VORTEX:

The Whirl at the Center of the World

Kevin Dann
419 Clinton Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11238

Summer 2021
 Prologue: A Theory of Everything Hiding in Plain Sight

Was the Big Bang just an accident?

Is there a God?

Is the future yet to be written, or is it already written?

Though it has only 24 million views – 11 million less than Mary Roach’s “10

Things You Didn’t Know About Orgasm” – TED CEO, curator, and knowledge

evangelist Chris Anderson’s “Questions No One Knows the Answer To” is TED’s #1

science talk. An 11-minute edutainment cartoon from Anderson and Andrew Park –

whose Animate series for the Royal Society of Arts reinvented the whiteboard as a

dynamic didactic tool – “Questions No One Knows the Answer To” settles on a riddle

that readily swallows up all the others: “How many universes are there?” Once the theme

of science fiction tales and the perennial dream of expansive teenagers, the “Many

Worlds” or “Cosmological Multiverse” hypothesis has in recent decades moved from

sober scientific subject to hyped up “Gee Whiz!” pop physics meme to Marvel plot ploy.

A cynical observer of contemporary culture might suggest that in the early 21st century,

the ultimate end point of any half-baked Theory of Everything is TED talk stardom, and

yet hiding in plain sight in those animated 11 minutes there is an elegant and tangible

Final Theory, one that has been for over a century as durable as the Hulk but as mercurial

as Loki.

Informing us in his erudite BBC English accent that no one on Earth knows the

answer to the multiverse riddle, the cartoon Anderson takes off from JFK airport on a

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cosmic junket to make sure that we know why no one knows if there is more than one

Universe. New York City and Long Island fade away below as the Sun reminds us just

how small the Earth is, since a million Earths would fit inside it. The Sun being but one

of 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is but one of 100 billion galaxies

visible to our telescopes, we quickly are reduced to volumetric comparison with a mere

30–by–30–by–3–foot–deep square of sand on a beach – that would have to stretch for

100s of millions of miles were it to compass all the stars in our Universe. With space

expanding – the physicists say – at an accelerated pace, such that the light from distant

galaxies has no chance to ever reach us, and with String Theory declaring that there could

be countless other universes built on different stuff and obeying different laws, and that

these might flash in and out of existence in nanoseconds, we just might be one bitty blip

out of the 10–to–the–500th universes out there.

“Holy Stephen Hawking!” (or Carl Sagan) cries Chris Anderson, the cartoon’s

laugh track cueing us to relax in the face of the existential threat posed by an infinite

number of universes. Quantum theory – “proven true beyond all doubt” – might only be

true if there are parallel universes in which alternate destinies await us. As Anderson’s

narration admits that some scientists dismiss this as “hogwash,” Isaac Newton, Albert

Einstein, and Stephen Hawking pop up on the screen, with Einstein chalking a zero and

infinity sign on his chalkboard to signify that the answer to the multiverse question lies

somewhere in between.

Without realizing it, the cartoon presents a nifty guided tour of Nature’s most

universal yet invisible phenomenon – the Vortex. The Vortex: built Manhattan and Long

Island and all of Earth’s other landforms; lifts Anderson’s jet; floats the clouds that drift

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past his window; drive the oceans; makes up the Sun and all the Stars and even the spiral

form of the Milky Way and all her sister galaxies. Back on Earth, momentarily stranded

on that vortex-washed beach of an infinite number of grains of sand, the animation’s

TED-monogrammed red swim trunk–wearing cartoon Chris Anderson – who is all

vortices, from the top of his cowlick-crowned head to his fingertips and toes, all of which

bear telltale vortex–created swirling patterns engraved into his skin – shares the beach

with a cartoon crab, scallop, and starfish, each of them vortical creations that move

through the ocean by vortical propulsions. Every single organ – eyes, nose, mouth, ears,

heart, lungs, brain, genitalia – and all the tissues of Chris and crab and scallop and

starfish are vortices too, as is every vertebrate’s bony frame from the skull to the toe

bones and especially the vertebrae themselves.

Seducing us into a vortex of befuddled wonder at the sublime infinitude of it all –

even if it is but a YouTube cartoon – Chris Anderson’s voice is a cascade of vortices too,

and as that voice tells us “this is a pretty cool time to be studying physics,” Isaac Newton

tosses his Granny Smith apple up into the star-speckled void of Space, where it

metamorphoses into a spinning green Earth shrouded by whirling clouds. We can’t see

that the apple is a pair of symmetrical vortices, that its seeds are also, engendered by the

very same motion that sculpts the unique–in–all–multiverses pattern of our face and

fingertips. The thoughts of both the animated beach-orphaned boy and our own are

vortices too, carried out of this physical universe of TED talks and Granny Smith apples

across the threshold of the sensible, to whatever supersensible dimensions lie beyond our

ken. Perhaps you have noticed that cool liquid galactic Big Bang animation that

introduces all the TED videos? Yes, it’s none other than a vortex ring.

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 Say the word “Vortex” round the TED executive offices on Hudson Street in

lower Manhattan, and someone is likely to throw a coffee mug at you, for a decade ago, a

TEDx video talk on “Vortex-Based Mathematics” momentarily mussed the TED brand,

when word got out that that a presenter down in Charlotte, North Carolina was spreading

New Age woo–woo under TED’s august and ever–objective banner. Randy Powell told a

small audience in 2010 that “what we have is a Grand Unified Theory with which we can

create inexhaustible free energy, heal all diseases, produce unlimited food, travel

anywhere in the universe, build the ultimate supercomputer and artificial intelligence, and

obsolete [sic] all existing technology.” Calling the vortex the “source of all time, energy,

motion,” Powell claimed that he had discovered that red blood cells, DNA, magnetic

fields, galaxies were all vortices, “a one–way, living semi–electrical machine, a self–

sustaining jet” that would allow humanity to “create a localized Space–Time implosion, a

controlled desktop black hole.” On the screen behind him was projected a grainy video of

a spinning steel marble, while Powell concluded that “this is the final technology, the

Philosopher’s Stone. . . the true model of the atom, the key to the Periodic Table, the

greatest scientific discovery of all time.” Speculative, sensationalist, devoid of evidence,

the talk was a spectacular cascade of category errors – a philosophical mistake that has

haunted human thinking about vortex phenomena for centuries. After WIRED, the

Harvard Business Review, and other media outlets got wind of the talk, the video was

removed from TED’s site, and new guidelines were issued to guard against “bad

science.”

There is a long history of both scientists – René Descartes, Emmanuel

Swedenborg, Lord Kelvin and most of the Victorian era Anglo–American physics

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community – and enthusiastic pseudoscientists embracing the Vortex as an explanatory

principle. A ubiquitous but largely unseen form running up and down the Great Chain of

Being, the Vortex is irresistible because of its simplicity, its dynamism, and its beauty.

These days we tend to hear about the Vortex’s destructive force mainly from the Weather

Channel, when severe storms or the polar expanses of swirling cold air or massive fires

act up, but Vortex motion is equally characteristic of constructive natural events, from the

building of barrier beaches to the development of embryos and even the generation of

speech. Both tornados and language are creatures of vortex motion.

Only about 2000 people have watched Romanian artist Gabriel Kelemen’s “The

Universality of the Sphere–Vortex Principle,” a TEDx talk given – in his native tongue,

with no translation captions or transcript available – in November 2019 in Brasov,

Romania. Punctuated for the non-Romanian speaker’s ears with the recognizable words

“microcosmos” and “macrocosmos,” Kelemen’s rapid–fire discourse occasionally slows

as he says “mesocosmos” – the human being standing between the infinitely subatomic

vortices below and the infinitely grand galactic vortices above. Kelemen never speaks the

word “vortex” until a little after 13 minutes into his talk, when he notices a perfect

spinning vortex appear on the screen behind him, which for the past 13 minutes has been

displaying pulsating cymatic forms created by sound waves acting on various sensitive

fluid films on a metal plate. The form looks like a coiled snake, and as its tail whips

around, it creates smaller spinning vortices in the fluid. Then they are all gone. Kelemen

quickly walks offstage, returning with a pair of his books. Opening one, The Universal

Sphere–Vortex Principle: Sound Visualization in Liquid and the Nature of Forms, he

flips to a page crowded with his drawings of “outward” (male) and “inward” (female)

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vortical forms in both animals and plants: the fertilized egg’s inward movement from

morula to blastula and gastrula; the male explosive movement of a flower; a cross-section

of a worm, the mouth and anus clearly depicted as a pair of right– and left–hand vortices,

female at the mouth and male at the anus; a schematic spherical cavity invaginates to

become a tubular torus, a vortex ring, which Kelemen’s pen then transforms into a

generalized animal embryo with yolk and amniotic sacs formed from vortices. Flipping

the pages, he stops to display drawings that build up a dozen chiral forms from

geometrically arranged spheres, reaching their apotheosis in the volutes of a classic Ionic

column. Finally, he flips to a photograph of a fetei umane – a silver cymatic face that

looks like a pentagonal mask made of fluid mercury in dynamic tension. Nose, chin, lips

and eyes are all clearly visible, all created by standing waves in response to sound. He

tells the audience that this facial form was a total surprise, and that he has no idea how or

why it formed. Inside the book, however, he has meticulously diagrammed the face’s

topography by way of vortices, such that each static line stands for innumerable spinning

tori and vortices invaginating and evaginating, gouging and agglomerating, shaping what

is for the human being the most compelling, comforting, and recognizable form on the

planet – our own faces.

At one point in the presentation, when referring to the pioneering cymatic

research of Hans Jenny, Kelemen refers to Jenny as an “anthroposophiste, Steineriste.”

“Steiner” is Rudolf Steiner, who, completely unbeknownst to Gabriel Kelemen, in 1905

had claimed for the vortex an absolutely unprecedented universality, declaring that:

The World is a Vortex.

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 The human being must become a Vortex.

All that is brought to completion as a Vortex is magic.

Steiner had never done any cymatic experiments as had Gabriel Kelemen; never

calculated – as had Lord Kelvin and dozens of other Victorian era physicists – the

mathematics of vortical motion; never studied embryology as had Ludwig Gräper, who in

the 1920s showed that the vertebrate embryo’s first movements away from the spherical

form were a “Polonaise” – a pair of spinning vortices; never researched the motions of air

and water, as did the worldwide network of physicists, engineers, and meteorologists who

would in the first half of the 20th century come to discover the central role of the Vortex

in the behavior of fluids. In the century following Rudolf Steiner’s having written those

three axioms down on a slip of paper next to his drawing of a pair of vortices turning

toward each other, decade-by-decade, from every direction has come an immense body of

scientific corroboration of the statement that the World – microcosmos, Macrocosmos,

and the human mesocosmos in between – is a Vortex. That corroboration continues apace

at this very moment, and yet his astonishing insight remains wholly unknown.

Axiom # 2, that the human being must become a Vortex, glances like a spinning

eddy off of Chris Anderson’s question about whether the future is already written. The

final axiom, that all that is performed as a Vortex is magic, might be seen as answering

the first two of his unanswerable questions, and a whole host of others that touch upon

the mysteries of Creation. Before humanity can begin to grapple with the riddles

presented by these last two axioms, it must fully explore, elaborate, and disseminate

Axiom #1 – the universality of the Vortex. In tracing the history of natural science’s

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investigation of the Vortex, pointing out the triumphs as well as the errors and missed

opportunities, this book seeks to lay the foundation for a very different Theory of

Everything than the ones that currently hold center stage in our consciousness.

Ever since the human being has turned his curiosity upon the stars above, the

elements and creatures around him, and his own skin and soul and spirit within, he has

found the Vortex. Usually invisible, a gossamer thing of motion rather than matter, the

Vortex perennially and eternally dances about us all, hiding in plain sight until some

spontaneous action of Nature or some experiment of man renders it visible. The ultimate

exemplar of the Goethean maxim that “the phenomenon itself is the theory,” the Vortex’s

universality across Time and Space carries a hidden promise that if followed faithfully, it

might answer the unanswerable questions. Come, follow the whirl at the center of the

world, and see.

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 1: Toujours les Tourbillons

“Les hirondelles.”

Crossing the Seine on the newly christened Pont Alexandre III with his colleague

chemist Edward Morley, physicist Dayton Miller savored each sibilant syllable of that

gossamer whisper as he watched the barn swallows playfully swoop and rise and bank

above and around the bateaux–omnibus – the small screw-steamers that in that first year

of the new century were as ubiquitous on the Seine as their companion swallows. “Les

hirondelles,” in fact, was the name by which Parisians knew the bateaux. When the birds

passed under the bridge their twittering cries grew momentarily louder, echoing off the

stone embankments and the bridge’s belly, reminding him of how they sounded while

darting among the rafters in the big barn of his family’s Ohio farm. As soon as they

reached the river’s south bank, the aerial laughter of les hirondelles was replaced by a

marvelous symphony of sound – waltzes and Polonaises from café orchestras, military

band marches, the babel of a dozen tongues jostling with French. Flanked on the east by a

half dozen rural French pavilions and on the west by Russian, Japanese, and various

European pavilions, his keen ear took a world tour over the course of a few hundred

yards promenade up the Esplanade des Invalides. A Breton biniou’s – bagpipe – voice

called up the wailing and whistling of the wind across barren dunes and through forest

branches and the roar of breakers on the wild Brittany shore, but also somehow the rustle

of the breeze through tall Ohio cornstalks, the lowing of Jersey cows, bleating of Merino

sheep, and the chatter of riotous Buckeye boys and girls – or swallows – at play. From

the Arles pavilion came the humming drone of a cornemuse accompanied by the vielle, a

hurdy-gurdy. There in embryo in those old Berrichon melodies, he thought, was all of the

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urbanity, the restrained sense of form and color that was the soul of the court of Louis

XIV. And then at the end of the Esplanade they found under an olive tree a pair of

Provençal tambourineur lads steadily beating on their indolent drums, while a shrill

cicada made for a reed pipe overhead.

Miller had an insatiable desire to measure and see all these sounds, to make them

as tangible as had his fellow physicists in recent decades made a whole range of

imponderables. He and Morley were here in Paris to attend the International Congress of

Physics; in just the last decade, physicists had extended the range of wavelengths of

electromagnetic waves downward a thousand times shorter and upward a billion times

longer. In the absence of any solid experimental and theoretical foundation in acoustics,

sound waves had remained largely inscrutable in these same years. Dayton Miller’s

nascent ambition was to establish those foundations. The trip to Paris – which 50 million

others would make in the months before and after the mid-August Congress, to attend the

Exposition Universelle – was an unwanted interruption to his blossoming research

program. But upriver on the Île St. Louis was the atelier of renowned acoustic instrument

maker Rudolf Koenig, where Miller had appointments to make purchases of the latest

equipment for his lab back home in Cleveland at Case Western Reserve University. His

other main motivation for coming to Europe was to visit flute makers Rudall & Carte in

London, where he had the chance to try out a solid gold flute that had been fashioned for

the Exposition, but had been withdrawn from exhibition after French newspapers had

published a caricature of Queen Victoria.1

The Congress’s very first rapport – all of the 80 invited lecturers were to survey

the main progress and problems of their specialized branches of physics, from molecular

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physics to optics to meteorology to cosmology – by celebrated French mathematician

Henri Poincaré had frankly confronted the elusiveness of a unifying theory for both

ponderable matter and the multiplying imponderables. Along with gravitation, light,

magnetism, and electricity, “we [now] have the cathode rays, the x-rays, the uranium and

radium radiations. There is a whole world that none suspect,” Poincaré declared.

Anticipating yet further discoveries, he asked the assembled savants how many more

unexpected guests they might have to find a place for. Most vexing of all was the

indefiniteness of that mercurial medium through which all of these emanations had for

centuries been assumed to pass – the “luminiferous ether.” Though Poincaré had thrown

down the rhetorical gauntlet – “Notre éther, existe-t-il réellement?” (“Our ether, does it

actually exist?”) – he clearly sided in favor of the ether when he asked how else the light

from distant stars could be sustained and supported sufficiently to reach the Earth. The

experiment known by every single one of the 836 physicists assembled at Paris to have

thrown the existence of the ether into doubt was the one performed at Case Western in

1887 by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. The ether, not flutes or tuning fork

tonometers and manometric flame apparatus (state-of-the-art acoustic instruments

invented by Koenig), was uppermost on Morley’s mind, for neither he nor Michelson had

ever intended to disprove the ether. In fact, both maintained that their admittedly tenuous

results confirmed its existence.2

The most celebrated Anglophone physicist to speak at the Congress was William

Thompson, Lord Kelvin. Only months before the Congress, he had delivered a lecture to

the Royal Institution in London that spoke of the confusion about the ether as a “dark

cloud” hanging over all of contemporary physics, pointing with great admiration to the

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Michelson-Morley experiment, which he also interpreted as possibly affirming that the

ether was real. Again, in his Paris lecture – translated into French – he spoke of the

“admirable” experiment, and the need to come to grips with its inferred result that there

was no “ether wind,” and hence, no ether. When, after his lecture, Kelvin sought out

Morley, urging him to repeat and extend the experiments of 1887, it made a deep

impression on Miller. Twenty-seven years younger than his mentor Morley, it would be

Dayton Miller who would spend decades seeking to establish – via practical results with

the most refined instruments and experimental conditions, rather than abstract

mathematics – that both his beloved sound waves and light waves could only exist

because they moved through a rarified but essential imponderable medium, the ether.

Back in the days before the ether had become a worrisome cloud, Thomson had

seized the Victorian scientific and popular imagination with his own grand unified theory

that all matter was composed of indestructible, inwardly mobile but highly stable “vortex

atoms.” The notion had come to him instantly in January 1867, in his friend and

colleague Peter Guthrie Tait’s Edinburgh lecture hall, where the playful mathematical

physicist had rigged up a box full of chemical smoke that he turned into a smoke ring

cannon activated by striking a tautly stretched rubber diaphragm at the box’s rear. The

newly knighted (thanks to his efforts in assisting the successful laying of the trans-

Atlantic telegraph cable) Sir William wrote to the original delineator of vortex

movement, Hermann von Helmholtz, employing the German word for vortex motion:

Just now . . . Wirbelbewegung have replaced everything else, since a few days ago

Tait showed me in Edinburgh a magnificent way of producing them. . . If you leave

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anything smoking in the box, you will see a magnificent ring shot out by every blow. . .

you will easily make rings of a foot in diameter and an inch or so in section, and be able

to follow them and see the constituent rotary motion.

The mesmerized Thomson watched as Tait made the smoke rings perform the

most surprising choreography. When Tait produced two rapidly rotating rings side by

side, they would bounce apart, while if they were sluggish, they would coalesce first into

an oscillating dumbbell and then ultimately into a circular form. Placing one “cannon”

directly across from another, and sending rings toward each other at the same speed, the

gyrating tori would expand indefinitely and move slower and slower, never reaching one

another. If Thomson placed his face in the path of one of Tait’s rings, there was no

sensation whatever until it came within a few inches of his nose, then stopped and sent

out from its center a sharp blast of wind. Tait also showed how the rings were indivisible,

holding up a knife to them, whereupon they simply moved away, wriggling round the

knife. A pair of successive smoke rings sent out quickly from the box performed a

leapfrogging contest; the pursuing ring would contract and move faster, while the

pursued expanded and decelerated, so that they would alternately penetrate each other.

Thomson realized from Helmholtz’s equations that if the air in that lecture room were a

perfect, frictionless fluid, the vortex rings would have gone on forever. Still, their

nonchalant journey across just twenty feet of lecture room was highly suggestive of how

they might perform as the perpetual motion at the heart of all matter.

More than differential equations, the mechanics of heat, or even theories of

Earth’s origin, Sir William had since his youth loved two things – skulling and spinning.

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As a 17-year-old Cambridge University freshman in 1842, he had spent seven precious

pounds earmarked for books and living expenses to purchase the Nautilus, a blue and

gold “funny” – one-person rowing shell – for racing on the River Cam. By the time of his

graduation, he was the Silver Sculls champion. In May 1844, at the seaside resort of

Cromer with a group of his fellow Cambridge students to prepare for senior

examinations, he spent many hours instead combing the glacial cobble and flint strewn

beach below the Cromer cliffs, in search of elliptical stones on which to perform

experiments to determine the physics and mathematics of spinning bodies. Six decades

later, he confessed to his biographer that his failure to win Senior Wrangler –

Cambridge’s top mathematics undergraduate – was solely the fault of those spinning

stones, along with an eclectic assemblage of teetotums, humming tops, and peeries,

Victorian children’s spinning toys that aided his research into the mechanics of rotation.

Upon his return to Cambridge, he spent the months leading up to exams filling his

notebooks with calculations and speculations about parabolic orbits, orbital velocity, the

axes of curvature, and the “problem of the hoop” – another spinning enigma.3

Despite this easy and sustained intimacy with the dynamics of water and whirling

objects, and despite his great appreciation for Helmholtz’s suggestion back in 1858 that

Wirbelbewegung would remain stable if they were established in a perfect – frictionless

and incompressible – fluid, the future Lord Kelvin had never actually seen vortices in

full-blown, effortless, glorious motion until Tait’s demonstration. Having seen them now

in their smoothly spinning course across the room, Thomson realized that here indeed

were the very entities that might constitute the essence of matter. “If,” he wrote to

Helmholtz:

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 there is a perfect fluid all through space, constituting the substance of all matter, a

vortex-ring would be as permanent as the solid hard atoms assumed by Lucretius. . . to

account for the permanent properties of bodies (as gold, lead, etc.) and the differences of

their characters. Thus if two vortex-rings were

once created in a perfect fluid, passing through one another like links of a chain, they

never could come into collision, or break one another, they would form an indestructible

atom; every variety of combinations might exist. Thus a long chain of vortex-rings, or

three rings, each running through each of the others, would give each very characteristic

reactions upon other such kinetic atoms.4

A month later Thomson delivered to the Royal Society of Edinburgh his paper

“On Vortex Atoms,” complete with a replication of Tait’s demonstrations.5 A

“hydrokinetic” theory of matter that was often identified with the luminiferous ether, and

yet did not rest on that identity, professional physicists on either side of the ether question

warmly embraced Thomson’s vortex atoms. Arriving as it did when the whole globe was

experiencing a wave of transportation and communication revolutions – and parallel

dynamic cultural metamorphoses – the notion of all of physical matter consisting of

endlessly spinning evanescent rings found friends everywhere. Tait’s smoke ring cannon

became a favorite of physics demonstration rooms, while among the public, popular

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science articles expounding on the vortex atom invariably trumpeted its superiority over

the classic Newtonian model of static, hard particles at the foundation of matter. Vortex

atoms had an inherently modern style – flexible, alert, diaphanous as the new

technologies of the telegraph and telephone and photography. In “A Charmer of Men,” a

short story for Cosmopolitan, New York World reporter T. C. Crawford has a

philosophical physician dispense romantic advice along the lines of the vortex theory:

"Two beings, in the excitement of courtship, may be powerfully attracted to the other.

Under this condition their vortex lives are complements one of the other: but in the

humdrum of married life the vortex velocities will so change that they may be and often

are absolutely discordant." Vortex atoms even seemed to satisfy Victorian spiritual

sensibility; in Thomson’s 1867 paper, he declared that to generate or destroy

Wirbelbewegung – the onomatopoeic German word literally meaning “whirling

movement” – “can only be an act of creative power,” that is, by God. Tait made the same

point in an address to the British Association in 1871, proclaiming that Thomson’s

“splendid suggestion of Vortex-atoms. . . implies the absolute necessity of an intervention

of Creative Power.”6

Long before the Paris Congress, Lord Kelvin had abandoned his vortex atom

theory, as had almost all of its former Anglo-American and German adherents, stymied

by how it might account for the newly emerging properties of matter – as well as for

crystalline configurations, electrical, chemical, and gravitational forces. Less than a year

before he stood before the world assembly of physicists in Paris, he had written that “in

respect to all these Ether Theories, my own Vortex-Atom included, I must unhappily rank

with Mephistopheles, ‘der Geist der stets verneint’ (spirit that always denies) . . . I cannot

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feel any happiness in any ether-theory which does not account for electro-static force and

ordinary magnetic attraction.”7 In his Paris address – “Sur le Mouvement d’Un Solide

Élastique Traversé Par un Corps, Agissant Sur Lui Par Attraction ou Répulsion,” (“On

the Motion Produced in an Infinite Elastic Solid by the Motion Through the Space

Occupied By It of A Body Acting On It Only By Attraction or Repulsion”) – Lord Kelvin

never once mentioned vortex atoms, never referred to Tait’s and his own beautiful

spinning smoke rings as models of the motion at the heart of matter, and yet the highly

abstract mathematical discourse he presented to the Paris congress was all-in-all yet

another attempt to wrestle with the reality or unreality of the elusive ether. Like Poincaré,

Kelvin called for a theory that would go beyond the explanation of light and radiant heat,

but also include electric currents, the magnetism of steel and lodestone, and electrostatic

forces. When the editors published the English version of the talk, the running head in the

journal glossed Kelvin’s ungainly title more matter-of-factly as “On the Motion of

Ponderable Matter Through Space Occupied by Ether.”8

Over the course of five days of papers read at the Congress, neither Lord Kelvin,

Dayton Miller, Edward Morley nor any of the other 800-plus attendees heard a single

mention of the word “Vortex.” It was as if the word had vanished from the vocabulary of

professional physicists. And yet, the ghost of the vortex undeniably hovered over the

entire Congress, for on the afternoon of August 6, moments after French Academy of

Science President Marie Alfred Cornu welcomed his nearly 1000 guests to the opening of

the Congress, he invoked the spirit of René Descartes and Descarte’s “fameux

tourbillons” – the vortex theory of solar system formation that Descartes had advanced in

1644 in his Principia Philosophiae. Before Isaac Newton brought forward in his own

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Principia (1687) his notion of universal gravitation, the Cartesian vortex philosophy had

held sway, arguably having been the very first “theory of everything” in that it attempted

by way of vortical motion – les tourbillons – to account for the planetary orbits, gravity,

tides, and magnetism. Descartes’ tourbillons were the starting point for all serious work

in physics in the 17th century, including Newton’s; Cornu positioned physics’ Holy Grail

of a unified theory as largely a story of Newton contra Descartes:

The problem of the unity of physical forces, so boldly proclaimed by Descartes,

eclipsed for two hundred years by the immortal synthesis of Newton, this great problem

has arisen again since the great discoveries which signaled the end of this century: also,

the constant preoccupation of our modern masters, Faraday, Maxwell, Hertz (to speak

only of the illustrious departed), consists in specifying the nature, in guessing the

properties of this subtle matter, receptacle of energy universal, to seek the laws of its

intimate movements, in order to explain the storage, transmission and sharing of energy

in its external manifestations.

Never in the history of the world had energy’s external manifestations been so

spectacularly displayed as they were at La Ville-Lumière’s Exposition Universelle. The

planners had contrived in the heart of Earth’s premier cosmopolis a grand spectacle of the

new Faustian magic of electromagnetic power. Transport to and around the 530 – acre

grounds was conspicuously electrifiée: the world’s first trolleybus linked the zones of the

Bois de Vincennes; an electric overhead railway easily linked the Invalides area on the

east with the Champs de Mars on the west, connecting up to the city’s brand new

underground Metropolitain system; automatic inclines and escalators moved the scores of

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spectators to the upper levels of the many exhibition halls; a Plate-Forme Mobile or

trottoir roulante – a 3-speed moving sidewalk taking in all the principle features of the

Exposition grounds – became one of the its most popular attractions, many visitors

coming explicitly to experience the ride. Both the Edison and Pathé studios made short

films of the Exposition from the trottoir roulante.

The main entrance to the Exposition – René Binet’s Porte Monumentale, a

towering Ernst Haeckel radiolarian–inspired fantasy atop which stood the 15-foot-tall

statue of La Parisienne, an elegant Paris woman in modern couture – was covered with

3500 blue and yellow electric lights. Just inside the vast arch Binet had placed a statue of

The Genius of Electricity with regal headgear and metallic orientalized dress. The Palais

Lumineux, a pagoda-like temple on an artificial island in a pond on the Champs de Mars

was encrusted with mirrors and painted glass stones illuminated by incandescent electric

filaments. The Eiffel Tower, feebly lit at its 1889 debut by a combination of gaslights and

electric lights, now sported thousands of light bulbs, and a massive beacon at the summit

that flooded the entire City of Light with its rotating beam. The Palais d’Électricité was

lit up by 5000 multicolored incandescent bulbs, and topped by la fée électricité – no fairy

at all, but a triumphant warrior princess in a fiery chariot led by a pair of lightning-fast

winged hippogryph spewing showers of multi-coloured flames. This dazzling electric fire

even extended to the Grand Basin of the Château d’Eau in front of the Electric Palace.

Each evening, tens of thousands of spectators jammed the broad champs promenade,

stairways, terraces, and palace galleries to be mesmerized by the multicolored waterfalls

and jets and sprays spilling into the Grand Bassin.

20
 Throughout the 205-day duration of the Exposition, billowing clouds of black

smoke poured forth from two gigantic brick chimneys at the south end of the Champs de

Mars. In the immense interior, an army of boilers burned 200 tons of coal a day to

produce from 1200 liters/second of Seine-diverted water 425,000 pounds of steam power

every hour, which was conducted in pipes beneath the palace to drive 40,000 horsepower

of dynamos generating 100,000 volts of electricity. French writer Paul Morand, who had

seen the electric fairyland as a 12-year-old boy, recalled the effect it had on him three

decades later, in his novel 1900:

. . . a strange, crackling, condensed laughter resounded, the laughter of the Fairy

Electricity. Just like morphine in the boudoirs of 1900, she triumphed at the Exposition;

she was born of the heavens, like true kings. The public laughed at the word ‘Danger of

Death’ written in the pylons; it knew that Electricity cured everything, even the

‘neuroses’ fashionable at the time. It was progress, the poetry of the rich and the poor; it

bestowed light in abundance.9

Perhaps la fée was laughing because all of this electrical illumination, like the

hippogriffs beneath her reins, was ultimately a mystery – to the Exposition spectators, the

Palais architects, the engineers who designed and installed the dynamos, even to the 836

physicists gathered for the International Congress of Physics. No consensus existed

among them as to the explanation for any form of electricity or magnetism. A week after

the Congress, Lord Kelvin was back home in Edinburgh still pondering the

electromagnetic imponderables, and sent a short “supplement” to his Paris paper, “On the

Duties of Ether for Electricity and Magnetism.” Contemplating the stress on the ether

21
resulting from attractions and repulsions of the newly discovered (in 1897, by J.J.

Thomson – perhaps the most enthusiastic supporter of Lord Kelvin’s vortex atom theory)

electrons, Kelvin offered mathematical calculations he felt hopeful of solving “the

formidable difficulties which meet every effort to explain electric insulation and

conduction, and electromagnetic force, and the magnetic force of a steel magnet, by

definite mechanical action of ether.”10 The vortex had momentarily done its duty, then –

like a spinning stone or top or riverine whirlpool – evanesced into oblivion, but the ether

was still being asked to perform the task of supporting the very marvels upon which the

entire Exposition’s spectacle of modernity was based.

Dayton Miller came home from Paris with no instruments from Koenig’s atelier,

not even a flute from London, but with both a mission – to continue the ether drift

experiments – and another “imponderable” mystery. Marie Curie had given him a gram

of radium bromide – likely from the public exhibition on radioactivity inside the Palais

d’Électricité. Discovered by the Curies barely a year and a half before the Congress, only

a handful of physicists had ever seen the strange luminescent substance before. The

Curies and their Paris associate Henri Becquerel had just begun to probe les

rayonnements radio-actifs of radium. Miller passed the tiny specimen on to Thomas

Edison, who, as a leading producer of x-ray equipment, was interested in the possible

application of radium emanations to medical imaging.

For all of the progress physical scientists and their companion engineers had made

since the days of Descartes and Newton, they were still striving towards the same goal –

to make the invisible visible. Like God and the ether, tourbillons – vortices – are

22
invisible. They are only made visible when, by accident or design, some more ponderable

substance – dust, smoke, ash, snow, leaves – falls into its path of swirling motion. Before

formulating his theory of universal tourbillons, Descartes had watched straws spinning in

streams, grapes spinning in an unplugged wine vat, and the magical formation of

tourbillon-shaped bands by iron filings around a magnet; before imagining the vortex

atom, Kelvin watched gyrating smoke rings. Descartes drank wine; Kelvin (and Tait) was

– like almost all Victorian gentlemen – a smoker. As a kind of epitome of motion, the

vortex, once made visible, set the minds of the world’s premier students of motion a–

spinning. Beneath all the theorizing and the abstruse mathematics of motion, lay the

powerful experience of analogy, and its relentless call upon the imagination to liken to

one another variegated discrete things. Following Descartes, the French were reputed to

be the champion practitioners of Rationalism/Deduction, the British – following John

Locke – the masters of Empiricism/Induction. And yet the entire nationalist French

enterprise of the 1900 world’s fair was an extravaganza of Empiricism; it was, after all,

an Exposition, a demonstration to one and all, rich and poor, young and old, male and

female, educated and uneducated, of the paragon products of human knowledge and

artifice. The Exposition was surely a carnival, un spectacle, but an altogether didactic

one.

At the other end of the Champs de Mars from the Electric Palace and its anterior

fountains lay the “Tour de Trois Cents Metres” – Gustave Eiffel’s iconic iron tower –

surrounded by the Exposition’s most daring attempts to simultaneously entertain and

educate. In 1889, ascending the tower promised an experience of transcendence, of

getting away from Earth enough to see a great distance. In 1900, at the tower’s feet

23
visitors could transcend without ascending. Along with the older visual technologies of

the diorama (Diorama de Fachoda) and panorama (the Panorama Transatlantique,

Panorama du Tour du Monde and Venise à Paris), there were the Cinéorama – a 360º

panoramic projection of a simulated hot air balloon trip in which 150 'heroes' under the

leadership of a real captain took off from the nearby Tuileries to rise on a fantastic

voyage over Paris, Brussels, Southampton, and Barcelona – and the Maréorama – in

which 700 passengers boarded a virtual ship to make a Mediterranean cruise from

Marseilles to Constantinople, passing along the way coasts and ports which were

projected on a kilometer-long, 13 meter-high screen. This was state-of-the-art virtual

reality; hydraulic screwjacks imitated waves; large fans blew gusts of wind; vaporized

salt masqueraded as sea air; and there was even a troupe of actors to play the part of the

luxury steamship's crew. In the Galileo Room of the Palais de l'Optique, the world’s

largest refracting telescope was paired with a show called "La lune à une metre," which

displayed colossal photographic enlargements of the Sun, Moon, and nebulae onto a giant

screen of a 3000–seat theater. At the microscopic end of vision, a projector in another

room of the Palais magnified the microbial life in a drop of Parisian tap water, and

explored the wonders of phosphorescence and fluorescence. Across the Avenue de

Suffren from the Maréorama sat the Grand Globe Céleste. Depicting the starry vault on a

scale never before attempted, this enormous planetarium presented 100 spectators with an

educational journey past the various galaxies to learn about the celestial movements

causing day and night, the seasons, and other earthly phenomena, accompanied by the

orchestral strains of Camille Saint–Saëns’ Le feu céleste.11

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 In the same manner as the Exposition’s glare of electric light obscured the fact

that there as yet existed no satisfactory theory of electricity, the Palais de l’Optique’s

technological and theatrical mastery stretching from the farthest reaches of the Galaxy to

the nearer invisibility of the microscopic masked the fact that Macrocosm and Microcosm

– as well as the human Mesocosm – were in that annus mirabilis of 1900 undeniably

severed l’un par l’autre. Neither an omniscient God nor a frictionless fluid ether

elegantly and harmoniously knit the Cosmos – growing in dimension daily thanks to just

the sort of instrumentation as was on display at the Exposition – into the heart and mind

of the human being, the one destined to feel that Cosmos fractured by his own

consciousness as surely as he would use science and art to mend it back into a whole.

Bringing the Moon within, or blowing up a bacillus to, one meter, ultimately had the

same effect as the Congress of Physics; rendering the invisible visible merely heightened

the yearning for a transcendental realm beyond the flashy, fleshy material world.

25
 And yet, but 100 meters from the Palais de l’Optique, in a small room within the

Palais de l'Education et de l'Enseignement, there could be found all of the expériences –

the French word for “experiment” – necessary to unify Macrocosm and Microcosm, the

human being and Nature, astronomy and optics, hydrodynamics and aerodynamics, even,

perhaps, the Dynamo and the Virgin, via the vortex. The dozen or so humble appareils –

apparatus – within that room all came from the hand of Monsieur Charles–Louis Weyher,

a civil engineer and industrialist who for 13 years had been devising instruments that

would produce visible tourbillons at different scales. Unable to be present to demonstrate

his devices, Weyher, a gifted draftsman and artist, had succinctly summarized them in his

neat script across a single page mounted on a wooden board. Following the 16 numbered

experiments around the room, any visitor might recapitulate the journey Weyher had

26
taken, to embrace les tourbillons as the key to making sense of all the diverse phenomena

of Nature.

The first experiment made use of a 10” by 5” glass cylinder, at the base of which

was a turnstile activated by a belt from a small motor. Placing oatmeal flour into the

cylinder, Weyher found that the oatmeal dust would perfectly outline the figure of the

tourbillon, so that one’s eye might easily follow the spiral paths of the dust in two

directions – upward centripetally and downward centrifugally. A little wire model

showed a perfect vortex ring, with a superior cone pointing down and joining with the

inferior cone pointing up, thus concentrating the material at the center.

Experiment #2 employed a 1.5 meter tall by 1 meter wide box with a glass front,

at the top of which was mounted a turnstile. At the base of the box, a heater created water

vapor, which was drawn up by the rapidly rotating turnstile, forming a perfect miniature

waterspout, or trombe. As an 8-year-old boy in a boat on the Rhine River with his

parents, Weyher had witnessed a violent storm tear across the valley, whipping up a

number of waterspouts. He recalled seeing the faces of the astonished inhabitants of the

hotels and homes along the Rhine looking out from their windows. On the upper walls

around the room were hung a number of his oil paintings of les trombes marines which

showed both the drama of dark clouds towering above tiny ships and a series of precisely

delineated arrows to indicate the motion of air within these massive vortices. Across the

bottom of one of these paintings, over a meter long, and mounted on a beautiful frame of

deeply incised curly maple, Weyher had written in tiny gold letters an account as poetic

27
as it was phenomenological, describing the essence of this movement that gave such

strikingly visible form to the vortex:

Le movement aérien, générateur de ces embryons de trombes, reste invisible en

raison de la transparence de l’air et échappe alors l’observation directe. (The air

movement, generator of these waterspout embryos, remains invisible due to the

transparency of the air and therefore escapes direct observation.)

Warning that “too often, we take the part for the whole,” Weyher noted how all who had

studied waterspouts had mistakenly assumed their analogy with eddies in rivers; by his

experiment, he showed that while the motive force for riverine tourbillons came from

below, the “turnstile” that created waterspouts and tornadoes and cyclones came from

above – and dramatically demonstrated this with his devices.

The third instrument was a two–meter long by one–meter wide table, on which

Weyher had fastened 200 pins topped by light woolen streamers – to represent the

pennant telltales of so many ships at sea. At the center of the table a hole led to a

manometer tube – analogous to a ship’s pressure gauge. Above the table was mounted a

large flat disc with radial blades; set in motion, the woolen pennants below immediately

stir to show centripetal force on the interior, centrifugal force at the exterior, while those

at the center lay quietly motionless – the cyclone’s central calm, the “eye of the storm.”

Moving the turnstile so that it is exactly positioned above the central hole, the pressure

gauge drops to zero, then gradually increases as the turnstile moves past. Weyher even

had a demonstration with lighted candles which showed all of the candles but the central

one would be blown out, while this single candle burned tranquilly.

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 Number 4 was the most magical perhaps of all the devices, worthy of having

taken center stage in one of the many theaters across the Seine on the Trocadero.

Displayed with another of Weyher’s charming paintings surrounded by his handwritten

explanatory text, the simple device was a “sphère tournante,” a rotating ball made up of

half a dozen cardboard pallets or paddles, mounted at a 45º angle on a turnstile. Bits of

paper or gold leaf dropped into the equatorial region of the spinning cardboard globe

would spin off, but when small balloons were similarly placed there, they became

entrained in orbits around the sphere’s equator. It was almost impossible to observe the

29
dancing balloons and not immediately appreciate that Weyher had created the humble

beginnings of a miniature solar system.

With machines numbers 5 to 11, Weyher moved on to solve the mysteries of

magnetism by convincingly demonstrating that all of the properties of magnets were

merely the epiphenomena of spinning tourbillons. Then, as boldly and effortlessly as a

stage magician’s sleight-of-hand, Weyher produced in #14 a pine cone through which

was woven a pair of wire spirals, illustrating the dextral and sinistral “screws” within. On

the table next to it he displayed a glass vial with pairs of right– and left–hand winged

pine seeds from the two opposing turns and again illustrated his observations with a

lovely watercolor painting and accompanying text:

A tourbillon, even if it was ether, is certainly not enough to explain the generation of any

body or any fruit. However, as we are forced to recognize that no body (or even any

30
molecule), either on earth or in space, can escape the action of a swirling fluid in which it

is immersed, it follows that each body, however small, becomes the cause of a localized

vortex around it, as can be seen in the large painting. All these small local vortices are

attached to the central motor (that is to say at infinity in Nature).

Weyher’s acute artist’s eye developed the analogies further:

A vertical section of this fruit (Fig. 2) bears a striking resemblance to the plume or

the waterspout bush and therefore the drops that would have been frozen and

immobilized during their course. Is one not tempted, in an irresistible way, to see the blue

screws of pitch on the right bring – little by little – the sap from the bottom and make it

go up, while the red screws of pitch to the left coming conversely, would bring the ether

to combine with the sap, fertilize it, so to speak, in order to generate a new immobilized

material on the very lines of the vortex as it is formed??

Weyher’s explanatory text then followed the ambulatory developmental course of the

mature pine seeds, which in dropping from the top of the tree, reaffirmed their vortical

origin by parachuting in spinning motion to right or left, in keeping with the dual

tourbillons that had formed them. Again he was led on to other analogical possibilities:

By considering a vortex with its veins reversed, the mind undergoes a new temptation:

that of attributing the 'masculine', that is to say the major power to the veins arriving all

fresh from the central motor (of infinity) and, the ‘female’ to those who return to this

engine after having been more or less trained. The effect of the two reversed screws is

always to determine the approximation of the bodies which they actuate either to generate

31
a new one of the same family, or to restore a new effect of a similar nature. This same

thing jumped out at the simple plume or waterspout, as well as with magnets. Thus, in

these, the reverse breaths (souffles) cause the poles to seek each other to arrive in contact

and merge by making only one turn but, by giving birth to a new breath which returns to

space where it arrives, the enveloping thread. The latter, for its part, immediately

engenders “his + and her -,” “his left and her right,” going to annihilate one in the other to

produce effects or give birth to the most diverse bodies according to the matters affected

to their power.

Just like every magic trick, effective physical science demonstrations consist

of three acts. The first act is the “pledge,” where the magician shows you something

ordinary. The second act, the “turn,” sees the magician take the ordinary and transform it

into something extraordinary. But then, when the audience expects nothing more, there

comes the coup de grace, the “Prestige.” Weyher chose for his surprise third act – #16,

the final demonstration – a pair of cross-sections of an elephant’s tusks, having outlined

in pen upon the ivory the exact same figure of the little wire vortex ring (#12) in

horizontal projection. “Nature,” he concluded:

offers us an infinite number of other examples giving the forecast of the existence in all

space of a fluid in swirling movement which conducts and shapes everywhere in matter

an infinite variety of forms in which it is almost always possible to discern the primordial

action of the vortex. Among these examples it is permitted to cite the human body.

It is impossible to say how many of the Exposition’s 51 million visitors ever

entered that demonstration room to witness Monsieur Weyher’s astonishing, daring, truly

32
universelle performance, but what the historical record shows is that Weyher’s research

had originally been offered to President Cornu as a paper for the Congress of physicists.12

In rejecting Weyher’s contribution, he had asked Weyher to instead “bring us this for

electricity.” The demonstration room in the Palace of Education had been solicited by

physicist Éleuthère Mascart, a member of the Exposition’s organizing committee, who

was so impressed by Weyher’s experiments in the 1880s that he had offer Weyher an

entire room in his newly founded Bureau Central Météorologique to display his

apparatus, paintings and didactic material. The room at the Exposition Universelle largely

reproduced that arrangement, adding Weyher’s most recent experiments.13

It is possible to know what Charles Louis-Weyher would have said to the

assembly of physicists, for in 1910 he published a pamphlet that he said was in large part

what he had submitted to Cornu in 1900 for the Congress. In this brief communiqué,

Weyher declares his “absolute conviction” that:

in sum, all known phenomena have only one and the same original cause, namely the

swirling of the material ether, that swirling giving rise within it to overpressures or

depressions depending on whether it exerts its action on such or such matter, on such or

such receiver, on such or such recorder.  

Truly, this would have been the Prestige, to have simply and directly declared to the

entire world body of physicists, that all of their mysterious imponderables – electricity,

magnetism, light, heat, sound, radioactivity, even the pure gossamer motion of the ether –

were tourbillons, vortices governed by universal, long–established laws. The key

33
determinant in differentiating such a universal phenomenon of Nature was the receiver.

Weyher neatly and matter-of–factly enumerated them:

For so-called conductive bodies, this will be electricity.

For the compass, galvanometer, etc., it will be magnetism.

For the eye, cameras, etc., it will be light.  

For the skin, muscles, thermometers, etc., it will be heat.  

For ears, taut membranes, etc., it will be sound.

For those same membranes or appropriate revealers, it will be movement.  

And so on.  

Charles-Louis’s Weyher’s Prestige was that he had revealed through simple experiment

that standing behind all of the phenomena of the physical world was not the ether, but the

vortex. The title of his brochure – what a delightful title it would have made for the

34
Congress! – was “Toujours les tourbillons.” Always, the Vortex.

Indeed, the final panel in the room literally reached for the stars, mounting photographs

of the Andromeda, Hunting Dogs, and Lyre galaxies around his own drawing of our solar

system as constituted by the ether of space’s tourbillons. His accompanying text declares

that our universe, no less than any other known to the visual grasp of the human eye, is a

Vortex. Toujours les tourbillons.

Every Parisian, every French man and woman and child, knew the proverb Une

hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps. Indeed, the proverb was as cosmopolitan as the barn

swallow, known in every European tongue, English, Russian – perhaps every single

language spoken at the Exposition. By 1900, it had become a commonplace amongst

scientists to use the expression as a caution against excessive inductive reasoning from a

single fact. But Charles-Louis Weyher had quietly brought to Paris a cornucopia of facts,

from which he deduced a single unifying principle, one that both honored the French

35
spirit of Cartesian mechanism, but that also promised to open out into organic,

metamorphic, fluid, non-mechanistic realms of observation and investigation. Had

Dayton Miller met Charles Weyher in Paris that August, he might have conducted an

entirely different research program. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, the cognitive

seeds of which were very much planted –particularly by French physicists like Henri

Poincaré – that summer at the Congress, may have had an altogether different fate had

Weyher’s tourbillons been given a more prominent stage at the Exposition.

Anyone – like Éleuthère Mascart – who realized the implications of Weyher’s

expériences would have had an altogether unique experience at the Exposition

Universelle. Every sensation of sound and sight – from the swooping and twittering aerial

hirondelles to the wake of the riverine bateaux hirondelles; from the strains of the

cornemeuse, vielle, and tambourine to Saint-Saëns’ Le feu celeste to the polyglot voices

of the nations and the hiss of steam issuing from the boilers and locomotives; from the

splashing waterfalls at the Chateau de l’Eau to the luminous fire raying out from both the

tens of thousands of electric lights and the little sample of Pierre and Marie Curie’s

radium; Loie Fuller’s sensational “Serpentine Dance,” during which she whirled and

whirled like a human vortex – would have been understood as a tourbillon. The second

modern Olympic games had taken place in Paris and its environs over the duration of the

Exposition; considering Charles-Louis Weyher’s final statement – “an infinite variety of

forms in which it is almost always possible to discern the primordial action of the vortex.

Among these examples it is permitted to cite the human body” – from his exhibition,

one’s imagination runs to the vast possibilities for further illustrations of the “Toujours

les tourbillons” axiom for a spectator of: archery; automobile and motorcycle racing;

36
ballooning; boxing; cricket; croquet; cycling; discus throwing; diving; fencing, golf;

gymnastics; lifesaving; Basque pelota; rowing; sailing; sprinting; swimming – both

classic and underwater; water polo; weightlifting; and wrestling. As surely and yet

invisibly as every dive and arch of les hirondelles, each and every motion of the human

limb and its ingenious extensions generated a train of vortices.

A dozen years after the Exposition, in a letter to a friend, Weyher voiced the

inevitable and ultimate deduction derived from both his ingenious but humble

expériences and from his quotidian experience as engineer, as artist, natural historian, and

sensate human being. “The human body (as indeed that of all beings alive) has also

localized and held onto its ethereal vortex which links it to the original motor – that is to

say to God – thus establishing direct, instant communication, constantly carried on

between the Creator and his creature.”14

37
 2: Making the Invisible Visible

What set Weyher’s vortex demonstrations apart was that they made invisible

motions visible, allowing a spectator to follow the rapid metamorphic movements with

both one’s eye and one’s body. Proprioceptively, the whirls out there became whirls in

here. When Lord Kelvin published his vortex atom theory, though he spoke of the

“diagrams and wire models” he had shown to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the only

diagram illustrating his paper was a pair of flat two–dimensional gyres of concentric

rings marked by tiny arrows to indicate direction – clearly an abstract image unconnected

to anything observably real in the physical world. Before Weyher produced them in a

meter-high box, people had – with a great deal of difficulty and little exactitude – been

describing and drawing waterspouts and tornadoes for centuries. Medieval and early

modern woodcuts depicted the fury of notable thunderstorms and tornadoes; the text

accompanying an ominous tornado above the town of Augsburg in July 1587 described

its motion so: “It was first on the right but soon wound itself to the left flank; at its

downward end it became smaller, sharp and pointed. It remained upright thus for almost

half-an-hour, and afterwards gradually disappeared.” By the late 17th century, European

storm studiers routinely drafted pictures whose dramatic narratives aimed at

communicating motion with copious annotation, in the manner of physicists’ diagrams.

An observer of a waterspout at Topsham on the river Exe between Exeter and the sea

used the spout’s shrapnel of destruction to indicate direction: X marked “the planks that

were blown from upright,” D the ship “shaken but not hurt,” K “a mast of near a tun

weight, thrown out of its place,” W an “anchor that was torn out of the ground and

38
carried seven or eight foot with a boat that was fastened to it,” B a “new boat blown

about six foot high and turned upside down" and A “a fisher boat with one man in it

which was near the place where the spout was at first perceived, but through mercy

escaped.” The agent of all this chaos (E) appears as but a vague column of arching mist.

When, in 1769, America’s most celebrated weather man Benjamin Franklin published the

most comprehensive study to date of waterspouts, his liberal use of arrows aimed to help

the reader to imagine the movement inside the intense columnar vortex. 15

39
 At a much smaller scale, and in the medium of water rather than air, vortex

motion found its first close student and modeler in Henry Deacon, a chemist and

industrial manufacturer of alkali and chlorine who in 1871 quite accidentally came upon

a simple method for producing clearly visible liquid vortex rings. Wishing to see if the

40
specific gravity of two volumes of water were equal, and knowing that if heavier, one

would sink, Deacon and his assistant dropped some spring water containing dissolved

indigo into a still container of pure spring water. As the indigo-laden drop sank, it

produced a marvelous cascade of vortex rings.

The resemblance to living forms was immediately apparent – Deacon recognized the sea

anemone – and so was their uncanny vitality. “Whilst they are growing, they are, so to

41
say, ‘alive’ . . . When they cease to grow their ‘life’ ceases too, they become dull, flaccid,

nebulous – they quickly dissolve into the surrounding space,– they die.” Along with the

indigo, Deacon the chemist played around with a substance he knew intimately –

permangate of potash – to create soft semi-solid forms, and dreamed of trying the effect

with melted wax, paraffin, and sulphur into baths of cold water: “Should we not have a

frozen ring?”16

The problem with all of these representations is that a vortex is largely motion, is

indeed nothing but motion, and as such, any static rendering cannot adequately represent

it. The very vitality that so excited Deacon escaped his most earnest efforts at describing

or drawing it. Though technologies of movement – phénakisticopes, zoetropes,

praxinoscopes, and other devices creating the illusion of motion – had been around since

1833, it was only in 1868, after corresponding with William Thomson, when Scottish

physicist James Clerk Maxwell made a zoetrope animation of leap-frogging vortex rings,

that anyone succeeded in dynamically mimicking even a small part of vortex motion.17 A

decade after Henry Deacon, English physicist Arthur Mason Worthington created an

“instantaneous illumination” device that permitted him to capture the motions of milk

drops splashing into water and other fluids. A talented artist, his published sketches

depicted successive stages of the form at intervals of a few thousandths of a second.

42
CAPTION: The splash of a drop of milk falling into olive oil

43
Read downward in the direction of the drop’s fall, the series of drawings was essentially a

static flipbook that the viewer could run mentally to create the illusion of continuous

movement, in the manner of the stroboscopic devices just then becoming a commonplace

in Victorian parlors throughout the world. (Indeed, but three months after publication of

these stunning series in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, a New Jersey

electrical engineer received patent number 258,164 for an “Optical Toy” – a flipbook; the

patent application drawing showed an approaching railroad car flanked by telegraph lines

and blowing smoke rings – vortex rings – from its stack.) Worthington’s drawings caught

for the very first time an elaborate but heretofore completely unseen series of

simultaneous motions – an annular rim raised at the moment of first impact; the

formation of a hollow with radiating arms and ribs; the submergence of the drop; an

ascending column; and finally, a descending vortex ring. The whole series of movements

lasted but one–third of a second. In the process of creating thousands of observations and

drawings, Worthington discovered that after he had sufficiently noted these motions, he

found it easy to see them in continuous light, without the aid of the strobe illumination.

He could even make out (Figures 11 to 14 in the image above) that the vortex ring of oil

dragged some of the adherent milk with it, turning “the drop inside out till it recovers

itself by irregular jerks under the influence of surface tension.”18

In the spring of 1894, with the help of the “sensitive” plates of R. W. Thomas, the

foremost photographer of racing cyclists, Worthington finally managed to truly stop the

splash of a drop in time. In an evening presentation to the Royal Institution of London,

44
Worthington candidly confessed that in his 17 years of studying splashes, he had drawn

many irregular or asymmetrical figures, but had rejected all of them for publication,

seeking always some ideal “Auto-Splash” of perfect symmetry. The new exactitude of

observation permitted by the improved photographic plates caused Worthington to turn

inward to closely examine his own process of sifting and sorting images. Calling the

photographs “objective views,” the published paper now exhibited both his drawings,

engravings made from photographs, and photographic prints. In Series III – like his

earlier work, a hand-drawn “flipbook” sequence – he drew attention to Figures 12 and

13’s well–marked vortex ring. One also sees how perfectly symmetrical his drawings

are.19

45
46
 Dissatisfied with the quality of the photographic plates, Worthington chose to

illustrate the new “objective views” largely by way of engravings, which accentuated and

delineated in a manner more like his drawings the variegated forms of the splash.

Throughout this Series, one sees the “true” forms – the spherical drop elongates and

widens to an oval shape during its fall, the splash is at every millisecond a bit chaotic, the

nicely symmetrical upward groping ring of his earlier drawings shown clearly to be an

error. The little individual droplets thrown off by the splash are scattered, not equidistant

as in his drawings. Now even the receding vortex ring is seen to be irregular.

47
Despite his dissatisfaction with the unmodified photographs, Worthington chose to head

the article with a photograph instead of a drawing or engraving.20

48
49
By the time Worthington revisited splashes once again in 1897, he had abandoned all

previously idealized representations, illustrating each of his nine series with only

photographs.

Concluding his 1894 address, Worthington had expressed the hope to his listeners

that “the details of this transaction, familiar though it has been to all mankind since the

world began, have yet proved worthy of an hour’s attention.” This was truly a watershed

in human history, for Worthington’s claim that the splash of a drop had been familiar to

“all mankind since the world began” was no exaggeration. Every time and everywhere it

has ever rained upon planet Earth, countless intricate vortical movements have unfolded,

completely unseen, even to any contemplative rain watcher who might have stood on the

shore of the sea or lake or river to scrutinize the gentle cacophony of raindrops splattering

against the surface waters of the planet. The subtle choreography caught by

Worthington’s strobe light and camera had remained hidden in plain sight since the world

50
began. As the 19th century drew to a close, the cold light of photographic objectivity

displacing the incomplete, subjectively warmed process of unadorned naked-eye

observation, the vortex – like the splash of a drop, heretofore invisible – was both coming

into sharper focus and at the same time becoming epistemically blurred.

Both Henry Deacon’s and Arthur Worthington’s research followed the motions of

a single drop of liquid. What was the nature of vortical motion in flowing bodies of water

composed of innumerable individual drops? In his lifelong quest to understand the

mechanics of motion in vertebrates, the physiologist physician Étienne–Jules Marey

moved from the study of animals in water to water itself, and then to the animal in air,

before coming to the more difficult problem of studying the motions of air itself. At each

step of his journey, Marey met the Vortex – as both object of and obstacle to

investigation.

Having begun his quest in the late 1850s by studying the circulation of the blood

and the nature of the pulse, by 1876 Marey was borrowing marine animals from Anton

Dohrn’s newly opened Stazione Zoologica on the shore of the Gulf of Naples in order to

study the locomotion of all manner of aquatic animals – those which projected a stream

of water (jellyfish, octopuses, insect larvae, bivalve molluscs); those which undulated

(eels, skates, long-bodied fish); and those using a flexible paddle (sea slugs, sea snails,

seahorses, caudal-finned fishes, and marine tortoises). Marey photographed the animals

in an aquarium tank marked with four horizontal lines to track movement. Even if an

animal moved across the aquarium space in a fraction of a second, Marey found he could

easily capture the movement in 10 to 20 rapidly imaged photographs. With the skate,

Marey found his ideal animal, its broad fins tracing graceful arcs through the water.

51
Fixing the skate in place with clips on a pair of uprights, Marey would scratch the skate’s

tail with a stick to provoke the sinuous wave of its fins. Impossible to see with the naked

eye, Marey’s chronophotographic apparatus made it fully visible.

52
 To make visible the movements of water, Marey formed wax and resin into tiny

balls, then covered them with silver; heavier than fresh water, he used salt water for his

hydrodynamic studies so that the “molecules” (Marey’s term for the spherical markers)

would not sink. To study currents and eddies, Marey – like Weyher before him –

employed a small screw propeller at the bottom of his tanks, and placed different shaped

obstacles at varying angles within the tank.

A fish-shaped celluloid object clearly showed the smooth laminar flow clinging to the

sides and then rejoining at the rear, while a current directed at the “tail” in the rear

produced strong eddies – vortices – once reaching the middle of the body. Marey’s bright

beads instantly affirmed the design genius of the pisciform shape. Keen to apply his

methods to the movement of birds in the air, Marey in 1881 devised his fusil

chronophotographique – the photographic gun – which he first lent to Eadweard

Muybridge to photograph pigeons in flight. In October 1888, when Marey projected

before the Academy of Sciences in Paris a 50–cm–long paper band of pigeon flight and

the opening and closing of his own hand, these became the earliest filmed images of

movement ever seen in public. By 1896 – a year after the first public film projectors –

Marey had devised a successful projector apparatus.

53
 Even as he improved both his cinematic cameras and projectors, the results

remained unsatisfactory to Marey. Fluid motion – of both water and air – was far too

rapid and complex to adequately capture with motion pictures, muddying rather than

clarifying the measurements he sought. Muybridge’s horse series clearly demonstrated

the successive attitudes and positions of the horse’s limbs; the pigeon’s wings were mere

blur. The photographic gun rotated the recording plates past the open shutter just 12 times

per second – a speed adequate to the medium of water, but far too slow for the lightning-

quick movements of birds in the much less resistant medium of air. As with his

hydrodynamic studies, he shifted his attention from the moving animal to the “organism”

of the fluid medium through which it moved, inventing the world’s first wind tunnel in

the process. Marey built a ventilator to blow smoke produced by burning tinder and

cotton in a small furnace through small tubes into a glass box. Encountering different

shapes, the even lines of the smoke broke up into chaotic turbulence. Using a magnesium

flash lasting 1/50th of a second, Marey’s camera, in his words, “surprise[d] the fillets of

smoke as they meander capriciously in the places where the eddies are formed.”21

54
55
 Marey’s wind tunnel images made clear that both flying birds and the many

pioneer aviators then hoping to make flying machines were aloft in a world of incessant

and mysterious invisible air movements – most of them vortices. Planted firmly on the

ground with his camera and observation tanks, Marey faced this invisible mystery as

well. Though the camera deftly “surprised” the smoke in the sense of capturing its

movement, it also presented an unwanted surprise, for the aeolian medium was so

sensitive that both the directing wire mesh grid meant to prevent turbulence and the

convective heat bubbles from the magnesium flash could disturb the air inside the

tunnel/tank. The very same vortical turbulence which his hydrodynamic and aerodynamic

apparatus made apparent threatened the exactness of his enterprise. In the photo above,

one can see the entire field of “straight lines” of laminar flowing smoke is a hair’s

breadth away from leaping into turbulence.22 The rhythmic alternating waves are

incipient vortices, a “vortex street” that awaited the Hungarian physicist Theodore von

Kármán to discover and define, as the brilliant tinkerer Marey had no mathematics or

physics to further illuminate the implications of his research.23

Étienne–Jules Marey was arguably the busiest man in Paris in the summer of

1900, for he held three different roles at the Exposition Universelle: President of the

Photographic Pavilion in the Palace of Education; Vice-President of the International

Congress of Aeronautics; and rapporteur for the Committee on Hygiene and Physiology

at the Olympic Games. Along with his colleague from the Station Physiologique out in

the Bois de Bologne, Marey was also active making films that summer – of the discus

and shot put champion Josiah McCracken; long and high jump champion Michael

Sweeney; Swiss wrestlers; hurdlers; and of all manner of motion of the visitors on the

56
Seine, the Champ de Mars, and around the Eiffel Tower; even dozens of films of men,

women and children from the Exposition’s African Village walking, running, and

balancing calabashes upon their heads.

As the one person upon the Earth who – much more comprehensively than the

more celebrated Eadweard Muybridge – could be said to have made invisible motion

visible, thus “picturing time,” Marey was well-situated to create for the Exposition a fully

elaborated history and state–of–the–art report of the field that he had almost

singlehandedly invented – Chronophotographie. In a massive mahogany display case at

the Palace of Education, Marey assembled 18 exhibits that carried the visitor from

astronomer Pierre Janssen’s revolver astronomique – a zoetrope of the 1873 transit of

Venus across the face of the Sun – to Muybridge’s 1878 series of the galloping horse to

57
his own 1899 invention of the fusil électrique – a dynamo-powered chronophotographic

gun capable of capturing over 1000 images on a band of celluloid 66-feet-long. In

between, 1873 and 1899, nearly all of the breakthroughs in technology and observation

had been his. There was a photographic sequence of a duck in flight; a sequential three-

dimensional sculpture of a goose coming in for a landing; his original 12-frame gun from

1882; a print of his elaborate registration–mark walking man; his first paper band film

reels of pigeons and his own hand; his prototype reversible camera/projector as well as

his improved 1898 model; his 1899 chronophotographique microscopique – a device that

permitted Marey to study the motions of all which took place within the field of the

microscope; and finally, the electric photographic gun which he had only a year before

demonstrated to the Societé Français de Photographie. Every other cinematic camera in

the world at the time was an ungainly fixed affair mounted on a tripod; Marey’s invention

was so sleekly revolutionary that it passed unnoticed in the display case, and was never

even copied – as was his original motion–picture camera, which was directly imitated by

Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope.24

Once again, despite all of this marvelous, ingenious exposition, the Vortex hid in

plain sight. In the film of the pigeons, invisible vortices spinning along the surfaces of the

wings provided the lift that permitted flight. Even the opening and closing of Marey’s left

hand generated slight movements of air – all vortices. And in that archetypal gesture

Marey was unwittingly performing a kinetic replication of the Vortex/tourbillon.

Releasing his clenched fist, the outsplaying fingers described an arc of expansion, a

moment of stillness, and then contraction of the fingers back into the enclosed gesture of

the fist. For an inveterate, unparalleled bricoleur like Marey, it was a circle of movement

58
he had executed countless times with the most striking results, for his inventions and

discoveries would ripple out into the 20th century in astonishing and diverse ways. At the

Paris Exposition – despite the Cinéorama and Maréorama and the Lumière brothers’

spectacular Cinematographe projecting films of the Exposition attractions on a 15 by 20

meter screen – cinema was not yet separate from photography in the Education Palace.

The scale and impact of this most enchanting art of simulating movement hinted quite

clearly at what lay ahead, and yet in 1900 there was still no certainty that the technology

that had been invented to make the invisible visible in the service of accurate description

of movement was about to become the human being’s most hallucinatory creation,

founded upon the illusion of movement. But three years from Kitty Hawk, and despite

Marey’s conviction that if enough measurements from birds and wind tunnels were

gathered and applied to the properly designed machine, the human being would soon fly,

the Aeronautical Congress was almost entirely devoted to balloons (and meteorological

kites) with barely a word spoken about les machines volantes. In that tightly crammed

cabinet of chronophotography, one could witness Marey’s work foundational to

aerodynamics and the incipient solution of the problems of flight – foremost, the

understanding of the role of vortices in generating both lift and drag on any airfoil,

natural or artificial. His photographic studies of human locomotion – culminating in the

films made of the Olympic competitors that summer – presaged something no one at the

1900 Exposition could ever have foreseen – a worldwide obsession with watching, not

participating in, sport. Marey’s summer 1900 triptych of aviation, cinema, and sport

handily prophesied three of the 20th century’s cultural keystones.

59
 A single panel in Marey’s exhibition was as full of unheard, unintentional

whispers of the Vortex as Weyher’s display just a short distance down the Education

Palace’s corridor was full of intentional declarations of Toujours les tourbillons. In the

bottom right, next to photographs of vortical formations in water and air, Marey included

an image from his Station Physiologique colleague Dr. Georges-René-Marie Marage’s

research on the pronunciation of vowels. The speed of Marey’s camera easily froze in

time the flickering rhythms of the human voice. This research circled back to some of

Marey's earliest investigations of movement 25 years before, and the birth of Marey's

dream of being able to make available for minute examination by sight, the fleeting

phenomena of speech. As yet unknown to Marey and Marage and human inquiry was that

the aspiration and expression of every single vowel and consonant, every movement of

60
the thoracic cage, the larynx, the lips, the motion of air within the nasal passages, and the

projection of the speaking breath from the soul of the human being into the medium of air

rested upon a gossamer foundation of vortices.25

CAPTION: Manometric flame inscriptions for vowels

Though totally unknown to Marey, the camera he invented to make these films also

depended on vortices for their operation. The clockwork gearing that moved the pair of

rotating bobbins that pulled the light-sensitive paper past the lens was operated

electromagnetically; an electrical contact was made each time the slot of the disk shutter

61
made a revolution in front of the lens. Applying historical hindsight – another technique

for seeing what is unseen – to the era’s immense labor in service of making the invisible

visible seemingly “implicates” vortices at every turn.

* * *

In the very same years that physicists, physiologists, and engineers were seeking

to make visible the mysteries of the physical vortex, an assortment of other researchers at

the margins of orthodox science were investigating and representing non–physical

vortices. Employing the same novel technology as Marey – but with none of his

proficiency – Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc, a clinician at the Saltpêtrière hospital and disciple

of Jean-Martin Charcot, began in the early 1890s a research program of iconographie

invisible, using the camera to make images of the interface of the human body with its

invisible nutritive cosmic forces. Rooted firmly in Charcot’s experimental culture of

hypnotism and animal magnetism, Baraduc’s simultaneous allegiance to older vitalist

traditions and to the new demands for quantitative demonstrations of objectivity led him

first to invent the Biometer, a device – modeled on Abbé Fortin’s magnetometer (ca.

1864) – that he claimed registered invisible soul emanations that could be used to

diagnose physical and mental health. Consisting of a steel needle suspended by a fine

thread held within a glass container, Baraduc’s Biometer could only register movement in

two directions – clockwise and counterclockwise – which he interpreted as attraction and

repulsion, in the manner of magnets directed at a compass needle. Having like so many

others in his era amalgamated popular ideas of electromagnetism with vitalist theories of

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Od, Baraduc claimed that a current of something like electricity runs continuously

through the human body, emerging at certain sites, particularly the hands. Believing that

a healthy individual’s current moves from right to left, he assumed that the right hand

would attract the needle, while the left hand would repel it. Sick or tired individuals were

found to repel the needle when either hand was placed in front of the Biometer.

Consistent with electrotherapeutic fashions of the day, to restore the patient to full vitality

Baraduc prescribed an “electro-luminous” bath of sitting naked in a little room filled with

electric lights of 320–candle power.

Casting his glance over all of the newly discovered imponderables of his era –

“the atoms of Newton; Maxwell's ether molecules moving at 70,000 leagues per second;

the universal bombardment of Lesage, exercising in all directions and in all points of the

expanse; the bombardment of radiant matter from Crookes” – Baraduc found “movement

everywhere, but intelligence nowhere.” To solve the supreme question of Life, he

declared “there are only findings of facts, and theories.” His Biometer, he asserted, gave

clear and unambiguous evidence of human thoughts and feelings by the number of

degrees right and left that they moved his device’s compass needle: “The biometric

formula by its appearance, its meaning, is therefore a true mirror of the state of mind that

cannot mislead.”26

The announcement in January 1896 of Wilhelm Roengten’s discovery of x-rays

elated occultists and vitalists of every stripe, as they suggested both that materialist

science was on the verge of acquiring physical proof of invisible emanations, and that x-

rays supported claims of clairvoyance – likened now to a kind of retinal hypersensitivity

to rays of the sort discovered by Roentgen. For Baraduc and others, radiographic images

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immediately suggested the possibility of photographing thoughts and feelings instead of

mere body parts. Knowing that Roentgen placed the sensitive plate under a hand to take a

picture of its finger bones, Baraduc brought photographic plates into proximity with his

subjects – either “sensitives” or hypnotized individuals, to more effectively concentrate

their vital emanations. Like the Biometer, the photographic plates needed no direct

contact with the human epidermis; just bringing the plates close was enough to register

the “extra-cutaneous intimate force.” While Baraduc’s published plates show a range of

completely ambiguous dots, mists, and lines, he found them to be spectacularly

demonstrative of tourbillons as the shape and substance of the force vitale. Cosmic, starry

substance was attracted to the human body in vortical curves, both giving support to J. C.

Maxwell's calculations on motion, and deriving support from the still prevailing popular

interpretations of Kelvin’s vortex atom lying at the bottom of all energies – luminous,

caloric, electric and beyond. In a dozen publications between 1896 and 1904, Baraduc

celebrated les tourbillons de la force vitale cosmique du Zoéter – the vortices of the

Zoetheric cosmic vital force.

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“Zoether” was Baraduc’s term for the aether of Victorian physicists, wed to esoteric

notions of an invisible fluidic substance making possible both life and all manner of

magic, clairvoyance, and miracles. Baraduc believed that his photographs proved the

vortical shape of the cosmic life force, which he took to be synonymous with the

physicists’ ether. His published works, all written in French, show his respect for (or

perhaps pseudoscientific aping of) English physical science in that “Vortex” is used more

frequently than tourbillon.27

As exciting to Baraduc was the similarity of his vortical iconographie invisible to

ancient symbols, particularly the Hindu swastika, Chinese yin/yang, and Vietnamese

Am/Duong. The image above was created from the right hand of a Dr. M. Adam,

“without light, electricity or photographic apparatus,”” that is, merely from exposing a

65
photographic plate placed near the subject’s hand. Baraduc reported that at the moment

when this vortical image began to appear, Dr. Adam had “been seized with a great

movement of mental sadness.” He singled out this particular image as experimentally

proving, of “validating” the ancient diagrams.

With the image above – produced by the hands of three individuals extended over one

plate – Baraduc reached a kind of apotheosis of materialized soul ecstasy, his caption

reading: “Triple vortex of cosmic curving force united in one and forming a fused fluidic

atmosphere, an aura of attraction. This vortex was produced by three hands extended over

one plate, three friends, having momentarily made but one breath, one thought, one

sympathetic interior vibration, a moral contraction of love.”28

Baraduc’s scientific critics, of whom there were many, argued that all of his

iconographes were merely artifacts of photochemical reactions, such as often happened

66
when silver bromide plates were handled or placed close to sources of heat. Knowing just

how prone any fluid is to form vortical patterns, one can reasonably interpret Baraduc’s

faint photographic tourbillons as fleeting impressions of some strictly physical

movement. His fiercest critic, physicist Adrien Guebhard, easily disposed of the vortical

iconographes as evidence of any cosmic vital force:

These vortexes, which we find so constantly in these inconstant figures, are only

the coils in twin volutes of the last superficial vortices of the liquid, quite distinct from

those small vortex rings with a vertical axis which I have observed that extinguish, by

infinitesimal fractionation, the living force of molecules, after the installation of apparent

rest, but of the kind of those swirling half-rings with a horizontal axis that the great

Helmholtz loved to observe, on the surface of his café au lait, and which, born from the

eddies of the liquid, serve as a definitive brake at all acquired speeds.

The fact that Guebhard published over two dozen such diatribes suggests that Baraduc’s

fantasies of a vortical vital cosmic fluid struck a particularly sensitive nerve – the anti-

vitalist, physicalist one just then roaring into full gear in all corners of Western science.

The intensity of Guebhard’s animus against Baraduc could very well spring from the fact

that the vortex was as fully an aesthetic obsession of Guebhard and his fellow physicists

as it was for the many fin–de–siècle seekers after satisfying semi-scientific

accommodations with a virulently God-denying natural science. Muddy, slightly out of

focus like Baraduc’s iconographes invisibles, there was something strangely upside down

here: Kelvin and the majority of his physicist peers were perfectly content to hypothesize

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for decades about a world founded on a vortex atom that no one had ever actually seen;

Baraduc and other “thoughtographers” took a handful of ill-defined forms on

photographic plates and built elaborate edifices of psychological and spiritual

signification out of them. Weyher’s playful declaration “Toujours les tourbillons” had

begun to take on a deeply ironic dimension.29

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 3: Die Welt ist eine Wirbelbewegung

In early 20th century Paris, “tourbillon” was a keyword in more than just the

physical and occult sciences. There were “Petit Tourbillon” waltzes; a winning racehorse

named Tourbillon out at the Longchamps track in the Bois de Bologne; and – even after

the dust from the Exposition Universelle had settled in the wake of the demolition of its

hundreds of plaster and staff architectural wonders – it was a favorite word of journalists

to describe Paris’s extraordinary urban dynamism. Social and economic life in Paris had

been a “whirl” for well over a century, but the new century’s technologies accelerated

and accentuated that whirl. “Tourbillon” was a favorite word of the poet, dramatist, and

essayist Edouard Schuré, who was born a little over a mile – and three big wide, swinging

vortex-generated oxbow bends in the River Ill – from where Charles-Louis Weyher was

born, in Strasbourg, in the Alsace. The word appeared half a dozen times in his newly

published Précurseurs et Révoltes (Precursors and Rebels), as it had in just about every

other one of his books. Hearing the lecturer – Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Berlin – before him

on this evening of May 29, 1906 speak of “Wirbel von Strömungen,” Schuré heard it

simultaneously as “tourbillons courantes” – “a vortex of currents.” In advance of the

third Theosophical Society Congress, Dr. Steiner had come to meet with a group of

Germans and Russians for a series of private lectures to be given at #5 Rue Raynouard in

Passy, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower, and as close to the north bank of the Seine

as Weyher’s demonstration room in 1900 was to the river’s south bank. Rudolf Steiner’s

colleague and friend Marie von Sivers, a Russian émigré from St. Petersburg who had

known Schuré since 1897 when she was living in Paris, brought Steiner to Schuré’s home

69
in Montmartre, to invite him to join the group. Marie von Sivers (later Rudolf Steiner’s

wife) described the scene that Schuré found at the Passy villa: “In the living room, chair

after chair, rescued from the garden, suitcases, they sat in the anteroom too. We hadn’t

found a waitress, so down in the basement small circles cooked and ate and washed

dishes where many literary-sounding names were our guests.”30

Schuré’s life had been one long search for an extraordinary teacher, one who had

succeeded in penetrating life’s greatest mysteries. After having in his high Romantic

youth become a follower (and friend) of both Wagner and Nietzsche, he became a

devotee of one after another Parisian mystic – Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, L’Abbé Roca,

Fabre des Essarts, Adolphe Franck, Papus, Stanislas de Guaita, le Sâr Péladan, and Jules

Bois. He had flirted briefly with Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Theosophy. His latest book,

which treated Shelley, Nietzsche, Ada Negri, Ibsen, Maeterlinck and Moreau as

Romantic voyants, was but a variation on his enormously popular Les Grandes Initiés

(published in 1888, by 1906 it had appeared in dozens of editions), which, in treating

Rama, Krishna, Hermes, Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, and Jesus, had often used

the world tourbillon to describe key actions or events in their extraordinary lives. In a

passage describing the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, Schuré wrote how Jesus was at

that moment, “far from the suns, the worlds, the lands, the whirlpools (tourbillons) of

painful incarnations.”31

The encounter with Rudolf Steiner was unlike any other he had ever experienced.

Looking into the “black mysterious eyes flashing light as if from unfathomable depths,”

Schuré realized instantly that he was in the presence of a “supreme seer,” one like those

he had described in The Great Initiates. Attending the first lecture the following day, he

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had taken no notes, but found when he reached home that Steiner’s words had made such

a vivid impression upon him that “by a process of involuntary and instantaneous

transmission,” he was able to transcribe the entire lecture into French. The 18 lectures

made up a vast all-embracing philosophy, containing all at once a complete theogeny,

cosmogony, and psychology that imbued modern science with spiritual concepts “without

even a hair’s breadth distortion from its exactitude and pristine clarity.” The lectures were

clear proof to Schuré that Steiner had mastered the wholly unique Christian–Rosicrucian

doctrine he owed to his own initiation. There was barely a trace of Theosophy – in the

modern sense that the Theosophical Society had given it – within this philosophy.

Twenty years later, preparing a foreword to his lecture transcriptions for their publication

in French, Schuré highlighted how “they show the genius of this thinker–seer at the

beginning of his career and the zenith of his inspiration.” Rudolf Steiner, reflecting on

this same course of lectures, recalled them as “the central spiritual insights into the

human being that I felt had ‘ripened’ in me.”32

These insights consisted of a series of stunning pictures, all of which were as

invisible to contemporary humanity as the ether or vortex atoms had been to the Victorian

physicists. The pictures that Rudolf Steiner gave were not models, he claimed, but

realities. Employing no charts or specimens, and only occasionally pausing to draw some

enigmatic figure upon a chalkboard, Steiner’s lecture series unfolded a grand tableau of

evolution in cinematic pictures that were cosmic in scope, encompassing both the entire

evolutionary history of humanity, and that of the Earth itself. Indeed, in Steiner’s portrait,

the two synchronous evolutions were intimately and inextricably intertwined. Whether

the subject was the ancient continent of Atlantis, the human heart, the pineal gland, the

71
past forms of the human body, the future organs of movement, the interior of the earth, or

the record of Earth creation and evolution, Rudolf Steiner’s clairvoyance offered

surprising – often shocking – images for Schuré and the other listeners.

The German word that Steiner used – Wirbel – actually communicated the

physical and spiritual reality much more clearly than either tourbillon or the English

word “vortex,” which tended to fossilize to merely form, rather than communicate the

associated movement. The German Wirbel was onomatopoeic, whirling and whirring in

one’s mouth upon pronunciation. No wonder Wirbel meant both vortex/whorl/eddy/swirl,

and also “vertebra” – an insightful recognition of the main gestural motif of the vertebral

bones (Wirbelknochen). Thus the German word for the spinal column was Wirbelsäule,

and for the class of backboned animals Wirbeltieren. To specify vortex motion, Rudolf

Steiner usually used the word Wirbelbewegung – literally, “whirling movement,” i.e.,

Vortex. This was the term used by Hermann von Helmholtz in his 1858 paper – “Ueber

Integrale der hydrodynamischen Gleichungen, welche den Wirbelbewegungen

entsprechen”– that stood at the head of all of late 19th century physics’ fascination for the

Vortex.

Rudolf Steiner had a deep tutelage in the ways of the Wirbel beginning in 1882, at

age 21, when he had become the editor of a new German National Literature edition of

Goethe’s natural scientific writings. Over the next six years, he developed an acute sense

of Goethe’s phenomenological method, one whose supreme achievement was the

discovery of the vertebral nature and origin of the skull. Indeed, Goethe had argued that

the entire skeleton comprised a metamorphosed series of the archetypal element – the

Wirbel, vertebral bone. After 1899, when the erudite editor emerged as an esoteric

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teacher, the Wirbel/Vortex became a leitmotif of a very different order. Often he spoke of

and drew the astrological sign Cancer – an interlocking pair of logarithmic spirals – and

stressed that it was an ancient esoteric sign signifying the breaking in of a new impulse.

Most often he associated this sign with major historical or evolutionary developments –

such as the advent of the ancient Indian civilization in the wake of the destruction of

Atlantis some 12,000 years ago, when the Sun rose in the constellation of Cancer.

Acknowledging the vortex form as commonly seen in constellations and nebulae,

he said it was “a figure to be found on the astral plane in all possible forms.”33 Whenever

he spoke of the “occult script” of the Rosicrucians, he usually gave the example of the

Vortex– which was expressly a double spiral, not single – as the Rosicrucian symbol for

the akasha, the “fifth ether” or “quintessence.” Here was the great “missing link” from

Lord Kelvin’s vortex atom, from Weyher’s Tourbillons theory of everything, from

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Worthington and Marey’s expositions of fluid motion, much closer to Baraduc’s

(imagined, not imaged) force vitale. Rudolf Steiner would have understood every single

spiral form – from the pyrochlorite molecule to spiral bacteria to twining tendrils to the

waterspout-mimicking umbilical cord to the human heart on up to the Andromeda Nebula

as but one-half of the complete form. Every one of these physical forms was an echo, a

reflection, a frozen picture of the invisible second spiral – the supersensible activity that

had brought them into being. In a 1909 lecture series in Berlin, Steiner declared that

“there is basically one blueprint for all the organs” – the Vortex – and explained how the

vortices produced by intersecting invisible streams formed the brain, the eye, and the

heart. Indeed, Rudolf Steiner repeatedly asserted that the human being was fundamentally

a vortex formed from the intersection of opposing spiritual and physical streams of

forces. Throughout Rudolf Steiner’s 25 years of esoteric teaching, at every turn, at the

very foundation of Earth and Man lay the vortical form and vortical movement.34

The lecture – entitled “Yoga in East and West” – where Edouard Schuré first

heard Rudolf Steiner use the word Wirbel opened by dismissing Theosophy’s attitude to

the material world. Theosophy’s teaching that the physical body and world were but

maya – illusion – to be overcome through ascetic practices was not an exaggeration, but a

grievous error that mistook the heart of esoteric science. Drawing on ancient Greek

conceptions, Steiner likened the soul to a bee emerging from the hive, gathering nectar to

make honey. The human physical body similarly acted to penetrate reality, to understand

as comprehensively as possible the nature of the physical world: “Esotericism is not a

science that subordinates the body, but teaches how to use it for higher ends. . . Visible

reality is pervaded by a deeper reality that the soul tries to penetrate and master.” Esoteric

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science – the knowledge and practice of initiated members of secret brotherhoods – had

only emerged into the public domain to the degree that exoteric science had investigated,

and often technically mastered, the physical world. Such a perspective allows one to see

the Victorian physicists’ penetration of the mysteries of the Vortex as preparing the

ground for esoteric science’s deeper understandings. For Rudolf Steiner, who would

come to call his system of spiritual knowledge “Anthroposophy” – the wisdom of the

human being – it was essential to begin with the 7-fold constitution of the human body:

1) the physical body, the body “visible to the natural eye and familiar to science”; 2) the

ether body, a luminous fluid body consisting of currents of various colors, the body of

growth, rhythm, and reproduction that Hippolyte Baraduc and Theosophists and others

knew about from books and lectures, but that most of them could not see; 3) the astral

body – the seat of the passions and emotions –extending beyond the physical body like

an ovoid cloud; 4) the “I,” the intelligent or rational soul, the human-divine self; 5) the

forces of manas in the upper astral body brought forth by the human ego purifying the

astral body; 6) buddhi, generated when manas works upon the etheric body; and 7) atma,

divine spirit, the result of manas working on the physical body; initiates at the atma stage

have “power over nature.” “The evolution of humankind,” Steiner declared, “amounts to

transforming the lower bodies by the higher ‘I’.”35

Once human beings individually transform all of their astral body to manas, they

begin work on their etheric body, which carries through eternity all the experiences and

impressions received by the physical body. Whereas in Eastern initiation the neophyte

was placed into trance for three days, during which one or more initiator/hierophants

imparted wisdom into the candidate’s etheric body which had been separated through

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special practices from the physical body, Western initiation took place in a state of

wakefulness – meaning the etheric body was not separated from the physical body.

Steiner emphasized that in Western initiation, it was absolutely essential to leave the

neophyte’s soul free, to act as servants of the one to whom they were imparting

knowledge. The initiator gave not dogma but soul–filled impulses for development.

Thought was to be permeated with feeling. At the exact moment when Western natural

science was birthing the ideal and idol of scientific objectivity, a great Western initiate

was offering a path of self–initiation founded upon rigorous rules of self–examination

rather than a set of external protocols.

In singling out the etheric body, and specifically the heart, as the locus of “the

veritable vortex of forces and flowing currents,” Rudolf Steiner was not casually using a

figure of speech – in the manner that his student Edouard Schuré might have done. The

etheric body was the missing key to modern biology, and the heated debate between

vitalist proponents like Henri Bergson and Hans Driesch and anti-vitalists like Ernst

Haeckel and Jacques Loeb was a symptom of the inability of modern science – both

exoteric and esoteric – to incorporate a working understanding of the etheric realm.

Rudolf Steiner was uniquely the only person on the planet who had full clairvoyance for

the etheric, and so could both describe it and actively work with it. This was the essential

hallmark of his work, vastly differentiating it from Theosophy or any other modern occult

movement. Baraduc’s photographic investigations were a testament to the fact that a non-

spatial, supersensible phenomenon like the etheric body could not be investigated with

physical instruments – including the physical senses, but demanded a new form of

perception. This is exactly what Steiner’s new yoga of the senses was designed to effect.

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From out of his own self-initiated clairvoyance for the invisible world, Rudolf Steiner

had arrived at a world understanding in which the Wirbelbewegung was a central

principle at all seven levels of human existence, from the oldest one – the physical body –

to atma, the one that for almost all of humanity lay far in the future, but which Steiner

himself had already reached. Whenever he spoke of the Vortex, it was out of a

completeness of comprehension that he had only just achieved, becoming the first human

being, living or dead, to do so.

About a year before the Paris lecture series, Rudolf Steiner had drawn on a small

sheet of paper two discrete vortex figures, along with a series of weighty and wholly

enigmatic axioms, to share with a select circle of his esoteric students. Next to the upper

vortex figure, which was actually made up of four parallel vortices, progressing from left

to right, there was a series of Roman numerals. I, II, III marked the left hand spiral; IV

the central apex or junction; and V, VI, and VII the right hand spiral. Clearly the left

point (I) meant some origin in time, VII its culmination.

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Next to this figure Rudolf Steiner had written:

Bild der Entwicklung des Menschengeistes

Am Beginn ist der Mensch Gott

Am Ende ist der Mensch Gottes Ebenbild

Picture of the development of the human spirit

At the beginning humans are God

At the end humans are the image of God

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 Below, next to a much smaller, single vortex figure, he had set down these

axioms:

Die Welt ist eine Wirbelbewegung

Jede Einrollung muß sich in Ausrollung verwandeln.

[Das Leben soll Lection sein]

Der Mensch soll eine Wirbelbewegung sein.

Alles, was im Sinne der Wirbelbewegung vollbracht ist, ist Magie

The World is a Vortex.

Every inward spiral must become an outward spiral [Life must be a lesson]

The human being must become a Vortex.

All that is brought to completion as a Vortex is magic.36

The little slip of paper offered a unified map of both Nature and human destiny. In

the upper half of this elegant formulation, Rudolf Steiner simultaneously expressed the

Alpha and Omega of Earth and human evolution – as beginning and end points of an

involuting and then evoluting double vortex. The diagram and its three explanatory lines

gave a concise picture of the human being’s origin as part of the Creator’s being, and

destiny as an independent spiritual creature who has taken on the “image” of that Creator.

The lower half gives a set of rules for the realization of the long journey put forth in the

upper half. The first axiom gave both a Cosmogony and a “Planetology,” for Steiner used

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Welt (“world”) both in the sense of planet Earth and the entire Cosmos. It also effectively

offered a natural history, an organizing principle for comprehending all of the phenomena

of the physical world. The second axiom gave a universal injunction for moral and

spiritual growth, as well as for biological existence. The third axiom gave a goal for

human evolution, pointing toward an end point of both bodily and consciousness

development. The final axiom, even as the culmination of the three that come before it, is

a profound enigma: “All that is brought to completion as a Vortex is magic.”

The son of a gamekeeper turned telegraph operator, the young polymath Rudolf

Steiner (1861 – 1925) was every inch a man of his time, and thus above all, a scientist.

He received a technical school education at the Vienna Institute of Technology, where he

studied mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, and mineralogy. After six

years service editing Goethe’s scientific works, and another eight working as an editor at

the Goethe Archives in Weimar – during which time he wrote two books about Goethe’s

worldview and completed his PhD in philosophy – Steiner became part owner and chief

editor of the Berlin literary magazine, Magazin für Literatur, for which he penned dozens

of articles on the latest developments in both the arts and sciences. Still, there is no

evidence that he ever made any special study of the Wirbelbewegung, either out of

Helmholtzian mathematics, Lord Kelvin’s ideal ether atoms, Weyher’s mechanistic

vortex cosmology and biology, and certainly not out of misty notions of Reichenbach’s

Od or Baraduc’s tourbillons de la force vitale cosmique du Zoéter. And yet there is this

mysterious document of 1905, declaring a bold and wholly unique Theory of Everything,

not as theory, but as fact. Pronounced to an intimate circle of perhaps a half dozen

people, Steiner’s vortex axioms show absolutely not a single trace in the historical record,

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as influence direct or indirect, as inspiration for research, or as dogma to be refuted. Like

an evanescent eddy in a flowing stream, that little slip of paper and its outrageous claims

whirls round about its own axis, then totally vanishes.

One characteristic of vortex motion in both air and water is that it seems to appear

out of nowhere, for its antecedent generative conditions – the slightest variations in

temperature, humidity, salinity, viscosity, etc. – are almost entirely undetectable in the

absence of focused attention by way of the senses or instrumentation. Tornados and

waterspouts and whirlpools leap into existence as if by magic, and yet their unstoppable

force always finds its origin in the most subtle gradation of initial conditions. Chaos

theory’s “butterfly effect” is a wholly apt picture for the power of magnification of the

Vortex, and – in yet another instance of hiding in plain sight – it is wholly fitting that its

explanatory efficacy lies in that same exponentially augmenting characteristic that turns

the accumulation of a thousand gentle eddies into a maelstrom. Even the slowest beat of a

butterfly’s wings manufactures a flurry of invisible vortical motions in the surrounding

air, and under the right conditions, these trivial whirls just may magnify themselves into

movements of immense proportion and influence.

Like Edouard Schuré in the face of the one he instantly recognized as a great

Christian initiate, we must abandon all positivist rules of history in any attempt to

“explain” Rudolf Steiner. We can marshal an ironclad chain of custody of ideas; draw up

a timeline of his activity, from his reading of Kant as a 15-year-old school pupil in

Wiener Neustadt (1876) to the convivial gatherings of savants and provocateurs at

Vienna’s Café Griensteidl (1882–1889) to the heady atmosphere of Weimar and his

personal encounters with both Ernst Haeckel and Friedrich Nietzsche (1889–1896), and

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finally to his immersion in the political, artistic, and theatrical life of Berlin (1898–1900);

compile an exhaustive bibliography both of his reading and writing. The same archive

that holds that single slip of paper bearing the revolutionary vortex axioms contains a

roomful of manuscripts, drawings, dozens of file drawers filled with correspondence,

notebooks, memoranda, travel journals and ledgers, clay models, photographs. No red

thread runs through them tracing Rudolf Steiner’s thoughts about the Vortex. And yet,

there is that slip of paper– just like a Vortex – a creatio ex nihilo. What is the source of

its unquestionable confidence, its axiomatic rhetorical quality, and yet its undeniable

tenor of whisper rather than manifesto?

In both of her pioneering works – Isis Unveiled (1877) and more extensively in

The Secret Doctrine (1888) – bringing forth formerly secret esoteric wisdom, Helena

Petrovna Blavatsky affirmed an ancient foundation of occult knowledge about the

vortical dimension of Nature. In Volume I (Science) of Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky in swift

brush strokes painted Descartes’ vortices as identical with both Franz Anton Mesmer’s

“magnet–streams” and the universal fluid of medieval alchemists. Descartes’ materialistic

vortices displaced Kepler’s concept of spiritual beings acting throughout the starry

heavens, making way for Newton’s ultimate disenchantment of universal gravitation.

Blavatsky without stating it explicitly was identifying etheric vortices – in her

terminology alternately called “akasha” and “astral fluid.”37 Clearly cognizant of

contemporary physical scientific research – “the form of force which first brings

nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity. . . the waterspout, the

tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of

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electrical action” – she draws on it to support her remarks about the magical feat of

levitation:

Force enough may actually be generated to create an electrical vortex, sufficiently

powerful to produce many a strange phenomenon. With this hint, the whirling of the

dervishes, and the wild dances, swayings, gesticulations, music, and shouts of devotees

will be understood as all having a common object in view-namely, the creation of such

astral conditions as favor psychological and physical phenomena.

Principally a discourse on magic, Isis Unveiled characterizes as vortices much of

the magical phenomena – ghostly voices, ectoplasmic production, table-turning and other

action at a distance, etc. – of the 19th century Spiritist séance parlor. What the Spiritist

medium does unconsciously with vortices in the akasha, ritualists and magical adepts

carry out by force of will. “The ecstatic so enormously reinforces his will-power, as to

draw into himself, as into a vortex, the potencies resident in the astral light to supplement

his own natural store.”38

In the first volume (“Cosmogenesis”) of her The Secret Doctrine (1888),

Blavatsky affirmed the occult foundation of knowledge about the vortical dimension of

cosmogenesis by citing the fifth stanza of the mysterious ancient Book of Dzyan:

‘Wheels’. . . are the centers of force, around which primordial cosmic matter

expands, and passing through all the six stages of consolidation, becomes spheroidal and

ends by being transformed into spheres or globes. It is one of the fundamental dogmas of

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Esoteric cosmogony, that during the kalpas (or Aeons) of life, motion, which, during the

periods of rest, pulsates and thrills through every slumbering atom – assumes an ever

growing tendency to circular movement. ‘The Deity becomes a Whirlwind.’ . . .

The Wheels are also called Rotae – the moving wheels of the celestial orbs

participating in the world’s creation. . .

This law of vortical movement in primordial matter is one of the oldest

conceptions in Greek philosophy, whose first historical sages were nearly all initiates of

the Mysteries. . .39

Blavatsky goes on to give a thumbnail – and yet magisterial and altogether

original – intellectual history of the vortex as a foundational principle of Creation,

concluding with a nod to Swedenborg and Sir William Thomson, citing his 1867 “On

Vortex Atoms” paper. Blavatsky perceptively recognizes the role of supersensible

cognition – either natural or inspired – in modern formulations of Nature that rest on a

foundation of vortices:

How men of the last few centuries have come to the same ideas and conclusions

that were taught as axiomatic truths in the secrecy of the Adyta [Greek mystery temples],

dozens of millenniums ago, is a question that is treated separately. Some were led to it by

the natural progress in Physical Science and by independent observation; others such as

Copernicus, Swedenborg, and a few more – their great learning notwithstanding, owed

their knowledge far more to intuitive than to acquired ideas, developed in the usual way

by a course of study. That Swedenborg, who could not possibly have known anything of

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the esoteric ideas of Buddhism, independently came near the Occult teaching in his

general conceptions, is shown by his essay on the Vortical Theory.40 

Blavatsky subtly hints here quite specifically that Copernicus, Swedenborg, “and

a few more” came upon their discoveries not by way of learning, but through some

manner of supersensible inspiration – and thus, direct perception of the spiritual world

lying behind the phenomena. Reproducing a passage describing his vortical theory from

Swedenborg’s Principia Rerum Naturalium (1734), she inserts commentary equating a

series of his fundamental propositions – on the first cause; the first motion; the

production of extension, space, figure, and time – with esoteric doctrine. “This is

Occultism pure and simple,” Blavatsky declares.

Although she does not include Descartes in her roster of Enlightenment scientists

whose breakthroughs came via inspiration, his vision of a vortical cosmos was exactly

that – a vision. On November 10, 1619, Descartes dreamed of a Universe made up of

tourbillons – vortices. Posthumously published in 1664 as Le Monde, Descartes’ triptych

dream vision inspired his model of space as a plenum of fluid, certain portions of which

were in a constant whirling motion. The stars, planets, and other celestial bodies all took

form at the center of these vortices.41

Given Madame Blavatsky’s opening of the floodgates of esoteric wisdom, it fell

to British Christian esotericist C. G. Harrison to comment upon HPB’s work and life –

including the East/West occult struggle over her destiny – in a series of six lectures in

1893 to the Berean Society in London. Although these lectures cover an extraordinary

range of esoteric terrain, a close reading reveals that, after Madame Blavatsky herself, the

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most prominent subject and constant leitmotif is the vortex. In the second lecture, at the

conclusion of his perceptive discussion of the nature of modern initiation, Harrison gives

“The Three Great Axioms”:

I. Seven is the Perfect Number.

II. The Microcosm is a Copy of the Macrocosm.

III. All Phenomena have their Origin in Vortices.42

Harrison’s formulation almost exactly matches a second undated document in

Rudolf Steiner’s hand, presumably another note for the esoteric lessons he presented in

the years 1904 to 1906:

I. Die zehn oder neun machen in sich verschlingend

die vollkommene Zahl [The ten or nine make the perfect number devouring itself]

II. Der Mensch ist eine kleine Welt [Man is a microcosm]

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 III. Alles Reale muß als Wirbelbewegung verstanden werden. [Everything real

must be understood as a Vortex.]43

The convergences and divergences of Harrison’s three axioms with those given

by Rudolf Steiner are immediately apparent. Though the diagram culminates with 10 at

its apex, fed by nine inwardly radiating lines, the Roman numeral hierarchy I to VII

standing just outside suggests a superior principle of number, the one – 7 – much more

familiar from both Rosicrucian and other esoteric traditions as “the number of Time.”

The axiom’s “devouring itself” once again evokes the “double vortex,” or Cancer glyph,

the interlocking involutionary and evolutionary spirals. Steiner’s second axiom here is

identical with Harrison’s, and nearly identical also with the second axiom of Hermes

Trismegistus’s Emerald Table. The obvious convergence of Harrison and Steiner’s third

axiom, elevating Nature’s simple form of the Vortex to a universal phenomenon, is

puzzling for a number of reasons.

In the case of both Rudolf Steiner and C. G. Harrison, this all-embracing

statement about Nature does not find an antecedent in the Emerald Table or any other

notable documents of the Hermetic tradition. Perhaps one can see the sort of lineage as

Blavatsky offers – from classical Greece to Descartes to Lord Kelvin – as a sufficiently

explanatory chain of custody for the idea, and yet an equally plausible interpretation

might be that wherever and whenever there exist sufficiently clairvoyant individuals, the

Vortex as a foundational form of the Creation will be independently recognized.

Harrison’s “All Phenomena have their Origin in Vortices” and Steiner’s “Everything real

must be understood as a Vortex” radically shift from fairly abstract and Platonic

observations of archetypal phenomena in the first two axioms to a more Aristotelian

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principle of the sort that might easily launch a systematic program of natural scientific

research. While Blavatsky and other esotericists routinely took heart that an ancient

occult principle was widely and rapidly receiving confirmation from modern scientific

research, no such appreciation of the elucidation of these esoteric axioms came from the

scientists’ side. Almost without exception, professional scientists eschewed all contact

with both Theosophy and Anthroposophy – the spiritual science that Rudolf Steiner

would develop under that name after 1911. After the widespread enthusiasm for Lord

Kelvin’s vortex atom, mainstream natural science would also shy away from any

attempts by those of their own who came to ally with a Vortex Theory of Everything.

Typical and representative was the oblivion to which would rapidly be consigned

Charles–Louis Weyher’s fully empirical and elegantly explanatory proposition of

tourbillons as the fundamental carrier of all physical phenomena, including the new

imponderables. As the foundation of the world as Vortex drew more and more clearly

into view thanks to the myriad efforts of fully materialist natural scientists, at the very

moment that a handful of clairvoyant visionaries unequivocally declared the same as a

universal occult principle, that principle kept slipping away, to be replaced by more and

more “occult” mainstream explanations of the material world. Relativity theory replaced

reality theory, that is, reductionist physicists and biologists invented more and more

convoluted explanations for Nature, the more fully Nature’s ubiquitous volutes – the

spiral scroll characteristic of Ionic capitals derives from ancient Greek clairvoyance of

the vortex-carried formative forces of Nature – were discovered and described.

The real beauty of C. G. Harrison’s lectures is how much – like both HPB before

him and Rudolf Steiner after him – his discussions of ancient truths are rooted in his own

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moment in history. His brief review of the first two axioms mainly reference

contemporary scientific literature and current political events. Harrison noted how, in the

1840s, Dr. Thomas Laycock published a series of studies in the British medical journal

Lancet in which he described how, “from the Larva or Ovum of a Minute Insect up to

Man,” the rhythm of the seven ruled. He concluded that “in animals, changes occur every

three and a half, seven, fourteen, twenty-one, or twenty-eight days, or at some definite

number of weeks.” Laycock also noted how pronounced peaks or valleys in the progress

of the illness almost always marked the seventh and fourteenth days of fevers.44 Harrison

saw this and other sevenfold spectra – of the perception of forms, colors, and sounds – as

an example of the widespread tendency of modern thought to find a homogeneous basis

for apparently widely different things. The diversification of scientific specialties brought

new evidence of general laws of Nature. “If the mysterious Septenary Cycle be a law of

nature,” Harrison asked, “if it is found controlling the evolution and involution (or death)

in the realms of entomology, ichthyology and ornithology, as in the kingdom of the

animal, mammalia and man, why cannot it be present and active in the cosmos in general,

and why should not an occultist be able to trace the same law in the life of the solar

system, the planet, and the races of men which inhabit it?”45

Harrison held that the second “Great Axiom” – the Hermetic law of

Correspondence – was dependent upon the first, the septenary constitution of the

universe, in that every series of which seven is the numerical ratio is a “cosmos” in itself,

whether great or small. Though he says nothing of it, the first two axioms can be readily

seen to “nest” in the third, since the number seven is arguably the lowest odd number

which, with its midpoint as the fulcrum, permits the action of involution and evolution.

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Five, with 3 as its fulcrum, is too small to permit any adequate evolutionary movement.

The initial stage (1) only passes through a single secondary phase before arriving at the

center, where the movement turns and becomes outward rolling, again, only a single

“beat” before arriving at the final condition (5). Seven stages or beats permit enough

elaboration and development to be recapitulated and fulfilled in a discrete passage of

time, in a way that the Five does not allow.

When Harrison turns to the third axiom, his audience, had they been totally

unversed in Theosophy or Christian occultism, would have been easily able to follow.

The particular statements of the scientists – Crookes, Buchner, Butlerof – to which

Harrison drew attention were ones chosen from Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, and were

widely quoted by the popular press, but he also related contemporary physicists’

conceptions to the Caduceus of Hermes and symbols from other gnostic traditions. In

Harrison’s parlance, the Caduceus is “the double vortex,” and in the final four lectures of

the series, becomes the leitmotif in his explanation of the many “signs of the times”

suggesting his era’s position at the center of Time’s vortex.46 Presaging very much what it

will become for Rudolf Steiner, Harrison’s double vortex veritably controls and directs

the balance of his epic exegesis. Implicitly human consciousness is presented as a Vortex

just as much as is the rhythmical unfolding of Time – both as God’s will and as human

struggle. What rings out as Mystery in Rudolf Steiner’s axioms is in these lectures almost

quotidian, in passages like this: “Until the divine reflection has recovered from the shock

produced in its medium by the impact of the two vortices, man must continue to manifest

as a double vortex with a center of its own.”47

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 In coming to terms with Harrison’s assertions, one confronts the same conundrum

that occasionally presents itself when studying Rudolf Steiner’s vortex statements: are

these figures of speech (and hence, like the 19th century physicists’ parlance, models) or

crystal clear clairvoyant perceptions of higher realities? The penultimate paragraph of

Harrison’s tour de force is but one such occasion:

The dynamic effects, therefore (if we may use the expression), of the Christian

sacraments are involutionary as regards the lower and evolutionary in respect to the

higher nature of man. If we apply this idea to the symbol of the double vortex, we shall

recognize in the Sacraments the appointed means whereby the opposing forces will

ultimately range themselves around their true center – the personality (the fifth or human

principle) . . . The spheroidal vortices will then coalesce and become one, first as an

elliptical spheroid and afterward as a true sphere capable of indefinite expansion.48

Madame Blavatsky, C. G. Harrison, and Rudolf Steiner’s embrace of the Vortex

as a universal explanatory principle of Nature share the outstanding characteristic that

this embrace comes within a worldview that takes for granted: the existence of the

supersensible world; the expectation that all humans will eventually become clairvoyant

for that world; and the knowledge that vortices are as ubiquitous in the spiritual world as

they are in the physical world. What sets Steiner’s axioms apart is his starting from “The

World is a Vortex,” while Harrison’s and Blavatsky’s formulations end there. All three

have received tutelage in an occult tradition that recognizes the centrality of the Vortex in

world phenomena; only Rudolf Steiner has developed the capacities to allow him to go

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beyond received knowledge, to offer a pair of axiomatic statements that might serve

humanity as seeds for future spiritual evolution.

Initiates paradoxically reveal the most profound secrets at the heart of creation

and simultaneously keep even deeper secrets guarded, holding them back out of a

sacrificial combination of humility, caution, and the instinct to leave their fellows free to

discover for themselves. Perhaps the most tender secret of all is the identity of the one

from whom he received initiation. It seems fitting that the only document in which

Rudolf Steiner spoke of his “Master” is one that he wrote at the request of Edouard

Schuré, a few months after the Paris lectures, when Steiner visited Schuré at his summer

home in Barr in Alsace. Subtly but unmistakably, Rudolf Steiner identifies as his Master

the founder of the Rosicrucian spiritual stream, Christian Rosenkreutz. Quite explicitly,

he links the Master to the beginning of his own spiritual clairvoyance, and that

clairvoyance to an experience of the Vortex – not of Space, but of Time:

During this period [age 18], and this is already due to external spiritual influences,

I gained complete understanding of the concept of time. This knowledge was in no way

connected with my studies and was guided totally by my spiritual life. I understood there

is a regressing evolution, the astral occult, which interferes with the progressing one. This

knowledge is the precondition of spiritual clairvoyance.49

In fact, the entire arc of the Paris lectures had issued straight from this backward–

flowing astral occult stream of time. At age 18, thanks to the subtle working of his Master

upon his etheric body, Rudolf Steiner could stand at the threshold of the physical and

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spiritual world and catch images of the future which flowed toward him as inexorably as

if he were the center of a vortex, drawing all of the periphery toward himself, for this is

exactly what he had become. The source of Axiom #3, that the human being must

become a vortex, was his own experience in 1879, one that had only deepened over time

as both his clairvoyance and his spiritual scientific research expanded.50

The day before the Passy lecture in which he spoke of the heart as a vortex,

Rudolf Steiner drew upon his perception of the double stream of time to name the two

arms of the Vortex: Involution and Evolution. Speaking of the “tiny pinecone” in the

brain, the pineal gland, he dismissed contemporary theories that held it to be a kind of

parasitic growth or evolutionary inheritance from some ancient piscine ancestor. It was

instead the surviving remnant of human beings’ first sensory organ for the outer world,

when it served as antenna, eye and ear in a period when the Earth was a gelatinous orb

still united with the Moon. Humans at that time moved about like fish through a semi-

fluid atmosphere, sensing all external stimuli – temperature, sound, light – with the pineal

organ. Rudimentary and vestigial at the present time, Steiner said that in the near future

the ancient organ once entirely responsible for sensing the physical world would

metamorphose into an organ for perception of the spiritual world. Here were the two

arms of the Vortex, the arm of Involution spiraling in from the ancient past, and the arm

of Evolution spiraling out toward humanity’s destined clairvoyant future. This was

Vortex Axiom # 2: Every inward spiral must become an outward spiral. Steiner noted

not only the vortical form of the pineal gland, but its ghostly vortical trace – the soft

whorled fontanelle on the baby’s crown – left by its having descended deep into the

tissue of the brain from its former location at the top of the skull.

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 Over and over in Steiner’s teachings about the past and future evolution of

humanity, he spoke of Strömung – streams – and Wirbeln – eddies. Like the Vortex, Time

had a fractal texture, scaling up and down in perfect rhythm – the rhythm of the 7. In a

letter to Marie von Sivers in April 1905, Steiner sketched the inflowing line of

“Initiation” – from which spiraled out the ancient Indian (I); Zarathustran (II);

Babylonian/Assyrian (III); and Greco-Roman (IV) cultures, and the outflowing line of the

5th culture, flowing from the Semitic and Christian cultures of the past into the Germanic

culture of the present.51 At the center stood the still point of human evolution – the Christ,

who had incarnated into the eye of the vortex, the 4th (Greco-Roman) culture, giving the

new impulses which would ramify through the outrolling arm of the evolutionary spiral.

In Steiner’s sketch, only the 5th culture is depicted, but beyond it, from his own

clairvoyance and the clairvoyance of his Master, he knew that the 5th Germanic culture

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would be followed (in AD 3575) by the 6th, Slavic culture, and the final “American”

culture 2160 years later, to complete the 7 post-Atlantean cultural epochs. Like any

vortical eddy in air or water, these 7 epochs had been spawned by prior eddies in the

Time stream, and after it would come an infinite spinning suite of 7-fold eddies yet to be

born. That Steiner’s Vortex Axiom diagram bore just four 7-fold double spirals is likely

because he was representing the larger eddies of time a dimension up from the seven

2160-year-long post–Atlantean epochs: the 15,120-year-long Hyperborean; Polarean;

Lemurian; and Atlantean eras.

Schuré and the other attendees at Passy were offered the fundamental set of

sevenfold Rosicrucian spiritual knowledges and practices. The day after he elaborated the

sevenfold bodily principles, Rudolf Steiner sketched the new cognitive yoga for

contemporary humanity – a set of seven simple exercises to achieve the transcendence of

Space and Time: 1) control of thought; 2) control of actions; 3) equilibrium of soul; 4)

optimism; 5) confidence; 6) inner balance; and 7) meditation. Candidates for Rosicrucian

initiation passed through seven degrees – the Raven; Scholar; Warrior; Lion; “German”

(in the 4th degree, candidates bore the name of their own people, since their soul had

grown to the point where in encompassed the larger Folk Soul); Sun Messenger;

“Pater”/Father. In the seventh lecture, Rudolf Steiner described how the heart of the

Rosicrucian initiation consisted of meditating the first 14 verses of the Gospel of St. John,

thereby reliving the seven stages of the Passion on Golgotha – the Washing of the Feet;

the Scourging; the Crowning with Thorns; the Bearing of the Cross; the Mystic Death

Upon the Cross; the Entombment; and the Resurrection. Believed to possess magical

power, the Rosicrucian candidate repeated the verses at the same hour, day after day

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without cease, until they began to see in vision all the events recorded in the Gospels,

living through them in inner experience. Here was another possible interpretation of

Axiom #3, that either through the evolutionary jumpstart of Christian initiation, or

through the much longer route of inheriting the evolutionary advancements gained by all

humanity in its destined course, every human being must “become a Vortex,” must bear

the Christ being within, through progressive purification of the astral body, whose

organs – known to Theosophists as chakras or “lotus flowers” – were themselves

spinning invisible vortices.

In the Passy series’ penultimate lecture, “Redemption and Liberation,” Steiner for

the first time in the history of humanity spoke openly of the Seven Mysteries of Life: 1)

the Mystery of the Abyss; 2) the Mystery of Number; 3) the Mystery of Alchemy; 4) the

Mystery of Death; 5) the Mystery of Evil; 6) the Mystery of the Word; and 7) the

Mystery of Divine Bliss, and then, in the final lecture, he gave an introductory glimpse

into the mysteries of St. John’s Revelation or Apocalypse, the ultimate exposition of the

sevenfold rhythm of Time. Here also Steiner made public for the first time the

Rosicrucian – and hence Johannine – comprehension of Revelation’s pictures of a

transformed Earth and humanity “in substance and in form” in the far distant future.

Throughout the Passy lecture series, there was a pronounced emphasis of

humanity’s role in the shaping of the physical earth. This fundamentally Rosicrucian

alchemical impulse distinguished Steiner’s “Theosophy” from that of the Theosophical

Society nearly as much as Steiner’s emphasis on the centrality of Christ in human

evolution. Rather than succumbing to the thrall of modern natural science, aping its

means and methods to a large degree while ancient importing Hindu doctrine, Rudolf

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Steiner accepted the insights of contemporary science as a landmark in history that

necessitated the development and flourishing of a truly spiritual science. “The descent

into materialism was needed so that the fifth epoch might fulfill its mission,” Steiner told

his Passy listeners. “It was necessary for astral and spiritual clairvoyance to be dimmed

so that the intellect could develop through precise, minute, and mathematical observation

of the physical world.” The experimentally, mathematically and observationally exact

pictures of Earth’s multitudinous vortical forms that were being developed in the decades

on either side of the year 1900 was very much a symptom and sign of both the final

extinguishing of the old clairvoyance, and a herald of the incipient new clairvoyance. In

the mystery language of Revelation, the term “head” refers to the organs that are in the

formative etheric body, “horns” to the organs of the physical body that arise out of the

etheric head. Physical organs are merely densified etheric organs. All are strictly vortical

in form; “horn” brings us to attention of the vortical nature of the organs, since all animal

horns bear to a greater or lesser degree the spiraling stamp of the Vortex.52

Though no one present for the 1906 lecture series could have realized it at the

time, Steiner repeatedly touched upon the “magical” aspect of the Vortex Axioms when

he described how in Devachan – the Sanskrit term for the period and region between

death and rebirth of human beings – those who have sufficiently purified their astral

bodies (buddhi) while on earth will have the capacity to work into the arena where new

plant forms are produced. Similarly, initiates at the highest (atma) stage of spiritual

development would work into Kamaloca – where new animal forms are generated.

Hinduism taught that new flora and fauna on Earth are created by Devas; both Steiner’s

Rosicrucian learning and his own spiritual research showed him that this conscious

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participation in the kingdoms of nature now lay within reach of the human being. “A time

will come when there is no question of ‘miracle’ or chance,” he said. “Flora and fauna

will be a conscious expression of the transfigured human soul.”53 Constant, perennial

vortical action automatically constrained by physical laws both built up and tore down

the shifting landforms of the Ganges and the Nile and every earthly river; constant,

perennial, conscious vortical action by human beings would bring about the

transformation of the Earth.

This was an infinitely higher magic than the sort that Madame Blavatsky both

discerned and practiced herself, the low magic of manipulating the vortices within the

“magnetic” ethers for titillating parlor tricks or the grey (and black) magic of sending

eddying vortical thought forms to influence the consciousness of others. On the 14th of

June, a week after the Theosophical Congress had ended, with much grumbling from the

French Theosophists about the “German invasion” led by Rudolf Steiner, he concluded

the Esoteric Cosmology series in Passy with a dizzying series of prophetic pictures of the

Book of Revelation’s Church of Laodicea, the future 7th civilization within the 5th (Post-

Atlantean) Evolutionary Epoch, of the 4th (Physical) Condition of Form, itself the 4th

(Mineral Kingdom) Condition of Life within the 4th (Earth) Condition of Consciousness.

Following on the heels of the 6th epoch’s Church of Philadelphia – an era of fellowship,

clairvoyance, and creative power, led by the Slavic peoples – the 7th epoch would see all

thoughts and feelings that lived within the human being manifested in the outside world.

In indelible characters upon both the human countenance and the face of the Earth, the

good and the evil within would become the very physiognomy of the planet and its

people. Humanity would divide into two streams according to their karma; only those

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strong enough to bring good out of evil through a process of spiritual alchemy would

move forward into the next phase of Earth evolution. There would come an actual

physical recapitulation of Earth’s first three periods such that those bodies that had

separated themselves from Earth – Moon and Sun – would reunite themselves with the

Earth. At the sound of the trumpets of judgment, Earth will have passed out of a physical

condition, so that the ruling principle of light would be replaced by sound.

Here was a grand vortical movement, one that Edouard Schuré could instinctively

feel as it unfolded over and through the Passy group. The turning inside out that Rudolf

Steiner spoke of was exactly the movement of the double vortex, the incurving and then

out–curving arc of time and events both physical and supersensible. At the center of the

two vortices came the transcendent still point into which transformative forces from the

spiritual world were able to work most effectively and dramatically. The human being

would indeed need by the conclusion of the 7th post-Atlantean epoch to become a double

vortex, a Cancer glyph, a whirpool, a Caduceus, turning himself inside out, and with that

movement, also turning the Earth inside out. This was not a figure of speech, but a literal

“Apocalyptic” – in the sense of revealing the future by consciously lifting the cover on

that which was hidden – image of human destiny. For Edouard Schuré and any other

attentive listener there at midsummer at #5 Rue Raynouard near the north bank of the

Seine, the Christian initiate standing before them was a living expression of what they

would themselves become, a human being permeated by the Christ impulse. Here before

them was the realization of Vortex Axioms #3 and #4, the two far-off-in-the-future

principles manifested completely in the person of Rudolf Steiner, who had already turned

himself inside out to offer as gifts to humanity all that he had experienced and learned.

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 * * *

The past is a very small world, especially for a spiritual initiate blessed with the

capacity to “swim” in the double stream of Time. Each moment, each fractal vortex of

history was available to Rudolf Steiner’s clairvoyant investigation, both as discrete

moments of Time’s immense historical river, and as preparation and seed for the future.

For we who are not endowed with such clairvoyance, the Passy gathering offers a very

different sort of witnessing of the Past’s proximal bounds. The little Rue Raynouard villa

where the lectures were held – rented that 1906 summer by the Russian–Ukrainian

painter and poet Max Woloschin and his painter wife Margarita – had only been built six

years before, on the site of a small farmhouse in whose yard there gushed a spring of the

celebrated “Eaux de Passy” medicinal mineral waters that had been visited by Antoine

Lavoisier, economist and statesman Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Jean-Jacques

Rousseau, Napoleon Bonaparte, Paris mayor Jean Bailly, Dr. Joseph Guillotin, Benjamin

Franklin, and dozens of other Enlightenment notables. Drawn to hear Rudolf Steiner, a

circle of “Occult Enlightenment” notables – Edouard Schuré; the Woloschins; Symbolist

poet Konstantin Balmont; novelist, poet and literary critic Dmitry Merezhkovsky and his

wife “Hippius” – poet, playwright, religious thinker and Symbolist leader Zinaida

Nikolayevna Gippius; mystical poet Nikolai Minsky; and a dozen other fervent seekers of

the mysterious world across the threshold of the physical – came together here each day

for nearly three weeks to drink from a healing fountain of esoteric knowledge.

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 There is no record that the notorious healer Franz Anton Mesmer ever visited that

Passy mineral spring, but it was just blocks from here that Benjamin Franklin (whose

name is on the adjacent street that comes in from the Trocadero) and his Royal

Commission on Animal Magnetism colleagues dealt the death blow to Mesmerism in the

summer of 1784. In the salon and gardens of Ambassador Franklin’s Passy residence, the

greatest polymath of his era and foremost investigator of the tourbillon aerienne, along

with his colleagues Lavoisier, Bailly, Guillotin, physicist, physiologist Charles Louis

Sallin, Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, and naturalist Gabriel de Bory conducted what has for over

two centuries now been hailed as a classic systematic scientifically controlled

investigation of the claims of animal magnetism. Yet it was no such thing. Celebrated as

the first use of blindfolding of both investigators and their subjects, and hence, a paragon

of scientific objectivity, the entire enterprise was shot through with poor experimental

design and execution. Countless commentators have approvingly quoted the

Commission’s report as definitively declaring that “L'imagination fait tout, le Magnétism

est nul” ('Imagination is everything, magnetism nothing'), but the primacy of imagination

applies equally to the investigators, who imagined that no “magnetic fluid” existed, and

hence there would be no valid healing phenomena to witness. Blavatsky, C.G. Harrison,

Rudolf Steiner, and every other 20th century builder of bridges between materialist and

occult science had to contend with the anti-vitalist prejudice fostered by that Passy

commission’s propaganda against the akasha.54

To realize that Mesmer’s invisible magnetic fluid was the very same magical

agent known throughout the ages, one must look to an initiate like Steiner, or to Madame

Blavatsky and other magicians, rather than any Royal Commission for reliable guidance

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through the maze that is magic. Most often, Blavatsky called Mesmer’s magnetic fluid

the “astral light,” deeming it the same as “the Sidereal Light of the Rosicrucians; the

Akâsa of the Hindu Adepts; . . . the nerve-aura and the fluid of the magnetists; the Od of

Reichenbach.” As many as there are different names given to this veiled universal aspect

of nature, humanity has devised rites, rituals, and techniques to actively work with it, and

has universally recognized that it is like a physical “fluid” in that it behaves in two

principle fashions – laminar flow or vortical turbulence. History is also universally

marked by episodes when this powerful “fluid” is active in human affairs but goes

unrecognized by all but a small circle of initiates into magical knowledge. Mesmer’s

healing magic shared a great deal with contemporary folk magical practices – whether in

Germany, France, or across the Atlantic in America. Indeed, while urban elites mocked

Mesmer and his students, rural people understood his magical role and methods as clearly

akin to their communities’ traditions of cunning men and women who possessed

supernatural powers. Even in 1900, there were local folk in Passy making daily trips to

gather l’Eaux de Passy who knew that the true source of its therapeutic properties was

not the chemical composition, but the beings whose qualities graced the springs. They

understood the same to be true of Mesmer and other contemporary healers.55

One sees faintly in the confluence of Nature and human inquiry into Nature at

Passy between the summers of 1784 and 1906 another vortex – an inward movement of

the final exhaustion of the old (Rudolf Steiner usually called this atavistisch – “atavistic”)

inherent, inborn natural clairvoyance for the beings and forces of the supersensible, and

the outward movement – tender, tentative, like a new green shoot or tendril – of the new

etheric clairvoyance that would become the destiny for all human beings. From such a

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perspective, one might see the Exposition Universelle of 1900 across the Seine as the Ür–

symbol of the exhaustion of the old civilization of Materialism, during which, for a very

brief moment, the human being was imprisoned in the autistic confinement of the five

physical senses; and the 1906 Passy gathering – from the upper windows of #5 Rue

Raynouard, one could see the entire Exposition grounds, from the Trocadero to the

Champs de Mars – as the birth of the new spiritual science that would accompany

humanity into the future, as birthright assistance to foster the new spiritual sensory

faculties.

At the Theosophical Society Congress, the lecturers – just like their founder,

Madame Blavatsky – offered no exercises for developing etheric clairvoyance, no

techniques of meditation. Most of the esoteric training undertaken by Theosophists was

drawn from contemporary interpreters of the ancient yoga teachings of the Hindu sage

Patanjali. J. C. Chatterjee, for example, in his 1898 La philosophie esoterique de l’Inde,

taught that:

Your modern knowledge will tell you that the universe you perceive is formed of

tourbillons of movement, tourbillons attracted or repelled, which implies the Sanskrit

‘where everything that exists is Vivartha’ – the Hindu and modern hypotheses are in

perfect accord, and sufficiently trained astral vision: 1) permits one to decompose

physical matter and its constituent elements by direct observation, and experimental

verification, although at a still elemental degree, the law of universal vortices; 2) this is

therefore the second law relating to the process of universal evolution. The universe is

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Vivartha – a vortical movement, where the cause remains identical to itself completely in

producing its effect.56

Chatterjee spoke of the purified astral body, manas, as “l’Objectivité,”

hypothesizing that this state was synonymous with the Virgin Mary of Christian doctrine.

The encounter of this objective principle with the subjective principle of the “I”

(Ankhara) – the “active principle in Nature” – produces a vortex movement that

“engenders all the vortices of the universe. . . This is the original idea of the Immaculate

Conception – le Saint–Esprit, the great breath [souffle] producing movement in cosmic

matter.”57 In his 1906 Le fakirisme hindou et les yogas, Paul Sedir briefly described the

yogic technical training as one aimed at preventing mental matter (Tchit) from taking

various spontaneous forms (Vritthis, i.e., tourbillons/vortices). To attain a state of true

objectivity – manas – the pupil mastered the mental tourbillons/Vritthis with an

invincible will. Noting that Patanjali gave recipes for controlling mental vortices, Sedir

wrote that the object was to “reduce all mental vortices to ONE only, then one dissolves

that, and the soul [Purusha] is finally perceived (Asmita Samadhi).”58 Patanjali gave five

purifications, mantrams, postures/asanas to master respiration and balance one’s vital

dynamism, such that the vortices of the vital energy awakened the chakras, the organs of

the astral body. A number of other fin de siècle authors explaining Hindu yogic systems

spoke of undisturbed subtle matter as chitta, and “turbulent” – i.e., uncontrolled – subtle

matter as chitta vritti. Literally, our undisciplined thinking is like a roiling river, churning

along as trillions of differently sized and shaped vortices of different intensity. The first

step of initiation was to calm and then tame these subtle vortices of thought.

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 In the same year as the Passy gathering, Rudolf Steiner gave what he considered

to be foundational exercises (he called them Nebenübungen – ‘side exercises’ – but they

are usually called “basic” or “subsidiary” exercises) for inner development. The

successful practice of these basic exercises would lead to the first stage of clairvoyance,

which he called “Imagination.” Each exercise was to be carried out for five minutes each

day, for thirty days, before passing on to the next one. Just like walking, the key is to

establish a firm rhythm. Note that each exercise ends with a very specific movement:

1) control of thoughts: we do not govern our thoughts, they govern us completely,

and so we must learn to control them. Rudolf Steiner gave a simple exercise – at a given

time of day, stop your activity and bring to mind some object (he gave the example of a

pencil). Become so absorbed in contemplating this object that no other thought can

disturb your soul. Gradually, you will feel a deep sense of security grows. Conclude the

exercise by focusing on your head and the middle of your spine, and pour into them this

feeling of security by actually lifting your head and feeling the sense of movement into

your spine.

2) control of actions: the “higher life” requires that we do things entirely out of

our own initiative. A simple exercise to practice is to, again, at a regularly chosen time of

day, perform some small gesture or movement – touching your nose, hopping on one

foot, etc. – that is unrelated to the external environment. A feeling of inner activity will

stir; pour this feeling into yourself by dropping your head forward, so that the feeling

streams down to a point just above the heart.

3) strive for equanimity: in our feeling life, we swing back and forth between joy

and sorrow. To come to a steadfast even-temperedness, bring some experience to mind,

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and feel into it with equanimity until a sense of tranquility develops; then, pour it out

from the heart toward the hands, the feet, and the head, moving each slightly in

succession to allow the feeling to enter them.

4) cultivate positivity: we should seek always for the good, the true, and the

beautiful in all living beings, experiences, and things. Bring to mind a person or an

experience, and let it grow into a feeling of bliss; let it stream into the eyes, and then out

into your surround.

5) become open-minded: we tend to judge things from habit, out of things we

already know, but need to remain always alert for the possibility of learning something

new, from the most unexpected directions. Bring your attention to something you have

heard – a contrary opinion, for example – and contemplate it with a sense of learning

something surprising from it. A very subtle feeling will develop that there is in the space

immediately before you, a slight stirring. Bring this feeling within each of the senses –

your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin, where it can be felt as a sense of warmth.

6) develop inner balance: balance or harmony is a result of these five qualities, so

in the sixth month, combine the five exercises in different succession, and you will notice

a beautiful equilibrium of soul.

Around the same time as the six basic exercises, Rudolf Steiner began to

recommend an exercise he called the Rückschau, or “backward review.” In the evening,

before going to sleep, imagine yourself walking back through your day, seeing pictures of

the day’s most important experiences. Though the overwhelming tendency was to fall

quickly to sleep, Steiner reassured his students that once they had begun this retrospective

“walk,” their souls would continue the movement while they were asleep. This exercise

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can quickly be felt to be a preliminary step toward knowledge of karma; as Rudolf

Steiner said, as a result of the Rückschau, “we take the past with us into the future and

prepare the way for our immortality.” Both the Rückschau and the six basic exercises are

founded on a single gesture or motion – the Vortex. Practicing these, what begins as a

vague feeling of whirling comes more and more into focus as distinct vortical motions

possessing varying qualities and characteristics. A few months after the Passy gathering,

in a letter Rudolf Steiner wrote to Edouard Schuré, Schuré’s master advised him

regarding these exercises:

You are in harmony with the Rosicrucian Wisdom. And if I can ask anything of

you, it is this: don't lose patience when it seems that any noticeable effect is a long time

coming. The Path is a safe one, but it takes a lot of patience.59

At no other time more than the summer and fall of 1906 would the Vortex serve

as a keyword for Rudolf Steiner. It was also the season in which he most fully focused his

research, teaching, and organizational efforts upon the renewal of Rosicrucianism. On

September 4, in a lecture on “Rosicrucian Training and the Mystery of the Earth,” Steiner

said that “These vortices exist everywhere in the world.” On 20 October, in “The

Rosicrucian Spiritual Path,” in but a few lines, he compassed nearly all that was stated in

the four Vortex Axioms:

There is a certain process in the higher worlds which also operates in the physical

world: the whirling of a vortex. You can observe this whirling of a vortex when you look

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at a star cluster, as in the constellation of Orion, for example. There you see a spiral, only

it is on the physical plane. But you can view this also on all planes. It can present itself in

the form of one vortex entwining itself into another. This is a figure to be found on the

astral plane in all possible forms. When you understand this figure, you can grasp through

it how one race transforms itself into another. At the time of formation of the first sub-

race of our present main race, the sun stood directly in the sign of Cancer. At that time,

one race entwined itself in the other; for this reason, one has this occult sign for Cancer.60

When Rosicrucians used the double–vortex Cancer glyph, they understood

intuitively that it embodied the birth of all new phenomena – new human races; new

organs; new animal and plant species; new impulses for cultural renewal – out of the

spiritual world. Rosicrucians used the Cancer glyph as the symbol for the Akasha because

it was from the achaos (the Greek word for the center of the vortex) that everything new

in the Cosmos was born. As a Rosicrucian initiate, Rudolf Steiner knew that each time he

drew the Wirbelbewegung, each time he spoke of it, he inwardly knew that he was also

speaking of himself and the spiritual brotherhood of which he was the highest

representative on Earth.

The fervent search for a science of the spirit by cosmopolitans like Marie von

Sivers and Edouard Schuré and all of the other attendees of Rudolf Steiner’s Passy

lectures and at the Theosophical Congress in Paris was certainly as profound a world

historical event as was King Louis XVI’s Commission. Indeed, the very force of

materialism that the Commission fostered was becoming a danger to the human soul, and

as surely as the spiritual world supported the healing waters of the Passy springs and the

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healing “magnetic” passes of earnest practitioners of the new magic of Mesmerism,

spiritual beings supported Rudolf Steiner’s Geistwissenschaft, including his declaration

that “Everything brought to completion as a Vortex is magic.” This final Vortex Axiom

necessitates a fuller consideration of the nature of magic, but if one simply understands

that magic is the principle and action whereby the subtle rules the dense, and that the

Vortex is perhaps the subtlest physical phenomenon in Nature, we too can begin to build

a bridge toward the realization of the goal that “The human being must become a

Vortex.”

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 4: The Spiralists

One halcyon spring day in 1903, the sixty-nine-year-old anatomist and naturalist

Dr. James Bell Pettigrew sat at the top of a sloping street on the outskirts of St. Andrews,

Scotland, perched inside a petrol-powered aëroplane of his own design. Over the course

of forty years, ever since he began his aeronautical experiments in London in 1864,

Pettigrew had constructed dozens of working models of various flying apparatus. From

anatomical dissection and observations of animals in the wild and at the London Zoo,

Pettigrew had come to conceive of all creatures — whether on land, in water, or in the air

— as propelling themselves by throwing their bodies into spiraling curves, such that their

movements were akin to waves in fluid, or to waves of sound. Instead of driving the

wings vertically as in other flying machines modeled on animal flight, Pettigrew’s

“ornithopter” emulated the movement that he had discovered to be universal in flying

creatures: rhythmic figure-of-eight curves. To permit this undulatory motion, Pettigrew

had furnished the root of the wing with a ball-and-socket joint; to regulate the several

movements of the vibratory wing — comprised of bamboo cane from which issued

tapering rods of whalebone covered in a thin sheet of India rubber — he employed a

cross-system of elastic bands. A two-stroke engine’s piston drove this elaborate apparatus

of helical biological mimicry.

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 The ornithopter covered a distance of about twenty meters during its maiden flight

before crashing, breaking both the contraption’s spiral whalebone wings and its pilot’s

own spiral hip. Convalescence gave Dr. Pettigrew the opportunity to begin work on

Design in Nature: Illustrated by Spiral and Other Arrangements in the Inorganic and

Organic Kingdoms as Exemplified in Matter, Force, Life, Growth, Rhythms, &c.,

Especially in Crystals, Plants, and Animals. In January 1908, as he was nearing its

completion, Pettigrew looped back at the work’s end to reiterate what he had stated so

vociferously at the beginning — the absolute primacy of design by a “ Great First Cause”

and “Omni–Present Framer and Upholder of the Universe.” After a lengthy essay

considering the antiquity of man — and once again stressing that the human physical

form had altered not at all for at least some ten thousand years — he concluded:

Man is not in any sense the product of evolution. He is not compounded of

an endless number of lower animal forms which merge into each other by

inseparable gradations and modifications from the monera up to man. . .

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 He is the highest of all living forms. The world was made for him and he

for it. . . Everything was made to fit and dovetail into every other thing. . . There

was moreover no accident or chance. On the contrary, there was forethought,

prescience, and design.61

Over the 3 volumes, 1416 pages, and nearly 2000 illustrations that made up his

magnum opus Design in Nature, Dr. James Bell Pettigrew barely mentioned Charles

Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which he found “lame, halting, and impotent”.62

Though Pettigrew deeply admired the English naturalist — who had on more than one

occasion (as had T. H. Huxley, Richard Owen, John Lubbock, St. George Mivart, and

dozens of other leading London men of science) visited Pettigrew at London’s Hunterian

Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England to view his state-of-the-art

anatomical and physiological preparations — Darwin seemed to Pettigrew only

tentatively confident of the very theory he had proposed to explain Nature’s “endless

forms most beautiful”. He expected that, within a generation, few would recall

Darwinism as anything other than a passing fancy. What Pettigrew could not excuse were

the egregious errors in Darwin’s pronouncement about the spiraling motions of Clematis,

Convolvulus, Honeysuckle, Hops, and many other plants. Whatever positive

contributions the retiring naturalist had made with his research on twining plants were

undermined by his inexact language and thinking. Pettigrew strenuously objected to

Darwin’s use of the term “reflex action” for these plants’ behavior, since this was a

phrase used for action in nervous systems — of which Clematis, Convolvulus, and their

cousins possessed none.63

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 By way of a few ingenious experiments — conducted back in 1865, after reading

Darwin’s “On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants” — Pettigrew had utterly

demolished its author’s “irritability theory” for the movement of the green chimeras. Just

as with spiral teeth, claws, horns, muscles, and bones, spirally-turning plant tendrils were

in no way the result of external contact. These whirling, twirling structures, as free of

contact as the ocean-suspended spiraling egg cases of sharks and dogfish, danced to some

wholly invisible music.

Pettigrew confessed himself totally spellbound by the mystery of Nature’s most

ubiquitous, liquid, and quixotic form — the spiral. Though he had scrutinized this

universal cipher from the macrocosmic spiral nebulae down to the dextro- and sinistro-

helical microcosmic molecules of the periodic table, Pettigrew was left baffled by the

question of its origin. The best that he could say was that the answer “by no means lies

on the surface”.64 Overwhelmed as he was by the world’s archetypal whorl, he was sure

of one thing — these marvelous spiral arrangements could not be of purely physical

origin. A reviewer of Pettigrew’s Lancet series on circulation in plants and animals

declared that the distinguished anatomist was a “spiralist” who found that organs were

not only constituted spirally, but that they functioned spirally too.65

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 Putting Isaac Roberts’ astonishing 1888 photographs of the Great Nebula in

Andromeda and other spiral nebulae to cosmic effect at his argument’s outset, Pettigrew

then immersed the reader in a cascade of more humble spiral forms — the mineral

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prochlorite; ram’s horns; bacteria from the River Thames; fossil algae carpogonia; dozens

of figures of spiral fronds, floral bracts, stems, leaves, tendrils, and seeds in plants.

Design in Nature’s plates of spirals in the animal world started with spermatozoa (of

crayfish, rabbit, field mice, wood shrike, goldfinch, creeper, perch, frog, rat, and human)

and ran up the great chain of being through: frog ganglia; dozens of species of

Foraminifera; the exquisite Nautilus pompilius; Devonian, Silurian, Jurassic, Cretaceous,

and contemporary shells; the horns of goats, gazelles, and antelope; the human cochlea;

almost every section of the vertebrate skeleton, from the phalanges of the Indian elephant

to the turbinated inner bones of the human skull. The human umbilical cord looked for all

the world like a waterspout or the homely and helically aspiring English Hops, those

twining stems of Darwin’s go-to research subject. All these were pictured in the first fifty

pages of the book; hundreds more images were liberally spread through the complete

three volumes. At times, while reading Design in Nature, the spiral risks losing all

significance, so promiscuously ubiquitous is its form.

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116
 At the center of this dizzying array lay the sacred secret that had so profoundly

occupied Aristotle and Aquinas, Leonardo and Vesalius — the human heart. The heart’s

sevenfold spiral structure was the mystery of mysteries, its form preserving perfectly the

sense of both its muscular contractions and the interior circulatory patterns of its blood.

Pettigrew had himself discovered this as a young medical student at the University of

Edinburgh; so impressed had his professor been by Pettigrew’s dissections that he invited

him to deliver the prestigious Croonian lecture at the Royal Society of London for 1860.

The University of Edinburgh was, in Pettigrew’s medical student days, at the

zenith of its reputation: James Syme was dazzling the world with his bold pioneering

surgery; James Young Simpson had — with dinner guests at his own 52 Queen Street

table — proved the safety of chloroform as an obstetric anesthetic; with his methodical

use of the microscope, John Hughes Bennett inaugurated a new era in the teaching of

clinical medicine; Joseph Lister’s careful application of carbolic acid (phenol) to wounds,

dressings, and instruments — though mocked initially by his medical colleagues — had

revolutionized the practice of surgery.

When Pettigrew reminisced that the rivalry among these stellar physicians had

been “a case of diamond cut diamond”, he recognized their fame by employing a most

apt metaphor. Cutting — with a varied repertoire of scalpels, lancets, and scissors — was

the surgeon’s special art. Pettigrew’s tutor in the art was Professor of Anatomy John

Goodsir, who, with his large, powerful, finely shaped hands never failed to wield the

scalpel “with a dexterity and grace truly remarkable”. At the end of the 1857–58 winter

session, Professor Goodsir gave out as the subject for the senior anatomy gold medal:

“The Arrangement of the Muscular Fibres in the Ventricles of the Vertebrate Heart”. This

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Gordian knot of anatomy had over the previous three centuries foiled the efforts of

Vesalius, Albinus, Haller, and others to unravel it.66

Back home, between sessions at his family’s country home in Lanarkshire, the

twenty-four-year-old Pettigrew at once proceeded to dissect in large numbers every kind

of heart within reach, making careful drawings and notes of each. Beginning with sheep,

calf, ox, and horse, he found that he had to devise a new mode of dissection that would

allow both sufficient hardness to preserve the anatomical structures, and ample softness

so as to tease out their multitudinous tissue layers.

Having exhausted a battery of methylated spirits and other chemicals, he hit upon

the expedient of stuffing and gently distending the ventricles of the heart with a truly

Scottish material — dry oatmeal. Slowly boiling the hearts for four to five hours, he

could get quit of all the external fat, blood vessels, nerves, lymphatics, and cellular tissue.

A fortnight to three weeks hardening in a bath of methylated spirits followed, after which

he was able to separate and peel off the muscular fibers of the ventricles as if they were

layers of an onion. The layers were of two kinds: muscular fibers from the outside of the

heart wound in a spiral direction from left to right, progressing downwards; the internal

fibers ran in an opposite spiral direction from right to left, upwards.

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 In fact, the internal and external layers of the muscular fibers of each and every

one of the more than one hundred vertebrate hearts he had dissected formed two sets of

opposite spirals which crossed each other, the crossings becoming more oblique towards

the center. These inner and outer layers were further divided into a pair of left- and right-

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handed spiral sets. There was, especially in the left ventricle, a most perfect spiral

symmetry, one that rivaled the Great Andromeda Nebula.

As gifted a model maker as he was a dissector, Pettigrew found this now-exposed

double spiral heart to be an anatomical puzzle of the first order, for the external muscle

fibers were seamlessly and spirally continuous with the internal muscle fibers at both the

apex and base of the ventricles. One day Pettigrew came down to dinner a little earlier

than usual, and, seeing a newspaper lying on the table, felt an impulse to roll it up

obliquely from one corner — as grocers do in making conical paper bags. To Pettigrew’s

surprise, the lines of print on the layers of newspaper ran in different directions according

to a graduated order: the lines on the outer layers ran spirally from left to right

downwards, becoming more oblique as the central layer was reached; the lines of print on

the inner layer ran spirally from right to left upwards, becoming more vertical as they

moved away from the center. The newspaper print on the two layers crossed at widening

angles, forming an X, as the center was approached.

The print was seamless at both base and apex of the paper cone, resembling the

arrangement of muscle fibers in the heart. There were, in effect, a series of complicated

figure-of-eight loops, arranged in a marvelously mathematical pattern of great complexity

and beauty. “Here”, he wrote, “was the whole thing in a nutshell. It was a case of the

reading turning in or involuting at the apex and of the reading turning out or evoluting at

the base”.67 Pettigrew’s newspaper model showed that the heart’s double helical structure

— now known as the helical ventricular myocardial band (HVMB) — was essentially a

triple-twisted Möbius strip.

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 Crying “EUREKA!”, Pettigrew ransacked the Lankarshire fish shops for the

hearts of cod, salmon, sunfish, and turbot. He also lucked into securing the heart of a

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monster shark killed in the Firth of Forth. From the large hotels he collected several fine

sea turtle hearts, as well as a land tortoise and an alligator. Raiding the poulterers too, he

got the hearts of duck, goose, capercaillie, turkey, and one “splendid” swan’s heart.68

From fish to frog to turtle, the muscular fiber arrangement — though interesting

— shed no light on the complicated arrangement in the ventricles of bird and mammal.

(The pattern in the bird exactly matched that of the mammal except that, in the right

ventricle of the bird, a muscular valve took the place of the fibrous tricuspid valve of

mammals.) In the small hours of the morning, in his humble student lodgings, Pettigrew

worked away now at dissections of sheep, calf, ox, horse, deer, pig, porpoise, seal, lion,

giraffe, camel, and human — 112 dissections and associated drawings in all.

When the day for awarding the gold medal arrived, four hundred students

crowded the large anatomical theater to hear the altogether unknown Pettigrew’s name

pronounced. Professor Goodsir asked Pettigrew to call on him the next day, anxious to

win the heart dissection preparations for the University’s Anatomical Museum. The 112

neat glass jars can still be found there today. He also invited young Pettigrew to report on

his discoveries to the Royal Society of London; Pettigrew delivered his address, “On the

Arrangement of the Muscular Fibres in the Ventricles of the Vertebrate Heart”, to the

Royal Society the very same week that Origin of Species was published by John Murray

of Albemarle Street, just a five-minute walk from the Royal Society lecture hall. That

anyone might attribute such an ingeniously crafted organ as the mammalian heart to mere

chance, Pettigrew believed, was sheer madness.

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 Nature’s variegated spiral structures, with the mammalian heart always for him

the epitome, represented but one panel of the triptych that Pettigrew would go on to

assemble over the next half century. Volume Two of Design in Nature is devoted solely

to spiral movement in circulation (although the circulation section dealt with both plant

and lower animal circulatory systems, three-quarters of this study focused on the

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mammals and man); Volume Three to the spiral as locomotion’s characteristic form. In

both arenas of animal physiology, Pettigrew found a spectacular resonance: movement at

once precedes and follows structure, the direction of movement in living things being in

every instance determined by the composition and configuration of kinetic spiral parts.

This resonance seemed to reach right down to the atomic level. Unlike the closed system

of the heart, the spiraling lines of atoms and molecules were arranged so that matter could

be added in any amount, in unlimited directions. An open flow of energy and form was

the basis for growth and progression in all creatures.

Reflected in the vertebrate skeleton, this open attitude also made graceful

locomotion possible. Pettigrew quoted his mentor John Goodsir: “The peculiar spiral

attitudes into which the human body can be thrown are explained by the spiral curve of

the vertebral articular surfaces, and the spiral arrangement of the muscles. No mammal

can throw its trunk into those spiral curves which subserve the balance of the human

frame and confer the peculiar grace and expression of its movements.”69 Only birds —

especially his beloved swallows and swifts, which darted round the turrets of

Swallowgate, the stone residence that Pettigrew had built at St. Andrews, and across the

broad moor leading to the nearby sea cliffs — could rival the poetry of motion executed

by the human body, their movements freed in the less resistant medium of air. The

earthbound human body’s idiosyncratic spiraling structure liberated the hands to sculpt

clay, tie rope, and grasp chalk, paintbrush, and scalpel in order to go inside the organs of

Life and then represent them in color and line. Bony spirals hidden beneath spiral

muscles flexed and extended to skip, leap, creep, crawl, wriggle, tumble, skate, march,

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flip, prance, moonwalk. The polka-ing, pirouette-ing, schottish-ing, waltzing, two-

stepping human danced upon a near infinity of corporeal eddies.

When Pettigrew took up the third strand of his argument from design, he began

again with structures — the muscular and osseous systems, which he found intimately

complimentary. The very first plate suggested that each part of our bony frame was but a

partial realization of the sort of spiral geometry Pettigrew had discovered in the heart.

The halfway twisting femur, humerus, tibia, fibula, ulna, and radius reached their fully

spiral apotheosis in clavicle, pelvis, and scapula — each of which approached once again

the geometry of the Möbius strip.

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 Published posthumously, just months before the centennial of Darwin’s birth, and

the fiftieth anniversary of On the Origin of Species — celebrations which were fully

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exploited by Darwinians to advance a false picture of Darwin as a rabid opponent of

teleology70 — Design in Nature dropped from sight as rapidly as Pettigrew’s ornithopter

dropped from the sky over the St. Andrews moorland. Nature’s full-page review savaged

the work’s teleological argument, wanly submitting that had Pettigrew lived to complete

the editing of his opus, he would have “expunged or modified” its conclusions.71

Biostatistician Raymond Pearl was less generous, calling “the ponderous work”

“probably the most extensive and serious single contribution to humorous literature

which has appeared in recent years”, and declaring Pettigrew’s “spiral philosophy” —

that “the Creator fashioned men and corkscrews on the same plan” — as “medieval as

any cathedral”.72 Not a single work of contemporary biology or natural history —

including D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form (1917), which devoted

considerable discussion to spiral forms — cited Design in Nature.

One might say that Dr. Pettigrew’s magnum opus failed for the same reason that

his ornithopter did – for want of sufficient appreciation of the Vortex’s ubiquity,

universality, and utility in biological design. The word “Vortex” occurs but a dozen times

in the three volumes of Design in Nature, mostly speaking of the spiral design carrying

right up to space, in allusions to Lord Rosse’s photographic images of the spiral nebulae.

Surely this consummate “Spiralist” is cognizant of the Vortex. On the very first page

Pettigrew notes Descartes’ vortical theory of the formation of the universe, describes the

vortical form of waterspouts, and includes as Figure #5 in a work with 2000 illustrations,

a diagram of a vortex ring. Citing not a single paper on the physics of vortex motion

from the growing scientific literature, the gifted anatomist lacked a language of

biophysics. Volume 3 – principally devoted to animal locomotion in air – makes not a

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single mention of the role of wing–generated vortices in providing lift. Neither his own

keen observations nor the science of aerodynamics had as yet discovered this – one more

example of the Vortex hiding in plain sight. In 1908, dramatic fluid– and debris–filled

waterspouts and whirlwinds were clearly understood as phenomena of vortex motion;

neither the wholly invisible train of vortices eddying off a gannet’s or or heron’s or

pterodactyl’s (all species that received close scrutiny by Pettigrew) wing, nor the infinite

microvortices attending every single insect’s filamentous wing flaps had entered

Pettigrew’s nor any other aeronaut’s consciousness.

Design in Nature closes with a detailed appendix about Pettigrew’s techniques of

anatomical preparation–making, illustrated with photographs of various human organs in

formaldehyde–filled jars and plaster cast cross-sections showing both hard and soft

bodily parts. Whether soft or hard, embalmed in formaldehyde or stuffed with plaster–of–

Paris, every single one of these illustrations expresses the human body’s signature shape

– the Vortex. An anterio–posterior section of the human head and neck showed the right

and left cerebral lobes, the cerebellum, and the spinal cord as paired vortices. A plaster

cast of the right and left ventricles of the heart; a longitudinal section of the human foot;

dissections of the superficial muscles of the left scapula and upper arm, and the left half

of the pelvis, hip and thigh; the left forearm and leg muscles in semi-pronated position;

the superficial muscles of both the sole and the arch of the foot – a Vortex-trained eye

saw in each and every one double lemniscates, vortex rings, Pettigrew’s “spirals” galore.

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 The very last of this exposition’s 2000 illustrations is a photograph of a plaster–

of–Paris cast of an anterio–posterior section of a frozen human torso with all the viscera

in situ as in life. In the center of the thorax one sees the heart and major blood vessels,

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encased in the right and left lungs. Below these, separating the chest from the abdomen,

the paper–thin layer of the diaphragm floats above the liver – the greatest gland in the

human body. Finally, the section reveals at the bottom the stomach and bowels. Regarded

while holding in mind Rudolf Steiner’s first Rosicrucian Vortex Axiom, one cannot help

but see the core of the human body as an analogue of the great dynamic deltas at the

mouths of the Mississippi or the Amazon or the Ganges or Nile, each curved and re–

curved line the product of the same innate turbulent genius that shifts and shapes

sandbars and meander scrolls and a thousand other landforms. Without realizing it, James

Bell Pettigrew surely showed that just like the World without, the one within the human

frame was a Vortex too.

* * *

Throughout Design in Nature, when Dr. Pettigrew assaults evolutionary theory,

he attacks not Darwin, but German zoologist Ernst Haeckel and his “merely mechanical

or automatic view of the cosmos.” As “head of the material or matter ‘cult,’” Haeckel

dispensed with any First Cause, content that autogony – the arising out of a formative

fluid of the first protoplasmic substance – and plasmogony – the differentiation of

primitive individual organisms from these protoplasmic compounds – accounted for the

origin of all life. For Haeckel, a gifted artist whose zoological drawings were widely used

as inspiration for a broad spectrum of artistic and architectural design, all supposed

“design” in the animal, plant, and human kingdoms was strictly the result of chance

operating mechanistically on inert biological matter.73

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 For all his animus against Ernst Haeckel, Pettigrew still drew upon his nemesis’s

zoological illustrations, including his infamous “embryonic grid.” Plate XCIII,

“Transition Links in Relation to Types,” illustrating vertebrate development, culminates

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in a series of ten paired embryos showing each animal – tortoise, fowl, echidna, koala,

rabbit, pig, deer, cat, monkey, and man (left to right in Figure 9 in Plate XCIII above) – at

the stage when each embryo bears gill arches and the absence of limbs, and a second

series where the limb buds are clearly visible and the gill arches have receded.

Pettigrew’s explanatory note takes aim once more at Haeckel’s theory of progressive

evolution: “they afford no proof of evolution, or the production of the higher animal

forms from the lower ones.” Pettigrew’s embryo series was a much abbreviated version

of Haeckel’s widely reproduced plates illustrating his celebrated Biogenetic Law, first

stated in his 1866 work Generelle Morphologie der Organismen: “Ontogenesis is a brief

and rapid recapitulation of phylogenesis.”74 Haeckel’s “portrait galleries” or “grids” of

comparative vertebrate embryogenesis – continually published in new editions up until

1914, and reprinted in dozens of other widely read works including textbooks – were

extremely powerful visual arguments for evolution.75

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 Pettigrew very briefly summarized the biogenetic law: “It is a common belief that

the human fætus during gestation passes through the several changes and stages which

characterise the adult fish, amphibian, reptile, and bird, to say nothing of all animals

lower in the scale of being, even to the protiston, which consists of an amorphous speck

of protoplasm.” Acutely aware that these grids were popularly perceived as affording

“crowning proof of the truth of the doctrine of evolution,” Pettigrew marshaled his

arguments – the incomplete fossil record; longtime persistence of form in individual

species; the reversion to original form in cultivated plants; hybrid sterility, etc. – against

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what to him was the decidedly un–philosophical folly of evolution by natural selection.

That embryos of taxonomically superior classes of vertebrates passed through stages

frequently resembling the adult condition of simpler organisms was a necessary

consequence of the conditions of life in utero, he argued. 

The facts, carefully considered point rather to the conclusion that all plants and

animals are formed on a general plan which repeats itself; that the simpler types precede

the more complex; that portions of the simpler types reappear in the higher, and that the

structures in both the lower and higher types are largely due to a repetition of parts by

division, by budding, by branching, by infolding, by outfolding, by invagination, by

evagination, by doubling, by crumpling, &c.76

Infolding, outfolding, invagination, evagination – this was the topographical language of

both all embryos and the Vortex. In this one statement, Pettigrew came very close to the

recognition of a very different “mechanism” than the one promulgated by Haeckel. The

jello-like colloidal nature of all embryos demanded a universal conformance to laws far

more fundamental than either any Biogenetic Law, or even the strictures of divine-driven

typology. Both Pettigrew’s designer God and Haeckel’s designer molecules and atoms

were absolutely constrained to work within the parameters of simple hydrodynamics.

Whatever the First Cause, the First Movement would be a Vortex, a primal eddy in the

protoplasm, be it chick, echidna, koala, monkey or man, and that whirl would make other

whirls and subwhirls, every single one of them an incipient organ or tissue.

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 * * *

By a very small and completely insignificant accident of history, February 16,

1914 was both Ernst Haeckel’s 80th birthday, and the day when Carnegie embryo #836

arrived at the Department of Embryology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a

day after Dr. William Wood Russell had performed a hysterectomy on a 25–year–old

farm wife from western Virginia known only as “Mrs. R.” Responding to Dr. Franklin

Mall’s urgent appeal to physicians to supply his research program with undamaged

human embryos, Dr. Russell – in the midst of a tremendous blizzard which piled snow

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high in the streets of Baltimore – immediately opened Mrs. R’s excised uterus after the

surgery to see if it might contain an embryo. The storm had sufficiently cleared on

Monday so that Dr. Russell traveled a mile across town to deliver the embryo just as the

JHU embryologists were finishing lunch.

Placing the embryo under a microscope in his lab, Dr. Herbert McLean Evans

recognized immediately that it was in exquisite condition: “Shimmering through the

amnion the 3 mm. embryo could be seen with its head visible above. It was apparently

perfectly preserved and two gill arches were seen.” Later in the day, Dr. Evans dashed off

a thank you note to Dr. Russell: “I carefully opened the . . . chorion and found a beautiful

young embryo which we have fixed in corrosive acetic and which will doubtless be one

of the very best specimens in the collection. I do not know how to inform you of our

appreciation of your thoughtfulness.”

In Leipzig Germany this same day, Ernst Haeckel was overcome with happiness

on the occasion of his 80th birthday, surrounded by admiring students, colleagues, and

friends. Over 120 scientists – including Wilhelm Ostwald, Paul Kammerer, Jacques

Loeb, Richard Hertwig and other leading embryologists – contributed tributes and

reminiscences to Was Wir Ernst Haeckel (What We Owe to Ernst Haeckel), a two–

volume festschrift presented to this titan of modern natural science. Although both his

Biogenetic Law and Gastraea theory had fallen out of fashion among most of his

colleagues, the popular reputation of Haeckel both in Europe and North America was

undiminished. As it had consistently done for the past four decades, the New York Times

celebrated Haeckel as a triumphant, bold, iconoclastic free thinker, running an article on

the 16th headlined: “Gives Heart to Museum.” The piece noted that a Professor Doerfler

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of Vienna had bequeathed one of his eyes, his “sick heart,” and his brain to the Phyletic

Museum in Jena, as a gesture “to establish the truth of your great principles.” The Times

Sunday supplement of 22 February featured a half–page paean to Haeckel, complete with

a photograph showing him at his desk, a human skull and unidentified embryo in a jar

close to his hand.

Chicago’s Open Court magazine published this same photograph by Paul Carus in

its February 1914 issue, along with a reprint of Haeckel’s recent address on “The

Boundaries of Natural Science.” The magazine cast the year 1913 as the “jubilee of

anthropology,” since in 1863 Haeckel had made his first exposition of the Biogenetic

Law, which “solves the riddle of the history of the animal kingdom and hence also of our

own race.” Every photo of Haeckel (like Darwin, he was graced with a broad full beard)

placed him in the aura not just of scientific genius, but as a kind of deliverer of humanity

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from the ignorance of religious superstition. As powerfully as the Hopkins embryologists,

Haeckel prepared the 20th century to see embryos as miniature engines of evolution

consigning to the dustbin all former conceptions of their forms as expressing processes of

spiritual Creation. In the wake of Darwin’s death in 1882 the world needed the image of a

gentle wise man to carry the brutal torch of Materialism; Haeckel filled this bill perfectly.

His glowing eyes, paternal beard, and broad forehead were the fleshy foundation of his

global celebrity. Haeckel was as much of an icon as his embryonic grid.

1914 was in fact a kind of annus mirabilis for Frankensteinian science. At Woods

Hole Marine Biological Laboratory that summer, Rockefeller University’s Jacques Loeb

and his protégé Ernest Just were pioneering techniques for fostering parthenogenesis in

sea urchins. They found that they could fertilize urchin eggs by exposing them to

ultraviolet rays. Loeb’s colleague Alexis Carrel announced in May 1914 that the

embryonic chick culture he had begun in a petri dish on January 17, 1912 had now been

transplanted 358 times, and that the cells were growing at a higher rate than ever before.

His “chicken heart culture” became world famous, as the leading scientific

accomplishment demonstrating that life was merely a physical phenomenon capable of

Promethean replication.

On April Fools Day in Baltimore, operations began to immortalize #836. In the

six weeks since its arrival, Dr. Evans had immersed it in a series of alcohol and then

formalin baths, before placing it on March 31 in a solution of 70 percent alcohol plus

iodine, making it ready for serial sectioning. At 9:58 AM the next morning, Evans

embedded the embryo in a block of melted paraffin, then at 10:25 AM he plunged it into

cold water for 15 minutes so that it would set. After a lab technician had microscopically

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examined the microtome cutting blade’s surface for any imperfections, he sliced the

paraffin–embedded embryo into thin slivers. In 45 minutes, the quarter–inch–long

embryonic human being known as #836 lay in 248 15 microns thick (a micron is a

millionth of a meter) sections. The embryologists were jubilant. Here at last was the

ontogenetic microcosmic virtual x-ray grid to match Haeckel’s phylogenetic

Macrocosmic vertebrate embryonic grid.

At the very same hour, in Dornach Switzerland, a crew of hundreds of volunteer

laborers from all over Europe broke into wild applause as a pair of spruce trees were put

into place at the apices of adjacent massive wooden domes, one slightly smaller and

lower than the other. The topping out ceremony for the building tentatively called the

“Johannes Bau” (John House) was for its architect Dr. Rudolf Steiner but a brief respite

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in the midst of a month of furious activity lecturing in Stuttgart, Pforzheim, Basel, Berlin,

Munich, Vienna, and Prague. Inspired by his long friendship with and admiration for

Ernst Haeckel, during this same month Steiner brought out a revised edition of his 1900

work, Die Rätsel der Philosophie: In ihrer Geschichte als Umriss dargestellt, which he

had dedicated to Haeckel, and whose title followed Haeckel’s 1899 Die Welträthsel, or

“World Riddle.”

Steiner’s Dornach building was intended by him as an artistic aid to the modern

human being to solve the world riddle that was man. He had modeled the building in

clay, sculpting it out of the same in–streaming cosmic forces that built up the human

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head, which it closely resembled. A noted architect of civic buildings from California,

upon studying the building, declared: “The one has done this is a master of mathematics,

a sovereign ruler of our profession. . . The person who erected this captures the heights

because he is master of the depths.” This architect was only partially correct, for the

Johannes Bau (eventually christened the “Goetheanum” by Steiner) was but incidentally

a mathematical tour de force. To break through to a totally new way of architecture, its

designer had to go inside the forces acting upon matter, allow them to fully resound

within himself, so that they might there find a crucible of metamorphosis upon their

reentry into the physical world – a threefold movement not unlike the clay sphere

inversion exercise. Steiner’s goal was to make the building organically speak the cosmic

laws that built up the Earth and human being both.

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 Within the sphere of the human head, expressed anatomically by both the shaping

of the skull’s inner concavities and reflected also in the architecture of the brain, there is

a pair of smaller overlapping spheres in the form of cerebrum and cerebellum. The

Goetheanum closely followed this same ground plan. The outer walls held entrances and

corridors that led to the two smaller inner domes, the larger of which was an auditorium

for audience members to receive from the stage under the smaller dome the artistic

pictures of humanity’s true destiny and evolution. Organically–sculptured capitals atop

seven massive wooden columns ringed the audience, over whose head arched pastel–

colored frescoes of Cosmogenesis and Anthropogenesis. The stained glass windows that

flooded the auditorium with colorful light bore deeply incised pictures portraying the

secrets of the human path of initiation.

At the exact moment in Earth history when microtome and microscope enabled

embryologists to peer into the tissues and cavities of a developing human being, Steiner’s

Goetheanum also gave visitors an experience of the temple of their own body. While the

Hopkins scientists drilled deep down into matter to wrest Creation’s secrets, Steiner’s

building worked from the opposite direction, drawing toward the building’s and its

visitors’ own center the forces and beings at the periphery. Pillars, plinths, capitals,

architraves – each architectural element resounded with cosmic and planetary forces. The

12 constellations of the zodiac and 7 planets of the solar system were palpably at play

within the space under the double domes, especially when the planetary pillars were

bathed in the colored light streaming in through the windows. For those visitors mindful

of Rudolf Steiner’s teaching that the form of every person’s head is a metamorphosis of

the trunk and limbs of the previous incarnation, the building could literally become an

142
initiation experience. Here one could read from a building that the human head was

formed by turning the body inside out, and the body by turning the head outside in.

Taking up the position of the epiphysis – the lectern poised between the two circles of

cerebrum/stage and cerebellum/auditorium – any human being might potentially feel

themselves as an embryonic being, one whose task was to turn himself inside out, just as

the very Cosmos had done to create the human bodily form.

Nowhere inside the Goetheanum did there appear the image of the human

embryo, and yet every surface of the structure echoed the same flowing curves and

streaming movements frozen in time by the serially sectioned #836. By what weird

morphological alchemy were Steiner’s 1914 designs for the immense wooden Saturn,

Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus capitals exact replicas of shapes seen

inside the Embryonic Arcade, whether as pictured by the Carnegie stages or

contemporary cinematic embryonic digital simulations? “Fixing” was the technical term

143
for the most critical stage of making #836 and any other embryo immortally available for

microscopic study. Despite the panoramic capacity of modern film and digital animation

techniques to capture the microscopic movements of embryonic cells and tissues, the

paramount pictures in our contemporary Embryonic Arcade are illusions of life, for they

still are rapidly projected single images strung together flipbook–style to imitate the

living movements.

Nothing, absolutely nothing inside the Goetheanum was “fixed.” Every single

surface seemed to move. Before Rudolf Steiner, Goethe had been the premier student and

expositor of metamorphosis in plants and animals. Goethe was sufficiently adept in his

phenomenological observations that he could bring forth from within himself wholly

continuous inner movies whose movements were faithful to the creatures themselves.

With the Goetheanum, Steiner approached this same fidelity, actually creating a building

that moved as metamorphically as the embryo. The great unspoken secret of this new

mystery temple was that, like its architect, every single human being was endowed with

the capacity to experience embryogenesis – and Cosmogenesis – from the inside. By

practicing the simple exercises prescribed by Rudolf Steiner, one could unite oneself with

the Cosmos’s formative forces, as they streamed into matter, dispensing with the Humpty

Dumpty – esque efforts of materialist science to put Nature back together again after so

brutally shattering it.

Rudolf Steiner was in 1914 not only revealing these secrets at the Goetheanum

but returning to them time and again in lecture series on a diverse suite of themes –

“Human and Cosmic Thought,” “Inner Nature of Man,” “The Presence of the Dead,” and

“Ways to a New Style of Architecture.” In a talk to a small group in Munich the day

144
before the April 1 topping out ceremony, he noted that no one had ever perceived

thinking with their senses because all human thought was super–sensible, i.e., spiritual,

not physical. “We’re always in the super–sensible world with our thinking,” he said,

before giving a totally down–to–earth characterization of what the spiritual world was

like for anyone who stepped across the threshold to explore it actively. While in the

physical world we experience everything inside our skin, in the spiritual world thinking

and feeling flow out from our bodily center to the periphery, such that one feels oneself

spread out. There being no bodily boundary to thoughts, intense soul hygiene must be

practiced while in a body–free existence. Steiner gave three 7–line verses he himself had

received in the spiritual world to assist others on their first steps across the threshold,

prescribing the first formula (the taking of a position towards the new outer world) to be

practiced in the morning, the second (questioning the new experience within oneself) in

the afternoon, and the final one – feeling the new self – only on Sundays. This was the

threefold primer for the new yoga of turning oneself inside out.

If one reviews the scientific literature in embryology for the year 1914, or any

year for decades before and after 1914, one finds universally a search for simple,

trustworthy “models.” Both in America and Europe, the sea urchin became the favorite

embryological model because of the organism’s amenability to artificial spawning,

fertilization and rearing, but also because sea urchin embryos are transparent; one can

see inside them. Other model organisms in early developmental biology (such as

zebrafish) were chosen for this same reason. For Rudolf Steiner, every organism seemed

to be transparent. He needed no microscope, microtome, or other tool to investigate them,

and their scales, feathers, and skin presented no obstacle to entry for him. Though he

145
occasionally spoke of the development of other vertebrates or invertebrates, 99% of

Steiner’s research was limited to seeing inside – or more properly, seeing from inside –

the human being.

Given Ernst Haeckel’s materialistic monism, Rudolf Steiner’s great admiration

for him was a profound enigma and irritation to his contemporaries. So shall it be for us

unless we first grasp Steiner’s capacity for going inside every phenomenon, including the

soul life and biography of other human beings.

“There is no better scientific foundation to esotericism than Haeckel’s teaching,”

Rudolf Steiner declared in 1907. “At present, German spiritual life really exists only in

Haeckel’s phylogeny.” Steiner, who had met Haeckel, and written about him in dozens of

essays and books, dedicated his 1899 work, Conceptions of the World and of Life in the

Nineteenth Century (re–published in 1914 as the second half of Riddles of Philosophy), to

him. In the dedication Steiner wrote: “One can find one’s way into the origin and

transformation of the organic forms better when one studies his works than through

anything else.” Attacked as he was constantly both by dogmatic religionists on one side,

and scientific opponents on the other, Rudolf Steiner for decades defended Haeckel from

the unfair criticisms of both camps. Steiner was in turn himself attacked by critics who

said it was hypocrisy that he should be advancing a spiritual view of evolution, even as

he admired and defended the most stridently Materialist proponent of Darwinism.

The enigma of Steiner’s admiration for Haeckel can perhaps best be understood

by examining yet one more seemingly contradictory statement. In a lecture in 1921 in

Stuttgart, Steiner mentioned how, on rare occasions, visionary experience – even so-

called “hallucinations” – could produce images that contained profound esoteric truths.

146
As was always true when he approached topics bordering on magical activity, Steiner

was quite circumspect:

Now I do not want to talk to you in rather nebulous terms. Let me therefore call to

mind something quite definite — one particular symbol. One symbol coming up again

and again was used to depict imaginative perception of the process of cognition in man

himself. The process was not described in the way a modern expert in the theory of

knowledge would do so. It was beheld in a form of instinctive clairvoyance, and they

represented what they saw by drawing a picture of a serpent biting its own tail. That

image showed a major characteristic of the process of attaining to knowledge. But in fact

the picture I have described to you is only something that came to be used later, more or

less for popular presentation. The actual symbolic images were carefully guarded secrets

in the groups, guarded because there was a certain desire for power, the desire to be the

ones in the know while others were not in the know. The picture shown in public, of the

serpent biting its own tail, should in fact be the image of a serpent that not merely bites

its own tail but swallows it, as it were. As much of the tail as enters into the mouth

becomes spiritualized. And then something would show itself that would need to be

painted in subtler colours — if the serpent itself had been painted in strong colours — as

a kind of aura for the serpent. The result was a somewhat more complex image. . .

As I have said, those figures were kept a deep secret, because of a certain feeling

of power. They were obtained only by achieving inner vision of a cosmic process. There

was no other way of developing a sense for the inner experience and understanding of

such figures.

147
 There is no question that Rudolf Steiner is speaking here of the Ouroboros, the

familiar universal symbol of Nature’s infinite and endless cycle of Creation and

Destruction, Life and Death. In ancient – Egyptian, Greek, and Gnostic – iconography an

openly “hermetic” symbol, during the Renaissance it had come to be more commonly

employed by alchemists and magicians. It absolutely bowled Rudolf Steiner over to

observe how his contemporary Ernst Haeckel had, by close observation of the natural

world, come to draw with scientific exactitude the very figure – the Gastraea – that had

been a closely guarded occult secret for over 2000 years. Haeckel looked out upon the

phenomena of Nature and came to visualize a hypothetical organism – a form he felt was

now being repeated at the gastrula stage of embryonic development – that was once

supposed to have existed in the course of phylogenetic evolution. Haeckel drew a faithful

reproduction of processes and forms occurring in the sense world, and thereby produced a

148
wholly supersensible figure, one that even at the opening of the 20th century, according to

Steiner, was considered downright treason to speak of within certain power-hungry

esoteric brotherhoods. What Steiner said for Haeckel’s Gastraea might be extended to

characterize the entire array of late 19th century picturing through technological means of

vortical phenomena. The Andromeda nebula, the human heart, the chambered nautilus,

and the embryo of every living creature are all arcana, of the same order as the

Ouroboros, which can rightly be considered as itself a variation on the Vortex

symbol/Arcanum.

149
1
William Fickinger, Miller’s Waves: An Informal Scientific Biography, (Xlibris: 2011), 41–45

2
For a comprehensive critical review of the Michelson–Morley experiment, and Dayton Miller’s later

ether drift research, see James DeMeo, “Does a Cosmic Ether Exist? Evidence from Dayton Miller and

Others,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 28 (4) (2014): and DeMeo, The Dynamic Ether of Cosmic

Space: Correcting a Major Error in Modern Science, (Ashland, OR: Natural Energy Works, 2019).
3
Silvanus Philips Thompson, The Life of William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs, Volume 1,

(Macmillan: New York, 1910), 36; 79–84

4
William Thomson to Hermann Helmholtz, 22 January 1867, in Thompson, The Life of William

Thomson, I: 513-15
5
Ibid., 519. Thomson, “On Vortex Atoms,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburg VI (1867):

94-105, reprinted in Philosophical Magazine XXXIV (1867): 15-24. I have skipped over discussion of

Helmholtz’s work; for a comprehensive review, see Viatcheslav V. Meleshko, “Coaxial Axisymmetric

Vortex Rings: 150 Years After Helmholtz,” Theoretical Computational Fluid Dynamics 24 (2010):

403–431. The literature of vortex study in the Victorian period is enormous; see Viatcheslav V.

Meleshko and Hassan Aref, “A Bibliography of Vortex Dynamics, 1858 – 1956,” Advances in Applied

Mechanics 41 (2007): 197–292.

6
T.C. Crawford, “A Charmer of Men,” Cosmopolitan 19 (1895): 91–104, 100; Peter G. Tait,

“Presidential Address to the Section of Mathematical and Physical Science,” Report of the British

Association for the Advancement of Science, 1871, 6

7
Lord Kelvin to Dutch physicist Willem Julius in Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise, Energy and

Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 489.

Recent studies of the transition from classical to the “new” physics include: Helge Kragh, Quantum

Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century, (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1999) and Higher Speculations: Grand Theories and Failed Revolutions in Physics and Cosmology,

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), especially Chapter 2, “A Victorian Theory of Everything”;

Richard Staley, Einstein's Generation: The Origins of the Relativity Revolution, (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2008). On ether theory, see Jaume Navarro, Ether and Modernity: The Recalcitrance

of an Epistemic Object in the Early Twentieth Century, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) and

Loyd S. Swenson, Jr., The Ethereal Aether: A History of the Michelson-Morley-Miller Aether-drift

Experiments, 1880-1930, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013).

8
Lord Kelvin, “On the Motion Produced in an Infinite Elastic Solid by the Motion Through the Space

Occupied By It of A Body Acting On It Only By Attraction or Repulsion,” The London, Edinburgh,

and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 5(50) (1900): 218–235, translated into

French by C. Raveau, “Sur le Mouvement d’Un Solide Élastique Traversé Par un Corps, Agissant Sur

Lui Par Attraction ou Répulsion,” Rapports Présentés au Congrès International de Physique de 1900,

Tome II, (Paris, Gauthier-Villars, 1901): 1-22. Kelvin’s remarks on the Michelson–Morley experiment

are at Section 18.

9
Paul Morand, 1900, (Paris: Payson, 1931), 65

10
Lord Kelvin, “On the Duties of Ether for Electricity and Magnetism”, The London, Edinburgh, and

Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 5(50) (1900): 305-307, 307
11
A vast library of both primary and secondary works celebrate, illustrate, and analyze the Exposition

Universelle; a concise and insightful source is Chapter 4 in Pieter van Wesemael, Architecture of

Instruction and Delight: A Socio-historical Analysis of World Exhibitions as a Didactic Phenomenon

(1798-1851-1970), (Amsterdam: 010 Publishers, 2001).

12
Charles-Louis Weyher, Toujours les tourbillons, (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1910), 6

13
All of the texts here are my translations of Weyher’s material, held at the Conservatoire national des

arts et métiers in Paris, where they were deposited by Weyher before his death in 1916. For

photographs and descriptions of each of the devices and the instructional tableaux, see:

https://collections.arts-et-metiers.net/?queryId=19bafaec-b747-4ff2-bf34-2eb5eab034c8

14
Colonel Gruau, "Charles Weyher," La Nouvelle Revue XXV (1916): 121-131, 130

15
Meaden, T. G., “A sixteenth century sketch of a tornado cloud, Augsburg, Germany, 2 July 1587,”

Journal of Meteorology 95 (1985): 15–16; Mayne, Z., “Concerning a spout of water that happened at

Topsham on the river between the sea and Exeter,” Philosophical Transactions 19 (1694): 28–31;

Benjamin Franklin, Experiments and Observations on Electricity, (David Henry: London, 1774), Plate

II following page 226 and Figure on page 229 were combined when an excerpt from the 1769 work

was published in The Royal American Magazine, or Universal Repository of Instruction and

Amusement for September 1774.

16
Henry Deacon, “Experiments on Formation of Ring Vortices (with Secondary Phenomena) in

Water,” Chemical News August 4, 1871: 60 – 61. Among those whose interest was excited by

Deacon’s demonstration was pioneer student of hydrodynamics Osborne Reynolds, who used colored

water to study the vortices/eddies generated by different screw–propellers. The colored water helped

him see that “the vortex played a part in fluid motion which he had never dreamt of, that, in fact, it was

the key to almost all the problems of internal fluid motion.” Osborne Reynolds, “On Vortex Motion,”

The Popular Science Review 1 (16) (1877): 276 – 284, 279.

17
James Clerk Maxwell, P.M. Harman, The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell:

1862–1873, Vol. 2, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 445

18
Arthur Worthington, “On Impact with a Liquid Surface,” Proceedings of the Royal Society 34

(1882): 217–230, 227, 226. The flipbook patent can be seen at:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US258164A/en?oq=us258%2c164. Many physicists studying vortex

phenomena pointed out the fact that vortex rings

could be commonly observed emerging from railroad smokestacks and smoker’s mouths, making it

very much a phenomenon of the modern world.

19
Arthur Worthington, “The Splash of a Drop and Allied Phenomena,” Proceedings of the Royal

Institution 14 (1894): 289 – 303, 302. In the prologue (“Objectivity Shock”) to their book Objectivity,

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison write beautifully

about Worthington’s turn towards the ideal of scientific objectivity.

20
Arthur Worthington and R. S. Cole, “Impact with a Liquid Surface, Studied by the Aid of

Instantaneous Photography” Philosophical Transactions 189 (1897): 137–148. The entire arc of

Worthington’s research is beautifully narrated for a general readership in both The Splash of a Drop

(Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge: London, 1895) and A Study of Splashes (Longman,

Green, and Co.: 1908). There is an animation of a couple of Worthington’s splash series here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_g0F_si04A
21
Étienne–Jules Marey, ‘‘Des mouvements de l’air lorsqu’il rencontre des surfaces de differentes

formes,’’ Comtes Rendus de l’Academie des Sciences 131 (1900): 160–163, 161. Much recent

scholarship examines the wider scientific, artistic, and cultural legacy of Marey’s chronophotography

work. See Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne–Jules Marey, (1830–1904), (University

of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1992); Inge Hinterwaldner, “Parallel Lines as Tools for Making Turbulence

Visible,” Representations November 2013: 1–42; Christoph Hoffmann, “Superpositions: Ludwig Mach

and Étienne-Jules Marey’s Studies in Streamline Photography,” Studies in History and Philosophy of

Science 44 (2013) 1–11; Daniela Hahn, ‘‘Tourbillons et turbulences. Zu einer Aësthetik des
Experiments in Étienne-Jules Marey’s Machines à fumée,’’ ilinx 1, no. 1 (2009): 43–69. On the role of

film in flow visualization, see Mario Schulze & Sarine Waltenspül, “From Images of Lines to Images

of Particles: The Role of the Film Camera in Flow Visualization,” Yearbook of Moving Image Studies.

Image Evolution. Technological Transformations of Visual Media Culture, (Büchner Verlag: 2009),

161-186.
22
The German zoologist Friedrich Ahlborn recognized that Marey’s apparatus introduced turbulence:

‘‘The flow straightener however is not only a destroyer but also a generator of turbulent movement

because due to friction new eddies must develop along its planes/surfaces. . .The wind jet obtains,

through the double layers of opposing, rotating vortices, the same cellular arrangement as the flow

straightener and the rotating columns of liquid of the vortices, which envelop each cell space in dense

succession, forming a sort of skeleton in the flow that opposes a certain resistance against the

deformation through outer forces.’’ Friedrich Ahlborn, Ueber den Einfluss der Turbulenz auf

Stroemung und Widerstand an Kugeln und Zylindern, quoted in Hinterwalder, 11. Like Marey, Ahlborn

studied air and fluid flow in his attempt to understand the mechanics of flight, and came to make

pioneering images of vortices while employing photography for the visualization of fluid flow.

Recognizing early on that air was too delicate a medium for effective laboratory study, Ahlborn

restricted his work to water. Using Lycopodium spores or aluminum powder to make the water’s

patterns visible, he struggled with the same technical issues of both fluid movement production,

recording, and reproduction as had Marey. He also found himself struggling against the tendency

toward abstraction of the physicists who engaged with his work, which was admirably

phenomenological. Many of Ahlborn’s publication titles include the word Wirklichkeit – “reality,” i.e.,

that reality to which physicists’ non-empirical mathematical theories blinded them.

23
Actually, both Osborne Reynolds and Henri Bénard had recognized the phenomenon that came (after

1911) to be known as “von Kármán vortex streets.” Von Karman gracefully credits Bénard in
Aerodynamics. Selected Topics in the Light of Their Historical Development, (Cornell University Press:

Ithaca, 1954), 64.

24
Braun, Picturing Time, 199; 189-90. Marey describes his Chronophotography exhibit in “A la

histoire de la Chronophotographie,” Musee Centennal de la Classe 12 (Photographie) a l’Exposition

Universelle International de 1900 à Paris; reprinted in English as “History of Chronophotography,”in

Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution 1901, (Smithsonian Institution: Washington, DC, 1902).
25
On Marey’s experimental phonetic work and the physiology of vocalization, see Chapter 3, “Visible

Speech,” in Robert Michael Brain, The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle

Europe, (University of Washington Press: Seattle, 2015).

26
Hippolyte Baraduc, La force vitale, notre corps fluidique, sa formule biometrique, (Carré: Paris,

1893), 12, 212–213

27
For example, Baraduc’s Les vibrations de la vitalité humaine: méthode biométrique appliquée aux

sensitifs et aux névrosés, (Libraire J-B. Bailliere, 1904) contains 49 instances of “vortex,” 6 of

“tourbillons.”
28
Hippolyte Baraduc, L'ame humaine: ses mouvements, ses lumières et l'iconographie de l'invisible

fluidiques, (Georges Carré: Paris, 1896), 203–204; Hippolyte Baraduc, La force courbe cosmique:

photographies des vibrations de l'éther, (Ollendorf: Paris, 1897), 24

29
Adrien Guebhard, “Le vrai fluide vitale,” Revue scientifique 4(9) (1898): 75-79, 77. For more on

Baraduc and the development of “thoughtography,” see Peter Geimer, Bilder aus Versehen: Eine

Geschichte fotografischer Erscheinungen (Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2010); Anthony Enns,

“Visualizing Thoughts: Photography, Neurology and Neuroimaging,” in Laurens Schlicht, Carla

Seemann, and Christian Kassung, (eds.), Mind Reading as a Cultural Practice: Palgrave Studies in

Science and Popular Culture, (Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, Switzerland, 2020); Margareta Ingrid

Christian, “Cameraless Photography and Its Imponderable Media,” History of Photography 42(4)
(2018): 319–337; and Nicolas Pethes, “Psychicones: Visual Traces of the Soul in Late Nineteenth-

Century Fluidic Photography,” Medical History 60 (3) (2016): 325–341; Steffen Sanzenbacher,

Fotografie als Medium zwischen Wissenschaft und Okkultismus, (Diplome: Hamburg, 2003)
30
Christoph Lindenberg, Rudolf Steiner: A Biography, (SteinerBooks: Hudson, NY, 2017), 402–403

31
Edouard Schuré, Les Grands Initiés: Esquisse de l’Histoire Secrète des Religions, (Didier: Paris,

1905), 512
32
Rudolf Steiner, Mein Lebensgang: Eine nacht vollendete Autobiographie, (Rudolf Steiner Verlag:

Dornach, 2000 (1925)), 457. For more on Schuré, see Alain

Mercier, Edouard Schuré et le renouveau idéaliste en Europe, (Ph.D. thesis, University of Paris, 1980);

on Marie von Sivers and Edouard Schuré, see N.V.P. Franklin, Freemasonry and Rudolf Steiner: An

Introduction to the Masonic Imagination, (Temple Lodge: London, 2021), 45–50

33
Rudolf Steiner, Self-Transformation, (Rudolf Steiner Press: London, 1995), 33

34
Rudolf Steiner, A Psychology of Body, Soul, and Spirit: Anthroposophy, Psychology, &

Pneumatosophy, (Anthroposophic Press: Hudson, NY, 1999), 48

35
Rudolf Steiner, An Esoteric Cosmology: Evolution, Christ, and Modern Spirituality, (Steiner Books:

Great Barrington, Mass., 2008), 20–25; 20

36
The Vortex Axiom document – Notizblatt Archiv-Nr. NZ 712 – is held at the Rudolf Steiner Archive

at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. Included in material given as “Meditations from the

Esoteric School,” it was published in Start Now! A Book of Soul and Spiritual Exercises (pp. 168–169),

standing

back-to-back between letters dated Dec. 1903 and “a letter, 1904.” The recent Vitra Design Museum

traveling exhibition Rudolf Steiner: Alchemy of

the Everyday included the NZ 712 document, and gave the date as 1921. I queried the Rudolf Steiner

Archive but was informed (by email from Stefan Widmer, Jan. 6, 2014) that the manuscript had no
date. Still, from the contents of the Esoteric

School lessons, it seems reasonable to date both these documents to 1904–1905.

37
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: I: Science, (J.W. Bouton, New York, 1877), I: 206–208

38
Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, I: 496; 498; 500

39
Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, I: 141

40
Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, I: 143. Swedenborg advanced his vortex cosmos seven years before

his visionary period began in 1741, and it is perhaps worth noting that his later works make no

statements about vortical forms of planetary and/or stellar generation or movement.

41
William Joseph Jackson, Heaven’s Fractal Net: Retrieving Lost Visions in the Humanities, (Indiana

University Press: Bloomington, 2004) contains a vivid account of the 1618 dream. Richard Watson’s

Cogito Ergo Sum: The Life of René Descartes, (David R. Godine: Boston, 2007) agrees with earlier

authors who suggest that the three-part dream was a retelling of the trio of dreams in The Chemical

Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. Amir D. Aczel, in Descartes's Secret Notebook: A True Tale of

Mathematics, Mysticism, and the Quest to Understand the Universe, (Broadway Books: New York,

2005) – without taking note of the fact that November 10 is one day after the fateful Schicksalstag –

raises many questions about Descartes’ dream, particularly the significance of the date November 10 in

Descartes’ biography. One might readily add William Blake’s visionary experiences of the vortex –

rendered both in poetry and his drawings. Perhaps the most familiar and fantastic example is from the

poem Milton:
The Nature of Infinity is this: That every thing has its

Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro’ Eternity

Has pass’d that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind

His path, into a Globe itself enfolding, like a sun,

Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty,         5

While he keeps onwards in his wondrous journey on the Earth,

Or like a human form, a friend with whom he liv’d benevolent.

As the eye of man views both the East and West, encompassing

Its vortex, and the North and South with all their starry host,

        1
Also the rising sun and setting moon he views, surrounding
0

His corn-fields and his valleys of five hundred acres square.

Thus is the Earth one infinite plane, and not as apparent

To the weak traveller confin’d beneath the moony shade.

Thus is the Heaven a Vortex pass’d already, and the Earth

A Vortex not yet pass’d by the traveller thro’ Eternity.

42
C. G. Harrison, The Transcendental Universe: Six Lectures on Occult Science, Theosophy, and the

Catholic Faith, (Lindisfarne Press: Hudson, NY, 1993), p. 95. Christopher Bamford, who brought these

lectures into public view at their centenary, muses briefly upon the echo of the vortex in Rudolf

Steiner’s axioms, in a brief footnote on page 199. The centrality of the vortex image within the work is

hiding in plain sight, in the book’s cover art.

43
Notizblatt Archiv-Nr. NZ 685, Rudolf Steiner Archive at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland.

44
Thomas Laycock, "Evidence and arguments in proof of the existence of a general law of periodicity

in the phenomena of life," Lancet 1 (1842-3): 124-129, 160-164; "On the influence of the moon on the

atmosphere of the earth, and on the pathological influence of the seasons," Lancet 2 (1842-3): 438-444;

"On some of the causes which determine the minor periods of vital movements," Lancet 1 (1842-3):

929-933
45
Harrison, Transcendental Universe, 97

46
One of the unspoken truisms of a metahistorical perspective is that every historical moment can be

reasonably conceived of as “the center of the vortex,” i.e., the microcosmic “still point” or pralaya

between manvantaras, and simultaneously a node on some incipient or manifest manvantara.

47
Harrison, Transcendental Universe, 155

48
Harrison, Transcendental Universe, 167

49
Rudolf Steiner, Correspondence and Documents 1901-1925, (SteinerBooks: Great Barrington, MA,

1988), 9
50
Both from statements made by Rudolf Steiner to close associates, and from the hidden history that C.

G. Harrison unfolds in The Transcendental Universe, it seems likely that the source of inspired wisdom

for Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (as well as, to a lesser extent, The Secret Doctrine) was in fact Christian

Rosenkreutz, as a living master, though his true identity remain veiled to her. See my Enchanted New

York: A Journey Along Broadway Through Manhattan’s Magical Past, (New York University Press:

New York, 2020), 128–130. Though divergent from the main line of Rosicrucian wisdom, C. G.

Harrison’s esoteric knowledge may be seen as largely springing from Christian Rosenkreutz as well.

(See Christopher Bamford’s introduction to The Transcendental Universe, pages 36–57) Thus, if there

is a common source for the “The World is a Vortex” axiom, Christian Rosenkreutz is the most
plausible candidate.
51
Rudolf Steiner and Marie Steiner-von Sivers, Briefwechsel und Dokumente 1901-1925: GA 262,

(Rudolf Steiner Verlag: Dornach, 2014), 104 – 108

52
Michaelangelo’s celebrated sculpture of Moses in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome gives

expression to the transformation of the etheric “head” into physical “horns” by portraying upon Moses’

forehead a pair of small stubs of horns – the recession into the physical brain’s pituitary gland of the

brow lotus flowers or chakras that enabled the former clairvoyance for communication with the

spiritual world. An initiate of both the ancient Egyptian and Midian mysteries, Moses possessed a

higher degree of atavistic etheric clairvoyance than his contemporaries, and yet became the first of his

race to sacrifice the old etheric organs upon the altar of a more modern, independent, physical

consciousness. Rudolf Steiner elaborates upon this historical development in a suite of 1908 lectures

published as The Gospel of St. John, (Anthroposophic Press: Hudson NY, 1962).
53
Steiner, An Esoteric Cosmology, 61

54
Fair treatments of the Commission’s investigation include L.B. Yeates, "James Braid (II):

Mesmerism, Braid’s Crucial Experiment, and Braid’s Discovery of Neuro-Hypnotism", Australian

Journal of Clinical Hypnotherapy & Hypnosis 40 (1) (2018): 40–92 and Malcolm Ashmore, Steven D.

Brown, and Katie MacMillan, “Lost in the Mall with Mesmer and Wundt: Demarcations and

Demonstrations in the Psychologies,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 30 (1) (2005): 76-110.

Reading the reports themselves, the biases and blind spots of the investigators are readily evident; see

I.M.L. Donaldson, The Reports of the Royal Commission of 1784 on Mesmer's System of Animal

Magnetism and Other Contemporary Documents, (James Lind Library: Edinburgh, 2014.
55
Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled I: 125

56
J. C. Chatterjee, La philosophie esoterique de l’Inde, (Bajat: Brussels, 1903), 36

57
Chatterjee, La philosophie esoterique, 58
58
Paul Sedir, Le fakirisme hindou et les yogas: Thaumaturgie populaire, constitution de l’homme

invisible selon le brahminisme, la force magnetique et la force mentale, entrainements occultes, leurs

buts et leurs dangers, (Chacornac: Paris, 1906), 92

59
Steiner, Briefwechsel und Dokumente 1901-1925, 167

60
Rudolf Steiner, Self-Transformation, (Rudolf Steiner Press: London, 1995), 33; 68–69

61
James Bell Pettigrew, Design in Nature: Illustrated by Spiral and Other Arrangements in the

Inorganic and Organic Kingdoms as Exemplified in Matter, Force, Life, Growth, Rhythms, &c.,

Especially in Crystals, Plants, and Animals, 3 volumes (London: Longman, Green, and Company,

1908), III: 1360.

62
Pettigrew, Design in Nature, I: 202.

63
Pettigrew, Design in Nature, II: 602

64
Pettigrew, Design in Nature, I: 12.

65
Journal of Mental Science 18 (1873): 571 – 577, 572.

66
James Bell Pettigrew, “Anatomical Preparation-Making as Devised and Practiced at the University of

Edinburgh and at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England," The Lancet

November 23, 1901, 1399-1403; 1399; Pettigrew, Design in Nature, III: 1363, 1365.
67
Pettigrew, Design in Nature, III: 1366.

68
Pettigrew, Design in Nature, III: 1367

69
Pettigrew, Design in Nature, II: 1020.

70
On Darwin and teleology, see Michael Ruse, Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose?,

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) and On Purpose, (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2019); Robert J. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and

Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin's Theory, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and
Robert J. Richards and Michael Ruse, Debating Darwin, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
71
“Teleology”, Nature 80, no. 2058 (8 April, 1909): 151-152, 151

72
Raymond Pearl, “The Spirality of the Cosmos”, The Dial (1 October, 1909): 230.

73
Pettigrew, Design in Nature, I: 193, 196, 200. Pettigrew quite correctly objected to both Haeckel and

Darwin’s routinely employing vitalistic language in ascribing “sensation, consciousness, a soul, likes

and dislikes” to atoms and molecules.” (202)

74
Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, (Harper &

Brothers: New York, 1900), 81

75
Pettigrew, Design in Nature, I: 402–403. There is a voluminous and still growing critical literature on

the complex history of Ernst Haeckel’s embryonic “portrait galleries” (Richardson) or “grids”

(Hopwood). Nick Hopwood provides a nice summary: “At first most viewing was of the illustrations in

Haeckel’s books—often, critics worried, at the expense of the text. How, it would be worth exploring,

did groups who did not author reviews interpret them . . . ? But since most reviews lacked illustrations

and Darwinism was by no means generally acceptable even by 1914, in some circles the pictures will

have remained more read about than seen. Soon most encounters were with reproductions. The wood

engravings in the Illustrirte Zeitung and copies in more popular evolutionary works circulated in larger

numbers than the originals; how did new contexts and physical forms affect meanings? By the mid-

twentieth century, biology textbooks had taken over as their main home. How did the pictures last so

long, and what were the effects on this stability of the (very different) controversies in 1908–1910 and

since 1997? How did these icons come to seem too striking, significant, or standard to hide, too

inaccurate, risqué, or boring to show?” [Nick Hopwood, “Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud:

Ernst Haeckel’s Embryological Illustrations,” Isis 97 (2006): 260–301, 300]. The most detailed

examination of Haeckel’s grid pictures largely exonerates him from charges of fraud; see Michael K.

Richardson and Gerhard Keuck, “Haeckel’s ABC of evolution and development,” Biological Reviews
77 (2002): 495-528.
76
Pettigrew, Design in Nature, I: 400