of life energy.

The way Burroughs described it, it had a very compelling magical quality and I was hooked.

After all, you don’t choose the orgone accumulator rabbit hole life. The orgone accumulator rabbit hole life chooses you.

An example of one of Reich’s early orgone accumulators

And so, down the rabbit hole I went. At first it was very hard to find any materials, this was before the internet or Amazon so I couldn’t just Google it or order one of Reich’s books. The pickings were slim, but I did find a book by Robert Anton Wilson titled “Wilhelm Reich in Hell”. This was originally written as a play and then published as a book. It was a mix between fiction and biography that chronicled the wild story of Reich’s persecution by the U.S. government by way of a fictional afterlife trial. 

That one crazy book was all I had to go on for quite a while, but then, with the advent of Amazon, many of Reich’s books became available for order. Now I could go to the source. I read everything I could get my hands on, not just the orgone accumulator stuff, but books like The Function of the Orgasm, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Ether God and the Devil. It was all compelling stuff and a lot of it was way over my head, but I didn’t care, I wanted to understand what I could.

There was something about this character, he had rubbed shoulders with the likes of Freud and Einstein; he had pioneered innovations like gestalt therapy and Vegetotherapy; he had influenced generations of intellectuals; he coined the phrase “the sexual revolution”. Reich was eventually imprisoned and had his accumulators destroyed by the FDA who also burned his books. This was a true Outsider, my kind of guy.

Reich's son, Peter, said of his father:

"He was a nineteenth-century scientist; he wasn't a twentieth-century scientist. He didn't practice science the way scientists do today. He was a nineteenth-century mind who came crashing into twentieth-century America. And boom!

The thing that attracted me the most about Reich was that he seemed to be on to some kind of magic. His theories about Orgone energy were my introduction to the concept of subtle energies, another rabbit hole that has endless, labyrinthine worlds, characters and devices.

Another interesting figure in was T.G. Hieronymus and his Radionics machine - a sort of ‘wishing machine’ which operates on a principle that is very much adjacent to the new age concept of ‘manifestation’. Hieronymus described a form of energy that has infinite possibilities, a force which he called“Eloptic Energy”, a combination of the words electric and optic. Hieronymus’ machines were appliances that later became known as “psionic devices” or “psychotronic technology” because they were dependent upon the psychic energy of the mind to operate.

A few years ago I stumbled upon a gem of a book by G Harry Stine with the intriguing title “Mind Machines You Can Build”.

It contained instructions for how to build a wide variety of psionic devices. As a creative experiment I decided to build a “Wishing Machine”  based on the instructions in the book. I am no electronics expert, but I went all in on the creativity of it, I followed the instructions for the circuitry, I added some vacuum tubes and even incorporated a magnetic levitation device for added sci fi factor. 

The device did not grant any wishes, but it made a great prop for a satirical “Wishing Machine” commercial I made for my Youtube Channel:

Sorry for the digression, back to Reich and his Orgone.

Despite being labelled as pseudoscience, Reich’s theories on Orgone energy and his orgone accumulators continue to fascinate people around the globe. There are many references to Reich and his machines in popular culture; the cult film Barbarella has a character based on Reich, Kate Bush wrote the song Cloudbusting about Reich’s arrest through the eyes of his son Peter, Hawkwind had a song titled “Orgone Accumulator”. There are sites all over the internet where you can order orgone accumulators and different orgone based products. I myself designed an orgone T shirt for my print on demand store just for my own amusement - even managed to sell a handful to random orgone fanatics.

That is the orgone accumulator rabbit hole, it has a compelling pull.

I know that this article has meandered all over the place from one tangent to another. That was intentional. I wanted to recreate the distracted  and discombobulating feeling of going down these rabbit holes, how you jump from one thing to another and find yourself in a strange new place with every turn. It is a very curious pursuit that gets curiouser and curiouser with every new character and theory. Much like Alice going through the looking glass, you find yourself in places that do not have the same rules as our reality.

Regardless of their truths, I will always be attracted to metaphysical realms with claims of magical properties and the people who wholeheartedly believe in them.