There is still a lot of confusion about the terms Orgone, Orgonite and who invented what. The name of pioneer psychoanalyst and researcher Dr. Wilhelm Reich is often falsely named as the inventor of orgonite.
Wilhelm Reich is of course the absolute grand daddy of orgone, having coined the term "orgone energy" in the late 1940s, but he did not invent orgonite
Let's have a look at this fascinating history:
- Early Life and Education — Born in 1897 in rural Galicia (now Ukraine), Wilhelm grew up on a family farm, developing a deep fascination with nature and human emotions amid personal hardships, including the tragic loss of his parents.
- Psychoanalytic Career — He studied medicine in Vienna, graduated in 1922, and became a close associate of Sigmund Freud. Reich innovated by focusing on character structure, sexual health, and social reform, authoring influential works like The Function of the Orgasm (1927) and The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933).
- Exile and Move to America — Facing persecution from the Nazis and expulsion from psychoanalytic circles, he fled to Scandinavia in 1934 and emigrated to the United States in 1939, where he continued his pioneering research.
- Discovery of Orgone Energy — In the U.S., Reich explored biophysics and identified what he called orgone energy—a universal life force he believed vital for health and the environment. He developed the orgone accumulator, a box-like device (consisting of alternating layers of organic material and metal) to concentrate this energy for therapeutic use, achieving astonishing healing successes including full reversals of cancer.
- Atmospheric orgone research — Reich invented the cloudbuster, a grounded apparatus consiting of an array of open tubes aimed at the sky to influence weather by drawing or directing orgone energy—used to break up "deadly orgone" clouds, induce rain, and combat drought.
- Desert Greening Experiments — In the early 1950s, particularly around Tucson, Arizona, he conducted ambitious "Cosmic Orgone Engineering" trials, reporting success in bringing rainfall to arid areas and promoting grass growth in long-barren desert regions.
- Persecution and Tragic End — His unconventional work faced intense opposition from what we would now call "the deep state"; the FDA labeled orgone devices fraudulent, leading to a 1956 injunction, the burning of his books and equipment, and his imprisonment for contempt of court. Interestingly a main witness in his trial was one Dr. Ewen Cameron, the evil psychologist who started the trauma based mind control program MKULTRA. Reich died untimely in federal prison in 1957 at age 60, only days before he was supposed to be released.
The discovery of orgone
Reich stumbled upon the phenomenon of life energy when looking at the blood of cancer patients compared to the blood of healthy people under a very high resolution optical microscope.
Interestingly optical microscopes reached a peak of perfection in the 1940s, never to be reached again after that. This allowed the study of live samples rather than inert, dead ones.
He saw that the red blood cells of healthy people had a bright blue corona or aura while those of the cancer patients were surrounded by a dull and grey aura of much lower brightness.
In his "bion experiments" he showed how pulsating energy "beings" that moved like amoeba could emerge in a sterile hay infusion, demonstrating the very genesis of life out of dead matter as a result of the all encompassing life energy.
Reich's further experiments lead to the construction of the orgone accumulator, a box consisting of alternating layers of organic material and metal which concentrated the orgone energy inside.
The Cloudbuster - making rain in the desert
Not so much later, Reich began experimenting with what he would call a Cloudbuster. An array of parallel metal pipes mounted on a swivelling turret on a small truck.
He used this to sweep the sky and draw the stagnant energy that he called DOR (Deadly Orgone eneRgy) and ground it to a flowing water body. This was perceived to revitalize the sky and unlock rainfall in drought areas among other things.
He embarked on a spectacular desert greening operation in Arizona where it was observerd that before any significant rainfall, green shoots of vegetation were miraculously appearing and restarting the cycle of evaporation and precipitation.
Wilhelm Reich operating one of his cloudbusters at Orgonon, Rangeley Virginia|
Persecution by the emerging medical-pharmaceutical cartel His fruitful trajectory of discovery was tragically cut short by his unjust incarceration and untimely death. Some of his findings must have disturbed the "powers that be" to such an enormous extent as his home and lab (Orgonon) were raided by the FBI and a lot of his books and scientific notes burned. Rarely has the fury of the established science cartel shown its ugly face in such a blatant manner as in the case of Wilhelm Reich. This was the time when the budding cancer industry was being pushed into gear by the Rockefellers and Reich's energetic and holistic understanding of this malfunction of the body was the last thing they wanted to hear. Even Reich's disciples, of whom there were quite a few, had to go underground and it became quiet around the idea of Orgone Energy until the 1970s when in the much more open climate of the emerging Hippie movement, several people began to build orgone accumulators and even cloudbusters. None of this has yet anything to do with orgonite as such. Wilhelm Reich used organized layers of metal and organic material to concentrate orgone energy in his accumulators or just the naked metal pipes of his original Cloudbuster in order to draw and direct the energy. His Cloudbuster required skill and experience to operate. Since the DOR was not converted, one could easily get sick from touching the pipes and grounding it into a flowing water body was absolutely essential. So, to sum it up: Reich managed to achieve concentration and redirection of orgone energy, but not the conversion or transmutation of DOR to POR. That was left to Austrian American Inventor Karl Welz and then finally Don Croft who started the present day Orgonite movement. To be continued... If you're curious about how the story continues you can read my older article about the history of orgone meanwhile. |