from "The Alchemical Fire"
by Erik Davis

Of all the forces crackling through the cosmos, electricity most embodies the spirit of modernity. Investigators first began experimenting with electricity during the Enlightenment, and within two centuries, the West had tamed and ruled its powerful mysteries. Technologies of communication and control now utterly depend on the electrical grid, and our minds have grown rather comfortable — perhaps too much — with the electron's conquest of shadows, stars, and silence. Electricity feeds modernity; it is our profane illumination.

But for all its practicality, the behavior of electricity itself is rather bizarre. Most of the dynamic nonbiological phenomena we encounter on a regular basis — paper airplanes, rush-hour fender benders, speeding tennis balls — can be dissected with the tools of classical physics, and classical physics does not make too many outrageous claims on the contemporary imagination. But electricity is an altogether different kettle of fish — to say nothing of the counterintuitive shenanigans that go down in the invisible world of electromagnetic fields and frequencies, which even now are saturating your body with traffic reports, pop songs, and other incorporeal communiqués.

Perhaps it is our fate as moderns to exploit the sublime for the banal, but the fact that we use the electromagnetic dimensions for heating up Pop-Tarts and transmitting golf tournaments should not blind us to the sorts of profundities they can sound. Like the moon's tidal tug, or the luminous aurora of northern climes, or a sunbeam fractured into rainbow, such arresting forces cannot help but generate cosmic meditations along with intellectual curiosity and utilitarian plots. Vibrating in the gap between life and physics, between matter and the unseen ether, electricity inhabits a liminal zone that calls down spirits and sublimities out of thin air.

"Do we really know what electricity is?" asks Lama Anagarika Govinda, a German scholar who became one of the earliest Western converts to Tibetan Buddhism. "By knowing the laws according to which it acts and by making use of them we still do not know the origin or the real nature of this force, which ultimately may be the very source of life, light, and consciousness, the divine power and mover of all that exists."

Maybe yes, maybe no; what's important is that electricity's uncanny play leads us to ask, not how it works or how it can be captured in jargon, but what it is. This is the kind of natural philosophy that can set one wondering about the whole enchilada of space and time, mind and bodies. For electricity does not just catapult your imagination into the metaphysical empyrean; it also grounds you on the earth. Govinda compares its curious properties to the animistic myths of traditional societies, myths "which only express what the poets of all times have felt: that nature is not a dead mechanism, but vibrant with life, with the same life that becomes vocal in our thoughts and emotions."

The romance of electricity and animism is an old one in the Western imagination. Govinda's vitalist interpretation of electric current, which loosely links it to the "life force" of the body and nature, is only one of a number of archetypes and intuitions that make up what I'll call, ignoring the differences between the forces involved, the "electromagnetic imaginary." Since the seventeenth century, the electromagnetic imaginary has seeped into religion, medicine, and technology, and over that time has probably led to more metaphysical speculations, heretical claims, and wacky gizmos than any other natural force. Much of this chapter traces the electromagnetic imaginary through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when electricity catalyzed the kind of heady enthusiasms that data devices do today. In fact, the transformation of electrical current into a communicating medium, which took place in the mid-nineteenth century, represents perhaps its most remarkable mutation: from energy into information.

The word electricity entered the English tongue in a 1650 translation of a treatise on the healing properties of magnets by Jan Baptist van Helmont, a Flemish physician and Rosicrucian who worked on the borderline between natural magic and modern chemistry. Though Helmont abandoned the hoary doctrines of the four elements, he remained spiritually committed to the alchemy of "pyrotechnia," the Paracelsan labor of the forge. As an incorporeal force coaxed out of matter, the quicksilver spunk of electricity signified for many of Helmont's ilk the spiritual energies pregnant in the physical universe, the elixir of the World Soul, the spark of Creation. Many of the earliest books on electricity described the force in distinctly alchemical terms, dubbing it the "ethereal fire," the "quintessential fire," or the "desideratum," the long-sought universal panacea. Now that electronics, electric power, radio waves, and microwaves form the energetic matrix of the information age, the patterns of the electromagnetic imaginary have in many cases just slipped right into the technological unconscious. As the electrical historian Dennis Stillings argues, "Material science could not pull itself clear from the psychological residuum that adhered to electrical theorizing, thus permitting the symbols carried by electricity to drive modern science toward accomplishments that strongly echo the goals of alchemy." Electricity, in particular, would carry three different aspects of the alchemical imagination into the modern world: the fascination with the vitality of bodies, the desire to spiritualize material form, and the millenarian drive to transmute the energies of earth into the divine realization of human dreams.