There is nothing anyone could say that would convince me that what I experienced was a twist of nature, an odd blip. I am convinced that it was an intentional act to help me understand the ways in which time, space, and energy interact.
—Elizabeth
Obviously, Elizabeth’s life after the lightning strike has been riveted with exceptional events and the dramatic appearance of new psychic capacities, many of which are clearly related to ancient religious lore and now contemporary sci-fi themes. Some of these strange events and new mutant abilities have also been connected to electromagnetic phenomena: the dramatic lightning strike itself first and foremost, of course, but also the perceived energy fields around human bodies and the odd behavior and content of modern technology (a ringing phone, the popping light bulbs, and the malfunctioning electronic devices).
“I can see all of your auras right now.” That is what she told a group of us in Big Sur in November of 2016, as we met for a week to try to explore just these kinds of perceptions and “bodies of light.” Elizabeth was being perfectly serious and matter-of-fact with such a statement. She was not claiming any superior spiritual state. Indeed, she repeatedly told us that she had no idea what the different bright colors mean or why our auras looked so different. She was simply reporting her own perceptions, as if she were watching the sun dip into the ocean and change the colors of the sky as it disappeared (we did that, too). She was simply reporting on the electromagnetic environment in which she lives and perceives. This environment is different than the one we perceive (or at least I do), but it may be different only in that she can see things that we cannot.
Or perhaps it is more complicated than that. Perhaps it is the case that what she is “seeing” is actually a combination of an empirical or objective fact (a living electromagnetic field) and a psychospiritual interpretation (a colored, flame-like aura). In this model, a perception of some actual electromagnetic presence is being registered by her sensory system and is then immediately, unconsciously translated into the image of auras around each of us. Perhaps what she is reporting, then, is a relationship between her psychoneurological system and the invisible electromagnetic ocean in which we all bob and swim. Another translation.
I don’t really know. What I do know is that “energy” is everywhere for her; that she perceives this energy as living and conscious; and that it is attempting to communicate meaning to her through its intensity, behavior, and colors. What it signals is not at all clear, again. The only color of whose meaning Elizabeth is certain is black. You don’t want a black aura. If your aura is black, you are very ill and probably about to die, as we saw with her story about seeing the black aura of a relative. You don’t really die, of course, but that is another story—the story of this book.
But even the “black aura” scene suggests a symbolic dimension and the activity of the religious imagination, since there is nothing in the natural world about the color black that would signal death. That is a cultural association, not a natural or objective one (and not every culture associates black with negative meanings, much less with death). So even here Elizabeth’s imagination is no doubt at work, translating for her in her vision the very accurate, even empirical meanings she is picking up and interpreting in the environment. For her, black means death, and so when she picks up the truth of a person’s physical state as dire or near death, she “sees” a black aura around that person. This may be her way of registering an accurate psychical cognition in a culturally relative visual or symbolic form. Another translation.
Obviously, there are many questions embedded in such moments that need to be addressed at this juncture. I write “addressed” rather than “answered,” as I do not think that we have any clear answers at this point in space and time, and we are certainly not going to arrive at them in the next few pages. I think the most productive things we can do are: first, simply stop denying that these things happen; and then, second, engage them honestly, fairly, and forthrightly with all of our intellectual resources. Once we do these two things, I suspect new, and better, questions will emerge to lead us forward to future answers.
One question that keeps emerging, for me anyway, is the question of why paranormal events so often get connected to various languages of energy, and whether this energy has anything to do with the particles, waves, and physical laws that physicists study and describe. “Enlightenment” or spiritual “illumination,” after all, are not always simple metaphors. Nor, I doubt, was Elizabeth simply being metaphorical when she described a glowing form that she followed after the lightning strike.
She is hardly alone here. Conscious lights, glowing bodies, spheres of intelligent plasma, altered states of erotic energy, visionary photisms, and electromagnetic effects are the very stuff of the history of religions. But what, exactly, do we mean when we refer to these experiences as “energies” or “light”? Are we speaking of the physicist’s photon that can be mathematically modeled, or perhaps some unknown place on the electromagnetic spectrum? Or something related, but different? Or something else entirely? When the folklorist and medical researcher David Hufford asked Genevieve W. Foster whether she could have read a newspaper by the light of her own mystical experience, when for days “the world was flooded with light,” she answered simply, “No.” And, yet, there was light—beautiful, knowing, beneficent Light.
We have thousands of other accounts of altered states of energy. Electromagnetic effects within paranormal events span a broad spectrum (and may actually be a spectrum). People have long reported glows or odd lights around particularly gifted or “holy” individuals. Greek Orthodox Christian theologians have long written of the “created” and “uncreated” energies of God that can transform human beings into saints. Contemporary near-death experiencers (like Elizabeth) and ufological contactees commonly report problems with electronics—they cannot wear watches, or computers malfunction in their presence. Electric lights flicker in poltergeist events. Similarly, streetlights go out (or on) in the presence of a whole class of experiencers known as SLIders (for Street Light Interference).55 Apparitions of various sorts (including of the Virgin Mary in Catholic cultures and UFOs in more secular contexts) occur in areas of high geomagnetic and seismic activity. Television sets fritz out in spectral or ghostly encounters. UFOs routinely stall or stop anything operating with a battery or electrical system—cars, tractors, or fighter jet systems. UFOs are commonly seen over or around atomic research or nuclear missile sites, military installations, and power lines, as well as while traveling in cars (that is, while sitting inside a very powerful electrical field produced by the automobile engine). Encounters of different kinds, from the ufological to the traditionally religious, often involve reports of “humming” or “buzzing,” as if magnetic or electronic fields are involved. I am thinking, for example, of the “divine speech” of Jain liberated souls, which are said to buzz when they “speak,” or the “buzzing” heard around the 1917 apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Fatima, Portugal, which also, by the way, featured lightning that was seen by the visionaries but not always by others present (who did hear the buzzing and a certain thunderous “roaring,” though).56
“Radioactive” saints transmit superintelligent energies into others by their mere presence or through some ritual touch. Glowing or burning forms, subsequently interpreted as deceased souls in purgatory, have appeared to baffled Catholic visionaries for centuries.57 People levitate (and are seen levitating by others), which suggests that the gravitational field is being affected by some temporary fantastic energy. Similarly, tables, or in one famous case a person (Daniel Dunglas Home), would float in nineteenth-century séances, a phenomenon that was sometimes accompanied by a palpable drop in temperature in the room, which suggests some kind of transfer of energy. The Virgin of Zeitoun, interpreted as an apparition of the Virgin Mary of Christian lore, glowed on top of a Coptic church outside of Cairo like some occult hologram for thirty months in the late 1960s. It was photographed multiple times and even became an advertised tourist attraction!58
Indeed, if there is any single universal in the history of humanity’s religious experience, it is energy and light, or perhaps better, Light. Such a history is literally filled with instances of human beings getting zapped, illuminated by mysterious lightforms, and receiving revelations or messages from humanoid figures emerging from some kind of glow, radiance, or lightform. The classic experience of the apostle Paul, who was struck by a light and a voice on the road to Damascus as he traveled to persecute the followers of Jesus, is such a case (the effects of which were unspeakably vast in Western history). But we could come up with tens of thousands of similar examples, if only we simply chose to invest enough time and resources in locating, describing, and classifying them. Elizabeth’s vision of a floating, guiding glow immediately after she was struck by lightning is simply one example of this same global pattern.
The language of light and energy is clearly not just metaphorical in these cases, then, even if many of these events are subsequently interpreted in various culturally specific ways and so come to shine through the prism of the human imagination. To return to the double nature of the paranormal, and indeed of so much religious expression: How do we make sense of both this very real light or energy and the obvious cultural refractions through which it shines and takes shape in the various publics? How do we acknowledge the symbolic nature of these events (that is, the way they are clearly designed to create and sustain very different worlds of meaning), but also the simple facts that they sometimes literally shock (or heal) bodies, levitate bodies, and stop electrical equipment? How do we account for both their real mental and material dimensions? And what exactly does “real” mean here?
One initial and very basic way to better understand Elizabeth’s experiences is to place them in a larger comparative context, that is, to look for cases like hers in other cultures and times. As it turns out, we find similar stories and similar people pretty much everywhere we look, if only we will look (and if we know where and how to look). Elizabeth is not the complete freak she thinks she is. She is a weirdo only in relationship to our present materialistic assumptions and conventional public culture. Once we compare her experiences to those of other times and climes, she becomes much more understandable, even if she never quite becomes “ordinary” or “normal.” Indeed, once we make this comparative move, we can easily see that Elizabeth is in good company precisely by being extraordinary, special, or set apart from the ordinary lot of us dullards, Muggles, and nonmutants.
Take, as a simple and obvious example, the key presence of lightning in her story. One could go to the Jewish tradition here, and in particular the Torah, where storms and lightning are said to surround the presence of God as a kind of natural cloak or hiding. But I know of no major Jewish stories or traditions that describe lightning-struck people as religious prodigies. No doubt, there must be some somewhere (there is something somewhere in any longstanding tradition), but their rarity and relative absence are significant, I think.
This absence, of course, is precisely what one would expect in a monotheistic tradition like Judaism (or Christianity or Islam) in which “God” is finally transcendent to the natural order, and the natural order is entirely created and separate from God, that is, is not God. Such “struck stories” imply, after all, that there is something sacred about the natural world itself, that it is not just there for us to use, that nature itself is intrinsically sacred, alive, and intentional. It is this same monotheistic imagination, I suspect, that is behind the assumption that the energies and lights of mystical or visionary experience can having nothing to do with the photons and waves of physics. They must be entirely different things, since “God” and “nature” are entirely different things.
But are they? I am not so sure.
Tellingly, probably the most common biblical association with lightning is as a form of punishment or threat, itself based on a number of passages spread throughout the Bible, both Jewish and Christian now.59 Hence the common sensibility that one will “be struck by lightning” if one offends God. This was no simple metaphor. When the lightning rod was first invented in Europe, in the late eighteenth century, it immediately became the object of intense religious concern and condemnation. For centuries, religious preachers had used the regular occasion of church steeples getting struck by lightning as apt moments to call their people to conversion and to repent from their sins. But now there were rods that could catch the divine punishment and disperse it harmlessly to the ground. The new invention was roundly condemned as blasphemous, as another example of human hubris and defiance of God.60
Lightning is commonly used in the Bible to signal the hiding of God’s nature and to invoke the human response of awe, or as a sign of God’s wrath and punishment, but never (or very rarely) the bestower of special powers or divinity. There are a few important exceptions, however, where lightning or lightning-like light signals divinity. A column of cloud by day and lightning by night guided the Hebrew people through the desert in Exodus. The shining body of the Son of Man in the Hebrew prophetic book of Daniel and that of the mysterious angel that announces Jesus’s resurrection in the Gospel of Matthew are both described as lightning-like.61
As is the thunderous, UFO-like vehicle of God that Ezekiel witnesses and is “abducted” by in the first chapters of the book of Ezekiel. Later in the Jewish mystical tradition, this whatever-it-is in Ezekiel becomes the focus and goal of a rich history of mystical practice, all aimed at encountering and entering the “chariot” (merkabah) of God, although the vehicle’s descriptions in Ezekiel render it anything but a simple chariot.62 Perhaps most relevant here, the strange Hebrew word in Ezekiel, hashmal, that is used to describe the “shining metal,” “amber” color, or “gleaming bronze” of the supercraft, remains deeply mysterious. Even more significantly for us, when the Torah was translated into Greek and Latin, this same Hebrew word was translated into Greek as elektron and into Latin as electrum and is now used in modern Hebrew for “electricity.”
The history of this strange word is hardly exhausted there. Indeed, this same electric word, hashmal, was considered so mysterious and so holy that the Jewish tradition tells a story of a child who happened on the book of Ezekiel in his teacher’s house. Literary historian and critic Michael Lieb tells us what happened next: “There, the child decided to read the opening chapter of the prophecy. Arriving at that point in which the text mentions hashmal, and apprehending its meaning, the child was suddenly consumed by the fires that surged forth from the mysterious phenomenon.”63 As the story goes on, the rabbis subsequently sought to suppress the study of this strangest of prophetic books and restrict its interpretation only to the properly prepared and most advanced readers. We are back to the paranormal powers of language, to the ability of a text to manifest or make real that which it is about, and the shocking, here literally deadly, potentials of interpretation.
For all of that, it is very doubtful that Exodus, Daniel, Matthew, or Ezekiel intended to communicate a sacred understanding of lightning as lightning. For such an understanding, we really have to go outside the monotheistic traditions (which the comparative method encourages us to do) and into the indigenous cultures of the Americas, where, interestingly enough, we can easily find virtually all of the different teachings and experiences that Elizabeth received in the Garden and reported afterward, including the reality of reincarnation, the importance of premonitional dreams, and the ability to visit the world of the dead, that is, the world of the ancestors.
Here, too, we can find different oral traditions in which a person is identified as sacred or special by virtue of a lightning strike. Consider what anthropologists call the shaman, a word derived from a Siberian language whose precise meaning has been lost but is now alternately translated as “knower,” “holy man,” “medium,” “sorcerer,” and “wizard.” There is no single “shaman” or single cultural way of being a shaman. The word is used today as a broad comparative term to describe any sacred person with special powers and recognized as such by his or her community, particularly in the indigenous or tribal cultures of Africa, Australia, the Americas, and Australia.
What is significant for us here is the fact that the shaman is sometimes identified or “chosen” by a lightning strike. He or she has literally been touched or elected by the heavens. Sometimes, like some ancient superhero (think Shazam or the Flash, both of which display a lightning bolt on their chests), a lightning bolt is displayed on the shaman’s ritual garb. In one case reported among the Sudanese of Africa, the individual was “dead” for two days; that is, he became a shaman through what we would today call a “near-death experience.” In one Canadian indigenous culture in British Columbia, the spirit itself is believed to come down in “in the shape of a stroke of lightning.” Another Eskimo shaman received his power when he was struck by a “ball of fire,” perhaps ball lightning. Among the Yakut of northeastern Russia, it is believed that the shaman’s ritual drum, with which he enters into trance, should be constructed from the wood of a tree struck by lightning. In another indigenous culture, those struck by lightning are believed to be able to fly up to the sky (perhaps in an event similar to our own “out-of-body experience”).64 Dreams, by the way, are also incredibly important in both the callings and the clairvoyant, healing, and precognitive practices of shamans.
According to Lee Irwin, a scholar of Native American religions, such lightning lore is especially prominent among the native peoples of the Plains, where huge thunderstorms with multicolored lightning are not uncommon, as anyone who has grown up in the Midwest knows well.65 The general religious notion here is that a person hit by lightning has been chosen by the spirits and initiated by the Thunder Being, who is usually imagined as a great eagle who hides in the storm clouds and is rarely seen. His eyes are closed, but when he opens them, lightning flashes forth. Note here how the natural world is not a cloak of God or a sign of God’s wrath but is an actual physical expression of divinity.
There are also a number of Native American stories about famous medicine people or religious prodigies whose spiritual paths were initiated when they were struck by a lightning bolt. The power surge is believed to give the individual special wakan, that is, sacred or mysterious powers. Such powers might include what we call clairvoyance and telepathy. It might also enable them to commune with the spirit world. Other powers include an ability to read impressions from material objects (what is known as “psychometry” in the parapsychological literature) and the ability to hear distant voices speaking in strange languages, called “spirit talk.”
Interestingly, there is also a tradition of “thunder dreamers,” that is, individuals who have been selected by the deity Thunder to enact a contrary or countercultural lifestyle. These are the Heyoka, the sacred and powerful but “upside down people” whose actions often challenge social norms and pretentions. Heyoka may also be gender switchers, taking on opposite gender roles for a period of time and then switching back again. From a broader comparative perspective, I should note that gender fluidity and transgenderism are common markers of sacrality or holiness in the world’s religions, not a sign of sin or mental pathology.
Overall, we might say that those hit by lightning in the indigenous cultures of the Americas are regarded as honored by the spirits and treated with great respect. There is also some expectation that they will possess unusual powers and abilities that may take years to fully develop. These paranormal powers often eventually lead to the person taking on a new shamanic role as a sacred specialist who can talk to spirits and find lost objects or missing people. These are the “mediums” and “psychics” of the indigenous cultures.
It is important to understand in this context that most traditional native sources are clear that native people do not want to become Heyoka or Thunder medicine people. Profound life changes and new social obligations, after all, come with the role. Most difficult of all, these obligations often involve a calling to challenge the accepted social order. I mention this to reiterate my earlier point that locating Elizabeth’s experiences in a broader comparative perspective does not normalize them or deny her confessed feelings of being “weird.” It only makes these feelings and social experiences more understandable. It normalizes her, but not too much.
I also mention this because I have often heard people or read commentators wanting to claim that the paranormal is normal. No, it is not. Sorry. The whole point of a paranormal event or experience is to not be normal. It wants to catch our attention. It wants to be noticed and heard. And to do this it must stand out. It must appear as strange and out of the ordinary. Paranormal processes may, of course, end up having a “natural” explanation (whatever that means). I have even translated the paranormal as the “super natural.” But I have also insisted on the “super” part. Again, that is the whole point. That is why these things happen in the first place. To normalize supernormal events, to remove the super-, is to fundamentally misunderstand them. It is also to erase and deny them yet again. So please don’t do that.
To return to our indigenous American comparisons, it is not too difficult to see all sorts of other correspondences here with Elizabeth’s experiences and her subsequent life, or, for that matter, those of any number of other individuals. Consider the enigmatic and tragic figure of Ted Owens, also affectionately known as the PK Man (the Psycho-Kinetic Man), who after a series of brain traumas and a dramatic UFO encounter in central Texas claimed to be able to direct lightning bolts (and hurricanes) at will.66
We do not need to land on any final verdict with respect to any of these remarkable lives and stories to recognize this: Elizabeth Krohn’s experience of the lightning strike and its psychical aftermath may have taken on all sorts of clear and profound Jewish shapings (from the invisibility of God in the paradisiacal Garden to the synagogue locale of the strike to, as we shall see soon enough, the kabbalistic motifs of auras, reincarnation, and the spiritual pair), but it also exploded beyond any Jewish framework, really beyond any particular religious complex. Indeed, its original thunderous roar and its later more distant rumbles in her lifelong experiences have resonated almost perfectly with a more global lightning lore.
Once again, everything depends on the framework that we are thinking and imagining in, not just the facts themselves. Those facts mean little, or nothing at all, until we place them in a particular framework. And the bigger the framework, the more they mean.
There are other possible frameworks to consider with some of Elizabeth’s phenomena. She herself has invoked the set of fantastic phenomena captured under the umbrella of synesthesia, a neurological gift that appears to run in her family and may have been awakened in her by the electric shock of the lightning strike. Thanks to the work of neuroscientists like Richard E. Cytowic and David M. Eagleman, we know quite a bit about synesthesia, even if we are very far from understanding it in any full way. Very briefly, synesthesia is the fairly common condition of “joint sensation” (syn-esthesia) within which sensory streams that are separated in other individuals are joined and combined in the synesthete. So a voice or a shape might be tasted; or a day of the week, a letter, or a number might be seen or sensed as a color; or a number might take on a three-dimensional form.67
There are many ways that the literature on synesthesia can help us understand and affirm Elizabeth’s experiences. One of the most elementary and common kinds of synesthesia, after all, is that in which “subjects see colored outlines or auras around people and objects.”68 There is, in other words, a very strong scientific basis for affirming the reality of seeing auras. The seeing of auras, it turns out, is a real thing.
There is good evidence, moreover, to suggest that in some cases the colors of such auras are emotionally mediated; that is, the different colors are translations of emotional fields the percipient is picking up. Hence Elizabeth senses that her relative in the car next to her is close to death and sees a black aura around him. Most synesthetes do not have a reliable code for the colors. This is the case for Elizabeth. But some do. Marnie Loomis, for example, explains her own conscious translation code: “Instead of seeing a person as mad, sad, or sick, … I see a person who is red, green, or black.”69 We might guess that there is a similar code at work in Elizabeth’s perception of auras; she simply cannot read it.
Yet.
The literature on synesthesia can also help us with one other mystery of mystical literature—the key role that sexual arousal and orgasm appear to play in visionary experiences and altered states of consciousness. Synesthetes report a whole range of synesthetic experiences in and around orgasm. In their book, Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia (2011), Cytowic and Eagleman quote a number of these: “brilliant flashes of colored lights”; “two dimensional, brightly colored shapes moving against a black background,” like a black opal. One woman explained that “my favorite orgasms are brown, two-dimensional squares, which I know doesn’t sound very exciting, but they are extremely pleasurable.”70 Another man reports intense libidinal arousal associated with specific tastes and food: “There are times when I am eating when I just want to push the table over and screw whoever is nearby.”71 The historian of religions would recognize in this last (somewhat humorous) moment an ancient symbolic connection reported and explored in numerous literatures: that between eating and sex (recall Adam and Eve, whose “eating of the fruit” made them realize they were naked, that is, made them realize their genitals).
It would be very easy to misinterpret all of this. Cytowic and Eagleman caution us against any easy conclusions here. They thus open their book with a philosophical bomb, that is, the basic idea that synesthesia is not just about sensing things differently. It is about living in a different reality. Put most simply, it is not simply a matter of synesthetes confusing an objective reality that the rest of us see, hear, feel, and taste correctly, as if we had everything right and they are mixing and messing it up. Not at all. They actually experience a different reality. Reality itself changes as human beings neurologically engage it differently. Reality, in short, is not “out there” in some kind of easy universal and objective way. Rather, reality is a combination or fusion of what is “out there” and what is “in here.”
Sound familiar by now?
Think I am making this up? Think again. If you need a scientist to tell you a truth, here are two of them saying the same thing:
This fact brings us back to a central point—namely, that reality is much more subjective than most people suppose. Far from being objectively fixed “out there” in the physical world and passively received by the brain, reality is actively constructed by individual brains that uniquely filter what hits the outside senses.72
In short, we cocreate our realities. We do not experience a single objective reality “out there.” This, of course, is very similar to my central point in the present book, namely, that this is how near-death experiences work as well—as super science-fiction movies that we cocreate individually and collectively, that live and shine in the in-between.
I suspect that synesthesia has played a major role in the history of religions, and especially in the hypercolorful literature of mystical vision and ecstatic states. My colleague Jonathan Garb, for example, tells me that in the context of Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism, the different sapphire-like dimensions of the Godhead (called sefirot in Hebrew, sefirah in the plural) are each assigned a color and a day and month. In other words, the mystical system looks synesthetic in the way it associates time and color. Jonathan told me that one famous Jewish mystic, Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, even encouraged his readers to match the color of their clothes to the appropriate sefirah or divine dimension of that particular day or month. This, of course, is highly reminiscent of Elizabeth’s practice of assigning colors to the days of the week and wearing appropriate clothes on each. I would be very surprised if Cordovero was not a synesthete, like Elizabeth.
In a very similar vein, my colleague Brian Ogren explained that Elizabeth’s son Jeremy’s ability to “count letters” is very similar to how gematria or Jewish numerology works. The latter is a complex system in which each Hebrew letter is assigned a number, and so each Hebrew word adds up to a particular total number, which itself has meaning and can be associated with other words and meanings.
One cannot also but help wonder if the extraordinary colors and sensory “Wow!” of the Garden are not also somehow a function or expression of a synesthetic reality. This, too, would give such an experience a sense of being “more real” than our ordinary reality. Maybe it is. Maybe more sensory modes are activated and combined in such a fuller encounter with the real. Maybe our present sensory modes “split up” and separate what is in fact a single coherent electromagnetic world. Maybe the mutant synesthete actually has a better picture of the real than the rest of us Muggles.
Allow me to end this chapter on both a historical and a contemporary note. As we have seen above, and true to my theory of religion as a kind of practiced science fiction, Elizabeth often resonated deeply with different science fiction movies and books that we talked about over the two years that we worked toward this book. One of these, again, was Mircea Eliade’s Youth Without Youth. I have written about this deep resonance elsewhere (including just above), but it is also worth exploring in a different direction here, as this new direction speaks to the deep connection between “energy” and “consciousness” so apparent in the near-death literature and so dramatically displayed in Elizabeth’s lightning strike.73
The novel, recall, is about an aging Romanian intellectual named Dominic Matei who is about to commit suicide on the night of Easter when he is struck by lightning in a rainstorm behind a church while holding an umbrella. The strike initiates a whole series of profound paranormal transformations in Dominic while he recovers in a hospital. He can hear people’s thoughts. He has dreams of the near future. He experiences the guiding presence of a spiritual double or guardian angel and becomes convinced of the reality of reincarnation. In short, he becomes Elizabeth Krohn.
What I did not tell you earlier is that toward the very end of this nonfiction fiction, Eliade reflects on Dominic’s electrical transformation through various literary devices, specifically through the voices of various fictional figures. Dominic, for example, speaks about the “theology and demonology of electricity” and, again, about the “eschatology of electricity.” Theology, demonology, and eschatology are all technical expressions from the comparative study of religion.
Theology is the discipline that seeks to intellectually determine or describe the nature of God. Demonology is a branch of theology that attempts to classify demons and their various appearances and habits. And eschatology is a branch of theology interested in understanding “last things” or ultimate ends or purposes, as in the end of the world or the death of an individual. With these phrases, then, Dominic (really Eliade) is suggesting that there may be an electrical dimension to people’s experiences of God and of demons; and that there might be a final purpose or goal of electricity that is fundamentally religious or spiritual in nature.
Dominic explains that he first heard the latter expression, the “eschatology of electricity,” from the mouth of a young scholar he met at a conference in 1964. It is always impossible to identify literary sources with absolute certainty, but I am willing to bet that this is a clear allusion to Ernst Benz (1907–1982), a German historian of religions whom Eliade could have easily met about then and whose Theologie der Electrizität (1970) or The Theology of Electricity was published just six years before Eliade finished Youth Without Youth in Paris, in 1976. The timing is perfect.
Benz’s book is a little gold mine for those who wish to think beyond the schizophrenia of our present “religion” and “science” wars. Indeed, Benz calls our present cultural situation “a classical case of schizophrenia.” It is so labeled because the divisions we draw with such words are finally false and very destructive. Actually, they are pathological—crazy-making. Why? Because “the experience of one and the same ultimate reality that we are faced with as human beings determines our religious as well as our scientific consciousness.” In other words, religion and science are engaging the same reality, one through symbol and experience, the other through mathematical modeling and experiment.
Or at least they should be. And they certainly once did. Indeed, what Benz attempts to show is that when both electricity and magnetism were first discovered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they ushered in an entirely new way—an energetic way—of thinking about the relationship of the soul and the body, of mind and matter, of “God” and the natural world, and of various “electrical species,” that is, apparitions, angels, and so on. In effect, “electricity and magnetism became a new symbol for God.”74
This is not the place to get into a detailed description of Benz’s history of the spiritual and occult dimensions of electricity and magnetism. We might simply recall here, as a single telling example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which equates lightning and electricity with a resurrecting but dangerous occult life force that can animate a corpse. Nor is this the place to discuss the astonishing healing career of Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), who worked with an invisible “animal magnetism” in the human body (he also thought of calling it “electricism”) to affect astonishing cures and healings and whose followers did the same for decades before they were effectively shut down by official government commissions in France and the rise of the medical profession.
One simple observation about Benz’s “theologies of electricity” will suffice. Before the discovery of these different forms of electromagnetic energy (we now know that electricity and magnetism are manifestations of the same physics), Western writers tended to think in terms that separated the supernatural and the natural. There was “spirit” or “God,” and then there was “matter” or “creation.” The natural and the supernatural were related (through the act of creation), but they were definitely separate and finally not the same. What the new languages of electricity and magnetism did was provide a third mode that could mediate these earlier natural and supernatural domains. Words like “energy” or human “magnetism” still named fundamentally mysterious processes or powers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—they signaled a both-and or in-between state. They were at once natural and supernatural. They could thus function symbolically.
And that was only the beginning. Indeed, eventually, with Einstein, we would learn that matter is energy, an energy whose nature became more and more mysterious as the decades ticked by (for example, the speed of light and its function in relativity theory). The same unifying trend would continue, and in the heart of physics itself. Consider the large quantum mystical literature, that is, that modern literature that draws explicit parallels or correspondences between the apparent philosophical implications of quantum physics and the paradoxical and unitive expressions of mystical literature. We saw a bit of this above with the work of Elliot Wolfson on the quantum nature of dreams. Mircea Eliade was also enthusiastically reading this literature before he died, in 1986.
Still, forays into this literature, however careful, are tricky at best and are often labeled dilettantish by physicists and philosophers of science, or worse. But such easy labels forget one simple historical fact: it was the founding quantum physicists themselves who encouraged this kind of thinking and who wrote books about the implications of quantum physics for the lay public. Many of them were also explicitly interested in mystical thought. In picking up this literature here, I am following those founding quantum physicists and not the contemporary naysayers.
In any case, one does not need to be a physicist to recognize what is at stake here, which is everything. Everything physical, after all, is composed of quantum particles and follows the “laws” of quantum mechanics, which are weird and wonderful beyond measure (literally, it turns out). One of the strangest features of quantum reality is this “beyond measure,” that is, the already noted fact that, at least in some standard interpretations, quanta or particles cannot be said to exist in any definite or localized way until they are observed or measured. Before such an observation, a quantum particle can only be described mathematically and statistically as a probability, as a “quantum wave function.” Put differently, a quantum particle is perfectly real, even perfectly mathematical, but there is nothing material or even “actual” about it. It possesses a potential existence, not an actual one. Numerous physicists have marveled at the apparent fact that this strange feature of quantum physics brings consciousness back into the heart of physics, since the wave function appears to require a conscious intervention to collapse and take on material or “particular” properties, that is, as a particle. It is as if material reality requires some kind of observation to appear at all.
It is tempting to imagine this weirdness as a function of our ignorance. “We just don’t know where the particle is, but it’s somewhere, goddamn it.” But this does not appear to be the case: in this interpretation of the physics, this indeterminable feature of quantum reality—which, please note, means the entire universe on a quantum level—is in fact the way things really are down there, “where” there are actually no “things” at all. Moreover, and weirder still, not only does it look like this is the way reality works “down there.” There is increasing evidence, in new fields like quantum biology and quantum computing, that these same quantum effects scale up to our world “up here.” Historically, physicists and philosophers of science have protected themselves from quantum weirdness (and their obvious mystical and paranormal implications) by arguing that such effects wash out as we move from the subatomic realm to the molecular and biological levels, where the Newtonian physics of hard stable objects bouncing around in absolute space and time reigns. But it is now looking more and more like this is not always the case.
The possible implications of such thoughts for our thinking about energy and consciousness are immense, since we now have a form of energy (a quantum particle or wave function) that seems to involve consciousness in its most basic behavior. Few writers have carried these implications further than the political scientist Alex Wendt. In deep conversation with his brother, who is a physicist, Wendt has written a book on quantum physics and the social sciences in an impressive attempt to show how quantum effects likely “scale up” into the social world and help determine human behavior, human freedom, and human consciousness itself. Indeed, Wendt has argued that human beings are actual “walking wave functions,” that is, that consciousness itself is a quantum phenomenon. He has also argued that we will misunderstand the nature of consciousness as long as we think of it in “Newtonian” terms, that is, in the ways that Newtonian physics understands hard physical objects interacting in three-dimensional space.75
Wendt wishes to push against the notion that he is simply being metaphorical when he writes of consciousness as a quantum wave function. He is not. He wishes to make a claim about the physics of consciousness and its fundamental relationship to all of reality. He thinks that quantum effects are manifested constantly within consciousness, that this in actual fact is what consciousness is. Which is to say: who we are. This, of course, would mean that consciousness is a kind of conscious energy or wave function, literally.
The entire distinction between “energy” and “consciousness” begins to dissolve here. As does the whole ancient problem of the relationship between “mind” and “matter.” In this model, at least, the former “mind” follows quantum rules; the latter “matter” Newtonian rules. But both are natural features of the same physical world; they simply do what they do at different levels of that world.
And although Wendt does not go there (these are my sins, not his), one could also now make some sense of all of the “lights,” “energies,” and “illuminations” of mystical literature. These would no longer be simple metaphors. These would be actual descriptions of consciousness itself manifesting in especially intense quantum ways. Similar readings would now be possible for what we now call paranormal phenomena, which—if we just think about it for a few seconds—look more than a little like quantum effects scaled up into our experiential world.
I do not mean to hopelessly confuse things here, or open a Pandora’s box (although I just did). I simply mean to observe that the early modern “theologies of electricity” that so fascinated Benz and Eliade continue to this very day in new and increasingly sophisticated forms. Bizarre phrases like the “physics of consciousness” or “conscious energy” are not at all impossible, it turns out. Neither are the knowing energies, conscious lightforms, and living auras of Elizabeth Krohn.