Odic Force

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In 1845 one of the most accomplished chemists in Europe announced, through a respected chemistry journal, that magnets, crystals, and human bodies give off a light that certain people can see in the dark. He called the emanation od; English readers came to know it as the odic force. The announcement would be easy to file among the era’s séance-room wonders, except for the man who made it and the door he came through.

Baron Karl von Reichenbach had earned his hearing. His fortune was industrial — forges in the Black Forest, then blast furnaces, chemical works and machine shops in Moravia — and his chemistry was permanent: from the distillation of wood and coal tar he drew paraffin and creosote. He wrote the first geological monograph published in Austria and belonged to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. In 1839 he retired from industry to study the disordered nervous system — somnambulism, hysteria, phobia — and concluded that such maladies clustered in people of unusually vivid senses. He named them sensitives, and came to estimate that as much as a third of the population shared the constitution in some degree.

The claims grew from there, and they grew large. In rooms kept utterly dark, after hours of adaptation, his sensitives described flame-like glows wavering from the poles of magnets, from the points of crystals, from human fingertips and foreheads; they felt coolness and warmth, attraction and aversion, in patterns Reichenbach mapped with a chemist’s patience across some two hundred subjects. The force he inferred was, in his account, a new imponderable — kin to heat, electricity, and magnetism, not a spirit and not a soul — streaming, he wrote, from “the whole material universe.” He named it od, by his own later account after the Norse god Odin. The phenomena were largely the old mesmeric ones; the treatment was new. Reichenbach was neither a spiritualist nor a mesmerist, and in his hands the mesmeric fluid was stripped of its magnetizer and re-engineered for the laboratory. The papers appeared in two supplementary numbers of Liebig’s Annalen der Chemie in March and May 1845; William Gregory, professor of chemistry at Edinburgh, issued the full English translation in 1850, softening od into “odyle” for British ears.

The decisive reply came within a year, from a Manchester surgeon. James Braid, who had lately coined the word hypnotism, read Gregory’s first abstract in 1846 and saw what the design lacked: any control over what the subject expected to perceive. His own repetitions managed that single variable. Sensitives shown into the darkened chamber after the magnet had been removed saw the flames and changing colours as before. A bent brass wire laid on a chimney-piece, in broad daylight, could be made to blaze with whatever colour Braid announced, to hold a subject’s hand fast or repel it, simply as he declared the influence to be acting or withdrawn. Braid was generous about Reichenbach’s method — “a better devised series of experiments,” he allowed, “I have never met with in any department of science” — and exact about its flaw: nothing in it could tell a force from an expectation. He accused no one of fraud, and did not need to. He moved the phenomena from physics to psychology, where they worked just as well without the magnet.

Physics agreed with Braid. Other investigators could not reproduce the results, and od never joined the imponderables. Reichenbach spent his remaining decades in rearguard polemics against the physiologists and physicists of the day, demonstrating in Berlin as late as the 1860s; Fechner, one of his critics, recorded that he grieved to the last at dying unrecognized; he died in 1869. A coda came from outside science: in the 1880s the young Society for Psychical Research appointed a committee to retest the claims, and found the postulated sensitivity in three subjects out of forty-five. By 1911 the Encyclopædia Britannica could file odyl in a single backward glance, as “a term once in vogue to explain the phenomenon of hypnotism.”

The word itself did not die; it changed addresses. Theosophy absorbed od as a partial, garbled glimpse of the astral light, its writers borrowing the adjective outright — an “odic chord” was said to link the astral and physical bodies. Éliphas Lévi set od beside the Hebrew ob and aour as the three aspects of that same light. French psychical researchers of the next generation worked in Reichenbach’s shadow, and historians now draw a single line from animal magnetism through od to orgone and the present vocabulary of subtle energies. Each successor inherited the claims. None inherited the laboratory.

The episode earns its place here twice over, and the second reason is the more durable. It was the last serious attempt by a credentialed chemist to put the luminous emanations of the subtle body on the laboratory bench. And it remains the standing case study in how suggestion mimics force: Braid’s brass wire is an early ancestor of the blinded trial. Od failed as physics. What the affair demonstrated instead — that an honest experimenter, a sincere subject, and an unguarded expectation can manufacture a force between them — has been replicated ever since.

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