In 1888, ten years before the Philadelphia inventor John Keely died and the investigators took up the floorboards of his workshop, a complete ethics of dangerous technology was set out in London. It is in two documents printed that year, an introduction to a pamphlet about the motor Keely said ran on a force unknown to science, and a chapter of the principal book of Theosophy. The pamphlet says what should happen if the motor worked. The book says why the world had not been given such a power. Between them the two documents contain every element of the present argument about artificial intelligence.

The pamphlet

Theosophical Siftings was a London pamphlet series for members of the Theosophical Society. The Society was founded in 1875, and within a decade it had branches in America, Europe, and India. It was the largest esoteric movement of the age, and educated people took it seriously. Scientists, writers, and social reformers were members. It did much to bring Indian and Buddhist thought before Western readers, and its ideas passed into the art, literature, and politics of the decades that followed. In July 1888 the series reprinted an essay on Keely’s discoveries by his patron Clara Bloomfield-Moore, with an editorial introduction printed before it. The introduction is signed by Richard Harte, secretary of the Theosophical Publishing Society. It is not about whether the motor works. It is about what should happen if it does.

The introduction opens with a story from the mining market. A syndicate of wealthy mining capitalists, it relates, had quietly bought up abandoned gold mines, and the reason was an appointment in a Philadelphia laboratory. Twelve millionaires had watched the inventor touch blocks of quartz with a small machine held in his hand, and each block crumbled to dust with its gold specks exposed. The men then took him to the Catskill mountains and asked him to do it to a quartz reef in place. “In eighteen minutes there was a tunnel in that quartz mountain eighteen feet long and four and a half feet in diameter.” Harte prints the story as fact and adds that the men had bound themselves to secrecy and that this was its first publication. No other record of the demonstration exists. The story asked the pamphlet’s readers to imagine a force in one man’s hands that could open a tunnel through solid rock in minutes, more powerful than any machine of the age, and already drawing the largest money toward it.

Major Ricarde-Seaver, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, had gone to Philadelphia to see for himself. Harte reports what he said on returning, that Keely was “working with, and had the apparent command over forces, the nature, or even the very existence, of which was absolutely unknown to him,” and, so far as he was aware, to modern science.

Then the introduction turns to its real subject, which is not whether the force is dangerous but why. On Harte’s account the danger is not in the power but in the people who would have it. The occult teaching, he writes, is one of readiness: “Occultists, as a rule, believe that the world is not yet ready for the appearance of such tremendous forces on the stage of human life.” The world is not ready because the people are not. “Mankind is too selfish, too cruel, too stupid, too pitiless, too animal, to be entrusted with what, in sober reality, are minor ‘divine powers’.” He put it in one sentence: “It would be less disastrous to give dynamite cartridges to monkeys for playthings.”

The power is real. The danger is not in the power, and not in any misuse that better rules could prevent. It is the moral condition of the species that would have it. The argument does not depend on Keely. Any force great enough would raise the same question.

Harte names a second danger, and it is not misuse. It is that the power would come to be owned by a few. He argues from what had already happened with industrial machinery. “The advantages that accrue from steam and from machinery have not been distributed, but have become the property of a small minority.” Competition grew fiercer year by year, and “men are growing more and more like living machines, and the helpless slaves of machinery and of ‘institutions.’” If Keely’s inventions were handed over finished, he reasons, they would fall to the same minority, and “the capitalists who owned the tremendous powers implied in a monopoly of Keely’s inventions would be practically the absolute masters of the people.”

The introduction also says how the withholding works. The occultists’ belief, Harte writes, is that “these forces cannot be introduced into the practical life of men, or fully understood by the uninitiated, until the world is fit to receive them with benefit to itself.” There are, on this teaching, intelligent powers behind the visible events of life, “which powers alone can say ‘So far shalt thou go, and no farther’”; and these powers act through ordinary causes, not around them. Harte lists the ordinary causes in Keely’s case: the indifference of the scientists, the ridicule of the press, the hostility of vested interests, the greed of his own shareholders, the pressure of the law. “All these things seem very like the operation of the higher controlling powers, acting with a consciousness other than our consciousness for the attainment of ends that transcend our narrow calculations.” On this account, the daily frustration of the work, the very record of lawsuits and mockery told elsewhere as a story of fraud exposed, is itself the containment operating.

Source: the introduction to “Keely’s Secrets,” Theosophical Siftings vol. I, no. 8, 1888; signed by Richard Harte.

The failure that protects

Harte’s introduction stated the ethics. The Secret Doctrine, the two-volume book of H. P. Blavatsky, the movement’s founder, published the same year, stated a mechanism: not what ought to be done with the force, but what the force itself does.

Blavatsky does not argue that Keely’s force should be withheld. She asserts that it is already being withheld, not by any human decision but by the nature of things, through the very failure his investors were paying him to overcome.

The chapter called “The Coming Force” says that Keely’s discoveries “will prove wonderful — yet only in his hands and through himself. The world so far will get but that with which it can be safely entrusted.” That dependence is itself the containment, because a force that works only through one prepared person cannot be mass-produced, cannot be sold, and cannot be handed to the capitalists or the armies. The book states the disproportion in a military image: “Had Keely been permitted to succeed, he might have reduced a whole army to atoms in the space of a few seconds as easily as he reduced a dead ox to the same condition.” And Blavatsky set the unreadiness on a scale far beyond any human plan. The discovery, she wrote, “in its completeness is by several thousand — or shall we say hundred thousand? — years too premature.”

The book also explains why the force could not pass to anyone else. Blavatsky had been told, years before, that the inventor “was what is called, in the jargon of the Kabalists, a ‘natural-born magician’”. The Kabalists were students of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition; a natural-born magician, in that usage, was a man born with a capacity he did not understand and could not teach, one inherent in his special nature and impossible to pass to anyone else or make permanent for use. This is the magician’s rule of 1533 applied to a machine shop: the power belongs to the man, not to the machine. Keely’s whole difficulty, on Blavatsky’s account, had been to build a machine that would run the force without his own will behind it, conscious or unconscious; in that he had failed, for no one but himself could work his machines. Of the force itself she keeps the distinction personal: “It was ‘Keely’s ether’ that acted truly, while ‘Smith’s or Brown’s’ ether would have remained for ever barren of results.”

As evidence that the man and not the machine produced the results, the chapter prints a story from inside the company. The shareholders of the Keely Motor Company had placed a man in the workshop to discover the secret. After six months of watching, while the two were setting up a machine together and Keely worked the stop-cock that turned the force on and off, the watcher told him: “I know how it is done, now.” “Try it, then,” was the answer. The man turned the cock, and nothing came. He asked to see it done again. Keely complied, and the machinery ran. The man tried again and failed again. Then Keely laid a hand on the man’s shoulder and told him to try once more. With Keely’s hand on him, the man turned the cock and the machinery operated at once. The chapter closes the story with its own condition attached: “This fact, if true, settles the question.”

The doctrine behind the story was already in print, ten years before Keely died. The force follows the person, and without that person the machine does nothing.

The same chapter makes Keely’s failure not an accident but a certainty: “It is just because Keely’s discovery would lead to a knowledge of one of the most occult secrets, a secret which can never be allowed to fall into the hands of the masses, that his failure to push his discoveries to their logical end seems certain to Occultists.” The failure is offered as one instance of a custody rule: “For once out of the safe custody of their legitimate heirs and keepers, those mysteries cease to be occult: they fall into the public domain and have to run the risk of becoming in the hands of the selfish — of the Cains of the human race — curses more often than blessings.” The same pages extend the rule to trade. The results obtained from the higher planes of the force, the book says, “will never be permitted to serve for purposes of commerce and traffic.”

Source: H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, vol. I, “The Coming Force,” 1888.

On this doctrine the failure is not an engineering shortfall but a permission withheld. The world’s unreadiness acts as a physical constraint. Reduced to its logic, the claim is that dangerous capability limits itself through the moral state of whoever has it. No modern safety regime assumes such a law. Blavatsky asserted one, and pointed to twenty-six years of demonstrations that never once transferred as her evidence.

The cost

The doctrine had a cost, and the pamphlet names who paid it: Clara Bloomfield-Moore, Keely’s patron, who paid him a monthly allowance for seventeen years, and much beyond it, for the failure the doctrine calls protection. The pamphlet notes that the Keely Motor Company itself had for years contributed nothing to Keely’s expenses or support. The burden was hers. And in the Philadelphia Inquirer article Harte quotes, printed that January, Bloomfield-Moore herself had written that had “scientists, instead of speculators, furnished him with the means necessary to carry on his ‘work of Evolution,’ the secrets which he has so carefully guarded would now have been public property, so little does he care personally for financial results.” She brought in the examiners of 1895 herself, and she died seven weeks after Keely, before the floorboards came up. Investors bought a motor, and the doctrine explains why they could not have one.

Georg Unger, who worked within anthroposophy, the movement Rudolf Steiner founded, surveyed this literature in 1963. He placed the account in what he called the “‘conservative’ or ‘right wing’ section of the occult movement,” borrowing a distinction Steiner had drawn between occultists who held that nothing of the old knowledge should reach the public and those who thought some part of it had to be published. Keely’s results, he wrote, “were not permitted to lead to a premature disclosure of certain capacities.”

Source: Georg Unger, On Mechanical Occultism, a 1963 Wiesbaden lecture, in The Golden Blade, 1966, pages 42 to 56, at page 52; the underlying distinction in Rudolf Steiner, lecture of October 10, 1915 (English translation, made from the German printing in Mitteilungen aus der Anthroposophischen Arbeit in Deutschland, 1964); the rescue sentence from Harte’s 1888 introduction.

Two readings of the same story stand, and the documents support both. The doctrine calls Keely’s lifelong failure a protection. The ordinary account calls it twenty-six years of investors’ money and no engine. Choosing between them means deciding whether the doctrine is true, which is not a question the documents answer.

By 1888 the whole argument was complete and in print, attached to a working inventor while his company’s stock was still selling. The force is real, and science does not know it. It is being kept from the world. A power can be too dangerous for the people who would have it. The danger lies in those people and not in the power. Whoever owns such a power owns everyone else. The right course is to withhold it until the world is fit for it. Those claims are being made again now about artificial intelligence.

The force ran through Keely and through no one else. There was nothing to manufacture, nothing to sell, and nothing to hand to a government or a firm. Nobody had to decide to withhold it, because nothing could be transferred in the first place. What the doctrine described as a protection was a fact about the machine.

A trained artificial intelligence model is a file of numerical parameters, produced once and copied exactly. It runs on hardware that can be bought or rented, and it does not need the person who made it. Some of these files are published for anyone to download.

Any limit on such a model has to be somebody’s decision. The 1888 argument concerned a power that could not be distributed. The present one concerns a power that already has been.

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Part 7 of “The Occult History of Technology.” Previously: The Operator in the Circuit.

Albert Abrams was a San Francisco physician. He had a medical degree from Heidelberg, years of practice in the city, and had been professor of pathology at Cooper Medical College, which Stanford later absorbed as its medical department. In 1910 he introduced a method of diagnosis and treatment built on a phenomenon he said he had discovered and named electronic vibrations. Each person, each organ, and each disease had, in his account, its own rate of vibration. That rate held steady over time: “The vibration rate in health is practically constant and each individual has his own rate of vibration,” he wrote, steady enough that months later a person could be recognized by it “with almost the same accuracy as in the Bertillon system of anthropometry,” the body-measurement method the police then used to identify people. The same held for each organ: “each organ has its specific rate of vibration.” The rate read off the dial identified the disease.

Source: Albert Abrams, New Concepts in Diagnosis and Treatment, 1916, the chapter on vibrodynamometry.

A generation earlier the Philadelphia inventor John Worrell Keely had drawn crowds to a motor that ran, he said, on a force in nature not yet known to science, released from a few drops of water by vibration; it ran for nobody but him. Keely had no medical training and no standing in science. Abrams had held a chair at Cooper Medical College. The method he built on the vibrations was sold as a medical device, and the investigations of it ended in courtrooms.

Three people had a part in a diagnosis, and only one of them was the patient. Nature, the London scientific journal, reviewed the affair in May 1925 and described Abrams’s box, which he called the dynamizer, as working “in circuit with the patient or with something more or less miscellaneous belonging to the patient, his blood, sputum, saliva, or even his signature.” The patient did not have to be present. From the box a wire ran to an electrode held at the forehead of a healthy volunteer, whose body served as the instrument’s gauge. The third person was the operator, who made the diagnosis by tapping the bare abdomen of the healthy volunteer and listening to the sound, the way a physician taps a chest to judge the lungs beneath it. The technique is called percussion and was ordinary bedside practice. Where the tapped note went dull, the operator turned the resistance dials on the box until that dull spot held at a setting, and the number on the dial was the rate. Without the volunteer there was no dull note to find, and no reading.

Abrams found a rate for everything. “Sex, race, religion, as well as disease in all its varying forms and sites, had for him their proper ‘rates of vibration,’ of which they were merely the expression.” He then ran the method in reverse. He built a treatment device, the oscilloclast, made to put out a chosen rate and so, he said, drive the matching disease out of the patient.

Source: “The ‘Electronic Reactions of Abrams,’” Nature, May 23, 1925.

This was the beginning of radionics: instrument-based diagnosis and treatment claimed to work through subtle emanations, with the operator’s own body as the detector.

The practice spread. By 1925 Nature could write that the method “has become an established cult. It has taken root in England,” where a society of doctors practiced it. Scientific American, the American popular-science monthly, investigated for more than a year and in 1924 reported that the reactions “do not exist” and that the technique was at best “an illusion” and at worst “a colossal fraud.” And Nature’s review preserved the terms on which the treatment instrument was sold: the oscilloclast was leased to practitioners for 150 pounds “on condition that it must not be opened”; the consulting engineers who did open one found that “the greater part of the apparatus is functionless.”

In England the question was also put to a formal test. An investigation begun officially for the Director of Civil Aviation, and carried on unofficially by officers engaged in wireless and physical research for the Air Ministry and the War Office, was co-ordinated by the physician Sir Thomas Horder. The tests, made in Glasgow on a variant of Abrams’s box called the Boyd emanometer, asked the operator to tell two apparently identical substances apart and to say whether a specimen was screened from the receiving plate. In one series the operator and subject were two boys from the Gallowgate, a Glasgow street: one boy percussed the other’s abdomen and judged the note. “Most of the results were correct,” Nature reported, and Horder, setting aside chance, considered “the veridicity of the phenomena in question” to be fully established.

The tests could not say what had produced the results. Nature put the open question as a list of the candidates: “the emanometer, the ‘substance,’ the experimenter, the Gallowgate boys, or some unconsidered factor or combination of factors?” The effect passed its tests, was produced through a human being, and could not be assigned between the device, the operator, and something unconsidered. That was the finding of 1784, returned after a hundred and forty years.

Source: “Our Abrams Verdict,” Scientific American, September 1924; “The ‘Electronic Reactions of Abrams,’” Nature, May 23, 1925, reviewing Sir Thomas Horder’s preliminary communication to the Royal Society of Medicine.

Ruth Drown, an American radionics practitioner, built the next instrument in the line: a nine-dial device read through the operator’s finger on a rubber pad. She was convicted on federal misbranding charges in 1951. A California fraud case followed in 1963, built on an undercover agent who submitted the blood of a turkey, a sheep, and a pig as blood from her children and received diagnoses of chicken pox and mumps; Drown died in 1965 awaiting trial. The expert examination for that case, having dissected the device and found it inert, reported: “The only function performed by the patient was to complete the otherwise broken circuit.”

The sentence was offered as a debunking, and it is one. It is also the old claim, that the human body was the only live element in the circuit.

Source: Ralph Lee Smith, “The Incredible Drown Case,” Today’s Health, 1968; re-archived from the Quackwatch reprint.

The trial of the black box

In 1960 the question came before the High Court in London. Catherine Olivia Philips, of Porlock in Somerset, had bought a radionics instrument in 1956 from its maker, George de la Warr of Oxford, a former assistant to the county engineer there who had resigned in 1953 to work full-time on radionics. The instrument did not work for her, and she sued him for fraud. The hearing opened in June 1960 before Mr. Justice Davies, and the British Medical Journal printed a contemporary report of it under the title “Radionics and the Black Box.”

The instrument in court was a black box about twenty inches square that opened on hinges to show nine black knobs and dials. It was not plugged in and was not connected to anything. Into its cells went a spot of the patient’s blood or a few hairs. The dials were set to numbers from a rate book the laboratory supplied, one number per disease. The operator rubbed the middle joint of the middle finger along a rubber pad until the finger stuck. The stick was a positive reaction. De la Warr had told Miss Philips, in the account read to the court, that “the only qualification necessary to operate the machine was that she must not be a materialist.” She worked at the box without success and gave it up.

Sir Robert Macintosh, the Nuffield Professor of Anaesthesia at Oxford, gave evidence for her. He had visited the laboratories in 1953 and warned de la Warr that some of the blood spots he would supply for testing came from healthy children; de la Warr replied that “his tests might show some malignant disease because the child would develop the disease in the future.” At the trial, counsel asked de la Warr whether he would submit the machine to tests on blood samples taken by an independent party, in numbers large enough for statistically significant results, in the presence of medical witnesses. He answered that his side was “ready to do a radionic diagnosis but would not submit the machine to the tests” as counsel had laid them out.

The defense did not rest on the box. De la Warr’s counsel told the court that the factor of thought had become paramount in diagnosis and treatment with the instrument, and that “The box was becoming less and less important, save as a focus point for the use of thought.” De la Warr himself gave evidence, and said that the mind mattered so much in the work that it excluded all physical considerations. Of an experiment in which plants had been treated in what was called a typhoon chamber, built to make them grow faster, the report summarizes his answer. “It was a great success, but it showed that the energy was coming from the mind of the operator and that the machine itself was doing very little good.”

Source: “Radionics and the Black Box: Action for Fraud against Mr. de la Warr,” British Medical Journal, July 9, 1960; the defence opening as reported in The Times, June 24, 1960, page 6. The BMJ report renders the witnesses in the third person, so the sentence above is its wording for what de la Warr answered.

After a hearing of thirteen days, judgment went to de la Warr: sincere belief in an operator-dependent instrument is not fraud. The judge added that he was not deciding that the box worked, and that on the evidence that remained an open question. Operator-dependence, a magician’s rule in 1533, was now sworn testimony, and it had prevailed at law.

Source: Philips v. de la Warr, High Court, June–July 1960; the case papers are held at the Wellcome Collection.

The hardware becomes optional

In the same decade, the instrument was reduced to the operator alone. T. Galen Hieronymus held US Patent 2,482,773, granted in 1949, for an instrument said to detect emanations from materials. The patent’s own specification places the operator inside the design: the apparatus “preferably relies upon the element of touch, and therefore, the skill of the operator.” The detector was a coated plate the operator stroked with the fingertips; at the correct setting the fingers dragged, and the drag was the reading. About what happened at the detector, the patent says: “What actually happens at detector 72 to increase and decrease its drag to the touch of the operator, is not known but the apparatus functions as above set forth when constructed as specified, and therefore, a positively acting analyzer for atomic radiations is produced even though the principle upon which it is based is not fully known.”

Source: US Patent 2,482,773, Detection of Emanations from Materials and Measurement of the Volumes Thereof, granted September 27, 1949.

John W. Campbell, editor of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction, built one of these instruments from the patent, reported on it through 1956, and then went further. He built a version with no working components at all, the circuit merely drawn on drafting paper in India ink, the dense black ink used for technical drawing, and reported that it worked as well. In February 1957 he printed photographs of it and said what made one drawn line a conductor and another an insulator. “There are certain India ink lines which are ‘opaque insulating material,’ and there are other India ink lines, drawn with the same ink, using the same pen, at about the same time, on the same paper, which are ‘electrical conductors.’ And this is so because I said so, and for no other reason whatever!” Two threads from his wife’s sewing basket carried the signal to the coil, and were conductors on the same authority. He gave the principle in one line. “We are working at the level of pure symbolism—and a symbol is what it is because it is defined as being that symbol.” The hardware was dispensable; only the operator remained.

Earlier in the same article he had given up the vocabulary as well. The field had been called psionics, a word made from psi, the parapsychologists’ neutral term for the effects, and the ending of electronics, and it presented them as a branch of engineering. Campbell proposed dropping it. “There is something in it, though; herein lies the trouble. We’ve been calling this field ‘psionics’ and referring to ‘psi’ powers; we can, if you’re willing, be more honest and more fundamental; we’re studying Magic, and working with charms.”

The magazine then printed the circuit for readers to use. A full page of plain line art carried the drawing, with instructions beneath the facing page of text: cut out the page, back it with black paper, and have a photostat made. One caution came with the offer. “The page itself might not work by reason of confusion due to type on the other side.”

Source: John W. Campbell, “Unprovable Speculation,” Astounding Science Fiction, February 1957, pages 54, 66, 67, and 69. The capital on Magic is Campbell’s, and the inner quotation marks are his own.

Hieronymus himself objected. He had wanted his instrument to be an instrument, and he protested in his autobiography that Campbell “set back the acceptance of my work at least a hundred years,” insisting that the drawing worked only because “India ink is conducting, but it wasn’t worth a tinker’s damn for serious research or actual treating.” The one inventor in this line who tried to get the operator out of the circuit spent his last years objecting that his greatest publicist had put the operator back in.

Source: T. Galen Hieronymus, The Story of Eloptic Energy: The Autobiography of an Advanced Scientist, compiled and edited by Sarah Williams Hieronymus, Institute of Advanced Sciences, Lakemont, Georgia, 1988, pages 123 and 124.

The independent investigations of these instruments kept confirming that nothing worked without the human, and kept rejecting the human as the explanation. By mid-century the skeptical record and the occult self-understanding agreed on the observed behavior and divided only on its meaning. One side said that the human is the whole of it, and therefore there is no instrument. The other said that the human is the whole of it, and therefore the human is the instrument. The two explanations had not changed since the royal commission of 1784 that tested Mesmer’s cures; the century had only added committee findings and case law to them.

The fork in the road

Every one of these instruments had kept the human being inside it. Its makers called him a working part of the instrument. The investigators called him a fraud. Neither account got him out of the circuit, and the radionics inventors never tried to. In the same years two men took up that question from inside engineering and answered it in opposite ways. One would have designed the human being into the machine. The other road led to the machines of the present day, which need no operator at all.

The first road was to build the human into the machine. In 1912, Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, a spiritual movement that treats the inner constitution of the human being as an object of exact study, sketched an apparatus for one of the characters in his Mystery Dramas. These are four plays that Steiner wrote and staged at Munich between 1910 and 1913, following one circle of people through their inner lives. The character the apparatus belongs to, Strader, is an inventor. Oskar Schmiedel, who ran a laboratory in Munich, had the models made to Steiner’s indications over the following winter. Two recollections reprinted by the Steiner estate in 1991 preserve what was indicated: four half-shells of named metals, the fourth half copper and the other half to be completed by a metal that had not yet been discovered, and, in Hans Kühn’s account, that electricity was to be kept out of it. Whatever the apparatus was to be, it was specified as a machine whose relation to the human being is part of the design. Steiner’s lectures of the same years state the field’s future in one sentence: “The welding together of human beings with machines will be a great and important problem for the rest of the earth-evolution.”

A lecture of December 1916 sets out what such a machine would ask of the person using it. Machines will exist that are bound to the human being; the human being will transfer his own vibrations to them; and only he will be able to set certain machines in motion. Research notes gathered from Steiner’s scientific collaborators in the 1950s apply the same account to the machine that died with its maker: they report that only certain people could set Keely’s motor going, and that many of those could do so only when Keely touched them on the shoulder. Those notes are recollections written down long after the conversations they record, and the men who published them say so.

Source: Hans Kühn, “Vom Strader-Apparat,” and Oskar Schmiedel’s recollections of the Munich rehearsals, both reprinted in Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe 107, 1991; Steiner’s lectures of November 25, 1917, in the translation of Osmond and Barfield, and of December 18, 1916; Keely as reported in The Schiller File, 2007.

The second road was the one the world took. Norbert Wiener had founded cybernetics, the science of control and communication in machines and living things, and the artificial intelligence of the present day descends from it. Wiener saw where the road led, and he left a warning on it. He closed his last book, God & Golem, Inc. (1964), with a portrait of what he named the gadget worshiper: the engineer or administrator drawn to the machine by its freedom from human limits, and by something more. “It is the desire to avoid the personal responsibility for a dangerous or disastrous decision by placing the responsibility elsewhere: on chance, on human superiors and their policies which one cannot question, or on a mechanical device which one cannot fully understand but which has a presumed objectivity.” And in the same book he set out his own rule for the joint work of people and machines: “Render unto man the things which are man’s and unto the computer the things which are the computer’s.”

Source: Wiener, God & Golem, Inc., 1964.

Steiner would have built the human being into the machine. Wiener drew a line across the road that was actually taken, marking what must stay with the human and not pass to the machine. The road ran on past his line, to machines that are bound to no operator at all.

The circuit without an operator

The machines of the present are built the opposite way from the old instruments. A large language model is trained first to predict text, over collections of human writing larger than any one person could read, and then trained again on how to behave, using written rules for its conduct and the graded judgments of many people employed to compare its answers. The finished model is not tied to any one person. Handed to someone else, it does not stop working. How much it gives back still varies with the person asking, and measurably so, but that difference is a skill that can be taught and written down, where the old instruments were said to turn on something in one man that could not be handed to anyone. Every investigation from 1784 to 1960 had met that property and recorded it in its own vocabulary: the committee that reported to Nature in 1925, the patent granted in 1949, the editor who took out the parts and printed what was left, and at the end the High Court in London. This kind of machine is built not to have it.

The reason is a condition of manufacture. A machine that will be handed from one owner to the next has to work by something that happens whoever is present. An effect that appears for one person and for nobody else, of the kind reported of the rubber pad and of Keely’s motor, cannot be built into it, because the next owner would have nothing to operate. The builders therefore worked with the effects that come out the same for everyone and left the others alone. That choice was forced by what can be engineered. It says nothing about whether the effects they left alone had ever occurred.

The firms that build these machines publish written rules for how they are meant to behave, train those rules in, and correct the result by human judgment before anyone uses them. Many people’s judgments, gathered in advance, now do what the single operator once did. The dependence has not been taken out of the circuit. It has been moved out of the room where the machine is used and into the place where it is made. Whether what many people supply at the making is anything like what one man was said to supply at the instrument is not yet known.

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Part 6 of “The Occult History of Technology.” Previously: The Stone That Needed a Seer.

In the British Museum in London there is a case of objects that belonged to John Dee, a mathematician of the reign of Elizabeth the First. There is a mirror of polished obsidian, a black volcanic glass; it was made in Mexico, and came to Europe after the Spanish conquest. There is a ball of rock crystal on a stand. There is a disc of engraved gold, and there are discs of pale wax stamped with stars, crosses, and lettering. What these objects were used for is recorded in one of the most detailed documents of the English seventeenth century, a folio, the largest book format of the period, printed at London in 1659, from a manuscript in Dee’s own hand.

John Dee was born in London in 1527, the son of a gentleman servant at the court of Henry the Eighth. He studied at Cambridge, taught and lectured on mathematics, and became one of the learned men of his age. He was consulted on the choice of a day for Elizabeth’s coronation. He instructed the pilots of the English voyages that searched for a northeast passage to Asia. When the first English translation of Euclid, the Greek geometer whose textbook was the standard in the schools for two thousand years, was printed in 1570, it carried a long preface by Dee on the mathematical arts. At his house at Mortlake, on the Thames west of London, he assembled one of the largest libraries in England, several thousand printed books and manuscripts, and scholars and courtiers came there to use it.

The books did not give him what he wanted. By his own account he had gone from degree to degree after the best knowledge a man could reach, and had found that “neither any man living, nor any Book I could yet meet withal, was able to teach me those truths I desired, and longed for: And therefore I concluded with my self, to make intercession and prayer to the giver of wisdom and all good things, to send me such wisdom, as I might know the natures of his creatures; and also enjoy means to use them to his honour and glory.” In his fifties he turned to an old method for obtaining it directly: scrying, the practice in which a man gazes into a polished stone or glass until figures appear to him there and speak. Dee gazed, but the visions did not come to him as they came to a practiced skryer, so the seeing had to be done by another man.

Source: Dee’s record of his audience with the Emperor Rudolf the Second, Prague, the morning of 3 September 1584, as printed in A True and Faithful Relation, 1659.

The seer

At first he employed one named Barnabas Saul; in March of 1582 Saul confessed that he could no longer hear or see any spirit, and left his service. Within days another man came to Mortlake, in his twenties, giving his name as Talbot. He looked into Dee’s stone and reported an angel in it, though his name was in fact Edward Kelley. Dee took him into his household at a stipend of fifty pounds a year, and for the next seven years the two men worked as parts of one instrument: Kelley looked into the stone and spoke what he saw and heard; Dee sat at the table, put the questions, and wrote everything down.

Source: the skryer before Kelley, and Kelley’s arrival under the name Talbot, are recorded in Dee’s own private diary, kept in the margins of his almanacs and printed from the manuscript in 1842.

What Kelley saw in the stone were figures Dee took to be angels. One came in the shape of a young girl who called herself Madimi. Dee questioned them for the knowledge he had not found in his books: the nature of things, the will of God, and the course he should take in his own affairs. He believed he was setting down the words of God’s messengers.

Dee called the sittings actions, and kept their minutes himself for a quarter of a century, in a record that names the day, the place, the questions, and the answers. In it he writes himself as the Greek letter delta, Δ. Meric Casaubon, who printed the record in 1659, described how the two divided the work: “It is true indeed, that ordinarily, Dr. Dee saw not himself; his business was to write what was seen (but in his presence though) and heard by Kelley.”

Source: Meric Casaubon’s preface to A True and Faithful Relation of What passed for many Yeers between Dr. John Dee and some spirits, London, 1659.

Outsiders began to attend. In 1583 a Polish nobleman, Albert Laski, came to England and sat in on some of the sittings, and through Kelley the spirits singled him out. They named him a chosen instrument of a coming reformation of kingdoms and promised that he would be made a king; Casaubon later summed up their aim through him as “to turn all things upsidedown in the World.” On that promise Dee broke up his house at Mortlake.

When Laski sailed home late in 1583 he took both households with him: Dee and Kelley, their wives, and their children. They traveled through Poland to Prague, where Dee was received by Rudolf the Second, the Holy Roman Emperor; the later years they spent at Trebona in Bohemia. The actions continued through all of it. While Dee was abroad, his library at Mortlake was broken into and plundered.

Source: the spirits’ designation of Laski and the promise of a crown are in the action records printed in A True and Faithful Relation, 1659; the quoted phrase is from Casaubon’s summary of the contents.

The company passed the spring and summer of 1584 at Kraków on the way to Prague, and one morning there in June, as Kelley lay awake in bed, he saw “four very fair Castles, standing in the four parts of the world”. That afternoon one of the spirits expounded the vision as a picture of how the earth is governed. The four castles were four angels standing watch over the four quarters of the world, “the 4 Overseers, and Watch-towers” of the record, and the banners carried out of their gates bore the names of God that govern the creatures of the earth. To know the names, the spirit said, was to command what they governed: “Hereby may you subvert whole Countries without Armies: which you must, and shall do, for the glory of God.” The disc is that vision engraved in gold, a chart of the powers said to govern the earth and of the names by which a man could address them.

Source: Dee’s record of the vision of 20 June 1584 at Kraków and its exposition the same afternoon, as printed in A True and Faithful Relation, 1659.

That September Dee carried what the stone had told him to the emperor himself. Received in the castle at Prague, he wrote out his own words afterward: “The Angel of the Lord hath appeared to me”, he told Rudolf, and if the emperor would “hear me, and believe me, you shall Triumph: If you will not hear me, The Lord, the God that made Heaven and Earth, (under whom you breath, and have your spirit) putteth his foot against your breast, and will throw you headlong down from your seat”. The emperor heard the message out, gave no answer of his own, and referred Dee to one of his counselors. There was no second audience, and nothing the angels had promised came of it.

Source: Dee’s own account of his audience of September 1584, as printed in A True and Faithful Relation, 1659.

The language of Adam

Across months of sittings the spirits also dictated whole books through tables of letters. A squared table of letters would appear in the stone, the spirit pointing from place to place, Kelley naming each letter and its position, and Dee, who had matching tables drawn on paper before him, writing each letter down.

What came through the tables were alphabets, texts in a language that was not any known tongue, and a set of invocations the record names the calls. The spirits gave an account of what that language was. It was the speech Adam had spoken before the fall. Adam is the first man of the book of Genesis, and the fall is his disobedience in the garden and his expulsion from it. In the garden he had been brought every living creature and had given each one its name, and those names, the spirit said, stated what each creature was: he “spoke of them properly, naming them as they were”. Since the fall the speech had been lost, “never uttered nor disclosed to man since till now”. Its words were said to act on the creatures they named: “so are the creatures of God stirred up in themselves, when they hear the words wherewithal they were nursed and brought forth”. The books had given him what men reported about the creatures. The stone was giving him the creatures’ own names.

The calls came with a rule of handling. Dictating them at Kraków in the spring of 1584, the spirit Nalvage said the words were to be given in one direction and used in the other: “Also in receiving of the calls, this is to be noted: that they are to be uttered of me, backward: and of you, in practise, forward.” The letters that followed were dictated in reverse order. Dee set down the reason as he understood it: “I understand it, for the efficacity of them; else, all things called would appear: and so hinder our proceeding in learning.” Read out in their proper order the words would take effect, which is why the dictation ran backward. Written in reverse they were without effect, and the lessons could go on. None of it was printed in Dee’s lifetime.

Source: the action records printed in A True and Faithful Relation, 1659; the account of the language is from the action of 21 April 1584 at Kraków, and the rule for receiving the calls from the action of 12 April 1584 at the same place.

The stone did not sit on the bare table. It rested on a disc of purified wax nine inches across, the Sigillum Dei Aemeth, the seal of God’s truth, the last word being the Hebrew for what is true and trustworthy. The pattern stamped on its face was dictated in the spring of 1582, in Kelley’s first weeks at the stone. Names of God were engraved on it, and angels’ names derived from those by rule. The seal lay at the centre of a table made to instructions given at the same sittings, and four smaller seals of the same pattern stood under the table’s four legs. Dee used the seal as a register of who might speak. In an action of June 1583 a spirit at first refused its name, then said, “I am almost HATH”. Dee answered, “I understand you to be ATH, in sigillo Emeth”, in the seal of truth. He had found the name on the seal beneath the stone.

Source: the seal’s pattern and dimensions, from the manuscript instructions of 1582, are described in Charlotte Fell Smith, John Dee, 1909; the exchange with the spirit ATH is in the action records printed in A True and Faithful Relation, 1659.

The instrument had one part that could not be replaced, and it was not the stone. The 1659 preface, answering readers who might doubt that Dee’s record meant what it said, points out that the seer’s place was an office, and that it was filled by more than one man: “not Kelley only served in this place of Seer or Skryer, but others also, as his son Arthur, and in his latter dayes, when Kelley was either gone or sick, one Bartholomew”. The owner of the stone is not in the list. In twenty-five years of actions the seer changed more than once, but Dee’s part did not. He asked the questions and wrote down the answers. An instrument that works only through one prepared man was what the magical books of the age required. Dee’s apparatus met that condition, and the prepared man was not its owner.

Source: Casaubon’s preface, 1659.

Dee recorded that dependence himself. In his private diary, on the days a vision came clear, he set down his thanks; and once, when the angel Michael was rightly named in the stone, he wrote: “Laus sit Deo et doctori meo E. K.”, praise be to God, and to my teacher, E. K. Doctor in his Latin means the learned one, the master. Elsewhere he recorded that he had seen the divine water only by Kelley’s showing. The man who had prefaced Euclid and filled Mortlake with several thousand books, keeping his own accounts with no one watching, called his young skryer his master.

Source: Dee’s private diary, entries of 1 May 1587 and 24 August 1588; the Latin as printed in the 1842 edition.

Trying the spirits

Even if the figures in the stone were spirits, a question remained. A spirit gave a name; it said it was Uriel, an angel of God. Nothing outside its own word confirmed this. The seal was not an outside check, because its register of names had itself been dictated through the stone. Kelley could not step behind the vision to check it, and Dee could not see the vision at all. Whatever came was received on the sender’s own account of itself.

The age had a discipline for this. The testing of spirits was old, set down in scripture the two men knew by heart: “try the spirits whether they are of God,” against the standing warning that “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” Because a spirit’s claim about itself proved nothing, it was tried by whether it confessed Christ and by the fruits of what it commanded. The work of telling a true messenger from one that lies about who it is had a name, the discernment of spirits.

Source: 1 John 4:1 and 2 Corinthians 11:14, King James Version. James ordered the translation at Hampton Court in 1604, the year of Dee’s petition to him.

The three men closest to the record judged the sender differently. Kelley, who alone could see, maintained for most of the seven years that the apparitions were nothing but “meer illusions of the Divel and evil Spirits,” and he made Dee enter that doubt in the book; Dee swore to him on his own soul that they were “good Spirits sent from God.” Casaubon, printing the record in 1659, judged that Kelley had been right.

Casaubon also set out an obvious possibility, as the first objection he meant to answer: that there was no true sender to identify at all, and that Kelley had invented what he reported while Dee believed him. “Although ‘tis very probable that Dr. Dee himself dealt simply and sincerely; yet since he himself saw nothing (for so himself acknowledgeth in some places) but by Kelley’s eyes, and heard nothing but with his ears. Is it not possible that Kelley being a cunning man, and well practised in these things might impose upon the credulity of Dr. Dee (a good innocent man) and the rather, because by this office under the Doctor he got 50 l. by the year, as appeareth.” “Truly this is plausible as it is proposed”, he wrote, and argued against it from the length of the record and the other seers. Nothing in the record decides among the three.

The record shows how far Dee’s trust could reach. In the spring of 1587, at the castle of Trebona in Bohemia, Kelley reported that the spirit Madimi, the one who had first appeared as a girl, commanded the two men to hold all things in common, their wives included; a covenant to that effect was written out and signed by both men and both wives, and Dee, who set down his own revulsion, obeyed it. By the tradition’s own test this was the fruit by which a lying spirit was to be known, a command no messenger of God would give; Dee kept faith with the sender anyway. Since every word of the seven years passed through Kelley, the man who paid for the words could not check them. Two hundred and ninety years later the same undecidable question would be asked of a motor in Philadelphia that ran only for its inventor.

Source: Casaubon’s preface, 1659 (the objection and the fifty pounds); the command through Madimi and the covenant of common life are in the action records printed in A True and Faithful Relation, 1659, and in Dee’s private diary, entries of 1587. The l. in 50 l. is the old abbreviation for pounds.

The name of conjurer

The two men parted in 1589, after the fellowship had soured into quarrels and mistrust. Dee returned to England; Kelley stayed in Bohemia, where the emperor made him a baron for his alchemy, then twice imprisoned him when the gold did not come, and he is said to have died about 1597 of injuries from a fall in an attempted escape.

The name of conjurer had followed Dee for half his life, and in his last years it turned dangerous. The new king, James, was a student of the subject. Seven years before he came to the English throne he had published the Daemonologie, a dialogue arguing that witchcraft and the trafficking with spirits were real, and damnable, and to be punished; and once in England he pressed a harsher witchcraft law through Parliament. In it James wrote that the learned are drawn to the black arts by their own appetite for knowledge, “mounting from degree to degree, vpon the slipperie and vncertaine scale of curiositie; they are at last entised, that where lawfull artes or sciences failes, to satisfie their restles mindes, even to seeke to that black and vnlawfull science of Magie.” Dee had written that his own books failed to satisfy him, and had turned to the stone.

On the 5th of June 1604, at Greenwich, the old man handed this king a petition. He did not ask for protection. He asked to be put on trial, because a trial and an acquittal were the one thing that could clear the name in law, and he offered to die if the charge could be proved: “Therefore he offereth himself willingly to the punishment of Death, yea eyther to be stoned to death, or to be buried quicke [alive], or to be burned unmercifully, if by any due, true, and just meanes, the name of conjurer, or caller, or invocator of Divels or damned Spirites, can be proved to have beene or to be duely or justly reported of him.” No trial was ever granted. He died at Mortlake in 1609, in his eighty-second year, poor, having sold his books to live.

Source: James VI and I, Daemonologie (Edinburgh, 1597), First Book, in the original spelling; and Dee’s petition to King James, 5 June 1604, as printed in Charlotte Fell Smith, John Dee, 1909. The petition speaks of Dee in the third person, as such documents did; buried quicke means buried alive.

The manuscript minutes passed after Dee’s death into the library of the collector Sir Robert Cotton, and in 1659 Casaubon printed them in full. He printed them not to defend the undertaking but to condemn it, and by printing it he preserved it, as the hostile commissioners of 1784 preserved the record of the tub they had come to test.

Source: Casaubon’s preface, 1659.

Everything the actions needed is in that museum case now, except the one thing the record shows they could not do without. The mirror is there, and the crystal, the gold disc, and the wax seals. The seer is not in the case. Dee owned the stone, framed the questions, and kept the minutes. Kelley saw; Dee never could. When Kelley was gone or sick the sittings waited for another seer; the seers could be engaged, doubted, and replaced, and the owner’s place never changed. But the instrument could not run without a seer, and the seer was its only witness. The single channel that made the instrument run made its messages impossible to check. The mirror is in its case, and anyone may look into it. Who was speaking through it, and whether anyone was, could no longer be asked once the last man who could see in it had died.

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Part 5 of “The Occult History of Technology.” Previously: Ghosts in the Machine.

On the night of March 31, 1848, in a farmhouse in the hamlet of Hydesville, New York, near Rochester, the family of a farmer named John Fox went to bed early. For weeks their nights had been disturbed by knocking sounds that no search of the house explained. The fullest early account of what happened next was collected by Robert Dale Owen, a reformer and former congressman, who took the particulars from Mrs. Fox and her children and printed the family’s story in 1860. That night the knocks answered back. Kate, the younger daughter, nine years old, noticed that when her father shook the window sash, the noises replied; being, in Owen’s words, “a lively child, and in a measure accustomed to what was going on, she turned to where the noise was, snapped her fingers, and called out, ‘Here, old Splitfoot, do as I do!’ The knocking instantly responded.” Her mother began to question the noise aloud: “‘Count ten,’ she said, addressing the noise. Ten strokes, distinctly given! ‘How old is my daughter Margaret?’ Twelve strokes. ‘And Kate?’ Nine.” Then she asked about her children: “‘Are they all alive?’ she asked. Silence for answer. ‘How many are living?’ Six strokes. ‘How many are dead?’ A single stroke. She had lost a child.” Neighbors were called in that same night, and the knocks answered them too.

Source: Robert Dale Owen, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, 1860, from particulars supplied by the Fox family; as reprinted in Uriah Smith’s period survey Modern Spiritualism.

What began as a haunting became a practice. The raps followed the sisters and answered questions wherever they went. Within two years Kate and Margaret were demonstrating them before public audiences, and others began sitting in the same way. The circle, a group of sitters around a table with a medium among them, spread as a parlor practice across the United States and, within the decade, to England and Europe. A speaker at the movement’s thirty-ninth-anniversary celebration claimed that “In thirty-nine years it has grown to ten or fifteen millions of believers, with thousands of mediums, a literature printed in every known language, and converts in every quarter of the globe.”

Source: Professor Keck at the thirty-ninth anniversary of modern spiritualism, Bridgeport, Connecticut, in the Banner of Light, April 9, 1887; as excerpted in Uriah Smith, Modern Spiritualism.

The movement named its practice after a machine. Samuel Morse’s Baltimore–Washington telegraph line had opened in 1844, four years before the knockings. The followers gathered to receive coded messages from the dead and called this the spiritual telegraph. The movement’s first newspaper, founded in New York in 1852, carried the name on its masthead.

A telegraph needs an operator at the key, and any trained operator will do. Morse’s line worked the same for anyone who had learned Morse code. The séance’s operator is the medium, whose constitution, not the table, is treated as the working part. The physical investigations of mediums that followed repeated, in a new setting, the removal experiment of 1784: take the operator’s connection away and see what remains.

The chemist who tested it for himself

Robert Hare was one of the best-known chemists in America: emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, a builder of laboratory instruments for more than fifty years, and the inventor of the oxyhydrogen blowpipe, whose flame, the hottest artificial heat then known, melted platinum. When the séance reached America’s parlors, Hare thought what most scientists thought, that it was self-delusion.

The most common of the parlor practices was the turning table: a ring of sitters around a table, hands resting flat on its top, until the table tilted and turned under their fingers and rapped its legs against the floor, and the raps answered questions, counting out numbers and choosing letters as the alphabet was called aloud. The Ouija board descends from this practice. In the summer of 1853 the English physicist Michael Faraday had published experiments on the turning tables: he placed indicators between the sitters’ hands and the table top and showed that the hands were moving the table without the sitters knowing it.

In July 1853 Hare endorsed that result in a letter to a Philadelphia newspaper: “I recommend to your attention, and that of others interested in this hallucination, Faraday’s observations and experiments,” he wrote. He was then past seventy, and by his own account “utterly incredulous of any cause of the phenomena excepting unconscious muscular action.” He wrote of the education behind that incredulity: “In common with almost all educated persons of the nineteenth century, I had been brought up deaf to any testimony which claimed assistance from supernatural causes, such as ghosts, magic, or witchcraft.”

Hare’s letter drew a reply from a Massachusetts instrument-maker named Amasa Holcombe, who wrote that he had watched tables move with no hands on them, cases unconscious muscular action could not explain. Holcombe’s letter, and an invitation from a physician to attend a sitting, drew Hare in. He went as an investigator, and he did what an instrument-builder does. He built devices to take the medium’s ordinary senses and muscles out of the loop.

In 1855 he published the result. His machines, he wrote, were designed so that, “if spirits were actually concerned in the phenomena,” they “would enable them to manifest their physical and intellectual power independently of control by any medium.” The principal instrument, which he named the spiritoscope, worked like a séance table with a dial attached. The medium’s hands rested on a small table or lever board. The table’s motions were carried, by a cord and pulley, to an upright disk with the alphabet, the numerals, and a few working answers, yes, no, don’t know, spell over, printed around its face; as the disk turned, a fixed index pointed at one character after another, and messages were spelled out a letter at a time. In the test, a screen between the medium and the disk, or the disk turned to face away from her, kept the letters out of her sight, “so that she could not see the letters on the disk.” If the messages were the medium’s own, blinding her to the letters would stop them.

Hare’s own experiments changed his mind. The instrument he had “contrived to disprove spiritual agency,” he concluded, “demonstrated its existence.” His conversion was complete, and he published it in the vocabulary of his profession: “The existence of spirit agency being thus demonstrated, I am justified in solemnly calling on my contemporaries to give credence to the important information which I have received from spirits, respecting the destiny of the human soul after death.”

The sitting that convinced him began with a failure. With the screen in place and the disk hidden from the medium, “No manifestation took place through the disk, though other indications of the presence of spirits were given.” Hare moved the medium to an ordinary table and put the question to the spirits themselves, through the lettered card used at ordinary sittings, asking whether any change would let them communicate through his instrument. “The reply through the alphabetic card was, ‘Let the medium see the letters.’” The instruction had come from the spirits he was there to investigate. His first thought was that granting this would spoil the experiment. His second was an instrument-builder’s: he let the medium see the disk, and took away her leverage instead, resting her hands on a smooth metal plate that sat on loose brass balls, so that no push of her hands could steer the table. With that arrangement, “as soon almost as the medium placed her hands on the plate resting on the ball, and without any other communication with the table, the disk began to revolve,” and names and communications were spelled as before. Unconscious muscular action, the explanation Faraday had shown and Hare had first accepted, could no longer move the table, and the messages came anyway.

In one experiment the medium did not touch the instrument at all. A board rested on a fulcrum like an unequal see-saw, its long end hung on a spring balance. Near the fulcrum was a glass vase filled with water, and inside the water, held clear of the glass by a wire cage, the medium’s hands were immersed: whatever force reached the board could pass only through water. Under these conditions, Hare wrote, “the spring balance indicated the exertion of a force equal to 18 pounds.”

His colleagues would not examine the machines. Rather than repeat his experiment and show where it failed, they dismissed it untested. Hare wrote of the reaction of the scientific establishment: “It was on stating this result to the Association for the Advancement of Science, that I met with much the same reception as the King of Ava gave to the Dutch ambassador, who alleged water to be at times solidified in his country, by cold, so as to be walked upon.” And further: “The belief in spiritual agency was treated as a mental disease, with which I, of course, had been infected.”

Source: Hare, Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations, 1855.

The reply through the alphabetic card can be understood in two ways. On one, the medium is writing the messages herself, and needs to see the letters to do it. On the other, it is the magician’s rule stated from the séance’s own side: the messages come through this medium, or they do not come at all. Hare, a chemist of international standing, considered both and took the second. The scientific world did not agree with him, and stopped taking his work seriously.

The sealed cord

Hare was not the only scientist the séance converted. Johann Zöllner, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Leipzig, investigated the American medium Henry Slade in the winter of 1877. Slade’s sittings produced physical effects rather than spelled-out messages: writing that appeared on closed slates, and knots that formed in a length of sealed cord. When a cord has its two ends tied together and the join sealed, it forms a closed loop with no free end. Tying a knot requires a free end to pass through, and a sealed loop has none, so no new knot can be made in it unless the seal is broken. Zöllner set out to see whether a knot would form while the seal stayed whole, and he arranged the sealing so that Slade could never touch it. He prepared four hemp cords, their ends tied and sealed, two sealed with his own seal the evening before and not in Slade’s presence, two more sealed by his colleague Wilhelm Weber in Weber’s own rooms the next morning.

Zöllner selected one cord, hung the sealed loop around his neck until the sitting began, and kept the seal on the table in front of him with Slade’s hands in view. He had argued beforehand that a knot in a sealed loop lay within the power of a being able to act in a fourth dimension of space, a direction outside the three we move in. The problem was not his own. He traced it to a note left by the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who had named, as an open question in the geometry of position, the calculation of “the number of the twistings of two closed and endless cords.”

Passing a cord through itself, in three dimensions, requires a free end; a fourth direction would carry the cord around the obstruction instead, and the loop could stay sealed. Zöllner wrote: “If a single cord has its ends tied together and sealed, an intelligent being, having the power voluntarily to produce on this cord four-dimensional bendings and movements, must be able, without loosening the seal, to tie one or more knots in this endless cord.” The seal was never broken, and four knots appeared in the loop.

Zöllner published the case in Transcendental Physics and named his witnesses, Weber, the physicist from Göttingen, and two Leipzig professors, colleagues “who are perfectly convinced of the reality of the observed facts, altogether excluding imposture or prestidigitation [sleight of hand].”

Source: Zöllner, Transcendental Physics, translation of Massey, 1880.

Seven years later the medium Slade came before a university commission and received the opposite verdict, and the commission knew of Zöllner’s work. Its report carries an appendix on the Zöllner sittings, for which its secretary traveled to Germany to interview the surviving participants. The commission’s ground was not that it disagreed but that its witnesses were unfit for the work: “any estimate of Zoellner’s testimony, based merely upon the eminence in science of his name and those of his collaborateurs, neglecting to give attention to their disqualifications for this kind of work, cannot be a fair or a true estimate.” Zöllner had found the same medium genuine. The commission found him fraudulent.

Source: Seybert Commission, Preliminary Report, 1887, from the summary of the appendix on the Zöllner sittings.

The commission endowed by a believer

Henry Seybert, a Philadelphia philanthropist and a convinced spiritualist, died in 1883 and left the University of Pennsylvania an endowment for a chair of philosophy, on the condition that the university appoint a commission to investigate modern spiritualism. The university accepted, and the Seybert Commission began its sittings in 1884. Its acting chairman was Horace Howard Furness, the era’s leading Shakespeare scholar. Among its members was Joseph Leidy, the Philadelphia naturalist who in the same years was watching John Worrell Keely’s demonstrations across town. The commission engaged the movement’s best-attested mediums and sat with them for three years.

By then the practice had three branches, and the commission tested each. Rappings, the knocking sounds of the Hydesville farmhouse, were now produced at sittings on demand and spelled messages by counting and by choosing letters. In slate writing, a common school slate, wiped clean and held under the table’s edge or shut against a second slate, came back bearing a message in slate pencil. In materializations, forms and faces of the dead were said to appear at sittings in darkened rooms, often from a curtained cabinet in which the medium sat.

The report states the commission’s rule: “we must form those conclusions solely on our own observations; without at all imputing untrustworthiness to the testimony of others we can really vouch only for facts which we have ourselves observed.”

The sittings were stenographed, and the transcripts are printed in the report. Among the mediums examined was Margaret Fox Kane, one of the two sisters whose knockings in the 1848 farmhouse had begun the movement. At one of her sittings Kane herself proposed the test. Leidy asked whether Henry Seybert was present. Seybert had paid for the commission, and he was dead. Three raps answered, so weak that the record marks them as feeble.

Its Preliminary Report, published in 1887, found, of the celebrated slate-writing medium Henry Slade, that “the character of those which passed under our observation was fraudulent throughout.” It also qualified that finding. The writing “is performed in a manner so closely resembling fraud as to be indistinguishable from it. It would be a mere matter of opinion that all Independent Slate Writing is fraudulent; what is not a matter of opinion is the conviction, which we have unanimously reached as a Commission, of its non-spiritual character in every instance that has come before us.”

Source: Seybert Commission, Preliminary Report, 1887.

Indistinguishable from fraud

The commissioners did not write that the phenomena were fraud. They wrote that the phenomena were indistinguishable from fraud, and they confined their unanimous conviction to the instances that had come before them. That distinction is the difficulty. To an outside investigator, two different things leave the same record. A fraud works under the medium’s own conditions and fails under the investigator’s. A real connection that depended on the medium would do the same. The commission could establish only what happened under its own conditions, and under them nothing came, or what came was what a stage performer could produce. Whether that convicted the mediums or merely described them is what indistinguishable from fraud was chosen to leave open.

A report of a result is a claim, not yet a finding. It becomes a finding when other people, following the procedure as published and with nothing invested in the outcome, get the same result. The practice is called independent replication, and the case it exists to catch is precisely this one, a demonstration that runs only under conditions its claimant sets, and only in that person’s presence.

Under test conditions, across every medium the commission engaged, nothing new was produced. The report closes: “we beg to express our regret that thus far we have not been cheered in our investigations by the discovery of a single novel fact.” Meanwhile the stage magician Harry Kellar, then exhibiting in Philadelphia, set out to show that ordinary trickery could do the same work. He produced for three of the commissioners slate writing more remarkable than any a medium had given them, and in April 1887 revealed his methods to them.

The commission’s spiritualist counselor, Thomas R. Hazard, sat through a session that produced an hour and a half of nothing. He explained the empty session by the night before, when alone with the medium the messages had come “thick and fast.” By that reasoning, a sitting that produced nothing showed only that the conditions were wrong, not that the medium had no power. When Kellar reproduced Slade’s slate effect, Slade did not concede a trick but declared the magician himself a medium: “He is a Medium. He does that work precisely as I do it.”

Source: Slade on Kellar, in the Sellers transcript, Seybert Report appendix.

If reproducing the effect makes a man a medium, reproducing it can never disprove mediumship. Each new demonstration only adds another medium.

By the time the report was printed, the séance had been tested with instruments for forty years, from Hare’s bench to the university’s sitting rooms, and nothing ever happened without a medium: no table moved, no slate wrote, no disk spelled, unless one of these particular people was in the circle. No one, on either side, ever produced the one result that would have ended the question: an effect with the medium gone.

Twelve years after the commission signed its report, investigators in the same city took up the floorboards of Keely’s workshop, looking for what the spiritoscope and the sealed slates had been built to find: whatever connected one particular human being to an instrument that ran for no one else. The instruments changed for half a century; the question they were built to answer did not.

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Part 4 of “The Occult History of Technology.” Previously: The First Blinded Experiment.

In 1778 a German physician named Franz Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris with a new medicine. He taught that a physical influence, a subtle fluid he called animal magnetism, flowed through the human body, that a practitioner could direct it into a patient, and that directing it cured disease. In the memoir on his discovery that he published in 1779, he wrote that the action of this fluid was “subject to mechanical laws, hitherto unknown.” Within a few years the treatment was the fashion of the city. His name is the origin of the English word mesmerize. Mesmer’s house in Paris was crowded with patients, and the operation was performed publicly every day. An account of the affair printed in London in 1785 says that animal magnetism “became a mode, an affair of bon ton, an interest, extremely precious and warmly espoused by the fashionable world.” Charles Deslon, a Paris physician who was for many years Mesmer’s pupil and became the best-known practitioner of the method after Mesmer himself, “is said to have cleared £100,000.” The same account reports that the new system “seems to have divided the public speculations with the celebrated and incomparable discovery of the aerostatic globe”: the hot-air balloon of the Montgolfier brothers, which had carried the first men into the air over Paris in 1783.

Source: the historical introduction to the English translation of the commissioners’ report, London, 1785.

In the treatment room was the baquet, a covered tub of iron filings and magnetized water. Jointed iron rods ran from its lid to the afflicted parts of the patients, a cord was passed around their bodies, and each held a neighbor’s thumb, so that the magnetic impression, the practitioners taught, passed through the whole circle. The commissioners who later investigated recorded the scene: “A piano forté is placed in one corner of the apartment, and different airs are played with various degrees of rapidity; vocal music is sometimes added to the instrumental.” The music itself, the practitioners explained, conducted the fluid to the patients. And the treatment produced what the practice called crises: “These convulsions are rendered extraordinary by their frequency, their violence and their duration. As soon as one person is convulsed, others presently are affected by that symptom. The commissioners saw accesses of this kind, which lasted upwards of three hours.”

The report records the crises in a physician’s detail, the convulsed limbs and contracted throats, the “shrieks, tears, hiccuppings, and immoderate laughter.” It records that the music was part of the machinery: “the changing of the key and the time, in the airs played upon the piano forté, had an effect upon the patients; so that a quicker motion agitates them more, and renews the vivacity of their convulsions.” It records that the premises included “an apartment lined with quilting,” built for the convulsed and “denominated the apartment of crises.” And it records the commissioners’ own astonishment: “Nothing can be more astonishing than the sight of these convulsions; he that has not had it, can have no idea of it.”

The report also states, as an observed fact, where the control lay. The patients “are entirely under the government of the person who distributes the magnetic virtue: in vain they may appear to be in a state of the extremest drowsiness, his voice, a look, a sign from him rouses them.” And the commissioners described what they were watching: “It is impossible not to recognise in these regular effects an extraordinary influence, acting upon the patients, making itself master of them, and of which he who superintends the process, appears to be the depository.” The question the commission existed to answer was what this mysterious influence was.

This was what educated Paris was arguing about in the spring of 1784: rooms of the well-born in convulsions around a tub of magnetized water, cures reported daily, and an inventor who insisted the agent at work was physical, a real fluid and not the patient’s imagination. Mesmer described the animal magnetism as “a fluid universally diffused; the vehicle of a mutual influence between the celestial bodies, the earth and the bodies of animated beings,” and its effects as produced by the fluid “insinuating itself into the substance of the nerves.” He described a fully physical agent. In his account, the human body had “poles different and opposite,” like a naturally magnetic loadstone. The body had a pole at each end and its magnetism ran between them in a definite direction, so that by the practice’s rules it took effect when applied one way and did nothing when applied the other. Its virtue could also be “reflected by mirrors,” “propagated and augmented by sound,” and “accumulated, concentrated and transferred.”

Source: Report of the commissioners, English translation, 1785.

In March 1784 Louis XVI appointed the Royal Commission on Animal Magnetism to determine whether that fluid existed: four physicians of the Paris faculty, Borie, Sallin, d’Arcet, and Guillotin, and, at the physicians’ own petition, five members of the royal academy of sciences, Franklin, le Roy, Bailly, de Borie, and Lavoisier. Benjamin Franklin, then the American minister at Paris, presided. During the Revolution that followed, Bailly and Lavoisier died on the guillotine, the machine that took its name from their fellow commissioner Guillotin. Mesmer refused to deal with the commission, and it was Deslon who consented to disclose the principles and assist the inquiry, so the practice the commissioners examined was his. Their design separated the physical treatment from the patient’s knowledge of it, and crossed the two: magnetism applied without the patient’s knowledge, and sham magnetism applied in full view.

The commissioners ran the design in both directions, on subjects supplied by the practice itself. The report records the trial of one sensitive subject: “She was accordingly blindfolded and magnetised; the phenomena no longer answered to the places towards which the magnetism was directed.” In the orchard of Franklin’s garden at Passy the commissioners tried the same separation on a single tree. Deslon claimed that a tree he had magnetized would throw a susceptible person into crisis, so one apricot tree, set well apart from the others, was magnetized, and Deslon brought a twelve-year-old boy he had chosen himself as reliably susceptible. The boy was blindfolded and led to embrace four trees in turn, and the magnetized tree was not among them; Deslon, kept at a distance with commissioners between him and the boy, aimed his cane at the real tree from where he stood. At the first tree the boy sweated and reported a slight pain in his head; at the second and third the symptoms grew, and he said he thought he was nearing the magnetized tree; at the fourth, still a tree nothing had been done to, “the boy fell into a crisis; he fainted away, his limbs stiffened, and he was carried to a neighbouring grass-plot.” He had convulsed under a tree that carried no magnetism, and had never been brought near the one that did. The crisis had followed his belief about where the magnetism was, not the magnetism.

The design was also run with no treatment at all. At Franklin’s house the commissioners asked Deslon to bring patients of proven susceptibility, and two women were placed in separate rooms. One, dame P., was blindfolded and “persuaded that M. Deslon had been brought into the room to perform the magnetical operation.” Three commissioners sat with her and did nothing but watch. Within three minutes she shuddered, stiffened, struck her hands together, stamped her feet: “the crisis had all the regular symptoms.” The other, mademoiselle B., sat with her eyes uncovered, “seated with her face towards a door which was shut, and persuaded that M. Deslon was on the other side, employed in performing upon her the magnetical operation.” In the third minute she fell into a full crisis; “she bit her hand, and that with so much force, that the marks of the teeth remained perfectly visible.”

The strictest experiment combined the two: real treatment, and no knowledge of it. Two adjoining rooms were separated by a doorframe covered with a double thickness of paper, and mademoiselle B., the same woman who at Passy had fallen into a crisis within three minutes while nothing at all was done to her, was brought in on a pretext and seated against the partition. On the other side, a foot and a half away, a physician among the commissioners who had performed the magnetical operation with success on other occasions magnetized her through the paper for thirty minutes, following the rules the commissioners had watched at Deslon’s house; Deslon had declared beforehand that the magnetism passes through paper. She conversed with much gaiety the whole time and answered, when asked about her health, that she felt perfectly well. The same commissioner then came into her room and repeated the operation where she could see it. This second time he worked it against the practice’s own rules, magnetizing her in the direction of the poles, the direction in which, by those rules, no effect ought to have been produced. In three minutes she was in a complete convulsive crisis. The report drew the inference in her case: “The only reason of this difference must be that here she was ignorant of the operation, and that at Passy she thought it had been performed. The inevitable conclusion is, that the imagination singly produces all the effects attributed to the magnetism, and that, where the imagination ceases to be called forth, it has no longer the smallest efficacy.”

The conclusion the commissioners signed on August 11, 1784, generalized it: they have “demonstrated by decisive experiments, that the imagination without the magnetism produces convulsions, and that the magnetism without the imagination produces nothing.”

The commissioners also submitted themselves to the treatment. A separate tub was set apart for their use at Deslon’s house, and they went there once a week; each sitting lasted two hours and a half, with the iron rod held to the body, the cord of communication around them, and the chain of fingers formed, the operation performed by Deslon himself or by one of his pupils. The result: “Not one of the commissioners felt any sensation, or at least none which ought to be ascribed to the action of the magnetism.” Everything physical in the treatment had been kept, and kept longer than in the public room. What had changed was the subjects and the setting: healthy men sitting quietly in private, instead of a crowded room of the sick. The report records the comparison between the two scenes: “All was calm and silence in the one, all restlessness and agitation in the other; there multiplied symptoms, violent crises, the ordinary state both of body and mind interrupted and overthrown, and nature wrought up to the highest pitch; here the body free from pain, and the mind from anxiety, nature preserving her ordinary course and her equilibrium.”

Source: Report of the commissioners, English translation, 1785.

The effects followed what the patients believed, not what was done to their bodies. This is the founding experiment of the blinded controlled trial, the method that still governs the testing of medicine. When a drug is tested now, some patients receive the drug and some receive an inert substitute that looks the same, and neither the patients nor those testing them know which is which, so that whatever belief produces is measured on its own and subtracted. The placebo control was invented to test an occult claim.

Two explanations

The experiment is, in form, a removal experiment, but the operator was not what it removed. In the partition experiment the physician stood a foot and a half from the patient, working by the rules of the practice, for thirty minutes. What was removed was the patient’s knowledge that the operation was being performed. Treatment without knowledge produced nothing; belief without treatment produced the full crisis. If anything passed from operator to patient, it did not behave the way a physical emanation behaves, acting on its object whether or not the object is aware of it. The effect required the patient to know.

Two explanations of that fact are available, and the experiment cannot separate them.

The first: the effect lives in the patient’s imagination, and there is no fluid and no connection. The patient’s belief produces the convulsions, and the operator contributes nothing but an occasion for the belief. This is the commission’s own conclusion, and it is the account on which the testing methods of modern medicine were built.

The second: something real passes between operator and patient, and the patient’s awareness of the operator is part of the channel it passes through. On this account the connection is not a physical radiation but a relation between two people, and it exists only while the patient is party to it. Blinding severs exactly that awareness, so the experiment measures the severance. The trial removes the patient’s knowledge of the operator and the effect stops, which is what the magician’s rule predicts for an operation that must pass through human beings.

The experimental result is identical on both accounts. An experiment whose method is to sever the connection cannot decide whether it severed an illusion or a working relation.

The first account is simpler, requires no new entity, and every practical success since has been built on it: blinded trials work, and they work because imagination effects are real and measurable. The second account is not refuted by any of that. It predicts the same data. Nothing in the 1784 design, or in any later design built on it, distinguishes a force that does not exist from a force that requires the very connection the blind removes.

Both verdicts were already present in 1784, inside the investigating bodies themselves. A second commission, drawn from the Royal Society of Medicine, examined the practice in parallel. One of its members, the botanist Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, declined to sign its report and published his own. The conclusion of his report, dated at Paris, September 12, 1784, reads: “The theory of the magnetism cannot be admitted, so long as it is not developed and supported by solid proofs. The experiments made to establish the existence of the magnetic fluid prove only that man produces upon his fellow man a perceptible action by friction, by contact, and more rarely by a simple approach at some distance.” Jussieu attributed that residual action to the animal heat that passes from body to body, and wrote that a wider and more considered use of the agent would make its true action and its degree of usefulness better known.

Source: A.-L. de Jussieu, Rapport de l’un des commissaires chargés par le Roi de l’examen du magnétisme animal, Paris, 1784; translated from the French of the page images.

After the verdict

The verdict did not end the practice. It was carried on across Paris by the pupils Mesmer had trained, and its converts had included, from his first years in the city, the 1785 account records, “some of the greatest physicians and most enlightened philosophers of France.” Nor did the state move to forbid it. Mesmer had refused the commissioners and appealed to the parliament of Paris, asking not that his theory be tested again but that a new commission judge a demonstration he would design; the parliament used the opening to corner him. By its ruling of September 6, 1784, it ordered Mesmer “to expose, before four doctors of the faculty of medicine, two surgeons and two masters in pharmacy, the doctrine, which he professes to have discovered.” What the state demanded in public, Mesmer had already sold in private. Since 1783 anyone who wished to learn the method had paid him a hundred louis and sworn to keep it secret; the payments came to more than three hundred thousand livres, many times the earnings of an ordinary lifetime of labor. The statutes of his Societies of Harmony forbade any “publication of the written theory of M. Mesmer, without a consent signed by him.” He never exposed it, and left the doctrine where it stood.

But the practice did not stay as the commission had found it. That same year, one of Mesmer’s own followers, the Marquis de Puységur, magnetized a young peasant and, instead of the convulsion, watched him “fall asleep peacefully in my arms, without convulsions or pains.” The calm trance he described that day, not the tub, is what animal magnetism became in the next century. In 1843 an English surgeon, James Braid, gave the trance the name it still holds, hypnotism, and in naming it he threw out the fluid. The effect, he wrote, depended “not at all on the volition, or passes of the operator, throwing out a magnetic fluid,” but on the mind of the subject. Braid’s account was taken up in the French clinics, at the city of Nancy and at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, and the hypnosis and suggestion practiced today descend from that work. Mesmerism did not die of the 1784 verdict; it survived by conceding it, keeping the one thing the commissioners had confirmed, that the effect follows the patient’s belief, and letting go of the fluid they never found.

Source: the converts and the parliament’s arrêt of 6 September 1784, from the historical introduction and the postscript to the Report of the commissioners, English translation, 1785; the secrecy article of the Réglemens des Sociétés de l’harmonie universelle, Paris, 1785, and Puységur’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire et à l’établissement du magnétisme animal, 1784, translated from the French; James Braid, Neurypnology, London, 1843. The 1783 subscription of a hundred louis a head is recorded in Frank Podmore, Modern Spiritualism, 1902.

The commission had established this much. The convulsions were real: the commissioners watched them for months and described them in a physician’s detail. The apparatus contributed nothing: the tub, examined with an electrometer and an unmagnetized needle, contained “no substance either electric or magnetical.” The treatment took effect when the patient believed it was being performed, whether or not anything was done, and it had no effect when the patient did not know it was being performed, even with a practiced operator at work a foot and a half away. The one thing the effects reliably followed was the patient’s belief that the operation was happening.

Source: Report of the commissioners, English translation, 1785.

At that point the two explanations separate, on a question the experiment leaves open: whether the belief manufactures the whole effect, or whether the belief is the channel through which a real influence passes from one human being to another. The commission’s test cannot decide between them, because the test works by taking away the patient’s knowledge of the operator, and on both explanations the effect stops when the knowledge goes. Every later investigation of an instrument said to depend on its operator repeated this structure: the dependence on the human being was confirmed, and the meaning of the dependence was not settled, because the only available test was still the removal on which the two explanations agree. It happened again in a Philadelphia workshop in 1899.

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Part 3 of “The Occult History of Technology.” Previously: The Magician’s Rule.

Renaissance magic had a rule, repeated across its standard books: the instruments of the art work only for a prepared human being. The operator was to be schooled in the knowledge of the day, disciplined in attention, and made morally fit, and without that preparation the procedures gave nothing, however exactly they were followed. The procedures could be copied; the preparation could not. When John Worrell Keely’s Philadelphia motor died with its maker in 1898, having run for no one but him through twenty-six years of demonstrations, it behaved as the rule specified, and Keely’s defenders said as much: the force, they wrote, came from the man.

The rule’s fullest statement had been in print for three and a half centuries by then, and the man who wrote it lived a public life. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim was born in Cologne in 1486, served the emperor Maximilian first as secretary and then as soldier, lectured on theology, and was for a time in the pay of the Duke of Savoy, his biographer thought as a physician. He hated his soldiering, and wrote of those years as years of blood and plunder. At Metz in 1519 he defended a peasant woman accused of witchcraft, discredited the Inquisitor’s case against her, and won her release; it ended his career in that city, where people avoided being seen with him in the street. His great book also had to be defended: the Inquisitor of Cologne denounced it, Agrippa answered the charge before the city’s magistrates, and the Occult Philosophy was printed in July 1533 with the printer’s name left off the title page. Agrippa died two years later.

Source: the biographical account in the Tyson edition of the Occult Philosophy, drawing on Morley’s Life of Agrippa.

The Occult Philosophy was the standard manual of Renaissance natural magic. Natural magic meant working with hidden but lawful powers in nature, as distinct from conjuring demons, and its range was wide: the hidden properties of herbs, stones, and animals, and which of them heal which disease; the sympathies binding metals to planets; numbers, figures, and the tables of the planets; sounds, words, and written characters; the names and ceremonies of religion. Agrippa arranged all of it in three books, one for each level of the world as the tradition counted them: a first book on the natural world and the hidden virtues of things; a second on the celestial world, its numbers, its figures, and its stars; and a third on the divine world, its names, its spirits, and its rites.

Agrippa states the first requirement in his second chapter, before any procedure is given: “Whosoever therefore is desirous to study in this faculty, if he be not skilled in natural philosophy, wherein are discovered the qualities of things, and in which are found the occult properties of every being, and if he be not skillful in the mathematics, and in the aspects, and figures of the stars, upon which depends the sublime virtue, and property of everything; and if he be not learned in theology, wherein are manifested those immaterial substances, which dispense, and minister all things, he cannot be possibly able to understand the rationality of magic.” Before a person can work in this art at all, he must be trained three ways: in natural science, in mathematics, and in theology. The training of the worker comes before the work.

Source: Book I, chapter 2, in James Freake’s 1651 English translation, in Donald Tyson’s modern-spelling edition.

The book returns to the requirement at its close, and there it says that everything else depends on it. There is, Agrippa writes, a “mystical and secret matter, necessary for everyone who desireth to practice this art, which is both the beginning, perfection, and key of all magical operations, and it is the dignifying of men to this so sublime virtue and power.” Dignifying is the tradition’s own word for making the operator fit: by study, by discipline, and by consecration, the person is raised toward the level of the power he intends to use. The human understanding “is the only worker of wonders,” and when it is sunk in the business of the body it commands nothing: “therefore many prosecute this art in vain.” The working power, in other words, is not in the procedures at all. It is in a state of the human being, and that state must be acquired. For the person who attempts the operations without it, the same chapter gives the outcome: “but whosoever beyond the authority of his office, without the merit of sanctity and learning, beyond the dignity of nature and education, shall presume to work anything in magic, shall work in vain, and deceive both himself and those that believe on him, and with danger incur the displeasure of the divine powers.” The unprepared operator does not merely fail. He fails, deceives himself, deceives his audience, and comes to an ill ending.

Source: Book III, chapter 3.

The rule in each of the three books

The requirement is not one chapter’s aside. It appears in each of the three books, fitted to each book’s subject, and Agrippa cross-references it himself.

Book I, the book of the natural world, says what the worker’s mind is: “he that works in magic, must be of a constant belief, be credulous, and not at all doubt of the obtaining the effect … distrust and doubting doth dissipate, and break the virtue of the mind of the worker, which is the medium betwixt both extremes.” The mind of the worker is the medium: the thing the operation passes through, standing between the power and its object. Belief is not an attitude the worker would do well to have; it is a working condition of the channel. And doubt does not merely discourage the worker. It breaks the channel, and the operation stops.

Book II, the book of the celestial world, carries the rule into the most procedure-like operation the art had: the casting of lots. Lots are dice, drawn slips, thrown counters, instruments of chance, built so that no skill enters the outcome. Agrippa writes that even these answer the soul of the person who casts them: the fall of the lots takes direction from a soul carried into the full strength of its desire, and the reason, he says, was already given, “as we said in the first book.” Even the instrument of pure chance, on this account, has the operator inside it.

Book III, the book of the divine world, cites Book I once more (“for how much a constant credulity can do, we have spoken in the first book”) and then makes the widest statement in the whole work: “incredulity and diffidence doth weaken every work not only in superstition, but also in true religion, and enervates the desired effect even of the most strong experiments.”

Source: Book I, ch. 66; Book II, ch. 54; Book III, ch. 4, in James Freake’s 1651 English translation, in Donald Tyson’s modern-spelling edition.

In the English of 1651, experiments means practical trials and operations of any kind: the procedures a person performs expecting a definite result. So the last sentence reaches past magic altogether. Agrippa is not saying that magic fails for the doubtful. He is saying that every work fails for the doubtful: superstitious works, religious works, and practical procedures alike. The state of the worker is a general condition of success, of which magic is one case. On this account there is no fully neutral procedure anywhere; in whatever a human being undertakes, the inner state of the human being is one of the working parts. A modern laboratory is built on the opposite assumption: an experiment is designed exactly so that the experimenter’s state of mind cannot matter, and an instrument is well made exactly when anyone can operate it. The two assumptions contradict each other. And the investigations of the following centuries, the commissions, the séance tests, and the courtrooms, all had the same form: an instrument said to obey Agrippa’s assumption, examined by people working from the laboratory’s.

Assembled from its statements, this is the magician’s rule: every operation passes through the human being who works it; the operator’s formed and undoubting constitution is a working part of the operation; and no exactness of procedure can replace it.

Agrippa also describes how the rule looks from outside, in ordinary life, where no one calls it magic. If the constitution of the person is a working part, then two people can follow the same procedure exactly and end differently, and the difference will stay invisible as long as only the procedure is examined: “So it falls out that some profit more in any science, or art, or office, in a little time, and with little pains, when another takes much pains, and studies hard, and all in vain.” The everyday fact that some people succeed quickly where others fail with more effort is, in Agrippa’s account, the same rule showing itself outside magic: the difference lies in the constitution of the person, not in the diligence of the procedure.

Source: Book III, chapter 22.

A component specification

In engineering terms, what Agrippa wrote is a component specification. A parts list states what a device needs in order to function: each part, its position, and the properties the part must have. Remove a part, or substitute one that does not meet the specification, and the device does not run. Agrippa’s rule treats the human operator as a part in this sense. The part has requirements, the ones the book opens with: training in natural science, in mathematics, in theology, and the fitness Agrippa called dignity. It has failure modes: doubt, missing training, a person never made fit. And without it, nothing else in the operation matters. The instrument alone does not act. The instrument plus the prepared human acts.

To a modern engineer, the familiar thing here is the structure: every device has a parts list, and every part on the list has required properties. The unfamiliar thing is what this particular list requires, because it requires nothing of the metal and everything of the man: his training, his attention, and his moral state. A modern specification demands properties of the wiring; Agrippa’s demands properties of the person.

Ficino and Boehme

Agrippa stated the rule most fully, but he neither invented it nor ended it.

Forty-four years before the Occult Philosophy was printed, Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine priest and philosopher who translated Plato and the Hermetic writings for the Medici, published Three Books on Life (1489), a manual of medicine and astrological practice. Part of that practice was the making of images: figures engraved on stone or metal at a chosen astronomical moment, in the belief that the object took in the influence of the stars at that moment and carried it afterward for the person who wore it. The book describes the practice concretely: “in order to bring two people together in passionate love, they used to fashion an image when the Moon was above the horizon and was coming together with Venus in Pisces or Taurus.” And the operator’s state is written into the instructions. One chapter carries it in its title: on the power of images, “And concerning the Emotional State of the User and Operator.” Ficino reports the medical commonplace that “the love and faith of the sick person towards the doctor, a lower and external agent, are very conducive to health,” and sharpens it with the judgment of Avicenna, the Persian physician whose eleventh-century Canon of Medicine was still the standard medical textbook in the universities of Europe, that “this faith does more than medicine.” And of the image-maker himself he writes: “The Arabs say that when we fashion images rightly, our spirit, if it has been intent upon the work and upon the stars through imagination and emotion, is joined together with the very spirit of the world.” The engraving alone was not the operation. The maker’s directed inner state was part of the making, and the wearer’s faith was part of the wearing. The same rule, before Agrippa, in a book of medicine.

Source: Ficino, Three Books on Life, 1489; Book III, chapters 20 and 21, in the translation of Kaske and Clark.

Eighty-nine years after Agrippa’s death, the rule reappears in Görlitz, a German town in the region of Silesia, east of Dresden. Jakob Boehme, a shoemaker of that town whose writings founded Protestant theosophy, opens De Signatura Rerum (1622) with the rule applied to words. Words about God, he says, give the hearer nothing by themselves. A man can hear the sermon and read the book and understand neither, because understanding is not carried in the words; it happens only when the speaker’s spirit strikes an answering form that lies prepared inside the hearer. Boehme’s image for it is a bell: the speaker must have the hammer that can strike my bell. The book then gives the rule as one image: the signature of nature “is a dumb essence; it is as a prepared instrument of music, upon which the will’s spirit plays; what strings he touches, they sound according to their property.” And the same chapter says that the human mind is such an instrument too, wanting nothing but the master who can strike it. On Boehme’s account the rule covers everything. A book, an instrument, and the human mind are alike silent until the prepared player takes them up.

Source: De Signatura Rerum, chapter I; translation of Bax, 1912.

Ficino in Florence in 1489, Agrippa in Cologne in 1533, Boehme in Görlitz in 1622: a physician-priest, a soldier-theologian, and a shoemaker, in three countries across a hundred and thirty years, each stating the same requirement. The work depends on the state of the worker.

What the rule says will happen

The consequences follow from the rule, and the book does not soften them. If the operator is a working part, then removing him stops the instrument, and restoring him starts it. The instrument cannot be transferred: for any other operator, however exactly the procedure is copied, it fails. And the instrument can die. A machine built around one human constitution does not survive that human.

Keely’s motor, whatever else it was, behaved to this specification: it failed for every other operator, it could not be transferred, and it did not survive him. The fraud verdict explains that behavior by hidden compressed air that Keely himself controlled; Agrippa’s rule explains it by the absence of the one prepared operator. Both explanations fit everything that was observed. That difficulty was not new in 1898, and it did not begin with Keely.

In the centuries between the Occult Philosophy and the Keely Motor Company, each of the rule’s consequences was examined in its turn: by a royal commission with Benjamin Franklin at its head, by an American chemist who built séance apparatus of his own, and by a university commission endowed by a believer.

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Part 2 of “The Occult History of Technology.” Previously: The Machine That Died With Its Maker.

In 1872, in Philadelphia, an inventor named John Worrell Keely announced a motor that ran on no fuel. He claimed to have discovered a new force in nature, released by vibration from a few drops of water. He called it sympathetic vibration, or etheric force. The ether, in the esoteric vocabulary of the period, was a supposed level of nature finer than matter, the carrier of life processes. If the claim was true, coal, steam, and electricity were obsolete. For the next twenty-six years, until his death, Keely demonstrated the force in his workshop before crowds of investors, engineers, and reporters, and a company formed around him sold stock on it. And in all those years, no one but Keely ever ran his machines.

What a demonstration was like is on record from the people who attended. The editor of a technical journal, the Scientific Arena, described one. A weighted lever was rigged so that lifting it would require, by the audience’s own arithmetic, a pressure of many thousands of pounds per square inch, “which we, as well as several others present, accurately calculated. When all was ready, and the crowded gathering had formed as well as possible to see the test, Keely turned the valve-wheel leading from the receiver to the flexible tube, and through it into the steel cylinder beneath the piston, and simultaneously with the motion of his hand the weighted lever shot up against its stop, a distance of several inches, as if the great mass of iron had been only cork.” The session closed with the force fired through a cannon: “a report like that of a small cannon followed, the ball passing through an inch board and flattening itself out to about three inches in diameter, showing the marvellous power and instantaneous action of this strange vapour.”

Source: the editor of the Scientific Arena, quoted in Clara Bloomfield-Moore, Keely and His Discoveries, 1893.

The witnesses were not only reporters and investors. Joseph Leidy, professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the most eminent scientists in America, attended a series of experiments and signed a statement on April 8, 1890: “it has appeared to me that he has fairly demonstrated the discovery of a force previously unknown to science. I have no theory to account for the phenomena observed, but I believe Mr. Keely to be honest in his attempt to explain them.” The philosopher James M. Willcox, who signed the same day, claimed more: “He has made manifest the existence of natural forces that cannot be explained by any known physical laws, and has shown that he possesses over them a very considerable control.” Six years later W. Lascelles Scott, an English scientist brought over to examine the machines, was invited to address the Franklin Institute, a scientific society in Philadelphia. Its minutes name his subject “the alleged discovery, by Mr. Keeley, of a new force,” thank him, and record nothing further.

Source: the Leidy and Willcox statements, printed in Bloomfield-Moore, 1893; the Franklin Institute meeting of April 15, 1896, as minuted in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, volume 141.

Exhibitions ran for a quarter century, and “experiments were made by him in the presence of thousands.” What Keely was selling, a hostile paper wrote, was “the monopoly of infinite power without cost, which he dangles before their astonished vision.”

Source: press and stockholder material collected in Bloomfield-Moore, 1893.

The music

In some of the demonstrations, the control was music. The notes were not accompaniment: they operated the machinery, and different notes produced different effects. Among Keely’s instruments were the tuning fork and the zither, a flat wooden box strung with many strings and played by plucking, a parlor instrument rather than a piece of apparatus. The Quintet Club, a club of Philadelphia musicians, visited the workshop after hearing that Keely had “employed the power of music to develop the wonderful forces of nature.” The Chicago Tribune, reporting the visit, wrote that the members “were familiar with the claim made by Paganini that he could throw down a building if he knew the chord of the mass of masonry.” Niccolò Paganini, the celebrated violinist of the early nineteenth century, had boasted of resonance at the scale of architecture: every structure vibrates at some natural rate of its own, and a tone matched to that rate and sustained makes the vibration grow instead of dying out, as a sung note at a wine glass’s own pitch can break the glass. If a player knew a building’s note, its chord, he could in principle play the building down. The musicians went to see whether such a thing had now been done in Philadelphia.

What they saw, in the Tribune’s account: “he caused a heavy sphere to rotate rapidly or slowly, according to the notes given by the instrument on which he played. The sphere was so isolated as to prove that it could not be acted on by electricity or in any other way than by the sound waves. He disintegrated water into what he calls ‘etheric vapour’ by means of a tuning fork and a zither. The disintegration of only four drops of water produced a pressure of 27,000 pounds to the square inch, and three drops of the harmless liquid fired off a cannon ‘with a tremendous roar.’”

The writer saw only two possibilities. “All this is wonderful — if true.” If Keely could do what was claimed, “he has already earned a title higher than that worn by any man of the age.” If he was cheating his audiences, he was “one of the biggest charlatans that ever drew breath.” The writer demanded a scientific investigation, “no matter whether the result be to raise a mortal to the skies or send an alleged angel down to the depths of infamy as a life-long deceiver of his species.”

Source: the Chicago Tribune, reprinted in Bloomfield-Moore, 1893.

The money

In 1874, two years after the initial announcement, organizers formed the Keely Motor Company to turn the discovery into a business. The arrangement was simple: Keely would perfect the motor, and the company’s stockholders would share in the profits of a power that was to make coal and steam obsolete. The engine itself did not exist yet. The company sold stock on the promise of it, and people bought. “There are perhaps a thousand stockholders in the Keely Motor Company,” one of them wrote. The hostile press reported “an issue of 5,000,000 dols. of new stock representing a new discovery veiled in mystery.” Year after year, no engine was delivered. The demonstrations were all the investors ever had.

Source: press and stockholder material collected in Bloomfield-Moore, 1893.

By 1882 the investors had waited eight years, and Keely was sued for failing to deliver on his contract. A court ordered him to make his secret public. He refused, and officers and stockholders of his own company continued proceedings against him through the decade. In 1888 a court appointed a commission of experts and ordered Keely not only to exhibit his machine but to operate it and to explain how it was constructed and how it worked: in effect, to hand over the secret. Keely exhibited the machine and refused the rest, and the judge, Finletter, committed him to Moyamensing Prison for contempt of court. Within three days the state Supreme Court discharged him, ruling the order an excessive use of the court’s powers.

What the jailing produced among his supporters was not doubt but indignation. A Vienna journal that had printed a series of papers on his discoveries wrote of the imprisonment: “The public are still but the children of those who murdered Socrates, tolerated the persecution of Galileo, and deserted Columbus.” His patron Clara Bloomfield-Moore, a Philadelphia philanthropist who funded him for years and collected the record of his case in her book, wrote that “His imprisonment exalted him, instead of degrading him.”

Source: the Vienna Weekly News, quoted in Bloomfield-Moore, 1893; the closing words are Bloomfield-Moore’s own.

And the motor was only the beginning of the claim. In a statement Bloomfield-Moore printed, Keely wrote that once the motor was perfected and patented, “I will devote the remainder of my life to Aerial Navigation, for I have the only true system to make it an entire success in the vibratory lift and the vibratory push-process.”

Source: Keely, quoted in Bloomfield-Moore, 1893.

The condition

In all twenty-six years, the machines ran only in Keely’s presence. Skeptics had an explanation for the wonders early on: hidden compressed air. On that theory, the lever and the sphere were moved by ordinary air pressure, built up in advance and stored out of sight, and the new force did not exist. A stockholders’ committee of his own company reported “deception and misrepresentation” as early as December 1881. And the air theory could be tested. In 1884 Keely was challenged to attach a pressure gauge, the instrument that would have shown whether hidden air was doing the work; he declined, saying “I do not believe in pressure gauges, anyhow.” In 1895 Bloomfield-Moore brought in an examiner of her own, the electrical engineer E. A. Scott. He concluded that a “wire” used in the demonstrations was an air pipe. The direct check was to cut it across, and when the physicist Henry Rowland had asked for that, Keely would not allow it. Nothing was settled. The demonstrations continued, the stock kept selling, and Bloomfield-Moore kept paying Keely’s expenses.

The skeptics were not the only ones with an explanation. The Theosophical Society was the era’s largest esoteric movement, and its founder, the Russian-born occultist H. P. Blavatsky, published its central book, The Secret Doctrine, in 1888, ten years before Keely died. The book devotes a chapter to him, called “The Coming Force.” Where the skeptics called the force a trick, the book calls it real. But the force does not come from the machines. It comes from Keely himself, and if anyone else operated one of his machines, nothing would happen. His discoveries would prove wonderful “only in his hands and through himself.” “It was ‘Keely’s ether’ that acted truly, while ‘Smith’s or Brown’s’ ether would have remained for ever barren of results.” About the engine that never came, the book says: “For Keely’s difficulty has hitherto been to produce a machine which would develop and regulate the ‘force’ without the intervention of any ‘will power’ or personal influence, whether conscious or unconscious of the operator. In this he has failed, so far as others were concerned, for no one but himself could operate on his ‘machines.’” The book presents the missing engine as a prediction fulfilled: “a failure prognosticated and maintained by some Occultists from the first.”

Source: Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, vol. I, 1888, the chapter titled “The Coming Force.”

What the investors were paying Keely to build, a motor anyone could run, is exactly what Blavatsky’s book said he could never build.

The floorboards

In November 1898 Keely died. The engine had never been delivered, and the secret had never been told. Within weeks, three investigators took up the workshop floor and removed a brick partition: the consulting engineer Carl Hering, the University of Pennsylvania physicist Arthur Goodspeed, and the psychologist Lightner Witmer. They found and photographed concealed brass tubing rated for high pressure, run through walls and bored through solid beams. In the basement they found a three-ton steel sphere, which they judged to be a compressed-air reservoir. Hering signed a statement that the exhibitions had been deception. At the annual meeting of the Engineers’ Club of Philadelphia on January 21, 1899, he “exhibited specimens of tubes and wires obtained in the laboratory of the late John W. Keely.”

Source: Philadelphia Press investigation, January 1899; the Engineers’ Club meeting as minuted in the Proceedings of the Engineers’ Club of Philadelphia, volume XVI.

The exposure ran in papers across the country. The newspapers printed diagrams of what the investigators found. The New York Journal drew the whole workshop in cross-section: the motor in the second-floor laboratory; beneath it a false ceiling, a trap door, and a false floor; and in the cellar a hidden water motor, started and stopped by a concealed rubber tube, its belt and shafts running up inside the wall.

The detail that remains

The fraud verdict and Blavatsky’s book start from the same fact: for twenty-six years the machines ran, and only with Keely present. The investigators said the reason was hidden under the floor. The machines had no power of their own, and Keely drove them with hidden compressed air. Blavatsky said the reason was in the man. On her account the force was real, but no machine could produce it by itself: it acted only through Keely’s own will, something in him rather than in the apparatus. The man was a working part of the machinery, the one part that could not be copied, taught, or sold. That is why no machine of his could ever run for anyone else.

Each answer covers the whole record. If the investigators were right, the demonstrations were compressed air, no engine was ever delivered because there was no force to put in one, and the machines stopped forever because the man running the trick was gone. If Blavatsky was right, the demonstrations were the force, no engine was ever delivered because the force could not be separated from Keely, and the machines stopped forever because the force died with him. Demonstrations, missing engine, dead machines: the record comes out the same either way.

The tubes do not decide it. They show how the demonstrations could have been produced. Whether that is how the demonstrations were produced was never tested: no demonstration was ever run from the tubes, then or later. The one test that would have decided, an examination of a machine while Keely ran it, was the test he refused: the pressure gauge in 1884, the cutting of the wire, the court’s commission in 1888. His death made the refusal permanent.

So the verdict of 1899 ended the Keely Motor Company, and fraud has been the accepted account ever since. But the two explanations were never separated by a test, and now they cannot be. The case closed because the man died, not because the question was answered.

The older and the later record

An instrument that depends on its operator: that is the one fact, and it appears in the record long before Keely and long after him.

Before him, it was a stated requirement, not an excuse. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, the standard manual of Renaissance magic, printed in 1533, teaches that the prepared human being is the working part of every operation, that the instrument fails for any other operator, that it cannot be transferred, and that it dies with its operator. Keely’s motor, on those terms, behaved as specified.

Around him and after him, investigators kept confirming the fact and kept dividing over its meaning: a royal commission in Paris in 1784, an American chemist testing his own apparatus in 1855, a university commission in 1887, an American courtroom in 1951, the High Court in London in 1960. And the machines of the present are built for the opposite condition: to work the same for anyone.

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Part 1 of “The Occult History of Technology.”

For centuries, people have connected machines to hidden forces, to spirits, and to the divine. Some were students of magic, mediums who claimed to speak with the dead, and founders of spiritual movements. Others were the engineers and mathematicians who built the machines, who described their own work in the language of creation, miracle, and magic. What they wrote survives in patents, court records, letters, and printed books.

A few patterns recur across it.

One is the record of machines that seemed to work only for a particular person. Over several centuries, inventors and investigators saw the same thing again and again: a machine that worked only when one particular person operated it and stopped when anyone else tried, that could not be transferred to a new operator, and that never ran again after that person died. Each time, careful observers confirmed that the machine depended on the person. Each time, they divided over what that meant. Some believed the man had been operating the device secretly himself; others believed the machine drew on some power in him that no one else had. The obvious test, taking the person away to see whether the machine still runs, could not settle the question, because both explanations predict the same result: without the person, the machine stops. The machines of today are built the opposite way: they are designed to work for anyone, not for one person alone.

A second pattern is about the danger of the new powers that technology brings. More than a century ago, some spiritual teachers warned that these powers arrive before people are ready to use them well, and that they should be kept back until they are. They saw the danger not in the machine but in its owners, in whether people could be trusted with it at all. The same warning is heard now, in nearly the same terms, about advanced computing, mostly from people who have never read its earlier forms.

A third is the two opposed ways people have understood the machine itself. In one, it is a made thing that imitates life and might escape its maker’s control. This is the fear behind the old tales of artificial servants, and behind the modern worry that the machines we are now building will not stay under human control. In the other, it is neither friend nor enemy in itself, but something a capable person can take up and put to good use. In both cases the strongest version of each view came not from outsiders but from the people who built the machines.

A fourth pattern is the difference between what actually happened and the legends that formed later. People tell dramatic stories about famous inventors. One is said to have worked in secret with hidden powers, another to have built a machine to reach the dead. Some of these stories are true, and come from the inventor’s own writing. Others were invented by people who needed the past to support a belief. Telling the two apart is not always easy.

The machines now being built, the ones that can write and answer like a person, raise every one of these questions again. The questions are not new. Older versions of them appear all through this record.