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Forgotten Religions That Worshipped Electricity

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Re: Forgotten Religions That Worshipped Electricity

#41

Post by iliis »

shostack wrote: post #39

While I don't know about religion, I personally love to think of electricity as "magic" or "mana" more specifically. It is the magical fuel that powers modern-day magic. We etch arcane runes (circuits), pump mana (electricity) through them, and generate magical results. Raw mana can also be projected to inflict damage, heal, generate light, heat, etc.

Ha, yes, definititely! Did you ever come into contact with RF design? Things like antennas are quite literally drawing-pentagrams-on-the-floor-style witchcraft ;) [1]

You might also like [2], a story where magic is real and treated as just another field of science/engineering (yes, there are ISO standards for your magic circles and everything ;).

---

[1] See e.g. https://www.sv1afn.com/pcbruler.html or http://www.digdice.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/panel22dbi... for some examples.

[2] https://qntm.org/ra

Re: Forgotten Religions That Worshipped Electricity

#42

Post by gwern »

For those wondering about "Electricity And Religion": it's pg213 ( https://books.google.com/books?id=NqQZ3XSvWcAC&lpg=PA213 ), chapter 27 of _The Truths of Spiritualism: Immortality proved beyond a doubt by living witnesses_, Wilson 1876 (not to be confused with Henslow's 1919, _The Proofs of the Truths of Spiritualism_), which as the name indicates is a rather credulous retelling of American spiritualism. Appears to not be a full essay but one of the summary descriptions of it from the table of contents ("Electricity and Religion - Christian Generosity - Brick Bats and Theology - Baptized into Glory").

Re: Forgotten Religions That Worshipped Electricity

#43

Post by gus_massa »

BjoernKW wrote: post #25
tzs wrote: post #16

> [...] the Oneida Community of New York. Founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848, the Protestant commune believed that Jesus Christ’s power was a form of liquid electricity that could be transmitted to believers through touch. As the most intimate form of touch is sex, the group also believed that, if they had enough of it, they’d create a spiritual battery that would make them immortal and create heaven on earth. So…

> wouldn't having sex among themselves only serve to redistribute the power more evenly among the group Reading that I thought about the perhaps more conventional sense of 'power' in that context. Monogamy to some extent at least is a social construct designed to establish and consolidate power. Marriage and the concept of legitimate children was the pivotal aspect of feudal society. Inheritance today still largely d…

You are underestimating the women. They will remember who is the mother of who, and try to favor their own children. Perhaps with enough time it will develop into a matriarchy instead of a patriarchy. (Elephants and whales are organized in a matriarchy. Is this a good comparison?)

And gossip, memory, guess and comparison will try to track who is the father anyway. Men will not be ignored.

Re: Forgotten Religions That Worshipped Electricity

#44

Post by nitwit005 »

You can find advertisements for seances referencing "X-ray Science", and various products attributing mystic powers to radium and the like.

All that technology was so amazing that it seemed genuinely magical: Light without fire, instant communication, seeing through objects, etc. We just don't appreciate it having grown up with it.

Re: Forgotten Religions That Worshipped Electricity

#45

Post by Pulcinella »

iliis wrote: post #41
shostack wrote: post #39

While I don't know about religion, I personally love to think of electricity as "magic" or "mana" more specifically. It is the magical fuel that powers modern-day magic. We etch arcane runes (circuits), pump mana (electricity) through them, and generate magical results. Raw mana can also be projected to inflict damage, heal, generate light, heat, etc.

Ha, yes, definititely! Did you ever come into contact with RF design? Things like antennas are quite literally drawing-pentagrams-on-the-floor-style witchcraft ;) [1] You might also like [2], a story where magic is real and treated as just another field of science/engineering (yes, there are ISO standards for your magic circles and everything ;). --- [1] See e.g. https://www.sv1afn.com/pcbruler.html or http://www.dig…

"On a Pale Horse"[1] also takes place in a world with magic and science. Airlines have to compete with magic carpet companies and computers are often used to cast magic because they can be incredibly precise.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_a_Pale_Horse

Re: Forgotten Religions That Worshipped Electricity

#46

Post by emodendroket »

danielvf wrote: post #18

> "So the community encouraged polygamy, orgies and generally engaging in as much sexual activity as possible. Needless to say, the Oneida members were a happy bunch, and the commune lasted more than three decades." Actually, Oneida had a commitmee of elder woman. You applied to the committee to have sex with someone one time, and they could approve or deny you. (This was designed to prevent forming couples, slow dow…

Frankly, completely flubbing the specifics of events they reference is a big problem with works that have sweeping subjects (in terms of time and place) like "the history of salt" or "religions that worshiped electricity."

Re: Forgotten Religions That Worshipped Electricity

#47

Post by emodendroket »

gus_massa wrote: post #43
BjoernKW wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wouldn't having sex among themselves only serve to redistribute the power more evenly among the group Reading that I thought about the perhaps more conventional sense of 'power' in that context. Monogamy to some extent at least is a social construct designed to establish and consolidate power. Marriage and the concept of legitimate children was the pivotal aspect of feudal society. Inheritance today still largely d…

You are underestimating the women. They will remember who is the mother of who, and try to favor their own children. Perhaps with enough time it will develop into a matriarchy instead of a patriarchy. (Elephants and whales are organized in a matriarchy. Is this a good comparison?) And gossip, memory, guess and comparison will try to track who is the father anyway. Men will not be ignored.

Well, one reason the ancient Greeks largely prevented women from leaving the home was anxiety about false paternity. A woman's maternity is never in doubt but a man's paternity can be.

Re: Forgotten Religions That Worshipped Electricity

#48

Post by tzs »

emodendroket wrote: post #47
gus_massa wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are underestimating the women. They will remember who is the mother of who, and try to favor their own children. Perhaps with enough time it will develop into a matriarchy instead of a patriarchy. (Elephants and whales are organized in a matriarchy. Is this a good comparison?) And gossip, memory, guess and comparison will try to track who is the father anyway. Men will not be ignored.

Well, one reason the ancient Greeks largely prevented women from leaving the home was anxiety about false paternity. A woman's maternity is never in doubt but a man's paternity can be.

> A woman's maternity is never in doubt but a man's paternity can be.

That's not always true. See the Lydia Fairchild case [1], and the earlier Karen Keegan case [2]. These are both cases where women were told, wrongly, based on genetic testing, that they were not the mothers of their children.

Fairchild was pregnant when the controversy over her maternity arose, and the court overseeing that controversy ordered a witness to attend the birth and ensure that blood samples were taken for testing from both Fairchild and the newly born child. Those samples were tested, and the result was that she was not the mother of that child.

How could this be? The answer turned out to be that both Fairchild and Keegan were chimeras. A chimera is a single organism composed of cells from different zygotes. This can happen when multiple fertilized eggs merge. In other words, both of these women were conceived as part of a set of fraternal twins, but sometime during development they merged with their twin.

Some organs and systems developed from one of the twins, some from the other, and so when you do a DNA test you get the DNA of one or the other, depending on where you sample. In Fairchild's case, for instance, DNA taken from her skin and hair did not match her children's DNA, but DNA from a cervical smear did.

Human chimeras are thought to be very very rare.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Fairchild

[2] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013452

Re: Forgotten Religions That Worshipped Electricity

#49

Post by shostack »

iliis wrote: post #41
shostack wrote: post #39

While I don't know about religion, I personally love to think of electricity as "magic" or "mana" more specifically. It is the magical fuel that powers modern-day magic. We etch arcane runes (circuits), pump mana (electricity) through them, and generate magical results. Raw mana can also be projected to inflict damage, heal, generate light, heat, etc.

Ha, yes, definititely! Did you ever come into contact with RF design? Things like antennas are quite literally drawing-pentagrams-on-the-floor-style witchcraft ;) [1] You might also like [2], a story where magic is real and treated as just another field of science/engineering (yes, there are ISO standards for your magic circles and everything ;). --- [1] See e.g. https://www.sv1afn.com/pcbruler.html or http://www.dig…

I started Ra a while back, but the writing style just threw me unfortunately. RF design is an area I had not considered, but that is kind of funny with the analogy to pentagrams.

Re: Forgotten Religions That Worshipped Electricity

#50

Post by Terr_ »

Aardwolf wrote: post #5

This very much reminds me of the "Children of the Atom" in the Fallout games, who love to worship nuclear installations and the atomic "glow". Their language is not unlike the language found in the article such as a miraculous healing through being "hit by an electric current". Makes me wonder if the Fallout designers based the Children of the Atom on this.

I thought it was a more general Cold-War-era apocalypse thing. As a late 90s game, Fallout reuses a bunch of tropes from earlier decades in the form of dark-humor.

For example, "Planet of the Apes" book series had the nuclear-bomb-worshiping cult in its 1970 sequel.

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