Dr. Weeks’ Comment: We have written at length about electrical pollution and the not-so-hidden price we pay for these enticing conveniences – smart phones, etc. Electricity is a convenience but is it our friend? Who is serving who? As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.” So, let’s review what electricity is, or as Dr. Otto Wolff would say: “What means electricity?” As always, consulting with Dr. Rudolf Steiner is fruitful. Then, it is with great appreciation that we read David Heath’s words as he brings the topic into the modern day.
“…When even the light is conceived of electrically, as has been done in a recent modern theory, then the qualities of Evil are attributed to the divinity of Good…”
“…The greatest contrast to electricity is LIGHT. If we look upon light as electricity we confuse good and evil. We lose sight of the true conception of evil in the order of Nature, if we do not realize that through the electrification of the atoms we transform them into carriers of evil; we do not only transform them into carriers of death, as explained in my last lecture, but into carriers of evil…”
Extract from a Lecture by
Dr. Rudolf Steiner,
Dornach, January 28, 1923
From stenographic notes unrevised by the lecturer.
The cultural ingredient that now permeates our whole external civilization began to rise to the surface at the turn of the 18th and 19th century. Think of the immense contrast between the present time and that time when a certain physicist prepared a frog’s leg which accidentally came into contact with the window … the frog’s leg quivered, and so he discovered electricity! How long ago was that? ”” Less than 150 years ago, yet electricity is now a cultural ingredient. Indeed, it is far more than this! You see, when the men of my age were young fellows, not one of them dreamt of speaking of the atoms in the sphere of physics otherwise than of tiny, unelastic, or even elastic spheres colliding with one another, and so forth, and then they calculated the results of these collisions. At that time, no one would have dreamt of conceiving the atom without further ado in the way which we conceive of it today: namely, as an electron, as an entity consisting altogether of electricity.
Human thought has spun itself altogether into electricity, and this occurred not so very long ago. Today we speak of the atoms as if they were small suns, centres around which electricity accumulates; we speak of electrons. Thus we suspect electricity everywhere, when we penetrate into the world’s mechanism. This is where our civilization so closely connects itself with a definite manner of thinking. If people would not travel on electric tramcars they would not think that the atoms are full of electricity.
If we now observe the connections that existed before the present age of electricity, we may say that they allowed the natural scientist of that time to imagine, at least abstractly, the spiritual in Nature. Although a tiny rest of scholastic realism remained, electricity then began to affect man’s nerves, expelling from them everything that tended towards the spiritual.
Things went still further. Even light, the honest light that surges through the world’s spaces, was gradually defamed and brought into the ill repute of resembling electricity! When we speak today, as I am speaking now, then the people whose heads are deeply submerged in the electric wave of civilization necessarily believe that this is utter nonsense. But this is only due to the fact that the people whose heads consider such things as nonsense drag themselves along (like dogs whose tongues are hanging out because of the heat) with a load of history, a load of historical concepts on their backs, so that they cannot speak in an unprejudiced way, from out of the immediate present.
You see, when we speak of electricity, we enter a sphere that presents a different aspect to the imaginative vision than that of the other spheres of Nature. So long as man remained within the light, within the world of sound, that is to say, in the spheres of optics and acoustics, it was not necessary to judge morally that which appeared in a stone, a plant, or an animal, either as colours in the sphere of light, or as sound in the world of tones; it was not necessary to judge these things morally, because he still possessed an echo, weak though it was, of the reality of concepts and ideas. Electricity, however, drove out this echo. And if today we are, on the one hand, unable to discover a reality in the world of moral impulses, we are, on the other hand, even less able to discover a moral essence in that sphere which is now considered to be the most important constituent of Nature.
Today, if we were to ascribe a real power to moral impulses, if we were to say that they contain a force enabling them to become sensory reality in the same way in which a plant’s seed becomes sensory reality, we would almost be looked upon as fools. And if someone were to come along today and ascribe moral impulses to the forces of Nature, he would be looked upon as a complete fool! But if you have ever allowed an electric current to pass through your nervous system, so as to experience it consciously with a genuine power of vision, you will realize that electricity in Nature is not merely a current but that electricity in Nature is, at the same time, a moral element. When we enter the sphere of electricity, we penetrate simultaneously into a moral sphere. If you connect your knuckle at any point with a closed current, you will immediately feel that your inner life extends to an inner sphere of your being, where the moral element comes to the surface, so that the electricity pertaining to the human being cannot be sought in any other sphere than that sphere which is also the source of the moral impulses. Those who can experience the whole extent of electricity, experience at the same time the moral element in Nature. Modern physicists have conjured and juggled about with electricity in a strange way, without the least suspicion. They imagine the atom as something electric, and through the general state of consciousness of the present time, they forget that whenever they think of an atom as an electric entity, they must ascribe a moral impulse to this atom, indeed, to every atom. At the same time, they must raise it to the rank of a moral entity. …But I am not speaking correctly … for, in reality, when we transform an atom into an electron, we do not transform it into a moral, but into an IMMORAL entity! Electricity contains, to be sure, moral impulses, impulses of Nature, but these impulses are IMMORAL; they are instincts of evil, which must be overcome by the higher world.
The greatest contrast to electricity is LIGHT. If we look upon light as electricity we confuse good and evil. We lose sight of the true conception of evil in the order of Nature, if we do not realize that through the electrification of the atoms we transform them into carriers of evil; we do not only transform them into carriers of death, as explained in my last lecture, but into carriers of evil. When we think of them as atoms, in general, when we imagine matter in the form of atoms, we transform these atoms into carriers of death; but when we electrify matter, Nature is conceived as something evil. For electric atoms are little demons of Evil. This, however, does not tell us much. For it does not express the fact that the modern explanation of Nature set out along a path that really unites it with Evil. Those strange people at the end of the Middle Ages, who were so much afraid of Agrippa von Nettesheim, Trithem of Sponheim, and others, so that they saw them walking about with Faust’s malevolent poodle, expressed this very clumsily, but although their thoughts may have been wrong, their feelings were not altogether wrong. For, when we listen to a modern physicist blandly explaining that Nature consists of electrons, we merely listen to him explaining that Nature really consists of little demons of Evil! And if we acknowledge Nature in this form, we raise Evil to the rank of the ruling world-divinity.
As modern men who do not proceed in accordance with old traditional ideas, but in accordance with reality, we would come across the fact that the electric element in Nature is endowed with morality in the same way in which moral impulses are endowed with life, with a life of Nature, so that, later on, they take on real shape, become a real world. In the same way in which the moral element one day acquires real shape in Nature, so the electric element once contained a moral reality. If we contemplate electricity today, we contemplate the images of a past moral reality that have turned into something evil.
If Anthroposophy were to adopt a fanatic attitude, if Anthroposophy were ascetic, it would thunder against the modern civilization based on electricity. Of course, this would be nonsense, for only world-conceptions that do not reckon with reality can speak in that way. They may say: “Oh, this is ahrimanic! Let us avoid it!” ”” But this can only be done in an abstract way. For the very people who thunder against Ahriman, and tell us to beware of him, go downstairs after their sectarian meeting and enter an electric tramcar! So that all their thundering against Ahriman, no matter how holy it may sound, is (excuse the trivial expression) simply rubbish. We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that we must live with Ahriman. But we must live with him in the right way, that is to say, we must not allow him to have the upper hand.
The final scene of my first Mystery Play can show you what it means to lack consciousness in certain things. [See The Portal of Initiation] Read this final scene once more, and you will see that it is a different matter whether I lull myself in unconsciousness over a fact, or whether I grasp it consciously. Ahriman and Lucifer have the greatest power over us if we do not know anything about them, so that they can handle us, without our being aware of it. This is expressed in the final scene of my Mystery Play. The ahrimanic electricity can therefore overwhelm civilized man only so long as he blandly and unconsciously electrifies the atoms and thinks that this is quite harmless. But in so doing, he does not realize that he is imagining Nature as a complex of little demons of Evil.
When even the light is conceived of electrically, as has been done in a recent modern theory, then the qualities of Evil are attributed to the divinity of Good. It is really terrifying to see to what a great extent the modern contemplation of Nature has unawares become a “demonology,” a worship of demons! We should realize this, for the essential thing is CONSCIOUSNESS: we live in the age of the consciousness-soul.
AND…
| Electromagnetic Radiation and the Human Being Dr David J. Heaf (UK) In New View issue 2 (UK), Alan Hall introduced some of the concepts needed to understand electromagnetic radiation (EMR) and shared his discovery that its impact on health is related to interference with the vibrating microstructure of water.2 More background material easily comprehensible to the lay reader as well as details of the ways of reducing the effect of EMR on health appears in his recent book.3 Here we take a brief look at the issue from a different angle. No hiding place In addition to the longer established sources of artificial EMR such as radio/TV transmissions and what comes from electrical power lines and appliances, no matter how remote we are from civilisation, we are bathed in a sea of microwaves from over 200 digital phone and broadcast satellites worldwide and thousands of mobile phone transmission towers in the UK alone. In view of what the digital revolution has in store for us, what we endure now is only the beginning of a huge quantitative and qualitative change in EMR exposure facing humanity. Prudent avoidance, therefore, would seem no longer to be an option for us as individuals, even if we can to some extent reduce our personal exposure. However, the fact that there is now really no hiding place has not deterred representatives three political parties in Stockholm from calling for the setting up of EMR-free zones in the city ”˜before it’s too late.’ Ongoing health studies Ongoing media interest in the health implications of mobile phone EMR is exemplified by New Scientistrecently devoting its whole editorial, a six page ”˜special investigation’ and a forum article to this subject.4 In the present state of conflicting evidence that the phones and the towers are harmful to health the editors obviously felt that they could safely scoff at the worriers, at least for the time being. But a World Health Organisation study is under way which has a $6 million funding and will be completed by 2005.5 To see them in perspective, these figures need to be considered in the light of the size of the mobile phone industry and likelihood that, as with the aetiology of cancer, the harmful impact on the human being, if it occurs, could be a long drawn out process. Incidentally, £6 million bought a sewage plant for the small town of Cricieth, Wales in its attempt, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to rid its beaches of Escherichia coli (a bacterium that lives in the gut). The much smaller sum of $6 million being spent on looking at the global threat of electro-pollution seems ludicrous, especially as the project does not aim to do the basic research but only to specify what research should be done and how it should be done. An even less incisive mandate is to be given to a UK panel whose formation was announced by Health Minister Tessa Jowell in April. Under the auspices of the National Radiological Protection Board it will examine published and ongoing research on the health effects of mobile phones. The 1997 press release from the WHO project says that over the next four years, international research efforts should be aimed principally at clarifying the extent to which EMR exposure may be associated with the incidence of cancers and diseases of the central nervous system. So far as mobile phones are concerned health risk was once ruled out on the basis that as long as the microwaves did not actually heat the brain, there was nothing to worry about. Happily, risk assessment of EMR is slowly becoming a little more subtle than that. But as the WHO project shows, it is primarily interested in the more extreme potential consequences of the radiation, namely disease and death. Animal and human studies, about which there is still controversy amongst the specialists, do show increases in leukaemia, lymphomas, skin and eye complaints, limb and joint pain etc. But still more difficult to assess are the finer long term risks of microwaving our planet. This uncertainty for the actuaries has prompted a Lloyds underwriter to refuse cover for manufacturers against the risk of being sued if mobiles turn out to cause long-term damage. Head and root In the discussion after the agriculture lectures given by Rudolf Steiner he was asked about a specific use of electricity.6 All of his answer is still very relevant, but as it would take up half a page of this article I will select only two extracts: “This life of men in the midst of electricity, notably radiant electricity, will presently affect them in such a way that they will no longer be able to understand the news which they receive so rapidly. The effect is to damp down their intelligence. […] …electricity always works on the higher organisation, the head-organisation both man and animal; and correspondingly, on the root organisation of the plant “ This points to much more delicate effects of EMR than are generally conceived by the people behind the WHO project, effects which may nevertheless be of far reaching significance for humanity because they touch on what is fundamentally human, namely thinking which is the basis for action, for behaviour of the free individual. Indeed, a neuropsychologist submitting evidence to an enquiry into siting a tower near a primary school in New Zealand stated that “behavioural changes are the most sensitive indicators of adverse responses in humans or animals to radio frequency radiation. […] …behavioural effects are seen as important because they are the ”˜smoking guns’ indicative of more fundamental effects of radiation on the nervous system” and cited a whole list of studies pointing to behavioural disturbances close to EMR sources including effects on movement, memory, attention and sleep, together with increases in tiredness, anxiety, and time spent away from homes close to a transmitter.7 That the towers can produce in their immediate vicinity a thousandfold increase in microwave exposure of the public compared with the previous background level is good reason to try to avoid siting them near habitation. Whilst admittedly their full impact is not yet known it is worth noting that last year 16 of the top scientists in the area signed the Vienna Declaration, which recognises that low intensity microwaves can cause biological effects or damage to humans. One possible biological effect, if a causal link is ever established, is the rise in the massive losses of homing pigeons, particularly in the USA.8 Has anybody thought of looking at the effect of EMR on the ”˜root organisation of the plant’? Oddly enough, yes. It was recently shown that in the growing root tips of broad bean the process of mitosis (cell division) was significantly slowed down by exposure to oscillating magnetic fields at ordinary domestic electricity mains frequencies at a strength typical of the vicinity of substation transformers.9 Spirituality and electricity In view of Rudolf Steiner’s prediction in 1924 that cows would go mad if they were fed animal protein, it could profit us to pay more than passing attention to his comments on our present subject. Ernst Lehrs collected together many quotations from Rudolf Steiner about electricity for his book Spiritual Science, Electricity and Michael Faraday including the following from a lecture: “Man’s thinking has been altogether enwebbed by electricity… The concepts that were held before the present age of electricity … allowed the thinkers about nature of that time to imagine – at least abstractly – the spiritual in nature. …electricity then began to affect man’s nerves, expelling from them everything that tended towards the spiritual.”10 From this, we might expect Steiner to advise people to avoid this enwebbing by electricity in any enterprise that is tending towards the spiritual. For instance, Steiner designed a building for a school of spiritual science called the Goetheanum at Dornach in Switzerland. Was it lit by gas? Not at all, it was lit by electricity. And when it was burnt down in 1922 it was replaced by the present Goetheanum which not only uses electricity but also generates surplus electricity from its gas turbine for sale at a profit to the public electricity supply! Insight into the background of this seeming paradox, this apparent lack of practising what was preached is provided by the following words of Steiner from the same lecture which Lehrs did not quote: “And if anthroposophy were to adopt a fantastical attitude, if anthroposophy were aesthetic, it would thunder against the modern civilisation based on electricity. Of course, this would be nonsense, for only world conceptions that do not reckon with reality can speak in that way. For the very people who thunder against Ahriman11 and tell us to beware of him, go downstairs after their sectarian meeting and enter an electric tramcar!” If we indeed are in the grip of ahrimanic adversaries seeking to destroy, through artificial EMR and other forms of pollution, the physical basis of our manifestation in the world, namely the human body, it is clear that those adversaries first took hold of us through our minds when we first thought and desired EMR and their impact on physical health is thus secondary. Evolving consciousness It is clearly therefore a matter of our becoming as conscious as possible of our entanglement in the web of these electrical technologies, and conscious of the deceptions in thought, particularly in scientific thinking used to play down the danger. No doubt a future age will see so-called clean electricity as a very dirty technology indeed, just as we see the technology of coal and steam. People may look back with mirth upon a civilisation of people who on entering their homes were content to step into a basket woven of pulsating, radiating electric wires – for that is indeed the modern home if one imagines it without its building materials. In this light, the sustainable generation of electricity through wind farms and the like does not look as morally desirable as certain environmental groups would claim. And in response to the increasing public concern about the harmfulness of EMR – not least amongst the ever growing number of people who appear to have developed an adverse hypersensitivity to EMR12 -, an increasing assortment of devices are being marketed which are designed to abolish its unwanted effects. After much less than a century of electrification of large parts of the UK, knowledge of the interaction of EMR with living organisms, and particularly their intrinsic relationship to electricity is still in its infancy. There are certainly processes in the body which can be detected on special instruments as oscillating electromagnetic fields. Their study is the subject of the discipline of bioelectromagnetics. It is now a very respectable area of the sciences with a journal of the same name and in the 1990s alone many thousands of papers published on cell, tissue and whole organism research including therapeutic aspects of the subject. A particularly interesting discovery in this field is the Schumann oscillation of the earth’s magnetic field which has a frequency of eight Herz (cycles per second) and corresponds to the frequency of human brain waves. And bodily circadian rhythms, the daily cycles of metabolic activity accompanied by changes in hormone secretion such as pineal melatonin which are a necessary part of life in organisms including human beings, are strongly influenced by environmental electromagnetism. With the earth’s magnetic field and the complex rhythmic changes it undergoes being closely connected with the movement of the planetary bodies it is easy to picture, purely at the level of electromagnetism, the delicate connectedness of the human being with the whole cosmos. And yet without a full understanding of this connectedness we year by year add ever more EMR to our surroundings. Further reading For an esoteric perspective on electricity I recommend as a starting point articles by Nick Thomas13 and Hedley Gange14 and the collected indications by Steiner the articles contain. There are many local action groups in existence worldwide devoted to the single issue of EMR, many with their own newspapers and web sites. Two outstanding UK based web sites which contain extensive bibliographies to the key publications – lay and specialist – and many articles on different aspects of EMR are provided by Alasdair Philips15 and Roger Coghill.16 Coghill’s site also leads into bioelectromagnetic phenomena known to ”˜fringe technology’, such as Kirlian photography and includes papers on work to test the author’s intriguing hypothesis that the mammalian brain influences cells at other parts of the body through direct information transfer through endogenous electric fields. UK’s NRPB has produced several well designed leaflets and posters dealing with EMR from a wide variety of artificial sources.17 Notes 1. This article is inspired by work for a presentation at the meeting of the UK group of the Science Section of the School of Spiritual Science, Stourbridge, 20th March 1999. 2. Hall, A. (1996) New View, issue 2, Winter 1996. Anthroposophical Association, London. 22-23. 3. Hall, A. (1997) Water, Electricity and Health. Hawthorn Press, Stroud. 4. New Scientist, No. 2181, 10 April 1999. Pages 3, 20-25 & 51. 5. Project title: International EMF Project: Health and Environmental Effects of Exposure to Static and Time Varying Electric and Magnetic Fields. For details contact: Dr M. H. Repacholi, Radiation Specialist, Office of Global and Integrated Environmental Health, World Health Organisation, 1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland. Fax +41 22 791 4123. Tel +41 22 791 3427. E-mail: repacholi@who.ch or visit the project’s web site at: http://www.who.ch/emf/. 6. Steiner, R. (1974) Agriculture. 8 lectures 7-16 June 1924, Koberwitz, Silesia. Biodynamic Agricultural Association, London. p. 153. 7. Beale, Ivan (1997) Statement of Evidence deposited with the Environment Court, Christchurch, NZ, in the matter of an appeal under section 121 of the Resource Management Act 1991 between Telecom Mobile Communications Limited (Appellant); Shirley Primary School and others (Appellant); Christchurch City Council (Respondent). This document is available in MS Word format by email from Dr Beale at ibeale@clear.net.nz. 8. Senator Allison (Victoria). Extract from the Current Senate Hansard, Australia, 29 March 1999 (22:15) Page: 3116. Adjournment Debate on Electromagnetic Radiation. 9. Rapley, B. I. (1998) Weak ELF Magnetic Fields Slow The Celll Cycle Clock In Root Tips of Vicia faba L., The Broad Bean. Proceedings of 2nd International Conference on Bioelectromagnetism, February 1998, Melbourne, Australia. 10. Steiner, R. (1982) Lebendiges Naturerkennen. Intellektueller Sündenfall und Spirituelle Sündenerhebung. GA 220. Lecture 12. Dornach 5-8 January 1923. English translations: 1st quote from Spiritual Science, Electricity and Michael Faraday, Ernst Lehrs. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1975, p. 17; 2nd quote from Rudolf Steiner’s Comments on Energy, Nick Thomas, Anthroposophical Review 2(2) Summer 1980, 15-19, Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain, London and taken from the translation of the full lecture published in the Anthroposophic News Sheet, 9 June 1940. 11. ”˜Ahriman’ is a Persian word for an aspect of the Devil which, for instance, tempted Christ to turn stones into bread (Matthew 4: 4). 12. For more information on this condition contact Sarah Benson, convenor of Electromagnetic Awareness Network, c/o Australian Democrats, 62 Wellington Parade, East Melbourne, Victoria 3002, Australia. Tel: + 61 3 9416 1880. Fax: + 61 3 9417 1690 13. Thomas, N. (1980) see note 10. 14. Gange, H. (1992) Electricity and the Search for Meaning. Anthroposophy Today, No. 12, Spring 1992, 27-46. Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain, London. 15. Powerwatch UK site: http://www.powerwatch.org.uk. Email aphilips@gn.apc.org. Fax: 01353 777646. 16. Coghill Research Laboratories Gwent NP4 5UH. Web site: http://www.cogreslab.demon.co.uk/ 17. National Radiological Protection Board, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon OX11 0RQ. Tel: 01235 831600. Fax: 01235 833891. Email: nrpb@nrpb.org.uk. Acknowledgement David Heaf edits the Newsletter of the Science Group of the Anthroposophical Society of Great Britain. The Science Group’s newly opened web site is at http://www.science.anth.org.uk/ |