THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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was able to adopt the scientific language and the electricity of the nineteenth century. And the transition to the really and truly revived ‘radiation magnetism’ of today
was represented by an otherwise very proficient natural scientist with an equally proficient eccentricity, the chemist Reichenbach, the discoverer of paraffin and
creosote; he provided the transition through the ‘discovery’ he also made of the ‘world­od’. This was actually the sought­after original radiating force, which spiritualists
were soon able to use too (‘Physical­physiological investigations into the dynamics of magnetism, electricity, light etc. in relation to the life­force’, 1845); it ranges from
protoplasm and the fuel of machines animated like the golem and operating instinctively, to the ‘cause’ of the halo. And part of the most recent bombast of the ‘fluid’,
one which now even makes its Perpetuum mobile again in a roundabout psychoanalytical way, is the so­called ‘orgone’ of W. Reich. That is: a juicy ‘world­od’, from
the wedding night of Being, or the biological­cosmic potent and orgasmic force par excellence. Moreover, this orgasmic force is visible, it appears both in the ‘blue
colouring of frogs during coition’ and in the St Elmo's fire on ship's yards, as well as in the likewise bluish twinkling of the stars. ‘Orgones’ and several other things of
this kind (sheer cosmic super­vitamins for that kind of hope which does not run out) were also collected by America in ‘accumulators’, which draw the priceless but
saleable substance from the air, after which it remedies every kind of debilitation, sexual, spiritual, social, and cosmic all at the same time. All this is the style of
Cagliostro and Orfyréus, introduced into the epigonic light of hazy blue nonsense in the world. Nevertheless, the Cagliostro approach belongs, even in the form of the
petit­bourgeois humbug of today, to the region of technological dreams; it constitutes its old traces of magic, even though they are grotesquely decayed. But just as
Gothic capitals often display little grotesque figures, with their heads looking out between their open legs or making other faces, the ever­recurring Professors Mystos
also have exactly this traditional place in the technological­utopian structure. And a permanent attribute of this kind of inventor, apart from the ‘world fluid’ mentioned
above, is not least the old alchemical gold­making, in the most comprehensible meaning of the word. So as not to tire ourselves out with too many tripods in the
modernized junk shop, let us indicate only one new motif of ancient alchemy. Typical of the continuing appeal of the cheap witches’ kitchen was the activity of the
alchemist Franz Tausend, one of the last of the breed. With a host of people behind him, right up to the ‘highest circles’, right up to the German general staff,